Emma Louise Bryant -

In the winter of 1917, the world was a jagged mosaic of ice and iron, and Louise Bryant (born Anna Louise Mohan) was determined to walk across the sharpest edges.

Louise’s later years were a different kind of war—one fought against heartbreak and a rare, disfiguring disease. She moved to Paris, becoming a "Queen of Bohemia" who told stories of past glory in cheap hotel rooms. Even in her final days, her heart remained in the fire of 1917. Shortly before she died in 1936, she scribbled a postcard with a simple, defiant instruction: "If I get to heaven before you do... tell Jack Reed I love him". John Reed (1887-1920) | American Experience - PBS emma louise bryant

But revolutions, she learned, have a way of consuming the people who love them most. After a grueling, illegal journey across the world to find Jack again, she found him in a Moscow hospital, wasted away by typhus. He died in her arms at only thirty-three, buried as a hero of the revolution beneath the Kremlin Wall. In the winter of 1917, the world was