Elizabeth Janeway

Elizabeth Janeway (October 7, 1913 – January 15, 2005) was an American author and critic.

Born Elizabeth Ames Hall in Brooklyn, New York, her naval architect father and homemaker mother fell on hard times during the Depression, leading her to end her Swarthmore College education and help support the family by creating bargain basement sale slogans (she graduated from Barnard College just a few years later, in 1935).

Intent on becoming an author, Janeway took the same creative writing class again and again to help hone her craft. While working on her first novel, The Walsh Girls, she met and married Eliot Janeway, a much-quoted economist who was to enjoy some influence with presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson (he was known as "Calamity Janeway" for his pessimistic economic forecasts). Elizabeth described Eliot as "the most intelligent man I had ever met."

The Janeways mingled with United States Supreme Court justices and many other luminaries of the day (she recommended Erica Jong's Fear of Flying to Justice William O. Douglas).

At the behest of labor organizer Walter Reuther she aided General Motors workers with their mid-1940s strike against the company.

Janeway finally finished Girls in 1943 while awaiting the birth of her second child; she signed the contract with the publishers while en route to the hospital. A later novel, 1949's The Question of Gregory, attracted attention due to the eerie similarities between Gregory and James Forrestal, a Defense Secretary and acquaintance of the Janeways who committed suicide. Janeway denied any connection between fact and fiction; she said the real theme of the book was "liberals in trouble".

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