 How important do you think Dear Abbey was for American life? Dear Abbey and her twin sister Anne Landers, both of whose obits I had the privilege of doing, were fascinatingly important and and remain so retrospectively as barometers of the way the country was going to go. They were both these very pragmatic women who, while not being firebrands in any sense, were just a little bit left of center because they embodied a kind of progressive mid-century humanism, and so they were a very very interesting index of the direction in which progressives were trying to nudge the country in those years.