Gloria Emerson
From dduffy@email.unc.edu Fri Aug 20 09:12:51 2004
Date: Fri, 06 Aug 2004 10:03:23 -0400
From: dduffy@email.unc.edu
Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Gloria Emerson mat roi
I picked up a Times yesterday on my way out of Seymour, in Connecticut's Appalachia, but didn't sit down with it until six hours later in Bethesda, a Beltway suburb outside Washington. I followed the front-page obituary of Cartier-Bresson into the paper. At the top of page 21 is an obituary for Gloria Emerson.
The obituary for Cartier-Bresson, a founding photographer of the look of modernity, is an art-history text that has been in the can for some time. The Emerson obituary by contrast reads like it caught the paper flat-footed. It is a cri de coeur:
"Gloria Emerson, a journalist and author who wrote with angry dignity about the effects of war on Americans, Vietnamese and Palestinians was found dead by friends and the police yesterday morning in her apartment in Manhattan. She was 75 and left no immediate survivors.
The medical examiner's office said that it had not ruled on the cause of death. Her physician, Karen Brudner, said Ms. Emerson had been suffering from Parkinson's disease, which she feared would leave her unable to write, and she left many notes at her apartment indicating she had taken her own life."
The reporter, Craig Whitney, rifles the archive of the Times, finding an employment application as well as articles, and quotes from an obituary Emerson herself left. Whitney's is a rich, helter-skelter article that provides nooks and crannies of fact around the simple strong narrative of Emerson's life provided by her ethnography of war in Viet Nam, Winners & Losers (1977).
Gloria Emerson was a young woman in Graham Greene's Saigon in 1956. She returned as a reporter in 1970. She followed the American men home and the refugees overseas. "Angry dignity" is an apt phrase for her work, and so would be "respect", "humanity", and "heartbreak."
Hers is one of many American works written deep in relationship with Vietnamese and American lives which are ignored by American literature specialists and consequently little known to such as Vietnamese area studies specialists.
The canon carries the autistic accounts, such Tim O'Brian's obsessive rehearsals of the failure of courage and imagination, and Michael Herr's monument to ignorance and alienation. O'Brians' Cacciato flees in fantasy but never drops his actual rifle. "Reading the Vietnamese," Herr writes, "is like reading the wind."
That's true enough, if you don't read books, and won't hire an interpreter, or god forbid, learn a foreign language. That is a fair characterization of most of the US soldiers who became authors, and almost all the Saigon press corps.
Emerson's oeuvre is one pillar of the hidden temple of US authors who write about the war as actual deeds by actual Americans and Vietnamese a person could go talk to. I am on the road and in any event my war books are in storage from a previous life, so I can't pull out good bits for you.
Drop into the library, or a chain bookstore, and Winners & Losers should be on the shelf. It did win the National Book Award and people read it. It's just not taught much. Maybe it would fit in your syllabus? I am going to go look at her recent novel, Loving Graham Greene (2000).
I never had a good reason as an editor to contact the author, or the good luck as a fan to see her speak. She was helpful to my Viet Nam Generation partner Kali Tal, to Randy Fertel in his Ron Ridenhour project, and a steady support to the work of Wayne Karlin. Besides blurbs and personal appearances, the obituary suggests that Emerson walked down the street handing out money to the poor.
She was also famously difficult. I would hear about that from people she had done favors for (not including those I mention here.) She was a lady, at ease enough to be herself with both the poor and the rich, flummoxing those locked in stances of gender and class. Reading her was one of the ways that I learned to take officers seriously as men.
She liked men. I keep her in a box in my mind with Alice Sheldon, who as James Tiptree, Jr. sparked a hilarious debate in science fiction about whether an author who knew men of action so well could possibly be a woman writing under a pseudonym, or conversely could possibly be a man. She was, to use the title of her great story, one of "The Women Men Don't See."
Alice the person was a secret agent in World War II who became a CIA analyst for the Cold War. She took a pistol to her husband when he succumbed to Alzheimer's, then to herself. It's impossible for me to read Tiptree's work now without knowing that, without whiffing, what? Despair? Steel analysis and compassionate action?
