Susan Braudy

Early life and education

Susan Braudy was born in 1941 in Philadelphia and now lives in Manhattan, New York She received a Cum Laude degree from Bryn Mawr College in the early 1960s, then attended University of Pennsylvania and Yale University (where she studied philosophy).

Braudy's father worked for the Philadelphia Housing Authority and actively supported local artists. He was Vice President of the American Jewish Committee. His Master's thesis at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania became the book Technological Unemployment, an early look at how advances in technology were replacing human labor. He also wanted to be a writer and Braudy believes this may be the reason she became a writer. Braudy's mother taught history at Germantown High School and became a reading supervisor. Braudy now lives with Joe Weintraub.

Career

Braudy has written for the New York Times, Newsweek and The Atlantic Monthly, The Huffington Post, Vanity Fair, Ms. Magazine, New York Magazine, The New Journal, Jezebel and The Week. She was the first woman writer hired by Newsweek.

She was one of the first editors of the student/faculty magazine The New Journal at Yale and is currently a member of the magazine's advisory board.

She was a judge for the 2006 Lukas Prize, an award from the Columbia University Journalism School given annually to recognize excellence in book-length investigative journalism. She has also taught writing at Brooklyn College.

In 1977, Braudy became an associate of the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press (WIFP). WIFP is an American nonprofit publishing organization. The organization works to increase communication between women and connect the public with forms of women-based media.

In 1981, Braudy was appointed as the Vice President of East Coast Production at Warner Brothers. She also worked as Vice President of Michael Douglas's Stonebridge Production Company for three years from 1986-1989. She was hired by Francis Ford Coppola, Jerry Bruckheimer, Martin Scorsese, and Oliver Stone to write screenplays.

Her research for a piece on paperback auctions, published in The New York Times, was used by the Federal Trade Commission to institute and win an anti-trust suit against the high-bidder in a multimillion-dollar paperback rights auction.

Her two blogs are Manhattan Voyeur and Writers Celebrate Writing

Braudy's prefaces to three books published by the Philosophical Library include Essays In Aesthetics by Jean Paul Sartre, The Treasured Writings of Kahlil Gibran, and Tears and Laughter by Kahlil Gibran.

She counts as her mentors Margaret Mead, whose class she audited at Columbia and who demonstrated what a smart woman on her own could be, Gloria Steinem, who encouraged her to express her female voice; Daniel Yergin, who taught her the value of infinite research; Michael Douglas, who taught her that glamor isn't glamorous; Michael Wolff, who taught her the music of the New York hustle; Marshall Brickman, who taught her about heartbreak on the fast track; Woody Allen, who taught her his artistic credo, "Turn pain into cash"; and Leo Braudy, who gave her Joan Didion's personal essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Braudy's most recently published works include two articles for Jezebel, "Up Against the Centerfold" and "Sisters in Misery" and one article for The Week, "A Feminist Among the Centerfolds" .

In Popular Culture

Braudy had been commissioned by Playboy magazine to write a piece on the feminism movement. Her final article was viewed as controversial by male Playboy editors. The debate continued up to Hugh Hefner; who wrote in a memo (secretly distributed by female Playboy employees) that he felt the article needed to focus more on the "highly irrational, emotional, kookie trend" of feminism due to "these chicks [being] the natural enemy of Playboy." He argued that radical feminists were rejecting the Playboy way of life.

Braudy was reportedly brought to tears by the negative reaction, from the team, to her piece and eventually refused to sell her work to Playboy for publication. She later wrote an article for Glamour magazine in which she disclosed the contents of Hefner's memo and criticized his approach to women.

After writing an article for The New York Times about Woody Allen and his writing partner Marshall Brickman she was used as the muse for Diane Keaton and Meryl Streep's characters in Manhattan. Her jokes about the surreal twist were quoted on the New York Post gossip column "Page Six," as well as in People Magazine.

After she wrote two articles on Seinfeld for The New York Times, Seinfeld writer Larry David named a screaming woman character "Susan Braudy" on his hit HBO comedy series Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Books

Braudy wrote Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left based on the story of Kathy Boudin, who was convicted for her part in the Brink's robbery (1981). Braudy was inspired to write the book because Kathy Boudin had been a classmate at Bryn Mawr. The book was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize by Alfred Knopf.

Family Circle got a "largely positive reception" despite being criticized by friends of Kathy Boudin. It was later the subject of a 2014 Guardian article by journalist Michael Wolff criticizing The New York Times and others for republishing findings on the break-in of FBI headquarters in Media, Pennsylvania that damaged J. Edgar Hoover's reputation beyond repair. The break-in's perpetrators had been revealed 11 years prior by Braudy in her nonfiction book.

This Crazy Thing Called Love was the basis for two television episodes on "A Crime To Remember" and "Power, Privilege & Justice."

Book List

Books with Prefaces by Susan Braudy

Articles and interviews