Several states can claim Gwen Bristow including South Carolina, Louisiana, Connecticut, Mississippi, California and Alabama. Let's investigate.
She was born in Marion, South Carolina, on September 16, 1903. Her writing efforts seem to have begun with her reporting of junior high school events to a local newspaper. Since her father Louis Jordan Bristow was a Baptist minister, she began college at Anderson Bible College in that South Carolina town. After a year she transferred to Judson College, a very strict Baptist women's college in Marion, Alabama. Despite her dislike of the rules,, Bristow continued her artistic development. She directed and played men's roles in two plays, and in 1923 was voted "Most Original" by her junior class peers.
Upon graduating the following year, Bristow began working odd jobs so she could study journalism at Columbia University in New York City. She only spent a year in the Big Apple, however. Bristow worked a summer job at the New Orleans Times-Picayune and when the paper offered her a permanent post; she took it. At first she lived with her parents on the grounds of Southern Baptist Hospital, where her father had become Superintendent.
Bristow spent much of the 1920's covering a range of events for the newspaper, including crimes and the great flood of 1927. She also wrote obituaries of prominent people and interviewed actors visiting the city. She also wrote poetry during this period and in 1926 published a small collection, The Alien and Other Poems.
While covering a murder trial Bristow met fellow journalist Bruce Manning, and they eloped on January 14, 1929, to avoid objections from her Baptist family to Manning's Catholicism. They moved into an apartment on 627 Ursuline Street in the French Quarter.
The couple soon collaborated on a novel, The Invisible Host, published by the Mystery League in 1930. From 1930 until 1933 the League published 30 hardcover mysteries that were inexpensive but featured striking Art Deco covers. The early titles--The Invisible Host was sixth in the series--sold for a quarter. I presume that because of the Great Depression the publisher folded after issuing only one title in 1933.
The plot of the book will be familiar to anyone who's read Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None or seen any of the film versions. Eight people known to each other receive anonymous invitations to attend dinner at a New Orleans penthouse. As the unseen host informs them over radio, the place is booby-trapped, and they will all die before morning. Complications ensue.
The Invisible Host was soon adapted into a Broadway play called The Ninth Guest by prolific playwright Owen Davis. A 1934 film adaptation used the same title as the play. Christie is presumed not to have read or seen these materials before writing her famous novel, which was published in November 1939.
For the next two years Bristow and Manning continued writing together and produced three more books: The Gutenberg Murders (1931), The Mardi Gras Murders (1932) and Two and Two Make Twenty-Two (1932). After these four collaborations their writing careers diverged when they moved to Hollywood in 1934.
Manning published one novel, Party Wire, in 1935, and then began working as a screenwriter, director and producer until 1957. He died in 1965. Bristow also wrote some novels on her own, couldn't find a publisher and destroyed the manuscripts. Then she began writing the first of what became three popular Louisiana plantation novels: Deep Summer (1937), The Handsome Road (1938), and This Side of Glory (1940). These works follow two families over several generations.
Bristow published several more novels before her death in 1980. She also published two memoirs, Gwen Bristow, A Self-Portrait (1941) and From Pigtails to Wedding Bells (1977). I wonder if she covers any of her time at Judson in either of those books.
Some Further Reading, etc.
Bristow, Gwen. Papers. South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia.
Dean, Lauren. “Gwen Bristow: Best Selling Author 1903-1980,” New Orleans Historical, accessed July 31, 2020, https://neworleanshistorical.org/items/show/558
Lowry, Julia B. “Carolina’s Gwen Bristow Finds She’s Obliged to Write!” Columbia State Magazine, November 5, 1950, pp. 6–7.
MacNebb, Betty L. “Gwen Bristow: Carolina’s Best Seller.” South Carolina Magazine 12 (July 1949): 8, 10.
Theriot, Billie J. “Gwen Bristow: A Biography with Criticism of Her Plantation Trilogy.” Ph.D. diss., Louisiana State University, 1994.
