Fadiman was born in Price, Utah, the daughter of bank president Leland Whitmore and Anne Sharp Whitmore, who later became a librarian at New York Public Library. Fadiman graduated from Stanford University in 1937. She was the first woman to be managing editor of the Stanford Daily student newspaper.[4] She moved from San Francisco, where she briefly worked at the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, then to Los Angeles taking a secretarial pool job at MGM. She wrote several screen treatments including Andy Hardy Meets Debutante (1940) and a screen adaptation for Tish.[5]
MGM offered her a contract but once the war began, Fadiman found "the prospect of seven years of Hollywood fluff when the real world was falling apart unendurable," and she applied to become a war correspondent but the War Department didn't allow female correspondents.[6]: 141 [4] She became a publicity manager for United China Relief, an aid organization, and wrote speeches for Madame Chiang Kai-shek.[6]: 142 [7][4] During her marriage to correspondent Melville Jacoby, Fadiman survived a month-long escape from the Philippines, and did six weeks of reporting from the front lines of Bataan and Corregidor.[8] Their writings were used nearly unedited, by John Hersey, in his best-seller Men on Bataan.
After the death of her husband, she continued to work as a journalist. Theodore H. White persuaded Time Magazine'sHenry Luce to petition the War Department for credentials for Fadiman. She became the only female correspondent reporting from Chongqing, China's wartime capital.[9] After the war, she collaborated with White on the best-selling book Thunder Out of China, about China's role in the war which contained portions of their published dispatches from Time.[4]
In the following years, she wrote, lectured, and participated in the radio quiz show Information Please.
She married Melville Jacoby on November 24, 1941 in Manila, Philippines.[10] He was killed in an airfield accident in Darwin in 1942 after the couple had moved to Brisbane.[9][4]
