Shelley Smith Mydans

Shelley Smith Mydans (born Shelley Smith; May 20, 1915 – March 7, 2002) was an American novelist, journalist and prisoner of war.

Life Mydans was born in California, where she grew up thinking of being a dancer, although her father was a university professor of journalism. As a child, she was one of the first participants in Lewis Terman's landmark Genetic Studies of Genius longitudinal study. She moved to New York to work for the Literary Digest, and became a journalist for Life magazine, where she met Carl Mydans in 1938. They married the following year and they were the first husband-and-wife team to be employed by the magazine.

In 1945 her husband went to Manila where he was to record the iconic moment of MacArthur's return but this was denied to Mydans and she was sent to Guam to work on a restricted basis. "I was accredited to the navy, but I was not - because I was a woman - allowed to cover action on naval ships or planes and my articles had to be confined to such things as the navy flight nurses and marine base camps." She wrote two more novels — the first was based around the life of Thomas Becket and the other was based in 8th-century Japan. She and her husband also wrote a non-fiction book about post war terrorism.

Mydans died in Larchmont, New York in 2002.