“At magazines I got tired of making other writers look good through my re-writing,” Goldsmith wrote. From the mid-1970s, though continuing to write for the
New Yorker and the
New York Times among other publications, Goldsmith concentrated on writing books, all of which brought critical success and became bestsellers. In 1975 Goldsmith completed her first book,
The Straw Man, a novel about the New York art world. The wealthy Royceman family’s private art collection—a hundred million dollars' worth of Old Masters, Impressionists, Neo-Impressionists, and objects d’art—has been willed by Bertram Royceman to a New York museum to be housed in a special pavilion. However, Bertie, the only son of Bertram Royceman, files suit to challenge his father’s will. The ensuing battle exposes many of the players in the art world. The book reached #1 on the bestseller lists and was praised in a review by John Kenneth Galbraith in
New York magazine as “brilliant social criticism.” Goldsmith’s second book was
Little Gloria...Happy at Last, published in 1980. The nonfiction narrative tracked the 1930s custody battle for
Gloria Vanderbilt (Little Gloria, then). The book reached the top of
The New York Times and
Publishers Weekly bestseller lists and was hailed by critics. It was a main selection of the Book of the Month Club and described as a “literary masterpiece...the skill of Proust,” by Alden Whitman. The book became both a Paramount Pictures film and a major NBC television mini-series,
Little Gloria... Happy at Last, starring
Bette Davis,
Angela Lansbury,
Christopher Plummer, and
Maureen Stapleton. It was nominated for six Emmys, including one which Goldsmith won.
Johnson v. Johnson, Goldsmith’s third book, completed in 1987, recounted the longest, most expensive will contest in United States history between Basia Johnson, the widow of pharmaceutical heir J. Seward Johnson, and his children from previous marriages. It, too, became a bestseller and received critical accolades, such as
The Washington Post Book World calling the book, “Brilliant and gripping...I hadn't counted on Barbara Goldsmith who somehow persuaded the combatants on both sides to level with her...The accumulated tawdriness seems part of some mythic destiny.” The
New York Times Book Review found it, “Intriguing...a shadowy Gothic family drama.”. Goldsmith completed her next book in 1998.
Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull chronicled the women of the Gilded Age who fought for equality and the right to vote. Centered around the controversial newspaper editor, spiritualist and free love advocate
Victoria Woodhull, author Jane Stanton Hitchcock described the work as "a whole vivid and inclusive way of writing history. It’s spellbinding.” The
New York Times’ Richard Bernstein hailed it as an “absorbing, sweeping book...the richness of its narrative, the complex and morally nuanced portraits of its character...You finish it nearly out of breath astonished at the tragic heroism of the flawed character who tried to challenge the American Establishment.”
Other Powers was the finalist for the Los Angeles Book Prize. The book is optioned to become a major motion picture. Her final book,
Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie, has been translated into 21 languages world-wide. The work is based on the workbooks, letters, and diaries of
Marie Curie, which had been sealed for sixty years because they were still radioactive. It won the prize for the Best Book of 2006 from the American Institute of Physics and its thirteen affiliated societies, earned Goldsmith the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit medal for service to the Republic of Poland in 2009, and will soon be adapted as a major joint HBO/Sony production. Goldsmith’s most recent awards are the highest honor given by her alma mater Wellesley College, the 2013 Wellesley Alumnae Achievement Award. In 2013, she also received the Erwin Piscator Honorary Award for her writing. Many of her other outstanding awards are listed below. She died on June 26, 2016, at the age of 85. == Philanthropy ==