Vera Caspary was one of the most prominent woman authors and playwrights of her generation, and one of the most forward-looking, in terms of her vision of the role of women, ever to succeed in Hollywood. Born in Chicago in 1899, Caspary started out writing advertising copy after leaving high school at age 17, but quit that job out of boredom to begin writing stories, and supported herself for a time by working as an editor of The Dance magazine. Early on, Caspary showed a penchant for serious stories — her first novel, The White Girl (1929), told about a black woman from the South who tries to pass for white when she moves north, while her second,
Thicker Than Water, told of life in a Jewish family from Chicago. In 1931, her play Blind Mice was adapted into the movie Working Girls, but Caspary's real break into the cinema came in 1932, when she wrote The Night of June 13th, which was adapted into a movie of the same name by Paramount, starring Clive Brook and Lila Lee. In many of her books, especially those from the late '30s, Caspary's heroines were often career women, or women attempting to juggle romance and independence, very similar to her own situation. Her output during the 1930s included the stories that became the movies Such Women Are Dangerous, …  » Read more