Shelley
Mydans,
the daughter of a university professor, was born in Stanford, United
States, in 1915. After college she moved to New
York where she found work with as a journalist
with the Literary Digest.
In
1936 she joined the staff of Life
Magazine where
she met the photographer Carl
Mydans.
In 1938 the couple married and the following year they were sent to
Europe to cover the Second World War. At first
they went to England before covering the
war in Sweden, Finland,
Portugal, Italy,
China, and Hong
Kong. During this period they travelled over 45,000 miles in pursuit
of picture stories.
Shelley
and her husband were in the Philippines
when Japan bombed Pearl
Harbor. Trapped in Manila they were captured by the Japanese
Army and were interned with other Americans and remained in captivity
until December 1943. Shelley wrote a novel, Open
City, about her experiences in a Japanese prison camp.
When the
US
Army regained
the Philippines in
1945 Carl
Mydans flew to Manila. However, General
Douglas MacArthur
refused to allow women correspondents to cover the war and she had
to go to Guam. She later recalled: "I was accredited to the navy,
but I was not - because I was a woman - allowed to cover action on
naval ships or planes and my articles had to be confined to such things
as the navy flight nurses and marine base camps."
After the war Shelley worked
for ABC network and wrote scripts for the March
of Time radio series but resigned when her first child
was born.
Shelley
Mydans,
who had two children, four grandchildren and one great-grandchild,
died in Sacramento, California, on the 7th March, 2002.
(1)
Shelley Mydans, letter to to Lilya Wagner (13th October 1986)
My work as a war correspondent in world War II was primarily as a
writer/researcher for life which meant that much of the time I was
working with photographers, making arrangements for their pictures,
and writing the background and captions for their stories which were
all excerpted and rewritten in New York. It was not a very glamorous
job, though I did write signed pieces for Life once in a while
and send dispatches to Time when there was no Time correspondent
in the field."
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