Margaret Elizabeth Sangster, Jr. was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1894 and died in Valatie, New York, October 1981.  Ms Sangster was a writer who began as a columnist and journalist, became an editor and novelist, and wrote poems, articles, short fiction stories, in addition to numerous radio and television scripts.

Early Life / Background

Margaret ElizabethSangster was born to George Munson and Ida May (Demarest) Sangster, and was educated at Miss Townsend’s School in Newark, New Jersey.  She would marry Mr Gerrit Van Deth.

Ms Sangster was named for her prominent grandmother, Margaret Elizabeth (Munson) Sangster (1838-1912), an inspirational writer and poet in the Victorian era.  She was an important part of her granddaughter’s life.  Grandmother Sangster sold her first story to a Presbyterian publication at seventeen; her granddaughter followed suit and became a member of the editorial staff at The Christian Herald at fifteen.

The granddaughter gives an account of an early event when a young Margaret was permitted to attend one of her grandmother’s afternoon tea parties.  “I watched my grandmother pour tea from a silver pot as the great and near great of the turning century talked, plotted stories, and gossiped of literary folk and their foibles.”  When Margaret became old enough to read, she spent many hours reading aloud to her grandmother who, by then, was almost totally blind.

Ms Sangster describes her grandmother as a “semi-amateur writer” whose greatest success came when she found it necessary to make a living.  “She had been married to a widower (a Colonel in the Union Army) who had three little girls.  When her husband disappeared and she was left penniless with his children and her own son (my father) to support, she began to write.  She was the editor of Harper’s Bazaar and Harper’s Young People.  Grandmother Sangster began one of the very first confidential columns and answered hundreds of letters every month.  She also wrote many inspirational poems.”

Professional Works

A significant part of Ms Sangster’s life was her writing.  At fifteen she was a staff writer for The Christian Herald and, at various times, a contributor, a war correspondent, and columnist for the magazine.  As a war correspondent during World War I, the youngest in history, she was sent overseas for The Christian Herald.  Margaret Sangster continued her close association with the magazine by writing (as had her grandmother) for The Herald for the next twenty-five years.  George H. Sandison, editor of The Christian Herald, wrote in the forward of Ms Sangster’s Real People and Dreams, ... her book struck a chord which evoked the admiration of all who were familiar with the literary work of her famous predecessor ... her poems and stories deal with many phases of human life...”

Ms Sangster was a woman of many talents.  She was editor (from 1929-31) of a magazine for young women, Smart Set.  Later she became the editor of two religious juvenile weeklies.  Once radio became a popular medium, she began writing serials.  For three years in the mid-1930s she wrote Hope Alden’s Romance which was sponsored by Tasty Bread, after that she penned Arnold Grimm’s Daughter sponsored by General Mills for eight years, and then Ellen Randolph for Colgate-Palmolive-Peet.  She wrote about six average-size novels a year, in addition to verse and volumes of essays.  Margaret Sangster also wrote a poem a day for a newspaper syndicate for sixteen years, as well as thousands of short stories for national magazines such as Redbook and True Confessions, and contributed to numerous other magazines as well.

Ms Sangster was viewed as an outstanding writer of daytime serials.  Her episodes of My True Story ran from 1943 through the 1950s.  Whispering Streets, a continuing saga, on ABC and CBS from 1952-1960, was a 30-minute daily drama featuring romantic stories narrated by Hope Winslow, a fictitious novelist performed by Gertrude Warner.  Later narrators included Bette Davis and Anne Seymour.

Margaret Sangster had more than two dozen books published.  Friends o’ Mine (1913), Real People and Dreams (1914), Cross Roads (1919), The Island of Faith (novel, 1921), Margaret Sangster’s Scrap Book (1930), Love Lightly (novel, 1932), God and My Garden (1933), The Littlest Orphan and Other Chrismas Stories (1935), Singing on the Road (1936), The Stars Come Close (novel, 1936), Surgical Call (novel, 1937), Reluctant Star (novel, 1940), Out of My Need (1942), and Bible Quiz Book (1944).

Ms Sangster’s output was truly prolific --a woman who wrote at a prodigious pace.  She developed a style that was both disciplined and methodical.  She apportioned her workdays by dictating two to three thousand words per hour, and her three secretaries (and two or three part-time assistants) worked staggered hours.  “It’s all very simple”, she once said.

In Her Own Words

In Out of My Need, Ms Sangster writes  “... my home, my garden, my reaction to prayer ... they have given me the desire and ability to translate my emotions into a common idiom”.  She took comfort in her writings about her garden. “My first garden came to me at a time when I needed a garden desperately.  My heart had been left empty, my hands without employment and my soul tortured by questions I could not answer.  I took up gardening principally because it was something I had never done before, and therefore carried no ache of a shared memory.”  Furthermore, Ms Sangster writes that “the need for comfort is universal ... the desire to be a little less lonely than we are is a desire that touches rich and poor alike.”

Margaret Sangster wrote often of God’s guidance and help.  “Transplanting taught me that a flower which is stunted in one location may grow in another.  When my blossoms multiplied so rapidly and filled my boxes, I uprooted some.  I did this for the greater good of my garden.  The divine plan of God, which at times we resent and fear, seems as apparently ruthless as my method of thinning out a flower box.  Although my method was causal, His can never be.”

Affiliations

 Margaret Sangster was a Congregationalist and a life-long contributor to Foreign Missions.  She was a member of The Christian Herald Children’s Home Board, a member of the Board of the National Arts Club, the Author’s Club, and on the board of the Bowery Mission.