Daisy Sarah Bacon (May 23, 1898 – March 1, 1986) was an American pulp fiction magazine editor and writer who was best known as the editor of Love Story Magazine from 1928 to 1947. She moved to New York in 1917, working at several jobs before being hired in 1926 by Street & Smith, a major pulp magazine publisher, to assist with "Friends in Need", an advice column in Love Story Magazine. Two years later, she was promoted to editor of the magazine, retaining that role for nearly twenty years. Love Story was one of the most successful pulp magazines, and Bacon was frequently interviewed about her role and her opinions of modern romance. Some interviews commented on the contrast between her personal life as a single woman, and the romance in the stories she edited; she did not reveal in these interviews that she had a long affair with a married man, Henry Miller, whose wife was the writer Alice Duer Miller.
Street & Smith gave Bacon other magazines to edit: Ainslee's in the mid-1930s and Pocket Love in the late 1930s; neither lasted until 1940. In 1940, she took over as editor of Romantic Range, which featured love stories set in the American West, and the following year she was also given the editorship of Detective Story. Romantic Range and Love Story ceased publication in 1947, but in 1948, she became the editor of both The Shadow and Doc Savage, two of Street & Smith's hero pulps. However, Street & Smith shut down all their pulps the following April, and she was let go.
In 1954, she published a book, Love Story Writer, about writing romance stories. She wrote a romance novel of her own in the 1930s but could not get it published, and in the 1950s also worked on a novel set in the publishing industry. She struggled with depression and alcoholism for much of her life and attempted suicide at least once. After she died, a scholarship fund was established in her name.
Early life and early career Daisy Sarah Bacon was born on May 23, 1898, in Union City, Pennsylvania. Her father, Elmer Ellsworth Bacon, divorced his first wife in 1895 to marry Daisy's mother, Jessie Holbrook. Elmer died of Bright's disease on January 1, 1900, and Jessie moved to her family's farm in Barcelona, New York, on Lake Erie on the outskirts of Westfield. Daisy was taught to read and write at age three by her maternal grandmother, Sarah Ann Holbrook. One of Daisy's great-uncles, Dr. Almon C. Bacon, was the founder of Bacone College in Oklahoma.Kerr, Adelaide, "Tough Editor: Daisy Bacon Brings Love to the Lonesome". Portsmouth Daily Times (July 10, 1941): 6. via Newspapers.com
Jessie remarried in 1906, to George Ford. George and Jessie had one child, Esther Joa Ford, born October 1, 1906; George died on January 24, 1907, leaving Jessie Ford alone to raise the two half-sisters.Powers (2019), pp. 15–20. In 1909 Jessie left the farm and moved into Westfield, where Daisy attended the local high school, Westfield Academy. While she was in high school the Westfield Republican published an essay she wrote about the Louisiana Purchase for a competition. She graduated from high school in 1917 as valedictorian, and was awarded a $100 scholarship to Barnard College, though she never enrolled there.Powers (2019), pp. 20–22. Shortly after Daisy's graduation from high school, the family moved to New York City, living in a hotel at first.Powers (2019), pp. 22, 25.
Bacon worked at several different jobs when she first moved to New York. She was briefly a photographer's model, before taking a job at the Harry Livingston Auction Company, which sold unclaimed luggage left at hotels by guests. She collected and recorded the auction payments.Powers (2019), pp. 25–26. Bacon also wrote and submitted articles and fiction to the magazines of the day, but she was not immediately successful in selling her work.Powers (2019), pp. 26, 29–30.
In the early 1920s, Bacon sold two articles to The Saturday Evening Post: one about her work at the auction company, and a ghost-written account of the life of a chambermaid in a New York hotel, titled "On the Fourteenth Floor".Powers (2019), pp. 29–30. Years later Bacon's half-sister Esther recalled living at the Astor Hotel and becoming friends with Arturo Toscanini's wife, Carla, and it is possible that Jessie took a job as a chambermaid at the Astor, with room and board, during the family's first years in the city.Powers (2019), p. 25.
Street & Smith Bacon continued writing, without further success, later recalling that she "worked like slaves to get into Liberty and never made it".Powers (2019), p. 31. In March 1926 she was hired by Street & Smith, one of the major pulp magazine publishers, as a reader for "Friend in Need", an advice column that ran in Love Story Magazine.Powers (2019), pp. 46–47. The magazine had been launched as a monthly in 1921, and was successful enough to switch to weekly publication in September 1922.Powers (2019), pp. 40, 43. The advice column received about 75 to 150 letters a day, mostly from women, and between ten and twenty were printed each week. Another Street & Smith employee, Alice Tabor, also worked on the column. Street & Smith insisted that no matter what the letter-writer's problem might be, divorce (which was scandalous at the time) could never be recommended as a solution. The letters covered every kind of romantic and matrimonial problem, and Bacon's biographer, Laurie Powers, suggests that the letters "gave Daisy a priceless education in the magazine's audience ... [and] became the foundation of Daisy's uncanny ability to know what her readers wanted to read in a romance".Powers (2019), pp. 47–49. While working on "Friend in Need", Bacon also wrote fiction for Love Story, beginning with "The Remembered Fragance".
