With its proximity to the cultural hub of New York City and its quieter suburban and rural landscapes, Connecticut was fertile ground for artists and writers in the period of Modernist movements between 1913 and 1979. Many of these cultural figures are well known through biographical and critical studies. Creative Places seeks to show how place played a significant role in creative work, and how in turn the artists and writers influenced communities in Connecticut.
Katharine Ingham Brush
Fiction, Journalism/Non-Fiction
1900 – 1952
Katharine Brush worked as a journalist and novelist throughout her life, both before and during marriage. She was among a small number of women in journalism in the 1920s and 1930s. Her popular fiction portrayed themes of the 20th-century, including new freedoms for women. Her novels that were made into films involved her in the phenomenon of Pre-Code Hollywood, a four-year period in early cinema, after which the Production Code imposed self-censorship by the film industry.
- Biography/Description of Work
Brush was born in Middletown, attended boarding school in New Jersey and began to work at a New York newspaper, eventually writing movie reviews and gossip columns. After starting a family in Ohio in 1920, she began writing again, and saw her first novel “Glitter” serialized in College Humor magazine. Soon after the family’s return to the East Coast in 1927, she divorced, all the while writing another book, “Young Man of Manhattan” which became a best seller. With her second marriage (which also ended in divorce in 1941) and the Wall Street crash of 1929, she became the breadwinner, writing and publishing “Red-Headed Woman” in 1931. Both novels became story lines for early talking pictures. 1939 saw the publication of sort of autobiography entitled “This is on Me” which combined short stories from her career with memoir and humor. Brush apparently found the simple, quiet life at her parents’ home in Haddam conducive to her creativity, spending time in the 1920s and 1930s in a small writing studio overlooking the Connecticut River.
- Sources view
- http://www.brainerdhousebb.com/about-the-inn/about-the-inn.htm
Brush, Katharine.
Red-headed Woman. Farrar & Rinehart, Inc. New York, 1931.
This is on Me. Farrar & Rinehart, Inc. New York, 1939.
New York Times.
Archives: book reviews 1935-1943.
Brush, Katharine, Obituary, 6/11/1952.
Brush, Thomas Stewart. Obituary, 10/31/1938.
Gottlieb, Robert. “Blue Period: Two books look at Hollywood cinema before the code ...” New York Times, 11/28/1999. https://www.nytimes.com/books/99/11/28/reviews/991128.28gottlit.html . - Associated Resource(s)