From Cowboy Ballads to Cold War Battles: Margaret Larkin’s Gendered Journey of Resistance 

Margaret Larkin was a poet, playwright, journalist, non-fiction author and labor activist. She was also a musician and folklorist best known for The Singing Cowboy, a much-admired collection of Western folk songs published in 1931. Among wide-ranging literary achievements, her award-winning play of 1926, El Cristo, is significant, as is the script she wrote that year for The Passaic Textile Strike, a stirring documentary film that exposed links between economic and sexual violence. In 1929, Larkin’s journalism in The Nation and New Masses featured eyewitness accounts of class warfare during a textile strike in North Carolina. In the last decade of her life, Larkin investigated the systemic oppression of women in her adopted country of Mexico and published two well-received non-fiction books that further confirmed her versatility as a writer.

In between the periods of literary activity that defined her early and late career, Larkin devoted herself to the roles of wife and mother. As the spouse of Oscar-winning screenwriter and novelist Albert Maltz, she gave up literary work for over a decade to raise two adopted children. But with the onset of the Cold War and the receipt of Albert’s subpoena from the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee, Larkin returned to writing. From 1947 to 1951 she published articles and made speeches in support of her husband and nine other film industry figures—the “Hollywood Ten”—who were blacklisted for refusing to answer questions about their political beliefs. In this period Larkin wrote and spoke as a mother, sharing stories about how Cold War ideology and the blacklist harmed children. In doing so she took a leadership role among the “wives of the Ten” and won a national following.

Learning self-reliance

Margaret Larkin was born on July 7, 1899, in the town of Las Vegas, New Mexico, to English and Scottish parents. She came from a rugged western family known for its daringly progressive women. Her grandmother on her father’s side, Dr. Harriet Hill Larkin, was one of the first female physicians in the United States; her mother, Anna Sommers Larkin, was elected to the New Mexico State Legislature.

In the fall of 1919, Larkin enrolled at the University of Kansas, where she majored in English and liberal arts, supplementing her studies with guitar and vocal lessons. In her freshman year, her mother and younger sister stayed with her in a boarding house near the campus. During her second year of studies, she wrote “Goodbye to My Mother”, a personal verse meditation that won the award for Best Poem submitted to the Kansas Authors’ Club in 1921.

After graduation, Larkin worked for a few years as a journalist in the Santa Fe area, where she befriended some vacationing New Yorkers and decided to come East. In the mid-1920s she moved to Manhattan, where she met and married her first husband, Liston Oak, a leftist writer and journalist active in the Communist Party, who introduced Larkin to pro-union publicity work and activism.

Larkin’s first poem in a national publication appeared in the October 8, 1924, issue of The New Republic under the title, “Poem to Another Lover.” Its three quatrains depict the emotions of repeated love relationships that end in disappointment but are tempered, significantly, by renewed self-reliance:

The decay of love is no strange thing to me surely
Yet here I sit half the black night weeping alone
Fool, that must learn for each love the same bitter lesson!
There is no love but my own.

When the Communist-led Workers Party asked Larkin to write the narrative for a film about a massive and hard-fought textile strike in Passaic, New Jersey, she jumped into the fray, immersing herself in the struggle and at times risking her own safety. As her sister, Katherine, recalled much later, “Margaret was stunned and appalled by what she saw and lived in Passaic; it was an education in the facts of life.”

Early activist work

In writing the film, Larkin took the creative liberty of introducing the story of the strike with a powerful “Prologue” that underscored the sexual exploitation of women. In a concise playlet acted by the Passaic strikers themselves and directed by Larkin, the striving Breznac family is compelled by a wage cut to send their school-age daughter into the workforce, where she is raped by her boss. Much like the opening chapters of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Larkin’s prelude instills awareness of the brutal threats faced by immigrant workers. As labor historian Philip Foner stated, “Audiences were deeply moved by the film” (153).

While Larkin was bravely documenting the violence in Passaic, her one-act play El Cristo was being produced and winning accolades in both New York and Dallas. The drama’s action takes in a New Mexico morada, a ritual chamber of Los Hermanos Penitentes (The Penitent Brothers), a religious sect that flourished in Mexican American Catholic communities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and was known for rituals of extreme devotion. But in Larkin’s play the religious observance is exposed as a false and manipulative tool for gaining political power. El Cristo, therefore, reinterprets the sacred rite as a metaphor for working-class suffering imposed by those who claim spiritual and moral authority. The play won the 1926 Samuel French Prize and was awarded the Belasco cup in the National Little Theatre Tournament in New York.

