She Hammered Out Danger
By Peter Kurth. 587 pages. Little, Brown. $24.95. Today all Dorothy Thompson’s books are out of print–they were largely rehashes of her newspaper columns and radio talks–and people tend to confuse her with Dorothy Parker. A decade after her death in 1961, she re-emerged as a minor heroine to gay women because of her affair with German writer Christa Winsloe; you don’t even hear much about that anymore. But Thompson’s friend John Gunther called her “the best journalist this generation has produced in any country”; after Eleanor Roosevelt, she was the most influential American woman of the ’30s and ’40s....