27 Facts About Dorothy Thompson

Dorothy Celene Thompson was an American journalist and radio broadcaster.

Dorothy Thompson was the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany, in 1934, and was one of the few women news commentators broadcasting on radio during the 1930s.

Dorothy Thompson was born in Lancaster, New York, in 1893, one of three children of Peter and Margaret Thompson.

Dorothy Thompson's siblings were Peter Willard Thompson and Margaret Thompson.

Dorothy Thompson's mother died in April 1901 when Thompson was seven, leaving Peter, a Methodist minister, to raise his children alone.

Shortly after graduation, Dorothy Thompson moved to Buffalo and became involved in the women's suffrage campaign.

Dorothy Thompson boarded a ship to London in June 1920 to become a foreign correspondent.

The interview was sent by INS to American newspapers and led to Dorothy Thompson being appointed Vienna correspondent for the Philadelphia Public Ledger.

Dorothy Thompson resigned in 1927 and, not long after, the New York Evening Post appointed her head of its Berlin bureau in Germany.

In Munich, Dorothy Thompson met and interviewed Adolf Hitler for the first time in 1931.

Dorothy Thompson is inconsequent and voluble, ill poised and insecure.

Dorothy Thompson is the very prototype of the little man.

Dorothy Thompson was given 24 hours to leave the country.

Dorothy Thompson's expulsion received extensive international attention, including a front page story on the New York Times.

In 1936, Dorothy Thompson began to write "On the Record", a New York Herald Tribune newspaper column that was syndicated nationwide.

Dorothy Thompson wrote a monthly column for the Ladies' Home Journal for 24 years, from 1937 to 1961.

When Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Dorothy Thompson went on the air for fifteen consecutive days and nights.

In 1938, Dorothy Thompson championed the cause of a Polish-German Jewish teenager, Herschel Grynszpan, whose assassination of a minor German diplomat, Ernst vom Rath, in Paris, had been used as propaganda to trigger the events of Kristallnacht in Germany by the Nazis.

Dorothy Thompson is read, believed and quoted by millions of women who used to get their political opinions from their husbands, who got them from Walter Lippmann.

Dorothy Thompson had been sympathetic to the Zionist movement since she first travelled to Europe in 1920.

Dorothy Thompson was a keynote speaker at the 1942 Biltmore Conference, and by the war's end, she was regarded as one of the most effective spokespersons for Zionism.

Dorothy Thompson was especially troubled by its escalating terrorism against the British.

Dorothy Thompson wrote a critique of American Zionism in Commentary in 1950, accusing Zionists of dual loyalty.

Dorothy Thompson was married three times, most notably, to her second husband, the Nobel Prize in Literature winner Sinclair Lewis.

Dorothy Thompson met Lewis on July 8,1927, at an afternoon tea at the German Foreign Ministry in Berlin, held by German Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann.

Dorothy Thompson married her third husband, the artist Maxim Kopf, in 1943, and their marriage lasted until Kopf's death in 1958.

Dorothy Thompson died in 1961, at the age of 67, in Lisbon, Portugal, and she is buried in the town cemetery of Barnard, Vermont.