Mary Schmich Biography Quotes 15 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Mary Schmich is an American journalist best known for her long tenure as a columnist at the Chicago Tribune and for a singular, widely quoted piece of advice literature that became a global pop-culture moment. She was born on November 29, 1953, in Savannah, Georgia, and grew up in a large family that moved around the United States during her childhood. Those moves helped shape her curiosity about people and places, a curiosity that would become the engine of her reporting and columns. She attended Pomona College in California and, later in her career, earned a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University, the prestigious mid-career program that widened her intellectual lens and briefly took her out of daily newspaper deadlines.

Early Career
Before she became a Chicago mainstay, Schmich worked as a reporter and feature writer, learning the trade in regional newsrooms and developing a voice that could be at once intimate and observant. Those early years taught her to marry meticulous reporting with a conversational tone, a pairing that would later define her column. By the mid-1980s she joined the Chicago Tribune, where editors recognized her mix of empathy and edge. The paper, under leaders who valued narrative journalism, offered room for a writer like Schmich to grow; among the colleagues she would come to know across the newsroom and the city were fellow columnists and editors who shaped the Tribune in that era, including Eric Zorn and, later in the paper's leadership lineage, Ann Marie Lipinski.

Chicago Tribune Columnist
Schmich became a Tribune columnist in the early 1990s, and for decades her pieces anchored the city's daily conversation. She wrote about Chicago's neighborhoods and the people who animate them, about public life and private struggles, about politics when it mattered and about the small moments when they revealed something larger. Her columns could comfort, provoke, and memorialize, often in the space of a few hundred words. She chronicled civic rituals, the changing skyline, and the rhythms of life under mayors such as Richard M. Daley and Rahm Emanuel, but she was equally at home on a bus bench, in a classroom, or at a corner cafe, turning casual encounters into stories that felt enduring.

Brenda Starr and Cartooning
Alongside her newspaper work, Schmich served for many years as the writer of the storied comic strip Brenda Starr, Reporter, created decades earlier by Dale Messick. When Schmich took up the scripting duties, she inherited not only a character but a tradition of women in journalism and the comics page. She collaborated first with artist Ramona Fradon and later with June Brigman, maintaining the strip's blend of adventure and newsroom savvy while updating its voice for new generations of readers. That partnership, lasting until the strip's conclusion in 2011, reflected how seriously she took storytelling across formats and how closely she worked with the artists who translated words into images.

Wear Sunscreen and Cultural Impact
In 1997, Schmich wrote a column titled "Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young", a meditation on adulthood that opened with a now-famous imperative: "Wear sunscreen". The column was passed from reader to reader, misattributed for a time to Kurt Vonnegut in internet chain letters, and then adapted by filmmaker Baz Luhrmann into the spoken-word hit "Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)". The global success of that track brought Schmich's words to audiences far beyond Chicago. She handled the attention with her usual dry humor, using the episode as a lesson in authorship and the life of words once they leave the page.

Awards and Recognition
Schmich's consistency and range culminated in one of journalism's highest honors when she won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for her Chicago Tribune columns. The prize recognized a body of work notable for its clarity, compassion, and craft. By then, she had become a fixture in the city's civic conversation, a writer to whom readers turned in times of celebration and sorrow. The award also acknowledged her influence on younger journalists who studied how she built a column from reporting, how she found a voice that was distinctly her own, and how she wrote about ordinary people with respect.

Community, Collaboration, and Mentorship
Beyond the page, Schmich invested in Chicago's cultural life. With Eric Zorn, she helped lead Songs of Good Cheer, an annual holiday singalong that gathered readers and musicians at the Old Town School of Folk Music, blending community-building with the Tribune's public presence. She also spent time teaching and mentoring student journalists and emerging writers, formalizing lessons she had learned in the newsroom: be curious, be fair, and do the work. Her network of collaborators over the years included editors who tightened her prose, artists who animated her scripts, and fellow columnists who shared the stage and the city's daily debates.

Later Years and Continuing Work
Schmich remained at the Tribune for decades, through the industry's technological and economic upheavals, adapting to new platforms while staying true to the column form. After more than three decades at the paper, she departed in 2021, a turning point for both writer and institution. In the years since, she has continued to write essays and occasional pieces, drawing on the same reporter's eye for detail and the same instinct for distilling complex feelings into clean, well-paced lines.

Style and Legacy
Mary Schmich's work is marked by an uncommon blend of intimacy and reportorial rigor. She can write about a public figure with a clear view and then shift, in the next paragraph, to a private citizen whose story she has earned the right to tell. The people around her helped shape that voice: editors who encouraged polish without sanding off personality; collaborators like Ramona Fradon and June Brigman, who navigated story arcs with her in Brenda Starr; colleagues such as Eric Zorn, who shared the craft of speaking to readers directly; cultural figures like Baz Luhrmann, whose adaptation amplified her words; and, in the background of her most famous column, the ghost of Kurt Vonnegut, a reminder of how easily authorship can be blurred in the digital age. Through the long sweep of her career, she has left a record of how a city sounds when it listens to itself, and how a columnist can be both witness and neighbor.

Our collection contains 15 quotes who is written by Mary, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Motivational - Friendship - Love - Art.

• 1997 Wear Sunscreen (Essay)