Viña Delmar

Born Alvina Louise Croter in New York City in 1903, Viña Delmar grew up around vaudeville and the Yiddish theater. After leaving school as a teenager and trying her hand at stage work, she began publishing short stories in the 1920s. Her breakthrough came with Bad Girl (1928), a bestselling and controversial novel about premarital sex, pregnancy, childbirth, and working-class marriage.

Delmar and her husband, Eugene, worked as a writing team, producing novels, short stories, plays, and screenplays. Their Hollywood work included Make Way for Tomorrow and The Awful Truth (both 1937); the latter earned Delmar an Academy Award nomination. She later returned to fiction, writing historical novels and stories well into the 1970s, including About Mrs. Leslie, Beloved, The Becker Scandal, and McKeever.

Known for her sharp eye for social pressures and complicated relationships, Delmar wrote about characters who challenged conventional expectations. She died in Los Angeles in 1990 at the age of 86.