Refiguring Authorship, Ownership, and Textual Commodities: Meridel Le Sueur's Pedagogical Legacy

Abstract

n 1937 Meridel Le Sueur authored a textbook, Worker Writers, for use in writing classes she offered under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration in Minnesota. To illustrate for her students the basic principles of storytelling and narrative technique, Le Sueur included an annotated version of her short story, Biography of My Daughter. The story focuses on the firstperson narrator's visit to a state-run sanitarium to see a young friend, Rhoda. Upon arriving at the hospital, the narrator learns she has come too late: Rhoda has died. Although her friend's death will be officially attributed to tuberculosis, the narrator knows that months of anxiously searching for a job; of working sixteen hours a day when employment was to be had; and of standing in long relief lines when no jobs were available had punished Rhoda's body beyond repair. The narrator recognizes that Rhoda has died of starvation (29; all page numbers refer to the first edition of Worker Writers). As the narrator drives back to Minneapolis with Rhoda's grieving family, they pass through fields with round pumpkins [...] corn fattening, [and] melons like the crescent moons of the season (34). The abundance of the natural world stands in stark contrast to the privations known by Rhoda and other women like her during the Great Depression. From the narrator's perspective, a system of proprietary control of resources by private individuals has led to grotesque social inequities and created a world in which young women like Rhoda starve amidst abundance. In using Biography of My Daughter as an illustrative short story in Worker Writers, Le Sueur astutely highlights important tensions between public property and private ownership. For Le Sueur, a social activist and member of the Commu-