Zoe Anderson Norris
Zoe Anderson Norris was a Kentucky-born journalist, novelist, short story writer and publisher, known for her bimonthly magazine, , which focused on impoverished immigrants in New York. She also contributed to publications including The New York Times, , , and Argosy. She investigated journalistic topics including corrupt charity executives and child abuse cases. Her fiction plots often centered around starving artists, women deceived by hypocritical suitors and farmers battling the elements. 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" and known as a Queen of Bohemia.
Biography
Zoe was the 11th of 13 children of Henry Tompkins Anderson and Henrietta Ducker Anderson. Henry, a Virginia native descended from the politician Garland Anderson, had two children from a previous marriage. Henry served as a Christian Church pastor and teacher in Kentucky while creating a of the New Testament based on ancient Greek manuscripts. Zoe was born in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, where John Augustus Williams and his wife Mary, who ran Daughters College, took in the impoverished Anderson family. Henry, shortly before his death, moved to Washington, D.C., to preach at a church that James A. Garfield attended. Henrietta, as a widow, briefly farmed near Ellsworth, Kansas, with Zoe and other children. In 1878, Zoe graduated from Daughters College and married a Missouri native, Spencer William Norris. The couple settled in Wichita, Kansas, and had two children, Robert Grimes Norris and Mary Clarence Norris, known as Clarence. The family lived on North Market Street, and Spencer ran a store specializing in fruit and ice cream at 104 North Main Street. By the late 1890s, Zoe had discovered Spencer’s infidelities and started writing fiction and journalism for magazines as well as a gossip column for the Wichita Eagle. She traveled to the Rockies and hiked along Pike’s Peak wearing thin slippers.Zoe and Clarence then spent more than a year in Europe and settled afterwards in New York with Clarence’s infant son Robert M. Morris. 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. 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. 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, James D. Corrothers, 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, Sydney Rosenfeld, Helen Rowland, Grace Miller White and Ella Wheeler Wilcox. 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. Artists, photographers, performers and theater and film executives were in her circle, too, such as , Jessie Tarbox Beals, Libby Blondell, Platon Brounoff, Louis H. Chalif, Beatrice deMille, Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale, Mary Theresa 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
Works
The villain of Norris's first novel 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." 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. Norris's novel , about a young American woman traveling in Europe seeking true love, was said to have a "brilliant, vivacious style." Her final novel, , portrayed a Kansas farmer, abandoned by his wife, who loses their son to illness and commits suicide, bequeathing valuable real estate to a young female friend who goes insane. Norris collected her short fiction published in the New York Sun in . Describing Scenes and Incidents in a Kentucky Colonel’s Life in the Southland. 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, , , Argosy, , The Bohemian, , , , The Clack Book, Etude and Musical World, Ev'ry Month, , , Frank Leslie’s Monthly, Harper’s Weekly, The Home Magazine of New York, The Ladies’ World, The Midland Monthly, The Mirror, The Monthly Illustrator, Munsey’s, , , People's, , , ,, Satire, , , , The Valley Magazine, 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 , and she wrote about Jewish immigrants traumatized by pogroms in their homelands.
Her journalism appeared in , The Bohemian, , The Criterion, The Manuscript, , , and . She was a member of the Woman's Press Club. Her topics ranged from exhausted child laborers to Mark Twain's Bambino. Her interviewees included Bat Masterson, Gutzon Borglum, Nat Goodwin, Oliver Herford and Mary Elizabeth Lease. 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.” 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.