"[1] Born Isabel Mary Bowler in rural Manitoulin Island, Ontario, she moved with her family to the west when she was very young.

In her late teen years, Bowler left the ranch for the city of Calgary, where she took a clerical job with the Canadian Pacific Railway.

It was during these years, in a foray south of the border, that Paterson landed a job with a newspaper, the Inland Herald in Spokane, Washington.

She 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.

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

Paterson opposed most of the economic program known as the New Deal, which American president Franklin D. Roosevelt put into effect during the Great Depression.

[3] By the late 1930s, Paterson led a group of younger writers, many of them other Herald Tribune employees, who shared her views.

"[5] Paterson and Rand promoted each other's books and conducted an extensive correspondence over the years, in which they often touched on religion and philosophy.

[2]: 313 As a sign of the political tenor of the times, The God of the Machine was published in the same year as Rand's novel The Fountainhead and Rose Wilder Lane's The Discovery of Freedom.

Journalist John Chamberlain credits Paterson, Lane and Rand with his final "conversion" from socialism to what he called "an older American philosophy" of libertarian and conservative ideas.

However, she sometimes sharply differed from Buckley, for example by disagreeing with the magazine's review of Rand's novel, Atlas Shrugged.

[2]: 325 Paterson died on January 10, 1961, and was interred in the Welles family plot at Saint Mary's Episcopal Churchyard in Burlington, New Jersey.