The Revolt of Mamie Stover
The
Revolt of Mamie Stover is a 1951
novel by William Bradford Huie about a young woman from Mississippi who goes to Hollywood
to work as an actress. Driven into prostitution, she moves to Honolulu, works
at a brothel and takes it over, challenges restrictions against prostitutes
after the US armed forces are built up on the island, buys real estate, and
becomes a wealthy war profiteer.
Plot
The
Revolt of Mamie Stover is an
allegory for the decline of American society because of the country-wide democratization
that conflict made possible. Using a Honolulu prostitute to state his case,
Huie shows her rise economically, socially, and politically with the aid, in
part, of the federal government as she flouts local regulation (prostitution
itself being legal at the time). As the war progresses, Stover becomes a war
profiteer, coming to control property, accumulating vast wealth in cash, and
visiting proscribed beaches in the company of U.S. military officers.
The
Revolt of Mamie Stover is the
first volume in a trilogy, including The Americanization
of Emily (1959), and Hotel Mamie Stover (1963), all of which have the same narrator. In the first
and third books, he is primarily present in order to observe and report, and in
the second he relates his experiences in the late stages of World War II.
Adaptation
A
movie version directed by Raoul
Walsh was released in 1956 with Jane
Russell in the title role. The screenplay
essentially dropped the Hollywood critique.
External links
- Jonathan Yardley, "'Mamie Stover': Blond Ambition", Washington Post, 31 May 2006
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