author
Grace Zaring Stone
1891–1991
Her fiction mixed suspense, travel, and human drama, and several of her novels reached Hollywood. Writing as both Grace Zaring Stone and Ethel Vance, she built a long career that stretched from the 1920s into the postwar years.
1 Audiobook
The bitter tea of General Yen
by Grace Zaring Stone
About the author
Born in New York City in 1891, Grace Zaring Stone became an American novelist and short-story writer whose work often moved across borders and cultures. She is especially remembered for novels including The Bitter Tea of General Yen, Winter Meeting, and Escape, all of which were adapted for film.
Stone also wrote under the pseudonym Ethel Vance. Her anti-Nazi novel Escape became one of her best-known books, and reference sources note that she used the pen name during a politically tense period connected to her family's situation in Europe.
She was married to U.S. Navy officer Ellis S. Stone, and their daughter was writer Eleanor Perenyi. Stone died in Connecticut in 1991 at the age of 100, leaving behind a body of popular fiction that connected literary storytelling with a wide public audience.