Mary Heaton Vorse
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Mary Heaton Vorse or Mary Heaton Vorse O'Brien (October 11, 1874 - 1966) was a U.S. suffragette, journalist, labor activist, theatre patron, and feminist.
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[edit] Life
Mary Heaton Vorse was born in New York City. She married three times: Albert White Vorse (d. 1910) in 1898, Joseph O'Brien (d. 1915) in 1912, and Robert Minor in 1920.[1]
[edit] Activism and journalism
She was outspokenly active in peace and social justice causes, such as women's suffrage, civil rights, pacifism (specifically including opposition to World War I), socialism, child labor, infant mortality, labor disputes, and affordable housing. She was instrumental in forming the Women's Peace Party in January 1915 in Washington, D.C. Newspapers and journals she wrote for included the New York Post, New York World, McCall's, Harper's Weekly, Atlantic Monthly, The Masses, New Masses, New Republic, and McClure's Magazine, as well as various news services.[2] She participated in and reported on the Lawrence textile strike, the steel strike of 1919, the textile workers strike of 1934, and coal strikes in Harlan County, Kentucky.[3] and [4]
[edit] Novels
She was also a popular novelist for several decades and published poetry as well. Her writing helped her raise three children without a husband. She wrote 18 books including: The Breaking-In of a Yachtsman's Wife (1908), The Very Little Person (1911), The Autobiography of an Elderly Woman (1911), The Heart's Country (1913), The Prestons (1918), I've Come to Stay (1919), Growing Up (1920), Men and Steel (1921), Fraycar's Fist (1923), A Footnote to Folly (1935), Labor's New Millions (1938) and Time and the Town (1942).[1]
[edit] Theatre
Most of her adult life was based in Provincetown, Massachusetts. In late 1915, she purchased Lewis Wharf on Provincetown Harbor and joined with other left-wing writers, including Floyd Dell, Eugene O'Neill, John Reed, George Cram Cook, Edna St.Vincent Millay, Susan Glaspell, and Louise Bryant to form the Provincetown Players.
[edit] Dos Passos character
Some critics consider the character Mary French in John Dos Passos' "U.S.A. trilogy" to be loosely based on Mary Heaton Vorse, though the writer himself never confirmed this.
[edit] Notes
- ^ a b Overton, Grant. The Women Who Make Our Novels. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 318.
- ^ Glossary of People:Vo. marxists.org. Retrieved on 2007-02-13.
- ^ Mary Heaton Vorse. spartacus.schoonet.co.uk. Retrieved on 2007-02-13.
- ^ Garrison, Dee. Mary Heaton Vorse: The Life of an American Insurgent.
[edit] Selected Writings
- Weisbord's Farewell to Passaic. (1926) New Masses.
- The Battle of Passaic. (1926) New Masses.
- School for Burns. (1931). New Republic.
- How Scottsboro Happened. (1933). New Republic.
- Lawrence Strike. (1935). from A Footnote to Folly: Reminiscences of Mary Heaton Vorse. Farrar & Rhinehart.
- U.S. Trailer Camps. (1935). Office of War Information.
- Reminiscences.(1935). Introduction from A Footnote to Folly: Reminiscences of Mary Heaton Vorse. Farrar & Rhinehart.
- Time and the Town: A Provincetown Chronicle. 1942. Dial Press, New York, 372 p.
