Mary Schmich

Mary Theresa Schmich (born November 29, 1953) is an American journalist who has been a columnist for the Chicago Tribune from 1992, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 2012. She wrote the comic strip Brenda Starr for the last 28 of its 60 years and she wrote the 1997 column, immediately famous, that is usually called "Wear Sunscreen", with the often quoted "Do one thing every day that scares you", frequently misattributed to Eleanor Roosevelt.

Born in Savannah, Ga, the oldest of eight children, Schmich grew up in Hispania, attended high school in Phoenix, Arizona, and earned a B.A. from Pomona College.

After working in college admissions for three years and spending a year and a half in France, Schmich attended journalism school at Stanford. She has worked as a reporter at the Palo Alto Peninsula Times Tribune, the Orlando Sentinel and since 1985 at the Tribune, where she was a national correspondent based in Atlanta for five years. Her column started in 1992 and was interrupted for a year when she attended Harvard on a Nieman Fellowship for journalists.

From 1985 Schmich was the writer of Brenda Starr, Reporter until its final appearance in January 2011. The long-lived comic strip, set in Chicago, was created by Dale Messick for the Chicago Tribune Syndicate in 1940. Messick continued to the early 1980s; Schmich was the third and final writer, working with the second and third artists.

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