`

Nebraska Authors

Bess Furman Armstrong

AKA: Mrs. Robert Armstrong

In her published works, the author went by the name Bess Furman.

Born 1894-12-02 Danbury, NE (USA)

Died 1969-05-12
Woodacres, MD (USA)

Author and Journalist, Bess Furman was a White House correspondent who became good friends with Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of the President. Bess was known as a champion of women's rights. She was the first woman reporter ever assigned by a press association to cover the House of Representatives and the first woman to hold a top press job with a cabinet agency. She covered the White House during five presidential administrations, starting with Herbert Hoover.

Places Lived

Danbury, NE
McCook, NE
Ft. Collins, CO
Kirksville, MO
Kearney, NE
Omaha, NE
Washington, D.C.
Montgomery, MD
Woodacres, MD

Author Of

  • Journalism
  • Nonfiction
  • Biography

Keywords

Journalism; Politics; Biographies; Women's Rights

Education

Northeast Missouri State Teachers College, Kirksville, MO
Degree, 1918, Nebraska State Teachers College, Kearney, NE

Occupation

Journalist
Teacher
Author
Business Owner
Assistant Chief, Magazine Division, Office of War and Information, 1941-1943
Staff Writer, New York Times
Head of the Press Information Division of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare

Places Worked

Kearney Daily Hub
Omaha Bee News
Associated Press
New York Times
Furman Features
U.S. Office of War and Information
U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare

Honors

Headliner Award, Theta Sigma Phi, National Journalistic Sorority, 1949
Elected to the Nebraska Newspaper Hall of Fame in 1975

Associations

National Women's Press Club President, 1946

Bibliography

Washington By-Line: The Personal History of a Newspaper Woman. 1949.
White House Profile: A Social History of the white House, Its Occupants and Its Festivities. 1951.
Progress in Prosthetics. 1962.
A Profile of the United States Public Health Service, 1789-1948. 1973.

We appreciate corrections and additions to our information about authors, but please read the following guidelines and caveats carefully.

  • The Nebraska Authors database is based on publicly available sources. Unless you are the author contacting us in person, it helps us if you cite the source or sources of your information. We cannot include unsourced information in the database.
  • We may be appreciative of information we choose not to include in the publicly available database.
  • To include an image on an author profile, please send jpg attachment to nebraskaauthors@lincoln.ne.gov. A photo-release agreement is required before the image will be published on this site.
  • Because of the way we are staffed, expect corrections or additions to take time, sometimes up to three months.
  • While we initially included some actual links to external URLs in the database, we will in the future no longer provide functioning links. We will instead record the presence of specific external materials in language that we hope will help intelligent users find it themselves. Web rot, in which actual materials remain online but undergo changes in their URLs, is too demanding in terms of staff time for us to hope to keep external links current.

Please copy, fill out the form below, and email it to heritage@lincoln.ne.gov to suggest a change.

/
Bess Furman Armstrong
bess-furman-armstrong

Do you have corrections for the above information or other information to add?:

(e.g. Author is buried in Fremont, not in David City / Also wrote for the Daily Nebraskan during her time as a student)