In June 1949, three women climbed into the Los Gatos hills to visit Ruth Comfort Mitchell at Yung See San Fong. Doris Frank, Clelles Ness and Claire Loftus were preparing a local production of Mitchell’s one-act play The Sweetmeat Game, and the Los Gatos Times chose an appropriate form for its account of their afternoon: the newspaper wrote the interview as though it were itself a play. The scene opened at a round table set with food and a Chinese tea service. Beyond it lay the Santa Clara Valley, with Los Gatos below and the mountains beyond. Ruth, by then sixty-seven, sat at the center of a setting in which several different periods of her life seemed to coexist.[1]
The women had come to talk about a play Ruth had written more than thirty years before, when she was living in New York and studying dramatic writing. She told them about its first professional production, about the actress Olive Wyndham, about her teacher Clayton Hamilton, and about the strange beginnings of a career that had passed through vaudeville, magazines, novels, motion pictures, radio, politics and public speaking. Then the conversation moved from memory back to the immediate problem of staging the play in Los Gatos. Ruth began offering objects from the house: Chinese cloths, an embroidered chair cover, a table, a box, and her statue of Quan Yin for the shrine onstage. A work written in New York in 1916 was coming home to Los Gatos in 1949, and the woman who had written it was still helping another generation put it on the stage.[1-1]
That afternoon is a useful place to begin because it contains much of Ruth Comfort Mitchell’s life in miniature. She was a writer, certainly, but writing did not isolate her. It repeatedly brought people toward her. Actors performed her plays. Editors became friends. Stories moved from magazines to movie screens. Writers visited her house. Political figures came through its doors. Children staged their own productions on its balconies. Women’s organizations carried her around California as a lecturer. Radio eventually carried her voice much farther. Even late in life, when she might easily have retreated into the role of established author, she was still lending props to local performers and talking theater over tea.
The friendships matter because they help us understand that larger life. Richard Bennett was not simply a famous actor whose name can be attached retrospectively to Ruth’s biography; contemporary newspapers called the Bennetts close friends, and the relationship lasted for decades. Clayton Hamilton was not merely a professor whose class she once took; she remembered him in old age as a great teacher and good friend. Lillian Burkhart Goldsmith appears beside Ruth in theatrical work separated by almost twenty years. Gertrude Atherton, Kathleen Norris, Robert W. Service and Wilbur Hall belonged, with different degrees of intimacy, to the literary world through which she moved. Herbert and Lou Hoover eventually belonged to the Youngs’ political and personal circle. The surviving evidence does not justify calling every celebrated visitor a close friend, but it does reveal an unusually broad social landscape around a woman whose name has largely disappeared from modern literary memory.
Before the House in the Hills
Ruth Comfort Mitchell was born in San Francisco in 1882. Los Gatos entered her life almost immediately: the National Register documentation for Yung See San Fong records that she was spending summers there with her parents and grandparents by 1886, and that the Los Gatos Mail published her first poem when she was fourteen. Her education was largely private rather than conventional, but the boundaries of her world were anything but narrow. By her twenties she was moving among Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and other parts of the country with an ease that helps explain the career that followed.[2]
The newspaper record catches her in motion. In 1908 she appeared in Los Angeles society coverage at an English tea, with Anne Bigelow of Indiana identified as Ruth’s own guest. The following year, another item reported that she had returned to California after spending several months in New York and elsewhere on the Atlantic Coast, then left almost immediately for a six-week stay in Pacific Grove.[3] New York, in other words, was part of Ruth’s life before her marriage and before Yung See San Fong existed. Los Gatos was an emotional home ground, but it was never the limit of her world.
Theater was becoming central. In 1912, the Los Angeles Ebell Club celebrated Dickens with The Rummage Sale, Ruth’s dramatization of characters and scenes from his novels. Lillian Burkhart Goldsmith directed the production, and after its success the women who had appeared in it honored Mitchell and Goldsmith together with a box party and tea. That same year, Ruth’s one-act play The Hornet, set against the Mexican Revolution, was performed at the Burbank Theatre during a major testimonial for veteran actor Harry Duffield. Richard Bennett was among the actors in the cast.[4]
Those early notices are important because they recover a Ruth who can be obscured by the later novels. She first learned the professional mechanics of storytelling through performance: entrances, exits, reversals, dialogue, timing and the problem of holding an audience in a room. Long afterward, even her newspaper columns and public lectures often retained something of the dramatist’s instinct. She liked scenes, voices and sudden reversals more than abstract exposition. Her later success in popular fiction grew from a writer who had already learned to hear a story spoken aloud.
The Bennetts, New York and a Marriage
Richard Bennett soon became much more than an actor who happened to appear in one of Ruth’s plays. By 1914, Ruth was spending extensive time with Richard and his wife, the actress Adrienne Morrison, during their stay in Santa Barbara. A later newspaper account explicitly called Ruth a close friend of Mr. and Mrs. Richard Bennett and recalled that she had been with them a great deal during that visit. Ruth was staying at the Arlington Hotel, where she was completing several one-act plays that subsequently reached New York stages. Another society notice records her taking the three Bennett children to luncheon.[5]
At almost exactly the same moment, her personal life changed. In August 1914 newspapers announced her engagement to William Sanborn Young of Chicago. The notice did not introduce her principally as somebody’s daughter or future wife. It described her as one of the prominent young playwrights, reported that she had just returned from five weeks in the north, and noted that a play she had recently completed had been accepted by Richard Bennett for production. The paper added that after their marriage Ruth and Sanborn expected to spend the winter in New York.[6]
They married at the Grand Canyon in October and moved east. The National Register research records that Ruth continued her literary work in New York while Sanborn studied photography. There she encountered another figure who would remain vivid in her memory for the rest of her life, the critic and teacher Clayton Hamilton.[2-1]
Ruth later recalled that theatrical friends had urged her to attend Hamilton’s Saturday morning lectures on playwriting at Columbia. She did, and eventually produced a play for the course. Hamilton returned it with a B-plus, provoking enough annoyance that Ruth searched through the manuscript for the problem until she reached his note at the end: most professors, he told her, would have given her an A-plus, but he did not want her to become “fat-headed.” More than thirty years later, she could still repeat the story. She described Hamilton as a magnificent teacher, a great man and a good friend.[7]
The play was The Sweetmeat Game. Written in 1916 and set in a Chinese milieu, it opened with Olive Wyndham in the leading female role and developed a long professional and amateur life. In 1949 Ruth recalled that amateur demand had never really disappeared; Samuel French handled those rights, and somewhere, it seemed to her, somebody was almost always putting the old play on.[7-1]
The play would matter in another way. When Ruth and Sanborn began building their Los Gatos home in 1916, the Chinese world she had recently imagined for The Sweetmeat Game helped shape the house itself. The National Register documentation quotes a 1918 Sunset account explaining that Ruth wanted to combine what she admired in Chinese taste and usage with her own ideas of comfort and beauty. Yung See San Fong was completed in 1917 on hillside property connected to the Mitchell family. Ruth, with characteristic humor, reportedly said that rather than a bungalow she had wanted a “bungahigh.”[2-2]
The house therefore did not appear after the writing life had been established, as though Ruth first became an author and then purchased a picturesque retreat. The two developed together. A theatrical imagination helped shape a building, and the building in turn became one of the stages on which the rest of Ruth’s life unfolded.
