Dorothy Thompson

1893-1961

Journalist, Author

Time magazine said in 1939 that Dorothy Thompson was the most influential women in America next to Eleanor Roosevelt. Christa Winsloe once wrote to Thompson that she was "dearer to me than you know."

Thompson, who was married in 1928 to Nobel Prize-winning novelist Sinclair Lewis, was an irreverent, opinionated and controversial reporter who interviewed Adolf Hitler in 1931. That was long before the war, and she made a number of predictions about the man that proved true, although many laughed at her prediction that Hitler would never come to power in Germany.

By the time her career reached its height, her three-times-per-week newspaper column reached around the world.

Christa Winsloe was one of the women who enter the journalist's life. While Thompson was never comfortable discussing her orientation, Winsloe's love notes to "Dotto" reveal a lot.

"I love you, and I rejoice to know how you care and lover surrounds me. I have slept in your eiderdown, I have drunk your wine, I am using your face cream and wearing your slacks," Winsloe wrote. "It's as though I exist only as a creation of my Dotto."

After living a life that included husbands, lovers both male and female, eight books and countless articles and columns, Thompson asked that her tombstone be inscribed simply, "Dorothy Thompson Kopf -- Writer"

There is something remarkable about a women who was described both as one of the nations most influential and as one who shared her face cream with a female lover. If she had been able to be out, imagine what might have happened.

"Leave the interpretation to the analysts," the ever-quoteable Thompson once said. "They're sure to be wrong."