Marion Bloom

For the Ulysses character, see Molly Bloom.

Marion Bloom
Born	1891 New Windsor, Maryland
Died	March 10, 1975(1975-03-10) (aged 83–84)
Occupations	Writer Nurse
Known for	Relationship with H. L. Mencken

Marion L. Bloom (1891–March 10, 1975) was a writer and nurse, known for her nearly decade-long relationship with H. L. Mencken. Bloom and Mencken first met in February 1914, when Bloom visited the offices of the Baltimore Sun. Mencken and Bloom ended their relationship in the early 1920s, though it appears that Bloom continued to admire Mencken. Their love letters were published in 1996 in In Defense of Marion: The Love of Marion Bloom & H. L. Mencken.

Life

Bloom was born and raised in rural New Windsor, Maryland, with five brothers and a sister. When she was seven, her father committed suicide, forcing the older children in the family to find work. As a teenager, Bloom moved to Washington, D.C. to find work as a writer. There she met H. L. Mencken in February 1914, and the two quickly began a relationship, with Mencken traveling to D.C. to see her and Bloom traveling to New York City. Bloom spent six months as a nurse for the United States Army in Europe during World War I, and returned to the United States as a convert to Christian Science. Mencken, an atheist, suggested Bloom's faith discouraged him from marrying her.

In 1923, in a shock to Mencken, Bloom briefly married Lou Maritza, a Romanian historian, perhaps because she believed Mencken would never marry her. In his anger, Mencken destroyed her letters to him. Later, Bloom moved to France. By the time she returned to the United States, Mencken had already married the terminally ill Sara Haardt in 1930, who died four years later.

According to Fred Hobson, Bloom was "an interesting character in her own right, a compelling figure not because she was special in any way, but because she was emblematic of the prototypical small-town girl, emerging from hardship, poverty, and religious piety, who went to the city to pursue her own idea of the American dream. But Marion was never fully able to determine what version of that dream she wanted most — whether to succeed as a new woman, self-reliant professionally and emotionally, or whether to play a more traditional role and become the wife of a powerful man such as H. L. Mencken. She could not easily, in her time, have both, and she ended up having neither."

Work

Edward A. Martin's book, In Defense of Marion, calls Bloom and Mencken's relationship "the most important love relationship in H. L. Mencken’s life, one that he tried to obscure and hoped would remain buried within the copious record of his achievements as author and editor." He noted that it "flourished during a period when he wrote frequently about women’s issues."

While details about her later life are sparse, Bloom authored several books and wrote for American Mercury and The Washington Herald. She also returned to the nursing field, working for the American Red Cross as assistant chief of the Resources Information unit. It is also believed that she may have served in the army again as a nurse during and after World War II, from 1944 until 1947. She worked for the Junior Red Cross and, in 1950, worked for the State Department, retiring ten years later. She died on March 10, 1975.

The correspondences between Mencken, Bloom, and her sister Estelle are housed at the Enoch Pratt Free Library of Baltimore and the New York Public Library.