Skip to content
LPBN-Icon-v1
ImmigrationProf Blog
A Member of the Law Professor Blogs Network

Immigrant of the Day: Meryle Secrest (United Kingdom)

By immigrationprof

Meryle Secrest (born June Meryle Doman) is an award-winning biographer. Secrest was born and Secrest_meryle educated in Bath, England. She began her career as a journalist in Canada. After her family emigrated to Canada, she worked as women’s editor for the Hamilton News in Ontario, Canada; shortly thereafter, Secrest was named “Most Promising Young Writer” by the Canadian Women’s Press Club. In 1964 she began writing for the Washington Post. In 1975, Secrest left the Post to write full-time.

  • Secrest has written a number of critically-acclaimed biographies; her subjects have included Frank Lloyd Wright, Joseph Lord Duveen, Stephen Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein, Salvador Dali, Kenneth Clark, Bernard Berenson, Romaine Brooks, and Richard Rodgers. She has also published an autobiography entitled Shoot the Widow: Adventurers of a Biographer in Search of Her Subject (2007).Shoot_the_widow

Secrest became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1957 and now lives in Washington, D.C.

Secrest’s Being Bernard Berenson was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1980 and for the American Book Awards in 1981. In 2006, she received the National Humanities Medal.

KJ