Name Anna Strunsky | Role Author | |
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Died 1964, New York, United States | ||
Charmian Kittredge London and the Secrets of the House of Happy Walls
Anna Strunsky Walling (1877–1964) was an early 20th-century Jewish-American author and proponent of socialism based in San Francisco, California. Her work focused on social problems, literature, and the labor movement. She had immigrated in 1886 as a child with her family to New York City in the United States from Russia. They moved to San Francisco, California, where she later became part of a radical group known as "The Crowd," which included writer Jack London. She wrote a memoir of him after his death.
Contents
- Charmian Kittredge London and the Secrets of the House of Happy Walls
- Early life and education
- Legacy
- References
Early life and education
Anna Strunsky was born March 21, 1877 into a Jewish family in Babinots (now - Babinovitch), Belarus, Russia. Her family (her parents were Elias Strunsky and Anna Horowitz) emigrated to New York City in 1886 when she was nine years old. Her siblings including a younger sister Rose and older brother Max. After several years in New York, in 1893, the family moved to San Francisco. They moved in with her older brother, Dr. Max Strunsky.
Anna joined the Socialist Labor Party as a teenager and remained a socialist the rest of her life. She studied at Stanford University (1896–1898). While at Stanford, Anna met the young writer Jack London, and they became close friends. She and London spent a great deal of time together discussing social and political issues.
Anna and her sister Rose, who also attended Stanford, became leading members of the turn-of-the-20th century San Francisco intellectual scene, part of a radical group of young Californian writers and artists known as "The Crowd" that included Jack London, Jim Whitaker, George Sterling, and others.
With Jack London, Anna Strunsky wrote her first novel, The Kempton-Wace Letters, in the epistolary style. They published it anonymously in 1903. After his death in 1916, Strunsky published a memoir of her relationship with London.
In 1906 Strunsky and her sister Rose joined American socialist William English Walling in Russia as correspondents for his revolutionary news bureau. Anna and William married that year, returning to the United States at the end of the year. They had four children together before separating.
Strunsky continued her writing, and her second book, Violette of Pere Lachaise, was published in 1915. William and Anna separated during the Great War, in part due to their disagreement over the United States' role in the conflict.
Strunsky continued to write and advocate for socialism. She was a participant in Quaker social activity, and an active member of several liberal-left groups, including the War Resisters League, the League for Mutual Aid, the American League to Abolish Capital Punishment, and the League for Industrial Democracy. She and her husband were among founding members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909.
Strunsky died on February 25, 1964 in New York. She was survived by her four children, Rosamund, Anna, Georgia and Hayden.
Legacy
In her 1931 autobiography, Emma Goldman wrote of meeting Anna and Rose in 1898,
Among the most interesting people I met in San Francisco were two girls, the Strunsky sisters. Anna, the elder, had attended my lecture on Political Action. She had been indignant, I afterwards learned, because of my "unfairness to the socialists." The next day she came to visit me "for a little while," as she said. She remained all afternoon, and then invited me to her home. There I met a group of students among them Jack London, and the younger Strunsky girl, Rose, who was ill. Anna and I became great friends. She had been suspended from Leland Stanford University because she had received a male visitor in her room instead of in the parlour. I told Anna of my life in Vienna and of the men students with whom we used to drink tea, smoke, and discuss all through the night. Anna thought that the American woman would establish her right to liberty and privacy, once she secured the vote. I did not agree with her....
Anna Strunsky Walling Papers are held by the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, the Yale University Library and the Huntington Library.