Rebecca Donner

Rebecca Donner is an American author whose work spans fiction, nonfiction, and biography. She is the grandniece of Mildred Harnack, the American woman at the center of her major nonfiction work. All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler (2021) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography and the Plutarch Award. The book tells the story of Mildred Fish Harnack, an American woman who married a German economist and became one of the central figures in the German resistance to the Nazi regime. Harnack ran a spy network for the Soviet Union while simultaneously leading a resistance cell in Berlin; she was arrested by the Gestapo in 1942 and executed by guillotine by direct order of Hitler in 1943. Donner conducted fifteen years of research across multiple countries and archives to reconstruct Harnack's life. The book combines biography, spy thriller, and intimate family history and has been widely praised as one of the definitive accounts of civilian resistance during the Third Reich. Donner is also the author of the novel Sunset Terrace (2005) and the graphic novel Burnout (2008). She has taught at Barnard College and Columbia University and has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Bogliasco Foundation, and the Ucross Foundation.