Violet Weingarten (1915–1976)

Violet Weingarten, née Brown, was born in San Francisco, California, a daughter of William and Elvira Fleischman Brown. She grew up in New York City and graduated from Cornell University. She worked for more than 15 years as a reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle, where she met her husband, Victor Weingarten, with whom she had two children. The couple would later be named as members of the Communist Party by reporter Winston Burdett in his 1955 testimony before the Senate Internal Security subcommittee. Violet quit the paper in the early 1950s, focusing on her family, and later launched a career as a novelist. Her debut novel, Mrs. Beneker, published in 1967, won critical and popular acclaim. It was followed by A Loving Wife (1969) and A Woman of Feeling (1972). She also wrote several advice books for parents such as You Can Take Them with You: A Guide to Traveling with Children in Europe (1961), and books for children such as The Nile, Lifeline of Egypt (1964). She was working on her fourth novel, Half a Marriage (1976), when she was first diagnosed with cancer. She began keeping a journal of her struggles with the disease and treatment that was published after her death in 1976 as Intimations of Mortality (1978).