Edythe Mae Chapman was born in Washington, D.C., probably on June 4 and sometime in the period 1895–1900; the date is uncertain because the existing documents differ on her birth year. She was apparently raised by members of her mother's family, surnamed Bicks; nothing is known of her father. She was educated at M Street School, a public school, and graduated in 1916. In her last year at the school, she married Eugene Gordon, then a student at Howard University and later a writer for the Boston Post. By 1919 they had moved to Boston; they separated in 1932 and divorced in 1942. In 1926, Gordon enrolled as an undergraduate at Boston University. She graduated in 1934 with a B.S. degree in religious education and social services; a year later she earned her master's degree from the university's School of Social Services, a then-rare accomplishment for an African-American woman.
Writing
In 1925, Gordon's husband Eugene organized an African-American literary group, the Saturday Evening Quill Club, out of which grew a literary magazine, Saturday Evening Quill, of which he became the editor. Published three times a year, Quill contains most of the surviving specimens of Gordon's writing. Her first piece for Quill was a 1928 short story, "Subversion." It was listed among the year's distinguished stories by the O. Henry Award prize committee, which at the time rarely noticed works by non-white authors. Gordon would go on to publish two more short stories and a dozen poems in Quill. She also published two poems in the 1938 anthology Negro Voices, edited by Beatrice Murphy. Gordon's fiction focuses on the unhappy lives of urban African-American couples, challenging some of the era's social norms. Her poems are lyrical odes to love that take their metaphors from nature. There is little information about Gordon after her 1942 divorce. She died in 1980. A compilation of Gordon's work, Selected Works of Edythe Mae Gordon, was published in 1996. That same year, "Subversion" and another story, "If Wishes Were Horses", were republished in the anthology Harlem's Glory: Black Women Writing, 1900-1950.
