The Department of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University in the Bronx, New York, has awarded the 2012 Ann M. Sperber Biography Prize to Pulitzer prize-winning author John Matteson for his work on a prominent 19th-century feminist leader. The award-winning book is The Lives of Margaret Fuller: A Biography (W.W. Norton, 2012). Matteson is a distinguished professor of English and legal writing at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.
Fuller was the editor of the literary magazine, The Dial. She was the first woman to serve as a foreign correspondent for a major American newspaper. She was the first woman to serve in the newsroom of the New York Tribune and the first woman to be granted access to the Harvard College Library. Her 1845 book Woman in the Nineteenth Century is widely considered the first major feminist treatise published in the United States. Fuller died in 1850 at the age of 40 in a shipwreck off the coast of New York.