Gertrude Sanborn

Gertrude Sanborn (1881–1928) was an American essayist, novelist, and children's book author. Sanborn's earliest works, collections of essays, were published by the Four Seas Company, a Boston publishing house that published the works of many important modernist writers such as Gertrude Stein andShe attained some notice for her novel Veiled Aristocrats (1922), published by the African American-owned Associated Publishers, which dealt with race relations more directly than was fashionable at the time. The novel belonged to the genre of "passing" stories, of African Americans passing for white, and featured an interracial romance set partly in Chicago. The novel's title was borrowed in 1932 by pioneer African American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux for his talkie Veiled Aristocrats, a remake of House Behind the Cedars, his 1924 silent film based on the novel by that name by Charles Chesnutt. Micheaux's Veiled Aristocrats also focused on "passing" and interracial relationships, but owed more to its source in Chesnutt than to Sanborn's novel.

In 1920 Sanborn published an optimistic riposte to Mary MacLane's 1917 memoir I, Mary MacLane under the title I, Citizen of Eternity.

Blithesome Jottings: A Diary of Humorous Days (Boston: Four Seas, 1918)

I, Citizen of Eternity: A Diary of Hopeful Days (Boston: Four Seas, 1920)

Toy (New York: Donahue, 1922)

Veiled Aristocrats (Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers, 1922).