"Marguerite Martyn - America's Forgotten Journalist" was compiled and published by George Garrigues, a journalism professor and retired Los Angeles Times journalist. His appreciation of her work is evident in the book's preface, and he adds clarifying notes throughout to provide perspective for Martyn's stories.Readers with an interest in St. Louis history will appreciate Martyn's accounts of visits to interview residents of Westmoreland Place and her descriptions of the city's illegal "Lid Clubs," where illicit and underage drinking took place on Sundays.
She goes to great lengths to describe the women's suffrage movement in Missouri, traveling to Jefferson City to report on the suffragists' lobbying of the all-male Legislature.
Her subject matter for the feature columns sometimes bordered on hard news, but her descriptive writing style, which relied heavily on her interview subjects and her surroundings, truly set her work apart from the day's standard news stories. Of sand castles being built by idle newsboys at construction sites in downtown St. Louis, she wrote: "I have seen these things materialize in the middle of Broadway. Amid the noises of hammer upon steel, the clash of metal upon stone. Ponderous drays and cars bear down upon these builders, but these small businessmen are oblivious to all outside their kidhood."
It is easy to discern in reading these articles that Martyn was quite a character herself. Visiting Denver to cover the Democratic National Convention, she set out to describe what she saw in that city: "The Denver girl, for example, is highly colored. I haven't seen a pale one yet. And she doesn't get tired, for she weighs about five pounds less than she would at a lower altitude and her hair doesn't come out of curl. But she squints because the sun shines so bright, and that is why they say she grows old quickly, for she gets crow's feet around her eyes."
After publication of Martyn's gut-wrenching story of a young St. Louis girl who had lost her arms in a child labor accident, Garrigues noted, "Marie, who had been working for $5.90 a week, received $1,800 in donations." She also won a cash settlement from the employer.
Martyn interviewed presidents, first ladies, governors, suffragists and everyday people, sketching them as they talked. These illustrations would later be inked to accompany her articles. Often, readers would note Martyn had inserted a small self-portrait in the sketches, showing herself sketching the person being interviewed. Garrigues writes that she always showed up for interviews carrying her sketchbook, often without calling ahead to arrange an appointment.
- Frank Absher review in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
