Trouble Maker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford with Carla Kaplan

Troublemaker tells the wild and unlikely story of Jessica Mitford, fifth of the six famous Mitford Girls, a British aristocrat-turned-American Communist, famous for exposés like The American Way of Death; this biography brings her astonishing self-transformation to life with a riveting, often hilarious account of trading wealth and status for a life of radical activism.

“Carla Kaplan writes with the flair of a novelist and backs it up with relentless research and keen insight. As infectious, stylish, and hard-hitting as its subject, Troublemaker is the marriage of a fascinating, timely story and a wonderful storyteller. An absolute treasure.”

-Jonathan Eig, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for King: A Life

About the Book

Who could predict that a British aristocrat would so energize American antifascist and civil rights struggles that Time magazine would crown her “Queen of the Muckrakers”? Jessica Mitford, always known as Decca, was brought up by an eccentric English family to marry well and reproduce her wealth and privilege, not to advocate for the rights of others. Her beautiful sisters have been subjects of books and movies dedicated to their naughty, glamorous lives. Decca ran away to America to forge a rebel’s life. As this richly researched book details, Decca broke the Mitford mold. Instead of settling for life as a professional Beauty, she fought fascism in the Spanish Civil War, became an American Communist and pioneered witty, hugely popular journalism, including her 1963 blockbuster The American Way of Death.

Decca dedicated her life to social justice and proved herself an immensely effective ally, but she also injected laughter into all her political work, annoying some activists with her relentless antics but encouraging many others to find joy in the struggle. From famed baby doctor Benjamin Spock to best friend Maya Angelou, her anti-authoritarian irreverence had a profound impact on American culture. Mining extensive, untapped sources, and with nearly fifty new interviews, Kaplan’s passionate biography beautifully illuminates how Decca’s hard-won and self-taught social empathy offers a powerful example of female freedom, the dramatic, novelistic story of an extraordinary woman of her time who is remarkably relevant and resonant today.

About the Author

Carla Kaplan is the Davis Distinguished Professor of American Literature at Northeastern University, where, as the Founding Director of the university’s Humanities Center, she created a conversational hub dedicated to diversity. She has held positions at Yale Univerity, the University of Southern California, Wellesley College, and the University of Illinois, and also teaches writing through arts councils and writers’ centers.

Kaplan’s previous books include Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, the first published collection of a major African American woman’s letters. This melding of biography, cultural history, and correspondence drew on nearly fifty archives and was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award, a New York Times Notable Book, a New York magazine “top five” book of the season, a Book-of-the-Month Club pick, and the subject of feature articles in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times.

Miss Anne in Harlem draws on Kaplan’s thirty years as a white scholar in Black Studies to explore cultural crossovers. Miss Anne in Harlem is the first book to tell the story of a number of spirited white women who crossed race lines viewed as impenetrable to play seminal roles in the great black cultural movement of the early twentieth century that came to be called the Harlem Renaissance.

She is also the author of The Erotics of Talk: Women’s Writing and Feminist Paradigms and the editor of numerous works of African American literature, including Hurston’s long-lost book of folklore, Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-Tales From the Gulf States; Nella Larsen’s Harlem Renaissance novels Passing and Quicksand, and a lost work of the black experience, Dark Symphony, by Elizabeth Laura Adams, as well as occasional pieces for such publications as The Los Angeles Times and The Nation. She lectures widely on literature and culture.

Kaplan has received such academic honors as the Robert D. Klein Award, the Mary L. Cornille Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Wellesley College, the Fannie Hurst Professorship at Washington University, and others, as well as fellowships from The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Culture, the National Endowment for the Humanities “Public Scholar” Program, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the National Humanities Center, the Harry Ransom Center, the Beinecke Library, and elsewhere. In May 2014, on the basis of Miss Anne in Harlem, Carla was elected a Fellow of the Society of American Historians.

Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, Kaplan grew up in Evanston, Illinois, spending summers in Cape Cod and going to camp at Circle Pines Center, one of the nation’s first interracial cooperatives; she lives in Boston and Eastham, Massachusetts.

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