NEW YORK (AP) – Before there was “Sex and the City,” there was “Sex and the Single Girl.” And before there was Carrie Bradshaw, there was Helen Gurley Brown.

True, Carrie, the fun-loving and fashionable sex columnist of the HBO series, was fictional. But such was the influence of Brown, the long-serving Cosmopolitan editor (and “Sex and the Single Girl” author) who died Monday at age 90, that her admirers reached into pop culture as well as recent American history to describe her importance.

“Carrie and her friends couldn’t have lived the lives they did without Helen,” said Bonnie Fuller, the celebrity editor who succeeded Brown at Cosmopolitan in 1997. “She was the first woman to say you could have it all – and by that she meant a career AND a man AND a hot sex life. She was a visionary. She created the modern woman.”