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Gwen Davis (born May 11, 1936) is an American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, songwriter, journalist and poet.

Davis has written seventeen novels, including the bestselling The Pretenders. She has also written songs, reviews, and numerous articles. She has written for online publications such as the Huffington Post and maintains a popular personal blog, "Report from the Front" and also a blog reviewing Broadway theater productions, "Will Blog for Broadway."

Davis grew up in New York, in Manhattan. Her parents were divorced. Her father, real estate developer Lew Davis, later served as mayor of Tucson, winning office in 1961..

She attended Bryn Mawr College. In 1954, at the age of eighteen, she went to Paris to study music and sang in a nightclub there until she gave into her mother's pleas to return to the U.S. She moved to California and continued singing, performing at the Purple Onion. She also obtained an M.A. in Creative Writing from Stanford University. She was part of the Hollywood social scene from the late 1950s, coming into contact with a wide range of celebrities and befriending Dennis Hopper and many others. Some of her experiences inspired her first novel, Naked in Babylon. She married businessman and producer Don Mitchell, with whom she had two children, a daughter and a son. One of the Mitchells' mocking Academy Awards parties was the subject of a Time magazine article in 1970, which mentioned some of the celebrities -- Shirley MacLaine, ZsaZsa Gabor, Lee Marvin and others...Davis and Mitchell counted among their friends.

One of her novels, Touching, published in 1971 was not a commercial success, but it resulted in a highly controversial lawsuit. Davis spent twenty hours at Sandstone, a Topanga Canyon therapy center run by E. Paul Bindrim, who was known as the "father of Nude Psychotherapy". Bindrim, once nearly kicked out of the American Psychological Association, was known for holding what he called "nude marathons" -- several clients were "placed in a warm pool for long sessions of touching and massaging, talking and sometimes shouting or acting out rage." . Davis always claimed she had used her real-life experiences to inspire fiction, but that Bindrim was not the psychologist in her fictional story, and did not resemble him...her character was overweight, had long hair, and had a Ph.D. By the time the case came to trial, Bindrim, who previously had only a masters degree, changed his appearance and obtained a Ph.D. from International College, founded in 1970, and which at the time claimed it had "no classrooms, no lecture halls, no resident faculty." These changes made him appear more like the psychologist in the book. He won his suit against Davis and her publisher, Doubleday. Doubleday then sued Davis, which raised the ire of many writers organizations and won Davis the support of Kurt Vonnegut and others.

Davis continues to write. She travels widely and has lived in Europe, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and London. She currently resides in New York.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Gwen Davis", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0