Lillian Day

Lillian Day, born Lillian Ethel Abrams on June 27, 1893, in Manhattan, New York City, was an American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and biographer who worked across stage, screen, and print throughout the twentieth century. She died on March 29, 1991, at the age of 98, at the DeWitt Nursing Home in Manhattan, where she had resided for eight years. Her parents, Amelia M. Fendler-Abrams and Alexander Abrams, were both physicians practicing in New York City during the 1890s. Their marriage ended in a widely publicized divorce case in March 1912, during which the eighteen-year-old Lillian testified on her mother's behalf.

Day began her writing career in the 1920s, contributing to magazines including The New Yorker and The Saturday Evening Post. She published her first novel, Kiss and Tell, in 1931. The following year, she co-wrote the novel Our Wife with her second husband, Lyon Mearson, and she subsequently adapted it into a stage play that opened at the Booth Theatre on Broadway in March 1933. Columbia Pictures later produced a film version of Our Wife in 1941. Day also co-wrote the screenplay for Wayward, released by Paramount in 1932, and her short story "Living up to Lizzie" served as the basis for the Warner Bros. film Personal Maid's Secret in 1935. Her 1938 novel The Youngest Profession was adapted into both a play, A Woman of Fifteen, and a film of the same title as the novel, both in 1943. She co-wrote the play Collector's Item, which ran at the Booth Theatre on Broadway in February 1952. Her Broadway work also includes the 1924 production Barbara.

In addition to her fiction and dramatic writing, Day produced several biographical works. Her biography of violinist Niccolò Paganini appeared in 1929, and in 1946 she wrote a children's biography of composer Edvard Grieg. In 1957, she published Ninon, a Courtesan of Quality, a biography of Ninon de l'Enclos. She also collaborated with her third husband, Norbert Lederer, on two mystery novels: Murder in Time in 1933 and Death Comes on Friday in 1937.

Day married three times. Her first husband, Mr. Day, provided the surname she used as her pen name throughout her career, retaining it through subsequent marriages and divorces. She married Lyon Mearson, a playwright and mystery writer, in 1928; the couple divorced in early 1934. She announced her engagement to Dr. Norbert Lewis Lederer, a chemical engineer, former attaché to Scotland Yard, and author on crime, tropical fish, and chess, in December 1934, and the two married around 1946. In 1950, Day and Lederer relocated to France. Following his death in Paris in November 1955, she continued to live in Paris and Neuilly-sur-Seine for approximately thirty years before returning to Manhattan.