A Woman Writer in the New Motion-Picture Business
The years around the construction of Yung See San Fong also brought Ruth into one of the newest forms of American popular culture. Motion pictures were changing rapidly from short novelty entertainment into a major national industry, and the division of labor among story writer, adapter, scenario writer, title writer and director was still developing. Modern use of the single word “screenwriter” can therefore flatten a much more fluid system of credits.
What is clear is that Ruth Comfort Mitchell was already supplying material for feature films by 1916. The American Film Institute places her in the writing history of The Price of Happiness, released in February 1916. AFI notes some ambiguity about the precise route by which the source material moved through adaptation, but Mitchell appears in the film’s writing record. Shortly afterward, The Blindness of Love also appeared with Ruth Comfort Mitchell among its writers.[8]
The more revealing episode came with Perjury, a William Fox production starring William Farnum. The archival credits require precision. The American Film Institute identifies Mary Murillo with the scenario and Ruth with the adaptation, based ultimately on Julius Steger’s play Guilty. In production history, then, Perjury was collaborative, as films usually were.[9] But the way theaters sold the picture to the public tells another part of the story.
When Perjury came to the Strand Theatre in Los Gatos, the theater turned the engagement into something close to a hometown premiere. A newspaper notice told readers that William Farnum would appear in Perjury and identified the work as being by “Ruth Comfort Mitchell Young, the well-known and popular authoress of Los Gatos.” More striking still was the large Strand advertisement occupying the bottom of the page. Farnum’s name dominated the headline, as a major movie star’s name should have, but immediately below came another line in conspicuous type:
“The Story is by Ruth Comfort Mitchell (Mrs. Sanborn Young of Los Gatos).”
The advertisement then explained that, in her honor, the theater had been allowed the picture’s first showing in the state.[10]
The distinction between production credit and advertising credit is historically revealing. Ruth did not single-handedly write the modern equivalent of a finished screenplay. The surviving records show Murillo, Mitchell and Steger performing different parts of the writing process. Yet when the picture was placed before an audience, the Strand considered Ruth Comfort Mitchell a sufficiently valuable name to place directly beneath William Farnum and to build the California-first engagement around her. “Mrs. Sanborn Young of Los Gatos” appeared in parentheses. The professional identity came first; the marital identity explained to local readers which Ruth Comfort Mitchell this was.
Nor was that simply hometown favoritism. A surviving Texas advertisement for Perjury similarly placed Ruth’s name prominently in the film’s public billing while separately identifying Mary Murillo’s scenario work.[11] Thousands of miles from Los Gatos, a theater still expected the author’s name to mean something to an audience.
That is an unusually concrete measure of literary celebrity. It is one thing to discover a woman’s name in studio paperwork a century later. It is another to find theater owners spending advertising space on that name because they believed customers would respond to it. Ruth’s authorship had become part of the commercial identity of the picture.
Her connection with film continued. In 1926 Corinne Griffith starred in Into Her Kingdom, based on Ruth’s story from Red Book Magazine. The American Film Institute identifies Mitchell as the literary source author, while other writers handled the film adaptation and titles.[12] Once again the public advertising is instructive. The California Theatre in San Jose promoted the feature not merely as a Corinne Griffith picture but as:
“Ruth Comfort Mitchell’s story ‘INTO HER KINGDOM.'”[13]
Ruth’s name had again moved from magazine page to movie-theater advertising.
Seen in sequence, these films enlarge our understanding of her career. Ruth was not a novelist who occasionally brushed against Hollywood. Her professional life began in theater, moved through vaudeville and magazine fiction, entered the silent-film industry while feature filmmaking was still young, and then continued feeding stories into motion pictures as Hollywood matured. She learned early that a story did not have to remain in the form in which it had first been written.
Yung See San Fong Becomes a Gathering Place
The move back to Los Gatos did not close the door on Ruth’s theatrical world. If anything, Yung See San Fong allowed her to bring that world home. The best evidence comes in the summer of 1919, when Richard Bennett, Adrienne Morrison Bennett and their children traveled from New York to stay with Ruth and Sanborn. Contemporary newspapers described the Bennetts as month-long house guests at the Chinese-style home in the hills.[14]
Richard Bennett himself left a wonderfully informal account of the visit. Asked for an interview by a local editor, he jokingly replied that he was too enamored of the place to leave and too occupied with the assortment of ranch chores his host had assigned him to sit down formally with a reporter. He wrote of rabbits, a new calf, blue jays and gophers, but beneath the humor was genuine affection. He said that this was the first vacation he could remember not wanting to end and wondered whether he should blame Los Gatos, its people, or his hosts.[15]
The Bennett children did not remain spectators to their parents’ theatrical world. Nine-year-old Joan Bennett and her Los Gatos playmate Mary Frances Balch created Timid Agnes and the Mouse and performed it on the lower balcony of Yung See San Fong. Joan conceived the plot, wrote the play and played Timid Agnes; Mary Frances carried the rest of the company, appearing as the Wicked Aunt, the Green Mouse and the Fairy Prince. Richard Bennett supplied musical accompaniment for the girls’ dancing, and Ruth, sitting among the adults, contributed an amused comment about the difficulty of one of the roles.[16]
It is easy to read that episode today only because Joan Bennett later became a major film actress. Its value is greater than that. The story shows the culture of the household. Professional theater did not remain something that occurred in New York or Los Angeles and was discussed reverently afterward. At Yung See San Fong, children could appropriate it, parody it, write their own scripts and turn a balcony into a stage. The distinction between celebrated artist and local amateur was unusually porous.
