Louise Bryant was wild and unconventional, a revolutionary thinker in her time, radical and passionate about herself, her beliefs and her life.
Early Life
Many of the facts of her life are unknown, partly because, in re-creating herself as a twentieth-century American heroine, she mythologized her past, concealing some details and omitting or changing others.
She was brought up in and near Reno, Nevada, where her mother had relocated because of its proximity to her own stepfather, James Say.
Writer and Suffragist
She attended the University of Nevada and was a believer in equality of the sexes, and in women's suffrage. She was an artist and illustrator, a creative and capable writer and journalist, a poet, and briefly, a playwright.
With the advent of the Industrial revolution, World War I, and women's suffrage, there were plenty of issues for Louise to rebel against and rally for. Many other artists and writers who emerged from this time thought the same way.
Love Life
Bryant's life was never trouble free, and when there wasn't any trouble to be had she had a way of discovering it or wringing it out in other people.
For example, she had "free" ways in romantic relationships, an inability to settle down, abhorrence for "women's work" and a woman's "proper" place in traditional male/female relationship dynamics.
She was not in love with her husband, and she didn't feel she was accomplishing the work she could do. The arrival of John Reed into her life must have seemed like fate.
She had heard of him before they actually met. Once, on a streetcar, she grew so mesmerized reading his story in Metropolitan magazine that she read on past her stop, and suddenly realized she had fallen in love with the man who'd written it.
She left her husband in Portland on New Year's Eve to run away to be with John Reed in New York and both became founding members of the Provincetown Players in Provincetown, Massachusetts. It was there Louise had a complicated affair with playwright Eugene O'Neill.
Writing Career
As a journalist she covered the Great War in France as well as in Russia. She wrote alongside her journalist husband, and it was there she found her confidence to be a writer.
This trip to Russia was a turning point in their lives, both in terms of their political consciousness and their careers as journalists.
Death
After John died of typhoid complications in 1920, she married a third time to William C. Bullitt, and had her only child, Anne.
They divorced bitterly and he denied her access to her daughter. She turned to alcohol and drugs, self-medicating her emotional wounds. She died in Paris in 1936 of a cerebral hemorrhage, destitute and with no family.
Dearborn, Mary V. Queen of Bohemia, The Life of Louise Bryant, 1996, Houghton Mifflin, New York, 365 pages.
(IBSN: 0395683963, 9780395683965)
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