318. Emily Hahn — No Hurry to Get Home with Julia Cooke

From bushwhacking through the Congo to smoking opium in Shanghai, Emily “Mickey” Hahn turned her need for adventure into captivating copy for The New Yorker, which published her vivid, first-person dispatches over the span of 60 years. Hahn also wrote more than 50 books and became a household name in America following her bestselling 1944 memoir China to Me. Author Julia Cooke joins us to discuss how Mickey’s unapologetic ambitions – (“Nobody told me not to go,” she once quipped) – shaped a brand of voice-driven reporting decades before the “new journalists” of the 1960s got credit for the style.

Mentioned in this episode:

Starry and Restless: Three Women Who Changed Work, Writing and the World by Julia Cooke

Come Fly The World: The Jet-Age Story of the Women on Pan Am by Julia Cooke

No Hurry to Get Home by Emily Hahn

Congo Solo: Misadventures Two Degrees North by Emily Hahn

China To Me: A Partial Biography by Emily Hahn

Mr. Pan by Emily Hahn

The Soong Sisters by Emily Hahn

A Degree of Prudery: A Biography of Fanny Burney by Emily Hahn

Mabel: A Biography of Mabel Dodge Luhan by Emiy Hahn

Affair by Emily Hahn

Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 30 on Martha Gellhorn