author
Helen Davenport Gibbons
1882–1960
An American journalist and memoirist, she turned firsthand experience into vivid books about war, exile, and life abroad. Her writing brings early 20th-century Europe and the Ottoman world close, personal, and sharply observed.
2 Audiobooks
Paris Vistas
by Helen Davenport Gibbons
The Red Rugs of Tarsus: A Woman's Record of the Armenian Massacre of 1909
by Helen Davenport Gibbons
About the author
Born in Philadelphia in 1882, Helen Davenport Gibbons studied at Bryn Mawr and later at Simmons before building a career as a writer and lecturer. After marrying historian and journalist Herbert Adams Gibbons in 1908, she lived overseas and drew deeply on those experiences in her work.
She is best known for The Red Rugs of Tarsus (1917), a personal account shaped by what she witnessed in the Ottoman Empire during the Armenian massacres of 1909. She also wrote for magazines including Harper’s, The Century, and Pictorial Review, and served as a correspondent for The Century at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.
Her books include A Little Grey Home in France, Paris Vistas, and Four Little Pilgrims, all marked by an eye for place and a reporter’s sense of detail. She spent years lecturing in English and French about her travels and experiences, and died in Princeton, New Jersey, in September 1960.