Louise Bryant

Louise Bryant
Bryant circa 1917
Born	Anna Louise Mohan (1885-12-05)December 5, 1885 San Francisco, California
Died	January 6, 1936(1936-01-06) (aged 50) Sèvres, France
Cause of death	Cerebral hemorrhage
Occupation	Journalist
Spouse(s)	Paul Trullinger (1909) John Reed (1916) William Christian Bullitt, Jr. (1924)
Children	Anne Moen Bullitt (1924–2007)
Parent(s)	Hugh Moran; Louisa Flick
Relatives	Sheridan Bryant, stepfather; James Say, step-grandfather

Louise Bryant (December 5, 1885 – January 6, 1936) was an American journalist known for her sympathetic coverage of Russia and the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution. Bryant, a feminist married in 1916 to the more famous writer John Reed, wrote about leading Russian women such as Katherine Breshkovsky and Maria Spiridonova as well as men including Alexander Kerensky, Vladimir Lenin, and Leon Trotsky. Her news stories, distributed by Hearst during and after her trips to Petrograd and Moscow, appeared in newspapers across the U.S. and Canada in the years immediately following World War I. A collection of articles from her first trip was published in book form as Six Red Months in Russia in 1918. In 1919, she defended the revolution in testimony before the Overman Committee, a Senate subcommittee established to investigate Bolshevik influence in the United States. Later that year, she undertook a nationwide speaking tour to encourage public support of the Bolsheviks and to discourage armed U.S. intervention in Russia.

Bryant grew up in rural Nevada and attended the University of Nevada in Reno and the University of Oregon, graduating with a degree in history in 1909. Pursuing a career in journalism, she became society editor of the Portland, Oregon, Spectator and freelanced for The Oregonian. During her years in Portland (1909–15), she became active in the women's suffrage movement. Leaving her first husband in 1915 to follow Reed to Greenwich Village, she formed friendships with leading feminists of the day, some of whom she met through Reed's associates at publications such as The Masses, or at meetings of a women's group, Heterodoxy, or through work with the Provincetown Players. During a National Woman's Party suffrage rally in Washington, D.C., in 1919, she was arrested and spent three days in jail. Like Reed, she had lovers outside of marriage; during her Greenwich Village years (1916–20) these included playwright Eugene O'Neill and painter Andrew Dasburg.

The 1981 film, Reds, tells the story of Bryant's time with Reed. After his death from typhus in 1920, Bryant continued to write for Hearst about Russia as well as Turkey, Hungary, Greece, Italy, and other countries in Europe and the Middle East. Some of these articles were republished in book form in Mirrors of Moscow in 1923. Later that year she married William Christian Bullitt, Jr., with whom she had her only child, Anne, born in 1924. Suffering from a rare and painful disorder, Bryant wrote and published little in her last 10 years and drank heavily. Bullitt, winning sole custody of Anne, divorced her in 1930. Bryant died in Paris in 1936 and was buried in Versailles. A group from Portland visited her neglected grave in 1998 and worked to restore it.

Early life

Bryant was born Anna Louise Mohan in San Francisco, California, in 1885. Her father, Hugh Mohan, born in Pennsylvania, became a journalist and stump speaker involved in labor issues and Democratic Party politics. Moving to San Francisco, he continued to write for newspapers, and in 1880 he married Louisa Flick, who grew up on the ranch of her stepfather, James Say, near Humboldt Lake in Nevada. The Mohans had two children, Barbara (1880) and Louis (1882), before the birth of Anna Louise. Later in 1885, the family moved to Reno, where Mohan continued his journalistic career but also drank heavily. One day he went away and never returned. Louise's mother divorced him in 1889 and married Sheridan Bryant, a freight conductor on the Southern Pacific railway. The family, which eventually added two more children, Floyd (1894) and William (1896) lived in Wadsworth. However, Louise soon accepted an invitation from her stepgrandfather, James Say, to live at his ranch. She remained there for three or four years, returning to Wadsworth only at her mother's insistence at the age of 12.

