Nava Atlas's Blog, page 55

Margaret Walker

Margaret Walker (July 15, 1915 – November 30, 1998) was an American poet and novelist. She is recognized today as one of the foremost African-American female writers of her generation. In addition to her acclaimed novel, Jubilee (1966), she wrote several volumes of poetry.

Walker participated in the literary movement known as the Chicago Black Renaissance, and was a long-time friend of novelist and poet Richard Wright. 

Walker was a university professor from the 1940s through the 1970s, and she held positions at colleges in North Carolina, West Virginia and Mississippi. She received six honorary degrees and was inducted into the African American Literary Hall of Fame in October 1998.

. . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . .

Early Life and Education

Margaret Walker was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on July 7, 1915. Her parents, Marion and Sigismund, introduced her to philosophy and poetry during her childhood.

The family moved to New Orleans when she was young, and she attended school there. As a child, she particularly loved the poetry of Langston Hughes, and began writing her own poems when she was 15 years old.

Walker received her bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University in 1935. While pursuing her studies there, she met Langston Hughes, who encouraged her to continue writing.

In 1936, Walker joined the Federal Writers’ Project and the South Side Writers Group, where she became friends with Richard Wright. In 1940, she received her master’s degree in creative writing from the University of Iowa.

The following year, Walker was awarded the Yale Younger Poets Prize for her debut collection of poetry, For My People, which was published in 1942. She was the first African-American person to be awarded this prize.

. . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . .

Family, Teaching and Early Career Highlights

In 1941, Walker began teaching at Livingstone College in North Carolina, and she taught at West Virginia State College in 1942. In 1943, she married Firnist Alexander, and her first child was born in 1944.

Throughout the 1940s, Walker researched her family history during the Civil War, compiling outlines and chapter titles for the novel that would later become her most famous work.

In 1949, Walker moved to Mississippi with her family, and she started teaching at Jackson State College. She re-enrolled at the University of Iowa in the early 1960s, graduating with her doctorate in 1965. She re-worked her doctoral dissertation into the form of a novel, and it was published as Jubilee in 1966.

. . . . . . . . . .

Margaret Walker page on Amazon*

. . . . . . . . . .

Jubilee (1966)

Jubilee, Ms. Walker’s best known work, is a novel based on the personal history of Ms. Walker’s great-grandmother. It follows Vyry, a slave on a plantation in Georgia, as she grows from childhood to adulthood during the antebellum period, the Civil War and the Reconstruction era.

The novel has been praised for its realistic depiction of daily life as a slave, and each of the 58 chapters begins with a proverb or an excerpt from a spiritual. Crispin Y. Campbell, a Washington Post contributor, hailed the work as “the first truly historical black American novel.”

While teaching at Jackson State College in 1968, Ms. Walker founded the Institute for the Study of the History, Life, and Culture of Black People at the college. The institute was later renamed as the Margaret Walker Center in her honor.

As the director of the institute, Margaret organized many events throughout the 1970s, including the 1973 Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival.

 

Later Works

Prophets for a New Day, a collection of poetry, was published in 1970. With the exception of “Elegy” and “Ballad of the Hoppy Toad,” the poems are focused entirely on the civil rights movement.

Many of the poems use biblical allusions, and historical events, major cities and important leaders associated with the movement are prominently featured.

How I Wrote Jubilee was published in 1972. In this work, Walker explains the creative process behind the novel, detailing the oral history she received from her grandmother and citing the historical references that served as the underpinning for her story. Another collection of poetry, October Journey, was published in 1973.

. . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . .

Later Years and Legacy

In 1979, Margaret Walker retired from teaching. During the 1980s and 90s, she continued to write both poetry and prose. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius, a nonfiction work which drew from her friendship with Richard, was published in 1988, and This Is My Century: New and Collected Poems followed in 1989.

In the 1990s, Walker published two volumes of essays. The last of these was On Being Female, Black, and Free (1997), and it became her final publication.

During her lifetime, Walker received numerous awards. In addition to Fulbright Commission, Ford Foundation, Rosenwald Foundation, and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, she received the Living Legacy Award from President Carter.

She was the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in the Arts, and the College Language Association also honored her with their Lifetime Achievement Award.

Walker died of cancer on November 30, 1998. Over a career that lasted nearly a century, her work spoke of the struggle for liberation and the importance of resilience and hope.

According to Tomeika Ashford, Margaret Walker was “one of the foremost transcribers of African-American heritage.” In 2014, she was posthumously inducted into The Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.

More about Margaret Walker

Major Works

For My People (poetry; 1942)
Jubilee (novel; 1966)
October Journey (poetry; 1973)
Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius (critical biography; 1988)
This Is My Century: New and Collected Poems. (1989)
 How I Wrote Jubilee and Other Essays on Life and Literature (1990)

Biography

Conversations with Margaret Walker with Maryemma Graham (2002)
Song of My Life: A Biography of Margaret Walker by Carolyn J. Brown (2014)

More information

Poetry Foundation
Poets.org
Biography
Wikipedia
Reader discussion on Goodreads

. . . . . . . . . .

*This is an Amazon Affiliate link. If the product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

The post Margaret Walker appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

A New England Nun by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman – full text

Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman (1852 –  1930), more commonly known as Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, was an American novelist and short story writer. Though no longer widely read, her 1891 short story, “A New England Nun,” is widely anthologized and still studied.

Born in Randolph, Massachusetts, Freeman came from New England Puritan stock. A prolific writer of novels, short stories, children’s books, and poems, her work has been largely forgotten, though it’s widely available online, all of it being in the public domain. 

Notably, she also wrote supernatural and weird fiction — a stark departure from her regionally-flavored New England tales. A 1911 encyclopedia entry on Freeman’s work stated:

“Her longer novels, though successful in the portrayal of character, lack something of the unity, suggestiveness and charm of her short stories, which are notable contributions to modern American literature.

She deals usually with a few traits peculiar to the village and country life of New England, and she gave literary permanence to certain characteristics of New England life which are fast disappearing.”

. . . . . . . . . 

Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

. . . . . . . . . .

Summary of A New England Nun

Louisa Ellis promised Joe Dagget that she would marry him upon his return from fortune-hunting in Australia. The years stretched to fourteen, and in the meantime, Louisa made a quiet and orderly life for herself.

She liked to keep the house neat, serve herself her meals on her nicest china, and take care of her old dog, Cæsar, who she has kept chained since he bit a neighbor as a puppy.

Joe’s return makes Louisa unhappy. He’s a distraction and a disruption; he’s somewhat boorish and awkward. To make matters worse, he tracks dirt on her clean floors and knocks things over in her neat home.

Louisa realizes that marrying Joe would mean loss of her independence and her enjoyment of an orderly life, filled with small pleasures that could be defined as somewhat feminine.

A fellow townswoman, Lily Dyer, has been taking care of Joe’s mother in his absence. This only further confirms to Louisa that her quiet life would be upended if she married Joe. At this point it’s clear that she’s only planning to go through with it due to her years-long promis.

However, just weeks before the wedding date, Louisa comes upon Joe and Lily during an evening stroll. It’s apparent that they have developed feelings for one another. Joe has fallen in love with Lily, but feels beholden to Louisa. He tells Lily to find someone else, but she responds: “I’ll never marry any other man as long as I live.”

When Joe comes to call on Louisa the next day, she releases Joe from his promise without letting on that she overheard the conversation. They part amicably, with the last line of the story, “Louisa sat, prayerfully numbering her days, like an uncloistered nun.”

 

Analyses of A New England Nun

Here are three excellent analyses of this classic short story:

Encyclopedia
Owlcation
Grin

The text following is completely true to the original. The long paragraphs have been broken up for better readability.

 

A New England Nun (1891) – full text

It was late in the afternoon, and the light was waning. There was a difference in the look of the tree shadows out in the yard.

Somewhere in the distance cows were lowing and a little bell was tinkling; now and then a farm-wagon tilted by, and the dust flew; some blue-shirted laborers with shovels over their shoulders plodded past; little swarms of flies were dancing up and down before the peoples’ faces in the soft air.

There seemed to be a gentle stir arising over everything for the mere sake of subsidence — a very premonition of rest and hush and night.

This soft diurnal commotion was over Louisa Ellis also. She had been peacefully sewing at her sitting-room window all the afternoon. Now she quilted her needle carefully into her work, which she folded precisely, and laid in a basket with her thimble and thread and scissors.

Louisa Ellis could not remember that ever in her life she had mislaid one of these little feminine appurtenances, which had become, from long use and constant association, a very part of her personality.

Louisa tied a green apron round her waist, and got out a flat straw hat with a green ribbon. Then she went into the garden with a little blue crockery bowl, to pick some currants for her tea.

After the currants were picked she sat on the back door-step and stemmed them, collecting the stems carefully in her apron, and afterwards throwing them into the hen-coop. She looked sharply at the grass beside the step to see if any had fallen there.

Louisa was slow and still in her movements; it took her a long time to prepare her tea; but when ready it was set forth with as much grace as if she had been a veritable guest to her own self.

The little square table stood exactly in the centre of the kitchen, and was covered with a starched linen cloth whose border pattern of flowers glistened.

Louisa had a damask napkin on her tea-tray, where were arranged a cut-glass tumbler full of teaspoons, a silver cream-pitcher, a china sugar-bowl, and one pink china cup and saucer. Louisa used china every day — something which none of her neighbors did.

They whispered about it among themselves. Their daily tables were laid with common crockery, their sets of best china stayed in the parlor closet, and Louisa Ellis was no richer nor better bred than they.

Still she would use the china. She had for her supper a glass dish full of sugared currants, a plate of little cakes, and one of light white biscuits. Also a leaf or two of lettuce, which she cut up daintily.

Louisa was very fond of lettuce, which she raised to perfection in her little garden. She ate quite heartily, though in a delicate, pecking way; it seemed almost surprising that any considerable bulk of the food should vanish.

After tea she filled a plate with nicely baked thin corn-cakes, and carried them out into the back-yard.

“Cæsar!” she called. “Cæsar! Cæsar!”

There was a little rush, and the clank of a chain, and a large yellow-and-white dog appeared at the door of his tiny hut, which was half hidden among the tall grasses and flowers.

Louisa patted him and gave him the corn-cakes. Then she returned to the house and washed the tea-things, polishing the china carefully.

The twilight had deepened; the chorus of the frogs floated in at the open window wonderfully loud and shrill, and once in a while a long sharp drone from a tree-toad pierced it.

Louisa took off her green gingham apron, disclosing a shorter one of pink and white print. She lighted her lamp, and sat down again with her sewing.

In about half an hour Joe Dagget came. She heard his heavy step on the walk, and rose and took off her pink-and-white apron. Under that was still another — white linen with a little cambric edging on the bottom; that was Louisa’s company apron.

She never wore it without her calico sewing apron over it unless she had a guest. She had barely folded the pink and white one with methodical haste and laid it in a table-drawer when the door opened and Joe Dagget entered.

He seemed to fill up the whole room. A little yellow canary that had been asleep in his green cage at the south window woke up and fluttered wildly, beating his little yellow wings against the wires. He always did so when Joe Dagget came into the room.

