``If I live to be very old, all my memories of the glory days will grow vague and confused, till I won’t bet certain any of it really happened,″ she once wrote. ``Apple Of My Eye″ focused on life in New York ``The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street″ on her fascination with literary London. Her first book, ``Underfoot in Show Business,″ described her coming to New York to work in theater in the 1940s. She also wrote 40 plays which were never performed. Hanff’s professional work consisted mostly of television plays and children’s books. Hanff.īorn in Philadelphia on April 15, 1916, Ms. It was adapted for the London stage and a New York production of the play was mounted in 1982 with Ellen Burstyn portraying Ms. She wrote ``84, Charing Cross Road″ as a tribute to Doel, who died before she could visit London. Hanff was living hand-to-mouth as a free-lance writer. All that gleaming leather and gold stamping and beautiful type belongs in a pine-paneled library of an English country home it wants to be read by a fire in a gentleman’s easy chair _ not in a secondhand studio couch in a one-room hovel in a broken-down brownstone front.″īefore the publication of ``84, Charing Cross Road,″ which was released in 1986 as a feature film starring Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins, Ms. ``The Newman arrived almost a week ago and I’m just beginning to recover,″ she wrote in 1950, when she bought a first edition John Henry Newman’s ``Idea of a University.″

The shop’s staff sent her recipes for Yorkshire pudding and she mailed them food packages and nylon stockings to ameliorate the rigors of postwar England. 12, 1668, where his wife chased him out of bed and round the bedroom with a red-hot poker?″ĭoel had responded impersonally at first but he and his colleagues soon warmed to Ms. ``this is not pepys’ diary, this is some busybody’s miserable collection of EXCERPTS from pepys’ diary may he rot.

``WHAT KIND OF A PEPYS’ DIARY DO YOU CALL THIS?″ she wrote after receiving a shipment from the bookshop in 1951. Her letters bore little resemblance to the usual business correspondence. Reviewer Thomas Lask in The New York Times called the book ``a charmer: a 19th century book in a 20th century world.″ of London, based on letters she exchanged with the shop and its chief buyer, Frank Doel, between 19. Her work was barely noticed until 1970, when she wrote ``84, Charing Cross Road,″ the address of Marks & Co. Hanff died of pneumonia Wednesday in Manhattan, where she had lived most of her life, her publishers said. NEW YORK (AP) _ Helene Hanff, the author whose 20-year correspondence with an English book seller inspired the book, play and movie ``84, Charing Cross Road,″ has died.

Frank doel helene hanff