Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht (1931–1991)

Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht was born in New York City. She earned a bachelor's degree from Hunter College in 1952 and worked as an editor for the Glen Oaks News and This Month magazine. She went on to become a freelance writer and an assistant editor at Gilberton, the publishers of Classics Illustrated comic books, where she worked until 1961. By the end of her tenure there, she was editor-in-chief and had created spin-off titles like Classics Illustrated Junior and other nonfiction comics like The World Around Us. In 1958, she married Herbert Feuerlicht, a sculptor, with whom she had a son. In 1963, Roberta published her first historical work, Andrews’ Raiders. In 1965, she began a series of biographies that included Oliver Wendell Holmes, Gandhi, Madame Curie (all 1965), Theodore Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King, Jr. (1966). Further works included The Desperate Act (1968), A Free People (1969), Henry VIII (1970), In Search of Peace (1971), America’s Reign of Terror (1971), Zhivko of Yugoslavia (1971), and Joe McCarthy and McCarthyism (1972). In 1977, she wrote a history of the trial and executions of Nicolas Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti called Justice Crucified, which was praised in The New York Times as "the most comprehensive and persuasive account of the case we have." She died at age 59 in 1991 of congestive heart failure.