Career
Pauline's writing career that led to "Dear Abby" began in January 1956 when she was 37 and new to the Greater San Francisco Area. Sometime during this period she phoned the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and said that she could write a better advice column than the one she had been reading in the newspaper.
She chose the name "Abigail Van Buren" because she was inspired by the Bible and a president. Her chosen first name was from the Old Testament for Abigail the widow of Nabel who later married King David. Her last name mirrored the last name of U.S. president Martin Van Buren.
After hearing her modest credentials, Stanleigh "Auk" Arnold wanted only to get this self-styled journalist out of his San Francisco Chronicle office, so he gave her some letters in need of answers; Phillips had her replies back to the Chronicle the same day. When asked what she considered her greatest accomplishment, Phillips was quick to say, simply, “surviving”.
As competing columnists, the sisters occasionally clashed; in 1956, Phillips offered her column to the Sioux City Journal at a reduced price, provided that the paper refused Lederer's column; Life Magazine reported on the offer in 1958.
The sisters ostensibly reconciled in 1964, although some suggest the acrimony between them remained.
Read more about this topic: Pauline Phillips
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.”
—Ruth Behar (b. 1956)