Gwen Davis

Gwen Davis (born May 11, 1936) is an American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, songwriter, journalist and poet.

Davis has written eighteen novels, including the sexy bestseller The Pretenders. She has also written about travel for the Wall Street Journal Europe, for online publications such as the Huffington Post, maintains a popular personal blog, Report from the Front, and a blog reviewing Broadway theater productions, Will Blog for Broadway.

Davis was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and grew up in New York City, in Manhattan. Her parents were divorced. Her father, real estate developer Lew Davis, later served as mayor of Tucson, winning office in 1961. Her parents' separation when she was five started a lifetime of gypsying. She attended Bryn Mawr College. In 1954, at the age of eighteen, she went to Paris to study music and sang in a nightclub there until she gave into her mother's pleas to return to the U.S. She moved to California and continued singing, performing at the Purple Onion. She also obtained a master's degree in Creative Writing from Stanford University.

She was part of the Hollywood social scene from the late 1950s, coming into contact with a wide range of celebrities and befriending Dennis Hopper and many others. Some of her experiences inspired her first novel, Naked in Babylon. She married businessman and producer Don Mitchell, with whom she had two children, a daughter and a son. One of the Mitchells' mocking Academy Awards parties was the subject of a Time magazine article in 1970, which mentioned some of the celebrities—Shirley MacLaine, ZsaZsa Gabor, Lee Marvin and others—Davis and Mitchell counted among their friends. She authored a famous movie, What a Way to Go, had a play on Broadway, The Best Laid Plans.

Davis continues to write. She travels widely and has lived in Spain, Paris, Rome, London, Venice, New York and Hollywood. She has returned from living in Bali, Indonesia and is living between New York, and Beverly Hills.

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