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Have you read Peyton Place by Grace Metalious (1956)?

yes

I didn't finish it

I've never heard

Voting ended onJun 6

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Peyton Place: The Novel That Shocked America

First appearing in 1956, Grace Metalious' Peyton Place blew the lid off the hypocritical conformity of small-town, postwar America. Considered the nation’s first “blockbuster” book, the novel both shocked and secretly delighted readers with its portrayal of sex, secrets, scandal, and even adultery, incest, and abortion. Selling 100,000 copies in its first month and at least 12 million more later, the book was so popular that it entered The New York Times Best Seller list a week before it was published. It inspired a film adaptation nominated for nine Oscars and network television’s first primetime soap, which once drew 60 million viewers three nights a week and helped launch the careers of Mia Farrow and Ryan O’Neal. (x)

Peyton Place was oddly familiar and yet jarringly strange not only because the novel shocked but also because in the minds of many readers the distinction between the imaginary realm of fiction and the reality of their lives was surprisingly effaced—a reality at best vaguely articulated and at times described as quite “unreal,” there being no words to express certain experiences, and thus no way to mark them off as such. Reading Peyton Place provoked an uncanny recognition, a glimpse into a somewhat frightening realm readers knew existed but could express in only a vague, inarticulate way, a taboo landscape, out of the public eye, that spoke to the silent fears and ambiguous emotions fans struggled to describe. Almost always, their stories begin with subterfuge:

“It was the kind of book mothers would hide under the bed,” a professor of English recalled.

“It was the first time I remember hiding anything from my husband. I kept it in the ice box, behind his beer.”

“I kept it hidden in the basement and used to sneak down there to read it.”

“I always carried it inside a brown paper wrapper. But that became pretty obvious, so my girlfriend and I slipped the dust jacket of Gone With the Wind—they were about the same size—over Peyton Place. But we still got yelled at—my teacher hated Gone With the Wind.”

“I kept it under the mattress. It was the only place close to me at night.”

“Oh, I had this big sock I’d use at Christmas. I’d shove Peyton Place down its long leg when my mother came in to say good night. It looked like a snake had eaten it.”

“In the toilet tank. We had one of those old-fashioned water closets, you know. The top had a little shelf where I hid stuff. Peyton Place sat there next to my Playboy magazines.”

“Under my pillow.”

“In a bag. A very deep bag.”

“Way up on the top shelf. My husband was short so he never much looked up there.”

“Under the lower bunk beds in the dorm. The nuns found it anyway and gave us hell. Then they took it back to the convent. We know they read it ’cause the sister who did the cleaning told us she had found it open on a table and what a disgrace it was to see it there. And I think they knew that we knew ’cause nothing was ever said about it and my folks were never notified, which was totally surprising!”

Metalious’s biographer Emily Toth tells the story of Michael True who while stationed at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, in the late 1950s, “could walk down the center aisle of any barracks and see forty men lying on their bunks, all still in army boots, reading the paperback version of Peyton Place.” (x)

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