“My grandfather once said, having watched me one entire afternoon, prancing and leaping and cavorting, ‘this child will either end up on stage or in jail." Fortunately, I took the easy route.’” – Mary Tyler Moore

“I’m Mary Tyler Moore and I am…an actress, an animal lover, the chairman of the Juvenile diabetes Research Foundation, the wife of Dr. Robert Levine…Suffice it to say there are a lot of ways to end that sentence, and I don’t think I’ve come close to living through all the possibilities, thank heavens. But what I do know is that in every role I am a devotee of laughter and tears, committed to expressing the nuances of each.” – Mary Tyler Moore

A lot of ink has been spilled covering the lives of history’s most influential figures, but how much of the forest is lost for the trees? In Charles River Editors’ American Legends series, readers can get caught up to speed on the lives of America’s most important men and women in the time it takes to finish a commute, while learning interesting facts long forgotten or never known.

If television was still coming into its own during the 1950s, it truly became a national phenomenon across America in the 1960s, and in an era where most Americans finally owned a television, one of the most popular shows on the air was The Dick Van Dyke Show. The show starred Dick Van Dyke as a middle class writer who worked on a television show, but it also helped catapult Mary Tyler Moore (who played his wife) to superstardom and her own hit show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show.