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Biography
American

Margaret Halsey

1910 — 1997

American author and social critic whose satirical memoir With Malice Toward Some (1938) — about living in England as an American faculty wife — was a massive bestseller, and whose later works, including Color Blind (1946), were early and forceful arguments against racial segregation. Halsey was a sharp, witty writer whose progressive politics sometimes overshadowed her literary gifts.

Past sales0
PeriodModernist
NationalityAmerican
1. Biography

A short life of the author

Margaret Halsey (1910–1997) was an American writer best known for With Malice Toward Some (1938, Simon & Schuster), a comic memoir of living in a small English town while her husband held a visiting academic appointment. The book’s sharp, irreverent observations of English manners and class distinctions made it one of the bestselling nonfiction books of the late 1930s.

Color Blind

Color Blind: A White Woman Looks at the Negro (1946, Simon & Schuster) was a direct, personal argument against racial segregation, written from Halsey’s experience running a wartime Stage Door Canteen in New York that was deliberately integrated. The book was unusually forthright for its era in naming white prejudice as the problem and in demanding desegregation.

Halsey continued to write on social and political topics but never recaptured the commercial success of her first book.

Collecting Halsey

With Malice Toward Some (1938, Simon & Schuster) first editions are common and bring $20–$50. Color Blind (1946) is scarcer and more historically significant. Halsey is undervalued by collectors relative to her importance in the history of American racial liberalism.