Hannah Arendt arrived in New York in May, 1941, stateless, broke, and far from fluent in English. Both got out, and, with American help, obtained visas and made their way to Lisbon, where they waited for some months to set sail. Among Arendt’s few possessions was a manuscript Walter Benjamin had given her of his “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Arendt, Blücher, and Arendt’s mother—who joined them a month later—initially occupied two small rooms off Riverside Drive, on West Ninety-fifth Street, in what amounted to a wartime boarding house. Her American friends and editors enabled her transformation from a displaced intellectual to a world-famous writer.