author
Marjorie Crocker
1895–1972
A sharp-eyed American writer in wartime Paris, she turned everyday letters into a vivid firsthand record of World War I. Her best-known book captures relief work, friendship, and the strange mix of danger and normal life during the conflict.
1 Audiobook
Over Periscope Pond : Letters from two American girls in Paris October 1916-January 1918
by Esther Sayles Root, Marjorie Crocker
About the author
Best known as the co-author of Over Periscope Pond (1918), she wrote with Esther Sayles Root about their experiences in Paris from October 1916 to January 1918. The book presents wartime life through personal letters, giving readers an immediate, human view of relief work and the city under pressure.
Sources found during this search also identify her as Marjorie Crocker Fairbanks and place her in art, music, culinary, and literary circles in Paris and Massachusetts in the decades that followed. Some archival and bookselling records describe her as a friend of writer Thomas Wolfe and as a manager for Lead Belly, but those details appear mainly in secondary listings, so they are best treated cautiously.
What is clear is that her surviving work preserves a lively witness to a remarkable moment in history: the voice of a young American abroad, writing with energy, humor, and attention to the real texture of wartime daily life.