Unbuttoning America: A Biography of "Peyton Place", by Ardis Cameron
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Unbuttoning America: A Biography of "Peyton Place", by Ardis Cameron
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Limited time offer: Through special arrangement with University Press of New England, we are pleased to offer a specially priced two-book set of Unbuttoning America and Peyton Place for just $29.95 paperback.
Published in 1956, Peyton Place became a bestseller and a literary phenomenon. 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 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
Unbuttoning America: A Biography of "Peyton Place", by Ardis Cameron- Amazon Sales Rank: #385202 in Books
- Brand: Cameron, Ardis
- Published on: 2015-05-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.20" h x .80" w x 6.20" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 240 pages
Review
"Unbuttoning Americaboasts a sizzling cover of a busty '50s pinup girl resting a blue book on her sleek, gartered legs while flashing the reader a come-hither-quick look. . . . Cameronteasesout the book's significance as a bold exploration of sexual, political, gender and class questions rarely recognized in its time.For the general reader, the most rewarding parts of Cameron's book are her pages about Grace Metalious herself, the sources of her material, and her fervent fans. Cameron had access to a trove of thousands of letters written by readers to Metalious. Most came from grateful women who felt that she had told their secret, anguished stories."―Edward Kosner, Wall Street Journal (May 22, 2015)
"Like any good biography of a human, this volume includes the background history of its subject, here Grace Metalious's scandalous best-selling novel Peyton Place (1956). Cameron's book is ararity among serious scholarly texts: it is thorough in its scholarshipand at the same time a page-turner." ―B. Wallenstein,Choice(November 2015)
"More than just a page-turner, Cameron argues, Peyton Place was 'an exercise in rupture, a deep gash in the iron fabric of conventional ways of thinking and being.' Its frank portrayal of sex outside of marriage was enough to invite censure and censorship nationwide. (In Beverly Farms, Cameron writes, the library posted a sign for those seeking Peyton Place: 'If you want it, go to Salem.') The book broke other rules as well, Cameron writes, including speaking directly to women about 'the unfairness of things,' a kind of proto-feminist protest published years before Betty Friedan wrote about the 'problem that had no name.'. . . This is a serious scholarly work, but with very few exceptions Cameron eschews academic jargon for a plainspoken intelligence that befits her subject, who once rebuked critics: 'If I'm a lousy writer ... a hell of a lot of people have got lousy taste.'"―Kate Tuttle, The Boston Globe (May 21, 2015)
★ "University of Southern Maine American Studies professor Cameron (Radicals of the Worst Sort) presents a unique synthesis of historical research and fresh analysis in this study of Peyton Place. . . . 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." Cameron's intelligent treatment of a racy novel meant to be read often at night, under bedcovers, a flashlight illuminating the guilty pleasures of the act' makes for a fascinating read in and of itself."―Publishers Weekly (May 4, 2015)
"Cameron (American & New England studies, Univ. 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. Metalious's fan mail shows how women identified with her: they felt she understood them; her success gave them hope. This brisk read on a fascinating subject will be helpful in understanding how we got from there to here. VERDICT Readers who remember the stir Peyton Place aroused when it first came out will rush to pick up this lively book.―David Keymer, Library Journal (June 1, 2015)
"When first-time author Grace Metalious's tale of a sleepy New England town's sordid underpinnings first appeared in 1956, it rocked America. Released at the height of Eisenhower-era conservatism, her colourful yarn, which addressed such taboos as incest, abortion and class inequality, with murder and large doses of social hypocrisy tossed into the mix, became the world’s favourite dirty secret. . . . 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. The novel, she says, "sounded a clarion call" to readers to acknowledge the falsity of Ozzie and Harriet mores. 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. . . . [Peyton Place] gave an entire generation of women 'hope, courage, confirmation, validation.'"―Christopher Loudon, Maclean's (May 22, 2015)
"Unbuttoning America is a wonderful book about a fascinating and historically significant topic: Grace Metalious, her novel Peyton Place, and her readers. It is clearly argued, strongly researched, impressively structured, and beautifully written. The consistent use of readers' fan letters, combined with quotes from Metalious and her personal and professional contemporaries, provides a thorough analysis and vivid sense of the production and reception of this literary blockbuster. The energetic writing, with Ardis Cameron's voice coming through on every page, makes the book lively. Cameron’s rich historical contextualization allows the reader to grasp the full meaning and significance of Peyton Place and its cultural work."―Jennifer Frost, University of Auckland, author of Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood: Celebrity Gossip and American Conservatism
"Seldom have I encountered a book as well-written and argued as Unbuttoning America. Ardis Cameron has mastered a tremendous amount of knowledge of the historic era, popular literature and popular culture, women's writing, women’s reading, the literary marketplace, New York publishing, the history of sexuality, the construction of New England, consumer culture, and the sociology of everyday life. 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."―Judith E. Smith, University of Massachusetts, Boston, author of Visions of Belonging: Family Stories, Popular Culture, and Postwar Democracy, 1940–1960
About the Author
Ardis Cameron is Professor of American and New England Studies at the University of Southern Maine. She is the author of Radicals of the Worst Sort: The Laboring Women of Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1880–1912 and the editor of Looking For America: The Visual Making of People and Nation. She also provided the introductions to the reprint editions of Peyton Place and Return to Peyton Place.
