Mary Moss

Mary Moss was born in Philadelphia to Dr. William Moss and Mary Noronha.^[2] She was a member an old and prominent Philadelphia Jewish family.^[3] Her great-grandfather was businessman Hyman Levy, in whose fur store John Jacob Astor was an apprentice.^[4] During the American Civil War, her father served as a private soldier in the 16st Pennsylvania Volunteers and as a surgeon in the 6th Pennsylvania Cavalry Regiment.^[5][6] She was educated at a private school in Chestnut Hill.^[7]

In 1900 Moss began writing for the Philadelphia Times and the Philadelphia Press, to which she contributed sketches on the Yiddish theater and other subjects.^[8][9] From 1902 she was a prolific contributor of fiction and essays to various magazines. Her Jewish novel Julian Meldohla appeared in Lippincott's Magazine in 1903. Besides two other novels, Fruit Out of Season (1902) and A Sequence in Hearts (1903),^[10] she contributed short stories and essays to the Atlantic Monthly, McClure's Magazine, The Bookman, Ainslee's Magazine, and Scribner's Magazine.^[11][12]

On her success as an author, Moss said of herself:

"Facts about me are terribly meagre. If I had to live over again and knew this 'fame' was to be thrust upon me I'd mis-spend every Saturday afternoon, so as to have a dark past to draw on. As it is, I've alwavs lived here and never experienced anything in the least noteworthy. I've always had a great curiosity about people in general, and very little about people in particular, the neighbours for instance. Always, without knowing why, I simply had to explore different kinds of people, had to understand how they felt about things, how they lived. It was imperative, though I did not realise why, or feel conscious of any definite aim."^[13]

She died at the Rindone Hospital in Catania, Sicily,^[14] several weeks after falling suddenly ill with a brain tumor.^[1]

• "Why We Read Samuel Richardson". Lippincott's Magazine. 69 (4): 489–491. April 1902.
• "Fruit Out of Season". Lippincott's Monthly Magazine. 70 (418): 385–436. October 1902.
• "Julian Meldohla". Lippincott's Monthly Magazine. 71 (423): 289–350. March 1903.
• "The Evolution of the Trained Nurse". Atlantic Monthly. 91: 587–599. May 1903.
• "Miss Atherton's Wanderjahr". Lippincott's Monthly Magazine. 72 (429): 353–360. September 1903.
• "A Pompadour Angel". McClure's. 21 (5): 490–498. September 1903. Illustrated by May Wilson Preston.
• A Sequence in Hearts. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co. 1903.
• "An Augur in Kimono". Ainslee's Magazine. 13 (1): 99–102. February 1904.
• "The Kangaroos". Scribner's Magazine. 35 (2): 181–188. February 1904. Illustrated by Karl Anderson.
• "Judith Liebestraum". Scribner's Magazine. 36 (1): 46–47. July 1904.
• "Machine-Made Human Beings". Atlantic Monthly. 94: 264–268. August 1904.
• "Marooned". Lippincott's Monthly Magazine. 74 (440): 244–250. August 1904.
• "In the City General". Everybody's Magazine. 11 (3): 348–353. September 1904. Illustrated by Charlotte Weber.
• "Routed at Brandywine". The Reader Magazine. 5 (2): 157–165. January 1905.
• "Significant Tendencies in Current Fiction". Atlantic Monthly. 95: 689–700. May 1905.
• "A Plea for Bores". The Bookman. 21 (6): 641–644. August 1905.
• "Mr. Nickerson's Star". McClure's Magazine. 26 (6): 664–671. April 1906. Illustrated by May Wilson Preston.
• "Shore Leave". Lippincott's Magazine. 78 (2): 206–213. August 1906.
• "The Novels of Thomas Hardy". Atlantic Monthly. 98: 354–367. September 1906.
• "H. Otway Presents". Ainslee's Magazine. 18 (4): 109–117. November 1906.
• "The Jewel of Experience". The Smart Set. 20 (4): 142–147. December 1906.
• The Poet and the Parish. New York: Henry Holt & Co. 1906. hdl:2027/uc2.ark:/13960/t2b855785.
• "An Impression of the Fifties". Putnam's Monthly. 3 (4): 389–401. January 1908.