Mel Leventhal

AW published her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, which in draft had been titled What Can the Righteous Do?, and which was dedicated to her mother and her husband .

She finished work on this volume (titled from a plant which her mother rescued from a deserted house, kept for years, and gave away in cuttings) during the first year of her Radcliffe Institute fellowship...

AW married Mel Leventhal in a civil ceremony in a New York courtroom.

Then, in Mississippi in the summer of 1966, she met white law student Mel (or Melvyn) Leventhal , who had a summer job with the Law Students' Civil Rights Research Council . They worked together...

When AW moved north in 1971 she took her daughter with her while Mel Leventhal stayed with his work in Mississippi. Rebecca was seriously ill during her winter in Massachusetts, and returned in summer 1972...

To enable AW to move north, Mel Leventhal took a job in the New York office of the NAACP , working for their Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Two years after the divorce he married...

After their wedding, in summer 1967, AW and Mel Leventhal moved back from New York to Mississippi, to a bungalow they bought at 1443 Rockdale Drive, Jackson, in a middle-class black neighbourhood.

In the first story in her collection The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart, AW wrote tenderly of her marriage to Mel Leventhal , from whom she had been divorced for nearly a quarter century.

After this she settled into the rent-free room overlooking Washington Square in New York that went with Mel Leventhal 's job. From there she moved on to the MacDowell Colony of writers at Peterborough, New...