1. Marijane Agnes Meaker was an American writer who, along with Tereska Torres, was credited with launching the lesbian pulp fiction genre, the only accessible novels on that theme in the 1950s.
19 Facts About Marijane Meaker
1. 2.
Marijane Meaker mentioned in an autobiography that Carson McCullers' book Member of the Wedding influenced her.
3.
Marijane Meaker was this sensitive, intelligent writer whose words were lovely.
4.
Marijane Meaker was particularly interested in the idea of a pseudonym, that one could invent a new name, and a new personality with each name.
5.
Marijane Meaker asked her parents to send her to Stuart Hall School, a boarding school in Staunton, Virginia, when she heard that lesbian activity occurred frequently at boarding schools.
6.
Marijane Meaker 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.
7.
Marijane Meaker made frequent submissions to literary magazines and collected many rejection slips.
8.
Marijane Meaker sold her first story to Ladies' Home Journal under the name Laura Winston for $750.
9.
Marijane Meaker used the pseudonym Ann Aldrich for a series of five books published as paperback originals, but which were in fact nonfiction works.
10.
Marijane Meaker read Donald Webster Cory's book The Homosexual in America, which was a nonfiction book about gay men.
11.
Marijane Meaker was persuaded to try young adult fiction at the suggestion of author Louise Fitzhugh, and chose to do so after reading Paul Zindel's The Pigman.
12.
Marijane Meaker chose the pen name M E Kerr, as a phonetic play on her last name.
13.
Marijane Meaker 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.
14.
The story was inspired by a class Marijane Meaker taught by going into high schools and talking to students about writing.
15.
Marijane Meaker was involved romantically with author Patricia Highsmith for two years.
16.
Marijane Meaker wrote about this relationship in the 2003 nonfiction 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.
17.
Marijane Meaker died of cardiopulmonary arrest at her home in Springs, New York, on November 21,2022, at the age of 95.
18.
Marijane Meaker won the award in 2013 and joined the likes of Ann Bannon, Sarah Aldridge, Jane Rule, Ellen Hart, and many others as guiding lights of lesbian literature.
19.
Marijane Meaker received other lifetime achievement awards from Publishing Triangle in 1998, the New York State Library Association in 1999 and the Assembly on Literature in 2000.