A01=Myra Page
American Political Novel
American Protest Novel
Author_Myra Page
Book History
Category=FBA
Category=FV
Communist literature
Communist Party USA
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eq_fiction
eq_historical-fiction
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_modern-contemporary
eq_nobargain
Feminist Literature
Gastonia Mill Strike
Great Depression
Labor Strikes
Mill Strikes
Modern American Literature
North Carolina Literature
Proletarian Literature
Social Realism
Socialism
Socialist Novel
Southern Cotton Mills
Southern Literature
Southern Race Relations
Southern Women's Writing
Soviet Union influence in the USA
Twentieth-Century Literature
Product details
- ISBN 9781469691084
- Dimensions: 203 x 127mm
- Publication Date: 21 Oct 2025
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
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.
Myra Page (1897–1993) was a twentieth-century American writer, journalist, and noted Communist.
Michael P. Bibler is associate professor at Louisiana State University.
Michael P. Bibler is associate professor at Louisiana State University.
