Hope Hale Davis, who died on Saturday – just a month short of her 101st birthday – was a magazine editor, semi-regretful ex-communist, and a widely published short story writer who was still on the faculty at Radcliffe at the time of her death.

Her 1993 memoir, “Great Day Coming: A Memoir of the 1930s,” created a sensation for its forthright, insider discussion of communist agitation in New Deal Washington, as well as sex, love, psychotherapy, and a cast of overwrought, semi famous characters.

Davis was in some respects a proto-feminist, for she pretty much made her own way in the world through careers and marriage. Yet she portrayed herself as “a child of the ’20s, when only a man’s word carried the real authority.” She was conflicted. Apropos of Gloria Steinem-style feminism, Davis told the Boston Globe in 1993,”They want to talk about it as if it hadn’t been heard of until the 1960s. Well, there were women organizing for the vote before the first War, women taking part in the sexuality of the ’20s, the social revolutions of the New Deal and women agitating for the violent revolution of Communism, both in the ’30s.”

Hope Hale was born in Iowa, daughter of a schoolteacher and a school superintendent. She left home early and settled at a Washington, D.C., boarding house, living near an older sister. There she met her first husband, a scenery carpenter for a theater company. “I was decorating a Christmas tree,” she told the Globe, “and he came in to the parlor and took one look at me – I was,you see, up on the ladder – and a half an hour later he proposed.” She toured with the theater company and helped paint sets. “In Cleveland he took out after the stage carpenter, a person he actually respected, with a hatchet. He was quite violent.”

Marriage no. 1 having failed, she arrived in New York in the mid-1920s and soon established herself in bohemian society in Greenwich Village. Despite having no college education, she found work writing advertising jingles for cereals (she wrote that her male boss took credit for her work) and then as promotions manager of Life, a humorous weekly magazine that happened to have the same title as Time’s later photogenic sibling. She later founded a magazine called Love Mirror that was sold in department stores.

By 1930 she was earning the princessly salary of $4,000 a year, holding formal dinners for the smart set in her basement apartment, and contributing to the Talk of the Town section of The New Yorker. Already possessed of a keen social conscience, she was proud of publishing romantic stories that included tableaux of rural squalor, including the Harlan County coal strike and the plight of sharecroppers.

In 1932, she married Claud Cockburn, the junior New York correspondent for the Times of London. Cockburn was an ardent Stalinist, and although Davis did not join the Communist Party, she fully partook of his vision of “the revolution that had to come.” Cockburn would soon return to England and found The Week, the notorious radical paper that was suppressed by the government during World War II. Orwell condemned Cockburn in “Homage to Catalonia” for issuing communist propaganda during the Spanish Civil War.

Choking back tears quayside as Cockburn steamed back to England, Davis affected a tough front befitting the vanguard. She confessed in the memoir that she immediately attended several Abbot and Costello films and bawled beneath the din of laughter. She was pregnant and the somewhat caddish Cockburn knew it. “I wanted what a woman has traditionally asked of a lover going off to war – his qualities, his heritage,” Davis wrote. She had dubbed her pregnancy “Project Revolutionary Baby.” Claudia Flanders, as her daughter eventually became, only met her father as an adult, after she moved to Britain. The two became close. Claudia was eventually named to the Order of the British Empire for services to the handicapped.

Throughout her life, Davis would tell admiring stories about Cockburn, even when it discomfited her husbands. “He genuinely tried to be what he once very soberly told me every man should be, ‘un homme serieux,'” she wrote in a letter in the mid-1980s.

Stuck with a baby and little means of support, Davis went to Washington, where she moved into a small cabin near her sister’s home and divorced Cockburn. Soon, Davis found work writing consumer guides for the Agricultural Adjustment Agency. There she met a bright young German immigrant economist, Hermann Brunck, and together they embarked on a love affair that revolved around their membership in the Communist Party. They were married in short order before a disapproving minister who chewed jelly beans as he performed the ceremony.

Davis tithed to the party, and even admitted to doing a bit of spying: “The only thing I ever stole from the Department of Agriculture was the formula for making soybean milk,” she told the Globe. Later, she spoke with distaste of Alger Hiss’s refusal to admit to communist affiliations. “The Washington spectrum ranged only from pink to red at that time,” she wrote to a friend.

Brunck was less comfortable taking orders from the party hierarchy, who apparently wanted him to cozy up to Nazis at the German Embassy. He was prone to depression, which the party seemed to regard as somewhat counterrevolutionary. Brunck was institutionalized, and hung himself with his belt in the hospital.

Always resilient, Davis lastly married husband no. 4, Robert Gorham Davis, another communist, whom she met at a workshop for radical writers in 1939.The two resigned from the party on the eve of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. They were finished with radical politics, although they retained a deep sensitivity to social injustice. In her memoir, Davis wrote of the fight that “indeed must be renewed and renewed as long as people are ill-fed, ill clothed, ill-housed, and brutally tortured. My shame is in the terms of my joining [the communists]: I forfeited my most essential freedom, to think for myself.”

Robert Gorham Davis went on to become professor of English at Smith and at Columbia, and wrote the popular classroom reader “Ten Modern Masters of the Short Story.” Davis settled into the conventional role of faculty wife, and produced two more (presumably less revolutionary) babies.

Davis continued writing, helping support the family with short stories in Redbook and other publications. Her stories, including three early ones from The New Yorker, were collected in “The Dark Way to the Plaza,” in 1968.

The family lived on the Upper West Side and were friendly with the Bernard Malamuds, the Lionel Trillings, and other luminaries on the Columbia scene.

After retiring to Connecticut in the 1970s, the Davises moved to Boston when Davis received a fellowship from Radcliffe to begin work on her memoir, in 1983. She ended up taking a permanent teaching post. Among her topics was how to keep a journal, something she had done religiously all her life.

Her husband having predeceased her, Davis was in recent years especially gratified with the successes of her granddaughters, one a correspondent for the BBC and the other a broadcaster on Air America, as well as that of her daughters Claudia and Lydia, a writer of short stories.