The Huntress

The fascinating biography of the maverick newspaperwoman and intrepid adventurer, which 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 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 failed, but her last, to someone of her...