Among her best-known books are The Last Night at the Ritz, the semi-autobiographical The Girls from the Five Great Valleys, Summer of Pride, But Not for Love, A Fall of Angels, and Happy Ending.

In novels such as But Not For Love, she captures the stresses caused by class distinctions, economic differences and male/female relationships within groups of friends or extended families, whether the combatants live in Maine beach colonies, remote Idaho ranches or Montana college towns.

After months of letters, he hopped on a Greyhound bus and traveled from Montana to Boston, where he met his future wife and her mother at the Copley Plaza Hotel, a scene she later fictionalized in her best-known novel, The Last Night at the Ritz.

[8] Savage wrote her first novel, Lacquer Lady, at the age of 10, featuring not only a “sophisticated young woman who wore black but also “Binky, an older man of 18.” She won a National Scholastic prize for “The Master in the House,” a one-act play set in Hingham, her birthplace.It was later published by Samuel French.

She sold a story based on her husband’s grandmother,“The Sheep Queen of Idaho,” to the Saturday Evening Post for $1,000—a princely sum at the time.

[9] Her interest in Victorian literature is reflected in Willowwood: A Novel, (1978), an exploration of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood focused on the complicated relationship between artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his muse Elizabeth Siddal.

Pearl notes that The Last Night In the Ritz is set in the Mad Men era and "there's a lot of drink, everyone smokes (cigarettes) and fornication, not to say adultery, is hardly an unknown event.

"[11] Last Night at the Ritz displays a "delicate interplay of past and present that is a pure delight ... " wrote Martin Levin in The New York Times.

"[12] Time magazine said that "In a very short compass, with extraordinary deftness, humor and a rueful shrewdness edging toward wisdom, it rises above its genre to something not unlike small genius.

"[13] "Published in 1973 and set in the late 1960s, The Last Night at the Ritz is both intensely of its time and also, in important ways, absolutely timeless," notes the Library Journal.