Boyer, Richard Owen and Sophia Ripley Ames Boyer

BOYER, RICHARD OWEN (1903–1973) and SOPHIA RIPLEY AMES BOYER (1907-1972) were a power couple in the leftish world of prestige journalism and children’s literature.

Richard Boyer, born in Chicago, worked on newspapers in St. Louis, Dallas and Boston before joining the staff of New York Tribune in 1929. Later free-lancing, he became a prominent writer for the left-leaning PM during its brief life in the 1940s. More notably, he wrote twenty-four “Profiles” for the New Yorker, from 1931-1950, including essays on Georg Grosz, Dizzie Gillespie and union leader Joseph Curran. Meanwhile, he authored a popular biography, Max Steuer, Magician of the Law (1932). His most successful work, The Legend of John Brown (1973) appeared long after his active Leftwing days. He had also co-authored, with Herbert Morais, Labor’s Untold Story (1979), still considered one of the all-time classics of popular labor history. In 1948 he served as an editor of Masses & Mainstream magazine.

Sophia Ripley Ames Boyer, a journalist and popular author, was the descendent of New England reformers including the famed Ripley family of transcendentalists and Utopian socialists. Growing up in Concord, Massachusetts, in the “Old Manse” of literary fame in the writings of Hawthorne, she attended Smith College, and soon after became the Executive Secretary of the Harvard Society of Contemporary Art. She moved on to become secretary to Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter. Close to the Communist Party, she was a founder, in 1935, and the president, in 1939, of the League of Women Shoppers (LWS). The most important Left organization created for blue-collar women during the Great Depression, the LWS won wide support in a handful of communities, constrained by its resistance to anything that hinted of a non-class oriented feminism. As the LWS faded with the Hitler-Stalin Pact, Sophia Boyer moved on to a short-lived career writing for PM, as the family relocated to Berlin in 1940. After World War II, she worked on a variety of literary projects and wrote the first children’s biography of Kwame Nkrumah and a children’s history of Greece in Antiquity.

The family remained part of the lively left-bohemian community Croton-On- Hudson until their passing.

“Richard Boyer, 70, Author and New Yorker Writer, Dies,” New York Times, August 9, 1973.

“Sophia Ripley Ames Boyer Dies at 65; Author of Books for Children,” New York Times, Dec.11, 1972.

Richard Owen Boyer and Sophia Ripley Ames Boyer Papers 1824-1973, University of Wyoming, American Cultural Center.