DEAR DOROTHY DIX: A Study in Compassion

In collaboration with Mrs. Arthur, who was trained by Dorothy Dix in the late years of her long role of service to humanity to take over some of her work, Harnett Kane, skilled biographer, has given his readers a moving and nostalgic portrait of a woman journalist who made her chosen pen name a byword in the American home. This is at one and the same time an intensely personal story of a courageous little woman who met hardship and sorrow and disillusionment and poverty head-on, and created for herself a place as counsellor to the many in need -- and a recall of two generation span in American mores. In the fifty- and more -years, from the time when shy little Lizzie Meriwether of Kentucky submitted her first pieces to the kindly and wise owner of the New Orleans Picayune -- and got herself a job at $3 a week, to her retirement, over sighty, and commanding the highest prices ever dreamed of by any woman- and but few men- for syndicated columns -- a tremendous change had come over the American scene. Born during the War between the States -- brought up in the desperate years of Reconstruction in a defeated South -- married to a man much older than herself, who proved to be unstable emotionally, mentally, physically, she saw a country rise again, despite three wars; she saw successive waves of prosperity and depression; she saw women come into their own. And throughout, she handled vast correspondence with those in need of personal advice on matters of the heart and head; she covered the most famous murder cases in the area; she gave women in journalism the right to hold up their heads with their fellows. Grand reading.