From Booklist
In the 1940s and 1950s, McBride was a prominent voice on radio, interviewing major public figures, but was mocked for her close emotional ties with her eight million listeners, all at a time when women's career prospects were very limited. Drawing on archives that include McBride's radio interviews, as well as letters from former listeners, Ware begins with a description of McBride's radio show when it was at its height. Ware then backs up to tell how a woman from a small town in Missouri came to such an exalted career in radio that her tenth anniversary was celebrated in Madison Square Garden, where she was greeted by Eleanor Roosevelt, a favorite guest and longtime friend. The event was dedicated to recruiting women volunteers for the armed forces. At McBride's fifteenth anniversary celebration, she raised eyebrows when she publicly embraced Walter White, head of the NAACP. The third part of the book explores McBride's career after World War II until her death in 1976. An epilogue examines how McBride's show compares to contemporary talk shows. Vanessa Bush
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Book Description
"This discerning biography of radio pioneer Mary Margaret McBride illuminates an entire cultural era and offers fascinating parallels to our own time. In Susan Ware's engaging narrative, McBride emerges as an icon of twentieth century popular culture and its romance with what we now describe as 'talk radio.' McBride's story is a tale of power, freedom and connection boldly interpreted by a leading woman's historian." —Joyce Antler, author of The Journey Home: How Jewish Women Shaped Modern America "Well written and lively, Susan Ware's biography rightly restores McBride to her proper place in broadcasting history." —Susan Douglas, author of Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination One of the most beloved radio show hosts of the 1940s and 1950s, Mary Margaret McBride (1899–1976) regularly attracted between six and eight million listeners to her daily one o'clock broadcast. During her twenty years on the air she interviewed tens of thousands of people, from President Harry Truman and Frank Lloyd Wright to Rachel Carson and Zora Neale Hurston. This is her story. Five decades after their broadcast, her shows remain remarkably fresh and interesting. And yet McBride—the Oprah Winfrey of her day—has been practically forgotten, both in radio history and in the history of twentieth-century popular culture, primarily because she was a woman and because she was on daytime radio. Susan Ware explains how Mary Margaret McBride was one of the first to exploit the cultural and political importance of talk radio, pioneering the magazine-style format that many talk shows still use. This radio biography recreates the world of daytime radio from the 1930s through the 1950s, confirming the enormous significance of radio to everyday life, especially for women. In the first in-depth treatment of McBride, Ware starts with a description of how widely McBride was revered in the mid-1940s—the fifteenth anniversary party for her show in 1949 filled Yankee Stadium. Once the readers have gotten to know Mary Margaret (as everyone called her), Ware backtracks to tell the story of McBride's upbringing, her early career, and how she got her start in radio. The latter part of the book picks up McBride's story after World War II and through her death in 1976. An epilogue discusses the contemporary talk show phenomenon with a look back to Mary Margaret McBride's early influence on the format.

About the Author
Susan Ware is the editor of Notable American Women: Completing the Twentieth Century at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. She is the author of Still Missing: Amelia Earhart and the Search for Modern Feminism and Letter to the World: Seven Women Who Shaped the American Century. She lives in Cambridge, MA, and Hopkinton, NH.

FROM THE PUBLISHER