Judith Merril
| Judith Merril | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born | Judith Josephine Grossman January 21, 1923 Boston, Massachusetts, United States |
| Died | September 12, 1997 (aged 74) Toronto, Ontario, Canada |
| Pen name | Cyril Judd (with C.M. Kornbluth) |
| Occupation | Editor, fiction writer |
| Genre | Science fiction |
| Spouse | Dan Zissman (1940–48; divorced; 1 daughter) Frederik Pohl (1948–52; divorced; 1 daughter) Ann (1960–?) |
Judith Josephine Grossman (January 21, 1923 – September 12, 1997), who took the pen-name Judith Merril about 1945, was an American and then Canadian science fiction writer, editor and political activist, and one of the first women to be widely influential in those roles.
Although Judith Merril's first paid writing was in other genres, in her first few years of writing published science fiction she wrote her three novels (all but the first in collaboration with C.M. Kornbluth) and some stories. Her roughly four decades in that genre also included writing 26 published short stories, and editing a similar number of anthologies.
Merril was born in Boston in 1923 to Ethel and Samuel (Shlomo) Grossman, who were Jewish. Her father committed suicide in 1929 soon after she began to attend school. In 1936, her mother found a job at Bronx House and moved them to the New York City borough of the Bronx. In her mid-teens, Merril pursued Zionism and Marxism. According to Virginia Kidd's introduction to The Best of Judith Merril, Ethel Grossman had been a suffragette, was a founder of the women's Zionist organization Hadassah, and was "a liberated female frustrated at every turn by the world in which she found herself".
In 1939, Judith graduated from Morris High School in the Bronx at 16 and rethought her politics under the influence of the Hitler-Stalin Pact (August 23), shifting to a Trotskyist outlook. She married Dan Zissman the next year, less than four months into a relationship that started when they met at a Trotskyist Fourth of July picnic in Central Park. Their daughter Merril Zissman was born in December 1942. In this period, she also became one of the few female members of the New York City-based group of science fiction writers, editors, artists and fans, the Futurians, which included Kornbluth. The Zissmans separated about 1945; in 1946 Frederik Pohl, another Futurian, began living with her. After her divorce from Zissman became final in 1948, she married Pohl on November 25; they divorced in 1952.
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