This series includes material that documents Helen Gurley Brown's personal life and professional accomplishments. There are clippings, appointment books, travel itineraries, awards, and photographs. There is also a file of material from and about David Brown. The many Clippings give a comprehensive picture of the heavy press coverage Brown has received throughout her career. They stretch from her schoolgirl days in Little Rock to the present. The Education material primarily covers Brown's involvement later in life with her alma mater Woodbury College. This series contains miscellaneous Financial and legal material, including a 1946 income tax return; Awards; and a Videotape profile of Brown aired on CNN. The Memorabilia is especially engaging, containing writings and ephemera from her years in Little Rock and those pre-dating Sex and the Single Girl. The Papers contain a large selection of Photographs, some shot by celebrity photographers, and many with celebrity friends.

Brown has always been a prodigious correspondent. Her correspondence is organized into several subseries. The Individuals subseries is arranged alphabetically by name and includes friends, frequent correspondents, and correspondence more personal than businesslike. Accordingly correspondence can be found here that is related to her work at Cosmopolitan, her writings, speeches and appearances, or other topics located elsewhere in her papers. Correspondence with celebrities is filed in Individuals.

The next subseries is Thank you and congratulatory notes, mostly from her staff at Cosmopolitan magazine, but also from her household staff and employers at Hearst. This correspondence is mainly of a quotidian nature, but illustrates how Brown, by many accounts a demanding person, earned the respect of her staff and employers.

Public response and fan mail includes letters from readers of Brown's writings and viewers of her appearances. Some letters are simple requests for autographs, while others provide detailed and moving accounts of how Brown's plan for success helped these generally working-class women find degrees of fulfillment. The extent to which these women embraced Cosmopolitan's message is in sharp contrast to the criticism leveled at the magazine by many conservatives and feminists.

Correspondence by Subject includes letters generated by Brown's philanthropic work, critiques of magazines other than Cosmopolitan and other Hearst properties, letters from libraries and museums interested in Brown's work, love letters from the 1950s, and correspondence with friends from Little Rock. The bulk of the Subject correspondence involves Editor's perquisites/gifts. These letters reveal Brown's personal interest in clothes and cosmetics. Noted for her thrift, she often used her clout as an editor of a women's magazine to obtain these items wholesale. Manufacturers and designers, eager to have their products highlighted in Cosmopolitan, and others because they were friends, obliged. These letters give no indication that the products were intended for the pages of Cosmopolitan; such correspondence can be found in SERIES V. COSMOPOLITAN. As best as can be determined, the letters here pertain to gifts and perquisites that were for Brown's personal use.

General correspondence contains letters of a quotidian nature, regarding home repairs and so forth.

This series contains most of Brown's correspondence, but there is additional correspondence in other series. For example, correspondence generated by the planning and execution of speeches and appearances, with publishers and media figures interested in Helen's writings, and tied explicitly to her work at Cosmopolitan can be found in the relevant series. Correspondence connected to specific projects has been kept with the project whenever possible. An exception to this rule is celebrity correspondence, which has been filed in SERIES II. CORRESPONDENCE—Individuals even though it may relate to a specific project. Determining whether or not correspondence should be categorized as professional or personal was one of the biggest challenges of this collection, since Brown's work and personal life were enmeshed. Many of the people with whom she maintained friendships were figures in the media. In general, the correspondence included in SERIES V. COSMOPOLITANis explicitly related to the production of the magazine. Nonetheless, many of the correspondents in SERIES II. CORRESPONDENCE are at least tangentially related to Cosmopolitan.

Material in this series pertains to Brown's presentations in person, or on television or radio. There are correspondence; speech texts; and notes from her personal appearances, including the text of a debate in which she participated at Oxford University. Her television and radio work generated scripts; schedules; and correspondence, including public response mail from an appearance on the news program Dateline. Pilot shows starring Brown, one in the 1960s called Outrageous Opinions and another in the 1980s called What Should I Do?, generated material as well. Television proposals that never came to fruition are filed in SERIES IV. WRITINGS. In the early 1960s, Brown recorded a radio show that was syndicated in Canada. This series contains the complete scripts of these recordings.

Besides editing Cosmopolitan, Helen Gurley Brown occupied herself primarily as a writer. Before she wrote the best-selling Sex and the Single Girl, she wrote ad copy, of which a small amount can be found here, and unpublished vignettes and poems. The emphasis on themes of sexuality and independent womanhood is greater in these early unpublished writings than her later published works.

