RTRAIT OF MYSELF

by Margaret Bourke-White ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 28, 1963

This is an all-American success story. Maggie Bourke-White came from a Mid-Western family rich in spirit if not in pocket. She took her own road at eighteen and has taken it even since. It is a road that has led her to the top of her profession and around the world. Ambition, determination, dedication, and the ability to take it characterize this woman of high independence and aim. And here, with unflagging interest, we share the story of a life of achievement and excitement. The author sums up her life as being in the right place at the right time. Just out of college and on her own in Cleveland, Maggie managed to photograph the inside of a steel mill because industry fascinated her. This led to her presence at the birth of Fortune -- later she was in at the birth of Life as one of four staff photographers. Advertising accounts in early New York days kept her in her penthouse-office and included Buick and Goodyear with its margin of safety demonstrated precariously. She went to Russia in the early thirties, covered the Dust Bowl, met Erakine Caldwell on a Tobacco Road book project and later married him, but career came first and the marriage was dissolved after five years. She returned to a vastly different Russia in 1941, was caught in the war and brought home the bacon to Life in exclusives of bombing, Stalin. As a war correspondent she lived through the torpedoing of the Flitgun, went on a bombing raid in North Africa, on a ""routine patrol"" in winter Italy, shot Buchenwald with Patton's Third Army, sized up Alfred Krupp. She learned to spin so as to see Gandhi, spent some two crucial years in India and had a memorable just-before death interview with the great man. She surveyed the anguished land of South Africa, where ""fear is everywhere"", observed the equally anguished land of a Korea tragically split in civil war. She has fought her own war with Parkinson's disease, and won a victory. Her most cherished future assignment: the moon. As a personal witness to great events and a woman of great elan, Miss Bourke-White is a winner -- and this book may just go.

Pub Date: June 28, 1963

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1963

Categories: NONFICTION