A voyage of discovery as I search for a lost American author from the early half of the past century.

From the online newsletter of renowned author Piers Anthony... ... And one more, not a novel but a biography. The Ghost of Jack Woodford, by Keith Nichols, that I received half a year ago but didn't get around to reading until now. Jack Woodford was the literary pseudonym of Josiah Pitts Woolfolk, a popular novelist of the 1920s and 1930s who then disappeared from the literary scene almost without trace. Most listings of American writers don't mention him. How come? I see two reasons. First, he was a trashy novelist, publishing many adventures and sex novels, writing to the public taste. Some said 140 books in all, but a number can't be documented. (For comparison, I have had 130 published, with 7 in the pipeline, and I'm not yet done. I tried to Google Andre Norton's bibliography, as I understand she wrote about 150 books, but though it said it downloaded it, I am unable to find it on my system. Par for the course. Maybe a reader will tell me how many she wrote. Anyway, Woodford wrote a lot.) Critics prefer to pretend that such writers don't exist. Second, he wrote several books telling the truth about writing and publishing... I learned that the love of Woodford's life was his daughter, Louella, on whom he doted. No, not incestuously; this was Family. She had potential, selling several novels before she was 20, with aspirations as a Hollywood actress. But then her career and his life were cut off by her insanity. She was in and out of mental hospitals, and he went broke trying to afford treatment for her. He was finally institutionalized himself, and died bankrupt and depressed. So the story of his life is a tragedy, but he was in his ornery fashion a great man.

Piers Anthony, April 1st, 2006 (in his online newsletter)

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• Publication Date: January 19, 2012
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• Lending: Disabled
• Print Length: 177 Pages
• File Size: 423 KB