memoirist and travel writer whose work was noted for its readability and its wit.

Simon's family immigrated to the United States in 1917 and settled in New York, first in Harlem and then in the Bronx. Simon graduated from Hunter College of the City University of New York with a bachelor's degree in 1935 and later held various editorial positions, including jobs at Publisher's Weekly and The New Republic (New Republic, The). Her first book was New York Places and Pleasures, a guidebook published in 1959. She won praise for similar guides to Italy, London, Mexico, and Paris, which combined carefully researched, up-to-date information with little-known facts and were written with elegance and verve.

Simon's three memoirs, Bronx Primitive: Portraits in a Childhood (1982), A Wider World: Portraits in an Adolescence (1986), and Etchings in an Hourglass (1990), won acclaim for their unsentimental evocation of her working-class immigrant Jewish family life.