IVINS, Molly

Born Mary Tyler Ivins, 30 August 1944, Monterey, California

Daughter of Margot (Milne) and Jim Ivins

Molly Ivins is one of America's most well-known syndicated political columnists. She writes for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, but her hilarious accounts of Texas and national politics may be found in over 100 other newspapers throughout the country. Her three bestselling books bring together collections of her wittiest and most scathing columns, essays, and magazine articles on politics and journalism.

Ivins was born Mary Tyler Ivins on August 30, 1944, in Monterey, California, but she grew up in Houston, Texas, with her brother, Andy. She graduated from Smith College in 1966 and studied briefly at the Institute of Political Science in Paris before earning a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University in 1967. While still in school, she worked as a reporter for both the Houston Chronicle and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune newspapers.

In 1970 she became a reporter and eventually coeditor of the liberal monthly Texas Observer. She covered the Texas legislature for the Observer, which accounts, as she puts it, "for her frequent fits of hysterical laughter in those years." She left the Observer in 1976 to become the Denver-based Rocky Mountain bureau chief for the New York Times, a position she held until 1982. She described this position by stating that "for three years, she covered nine mountain states by herself and was often tired."

After leaving the New York Times in February 1982, she became a columnist for the Dallas Times Herald until 1991, when she accepted her present position as columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Ivins once commented that her return to Texas "may indicate a masochistic streak, [but I've] had plenty to write about ever since."

The title of Ivins' first book, Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She? (1991), grew out of one of her columns for the Dallas Times Herald. Ivins commented that if a state representative's "IQ slips any lower, we'll have to water him twice a day." Offended by this remark, some members of the Dallas business community tried to force the Times Herald into censuring Ivins. The Times Herald refused and plastered Dallas billboards with the question Ivins later took as her first book title. Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She? was on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year.

Ivins' second book, Nothin' But Good Times Ahead (1993), continues her coverage of Texas politics, which she once called the "finest form of free entertainment ever invented." In addition to the 1992 presidential campaign, she wrote about Queen Elizabeth's visit to Texas and the Clarence Hill-Anita Thomas hearings. Publishers Weekly noted in its 23 August 1993 review of this book that Ivins "has a B.S. detector as sensitive as an electron microscope and a vocabulary that, when she is riled, goes beyond earthy."

In February, 1994, Ivins wrote an article in the Nation explaining why she had declined, against the urging of some, to enter the U.S. Senate race in Texas. Later that year she battled charges of plagiarism when staunch conservative Florence King, author of nine volumes on Southern humor, accused Ivins of copying from King's 1975 title, Southern Ladies and Gentleman. Ivins had cited King throughout her work, but apologized for some passages in which she failed to adequately acknowledge the other author. In 1996 Ivins began a short-lived position on television's 60 Minutes as the third member of a trio that included Stanley Crouch and P. J. O'Rourke. The three offered differing opinions in a point/counterpoint segment that was eventually dropped.

Ivins' third book, You've Got to Dance with Them That Brung You: Politics in the Clinton Years, was published in 1998 to the same critical acclaim as her previous titles. In this latest work, Ivins comments on the 1996 presidential campaign, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the O. J. Simpson case, in addition to her usual hilarious discourse on politics in her native Texas. The last section of this book, which Ivins dubs "Tributes to Souls Passing," are farewells to the famous and the infamous. Particularly poignant and poetic is Ivins' farewell to her own mother, which begins "My mother died the other day." Her latest work, in progress and scheduled for a January 2000 publication, is a biography of Texas governor and Republican presidential hopeful George W. Bush. The book's tenative title Shrub derives from an article Ivins wrote, in which she stated Bush had all the "charisma of a shrub."

In addition to her regular column, Ivins is a frequent contributor to such periodicals as the Nation, Esquire, Harper's, Progressive, and Mother Jones and a frequent guest on network radio and television shows. Unabashedly liberal, Ivins is active in the Amnesty International Journalism Network and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. She also writes about press issues for the American Civil Liberties Union.

Ivins has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist three times and has won numerous journalism awards, including Columbia University's School of Journalism Outstanding Alumna award in 1976. She also served as a member of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize Jury. Yet, appropriately enough for Ivins, she wrote her two greatest honors are that "the Minneapolis police force named its mascot pig after her and that she was once banned from the campus of Texas A&M."

Other Works:

Contributed to: The Edge of Texas and Other Texas Stories (1990).

Bibliography:

Reference works:

CANR 138 (1993). Who's Who in America (1998).

Other References:

"About Molly Ivins," at http://creators.com/opinion/bio/bio-ivin.htm. "A Lifetime Prize for an Under-50 Writer," in Editor & Publisher (16 July 1994). "Good Golly, Miss Molly," in Entertainment Weekly (24 Nov. 1995). "Molly Ivins to Bring Her 'Left-wing Populist' Take to 60 Minutes," in Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service (19 Feb. 1996). "My Friends, the Time Is Not Yet," in Nation (7 Feb. 1994).

—LEAH J. SPARKS