Second Edition
VOLUME 1 A-D Editor Ta r y n B e n b o w - P f a l z g r a f
Taryn Benbow-Pfalzgraf, Editor Glynis Benbow-Niemier, Associate Editor Kristin G. Hart, Project Coordinator Laura Standley Berger, Joann Cerrito, Dave Collins, Steve Cusack, Nicolet V. Elert, Miranda Ferrara, Jamie FitzGerald, Laura S. Kryhoski, Margaret Mazurkiewicz, Michael J. Tyrkus St. James Press Staff Peter M. Gareffa, Managing Editor, St. James Press Mary Beth Trimper, Composition Manager Dorothy Maki, Manufacturing Manager Wendy Blurton, Senior Buyer Cynthia Baldwin, Product Design Manager Martha Schiebold, Art Director Ronald D. Montgomery, Data Entry Manager Gwendolyn S. Tucker, Project Administrator
While every effort has been made to ensure the reliability of the information presented in this publication, St. James Press does not guarantee the accuracy of the data contained herein. St. James Press accepts no payment for listing; and inclusion of any organization, agency, institution, publication, service, or individual does not imply endorsement of the editors or publisher. Errors brought to the attention of the publisher and verified to the satisfaction of the publisher will be corrected in future editions. This publication is a creative work fully protected by all applicable copyright laws, as well as by misappropriation, trade secret, unfair competition, and other applicable laws. The authors and editors of this work have added value to the underlying factual material herein through one or more of the following: unique and original selection, coordination, expression, arrangement, and classification of the information. All rights to this publication will be vigorously defended. Copyright © 2000 St. James Press 27500 Drake Rd. Farmington Hills, MI 48331 All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data American women writers : from colonial times to the present : a critical reference guide / editor: Taryn Benbow-Pfalzgraf. -- 2nd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-55862-429-5 (set) — ISBN 1-55862-430-9 (vol.1) — ISBN 1-55862-431-7 (vol.2) — ISBN 1-55862-432-5 (vol.3) — ISBN 1-55862-433-3 (vol.4) 1. American literature-Women authors-Bio-bibliography Dictionaries. 2. Women authors, American-Biography Dictionaries. 3. American literature-Women authors Dictionaries. I. Benbow-Pfalzgraf, Taryn PS147.A42 1999 810.9’9287’03—dc21 [B]
Printed in the United States of America St. James Press is an imprint of Gale Group Gale Group and Design is a trademark used herein under license 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
99-43293 CIP
EDITOR’S NOTE American Women Writers, Second Edition is an important resource for many reasons, the least of which is to disseminate information about hundreds of women writers who have been routinely overlooked. A veritable treasure trove of knowledge, the women profiled in this series have literally changed the world, from Margaret Sanger’s quest for reproductive freedom to Jane Addams and Hull House, from Sylvia Earle and Rachel Carson’s environmental concerns, to the aching beauty of poems by Olga Broumas, Emily Dickinson, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath, Sara Teasdale, Lorrie Moore, and many others. There are writers who are immensely entertaining (M.F.K. Fisher, Jean Craighead George, Sue Grafton, Helen MacInnes, Terry McMillan, C. L. Moore, Barbara Neely, Danielle Steel), some who wish to instruct on faith (Dorothy Day, Mary Baker Eddy, Catherine Marshall, Anne Morrow Lindbergh), others who revisit the past to educate us (Gwendolyn Brooks, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Paula Allen Gunn, Carolyn Heilbrun, Mary Johnston, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Mary White Ovington, Sherley Ann Williams, Mourning Dove), and still more who wish to shock us from complacency of one kind or another (Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Lillian Hellman, Shirley Jackson, Harriet Jacobs, Shirley Jackson, Carson McCullers, A.G. Mojtabai, Bharati Mukherjee, Carry A. Nation, Flannery O’Connor, Anne Sexton, Phillis Wheatley, and more). The women filling these pages have nothing and everything in common; they are female, yes, but view their lives and worth in vastly different manners. There is no census of ethnicity, class, age, or sexuality—the prerequisites for inclusion had only to do with a body of work, the written word in all its forms, and the unfortunate limits of time and space. Yes, there are omissions, none by choice: some were overlooked in favor of others (by a voting selection process), others were assigned and the material never received. In the end, it is the ongoing bane of publishing: there will never be enough time nor space to capture all—for there will (hopefully) always be new women writers coming to the fore, and newly discovered manuscripts to test our conceptions of life from a woman’s eye. Yet American Women Writers is just what it’s title implies, a series of books recounting the life and works of American women from Colonial days to the present. Some writers produced far more than others, yet each woman contributed writing worthy of historical note, to be brought to the forefront of scholarship for new generations to read. Last but never least, thanks to Peter Gareffa for this opportunity; to Kristin Hart for her continual support and great attitude; to my associate editor Glynis Benbow-Niemier; to my editorial and research staff (Jocelyn Prucha, Diane Murphy, and Lori Prucha), and to the beloveds: Jordyn, Wylie, Foley, Hadley, and John.
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FOREWORD In a memorandum to contributors, Lina Mainiero, the founding editor of American Women Writers described the project she envisioned in 1978: Written wholly by women critics, this reference work is designed as a four-volume survey of American women writers from colonial days to the present. . . Most entries will be on women who have written what is traditionally defined as literature. But AWW will also include entries on writers in other fields. . . I see AWW as a precious opportunity for women—those who write it and those who read it— to integrate at a more self- conscious level a variety of reading experience. The result was a document of its time, a period when feminism was associated with building sisterhood and raising consciousness. Even a commercial publishing venture might take on the trappings of a consciousness raising session in which readers and writers met. The idea now seems naive, but the ideal is worth remembering. In 1978 Mainiero was neither young nor revolutionary. She was hesitant about pushing too far; she was content to let traditional definitions stand. But the very inclusion of Rachel Carson and Margaret Mead, Betty Smith and Ursula LeGuin, Rebecca Harding Davis and Phillis Wheatley, Gertrude Stein and Dorothy Parker in a reference work entitled simply and profoundly American Women Writers spoke eloquently. Without ever referring explicitly to ‘‘canon revision,’’ these four volumes contributed to the process. Having the books on the shelves testified to the existence of hundreds of women who had written across the centuries. Including those whose work was perceived to be ‘‘literary’’ alongside those whose work was not, prefigured debates that continue today both inside and outside of the academy. Mainiero was especially concerned that contributors not aim their entries at the academic specialist. The ‘‘putative reader’’ was a college senior, who was conversant with literary history and criticism, feminism, and the humanities. This emphasis provoked criticism, because it was expressed during the heyday of academic feminism. American Women Writers appeared the same year as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar published The Madwoman in the Attic, their influential study of 19th-century English women writers. Nina Baym’s American Women Writers and Women’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and About Women in America had appeared the year before. In retrospect, however, the reader Mainiero targeted is precisely the young woman she hoped would join the consciousness session organized by her elders, a woman who would not become an academic, but who would find in women’s writing the ‘‘necessary bread’’ to sustain her in living her life. Ideals and realities clashed in a project that was clearly intended to make money, but declined to pay honoraria to individual contributors. Instead, the publisher promised to contribute a percentage of any profits to ‘‘women’s causes.’’ The desire to reach the common reader was one reason the volumes were published without a scholarly overview. The decision not to address an academic audience meant the entries contained no critical jargon, but it also meant no authorities checked facts. In fairness, few facts were known about many of the women in the book. Numerous articles profiled women about whom no one had written. One way to gauge the success of feminist scholarship over the past two decades would be to compare the bibliographies of women in this edition with those in the original edition. What we know now about women’s writing in the United States is more than we realized there was to know two decades ago. Let me use my contributions as examples. I wrote entries on Gwendolyn Brooks, Frances Watkins Harper, Nella Larsen, and Anne Spencer. These black women lived and worked across almost two centuries. Harper, an abolitionist and women’s rights advocate, had been the most popular African American poet of the mid-19th century. Larsen and Spencer published fiction and poetry, respectively, during the Harlem Renaissance. Of Brooks, I concluded, ‘‘by any reckoning, hers is one of the major voices of 20th-century American poetry.’’ Yet no biographies existed for any of them. All of the information in print on Harper referred to a single source. Twenty years later, scholars have explored Harper’s life in depth; digging through the archives, Frances Smith Foster discovered three lost novels and a treasure trove of poems. In search of the women of the Harlem Renaissance, scholars have unearthed much more information concerning Larsen and Spencer. Now the subject of a biography by Thadious Davis, Larsen and her novels—Passing in particular—have become key texts in the formulation of feminist theory and queer theory. Ironically, though Spencer’s oeuvre was the most slender, she was the only one of these writers to have been the subject of a book: J. Lee Greene’s Time’s Unfading Garden, a biographical and critical treatment of the poet along with a selection of her poems. Brooks has begun to receive her due in five biographical and critical studies. As scholars have continued their work, readers have found a valuable reference tool in American Women Writers. The fourth and final volume of the original edition appeared in 1982. Soon afterward, Langdon Lynne Faust edited an abridged version, including a two-volume edition in paperback. In part because the original edition concentrated on writers before 1960, a supplement, edited by Carol Hurd Green and Mary G. Mason, was published in 1993. The writers included were more diverse than ever, as a more inclusive understanding of ‘‘American’’ grew. Fostering that understanding has been a priority of this project since the beginning. That new editions continue to be published confirms the existence of a need that these volumes fill. The explosion of feminist scholarship has enriched each subsequent edition of American Women Writers. In this venue at least, the gap between academic specialist and common reader has narrowed. One development that no one would have predicted is the re-emergence of the literary society, a common feature in 19th-century American life. The name has changed; it is now more often called the reading group. But the membership remains mostly female. Such groups have grown up in every segment of American society. Indeed, ‘‘Oprah’s Book Club’’ is a macrocosm of a widespread local phenomenon. I hope and suspect members of reading groups, as well as the undergraduates who remain its putative readers, will find this new edition of American Women Writers a resource that can be put to everyday use. CHERYL A. WALL Professor of English Rutgers University
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BOARD OF ADVISORS Roger Blackwell Bailey, Ph.D. Professor of English San Antonio College Alanna K. Brown, Ph.D. Professor of English Montana State University Pattie Cowell Professor of English Colorado State University Barbara Grier President and CEO Naiad Press, Inc. Jessica Grim Reference Librarian Oberlin College Library
Kathleen Bonann Marshall Assistant Director, Center for the Writing Arts Northwestern University Margaret (Maggie) McFadden Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies Editor, National Women’s Studies Association Journal Appalachian State University Kit Reed Novelist, Teaching at Wesleyan University
Carolyn G. Heilbrun Avalon Professor in the Humanities, Emerita Columbia University
Cheryl A. Wall Professor of English Rutgers University
Marlene Manoff Associate Head/Collection Manager Humanities Library Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Barbara A. White Professor Emeritus of Women’s Studies University of New Hampshire
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BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS Aarons, Victoria Allegra Goodman Alice Hoffman Faye Kellerman Lesléa Newman Tillie Olsen Francine Prose Adams, Barbara Aimee Semple McPherson Adams, Pauline Marion Marsh Todd Alldredge, Betty J. Katherine Mayo Katharine Pearson Woods Allen, Carol Alice Childress Allen, Suzanne Martha Moore Avery Madeleine Vinton Dahlgren Anna McKenney Dorsey Ella Loraine Dorsey Susan Blanchard Elder Caroline Gordon Laura Z. Hobson Lillian Smith Alonso, Helena Julia Álvarez Sandra Cisneros Achy Obejas Anderson, Celia Catlett Beverly Cleary Marguerite Henry Florence Crannell Means Cornelia Meigs Anderson, Eileen M. Phyllis Chesler Anderson, Kathryn Murphy Beth Henley Marsha Norman Anderson, Maggie Jane Cooper Anderson, Nancy G. Dorothy Scarborough Lella Warren
Antler, Joyce Lynne Sharon Schwartz Armeny, Susan Mary Sewall Gardner Lillian D. Wald Armitage, Shelley Ina Donna Coolbrith Anne Ellis Assendelft, Nick Lisa Alther Anne Bernays E. M. Broner Marilyn Hacker Joy Harjo Maureen Howard Florence Howe Susanne K. Langer Meridel Le Sueur Bach, Peggy Evelyn Scott Bakerman, Jane S. Vera Caspary Ursula Reilly Curtiss Dorothea Canfield Fisher Lois Gould Elisabeth Sanxay Holding Emma Lathen Ruth Doan MacDougall Margaret Millar Toni Morrison May Sarton Elizabeth Savage Susan Fromberg Schaeffer Gene Stratton-Porter Mary Sture-Vasa Dorothy Uhnak Jessamyn West Bannan, Helen M. Fabiola Cabeza de Baca Elizabeth Bacon Custer Elaine Goodale Eastman Helen Hunt Jackson Mary Harris Jones Kathryn Anderson McLean Franc Johnson Newcomb Anna Moore Shaw Elizabeth G. Stern xi
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Banner, Lois W. Harriet Hubbard Ayer
Barr, Marleen S. Deborah Norris Logan
Benet, Sydonie Janet Flanner Mary McCarthy Josephine Miles Edna St. Vincent Millay Virginia Ramey Mollenkott Linda Pastan Katherine Paterson Marilyn Sachs Elizabeth Spencer Ruth Stone Michele Wallace Mae West Sherley Anne Williams
Baruch, Elaine Hoffman Susan Sontag Diana Trilling
Berke, Jacqueline Harriet Stratemeyer Adams Eleanor Hodgman Porter
Bauer, Denise Lucille Clifton Alicia Ostriker Alix Kates Shulman
Berry, Linda S. Georgia Douglas Johnson
Barbour, Paula L. Jane Auer Bowles Barbuto, Domenica Anne Warner French Amanda Theodocia Jones Barnhart, Jacqueline Baker Sarah Bayliss Royce Elinore Pruitt Stewart
Baytop, Adrianne Margaret Walker Phillis Wheatley Beasley, Maurine Mary E. Clemmer Ames Emily Edson Briggs Kate Field Beecher, Maureen Ursenbach Susa Young Gates Bell, Alice Paula Fox Belli, Angela Frances Winwar Ben-Merre, Diana Helen McCloy Benardete, Jane Harriot Stanton Blatch Abby Morton Diaz Mary Abigail Dodge Amanda Minnie Douglas Malvina Hoffman Elizabeth Palmer Peabody Lydia Huntley Sigourney Sophie Swett Benbow-Niemier, Glynis Jane Kenyon Lorine Niedecker Jean Valentine xii
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Berube, Linda Susan Griffin Alice Hoffman Maxine W. Kumin Valerie Miner Grace Paley May Swenson Beyer, Janet M. Erma Bombeck Ellen Goodman Lois Gould Doris Grumbach Nicole Hollander Biancarosa, Gina Erica Jong Bienstock, Beverly Gray Anita Loos Shirley MacLaine Cornelia Otis Skinner Thyra Samter Winslow Biguenet, John Valerie Martin Bird, Christiane Rosamond Neal DuJardin Josephine Lawrence Harper Lee Harriet Stone Lothrop Alice Duer Miller Bittker, Anne S. Mary Margaret McBride
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Blair, Karen J. Jane Cunningham Croly Ella Giles Ruddy Blicksilver, Edith Leslie Marmon Silko Bloom, Lynn Z. Natalie Stark Crouter Bloom, Steven F. Wendy Wasserstein Bloom, Susan P. Natalie Babbitt Eloise Greenfield Boisvert, Nancy L. Judith Rossner Bonazoli, Robert Kit Reed Bordin, Ruth Elizabeth Margaret Chandler Mary Rice Livermore Anna H. Shaw Boyd, Karen Leslie Patricia Highsmith Nora Roberts Boyd, Lois A. Paula Marie Cooey Boyd, Zohara Sophia Robbins Little Josephine Pollard Martha Remick Mary Jane Windle Brahm, Laura Judy Grahn Mary Oliver Breitsprecher, Nancy Zona Gale Bremer, Sidney H. Lucy Monroe Elia Wilkinson Peattie Eunice Tietjens Edith Franklin Wyatt Brett, Sally Inglis Clark Fletcher Bernice Kelly Harris Edith Summers Kelley Ida Tarbell Broner, E. M. Anne Bernays
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Brooker-Gross, Susan R. Ellen Churchill Semple Brookes, Kimberly Hayden Barbara Deming Brostoff, Anita Gladys Schmitt Brown, Alanna Kathleen Mourning Dove Brown, Dorothy H. Rose Falls Bres Elma Godchaux Margaret Landon Mary Lasswell Mary Ashley Townsend Jeannette Hadermann Walworth Brown, Fahamisha Patricia Jayne Cortez Carolyn M. Rodgers Ntozake Shange Brown, Lois Octavia E. Butler Terry McMillan Brown, Lynda W. Caroline Whiting Hentz Octavia Walton Le Vert Anne Newport Royall Jennette Reid Tandy Bryer, Marjorie Michele Wallace Buchanan, Harriette Cuttino Corra May Harris Helen Kendrick Johnson Agnes C. Laut Blair Rice Niles Marie Conway Oemler Josephine Pinckney Lizette Woodworth Reese Mary Howard Schoolcraft Bucknall, Barbara J. Pearl S. Buck Ursula K. Le Guin Phyllis McGinley Hannah Whittal Smith Evangeline Walton Burger, Mary Diane DiPrima Burns, Lois Mary Hunter Austin xiii
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Burns, Melissa Anne Bernays E. M. Broner Mary McCarthy Helen Hennessy Vendler
Challinor, Joan R. Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams
Butery, Karen Ann Karen Horney
Chew, Martha Mary Henderson Eastman Sallie Rochester Ford Maria Jane McIntosh
Butler, Francelia Harriet Taylor Upton Byers, Inzer Annie Heloise Abel Mary Sheldon Barnes Mary Louise Booth Catherine Drinker Bowen Carrie Chapman Catt Frances Manwaring Caulkins Margaret Antoinette Clapp Margaret L. Coit Angelina Grimké Sarah Moore Grimké Louise Kellogg Adrienne Koch Martha Nash Lamb Alma Lutz Nellie Neilson Martha Laurens Ramsay Constance Lindsay Skinner Margaret Bayard Smith Byington, Juliet Susan Brownmiller Lorna Dee Cervantes Alice Childress Rosalyn Drexler Eloise Greenfield Catharine A. MacKinnon Kate Millett Andrea Nye Susan Sontag Campbell, Mary B. Carolyn Forché Carl, Lisa Nikki Giovanni Mary Lee Settle Carlin, Sandra Louella Oettinger Parsons Carnes, Valerie Janet Flanner Carroll, Linda A. Jean Craighead George xiv
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Chase, Evelyn Hyman Mary Ellen Chase
Chou, Jerome Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Cathy Song Eudora Welty Kate Wilhelm Christensen, Lois E. Louise Smith Clappe Clark, Susan L. Mignon G. Eberhart Doris Grumbach Mary R. Higham Mabel Seeley Cleveland, Carol Patricia Highsmith Cohn, Amy L. Lois Lowry Cohn, Jan Mary Roberts Rinehart Coleman, Linda S. Mollie Dorsey Sanford Condit, Rebecca C. Ai Jayne Cortez Joan Didion Frances FitzGerald Paula Fox Sandra M. Gilbert Ellen Gilchrist Marita Golden Mary Catherine Gordon Lois Gould Joanne Greenberg Beth Henley Pauline Kael Alison Lurie Marge Piercy Rosemary Radford Ruether Linda Ty-Casper Dorothy Uhnak Ann Belford Ulanov
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Cook, Martha E. Virginia Hamilton Annie Fellows Johnston George Madden Martin Katherine Bonner McDowell Mary Murfree Cook, Sylvia Olive Tilford Dargan Grace Lumpkin Coultrap-McQuin, Susan Eliza Leslie Catharine Arnold Williams Cowell, Pattie Bathsheba Bowers Martha Wadsworth Brewster Elizabeth Sandwith Drinker Anna Young Smith Annis Boudinot Stockton Lydia Fish Willis Anna Green Winslow Cox, Virginia Erica Jong Crabbe, Katharyn F. Jane Andrews Carolyn Sherwin Bailey Katherine Lee Bates Margery Williams Bianco Claire Huchet Bishop Rebecca Sophia Clarke Clara F. Guernsey Lucy Ellen Guernsey Theodora Kroeber Elizabeth Foreman Lewis Ella Farman Pratt Susan Ridley Sedgwick Monica Shannon Eva March Tappan Louisa Huggins Tuthill Elizabeth Gray Vining Eliza Orne White Crumpacker, Laurie Sarah Prince Gill Cutler, Evelyn S. Rose O’Neill Dame, Enid Edna St. Vincent Millay Darney, Virginia Maude Howe Elliott Laura Howe Richards
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Dash, Irene Carolyn G. Heilbrun Davidson, Cathy N. E. M. Broner Laura Jean Libbey Tabitha Tenney Davis, Barbara Kerr Ellen Moers Davis, Thadious M. Anna Julia Cooper Mollie Moore Davis Shirley Graham Mary Spring Walker Rhoda E. White Deegan, Mary Jo Edith Abbott Emily Greene Balch Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge Helen Merrell Lynd Marion Talbott DeMarr, Mary Jean Charlotte Armstrong Sarah T. Bolton Gwen Bristow Doris Miles Disney Janet Ayer Fairbank Rachel Lyman Field Alice Tisdale Hobart Agnes Newton Keith Alice Hegan Rice Mari Sandoz Anya Seton Ruth Suckow Elswyth Thane Agnes Sligh Turnbull Carolyn Wells Demetrakopoulos, Stephanie Mary Daly Mary Esther Harding June K. Singer Ann Belford Ulanov Deming, Caren J. Gertrude Berg Elaine Sterne Carrington Agnes E. Nixon Irna Phillips xv
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Denler, Heidi Hartwig Alice French Tina Howe Kristin Hunter-Lattany Alice McDermott Anne Tyler Denniston, Dorothy L. Paule Marshall DeRoche, Celeste Beverly Cleary Natalie Zemon Davis Rachel Blau DuPlessis Sylvia A. Earle Louise Erdrich Gail Godwin Katharine Graham Carolyn G. Heilbrun Linda Hogan Nicole Hollander Barbara C. Jordan Nancy Mairs Maria Mitchell Robin Morgan Gloria Naylor Anne Firor Scott Joan Wallach Scott Vida Dutton Scudder Jane P. Tompkins Dorothy West Dixon, Janette Goff Judy Blume Erma Bombeck Betty Friedan Barbara Tuchman Helen Hennessy Vendler Dobbs, Jeannine Hildegarde Flanner Hazel Hall Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck Leonora von Stosch Speyer Jean Starr Untermeyer Marya Zaturenska Domina, Lynn Dorothy Allison Susan B. Anthony Rita Dove Anne Lamott Denise Levertov Sojourner Truth xvi
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Donnelly, Daria Sarah Appleton-Weber Joy Harjo Naomi Shihab Nye Linda Pastan Donovan, Josephine Annie Adams Fields Louise Imogen Guiney Sarah Orne Jewett Lucy Larcom Celia Laighton Thaxter Dooley, Dale A. Ai Alexis DeVeaux Dorenkamp, Angela Mary Catherine Gordon Dorenkamp, Monica Kathy Acker Alicia Ostriker Dykeman, Amy Kate W. Hamilton Cecilia Viets Jamison Adeline Trafton Knox Eliasberg, Ann Pringle Annie Brown Leslie Josephine Preston Peabody Dorothy Thompson Victoria Woodhull Estess, Sybil Maxine W. Kumin Etheridge, Billie W. Abigail Smith Adams Mercy Otis Warren Evans, Elizabeth Josephine Jacobsen Helen MacInnes Frances Newman Margaret Junkin Preston Anne Tyler Eudora Welty Ewell, Barbara C. Sarah McLean Greene Fannie Heaslip Lea Eliza Jane Poitevent Nicholson Eliza Phillips Pugh Faust, Langdon Frances Willard
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Ferguson, Mary Anne Lisa Alther Sally Benson Doris Betts Tess Slesinger Finger, Mary E. Josephine Herbst Madeleine L’Engle Fiore, Jullie Ann Annie Dillard Fish, Virginia K. Frances R. Donovan Annie Marion MacLean Fitch, Noel R. Sylvia Beach Fleche, Anne Adrienne Kennedy Fleenor, Juliann E. Catharine Esther Beecher Caroline Chesebrough Susan Hale Emily Chubbuck Judson Margaret Sanger Ann Winterbotham Stephens Flint, Joyce Margaret Craven Florence, Barbara Moench Lella Secor Fowler, Lois Eleanor Flexner Frances Dana Gage Ida Husted Harper Julia McNair Wright Franklin, Phyllis Judith Sargent Murray Elsie Clews Parsons Jean Stafford Frazer, Winifred Dorothy Day Voltairine de Cleyre Emma Goldman Freiberg, Karen Kate Wilhelm Freibert, Lucy Georgiana Bruce Kirby Jessica N. MacDonald Marianne Dwight Orvis
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Friedman, Ellen Anna Hempstead Branch Bettina Liebowitz Knapp Dilys Bennett Laing Fuchs, Miriam Beulah Marie Dix Maude McVeigh Hutchins Gabbard, Lucina P. Mary Coyle Chase Clare Boothe Luce Galanter, Margit Barbara Tuchman Gallo, Rose Adrienne Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald Garson, Helen S. Jacqueline Susann Sophie Kerr Underwood Gartner, Carol B. Carman Dee Barnes Laura Benét Mary Putnam Jacobi Kate Jordan Myra Kelly Gaskill, Gayle Isabella MacDonald Alden Beatrice J. Chute Marchette Chute Mathilde Eiker Sarah Barnwell Elliott Jean Kerr Gensler, Kinereth Sandra M. Gilbert Gentilella, Dacia Paula Gunn Allen Gerson, Risa Susanna Anthony E. L. Konigsburg Eliza Buckminster Lee Gibbons, Christina Tischler Mary Palmer Tyler Gibbons, Sheila J. Mary McGrory Gilbert, Melissa Kesler Gloria Steinem Giles, Jane Elizabeth Elkins Sanders Catharine Maria Sedgwick xvii
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Ginsberg, Elaine K. Amelia Jenks Bloomer Maria Susanna Cummins Hannah Webster Foster Mary Jane Hawes Holmes Betty Smith E. D. E. N. Southworth Gironda, Suzanne Michelle Cliff Jill Johnston Meridel Le Sueur Gladstein, Mimi R. Ayn Rand Gleason, Phyllis S. Alice Adams Alison Lurie Goldman, Maureen Esther Edwards Burr Hannah Flagg Gould Hannah Sawyer Lee
Griffith, Susan Nicholasa Mohr Grim, Jessica Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Lucy R. Lippard Eileen Myles Rosmarie Waldrop Groben, Anne R. Ella Wheeler Wilcox Grove, Shari Linda Hogan Hall, Joan Wylie Ruth McEnery Stuart Eudora Welty Halpern, Faye Joanne Greenberg Maureen Howard
Grant, Mary H. Florence Howe Hall Julia Ward Howe
Hamblen, Abigail Ann Eleanor Hallowell Abbott Temple Bailey Amelia E. Barr Clara L. Root Burnham Elizabeth Jane Coatsworth Margaret Campbell Deland Mary E. Wilkins Freeman Honoré McCue Morrow Louise Redfield Peattie Lucy Fitch Perkins Margaret E. Sangster Elsie Singmaster Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard Nelia Gardner White Ola Elizabeth Winslow
Green, Carol Hurd Eve Merriam
Hamblen, Vicki Lynn Helen M. Winslow
Greene, Dana Sophia Hume Martha Shepard Lippincott Lucretia Mott Sara Vickers Oberholtzer
Hannay, Margaret P. Marabel Morgan
Gottfried, Erika Rose Pesotta Gottlieb, Phyllis Lucy Hooper Lucy Jones Hooper Graham, Theodora R. Louise Bogan Grace Elizabeth King Josephine Miles Harriet Monroe
Greyson, Laura Hannah Arendt Grider, Sylvia Ann Linda Dégh Grierson, Beth Rita Mae Brown Alma Routsong xviii
