2013 Essays

Elizabeth Chevalier Pickett

Koerner, Michelle

Screenwriter, short film director, and best-selling novelist, Elizabeth Pickett began her career in motion pictures directing a series of documentary films for the American Red Cross near the end of World War I. Much later, in 1942, she published an extremely successful novel (fittingly entitled Drivin’ Woman) as Elizabeth Chevalier, her maiden name. In interviews given around that time, she frequently mentions her early experiences working in film as crucial to her work as a novelist (although the novel does not deal with women in the film industry). But by the time she published the novel, much of her earlier work in the silent film industry had already been forgotten.