Sunnycroft Books — Publishing the late-life works of Ardyth Kennelly

Publishing the late-life works of Oregon
author Ardyth Kennelly (1912–2005)

Seven decades after Ardyth Kennelly delighted readers with her best-selling novels of the 1950s, Sunnycroft Books is pleased to be publishing the works that she wrote later in her life. Ardyth also had a second career as a collage artist, creating huge, strikingly imaginative and whimsical pieces.

Variation West (2014) This last and greatest novel by Ardyth Kennelly—completed in 1994 and finally published two decades later—is set against the background of late-19th-century Mormonism and the 1857 Mountain Meadows massacre. The book has all the wit, warmth, and storytelling genius of Kennelly's previous novels, but also the darker themes and more critical views that she was not able to express openly in that more reserved era of the 1950s.

Bodies Adjacent: Ardyth's Memoir & Egon's Journal (2023) is Ardyth Kennelly's story of her life with her husband, the Jewish Viennese physician Egon V. Ullman. In the middle of her memoir, Ardyth places the journal of their lives that Egon kept from 1947 to 1956, during the years when Ardyth was writing her first five books.

New York on $5 a Day (2024) is a brief but charming memoir of Ardyth Kennelly's 1963–64 sojourn in New York City. It's a chatty and engaging reminiscence about the unusual people she met in New York—including the English witch Sybil Leek, the minor poet Sanders Russell, the Spanish Civil War veteran Robert Raven, the dancer Raymond Duncan, and the forgotten writer Anzia Yezierska.

Millionaire Housekeeping (2026) is a mid-career novel written probably around 1970. Set in 20th-century New York City, it deftly satirizes the habits and preoccupations of the ultra-rich—while also illustrating how the old ideas about propriety and art were swept away in the countercultural 1960s.