Helen Sullivan

Helen Sullivan was born in 1906 in New York to Irish parents. She attended Cornell University and wrote her thesis under the supervision of the renowned professor of European History, Carl Becker. She worked as one of the editors of the pioneering Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences under the direction of Alvin Johnson. In 1935, she received the Guggenheim Fellowship for research in Spain, focusing on the history of the War of the Communities in Castile during the 16th century. The material from the archives of the central libraries in Madrid and Valladolid provided the foundation for her book, which would become her life's work. For nearly the next twenty years, she worked on the seven-hundred-page comparative history of Spain and England titled "The Spirit of the People and the Machinations of Power." In 1951 and 1952, she completed her painstaking research at the National Library of Paris and the Widener Library at Harvard. However, mainly as a result of McCarthyism, the book was not published in the United States. In 1976, she moved to Greece, where she reached the end of her journey in 1992, at the age of eighty-five.