American journalist
Stephen Fried is an American investigative journalist, non-fiction author, and lecturer who teaches at Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania. His first book, "Thing of Beauty: The Tragedy of Supermodel Gia (Pocket)", a biography of model Gia Carangi and her era, was published in 1993. He has since written "Bitter Pills: Inside the Hazardous World of Legal Drugs (Bantam 1998)", an investigation of medication safety and the pharmaceutical-industrial complex; "The New Rabbi (Bantam 2002)", which weaves the dramatic search for a new religious leader at one of the nation's most influential houses of worship with a meditation on the author's Jewish upbringing; "Husbandry (Bantam 2007)", a collection of essays on marriage and men; Appetite for America: Fred Harvey and the Business of Civilizing the Wild West—One Meal at a Time (Bantam 2010), the bestselling biography of restaurant and hotel entrepreneur  Fred Harvey; and RUSH: Revolution, Madness &amp; the Visionary Doctor Who Became a Founding Father (Crown 2018). In 2015, he co-authored the New York Times bestseller A Common Struggle: A Personal Journey Through the Past and Future of Mental Illness and Addiction (Blue Rider 2015) and Profiles in Mental Health Courage (Dutton 2024) with former Congressman and mental health advocate Patrick J. Kennedy.
Fried is also an award-winning writer, a two-time recipient of the National Magazine Award, and has written for "Vanity Fair", "GQ", "Rolling Stone", "Glamour", "Smithsonian, Parade", "Ladies' Home Journal" and "Philadelphia" magazine, where he was also editor-in-chief in 1999 and 2000. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, author Diane Ayres.
Early life and education.
Fried was born and grew up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. As a child, he attended Pinemere Camp in the Pocono Mountains. He enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania in 1975, where he wrote for and co-edited "34th Street", the university's weekly magazine. While in college, he also became part of a small network of future journalists, authors and editors taught and nurtured by Nora Magid, a Canadian-born editor and professor whom Fried has referred to as a "one-woman journalism school." The self-dubbed "Nora-ites"—whose ranks include writers and editors Eliot Kaplan, Jean Chatzky, Randall Lane, David Borgenicht, Stefan Fatsis, Joe Siegel, Lisa DePaulo, Miriam Around, and Sandee Brawarsky—created a mentorship prize in Magid's name in 2003. Fried eulogized Magid eleven years earlier in a piece for "Philadelphia" magazine, in which he shared experiences from her first-ever Advanced Expository Writing class in 1977. He graduated with a B.A. in International Relations from the University of Pennsylvania in 1979.
Books.
Fried published his first book, a biography of high-fashion model and AIDS victim Gia Carangi, in 1993. Titled "Thing of Beauty: The Tragedy of Supermodel Gia", the book grew out of a lengthy "Philadelphia" magazine piece and was reviewed positively in "The New York Times" and "The Boston Globe" upon its release. Fried's book was optioned by Paramount but was also used as the basis for the 1998 HBO film "Gia", which went on to win an Emmy Award and two Golden Globe Awards, including one for Angelina Jolie in the title role. Fried is also credited with having invented the word "fashionista" for "Thing of Beauty", which he used as shorthand for anyone involved in the creation and manufacturing of high fashion. His name appears in the Oxford English Dictionary entry for the word.
In 1998, Fried published his second book, "Bitter Pills: Inside the Hazardous World of Legal Drugs". An outgrowth of his award-winning "Philadelphia" magazine piece "Less Than One Percent," prompted by his wife's serious adverse reaction to one pill of a new antibiotic, the book investigated prescription drug manufacturers, the safety of their products and FDA regulation (or lack thereof). "The New York Times Book Review" called it "the best popular book on the subject," the "American Journalism Review" named "Bitter Pills" one of the fifteen best books in the genre of investigative reporting, and "The San Diego Union-Tribune" said the book "could save your life." It was also a finalist for the "Investigative Reporters and Editors" book prize, was named one of the best books of the year by "The Philadelphia Inquirer" and "Men's Health", and was featured on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" and "Dateline".
His third book, 2002's "The New Rabbi", combined several years of reporting on the effort to choose a new spiritual leader at Philadelphia's influential Har Zion Temple with Fried's own spiritual search after the death of his father. The book, initially controversial among some clergy, went on to receive very favorable reviews from "The New York Times", "The Washington Post Book World" and "The Philadelphia Inquirer", which called it "brave...remarkable...a book about leadership you don't have to be Jewish to appreciate." It was also named one of the ten best spiritual books of the year by "Beliefnet", and is used as a seminary textbook and read by congregations preparing to choose new leaders. His following book, "Husbandry: Sex, Love &amp; Dirty Laundry—Inside the Minds of Married Men", was a collection of 31 essays about men and relationships, originally written for his "Ladies' Home Journal" column "Heart of a Husband."
