Gail Sheehy - Journalism

Journalism

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. For example, 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 Bouvier Beale and cousin 'Edith 'Little Edie' Bouvier Beale' to public attention. The story was later immortalized in the film Grey Gardens and a Broadway musical of the same name.

Sheehy began working as a journalist for the Rochester publication, Democrat and Chronicle from 1961 to 1963, then for the New York Herald Tribune from 1963 to 1966, and then as one a founding contributor to New York from 1968 to 1977. She has been a contributing editor to Vanity Fair magazine since 1984.

Her work has appeared in many other major publications, including The New York Times Magazine; The New Yorker; New York Observer; USA Today; O, the Oprah Magazine; The Daily Beast, Huffington Post, Rolling Stone, Harper’s Bazaar, Harvard Business Review, Psychology Today, Publishers Weekly, The Guardian, London Telegraph, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Glamour, People, Cosmopolitan, and Parade.