Irrespective of genre or pen name, Meaker's books have in common complex characters that have difficult relationships and complicated problems, who rail against conformity. Meaker said of this approach, "I was a bookworm and a poetry lover. When I think of myself and what I would have liked to have found in books those many years ago, I remember being depressed by all the neatly tied-up, happy-ending stories, the abundance of winners, the themes of winning, solving, finding --- when around me it didn't seem that easy. So I write with a different feeling when I write for young adults. I guess I write for myself at that age."
Marijane Agnes Meaker was born to Ida T. and Ellis R. Meaker (a mayonnaise manufacturer) in Auburn, New York, where she also spent her childhood. She mentions in an autobiography that Carson McCullers' book Member of the Wedding influenced her. In a 2006 interview, Meaker said of McCullers', "I was drawn to all McCullers’s books. She was an underdog-lover as I am. She was also this sensitive, intelligent writer whose words were lovely. I felt she was a champion of everyone who felt out-of-step with the world. I still feel that way." Meaker grew up in a house filled with books and was fascinated by the concept of writing and writers. She was particularly interested in the idea of a pseudonym, that one could invent a new name and a new personality with each name.
Marijane Meaker, aka Vin Packer, was involved romantically with author Patricia Highsmith for two years. She wrote about this relationship in the 2003 non-fiction memoir, Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s, and discussed it and her own pulp-fiction novels in interviews around the time of the book's release. Meaker explained her reasons behind writing about their relationship: "I knew Pat when she was young and not yet so jaded and bigoted. The internet is filled with stories of her meanness, and prejudice, and also of her introversion, of her being a loner. I met that Pat many years after we broke up."
Meaker received an education from Stuart Hall School, a boarding school in Staunton, Virginia, after asking her parents to send her there when she heard that lesbian activity occurred frequently at boarding schools. She was kicked out of the boarding school, she explains: "I was an unruly, rebellious child - a troublemaker with low marks. I was suspended in my senior year for throwing darts at a dartboard decorated with the pictures of faculty members cut out of an old yearbook. My mother's pleas to the bishop (it was an Episcopal school) got me reinstated long enough to graduate." She began submitting stories to women's magazines as a junior in high school under the name Eric Rantham McKay and was soundly rejected.
She later attended Vermont Junior College in 1945 and the University of Missouri from 1946 to 1949 where she was a member of Alpha Delta Pi sorority. However, she was less interested in conforming to the rules of a sorority, and preferred to find friends who were also writers. She made frequent submissions to literary magazines and collected many rejection slips.
Meaker sold her first story to Ladies' Home Journal under the name Laura Winston for what she thought was $75 US, but what her roommates had to point out to her was $750.00 US.
Upon graduation, she worked as a file clerk with Dutton Publishing, then as a proofreader with Gold Medal Books and began writing mostly mystery novels as Vin Packer. According to her autobiographical young adult book ME ME ME ME: Not a Novel (1984), Meaker began her professional writing career by posing as a literary agent, whose "clients" consisted of her own pen names. As Packer, Meaker wrote 20 books in all, including The Evil Friendship from 1958, an account of the Parker-Hulme murder in New Zealand. Two books by Packer were loosely based on the Emmett Till murder and the aftermath of the investigation: 3-Day Terror and Dark Don't Catch Me. Unlike other popular crime writers in the pulp market, Packer's books were less based on action (such as Mickey Spillane's books), and more "psychologically dense" and "insidious". One mystery critic said of Packer's books, "Her probing accounts of the roots of crime are richly detailed snapshots of their times, unconventional, intensely readable, and devoid of heroes, villains, or pat solutions."
As Vin Packer, Meaker wrote the groundbreaking romance novel Spring Fire, published in 1952, which is now credited with launching the genre of lesbian "pulp" fiction. Spring Fire was a response to the immense success of a previous Gold Medal Books publication named Women's Barracks, that sold 4.5 million copies. Eager to continue their financial success, editor Dick Carroll asked Meaker to write a book with a lesbian theme. Her original story idea involved a romance between two students of a boarding school, but editor Dick Carroll asked her to change it to sorority sisters because the boarding school setting was too risky. "He said, 'Well, it has to be a sorority, because a boarding school is too young.' He added, 'Make sure that these girls turn away from homosexuality because it is immoral, don't just have them talk about it being a hard life. We have to pass postal inspection.'" Writer Ann Bannon has credited her beginnings as an author of lesbian fiction to discovering the Vin Packer novels in the 1950s. The response to Spring Fire was beyond all Meaker's and Gold Medal Books' expectations. Meaker states she got "boxes of mail" from women who were thrilled to see a book that addressed a lesbian relationship; gay audiences weren't considered a market at this time.
