Margery Latimer

Margery Latimer (February 6, 1899 – August 16, 1932), born in Portage, Wisconsin, was a writer, feminist theorist, and social activist. Latimer published two highly acclaimed novels, We Are Incredible (1928) and This is My Body (1930), and two collections of short stories, Nellie Bloom and Other Stories (1929), and Guardian Angel and Other Stories (1932). Her formally experimental fiction was greatly influenced by the modernism of the 1920s, and reviewers of the period compared her to Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence. Her work reflects her feminist, socialist, and anti-racist ideals.

Latimer was mentored by her Portage neighbor Zona Gale, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama, whose ideology and style of writing were more traditional than that of her protege. The two writers had a deep and often difficult relationship. Latimer attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison on a Zona Gale scholarship and maintained an intimate correspondence with her mentor until about the time of Gale's marriage in 1928. Latimer fictionalized their conflicted relationship in the short story "Possession" (Nellie Bloom and Other Stories), the novel We Are Incredible, and the long title story in Guardian Angel and Other Stories. While living in New York City’s Greenwich Village in the 1920s, Latimer became active in various social causes as well as doing some political reporting for a radical journal of the twenties, The New Masses. She lived with poet Kenneth Fearing, her romantic partner, and was friends with writers and artists of the period such as Georgia O'Keeffe, Walt Kuhn, Meridel Le Sueur, Carl Rakosi, and Carl Van Vechten.

Latimer met her husband, Harlem Renaissance writer Jean Toomer, while living in New York City. Toomer was then the leader of the Gurdjieff movement in the United States. To test Gurdjieffian ideas of harmonious living, Latimer and Toomer, with six other unmarried people, moved to the Witte farm near Briggsville, Wisconsin. The goal was, in Toomer's words, "to eradicate the false veneer of civilization, with its unnatural inhibition, its selfishness, petty meanness and unnatural behavior.... Adults can be re-educated to become as natural as little children...." While the participants seemed to enjoy the experiment, the neighbors in the countryside and in Portage were scandalized. Talk of communism, nudity and sexual license, spiked by the fact that Toomer was of mixed racial heritage, abounded and prompted hostility. By the end of the summer of 1931, Toomer ended the experiment and documented its demise in a book entitled Portage Potential. In October, 1931, the authors married in Portage and left on a wedding trip for Santa Fe, Pasadena, and Carmel, California, where they were residing when a nationwide anti-miscegenation scandal concerning their marriage broke. Latimer was pregnant, and they returned to Chicago and took an apartment. Latimer died after giving birth to their healthy daughter on August 16, 1932. She was thirty-three years of age.

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Name	Latimer, Margery
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Date of birth	February 6, 1899
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Date of death	August 16, 1932
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