“Good-evening,” said Louisa. She extended her hand with a kind of solemn cordiality.

“Good-evening, Louisa,” returned the man, in a loud voice.

She placed a chair for him, and they sat facing each other, with the table between them. He sat bolt-upright, toeing out his heavy feet squarely, glancing with a good-humored uneasiness around the room. She sat gently erect, folding her slender hands in her white-linen lap.

“Been a pleasant day,” remarked Dagget.

“Real pleasant,” Louisa assented, softly. “Have you been haying?” she asked, after a little while.

“Yes, I’ve been haying all day, down in the ten-acre lot. Pretty hot work.”

“It must be.”

“Yes, it’s pretty hot work in the sun.”

“Is your mother well to-day?”

“Yes, mother’s pretty well.”

“I suppose Lily Dyer’s with her now?”

Dagget colored. “Yes, she’s with her,” he answered, slowly.

He was not very young, but there was a boyish look about his large face. Louisa was not quite as old as he, her face was fairer and smoother, but she gave people the impression of being older.

“I suppose she’s a good deal of help to your mother,” she said, further.

“I guess she is; I don’t know how mother’d get along without her,” said Dagget, with a sort of embarrassed warmth.

“She looks like a real capable girl. She’s pretty-looking too,” remarked Louisa.

“Yes, she is pretty fair looking.”

Presently Dagget began fingering the books on the table. There was a square red autograph album, and a Young Lady’s Gift-Book which had belonged to Louisa’s mother. He took them up one after the other and opened them; then laid them down again, the album on the Gift-Book.

Louisa kept eying them with mild uneasiness. Finally she rose and changed the position of the books, putting the album underneath. That was the way they had been arranged in the first place.

Dagget gave an awkward little laugh. “Now what difference did it make which book was on top?” said he.

Louisa looked at him with a deprecating smile. “I always keep them that way,” murmured she.

“You do beat everything,” said Dagget, trying to laugh again. His large face was flushed.

He remained about an hour longer, then rose to take leave. Going out, he stumbled over a rug, and trying to recover himself, hit Louisa’s work-basket on the table, and knocked it on the floor.

He looked at Louisa, then at the rolling spools; he ducked himself awkwardly toward them, but she stopped him. “Never mind,” said she; “I’ll pick them up after you’re gone.”

She spoke with a mild stiffness. Either she was a little disturbed, or his nervousness affected her, and made her seem constrained in her effort to reassure him.

When Joe Dagget was outside he drew in the sweet evening air with a sigh, and felt much as an innocent and perfectly well-intentioned bear might after his exit from a china shop.

Louisa, on her part, felt much as the kind-hearted, long-suffering owner of the china shop might have done after the exit of the bear.

She tied on the pink, then the green apron, picked up all the scattered treasures and replaced them in her work-basket, and straightened the rug. Then she set the lamp on the floor, and began sharply examining the carpet. She even rubbed her fingers over it, and looked at them.

“He’s tracked in a good deal of dust,” she murmured. “I thought he must have.”

Louisa got a dust-pan and brush, and swept Joe Dagget’s track carefully.

If he could have known it, it would have increased his perplexity and uneasiness, although it would not have disturbed his loyalty in the least.

He came twice a week to see Louisa Ellis, and every time, sitting there in her delicately sweet room, he felt as if surrounded by a hedge of lace.

He was afraid to stir lest he should put a clumsy foot or hand through the fairy web, and he had always the consciousness that Louisa was watching fearfully lest he should.

Still the lace and Louisa commanded perforce his perfect respect and patience and loyalty. They were to be married in a month, after a singular courtship which had lasted for a matter of fifteen years.

For fourteen out of the fifteen years the two had not once seen each other, and they had seldom exchanged letters. Joe had been all those years in Australia, where he had gone to make his fortune, and where he had stayed until he made it.

He would have stayed fifty years if it had taken so long, and come home feeble and tottering, or never come home at all, to marry Louisa.

But the fortune had been made in the fourteen years, and he had come home now to marry the woman who had been patiently and unquestioningly waiting for him all that time.

Shortly after they were engaged he had announced to Louisa his determination to strike out into new fields, and secure a competency before they should be married.

She had listened and assented with the sweet serenity which never failed her, not even when her lover set forth on that long and uncertain journey. Joe, buoyed up as he was by his sturdy determination, broke down a little at the last, but Louisa kissed him with a mild blush, and said good-by.

. . . . . . . . .

Mary E. Wilkins Freeman page on Amazon*

. . . . . . . . . 

“It won’t be for long,” poor Joe had said, huskily; but it was for fourteen years.

In that length of time much had happened. Louisa’s mother and brother had died, and she was all alone in the world.

But greatest happening of all — a subtle happening which both were too simple to understand — Louisa’s feet had turned into a path, smooth maybe under a calm, serene sky, but so straight and unswerving that it could only meet a check at her grave, and so narrow that there was no room for any one at her side.

Louisa’s first emotion when Joe Dagget came home (he had not apprised her of his coming) was consternation, although she would not admit it to herself, and he never dreamed of it.

Fifteen years ago she had been in love with him — at least she considered herself to be. Just at that time, gently acquiescing with and falling into the natural drift of girlhood, she had seen marriage ahead as a reasonable feature and a probable desirability of life.

She had listened with calm docility to her mother’s views upon the subject. Her mother was remarkable for her cool sense and sweet, even temperament.

She talked wisely to her daughter when Joe Dagget presented himself, and Louisa accepted him with no hesitation. He was the first lover she had ever had.

She had been faithful to him all these years. She had never dreamed of the possibility of marrying any one else.

Her life, especially for the last seven years, had been full of a pleasant peace, she had never felt discontented nor impatient over her lover’s absence; still she had always looked forward to his return and their marriage as the inevitable conclusion of things.

However, she had fallen into a way of placing it so far in the future that it was almost equal to placing it over the boundaries of another life.

When Joe came she had been expecting him, and expecting to be married for fourteen years, but she was as much surprised and taken aback as if she had never thought of it.

Joe’s consternation came later. He eyed Louisa with an instant confirmation of his old admiration. She had changed but little. She still kept her pretty manner and soft grace, and was, he considered, every whit as attractive as ever.

As for himself, his stent was done; he had turned his face away from fortune-seeking, and the old winds of romance whistled as loud and sweet as ever through his ears.

All the song which he had been wont to hear in them was Louisa; he had for a long time a loyal belief that he heard it still, but finally it seemed to him that although the winds sang always that one song, it had another name.

But for Louisa the wind had never more than murmured; now it had gone down, and everything was still. She listened for a little while with half-wistful attention; then she turned quietly away and went to work on her wedding clothes.

Joe had made some extensive and quite magnificent alterations in his house. It was the old homestead; the newly-married couple would live there, for Joe could not desert his mother, who refused to leave her old home. So Louisa must leave hers.

Every morning, rising and going about among her neat maidenly possessions, she felt as one looking her last upon the faces of dear friends. It was true that in a measure she could take them with her, but, robbed of their old environments, they would appear in such new guises that they would almost cease to be themselves.

Then there were some peculiar features of her happy solitary life which she would probably be obliged to relinquish altogether. Sterner tasks than these graceful but half-needless ones would probably devolve upon her.

There would be a large house to care for; there would be company to entertain; there would be Joe’s rigorous and feeble old mother to wait upon; and it would be contrary to all thrifty village traditions for her to keep more than one servant.

Louisa had a little still, and she used to occupy herself pleasantly in summer weather with distilling the sweet and aromatic essences from roses and peppermint and spearmint. By-and-by her still must be laid away.

Her store of essences was already considerable, and there would be no time for her to distill for the mere pleasure of it. Then Joe’s mother would think it foolishness; she had already hinted her opinion in the matter.

Louisa dearly loved to sew a linen seam, not always for use, but for the simple, mild pleasure which she took in it. She would have been loath to confess how more than once she had ripped a seam for the mere delight of sewing it together again.

Sitting at her window during long sweet afternoons, drawing her needle gently through the dainty fabric, she was peace itself. But there was small chance of such foolish comfort in the future.

Joe’s mother, domineering, shrewd old matron that she was even in her old age, and very likely even Joe himself, with his honest masculine rudeness, would laugh and frown down all these pretty but senseless old maiden ways.

Louisa had almost the enthusiasm of an artist over the mere order and cleanliness of her solitary home. She had throbs of genuine triumph at the sight of the window-panes which she had polished until they shone like jewels.

She gloated gently over her orderly bureau-drawers, with their exquisitely folded contents redolent with lavender and sweet clover and very purity.

Could she be sure of the endurance of even this? She had visions, so startling that she half repudiated them as indelicate, of coarse masculine belongings strewn about in endless litter; of dust and disorder arising necessarily from a coarse masculine presence in the midst of all this delicate harmony.

Among her forebodings of disturbance, not the least was with regard to Cæsar. Cæsar was a veritable hermit of a dog. For the greater part of his life he had dwelt in his secluded hut, shut out from the society of his kind and all innocent canine joys.

Never had Cæsar since his early youth watched at a woodchuck’s hole; never had he known the delights of a stray bone at a neighbor’s kitchen door. And it was all on account of a sin committed when hardly out of his puppyhood.

No one knew the possible depth of remorse of which this mild-visaged, altogether innocent-looking old dog might be capable; but whether or not he had encountered remorse, he had encountered a full measure of righteous retribution.

Old Cæsar seldom lifted up his voice in a growl or a bark; he was fat and sleepy; there were yellow rings which looked like spectacles around his dim old eyes; but there was a neighbor who bore on his hand the imprint of several of Cæsar’s sharp white youthful teeth, and for that he had lived at the end of a chain, all alone in a little hut, for fourteen years.

The neighbor, who was choleric and smarting with the pain of his wound, had demanded either Cæsar’s death or complete ostracism. So Louisa’s brother, to whom the dog had belonged, had built him his little kennel and tied him up.

It was now fourteen years since, in a flood of youthful spirits, he had inflicted that memorable bite, and with the exception of short excursions, always at the end of the chain, under the strict guardianship of his master or Louisa, the old dog had remained a close prisoner.

It is doubtful if, with his limited ambition, he took much pride in the fact, but it is certain that he was possessed of considerable cheap fame. He was regarded by all the children in the village and by many adults as a very monster of ferocity.

St. George’s dragon could hardly have surpassed in evil repute Louisa Ellis’s old yellow dog. Mothers charged their children with solemn emphasis not to go too near to him, and the children listened and believed greedily, with a fascinated appetite for terror, and ran by Louisa’s house stealthily, with many sidelong and backward glances at the terrible dog.

If perchance he sounded a hoarse bark, there was a panic. Wayfarers chancing into Louisa’s yard eyed him with respect, and inquired if the chain were stout. Cæsar at large might have seemed a very ordinary dog, and excited no comment whatever; chained, his reputation overshadowed him, so that he lost his own proper outlines and looked darkly vague and enormous.

Joe Dagget, however, with his good-humored sense and shrewdness, saw him as he was. He strode valiantly up to him and patted him on the head, in spite of Louisa’s soft clamor of warning, and even attempted to set him loose.

