Dundy described her childhood home, dominated by her abusive father, as “a prison where my father was the warden, my sisters the inmates, and my mother the snitch. The Depression led the family to move to Great Neck, N.Y., but their fortunes rebounded, and the family returned in triumph to Park Avenue. She later complained that critics failed to credit her heroine’s orgasm as an important first step toward the frank treatment of female sexuality in fiction.Įlaine Brimberg grew up in Manhattan, the daughter of a wealthy clothing manufacturer, and attended the Ethical Culture School.

“It seemed to me that the American girl had changed tremendously from the Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway days, and that this change had not yet been recorded, at least to my satisfaction,” Ms. A precise contemporary of Holly Golightly, Sally Jay carried on the Daisy Miller tradition of ardent, questing American women exemplified more recently by the characters Isadora Wing and Carrie Bradshaw. “The Dud Avocado,” published in 1958, chronicled the Parisian adventures of Sally Jay Gorce, a free-spirited American girl with the avocadolike qualities typical of the breed: “So green so eternally green,” one of her European admirers gushes. Edith Wharton and Henry James wrote about the American girl abroad, but it was Elaine Dundys Sally Jay Gorce who told us what she was really thinking. The cause was a heart attack, said her daughter, Tracy Tynan. The Dud Avocado follows the romantic and comedic adventures of a young American who heads overseas to conquer Paris in the late 1950s. Elaine Dundy, the author of the best-selling novel “The Dud Avocado,” whose title came from the theater critic Kenneth Tynan, her husband at the time, died on May 1 at her home in Los Angeles.

The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy