Josephine Herbst
Encyclopedia
Josephine Herbst was an American writer
and journalist
, active from 1923 to near the time of her death. She was a radical with communist leanings, who "incorporate[d] the philosophy of socialism into her fiction" and "aligned herself with the political Left", She wrote "proletarian novels" conceived along the party line, "in Marxist terms" and described as a "subtle blend of art and propaganda."
. She finished high school in 1910, attended Morningside College (1910-12), the University of Iowa (1912-13), the University of Washington (1916) and the University of California at Berkeley
, where she got her bachelor's degree in 1918. She then moved to New York where she affiliated herself with the people involved with The Writer
and The Liberator. Friends were Genevieve Taggard
, Max Eastman
and Albert Rhys Williams
. The journalist and poet Maxwell Anderson
, who was married, became her lover. Herbst published her first short stories
under the pseudonym
Carlotta Geet in American Mercury and Smart Set, then edited by H.L. Mencken, for whom she had worked as a publicity writer and editorial reader.
She went to Europe in 1922. In Berlin
she began to write her first, unpublished, novel Following the Circle, an account of her affair with Anderson and her and her sister's fatal abortions. In Paris in 1924 she fell in love with writer John Herrmann
, nine years her junior. The couple left Europe at the end of the year and lived in a New Preston, Connecticut farmhouse the next year. They were married in 1926 and the Herrmanns bought a farm house in Erwinna, Pennsylvania, in 1928, that remained Herbst's home until she died. The couple separated in 1934 (divorced in 1940).
In the 1920s Herbst had made friends with Nathan Asch, Robert McAlmon
, William Carlos Williams
and Ernest Hemingway
, Katherine Anne Porter
and John Dos Passos
. In addition to her novels, in the 1930s she published in several newspapers and magazines, including New Masses, then edited by Whittaker Chambers
. In 1936 she was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship
. In 1937 she toured the fronts of the Spanish Civil War
, as a guest of the Stalinist supporters of the Second Spanish Republic
.
After Pearl Harbor
, Herbst got a job as a propaganda writer for foreign broadcast in the Office of the Coordinator of Information
(progenitor of the CIA), but was fired a few months later in 1942 after background investigation by the FBI found that she wrote that she voted Communist
, that she lobbied the U.S. Ambassador to France to get Communist aliens into the U.S., and that she was a "great admirer" of Stalin
, and considered Communist Party boss Earl Browder
too "timid."
During the Alger Hiss
-Whittaker Chambers
battle, Herbst told the FBI that in the apartment she and Herrmann shared for three months in 1934 she had seen documents taken from government offices by members of the Ware group
for transmission to New York., and told Hiss's lawyers that Chambers and Herrmann discussed recruiting Hiss to help them acquire such documents, and that they and Harold Ware
all told her in mid-1934 that they were already in touch with Hiss, trying to recruit him for espionage more than six months before Hiss claimed to have met Chambers.
In her letters and papers, wrote her biographer, Elinor Langer, Herbst revealed that she knew Chambers as "an underground agent of the Communist Party known as 'Carl,' responsible for transmission of documents from a sympathetic cell of government employees in Washington, D.C., to Communist authorities in New York,". Ruth Herrmann, widow of Herbst's ex-husband, John Herrmann, told Langer that her late husband was "the man who introduced Chambers to Alger Hiss."
Writer
A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....
and journalist
Journalist
A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...
, active from 1923 to near the time of her death. She was a radical with communist leanings, who "incorporate[d] the philosophy of socialism into her fiction" and "aligned herself with the political Left", She wrote "proletarian novels" conceived along the party line, "in Marxist terms" and described as a "subtle blend of art and propaganda."
Biography
Herbst was born in Sioux City, IowaSioux City, Iowa
Sioux City is a city in Plymouth and Woodbury counties in the western part of the U.S. state of Iowa. The population was 82,684 in the 2010 census, a decline from 85,013 in the 2000 census, which makes it currently the fourth largest city in the state....
