Helene Hanff(1916-1997)
- Writer
Growing up during the depression in Philadelphia, she was in a family
that lived for the theater - her father was a shirt salesman who took
the family to plays every week. All she ever wanted to do was to be a
playwright. She could only afford a year of college, but all her life
continued to learn as an avid reader. She left Philadelphia for New
York, and through the 1940s wrote over 20 plays, none ever produced.
She supported herself precariously by writing television scripts and
children's books. And she read - one wall of her studio apartment was
filled with books, almost all from the London antiquarian bookshop
Marks & Co. It was that bookshop and her connection with it that
brought her fame. She started a correspondence with the shop, and in
particular with Frank Doel, the shop's chief buyer. This
correspondence, carried on for 20 years from 1949 to 1969, was
published in 1970, and was the basis for a British play, then Broadway,
and the movie Poste restante (1987) with Anne Bancroft, as Helene and Anthony Hopkins as Frank
Doel. Twenty years of hand-to-mouth writing, with an overflowing
ashtray and a near-by gin bottle - repeated pleas from Marks & Co. and
Frank to visit them in London could only be realised after the success
of the book. By then it was too late - the bookshop was boarded up and
Frank was dead of peritonitis. There is a brass plaque on the site of
the former shop, in memorial to a remarkable correspondence between two
remarkable people.
