Holiday

by Waldo Frank, Kathleen Pfeiffer (Introduction)

The novel Holiday is a compelling account of a southern lynching in which the simmering sexual and religious fervor and the violent act to which they inexorably lead are depicted in a modernist, experimental style.
 
Although Holiday was promoted alongside Harlem Renaissance works, Waldo Frank was not a natural fit for the New Negro movement. Born into an upper-middle-class Jewish family in New Jersey and educated at Yale, Frank traveled around the South in 1922 with his friend, the Harlem Renaissance writer Jean Toomer, collecting observations for what was to become Holiday.
 
The events of the novel take place on a single day in the southern town of Nazareth, a day so punishingly hot that Virginia Hade gives her father's black workers a holiday from work at the request of the black overseer, John Cloud. Meanwhile, a Revival tent is set up in the town, and a wave of religious passion spreads among the townsfolk, culminating in the novel's final, brutal act.
 

Genres: Fiction

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1923

About the author

Waldo David Frank was an American novelist, historian, political activist, and literary critic, who wrote extensively for The New Yorker and The New Republic during the 1920s and 1930s. Frank is best known for his studies of Spanish and Latin American literature and culture and his work is regarded as an intellectual bridge between the two continents.

A radical political activist during the years of the Great Depression, Frank delivered a keynote speech to the first congress of the League of American Writers and was the first chair of that organization. Frank broke with the Communist Party, USA in 1937 over its treatment of exiled Soviet leader Leon Trotsky, whom Frank met in Mexico in January of that year.

Reviews

[Ellice · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked up a copy of Holiday in a used bookstore. It looked intriguing, and discovering that Frank, while white and Jewish, was a friend of Jean Toomer, added another reason to read it. The book itself was OK—interesting, but perhaps not as successful as it could have been. (It was also slightly uncomfortable to read Black “patois” written by someone not of that community.) However, the evolution of the friendship between Toomer and Frank turns out to have been much more interesting—Frank’s wife fell in love with Toomer and left Frank for him. This book is still worth a read, probably, but don’t expect it to be Cane.