Zoe Anderson Norris

Zoe Anderson Norris (February 29, 1860 – February 13, 1914) was a Kentucky-born journalist, novelist, short story writer and publisher, known for her bimonthly magazine, The East Side (1909-1914), which focused on impoverished immigrants in New York. She also contributed to publications including The New York Times,[1] New York Sun, Frank Leslie’s Monthly, Harper’s Weekly and Argosy.[2] She investigated journalistic topics including corrupt charity executives[3] and child abuse cases.[4] Her fiction plots often centered around starving artists, women deceived by hypocritical suitors and farmers battling the elements.[5] She founded the Ragged Edge Klub, a group of writers, filmmakers, politicians and performers who met for weekly dinners. She was considered "one of the most popular writers of newspaper sketches in the country"[6] and known as a Queen of Bohemia.[7]

Zoe Anderson Norris
Born(1860-02-29)February 29, 1860
Harrodsburg, Kentucky, United States
DiedFebruary 13, 1914(1914-02-13) (aged 53)
New York City, New York, United States
OccupationJournalist, novelist, magazine publisher
Notable work
The Color of His Soul, The Quest of Polly Locke, The Way of the Wind, The East Side

Biography

Zoe was the 11th of 13 children of Henry Tompkins Anderson (1812-1872) and Henrietta Ducker Anderson (1819-1897). Henry, a Virginia native descended from the politician Garland Anderson (1742-1811), had two children from a previous marriage. (Anderson’s descendants include Rear Admiral Robert M. Morris, Rear Admiral Creed Cardwell Burlingame, Kentucky soldiers from the 192nd Tank Battalion who were captured in the Bataan Death March, the singer and teacher Mary Chelf Jones, a founder of the Ragged Edge Theatre, and the actors Sara Rue and Chris Stack.) Henry served as a Christian Church pastor and teacher in Kentucky while creating a new translation of the New Testament based on ancient Greek manuscripts.[8] Zoe was born in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, where John Augustus Williams and his wife Mary, who ran Daughters College, took in the impoverished Anderson family.[9] Henry, shortly before his death, moved to Washington, D.C., to preach at a church that James A. Garfield attended.[10] Henrietta, as a widow, briefly farmed near Ellsworth, Kansas, with Zoe and other children.[11] In 1878, Zoe graduated from Daughters College and married a Missouri native, Spencer William Norris (1856-1904). The couple settled in Wichita, Kansas, and had two children, Robert Grimes Norris (1879-1948) and Mary Clarence Norris, known as Clarence (1881-1967). The family lived on North Market Street, and Spencer ran a store specializing in fruit and ice cream at 104 North Main Street.[12] By the late 1890s, Zoe had discovered Spencer’s infidelities (the couple divorced in 1898)[13] and started writing fiction and journalism for magazines as well as a gossip column for the Wichita Eagle (under the pseudonym Nancy Yanks).[14] She traveled to the Rockies and hiked along Pike’s Peak wearing thin slippers.[15]

Zoe and Clarence then spent more than a year in Europe (Robert Norris became a railroad executive) and settled afterwards in New York with Clarence’s infant son Robert M. Morris (1901-1984). In 1902, Zoe married an illustrator, J. K. “Jack” Bryans, but she left him upon realizing that he could not support her and did not tolerate her daughter and grandson.[16] (Clarence and Robert eventually returned to Harrodsburg, where Clarence married Fletcher Chelf, a seed company owner, and had two more children; her daughter Mary Chelf Jones was a mentor of the pianist Kevin Cole.) Around 1906, Zoe moved to a seventh-floor apartment at 338 East 15th Street, and in 1909, she began issuing The East Side, which was illustrated pro bono by William Oberhardt.

Ragged Edge members were known for dancing between meal courses and for smoking cigarettes while simultaneously inhaling spaghetti.[17] Club members and other East Side readers included writers and editors such as Edith and Rex Beach, Grace Duffie Boylan, Guido Bruno, Charles E. Chapin, Winnifred Harper Cooley,[18] James D. Corrothers,[19] Maria Thompson Daviess, Benjamin De Casseres, Helen Hamilton Gardener, Sadakichi Hartmann, Waldemar Kaempffert, Leita and Owen Kildare, Richard Le Gallienne, Miriam Leslie, Sophie Irene Loeb, Edwin Markham, Roy McCardell, Shaemas O'Sheel, John Milton Oskison, Ameen Rihani,[20] Sydney Rosenfeld, Helen Rowland, Grace Miller White[21] and Ella Wheeler Wilcox.[22] Zoe's works were also lauded and read by the philosopher and tastemaker Elbert Hubbard and the academics David Starr Jordan, James Hardy Ropes and Edwin Robert Anderson Seligman. Her writings appealed to politicians, lawyers and businessmen as well, including John F. Ahearn, Bird Sim Coler, Lee de Forest, Big Bill Edwards, Henry DeWitt Hamilton, John Temple Graves, Clifford B. Harmon, James Clark McReynolds, Herman A. Metz, William I. Sirovich, Arthur Stilwell and John Francis Tucker (president of the Twilight Club).[23] Artists, photographers, performers and theater and film executives were in her circle, too, such as Arthur Bairnsfather, Jessie Tarbox Beals, Libby Blondell (first wife of actor Edward Blondell, father of Joan Blondell), Platon Brounoff, Louis H. Chalif, Beatrice deMille, Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale, Mary Theresa Hart (daughter of painter James McDougal Hart), Burling Hull, Ovide Musin, Wray Physioc, Betty and Will Rogers and Laurette Taylor. Zoe also befriended restaurateurs, including Joel Renaldo, as well as aviators such as Lincoln Beachey and Mortimer Delano.