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Hardesty, Nancy Antoinette Brown Blackwell Hannah Chaplin Conant Sarah Ewing Hall Phoebe Worrall Palmer Elizabeth Payson Prentiss Elizabeth Cady Stanton Emma Willard Hardy, Willene S. Katharine Fullerton Gerould
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Harlan, Judith Sue Grafton Shere Hite Diane Johnson Sarah Winnemucca Naomi Wolf Harris, Miriam Kalman, Ph.D Jean Houston Claire Myers Owens Florida Scott-Maxwell Harvey, Mary E. Mari Evans Sally Miller Gearhart Marita Golden Kristin Hunter-Lattany Healey, Claire H. D. Amy Lowell Heilbrun, Carolyn G. A. G. Mojtabai Helbig, Alethea K. Carol Ryrie Brink Eleanor Estes Lucretia Peabody Hale Irene Hunt Madeleine L’Engle Myra Cohn Livingston Emily Cheney Neville Ruth Sawyer Kate Seredy Caroline Dale Snedeker Zilpha Keatley Snyder Elizabeth George Speare Anne Terry White Ella Young Henderson, Kathy Linda J. Barnes Joan Didion Martha Grimes Susan Minot
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Hill, Vicki Lynn Bessie Breuer Mary Cruger Helen Hamilton Gardener Ursula N. Gestefeld Marie Howland Ellen Warner Kirk Theresa S. Malkiel Myra Page Martha W. Tyler Marie Van Vorst Mary Heaton Vorse Bessie McGinnis Van Vorst Hobbs, Glenda Harriette Simpson Arnow Hoeveler, Diane Long Mathilde Franziska Giesler Anneke Phoebe Cary Mary Andrews Denison Alice Bradley Haven Eleanor Mercein Kelly Juliette Magill Kinzie Marya Mannes Jessica Mitford Frances Crosby Van Alstyne Babette Deutsch Holbrook, Amy Alice McDermott Holdstein, Deborah H. Harriet Livermore Vienna G. Morrell Ramsay Dora Knowlton Ranous Itti Kinney Reno Mae West Holly, Marcia Margaret Culkin Banning
Hepps, Marcia María Irene Fornés Tina Howe Megan Terry
Hornstein, Jacqueline Jenny Fenno Sarah Symmes Fiske Susannah Johnson Hastings Elizabeth Mixer Sarah Parsons Moorhead Sarah Wentworth Morton Sarah Osborn Sarah Porter Eunice Smith Jane Turell Elizabeth White
Hill, Holly Mina Kirstein Curtiss
Horton, Beverly Harriet Jacobs
Henning, Wendy J. Marie Manning
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BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Howard, Lillie Fannie Cook Alice Walker Howze, Jo Mary McLeod Bethune Hoyle, Karen Nelson Virginia Lee Burton Natalie Savage Carlson Marguerite Lofft de Angeli Jean Lee Latham
Jones, Judith P. Phyllis Chesler Eleanor Clark Elizabeth Gould Davis Gayl Jones Kafatou, Sarah Ellen Bryant Voigt Kahn, Mariam Ruth Benedict Margaret Mead
Hudspeth, Cheryl K. Rodello Hunter
Kaledin, Eugenia Carolyn Kizer Elizabeth Spencer
Hughson, Lois Mary Ritter Beard Barbara Tuchman
Karp, Sheema Hamdani Adrienne Rich
Humez, Jean McMahon Rebecca Cox Jackson Hunter, Edith F. Sophia Lyon Fahs Irvin, Helen Deiss Antoinette Doolittle Anna White Johnson, Claudia D. Olive Logan Clara Morris Johnson, Lee Ann Mary Hallock Foote Johnson, Robin Marianne Moore Jones, Allison A. Maxine W. Kumin Rhoda Lerman Lois Lowry Paule Marshall Terry McMillan A. G. Mojtabai Katherine M. Rogers Susan Fromberg Schaeffer Ntozake Shange Jones, Anne Hudson Kate C. Hurd-Mead Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Esther Pohl Lovejoy Gail Sheehy xx
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Kaufman, Janet E. Eliza Frances Andrews Mary Miller Chesnut Kate Cumming Sarah Ellis Dorsey Rebecca Latimer Felton Constance Cary Harrison Sarah Stone Holmes Mary Ann Webster Loughborough Judith Brockenbrough McGuire Elizabeth Avery Meriwether Phoebe Yates Pember Sara Rice Pryor Sallie A. Brock Putnam Eliza M. Ripley Cornelia Phillips Spencer Susie King Taylor Katharine Prescott Wormeley Kavo, Rose F. Sue Petigru Bowen Jane C. Campbell Juliet Lewis Campbell Jane McManus Cazneau Jane Dunbar Chaplin Ella Rodman Church Jane Hardin Cross Keeney, William María Irene Fornés Tina Howe Keeshen, Kathleen Kearney Marguerite Higgins Ada Louise Huxtable Miriam Ottenberg
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Kelleghan, Fiona Marion Zimmer Bradley Suzy McKee Charnas Anne McCaffrey Vonda N. McIntyre Andre Norton Kit Reed Elizabeth Ann Scarborough Sheri S. Tepper Connie Willis
Koengeter, L. W. Ann Eliza Schuyler Bleecker Maria Gowen Brooks Hannah Mather Crocker Margaretta V. Faugeres Rose Wilder Lane Adah Isaacs Menken
Kenschaft, Lori Martha Ballard Barbara Ehrenreich Charlotte Perkins Gilman Frances Kellor Carson McCullers Ann Lane Petry Ida B. Wells-Barnett
Kolmerten, Carol A. Frances Wright
Kern, Donna Casella Frances Fuller Victor Kern, Edith Ann Landers Kessler, Carol Farley Elizabeth Stuart Phelps King, Margaret J. Clara Jessup Bloomfield-Moore Peg Bracken Judith Crist Maureen Daly Pauline Kael Elizabeth Linington Madalyn Murray O’Hair Emily Post Mary Wilson Sherwood Amy Vanderbilt Kish, Dorothy Rebecca Harding Davis Klein, Kathleen Gregory Susan Griffin Ruth McKenney Anne Nichols Bella Cohen Spewak Megan Terry Klein, Michael Jean Valentine Knapp, Bettina L. Anaïs Nin
Kohlstedt, Sally Gregory Anna Botsford Comstock Almira Lincoln Phelps
Kondelik, Marlene Mary Shipman Andrews Koon, Helene Marian Anderson Ruth Gordon Anna Mowatt Ritchie Elizabeth Robins Catherine Turney S. S. B. K. Wood Koppes, Phyllis Bixlir Frances Hodgson Burnett Kouidis, Virginia M. Mina Loy Krieg, Joann Peck Charlotte Mary Sanford Barnes Susan Fenimore Cooper Mary Baker Eddy Kroll, Diane E. Jean Fritz Katherine Paterson Krouse, Agate Nesaule Rhoda Lerman Kuenhold, Sandra Leta Stetter Hollingworth Kuznets, Lois R. Esther Forbes Lois Lenski Lamping, Marilyn Hallie Quinn Brown Pauline Hopkins Maria W. Stewart Fannie Barrier Williams Langhals, Patricia Florence Wheelock Ayscough Alice Bacon Dorothy Borg xxi
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Langsam, Miriam Z. Margaret Bourke-White Laska, Vera Marcia Gluck Davenport Elisabeth Elliot
Ludwig, Linda Kathryn Cavarly Hulme Margaret Mitchell MacDonald, Maureen Katherine Bolton Black
Lauter, Estella Diane Wakoski
MacKay, Kathryn L. Maurine Whipple
Levy, Ilise Alice Hamilton Jane Jacobs
MacPike, Loralee Emily Kimbrough Maxine Hong Kingston Mary Jane Ward
Lewandowska, M. L. Marilyn Hacker Lewis, Janette Seaton Carrie Jacobs Bond Joanne Greenberg Lewis, Sharon A. Marita Bonner Lezburg, Amy K. Ilka Chase Linden-Ward, Blanche Andrea Dworkin Marilyn French Robin Morgan Loeb, Helen Inez Haynes Irwin Lohman, Judith S. Crystal Eastman Londré, Felicia Hardison Agnes de Mille Edith Ellis Anne Crawford Flexner Harriet Ford Rose Franken Ketti Frings Dorothy Kuhns Heyward Jeannette Augustus Marks Frances Aymar Mathews Adelaide Matthews Marguerite Merington Lillian Mortimer Martha Morton Josefina Niggli Charlotte Blair Parker Lillian Ross Lillie West Rida Johnson Young Lord, Charlotte V. Sidney Cowell Bateman xxii
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Madsen, Carol Cornwall Louisa Greene Richards Emmeline Woodward Wells Maida, Patricia D. Lillian O’Donnell Mainiero, Lina Willa Sibert Cather Maio, Kathleen L. Anna Katharine Green Mary R. Platt Hatch Lenore Glen Offord Metta Fuller Victor Mallett, Daryl F. Leigh Brackett Jane E. Brody Carolyn Chute Emma Lathen Ursula K. Le Guin Reeve Lindbergh Bobbie Ann Mason Rachel Pollack Anne Rice Kristine Kathryn Rusch Joanna Russ Jessica Amanda Salmonson Lee Smith Margaret Truman Marchino, Lois Rita Mae Brown Marcus, Lisa bell hooks Sherley Anne Williams Margolis, Tina Eva LeGallienne Marie, Jacquelyn Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Marks, Elaine Germaine Brée Marshall, Kathleen Bonann Susan H. Bergman Elizabeth Hardwick Linda Kaufman Kerber Bette Bao Lord Lorrie Moore Sara Paretsky Elaine Showalter Mona Van Duyn Edith Wharton Martinez, Elizabeth Coonrod Sandra Benítez Rosa Guy Demetria Martínez Cherríe Moraga Judith Ortiz Cofer Esmeralda Santiago Helena María Viramontes Masel-Walters, Lynne Alice Stone Blackwell Mary Ware Dennett Miriam Follin Leslie Inez Haynes Irwin Mason, Mary Grimley Betty Friedan Carolyn G. Heilbrun Nancy Gardner Prince Mason, Sarah E. Pauline Kael Masteller, Jean Carwile Annie Nathan Meyer Elizabeth Seifert Masters, Joellen Gayl Jones Masters, Jollen Susan Fromberg Schaeffer Matherne, Beverly M. Alice Gerstenberg
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
McCarthy, Joanne Kay Boyle Maeve Brennan Mary Maguire Colum Hedda Hopper Betty MacDonald Kathleen Thompson Norris McCay, Mary A. Rosellen Brown Louise Erdrich Kaye Gibbons Ellen Gilchrist Patricia Highsmith Barbara Kingsolver Bobbie Ann Mason Brenda Marie Osbey Anne Rice Helen Yglesias McClure, Charlotte S. Gertrude Atherton McColgan, Kristin Dorothea Lynde Dix McCrea, Joan M. Katharine Coman McDannell, M. Colleen Katherine Eleanor Conway Pearl Richards Craigie Amanda Smith Frances Fisher Tiernan Ellen Gould White McFadden-Gerber, Margaret Sally Carrighar Annie Dillard Wilma Dykeman Fannie Hardy Eckstorm Josephine Winslow Johnson Harriet M. Miller Louise Dickinson Rich
May, Jill P. Ann Nolan Clark Ingri Mortenson d’Aulaire Maud Fuller Petersham Marilyn Sachs
McGovern, Edythe M. Margaret Wise Brown Rachel Crothers Susan Glaspell Lorraine Hansberry Sophie Treadwell Charlotte Zolotow
Mayer, Elsie F. Anne Morrow Lindbergh
McKay, Mary A. Lee Smith xxiii
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
McLennan, Karen Harriette Simpson Arnow Toni Cade Bambara Mary Daly Louise Glück Virginia Johnson-Masters Audre Lorde Patricia Meyer Spacks McQuin, Susan Coultrap Sarah Ann Evans Medeiros, Kimbally A. Sandra Harding Eleanor Munro Anne Truitt Anne Waldman Menger, Lucy Ruth Shick Montgomery Jane Roberts Susy Smith Mercier, Cathryn M. Yoshiko Uchida Cynthia Voigt Miller, James A. Margaret Randall Miller, Marlene M. Elizabeth Bishop Kelly Cherry Elizabeth Cook-Lynn M. F. K. Fisher June Jordan Mitchell, Nora Olga Broumas Louise Glück Sharon Olds Mitchell, Sally Francesca Alexander Helen Dore Boylston Margaret Mayo Cora Baggerly Older Mary Green Pike Rose Porter Molly Elliot Seawell Mary Ella Waller Moe, Phyllis Abbie Farwell Brown Helen Stuart Campbell Eliza Cabot Follen Emily Huntington Miller Sarah Chauncey Woolsey xxiv
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Mollenkott, Virginia Ramey Grace Livingston Hill-Lutz Sarah Smith Martyn Marjorie Hope Nicolson Rosemond Tuve Montenegro, David Linda Ty-Casper Morris, Linda A. Marietta Holley Frances Berry Whitcher Mortimer, Gail Katherine Anne Porter Mossberg, Barbara A. Clarke Sylvia Plath Genevieve Taggard Moynihan, Ruth Barnes Abigail Scott Duniway Murphy, Maureen Mary E. McGrath Blake Helena Lefroy Caperton Kathleen Coyle Blanche McManus Mansfield Mary L. Meaney Asenath Hatch Nicholson Florence J. O’Connor Jessie Fremont O’Donnell Katharine A. O’Keeffe Clara M. Thompson Murphy, Miriam B. Sarah E. Carmichael Martha Spence Heywood Murphy, Paula C. Maya Angelou Eleanor Taylor Bland Nora Ephron Barbara Kingsolver Barbara Neely Mussell, Kay Phyllis A. Whitney Nance, Guin A. Gail Godwin Nancy Hale Virginia M. Satir Elizabeth Spencer Clara M. Thompson Neils, Patricia Langhals Emily Hahn Charlotte Y. Salisbury Mary Clabaugh Wright
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Neville, Tam Lin Ruth Stone Newman, Anne Julia Mood Peterkin Elizabeth Sewell Amélie Rives Troubetzkoy Nichols, Kathleen L. Miriam Coles Harris Ellen Peck Harriet Waters Preston Anne Sexton Nix, E. M. Gail Godwin Nochimson, Martha Carry A. Nation Martha Harrison Robinson Norman, Marion Lucretia Maria Davidson Margaret Miller Davidson O’Connor, Christine Martha Ostenso O’Loughlin, James Tillie Olsen Ockerstrom, Lolly Mona Van Duyn Pannill, Linda Isadora Duncan Parker, Alice Ada Jack Carver Edith Hamilton Passty, Jeanette Nyda Isabella Oliver Sharp Sarah Pogson Smith Sukey Vickery Watson Payne, Alma J. Louisa May Alcott Pelzer, Linda C. Patricia Cornwell Martha Gellhorn Anita Shreve Penn, Patricia E. Del Martin Annie Smith Peck Penn, Shana Lucy S. Dawidowicz Perez-Guntin, Amiris Julia de Burgos
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Peterson, Margaret Emily Dickinson Janet Lewis Pettis, Joyce Zora Neale Hurston Philips, Elizabeth Sarah Helen Whitman Phillips, Elizabeth Elizabeth Ellet Annie Somers Gilchrist Estelle Robinson Lewis Frances Sargent Osgood Caroline Ticknor Mabel Loomis Todd Piercy, Josephine K. Anne Dudley Bradstreet Pogel, Nancy Constance Mayfield Rourke Poland, Helene Dwyer Julia Henrietta Gulliver Susanne K. Langer Pool, Gail Cynthia Ozick Dawn Powell Pouncey, Lorene Vassar Miller Marguerite Young Preston, Caroline Annie Trumbull Slosson Pringle, Mary Beth Léonie Fuller Adams Charlotte Perkins Gilman Puk, Francine Shapiro Elizabeth Akers Allen Victoria Lincoln Dorothy Parker Frances Gray Patton xxv
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Radtke, Barbara Anne Mary Daly Rosemary Radford Ruether Ratigan, Virginia Kaib Isabella Marshall Graham Mary Agnes Tincker Raugust, Karen Kathy Acker Natalie Angier Nevada Barr Ann Beattie Blanche McCrary Boyd Sandra Brown Edna Buchanan Amy Clampitt Nancy F. Cott Elizabeth Daly Dorothy Salisbury Davis Elizabeth Drew Carolyn Forché Jean Garrigue Kaye Gibbons Doris Kearns Goodwin Jorie Graham Jane Hamilton Lyn Hejinian Laurie R. King Ray, Sandra Rosa Guy Mildred Pitts Walter Nancy Willard Rayson, Ann Adelle Davis Ann Lane Petry
xxvi
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Rhodes, Nelson Margaret Wise Brown Alexis DeVeaux Ann Douglas Susan Griffin Lillian Hellman Zenna Henderson Jill Johnston Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Madeleine L’Engle Harper Lee Anne Morrow Lindbergh Shirley MacLaine Nancy Mairs Del Martin Marsha Norman Rochelle Owens Sylvia Plath Ayn Rand Hannah Whittal Smith Gertrude Stein Megan Terry Phyllis A. Whitney Richardson, Susan B. Mitsuye Yamada Hisaye Yamamoto Richmond, Velma Bourgeois Anne Fremantle Frances Parkinson Keyes Ruth Painter Randall Agnes Repplier Richter, Heddy A. Elizabeth Frances Corbett Olive Higgins Prouty Roberts, Audrey Caroline M. Stansbury Kirkland
Reardon, Joan Julia Child
Roberts, Bette B. Lydia Maria Child
Reisman, Jessica Hortense Calisher Angela Yvonne Davis Rachel Hadas Anne Moody Ann Rule Cynthia Voigt Alice Walker Kate Wilhelm
Roberts, Elizabeth Fannie W. Rankin Maggie Roberts Harriet Winslow Sewall Eliza Ann Youmans
Reuman, Ann E. Janice Mirikitani
Rogers, Katharine M. Lillian Hellman
Roca, Ana Julia Álvarez Gloria Anzaldúa Achy Obejas
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Rosenberg, Julia Emma Manley Embury Mary E. Moore Hewitt Rebecca Rush Caroline Warren Thayer Rosinsky, Natalie McCaffrey Anne McCaffrey Judith Merril C. L. Moore Rowe, Anne Maya Angelou Elizabeth Madox Roberts Constance Fenimore Woolson Rudnick, Lois P. Mabel Dodge Luhan Rushin, Kate Audre Lorde Ryan, Rosalie Tutela Jane Starkweather Locke Salo, Alice Bell Marjorie Hill Allee Mabel Leigh Hunt Elizabeth Yates Sandberg, Elisabeth Carolyn Chute Ruth Seid Scanzoni, Letha Anita Bryant Virginia Ramey Mollenkott Schiavoni, Andrew Rochelle Owens Susan Sontag Schleuning, Neala Yount Meridel Le Sueur Schoen, Carol B. Hannah Adams Rebekah Bettelheim Kohut Emma Lazarus Penina Moise Ruth Seid
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Schoenbach, Lisi Germaine Brée Schofield, Ann Helen Marot Schull, Elinor Adela Rogers St. Johns Schwartz, Helen J. Mary Antin Hortense Calisher Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer Margaret Thompson Janvier Margaret Woods Lawrence Tillie Olsen Grace Paley Schweik, Joanne L. Marilyn French Isabella Gardner Vivian Gornick Hettie Jones Gloria Steinem Scura, Dorothy M. Mary Johnston Seaton, Beverly Florence Merriam Bailey Gladys Hasty Carroll Mary Hartwell Catherwood Nellie Blanchan Doubleday Mateel Howe Farnham Margaret Flint Helen Morgenthau Fox Mary Griffith Susan Huntington Louisa Yeomans King Elizabeth L. Lawrence Alice Lounsberry Helen Reimensnyder Martin Sarah Edgarton Mayo Josephine Clifford McCrackin Helen Matthews Nitsch Frances Dana Parsons Grace Richmond Gladys Bagg Taber Anna Bartlett Warner Susan Bogert Warner Mary Stanbery Watts Adeline D. T. Whitney Kate Douglass Wiggin Laura Ingalls Wilder Louise Beebe Wilder Mabel Osgood Wright xxvii
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Secrest, Rose V. C. Andrews Mary Higgins Clark June Doman Katherine V. Forrest Nancy Freedman Carolyn G. Hart Joyce Maynard Sharon McCrumb Bharati Mukherjee Frances Perkins Belva Plain Patricia Polacco Sylvia F. Porter Pamela Sargent Shaffer-Koros, Carole M. Willystine Goodsell Helen Hazlett Ruth Putnam Shakir, Evelyn Ednah Littlehale Cheney Abigail May Alcott Nieriker Sharistanian, Janet Florence Howe Elizabeth Janeway Helen Waite Papashvily Katherine M. Rogers Shelton, Pamela Rita Mae Brown Nikki Giovanni Harriet Jacobs Sherman, Sarah Way Sarah Knowles Bolton Alice Brown Rose Terry Cooke Gertrude Battles Lane Louise Chandler Moulton Mary Alicia Owen
xxviii
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Shostak, Elizabeth Bette Bao Lord Jayne Anne Phillips Kate Simon Shur, Cherri L. Marianne Wiggins Shute, Carolyn Judy Blume Mildred Delois Taylor Siefert, Susan E. Ariel Durant Fannie Merritt Farmer Skaggs, Peggy Helen Keller Catherine Marshall Sladics, Devra M. Lilian Jackson Braun Gwendolyn Brooks Tess Gallagher Doris Grumbach Sonia Sanchez Dana Stabenow Wendy Wasserstein Sylvia Watanabe Jade Snow Wong Charlotte Zolotow Slaughter, Jane Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Smelstor, Marjorie Fanny Kemble
Shinn, Thelma J. Margaret Ayer Barnes Frances Courtenay Baylor Barnum Kate Chopin Martha Finley Lucy Smith French Shirley Ann Grau Mary Dana Shindler Harriet Prescott Spofford
Smethurst, James Maya Angelou Marilyn Hacker Maxine Hong Kingston Sonia Sanchez Alice Walker Margaret Walker
Shortreed, Vivian H. Elizabeth Oakes Smith Jane Grey Swisshelm
Smith, Martha Nell Toi Derricotte
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Smith, Susan Sutton Elizabeth Cabot Cary Agassiz Jane Goodwin Austin Delia Salter Bacon Sarah G. Bagley Mary Edwards Bryan Maria Weston Chapman Adelaide Crapsey Caroline Healey Dall Eliza Ann Dupuy Harriet Farley Eliza Rotch Farrar Margaret Fuller Caroline Howard Gilman Caroline Gilman Jervey Elizabeth Dodge Kinney Sara Jane Lippincott Harriet Hanson Robinson Phoebe Atwood Taylor Mary Hawes Terhune Jean Webster Sneller, Jo Leslie Rosemary Sprague Snipes, Katherine Clara Barton Laura Jackson Carson McCullers Snyder, Carrie Ana Castillo Julia Child Jane Cooper Mari Evans María Irene Fornés Shirley Ann Grau Bertha Harris Erica Jong Sandra McPherson Valerie Miner Alma Routsong Anya Seton Gail Sheehy Leslie Marmon Silko Zilpha Keatley Snyder Cathy Song Danielle Steel Mildred Pitts Walter Sonnenschein, Dana Rosalyn Drexler Jorie Graham Sandra McPherson
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Sparks, Leah J. Sanora Babb Carman Dee Barnes Doris Betts Germaine Brée Olga Broumas Octavia E. Butler Rachel Carson Kim Chernin Phyllis Chesler Marilyn Chin Michelle Cliff Judith Crist Toi Derricotte Diane DiPrima Andrea Dworkin Suzette Haden Elgin Carol Emshwiller Marjorie Garber Sally Miller Gearhart Donna Haraway Lillian Hellman Susan Isaacs Molly Ivins Shirley Jackson Gerda Lerner Del Martin Alice Notley Martha Craven Nussbaum Flannery O’Connor Joyce Carol Oates Camille Paglia Margaret Randall Harriet Beecher Stowe Lois-Ann Yamanaka Spencer, Linda Jayne Anne Phillips Eleanor Roosevelt Judith Rossner Sprague, Rosemary Sara Teasdale Sproat, Elaine Lola Ridge Stackhouse, Amy D. Edith Maud Eaton Lorine Niedecker Staley, Ann Jane Hirshfield Stanbrough, Jane Elizabeth Manning Hawthorne Hildegarde Hawthorne Rose Hawthorne Lathrop xxix
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Stanford, Ann Sanora Babb Sarah Kemble Knight May Swenson Staples, Katherine G. M. Flanders Louisa Park Hall Caroline E. Rush Alma Sioux Scarberry Stauffer, Helen Bess Streeter Aldrich Bertha Muzzy Sinclair Dorothy Swain Thomas Steele, Karen B. Elizabeth W. Latimer Mary Lowell Putnam Stein, Karen F. Paulina Wright Davis Alice Dunbar-Nelson Abbie Huston Evans Phebe Coffin Hanaford Elinor Hoyt Wylie Stein, Rachel Toni Cade Bambara Stepanski, Lisa Ann Beattie Stetson, Erlene Gwendolyn B. Bennett Stevenson, Deanna Olga Broumas Stiller, Nikki Helaine Newstead Stinson, Peggy Jane Addams Agnes Smedley Ella Winter Anzia Yezierska Stoddard, Karen M. Dorothy Daniels Summers, Shauna Joan Didion Anne Tyler Swan, Susan Jamaica Kincaid xxx
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Swartz, Mark Djuna Barnes bell hooks Susan Howe Ann Lauterbach Cynthia Ozick Swidler, Arlene Anderson Sarah N. Brownson Katherine Kurz Burton Aline Murray Kilmer Sister Mary Madeleva Helen Constance White Sylvander, Carolyn Wedin Martha Griffith Browne Jessie Redmon Fauset Frances Noyes Hart Helen Hull Mary Britton Miller Mary White Ovington Laura M. Towne Szymanski, Karen Anne C. Lynch Botta Eliza Woodson Farnham Talamantez, Inés Ella Cara Deloria Tebbe, Jennifer L. Georgette Meyer Chapelle Elisabeth May Craig Rheta Childe Dorr Elizabeth Drew Barbara Ehrenreich Frances FitzGerald Anne O’Hare McCormick Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman Anna Louise Strong Terris, Virginia R. Alice Henry Sarah Bryan Piatt Jessie B. Rittenhouse Lillian Whiting Thiébaux, Marcelle Faith Baldwin Cuthrell Julia Ripley Dorr Ellen Glasgow Anne Green Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Thomas, Gwendolyn A. Henrietta Buckmaster Charlotte L. Forten Pauli Murray
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Thompson, Ann Rosemary Radford Ruether Thompson, Dorothea Mosley Mary Cunningham Logan Ruth Bryan Owen Irma von Starkloff Rombauer Caroline White Soule Thornton, Emma S. Marion Marsh Todd Tipps, Lisa Bertha Harris Tobin, Jean Hilda Morley Adrienne Rich Ruth Whitman Townsend, Janis Mildred Aldrich Gertrude Stein Alice B. Toklas Treckel, Paula A. Alice Morse Earle Gerda Lerner Emily Smith Putnam Lucy Maynard Salmon Eliza Snow Smith Fanny Stenhouse Narcissa Prestiss Whitman Ann Eliza Young Turner, Alberta Katherine Garrison Chapin Ruth Herschberger Barbara Howes Muriel Rukeyser Uffen, Ellen Serlen Fannie Hurst Uphaus, Suzanne Henning Ann Chidester Eleanor Carroll Chilton Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn Pamela Frankau Maureen Howard Marge Piercy Vasquez, Pamela Judith Ortiz Cofer
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Vogrin, Valerie Alice Adams Annie Dillard Jamaica Kincaid Maxine Hong Kingston Carole Maso Toni Morrison Sharon Olds Grace Paley Ann Patchett Amy Tan Wahlstrom, Billie J. Alice Cary Anna Peyre Dinnies Betty Friedan Zenna Henderson Andre Norton Joanna Russ Waldron, Karen E. Kim Chernin Walker, Cynthia L. Shirley Barker Taylor Caldwell Edna Ferber Eleanor Gates Caroline Pafford Miller Myrtle Reed Florence Barrett Willoughby Wall, Cheryl A. Gwendolyn Brooks Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Nella Larsen Gloria Naylor Anne Spencer Ward, Jean M. Elizabeth Blackwell Ella Rhoads Higginson Bethenia Owens-Adair Welch, Barbara A. Alice James Werden, Frieda L. Dorothy Dodds Baker Kate Millett Bernice Love Wiggins West, Martha Ullman Rosellen Brown Lynne Sharon Schwartz xxxi
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
White, Barbara A. Lillie Devereux Blake Sarah Josepha Hale Sara Willis Parton Marilla M. Ricker Caroline Slade
Yee, Carole Zonis Leane Zugsmith
White, Evelyn C. Angela Yvonne Davis
Yongue, Patricia Lee Zoë Akins Anne Douglas Sedgwick Helen Hennessy Vendler
Williams, Donna Glee Diane Wakoski Williams, Lynn F. Marion Zimmer Bradley Joanna Russ Wolff, Ellen Harriet E. Adams Wilson Jade Snow Wong Wolfson, Rose Klara Goldzieher Roman Wollons, Roberta Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg Woodward, Angela Natalie Babbitt Ellen Goodman Elizabeth Gray Vining Diane Wakoski Wright, Catherine Morris Mary Mapes Dodge Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne Gloria Anzaldúa Ana Castillo Lorna Dee Cervantes Sandra Cisneros Cherríe Moraga Helena María Viramontes
xxxii
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Yglesias, Helen Amy Tan
Young, Melanie Harriette Fanning Read Caroline H. Woods Zajdel, Melody M. Caresse Crosby Zilboorg, Caroline Elise Justine Bayard Ann Douglas Maud Wilder Goodwin Sarah Sprague Jacobs Charlotte A. Jerauld Mary Elizabeth Lee Dolley Madison Louisa Cheves McCord Maria G. Milward Agnes Woods Mitchell Mrs. H. J. Moore Martha Read Catherine Ware Warfield Amelia Coppuck Welby Zimmerman, Karen Marcia Muller
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS Abbott, Edith Abbott, Eleanor Hallowell Abel, Annie Heloise Acker, Kathy Adams, Abigail Smith Adams, Alice Adams, Hannah Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, Léonie Fuller Adams, Louisa Catherine Johnson Addams, Jane Adisa, Giamba See Lorde, Audre Agassiz, Elizabeth Cabot Cary Ai Akins, Zoë Alcott, Louisa May Alden, Isabella MacDonald Aldon, Adair See Meigs, Cornelia Aldrich, Bess Streeter Aldrich, Mildred Alexander, Francesca Allee, Marjorie Hill Allen, Elizabeth Akers Allen, Paula Gunn Allison, Dorothy Alther, Lisa Álvarez, Julia Ames, Mary E. Clemmer Anderson, Marian Andrew, Joseph Maree See Bonner, Marita Andrews, Eliza Frances Andrews, Jane Andrews, Mary Shipman Andrews, V. C. Angelou, Maya Angier, Natalie Anneke, Mathilde Franziska Giesler Anpetu Waśte See Deloria, Ella Cara Anthony, Susan B. Anthony, Susanna Antin, Mary Anzaldúa, Gloria Appleton-Weber, Sarah Appleton, Sarah See Appleton-Weber, Sarah Appleton, Victor, II See Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Arendt, Hannah Armstrong, Charlotte Arnow, Harriette Simpson Ashley, Ellen See Seifert, Elizabeth Atherton, Gertrude Atom, Ann See Walworth, Jeannette Hadermann
Auerbach, Hilda See Morley, Hilda Austin, Jane Goodwin Austin, Mary Hunter Avery, Martha Moore Ayer, Harriet Hubbard Ayscough, Florence Wheelock Babb, Sanora Babbitt, Natalie Bacon, Alice Bacon, Delia Salter Bagley, Sarah G. Bailey, Temple Bailey, Carolyn Sherwin Bailey, Florence Merriam Baker, Dorothy Dodds Balch, Emily Greene Ballard, Martha Bambara, Toni Cade Banning, Margaret Culkin Barker, Shirley Barnard, A. M. See Alcott, Louisa May Barnes, Carman Dee Barnes, Charlotte Mary Sanford Barnes, Djuna Barnes, Linda J. Barnes, Margaret Ayer Barnes, Mary Sheldon Barnum, Frances Courtenay Baylor Barr, Amelia E. Barr, Nevada Barton, Clara Barton, May Hollis See Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Bateman, Sidney Cowell Bates, Katherine Lee Bayard, Elise Justine Beach, Sylvia Beard, Mary Ritter Beattie, Ann Beebe, Mary Blair See Niles, Blair Rice Beecher, Catharine Esther Benedict, Ruth Benét, Laura Benítez, Sandra Bennett, Gwendolyn B. Benson, Sally Berg, Gertrude Bergman, Susan H. Bernays, Anne Berne, Victoria See Fisher, M. F. K. Bethune, Mary McLeod xxxiii
