AAmerican journalist and liberal political commentator, noted for poking fun at Texan culture, politicians and those who had grown “too big for their britches.”
Ivins grew up in an upper middle class neighborhood of Houston. Her dad was the family disciplinarian, a conservative Republican who was general counsel and then president of Tenneco Corporation. She admits to having many arguments with him about their widely divergent political views and claimed that she had trouble with male authority figures because of his strictness. She also credited him with her tough exterior: “I believe that all the strength I have comes from learning how to stand up to him.” In 1998, suffering from cancer, her father committed suicide by shooting himself.
As a teenager, she was tall and large for her age and felt out of place at her private high school. She would later comment that she felt like a “Clydesdale among thoroughbreds.” Following in her mother’s and grandmother’s steps, Ivins graduated from Smith College in 1966. She subsequently spent a year in Paris at the Institute of Political Science and earned a master’s degree at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Not long after landing a job at the Houston Chronicle. she was hired by the Minneapolis Tribune and took off for Minnesota. By 1970 she was back in Texas as co-editor of The Texas Observer. One of her beats was the state legislature which she humorously called “a reporter’s heaven.” Once, when the legislature was getting ready to convene, she wrote “every village is about to lose its idiot.”
The editors of the New York Times were so impressed with her writing that they offered her a job in 1976. She moved to New York but never quite fit in at the offices of the aptly-nicknamed Gray Lady. She cut a too-colorful figure in the newsroom, often walking around the office in her blue jeans and bare feet, calling to her dog whose name was an expletive. She wasn’t crazy about the way her editors sanitized her work either. She later said “The New York Times is a great newspaper; it is also No Fun.” After several assignments for various bureaus and offices of the Times, she finally quit in 1982, and landed a job offer from the Dallas Times Herald. That paper closed its doors in 1991 and she spent the following year at The Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Her column was syndicated by Creators Syndicate in 1992 and was then published in several hundred newspapers.
A close friend of the equally irreverent Ann Richards, former Texas Governor, Ivins never married. She is the author of several books, the first of which is entitled “Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?” published in 1991. Its title came from billboard ads paid for by her Dallas Times Herald in her defense after readers and advertisers expressed their anger over her unflattering description of a congressman. “If his I.Q. slips any lower,” she had written, “we’ll have to water him twice a day.” A harsh critic of George W. Bush, she usually referred to him as “Shrub” and “Dubya” and co-authored two best-selling books about him: “Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush” (2000) and “Bushwacked: Life in George W. Bush’s America” (2003).
In 1999, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She died of the disease on January 31, 2007 in Austin, TX at 5:24 PM local time according to the Texas Star-Telegram. She was 62.
Link to Wikipedia biography
Link to Astrodienst discussion forum