Maureen Dowd

Maureen Bridgid Dowd[1] (born January 14, 1952) is a Washington D.C.-based columnist for The New York Times and best-selling author.[2][3] During the 1970s and the early 1980s, she worked for Time magazine and the Washington Star, where she covered news as well as sports and wrote feature articles.[2][3] Dowd joined the Times in 1983 as a metropolitan reporter and eventually became an Op-Ed writer for the newspaper in 1995.[2][3] In 1999, she was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her series of columns on the Monica Lewinsky scandal in the Clinton administration.[
Dowd was born the youngest of five children in Washington, D.C.[2][3] Her father, Mike, worked as a D.C. police inspector while her mother, Peggy, was a homemaker.[1][5] In 1973, Dowd received a B.A. in English from Catholic University in Washington, D.C.[2][3]

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.[2][3] When the newspaper closed in 1981, she went to work at Time.[2][3] In 1983, she joined The New York Times, initially as a metropolitan reporter.[2][3] She began serving as correspondent in The Times Washington bureau in 1986.[2][3]

In 1991, Dowd received a Breakthrough Award from Columbia University.[3] In 1992, she was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for national reporting,[3] and in 1994 she won a Matrix Award from New York Women in Communications