Margaret Halsey

Margaret Halsey (1910-February 4, 1997) was an American writer who lived in the United Kingdom for a short time. Her witty and humorous bestselling book With Malice Towards Some in 1938 grew out of her experiences there. It sold an impressive 600,000 copies. According to her New York Times obituary she was "a witty writer with an acute social concern, [and] was compared to Dorothy Parker and H. L. Mencken."

A number of her other books were controversial or took on controversial subjects. Banned in Georgia, Color Blind: A White Woman Looks at the Negro attacked racism by identifying at its core the fear of the sexuality of black people and the need for a cheap labor supply. Margaret Mead reviewed it favorably.

Her book The Pseuo-Ethic: A Speculation on American Politics and Morals is a defense of Alger Hiss.

Life

She was born in Yonkers, New York, and attended Skidmore College. In 1933, editor and author Max Eastman hired her as his secretary. With his help, she became an entry-level employee at Simon & Schuster.

After their marriage in 1935, Halsey and her first husband, Henry Simon, moved to Devon, England. Her letters back to American relatives and friends inspired her brother-in-law, the publisher Richard L. Simon, to ask her to write what would become With Malice Toward Some. Halsey and Simon divorced in 1944. A later marriage to Milton R. Stern ended in divorce in 1969. Their daughter, Deborah, survived both her parents despite brain cancer.

Halsey's struggles with agoraphobia and alcoholism were the focus of her 1977 book, No Laughing Matter: The Autobiography of a WASP.

She died in a nursing home in White Plains, New York.

Works

• With Malice Toward Some (1938)
• Some of My Best Friends Are Soldiers (1944)
• Color Blind: A White Woman Looks at the Negro (1946)
• The Folks at Home (1952)
• This demi-paradise : a Westchester diary (1960)
• The Pseudo-Ethic: A Speculation on American Politics and Morals (1963)
• No Laughing Matter: The Autobiography of a WASP (1977)

External links

• New York Times obituary.

Persondata
Name	Halsey, Margaret
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Date of birth	1910
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Date of death	1997
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