Olive Tilford Dargan, also known through her pseudonym Fielding Burke, was born to a rural family in Litchfield, Kentucky and later became a poet, playwright and novelist. Much of her writing focused on women and working class issues of the Southern Appalachian region. She was a feminist and a socialist, providing one of the few strong southern female voices to the proletarian fiction of the 1930s. As an active participant in the proletarian movement, Dargan wrote a series of radical feminist/socialist novels on the Gastonia mill strikes. Dargan was one of the only proletarian writers to provide a voice of the female working class experience.