An American Girl was banned in 1933 for obscenity in some corners of the country, and was ravaged by outraged, negative reviews from many literary critics…, and yet it became a massive bestseller that, despite selling a million copies, slipped into obscurity for the next 92 years. Now it’s finally back in print.
A Hollywood film crew, and a young Iowa starlet from the midwest, travel to a fictional country in the Pyrenees to make an epic movie… and get drawn into the kingdom’s palace intrigues, sexual politics, and a bloody revolution, which makes for exciting production value on screen, but it could get them all killed.
“Thayer is beyond question a writer of power; and his power lies in his ability to make sex so thoroughly, graphically, and aggressively unattractive that one is fairly shaken to ponder how little one has been missing.” Dorothy Parker, The New Yorker
“Thayer is the bad boy of modern literature. His books have broken bestseller records but the question is whether there is any literary value to his work. Naughtiness runs rampant through the story, [which is] very exciting and sometimes very sordid. It provides hours of ribald reading.” Charlotte Observer
“It belongs in that class of contemporary fiction which one denounces audibly as wicked but reads avidly in privacy. An American Girl seems unnecessarily wicked. Almost every chapter ends in too great intimacy and the final debauch in [a] basement could have gone without the monkeys.” Fort Worth Star Telegram
“Not quite as vile as Three Sheet, with a bit more plot than Thirteen Men, but it’s quite a story, but the reader can’t get through it without being dragged through the muck. Adventure and romance and all manner of deft characterization, such as Thayer is a master of. But then he dips his pen in eau de skunk. But it seems the reading public asked for it and Tiffany appears always willing to has oblige.” The Oregon Daily Journal
“As long past as 1930, I had a hunch that the talkies would make even the best selling novelist as archaic as silent pictures. People still read, if only Professor Canby’s book of the month—curious children nosed at the slime of Mr. Tiffany Thayer in the drug-store libraries—but there was a rankling indignity, that to me had become almost an obsession, in seeing the power of the written word subordinate to another power, a more glittering, a grosser power…” F. Scott Fitzgerald, Esquire Magazine, March 1936.
“A good, honest-to-Graustark adventure story. Realizing that 1933 is a buyer’s market, Thayer tacks on a murder, two seductions, and a very high-grade orgy in order to give you that extra something that canny shoppers demand.” Richmond Times-Dispatch
“A fast-moving tale of lust and adventure. Sensational.” Miami News
“There is one offense of which Thayer has never been accused: being dull. His novels have been condemned year after year, but they continue to have wide sales. But he makes plots so interesting right from the start that one puts up with his offensiveness in order to be intrigued by his gift of story-making. This book is no exception.” The Capital Times
Tiffany Thayer /
Adventure, Historical, Sexy Fiction
