In the Summer of 1934, the Partisan Review, then the premier journal of American communism and letters, asked Tillie Lerner Olsen to write a dispatch from the San Francisco waterfront, where longshoremen had ground the docks to a standstill. Lerner was twenty-one when she appeared in the pages of the second issue of the Review, which introduced her as a “Nebraska girl at present living in Stockton, Calif [who] last year she took a leave of absence from the Young Communist League to produce a future citizen of Soviet America.” Four months later, Lerner reappeared in the journal. San Francisco had rid her of her status as an ingenue and the contributor’s section of the Review now began, “Tillie Lerner, arrested during the raids in San Francisco, has been recently released on bail.”

“Do not ask me to write of the strike and the terror,” began her classic account of the strike.

I am on a battlefield, and the increasing stench and smoke sting the eyes so it is impossible to turn them back into the past. . . .  The kids coming in from the waterfront. The flame in their eyes, the feeling of invincibility in their blood. The stories they had to tell of scabs educated, of bloody skirmishes. My heart was ballooning with happiness anyhow, to be back, working in the movement again, but the things happening down at the waterfront, the heroic everydays, stored such richness in me I can never lose it.