Early Life
Pogrebin was born to an American Jewish family and grew up in Jamaica, New York. In 1952, she became one of the first girls to celebrate a bat mitzvah in Conservative Judaism. When her mother died of cancer in 1955, Pogrebin was prevented from saying the Kaddish, the traditional memorial prayer, because women were not counted in the minyan, the quorum of ten required for public prayer. She has retroactively traced her feminist awakening to this experience of exclusion at a moment of great personal anguish and vulnerability.
She graduated from Jamaica High School at age 16, and from Brandeis University at 19, earning a B.A. cum laude with Distinction in English and American Literature. In her first career in the book publishing business, she worked her way up to become Vice President at Bernard Geis Associates, a small New York publishing house where she was known for her creative promotion campaigns for authors such as Jacqueline Susann, Helen Gurley Brown, Groucho Marx, Harpo Marx, and Brendan Behan. She became an author herself and a full-time professional writer when her first book, How To Make It In A Man’s World was published in 1970 to rave reviews.
Read more about this topic: Letty Cottin Pogrebin
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“For the writer, there is nothing quite like having someone say that he or she understands, that you have reached them and affected them with what you have written. It is the feeling early humans must have experienced when the firelight first overcame the darkness of the cave. It is the communal cooking pot, the Street, all over again. It is our need to know we are not alone.”
—Virginia Hamilton (b. 1936)
“It seems to be a law in American life that whatever enriches us anywhere except in the wallet inevitably becomes uneconomic.”
—Russell Baker (b. 1925)