Louisa grew so alarmed that he desisted, but kept announcing his opinion in the matter quite forcibly at intervals. “There ain’t a better-natured dog in town,” he would say, “and it’s down-right cruel to keep him tied up there. Some day I’m going to take him out.”

Louisa had very little hope that he would not, one of these days, when their interests and possessions should be more completely fused in one. She pictured to herself Cæsar on the rampage through the quiet and unguarded village.

She saw innocent children bleeding in his path. She was herself very fond of the old dog, because he had belonged to her dead brother, and he was always very gentle with her; still she had great faith in his ferocity.

She always warned people not to go too near him. She fed him on ascetic fare of corn-mush and cakes, and never fired his dangerous temper with heating and sanguinary diet of flesh and bones. Louisa looked at the old dog munching his simple fare, and thought of her approaching marriage and trembled.

Still no anticipation of disorder and confusion in lieu of sweet peace and harmony, no forebodings of Cæsar on the rampage, no wild fluttering of her little yellow canary, were sufficient to turn her a hair’s-breadth.

Joe Dagget had been fond of her and working for her all these years. It was not for her, whatever came to pass, to prove untrue and break his heart.

She put the exquisite little stitches into her wedding-garments, and the time went on until it was only a week before her wedding-day. It was a Tuesday evening, and the wedding was to be a week from Wednesday.

There was a full moon that night. About nine o’clock Louisa strolled down the road a little way. There were harvest-fields on either hand, bordered by low stone walls. Luxuriant clumps of bushes grew beside the wall, and trees — wild cherry and old apple-trees — at intervals.

Presently Louisa sat down on the wall and looked about her with mildly sorrowful reflectiveness. Tall shrubs of blueberry and meadow-sweet, all woven together and tangled with blackberry vines and horsebriers, shut her in on either side.

She had a little clear space between them. Opposite her, on the other side of the road, was a spreading tree; the moon shone between its boughs, and the leaves twinkled like silver. The road was bespread with a beautiful shifting dapple of silver and shadow; the air was full of a mysterious sweetness.

“I wonder if it’s wild grapes?” murmured Louisa. She sat there some time. She was just thinking of rising, when she heard footsteps and low voices, and remained quiet.

It was a lonely place, and she felt a little timid. She thought she would keep still in the shadow and let the persons, whoever they might be, pass her.

But just before they reached her the voices ceased, and the footsteps. She understood that their owners had also found seats upon the stone wall. She was wondering if she could not steal away unobserved, when the voice broke the stillness. It was Joe Dagget’s. She sat still and listened.

The voice was announced by a loud sigh, which was as familiar as itself. “Well,” said Dagget, “you’ve made up your mind, then, I suppose?”

“Yes,” returned another voice; “I’m going day after to-morrow.”

“That’s Lily Dyer,” thought Louisa to herself. The voice embodied itself in her mind. She saw a girl tall and full-figured, with a firm, fair face, looking fairer and firmer in the moonlight, her strong yellow hair braided in a close knot.

A girl full of a calm rustic strength and bloom, with a masterful way which might have beseemed a princess. Lily Dyer was a favorite with the village folk; she had just the qualities to arouse the admiration. She was good and handsome and smart. Louisa had often heard her praises sounded.

“Well,” said Joe Dagget, “I ain’t got a word to say.”

“I don’t know what you could say,” returned Lily Dyer.

“Not a word to say,” repeated Joe, drawing out the words heavily. Then there was a silence.

“I ain’t sorry,” he began at last, “that that happened yesterday — that we kind of let on how we felt to each other. I guess it’s just as well we knew. Of course I can’t do anything any different. I’m going right on an’ get married next week. I ain’t going back on a woman that’s waited for me fourteen years, an’ break her heart.”

“If you should jilt her to-morrow, I wouldn’t have you,” spoke up the girl, with sudden vehemence.

“Well, I ain’t going to give you the chance,” said he; “but I don’t believe you would, either.”

“You’d see I wouldn’t. Honor’s honor, an’ right’s right. An’ I’d never think anything of any man that went against ’em for me or any other girl; you’d find that out, Joe Dagget.”

“Well, you’ll find out fast enough that I ain’t going against ’em for you or any other girl,” returned he. Their voices sounded almost as if they were angry with each other. Louisa was listening eagerly.

“I’m sorry you feel as if you must go away,” said Joe, “but I don’t know but it’s best.”

“Of course it’s best. I hope you and I have got common-sense.”

“Well, I suppose you’re right.” Suddenly Joe’s voice got an undertone of tenderness. “Say, Lily,” said he, “I’ll get along well enough myself, but I can’t bear to think — You don’t suppose you’re going to fret much over it?”

“I guess you’ll find out I sha’n’t fret much over a married man.”

“Well, I hope you won’t — I hope you won’t, Lily. God knows I do. And — I hope — one of these days — you’ll — come across somebody else —”

“I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t.” Suddenly her tone changed. She spoke in a sweet, clear voice, so loud that she could have been heard across the street.

“No, Joe Dagget,” said she, “I’ll never marry any other man as long as I live. I’ve got good sense, an’ I ain’t going to break my heart nor make a fool of myself; but I’m never going to be married, you can be sure of that. I ain’t that sort of a girl to feel this way twice.”

Louisa heard an exclamation and a soft commotion behind the bushes; then Lily spoke again — the voice sounded as if she had risen. “This must be put a stop to,” said she. “We’ve stayed here long enough. I’m going home.”

Louisa sat there in a daze, listening to their retreating steps. After a while she got up and slunk softly home herself. The next day she did her housework methodically; that was as much a matter of course as breathing; but she did not sew on her wedding-clothes.

She sat at her window and meditated. In the evening Joe came. Louisa Ellis had never known that she had any diplomacy in her, but when she came to look for it that night she found it, although meek of its kind, among her little feminine weapons.

Even now she could hardly believe that she had heard aright, and that she would not do Joe a terrible injury should she break her troth-plight. She wanted to sound him without betraying too soon her own inclinations in the matter.

She did it successfully, and they finally came to an understanding; but it was a difficult thing, for he was as afraid of betraying himself as she.

She never mentioned Lily Dyer. She simply said that while she had no cause of complaint against him, she had lived so long in one way that she shrank from making a change.

“Well, I never shrank, Louisa,” said Dagget. “I’m going to be honest enough to say that I think maybe it’s better this way; but if you’d wanted to keep on, I’d have stuck to you till my dying day. I hope you know that.”

“Yes, I do,” said she.

That night she and Joe parted more tenderly than they had done for a long time. Standing in the door, holding each other’s hands, a last great wave of regretful memory swept over them.

“Well, this ain’t the way we’ve thought it was all going to end, is it, Louisa?” said Joe.

She shook her head. There was a little quiver on her placid face.

“You let me know if there’s ever anything I can do for you,” said he. “I ain’t ever going to forget you, Louisa.” Then he kissed her, and went down the path.

Louisa, all alone by herself that night, wept a little, she hardly knew why; but the next morning, on waking, she felt like a queen who, after fearing lest her domain be wrested away from her, sees it firmly insured in her possession.

Now the tall weeds and grasses might cluster around Cæsar’s little hermit hut, the snow might fall on its roof year in and year out, but he never would go on a rampage through the unguarded village.

Now the little canary might turn itself into a peaceful yellow ball night after night, and have no need to wake and flutter with wild terror against its bars. Louisa could sew linen seams, and distill roses, and dust and polish and fold away in lavender, as long as she listed.

That afternoon she sat with her needle-work at the window, and felt fairly steeped in peace. Lily Dyer, tall and erect and blooming, went past; but she felt no qualm.

If Louisa Ellis had sold her birthright she did not know it, the taste of the pottage was so delicious, and had been her sole satisfaction for so long. Serenity and placid narrowness had become to her as the birthright itself.

She gazed ahead through a long reach of future days strung together like pearls in a rosary, every one like the others, and all smooth and flawless and innocent, and her heart went up in thankfulness.

Outside was the fervid summer afternoon; the air was filled with the sounds of the busy harvest of men and birds and bees; there were halloos, metallic clatterings, sweet calls, and long hummings. Louisa sat, prayerfully numbering her days, like an uncloistered nun.

. . . . . . . . . . .

*This is an Amazon Affiliate link. If the product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

The post A New England Nun by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman – full text appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Heidi by Johanna Spyri (1881)

Johanna Spyri (1827 – 1901), the author of Heidi, has been called the “Swiss Louisa May Alcott.” Tens of millions of copies of this classic children’s novel (first published in 1881) have sold worldwide in translations of more than forty languages.

Originally written in German, Heidi was Spyri’s first published novel. None of her subsequent books — and there were many — achieved the level of success as did Heidi. It’s not only the bestselling Swiss book ever published, but one of the bestselling books in the world.

Heidi has also been adapted numerous times to the stage, including an opera, plus several movies and television series.

One of the most famous adaptations is the 1937 Shirley Temple film, which plays up on sentimentality, charming though it is. One of the most faithful adaptations is the 2015 German language film, with an accurately dark-haired Heidi — like she was described in the book.

It’s hard to account for the extraordinary popularity of Heidi. It’s a simple and rather sentimental tale of an orphan girl (of course) who is left by her aunt Dete, who has been caring for her, with her gruff grandfather, a veritable hermit living in the Swiss Alps with a few goats.

Heidi wins him over (of course) and grows to love him, the mountains, and the little goat herd Peter, her only friend. After a time, Dete comes back for Heidi, over Grandfather’s objections, having secured a place for her as a companion to the disabled young daughter of a wealthy businessman.

Heidi grows attached to the girl, and vice versa, but can’t shake her homesickness. She is returned to Grandfather, and, after some turmoil, all is well that ends well.

Johanna Spyri’s inspiration

The 1922 David McKay edition of Heidi featured the beautiful illustrations  by famed American illustrator Jessie Willcox Smith seen in this post. The introduction of this edition elaborates on what inspired Johanna Spyri:

Heidi is a delightful story for children of life in the Alps, one of many tales written by the Swiss authoress, Johanna Spyri, who died in her home at Zürich in 1891.

She had been well known to the younger readers of her own country since 1880, when she published her story, Heimathlos, which ran into three or more editions, and which, like her other books, as she states on the title page, was written for those who love children, as well as for the youngsters themselves.

Her own sympathy with the instincts and longings of the child’s heart is shown in her picture of Heidi.

The record of the early life of this Swiss child amid the beauties of her passionately loved mountain-home and during her exile in the great town has been for many years a favorite book of younger readers in Germany and America.

Madame Spyri, like Hans Andersen, had by temperament a peculiar skill in writing the simple histories of an innocent world.

In all her stories she shows an underlying desire to preserve children alike from misunderstanding and the mistaken kindness that frequently hinder the happiness and natural development of their lives and characters.

The authoress, as we feel in reading her tales, lived among the scenes and people she describes, and the setting of her stories has the charm of the mountain scenery amid which she places her small actors.

. . . . . . . . . .

Heidi by Johanna Spyri on Amazon*

. . . . . . . . . . . .

