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21 Facts About Janet Stevenson

1.

Janet Marshall Stevenson was an American writer, teacher and social activist who wrote in the areas of civil rights, the women's movement, the peace movement, the environment and the arts.

2.

Janet Stevenson published works in multiple fiction and nonfiction genres, and was recipient of several awards.

3.

Janet Stevenson co-authored the successful 1943 Broadway play, Counterattack, which was adapted for the screen.

4.

Janet Stevenson wrote a biography of California Attorney General Robert W Kenny, who had defended the Hollywood Ten before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

5.

Janet Stevenson spent the latter decades of her life in Oregon where she became active in local politics.

6.

Janet Stevenson graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1933 and received an MFA in theater arts from Yale University in 1937.

7.

Janet Stevenson married playwright and screenwriter Philip Edward Stevenson in New York City in 1939.

8.

Besides writing for stage and screen, Janet Stevenson lectured in drama at the University of Southern California from 1951 to 1953, but was fired for her alleged ties to the Communist Party.

9.

Janet Stevenson wrote under the pseudonym Janice Stevens on The Man from Cairo, and was an uncredited co-writer of The Law vs Billy the Kid.

10.

Janet Stevenson was assistant professor of English at Grambling College in Louisiana from 1966 to 1967, and was a lecturer at Portland State University in 1968.

11.

Janet Stevenson served as cultural arts editor of the Chicago Weekly while temporarily living in Chicago in the 1970s.

12.

Janet Stevenson published articles in American Heritage and the Atlantic Monthly among other magazines.

13.

Janet and Philip Stevenson divorced in 1964, and Philip died while traveling in the Soviet Union in 1965.

14.

Janet Stevenson soon settled in Clatsop County, Oregon and made it her home until her death in 2009.

15.

Janet Stevenson resided at various times in Walluski, Hammond and Warrenton, and served two terms as the mayor of Hammond, beginning in 1986.

16.

Janet Stevenson was president of the Oregon Women's Political Caucus for many years and helped found the North Coast chapter of the organization.

17.

Janet Stevenson appealed to the American Association of University Professors, but their decision was still pending when he died later in 1970 in a boating accident on the Columbia River Bar.

18.

Janet Stevenson's last published book, The Slope, is based on episodes from the life of Bethenia Angelina Owens-Adair, the first woman doctor in Oregon.

19.

In 1938, Janet Stevenson won a John Golden Fellowship in playwriting; her fellow recipient that year was Tennessee Williams.

20.

Janet Stevenson won the National Arts of the Theatre Award for "Weep No More" in 1953.

21.

Janet Stevenson's name is included in Portland State University's Walk of the Heroines.