Oriana Fallaci, remembered differently by different generations, died today.

Breast cancer took her - fighting and reluctant - at age 77. She had lived in New York much of her life but returned to Florence, Italy, her hometown, soon after she was diagnosed.

Fallaci was an Italian journalist who made her name in the '70s and '80s by getting the interviews others could not and by asking the tough questions that many thought she ought not. "Don't you find, Dr. Kissinger, that it's been a useless war?" she asked then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 1972.

The New Yorker, in a June article, "The Agitator," details many other examples of her interviews with the likes of Golda Meir, Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, and Muammar al-Qaddafi.

Her work was written for, or reprinted in, the major news magazines and newspapers of the day. Though a slight woman, she propelled herself into history by getting the exlusives.

Fallaci, an atheist, has been celebrated and decried in recent years for her take-no-prisoners, insult-laden stance against Islam and Islamic terrorists.

Fallaci was set to go on trial in Italy for defaming Islam in her book, Force of Reason. The Muslim Union of Italy filed the charges in 2004. Judge Armando Grasso ordered charges against Fallaci to go forward followng June's preliminiary trial, saying the book used language "unequivocally offensive to Islam."

She first started her professional journalism career for the Italian magazine L’Europeo though had worked journalistically while a teenager. A Resistance fighter in World War II with Giustizia e Libertà, she became a war correspondent in the world's wars over the next decade.

In 1968, while in Mexico covering the Tlatelolco massacre, she was shot multiple times.

In a life known for what she brought and took out of others, she rarely gave interviews, perhaps understanding their power, perhaps not thinking anyone else could do her justice.

As with Bobby Fischer and many others, it is unclear how much her later paranoia and hatred of Muslims overcome her genius and distracted her from her work, or whether, in fact, it was the culmination of her work and what she had observed over the years.

In the introduction to her 1976 book Interview with History, a collection of many of her interviews with world leaders, Fallaci explained the basic essence of her work, and her life. "I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born."