Shana Alexander (October 6, 1925 – June 23, 2005) was an American journalist. Although she became the first woman staff writer and columnist for Life magazine, she was best known for her participation in the "Point-Counterpoint" debate segments of 60 Minutes in the late 1970s with conservative James J. Kilpatrick.
Early life and journalism career
Alexander was born Shana Ager on October 6, 1925, in New York City, the daughter of columnist Cecelia Ager (née Rubenstein) and Tin Pan Alley composer Milton Ager, who composed the song "Happy Days Are Here Again".
She inspired his famous song "Ain't She Sweet." Her family was Jewish. Alexander graduated from Vassar College in 1945, majoring in anthropology. She fell into writing when she took a summer job as a copy clerk at the New York City newspaper PM, where her mother worked. During the 1960s she wrote "The Feminine Eye" column for Life.
In 1962 she wrote an article for Life entitled "They Decide Who Lives, Who Dies: Medical miracle puts moral burden on small committee," which sparked a national debate on the allocation of scarce kidney dialysis machine resources. Another Life article, about a suicide-hotline worker's efforts to keep a caller from killing herself, was turned into the 1965 film, The Slender Thread. She was writing a column for Newsweek in 1975 when she replaced Nicholas von Hoffman on 60 Minutes, and debated Kilpatrick for the next four years. She played down this part of her career, commenting in 1979 that prior to that she "had been a writer, a columnist for Life magazine and for Newsweek -- that was about as high as you could get in column writing. I care about my writing. I'm not a quack-quack TV journalist."
She also wrote a number of non-fiction books, including Anyone's Daughter, a biography of kidnapped heiress Patricia Hearst. Her book Nutcracker, about Frances Schreuder, the convicted socialite who persuaded her son to kill her millionaire father, was made into a 1987 TV miniseries. As a child, after her parents divorced, Katherine had chosen to live with Stephen Alexander and his wife. and a niece.
Books
- Talking Woman (1976)
- Anyone's Daughter (1979)
- Happy Days: My Mother, My Father, My Sister & Me (1995), autobiography
- Very Much a Lady: The Untold Story of Jean Harris and Dr. Herman Tarnower, Edgar Award, Best Fact Crime book, (1983)
- When She Was Bad (1991)
- Nutcracker (1985)
- The Astonishing Elephant (2000)
- The Pizza Connection: Lawyers, Money, Drugs, Mafia (1988)