Margaret Bourke-White American, 1904-1971 Margaret Bourke-White was a preeminent photojournalist who gained fame for her striking images published in Fortune and Life magazines in the 1930s-50s. In 1922, while at Columbia University Teachers College in her native New York City, Bourke-White studied photography with Clarence White. She attended several other colleges before graduating from Cornell University (1927), then moved to Cleveland. The city's industrial landscape was influential in the development of Bourke-White's photographic style. One of her images from this period, Romance of Steel, was a first-place winner in the Cleveland Museum of Art's 1928 May Show, a regional juried exhibition. The following year Bourke-White moved back to New York to work for Henry Luce's new business magazine, Fortune. In 1934 she was sent by the magazine to cover the drought in the Midwest, an assignment she credited with awakening her social conscience. Three years later she collaborated with writer Erskine Caldwell on You Have Seen Their Faces, an acclaimed study of the plight of rural Southerners during the Great Depression. Bourke-White's long association with Life began in 1936 when she joined the magazine as one of its first staff photographers. When it premiered on November 23, 1936, her photographs of Fort Peck Dam in Montana were featured on the cover and in the lead story. During her career, Bourke-White covered many major world events: the Great Depression, World War II, the partitioning of India, and the Korean War. She continued to photograph throughout the 1950s, publishing her images in magazines and in a number of books, including Eyes on Russia (1931), North of the Danube, with Erskine Caldwell (1939), Say, Is This the U.S.A.?, with Erskine Caldwell (1941), Shooting the Russian War (1942), Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly (1946), Halfway to Freedom: A Report on the New India (1949), and Portrait of Myself (her autobiography, 1963). M.M.