You're Only Young Once

by Margaret Widdemer

You're Only Young Once is a novel written by Margaret Widdemer, first published in 1934. The story follows the life of a young woman named Vinnie, who is struggling to find her place in the world. Vinnie is a talented artist, but her conservative family disapproves of her pursuing a career in the arts. Instead, they pressure her to marry a wealthy man and settle down.Despite her family's expectations, Vinnie moves to New York City to pursue her dream of becoming an artist. She meets a group of bohemian artists who encourage her to follow her passion, but also introduce her to a world of parties, alcohol, and romance. Vinnie finds herself torn between her desire for artistic success and her growing feelings for a charismatic musician named Tony.As Vinnie navigates the ups and downs of her new life in the city, she must also confront the realities of the Great Depression and the challenges facing young women in the 1930s. You're Only Young Once is a coming-of-age story that explores themes of identity, love, and the pursuit of happiness.1918. American author, novelist, poet, Widdemer shared the 1919 Pulitzer Prize for poetry (the second ever awarded) with Carl Sandburg. The book You might have thought, if you didn�������t know, that there was an afternoon tea-party going on, but it wasn������� it was merely all the Goldsborough girls in one room. There were five of them, ranging all the way from Angela, who was twenty-three and looked so much like a doll that by the law of contraries you could be almost sure she had a great deal of common sense, to Isabella, who was fifteen and had large eyes and brown curls and dimples and had to be kept down. In between came Deborah, who was tall and lissom and cream-and-gold, Janetta, who was straight and dark and Indian-handsome, and Annice, small and dark and quiet and so much like a Sir Walter Scott engraving, at sixteen, that her sisters made her life a burden about it. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.

320 pages, Paperback

Published April 1, 2005

About the author

Margaret Widdemer (1884-1978) was an American author who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (known then as the Columbia University Prize) in 1919 for her collection The Old Road to Paradise (1918). She shared the prize with Carl Sandburg, who won for his collection Corn Huskers (1916). Margaret Widdemer was born in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. She grew up in Asbury Park, New Jersey. She graduated from the Drexel Institute Library School in 1909. She came to public attention with her poem The Factories (1917), which treated the subject of child labor. In 1919 she married Robert Haven Schauffler (1879-1964), a widower five years her senior. Schauffler was an author and cellist who published widely on poetry, travel, culture, and music. Widdemer's memoir Golden Friends I Had (1964) recounts her friendships with eminent authors such as Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, Thornton Wilder, and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Reviews

[Alisha Trenalone · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book deals with a large family of siblings, as they one by one get married off. Some of their stories are cute, some are sweet, some are just strange or blah, and most of them are funny. Not my favorite of Margaret Widdemer's books so far as a whole, but a couple of the stories were pretty memorable. My favorite: one of the sisters, Annice, is desperate to own a silk dress and decides that any effort is worth it. She reads in an old book that there is a law that if a woman asks a man to marry her and he refuses, he is obligated to buy her a silk dress (who would write a law like that???). Anyway, Annice selects the bachelor most unlikely to get married, and decides to throw herself in his way a few times and then propose. It sounds ridiculous, and it is, but it's also pretty funny, and she's kind of sweetly naive when he truly does start to be attracted to her. He's a little bit older, and kind of serious and thoughtful and old-fashioned, and she's a lot like him, which he's never seen in a girl before.

Not the best place to start with Margaret Widdemer books, but amusing enough.

[Emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is your typical frothy Edwardian confection but it has these wonderful caustic jabs of humour here and there that just delighted me. The cat(t) named Carrie Chapman made me SHRIEK.