Marian Cannon Schlesinger, "a droll and high-spirited protofeminist artist, writer and eyewitness to history in the Kennedy White House as the first wife of the president's resident intellectual, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.," died October 14, the New York Times reported. She was 105.
"Early on I decided being a painter was what I wanted to be, but I wanted to be a lot of other things too," she told the Atlantic in 2013. "I wanted to write. I wanted to play tennis. I wanted to have a lot of friends. I wanted to have a lot of beaus... I think I've been very lucky. But I think that I've made some of it for myself. I never gave up. I wanted it all, in other words, and I think I really almost got it all too."
Her books include I Remember: A Life of Politics, Painting and People (2011) and Snatched From Oblivion: A Cambridge Memoir (1979), as well as five children's books she wrote and illustrated.
The Boston Globe noted that "politics became a significant part of her life during her 30-year marriage to Schlesinger, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, published in 1965. Schlesinger, whom she divorced in 1970, died in 2007."