Lois Long

Lois Long (right) in her office at the New Yorker

Lois Bancroft Long (born December 15, 1901 in Stamford , Connecticut , † July 29, 1974 in Saratoga , New York ) was an American columnist who worked for the American magazine The New Yorker under her pseudonym Lipstick at the time of Prohibition (Lipstick) became known.

Life

Lois was the first of three children of William J. Lange (1866–1952) and Frances Bancroft Long. Her father was a pastor of the First Congregational Church of Stamford ( Congregationalism ), graduated from Harvard in 1892 and then studied in Paris, Berlin, Heidelberg and at the Vatican . He saw himself as a naturalist and used to spend months in the “wilderness” of Maine , sometimes together with his family . He also wrote school books on English literature and natural science subjects, which were illustrated by Charles Copeland and Charles Livingston Bull , respectively.

After graduating from Stamford High School, Lois attended Vassar College from 1918 , where she studied English and French and graduated with a major ( Bachelor ) in English in 1922 . After graduating, she went to New York to work as a freelance copywriter for Vogue and Vanity Fair magazines . At Vogue, she soon received the beauty column Lipstick , whose name she later adopted as a pseudonym . In 1925, Long got his own CBS radio talk show .

In the same year, Harold Ross brought her along with Katharine Angell , editor-in-chief Ralph Ingersoll and cartoonists Peter Arno and Helen Hokinson to his newly founded and still heavily deficit magazine The New Yorker . There she wrote on fashion and lifestyle topics. In her column “On and off the Avenue: Feminine Fashions” she introduced new fashion trends, while in “Table for two” and “When Nights are Bold” she dealt with the nightlife of Manhattan and addressed her own dissolute life as a flapper . She also discussed illegal nightclubs and bars as well as legal entertainment establishments such as the Cotton Club during this time of prohibition . Long used the stylistic devices of satire and sarcasm and played with the role models common at the time. Their way of working was often unusual. So she often came to the publishing house early in the morning in her evening clothes and sometimes drunk straight from the clubs. Her relationship with her rather conservative boss Ross was therefore tense. Nonetheless, she stayed with the New Yorker until the end of her working life in 1970 .

On August 13, 1927, Long married her work colleague Peter Arno. They were married by Long's father in Stamford. In 1929 daughter Patricia was born. The couple divorced on June 30, 1931. Her second marriage was on August 1, 1938, with Donaldson Bride Thorburn, called Don, who was drafted a little later for World War II . After his return to the war in 1945, they wrote the book No tumult, no shouting , the story of the sea scout PBY . He died in 1952. On November 26, 1953, Long married Harold A. Fox, an investment broker from Easton, Pennsylvania, for the third time.

Long died on July 29, 1974 near her daughter's home in Saratoga, New York.

She was portrayed in Ken Burns' 2011 documentary Prohibition .

literature

• Catherine Keyser: Playing Smart: New York Women Writers and Modern Magazine Culture . Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick 2010. ISBN 978-0-8135-4786-2
• Joshua Zeitz: Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern. Crown Publishing Group, 2007. ISBN 140-0-0805-41
• Nightclub City: Politics and Amusement in Manhattan. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. ISBN 0-812-2399-70

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b} Lois Long in The Vassar College Encyclopedia , accessed January 12, 2013
2. Jump up ↑ Lindy Woodhead: War Paint: Madame Helena Rubinstein and Miss Elizabeth Arden
3. ↑ Website of the film Prohibition (English)
4. ↑ No tumult, no shouting