Katherine Fanning built the Anchorage Daily News into the winner of a Pulitzer Prize. She later became one of the few women in the 1980s to lead a major American newspaper, the Christian Science Monitor, and the first woman to head the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

Katherine Woodruff Fanning, the only child of Frederick William and Katherine Bower (Miller) Woodruff, was born in Chicago on 18 October 1927. She spent most of her early years just outside Joliet, Illinois, where her father was the third generation in a line of bank presidents. She credits him with inspiring in her an interest in the world and its events and a sense that there were no limitations on what she could do. She went to school at home with nine other children because there was no private school nearby, and her parents felt the public schools were inadequate. In seventh grade...