WOOD, CLEMENT. Strange Fires. Woodford Press, 1951. “Shipwreck on Lesbos” in his Desire, Berkeley n. d. 1958 (copyright 1950, perhaps Woodford Press?) Clement Wood is either a pen name for, or a successor to, Jack Woodford, a popular writer of racy, risque, sexy books of little literary merit but relatively innocuous even for teenagers ... the trash of the thirties and forties was a very different thing from the scv of the fifties.
WOOD, CLEMENT, and Gloria Goddard. Fair Game. Woodford Press, 1949, pbr Beacon 1958. Evening waster about girls coming to the wicked big city, and we all know what happens to such girls in this kind of book. One of them falls in with the dangerous women instead of the dangerous men.
+ WOOLF, VIRGINIA. Orlando. To The Lighthouse.
Mrs. Dalloway. All of these are classics easily available.[57] in small, medium and large libraries, college bookstores, and the like. The lesbian content is vague and subtle, but good; one of the best woman writers.
WOUK, HERMAN. Marjorie Morningstar. Doubleday 1955, pbr 1956. The variant element in this is minor and problematical. In conversation, it occurred to a group of reviewers that the developing relationship between Marjorie and Marsha “resembled a love affair”, that Marsha’s attack of hysterics at her wedding, and her outcry that all she had ever wanted was a friend, and now she’d always be alone, was of distinct significance, BAYOR.
WYLIE, PHILIP. The Disappearance. Rinehart 1951, pbr Pocket Books 1958. Science fiction; for men, all women vanish; for women, all men vanish. The problem of lesbianism arises in the women’s world; Wylie, though technically and superficially approving of homosexuality, has his heroine reject it for herself, saying “I’m not a child.”
Opus 21. Rinehart 1949, pbr Signet 1952, 1960. The hero, rewriting a book in a hotel during a weekend of crisus, runs across many unusual characters; among them a woman, shaken because her husband is having a homosexual affair, is shamed into tolerance by dallying with a lesbian prostitute. Wylie, again superficially approving, has his hero act in a skirt-withdrawing way, refusing such things for himself at the last minute in every book.
WYNDHAM, JOHN. “Consider her Ways” in Sometime, Never, Ballantine 1956-57. Science Fiction; a woman experimenting with strange drugs goes into the future, where all men have perished and society resembles that of the ant. Good.
The Midwich Cuckoos. Ballantine, 1957. Science Fiction. Alien visitation from outer space leaves every nubile female in Midwich—married or single, young or old—pregnant. Hilariously funny situations arise; one of the funniest involves a pair of lesbians. Wonderful fun.
YAFFE, JAMES. Nothing But the Night. Little, Brown & Co, 1957, pbr Bantam 1959, (m). More fake Leopold-Loeb. Good.