You Got to Dance with Them What Brung You

Molly Ivins began her career in journalism in the complaint department of the Houston Chronicle. In 1970, she became coeditor of The Texas Observer, which afforded her frequent fits of hysterical laughter while covering Texas legislature. In 1976, Ivins joined The New York Times as a political reporter. The next year, she was named Rocky Mountain Bureau Chief, chiefly because there was no one else in the bureau. In 1982, she returned once more to Texas, which may have indicated a masochistic streak, and always had plenty to write about after that. Her column was syndicated in more than three hundred newspapers, and her freelance work appeared in Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, Harper’s, and other publications. Her first book, Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?, spent more than a year on the New York Times bestseller list. Her books with Lou Dubose on George W. Bush—Shrub, Bushwhacked, and Who Let the Dogs In?—were national bestsellers. A three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, she claimed that her two greatest honors were that the Minneapolis police force named its mascot pig after her and that she was once banned from the campus of Texas A&M. Molly Ivins died in 2007.