Ivins is a political columnist, but somehow that term doesn't do her justice. We've come to associate political columnists (or commentators) with the self-important talking heads who clutter the airwaves and the predictable bores who take up space on the Op-Ed pages. What she has in mind is more ambitious than that. Basically, she's a storyteller who uses satire to drive home her points, and thus is in the rarefied line of such legendary observers as Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Will Rogers, H.L. Mencken and Red Smith, all of whom considered pomp deflation and conventional-wisdom dispersal among their primary missions.

As a personality profiler, Ivins is peerless. Her essays on Barbara Jordan, Ann Richards, an anonymous visitor to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and her own parents swing from the hilarious to the heartbreaking. As a chronicler of that perverse body known as the Texas Legislature, where humanity seems to exist in its most primitive state, she is like a griot or a James Boswell -- or perhaps a proctologist.

Here's Ivins writing in the Atlantic in 1975:

Take the last all-House duke-out. It was, distressingly enough, over ten years ago. Although there have been a fair number of fistfights in the Capitol since, none has qualified as total Fist City. On the last such occasion (the cause long forgotten), over half of the 150 House members were actively engaged in slugging their colleagues, insulting the wives and mothers of same, knocking over desks, and throwing chairs. Now, any legislature can have a mass duke-out, but where else would there be musical accompaniment? In mid-melee, four members mounted the speaker's dais and held forth, in barbershop-quartet harmony, with "I Had a Dream, Dear."

In a tribute to Jordan after the great congresswoman from Texas died in 1996, Ivins wrote: "But the real secret of her rhetoric, the reason she jolted everyone who ever heard her into respectful attention, was that her choice of words was just as precise as her diction. She used words to construct thoughts with the exactitude of a skilled craftsman building a limestone wall."

Ivins could just as well have been writing about herself.

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Both of her parents, upstanding Texans, were Republicans, so young Molly was a bit of a rebel. She wrote that her turn into activism sprang from the same realization that creates all Southern liberals. "Once you figure out they are lying to you about race, you start to question everything."

Like many progressives on the front end of the boomer generation, Ivins got involved in civil rights and the early anti-Vietnam War movement. But she notes a difference between her compatriots and those who came later: "By the time of the antiwar movement we were sort of political veterans, and so I don't think we got quite as disenchanted as some of the younger antiwar people did. I mean, as far as we were concerned you organized and changed things -- because we'd seen it done and we knew it could be done. So it didn't seem to us like the country was evil or bizarre or anything like that."

As her mother and grandmother did, Ivins graduated from Smith College, and decided to become a journalist because it combined two of her passions -- writing and politics.

She enrolled at the Columbia School of Journalism, she says, because "in those days if you were a female, unless you had an extra credential, your chances of getting hired, and then getting a good assignment, were really quite slim. In those days, if newspapers hired women at all they would send you to what they called the snake pit, which is what they called the women's department, the women's pages, which is where you'd spend the rest of your life writing about food, fluff and fashion. There was really quite a remarkable level of sexism on newspapers when I started."

Ivins is fond of relating that she worked in the complaints department and was "sewer editor" at the Houston Chronicle during summer breaks from Columbia, but her first postgraduate newspaper job was at the Minneapolis Tribune, where, she says, "they let me write about the uproar of the late '60s -- the antiwar movement, black riots, angry women. It was a wonderful time."

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