Today is Valentine’s Day, so it’s perhaps fitting that in chapter three of my book about Jane Grant, she meets Harold Ross. He becomes her first husband, and together they create The New Yorker. But that comes later.
In this chapter, Jane is overseas with the YMCA in 1918-1919 doing war work. Both adventurous and practical, she couldn’t wait to get to France. She knew that a few female journalists had managed, despite military restrictions, to get across the Atlantic and file stories about World War I. But the New York Times wouldn’t send her as a reporter, so she applied to one of the government-sanctioned service organizations that hired women for clerical work, nursing, and entertainment. Jane figured she was qualified for two out of those three, and she believed that whatever her posting entailed, it would somehow further her career.
[Jane Grant, c. 1918-1919, Jane Grant papers, University of Oregon]
The Y sent Jane to Tours, France, but her friend and colleague from the Times, Alexander Woollcott, pulled strings to get her to Paris. He had been in the army since 1917, and now, as a sergeant, he worked in Paris on the staff of the American Expeditionary Forces’ Stars and Stripes. Jane easily fell in with that newspaper crowd, and it was Woollcott who introduced her to Ross, editor of the publication. It was not love at first sight, but the attraction was strong enough to induce Ross to take a job in New York City after the war to be near Jane.
This chapter revision is ongoing. There is less to weed out, and more to weave in.
What I’m Reading
I started a novel, The Wilderness, by Angela Flournoy. Good so far. I read her first, The Turner House, back in 2016, and I noted this on Goodreads: This is a lovely, lovely novel. Set in contemporary Detroit, it tells the tale of a large family still dealing with the death of the patriarch and with the rapid decline of the matriarch. The fate of the family home, which has fallen into considerable disrepair, is a point of contention among the 13 siblings. And there’s a haint. Wonderful.
I’m continuing with Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade and Lorissa Rinehart’s Winning the Earthquake. I can’t renew the Stein biography, so I have to make sure that takes precedence during my reading time. I’m pretty sure the only thing of Stein’s I’ve read is The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and probably only selections from it, a long, long time ago. I doubt that I would have much patience for her modern, experimental work.
I finally finished Vanity Fair, and I’m very glad. I’m participating in a Zoom book discussion this coming Wednesday night.
What I’m Watching
Starfleet Academy (Paramount+), Grace (BritBox), All Creatures (PBS), and The Lincoln Lawyer (Netflix) remain in rotation. I still like Grace the best—good storylines and an efficient use of the 90-minute format. I also started The Game, also on BritBox, which has more thriller elements than I like, but the acting is good and there are only four episodes, so I think I can see it through.
What Else I’ve Been Doing
I made progress on my review of a book proposal for an academic press, so I remain on track to meet the deadline.
The weekly bowling took place, the usual two games. Overall, I rolled pretty mediocre. But there was a bright spot: I made three spares in a row, which I kind thought might be referred to as a chicken. It made sense to me since three strikes in a row is a turkey, and I figured a chicken was the next bird down, size-wise. When I finally remembered to look it up, I learned to my absolute delight that three spares in a row are called a sparrow. Perfection!
Happy Valentine’s Day! (to those who celebrate)
Thanks for reading. Check back next week to see how far the chapter three revisions have progressed.
I finished revisions on chapter two. Finally, progress.
The challenge was to take two rough chapters and combine them into one. I find it difficult to jettison material (though I safely store it in a scrap file, just in case), whether it’s from primary or secondary sources, because it interested me enough to include it in the first draft.
But what interests me doesn’t always serve the story. The story I need to tell in this chapter is about Jane Grant’s first years of working at the New York Times. She was in her 20s and still harbored hopes of a singing career. Jane viewed the job at the Times as a means to an end, a way to support herself while she went out on auditions and took on performing gigs. Key to the chapter is how and why Jane became a journalist.
Now that I have that all set up, I’m getting ready to move on to the third chapter, which highlights another pivotal point in Jane’s life: working overseas for the YMCA during World War I. A lot of revisions will go into this, too, because I also spread these events over two draft chapters. Does the story require all of that material, all of those pages? That’s what I’m going to be working through. Luckily, I’ve had a lot of recent practice.
