Abel Meeropol
Abel Meeropol (1903 - 1986) was an American writer best known under his pseudonym Lewis Allan, under which he wrote the anti-lynching poem Strange Fruit which he subsequently set to music and was famously performed by Billie Holiday.
Meeropol was the writer of countless poems and songs, including the Sinatra hit The House I Live In. He taught at De Witt Clinton High School in the Bronx, and on the side was an ardent, but closet, Communist. Meeropol chose to write as Lewis Allan in memory of the names of his two still-born children.
He later adopted Ethel and Julius Rosenberg's two sons, Michael and Robert, after their parents' execution.
Billie Holiday (or rather her ghostwriter) claimed, in Lady Sings the Blues, that she cowrote the music to the song with Meeropol and Sonny White, but in fact, Meeropol was the sole writer of both lyrics and melody to this haunting plea for civil rights.
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