“Out of the Dark,” The Home Magazine of New York,

Zoe Anderson Norris.

“Out of the Dark,” The Home Magazine of New York,

March 1902.

Illustrated by Jack Bryans (Zoe’s second husband).

Home (1893-1902) ran Zoe’s story about an American woman’s cross-Atlantic voyage soon after Zoe returned from Europe by steamship. The heroine, curious about the ship’s workings, explores a furnace room belowdecks and “lost herself in sympathy” for the bedraggled stokers shoveling coal. One young worker dies at her feet, “burned out with the heat of the furnace.” Zoe wrote often about lowly, unseen, vulnerable employees making luxury possible. 

From the Collection of Eve M. Kahn.