ABSTRACT
When, in 1908, I set out to join my husband-to-be, Harry Levi Hollingworth, in New York City, my sense of what life would hold for me was quite different than the way the story actually unfolded. You see, I was leaving western Nebraska to become a writer. The plan was simple: I would teach school as I had in Nebraska while Harry established himself as a young professor of psychology at Barnard College. Meanwhile, I would set about establishing my writing career. From my young adolescence when my poetry helped me through the stormy and unloving years with an alcoholic and often absent father and a bitter and resentful stepmother, I knew that writing was my vocation in the fullest sense of the word. Perhaps the lovingly detailed baby biography that my mother wrote during my infancy was the model, perhaps it was my father’s lively skill at storytelling, but I knew that I must be a writer. What I, like every young person, did not anticipate was that the world would not choose to cooperate with these ambitions.
