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Plaid Elephant Books is pleased to join the Harrodsburg Historical Society as the bookseller for their upcoming event with author Eve Kahn. Her new book explores how Harrodsburg-born Zoe Anderson Norris (1860-1914) evolved from an impoverished Kentuckian theologian’s daughter into a restless Kansan housewife and then a prolific New York writer, reformer, and publisher who documented desperate immigrant poverty.This event is FREE and open to the public!
Kahn's book - "Queen of Bohemia Predicts Own Death" - will be available for purchase at the event! You can also pre-order a copy via the Plaid Elephant Books website and have it waiting for you at the event.
https://plaidelephantbooks.com/events/3652520251111
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…
About the Author
Independent scholar Eve M. Kahn’s Queen of Bohemia Predicts Own Death: Gilded-Age Journalist Zoe Anderson Norris has been called “a daring story told with exceptional verve” (Amy Reading, 2024 Pulitzer finalist and biographer of New Yorker editor Katharine White).
Kahn is a frequent contributor to The New York Times (where she served as weekly Antiques columnist, 2008-2016), among other publications. Her 2019 biography of the Connecticut-born, globetrotting painter Mary Rogers Williams (1857-1907) from Wesleyan University Press won awards from institutions including the Connecticut League of History Organizations.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Harrodsburg Historical Society, 220 South Chiles Street,Harrodsburg, Kentucky, United States
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups - all the happenings, one place.
