Pearl Schiff

Pearl Schiff (May 12, 1916 – July 28, 2005) was an American author from Boston, Massachusetts. She is best known for her first novel, Scollay Square, which made The New York Times Best Seller list in 1952. The novel, about an upper-class woman's affair with a sailor in Boston's red-light district, was considered scandalous at the time.

Life and career Schiff was born to immigrant parents, grew up in Boston, and worked her way through college at Radcliffe, graduating in 1937. The Russian poet Itzik Feffer was her cousin. She married Dr. Louis Schiff, a podiatrist, and lived for some time on Boston's Beacon Hill, a few blocks away from the considerably less affluent Scollay Square. At the time, Scollay Square was Boston's red-light district, as well as home to thousands of low-income and working-class residents; just a few years later, in the early 1960s, the neighborhood was razed to make room for Government Center.

Schiff wrote her first novel, Scollay Square, while raising her two young children, Arthur and Janet. In a 1953 interview, she said she could not have written the book without the support of her husband, who accompanied her several nights a week to the bars and nightclubs of Scollay Square to gather material. "All my life, my mother told me not to go through Scollay Square and it was a place I was always curious about", she said.

Schiff worked as a proofreader and book reviewer for The Boston Globe for many years. After retiring in 1978, she led tours of the Globe facility. Her husband died in 1989. In her later years she lived in Sharon, Massachusetts, where she taught a memoir-writing class for the Council on Aging, She died in 2005 at the Goddard Nursing Home in Jamaica Plain. A reviewer at Kirkus Reviews accused Schiff of resorting to social stereotypes and easy solutions. The novel is characterized as "scandalous", "sensational", and "taboo-breaking" in Schiff's Boston Globe obituary.

Works Scollay Square (1952). Rinehart. Walk a Narrow Line (1966). Frederick Muller. The Story of Pearl: Cultured and Otherwise (2006). Xlibris.