Nicholas Vachel Lindsay, professionally known as Vachel Lindsay, was born in Springfield, Illinois, on November 10, 1879. After studying medicine at Hiram College in the late 1890s, Lindsay studied art in Chicago and New York, where he also began writing and publishing poetry; he returned to Springfield in 1908. Lindsay's literary reputation steadily grew after 1910, when he published a collection of his editorials and poems entitled The Village Magazine, and he toured extensively throughout the remainder of his life, delivering dramatic recitations of his work domestically and abroad. Lindsay taught at the Gulf Park College for Women from 1923-1924 and lived in Spokane, Washington, from 1924-1929. On May 19, 1925, he married Elizabeth Connor, with whom he had two children: Susan Mountjoy Doniphan Frazee (b. 1926) and Nicholas Cave (b. 1927). Faced with declining popularity, a difficult financial situation, an excessive touring schedule, and his own deteriorating mental health, Lindsay committed suicide on December 5, 1931.
Harriet Converse Tilden was born in Ohio on March 18, 1857, and moved to Chicago with her family in 1868. Tilden earned a bachelor's degree from Cornell University in 1876 and briefly studied medicine at the Women's Medical College of Philadelphia. Upon her return to Chicago, she married Edwin Brainard; the marriage, an unhappy one, soon ended in divorce, and she began teaching high school in 1889. She married William Vaughn Moody, a poet and English professor at the University of Chicago, on May 7, 1909. Following his death in October 1910, Moody formed and maintained friendships with several influential writers, including Rabindranath Tagore, Robert Frost, and Vachel Lindsay. She hosted many of these figures in her home and at "Les Petits Jeux Floraux," a literary series held at her Chicago restaurant, Le Petit Gourmet. Moody had previously established a catering company, the Home Delicacies Association, and later published Mrs. William Vaughn Moody's Cookbook (1931). Harriet Moody died on February 22, 1932.
Edith S. Kellogg was Harriet Moody's personal secretary after 1912. She lived in Moody's Chicago home as of 1920.
Sources
Albertine, Susan. "Moody, Harriet Converse." American National Biography Online. 2000.
Chenetier, Marc, ed. Letters of Vachel Lindsay. New York: Burt Franklin & Co., 1979.
Dunbar, Olivia Howard. A House in Chicago. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1947.
Kronick, Joseph G. "Lindsay, Vachel." American National Biography Online. 2000.
U.S. Bureau of the Census. Fourteenth Census of the United States: 1920--Population. 1920.
Author: Meg Hixon
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