Josephine Herbst (1897-1969)
Josephine Herbst was a left-wing writer and journalist. She was born in Sioux City, Iowa and educated at the University of California, Berkeley. She began her career by writing for New Masses and The Daily Worker. But she rejected the label of "proletarian writer" because, as she said, she didn't want "to be ghettoized within the communist milieu". During the 1920s and 1930s she was writer for Scribner's and special correspondent for the New York Post who sent her to Germany in 1935. She also went to Spain during the Civil War as a journalist. John Cowper Powys and Phyllis Playter got to know her and her husband, John Herrmann, also a writer, in New York when they were living in Patchin Place. Josephine Herbst had just published Nothing is Sacred (1928) and Money for Love (1929). Her last book,The Burning Bush, is a literary and personal history of the 1920s and 1930s.
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