Bestselling author Jean Stein, known for her pioneering oral histories, is believed to have killed herself. She was 83.
Stein began her career as an assistant to theatre director Elia Kazan on the original production of Tennessee Williams’s play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. An editor on the Paris Review, she rose to prominence for her pioneering use of oral narratives to write three histories of the US in the 20th century. One of them, 1982’s Edie: An American Girl, became an international bestseller. Melding together the voices of family and friends including Andy Warhol, for whom Edie Sedgwick acted as muse, the book used the socialite’s troubled story to shed light on the decade. Norman Mailer praised it as “the book of the 60s that we have been waiting for”.
A New York City police department official said that Stein had jumped to her death on Sunday morning from the 15th floor of a Manhattan tower. A spokesperson at Random House, which published her most recent book, 2016’s West of Eden: An American Place, issued the short statement: “Random House is deeply saddened by the death of Jean Stein.”
Educated in Los Angeles, Switzerland, New York and the Sorbonne, where she had an affair with William Faulkner, Stein eventually took the editor’s seat on the literary and visual arts magazine Grand Street, a role she kept until 2004. Stein’s first husband was the lawyer William vanden Heuval, who served in the US justice department under Robert F Kennedy. Her second marriage, in 1995, was to Swiss Nobel prize-winner Torsten Wiesel, a neurophysiologist. They divorced in 2007.
In West of Eden, Stein trained her eye on her childhood home of Los Angeles and the dynasties of five larger-than-life families, including those of movie mogul Jack Warner, the Garlands, and her own. Her father Jules C Stein founded the media company MCA.
Her friend, journalist Robert Scheer, who had known Stein since the 60s, told the LA Times: “She was pretty depressed. We were all worried.” But he remembered her as a person who “had the respect of the heavy hitters, people who weren’t interested in the small talk – people like Joan Didion, Jules Feiffer. It was a circle of people who were very tough and demanding.”
The author is survived by two daughters: Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of the Nation; and Wendy vanden Heuvel, an actor and producer in New York.
- In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14. Hotlines in other countries can be found here.