Return to Peyton Place by Grace Metalious

But wow did Grace paint us such a vivid life of an updated Little House On The Prairie/Walton's place to live. Okay How unbelievable that these books literally made it to the shelves if you think of the time and the content. Before I was successful, I was as happy as anyone gets.' She is buried in Smith Meeting House Cemetery in Gilmanton, New Hampshire. 'If I had to do it over again,' she once remarked, 'it would be easier to be poor. Metalious died of alcoholism on February 25, 1964. Her other novels, all of which sold well but never achieved the same success as her first, were Return to Peyton Place (1959), The Tight White Collar (1961) and No Adam in Eden (1963). With regard to her success, she said, 'If I'm a lousy writer, then an awful lot of people have lousy taste,' and as to the frankness of her work, she stated, 'Even Tom Sawyer had a girlfriend, and to talk about adults without talking about their sex drives is like talking about a window without glass.' Metalious - the 'Pandora in bluejeans' - was said by some to be a dreadful writer and a purveyor of filth, but her most famous book changed the publishing industry forever. They combined this with Place and changed the 'a' to an 'e'. Realizing their town should have a fictional name, they looked through an atlas and found Payton (the name of a real town in Texas). They first considered Potter Place (the name of a real community near Andover, New Hampshire). However, she and her husband regarded The Tree and the Blossom as an unwieldy title and decided to give the town a name which could be the book's title. By the spring of 1955, she had finished a first draft. When George graduated, he took a position as principal at a school in Gilmanton, New Hampshire.Īt the age of 30, she began work in the fall of 1954 on a manuscript with the working title The Tree and the Blossom. In Durham, Grace Metalious began writing seriously, neglecting her house and her three children. With one child, the couple moved to Durham, New Hampshire, where George attended the University of New Hampshire. After graduating from Manchester High School Central, she married George Metalious in 1943, became a housewife and mother, lived in near squalor - and continued to write.

Blessed with the gift of imagination, she was driven to write from an early age. She was born into poverty and a broken home as Marie Grace de Repentigny in the mill town of Manchester, New Hampshire. Grace Metalious was an American author, best known for the controversial novel Peyton Place.

Return to Peyton Place by Grace Metalious