Margaret E. Sangster

Margaret in 1929,
at age 35

Margaret E. Sangster was born in Brooklyn in 1894 to a prominent family of writers. Her grandmother, after whom she was named, wrote poetry and magazine articles, and served as editor for magazines including Harper’s Bazaar. Margaret Senior’s  audience “was so vast as to drive any but the most intrepid namesake into sheltering obscurity,” declared one newspaper profile. Margaret’s father, George, was a newspaperman, so it does seem inevitable that Margaret would also take up a pen at an early age—and books, too; as soon as she could read, she was corralled into reading to her grandmother several hours a day, as Margaret Senior had become blind.

Margaret spent her teen years in New Jersey, attended Miss Townsend’s School in Newark. Her mother, who was an invalid, did not allow the girl to leave the stoop of the family brownstone; Margaret later recalled “with a trace of regret in her voice that as a child she was insufferably good.” In 1910, when she was 15, she sold her first poems, to the weekly newspaper Christian Herald; her grandmother, who frequently contributed to religious publications, may have played a hand in promoting the young Margaret’s work. In December 1918, at age 24, she was sent overseas by that publication to serve as a war correspondent and spent three months traveling through France, Belgium and Germany; in the latter country, alongside the Occupation Army, she got closer to the battlefront than any American woman had been during the war. On her return she was made associate editor.

In June 1920 at age 26 she married newspaper businessman McCoy Sheridan—the ceremony was performed by the editor-in-chief of the Christian Herald, who was also a reverend—and moved back to Brooklyn, but he died suddenly at age 35, just four years after their marriage. In 1928, when she was 33, she married illustrator George Illian, and the couple moved to 12 West 10^th Street in Manhattan. In 1932, four years into their marriage, shortly after moving to the penthouse at 410 West 23^rd Street, George died at age 37. She doesn’t appear to have had children with either man. (In 1930, Margaret and George were sharing their home with a nine-year-old girl named Margaret Illian, which would have put the girl’s birth year as 1921, the year after Margaret married McCoy, but his obituary did not list any children as survivors, only Margaret and his mother. A newspaper profile in 1941, though, states that “caring for orphans is a subject close to Margaret’s heart. Indeed, in her roomy, rambling house at Tenafly, N.J., one is likely to encounter the forsaken of any age,” so it’s possible that this young girl was a foster child taken in by Margaret and George.)

Margaret never completely left the Christian Herald and wrote a monthly column for that paper for 50 years. Beyond this steady gig, in the 1920s she also became an associate editor of Photoplay, one of the first American film fan magazines. In May 1929 she was made editor of Smart Set, a literary magazine popularized by H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, but the publication could not withstand the Wall Street crash late that year and the ensuing depression, and the magazine folded in June 1930. She then became a freelance writer, setting up an office two blocks from her house,  and worked there five days a week, writing from 10 am to 12 pm in longhand, a routine she followed strictly for many years.

This portrait appeared
in 1934

Though she sold short stories to numerous magazines including McCall’s, Redbook and Good Housekeeping, and at one point wrote a poem a day for five years for a newspaper syndicate, she was not conceited about her work. “I never have written a story that I thought was really good,” she stated in a 1934 newspaper profile. “I think it’s partly because I was brought up in a family in which any man was so much more important than the most important women, and I developed a profound sense of my own shortcomings. I’ve only written one story in my life with which I was fairly satisfied. It was a poetic story, and I had to send it to 20 editors before I sold it. Finally one editor bought it, writing me that he liked it but didn’t understand it. He paid me half price for it.”

In 1936 she began writing for radio programs, writing stories for NBC soap operas. “Her intense interest in people leads her into talking to strangers at every opportunity,” stated one 1958 newspaper profile. “One day a taxicab driver asked her where she got her ideas for scripts. ‘I’ve gotten three from you in the last five minutes,’ she said.” But the sheer volume of prose she was required to produce obliged her to hire a secretary, to whom she would dictate her stories, and the secretary would type them out; in this fashion she could crank out a 30-minute script in 90 minutes.  In 22 years she wrote more than 3,500 scripts for one show alone. This radio writing she didn’t value much, either; she called it “corny,” but added that she thought corn was underrated. “Everything that happens every day is a corny thing. As for cliches, which are so looked down on by the so-called sophisticates, I am all for them. I think they’re honest. I think that in hours of great extremity, people turn quite simple in their language.” In addition, she was also able to turn out novels; her only nurse novel, the brilliant Surgical Call, was published in 1937.

In 1933 at age 38 she married her third husband, Gerrit Van Deth, a Dutch native who emigrated to the United States in his 20s. The pair were still seen together in public together ten years later, but in the late 1940s a young Brazilian woman 24 years younger than Gerrit was travelling back and forth to the United States under the last name Van Deth, and the two married in 1975, so this third union of Margaret’s likely ended in divorce in the late 1940s. She never married again, and died after a long illness in a nursing home in Valatie, New York, in 1981, when she was 87 years old.