ADDRESS: 416 Highland Road

DATE COMPLETED: 1930

STYLE: English Cottage Revival

ARCHITECT: Lowe & Speer

“Now, after fifteen years of writing, I have enough to live on simply,” wrote novelist and journalist Maude Radford Warren (1875-1934) to Saturday Evening Post editor Horace Lorimer in about 1917-1918. “This means that I can afford to put all the time I need on incubating ideas for fiction, without the nagging necessity of doing the work too hastily, or pushing it aside for a pot-boiler. And I hope it also means that during the next fifteen years I am going to have a second blooming, and write stories for the Post that will put me higher in your scale of excellence than I have so far deserved to be.”

Warren was writing to Lorimer from her residence in Ithaca, where she lived with the family of her best friend, Harriet Crandall Davenport (1871-1922), and Harriet’s husband, Herbert J. Davenport (1861-1931). The Davenports had moved to Ithaca in 1916, when economist Herbert Davenport had assumed a professorship at Cornell University. Warren was godmother to the Davenport’s two sons, and she helped care for the boy after their mother’s death in 1922.

The next fifteen years were indeed a “second blooming” for the trailblazing World War I correspondent, who covered the war and its aftermath from 1915 to 1919. The Canadian-born war writer had an academic and not a journalism background. She received degrees in English literature and composition from the University of Chicago, where she also taught those subjects for more than ten years. Her first article was accepted for publication in about 1901, and Warren quickly became a regular contributor of non-fiction articles, stories, and serialized novellas to such prominent publications as the Saturday Evening Post, New York Times, Harpers Magazine, and the Ladies Home Journal.

The Saturday Evening Post hired Warren to cover World War I after it began in 1914. Her volunteer job as a mobile canteen worker with the YMCA in 1918 took her close to the front lines, and her reporting about French battles conveyed a first-hand perspective of how the war affected soldiers and French civilians to Saturday Evening Post readers.

For her “service under fire,” Warren received an honorary commission as a private and then, six months later, as a major in the 117th Field Signal Battalion of the Rainbow Division, one of only four women to receive such a citation from a divisional commander.

Warren’s observations during World War I and after wove through much of her writing. The White Flame of France, published in 1918, described her travels through England and France during the war. Warren’s March 1918 short story, “The Road Through the Dark,” dramatized the early years of the conflict from the perspective of a young woman in peril after the German invasion of France. The Metropolitan magazine story was quickly adapted into film and released in early December 1918.

Warren’s best-selling novel, The House of Youth (1923), depicted the aftereffects of World War I on a group of privileged young people. It focused on young Jazz-Age heroine Corinna Endicott and three generations of her upper class but financially floundering family. Major producer Thomas Ince’s Regal Pictures adapted The House of Youth into a silent film and invested in a major publicity campaign for the film’s release in October 1924. It starred young starlet Jacqueline Logan as a “modern girl sport enough to know when she’s beaten and game enough to conquer the follies of her youthfulness.”

The English Cottage Revival-style home at 416 Highland Road was built for Warren in 1930, after Herbert Davenport sold the 216 Overlook Road residence at which Warren had lived. It was designed by Chicago-area architectural firm Lowe & Speer. Sadly, Warren lived at the Cayuga Heights residence for only four years, until her death in 1934, at age 59. In her will, she requested burial at Pleasant Grove Cemetery next to her best friend Harriet Davenport.