SAMUELS, Gertrude 1910(?)-2003

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born c. 1910 in Manchester, England; died July 2, 2003, in New York, NY. Journalist, photographer, and author. Samuels was an award-winning reporter who spent over thirty years with the New York Times. She was brought to the United States by her parents when she was fourteen years old, and she eventually attended the Busch Conservatory of Music and George Washington University. However, when she was offered a job at the New York Post in 1937 she left school to work as a journalist. During World War II she also worked for Newsweek and Time before joining the New York Times staff as a writer for the paper's Sunday magazine in 1943, becoming a writer and photographer in 1947 and editor in 1972. She left the newspaper in 1975 to become a freelancer, and she returned to school to complete her B.A. in English at New York University in 1982, followed by an M.A. in 1983. During her career, Samuels reported on events from around the world, often in dangerous locations such as Middle East refugee camps and war-torn Korea. She also wrote and photographed stories about crime and drugs in America's inner cities. For her work, she won the Front Page Award from the American Newspaper Guild, and the George Polk Award, which she earned in 1955 for her stories about school desegregation. Samuels turned some of her reportage into books, including Report on Israel (1960) and The Secret of Gonen: Portrait of a Kibbutz on the Border in a Time of War (1969). She was also a novelist, publishing such fiction as Run, Shelley, Run! (1974) and Adam's Daughter (1977), as well as writing several plays, among them Judah the Maccabee and Me (1970), The Assignment (1974), and Of Time and Thomas Wolfe (1980).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

BOOKS

Ward, Martha E., and others, editors, Authors of Books for Young People, third edition, Scarecrow Press (Metuchen, NJ), 1990.

PERIODICALS

New York Times, July 5, 2003, p. A13.

Washington Post, July 6, 2003, p. C10.