Dorothy Daniels

Dorothy Daniels was born in Connecticut but by the time she was a full-time writer, in the middle 1960's, was living in California. She was initially an English teacher at a state college but later wrote articles that appeared in national magazines, which led to her career as a writer of mostly gothic paperbacks. Lancer books, which published more than twenty of her novels, proclaimed her "America's Most Popular Gothic Novelist" while Pocket Books claimed her gothic novels had sold over eleven million copies by the middle 1970's. Her approximately 146 novels were published by a dozen paperback publishers, some had as many as four printings while others were printed only once. Lancer and Warner Books together published more than sixty of her novels. The vast majority of her novels were written in the first person and this was a trademark of sorts with Dorothy Daniels, as she rarely strayed from this pattern. Several of her novels take place in the Old South. Her novels were also considerably more involving plot-wise and contained more character development than other gothic novels. She published her last gothic novel, "House of Silence", in late 1980. Afterward she wrote a handfull of historical romances and her last published novel appears to be "Crisis at Valcour" in 1985.