Josephine Herbst

Josephine Herbst (March 5, 1892 – January 28, 1969) 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."

Herbst was born in Sioux City, Iowa. 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 In Berlin she began to write her first, unpublished, novel Following the Circle, an account of her affair with Anderson and her and her sister's fatal abortions.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).

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