WASHINGTON, June 23: Ann Landers, one of the world’s most widely- read advice columnists, died Saturday of multiple myeloma, her home newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, said.
Esther Lederer, which was her real name, was 83, and just two weeks shy of her July 4 birthday.
With some 90 million readers in 1,200 newspapers and more than 20 languages, Landers was one of the most recognized expressions of American culture and attitudes around the world for more than 40 years. She competed with, and often did not speak to, her twin sister, Dear Abby — Pauline Esther Phillips — who gained near equal global fame as a columnist.
During her life as a columnist, the United States metamorphised from a prim society centred on the nuclear family, with father at the head, to a place where women work outside the home, and where discussion of divorce, sex, incest, homosexuality and abortion is no longer tabu.
Her columns reflected those changes, and gradually embraced the liberation of women from traditional roles.
In a rare 1975 column where she spoke of her own travails, Landers announced her divorce from her husband, Jules Lederer, who built the Budget Rent-A-Car empire, and left the bottom third of her column space blank “in honour of a great marriage that never made it to the finish line,” the Tribune reported.
She received 2,000 letters a day from people seeking her advice on neighbours, families, work, and illness.
She said the letter-writers did not consider her a “stranger ... I’m the lady next door, their best friend, the mother they couldn’t communicate with before, but they can now. Most of all, I’m a good listener,” she was quoted as saying in the Chicago Tribune obituary online.
Above all, she was known for her snappy wit and use of language. Advising “Cheated and Angry in Missouri”, she wrote: “Mid-50’s is too young to settle for ashes if there’s still fire in the furnace.”
She was one of four children born to Russian Jewish immigrants, who fled czarist pogroms in 1908.—dpa