What I’m Reading
Many of the books on my library hold list come from reading Nancy Bekofske’s blog The Literate Quilter. She reviews a variety of fiction and nonfiction, even poetry. It’s a great way to keep up with forthcoming and recent publications.
I finished Palace of Deception: Museum Men and the Rise of Scientific Racism by Darrin Lunde and liked it well enough, especially the behind-the-scenes stories of how museums acquire collections. Lunde is also very good at delving into the characters of these museum men. But because of my own particular interests, I found myself more drawn to the women who, in this telling, existed on the periphery of these events.
I started Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade. The first sentences of the prologue are stunning: “She came to Paris, she said, to kill the nineteenth century. Her weapons were a pencil and a supply of softcover notebooks, her targets dullness and cliché. She chopped off her long coils of hair and dispensed with punctuation….” There is Stein, fully alive, confident in her importance. Moreover, a casual look at the notes section of the book reveals an impressive amount of archival sources and ample citations for quotes and other information found in the text. Wade also discusses some of the process of her research in her acknowledgements. These are the kinds of things I regularly look at in nonfiction books.
I continue to read Lorissa Rinehart’s Winning the Earthquake: How Jeannette Rankin Defied All Odds to Become the First Woman in Congress. Consider these first sentences: “Her water broke. Mary, the family cook, helped her into bed. Besides Mary, Olive Rankin was alone on the ranch situated in Grant Creek Valley, some six thousand feet above Missoula, Montana.” And the beginning of the third paragraph: “Between contractions, Olive tried to focus on the wildflowers painting the mountainsides. White yarrow and purple lupine.” It’s all very evocative, but my first thought was, “How do we know?” The notes section doesn’t provide an answer. The information may have come from a previous biography of Rankin written by the late Norma Smith and published in 2002. Or Rinehart may have imagined the scene, leaning into creative nonfiction. I always prefer a sharp delineation between fact and imagination.
I’m still reading Vanity Fair. Still. But I’m closing in on the end.
What I’m Watching
The final episodes of Shetland and Bookish were both good, though I like the Shetland series more than Bookish. Maybe it’s because of a familiarity with the characters. But Bookish seemed a bit tentative about where it was going and what it wants to be. Still, I’m willing to watch the next season.
My ambivalence about Starfleet Academy continues. All Creatures Great and Small remains a good comfort watch, though I wish the female characters had better storylines.
New seasons of Grace (BritBox) and The Lincoln Lawyer (Netflix) have moved into my rotation. I appreciate that Grace solves one crime per 90-minute episode. The Lincoln Lawyer is going to be a tense season, with Mickey Haller in jail awaiting his murder trial.
I also saw Agatha and the Truth of Murder (Prime), a re-imagining of what happened during Agatha Christie’s disappearance in the 1920s. I liked it.
What Else I’ve Been Doing
I was asked by an academic press to review a book proposal, and I need to finish that before the end of February. This is not the kind of deadline that can be elastic. It’s not fair to keep a hopeful author waiting any longer than necessary.
Happy Super Bowl Sunday to all who celebrate. May your favorite team win. And happy Olympics viewing, too.
Thanks for reading. Find out next week how chapter three is coming along.
This may be a first for my annual list of nonfiction favorites, but it’s certainly not surprising. All fifteen of the books listed below, plus a bonus title, were written by women. And all fifteen are about women. Unusual and a bit surprising: I read several memoirs.
In my last post I mentioned that I sometimes forget to log my books on Goodreads, which makes tallying up a year’s worth of reading inexact. I’m leading the 2025 list with my most embarrassing omission from last year because I can’t bear for everyone not to know that it’s one of my favorite works of nonfiction. The rest are listed roughly in the order in which I read them.
1. The Dragon from Chicago: The Untold Story of an American Reporter in Nazi Germany by Pamela D. Toler. This is an excellent and much needed biography of Sigrid Schultz, the Chicago Tribune’s bureau chief and foreign correspondent in Central Europe who warned about the dangers of Adolf Hitler and Nazism. The book received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews, and it was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times’s 2024 Book Prize in Biography.