Attending high school in Wadsworth and Reno, then Nevada State University (which became the University of Nevada, Reno), Bryant developed interests in journalism, debate, illustration, social life, dancing, and basketball. She edited the "Young Ladies Edition" of the Student Record in 1905, wrote a short story, "The Way of a Flirt", for a literary magazine, Chuckwalla, and contributed sketches to it and another publication, Artemisia. Depressed after the death of Say in 1906, Bryant left school for a job in Jolon, California, where for a few months she boarded at a cattle ranch and taught children, mostly young Mexicans. That summer she moved again, this time to Eugene, Oregon, where her brother Louis worked for the Southern Pacific.

After learning that she could transfer her college credits from Nevada, she enrolled at the University of Oregon, in Eugene. Socially popular at the school, which then had a total student enrollment of less than 500, she helped start a small sorority, Zeta Iota Phi (a chapter of Chi Omega), of which she was the first president. During her time in Eugene, she produced poems and pen-and-ink sketches for publication in the Oregon Monthly. In a small city steeped in "puritan moralism", she was the first to wear rouge on campus; she acquired boyfriends and wore clothes considered by some to be "flashy". Taking off the spring semester of 1908 to teach in a one-room schoolhouse on Stuart Island, one of the San Juan Islands near the U.S. border with Canada, she returned to Eugene to finish her bachelor's degree in history, graduating in early 1909. Her senior thesis was on the Modoc Indian Wars.

Portland

Portrait of Bryant in 1913 by Paul Trullinger's uncle, John Henry Trullinger

That spring, Bryant moved to Portland, first sharing a downtown apartment with one of her college friends, Clara Wold, then renting her own apartment in the same building. Seeking employment, she landed a temporary job designing a stained-glass window for the Povey Brothers, did some freelance reporting for The Oregonian, and found work as an illustrator and society editor for the Portland Spectator. Meanwhile, she formed friendships with people such as Cas Baer, drama editor for The Oregonian, who were interested in journalism and the arts. In late 1909, she met and married Paul Trullinger, a handsome dentist who lived on a houseboat on the Willamette River, collected art, and enjoyed uninhibited parties.

Bryant, who retained her maiden name and her downtown apartment after her marriage to Trullinger, bridled at doing housework and yearned for professional advancement. Drawn toward politics by a new friend, Sara Bard Field, she became involved in the women's suffrage movement. In 1912, she joined the Oregon branch of the College Equal Suffrage League. She and Field gave pro-suffrage speeches in smaller Oregon cities, and Bryant rode on the suffrage float in Portland's annual Flag Day parade. Led by Abigail Scott Duniway, women achieved suffrage in Oregon later that year.

Bryant became familiar with the socialist journal The Masses through Portland resident and lawyer C. E. S. Wood, who eventually married Field and who often contributed to the magazine. Enthusiastic about its contents, particularly articles by Portland native John Reed, Bryant began raising subscriptions for it. Emma Goldman, a well-known anarchist whom Wood had defended in court, gave a speech in Reed's honor at the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) hall in Portland. She and other political activists, such as Alexander Berkman, were among guests entertained by Bryant and her husband. In 1914, Reed, a Harvard graduate and established writer who by then lived in Greenwich Village, came home for a visit, during which he spoke at the University Club of Portland against the class system. Exactly how or when or how often Bryant and Reed met is uncertain, but near Christmas 1915 when Reed again came home to visit his widowed mother, the young couple announced their love at a dinner party. Reed returned to Greenwich Village on December 28, and Bryant, abandoning her marriage, followed him three days later. Trullinger filed for divorce, which was granted in July 1916, on grounds of desertion.

