Peyton Place

Product Information

Several characters and events were drawn from events in nearby towns and people that Metalious actually knew. Selena Cross was based on Barbara Roberts, a 20-year-old girl from the village of Gilmanton Ironworks, who murdered her father Sylvester after years of sexual abuse and buried his body under a sheep pen. In the novel, Selena kills her stepfather because incest was considered too taboo for readers at the time. Metalious' editor Kitty Messner made the change, much to the author's dismay and disapproval. [5] Plot [ edit ] She was born into poverty and a broken home as Marie Grace de Repentigny in the mill town of Manchester, New Hampshire. Blessed with the gift of imagination, she was driven to write from an early age. After graduating from Manchester High School Central, she married George Metalious in 1943, became a housewife and mother, lived in near squalor — and continued to write. Once when asked if Peyton Place would stand the test of time, Grace said she didn’t think so, but as the structure of society has changed so has the way people now look at her work.

After Metalious's death, Peyton Place resurfaced as the setting for nine novels by Don Tracy (1905–1976), writing as Roger Fuller, including Evils of Peyton Place (1969) and Temptations of Peyton Place (1970), but this series had only modest sales. [6] In spite of a short-lived reconciliation with her first husband George, Grace continued on her destructive path. She began an affair with a British journalist, John Rees, and made a new will leaving him her whole estate shortly before she was rushed to hospital in Boston.Her other novels, all of which sold well but never achieved the same success as her first, were Return to Peyton Place (1959), The Tight White Collar (1961) and No Adam in Eden (1963). This book is a story within another story. The first story is about author Grace Metalious, her life, and her novel "Peyton Place". The second story is about Barbara Roberts and the sheep pen murder which was, at least to some degree, the inspiration for the murder in Metalious' novel. It was while living in Gilmanton, New Hampshire, where George was a principal, that Grace read about a girl who murdered her father after he sexually abused her repeatedly. She hid him in their farm’s sheep pen, thus earning the case national headlines as “The Sheep Pen Murder.”

This book is perfect for a summer afternoon on the couch, or taking to the beach for a good read! For true crime lovers, this is one story that you are not going to want to miss - even if you discover that you can't stand Grace Metalious, you will be drawn into the story of a young girl who would do anything to protect herself and her younger brother at any cost. Actors Terry Moore and Barry Coein a scene from the 1957 Peyton Place film adaptation. (20th Century Fox/Getty Images) The original movie Peyton Place (1957) starred Lana Turner and Hope Lange. A TV series Peyton Place ran from 1964 to 1969 and was the springboard for a number of actors including Ryan O’Neal and Mia Farrow. Return to Peyton Place (1961) was directed by Jose Ferrer and its stars included Jeff Chandler, Carol Lynley and Tuesday Weld.

Peyton Place, The Book

La novela esta dividida en tres partes y en cada parte irán apareciendo personajes nuevos pero en las tres partes se van a mantener dos protagonistas, Selena y Allison. A pesar de tener un reparto coral con gran cantidad de personajes, en ningún momento uno se siente perdido, ya que todos ellos están fantásticamente caracterizados, incluso los más secundarios. En mi opinión, uno de los puntos fuertes de la obra es cómo están representados aquellos personajes femeninos que se alejan de aquello que se esperaba de las mujeres en los años 30 y 40, como Selena y Allison, y cuyos comportamientos y actitudes de mujeres fuertes e independientes escuecen a más de uno. From the original review by Luise Putcamp, Jr., in the Ogden (Utah) Standard-Examiner, October 7, 1956: I shot my father, Sylvester Roberts, last December at our home in Gilmanton Iron Works. This happened December 23, 1946 at 6p.m. I shot him with a gun that was at the house. It was his gun; I don’t know what caliber it was. After I shot him, I dragged him into the barn myself and put him into the cellar under the sheep pen. There was nobody there when all this happened. I never told anybody about this until I told my brother today (Sept. 5)”

Grace made statements to interviewers like: “Everybody who lives in town knows that’s going on. There are no secrets, but they don’t want outsiders to know,” and “To a tourist these towns look as peaceful as a picture postcard, but if you go beneath that picture … all kinds of strange things crawl out.” Unknown to most readers, behind the fictional story about the lives and scandals of residents of a small New England town Metalious called Peyton Place, lay a dark secret based on fact. The story was, in part, inspired by a true life crime known in the press as “The Sheep Pen Murder,” which took place in Gilmanton, New Hampshire in the late 1940s.Metalious found an agent, Jacques Chambrun, who submitted the draft manuscript to three major publishers. In the summer of 1955, Leona Nevler, a freelance manuscript reader, read it for Lippincott and liked it, but knew it was too steamy for a major publisher to accept. She showed it to Kathryn G. ("Kitty") Messner, president and editor-in-chief of the small firm Julian Messner. Messner immediately acquired the novel and asked Nevler to step in as a freelance editor for final polishing before publication. [4] Publishing phenomenon [ edit ] At the age of 30, she began work in the fall of 1954 on a manuscript with the working title The Tree and the Blossom. By the spring of 1955, she had finished a first draft. However, she and her husband regarded The Tree and the Blossom as an unwieldy title and decided to give the town a name which could be the book's title. They first considered Potter Place (the name of a real community near Andover, New Hampshire). Realizing their town should have a fictional name, they looked through an atlas and found Payton (the name of a real town in Texas). They combined this with Place and changed the "a" to an "e". Thus, Peyton Place was born. Supongo que se tiene que reconocer el valor de la propuesta, que tiene algo de fundacional. Quiero decir que debe de ser uno de los primeros libros que explota el ahora tópico esquema de pueblo aparentemente idílico de familias modélicas de puertas afuera pero que esconden secretos más o menos escabrosos de puertas adentro. Así, se atreve a tocar temas como el sexo prematrimonial, el incesto, el aborto, los abusos sexuales, el caciquismo de los poderosos, etc. Y él que a mí más me ha parecido más interesante (por más poco habitual): la sexualidad femenina, desde el despertar hasta el redescubrimiento pasando por la represión.

At the age of eighteen she married George Metalious (1925-2015) who came from a Greek family. The couple had three children. After World War II army service, George became a teacher, but Grace wasn’t the perfect faculty wife and displayed rebellious tendencies. Not your ideal mom The Peyton Place Murder takes the reader from Grace's first days of her writing to her death at age 39. Her life, even when earning large amounts of money for her book, was not a happy one. She was not well-liked in the small town where she lived because everyone was scandalized by her book ... all swearing that she was using them as characters in her book. That never changed in her lifetime.Both Grace and Barbara had tragic events in their lives. It was fascinating that 1940s and 1950s small town residents could forgive and embrace a young woman for murder more easily than a rebellious writer who would not conform to small town standards.