15 Facts About Helene Hanff

Helene Hanff was an American writer born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Helene Hanff is best known as the author of the book 84, Charing Cross Road, which became the basis for a stage play, television play, and film of the same name.

Helene Hanff's father had been a performer, but he settled down to sell shirts.

Helene Hanff said that she was resigned to leaving after a year when the money was used up.

Helene Hanff decided to teach herself, and she established a daily schedule of study.

Helene Hanff had to abandon this when she realized that her family needed her to be a wage earner.

Helene Hanff wrote a memoir in 1961 called Underfoot in Show Business that chronicled her struggles as an ambitious young playwright trying to make it in the world of New York theatre in the 1940s and 1950s.

Helene Hanff worked in publicists' offices and spent summers on the "straw hat circuit" along the East Coast, all the while writing one play after another.

When network television production geared up in New York City in the early 1950s, Hanff found a new career writing and editing scripts for many early television dramas.

In 1981, Helene Hanff appeared on the BBC's Desert Island Discs radio programme, in which she discussed her life and career along with her top choice of music which was Bach and her choice of luxury was Scrabble.

Helene Hanff became intimately involved in the lives of the shop's staff, sending them food parcels during Britain's postwar shortages and sharing with them details of her life in Manhattan.

Helene Hanff did finally visit Charing Cross Road and the empty but still-standing shop in the summer of 1971, a trip recorded in her 1973 book The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street.

In Duchess, Helene Hanff describes her visits with friends and fans to various locations and places of literary and historical interest in London and Southern England.

Helene Hanff later put to good use her obsession with British scholar Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in a book called Q's Legacy.

Helene Hanff died from diabetes six days before her 81st birthday in 1997 in New York City.