AMERICAN
CASSANDRA: THE LIFE OF DOROTHY THOMPSON
“I know now that
there are things for which I am prepared to die. I am willing to die for political freedom;
for the right to give my loyalty to ideals above a nation and above a class;
for the right to teach my child what I think to be the truth; for the right to
explore such knowledge as my brains can penetrate; for the right to love where
my mind and heart admire, without reference to some dictator's code to tell me
what the national canons on the matter are; for the right to work with others
of like mind; for a society that seems to me becoming to the dignity of the
human race.” – Dorothy Thompson, 1937
"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
"If you're old enough to remember Dorothy Thompson, you know she
was an Inescapable Fact. Her output was like some vast and relentless torrent
with a dozen tributaries feeding into the main stream and back out again. Kurth
beats a path through all this without fear or pause. He somehow imposes a sense
of order on things, despite the odds, and guides us
through the tumultuous complexities of the time-the rise of Nazism in
“As far as I can
see, I was really put out of
"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." --
“Anyone who saw Katharine Hepburn's celebrated performance in `Woman Of
The Year,’ will never forget the image of the brilliant female journalist
rushing, blindly self-absorbed, from typewriter to podium, happily confident
that the people she bowls over are only too grateful to have seen her pass by.
… Kurth has a surprising grasp of Thompson's emotional makeup, strictly
avoiding the kind of supercilious or paternalistic attitude that such a
character invites in male authors. His biography is insightful without being
sentimental, warm without being sycophantic. … Thompson agitated tirelessly to
pull her country into World War II as
“Few columnists have been able to devote themselves to a cause with
such integrity and utter, even obsessive, devotion. Then again, few have found
an evil of the dimensions of Nazism. But in a day of dime-a-dozen pundits
jabbering on the talk shows, Thompson's diligence and influence are worth
recalling. Mr. Kurth's compulsively readable account allows us to re-live an
age and do just that.” -- Wall Street Journal
"An important asset of this big, solid book is author Kurth's
prolific use of Thompson's own words. She left 150 file cases of published and
unpublished writings, her ideas, notes and voluminous letters -- chunks of
private thoughts and musings on her three husbands and her own sexuality one
would have expected her to burn, except that the conflagration, in a more
reticent time, might have required a fire company on hand to douse it. Kurth
has battled through this paper blizzard and emerged with a clear-as-ice-water
picture of a turbulent, complex personality." --
“If I earned my
income from a lead mine, I could demonstrate its gradual exhaustion, but
apparently my head and my nerves are inexhaustible. If the government would just be logical and
apply the Social Security philosophy to the income tax, they wouldn’t have to
worry about my old age at all. They
could take me right off their minds.” --
1938
“It was Miss Thompson's
great personal tragedy that she never met a man who understood her or knew how
to handle her - until now. Peter Kurth, author of the haunting Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson, proves once again that he
is the equal of Stefan Zweig as a biographer of
women. His fairness, his control of his material and his eye for the revealing
quotation are such that he makes us empathize with Miss Thompson even when we
feel like strangling her." -- Florence
King, Washington Times
"Kurth has set out to make "American Cassandra" the
definitive life of Miss Thompson, as she was widely known. And what a life it
was! Her trials and triumphs larger than ordinary reality, Thompson seemed to
live in Technicolor. As the story moves along the reader is drawn into her
passions and private tribulations. In the end, her death becomes a personal
loss." -- Chicago Tribune
“It simply would
not have been like Dorothy Thompson to see an injustice and do nothing to
correct it, and certainly the fear of controversy and defamation would be no
deterrent to her. This book does
posthumous honor to a great American hell-raiser. I hope it leads to a sympathetic remake of Woman of the Year.” -- New York Newsday
“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.”
“For,
believe it or not, there are such things in the world as morality, as
law, as conscience, as a noble concept of humanity, which, once awake, are
stronger than all ideologies.”
“I don’t want to emphasize American unity if
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AMERICAN CASSANDRA is currently -- nay,
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