Papers of Marion Osborne Graves Code, 1953-1961 (inclusive), 1953-1955 (bulk)

Marion Osborne Graves Code was born in 1896 in Boston, Massachusetts, and for her first 20 years lived in Cambridge near Harvard University. Most of her friends were associated with Harvard or generally with the academic and artistic worlds. Code's mother was an accomplished singer and piano player; discouraged by her family from pursuing a career in "light" opera (her voice was not "big" enough for "grand" opera), she spent most of her life as an interior decorator, doing business mainly in New York, St. Louis and Paris. Code's father was an architect, ceramic engineer, and manufacturer of vases and tiles. In Code's youth, the family was quite wealthy, but lost most of its money through unfortunate investments; although luxuries and the arts were taken for granted, the family was usually in debt. Code was educated in Cambridge private schools: Buckingham School, the Cambridge School for Girls, and Radcliffe College. She graduated from Radcliffe cum laude in 1918.

Code's work as a Red Cross volunteer in Boston during World War I resulted in a life-long horror of war; for many years she worked with the War Resister's League in New York and Philadelphia.

After the war, Code married a Harvard classmate, Grant Code, a freelance writer, poet and critic who taught at Harvard for eight years and was an officer of several art institutions. Like the Graves family, the Codes were always in debt and devoted to the arts they could not afford.

Code's jobs, most of them editorial or secretarial, included work in General Hugh Johnson's office at the National Recovery Administration (NRA) during the early years of the Roosevelt administration. She also did some nightclub and stage work, and sang in choruses and choirs.

When the Code's one son was killed in a railroad accident at the age of 15, Code moved to Philadelphia; she and Grant Code, who remained in New York, corresponded and visited back and forth. Code attended the lectures of Swami Yatiswarananda, and helped edit his lectures. The Swami returned to India, and wrote Code asking her to help him write a book. Code had just received a small inheritance, and decided to go to India to search for the spiritual values she found lacking in the western world.