Greenwich Village and Cape Cod

John Reed in about 1910–15

Reed had rented a room for Bryant near his apartment at 43 Washington Square, but instead she moved in with him as part of what Max Eastman, editor of The Masses, called a "gypsy compact". Their unmarried co-habitation caused little curiosity among Reed's friends in the Village, many of whom rejected marriage and other middle-class norms out of principle. Unified by an "air of intellectual freedom, moral laissez-faire and comaraderie", most were involved in literary, artistic, or political pursuits in a bohemian neighborhood that in some ways resembled the Left Bank of Paris. While visiting New York, Field took Bryant to a meeting of Heterodoxy, a women's group that included feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, journalist Mary Heaton Vorse, political activist Crystal Eastman (Max's sister), actress Ida Rauh, writers Zona Gale and Mary Austin, and many others. Among Bryant's new friends were feminists Inez Milholland, Inez Gillmore, and Doris Stevens. Other notables circulating in the Village included Goldman, playwright Eugene O'Neill, and one of Reed's former lovers, arts patron Mabel Dodge.

At Number 43, Bryant and Reed pursued their journalistic endeavors in separate work rooms. Four months after leaving Oregon, Bryant broke into print in New York with an article about two Portland judges, one of whom had dismissed a case brought against Goldman for distributing birth-control information. It was published as "Two Judges" in the April 1916 issue of The Masses. Meanwhile, Reed, who had reported on the 1913 Paterson silk strike, Pancho Villa, and the ongoing war (World War I) in Europe, went on assignment for Collier's to interview William Jennings Bryant in Florida.

Later that spring Bryant and Reed heeded Vorse's call to spend the warm season in Provincetown, Massachusetts, at the tip of Cape Cod, and to take part in the communal theater productions of the Provincetown Players. Others from the Village went as well and joined the group, organized in 1915 by George Cram Cook and his wife, Susan Glaspell, who hoped to produce plays that were both political and artistic. Among the works the group staged in 1916 were Bryant's "The Game", in which characters named Life and Death play dice for the lives of Youth (a poet) and Girl (a dancer). It appeared on the same bill as "Not Smart" by Wilbur Steele and "Bound East for Cardiff" by Eugene O'Neill.

During the summer, Reed left Cape Cod to cover the Progressive Party convention in Chicago, and at other times he retreated from the players to work on articles for Collier's and Metropolitan Magazine. During these absences, Bryant and O'Neill became lovers, not surprising in a group that professed and practiced free love. Reed, made aware of this new development, responded by inviting O'Neill to begin taking his meals with them. In a note to Field, Bryant said that her relationship with Reed was "so beautiful and so free!... We don't interfere with each other at all...we feel like children who will never grow up."

Croton-on-Hudson

"Europe 1916", an anti-war cartoon by Boardman Robinson, appeared in the October 1916 issue of The Masses, a magazine for which Bryant began writing articles and poems that same year.

After spending the month of September in a cottage they bought in Truro, Bryant and Reed returned to Greenwich Village, where the Provincetown Players planned to establish an alternative to Broadway theater. On weekends, they sojourned to Croton-on-Hudson, upriver from New York City, where Villagers including Eastman, Dodge, and illustrator Boardman Robinson and his wife had cottages. In October, Bryant and Reed bought their own place in Croton-on-Hudson. Meanwhile, Reed, who had suffered from kidney ailments since childhood, was told by his doctors that he would need to have a kidney removed. The surgery, considered "gravely serious", was scheduled for mid-November. To protect Bryant by making her his legal heir, Reed married her before leaving for surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital, in Baltimore.

Compounding their difficulties were Bryant's ongoing relationship with O'Neill and gynecological problems she was treated for while Reed was in the hospital. When he returned from Baltimore in mid-December, the couple retreated full-time to Croton-on-Hudson to recuperate and to focus on writing. They made plans to travel to China in 1917 to cover events for American publications, but in January the plans fell through when U.S. entry into the war against Germany became highly likely. (The U.S. entered the war on April 6.) To boost their finances, they sold the cottage in Truro to Margaret Sanger, and Reed pawned his father's gold watch. At the same time, his strong anti-war positions, enunciated in The Masses and elsewhere, alienated most of his employers, further reducing his income. Adding to these stresses was Reed's confession to Bryant that he had had multiple love affairs that he had not told her about, and the subsequent unhappiness between Bryant and Reed led to a temporary separation. After securing press credentials for Bryant, Reed moved to the Harvard Club, and Bryant, setting sail in June, went to France to cover the war for the Bell Syndicate. Regrets quickly followed:

No sooner had they parted on board the ship than both Reed and Bryant were assailed by misgivings. An outpouring of letters from either side of the Atlantic followed. Both were suffering, both were confused, lonely, and miserable... [The letters were] proof of the basically strong bond that held the two, the poet-reporter and social critic and the erratic, appealing woman he had rescued from the banality of middle-class existence in Portland.

