Dorothy Thompson

Dorothy Thompson was seven when her mother died, and the stepmother her Methodist-minister father brought in afterward made the house in Lancaster, New York, hard enough to live in that by 14 she was sent to Chicago to be raised by his sisters instead. She put herself through two years at the Lewis Institute, then finished at Syracuse University, graduating cum laude in 1914 with a degree in politics and economics. She worked in New York for the women's suffrage movement and for a time in publicity, then in 1920 sailed for Europe with almost no journalism credentials and started filing stories to whoever would print them.

She talked her way into foreign correspondence in 1920 and by 1927 ran the Berlin bureau of the New York Evening Post, the first woman to head a major American paper's overseas desk. She interviewed Hitler in 1931 and judged him a nobody who would not last — when she published the opposite verdict three years later, the Gestapo gave her 24 hours to leave the country, and she became the first American correspondent expelled from Nazi Germany. From 1936 her column, "On the Record," ran three times a week in more than 170 papers to some ten million readers, and her NBC radio commentary made her, alongside Eleanor Roosevelt, one of the two women Time called most influential in the country.

The woman who spent the 1930s as one of the country's most effective advocates for Jewish refugees and a Jewish homeland reversed herself within a few years of getting one. A 1945 trip to Palestine left her condemning what she called right-wing Zionist terrorism, and a 1950 Commentary article accusing American Zionists of dual loyalty finished the turn. The backlash was immediate: colleagues called her antisemitic, her speaking engagements dried up, and an editor told her flatly that criticizing Israel was close to professional suicide. She kept writing anyway, now on behalf of Palestinian refugees, and lost most of the influence that had made her a household name. Her marriage to novelist Sinclair Lewis, father of her only child, had already ended in divorce in 1942 after fourteen years.

She died in Lisbon on January 30, 1961, at 67, and was buried in Barnard, Vermont, where she and Lewis had once kept a farm together. For decades afterward she was remembered, if at all, as the model for Katharine Hepburn's character in the 1942 film "Woman of the Year" rather than for the reporting that inspired it. The Library of Congress added her 1939 NBC broadcasts on the German invasion of Poland to its National Recording Registry in 2023, and biographers have since worked to separate her two careers — the reporter who read Hitler correctly years ahead of the American press, and the columnist whose late writing on Israel cost her nearly everything she had built.

Dorothy Thompson's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The New Russia book
  Reporting from the early Soviet Union 1928
• I Saw Hitler! book
  Her account of interviewing him in Munich the year before 1932
• Refugees: Anarchy or Organization? book
  Argued for a coordinated Western response to the refugee crisis 1938
• On the Record other
  Syndicated column, read by roughly ten million people a week 1936
• Let the Record Speak book
  A collection of her columns 1939

• July 9, 1893 aged 0 Born in Lancaster, New York
• 1908 aged ~15 Sent to Chicago to live with her aunts Her mother had died when she was seven, and the household after her father remarried had grown difficult.
• 1914 aged ~21 Graduates Syracuse University cum laude
• August 12, 1920 aged 27 Interviews Irish hunger striker Terence MacSwiney days before his arrest The assignment launched her career as a foreign correspondent.
• 1927 aged ~34 Becomes Berlin bureau chief for the New York Evening Post The first woman to head a major American paper's overseas bureau.
• 1931 aged ~38 Interviews Adolf Hitler in Munich
• August 25, 1934 aged 41 Expelled from Nazi Germany with 24 hours' notice
• 1936 aged ~43 Begins the column "On the Record" Syndicated to more than 170 papers and read by roughly ten million people.
• January 30, 1961 aged 67 Dies in Lisbon, Portugal, at 67

• Sinclair Lewis 1885–1951
  First American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, whose satirical novels critiqued American capitalism. married to
• Eleanor Roosevelt 1884–1962
  First Lady and human rights advocate who chaired the UN committee that drafted the Universal Declaration. named alongside her as most influential
• Henry Luce 1898–1967
  Magazine publisher whose Time — Life and Fortune defined mid-century American newsweekly formats. rival press figure
• William Randolph Hearst 1863–1951
  Publisher whose sensational newspapers and national media empire wielded immense cultural and political power. early employer