Mary Heaton Vorse, long-time activist, journalist, and author, was born in the late 1870's in Amherst, Massachusetts. She was educated in Europe, and in 1898, married Albert White Vorse, who died in 1910. Two years later she married Joseph O'Brien, a newspaperman, who died in 1915. Her third marriage, to Robert Minor in 1920, ended in divorce in 1922. By her first husband, she had two children, Heaton White Vorse and Mary Ellen Vorse, and by O'Brien, a son, Joel Heaton O'Brien.
Mrs. Vorse made Provincetown, Massachusetts her home from 1907 to her death in 1966. She was acquainted with many of the writers who lived in Provincetown, including Eugene O'Neill, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Susan Glaspell. Upon her first husband's death, she turned to journalism as a means of support. In 1909 to 1910 she reported from Morocco for Harpers, and in 1912 she covered her first textile strike. During the First World War, she served as a war correspondent, and in 1918 was a member of the Red Cross Balkan Commission. She covered the steel strike of 1919, and in 1921 to 1922 she reported on the Russian famine for the International News Service, and was granted an interview with Lenin.
In 1926 she covered the textile strike in Passaic, New Jersey, and three years later became deeply involved in the Gastonia, N.C., Marion, N.C., and Elizabethton, Tenn. textile-worker strikes. Her novels Passaic (1926) and Strike - A Novel of Gastonia (1930) evolved from her experiences in covering these strikes.
Mrs. Vorse's interest in trade-unionism led her to Youngstown, Ohio in 1937, where she was wounded by a strike breaker's bullet during the Republic Steel strike. In the same year she also covered labor disturbances in Anderson, Ind. and Flint, Mich. In 1938 she published her chronicle of the rise of the C.I.O. - Labor's New Millions.
In 1939 she was in Europe for the North American Newspaper Alliance to cover the annexation of the Sudetenland, the invasion of Poland, and the situation in Paris before the German attack on France. She spent the remainder of the Second World War as a correspondent.
Mary Heaton Vorse's literary and journalistic career spanned more than half-a-century (from 1903 to 1960), and she spent twelve years on foreign assignments in twenty different countries and on three continents. She wrote for a number of publishers and news services, including Harpers, McClures, Fawcett, Metropolitan, Out Look, Woman's Home Companion, The New Republic, INS, UP, the North American Newspaper Alliance, and the Federated Press.
She was a prolific writer, and in addition to her novels about Passaic and Gastonia, she published The Breaking of a Yachtsman's Wife (1908), The Very Little Person (1911), The Autobiography of an Elderly Woman (1911), The Heart's Country (1913), The Ninth Man (1918), The Prestons (1918), I've Come to Stay (1919), Growing-Up (1920), Men and Steel (1921), Second Cabin (1928), her autobiography, A Foot Note to Folly (1935), Time and the Town (1942), and Here Are the People (1943).
In recognition of her devotion to the cause of organized labor, Mrs. Vorse, along with Eleanor Roosevelt and Upton Sinclair, was awarded the first Social Justice Award of the United Auto Workers in 1962. At that time, Walter Reuther, the president of the UAW, cited her for “have[ing] been a continuing source of hope and inspiration to workers as they fought to win a fuller and richer life for themselves and their families.”
Mrs. Vorse died in Provincetown in June, 1966.
