American writer – Literary Fictions

Shirley ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

Shirley is an odd little novel by a writer named Susan Scarf Merrell about the celebrated American writer Shirley Jackson, who was born in 1916 and died in her sleep of apparently undiagnosed heart disease in 1965 at the age of 48. Shirley Jackson is known today mostly for her short stories (of which my favorite is The Daemon Lover), but she also wrote a handful of novels. She was an eccentric, as writers or artists very often are, and was married to the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, who was a professor at Bennington College in Vermont. He and Shirley Jackson had four children and lived near the Bennington campus.

Entering the odd world of Shirley Jackson, her husband and family is the fictional character, Rose Nemser. Rose is the first-person narrator of Shirley. Her husband, Fred, is a protégé of Shirley Jackson’s husband, Stanley Hyman. Rose and Fred have sort of been adopted by Shirley Jackson and her husband and live with the family in their large house. Fred has a job teaching at Bennington College with Stanley. Rose and Fred have an infant daughter, Natalie.

Rose is very young, has literary aspirations of her own, and is awed to be in the household with the celebrated writer Shirley Jackson and her not-quite-as-celebrated husband. Rose helps out with the housework and the cooking and becomes a confidante and friend of Shirley Jackson. Rose also comes to understand the strange marriage that is Shirley and Stanley’s. Shirley is a large woman, unattractive and bespectacled. Stanley is exposed every day to willing young college girls who adore their professors, no matter how unattractive they are. That Stanley is cheating on Shirley is understood, even by Shirley. (“He’s a magician of the loins,” Shirley says.) In a scene reminiscent of the movie, Terms of Endearment, Rose discovers that her own husband is also cheating with a female student.

Hanging over the Jackson-Hyman household (for Rose, anyway) is the unsolved murder of a Bennington college student from years earlier, one Paula Welden, who was lost in the Vermont mountains and was never seen again. Rose comes to believe that Paula Welden was one of Stanley’s extramarital dalliances and that Shirley, in a fit of jealousy, might have done away with her. Of course, we never know for sure.

Shirley is an interesting (though speculative) account of Shirley Jackson’s private life. We come to see Shirley Jackson as a real person, rather than just a shadowy literary figure. People who have an interest in Shirley Jackson or her work will find the book intriguing. About ninety-nine percent of other people, though, will know she’s not Jennifer Lopez and will say: “Who the hell is Shirley Jackson?” Not everybody majored in English.

February 7, 2015February 7, 2015 by allen0997

Grace Metalious ~ A Sensational Life

Grace Metalious, American author of Peyton Place and other works, was a Yankee girl. She was born Mary Grace de Repentigny in Manchester, New Hampshire, on September 8, 1924. At the age of nineteen she married her childhood sweetheart, George Metalious. They settled in the New Hampshire town of Gilmanton, which, coincidentally, was also the birthplace in 1861 of one Herman Mudgett, who gained notoriety under the name of Dr. H. H. Holmes in the 1890s as America’s first serial killer.

Grace hated the hypocrisy, dissembling, and closed-door intrigues of small-town life. It was this atmosphere or repression that led her to write her first and most famous novel, Peyton Place.

Peyton Place was turned down by virtually every publisher in New York. Publishers found its unsophisticated prose and explicit sexuality unfit for the sanitized 1950s. Finally it was accepted by the publishing house Julian Messner, where it was so heavily edited that Grace’s authorship was called into question.

When the book was released, it became an unprecedented success, selling eight million copies in hardback and twelve million in paperback. In the 1950s it was exceeded in sales only by the Bible. It stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year and made Grace Metalious a celebrity and a wealthy woman.

In 1957, Peyton Place was turned into a surprisingly tasteful and artful movie starring Lana Turner. The movie was a critical and box-office success and added to the luster of the novel and its author. A best-selling sequel called Return to Peyton Place was penned by Metalious (she used a ghostwriter for this one), published in 1959, but she was never able to duplicate the success of Peyton Place, which for her was had been the pinnacle of her success. Subsequent novels, The Tight White Collar and No Adam in Eden were not successful.

Grace Metalious’s private life was just as sensational and interesting as any of the characters in her books—some would argue more so. She did not handle fame and fortune well. She divorced her first husband (only to remarry him and divorce him again) and had two other failed marriages. She squandered much of her wealth and drank heavily. She attracted a series of lovers who were interested in her only for her money and fame. Her self-destructive tendencies continued for the rest of her life, until she died of liver disease at the age of thirty-nine on February 25, 1964.

Grace Metalious was not an accomplished or a polished or a sophisticated writer, but she achieved the kind of success that few writers ever achieve. With the success of her books, the focus in publishing shifted from literary merit and critical praise to shrewd marketing and sensationalism. She began the trend for so-called “tell-all” books that continues to this day. For that reason, she was one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century.

September 19, 2011 by allen0997

Literary Fictions

Tag: American writer

Shirley ~ A Capsule Book Review

Grace Metalious ~ A Sensational Life