Kathleen Winsor

Winsor became interested in the Restoration period through her husband. Herwig was writing a paper for school on Charles II, and, out of boredom, Winsor read one of his research books.[1]

Her husband joined the military at the outbreak of World War II and spent five years with the United States Marines fighting in the Pacific theatre.[2] During that time, Winsor studied the Restoration period, claiming to have read 356 books on the subject. She began writing a novel based on her research. Her fifth draft of the novel was accepted for publication. The publishers promptly edited the book down to one-fifth of its original size. The resulting novel, Forever Amber, was 972 pages long.[1] The novel took readers on a frolic through Restoration England and offered vivid images of fashion, politics, affairs and public disasters of the time, including the plague and the Great Fire of London.

The book appeared in 1944. It attracted criticism for its blatant sexual references.[3] Fourteen U.S. states banned it as pornography and the Hays Office also condemned it, but within a month the movie rights had been purchased by Twentieth Century Fox.[3] The film, directed by Otto Preminger and starring Linda Darnell and Cornel Wilde, was released in 1947.[1]

Despite being banned, Forever Amber became one of the bestselling American novels of the 1940s.[5] It sold over 100,000 copies in its first week of release, and went on to sell over three million copies.[1]

Made a celebrity by the success of her novel, Winsor found it unthinkable to return to the married life she had known with Herwig and, in 1946, they divorced. Ten days later, she became the sixth wife of the big-band leader and clarinetist Artie Shaw, despite the fact that two years previously Shaw had castigated his then-wife, Ava Gardner, for reading such a "trashy novel" as Forever Amber.[1][4] The marriage to Shaw ended in 1948, and Winsor soon married her divorce attorney, Arnold Krakower. That marriage likewise ended in divorce, in 1953.[1][4] In 1956 Winsor married for the fourth time, to Paul A. Porter, a former head of the Federal Communications Commission. They remained married until Porter's death in 1975.[2]

Winsor's next commercially successful novel, Star Money, appeared in 1950, and was a portrait closely drawn from her experience of becoming a bestselling author. But in five subsequent novels, the last appearing in 1986 – The Lovers, Calais, Robert and Arabella, Jacintha, and Wanderers Eastward, Wanderers West – she failed to make as much of an impact. In 2000 a new edition of Forever Amber was published with a foreword by Barbara Taylor Bradford.[4]