Herbst, Josephine

HERBST, JOSEPHINE (1892–1969). An important Left journalist of the 1930s, Josephine Frey Herbst was one of the most accomplished of the “proletarian novelists” around the peripheries of the Communist Party and Popular Front. Born in Sioux City, Iowa, and raised in near-poverty, Herbst attended several colleges between periods of work, and graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1919. That year she moved to New York City, and almost immediately became involved in the circles around the Liberator and, later, the New Masses.

Following an unhappy affair and near-breakdown, Herbst moved to Berlin in 1922 to pursue full-time writing. There she met a writer she later married, John Herrmann, an alcoholic eight years her junior. By 1928 she settled down in Erwinna, Pennsylvania, which became her lifelong residence and the site of her most productive literary work.

Shifting from the Hemingway style popular in the 1920s that marked her first two novels, Herbst took up a proletarian literary form for her monumental trilogy Pity Is Not Enough (1933), The Executioner Awaits (1934), and Rope of Gold (1939). These family sagas from the Civil War to the then-present were widely recognized at the time as manifesting the maturity, breadth, and careful style lacking in nearly all other full-scale proletarian literary efforts.

As her marriage to Herrmann broke up in the middle 1930s, Herbst also became a noted journalist on such topics as the farm crisis, the Cuban uprising, German antifascism, and the civil war in Spain. Especially as a writer for the New Masses, she drew wide praise. Her experience in Spain in 1937 left her in personal despair and distanced her from formal political involvement. (Although she had never joined the Communist Party, she had been very close for several years.)

From 1942, when she lost a government job for political reasons, to 1954, she endured government harassment in a variety of forms. Her further literary work meanwhile received scarce recognition. Although little more was published before her death, she began to enjoy a literary revival, with her own Pennsylvania home an informal center for once-radical writers such as Alfred Kazin and Saul Bellow.

Ehrhardt, Julia C. Writers of Conviction: The Personal Politics of Zona Gale, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Rose Wilder Lane, and Josephine Herbst. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004.

Francis, Elizabeth. The Secret Treachery of Words: Feminism & Modernism in America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

Langer, Elinor. Josephine Herbst. Boston: Little, Brown, 1982.

Roberts, Nora R. Three Radical Women Writers: Class and Gender in Meridel he Sueur, Tillie Olsen, and Josephine Herbst. New York: Garland Publishing, 1996.

Josephine Herbst Papers. Guide. The University of Iowa Libraries. http://collguides.lib.uiowa.edu/?MSC0838