Elinor Glyn

Elinor Glyn was a popular writer of romance novels. In 1920, she made the move to Hollywood where her work gave rise to a run of silent films, most famously the Gloria Swanson/Rudolph Valentino melodrama "Beyond the Rocks" (1924) and the Clara Bow-starring "happy-flapper" romp "It," which redefined that word as a term for cultural bellwether. Glyn fell in with the "It" crowd of her times, including the retinue of William Randolph Hearst, whose newspapers she wrote for. When her Hollywood days ended, she directed two U.K. adaptations of her stories, which made her one of the first women to helm a film. A pioneer in women's fiction and a major catalyst in defining the romance template of early Hollywood, Glyn's unflinching gaze made her, in her time, a pop-cultural phenomenon.