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Betts, Doris Bianco, Margery Williams Bishop, Claire Huchet Bishop, Elizabeth Black, Katherine Bolton Blackwell, Alice Stone Blackwell, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Elizabeth Blaisdell, Anne See Linington, Elizabeth Blake, Lillie Devereux Blake, Mary E. McGrath Bland, Eleanor Taylor Blatch, Harriot Stanton Bleecker, Ann Eliza Schuyler Bloomer, Amelia Jenks Bloomfield-Moore, Clara Jessup Blume, Judy Bly, Nellie See Seaman, Elizabeth Cochrane Bogan, Louise Bolton, Isabel See Miller, Mary Britton Bolton, Sarah T. Bolton, Sarah Knowles Bombeck, Erma Bond, Carrie Jacobs Bonner, Marita Booth, Mary Louise Borg, Dorothy Botta, Anne C. Lynch Bourke-White, Margaret Bowen, Catherine Drinker Bowen, Sue Petigru Bower, B. M. See Sinclair, Bertha Muzzy Bowers, Bathsheba Bowles, Jane Auer Boyd, Blanche McCrary Boyd, Nancy See Millay, Edna St. Vincent Boyle, Kay Boylston, Helen Dore Bracken, Peg Brackett, Leigh Bradley, Marion Zimmer Bradstreet, Anne Dudley Branch, Anna Hempstead Braun, Lilian Jackson Breckinridge, Sophonisba Preston Brée, Germaine Brennan, Maeve Brent, Linda See Jacobs, Harriet Bres, Rose Falls Breuer, Bessie Brewster, Martha Wadsworth Briggs, Emily Edson Brink, Carol Ryrie Bristow, Gwen Brody, Jane E. xxxiv
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Broner, E. M. Brooks, Gwendolyn Brooks, Maria Gowen Broumas, Olga Brown, Abbie Farwell Brown, Alice Brown, Hallie Quinn Brown, Margaret Wise Brown, Nancy See Leslie, Annie Brown Brown, Rita Mae Brown, Rosellen Brown, Sandra Browne, Martha Griffith Brownmiller, Susan Brownson, Sarah N. Bryan, Mary Edwards Bryant, Anita Buchanan, Edna Buck, Pearl S. Buckmaster, Henrietta Burke, Fielding See Dargan, Olive Tilford Burnett, Frances Hodgson Burnham, Clara L. Root Burr, Esther Edwards Burton, Katherine Kurz Burton, Virginia Lee Butler, Octavia E. Cabeza de Baca, Fabiola Cade, Toni See Bambara, Toni Cade Caldwell, Taylor Calhoun, Lucy See Monroe, Lucy Calisher, Hortense Campbell, Helen Stuart Campbell, Jane C. Campbell, Juliet Lewis Caperton, Helena Lefroy Carlson, Natalie Savage Carmichael, Sarah E. Carrighar, Sally Carrington, Elaine Sterne Carroll, Gladys Hasty Carson, Rachel Carver, Ada Jack Cary, Alice Cary, Phoebe Caspary, Vera Castillo, Ana Cather, Willa Sibert Catherwood, Mary Hartwell Catt, Carrie Chapman Caulkins, Frances Manwaring Cazneau, Jane McManus Cervantes, Lorna Dee Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Chandler, Elizabeth Margaret Chapelle, Georgette Meyer Chapin, Katherine Garrison Chaplin, Jane Dunbar Chapman, Lee See Bradley, Marion Zimmer Chapman, Maria Weston Charnas, Suzy McKee Chase, Ilka Chase, Mary Coyle Chase, Mary Ellen Chehia See Shaw, Anna Moore Cheney, Ednah Littlehale Chernin, Kim Cherry, Kelly Chesebrough, Caroline Chesler, Phyllis Chesnut, Mary Miller Chidester, Ann Child, Julia Child, Lydia Maria Childress, Alice Chilton, Eleanor Carroll Chin, Marilyn Chopin, Kate Church, Ella Rodman Chute, Beatrice J. Chute, Carolyn Chute, Marchette Cisneros, Sandra Clampitt, Amy Clapp, Margaret Antoinette Clappe, Louise Smith Clark, Ann Nolan Clark, Eleanor Clark, Mary Higgins Clarke, Rebecca Sophia Cleary, Beverly Cleghorn, Sarah Norcliffe Cliff, Michelle Clifton, Lucille Coatsworth, Elizabeth Jane Coit, Margaret L. Colum, Mary Maguire Coman, Katharine Comstock, Anna Botsford Conant, Hannah Chaplin Conway, Katherine Eleanor Cooey, Paula Marie Cook, Fannie Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth Cooke, Rose Terry Coolbrith, Ina Donna Coolidge, Susan See Woolsey, Sarah Chauncey Cooper, Anna Julia Cooper, Jane
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Cooper, Susan Fenimore Corbett, Elizabeth Frances Cornwell, Patricia Cortez, Jayne Cott, Nancy F. Coyle, Kathleen Craig, Elisabeth May Craig, Kit See Reed, Kit Craigie, Pearl Richards Crapsey, Adelaide Craven, Margaret Crist, Judith Crocker, Hannah Mather Croly, Jane Cunningham Crosby, Caresse Cross, Amanda See Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Cross, Jane Hardin Crothers, Rachel Crouter, Natalie Stark Crowe, F. J. See Johnston, Jill Cruger, Mary Cumming, Kate Cummins, Maria Susanna Curtiss, Mina Kirstein Curtiss, Ursula Reilly Custer, Elizabeth Bacon Cuthrell, Faith Baldwin Dahlgren, Madeleine Vinton Dall, Caroline Healey Daly, Elizabeth Daly, Mary Daly, Maureen Daniels, Dorothy Dargan, Olive Tilford d’Aulaire, Ingri Mortenson Davenport, Marcia Gluck Davidson, Lucretia Maria Davidson, Margaret Miller Davis, Adelle Davis, Angela Yvonne Davis, Dorothy Salisbury Davis, Elizabeth Gould Davis, Mollie Moore Davis, Natalie Zemon Davis, Paulina Wright Davis, Rebecca Harding Dawidowicz, Lucy S. Day, Dorothy de Angeli, Marguerite Lofft de Mille, Agnes de Burgos, Julia de Mondragon, Margaret Randall See Randall, Margaret de Cleyre, Voltairine Dégh, Linda xxxv
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Deland, Margaret Campbell del Occidente, Maria See Brooks, Maria Gowen Deloria, Ella Cara Deming, Barbara Denison, Mary Andrews Dennett, Mary Ware Derricotte, Toi Deutsch, Babette DeVeaux, Alexis Dexter, John See Bradley, Marion Zimmer Diaz, Abby Morton Dickinson, Emily Didion, Joan Dillard, Annie Dinnies, Anna Peyre DiPrima, Diane Disney, Doris Miles Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee Dix, Beulah Marie Dix, Dorothea Lynde Dix, Dorothy See Gilmer, Elizabeth Meriwether Dixon, Franklin W. See Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Dodge, Mary Abigail Dodge, Mary Mapes Doman, June Domini, Rey See Lorde, Audre Dominic, R. B. See Lathen, Emma Donovan, Frances R. Doolittle, Antoinette D(oolittle), H(ilda) Dorr, Julia Ripley Dorr, Rheta Childe Dorsett, Danielle See Daniels, Dorothy Dorsey, Anna McKenney Dorsey, Ella Loraine Dorsey, Sarah Ellis Doubleday, Nellie Blanchan Douglas, Amanda Minnie Douglas, Ann Dove, Rita Drew, Elizabeth Drexler, Rosalyn Drinker, Elizabeth Sandwith DuBois, Shirley Graham See Graham, Shirley DuJardin, Rosamond Neal Dunbar-Nelson, Alice Duncan, Isadora Duniway, Abigail Scott Dunlap, Jane See Davis, Adelle DuPlessis, Rachel Blau Dupuy, Eliza Ann Durant, Ariel Dworkin, Andrea Dykeman, Wilma xxxvi
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Earle, Alice Morse Earle, Sylvia A. Eastman, Crystal Eastman, Elaine Goodale Eastman, Mary Henderson Eaton, Edith Maud Eberhart, Mignon G. Eberhart, Sheri S. See Tepper, Sheri S. Eckstorm, Fannie Hardy Eddy, Mary Baker Egan, Lesley See Linington, Elizabeth Ehrenreich, Barbara Eiker, Mathilde Elder, Susan Blanchard Elgin, Suzette Haden Ellet, Elizabeth Elliot, Elisabeth Elliott, Maude Howe Elliott, Sarah Barnwell Ellis, Anne Ellis, Edith Embury, Emma Manley Emshwiller, Carol Ephron, Nora Erdrich, Louise Estes, Eleanor Evans, Abbie Huston Evans, Mari Evans, Sarah Ann Evermay, March See Eiker, Mathilde Fahs, Sophia Lyon Fairbank, Janet Ayer Fairfield, A. M. See Alcott, Louisa May Farley, Harriet Farmer, Fannie Merritt Farnham, Eliza Woodson Farnham, Mateel Howe Farquharson, Martha See Finley, Martha Farrar, Eliza Rotch Faugeres, Margaretta V. Fauset, Jessie Redmon Felton, Rebecca Latimer Fenno, Jenny Ferber, Edna Field, Kate Field, Rachel Lyman Fields, Annie Adams Finley, Martha Fisher, Dorothea Canfield Fisher, M. F. K. Fiske, Sarah Symmes Fitzgerald, Zelda Sayre FitzGerald, Frances Flanders, G. M.
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Flanner, Hildegarde Flanner, Janet Fletcher, Inglis Clark Flexner, Anne Crawford Flexner, Eleanor Flint, Margaret Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley Follen, Eliza Cabot Foote, Mary Hallock Forbes, Esther Forché, Carolyn Ford, Harriet Ford, Sallie Rochester Forester, Fanny See Judson, Emily Chubbuck Fornés, María Irene Forrest, Katherine V. Forten, Charlotte L. Foster, Hannah Webster Fox, Helen Morgenthau Fox, Paula Frankau, Pamela Franken, Rose Freedman, Nancy Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins Fremantle, Anne French, Alice French, Anne Warner French, Lucy Smith French, Marilyn Friedan, Betty Frings, Ketti Fritz, Jean Fuller, Margaret Gage, Frances Dana Gale, Zona Gallagher, Tess Garber, Marjorie Gardener, Helen Hamilton Gardner, Isabella Gardner, Mariam See Bradley, Marion Zimmer Gardner, Mary Sewall Garrigue, Jean Gates, Eleanor Gates, Susa Young Gearhart, Sally Miller Gellhorn, Martha Genêt See Flanner, Janet George, Jean Craighead Gerould, Katharine Fullerton Gerstenberg, Alice Gestefeld, Ursula N. Gibbons, Kaye Gilbert, Fabiola Cabeza de Baca See Cabeza de Baca, Fabiola
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Gilbert, Sandra M. Gilchrist, Annie Somers Gilchrist, Ellen Gill, Sarah Prince Gilman, Caroline Howard Gilman, Charlotte Perkins Gilmer, Elizabeth Meriwether Giovanni, Nikki Glasgow, Ellen Glaspell, Susan Glück, Louise Godchaux, Elma Godwin, Gail Golden, Marita Goldman, Emma Goodman, Allegra Goodman, Ellen Goodsell, Willystine Goodwin, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Maud Wilder Gordon, Caroline Gordon, Mary Catherine Gordon, Ruth Gornick, Vivian Gottschalk, Laura Riding See Jackson, Laura Gould, Hannah Flagg Gould, Lois Grafton, Sue Graham, Isabella Marshall Graham, Jorie Graham, Katharine Graham, Shirley Grahn, Judy Grant, Margaret See Franken, Rose Grau, Shirley Ann Graves, Valerie See Bradley, Marion Zimmer Gray, Angela See Daniels, Dorothy Green, Anna Katharine Green, Anne Green, Olive See Reed, Myrtle Greenberg, Joanne Greene, Sarah McLean Greenfield, Eloise Greenwood, Grace See Lippincott, Sara Jane Griffin, Susan Griffith, Mary Grimes, Martha Grimké, Angelina Grimké, Sarah Moore Gruenberg, Sidonie Matzner Grumbach, Doris Guernsey, Clara F. Guernsey, Lucy Ellen Guiney, Louise Imogen xxxvii
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Gulliver, Julia Henrietta Guy, Rosa H. D. See D(oolittle), H(ilda) Hacker, Marilyn Hadas, Rachel Hahn, Emily Hale, Lucretia Peabody Hale, Nancy Hale, Sarah Josepha Hale, Susan Hall, Florence Howe Hall, Hazel Hall, Louisa Park Hall, Sarah Ewing Hamilton, Alice Hamilton, Edith Hamilton, Gail See Dodge, Mary Abigail Hamilton, Jane Hamilton, Kate W. Hamilton, Virginia Hanaford, Phebe Coffin Hansberry, Lorraine Haraway, Donna Harding, Mary Esther Harding, Sandra Hardwick, Elizabeth Harjo, Joy Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Ida Husted Harris, Bernice Kelly Harris, Bertha Harris, Corra May Harris, Miriam Coles Harrison, Constance Cary Hart, Carolyn G. Hart, Frances Noyes Hasbrouck, Lydia Sayer Hastings, Susannah Johnson Hatch, Mary R. Platt Haven, Alice Bradley Hawthorne, Elizabeth Manning Hawthorne, Hildegarde Hazlett, Helen Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Hejinian, Lyn Hellman, Lillian Henderson, Zenna Henissart, Martha See Lathen, Emma Henley, Beth Henry, Alice Henry, Marguerite Hentz, Caroline Whiting Herbst, Josephine Herschberger, Ruth xxxviii
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Hewitt, Mary E. Moore Heyward, Dorothy Kuhns Heywood, Martha Spence Higgins, Marguerite Higginson, Ella Rhoads Higham, Mary R. Highet, Helen MacInnes See MacInnes, Helen Highsmith, Patricia Hill-Lutz, Grace Livingston Hirshfield, Jane Hite, Shere Hobart, Alice Tisdale Hobson, Laura Z. Hoffman, Alice Hoffman, Malvina Hogan, Linda Holding, Elisabeth Sanxay Hollander, Nicole Holley, Marietta Hollingworth, Leta Stetter Holm, Saxe See Jackson, Helen Hunt Holmes, Mary Jane Hawes Holmes, Sarah Stone hooks, bell Hooper, Lucy Jones Hooper, Lucy Hope, Laura Lee See Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Hopkins, Pauline Hopper, Hedda Horlak, E. E. See Tepper, Sheri S. Horney, Karen Houston, Jean Howard, Maureen Howe, Florence Howe, Julia Ward Howe, Susan Howe, Tina Howes, Barbara Howland, Marie Hull, Helen Hulme, Kathryn Cavarly Hume, Sophia Humishuma See Mourning Dove Hunt, Irene Hunt, Mabel Leigh Hunter, Rodello Hunter-Lattany, Kristin Huntington, Susan Hurd-Mead, Kate C. Hurst, Fannie Hurston, Zora Neale Hutchins, Maude McVeigh Huxtable, Ada Louise Hyde, Shelley See Reed, Kit
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Ireland, Jane See Norris, Kathleen Thompson Irwin, Inez Haynes Isaacs, Susan Ives, Morgan See Bradley, Marion Zimmer Ivins, Molly Jackson, Helen Hunt Jackson, Laura Jackson, Rebecca Cox Jackson, Shirley Jackson, Ward See Braun, Lilian Jackson Jacobi, Mary Putnam Jacobs, Harriet Jacobs, Jane Jacobs, Sarah Sprague Jacobsen, Josephine James, Alice Jamison, Cecilia Viets Janeway, Elizabeth Janvier, Margaret Thompson Jerauld, Charlotte A. Jervey, Caroline Gilman Jewett, Sarah Orne Johnson, Diane Johnson, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Helen Kendrick Johnson, Josephine Winslow Johnson-Masters, Virginia Johnston, Annie Fellows Johnston, Jill Johnston, Mary Jones, Amanda Theodocia Jones, Edith See Wharton, Edith Jones, Gayl Jones, Hettie Jones, Mary Harris Jong, Erica Jordan, Barbara C. Jordan, June Jordan, Kate Jordan, Laura See Brown, Sandra Judson, Emily Chubbuck Kael, Pauline Kavanaugh, Cynthia See Daniels, Dorothy Keene, Carolyn See Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Keith, Agnes Newton Keller, Helen Kellerman, Faye Kelley, Edith Summers Kellogg, Louise Kellor, Frances Kelly, Eleanor Mercein Kelly, Myra Kemble, Fanny
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Kennedy, Adrienne Kenyon, Jane Kerber, Linda Kaufman Kerr, Jean Keyes, Frances Parkinson Kilmer, Aline Murray Kimbrough, Emily Kincaid, Jamaica King, Grace Elizabeth King, Laurie R. King, Louisa Yeomans Kingsolver, Barbara Kingston, Maxine Hong Kinney, Elizabeth Dodge Kinzie, Juliette Magill Kirby, Georgiana Bruce Kirk, Ellen Warner Kirkland, Caroline M. Stansbury Kizer, Carolyn Knapp, Bettina Liebowitz Knight, Sarah Kemble Knox, Adeline Trafton Koch, Adrienne Kohut, Rebekah Bettelheim Konigsburg, E. L. Kroeber, Theodora Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth Kumin, Maxine W. Laing, Dilys Bennett Lamb, Martha Nash Lamott, Anne Landers, Ann Landon, Margaret Lane, Gertrude Battles Lane, Rose Wilder Langdon, Mary See Pike, Mary Green Langer, Susanne K. Larcom, Lucy Larsen, Nella Lasswell, Mary Latham, Jean Lee Lathen, Emma Lathrop, Rose Hawthorne Latimer, Elizabeth W. Latsis, Mary Jane See Lathen, Emma Laut, Agnes C. Lauterbach, Ann Lawrence, Elizabeth L. Lawrence, Josephine Lawrence, Margaret Woods Lazarus, Emma Le Guin, Ursula K. Le Sueur, Meridel Le Vert, Octavia Walton xxxix
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Lea, Fannie Heaslip Lee, Eliza Buckminster Lee, Hannah Sawyer Lee, Harper Lee, Marion See Comstock, Anna Botsford Lee, Mary Elizabeth LeGallienne, Eva L’Engle, Madeleine Lenski, Lois Lerman, Rhoda Lerner, Gerda Leslie, Annie Brown Leslie, Eliza Leslie, Miriam Follin Levertov, Denise Lewis, Elizabeth Foreman Lewis, Estelle Robinson Lewis, Janet Libbey, Laura Jean Lincoln, Victoria Lindbergh, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Reeve Linington, Elizabeth Lippard, Lucy R. Lippincott, Martha Shepard Lippincott, Sara Jane Little, Sophia Robbins Livermore, Harriet Livermore, Mary Rice Livingston, Myra Cohn Locke, Jane Starkweather Logan, Deborah Norris Logan, Mary Cunningham Logan, Olive Loos, Anita Lord, Bette Bao Lorde, Audre Lothrop, Amy See Warner, Anna Bartlett Lothrop, Harriet Stone Loughborough, Mary Ann Webster Lounsberry, Alice Lovejoy, Esther Pohl Lowell, Amy Lowry, Lois Loy, Mina Lucas, Victoria See Plath, Sylvia Luce, Clare Boothe Luhan, Mabel Dodge Lumpkin, Grace Lurie, Alison Lutz, Alma Lynd, Helen Merrell MacDonald, Betty MacDonald, Jessica N. xl
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Macdonald, Marcia See Hill-Lutz, Grace Livingston MacDougall, Ruth Doan MacInnes, Helen MacKinnon, Catharine A. MacLaine, Shirley MacLean, Annie Marion Macumber, Marie S. See Sandoz, Mari Madeleva, Sister Mary Madison, Dolley Mairs, Nancy Malkiel, Theresa S. Mannes, Marya Manning, Marie Mansfield, Blanche McManus March, Anne See Woolson, Constance Fenimore Marks, Jeannette Augustus Marot, Helen Marshall, Catherine Marshall, Gertrude Helen See Fahs, Sophia Lyon Marshall, Paule Martin, Del Martin, George Madden Martin, Helen Reimensnyder Martin, Valerie Martínez, Demetria Martyn, Sarah Smith Maso, Carole Mason, Bobbie Ann Mathews, Frances Aymar Matthews, Adelaide May, Sophie See Clarke, Rebecca Sophia Maynard, Joyce Mayo, Katherine Mayo, Margaret Mayo, Sarah Edgarton McBride, Mary Margaret McCaffrey, Anne McCarthy, Mary McCloy, Helen McCord, Louisa Cheves McCormick, Anne O’Hare McCrackin, Josephine Clifford McCrumb, Sharon McCullers, Carson McDermott, Alice McDowell, Katherine Bonner McGinley, Phyllis McGrory, Mary McGuire, Judith Brockenbrough McIntosh, Maria Jane McIntyre, Vonda N. McKenney, Ruth McLean, Kathryn Anderson McMillan, Terry McPherson, Aimee Semple
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
McPherson, Sandra Mead, Kate C. See Hurd-Mead, Kate C. Mead, Margaret Meaney, Mary L. Means, Florence Crannell Meigs, Cornelia Meloney, Franken See Franken, Rose Menken, Adah Isaacs Merington, Marguerite Meriwether, Elizabeth Avery Merriam, Eve Merril, Judith Meyer, Annie Nathan Meyer, June See Jordan, June M. Miles, Josephine Millar, Margaret Millay, Edna St. Vincent Miller, Alice Duer Miller, Caroline Pafford Miller, Emily Huntington Miller, Harriet M. Miller, Isabel See Routsong, Alma Miller, Mary Britton Miller, Vassar Millett, Kate Milward, Maria G. Miner, Valerie Minot, Susan Mirikitani, Janice Mitchell, Agnes Woods Mitchell, Margaret Mitchell, Maria Mitford, Jessica Mixer, Elizabeth Moers, Ellen Mohr, Nicholasa Moise, Penina Mojtabai, A. G. Mollenkott, Virginia Ramey Monroe, Harriet Monroe, Lucy Montgomery, Ruth Shick Moody, Anne Moore, C. L. Moore, Lorrie Moore, Marianne Moore, Mary Evelyn See Davis, Mollie Moore Moore, Mollie E. See Davis, Mollie Moore Moore, Mrs. H. J. Moorhead, Sarah Parsons Moraga, Cherríe Morgan, Claire See Highsmith, Patricia Morgan, Marabel Morgan, Robin Morley, Hilda
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Morris, Clara Morrison, Toni Morrow, Honoré McCue Mortimer, Lillian Morton, Martha Morton, Sarah Wentworth Mother Goose See Walworth, Jeannette Hadermann Mott, Lucretia Moulton, Louise Chandler Mourning Dove Mukherjee, Bharati Muller, Marcia Munro, Eleanor Murfree, Mary Murray, Judith Sargent Murray, Pauli Myles, Eileen Nation, Carry A. Naylor, Gloria Neely, Barbara Neilson, Nellie Neville, Emily Cheney Newcomb, Franc Johnson Newman, Frances Newman, Lesléa Newstead, Helaine Nichols, Anne Nicholson, Asenath Hatch Nicholson, Eliza Jane Poitevent Nicolson, Marjorie Hope Niedecker, Lorine Nieriker, Abigail May Alcott Niggli, Josefina Niles, Blair Rice Nin, Anaïs Nitsch, Helen Matthews Nixon, Agnes E. Norman, Marsha Norris, Kathleen Thompson Norton, Alice See Norton, Andre Norton, Andre Norton, Katherine LaForge See Reed, Myrtle Notley, Alice Nussbaum, Martha Craven Nye, Andrea Nye, Naomi Shihab Oates, Joyce Carol Obejas, Achy Oberholtzer, Sara Vickers O’Connor, Flannery O’Connor, Florence J. O’Donnell, Jessie Fremont O’Donnell, Lillian Oemler, Marie Conway xli
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Offord, Lenore Glen O’Hair, Madalyn Murray O’Hara, Mary See Sture-Vasa, Mary O’Keeffe, Katharine A. O’Neill, Egan See Linington, Elizabeth Older, Cora Baggerly Olds, Sharon Oliphant, B. J. See Tepper, Sheri S. Oliver, Mary Olsen, Tillie O’Neill, Rose Orde, A. J. See Tepper, Sheri S. Ortiz Cofer, Judith Orvis, Marianne Dwight Osbey, Brenda Marie Osborn, Sarah Osgood, Frances Sargent Ostenso, Martha Ostriker, Alicia Ottenberg, Miriam Ovington, Mary White Owen, Catherine See Nitsch, Helen Matthews Owen, Mary Alicia Owen, Ruth Bryan Owens, Claire Myers Owens-Adair, Bethenia Owens, Rochelle Ozick, Cynthia Page, Myra Paglia, Camille Paley, Grace Palmer, Phoebe Worrall Papashvily, Helen Waite Paretsky, Sara Parker, Charlotte Blair Parker, Dorothy Parrish, Mary Frances See Fisher, M. F. K. Parsons, Elsie Clews Parsons, Frances Dana Parsons, Louella Oettinger Parton, Sara Willis Pastan, Linda Patchett, Ann Paterson, Katherine Patton, Frances Gray Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Josephine Preston Peattie, Elia Wilkinson Peattie, Louise Redfield Peck, Annie Smith Peck, Ellen Pember, Phoebe Yates Penfeather, Anabel See Cooper, Susan Fenimore Percy, Florence See Allen, Elizabeth Akers xlii
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Perkins, Frances Perkins, Lucy Fitch Pesotta, Rose Peterkin, Julia Mood Peters, Sandra See Plath, Sylvia Petersham, Maud Fuller Petry, Ann Lane Phelps, Almira Lincoln Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart Phillips, Irna Phillips, Jayne Anne Piatt, Sarah Bryan Piercy, Marge Pike, Mary Green Pinckney, Josephine Pine, Cuyler See Peck, Ellen Plain, Belva Plath, Sylvia Polacco, Patricia Pollack, Rachel Pollard, Josephine Porter, Eleanor Hodgman Porter, Katherine Anne Porter, Rose Porter, Sarah Porter, Sylvia F. Post, Emily Powell, Dawn Pratt, Ella Farman Prentiss, Elizabeth Payson Preston, Harriet Waters Preston, Margaret Junkin Prince, Nancy Gardner Prose, Francine Prouty, Olive Higgins Pryor, Sara Rice Pugh, Eliza Phillips Putnam, Emily Smith Putnam, Mary Lowell Putnam, Ruth Putnam, Sallie A. Brock Raimond, C. E. See Robins, Elizabeth Rampling, Anne See Rice, Anne Ramsay, Martha Laurens Ramsay, Vienna G. Morrell Rand, Ayn Randall, Margaret Randall, Ruth Painter Rankin, Fannie W. Ranous, Dora Knowlton Rawlings, Marjorie Kinnan Read, Harriette Fanning Read, Martha Reed, Kit
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Reed, Myrtle Reese, Lizette Woodworth Remick, Martha Reno, Itti Kinney Repplier, Agnes Rice, Alice Hegan Rice, Anne Rich, Adrienne Rich, Barbara See Jackson, Laura Rich, Louise Dickinson Richards, Laura Howe Richards, Louisa Greene Richmond, Grace Ricker, Marilla M. Ridge, Lola Riding, Laura See Jackson, Laura Rinehart, Mary Roberts Ripley, Eliza M. Ritchie, Anna Mowatt Rittenhouse, Jessie B. Rivers, Alfrida See Bradley, Marion Zimmer Rivers, Pearl See Nicholson, Eliza Jane Poitevent Robb, J. D. See Roberts, Nora Roberts, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Jane Roberts, Maggie Roberts, Nora Robins, Elizabeth Robinson, Harriet Hanson Robinson, Martha Harrison Rodgers, Carolyn M. Rogers, Katherine M. Roman, Klara Goldzieher Rombauer, Irma von Starkloff Roosevelt, Eleanor Roquelaure, A. N. See Rice, Anne Ross, Helaine See Daniels, Dorothy Ross, Lillian Rossner, Judith Rourke, Constance Mayfield Routsong, Alma Royall, Anne Newport Royce, Sarah Bayliss Ruddy, Ella Giles Ruether, Rosemary Radford Rukeyser, Muriel Rule, Ann Rusch, Kristine Kathryn Rush, Caroline E. Rush, Rebecca Russ, Joanna Ryan, Rachel See Brown, Sandra Sachs, Marilyn St. Johns, Adela Rogers
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
St. Claire, Erin See Brown, Sandra Salisbury, Charlotte Y. Salmon, Lucy Maynard Salmonson, Jessica Amanda Sanchez, Sonia Sanders, Elizabeth Elkins Sandoz, Mari Sanford, Mollie Dorsey Sanger, Margaret Sangster, Margaret E. Santiago, Esmeralda Sargent, Pamela Sarton, May Satir, Virginia M. Savage, Elizabeth Sawyer, Ruth Scarberry, Alma Sioux Scarborough, Dorothy Scarborough, Elizabeth Ann Schaeffer, Susan Fromberg Schmitt, Gladys Schofield, Sandy See Rusch, Kristine Kathryn Schoolcraft, Mary Howard Schwartz, Lynne Sharon Scott, Anne Firor Scott, Evelyn Scott, Joan Wallach Scott, Julia See Owen, Mary Alicia Scott-Maxwell, Florida Scudder, Vida Dutton Seaman, Elizabeth Cochrane Seawell, Molly Elliot Secor, Lella Sedges, John See Buck, Pearl S. Sedgwick, Anne Douglas Sedgwick, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Susan Ridley Seeley, Mabel Seid, Ruth Seifert, Elizabeth Semple, Ellen Churchill Seredy, Kate Seton, Anya Settle, Mary Lee Sewall, Harriet Winslow Sewell, Elizabeth Sexton, Anne Shange, Ntozake Shannon, Dell See Linington, Elizabeth Shannon, Monica Sharon, Rose See Merril, Judith Sharp, Isabella Oliver Shaw, Anna Moore Shaw, Anna H. Sheehy, Gail xliii
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Sheldon, Ann See Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Sherwood, Mary Wilson Shindler, Mary Dana Showalter, Elaine Shreve, Anita Shulman, Alix Kates Sidlosky, Carolyn See Forché, Carolyn Sigourney, Lydia Huntley Silko, Leslie Marmon Simon, Kate Sinclair, Bertha Muzzy Sinclair, Jo See Seid, Ruth Singer, June K. Singleton, Anne See Benedict, Ruth Singmaster, Elsie Skinner, Constance Lindsay Skinner, Cornelia Otis Slade, Caroline Slesinger, Tess Slosson, Annie Trumbull Smedley, Agnes Smith, Amanda Smith, Anna Young Smith, Betty Smith, Eliza Snow Smith, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Eunice Smith, Hannah Whittal Smith, Lee Smith, Lillian Smith, Lula Carson See McCullers, Carson Smith, Margaret Bayard Smith, Rosamond See Oates, Joyce Carol Smith, Sarah Pogson Smith, Susy Snedeker, Caroline Dale Snyder, Zilpha Keatley Solwoska, Mara See French, Marilyn Somers, Suzanne See Daniels, Dorothy Song, Cathy Sontag, Susan Sorel, Julia See Drexler, Rosalyn Soule, Caroline White Southworth, E. D. E. N. Souza, E. See Scott, Evelyn Spacks, Patricia Meyer Speare, Elizabeth George Spencer, Anne Spencer, Cornelia Phillips Spencer, Elizabeth Spewak, Bella Cohen Speyer, Leonora von Stosch Spofford, Harriet Prescott Sprague, Rosemary Stabenow, Dana xliv
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Stack, Andy See Rule, Ann Stafford, Jean Stanton, Elizabeth Cady Steel, Danielle Stein, Gertrude Steinem, Gloria Stenhouse, Fanny Stephens, Ann Winterbotham Stephens, Margaret Dean See Aldrich, Bess Streeter Steptoe, Lydia See Barnes, Djuna Stern, Elizabeth G. Stewart, Elinore Pruitt Stewart, Maria W. Stockton, Annis Boudinot Stoddard, Elizabeth Barstow Stone, Ruth Story, Sydney A. See Pike, Mary Green Stowe, Harriet Beecher Stratton-Porter, Gene Strong, Anna Louise Stuart, Ruth McEnery Sture-Vasa, Mary Suckow, Ruth Sui Sin Far See Eaton, Edith Maud Susann, Jacqueline Swenson, May Swett, Sophie Swisshelm, Jane Grey Taber, Gladys Bagg Taggard, Genevieve Talbott, Marion Tan, Amy Tandy, Jennette Reid Tappan, Eva March Tarbell, Ida Taylor, Mildred Delois Taylor, Phoebe Atwood Taylor, Susie King Teasdale, Sara Tenney, Tabitha Tepper, Sheri S. Terhune, Mary Hawes Terry, Megan Thane, Elswyth Thanet, Octave See French, Alice Thaxter, Celia Laighton Thayer, Caroline Warren Thayer, Geraldine See Daniels, Dorothy Thomas, Dorothy Swain Thompson, Clara M. (b. c. 1830s) Thompson, Clara M. (1893-1958) Thompson, Dorothy Thorndyke, Helen Louise See Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Ticknor, Caroline
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Tiernan, Frances Fisher Tietjens, Eunice Tilton, Alice See Taylor, Phoebe Atwood Tincker, Mary Agnes Todd, Mabel Loomis Todd, Marion Marsh Toklas, Alice B. Tompkins, Jane P. Towne, Laura M. Townsend, Mary Ashley Treadwell, Sophie Trilling, Diana Troubetzkoy, Amélie Rives Truitt, Anne Truman, Margaret Truth, Sojourner Tuchman, Barbara Turell, Jane Turnbull, Agnes Sligh Turney, Catherine Tuthill, Louisa Huggins Tuve, Rosemond Ty-Casper, Linda Tyler, Anne Tyler, Martha W. Tyler, Mary Palmer Uchida, Yoshiko Uhnak, Dorothy Ulanov, Ann Belford Underwood, Sophie Kerr Untermeyer, Jean Starr Upton, Harriet Taylor Valentine, Jean Valentine, Jo See Armstrong, Charlotte Van Alstyne, Frances Crosby Vandegrift, Margaret See Janvier, Margaret Thompson Vanderbilt, Amy Van Duyn, Mona Van Vorst, Bessie McGinnis Van Vorst, Marie Vendler, Helen Hennessy Victor, Frances Fuller Victor, Metta Fuller Vining, Elizabeth Gray Viramontes, Helena María Voigt, Cynthia Voigt, Ellen Bryant Vorse, Mary Heaton Wakoski, Diane Wald, Lillian D. Waldman, Anne Waldrop, Rosmarie Walker, Alice
