Who Was Zoe Anderson Norris

In her bimonthly magazine The East Side, Zoe (as everyone called her) set out “to fight for the poor with my pen.” She sometimes reported undercover, dressed as a beggar, and raged against forces that remain pernicious: policemen brutalizing street peddlers, hypocritical charity executives splurging on themselves, child laborers tottering under burdens, millionaire deadbeat dads evading prosecution, predatory bosses cornering underlings... Her fellow Manhattan bohemians—writers, filmmakers, performers, politicians—joined an intentionally disorganized organization that she founded, the Ragged Edge Klub, and appointed her Queen of Bohemia, so she handed out aristocratic titles to Klub members: Lady Betty Rogers of the Bronx, for instance, and Baron Bernhardt of Hoboken.

Zoe’s Kentucky upbringing also influenced her writings; she compared New York’s landscape and inhabitants to her homeland’s velvety bluegrass, hair-triggered feudists, whiskey distillers, schoolmarms, evangelists, musicians playing “My Old Kentucky Home,” and antebellum abolitionists, enslavers and the enslaved.

The last issue of The East Side described her recent dream that she would soon die, and after that accurate premonition made headlines in hundreds of newspapers nationwide, she fell into obscurity, until now… Kahn’s book will be available for sale and signing at the talk.