Louise Bryant

Louise Bryant (December 5, 1885 – January 6, 1936) was an American feminist, political activist, and journalist best known for her sympathetic coverage of Russia and the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution. Bryant, who married fellow journalist John Reed (her second husband) in 1916, wrote about Russian leaders such as Katherine Breshkovsky, Maria Spiridonova, Alexander Kerensky, Vladimir Lenin, and Leon Trotsky. Her news stories, distributed by Hearst during and after her trips to Petrograd and Moscow, appeared in newspapers across the United States and Canada in the years immediately following World War I. A collection of articles from her first trip was published in 1918 as Six Red Months in Russia. Over the next year, she defended the revolution in testimony before the Overman Committee, a Senate subcommittee established to investigate Bolshevik influence in the United States. Later in 1919, she undertook a nationwide speaking tour to encourage public support of the Bolsheviks and to denounce armed U.S. intervention in Russia.

Born Anna Louise Mohan, as a young girl she began using the last name of her stepfather, Sheridan Bryant, in preference to that of her father. She grew up in rural Nevada and attended the University of Nevada in Reno and the University of Oregon in Eugene, graduating with a degree in history in 1909. Pursuing a career in journalism, she became society editor of the Spectator and freelanced for The Oregonian, newspapers in Portland, Oregon. During her years in that city (1909–1915), she became active in the women's suffrage movement. Leaving her first husband in 1915 to follow Reed to Greenwich Village, she formed friendships with leading feminists of the day, some of whom she met through Reed's associates at publications such as The Masses; at meetings of a women's group, Heterodoxy; and through work with the Provincetown Players. During a National Woman's Party suffrage rally in Washington, D.C., in 1919, she was arrested and spent three days in jail. Both she and Reed took lovers outside of marriage; during her Greenwich Village years (1916–1920) for her these included the playwright Eugene O'Neill and the painter Andrew Dasburg.

After Reed's death from typhus in 1920, Bryant continued to write for Hearst about Russia and also about Turkey, Hungary, Greece, Italy, and other countries in Europe and the Middle East. Some articles from this period were collected in 1923 under the title Mirrors of Moscow. Later that year she married William C. Bullitt, Jr., with whom she had her only child, Anne, the following year. Suffering in her later years from the rare and painful disorder adiposis dolorosa, Bryant did little writing or publishing in her last decade, and drank heavily. Bullitt, winning sole custody of Anne, divorced Bryant in 1930. Bryant died in Paris in 1936 and was buried in Versailles. In 1998, a group from Portland restored her grave, which had become neglected.
Bryant's personal papers were transferred to Bullitt, with whom they remained until their daughter, Anne, donated the collection to Yale University in 2004. They exist as separate collections, the Louise Bryant Papers (MS 1840) and the William C. Bullitt Papers (MS 112) in the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale. The Louise Bryant Papers consists of about 19 linear feet (5.8 m) of letters, texts, photographs, art, and other materials that she created or collected between 1916 and 1936.

Bryant's early journalistic work appeared in college publications and in newspapers—The Spectator, where Bryant was society editor, and The Oregonian, for whom she freelanced—in Portland. Later work appeared in independent magazines, including The Masses,[28] and The Liberator, Some, written for the New York American and other Hearst publications, were syndicated to newspapers across North America. Collections of her articles appeared in book form in 1918 and 1923. Below is a partial list of her published work.