V. C. Andrews was best known as the creator of the Dollanganger series, the story of four children born of an incestuous union and imprisoned in an attic by their sadistic grandmother. Virginia Cleo Andrews was born on June 6, 1923, in Portsmouth. Her first published work was Flowers in the Attic, published in 1979. A popular success, especially with adolescents and young women, V. C. Andrews wrote in a genre first explored by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Bram Stoker and later popularized by Stephen King, Ira Levin, and Tom Tryon. Like them, she attracted an international audience. The Tidewater native told an interviewer that her stories were “based on dreams, and situations taken from my own life, in which I changed the pattern so that what might have happened actually does happen.” In 1984 the city of Norfolk named her Professional Woman of the Year. On December 19, 1986, Andrews died of breast cancer in Virginia Beach. She was buried in Olive Branch Cemetery, in Portsmouth.
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