first to the front
by Lorissa Rinehart
From 1945 to 1965, Dickey Chapelle covered almost every major conflict from WWII to Vietnam.
She was the only woman on the front lines of Okinawa.
She survived six weeks of solitary confinement in a communist Hungarian prison.
She marched beside the FLN in Algeria and found her way to Castro’s camp in the Sierra Maestra mountains.
She paratrooped with the 82nd, 101st, and Vietnamese Airborne, embedded herself with Special Forces in Laos and lived for a month with an anti-communist guerrilla army in the Mekong Delta.
While on patrol with some of the first combat Marines deployed to Vietnam in 1965, she was killed by an improvised explosive.
Dickey’s writing and photographs chronicle the arc of the Cold War like no other journalist. And yet, her work is almost unknown.
Until now.
“An extraordinary story….Reads like a Hollywood movie.”
— The Wall Street Journal
“Compelling and detailed…a thrilling adventure story.”
—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“Jam-packed with colorful details and incisive character sketches, this is a vivid reappraisal of a pioneering journalist.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Unforgettable….A valuable, long-overdue tribute to an American woman whose work and commitment to human rights is more relevant than ever.”
—BookPage (starred review)
About lorissa
Lorissa Rinehart writes about women, politics, war, and their points of intersection.
Her writing has recently appeared in Hyperallergic, Perfect Strangers, and Narratively, among other publications. Her biography, First to the Front: The Untold Story of Dickey Chapelle, Trailblazing Female War Correspondent (St. Martin’s Press) has received rave reviews from The Wall Street Journal, The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Publishers Weekly, among numerous other publications.
When not writing she can be found photographing the natural world impinging upon the urban landscape or digging in the dirt with her husband and two sons in Santa Barbara, California.
She holds an MA from NYU in Experimental Humanities and a BA in Literature from UC Santa Cruz. She is proudly represented by Lowenstein Associates.
Instagram @Lorissa_Rinehart
