Croswell Bowen: A Writer’s Life, a Daughter’s Portrait is the life story of a journalist who wrote his way through the major events of the mid-twentieth century.
 While tracing the trajectory of Croswell Bowen’s (1905–71) personal life, his daughter, Betsy Connor Bowen, follows the path left by her father as he wrote about the Wall Street crash of 1929, the Great Depression, World War II, the McCarthy era, the presidency of John F. Kennedy, and the Vietnam War.
 A riveting account of the life and times of an American journalist, Connor Bowen’s biography of Bowen is a daughter’s quest to find her father through his work at the intersections of journalism, democracy, and liberalism.
 Bowen’s life and work were shaped by his conviction that finding the right stories and telling them with the right words could create a better world. He wrote about criminals, poverty, illness, discrimination, and other matters of social injustice. While writing to advance causes he believed in and lending a voice to the less fortunate, he struggled to maintain his marriage and provide for his family. Although he made mistakes in both his professional and personal life, Connor Bowen celebrates his ability, even in failure, to maintain bold moral integrity.