“Writers should know when not to
intervene, for very little of any life can be tidily explained and its seams
made straight.” – Gloria Emerson
Born in Manhattan on this date in 1929, Emerson intended
to be a full-time novelist but gravitated to journalistic feature writing first when
she discovered “numerous untold behind-the=scenes stories just waiting to be
told.” Ultimately she achieved fame in
both arenas as a war correspondent for The
New York Times and winner of the National Book Award for her Vietnam War
masterpiece Winners and Losers. 
Among her most famous feature stories was an
interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, during which she disputed the
effectiveness of Lennon and Ono's anti-war campaign. Her skeptical approach enraged
Lennon and became famous as an example of the establishment press’s resistance
to the Lennons' peace movement. The interview is prominently featured in the
1988 documentary Imagine: John Lennon and the 2006 movie The U.S. vs.
John Lennon. Emerson said she
believed the Beatles and Lennon "could have stopped the war" had they
performed for U.S. troops in Vietnam.
Her Vietnam War dispatches won a George Polk Award for excellence
in foreign reporting, and later a Matrix Award from New York Women in
Communications. Over
her long career she wrote 4 major books and myriad articles for such wide-ranging
magazines and newspapers as The New York
Times, Esquire, Harper's, Vogue, Playboy and The Rolling
Stone.
“I
didn't write to be famous,” she said. “I
wrote to keep a record.”
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