Kathrine Taylor - Life

Life

Kathrine Kressmann moved to San Francisco after graduating from the University of Oregon in 1924 and worked as an advertising copywriter. In 1928, Kressmann married Elliott Taylor, who owned an advertising agency. Ten years later, the couple moved to New York, where Story magazine published Address Unknown. The editor Whit Burnett and Elliot deemed the story "too strong to appear under the name of a woman," and assigned Kressmann the masculine pseudonym of Kressmann Taylor, which she used professionally for the rest of her life. Reader's Digest soon reprinted the novel, and Simon & Schuster published it as a book in 1939, selling 50,000 copies. Foreign publications followed quickly, including a Dutch translation, later confiscated by Nazis, and a German one, published in Moscow. The book was banned in Germany.

An indictment of Nazism was also the theme of Taylor's next book, Until That Day, published in 1942. In 1944, Columbia Pictures turned Address Unknown into a movie. The film director and production designer was William C. Menzies (Gone with the Wind), and Paul Lukas starred as Martin. The screenplay, written by Herbert Dalmas, was credited also to Kressmann Taylor. In Russian, there was another screenplay by David Greener, but it was never filmed.

From 1947, Taylor taught humanities, journalism and creative writing at Gettysburg College, in Pennsylvania, and, when Elliot Taylor died in 1953, lived as a widow. Retiring in 1966, she moved to Florence, Italy and wrote Diary of Florence in Flood, inspired by the great flood of the Arno river in November of that year. In 1967, Taylor married the American sculptor John Rood. Thereafter, they lived half a year in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and half in Val de Pesa, near Florence. Taylor continued this style of living after her second husband’s death in 1974.

In 1995, when Taylor was 91, Story Press reissued Address Unknown to mark the 50th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps. The story was subsequently translated into 20 languages, with the French version selling 600,000 copies. The book finally appeared in Germany in 2001, and was reissued in Britain in 2002. In Israel, the Hebrew edition was a best-seller and was adapted for the stage. There has already been over 100 performances of the stage show, and it was filmed for TV and broadcast on the occasion of Holocaust Memorial Day, January 27.

Rediscovered after Address Unknown's reissue, Taylor spent a happy final year signing copies and giving interviews until her death at age 93.