Brown, Helen Gurley

Editor; Advertising copywriter; Journalist; Author; Secretary.

Born Helen Gurley in Green Forest, Arkansas, 1922. She graduated from Woodbury Business College (Los Angeles) in 1941 and worked as a secretary and, later, as an advertising copywriter. She married editor and film executive, David Brown in 1959. She published her controversial best seller, Sex and the Single Girl (1962) and became editor of Cosmopolitan, formerly a failing general-interest magazine, in 1965. Brown dramatically raised the circulation and advertising revenue of Cosmopolitan by converting it to a sex-suffused women's magazine. In 1997, she stepped down as editor and became editor-in-chief of international editions of Cosmopolitan. Brown's other books include Sex and the Office (1964); Having It All (1989); The Late Show (1993); The Writer's Rules (1999); and a memoir, I'm Wild Again (2000).

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