The Year of Jane Grant: On Marcia Davenport and Archival Absences

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Way back in the spring of this year I traveled to Washington, D.C. It was a multi-purpose trip. I wanted to attend the annual conference of the Biographers International Organization (BIO). I have been a member for several years and have met, mostly online, many wonderful and talented writers. This would be a chance to see some of them in person and to learn new things about writing biography.

And while in D.C., I could do some research at the Library of Congress in two collections that I thought might have some useful information about Jane Grant: the papers of author Marcia Davenport and the records of the Writers’ War Board (WWB).

The third reason was just as important: sightseeing. Charles and I hadn’t been to D.C. in a very long time and it’s one of our favorite cities. I hesitated a bit because of the presence of the current administration but then worried that because of the current administration, the things we enjoy seeing might not be accessible for much longer. (I was right to be concerned. The recent government shutdown caused the Smithsonian to close its doors.) So off we went.

It was a marvelous trip. We visited many of the Smithsonian museums and various monuments, we ate at very good restaurants—our favorite was probably Immigrant Food at the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue. The BIO conference was illuminating, and I enjoyed meeting other biographers. I hope to attend another soon, especially when it’s back in its usual New York City location, because then I can add some more Jane Grant research to my itinerary.

(Immigrant Food at the White House, 1701 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, via Tripadvisor)

About the second reason for the D.C. trip: archival research. I ended up not needing all the time for it that I blocked off. On the one hand—yay! More time for museums. On the other—rats! Nothing new about Jane. I knew it was a gamble going in, but a historian always hopes to get her eyes on something stunning. Or at least interesting. Mostly, though, the visit to the Library of Congress served as a sharp reminder of archival absences, what gets saved and preserved and what gets, for one reason or another, tossed.

(Library of Congress, Main Entrance of the Thomas Jefferson building, Billy Wilson, Flickr, 2022, NPS.gov)

During World War II, Jane served as the editor of the WWB’s newsletter. The board was a volunteer organization that helped the government produce well-written propaganda in support of the war effort by matching writers with issues the government and military wanted to highlight. The WWB’s records provided a lot of information on how this worked, but nothing about Jane’s role that I didn’t already know from the documents she saved and are with her papers at the University of Oregon.

I knew from the collection description of Marcia Davenport’s papers that they focused on her writing career—that there would be a lot about her public life and maybe nothing about her private life. The second part proved true. Since she and Jane were friends for many years, I’d hoped that some of their personal correspondence might have sneaked in. But Jane is as absent in the collection as she is in Marcia’s 1967 memoir Too Strong for Fantasy. (To be fair, Marcia does not appear in Jane’s memoir, either. But Marcia’s book covers the time period during which their friendship was the most active, and Jane’s does not.)

Jane first knew Marcia Davenport as Marcia Clarke. Before that, she was Abigail Marcia Glick, born in New York City in 1903 to Reba Feinsohn Glick and Bernard Glick, who worked in insurance. The Romanian-born Reba, twelve years younger than her husband, began formal singing lessons as an adult, taking her young daughter with her to Europe for her summer studies. Within a few years Reba was performing at the Metropolitan Opera under her stage name, Alma Gluck. Marcia’s parents divorced in 1911, and she started using the name Gluck instead of Glick, so throughout her life she was known, at different times, as Glick, Gluck, Clarke, and finally Davenport. Three years after the divorce, Alma Gluck married Ephrem Zimbalist, a concert violinist. (Alma then gave birth to Marcia’s half-brother, Ephrem Zimbalist, Jr., who went on to become an actor, probably most known as the lead in the 1960s television show The F.B.I., and the father of Stephanie Zimbalist, who in the 1980s co-starred in the marvelous Remington Steele with Pierce Brosnan.)

