Celeste De Blasis (May 8, 1947 - April 13, 2001)

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Celeste N. De Blasis was born on May 8, 1946 in Santa Monica, California. She grew up at the Kemper Campbell Ranch in Victorville, California located in the high Mojave Desert. She was the daughter Jean De Blasis. Jean De Blasis and Joseph Campbell are the children of author Mrs. Kemper Campbell (Litta Belle Campbell). Joseph, who passed away in 1990, was a Superior Court judge. Jean served as a councilwoman in Victorville. Celeste De Blasis attended Wellesley College, later transferred to Oregon State University, and in 1968 was graduated from Pomona College where longing to be back home at the ranch had drawn her. She continued to live on the ranch until her death of cancer on April 13, 2001.

Celeste De Blasis was published in a number of poetry magazines, including "Manifold" (London), "Kauri" and "Sandcutters". In 1969 she was given the Southern Division National League of Pen Women Award for Letters for her poetry.

Celeste was grateful to her parents for the adventures they enabled her to have abroad, "among the loveliest of the many gifts they gave my brother and me," she said. "Born in this country of immigrant parents, my father is European in ways even he himself does not understand," she explained. "He has a sense of the world as a vast, continuous treasure house of man's history. And my mother's view is identical."

In 1970, Celeste spent six months in the British Isles, developing a wild love for Scotland. Her brother David, meanwhile, went to school in Florence and became, as Celeste said, "the complete Italian."

"Though my parents could ill afford it, they helped give us both time to savor those different cultures," she said. "They were wise in their knowledge that realization of a dream should not be put off. Shortly after David returned home, he found that he was suffering from a rare and fast-growing form of cancer. He fought an incredible battle for two years. His laughter, wit, courage, and dignity never failed; only his body could not bear the burden."

David died two years later in September, 1973, at the age of twenty-five. A week before David died, she finished the manuscript of The Night Child and sent it to her agent. When told of it, David answered her that it would be a success. And it was.

In 1975, De Blasis published her first novel titled The Night Child and was followed the next year by Suffer A Sea Change (1976). Her third book, titled The Proud Breed (1978) was about having pride in being a Californian.

Of the novel, De Blasis observed, "This story is very dear to me, and the need to write it came from the demands of pride. I grew up in an educational system that taught me more about the eastern seaboard than I needed to know and almost nothing about California... and the paucity of that history grew to be more and more galling. In the writing of The Proud Breed I have discovered what an immensely rich, varied and intricate weaving has made the fabric of this state, and I am proud to be even so small a thread in the pattern."

The book became a Doubleday Book Club selection. In 1981, De Blasis published The Tiger's Woman. The book became Doubleday Book Club and Literary Guild selections. De Blasis then embarked on her most ambitious and successful work, the Wild Swan trilogy. The first volume, Wild Swan was published in 1984, set in Collington, Maryland around the Belair Mansion and was quickly followed by Swan's Chance in 1985. The final volume of the trilogy, A Season of Swans was published in 1989.

Her final book did not follow her proven historical romance formula. It was a biographical work titled Graveyard Peaches about her life at the Kemper Campbell Ranch in Victorville, California. After the publication of this work, Celeste De Blasis battled cancer until her death in 2001. She was cremated and her ashes were spread along her favorite trail at the Kemper Campbell Ranch where she had walked nearly everyday.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celeste_De_Blasis


Cover Art by Max Ginsburg