Louise Bryant

Who Was Louise Bryant?

Louise Bryant was a journalist, playwright, and radical activist whose eyewitness account of the Russian Revolution, Six Red Months in Russia (1918), is one of the most vivid and immediate documents of that transformative event in American letters. Born Anna Louise Mohan in San Francisco, she adopted the name Bryant from her stepfather, attended the University of Oregon, and moved to Portland and then Greenwich Village, where she became part of the radical intellectual and artistic world that surrounded John Reed, whom she loved and eventually married.

She and Reed were among the handful of Western journalists who witnessed the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 — Reed wrote Ten Days That Shook the World, the most celebrated account of the revolution; Bryant’s Six Red Months in Russia appeared first and provided an equally vivid, if less famous, record. Her play The Game (1916) was produced by the Provincetown Players, the theatrical company that also first produced Eugene O’Neill.

Bryant is significant for TLA as a figure who embodied the radical secular faith of the early twentieth century — the conviction that the Russian Revolution represented the dawn of a genuinely new human order — and whose later life, marked by the death of Reed, alcoholism, and a rare neurological disease, documented the cost of that faith’s failure to deliver what it promised.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• The Game — 1916 — play
• Six Red Months in Russia — 1918 — journalism
• Mirrors of Moscow — 1923 — journalism