Jean Stein, an author who wrote best-selling oral histories, has died in New York City. She was 83.Authorities say Stein

Died: April 30, 2017

JEAN Stein, who has died aged 83, was a writer, editor and historian who was best known for her international bestseller about the troubled life of Edie Sedgwick, a muse of Andy Warhol in the 1960s. She also wrote a successful biography of Robert Kennedy and, most recently, West of Eden which chronicled the torrid life and times of five Hollywood families, including her own.

Stein came from a wealthy background, growing up on a large estate in Beverly Hills where her father ran the entertainment group MCA, and it was common for her to see big stars visiting her parents. They wanted the young Jean to marry “well”, but initially she had other ideas. “My parents were ambitious for me to marry someone from a noble family,” she said. “It was a Henry James novel set in Hollywood.”

Educated in California and Switzerland, Stein later came under the influence of Gore Vidal who encouraged her to move to Paris to attend the Sorbonne. There, she found a job with The Paris Review before moving to New York where she worked in features at Esquire.

In 1970, Stein and editor George Plimpton produced American Journey: The Times of Robert Kennedy based on hundreds of interviews with people who knew him.

Edie: American Girl was published in 1982 and followed Edie Sedgwick’s life through interviews with many of her contemporaries.

Plimpton also edited Edie: American Girl, an oral history of 1960s and Warhol's muse Edie Sedgwick. Sedgwick appeared in many of the films that Warhol produced at The Factory before succumbing to drug addiction and mental illness. She died of a drug overdose in 1971 when she was just 28. Normal Mailer said of Stein’s book about her: “This is the book of the sixties that we have been waiting for.”

Stein said she wrote about Sedgwick because she was a way of writing about the 1960s more generally. “I felt that she symbolized the 1960s the way that Zelda Fitzgerald represented the 1920s,” said Stein. “But what makes Edie, the book, work is that she touched so many worlds — these different, alienated worlds in the 1960s — and the story is as much about all of those people as it is about her.”

Stein’s friend, the journalist and editor Robert Scheer said she had been depressed recently. “I saw her last month or so. Every time I went to New York, I saw her. And she would come here,” he said. “She was pretty depressed. We were all worried.”

Scheer also paid tribute to Stein’s work. “She had the respect of the heavy hitters,” he said, “people who weren’t interested in the small talk. It was a circle of people who were very tough and demanding.”

Stein was married twice, first to the lawyer William vanden Heuvel, who was a friend of Robert Kennedy - the connection led to Stein's book about him. She later married the neurologist Torsten Ejesel, but the marriage ended in divorce.

Authorities say Stein apparently killed herself by jumping from the penthouse floor of a building in upper Manhattan. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

She is survived by her two daughters.

Last year, Random House published her book, West of Eden: An American Place, about Los Angeles and the American dream.

In a statement, the publisher said they were greatly saddened to hear the news of Stein's death.