Schlesinger, Marian Cannon, 1912-

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1913, writer and artist Marian Cannon was the fourth and youngest daughter of the well-known Harvard physiologist, Walter B. Cannon, and his wife, Cornelia James Cannon. After graduating from Radcliffe College in 1934, Marian spent a year traveling in China and studying Chinese painting in Peking. On her return home, she wrote and illustrated San Bao and His Adventures in Peking, a classic children's book of the 1930s. In 1940 she married the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., whom she had met during his junior year at Harvard; they had four children. The couple divorced in 1970. In 1979, she published an autobiography, Snatched From Oblivion, that described growing up in an academic household in Cambridge dominated by strong-minded women, including her novelist mother.