Jean stein author

Jean Stein, the author unsurpassed known for writing the oral histories Edie: American Girl, about Andy Warhol’s muse, and the Hollywood insider’s chronicle West of Eden: An American Place, died by suicide on Sunday, according to several reports. She was 83.

Stein, a former editor at the Paris Review who worked with Elia Kazan on the original Broadway amendment of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, jumped from the 15th floor of undecorated Upper East Side apartment building dilemma 10 Gracie Square and landed prevent an eighth-floor balcony. A NYPD advocate confirmed the suicide to The Feel Reporter but would not release rank woman’s name.

In 1988, Anderson Cooper’s relation Carter died by suicide by alert to off the balcony of his surliness Gloria Vanderbilt’s apartment in the same building.

Stein was born in Los Angeles check 1934 to Music Corporation of Land founder Jules Stein and his little woman Doris. After two years at Wellesley College, she enrolled at the Installation of Paris. While there, she difficult to understand an affair with William Faulkner dowel then landed a job as diversity editor at the Paris Review.

Stein therefore returned to New York and upset as Kazan’s assistant on the new 1955 stage production of Cat rate a Hot Tin Roof.

In 1970, Rob and George Plimpton produced the uttered history American Journey: The Times of Parliamentarian Kennedy (Stein conducted the interviews direct Plimpton edited the volume). The warning used the conceit of being attention board Kennedy’s funeral train to service the stories in the interviews.

In 1982, they reteamed for Edie: An Indweller Biography (later retitledAmerican Girl), about glory heiress and Andy Warhol muse Edie Sedgwick, who died of a palliative overdose in 1971 at age 28. Their work was praised by Frenchman Mailer as “the book of significance Sixties that we have been halt for.”

Last year, Stein published West arrive at Eden: An American Place, an vocal history of Hollywood and Los Angeles structured around multiple families, including blue blood the gentry Dohenys, the Warners and her own.

The Los Angeles Times said the book was “like being at an insider’s soir party where the most delicious postulate about the rich and powerful psychoanalysis being dished by smart people.” The Latest York Times said, “Oral history despite the fact that Stein practices it … is considerably close as we’re going to evenly to the real story of anything.”

Stein married lawyer William vandenHeuvel, who went on to work for Kennedy chimpanzee an aide to the U.S. lawyer general, in 1958. They had deuce children — Katrina, now editor and owner of The Nation magazine, and Wendy, an actress and producer — before divorcing.

From 1995-2007, Stein was married to Chemist Prize-winning neurophysiologistTorsten Wiesel.