The Bennett friendship also survived the 1919 house party. In 1934, speaking before a Business and Professional Women’s gathering in Hanford, Ruth moved the scarf at her neck to show the audience an emerald Normandie cross. It had been a wedding gift from Richard Bennett, whom the newspaper called an old family friend. Ruth then entertained the room with stories of the Bennett family from the years when Joan was, in her phrase, “no bigger than a bumblebee.” Twenty years after Ruth’s wedding and fifteen years after that summer at Yung See San Fong, Richard Bennett’s gift was still around her neck and the family was still alive in her stories.[17]
Other names accumulated in the house’s guest book. The National Register nomination records Frank Spearman, journalist Bessie Beatty, Robert W. Service, Edgar Lee Masters, Charles and Kathleen Norris, Gertrude Atherton, Joan Bennett, former United States Senator James D. Phelan, California Governor William D. Stephens and others. The same documentation preserves evidence of the Youngs’ connection to a gathering involving Gertrude Stein.[18]
A guest book, however, should not be mistaken for a list of intimate friends. It proves that a person came through the house, not what two people said to one another afterward. The deeper relationships are the ones that surface repeatedly and independently: the Bennetts; Clayton Hamilton; Lillian Burkhart Goldsmith; the editors Ruth came to know through her magazine work; old family friends such as Mary Merrill; and eventually the Hoovers. The larger guest list is still important because it shows the cultural traffic through Yung See San Fong, but the distinction makes the genuine friendships more meaningful rather than less.
The National Register research gives another revealing detail. Ruth contributed frequently to Ladies’ Home Journal, and the relationship with the magazine became personal enough that she developed close friendships with editors who came to visit her at Yung See San Fong.[18-1] Publishing was not simply an anonymous transaction in which manuscripts went east and checks came west. Her professional network entered the household.
A Literary Colony and a Town That Became a Stage
Los Gatos itself supplied another circle. During the 1920s the hills around the town were home to enough writers that newspapers could speak casually of a local writers’ colony. In 1925, when the town prepared La Favorita de Los Gatos for its outdoor theater, the Oakland Tribune named Ruth Comfort Mitchell, Kathleen Norris, Charles Norris, Wilbur Hall and Ruth Hall among the writers taking parts in the enormous cast.[19]
Ruth’s involvement eventually moved from participant to creator. In 1929 she wrote The Magic Lamp, the eleventh annual Los Gatos Pageant. The production required a cast of nearly two hundred, a fifty-piece orchestra and elaborate lighting effects. Lieutenant Governor H. L. Carnahan was expected in the audience. Sanborn Young, by then a state senator, did not sit in the official box with his legislative colleagues because he had taken a part in the pageant. Richard Bennett returned to speak the prologue.[20]
The local review credited Ruth’s “master hand” with the strange mixture that made the production work. She had taken Aladdin, contemporary jokes, old costumes, music and farce, then put the whole thing outdoors under the Los Gatos moon.[21] The important point is not whether The Magic Lamp belongs in the permanent canon of American drama. It is that an established professional writer willingly poured her skills into a civic production that required a large portion of her community to make it happen.
The same instinct operated on a grander scale a few months later. In January 1930 Ruth and Lillian Burkhart Goldsmith, the woman with whom she had worked on the Dickens entertainment back in 1912, collaborated on Hear, Oh Israel for the National Council of Jewish Women convention at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. The pageant extended through a prologue, twelve acts and an epilogue and involved hundreds of performers, a symphony orchestra, a large choir and dancers. Ruth and Goldsmith were involved not simply as writers but in the direction of the production.[22]
The eighteen years separating their Ebell Club Dickens production from Hear, Oh Israel make Goldsmith particularly interesting in Ruth’s biography. Famous visitors are easy to notice because famous names catch the eye. A working relationship that persists across decades tells us something different. Ruth’s career was sustained not only by celebrity contacts but by collaborators, clubwomen, editors, performers and organizers who repeatedly made things with her.
From the Printed Page to the Radio
Ruth’s career is also a history of changing American media. She began in a world dominated by newspapers, magazines and live performance. Motion pictures came next. By the 1920s another technology was changing the way writers reached audiences, and Ruth’s name began appearing around radio.
One early example came through Sunset, which informed readers that it had already discussed Ruth’s novel A White Stone at length on its regular Monday evening program over KGO. The book review had effectively crossed from the printed magazine into broadcasting. The notice is small, but it captures a larger change: literary publicity was no longer restricted to the page.[23]
Soon Ruth herself was becoming part of radio programming. In 1934 Broadcast Weekly identified her as a nationally known California novelist and announced an appearance on KGO in connection with a Community Chest forum.[24] The following year the magazine promoted KSFO’s “Contemporary Authors” series, a program whose announced literary guests included Ruth Comfort Mitchell, Charles Erskine Scott Wood, Hildegarde Hawthorne, Gertrude Atherton and John D. Barry.[25]
By 1936 radio had become part of Ruth’s political work as well. A campaign advertisement listed broadcasts by Alf Landon, Lieutenant Governor George Hatfield, Frank Knox, Philip Bancroft and former President Herbert Hoover. Ruth Comfort Mitchell’s name appeared in the same schedule, with a fifteen-minute KPO broadcast devoted to women’s interest in the election.[26]
There is a useful progression here. Ruth’s stories had first been sold to readers. Then theaters sold tickets partly on the strength of her name. Magazines and radio stations advertised her as a literary personality. Political organizations eventually advertised the time at which listeners could hear Ruth herself. The medium changed, but the underlying evidence is consistent: for a substantial period of her life, Ruth Comfort Mitchell was a name that publishers, theaters and broadcasters believed an audience would recognize.
That is a more reliable measure of her contemporary position than retrospective superlatives. Fame is difficult to reconstruct after it has disappeared. Advertisements help. People pay for advertising space, and the names given prominence are generally the names somebody believed could attract attention.
