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Katharine T. Kinkead | |
|---|---|
| Born | May 18, 1910 Galion, Ohio |
| Died | November 18, 2001 (age 91) Salisbury, Connecticut |
| Education | M.A. 1932 |
| Alma mater | University of Wisconsin-Madison |
| Years active | 1934-1967 |
| Spouse | Eugene Kinkead |
| Children | 4 |
Katharine T. Kinkead was an American author, journalist, and staff writer at The New Yorker magazine for 25 years.
Biography
editKatharine T. Kinkead grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, the daughter of German-American civil engineer Adolf Theobald and teacher Edith Jackson. She graduated with an M.A. in comparative literature from the University of Wisconsin in 1932, and a degree from the Sorbonne University in Paris. In 1934, while a receptionist in a false tooth factory in Ohio, she was offered an editorial position with publisher William Morrow & Co. in New York City for $20 a week. She took the job, married New Yorker writer and editor Eugene Kinkead several years later, and joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 1942.[1]
Writing career
editOne of the first women reporters at The New Yorker, Kinkead pioneered coverage on taboo subjects in the 1940s and 1950s such as unwed mothers, teen runaways, adoption, and New York's innovative Home Term Court for domestic abuse and troubled families, as well as less controversial topics such as the American Feline Society and rose breeding.[2] She maintained she could not write about unwed mothers and runaways until William Shawn succeeded founder Harold Ross as New Yorker editor in 1952 because the brilliant, profane Ross was squeamish about the "bathroom and bedroom stuff".[3] In these pieces, Kinkead focused on people helping people--the social workers, nurses, judges, psychologists, police, charity directors, service program chiefs--who tried to assist frightened expectant young mothers and runaways.
Kinkead also examined political processes in Reporters at Large on the League of Women Voters and American foreign exchange programs, including a federal initiative bringing young sub-Saharan Africans to study in U.S. colleges to introduce them to democracy. Her 1961 book on Yale University, How an Ivy League College Decides on Admissions, (W. W. Norton & Company) was the first to explain the process by which an elite college selects its freshman class, a subject which became a publishing staple. Kinkead's civil rights reportage on the first sit-ins in the U.S., It Doesn't Seem Quick to Me (Desegregating Durham) 1961, the protest movement in the South that eventually desegregated lunch counters in the country and some movie theaters,[4] is anthologized in The '60s: The Story of a Decade, a collection of classic New Yorker articles from the 1960s.
Personal life
editA shy perfectionist and intellectual, Kinkead maintained her career while raising four children. She and husband Eugene were one of several married couples writing for The New Yorker in its formative years.[5] Their Chappaqua, N.Y. home reverberated with the clatter of their typewriters from adjoining studies in the decades before women could serve on juries, own credit cards, enroll in many Ivy League colleges, or use birth control without their husband's consent or co-signature.[6]
Kinkead lived in Chappaqua, New York and Truro, Massachusetts. In her final years, she worked on an unpublished biography of 15th-century feminist poet and queen consort Marguerite of Angouleme, sister of Francis l, King of France.
Bibliography
editBooks
edit- How an Ivy League College Decides on Admissions. W. W. Norton & Company. 1961
- Walk Together, Talk Together: The American Field Service Student Exchange Program. W. W. Norton & Company, 1962
Articles (Partial Selection)
edit- A Cat in Every Home, The Big New Yorker Book of Cats. Random House. 2013
- It Doesn't Seem Quick to Me (Desegregating Durham), The 60s: The Story of A Decade. Modern Library. 2017
- Something to Take Back Home, The New Yorker. January 1, 1964
- A Rose is a Rose is a Rose is a Business, The New Yorker. July 11, 1958
- Runaways, The New Yorker. February 15, 1952
- They Love Mamie in Augusta, McCall’s Magazine. September, 1953
- The Lonely Time, (unwed mothers), The New Yorker. January 20, 1951
- Just Give Us Peace in Our Home, (troubled families), The New Yorker, December 3, 1945
- Miss Latimer and her Kit B., The New Yorker, November 3, 1944
References
edit- ^ The Big New Yorker Book of Cats. New York, N.Y.: Random House. 2013. p. 323. ISBN 978-0-679-64477-4.
- ^ "Katharine T. Kinkead, obituary". Newsday. New York, New York. Associated Press. December 17, 2001. Retrieved September 2, 2024.
- ^ Thurber, James (1959). The Years With Ross (BOMC 1959 ed.). Boston: Little, Brown and Company. p. 12.
- ^ Bernstein, Illana (September 5, 2024). "Lunch Counter Sit in at Woolworth Five & Dime". Durham Civil Rights Map. Retrieved September 5, 2024.
- ^ Harold Ross and wife Jane Grant, the first woman New York Times reporter, co-founded The New Yorker. E.B. White and Katharine White, Lois Long and cartoonist Peter Arno, and Philip and Edith Iglauer Hamburger were also husband and wife teams at The New Yorker in the Ross years.
- ^ LaMotte, Sandee (April 23, 2023). "These women ran an underground abortion network in the 1960s. Here's what they fear might happen today". CNN. Retrieved September 2, 2024.