Vanished

I read a really fascinating story today about a young woman named Barbara Follett.  She was a published and accomplished author at the age of 13 (in the mid-1920s).  She was hailed by the New York Times and H.L. Mencken for her extraordinary talent and "almost unbearably beautiful" style of writing.  She would have likely had an amazing career if it were not for the misfortunes that fell upon her as she entered her twenties.  The abandonment of her father and the immediate need to quit school in order to work to support her mother meant she had to postpone her dreams of writing.  In 1939, she walked out after a nasty quarrel with her husband and vanished.  She was never seen or heard from again and her body was never found.  She was 26.

Here is an excerpt from a letter she wrote a friend about her heartache:

“My dreams are going through their death flurries,” she wrote that June. “I thought they were all safely buried, but sometimes they stir in their grave, making my heartstrings twinge. I mean no particular dream, you understand, but the whole radiant flock of them together—with their rainbow wings, iridescent, bright, soaring, glorious, sublime. They are dying before the steel javelins and arrows of a world of Time and Money.”