Grace Metalious - Peyton Place

Peyton Place

At the age of 30, she began work in the fall of 1954 on a manuscript about the dark secrets of a small New England town. The novel had the working title The Tree and the Blossom. By the spring of 1955, she had finished a first draft. However, she and her husband regarded The Tree and the Blossom as an unwieldy title and decided to give the town a name which could be the book's title. They first considered Potter Place (the name of a real community near Andover, New Hampshire). Realizing their town should have a fictional name, they looked through an atlas and found Payton (the name of a real town in Texas). They combined this with Place and changed the "a" to an "e". Thus, Peyton Place was born, prompting her comment, "Wonderful—that's it, George. Peyton Place. Peyton Place, New Hampshire. Peyton Place, New England. Peyton Place, USA. Truly a composite of all small towns where ugliness rears its head, and where the people try to hide all the skeletons in their closets."

She found an agent, M. Jacques Chambrun, who submitted the manuscript to three major publishers before it was accepted at the end of summer 1955 by the small firm of Julian Messner, Inc., owned and operated by Kathryn G. Messner. At the time of Rona Jaffe's departure from Fawcett Publications in 1955, the new associate editor who stepped in was Leona Nevler, formerly with Little, Brown and Lippincott but best known in 1950s publishing circles as the person who saw the potential of Peyton Place. While working as a manuscript reader for Lippincott, Nevler read the Metalious novel, realizing that it had too much steamy content for Lippincott. She passed it on to Kathryn Messner, who immediately acquired the novel and asked Nevler to step in as a freelance editor for final polishing before publication. During her 26 years at Fawcett, Nevler helped launch Crest Books and eventually became the publisher of Fawcett Books.