Margaret Cousins: Writer and Women's Magazine Editor (1905–1996)

Sue Margaret Cousins, author and editor, was born in Munday, Texas, on January 26, 1905, to Walter Henry and Sue Margaret (Reeves) Cousins. Her father, who in his youth was a cowpuncher in West Texas, studied pharmacy and eventually became publisher of the Southern Pharmaceutical Journal. A few years after Margaret’s birth, he moved the family to the Dallas area, where Margaret and her brother, Walter Henry Jr., were raised.

Cousins displayed her literary interests early in life. By the time she graduated from Bryan Street High School in 1922, she had published a poem in the Dallas Journal and had sold another poem about silent film actor Rudolph Valentino to Motion Picture Magazine. Cousins attended the University of Texas at Austin, where she studied journalism. There she wrote and edited for the Daily Texan, The Ranger, and Longhorn Magazine. She studied under a number of notable professors, including future dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Hanson Tufts Parlin, whom she said greatly influenced her literary tastes. She was awarded the D.A. Frank Poetry Prize and graduated in 1926.

After her graduation, Cousins became associate editor and later editor of her father’s Southern Pharmaceutical Journal. Her poetry earned her inclusion in Texas Writers of Today (1935) and garnered her the attention of editor Herbert Mayes, who became her longtime mentor. In 1937, on the invitation of Mayes, she left her position as editor to her brother and moved to New York City to work as associate editor for the Pictorial Review. When the Review folded in 1939, Cousins took a copy editing job with the promotional department of Hearst Magazines. In 1942 she was hired by Mayes as associate editor of Good Housekeeping and in 1945 won herself a promotion to managing editor. By 1940 Cousins was joined in New York by Mildred Randolph Culbreath, a woman who had been close enough to Cousins in Dallas to be described as her “foster sister.” Culbreath later worked as editorial promotions director at Good Housekeeping, and the two lived together for more than a decade before Culbreath’s sudden death from a cerebral hemorrhage in 1951. At the time of Culbreath’s death, the two had commissioned famed interior designer and personal friend William C. Pahlmann, to design a home for them in Dobbs Ferry, New York. The home was among the most celebrated of Pahlmann’s career, and he later designed Cousin’s apartment in the Clifford Building in San Antonio following her retirement.

In 1958 Cousins moved with Mayes to McCall’s magazine and served as managing editor there until 1961, when she quit after Mayes chose another man to succeed him as editor rather than her. She then ventured into book publishing and worked as senior editor for Doubleday and Company from 1961 to 1970 and then as special editor for Holt, Rinehart & Winston in 1970. At Doubleday she edited the bestsellers Hurry Sundown (1964) by K. B. Gilden and Ruffles and Flourishes (1970), a memoir by Liz Carpenter. Cousins also compiled and edited the anthology Love and Marriage: 22 Stories (1961) and edited Lady Bird Johnson’s memoir A White House Diary (1970), and Lyndon Baines Johnson’s memoir The Vantage Point (1971). From 1971 to 1973 she was book and fiction editor for Ladies’ Home Journal.

As well as editing the works of other writers, Cousins wrote and published her own material. As a writer she is best-known for her children’s books, including Ben Franklin of Old Philadelphia (1952), The Story of Thomas Alva Edison (1965), and We Were There at the Battle of the Alamo (1958), the latter of which children’s author Siddie Joe Johnson called “the most moving account of the Alamo story that has yet been written for children.” Celebrated Texas historian Walter Prescott Webb served as Cousins’s historical consultant for that book. Cousins’s other books include Christmas Gift (1952), a collection of her Christmas short fiction, and Traffic with Evil (1962), a mystery written under the pen name Avery Johns. Her book Uncle Edgar and the Reluctant Saint was first published in 1948 and later anthologized in William Peery’s 21 Texas Short Stories (1954). In addition, Cousins ghost wrote Margaret Truman’s autobiography Souvenir (1956). By the end of her career Cousins had published more than 200 short stories as well as numerous essays and nonfiction articles. Several of her short stories were adapted for radio and television. “The Life of Lucy Gallant” (1953) was adapted into a 1955 film starring Jane Wyman and Charlton Heston.

Throughout her career, Cousins was active in the Authors League of America (later the Authors Guild). She was also a member of Alpha Chi Omega, the honorary journalism sorority Theta Sigma Phi (later Women in Communications), the Texas Institute of Letters, the Philosophical Society of Texas, and the American Institute of Interior Designers. In August 1973 Cousins retired and moved to San Antonio, Texas. There she was a member of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, the San Antonio Fine Arts Commission, and the Arts Council of San Antonio. She also served on the board of directors of the San Antonio Conservation Society.

Cousins received numerous awards and honors throughout her life. She was named a National Headliner by Theta Sigma Phi in 1946 and granted an Alpha Chi Omega achievement award in 1955. In 1969 she received the Penney–Missouri Journalism Award for her magazine writing and the George Washington Honor Medal from the Freedom Foundation at Valley Forge. In 1973 she was named a University of Texas Distinguished Alumna. In 1980 William Woods College presented Cousins with an honorary doctorate. She was inducted into the San Antonio Women’s Hall of Fame in 1985 and the Texas Women’s Hall of Fame in 1986. She received a lifetime achievement award from Women in Communications in 1986 and the Lon Tinkle Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Texas Institute of Letters in 1991. Margaret Cousins died at the age of ninety-one at a San Antonio nursing home on July 30, 1996. She was interred at Restland Memorial Park in Dallas.