15 Facts About Isabel Paterson

Isabel Paterson was a Canadian-American journalist, novelist, political philosopher, and a leading literary and cultural critic of her day.

Isabel Paterson grew up on a cattle ranch in Alberta.

Isabel Paterson's family was quite poor and she had eight siblings.

In 1914, Isabel Paterson started submitting her first two novels, The Magpie's Nest and The Shadow Riders, to publishers, without much success.

Isabel Paterson was creating statues for the Cathedral of St John the Divine and would later carve the memorial at Mount Rushmore.

Isabel Paterson wrote for the World and the American in New York.

In 1921, Isabel Paterson became an assistant to Burton Rascoe, the new literary editor of the New York Tribune, later the New York Herald Tribune.

Isabel Paterson became one of the most influential literary critics of her time.

Isabel Paterson covered a time of great expansion in the United States literary world, with new work by the rising generation of Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald and many others, African Americans of the Harlem Renaissance, as well as the first American generation of the great waves of European immigrants.

Isabel Paterson was notorious for demonstrating her sharp wit and goring of sacred cows in her column, where she first articulated many of the political ideas that reached their final form in The God of the Machine.

Isabel Paterson's thinking, especially on free trade, was foreshadowed in her historical novels of the 1920s and 1930s.

Isabel Paterson advocated less government involvement in both social and fiscal issues.

Similarly, Isabel Paterson had broken with another friend and political ally, Rose Wilder Lane, in 1946.

Buckley and Kirk went on to found the National Review, to which Isabel Paterson contributed for a brief time.

Isabel Paterson died on January 10,1961, and was interred in the Welles family plot at Saint Mary's Episcopal Churchyard in Burlington, New Jersey.