海伦·汉芙

海伦·汉芙（英语：Helene Hanff，1916年4月15日—1997年4月9日）是一位美国作家，出生于宾州费城。绝大部分时光都在曼哈顿岛的一所旧公寓内度过，一生困窘潦倒。

汉芙生前从事最多的工作是为剧团修审剧本，并撰写了多部电视剧的剧本。她最为人所知的身份是《查令十字街84号》的作者，这本书后来被改编成为舞台剧、电视剧，以及同名电影。1997年，汉芙因肺炎在纽约市病逝。

著作

1970年出版《查令十字路84号》，次年出版其英国版

1977年出版日记体纽约市导览《我眼中的苹果》(Apple of My Eye)

1980年出版的半自传《别脚混剧圈》(Underfoot in Show Business)

1985年出版传记《Q的惠泽》(Q's Legacy)

1992年出版《纽约来鸿》(Letter From New York)

一系列以少年为对象的美国历史读物

Helene Hanff (April 15, 1916 – April 9, 1997) was an American writer born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She is best known as the author of the book 84, Charing Cross Road, which became the basis for a stage play, television play, and film of the same name.

Early life

She was born in 1916 to Miriam (born Levy) and Arthur Hanff. Her father had been a performer, but he settled down to sell shirts. However, it was said that he still liked the theatre, and he would swap shirts for a chance to get into a theater. Her family could not fund an expensive education, but Hanff won a scholarship to attend Temple University. She said that she was resigned to leaving after a year when the money was used up. She decided to teach herself, and she established a daily schedule of study. She had to abandon this when she realized that her family needed her to be a wage earner.

Career

Helene Hanff's literary career saw her move from unproduced playwright to writer of some of the earliest television dramas to becoming a noted writer and personality in her own right, as a quintessential New Yorker. She wrote a memoir in 1961 called Underfoot in Show Business that chronicled her struggles as an ambitious young playwright trying to make it in the world of New York theatre in the 1940s and 1950s. She worked in publicists' offices and spent summers on the "straw hat circuit" along the East Coast, all the while writing one play after another. Her plays were admired by some of Broadway's leading producers, but somehow none of them ever made it to the stage, Hanff herself saying her plays specialized in "plotless charm."

When network television production geared up in New York City in the early 1950s, Hanff found a new career writing and editing scripts for many early television dramas. Chief among these was the Dumont Network series The Adventures of Ellery Queen. At the same time, she continued to try to get one of her plays produced on Broadway and not just be "one of the 999 out of 1,000 who didn't become Moss Hart." (In later editions of Underfoot, this reference was changed to Noël Coward.) The bulk of television production eventually moved to California, but Hanff chose to remain in New York. As her TV work dried up, she turned to writing for magazines and, eventually, to the books that made her reputation. In 1981, Hanff also appeared on the BBC's Desert Island Discs radio programme, in which she discussed her life and career along with her top choice of music which was Bach and her choice of luxury was Scrabble.

84, Charing Cross Road

The epistolary work 84, Charing Cross Road was first published in 1970. It chronicles Hanff's 20 years of correspondence, primarily with Frank Doel, the chief buyer for Marks & Co, a London bookshop. She depended on the bookshop—and on Doel—for the obscure classics and British literature titles that fueled her passion for self-education. She became intimately involved in the lives of the shop's staff, sending them food parcels during Britain's postwar shortages and sharing with them details of her life in Manhattan.

Due to financial difficulties and an aversion to travel, she put off visiting her English friends until too late; Doel died in December 1968 from peritonitis from a burst appendix, and the bookshop eventually closed. Hanff did finally visit Charing Cross Road and the empty but still-standing shop in the summer of 1971, a trip recorded in her 1973 book The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street. In Duchess, Hanff describes her visits with friends and fans to various locations and places of literary and historical interest in London and Southern England. This trip was a highlight of her life – her modesty and sense of humor are evident as she talks about her love of London and the friends who were so devoted to her because of 84, Charing Cross Road, including Frank Doel's wife Nora and his daughter Sheila, by his first wife Mary Price.