Louise Bryant

Who was Louise Bryant?

Louise Bryant was an American journalist known for her sympathetic coverage of Russia and the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution. Bryant, a feminist married in 1916 to the more famous writer John Reed, wrote about leading Russian women such as Katherine Breshkovsky and Maria Spiridonova as well as men including Alexander Kerensky, Vladimir Lenin, and Leon Trotsky. Her news stories, distributed by Hearst during and after her trips to Petrograd and Moscow, appeared in newspapers across the U.S. and Canada in the years immediately following World War I. A collection of articles from her first trip was published in book form as Six Red Months in Russia in 1918. In 1919, she defended the revolution in testimony before the Overman Committee, a Senate subcommittee established to investigate Bolshevik influence in the United States. Later that year, she undertook a nationwide speaking tour to encourage public support of the Bolsheviks and to discourage armed U.S. intervention in Russia.

Bryant grew up in rural Nevada and attended the University of Nevada in Reno and the University of Oregon, graduating with a degree in history in 1909.