Edith Iglauer

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, March 10, 1917. B.A. degree from Wellesley College, 1938; M.S., School of Journalism, Columbia University, 1939. Married writer Philip Hamburger, 1942; divorced, 1966. Moved to Canada, 1974. Married John Heywood Daly, a commercial salmon troller, deceased 1978.

Employed: McCall’s magazine, 1940. At outbreak of World War II, worked in Washington in radio newsroom, Office of Strategic Services (OSS), later amalgamated into the Office of War Information (OWI). In charge of Scandinavian and religious desks and at her suggestion, covered First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, at the White House, 1942-44. War correspondent in the Mediterranean Theatre, 1945, mainly in Italy and what was then Yugoslavia, for The Cleveland News.

At the end of World War II moved to New York. Two sons, Jay Philip Hamburger, Founder and Director of Theater in the Raw in Vancouver, B.C. and Richard Shaw Hamburger, Artistic Director of the Dallas Theater Center in Dallas, TX. Wrote series of reports about the beginning of the United Nations in New York and Lake Success, L.I., for Harper’s magazine, and numerous other articles for The Christian Science Monitor, the New York Herald Tribune, the Atlantic Monthly, MacLean’s, and other American and Canadian magazines, 1946-60.

From 1961 on, a staff writer and frequent contributor to The New Yorker magazine: followed the foundations of the World Trade Center for the seven years it took to build them, with the Reporter-at-Large, “The Biggest Foundation” published in 1972, (with an addendum immediately after the bombing in March, 1993) often referred to since 9/11; two pieces in early 1960’s about air pollution that changed pollution laws in New York City; frequently quoted, seminal Profile of Pierre Trudeau shortly after he became Prime Minister of Canada, 1969; article about New York City’s mounted police, 1962; series about Inuit co-operatives, 1961-64; New York’s fair housing law, 1966; the opening of an ice road in the Canadian North, 1975; profile of international architect, Arthur Erickson, 1981.

Author of five books:

l) The New People (1966), reprinted and updated as Inuit Journey, 1979 and 2000; the development of Inuit cooperatives in the eastern Canadian Arctic, beginning with a journey over river ice by Inuit sled, or komatik, to second meeting of first Inuit cooperative in a remote area of northern Quebec. A turning point for better or worse, from a previous nomadic to settlement life, and the first step to Inuit self-government, finally achieved in 1999 with the creation of Nunavut.

2) Denison’s Ice Road (1974; reissued, 1982, 1991, 2000), traveling with the truck crew building the annual 325-mile winter road from Yellowknife, capital of the Northwest Territories, over eleven hopefully frozen lakes, to a silver mine on Great Bear Lake, above the Arctic Circle.

3) Seven Stones: A Portrait of Arthur Erickson, Architect, (1981), an expansion of the profile of the great Canadian architect, published in The New Yorker June 4, 1979.

4) Fishing With John (1988), a runaway bestseller, an unwitting love story and a nominee for the 1989 Canadian Governor General’s Award for non-fiction, about her experiences as an absolute novice on a commercial salmon troller.

5) The Strangers Next Door (1991), a partial collection of past writing accompanied by personal comments.

Recent publications:
two op-ed pieces in the Vancouver Sun, "Drinking Water Purity", and "The Biggest Foundations Was No Help", written on the first anniversary of 9/11, about the World Trade Center in New York. In Americas, the magazine of the Organization of American States, "Pierre Trudeau: Champion of a Just Society", a tribute to the late Canadian Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau; and a series of personal anecdotes that the editors of the Vancouver magazine, Geist, find amusing, "Snowed in at the Sylvia", "Revisting Mrs. R", "My Lovely Bathtub", "Tiens! Croissants!", and "Wait, Save, Help."

Working on a book. At 86, still believes that journalists are the watchdogs of democracy, and in the power of the still small voice of truth.