This fascinating biography of the maverick newspaperwoman and intrepid adventurer follows her exceptional exploits through the first half of the twentieth century, from her troublemaking days as the middle child of complicated parents to her successes as publisher of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Newsday.
The authors take us into the lost WASP world of Alicia Patterson: her larger-than-life father—scion of the Patterson-Medill Chicago publishing dynasty—and her traditional mother, her childhood of foreign caretakers, travel, and boarding schools. Married off at twenty-three to a friend of her father’s, Alicia spent little time at home during the brief marriage, instead she earned a transport pilot’s license (only the tenth woman in the country to do so); hunted big game in Indochina and India; and began to write for her father’s newspaper The Daily News. Her second father-orchestrated marriage also failed, but her last to Harry Guggenheim, someone of her own choosing, resulted in the founding of Newsday in 1940. As she guided the paper through investigative exposés and international and liberal political coverage, her influence on the national stage grew along with the newspaper’s reputation and circulation, winning a Pulitzer in 1954 and putting her on the cover of Time. Over the years admirers ranged from the Maharajah of Baroda to Adlai Stevenson. Here is the story of the spirited and formidable young woman who became a preeminent figure of the golden era of print newspapers.