[3] Gamel's aunt, Sarah Chauncey Woolsey – better known by her pen name, Susan Coolidge – wrote the popular Katy series and other children's fiction.
Gamel's half-brother John M. Woolsey was the judge who ruled that James Joyce's Ulysses was not obscene.
Despite weak health following an attack of tuberculosis in 1915, Woolsey moved to New York City in 1921, hoping to be an actress or a writer.
They moved to Churriana, a village near Málaga, just before the Spanish Civil War broke out, staying in Spain until the city was occupied by Italian forces sent by Mussolini to support the fascist rebels.
Her science fiction short story "The Star of Double Darkness" was published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1955.
Death's Other Kingdom was re-released as Malaga Burning in 1998 by Pythia Press,[10] and is now available on e-readers and in paperback under its original title.
Patterns on the Sand, which recalls Woolsey's South Carolina childhood, was published by The Sundial Press in 2012.