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."

Biography

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.