Cosmo editrix Helen Gurley Brown dead at 90

NEW YORK, Aug. 13 (UPI) -- Helen Gurley Brown, editor of Cosmopolitan from 1965 until 1997, died Monday in New York, the magazine's publisher said. She was 90.

The New York Times confirmed her death at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia hospital, but did not report the exact cause of it.

Before her decades-long stint at Cosmo, the Arkansas native worked as an advertising copywriter and penned the ground-breaking 1962 book "Sex and the Single Girl."

"I never liked the looks of the life that was programmed for me -- ordinary, hillbilly and poor -- and I repudiated it from the time I was 7 years old," Brown wrote in her 1982 book "Having It All."