Biography

Iris Owens (née Klein) (1929–2008) was born and raised in Brooklyn, the daughter of a professional gambler. She attended Brooklyn College, was briefly married, and then moved to Paris, where she fell in with Alexander Trocchi, the editor of the legendary avant-garde journal Merlin and a notorious heroin addict. Owens supported herself by producing pornography, or DBs as she referred to Dirty Books, (under the name of Harriet Daimler) for Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press. She also married an Iranian prince. Resettled in NYC, Owens wrote After Claude (1973). A second novel, Hope Diamond Refuses, loosely based on her second marriage, was published in 1984.

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