Let's write about the 70th anniversary of the blockbuster "Peyton Place" and the tragic life of the book's author

(Maine Writer:  I recall how our Dundalk, Maryland public library kept this book hidden under the distribution desk so minors like me would be unable to read it.)

70 years since the scandal surrounding the publication of 'Peyton Place'. Echo report published in Elmundo America by Luis Fernando Romo. 

Grace Metalious and her husband, George, at home in front of the typewriter.

The anniversary of the provocative 'best seller' that made a poor American housewife rich and famous is celebrated. She ended up ruined, alcoholic, and estranged from her family.

Grace Metalious' name may have been forgotten, but not her scandalous novel Peyton Place, which is now celebrating its 70th anniversary. Fame exacerbated her alcoholism, she fought with her three children, and her lover inherited everything.

A poor housewife, uneducated and addicted to alcohol, overnight became one of the great literary phenomena of the 1950s. Amidst the scandal involving Ingrid Bergman after leaving her husband and daughter for Roberto Rossellini and Elizabeth Taylor's excommunication by the Vatican for her affair with Richard Burton during Cleopatra, there was another uproar that left conservative American society disturbed.

In 1956, Grace Metalious published Peyton Place, the most transgressive and sinful novel to date, exposing the most shameful human miseries such as domestic violence, racial and class hatred, corruption of religious power, and taboo conversations like childhood sexual abuse, the right to abortion, and women's sexual awakening, among others.

But, until success came, Grace couldn't shake off the memory of that lonely girl who escaped the poverty of her home by taking refuge in her aunt's bathroom where she wrote poems and fairy tales.

An avid reader with an unfathomable imagination, Grace wanted to erase any trace of the impoverished ghetto in which she was trapped. The small Franco-American community of Manchester, a town in New Hampshire, New England, was not meant for her.

Therefore, she didn't hesitate to change the spelling of her last name, DeRepentigny, to invent a French aristocratic lineage while in high school. She tried to convince everyone that her full name was Grace Marie-Antoinette Jeanne d'Arc de Repentigny, but she became the laughingstock of almost everyone.

In her quest for a glamorous past, she took after her mother, who used to sell trinkets like antique French furniture at flea markets. She never heard from her father again after he enlisted in the Navy.

Despite opposition from both families, Grace married at 18 years old her high school friend George Metalious, from whom she took her last name and with whom she had three children, Marsha, Christopher, and Cynthia.

Once again, writing helped her cope with a tubal ligation, her husband's service in World War II, and their infidelities.

After moving to Gilmanton, New Hampshire, Grace sought a way to type her first major novel while enduring severe poverty. To concentrate, she sent her hungry, blue-lipped children out into the street, while neighbors criticized her behavior. To them, the writer was a strange specimen sabotaging the strict conservative norms by dressing in an androgynous manner.

Rising above adversity, in the summer of 1955, she completed her first manuscript titled The Tree and the Flower.

Several publishers ignored the story until it landed in the hands of Kitty Messner, the founder of a small independent publishing house and one of the few women in the field.

After changing the title to Peyton Place, the novel was released in September 1956. The story exposed the hypocrisy, scandals, and dark secrets behind the moral façade of a small town in New England. On the 70th anniversary of the work, the publisher Blackie Books releases Return to Peyton Place, which the writer marketed in 1959.

The puritan and self-righteous society collapsed. How dare she, a woman, insult the image of so many respectable citizens? Critics called the work sensationalist garbage, immoral, obscene, and devoid of literary value.

Some bookstores even displayed a sign saying: "We don't have any copies of Peyton Place. If you want this book, go to Salem." Punishment soon followed. Children didn't want to play with her kids, her husband was fired from his teaching job, the townspeople thought she was talking about them, and they tore her apart with gossip.

Revenge also came. In the first month, she sold 100,000 copies, and Twentieth Century Fox paid her 250,000 dollars for the film and television rights. In 1957, the movie was released under the title "Peyton Place" starring Lana Turner and Hope Lange, receiving nine Oscar nominations. And in 1964, the TV series of the same name was created with Ryan O'Neal and Mia Farrow.

Wealth revealed the dark side of fame for Grace Metalious, who succumbed to alcoholism and stopped speaking to her children. 

After divorcing George in 1958, she married a DJ, from whom she also separated to return to her first husband. Tragically, she passed away at 39 from cirrhosis after becoming a grandmother.

Shortly before her death, her last lover, the journalist John Rees, persuaded her to leave everything to him. The family contested the will when he had already spent it all.