Her news stories, distributed by Hearst during and after her trips to Petrograd and Moscow, appeared in newspapers across the United States and Canada in the years immediately following World War I.

After Reed's death from typhus in 1920, Bryant continued to write for Hearst about Russia, as well as Turkey, Hungary, Greece, Italy, and other countries in Europe and the Middle East.

[7] Depressed after the death of her step-grandfather in 1906, Bryant left school for a job in Jolon, California, where for a few months she boarded at a cattle ranch and taught children, mostly young Mexicans.

[9] Popular at the school, which then had a total student enrollment of less than 500,[9] she helped start a small sorority, Zeta Iota Phi (a chapter of Chi Omega),[10] and served as its first president.

[9] In a small city steeped in "puritan moralism",[9] she was the first to wear rouge on campus; she had multiple boyfriends, and she wore clothes that Miriam Van Waters, the editor of the Oregon Monthly, and Luella Clay Carson, the dean of women, considered improper.

[12] Among her jobs, she designed a stained-glass window for the Povey Brothers,[12] worked as a freelance reporter for The Oregonian,[13] and became an illustrator and society editor for the Portland Spectator,[12] a weekly news magazine.

[12] In late 1909, she met and married Paul Trullinger, a dentist who lived on a houseboat on the Willamette River, collected art, and liked drinking parties that sometimes included invitations to his office to inhale ether.

[17] Emma Goldman, a well-known anarchist whom Wood had defended in court,[16] gave a speech in Reed's honor at the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) hall in Portland.

[24] Unified by an "air of intellectual freedom, moral laissez-faire and camaraderie", most were involved in literary, artistic, or political pursuits in a Bohemian neighborhood that in some ways resembled the Left Bank of Paris.

[28] Four months after leaving Oregon, Bryant broke into print in New York with an article about two Portland judges, one of whom had dismissed a case brought against Goldman for distributing birth-control information.

[32] During the summer, Reed left Cape Cod to cover the Progressive Party convention in Chicago, and at other times he retreated from the players to work on articles for Collier's and Metropolitan Magazine.

"[35] After spending the month of September 1916 in a cottage they bought in Truro, Bryant and Reed returned to Greenwich Village, where the Provincetown Players planned to establish an alternative to Broadway theater.

Both were suffering, both were confused, lonely, and miserable ... [The letters were] proof of the basically strong bond that held the two, the poet-reporter and social critic and the erratic, appealing woman he had rescued from the banality of middle-class existence in Portland.

Eastman of The Masses had raised funds to pay Reed's travel expenses, and the Bell Syndicate assigned Bryant to report on the war "from a woman's point of view".

Openmindedness about the new Russian experiment in cities and the hinterland coexisted with the intensified patriotism of wartime ... No matter what appeared in their editorial pages, newspaper editors knew that feature stories with first-hand knowledge of the Revolution sold papers.

The conservative and Republican Philadelphia Public Ledger syndicate bought Bryant's thirty-two stories and sold them to Hearst's New York American and to more than one hundred newspapers over the United States and Canada.

[49]Leaving Russia before Reed, who wanted to report on the Bolshevik debate about Russian participation in the war with Germany,[50] Bryant returned to New York, arriving on February 18, 1918.

[56] In August, during a long weekend in the arts colony at Woodstock, Bryant began what was to be a long-term, intermittent love affair with painter Andrew Dasburg, with whom she had been close for a couple of years.

[58] Later in the month, Reed was arrested for giving a speech in which he denounced the use of Allied troops in Russia; the specific charge against him was that he had used "disloyal, scurrilous and abusive language about the Military and Naval Forces of the United States".

[59] In October, Bryant's first book, Six Red Months in Russia, was published to "mostly favorable reviews,"[61] and Reed resumed work on Ten Days That Shook the World after the government returned his notes.

Deflecting questions about her religious beliefs, marriages, and other personal matters during her two days of testimony, she tried to convince the subcommittee, led by Senator Lee S. Overman, that Russia had a right to self-determination.

[67] Soon thereafter, she began a cross-country speaking tour, "The Truth About Russia", arranged by Anna Louise Strong, during which she addressed large audiences in Detroit, Chicago, Spokane, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other American cities.

[73] In danger of being arrested and unable to get a passport to go to Russia, Reed, disguised as a stoker, left the United States in late September 1919 on a Scandinavian ship headed for Europe.

This is where, on September 15, they finally reconnected, spending the next few days together and visiting Lenin, Trotsky, Hungarian revolutionary Béla Kun, and Enver Pasha, a former minister of war in the Ottoman Empire.

We visited together Lenin, Trotsky, Kaminev, Enver Pasha, Bela Kun, we saw the Ballet and Prince Igor and the new and old galleries.A week after Reed's return from Baku, he began to experience dizziness and headaches, thought at first to be symptoms of influenza.

[92] In August, the New York American, a Hearst newspaper, began publishing a series of 16 of Bryant's articles describing famine in Russia, Lenin's New Economic Policy, the end of the Russian Civil War, and related topics.

She described the future dictator this way: I will always think of Mussolini as one of the oddest characters in history, and I will remember him as I last saw him in the great white and gold foyer of the Grand Hotel, under a huge crystal candelabra slouching wearily into a graceful Louis XV ivory and enameled chair.

[105] As the wife of a rich man, Bryant had duties related to the running of an upper-class household: "... the management of servants, the ordering of food and planning of menus, house decoration, flower arrangement, keeping a social calendar.

[113] Bryant remained in Paris, occasionally advising writer Claude McKay,[114] and briefly assisting researchers from Harvard University in preserving Reed's papers.

[116] Supporting actors include Jack Nicholson as Eugene O'Neill, Maureen Stapleton as Emma Goldman, Jerzy Kosiński as Grigory Zinoviev (one of the Bolshevik leaders), and Edward Herrmann as Max Eastman.