Marjorie Lee
Marjorie Ruth Lederer Lee was born in Manhattan. By age 13, her poetry and short stories were already featured in notable publications such as Mademoiselle, Harper’s Bazaar, and McCall’s. After graduating from Sarah Lawrence College, she married Robert Lee and, in her early twenties, served as the poetry editor for The Ladies’ Home Journal. Several of her poems were set to music and performed by artists like Dinah Shore and Martha Raye. Lee’s first novel, The Lion House, published in 1959, was drawn on her life as a young mother of five in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. The London Observer called it “a first novel by an American genius.” She also was author of the novels The Eye of Summer and Dr. Block and the Human Condition, as well as the poetry collection What Have You Done All Day. Lee died on May 5, 1999, at age 78, in Manhattan, from complications of Alzheimer’s disease.
Ursula Parrott
Katherine Ursula Towle Parrott was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on March 26, 1899. She attended the Catholic Girls Latin School before graduating from Radcliffe College. Shortly after graduation, she relocated to New York City's Greenwich Village and worked as a fashion writer. In 1922, at the age of 23, she married Lindesay Marc Parrott, a reporter for The New York Times, whom she divorced in 1928. Parrott's first book, Ex-Wife, was published in 1929 and drew from her own divorce experience. Initially published anonymously, it was deemed scandalous at the time. The book achieved great success, catapulting Ursula into the spotlight as both a celebrated author and a controversial figure. After Ex-Wife, Parrott's subsequent 21 books and more than 50 short stories were presented as mass-market tales of romance, or what her son, Marc, called "formula stuff," the creation of which required her to work "like a galley slave." Formulaic though these works may have been, their depiction of strong women seeking to establish independent identities within a frequently hostile environment was vivid and remains highly contemporary. She stopped writing in 1947, and in 1952, a warrant was issued for her arrest in New York for grand larceny after she allegedly stole and pawned $1,000 worth of silverware from friends. According to her son, she passed away from cancer in 1957, anonymously, in a charity ward of a New York hospital.
Fan Nichols
Fan Nichols (married name, Frances Nichols Hanna) is a now-little-known author of pulp crime novels and noir romances in the 1950s and 1960s. She was born in South Dakota, was educated in Oregon and California, and trained to become a concert pianist. She was a song plugger in Portland, Oregon—a pianist who played in music stores to promote sheet music sales—as well as a model, stenographer, and cosmetologist before becoming a freelance writer in New York City. She published more than 20 novels, hardcover and paperback originals, and numerous stories.