Biography
Born Fay Mitchell to Bessie Kaiser Mitchell and David Mitchell in New York City, she was raised in Elmira, New York, where she won the New York State Spelling Championship at twelve and was presented with a silver cup by then Governor Franklin Roosevelt. She was encouraged to write for money by supplying small items to the Elmira Star Gazette. In high school she wrote and produced a children's radio show; then on full scholarship, she attended the private, all-female Elmira College where she divided her studies between writing and acting as well as editing the yearbook. Her mother took her to visit Kanin's grandmother who lived in the Bronx, and it was there that she became devoted to the theater when she saw a matinée of Idiot's Delight starring Lunt and Fontaine.
Read more about this topic: Fay Kanin
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A biography is like a handshake down the years, that can become an arm-wrestle.”
—Richard Holmes (b. 1945)
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)