------V.C.Andrews------

Cleo Virgina Andrews was born to William and Lillian Andrews on June 6, 1924 in Portsmouth, Virgina. She was the youngest of three children, and spent her childhood in Portsmouth and Rochester. Her passions were ballet, classical music, and astrology. She loved to read and excelled in art. When Ms. Andrews was fifteen, she won a scholarship for a literary parody she had written. During her late teens, Ms. Andrews had a tragic fall down a flight of stairs and tore a membrane that led to bone spurs. Because of this accident she was confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life. This however did not stop her from continuing highschool and then college. Her mother did not feel the same as V.C. did. She kept her daughter from the world and tried to shield her from the outside. Ms. Andrews father died in the late 1960s and her family moved to Manchester, Missouri. Later she was living in Arizona where she began to devote her life to writing and full filling her dreams of becoming a writer. She completed her first novel, The Gods of the Green Mountain, in 1972, but it was not published. She had many rejections but this did not hender from continuing on. She was a determined woman with a goal. A tenth novel, called The Obsession, was sent to a publishing company where the editors said it was too long but had alot of potential. She reworked it, shortened and revised it to Flowers in the Attic. She rewrote it once more, dedicated the book to her mother, and sold it to Pocket Books for seventy-five thousand dollars. It was not Andrews' decision to use her initials on her books. At first, she was told that it was an irreversible error by the printers, but later learned that it was an editorial decision. The editors wanted to prove to men that women didn't always write about so-called "girlish" things. They used her initials, instead of Virginia, so men would buy the books. Flowers in the Attic was released in November 1979. Word spread that there would be a sequel to V.C,'s popular novel. The demand was so great that the publisher moved the publishing date up by several months. Petals on the Wind was released in June 1980 and became an instant success. It rose to the number one position and remained on the New York Times best seller list for nineteen weeks. Its popularity was so great that it caused Flowers in the Attic to reappear on the list. If There Be Thorns was the third book in the series. It was released in June 1981 and was also successful; it appeared on the best seller lists the second week after its release. Shortly after Thorns, Andrews wrote a new novel entitled My Sweet Audrina which was released in April 1983. The fourth book of the Dollanganger series, Seeds of Yesterday, was published in March 1984. Ms. Andrews then started the Casteel series, publishing Heaven in October 1985 and Dark Angel in November 1986. Ms. Andrews died of cancer on December 18, 1986. Her family had promised themselves to continue her novels. The fifth and last book of the Dollanganger series, Garden of Shadows was released in November 1987, less than a year after Ms. Andrews' death. The movie adaptation of Flowers in the Attic, in which Andrews had a cameo as a window-washing maid, was released to theatres in the fall of 1987 and made into video in the spring of 1988. Ms. Andrews' family carefully selected a "ghostwriter" (Andrew Neiderman) after her death to complete her ideas that she had written down in a notebook into complete novels. Mr. Neiderman continued to write under Ms. Andrews' name to this day bringing continuous joy and happiness....intrigue and mystery...to every heart...

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