Gertrude Sanborn

Who was Gertrude Sanborn?

Gertrude Sanborn was an American author who lived in Milwaukee. She attained some notice for her novel Veiled Aristocrats, which dealt with race relations more directly than was fashionable at the time. The novel belonged to the genre of "passing" stories, of African Americans passing for white, and featured an interracial romance set partly in Chicago. The novel's title was borrowed in 1932 by pioneer African American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux for his talkie Veiled Aristocrats, a remake of House Behind the Cedars, his 1924 silent film based on the novel by that name by Charles Chesnutt. Micheaux's Veiled Aristocrats also focused on "passing" and interracial relationships, but owed more to its source in Chesnutt than to Sanborn's novel.

In 1920 Sanborn published an optimistic riposte to Mary MacLane's 1917 memoir I, Mary MacLane under the title I, Citizen of Eternity.