Petrograd

Katherine Breshkovsky, "grandmother of the revolution", was among women interviewed by Bryant in 1917.

In mid-August, when Bryant returned from France, Reed met her at the dock and told her to prepare to go to Petrograd (the historic names of which also include Saint Petersburg and Leningrad) four days later to cover the Russian Revolution. Eastman of The Masses had raised funds to pay Reed's travel expenses, and the Bell Syndicate assigned Bryant to report on the war "from a woman's point of view". Leaving New York on August 17, they arrived in the Russian capital city (then Petrograd, later Moscow) about six months after the forced abdication of the last Russian czar, Nicholas II. Headed by Alexander Kerensky, the provisional government that had succeeded the czar had already survived an attempted putsch by General Kornilov. Bryant and Reed entered the city after the Kornilov Affair and before the Bolsheviks overthrew the Kerensky government in the October Revolution.

Reconciled as a couple, and working from their room at the Angleterre Hotel, Bryant and Reed attended gatherings at the Smolny Institute and elsewhere in Petrograd and interviewed many leading political figures, including Lenin, Trotsky, and Kerensky, and both eventually compiled books—Six Red Months in Russia by Bryant and Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World—from their articles. Bryant circulated widely, covering Duma meetings, dining in public mess halls with soldiers and workers, and interviewing women revolutionaries. Among those were Katherine Breshkovsky, known as the "grandmother of the revolution", Maria Spiridonova, whom Bryant considered the most powerful woman in Russia, and Aleksandra Kollontai, who became People's Commissar of Social Welfare and the only woman in the Bolshevik cabinet. In the process, Bryant, who had often been overshadowed by her more famous husband, gained confidence in her professional reporting skills. By the time she returned to New York, her work was being read across North America:

[The] springtime of 1918 in the United States was a time of heightened contradictions. Openmindedness about the new Russian experiment in cities and the hinterland coexisted with the intensified patriotism of wartime... No matter what appeared in their editorial pages, newspaper editors knew that feature stories with first-hand knowledge of the Revolution sold papers. The conservative and Republican Philadelphia Public Ledger syndicate bought Bryant's thirty-two stories and sold them to Hearst's New York American and to more than one hundred newspapers over the United States and Canada.

New York

Anna Louise Strong in 1918, the year before she arranged Bryant's national speaking tour, "The Truth About Russia".

Leaving Russia before Reed, who wanted to report on the Bolshevik debate about Russian participation in the war with Germany, Bryant returned to New York, arriving on February 18, 1918. She found Greenwich Village much changed by the war; old friends had moved, rents had gone up, and tourists were replacing bohemians. Under government pressure, The Masses had shut down. Working out of a room at the Brevoort Hotel, Bryant wrote articles about the October Revolution and speeches or cables urging support of the workers' government in Russia.

Meanwhile, Reed, who was trying to get home, was unable to get State Department clearance for a visa and was detained in Oslo (then called Christiana), Norway, for more than a month. His letters were censored, and Bryant did not hear from him directly until April. On orders from Edgar Sisson of the U.S. Commission on Public Information, all of Reed's papers were confiscated when he arrived in New York on April 28. Unable to write about the October Revolution without his notes, Reed instead gave speeches advocating U.S. recognition of the new Russian government. That summer, the couple retreated to Croton-on-Hudson.

