Annalee Whitmore Fadiman

Annalee Whitmore Fadiman (May 27, 1916 – February 5, 2002)^[1] was a scriptwriter for MGM, and World War II foreign correspondent for Life and Time magazines.^[2] Under the name Annalee Jacoby she was the co-author with Theodore H. White of Thunder Out of China, a book of reportage on World War Two in China.^[3]

Fadiman was born in Price, Utah, the daughter of bank president Leland Whitmore and Anne Sharp Whitmore, who later became a librarian at New York Public Library. Fadiman graduated from Stanford University in 1937. She was the first woman to be managing editor of the Stanford Daily student newspaper.^[4] She moved from San Francisco, where she briefly worked at the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, then to Los Angeles taking a secretarial pool job at MGM. She wrote several screen treatments including Andy Hardy Meets Debutante (1940) and a screen adaptation for Tish.^[5]

MGM offered her a contract but once the war began, Fadiman found "the prospect of seven years of Hollywood fluff when the real world was falling apart unendurable," and she applied to become a war correspondent but the War Department didn't allow female correspondents.^{[6]: 141 [4]} She became a publicity manager for United China Relief, an aid organization, and wrote speeches for Madame Chiang Kai-shek.^{[6]: 142 [7][4]} During her marriage to correspondent Melville Jacoby, Fadiman survived a month-long escape from the Philippines, and did six weeks of reporting from the front lines of Bataan and Corregidor.^[8] Their writings were used nearly unedited, by John Hersey, in his best-seller Men on Bataan.

After the death of her husband, she continued to work as a journalist. Theodore H. White persuaded Time Magazine's Henry Luce to petition the War Department for credentials for Fadiman. She became the only female correspondent reporting from Chongqing, China's wartime capital.^[9] After the war, she collaborated with White on the best-selling book Thunder Out of China, about China's role in the war which contained portions of their published dispatches from Time.^[4]

In the following years, she wrote, lectured, and participated in the radio quiz show Information Please.

She married Melville Jacoby on November 24, 1941 in Manila, Philippines.^[10] He was killed in an airfield accident in Darwin in 1942 after the couple had moved to Brisbane.^[9][4]

She married Clifton Fadiman in 1950.^[11] The couple had two children, Kim Fadiman and Anne Fadiman. Fadiman lived on Captiva Island, Florida and was a member of the Hemlock Society. She took her own life in 2002 after living with breast cancer and Parkinson's disease.^[9]

• Lascher, Bill (2016). Eve of a Hundred Midnights : The Star-Crossed Love Story of Two WWWII Correspondents and Their Epic Escape across the Pacific. New York: William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. ISBN 9780062375209.