Gathering Storm: A Story of the Black Belt

by Myra Page, Michael Bibler (Foreword)

This novel is one of the most clear-eyed and compelling works of the Great Depression. As Marge Crenshaw grows up in the cotton mills, she learns to fight the forces of racial, sexual, and class oppression that hold her, her family, and her community back. With her brother Tom, who has joined the Communist Party, Marge eventually becomes a union organizer who leads the famous strike at Loray Mill in Gastonia, North Carolina—a real-life strike in 1929 that claimed numerous lives, including that of organizer and songwriter Ella May Wiggins.

Myra Page was an active member of the Communist Party, and Gathering Storm stands out from other Gastonia novels because it was printed in the Soviet Union. Yet this is not a novel about outsider agitators infiltrating a peaceful Southern town. Page was born in Virginia and worked as a labor organizer throughout the South. And as Marge’s heart-wrenching story demonstrates, the fight against the forces of capitalist exploitation and inequality was entirely homegrown. Gathering Storm is a bona fide Communist novel; but with the story of Marge and her family at its heart, it is also a deeply intimate novel that proves the personal is always political.

354 pages, Paperback

Published October 21, 2025

About the author

Writer, union activist, and communist Dorothy Markey (nee Dorothy Page Gary) was born in Newport News, Va., in 1897. Under the name Myra Page, Markey was an active political journalist and writer in the 1930s. In the early 1940s, she taught writing at the Writers' School sponsored by the League of American Writers in New York City. During the 1950s and 1960s, she wrote and published the juvenile biographies. Dorothy Markey died in 1993.

(from http://www2.lib.unc.edu/mss/inv/p/Pag...)