Humorist, born
1936 in the
District of Columbia (with family mostly from
Virginia). She grew up with her
British musician father, her
tomboy mother, and her
Southerner grandmother who was determined to make Florence more of a "
lady" than her mother. (Florence gauges her success with the sentence, "no matter which
sex I went to bed with, I never
smoked on the street.")
"My aversion to children took root the day I started kindergarten in 1941," she says, and describes herself as avery good student who was never popular. She wanted to major in French in college and become a translator, but the Washington school she won a scholarship to didn't offer it as a major, so she went into history. "I graduated from college qualified to do nothing but crossword puzzles in ink," she says, and so went to graduate school in Mississippi. she was writing anything she could get published.
She proudly calls herself a spinster. She's written "thirty-seven paperback porn novels in which I was supposed to sound like a man and did" (under a pseudonym, obviously), many articles for various magazines, books such as Southern Ladies and Gentlemen (essentially a guidebook to understanding Southerners), and of course her autobiography. At the moment the National Review is her most consistent forum. Wherever it's seen, her writing is acerbic, usually politically conservative, erudite, and hilarious.
Books under her own name:
Also, as Laura Buchanan, she wrote a
romance novel called
The Barbarian Princess -- the only pseudonymous work she's ever referred to in works under her own name.
Sources: Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady, Reflections In A Jaundiced Eye
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/3681/king.html
http://w3.one.net/~muir/fk/