Velda Johnston

Velda Johnston (1912–1997) was an American writer of Gothic Romance novels. She also wrote under the pseudonym Veronica Jason. She was raised and educated in Pasadena, California where she sold her first short story as a high school student. She went to UCLA on scholarship where she majored in Journalism and wrote articles for the UCLA newspaper. In the early 1950s, she and her husband, Robert Heslop, moved to New York. They divided their time between an apartment in Manhattan and a nineteenth-century farmhouse in Sag Harbor on eastern Long Island. Her work, both fiction and nonfiction, appeared in scores of magazines in the United States and abroad over a 40-year period of time. In her writing, Velda Johnston provides examples of young women who seek happiness and fulfillment in an assertive, independent manner. Her early novels were set in the U.S., but her later novels usually had foreign settings. A Howling in the Woods was made into a television movie in 1971 and starred Barbara Eden and Larry Hagman.