Author, Social Activist. She was known as the "The Sweatshop Cinderella" with her rags to riches story. She was about five years-old when her large Russian Orthodox Jewish family immigrated to the United States from what now is Poland. They settled in the lower east end of Manhattan. Her father did not work outside of his home practicing his faith continually. When her family changed their surname to “Mayer”, she took the name of Harriett Mayer, but later, as adult, assumed her birth name. Her father sent her to grammar school only before putting her, along with her mother, in the sweat shops to support the family. Her father’s reasoning was that men, meaning her older brothers, were entitled to an education, but disagreeing, she was determined to get an education beginning with night school to learn English. To get accepted to Columbia University in New York City, she lied on the application saying she was a high school graduate. While she continued to do menial work, she attended Columbia University’s Teachers College on scholarship from 1901 to 1905. She then taught elementary school from 1908 to 1913, with a brief leave of absence to attend the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. In 1910, she married Jacob Gordon, a New York attorney, but the marriage was annulled six months later. Within months in a Jewish wedding, she married Arnold Levitas, a long-time friend. Her only child, a daughter, was May 29, 1912. In 1913, she began to write fiction and in 1915 published her first short story, “The Free Vacation House”. By 1916, she had left Levitas, moved to San Francisco with her daughter, and started working as a social worker. At this point, she realized being a single parent was too much for her. She relinquished maternal rights of her daughter to child’s father, but did return to New York to maintain a stressed relationship with her daughter. In 1917, she met John Dewey , a philosophy professor at Columbia University who was over thirty years her senior. They became very close while she was auditing his seminar in social and political thought. She abandoned her Jewish faith for more an analytic reasoning. He wrote her love letters and over 21 poems, which she later used uncredited in her 1932 novel “All I Could Never Be”. By introducing her to editors, Dewey encouraged her to continue writing. Her fictional writings focused on difficulties of Jewish immigrant’s life at the turn of the century, thus seeing herself as voice to her people. Her short story, “The Fat of the Land,” was chosen the best of Best Short Stories of 1919. Published in 1920, her first collection of short stories, which included her chosen best story, was “Hungry Hearts”. This first book received surprising acclaim, along with an opportunity to go in Hollywood. Samuel Goldwyn bought the film rights to “Hungry Hearts”, eventually turning it into a well-received movie. She was given the opportunity to become a screenwriter when offered a $100,000 contract by Goldwyn, however she left Hollywood for New York returning to writing. In 1922, her first novel, “Salome of the Tenements” gave a story of doomed love between a working-class girl and her well-heeled suitor; it, too, was adapted into a film. Most recently, the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival showed this restored silent, black and white film in July 2010. In 1923 a novel, “Children of Loneliness” followed with a similar theme. Her 1925 master piece, “Bread Givers”, had a plot based on a Russian Jewish family leaving for American “the land of milk and honey” only to find exclusion, poverty, and the inability to better themselves. Another book followed in 1927, “Arrogant Beggar”. She held a Zona Gale Fellowship for writers-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin from 1928 to 1931, which gave time to write. During the rest of the 1930’s, she worked for the Works Progress Administration’s Writers Project in New York City. From 1932, she did not publish anything until her fictional autobiography, “Red Ribbon on a White Horse”, in 1950. With this book’s success, there was a demand for her earlier works to be published. In the last decades of her life, she documented the plight of Puerto Rican immigrants in New York, wrote “New York Times” book reviews and sometimes lectured. In 1962, she compared an elderly woman to a sickly bird in her book, "The Open Cage". Nearly blind but still writing, she moved to her daughter’s home in 1966. Sources state she fought depression and mood swings all her life. She died of “old age” in a long-term facility near Claremont, California. Since there is some question about the actual year of her birth with some saying 1880 while others closer to 1885, she was somewhere near ninety-years-old when she died. This age was based on the date of her first marriage in 1910 with the bride being about twenty-five-years old. Over the years, her books about the hardships of the Jewish Immigrants were considered the best depiction of this era in American history.