She was a faculty member of Columbia University’s school of journalism as well as Barnard College, and was a winner of the Front Page Award for her journalistic achievement in writing about the Hollywood Blacklist.
She grew up especially close to her younger brother, Bartley Crum Jr. Their father was active in politics as a confidant to Wendell Willkie during the 1940 U.S. presidential election, and he served on the 1945 Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry into Palestine that advised President Harry Truman to support the creation of a Jewish state.
The elder Crum gained renown for being one of the six lawyers who defended the Hollywood Ten during the Red Scare at the start of the Cold War in 1947.
[4] Arthur Penn cast her as the lead in her first professional play, a pre-Broadway tryout of James Leo Herlihy’s Blue Denim, about the consequences of teenage pregnancy and abortion.
During this period, Bosworth toured in The Glass Menagerie, playing Laura to Helen Hayes's Amanda and Remains to be Seen with Tommy Sands.
She worked regularly on popular television series, including Naked City, Kraft Theater (The Man That Didn't Fly - 1958) The Secret Storm, Young Dr. Malone, and The Patty Duke Show.
Penthouse founder Bob Guccione hired Bosworth as executive editor of the erotic women's magazine Viva from 1974 to 1976.
She continued to freelance for the magazine until 1997 when she rejoined as contributing editor under Graydon Carter’s leadership, a position she held to the end of her life.
Her profile of Elia Kazan and his reflections on the Hollywood Blacklist, published in a spring 1999 issue of Vanity Fair, won Bosworth the Front Page Award from the Newswomen's Club of New York.
Andrew Holleran of New York magazine said it was "a biography that seems to have...more than enough material for several art legends...Patricia Bosworth has created a spellbinding portrait."
Washington Post Book World reviewed it as "fascinating" and "a compelling biography.. as valuable in its insights into the cultural history of the 50s and 60s as its understanding of the special place Arbus occupies in it."
She provides a fine, detailed sketch of his New York days when he took acting classes with Harry Belafonte, Elaine Stritch, Gene Saks, Shelley Winters, Rod Steiger and Kim Stanley, and presents a great portrait of the craziness on the set of Last Tango in Paris (co-star Maria Schneider announced that they got along 'because we're both bisexual')", but in only 228 pages, the author "can't approach the complexity of her earlier work."
Bosworth's biography Jane Fonda: The Private Life of a Public Woman was on the New York Times bestseller list in 2011 and was named one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Six Books of the Year.
It tells the story of Bosworth's father Bartley Crum and how his decision to defend the Hollywood Ten at the height of McCarthyism destroyed his career, ultimately leading to his suicide.
It examines Bosworth's career as an actress, her early transition into journalism, her first and second marriages, and ways she survived the suicides of both her brother and father.
During Bosworth's sophomore year at Sarah Lawrence, her brother Bart Jr. committed suicide in 1953 at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.
He and Bosworth worked on a number of plays together for the Actors Studio and Lincoln Center, including a production of The Seagull starring Laura Linney as Nina and Tammy Grimes as Arkadina.