Customer Reviews

Josephine Herbst

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I read this book a while ago so I don't remember many details, but I do know that I was fascinated by the glimpse of early American radicals, including the writer Josephine Herbst and the other, more well-known writers who were a part of her world. The book was well-written and easy to read, and made me want to read Herbst herself.

1929 Josephine Herbst, by Elinor Langer (read 25 May 1985) This is an exceptionally well-written absorbing biography. Herbst was born 5 March 1892 in Sioux City, Iowa, and died in New York in 1969. She is buried in Graceland Cemetery in Sioux City. I am not at all sure I ever heard of her before this book was published. The book got a front page review in the New York Times and I went to the Sioux City Library and was dismayed to find it only had one of her books--volume 3 of the trilogy. She led a life I can only view with dismay, but the story of it as told in this book is evocative of an era. She had an abortion of Maxwell Anderson's child because he wanted her to--he was married to someone else--she persuaded her sister to have an abortion from which her sister died; she lived with John Hermann and eventually married and divorced him; she had lesbian affairs; she went to Cuba, Spain, Germany, Russia in the thirties; she attended Morningside College, Iowa U., and finally finished college at Berkeley at age 26. She knew and associated with numerous great names: Hemingway, Katherine Anne Porter, John Cheever, Saul Bellow, etc. She knew Whitaker Chambers when he was "Carl" and the author of this book--very sympathetic to "Josie" and to left-wing causes, implies that Alger Hiss was lying in denying he knew Whitaker Chambers. This has been one of the best biographies I've ever read, though partly "literary" and written in a rather different style. But it had a special interest because of the fact that Josie was born and reared in Sioux City.