PCL MS 149 Pamela Browning Collection

Pamela Browning is a contemporary author of romance novels. Notes and a manuscript to one of her novels and correspondence with other romance writers comprise the core of this collection.

Pamela Browning transferred her manuscripts to the Browne Popular Culture Library, Bowling Green State University, in September 1996. The collection is open for research, but photocopying or other duplication of manuscripts must comply with applicable copyright laws. This register was compiled by Kirk Richardson under the supervision of Jean Geist, Popular Culture Library Associate II in November 1996 and was updated in September 2009 by Patricia Falk.

Pamela Browning was born in Evanston, Illinois. She traveled with her parents when her father was a big-band musician and, for the most part, lived in Chicago until she was nine. She then moved to Florida where she eventually graduated college. She has worked in the Training Department of Pratt & Whitney Aircraft Florida Research & Development Center, has been a newspaper reporter and columnist, and as Assistant Director of Public Information at a four-year liberal-arts college. She has also worked for the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources as a tour guide at the CSS Neuse, the remains of an ironclad ship from the Confederate Navy. She has stated her interests and hobbies as "ranging from designing and making my own clothes and draperies to collecting antiques to inventing recipes to skiing to photography to club work to taking ballet and piano lessons at an advanced age to public speaking and storytelling for adults and children - and always reading, reading, reading." Currently, she makes her home in North Carolina with her husband and cat, Elizabeth Barrett. She has a son and daughter.

Browning began her writing career when she was a child by "scratching phrases on brass doorknobs with a pin, which did not impress anyone much . . . ." She was first published at the age of ten in a children’s magazine. Later she was a newspaper columnist, reporter and feature writer who began writing romance fiction when her children were small and eventually sold the first of her thirty-five romances in 1980. Her first publication was Sands of Xanadu (1982), and was soon followed by Wish for Tomorrow (1983), One on One (1983), Touch of Gold (1984), Stardust Summer (1984), Sea of Gold (1985), Cherished Beginning (1985), Handyman Special (1985), Interior Designs (1985), Through Eyes of Love (1985), Ever Since Eve (1986) which was considered a "Reviewer's Choice of 1986" by Romantic Times, Forever Is A Long Time (1986), To Touch the Stars (1986), The Flutterby Princess (1987), Ice Crystals (1987), Kisses in the Rain (1987), Fly Away (1988), Harvest Home (1988), Simple Gifts (1988), Feathers in the Wind (1989), Until Spring (1990), Humble Pie (1990), A Man Worth Loving (1991), For Auld Land Syn (1991), Sunshine and Shadows (1991), Morgan’s Child (1992), Merry Christmas, Baby (1993), The World's Last Bachelor (1995), Angel’s Baby (1995), and Lover’s Leap (1996). She has an affinity for travel, flying with her husband in their private plane to different locales in order to research them before using them in any of her books. Often, she finds material for her books in her real life experiences; for example, she based some of the dialog for the heroin in The World's Last Bachelor on actual lines her daughter had to learn as a part of a job modeling and selling perfume.

Many of her books have been listed on the B. Dalton and Waldenbooks bestseller lists, including four in a row for Harlequin American. Her books consistently win high ratings from reviewers, most recently a 4+ from Romantic Times for Lover’s Leap. Also, her book Morgan’s Child won the B. Dalton Booksellers Award for the bestselling Harlequin American Romance in

1992. She has won many national awards from the National Federation of Press Women for both adult and juvenile books, including a coveted First Place for The World’s Last Bachelor in the federation’s 1995 national communications contest. Ms. Browning has been a frequent speaker at Harlequin publicity events and, at the invitation of Mondadori, Harlequin’s Italian affiliate, she spoke at a luncheon for 500 at the Excelsior Hotel in Rome, Italy , in 1989. She has been featured on regional television and radio shows, such as The Carol Saline Show in Philadelphia, and in a nationally aired segment of PM Magazine, a TV magazine show.

Pamela Browning is a charter member of Romance Writers of America, a member of the National Federation of Press Women, Media Women of South Carolina, Novelists, Inc., and the Authors Guild.

Pamela Browning also writes under the pseudonyms: Pamela Ketter and Melanie Rowe.

The Pamela Browning Collection houses the notes and manuscript for one of the author's works, as well as correspondence between the author and other writers of romantic novels. These letters form a particularly strong core for this collection, for they address the genesis and subsequent outline for a serial collaboration of romantic novels.

Researchers interested in romantic fiction and the writing process will find this collection useful.

Correspondence

Series

Literary Correspondence

1994

Letters to Linda Randall Wisdom, Barbara Keiler, and Julie Kistler

Literary Production

Series

Literary Manuscript

1996

Arranged chronologically by date of published work

Typed manuscript, with handwritten corrections by editors