Fearless: A Q & A with Cathy Curtis
I am delighted to have biographer Cathy Curtis back on the Margins to discuss her new book, Fearless, the first comprehensive biography of Irish writer Edna O’Brien (1930-2024). Pull up a chair and enjoy the conversation!
What drew you to Edna O’Brien’s story?
I had been a longtime fan of Edna O’Brien’s novels and short stories, always keen to buy her latest book. While I was in the final stages of my previous book, I looked for another contemporary writer whose work I admired, who had not yet been the subject of a comprehensive biography, and who had led an eventful life.
Writing about a figure like Edna O’Brien requires living with her over a period of years. What was it like to have her as a constant companion?
Delightful! She was a mercurial person, quick to take offense, but her other traits were endearing to me: her passion for ultra-feminine clothes; her impulsive generosity; her abiding love for her two sons; her passionate romances with men unable to cope with her intensity; her wry sense of humor; her ability to use her intimate experiences as the basis of memorable fiction; her unwavering belief in the power of the written word; and above all, her extraordinary perseverance in the face of personal tribulations and literary snubs.
Are there any special challenges to writing about a woman who was a literary superstar in the second half of the twentieth century?
All five of my biographies are about notable women whose careers blossomed during the second half of the twentieth century, the historical period in which I feel most at home. But my previous books were about Americans. The challenge with this biography was to learn more about Ireland’s tragic history in order to comprehend the values and constraints that molded Edna’s way of looking at the world.
It was important to know that the Great Famine of the mid-nineteenth century had decimated the population, that Ireland’s fight for independence from the U.K. took agonizing decades to (partly) achieve, and that living under the total dominance of the Catholic Church had a terrible effect on human lives. I rewrote each chapter dozens of times, letting it “breathe” for weeks and returning to add more information, or to clarify what I had written.
Edna O’Brien died in 2024. Did her death change the book in any way?
She was in her late eighties and in declining health when I began researching the book in 2019, so her death was always on the horizon as I wrote. Afterward, I was able to write about her deeply moving funeral Mass (which I watched in real time on Vimeo) and to incorporate quotes from some of the people who wrote about their memories of her in the Irish and British press.
What was the most surprising thing you learned?
I had no idea how long it had taken for Edna’s work to receive serious recognition in the form of awards and reviews that did not belittle her writing as too overblown, too involved with women’s dashed romantic hopes, or “too Irish” to be the equal of works by prominent British writers. During her last years she finally received a bouquet of major awards, including the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, the David Cohen Prize for Literature, and the Prix Femina Spécial—all for her entire body of work. But her novels were never even shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the most famous British literary award.
Did the writing of this book lead you to make other discoveries?
Yes, I began reading the seemingly endless stream of brilliant novels by younger Irish authors. The last chapter of my book takes a final look at Edna O’Brien’s life and work alongside brief mentions of remarkable novels by ten contemporary Irish women authors who in some way owe their candor and literary inventiveness to her writing.
Cathy Curtis is the author of four previous biographies of prominent 20th-century women in the fields of visual arts and literature: Grace Hartigan, Elaine de Kooning, Nell Blaine, and Elizabeth Hardwick. Fearless: A Biography of Edna O’Brien will be published on September 9, 2025. Curtis is a former journalist, a member of The Authors Guild, and a past president of Biographers International Organization. Her website is www.cathycurtis.net
Buffalo Soldiers on Bicycles
This is one of my favorite stories from our visit to Fort Snelling:
After the American Civil War, Congress created six regiments of Black soldiers, led for the most part by white officers, known informally as Buffalo Soldiers.[1] One of those regiments , the 25th Black Infantry, was posted at Fort Snelling in 1880. Eight years later they were transferred to Fort Missoula, Montana, where this story took place.
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At the end of the nineteenth century, bicycles were all the rage. The bicycle was as popular with members of the army as it was with the general public. In 1894, roughly half the personnel at Fort Missoula had bicycles and the fort was holding informal bicycle drills, which included members of the 25th Infantry.
In 1896, Lieutenant James Moss, commander of the 25th Infantry Regiment in Missoula,[2] took the idea one step further and proposed that the military could replace horses with bicycles for some operations.[3] Bicycles, unlike horses, did not need food water or rest. They were virtually noiseless. He was not the first Army officer to suggest the use of bicycles by the military. Several years previously, then Major General Nelson A. Miles tested the possibility of using bicycle couriers. (Among other things, he reported, his bicycle trials demonstrated the wretched condition of American roads.)
