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And it was social hypocrisy that she wrote of. As writers are told to do still, she wrote what she knew. Many of the plot lines in her books were taken from true accounts of New England life, and all of the "back story" reflected the time and place where she had lived. She wrote about the terrible side to mill work, a life she knew well, growing up in a major textile town among the working class who were trying to succeed there. She wrote of women, of all ages, but especially adolescent and young married women, and their triumphs and traumas, naturally including their sexual and reproductive lives. She wrote of what they thought, how they felt and what they wanted out of life. She showed how they did and did not have power, and how power was used against them. And she wrote of community. How it functions well and how it harms. How it takes a village to raise a child, well and not so well. She called the village out, and held the village accountable, and the villagers got angry, very angry.

The basic plot of Peyton Place is the story of the lives of two girls as they mature in a small New Hampshire town. They are best friends as children but can't remain so into adulthood, mostly because they are from different sides of town. Allison is the child of a single mother who covers for her daughter's illegitimacy by feigning widowhood. Her mother is middle class with aspirations to become a writer. Selena is the daughter of Allison's mother's maid. She is a beautiful child from a poor two-parent home that today would be called highly dysfunctional. Her mother is both mentally and physically unwell (her husband abuses her) and is unable to protect her daughter, whom he eventually rapes. She becomes pregnant, has an abortion, and a couple of years later, she murders him when he tries to attack her again. Both girls attempt to make their way in the world with very little support from that world. Along the way the reader becomes familiar with the families and neighbors of both girls and how their families operate for better and worse within the small puritanical town that was a composite of many towns, and stood for any town. It is so well written as to never be dull, and at times is poetic in its prose. It is intelligent and accurate in its portrayal of the townspeople. It is also fair. Though its social criticism is clear, Metalious isn't heavy-handed in her condemnation. She shows all sides, the often competing and conflicting sides of issues, as she did with the illegal abortion.

I am also a child of this village. Metalious and I went to the same high school. I can attest to the unflinching honesty in her book.

There is another important point to be made about Peyton Place, and that is that it is not the novel Metalious wrote. There are three ways that her manuscript was changed. The title was chosen by the publisher, probably to link it to Kings Row. She had titled it The Tree and the Blossom, indicating what she wanted to talk about.

While there are plenty of sex scenes in the book, there is one that she didn't write in her original version of the book. It's a scene the publisher required her to add that isn't pertinent to the plot. Metalious was furious.

In her story the rape is by the girl's father. Metalious took this story almost exactly from an actual 1947 New Hampshire patricide. It was, in fact, the impetus for her novel. But the publisher refused to sign the book contract unless the rapist was changed to a stepfather so that there would be no actual blood relationship. She agreed, because she also didn't really have a choice but was very unhappy with the change, saying that it changed her book from "tragedy to trash." She also knew it disturbed her introduction of the topic of abortion, because it was the blood relation that convinced the town doctor to uncharacteristically perform the illegal procedure. She was, of course, right.

Metalious wrote four novels, all of which were published, and all of which reached best-seller status. It isn't likely that a no-talent hack could have done that, but such is the claim often levied against her. There has always been a dismissal of that which is popular as not being worthy of scholarly attention, and Peyton Place, the first book to ever achieve actual blockbuster status. It joined the best-seller list before it came out and stayed there for 59 weeks, blowing away the previous No. 1 title, Gone With The Wind). It was more popular than almost any book had ever been. Even though most Americans read at least parts of it (the wide demographics alone of who read it are remarkable) it was considered low-brow pulp fiction because of its shocking content and its second release in paperback, even though it was written to protest reality, not to titillate. Without the backing of academia, Metalious was thrown under the bus as a writer, and the publishing industry, which she and her book would transform forever, was happy to run her over again and again to sell even more books. I would argue the dismissal of her book as low-brow was just another type of the marginalization that she was protesting.

Metalious could not help herself on this count either. She did not have an education beyond high school (although she was very well read), and she had doubts about herself as a serious writer, which the negative feedback of course, fueled. Naturally, the evidence on this issue is the writing itself, and it's telling that most of her worst reviews were from New England residents who were most offended by her work. While many called the book perverted trash, few serious reviewers dismissed her talent completely, saying that her writing style was in fact gifted, but that her choice of subject matter was where she erred, or some similar paternalistic pandering. Many reviews were more scathing than anything I've ever heard of for a writer save Salman Rushdie. William Loeb, the conservative New Hampshire newspaper publisher who virtually controlled the printed media in the state for decades, called her a filth monger and in capital letters wrote in an editorial:

"THERE ALWAYS ARE PEOPLE WHO ARE MORE PREOCCUPIED WITH THE BARNYARD ASPECTS OF EXISTENCE THAN WITH THE BRIGHT LIGHT THAT SHINES FROM ABOVE AND DISTINGUISHES MAN FROM BEAST." Manchester Union Leader, 1957

When all else failed, and her critics--a vast bevy of book banners and burners-- made sure (Peyton Place was banned in many libraries, some states and several countries. including Canada. for being obscene. Measures were taken in some places to criminalize its sale. Since the critics couldn't find any real fault with the writing, they claimed she hadn't actually written it herself, sometimes attributing the work to her husband, an educated college graduate who could be accepted as the author of impolite topics. Or the author, they claimed, was a female friend who was better educated and an experienced writer, or her publisher. All such claims have been proven false. It isn't hard to imagine how difficult it must have been for a struggling young female writer to process the unprecedented firestorm of criticism that her work created.

She would never receive any awards or recognition from the literary world beyond the wild commercial success of Peyton Place. Still, the writing should speak for itself, even today. And though of course this was and always will be an ultimately subjective evaluation, I do not see how her talent can be questioned after just reading the opening sentences of Peyton Place:

"Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases so that one is never sure whether she will come at all, nor for how long she will stay. In northern New England, Indian summer puts up a scarlet-tipped hand to hold winter back for a little while."

As a writer she was often compared to Sinclair Lewis, and less frequently, William Faulkner. Metalious herself has often been quoted as saying, "If my writing is lousy, then a hell of a lot of people have lousy taste." She was, of course, right again.

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