Carol Brightman (1939–2019)

Carol Brightman was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and grew up there and in Wilmette and Winnetka, Illinois. After graduating from New Trier High School, she went to Vassar College and then earned a master's degree from the University of Chicago.

As a graduate assistant in English at New York University in 1965, she co-founded a periodical entitled Viet Report to refute misinformation about the Vietnam War. It was sent to libraries and sold by groups like the American Friends Service Committee and Students for a Democratic Society. In 1967, Brightman went to North Vietnam as part of the Russell Tribunal contingent. The following year, she co-founded Leviathan, a New Left radical underground newspaper. She also served as a leader for the Venceremos Brigade, which arranged for young Americans to go to Cuba, and co-edited a book of writings by the participants with Sandra Levinson titled Venceremos Brigade: Young Americans Sharing the Life and Work of Revolutionary Cuba (1971).
She taught at Brooklyn College and was an associate editor at Geo magazine. She had a long-term relationship with Richard Levy, the father of her daughter. In 1987, Brightman, her partner Michael Uhl, and their son moved to Walpole, Maine, and she began writing books.
In 1992, she published Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World, which received the 1992 National Book Critics Circle Biography/Autobiography Award. She later edited correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy into a book titled Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy 1949-1975. Her younger sister Candace worked with the Grateful Dead as their lighting designer, which led Carol to write her book Sweet Chaos: The Grateful Dead's American Adventure, consisting of interviews with band members and fans.