Sylvia Porter; Widely Read Financial Columnist and Author

Sylvia Porter, whose columns on finance reached 25 million readers in 150 newspapers across the land, making her the most widely read reporter in her field, has died at her home in Pound Ridge, N.Y.

Her husband, James Fox, said Thursday that his wife was 77 when she died Wednesday of the complications of emphysema.

Miss Porter’s New York Daily News column on personal finance was syndicated three times each week by the Los Angeles Times Syndicate to newspapers nationwide.

Her 1975 book, “Sylvia Porter’s Money Book,” sold more than 1 million copies. A second edition was published in 1980.

Last year she published “Sylvia Porter’s Your Finances in the 1990s,” and “Planning Your Retirement” is scheduled for publication in September.

Miss Porter began writing in an era when she had to overcome many barriers in a male-dominated field.

Early in her career, she used the byline S. F. Porter to conceal the fact that she was a woman.

Miss Porter, born Sylvia Feldman and married for the first time to Reed Porter, a banker, was a freshman at Hunter College specializing in English literature and history when the stock market crashed in 1929. Stunned by her parents’ $30,000 loss, she switched her major to economics.

From the beginning, she seemed to have a talent for turning the gobbledygook of economics into readable, straightforward and sometimes humorous prose.

“I tried to combine the writing of economics with simple writing,” she told the Baltimore Sun in 1980. “That meant you had to know what you were talking about . . . which wasn’t easy.

She was hired at the New York Post in 1935 to write an occasional financial column and soon had a regular Wall Street beat.

Her first book, “How to Make Money in Government Bonds,” published in 1939, was recommended both to students and investment counselors.

In 1942, one year after her second book received favorable reviews, the Post decided to consider her gender an asset and changed her byline to Sylvia F. Porter.

Besides her husband, Miss Porter is survived by a daughter, a stepson and several grandchildren.