Virginia Cowles (1910-1983) was born in Vermont. She gravitated to journalism in her youth, beginning as a society reporter for Harper’s Bazaar before pitching the idea of a travel column to Hearst Magazines, which she successfully transformed into a foreign press correspondent role when she began covering the Spanish Civil War in 1937. She later reported from North Africa as the special assistant to the American ambassador. Cowles died in France in 1983.