This work first appeared in a story collection in 1984, six years after the author, octogenarian Meridel Le Sueur, had rescued the yellowing manuscript from her basement. Strikingly parallel to Le Sueur's city novel The Girl, I Hear Men Talking was written primarily in the 1930s, depicting life in rural Iowa during the Depression. In the novel the girl Penelope runs about the town, visiting its principal actors and recovering...