author
Isa Glenn
1874–1951
A rediscovered Southern novelist, she turned to fiction after being widowed and went on to publish a string of novels in the 1920s and 1930s. Her work often draws on the social worlds she knew firsthand, from the American South to the far-flung settings of Army life.
1 Audiobook
East of Eden
by Isa Glenn
About the author
Born in Atlanta in 1874, Isa Glenn was the daughter of John Thomas Glenn, who served as mayor of the city for a time. Yale’s finding aid for her papers notes that she studied art briefly with James McNeill Whistler in Paris in the late 1890s.
In 1903 she married Colonel S. J. Bayard Schindel and traveled with him to places including the Philippine Islands, South America, and the South Seas. After his death in 1921, she began her literary career in earnest, publishing novels such as Heat (1926), Little Pitchers (1927), Southern Charm (1928), Transport (1929), A Short History of Julia (1930), East of Eden (1932), Mr. Darlington's Dangerous Age (1933), and The Little Candle's Beam (1935).
Although she is not widely known today, archives and later literary scholarship have helped bring attention back to her writing. Her surviving papers, held at Yale, reflect both her own work and the literary life she shared with her son, Bayard Schindel.