“By the time she entered Vassar she was the fully formed person she would be for the rest of her life: beautiful and brilliant, possessed of an eye protected against sentiment coupled with a steel-trap mind and a tongue feared by all who had been at the receiving end of its talented sarcasm … She married straight out of college in 1933, came to live in New York, soon got divorced, rented a tiny apartment in Greenwich Village, and began her life.”