Ann Landers

JUST POSSIBLY, Ann Landers was the most influential American woman of the second half of the 20th century. Her claim rested not on political achievement or pioneering social reform – but on her unchallenged status as the most widely read agony aunt of her age.

Esther Pauline Friedman (Ann Landers), advice columnist: born Sioux City, Iowa 4 July 1918; married 1939 Jules Lederer (one daughter; marriage dissolved 1975); died Chicago 22 June 2002.

Just possibly, Ann Landers was the most influential American woman of the second half of the 20th century. Her claim rested not on political achievement or pioneering social reform – but on her unchallenged status as the most widely read agony aunt of her age.

Over a career of almost 50 years, her subjects ranged from the everyday (how to get rid of dinner guests who won't leave, how much to tip the pizza home delivery boy) to the recurring, ineradicable miseries of the human species: children you can't stand, marital betrayal, divorce, depression, illness, bereavement and financial failure.

Ann Landers had such staying power because she listened and because she cared deeply for those who wrote to her – so much so that she had to seek advice herself on making sure that her correspondents' problems did not become her own and overwhelm her.

"Some of the letters are so sad," she once wrote. "If I couldn't insulate myself I'd have gone to pieces." Larry Fanning, an editor at the Chicago Sun Times where she began her career, is credited with providing the answer. "Look baby, these things aren't happening to you. You've got to separate yourself from your readers."

With difficulty, Landers did so. But that did not prevent her operating as a one-stop social worker, whose staff maintained computerised lists of hundreds of help agencies, consultancies and support groups. "I can't salvage a life that's been rotten for 20 years in a little bit of newspaper space," she once told The New York Times, "but we know exactly where to send people for every imaginable problem."

The turning point for the woman born Esther Pauline Friedman on Independence Day in the final year of the First World War came in the summer of 1955, when she moved to Chicago with her husband, Jules Lederer, and 15-year-old daughter, Margo. The family was affluent and moved in powerful social circles, and for "Eppie" Lederer the sole task until then had been keeping house for her husband, a businessman who had founded the Budget car rental company and whom she had married straight out of college.

But, as not infrequently happens, the housewife with time on her hands became an avid reader of the advice columns – in her case an Ann Landers of the Chicago Sun Times. On one of those whims which can change lives, Eppie Lederer asked a friend who was an executive on the paper whether she could help answer the columnist's mail.

In fact, the first Ann Landers (a nurse whose real name was Ruth Crowley) had just died, and Lederer joined 28 other women who were seeking the job. Each was given an identical set of letters to answer. Lederer might not have possessed a shred of journalistic experience, but she did have influential and knowledgeable friends. One was William Douglas, the Supreme Court justice, who helped her with an especially tricky letter about the ownership rights of walnuts that had fallen from a tree into the next door garden. She got the right answer (the neighbour could do anything with the nuts except sell them). She also got the job.

Thus was launched the second Ann Landers, queen of US agony aunts. In the next two decades she transformed the business. Hitherto, advice columnists, as they are called in America, were prissy and dainty, tiptoeing around contentious issues and often wrapping replies in swathes of euphemism. Some subjects, like homosexuality, were off limits completely.

But the new Landers brought to the job a brash, upfront self-confidence. The columns exuded the commonsense and straightforwardness for which her native Midwest is famous, and a typical American optimism. In print at least, she always tried to see the brighter side. She also had a snappy line in puns. To a husband who complained of his wife's lack of attention, she told him not to lose hope, insisting that "Many are cold, but few are frozen." A Miss Icarus who wrote saying she wanted to marry her fiancé's father was told simply, "Drop Daedalus."

Perhaps her biggest competitor, amazingly, would be her twin sister Pauline. Pauline found that she too had a talent for advice-giving and, as Abigail Van Buren of the San Francisco Chronicle, became a famous agony aunt in her own right. The sisters fell out – to the point of not speaking for five years.

Nor was sibling rivalry the only aspect of Lederer's private life that might have benefited from some Ann Landers straight talk. In 1975 she suffered the greatest trauma of her life, when her husband left her for another woman. She informed readers of what had happened, in a shorter column than usual that ended with a request for editors to leave a little white space at the bottom, to honour "one of the world's best marriages that didn't make it to the finish line".

By then, Ann Landers was a national institution. She received an average of 2,000 letters daily. These were reduced to several hundred by her staff, often to be perused by the lady herself in her bath, in an opulent 11-room apartment overlooking Lake Michigan.

Over her 47-year career, she was awarded more than 30 honorary degrees. The Ann Landers column appeared in over 1,000 US newspapers, in some of them for seven days a week. In 1967 she visited Vietnam to boost the morale of US troops (though she opposed the war and had long since given up on President Lyndon Johnson).

Politically she was what the Americans call a liberal, who favoured abortion rights, advocated gun control and supported the use of animals for medical research – a stance which earned her the lasting enmity of three powerful lobby groups, including the National Rifle Association.

There was the odd faux pas, such as when she admitted in 1982 to re-using some letters of 15 years before for current columns, and when she called Pope John Paul II a "Polack" in a magazine interview. But her reputation survived unscathed. The second Ann Landers, meanwhile, will be the last. She owned the rights to the name, and in 1995 announced to her millions of readers, "When I go, the column goes with me."

Rupert Cornwell