Mrs. Sanborn Young and Ruth Comfort Mitchell
Marriage to Sanborn Young introduced Ruth more deeply into political life, but it did not absorb her professional identity. Newspaper coverage shifted easily between “Mrs. Sanborn Young” and “Ruth Comfort Mitchell,” sometimes using one to explain the other. The pattern is visible even in the Strand advertisement for Perjury: the writer’s name came first, while “Mrs. Sanborn Young of Los Gatos” followed in parentheses.[10-1]
Sanborn entered the California State Senate in 1925 and remained there through the 1930s. His principal interests included conservation and narcotics control, and President Herbert Hoover later appointed him to the United States delegation at the 1931 Geneva conference on limiting narcotics manufacture. The political relationship developed into a personal one: surviving Hoover correspondence and the National Register research indicate a close relationship between the Youngs and Herbert and Lou Hoover.[27]
Ruth, meanwhile, was developing a political career in her own right. On March 4, 1929, the day Herbert Hoover was inaugurated, the Republican Women’s Federation of Northern California gathered in San Francisco for a luncheon built around the inauguration broadcast. Ruth was selected to give the principal address.[28] The event is an early indication that she should not be understood simply as a senator’s wife who occasionally appeared at party functions. She was already valuable to the organization as a speaker.
Over the following decade that role expanded considerably. Historical documentation records her service as California’s Republican National Committeewoman and her leadership in Pro America. In 1936 a newspaper reported that she was among California’s Republican delegates headed for Cleveland, while other reports put her on the road speaking for Republican candidates and discussing government, citizenship and campaign issues.[29]
Her speaking life was extraordinarily broad. A Santa Cruz newspaper in 1934 found humor in the pace of it: Ruth had recently spoken in Fresno on education, in Stockton on modern poetry, and was then moving into political appearances. The reporter suggested that only her versatility kept her subjects from becoming mixed. At Hanford that same year she spoke not about politics but about the theater, filling the talk with stories of one-act plays, vaudeville, press-club productions and old actors.[17-1][30]
This parallel career helps explain why women’s organizations recur so persistently in the record. Ruth addressed Business and Professional Women, P.E.O., women’s clubs, literary societies, Pen Women and Republican women’s organizations. In 1935 she gave an address built around the biblical phrase “She considereth a field,” tracing the changing position of women over time while mixing the serious subject with the humor for which audiences knew her.[31] Her politics were conservative Republican politics, but that did not prevent her from thinking and speaking repeatedly about women’s public capacities.
The clubs also formed a social network. When Ruth and Sanborn traveled to Ukiah in 1935, they stayed with former State Senator R. R. Ingels and his wife while Ruth addressed the Saturday Afternoon Club. Along the Central Coast, the Merrill and Routzahn families appear over several years; Mary Merrill was an old friend of the Mitchell family, and a 1937 newspaper item described Ruth herself as a lifelong friend.[32] These less celebrated names help fill out the picture of a woman whose friendships ranged from Broadway actors to people connected through family and California civic life.
The Writers She Remembered
By the late 1930s Ruth had lived long enough in California literary life to turn her acquaintances into material for a lecture. At a Sacramento gathering in 1937, she spoke under the title “Inky Personalities.” The newspaper singled out her recollections of Gertrude Atherton, Robert W. Service, Wilbur Hall, Ethel Storms, I. A. R. Wylie and Kathleen Norris.[33]
That list overlaps with the world documented elsewhere. Service had visited Yung See San Fong. Kathleen Norris appears in the guest record and in the Los Gatos pageant circle. Wilbur Hall was central to those same pageants. Atherton appears in the guest material and elsewhere in Ruth’s literary orbit.[18-2] Ruth was not simply giving a book-club lecture about writers she admired from afar; at least several of the “inky personalities” belonged to her lived experience.
California’s literary world at the time was also less compartmentalized than later literary histories can make it seem. A popular novelist, a poet, a journalist, a Hollywood writer, a clubwoman and a political speaker might appear at the same dinner or pageant. In 1924, for example, Ruth was among the writers specially honored at a California Writers Club dinner alongside Ina Coolbrith, Jessie Rittenhouse, Henry Meade Bland and others.[34] In 1933, Williams Junior College in Berkeley advertised Ruth alongside Edwin Markham, Rupert Hughes, Robert Welles Ritchie, John D. Barry and Samuel G. Blythe as one of the literary and journalistic personalities students would have an opportunity to know and study with.[35]
Again, the advertisement is more useful than an unsupported claim about stature. The school was trying to attract students. It believed access to Ruth Comfort Mitchell belonged in the sales argument alongside access to Edwin Markham and Rupert Hughes.
Writing California
As Ruth’s public world expanded, California itself became increasingly important as the subject of her fiction. Her early career had been grounded in theater and magazine storytelling, but by the late 1920s and 1930s she was drawing irrigation, dairying, agriculture, labor and regional politics into her novels.
Water, published in 1931, is a particularly clear example. A contemporary newspaper explained that the book developed from an earlier Ruth story set in the San Joaquin Valley. The editor had received enough response to conclude that readers were interested in a California beyond the familiar eastern image of polo fields, resorts, Del Monte and Coronado. Ruth’s novel instead turned toward the California in which people worked, worried, irrigated land, raised dairy cattle, endured heat and tried to keep farms and communities alive.[36]
That turn toward agricultural California eventually placed her in one of the bitterest literary and political arguments of the period. John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath appeared in 1939, and agricultural critics quickly began telling newspapers that Ruth Comfort Mitchell was preparing the growers’ answer. A July column explicitly announced that her forthcoming novel would present the farmer’s side of the migrant problem and answer Steinbeck.[37]
Ruth herself later rejected that neat origin story. Speaking at the Lindsay Woman’s Club in February 1940, shortly before Of Human Kindness appeared, she said the novel was not conceived as an answer to The Grapes of Wrath. According to her account, a reporter learned that she was writing about migrants, assumed the book was a reply to Steinbeck, and the description spread. Ruth said that she had outlined the novel at least a year before she had even read The Grapes of Wrath.[38]
That did not mean she agreed with Steinbeck. She emphatically did not. She believed his fiction had been accepted too readily as a factual portrait of California agriculture, and Of Human Kindness offered a sharply different interpretation. Yet the same Lindsay report shows that she did not claim to have written the book purely from ideology or from the comfort of her hillside home. She said she had traveled through migrant areas gathering material, visiting camps, schools and hospitals and observing programs serving migrant children and families.[38-1]
A modern account need not adopt Ruth’s judgments to take her method seriously. Her views belonged to a particular political and agricultural world, and some of her language about migrants is jarring today. But the historical record is more interesting when the disagreement is allowed to remain complicated. Ruth was a conservative Republican who believed Steinbeck had distorted California agriculture; she was also a novelist who said she had gone into camps, schools and hospitals to see conditions for herself. The resulting book belongs to the contentious history of California’s response to the Depression and migration, not merely to a two-line literary feud.
