That couldn't have happened without them." But as intertwined as the sisters' rival columns were, they "differed in style," says the AP's Jocelyn Noveck. These columns are loved and widely read, by people you wouldn't expect. "The advice column was a backwater of the newspaper, and now it is so woven into our cultural fabric. "Any of us who do this owe them such a debt," advice columnist Carolyn Hax tells the AP. And after charming and cajoling her way into an advice columnist job at the San Francisco Chronicle, Abby transformed the staid, prudish world of dishing out syndicated advice, along with her sister. Phillips chose her pen name from the Bible ("Then David said to Abigail 'Blessed is your advice and blessed are you'" -the Book of Samuel) and our eighth president (she liked the "old-family, presidential ring" of Van Buren, says Margalit Fox in The New York Times). She was born 17 minutes after her identical twin sister, Esther Lederer, and published her first Dear Abby column in 1956, three months after Esther's debut as Ann Landers. Pauline Friedman Phillips, better known by her pen name, Abigail Van Buren, died on Thursday at age 94, after a decade-long battle with Alzheimer's.
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