Paperback novels were rarely reviewed by mainstream literary reviews, but a Packer novel titled, Come Destroy Me was noticed by the New York Times crime-fiction reviewer Anthony Boucher. Meaker said, "I decided then and there that I would never write an ordinary story again; that if I was writing for paperback, I would write suspense because I wanted the reviews." Soon after editor Dick Carroll from Gold Medal Books died, Meaker stopped writing as Vin Packer.
Meaker used the pseudonym Ann Aldrich for a series of five books published as paperback originals, but which were in fact nonfiction works. She read Donald Webster Cory's book The Homosexual in America, which was a nonfiction book about gay men. Noticing there was nothing similar for lesbians, Meaker used her own observations of lesbians and the lives of lesbians that included We Walk Alone in 1955, We, Too, Must Love in 1958, Carol in a Thousand Cities in 1960, We Two Won't Last in 1963, and Take A Lesbian To Lunch in 1972. The Feminist Press re-released We Walk Alone and We, Too, Must Love in 2007. Meaker said of this series, "The Aldrich books were more like resource books. A lot of the mail I got was from people wanting to know where the bars were in New York, where they could live, where I had lived. You know, they wanted to know how to get to New York and how to get to these bars."
In an interview with the Lambda Book Report in 2005, Meaker reflected on the impact of her books as Ann Aldrich, saying, "I honestly never thought about anything except people like me buying the book. I never thought of us having any entitlement or any importance; it just never dawned upon me. If somebody had showed me the [gay couples in the] wedding pages of The New York Times, which was awaiting us in the future, I wouldn't have believed it. I thought books were important, but these were paperbacks and so I didn't think they would last any longer than the paper that they were printed on." These books proved to be controversial when released. Books by Ann Aldrich were not overly sympathetic toward lesbians as a group, and they caused some consternation when being discussed by the Daughters of Bilitis. Ann Aldrich and the contributors to The Ladder took potshots at each other in print, once a contributor to The Ladder accusing Aldrich of being Ann Bannon, but always stating she expressed self-loathing in her writings. In 1970, Gene Damon of The Ladder referred to Meaker as "the evil genius" for her excellent writing about unpleasant and unsatisfactory lesbian themes.
Meaker was persuaded to try young adult fiction at the suggestion of author Louise Fitzhugh (Harriet the Spy), and chose to do so after reading Paul Zindel's The Pigman. She chose the pen name M.E. Kerr, as a phonetic play on her last name. Although the audience was different from Vin Packer's, Kerr's approach to her stories and characters seemed to vary little. She still addressed topics not usually covered by children's books: racism, AIDS, homosexuality, absent parents, social class differences, and her characters still had problems that had no easy solutions. She said of this direction, "I tend to write about people who struggle, who try to overcome obstacles, who usually do, but sometimes not. People who have all the answers and few problems have never interested me, not to write about, not to befriend." Kerr's books addressed functions and dysfunctions in relationships between parents and children, teachers and students, friends, and she often wrote about first loves.
Kerr's first attempt was extremely successful. Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack! was published in 1972 and was about an overweight girl whose mother is so preoccupied with assisting people addicted to drugs that her daughter is virtually ignored. It was listed by the School Library Journal's 20th century 100 most significant books for children and young adults. The story was inspired by a class Meaker taught by going into high schools and talking to students about writing. One overweight girl wrote stories Meaker characterized as, "really grotesque", and when her mother (a local do-gooder) found out Meaker was encouraging her, complained that she was trying to get her daughter to "write weird." The novel would later be turned into a ABC Afterschool Special as "Dinky Hocker" in 1979 with Wendie Jo Sperber in the title role.
Is That You, Miss Blue? published in 1975 involves the story of a girl in a Virginia Episcopal boarding school who develops a crush on her religiously devout teacher. Kerr modeled the story on her own experiences in boarding school when she developed a crush on one of her own teachers.
Kerr's novel Gentlehands, from 1978, is about a young man who becomes involved with a young woman who is much wealthier than he is. He tries to get to know his estranged grandfather, to learn that his grandfather was a Nazi who killed Jews at Auschwitz. The premise for the book, stated Kerr, was, "I wanted to provoke the idea of what if you meet a nice guy, a really nice man, and what if you find out that in his past he wasn't such a nice man? How would you feel?"
