Peyton Place (novel)

Peyton Place

First edition
Author	Grace Metalious
Language	English
Publisher	Julian Messner, Inc. (hardcover) Dell Publishing (paperback)
Publication date	September 24, 1956[1]
Publication place	United States of America
Media type	Print, e-book
Pages	372
OCLC	289487
Followed by	Return to Peyton Place
Text	Peyton Place online

Peyton Place is a 1956 novel by the American author Grace Metalious. Set in New England in the time periods before and after World War II, the novel tells the story of three women who are forced to come to terms with their identity, both as women and as sexual beings, in a small, conservative, gossipy town. Metalious included recurring themes of hypocrisy, social inequities and class privilege in a tale that also includes incest, abortion, adultery, lust and murder. The novel sold 60,000 copies within the first ten days of its release, and it remained on The New York Times best seller list for 59 weeks.

The novel spawned a franchise that would run through four decades. 20th Century-Fox adapted it as a movie in 1957, and Metalious wrote a follow-up novel that was published in 1959, titled Return to Peyton Place, which became a film in 1961 using the same name. The original 1956 novel was adapted again in 1964, in what became a prime time television series for 20th Century Fox Television that ran until 1969, and the term "Peyton Place" entered the American lexicon describing any small town or group that holds scandalous secrets.^[2]

A daytime soap opera titled Return to Peyton Place ran from 1972 to 1974, and the franchise had two made-for-television movies: Murder in Peyton Place and Peyton Place: The Next Generation in 1977 and 1985 respectively.