Up from Orchard Street

About Eleanor Widmer

Eleanor Widmer, who grew up on New York’s Lower East Side, had a varied career as a scholar, critic, teacher, and a food and restaurant critic in the San Diego region where she made her home. She earned a master’s degree at Columbia University and a doctorate in English literature at the University of Washington in 1956. A passionate defender of freedom of expression, she was an expert witness in an obscenity trial involving banning the sale of Henry Miller’s novel, Tropic of Cancer. She died in California in 2004 at the age of eighty.