Nora Waln

Nora Waln (1895–64) was a bestselling author and journalist in the 1930s–50s, writing books and articles on her time spent in Germany and China. She was among the first to report on the spread of Nazism from 1934-38.

She traveled widely in Europe and Asia, contributing articles to the Saturday Evening Post, Atlantic Monthly and other magazines. She was one of the few correspondents who reported from Communist China and Mongolia.

From 1934 to 1938, she and her husband lived in Germany. She was moved to write Reaching for the Stars (Cresset Press, London, and Little, Brown and Co., Boston, 1939), which recounts the spread of Hitler’s Nazi movement against a backdrop of her despair for the changes in a people she loved. In spite of the horror which she saw and described, she felt that the German people would revolt against Nazism.^[1]

Her damning exposé of Nazi Germany was a bestseller in the US in 1939 (ahead of Mein Kampf), and was reissued in paperback by Soho Press in 1994 under a new title, The Approaching Storm: One Woman's Story of Germany, 1934-1938.

Previously, Nora wrote House of Exile about her 12 years in China, and after her time in Germany, she traveled the world, filing stories for several prominent magazines and writing two more books, The Street of Precious Pearls and Surrender the Heart.

A quote from Nora Waln's "House of Exile" serves as the motto for one of the chapters in Dorothy Sayers' The Nine Tailors.

Notes

1. ^ Nora Waln, Reaching for the Stars (first edition, London: Cresset Press, 1938), book jacket

External links

• Time, 13 March 1939, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,760957,00.html .

Persondata
Name	Waln, Nora
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Date of birth	1895
Place of birth
Date of death	1964
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