Letty Cottin Pogrebin - Early Life

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.