The same Lindsay appearance provides a smaller detail worth preserving. At the end of the program, the audience was told that Ruth was taking only her expenses from the engagement and donating the remainder of her lecture fee to the local Y.W.C.A. for work with girls.[38-2]
That gesture belongs with another long-running interest that appears only intermittently in the newspaper record: work with young people. In 1929, when Campbell dedicated a new Scout and Camp Fire building, the newspaper called Ruth an enthusiastic worker in Camp Fire circles both locally and nationally. She could not attend the ceremony, but sent a large arrangement of flowers.[39]
The importance of that detail only becomes clear at the end of her life.
Recognition and the Strange Fate of Literary Fame
By 1939 Ruth’s position in California public life was substantial enough that the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island invited her as the honor guest speaker for Business Women’s Day. At the evening dinner, accomplished women were assigned to speak for different fields. Former congresswoman Florence Kahn represented politics; other women represented law, art, music, peace and education. Ruth represented the literary field.[40]
Two years later her name entered an even more unusual archive. The official Nobel Prize nomination records show Ruth Comfort Mitchell Young among the nominees for the 1941 Nobel Prize in Literature. A nomination was not equivalent to being shortlisted by the Swedish Academy, much less to winning the prize, and that distinction should be maintained. What the record does demonstrate is that academics thought her literary work important enough to put her name formally into the Nobel process.[41]
There is something striking about seeing her name in that archive today because it dramatizes the problem of historical reputation. Ruth is now obscure enough that even Californians familiar with Steinbeck, Atherton or Norris may never have heard of her. Yet contemporary traces keep showing a woman who did not live an obscure life: a vaudeville and theatrical playwright, a magazine writer, a novelist, a credited film writer and source author for Hollywood, a statewide lecturer, a radio guest, a political broadcaster and a woman whose name could be placed prominently in advertisements.
The phenomenon is not unique to Ruth. Historical writing about once-famous authors such as Fannie Hurst has noted the same disjunction between enormous contemporary visibility and later cultural forgetting.[42] Popular literary culture is particularly vulnerable to that kind of disappearance because the magazines, theatrical circuits, radio programs and organizations that sustained a reputation can vanish along with it.
Ruth’s surviving advertisements are therefore almost as valuable as her reviews. The Strand Theatre ad tells us that her name could help sell Perjury. The California Theatre advertised Into Her Kingdom as her story. Radio magazines presented her among contemporary authors worth hearing. Political advertising told Californians when Ruth would speak. Williams Junior College advertised the opportunity to study with her. These were independent institutions, operating in different media and for different purposes, all making the same basic assumption: the public knew who Ruth Comfort Mitchell was.
The Older Ruth at Home
By the 1940s Ruth had become an elder figure in California literary and club life without withdrawing from it. In 1946 she appeared in Sacramento as guest speaker for a joint gathering of the California Writers Club and the League of American Pen Women.[43] The following year, at a major P.E.O. convention in Los Angeles, she was not used for a solemn ceremonial address but for something that contemporaries had long associated with her: humor. The newspaper billed her as a P.E.O. humorist and author and gave her a few minutes in the banquet program to entertain the audience.[44]
Then came the 1949 interview at Yung See San Fong. Ruth looked backward without seeming trapped in the past. She talked about Cupid in Manila, the naive Sunday-school play that unexpectedly helped open the door to professional vaudeville work. She remembered being paid two hundred dollars apiece to write playlets on demand for performers. She told the story of Clayton Hamilton and the B-plus. She remembered actress Bertha Kalisch dismissing her as too young to have suffered enough to write the play Kalisch wanted. She described her writing method: long morning walks with the dogs while she worked a piece out in her mind, followed by slow composition and relatively little rewriting once she finally sat down at the page.[1-2]
What she did next may tell us as much about her as the reminiscences. She turned back to the Los Gatos production at hand. She bought tickets. She teased Clelles Ness about playing the supposedly meek Chinese woman. She inspected Doris Frank’s ideas for the set. She opened cupboards and offered the company things from the house. The famous old play had ceased to belong only to the professional stage; Ruth was perfectly willing to place it back into the hands of her neighbors.[1-3]
Two years later, Yung See San Fong was still serving as a literary meeting place. Ruth hosted the Santa Clara County branch of the National League of American Pen Women there while San Jose State professor Dorothy Kaucher discussed current New York plays. Gwendolen Penniman and Jean Scott poured.[45] The house built in 1917 for a playwright and her new husband was, more than three decades later, still being used to gather writers and talk about theater.
What Her Friendships Reveal
Looking across Ruth’s life, the famous names are tempting because they make easy headlines. Richard and Joan Bennett, Gertrude Atherton, Kathleen Norris, Robert W. Service, Edgar Lee Masters, Herbert Hoover and Gertrude Stein all pull the eye. But the more interesting story is not that a large number of recognizable people can be connected somehow to Ruth Comfort Mitchell. It is the different kinds of relationships the evidence reveals.
The Bennetts were family-level friends. The evidence begins in Ruth’s early theatrical career, continues through her Santa Barbara time with Richard and Adrienne, includes her luncheon with their children, Richard’s wedding gift, the family’s long stay at Yung See San Fong, Joan’s childhood performance there and Ruth’s reminiscences twenty years afterward.[5-1][14-1][16-1][17-2] That is a friendship documented through time rather than a single social encounter.
Clayton Hamilton belonged to another category. He was a teacher who became important enough personally that Ruth still spoke about him with affection three decades later.[7-2] Lillian Burkhart Goldsmith was a creative collaborator whose work with Ruth can be seen in 1912 and again in 1930.[4-1][22-1] Mary Merrill represented an older family friendship that survived Ruth’s rise to public prominence.[32-1] The magazine editors show professional relationships becoming social ones. The Hoovers show political association becoming friendship. Each relationship grew from a different part of Ruth’s life.