Moss’s request to organize an experiment with bicycles was approved on May 12, 1896. A little over a year later, after months of training that included daily rides of fifteen to forty miles and two longer excursions to Lake McDonald and Yosemite during which they carried rifles, rations, and equipment, the 25th Infantry Regiment Bicycle Corps, also known as the Iron Riders were ready for a much longer expedition. This ride was designed to demonstrate to the Army leadership that bicycles would be an efficient way to transport soldiers in time of war. Moss described the corps as “bubbling over with enthusiasm . . . about as fine a looking and well-disciplined a lot as could be found anywhere in the United States Army.”
On June 14, 1897, twenty soldiers, two officers and one reporter set out on a 1,900 mile bike ride from Fort Missoula to Saint Louis. The route took them through a variety of terrain and climates. Averaging 50 miles a day for 41 days, on bikes specially made for them by Spaulding Bicycle Company, they rode on unpaved roads and occasionally on railroad tracks. (Not a fun surface to ride on, as anyone who ever rode a bicycle can imagine.) They crossed mountains and forded rivers. They rode through snow, sleet, rain, and oppressive heat. Sometimes the ground was so muddy and slippery that they had to push their bikes for several miles.
By the time the riders reached Missouri, the story had caught the public imagination. When the members of the 25th Infantry Regiment Bicycle Corps reached St. Louis on July 24, almost 1000 local cyclists rode out to meet them. Crowds lined the streets to greet them as they rode into the city, In the following days, tens of thousands St. Lois residents visited the corps’ camp in Forrest Park and watched them perform exhibition drills.
The discovery of gold in Alaska replaced the story of the bicycling Buffalo Soldiers in the nation’s headlines. The corps was disbanded once it reached Missoula, traveling this time by train. Lieutenant Moss remained optimistic about the value of the bicycle to the military in his report to the War Department and requested permission to organize a second bicycle corp. But with the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, the military moved further experiments with bicycles to a back shelf.
The 25th Infantry Regiment left Fort Missoula for training camps in Georgia and Florid. From there, the unit saw action in Cuba and distinguished itself in the Spanish-American War. Moss returned from Cuba and proposed a company of 100 soldiers on bicycles to patrol Havana once it was under the occupation of American troops. His proposal was rejected.
By World War I, the Model-T had replaced the bicycle as the hot new mode of transportation in the eyes of both the public and the military.
[1] By some accounts, the Native Americans against whom they fought gave them the nickname because their curly hair resembled buffalo manes and because of their fierce nature. Maybe. Maybe not.
[2] Racism was rampant in the army at the time. Moss graduated last in his class at West Point and had no choice in where he was assigned. As he later said in a speech in his home town in Louisiana “ Being a Southern boy I did not at first, I must admit, like the idea of serving with colored troops.” With time, he changed his mind and was proud to have them under his command.
[3] This was not as revolutionary an idea as is sometimes claimed. Italy created a military bicycle unit, which was used for reconnaissance and courier services, as early as 1875. Other European countries followed Italy’s lead. By 1890, France, Austria, Switzerland and Germany all had bicycle units.
Queen of Bohemia: A Q & A with Eve Kahn
I’m delighted to have Eve Kahn back on the Margins to talk about her new book, Queen of Bohemia Predicts Own Death: Gilded Age Journalist Zoe Anderson Norris. Queen of Bohemia is the story of a Kentucky-born belle turned ferocious New York journalist who used her pen to advocate for impoverished immigrants and to expose corrupt politicians. (I leave you to make any comparisons you please.) Eve—and Zoe—give us a different image of the Gilded Age. I was hooked from page one.
Take it away, Eve!
Even well-known women in the nineteenth century are often neglected by biographers and historians. What path led you to the story of journalist Zoe Anderson Norris, and why do you think it’s important to tell her story today?
I was introduced to Zoe (as everyone called her) in 2018 by my friend Dr. Steven Lomazow, a neurologist and preeminent historian of American magazines—his holdings of some 83,000 periodicals date back to the 1700s and include examples of Zoe’s groundbreaking bimonthly magazine, The East Side (1909-1914). I could not believe, in 2018, that no scholar had written anything about this expectation-defying woman. She set out “to fight for the poor with my pen,” and her self-published writings combating bigotry against immigrants resonate in our own tumultuous times. She documented, for instance, the sufferings of sweatshop workers at firetraps including the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory—like my own Ukrainian-born ancestors—and caged deportees at Ellis Island.
Zoe was a well-known journalist and activist during her lifetime, but is largely forgotten today. Why do you think stories like hers vanish from history?
