New York Magazine Revisits Steamy Local Novel
(Hint: It’s Not One Of James Fenimore Cooper’s)
COOPERSTOWN – It’s the novel that won’t die.
Elaine Dorian’s “The Sex Cure,” a ’60s work that gave “Peyton Place” treatment to Cooperstown, is revisited in the latest edition of New York Magazine.
The article, by Callie Morgan, who recently published a sequel, “Love All,” begins like this:
“I first heard about The Sex Cure in 1991 when I was 13 years old and my family had recently moved from Dallas to the picturesque, upstate village of Cooperstown, New York. Older adults there would make occasional, hesitant reference to a novel, published decades earlier, that revealed the town’s secrets under a thin fictional veil, but refused to say more. I got the sense that it had disrupted a lot of lives and caused a lot of pain — but that there was also a very interesting story there. The problem was figuring out what it was. It took me until 2005 to track down a copy of The Sex Cure — if you can find one on eBay now, expect to pay up to $500 for a paperback that once sold for 50 cents. Over the course of years, I pieced together the details of the scandal by talking to longtime residents, searching through microfilm and old lawsuits, and digging up newspaper clippings. Cooperstown, as all but a few people had forgotten, was once at the center of one of the best literary sex scandals of the 20th century.”
