Happy Birthday to journalist, writer, and screenwriter Adela Rogers St. Johns (b. May 20, 1894, in Los Angeles, CA), who broke down barriers for women as lead storytellers across numerous fields. She also blended her journalism experiences with her fiction writing and screenwriting work. For example, she earned a reputation for courtroom drama screenplays partly by basing these on actual legal cases she previously worked as a crime reporter. She also adapted many of her fictional novels and short stories directly into films. As she traversed mediums, she found ways to subtly incorporate social commentary. Indeed, she wrote in her autobiography that "Fiction, as I discovered then and later, had that one distinct advantage. in some instances it was the only way in which you could print the truth.” As scholar Sarah Amble Whorton emphasizes, “St. Johns knew how to write candy-coated social awareness films. Each movie offers dramatic conflict and the expected happy ending. Hidden at the core is St. Johns’ point of view that women could not fully succeed in a society bound by antiquated gender roles.”
Citations: Sarah Amble Whorton, “Adela Rogers St. Johns: Survival of the Feisty,” in When Women Wrote Hollywood: Essays on Female Screenwriters in the Early Film Industry, ed. Rosanne Welch (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2018), 14-16, Kindle edition; Adela Rogers St. Johns, The Honeycomb (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1969), 136, https://archive.org/details/adelarogersstjoh0000unse; “American journalist and screenwriter Adela Rogers St. Johns, then West Coast Editor for Photoplay, on page 70 of the April 1922 Photoplay,” public domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Adela_Rogers_St_Johns_-_Apr_1922_Photoplay.jpg#/media/File:Adela_Rogers_St_Johns_-_Apr_1922_Photoplay.jpg.
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