Helen Foster Snow

Vocation

American journalist who reported from China in the 1930s under the name "Nym Wales" on the developing revolution in China and the Korean independence movement. While, like her husband, Edgar Snow, she was never a member of the Chinese or American Communist Party, she was sympathetic to the revolutionaries in China, whom she compared favorably to the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek. In the late 1940s, critics grouped her with the China Hands as one of those responsible for the "loss of China" who went beyond sympathy to active support of Mao's revolution. The couple's marriage was strained and the Japanese occupation of much of China made life difficult. Helen returned to the States in 1940. The couple formally divorced in 1949. She spent the rest of her life in Connecticut, developing an interest in family genealogy, drafting a novel, and writing short pieces on her experiences in China. She published her autobiography in 1984. She died on 11 January 1997 in Guilford, New Haven County, Connecticut. Link to Wikipedia biography