Complete v c andrews biography
Ive written before about the mysterious Ms Andrews , how so little of her life is truly known and how that feeds in the mystery surrounding her life …
It is widely known Virginia herself fed these mysteries , she rarely gave interviews, she dropped hints when she did driving fans wild with speculation and particularly played up to her most famous story : Flowers in the Attic – by giving journalists sugared doughnuts and Southern fried chicken when they visited.
Due to the fact she had dedicated Flowers in the Attic to her mother and the subsequent Petals on the Wind to her brothers who remembered when … The fact her life was so private … A lot of fans wondered if the story of the dollanganger s could in fact be her life story ? Was she Cathy ? Her writing was so heartfelt , so intense and so raw it wasn’t too difficult to imagine so ….
Her ” official” biography from her publishers didn’t help cast any light either, brief and contradictory it all fuelled speculation into this woman’s life and the reason she was so fiercely private
To add fuel to the fire , the one infamous interview she did with People Magazine was littered with false information about her and her life .. information which for some reason has over the years found its way into the mainstream by being repeated in innacurrateWikipedia articles and helped purportrate the myths surrounding her.
With all this in mind, I have over the years made it a project to piece together her actual life story, to sort the fact from the fiction using research from the archives , actual historic records, family information and data to create a more accurate detailing of her life story.
It’s no where near complete but as part of the 40th anniversary celebration of Flowers in the Attic and to be able to pay tribute to this amazingly talented lady – I’d like to set some records about her straight.
For me it would be an actual Cleo Virginia Andrews (V. C. Andrews) (June 6, 1923 – December 19, 1986) was an American writer from Portsmouth, Virginia. Her best-selling stories included "My Sweet Audrina" and two series of books about the "Dollanganger" and "Casteel" families. Her stories were written in English and translated into French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, Korean, Turkish, Greek, Finnish, Hungarian, Swedish, Portuguese and Hebrew. Her first novel, "Flowers in the Attic," was published in 1979. V. C. Andrews died from breast cancer in 1986, leaving behind some unpublished stories. The estate of V. C. Andrews hired a ghostwriter, Andrew Neiderman, to continue the stories, which are still published under the name V. C. Andrews. This series and all subsequent novels were written by Neiderman, but are attributed to Andrews. American novelist (1923–1986) Cleo Virginia Andrews (June 6, 1923 – December 19, 1986), better known as V. C. Andrews or Virginia C. Andrews, was an American novelist. She was best known for her 1979 novel Flowers in the Attic, which inspired two movie adaptations and four sequels. While her novels are not classified by her publisher as Young Adult, their young protagonists have made them popular among teenagers for decades. After her death in 1986, a ghostwriter who was initially hired to complete two unfinished works has continued to publish books under her name. Andrews's novels combine Gothic horror and family saga, revolving around family secrets and forbidden love (frequently involving themes of horrific events, and sometimes including a rags-to-riches story). Her best-known novel is the bestseller Flowers in the Attic (1979), a tale of four children smuggled into the attic of their wealthy estranged pious grandmother, and held prisoner there by their mother. Her novels were successful enough that following Andrews's death, her estate hired a ghost writer, Andrew Neiderman, to continue to write novels to be published under her name. In assessing a deficiency in her estate tax returns, the Internal Revenue Service argued (successfully) that Virginia Andrews's name was a valuable commercial asset, the value of which should be included in her gross estate. Her novels have been translated into Czech, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, Korean, Turkish, Greek, Finnish, Hungarian, Swedish, Polish, Portuguese, Lithuanian, Chinese, Russian and Hebrew. Andrews was born in Portsmouth, Virginia, the youngest child and only daughter of Lillian Lilnora (Parker), a telephone operator, and William Henry Andrews, a tool-and-die maker. She had two older brothers, William Jr. and Eugene. Andrews grew up attending Southern Baptist and Methodist churches. As Virginia Cleo Andrews was born on June 6, 1923, in Portsmouth, Virginia, where she later attended high school and then studied art. Crippled by rheumatoid arthritis as a young woman, she had to use crutches and later a wheelchair. Andrews never married and always lived with her mother. Secretive about the details of her life, particularly her age, Andrews related little about her early adult years. She resided in Manchester, Missouri, and Apache Junction, Arizona, but had returned to Portsmouth by the time she began earning professional acclaim late in the 1970s. Later she moved to Virginia Beach. Andrews worked as a portraitist, commercial artist, and fashion illustrator, but she eventually turned to writing. Often typing in bed or propped up in a body brace, she wrote thirty to forty pages a night for years. Her only publications before 1979 were pieces for confession magazines. Andrews eventually completed a 290,000-word novel, The Obsessed. Retitling the work Flowers in the Attic, she shortened it to ninety-eight pages but was again told to revise it. As Andrews later recalled, she added “all those unspeakable things my mother didn’t want me to write about.” She sold the new version for $7,500 to Pocket Books, a division of Simon and Schuster. Published in 1979, Flowers in the Attic was the first of the Dollanganger trilogy. Many critics dismissed Andrews’s novel, but it was an immediate success, prompting the release of a sequel, Petals on the Wind (1980), in which the children escaped and exacted their revenge. The final installment, If There Be Thorns, appeared the following year with an initial printing of 2.5 million copies. Andrews followed her first successes with My Sweet Audrina (1982), Seeds of Yesterday (1984), Heaven (1985), and Dark Angel (1986). Together, the seven novels sold more than thirty million copies and consistently reached best-seller lists. On December 19, 1986, Andrews died of breast cance
V. C. Andrews
Novels
[change | change source]The Dollanganger series
[change | change source]Stand alone works
[change | change source]The Casteel series
[change | change source]The Cutler series
[change | change source]The Landry series
[change | change source]The Logan series
[change | change source]The Orphans series
[change | change source]The Wildflowers series
[change | change source]The Hudson series
[change | change source]The Shooting Stars series
[change | change source]The DeBeers series
[change | V. C. Andrews
Profile
Life