Louise Bryant
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Louise Bryant (December 5, 1885 - January 6, 1936) born Reno, Nevada was a journalist, and writer, best known for her Marxist and Anarchist beliefs and her essays on radical political and feminist themes. Bryant published articles in several radical left journals during her life, including Alexander Berkman's The Blast.
After a long love affair, Bryant married journalist John Reed, and the two traveled to Russia together in 1917 and 1918. While there, they participated in Bolshevik agitation and Communist party activities, and wrote articles about the pending revolution. Bryant was with Reed when he died of typhus and was interred in Moscow.
Many years later, letters by and about John Reed and Louise Bryant were discovered in Soviet archives by the researchers from the Library of Congress. In a 1920 letter to a friend, Reed’s wife, Louise Bryant, spoke of her typhus-stricken husband’s death in Moscow and how she watched Soviets pass his grave:
“I have been there in the busy afternoon when all Russia hurries by,” she wrote. “Once some of the soldiers came over to the grave. They took off their hats and spoke very reverently: ‘What a good fellow he was!” said one. ‘He came all the way across the world for us. He was one of ours.”’
Communist historians have been far less kind to the memory of Bryant, claiming that she has no proper place in history, dismissing her, as anarchist Emma Goldman famously did: "Louise was never a Communist; she only slept with a Communist."
Four years after Reed's death, Bryant, now a leading reporter for the Hearst newspaper chain and pregnant, married former Wilson assistant secretary of state William Bullitt. Their move to Paris introduced Bryant to its lesbian subculture, and her affair with English sculptor Gwen Le Gallienne led to a bitter divorce in 1930, with Bryant denied access to her only child, Anne, who wasn't informed of the circumstances until well after the end of the Second World War.
Bryant's long, tragic decline (caused by Adiposis dolorosa or Dercum's disease with which she was diagnosed in 1928) was marked by extreme weight gain, fatigue, and mental confusion; she increasingly sought oblivion in alcohol, and died alone and all but forgotten in Paris in 1936.
The 1981 film Reds starring Diane Keaton, Warren Beatty, and Jack Nicholson (as playwright Eugene O'Neill, a sometime lover of Louise's), was based on her life with Jack Reed.
[edit] See also
- Alexander Berkman
- Anarchism
- Communist Party of the United States
- Eugene O'Neill
- John Reed
- Leon Trotsky
[edit] Further reading
- Mary V. Dearborn, Queen of Bohemia (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), hardcover, 365 pages, ISBN 0-395-68396-3
- Virginia Gardner. Friend and a Lover: The Life of Louise Bryant (New York: Horizon Press, 1982)
- Louise Bryant. Six Red Months in Russia (Powells.com, 2002)
- Louise Bryant. Mirrors of Moscow (Hyperion Books 1973)
[edit] External links
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