Helen Gurley Brown, Editor-in-Chief of Cosmopolitan magazines’ 64 international editions and one of the world’s most influential editors, died yesterday in New York aged 90.
Gurley Brown’s impact on popular culture and society was significant, first with her 1962 bestseller, Sex and the Single Girl, and then for the putting her incomparable stamp on Cosmopolitan for over thirty years.
“Helen Gurley Brown was an icon. Her formula for honest and straightforward advice about relationships, career and beauty revolutionized the magazine industry,” said Frank A. Bennack, Jr., CEO of Hearst Corporation.
“She lived every day of her life to the fullest and will always be remembered as the quintessential ‘Cosmo girl.’ She will be greatly missed.”
David Carey, President of Hearst Magazines, added: “Helen was an inspiration, a true success story. Her energy, enthusiasm and true passion for women’s issues unleashed a platform for women worldwide,”
“She brought the subject that every woman wanted to know about but nobody talked about, to life, literally, in Cosmo’s pages.”
She was inducted into the Publisher’s Hall of Fame in America in 1988, taking her place with such US publishing icons as Henry Luce, DeWitt Wallace, Harold Ross, and Norman Cousins.
The Magazine Publishers of America honoured Helen Gurley Brown with the 1995 Henry Johnson Fisher Award - the magazine publishing industry’s highest accolade – of which she was the first woman recipient.
She also received the 1996 American Society of Magazine Editors’ Hall of Fame Award.
Gurley Brown survived her film producer husband David who died in 2010 – they were married for 51 years.
In January, she gave $30 million to Columbia and Stanford Universities to create the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation.