Anna Strunsky

rdf:langString Anna Strunsky

rdf:langString Anna Strunsky Walling (March 21, 1877 – February 25, 1964) was known as an early 20th-century Jewish-American author and advocate of socialism based in San Francisco, California, and New York City. She was primarily a novelist, but also wrote about social problems and the labor movement. Born in the Russian Empire in what is now Belarus, she emigrated as a child with her family to New York City in the United States in 1886. After a few years they moved to San Francisco. Strunsky studied at Stanford University, where she met writer Jack London and later became part of a radical group known as "The Crowd", of which London was also a member. They wrote an epistolary novel together, publishing it anonymously in 1903. She wrote a memoir of him after his early death in 1916. In 1906 Strunsky and her sister Rose went to Russia as correspondents for a revolutionary journal run by the wealthy American socialist William English Walling. She married him there, and they settled in New York City after returning to the United States. She lived there for the remainder of her life, continuing to write. She was active in socialist and progressive causes, maintaining opposition to war after the United States entered World War I. She worked to end war and capital punishment.