Mildred Aldrich

The Peak of the Load (1918) by Mildred Aldrich (historical)

Mildred Aldrich (November 16, 1853 - February 19, 1928) was an American journalist and writer. *Biography* She was born in 1853 in Providence, Rhode Island. She grew up in Boston, taught at elementary school there and went on into journalism. She wrote for the Boston Home Journal, the Boston Journal and the Boston Herald. She started the short-lived The Mahogany Tree in 1892. In 1898, she moved to France, and, while there, became a friend of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. She worked as a foreign correspondent and translator. Aldrich moved to Huiry, near Paris, in 1914, only months before the outbreak of the First World War. Her house there overlooked the Marne river valley, and her experiences during the First Battle of the Marne, as detailed in her letters to friends in the U. S., constitute her first book, A Hilltop on the Marne (1915). Following the success of that work, Aldrich produced three more collections of her wartime letters. On the Edge of the War Zone (1917) contains letters dating from the aftermath of the Marne battle until the entry of the U. S. into the war, The Peak of the Load (1918) details most of the final year of the war, and When Johnny Comes Marching Home (1919) describes her experiences in the months immediately following the war's end. Aldrich also produced one novel, Told in a French Garden, August 1914 (1916), and in 1926 completed an autobiography entitled Confessions of a Breadwinner, which resides in the collections of the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University, but has never been published. Aldrich received the French Legion of Honor 1922 for her war work and her influence on behalf of the US entry into the war. In February 1928, she suffered a heart attack and died a few days later at the American Hospital in Neuilly. She is buried at the Church of St Denis in Quincy-Voisins.