In a letter to Lorraine Hansberry, Louise listed some of the other books she was reading as she worked: Ship of Fools by Katherine Anne Porter Julius Horwitz’s The Inhabitants, about unrelenting cycles of poverty in Harlem Freedom Road, Howard Fast’s novel about the Reconstruction era a biography of Eugene O’Neill, whose tragic life of alcoholism she found both pitiful and a little boring and Lawrence Durrell’s gorgeous The Alexandria Quartet. Her affection for the name Harriet is obvious, and Louise herself would briefly use Peter as an alternate name. Sayers’s detectives, Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey. Louise read these, but when it came to intrigue and mystery, she preferred the intellectual peregrinations of Dorothy L. Spy was a popular feature in Mad Magazine. John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Ian Fleming’s James Bond books were leading hardcover and paperback bestseller lists, and Spy vs. Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music were in the movie theaters. In 19, as Louise Fitzhugh was inventing Harriet the Spy’s world, nannies and spies were very much in the public eye.
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