2. The Icon and the Idealist: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the Rivalry That Brought Birth Control to America by Stephanie Gorton. A first-rate dual biography of two of the most important birth control activists in United States history. Sanger’s name is the more familiar of the two, but Gorton convincingly demonstrates that Dennett deserves just as much attention. I’ve long been a huge fan of Dennett so was particularly pleased to see her in the limelight. And she’s the subject of an Ogden Nash poem, probably the only verse I know by heart.
I for one Think the country would be better run, If Mary Ware Dennett Explained things to the Senate.
3. The Many Lives of Anne Frank by Ruth Franklin. I first read The Diary of a Young Girl in a grade school English class. Over the years, I’ve read the expanded versions as well as books about Frank, her family, and the people who made the Secret Annex possible. Franklin combines a well-written biography of Anne Frank with investigations into the various forms of the diary, the ways in which it has been dramatized for stage and screen, and how Frank has become a fictional character in the works of other authors. Fascinating all the way through.
4. Tell Me a Story Where the Bad Girl Wins: The Life and Art of Barbara Shermund by Caitlin McGurk. This biography wins Best Title of the Year, at least as far as me and my list are concerned. Who wouldn’t want to hear that story? And McGurk has done a marvelous job of situating artist Shermund in her proper place in the history of American illustrators and cartoonists. I was especially intrigued with Shermund’s work for The New Yorker during its early years, when Jane Grant was still around. The two women probably had a lot in common.
5. After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart by Megan Marshall. These essays, by a genius biographer, blend memoir with craft advice. It’s all beautifully written and inspiring.
6. Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder. Wow, wow, wow. An insightful, incisive biography of Eileen O’Shaughnessy, who married George Orwell. Funder shows exactly what O’Shaughnessy contributed to the artistic success of Orwell and explores how and why she was pretty much written out of the biographies of the author. The book has made a huge impact on how I view Jane Grant.
7. Dust and Light: On the Art of Fact in Fiction by Andrea Barrett. I adore Barrett’s fiction, and I loved her take on novelists’ use of history in their (and her own) work. Beautiful.
8. The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir by Martha S. Jones. Jones is a brilliant historian, and she has deployed her formidable skills to answer a personal question for herself: “Who do you think you are?” Her search takes her through her family’s history, which included enslavement, as she grapples with the meaning of color in the lives of her ancestors—and herself.
9. The Last American Road Trip: A Memoir by Sarah Kendzior. A family memoir of a different kind, Kendzior looks at politics and society in America, past and present, through road trips she takes with her family during the pandemic years. I admired the gorgeous writing, the strong sense of place, and the whiffs of nostalgia infused with a bit of hopefulness.
10. Marion Greenwood: Portrait and Self-Portrait—A Biography by Joanne B. Mulcahy. This biography focuses on all the things I’m drawn to in this genre: a once well-known woman, incredibly smart and talented, whose political beliefs led her to live an unconventional life, who somehow disappears from history. Greenwood, a devotee of social realism, painted some of the most stunning murals and portraits in the first half of the twentieth century. Mulcahy, with her usual elegant prose, reminds us why it’s still important to know about her.
11. Birding to Change the World: A Memoir by Trish O’Kane. Originally an investigative journalist, O’Kane switched careers after Hurricane Katrina upended her life. She developed an interest in birds, enrolled in an environmental studies Ph.D. program, and embarked on a social justice campaign to save a local park from over-development. O’Kane’s passion and dedication shine through—for her academic work and love of learning, her community and its people, and the many species of birds she encounters.
12. Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange by Katie Goh. Goh traces the history of the orange as she untangles the strands of her multi-cultural heritage. She travels from Ireland to China and Malaysia to connect with far flung family members, seeking answers about her identity. The orange, with its own complicated history, gives her grounding and perspective. I liked this unique approach to memoir.
