Early Years
Merril was born in Boston. After her father's suicide during her grade-school years, her mother found a job at Bronx House and moved them to the borough of the Bronx in New York City. In her mid-teens, she pursued Zionism and Marxism.
In 1939, she graduated from Morris High School in the Bronx at 16, and rethought her politics under the influence of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. She married Dan Zissman the next year, less than four months into a relationship that started through Trotskyist activities. Their daughter Merril Zissman was born in December 1942. In this period, she also became one of the few female members of the New York City-based group of science fiction writers, editors, artists and fans, the Futurians, which included Kornbluth. The Zissmans separated about 1945; in 1946 Frederik Pohl, another Futurian, began living with her. After her divorce from Zissman became final in 1948, she married Pohl, November 25, 1948.
Read more about this topic: Judith Merril
Famous quotes containing the words early years, early and/or years:
“I believe that if we are to survive as a planet, we must teach this next generation to handle their own conflicts assertively and nonviolently. If in their early years our children learn to listen to all sides of the story, use their heads and then their mouths, and come up with a plan and share, then, when they become our leaders, and some of them will, they will have the tools to handle global problems and conflict.”
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“The shift from the perception of the child as innocent to the perception of the child as competent has greatly increased the demands on contemporary children for maturity, for participating in competitive sports, for early academic achievement, and for protecting themselves against adults who might do them harm. While children might be able to cope with any one of those demands taken singly, taken together they often exceed children’s adaptive capacity.”
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“He took control of me for forty-five minutes. This time I’ll have control over him for the rest of his life. If he gets out fifteen years from now, I’ll know. I’ll check on him every three months through police computers. If he makes one mistake he’s going down again. I’ll make sure. I’m his worst enemy now.”
—Elizabeth Wilson, U.S. crime victim. As quoted in People magazine, p. 88 (May 31, 1993)