Books: Laura Jean Libby

Laura Jean Libbey

A Wedding at Every Book’s End

Thomas Hardy, Sinclair Lewis, the late Anatole France have variously been talked of as the best known of contemporary writers. But the dwelling-place of renown is not always in the high places. The Sophisticati may sneer; but the reading public extends even to the scullery and the attic. A census of that mysterious body would not impossibly reveal an equal extent of the fame of humbler wielders of the pen. The laughter of Olympus is no barrier to the literary delectation of the barely literate.

Laura Jean Libbey, as much of an institution in our country as Christopher Columbus, the hot dog, Pike’s Peak, the Statue of Liberty, is dead at the age of 62. Her passing means a severe dearth in the reading-matter of millions of the great submerged. She was to the masses what Michael Arlen temporarily threatens to become to the classes.

Her novels number 82. Two are to be published posthumously. She was not a slow and painstaking writer, stringing her words like gems through hours of precious toil. She allowed twenty chapters to a novel, wrote a chapter a day.* Her themes never varied. They always had to do with love—fervid, magnificent love. Her exemplary heroes and heroines she invariably nursed benevolently to a final altar—at least to an engagement ring. They might always be presumed to live happily ever after.

Her first work was published in The New York Ledger when she was 14. Among her subsequent titles are: Lovers Once but Strangers Now, That Pretty Young Girl, Miss Middleton’s Lover, which was dramatized as Parted on Her Bridal Tour, A Forbidden Marriage, Olive’s Courtship, When His Love Grew Cold.

*Said she: “I never have had to struggle to succeed in completing a book. I always have found it easy to write. Usually, I figured on twenty chapters a day and then proceeded to write one chapter a day; but sometimes there were several days between chapters.”