Wild Rose is Ann Blackman’s third biography. She is the author of Seasons of Her Life: A Biography of Madeleine Korbel Albright published by Scribner/Simon & Schuster in 1998 and co-author of The Spy Next Door: the Extraordinary Secret Life of Robert Philip Hanssen about the FBI agent who spied for the Russians, published by Little, Brown and Co. in 2002.
Ms. Blackman’s three decades of reporting from Washington helped her understand the world of Rose O’Neale Greenhow, who grew up in the nation’s capital in the 19th century, yet inhabited a world surprisingly similar to Washington today.
Ms. Blackman worked at TIME magazine for 16 years, specializing in reporting about the life of the nation’s power brokers and their families. She joined the magazine in 1985 as deputy bureau chief in the Washington bureau and spent three years as a correspondent in the TIME Moscow bureau. Before that, she worked for 15 years as a national correspondent for The Associated Press, covering the Watergate hearings, presidential politics, the Iranian hostage crisis and the assassination attempts on Governor George Wallace and President Ronald Reagan. She left TIME in 2001 to concentrate on writing books.
Wild Rose explores Mrs. Greenhow’s climb through Washington’s social hierarchy and her development into a brazen, independent-minded woman passionately committed to the Confederate cause at a critical juncture in the country’s history.
Ms. Blackman is married to Michael Putzel. They have two grown children, Leila and Christof Putzel, and live in Washington with their Golden Retriever named Muggs.
Courtesy of Ann Blackman Official Site.