"Assignment America"

While filling in for Columnist Bennett Cerf in the Saturday Review, Novelist Laura (Gentleman's Agreement) Hobson discovered that she "adored having a column." Writer Hobson confessed her new passion to the editor of Hearst's Good Housekeeping, who signed her to do nine columns a year. When Columnist Inez Robb of Hearst's International News Service left, by mutual consent, to join Scripps-Howard and United Feature syndicate a fortnight ago, I.N.S. knew just where to turn. Beginning next week, Laura Hobson will do five columns a week for I.N.S. and its clients, titled "Assignment America."

Laura Z. (for Zametkin) Hobson is not entirely new to newspapering. After graduating from Cornell, she went to work as an ad copywriter, then as a reporter on the New York Post, later switched back to advertising. She joined TIME Inc.'s promotion department as a writer in 1934, left in 1940 and began devoting full time to writing fiction. Of her four novels and many short stories, the most successful has been Gentleman's Agreement, which sold more than 1,600,000 copies. As a columnist, Novelist Hobson is still not sure what she will write. But she is sure that she is "not going to be Mrs. Political Pundit."

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Along with Columnist Inez Robb, Scripps-Howard last week announced another new hand: New York Herald Tribune Washington Correspondent Jack Steele, who joined the Scripps-Howard staff. Steele. who in 1949 won several prizes for his series on the five-percenter scandals, was frequently mentioned as the successor to the late Bert Andrews to head the Trib's Washington bureau. But when the paper named the Christian Science Monitor's Roscoe Drummond (TiME, Sept. 21), Steele took Scripps-Howard's offer to join its Washington staff.

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