For twenty-five years, Charlotte Curtis was a society/women’s reporter and editor and an op-ed editor at the New York Times. As the first woman section editor at the Times, Curtis was a pioneering journalist and one of the first nationwide to change the nature and content of the women’s pages from fluffy wedding announcements and recipes to the more newsy, issue-oriented stories that characterize them today. In this riveting biography, Marilyn Greenwald describes how a woman reporter from Columbus, Ohio, broke into the ranks of the male-dominated upper echelon at the New York Times. It documents what she did to succeed and what she had to sacrifice. Charlotte Curtis paved the way for the journalists who followed her. A Woman of the Times offers a chronicle of her hard-won journey as she invents her own brand of feminism during the 1960s and 1970s. In the telling of this remarkable woman’s life is the story, as well, of a critical era in the nation’s social history.
Marilyn Greenwald was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and has had an interest in journalism and writing for as long as she can remember. She worked on her junior high school newspaper, her high school newspaper, and she was a reporter, columnist and editorial page editor for the Ohio State University Lantern. It was natural for her to spend ten years of her professional career at newspapers. She was a copy editor and entertainment writer at the Telegraph in Painesville, Ohio, and a news and business reporter for the Columbus Citizen-Journal and the Columbus Dispatch in Ohio.
Her career took a different turn in the late 1980s when she began as an assistant professor at the Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University; during her first few years there, she developed an interest in studying women in journalism and the portrayal of women in newspapers. As part of a doctoral dissertation at Ohio State University, she began studying the career of Charlotte Curtis, an Ohioan who eventually became the first top female editor at the New York Times. That provided much of the information for her first biography, "A Woman of the Times: Journalism, Feminism and the Career of Charlotte Curtis," which was published in 1999 and named a Notable Book of the New York Times.
Her second biography in 2004 chronicles the life of Canadian newspaper reporter Leslie McFarlane, who is best known as "Franklin W. Dixon," the man who wrote the first group of Hardy Boys mysteries. McFarlane, who wrote the books in the 1930s and 1940s, earned about $100 per book and signed away all rights to their profits. His books have sold millions and millions of copies over more than 70 years.
Her third biography, "Cleveland Amory: Media Curmudgeon and Animal Rights Crusader," published in May 2009, was born from an interest she developed in graduate school in the lives and persuasion techniques of activists and true believers. Greenwald teaches a class in Review Writing at Ohio University, and has always been interested in arts criticism. So studying the life of Amory -- who was a best-selling author, TV Guide critic and Today show commentator -- provided the perfect opportunity to meld those two interests.
She finds writing biographies to be hard work, but it is also fun and interesting. And she believes that the lives of many accomplished people can be much more complex and fascinating than the lives of most fictional characters.
A professor at Ohio University, Greenwald teaches classes in news reporting, arts criticism, and biography writing (for graduate students). She has three degrees from Ohio State -- a bachelor's and master's degree in Journalism and a Ph.D in Communication, and lives in Columbus, Ohio, with her husband, Tim Doulin.
