My Brother's Keeper is a novel by Marcia Davenport based on the true story of the Collyer brothers. Published in 1954 by Charles Scribner, it was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and was later reprinted as a 1956 Cardinal paperback with a cover painting by Tom Dunn.
Inspired by the 1947 New York Times articles detailing items taken from the Collyers' brownstone after their deaths, Davenport constructed a tale of the Holt brothers, one a failing concert pianist and the other a naval architect, and the events that prompted them to become recluses in later life. The back cover blurb of the 1956 Cardinal paperback edition described the story with hyperbolic highlights:
When the novel was published, it was reviewed in The Washington Post and other newspapers of note. An anonymous critic for Time (November 8, 1954) made clear the connection with the Collyer brothers:
As noted in Variety , motion picture options on Davenport's novel have spanned decades, yet it has never been filmed. At one point there was some interest in the property by Leonard Mogel, producer of Heavy Metal , a 1981 movie. H. L. Gold's story "The Old Die Rich" ( Galaxy Science Fiction , March 1953), written at the same time as My Brother's Keeper, may also have been inspired by The New York Times articles about the Collyer brothers. (Gold may have identified with the Collyers; for many years, he suffered from agoraphobia and was psychologically unable to leave his apartment. Frederik Pohl's autobiography The Way the Future Was describes Gold's long-time agoraphobia in detail.) Unaware of My Brother's Keeper, the photographer-novelist Jerry Yulsman, during the 1980s, planned a novel based on the Collyer brothers, but he abandoned it when he was told about Davenport's novel.
Homer & Langley , a 2009 novel by E. L. Doctorow, was inspired by the story of the Collyer brothers, although the author made several changes from historic fact for his narrative.
The Dice Man is a 1971 novel by American novelist George Cockcroft, writing under the pen name, "Luke Rhinehart". The book tells the story of a psychiatrist who makes daily decisions based on the casting of a diсe. Cockcroft describes the origin of the title idea variously in interviews, once recalling a college "quirk" he and friends used to decide "what they were going to do that night" based on a die-roll, or sometimes to decide between mildly mischievous pranks. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy user site describes the novel as a book that was viewed as subversive, as having "anti-psychiatry sentiment", and as "reflecting the mood of the early 1970s in permissiveness". It has content that includes the protagonist's decisions to engage in rape and murder, and is described as having been "banned in several countries".
Eleanor Alice Hibbert was an English writer of historical romances. She was a prolific writer who published several books a year in different literary genres, each genre under a different pen name: Jean Plaidy for fictionalized history of European royalty, Victoria Holt for gothic romances, and Philippa Carr for a multi-generational family saga. She also wrote light romances, crime novels, murder mysteries and thrillers under pseudonyms Eleanor Burford, Elbur Ford, Kathleen Kellow, Anna Percival, and Ellalice Tate.
Horace Leonard Gold was an American science fiction writer and editor. Born in Canada, Gold moved to the United States at the age of two. He was most noted for bringing an innovative and fresh approach to science fiction while he was the editor of Galaxy Science Fiction, and also wrote briefly for DC Comics.
Homer Lusk Collyer and Langley Wakeman Collyer, known as the Collyer brothers, were two American brothers who became infamous for their bizarre natures and compulsive hoarding. The two lived in seclusion in their Harlem brownstone at 2078 Fifth Avenue in New York City where they obsessively collected books, furniture, musical instruments, and myriad other items, with booby traps set up in corridors and doorways to crush intruders. Both died in their home in March 1947 and were found dead surrounded by more than 140 tons of collected items that they had amassed over several decades.
Ballantine Books is a major book publisher located in the United States, founded in 1952 by Ian Ballantine with his wife, Betty Ballantine. It was acquired by Random House in 1973, which in turn was acquired by Bertelsmann in 1998 and remains part of that company today. Ballantine's original logo was a pair of mirrored letter Bs back to back, while its current logo is two Bs stacked to form an elaborate gate. The firm's early editors were Stanley Kauffmann and Bernard Shir-Cliff.
"For Esmé—with Love and Squalor" is a short story by J. D. Salinger. It recounts a sergeant's meeting with a young girl before being sent into combat in World War II. Originally published in The New Yorker on April 8, 1950, it was anthologized in Salinger's Nine Stories two years later.
