Odd Girl Out by Ann Bannon (All Editions)

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Odd Girl Out is the novel that launched the career of the most loved of the lesbian pulp writers. Ann Bannon was twenty-two when she began it. After reading Vin Packer's Spring Fire she wrote to its author, Marijane Meaker, who introduced her to Gold Medal editor Dick Carroll. Her manuscript was a long novel about sorority life with a subplot about two women; Carroll told her to make the two women the story. Gold Medal published it in 1957, and it was the second best-selling paperback original of the year, a fact Bannon did not learn until 1983.

The story of Laura and Beth, college sorority sisters, departed from the formula of the time. Beth chooses a man, but Laura neither dies nor recants; she leaves for New York to find a life among other women, and Bannon's next books followed her to Greenwich Village. The Ladder recommended it in 1957 as less sensational than most paperbacks on the theme. Katherine V. Forrest has written that finding the book at eighteen told her who she was, and she credits Bannon with saving her life.

Odd Girl Out became the first of the Beebo Brinker Chronicles. Naiad Press reissued it in 1983 and Cleis Press in 2001, with a new introduction by Bannon, and the series has since been adapted for the stage.