A summary of the plot of Heidi

From the original review in The Boston Globe, August 5, 1940: The housewives stopped their work and ran out to talk with Dete. She had Heidi with her and they wanted to get a good look at the child.

Little five-year-old Heidi trudged along wearily beside her Aunt Deta, who had taken care of her the four years since her mother’s death. Because Heidi’s clothes would have made a heavy bundle, Dete had put them all on the child. Red-faced and hot, the child hurried along the uphill road in the June sun.

The village women scolded Dete when they heard that Heidi was going to live with her grandfather. He had a bad name. While Dete was arguing, Heidi spied Peter the goat-herd. Running toward him, she began to ask a thousand questions about her new home.

As she ran along, the heat became unbearable; so the little girl took off three dresses, piled them in the pathway, and skipped merrily along with Peter.

Meanwhile, Dete’s conscience was giving her a bad time. Had she not promised to take care of her niece? But there was now this position that would pay her well, which she could not take with Heidi on her hands.

When the two reached the hut of Heidi’s grandfather, he greeted them gruffly. He disliked Data and spoke harshly to her. Leaving the child without learning whether it was safe or not, Deteran down the mountain, pursued by her sense of guilt.

Heidi was entranced by her new world. Into every corner of the hut and stable she peeped, asking “Grandfather, what is this for?” The old man spoke slowly, watching the child. To himself, he commented, “She uses her head.”

Together they made a new bed, piling hay in the loft and covering it with a heavy sheet. The old man served a supper of bread and cheese with bowls of warm goat’s milk to the hungry child. She relished everything she ate.

Every morning Heidi went to the higher pastures with Peter. The boy was a simple person whose environment had not contributed to his learning. Heidi was his first companion.

As the summer passed, Heidi’s cheeks grew redder and her body stronger. Winter came, then June again. One, two, and three years passed. Heidi was now eight and had not yet been to school.

One day the village pastor called, urging the grandfather to come to the village in winter so that Heidi could go to school. But the old man refused, responding bitterly.

One day, quite unexpectedly, Dete returned. She brought word of a position for Heidi in the home of a rich man Herr Sesemann, where she would be companion to his ill daughter, Clara Heidi would share Clara’s tutors.

It seemed like a wonderful opportunity, but the grandfather stormed at Dete, who took Heidi by the hand and dragged her away.

Dete quieted Heidi’s protests by promises of presents she could bring back to her friends, though she didn’t reveal that this return might not take place for years.

Heidi reached Frankfurt under the impression that she would return home that very night; when she learned the truth, her heart ached. To make matters worse, the housekeeper disliked children, Heidi most of all. The woman did all she could to make Heidi miserable.

As Heidi’s unhappiness grew deeper, Clara grew to love Heidi and found herself getting better for having her young, lively companion.

When some months had passed, life took a bad turn for Heidi. Under the constant scolding of the housekeeper, who would not let her cry, the child was repressing her homesickness and unhappiness, and she began walking in her sleep.

The servants caught glimpses of a figure and thought a ghost had come to the house; but Mr. Sesemann and the family doctor began an all-night watch. When Heidi walked down and went out the front door, they woke her. The child began to sob, telling them of her nightly dream that is was with her grandfather in the Alps.

“Home you go tomorrow!” ordered the doctor. So Heidi returned to her home in the mountains, with boxes of gifts for her friends.

The grandfather had changed. Softened by his loneliness, he had decided to move into the village for the winter months, so that Heidi could go to school. Each Sunday morning they dressed in their best clothes and went to church. All the villagers were amazed by the old grandfather and his new ways.

After some time, a letter came, saying that Clara was coming for a visit. When Clara arrived, carried in her wheelchair by a group of men, Heidi was beside herself with joy. The two girls were together in the sunshine and fresh air.

For Clara, the experience brought rosy cheeks and a new strength to her body. But Peter was miserable. Jealous of Clara, he spitefully pushed her wheelchair down the mountainside.

Without her chair, Clara had to be carried everywhere, this hampered her fun so much that every day she tried to walk. And eventually, she did— even winning over Peter, who came to Heidi’s aid in assisting Clara to walk.

When her father came for her, he wept with happiness to see his daughter walking. The story ends with happiness in the hearts of all.

 

More about Heidi by Johanna Spyri

Read Heidi on Project Gutenberg
Reader Discussion on Goodreads
The Quintessential Swiss-ness of Johanna Spyri’s Heidi
Wikipedia

. . . . . . . . . .

*This is an Amazon Affiliate link. If the product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

The post Heidi by Johanna Spyri (1881) appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Little Birds: Erotica by Anaïs Nin (1979)

Little Birds was Anaïs Nin’s second volume of erotic short stories, following Delta of Venus. Originally written as a way to make quick money, she sold them at a rate of a dollar per page to an anonymous client in the 1940s.

Little Birds was published in 1979, two years after Nin’s death. This collection of thirteen stories, perhaps more accurately termed vignette, cover a range of sexual topics from the female perspective.

Some of the characters from Delta of Venus make an appearance in these pages. The publisher describes the work:

“Evocative and superbly erotic, Little Birds is a powerful journey into the mysterious world of sex and sensuality.

From the beach towns of Normandy to the streets of New Orleans, these thirteen vignettes introduce us to a covetous French painter, a sleepless wanderer of the night, a guitar-playing gypsy, and a host of others who yearn for and dive into the turbulent depths of romantic experience.”

. . . . . . . . . .

Reissued books by Anaïs Nin by Swallow Press

. . . . . . . . . . .

However, it garnered mixed reviews from critics, and one wonders if Nin, despite her comfort with confession, would have fully approved the publication of these stories by her estate. Here is one such typical review from the time the book was published:

A 1979 review of Little Birds by Anaïs Nin

From the original review by James E. Alexander in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, June 9, 1979:

When a writer confesses that the stories that she is pouring out are boring and almost without merit, it’s no wonder that a reader is inclined to agree.

When Anaïs Nin wrote the many-volumed The Diary of Anaïs Nin, she reflected on the times of her life (she died in 1977 at the age of 74) and that of many of the writers and poets with whom she associated during those decades.

Since then, ostensibly because of the attraction of the word erotica in the title and the possibility that the author would draw upon her own experiences, two books of her writings have been issued.

The earlier Delta of Venus, with the same attribution of what the book contained and by whom it was written, was published. Now comes this small volume.

Nin and a coterie of poor, hungry friends found an unidentified client who offered her one dollar a page to produce erotic short stories. His orders were plain:

“Leave out the poetry and description of anything but sex. Concentrate on sex.”

This was at a time when today’s brand of X movies and X magazines were known only to those who met secretly with others to view stag films or who found sloppily printed matter at inflated prices, not in proper bookstores.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Anaïs Nin on Why She Wrote Delta of Venus 

. . . . . . . . . . .

Nin found nothing attractive about the offer — except the cash. She even kicked up her heels a bit by writing:

“Before I took up my new profession I was known as a poet, as a woman who was independent and wrote only for her own pleasure … My real writing was put aside when I went out in search of the erotic.

Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone — when it becomes a mechanistic obsession.”

She said to the benefactor who was paying her one dollar a page:

“You have taught us more than anyone I know how wrong it is not to mix sex with emotion, hunger, desire, lust, whims, caprices, personal ties, deeper relationships that change its color, flavor, rhythms, intensities.”

The result, obviously, is as she states. For instance, in one of the stories, the narrator is listening to an involved tale of a woman whose husband has been unfaithful and has left her. She has picked up a lover and as they are together the husband calls on the phone, begging to return.

She revels in the prolonged phone call as she continues to entertain her new companion. She tells almost the whole adventure to the narrator, but stops short of a conclusion. The narrator finishes this way:

“The sirocco had again blown the door open, and the woman went to close it. The wind was dying now, and this was the last of its violence.

The woman sat down, I thought that she would go on … But she remained silent. After a while I left. The next day when we met at the post office she did not even seem to recognize me.”

Exciting?

Hardly. But much in keeping with the material Nin turned out for a needed pittance. It’s worth just about that.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Little Birds by Anaïs Nin on Amazon*

More about Little Birds: Erotica by Anaïs Nin

Wikipedia
Reader discussion on Goodreads
Little Birds: The Talking Book
Sexy Sunday: Little Birds by Anaïs Nin

. . . . . . . . . .

*This is an Amazon Affiliate link. If the product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

The post Little Birds: Erotica by Anaïs Nin (1979) appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

“Ladies of the Black Press” — Five Inspiring Midcentury Journalists

African-American women journalists whose careers were in full force in the mid-twentieth century came to be known as the “Ladies of the Black Press.” Here are five of these inspiring women, who worked in various capacities of journalism in this era, including reporting, editing, broadcasting, and publishing.

Since its first seed was planted in the 1820s, the American Black Press has promoted social justice and equality. The women journalists of the mid-twentieth century that will be highlighted here stood on the shoulders of two powerful trailblazers — Mary Ann Shadd Cary and Ida B. Wells.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Mary Ann Shadd Cary

Mary Ann Shadd Cary’s Provincial Freeman was published before the Civil War to oppose slavery. Ida B. Wells’ Free Speech and Headlight was one of many black newspapers popping up around the country in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Both of these papers reported on discrimination and lynching, topics that other newspapers rarely touched. In addition to these social justice issues, they also presented a more complete portrait of Black America, reporting on achievements in arts, culture, and entertainment.

The role of the Black Press

Alice Dunnigan, one of the journalists we’ll read about ahead, defined the importance of the black press:

“While the role of the black press, like other newspapers, is that of objectively reporting the news as it happens, it has had another function equally important — that of fighting oppression.

Without black reporters constantly on the national scene to report the fight for civil rights, equality, and justice … the deeds, efforts, and struggles would forever be lost to history.”

Many legendary newspapers like The Chicago Defender, New York Age, and The Pittsburgh Courier are no longer being published. 

But because the fight for justice hasn’t ended, the black press lives on. In the mid-1950s, black newspapers formed a syndicate called the National Newspaper Publishers Association. Today, it publishes more than two hundred black newspapers. 

A more contemporary black journalist, the legendary Dorothy Butler Gilliam (editor, columnist, and the founder of the Young Journalists Development Program for The Washington Post) elaborated further:

“The critical role of the black press in the civil rights movement has not received the attention it deserves. Black journalists put themselves on the front lines of these stories before and during the civil rights movement, doing the work and putting their bodies in danger so the sacrifices of activists would not go unnoticed.

The nation needs to acknowledge and learn from the experiences of those who witnessed those early civil rights protests if we are to actualize Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream.”

. . . . . . . . . .

Alice Dunnigan

Alice Allison Dunnigan (1906 – 1983) cherished a childhood dreamed of traveling the world as a reporter. In the early 1900s, that was a daring ambition for an African-American girl from the red clay farmland of rural Kentucky.

Alice taught for many years in Kentucky’s segregated schools, but never forgot her ambition of becoming a journalist. To keep up with writing, she submitted articles to local papers.

Her break finally came when she was hired as Washington correspondent for the Chicago Defender. As a reporter for one of America’s great black newspapers, she broke down many barriers.