Winners and Losers is shot with despair, analysis, and compassion. I know that when I first read it twenty years ago I was surprised and grateful to learn that the author was still alive. Since then I have always been glad to see her blurb on yet another good book about Viet Nam destined to be ignored by the literature professors. I am sorry to read that she has checked out, and grateful for her colleague's effort to give an honest account of an author who doesn't fit the national narrative at all.
Dan Duffy
From MGilbert@ngcsu.edu Fri Aug 20 09:12:59 2004
Date: Sat, 18 Sep 2004 17:48:34 -0400
From: Gilbert <MGilbert@ngcsu.edu>
Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: Gloria Emerson mat roi
I just got back from New Delhi where I saw the Times obituary for Gloria Emerson in a Herald Tribune.
Dan Duffy was right: this obituary is unlike any other, but so was she. Its style replicated, I think, the herky jerky but soul deep, crack-wise but serious, the funny and the tragic that flew about in any conversation with her. Dan wrote that she was rare in her concern for the Vietnamese people, but she stood apart for being a crusader in that cause in ways not available to Don Luce and others. She had a quick pen and real mouth to use in this battle and I can well understand, having had family with Parkinsons, why she might rage against the dying of those talents with which she was so closely identified. So no second guessing her suicide, but, still, she will be missed.
Thanks to an introduction from Bill Ehrhart, I was able to interview her. I promised her I would hold the following story at least until Lucien Conein died --so she could avoid a nuisance lawsuit-- and I took that promise so seriously I never used it (Conein was then ill; he died in 1998). While in a restaurant in Saigon in 1963, she overheard a drunk Conein loudly berating and yelling at a cabal of senior ARVN officers at another table that "If you won't overthrow Diem, we will!"
Could anyone wish for a better fly on the wall? She once told a reporter she was "Bossy. Ill-tempered. Ferocious. Put all of that down. Do you have it?" Yes, and received with thanks.
Professor Marc Jason Gilbert
Department of History
North Georgia College and State University
Dahlonega, Georgia 30597
Phone: (706) 864-1911
Fax: (706) 864-1873
E-mail: mgilbert@ngcsu.edu
From Edward.G.Miller@Dartmouth.EDU Fri Aug 20 09:13:03 2004
Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2004 09:04:36 -0400
From: Ed Miller <Edward.G.Miller@Dartmouth.EDU>
Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: RE: Gloria Emerson mat roi
Dear Marc:
Thanks for relating this story of Emerson's. Is it true, I wonder? A quick perusal of "Winners & Losers" does not turn up any mention of Emerson having been in Saigon in 1963. She was there in 1956, of course, and again in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but I've never seen anything suggesting that she was there during the 1963 crisis. While her reluctance to publish this particular anecdote about Conein is understandable, i find it strange that someone with her interests would have witnessed the dramatic events of 1963 in Saigon and never written about it. Also, a notice in the Times shows that she was in Paris in late September (NYT, 29 Sep 1963, p. 89), which was presumably around the time that Conein would have been berating the ARVN brass. Are there other materials I've missed that corroborate this story?
Ed
From dduffy@email.unc.edu Fri Aug 20 09:13:08 2004
Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2004 14:41:00 -0400
From: Dan Duffy <dduffy@email.unc.edu>
Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: Gloria Emerson mat roi
I have the same concerns as Ed. I will believe anything of Conein, but it has got to be plausible.
Emerson's chronology and whereabouts, in and out of Indochina, has always confused me. The NYT obituary, with all its stray facts, suggests a person who authored herself in difficult circumstances, reminiscent of the American anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston who edited ten years out of her life. I leave people like that alone while they're alive, but once he or she is gone they are fair game for scholarship.
Can Marc clear things up?
