Title: Passionate Pilgrim
Subtitle: The Extraordinary Life of Alma Reed
First published: 1993
Description: A Mexican love song called her "La Peregrina"--The Pilgrim - for Alma Reed's adventures as a journalist and explorer drew her around the globe, to the fabled and mysterious sites of lost civilizations. But her heart remained in the Yucatan, where she would be buried alongside her celebrated murdered lover, the Abraham Lincoln of Mexico. This is the first biography ever to recount Reed's remarkable story - as dramatic and romantic as the chronicles of Isak Dinesen and Beryl Markham. Born in the gold-rush boomtown of San Francisco in 1889, Reed shocked her family by determining to become a writer. In an era when most women's vocation was marriage, she got a job at the San Francisco Call. It was a "woman's beat" - writing feature stories on the poor under the byline Mrs. Goodfellow - but Reed used it to jog the public conscience, forcing the state to spare a Mexican boy and to reform its laws on capital punishment.

That campaign won her a tour of Mexico, where she would meet a lifelong friend, the famed muralist Jose Clemente Orozco, and a lifelong love, the Yucatan governor Felipe Carrillo Puerto. In Mexico she also found a new passion - archaeology - while breaking the story of the discovery of the Mayan treasures at Chichen Itza for the New York Times. Later, she would cover the excavation of Carthage, the home of Hannibal and Dido, the tragic queen of the Aeneid; the search for the River Styx, the portal of death in classical mythology; and other major expeditions. She lived her stories - even setting a deep-sea diving record on the quest for the lost continent of Atlantis. In 1925, the New York Times documented her adventures in a profile calling her "the only archaeological reporter in the world."

In the years between the world wars, Reed's Greenwich Village apartment, nicknamed The Ashram in honor of Mahatma Gandhi, became one of New York's most glittering salons, the gathering place for an international mix of artists and intellectuals devoted to the cause of world peace. But Reed longed to return to Mexico and in 1950 finally realized her dream. There she would join in the exploration of Cozumel, the equivalent of Mecca or Jerusalem, sacred to Ixchel, the Mayan goddess/oracle. Passionate Pilgrim is a biography as vivid and dramatic as fiction, the inspiring account of a life magnificently lived. It should assign Alma Reed her rightful place in the pantheon of twentieth-century heroines.
Subjects: Biography, Women journalists, Women archaeologists, Journalists, Pilgrims and pilgrimages, Fiction, general
Places: United States
People: Alma M. Reed