Agnes Smedley was born in Osgood, Missouri, on Feb 23, 1892, the second of five children. In 1901, at the age of nine, she and her family moved to Trinidad, Colorado, where she witnessed many of the events in the 1903–04 coal miners’ strike. Her father worked for several of the coal companies in Colorado and the family moved back and forth across southwestern Colorado. At the age of 17, Smedley took the county teacher’s examination and taught in rural schools near her home for a semester. She returned home when her mother, Sarah, became ill. Sarah died in early 1910.

Later that year, with the help of an aunt, Smedley enrolled in a business school in Greeley, Colorado, after which she worked as a traveling salesperson. Suffering from physical and emotional stress in 1911, Smedley checked into a sanatorium. A family friend in Arizona offered her a place to stay after she was discharged, and from 1911 to 1912 Smedley enrolled in Tempe Normal School. She published her first writings as editor and contributor to the school paper, Tempe Normal Student. At Tempe, she became friends with a woman named Thorberg Brundin and her brother Ernest Brundin. Both Brundins were members of the Socialist Party of America and gave Smedley her first exposure to socialist ideas. When the Brundins left Tempe for San Francisco, they invited Smedley to come stay with them, and in August 1912 Smedley married Ernest. The marriage did not last, however; by 1916, Smedley and her husband divorced and at the beginning of 1917, Smedley moved to New York City.

In March 1918, Smedley was finally arrested by the U.S. Naval Intelligence Bureau. She was indicted for violations of the Espionage Act, first in New York and later in San Francisco, and imprisoned for two months, when she was released on bail through the efforts of friends such as Rodman. Smedley spent the next year and a half fighting the indictments; the New York indictment was dismissed in late 1918, and the government dropped the San Francisco charges in November 1919. Smedley continued working for the next year for Lajpat Rai and on behalf of the Indians who had been indicted in the Hindu–German Conspiracy Trial. She then moved to Germany, where she met the most important Indian leader in Europe, Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, (wrong: Chatto not a communist until 1927) whom she lived with for the next several years in Germany, involved with various left-wing causes. Apart from Chatto, she had also an affair with an Indian student from Oxford, Barkat Ali Mirza, who had been to Berlin in 1926. Smedley suffered a nervous breakdown over the marriage to Chatto and underwent analysis with a major Freudian, Elizabeth Naef. Mirza wanted an Islamic marriage, which she refused. After returning to India he joined the Indian National Congress and became a member of Parliament, twice, for Secunderabad and Warangal, during 1962–1971.

During this same time, Smedley also became involved with a number of Bengali Indian revolutionaries working in the United States, including M. N. Roy and Sailendranath Ghose. Working to overthrow British rule in India, these revolutionaries saw World War I as an opportunity for their cause, and began to cooperate with Germany, which saw in the revolutionaries’ activities an opportunity to distract Britain from the European battlefront. The cooperation between the revolutionaries and Germany became known as the Hindu-German Conspiracy, and the United States government soon took action against the Indians. Roy and Ghose both moved to Mexico, and recruited Smedley to help coordinate the group’s activities in the United States during their absence, including operating a front office for the group and publishing anti-allied propaganda. Most of these activities continued to be funded by Germany. Both American and British military intelligence soon became interested in Smedley’s activities. To avoid surveillance, Smedley changed addresses frequently, moving ten times in the period from May 1917 to March 1918, according to biographer Ruth Price. More important in terms of the Indian Nationalist movement was the work Smedley did in New York for the leading nationalist in exile in New York, Lala Lajpat Rai. Smedley became his secretary and wrote regularly for his influential journal, The People, until his death in 1928. Rai was known as the Lion of the Punjab and Smedley worked with him closely to win support among the leading progressives in New York like Roger Baldwin and Margaret Sanger forming Friends of Freedom for India as an advocacy group that was of lasting importance. Smedley also became a significant local journalist writing about prison conditions for The Call, a socialist daily edited by Robert Minor.

With the support of the Danish writer, Karin Michaelis, in 1928, she finished her autobiographical novel Daughter of Earth. She then left Chattopadhyaya and moved to Shanghai, initially as a correspondent for a liberal German newspaper. Daughter of Earth was published in 1929 to general acclaim.

Smedley had a sexual relationship with Richard Sorge, a Soviet spymaster, while in Shanghai, and probably with Ozaki Hotsumi, a correspondent for the Asahi Shimbun. Later he translated Smedley’s Daughter of Earth into Japanese. She introduced Sorge to Ozaki, who became Sorge’s most important informant in Japan. Maj. Gen. Charles A. Willoughby, who served with Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s chief of intelligence, claimed that Smedley was a member of the anti-Japanese Sorge spy ring. After the war, Smedley threatened to sue Willoughby for making the accusation. Ruth Price, author of the most recent and extensive biography of Smedley, writes that there is very strong evidence in former Soviet archives that Smedley was indeed a spy who engaged in espionage for the Comintern and on behalf of the Soviet Union. Soviet archives also make it clear that Smedley’s connection to the Comintern ended in 1936.

In 1937 she applied for membership in the Chinese Communist Party but was rejected due to Party reservations about her lack of discipline and what it viewed as her excessive independence of mind. Smedley was devastated by this rejection but remained passionately devoted to the Chinese communist cause.

Smedley left Yan’an in 1937; thereafter she organized medical supplies and continued writing. From 1938 to 1941, she visited both Communist and Kuomintang forces in the war zone. It was during her stay with Communist forces in Yan’an, after the Long March, that she conducted extensive interviews with General Zhu De, the basis of her book on him. She was helped later with her book by the actress and writer Wang Ying who was living in the USA during the 1940s.

She relocated to Washington, DC in 1941 to advocate for China and authored several works on China’s revolution. In the mid 1940s she was influential voice in support of the Chinese Communists on public forums and NBC radio. Her 1944 book Battle Hymn of China (Knopf) was widely read and reviewed. During the 1940s she lived at Yaddo, a writer’s colony in upstate New York and lived at times with Edgar Snow. In 1947 she was accused of espionage by General McArthur and followed by the FBI. Feeling pressure, she left the U.S. in the fall of 1949. She died in the UK in 1950 after surgery for an ulcer.

Her ashes were buried at the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery in Beijing in 1951.

Smedley’s final book, a biography of Zhu De, was incomplete at the time of her death. It was published in 1956.