Dan Duffy
From hhtai@fas.harvard.edu Fri Aug 20 09:13:13 2004
Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2004 15:35:16 -0400
From: Tam Tai <hhtai@fas.harvard.edu>
Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: Gloria Emerson mat roi
I had a very different encounter with Gloria Emerson. I was in my first year of graduate school at Harvard and decided to eat in the cafeteria of the East Asian Research Center. Gloria Emerson was spending a year at Harvard then. She happened to be in line before me. I was introduced to her as a Vietnamese student. She immediately turned a very concerned looking countenance on me and said: "You poor thing, is your family okay?" I was a bit taken aback as she seemed to expect me to answer in the negative. But I was not in the habit of telling my life story to complete strangers the minute I met them, so I said, "Yes, they're okay." That was it. She totally lost interest in me and turned her back once again, engaging in conversation with someone else in the line. She was in search of war victims and I had failed to deliver.
Hue-Tam
From hhtai@fas.harvard.edu Thu Aug 19 12:36:21 2004
Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2004 15:35:16 -0400
From: Tam Tai <hhtai@fas.harvard.edu>
Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: Gloria Emerson mat roi
I had a very different encounter with Gloria Emerson. I was in my first year of graduate school at Harvard and decided to eat in the cafeteria of the East Asian Research Center. Gloria Emerson was spending a year at Harvard then. She happened to be in line before me. I was introduced to her as a Vietnamese student. She immediately turned a very concerned looking countenance on me and said: "You poor thing, is your family okay?" I was a bit taken aback as she seemed to expect me to answer in the negative. But I was not in the habit of telling my life story to complete strangers the minute I met them, so I said, "Yes, they're okay." That was it. She totally lost interest in me and turned her back once again, engaging in conversation with someone else in the line. She was in search of war victims and I had failed to deliver.
Hue-Tam
From dduffy@email.unc.edu Sun Aug 22 10:46:56 2004
Date: Sun, 22 Aug 2004 13:44:21 -0400
From: Dan Duffy <dduffy@email.unc.edu>
Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Emerson obituaries
I am spending a couple hours to work out when Gloria Emerson was in Saigon. I am trying public sources first. Today the Web, next week her published texts and any account she may have given the Dictionary of Literary Biography and other standard references.
The upshot of my Web search is the basic story, that Emerson was in the South in 1956, reporting in some capacity, and returned in 1970 for a couple years. One interesting devleopment to the story is that she was friendly with VN people in France from 1964 to 1968.
It is also clear that there is no satisfactory story with dates and names and context readily available.
I attach the raw materials with web addresses I found in a quick search of the Web. There are original obituaries from the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, Associated Press and the San Francisco Chronicle. I would have had to pay to see the full Times obituary at this time so I pass on a copy a vet made to a listserv.
Emerson was a transatlantic personage, but the only Romance-language coverage I found came from a brief Agence France Presse obituary, reprinted in Le Devoir and sighted also in Spanish and Italian papers. I didn't find anything from Figaro, France Ouest, Humanitie, or Liberation, my basic rounds in the French press. Maybe I made some basic search error.
From the UK, I got the Guardian obituary but could not get the Independent one.
I found a long, lovely article from Tuoi Tre, by one Ho* Anh Thai', who must be the novelist Ho^` Anh Thai', who knew her. I also copied an appreciative VOV article cited to Lao Dong, and an English-language press review which mentions a Thanh Nhien article that I did not find.
I didn't run across any articles from the overseas Vietnamese press.
I also found and copied stray matter, such as Emerson's own one-page account of her travels in VN from one of her books, and an article that makes the valuable point that there were foreign women working in some way as reporters all over SG during the war. There is also a New York gossip sheet's coverage of the New York Times obituary, raising the kind of concerns I have about what we know about Emerson's early life.
The document I really want is the obituary that Emerson left herself. I qould also like to see free-lance stories with her byline from Saigon in 1956.
The friend of Emerson's I would first approach to ask if he had a detailed knowledge of her early life in Saigon would be Dick Hughes, the Shoeshine Boy project man, who drove her around while she was preparing to die. I think that different people will know stray details, because she seems to me to have been not secretive, just private.
It sure would be nice to just find it all in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. I'll get to that next week.
