author
Edna M. (Edna Mary) Colman
d. 1951
A writer with a taste for political anecdote and behind-the-scenes history, she is best known for lively books about life in and around the White House. Her work brings presidents and their households into focus through stories meant to feel personal as well as historical.
1 Audiobook
White House gossip : from Andrew Johnson to Calvin Coolidge
by Edna M. (Edna Mary) Colman
About the author
Edna M. Colman, also cataloged as Edna Mary Hercher Colman, was an American author remembered for writing popular White House history. Library and archive records connect her with books including Seventy-five Years of White House Gossip: From Washington to Lincoln (1925) and White House Gossip: From Andrew Johnson to Calvin Coolidge.
Her books gathered anecdotes, social details, and historical sketches about presidents and presidential families, aiming to make political history more vivid for general readers. The emphasis was less on formal scholarship than on storytelling, with a clear interest in the human side of public life.
Reliable biographical information about her personal life appears to be scarce in the sources available here, so it is safest to remember her chiefly through the books she left behind. Those works still circulate in library catalogs, archives, and Project Gutenberg, which has helped preserve her slice of White House lore for modern readers.