Ann Landers:At her peak, agony aunt Ann Landers, who died on June 7th aged 83, was read by an estimated 90 million people in 1,200 newspapers worldwide. She was an icon, and "Dear Ann" for 46 years.
Both brash and compassionate, she set the tone for the modern agony aunt. As well as the usual fare of childrearing, marital difficulties, health and housekeeping, her columns dealt with a range of tougher issues, from incest to AIDS. When, during her first year in the trade, in 1955-'56, one of her then 26 syndicated papers refused to print a letter about homosexuality, she threatened to take her column to a rival. "From then on, boy," she was to say, "that paper printed every damn word I wrote."
Her influence was impressive and lasting. She wrote six books and many public service booklets, and was a leading exponent of counselling. She helped make it respectable in the United States to ask for therapy. A World Almanac survey in 1978 called her the most influential woman in America.
Ann Landers, whose real name was Esther (Eppie) Lederer, was a traditionalist when it came to the family, seeing it as the most important basis for happiness and security. But she was proud to align herself with women's rights issues. She was pro-choice on abortion, anti-capital punishment and in favour of suicide for the incurably ill. She also went up against the powerful gun lobby - the "gun nuts", as she called them.
She saw herself as a listener. "Just getting people to write problems down is part way to solving them," she said. "They can think about the problem, then they cope with it in a more objective way."
Working from her lakeside apartment on Chicago's Lake Shore Drive, Ann Landers often read her letters in the bath. Her office received as many as 2,000 letters a day, and she reckoned she could get through 800 before the water got cold.
The daughter of Russian immigrants, she was born on July 4th, 1918, in Sioux City, Iowa, 17 minutes before her twin sister, Pauline. "Eppie" and "Popo" both attended the local Morningside College, "majoring in boys", as Eppie put it. Both married at 21, on the same day, in matching gowns, to two men who became best friends. Eppie and Jules Lederer moved to Wisconsin, where she became involved in voluntary work.
In 1955, after the family had moved to Chicago, a chance meeting on a train with a Chicago Sun-Times executive - and a desire to do something helpful - inspired her to ask for a job as an advice columnist. By extraordinary coincidence, the writer of the paper's Ann Landers column had died a week earlier. Her first column was published on October 16th 1955.
At first, Eppie Lederer asked for help from her sister, who proved even better than she was with pithy one-liners - so good, in fact, that Popo soon got her own column in the San Francisco Chronicle, as Abigail Van Buren or Dear Abby, and became the other iconic American agony aunt.
Eppie Lederer served on many US government bodies, including the board of the National Cancer Institute, President Reagan's Commission on Drunk Driving, and the Advisory Council on Violence against Women. In 1971, she wrote about a bill to allocate $ 100 million for cancer research that was still awaiting President Nixon's signature, and asked readers to send copies of her column to Washington. Buried under a million newspaper clippings, Nixon signed the National Cancer Act.
In 1975, she used her column to tell readers that her 36-year-marriage was ending. She left a third of the page blank in honour of "one of the world's best marriages that didn't make it to the finish line". She received more than 35,000 letters of support.
Esther (Eppie) Lederer (Ann Landers): born 1918; died, June 2002