History so often gets told because of flukes, for instance someone’s papers land at the right institutions and are findable by scholars. Zoe’s descendants in her sleepy Kentucky hometown tucked away a boxful of her manuscripts and memorabilia. Who knows what would have been previously published about Zoe if, perhaps, she’d corresponded copiously with someone celebrated like Willa Cather and those letters survived in some well-combed archive?
Zoe sometimes went undercover for her stories about immigrant poverty. How does Zoe fit into the tradition of “stunt girl” journalists?
It’s fascinating that Zoe never, as far as I know, wrote about those newspaperwomen, her trailblazer predecessors and colleagues like Nellie Bly. And Zoe’s take on undercover reporting is wry and self-deprecating, it’s sui generis. She sometimes made fun of herself for being poorly disguised. She wrapped herself in shawls while pretending to be an immigrant accordionist beggar, taking notes on wealthy philanthropists ignoring her while other beggars gave her coins, but one of the few songs she could play, “My Old Kentucky Home,” was a dead giveaway of her Kentucky origins.
The Gilded Age has been a popular history hotspot for several years now, the setting for the television series by that name, now at the end of its third season, and a number of best-selling novels, including The Personal Librarian, The Address, and The Social Graces. In your subtitle, you describe Zoe as a Gilded Age journalist. How does her story relate to the world evoked in such works?
I’ve had many conversations about this, especially with my podcaster friend Carl Raymond, “The Gilded Gentleman.” Zoe wrote vividly about her era’s gaping disparities and fluidity. Immigrants were starving and freezing on garbage-strewn streets, a few blocks from new skyscrapers “flashing back the fire of the sun” (Zoe’s gorgeous phrase) and liveried servants hoisting bejeweled blueblood employers into carriages upholstered in velvet. And yet immigrants were also visibly getting footholds in a new land, elbowing their way from wheeling pushcarts to running department stores.
Writing about a historical figure like Zoe Anderson Norris requires living with them over a period of years. What was it like to have her as your constant companion?
You can’t believe how often I see the world through Zoe’s eyes. Just the other day I was heading back to Manhattan across an East River bridge and I thought, oh, there are those luminous skyscrapers still flashing back the fire of the sun, in a town still so full of gaping economic disparities and fluidity.
Can you tell me where you got the title Queen of Bohemia?
Zoe drew people into her social justice battles and attracted new East Side subscribers by having fun, especially at weekly restaurant dinners for an intentionally disorganized bohemian group that she organized, the Ragged Edge Klub. Reporters descended on Klub meetings as the members tried out trendy ragtime dance moves, like the Tarpon Squirm and Banana Peel Slide (that one required wearing white tights under a yellow gown). Newspapers dubbed Zoe the Queen of Bohemia, and at first she chafed at that title, since bohemia in her time suggested a place full of unbathed, self-indulgent wastrels. But eventually she ironically coronated herself, and she used a wine bottle as a scepter to anoint her friends with aristocratic titles—Baron Bernhardt of Hoboken, for instance, and Lady Betty Rogers of the Bronx.
Zoe is not a major historical figure. How difficult is it to find sources for women whose lives are not well documented? What is your favorite research tip for people who want to write about relatively obscure historical women?
Any institution that seems, as you comb through databases like worldcat.org and ArchiveGrid, to have anything related to someone who knew the figure you’re researching, don’t hesitate to call or email the librarians for deeper dives into the finding aids and boxes. And don’t hesitate to call or email people descended from people you’re researching. You can’t imagine how often, even in this age of constant downsizing and tossing out heirlooms, I reach someone who says, basically, “oh, call my sister, she’s the keeper of family stories and artifacts, she’s got a box in the garage.”
What was the most surprising thing you learned working on this book?
How many descendants of people whose lives Zoe touched remembered her as the Queen of Bohemia, who fought for the poor with her pen. How amazing that the daughter and granddaughter of The East Side’s illustrator William Oberhardt carefully kept mounds of his sketched portraits of immigrants (which the family donated, bless them, to the New York Historical). And how amazing that Zoe’s descendants include writers and social justice advocates.
Independent scholar Eve M. Kahn’s Queen of Bohemia Predicts Own Death: Gilded-Age Journalist Zoe Anderson Norris (Fordham U. Press) has been called “a daring story told with exceptional verve” (Amy Reading, 2024 Pulitzer finalist and biographer of New Yorker editor Katharine White). Kahn writes for The New York Times (where she served as weekly Antiques columnist, 2008-2016), among other publications. Her 2019 biography of the Connecticut-born, globetrotting painter Mary Rogers Williams (1857-1907) from Wesleyan University Press won awards from institutions including the Connecticut League of History Organizations.