The Heart of Revolution: The Radical Life and Novels of Olive Dargan

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Despite the timeless themes of Olive Tilford Dargan's work and the acclaim she earned with her novels Call Home the Heart (1932) and A Stone Came Rolling (1935), the author, who published her best-known works under the pseudonym Fielding Burke, has been largely forgotten by the American literary establishment. In this first book-length study of Dargan's life and work, Kathy Cantley Ackerman combines biography and history with a critical reading of Dargan's work. Ackerman pays close attention to the proletarian, feminist, and racial issues in the novels, she then examines the ways these issues intersect in the southern Appalachian and Piedmont regions. Ackerman shows how Dargan's aesthetic, articulated in her depiction of the southern textile mill strikes of 1929 and the early 1930s, defies the party line of the period that privileged the struggle of white working men over the concerns of women and minorities. Through strong female characters, she reconstructs the paternalistic, capitalistic marriage-and-mother myth, replacing it with a model based on egalitarian principles--an ideology that has only gained relevance over time.