Works by
Gypsy Rose Lee
(Aka Louise Hovick, Rose Louise Hovick)
(Entertainer, Writer)
[February 9, 1911 (or 1914) – April 26, 1970)

Biography/Memoirs

• Gypsy: Memoirs of America's Most Celebrated Stripper (1999)
  The touching, hilarious memoir of legendary stripper Gypsy Rose Lee reveals her childhood trouping across 1920s America as the rear end of a cow in vaudeville. Her rise to stardom as The Queen of Burlesque in 1930s New York occurred when gin came in bathtubs, gangsters were celebrities and Walter Winchell was king.
  
  Filled with an outrageous cast of characters, including Broadway's funny girl, Fanny Brice, who taught Gypsy how to be a star; gangster Waxy Gordon, who fixed her teeth; and her indomitable mother, Rose, who lived by her own version of the Golden Rule: "Do unto others... before they do you."

Fiction

• Mother Finds a Body (1942)

• The G-String Murders (1942)
  A mystery set in the underworld of burlesque theater, The G-String Murders was penned in 1941 by the legendary queen of the stripteasers-the witty and wisecracking Gypsy Rose Lee. Narrating a twisted tale of a backstage double murder, Lee provides a fascinating look behind the scenes of burlesque, richly populated by the likes of strippers Lolita LaVerne and Gee Gee Graham, comic Biff Brannigan and Siggy the g-string salesman. This is a world where women struggle to earn a living performing bumps and grinds, have gangster boyfriends, sip beer between acts and pay their own way at dinner.
  
  The story unfolds in a New York theater modeled on the legendary Minsky's, prone to raids by corrupt city cops and fierce competition among strippers. When one performer is found strangled with a g-string, no one is above suspicion. But when a second murder follows, the trail-and the action-really heats up. In the police procedural that follows, a host of clueless coppers faces off against the theater's tough-talking guys and dolls, and it's clear that Gypsy and her cohorts will have to crack the case themselves.
  
  The basis of the 1943 film Lady of Burlesque starring Barbara Stanwyck, The G-String Murders was the first of two murder mysteries written by Gypsy Rose Lee. A natural-born raconteur, Lee also contributed short pieces to The New Yorker and hosted her own television talk show; even her unparalleled stardom in the burlesque world was attributed more to her witty banter than to her risque moves. It is this fabled wit, along with Gypsy's brassy sociology, that make The G-String Murders a must-read primer of sex, commerce and urban living.
  Movie (1943): Lady of Burlesque, William A. Wellman, director with Barbara Stanwyck and Michael O'Shea  DVD  VHS

See also:

• Movie: Gypsy (1962), Mervyn LeRoy, director with Natalie Wood and Rosalind  DVD VHS

• Life Magazine: February 19, 1945
  Gypsy Rose Lee pins up son.

• Gypsy and Me: At Home and on the Road With Gypsy Rose Lee (1984) by Erik Lee Preminger
   

• My G-String Mother: At Home and Backstage with Gypsy Rose Lee (2004) by Erik Preminger
  Erik was 12 when Gypsy decided she was through with striptease—'I’m forty-two years old. Too old to be taking my clothes off in front of strangers.' Her endless schemes for staying famous and maintaining their extravagant lifestyle—a best-selling writing career, a musical based on her life, a disastrous attempt to turn her home movies into a blockbuster—make for comedic yet poignant reading. My G-String Mother is a stylish, incisive portrait of two lives: an awkward adolescent who was as much confidante, co-conspirator, and companion as son, and the legendary woman who told police at a raid at the famous Minsky’s burlesque house, 'I wasn’t naked. I was completely covered by a blue spotlight.'

• February House: The Story of W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof In Wartime America (2005) by Sherill Tippins -- Finalist Lambda Literary Award for Biography
  February House is the uncovered story of an extraordinary experiment in communal living, one involving young but already iconic writers -- and the country's best-known burlesque performer -- in a house at 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn during 1940 and 1941. It was a fevered year-long party fueled by the appetites of youth and by the shared sense of urgency to take action as artists in the months before America entered the war. In spite of the sheer intensity of life at 7 Middagh, the house was for its residents a creative crucible.
  
  Carson McCullers's two masterpieces, The Member of the Wedding and The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, were born, bibulously, in Brooklyn. Gypsy Rose Lee, workman-like by day, party girl by night, wrote her book The G-String Murders in her Middagh Street bedroom. Auden -- who along with Britten was being excoriated at home in England for absenting himself from the war -- presided over the house like a peevish auntie, collecting rent money and dispensing romantic advice. And yet all the while he was composing some of the most important work of his career.
  
  Sherill Tippins's February House, enlivened by primary sources and an unforgettable story, masterfully recreates daily life at the most fertile and improbable live-in salon of the twentieth century. 
  
  See also Jane Bowles and Paul Bowles