Nan Robertson, Who Chronicled Discrimination Suit at The Times, Is Dead at 83
Nan Robertson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times who was widely known for her book “The Girls in the Balcony,” which chronicled the fight for workplace parity by female employees of The Times, and for writing candidly about her alcoholism and battle with toxic shock syndrome, died on Tuesday in Rockville, Md. She was 83 and lived in Bethesda, Md.
The apparent cause was heart disease, said Jane Freundel Levey, Ms. Robertson’s stepdaughter-in-law. After retiring from The Times in 1988, Ms. Robertson taught journalism at the University of Maryland and elsewhere.
A reporter at The Times for more than three decades, Ms. Robertson received the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for “Toxic Shock,” published in The New York Times Magazine the year before. The article unsparingly described the author’s swift, brutal encounter with the illness, which resulted in the partial amputation of eight fingers:
“I went dancing the night before in a black velvet Paris gown, on one of those evenings that was the glamour of New York epitomized. I was blissfully asleep at 3 A.M.
“Twenty-four hours later, I lay dying, my fingers and legs darkening with gangrene.”
Ms. Robertson, who after a grueling rehabilitation was able to resume her career, wrote two books. The first, “Getting Better: Inside Alcoholics Anonymous” (Morrow, 1988), was both a history of the organization and a narrative of the author’s recovery from alcoholism. The second, “The Girls in the Balcony: Women, Men, and The New York Times” (Random House, 1992), was in part about the suit brought by female employees against the newspaper in 1974.
Reviewing “The Girls in the Balcony” in The New York Times Book Review, Arlie Russell Hochschild called it a “warm, salty, wisecracking book.”
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The apparent cause was heart disease, said Jane Freundel Levey, Ms. Robertson’s stepdaughter-in-law. After retiring from The Times in 1988, Ms. Robertson taught journalism at the University of Maryland and elsewhere.
A reporter at The Times for more than three decades, Ms. Robertson received the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for “Toxic Shock,” published in The New York Times Magazine the year before. The article unsparingly described the author’s swift, brutal encounter with the illness, which resulted in the partial amputation of eight fingers:
“I went dancing the night before in a black velvet Paris gown, on one of those evenings that was the glamour of New York epitomized. I was blissfully asleep at 3 A.M.
“Twenty-four hours later, I lay dying, my fingers and legs darkening with gangrene.”
Ms. Robertson, who after a grueling rehabilitation was able to resume her career, wrote two books. The first, “Getting Better: Inside Alcoholics Anonymous” (Morrow, 1988), was both a history of the organization and a narrative of the author’s recovery from alcoholism. The second, “The Girls in the Balcony: Women, Men, and The New York Times” (Random House, 1992), was in part about the suit brought by female employees against the newspaper in 1974.
Reviewing “The Girls in the Balcony” in The New York Times Book Review, Arlie Russell Hochschild called it a “warm, salty, wisecracking book.”