Dorothea Brande

Dorothea Brande was an American writer and editor associated with New York City, best remembered for a book that has stayed close to working writers: Becoming a Writer. She was born Alice Dorothea Alden Thompson in Chicago on 12 January 1892, and her life in print took shape across newspapers, magazines, fiction, and practical books. Her public career belongs especially to the years around the 1930s, when she published the works that made her name and worked in New York literary circles.

Brande attended the University of Chicago, the Lewis Institute, and the University of Michigan. In 1916 she married Herbert Brande, a fellow Chicago newspaper reporter; the marriage ended in divorce sometime before 1930. That early connection to newspaper work placed her in a practical writing culture, one concerned not only with ideas but with deadlines, habits, and finished copy. Those concerns would later become central to the way readers came to know her.

Her best-known book, Becoming a Writer, was published in 1934 by Harcourt, Brace and Company. Rather than treating writing only as a matter of style or talent, the book offers advice for beginning and sustaining any writing enterprise. It remains in print today, a rare fact for a writing manual from its period. Brande followed it with several other books, including Beauty Vanishes and The Most Beautiful Lady in 1935, Wake Up and Live! in 1936, Letters to Philippa in 1937, and My Invincible Aunt in 1938.

Wake Up and Live! brought her an even wider readership. Published by Simon and Schuster in 1936, it sold more than a million copies and was used as the inspiration for the 1937 comedy film Wake Up and Live. Brande also wrote short fiction earlier in her career, including “Eater of Souls,” published in The Smart Set in January 1916 under the name Dorothea Thompson, and stories in Smith’s Magazine in 1921 and 1922.

In 1936, while serving as associate editor of The American Review, Brande married Seward Collins, the journal’s owner and editor. Collins also served as managing editor of The Bookman and was a prominent literary figure in New York, as well as a proponent of an American version of fascism. Brande died in Boston in December 1948. Her work continues to attract attention because it treats writing as something lived daily: not a mystery reserved for a few, but a practice built through attention, discipline, and steady return to the page.