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Anna Strunsky was born in Russia on 21st March, 1879. When she was a child her family emigrated to the United States. They lived in New York City until moving to San Francisco in 1894. During her last year in high school, Anna joined the Socialist Labor Party (SLP). She later recalled: “You are born a socialist. You are born with music, or poetry or painting or science. You can’t really become a socialist unless you’re born that way.”

Strunsky became a student at Stanford University and in December 1899 met the young writer, Jack London. She later recalled: "Objectively, I confronted a young man of about twenty-two, and saw a pale face illumined by large, blue eyes fringed with dark lashes, and a beautiful mouth which, opening in its ready laugh, revealed an absence of front teeth, adding to the boyishness of his appearance. The brow, the nose, the contour of the cheeks, the massive throat, were Greek. His form gave an impression of grace and athletic strength, though he was a little under the American, or rather Californian, average in height. He was dressed in gray, and was wearing the soft white shirt and collar which he had already adopted."

They became very close and in 1903 they wrote a joint novel, The Kempton-Wace Letters (1903). Norma Fain Pratt argues that the "book is devoted to a debate on the nature of love in which the woman correspondent, Dane Kempton, defines the ideals of love as romantic, while the man, Herbert Wace, contends love is essentially biological."

After the 1905 Russian Revolution she established a branch of the Friends of Russian Freedom in San Francisco. During this period she met and fell in love with William English Walling. They were married in Paris in 1906. Anna’s first child, born in 1908, died when only five days old. The following year she had a miscarriage. Over the next few years Anna Walling gave birth to four children, Rosamond, Anna, Georgia, and William Hayden English.

In August, 1908, Anna and her husband witnessed the Springfield Riot in Illinois, where a white mob attacked local African Americans. During the riot two were lynched, six killed, and over 2,000 African Americans were forced to leave the city. In an article entitled, The Race War in the North, that he wrote for the The Independent about the riot, Walling complained that "a large part of the white population" in the area were waging "permanent warfare with the Negro race". Walling argued that they only way to reduce this conflict was "to treat the Negro on a plane of absolute political and social equality".

Mary Ovington, a journalist working for the New York Evening Post, responded to the article by writing to William English Walling and at a meeting in New York they decided to form the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP). The first meeting of the NAACP was held on 12th February, 1909. Early members included Josephine Ruffin, Mary Talbert, Mary Church Terrell, Inez Milholland, Jane Addams, George Henry White, William Du Bois, Charles Edward Russell, John Dewey, Charles Darrow, Lincoln Steffens, Ray Stannard Baker, Fanny Garrison Villard, Oswald Garrison Villard and Ida Wells-Barnett.

In 1912, their Max Eastman, became editor of the left-wing magazine, The Masses. Organised like a co-operative, artists and writers who contributed to the journal shared in its management. Walling and Strunsky joined the team as did Floyd Dell, John Reed, Crystal Eastman, Sherwood Anderson, Carl Sandburg, Upton Sinclair, Amy Lowell, Louise Bryant, John Sloan, Dorothy Day, Cornelia Barns, Alice Beach Winter, Art Young, Boardman Robinson, Robert Minor, K. R. Chamberlain, Stuart Davis, George Bellows and Maurice Becker. As well as writing for the magazine, Anna published the novel, Violette of Père Lachaise (1915).

The harmony of the group came to and end during the First World War. The editor, Max Eastman, believed that the war had been caused by the imperialist competitive system. Eastman and journalists such as John Reed who reported the conflict for The Masses, argued that the USA should remain neutral. Most of those involved with the journal agreed with this view but there was a small minority, including William English Walling and Upton Sinclair, who wanted the USA to join the Allies against the Central Powers. When Walling failed to convince his fellow members he ceased to contribute to the journal.

Anna Strunsky disagreed with her husband over this issue of the First World War and this created problems in their marriage. They also had arguments on the merits of the Russian Revolution. Whereas she was an enthusiastic supporter he was highly critical of the Bolsheviks.

In 1932, William filed for a Mexican divorce, but Anna refused to recognize the end of the marriage. William Walling died in Amsterdam in 1936.

Anna Walling continued to be active in politics and was a member of the War Resisters League, the American League to Abolish Capital Punishment, the League for Industrial Democracy, and the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People.

Anna Strunsky Walling died in February 1964.

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(1) Jack London, letter to Anna Strunsky (21st December 1899)

Somehow I am like a fish out of water. I take to conventionality uneasily, rebelliously. I am used to saying what I think, neither more nor less. Soft equivocation is no part of me. As had I spoken to a man who came out of nowhere, shared my bed and board for a night, and passed on, so did I speak to you. Life is very short. The melancholy of materialism can never be better expressed than by Fitzgerald's "O make haste." One should have no time to dally. And further, should you know me, understand this: I, too, was a dreamer, on a farm, nay, a California ranch. But early, at only nine, the hard hand of the world was laid upon me. It was never relaxed. It has left me sentiment, but destroyed sentimentalism. It has made me practical, so that I am known as harsh, stern, uncompromising. It has taught me that reason is mightier than imagination; that the scientific man is superior to the emotional man. It has also given me a truer and a deeper romance of things, an idealism which is an inner sanctuary and which must be resolutely throttled in dealing with my kind, but which yet remains within the Holy of Holies, like an oracle, to be cherished always but to be made manifest or be consulted not on every occasion I go to market. To do this latter would bring upon me the ridicule of my fellows and make me a failure; to sum up, simply the eternal fitness of things:

All of which goes to show that people are prone to misunderstand me. May I have the privilege of not so classing you?

Nay, I did not walk down the street after Hamilton - I ran. And I had a heavy overcoat, and I was very warm and breathless. The emotional man in me had his will, and I was ridiculous.

I shall be over Saturday night. If you draw back upon yourself, what have I left ? Take me this way : a stray guest, a bird of passage, splashing with salt-rimed wings through a brief moment of your life - a rude and blundering bird, used to large airs and great spaces, unaccustomed to the amenities of confined existence. An unwelcome visitor, to be tolerated only because of the sacred law of food and blanket.

(2) Jack London, letter to Anna Strunsky (15th March, 1900)

Regarding box... please remember that I have disclosed myself in my nakedness - all those vain efforts and passionate strivings are so many weaknesses of mine which I put into your possession. Why, the grammar is often frightful, and always bad, while artistically, the whole boxful is atrocious. Now don't say I am piling it on. If I did not realize and condemn those faults I would be unable to try to do better. But - why, I think in sending that box to you I did the bravest thing I ever did in my life.

Say, do you know I am getting nervous and soft as a woman. I've got to get out again and stretch my wings or I shall become a worthless wreck. I am getting timid, do you hear? Timid! It must stop. Enclosed letter I received to-day, and it brought a contrast to me of my then 'unfailing nerve' and my present nervousness and timidity. Return it, as I suppose I shall have to answer it some day.

© John Simkin, April 2013