12 Facts About Mary MacLane

Mary MacLane was a controversial Canadian-born American writer whose frank memoirs helped usher in the confessional style of autobiographical writing.

Mary MacLane was considered wild and uncontrollable, a reputation she nurtured, and was openly bisexual as well as a vocal feminist.

Mary MacLane was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada in 1881, but her family moved to the Red River area of Minnesota, settling in Fergus Falls, which her father helped develop.

Mary MacLane spent the remainder of her life in the United States.

Mary MacLane began writing for her school paper in 1897.

Mary MacLane was influenced by such American regional realists as John Townsend Trowbridge, Maria Louise Pool, and Hamlin Garland.

In 1901, Mary MacLane wrote her first book, which she originally titled I Await the Devil's Coming.

Some critics have suggested that even by today's standards, Mary MacLane's writing is raw, honest, unflinching, self-aware, sensual, and extreme.

Mary MacLane had always chafed, or felt, "anxiety of place", at living in Butte, a mining city far from cultural centers, and used the money from her first book's sales to travel to Chicago and then throughout the East Coast.

Mary MacLane lived in Rockland, Massachusetts, wintering in St Augustine, Florida, from 1903 to 1908, then in Greenwich Village from 1908 to 1909, where she continued writing and, by her later published accounts, living a decadent and Bohemian existence.

Mary MacLane was close friends with the feminist writer Inez Haynes Irwin, who is referenced in some of MacLane's 1910 writing in a Butte newspaper and who in turn mentioned MacLane in a 1911 magazine article.

Mary MacLane died in Chicago in early August 1929, aged 48.