Brown's collection boasts impressive documentation of her published writing efforts. It contains drafts; manuscripts; newspaper clippings; and published copies of Sex and the Single Girl, Sex and the Office, Outrageous Opinions, Having It All, The Late Show, and I'm Wild Again. Researchers interested in her first two books should consult correspondence (filed in this series) with her publisher Bernard Geis Associates, which includes letters from Bernard Geis and Letty Cottin Pogrebin, and the Lucy Kroll Agency. This correspondence gives an excellent sense of the circumstances that surrounded Brown's sudden rise to fame and the successful efforts of Helen and David Brown to capitalize upon that fame. The correspondence also elucidates the changing world of the media and publishing in the 1960s as well as relatively new strategies of marketing controversial and sexually explicit material. Clippings record the public response to such efforts.

There are published and draft versions of Brown's magazine and newspaper articles in this series. Material related to a syndicated advice column for single women that ran between the time Sex and the Single Girl was published and the point at which Brown took over Cosmopolitan is of special interest. The series also contains the scripts and LP albums Brown recorded, one an album of advice, the other a recording of a speech. Short pieces that Brown wrote for other people's books and articles and her declines of such requests are found here.

The unpublished material reveals the breadth of Brown's ideas. Several proposals for unrealized television programs, plays, and articles concern themes that Brown repeated in her published work, but take a more radical approach to them. Fragments of an incomplete autobiography; an autobiographical theatrical piece, which includes an audiotaped interview; and fictional short stories and poems are included among the unpublished works.

The series also contains letters to the editor, notes, and some writings by David Brown

Helen Gurley Brown's 'child' for the past thirty-five years has been Cosmopolitan magazine. She changed a failing general interest magazine into a phenomenon - not only a best-selling magazine, but a cultural icon.

This series comprehensively traces Brown's Cosmopolitan career from its beginnings to her current job evaluating Cosmopolitan's international editions. Of special note is the proposal circulated by David and Helen Brown for a new magazine, 'Femme,' that would become Cosmopolitan's new format.

Throughout her tenure, a primary component of Brown's job was the courting of advertisers. Texts of the speeches and presentations she gave to advertisers and international editorial staff, as well as acceptance speeches for awards given to Cosmopolitan can be found in the subseries Advertising and publicity. This subseries includes advertisements for the magazine, including many written by Brown; promotional materials from the Hearst Corporation; and a large amount of newspaper clippings documenting coverage of Cosmopolitan in the press.

Correspondence (the years 1988-89 are especially well documented) illuminates the day-to-day operations of Brown's editorial work, as letters flow between Brown and writers, Cosmopolitan staffers, advertisers, and Hearst executives regarding specific issues of the magazine as well as ongoing concerns. Frequent correspondents among the staff and Hearst executives are filed by individual. Researchers interested in the advertising content of the magazine may wish to consult the letters of Stan Perkins and Seth Hoyt.

The Editorial subseries provides an in-depth look at the magazine production process. Rules for writing and art format, which Brown enforced strictly, are compiled from the 1970s to the 90s. There are files of article ideas and editing memos, and a sample folder that represents the transformation of an article from its submitted state to the published version. Some notes on Brown's ideas for the magazine have been included, as is information on production and circulation. This subseries also contains the results of reader and staff surveys. Within the Editorial material is a section on special features. Material regarding the famous Burt Reynolds centerfold and other special issues of the magazine, such as anniversary issues and the last issue edited by Helen Gurley Brown, are filed here. Another special feature was the failed television pilot A View from Cosmo starring Brown. A “Best of” set of articles has Brown's favorite article among pieces from such regular Cosmopolitan writers as Erica Jong, Judith Krantz, and Gail Sheehy; a collection of some of Brown's long-running editorial, “Step into My Parlor;” and drafts and a copy of the only article Brown wrote for the magazine.

A small subseries concerns Cosmopolitan Events and includes material from a lunch given by Brown for other women's magazine editors to raise awareness for the National Abortion Rights Action League and a party thrown by the Hearst organization to celebrate Brown's twenty-fifth anniversary as Editor.

A set of Cosmopolitan magazines from 1953-79 is housed in the Sophia Smith Collection's Periodicals Collection.

These items have been culled from other series for preservation purposes. The series features large photographs and artwork of Brown; an honorary degree; birthday cards and tributes; writings; publicity from her books and Cosmopolitan; material from Cosmopolitan; and scrapbooks from Sex and the Office, a television show proposal, a Cosmopolitan speech, and her Cosmopolitan twenty-fifth anniversary party.