Life and Career
Born in the Caroline County town of Denton, Maryland, in 1880, Sophie Kerr graduated from Denton High School in 1895 and went on to earn a bachelor’s degree from Hood College and a master’s degree from the University of Vermont. She married John DeLoss Underwood, a civil engineer, in 1904 and divorced him four years later.
In order to support herself, Kerr went into journalism, launching her career in Pittsburgh, Pa. as the women’s page editor at the Chronicle Telegraph and the Pittsburgh Gazette. Moving to New York, she become managing editor of the The Woman's Home Companion. and published her fiction in other popular magazines of the day, including Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s Saturday Review of Literature and McCalls. From 1920 until her death in 1965 at age 84, Kerr lived in a brownstone residence at 115 East 38th Street, where she created something of a literary salon for her friends in publishing and theater. In 1942, as part of a celebration of the 50th anniversary of co-education at Washington College, she accepted an honorary degree along with Eleanor Roosevelt.
While her fiction is largely unknown to contemporary readers and her books are long out of print, her stories dealt with class and gender issues at work in the first half of the 20th century. “Kerr wrote stories about plucky heroines, young women who rose to the challenge and went for the gusto. They had big dreams and lots of charm and tons of blond curls. For the most part, they were smart and unassuming and hopelessly, wonderfully, kind, but they had ambition. Even her seemingly vapid heroines had hearts of gold and wills of iron hidden under all their finery.”
In her will, she left the bulk of her estate to Washington College, with the stipulation that half its income would be awarded annually to the senior showing “the most ability and promise for future fulfillment in the field of literary endeavor.” The other half funds scholarships, student publications and a series of visits by renowned writers.
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