We Too Are Drifting by Gale Wilhelm (All Editions)

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Random House published Gale Wilhelm's first novel in 1935 and gave it wide publicity, and dozens of reviews appeared in newspapers across the country. Kirkus compared it to Colette, and reviewers who set it beside The Well of Loneliness praised its restraint. Wilhelm's spare prose, with no quotation marks and almost no adjectives, drew comparisons to Hemingway, a connection scholars have since examined in The Hemingway Review and College Literature.

Its standing among lesbian readers was high from the start. Marion Zimmer Bradley, in her 1960 checklist of lesbian fiction, called it probably the major novel of the 1930s to deal with lesbians, and its modern publishers describe it as the first mainstream American novel to treat lesbian relationships in a straightforward, unapologetic way. The book was reprinted many times in paperback in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, beginning with a Berkley edition in 1953, and Ireland's Censorship Board prohibited it in 1956.

Wilhelm stopped publishing after 1943 and dropped out of sight. When Barbara Grier's Naiad Press reissued the novel in 1984, Grier's foreword asked anyone with information about the author to come forward. Wilhelm, who lived with her partner Kathleen Huebner until her death in 1991, was pleased by the reissues and contributed a short autobiographical sketch to the 1985 Naiad edition of Torchlight to Valhalla. Boiler House Press brought the novel back again in 2026 in its Recovered Books series.