Margery Bodine Latimer[1] (February 6, 1899 – August 16, 1932), born in Portage, Wisconsin,[1] was an American novelist and short-story writer.

This caught the attention of her Portage neighbor Zona Gale, a well-known writer, journalist, and suffragist.

She lived with poet Kenneth Fearing, her romantic partner, and became friends with writers and artists of the period, such as Georgia O'Keeffe, Walt Kuhn, Meridel Le Sueur, Carl Rakosi, and photographer Carl Van Vechten.

Her debut novel received notices in the New York Times, McCall's, The Saturday Review of Literature, Chicago Tribune, and others.

Of mixed race and majority-white ancestry, he was known for his first novel, Cane (1923), a modernist exploration of his paternal African-American roots in Georgia.

To test Gurdjieffian ideas of harmonious living, in 1931 Latimer and Toomer, with six other unmarried people, moved to the farm at Bonnie Oaks near Briggsville, Wisconsin.

Adults can be re-educated to become as natural as little children...." While the participants seemed to enjoy the experiment, the neighbors in the countryside and in Portage were scandalized.

Talk of communism, nudity, and sexual license abounded, spiked by Toomer's being of mixed race; hostility arose among the locals.

They were staying in Carmel when a nationwide, anti-miscegenation scandal broke concerning their marriage, fanned by a sensationalist, exaggerated Hearst newspaper story.

[1][a][9] Because of threats and hate mail, Latimer's parents moved out of Portage temporarily and stayed with their older daughter Rachel in Montana.