biography
| name: |
Herbst, Josephine (Frey)
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| sex:
| female
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| lived:
| (1892–1969)
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| biography:
| Writer, born in Sioux City, Iowa, USA. From a poor family, she worked at odd jobs as she went from college to college, finally gaining her BA from the University of California, Berkeley (1918). She moved to New York City and fell in with the literary set, had an affair with Maxwell Anderson, and then went off to Berlin and Paris to write. She returned to the USA (1924) with the writer, John Hermann, whom she married, and they settled in a farmhouse in Erwinna, PA. During the next several years she published a series of novels on which her reputation rests, including Pity is Not Enough (1933), the first volume of her trilogy based on her own family's history from the Civil War to the Great Depression. During the 1930s the world's economic, political, and social problems led her to journalism and to identifying with radical views and circles. In 1937 she went to Spain briefly to report on the civil war there. On the fringes of the American Communist Party, she was dismissed from a government job because of her leftist associations (1942). In the postwar years (divorced 1940), she became almost a recluse in her Erwinna home, but as she resumed her writing she gained a new circle of admirers. |
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