Storm Songs and Fables.
Presentation Copy of Anna Louise Strong’s First Book
Strong, Anna Louise. Storm Songs. Chicago: The Langston Press, 1904.
8vo.; blue cloth, stamped in gilt; frontispiece portrait of Anna Louise Strong in cap and gown; light wear to extremities. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: ‘Love broodeth o’er the/ raging tempest—strife,/ And Love shall crown with/ peace the future years,/ And unto perfect Love I/ yield my life,’/ I write this for you, Edith, because it contains most of my philosophy of life, and is the Song the Storms have taught me. Anna Louise Strong”
Published while Strong was attending Bryn Mawr College, this collection of poems and fables offers a glimpse into the Leftist author’s earliest writing, before she shifted her focus to books about the inner workings of Communist countries. The collection is dedicated to her mother, Ruth Marie Strong, who died in 1903, the year before Storm Songs was published. Strong’s verse is filled with natural imagery and somewhat melancholy in tone; in “Life’s Music,” she writes of the “jarring dissonance” of life, which is made up of “blurred, ill-played chords” (p. 21). Even the titles of the poems are telling: “Weariness,” “Melancholy,” “Lost Dreams.” The fables are more humorous and contain hints of Strong’s developing philosophical and political beliefs. The allegorical tales, featuring talking animals and characters such as The Laborer and the Poet, highlight the divide between what Strong refers to as “The Land of the Real in the World of Men” and the realm of ideas and poetry, “The Isle of Dreams.” Strong’s skepticism toward organized religion is also apparent; in “The Crocodile,” a crocodile eats a missionary and then is approached by another crocodile, who invites him to join the Crocodile Church. The crocodile responds, “I’m afraid I can’t…I have intellectual doubts” (p. 32).
The inscription is taken from the final lines of Strong’s “The Weary Land” (25); Edith was most likely a close friend from Bryn Mawr.
Anna Louise Strong (1885-1970) was born in Friend, Nebraska and attended Bryn Mawr College and Oberlin College before earning her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Chicago in 1908. After finishing her education, she moved to Seattle, where she was elected to the Seattle School Board, the only woman on the board at that time. She became an advocate for organized labor and pacifism, and openly opposed the U.S.’s entry into World War I. After Strong testified in court in favor of a female friend who was on trial for sending out mailers encouraging young men to dodge the draft, she was forced to leave the Seattle School Board. Already interested in socialism, Strong began her travels abroad to Communist countries. These extended trips provided the source material for all of her books. At one point, both the F.B.I. and the Russian secret service suspected that Strong was a spy, and in 1949, she was arrested in Moscow, but ultimately released due to the lack of evidence against her. An acquaintance of Mao Zedong, Strong spent the latter part of her life living in China, where she died in 1970.
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