Dorothy Sterling


Dorothy Sterling was an American writer and historian. After college, she worked as a journalist and writer in New York for several years, including work for the Federal Writers’ Project.

Biography

Sterling worked for Time from 1936 to 1949 and was then assistant bureau chief in Life’s news bureau from 1944 to 1949.
Starting in the 1950s, she authored more than 30 books, mainly non-fiction historical works for children on the origins of the women's and anti-slavery movements, civil rights, segregation, and nature, as well as mysteries.

Personal life

In 1937, she married Philip Sterling, also a writer. Her daughter, Anne Fausto-Sterling, is a noted biologist, the Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Biology and Gender Studies at Brown University, and is married to playwright Paula Vogel. Her son, Peter Sterling, is a well-known neuroscientist and coiner of the term allostasis.
Sterling belonged to the Communist Party USA in the 1940s. Even after leaving the party, she said socialism was her long-term goal.
In early 1968, Sterling and her husband joined 448 writers and editors in placing a full-page ad in the New York Post declaring their intention to refuse to pay taxes for the Vietnam War. In 1984, she challenged President Ronald Reagan's decision to award the Medal of Freedom to Whittaker Chambers, writing, "With all due respect to the dead, is this man, who has left behind him so many doubts about his own role, an appropriate recipient of the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award?"

Awards