Croswell Bowen

Croswell Bowen (1905–1971) was an American political reporter, activist journalist, and biographer who contributed extensively to newspapers and magazines in the 1940s and 1950s.

For his activist journalism, he was awarded a Benjamin Franklin Citation for an investigative report on low-level radiation risks, "The New Invisible Death Around Us."

As a biographer, his Curse of the Misbegotten, finalist for the National Book Award, was the first-full-length biography of Nobel Prize–winning dramatist Eugene O'Neill.

Born in Toledo, Ohio, he was educated at the Choate School, Yale University, the Sorbonne, and the New School for Social Research.

Bowen made an early name for himself as a reporter, the "Rover Boy of Park Row," clattering down the stairs of the World Building, press card stuck in the brim of his fedora, breaking through police barriers calling out “I’m Bowen of the INS!" In Washington, D.C., as an International News Service reporter, Bowen covered high-level government press conferences, where the atmosphere was more gentlemanly. Reporters carried walking sticks and submitted written questions in advance. Ignoring that custom, he directly grilled Secretary of State Stimson on the Mukden incident. His connection to the INS ended thereafter.

Returned to New York's Greenwich Village, Bowen joined the company of the writers, artists and editors who gathered at the evening salon of best-selling popular historian Carl Carmer.

His essay “I Was a Rich Man’s Son” appeared in a 1935 collection, the Forum and Century.

Having studied photography with Berenice Abbott at the New School, Bowen's opportunity to combine photography and writing came when Carl Carmer hired him to research the lives and lore of Hudson River folk for a volume in The Rivers of America series edited by Constance Lindsay Skinner.

A prose/photography book of Bowen’s own followed, The Hudson: Great River of the Mountains published in 1940, its text and pictures showing the influence of the Federal Writers' Project version of American literary regionalism.

When Life commissioned Margaret Bourke-White to photograph the Hudson, Bowen and Carmer went with her as guides.

In 1941, he joined the American Field Service as an official photographer, was wounded during the battle of Tobruk in 1942, and received the Africa Star and the British Empire Medal.

In 1943, he joined the staff of PM Magazine, the New York tabloid legendary among newsmen for its policy against running advertising.

PM staffers spanned a broad range of political viewpoints and included avowed Communists, although its editorials were generally left-liberal.

Editors allowed reporters and photographers unusually free rein carrying out their work.

Ever since his 1947 PM piece on Eugene O’Neill, “The Black Irishman,” cited below, Bowen had continued to pursue the story of how the playwright’s troubled life had influenced his work.

As O’Neill’s stature revived with production of his masterpiece Long Day’s Journey into Night, Bowen contracted to write a book-length biography.

The Curse of the Misbegotten: A Tale of the House of O’Neill was a National Book Award finalist.

Beginning as local news reporter and rising to associate editor, Bowen produced political reporting on subjects ranging from press freedom at William and Mary to the press buildup given Von Hayek, from the formation of the United Nations to domestic fascism, from to George C. Marshall to J. Parnell Thomas at the trial of the Hollywood Ten, all cited below, a stream of work that ended only when the paper folded in 1948.

When Tammany politics surfaced again in mid-1950s New York, a Shawn assignment to write a piece on 19th Century Tammany Mayor A. Oakey Hall led to a year-long immersion in the New York Public Library and a third book, his first biography, The Elegant Oakey.

The McCarthyism of the early 1950s was an uneasy time for Eastern liberals like Bowen, as they watched the hard-won reputations of many they knew – Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett—challenged by the Hollywood Blacklist of the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Then, when the televised Army-McCarthy Hearings caused the power of Joseph McCarthy to wane, Bowen looked for an opportunity to expose the Federal Bureau of Investigation's investigations of "subversives and radicals." He constructed a plan to gain access through the F.B.I. for a New Yorker-style profile on its Director, J. Edgar Hoover.

Unaware of what records accessed under the Freedom of Information Act reveal, that his PM affiliation had long ago tainted him as suspect or that his New Yorker crime pieces marked him as “not a friend of law enforcement,” he did not know how improbable it was that he would gain their trust.

Access was handily refused.

As he had since the 1950s, Bowen continued publishing on subjects he believed in – on the "spin" world of public relations, consumer psychology-based marketing techniques, the rationalizations Madison Avenue made to keep on advertising cigarettes, and the tragedy that had struck when Donora, PA was the site of the first smog outbreak.

He began a John F. Kennedy biography and a semi-autobiographical novel, both left unfinished.

By then married and a father, Bowen moved to William Shawn’s New Yorker as a staff writer, where he wrote pieces for “Reporter at Large” and profiled criminals for “Annals of Crime.” Turning on the accused the same psychological attention he’d given to the powerful and famous, the profiles were published in 1954 as They Went Wrong.

Croswell Bowen died on July 15, 1971, in his New York City apartment of a fourth heart attack.

He was survived by his former wife Marjory Hill Bowen and three daughters, Betsy, Lucey and Molly.

His papers are housed in the Beinecke Library at Yale and the Andrew Mellon Library, Choate-Rosemary Hall.

Back From Tobruk, his account of that experience, was published in 2012.

Returned to wartime New York City, Bowen gave speeches for the Victory Speakers’ Bureau under the Office of War Information and held a desk job at CBS, monitoring and writing the foreign news, but resigned when CBS overrode his protests and reported the dispatches of a known propaganda source as legitimate.

For a proposed book, Bowen interviewed and corresponded with Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, whose ideas about the role of the press in democracy inspired his subsequent career.