She was the first black woman:

to gain press credentials to the White House
to travel with a president (Truman) on a campaign
to get press access to the House and Senate galleries, Department of State,  and the Supreme Court

As a white house correspondent, Dunningan became known for asking tough questions. President Eisenhower stopped calling on her at press briefings because he wasn’t prepared to answer them. But President Kennedy was so impressed with her that appointed her as an educational consultant.

In this third phase of her career, Alice Dunningan combined her passions for journalism and education. And in the end, her girlhood dream of traveling the world as a reporter had come true.

. . . . . . . . . .

Daisy Bates

Daisy Bates (1914 – 1999), born Daisy Lee Gatson in Huttig, Kansas, endured a traumatic childhood. Her mother was murdered by three white men, and later, she was abandoned by her father. Raised by family friends, she learned to navigate life on her own terms.

In the early 1940s, she and her husband Christopher Bates started a weekly black newspaper, the Arkansas State Press. At the same time, Daisy Bates became deeply involved in the civil rights movement, becoming the president of the Arkansas chapter of the NAACP in the early 1950s.

In 1954, the Supreme Court case Brown v Board of Education ruled that school segregation was unconstitutional. But the decades-long struggle was far from over. As a journalist, newspaper publisher, and activist, Bates played a part in seeing that fight through.

In 1957, she helped a group of African-American students, known as the Little Rock Nine, attend an all-white high school. Daisy Bates has been honored for her role in the battle for school integration as well as her many contributions to the black press.

. . . . . . . . . .

Ethel Payne

Ethel Payne (1911 – 1991) came from a working-class Chicago family that could afford to send only one of their children to college. Unfortunately, she wasn’t the one.

Instead, she set out on her own agenda, which took her from Washington, D.C. during the World War II years to post-war Japan. Her experiences in both places shaped her as a journalist and activist.

In some ways, Payne’s journey was similar to Alice Dunnigan’s. Like Dunnigan, she was a correspondent for the Chicago Defender and worked as a White House correspondent. And simillarly, Ethel made president Eisenhower angry with her questions about civil rights. 

Payne was often called “the first lady of the black press” for her stellar career as a civil rights journalist. But the best was yet to come when CBS hired her in 1972, making her the first female African-American political commentator on a national television network. She said:

“I’ve been an eyewitness to so many profound things and so many changes … I’ve had a box seat on history, and that’s a rare thing.”

More on Ethel Payne:

Ethel Payne: Groundbreaking Black Female Journalist
Interviews with Ethel Payne

. . . . . . . . . .

Evelyn Cunningham

Evelyn Cunningham (1916 – 2010) and her parents moved from North Carolina to New York City when she was a young girl. While still a student at Long Island University in 1940, she was hired by the Pittsburgh Courier, the most widely read black newspaper in the country, to work in their Harlem office.

Cunningham became known as “the lynching editor” for her tireless reporting on Southern mob violence. She interviewed civil rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, and wasn’t afraid to call out bigoted politicians.

She continued to work at the Courier until 1962, when she left to host her own radio show on WLIB, a black radio station in New York City.

Evelyn Cunningham embarked on a “third act” in her career. She worked as a special assistant to Nelson Rockefeller when he was governor of New York State, and followed him to Washington, D.C. when he became Vice President.

She worked on government task forces on women’s rights and was even a co-founder of one, the New York Coalition of One Hundred Black Women, dedicated to improving the lives of black women and their families.

. . . . . . . . . .

Marvel Jackson Cooke

Marvel Jackson Cooke (1903–2000): In addition to making her mark in journalism, Cooke made significant contributions to the labor and civil rights movements. She started her career as assistant to W. E. B. DuBois at the NAACP’s The Crisis magazine in the 1920s, making the acquaintance of all the luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance era.

In the 1930s, Cooke worked for the New York Amsterdam News, becoming the first woman reporter in the newspaper’s 40-year history. In the mid-1940s, she wrote for Adam Clayton Powell’s publication, the People’s Voice.

In 1950, she was hired by the Daily Compass, becoming the first African-American woman reporter for a mainstream white-owned newspaper (she was also the only woman on staff at the time). Cooke was also a labor activist and started the New York City chapter of the Newspaper Guild, the labor union that protected the rights of newspaper journalists.

Cooke was in the thick of the social protest movement of the 1960s, active in the Angela Davis Defense Committee, among other causes. She died in 2000, and having lived to the age of 97, she was able to experience an incredibly varied career in journalism.

. . . . . . . . .

You may also enjoy …

10 Pioneering African-American Women Journalists

The post “Ladies of the Black Press” — Five Inspiring Midcentury Journalists appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Gertrude Stein has Arrived: The Homecoming of a Literary Legend

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) is actually Gertrude Stein‘s own memoir. Gertrude Stein Has Arrived by Roy Morris, Jr. chronicles the return of the delightfully perplexing literary figure to her American homeland in 1934. With Alice in tow, she conducted an epic lecture tour to promote what would be her most commercially successful book.

Gertrude appropriated the supposed persona of her longtime companion, Alice B. Toklas, to tell her own tale. Famously, Alice is quoted as saying:

“About six weeks ago Gertrude Stein said, ‘It does not look to me as if you were ever going to write that autobiography. You know what I am going to do? I am going to write it for you. I am going to write it as simply as Defoe did the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe.’ And she has, and this is it.”

Of course, Alice probably said no such thing. The entire book is narrated as if Alice is doing the writing, which comes across in a fresh and vibrant manner.

Stein was known both in America and her adopted home of France for her experimental, often ponderous works (like The Making of Americans) and modernist poetry (including Tender Buttons). The Autobiography … is considered one Stein’s most accessible works, and it became a commercial and critical success.

. . . . . . . . . . .

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas 

. . . . . . . . . . .

The book’s overwhelmingly positive reception prompted a return to America by the confirmed ex-pat couple to build on its success. Stein’s return to her homeland is chronicled in Gertrude Stein Has Arrived. From the publisher, Johns Hopkins University Press:

“The surprise success of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in 1933 prompted the book’s real author, Gertrude Stein, to return to America from her self-imposed exile in France for the first time in three decades.

Accompanied by her life partner Alice Toklas, Stein undertook a seven-month-long, thirty-seven-city lecture tour of the United States in the fall and winter of 1934. From New England to California, from Minnesota to Texas, the pair went everywhere and saw everyone. 

Everywhere they went, they were treated like everyone’s favorite maiden aunts — colorful, eccentric, and eminently quotable. Based on the firsthand reminiscences of Gertrude, Alice, their friends and associates, and contemporary newspaper accounts of the tour, Gertrude Stein Has Arrived is the first book-length account of their rollicking American tour.

Intended for both general readers and serious scholars, the book reveals how their warm reception enabled the couple to rediscover their American roots after three decades of living abroad.”

. . . . . . . . . .

Gertrude Stein Has Arrived on Amazon*

. . . . . . . . . .

Introduction to Gertrude Stein Has Arrived by Roy Morris, Jr.

In the summer of 1933, after nearly three decades of writing and publishing everything from three-word poems to one-thousand-page novels, American author Gertrude Stein finally achieved overnight success.

The surprising vehicle for her literary stardom was an uncharacteristically lucid and readable book, one that until the last sentence of the last paragraph of the last page she had pretended was written by someone else. That book was The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

Supposedly the reminiscences of her life partner, elfin, austere Alice Babette Toklas of San Francisco, California, it was actually the reminiscences of portly, genial Gertrude Stein of Allegheny, Pennsylvania.

Gertrude compared it, in her modest way, to the Battle of Waterloo, quoting Victor Hugo’s famous comment that the fate of Europe would have changed completely had it not rained on the night before Napoleon’s epic defeat. “Of course it is not so,” she wrote, “if you win you do not lose and if you lose you do not win.”

Still, Hugo had a point, and if the weather had not been so lovely in France the previous autumn, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas might never have been written, Gertrude conceded, at least “probably not then.”

As it was, the book Gertrude ghosted for Alice in October and November 1932 at their country home in Bilignin, France, near the Swiss border, would make both women famous, if not necessarily rich.

. . . . . . . . . . 

Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein

. . . . . . . . . . .

Published in America by Harcourt, Brace on August 31, 1933, the first printing of the Autobiography sold out its initial fifty-four hundred copies nine days before it was officially released.

… The unexpected success of the book, whose putative author disliked, among other things, the inclusion of her middle initial in the title, would place the real author’s name before the American public in a way that three decades’ worth of novels, stories, essays, poems, and plays had not. It would also bring Gertrude and Alice back to their native country for the first time in thirty years.

“You’d better come over and take the tribute due you,” their friend Carl Van Vechten advised them in September 1933, and fellow author Sherwood Anderson agreed. “Why don’t you and Alice come to America as a great adventure next summer,” he suggested, “Ford around [travel by automobile], come see us and others?”

It would give them the opportunity, he said, to have “one big taste of America again.”

Despite the blatant appeal to their appetites, Gertrude and Alice ignored Anderson’s advice for several months. “I am a person of no initiative,” Gertrude observed later, “and I usually stay where I am. Why not as long as there are plenty of people about.”

Foreshadowing one of her most famous quotes, she added, “After all I am American all right. Being there does not make me more there.”

. . . . . . . . . .

Gertrude and Alice in Paris, with their dog, Basket

. . . . . . . . . . .

… Eventually, the public clamor proved impossible to resist, and Gertrude agreed to undertake a lengthy speaking tour of America, commencing in October 1934. Alice, of course, would come along.

“I used to say that I would not go to America until I was a real lion a real celebrity,” Gertrude wrote in her characteristically unpunctuated style, “at that time of course I did not really think I was going to be one. But now we were coming and I was going to be one.”

In a way, she was being modest. The couple’s much-anticipated homecoming would last for nearly seven months and become a media sensation, garnering them a level of attention typically accorded, one biographer noted, “only to gangsters, baseball players, and movie stars.”

Their travels would take them completely across the United States, from New York to California, from New Hampshire to Texas—thirty-seven cities in twenty-three states.

The trip would be great fun, not merely for Gertrude and Alice but for thousands of literally depressed Americans who would find some much-needed diversion in the unpredictable antics of a pair of eccentric, accessible, uninhibited women who were apt at any given time to say or do anything.

The headline crawl on the New York Times Building in Times Square—“Gertrude Stein Has Arrived . . . Gertrude Stein Has Arrived . . . Gertrude Stein Has Arrived”—was both literally and figuratively true.

. . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . .

It had been, all things considered, a long time coming. Prior toThe Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein was known primarily to American readers for her dense, often indecipherable prose and for being an amusing, frequently quoted avatar of the modernist movement in painting and literature.

Her face was well known, her writing not so much. “It always did bother me,” she complained, “that the American public were more interested in me than in my work.” 

The Autobiography changed that equation, or rather, it combined the public’s interest in her and her work by making both the writing and the author a good deal more accessible. In any case, Gertrude was largely to blame for her own neglect.

After publishing the comparatively traditional Three Stories in 1909, she had turned away from conventional forms of narrative fiction and begun experimenting with complex mixtures of rhythm, repetition, syntax, and sound to challenge readers on a subconscious level.

