Ursule Molinaro (1916–2000)

Ursule Molinaro was born in Paris, educated at the Sorbonne and the University of London, and studied medicine in Florence, Italy. During World War II in Paris, she was jailed for harboring Jews from the Nazis, but escaped and joined the French Resistance. After the war, she became a freelance journalist and soon published her first book, a collection of fables.

She went to New York City in the 1950s to work as a simultaneous translator at the United Nations and adopted English as her primary language -- although she was also fluent in French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Greek. In 1958, she became one of the founders of Chelsea, a literary magazine. She was a prolific writer in a career that spanned five decades, in which she wrote 14 novels, four collections of short fiction, and 18 one-act plays. Her novels included Green Lights Are Blue (1967), Sounds of a Drunken Summer (1969), The Borrower (1970), Positions with White Roses (1983), and A Full Moon of Women (1990). During the 1960s and 70s, she also translated works into English by German and French authors such as Hermann Hesse, Christa Wolf, and Nathalie Sarraute. She also subtitled a number of films, including Une femme mariée (1964) and Le Bonheur (1965). She was deeply interested in astrology and numerology and wrote two nonfiction books on these subjects, The Zodiac Lovers (1969) and Life by the Numbers (1971). In the latter part of her life, she taught creative writing at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, the University of Hawaii, and New York University, among others.