Listen, World! How the Intrepid Elsie Robinson Became America’s Most-Read Woman
(Seal, $30)
“That we suffer from a shortage of women’s histories is not new information,” said Glynnis MacNicol in
The New York Times. Still, the contemporary obscurity of Elsie Robinson—a newspaper columnist who from about 1924 to 1956 was the most widely read woman in America—“feels particularly surprising when you consider her popularity and the dramatic life behind her hardwon sagacity.” This new biography aims to restore Robinson to due prominence, and “the result is an engaging tale that doesn’t gloss over the extreme adversity and restrictions Robinson faced as a woman of much ambition and few means.”
Robinson’s path to fame wasn’t easy, said Rachel Zarrow in the San Francisco Chronicle. Born in California in 1883, she moved to the East Coast at 19 to marry an older widower, but fled the unhappy marriage a decade later by returning to California with the couple’s chronically asthmatic only son. Living with a lover, Robinson pursued writing and illustration from early on, but for three years worked as a gold miner to make ends meet. Through persistence, she finally found editors interested in her work, and eventually she launched a column titled “Listen, World!” that would soon be carried in Hearst newspapers nationwide. Her “shockingly contemporary” voice earned her a daily audience of 20 million, and she expanded her reach by also publishing poetry and fiction.
“What did Elsie Robinson write about? Everything,” said Carl Rollyson in The
New York Sun. An advice columnist as well as a social and political commentator, she “did not hide that she had come out of a hard time and that she had made her luck and happiness.” But she was more focused on issues of the day, including racism and gender bias, and on her readers. “No one today, man or woman, commands such an audience.” Though Robinson left behind a 1934 memoir, this book’s co-authors “had to work mightily” to assemble the lost details of her life. We’re lucky that they put in that work. “It needed to be done.”