AMERICAN CASSANDRA: THE LIFE OF DOROTHY THOMPSON
"Peter Kurth's
opening description of perhaps the most influential woman journalist of the
century is too good to pass up. 'The Reverend Peter
Thompson's elder daughter, according to family legend, ran away from home for
the first time at the age of three, taking with her some docile, dimly
remembered childhood playmate and her father's buggy umbrella and heading
straight down the line of the Erie Railroad into the open world.' But there you
have Dorothy Thompson in a nutshell: precocious, independent, commanding,
fearless, legendary. … Kurth weaves the public and the
private Thompson together with considerable deftness. The task is made somewhat
easier by the fact that much of his subject's private life was lived in public.
Her romance with Sinclair Lewis (who proposed to her on their first meeting
despite the inconvenience of being already married) was the stuff of which a
John Reed need not have been ashamed. Indeed, the movie "Woman of the
Year," with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, was an explicit satire on
her exploits and notoriety. The fact that she is so little remembered today is
itself a satire on celebrity, because in the interwar years she was one of the
best known women in
"Those who remember Dorothy Thompson
(1893-1961) know she was once married to Sinclair Lewis, and was a journalist
of high influence and repute in her own time.
As Peter Kurth's sensationally good biography
reveals, Thompson was much more: an opinion-maker, international celebrity and
very real power behind several thrones - pushing and nagging the great, the
near-great and the inept to ensure the survival of those humanitarian ideals
for which she tirelessly campaigned and more than once risked her life. Kurth's vividly
detailed and dramatic portrayal of her life fully compensates for the memoirs
she planned but never lived to write. He
shows her at her best and worst and, without insisting, leaves us persuaded
that here was a one-of-a-kind incarnation of energy, honesty and commitment; a
woman we must not forget." --
MUSEUM OF TELEVISION AND
RADIO: DOROTHY THOMPSON
Dorothy
Thompson was one of
the most influential journalists in American history. In the
mid-1930s, having already forged a precedent-shattering career in print as a
reporter, foreign bureau chief, and nationally syndicated columnist, Thompson
went on the radio with her passionate and politically charged commentary. From
1936 to 1945, as the world first balanced on the edge of war then plunged
full-bore into armed conflict, Thompson’s eloquent and well-informed views were
regularly broadcast to millions… The volume of mail sent to Thompson’s office
after one of her radio addresses was so immense it required delivery in special
sacks. In 1939 she made the cover of Time magazine at an NBC mike. The article
said that, after Eleanor Roosevelt, Thompson was “undoubtedly the most
influential” woman in the
"As
far as I can see, I really was put out of
“Security for all, aggression for none – that
is the fundamental thesis of the United Nations. But to make this thesis real one sovereign
right – the right to wage aggressive war – must be banned by all nations, and
an international power must exist to see that the ban is observed. …It does not
require a `world government’ beyond one single world law: a law against aggression and preparation for
aggression.”
AMERICAN CASSANDRA: THE LIFE OF DOROTHY THOMPSON