… Toward the end of the trip they revisited Gertrude’s childhood home in Oakland, California, about which she would famously say, “There is no there there.”

Throughout the tour Gertrude demonstrated strong appeal with American college students, who proved particularly receptive to her unconventional ideas about literature, painting, and life in general.

She had a simple explanation for why students liked her. “You see why they talk to me is that I am like them,” she told the president of the University of Chicago. “I do not know the answer, I do not even know whether there is a question let alone having an answer for the question.” She even took the time to expound on her most famous, if frequently misquoted, line: “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.”

“Now listen,” she told a writing seminar at the University of Chicago. “You all have seen hundreds of poems about roses and you know in your bones that the rose is not there. I’m no fool; but I think that in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years.” No one disagreed.

. . . . . . . . . . . 

The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein

. . . . . . . . . . .

… Proof of the book’s popularity came regularly in cities and towns across the country, where the visiting couple was greeted like everyone’s favorite maiden aunts. They fully returned the compliment, rediscovering along the way their own American identities after thirty years abroad.

“I never knew it was so beautiful,” Gertrude said of their homeland. “I was like a bachelor who goes along fine for twenty- five years and then decides to get married.”

There was no marriage on the tour, but Gertrude and Alice did enjoy something of a delayed second honeymoon on their epic jaunt across America.

Every honeymoon must start somewhere, and theirs started four thousand miles away, in the French foothills of the Swiss Alps, where the two women could be found innocently at work—or in Gertrude’s case, what passed for work—in the autumn of 1932, when a rose was still a rose and there was still there.

. . . . . . . . .

*This is an Amazon Affiliate link. If the product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

The post Gertrude Stein has Arrived: The Homecoming of a Literary Legend appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Books by Anaïs Nin for a New Generation: Recent Publications by Swallow Press

Anaïs Nin (1903 – 1977), an iconic literary figure of the 20th century, was best known for her Diary series. A  trove of books by Anaïs Nin  has recently been reissued in updated editions by Swallow Press, the premier U.S. publisher of her works.

Swallow Press is a division of Ohio University Press, and many of these updated editions have been edited by Paul Herron. As founder and editor of Sky Blue Press, Herron publishes the journal A Café in Space and digital editions of the fiction of Anaïs Nin, as well as a new collection of Nin erotica, Auletris.

Born in France, Nin was by heritage Cuban-American; her full name was Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell. Best known for her multi-volume series, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, she wrote these journals over the span of more than thirty years (not including her Early Diaries series).

Nin became a feminist icon in the 1970s once a number of volumes of the Diary series were published. They became a touchstone for female readers, and have come to define a large part of Nin’s legacy.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

More about Anaïs Nin

. . . . . . . . . . . .

However, her oeuvre went far beyond the diary genre that made her famous. She was also one of the first women writers to create literary female erotica, notably, The Delta of Venus and Little Birds. She was a splendid essayist as well, and was a prolific author of fiction, both short stories and novels.

Here are new and recent publications by and about Anaïs Nin. And this is just a partial listing — make sure to see the entire list of books by Anaïs Nin at Swallow Press/Ohio University Press.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

Reunited

Reunited: The Correspondence of Anaïs and Joaquín Nin, 1933–1940

By Anaïs Nin and Joaquín Nin

Edited by Paul Herron

Release date: May 2020

In 1913, Joaquín Nin abandoned his family, including his ten-year-old daughter, Anaïs. Twenty years later, Anaïs and Joaquín reunited and began an illicit sexual affair. Long believed to have been destroyed and lost to history, Reunited reveals correspondence between father and daughter, exposing for the first time both sides of their complicated relationship.

Reunited collects the correspondence between Anaïs and Joaquín just before, during, and after the affair, which commenced in 1933, twenty years after he had abandoned his ten-year-old daughter and the rest of his family.

These letters were long believed to have been destroyed and lost to history. In 2006, however, a folder containing Joaquín’s original letters to his daughter was discovered in Anaïs’s Los Angeles home, along with a second folder of her letters to him.

Together, these letters tell the story of an absent father’s attempt to reconnect with his adult daughter and how that rapprochement quickly turned into an illicit sexual relationship. 

. . . . . . . . . . .

Trapeze

Trapeze: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1947–1955

By Anaïs Nin

Edited by Paul Herron

Anaïs Nin made her reputation through publication of her edited diaries and the carefully constructed persona they presented.

It was not until decades later, when the diaries were published in their unexpurgated form, that the world began to learn the full details of Nin’s fascinating life and the emotional and literary high-wire acts she committed both in documenting it and in defying the mores of 1950s America.

Trapeze begins where the previous volume, Mirages, left off: when Nin met Rupert Pole, the young man who became not only her lover but later her husband in a bigamous marriage.

It marks the start of what Nin came to call her “trapeze life,” swinging between her longtime husband, Hugh Guiler, in New York and her lover, Pole, in California, a perilous lifestyle she continued until her death in 1977.

Today what Nin did seems impossible, and what she sought perhaps was impossible: to find harmony and completeness within a split existence. It is a story of daring and genius, love and pain, largely unknown until now.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Mirages

Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1939–1947

By Anaïs Nin

Edited by Paul Herron

Mirages opens at the dawn of World War II, when Anaïs Nin fled Paris, where she lived for fifteen years with her husband, banker Hugh Guiler, and ends in 1947 when she meets the man who would be “the One,” the lover who would satisfy her insatiable hunger for connection.

Mirages collects, for the first time, the story that was cut from all of Nin’s other published diaries, particularly volumes 3 and 4 of The Diary of Anaïs Nin, which cover the same time period. It is the long-awaited successor to the previous unexpurgated diaries Henry and June, Incest, Fire, and Nearer the Moon. 

Mirages answers the questions Nin readers have been asking for decades: What led to the demise of Nin’s love affair with Henry Miller? Just how troubled was her marriage to Hugh Guiler? What is the story behind Nin’s “children,” the effeminate young men she seemed to collect at will? 

Mirages is a deeply personal story of heartbreak, despair, desperation, carnage, and deep mourning, but it is also one of courage, persistence, evolution, and redemption that reaches beyond the personal to the universal.

. . . . . . . . . . .

House of Incest

House of Incest

By Anaïs Nin

With an introduction by Allison Pease, this new edition of House of Incest is a lyrical journey into the subconscious mind of one of the most celebrated feminist writers of the twentieth-century.

Originally published in 1936, House of Incest  is Anaïs Nin’s first work of fiction. Based on Nin’s dreams, the novel is a surrealistic look within the narrator’s subconscious as she attempts to distance herself from a series of all-consuming and often taboo desires she cannot bear to let go.

The incest Nin depicts is a metaphor—a selfish love wherein a woman can appreciate only qualities in a lover that are similar to her own. Through a descriptive exploration of romances and attractions between women, between a sister and her beloved brother, and with a Christ-like man, Nin’s narrator discovers what she thinks is truth: that a woman’s most perfect love is of herself.

At first, this self-love seems ideal because it is attainable without fear and risk of heartbreak. But in time, the narrator’s chosen isolation and self-possessed anguish give way to a visceral nightmare from which she is unable to wake.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Collages

Collages

By Anaïs Nin

First published in 1964 and reissued in 2019 with a new introduction by Anita Jarczok, Collages showcases Anaïs Nin’s dreamlike and introspective style and psychological acuity.

Seen by some as linked vignettes and by others as a novel, the book is a mood piece that resists categorization. Based on a close friend of Nin’s, Renate is the glue that holds the pieces, by turn fragmentary and full, together.

One character absorbs a lesson from the Koran: “Nothing is ever finished.” With each of Renate’s successive encounters, we take that message to be true.

. . . . . . . . . . . 

Waste of Timelessness

Waste of Timelessness and Other Early Stories

By Anaïs Nin

Written when Anaïs Nin was in her twenties and living in France in the 1920, the stories collected in Waste of Timelessness contain many elements familiar to those who know her later work as well as revelatory, early clues to themes developed in those more mature stories and novels.

Seeded with details remembered from childhood and from life in Paris, the wistful tales portray artists, writers, strangers who meet in the night, and above all, women and their desires.

These experimental and deeply introspective missives lay out a central theme of Nin’s writing: the contrast between the public and private self. The stories are taut with unrealized sexual tension and articulate the ways that language and art can shape reality.

Nin’s deft humor, ironic wit, and ecstatic prose display not only superb craftsmanship but also the author’s own constant balancing act between feeling and rationality, vulnerability and strength.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Winter of Artifice: Three Novelettes

Winter of Artifice: Three Novelettes

By Anaïs Nin

Swallow Press first published Winter of Artifice in 1945, following two vastly different versions from other presses. The book opens with a film star, Stella, studying her own, but alien, image on the screen. It ends in the Manhattan office of a psychoanalyst—the Voice—who, as he counsels patients suffering from the maladies of modern life, reveals himself as equally susceptible to them.

The middle, title story explores one of Nin’s most controversial themes, that of a woman’s sexual relationship with her father. Elliptical, fragmented prose; unconventional structure; surrealistic psychic landscapes—Nin forged these elements into a style that engaged with the artistic concerns of her time but still registers as strikingly contemporary.

This reissue, accompanied by a new introduction by Laura Frost and the original engravings by Nin’s husband Ian Hugo, presents an important opportunity to consider anew the work of an author who laid the groundwork for later writers. Swallow Press’s Winter of Artifice represents a literary artist coming into her own, with the formal experimentation, thematic daring, and psychological intrigue that became her hallmarks.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

Seduction of the Minotaur

Seduction of the Minotaur

By Anaïs Nin

Seduction of the Minotaur is the fifth and final volume of Anaïs Nin’s continuous novel known as Cities of the Interior. First published by Swallow Press in 1961, the story follows the travels of the protagonist Lillian through the tropics to a Mexican city loosely based on Acapulco, which Nin herself visited in 1947 and described in the fifth volume of her Diary.

As Lillian seeks the warmth and sensuality of this lush and intriguing city, she travels inward as well, learning that to free herself she must free the “monster” that has been confined in a labyrinth of her subconscious.

This new Swallow Press edition includes an introduction by Anita Jarczok, author of Inventing Anaïs Nin: Celebrity Authorship and the Creation of an Icon.

Swallow Press publishes all five volumes that make up Cities of the Interior: Ladders to Fire, Children of the Albatross, The Four-Chambered Heart, A Spy in the House of Love, and Seduction of the Minotaur.

. . . . . . . . . .

Under a Glass Bell

Under a Glass Bell

By Anaïs Nin

Although Under a Glass Bell is now considered one of Anaïs Nin’s finest collections of stories, it was initially deemed unpublishable. Refusing to give up on her vision, in 1944 Nin founded her own press and brought out the first edition, illustrated with striking black-and-white engravings by her husband, Hugh Guiler.

Shortly thereafter, it caught the attention of literary critic Edmund Wilson, who reviewed the collection in the New Yorker. The first printing sold out in three weeks.

This new Swallow Press edition includes an introduction by noted modernist scholar Elizabeth Podnieks, as well as editor Gunther Stuhlmann’s erudite but controversial foreword to the 1995 edition.