Deliver Us From Evie, published in 1994, tells the story of a 17-year-old girl who falls in love with another girl in her town, but told in the perspective of her younger brother, whose interest lies with a girl whose family rejects homosexuality as immoral. In Hello, I Lied, Kerr again addressed homosexuality in 1997 in a story about a young man who finds himself pulled in multiple directions.
Her instructional book, Blood on the Forehead: What I Know About Writing (1998), arose in part from these experiences as a writing instructor. Notably, in 1993, Meaker received a lifetime achievement award in the form of the Margaret A. Edwards Award from the Young Adult Library Services Association of the American Library Association.
In the 1990s, Meaker added the pen name Mary James for a series of novels aimed at readers younger than the Kerr readership; it was not until 1994, after the publication of the third Mary James novel, that the covers indicated that the author was also known as M. E. Kerr. Mary James books include Shoebag, The Shuteyes, Frankenlouse and Shoebag Returns.
Meaker gave advice in an interview for any aspiring writer, from her own experience: "I would tell aspiring writers to read. Read, read, read, read... Read the kind of books you'd like to write. Study your competition, see how they do it. Go away to college, or to work or whatever. See some of the world away from where you live. Try to join or start a writers' group where everyone shares what they're working on."
In her early life, Meaker admits to dating men because it was expected of her. She said of meeting the expectations of her family and friends despite knowing she was a lesbian: "I dealt with it by playing the game: dating, going steady with a serviceman I really liked, but not 'that way' and in general coping as we all had to do by behaving like everyone else."
Meaker was involved romantically with author Patricia Highsmith for two years. She wrote about this relationship in the 2003 non-fiction memoir, Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s, and discussed it and her own pulp-fiction novels in interviews around the time of the book's release. Meaker explained her reasons behind writing about their relationship: "I knew Pat when she was young and not yet so jaded and bigoted. The internet is filled with stories of her meanness, and prejudice, and also of her introversion, of her being a loner. I met that Pat many years after we broke up."
As of 2006, Meaker was living in East Hampton, New York, where she taught writing classes at the Ashawagh Hall Writers' Workshop. Her workshop experiences led to the nonfiction instructional book, Blood on the Forehead: What I Know About Writing (1998).
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marijane_Meaker
The fabric of my nighttime twin is made of desire, of music, from the ash of the books that mattered most. That fabric is stressed and frayed when I am in-between books, when a suitable suitor isn’t lined up for immediate consumption after finishing a satisfying book, I’ll rip through back issues of the New Yorker and pull out all of the amazing but just-not-right-now books I’ve hoarded for years. I’ll visit the Strand and hunt online and never ask for recommendations as this is my problem, not yours. It’s as personally crushing as an engagement deferred. Often I’ll fortify myself with four or five pending titles so that when I finish a book there are ample choices, always a healthy mixture of fiction and nonfiction, representing different cultures and time periods (I favor all things Japanese, the later Roman Empire, and Twentieth Century author biographies and in keeping with my tradition of reading one author biography a year and breaking my own rules, I’ve read five so far this year and can strongly recommend Marijane Meaker’s memoir of her relationship with Patricia Highsmith). --Tom Cardamone
Marijane Meaker, 2000, by Robert Giard (http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/brbldl_getrec.asp?fld=img&id=1123972)
American photographer Robert Giard is renowned for his portraits of American poets and writers; his particular focus was on gay and lesbian writers. Some of his photographs of the American gay and lesbian literary community appear in his groundbreaking book Particular Voices: Portraits of Gay and Lesbian Writers, published by MIT Press in 1997. Giard’s stated mission was to define the literary history and cultural identity of gays and lesbians for the mainstream of American society, which perceived them as disparate, marginal individuals possessing neither. In all, he photographed more than 600 writers. (http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/digitallibrary/giard.html)
Marijane Meaker was involved romantically with author Patricia Highsmith for two years. She wrote about this relationship in the 2003 non-fiction memoir, Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s, and discussed it and her own pulp-fiction novels in interviews around the time of the book's release. Meaker explained her reasons behind writing about their relationship: "I knew Pat when she was young and not yet so jaded and bigoted. The internet is filled with stories of her meanness, and prejudice, and also of her introversion, of her being a loner. I met that Pat many years after we broke up."
As of 2006, Meaker was living in East Hampton, New York, where she taught writing classes at the Ashawagh Hall Writers' Workshop. Her workshop experiences led to the nonfiction instructional book, Blood on the Forehead: What I Know About Writing (1998).
Michael Dirda observed that "Europeans honored her as a psychological novelist, part of an existentialist tradition represented by her own favorite writers, in particular Dostoevsky, Conrad, Kafka, Gide, and Camus".Born Mary Patricia Plangman in Fort Worth, Texas. She lived in her maternal grandmother's boarding house with her mother, and later her step father. In 1927 she moved to New York City with her mother and step father. When Highsmith was 12 years old, she was taken to Fort Worth and lived with her grandmother for a year. She called this the "saddest year" of her life, and felt abandoned by her mother. She returned to New York to continue living with her mother and step father, Stanley Highsmith. Highsmith's mother Mary had divorced "Patsy's" father (Jay Bernard Plangman) five months before her birth, and he is absent from the family's history after that. The young Highsmith had an intense, complicated relationship with her mother and resented her stepfather, although she took his surname, and in later years she sometimes tried to win him over to her side of the argument in her confrontations with her mother. According to Highsmith, her mother once told her that she had tried to abort her by drinking turpentine. Highsmith never resolved this love-hate relationship, which haunted her for the rest of her life, and which she fictionalized in her short story "The Terrapin", about a young boy who stabs his mother to death.
Highsmith's grandmother taught her to read at an early age. Highsmith made good use of her grandmother's extensive library. At the age of eight, she discovered Karl Menninger's The Human Mind
According to her biography, Beautiful Shadow
She famously preferred the company of animals to that of people, and once said, "My imagination functions much better when I don't have to speak to people."
"She was a mean, hard, cruel, unlovable, unloving person," said acquaintance Otto Penzler. "I could never penetrate how any human being could be that relentlessly ugly."
Other friends and acquaintances were less caustic in their criticism, however; Gary Fisketjon, who published her later novels through Knopf, said that "she was rough, very difficult... but she was also plainspoken, dryly funny, and great fun to be around."Highsmith was bi-sexual, and never married or had children. In 1943 she had an affair with the artist Allela Cornell (who subsequently committed suicide in 1946 by drinking nitric acid and in 1949), she became close to novelist Marc Brandel. Between 1959 and 1961 she had a relationship with Marijane Meaker, who wrote under the pseudonyms of Vin Packer and Ann Aldrich, but later wrote young adult fiction with the name M.E. Kerr. Meaker wrote of their affair in her memoir Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s
Highsmith was never comfortable with blacks, and she was outspokenly anti-Semitic — so much so that when she was living in Switzerland in the 1980s, she invented nearly 40 aliases, identities she used in writing to various government bodies and newspapers, deploring the state of Israel and the “influence” of the Jews; nevertheless, she had Jewish friends such as author Arthur Koestler, and admired Jewish writers such as Franz Kafka and Saul Bellow. She was accused of misogyny because of her satirical collection of short stories Little Tales of Misogyny
Highsmith loved woodworking tools and made several pieces of furniture. She kept pet snails; she worked without stopping. In her later life she became stooped, with an osteoporotic hump.
Though her writing — 22 novels and eight books of short stories — was highly acclaimed, especially outside of the United States, Highsmith preferred for her personal life to remain private. She had friendships and correspondences with several writers, and was also greatly inspired by art and the animal kingdom. Highsmith believed in American democratic ideals and in the promise of US history, but she was also highly critical of the reality of the country's 20th-century culture and foreign policy. Beginning in 1963, she resided exclusively in Europe.
Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes
Highsmith died of leukemia in Locarno, Switzerland. In gratitude to the place that helped inspire her writing career, she left her estate, worth an estimated $3 million, to the Yaddo colony. Her last novel, Small g: A Summer Idyll
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Highsmith
Highsmith has long been one of my literary icons. When it comes to probing the darkest sides of human nature, no one does it better than she. Strangers on a Train is a much better novel than the Hitchcock movie of the same name (although that was not without its charm, among them the very lovely Farley Granger) and has a much darker resolution. Its homoeroticism, too, is much more explicit than in the sanitized Hollywood film that bears the same name. --Rick R. Reed
On my first casual viewing of the film, The Talented Mr. Ripley, I missed most of the gay content. After reading the book and watching the movie again, I marvel at how anyone could miss it. Ripley is a tragic villain, if there can be such a thing, but such a well-drawn character that you can't help being engaged in the book. --Kyell Gold
Some books (like mine) leave little to the imagine when it comes to sizzling mansex. Others, like THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY, let the heat between the characters simmer and brew, without so much as a word being said or a deed being done. And although this book isn’t strictly a GLBT novel, the sexual tension between Tom and Dickie is electric, and ultimately devastating. I’ve loved this book for a long time, and I was so pleased when the movie came out that instead of dumbing down the homoerotic tension (which Hollywood is so fond of doing), director Anthony Minghella actually turned the gay heat levels all the way up, even given Tom a male love interest other than Dickie! Bravo! --Geoffrey KnightFurther Readings:
Paperback: 250 pages
Publisher: Cleis Press; 1 edition (April 2003)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1573441716
ISBN-13: 978-1573441711
Amazon: Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950's
Patricia Highsmith, author of classics such as The Talented Mr. Ripley and The Price of Salt, was a lesbian who defied categorization during the postwar period. Her dynamic, often difficult life coupled with her sinister crime stories and upbeat lesbian pulp fiction challenged popular stereotypes about homosexuality as well as women writers. To aspiring young novelist Marijane Meaker, however, Highsmith was more than a role model. During their two-year romance amidst the bohemian set of Greenwich Village and the literary crowd of the Hamptons, the pair navigated the underground lesbian bar scene, lunched with literary stars like Janet Flanner, shared intimacies, gossiped with abandon, and maintained a steady routine of writing and heavy drinking. Written with wit and brassy candor, this is a rare and revealing look at the life and loves of a controversial icon of popular American fiction.
Paperback: 183 pages
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY (November 1, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1558615253
ISBN-13: 978-1558615250
Amazon: We Walk Alone
In 1955, this groundbreaking pulp revealed “underground” lesbian life in Greenwich Village. Part Kinsey-esque portraits of real people, part you-are-there reports on the scene in bars and offices and at clubs and house parties, this is an authentic “cultural artifact” of a resilient community on the cusp of change.
Paperback: 185 pages
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY (November 1, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 155861527X
ISBN-13: 978-1558615274
Amazon: We, Too, Must Love
Three years after We Walk Alone, Ann Aldrich expands on her journalistic portraits of lesbian subcultures in and around New York to include: class questions; the diverse jobs lesbians held; social cliques; differences among the “Village,” “Uptown,” and Brooklyn communities; and hints at the growing consciousness that would fuel later lesbian and gay rights movements. The sequel closes with sample letters from the six hundred written to Aldrich after We Walk Alone was published.
Paperback: 240 pages
Publisher: Harper Perennial (December 17, 2002)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0060087919
ISBN-13: 978-0060087913
Amazon: Shockproof Sydney Skate
Sydney Skate has dubbed himself "Shockproof": He decoded his mother's gossip with her glamorous lesbian girlfriends at age eight (but has never let on to her that he knows she's gay). He easily shrugs off his father's demands to skip college and join him in the exciting world of swimming pool sales for suburbanites. During his summer days, he deftly cares for snakes at the local pet shop. And he has memorized the sex scenes of every book he's ever read in order to better seduce women. Nothing, however, has prepared Sydney for his mother sweeping Alison Gray, the girl of his dreams, off her feet.
Witty and perceptive, Sydney's coming-of-age story has been a classic of lesbian literature since it was first published in 1973. It was a Literary Guild Alternate and a Book Find Club Selection. Hailed as the Catcher in the Rye for the seventies, Shockproof Sydney Skate exposes the confusion of its time and remains keenly relevant to the sexual absurdities of today.
Paperback: 704 pages
Publisher: Picador; First Edition edition (January 4, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0312363818
ISBN-13: 978-0312363819
Amazon: The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith
A 2010 Lambda Literary Award Winner
A 2009 Edgar Award Nominee
A 2009 Agatha Award Nominee
A Publishers Weekly Pick of the Week
Patricia Highsmith, one of the great writers of twentieth-century American fiction, had a life as darkly compelling as that of her favorite “hero-criminal,” the talented Tom Ripley. Joan Schenkar maps out this richly bizarre life from her birth in Texas to Hitchcock’s filming of her first novel, Strangers on a Train, to her long, strange self-exile in Europe. We see her as a secret writer for the comics, a brilliant creator of disturbing fictions, and an erotic predator with dozens of women (and a few good men) on her love list. The Talented Miss Highsmith is the first literary biography with access to Highsmith’s whole story: her closest friends, her oeuvre, her archives. It’s a compulsive page-turner unlike any other, a book worthy of Highsmith herself.
JOAN SCHENKAR is the author of Truly Wilde: The Unsettling Story of Dolly Wilde as well as a collection of plays, Signs of Life: 6 Comedies of Menace. She lives in Paris and Greenwich Village.
More Particular Voices at my website: http://www.elisarolle.com/, My Ramblings/Particular Voices
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