The Judith Guest collection consists of correspondence, typescripts, notes, screenplays, interviews, and print material, such as reviews, interviews, and announcements. The papers are divided into five series: Correspondence; Promotional material, reviews, interviews; Serials; Speeches; and Works, which contains the Ordinary People and Second Heaven subseries. Guest's initial correspondence with Viking regarding the manuscript for Ordinary People, which may be found in the Correspondence series, is particularly evocative of the excitement surrounding its publication.
The Promotional material, review, interviews; Serials; and Speeches series consist of ephemera relating to Guest's career as a writer including numerous clippings of biographical profiles and book reviews. These series also document some of the author's professional and promotional activities, such as publication tour interviews and speeches.
The emphasis of the collection is on Guest's creative process in writing Ordinary People and Second Heaven, which comprises the Works series. Many drafts of both novels are included, with editorial and authorial marginalia and corrections. The metamorphosis of the bestselling Ordinary People into a screenplay is well documented in Guest's attempt, followed by screenwriter Alvin Sargent's final shooting script.
Novelist Judith Guest was born March 29, 1936 in Detroit, Michigan. After graduating from the University of Michigan in 1958 with a BA and Certificate in Education, she taught elementary school in Birmingham, Michigan. Subsequent teaching stints in Royal Oak and Troy were interrupted when Guest moved to Illinois. In Palatine, Illinois, from 1966-1969, Guest honed her writing skills producing articles for local and regional newspapers.
Guest is best known for the astounding success of her first novel Ordinary People. Disregarding the standard procedure for manuscript submission, the novice author sent the entire unsolicited manuscript to Viking Press. The novel was well received by the editorial staff and became the first unsolicited book to be published by Viking in twenty-six years.
Ordinary People, published in 1976 after Guest and her family moved from Michigan to Edina, Minnesota, became an immediate bestseller. The novel was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, serialized in Redbook, and had its paperback rights sold to Ballantine for a hefty $635,000. But most notably, Guest's story of a suicidal young man and his emotionally remote parents was made into a movie which won the 1980 Academy Award for best movie. Robert Redford garnered the Academy's best director award for his realization of the novel onto film.
After the publication of her first novel, Guest became a full-time writer. Her second novel, Second Heaven, was published in 1982, and it too was chosen as a Book-of-the-Month selection. Though optioned to be made into a movie, this story has yet to be filmed.