She won a 2001[1] Pulitzer Prize for national reporting as part of a New York Times team on race in America.

Her grandmother, Hope Montgomery Scott, has been said to be the inspiration for Katharine Hepburn's Tracy Lord in the film and play The Philadelphia Story.

[6] Her great-grandfather, Thomas A. Scott, helped build the Pennsylvania Railroad from a "struggling experiment" into what was then the largest corporation in the world, twice over; another ancestor, Horace Binney,[7] served in Congress[8] and was known for his public speeches as well as the founding of the Hasty Pudding Club at Harvard.

He had been appointed special assistant to the ambassador to England, Walter Annenberg, a fellow Main Liner.

She reports that she had "a very good time," finding it "nice to be with men," meeting a different crowd, including radicals, and experiencing the intellectual environment.

Working with Christine Kay, a metro desk editor, she proposed the idea of writing essays about the individuals lost in the attack.

[17] On first learning about Barack Obama's mother, Scott felt that the usual representation of her as a "white woman from Kansas" an oversimplification and missed an extraordinary life story.

The resulting 200 interviews over two and a half years led to the publication of A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother.

[25] She is saddened by her father's only feeble attempts to deal with alcohol and depression; and, his lack of forthrightness in discussing these problems with the family.