In her early twenties, she wrote a series of prize-winning profiles of such Hollywood luminaries as Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Joan Crawford, and Audrey Hepburn.

Goldsmith’s “The Creative Environment” caught the eye of Clay Felker, editor of the Sunday magazine supplement of the New York Herald Tribune.

In the third issue of New York, she wrote a landmark article on Viva, a “superstar” in Andy Warhol films, with accompanying photographs by Diane Arbus.

[6] When Wolfe called her one of the originators of this movement, Goldsmith said, “I think good journalism is all that counts, not a so-called group.”[7] Other notable New York articles included her profiles of the Centennial of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and curator Henry Geldzhaler’s emerging artists exhibit, Thomas Hoving, Jamie Wyeth and Andy Warhol.

In 1974 Barbara Goldsmith became an adviser to the Hearst Corporation and then Senior Editor of Harper’s Bazaar, attracting top writers to the publication.

Centered around the controversial newspaper editor, spiritualist and free love advocate Victoria Woodhull, author Jane Stanton Hitchcock described the work as "a whole vivid and inclusive way of writing history.

It’s spellbinding.”[14] The New York Times’ Richard Bernstein hailed it as an “absorbing, sweeping book...the richness of its narrative, the complex and morally nuanced portraits of its character...You finish it nearly out of breath astonished at the tragic heroism of the flawed character who tried to challenge the American Establishment.”[15] Other Powers was the finalist for the Los Angeles Book Prize.

It won the prize for the Best Book of 2006 from the American Institute of Physics and its thirteen affiliated societies, earned Goldsmith the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit medal for service to the Republic of Poland in 2009, and will soon be adapted as a major joint HBO/Sony production.

[2] The President of the Carnegie Corporation, Vartan Gregorian, named Barbara Goldsmith along with David Rockefeller and Brooke Astor on his list of America’s ten most enlightened philanthropists.

[16] Gregorian particularly noted the campaign she spearheaded to convert books and documents to permanent paper lasting 300 years instead of disintegrating in thirty and her securing of $20 million from the federal government for this crucial work.

In 2010 the New York Public Library Services Center, a 126-square-foot (11.7 m2) building with 220 workers, now contains the state-of-the-art Barbara Goldsmith Preservation and Conservation Divisions.

She also funded a state-of-the-art rare book library at the American Academy in Rome and a preservation and conservation treatment facility at Wellesley College.