Obsessive Genius (Goldsmith)

Author Bio
• Birth—1937
• Where—New York City, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Wellesley College
• Currently—lives in New York City


Barbara Goldsmith is an American author, journalist, and philanthropist. She has received critical and popular acclaim for her best selling books, essays, articles and her philanthropic work. She was born in New York City and received a Bachelor of Arts from Wellesley College, after which she took art courses at Columbia University.

Her first assignments as a journalist were in the art field, where she simultaneously amassed an art collection comprising mostly contemporary American painting and sculpture. In her early twenties, she wrote a series of prize-winning profiles of such Hollywood luminaries as Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Joan Crawford, and Audrey Hepburn.

In the late 1960s she initiated the "The Creative Environment" series of the creatie process, based on in-depth interviews with Marcel Breuer, I.M. Pei, George Balanchine and Pablo Picasso, among others. The series caught the eye of Clay Felker, editor of the Sunday magazine supplement of the New York Herald Tribune. In 1967, after the Tribune failed, Goldsmith provided Felker with the money to purchase the name “New York.” In 1968 she became a founding editor and writer of New York magazine, where she wrote not only about art, but also about the colorful characters in the art world.

In 1968 Goldsmith wrote "Bacall and the Boys," a television special about Lauren Bacall in Paris with then young, unproven avant-garde designers—Yves St. Laurent, Giorgio Armani, Pierre Cardin, and Marc Bohan of Dior. This earned her an Emmy award.

In 1974 Goldsmith became Senior Editor of Harper’s Bazaar, attracting top writers to the publication. But somewhere along the way she declared that at magazines she "got tired of making other writers look good through my re-writing." Since the mid-1970s, she concentrated on writing books while still continuing to write for the New Yorker and the New York Times among other publications

Biography & Books
Goldsmith completed her first book in 1975, The Straw Man, a novel about the New York art world. The book reached #1 on the bestseller lists and was praised in New York magazine by reviewer John Kenneth Galbraith as “brilliant social criticism.”

Her second book Little Gloria...Happy At Last was published in 1980. The work tracks the 1930s custody battle for Gloria Vanderbilt (Little Gloria, then). The book reached the top of the New York Times and was adapated to both film and and an NBC mini-series of the same name. The TV version starred Bette Davis, Angela Lansbury, Christopher Plummer, and Maureen Stapleton.

Johnson v. Johnson, Goldsmith’s third book, issued in 1987, recounts the longest, most expensive will contest in United States history between Basia Johnson, the widow of pharmaceutical heir J. Seward Johnson, and his children from previous marriages.

Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull, out in 1998, chronicles the women of the Gilded Age who fought for equality and the right to vote.

Her 2005 work Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie is based on the workbooks, letters, and diaries of Marie Curie, which had been sealed for sixty years because they were still radioactive. It won the prize for the Best Book of 2006 from the American Institute of Physics.

Recognition
In 2013, Goldsmith was awarded the Wellesley Alumnae Achievement Award, the highest honor given by her alma mater. That same year, she also received the Erwin Piscator Honorary Award for her writing. She has been awarded four honoris causa doctorates; she has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, two Presidential Commissions, and the New York State Council on the Arts; she has been honored by the New York Public Library Literary Lions as well as the Literacy Volunteers, American Academy in Rome, Authors Guild, and Guild Hall Academy of Arts for Lifetime Achievement. In 2009, she received the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit medal from the Republic of Poland.

Philanthropy
Goldsmith spearheaded a project to convert books and documents to permanent paper that wold lastng 300 years instead of disintegrating in 30. She secured $20 million from the Federal government for the work. Other literary preservation efforts include the donation of two preservation and conservation laboratories at The New York Public Library and at New York University. She also funded a state-of-the-art rare book library at the American Academy in Rome and a preservation and conservation treatment facility at Wellesley College. She served on the Presidential Commission on Preservation and Access during the Clinton administration and received the American Archival Association’s top award. Earlierin 1968, she helped found the Center for Learning Disabilities at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

In 1987 she founded and still funds the PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom-to-Write Award in order to spotlight writers of conscience in 113 countries who have disappeared, were tortured, or in prison at the time of the awards. The award was instrumental in starting the campaign that led to the Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo winning the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. Since the award's inception, 34 out of 37 imprisoned writers have been released, often within months of the award. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/2/2014.)