Marion Strobel

A fiction writer, critic, and poet, Marion Strobel was an associate editor of Poetry from 1920 to 1925. The daughter of Charles Louis Strobel, a successful civic engineer, she married the prominent dermatologist James Herbert Mitchell in 1922 and settled with him in Chicago.

Strobel was the author of the poetry collections Once in a Blue Moon (1925) and Lost City (1928). Her work was included in the anthology Modern American Poetry: A Critical Anthology (1930), edited by Louis Untermeyer, and appeared in Poetry in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Harriet Monroe, in a review, noted that “Once In a Blue Moon gives us the modern girl, the modern young woman—the various rainbow colors of her prismatic emotional experience, registered in a technique audaciously personal and felicitous. Her flirtations are here, in all their ephemeral intensity; her friendships, even her athletics; also her observations of characters and situations, presented with irony, compassion, or reverence, but always with a keen sense of drama.”

Strobel remained associated with Poetry for more than 45 years and was acquainted with numerous writers and literary figures, including Sylvia Beach, Louise Bogan, Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Carl Sandberg. She reviewed poetry for the magazine and also published novels: Saturday Afternoon (1930), A Woman of Fashion (1931), Silvia’s in Town (1933), Kiss and Kill (1935), and Ice Before Killing (1943).

Strobel and her husband had two daughters, one of whom was the abstract expressionist painter Joan Mitchell.