The Club (1976), a wry and sharply comic satire of male behavior, epitomizes the feminism that had been a motif in Merriam’s work long before the contemporary women’s movement. “Hushabye Baby” is not on the treetop but on “the top floor / Project elevator / Won’t work any more,” and “Mary, Mary / Urban Mary,” watches her “sidewalk grow / with chewing gum wads / And cigarette butts.” Set to music by Helen Miller, Inner City: A Street Cantata opened on Broadway in December 1971. In The Inner City Mother Goose (1969), she transforms nursery rhymes into social commentary. She transformed a lifelong commitment to progressive political views into poems and plays of urban life and social justice. Roosevelt (1952), Emma Lazarus (1956, 1959), and Martin Luther King, Jr.
For children and adults she wrote biographies of women and men whom she saw as models: Franklin D. Though known for her books of children’s poetry, there is more to Merriam’s remarkable body of work. She raised her children in the city and once commented, “I expect to be the last living inhabitant of Manhattan when everyone else has quit for sub or exurbia.” 1952), by her second husband, Martin Michel. Married four times, she was the mother of two sons, Guy (b. Although she delighted in travel and loved the sea, Merriam’s life and writing career centered on New York. She chose the writing name Merriam from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary on her desk. There, a teacher speculated that her lack of success in getting her work published might be the result of her Jewish surname.
The family owned a chain of dress shops, and Eve “grew up with fashion.” Her book Figleaf: The Business of Being in Fashion (1960) is a wittily devastating critique of the industry for its manipulation of women.Īfter graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1937, she embarked on graduate study at Columbia University. Eve Merriam was born Eva Moskowitz in Philadelphia, on July 19, 1916, one of four children of Jennie (Siegel) and Max Moskowitz, emigrants as children from Russia.
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