Belfrage, Sally, 1936-

Sally Mary Caroline Belfrage, independent leftist, world travelling journalist, and author of five books, was born in Hollywood, California, in 1936, and raised in New York City, where her father, Cedric Belfrage founded, in 1948, the independent weekly radical newspaper The National Guardian. She went to Bronx Science High School, and briefly attended Hunter College before moving to London in 1955 when her parents were deported under the provisions of the McCarran Act. In London, she attended the London School of Economics and worked in publishing. In 1957 she attended the World Youth Festival in Moscow, where she then worked (editing English translations of Tolstoy) and lived for the better part of a year. Her experiences were the subject of her first book, A Room in Moscow (1958). Much of the years 1959-1962 were spent traveling, first in the Near East, then throughout Europe with Benjamin Sonnenberg, founder of the magazine Grand Street, before moving to New York in mid-1962. Her next book, Freedom Summer (1965) resulted from her participation in the SNCC-sponsored Freedom Summer organizing drive of 1964 Democratic National Convention with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation.

In November of 1965 Sally married playwright Bernard Pomerance (The Elephant Man). In 1967 her daughter Eve was born, followed in 1969 by her son Moby. After the latter's birth, the four moved to London, which was to remain Sally's home until her death. In 1975 Belfrage and Pomerance were separated, and Pomerance moved to the United States. In 1980 she published Flowers of Emptiness, about her 1976 experiences during a two month visit to a guru's ashram in India. In 1983-1984 Sally was involved in teh Greenham Common Women's Nuclear Disarmament movement. In 1984 she began to visit Belfast, Northern Ireland, to research the effects of the longstanding civil conflict on Catholic and Protestant women. The resulting book, The Crack (Living with War): a Belfast Year, was published in 1987. The remainder of Belfrage's life was spent travelling and writing her last book, Un-American Activities (1994), which described her coming of age in the anti-communist 1950s. She died of cancer in London in March, 1994.

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