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Walker, Margaret Walker, Mary Spring Wallace, Michele Waller, Mary Ella Walter, Mildred Pitts Walton, Evangeline Walworth, Jeannette Hadermann Ward, Mary Jane Warfield, Catherine Ware Warner, Anna Bartlett Warner, Susan Bogert Warren, Lella Warren, Mercy Otis Wasserstein, Wendy Watanabe, Sylvia Watson, Sukey Vickery Watts, Mary Stanbery Weber, Sarah Appleton See Appleton-Weber, Sarah Webster, Jean Weeks, Helen C. See Campbell, Helen Stuart Welby, Amelia Coppuck Wells, Carolyn Wells, Emmeline Woodward Wells, John J. See Bradley, Marion Zimmer Wells-Barnett, Ida B. Welty, Eudora West, Dorothy West, Jessamyn West, Lillie West, Mae Wetherall, Elizabeth See Warner, Susan Bogert Wharton, Edith Wheatley, Phillis Wheaton, Campbell See Campbell, Helen Stuart Whipple, Maurine Whitcher, Frances Berry White, Anna White, Anne Terry White, Eliza Orne White, Elizabeth White, Ellen Gould White, Helen Constance White, Nelia Gardner White, Rhoda E. Whiting, Lillian Whitman, Narcissa Prentiss Whitman, Ruth Whitman, Sarah Helen Whitney, Adeline D. T. Whitney, Phyllis A. Wiggin, Kate Douglass Wiggins, Bernice Love Wiggins, Marianne Wilcox, Ella Wheeler Wilder, Laura Ingalls xlv
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Wilder, Louise Beebe Wilhelm, Kate Willard, Emma Willard, Frances Willard, Nancy Williams, Catharine Arnold Williams, Fannie Barrier Williams, Sherley Anne Willis, Connie Willis, Lydia Fish Willoughby, Florence Barrett Wilson, Harriet E. Adams Windle, Mary Jane Winnemucca, Sarah Winslow, Anna Green Winslow, Helen M. Winslow, Ola Elizabeth Winslow, Thyra Samter Winter, Ella Winwar, Frances Wolf, Naomi Wong, Jade Snow Wood, Ann See Douglas, Ann Wood, S. S. B. K. Woodhull, Victoria Woods, Caroline H.
xlvi
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Woods, Katharine Pearson Woolsey, Sarah Chauncey Woolson, Constance Fenimore Wormeley, Katharine Prescott Wright, Frances Wright, Julia McNair Wright, Mabel Osgood Wright, Mary Clabaugh Wyatt, Edith Franklin Wylie, Elinor Hoyt Yamada, Mitsuye Yamamoto, Hisaye Yamanaka, Lois-Ann Yates, Elizabeth Yezierska, Anzia Yglesias, Helen Youmans, Eliza Ann Young, Ann Eliza Young, Ella Young, Marguerite Young, Rida Johnson Zaturenska, Marya Zolotow, Charlotte Zugsmith, Leane
ABBREVIATIONS A style of all or nothing (initials or complete title) has been employed in this new edition; partial abbreviations have been purged, to limit confusion. In cases where two well-known periodicals have the same initials, only one has the initials and the other is always spelled out in its entirety (i.e. NR is New Republic, and National Review is spelled out).
KR
Kirkus Reviews
LATBR
Los Angeles Times Book Review
LJ
Library Journal
APR
American Poetry Review
MTCW
Major Twentieth–Century Writers
CA
Contemporary Authors
NAW
Notable American Women
CAAS
Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series
NAW:MP
Notable American Women: The Modern Period
CANR
Contemporary Authors New Revision Series
NBAW
Notable Black American Women
CB
Current Biography
NR
New Republic
CBY
Current Biography Yearbook NYRB
New York Review of Books
NYT
New York Times
NYTM
New York Times Magazine
NYTBR
New York Times Book Review
CLAJ
College Literary Association Journal
CLC
Contemporary Literary Criticism
CLHUS
Cambridge Literary History of the United States
CLR
Children’s Literature Review
CN
Contemporary Novelists
PMLA
Publication of the Modern Language Association
CP
Contemporary Poets
PW
Publishers Weekly
CPW
Contemporary Popular Writers
SATA
Something About the Author
CWD
Contemporary Women Dramatists
SL
School Librarian
CWP
Contemporary Women Poets
TLS
[London] Times Literary Supplement
DAB
Dictionary of American Biography TCCW
Twentieth–Century Children’s Writers
WP
Washington Post
WPBW
Washington Post Book World
VV
Village Voice
DLB
Dictionary of Literary Biography
DLBY
Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook
DAI
Dissertation Abstracts International
FC
Feminist Companion
FW
Feminist Writers
WRB
Women’s Review of Books
GLB
Gay & Lesbian Biography
WWAW
Who’s Who of American Women xlvii
A ABBOTT, Edith Born 26 September 1876, Grand Island, Nebraska; died 28 July 1957, Grand Island, Nebraska Daughter of Othman Ali and Elizabeth Abbott Edith Abbott was the first woman dean of a graduate school in an American university and, simultaneously, the first dean of the first school of social work in the nation. A dedicated social reformer and scientist, Abbott’s significant contributions are often overshadowed by the fame and writings of her close friends and colleagues at Hull House in Chicago: Jane Addams, Sophonisba Breckinridge, and her sister, Grace Abbott. Born into a well-established family that had moved to the Nebraska frontier just prior to her birth, Abbott was encouraged to be independent and intellectual. She graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1901 and, frustrated with the lack of career opportunities in Nebraska, moved to Illinois where she began her studies at the University of Chicago. After receiving her Ph.D. in political economy in 1907, Abbott became an industrious and illustrious faculty member of the University of Chicago. When the School of Social Services Administration was founded in 1920, she was appointed dean. Always interested in women’s rights, Abbott fought for high positions for women, laying a foundation for the female control and domination in social work that has continued until today. Abbott, her sister Grace, and Sophonisba Breckinridge were major leaders in the formation of public policy affecting women, children, industrial relations, and immigration. Furthermore, they helped establish the profession of social work as an academic occupation, raising its prestige and power as a source of social change. Unfortunately, their tradition of sound research and political advocacy on behalf of the underprivileged, especially women, has lost much of its momentum among conservative social workers of today. Abbott’s first book, Women in Industry: A Study in American Economic History (1909), is a massive, comprehensive study of women’s work in the marketplace. Evolving out of earlier work done with Breckinridge on census statistics dealing with the employment of women, it developed a complex and thorough analysis of women in various industrial areas, including factories, cotton mills, and the clothing and printing industries. The book records not only historical antecedents of women’s industrial labor but also 1909 public opinion. It is an invaluable history of the early labor movements and occupational structures, as well as the more specialized topic of women and industry. Abbott coauthored The Delinquent Child and the Home with Breckinridge in 1912. It elaborates in a systematic and documented fashion the problems of urban youth. Abbott and Breckinridge again collaborated when they wrote Truancy and Non-Attendance in the Chicago Schools: A Study of the Social Aspects of the
Compulsory Education and Child Labor Legislation of Illinois (1917). Highly committed to the need for education until age sixteen, the authors examine the many factors leading to school absence, such as poverty, mental and physical defects, lack of knowledge of immigrant parents and children, and delinquency. Documenting the existence and extent of missed school days and the historical development of compulsory education, remedies are suggested. The authors’ arguments are still timely and the controversy still lively. The Tenements of Chicago, 1908-1935 (1936), is a massive study of housing conditions and poverty in Chicago. The book, a result of 25 years of study, is based on house-to-house canvassing in 151 city blocks, including visits to 18,225 apartments. The problems Abbott and Breckinridge noted, such as lack of enforcement of housing regulations, too few city inspectors, high rents for substandard housing, large numbers of unemployed suffering from the social stresses of broken families, ill health, and lack of education, are as relevant today as they were over 40 years ago. The documentation of these problems provides an excellent basis for their understanding today. Abbott’s vision of social work as an aggressive, policymaking, and controversial profession is clearly specified in Social Welfare and Professional Education (1931). Partially written during the Great Depression, it advocates government-sponsored, guaranteed employment, centralized and organized through public agencies. Abbott was a talented, conscientious scholar, educator, and social reformer who was overshadowed during her life by her association with famous and more charismatic figures. Today she remains little known outside of the field of social work, but her writings are a witness and a tribute to her talents and contributions. OTHER WORKS: The Real Jail Problem (1915). The One Hundred and One County Jails of Illinois and Why They Ought to Be Abolished (1916). Immigration: Selected Documents and Case Records (1924). Historical Aspects of the Immigration Problem (1926). Some American Pioneers in Social Welfare (1937). Public Assistance (1940). From Relief to Social Security: The Development of the New Public Welfare Services (1941). Twenty-One Years of University Education for Social Service, 1920-1941 (1942). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Chambers, C. A., Seedtime of Reform: American Social Service and Social Action, 1918-1933 (1963). Costin, L. B., ‘‘Edith Abbott and the Chicago Influence on Social Work Education’’ in Social Service Review (March 1983). Costin, L. B., Two Sisters for Social Justice: A Biography of Grace and Edith Abbott (1983). Other references: Survey Graphic (June 1936). ANB (1999). —MARY JO DEEGAN
1
ABBOTT
ABBOTT, Eleanor Hallowell Born 22 September 1872, Cambridge, Massachusetts; died 4 June 1958, Portsmouth, New Hampshire Daughter of Edward and Clara Davis Abbott; married Fordyce Coburn, 1908 The youngest child in her family, Eleanor Hallowell Abbott grew up surrounded by literary and religious luminaries. Her father’s father was Jacob Abbott, author of many books for young people, including the famous Rollo series. The family was friendly with Longfellow, Lowell, and the like; the atmosphere of the home was decidedly religious and scholarly. Abbott’s father, a Congregational clergyman, left his church to be ordained an Episcopal priest; he was also editor of The Outlook for many years. Abbott attended private schools in Cambridge, took special courses at Radcliffe, and later was a secretary and teacher of English at Lowell State Normal School. She wrote poetry and short stories for some time, with no success. Just as she was at the point of giving up, Harper’s Magazine accepted two long poems, and she won three of the short-story prizes offered by Collier’s and The Delineator.
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
In spite of critical strictures, Abbott’s fiction is interesting, for it reveals a personality resolutely turning away from the harshness of her New England mental and emotional legacy. In its determined gaiety and its triumphant euphoria it is like a backlash to the ponderous, doomsounding religiosity of her grandfather Jacob Abbott and his ancestors. Certainly it was popular in its day, and perhaps no more naive than the so-called ‘‘romances’’ that fill the racks of modern drugstores.
OTHER WORKS: Molly Make-Believe (1910). The Sick-A-Bed Lady, and Other Stories (1911). White Linen Nurse (1913). Little Eve Edgarton (1914). Indiscreet Letter (1915). Stingy Receiver (1917). Ne’er-Do-Much (1918). Old-Dad (1919). Rainy Week (1921). Fairy Prince, and Other Stories (1922). Silver Moon (1923). Love and the Ladies (1928). But Once a Year (1928). Minister Who Kicked the Cat (1932). Being Little in Cambridge When Everyone Else Was Big (1936).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works:Notable Boston Authors, M. Flagg, ed. (1965). Other references: Boston Transcript (15 Oct. 1913, 1 Dec. 1928). NYT (12 Oct. 1913, 3 Jan. 1937). Springfield Republican (11 Oct. 1936). TLS (31 May 1928).
In 1908, shortly before her fortune turned, she married Dr. Fordyce Coburn, who encouraged her literary efforts. The marriage, which took her to Wilton, New Hampshire, was a happy one, though childless. Until the writing of her autobiography, Abbott published 14 books and about 75 magazine stories. Judging from her own account, as a child she had been nervous and excitable, and her fiction gives evidence that she never lost the intensity of feeling which seems to have been her chief characteristic. Her writing is unblushingly romantic, and although unpleasant occurrences do take place in her fiction—people do suffer—over the whole is a sheen of unreality; each novel and story has a happy ending. Her principal characters are young girls (much, one suspects, like Abbott herself): audacious, high-strung, terribly talkative, and full of unsettling demands. Her male characters are usually quiet, strong, sturdy, and inured to patient suffering. Abbott’s unique style gives the effect of breathlessness, as of a child trying to describe some deeply felt experience. Apparently aiming for spontaneity and originality, she too often falls into distressing triviality and banality; occasionally the reader feels that Abbott is lapsing into baby talk. Sometimes she seems almost manic in her hectic gaiety; imagery is often startling, and always vivid. Though critics spoke of Abbott’s work as ‘‘charming,’’ they found the charm often forced, and emphasized the improbability and unreality of plot and characters. One reviewer summed up the matter succinctly: ‘‘Miss Abbott has an original and sprightly method—but she overdoes it. Her apparent dislike of the conventional and tame lead her to exaggerate her own virtues into sensationalism.’’
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—ABIGAIL ANN HAMBLEN
ABEL, Annie Heloise Born 18 February 1873, Fernhurst, Sussex, England; died 14 March 1947, Aberdeen, Washington Daughter of George and Amelia Anne Hogben Abel; married George Cockburn Henderson, 1922 Annie Abel’s family emigrated to Salina, Kansas, in 1884, and she went on to attain literary prominence as an authority on American Indian history. Her master’s thesis was ‘‘Indian Reservations in Kansas and the Extinguishment of their Title (1902).’’ Her doctoral dissertation, ‘‘The History of Events Resulting in Indian Consolidation West of the Mississippi,’’ won the American Historical Association’s Justin Winsor Prize in 1906 and was published in the Annual Report of that year. Abel’s major work was the three-volume study, The Slaveholding Indians, the first of which was The American Indian as Slaveholder and Secessionist: An Omitted Chapter in the Diplomatic History of the Confederacy (1915). In Abel’s view, though there was slaveholding among Indian tribes, only the Choctaw and Chickasaw were drawn to the Confederacy because of concerns about slavery. The South, out of its own needs, notably strategic concern for territorial solidarity, offered a number of concessions. Most significant perhaps were Confederate
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guarantees of criminal and civil rights. The South also offered to give Indians control of their own trade, but that offer was later rescinded. Through General Albert Pike, the Confederacy made its approaches to the Western tribes, and his wartime disaffection with the Confederacy over its betrayal of promises to the Indians would prove costly to the South. Despite Southern concessions, Abel noted, the Indians ‘‘actually fought on both sides and for the same motives and impulses as whites.’’ In her view, it was the failure of the U.S. government to provide the promised protection for the Southern Indians which led them to ally with the Confederacy. From first to last, she maintained, military conditions and events determined political ones. In the next two volumes, The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War (1919) and The American Indian Under Reconstruction (1925), Abel traced the tragic consequences of Indian involvement in the sectional strife. The alliance with the Confederacy proved ‘‘most unstable’’ as the relatively few well-intentioned men in Richmond were ‘‘checkmated’’ by the men west of the Mississippi. After General Pike lost his command, white abuses proliferated and the ‘‘grossest corruption’’ ensued. The North showed no concern for Indian rights whatsoever and the Unionist mishandling of refugee problems and military operations proved especially costly. But the final tragedy still awaited the Indians in the Reconstruction era. With the new 1866 boundary settlements, Indians found their boundaries had ceased to be ‘‘interdicted lines.’’ First the non-Southern civilized tribes, then the uncivilized tribes and white settlers breeched the lines, and finally, the Indians could not withstand railroad pressures. The Reconstruction treaties, Abel concluded, ‘‘really meant not amnesty but confiscation of rights.’’ Her work also included ‘‘Proposals for an Indian State, 1778-1878,’’ a study published in the 1907 Annual Report of the American Historical Association. In it Abel traced the history of the idea of an Indian state from Jefferson’s time to the idea’s final demise with the admission of Oklahoma as a state. She also investigated problems of early-19th-century westward expansion. This work involved primarily the editing of letters and journals. Throughout her work Abel proves to be both an effective researcher and a perceptive scholar who wrote sympathetically about problems the Indians encountered. Although she occasionally wrote in a paternalistic or romantic tone, she is essentially an objective historian. Her English background, she noted, freed her from sectional attachments in dealing with Civil War issues. And she could likewise appraise with detachment the conflict between Indian claims and American expansionist urges. Her work is marked with a sense of the tragedy that befell the Indians, but this sense did not obscure her judgement. If, in her final view, the fate of the Indians was determined by white greed and power, she also recognized the part which the Indians’ ‘‘inability to learn from experience’’ played in the final outcome. The breadth of her research and her capacity for informed, detached judgement gave her work its strength and power.
ACKER
OTHER WORKS: Brief Guide to Points of Historical Interest in Baltimore City (1908). Proposals for an Indian State, 1778-1878 (1909). The Official Correspondence of James S. Calhoun (ed. by Abel, 1915). A New Lewis and Clark Map (1916). A Sidelight on Anglo-American Relations 1839-1858 (ed. by Abel with F. J. Klingsberg, 1927). Chardon’s Journal at Fort Clark, 1834-39 (ed. by Abel, 1932). Tabeau’s Narrative of Loisel’s Expedition to the Upper Missouri (ed. by Abel, 1939).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Notable American Women, 1607-1950, E. T. James et al., eds. (article by F. Prucha, 1971). Other references: AHR (July 1947). ANB (1999).Mississippi Valley Historical Review (March 1916, March 1920). Yale University Obituary Record of Graduates (1946-47). —INZER BYERS
ACKER, Kathy Born 18 April 1947, New York, New York Daughter of Donald and Claire Weill Lehman; married Robert Acker, 1966 (divorced); Peter Gordon, 1976 (divorced) Often referred to as a punk and, later, a postmodern writer, Kathy Acker is actively involved in the construction of new myths by which to live. Like many of the artists and writers who have influenced her work, she does not draw easy distinctions between life and art, sometimes consciously making up contradicting stories about her past. In this way, Acker becomes as much of a literary construct as any of her characters. The daughter of wealthy Jewish parents who disowned her, Acker grew up in Manhattan where she wrote poetry from an early age and read voraciously. She was so attached to her books she sometimes performed ceremonies in which she married them. She received a B.A. from the University of California, San Diego in 1968, having transferred there from Brandeis two years earlier. She also completed two years of graduate work at New York University and City University of New York, studying English, classics, and philosophy. After Blood and Guts in High School (1984) sold well in England, she moved to London for several years, finding it more supportive of writers than New York. Subsequently, she moved to San Francisco, where she taught at the San Francisco Art Institute. Acker’s influences are many and include photographers, filmmakers, and artists. Having grown up in New York’s postBeat art world, it is those writers and poets who had the strongest influence on the early shaping of her sensibility. The explorations of memory and the ‘‘madeness’’ of language through formal styles such as repetition, used in the work of Black Mountain
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poets like Charles Olson, Jerry Rothenberg, and David Antin, and Beats like Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, appear in much of Acker’s writing. Her first privately published book, Politics (1972), came out of her experience working in sex shows on 42nd Street—something of a ‘‘test’’ of the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Since then Acker’s work has always had an important political edge. Because labels tend to diffuse that edge, she rejects words like ‘‘experimental’’ to describe her work. Even so, Acker is an experimental writer, in what has become the conventional understanding of the term. She is perhaps best known, and least understood, for her extensive formal use of plagiarism. To call attention to the already appropriated status of their images and to her refusal or inability to partake in similar, patriarchally determined productions, Acker literally copies from a number of mostly Western, classic literary texts (Freud, Genet, de Sade, Cervantes, Twain). Not a response to a Barthian understanding of the diminished possibilities of literature in its postmodern state of exhaustion, instead Acker’s ‘‘plagiarism’’ critiques and rewrites Western cultural myths in ways that consciously disclaim any pretension to originality or mastery. In this respect it can also be recognized as a survival strategy in a world where master narratives of freedom and truth have been exposed as such, leaving these appropriated acts the only ones available. Although often criticized by feminists for the violent and pornographic elements of her novels, Acker is clearly involved in a project to explore the conditions of living in a society that depends on the economic and sexual dependence of some of its members, including women. Her main characters, who are often on some sort of quest, are always outside of the mainstream; they are would-be pirates, cyborgs, or sex-show workers. In this sense, Acker’s feminist sensibility is evident in most of her writing. Her most explicitly feminist novel is probably Don Quixote (1986), in which Acker refigures the title character as a contemporary woman on a search for love. The obstacles she encounters are historical, mythical, and literary patriarchal figures (Christ, Machiavelli, Richard Nixon). Acker carries out the examinations of power structures and relations on both thematic and formal levels. Her writing occasionally resembles that of Gertrude Stein in its careful and consistent attention to the material qualities of language and the possibilities they provide. Like Stein too, Acker connects these with the materiality of the body, going a step further and, as Ellen G. Friedman notes, locating the body itself as a potential ‘‘site of revolution.’’ In Empire of the Senseless (1988) she looks to tattoos, a material writing on the body, as a possibility of controlling the means of sign production and self-representation. Pussy, King of the Pirates (1995) drew upon the same themes evident throughout Acker’s previous body of work. Inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, the book incorporates references ranging from Antigone to Newt Gingrich, features a chameleon like-first-person narrator, and includes graphic descriptions of menstruation, incest, and sex. The New York Times
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Book Review noted that, in Pussy, Acker ‘‘engages in some of her favorite pastimes: decoding language, debunking culture, deconstructing (if that’s the right word) gender (that’s not the right word).’’ Publishers Weekly wrote of Pussy: ‘‘Acker writes a deliberately affectless, deadpan prose, rendering both the absurd and the disturbing. . .with a declarative nonchalance. Like Acker’s other work, this campy and enigmatic novel is self-consciously provocative as she detonates her battery of literary and sexual references in order to illuminate themes of masochism and rebellion—but it’s also often funny and invariably intelligent.’’ When an interviewer in 1996 asked Acker why she writes so many sex scenes, often graphic enough to be nearly pornographic, she said, ‘‘I’m sure my privileged background has something to do with it, and the fact that my first jobs were in the sex industry. I think I see the world through a sexual lens, like Genet. The idea that you exist to please men—that is almost relentlessly my subject.’’ In 1997 Acker published Bodies of Work, a series of essays on topics ranging from fine arts, language, and literature to gender, politics, and postmodernism. In her preface she advises her audience to avoid reading the essays in the book. Since fiction allows more freedom than this form, she says, she questions this volume’s content. Yet reviewers called the essays—the structure of which range from conventional to pure description—compelling. OTHER WORKS: I Don’t Expect You’ll Do the Same, by Clay Fear (1974). I Dreamt I Became a Nymphomaniac! Imagining (1974). The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec by Henri Toulouse Lautrec (1975). The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by the Black Tarantula (1975). Persian Poems (1978). New York City in 1979 (1981). Great Expectations (1982). Hello, I’m Erica Jong (1982). Algeria: A Series of Invocations because Nothing Else Works (1984). Literal Madness: Kathy Goes to Haiti; My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini; Florida (1988). In Memoriam to Identity (1990). Hannibal Lecter, My Father (1991). Portrait of the Eye: Three Novels (reprint, 1992). My Mother: Demonology (1993). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Dick, L., ‘‘Feminism, Writing, Postmodernism,’’ in From My Guy to Sci-fi: Genre and Women’s Writing in the Postmodern World, H. Carr, ed. (1989). Hulley, K., ‘‘Transgressing Genre: Kathy Acker’s Intertext,’’ in Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction, P. O’Donnell and R. Davis, eds. (1989). McCaffery, L., ‘‘The Artists of Hell: Kathy Acker and ‘Punk’ Aesthetics,’’ in Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction, E. G. Friedman and M. Fuchs, eds. (1989). Reference Works: Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature (1991). Other references: Booklist (15 Dec. 1997). NYTBR (3 Mar. 1996). PW (16 Oct. 1995, 11 Dec. 1995). Review of Contemporary Fiction 9 (Fall 1989). —MONICA DORENKAMP, UPDATED BY KAREN RAUGUST
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ADAMS
ADAMS, Abigail Smith
and vivid sense of life suffer from her grandson’s well-meant editing.
