a biography of the day--dame rebecca west

Rebecca West
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Cicely Isabel Fairfield (21 December 1892–15 March 1983), known by her pen name Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, DBE was an English author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer. A prolific, protean author who wrote in many genres, West was committed to feminist and liberal principles and was one of the foremost public intellectuals of the twentieth century. She reviewed books for The Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the Sunday Telegraph, and the New Republic, and she was a correspondent for The Bookman[disambiguation needed ]. Her major works include Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), on the history and culture of Yugoslavia; A Train of Powder (1955), her coverage of the Nuremberg trials, published originally in The New Yorker; The Meaning of Treason, later The New Meaning of Treason, a study of World War II and Communist traitors; The Return of the Soldier, a modernist World War I novel; and the "Aubrey trilogy" of autobiographical novels, The Fountain Overflows, This Real Night, and Cousin Rosamund. Time called her "indisputably the world's number one woman writer" in 1947. She was made CBE in 1949, and DBE in 1959, in recognition of her outstanding contributions to British letters.


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West established her reputation as an eloquent spokesperson for feminist and socialist causes and as a sharp-witted critic, turning out a staggering number of essays and reviews for The New Republic, New York Herald Tribune, New York American, New Statesman, The Daily Telegraph, and many more newspapers and magazines. George Bernard Shaw said in 1916 that "Rebecca West could handle a pen as brilliantly as ever I could and much more savagely."[7] During the 1920s, West began a lifelong habit of visits to the U.S. to give lectures, meet artists, and get involved in the political scene. There, she befriended CIA founder Allen Dulles, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Ross of The New Yorker , and historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., among many other significant figures of the day. Her lifelong fascination with the United States culminated in 1948 when President Truman presented her with the Women's Press Club Award for Journalism, calling her "the world's best reporter."[7]
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As West grew older, she turned to broader political and social issues, including humankind's propensity to inflict violent injustice on itself. Before and during World War II, West traveled widely, collecting material for books on travel and politics. In 1936-38, she made three trips to Yugoslavia, a country she came to love, seeing it as the nexus of European history since the late Middle Ages. Her non-fiction masterpiece, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is an amalgamation of her impressions from these trips. New York Times reviewer Katherine Woods wrote: "In two almost incredibly full-packed volumes one of the most gifted and searching of modern English novelists and critics has produced not only the magnification and intensification of the travel book form, but, one may say, its apotheosis." West was assigned by Ross' magazine to cover the Nuremberg Trials for The New Yorker, an experience she memorialized in the book A Train of Powder. She also went to South Africa in 1960 to report on Apartheid in a series of articles for the Sunday Times.

She traveled extensively well into old age. In 1966 and 1969, she undertook two long journeys to Mexico, becoming fascinated by the indigenous culture of the country and its mestizo population. She stayed with actor Romney Brent in Mexico City and with Katherine (Kit) Wright, a long-time friend, in Cuernavaca.[8] She collected a large number of travel impressions and wrote tens of thousands of words for a "follow-up" volume to Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, tentatively titled "Survivors in Mexico." The work, however, was never finished, and only saw publication posthumously in 2003. Even into her late 70s, she visited Lebanon, Venice, Monte Carlo, and always went back to the United States.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_West