Nebraska Authors

After beginning her career as a newspaper reporter in Denver and Chicago, Francis Maule became an influential copywriter and editor of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in New York.

Her father was John Penrose Maule, prosecuting attorney of Fillmore County, Nebraska. When Frances was around eight years old, the Family came to Lincoln, where Mr. Maule successively became city attorney and judge. Francis was familiar with Chancellor Canfield and Lt. John Pershing while attending the University. After settling in New York City Francis wrote the scripts for the vocational guidance programs of Columbia's School of Air (15 minute dramatic sketches on radio), and lectured on vocational problems before schools, colleges, women's clubs and organizations. She edited the National American Woman Suffrage Association's so-called Blue Book, also known as The Woman Suffrage Yearbook (eg., 1917). She is credited as script writer and for playing herself in the 1912 film short "Votes for Women." Francis worked as a copy writer for the J. Walter Thompson company, an iconic advertising agency, from 1920 to 1929. In 1929-1930 she worked as a script writer for the Judson Radio Program, a precursor of CBS.

She and her husband joined the Helicon Home Colony, an experimental utopian community founded by writer Upton Sinclair, in 1907 and lived there for four months until a fire destroyed the Colony and all their possessions.

Francis was long separated from her husband, Swedish-American literary critic, Edwin Bjorkman (1866-1951). Edwin Bjorkman was director of the North Carolina Federal Writers Project in the 1930s, and his papers are at the University of North Carolina. Francis was married to him from 1906 through about 1920, and some of her letters are found in his papers. Digitized versions of those letters are available from the U-NC archives.

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