An item in GalleyCat today about the recent death of novelist Theodora Keogh led me to hit ProQuest to see if there was much in newspaper archives on her aside from the London Telegraph obituary and the obit in the Charlotte Observer. Nothing doing, really, except for a mention in a 2004 Utne piece by Michael Bronski on pre-Stonewall gay pulp fiction:
From Knock on Any Door, I naturally went to [Willard] Motley’s other books. The flyleaf advertisement on Let No Man Write My Epitaph for “other books you will enjoy” led me to Theodora Keogh’s 1950 The Double Door, about a married gay man who leads a double life. After some hunting, I finally found a copy on eBay. I read her 1952 novel Street Music, which also has overt gay male themes, and her 1949 Meg, a story with lesbian overtones, about a rich New York girl who joins a street gang. I knew even less about Keogh than I did about Motley, so I did a quick Internet search and learned that Keogh, the granddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt, had been a highly respected novelist who became famous for her “daring” themes.
2 responses so far ↓
Christine Rauchfuss Gray // February 2, 2008 at 8:14 am |
Your link to the Charlotte “obituary “does not take a reader to the actual obituary published by that paper Instead, the link is to an opinion piece on Theo.
Judy Laddon // February 7, 2008 at 7:09 pm |
A new biography of Sally Paine Pierone, a close friend of the Keoghs, contains pictures of Theodora and a number of anecdotes from the Forties and Fifties. Pierone was art director of the Marshall Plan in Paris in 1952. You can see my blog post on Theodora at
http://sallythebook.wordpress.com, and the book at http://www.sallythebook.com