Kimbrough, Emily

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KIMBROUGH, Emily

Born 23 October 1899, Muncie, Indiana

Daughter of Hal C. and Charlotte Wiles Kimbrough; married John Wrench, 1926 (divorced); children: two daughters

Emily Kimbrough graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1921, studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, and in 1923 began a career in advertising copywriting for Marshall Field & Co. that was to lead, four years later, to the managing editorship of the Ladies' Home Journal, a position she held until 1929. In 1929 she gave birth to twin daughters; she was divorced after only several years of marriage. By 1934 Kimbrough's articles had begun to appear in various national magazines, including Country Life, House and Garden, Travel, Readers' Digest, and Saturday Review of Literature. Even a reader of Parents' magazine would have come across her down-to-earth advice about raising twins. By 1968 she had devoted herself to accounts of her frequent travels to Europe and around America.

Emily Kimbrough used to be a household name. "Oh, I LOVED Our Hearts Were Young and Gay " is the inevitable cry of almost anyone old enough to read in 1942. Kimbrough's first and most famous work, written jointly with Cornelia Otis Skinner, was a chronicle of their 19th summer, spent in Europe contracting measles on an ocean liner, overnighting in an unsuspected brothel, lunching at the Ritz in Paris, and generally charming one continent with their exploits and another with the reminiscences of them. Kimbrough's next volume, We Followed Our Hearts to Hollywood (1943), describes the summer she and Skinner spent writing a film script for Our Hearts.

Amusement and satisfaction remain with the reader of any of Kimbrough's subsequent books, which followed Our Hearts Were Young and Gay in rapid succession. At one time, Kimbrough's travel books were standard guides to England, Italy, Portugal, Greece, France, and Ireland; that they have fallen out of currency is our loss. Full of Michelin-type restaurant and hotel lore, news of vistas and sights far beyond the guidebooks, and chatty stories of the people behind the walls and doors forming the boundaries of most tourists' experiences, they were the guiding tour lights of an entire generation. Kimbrough does more than recount the sights seen or merely detail the humorous adventures of four middle-aged women who "no speaka da language"—she takes the reader into the atmosphere of the places she visits, and throughout she provides the reader with the most intimate historical details.

But it is not only for her travel books that Kimbrough deserves to be remembered. Through Charley's Door (1952) is an intimate biography of Marshall Field & Co. and takes the reader to the heart of Chicago's venerable department store. Equally good are her stories of her childhood. How Dear to My Heart (1944, reissued most recently in 1991) introduces six-year-old Emily about to begin school. The innocence and imagination of childhood are recreated in this story of her extended family (including Indiana Senator Charles M. Kimbrough), of the birth of her baby brother, and of her growing understanding of the world. In The Innocents from Indiana (1950), 11-year-old Emily moves from Muncie to Chicago and learns to love the big city in a series of adventures that includes playing catch unawares with Douglas Fairbanks and driving around and around the block in an electric car that cannot be stopped because its clutch is stuck. In Now and Then (1972), Kimbrough goes back, through her twins' childhood experiences, to more of her own. These delightful, low-key books, reminiscent of James Thurber, should be included among adolescent reading selections, for they reproduce the puzzlement and triumph of a child growing into herself.

Kimbrough's writing has a simplicity and directness that immediately attracts. Her own naive pleasure at what she has seen, heard, and experienced is communicated directly to the reader. Of course, such simplicity dates the travel books; they could hardly be written in these days of jet travel, inflation, and mass education. It is for this reason that Kimbrough is an important mid-20th-century writer, for she manages to reproduce the wonderment of which the American, particularly the sophisticated American matron, is no longer capable.

In addition to a sharp sense of the times, Kimbrough's books present a great deal of information, even if much of it is dated, that provides the sort of rich historical background lately recognized in the writings of such regionalists as Jewett and Chopin. Kimbrough's readers can hardly help but experience an otherwise unrecapturable past. Each book ends before we want it to and dances around the edges of our memories. It is little wonder Our Hearts Were Young and Gay (most recently reprinted in 1983), remains beloved to this day.

Other Works:

Forty Plus and Fancy Free (1954). So Near and Yet So Far (1955). Water, Water Everywhere (1956). And a Right Good Crew (1958). Pleasure by the Busload (1961). Forever Old,Forever New (1964). Floating Island (1968, reissued 1984). Time Enough (1974). Better Than Oceans (1976).