Priscilla Hiss

Hiss died age 81 on October 14, 1984, at St. Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan.

At both trials, FBI typewriter experts testified that the Baltimore Documents from Chambers's matched samples typed in the 1930s by Priscilla Hiss on a Woodstock model number N23009 typewriter that the Hiss family had owned. On March 17, 1978, the New York Times published a letter from her:

After her husband, Alger, was convicted and imprisoned in the early 1950s, she worked in a bookstore and then as a book editor for publishing houses. In 1966, her alumni details show her working as copy editor for Harcourt, Brace & World. In 1972, she was a senior editor for the Golden Press children's imprint of the Western Publishing Company.

After the Hiss Case, Priscilla Hiss used to leave son Tony to stay at the home of Alger Hiss's personal attorney Helen Lehman Buttenweiser and psychiatrist Dr. Viola W. Bernard. (Buttenweiser's uncle, New York Governor Herbert H. Lehman, served on the same "Committee for the Marshall Plan" as Alger Hiss during 1948. Bernard's family, the Wertheims, included Henry Morgenthau Jr., boss of Harry Dexter White, and Maurice Wertheim and his daughter Barbara W. Tuchman, whose daughter Jessica Matthews later headed the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace half a century after Alger Hiss had.)

When they moved back to Manhattan in 1947, she worked the Dalton School, as the alumni record confirms.

During two criminal trials against Alger Hiss, Priscilla Hiss defended her husband with her own testimony. There were two principal areas of interest in her testimony. First, had she typed documents found in the "Baltimore Documents" (scores of typewritten documents plus several documents handwritten by Hiss and Harry Dexter White)? Second, had she, like her husband, met with Whittaker Chambers (the Federal prosecutor's principal witness) after January 1, 1937? She denied both allegations.

For 1933–1934 and 1934–1935, her Bryn Mawr alumni records show that she engaged in "Research": for 1935–1936, her occupation is blank.

In 1932, she registered as a Socialist to vote in the U.S. Presidential election (when Norman Thomas was the Socialist candidate). After the Hiss Case, she was a Village Independent Democrats supporter. As one anecdote tells, during the Great Depression, "when a friend of Alger's remarked how pleasant the day seemed... Priscilla snap[ped] back that it might be nice day for people with homes."

In 1929, she had an affair with William Brown Meloney V, became pregnant with his child, and underwent an abortion. Priscilla in the same year married Alger Hiss.

On December 13, 1929, Priscilla Fansler Hobson married Alger Hiss in Washington, DC. On August 5, 1941, they had one son, Tony Hiss. In 1959, they separated but did not divorce. (Alger Hiss remarried after her death and outlived her by 12 years.) They had met earlier, in 1924, on an ocean-liner to England. Their nicknames for each other were "Hill" (or "Hilly") and "Prossy" (important because during proceedings Whittaker Chambers and Esther Shemitz remembered "Hilly" and "Dilly").

The alumni details also state she had received an MA in English literature from Columbia University in 1929. William L. Marbury Jr. wrote of Priscilla Hiss:

In 1925, Priscilla Fansler married Thayer Hobson, a New York book publisher (who bought William Morrow and Company when Morrow himself died). In 1926, they had one son, Timothy Hobson. In 1927, they divorced; her alumni records show her "divorced" in 1928.

In the mid-1920s, Priscilla Hiss was working as an "office manager" at TIME magazine. When the Hiss family moved to Washington, DC (where her husband, Alger Hiss, would join the New Deal government), she taught English at the Potomac School.

Priscilla Hiss (October 13, 1903 – October 14, 1984), born Priscilla Fansler and first married as Priscilla Hobson, was a 20th-century American teacher and book editor, best known as the wife of Alger Hiss, an alleged Communist and former State Department official whose innocence she supported with testimony throughout his two, highly publicized criminal trials in 1949.

Priscilla Harriet Fansler was born on October 13, 1903, in Evanston, Illinois. Her father was Thomas Lafayette Fansler and mother Willa Roland Spruill. She had two older brothers Dean Fansler (a teacher of English at Columbia University and acquaintance of Mortimer J. Adler, a classmate of Whittaker Chambers) and Henry Fansler (who as the Hiss Case began had moved recently to Preston, Maryland, and whom the FBI reported was a "something of a drunkard"). In 1924, she graduated cum laude from Bryn Mawr College. Her roommate Roberta Murray (of Murray Hill, Manhattan) became for a time her sister-in-law as Roberta Fansler. Later, she obtained an MA in English literature from Yale University.