Marijane Meaker

Marijane Agnes Meaker (May 27, 1927 – November 21, 2022) was an American writer who, along with Tereska Torres, was credited with launching the lesbian pulp fiction genre, the only accessible novels on that theme in the 1950s.

Under the name Vin Packer, she wrote mystery and crime novels, including Spring Fire.

As Ann Aldrich, she wrote nonfiction books about lesbians, and as M.E. Kerr, she wrote young-adult fiction.

As Mary James, she wrote books for younger children.

Meaker won multiple awards including the American Library Association's lifetime award for young-adult literature, the ALA Margaret A. Edwards Award.

She was described by The New York Times Book Review as "one of the grand masters of young adult fiction."

Meaker's books feature complex characters that have difficult relationships and complicated problems, who rail against conformity.

Meaker said of this approach, " I remember being depressed by all the neatly tied-up, happy-ending stories, the abundance of winners, the themes of winning, solving, finding — when around me it didn't seem that easy. So I write with a different feeling when I write for young adults. I guess I write for myself at that age."

Meaker was born May 27, 1927, in Auburn, New York, to Ellis R. Meaker and the former Ida T. Jonick.

Her father was a mayonnaise manufacturer.

She spent her childhood in Auburn.

She mentioned in an autobiography that Carson McCullers' book Member of the Wedding influenced her.

Meaker later attended Vermont Junior College in 1945 and the University of Missouri from 1946 to 1949, where she was a member of Alpha Delta Pi sorority.

She wasn't interested in conforming to the rules of a sorority, though; she preferred to seek friends who were also writers.

She made frequent submissions to literary magazines and collected many rejection slips.

Meaker sold her first story to Ladies' Home Journal under the name Laura Winston for $750.

Upon graduation, she worked as a file clerk with Dutton Publishing, then as a proofreader with Gold Medal Books, and began writing mostly mystery novels as Vin Packer.

Spring Fire was a response to the immense success of the 1950 Torres novel, which sold 4.5 million copies.

Eager to continue their financial success, editor Dick Carroll asked Meaker to write a book with a lesbian theme.

Her original story idea involved a romance between two students of a boarding school, but editor Dick Carroll asked her to change it to sorority sisters because the boarding school setting was too risky.

"He said, 'Well, it has to be a sorority, because a boarding school is too young.' He added, 'Make sure that these girls turn away from homosexuality because it is immoral, don't just have them talk about it being a hard life. We have to pass postal inspection.'" Writer Ann Bannon has credited her beginnings as an author of lesbian fiction to discovering the Vin Packer novels in the 1950s.

The response to Spring Fire was beyond all Meaker's and Gold Medal Books' expectations.

Meaker states she got "boxes of mail" from women who were thrilled to see a book that addressed a lesbian relationship; gay audiences weren't considered a market at this time.

Paperback novels were rarely reviewed by mainstream literary reviews, but a Packer novel titled, Come Destroy Me was noticed by The New York Times crime-fiction reviewer Anthony Boucher.

Meaker said, "I decided then and there that I would never write an ordinary story again; that if I was writing for paperback, I would write suspense because I wanted the reviews."

Soon after editor Dick Carroll from Gold Medal Books died, Meaker stopped writing as Vin Packer.

Meaker used the pseudonym Ann Aldrich for a series of five books published as paperback originals, but which were in fact nonfiction works.

She read Donald Webster Cory's book The Homosexual in America, which was a nonfiction book about gay men.

As Vin Packer, Meaker wrote the groundbreaking romance novel Spring Fire, published in 1952, which along with Tereska Torres' Women's Barracks is credited with launching the genre of lesbian "pulp" fiction.

As Packer, Meaker wrote 20 books in all, including The Evil Friendship from 1958, an account of the Parker–Hulme murder case in New Zealand.

Two books by Packer were loosely based on the Emmett Till murder and the aftermath of the investigation: 3-Day Terror and Dark Don't Catch Me.

Unlike other popular crime writers in the pulp market, Packer's books were less based on action, and more "psychologically dense" and "insidious".

One mystery critic said of Packer's books, "Her probing accounts of the roots of crime are richly detailed snapshots of their times, unconventional, intensely readable, and devoid of heroes, villains, or pat solutions."

According to her autobiographical young adult book ME ME ME ME: Not a Novel (1984), Meaker began her professional writing career by posing as a literary agent, whose "clients" consisted of her own pen names.

In a 2006 interview, Meaker said of McCullers, "I was drawn to all McCullers’s books. She was an underdog-lover as I am. She was also this sensitive, intelligent writer whose words were lovely. I felt she was a champion of everyone who felt out-of-step with the world. I still feel that way."

Meaker grew up in a house filled with books and was fascinated by the concept of writing and writers.

She was particularly interested in the idea of a pseudonym, that one could invent a new name, and a new personality with each name.

Meaker asked her parents to send her to Stuart Hall School, a boarding school in Staunton, Virginia, when she heard that lesbian activity occurred frequently at boarding schools.

Unfortunately, she was kicked out: "I was an unruly, rebellious child – a troublemaker with low marks. I was suspended in my senior year for throwing darts at a dartboard decorated with the pictures of faculty members cut out of an old yearbook. My mother's pleas to the bishop (it was an Episcopal school) got me reinstated long enough to graduate."

As a high-school junior she began submitting stories to women's magazines under the name "Eric Rantham McKay" and was soundly rejected.