English writer and political campaigner, Jessica Mitford, had a colorful history. Born the sixth of seven children into an affluent, English family, she would later renounce her privileged upbringing to join the ranks of the Communist Party, thereby becoming known as the Mitford family's "red sheep". She emigrated to the United States in 1939 with her husband, Esmond Romilly, who would go missing in action during an air raid over Nazi Germany just two years later in 1941. Her later interaction with, and work amongst lawyers, academics, and left-wing activists in the United States introduced her to the civil rights lawyer, Robert Treuhaft, whom she would later marry. Through his legal practice, Mitford advocated on behalf of a myriad of civil rights campaigns that would inform much of her own investigative journalism, whereby her 1963 exposé, The American Way of Death, would come to fruition.