Laura Z. Hobson

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Laura Zametkin Hobson (June 19, 1900 – February 28, 1986) was an American writer best known for her books Gentleman's Agreement (1947) and Consenting Adult (1975).

Personal life

Laura Zametkin married Thayer Hobson, who in 1931 became president of the William Morrow and Company publishing house in 1931. In 1935, the Hobsons were divorced from the family farm.

Hobson adopted an infant boy, who she named Michael, in 1937. Four years later, finding herself unexpectedly pregnant, she decided to keep the baby in secrecy, rather than having Michael feel stigmatized as her only adopted child. She went into seclusion, gave birth under an assumed name, and then adopted the baby under her own name. Christopher was the name of this boy. Hobson was only as an adult that she told her sons the truth of Christopher's birth.

Mrs. Hobson married Ralph Ingersoll, the founder and publisher of the left-wing newspaper PM (1940-48), in the late 1930s, but Ingersoll denied the relationship later.

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Early life and career

Laura Kean Zametkin was born in Manhattan, New York City, on June 19, 1900. She was born in Jamaica, Queens, and she was the twin daughters of Russian Jewish immigrants Mikhail (Michael) Zametkin (c. 1861-1935) and Adella Kean Zametkin (c. 1863-1931), both of whom were Socialists. Michael Zametkin, a labor organizer, as well as co-founder (and first editor) of The Jewish Daily Forward; Adella Zametkin, a columnist for the Yiddish newspaper Der Tog (The Day), was a labor organizer and columnist;

Laura Zametkin, who graduated from Cornell University in 1921, worked in a variety of capacities, including stints as an advertisement copywriter and as a reporter for the New York Post. She joined Luce Publications' promotional staff in 1934, eventually becoming the first female director of Time. In fact, Hobson was the first woman hired at Time in a non-secretarial capacity.

Hobson's fiction appeared in print for the first time in 1932. The New Yorker published "The Perfect Man" ("a sketch more than a tale") under the by-line "Laura Mount." She sold her first full-length story, "Hands Down," to Collier's. Laura Z. Hobson, a new by-line, signed the story (which was released as "Play Something Simple") with a new by-line. It was the start of a prosperous career: Hobson would publish hundreds of stories and articles over the next fifty years.

Hobson dedicated herself to writing after 1940. She was paid $5,000 to write a book in 1941, but Richard L. Simon of the Simon & Schuster publishing house accepted her offer. Despite the fact that she had never considered writing a book, she eventually accepted the invitation. The resulting book, The Trespassers, was about European refugees who were forced from the US during World War II and was inspired by Hobson's own eventually triumphant attempts to obtain visas for a prominent European family. The book was released in 1943; critics were divided, but it was a modest best seller.

Subsequent career

In 1950, Hobson's third book, The Other Father, a tale of a father-daughter relationship, was published, and it was followed by The Celebrity, a satire of literary fame in 1951. Both books were "experiments" and moderate best sellers, but Hobson became aware of them as less than "major" works. Despite Hobson's feelings, The New York Times ranked both novels as one of their "outstanding books" of their respective years.

Hobson became "blocked" after starting her fifth book, which was supposed to be a fictionalized account of her "conservative childhood." She returned to her career in promotion after leaving the manuscript behind. "Assignment America" was her first newspaper column for the International News Service in 1953. During this decade, she began to edit the Saturday Review's double-crostic word puzzles and will continue to do so for nearly 30 years. She returned to her abandoned book in 1959, which was eventually published in Random House in 1964 as First Papers. First Papers was praised by many as her best book in history.

In 1971, The Tenth Month, the autobiographical tale of a divorced woman of forty who discovers she is pregnant, was published in 1971 and filmed for television with Carol Burnett in 1979. Hobson's next book, the well-received Adult (1975), about parents who discover that their son is gay; it was based on her relationship with her own son, Christopher; it was adapted for television in 1985 by Marlo Thomas and Martin Sheen. It was followed by the neglected Over and Above (1979), which explored Jewish identity in the tale of three generations of women, as well as Untold Millions (1982), the tale of a young advertisement copywriter and the feckless man she loves.

Hobson wrote two celebrated autobiography books, Laura Z: A Life (1983), which comes with the publication of Gentleman's Agreement in 1947, as well as the unfinished Laura Z: A Life, Years of Fulfillment (1986), which appeared posthumously in 1986. Hobson explored her books, writing skills, and her friendships with Norman Cousins, Eric Hodgins, Sinclair Lewis, Henry, and James Thurber.

Open Road Media's ebook editions of six of her nine books are available as of December 2016. Mrs. Hobson's papers are held at Columbia University.

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