Anzia Yezierska (1880-1970) was a Polish-born American novelist and short story writer whose work chronicles the lives of Jewish immigrants in New York's Lower East Side. Emigrating to the United States as a child, she drew on her own experiences of poverty, cultural displacement, and intellectual aspiration to create vivid portraits of immigrant women striving for dignity and independence. Her fiction, including Hungry Hearts and Bread Givers, occupies a significant place in early twentieth-century American literature and in the canon of immigrant and women's writing.