New book about forgotten Gilded Age journalist details rise of Wichita columnist

It wasn’t until after Zoe Anderson Norris died in 1914 — which the Gilded Age journalist predicted in the last issue of her New York City magazine — that The Wichita Eagle revealed Norris had been the writer of a “snappy gossip column” it had published under a pseudonym some two decades before.

“Wichita was too small a field for such an ambitious spirit,” read The Eagle’s obituary about Norris.

Her column was the start of a prolific writing career that included magazine articles, novels and stories about poverty, corruption, sexism and other social injustices during the Gilded Age in New York City.

More than a century later, writer Eve Kahn is reviving that spirit with her newly published book, “Queen of Bohemia Predicts Own Death: Gilded-Age Journalist Zoe Anderson Norris.” The biography details Norris’ life, which began as a Kentucky belle born into a well-connected but poor family, then migrated to a Wichita society wife and acerbic local columnist, then was reinvented in New York City as a writer and a Queen of Bohemia — a title Norris initially hated but then embraced.

Kahn, who visited Wichita as part of her research into Norris, will give a free talk about the book at 2 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 9, at the Wichita-Sedgwick County Historical Museum. Kahn is a former antiques columnist with the New York Times and continues to contribute articles to the Times and other publications about art, architecture and design.

“I’m really looking forward to my talk to tell people how Zoe lived there and the lens she used to record her experiences,” said Kahn, who noted Norris’ first name is pronounced “Zo,” as in Joe, according to her descendants.

“What really grabbed me about Zoe is that throughout her career, from the time she started writing a vicious gossip column under a pseudonym for The Wichita Eagle, she was unfiltered.

“She defied expectations and defied authority, and she was very confessional. There’s raw stuff about her own life going on in her writing. From the first day that she sat down at the typewriter, that soul baring is so unusual, and by the time she’s publishing her own magazine, it’s literally like a contemporary blog,” Kahn said.

Kahn was first introduced to Norris in 2018, when she and other members of the Grolier Club toured the prolific basement archives of historian and neurologist Steven Lomazow, who has collected decades and decades of American periodicals. The Grolier Club is a museum, library and bibliophile society in New York.

Lomazow handed Kahn a stack of Norris’ magazines, East Side, that she had produced at her Manhattan apartment from 1909 to her death in 1914, Kahn writes in the biography. He also shared that he “had long been intrigued by Zoe, an underrated innovator.”

That set off Kahn’s deep-dive research into the life of a trailblazing journalist who had fallen into obscurity.

Norris initially came to Kansas in the 1870s, when her widowed mother and siblings homesteaded near Ellsworth. By 1887, Norris was living in Wichita, where her first husband, Spencer, ran a grocery store near Main and Douglas.

The family lived on Market, right next to Lewis Academy, where Norris taught art for a few semesters. One of her students included Victor Murdock, the son of Eagle founder and publisher Marshall Murdock.

Jami Frazer Tracy, the collections curator with the Wichita-Sedgwick County Historical Society, unearthed photos related to Norris’ life in Wichita that are reproduced in the book, including photos of Spencer Norris seated on a wagon, the front of his grocery store, and the family’s home next to Lewis Academy.

“The way it’s all come together has been exciting for us. Anytime we can highlight someone from Wichita who made a significant difference in the world that no one has heard about is exciting,” said Tracy, who said she first heard of Norris when Kahn contacted her.

Norris, considered a society wife at the time, and her family were often written about in the newspapers, in large part because of Spencer’s standing as an early business owner. Published accounts provided details on how Norris decorated their home and how their pets lived.

Kahn’s 2022 research visit to Wichita included stops at Maple Grove Cemetery, where Spencer is buried, the auditorium at Friends University (then known as Garfield University), where Norris and her daughter performed piano concerts, the old Sedgwick County Courthouse (where the Norrises got their divorce) and other sites.

In her writing, Norris never really stopped skewering prominent figures, like she had started in Wichita, where she wrote cheekily about pillars of the Hypatia Club, known for its cultural and civic projects, which denied her membership. Likely due to her husband squandering the store’s profits on his mistress, she often wrote about philanderers and warned women about their choice of husbands.

She even lamented that bartenders in Wichita couldn’t come up with a decent cocktail because women temperance activists kept “weeping and wailing” and suggested that the women may have brought on their marital problems by being desperate enough to marry alcoholics.

In New York City, she continued making fun of society clubs and formed her own social group called the Ragged Edge Klub, where the membership qualifications were to simply show up — and pay for dinner — at whichever restaurant Norris hosted club dinners. Club members, known as Ragged Edgers, gained notoriety for dancing between courses.

Norris’ death in 1914 was well-publicized in newspapers across the country, in large part because Norris had written about a premonition she’d had about her own death in the last issue of her East Side magazine. She died of heart failure on Feb. 13, after a Ragged Edger Klub dinner.

Kahn’s book was published by Fordham University Press and released in September. Copies of the 304-page book, which retails for $29.95, are available at Watermark Books.

Author talk: ‘Queen of Bohemia Predicts Own Death: Gilded-Age Journalist Zoe Anderson Norris’

What: Talk by author Eve Kahn, a former New York Times columnist, about the trailblazing journalist who got her start with The Wichita Eagle before documenting Gilded Age injustices in New York City.

When: 2-4 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 9

Where: Second floor, DeVore Auditorium, Wichita-Sedgwick County Historical Museum

Admission: Free

More info: 316-265-9314, wichitahistory.org

This story was originally published November 2, 2025 at 5:47 AM.