(The Tight White Collar, first published in 1960 by the au...)
The Tight White Collar, first published in 1960 by the author of the runaway best-seller Peyton Place, again depicts live in a small New England town as lived by a number of characters, all of whom have secrets in their past. In addition to Peyton Place and The Tight White Collar, Grace Metalious, pen-name of Marie Grace DeRepentigny, authored two additional novels before her untimely death at age 39 in 1964.
(So who needs an Adam in Eden?
Angelique was small, blonde...)
So who needs an Adam in Eden?
Angelique was small, blondem passionate--and as capable of love as a hooded cobra. She learned sexual blackmail at her mother's knee, and before she was through she bit off more of the apple than any woman since Eve.
It is doubtful that there exists in all fiction a more intriguing character--in spite of her sexual aberrations, her innate selfishness and cruelty, her all but psychotic belief that was something very special and thus excused from the normal mores of decency and honesty.
"Paradise," she said, "I'll tell you what paradise is--it's having what you want all the time. I don't need any one man for that!"
(When Grace Metalious's debut novel about the dark undersi...)
When Grace Metalious's debut novel about the dark underside of a small, respectable New England town was published in 1956, it quickly soared to the top of the bestseller lists. A landmark in twentieth-century American popular culture, Peyton Place spawned a successful feature film and a long-running television series—the first prime-time soap opera.Contemporary readers of Peyton Place will be captivated by its vivid characters, earthy prose, and shocking incidents. Through her riveting, uninhibited narrative, Metalious skillfully exposes the intricate social anatomy of a small community, examining the lives of its people—their passions and vices, their ambitions and defeats, their passivity or violence, their secret hopes and kindnesses, their cohesiveness and rigidity, their struggles, and often their courage.This new paperback edition of Peyton Place features an insightful introduction by Ardis Cameron that thoroughly examines the novel's treatment of class, gender, race, ethnicity, and power, and considers the book's influential place in American and New England literary history.
Grace Metalious was born on September 8, 1924, in Manchester, New Hampshire. She was the daughter of Albert de Repentigny, a pressman, and Laurette Royer. The Repentignys were of French-Canadian descent, and Grace spoke French before she spoke English. Her parents were divorced when Grace was eleven, and she and her sister were brought up by her mother and grandmother.
Education
In 1942, Grace graduated from the local public high school.
Career
Metalious spent the war years working at an air force base. The news about her fatal pregnancy was deeply disturbing, and Metalious turned to writing as an alternative form of creativity. Thus was begun, in the winter of 1954, a novel that she called The Tree and the Blossom but that in less than two years would appear as Peyton Place. Even the well had run dry at the house, called "It'll Do, " where they lived in rural New Hampshire. A young New York editor, Leona Nevler, had recommended Metalious' manuscript to Kathryn Messner during a job interview; her present employer had turned the book down in spite of her strong recommendations. Nevler was asked to edit the book, but Metalious' recalcitrance and reluctance to take any editorial advice immediately led to friction. After one editorial session, Metalious spent the night drinking in a Greenwich Village saloon, and in the early morning went straight to her agent's office to complain. Kathryn Messner then took over the editing of the book. Metalious' discoverer was later paid $1, 100 by Messner, whose firm was to make millions from Peyton Place. Peyton Place was published in September 1956, and within a month was on the best-seller lists. It was inevitably seen as an exposé of Gilmanton, a view that was reinforced when George Metalious was fired from his job. It made little difference that he was fired before the book came out. Such a scandal, coupled with reviews that stressed the salacious nature of the work, guaranteed its success. Peyton Place sold 300, 000 copies in hardcover and more than 8 million in paperback. On the New York Times best-seller list for more than a year, it was denounced by politicians and preachers, and banned in many areas of the country. The book captured the popular imagination, and the term "Peyton Place" became part of the language, used to denote a small town or area with smug, self-satisfied hypocrites who engage in secret and scandalous sexual shenanigans. A successful motion picture and television series were based on the book. Metalious wrote three more books, all of them set in small New England towns, all iconoclastic, sex-ridden treatments of small-town life: Return to Peyton Place (1959), rumored to have been partly, if not largely, written by a ghostwriter; Tight White Collar (1960); and No Adam in Eden (1963). Each was a best seller, in spite of or because of universally bad reviews, although none of them was as successful as her first novel. Grace Metalious died at the age of thirty-nine, of chronic liver disease, in Boston, Massachusetts.
When Grace's husband, George Metalious, returned from the army, he worked at various jobs until he enrolled at the University of New Hampshire in order to become a schoolteacher. After he graduated, the couple lived a rather precarious and peripatetic existence until he accepted a job as principal at a school in Gilmanton, New Hampshire. By this time they had three children, and Grace had been advised by a physician that another pregnancy could be fatal. Metalious' personal life did not match her public success. She and her husband George, Metalious, separated.
Nowhere are the limits of her modest talent more evident than in the autobiographical pieces she wrote for American Weekly, even allowing for her intended audience.
Quotes from others about the person
"Her love scenes are as explicit as love scenes can get without the use of diagrams and tape recorder. "
Connections
In 1942, Grace married George Metalious, a millhand. World War II had just begun, and her husband was soon in the army. In 1958 she divorced Metalious and married T. J. Martin, a local disc jockey. Two years later she divorced Martin and remarried Metalious, although she later denied having done so. By 1963 they had separated again.