Author and magazine editor Helen Gurley Brown was born in Green Forest, Arkansas
on February 18, 1922. Her family lived in Little Rock, Arkansas until her father Ira M. Gurley, a
school teacher, was killed in an elevator accident when she was ten years old. Her mother, Cleo
Gurley, was left to raise two daughters. When Helen was fourteen, the family moved to Los
Angeles, California. A few months later, Gurley’s sister Mary was stricken with polio. Despite
her family desperate situations, she did not fail to complete her school education. Gurley
attended John H. Francis Polytechnic High School, where she was in the top ten percent of her
academic class. After high school, she attended Texas State College Women, and then she
returned to Los Angeles and graduated at Woodbury Business College in 1941. Helen Gurley
Brown was a native Arkansan whose career includes landmark achievements in advertising and
publishing. She was also known as the spokesperson for the women’s liberation movement
and
sexual revolution in the mid-twentieth century as author of the bestselling book Sex and the
Single Girl and editor of Cosmopolitan magazine.
Helen Gurley Brown started her secretarial job with the Los Angeles advertising firm
of Foote, Cone and Belding.She rose rapidly in advertising and won three Frances Holmes
Advertising Copywriters awards. She became one the nation’s highest paid copywriters at the
time. The following year in 1956, at the age of thirty-seven, Helen married the movie producer
David Brown. With her husband’s encouragement, she documented her memories of her time as
an unmarried woman. In 1962, Brown published the book Sex and the Single Girl, which became
an immediate bestseller and was later on turned into a motion movie. Her work covered the idea
of beauty, dating, work, finance, and sex. She assured her readers that sex could be natural and
healthy, and she also emphasized on the importance of what to be known as self-esteem. “A full,…
