Barbara Goldsmith has died. She (pictured, via) was 85 years old.
The New York Times reports that Goldsmith became well-known as one of the founding editors of New York Magazine. As an author. she wrote and published one novel and four nonfiction books: The Straw Man (1975), Little Gloria…Happy at Last (1980), Johnson v. Johnson (1987), Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull (1998), and Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie (2005). Many consider her best-known work to be Little Gloria…Happy at Last.
Here’s more from The Washington Post: “Working in a library, she stumbled upon 8,000 pages of court transcripts from the 1934 custody challenge that made 10-year-old Vanderbilt one of the most famous children in the United States. The case involved the girl’s widowed mother, Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, and an aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, who ultimately obtained custody. Their war over ‘little Gloria,’ which riveted Depression-era Americans with lurid revelations of the family’s dissolution, became the subject of Ms. Goldsmith’s best-selling volume Little Gloria…Happy at Last (1980).” (via The Telegraph)