31 Facts About Marguerite Higgins

Marguerite Higgins Hall was an American reporter and war correspondent.

Marguerite Higgins had a long career with the New York Herald Tribune and as a syndicated columnist for Newsday.

Marguerite Higgins was the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for Foreign Correspondence awarded in 1951 for her coverage of the Korean War.

Marguerite Higgins subsequently won Long Island University's George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting for articles from behind enemy lines in Korea and other nations in 1952.

Marguerite Higgins was born on September 3,1920, in Hong Kong, where her father, Lawrence Marguerite Higgins, was working at a shipping company.

Marguerite Higgins's father lost his job during the 1929 stock market crash, which promoted anxiety for the family.

Marguerite Higgins started at the University of California, Berkeley, in the fall of 1937, where she was a member of the Gamma Phi Beta sorority and wrote for The Daily Californian, serving as an editor in 1940.

Marguerite Higgins planned to give herself a year to find a job, and if that failed, she would return to California to be a French teacher.

Marguerite Higgins walked into the New York Herald Tribune city office after arriving in New York in August 1941.

Marguerite Higgins decided to stay in New York and studied at Columbia.

In 1942, Marguerite Higgins replaced her classmate as the campus correspondent for the Tribune, which led to a full-time reporting position.

Eager to become a war correspondent, Marguerite Higgins persuaded the management of the New York Herald Tribune to send her to Europe in 1944, after working for the paper for two years.

Marguerite Higgins later covered the Nuremberg war trials and the Soviet Union's blockade of Berlin.

In 1950, Marguerite Higgins was named chief of the Tribunes Tokyo bureau, and she received a cold welcome by her colleagues in Tokyo.

Marguerite Higgins later learned that a recently published novel by her colleague in Berlin had created a hostile impression.

The gossip at the time speculated that the novelist, Toni Howard, based the main character on Marguerite Higgins, raising suspicion and hostility among Tokyo staffers.

Marguerite Higgins is held in highest professional esteem by everyone.

Marguerite Higgins refused and the Tribune allowed her to stay, which would lead to a competitive feud between the two that would result in both receiving the 1951 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.

Marguerite Higgins contributed along with other major journalistic and political figures to the Collier's magazine collaborative special issue Preview of the War We Do Not Want, with an article entitled "Women of Russia".

Marguerite Higgins continued to cover foreign affairs throughout the rest of her life, interviewing world leaders such as Francisco Franco, Nikita Khrushchev and Jawaharlal Nehru.

Marguerite Higgins's battle was not for scoops or headlines this time.

Marguerite Higgins believed they did not have a real understanding of the war and oftentimes called them Rover Boys, who never ventured outside of Saigon to the countryside to see what was going on.

From a young age, Marguerite Higgins was competitive, a habit that continued well into the newsroom and reporting abroad.

Marguerite Higgins remarked that, that was what female journalists at the time had to do:.

Faculty and peers who knew Marguerite Higgins claimed that she would use her "sex appeal" to get difficult interviews or stories.

Marguerite Higgins was eager and willing to do what was necessary to get the story.

Marguerite Higgins was well aware of what her male peers were saying about her, but she refused to pay it any attention and continued to do her job.

When Marguerite Higgins moved to New York, she became reacquainted with Moore, who was then a philosophy professor at Harvard.

Marguerite Higgins was drafted into WWII, and their relationship fell apart, ending in a divorce finalized in 1947.

When Marguerite Higgins was six months old, she came down with malaria.

Decades later, Marguerite Higgins returned from assignment in South Vietnam in November 1965, where Marguerite Higgins contracted leishmaniasis, a disease that led to her death on January 3,1966, aged 45, in Washington, DC She is interred at Arlington National Cemetery with her husband.