Virginia Coffman Papers

Virginia Coffman was born on July 30, 1914 in San Francisco, California to Edythe L. Deuvaul and William Milo Coffman. She spent most of her childhood in Long Beach, California and attended Edison Elementary and Junior High School, and the Polytechnic High School in Long Beach, where she won three newspaper prizes. She and her sister, Florence (Donnie), wrote, produced, and acted in plays for friends and family while growing up. Her family survived the 1933 Long Beach earthquake, although the earthquake destroyed the schools she had attended. Edythe and the two girls moved to Oakland, California, where Virginia was a freelance movie reviewer for the Oakland Tribune newspaper from 1933-1940. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1938. Her parents divorced amicably during the 1940s.

Both Virginia and Donnie Coffman worked as actors during the late 1930s and early 1940s. Virginia believed her best roles were in The Damask Cheek and Voice of the Turtle. The family moved back to Hollywood in 1944, where Donnie pursued work in opera and musical comedy. Virginia preferred writing to acting and took a secretarial job with the Selznick Studios, hoping it would lead to an opening in the script department. She also worked for Columbia, Hal Roach, Monogram Pictures Corp., and RKO studios as a secretary and scriptwriter for both film and television during her early writing career, 1944-1956.

Coffman moved to Reno, Nevada in 1956 to focus on her writing. She worked for Henry F. "Chick" Bennett in Reno until her early novels proved to be financially successful, becoming a full-time writer in 1965. Her first published novel, Moura, was released in 1959, showcased by Library Journal, and became a bestseller. She was dedicated to meticulous research for her historical novels, drawing upon personal experience as a world traveler. Coffman attributed her love of France and interest in Napoleon Bonaparte to a maternal ancestor, Colour-Sergent Bertrand Neu, who accompanied Napoleon into Russia and later fought the British in New Orleans during the American Revolution. Her younger sister, Florence (Donnie) Coffman Micciche, a Reno artist and musician, accompanied her on several international cruises, along with her husband, John (Johnny) Micciche, who was employed by the First National Bank of Nevada in Reno.

Coffman used several pen names for her fiction: Anne Austen, Kay Cameron, Victor Cross, Jeanne Duval, Virginia C. Du Vaul, Diana Saunders, and Ann(e) Stanfield. Many of Coffman's historical romance and gothic mystery novels were translated into several European languages, as well as being published in large print English language and audio editions. By the mid-1980s, over five million paperback editions of her novels had been sold. By then, Coffman was recognized as "the author largely responsible for setting off the Gothics craze of the 1960s," earning her the reputation of "Queen of Gothics."

Coffman was recognized by Who's Who of American Women and Who's Who in the West. She was a member of the Screen Writers Guild, the Authors League of America, and the Mystery Writers Guild of America. In 1990, the University of Nevada, Reno inducted her into the Nevada Writer's Hall of Fame.

Coffman died in Reno on March 31, 2005.