Together, they place the collection in its historical context and sort out the individuals and events recorded in the diary that served as its inspiration. The new Swallow Press edition also restores the thirteen stories to the order Nin specified for the first commercial edition in 1948.

The post Books by Anaïs Nin for a New Generation: Recent Publications by Swallow Press appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Dust Tracks on a Road by Zora Neale Hurston (1942)

Dust Tracks on a Road, Zora Neale Hurston’s 1942 autobiography, has confounded critics and scholars from the time of its publication, even as it has enthralled and entertained readers.

It was the most commercially successful book she published during her lifetime, though it has since been eclipsed by her 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Zora (1891 – 1960) studied anthropology at Barnard College in the 1920s, becoming the first African-American student at the prestigious college. With her larger-than-life personality, she quickly became a big name in the Harlem Renaissance movement of the 1920s.

She pursued a career as an ethnographer, collecting stories from the oral traditions of the Black south and the cultures of the Caribbean. At the same time, she wrote fiction, plays, and essays.

Zora’s life was marked by peaks and valleys, accolades and crushing disappointments. Zora stubbornly persisted despite constant financial crises and failed relationships.

When her publisher urged her to write the autobiography that became Dust Tracks, Zora balked. She was only in mid-career, she protested. But she relented because, as always, she needed the funds.

The question has always remained, is Dust Tracks true memoir, or is her life story, as she tells it, more impressionistic rather than realistic? It’s likely a bit of both, something that readers can only guess now.

 . . . . . . . . . . .

Learn more about Zora Neale Hurston

 . . . . . . . . . . .

In her Foreword to the 2006 edition, Maya Angelou wrote:

“Zora Neale Hurston chose to write her own version of life in Dust Tracks on a Road. Through her imagery one soon learns that the author was born to roam, to listen, and to tell a variety of stories.

An active curiosity led her throughout the South, where she gathered up the feelings and sayings of her people as a fastidious farmer might gather eggs. When she began to write, she used all the sights she had seen, all the people she encountered and the exploits she had survived …

In this autobiography, Hurston describes herself as obstinate, intelligent, and pugnacious. the story she tells of her life could never have been told believably by a non-Black American, and the details even in her own hands and words offer enough confusions, contusions, and contradictions to confound even the most sympathetic researcher.”

Robert Hemenway, in Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (1977), sums up the book’s difficulties:

“Dust Tracks can be a discomfiting book, and it has probably harmed Zora’s reputation. Like much of her career, it often appears contradictory. Zora seems to be both an advocate for the universal, demonstrating that this black woman does not look at the world in racial terms, and the celebrant of a unique ethnic upbringing in an all-black village.

Dust Tracks begins with Zora as she grows to adulthood, moving from rustic security toward college and career … She describes herself as a bright, combative, overly imaginative child who had a difficult time between her mother’s death and her college success, but who persevered, and was served well by the values learned in Eatonville.

The final two-fifths of the book self-consciously, and at times simplistically, ranges through love, religion, friendship; it explains why Zora has ‘no race prejudice of any kind.’

When she selects a story from the repertoire of her life and narrates it for her audience, Dust Tracks succeeds. It fails when she tries to shape the narrative into a statement of universality, manipulating events and ideas in order to suggest that the personal voyage of Zora Neale Hurston is something more than the special experience of one black woman.

… That is the chief value of her autobiography — its documentation of the Eatonville scene and what it meant to be a woman who would rise by force of will and talent to become nationally known.”

Mary Helen Washington, in an introduction to one of the book’s later editions, wrote that the book is “filled with evasion, posturing, and all kinds of self-concealment.”

Despite these critical misgivings, Dust Tracks is a wise, warm, and entertaining read by an American writer who was one of a kind. A description from the official Zora Neale Hurston website gives a counterweight argument to the more problematic viewpoints: 

“First published in 1942 at the height of her popularity, Dust Tracks on a Road is Zora Neale Hurston’s candid, funny, bold, and poignant autobiography, an imaginative and exuberant account of her rise from childhood poverty in the rural South to a prominent place among the leading artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance.

As compelling as her acclaimed fiction, Hurston’s very personal literary self-portrait offers a revealing, often audacious glimpse into the life—public and private—of an extraordinary artist, anthropologist, chronicler, and champion of the black experience in America.

Full of the wit and wisdom of a proud, spirited woman who started off low and climbed high, Dust Tracks on a Road is a rare treasure from one of literature’s most cherished voices.”

The following brief passages from Dust Tracks on a Road offer a glimpse of its contents.

 
“Jump at de sun”

“I was born in a Negro town. I do not mean by that the black back-side of an average town. Eatonville, Florida is, and was at the time of my birth, a pure Negro town — charter, mayor, council, town marshal and all. It was not the first Negro community in America, but it was the first to be incorporated, the first attempt at organized self-government on the part of Negroes in America.

… So, looking back, I take it that Papa and Mama, in spite of his meanderings, were really in love. Maybe he was just born before his time. There was nothing then to hinder impulses.

Mama exhorted her children to “jump at de sun.” We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground. Papa did not feel so hopeful. Let well enough alone. It did not do for Negroes to have too much spirit. He was always threatening to break mine or kill me in the attempt. My mother was always standing between us.”

“One of the most serious objections to me was that having nothing, I still did not know how to be humble. A child in my place ought to realize I was lucky to have a roof over my head and anything to eat at all.”

 . . . . . . . . . . .

What White Publishers Won’t Print

 . . . . . . . . . . .

Books and Things

While I was in the research field in 1929, the idea of Jonah’s Gourd Vine came to me. I had written a few short stories, but the idea of attempting a book seems so big, that I gazed at it in the quiet of the night, but hid it away from even myself in daylight.

For one thing, it seemed off-key. What I wanted to tell was a story about a man, and from what I had read and heard, Negroes were supposed to write about the Race Problem. I was and am thoroughly sick of the subject.

My interest lies in what makes a man or a woman do such and so, regardless of his color. It seemed to me the human beings I met reacted pretty much the same to the same stimuli. Different idioms, yes.

Circumstances and conditions having power to influence, yes. Inherent difference, no. But I said to myself that that was not what was expected of me, so I was afraid to tell a story the way I wanted or rather the way the story told itself to me. So I went down that way for three years.

 . . . . . . . . . . .

Their Eyes Were Watching God

 . . . . . . . . . . .

Their Eyes Were Watching God

I wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in Haiti. It was dammed up in me, I wrote it under internal pressure in seven weeks. I wish that I could write it again. In fact, I regret all of my books. It is one of the tragedies of life that one cannot have all the wisdom one is ever to possess in the beginning.

Perhaps, it is just as well to be rash and foolish for a while. If writers were too wise, perhaps no books would get written at all. It might be better to ask yourself “Why?” afterwards than before.

Anyway, the force from somewhere in Space which commands you to write in the first place, gives you no choice. You take up the pen when you are told, and write what is commanded. There is no agony like a bearing and untold story inside you.

 . . . . . . . . . . .

Dust Tracks on a Road on Amazon*

 . . . . . . . . . . .

Looking Things Over

I can look back and see sharp shadows, high lights, and smudgy inbetweens. I have been in Sorrow’s kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with the heart and a sword in my hands.

What I have to swallow in the kitchen has not made me less glad to have lived, nor made me want to low-rate the human race, nor any whole sections of it. I take no refuge from myself in bitterness …

If tough breaks have not soured me, neither have my glory-moments caused me to build any altars to myself where I can burn incense before God’s best job of work. My sense of humor will always stand in the way of my seeing myself, my family, my race, or my nation as the whole intent of the universe.

I see too, it while we all talk about justice more than any other quality on earth, there is no such thing as justice in the absolute in the world. We are too human to conceive of it. We all want the breaks, and what seems just to us is something that favors our wishes.

More about Dust Tracks on a Road by Zora Neale Hurston

Most recent edition:

The Restored Text Established by the Library of America with a Foreword by Maya Angelou

Series editor: Henry Louis Gates, Jr. | HarperPerennial Modern Classics

HarperCollins publishers © 1942, 1995 Copyright renewed 1970, John Hurston

Previously unpublished passages © 1995 by the Estate of Zora Neale Hurston

Wikipedia
Reader discussion on Goodreads
Video review by Climb the Stacks

. . . . . . . . . . .

*This is an Amazon Affiliate link. If the product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

The post Dust Tracks on a Road by Zora Neale Hurston (1942) appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

The Stunt Girls — 3 Fearless American Pioneers of Investigative Journalism

When you think of undercover reporting, what comes to mind? I have to admit that the image that came to my mind was some guy in a trench coat, wearing a fedora. That is, until I learned about the group of late nineteenth and early twentieth century reporters referred to as “stunt girls.”

These intrepid young women, following in the footsteps of Nelly Bly, pioneered the practice of underground investigative reporting in journalism.

Good journalism has always been about presenting the human story behind events large and small. It’s also about holding the powerful accountable for their actions, a cornerstone of democracy (at least in theory). Women have always had the desire, talent, and ability to participate in these endeavors.

Yet every step of the way, from early American newspapers to broadcast news, women have had to fight for the right to report. But no matter what barriers stood in their way, women have found a way around them or blasted through them.

These three trailblazers did just that, paving the way for women to cover hard news and social issues a matter of course — though that fight would still be waged for decades to come.

. . . . . . . . . .

Eva McDonald Valesh posed as a worker to expose unsafe working conditions in factories

. . . . . . . . . .

The birth of the “stunt girl” reporter

In 1887, a small-town girl from Pennsylvania arrived in New York City with the burning ambition of becoming a star reporter. Elizabeth Cochrane changed her name to Nellie Bly and would become the first “stunt girl” reporter, inspiring other young women of her time to go undercover.

Using secret identities like “Dorothy Dare” and “Florence Noble,” this breed of female reporters tackled subjects considered “unfit for ladies.” Newspaper readers devoured their exposés on the plights of factory workers (including children), the mentally ill, disaster victims, and immigrants.

From the late 1880s through the early 1900s, daily newspapers were cropping up in every American city, large and small. As the printing process continued to grow cheaper, competition for readers grew more fierce. More women were literate, and newspapers were hungry to grab their attention.

. . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . .

Yellow Journalism and “Ten Days in a Madhouse”

Two of the top newspapermen of the time, William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, constantly competed to outdo each other for the most sensational human interest news stories. This kind of “yellow journalism” was packed with drama and printed under blaring headlines.

After Nellie Bly’s explosive 1887 “Ten Days in a Madhouse” series appeared in Pulitzer’s New York World, every major newspaper wanted a stunt girl on staff. Following in the footsteps of Nellie Bly, young women reporters risked life and limb for the juiciest scoops. The shocking stories they wrote captured readers’ imaginations — and sold a ton of newspapers!

Though this overly dramatic stunt reporting was eventually looked down upon, these young reporters truly pioneered the more respected kind of investigative journalism. Their writing style might have been over the top, but the scandals and injustices they revealed were real. In many cases, their reporting led to lasting change supported by Congress and the courts.

. . . . . . . . . .

