Florabel Muir

Who was Florabel Muir?

Florabel Muir was an American reporter and newspaper columnist from the 1920s through the 1950s. She was famous for covering both Hollywood celebrities and underworld gangsters.

Muir attended the University of Washington in Seattle, where she worked as the assistant editor of a student paper. She began her professional newspaper career at the Salt Lake Herald after convincing the city editor to break with tradition and hire their first female reporter. Eventually, she moved to the Salt Lake Tribune where she was, again, their first female reporter. After brief stints at other papers, she went to work for the New York Daily News as a police reporter in 1927.

In 1934, she attempted to quit her newspaper career and become a fiction writer. However, she received and accepted an offer from the New York Post. Later, she and her husband left for Hollywood after receiving an offer to write screenplays at Fox. She is credited with one screenplay, Fighting Youth, produced by Universal.

She went back to the Daily News as their Los Angeles correspondent when her former editor was having trouble covering a story in Hollywood. While still writing for the Daily News, she also contributed stories to the Saturday Evening Post, the Los Angeles Mirror, and began writing a column for Daily Variety. She also hosted programs on radio and television.