October 6, 2006

'Peyton Place' Lives

To the Editor:

I was pleased to read Leonard Cassuto's "Beyond Peyton Place" (The Chronicle Review, August 11). That a book once vilified as the epitome of crude and tawdry literary sensationalism is now not only mild in comparison to what came after, but the stuff of which comedy is made — if Desperate Housewives is an exemplar of that genre — speaks to America's shifting mores as much as it does to the values of those who spoke out against the novel in the late