Higgins, Marguerite

Marguerite Higgins (1920-1966), pioneering newspaperwoman, columnist, and author, was best known for reporting from the front lines during the Korean War. Honored as the first woman to receive a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of international affairs (1951), she had a long career with the New York Herald Tribune (1942-1963), and later, as a syndicated columnist for Newsday (1963-1965). She also wrote books on reporting, Korea, Russia and Vietnam, and contributed articles to several other newspapers and magazines including America, the Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), Mademoiselle, and McCall’s . She made television appearances on shows such as "Meet the Press" and "Today." A frequently requested lecturer, she traveled as extensively inside the U.S. as abroad. She visited Vietnam several times, and while touring there in 1965 contracted leishmaniasis, a parasitic disease, which forced her to return to the U.S. where she died in Washington D.C. on January 3, 1966 at age 45. She is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Higgins was born in Hong Kong on September 3, 1920 to Lawrence Daniel Higgins, a WWI pilot, steamship freight manager, and businessman and Marguerite de Godard Higgins, a Frenchwoman and teacher. She grew up in Oakland, California and attended the prestigious Anna Head School in Berkeley. In 1941 she graduated cum laude from the University of California, Berkeley, after which she moved to New York City with the hopes of finding a newspaper job. Frustrated in her efforts, she applied for a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University. While attending Columbia, she became a campus correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune and upon graduating in 1942, joined the city desk staff. She married Stanley Moore, a philosophy professor at Harvard, in 1942, but their union later ended in divorce.

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