Larkin’s only known publication of 1927 appeared in the March issue of Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, a magazine famous for promoting the culture of the Harlem Renaissance. Her contribution to the cutting-edge journal was a commissioned review of Fine Clothes to the Jew, a poetry collection by a future superstar: “In casting about for a precise category in which to identify the work of Langston Hughes,” she wrote, “I find that he might be acclaimed a new prophet in several fields.” Having heard Hughes read his works in person, Larkin compared his use of dialect and speech cadences to those of the Scottish poet Robert Burns:

“Hughes is doing for the Negro race what Burns did for the Scotch—squeezing out the beauty and rich warmth of a noble people into enduring poetry” (84).

The Singing Cowboy: A Book of Western Songs

In Passaic, Larkin had formed sympathetic bonds with impoverished women workers of the urban North. In August 1929, at an outdoor rally in support of a textile strike in Gastonia, North Carolina, she was moved by a courageous female folk musician of the Appalachian South. After the rally, Larkin interviewed Ella May Wiggins, who held the smallest of her five children in her arms and told her story:

“I’m the  mother of nine,” she said, “four of them died with whooping cough. . .I was working nights and nobody to do for them. . .I never could do anything for my children, not even to keep ’em alive, it seems. That’s why I’m for the Union, so’s I can do better for them” (The Story of Ella May, 3).

Less than three weeks later, twenty-nine-year-old Ella May was killed—shot in the chest by an anti-union mob while walking to a strike meeting. Larkin’s article in The Nation under the simple title “Ella May’s Songs,” eulogized the martyred balladeer along with stanzas of her verses, allowing the singer and folk hero to speak for herself. In the radical journal New Masses, Larkin published a similar piece that used fewer song lyrics but offered vivid personal details about “the immense vitality of the mountain woman” (3). Her reporting from Gastonia introduced the world to legendary female labor leader while expressing both political ideals and deep appreciation for music as a cultural force.

As a young woman in New Mexico, Larkin had gathered, without any particular purpose in mind, a large collection of obscure western folk songs. When she left New Mexico for New York in 1924, she had with her only about ten dollars, but she had also brought her ten-gallon hat, her guitar, and her music. Her first steady job in the city was a week-to-week gig singing cowboy songs in a Yiddish cafe on Second Avenue. She was also hired out for private events, often with her close friend and collaborator, Helen Black. One night the two sang at a party where the highly successful publishers Alfred A. Knopf and his wife Blanche were present. They had loved what they’d heard and said they would be very interested in publishing a book of Western “people’s songs” curated by Larkin, a genuine cowgirl.

Larkin’s book-length collection of western ballads, The Singing Cowboy: A Book of Western Songs, was published in 1931 and won praise for its historically accurate preservation of melodies and lyrics in the vernacular. Helen provided the piano arrangements. The text includes sheet music and illustrations for traditional western tunes including “I Ride an Old Paint”, which was published in 1927 by Carl Sandburg but inspired by Larkin herself, who brought the song to Sandburg’s attention while he was visiting Santa Fe. To promote the book in  New York, Margaret and Helen gave a round of concerts and interviews, after which they were portrayed in press accounts as daring female “adventurers” of the West. This was misleading only because cowboy country was nothing new to Margaret—she saw herself as “a permanent Westerner.”

The Singing Cowboy became the standard sourcebook for a generation of folk musicians who drew on its riches, including on-screen cowboy singers in many Hollywood westerns. Following the book’s publication Larkin was hired as an on-stage performer in the road company for Green Grow the Lilacs, the popular play that inspired the Broadway musical Oklahoma!        

Between 1925 and 1933 Larkin published a handful of lyric poems in The New Republic. In 1934 the Nation, aware of Larkin’s ability to write authoritatively about African American culture, asked her to review Beale Street: Where the Blues Began, a non-fiction study by Black author and future civil rights leader, George W. Lee. In an unusually perceptive review, Larkin discerned that the real power of the book’s stories had been sadly undercut by the need to placate white audiences. She used her platform to explain how much better the book would have been without the domination of “lily white” politics and the caste system of the Jim Crow South:

“The bourgeois Negro is in a peculiarly tragic position in America. By raising himself above the proletarian and farmer, the Negro cuts himself off from his own mainstream. The whites bar him from further advancement. The correct Babbittry of the middle class is intensified by the incessant need to prove that a Negro banker, doctor, merchant, or civil servant is as good as his white prototype or even better. This is the point of view in “Beale Street.” It accounts for the pedestrian dullness with which Mr. Lee has handled the dramatic and heroic story of a Negro community struggling for economic and political power in the midst of the intolerant South” (279).

Theatre is a weapon

After her divorce from Liston Oak in 1935, Larkin remained in New York and was named executive secretary of the Theater Union, a group of young leftist dramatists united by the slogan “Theatre is a weapon” and committed to staging politically engaged drama written from the point of view of the working class (Rabkin 45). In charge of publicity, Larkin received letters asking advice about how to form drama groups and took it upon herself to write an influential and widely circulated pamphlet with guidelines for organizing and sustaining local theatres.

