Bryant was born Anna Louisa Mohan in San Francisco, California. Her father, Hugh Mohan was a coal miner from Pittsburgh, Pa, who made his way west with the Railroad crews. Her mother remarried Sheridan Bryant and Louise took her stepfather's name. The family moved to Nevada where Louise was a student at the University of Nevada. She later moved to the University of Oregon in Eugene. Her Senior thesis was about the "Modoc Indian War" of Southern Oregon and was completed in 1908. Bryant returned to San Francisco to become a journalist after graduation but was soon nudged, for financial reasons, to teach "school" in Salinas, California in her words "in a remote area, forty miles from a train station". She also wrote that "Mexicans and Spaniards are my students". She moved back to Oregon and became involved with the Suffrage Movement in Portland, worked for the Spectator, and married Paul Trillinger.

Bryant met journalist John Reed in Portland, Oregon while he was visiting his family after attending Harvard and moving in "Radical" circles of the Village in New York CIty. Louise moved with him to New York City, and amicably divorced Trillinger several months later. Reed and Bryant together traveled to Russia in 1917 where they witnessed the October Revolution. Both published books about the event, Reed's Ten Days that Shook the World and Bryant's Six Red Months in Russia. Bryant was with Reed when he died of typhus in 1920. He is the only American to be buried at the Kremlin in Moscow.

In a 1920 letter to a friend, Bryant spoke of her typhus-stricken husband’s death in Moscow and how she watched Soviets pass his grave:

“I have been there in the busy afternoon when all Russia hurries by,” she wrote. “Once some of the soldiers came over to the grave. They took off their hats and spoke very reverently: ‘What a good fellow he was!” said one. ‘He came all the way across the world for us. He was one of ours.”’

Louise Bryant continued to work following her second husband's death and became a leading reporter for the Hearst newspaper chain. Recently her "lost works" were recovered from a "basement in Dublin, Ireland" www.louisebryantbook.blogspot.com . They reveal much about her turmultous marriage to William C. Bullitt just three months before her daughter Anne was born in Feb. 1924. Becoming ill with what was diagnosed in 1928 as "Dercum's Disease" and despite several treatments including stays at Dr. Dengler's Sanatorium in Baden Baden, Germany and a few sessions with Sigmund Freud in 1929, Bryant continued efforts to be a wife, mother, and writer.

Her last years were spent fighting for custody of her daughter.

She died on Jan. 6, 1936 of a brain hemorrhage in Paris and is buried in Des Gonards Cemetery in Versailles, France[1].