An opening essay in The Most of Nora Ephron, the nearly 600-page anthology of the late writer’s work to be published tomorrow, contains the DNA of the late writer’s razor-sharp and beloved mind.

In introducing this massive body of work with “Journalism: A Love Story,” originally published in her last bestselling book I Remember Nothing and Other Reflections, her longtime editor Robert Gottlieb must have been influenced by this insight contained in her essay “What Narrative Writers Can Learn from Screenwriters," which grew out of a keynote address she delivered at a Nieman narrative writing conference and is published in full in the book Telling True Stories:

“Structure is the key to narrative. These are the crucial questions any storyteller must answer: Where does it begin? Where does the beginning start to end and the middle begin? Where does the middle start to end and the end begin?”

The story of Ephron’s career, which rose to Oscar-nominated heights for screenplays including “When Harry Met Sally” and “Sleepless in Seattle,” clearly begins and ends with journalism, from her undergraduate days of working on the school newspaper at Wellesley and her first job as mail girl at Newsweek after graduating from college in 1962, to the posthumous Broadway production of her play Lucky Guy, starring Tom Hanks.

The strength of psychic substance that carried her through decades of reporting, profiling, essay writing, and screenwriting until her death from leukemia in 2012 at the age of seventy-one, was both hardwired and hard earned. The genetic information, likely inherited from her Hollywood screenwriter parents and shared with her three sisters -- all of whom are also writers -- was enhanced by her training in the dirty, smoky newsroom of the New York Post, where she learned to write honestly and fearlessly.

Her mid-career accomplishments can all be traced back to the skills she learned as a reporter and profile writer: close listening, attention to detail, persistence, discipline, engaging the audience through pace and rhythm of language, and communicating in visual, even cinematic, terms.

In her final days, she wrote the play Lucky Guy, contained in the new anthology and centered around the story of tabloid columnist Mike McAlary. The play dramatizes his controversial career, ending with his Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Abner Louima police brutality case that scandalized New York City in the late 1990s.

In retrospect, so much about Ephron’s final chapter is poignant given the discretion she exercised in working with the dedication of her most productive, healthy years even at her most ill. Despite depicting the gritty reality of McAlary’s fate as it intersected with Louima’s, the return to her journalistic roots ultimately captures the element of “happy ending” for which her romantic screenplays are famous.

In “Journalism: A Love Story,” she writes:

The city room was right next to the press room, and the noise—of reporters typing, pressmen linotyping, wire machines clacking, and presses rolling—was a journalistic fantasy….

But for many years I was in love with journalism. I loved the pack. I loved smoking and drinking Scotch and playing dollar poker. I didn't know much about anything, and I was in a profession where you didn't have to. I loved the deadlines. I loved the speed.

Throughout the ups and downs of her three marriages, her most reliable love affair was with the journalistic sensibility that shaped her every experience. In structuring this collection of her life’s work around that curiosity, passion, and humanity, and in opening the book with a section called “The Journalist,” Gottlieb honors that formative and enduring legacy.