One of the Union’s first productions was the premiere of a controversial labor play, Black Pit, written by the twenty-seven-year-old Jewish American playwright Albert Maltz. When some doctrinaire leftist critics attacked Maltz’s play as “mistaken in its Marxist ideology and possibly harmful to the labor movement,” Larkin came to the playwright’s defense in the Daily Worker, interpreting Black Pit as “a worthy and necessary advance for the social theatre.” Albert and Margaret were married in 1937. Early in her adult life Larkin had accepted a diagnosis that, due to a childhood accident and chronic health problems ever since, she was unable to have children. Their son Peter was adopted as an infant in early 1938.

Throughout the 1930s Albert’s plays and short fiction won critical praise and a handful of prizes including the 1938 O. Henry Award. This success, however, did not translate into financial security. Living in a duplex in Long Island City with a small child at home, the couple struggled to pay bills but staked their hopes for financial relief on Albert’s first novel, The Underground Stream, the story of a young Communist labor organizer. Published in June 1940, the book received glowing reviews, but its chance for mass appeal was undermined by the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939, and it earned almost nothing.

Several literary friends of Albert and Margaret had already left New York for well-paid work in the Hollywood film industry, so in mid-1941 the family headed west to pursue the California dream. Albert quickly learned the ropes as a screenwriter, and the family’s fiscal position improved, allowing the couple to adopt a second child in 1942. In coordination with another married couple who were close friends—director Herbert Biberman and actress Gale Sondergaard—arrangements were made to adopt two children (a girl for the Maltzes and a boy for the Bibermans), from an orphanage in Georgia. But when word came in August 1942 that the two newborns were available, Albert, Herbert and Gale were all busy with film projects, allowing Margaret to step forward for an amazingly difficult mission.

Long-distance driving was prohibited by wartime gas rationing policies. Larkin took a train from Los Angeles to Manhattan to visit her younger sister for two days and gather strength before embarking, alone, on a cross-continental odyssey. By rail she traveled from New York to Atlanta; then, with two infants in tow, in railcars overcrowded with troops in transit, from Atlanta to New Orleans, and finally back to Los Angeles—a chaotic, harrowing six-day journey complicated by wartime transportation irregularities. The story of the adoption of infants Kathy Maltz and Daniel Biberman in September 1942 might be cited as evidence of Margaret Larkin’s epic physical endurance and resourcefulness. Why did the families choose to adopt children from Georgia? The Maltzes and the Bibermans were politically progressive; they shared a desire to counteract racism by “rescuing” the children from an upbringing in the color-prejudiced Deep South.

Stay tuned for Margaret Larkin Part 2: Cold War Battles

Margaret Larkin is a Nasty Woman Activist and Writer.

© Patrick Chura 2026

Works Cited 

Foner, Phillip S. History of the Labor Movement of the United States: Volume 10: The TUEL, 1925-1929. New York: International Publishers, 1994; pp. 143, 148.

Kalmar Odenheim, Lynne. Phone interview with the author, January 9, 2026.

Larkin, Margaret. “Poem to Another Lover”, The New Republic, October 8, 1924.

Larkin, Margaret. The Passaic Textile Strike . Directed by Samuel Russak., 1926.

Larkin, Margaret. “A Poet for the People—A Review”, Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, March 1927, pp. 84-85.

Larkin, Margaret. “Ella May’s Songs”, The Nation, October 9, 1929, pp. 382-383.

Larkin, Margaret, “The Story of Ella May”, New Masses, November 1929, pp. 3-4.

Larkin, Margaret. The Singing Cowboy: A Book of Western Songs. 1931. A. A. Knopf, 1931, Da   Capo Press, 1979.

Larkin, Margaret. “Success Stories: Beale Street: Where the Blues Began,” by George W. Lee.  The Nation, September 5, 1934, 279.

Larkin, Margaret. “How One Type of Worker is Corrupted by Capitalism is Theme of Black Pit.” Daily Worker, March 19, 1935.

Larkin, Margaret. Seven Shares in a Goldmine. Simon & Schuster, 1959.

Larkin, Margaret. The Six Days of Yad Mordechai. Yad Mordechai Museum, 1966.   

Larkin, Margaret. “Family Planning in Mexico”, The Nation, November 14, 1966, pp. 508-511.   

Larkin, Katherine. Letter to Lynn Haessly, February 22, 1986.

Potok, Chaim. “This Piece of Earth”, New York Times, June 9, 1968.

Rabkin, Gerald. Drama and Commitment: Politics in the American Theatre of the Thirties. Indiana University Press, 1964.

Sandburg, Carl. “I Ride an Old Paint”, The American Song-bag, Harcourt Brace and Company, 1927.