30 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 Dorothy Thompson.

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

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

Peter soon remarried, but Dorothy Thompson did not get along with his new wife, Elizabeth Abbott Dorothy Thompson.

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

Dorothy Thompson worked there until 1920, when she went abroad to pursue her journalism career.

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

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

Dorothy Thompson is the very prototype of the little man.

Later, when the full force of Nazism had crashed over Europe, Dorothy Thompson was asked to defend her "little man" remarks; it seemed she had underestimated Hitler.

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 writing "On the Record", a New York Herald Tribune newspaper column that was syndicated nationwide.

The column, which Dorothy Thompson wrote three times a week, lasted, uninterrupted, for 22 years.

Dorothy Thompson wrote a monthly column for the Ladies' Home Journal for 24 years ; its topics were far removed from war and politics, focusing on gardening, children, art, and other domestic and women's-interest topics.

Dorothy Thompson began in 1936 and remained with NBC until 1938.

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 in Paris of a minor German diplomat, Ernst vom Rath, had been used as propaganda by the Nazis to trigger the events of Kristallnacht in Germany.

In 1939, Dorothy Thompson was featured on the cover of Time, with an accompanying picture of her speaking into an NBC radio microphone.

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 first setting off for Europe in 1920.

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

Dorothy Thompson eventually concluded that Zionism was a recipe for perpetual war.

Dorothy Thompson was married three times, most famously to second husband and 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 Lewis in 1928 and acquired a house in Vermont.

Dorothy Thompson married her third husband, artist Maxim Kopf, in 1945, and they were married until Kopf's death in 1958.

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