13. The Girl in the Middle: A Recovered History of the American West by Martha A. Sandweiss. The presence of a Native American girl, Sophie Mousseau, in an 1868 photograph taken at Fort Laramie is Sandweiss’s jumping off point for this meticulous work of history about post-Civil War America and westward expansion. It’s a densely packed story, and Sandweiss’s other real-life characters, including photographer Alexander Gardner and Union general William S. Harney, occupy much of the narrative. But Mousseau is a constant, almost haunting presence, at the heart of the story.
14. Sisters of Influence: A Biography of Zina, Amy, and Rose Fay by Andrea Friederici Ross. During the Victorian era, known for its constraints on women’s behavior, these three sisters pushed at the boundaries of those expectations to make names for themselves in music, writing, and domestic reform. It’s an absorbing family biography, and Ross calmly and ably juggles all the different personalities.
15. Joyride: A Memoir by Susan Orlean. I’m a fan of Orlean but not a super fan. I haven’t read everything she’s written but I liked The Library Book and many of her articles. Reading this memoir provides the sense of exhilaration portrayed on the book’s cover. I was fascinated by how Orlean carved out a career as a writer and enjoyed the snippets of her personal life that she included.
Bonus book:
How to Write a Bestseller: An Insider’s Guide to Writing Narrative Nonfiction for General Audiences by Tilar J. Mazzeo. A former academic who has written bestsellers, and Mazzeo provides practical advice to narrative nonfiction writers, especially those who want to move away from scholarly writing. It’s one of the most helpful how-to writing books I’ve read in a long time.
And one final kind of quirky thing about my 2025 reading. In a previous post I wrote about how much I liked Debby Applegate’s Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age, but had to stop reading it because it invaded too much of my head space while I was drafting my book about Jane Grant. Well, that happened again. This time I set aside The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage that Made an American Icon, Laurie Gwen Shapiro’s latest book. It’s terrific, but Shapiro’s voice is so strong that the book is now sitting on the shelf next to Madam, where they will stay until I’m much further along with Jane. (At least I didn’t put them in the freezer, which was Joey Tribianni’s solution to troublesome books.)
To all of you who made it this far, thanks for reading. I hope you encounter loads of good books in 2026 that take you on your own joyride.
Here on the blog, I have designated 2025 as the year of Jane Grant, mostly because it marks the centennial of The New Yorker, the magazine Jane co-founded with her first husband, Harold Ross.
(Jane Grant, c. 1917. Jane Grant Photograph Collection, PH141, University of Oregon Libraries Special Collections)
Also, because for more than a year, I have been engrossed with writing the (very) rough draft of a book about her. I hope this is the year I finish the draft and start reworking it into a less messy version, with a clearer shape, sharper writing, and more vivid story arcs.
My Jane Grant book is not a cradle-to-grave biography. It focuses instead on how Jane got The New Yorker off the ground in 1925 and kept it going. To accomplish this, I explore her journalism career in New York City in the 1910s and 1920s, plus her marriage and subsequent divorce from Harold Ross. All bolstered by an unwavering dedication to the pursuit of gender equality.
Other books have told The New Yorker’s story, but they have been, predictably, male centered. Jane Grant’s presence is sidelined in them, her role largely subsumed under that of “wife.”
As Amy Reading points out in The World She Edited, her marvelous 2024 biography of the magazine’s long-time fiction editor Katharine White:
“But there’s another way to tell the magazine’s origin story: by traveling along the networks forged by the women who were there from the beginning and who have been barely mentioned in histories of the magazine.” Reading’s book traces how White’s tenure at The New Yorker (like Jane Grant’s involvement, as I will demonstrate) “shows quite simply that so many of The New Yorker’s early successes were due to the efforts of feminist women who interpreted the magazine’s obsession with sophistication in a way guaranteed to appeal to readers like themselves—educated, active participants in the city’s cultural life.”
Reading’s book has proved a good resource for my project. It is also an inspirational model of writing, as is Debby Applegate’s biographyMadam, about Polly Adler. I anticipate that Laurie Gwen Shapiro’s forthcoming book, The Aviator and the Showman, about Amelia Earhart, will form the third point of that inspirational model triangle.