Then there was the wider literary community. Kathleen Norris, Wilbur Hall, Robert Service, Gertrude Atherton and others moved through the same northern California cultural landscape, sometimes appearing in Ruth’s guest book, sometimes participating in the same public events, sometimes reappearing in the stories she later told about writers she had known.[18-3][19-1][33-1] They need not all have been intimate friends for the network itself to matter.
What emerges is not a salon in the formal European sense and not a celebrity guest house collecting names for prestige. Yung See San Fong seems instead to have functioned as one node in Ruth’s much larger habit of bringing different worlds into contact. Theater people, writers, politicians, editors, children, clubwomen and neighbors could all enter the same orbit.
A Life Larger Than a Bibliography
Ruth Comfort Mitchell died at Yung See San Fong in February 1954. An autopsy determined that the cause was a coronary occlusion. She left Sanborn, her brothers and a large extended family, but the family’s request concerning memorials provides a more revealing end to the story than the medical details. They asked that contributions in Ruth’s memory go to the Los Gatos Youth Center or the Camp Fire Girls.[46]
Twenty-five years earlier the newspaper had described her as an enthusiastic Camp Fire worker locally and nationally.[39-1] The interest had endured long enough to be named at her death.
So had Los Gatos. Ruth had first come there as a child when the town was still surrounded by orchards and open land. Her first published poem appeared in its newspaper. She returned after New York and marriage to build a house above the town. There she wrote, entertained, rode horses, walked with her dogs, planned stories and watched the valley below change across nearly four decades. The house became a place where Richard Bennett could spend a month away from Broadway, where Joan Bennett could write a childhood play, where Robert W. Service could visit, where magazine editors could stay, where politicians could talk, and where local women could come in 1949 to ask an old playwright how best to stage a work she had written in her thirties.
Yet Los Gatos explains only one part of Ruth. The fuller life stretched between places and media. She wrote for vaudeville and professional theater before the First World War. She was working in feature films by 1916. In the 1920s her novels appeared while her stories continued moving onto movie screens. Movie theaters used her name in their advertising. She participated in enormous civic pageants and wrote productions requiring hundreds of performers. She lectured across California, entered party politics, became a Republican National Committeewoman and Pro America leader, appeared on radio as both author and political speaker, wrote novels about agricultural California, argued publicly with the cultural interpretation represented by Steinbeck, and continued meeting younger writers and performers almost to the end of her life.
Perhaps the clearest evidence of her position survives in that old Strand Theatre advertisement. William Farnum, the movie star, received the great headline. Underneath, however, the theater printed another name large enough to matter:
Ruth Comfort Mitchell.
The parenthetical “Mrs. Sanborn Young of Los Gatos” came afterward.[10-2]
For a woman building a professional career in the first decades of the twentieth century, that order is worth noticing. Ruth did not cease to be Sanborn Young’s wife, nor does the evidence suggest that she wanted to. Their lives were deeply intertwined. But the public identity she had constructed before their marriage survived it. Readers, theater audiences and eventually radio listeners knew her by the name under which she wrote.
That may also explain a remark attributed to Sanborn late in life. Looking back over a career that had included the California Senate, narcotics legislation, an international conference and his beloved beagles, he reduced his claims to fame with characteristic humor. The first thing he named was that he had married Ruth Comfort Mitchell.[47]
The line works because the historical record makes it plausible. Ruth did not inhabit the margins of Sanborn Young’s public career. For long stretches of their married life, she was the better-known name.
Her life is therefore difficult to capture with a single occupational label. “Novelist” leaves out the stage. “Playwright” leaves out the books. “Screenwriter” oversimplifies the collaborative vocabulary of silent filmmaking. “Political activist” leaves out the fiction. “Senator’s wife” diminishes a career that was already established before the marriage. Even “writer” misses the importance of performance, broadcasting, civic organizations and friendship.
A better description may be that Ruth Comfort Mitchell belonged to the generation that learned how a story could travel. She saw writing move from paper to stage, from magazine to motion picture, from book review to radio microphone. She knew how literary reputation circulated through clubs, newspapers, theaters, advertisements, publishers and personal relationships. She was comfortable enough in all of those worlds that she could move from a Broadway actor to a local pageant, from a Hollywood feature to a women’s luncheon, from a political broadcast to an afternoon helping neighbors arrange a stage set.
And throughout that movement, she kept returning to people. Richard Bennett remained a friend long after the first play. Clayton Hamilton remained alive in memory decades after the classroom. Lillian Burkhart Goldsmith remained a collaborator. Writers came up the hill. Editors became house guests. The Hoovers became friends. Women gathered around Ruth at club tables across California. Children performed on her balcony. Local actors carried her old play back onto a Los Gatos stage.
By the time the three women arrived for tea in 1949, Ruth had spent more than fifty years writing stories. But she had also spent those years creating circumstances in which people could gather around them.
That is what the house in the hills preserves better than a bibliography ever could. Yung See San Fong was not simply where Ruth Comfort Mitchell lived while she pursued a career somewhere else. It was one of the places where the career, the friendships and the public life met. And for a long stretch of the twentieth century, the woman at the center of that world was famous enough that a movie theater could put her name beneath the star’s, a radio station could advertise the hour when she would speak, and a visitor climbing the road above Los Gatos might reasonably expect to find, somewhere around Ruth Comfort Mitchell’s table, a writer, an actor, a politician, a neighbor, or all four.
