15 Facts About Lola Ridge

Lola Ridge is best known for her long poems and poetic sequences, published in numerous magazines and collected in five books of poetry.

John Henry died when Lola Ridge was three-years-old, and Lola Ridge and her mother subsequently emigrated to Hokitika, New Zealand, when she was six-years-old.

Lola Ridge settled in San Francisco and published in Overland Monthly.

Lola Ridge placed her son in a Californian orphanage and moved to New York City's Greenwich Village.

On 22 October 1919, Lola Ridge married David Lawson, a fellow radical.

In 1918, Lola Ridge gained considerable notice with her long poem, The Ghetto, first published in The New Republic.

The title poem portrays the Jewish immigrant community of Hester Street in the Lower East Side of New York, where Lola Ridge lived for a time.

Lola Ridge published 61 poems from 1908 to 1937 in such leading magazines as Poetry, New Republic, The Saturday Review of Literature and Mother Earth.

Lola Ridge was a contributing editor to The New Masses.

Lola Ridge wrote and published four more books of poetry through 1935, and single poems into 1937.

Lola Ridge's collections include The Ghetto, and Other Poems, Sun-up, and Other Poems, Red Flag, Firehead, and Dance of Fire.

In 1929, Lola Ridge was accepted for a residency at the writers colony of Yaddo.

Lola Ridge received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America in 1934 and 1935.

Lola Ridge did not join any political party, but was active in radical causes.

Lola Ridge protested against the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927, and was among those arrested that day.