Viña Delmar (1903–1990)

Viña Delmar was born Alvina Croter in Brooklyn, New York to a Jewish family of vaudeville performers. As a child, she was taken along by her parents as they traveled the vaudeville circuit around the USA. She showed an interest in writing at an early age. Alvina left school at age 13 and by 16, she was also appearing in vaudeville. She also took various other jobs, including theater usher, typist, switchboard operator, and assistant manager of a movie house. In 1921, she married Albert Zimmerman, a radio announcer and writer who was using the surname Delmar, perhaps as a stage name, which Alvina assumed. The following year, her short story "Tony Checks Out" was published in Snappy Stories. Her big breakthrough as a writer occurred in 1928, at age 25, with the novel Bad Girl, a cautionary tale about premarital sex, pregnancy, and childbirth, seen through the view of tenement married life. Bad Girl was an unexpected and immediate sensation and bestseller. It gained additional notoriety when it was initially banned in Boston, and was then chosen by the Literary Guild as its April 1928 selection.
In 1929, attempting to capitalize on the success of Bad Girl, she produced two other books in quick succession, the novel Kept Woman and a collection of stories called Loose Ladies. As the Great Depression took hold in the early 1930s, Viña Delmar's gritty stories began to slip out of favor with the public. Bad Girl, which was adapted to the screen in 1931, gave her entry to Hollywood. Sometime in the 1930s, she and her husband moved to Los Angeles and connected with film director Leo McCarey, which led to contracts for two screenplays, both of which were developed into films he directed. These were Make Way for Tomorrow (1937) and The Awful Truth (1937), the latter now considered among the best screwball comedy films ever produced. Viña Delmar received an Academy Award nomination for The Awful Truth but she left the film writing business shortly afterwards. During the later 1930s and 1940s, Delmar and her husband continued to churn out short stories, most of which were published in national magazines such as Cosmopolitan and Liberty. By the mid-1940s, the duo had switched gears again to the theater, writing the drama The Rich Full Life: A Play in Three Acts, which opened in 1945 on Broadway and the comedy Mid-Summer (1953). Viña then returned to writing fiction, first with the novel I'll Take My Stand (aka New Orleans Lady) in 1949. About Mrs. Leslie was published to moderate success in 1950 and adapted into a film in 1954. She continued to write steadily until the late 1970s.