Jacqueline Susann plan of treatment and subsequent prognosis. Despite the grueling treatment, Susann's cancer spread, and she entered Doctors Hospital for the last time, on August 20, 1974, her fifty-sixth birthday. After days lapsing in and out of a coma, she died on September 21. Her last words to Mansfield were, "Hey, doll, let's get the hell out of here." She was survived by her husband, her son, and her mother. Jacqueline Susann is acknowledged to be the first "brand-name" novelist, a novelist who sells independent of critical attention. With her husband, Irving Mansfield, Susann revolutionized book promotion, and they are widely
Naked Came the Stranger year, further spurring the book's popularity. Mike McGrady was convinced that popular American literary culture had become so base—with the best-seller lists dominated by the likes of Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann—that any book could succeed if enough sex was thrown in. To test his theory, in 1966 McGrady recruited a team of "Newsday" colleagues (according to Andreas Schroder, nineteen men and five women) to collaborate on a sexually explicit novel with no literary or social value whatsoever. McGrady co-edited the project with his "Newsday" colleague Harvey Aronson, and among the other collaborators were well-known writers including 1965 Pulitzer Prize