Diana Birchall

The fascinating biography of a nearly fictional woman who overcame race and gender barriers to achieve amazing success

"[Birchall] portrays a curiously fascinating and remarkably bold woman, best-selling novelist, and Hollywood scriptwriter who lived a life as intermingled with fact and fantasy, reality and fiction, as her novels and short stories."
"Birchall, a novelist and Warner Brothers story analyst, reports the life of her 'bad grandmother' in straightforward and heartfelt prose, offering both a fascinating life story and a social history of fin de siècle literary life in New York."
Born to a British father and a Chinese mother, Winnifred Eaton (1875-1954) decided to capitalize on her exotic appearance while protecting herself from Americans' scorn of Chinese: she "became" Japanese, assuming the pen name Onoto Watanna. While her eldest sister (now acknowledged as the mother of Asian American fiction), was writing stories of downtrodden Chinese immigrants under the name Sui Sin Far, Winnifred's Japanese romance novels and stories became all the rage, thrusting her into the glittering world of New York literati. Diana Birchall chronicles the sometimes desperate, sometimes canny, and always bold course of her grandmother's amazing professional career as a journalist, a bestselling novelist, and a Hollywood scriptwriting protégée of Carl Laemmle at Universal Studios.

A volume in the series The Asian American Experience, edited by Roger Daniels

Diana Birchall is a story analyst at Warner Brothers and the author of two historical novels.