I will be touching on these books (and others) plus exploring fascinating primary sources as I write my way through 2025 and the year of Jane Grant. Some of the more interesting findings will appear on the blog during the year, most likely at irregular intervals (Writing history is challenging, and, for me, writing about writing history is even more so.) Hope you will follow along.
Back in the summer of 2024, I started reading Debby Applegate’s biography of Polly Adler, the (in)famous Manhattan madam of the 1920s. It was an obvious choice for me: a story about a little-known woman—today, not back then—written by a woman who turned what she learned in graduate school into a Pulitzer Prize winning writing career. Applegate won that award for her first book, The Most Famous Man in America, a biography of the nineteenth-century minister Henry Ward Beecher.
(That book also serves as the sample proposal in the extraordinarily useful Thinking Like Your Editor: How to Write Great Serious Nonfiction—and Get It Published by Susan Rabiner (Applegate’s literary agent) and Alfred Fortunato. My copy is dog-eared now. It is the resource I turn to when I need to write a book proposal. Now I am reading Tilar Mazzeo’s How to Write a Bestseller: An Insider’s Guide to Writing Narrative Nonfiction for General Audiences, which may prove to be equally valuable.)
Madam is Applegate’s second book. (I admire an author who takes their time to conduct quality research.) I knew going in that it would be good. My interest in Madam extended beyond character to setting. Right now I want to read as much as I can about New York City in the 1920s to get background information for my current book-in-progress about Jane Grant, co-founder of The New Yorker.
Polly Adler was born around 1900; Jane in 1891. When Polly arrived in New York City from Russia in 1913, Jane had already been there (from Kansas) for five years. Both changed their first names to make a break with their pasts. The two young women struggled to gain a foothold in the city so they could live the life of their dreams. Each got what she wanted, mostly, in some way.
It is not unreasonable to think their paths may have crossed in New York in the 1920s, though trying to imagine that encounter makes my head spin. Polly opened her first brothel at the beginning of that decade that was known for its roar. By 1924, as Applegate writes, “her house had become an after-hours clubhouse for the adventurous Broadway bohemians who gathered at the Algonquin Hotel for lunch.” Jane Grant was a member of the legendary Round Table that met at the Algonquin. As was her husband, the talented editor Harold Ross. Their home was another “after-hours clubhouse” for the Round Tablers, though the entertainment they provided did not include Polly’s specialty.
(I have come to think of Jane as the anti-Polly.)
With some trepidation, I looked for Harold Ross’s name in the index of Madam and found it. (Jane’s is not there.) I could hardly bring myself to read what was on the corresponding page—would he turn out to be a rat or a super rat? But according to Applegate, Ross was “one of the few who failed to fall for Polly’s charms.” The lone time friends dragged him to her brothel, he carried along a stack of manuscripts, which he read “while the fun eddied around him.” This left me with a lot to think about.
I read about a quarter of Madam before I set it aside. It had nothing to do with the quality of the biography, which is as excellent as I anticipated, but rather because I started to consider it an ideal model for my book on Jane Grant. Too ideal. I am still very much at the beginning of my project, and I started to worry that I would imitate Applegate’s style. I do not want to cross the line between modeling and imitating. I need space, considerable space right now, to identify that boundary, to develop my own style and voice based on how I think Jane’s story needs to be told.
This is not the way I typically respond to the secondary (or published) sources I read for my book research. Every so often, though, I encounter a book—whether during leisure reading or work reading—I admire so much that I am overwhelmed by a sense of futility. (Also known, perhaps, as imposter syndrome.) As in, why should I continue to do what I do when someone has already published the perfect gem of a book. (Rebecca Donner’s All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, about Mildred Harnack, was the last book to strike me like that.)
The feeling eventually passes, and, of course, I go on to do what I do, because what I write ends up different than what anyone else writes. And maybe it is as good, maybe not. But that is what happens. I write the best book I can.
When I’m ready for my first round of revisions on the (still in progress) rough draft, I might pick up Debby Applegate’s book again. Or maybe I will wait for the second round. But I know I will finish reading that biography. I need to find out what happened to Polly Adler. And I need to pay close attention to how Applegate makes me care.
Theresa Kaminski 
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