Isa Glenn

Born in Atlanta in 1874, she was the daughter of John Thomas Glenn, who served as mayor of the city for a time. Yale’s guide to her papers says she was also a cousin of James McNeill Whistler and briefly studied art with him 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, she wrote under her maiden name, drawing on both her Southern background and her wider experience of the world.

She is remembered for novels such as Transport (1929) and East of Eden (1932). Her surviving papers, preserved at Yale, suggest a busy literary life connected to writers, editors, publishers, friends, and family, and they help keep her work in view for new readers today.