(Alma Gluck and daughter Marcia, c. 1915, Library of Congress)

Growing up, Marcia was surrounded by classical music and classical musicians. She had also become, by her own admission, a “spoilt brat.” Her mother sent her to live with the Earl Barnes family, friends of friends, in Philadelphia where she attended a Quaker day school. From there, Marcia enrolled at Wellesley College in 1921 but failed to graduate. During the summer of 1922, while taking some courses at the University of Grenoble in France, she met Frank Delmas Clarke, who was from New Orleans and a student at Yale University’s Sheffield Scientific School in New Haven, Connecticut.

They fell in love. Both returned to their respective colleges in the fall but hated being apart. Marcia, who had not done well during her freshman year, knew she was in danger of flunking out. Clarke was not happy with his program, so they decided to get engaged. Clarke dropped out of school, and a relative secured a position for him in the coal business in Pittsburgh. Marcia and Clarke married on April 22, 1923, in Port Chester, New York, before moving to the Steel City.

The next year, Marcia gave birth to a daughter. Clarke relocated the family to Philadelphia, where he had taken a new job, then walked out on them after a few weeks. Suddenly a single mother, Marcia scrambled to land a job as a copywriter for a local retail store. She enjoyed the work and thrived on it, appreciating the independence it afforded her. In 1927, she returned to New York City to pursue a job as a writer.

Vanity Fair editor and friend of the family Frank Crowninshield arranged an introduction to John Hanrahan, business manager at The New Yorker. Since Marcia lacked any real journalism experience, Crowninshield thought Hanrahan would be more likely to see the potential in her advertising copy portfolio. It would at least get her a foot in the door at the magazine.

The strategy worked. Hanrahan put in a word for Marcia with Harold Ross, and she was asked to write an article, on speculation, about a new apartment house that was going up. “The assignment was like handing a porterhouse steak to a hungry hound,” Marcia recalled in her memoir. “I was hired immediately as a general staff writer. My basic work was as a reporter for ‘The Talk of the Town.’ My job was leg-work, gathering at its sources the material which the rewrite geniuses turned into the front-of-the-book.”

Soon, in addition to her “Talk of the Town” work, Marcia was writing five columns under different pseudonyms. She later remembered that this frenetic activity was not unique to her. “We all worked as hard. We thought nothing of working from early morning until nine or ten at night, with a sandwich for lunch at our desks. Then after a dinner break the proofs would start coming in. They had to be corrected and rewritten in whole or in part after Ross got his hooks into them, so it was the rule rather than the exception to work from eleven or twelve at night until dawn.”

It’s not clear exactly when Jane Grant met Marcia, but it was likely not long after she started at The New Yorker. If the two women didn’t run into each other during one of Jane’s rare visits to the magazine’s office, Ross might have made a point of mentioning Marcia to his wife. The women had a lot in common: music, opera, journalism. It is likely that Jane invited Marcia to the brownstone for dinner at least once, maybe more often.

In 1929, the year Jane and Ross divorced, Marcia remarried. Russell Davenport was a Yale graduate and an aspiring novelist and poet from an influential Philadelphia family. Marcia Davenport left The New Yorker about a year later to focus on writing a biography of Mozart, which was published in 1932 by Charles Scribner’s Sons and remained in print for decades.

During the 1930s, when Jane traveled extensively through Europe, she and Marcia joined up for at least part of her journey. They got along so well that once, after they parted from their travels in the summer of 1937, Marcia wrote to Jane, “I can tell you with the utmost truth that the best part of the summer for me was our trip, even with the trials of Albania, and that Athens remains the high point of my experiences for a long time past.”

Their friendship may have continued beyond the late 1930s, after Jane stopped taking European vacations. Fascism had been on the rise and World War II was about to break out. William Harris, the man Jane was seeing in the 1930s and would later marry, took a job at Fortune in 1937, the same year Russell Davenport became the magazine’s managing editor, so the two women had that connection as well.

