Friend and Lover: The Life of Louise Bryant

by Virginia Gardner

Portrays Louise Bryant's life, her activities in Russia as a newspaper correspondent, and her relationships with John Reed and Eugene O'Neill

390 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1982

Reviews

[Julio The Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

Louise Bryant is largely and for some folks fondly remembered today for her triad of husbands, a dullard dentist, romantic Communist, John Reed, leading her friend, the journalist Lincoln Steffens to crack, "Louise was not a Communist, she only slept with one", and a megalomaniacal millionaire diplomat, William Bullitt, along with Diane Keaton's sizzling portrait of Louise in REDS. This first-class biography, based on a perusal of her letters and interviews with surviving friends, attests to the killing contradictions in Louise's life. She was a fiercely independent Irish-American feminist whose life was charted by her male partners. Louise was not political, joined no labor unions or parties, but was zealously devoted to the Russian Revolution. A dedicated journalist, earning more money and publicity for her articles on Russia than Jack Reed, still her reporting on Lenin and the Bolsheviks was completely eclipsed by her husband's TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD, a book that earned Jack celebrity and his own place in history. Virginia Gardner's research is exhaustive, including use of the Freedom of Information Act to document Hoover's FBI spying on Bryant, but this biography is curiously deficient in explaining the politics of her generation. Jack Reed was a seasoned union organizer and agitator before he and Bryant moved in together in Greenwich Village. He and Louise played a key role in mobilizing against Wilson's drive toward war after 1916 by speaking and writing, risking their freedom. After John died in Russia in 1920, with a state funeral and burial in the Kremlin, Louise suffered a heart attack following his entombment, she lost her political and mental bearings, marrying Bullitt, an arch anti-communist, birthing a daughter whom she adored and lost after her divorce, and sinking into alcohol and drug abuse. Louise Bryant lived the twentieth century while covering its crises, she interviewed Lenin, Trotsky, Kemal Ataturk, and Mussolini, finally succumbing to a life without anchor in the revolutionary faith that sustained the only love of her life, Red Jack Reed.

[TheBruce · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book is well researched and provides a great insight of the times in which Louise Bryant lived. She was ahead of her time when it came to choosing her own path whether in love or work. The later part of her life is filled with tragic events, but the author conveys her perseverance with plenty of sources to draw upon.