. She finished high school in 1910, attended Morningside College (1910-12), the University of Iowa (1912-13), the University of Washington (1916) and the University of California at Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
, where she got her bachelor's degree in 1918. She then moved to New York where she affiliated herself with the people involved with The Writer
The Writer
The Writer is a monthly magazine for writers published by the Kalmbach Publishing Company of Waukesha, Wisconsin. It was first established by William H. Hills and Robert Luce, two Boston Globe reporters, as "a monthly magazine to interest and help all literary workers", in April 1887. Until the...
and The Liberator. Friends were Genevieve Taggard
Genevieve Taggard
Genevieve Taggard was an American poet.-Biography:Genevieve Taggard was born to James Taggard and Alta Arnold, both of whom were school teachers...
, Max Eastman
Max Eastman
Max Forrester Eastman was an American writer on literature, philosophy and society, a poet, and a prominent political activist. For many years, Eastman was a supporter of socialism, a leading patron of the Harlem Renaissance and an activist for a number of liberal and radical causes...
and Albert Rhys Williams
Albert Rhys Williams
Albert Rhys Williams , American journalist, labor organizer and publicist. Wrote memoirs about the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia which he has been both witness and participant.- Biography :...
. The journalist and poet Maxwell Anderson
Maxwell Anderson
James Maxwell Anderson was an American playwright, author, poet, journalist and lyricist.-Early years:Anderson was born in Atlantic, Pennsylvania, the second of eight children to William Lincoln "Link" Anderson, a Baptist minister, and Charlotte Perrimela Stephenson, both of Scots and Irish descent...
, who was married, became her lover. Herbst published her first short stories
Short Stories
Short Stories may refer to:*A plural for Short story*Short Stories , an American pulp magazine published from 1890-1959*Short Stories, a 1954 collection by O. E...
under the pseudonym
Pseudonym
A pseudonym is a name that a person assumes for a particular purpose and that differs from his or her original orthonym...
Carlotta Geet in American Mercury and Smart Set, then edited by H.L. Mencken, for whom she had worked as a publicity writer and editorial reader.
She went to Europe in 1922. In Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
she began to write her first, unpublished, novel Following the Circle, an account of her affair with Anderson and her and her sister's fatal abortions. In Paris in 1924 she fell in love with writer John Herrmann
John Herrmann
John Theodore Herrmann was the person who introduced Whittaker Chambers to Alger Hiss.-Biography:He was born in Lansing, Michigan in 1900. He lived in Paris in the 1920s, as part of its famous expatriate American writers' circle, when he met his first wife, Josephine Herbst in 1924...
, nine years her junior. The couple left Europe at the end of the year and lived in a New Preston, Connecticut farmhouse the next year. They were married in 1926 and the Herrmanns bought a farm house in Erwinna, Pennsylvania, in 1928, that remained Herbst's home until she died. The couple separated in 1934 (divorced in 1940).
In the 1920s Herbst had made friends with Nathan Asch, Robert McAlmon
Robert McAlmon
Robert Menzies McAlmon was an American author, poet and publisher.-Life:McAlmon was born in Clifton, Kansas, the youngest of ten children of an itinerant Presbyterian minister....
, William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...
and Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...
, Katherine Anne Porter
Katherine Anne Porter
Katherine Anne Porter was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist. Her 1962 novel Ship of Fools was the best-selling novel in America that year, but her short stories received much more critical acclaim...
and John Dos Passos
John Dos Passos
John Roderigo Dos Passos was an American novelist and artist.-Early life:Born in Chicago, Illinois, Dos Passos was the illegitimate son of John Randolph Dos Passos , a distinguished lawyer of Madeiran Portuguese descent, and Lucy Addison Sprigg Madison of Petersburg, Virginia. The elder Dos Passos...
. In addition to her novels, in the 1930s she published in several newspapers and magazines, including New Masses, then edited by Whittaker Chambers
Whittaker Chambers
Whittaker Chambers was born Jay Vivian Chambers and also known as David Whittaker Chambers , was an American writer and editor. After being a Communist Party USA member and Soviet spy, he later renounced communism and became an outspoken opponent later testifying in the perjury and espionage trial...
. In 1936 she was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...
. In 1937 she toured the fronts of the Spanish Civil War
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...
, as a guest of the Stalinist supporters of the Second Spanish Republic
Second Spanish Republic
The Second Spanish Republic was the government of Spain between April 14 1931, and its destruction by a military rebellion, led by General Francisco Franco....
