Allison Pataki

Allison Pataki was writing and producing television news in New York when she began drafting historical fiction in her spare time; three unpublished manuscripts later she signed a book deal in 2012 and has stayed with the form since. She read English at Yale. The Magnificent Lives of Marjorie Post, published in 2021, is her sixth novel and takes the voice of Marjorie Merriweather Post, born in Springfield, Illinois in 1887, who inherited the Postum cereal company at twenty-seven, grew it into General Foods, married and divorced four times, and left behind the Hillwood estate in Washington and Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach. Pataki's other books include The Traitor's Wife, The Accidental Empress, Sisi, The Queen's Fortune and Finding Margaret Fuller, along with a memoir, Beauty in the Broken Places, about her husband's stroke.