Stephen Fried

Stephen Fried is an American investigative journalist, non-fiction author, essayist and adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the University of Pennsylvania.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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; and 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.

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.

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.

Fried is also an award-winning writer, a two-time recipient of the National Magazine Award, and has written for GQ, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Glamour, 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.

Fried was born and grew up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

As a child, he attended Pinemere Camp in the Pocono Mountains.

In 1999, he began a two-year stint as the editor-in-chief of Philadelphia, after which he returned to writing, editorial consulting and teaching.

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, and in 2003 began teaching magazine writing at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

He currently writes for a variety of publications.

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 & 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."

The self-dubbed "Nora-ites" — whose ranks include bestselling author and publisher David Borgenicht, ABC News writer and producer Joel Siegel, GQ contributing editor Lisa DePaulo and Eliot Kaplan, editorial talent director at Hearst magazines — created a mentorship prize in Magid's name in 2003.

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.

The Wall Street Journal also named the book one of its Ten Best of the Year for 2010.

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 with Congressman Patrick Kennedy.

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."