I, Mary MacLane
I, Mary MacLane—the follow-up to I Await the Devil’s Coming—available now from Melville House, with a foreword by Emily Gould
Fifteen years separate I Await the Devil’s Coming and Mary MacLane’s follow-up memoir, I, Mary MacLane (1917). They were years filled with men and affairs, drink and debauchery, war, friendship, and independence in New York and Boston. That independence was cut short by an illness that brought MacLane home to the loathed, provincial Butte, Montana, where once again she took up her pen.
In I, Mary MacLane, the national sensation told all, revealing many of the salacious details of her taste of freedom. As we now know, though, the battle for freedom had only just begun: if I Await…
MARY MACLANE was born on May 1st 1881 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Her family moved to Minnesota while she was young, then again to Montana after the death of her father and remarriage of her mother. She began writing for her school paper in 1898 and published her first book, I Await the Devil's Coming, under the title The Story of Mary MacLane, in 1902 at the age of nineteen. She published two further books, including the memoir I, Mary MacLane in 1917; also in 1917 she wrote and starred in an autobiographical silent film, Men Who Have Made Love to Me. She died in mysterious circumstances in Chicago in 1929, at the age of 48, and her works fell almost…