Helen Gurley Brown, Legendary Cosmo Editor, Is Dead

The longtime and legendary editor of Cosmopolitan Magazine Helen Gurley Brown died today. The Hearst Corporation, which published Cosmopolitan, announced her death in a press release, according to the Albany Times-Union.

She was 90.

NPR’s Selena Simmons-Duffin filed this remembrance for our Newscast unit:

“Brown made her name by writing frankly about women and sex when that was truly a rare thing.

“Her 1962 bestseller, Sex and the Single Girl, came out a year before The Feminine Mystique.

“The book was its own kind of feminist text. Although most of the book is light-hearted advice on everything from where to find a man to how to invest in stocks.

“She summed up her greater point in a TV interview in 1981.

“‘I’m one of the first people who said for heaven’s sake don’t live through your man,’ she said. ‘You’re just as good as they, that other sex, are. Why don’t get some of the spoils and the glory and the rewards.'”

“Helen Gurley Brown got plenty of all of those things — as the head of Cosmopolitan Magazine for decades.

“She made it the sex-centric glossy we know today.”

“Helen Gurley Brown was an icon. Her formula for honest and straightforward advice about relationships, career and beauty revolutionized the magazine industry,” Frank A. Bennack, Jr., CEO of Hearst Corporation, said in a statement. “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.”