In August, Bryant spent a long weekend in the arts colony at Woodstock, where she and painter Andrew Dasburg, with whom Bryant had been close for a couple of years, began a long-term, intermittent love affair. Returning to the Village in September, Bryant and Reed rented a small house at 1 Patchin Place and settled in. Later in the month, Reed was arrested for giving a speech in which he denounced the use of Allied troops in Russia. In a separate case, Reed stood trial with Eastman, Floyd Dell, and others from the former staff of The Masses for conspiracy to obstruct the draft. Bryant was questioned but not charged. Both this and an earlier trial against The Masses ended in hung juries, and the defendants were set free. Also in October 1918, Bryant's first book, Six Red Months in Russia, was published to "mostly favorable reviews," and Reed resumed work on Ten Days That Shook the World after the government returned his notes. It would not be published until April 1919.

Portrait of Senator Lee Slater Overman, chairman of the Senate subcommittee established to investigate Bolshevism in the U.S. Bryant testified before the committee in 1919.

In February 1919, while still based in New York, Bryant went to Washington, D.C., to speak, along with Albert Rhys Williams, about the situation in Russia. She stayed in Washington long enough to participate in a National Woman's Party suffrage rally, during which she was arrested and spent three days in jail. Upon her release, she insisted on testifying as an unfriendly witness before the Overman Committee, which had been set up to investigate Bolshevik activity in the United States. Deflecting questions about her religious beliefs, marriages, and other personal matters during her two days of testimony, she tried to convince the subcommittee, led by Senator Lee S. Overman, that Russia had a right to self-determination. Soon thereafter, she began a cross-country speaking tour, "The Truth About Russia", arranged by Anna Louise Strong, during which she addressed large audiences in Detroit, Chicago, Spokane, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other American cities. According to biographer Virginia Gardner, Bryant was "...the first woman to go among the huskings to defend Lenin and Trotsky. Her message was simple: 'Hands off Russia!' 'Bring the boys home!' "

After Bryant returned from her lecture tour in May, she and Reed spent the next few months mainly in Croton-on-Hudson writing, gardening, and in Reed's case, recuperating from influenza. In late August, Reed, who had joined the Socialist Party of America, was chosen by one of its factions, the Communist Labor Party of America (CLP), to visit Moscow to seek recognition for the CLP as the sole representative of the Communist International (Comintern) in the U.S. The U.S. government quickly outlawed the CLP and its competitor, the American Communist Party, headed by Louis Fraina. In danger of being arrested and unable to get a passport to go to Russia, Reed, disguised as a stoker, left the U.S. in late September 1919 on a Scandinavian ship headed for Europe. During the Palmer Raids and Red Scare days beginning in November 1919, he would be charged with conspiring to overthrow the government by force. Succeeding in reaching Moscow, he was arrested and incarcerated in Finland in March 1920 on his way home. Three months later, he was returned to Moscow in a prisoner exchange between the White (anti-Bolshevik) Finns of the Finnish Civil War and the Bolsheviks. From Reval (Tallinn), Estonia, he cabled Bryant, "Passport home refused. Temporarily returning headquarters. Come if possible." Traveling without passport, Bryant, disguised as the wife of a Swedish businessman, arrived in Petrograd in late August 1920.

Reed's death

When Bryant reached Petrograd, Reed was in Baku, attending the "first congress of peoples of the east" (Oriental Congress) with the Comintern executive committee. He had left a letter for her with several possibilities for lodging, one of which was a room he had arranged for her at the Dielovoy Hotel in Moscow. This is where, on September 15, they finally reconnected, spending the next few days together and visiting Lenin, Trotsky, Hungarian revolutionary Béla Kun, and Enver Pasha, a former minister of war in the Ottoman Empire. Bryant began filing Moscow news stories with the International News Service, which had hired her before she left New York.

A week after Reed's return from Baku, he began to experience dizziness and headaches, thought at first to be symptoms of influenza. Five days later, when he became delirious, doctors diagnosed typhus and sent him to the hospital. There, with Bryant by his side, he died on October 17, 1920, a few days shy of his 33rd birthday. On the day of Reed's funeral, in keeping with Russian custom, Bryant walked alone behind the hearse, at the head of the funeral procession. Fainting during the burial, she awoke in her hotel room. Among those at her bedside were Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, who had been arrested in the U.S. and deported to Russia in late 1919.

