Fadiman, Annalee Whitmore

▪ 2003

      American screenwriter and journalist (b. May 27, 1916, Price, Utah—d. Feb. 5, 2002, Captiva, Fla.), was working as a secretary in the typing pool at MGM when she co-wrote Andy Hardy Meets Debutante (1940), a vehicle for Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, and although she produced several other screenplays and MGM offered her a seven-year contract, she was intent on reporting on the war raging in China. Though the War Department barred women from serving as foreign correspondents, she took a job as a representative of a relief agency in Chungking. There she began writing speeches for Madame Chiang Kai-shek and landed a job as a reporter with Liberty magazine. Later, author Theodore H. White, a friend of her late husband, Melville Jacoby, arranged for her to join him in Chungking, where they penned the best-selling Thunder Out of China (1946). Following the war she married book critic and radio quiz show host Clifton Fadiman.

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