Aola Vandergriff; Popular Romance Novelist

Aola Vandergriff, 68, who became a successful romance novelist after taking a $3 writing class in her mid-40s. Mrs. Vandergriff wrote 20 romance novels that sold more than 3 million copies worldwide. She had written since she was a child in Oklahoma City but said she did not know she had talent until she enrolled in an adult education class while living in Sacramento. Then 46, a homemaker and the mother of six children, Mrs. Vandergriff started selling first-person confessions to magazines. In six years, she published 2,500 of the unsigned testimonials. Later, Mrs. Vandergriff wrote under her own name and the pen name of Kitt Brown. Best-known were her “Daughters” series of books, set in such locations as Alaska, the Australian outback and World War I Europe. In Tularosa, N.M., on Feb. 21 of undisclosed causes.