author
Mary Knight
1898–1996
A pioneering journalist and memoirist, she wrote with unusual independence and firsthand experience. Her best-known autobiographical work reflects a life shaped by reporting, travel, and a determination to make her own way.
1 Audiobook
Red blight
by Mary Knight
About the author
Mary Knight was an American author, journalist, and lecturer born in 1898. Archival records at Emory University identify her as Mary Lamar Knight McConnell and note that she was one of the first women news correspondents for United Press International, as well as the first woman on its Paris staff from 1930 to 1935.
She is associated with On My Own, published in 1938 and described in library records as an autobiography. That mix of reporting experience and personal storytelling helps explain why her writing still stands out as direct, self-reliant, and shaped by real-world experience.
Knight died in 1996. Based on the sources I could confirm here, the strongest documented picture is of a trailblazing woman in journalism who also turned her life experience into books.