“Here are bloggers and bullies, misfits and misanthropes, dear hearts and black hearts, dogfights and catty squalls spun into a darkly humorous chick lit saga.” —Publishers Weekly
Candace Bushnell is the critically acclaimed, international best-selling novelist whose first book, Sex and the City, was the basis for the HBO hit series and subsequent blockbuster movie. Bushnell’s best-selling novels include Four Blondes (2000), Trading Up (2003), Lipstick Jungle (2005), One Fifth Avenue (2008), and the teen series, The Carrie Diaries (2010) and Summer in the City (2011). Endlessly ambitious, she continues to conquer the entertainment world as a producer of the TV show based on The Carrie Diaries on The CW. Bushnell is also under contract for two more novels in the Carrie Diaries series.
Hailed as an “addictive, ingenious origin story” by the Los Angeles Times, The Carrie Diaries (2010) introduces the teenage Carrie Bradshaw as she evolves through her formative teen years to find her dreams. Through the second installment, Summer in the City (2011), the teen series gives readers an inside glimpse of Carrie as she embarks for the first time on journalism, love, and New York City. With her signature wit and sparkling humor, Bushnell reveals the irresistible story of how Carrie met Samantha and Miranda, and what turned a small-town girl into one of New York City’s most unforgettable icons, Carrie Bradshaw.
Bushnell’s novel, One Fifth Avenue, is a modern-day story of old and new money, the always combustible mix that Edith Wharton mastered in her novels about New York’s Gilded Age and that F. Scott Fitzgerald illuminated in his Jazz Age tales. Bushnell’s New Yorkers suffer the same passions as those fictional Manhattanites from eras past: thirst for power, for social prominence and for marriages that are successful—at least to the public eye.
Throughout her twenties, Bushnell developed her trademark style as a freelancer, writing darkly humorous pieces about women, relationships and dating for Mademoiselle, Self Magazine, and Esquire. In 1990, she wrote a column that would become a precursor for Sex and the City, called The Human Cartoon, a fictional serial published in Hamptons Magazine. She began writing for the New York Observer in 1993; in November of 1994 she created the column Sex and the City, which ran in the New York Observer for two years. The column was bought as a book in 1995, and sold to HBO as a series in 1996.
From Sex and the City through her six successive novels, Bushnell has revealed a gift for tapping into the zeitgeist of any New York minute. With each book, she has deepened her range, but with a light touch that makes her complex literary accomplishments look easy. As The Guardian pointedly sums up, “she caustically addresses the conditions of materialism, cramped urban life, and metropolitan speed, where fame and wealth are all around, but never in one’s grasp …Bushnell is courageous in bringing this to the fore, and she is blessed with an Austen-like mastery in doing so. She cuts through the lies that women tell themselves about the surface equality of Western society. As such, she has much more in common with Edith Wharton, Dorothy Parker and early Bret Easton Ellis.”
Through her books and television series, Bushnell’s work has influenced and defined two generations of women. She is the winner of the 2006 Matrix award for books (other winners include Joan Didion and Amy Tan), and a recipient of the Albert Einstein Spirit of Achievement Award. Bushnell grew up in Connecticut and attended Rice and New York University. She currently resides in Manhattan.