Marcia Davenport’s writing career took off in the 1930s. She worked for a few years as the music critic for Stage magazine, which had a financial connection to The New Yorker. She penned two best-selling novels in the 1940s: The Valley of Decision, a multi-generational family drama, and East Side, West Side, a story of the unraveling of the marriage of a New York City couple. Both became big-budget MGM movies; the first starred Greer Garson and Gregory Peck, the second James Mason and Barbara Stanwick.

(Marcia Davenport at NBC radio, 1936)

So far, I have found no evidence that Jane read either of the novels or saw the movie versions. But I will be making another research trip to the University of Oregon for another look through Jane’s papers. I did not have enough time to turn over every page during my first trip, but one of the things I want to keep an eye out for on my next visit is additional information about the Jane/Marcia friendship. It may exist. It may not. That’s all part of the research life—finding the conversations and confronting the silences.

Now that December is here, it’s time to draw to a close The Year of Jane Grant. My work on the Jane Grant book will continue into 2026, so stay tuned for updates on its progress. The first posts of 2026 will likely be my annual roundup of my favorite books from the past year, something I love to share.

Until then, happy holidays!

The Year of Jane Grant: On This Day in 1924

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The New York Times ran a short article on page 15 of its Friday, November 28, 1924, issue: “Greet Santa Claus as ‘King of Kiddies’.” Police estimated that at 9:00 in the morning on Thanksgiving Day, about 10,000 people had jammed 34th Street between Sixth and Sevenths Avenues in Manhattan to watch a parade sponsored by Macy’s, one of the city’s big department stores.

The event had been designed to celebrate the opening of Macy’s new store at 34th near Seventh Avenue, but much of the crowd, made up of small children, were there to catch a glimpse of the big man of the holiday season: Santa Claus.

“Santa came in state,” the article reported. “The float upon which he rode was in the form of a sled driven by reindeer over a mountain of ice. Preceding him were men dressed like the knights of old, their spears shining in the sunlight.”

The parade, populated with clowns, animals, marching bands, and floats, began at Convent Avenue and 145th Street and attracted audiences standing some four or five deep along the walk. It concluded at noon at the entrance of the new Macy’s, with Santa’s new nickname, “King of the Kiddies,” lit up on the store’s marquee. “When Santa seated himself on the throne he sounded his trumpet, which was the signal for the unveiling of the store’s Christmas window, showing the ‘Fairy Frolics of Wondertown,’ designed and executed by [puppeteer] Tony Sarg. The police lines gave way and with a rush the enormous crowd flocked to the windows to see Mother Goose characters as marionettes.”

This was, of course, the first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. It has since been immortalized by the 1947 movie Miracle on 34th Street and has been shown on network television since 1948. I’m a big fan of Miracle on 34th Street but not of parades. They don’t hold my attention for more than a few minutes.

But as I cruised through the internet yesterday, an article with a headline about the first Macy’s parade taking place in 1924 did catch my attention.

I immediately wondered if Jane Grant watched any of the parade. She worked on the New York Times city desk in 1924, after logging in some years in the society department, so it would have been within her purview. (And she enjoyed the many fine retail establishments the city had to offer.)

Macy’s advertised in the Times for what was originally called its Christmas parade and placed a full-page ad that ran the day before the event, encouraging “Everybody Be On Hand!” The newspaper ran a brief, two-paragraph article, “Santa to Lead a Parade,” that day, too. A smaller ad appeared on the day of the parade. The day after, the store published a “thank-you” ad and announced this would become an annual event. “We advise you now to make no other engagement for the morning of Thanksgiving Day, 1925.”

But if Jane did not cover the parade, she may not have taken the time to watch it. During the fall of 1924 she was stretched thin. In addition to her full-time job at the Times, she had been writing articles and stories for other publications to boost her income. She and her husband Harold Ross needed the money because, in addition to everything else, Jane was working at all hours that fall with Ross to get the first issue of The New Yorker magazine ready for publication.

That would happen in February 1925. And like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, The New Yorker has thrived into the 21st century.

Wishing you all a peaceful start to the holiday season.

