Marijane Meaker, a prolific author who was best known for helping pioneer the genre of lesbian pulp fiction, died on November 21 at her home in East Hampton, New York. She was 95.
The cause was cardiac arrest, said Zoe Kamitses, a longtime friend.
Mercurial Marijane and ‘Vin Packer’
She was born Mary Jane Meaker in Auburn, New York, on May 27, 1927. Her birth certificate listed her given name as two words, although, by the time she got a passport in the 1950s, it was spelled “Marijane”, according to her friend Kamitses.
At some point, Meaker began using the middle name Agnes, after an aunt. “I like pseudonyms,” she told NPR. “I like disguises. I’ve always hated the name Marijane. And I think the idea that you can name yourself is interesting.”
Perhaps using pseudonyms was also a matter of necessity: she couldn’t get an agent when she arrived in New York City as an adult. So she became her agent- with a roster of clients that consisted of her pseudonymous selves.
“I would take people out to lunch and tell them about my clients. And nobody knew that I was all my clients,” Meaker explained. She wrote dozens of books in multiple genres under multiple pen names.
As Ann Aldrich, she wrote nonfiction books that chronicled lesbian life in Greenwich Village and beyond- “We Walk Alone” (1955), “We, Too, Must Love” (1958), and others.
She used Mary James for quirky books aimed at younger children, like “Shoebag” (1990), about a cockroach that turns into a boy.
But she used the unlikely pen name Vin Packer, a male pseudonym, for her groundbreaking 1952 novel “Spring Fire”. The book- about a lesbian affair among a college sisterhood- was among the first lesbian-themed paperback originals and sold so briskly that it jump-started the genre of lesbian pulp fiction.
She wrote 20 books as Packer, including the thriller “Dark Intruder” (1952). She wrote only half a dozen books under her own name.
Her books under her own name included “Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s” (2003), about her two-year relationship with the author Patricia Highsmith.
A shift to YA and later life
The relative failure of her comic novel “Shockproof Sydney Skate” (1972) may have been a factor in her decision to switch to the pen name, M.E. Kerr (a play on her surname), along with a shift to the Young Adult market.
In 1993, she received the American Library Association’s Margaret Edwards Award for contributions to young adult literature: “When I think of myself and what I would have liked to have found in books those many years ago, I write with a different feeling when I write for young adults,” Meaker said at the time.
“I guess I write for myself at that age,” she added.
Marijane Meaker had lived since the early 1970s on the East End of Long Island, where she started the Ashawagh Hall Writers Workshop, a writers organization that she continued leading into her 80s.