Page, Myra, 1897-1993

Writer, union activist, and communist Dorothy Markey (nee Dorothy Page Gary) was born in Newport News, Va., in 1897. Under the name Myra Page, Markey was an active political journalist and writer in the 1930s. In the early 1940s, she taught writing at the Writers' School sponsored by the League of American Writers in New York City. During the 1950s and 1960s, she wrote and published the juvenile biographies. Dorothy Markey died in 1993.

Dorothy Markey (nee Dorothy Page Gary), writer, union activist, and communist who wrote as Myra Page, was born into the family of a well-established physician in Newport News, Va., in 1897. After completing high school, she attended Westhampton College in Richmond, Va., graduating in 1918 with a bachelor's degree in English and history. Markey briefly taught school in Richmond before moving to New York City, where she attended Columbia University and earned a master's degree in political science and sociology in 1920. After graduating, she returned to Virginia and worked for one year as the Industrial Secretary for the YWCA in Norfolk helping to organize southern working women. Markey spent the next several years working as a shop clerk and machine worker in Philadelphia, Pa., and St. Louis, Mo., while she was involved with organizing workers for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. From 1924 to 1928, she studied at the University of Minnesota and earned her Ph.D. in sociology by writing and publishing, Southern Cotton Mills and Labor (1929). During this period, she married John Fordyce Markey and joined the Communist Party.

Over the next two decades, under the pen name Myra Page, Markey was a very active political journalist. Her writings about the social, political, and economic conditions in the American South, Mexico, and the Soviet Union appeared in a number of Communist-sponsored papers, including The Daily Worker, The Southern Worker, Working Woman, and Soviet Russia Today . She was one of The Daily Worker 's correspondents in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, and, for a number of years, she served on the editorial board of Soviet Russia Today . It was during this period that she wrote and published Gathering Storm: A Story of the Black Belt (1932); Soviet Main Street (1933); Moscow Yankee (1935); and With Sun in Our Blood (1950), which was later republished as Daughter of the Hills: A Woman's Part in the Coal Miners' Struggle (1986). In the early 1940s, Markey taught short story writing and similar courses at the Writers' School sponsored by the League of American Writers in New York City.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Markey wrote and published the juvenile biographies Explorer of Sound: Michael Pupin (1964) and The Little Giant of Schenectady: Charles Steinmetz (1956), both released under her married name.

Dorothy Markey died in 1993.