RESEARCH General Arts

LITERARY JOURNALISM
Shana Alexander's papers chronicles lifetime of achievement as writer

Andrea Lynn, Humanities Editor
(217) 333-2177; a-lynn@uiuc.edu

5/1/2001

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Of the thousands of items that journalist Shana Alexander has just given the University of Illinois, perhaps none telegraphs her career better than her box of press passes.

The passes, a tiny part of the new Shana Alexander Collection, reflect Alexander’s decades of globetrotting in pursuit of the story, whether it was in Lewiston, Maine – site of the 1965 heavyweight boxing championship; Chicago – site of the 1968 Democratic National Convention; or Vietnam.

Alexander was a writer for Life magazine for 18 years; the first female editor of McCall's; a columnist for Newsweek; a co-host of "Point/Counterpoint," a segment on the "60 Minutes" television program; and is the author of seven books, including her autobiography, "Happy Days."

Now teaching writing at Southampton College in New York, Alexander was honored for her gift April 17 at the UI Library. She and some of her friends, including poet Maya Angelou and former school headmistress Jean Harris, the subject of one of Alexander's books, attended the event.

Alexander’s papers were given to Illinois because, "I asked Shana and she said ‘yes,’ " said Barbara Jones, head of the UI Rare Book and Special Collections Library, the repository for the new collection. According to Jones, Alexander "experienced the difficulties of a woman journalist navigating the male-dominated world of publishing as she reported on the war in Vietnam, the women’s movement and the Civil Rights Movement." Her papers will be "an invaluable resource to scholars in women's studies, communications research, social and family history, and the art and craft of writing."

The collection is wide-ranging. It contains boxes of reporter's notebooks, transcripts of interviews, trial notes, drafts of stories and hundreds of letters, including a 1979 note from Kurt Vonnegut praising her for her book "Anyone's Daughter," the story of the 1974 kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patty Hearst. Alexander also kept files of the correspondence between irate readers and her editors at Life. Her 1966 profile of Alabama first lady Lurleen Wallace drew a great deal of fire.

Alexander's original Teletyped columns and edited drafts show the process of journalism – from the field to the newsstand. From Saigon on Oct. 13, 1965, she telexed her draft of a story on the musical "Hello, Dolly," which was playing for U.S. troops in Vietnam. Because it was difficult for a female reporter to get an assignment in Vietnam during the war, Alexander signed on as a dancer in the show.

"Feel free to change, rewrite, trim or junk (the piece)," she wrote her editor, Kunhardt Morse. Morse asked Alexander to add more details about the "feel of the country" and the "smell of war," and also to rewrite the ending. Her new closing reads: "I'm glad now that I went along. Despite or perhaps because of the preposterous nuisance of sending a full dress Broadway musical comedy on tour through a combat zone in what turned out to be the hottest shooting week so far, it came to seem that somehow the right show had got sent to the right war after all."

Items from the Alexander Collection are on display in the UI Rare Book Library through July 31.