Endnotes
- Graves Taylor, “Playwright at Home — Early Career of Los Gatos Playwright Recalled in Play-patterned Interview,” Los Gatos Times, July 1, 1949, p. 16. The interview takes place at Yung See San Fong and records Mitchell’s memories of her early theater career, Clayton Hamilton, The Sweetmeat Game, her writing method, and the objects she offered for the 1949 Los Gatos production.↩︎↩︎↩︎↩︎
- Yung See San Fong House, National Register of Historic Places registration documentation. The nomination provides biographical material on Ruth Comfort Mitchell and Sanborn Young, the Mitchell family’s early Los Gatos connections, Ruth’s first publication, construction of Yung See San Fong, the house’s relationship to The Sweetmeat Game, political associations, surviving guest-book material and the later historical significance of the property.↩︎↩︎↩︎
- “Society,” Los Angeles Herald, March 6, 1908, p. 5; and Los Angeles Herald, June 8, 1909. The first places Ruth in Los Angeles society with Anne Bigelow as her guest. The second reports her return from several months in New York and elsewhere on the Atlantic Coast and her subsequent departure for Pacific Grove.↩︎
- “The ‘Rummage Sale’ by Ebell Club: Women Observe Dickens’ Memory,” Los Angeles Herald, February 26, 1912; Juana Neal Levy, “Women Honored,” Los Angeles Herald, March 8, 1912; “Duffield Benefit at Burbank Tomorrow,” Los Angeles Herald, September 9, 1912; and Sidle Lawrence, “Actor Is Honored by Associates,” Los Angeles Herald, September 11, 1912. These articles document Ruth’s Dickens dramatization, her collaboration with Lillian Burkhart Goldsmith, and the performance of Mitchell’s The Hornet with Richard Bennett among the actors.↩︎↩︎
- Morning Press, August 4, 1914; and Morning Press, September 28, 1916. The later article explicitly describes Mitchell as a close friend of Richard and Adrienne Bennett and recalls her spending considerable time with them in Santa Barbara in 1914 while completing one-act plays at the Arlington Hotel.↩︎↩︎
- “Engagement Announced,” Los Angeles Herald, August 20, 1914. The notice describes Ruth as a prominent young playwright, reports Richard Bennett’s acceptance of a recent play, announces her engagement to William Sanborn Young, and says the couple expected to spend the winter in New York.↩︎
- Graves Taylor, “Playwright at Home — Early Career of Los Gatos Playwright Recalled in Play-patterned Interview,” Los Gatos Times, July 1, 1949, p. 16. Mitchell discusses Clayton Hamilton, Columbia, The Sweetmeat Game, Olive Wyndham and the continuing amateur demand for the play.↩︎↩︎↩︎
- American Film Institute Catalog entries for The Price of Happiness (1916) and The Blindness of Love (1916). The AFI records place Ruth Comfort Mitchell in the writing history of both early feature films.↩︎
- American Film Institute Catalog, Perjury (Fox Film Corporation, 1921). The AFI production record distinguishes Ruth Comfort Mitchell’s adaptation credit from Mary Murillo’s scenario work and traces the film to Julius Steger’s dramatic source.↩︎
- Strand Theatre advertisement and accompanying Los Gatos news item for William Farnum in Perjury, January 1922. The advertisement reads, “The Story is by Ruth Comfort Mitchell (Mrs. Sanborn Young of Los Gatos),” and states that “in her honor we were allowed its first showing in this State.” The accompanying article calls her the “well-known and popular authoress of Los Gatos.”↩︎↩︎↩︎
- Contemporary Texas theater advertising for Perjury likewise promoted Ruth Comfort Mitchell’s name prominently while separately identifying Mary Murillo’s scenario work. The advertisement is useful evidence that Mitchell’s public billing was not confined to her hometown.↩︎
- American Film Institute Catalog, Into Her Kingdom (1926), starring Corinne Griffith. AFI identifies Ruth Comfort Mitchell’s published story as the literary source for the motion picture.↩︎
- California Theatre advertisement, Los Gatos Star, August 26, 1926, p. 10. The theater advertised the feature as “Ruth Comfort Mitchell’s story ‘INTO HER KINGDOM,'” starring Corinne Griffith.↩︎
- “News of the Smart Set,” San Francisco Call, July 22, 1919; and “Interesting Guests,” San Jose Mercury-news, July 20, 1919. Both report the Bennett family’s extended stay with the Youngs at Yung See San Fong.↩︎↩︎
- “Editor’s Interview with Richard Bennett,” Saratoga Star, August 15, 1919, p. 4. Bennett describes his stay with the Youngs, his affection for Los Gatos and his reluctance to end the vacation.↩︎
- “Clever Kiddie Writes, Stages, Acts Playlet,” Saratoga Star, August 22, 1919, p. 4. The article describes Joan Bennett and Mary Frances Balch presenting Timid Agnes and the Mouse on the lower balcony of Yung See San Fong, with Richard and Adrienne Bennett, Sanborn Young and Ruth Comfort Mitchell present.↩︎↩︎
- “Hanford Business Women Endorse Mrs. James For State Federation Head,” Hanford Sentinel, November 22, 1934. The report describes Ruth displaying an emerald Normandie cross given to her as a wedding gift by Richard Bennett, identified as an old family friend, and telling stories of the Bennett family and her early theatrical career.↩︎↩︎↩︎
- Yung See San Fong House, National Register of Historic Places registration documentation. The nomination records surviving guest-book entries and discusses Ruth’s literary and political associates, including Robert W. Service, Kathleen Norris, Gertrude Atherton, Edgar Lee Masters, political figures and editors connected with her magazine work.↩︎↩︎↩︎↩︎
- Suzette, “Festival Colors Proclaim State’s Diamond Jubilee,” Oakland Tribune, June 21, 1925. The article describes the writers’ colony in the Los Gatos hills and names Ruth Comfort Mitchell, Kathleen Norris, Charles Norris, Wilbur Hall and Ruth Hall among the pageant participants.↩︎↩︎
- “Lt. Governor to Be Guest at Magic Lamp,” Los Gatos Star, June 20, 1929, pp. 1, 5. The article credits Ruth with the script, describes the cast of nearly 200, the fifty-piece orchestra and elaborate lighting, and notes Richard Bennett’s role in the prologue and Sanborn Young’s participation in the cast.↩︎
- Review of The Magic Lamp, Los Gatos Star, June 27, 1929. The review praises “Ruth Comfort Mitchell’s master hand” in creating the production’s mixture of farce, spectacle, modern language and deliberately mixed historical settings.↩︎
- Contemporary reporting on Hear, Oh Israel, presented January 15, 1930, at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles during the National Council of Jewish Women convention. Ruth Comfort Mitchell and Lillian Burkhart Goldsmith were credited as writers and participated in the production, which employed hundreds of performers, a symphony orchestra and a large choir.↩︎↩︎