Born 11 November 1744, Weymouth, Massachusetts; died 28 October 1818, Quincy, Massachusetts Daughter of William and Elizabeth Quincy Smith; married John Adams, 1764; children: five
The Book of Abigail and John (1975, eds. L. H. Butterfield et al.) is limited to what its editors consider the best letters of John and Abigail, spanning the years of their courtship in 1762 and her arrival in London in 1784. In them, Adams’ affectionate nature is expressed freely. Her loneliness and pride in herself and in her husband is described, too: ‘‘I miss my partner, and find myself uneaquuil [sic] to the cares which fall upon me; . . . I hope in time to have the Reputation of being as good a Farmeress as my partner has of being a good Statesman.’’
Abigail Adams grew up as part of three tightly knit families: that of her parents, where she acquired her Puritan faith, humor, and skills in home and business management; that of her maternal grandparents, where she learned social poise and a love of politics; and that of her paternal uncle, whose wife may have been Adams’ model as a letter writer. Adams’ formal education was virtually nonexistent, due to her poor health. Fortunately, however, she was surrounded by literate adults who guided her studies that ranged from Plato, Locke, and Burke, to the Bible. She and John Adams were married by her father in Weymouth. In the first eight years of marriage, Adams bore five children: Abigail, John Quincy, Susanna (died at fourteen months), Charles, and Thomas Boylston. In 1784, Adams and her daughter joined her husband and grandfather in Europe. Horrified at first by the pleasure-seeking life of Paris, she later grew more understanding and even learned to love the theater, though she wrote: ‘‘I do not feel myself captivated either with the Manners or politicks [sic] of Europe.’’ John became vice-president in 1789 and president in 1797, but Adams’ health began to fail in 1790, and she returned to Quincy where she spent most of her time during John’s years as president. She did go to Washington to open the White House, but her increasingly poor health forced her back to Quincy shortly before John completed his presidency. She died in Quincy on 28 October 1818. Adams’ claim to literary fame rests upon the hundreds of letters picturing her times in warmly human terms. John was her favorite correspondent, but she wrote extensively to her large family and to a wide circle beyond, including such intellectuals as Mercy Otis Warren and Thomas Jefferson. In New Letters of Abigail Adams (1947), editor Stewart Mitchell printed her correspondence to her older sister, Mary Cranch. To Mary more than anyone else, Adams wrote of ‘‘women’s concerns’’—smallpox and fevers, incompetent servants, inflation, poor food, bad weather, and the deplorable state the White House was in when she arrived to become its first mistress. Mitchell’s publication corrects the bowdlerized portrait of Adams rendered by her Victorian grandson, Charles Francis Adams. His Letters of Mrs. Adams, the Wife of John Adams (2 vols., 1840-41) and Familiar Letters of John Adams and His Wife Abigail Adams During the Revolution (1876) not only censor her passionate declarations of love to John, but also delete much from her personal accounts of pregnancies and childbirth, the dysentery epidemic of 1775, and smallpox inoculations. Adams’ personality
Adams never hesitated to address herself to political matters. Two issues which drew strong reaction from her were slavery and women’s rights. Writing to John in 1774, she wished ‘‘most sincerely there was not a slave in the province.’’ Concerning women’s rights, Adams wrote early in 1776 the letter for which she is most famous: ‘‘[A]nd by the way in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous to them than your ancestors.’’ Undaunted by John’s reply denying her petition and charging her with being ‘‘saucy,’’ she retorted, ‘‘I can not say that I think you very generous to the Ladies, for whilst you are proclaiming peace and good will to Men, Emancipating all Nations, you insist upon retaining absolute power over Wives.’’ Never dull, always animated, Adams’ letters are more like conversations than compositions. Her style is easy, natural, and very oral in manner. Her spelling is phonetic, underscoring the verbal nature of her writing, and her punctuation follows natural pauses rather than written conventions. Her letters tell us how it felt to live through the American Revolution and what it was like to be a New England Puritan in Europe in the late-18th century. More than that, however, they help us understand the creative force we call the ‘‘Puritan ethic.’’ Adams has long been credited with a unique place in history as wife of the second president and mother of the sixth, but she also deserves attention as a literary and historic figure in her own right.
OTHER WORKS: Adams Family Correspondence (eds., L. H. Butterfield et al., 4 vols. 1963-1973).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: American First Ladies: Their Lives and Legacy (1996). Bobbe, D., Abigail Adams, the Second First Lady (1929). Bradford, G., Portraits of American Women (1919). Gordon, L., From Lady Washington to Mrs. Cleveland (1889). Ketcham, R. L., ‘‘The Puritan Ethic in the Revolutionary Era: Abigail Adams and Thomas Jefferson,’’ in ‘‘Remember the Ladies:’’ New Perspectives on Women in American History, George, C. V. R., ed. (1975). Hole, J. and E. Levine, ‘‘The Adams Letters of Abigail & John Adams—Historical Precedent: Nineteenth Century Feminists,’’ in Issues in Feminism: An Introduction to Women’s
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Studies (1995). Minningerode, M., Some American Ladies: Seven Informal Biographies (1926). Richards, L. E. Abigail Adams and Her Times (1936). Shepherd, J., The Adams Chronicles: Four Generations of Greatness (1975). Stone, I., Those Who Love (1965). Whitney, J., Abigail Adams (1949). Other references: ScribM (Jan. 1930). Biography of the First Ladies of the United States (Phoenix Multimedia, 1998). —BILLIE W. ETHERIDGE
ADAMS, Alice Born 14 August 1926, Fredericksburg, Virginia; died 27 May 1999 Daughter of Nicholson Barney and Agatha Erskine Boyd Adams; married Mark Linenthal, Jr., 1946 (divorced 1958); children: Peter Adams Linenthal The only child of Nicholson, a Spanish professor, and Agatha Adams, a ‘‘failed’’ writer, Alice Adams wrote poetry as a child hoping that if she were a writer, her mother would ‘‘like’’ her. Raised in a ‘‘semi-intellectual atmosphere’’ that was ‘‘materially comfortable but emotionally unsatisfying,’’ Adams graduated from high school at the age of fifteen and from Radcliffe College in 1946. Her recurring themes of change, economic independence, and survival, which can often be paralleled to events in her life, earn her both praise and criticism. At the end of a writing course at Radcliffe, Adams’ professor advised her to ‘‘get married and forget’’ writing. Following his prescription, she married within a year, spending the next 12 years in the expected 1950s domestic role. For the first year she lived in Paris where her husband studied at the Sorbonne (the setting of her first published story, ‘‘Winter Rain,’’ 1959). In 1948 the couple moved to California and after the birth of her son, Adams found little time for writing. Adams’ first novel, Careless Love, appeared in 1966. It satirizes the 1960s San Francisco dating scene in a remotely autobiographical tale about a newly divorced woman. Often widowed or divorced, Adams’ characters not only survive changes but transcend them, ultimately gaining economic independence and experiencing growth—and this gain becomes an integral part of Adams’ plots. Having been disinherited by her father when he left their family home to her stepmother, and having spent the years following her divorce in constant struggle with ‘‘part-time secretarial jobs’’ Adams has had firsthand knowledge of the importance of economic independence. In the novels following Careless Love, Adams’ maturity and focus as a writer become increasingly evident in the complexity of her female protagonists. Usually well-educated, upper-middle class female visual artists who are enacting a journey to womanhood, the characters are often developed through the use of parenthetical comments by an omniscient narrator. In Adams’ second novel, Families and Survivors (1975), Louisa Calloway undergoes many changes before finding happiness in a second marriage and realizing her talent as a painter. In Listening to Billie
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(1978) Eliza Quarles attains a sense of freedom as a poet; in Rich Rewards (1980) Daphne Matthiesen earns respect as a self-supporting interior decorator; in Superior Women (1985) Megan Greene, a financially successful publisher, cosponsors a temporary haven for Atlanta’s homeless women. Second Chances (1988) again explores Adams’ trademark themes while examining ‘‘people’s changing expectations of aging.’’ In Caroline’s Daughters (1991) the vicissitudes of the five daughters’ lives ‘‘intrude’’ into Caroline’s long-awaited contented space, but Caroline endures and survives. Adams’ stories appeared in numerous periodicals, including the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and Paris Review, and she published several short-story collections. Beautiful Girl (1979) contains her first O. Henry award-winning story ‘‘A Gift of Grass.’’ The women in the stories in To See You Again (1982) abide by an Adams’ ‘‘code’’: ‘‘She behaves well, even under emotional stress. She does not make scenes, does not cry in public, rarely cries alone.’’ In Return Trips (1985) as women recall or revisit people who ‘‘shaped their lives’’ they recognize the irreversible and continuing effects of past events. The stories in After You’ve Gone (1989) are about loss: some characters are devastated by it; most recover from it, and some are even freed by it. Seeing marriage as ‘‘primarily concerned with propers,’’ Adams lived in San Francisco with interior designer Robert McNie beginning in 1964, and she taught at the University of California at Davis as well as at Berkeley and Stanford. The 1982 recipient of the O. Henry Special Award for Continuing Achievement, Adams has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and in all but one edition of Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards from 1971 to 1989. In the 1990s Adams continued her prolific output, producing a book approximately every two years. In A Southern Exposure (1995) Adams travels back to her native South and back in time— 1939—to create one of her characteristic group novels. A Connecticut family, the Bairds, flee their former lives, settling in North Carolina. How they change as a result of their move is somewhat secondary to the social satire Adams has set up, as the Yankees, the outsiders, observe the mores of the prewar, pre-Civil Rights South. Almost Perfect (1993) and Medicine Men (1997) are set on more familiar ground. Novels of manners, they continue Adams’ examination of the affluent, well-educated milieu of San Francisco, focusing on the negotiation of power between men and women. Almost Perfect’s Stella Blake initially believes she’s found a dream relationship, her instability and going-nowhere career buoyed by her alliance with the successful, charismatic Richard Fallon. The balance shifts dramatically, however, as Richard experiences a precipitous descent and Stella’s fortunes rise both professionally and emotionally; she not only survives her relationship with him, but heals old emotional wounds. The cards are initially stacked in favor of the men of Medicine Men as well. When Molly Bonner, the protagonist, is diagnosed as having a brain tumor she feels compelled to rely on the expertise of her arrogant physicians and her bossy new
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doctor—lover. The novel portrays the passivity, infantalization, and entrapment of a patient overwhelmed by the medical establishment. It also reveals that the conduct expected of a good patient—well-behaved, uncomplaining, compliant—is not much different from that expected of a well woman in Adams’ world. Adams remained devoted to the short story. She edited the Best American Short Stories in 1991 and continued to write and publish widely in this form. Another collection, The Last Lovely City appeared in 1999. Though her characters continue in large part to be from a privileged, protected class, her stories edged into a darker, melancholy realm as the characters are made vulnerable by age, dealing with the disquieting inevitabilities of loss, diminished beauty, illness, and death. In light of these changes and the precariousness of romantic attachments, friendships are portrayed with increasing significance; the old friend especially is someone to be treasured. OTHER WORKS: Mexico: Some Travels and Some Travelers There (1990). ‘‘A Very Nice Dog,’’ in Southwest Review (Spring 1997). After the War (2000). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Buffington, R., ‘‘Comedy, Human; Variety, Southern,’’ in Sewanee Review (Summer 1996). Karamcheti, I., ‘‘Troubled in Paradise,’’ in WRB (1 Sept.1997). Other references: BL (19 Aug.1995). CA 81-84 (1979). CANR 26 (1989). CBY (1989). CLC 46 (1988). DLBY (1986).KR (15 Dec. 1988). MTCW (1991). NYT 27 May 1999. NYTBR (May 1988, Apr. 1991, Oct. 1995, Apr. 1997). Time (27 May 1999). World Literature Today (Spring 1994). —PHYLLIS S. GLEASON, UPDATED BY VALERIE VOGRIN
ADAMS, Hannah Born 2 October 1755, Medfield, Massachusetts; died 15 December 1831, Brookline, Massachusetts Daughter of Thomas and Eleanor Clark Adams The second of five children, Hannah Adams was considered too frail to attend public school and was educated at home. Discovering she was unable to support herself at needlework, Adams undertook a literary career. Although excessively modest and timid, she was the first and for many years the only woman permitted to use the Boston Atheneum. Her learning was prodigious, and while her books were successful, poor business arrangements limited the income she derived from them. The research into religious sects that Adams had begun for her own edification became, in 1784, her first published volume, the Alphabetical Compendium of the Various Sects Which Have Appeared from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Present Day. In its objectivity, it represented a major improvement over
ADAMS
existing works on the subject, and although it contains some misinformation due to inaccurate sources, the scope of its coverage is impressive. Edited and retitled for later editions, it includes a dictionary listing of the separate Christian sects, a survey of the beliefs of non-Christian groups, and a geographical breakdown of world religions. For her Summary History of New England (1799), Adams undertook serious primary research, delving into state archives and old newspapers, causing serious injury to her eyesight. The material, which covers events from the sailing of the Mayflower through the adoption of the Federal Constitution, is presented in a clear, straightforward manner with occasional attempts to recreate particularly affecting scenes such as the farewell of the Pilgrims from Holland. The Abridgement of the History of New England for the Use of Young People (1807) involved a protracted controversy with Dr. Jedidiah Morse over unfair competition, eventually resolved in Adams’ favor. In revising her History, Adams edited it for greater smoothness and clarity, but simplified neither the language nor the thought. She added a paragraph at the end of each chapter to point up the moral lesson to be learned from the event. While working on the Abridgement, Adams published The Truth and Excellence of the Christian Religion Exhibited (1804), surveying the support which laymen had given to their religion since the 17th century. Divided into two parts, it first presents brief biographies of 60 men, showing how their lives exemplified the Christian spirit. The second part provides excerpts listed under various kinds of ‘‘Evidence in Favor of Revealed Religion.’’ Most of the material was drawn from the writings of those covered in the first section, but it also includes selections by the Marchioness de Dillery, Hannah More, and a Mrs. West. Adams’ The History of the Jews from the Destruction of Jerusalem to the Present Time (1812) represented one of the first attempts to relate their story sympathetically, a story which Adams described as a ‘‘tedious succession of oppression and persecution.’’ Written to encourage efforts to convert the Jews, her discussion of the early period stresses its substantiation of ‘‘our Savior’s prediction’’ of their fate. Not completely free from bias, Adams nevertheless carefully recorded the confiscatory taxes, the mass murders, and the expulsions suffered by the Jews. Adams was probably the first professional woman writer in America, pursuing her career despite the knowledge that the ‘‘penalties and discouragements attending authors in general fall upon women with double weight.’’ Although most discussions of Adams adopt her own designation of herself as a ‘‘compiler,’’ she was, in fact, a fine historian whose meticulous research included examination of primary materials when available, extraordinarily wide reading of secondary sources, and a remarkable objectivity. Her histories are no longer relevant, but her contributions to historiography deserve attention. OTHER WORKS: A Narrative of the Controversy Between the Rev. Jedidiah Morse, D.D., and the Author (1814). A Concise Account of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the
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Jews (1816). Letters on the Gospels (1824). Memoir of Hannah Adams (ed. by J. Tuckerman, 1832). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brooks, V. W., The Flowering of New England (1936). Other references: The Dedham Historical Register (July 1896). The New England Galaxy (Spring 1971). New England Magazine (May 1894). ANR (1999). —CAROL B. SCHOEN
ADAMS, Harriet Stratemeyer Born 3 December 1892, Newark, New Jersey; died 1981 Wrote under: Victor Appleton II, May Hollis Barton, Franklin W. Dixon, Laura Lee Hope, Carolyn Keene, Ann Sheldon, Helen Louise Thorndyke Daugther of Edward and Magdalene Van Camp Stratemeyer; married Russell Vroom Adams, 1915; children: two daughters Better known under a variety of pen names, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams may well be the most prolific woman writer of all time. Author of the perennially popular Nancy Drew mysteries for young girls and the equally popular Hardy Boys and Tom Swift, Jr., series for young boys, she also wrote numerous volumes in the Bobbsey Twins, Honey Bunch, and Dana Girls series. All of these, along with the famous Rover boys, were originated by her father who founded the Stratemeyer Syndicate in 1901. A ‘‘writing factory’’ located in Maplewood, New Jersey, it still turns out the most successful series books ever written for American youngsters roughly eight to 14 years of age. The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series alone sell 16,000,000 copies a year. When he died in 1930, Stratemeyer left to his daughters, Harriet and Edna, the job of keeping up the 17 sets of series then in print. Edna remained in the business for 12 years; Harriet remained a senior partner well into her 80s, working with three junior partners to update earlier titles to create new volumes. Adams herself wrote nearly 200 volumes, including most of the titles in the Nancy Drew series, along with rewrites of the first three originated by her father: the young sleuth’s blue roadster with running boards had to be replaced, as well as outdated hair styles and various dialects which the modern reader would find offensive. Characters produced by the Stratemeyer Factory are either good or bad because, Adams maintained, mixed characters don’t interest children. Plots are spun according to a strict formula guaranteed to satisfy adolescent fantasy: action and suspense packed into 20 cliffhanging chapters. Only eighteen years of age, Nancy Drew is omniscient and omnipotent, solving mysteries that baffle adults, professional detectives, and the well-intentioned police who, however hard they try, are never as quick-thinking and fast-acting as Nancy.
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A 1914 graduate of Wellesley College, an English major with deep interests in religion, music, science, and archeology (her favorite Nancy Drew, The Clue in the Crossword Cipher, is based on ‘‘astounding’’ archeological discoveries and deductions among the Inca ruins), Adams was an active alumna and a 1978 winner of the Alumnae Achievement Award. Wellesley’s motto, ‘‘Non Ministrari Sed Ministrare’’ (not to be ministered unto but to minister), had been Adams’s own guiding principle and the lesson she hoped to teach young readers who gathered in schools and libraries all over the country to hear her speak. ‘‘Don’t be a gimme, gimme kind of person,’’ she told them in an amusingly loose translation of the Latin, ‘‘Do something yourself to help other people.’’ Adams traveled widely (South America, Hawaii, Africa, the Orient), using the foreign settings to provide ‘‘authentic backgrounds’’ for her stories, especially for the Nancy Drews. Indeed, Nancy—whom she regarded as ‘‘a third lovely daughter’’ (in addition to her two real-life daughters)— was rarely out of Adams’ thoughts when she took a trip. Adams’ books have been translated into more than a dozen languages and, although considered nonliterary, are now staples in most children’s libraries. In late 1977 the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series were adapted for television (Nancy Drew films had been made in the 1930s), although Adams did not write the scripts. She did, however, require the television programs to observe the same high standards as the books: no profanity, no sex (as a concession to the new morality, however, Nancy’s boyfriend Ned is now allowed to give her a quick goodbye hug and kiss), no extreme violence (a villain’s moderately heavy blow on the head which temporarily renders Nancy unconscious is not considered ‘‘extreme’’), no racism, and no ‘‘religious confrontations.’’ Adams received public recognition in the late 1970s such as the 1978 Certificate of Appreciation from the New Jersey Congress of Parents and Teachers and, in the same year, honorary doctorate degrees from Kean and Upsala Colleges in New Jersey. To encourage more serious study and writing of children’s books, Adams endowed a chair at Wellesley to be known as the Harriet Stratemeyer Adams Professor in Juvenile Literature. Continuing to work nearly to the end of her life, Adams died in 1981. OTHER WORKS: As Victor Appleton II, The Tom Swift, Jr., Series (21 titles, 1935-1972). Including: Tom Swift and His Planet Stone (1935), Tom Swift and His Giant Robot (1954), Tom Swift and the Spectromarine Selector (1960), Tom Swift and the Visitor from Planet X (1972). As May Hollis Barton, The Barton Books for Girls Series (15 titles, 1931-1950). Including: Sallie’s Test of Skill (1931), Virginia’s Ventures (1932). As Franklin W. Dixon, The Hardy Boys Series (20 titles, 1934-1973). Including: The Mark on the Door (1934), The Clue in the Embers (1955), The Mystery of the Aztec Warrior (1964), The Mystery at Devil’s Paw (1973). As Laura Lee Hope, The Bobbsey Twins Series (15 titles, 1940-1967). Including: The Bobbsey Twins in the Land of Cotton
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(1940). The Bobbsey Twins on a Bicycle Trip (1955). The Bobbsey Twins and the Cedar Camp Mystery (1967). As Carolyn Keene, The Dana Girls Series (32 titles, 1934-1978). Including: By the Light of the Study Lamp (1934), Secret of the Swiss Chalet (1958), The Phantom Surfer (1968), The Curious Coronation (1976), Mountain Peak Mystery (1978). The Nancy Drew Mystery Series (56 titles, 1930-1978). Including: Secret of the Old Clock (1930), The Hidden Staircase (1959), The Mystery of the Fire Dragon (1961), The Mysterious Mannequin (1970), The Nancy Drew Cookbook: Clues to Good Cooking (1973), The Mystery of Crocodile Island (1978). As Ann Sheldon, The Linda Craig Series (4 titles, 1960-1966). Including: Linda Craig and the Mystery in Mexico (1964). As Helen Louise Thorndyke, The Honey Bunch Series (7 titles, 1945-1955). Including: Her First Trip to a Lighthouse (1949), Her First Trip to Reindeer Farm (1953).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Berryman, M. A., ‘‘Harriet Stratemeyer Adams & the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories: Feminist Gender Tales 1930-1990, The Construction and Destruction of a Heroine,’’ (thesis, 1990). Keene, C., ‘‘Nancy Drew’’ in The Great Detectives, Penzler, O., ed. (1978). Prager, A., Rascals at Large, or, The Clue in the Old Nostalgia (1971). Reference works: ANB (1999). CA (1968). Other references: Boston Globe (6 Jan. 1976). Family Circle (Aug. 1978). NYT (27 March 1977). NYHT (14 April 1946). People (14 May 1977). TV Guide (25 June 1977). WSJ (15 Jan. 1975). The Secret of Nancy Drew (film, 1982). —JACQUELINE BERKE
ADAMS, Léonie Fuller Born 9 December 1899, Brooklyn, New York; died 27 January 1988 Daughter of Charles F. and Henrietta Rozier Adams; married William Troy, 1933 Léonie Fuller Adams’ father taught her to be an agnostic and to love poetry. From her mother, she inherited a sense of mystery, primitivism, and faith that led eventually to her joining the Roman Catholic church. Her early life, she felt, was lonely, although she tended to develop deep, mystical relationships with school friends. Both teachers and parents encouraged Adams to write; by a fairly early age she had composed a great deal of poetry. At Barnard College, from which she graduated in 1922, Adams continued her study of composition and poetry. Friends and professors praised her writing and one, Marian Smith, passed on some of Adams’ poems to Louis Untermeyer, who arranged to have them published. For a time after graduation, Adams lived and wrote in New York City and, in 1928 she received a two-year Guggenheim fellowship for study in Europe. She then taught in various capacities at several American colleges and universities,
including New York University (1930-32, 1951-52), Bennington (1935-37, 1942-45), and Columbia (1947-68). She also received a Fulbright Fellowship for teaching in France (1955-56) and from 1948-49 was a consultant to the Library of Congress. She has served on numerous boards and councils for the arts and has received several awards for her writing. Adams’ first book of poetry, Those Not Elect (1925), contains poems from her undergraduate days at Barnard. For the most part, they optimistically celebrate natural mysteries and joyous life. Most critics see reflected in these poems and in Adams’ later work her interest in the Elizabethan and the metaphysical poets. High Falcon (1929, reprinted in 1983) Adams’ second volume, reveals her special connection with Louise Bogan, with whom she later shared the Bollingen Prize (1954). Her focus on natural imagery is especially sharp in High Falcon and has been fruitfully compared to poetry of the metaphysics. Poems: A Selection, appeared in 1954 (reprinted in 1959) and was described by Wallace Fowlie in Commonweal as ‘‘a work of modest proportions but one of high significance in the history of American letters.’’ Poems contains both a sampling from earlier volumes as well as new poems as rich and full as her earlier work. In 1940, Adams had written in Fred B. Millett’s Contemporary American Authors, ‘‘I have been silent a long time because I am now grappling with the limitations of the lyric.’’ Poems: A Selection, published 14 years later, proved that in the struggle, Adams—and her readers—eventually won. OTHER WORKS: Midsummer (1929). This Measure (1933). Lyrics of François Villon (edited and translated by Adams, 1933). Her Lullaby (1947). Léonie Adams Reading Her Poems (audio recording, 1947). Léonie Adams Reading Her Poems in the Recording Laboratory (audio recording, 1949). Léonie Adams Reading Her Poems in the Coolidge Auditorium (audio recording, 1949). Léonie Adams Reading Her Poems in New York City (audio recording, 1951). Enjoyment of Poetry: Survival of the Lyric (audio recording, 1963). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bogan, L., Achievement in American Poetry (1950). Bonacci, B. B., ‘‘Image and Idea in the Poetry of Léonie Adams’’ (dissertation, 1977). Gregory, H., and M. Zaturenska, A History of American Poetry, 1900-1940 (1969). Ruihley, G. R., ed., An Anthology of Great U.S. Women Poets, 1850-1990: Temples and Palaces (1997). Tuthill, S., ed., Laurels: Eight Women Poets (1998). Untermeyer, L., Modern American Poetry (1962). Reference works: Modern American Literature (1960-1969). Other references: CW (26 Nov. 1954). Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (March 1930). Kresh, P., ed., Allen Tate, Léonie Adams, Yvor Winters, Oscar Williams, and Langston Hughes Reading Their Poems (audio recording, 1970). Muriel Rukeyser, Howard Baker, Léonie Adams, [and] Janet Baker Reading Their Own Poems (audiocassette, 1969). —MARY BETH PRINGLE
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ADAMS, Louisa Catherine Johnson Born 12 February 1775, London, England; died 15 May 1852, Washington, D.C. Daughter of Joshua and Catherine Nuth Johnson; married John Quincy Adams, 1797 Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams was the second daughter of an Englishwoman and a Maryland merchant residing in London. During the American Revolution, Adams’ father, strongly proAmerican, moved to Nantes, France, where Adams became bilingual, a great asset in the diplomatic world in which she later moved. In 1783 the family returned to London and the Johnson home became a meeting place for many Americans in London. It was there that John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) met, courted, and married her in 1797. Much of the Adams’ life was spent in Europe at John Quincy’s diplomatic posts: Prussia (1797-1801), Russia (1809-1814), and Great Britain (1815-1817). John Quincy was also a U.S. senator, secretary of state, president, and member of the House of Representatives. Throughout her marriage Adams played a secondary role to her husband’s career, and her writings express the anger and frustration her subordinate role engendered. Although Adams wrote a number of works, only one has been published. Her unpublished writings can be read only on the microfilm edition of the Adams Papers. The first of Adams’ autobiographical works, Record of a Life or My Story (1825), is a detailed account of her childhood, courtship, and experiences in Prussia. Written for her children, the story is episodic and strongly stresses the idyllic quality of her childhood. Highly dramatic episodes are recounted in the greatest detail, and Adams is always at the center of attention. The description of her courtship emphasizes her feelings of inadequacy as the future wife of John Quincy Adams. Her extreme sensitivity to events and people, especially to her father, are most evident in these recollections. Ill health and struggles with her husband’s small salary made her life at the Prussian court difficult and she sorely missed the domestic warmth she had known as a child. Despite her extraordinary memory and talent for description, this is essentially a family memoir. Even events at the court are written about from a personal point of view; the wider world of politics and history are not included. In 1836 Adams wrote a dramatic and compelling history of a trip she and her seven-year-old son took in 1815. The Narrative of a Journey from St. Petersburg to Paris 1815, was published in 1903 by Scribner’s Magazine. Adams followed the route of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow through a countryside still recovering from the ravages of war, and as she approached Paris, Napoleon returned from exile, plunging all of France into further turmoil. Had it not been for Adams’ cool head and great courage, both she and her son might well have been killed. She wrote of the trip with great intensity and the narrative includes vivid descriptions of people and places; the self-centeredness of her other writings is absent here. Of all Adams’ works this is the one most deserving of a modern publication.
