Grace Flandrau: Voice Interrupted

Grace Flandrau achieved international recognition as a writer of short fiction, novels, and journalism. During her career’s full bloom, legendary literary editors such as H. L. Mencken, Maxwell E. Perkins, Kyle S. Crichton, and Harold Ross purchased her works; filmmakers bought screen rights to her fiction and journalism; and at least eight anthologies of short stories included her fiction.

But this biography is also the story of a woman’s struggle to transcend the secrets of her youth and the stresses of a life as a creative writer in a society that sometimes scoffed at her talent.

Grace is surrounded by a remarkable supporting cast that includes her brother-in-law and ascerbic writer, Charles Macomb Flandrau, Theodate Pope Riddle, one of America’s greatest woman architects, and fellow authors F. Scott Fitzgerald, Meridel Le Sueur, and Brenda Ueland.

Georgia Ray has woven together a remarkable biography of an important twentieth-century American writer.

Photograph used by permission of Minnesota Historical Society.