Ann Bannon
Her paperback novels offered isolated lesbian readers stories in which women could find one another and build a life.
Ann Bannon was born in Joliet, Illinois, in 1932. Writing under a pen name, Ann Weldy published “Odd Girl Out” in 1957 while still in her early twenties. Its story of two college women falling in love drew on feelings she was beginning to understand in her own life.
Four more novels followed, forming the five-book series later known as “The Beebo Brinker Chronicles”. Set largely in Greenwich Village, the books followed women seeking desire, friendship and a place to belong before the gay liberation movement.
Sold as inexpensive paperbacks in newsstands, pharmacies and railway kiosks, they reached readers far beyond established lesbian communities. Their sensational covers could conceal a more hopeful prospect: characters who might survive rejection and make lives together. Bannon later heard from women for whom the books had been a first encounter with that possibility.
She went on to earn a doctorate in linguistics and worked as an English professor and associate dean at California State University, Sacramento. Republication in the 1980s brought the novels to another generation. Once marketed as pulp, they also became valuable records of lesbian life and imagination in the 1950s and early 1960s.