How Old Is Marijane Meaker? Marijane Meaker Birthday
Marijane Meaker was born on May 27, 1927 and is 96 years old now.
Birthday: May 27, 1927
How Old - Age: 96
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Marijane Meaker - Biography
Marijane Meaker (born May 27, 1927) is an American novelist and short story writer in several genres using different pen names. From 1952 to 1969 she wrote twenty mystery and crime novels as Vin Packer, including Spring Fire, which is credited with launching the genre of lesbian pulp fiction (although few of Packer's books address homosexuality or feature gay characters).
Using her own observations of lesbians in the 1950s and 1960s, she wrote a series of nonfiction books about lesbians under the pen name Ann Aldrich from 1955 to 1972. In 1972 she switched genres and pen names once more to begin writing for young adults, and became quite successful as M.E. Kerr, producing over 20 novels and winning multiple awards including the American Library Association's lifetime award for young-adult literature, the ALA Margaret Edwards Award. She was described by The New York Times Book Review as "one of the grand masters of young adult fiction." As Mary James, she has written four books for younger children.
In her early life, Meaker admits to dating men because it was expected of her. She said of meeting the expectations of her family and friends despite knowing she was a lesbian: "I dealt with it by playing the game: dating, going steady with a serviceman I really liked, but not 'that way' and in general coping as we all had to do by behaving like everyone else."
Meaker was involved romantically with author Patricia Highsmith for two years. She wrote about this relationship in the 2003 nonfiction memoir, Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s, and discussed it and her own pulp fiction novels in interviews around the time of the book's release. Meaker explained her reasons behind writing about their relationship: "I knew Pat when she was young and not yet so jaded and bigoted. The internet is filled with stories of her meanness, and prejudice, and also of her introversion, of her being a loner. I met that Pat many years after we broke up."
