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Connie Converse, Connie Converse was a woman who existed almost entirely outside of public attention for most of her life, and then, after she vanished, became the subject of a quiet and sustained fascination that she never experienced while she was alive. She was born Elizabeth Eaton Converse in 1924 in New Hampshire. By the early 1950s, she had moved to New York City and was living the kind of life that the city offered to creative people who had no particular commercial standing small apartments, odd jobs, a tight circle of friends and intellectuals. She played guitar and sang. She wrote her own songs. She recorded them at home on a reel-to-reel machine belonging to a friend named Gene Deitch. The recordings were made years before the American folk revival transformed that kind of music into a commercial and cultural force. There was no label. There was no manager. There was no release. There was no audience beyond the people who happened to be in the room. She gave occasional informal performances in people's homes. She never pursued a professional music career with any real conviction. By the late 1950s, she had left New York. She spent years living in different parts of the country — working various jobs, staying connected to a small network of people who cared about her, but drifting further from any stable center. Eventually she settled in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she worked for decades as an editor and administrative assistant at the University of Michigan. In August 1974, Connie Converse was fifty years old. She had grown increasingly withdrawn in the years prior. Those who knew her described a woman who had become quieter, more isolated, more convinced that her presence in the world was more of a burden than a contribution. She wrote letters to several of the people she was closest to. The letters were calm and deliberate. She said she felt she had become a weight on those around her. She said she believed it was time to move on.