User:Mwinog2777/ janey scott

Janny Scott
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Harvard University
Period	1977–present
Genre	Journalism Biography
Notable awards	Pulitzer Prize, 2000, for national reporting

Janny Scott is an American journalist and biographer. She won a 2000 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting as part of a New York Times team reporting on race in America.

Family, early life and education

Scott was born to a prosperous blue blood family living outside Philadelphia. Her ancestors included a railroad baron, socialites, a congressman, a diplomat and a financier. Her grandmother, Hope Montgomery Scott, has been said to be the inspiration Katharine Hepburn's Tracy Lord in the film and play The Philadelphia Story. Her father, Robert Montgomery Scott, was a philanthropist and president of the Philadelphia Museum of Art; her maternal grandfather, Colonel Robert L. Montgomery founded the investment firm Janney Montgomery Scott; her great-grandfather, Thomas A. Scott helped build the Pennsylvania Railroad from a "struggling experiment" into what was then the largest corporation in the world, twice over; another ancestor, Horace Binney, served in Congress. Scott grew up on Androssan, an 800 acre estate on the Philadelphia Main Line. She lived there until 1969, when at age 14, her father transplanted the family to England. He had been appointed special assistant to the ambassador to England, Walter Annenberg, a fellow Main Liner. Her family eventually returned to Androssan to live, but she never did. She continued her education at an all-girls boarding school in the countryside. She attended Harvard University, graduating in 1977, describing her time there as a turning point in her life. She reports that she had "a very good time," finding it "nice to be with men," meeting a different crowd, including radicals, and experiencing the intellectual environment. She began her writing career there "on almost a whim." She wrote for The Harvard Crimson, describing it as her main activity while in school. She also wrote for the The Real Paper, a weekly alternative, and continued writing for it after graduation.

Writing career

Journalism

After 75 rejections at other newspapers, she became a reporter for The Record, in Bergen County, New Jersey. After five years there she landed a job with The Los Angeles Times's San Diego desk. She moved to California; being there was a new experience for her and she loved everything about it. She was later transferred to the Los Angeles office where she covered medicine and politics, and then to their New York City desk. While in New York she left the L.A. Times and joined The New York Times where she worked 14 years (1994-2008) as a reporter, covering race, ideas, class, and demographic changes.

Biographer

On first learning about Barack Obama's mother, Scott felt that the usual representation of her as a "white woman from Kansas" an oversimplification and missed an extraordinary life story. In 2008 she took a leave from The Times to write a fuller story. The resulting 200 interviews and two and a half led to the publication of A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother. The book was a bestseller, runner up for the 2012 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, and one of Time Magazine's top ten of nonfiction books for 2011.

Her second book, The Beneficiary: Fortune, Misfortune and the Story of My Father explored secret family legacies. Scott inherited his diaries when died of alcoholic cirrhosis in 2005. She lays bare a family history of alcoholism, depression and infidelity; and, how her father was "trapped by his inheritance." She is saddened by her father's only feeble attempts to deal with alcohol and depression; and, his lack of forthrightness in discussing these problems with the family. She is less saddened by his infidelity, which was common in the family. She notes that fidelity in a long marriage is not for everybody; and she views infidelity not as a character flaw, but as a character fact. The book was a New York Times notable book of2019 and an NPR favorite book of 2019.

Personal

Scott was married to Bill Ritter, a television news anchor. They were together for 19 years and had two children. In 2005, while married, a relationship between Scott and Joseph Lelyveld, former executive editor of The New York Times, became public. Scott was his partner for 19 years until his death in 2024.