American journalist, Dorothy Thompson (1893-1961) was born in Lancaster, New York. When she was 7, her mother died. Her father, Peter, remarried but Dorothy didn’t get along with her stepmother so in 1908 Peter sent his daughter to live in Chicago with his 2 sisters.

Dorothy graduated from Syracuse University in 1914. She then moved to Buffalo, New York where she was involved in the women’s suffrage campaign.

Dorothy relocated again in 1920, this time to Europe so she could pursue a career in journalism. After several positions, she became the head of the New York Post’s Berlin bureau in Germany. She famously interviewed Adolf Hitler in 1931. In 1934, Dorothy Thompson became the first American journalist to be expelled from Germany.

From 1936, Thompson wrote a column for the New York Herald Tribune which became wildly popular and in 1939 Time magazine decided she was America’s most popular woman – after Eleanor Roosevelt.

Thompson also published several books and ended her career writing a monthly column for the Ladies Home Journal.