Description: Mary Edna Tobias Marcy (1877-1922) was an American socialist author, pamphleteer, poet and magazine editor. She is particularly remembered for her muckraking series of magazine articles on the meat industry, Letters of a Pork Packer's Stenographer, and also as the author of a widely translated socialist propaganda pamphlet, Shop Talks on Economics, regarded as a classic of the genre. She was an assistanat editor of the International Socialist Review, one of the most influential American socialist magazines of the early 20th century. Orphaned in childhood, she worked to support herself while attending high school and taught herself shorthand from a textbook on stenography in her free time. She obtained a position as secretary to the president of the University of Chicago which included free tuition at the university where she studied psychology and took advanced courses in literature and philosophy. After her marriage to socialist journalist Leslie Marcy she moved to Kansas City where she worked as a secretary in a large meat packing company from 1902-05 and her experiences here led to her series of articles exposing the dangerous working conditions and inadequate wages prevailing in the industry. She went on to work for Charles H Kerr, publisher of the International Socialist Review, with whom she had an affair, remaining with the company until her death by suicide. Published in 1917, this work is one of her two children's books. She also wrote a novel, a play and a number of short stories and poems. With illustrations throughout.

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