the strike, ''Thousand-Dollar Vagrant," which describes her arrest in deliberately tough, colloquial language. The following year, she was invited to attend the American Writers Congress in New York, where she marched in a parade side by side with Mike Gold and James T. Farrell, Nelson Algren and Richard Wright, and where she was one of a very few women to address the assembly, which included most of the major writers of the day. 19 A drawing of her, a cartooned profile of a lean, intense young woman, was one of a few portraits of American women writers to appear among the myriad renderings of male literary personages in the May 7, 1935, issue of New Masses that reported on the congress. 20
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| Clearly, though Olsen's involvement in the Left as an activist, coupled with the other demands on her workermother life, took time, energy, and commitment that might in another milieu and another era have gone into her writing, and although her closest friends in the midwestern movement did not always understand her literary aspirations, the atmosphere of the Left as a whole did encourage her. The Left provided networks and organs for intellectual and literary exchange, gave her a sense of being part of an international community of writers and activists engaged in the same revolutionary endeavor, and recognized and valued her talent.
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The second contradiction I will consider is closely related to the first and third; in using it as a bridge between them, I will turn first to the way in which Left critical theory validated and supported Olsen's subject and vision before suggesting how some of its tenets ran counter to and perhaps impeded the development of her particular artistic gift.
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Literary criticism flourished on the Left in the thirties, and writers like Gold, editor of the New Masses and one of the most influential of Communist party critics, and Farrell, a leading critic and writer for the increasingly independent Partisan Review, as well as a novelist, hotly debated such issues as the role of the artist in revolutionary struggle, the applications of Marxist thought to American literature, and the proper nature and functions of literature in a revolutionary movement. 21 As Olsen's early journals indicate, she followed such discussions with intense interest. There was much in the
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