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SIGNATURES
Identified individuals are represented by a biographical sketch, a list of connections to other signatures, and, in most cases, an artifact from the Ransom Centers collections. Help us identify more signatures by submitting your suggested identification.
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THE DOOR
Location on door: front, panel 1
JEANNE JUDSON
The prolific novelist Jeanne Judson (d.1981) published dozens of romance novels from the 1950s through the 1970s under her own name and the pseudonyms Emily Thorne and Frances Dean Hancock. Her career in the book business started early. A 1919 issue of the Bookman quoted her brief autobiographical statement: "I have earned my own living since I was fifteen years of age--as a printer, a proof-reader, a reporter, a press agent, an advertising copy writer and advertising salesman, etc. I have lived in San Francisco, Chicago, Detroit, New York, Grand Rapids, St. Louis, and many smaller towns." She worked as an editor for the magazine Smart Set in the 1910s, and during World War I, Mother's magazine sent Judson to England to report on the war for the magazine's readership. While there she served as a nurse at a hospital and published poems and articles on the Red Cross in various magazines upon her return. For a time, Judson was married to the writer Gordon Stiles. Judson was a prolific novelist in her early career, publishing two novels in book form and others in serial form in magazines in the late 1910s and early 1920s. The 1919 novel The Beckoning Roads was made into a film the year it was published. After this early period of productivity, Judson did not return to novel-writing for more than two decades.
A letter from Jeanne Judson to Ernest Noddall Willett, annotated by Willett, August 14, 1919
With this letter, Judson started the process of contracting a British edition of her 1919 novel, The Beckoning Roads by contacting editor Ernest Noddall Willett at the publishing house of John Lane. At the bottom, Willett has noted "English Rights Offered." However, John Lane does not appear to have published an edition of the book.