Michael Strange (1890–1950)

Michael Strange was the pen name of Blanche Marie Louise Oelrichs, born in New York City to Charles May Oelrichs and his wife Blanche de Loosey. The family spent summers in Newport, Rhode Island, with many other wealthy and socially prominent clans of the Gilded Age.

In 1910, she married her first husband, Leonard M. Thomas, a diplomat, with whom she had two sons. She became an ardent supporter of women's suffrage and was a member of the Lucy Stone League. She published Miscellaneous Poems, her first collection of poems, in 1916 under the pseudonym Michael Strange, and went on to use the name for all her published works. She and Thomas divorced in 1919 and she remarried to famed actor John Barrymore in 1920. Their daughter Diana Barrymore was born the following year. Strange also wrote plays, including Clair de Lune, based on L'Homme qui rit by Victor Hugo. It was produced on the Broadway stage in 1921, starring her husband and his sister Ethel Barrymore, and was adapted into a 1932 movie of the same name in France.

Strange spent much time in Paris during the next few years while her husband performed abroad. After returning to the USA, she began acting in summer stock and went on lecture tours. Her marriage to John Barrymore ended in 1928 and she married her third husband Harrison Tweed, an attorney, the next year. She had a poetry and music program on New York radio station WOR, eventually with a full orchestra accompanying her readings. In 1940, she met and became involved with writer Margaret Wise Brown, with whom she was associated until her death. They lived together at 10 Gracie Square in Manhattan beginning in 1943. Strange also was a part of the weekly radio show for the America First Committee, the foremost isolationist pressure group in the USA against American entry into World War II. Her other books included Resurrecting Life (1921), Selected Poems (1928), and Who Tells Me True (1940), an autobiography.