[3] During her school years, she married a fellow student, All-American college football player Robert Herwig.

Herwig was writing a paper for school on Charles II, and, out of boredom, Winsor read one of his research books.

[1] Her husband joined the military at the outbreak of World War II and spent five years with the United States Marines fighting in the Pacific theatre.

[1] The novel took readers on a frolic through Restoration England and offered vivid images of fashion, politics, affairs and public disasters of the time, including the plague and the Great Fire of London.

[3] Fourteen U.S. states banned it as pornography and the Hays Office also condemned it, but within a month the movie rights had been purchased by Twentieth Century Fox.

[1] Made a celebrity by the success of her novel, Winsor found it unthinkable to return to the married life she had known with Herwig and, in 1946, they divorced.

[1][4] In 1956 Winsor married for the fourth time, to Paul A. Porter, a former head of the Federal Communications Commission.

[2] Winsor's next commercially successful novel, Star Money, appeared in 1950, and was a portrait closely drawn from her experience of becoming a bestselling author.