Anne Tolstoi Wallach

Anne Tolstoi Wallach (February 19, 1929 – June 27, 2018) was an American advertising executive and author. Her debut novel, Women's Work, focused on a female advertising executive and received an uncommonly large advance. She wrote a nonfiction book, Paper Dolls — How to Find, Recognize, Buy, Collect and Sell the Cutouts of Two Centuries (1982), and two subsequent novels, Private Scores (1988) and Trials (1996).

Wallach was born Anne Tolstoi on February 19, 1929, in Manhattan, New York. Her parents were Cecile (née Voice), a homemaker, and Edward Tolstoi, a Russian immigrant and physician who specialized in diabetes at Cornell Medical College. Her mother often struggled with mental illness throughout her childhood. She attended the Dalton School, graduating in 1945. She attended Radcliffe College, where she edited the literary magazine and aspired to be Edna St. Vincent Millay, sending copious poems to The New Yorker throughout her time as an undergraduate. She graduated cume laude with a bachelor's degree in English in 1949.

Following graduation, Wallach began working for the agency J. Walter Thompson on the basis of her secretarial experience, becoming a copy editor in the women's group. Established by the company under a female vice president, it was created due to a belief that only women could advertise to other women. She rose through the company, becoming a vice president and later the creative director. While at the company, she worked for the Ford Thunderbird. She left Thompson after fourteen years to become a vice president and creative supervisor for Grey Advertising, where she worked until 1975. She later joined Cunningham & Walsh Inc. as a vice president, where she was working in 1976. While writing her first book, she worked on campaigns for the National Organization for Women and for brands such as Playtex and Aquafresh.

Literary career

In 1981, Wallach published her debut novel, Women's Work, which received a $850,000 advance from the publishing company New American Library. The amount was considered a record for a debut novelist. The novel was about a female advertising executive who, frustrated by earning less than her male coworkers, decides to start her own marketing agency. It received mixed reviews from critics, including a starred review from Kirkus Reviews, but was not the commercial hit that was expected, spending only two weeks on the best-seller list. It was criticized by a review in The New York Times for the emotional protagonist, Domina Drexler. Despite this, Wallach was able to use the novel to draw focus to workplace issues, including the lack of maternity leave, and to publish the 1982 nonfiction book Paper Dolls — How to Find, Recognize, Buy, Collect and Sell the Cutouts of Two Centuries, based on her own collection of 3,000 dolls. Published by Van Nostrand Reinhold, it covered the history of paper dolls.

Wallach left her career in advertising to continue writing, publishing the novels Private Scores in 1988 and Trials in 1996. The first novel focused on a casting director whose daughter is expelled from a prestigious private school in order to cover up the fact that she is being sexually assaulted. Her novel Trials was about a judge who is deciding the custody of a six-year-old girl following her father's death, which is contested by her father's gay lover and the child's aunt. The story discusses child abuse, AIDS and racism. She also wrote articles for Harper's Bazaar.

Wallach divorced her first husband, Ronald M. Foster Jr., an employee benefits consultant, in 1972. Before the divorce, the couple had three children: Thomas, Alison and Alexander. She married Richard W. Wallach, a state appellate judge, in 1976, a marriage which lasted until his death in 2003. She married Gerald Edward Maslon, a lawyer, in 2003, when she was 80 and he was 84. Maslon died in 2013.

Wallach died on June 27, 2018, at her home in Manhattan, at the age of 89. Her papers are held by the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

• Wallach, Anne Tolstoi (1981). Women's Work. New American Library.
• Wallach, Anne Tolstoi (1982). Paper Dolls — How to Find, Recognize, Buy, Collect and Sell the Cutouts of Two Centuries. Van Nostrand Reinhold.
• Wallach, Anne Tolstoi (1986). Private Scores. New American Library.
• Wallach, Anne Tolstoi (1996). Trials. Dutton.