Gail Sheehy
| Gail Sheehy | |
|---|---|
| Born | Gail Henion November 27, 1937 Mamaroneck, New York, United States |
| Occupation | Journalist, author |
| Language | English |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | University of Vermont, Columbia University |
| Literary movement | New Journalism |
| Notable works | Passages; The Silent Passage; Understanding Men's Passages; Hillary's Choice; New Passages; Passages in Caregiving |
| Website | |
| gailsheehy |
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Gail Sheehy (born Gail Henion on November 27, 1937) is an American author, journalist, and lecturer. She is the author of seventeen books, including Passages (1976), named one of the ten most influential books of our times by the Library of Congress. Sheehy has written biographies and character studies of major twentieth-century leaders, including Hillary Clinton, both presidents Bush, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev. Her latest book, Daring: My Passages, (Sept. 2014) is a memoir.
Sheehy played a part in the movement Tom Wolfe called the New Journalism, in which some journalists and essayists experimented with adopting a variety of literary techniques such as scene setting, dialogue, status details to denote social class, and getting inside the story and sometimes reporting the thoughts of a central character. Sheehy's article "The Secret of Grey Gardens", a cover story from the January 10, 1972 issue of New York, brought the bizarre bohemian life of Jacqueline Kennedy's aunt Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale and cousin Edith "Little Edie" Bouvier Beale to public attention. The story was the basis for the film Grey Gardens and a Broadway musical of the same name.
Gail Sheehy was born in Mamaroneck, New York, to Lillian Rainey Henion and Harold Merritt Henion. Her mother's family was Scotch-Irish. Her grandmother, Agnes Rooney ran away from Northern Ireland to the United States as a mail-order bride. Another part of her mother's family was Scottish and worked the Ulster plantation for English landowners. Growing up, Sheehy was close to her father's mother, Gladys Latham Ovens who lived with them. Gladys's husband had died of a stroke during the Great Depression—and after he died, Ovens went to work as a real estate agent, a career that lasted for over 40 years. Her grandmother Gladys Ovens bought Sheehy her first typewriter at age 7. When as an adolescent Sheehy began to sneak into New York City on Saturday mornings to explore, her grandmother kept her secret.
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