Anna Strunsky

Anna Strunsky Walling (1877–1964) 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 a novelist primarily, but also wrote about social problems and the labor movement. She had immigrated in 1886 as a child with her family to New York City in the United States from the Russian Empire, where she was born in what is now Belarus. 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," which included him. 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 the Great War. She worked to end war and capital punishment.

Anna Strunsky was born March 21, 1877 into a Jewish family in Babinots (now Babinovitch), Liozna Raion, Russian Empire (now Belarus). Her family (her parents were Elias Strunsky and Anna Horowitz) emigrated to New York City in 1886 when she was nine years old. Her several siblings included an older brother Max and a younger sister Rose, with whom she was close. After several years in New York, in 1893, the family moved to San Francisco. They moved in with her older brother Max, already established in the city as a doctor.

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.

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