.
After Pearl Harbor
Pearl Harbor
Pearl Harbor, known to Hawaiians as Puuloa, is a lagoon harbor on the island of Oahu, Hawaii, west of Honolulu. Much of the harbor and surrounding lands is a United States Navy deep-water naval base. It is also the headquarters of the U.S. Pacific Fleet...
, Herbst got a job as a propaganda writer for foreign broadcast in the Office of the Coordinator of Information
Office of the Coordinator of Information
The Office of the Coordinator of Information was an intelligence and propaganda agency of the United States Government, founded on July 11, 1941 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, prior to U.S. involvement in the Second World War...
(progenitor of the CIA), but was fired a few months later in 1942 after background investigation by the FBI found that she wrote that she voted Communist
Communist Party USA
The Communist Party USA is a Marxist political party in the United States, established in 1919. It has a long, complex history that is closely related to the histories of similar communist parties worldwide and the U.S. labor movement....
, that she lobbied the U.S. Ambassador to France to get Communist aliens into the U.S., and that she was a "great admirer" of Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
, and considered Communist Party boss Earl Browder
Earl Browder
Earl Russell Browder was an American communist and General Secretary of the Communist Party USA from 1934 to 1945. He was expelled from the party in 1946.- Early years :...
too "timid."
During the Alger Hiss
Alger Hiss
Alger Hiss was an American lawyer, government official, author, and lecturer. He was involved in the establishment of the United Nations both as a U.S. State Department and U.N. official...
-Whittaker Chambers
Whittaker Chambers
Whittaker Chambers was born Jay Vivian Chambers and also known as David Whittaker Chambers , was an American writer and editor. After being a Communist Party USA member and Soviet spy, he later renounced communism and became an outspoken opponent later testifying in the perjury and espionage trial...
battle, Herbst told the FBI that in the apartment she and Herrmann shared for three months in 1934 she had seen documents taken from government offices by members of the Ware group
Ware group (CPUSA)
The Ware group was a covert organization of Communist Party USA operatives within the United States government in the 1930s, run first by Harold Ware and then by Whittaker Chambers.-Background:...
for transmission to New York., and told Hiss's lawyers that Chambers and Herrmann discussed recruiting Hiss to help them acquire such documents, and that they and Harold Ware
Harold Ware
Harold Maskell "Hal" Ware was an American Marxist regarded as one of the Communist Party's top experts on agriculture....
all told her in mid-1934 that they were already in touch with Hiss, trying to recruit him for espionage more than six months before Hiss claimed to have met Chambers.
In her letters and papers, wrote her biographer, Elinor Langer, Herbst revealed that she knew Chambers as "an underground agent of the Communist Party known as 'Carl,' responsible for transmission of documents from a sympathetic cell of government employees in Washington, D.C., to Communist authorities in New York,". Ruth Herrmann, widow of Herbst's ex-husband, John Herrmann, told Langer that her late husband was "the man who introduced Chambers to Alger Hiss."
Works by Herbst
- Nothing is Sacred, 1928
- Money for Love, 1929
- Trexler trilogy:
- Pity is Not EnoughPity is Not EnoughPity is Not Enough is a 1933 semi-autobiographical modernist novel by American author Josephine Herbst and the first book in her Trexler family trilogy. It is followed by The Executioner Waits , and Rope of Gold...
, 1933 - The Executioner Waits, 1934
- Rope of Gold, 1939
- Pity is Not Enough
- Satan's Sargeants, 1941
- Somewhere the Tempest Fell, 1947
- New Green World, 1954
- The Starched Blue Sky of Spain and Other Memoirs, 1991
Studies on Herbst
- Barbara WiedemannBarbara WiedemannBarbara Wiedemann is an American poet and currently a professor of literature at Auburn Montgomery. Wiedemann, who received her Ph.D. from the University of South Florida, has published one book of poetry, besides a number of poems in literary journals...
, Josephine Herbst’s Short Fiction: A Window to Her Life and Times. Susquehanna UPSusquehanna UniversitySusquehanna University is a liberal arts college in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, United States, north of the state capital, Harrisburg.-Academics:...
, 1998. ISBN 978-1575910079.