The NYT is reporting the death of Tereska Torrès.
Yeah, I’d never heard of her, either. After the jump, why I’m bringing this up (so to speak). (Strong hint: mature content.)
Ms. Torrès wrote Women’s Barracks
, which the paper of record describes as “America’s first lesbian pulp novel”.
The book is a fictionalized account of the author’s wartime service in London with the women’s division of the Free French forces. Though its sexual scenes appear tame to 21st-century eyes, the author’s forthright depiction of the liaisons of the women in her unit with male resistance members — and with one another — scandalized midcentury America.
Women’s Barracks was “condemned in 1952 by the House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials, which found the book’s offending passages too lurid to quote in its official proceedings”, and banned in Canada.
On a somewhat related note, has anyone done a history of Gold Medal Books?
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