Josephine Herbst
Josephine Herbst was an influential American writer and journalist, born on March 5, 1897, in Sioux City, Iowa. Her early life was marked by financial challenges, leading her to attend several colleges before graduating from the University of California at Berkeley in 1918. Driven by a desire to address social injustices, she immersed herself in the leftist bohemian scene of 1920s New York City, gaining recognition for her critiques of capitalism through publications like *The Masses* and *The Liberator*. In 1922, seeking a broader perspective, Herbst moved to Europe, where she became part of the expatriate community of American writers and artists.
Her novelistic works, including *Nothing Is Sacred* (1928) and *Money for Love* (1929), delve into the struggles of ordinary people facing economic hardships. Her sociopolitical trilogy—*Pity Is Not Enough* (1933), *The Executioner Waits* (1934), and *Rope of Gold* (1939)—examines the impact of capitalism on American families from the Civil War to the Great Depression, advocating for social reform and activism. Although her prominence waned after World War II due to anti-Communist sentiments, Herbst's legacy endures as a voice for the working class, celebrated for her passionate and compassionate storytelling. She passed away on January 28, 1969, leaving behind a significant body of work that critiques societal inequities and champions human dignity.
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Josephine Herbst
Writer
- Born: March 5, 1897
- Birthplace: Sioux City, Iowa
- Died: January 28, 1969
- Place of death: New York, New York
Biography
Although she would be a charismatic presence among 1920’s Manhattan intelligentsia and one of the most well-traveled journalists in the American expatriate community in Europe between the two world wars, Josephine Herbst was actually born in the small farming town of Sioux City, Iowa, on March 5, 1897. Her father struggled to run a small farm equipment store that closed in 1912. Due to her family’s financial distress, Herbst attended several colleges until finally completing her undergraduate degree at the University of California at Berkeley in 1918. With aspirations to write and a fierce commitment to capture her own sense of the wrongs of capitalism, she immediately moved to New York City and joined the thriving leftist bohemian intelligentsia. She quickly made a name for herself with her passionate and unflinching critiques of American economic inequities that were published in progressive journals such as The Masses and The Liberator.
In 1922, Herbst, unhappy with the restrictive and conservative political environment in the United States, moved to Europe to join the expatriate colony of American writers and artists. When she returned to the United States six years later, she had nearly completed the manuscript for her first novel. She settled in Erwinna along the Delaware River in rural Pennsylvania. In quick succession, she published two novels, Nothing Is Sacred (1928) and Money for Love (1929), which explored with unadorned prose and sincere compassion the economic unhappiness of ordinary people who struggle, because of capitalism’s shortcomings, with collapsing marriages, unfulfilling family life, deep debt, and spiritual starvation. With a wider eye for cultural traits, Herbst offered a disturbing sense of lost values as materialism gave rise to unscrupulous activity.
The onset of the Great Depression sharpened Herbst’s discontent with capitalism and her embrace of Marxism, which contributed to her landmark work, a sociopolitical trilogy, Pity Is Not Enough (1933), The Executioner Waits (1934), and Rope of Gold (1939). The trilogy traces the evolution of an American family, based on Herbst’s own family history, from the last years of the Civil War to the depths of the Depression; the book emphasizes without particular subtlety the destructive impact of capitalism on honest and hardworking families as each generation struggles to achieve the tantalizing promise of the American Dream, only to find such privilege reserved for the rich. As the family moves into the early twentieth century, Herbst advocates the need for political activism and social reform as a way to redress generations of economic deprivation.
Although Herbst enjoyed celebrity as a globe-trotting correspondent and wrote anti-Nazi propaganda for the government during World War II, the postwar backlash against Communist sympathizers (although Herbst never actually joined the Communist Party) diminished her reputation. She published a fascinating fictional account of wartime culture, Somewhere the Tempest Fell (1947), and completed extensive writings concerning her time in the 1920’s. However, she never quite secured the literary reputation of other members of the Lost Generation. When she died on January 28, 1969, she was remembered as a writer of strident voice and uncompromising conscience who brought to her fiction a compassionate sensibility for the working-class struggle for dignity and empowerment.