Edith Evans Asbury earned the bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history from UT in 1932 and 1933, respectively. While a student at Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, she had worked for the Cincinnati Times-Star, and she developed a passion for journalism. Following graduation, she became a reporter for the Knoxville News Sentinel until 1937, when she left her job (and her husband, Joe Evans) and moved to New York with no prospects for employment.
She landed a series of jobs: at the New York Post, in public relations for the New York City Housing Authority; with the Associated Press; and then at the World-Telegram and Sun, where she was the assistant editor for women’s news. While at the World-Telegram, she was elected president of the New York Newspaper Women’s Club.
She joined the staff of the New York Times in 1952, upon the assurance that she would be assigned to the city room and not the women’s department of the paper. Her earliest Times bylines, however, appear on articles about holiday shopping, a wayward canary, and the Fifth Avenue Easter Parade. More serious work followed.
In 1955 she wrote a highly praised series on the problems of the elderly. In 1956 she was one of several reporters sent by the Times to report on desegregation in the South following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. The stories were summarized in a special eight-page section published in March 1956 and made available to the public as a reprint. Her reporting in 1958 about an unwritten ban on counseling and prescription of birth control pills in New York City hospitals was credited with helping to overturn the ban. In 1967 she won a Page One Award from the Newspaper Guild of New York for her articles about an Italian-American couple in upstate New York who had to wage a legal battle to adopt their blind foster child. Other major stories she covered for the Times included the 1959 tour of the United States by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, the 1970 to 1971 Black Panther trial, and New York politics.
From 1973 on, she was a fixture in the annual satirical show put on by the Inner Circle, a troupe of City Hall reporters in New York, and generally had the honor of delivering the naughtiest line of the show. She was one of 20 women journalists interviewed as part of the Washington Press Club Foundation’s oral history project, Women in Journalism.
In 1945 she married Herbert Asbury, author of The French Quarter and The Gangs of New York. They were divorced in 1958. In 1971 she married Robert E. Garst, an assistant managing editor at the Times. He died in 1980.