The Story of Rose O'Neill: An Autobiography

by Miriam Forman-Brunell (Editor)

To most of us, Rose O'Neill is best known as the creator of the Kewpie doll, perhaps the most widely known character in American culture until Mickey Mouse. Prior to O'Neill's success as a doll designer, however, she already had earned a reputation as one of the best-known female commercial illustrators. Her numerous illustrations appeared in America's leading periodicals, including Life, Harper's Bazaar, and Cosmopolitan. While highly successful in the commercial world, Rose O'Neill was also known among intellectuals and artists for her contributions to the fine arts and humanities. In the early 1920s, her more serious works of art were exhibited in galleries in Paris and New York City. In addition, she published a book of poetry and four novels. Yet, who was Rose Cecil O'Neill? Over the course of the twentieth century, Rose O'Neill has captured the attention of journalists, collectors, fans, and scholars who have disagreed over whether she was a sentimentalist or a cultural critic. Although biographers of Rose O'Neill have drawn heavily on portions of her previously unpublished autobiography, O'Neill's own voice--richly revealed in her well-written manuscript--has remained largely unheard until now. In these memoirs, O'Neill reveals herself as a woman who preferred art, activism, and adventure to motherhood and marriage. Featuring photographs from the O'Neill family collection, The Story of Rose O'Neill fully reveals the ways in which she pushed at the boundaries of her generation's definitions of gender in an effort to create new liberating forms.

168 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1997

Reviews

[Diane O]

I really wanted to like this book but it was a mess. Sporadic, hopscotching around from one random memory to the next. I was trying to keep track of who was who and only getting a glimpse of this artist's life in various stages. The editor tried to make the artist's personal memoirs more coherent and organized, but it still was a chore trying to follow along. This was an artist who was intelligent, talented, fascinating, generous, famous, independent, beautiful and wealthy, yet I felt none of that really came through with the way it was presented here. I learned more about her father than the artist herself! I think it would have been a much better book if a biographer wrote about her life and included some of these memoirs within the story where appropriate (and left some out). Perhaps it should be titled: Memoirs of Rose O'Neill and to be read only AFTER reading a more comprehensive biography.