V. C. Andrews

V. C. Andrews (1923-1986) was an American novelist whose gothic family saga Flowers in the Attic (1979) became a bestseller and began a series of books that continued under her name long after her death.

Cleo Virginia Andrews was born on 6 June 1923 in Portsmouth, Virginia. Arthritis following a fall in her teens left her using crutches and a wheelchair for much of her life. She trained by correspondence course and worked as a commercial artist, illustrator and portrait painter, supporting her family after her father's death in 1957.

Flowers in the Attic appeared in November 1979 as a mass-market paperback from Pocket Books, priced at 2.50 dollars. Its Dollanganger sequels were Petals on the Wind (1980), If There Be Thorns (1981) and Seeds of Yesterday (1984). She also wrote My Sweet Audrina (1982) and Heaven (1985), which began the Casteel series. By 1982 her novels had sold more than 11 million copies. She died of breast cancer in Virginia Beach on 19 December 1986.

After her death the ghostwriter Andrew Neiderman completed Garden of Shadows (1987) and Fallen Hearts (1988) from her material, and Publishers Weekly reported in 2019 that he had written more than 80 books. Publishers Weekly reported in 2019 that the Andrews books had more than 146 million copies in circulation. Flowers in the Attic was filmed in 1987 and again for television in 2014.

For collectors. The first edition of Flowers in the Attic is the 1979 Pocket Books paperback, although some records, including Wikipedia's infobox, name Simon & Schuster. Collectors usually separate the novels Andrews wrote herself, from Flowers in the Attic to Heaven, from the posthumous titles.