From Cold War Lesbian Pulp to Contemporary Young Adult Novels: Vin Packer's Spring Fire, M. E. Kerr's Deliver Us from Evie, and Marijane Meaker's Fight against Fifties Homophobia

This essay unpacks the formerly overlooked links between the lesbian pulp fiction that Marijane Meaker wrote under various pseudonyms during the postwar period and the young adult novels that she has published in recent decades under the name M. E. Kerr. In particular, it reads her 1994 YA text Deliver Us From Evie as a type of retro retelling of her best-selling 1952 lesbian paperback, Spring Fire. Some elements of postwar pulp fiction may seem campy, ironic and even ridiculous to late-twentieth century readers. But, as Evie demonstrates, many of the messages that they communicate about same-sex love unfortunately endure. This essay demonstrates that Meaker is revisiting and revising her earlier pulp work in her 1994 YA novel, and she is doing so within the context of a 1990s-to-1950s retrospection that is campy and ironic, but also earnest.