Agnes Smedley's Daughter of Earth was published in 1929, just months before the October 1929 economic crash on Wall Street, ushering in the Depression. The experimental, self- questioning, reflective, and healing autobiographical novel has an intricate publication history, enshrouded in all the social and political issues and movements of the time. Smedley, an avowed communist, feminist, antiracist, and anticolonialist, wrote the novel, whose original title was Outcast, in Denmark at the home of her friend, Danish novelist Karen Michaelis. She had moved to Berlin in the early 1920s with her Asian Indian partner, Chatto, of the Berlin Indian Revolutionary Committee, an anticolonial organization. She was teaching at Berlin University. The relationship eventually falls apart and Smedley has a psychological breakdown, going into Freudian psychoanalysis for treatment. In August 1925, Smedley accepts an invitation from Karen to come to Denmark and write her book, locating what trauma theorist Judith Herman calls a “safe” place for recovery.

Smedley completes the first draft of her novel in November 1925, five years after the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, giving women the right to vote, and eight years after the Bolshevik socialist revolution, providing the consciousness for a working- class revolution around the world, including the United States. Smedley finishes the novel with “Karen Michaelis and the exiled Russian- born anarchist Alexander Berkman, acting as midwives.” Karen looks for a Danish publisher, and Smedley's friend, Emma Goldman, who, because of her labor activism, was deported from the United States, looks for a publisher in Great Britain, but to no avail. When Smedley resumes her teaching post at Berlin University in the spring of 1926, she, now out of psychoanalysis and somewhat recovered from the traumatic breakup of her marriage and the trauma of her past, had revised the entire manuscript twice, retitling it The Struggle of Earth. While still in Germany, her lawyer, Gilbert Roe, looks for a US publisher. By 1927, Smedley is based in China, but in early 1928 Gilbert Roe places the novel with Coward- McCann, a start- up publishing house in New York City. The novel is slated to appear on the company's first list that fall, alongside works by Thornton Wilder, Alexander Woollcott, and Joseph Herbst.