Publisher Description

When Grace Metalious's debut novel about the dark underside of a small, respectable New England town was published in 1956, it quickly soared to the top of the bestseller lists. A landmark in twentieth-century American popular culture, Peyton Place spawned a successful feature film and a long-running television series-the first prime-time soap opera.Contemporary readers of Peyton Place will be captivated by its vivid characters, earthy prose, and shocking incidents. Through her riveting, uninhibited narrative, Metalious skillfully exposes the intricate social anatomy of a small community, examining the lives of its people -- their passions and vices, their ambitions and defeats, their passivity or violence, their secret hopes and kindnesses, their cohesiveness and rigidity, their struggles, and often their courage.This new paperback edition of Peyton Place features an insightful introduction by Ardis Cameron that thoroughly examines the novel's treatment of class, gender, race, ethnicity, and power, and considers the book's influential place in American and New England literary history.

Author Biography

GRACE METALIOUS (1924-1964) was the author of Peyton Place, Return to Peyton Place, The Tight White Collar (1960), and No Adam in Eden (1963). She was a resident of Gilmanton, New Hampshire.

Review

"a rip-roaring good yarn. If the term 'page turner' has any complimentary meaning, it applies here...[Grace] Metalious has lasted as a force in American life."--Washington Times

"Ten years ago, Ardis Cameron, a professor at the University of Southern Maine, was astonished to discover the title was out of print, and mounted a one-woman campaign to resurrect it. She eventually persuaded Northeastern University Press to reissue the novel, and wrote a Camille Paglia-worthy introduction that casts Grace as a literary Joan of Arc, sword drawn, swinging at the oppressive social conventions of the 50s. The book, says Cameron, spoke about things that were not discussed in polite society, and allowed people to talk about all sorts of issues -- but particularly their own sense of being different in the 1950s."--Vanity Fair

The most pointful thing about rereading this book is the fact that what was clear and present and shocking in those benighted days--hasn't gone away. Sure, the questions are being dealt with instead of shoved under a rug--but they're still around. And debated. --Courier-Gazette (ME)

"Metalious is well on her way to academic respectability, too. Ardis Cameron, an English professor at the University of Southern Maine, helped get Peyton Place back between soft covers a few years ago with an introduction describing it as America's first blockbuster and a key to understanding both the stifling cultural conformity of the 1950s and the first stirrings of rebellion against it."--The Independent

"Peyton Place, six decades on. In 1999 Northeastern University Press reissued it in its Hardscrabble Books line of novels devoted to New England. It remains in print today, ever reproachful--and ever steamy."--Kirkus

"Peyton Place is hot, even by today's standards. Everything, including the trees, seem to heave with sexuality."--Sunday (Concord) Monitor

It's the perfect . . . sit back and relax read.--The Courier Gazette (ME)

Grace Metalious' 1956 novel book brings themes of class privilege, sexual desire and hypocrisy. In revealing the hidden secrets behind the straight-laced facade of a quaint New England town, the book rocked the region's stuffy reputation.--Associated Press

More than perhaps any other New England novel, Peyton Place entered the American lexicon . . . Peyton Place is now being acknowledged as a book that destroyed Northern New England's facade of moral uprightness while simultaneously reinventing book publishing . . . Peyton Place is as relevant now as it was 50 years ago.--Valley News

Kirkus UK Review

First published in 1956, Grace Metalious's story of scandal and prejudice in small-town New England was greeted at the time of its publication with gasping moral outrage, and recordbreaking sales. It's much less shocking now, but it's still easy to see why it caused such a reaction - illegitimate pregnancies, abortion, sexually aggressive women, incest and drunkenness were not exactly staples of the post-war novel. However, Peyton Place is far from being just a lurid tale of moral infamy. Metalious's sharp pen draws a harsh but believable picture of the town, gradually highlighting the dark areas behind the respectable surface. Women's sexuality and male reactions to it are at the heart of many family dysfunctions. Allison MacKenzie is beginning to discover her sexuality, while her repressed mother is terrified that her long-ago adulterous affair will come to light. On the other side of the tracks Selena Cross is being brutally abused by her stepfather, until she finally decides to take the law into her own hands. But it's not all misery - Metalious has an eye for the lighter side of community life as well, and the scene in which the town drunks are hauled out of the cellar where they've been on a six-week binge brilliantly combines humour and pathos. Altogether, then, this is a novel that is still well worth reading, not only - or even mainly - for the elements that made it famous, but for the author's piercing but always sensitive insights into the tangled personalities and emotions that make up human existence. (Kirkus UK)

Kirkus US Review

Here's an unexpected publication: a new edition, complete with scholarly introduction, of the 1956 succes de scandale that was in its time the single bestselling American novel, inspiring both a nighttime "television novel" (i.e., soap opera) and an only slightly less soapy (1958) feature film. Metalious (1924-64) was a competent writer with some flair whose punchy workmanlike prose efficiently captured her little inland New England hamlet's earthy (if somewhat unbelievably sexually functional) populace. The characters - among others, Allison MacKenzie, round-heeled Betty Anderson, m.c.p. Rodney Harrington, and longsuffering Selena Cross - retain a perversely appealing, pulpy vitality. But scholar Ardis Cameron's assertion that this likeably trashy novel offers "a valuable corrective to the myth of quiescent domesticity and class consensus," besides gilding the lily indefensibly, confuses its author with Sinclair Lewis, not to mention Gustave Flaubert. Peyton Place is, on its own terms, both a perfectly decent popular novel and an honest one. But it never was an important one, and no amount of retroactive puffery can make it so. (Kirkus Reviews)

Review Quote

"The most pointful thing about rereading this book is the fact that what was clear and present and shocking in those benighted days

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