Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant (1881–1965)

Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. She attended Miss Winsor's School in Boston and graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1903. Over the next 10 years, she took several extended trips to France, attending lectures at the Sorbonne and meeting artists and writers. Her volunteer social work in Boston and New York inspired her first article, "Toilers of the Tenements," which was published in 1910 in McClure's. In 1914, she became one of the original contributors to The New Republic, specializing in French literature and culture. Her first book, French Perspectives, was published in 1916. The following year, she went back to France as a World War I correspondent for The New Republic. While touring a battlefield in 1918, she was severely wounded by a grenade explosion and hospitalized for several months. She described her experiences in Shadow-Shapes: Journal of a Wounded Woman (1920). She moved for her health to New Mexico, where she met members of the Taos writers' colony and the Indian rights movement. She published more than a dozen articles on New Mexico and the Pueblo Indians, mostly in The Nation and The New Republic. Her only novel, Short as any Dream, appeared in 1929. She studied with analyst Carl Jung in Zurich from 1929 to 1931. In the mid-1930s, she returned to New York, eventually settling in Rockland County. She continued to publish magazine articles and worked on her two biographies. Willa Cather: A Memoir was published in 1953, and Robert Frost: The Trial by Experience appeared in 1960. Sergeant had planned to follow this with her autobiography, but did not live to complete it.