Dan Duffy
From hhtai@fas.harvard.edu Tue Aug 24 07:57:13 2004
Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2004 10:55:48 -0400
From: Tam Tai <hhtai@fas.harvard.edu>
Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: Gloria Emerson at Harvard
Marc:
The two episodes are not comparable. The only point of similarity is that atwo journalists initiated an exchange, with one thrusting a microphone in your face and another--Gloria Emerson-- initiating an exchange with me. But as soon as I produced an answer that did not fit her preconceived narrative of the Vietnam War as a story of victims oppressed by American imperialism (yeah, I was at Harvard on full fellowship), I ceased to exist for her. She literally turned her back on me. Did anybody ever tell her that you need to cultivate your sources before they open up? Did she expect that I would tell stories of death, jail, divided loyalties, and more in a cafeteria line within seconds of meeting her? I could have told her all of the above and more, just drawing on my family, as many members of VSG must know. What struck me about my encounter with Emerson was her utter lack of curiosity. Not a good trait in a journalist.
Hue-Tam
From dduffy@email.unc.edu Tue Aug 24 10:29:33 2004
Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2004 13:27:03 -0400
From: Dan Duffy <dduffy@email.unc.edu>
Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Gloria Emerson bio progress
It seems to me that Marc and Tam Tai are talking about the same person. If you go through her obituaries, you will see Emerson's manner recorded from both perspectives.
As for me, I let opportunities to interact with her pass, because I expected that it would go something as it did with Tam Tai. I dislike anyone, especially from the Saigon press corps, sizing up my involvement with Viet Nam on the fly, and I refuse to explain it to anyone who tries.
But it's apparent that a long list of substantial people, from Dick Hughes to Wayne Karlin to Ho Anh Thai, had sustained and mutual friendships with Emerson the person. I like the author of her books. She shows tremendous sympathy with the people she could relate to.
I think it is interesting that the person who became the author of those books once told an historian that she was in a restaurant with Lucien Conein and some RVNAF officers. Lucien Conein was a secret agent. It is interesting to me that a belles-lettriste do-gooder would recognize him in the first place, and in the second place stick around to eavesdrop.
So, I would like to know what she was doing in Saigon in 1956. I would like to know about the European, Znamiecki, whom she first married. Did he go to Viet Nam, too? What did he do for a living and why was he dead in 1957? I would like to know what Vietnamese people Emerson was meeting in Paris in the 1960s.
No progress so far. Neither Contemporary Authors nor the Dictionary of Literary Biography has published an article on Gloria Emerson, though they have been doing Michael Herr at intervals since the 1970s. UNC doesn't carry old copies of the Social Register, the phone book of wealthy WASPs in New York in her day, with marriages and births.
Next I go through her books and interviews.
Dan Duffy
From MGilbert@ngcsu.edu Tue Aug 24 16:39:49 2004
Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2004 19:36:13 -0400
From: Gilbert <MGilbert@ngcsu.edu>
Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: Gloria Emerson at Harvard
Hue-Tam is absolutely right, but I have never had any other than the experience she had with Emerson with any journalist, do-gooder, Big Wig and with far too many academics (don't get me started). Yes, you would think that this attitude was counterproductive, but no. If you do not fit their vision of the little world they have created, you are just a fly on their pudding. When they fix on their project, it is all they can do to stay on point, and so they miss the point altogether. For them, as Vincent Millay said, the motto becomes "I love humanity; its people I hate."
Emerson always said that she was a royal pain in the ass, and her persona inspired as well as repelled, but when I read Hue-Tam's e-mail, I vividly saw a human being reduced to a nonentity by Emerson and I thought "What a jerk!" But perhaps it is my own Buddhist practice prevents me from letting that diminish my compassion for those who, like Emerson, live in hope that the world can be made to live up to their expectations, only to find in the end, it is incapable of offering such satisfaction. Hue-Tam's young self offered Emerson a lesson in that, as well as in the complexity of Vietnamese life, and it passed her by, leaving her unknowingly diminished as a journalist, as a crusader for what she believed was in the best interest of the Vietnamese people, and as a human being. In the face of such an outcome, one all too common in U. S.-Vietnamese relations (Lodge, Westmoreland, Rostow, and 200 million others), I would prefer to turn any anger at Emerson's perceived shortcomings into the means of making sure that our own chances at lessons learned do not pass us by. Insofar as Emerson herself tried to do that in her books and other writings, let that good live after her. We can use all the help we can get.
