The fictional character of Marie Rogers lives a life similar to Agnes Smedley's. While the novel is fiction, the content is predominantly autobiographical. In the 1987 republication, Alice Walker states in her foreword “... it is the true story (give or take a few minor changes, deletions, or embellishments) of one woman’s life. Marie Rogers of Daughter of Earth is Agnes Smedley” (2). In his 1973 afterword, Paul Lauter discusses Smedley's life, full of struggle and hardship, as it led up to the writing of Daughter of Earth as a therapeutic exercise. “Psychoanalysis...was for her not a fad but a last remedy” (411). The novel is divided into seven parts. Daughter of Earth has become a standard piece of proletarian literature because of its focus on the struggles of the working class.
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