Everyone got married in the 1950s, then moved to the suburbs to have the children of the soon-to-be-famous baby boom. For Americans who had survived the Great Depression and World War II, prosperous married life was a triumph. The unwed were objects of pity, scorn, even suspicion. And so in the 1950s, Eva Eldridge, no longer so young and marginally employed, was the perfect target for handsome Vick, who promised everything: storybook romance, marital respectability, and the lively social life she loved. When he disappeared not long after their honeymoon, she was devastated.  Eva hadn’t always been so vulnerable. Growing up pretty and popular in rural Oregon, she expected to marry young and live a life much like that of her parents, farming and rearing children. But then the United States threw its weight into World War II and as men headed to battle, the government started recruiting women to work in their places. Eva, like many other young women, found that life in the city with plenty of money, personal freedom, and lots of soldiers and sailors eager to pay court was more exhilarating than life down on the farm. After the war, she was ambivalent about getting married and settling down—at least until Vick arrived.  Refusing to believe her brand-new husband had abandoned her, Eva set about tracking down a man who, she now believed, was more damaged by wartime trauma than she had known. But instead of a wounded hero, she found a long string of women much like herself—hard-working, intelligent women who had loved and married Vick and now had no idea where—or even who—he was.  Drawing on a trove of some eight hundred letters and papers, Diane Simmons tells the story of Eva’s poignant struggle to get her dream husband back, as well as the stories of the women who had stood at the altar with Vick before and after her. Eva’s remarkable life illuminates women’s struggle for happiness at a time when marriage—and the perfect husband—meant everything. "In The Courtship of Eva Eldridge , Diane Simmons traces one woman’s story through hundreds of wartime letters and papers, ultimately uncovering postwar America’s rampant bigamy and the women who overcame it." ― New Yorker Published On: 2016-10-16 "When I saw the description for Diane Simmons’s new book—that she had relied on over 800 pieces of correspondence and ephemera to write her book about a woman married to a bigamist in the 1950s—I was immediately hooked. . . . But  The Courtship of Eva Eldridge  goes further. It also delves into our collective history, reveals and educates its reader. . . And Simmons does a masterful job of relating her thorough research without making us feel in the least like we’re sitting in a Sociology 101 lecture hall. She makes her case slyly, so that we don’t even notice we’re nodding along and going, 'Ohhhh, yes, of course!'" -- Yi Shun Lai ― Tahoma Literary Review “ The Courtship of Eva Eldridge  is both a riveting narrative of detection and a moving story about individual lives caught up in the changing gender roles generated by World War II. Diane Simmons employs dogged research, smart analysis, existing scholarship, and lively prose to create a history that is hard to put down.” -- Susan Hartmann, author, The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s “The writing is vivid and tight, with a touch of American noir reminiscent of Raymond Chandler and Joan Didion. Simmons's writing brings to life the dark side of a country trying to move on in the wake of war. She blends history and her won detective work to tell a story of betrayal and shattered dreams.” -- Peter Chilson, author, Disturbance-Loving Species: A Novella and Stories DIANE SIMMONS has published two novels, Let the Bastards Freeze in the Dark and Dreams Like Thunder, which won the Oregon Book Award. Her short story collection Little America won the Ohio State University Prize for Short Fiction. She lives in the New York City area and is a professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College–City University of New York.  The Courtship of Eva Eldridge A Story of Bigamy in the Marriage-Mad Fifties By Diane Simmons University of Iowa Press Copyright © 2016 University of Iowa Press All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-60938-461-6 Contents Acknowledgments, Introduction, PART 1, March 1958, Boise, Idaho, Spring 1940, Wing Valley, Oregon, Summer 1956, Boise, 1940–1942, Wing Valley, 1942, "If the Fair Sex Were to Replace Men", 1942–1943, War in Europe, 1943, "One Woman Can Shorten This War", Winter 1956, Vick Hits Boise, 1943, Shipbuilding Boomtown, Portland, Spring 1957, Engaged, Wing Valley, 1944, Swan Island, Portland, 1957, A Wedding, Boise, 1944–1946, Swan Island Shipyard and Fort George Wright Convalescent Hospital, Spring 1958, Farewell Bend, Oregon, 1944, "The Taste of Independence," Swan Island, 1957, Honeymoon, Nevada and California, 1945, Sunday Punch, 1946, Waiting for a Wedding, Wing Valley, PART 2, Odette, March 19