Grace Metalious

American writer, a novelist whose book, "Peyton Place," published on 24 June 1956, centered on small town scandal and sex. The book swept the market with 3,000 copies a week, selling ten million copies in ten years. A year after the first publication of the book, a sanitized movie version came out and in 1964 it became TV's first prime-time soap, specializing in two nights of sin a week for six seasons.

A New England housewife living in New Hampshire with her husband and three kids, Metalious later wrote a sequel entitled "Return to Peyton Place," as well as an autobiography which was published a year after her death.

She was married three times, twice to the same man. She left her first husband, a junior high school administrator, in a shiny new Cadillac on her way to Hollywood. After marrying and divorcing a beefy New York DJ, she married and divorced her first husband again, moving back to her hometown of Gilmanton, New Hampshire.

She died of a liver ailment on 25 February 1964, Gilmanton, NH.