49 Facts About Theodora Kroeber

Theodora Kroeber was an American writer and anthropologist, best known for her accounts of several Native Californian cultures.

Theodora Kroeber attended the University of California, Berkeley, for her undergraduate studies, graduating with a major in psychology in 1919, and received a master's degree from the same institution in 1920.

Theodora Kroeber met anthropologist Alfred Louis Kroeber during her studies, and married him in 1926.

One of her two children with Kroeber was the writer Ursula K Le Guin.

The Kroebers traveled together to many of Alfred's field sites, including an archaeological dig in Peru, where Theodora worked cataloging specimens.

Theodora Kroeber began writing professionally late in her life, after her children had grown up.

Theodora Kroeber published The Inland Whale, a collection of translated Native Californian narratives in 1959.

Two years later she published Ishi in Two Worlds, an account of Ishi, the last member of the Yahi people of Northern California, whom Alfred Theodora Kroeber had befriended and studied between 1911 and 1916.

Nine years after Alfred's death in 1960, Theodora Kroeber married artist John Quinn.

Theodora Kroeber published several other works in her later years, including a collaboration with her daughter Ursula and a biography of Alfred Theodora Kroeber.

Theodora Kroeber served as a regent of the University of California for a year before her death in 1979.

Theodora Kroeber has been described as having influenced her husband's anthropological work, and as having inspired interest in indigenous culture through Ishi in Two Worlds.

Theodora Kroeber Covel Kracaw was born on March 24,1897, in Denver, Colorado, and lived there for her first four years.

Theodora Kroeber grew up in the mining town of Telluride, where her parents, Phebe Jane and Charles Emmett Kracaw, owned a general store.

Theodora Kroeber was the youngest of three Kracaw children; she had two brothers, five and ten years older than she was.

Theodora Kroeber, who described herself as a shy and introverted person, said her childhood was happy.

Theodora Kroeber considered majoring in economics or English literature before deciding on psychology.

Theodora Kroeber made lifelong friends during her undergraduate years, including Jean Macfarlane, whose interest in psychology drove Kracaw to select that discipline for her major.

Theodora Kroeber volunteered as a probation officer and was required to meet and report on the families she was studying.

Theodora Kroeber later wrote that she struggled to be objective in writing about these families.

Theodora Kroeber took a course on symbolism with Robert Lowie.

Alfred, 21 years older than Theodora Kroeber, had been previously married; his wife had died of tuberculosis in 1913.

Theodora Kroeber accompanied Alfred on another trip to Peru in 1942 and other trips studying the Yurok and Mohave peoples, including to the Klamath River.

Theodora Kroeber drew on these experiences in her 1968 book Almost Ancestors.

Theodora Kroeber began writing seriously after her husband had retired and her children were all grown, at approximately the same time that Ursula began writing professionally.

Between 1955 and 1956, a year the Kroebers spent at Stanford University, Theodora wrote a novel about Telluride.

One reviewer said Theodora Kroeber had made the legends accessible to a general audience by "translating freely in her own sensitive, almost lyrical style".

Theodora Kroeber spent 1960 and 1961 exploring the literature about Ishi, the last known member of the Yahi people, who had been found starving in Oroville, California, in 1911.

Theodora Kroeber undertook to write an account of his life, believing that Alfred could not bring himself to do so.

Theodora Kroeber released a version of the story for children in 1964 titled Ishi: Last of His Tribe.

Theodora Kroeber found this version even harder to write, as she struggled to present death to an audience largely shielded from it.

The book generally received high praise upon publication: one reviewer said Theodora Kroeber had a talent for "making us part of a life we never took part in".

Pascal nonetheless argued that the narrative's goal was one of assimilation, and said it was "colonizing 'Ishi' in the name of American culture", and Clifford criticized the implicit assumption that coming into the care of Alfred Theodora Kroeber was the best outcome for Ishi.

Clifford wrote that the account of Ishi's life in San Francisco was written with "skill and compassion", and added that "[w]ith a generous appreciation of human complexity and an eye for the telling detail, [Theodora Kroeber] created a masterpiece".

Theodora Kroeber published two papers in 1969, "Shropshire Revisited" and "Life Against Death in English Poetry: A Method of Stylistic Definition", which she had written previously with Alfred.

Grace Buzaljko, editor for the UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology and subsequently author of a short biography of Theodora, described both Kroebers as "superb stylists", Theodora having an inclination towards the "personal and intense", which made her anthropological writing accessible and enjoyable for a wide audience.

Theodora Kroeber edited Alfred's An Anthropologist Looks at History, wrote the forewords to two collections of Alfred's writings which were unpublished until after his death, Yurok Myths and Karok Myths, and collaborated with her daughter on Tillai and Tylissos, a poetry collection released in 1979.

Theodora Kroeber wrote a biography of her husband titled Alfred Kroeber: A Personal Configuration, published in 1970 by the University of California Press.

Theodora Kroeber published several other works in the years that followed, including a short story and two novels along with her anthropological writings.

On December 14,1969, Theodora Kroeber married John Quinn, who was working at the time for the Sierra Club.

Theodora Kroeber reflected on the impact of age gaps within marriage in a 1976 essay, using her own experience of having been much younger than her second husband and older than her third husband.

Ten years later, when Theodora Kroeber's health was declining, Quinn encouraged her to write a short autobiography, which was printed privately after her death.

Theodora Kroeber described her political views as those of an "old thirties liberal".

Theodora Kroeber was a lifelong supporter of the Democratic Party and a participant in peace rallies in her final years.

Theodora Kroeber held the position for a year before she resigned, stating that the position was exhausting her.

Elsasser wrote that Theodora Kroeber did not have an inclination for "any discipline that stressed dry prose or statistics", and notes that it was not clear whether she wished to pursue a career in academia.

Theodora Kroeber said she had no ambition "in the public sense of ambition", and expressed no dissatisfaction at having left her graduate work.

Critics wrote of The Inland Whale that Theodora Kroeber had broken ground in getting oral traditions recognized for their literary worth.

Buzaljko's 1989 biography of Theodora Kroeber stated that her "great strength was as an interpreter of one culture to another", going on to say that through her writing she demonstrated the connections between the history of California's indigenous people and modern society.