Jane Grant and Caroline Singer

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Jane Grant, co-founder of The New Yorker, writer, and newspaperwoman, worked and/or crossed paths with many intelligent, ambitious career women. Like her, most of them were well known in their lifetimes but have since fallen into historical obscurity. As I tell the story of Jane’s involvement with The New Yorker, I weave in bits of those women’s lives, too—to remind the world of their accomplishments and to show how they may have inspired Jane.

Caroline Singer was one. By 1909, when she was still in her early 20s, she worked as a newspaper reporter in San Francisco, the city she grew up in, and had her own byline. Caroline married newspaper man William (“Doc”—he would, for a short time, practice dentistry) Mundell in 1911; two years later he changed careers again and opened a private detective agency.

In 1918, while the United States was involved in what would come to be called the First World War, the couple temporarily lived in Washington, D.C. Mundell was recruited for “secret service work” for one of President Wilson’s cabinet members. Caroline served as a member of the education committee of the War Camp Community Service under Raymond Fosdick, chair of the Committee on Training Camp Activities.

The American Red Cross then hired Caroline to go to France as part of its news service and to assist with publicity. She arrived during the last weeks of the war in 1918. She quickly found the Stars and Stripes office in Paris, where she made an immediate impression on its all-male staff. Caroline was not only a smart, seasoned journalist, she also commanded attention, standing at six feet tall, with inquisitive hazel eyes and cropped brown hair, all of which later earned her the nickname “the Goddess.”

Jane Grant, who also frequented The Stars and Stripes office, made fast friends with Caroline. The two women spent time together when free from their other obligations—Jane performing with the YMCA and Caroline gathering information for a book she would co-write about the history of the Red Cross during the war. Jane later remembered how “Caroline and I were called the Stars and Stripes camp followers by this mad crowd.” The women surely understood the double entendre.

Cyrus Leroy (known as Roy) Baldridge, the artist-illustrator for the newspaper whose own height surpassed six feet, was particularly captivated by Caroline Singer. A romance ensued. But when her Red Cross work wrapped up in 1919, Caroline returned to San Francisco and, presumably at least for a while, Mundell. The marriage did not last; Caroline and Baldridge wed in November 1921 and settled in Harmon, an area of Croton-on-Hudson, New York, about an hour north of New York City.

They built a blue stone cottage on a hill overlooking the Hudson River. A reporter noted a few years later that the locals, “more or less accustomed by now to the queer ways of bohemians, still watch them, wide eyed,” and “can’t tell Caroline from Roy at a distance, for they both wear flannel sport shirts, riding breeches, and her hair is cropped as close as his.”

[Caroline Singer, c. 1920s]

Every Sunday for about three years, visitors from New York City—mostly editors, publishers, writers, painters—made the trek north to spend the day soaking in the natural beauty of the place and having fun. It is likely that Jane Grant and Harold Ross were among them.

In the summer of 1924, Caroline Singer and Roy Baldridge rented out the cottage and headed off to Asia for six months. The result was a book, Turn to the East (1926), written by Caroline and illustrated by Baldridge. They continued this professional partnership as they traveled widely during the rest of the 1920s and into the 1930s, producing White Africans and Black (1929) and Half the World is Isfahan (1936). The books earned positive reviews, both for Caroline’s narrative style and Baldridge’s artistic talent.

International travel became more dangerous by the end of the 1930s, and the couple adjusted their careers accordingly. Caroline wrote children’s books (she also volunteered for children’s organizations in New York), which Baldridge illustrated. They both became involved with liberal political causes. Caroline may have attended meetings of the feminist group, Heterodoxy, and she joined the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and the League of Women Voters.

Caroline also continued to write articles, mostly for magazines, including Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, published by the National Urban League. A reporter for the Black weekly newspaper the New York Age described her in 1941 as “one of America’s better known white writers.” The article highlighted a piece Caroline had recently written for Opportunity, in which she asked white women to “make real democracy work here in America.” Caroline labeled “Anti-Negroism the most deeply-rooted and the most wide-spread of our Anti-Democratic and Anti-Social prejudices.” She believed they were a “national vice.” Caroline called on white women to admit Black women into their clubs and organizations, especially—and crucially now that it was wartime—those involving civilian defense.

