Marjorie Muir

Marjorie Muir Worthington (1900 – February 17, 1976) was an American Broadway performer and writer born in New York City. Her career spanned both the stage and literary worlds, beginning with a Broadway appearance in 1921 in the musical The Last Waltz and extending across several decades of fiction writing, journalism, and biography.

Worthington studied journalism at New York University School of Journalism, and during her time in New York she married her first husband, Carlton Beecher Stetson. Her second marriage was to Lyman Worthington, from whom she was divorced in 1932. That same year, she traveled to Africa alongside the author William Seabrook, who was gathering material for a book. The two had first encountered each other in Paris in 1926, when Worthington relocated there and became part of a circle of expatriate American artists and writers. Among those she and Seabrook socialized with in France were Ford Madox Ford, Sinclair Lewis, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Aldous Huxley, Thomas Mann, and Walter Duranty. Worthington and Seabrook married in 1935, but the marriage ended in divorce in 1941, attributed to his alcoholism and sadism.

Throughout her travels, Worthington maintained an active writing career. She published eleven novels, among them Spider Web (1930), Mrs. Taylor (1932), Scarlet Josephine (1933), Come, My Coach (1935), Manhattan Solo (1937), The House on the Park (1946), and The Enchanted Heart (1950). Her short fiction appeared in publications including Vogue, McCall's, Vanity Fair, Harper's, and Cosmopolitan. Beginning in the 1950s and continuing into the 1960s, she turned to biography, producing three published works: Miss Alcott of Concord (1958), The Immortal Lovers: Heloise and Abelard (1962), and The Strange World of Willie Seabrook (1966), the last of which served as her final major work. She also authored the children's book Bouboukar, Child of the Sahara (1962). Worthington died of cancer on February 17, 1976, at the age of 76.