Fortune Made His Sword by Martha Rofheart

In 1940 the Ashcan School artist, John Sloan painted four portraits of her 'Lady From Louisville', 'Blue Eyed Girl' and 'Miss Jones' are all in the collection of the Delaware Art Museum, 'Dramatics' also known as 'Portrait of a Lady in Red', was sold at auction in 1984 and is in a private collection. Career as a model and actress Īfter moving to New York City, she became a model with the Harry Conover agency. While attending college, she wrote to Lynn Fontanne of the acting couple The Lunts, and was invited by Miss Fontanne to audition in New York for their newly formed repertory theatre company. She won a scholarship to the University of Cincinnati's Drama School, the College-Conservatory of Music, which she attended for two years. Martha Jane attended the Louisville Public Schools, first at the Montgomery Street School through sixth grade, and then at Western Middle School, before graduating in 1934 from Shawnee High School (Kentucky), with Honors. While she was still in the first grade, her grandfather would give her a quarter for each poem she wrote growing up she had several poems published in Louisville newspapers and magazines, and at the age of 10, she won a national one-act play contest. Jones, and her grandfather, Evan Jones, were partners in a boiler works factory, C.J.Walton & Son, that employed some of her extended family as boilermakers, including her father, Evan Jones. She grew up in the Portland, Louisville neighborhood, surrounded by a large upper-middle-class extended family, that was spread out along Portland Avenue and nearby streets. When her mother Noreen died in the 1918 flu pandemic, Martha was a year and a half old, and with her young father unable to care for her, she was raised by her paternal grandparents Evan Jones and his wife Elizabeth or Lizzy, who were of Welsh and Scottish extraction. She was born Martha Jane Jones, in Louisville, Kentucky, to Evan Jones and his wife, the former Noreen Sorrell. Martha Rofheart (born Martha Jane Jones, 1917–1990) was an American writer of historical novels, an actress and early in her career, a model.

Fortune Made His Sword by Martha Rofheart