Josephine Frey Herbst was an American novelist and radical journalist. She wrote proletarian novels conceived along the party line, in Marxist terms and described as a "subtle blend of art and propaganda. "
Background
Josephine Frey Herbst was born on March 5, 1892, in Sioux City, Iowa, United States; the daughter of William Benton Herbst, and Mary Frey, who were distant cousins. Her parents had moved from eastern Pennsylvania in the 1880s, seeking economic opportunity. But William Herbst’s farm implement dealership failed when farmers could not pay their debts to him, and Mary never felt comfortable in the then frontier town. Neither did Josephine, the third of four daughters.
Education
Herbst, called Josie all her life, graduated from high school in 1910. She attended Morningside College in Sioux City, and by the fall of 1912 had saved enough to enroll at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa, United States, where she determined that she wanted to be a writer.
In September 1915, Josephine Frey enrolled at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, United States, but withdrew because of illness. In 1918 she received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California in Berkeley, California, United States.
From 1919 to 1922 Josephine lived in New York, ultimately becoming a reader for H. L. Mencken’s magazine, Smart Set, where her first stories were published under the pseudonym Carlotta Greet. Her friends were other writers and political radicals, including the young dramatist Maxwell Anderson, with whom she conceived a child. Then, having terminated the pregnancy, an experience partially recounted in her novel Money For Love, she went to Europe in 1922 to live in Germany, Italy, and Paris. There she met John Herrmann, the son of a well-to-do Michigan family.
Soon after Josephine and Herrmann returned to the United States late in 1924, she went back to Sioux City to write and be with her dying mother. In her novel Nothing Is Sacred, she described the generation of her two older sisters and their husbands as ambitious but frivolous, dull, and dishonest, unlike the strong and reliable, if poorer, generation of her parents.
Over the next few years Josephine lived with Herrmann in Connecticut and New York until, after they married, they bought an old farmhouse in Erwinna, Pennsylvania, near the Delaware River, and moved there in 1928. The house appealed to Josephine because of its similarity and proximity to the homes where her Swiss-German ancestors had lived for generations. There she was to live until her death, despite her divorce from Herrmann in 1940 and despite many travels.
Following her father’s death in Sioux City in 1929, she inherited bundles of old letters and diaries that recounted her family’s long odysseys in quest of wealth. One uncle went from being a carpetbagger in Atlanta to a gold miner in the Black Hills. Another became a successful druggist and banker in Oregon, neglecting his long-sacrificing mother in Pennsylvania and also his sister, Josephine’s mother, in Sioux City. These stories became the basis for her trilogy Pity Is Not Enough, The Executioner Waits, and Rope of Gold, an epic of the American family and economic life from the Civil War to the 1930s.
The Depression aroused her political radicalism, and throughout the 1930s Josephine wrote magazine and newspaper articles on strikes, wars, and revolutions. Among the first was a series of on-farm conditions in Iowa, Nebraska, and the Dakotas, beginning with “Feet in the Grass Roots” in Scribner’s Magazine (1933), which strongly identified her with her Iowa past. She defended the farmer's blockading roads outside Sioux City, but also maintained her objectivity and independence. Other brilliant articles were on Cuba, anti-Nazi feeling in Germany, and the Loyalist cause in Spain.
Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, she went to Washington, D.C., to write government radio broadcasts designed to undermine the German will to fight, but she was soon dismissed. Her old friend Katherine Anne Porter, it was learned much later, had falsely described her to the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a Communist. Herbst spent the remainder of the war in Chicago and Erwinna. For years she was hounded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In 1951, wanting to go to Europe with her lover, the poet Jean Garrigue, she was refused a passport.
Despite such slander and humiliations, Josephine continued to write fiction, a biography of the naturalist John Bartram and William Bartram, and her memoirs. Along with her earlier achievements and experiences, her work attracted the attention of many younger writers. In the 1960s Josephine received grants and awards and sold her papers to the Beinecke Library at Yale University. The publication of Elinor Langer’s outstanding biography of her in 1984 increased interest in her among feminists, both for her writing and for her bisexuality. The Starched Blue Sky of Spain, with four of her best memoirs, was praised for her insights into herself, her friends, and her era. It also revealed, editor Diane Johnson wrote, her deep affiliation with prairie radicalism and “an Iowan skepticism".
Quotations:
Herbst's final words, "Tell my friends I do not repent, that I love life unto eternity-love and life, " stand as her epitaph.
Connections
Herbst fell under the spell of Maxwell Anderson, then a young married newspaperman, by whom she became pregnant. He insisted on abortion and then ended the brief affair. The abortion haunted Herbst to the close of her life; of all her friends, only Taggard was told of it.
Josephine met John Herrmann, also an aspiring writer. A friend of Ernest Hemingway, Herrmann introduced Herbst to the American expatriate world in Paris, and in the fall the couple returned to the United States, where they wrote and lived together in New Preston, Connecticut. They married on September 2, 1926, and were separated in 1935 after a turbulent union. They were divorced in 1940. The couple made friends with Malcolm Cowley, John Dos Passos, Katherine Anne Porter, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, Hart Crane, and many others in literary and left-wing circles.
The Biographical Dictionary of Iowa
Iowa has been blessed with citizens of strong character who have made invaluable contributions to the state and to the nation. In the 1930s alone, such towering figures as John L. Lewis, Henry A. Wallace, and Herbert Hoover hugely influenced the nation’s affairs.