née Meyer (1917–2001), American newspaper publishing executive. Graham, the first woman to head one of the nation's top 500 companies (as ranked by Fortune magazine), helped transform the Washington Post Co. from a relatively modest family-owned business to a modern media conglomerate.

Born in New York City on June 16, 1917, she was not quite 16 years old when her father, Eugene Meyer (1875–1959), an investment banker, purchased the Washington Post newspaper at a bankruptcy auction for $825,000. She served as a copy girl at the Post while still in high school, and after graduating from the University of Chicago and working for nearly a year as a reporter on the San Francisco News, she returned to the Post in 1939 as a full-time staffer. The following year, she married lawyer, Philip L. Graham (1915–63). Meyer made Philip publisher of the Post in 1946 and majority owner of the newspaper company two years later. Katharine received a minority interest.

For almost the next two decades, Katharine was a homemaker—raising the couple's four children and managing the household—and socialite. Philip Graham became a key Washington insider, advising prominent officeholders on politics and policy, while expanding the newspaper's circulation and augmenting the company's portfolio with the addition of two television stations and the weekly newsmagazine Newsweek. All that changed in 1963, when Philip, who had battled manic depressive illness for several years, shot himself to death at the Grahams' country house in northern Virginia and Katharine succeeded him as chief executive of the Washington Post Co.

Unschooled in business, a woman in a profession then dominated by men, she set out to master the intricacies of the newspaper and the media company she now headed. To sharpen the Post's news coverage, in 1965 she brought in Benjamin Bradlee (1921– ), who had served for eight years as Newsweek's Washington bureau chief, and gave him an enhanced budget to recruit front-rank reporting talent. Under Graham's increasingly steady hand, the Post weathered a stormy period in the early 1970s, when it joined the New York Times in publishing the Pentagon Papers (see NEWSPAPERS,) and wrote a new chapter in the history of investigative journalism by unraveling the Watergate scandal. Graham was also confronted with a violent work stoppage by the pressmen's union that began in October 1975; the 139-day strike ended when she broke the union's stranglehold on the paper's printing operations by training and hiring permanent replacement workers. Graham's son, Donald (1945– ), became publisher of the Post in 1979 and held that title for 21 years. By 1991, when he succeeded his mother as chief executive and took over responsibility for day-to-day operations, the firm had greatly diversified its media holdings and expanded its annual revenues to well over $1 billion.

Katharine Graham's memoir Personal History (1997) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for autobiography. She died July 17, 2001, in Boise, Idaho, three days after suffering head injuries in a fall at a business conference in Sun Valley.