TY - SER KW - Scots-Irish Americans KW - ministers KW - actors and actresses KW - Works Progress Administration KW - housewives KW - Protestants KW - Jewish Americans AU - Gladys Schmitt AB - Alexandra, unappreciated as a child, falls in love with a ruthless actor who breaks her heart. The story is told through Sophie Littman, a Squirrel Hill Jewish housewife whose husband is a mathematician. C1 - 1930s C3 - Allegheny County; Pittsburgh; Oakland; Schenley High School; Phipps Conservatory; Carnegie Museum; Carnegie Library; Shadyside; Squirrel Hill; Schenley Park; Carnegie Mellon University; Lawrenceville; St. Francis Hospital C4 - Literary; Psychological CY - New York LA - English M3 - Novel N1 - Carnegie Mellon University is referred to as Carnegie Technical Institute, as it was then known. MGM bought film rights to this novel in 1947 for June Allyson but never produced it. Julie Harris tried and failed to bring its stage play adaptation to Broadway in the 1950s. N2 - Alexandra, unappreciated as a child, falls in love with a ruthless actor who breaks her heart. The story is told through Sophie Littman, a Squirrel Hill Jewish housewife whose husband is a mathematician. PB - Dial Press PP - New York PY - 1947 RN - Gladys Schmitt (1909-72), born in Pittsburgh, graduated from Schenley High School. She attended Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham University) on a scholarship but transferred to the University of Pittsburgh, from which she graduated in 1932, then took a job in New York with Scholastic Publishing. She returned to Pittsburgh in 1942 and began a 30-year teaching career in the English department of Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon University), where she founded the creative writing program. She published nine novels, many of them selections of the Literary Guild, including her million seller David the King (1946). She married the composer Simon Goldfield, her high school boyfriend. She is buried in Pittsburgh and her name is memorialized in Carnegie Mellon's Gladys Schmitt Creative Writing Center. EP - 316 p. TI - Alexandra ER -