From “Pamela Moore + 40” by Robert Nedelkoff
The Baffler Magazine , Issue 10, 1997
Kathy was never published. In September, Dell issued her second novel under the title Diana; both it and Suzy-Q were out of print by the following year. Bantam reprinted Chocolates thrice more; it went out of print in America for the last time sometime in 1968, about when Dell pulped its last copies of The Horsy Set and not long after what would have been Pamela Moore’s thirtieth birthday. In England and Europe, her books stayed in print until a little after the turn of the decade.
Since then, her work has never been reprinted. Apart from the 1982 reference that drew my attention to her, the Contemporary Authors sketch (last updated in 1968), and an entry in Who’s Who Of American Women for 1965-66 (apparently compiled before her death), her name appears in almost no books or reference materials. She has been the subject of no articles since the newspaper stories immediately following her suicide. Nor does she figure in any academic discussions of feminist literature, despite the fact that some of her work clearly prefigures the great awakening of feminism in the late ’60s and ’70s.
Don Moore, her father, was “rediscovered” when the movie version of Flash Gordon came out in 1980, and he colorfully recounted his years on the strip and in Hollywood for movie and science-fiction magazines that year. He didn’t discuss Pamela. He died in Florida in 1986.
Isabel Moore continued to write for a time. In 1965, under the pseudonym Grace Walker, she published a biography of her surviving daughter, the full title of which is: Elaine Moore Moffat, Blue Ribbon Horsewoman: The Complete Life Story Of A Champion Rider Who Learned To Deal With Life By Dealing With Horses. Two years later, she published Women Of The Green Cafe, a paperback novel about lesbians. In 1970, she published That Summer In Connecticut, a smoothly written but cliche-riddled account of a May-December romance that indicates just what difficulty she must have had understanding her younger daughter given the generational gulf that separated the women who came of age before the ’50s and those who matured just as the implications of The Second Sex were beginning to resonate in this country.