Rose, Heloise Durant

Héloïse Durant Rose (1854?-1943) was an American author, playwright, and critic. The daughter of Héloïse Durant and Union Pacific Railroad industrialist Thomas Clark Durant, she attended private schools in Europe and America and was fluent in Italian, French, German and Arabic.

Rose was a book reviewer for the New York Times and the author of plays, poems, essays, articles and short stories. Her dramatic poem Dante (1910) was translated into Italian and is believed to be the first American play produced on the Italian stage.

Rose founded the Dante League in 1917 "for popular propaganda for the study of Dante" and was a signatory of the "Memorial to the Columbia College Board of Trustees," an 1883 petition to allow female students to attend lectures and examinations at Columbia College. (Other signers included Parke Godwin, Georgina Schuyler, Caroline Sterling Choate, Susan B. Anthony, Chauncey M. Depew, Emma Lazarus, Josephine Shaw Lowell, Theodore Roosevelt, Charles Comfort Tiffany.)

[Portions of this biographical sketch adapted from the article "Rose, Heloise Durant" in the 1935 edition of Who's Who and What to See in Florida: A Standard Biographical Reference Book of Florida, pp 225-226.]

From the guide to the Heloise Durant Rose Letters, 1873-1945, (Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries)