“Beautiful one! beautiful one!” she purred. The book’s crowning glory was a sex scene that took place on a tiger skin: Critics hated Glyn’s stilted language and, as Nickianne Moody points out, her choice of subject matter (an older woman seducing a younger man in the hopes of conceiving a child).

She had already stormed the far frontiers of American sexuality in 1907, when her shocking novel Three Weekshit the bestseller lists. It translated sex appeal, taboo at first but soon pounded into the cultural matrix by Hollywood.” Pre- It, Maurer notes, Americans didn’t have socially approved words with which to describe pregnancy or menstruation, let alone sex.Įnter one Elinor Glyn. A third-rate writer named Elinor Glyn wrote a novel entitled It, which was the same it that everybody was doing in the song. Maurer explains: “If there was a strong erotic fluttering underneath the campus elms, there was parallel activity elsewhere. And though the book and the movie that followed are tame indeed compared to today’s racy BDSM tome, they were enough to scandalize and titillate their Prohibition-era audiences. But in the 1920s, the word meant something much more salacious for book lovers.Īmerica is currently obsessed with 50 Shades of Grey (the movie broke records by bringing in $81.7 million on its first weekend), but in the 1920s, readers were all about It. Some readers associate the title It with Stephen King’s creepy-clown story.

The Reason Why by Elinor Glyn