Davis, Hope Hale
Writer, feminist, one-time Communist, and teacher, Frances Hope Hale Davis was born on November 2, 1903, in Iowa City, Iowa, the fifth and youngest child of Hal and Frances McFarland Hale. Davis studied art and worked for the Stuart Walker Repertory Company as a scenery painter. After a short-lived marriage to scenery designer George Patrick Wood, Davis moved to New York City. She worked in the advertising industry, eventually becoming a freelance writer, publishing stories in magazines such as Collier's, The New Yorker, and Bookman. She married her second husband, British journalist and Communist Claud Cockburn, in 1932, and gave birth to their daughter, Claudia, in 1933. Cockburn returned to Europe, and Davis went to work in the Consumers' Counsel of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration in Washington, D.C. Davis and Cockburn divorced in 1934. That same year, she married German economist Karl Hermann Brunck and together they joined the Communist Party. Soon after, Brunck suffered a mental breakdown; Davis chronicles his breakdown, and eventual suicide in 1937, in her memoir Great Day Coming (1993).
After Brunck's death Davis returned to New York City, where she worked as a free-lance writer, crafting short stories with subtle Communist themes. She met fellow Communist, professor, and literary critic Robert Gorham Davis at a congress of The League of American Writers; they were married in 1939. Soon after the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact with Germany, the couple quit the Communist Party, but they continued to press for progressive reforms throughout their lives. Davis helped edit her husband's work, and continued writing stories for magazines such as Redbook and Town & Country, as well as literary criticism for the New Leader and other publications. She published a volume of short stories, The Dark Way to the Plaza, in 1968. In 1983-1984 she was a fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College. She taught writing at the Radcliffe Seminars from 1985 until a month before her death on October 2, 2004, at age 100. Hope and Robert Davis had two children, Stephen Davis (born in 1943) and writer Lydia Davis (born in 1948).
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