page_title: Gail Sheehy
section_title: Early life and education
hierarchical_section_title: Gail Sheehy / Early life and education
caption_attribution_description: Graduate school of journalism @ Columbia University
context_page_description: Gail Sheehy was an American author, journalist, and lecturer. She was the author of seventeen books and numerous high-profile articles for magazines such as New York and Vanity Fair. Sheehy played a part in the movement Tom Wolfe called the New Journalism, sometimes known as creative nonfiction, in which journalists and essayists experimented with adopting a variety of literary techniques such as scene setting, dialogue, status details to denote social class, and getting inside the story and sometimes reporting the thoughts of a central character.
  Many of her books focused on cultural shifts, including Passages, which was named one of the ten most influential books of our times by the Library of Congress. Sheehy penned biographies and character studies of major twentieth-century leaders, including Hillary Clinton, both presidents Bush, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev. Her most recent book, Daring: My Passages, is a memoir.
context_section_description: Gail Sheehy was born in Mamaroneck, New York, to Lillian Rainey Henion and Harold Merritt Henion. Her mother's family was Scotch-Irish. Her grandmother, Agnes Rooney ran away from Northern Ireland to the United States as a mail-order bride. Another part of her mother's family was Scottish and worked the Ulster plantation for English landowners.
  Growing up, Sheehy was close to her paternal grandmother, Gladys Latham Ovens. Ovens' husband had died of a stroke during the Great Depression—and after he died, Ovens went to work as a real estate agent in a career that lasted for over 40 years. Ovens bought Sheehy her first typewriter at age 7. When as an adolescent, Sheehy began to sneak into New York City on Saturday mornings to explore, her grandmother kept her secret.
  In 1958, Sheehy graduated from the University of Vermont with a Bachelor of Arts in English and home economics. She later returned to school in 1970, earning her Master of Arts in journalism from Columbia University, where she studied on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship under the cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead.
caption: Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University
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