Rosemary's Baby (novel)
1967 novel by Ira Levin
Rosemary's Baby is a 1967 horror novel by American writer Ira Levin; it was his second published book. The novel follows a young couple who move into an apartment building, where they befriend an older couple in the neighboring apartment, who become increasingly involved when Rosemary becomes pregnant. It was the best-selling horror novel of the 1960s, selling over four million copies.
The high popularity of the novel was a catalyst for a boom in popularity for horror fiction, which achieved enormous commercial success in its wake. In 1968, Roman Polanski adapted the novel as a film of the same name, amongst other adaptations.
Plot
The book centers on Rosemary Woodhouse, a young woman who moves into the Bramford, a historic Gothic Revival-style New York City apartment building, with her husband, Guy, a struggling actor. Guy has so far appeared only in small roles in the stage plays Luther, Nobody Loves an Albatross, and various TV commercials. A friend warns the pair that the Bramford has a disturbing history involving witchcraft and murder, but they discount this. Rosemary wants to start a family, but Guy prefers waiting until his career is more established.
Rosemary meets Terry Gionoffrio, a girl about her own age, who is staying with one of their neighbors, the Castavets, whom Rosemary and Guy have yet to meet.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Rosemary's Baby (novel)” as 1967 novel by Ira Levin. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as 1967 novel by Ira Levin. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1194339. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1967 and 1968.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.
Three-step research path
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Rosemary's Baby (novel)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.