Portal:Oregon/Selected biography/55

Louise Bryant (December 5, 1885 – January 6, 1936) was an American journalist known for her sympathetic coverage of Russia and the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution. Bryant, a feminist married in 1916 to the more famous writer John Reed, wrote about leading Russian women such as Katherine Breshkovsky and Maria Spiridonova as well as men including Alexander Kerensky, Vladimir Lenin, and Leon Trotsky. Her news stories, distributed by Hearst during and after her trips to Petrograd and Moscow, appeared in newspapers across the U.S. and Canada in the years immediately following World War I. A collection of articles from her first trip was published in book form as Six Red Months in Russia in 1918. In 1919, she defended the revolution in testimony before the Overman Committee, a Senate subcommittee established to investigate Bolshevik influence in the United States. Later that year, she undertook a nationwide speaking tour to encourage public support of the Bolsheviks and to discourage armed U.S. intervention in Russia. Bryant grew up in rural Nevada and attended the University of Nevada in Reno and the University of Oregon, graduating with a degree in history in 1909. Pursuing a career in journalism, she became society editor of the Portland, Oregon, Spectator and freelanced for The Oregonian. During her years in Portland (1909–15), she became active in the women's suffrage movement. Leaving her first husband in 1915 to follow Reed to Greenwich Village, she formed friendships with leading feminists of the day, some of whom she met through Reed's associates at publications such as The Masses, or at meetings of a women's group, Heterodoxy, or through work with the Provincetown Players. During a National Woman's Party suffrage rally in Washington, D.C., in 1919, she was arrested and spent three days in jail. Like Reed, she had lovers outside of marriage; during her Greenwich Village years (1916–20) these included playwright Eugene O'Neill and painter Andrew Dasburg. Suffering from a rare and painful disorder, Bryant wrote and published little in her last 10 years and drank heavily. Bullitt, winning sole custody of Anne, divorced her in 1930. Bryant died in Paris in 1936 and was buried in Versailles. A group from Portland visited her neglected grave in 1998 and worked to restore it.