Iris Owens

Iris Owens (1929-2008), also known by her pseudonym Harriet Daimler, was an American novelist.

Background

Born Iris Klein^[1] in Brooklyn, New York, Owens graduated from Barnard College. During the 1950s she lived in Paris, where she was associated with the group of expatriate writers who produced the literary review Merlin, among them Alexander Trocchi, Christopher Logue, John Stevenson, George Plimpton and Richard Seaver. Like Trocchi and Logue, she earned money writing erotic novels^[2] for Maurice Girodias's Olympia Press. Owens's four Olympia Press novels, along with a fifth which she coauthored, were published under her pseudonym.

Owens returned to New York in the 1960s and remained there until her death. Under her own name she published two more novels, the first of which, After Claude, was published in 1973^[3] and reissued in 2010 in the New York Review of Books NYRB Classics series. The second was Hope Diamond Refuses, published in 1984.^[1]

Works

As Harriet Daimler:

• Darling (Olympia Press, 1956)
• The Pleasure Thieves (with "Henry Crannach," pseudonym of Marilyn Meeske) (Olympia Press, 1956)
• Innocence (Olympia Press, 1957)
• The Organization (Olympia Press, 1957)
• The Woman Thing (Olympia Press, 1958)

As Iris Owens:

• After Claude (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1973)
• Hope Diamond Refuses (Alfred A. Knopf, 1984)

References