It was after ten when she and Clem left the party … He said, a trifle thickly, “Where to? I haven’t any idea where you live. ” Viola slid close to him and lifted her face until her lips were against his ear. She spoke straight from her wildly beating heart, “Take me home with you. Please–please take me home with you”. His arms encircled her … “Sure, why not? Why the devil not? ” He leaned forward, gave the taxi-driver his address and turned to pull Viola’s trembling body hard against him. He covered her lips with his … Viola Barton thought that she could throw away her heart, deny her son his true father, and make a life for herself without the ecstasy of a young man’s love. She married Eugene, old and dying and passionless … and then found that there are wellsprings in a woman’s soul which cannot be stifled or denied There was room in her thoughts only for Clem … here beside her …
Erolie Pearl Gaddis was born in Gaddistown, Georgia on March 5, 1895. She married John Sherman Dern in 1931. She wrote as both Peggy Gaddis and Peggy Dern indiscriminately, sometimes swapping the bylines on different editions of the same book. Peggy was probably a family nickname dating from her childhood; since it is not a recognized nickname for either of her given names. I consider it a pseudonym, even though it was probably the name she was known by in everyday life.
According to Contemporary Authors her early career revolved around the entertainment business. She claimed to have appeared on stage and in movies as an actress but I have not found any details of such work. She edited trade journals and fan magazines, presumably in the 1920’s; at a later time she edited at least one romance pulp magazine. She is known to have written prolifically for the romance pulps but these magazines are poorly documented and the handful of stories currently known are a drop in the bucket.
As a novelist her work was confined entirely to two closely related genres, virtually all of it written for lending library publishers. For thirty years she wrote traditional romances, almost entirely for one publisher, Arcadia House. For the last ten of those years she wrote principally nurse novels. She also wrote “love novels,” a somewhat sleazier form of romance that was invented by the lending library publishers. In the 1930’s she wrote them for William Godwin, Inc. and in the 1940’s for Phoenix Press. By 1951 this genre had been abandoned by the hardcover publishers and found a new home in the proliferating digest-size paperbacks. These publishers faded away by 1955, those that survived shifting to soft core porn. Most of the older authors, like Peggy Gaddis, chose not to follow this direction and fell back on writing traditional romances. In the early 1960’s Arcadia House found that there was a mass-market audience for their romances, especially the nurse novels. A flood of Gaddis’s novels were reprinted, some of them several times, under a bewildering array of titles and bylines.
Peggy Gaddis passed away on June 14, 1966. For several years her novels continued to be reprinted, but by the mid-1970’s tastes in romances had changed and her work gradually faded into obscurity. A number of her works have been reprinted in Large Print editions in recent years but this has failed to produce a revival of interest in her work at large and she has never become a “cult” author. By the time the first edition of Twentieth Century Romance...Writers was published, in 1982, she was already passé.
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