John Arthur Maynard Venice West: The Beat Generation in Southern California, Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick, NJ, 1991. 242 pp., 1948, 1946, 1944, 1938
"Time Magazine, 28, January 1946, cover story was on Craig Rice, the first woman to win a Gertrude, for having sold a million copies of a single title in paperback. Lawrence Lipton, 48, was fifty percent of her for at least the last eight years, since 1938, six of which she had been sober and two drinking again, living and working in Santa Monica. He had been doing all the writing since 1944.
" . . . a veteran of radical literary and political movements in New York, Detroit, and Chicago, and the co-author with, Kenneth Rexroth of . . . the Escaltor Manifesto, Lipton was also a past editor of the Detroit Jewish Chronicle, a former director of national publicity for the Fox Theatre Chain, and the well-paid author of stories, screenplays, and potboiler novels that almost never appeared under his name . . ."
"Each title normally sold between fifteen and twenty thousand copies in hardcover . . .
"The Craig Rice titles were selling too well. Even at the rate of a quarter of a million words per year, he and Rice could not keep up with the demand. The unreasonable pace was at least part of the reason Rice began to drink again in 1944. As the pressure mounted, their marriage, anchored in work, turned destructive.
"They separated early in 1946 . . . In February 1948, the two of them signed an agreement to share the income from all Craig Rice properties . . .
". . . He moved from a beachfront hotel in Santa Monica to a cottage near the boardwalk in Venice . . .
". . . By November 1948, he was far enough ahead to marry his former secretary, Nettie Brooks, . . ." p. 35