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Written in the 1930s by Le Sueur, I Hear Men Talking wasn’t published until 1984. It was intended as a companion to her city novel, The Girl, and depicts life in rural Iowa and a rural town during the Depression. The town’s complacency in the face of the social and economic crisis of the Depression is reflected when it is nearly destroyed during a revolt led by frustrated farmers.
This revised edition includes an introduction by Linda Ray Pratt, professor of English at the University of Nebraska, and an afterword by the author.
“Modernist literary experimentalism engages a distinctively feminist conception of how people defend themselves and organize for change.”
— Paul Lauter, Trinity College
Meridel Le Sueur was born to socialist parents in 1900 and lived to be 96, spending most of her life in the middle west.
She has been recognized as one of the leading proletarian short story writers of the 1930s, and her work includes short stories, novels, children’s books, poetry, and nonfiction.
Blacklisted during the McCarthy Period, Le Sueur’s contribution to American literature faded for nearly 30 years, gaining renewed prominence in the mid-1970s.