Caroline Singer and Roy Baldridge left New York in 1952 and settled in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Baldridge joined the faculty of the Hill and Canyon School of the Arts. Caroline apparently stopped writing, perhaps due to ill health. She died in 1963.

“Mrs. Baldridge, Noted Writer, Dies After Illness” announced the obituary that ran in the local paper. It identified, with little elaboration, that Caroline was an “author and artist of renown in her own right,” and acknowledged that “her name before her marriage was Caroline Singer.” Such a cursory nod to such a remarkable career for an American white woman in the first half of the twentieth century.

After Caroline’s death, Baldridge donated to the University of Chicago, his alma mater, some of his drawings and copies of the books they published. His papers are also there, a modest accumulation amounting to four boxes, probably bequeathed after his death in 1977. Traces of his wife can be found in the collection’s Series III, labeled Caroline Singer, containing pieces of her published and unpublished work, portraits, and photographs from 1920 to 1943. They comprise three file folders.

The Chicago art critic, poet, and world traveler Blanche Coates Matthias, a friend of the couple, saved many of the letters she received from Caroline Singer. Those are located in the Blanche Matthias Papers (17 boxes, 2 file folders of Caroline’s letters that have been digitized and make fascinating reading) at the Yale University Archives.

That is what remains of Caroline Singer: her books and articles, plus some modest archival holdings.

In 1927, the journalist and critic Alexander Woollcott, who had been one of Jane Grant’s first friends at the New York Times, wrote about Caroline Singer and Roy Baldridge for a newspaper piece. Woollcott was particularly fascinated by Baldridge’s “penchant” for traveling, and pointed out that “Caroline Singer is far from his silent partner in vagrancy. She goes along and helps.” According to Woollcott, how did this wife help her husband? When Baldridge decided, while out on one of their adventures, to make a sketch, Caroline “pitches in” to arrange the subject. “Or they come out of Japan with a book in mind, and, as in the case of their beautiful Turn to the East, she will write its text.”

How is writing the text of a book—actually writing a book—considered helping? The title page lists Caroline’s name first, as it was on the couple’s subsequent books. Caroline was not “far from” being Baldridge’s silent partner; she was not silent at all. She was an equal partner and deserved, in all situations, to be recognized as such. Yet despite her accomplishments, because Caroline was married, many people like Woollcott assumed she was the helpmate of her husband.

Jane Grant faced the same assumption about her role with The New Yorker. This is one of the ways in which women disappear from or are obscured in the historical record. Uncovering and restoring these women’s lives is essential to documenting and understanding a complete history of any given society. (And “complete,” these days, is especially important.) This is why Women’s History Month remains crucial.

Welcome to Women’s History Month 2025

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Every year, the National Women’s History Alliance selects a theme for Women’s History Month. 2025’s is particularly relevant.

Its goals and objectives in choosing this theme are listed as:

  • Honor: Recognize the achievements and contributions of women educators, mentors, and leaders.
  • Inspire: Motivate all generations to pursue education and leadership roles.
  • Educate: Raise awareness about the unheralded legacies of women from every walk of life, highlighting their unique contributions and diverse backgrounds, including socioeconomic status, ethnicity, race, culture, abilities, and personal experiences.
  • Unite: Bring together communities to explore, share, and celebrate women’s history and achievements.
  • Envision: Create a blueprint for the future that honors our foremothers and builds bridges for the next generation of women.

This would be challenging during the best of times, and politically, these are not the best of times. I was surprised—but very relieved—to find that an official government website still exists for Women’s History Month and that it contains good, solid information about a diversity of women.