Nellie Bly (1864 – 1922)

Nellie Bly was the nom de plume that Elizabeth Cochrane took when she arrived in New York City at age twenty-two. She’d already investigated Pittsburgh’s factories, and what she’d seen had made her mad. It confirmed her belief that reporting was a good way to expose the truth.

As a newly hired reporter for the New York World, she was pushed into society and theater pages. But that wasn’t what she’d come to New York to write about.

In 1887, Nellie convinced her editor to let her investigate the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island. She pretended to be insane so she’d be committed as a patient. Her series on the brutal conditions she saw and experienced herself is still considered a groundbreaking work of investigative journalism.

Nellie Bly’s travel adventures inspired a board game

Two years later, Nellie got Joseph Pulitzer to fund a trip around the world. She would follow the footsteps of the fictional Phileas Fogg, hero of Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne. She beat the record, traveling nearly 25,000 miles in seventy-two days.

This stunt didn’t change anyone’s life for the better, but her exciting travelogues made her world-famous. Nellie now had more power to do the kind of reporting she felt was important.

And that’s exactly what she did. Nellie wrote about immigrants, women’s prisons, labor issues, abandoned children, sexual harassment, and more. Was she ahead of her time? Possibly. But there were already many young women who wanted to dive into investigative reporting; she was brave enough to light the way.

More about Nellie Bly on this site:

In Search of Nellie Bly: America’s Pioneering Investigative Journalist
Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Journalist

. . . . . . . . . .

Winifred Sweet Bonfils Black (1863 – 1926)

Winifred Sweet Bonfils Black was the original “sob sister” — a name for female reporters who wrote human interest stories with enough drama and emotion to make readers weep.

Another pioneer of undercover journalism, Winifred was just a year younger than Nellie Bly, and was inspired by her daring spirit and sense of adventure.

For her undercover work, Winifred used the byline “Annie Laurie” but also wrote under her real name. She especially liked covering murder trials and interviewing famous people. Once, after being denied an interview with President Benjamin Harrison, she hid under his railroad dining car and cornered him when he sat down to dinner.

One of her famous stunts involved throwing herself under a truck in San Francisco and pretending to faint. Instead of her trademark elegant dresses, she wore shabby clothes. Taken to a nearby hospital, she was assumed to be poor and took secret notes on how she was treated — or rather, mistreated. When her series was published, the entire hospital staff was fired.

Winifred also went undercover to report on natural disasters, including the Galveston flood of 1900. Women reporters weren’t allowed, so she disguised herself as a boy. She exposed conditions in juvenile courts, cotton mills, canneries, and more.

Her articles resulted in improved conditions for workers as well as better emergency and disaster relief. By the time of her death, Winifred Sweet Bonfils Black was a respected journalist — no longer dismissed as a “stunt girl” or “sob sister.”

More about Winifred Sweet Bonfils Black, including links to some of her articles.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Eva McDonald Valesh (1866 – 1956)

Eva McDonald Valesh came to her interest in journalism early. Growing up in Minnesota, she worked as a typesetter in a print shop, which was unusual for a young woman. She also joined a typographer’s union — even more unusual.

As a young reporter for the twin cities’ Globe, she posed as a worker at a local garment factory. Under the name “Eva Gay,” she wrote articles on female workers’ long hours, low wages, and the unhealthy conditions in the factory. Her reports inspired a successful strike for better pay and working conditions.

When Eva’s exposés started to gain attention, employers in the Minnesota area became wary, not wanting to be fooled by her. But even with her unique tomboy looks and ragged costumes, she never failed to slip under the radar and get her stories.

Through her investigations as a stunt girl reporter, Eva created lasting improvements for factory, domestic, and service workers. When that phase of her career was over, she got involved in the Minnesota labor movement and led the campaign for an 8-hour workday — something we now take for granted.

The only time Eva ever slowed down was when she nearly died giving birth to her only child. For the rest of her long life, she proudly supported labor causes as a passionate speaker and writer.

More about Eva McDonald Valesh.

. . . . . . . . . . .

More about “stunt girl” reporters

5 Stunt Girl Reporters that Changed Investigative Journalism
These Women Reporters Went Undercover to Get the Most Important Scoops of Their Day
Nellie Bly and Stunt Journalism: Undercover Exploration to Discover the Truth

And though this is by no means an exhaustive list, here are more investigative journalists who were considered “stunt girls” of their time:

Elizabeth Banks (“Mary Mortimer Maxwell”)
Nixola Greeley-Smith
Ada Patterson
Helen Cusack (“Nell Nelson”)
Nora Marks
Winifred Mulcahey
Elizabeth Jordan
“Florence Noble”
“Dorothy Dare”
Eleanor Stackhouse

You might also enjoy:

10 Pioneering African-American Women Journalists

6 Women Journalists of the World War II Era

3 Trailblazing Sports Journalists

The post The Stunt Girls — 3 Fearless American Pioneers of Investigative Journalism appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

The Message of the City: Dawn Powell’s New York Novels 1925 – 1962

Dawn Powell (1896 – 1965) is considered a “writer’s writer,” though nearly all of her work was out of print by the time she died. Overcoming a hard-knock early life in the American midwest, she moved to New York City in 1918 and fell in love with it. Dawn Powell’s New York novels and stories are among the most enduring of her works.

Though she wrote prolifically throughout her life, producing novels, short stories, poetry, and plays, she didn’t gain much notoriety — for better or worse — during her lifetime. To the joy of devoted fans and new readers alike, many of her works have been rediscovered and rereleased.

 
A critical biography of Dawn Powell’s New York novels

In The Message of the City: Dawn Powell’s New York Novels 1925 – 1962 (2016), a critical biography and study of Powell’s work, Patricia Palermo gives the underappreciated author her due, and a place in American letters. From the publisher, Ohio University Press (A Swallow Press book):

Dawn Powell was a gifted satirist who moved in the same circles as Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway, renowned editor Maxwell Perkins, and other midcentury New York luminaries.

Her many novels are typically divided into two groups: those dealing with her native Ohio and those set in New York.

“From the moment she left behind her harsh upbringing in Mount Gilead, Ohio, and arrived in Manhattan, in 1918, she dove into city life with an outlander’s anthropological zeal,” reads a New Yorker piece about Powell, and it is those New York novels that built her reputation for scouring wit and social observation.

In this critical biography and study of the New York novels, Patricia Palermo reminds us how Powell earned a place in the national literary establishment and East Coast social scene.

Though Powell’s prolific output has been out of print for most of the past few decades, a revival has been under way: the Library of America, touting her as a “rediscovered American comic genius,” released her collected novels, and in 2015 she was posthumously inducted into the New York State Writer’s Hall of Fame.

Engaging and erudite, The Message of the City fills a major gap in in the story of a long-overlooked literary great. Palermo places Powell in cultural and historical context and, drawing on her diaries, reveals the real-life inspirations for some of her most delicious satire.

. . . . . . . . . .

Learn more about Dawn Powell

. . . . . . . . . . .

From the introduction to The Message of the City 

Ohio-born writer Dawn Powell, who lived from 18961 to 1965, was always prolific, writing fifteen novels; more than a hundred short stories; a dozen or so plays; countless book reviews; several radio, television, and film scripts; volumes of letters and diary entries; even poetry.

So productive was she that, following one spate of housecleaning, she wrote to her editor at Scribner’s, Max Perkins, “I was appalled by the mountains of writing I had piled up in closets and file cases and trunks … It struck me with terrific force that I just wrote too goddam much. Worse, I couldn’t seem to stop”

Weighing her literary output against that of some of her contemporaries, Powell joked to her close friend, writer and literary critic Edmund Wilson, “If I don’t write for five years I may make quite a name for myself and if I can stop for ten I may give Katherine Anne [Porter] and Dorothy Parker a run for their money.”

If in her lifetime, Powell never did make either the name for herself or the money she had hoped, she did enjoy certain successes. In the year before her death, she was awarded the American Institute of Arts and Letters’ Marjorie Peabody Waite Award for lifetime achievement; a few years before that, she was granted an honorary doctorate from her alma mater, Lake Erie College for Women.

… After she moved from Ohio to Manhattan in 1918 and began writing the many works that today are divided into the Ohio and the New York novels (with the exceptions of Angels on Toast, sometimes called a Chicago novel, and A Cage for Lovers, set in Paris), Malcolm Cowley hailed her as “the cleverest and wittiest writer in New York”; Diana Trilling called her “one of the wittiest women around.”

Other friends and admirers included Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Matthew Josephson, Edmund Wilson, and many more. Some of her books sold adequately, many less than adequately; none were blockbusters by any means, and virtually all were out of print by the time of her death in 1965.

Thanks to the late Gore Vidal and Tim Page — her biographer, the Pulitzer prize–winning former Washington Post music critic and professor in both the Annenberg School of Journalism and the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California—twelve of her novels, a volume of her letters, a collection of her diaries, and some of her plays and short stories have in recent decades been reissued to critical acclaim.

Several of her plays have been either restaged or produced for the first time, and a 1933 film, Hello Sister, loosely based on Powell’s play Walking Down Broadway, was in the 1990s released on VHS, if only out of interest in its famous director, Erich von Stroheim; it was shown in a Greenwich Village cinema in 2012.

Of course, more important than quantity of writing is quality. Powell’s novels are filled with astute observations, wry commentaries, spot-on characterizations. Despite her reputation as a tough and unflinching satirist, she is capable of moving tenderness and pathos, particularly in the Ohio novels.

In an article originally published in the New York Times Book Review, Terry Teachout called My Home Is Far Away, one of the Ohio novels, a “permanent masterpiece of childhood.” Few novelists are better at depicting young children than is Powell; one need read but the first several chapters of My Home Is Far Away to see that. Edmund Wilson found her books “at once sympathetic and cynical.”

… But most remarkable perhaps is her sense of humor. Few writers are wittier, more scathing, more insightful than Powell. Not only Gore Vidal, Terry Teachout, and Diana Trilling, but Margo Jefferson, John Updike, Michael Feingold, and many other distinguished authors and critics have found much to like in the novelist.

 

About the author

Patricia E. Palermo is a Southern California native, professor of English, and independent scholar who has lived in the New York City area for more than twenty years.

. . . . . . . . . . .

The Message of the City on Amazon*

. . . . . . . . . . .

Praise for Message of the City

“Palermo understands Powell’s mixture of wit and pain, knows the books by heart, has the scholarship down pat, and has written it up in an intelligent and lyrical manner. A smart, affectionate, and never blinkered study of one of America’s great authors.” — Tim Page, author of Dawn Powell: A Biography

“The Message of the City is a solid, thoughtful piece of work. Palermo’s familiarity with Dawn Powell’s own writings and with the secondary literature on her life is comprehensive, and she’s integrated her analyses of fact and fiction with exceptional skill. Anyone who reads the book will come away with a clear understanding of why Powell’s New York novels are of continuing interest, both as works of satire and as sharp-eyed fictionalized portraits of her life and times.” — Terry Teachout, drama critic, Wall Street Journal

. . . . . . . . . . .

*This is an Amazon Affiliate link. If the product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

The post The Message of the City: Dawn Powell’s New York Novels 1925 – 1962 appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.