Clare Boothe Luce

When she published her second book, Europe in the Spring (1940), an acutely observed report on the "phony war" preceding the conquest of France, her first-person style caused Dorothy Parker to dub it "All Clare on the Western Front." After the war, Luce's conversion to Catholicism made her for some years a religious proselytizer, and she later mourned that theological writing had killed her creative originality. It could be argued that her increasing tendency to orate on political platforms, where rhetoric was cheap, was a contributing factor. Nevertheless, she had some success in 1949 with her scenario for Come to the Stable, a popular 20th Century Fox movie about Benedictine nuns establishing a monastery in Connecticut. Luce's plot was nominated for an Academy Award that year in the Best Story category. Several other ambitious Hollywood scripts, including a big-budget project for Howard Hughes at RKO entitled "Pilate's Wife", came to nothing. Luce's play Child of the Morning, about the murder of a saintly girl (1951), received mixed reviews in its Massachusetts tryouts and never made it to Broadway. In 1952 she edited a volume of divine lives, Saints for Now, recruiting as contributors such distinguished authors as Evelyn Waugh, Thomas Merton, Whittaker Chambers, and Rebecca West. She wrote her final play, Slam the Door Softly, in 1970.

Another branch of Luce's literary career was that of war journalism. From her first teenage encounter with the battlefields of World War I, she had always been drawn to matters military—not to mention military officers, with whom she had many affairs. Read Less