Further reporting

After Reed's death, Bryant obtained Lenin's approval for a trip to the southern Russian border and neighboring countries. She went by train over the Kazakh Steppe, through areas hard hit by famine, to Tashkent and Bukhara and to the borders of Iran and Afghanistan, interviewing and taking notes.

She returned to the U.S. in mid-summer 1921, and stayed for about a year. In August, the New York American, a Hearst newspaper, began publishing a series of 16 of her articles describing famine in Russia, Lenin's New Economic Policy, the end of the Russian civil war, and related topics. In general, the tone of these articles was "sober and at times unsparing, in contrast to her often rapturous reporting in her 1918 stories."

In October, she was the main speaker at a memorial for Reed in New York City, and she spent some of her time collecting Reed's papers together for possible publication. In addition, she arranged with King Features Syndicate, another Hearst agency, to return to Russia to write portraits of Russians. The first of these appeared in print in June 1922 and led to her second book, Mirrors of Moscow, in 1923. Bryant's travels in Europe this time included Moscow, Berlin, London, Paris, and other cities. By late October, she was in Rome, accompanied by William Christian Bullitt, Jr., who would become her third husband. Here in late 1922, she wrote about Benito Mussolini, the Fascist leader who had just come to power and with whom she obtained an interview. Gathering material from a variety of sources, including Madame Mussolini, Bryant wrote a feature article, "Mussolini Relies Upon Efficiency to Restore Italy", published in the New York American in early 1923. She described the future dictator this way:

I will always think of Mussolini as one of the oddest characters in history, and I will remember him as I last saw him in the great white and gold foyer of the Grand Hotel, under a huge crystal candelabra slouching wearily into a graceful Louis XV ivory and enameled chair.

His pale, heavy-boned face showed signs of sleeplessness. His strong body was bulging over the sides of the seat; his legs were spread wide over the pale, rose-colored velvet carpet. There was a little cup of black coffee, absurdly delicate, beside his gnarled work-warped hand.

Leaving Rome to cover the Turkish War of Independence for the International News Service, Bryant lived with Bullitt in a villa in Constantinople in early 1923. Bullitt was a wealthy Philadelphian who would later become the first U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union. While he worked on a novel, It's Not Done, published in 1926 and dedicated to Bryant, she covered events related to the rise of Turkish strongman Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. From her base in Turkey, she ventured to Palermo to interview the deposed king of Greece, Constantine I, and to Athens to interview his son, George II. Shortly thereafter, Bryant suspended her journalistic career to focus on family matters.

Paris

William C. Bullitt, Bryant's third husband, who became the first U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1933.

Later in 1923, Bryant and Bullitt moved to Paris, where they married in December. Bryant gave birth to her only child, Anne, in February 1924, and in 1925 she and Bullitt added to their family an 8-year-old boy, Refik Ismaili Bey, whom they had met in Turkey. As the wife of a rich man, Bryant had duties related to the running of an upper-class household: "...the management of servants, the ordering of food and planning of menus, house decoration, flower arrangement, keeping a social calendar." She told one visitor to her home that she considered her new life "useless", and the Bryant–Bullitt marriage began to unravel. In "Louise Bryant Grows Old", historian Christine Stansell examines the great changes in Bryant's life after her marriage to Bullitt:

The entrance of William Bullitt into Louise Bryant's life confounds the intertwined stories of the grief-stricken war widow, the radical heroine, and the champion of the oppressed. The marriage is a puzzle, both biographically and historically. Biographically, it proved to be a disaster, in contrast to Bryant's earlier romantic choices, which had been smart and fulfilling.

Although Bryant continued to write, little of her work toward the end of her life was published. Her last piece of journalism, "A Turkish Divorce", about Atatürk's treatment of women, appeared in The Nation in August 1925.