The East Side's January/February 1914 issue described Zoe's recent dream that her mother Henrietta had appeared at her bedside and warned of imminent death. Soon after the issue was mailed, Zoe collapsed after a Ragged Edge dinner and died of heart failure at People’s Hospital at 203 Second Avenue. (She is buried in Spring Hill Cemetery in Harrodsburg.) Her magazine’s premonition was noted in newspaper obituaries around the U.S. and in Canada, including The New York Times,[24] Washington Post[25] and San Francisco Chronicle.[26]

Works

The villain of Norris's first novel The Color of His Soul (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1902, and New York: R. F. Fenno & Co., 1903) was a hypocritical socialist orator, Cecil Mallon, who encourages rebellion among "wage slaves" but sponges off friends and relatives and abandons his pregnant mistress. The book was described as "a keen and relentless satire." [27] Funk & Wagnalls withdrew the 1902 edition after Courtenay Lemon, a chess player turned socialist orator, recognized himself blackly caricatured in the book and threatened to sue.[28] Norris's novel The Quest of Polly Locke (New York: J. S. Ogilvie, 1902), about a young American woman traveling in Europe seeking true love, was said to have a "brilliant, vivacious style."[29] Her final novel, The Way of the Wind (New York: self-published, 1911), portrayed a Kansas farmer, abandoned by his wife, who loses their son to illness and commits suicide, bequeathing valuable real estate (Wichita is built there) to a young female friend who goes insane. Norris collected her short fiction published in the New York Sun in Twelve Kentucky Colonel Stories. Describing Scenes and Incidents in a Kentucky Colonel’s Life in the Southland (New York: J. S. Ogilvie, 1905). The Kentucky colonel raconteur was based on her brother-in-law John B. Thompson Jr.'s twin Philip, sons of the politician John Burton Thompson.

Her fiction and poetry appeared in publications including 10 Story Book, Ainslee's, The Arena, Argosy, The Bankers Magazine, The Bohemian, The Book-Lover, The Bostonian, Brooklyn Life, The Clack Book, Etude and Musical World, Ev'ry Month, Everybody's, Four o'Clock, Frank Leslie’s Monthly, Harper’s Weekly, The Home Magazine of New York, The Ladies’ World, The Midland Monthly, The Mirror (published by William Marion Reedy), The Monthly Illustrator, Munsey’s, The New Age, The New Bohemian, People's, Pearson's, The Peterson Magazine, The Puritan, The Red Letter, Satire (published by Walter Pulitzer, the son of Albert Pulitzer), The Smart Set, Success, The Symposium (published by George Washington Cable), The Valley Magazine (published by William Marion Reedy), Wisdom Monthly, Woman’s Home Companion and Woman’s World. About 50 of her short stories were widely syndicated in newspapers. Recurring characters include male and female writers and artists running out of money, lovers reuniting after quarrels and lonely older people grateful for visitors to listen to their gossip. She included African-American characters such as cakewalk performers, and she wrote about Jewish immigrants traumatized by pogroms in their homelands.[30]

Her journalism appeared in The American Agriculturist, The Bohemian, The Bookman, The Criterion, The Manuscript, New York Press, New York Sun, New York Times and The Writer. She was a member of the Woman's Press Club. Her topics ranged from exhausted child laborers to Mark Twain's escaped cat Bambino. Her interviewees included Bat Masterson,[31] Gutzon Borglum,[32] Nat Goodwin,[33] Oliver Herford[34] and Mary Elizabeth Lease.[35] The East Side documented immigrants overcrowded in tenements, working in sweatshops and suffering from disease and starvation. Norris also wrote about her own struggles to make ends meet. The publication was lauded as "written with great vivacity, though evidently inspired by a sincere, earnest, and sympathetic spirit.”[36] Her masthead titles for herself included office boy, bootblack, printer's devil and circulation liar. She sometimes reported undercover, dressed as a blind street accordionist or a bedraggled recent arrival from Ellis Island, to see how policemen, streetcar conductors and passersby treated her.[37]

Papers

Correspondence from Norris survives in a few institutional collections including New York University's Pleiades Club Collection and Eastern Kentucky University's John Wilson Townsend papers.

