Maureen Dowd

Maureen Bridgid Dowd (/daʊd/; born January 14, 1952) is a liberal/progressive American columnist for The New York Times, and a best-selling author. During the 1970s and the early 1980s, Dowd worked for Time magazine and the Washington Star, where she covered news and sports and wrote feature articles. Dowd joined The New York Times in 1983 as a Metropolitan Reporter, and became an Op-Ed writer for the newspaper in 1995. In 1999, Dowd was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her series of columns on the Monica Lewinsky scandal in the Clinton administration. 2Early life and career Dowd was born the youngest of five children in Washington, D.C., and is of Irish ancestry. Her mother, Margaret "Peggy" (Meenehan), was a housewife, and her father, Mike Dowd, worked as a Washington, D.C. police inspector. Dowd graduated from (now defunct) Immaculata High School in 1969. She received a B.A. in English in 1973 from The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Dowd began her career in 1974 as an editorial assistant for the Washington Star, where she later became a sports columnist, metropolitan reporter, and feature writer. When the newspaper closed in 1981, she went to work at Time. In 1983, she joined The New York Times, initially as a metropolitan reporte