STEPHEN FRIED

Stephen Fried is an award-winning journalist and New York Times best-selling author who teaches at Columbia University and at the University of Pennsylvania.

Stephen Fried is the author of seven acclaimed nonfiction books, including Appetite for America: Fred Harvey and the Business of Civilizing the Wild West—One Meal at a Time (a New York Times bestseller that was the subject of a PBS documentary); Thing of Beauty: The Tragedy of Supermodel Gia (which inspired the Emmy-winning HBO film Gia starring Angelina Jolie); Bitter Pills: Inside the Hazardous World of Legal Drugs (which triggered an FDA inquiry into CNS adverse reactions to antibiotics); The New Rabbi (a behind-the-scenes look at one of the nation’s most powerful houses of worship struggling to choose a new spiritual leader) and a collection of his magazine columns on being a spouse, Husbandry. He is also co-author, with Patrick Kennedy, of the 2015 New York Times bestseller A Common Struggle: A Personal Journey through the Past and Future of Mental Illness and Addiction.

His latest book is Rush: Revolution, Madness, and the Visionary Doctor Who Became a Founding Father (Crown).

Stephen Fried invented the word “fashionista.” He is credited for it in the Oxford English Dictionary and even in a clue on Jeopardy!. He later apologized.

Fried has been a staff writer at Vanity Fair, GQ, Glamour and Ladies’ Home Journal and at Philadelphia magazine, where he won two National Magazine Awards as a writer and also served as editor-in-chief. He is best-known for his longform narratives on mental health and addiction, scientific controversies, and family businesses, which often include in-depth period historical recreations (of everything from the creation of the Liberty Bell in the 1750s to the American frontier in the 1870s to the international fashion industry in the 1970s.) His articles are included in a variety of textbooks, and he has lectured on investigative and narrative techniques for Investigative Reporters and Editors, the national Society of Professional Journalists, the Association of Alternative Newsmedia and the Mayborne Literary Nonfiction Conference.

In 1998, his story “Cradle to Grave” reopened the case of the suspicious deaths of ten babies born to the same mother, Marie Noe, from 1949 to 1968—and led her to plead guilty to their murders, after being shown to have been suffering from post-partum psychosis during the killings. For his role in the case, Fried received a medal—he became the first journalist ever to receive the Medal of Honor from the Vidocq Society, the elite international group of criminologists, pathologists and police investigators.

Fried lectures widely on the subjects of his medical and historical narratives, and does editorial consulting for a variety of clients. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, author Diane Ayres, just down the street from where the subject of his new book, Dr. Benjamin Rush, lived and worked and signed the Declaration of Independence.

He grew up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where he did his first magazine work at the campus weekly 34th Street and was mentored by Penn’s one-woman journalism school, Nora Magid (in whose memory he co-chairs an annual award.) In his free time, he serves as commissioner of an invitation-only half-court basketball game, fishes badly, walks beaches in search of sea glass, and, once a year, bowls.