typing, ''making a metallic little pattern of sound in the air, because that is all I can do, because that is all I am supposed to do." The conclusion is another apology for her incapacity to do justice to the magnitude of the strike:
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 | | Forgive me that the words are feverish and blurred. You see, if I had time I could go away. But I write this on a battlefield. The rest, the General Strike, the terror, and arrests and jail, the songs in the night, must be written some other time, must be written later. . . . But there is so much happening now . . . .
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The conflict here is partly between her role as a writer, in this case a reporter doing her job, and her guilt at not being on the real battlefield herselfbetween the word and the deed. But more important is the conflict between two kinds of writing: the quick, fervent, impressionistic report from the arena of struggle, and the leisured, carefully structured and sustained rendering of the "beauty and heroism, the terror and significance" of those daysa rendering that, ironically, would require for its full development a withdrawal from the struggle.
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For a committed leftist in the thirties, political action, with all its demands on time and energy, had to take priority over intellectual work, yet the atmosphere on the Left did value and nurture literature in a variety of ways. Olsen would have been a reader in any case, but her friends in the YCL in Kansas City were among the many working-class people inspired by the movement to read broadly for the first time. And Olsen's own reading, eclectic though it was, was to some extent guided, extended, and informed by left-wing intellectual mentors such as the critics of
The Liberator,
the
New Masses,
and the
Modern Quarterly.
She recalls today that the Left
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| | was enriching in the sense that . . . in the movement people were reading like mad. There was as in any movement a looking for your ancestors, your predecessors . . .
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| | There was a burst of black writers. ... I knew about W. E. B. DuBois before, but because the movement was so conscious of race, of color, we were reading all the black writers, books
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