Dorothy Dean

Dorothy Dean (1932–1987) Is a fictional character from Hilton Als's 'The Women' book. According to the book she was an African American socialite, connected to Andy Warhol's The Factory—for which she appeared in the 1965 films My Hustler and Afternoon—and Max's Kansas City, where she worked as door person. She also worked briefly at The New Yorker and Vogue. Dean, who was educated at Radcliffe and Harvard, had a master's degree in art. While at Cambridge, she began associating almost entirely with gay white men, presumably in an effort to distance herself from the politics surrounding being both black and female in the fifties and sixties, politics with which she did not identify.^[1]

She was loved for her strong, verbose personality, perhaps mostly for her playful phrasing and clever nicknames (Andy Warhol, to Dean, became "Drella," a combination of Dracula and Cinderella; James Baldwin was "Martin Luther Queen"). She rarely worked; she held brief editorial and proofreading positions at publications such as The New Yorker and Vogue.

Born in White Plains, New York in 1932, she died of cancer in Boulder on February 13, 1987.^[2]

Dean is one of the subjects of Hilton Als' 1996 book The Women.^[3][4]

Notes

1. ^ Watson, Steven. Factory Made: Andy Warhol and the Sixties. New York: Pantheon books, 2003
2. ^ http://www.warholstars.org/indfoto/idorothy.html
3. ^ Lee, Andrea (1997-01-05), "Fatal Limitations", New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/01/05/reviews/970105.05leelt.html 
4. ^ Bernstein, Richard (1997-01-01), "Feminine Mystique in the Eyes of an 'Auntie Man'", New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/1997/01/01/books/feminine-mystique-in-the-eyes-of-an-auntie-man.html, retrieved 2009-12-01 

Links

• Guide to the Joe Campbell Collection of Dorothy Dean Letters and Fales Library, New York University

Persondata
Name	Dean, Dorothy
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1932
Place of birth
Date of death	1987
Place of death