Elinor Glyn, glamorous socialite, incessant traveler, and romantic novelist, reached the peak of her celebrity in the autumn of 1907, when she published Three Weeks. Soon a naughty rhyme was circulating in New York and London society, cleverly mocking the novel's central scene, in which the heroine, reclining seductively on a tiger skin, seduces the spellbound hero:

Would you like to sin
with Elinor Glyn
on a tiger skin"
Or would you prefer
to err with her
on some other fur"

Within two years the novel had sold two million copies worldwide, largely because of its scandalous reputation. Much later, in 1957, Meredith Wilson's Broadway tribute to American small-town life in turn-of-the-century Iowa, The Music Man, included a scene in which Marion the Librarian defends her choice of teenage books to the mayor's wife, Mrs. Shin. Would she not rather have her daughter read the classics than the novels of...