MCCORMICK, ANNE (O'HARE)

MCCORMICK, ANNE (O'HARE) (16 May 1880-29 May 1954), the first woman on the editorial board of the New York Times (NYT) (1936-54) and the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for foreign correspondence (1937), began her writing career in Cleveland.

Of Irish heritage, Anne Elizabeth was the oldest of three daughters of Teresa (Berry) and Thomas J. O'Hare. Born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, England, she and her family soon came to the U.S., first to MA, then to Columbus, OH, where O'Hare graduated from St. Mary of the Springs Academy (1898). After her father's desertion, McCormick's family moved to Cleveland. Both she and her mother, a published poet, worked for the Universe (later the Catholic Universe Bulletin), McCormick as associate editor and her mother as column author and women's section editor. Anne O'Hare married engineer Francis J. McCormick 14 Sept. 1910 and moved to join him in Dayton. She began free-lance writing, publishing articles in Catholic World, Reader Magazine, and the New York Times Magazine and poetry in magazines such as Smart Set and Bookman. McCormick's strong Catholic faith always influenced her work; in 1920 she completed a history of her former parish, entitled St. Agnes Church, Cleveland, Ohio.

During travels abroad with her husband, McCormick sent dispatches to the NYT concerning post-WWI Europe. She became a NYT correspondent in 1922 and by 1936 had a thrice weekly column, "In Europe," and was "freedom editor" on the paper's editorial board. She interviewed Mussolini, Hitler, Roosevelt, and Stalin. McCormick received many honorary degrees and awards in addition to the Pulitzer. She published one book, The Hammer and the Scythe: Communist Russia Enters the Second Decade (1928). In 1946 and 1948, she served as a UNESCO delegate. McCormick died in New York City, where she and her husband had lived since 1936, and is buried in the Gate of Heaven Cemetery, Mt. Pleasant, New York.


McCormick,Anne O. St. Agnes Church, Cleveland, Ohio. WRHS.

________________. The World at Home: Selections from the Writings of Anne O'Hare McCormick, ed. Marion Turner Sheehan. (1956).


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