Elaine Dundy

Elaine Dundy was an American novelist, biographer and journalist who became a significant figure in mid-twentieth-century literary culture. Born in 1921, she is best known for The Dud Avocado, her exuberant and witty debut novel published in 1958, which follows a young American woman living it up in 1950s Paris with reckless abandon and sharp-eyed observation. The novel was a sensation upon publication and has been championed by successive generations of readers and writers, including Terry Southern, who praised it as the best novel about bohemian Paris since The Sun Also Rises. Dundy was married for a time to theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, and her life moved through the most glamorous and creative circles of post-war London and New York. She also wrote acclaimed biographies of Elvis Presley and Peter Finch. Her audiobooks and books capture the energy, wit and independence of a woman and a writer who lived life on her own spirited terms. She died in 2008.