New York Times correspondent MILTON BRACKER was born December 13, 1909, in Cincinnati, Ohio, but raised and educated in New York City where he graduated from City College in 1929 and Columbia School of Journalism in 1931. While still a student Bracker was hired as the Times' campus representative; in 1931 he became a full-fledged staff reporter.
By the late 1930s Bracker's by-line appeared frequently over important news stories such as the “Little Steel” strike of 1937. In 1935 he published his first “magaziner,” the first of many such articles to be published in the New York Times Magazine. In addition, he began writing articles for other publications on a free-lance basis. Over the years he also wrote fiction and published a good deal of poetry.
During an assignment in 1935 Bracker met Virginia Lee Warren, a correspondent for the Washington Post, and they were married in 1936.
In November, 1942, the Times assigned Bracker to its London bureau. After reporting on the Battle of Britain from January to July, 1943, he covered the Italian campaign without interruption from the first landings to the Allied entry into Rome in June, 1944. Later that year Bracker was the only American correspondent to accompany the British invasion of Greece. From March, 1945 to February, 1946, he was acting head of the Rome bureau, although frequently absent from Rome to cover news at the front. In Milan in April, 1945, Bracker witnessed the mob's treatment of Mussolini's body; his account of this event was to become one of the classics of World War II journalism.
In May, 1946, the Times transferred Bracker and his wife (who had joined the Times' Rome bureau in February, 1945) to the paper's Central American bureau in Mexico City; the following year they were transferred to Buenos Aires, from which post Bracker covered the South American continent. So excellent was his coverage that in 1949 he won the first Maria Cabot prize for the best hemispheric reporting and in 1951 (together with his wife) he won the George Polk award for coverage of the suppression of the anti-Peron press.
In 1951 Bracker returned to the city staff in New York City. In subsequent years his domestic assignments ranged from award-winning coverage of the sinking of the Andrea Doria (1956) to the first launching at Cape Canaveral (1957), yet he always maintained his mastery of foreign affairs. Over the years he published numerous editorials on Latin American events, returned to South and Central America on several special assignments, and was a roving correspondent in Africa in 1959. In 1960 Bracker was named special staff correspondent for the Times' international edition and he spent nine months in Europe reporting on cultural matters. In August, 1963, he was designated chief of the Rome bureau. Bracker died while on assignment on January 28, 1964.
Writing under the name VIRGINIA LEE WARREN, Mrs. Milton Bracker is a native of Winchester, Virginia. After education at Western College, Oxford, Ohio, and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and a brief fling at the theatre, she began her career in journalism as women's page editor for the Redlands (Calif.) Daily Facts in 1931. In 1933 she became a fashion reporter for the Washington Post; two years later she became the first woman reporter on the Post's city staff.
After three years with the paper during which time she covered several sensational murder trials, Warren retired from journalism to marry Milton Bracker in 1936. This retirement ended when Bracker was sent overseas as a war correspondent for the New York Times. In his absence Warren worked for Time magazine then turned to free-lance journalism.
In 1945 the Times hired her as a war correspondent and transferred her to the Rome bureau where her husband was also assigned. After a year of covering the Vatican as well as Allied headquarters, Mrs. Bracker accompanied her husband to Mexico in the capacity of reporter. In 1947 her story on the Mexican election won an award from the New York Newspaperwomen's Club. From 1948 to 1951 Warren worked in the Buenos Aires bureau office while her husband labored as roving reporter and bureau chief. Her stint in the Argentine capital included an arrest by Peron's special police and (in conjunction with her husband) the George Polk award for coverage of the suppression of the anti-Peron press.
When the Brackers returned to the United States in 1951, Warren again retired from journalism, resuming her career only after her husband's death in 1964. Since then she has been a frequently by-lined writer for the Women's/Style section of the New York Times.
The Bracker/Warren Papers, which consist almost entirely of newsclippings, are a good record of the couple's by-lined writings.
Bracker's papers are comprised of several types of clippings including biographical material, news stories from the New York Times, articles published in other journals, and poetry. A number of his early articles from the New York Times are taken from a scrapbook and consequently present a deviation from the normal chronological order. These scrapbook pages, which were cut up prior to donation, provide a limited but the only extant record of Bracker's un-by-lined articles.
Warren's clippings consist of stories from the Washington Post and the New York Times. In addition, her papers include a small file of manuscript stories which bear considerable evidence of editing by the author. Those that are undated are arranged in an alphabetical subject file.