- Sunset notice concerning Ruth Comfort Mitchell’s A White Stone, 1925. The magazine stated that the novel had already been discussed “quite fully” during its regular Monday evening broadcast over KGO.↩︎
- Broadcast Weekly, 1934. Announcement of Ruth Comfort Mitchell’s KGO appearance in connection with the Community Chest campaign, identifying her as a nationally known California novelist.↩︎
- Broadcast Weekly, 1935. Announcement of KSFO’s “Contemporary Authors” series, listing Ruth Comfort Mitchell among scheduled writers together with Gertrude Atherton, Charles Erskine Scott Wood, Hildegarde Hawthorne and others.↩︎
- Political radio advertisement, Oakland Tribune, October 13, 1936. The schedule places Ruth Comfort Mitchell’s KPO broadcast on “Women’s Interest in Election” alongside broadcasts by Alf Landon, George Hatfield, Frank Knox, Philip Bancroft and Herbert Hoover.↩︎
- Yung See San Fong House, National Register of Historic Places registration documentation, for Sanborn Young’s California Senate career, narcotics work, Geneva appointment and the Youngs’ relationship with Herbert and Lou Hoover.↩︎
- “Ruth Comfort Mitchell to Speak on Monday,” The Sebastopol Times, March 1, 1929, p. 6. Mitchell was scheduled to give the luncheon address to the Republican Women’s Federation of Northern California on Herbert Hoover’s inauguration day.↩︎
- Yung See San Fong House, National Register documentation, for Mitchell’s Republican National Committee and Pro America roles; “California Women Hear Ruth C. Mitchell,” Napa Journal, May 29, 1936, reporting her political address and her status among California Republican delegates.↩︎
- “Ruth Comfort Mitchell Honor Guest B. & P. W. C.,” Santa Cruz Sentinel, October 30, 1934. The article summarizes her successive talks in Fresno, Stockton and Santa Cruz and comments on the extraordinary range of subjects she was addressing.↩︎
- “Ruth Comfort Mitchell Speaks,” Santa Cruz Evening News, September 16, 1935. Mitchell’s address, based on “She considereth a field,” traced women’s historical development while combining serious argument with the humor for which she was known.↩︎
- “Author to Speak,” Press Democrat, March 15, 1935, for the Youngs’ visit with former Senator R. R. Ingels and his wife in Ukiah; and Arroyo Grande Valley Herald Recorder, August 6, 1937, for the Routzahn-Merrill connection and Ruth’s longtime friendship with Mary Merrill.↩︎↩︎
- Marjorie Thompson, “Woman’s Council Closes Term at Luncheon,” Sacramento Daily Union, May 20, 1937. Ruth’s “Inky Personalities” talk included recollections of Gertrude Atherton, Robert Service, Wilbur Hall, Ethel Storms, I. A. R. Wylie and Kathleen Norris.↩︎↩︎
- Oakland Tribune, February 10, 1924. Ruth Comfort Mitchell was among the writers specially honored at a California Writers Club poets’ dinner with Ina Coolbrith, Jessie Rittenhouse, Henry Meade Bland and others.↩︎
- Williams Junior College advertisement, Oakland Tribune, August 10, 1933. The school promoted the opportunity to know and study with Ruth Comfort Mitchell alongside Edwin Markham, Rupert Hughes, Robert Welles Ritchie, John D. Barry and Samuel G. Blythe.↩︎
- Herbert W. Slater, “Ruth Comfort Mitchell, Known Here, Uses San Joaquin as Locale,” Press Democrat, March 29, 1931. The article explains the origins and themes of Water and its attention to the working and agricultural California beyond the state’s fashionable resort image.↩︎
- Ralph H. Taylor, “Farmers Resent ‘The Grapes of Wrath,'” Lindsay Gazette, July 21, 1939, p. 3. The column presents Mitchell’s forthcoming migrant novel as a farmer-side response to Steinbeck.↩︎
- Agnes Webb, “Mitchell Novel Presents ‘Other Side’ Of Migrant Situation; Not Answer To Steinbeck, Says Author,” Lindsay Gazette, February 23, 1940. Ruth says the novel had been planned before she read The Grapes of Wrath, describes research visits to migrant camps, schools and hospitals, discusses her interpretation of migrant conditions, and donates the portion of her lecture fee above expenses to Y.W.C.A. girls’ work.↩︎↩︎↩︎
- “Fitting Ceremony Marks Opening of New Scout Bldg.,” Campbell Press, October 1, 1929. Ruth is described as an enthusiastic worker in Camp Fire circles locally and nationally.↩︎↩︎
- “Women’s Clubs Prepare For Island Celebration,” Oakland Tribune, July 19, 1939. Ruth was the honor guest speaker for Business Women’s Day at the Golden Gate International Exposition and represented the literary field at the evening dinner.↩︎
- Nobel Prize Nomination Archive, Literature, 1941, records for Ruth Comfort Mitchell Young. The archival record documents nomination but should not be confused with winning the prize, being named a finalist, or receiving an endorsement from the Swedish Academy.↩︎
- National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, biographical discussion of Fannie Hurst and the disparity between her extraordinary contemporary literary fame and her later obscurity. The comparison is used here only to illustrate the broader historical phenomenon of popular writers losing cultural visibility as the media systems that sustained their fame disappear.↩︎
- Sacramento Daily Union, January 20, 1946. Ruth Comfort Mitchell was guest speaker at a joint meeting of Sacramento branches of the California Writers Club and League of American Pen Women.↩︎
- “International P.E.O. Parley Ends, New Officers Announced,” Press-Telegram, October 12, 1947. Ruth was presented as a P.E.O. humorist and author and supplied a short humorous portion of the convention banquet program.↩︎
- “Plays Are Discussed At Pen Women Meeting,” Los Gatos Daily Times, April 12, 1951. Ruth hosted the Santa Clara County branch of the National League of American Pen Women at Yung See San Fong while Dr. Dorothy Kaucher discussed contemporary New York theater.↩︎
- “Last Rites Tomorrow For Los Gatos Author Ruth Comfort Mitchell,” Los Gatos Times, February 19, 1954, p. 1. The article reports the autopsy finding of coronary occlusion and states that the family preferred memorial contributions to the Los Gatos Youth Center or Camp Fire Girls.↩︎
- Yung See San Fong House, National Register of Historic Places registration documentation, for the retrospective account of Sanborn Young’s life and the remark placing his marriage to Ruth Comfort Mitchell first among the accomplishments for which he wished to be remembered.↩︎