Joan Lowery Nixon
American children's writer and journalist

Joan Lowery Nixon (February 3, 1927 – June 28, 2003) was an American journalist and author, specializing in historical fiction and mysteries for children and young adults.
Biography
Joan Lowery was born on February 3, 1927, in Los Angeles, California. In 1947, she received a degree in journalism from the University of Southern California. At USC, she met her husband, Hershell, a United States Navy officer and a geologist. At USC she was a member of Kappa Delta sorority. She taught school in Los Angeles before starting her family. In 1964 her first book for children, The Mystery of Hurricane Castle, was published. Her son, Joe Nixon, is a Houston lawyer, who was from 1995 to 2007 a Republican member of the Texas House of Representatives from District 133 in Houston. Nixon, her husband, and their children lived in Corpus Christi, Texas, before finally settling in the Memorial and Tanglewood area of Houston, Texas. She died of pancreatic cancer in Houston on June 28, 2003.
“Joan Lowery Nixon” enters the record as american children's writer and journalist. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Joan, Lowery and Nixon can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Joan Lowery Nixon” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Joan, Lowery and Nixon provides the most credible route into that argument.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q6205240. VIAF identifies the subject as 95154980. The Library of Congress control number is n78093546. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1927, 2003, 1947 and 1964.
Public reputation and documentary evidence do not always develop together; absence from a summary is not evidence of historical absence. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.
- Establishing names and roles
- Building a first chronology
- Locating cited institutions
Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Joan Lowery Nixon”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Joan Lowery Nixon primary sources, Joan Lowery Nixon archive and Joan research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Joan Lowery Nixon”?
- Which claims depend on a single source or contested interpretation?
- How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Joan Lowery Nixon” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.