Why Read About Virginia Faulkner?
This video offers 10 good reasons to read about this woman you’ve never heard of.
Why “A Life in Two Acts”?
F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that there are no second acts in American lives. Virginia Faulkner came close to proving that true. With two bestselling comic novels—Friends and Romans (1934) and The Barbarians (1935)—to her name by the age of 22, Virginia Faulkner was called the “next Dorothy Parker,” and her wise-cracking quips were quoted in gossip columns around the country. Finding herself married to a stranger after a wild night out with Tallulah Bankhead, she headed to Hollywood, where she spent as much time becoming a fixture of the queer community, even enticing Greta Garbo out of her legendary seclusion for one party, than she did working on scripts.
When she returned to New York, she invented her greatest comic character, the gate-crasher extraordinaire Princess Tulip Murphy, entertaining readers throughout World War Two with her excursions to everywhere from the North Pole to Mexico to Hell. She fell in love with the Tin Pan Alley songwriter Dana Suesse, but when the play they wrote together bombed after a week on Broadway, she had a breakdown and spent much of the next two years in and out of sanatoriums where she received multiple doses of electroshock therapy. While recovering, she ghostwrote the autobiography of her old friend, the notorious Jazz Age madam Polly Adler, though she received no credit for the resulting bestseller, A House is Not a Home.
Broke, without prospects, and struggling with alcoholism when she returned home to Lincoln, Nebraska in 1955, she could easily have descended into the early end as Fitzgerald. Instead, offered the job of assembling a commemorative anthology for Nebraska, she discovered her genius for editing – and recognized her opportunity to put her energies to work in the cause of resurrecting the work and legacy of Nebraska’s greatest writer, Willa Cather. With her partner, the poet and scholar Bernice Slote, she spent the next 25 years in the service of Cather, academic publishing, and western American literature, working until her last day on scholarly editions of books by and about Willa Cather.
Why Write About Virginia Faulkner?
I first became interested in Virginia Faulkner after reading her Princess Tulip book, My Hey-Day (1940). When I looked up her biography, as is often my habit with neglected writers, I was confused to find that she ended her career as an editor with the University of Nebraska Press: how to connect the dots between the sophisticated comic writer of New York City in the 1930s and 1940s. Later, when doing a little more research, I was sent a PDF full of letters she wrote her brother Eddie in the early 1930s. In one prescient letter from 1934, just after selling her first book, Friends and Romans, to Simon & Schuster, she confided, “If I’m ever really going to be any good, I’ll have to give up this smart, know-it-all line for something a little kinder and truer.” But as became clear, she found the demand for her wise-crack-filled stories (and the money that came with them) too hard to resist. Always thinking she could move into more serious writing, she found herself instead adrift after Dana Suesse left to study composition.
Moving back to Lincoln—literally moving into her childhood bedroom at first, in fact—was undoubtedly a humiliating experience. But in the course of the next few years, she found work that for the first time truly inspired her. And as countless authors who worked with her attest, she was a brilliant, if demanding, editor. That left-turn that first confused me turned out to be an act of reinvention and recovery, a deliberate decision to step away from the glitz, glamour, and money of New York City and back to the grassroots values of Nebraska—a place she couldn’t wait to escape from when she was twenty.
Virginia Faulkner: A Life in Two Acts — A Photo Album
A collection of photographs and other images from Virginia Faulkner’s life, including some not found in the book. A browse through this album will give you some idea of the diversity of events and personalities in Virginia’s story.
Praise for Virginia Faulkner: A Life in Two Acts:
“Intimidating, brilliant, and scathingly funny, Virginia Faulkner is a true American original. She fled her corn-fed Midwestern childhood in 1928 and reinvented herself as an international sophisticate and renowned wit. . . . Famous for her impeccable taste and stubborn eccentricities, Faulkner masterminded the literary reputations of authors ranging from Polly Adler to Willa Cather, but her own fascinating story has been forgotten until now. Brad Bigelow brings this complex, trailblazing woman back to life and restores her to her rightful place in American history.”—Debby Applegate, Pulitzer Prize–winner and author of Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age
I was gripped. The writing is really sharp. I couldn’t believe the level of compression and the types of details that Bigelow managed…. He gave the illusion that he knew absolutely everything about her life. And as a portrait of both life in a midwestern university town and life in mid-century academia, it was superb. The book read like a novel. It was honestly a lot like reading Stoner, because it was suffused with the same kind of quiet melancholy. But…in the end, there was more hope and more joy. I think, ultimately, it was a good life. It’s a life to be proud of. — Naomi Kanakia, author of The Default World and What’s So Great About The Great Books
“Virginia Faulkner: A Life in Two Acts is a fascinating tribute to literary obsession. Not only does Brad Bigelow offer a captivating tale of Virginia Faulkner’s mad devotion to Willa Cather; he provides a portrait of how profoundly one scholar, one editor, can amplify one writer’s voice.”—Timothy Schaffert, author of The Titanic Survivors Book Club and The Perfume Thief
“I’m a bit embarrassed to confess that I’d never even heard of Virginia Faulkner before I met her in this engrossing biography, and now I wish I could have met her in person.”—Nancy Pearl, author of the best-selling Book Lust and More Book Lust
“This is a tale of struggle, uncertainty, and commitment, but it is mostly one of triumph. Brad Bigelow brings Virginia Faulkner and her partner, the distinguished, pathbreaking Willa Cather scholar Bernice Slote, alive on the page. This biography is a significant contribution.”—Robert Thacker, historical editor of Willa Cather’s Complete Poems and author of Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives; A Biography
“An illuminating biography of Faulkner. Her life was nothing short of extraordinary. How perfectly fitting it is, then, to have her life’s story told by an extraordinary biographer.” — Andrew Guschausky, Big Sky Journal
“In this impeccably researched and entertaining biography, Virginia Faulkner emerges as a waspish, Dorothy Parker–like novelist and newspaper columnist, whose glamorous (if sometimes rackety) life has the makings of a Hollywood motion picture. In pages of lucid prose, Brad Bigelow does this neglected American writer full justice. Terrific.”—Ian Thomson, author of Primo Levi: A Life and Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Journey Without End
Virginia Faulkner: A Life in Two Acts
by Brad Bigelow
Published by: Bison Books
280 Pages, 23 photographs
Hardcover
9781496230621
Publication date: January 2026
Available now