Hobart, Alice Tisdale, 1882-1967

Alice Tisdale Hobart was born Alice Nourse in Lockport, New York on January 28, 1882. In 1910, Alice went to China to teach at a girls' school in Hangchow, where she met Earle Tisdale Hobart, an executive of the Standard Oil Company of New York. They married in 1914 and spent the early years of their marriage in Manchuria amid the turbulence that followed the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty. Alice began writing about her life in China and in 1916 she submitted an account of her encounter with Manchurian bandits to the Atlantic monthly and it was published as the first in a series called Leaves from a Manchurian diary. Her first book was based on this series and titled Pioneering where the world is old (Holt, 1917). Her experiences as an oil executive's wife provided material for her second book, By the city of the long sand (Macmillan, 1926). In 1927, the Hobarts fled Nanking when Nationalist soldiers attacked the city. Their escape was the climax of Hobart's next book, Within the walls of Nanking (1928). Earle Hobart resigned from the company and the Hobarts returned to the United States in the summer of 1927. His subsequent jobs took them to Europe and back to the U.S. Alice continued to write. Oil for the lamps of China (1933) told the story of an American businessman and his wife in China and how their lives were consumed by the company for which he worked. It was Hobart's most popular book and her first to be made into a movie. Hobart published a novel every two or three years, many of which were set in China. After Hobart settled in California in the 1940s her topics included twentieth-century Mexico and agriculture in California. By the time she died in 1967, Hobart had published more than a dozen novels, of which almost four million copies were sold.

From the description of Alice Tisdale Hobart papers, 1916-1967. (University of Oregon Libraries). WorldCat record id: 54069135

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