Elvis author Elaine Dundy passed away.

[presley31]

Elaine Dundy author of the marvellous book 'Elvis and Gladys' passed away on May 2nd. She was aged 81.

In her early years Elaine Dundy was a significant part of the Hollywood and theatre scene with friends such as Ernest Hemingway, Orson Welles, Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams.

As an author Dundy was well respected for her inspired writing, as well as her attention to detail and thorough research. Her 1958 novel 'The Dud Avocado' was a massive seller world-wide and has never been out of print.

For 'Elvis and Gladys' she lived over 5 months in Tupelo befriending many of Elvis' Tupelo acquaintances and returning multiple times to continue her investigations.

As she noted in the book, "I arrived in Tupelo Friday night and by Sunday I was listening to a sermon delivered Brother Frank Smith at the Assembly of God."

Brother Frank Smith was of course a key player in Elvis' musical development.

She will be missed by all her friends.


2008/05/04 www.elvisinfonet.com - Gansky / www.epgold.com

[franny]

May she RIP, that's sad news...
I havent read Elvis and Gladys, but I always wanted to.

franny

[cameron]

I just read that. That's kinda sad.
IMO, her book said more about Elvis than some of these others. Cleared up a lot of misconceptions about his family and young life. Thanks, Jen.

[cameron]

http://entertainment.timesonline.co....cle3939300.ece

.........The advantages of not being a typical Presley biographer are instructive. Intrigued by the Presley clan and their everyday Southern world for their own sake, rather than as a tiresome preamble to the Greatest Rock ’n’ Roll Story Ever Told, Dundy is entrusted with revelations that were denied to her more single-minded predecessors. Although often informative about Elvis’s musical background she is more interested in his family antecedents, the blood and character that he inherited from his parents, handsome, unlucky Vernon Presley and spendthrift, determined Gladys Smith.
Gladys does not have quite the half-book that the title promises – even a level-headed account of Elvis’s rise to fame obscures any other theme – but she is nearly always around: sometimes a sturdy, hardworking Southern mother, as in the photographs of Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange, sometimes less heroic but amiable, fond of a beer, not much of a manager, but devoted to her only son. She brought him up carefully, and she was reimbursed with depression, drink and an early death – a commonplace tragedy, perhaps, but one feels a renewed dislike of those, such as Elvis’s manager Colonel Tom Parker, who thrust her towards it.