Early Life
Elizabeth Terrill Bentley was born in New Milford, Connecticut to Charles Prentiss Bentley, a dry-goods merchant, and May Charlotte Turrill, a schoolteacher. In 1915 her parents had moved to Ithaca, New York, and by 1920 the family had moved to McKeesport, Pennsylvania and then to Rochester, New York. Her parents were described as strait-laced old family Episcopalian New Englanders.
She attended Vassar College, graduating in 1930 with a degree in English, Italian, and French. In 1933, while she was attending graduate school at Columbia University, she won a fellowship to the University of Florence. While in Italy, she briefly joined a local student Fascist group, the Gruppo Universitate Fascisti. Under the influence of her anti-Fascist faculty advisor Mario Casella, with whom she had an affair, she soon moved to another part of the political spectrum, however. While completing her Masters degree at Columbia University, she attended meetings of the American League Against War and Fascism, a Communist front group. Although she would later state that she found Communist literature unreadable and "dry as dust," she was attracted by the sense of community and social conscience she found with her friends in the league. When she learned that most of them were members of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), she joined the party herself in March 1935.
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