User:Nuch1102/Edythe Mae Gordon

Personal Life

Edythe Mae Chapman was born in Washington, D.C., probably on June 4 and sometime in the period 1895–1900; the date is uncertain because the existing documents differ on her birth year.[1] She was raised by members of her mother's family, surnamed Bicks; nothing is known of her father. [2] She was educated at M Street School (later renamed Dunbar High),[3] a public school, and graduated in 1916.[2] M Street School employed literary figures Anna J. Cooper, Carter G. Woodson, and Jessie Redmon Faust during Gordon's education and may have influenced her writing. January 10th, 1916 she married Eugene Gordon, then a student at Howard University and later a writer for the Boston Post and eventual founder of the Saturday Night Quill Club. By 1919 they had moved to Boston but had ten separate addresses across ten years of attending college and publishing. Eugene and Edythe separated in 1932 and divorced in 1942.[1][2]

In 1926, Gordon enrolled as an undergraduate at Boston University.[2] She graduated in 1934 with a B.S. degree in religious education and social services; a year later she earned her master's degree from the university's School of Social Services, a then-rare accomplishment for an African-American woman.[1] Gordon's thesis for her master's focused on the status of Black women, and is published in her anthology Selected Works of Edythe Mae Gordon. [4]

After Edythe divorced Eugene, she effectively disappears from the literary world. The last public records of her life were a 1938 transcript to Boston University, a note with two poems published in Negro Voices in 1938, and her 1942 petition for divorce from Probate and Family Court. Her disappearance and its relation to her divorce are unknown