Kate Simon (1) (1912–1990)

Kate Simon was born Kaila Grobsmith to a Jewish family in Warsaw, Poland. When she was four years old, she, her mother Lonia, a corset maker, and her younger brother emigrated to the USA, her father David Grobsmith, a cobbler, having gone ahead three years earlier. During her childhood, her father pressured her to practice the piano for hours a day, urging her to quit school and fulfill his own thwarted ambition of becoming a professional concert pianist. She attended James Monroe High School and began to live in various friends’ homes and take odd jobs to support herself. She then studied English literature at Hunter College. She married Steve Simon, a deaf endocrinologist with whom she had a daughter. Following his death, she remarried in 1947 and divorced in 1959. Her literary career began as a book reviewer for The New Republic and The Nation magazines. She worked for the Book-of-the-Month Club, Publishers Weekly, and as a freelance editor for Alfred A. Knopf. She travelled around the world and from 1959 to 1978 wrote a series of bestselling guidebooks called Places and Pleasures for Meridian Books. Her three volumes of memoirs, beginning with A Bronx Primitive (1982) and continuing with Wider World: Portraits in an Adolescence (1986) and Etchings in an Hourglass (1990), were considered shocking for their frank discussion of her mother’s abortions, her own early experiences of sexual abuse, her political, artistic, and sexual explorations in college, her affairs, her own abortions, and her painful second marriage. She also wrote a social history of Manhattan, Fifth Avenue: A Very Social Story (1978) and A Renaissance Tapestry: The Gonzaga of Mantua (1988).