Wilma Shore (1913–2006)

Wilma Shore was born in New York City, the only child of Viola Brothers Shore, soon to be a well-known writer, and her husband William Shore, an engineer. At the time, her parents ran an electrical consulting business together. Wilma was educated at the Walden School, a progressive day school in NYC, attended high schools in California after her mother moved there with her second husband. At age 16, Wilma went to Paris to study painting, and went on to enroll in the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles.

In 1932, Wilma married Charles Hancock, an actor, with whom she had a daughter, and gave up her painting career. Following a divorce, she returned to New York City and remarried in 1935 to Lou Solomon, a writer and producer with whom she had another daughter. Together moved to California in 1940 and wrote at least one radio script for The Orson Welles Almanac, "Something's Going to Happen to Henry." Wilma's second published short story, "The Butcher," was included in The Best Short Stories of 1941; she continued to receive honorable mention in subsequent years. She published widely in magazines, including The New Yorker, Cosmopolitan, The Saturday Evening Post, Ladies’ Home Journal, McCalls. and The Nation. Her story "The Cow on the Roof" was included in the 1950 O. Henry Awards Prize Stories volume. In 1965, she published Women Should Be Allowed, a collection of her short fiction. Her work also was included in the anthology Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1965 and 1973. She published autobiographical pieces in The New York Times Sunday Magazine and the Women’s Studies Quarterly.
She also wrote for television and was commissioned to write a song for Carol Channing.
She taught at the League of American Writer’s School from 1942 to 1944 and at the People’s Education Center until it closed, and then taught from her home.

Wilma’s involvement with these schools, her work on the editorial board of the California Quarterly, a politically progressive publication, and her other left-wing political activity caused her to be mentioned during hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the 1950s. She and her family returned to live in New York City in 1954.