Stephen Fried

At 66 years old, Stephen Fried physical status not available right now. We will update Stephen Fried's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

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. 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.

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. 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. Fried explored whether the Noes might have been responsible for those deaths, and his investigation led the Philadelphia homicide unit — which had officially closed the Noe file three decades earlier — to begin reexamining the deaths. One day after his story ran, the police interrogated Mr. and Mrs. Noe and received a confession from Marie that she had suffocated eight of her own children (two died of natural causes), leading to a guilty plea and a controversial sentence — which was to include house arrest and probation, along with her cooperation in an unprecedented analysis of her medical history and actions by top experts in fields that study post-partum violence (an analysis which was never carried out). For his work on the Noe case, Fried became the first journalist to receive the Medal of Honor from the Vidocq Society, an elite international group of criminologists, pathologists and police investigators. The piece was also part of his winning entry for the 1999 National Headliners Award for Outstanding Feature Writing, won a Clarion Award from national Women in Communications, and was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Reporting.

Among his earlier notable magazine stories are "Over the Edge" (Philadelphia, October 1984), an investigation of a series of teen suicides in a small town in Bucks County, which won a Clarion Award and was a finalist for the Livingston Award, and "Boy Crazy" (Philadelphia, November 1987), about a homosexual pedophile police chief in a community nearby to Philadelphia, which won the national Sigma Delta Chi/Society of Professional Journalists award for Magazine Reporting. His January 1989 Philadelphia story "The Three Mrs. Lymans", about the battle over the estate of singer Frankie Lymon, inspired the Warner Brothers film Why Do Fools Fall in Love.

In 1993 he won his first National Magazine Award in the field of Special Interest as one of the writers on a Philadelphia feature about the simple pleasures of life in and around the city. Fried's contribution, an essay on returning to fishing after many years' absence, was later expanded into a 1995 Philadelphia feature called "Reeling in the Years", which was selected as a notable story of the year in Best American Sports Stories.

The next year, Fried won his second National Magazine Award in the field of Public Interest Reporting for a series of three stories in Philadelphia on the prescription drug Floxin. The first piece in the series, titled "Less than One Percent" (April 1993), chronicled his wife's adverse reaction to a single dose of Floxin and examined the FDA's regulatory process for prescription drugs. Parts two and three called for (and later prompted) tougher FDA rules on antibiotic drugs.

Fried went on to publish three award-winning pieces about mental health care. "War of Remembrance" (Philadelphia, January 1994), was the first in-depth investigative treatment of the "false memory syndrome" and the Freyds family of Philadelphia, who invented and popularized it. It won a Health Journalism Gold Award and is generally credited with leveling the playing field in the contentious debate over false memory syndrome's validity. His Washington Post Magazine cover story "Creative Tension" (April 16, 1995) was the first major national profile of Johns Hopkins psychologist Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison, and the first time she "came out" as having manic-depressive illness – the disease she had devoted her life to researching and treating (laying the groundwork for her bestselling memoir, An Unquiet Mind). "Creative Tension" won a 1995 Easter Seals Equality, Dignity and Independence Award for enhancing the image of people with disabilities, as did Fried's Philadelphia story the same month, "The Incredible Shrinking Institute", about the rise and fall of the nation's first psychiatric institution (and the birthplace of the American Psychiatric Association). In 1999, his final year as a writer at Philadelphia magazine, he received the National Headliner Award for Feature Writing on a Variety of Subjects for his investigation of the Noes as well as "Family Business" (September 1998), the first in-depth story about the family that had built – and was in the process of slowly destroying – the Rite Aid drugstore chain.

While Fried was editor-in-chief at Philadelphia, the magazine was a National Magazine Award finalist for Feature Writing and Profiles in 2000. The same year, it won the Clarion Award for Best Magazine in Philadelphia's circulation category as well as the award for Most Improved Magazine, and Philadelphia earned gold medals from the City and Regional Magazine Association for General Excellence and Excellence in Writing. Since returning to magazine and book writing, he won the Epilepsy Foundation's Distinguished Journalism Award for "How Far Would You Go To Save Your Health?" (Glamour, August 2004), which followed for a year the case of a young woman having a temporal lobectomy — an extreme surgical procedure — as a last resort to stop treatment-resistant seizures.

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