What she deserved — the commercial success, the contemporaneous recognition, the financial reward — she did not get, or got too late and in too small a measure.

The mystery of how this happened is not actually mysterious, once you understand the systems that produced it.

The tragedy is that those systems were so effective for so long, and that their effectiveness came at the cost of a long string of individuals whose contributions were real and whose recognition was denied.

Mary Kenner’s story is the story of one of those individuals.

It is also the story of a pattern that shaped American life in ways we are still working to fully understand and address.