Although Jay Presson Allen has written novels, plays, and television scripts and although she has written only eight screenplays in nearly twenty years, she is best known for her work in motion pictures, for which she has achieved considerable critical acclaim and financial success. By the beginning of the 1980s, she had also established herself as an important Hollywood producer.

Allen was born Jacqueline Presson in San Angelo, Texas, daughter of Albert Jeffrey and Wilhilmina Miller Presson. "Somewhat" educated in Texas, she moved to New York in the late 1940s with ambitions to become an actress. Instead, she married and settled in Connecticut, where she wrote two unproduced plays and a novel, Spring Riot (1948).

Allen's first marriage ended in divorce, and on 17 March 1955 she was married to Lewis Maitland Allen, a theater and movie producer. Never particularly fond of her given name, she decided to use her first...