Editor of Love Story Magazine
In March 1928 Ruth Abeling, the editor of Love Story, was fired, and Bacon was made editor in her stead.Powers (2019), p. 58. She hired her sister Esther as her assistant; to ensure that their relationship appeared professional at the office, the two of them switched to using their last names, Bacon and Ford, for each other, both in and out of the office.Powers (2019), pp. 60–61. Bacon found she had to adapt her usual soft-spoken and rather genteel speech to be successful in some of her working relationships at Street & Smith: "well-bred tones did not spell authority to them", she later recalled, but "after I learned to talk to them in language which I had heard my grandfather's stable boys use, everything was fine".Powers (2019), p. 63.
There were so many stories submitted to the magazine that other staff had to be employed to reduce the volume of submissions that reached Bacon's desk to a manageable quantity; even so Bacon found herself reading about a million words of manuscripts each week.Powers (2019), p. 61. The fiction in the magazine when Bacon began working at Street & Smith was Victorian in tone,Powers (2019), p. 44. and Bacon was scornful of the characterization: "The heroines were usually paid companions, governesses, or employed in some such genteel occupation and were always so sweet that it made you want to choke them!"Powers (2019), p. 55. She wanted the heroines of her stories to more closely resemble her readership, working as secretaries or beauticians. However, she also understood the role of glamor in the magazine: readers liked to read about chorus girls and models struggling to succeed, and about women in unusual roles such as pilots.Powers (2019), p. 65. A common stereotype in romance fiction was a poor girl with rich relatives who cruelly mistreated her; Bacon argued that "anyone who thinks that only those people who do not have to work for a living have the capacity for making other people's lives miserable has just never spent an hour inside of the average factory, hotel, school, or department store or around almost any office."Powers (2019), p. 82.
Circulation was strong at the time Bacon became editor, at perhaps 400,000, a very high figure for a pulp magazine.Powers (2019), p. 67.Hulse (2013), pp. 287. The magazine continued to prosper in her hands, and the circulation may have reached 600,000.Powers (2019), p. 4. In her first year as editor, Bacon was forced to write the ending to a serial by Ruby Ayres. The serial had already begun when Bacon took over as editor, even though Ayres had not sent the last installment by the time the first one appeared in print. When the final installment did not arrive in time for publication, Bacon delayed the problem for a week by splitting the most recent episode into two, but by the time the deadline for the next issue came, the rest of the manuscript still had not arrived. The story was about an unpleasant woman whose husband was falling in love with his secretary. In Bacon's version the wife falls from a high window and dies, leaving him free to marry his secretary. Bacon was criticized for the ending, but Ayre's own version of the installment, which finally arrived, had the wife die in the same way.Powers (2019), pp. 70–71.Bacon (1954), pp. 149–152.
Bacon became friends with some of her writers, inviting them to her apartment and buying them lunch. Douglas Hilliker, an artist who drew interior illustrations and later painted magazine cover art, lodged with Bacon and her mother and half-sister for a while in 1930, along with his wife and daughter. Bacon was friends with Maysie Grieg, who was already a successful writer when Bacon met her, and with Gertrude Schalk, an African-American writer who sold her first story to Bacon in 1930.Powers (2019), p. 80. Bacon and Schalk planned an unusual book together: a collection of Schalk's stories that would have included the initial version submitted to Bacon, the correspondence over the changes Bacon requested, and the final version printed in the magazine. The project had to be abandoned when Schalk's manuscripts were accidentally destroyed and Bacon's correspondence files were lost in an office move.Bacon (1954), pp. 12–13.Hefner (2021), pp. 54–55.
In mid-1934, Street & Smith decided to resurrect Ainslee's Magazine, which had been merged into Far West Illustrated in 1926, as another love story magazine.Powers (2019), p. 110. It was titled Ainslee's, and given to Bacon to edit from its first issue, dated December 1934. It was in bedsheet format, with slightly more risqué plots, and an occasional mention of nudity. Powers comments on the language used: "More explicit kissing scenes used word such as 'sensuous' and 'intimate' [and] the word 'damned' showed up several times."Powers (2019), p. 111.
In 1935 Bacon submitted a manuscript of a romance novel to William Morrow. It was rejected, and she seems not to have submitted it elsewhere.Powers (2019), p. 113.
Late 1930s