Lola Ridge (1873–1941)

Lola Ridge, née Rose Emily Ridge, was born in Dublin, Ireland and moved to New Zealand with her mother in childhood. In 1895, at age 21, she married Peter Webster, the manager of a gold mine in her town of Hokitika. When the marriage was failing in 1903, she left her husband and moved with their young son to Sydney, Australia to study painting at the Sydney Art School. After her mother died in 1907, Ridge emigrated to the USA and reinvented herself as Lola Ridge, poet and painter. She settled in San Francisco, California and made her literary debut in Overland Monthly. She then moved on to Greenwich Village in New York City. There she wrote advertising copy and worked as an artists' model and in a factory. She became active in working class politics and radical and anarchist causes, often writing about the rights of women, immigrants, and people of color. She participated in demonstrations and marches and got arrested in Boston in 1927 for protesting the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. Her circle of writers and poets included William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore, and she often hosted gatherings in her home. Ridge first received critical attention for her long poem "The Ghetto," about life among Jewish immigrants in Lower East Side tenements, published in 1918 in The New Republic. Later that year, she published her first book, The Ghetto and Other Poems. The success of this work led to new opportunities for Ridge: she became the influential editor of several avant-garde journals, and contributed her own poems to Poetry, New Republic, The Saturday Review of Literature, and Mother Earth, among others. She published four more collections of poetry, Sun-up and Other Poems (1920), Red Flag (1927), Firehead (1929), and Dance of Fire (1935). Her work also was collected in anthologies. In 1935, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and she received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America twice, in 1934 and 1935.