Gathering Storm - (Radical Souths) by Myra Page

About the Book

"This novel is one of the most clear-eyed and compelling works of the Great Depression. As Marge Crenshaw grows up in the cotton mills, she learns to fight the forces of racial, sexual, and class oppression that hold her, her family, and her community back. With her brother Tom, who has joined the Communist Party, Marge eventually becomes a union organizer who leads the famous strike at Loray Mill in Gastonia, North Carolina -a real-life strike in 1929 that claimed numerous lives, including that of organizer and songwriter Ella May Wiggins. Myra Page was an active member of the Communist Party, and Gathering Storm stands out from other Gastonia novels because it was printed in the Soviet Union. Yet this is not a novel about outsider agitators infiltrating a peaceful Southern town. Page was born in Virginia and worked as a labor organizer throughout the South. And as Marge's heart-wrenching story demonstrates, the fight against the forces of capitalist exploitation and inequality was entirely homegrown. Gathering Storm is a bona fide Communist novel; but with the story of Marge and her family at its heart, it is also a deeply intimate novel that proves the personal is always political"-- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

This novel is one of the most clear-eyed and compelling works of the Great Depression. As Marge Crenshaw grows up in the cotton mills, she learns to fight the forces of racial, sexual, and class oppression that hold her, her family, and her community back. With her brother Tom, who has joined the Communist Party, Marge eventually becomes a union organizer who leads the famous strike at Loray Mill in Gastonia, North Carolina--a real-life strike in 1929 that claimed numerous lives, including that of organizer and songwriter Ella May Wiggins.

Myra Page was an active member of the Communist Party, and Gathering Storm stands out from other Gastonia novels because it was printed in the Soviet Union. Yet this is not a novel about outsider agitators infiltrating a peaceful Southern town. Page was born in Virginia and worked as a labor organizer throughout the South. And as Marge's heart-wrenching story demonstrates, the fight against the forces of capitalist exploitation and inequality was entirely homegrown. Gathering Storm is a bona fide Communist novel; but with the story of Marge and her family at its heart, it is also a deeply intimate novel that proves the personal is always political.

Review Quotes

"Gathering Storm is a useful, even powerful place for contemporary readers to reacquaint (or newly acquaint) themselves with what we mean when we refer to the proletariat tradition. Reading the novel against the backdrop of today's dizzying political confusion, the miasmatic furor of the populist right and the siloed certitudes of the progressive left, I felt a compelling clarity in the openly ideological structures clearly visible and firmly in place behind Page's fictive prose. I'm delighted it is back in print."--Ed Pavlic, author of Call It in the Air: Poems

About the Author

Myra Page (1897-1993) was a twentieth-century American writer, journalist, and noted Communist. Michael P. Bibler is associate professor at Louisiana State University.