Fishing on the Terrace

Mary Mayer Tanenbaum was born and raised in San Francisco, where her girlhood experience of the sights and sounds of Chinatown sparked a lifelong passion for Chinese culture. After graduating from Stanford in 1936, she worked as a book reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle. In 1938 she married Charles Tanenbaum and moved to New York. There she collected Chinese art and developed a deep knowledge of its history.Tanenbaum contributed extensively to cultural and scholarly life. Beyond the essays she wrote for the Christian Science Monitor, she compiled and edited the twelve-part series Chinese Book Arts and California, published in 1989 for the Book Club of California, and created an award for nonfiction writers through the San Francisco Foundation.At Stanford, she endowed the Mary M. Tanenbaum Fund for the acquisition of books and research materials on Chinese art. In 1993, she and Charles received the Warren R. Howell Award for exceptional contributions to Stanford University Libraries.