Her disappearance is a mystery that continues to intrigue Texas literary scholars today.

My First Thirty Years is profoundly human and shockingly candid, a rallying cry that cost its author her career and her freedom.Her story deserves to be heard.Praise for My First Thirty Years:'For almost a century in Texas literary circles, Gertrude Beasley's 1925 memoir has been more a legend than a book.Although her book, My First Thirty Years, addresses this question head-on and has been deemed “one of the finest Texas books of its era,” by Larry McMurtry, author and authority on Texas literature, Beasley’s writing and almost all knowledge of her later life were largely unknown for the greater part of a century. She is undaunted by authority figures but secretly ashamed of her origins and yearns to be loved. With characteristic ferocity, Beasley rejected a life of dependence, persisting in her studies and becoming first a teacher, then a principal, then a college instructor, and finally a foreign correspondent.Along the way, Beasley becomes a strident activist for women's rights, socialism, and sex education, which she sees as key to restoring bodily autonomy to women like those she grew up with. Her mother and sisters braved male objectification and the indignities of poverty, with little if any control over their futures. Though British Nobel Prize winner Bertrand Russell called My First Thirty Years 'truthful, which is illegal' and Larry McMurtry pronounced it the finest Texas book of its era, Beasley's words have been all but inaccessible for almost a century-until now.Beasley penned one of the most brutally honest coming-of-age historical memoirs ever written, one which strips away romantic notions about frontier women's lives at the turn of the 20th century. association with people whom I should never have chosen.'Shortly after its 1925 publication, Gertrude Beasley's ferociously eloquent feminist memoir was banned and she herself disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

'Thirty years ago, I lay in the womb of a woman, conceived in a sexual act of rape, being carried during the prenatal period by an unwilling and rebellious mother, finally bursting from the womb only to be tormented in a family whose members I despised or pitied, and brought into. My First Thirty Years: A Memoir (Trade Paperback / Paperback)īy Beasley, Gertrude Edited by Bennett, Marie Foreword by Bennett, Nina

My first thirty years gertrude beasley