Louise Bryant

Louise Bryant was an American journalist known for her sympathetic coverage of Russia and the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution. Bryant, a feminist, married in 1916 to the more famous writer John Reed, wrote about leading Russian women such as Katherine Breshkovsky and Maria Spiridonova as well as men including Alexander Kerensky, Vladimir Lenin, and Leon Trotsky. Her news stories, distributed by Hearst during and after her trips to Petrograd and Moscow, appeared in newspapers across the U.S. and Canada in the years immediately following World War I. A collection of articles from her first trip was published in book form as Six Red Months in Russia in 1918. In 1919, she defended the revolution in testimony before the Overman Committee, a Senate subcommittee established to investigate Bolshevik influence in the United States. Later that year, she undertook a nationwide speaking tour to encourage public support of the Bolsheviks and to discourage armed U.S. intervention in Russia

The 1981 film, Reds, tells the story of Bryants time with Reed. After his death from typhus in 1920, Bryant continued to write for Hearst about Russia as well as Turkey, Hungary, Greece, Italy, and other countries in Europe and the Middle East. Some of these articles were republished in book form in Mirrors of Moscow in 1923. Later that year she married William Christian Bullitt, Jr., with whom she had her only child, Anne, born in 1924. Suffering from a rare and painful disorder, Bryant wrote and published little in her lastyears and drank heavily. Bullitt, winning sole custody of Anne, divorced her in 1930. Bryant died in Paris in 1936 and was buried in Versailles. A group from Portland visited her neglected grave in 1998 and worked to restore it.

Source: Wikipedia