By 1926, Bryant, who had generally abstained from alcohol earlier in life, was suffering from painful and incurable adiposis dolorosa (Dercum's disease) and had begun drinking heavily. In 1930, Bullitt, citing his wife's drinking and alleging that she was involved in a lesbian relationship with Gwen Le Gallienne, a daughter of writer Richard Le Gallienne, divorced Bryant and won sole custody of Anne. Bryant continued to live in Paris, occasionally advising writer Claude McKay, and briefly assisting researchers from Harvard University in preserving John Reed's papers.

Death and legacy

Sterling Memorial Library houses the Bryant papers.

Bryant died on January 6, 1936, of a brain hemorrhage in Sèvres, in the suburbs of Paris, and is buried in Cimetière des Gonards in Versailles. In 1998, three volunteers from the Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission went to Paris to find the grave, which they discovered was crumbling, undated, and scheduled for removal. Through the commission's efforts as well as donations, including some from relatives of Bryant and Bullitt, the grave was restored.

Bryant's personal papers were transferred to Bullitt, where they remained until their daughter, Anne, donated the collection to Yale University in 2004. They exist as separate collections, the Louise Bryant Papers (MS 1840) and the William C. Bullitt Papers (MS 112) in the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale. The Bryant collection consists, linearly, of 19.43 feet (5.92 m) of "correspondence, writings, books, visual artwork, photographs, printed matter, and other material created and collected by Bryant during the last twenty years of her life from 1916 to 1936."

The Bryant–Reed story is told in the 1981 film Reds, starring Diane Keaton as Bryant and Warren Beatty as Reed. Supporting actors include Jack Nicholson as Eugene O'Neill, Maureen Stapleton as Emma Goldman; Jerzy Kosiński as Grigory Zinoviev (one of the Bolshevik leaders), and Edward Herrmann as Max Eastman.

Works

Bryant's early journalistic work appeared in college publications and in newspapers—The Spectator, where Bryant was society editor, and The Oregonian, for whom she freelanced— in Portland. Much of her later work appeared in newspapers such as the Philadelphia Public Ledger and in the New York American and other Hearst publications, and were syndicated to newspapers across North America. Some of these articles also appeared as collections in book form in 1918 and 1923. Her work also appeared in independent magazines, including The Masses, The Liberator, and The Nation. Below is a partial list of her published work.

Books

• Mirrors of Moscow. New York: Thomas Seltzer. 1923. OCLC 1012771.
• Six Red Months in Russia: An Observer's Account of Russia Before and During the Proletarian Dictatorship. New York: George H. Doran Company. 1918. OCLC 464606065.

Plays

• "The Game: A Morality Play in One Act" (reprinted from The Provincetown Plays. New York: Frank Shay, 1916, OCLC 33854096). One-Act-Plays.com. Retrieved January 22, 2014. {{cite web}}: External link in |format= (help); templatestyles stripmarker in |format= at position 72 (help)

Other

• "Fables for Proletarian Children" (satire reprinted from The Revolutionary Age, January 25, 1919). Marxists Internet Archive. Retrieved January 22, 2014.
• "The Last Days With John Reed: A Letter from Louise Bryant" (letter to Max Eastman reprinted from The Liberator, February 1921). Marxists Internet Archive. Retrieved January 22, 2014.
• "Two Judges" (short article republished online by New York University). The Masses. 8 (6). New York: The Masses Publishing Company: 18. April 1916. Retrieved January 24, 2013.

Notes and references

Notes

References

Works cited

• Dearborn, Mary V. (1996). Queen of Bohemia: The Life of Louise Bryant. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. ISBN 0-395-68396-3.
• Gardner, Virginia (1982). Friend and Lover: The Life of Louise Bryant. New York: Horizon Press. ISBN 0-8180-0233-6.
• Gelb, Barbara (1973). So Short a Time: A Biography of John Reed and Louise Bryant. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-07478-1.

External links

• Media related to Louise Bryant at Wikimedia Commons