Daughter of Earth is an autobiographical novel published by Agnes Smedley in 1929. The story spans from the 1890’s to the 1920’s and essentially charts in semi-fictionalized form the story of Smedley’s own awakening political consciousness. A sprawling tale that covers much of the inner geography if America, Daughter of Earth is something of an anomaly in Smedley’s canon which is primarily focused on her activities and witnessing of the Chinese revolution. The story instead transforms its main character Marie Rogers into her fictional doppelganger as it relates the story of how Smedley became politically radicalized to make that social and historical movement the driving force of her writing.
Ultimately, however, it is precisely this radicalization that led Daughter of Earth to essentially become a lost novel for many decades. Smedley published Daughter of Earth at a time when socialism and communist sympathies were perhaps at their high point in American society. The collapse of the Roaring Twenties amid the chaos of the 1929 stock market crash revealed the shaky foundation upon which capitalism was built. The Great Depression created a need for sharing and a distrust of the basic selfish premise of capitalist economics which proved to be just the right time and place for a book like Daughter of Earth.
By the end of World War II, however, everything had changed. Smedley became one of many creative artists whose work would suffer intolerably at the hands of those pushing the Red Scare agenda. As a result, Daughter of Earth was quite literally removed from book stores and circulation in libraries as she suffered persecution by the government and—perhaps even more distressing—ostracism by her literary peers looking out for their hides. Daughter of Earth would therefore suffer for several decades before its rediscovery during the countercultural revolution of the 1960’s.