References
  1. Norris, Zoe Anderson. "On the Rim of Manhattan". New York Times.
  2. Townsend, John Wilson (1913). Kentucky in American Letters. Cedar Rapids, Iowa: Torch Press. pp. 135–139.
  3. "Has Own Magazine". Wichita Eagle. June 14, 1911.
  4. Hart, Tanya (2015). Health in the City: Race, Poverty, and the Negotiation of Women’s Health in New York City, 1915-1930. New York University Press. pp. 56–62, 257–258.
  5. "Wichita Woman's New Book". Wichita Eagle. October 11, 1911.
  6. "The Color of His Soul". Buffalo Sunday Morning News. February 2, 1902.
  7. Cooley, Winnifred Harper. "Feminism Has Struck New York". Star Tribune (Minneapolis). February 22, 1914.
  8. Boles, H. Leo (1932). Biographical Sketches of Gospel Preachers. Nashville, TN: Gospel Advocate Co.
  9. Bourne, Ann Shanks. History of Daughters College (1856-1893) and Its Founder John Augustus Williams. Harrodsburg, KY. p. 46.
  10. Wasson, Woodrow (1952). James A. Garfield: His Religion and Education: A Study in the Religious and Educational Thought and Activity of an American Statesman. Tennessee Book Co. p. 95.
  11. "Queen of Bohemia Dead". Ellsworth Messenger. February 19, 1914: 3.
  12. Driscoll, Charles. "The World and All An Old Story". Daily News. February 23, 1932: 20.
  13. Craddock, Susanne Britt. "Zoe Anderson Norris—Ahead Of Her Time". Harrodsburg Herald. June 2, 1983: 1B.
  14. "Rests in the 'Land of Lilies'". Wichita Eagle. February 15, 1914: 2.
  15. "A City Bred Girl's Attempt to Climb Pike's Peak". Philadelphia Inquirer. October 10, 1897: 26.
  16. Craddock, Susanne Britt. "Zoe Anderson Norris—Ahead Of Her Time". Harrodsburg Herald. June 2, 1983: 1B.
  17. "'Ragged Edgers?' Do You Know 'Em? No! Well, Go Then With Norman and Ewer and See Them Inhale Their Spaghetti and Cigaret Smoke Simultaneously". Evansville Press. July 24, 1913: 2.
  18. Cooley, Winnifred Harper. "Heartless New York". Minneapolis Sunday Tribune. February 22, 1914: 14.
  19. Corrothers, James D. (1916). In Spite of the Handicap. New York: George H. Doran Company. p. 190.
  20. Norris, Zoe Anderson. "Shopping in Little Syria". New York Press. July 23, 1905: 5.
  21. "Brief Points About People". Louisville Courier-Journal. April 1, 1902: 5.
  22. Wilcox, Ella Wheeler. "Ella Wheeler Wilcox Writes On 'The Charity Trust'". Los Angeles Herald. April 26, 1912: 6.
  23. "Zoe Norris's Funeral". New York Times. February 18, 1914: 5.
  24. "Mrs. Zoe Anderson Norris/Novelist and Editor of East Side Magazine Dies Suddenly". New York Times. February 14, 1914: 11.
  25. "Curb Band Plays Her Dirge". Washington Post. February 19, 1914: 10.
  26. "Zoe Anderson Norris, Writer and Editor, Dies". San Francisco Chronicle. February 14, 1914: 1.
  27. "'The Color of His Soul': An Impressionistic Sketch of Certain Phases of Life in New York". Brooklyn Daily Eagle. February 1, 1902: 8.
  28. "Threat to Pretty Girl Novelist" (PDF). New York Evening World. February 10, 1902: 5.
  29. "J. S. Ogilvie Publishing Company". The Bookseller. October 1902: 414.
  30. Norris, Zoe Anderson. "Yom Kippur". People's. January 1909: 153–156.
  31. Norris, Zoe Anderson. "'Bat' Masterson Vindicated: Woman Interviewer Gives Him 'Square Deal.'". New York Times. April 2, 1905: 4.
  32. Norris, Zoe Anderson. "Mourns His Lost Angels". New York Sun. October 15, 1905: II, 2.
  33. Norris, Zoe Anderson. "The Cowboy and the Lady". The Criterion. August 19, 1899: 20–21.
  34. Norris, Zoe Anderson. "Omar of the Persian Kitten". The Bohemian. January 1907: 68–77.
  35. Norris, Zoe Anderson. "Mrs. Lease Is Seen at Home". New York Sun. September 25, 1904.
  36. "Mrs. Norris, P., P. A., P. R., A. M., M. A. W., P. D., B". New York Times Book Review. September 17, 1911: 73.
  37. Townsend, John Wilson (1913). Kentucky in American Letters. Cedar Rapids, Iowa: Torch Press. pp. 135–139.
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