Hope Hale Davis

Background

Hope Hale Davis was born on the 2nd of November, 1903 in Iowa City, Iowa, United States, the fifth and youngest child of Hal and Frances McFarland Hale. Her father died just before she was born, and she was raised by her mother, a teacher. Her mother remarried John Overholt, but later her step-father died and the family moved to Washington.

Education

Hope Hale Davis attended Corcoran School of Art and George Washington University, Cincinnati University and the Portland School of Art, but she didn't earn a college degree.

Career

Hope Hale Davis started her career as a magazine editor, writer, and columnist, working for the Daily Worker and contributing to Private Eye magazine. In 1924 she became an assistant to the art director of the Stuart Walker Repertory Company. In 1926 Hope moved to New York City and worked briefly as a secretary to an advertising executive at the Frank Presbrey Agency. Later Hope Hale became a freelance writer, publishing stories in magazines such as Collier's, The New Yorker, and Bookman. In 1929 she became a promotion manager for Life magazine and two years later she founded and edited Love Mirror. After that Hope Hale went to work in the Consumers' Counsel of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), under Frederic C. Howe in 1933 and joined the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) a year later.

Besides this colorful life, which she later described in her 1994 autobiography, Great Day Coming: A Memoir of the 1930s, Davis was an author who released only one other book, a short-story collection titled The Dark Way to the Plaza (1968). Despite not having many credits to her name, and the fact that she lacked a university degree, she was hired by Radcliffe College in 1983-84 as a fellow. Hope Hale received an invitation to remain as a visiting scholar in 1985. She enjoyed a successful career there as an instructor and she was still holding classes up to a month before she died in Boston.

Achievements

• Hope Hale Davis enjoyed a successful career at Radcliffe College as an instructor and at one point was named Teacher of the Year.
  
  After Hope Hale Davis's death, the Guardian called Hope an "American author who defied social conventions with her feminist, leftwing beliefs". The New York Sun called Hale Davis a "semi-regretful ex-communist".
  
  

Works

More photos

• book

  • Great Day Coming: A Memoir of the 1930s 1994

Politics

Hope Hale Davis became a member of the Communist Party in the 1930s. Though she abandoned the party officially in 1939 after Josef Stalin signed a pact with Nazi Germany, she remained a leftist in her heart all her life.

Views

Developing left-wing beliefs, Hope Hale Davis held a strong feminist point of view, which she expressed in the short stories she wrote.

Connections

Davis followed a radical personal lifestyle for the times, marrying four husbands over the years. The first was a brief marriage to a Vaudeville scenery painter; this was followed by her marriage to journalist Claud Cockburn. The sole purpose of the marriage was for Davis to have a child, whom she labeled her "Project Revolutionary Baby." After she became pregnant, the couple split up. Next, Davis married Hermann Brunck, an economist with whom she first joined the Communist Party in 1934. Brunck worked as a spy, infiltrating the German embassy. Unfortunately, the psychological strain of this work was too much for him, and he committed suicide in 1937. Davis's last marriage was to Columbia University professor Robert Gorham Davis. This was the most successful union, lasting from 1939 until his death in 1998.

Father:

Hal Hale Davis

Mother:

Franc Bent MacFarland

Daughter:

Lydia Davis

daugfter:

Claudia Cockburn

Ex-husband:

Claud Cockburn

Ex-husband:

Hermann Brunck

Late Husband:

Robert Gorham Davis

grandchild:

Stephanie Flanders

grandchild:

Laura Flanders