Donald Edwin Westlake was an American writer, with more than a hundred novels and non-fiction books to his credit. He specialized in crime fiction, especially comic capers, with an occasional foray into science fiction and other genres. Westlake created two professional criminal characters who each starred in a long-running series: the relentless, hardboiled Parker, and John Dortmunder, who featured in a more humorous series.
Marcia Davenport was an American writer and music critic. She is best known for her 1932 biography of composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the first American published biography of Mozart. Davenport also is known for her novels The Valley of Decision and East Side, West Side, both of which were adapted to film in 1945 and 1949, respectively.
Fawcett Publications was an American publishing company founded in 1919 in Robbinsdale, Minnesota by Wilford Hamilton "Captain Billy" Fawcett (1885–1940).
Lesbian pulp fiction is a genre of lesbian literature that refers to any mid-20th century paperback novel or pulp magazine with overtly lesbian themes and content. Lesbian pulp fiction was published in the 1950s and 60s by many of the same paperback publishing houses as other genres of fiction including westerns, romances, and detective fiction. Because very little other literature was available for and about lesbians at this time, quite often these books were the only reference the public had for modeling what lesbians were. English professor Stephanie Foote commented on the importance of lesbian pulp novels to the lesbian identity prior to the rise of organized feminism: "Pulps have been understood as signs of a secret history of readers, and they have been valued because they have been read. The more they are read, the more they are valued, and the more they are read, the closer the relationship between the very act of circulation and reading and the construction of a lesbian community becomes…. Characters use the reading of novels as a way to understand that they are not alone."
"Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer" is a novelty Christmas song. Written by Randy Brooks, the song was originally performed by the then-husband-and-wife duo of Elmo Shropshire and Patsy Trigg in 1979.
Here Be Dragons is a historical novel written by Sharon Kay Penman published in 1985. The novel is the first in a trilogy known as the Welsh Princes series set in medieval England, Wales and France that feature the Plantagenet kings.
The Book of Ebenezer Le Page is a novel by English writer Gerald Basil Edwards first published in the United Kingdom by Hamish Hamilton in 1981, and in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf in the same year. It has since been published by Penguin books and New York Review Books in their classics series, as well as in French and Italian.
A Feast Unknown is a novel written by American author Philip José Farmer. The novel is a pastiche of pulp fiction, erotica, and horror fiction. It was originally published in 1969, and was followed by two sequels, Lord of the Trees and The Mad Goblin.
The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963 is a historical-fiction novel by Christopher Paul Curtis. First published in 1995 by Delacorte Press, it was reprinted in 1997. It tells the story of the Watsons, a lower middle class African-American family living in Flint, Michigan in the early 1960s from the perspective of Kenny Watson, the middle child of three. The first part of the novel focuses on Kenny's struggles to make friends as a smart and thoughtful ten-year-old, then shifts in setting when his parents decide to deliver their oldest son, Byron, to live with his grandmother in Birmingham, Alabama. The family embarks on a road trip to the deep south, and while visiting in Alabama, they get caught up in a tragic historical event of the Civil Rights Movement.
Jerry Yulsman was an American novelist and a photographer best known for his photographs of Jack Kerouac, notably the cover illustration on Joyce Johnson's memoir Minor Characters.
Homer & Langley is a novel by American author E. L. Doctorow published in September 2009. It imagines a version of the lives of the Collyer brothers of New York City, notorious for their eccentricities as well as their habit of compulsively hoarding a plethora of various bric-à-brac, newspapers, books and other items.
Russell H. Greenan is an American author with an established readership in the U.S.A. and Europe, particularly France. His first book It Happened in Boston? was reprinted in 2003 in the U.S.A. as a 20th Century Rediscovery by Modern Library. His fourth book The Secret Life of Algernon Pendleton was made into a motion picture titled The Secret Life of Algernon in 1997.
The Giant, O'Brien is a novel by Hilary Mantel, published in 1998. It is a fictionalised account of Irish giant Charles Byrne (O'Brien) and Scottish surgeon John Hunter.
Bertha Marian Holt founded the Holt International Children's Services organization and fought to have the law changed in America to allow for more than two international adoptions.