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Adams’ third memoir is The Adventures of a Nobody began in 1840. The title of this work aptly sums up her feelings about herself. The long narrative, in part diary entries, records her married life until 1812. Adams appears here as an appendage to her family who isn’t even in control of the domestic arrangements; all decisions concerning the upbringing of the children were being made by John Quincy. In sharp contrast to the picture she gives of her father, her husband is depicted as a cold and distant man. The details of life within the Adams family and at the Russian court are fascinating, but are unfortunately marred by a querulous tone. Adams seems to be trying to erase emotionally distressing episodes from her memory by sheer repetition. Adams kept a remarkable diary during the years 1818 to 1821 for her aged father-in-law, whom she dearly loved. During this time John Adams resided in Massachusetts, while Adams herself was in the midst of the Washington political and social scene. Her comments show her to have been a keen observer and possessor of a very sharp wit. The endless ‘‘visitings,’’ the importance of protocol, and the boredom of women’s restricted lives in the 19th century are vividly portrayed in this diary and Adams’ underused talents are never more in evidence. In spite of poor health during this period, she carried out her extensive social duties and coped as best she could with a very difficult family. Adams’ poems in both French and English are derivative and attract the reader by the sensitive feelings they portray rather than by originality of form or content. Several plays, written for family amusement, and a few prose compositions complete her works. None are of more than family interest. Adams lived, by her own admission, a tormented and frustrated life. She fiercely resented the self-absorbed, remote man with whom she lived, while at the same time admiring him for his patriotism. She thought herself a failure as a mother and a wife. She wrote, like so many other women in the 19th century, to relieve feelings too pressing to contain. Her position in the Adams family is absolutely crucial in understanding the succeeding generations of Adamses. Very little has been written about her and what was usually glosses over her life with platitudes. Adams deserves an honest and comprehensive biography. OTHER WORKS: Diary (22 Oct. 1812-15 Feb. 1814, The Adams Papers, Reel #264). Diary (24 Jan. 1819-25 Mar. 1819, Reel #264). Diary (19 Jul. 1821-19 Aug. 1821, Reel #266). Diary (17 Aug. 1821-27 Sept. 1821, Reel #267). Diary (12 Apr. 1843-28 Aug. 1843, Reel #270). Poems, dramatic compositions, prose reflections, a commonplace book, translations of poems and a prose composition can be found in The Adams Papers, Reels #264, 268, 270-74. BIBLIOGRAPHY: American First Ladies: Their Lives and Legacy (1996). Klapthor, M. B., Maryland’s First Ladies of the White House: Mrs. J. Quincy Adams (1825-1829), Mrs. Zachary Taylor (1849-1850) (1987). Minnergerode, M., Some American Ladies: Seven Informal Biographies (1926). Whitton, M. O., First First
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Ladies 1789-1865: A Study of the Lives of the Early Presidents (1926). Other references: ANB (1999). Biography of the First Ladies of the United States (film,1998). Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (April 1974). Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams: The Ambiguous Adventure of ‘a woman who was’ (dissertation, 1992). Louisa Katherine Johnson Adams: The Price of Ambition (1982). —JOAN R. CHALLINOR
ADDAMS, Jane Born 6 September 1860, Cedarville, Illinois; died 21 May 1935, Chicago, Illinois Daughter of John and Sarah Weber Addams Jane Addams attended Rockford Female Seminary, and, for one year, Woman’s Medical College in Philadelphia. She never married; the closest emotional ties over her lifetime were to her father and to a few women friends. Addams’ name is most often associated with Hull House, the renowned settlement she founded in 1889 in the immigrant slums of Chicago. Her experiences there formed the basis for her efforts, carried out on a local, national, and international scale, for social reform. She devoted herself to such causes as child labor legislation, women’s suffrage, educational reform, and world peace. She helped found the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and served as its president until her death. In 1931, she was co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Addams wrote ten books, countless articles, and lectured extensively. This presented to a wide audience her conviction that citizens of the new urban-industrial age must move beyond individualism toward a new social ethic. By the time she died in 1935, Addams had become one of the best known and most respected women of her time. Her first book, Democracy and Social Ethics (1902), is a perceptive analysis of the new industrial American society peopled by masses of immigrants and urban poor. In six essays adapted from earlier articles and lectures, Addams suggests that changes in industrial and household relations, in politics, education and organized charity, and in ways of understanding the role of women will be necessary if true democracy is to be extended successfully into the new age. Her view that women’s political and social roles should be expanded so women could become caretakers of the well-being and morality not just of their families, but of society at large, is typical of the viewpoint known as social feminism. Newer Ideals of Peace (1907) continues and expands Addams’ analysis, suggesting that as a social ethic of morality is put into practice, the need for war will disappear. The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1909), Addams’ own favorite among her books, and A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil (1912), a study of
prostitution, are pioneering contributions to the field of urban sociology. Addams’ best known work is Twenty Years at Hull-House, with Autobiographical Notes (1910), the classic autobiography she published at age fifty. The book describes Hull House and its cultural, educational, political, and humanitarian activities, but its broader focus is the education of Addams herself. She was indebted to the thought or moral example of such diverse figures as John Ruskin, Abraham Lincoln, Leo Tolstoy, her friend John Dewey, and to the founders of the settlement house in London, known as Toynbee Hall. But she also learned from the ideas and problems of her immigrant neighbors, for she viewed Hull House not as a charitable mission to the downtrodden but as a forum where diverse nationalities and social classes could interact for the betterment of all. Like all autobiographies, Twenty Years at Hull-House is selective and stylized in its presentation of events. Addams writes lucidly and sometimes movingly, enlivening her narrative with anecdotal accounts of the people and situations she met in her Hull House work. She adopts the persona of a seeker rather than dispenser of enlightenment, but she writes with moral earnestness and naive optimism that justice and peace will be made to prevail. During the next two decades, Addams passed for a time beyond liberal social reform to positions which many regarded as radical and even seditious. She was a pacifist during World War I, an internationalist in the isolationist 1920s, a supporter of civil liberties when the prevailing mood was suppressive of dissent. Addams discusses her peace efforts, and the condemnation and self-doubt she suffered because of her unpopular views in Peace and Bread in Time of War (1922), and in The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House, September 1909 to September 1929, with a Record of a Growing World Consciousness (1930). The latter book is a disjointed but still interesting account of Addams’ continuing reform activities and of her view of the postwar years. It includes one of Addams’ favorite pieces: an analysis of a rumor (spread widely in 1913), that a devil baby resided at Hull House. Even before her death, Addams had become a legendary figure. Unfortunately, the image of her which survives is that of the do-gooder Saint Jane, the lady in long skirts who helped the poor. But Addams was a social reformer of far-ranging breadth and influence, a gifted writer, and a first-rate intellect. She was not so much an original thinker as a perceptive observer of the society around her, and an able synthesizer and popularizer of the ideas of the leading social theorists of her time. Addams’ work and writing helped make possible the liberal reforms of the Progressive Era and of the New Deal and helped arouse the social conscience of two generations of Americans. OTHER WORKS: The Women at The Hague (with E. Balch and A. Hamilton, 1915). The Long Road of Woman’s Memory (1916). The Excellent Becomes the Permanent (1932). My Friend, Julia Lathrop (1935). Jane Addams: A Centennial Reader (ed. E. C. Johnson, 1960). The Social Thought of Jane Addams (ed. C.
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Lasch, 1965). The Social Thought of Jane Addams 1997). Twenty Years at Hull-House, with Autobiographical Notes(1999).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brown, V., ‘‘Advocate for Democracy: Jane Addams & The Pullman Strike,’’ in The Pullman Strike & the Crisis of the 1890s: Essays on Labor & Politics (1999). Bryan, M. L. McCree et al, eds., The Jane Addams Papers: A Comprehensive Guide (1996). Commager, H. S., foreword to Jane Addams’ Twenty Years at Hull-House (1961 ed.). Conway, J., ‘‘Jane Addams: An American Heroine,’’ in Daedalus 93 (Spring 1964). Conway, J., ‘‘Women Reformers and American Culture, 1870-1930,’’ in JSocHis 5 (Winter 1971-72). Conway, J. K., ed., ‘‘Jane Addams,’’ in Written by Herself: Autobiographies of American Women (1992). Curti, M., ‘‘Jane Addams on Human Nature,’’ in JHI 22 (April-June 1961). Davis, A. F., American Heroine, The Life and Legend of Jane Addams (1973). Diliberto, G., A Useful Woman: The Early Life of Jane Addams (1999). Harvey, B. C., Jane Addams: Nobel Prize Winner and Founder of Hull House (1999). Farrell, J. C., Beloved Lady: A History of Jane Addams’ Ideas on Reform and Peace (1967). Lasch, C., The New Radicalism in America (1899-1963), The Intellectual as a Social Type (1965). Lasch, C., introduction to Jane Addams’ The Social Thought of Jane Addams (1965). Levine, D., Jane Addams and the Liberal Tradition (1971). Linn, J. W., Jane Addams, A Biography (1935). Scott, A. F., introduction to Jane Addams’ Democracy and Social Ethics (1964 ed.). Stebnor, E. J., The Women of Hull House: A Study of Spirituality, Vocation and Friendship (1997). Other references: Commentary (July 1961). American Women of Achievement Video Collection (video, 1995). Jane Addams: A Pilgrim’s Progress (video, 1997). Website: www2swathmore.edu/peace/exhibits/ addams.index/html (1997). —PEGGY STINSON
ADISA, Giamba See LORDE, Audre
AGASSIZ, Elizabeth Cabot Cary Born 5 December 1822, Boston, Massachusetts; died 27 June 1907, Arlington, Massachusetts Wrote under: Actinea, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, Mrs. Louis Agassiz Daughter of Thomas Graves and Mary Ann Cushing Perkins Cary; married Louis Agassiz, 1850 Elizabeth Cabot Cary Agassiz grew up in Boston, close to her Perkins, Cabot, and Gardiner relatives. She moved in Cambridge
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society, and, after marriage, assumed the care of her husband’s three children from a previous marriage. Eight days after Louis’ death in 1873, one of Agassiz’s daughters-in-law died, and Agassiz again became foster mother to three boys, the youngest just three years old. To guarantee a regular income, Agassiz opened the Agassiz School in 1855, thus providing the opportunity for teenage girls to acquire a high school education comparable to that of their brothers. In 1878-79 Agassiz was one of seven women approached by Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Gilman about a program of higher education for women. When the Harvard Annex became the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women in 1882, Agassiz became its president. She also played a key role in convincing a committee of the Massachusetts legislature to charter the new college. Subsequently, she was the first president of Radcliffe (1893-99), and its honorary president from 1899 to 1903. Agassiz joined her husband on scientific expeditions, becoming their scribe. She never claimed to be a natural scientist, but she developed a remarkable ability to present ‘‘second-hand knowledge accurately and with. . .animation and authority.’’ A First Lesson in Natural History (1859), published under the pseudonym of ‘‘Actinea,’’ went through nine printings by 1899. Agassiz’s achievement is more remarkable because she succeeds in making the structure and beauty of such creatures as sea anemones, corals, and starfish clear and vivid without the color photographs that would aid a modern teacher. Agassiz joined her husband on the Thayer Expedition to Brazil (April 1865-August 1866) and kept a journal of the trip. Parts of it appeared in Atlantic Monthly and then in A Journey in Brazil (1867, written with her husband). William James, who had accompanied the expedition was ‘‘agreeably disappointed’’ in the work. According to L. H. Tharp, ‘‘[James] had feared there would be too many descriptions of sunsets, but read the whole of it with interest’’ and found Agassiz had ‘‘varied the contents very skillfully. . .to entertain and interest the reader.’’ For almost 10 years after her husband’s death, Agassiz worked on Louis Agassiz, His Life and Correspondence (1885). A modern biographer of Agassiz considers it ‘‘much more than the usual Victorian ‘Life and Letters’ written by a devoted relative. She brought to this study of her husband the perception and insight she evidenced in the years of their marriage.’’ In Agassiz’s preface she expresses the hope that ‘‘the story of an intellectual life, which was marked by such rare coherence and unity of aim, might have a wider interest and usefulness,’’ and it does. William James felt it gave ‘‘a beautiful picture of an energetic nature impassioned in one pursuit.’’ To this day, the book remains interesting and readable. OTHER WORKS: Seaside Studies in Natural History (with Alexander Agassiz, 1865). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Agassiz G. R., ed., Letters and Recollections of Alexander Agassiz (1913). Lurie, E., Louis Agassiz: A Life in
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Science (1960). Paton, L. A., Elizabeth Cary Agassiz: A Biography (1919). Reed, E. W., American Women in Science Before the Civil War (1992). Tharp, L. H., Adventurous Alliance: The Story of the Agassiz Family of Boston (1959). Other references: Notable American Women, 1607-1950, E. T. James et al., eds. (article by H. Hawkins, 1971). —SUSAN SUTTON SMITH
AI Born Florence Anthony, 21 October 1947, Albany, Texas Also written under: Florence Haynes, Pelorhanke Ai Ogawa Married Lawrence Kearney, circa 1975 (divorced) Ai is a narrative poet. Her work is intense, her writing efficient and vivid. Her poems reveal an intimacy between emotions and values that traditionally have been viewed as oppositional: love and hate are enmeshed, tenderness and violence interconnected. The characters who speak through Ai’s poetry are as varied as the American, multiracial, multicultural society from which they, and she, emerged. All voices—of men, women, teenagers, children; of black, white, red, yellow, brown; famous and anonymous, infamous and obscure—are heard at equal volume. Each speaks of the effort and desire to assert one’s will, to make an impact, to understand pain. Their voices are clear and even-toned, yet their messages are wrenching and sometimes shocking. Ai grew up in the Southwest and in San Francisco. She earned a B.A. in English/Oriental studies from the University of Arizona in 1969. While an undergraduate, she met the poet Galway Kinnell, who became a mentor for her, the ‘‘most important literary relationship of my life.’’ Through Kinnell, she went to the University of California at Irvine, where she completed an M.F.A. in 1971. She taught subsequently at the State University of New York at Binghamton, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Wayne State University. She received a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship in 1975. Her first book of poems, Cruelty (1973), established her as a new, strong voice in contemporary poetry. Cruelty projects rugged images of sexuality, death, sensuality, and blood, and challenges the stereotype of ‘‘women’s poetry.’’ Noted Alice Walker, ‘‘If you want nice poems to ‘like,’ this [ Cruelty ] is not your book.’’ Ai’s Killing Floor (1979) won the 1978 Lamont Poetry Selection Award for the best second book by an American poet. The poems in this collection intensify the themes of sexuality and violence introduced in Cruelty and expand Ai’s cast of characters to include public figures from history and popular culture. After winning the Lamont Prize, Ai moved to New York to ‘‘actually. . .enter the world of poetry.’’ Since her move, she published Sin (1986) and Fate (1991), both books of poetry. The settings of
the later poems also moved from the rural, smalltown world of her first two books into the urban arena. In Sin, which won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, and Fate, Ai creates the voices, the ‘‘secret souls,’’ of public figures such as Robert and John F. Kennedy, (Sin) and Mary Jo Kopechne (Fate). Still, the voices of anonymous Americans are also heard. The persona poems in Sin and Fate are longer, detailed portraits rather than the snapshots found in her earlier volumes. In ‘‘On Being 1/2 Japanese, 1/8 Choctaw, 1/4 Black and 1/16 Irish’’ (1978) and ‘‘Arrival’’ (1991), Ai discusses her multiracial heritage, her struggle to forge an identity, the importance of her ‘‘true’’ name (Ai means ‘‘love’’ in Japanese), and her development as a narrative poet. (Given the name Florence Anthony at birth, she has also used the names Florence Haynes and Pelorhanke Ai Ogawa; she learned from her mother in 1973 that her father’s surname was Ogawa.) Ai’s passion for poetry pervades her autobiographical works. As she has explained, ‘‘I wanted to write poetry with a capital P’’ and she continues to do so. Her latest works, including 1999’s Vice: New and Selected Poems, presents a collection of 58 monologues from four of Ai’s earlier books—Cruelty, Sin, Fate, and Killing Floor—along with 17 new poems. From the past are notable contributions capturing disturbing realities in the lives and deaths of such notables as James Dean, Jimmy Hoffa, Lenny Bruce, and J. Edgar Hoover. Ai’s new subjects rise from more recent news headlines (O. J. Simpson, David Koresh, Jon-Benet Ramsey, and Monica Lewinsky) and from behind the headlines, including the agony of the police officer who commits suicide before being able to accept a medal for rescuing victims of the Oklahoma City bombing. Ai’s desire to examine conflicting moral values is alive and well and on display in this volume. Successfully continuing in her quest to push the envelope of reader emotions, Ai offers yet another glimpse into worlds of human angst, edged with empathy, which moved one reviewer to observe Vice as ‘‘rewarding, but not for the squeamish.’’ Authored by the ‘‘foremost poet of urban terror,’’ this mini anthology reminds one of the poet’s explosive earlier works and offers shades of things to come. OTHER WORKS: ‘‘Nothing But Color’’ (1981). ‘‘Ai’’ (1988). Greed (1993). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1980). CLC (1975, 1980). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Belles Lettres (Spring 1991). Chicago Review (Spring 1979). LJ (15 Apr. 1999). Ms. (June 1974). NYTBR (17 Feb. 1974, 8 July 1979, 8 June 1986). Poetry (Jan. 1987, Nov. 1991). PW (29 Mar. 1999). Virginia Quarterly Review (Summer 1991). Web site: http://www.wwnorton.com/ catalog/fall98/vice.htm. —DALE A. DOOLEY, UPDATED BY REBECCA C. CONDIT
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AKINS
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
AKINS, Zoë
for two straight years at the Empire Theater and on the road, and by 1936 an English theater company was taking it on tour.
Born 30 October 1886, Humansville, Illinois; died 29 October 1958, Los Angeles, California Daughter of Thomas J. and Elizabeth Green Akins; married Hugo C. Rumbold, 1932
It would be interesting to know precisely what it was Willa Cather detected in the not-so-good poems of a not-so-good actress that suggested playwriting potential. Whatever it was, Akins never completely realized her potential as a dramatist of stature. Except for a thorough dissertation by Ronald Mielech, Akins has received almost no scholarly attention.
Zoë Akins grew up and went to school in Illinois and Missouri, but none of her original plays give prominence to the Midwest. Most deal with the sometimes decadent middle and upper classes in New York, where she lived for twenty years. Akins early expressed a strong interest in the theater and especially in acting. When she left St. Louis and went to New York in 1909, however, with romantic dreams of going on stage and with the determination and pluck for which she was always admired, she encountered her first defeat. She was told she had no acting talent. She decided at this point to stay in New York and write plays. This decision seems to have been implemented at least in part by the advice of a soon-to-be-important novelist and lifelong correspondent and friend, Willa Cather. During the time Akins was submitting her poetry to the then prestigious McClure’s magazine and Cather was its managing editor. Cather, a drama critic in her own right, rejected Akins’ poems but told her, prophetically and shrewdly enough, that she should write for the stage. Cather must have perceived something extraordinary in Akins ’ poems and letters, for she encouraged a friendship with Akins almost immediately. This was unusual, since McClure’s rather aloof and shy managing editor had already begun her practice of eschewing personal contact with all but a very special few of the literary hopefuls who approached her. Although Akins ’ first published book was a volume of poetry, Interpretations (1911), and although she eventually wrote a novel, Forever Young (1941), she is best known for her original dramas, comedies, screenplays, and adaptations. She began to generate attention in 1916 with her vers libre drama, The Magical City. She went on to write Déclassée (1919), perhaps the best original play of that year. Akins ’ high comedies like Papa (1913) and Greatness; A Comedy (1921) demonstrated continued sophistication and even greatness; but she later turned her art to the more popular situation-type comedies which, on the whole, do not possess the dramatic quality of her early original work. Her sharp wit and sense of irony, especially, were quite lost in the shift from high to situation comedy. While she herself never really achieved the popular or critical success she often deserved for her original plays which she produced steadily after 1919, Akins finally earned a measure of fame for her adaptations and screenplays, like Edith Wharton’s The Old Maid (1935) and Edna Ferber’s Showboat (1931). Akins won the 1935 Pulitzer Prize for drama for The Old Maid. Her award initially aroused vigorous controversy over the appropriateness of granting the drama prize for an adaptation rather than for an original work. Eventually, though, the ‘‘discovery’’ that a precedent had already been established silenced her opponents. Both a critical and popular success, The Old Maid ran
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While it is true that Akins’ writing is uneven and occasionally suffers from what Mielech calls ‘‘romantic excesses’’ associated with postwar American drama, and while many of her otherwise attractive protagonists periodically engage in a rhetoric that is uncharacteristic or platitudinous, much of her excellence has gone unappreciated. Some of her efforts at characterization have been misconstrued as overindulgence or a lapse in realism. Akins’ significance, it seems, lies in her extremely sharp and sympathetic understanding of human foibles in general and of female folly and frustration in particular. In a play like Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting (1921), for example, Akins insightfully portrays the all too common situation of a woman, Edith, blindly committed to fidelity to a confused husband who psychologically abuses her, and who manipulates and keeps her with him largely through the guilt he—as well as society—stirs up in her. When she finally rejects his ‘‘open marriage’’ ideas and leaves him, she flees to another, kinder man who ‘‘keeps’’ her sexually and financially, but whom she refuses to marry because she will not get a divorce. Although the play is recognized for its unorthodox focus on a troubled quest for personal freedom, it is more powerful for its quiet repudiation of women’s considerable dependence on men and for its unhappy admission that women like Edith—most women for that matter— find the world ‘‘unsafe’’ when their traditional sources of security are taken from them. Neither Edith’s initial decision to remain true to her adulterous husband nor her later decision to live with Greenough in the face of society’s censure is completely admirable. According to Akins her keen irony underscores Edith’s appalling lack of personal identity and purposiveness, and the reader experiences her horror in realizing she cannot expect men or children to provide meaning and identity for her. In general, Akins’ plays—whether serious dramas or high comedies—emphasize the distortions in values, attitudes, and manners which society promulgates. She is simultaneously both amused and disturbed by the often pathetic efforts of her dramatic characters to extricate themselves from the web of social behavior patterns and thinking they cannot really understand. Akins is probably not a great playwright, but she is surely worthy of more notice and exposure than she has been receiving. If she cannot be applauded for consistent dramatic excellence, she can be appreciated for her exceptional insights into human nature and society, and for her enterprising, delightful sense of humor. OTHER WORKS: Such a Charming Young Man (1916). Did it Really Happen? (1917). Cake Upon the Waters (1919). FootLoose (dramatization by Akins, 1920). The Varying Shore (1921).
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
ALCOTT
The Texas Nightingale (first produced 1922). A Royal Fandango (1923). The Moon-Flower (dramatization by Akins, 1924). First Love (dramatization by Akins, 1926). Pardon My Glove (1926). The Crown Prince (dramatization by Akins, 1927). Thou Desperate Pilot (1927). The Furies (1928). The Love Duel (1929). The Greeks Had a Word for It (1930). O Evening Star (1935). The Little Miracle (1936). The Hills Grow Smaller (1937). I Am Different (1938). The Happy Days (dramatization by Akins from Les Jours Heureux by Claude-André Puget, 1942). Mrs. January and Mr. Ex (1944). The Human Element by W. Somerset Maugham (dramatization by Akins, n.d.). Bradley, J., ‘‘Zoë Atkins & The Age of Excess: Broadway Melodrama in the 1920s’’ in Modern American Drama: the Female Canon (1990). Demastes, W. W., ed., American Playwrights 1880-1945: A Research and Production Scrapbook (1995). Mielech, R.A., ‘‘The Plays of Zoë Akins Rumbold’’ (Dissertation, Ohio State University, 1974). Other references: American Mercury (May 1928). SatRL (11 May 1935). WLB (June 1935). —PATRICIA LEE YONGUE
ALCOTT, Louisa May Born 29 Nov. 1832, Germantown, Pennsylvania; died 6 March 1888, Boston, Massachusetts Also wrote under: L.M.A., A. M. Barnard, Flora Fairfield, A.M. Daughter of Amos B. and Abba May Alcott Although regarded during much of the 20th century only as the author of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott had a manyfaceted personality. She was the daughter of Amos Bronson Alcott, the high priest of transcendentalism, friend and admirer of Emerson and Thoreau. She was the pseudonymous author of sensational and sentimental potboilers, as well as the realistic recorder of her brief career as a Civil War nurse, and she was the world-known author of delightful accounts of family life. Personally, she was a ‘‘child of duty’’ supporting her family, and an early advocate of woman suffrage, prison reform, and emancipation. Although the early years of Alcott’s life were marked by poverty and uncertainty, as her father sought to establish his ‘‘perfect school,’’ they were rewarding years. She had little institutionalized education but her father taught her under his advanced educational theories. She knew and learned from Emerson, Thoreau, and the many books which she read from an early age. Her love of drama gave her an awareness of the melodramatic and sensational in everyday life. Her attempts to augment the family income by teaching, sewing, working as a servant, and acting as a companion provided raw material for her own creative works. In 1855 the first book published under Alcott’s own name, Flower Fables, was dedicated to Emerson’s daughter, Ellen. Earlier she had contributed poems under the pseudonym Flora
Fairfield, and scattered throughout her later career were ‘‘necessity tales,’’ sometimes lurid and sensational, which were also published under pseudonyms. With Hospital Sketches (1863) and Little Women (1868), followed by a series of titles between 1870 and 1886, Alcott became an institution, a center of public attention. In addition to these well-known volumes, she wrote on contemporary problems such as suffrage, temperance, prison reform, and child labor. Driven by the demands of her public, Alcott wrote until ill health made her unable to continue. Worn out by personal tragedy, family responsibility, and sickness, she died within hours of the death of her father. Although Alcott is most commonly associated with the juvenile series beginning with Little Women, she wrote in a variety of genres. Her first published book, Flower Fables, represents the charming, imaginative fantasies written for young children. A combination of colorful prose and delicate poetry, it not only peopled the child’s world with fairies, elves, and small animals, but taught lessons of compassion, patience, duty, honor, and above all, the power of love, in terms a child could understand. The scholar can detect the influence of transcendentalism in the importance given to all living things, but for the child reader the fairy songs and the enchanted world from which they come are enough. Alcott continued to please her young audience in stories included in Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag (4 vols., 1872-78), and Lulu’s Library (3 vols., 1886-89). Not until the publication of Leona Rostenberg’s ‘‘Some Anonymous and Pseudonymous Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott’’ in 1943 did Alcott’s public become aware of her many contributions under various pen names to the body of sensational fiction appearing in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, The Flag of Our Union, and other periodicals. Four of these stories (‘‘Behind a Mask,’’ ‘‘Pauline’s Passion and Punishment,’’ ‘‘The Mysterious Key,’’ and ‘‘The Abbot’s Ghost’’) were made available to the general reader in Madeleine Stern’s Behind a Mask: The Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott (1975). The title story retains its appeal for the modern reader of gothics. In it, Jean Muir, an aging but fascinating actress, has been spurned by the man she loves and finds revenge as well as security in her plot to ruin the entire Coventry family. This brooding, passionate woman, deeply aware of her sexual power, was perhaps the strongest and best developed of many skillfully drawn characters peopling Alcott’s escapist literature. Madeleine Stern proves Alcott was a very conscious artist, producing these ‘‘thrillers’’ for a definite audience, while writing for economic reasons. There is no doubt of the influence of her own experiences on another group of Alcott’s works. The earliest published book based almost completely on her life was Hospital Sketches (1863), and its critical reception convinced its author that success lay in portraying real life rather than in flights of fancy. The experiences of ‘‘Tribulation Periwinkle’’ not only reflect the realities of Alcott’s nursing career but also rank with Whitman’s poetic record in its picturing of suffering, gallantly borne, and the compassion of those who served as nurses.
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ALCOTT
Throughout her career, Alcott produced poems, essays, and stories which were obviously autobiographical. ‘‘Thoreau’s Flute’’ (1863) reflected her hours spent at Walden Pond; ‘‘Transcendental Wild Oats’’ (1873) provided a frank, humorous-pathetic account of the family’s abortive Utopia; while ‘‘Ralph Waldo Emerson’’ (1882) paid tribute to the guardian angel of the Alcott family. In 1867 Alcott initiated a new genre when she rather reluctantly agreed to write a girls’ book. The result was Little Women, which succeeded largely because, as Alcott said, ‘‘We really lived most of it.’’ Using experience as her starting point, she created a gallery of characters that entered American literature. Little Women was an instant success, with multiple editions and translations in more than 30 languages. The simple everyday events and small crises of Jo, Meg, Beth, and Amy, and the warmth of the family life provided by ‘‘Marmee’’ and Mr. March, along with the friendship of Laurie, Mr. Laurence, and the sharp-tongued Aunt March have influenced every generation since 1868. Although Jo’s marriage to Professor Bhaer disappointed many readers who hoped she would marry Laurie and disapproved of his eventual marriage to Amy, the Bhaer family soon developed its own personality. In Little Men (1871) and Jo’s Boys (1886), Alcott not only gave Jo two boys of her own but provided a whole school of boys and girls of all ages, races, and levels of wealth, who were loved and educated on the estate bequeathed by Aunt March. The freedom of the learning environment is reminiscent of Amos Bronson Alcott’s avant-garde philosophy; the lessons of love and duty taught to the March girls are transmitted to all. The readers’ interest in the destinies of the 12 boys who lived at Plumfield led Alcott to write Jo’s Boys, set 10 years later than Little Men. Interest continued far longer than Alcott could ever have imagined with a television series based on Little Men running in 1999. Although the destinies of all the characters who peopled Little Men are traced in Jo’s Boys, the changes which 15 years brought in the author herself are evident in the ending of the book. Despite the pleas of young readers, Dan’s imprisonment as the result of killing a man, even by accident, shuts him off from marrying Bess, the exquisite daughter of Amy and Laurie. Nan, Meg’s daughter, defends her position as a new woman and pursues her career as a doctor, while Bess becomes an artist and Josie an actress, before they become wives. Lesser known but equally delightful are Eight Cousins (1875) and Rose in Bloom (1876), which trace the adventures of Rose and her seven cousins, adding more memorable portraits to Alcott’s gallery and providing the author with many opportunities to comment upon the silliness of Victorian society’s values and customs. In Under the Lilacs (1878), Ben and his remarkable performing dog, Sancho, join Bab and Betty in a series of happy adventures on Miss Celia’s estate, The Lilacs. In this children’s world and in that of Jack and Jill (1880), many lessons are learned by the characters and by the readers who follow the everyday crises and joys so realistically presented.
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AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
The critical reception of Alcott’s works during her life ranged widely but was generally favorable. There were few reviews of Flower Fables, but Hospital Sketches was praised for its ‘‘fluent and sparkling style.’’ Little Women securely established its author in the favor of critics, who saw it as giving pleasure to young and adult readers. An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870) was particularly well received, but the other six volumes of the series became more and more identified with a juvenile audience. The death of Alcott produced many personal tributes but no critical evaluation until the appearance in 1889 of Edna Cheney’s Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters and Journals. As a personal friend, Cheney stressed the autobiographical nature of Alcott’s best work and the effect her sense of duty had upon what might have been a greater career. This biography was influential in shaping the criticism which followed. In 1909 the first biography written in the 20th century, Belle Moses’ Louisa May Alcott, Dreamer and Worker, appeared. Moses’ examination of known details of publication provided the first attempt at scholarly examination of Alcott. Jessie Bonstelle and Marian DeForest collected Little Women Letters from the House of Alcott in 1914, providing important primary sources. Not until the 1930s, however, did an important body of Alcott scholarship appear. Louisa May Alcott: A Bibliography (1932) was compiled by Lucile Gulliver, and it made information available on all editions of American, English, and foreign origin. A Newbery Medal was awarded in 1933 to Cornelia L. Meigs for The Story of the Author of Little Women: Invincible Louisa, which provided background valuable to an understanding of Alcott’s works. In 1936 Katherine S. Anthony’s psychoanalytical study, Louisa May Alcott, aroused controversy but went beyond the usual interpretation of Alcott as a writer for children. Leona Rostenberg’s ‘‘Some Anonymous and Pseudonymous Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott’’ provided knowledge of the sensational fiction written under a variety of pen names. Madeleine Stern followed with a number of articles presenting other facets of Alcott; she climaxed her studies with Louisa May Alcott, a sound critical biography in 1950 (a second edition in 1971 made available a bibliography of 274 items). The 1968 centennial celebration of the first edition of Little Women was marked by the important publication of Louisa May Alcott: A Centennial for Little Women, by Judith C. Ullom. Cornelia Meigs’s biography was reprinted with a new introduction. She also introduced a Centennial Edition of Little Women and edited Glimpses of Louisa: A Centennial Sampling of the Best Short Stories by Louisa May Alcott. Her critical overview presents an excellent final judgement of this writer whose potential sociohistorical worth has not yet been fully explored. In Meigs’ opinion, Alcott’s strength lay in her honesty, awareness of the danger of overmoralizing, and in her ability to present a story with a distinctive pattern and an atmosphere in which the common life, its joy or pain or despair, attains a true splendor. OTHER WORKS: Moods (1865). Morning-Glories, and Other Stories (1868). Kitty’s Class Day (1868). Aunt Kipp (1868).
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
ALDEN
Psyche’s Art (1868). Three Proverb Women, or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy (1868). My Boys: Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag, I (1872). ShawlStraps: Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag, II (1872). Work: A Story of Experience (1873). Cupid and Chow-Chow: Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag, III (1874). Silver Pitchers; and Independence, a Centennial Love Story (1876). A Modern Mephistopheles (1877). My Girls: Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag, IV (1878). Proverb Stories (1882). An OldFashioned Thanksgiving: Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag, V (1882). A Garland for Girls (1888). Recollections of My Childhood’s Days (1890). Comic Tragedies Written by Jo and Meg and Acted by the Little Women (1893). The Poetry of Louise May Alcott (1997). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Anthony, K. S., Louisa May Alcott (1936). Auerbach, N., Communities of Women (1978). Bedell, M., The Alcotts: Biography of a Family (1980). Bonstelle, J., and M. DeForest, eds., Little Women Letters from the House of Alcott (1914). Cheney, E., Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters and Journals (1889). Clark, B. L., and Albergheni, J., eds., Little Women and The Feminist Imagination: Criticism, Controversy, Personal Essays (1999). Elbert, S., A Hunger for Home: Louisa May Alcott and Little Women (1984). Gulliver, L., Louisa May Alcott: A Bibliography (1932). Keyser, E. L., Little Women: A Family Romance (1999). MacDonald, R. K., Louisa May Alcott (1983). Meigs, C. L., The Story of the Author of Little Women: Invincible Louisa (1933). Myerson, J. et al eds., The Journals of Louise May Alcott (1989, reprinted 1997). Moses, B., Louisa May Alcott, Dreamer and Worker: A Story of Achievement (1909). Papashvily, H. W., Louisa May Alcott (1965). Peare, C. O., Louisa May Alcott: Her Life (1954). Saxton, M., Louisa May: A Modern Biography of Louisa May Alcott (1977). Stern, M. B., Louisa May Alcott (1950). Stern, M., Lousie May Alcott: From Blood and Thunder to Hearth and Home (1998). Ullom, J. C., Louisa May Alcott: A Centennial for Little Women (1969). Reference works: Bibliography of American Literature (1955). NAW (1970). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: American Literature Review (Winter 1973). Bibliographical Society of America Papers (2nd Quarter, 1943). New England Quarterly (June 1943, Dec. 1949). NYTM (Dec. 1964). —ALMA J. PAYNE
ALDEN, Isabella MacDonald Born 3 November 1841, Rochester, New York; died 5 August 1930, Palo Alto, California Wrote under: Pansy Daughter of Isaac and Myra Spafford MacDonald; married Gustavus R. Alden, 1866; children: Raymond The sixth of seven children born to a well-educated merchant, Isabella MacDonald Alden was tutored by her father, who required from her a daily journal of criticism and stories. While a
pupil and teacher at the Oneida seminary, she won a Christian tract society’s contest with her didactic novel, Helen Lester, published in 1866 under ‘‘Pansy,’’ a childhood pet name given by her father. That same year she became the wife of Gustavus R. Alden, a Presbyterian minister. In 1874, a year after the birth of their only child, Raymond, she began to edit Pansy, a popular Sunday-school weekly. Alden wrote more than 120 books emphasizing private religious commitment, Bible study, and a moral duty to improve the lives of the poor. She wrote and edited several Presbyterian publications, taught and directed Sunday schools, and occasionally lectured on temperance. She served as a teacher and organizer of the Chautauqua movement from its founding in 1874. One of her best novels, Four Girls at Chautauqua (1876), not only promoted the summer resort of Christian education, but introduced the four female characters whom Alden developed in a series of novels closing with Four Mothers at Chautauqua (1913). Alden’s most popular novel, Ester Reid (1870), portrays an earnest young woman committing her life and good manners to Christ, to Sunday school, and to social progress as three facets of one work. Sequels expanded the application of Christian principles of prayer and social service among middle class urban women. Alden consciously aimed at making religion attractive through realistic female characters who improve the personalities around them with good intentions, prayer, and persistent effort. Mrs. Solomon Smith Looking On (1882), an extended complaint against dull-witted or fashionably bored church members, emphasizes that women are called to moral duty, a responsibility superior to that of men. Alden never explores a domestic clash of values, however, and her men support their wives’ efforts from a distance. Alden’s popular series on the life of Christ culminates in Yesterday Framed in Today (1898), which places the events of Jesus’ life in a modern city. Thoughtful readers are asked to recognize themselves as one prominent character, who abandons ambitions to join the rabble following the new master, or as another, who plots against him with influence and intellect. Though Alden’s books in English and several translations sold more than 100,000 copies annually, they were rarely reviewed, especially in the 1870s and 1880s, when she was doing her most original work. The little critical attention they received resigned them to Sunday school use. Whether The Nation condemned the ‘‘goodiness’’ and ‘‘uncomfortable amount of religious slang’’ in Ruth Erskine’s Crosses (1879), or The Chautauquan praised the ‘‘wholesome homeliness’’ of Why They Couldn’t (1896), each reviewer overlooked Alden’s fictional development of the strong American female personality. Her heroines repeatedly overcame male patronizing with courteous intensity and worked great changes by persistent and thoughtful attention to the effects of small detail. Though they may overprize the work ethic, Alden’s books are valuable records of cultural values and domestic artifacts. When things went wrong, Alden once claimed, she righted them in a book; this theory accounts for both the weakness and the strength of her realistic portrayals of good women.
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ALDRICH
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
OTHER WORKS: Tip Lewis and His Lamp (1867). Julia Reid: Listening and Led (1872). The King’s Daughter (1873). The Chautauqua Girls at Home (1878). Links in Rebecca’s Life (1878). A New Graft on the Family Tree (1880). Next Things (1880). Mrs. Harry Harper’s Awakening (1881). Ester Reid Yet Speaking (1883). Judge Burnham’s Daughters (1888). The Prince of Peace: or, The Beautiful Life of Jesus Christ (1890). Ruth Erskine’s Son (1907). An Interrupted Night (1929). Memories of Yesterdays (completed by G. L. Hill; 1931). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hill, G. L., foreword to Isabella MacDonald Alden’s An Interrupted Night (1929). Logan, M. S., The Part Taken by Women in American History (1912). Reference works: American Women, F. E. Willard and M. A. Livermore (1897). National Cyclopedia of Amerian Biography (1892 et seq.). NAB, 1607-1950 (1971). Other references: NYT (6 Aug. 1930, 7 Aug. 1930). —GAYLE GASKILL
ALDON, Adair See MEIGS, Cornelia
ALDRICH, Bess Streeter Born 17 February 1881, Cedar Falls, Iowa; died 3 August 1954, Lincoln, Nebraska Also wrote under: Margaret Dean Stephens Daughter of James Wareham and Mary Anderson Streeter; married Charles Aldrich, 1907 Bess Streeter Aldrich’s parents emigrated to frontier Iowa in the 1850s. The family’s experiences there became the basis for Aldrich’s most successful novels. After graduating from Iowa State Teachers’ College in Cedar Falls in 1901, she wrote articles for teachers’ magazines and stories for primary school children. When her husband died suddenly from a heart attack in 1925, Aldrich was the sole supporter of her children, and she began writing professionally. In 1930 Aldrich became book editor of the Christian Herald. She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Literature in 1935 from the University of Nebraska, and she was elected to the Nebraska Hall of Fame in 1973. The Rim of the Prairie (1925), Aldrich’s first novel, is a contemporary story of Nancy, a farm girl living near a small town remarkably similar to Elmwood, Nebraska. Through the recollections of the old people, Aunt Biney and Uncle Jud Moore, Aldrich recounts details of settling in this part of the country, as civilization and modern farming overtake the wild prairie. The author’s knowledge and love of nature, her descriptions of the rolling hills
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and the flowers of the prairie are well expressed here, as in all of her books. A Lantern in Her Hand (1928) is a much better work, perhaps because several actual events from her family history form its basis. The character of Abbie Deal, who moves from Illinois to Iowa in 1854, then marries and homesteads with her husband in Nebraska, is based on her mother. In spite of sorrow, hardship, and lack of opportunity to develop her talents, Abbie has a happy life. The ‘‘lantern in her hand’’ has lighted her children’s way. The novel, perhaps Aldrich’s best book, was immensely popular and a bestseller for years. Later works are sometimes variations of its theme, setting, and events. Aldrich’s work is romantic, optimistic, and ‘‘wholesome.’’ Her stories usually end happily, her romances join those people who should be joined; some of them are sentimental. Nevertheless, they display certain strengths—characterization is often excellent, as are her descriptions of nature. The background is always the Midwest, and she describes it precisely and accurately. Although Aldrich is most noted for her stories of the settling of the Midwest, her short stories give fine details of middle class family life in the small towns of the 1920s and 1930s. Her stories and articles were published in many of the leading periodicals. Aldrich’s style is not mannered or dated; neither is it remarkably original. The careful attention Aldrich gives to details— dates, clothing styles, food, customs—are strong points, creating a realistic background. The hardships of settling the frontier and of country living, such as the back-breaking labor, particularly for the women, the lack of refinements, the inconvenient kitchens, the bare and ugly houses, are details such as Hamlin Garland often gives. But whereas Garland points out the hopelessness of the unremitting hard labor in fighting poverty, dirt, and squalor, Aldrich affirms life, and her characters find, usually, some reason for happiness, be it through love or belief in honor and duty. OTHER WORKS: Mother Mason (1924). The Cutters (1926). A White Bird Flying (1931). Miss Bishop (1933). Spring Came on Forever (1935). The Man Who Caught the Weather (1936). Song of Years (1939). The Drum Goes Dead (1941). The Lieutenant’s Lady (1942). Journey into Christmas, and Other Stories (1949). The Bess Streeter Aldrich Reader (1950). A Bess Streeter Aldrich Treasury (ed. R. S. Aldrich, 1959). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Aldrich, R., A Bess Streeter Aldrich Treasury (1959). Marble, A. R., A Daughter of Pioneers: Bess Streeter Aldrich and Her Books (n.d.). Martin, A., Bess Streeter Aldrich (1992). Meier, A. M., ‘‘Bess Streeter Aldrich: Her Life and Works’’ (Master’s thesis, Kearney State College, 1968). Peterson, C. M., Bess Streeter Aldrich: The Dreams Are All Real (1995). Reinke, M. F., Bess Streeter Aldrich: A Pictoiral History, 1881-1925 (1986). Thomas, J., Bess Streeter Aldrich: Conflict Between Home and Career in A Lantern in Her Hand, A White Bird Flying, and Miss Bishop (1994). Williams, B.C., Bess Streeter Aldrich, Novelist (n.d.). Other references: Appleton’s Book Chat (1 Feb. 1930, 21 Nov. 1931). WLB (April 1929). Women Writers of the Great
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ALEXANDER
Plains, #1: Willa Cather, Mari Sandoz and Bess Streeter Aldrich (video, 1985).
American opinion towards entrance into World War I and her assistance to soldiers and refugees, Aldrich was awarded the Legion of Honor by the French government in 1922.
—HELEN STAUFFER
ALDRICH, Mildred
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Stein, G. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1932). Mellow, J. R., Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein & Company (1973). —JANIS TOWNSEND
Born 16 November 1853, Providence, Rhode Island; died 19 February 1928, Huiry, France Wrote under: H. Quinn Daughter of Edwin and Lucy Ayers Baker Aldrich For 12 years, Mildred Aldrich was secretary to the manager of the Boston Home Journal and a contributor under the pseudonym ‘‘H. Quinn.’’ She also edited The Mahogany Tree, a journal of ideas, and during 1892 and 1893, submitted three substantial pieces on theater to Arena. She joined the Boston Journal in 1894, and moved the following year to the Boston Herald. There she further strengthened her already strong reputation for astute dramatic criticism. Sometime around the turn of the century, but before 1904, Aldrich moved to Paris, where she represented several American theatrical producers and wrote for American magazines. When she was sixty-one, in 1914, she retired to the French countryside. Her hilltop home, La Creste, afforded a view of the site of the Battle of the Marne. From La Creste, Aldrich wrote four firsthand accounts of life in wartime France. A Hilltop on the Marne (1915), her most successful book, first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. It treats the progress of the battle, and the spirit and commitment of both soldiers and villagers. The work’s strength derives from the compression of events and Aldrich’s expanding understanding, which the reader shares. On the Edge of the War Zone (1917) covers the period 16 September 1914 to 28 March 1917, and is more diffuse in its approach; of special interest are Aldrich’s reports on gas warfare and descriptions of soldiers’ wartime entertainments. The Peak of the Load (1918) deals with ‘‘the waiting months on the hilltop from the entrance of the stars and stripes to the second victory on the Marne.’’ In the following year, 1919, came When Johnny Comes Marching Home, in which Aldrich describes how ‘‘the countryside settled down’’ after the armistice. She also produced two other wartime books.
ALEXANDER, Francesca Born as Esther Frances Alexander, 27 February 1837, Boston, Massachusetts; died 21 January 1917, Florence, Italy Daughter of Frances and Lucia Gray Swett Alexander Francesca Alexander was the daughter of a portrait painter who was a member of the Boston intellectual and cultural elite. After moving to Florence in 1853, the family became hosts to many eminent visitors including Sarah Orne Jewett and James Russell Lowell (who wrote a sonnet to Francesca). Alexander was educated at home, and principally by herself; in art, for example, she was not given lessons so that her talent might develop in its own direction. Nor was she allowed to play freely with other children or to read uncensored books. Her mother, who died at the age of 102, dominated Alexander throughout her entire life. Alexander first sold her drawings to earn money for works of charity. She began to set down the life stories of the Italian peasants who served as her models, and also to collect from them the traditional songs and legends of their villages. Inspired by medieval manuscripts, Alexander created a large folio volume of traditional songs with her own English translations, embellished by pen-and-ink drawings and elaborate full-page illustrations.
Told in a French Garden, August, 1914 (1916) is Aldrich’s sole work of fiction. By a ‘‘strange irony of Fate,’’ nine people find themselves in provincial France in the darkest days of the war. To raise their spirits, they follow Boccaccio’s example in The Decameron, and each relates a story following the day’s dinner. Prologues and epilogues frame the stories and reveal the conflicts in value displayed by the participants.
The aging John Ruskin, visiting Italy in 1882, was entranced by Alexander’s art, her charity, and her religious faith; he bought her work and arranged for its publication, praised her in his lectures, and wrote to her reams of the sort of precious letter with which Ruskin favored young women. Alexander’s major work was edited by Ruskin and published in ten parts in 1884-85 as Roadside Songs of Tuscany. In this version the book is as much Ruskin’s as Alexander’s; he added introductions, moral homilies, footnotes, and quotations from Alexander’s letters about the people who modeled for the illustrations. Improved photographic processes made possible a new edition, in 1897, entitled Tuscan Songs, which reproduces the integrated text and illustration of Alexander’s manuscript and omits the Ruskin material. The verse is poor-people’s poetry: obvious, simple, repetitive. Alexander was sincerely interested in folklore and oral tradition, and respected the piety which often represented Christ as a character in a contemporary village drama.
Aldrich also wrote the foreword to The Letters of Thomasina Atkins (W.A.A.C.) on Active Service (1918). This volume recounts Atkins’ experiences in the British Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps stationed ‘‘somewhere in France.’’ For her help in swaying
The Story of Ida (1883) is a narration of the rather commonplace, unhappy love experience of a young woman who posed for Alexander. Though Alexander tried to reproduce reality without exaggeration or sentimentality, Ida’s piety, her submission, and
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her long decline give the book a texture indistinguishable from religious tracts. Christ’s Folk in the Apennine (1888) was put together by Ruskin, who selected passages from Alexander’s letters that told stories about her peasant acquaintances. After her sight had failed too much for drawing, Alexander published one book independent of Ruskin: The Hidden Servants (1900), a collection of longer traditional legends retold in English verse. The style is not so simple as her prose; archaic diction, commonplace imagery, and the extra words required to fill out conventional meters create rather tedious poetry. Alexander is remembered primarily because of the letters Ruskin wrote to her, and Ruskin scholars now consider his infatuation with Alexander to have been one of the embarrassing symptoms of the great mind in its decline. Alexander’s one important work is, however, of value for preserving verbally and pictorially details of folklore and rural life from a time now gone. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Alexander, C. G., Francesca Alexandra, A ‘‘Hidden Servant’’ (1927). Alexander, F. Francesca Alexander: Drawings from Roadside Songs of Tuscany (1981). Ruskin, J., ‘‘Francesca’s Book’’ in Works, Cook, E. T., and A. Wedderburn, eds. (Vol. 32, 1907). Swett, L. G., John Ruskin’s Letters to Francesca and Memoirs of the Alexanders (1931). Other references: Dial (16 March 1898). The Magazine of Art (1895). —SALLY MITCHELL
ALLEE, Marjorie Hill Born 2 June 1890, Carthage, Indiana; died 30 April 1945, Chicago, Illinois Daughter of William and Anna Elliott Hill; married Warder Clyde Allee, 1912 Marjorie Hill Allee grew up on an Indiana farm in a community of Quakers whose ancestors had migrated northward from the Carolinas to escape the environment of slavery. At the age of eighteen, having completed high school and two years at Earlham College, Allee taught all eight grades in the one-room school which she had attended as a child. The following year she enrolled at the University of Chicago, determined to become a writer. Allee’s apprentice work includes the publication of numerous articles, reviews, and stories, as well as collaboration with her husband on Jungle Island (1925), a nonfiction book for children which describes the plants and animals on Barro Colorado Island in the Panama Canal. Between 1929 and 1945 Allee published 14 novels for older juvenile readers. Her characters are usually young women just beginning to confront the personal discords and social problems of adult life. Working from memoirs and personal histories, Allee wrote six novels depicting Quaker families caught in the turmoil of
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changing values during the mid-19th century. These novels portray a vivid picture of American life between 1840 and 1875, and they present a multifaceted view of slavery. Allee presents both ideological and personal conflicts with clarity, restraint, and impartiality. Three of Allee’s historical books recount the struggles of widow Charity Lankester and her eight daughters to earn their own living after freeing their slaves and selling their estate. While daughter Judith nurses a neighbor’s child and slowly masters a few homemaking skills (Judith Lankester, 1930), her older sister Catherine teaches in a one-room school, outwitting unruly boys, nurturing neglected girls, rescuing a former slave from an angry mob, and establishing a home in a tiny cabin (A House of Her Own, 1934). In Susanna and Tristram (1929), orphaned sixteen-year-old Susanna Coffin assumes responsibility for her younger brother. She becomes a ‘‘conductor’’ on the Underground Railroad, meeting escaping slaves at the boat and driving them northward. In reaction against the dormitory dance-drink-drive formula for the college novel, Allee wrote The Great Tradition (1937). Much of this novel takes place in a biology laboratory, and it depicts young women engaged in serious study and research at the University of Chicago. The Great Tradition and The House (1944) explore the problems of harmonious relations between individuals of differing ages, social backgrounds, and races. The House received an award from the Child Study Association for the honesty and courage with which it faces the problems of young people. Two of Allee’s novels take place in settings of unusual interest to the naturalist. Jane’s Island (1931), a Newberry honor book, describes the unspoiled beauty of Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where scientists study marine biology with inadequate equipment but disciplined dedication. Ann’s Surprising Summer (1933) takes place in the dune country of northern Indiana, where biologists strive to preserve a portion of the dunes as a natural habitat. Allee’s female characters demonstrate a deep sensitivity to the needs of others, and are unusually competent and resourceful in solving practical problems. They are not restricted to traditional activities and roles. OTHER WORKS: The Road to Carolina (1932). Off to Philadelphia (1936). The Little American Girl (1938). Runaway Linda (1939). The Camp at Westlands (1941). Winter’s Mischief (1942). Smoke Jumper (1945). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: The Junior Book of Authors, S. J. Kunitz, and H. Haycraft, eds. (1951). Other references: Horn Book (May 1946). Illinois Libraries (Dec. 1938). —ALICE BELL SALO
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ALLEN, Elizabeth (Ann Chase) Akers
and poetic grace is evidenced in the pat rhymes and similarity of structure and meter throughout her canon.
Born 19 October 1832, Strong, Maine; died 7 August 1911, Tuckahoe, New York Wrote under: Elizabeth Akers, Florence Percy Daughter of John and Mary Barton Chase; married Marshall Taylor, 1851 (divorced); (Benjamin) Paul Akers, 1860; E. M. Allen, 1865
Allen is at her best when she manages to dissociate herself from her personas. Then her poetic narratives, light verse, and fables are well handled metrically and display a felicity of expression not found in the bulk of her work. Many of these poems are worthy of collection for their artistic illumination of the plight of the 19th-century woman.
