Katherin Kressman Taylor
Author profile
born
January 01, 1903
in Portland, Oregon, The United States
died
January 01, 1996
gender
female
About this author
Kathrine Taylor was born Kathrine Kressmann in Portland, Oregon. After graduating from the University of Oregon in 1924, she moved to San Francisco and worked as an advertising copywriter. In 1928, Kathrine married Elliott Taylor, who owned an advertising agency. In 1938, the couple moved to New York, where Story magazine published Address Unknown. The editor Whit Burnett and Elliot deemed the story "too strong to appear under the name of a woman", and assigned Kathrine the masculine pseudonym of Kressmann Taylor, which she used professionally for the rest of her life. Reader's Digest soon reprinted the novel, and Simon & Schuster published it as a book in 1939 and sold 50,000 copies. Foreign publications followed quickly, including a D...more
Kathrine Taylor was born Kathrine Kressmann in Portland, Oregon. After graduating from the University of Oregon in 1924, she moved to San Francisco and worked as an advertising copywriter. In 1928, Kathrine married Elliott Taylor, who owned an advertising agency. In 1938, the couple moved to New York, where Story magazine published Address Unknown. The editor Whit Burnett and Elliot deemed the story "too strong to appear under the name of a woman", and assigned Kathrine the masculine pseudonym of Kressmann Taylor, which she used professionally for the rest of her life. Reader's Digest soon reprinted the novel, and Simon & Schuster published it as a book in 1939 and sold 50,000 copies. Foreign publications followed quickly, including a Dutch translation, later confiscated by Nazis, and a German one, published in Moscow. In Germany itself, the book was banned.
From 1947, Kathrine started teaching humanities, journalism and creative writing at Gettysburg College, in Pennsylvania, living as a widow from 1953, when Elliot Taylor died. Retiring in 1966, she moved to Florence, Italy and wrote Diary of Florence in Flood, inspired by the great flood of the Arno river in November of that year. In 1967, Kathrine married the American sculptor John Rood. Thereafter, they lived half a year in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and half in Val de Pesa, near Florence. Mrs. Rood continued this style of living also after her husband’s death in 1974.
In 1995, when Kathrine was 91, Story Press reissued Address Unknown to mark the 50th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps. The novel was subsequently translated into 20 languages, and the French version sold 600,000 copies. The book finally appeared in Germany in 2001, and was reissued in Britain in 2002. In Israel, the Hebrew edition was a best-seller and was adapted for the stage. It has already given over 100 performances and the stage show was filmed for TV and broadcast on the occasion of Holocaust Memorial Day.
Rediscovered after Address Unknown was reissued, K. Taylor spent a happy year signing copies and giving interviews until her death in July 1996 at age 93.(less)
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4.18 avg rating — 598 ratings
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published
1939
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27 editions
4.00 avg rating — 1 rating
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published
2003
