Nan Robertson

Nan Robertson was born Nancy Robertson on July 11, 1926, in Chicago, Illinois, to Frank and Eva (Morrish) Robertson. She had one older sister, Jane, born in 1923. Robertson attended Northwestern University and earned a bachelor of science degree from the Medill School of Journalism in 1948. Following graduation, she moved to Paris and then Germany, and worked as a copy-editor and reporter with Stars & Stripes, covering post-war occupation and reconstruction efforts. In 1950, she married Allyn Baum (1925-1997), a college friend who was also living and working in Germany as a news photographer. The two were divorced by 1960.

While in Europe, Robertson worked for a number of American newspapers, including the Milwaukee Journal, the New York Herald Tribune (Paris edition), and the American Daily (London), before moving to the New York Times in 1955. Although hired as a women's news reporter, Robertson soon became a general assignments correspondent, covering culture, politics and government, and daily news in New York, Washington, and Paris. While working in the city room in New York, Robertson befriended Stanley Levey (1914-1971), a mentor and labor reporter for the New York Times who Robertson later described as her "greatest love." The two married in 1961, but Levey died of a sudden heart attack in 1971. After his death, Robertson remained close to Levey's son, Robert, and daughter-in-law, Jane (Freundel) Levey, who helped care for her into older age.

In 1983, Robertson won the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing for Toxic Shock, a New York Times Magazine account of her own nearly fatal struggle with toxic shock syndrome. Although Robertson lost the tips of eight fingers from the disease, she continued to write for the New York Times until she retired from the paper in 1988. That same year, she published her first full-length book, entitled Getting Better: Inside Alcoholics Anonymous . The book examines AA and describes Robertson's personal struggle with alcoholism. She later wrote The Girls in the Balcony: Women, Men, and the New York Times , published in 1992. That book chronicled the fight for workplace parity by female employees of the New York Times . In 1994, Robertson accepted a visiting professorship at the Journalism School at the University of Maryland before fully retiring in 1999. That same year, she married William "Bill" Warfield Ross (1926-2006), who she described as her "late blooming love." The two traveled around the world together in 2000, and Robertson wrote about the adventure in a special piece for the Washington Post entitled, Delivering the Goods. Robertson died of cirrhosis in Rockville, Maryland, on October 13, 2009.

From the guide to the Papers of Nan Robertson, 1920-2004, (Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute)