Return to Peyton Place by Grace Metalious

It was while she was living in Gilmanton that Julian Messner, a New York publisher, agreed to publish Peyton Place.

By now the family had three children, all dependent upon his meager salary. It was here that Metalious began writing seriously, neglecting both her house and, eventually, three children, despite the condemnation of her neighbors.Īfter graduation George was offered a position as a principal at a school in Gilmanton, New Hampshire. A few years later, with one child already, the Metalious's moved to Durham, New Hampshire, where George attended the University of New Hampshire.

In high school Grace met George Metalious, who was neither Catholic nor of French-Canadian background and, thus, highly unacceptable to her family. These activities seemed to offer her an escape from a generally unhappy family. Grace also enjoyed acting in school plays. Many of her stories featured a romantic heroine who gets her hero in the end. Metalious, however, discovered the pleasure of writing early. At that time divorce was unusual in a French Canadian family, and Grace and her sisters felt stigmatized. Metalious's father deserted his wife and three daughters when Grace was 11 years old. She was born Marie Grace DeRepentigny in Manchester, New Hampshire, in 1924. Treat yourself to this rediscovered classic.Grace Metalious is best known as the author of the infamous Peyton Place, a book that caused a social upheaval even before it was published in 1956. Peyton Place and its sequel, Return to Peyton Place, the books that readers used to hide under their mattresses, are now recognized by scholars as the Silent Generation’s Perfect Storm and predecessors to the women’s liberation movement. Peyton Place, the small, seemingly respectable New England town, is revealed as a vividly realistic cauldron of secrets and scandal. At home, the rest of the most controversial characters in 1950s American fiction continue to create a stir in this ongoing exposé of sex, hypocrisy, social inequity, and class privilege in contemporary America. In 1959 the sizzling sequel, Return to Peyton Place, picked up where Peyton Place left off: Allison MacKenzie, now the author of America’s #1 bestseller, is thrown into the glamorous whirl of the smart set of New York and Hollywood. In 1956 Grace Metalious published Peyton Place, the novel that unbuttoned the straitlaced New England of the popular imagination, transformed the publishing industry, topped the bestseller lists for more than a year, and made its young author one of the most talked-about people in America.

Return to Peyton Place by Grace Metalious