Peyton Place and Valley of the Dolls

Camp classics or mid-century moderns?

Nicola Onyett compares the cultural impact of two blockbuster bestsellers of the mid-twentieth century — Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place and Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls — and their iconic screen adaptations

Text as a construct
Context
Identifying literary techniques
Critical evaluation
NEA
English Review
Gender
Genre
Post 1900 Prose
Skills

Nicola Onyett

AQA: NEA

Grace Metalious (1924–64) and Jacqueline Susann (1918– 74) wrote two of the twentieth century’s bestselling novels. Yet despite their enormous popular success — or perhaps because of it — contemporary critical responses to Peyton Place (1956) and Valley of the Dolls (1966) were scathing. Novelist Gore Vidal summed up the snooty attitude of the literary establishment when he wrote of Susann, ‘She doesn’t write, she types’ (Cooke 2012). Yet, as Susann’s husband Irving Mansfield noted: