Edith Henriet Rosenfels was born in 1913 as the youngest child and only girl in a Jewish family in Oak Park, Illinois.
[1] Edith later described their mother Helen (d. 1965) as politically liberal; for years she was on the Abraham Lincoln Center Board on the South Side of Chicago.
In terms of family dynamics, Edith believed she was the favorite of their father; she said he found the boys difficult to deal with, and Richard was preferred by their mother.
[1] Richard earned a PhD in botany; Paul became a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, and Walter worked in advertising as a copy writer.
[1] Edith Rosenfels met her future husband Philleo Nash while in college at the University of Chicago.
In 1973 he and Dean Hannottee with students co-founded the Ninth Street Center in New York City for the study of humanity.
They returned to Washington in the early 1960s, when Philleo served as Director of the Bureau of Indian Affairs under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.
Included in it are poems about her 1930s "coming out" party at a Chicago speakeasy, meeting "Ernie" Hemingway through his younger sister in 1929 at their parents' house, and progressive causes she had championed.
[3] Her life was celebrated in the poem "When You're Eighty-Five," written by her friend Mark Scarborough and published in the summer 2001 issue of the Wisconsin Academy Review.