Helen Gurley Brown, editor of Cosmopolitan from 1965 until 1997, died Monday in New York, the magazine's publisher said. She was 90.

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The New York Times confirmed her death at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia hospital, but did not report the exact cause of it.

Before her decades-long stint at Cosmo, the Arkansas native worked as an advertising copywriter and penned the ground-breaking 1962 book "Sex and the Single Girl."

"I never liked the looks of the life that was programmed for me -- ordinary, hillbilly and poor -- and I repudiated it from the time I was 7 years old," Brown wrote in her 1982 book "Having It All."