The Girl

In November 1978, West End Press published The Girl by Meridel Le Sueur, a rewritten version of a novel the author had first completed in 1939. The original story told of women struggling to survive a harsh winter in St. Paul after having suffered the loss of their male companions in a failed bank robbery. According to Le Sueur, it was a collective work: We had a writer's group of women in The Workers Alliance and we met every night to raise our miserable circumstances to the level of sagas, poetry, cry-outs. The rewritten version emphasized the fate of the farm girl of the title as she struggled to survive the death of her lover and give birth to another girl, the hope of a new and better generation. The Girl is the most popular title published by West End Press, with over 24,000 copies sold. It has been adopted for courses in over a hundred colleges and universities, published in three foreign editions, and optioned for movie rights. This edition includes an afterword by editor John Crawford, The Book's Progress: The Making of The Girl. The author, emerging from the political blacklist of the McCarthy Period, was honored after its publication with a Senior Fellowship in Literature from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1979. Meridel Le Sueur died in 1996 at the age of ninety-six.