Peyton Place is a 1956 novel describing how three women are forced to come to terms with their identity, both as women and as sexual beings, in a small, conservative, gossipy New England town. Considered scandalous at the time of its release, the story is filled with recurring themes of hypocrisy, social inequities and class privilege in a tale that includes incest, abortion, adultery, lust and murder.

The novel remained on the New York Times best seller list for 59 weeks and spawned a franchise that would run through four decades: a 1957 movie, a follow-up novel, Return to Peyton Place, filmed in 1961, and a 1964 TV series which ran for 5 years.

The fictional Peyton Place setting appears to be a composite of several New Hampshire towns: Gilmanton, Gilford, Laconia, Manchester and Plymouth, where some of the work was written. The novel originally had the working title The Tree and the Blossom, but Grace considered it too long. She and her husband, George, first considered Potter Place (a real community near Andover, New Hampshire). Realizing their town should have a fictional name, they looked through an atlas and found Payton (a real town in Texas). They combined that with Place and changed the “a” to an “e”. Thus, Peyton Place was created.

Grace Metalious (September 8, 1924 – February 25, 1964) was born Marie Grace DeRepentigny into poverty and a broken home in the mill town of Manchester, New Hampshire. After graduation from high school, she married George Metalious and became a housewife and mother. At the age of 30, she began work on a manuscript about the dark secrets of a small New England town. She found a literary agent and Peyton Place, her first novel, became an immediate bestseller. Her other novels sold well but never achieved the same success. Suffering from cirrhosis of the liver from years of heavy drinking, she died at age 39.

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