Fried's fifth book, titled "Appetite for America: How Visionary Businessman Fred Harvey Built a Railroad Hospitality Empire That Civilized the Wild West", was published in March 2010. The product of five years of cross-country research, the book is the first-ever full-length biography of restaurant and hotel mogul Fred Harvey, his innovative family business, the Harvey Girls, the Santa Fe railway, and the America they helped create. The book draws on newly discovered datebooks and letters of Fred Harvey and his son, Ford (who actually ran the company much longer than his father), which had been in family hands for decades. In support of the book, Fried embarked upon a train tour along the old Santa Fe route from Chicago to Los Angeles, visiting many of the classic mid- and southwestern cities where Harvey establishments thrived from the late 19th century well into the 20th. He was also interviewed by Melissa Block of NPR's "All Things Considered", and the book won accolades from "The New York Times" and "The Wall Street Journal" upon its release — the second of which complimented Fried's "crisp prose and delightful detail" and praised the book as "sweeping social history populated with memorable characters." "The Wall Street Journal" also named the book one of its Ten Best of the Year for 2010. It earned the same honor from "The Philadelphia Inquirer", was named one of the ten best business books by Amazon.com and won the Athenaeum of Philadelphia Literary Award, a prize given to Philadelphia-area writers since 1949, for non-fiction. The book has helped fuel a renaissance of interest in Harvey, the Harvey Girls and the company’s historic hotels, several of which have been in constant use (El Tovar at the Grand Canyon, La Fonda in Santa Fe) and others that have been restored (including La Posada in Winslow, AZ and, most recently, Castaneda Hotel in Las Vegas, NM) Since its publication, Fried has been invited to lecture at museums and universities across the country about the book. He now oversees the annual Fred Harvey History Weekend each fall at the New Mexico History Museum in Santa Fe, highlighted by the Fred Harvey Foodie Dinner &amp; Auction.
His sixth book, co-authored with former Patrick J. Kennedy, was "A Common Struggle: A Personal Journey Through the Past and Future of Mental Illness and Addiction", published in September, 2015. It was an overnight "New York Times" bestseller, was featured on “60 Minutes” and included as appendices a complete political agenda for the future of American mental health and addiction care. In its aftermath, Fried wrote a cover story for The Forward about how faith communities can help change the lives of people with mental illness and addiction, and their families. He now does “Brain Health &amp; Faith” presentations across the country.
Fried’s seventh book, "RUSH: Revolution, Madness &amp; the Visionary Doctor Who Became a Founding Father" was published in September 2018. A finalist for the George Washington Book Prize, RUSH was also named an American Library Association Notable Book of the Year, and was an inaugural selection for the DAR Library Book Club. It was featured on CBS This Morning and NPR’s “Morning Edition” The New Yorker called it “entertaining...Benjamin Rush has been undeservedly forgotten. In medicine ... [and] as a political thinker, he was brilliant.” The Philadelphia Inquirer said it was “superb” and “reminds us eloquently, abundantly, what a brilliant, original man Benjamin Rush was, and how his contributions to ... the United States continue to bless us all.”
His eighth book, co-authored with Patrick J. Kennedy, is "Profiles in Mental Health Courage" was published in April 2024 by Dutton.
Fried is currently writing a biography of controversial early twentieth century business and political hero William Gibbs McAdoo, the progressive New York entrepreneur who dug the first tunnels under the Hudson River (now the PATH system), was the landmark Secretary of the Treasury during WWI, co-founded United Artists Studios with Charlie Chaplin, almost became President of the United States (twice), and later was an influential U.S. Senator from California during the New Deal.
Career in journalism.
Fried first became known as a writer for "Philadelphia", where he began in 1982, worked full-time until 1989 and remained for another decade as a contract writer and editorial consultant. During that time he was also a contributing writer and music columnist at "GQ" from 1987 to 1991, a contributing writer at "Vanity Fair" from 1994 to 1997, a contributing editor at "Glamour" from 1996 to 1998, and a regular contributor to "The Washington Post Magazine", "Rolling Stone" and others. In 1999, he began a two-year stint as the editor-in-chief of "Philadelphia", after which he returned to writing and editorial consulting. He also began teaching and lecturing about the subjects of his books and articles. He returned to Glamour as a contributing editor from 2001 to 2008, was a contributing writer and columnist at "Ladies Home Journal" from 2003 to 2008, returned to "Philadelphia Magazine" as a writer-at-large in 2011, and has since freelanced for "Smithsonian" magazine, "Deseret Magazine" and a variety of other publications.
In 2002, he began teaching narrative nonfiction magazine writing as an adjunct professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism; in 2008, he also joined the adjunct faculty at Penn as a lecturer in the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing. He taught Magazine Writing Workshop B at Columbia J-school from 2003-2015, and then oversaw masters’ projects until 2019, after which he began teaching selected Columbia physicians and staff, initially in the Department of Psychiatry. In the spring of 2020, he was hired by Columbia Medical School’s landmark Narrative Medicine department to create a journalism workshop for Columbia clinicians and trainees who wanted to learn to write narratively and journalistically for the general public. The Narrative Medicine Journalism Workshop he started is now supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and its members—most of whom had never published outside of medical journals—have now had pieces published in the "New York" "Times", "Washington Post", "The New Yorker", and "Vice" among other publications.
Fried's best-known magazine piece is "Cradle to Grave", the April 1998 "Philadelphia" cover story that led the biggest maternal homicide case in history to be reopened and solved. In it, he investigated the family tragedy of Art and Marie Noe, a Philadelphia-area couple who lost ten infant children from 1949 through 1968 to undetermined causes. Fried explored whether the Noes might have been responsible for those deaths, and his investigation led the Philadelphia homicide unit — which had officially closed the Noe file three decades earlier — to begin reexamining the deaths. One day after his story ran, the police interrogated Mr. and Mrs. Noe and received a confession from Marie that she had suffocated eight of her own children (two died of natural causes), leading to a guilty plea and a controversial sentence — which was to include house arrest and probation, along with her cooperation in an unprecedented analysis of her medical history and actions by top experts in fields that study post-partum violence (an analysis which was never carried out). For his work on the Noe case, Fried became the first journalist to receive the Medal of Honor from the Vidocq Society, an elite international group of criminologists, pathologists and police investigators. The piece was also part of his winning entry for the 1999