Novelist, actress, and playwright Elaine Dundy (1921-2008) was born and raised in New York during The Depression. She studied art history at Mills College in Oakland before transferring to Sweet Briar College in Virginia, where she earned a degree in 1943. Following World War II, she enrolled in the Jarvis Theater School in Washington and studied at the Dramatic Workshop Theater in Manhattan. The year she spent living in Paris gave her the material for her best-selling novel, The Dud Avocado (1958), which details the Parisian adventures of American Sally Jay Gorce. In The Dud Avocado, Dundy sought to describe a modern American girl – one who had changed since the writings of Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway.
Dundy wrote two other novels, The Old Man and Me (1964) and The Injured Party (1974) before turning to nonfiction in Finch, Bloody Finch (1980) and Ferriday, Louisiana. In her volume of memoirs, Life Itself! (2001), Dundy describes her marriage to theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, leading readers through a who’s who of theatrical and literary celebrities that formed her extraordinarily wide circle of acquaintances.
