And yet Peyton Place was once a phenomenon, a book that smashed the previous fiction sales record set by Gone With The Wind and remained the best-selling American novel for close to 20 years. It shook the complacent, tightly buttoned world of America during the Eisenhower years, prefigured the sexual and societal liberations of the '60s and entirely transformed the paperback end of the publishing industry.

The memory of it, though, has become severely diminished. If people think of Peyton Place at all, they think of a tawdry small-town soap opera filled with frustrated ambition, repressed sex drives, bitching and conniving.

During Bill Clinton's impeachment hearings in 1998, a South Carolina congressman called Lindsey Graham famously asked of the relationship between the president and Monica Lewinsky: "Is this Watergate or Peyton Place?" In the annals of Hollywood, the set of the TV show is remembered as the place where a 47year-old Frank Sinatra, who was visiting, swept 19-year-old Mia Farrow off her feet and scandalised the gossip-mongers by sweet-talking her into a shortlived marriage.

None of this does justice to the original book, or to the intriguing, free-spirited but ultimately self-destructive woman who wrote it. For years, Peyton Placewas out of print, making it all but inaccessible to a new generation of readers, and Metalious seemed well on her way to oblivion.

With the 50th anniversary of the publication of Peyton Place looming later this year, though, she could be in for a major rehabilitation. A biopic, called Grace, is in the works, with Sandra Bullock in the title role and a script written by Naomi Foner, the mother of Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal. Vanity Fair has just published a vast profile of Metalious, hailing her as an original and inspired writer prepared to tell the truth about the hidden underbelly of small-town New England. Peyton Place, the magazine writes, is "a crafty, page-turning brew of illicit sex, secret lives, public drunkenness, abortion, incest and murder" . . . a sort of Desperate Housewives of the 1950s.

Peyton Place is a surprisingly good, and literate, read. In its opening lines, it describes Indian summer in New England as being like a woman, "ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle". The language may seem a little purple now, but that opening managed, with remarkable efficiency, to "unbutton New England", according to Ardis Cameron, professor of English at the University of Southern Maine, who helped republish the novel a few years ago.

Through her main characters . . . the free-spirited but fragile Allison MacKenzie, her earthy, gypsy-featured friend Selena Cross from the wrong side of the tracks, the bad boy Rodney Harrington, Selena Cross's boozing, abusive stepfather Lucas, and the conscientious, deeply anti-clerical doctor Matt Swain . . . Metalious aimed not for sensation and raciness for its own sake so much as a witheringly accurate portrayal of the hypocrisies, power games, emotional impulses and cruel repressions of a small town in New Hampshire.

Among the things that crawl out of Peyton Place are topics considered entirely taboo at the time Metalious wrote about them, with child sexual abuse at the top of the list.

Selena Cross's abuse at the hands of her alcoholic stepfather, and the murder she commits to end it, were inspired by the real-life case of a young New England woman who shot and killed her rapist father.

Metalious originally intended Lucas Cross to be Selena's father, too, but her publisher said America was not ready to confront full-on incest so he became her stepfather instead.

The critics were no less appalled. Peyton Place was denounced as wicked, sordid and cheap. William Loeb, writing in the local paper, the Manchester Union Leader, said its popularity demonstrated "a complete debasement of taste" heralding the collapse of civilisation itself. Libraries refused to buy it, and bookstores refused to carry it. In Canada, the book was banned altogether.

The hypocrisies Metalious had skewered in her book were evident in the public reaction to it. People may have claimed to be shocked and outraged, but they were also lapping up her every word. It sold 100,000 copies in its first month and went on to sell 12 million more.

Metalious summed up the paradox in blunt fashion. "If I'm a lousy writer, " she said, "then a hell of a lot of people have lousy taste."

Metalious stood out from the crowd long before she became famous. She did not refuse to conform to New England conventions so much as completely fail to understand them. The shack she shared with her husband and three children was perenially filthy.

She locked her children out of the house for hours while she was writing. And she drank herself silly . . . the vice that would eventually kill her on the eve of her 40th birthday.

"I didn't know any other woman like her, " Lynne Snierson, the daughter of her lawyer, told Vanity Fair. "Grace swore a lot, and she drank a lot, and she had lots of guys around her. She got married and divorced and had affairs. And she talked about sex and she talked about real life and she didn't filter it. I didn't know any other woman who was like that in the '50s."

Her book was an immediate attraction to Hollywood because of its commercial success, but its content proved too much for the world of mainstream entertainment.

Both the film and TV series shifted Peyton Place from inland New Hampshire to the more picturesque coast. The graphic descriptions of abortions and erections were gone;

incest was no longer something hushed up and tolerated, but a rare, irrational act of violence.

Metalious would no doubt have been horrified, but she died shortly before the show went on the air. Because of an overhasty deal to sell the rights to her book years earlier, her estate did not receive a penny in royalties from either the film or the TV series. She died, in fact, saddled in debt, having torn through her money with luxury trips to New York and the Caribbean, fast cars, fancy dinners and case upon case of booze. It was, in the end, a tragic life . . . but one that may now at last be recognised for its solid achievements, not just its propensity for generating shock and scandal.