Violet Weingarten

Description

Violet Weingarten began her career in 1937 as a young reporter on the Brooklyn Eagle, where she remained for twelve years, turning her attention thereafter to the writing of films, short stories, and nonfiction works. These early works include You Can Take Them with You: A Guide to Traveling with Children in Europe (1961); The Mother Who Works outside the Home (1961); and Life at the Bottom (1965). She also wrote three “river books” for young people; The Nile, Lifeline of Egypt (1964); The Jordan, River of the Promised Land (1967); and The Ganges, Sacred River of India (1969). In 1968, Weingarten published her first novel, Mrs. Beneker, a witty account of a well-to-do suburban woman who, in her late forties (with children grown), sallies forth to pursue higher education and confront the burning social and political issues of the day. Weingarten published three additional novels in the next eight years. In A Loving Wife (1969), forty-two-year-old Molly Gilbert misses her son at college and feels “a kind of free-floating discontent” with a husband overinvolved in his work. In A Woman of Feeling (1972), Jo Baer, politically radical in her youth but now a middleaged, middle-class liberal, is caught up in a generational struggle with her counterculture son and her socially aware daughter, who feels guilty about giving birth to her own child when there are so many needy children seeking adoption. In Half a Marriage (1976), the perfect couple is threatened by the husband's affair with a younger woman. (Shorter version of Weingarten's biography in