• 2007 Sperber Award for BiographyMyra MacPherson (born 1934) is an American author, biographer, and journalist known for writing about politics, the Vietnam War, feminism, and death and dying.
She Came to Live Out Loud: An Inspiring Family Journey through Illness, Loss and Grief was published in 1999 and won health care hospice awards.
MacPherson's book, The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage and Scandal in the Gilded Age (Hachette, 2014; paperback 2015) exposes Victorian hypocrisy on sex and women through the true story of two feminist sisters who broke all the rules in 1870 and fought for rights still denied women.
"MacPherson's enchanting dual biography…the epilogue "hammers home that even [today] men use women's bodies as political bargaining chips."
As for females, she interviewed such disparate women as Helen Keller, Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, and the mother of the serial killer Ted Bundy.
She wrote about murderers and slain Civil Rights leader Medgar Evers, covered the State funeral of President Kennedy, Presidential campaigns and specialized in in-depth profiles of politicians, including a martini-drinking Fidel Castro.
When she wrote about the banning, and another women reporter sued, Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times sports columnist, Red Smith, wrote that it was about time such silly rules ended, thus paving the way for the many women active in sports media, including MacPherson's daughter, Leah Siegel, who became a three-time Emmy award-winning ESPN producer.
Decades before, he had introduced his wife to a host of sports characters and hangers on, including New York restaurateur Toots Shor who told MacPherson at an all-male-except-her dinner, "We're not interested in what you think, you're only here because of Morrie… As far as I am concerned all broads are a piece of raisin cake.
She met her second husband, liberal Florida State Senator, Jack Gordon, when she covered the ultimately rejected Equal Rights Amendment for The Washington Post in 1977.