Louise Bryant - Career

Career

Bryant met journalist John Reed in Portland, Oregon while he was visiting his family after attending Harvard and moving in radical circles of the Village in New York City. Louise moved with him to New York City, and amicably divorced Trullinger several months later. Reed and Bryant together traveled to Russia in 1917 where they witnessed the October Revolution. They both attended the first Bolshevik political trial, that of Sofia Panina. Both published books about their experiences in Russia, Reed's Ten Days that Shook the World and Bryant's Six Red Months in Russia. Bryant was with Reed when he died of typhus in 1920. He is the only American to be buried at the Kremlin in Moscow. Their story is told in the 1981 film Reds, starring Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, and Jack Nicholson.

In a 1920 letter to a friend, Bryant spoke of her typhus-stricken husband's death in Moscow and how she watched Soviets pass his grave:

"I have been there in the busy afternoon when all Russia hurries by," she wrote. "Once some of the soldiers came over to the grave. They took off their hats and spoke very reverently: 'What a good fellow he was!' said one. 'He came all the way across the world for us. He was one of ours.'"

Louise Bryant continued to work following her second husband's death and became a leading reporter for the Hearst newspaper chain. After Reed's death, Bryant married William C. Bullitt in early 1924. The couple had one child, Anne. Becoming ill with what was diagnosed in 1928 as adiposis dolorosa, "Dercum's Disease", and despite several treatments including stays at Dr. Dengler's Sanatorium in Baden Baden, Germany and a few sessions with Sigmund Freud in 1929, Bryant continued efforts to be a wife, mother, and writer. Bullitt divorced Bryant in 1930, upon learning of her alleged lesbian affairs in Paris.