Readers of the New York Times on February 18th, 1914 might have missed it.

But if you looked closely at the top of page 5, you would have seen it.

A small, two-columed article entitled

Zonoris's funeral, Ragged Edge Club founder had asked for Little Dutch Band. A curious headline,

certainly for us today, the article goes on to share that in a dance hall over a saloon on Avenue A, on New York's

Lower East Side, a funeral service was conducted the previous afternoon for the novelist

and journalist Zoe Anderson Norris. Her body, The Times reports, lay in state in a violet

covered coffin surrounded by very few of her real

relatives, but as many as you could fit of her admirers and friends. And indeed, as she wished,

a small, out-of-tune brass band played to mourners as a memorial to commemorate her life.

The world of early 20th century Lower East Side, New York, was a dirty, unfair, struggle-filled,

poverty-ridden one for many of its inhabitants, including at times for Zoe herself.

It was a world she came to as a committed writer and journalist

from the prairies and farmlands of Kentucky and Kansas.

As she came to Gotham determined to remake her life,

she dedicated her relatively short life

to improving the conditions she saw

with unfiltered passionate rants intended to convey in raw

and soul-bearing detail the real state of the unfortunate who wandered and for some who lived

on the streets of the immigrant-filled east side of the city. Her mission, that was clear,

in all she wrote, was to fight for the poor with her pen. The life and contributions of Zoe

Anderson-Norris have nearly been forgotten today, until now. My guest today, scholar and author Eve M. Kahn, after her show

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