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Phyllis A. Whitney

September 9, 1903 was when Phyllis Ayame Whitney was born in Yokohama, Japan. Her parents were actually Americans, and her father Charles was from Iowa.

Phyllis A. Whitney lived abroad for the first 15 years of her life, during which her ambition was to become a dancer. Her mother encouraged both Phyllis interest in dancing as well as writing, and Ms. Whitney's first stories were written as a teenager in the Orient.

After her father's death in 1918, Phyllis and her mother traveled to California, and eventually lived in Texas, where Phyllis taught dancing. When her mother also died, Phyllis moved to Chicago to live with her aunt, and sold a number of stories to church papers and pulp magazines.

Phyllis A. Whitney has served as Book Editor for the Chicago Sun and also for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Her first published book was for young people (A Place For Ann), published by Houghton Mifflin in 1941. 'Red is for Murder' was her first published adult murder mystery, put out by the Ziff-Davis Publishing Company in 1943.

Phyllis A. Whitney has taught juvenile fiction at Northwestern University and at the New York University. Ms. Whitney was also the recipient of a couple of Edgar Awards and several nominations. She has been President of the Mystery Writers of America and received the Grand Master Award from that same organization. She also has received other lifetime awards - the Agatha from Malice Domestic and another from the Society of Midland Authors.

Compared frequently to both Mary Stewart and Victoria Holt, Ms. Whitney as 'Queen of the Gothics' has joined the ranks of other famous authors such as Daphne du Maurier, Earl Stanley Gardner, and Ellery Queen.

Phyllis A. Whitney has lived in New Jersey, has been divorced and married again, has visited a number of countries serving as backgrounds for her books, and has been a prodigious writer with hundreds of published stories to her credit. As well, Ms. Whitney has written a huge number of books including both fiction and non-fiction.

At her advanced age, we're not sure of whether or not Phllis A. Whitney is still alive. The last we knew, Ms. Whitney was living in Virginia and working on her biography at the age of 101. Phyllis A. Whitney has one daughter, three gandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Phyllis A. Whitney's Website

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Books by this author we have reviewed:

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