Spring Fire by Vin Packer (All Editions)

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Spring Fire followed Women's Barracks to the Gold Medal list and turned a single bestseller into a genre. Marijane Meaker was reading manuscripts for Gold Medal editor Dick Carroll when she showed him her own novel, the story of sorority sisters Mitch and Leda, and it appeared in 1952 under the name Vin Packer. It sold close to a million and a half copies, more that year than The Postman Always Rings Twice or My Cousin Rachel, and its success is credited with launching lesbian pulp fiction as a publishing category.

The book also shows the conditions those novels were written under. Carroll warned Meaker that because the books travelled through the mail, nothing could make homosexuality look attractive, so the novel could not end happily for its lesbian heroine. Spring Fire was among the books discussed in the 1952 report of the House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials. Meaker was long embarrassed by the ending and refused to allow a reissue until Cleis Press brought the novel back in 2004 with her introduction explaining how it came to be written.

Its influence was immediate. Letters from isolated women poured in to Gold Medal, and one reader, Ann Bannon, wrote to Meaker and was introduced to Carroll, which led to Odd Girl Out and the Beebo Brinker novels. Meaker went on to write about lesbian life as Ann Aldrich and, as M.E. Kerr, became a major figure in young adult fiction. She died in 2022 at ninety-five.