Dorothy Thompson

Dorothy Celene Thompson (9 July 1893 – 30 January 1961) was an American journalist and radio broadcaster, who in 1939 was recognized by Time magazine as the second most influential woman in America next to Eleanor Roosevelt. She is notable as the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany in 1934 and as one of the few women news commentators on radio during the 1930s. She is regarded by some as the "First Lady of American Journalism."

Dorothy Thompson was born in Lancaster, New York, in 1893, one of three children of Peter and Margaret (Grierson) Thompson. Her siblings were Peter Willard Thompson and Margaret Thompson (later Mrs. Howard Wilson). Her mother died when Dorothy was seven (in April 1901), leaving Peter, a Methodist preacher, to raise his children alone. Peter soon remarried, but Dorothy did not get along with his new wife, Elizabeth Abbott Thompson. In 1908, Peter sent Dorothy to Chicago to live with his two sisters to avoid further conflict. Here, she attended Lewis Institute for two years before transferring to Syracuse University as a junior. At Syracuse, she studied politics and economics and graduated with a degree in 1914. Because she had the opportunity to be educated, unlike many women of the time, Thompson felt that she had a social obligation to fight for women's suffrage in the United States, which would become the base of her ardent political beliefs. Shortly after graduation, Thompson moved to Buffalo, New York and became involved in the women's suffrage campaign. She worked there until 1920, when she went abroad to pursue her journalism career.

She was married three times, most famously to second husband and Nobel Prize in literature winner Sinclair Lewis. In 1923 she married her first husband, Hungarian Joseph Bard; they divorced in 1927. Thompson married Lewis in 1928 and acquired a house in Vermont. They had one son, Michael Lewis, born in 1930. The couple divorced in 1942. She married her third husband, the artist Maxim Kopf, in 1945, and they were married until Kopf's death in 1958.

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