reviews_and_ramblings | In memory of Peggy Gaddis

Erolie Pearl Gaddis was born in Gaddistown, Georgia on March 5, 1895. She married John Sherman Dern in 1931. She wrote as both Peggy Gaddis and Peggy Dern indiscriminately, sometimes swapping the bylines on different editions of the same book.

She claimed to have appeared on stage and in movies as an actress but there are any details of such work. She edited trade journals and fan magazines, presumably in the 1920’s; at a later time she edited at least one romance pulp magazine. She is known to have written prolifically for the romance pulps but these magazines are poorly documented and the handful of stories currently known are a drop in the bucket.

For thirty years she wrote traditional romances, almost entirely for one publisher, Arcadia House. For the last ten of those years she wrote principally nurse novels. She also wrote “love novels,” a somewhat sleazier form of romance that was invented by the lending library publishers. In the 1930’s she wrote them for William Godwin, Inc. and in the 1940’s for Phoenix Press. By 1951 this genre had been abandoned by the hardcover publishers and found a new home in the proliferating digest-size paperbacks. These publishers faded away by 1955, those that survived shifting to soft core porn. Most of the older authors, like Peggy Gaddis, chose not to follow this direction and fell back on writing traditional romances.

Peggy Gaddis passed away on June 14, 1966. For several years her novels continued to be reprinted, but by the mid-1970’s tastes in romances had changed and her work gradually faded into obscurity.

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