Helene Hanff

Helene Hanff was a celebrated American author, born on April 15, 1916, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She is best known for her book "84 Charing Cross Road," which was adapted into a play, teleplay, and film of the same name. Hanff's career was varied and saw her transition from writing unproduced plays to creating some of the earliest television dramas in New York. She also worked in publicists' offices and spent summers writing plays for the East Coast's "straw hat" circuit.

Hanff's 1961 memoir, "Underfoot in Show Business," chronicles her struggles as an ambitious young playwright trying to make it in the New York theatre scene in the 1940s and 1950s. Despite having her plays admired by some of Broadway's leading producers, she never saw them produced. Hanff turned to writing for magazines and books after the bulk of television production moved to California, and her work dried up.

"84 Charing Cross Road" is an epistolary work that chronicles Hanff's 20-year correspondence with Frank Doel, the chief buyer for Marks & Co., a London bookshop. Hanff depended on the shop for obscure classics and British literature titles, and her passion for self-education revolved around these titles. She became intimately involved in the lives of the shop's staff, sending them food parcels during England's post-war shortages and sharing details of her life in Manhattan.

Hanff never visited her English friends until it was too late, as Doel died in December 1968 from peritonitis from a burst appendix, and the bookshop eventually closed. She finally visited Charing Cross Road and the empty but still-standing shop in the summer of 1971, a trip recorded in her 1973 book "The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street." Hanff's other books include "Q's Legacy," "Apple of My Eye," and "A Letter from New York." She died of diabetes in New York City in 1997 at the age of 80. The apartment building where she lived at 305 E. 72nd Street has been named "Charing Cross House" in her honor, with a bronze plaque commemorating her residence and authorship of the book.