Gwen Bristow (September 16, 1903 – August 17, 1980) was an American writer and journalist, best known for her tales of the Old South, especially the "Plantation Trilogy.
[3] Bristow became interested in writing while reporting junior high school functions for her local newspaper.
[4] Students were required to wear uniforms, and they were forbidden from speaking with men or boys during visits downtown.
Bristow kept a journal during her time at Columbia that she later destroyed, observing that she had been a "shrewd and remarkably accurate reporter" of her classmates' "foibles," and "this stuff should not be lying around.
[4] When women in the United States were granted the right to vote by constitutional amendment in 1920, Bristow immediately registered.
Bristow covered the great flood of 1927 for the newspaper and social issues that touched on gender equality, such as the insistence by some brides that "obey" be left out of the marriage ceremony.
Bristow met another journalist, Bruce Manning, while covering a murder trial, and the pair began to date.
Bristow later wrote: "We were having a wonderful literary life on the coast and in the city when the Depression, which I had heard of but ignored, swooped down upon us and sent us scurrying for shelter.
[4] RKO Pictures bought the film rights to The Ninth Guest in 1933 and asked Bristow and Manning to write the script.
Deep Summer (1937), The Handsome Road (1938), and This Side of Glory (1940) are historical novels that follow two Louisiana families over the course of several generations.
[4] They befriended Joe Pasternak, Ray Bradbury, Irving Stone, and scriptwriters Pauline and Leo Townsend.
The protagonist Garnet Hale joins a wagon train bound for California, and the novel offers a fictionalized account of the early Santa Fe trail pioneers.
Bristow had plastic surgery in 1937 to affix her ears more closely to her head and had her lashes and eyebrows dyed regularly.
[4][1] Bristow's historical novels, set in the southern United States, included slavery and racial discrimination.