Marc
From tbalaban@earthlink.net Wed Aug 25 06:06:08 2004
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2004 09:03:20 -0400
From: John Balaban <tbalaban@earthlink.net>
Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Gloria Emerson
Gloria Emerson was a brilliant writer and a very brave woman. She was a very funny and charming person. She was generous beyond belief with veterans of the Vietnam war, especially writers, whom she often helped into print and to whom she sometimes gave money when they were down in their luck. Long after she wrote her Pulitzer Prize-winning Winners and Losers, she stayed in contact with the men of that book and their families. She visited some of them in prison. She was also famously curt and difficult, as all of her friends will attest.
She died by her own hand after a long-term injury and the onset of Parkinson's disease. It strikes me as indecent that VSG members who met her only briefly or not at all would use this scholars' listserve for cruel and uninformed gossip about her life, about which they know nothing.
From hhtai@fas.harvard.edu Wed Aug 25 06:46:10 2004
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2004 09:43:51 -0400
From: Tam Tai <hhtai@fas.harvard.edu>
Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: Gloria Emerson
>> It strikes me as indecent that VSG members who met her only
briefly or not at all would use this scholars' listserve for cruel
and uninformed gossip about her life, about which they know
nothing.>>
Please note that I limited myself to my personal encounter with Gloria Emerson. My encounter with Emerson was indeed as brief as can be. She: "You poor thing, how is your family?" Me: "They're okay." End of encounter. I never talked to her again, though I occasionally saw her from afar during her year at Harvard. That Emerson was capable of great sympathy and sustained friendships comes through very clearly in her writings. My recounting this episode was not intended to undermine her writings, and I am sorry if it came across that way.
It is, however, legitimate to ask, as Ed Miller has, in what circumstances Lucien Conein would have made the comments she attributes to him. The actual role of the US in the overthrow of Diem is a matter of scholarly analysis. If Dan Duffy can shed light on when the meeting between Conein and Emerson took place, that would be very helpful.
Hue-Tam
From DNguyen@KQED.org Wed Aug 25 09:40:50 2004
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2004 09:39:18 -0700
From: Nguyen Qui Duc <DNguyen@KQED.org>
Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: RE: Gloria Emerson
Thank you, John.
It'd been quite difficult, especially as a Vietnamese, to see such a discussion--even with normal scholarly concerns--so immediately after someone's death.
Gloria Emerson has often been difficult and eccentric, and had harsh words for me the first time I talked to her in 1989. Since then I have had the pleasure of working with her, being with her at conferences, simply being around her, or receiving kind letters and phone calls from her. Whichever way she expressed her passion, or obsession, she remained a caring person--more capable than many of us of sympathy and friendships.
Getting at the truth is one thing, allowing a limited incident or two to create a different impression of her is another.
I have hesitated to join this discussion since I couldn't trust that further words would help show respect, and I apologize if mine offend.
I am thankful to see the eloquence in the responses from John and others.
duc
From MGilbert@ngcsu.edu Tue Aug 24 06:30:42 2004
Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2004 09:28:11 -0400
From: Gilbert <MGilbert@ngcsu.edu>
Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: RE: Gloria Emerson at Harvard
Edward.G.Miller@Dartmouth.EDU wrote: "Thanks for relating this story of Emerson's. Is it true, I wonder?
But first, the further response: was Gloria Emerson a self-obessed user, like all reporters and almost all crusaders? Answer, Yes. Even Florence Nightingale feared she would become an abuser of others and a reducer of those she hoped to help into mere objects of her own desire "like all reformers." Sounds like Emerson fit that bill in the cafeteria at Harvard. My own view, based on my own experience, is that it is all too easy to fall into that error. After completing six years of work interviewing homeless Vietnam combat veterans for a documentary (only in the US; I wasn't allowed to film in Vietnam) , the film's camerman (a Vietnam vet) and I went to the Vietnam Veteran Memorial Wall on the 20 th anniversary of the end of the war to quietly and privately perform a brief Indian healing ceremony at its base (for us as well as them). It was past sunset and in a light drizzle, but within seconds, there was an entrie camera crew filming and a reporter thrusting a microphone in our faces. Past our tears, we both had to smile. How many times in six years had we been just as intrusive? We kept our mouths shut and accepted our lesson with gratitude for so clear and so Zen a lesson..