Yes, I used diversity, as in the first word in DEI, which the current administration is trying to wipe out. Diversity, Equity, Inclusion. A quick look at Wikipedia reveals a fair, common-sense definition:

Organizational frameworks that seek to promote the fair treatment and full participation of all people, particularly groups who have historically been underrepresented or subject to discrimination based on identity or disability.

Nothing to be afraid of here, nothing evil.

Women historically have been underrepresented and subjected to discrimination. Movements to end those practices have existed and continue to exist while those practices continue. Sometimes these movements have been successful.

That Women’s History Month exists at all represents one of those successes. You can read about its history here.

Unfortunately, women today are confronted with the reality that hard-won rights can be taken away. Vigilance is required more than ever. Complacency is the enemy. Do what you can. Follow current events. Vote. Read. Read women’s history.

Not sure where to begin? Historian Pamela D. Toler writes a marvelous blog called History in the Margins. During the month of March she is featuring (as she has done for the last six years) interviews with very smart people who focus on women’s history. She started a bit early this year, with a late February post about Amy Reading and her biography of editor Katharine White. There will be great stuff all month.

Since I’ve declared 2025 the year of Jane Grant, I will be posting about some of the women (both well-known and decidedly less so) she crossed paths with in her lifetime.

Until then, Happy Women’s History Month.

On This Day in 1925: “There would be no New Yorker today if it were not for her.”

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One hundred years ago today, February 17, 1925, the premiere issue of The New Yorker magazine appeared on newsstands in New York City. The 15,000-copy print run, dated February 21, cost 15 cents, the equivalent of about $2.70 today.

The publication was the culmination of nearly five years of planning by Jane Grant and Harold Ross, two journalists (and husband and wife) determined to create a magazine unlike any other.  

(Jane Grant and Harold Ross in the mid-1920s. Jane Grant papers, University of Oregon)

As Jane later explained, “Our magazine would fill the metropolitan gap. It would be so attractive, gay and informative, that it would be an asset on any library table. It could be read for the entire week, or more, for there would be articles for leisurely reading in addition to those of timely interest. It would be a new medium for local advertisers. The ads would be individual, sophisticated and lively—a new departure in that field.”

The first issue contained several paragraphs of “Of All Things,” many of which referenced The New Yorker, some fiction, short pieces on current books, plays, and movies, and a profile of Giulio Gatti-Casazza, manager of the Metropolitan Opera. Despite Harold Ross’s preference for anonymous articles, some were attributed—or as Jane put it, some writers were “brave enough to sign their names”—including Franklin P. Adams, Corey Ford, and Fairfax Downey.

Overall, however, the premiere lacked the coherent vision that Ross and Jane had so carefully crafted. The only thing Ross liked about the February 21st issue was its cover. Designed by The New Yorker’s art editor, Rea Irving, it depicted a fashionable, cavalier socialite (later named Eustace Tilley) inspecting a butterfly through his monocle. It complemented the magazine’s title, reflected its content and style, and was eye-catching enough to entice newsstand browsers—exactly what Ross had in mind.

Despite advanced publicity, some of it orchestrated by the public relations giant Edward Bernays, including two articles in the New York Times (Jane, one of its reporters, may have also played a role in their placement), The New Yorker fell flat.

 During the first week of the launch, as Jane moved about the city for her Times reporting duties, she checked hotel newsstands to see how many New Yorkers she could find. There they sat. Ross joined her at night to investigate other locations, and they found the same. “The piles of unsold The New Yorkers were staggering,” she later remembered. “We had hoped it would be an immediate triumph as well as a literary one. Failure hung all about us.”

That fear of failure involved more than their careers. Jane and Ross sunk their personal savings into the magazine. Failure would mean a double ruin for them.

But The New Yorker survived and has been publishing now for one hundred years. It is a remarkable achievement. And as Harold Ross admitted of Jane Grant’s role, “There would be no New Yorker today if it were not for her.”

(Jane Grant and Harold Ross, NYPL Digital Collections)