was fired a few months later in 1942 after background investigation by the FBI found that she wrote that she voted Communist, that she lobbied the U.S. Ambassador to France to get Communist aliens into the U.S., and that she was a "great admirer" of Stalin, and considered Communist Party boss Earl Browder too "timid." During the Alger Hiss-Whittaker Chambers battle, Herbst told the FBI that in the apartment she and Herrmann shared for three months in 1934, she had seen documents taken from government offices by members of the Ware group for transmission to New York. She told Hiss's lawyers that Chambers and Herrmann discussed recruiting Hiss to help them acquire such documents, and that they and Harold Ware all told her in mid-1934 that they were already in touch with Hiss, trying to recruit him for espionage more than six months before Hiss claimed to have met Chambers. In her letters and papers Herbst revealed that she knew Chambers as "an underground agent of the Communist Party known as 'Carl,' responsible for transmission of documents from a sympathetic cell of government employees in Washington, D.C., to Communist authorities in New York,". Ruth Herrmann, widow of Herbst's ex-husband, John Herrmann, told Langer that her late husband was "the man who introduced Chambers to Alger Hiss." Selected works Nothing is Sacred, 1928 Money for Love, 1929 Trexler trilogy: Pity Is Not Enough, 1933 The Executioner Waits, 1934 Rope of Gold, 1939 Behind the Swastika, 1936 Satan's Sergeants, 1941 Somewhere the Tempest Fell, 1947 New Green World, 1954 The Starched Blue Sky of Spain and Other Memoirs, 1991 References Further reading Barbara Wiedemann, Josephine Herbst’s Short Fiction: A Window to Her Life and Times. Susquehanna UP, 1998. . External links Josephine Herbst at The Literary Encyclopedia Josephine Herbst Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 1892 births 1969 deaths 20th-century American women writers American lesbian writers Writers from Iowa Morningside University alumni University of Iowa alumni University of Washington alumni University of California, Berkeley alumni Proletarian literature People from Bucks County, Pennsylvania 20th-century LGBT people