Passionate pilgrim : the extraordinary life of Alma Reed, heroine of Mexico, pioneer archaeologist and acclaimed Journalist / Antoinette May

A Mexican love song called her "La Peregrina"- the Pilgrim - for Alma Reed's adventures as a journalist and explorer drew her round the globe, to the fabled sites of lost civilizations. But her heart remained in the Yucatan, where she would be buried alongside her celebrated murdered lover, the Abraham Lincoln of Mexico. This is the 1st biography to recount her remarkable story. Born in the gold-rush boomtown of San Francisco in 1889, Reed shocked her family by determining to become a writer. In an era when a woman's vocation was marriage, she got a job at the San Francisco Call. It was a "woman's beat"-writing feature stories on the poor under the byline Mrs Goodfellow-but Reed used it to jog the public conscience, forcing the state to spare a Mexican boy & to reform its capital punishment laws. That campaign won her a tour of Mexico, where she would meet a lifelong friend, the famed muralist Jose Clemente Orozco, & a lifelong love, the Yucatan governor Felipe Carrillo Puerto. In Mexico she also found a new passion-archeology-while breaking the story of the discovery of the Mayan treasures at Chichen Itza for the NY Times. Later, she would cover the excavation of Carthage, the search for the River Styx & other expeditions. She lived her stories-even setting a deep-sea diving record on the quest for the continent of Atlantis. In 1925, the NY Times documented her adventures in a profile calling her "the only archeological reporter in the world." In the years between the world wars, her Greenwich Village apartment, nicknamed The Ashram in honor of Mahatma Gandhi, became one of the most glittering salons, the gathering place for an international mix of artists & intellectuals devoted to the cause of world peace. But Reed longed to return to Mexico & in 1950 finally realized her dream. There she would join in the exploration of Cozumel, the equivalent of Mecca or Jerusalem, sacred to Ixchel, the Mayan goddess.

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