Susan Southworth
April 4, 1947-Dec. 11, 2020
Menlo Park, California

The eldest of four sisters, Susan was born to Elizabeth Lee and Edwin Brown in Northfield, Minnesota. At the age of ten, her family moved to Edina, a Minneapolis suburb. After receiving a BA in English from St. Olaf College and an MA, summa cum laude, in art history from Southern Methodist University, she studied cultural anthropology at the University of Hawaii-Manoa and at the Sorbonne's Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes.

From 1999 to 2020, Susan worked at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Over the years, both independently and at Stanford, she edited numerous publications. In 2010, she and close friend Lenora Ferro wrote George P. Shultz--A Tribute: Tales from the First 90 Years, a book honoring the former US secretary of state on his ninetieth birthday. Their biography of the late theoretical physicist Sidney Drell, Into the Heart of Matter, Passionately was published in 2020.

A lover of classical music, Susan was known to fly to Los Angeles three weekends in a row to see Gustavo Dudamel conduct the Los Angeles Philharmonic and to watch the Paris Opera Ballet perform the same ballet four nights in succession at Palais Garnier. Normally tolerant and mild mannered, she could barely contain her wrath for concert audience members whose mindless coughing ruined sublime moments of music.

Devoted to her two children, Susan was an active volunteer at the Peninsula French-American School (now the Silicon Valley International School) during their elementary school years. A Francophile, she lived in Nantes in the late 1970s and in Paris in the late 1980s. She also cherished her Norwegian heritage and Mayflower lineage.

Susan is survived by her son, Elliott, his wife, Manal el Khazen, and their son (her grandson), Stephen; her daughter, Melisande, and her husband, Marc Beretti; and Fenja, her faithful Bernese Mountain Dog.

A private garden party is planned. Gifts in Susan's memory may be made to the Big Sur Land Trust, P.O. Box 221864, Carmel, CA 93922; the Peninsula Humane Society, 12 Airport Boulevard, San Mateo, CA 94401; or to Menlo School; Music@Menlo, 50 Valparaiso Avenue, Atherton, CA 94027.