Margaret Leech (1893–1974)

Margaret Leech was born in Newburgh, New York, and earned a B.A. from Vassar College in 1915. She moved to New York City and began her writing career in the advertising and publicity departments of Condé Nast. After World War I, she served on the American Committee for Devastated France and became a journalist and author. She was a member of the famous Algonquin Round Table of wits and writers in Manhattan. In 1928, she married Ralph Pulitzer, publisher of the New York World, with whom she had a daughter. Her father-in-law Joseph Pulitzer had established the Pulitzer Prize by a bequest to Columbia University in 1917. Magaret became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for History and one of only two people to win it twice. The first was in 1942 for Reveille in Washington, 1860-1865, a history of the capital during the American Civil War. The second was for In the Days of McKinley (1960), which also received the Bancroft Prize. Margaret Leech also wrote three novels: The Back of the Book (1924), Tin Wedding (1926), and The Feathered Nest (1928). In 1927, she co-wrote a biography of Anthony Comstock with Heywood Broun, and she collaborated with Beatrice Kaufman on a play, Divided by Three (1934).