Margaret Halsey (1910–1997)
Author of With Malice Toward Some
About the Author
Image credit: Courtesy of the NYPL Digital Gallery (image use requires permission from the New York Public Library)
Works by Margaret Halsey
Associated Works
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1910-02-13
- Date of death
- 1997-02-04
- Gender
- female
- Education
- Skidmore College
Teacher's College, Columbia University - Occupations
- author
- Organizations
- Simon & Schuster
- Short biography
- Margaret Halsey was born in Yonkers, New York, and attended Skidmore College. In 1933, she was hired by famed editor and writer Max Eastman as his secretary, and then with his help got a job at Simon & Schuster.
In 1935, she married Henry Simon, an assistant professor at Columbia University and vice-president of the company. The couple moved to Devon, England for her husband's teaching exchange program. Her humorous letters home to American relatives and friends recounting what she saw as the eccentricities of the English people, their food, and the drudgery in their lives, caught the attention of her brother-in-law, publisher Richard L. Simon. He commissioned her to write what became the book With Malice Toward Some (1938). It became a bestseller and won the National Book Award. Critics considered her a witty writer and compared her favorably to Dorothy Parker and H. L. Mencken. She went on to write several other books, including two inspired by her experiences volunteering as a hostess at the racially-integrated Stage Door Canteen in Times Square, New York during World War II; This Demi-Paradise: A Westchester Diary (1960); The Pseudo-Ethic: A Speculation on American Politics and Morals (1963); and No Laughing Matter: The Autobiography of a WASP (1977), which included her struggles with alcoholism and agoraphobia.
Margaret and her first husband divorced in 1944. A later marriage to Milton R. Stern ended in divorce in 1969. - Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Yonkers, New York, USA
- Places of residence
- Yonkers, New York, USA
- Place of death
- White Plains, New York, USA
- Associated Place (for map)
- New York, USA
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Reviews
This one was just for fun. Written as a diary detailing approximately 6 months of temporary ex-pat life in Devonshire, with side trips to Scandinavia, Paris, and London, in 1938. Parts of this are just hysterical, not so much in the anecdotes themselves, but in the author's descriptions of ordinary things. The English countryside comes off very fine--("The countryside around Stratford is green and plenteous..Cushioned with trees and padded with hedgerows, it runs up into little mattress show more slopes...the thatched houses rest on their gardens like cuff-links on jeweler's cotton"; the weather and food not so well--"Devonshire weather, though not cold, is unendurably damp...I walk furiously to keep warm, and when not walking, I live in a six-foot semi-circle in front of the drawing room fire"; "I suppose the English {feel} that American women spend too much time and energy on their clothes...But what do Englishwomen spend their time and energy on instead? I ask it, who have eaten their cooking."; and the gentry...well, "the gentry will not melt in hell". Relaxing fare.
Review written February 2009 show less
Review written February 2009 show less
Margaret Halsey (1910-1997) was a very popular writer in her day, and even one of the earliest recipients of the National Book Award. She wanted to write this book, published in 1944 (the year I was born), as non-fiction, since it is largely based on her personal experience as a hostess in a NYC canteen for servicemen during WWII. However, her publisher and others close to her dissuaded her, due to the book's subject: racism and antisemitism as she witnessed it, in a time when such practices show more were still very common, and, for the most part, overlooked or even condoned. So she wrote her story as "a kind of novel," in an epistolary format with its heroine, Gretchen, twenty-six and divorced, keeping house for her widowed father, relating her daily activities at home and at work in a mostly very light-hearted manner, to her older brother, Jeff, a scientist who'd been drafted and sent to Fort Bragg, where he runs afoul of some Southern "white supremacists.' (Yes, she even calls them that, and this nearly eighty years ago.) In fact, her title, SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS ARE SOLDIERS, is probably a not-so-gentle jab at the complacency and hypocrisy of so many of her supposedly enlightened white friends.
There are nods to rationing and housing shortages of the era, but prejudice is center stage for most of the story, and it is sad how little has changed in that regard in the past eighty years. Halsey is a decent writer, although I found her unrelenting attempts to be constantly witty and clever off-putting and even annoying.
Long out of print, but a quick read and still a rather interesting artifact of the wartime era.
- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER show less
There are nods to rationing and housing shortages of the era, but prejudice is center stage for most of the story, and it is sad how little has changed in that regard in the past eighty years. Halsey is a decent writer, although I found her unrelenting attempts to be constantly witty and clever off-putting and even annoying.
Long out of print, but a quick read and still a rather interesting artifact of the wartime era.
- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER show less
This 1938 book won Halsey, who died in 1997, one of the early National Book Awards. It's a delightfully acid account of her impressions during a brief period she and her husband spent in England, written in the form of a diary, although its was apparently cobbled together from her letters to friends and family back home in NYC. Halsey has often been compared to Dorothy Parker, and certain shares her arch wit. A smart woman in the 'fast-talking dames' model, this book is a crisp, often show more hilarious, look at a (regretfully) long-gone era. show less
The diary of a year in England, in the 1930's, by an American woman who accompanied her professor husband on his year abroad. Her descriptions of British American culture clashes are extremely funny and mostly affectionate. I haven't read it in a while, so I hope it has stood the test of time...just checked on Amazon and there are several excellent reviews. You can purchase a used copy cheaply and I would highly recommend you do so!
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