Draft:Lula Vollmer

Lula Smith Vollmer, Asheville College, and Lulu Vollmer should link here

Lula Smith Vollmer (March 7, 1889 - 1955) was an American writer and dramatist whose work includes plays, short stories, and radio serials. Some of her plays were adapted to film.

Born in North Carolina, Louisa Smith Vollmer in what became Addor, North Carolina, traveling in the Southern United States with her machinist father who worked for lumber companies.^[1] She was sent to school at a predecessor of Asheville College.^[2]

She began writing stories as a child began had a piece published in The Nickel Magazine when she was seventeen. She worked as a reporter after high school and then as an auditor at the Hotel Piedmont in Atlanta, Georgia. She moved to New York in the early 1920s, completed her first play titled Sun-Up while working as a ticket seller at the Theatre Guild. It became her best-known after debuting on Broadway at the Provincetown Playhouse in 1923. It was adapted into a film in 1925 and a television movie in 1939.^[3]

Vollmer also wrote the plays The Shame Woman (1923), The Dunce Boy (1925), and Trigger (1927), which was made into the 1934 film Spitfire starring Katherine Hepburn,^[3] as well as Sentinels (1931), In a Nutshell (1936), The Hill Between (1939), and She put Out to Go (1946).^[4]

Vollmer often wrote versions of a single title for vaudeville, theater, radio, television, motion pictures, and short stories. Vollmer began writing more for radio serials in the 1930s. Her radio programs include The Widow's Son, Grits and Gravy, Moonshine and Honeysuckle, and It's Your Business. Her short stories published in Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post, including "The Road That Led Afar" (1939), which was adapted into an episode of the General Electric Theater in 1956. It and some other of her works were published or produced after her death from a heart attack in New York City in 1955.^[3]

She never married and lived with literary women in New York City. Two of her personal letters survive.^[5]

• The Widow's Son
• Grits and Gravy

• Moonshine and Honeysuckle
• It's Your Business

• Sun-Up
• The Shame Woman
• The Dunce Boy
• Trigger
• Sentinels^[2][6]

• When Love Forgives (1913)
• Sun-Up (1925)
• Spitfire (1934)
• Sun-Up, TV movie (1939)