Marie Brenner

Marie Brenner (born 1949) is an American author, investigative journalist and writer-at-large for Vanity Fair. She has also written for New York, The New Yorker and the Boston Herald and has taught at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. Her Vanity Fair article on tobacco insider Jeffrey Wigand, "The Man Who Knew Too Much", inspired the 1999 movie The Insider, starring Russell Crowe and Al Pacino.

Personal

Marie Harriet Brenner was born in San Antonio, Texas to Milton and Thelma Brenner. She grew up in San Antonio and moved to New York in 1970.

Her father was chairman of Solo Serve Corporation, a chain of Texas discount stores started by her grandfather Isidor Brenner, who emigrated from Mexico to Texas during the Mexican Revolution. The grandfather, was born in the Baltic duchy of Kurland in 1872 and came through the Texas port, Galveston, in 1890. The grandmother, Paula, came from Riga, Latvia and Chicago.

She is the niece of Anita Brenner, anthropologist and author of Idols Behind Alters, published in 1929. Anita was a member of the circle of Mexican muralists and artists, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Edward Weston, and Tina Modotti, who flourished in Mexico in the 1920s and was widely credited with helping to introduce their work in the United States. One of the first women to be a regular contributor to The New York Times, Anita Brenner once interviewed Leon Trotsky, the deposed leader of the Russian Revolution and was an authority on Mexico and Latin American affairs.