Dola de Jong (1911–2003)

Dorothea Rosalie "Dola" de Jong was born to a prosperous Jewish family in Arnhem, The Netherlands. Her parents were Salomon Louis de Jong and his wife Lotte Rosalie Benjamin, who was German by birth. She had two brothers. Her mother died when Dola was five years old.
She showed a talent for writing from a young age. Growing up, she decided to become a ballet dancer, but her conservative father opposed this idea and wanted to send her to finishing school instead. After graduating from high school, as a compromise, she became an apprentice journalist at the Nieuwe Arnhemsche Courant. Around 1930, she she moved to Amsterdam. She took advanced ballet lessons there and in the UK and became a member of the Royal Dutch Ballet. She toured with the Yvonne Georgi Ballet. To fund her dance lessons, De Jong worked as a freelance journalist, writing under the pseudonym Sourit Ballon, and also wrote some children's books.
She published her first literary novel, Dans om het hart (Dance Around the Heart), in 1939. De Jong recognized the signs that the Netherlands was no longer safe for Jews. She fled to Tangier, Morocco in April 1940, just a few weeks before Nazi Germany invaded her country. Her father, stepmother, and one brother were killed by the Nazis.
In 1941, De Jong married Jan Hoowij, a painter, and the couple moved to New York City. In New York, De Jong sold the rights to her children's book Knikkernik, Knakkernak, and Knokkernok (1942), and soon afterwards received an advance from Scribner's editor Maxwell Perkins to write a novel. That became the critically acclaimed En de akker is de wereld (English title: And the Field Is the World, 1945), which was awarded the City of Amsterdam Literature Prize in 1947. She continued to dance with Bernard van Leer's Circus Kavaljos. She won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for her 1964 mystery novel The Whirligig of Time. She was divorced from Jan Hoowij and later remarried to Robert Joseph.
After another divorce, in 1970 she moved back to the Netherlands, where she wrote for Dutch magazines and radio and published more novels. In 1978, she returned to New York, where she completed a bachelor's degree in literature at Empire State College at SUNY. After graduating at age 72, De Jong became a teacher at the university.

In the late 1980s, she started painting, and wrote for De Nieuwe Amsterdammer.
Her controversial novel
De thuiswacht, originally published in 1954, was not translated into English (as The Tree and the Vine) until 1961. It was reissued by The Feminist Press at CUNY in 1996.