Collection on Brenda Ueland

Brenda Ueland was born in Minneapolis on October 24, 1891 and died on March 5, 1985. She was one of seven children, the daughter of a suffragette and a lawyer who worked his way through law school digging ditches. Ueland was a graduate of Barnard College in 1913 but eschewed the standard debutante party. She was active in suffrage and socialist meetings, advocating on behalf of factory girls and prostitutes, and became the first female reporter for the Minneapolis Tribune.

An author and columnist, Ueland worked as a columnist for Liberty (Chicago Tribune), then as a freelance writer, and was published in The Saturday Evening Post, Ladies’ Home Journal, Colliers, Harper's, Delineator, and Hearst’s International. She also wrote the column “What Goes on Here” for the Minneapolis Daily Times. Her books include the famous If You Want to Write, Mitropoulos and the North High Band, and her celebrated autobiography, Me, which was first published in 1939 and reissued in 1983, in which she recounts her encounters with the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen, and the writers Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, Eugene O’Neill, and John Reed.

She also visited post-war Norway in an effort to locate the relatives of Minneapolitans, many of whom were persecuted by the Nazis. Back in the U.S., she lectured on the educational and economics needs of Norwegian women, and kept a menagerie of pets. Ueland married three times: to William Benedict in 1916, divorced in 1926; to Manus McFadden, the editor of the Minneapolis times which also ended in divorce and finally she married Sverre Hanssen in 1959; they divorced in 1964. She left one daughter, Gaby (Ueland) Benedict McIver, born in 1921.