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Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful. Admirable Effort and a Fabulous Read By Laura D WHAT a fabulous book, and why couldn't it be longer? I gobbled it up this afternoon and evening, as soon as it was delivered in the mail. There is so much to say about the cultural influence of Peyton Place and Grace Metalious' life -- well covered in Emily Toth's excellent 1981 and so far only extant biography, yes, but here is updated information from Ardis Cameron on the 1947 Barbara Roberts case (whom Toth, to my and perhaps other readers' puzzlement, covers with the pseudonym of "Jane Glenn", so that for years I thought that WAS the victim's real name).It's so absolutely true that the novel had a dark, despairing interior which the silly, squeaky-clean movie version of course came nowhere near capturing, and for once an old fart like myself can say that I was too young to have ever seen the 1960's TV series, but I'd always heard it was even worse than the movie. I wonder, I just wonder what it would be like to actually do a film version which is really true to the book, setting it in the 1930's, and WWII-and-postwar 1940's -- to really have it as sordid and shabby with tragic class struggles and grim sexual cruelty as Grace Metalious' novel portrayed. They can even throw in the sleazy aspects of the sequel novel, Return to Peyton Place, but how interesting it would be to have 1940's period authenticity (just like in the 1996 version of Lolita, which makes the story one of heartrendingly sad and tragic abuse belying the bucolic settings, instead of snickering trash like the 1962 version). I don't understand why no film company, especially an indie one, would want to undertake this project, and highlight the proto-feminist undertone of the story, which Metalious probably didn't even realize she was doing. I'd heard that for some time there was going to be a film biography of Grace Metalious, and THAT would be very interesting.There is some disparity of agreement of whether or not Metalious' publisher had a ghostwriter pull together the sequel novel, because Grace was by then severely alcoholic and the book, such as it was, proved to be a mess, yet she was able to follow it with two readable, in fact fairly well written, books: The Tight White Collar and No Adam in Eden, although both novels sorely lacked the pungency of the first Peyton Place. One wonders what Grace Metalious could have been capable of had she lived, been able to temper or even recover from her drinking trouble, and sailed into the 1970's with novels of possibly equal merit (as far as popular fiction is concerned,but let's face it, we can't be literary snobs here; this book's appearance in the mid-1950's blew everyone out of the water.) If critics grumble that Sinclair Lewis did pretty much the same thing in the 1920's, just remember that getting the story from a woman's point of view isn't the same as having a woman actually write it, and rather than scraping against or hinting at scandal, she bravely dove into a roman a clef which exposed the very worst of a small community's rancid hypocrisy and exploitation of the poor and helpless. Whether or not it was quasi-autobiographical really doesn't matter some 60 years later. She showed people the ghastliness of their lives which none of the existing blue laws or churchgoing or smug acceptance of everyone "knowing their place" could successfully quash, no matter how many town elders and librarians fought to keep the novel out of circulation and from being sold in bookstores. Yes, of course since the 1900's there'd been plenty of novels showing how wormy and vile supposedly pastoral small towns can be -- Bellemann, Dreiser, Anderson, Lewis, et. al. -- but having a woman write it, with females as acting protagonists instead of ornaments, was a revelation in its time. And really, I am disappointed this remarkable effort by Cameron wasn't longer -- it truly should have been; there is much to expound upon to expand it.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. Dangerous Ideas Packaged as Pulp Fiction By takingadayoff It's hard to imagine what a splash the book Peyton Place made when it came out in the Fifties. It addressed issues that were largely not discussed except in whispers, issues such as incest, child abuse, date rape, and perhaps the most dangerous of all, feminism. Of course it was the sex that sold the book, and that's what most people remember about it even today.American Studies Professor Ardis Cameron looks at Peyton Place in its mid-century historical context, as a publishing phenomenon, at its incarnations as a movie and as a TV series, at the reactions among critics and fans, and at the author, Grace Metalious.The divide that Peyton Place exposed was evident in a single household. While noted critic Bernard De Voto was harrumphing over the "cultural tripe" that was infesting the literary world, his wife, book reviewer and editor Avis De Voto got a letter from family friend Julia Child (yes, the French Chef) saying she had "quite enjoyed it." She said that Metalious "does have a style, and a manner of creating atmosphere and character." And that having finished Peyton Place, Child was ready to return to the Goethe she'd been tackling before that.Metalious wrote Peyton Place as a serious effort, not as is suggested by the lurid paperback cover art, as pulp fiction. In a way, it was as much a protest against the status quo as was Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, which wouldn't appear until 1963, seven years after the debut of Peyton Place. Metalious was considered an outsider of sorts due to her "exotic" ethnicity as French Canadian and her husband's Greek heritage. She would never be allowed to fit in, so she decided to stand out.Cameron makes an academic treatment of literature into a fascinating ride into Fifties culture, post-War angst, publishing and bookselling, the results of sudden fame and fortune, and reverberations that reach into the 21st century.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. The last part of the book finally deals with Grace Metalious and The Book Peyton Place and I really enjoyed it. However having s By bookwomen37 This review is really a 3 1/2 star review. I found the beginning of the book to be rather slow and the author repeated herself a lot, sometimes word for word. The beginning of the book was more of a history of publishing and reading. The last part of the book finally deals with Grace Metalious and The Book Peyton Place and I really enjoyed it. However having studied Women's Lit, read Peyton Place and the Grace Biography there was not a lot of new information to me in this book. The letters to Grace are interesting but they are too many of them that basically say the same thing. I am glad I finished this book since I enjoyed the ending and for those not familiar with Peyton Place or Grace should enjoy reading about this publishing phenomenon.
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