Bryant, Louise

BRYANT, LOUISE (1885–1936). The daughter of a newspaperman, Anna Louise Mohan was born in San Francisco; she took her stepfather’s surname when her mother remarried. She graduated from the University of Oregon in 1909, married Portland dentist Paul Trullinger, and with him raised Persian cats. Working as a journalist for the Portland Spectator, Bryant soon joined the woman suffrage movement. She also became an enthusiastic reader of The Masses. In 1915, she met John Reed while he was in Portland visiting his mother, and within weeks she walked out on Trullinger and went to New York City at

Reed’s urging. As soon as her divorce became final in mid-1916, she married Reed. Her life with the tumultuous Reed caused her to be slighted both by her Greenwich Village and Provincetown contemporaries and by subsequent historical (including media) treatments. She was, however, a talented journalist in her own right. She went with Reed to Russia during the Russian Revolution of 1917 and spent some time with Leon Trotsky. She had a series of newspaper stories already in print when he arrived home. The book she wrote, Six Months in Russia (1918), won praise for its clear information, and she addressed large, enthusiastic American audiences on a whirlwind tour.

Following Reed’s death of typhus in Russia in 1920, Bryant stayed on to write for King Features, a Hearst syndicate, and International News Service. Among the first Western reporters to travel to the vast stretches of eastern Russia, she remained an outstanding observer. In 1921, she met William C. Bullitt, formerly Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of state and in 1933 the first US ambassador to the Soviet Union. They married in 1923. That same year, Bryant has her second book published, Mirrors of Moscow (1923).

After her marriage to Bullitt, Bryant became increasingly wearied and reportedly depressed, and she traveled frequently, although spending much time at their Paris home. Bryant and her third husband divorced in 1930, and Bullitt, citing his wife’s alcoholism, gained custody of their only daughter. After her death of a brain hemorrhage, Bryant became almost immediately an obscure figure, her acclaim of the 1920s forgotten next to John Reed’s deathless (and much deserved) reputation.

Dearborn, Mary. Louise Bryant: The Queen of Bohemia. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996.

Gardner, Virginia. Friend and Lover: The Life of Louise Bryant. New York: Horizon Press, 1983.

Stansell, Christine. American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, revised edition, 2009.

Louise Bryant, 1885-1936, Books and Articles. Marxist Internet Archives. https://www.marxists.org/archive/bryant/index.htm

Louise Bryant Papers, 1908-1938. Archives at Yale. Yale University. https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/12/resources/4096