Editing Clare Boothe Luce (section)

==Writing career==
[[File:Poster - Women, The 01.jpg|thumb|Poster from the 1939 film ''[[The Women (1939 film)|The Women]]'']]
Luce published ''Stuffed Shirts'', a volume of short stories, in 1931. ''[[Scribner's Magazine]]'' compared the work to [[Evelyn Waugh]]'s ''Vile Bodies'' for its bitter humor. ''[[The New York Times]]'' found it socially superficial, but praised its "lovely festoons of epigrams" and beguiling stylishness: "What malice there may be in these pages has a felinity that is the purest [[Turkish Angora|Angoran]]."<ref>Morris 1997, pp.&nbsp;188–89.</ref> The book's device of characters interlinked from story to story was borrowed from [[Sherwood Anderson]]'s ''[[Winesburg, Ohio (novel)|Winesburg, Ohio]]'' (1919), but it impressed [[Andre Maurois]], who asked Luce's permission to imitate it.<ref>Morris 1997, p. 182.</ref> Luce also published many magazine articles. She was also a playwright.

After the failure of her initial stage effort, the marital melodrama ''Abide With Me'' (1935), she rapidly followed up with a satirical comedy, ''[[The Women (play)|The Women]]''. Deploying a cast of no fewer than 40 actresses who discussed men in often scorching language, it became a Broadway smash in 1936 and, three years later, a successful Hollywood movie known for its exclusively female cast. Toward the end of her life, Luce claimed that for half a century, she had steadily received royalties from productions of ''The Women'' all around the world. Later in the 1930s, she wrote two more successful, but less durable plays, also both made into movies: ''Kiss the Boys Goodbye'' and ''[[Margin for Error (play)|Margin for Error]]''. The latter work "presented an all-out attack on the [[Nazism|Nazis]]' racist philosophy".<ref>Lyons (1989), ''Clare Boothe Luce, Author and Diplomat'', p.&nbsp;61.</ref> Its opening night in [[Princeton, New Jersey]], on October 14, 1939, was attended by [[Albert Einstein]] and [[Thomas Mann]]. [[Otto Preminger]] directed and starred in both the Broadway production and [[Margin for Error|screen adaptation]].<ref>Morris 1997, pp. 351–55, 368.</ref>

Much of Luce's famously acid wit ("No good deed goes unpunished",<ref>The famous quip was first quoted in print by Luce's social secretary [[Letitia Baldrige]] in ''Roman Candle'' (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1956), 129: "When I would entreat her to engage in resolving a specific case, she replied, 'No good deed goes unpunished, Tish, remember that.{{'"}} Oscar Wilde, Billy Wilder, and Andrew W. Mellon have also been cited as sources, but without written evidence.</ref> "Widowhood is a fringe benefit of marriage", "A hospital is no place to be sick") can be traced back to the days when, as a wealthy young divorcee in the early 1930s, she became a caption writer at ''[[Vogue (magazine)|Vogue]]'' and then, associate editor and managing editor of [[Vanity Fair (American magazine 1913-1936)|''Vanity Fair'']]. She not only edited the works of such humorists as [[P. G. Wodehouse]] and [[Corey Ford]] but also contributed many comic pieces of her own, signed and unsigned.

[[File:Luce and Sheks.jpg|thumb|left|General [[Chiang Kai-shek]] and [[Soong Mei-ling|Madame Chiang]] welcome Clare Boothe Luce, April 1942.]]
Another branch of Luce's literary career was that of [[War reporting|war journalism]]. ''Europe in the Spring'' was the result of a four-month tour of Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, and France in 1939–1940 as a correspondent for ''Life'' magazine. She described the widening battleground of World War II as "a world where men have decided to die together because they are unable to find a way to live together."<ref name=Front >{{cite web|title=Women Come to Front: Journalist, Photographers and Broadcaster During WWII|date=July 27, 2010|url=https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/wcf/wcf0010.html|publisher=Library of Congress|access-date=May 30, 2012}}</ref>

In 1941, Luce and her husband toured [[China]] and reported on the status of the country and its war with [[Japan]]. Her profile of General [[Douglas MacArthur]] was on the cover of ''[[Life (magazine)|Life]]'' on December 8, 1941, the day after the Japanese attacked [[Pearl Harbor attack|Pearl Harbor]]. After the United States entered the war, Luce toured military installations in Africa, India, China, and [[Burma]], compiling a further series of reports for ''Life''. She published interviews with General [[Harold Alexander]], commander of British troops in the Middle East, [[Chiang Kai-shek]], [[Jawaharlal Nehru]], and General [[Joseph Warren Stilwell|Stilwell]], commander of American troops in the China-Burma-India theater.<ref name="Front"/>

Being in the right place at the right time and easy access to key commanders made her an influential figure on both sides of the Atlantic. She endured bombing raids and other dangers in Europe and the [[Far East]]. She did not hesitate to criticize the unwarlike lifestyle of General Sir [[Claude Auchinleck]]'s Middle East Command. One draft article for ''Life'', noting that the general lived far from the Egyptian front in a houseboat, and mocking RAF pilots as "flying fairies", was discovered by British Customs when she passed through [[Trinidad]] in April 1942. It caused such Allied consternation that she briefly faced house arrest.<ref>Morris 1997, p. 458.</ref> Coincidentally or not, Auchinleck was fired a few months later by [[Winston Churchill]]. Her varied experiences in all the major war theaters qualified her for a seat the following year on the House Military Affairs Committee after she was elected to the [[United States House of Representatives]] in 1942.{{citation needed|date=January 2019}}

Luce never wrote an autobiography but willed her enormous archive of personal papers to the [[Library of Congress]].<ref>Library of Congress, https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/eadmss.ms003044</ref>