Soviet Women

Francine du Plessix was born in Warsaw, Poland on September 25, 1930. She received a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Barnard College in 1952. For two summers she studied at the Black Mountain College in North Carolina. After writing radio reports at the United Press for two years, she moved to Paris to report on fashion for the French magazine Réalités. She returned to the United States and married the painter Cleve Gray in 1957.

She wrote both fiction and nonfiction. Her novels included Lovers and Tyrants, World Without End, October Blood, and The Queen's Lover. Her nonfiction works included Divine Disobedience: Profiles in Catholic Radicalism, Hawaii: The Sugar-Coated Fortress, Soviet Women: Walking the Tightrope, and biographies of the poet Louise Colet, the Marquis de Sade, Simone Weil, and Madame de Staël. Them: A Memoir of Parents won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2006. She died from complications of congestive heart failure on January 13, 2018 at the age of 88.

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