It’s the birthday of Judith Krantz (b. 1927 or 1928, sources disagree), whose salacious romance novels based on S&S (sex and shopping) have sold a respectable 80-plus million copies in 50-plus languages, and whose best-known titles probably include Scruples (1978) and Princess Daisy (1980). You will not find her next to Jane Austen or George Eliot on any literary lists, but you will find her in a very amusing 2013 New York Times article called “The First Illicit Thing You Read.”

Krantz was born in New York City and grew up in upper-middle-class Manhattan, where she attended swanky schools and was unpopular and insecure. Her mother gave her a too-modest clothing allowance with the result that Krantz became obsessed with clothes. She studied at Wellesley College, where she dated extensively and got unimpressive grades, and graduated in 1948, then went to Paris for a year as a fashion publicist. She returned to New York for a career as a magazine journalist and worked at Good Housekeeping, ultimately becoming the fashion editor, and later worked for Cosmopolitan. She also did some freelance writing for other women’s magazines as well.

While in college, Krantz had taken a short story writing class in which the professor gave her a B because of bad spelling. For years afterward, she believed she couldn’t write fiction and didn’t try. Finally in the late 1970s, she sat down and wrote Scruples, which became a New York Times #1 bestseller. All of her 10 novels, in fact, have been bestsellers and seven of them adapted into film or miniseries.

Ironically (and yes, this is literally going to be ironic), this writer of racy novels was married to the same man for over 50 years. Her husband, producer Steve Krantz, died of pneumonia in 2007. He had produced a number of her film adaptations and together the couple had two children. Krantz said in one interview that she was probably rich but didn’t know how much money she had because her husband would send it all to their accountant. (Possibly he did so because she was perfectly capable of spending $25,000 a year on clothes, not including fur and jewelry, and that’s 1986 dollars.)

Have a cold day tinged with a frisson of anticipation (it might snow!) and stay scrupulously honest to the data, far more scrupulous than I was yesterday when I claimed that The Woman in White had been adapted for film about half a million times. (It hasn’t. But more than 10.)