Kathleen Winsor

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Kathleen Winsor (October 16, 1919 - May 26, 2003) was an American author, best known for the romance novel Forever Amber.

Born in a small town in Minnesota, Winsor was raised in Berkeley, California, where she attended university. At the age of 17, she married a campus football star, Robert Herwig. It was his senior honours thesis on Charles II that attracted her to the Restoration period, and she later claimed to have read 356 books on the subject.

She became famous for the bestselling Forever Amber, her 1944 novel, which was made into a high-profile film directed by Otto Preminger. A thousand-page saga, the novel frolicked through Restoration England and vivid images of fashion, politics, bedrooms and public disasters of the time, including the plague and the Great Fire of London. The novel was widely condemned for its blatant sexual references and banned in many places as 'pornography'.

Winsor denied that her book was particularly daring, and said that she had no interest in "anatomical scenes". "I wrote only two sexy passages," she remarked, "and my publishers took both of them out. They put in ellipses instead. In those days, you know, you could solve everything with an ellipse."

Altogether, Forever Amber sold more than three million copies and was translated into sixteen languages. It was the bestselling US novel in the 1940s.[1]

Made a celebrity by the success of her novel, Winsor found it unthinkable to return to the married life she had known with Herwig and, in 1946, they divorced. She soon became the sixth wife of the big-band leader and clarinetist Artie Shaw, following (among others) Lana Turner and preceding Ava Gardner.

Her next commercially successful novel, Star Money, appeared in 1950, and was a portrait closely drawn from her experience of becoming a bestselling author. But in five subsequent novels, the last appearing in 1986 -- The Lovers, Calais, Robert and Arabella, Jacintha, and Wanderers Eastward, Wanderers West -- she failed to make as much of an impact.

In 2002 a new edition of Forever Amber was published with a foreword by Barbara Taylor Bradford.