School, Carpatho-Ukraine

1936

The first woman photojournalist at Life

When Henry Luce launches his third magazine, the photograph-centred Life, he hires her as its first female photojournalist. She is a staff photographer until 1940, returns to the magazine in 1941–1942 and again from 1945, and also starts its first photography laboratory.

1937

The book “You Have Seen Their Faces”

Her book with Erskine Caldwell, seventy-five photographs of the lives of poor rural sharecroppers in the American South, is a commercial success and one of the major documentary works of the time to draw attention to the needs of the South.

1939

Married: Erskine Caldwell

1939

The book “North of the Danube”

With Caldwell she travels through Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia to record life under Nazism; the result is a travelogue about Czechoslovakia under the shadow of Nazi occupation.

1939–1942

J. Edgar Hoover files her among the “dangerous”

FBI director J. Edgar Hoover places her and her then husband Erskine Caldwell in a category of dangerous persons to be interned in the event of a future national emergency. For years agents read her mail, searched her luggage and kept informants, but found nothing incriminating: there was no indication she was ever active on behalf of the Communist Party.