Was Emerson in Vietnam in 1963? Very good question.
I never gave it much thought since it seemed at best evidence only of Conein's well-known arrogance. And since Emerson told me he would deny it, what would be the point of using the story for scholarly purposes? Not much.. And I would urge all to take that position, unless someone comes forward to confirm it, like the waiters at the Continental (or whereever).
In retrospect, now I wish I had occasion to use it in my published work, as before I did, I would have got back to her and quizzed her about the specificss. It might be worth exploring Conein's service years and hers to see if she merely conflated coups, or whether the error was mine in assuming that it was 1963 and not earlier. The conversation lept from me remarking that Conein was ill, and sprung from her hatred of him, not from a disucssion/analysis of how the USA went to war. Perhaps if that had been the subject of our talk, I would have naturally followed it up. Instead, we both laughed bitterly at the typical image it called to mind of the Ugly American. Lost opportunity that, but over the years several exploding bombs/mines missed my pacifist rear-end at less than fifty yards, etc. so I will take the luck I get.
My motive for contacting Emerson then was that I needed to use her as a source for a statement that Harry Summers made in her presence that we should have used nuclear weapons in Vietnam. She confirmed the remark, but I got confirmation from others present when he made it before using it, as is my practice.
Marc
Professor Marc Jason Gilbert
Department of History
North Georgia College and State University
Dahlonega, Georgia 30597
Phone: (706) 864-1911
Fax: (706) 864-1873
E-mail: mgilbert@ngcsu.edu
From: Bunch, Dean
To: dduffy@email.unc.edu ; vsg@u.washington.edu ;
hhtai@fas.harvard.edu
Cc: MGilbert@ngcsu.edu ; Edward.G.Miller@Dartmouth.EDU
Sent: Saturday, October 09, 2004 5:48 AM
Subject: Gloria Emerson
I knew Gloria as a young information officer in Vietnam in 1970-71. I have read with interest your emails concerning her and her death and obits.
If anyone has it, or could get it, I think it would be very interesting to all if her self-written obit, referred to in the NYT and Wpost obits, could be published, at least on the web, in its entirety. Does anyone have the obit that she wrote, or perhaps could tell me where to get it?
Thanks.
Dean Bunch
Sutherland Asbill & Brennan LLP
2282 Killearn Center Boulevard
Tallahassee, Florida 32309
(850) 894-0471
Fax: (850) 894-0030
Cell: (850) 510-6365
Home: (850) 893-7875
email: dean.bunch@sablaw.com
From dduffy@email.unc.edu Sun Oct 10 06:39:01 2004
Date: Sun, 10 Oct 2004 09:37:34 -0400
From: Dan Duffy <dduffy@email.unc.edu>
Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: Gloria Emerson
Since the school year started soon after Gloria Emerson's death I haven't had time even to go through her published work to write a chronology.
I also think that Emerson's own obituary should be on the Web. A reporter who writes an obituary before suicide is making a statement to the world.
It seems to me that a determined person who made it a priority to get a copy of Emerson's own obituary and mount it on the Web could accomplish it that goal in a few steps.
The only objections I can imagine someone holding a copy of Emerson's own obituary could raise to passing it on are those of intellectual property and privacy. They don't seem to apply to an obituary written by a reporter before her deliberate and open suicide.
Perhaps writing directly to the man who wrote the New York Times obituary, Craig Whitney, would be the first step. If he isn't happy to pass on his colleague's own obituary to the world she wrote it for, perhaps her good friend who drove her around the last day of her life would cooperate. He is named in the bundle of documents I sent to the list.
Dan Duffy