Unbuttoning america a biography of peyton place
Home / Celebrity Biographies / Unbuttoning america a biography of peyton place
With its positive portrayal of single motherhood, working women and female sexuality, she argues, it helped pave the way for Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique.... of Sourthern Maine; Looking for America) explores the impact of this admittedly trashy novel on buttoned-up America: "dirty" books such as Peyton Place presented believable alternatives to people seeking answers to their dilemmas.
Cameron's book is a rarity among serious scholarly texts: it is thorough in its scholarship and at the same time a page-turner.
Cameron (American & New England studies, Univ. Metalious's fan mail shows how women identified with her: they felt she understood them; her success gave them hope. A lurid and gripping story of murder, incest, female desire, and social injustice, it was consumed as avidly by readers as it was condemned by critics and the clergy.
Its author, Grace Metalious, a housewife who grew up in poverty in a New Hampshire mill town and had aspired to be a writer from childhood, loosely based the novel’s setting, characters, and incidents on real-life places, people, and events. The novel, she says, sounded a clarion call to readers to acknowledge the falsity of Ozzie and Harriet mores.
Cameron deploys this material lightly, with consummate skill, to produce a revelatory account that illuminates how a popular book enters and transforms the cultural landscape.
Unbuttoning America: A Biography of "Peyton Place"
Published in 1956, Peyton Place became a bestseller and a literary phenomenon.
Cameron dexterously tracks the shock waves, unearthing gushing fan letters as well as scathing reviews that deemed the book a lethal weapon aimed at the purity of family life. Its author, Grace Metalious, a housewife who grew up in poverty in a New Hampshire mill town and had aspired to be a writer from childhood, loosely based the novel’s setting, characters, and incidents on real-life places, people, and events.
Fictionalizing contemporary realities, Metalious pushed to the surface the hidden talk and secret rebellions of a generation no longer willing to ignore the disparities and domestic constraints of Cold War America.
Keywords
publishing industry, Grace Metalious, incest novels, sex and gender, 1950s US, women's history, sexuality, abortionISBN
9780801453649, 9780801456091, 9781501775970, 9780801456107Publisher
Cornell University PressPublisher website
https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/Publication date and place
2015Classification
Literature: history and criticism
History of the Americas
Biography: writers
Pages
240Rights
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
She argues that Peyton Place, with its frank discussions of poverty, sexuality, class and ethnic discrimination, and small-town hypocrisy, was more than a tawdry potboiler.More broadly, Cameron asserts, the novel was also part of a larger postwar struggle over belonging and recognition. More than half a century later, the term "Peyton Place" is still in circulation as a code for a community harboring sordid secrets.In Unbuttoning America, Ardis Cameron mines extensive interviews, fan letters, and archival materials including contemporary cartoons and cover images from film posters and foreign editions to tell how the story of a patricide in a small New England village circulated over time and became a cultural phenomenon.
Fictionalizing contemporary realities, Metalious pushed to the surface the hidden talk and secret rebellions of a generation no longer willing to ignore the disparities and domestic constraints of Cold War America. ; Published in 1956, Peyton Place became a bestseller and a literary phenomenon. Metalious’s depiction of how her three central female characters come to terms with their identity as women and sexual beings anticipated second-wave feminism.
More broadly, Cameron asserts, the novel was also part of a larger postwar struggle over belonging and recognition. a hell of a lot of people have got lousy taste.'
B. That response is worthy of consideration.'
Christopher Loudon:
When first-time author Grace Metalious's tale of a sleepy New England town's sordid underpinnings first appeared in 1956, it rocked America.
The novel sold more than 30 million copies in hardcover and paperback, and it was adapted into a hit Hollywood film in 1957 and a popular television series that aired from 1964 to 1969. Now, six decades on, Ardis Cameron, a professor at the University of Southern Maine, shapes what is likely the first scholarly examination of the book's role in the changing American zeitgeist.