Maureen Dowd
Maureen Dowd is a columnist for The New York Times Opinion Pages and a feature writer for The Times’s Style and Arts & Leisure sections.
Ms. Dowd won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999, in the commentary category, for her “unsparing columns on the hypocrisies involved in the Lewinsky affair and the effort to impeach President Clinton.” Ms. Dowd was appointed a columnist for the Op-Ed page of The New York Times in January 1995 and has covered ten presidential campaigns. She served as White House correspondent during the first Bush administration and the Clinton administration, gaining a wide following of admirers and imitators for her witty, incisive and acerbic portraits of the powerful.
Ms. Dowd joined The Times as a metropolitan reporter in October 1983. She 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.
When The Star closed in 1981, she went to Time magazine. A 1992 Pulitzer Prize finalist in national reporting for her coverage of the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, Ms. Dowd received the Breakthrough Award from Women, Men and Media at Columbia University in 1991 and a Matrix Award from New York Women in Communications in 1994. She was named one of Glamour’s Women of the Year for 1996 and won the Damon Runyon Award in 2000 for outstanding contributions to journalism. In 2017, she received the Ernie Pyle Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. She has written three best-selling books: “Bushworld,” “Are Men Necessary?” and most recently “The Year of Voting Dangerously.” Her latest book, “Notorious,” releases in March 2025.
Born in Washington, D.C., she received a B.A. degree in English literature from Catholic University in Washington, D.C. in 1973 and honorary doctorates from Manhattanville College in Purchase, N.Y., and the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. In 2012, she received an honorary doctorate from National University of Ireland, Galway. She received her master’s degree in English literature from Columbia University in 2023. Ms. Dowd lives in Washington, D.C.