Elizabeth Akers Allen was the daughter of a carpenter and circuit preacher. ‘‘Feeling unwelcome at home’’ after her mother’s death and father’s remarriage, she sought independence at the age of thirteen through a job in a bookbindery and later as a teacher. In 1856 she became an assistant editor for the Portland Transcript and published verse and essays in various magazines. It was during this time that she was ‘‘forced to divorce her husband [Marshall Taylor] or starve,’’ since he was legally entitled to her earnings and had already misappropriated payment due her. Her first volume of poetry Forest Buds From the Woods of Maine (1856) was well received. After her second marriage, to Paul Akers, her many volumes of poetry dating from 1866 to 1902 were published under the name Elizabeth Akers. The poem that assures Allen of immortality is ‘‘Rock Me to Sleep,’’ which appeared in the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post in May 1860 under her pseudonym. It caught the popular imagination and was set to music by 30 different composers; it was also issued as an illustrated Christmas giftbook and incorporated into novels, plays, and various collections. Until Allen reprinted it in her Poems (1866) and The Sunset Song, and Other Verses (1902), her sole remuneration was the $5 she had received from the newspaper. Unfortunately, authorship of the poem was contested by Alexander M. W. Ball, a New Jersey legislator, who presented sufficient evidence and witnesses to raise serious questions about the poem’s authorship. The poem, which ‘‘during the Civil War. . . was printed on leaflets and scattered by thousands in the army,’’ is a plaintive cry to a departed mother for relief and solace. The first stanza displays the intensity of the verses which received public acclaim: Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight, Make me a child again just for to-night! Mother, come back from the echoless shore, Take me again to your heart as of yore; Kiss from my forehead the furrows of care, Smooth the few silver threads out of my hair; Over my slumbers your loving watch keep;— Rock me to sleep, mother,—rock me to sleep! Most of Allen’s poetry is flawed by sentimentality and a rigid metrical arrangement that often degenerates into a singsong bathos. One narrative voice permeates most of her work, which is best described by a contemporary as ‘‘sweet, sad sick-room poetry.’’ The lamentations on death and effusive responses to nature contain little philosophical import or melodic composition. Her concept of the poet as one ‘‘who pours the wine of his life for bread’’ evidently prompted her to try to wring her own most heartfelt emotions for literary use. However, the lack of control
OTHER WORKS: Queen Catherine’s Rose (1885). The Silver Bridge (1886). The Triangular Society (1886). ‘‘Gold Nails’’ to Hang Memories On (1890). The High-Top Sweeting (1891). The Proud Lady of Stavoren (1897). The Ballad of the Bronx (1901). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cary, R., ‘‘The Misted Prism: Paul Akers and Elizabeth Akers Allen,’’ in CLQ 7 (1966). Leavenworth, E. W., ed., Who Wrote ‘‘Rock Me To Sleep’’? (1870). Morse, O. A., A Vindication of the Claim of Alexander M. W. Ball (1867). Reference works: A Woman of the Century, F. E. Willard and M. A. Livermore (1893). Other references: Colophon (4 Oct. 1933). Northern Monthly (March 1868). —FRANCINE SHAPIRO PUK
ALLEN, Paula Gunn Born Paula Marie Francis, 24 October 1939, Albuquerque, New Mexico Married (divorced); children: two A Native American of Laguna Pueblo and Sioux heritage, Paula Gunn Allen was raised in Cubero, New Mexico, a Spanish land-grant town 50 miles west of Albuquerque, abutting the Laguna Reservation. Allen’s mother is of Laguna Pueblo and Sioux heritage and her father was Lebanese-American. The writings of her mother’s uncle, John Gunn, an anthropologist and researcher of Native American cultures, was a major source of information for Allen’s writings. Her sister is poet Carol Lee Sanchez and her cousin is writer Leslie Marmon Silko, both of whom were reared in her community. After attending mission schools in rural Cubero, San Fidel, and a convent school in Albuquerque, Allen went on to receive her B.A. in English from the University of Oregon (1966). After college, she married, had two children, and subsequently divorced. She returned to school and in 1968 received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, also from the University of Oregon. Allen returned to New Mexico and in 1975 received a Ph.D. in American Studies and Native American Studies from the University of New Mexico. She was a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA in 1981-82. Between 1986 and 1990 she was professor of Ethnic Studies and
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Native American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Subsequently, Allen has been a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. Three components central to Native American culture are the individual, the land, and the spiritual world; the way in which they are woven together forms the fabric of life for the community and the basis for Allen’s work. She encourages her reader to see the multiplicity present in all things. Nature is welcomed and accepted in all forms. Spirits are continually present and the individual aware of the power present in the world and prepared to ‘‘walk in balance’’ can move down a path toward spiritual exploration and knowledge. Allen has written numerous books of poetry, many of which explore the issue of the relationship between the individual and a ‘‘mythic space’’ or the spiritual realm. Even as she continues to explore these issues through her poems, they also permeate her work as a novelist exploring the depths of the individual; as an essayist and editor looking at feminist and historical perspectives; and as an anthologist of Native American tales and myths looking at the works from an anthropological feminist standpoint. Allen’s novel, The Woman Who Owned the Shadows (1983, reprinted 1995), introduces a recurrent theme, depicting a Native American woman struggling both to discover her own place in a world bent on judging her behavior and restricting her options and to integrate her sense of herself as a modern woman with the power of ancient spiritual beliefs. The vital healing process and reeducation emerging at the end of the novel reappear in the form of theoretical, feminist historical essays in the nonfiction collection The Sacred Hoop (1986, expanded 1992). Here Allen strikingly reconstructs the gynocratic and gynocentric visions of the world as captured in the stories and religions of Native Americans, examining the traditional and sacred teachings centered within the sacred hoop of life in which everything has a place and role. Asserting that many of the orally transmitted tales have been influenced by the encroaching Anglo-American patriarchal system of politics and religion, Allen presents the tales in their original gynocentric forms. Allen’s strong commitment to textual restoration also appears in essays exploring the incompatibilities between femalecentered traditions and those espoused by individuals raised in patriarchal societies; the differences between the European monotheistic and individualist model of society and the communitybased, multitheistic Native American model; and the impact of writing and thinking from a position of ‘‘tribal-feminism’’ and ‘‘feminist-tribalism’’ that respects the separate natures of men and women while stressing the need for both sexes to work in balance with each other. Spider Woman’s Granddaughters (1989) explores 100 years of the strong and vital tradition of Native American women in a collection including traditional tales, biographical writings, and short stories. Allen feels these are the stories of ‘‘women at war’’ who have become captives in their own lands. The major figures include ‘‘Sacred Woman,’’ ‘‘Grand-mother Spider,’’ and ‘‘Yellow Corn Woman’’ who appear repeatedly, under various names,
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throughout Native American traditional songs and writings. The stories capture the resistance and continuing hope enduring in Native American cultures that continues to be spoken and written about by the women of the culture. Grandmothers of the Light: A Medicine Woman’s Sourcebook (1991) continues the discussion of mythic stories that incorporate a polytheistic female-based belief structure with its concepts of duty to the larger group, balance in all things, and connections to the earth. Substantiating her assertions with extensive research in the belief structures of many Native American cultures, Allen stresses the applicability of these stories to the present day, and the necessity of these beliefs in a modern world that has not only become estranged from the earth, the source of all things, but destroys it as well. As a writer, Allen believes it is her responsibility to bring forth the visions existing within herself as poet, essayist, novelist, activist, teacher, woman, lesbian, and Laguna Pueblo-Sioux. Her work makes a major contribution to the female strength, and the tribal and native female resistance and hope of Native American cultures. As Allen re-remembers the past of Native American cultures and history, she embodies her hope that her readers and the Native communities will ‘‘walk in balance’’ with the surrounding world. OTHER WORKS: The Blind Lion (1974). Coyote’s Daylight Trip (1978). A Cannon Between My Knees (1981). Shadow Country (1981). Star Child: Poems (1981). Studies in American Indian Literature: Critical Essays and Course Designs (editor, 1983). Judy Grahn: Gathering the Tribe (1983). Wyrds (1987). Skins and Bones: Poems 1979-1987 (1988). Women’s Friendship: A Collection of Short Stories (1991). Voice of the Turtle: A Century of American Indian Fiction (editor, 1995). As Long as the River Flows: The Stories of Nine Native Americans (1996). Life is a Fatal Disease: Collected Poems, 1962-1995 (1997). Off the Reservation: Reflections on Boundary-Busting Border-Crossing Canons (1998). Contributor to many anthologies, including: Talking Leaves: Contemporary Native American Short Stories (1991); A Circle of Nations: Voices and Visions of American Indians (1993); No More Masks! An Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Women Poets, Newly Revised and Expanded (1993); From Different Shores: Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity in America (1994); Growing Up Gay/Growing Up Lesbian: A Literary Anthology (1994); Issues in Feminism: An Introduction to Women’s Studies (1995); The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (1996); Classics in Lesbian Studies (1997); The Other Within Us: Feminist Explorations of Women and Aging (1997); Recovering the Word: Essays on Native American Literature (1997); Natives and Academics: Researching and Writing about American Indians (1998). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Balassi, W., This Is About Vision: Interviews with Southwestern Writers (1990). Bloom, H., ed., Native American Women Writers (1998). Bruchac, J., Survival This Way: Interviews with American Indian Poets (1987). Coltelli, L., Winged
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Words: American Indian Writers Speak (1992). Donovan, K. M., Feminist Readings of Native American Literature: Coming to Voice (1998). Fleck, R. F., ed., Critical Perspectives on Native American Fiction (1997). Hanson, E. I., Paula Gunn Allen (1990). Keating, A., Women Reading Women Writing: Self-invention in Paula Gunn Allen, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Audre Lorde (1996). Lang, N. H., Through Landscape Toward Story/Through Story Toward Landscape: A Study of Four Native American Women Poets (dissertation, 1991). Rothblum, E. D., ed., Classics in Lesbian Studies (1997). Ruoff, A. L. B., American Indian Literatures (1990). Stauffer, H. W., and S. Rosowski, eds., Women and Western American Literature (1982). Swann, B. and A. Krupat, eds., I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers (1987). Swann, B. and A. Krupat, eds., Recovering the Word: Essays on Native American Literature (1987). Reference works: Benet’s (1991). FC (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). 20th Century Western Writers (1991). Other references: American Anthropologist (Sept 1990). American Book Review (Dec 1992, Dec. 1993). American Indian Quarterly (Spring 1983, Spring 1991, Spring 1992). Journal of Homosexuality (1999). NDQ (interview, Spring 1989). MELUS (interview, Summer 1983). —DACIA GENTILELLA
ALLISON, Dorothy Born 11 April 1949, Greenville, South Carolina Daughter of Ruth Gibson Allison; children: Wolf Michael When Dorothy Allison was born in 1949, her mother, Ruth Gibson Allison, was only 15 years old. In addition, she was poor and unmarried. This early experience of dramatic poverty would influence much of her work. Eventually, Allison’s mother married a man who was not Allison’s father; this stepfather abused her sexually for several years, until Allison described the experience to another relative. When Ruth Allison learned of these events, the abuse stopped, although she remained married to this husband. This experience of abuse would also inform much of Allison’s writing. After high school, Allison attended Florida Presbyterian College, currently known as Eckerd College; she earned her B.A. in 1971. She was introduced to feminism during her college years, an experience she credits with validating her life and feelings. She later earned an M.A. from the progressive New School for Social Research in New York City. She currently lives in California. Unlike many writers who have come of age during the last generation, Allison did not serve an apprenticeship in a creative writing program; she did not begin to consider herself a serious writer until after she earned her master’s degree. She has been nominated for a National Book Award and has won a Lambda Literary award.
Allison is most well known for her novel Bastard Out of Carolina (1992), a book with many autobiographical overtones, although Allison asserts it is not simply an autobiography under another label. Yet much of the plot and many of the details do resemble Allison’s life. The protagonist is a young girl named Ruth Anne Boatwright, known by her nickname, Bone. Bone is illegitimate, her family is exceptionally poor, and she suffers sexual abuse by her mother’s current husband, Daddy Glen, whom her mother had married in part to relieve her family of its poverty. Despite the fact that her mother denies this abuse until she can no longer ignore it, Bone achieves some security in her family’s community of women, especially with her Aunt Raylene, who had once engaged in a sexual relationship with another woman. While much of Bone’s experience is marked by a sense of desperation, she nevertheless is also characterized by the grit of a survivor. Bastard Out of Carolina was both a critical and a popular success, although some readers found it too blunt in its descriptions of poverty and abuse. Allison’s writing is consistently direct and never sentimental. Regardless of a reader’s aesthetic preferences, some of Allison’s scenes are painful to read, but this is precisely her goal. She has stated that individuals of her background and experience have too often been the objects of writing by others; her goal, on the other hand, is to tell her own story rather than be told about, to present her life and the lives of people like her as fully as possible. Like many fiction writers, she claims stories create what meaning one can find in life. In addition to Bastard Out of Carolina, Allison has published poetry, short stories, and essays, as well as a second novel. Her collection of stories, Trash (1988), received more attention than books published by small presses often do. These stories are characterized by many of the same themes as her longer fiction. More recently, Allison has published a collection of essays and a memoir, both of which address issues similar to those she raises in her fiction. Skin: Talking About Sex, Class and Literature (1993), is provocative both in terms of the ideas it addresses and the style with which it addresses them. Her language, and her style in general, is easily accessible; her consistent choice to be direct precludes any option to participate in jargon that would exclude some of her intended audience. Although Allison is clearly a feminist, she does not avoid some of the current tensions within the mainstream feminist movement, including class differences and the implications that accompany them. Nor does she shy away from open acknowledgment of sexuality, sexual preference, and desire, even (or especially) when such a direct style may make some readers uncomfortable. She is no more willing, in other words, to tone her story down for middle-class feminists than she would be for conservative men. Allison’s recent book, Cavedweller (1997), is her second novel. Cavedweller is less obviously autobiographical. Critics have found this novel somewhat less stunning than her first, but that is perhaps inevitable. For the foreseeable future, Allison is likely to remain known most as the author of Bastard Out of Carolina, which was turned into a controversial film by Anjelica Huston.
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OTHER WORKS: The Women Who Hate Me (1983). The Women Who Hate Me: Poetry, 1980-1990 (1991). Two or Three Things I Know for Sure (1995). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CANR (1998). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —LYNN DOMINA
ALTHER, Lisa Born Elisabeth Greene Reed, 23 July 1944, Kingsport, Tennessee Daughter of John S. and Alice Greene Reed; married Richard P. Alther, 1966 (divorced); children: Sara Though she was born and grew up in the South, Lisa Alther has spent all of her adult life in the North. She graduated from Wellesley College, married in 1966, and has lived for many years on the edge of a small town in Vermont. Alther has taught Southern fiction at St. Michael’s College in Winooski, Vermont. She identifies herself as a Southern writer, however, because of the influence of storytelling in her home and her early exposure by her English-teacher mother to the works of Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, and Carson McCullers. From her father, a surgeon, she acquired an interest in science, which was reflected in her earliest publications about the environment and her continuing use of scientific metaphors. Her first two novels are set in her native South; the second two in New England. All of them reflect smalltown life and deal with problems of community. Alther has said she had over 200 rejection slips before her first fiction publication, Kinflicks (1976). The novel was so financially successful Alther has been able to write in her preferred manner, taking several months between multiple drafts and a year between books. Though widely admired for her comic tone, Alther is a serious writer who has focused on the ironies involved in the search for meaning by characters trying to avoid stereotypical, inherited responses to the hostile forces of 20th-century life. Kinflicks deals with the 1960s generation’s agonized conflicts over sex, religion, education, and the war in Vietnam. In half the chapters, Ginny Babcock recapitulates her youthful rebellion against her parents’ life pattern and goals and savagely rejects religious rationalizations of their greed, racism, and class prejudices. Adolescent sexual initiation rites furnish ironic views of the older generation’s hypocrisy about sex, and Ginny’s search for alternatives includes experiments with backseat petting, heterosexual and homosexual monogamy, and lesbian communes. In alternate chapters, Alther uses a third person narrator to show Ginny’s return home at twenty-seven to the bedside of her dying mother and their reconciliation when Ginny realizes her mother had deliberately played the stereotypical mother role in order to meet her children’s need for meaning. Mrs. Babcock’s self-awareness frees Ginny from guilt and the necessity of role playing. Kinflicks has been very popular; in the 1990s it was in print. As
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with all of Alther’s books, it was highly praised and also strongly condemned. Most critics praised it for its verbal wit and for the irony with which the sexual escapades target stereotypes, male sexual conquest, and adult sanctimoniousness; many recognized it as serious social criticism. Very few mentioned the serious mother-daughter plot or perceived the female bildungsroman structure of the book. In Original Sins (1981) Alther juggles the stories of five protagonists who find their small-town Southern environment pernicious. Whereas Kinflicks is picaresque in its emphasis on the journey away, Original Sins focuses on home and its limitations. But as ‘‘the Five’’ mature, their self-awareness, like that of Mrs. Babcock, offers more hope for them than for their parents. Critics agreed the two female characters’ sexual experiences are the most vivid aspects of this book. In Other Women (1984), Alther again juxtaposes the lives of two women, a confused nurse who has experimented sexually as had Ginny Babcock in her search for meaning, and an older woman psychotherapist, whose counsel stems from her own tragic experiences. The book is unusual in focusing equally on patient and therapist and offers their relationship as a model of feminist therapy, nonhierarchical and eventuating in friendship. Though friendship between two women that blossoms into love is central to Bedrock (1990), the focus really is on a town in Vermont to which one of them flees in her search for meaning. The 20-year romantic friendship between the two women in Bedrock is loosely based on the friendship between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. We see all the hypocrisy and self-delusion of less than admirable characters, but the tone— sometimes almost farcical—is accepting and hopeful. Clea Shawn loses her romantic illusions about a small town, remodels a decaying house, and finds happiness when she recognizes that her long friendship with Elka is the basis of a lesbian relationship. Five Minutes in Heaven (1995) follows its main character from childhood in Tennessee to adulthood in New York City and Paris. Along the way, Jude has a number of relationships that force her to come to terms with her sexuality. First, she has an attraction to her best friend, Molly. After Molly dies and Jude tries to sort out her feelings about her emerging lesbianism, she begins a relationship and falls in love with a gay man. After losing Sandy, Jude has a passionate love affair with a married woman. After moving to Paris, she finally finds comfort in her sexuality. Alther explains why she wrote Five Minutes in Heaven: ‘‘Three of my best friends died violent deaths—one when we were teenagers, and the other two when we were in our forties. Five Minutes in Heaven, an extended meditation on ‘graveyard love’ (the kind of love that lasts until you’re both dead and buried in the graveyard), is my memorial to them.’’ The book, Alther says, ‘‘is an extended meditation on love in all its phases—the longing for it, the contentment of its fulfillment, the pain of its loss, the memories of it that can shape a person’s life.’’ Though Alther’s books are lauded for her wit and humor, Five Minutes in Heaven is much more serious and rarely gives the reader a reason to laugh. Alther’s works trace the experiences of her generation and continue to be popular. Though critical acceptance of Bedrock
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was somewhat grudging, her work is now being seriously considered by critics and scholars. Alther’s books have been worldwide bestsellers and have been translated into 17 languages including French, German, Dutch, Japanese, and Spanish. Her novella Birdman and the Dancer (1993), is an adult fairy tale based on monotypes by French artist Françoise Gilot. It has been published only in Denmark, the Netherlands, and Germany. Many of Alther’s reviews and articles have been published in the New York Times, Art and Antiques, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Natural History, New Society, and the Guardian. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Abel, E., et al., eds., The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development (1983). Prenshaw, P., ed., Women Writers of the Contemporary South (1984). Todd, J., ed., Gender and Literary Voice (1980). Reference works: CA (1977). CLC (1977, 1987). CANR (1984, 1990). FC (1990). MTCW (1991). Other references: Appalachia/America (1980). Arizona Quarterly (Winter 1982). Booklist (1 Mar. 1995). DIA (1988). Frontiers 4 (1979). PW (27 Feb. 1995). —MARY ANNE FERGUSON, UPDATED BY NICK ASSENDELFT
ÁLVAREZ, Julia Born 27 March 1950, New York, New York Julia Álvarez’s family fled the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic in 1960, when she was ten years old. They went to live in New York City, where Álvarez’s grandfather had worked as the Dominican cultural attaché to the United Nations. By the time she attended Connecticut College, Álvarez was already receiving prizes for her poetry. She transferred to Middlebury College in Vermont, where she graduated summa cum laude in 1971 and was awarded the college’s creative writing prize. In 1975 she received a Master’s degree in creative writing from Syracuse University. She has taught writing to students of all levels and all ages, from young children to senior citizens. In 1996 she received a Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa, from the City University of New York, John Jay College. She is currently a full professor in the English Department at Middlebury and a frequent scholar at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. It was the emotional upheaval caused by leaving her homeland and her language behind which led Álvarez to become a writer. Of her childhood in the Dominican Republic she states: ‘‘The power of stories was all around me.’’ Álvarez was a reluctant student, who seized every opportunity to play hooky from the Carol Morgan School that she attended with her three sisters, but who relished furtively reading The Thousand and One Nights under the bedskirts or hearing legends and stories told by her elders, from the aunts and uncles in her extensive family to the domestic servants who worked for them.
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With the move to the U.S., Álvarez began to realize the power of language in giving one a sense of place and belonging. As an adolescent at the Abbott School, a boarding school north of Boston, Álvarez says she ‘‘landed in the English language.’’ The process of assimilation took her away, however, from the Spanish of her youth. Writing novels and poetry that center on the immigrant experience is a way for Álvarez to reclaim her cultural identity. Her first book-length work of fiction, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), was awarded the Pen Oakland/Josephine Miles award. This collection of interconnected short stories centers around the character of Yolanda García, the third child in a Dominican family that has fled their homeland and resettled in New York City. Yolanda and her three sisters, Carla, Sandra and Sofia, struggle to be accepted in their new country. As the title reveals, this story is one of assimilation and the loss that assimilation inevitably entails. Arranged in reverse chronology, the grown-up García girls at the beginning of the work have already lost their accents, but like many immigrants, they have also come to realize the importance of holding fast to the ties that bind them to Caribbean culture and to the country they were born in. As the stories work their way backward to the girls’ childhood in the Dominican Republic, they become increasingly assured and powerful. Donna Rifkind, in a review for the New York Times Book Review, said that Álvarez has ‘‘beautifully captured the threshold experience of the new immigrant, where the past is not yet a memory and the future remains an anxious dream.’’ In the Time of the Butterflies (1994), Álvarez’s second novel, takes place in the Dominican Republic during Rafael Leónidas Trujillo’s brutal 31-year regime. The novel weaves historical fact with fiction to tell the story of the coming of age of four sisters: Minerva, Patria Mercedes, Dedé and María Teresa (‘‘Mate’’). Known throughout Latin America by their code name, ‘‘Las Mariposas,’’ the butterflies, Minerva, Patria, and María Teresa Mirabal, were murdered by Trujillo’s henchmen in 1960 on the way home from visiting their husbands in jail. The novel traces the transformation of these ordinary girls into extraordinary young women, revolutionaries who lose their lives in their country’s struggle for democracy. As In the Time of the Butterflies opens, Dedé, the one sister who survives, is preparing to be interviewed by a DominicanAmerican novelist who is writing a book about the Mirabal sisters and the events leading up to their murders. Using first-person narratives, Álvarez gives each of the sisters a turn to tell her story. The youngest, Mate, confides her secrets—mostly the giggly, romantic variety—to a diary. The voice of Patria, the pious sister who as a young girl dreams of becoming a nun, is at times almost prayer-like, as if her words were meant for the Virgin Mary’s ears or for a hushed confessional. Minerva speaks with authority and insight, like the lawyer she studies to become (only to be prevented from practicing by a direct order from Trujillo himself). Dedé’s story, however, alternates between the first and third person. She is the one who survives to tell and retell her sisters’ story, living out her years in their childhood home, which has been turned into a museum where the curious flock like pilgrims to see the relics of
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the Mirabal sisters, martyrs to the cause of democracy, brought to life again by Dedé’s words and by Álvarez’s own skillful writing.
with the poets Alice and Phoebe Cary, to the Utica Morning Herald and the Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican.
In Álvarez’s third novel, Yo! (1997), she continues the exploration of multiple narrators that is a hallmark of her fiction. Yo, Spanish for ‘‘I,’’ is also short for Yolanda, but the Yolanda of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents is now a thirty-fiveyear-old free spirit who has been waylaid from her early promise as a scholar by hippie boyfriends and bad decisions. Seen only in this novel from without, by family, friends, and others, she is still ‘‘caught between two cultures’’ but manages finally to find a place for herself as a happily married and successful writer.
After her marriage to a minister ended, Ames began a ‘‘Woman’s Letter from Washington,’’ for the New York Independent. The column continued from 1866 until her death. She also wrote for the Brooklyn Daily Union and for the Cincinnati Commercial. Her literary output from 1870 on included two novels, A Memorial to Alice and Phoebe Cary (1873), two volumes based on her columns, and a book of poetry. A year before she died, she married Edmund Hudson, a Washington journalist.
Before turning to fiction, Álvarez focused on poetry. She received the American Academy of Poetry Prize in 1974 and a 1987-88 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Grant. She has published three collections of poetry: Housekeeping Book (hand printed in 1984), Homecoming (first published in 1984, with a revised, expanded edition appearing in 1996), and The Other Side/ El Otro Lado (1995). Álvarez’s poetry and essays have appeared in the Kenyon Review, Hispanic magazine, the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and the Washington Post Magazine. Álvarez has also written nonfiction. Something to Declare, a collection of her essays, deals with many of the themes she treats in her fiction and poetry: the immigrant experience, the politics of language, the importance of retaining cultural identity. Inasmuch as they treat becoming and living as a writer, however, the essays in Something to Declare also explore new territory. They are particularly revealing in that they illustrate just how much of Álvarez’s creative work parallels her own life history: ‘‘There is no such thing as straight-up fiction,’’ Álvarez declares. ‘‘In spite of our caution and precaution, bits of our lives will get into what we write.’’ BIBLIOGRAPHY: American Book Review (Aug. 1992). CLC (1996). Hispanic Journal (Spring 1993). Nation (7 Nov. 1994). New England Review (Summer 1993). NYTBR (6 Oct. 1991). PW (16 Dec. 1996). WRB (May 1995). —HELENA ALONSA AND ANA ROCA
AMES, Mary E. Clemmer Born 6 May 1831, Utica, New York; died 18 August 1884, Washington, D.C. Wrote under: M.C.A., Mary Clemmer, Mary Clemmer Ames Daughter of Abraham and Margaret Kneale Clemmer; married Daniel Ames, 1851; Edmund Hudson, 1883 The oldest of seven children, Mary E. Clemmer Ames moved with her family to Westfield, Massachusetts, where she attended the Westfield Academy. Her career began in 1859, when she sent letters from New York City, where she was living temporarily
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Ames’ literary significance stems mainly from her column in the influential weekly, the Independent. It made her one of the best known of a group of post-Civil War women Washington correspondents, known as ‘‘literary ladies.’’ Avoiding social news, she concentrated on political issues, defending the freed Black and civil rights, and sharply criticizing the excesses of Gilded-Age politics. She moved in the same social circles as leading politicians and used them as news sources. In spite of her participation in the masculine worlds of both politics and journalism, Ames repeatedly told her readers that she modestly shrank from public notice and preferred the domestic scene to the political arena. Asserting her career had been the product of financial necessity, she justified it morally on the grounds that women journalists had a spiritual duty to purify politics, even if their efforts brought them unwelcome personal attention. She did not appear publicly to support woman suffrage, although she did advocate it. Considering suffrage less important than economic gains, she wrote: ‘‘Women can live nobly without voting; but they cannot live without bread.’’ Ames’ weekly columns bore the hallmark of popular Victorian literature—excessive sentiment, self-conscious moralizing, and verbosity. Still, they provided an intriguing picture of a woman standing apart from the seamy side of politics and pinpointing politicians guilty of drunkenness and corruption. The books based on her columns—Outlines of Men, Women and Things (1873) and Ten Years in Washington (1873)—emphasized people and places rather than politics. Part guidebook to the capital, Ten Years in Washington, a subscription book reprinted three times, was crammed with historical lore. Outlines included descriptions of scenic spots, biographical sketches of literary and theatrical figures, and, more importantly, several essays dealing with relations between the sexes. Ames urged men to subscribe to the ‘‘pure’’ moral standards of women and exhorted women to educate themselves. Her most successful work of nonfiction, A Memorial to Alice and Phoebe Cary, a gushing tribute to the women who had befriended her, drew critical acclaim in a sentimental era. Making a virtue of what was obviously a handicap to a Washington correspondent—her sex—she contended that her womanhood gave her the right to comment on political issues to promote reform. Trading on the Victorian mystique that women possessed a higher moral sense than men, she showed that a facile woman writer could make a place for herself by pointing a finger of righteous scorn and indignation at the men who ran the country.
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OTHER WORKS: Victoire (1864). Eirene, or, A Woman’s Right (1871). His Two Wives (1875). Memorial Sketch of Elizabeth Emerson Atwater (1879). Poems of Life and Nature (1883). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Beasley, M. H., The First Women Washington Correspondents (George Washington University Studies No. 4, 1976). Beasley, M. H., and S. Silver, Women in Media: A Documentary Source Book (1977). Hudson, E., An American Woman’s Life and Work: A Memorial of Mary Clemmer (1886). Whiting, L., ‘‘Mary Clemmer,’’ in Our Famous Women (1884). Other references: Arthur’s Home Magazine (Dec. 1884). The Cottage Hearth (Feb. 1875). The Independent (28 Aug. 1884). —MAURINE BEASLEY
ANDERSON, Marian
became the first black diva at the Metropolitan Opera, singing Ulrica in The Masked Ball (1955). In 1957 Anderson published her autobiography, My Lord What a Morning. Her writing style is not vivid, but she gives a clear picture of herself as a simple, deeply religious woman who feels a strong obligation to use her talent for others’ benefit. She writes of her career in personal terms, omitting many of the honors that have accrued to her. They are many—over three dozen honorary degrees from American universities, the Bok Award (1940), the Finnish decoration (1940), the Swedish Litteris et Artibus medal (1952), the Japanese Yokusho Medal (1953), the Gimbel Award (1958), and the U.S. Institute of Arts and Sciences’ gold medal (1958). She became a delegate to the Thirteenth General Assembly of the United Nations (1958) and, in 1963, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor an American civilian can attain. In 1965 Anderson retired from singing and to live quietly in Danbury, Connecticut. She died in 1993.
Born 17 February 1902, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; died 1993 Daughter of John Berkeley and Anna Anderson; married Orpheus H. Fisher, 1943
OTHER WORKS: Essay featured in Written By Herself: Autobiography of American Women: An Anthology (1992).
Marian Anderson was the eldest of three daughters. The unusual quality of her voice was noted by the time she was six years old. She began singing in the choir of the Union Baptist Church near her home, and her remarkable range permitted her to substitute for absent sopranos, mezzos, or altos with equal ease. Eventually, her voice developed into a rich contralto, with a particularly beautiful middle register.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Formica, R., Black Americans of Achievement: A Teachers Guide (1992). Kostman, S., Twentieth Century Women of Achievement (1976). Perry, S., Things from the Heart: Marian Anderson’s Story (1981). Richardson, B., and W. A. Fahey, Great Black Americans (1976). Roosevelt, F. W., Doers and Dowagers (1975). Smallwood, D., Profiles of Great African Americans (1998). Smaridge, N., Trailblazers in American Arts (1971). Spivey, L., Singing Heart: A Story Based on the Life of Marian Anderson. Topplin, E. A., Biographical History of Blacks in America since 1528 (1971). Vehanan, K., Marian Anderson: A Portrait (1941). Ware, S., Letter to the World: Seven Women Who Shaped the American Century (1998). Other references: AH (Feb. 1977). American Women of Achievement Video Collection (video, 1995). Marian Anderson (video, 1998). Marian Anderson Rare and Unpublished Recordings, 1936-1952 (audio, 1998).
Her father died when she was very young, and before she was fifteen, she began to take singing engagements to help support the family. She was unable to enroll at the Philadelphia Academy of Music, but the black community subscribed funds for her to study with noted voice teacher Giuseppe Boghetti, who gave her the only formal coaching she ever received. For several years she toured in the eastern and southern United States, performing mostly for church groups. In 1925 Boghetti entered her name in a national competition held in New York; she sang at the Lewisohn Stadium and won first prize out of 300 entrants. That was the beginning of her career. In 1930 she studied in Europe, and the following year began to concertize there. A Scandinavian tour brought favorable recognition, and by 1932 she was in demand in all the European capitals. Toscanini called hers ‘‘The voice that comes once in a hundred years!’’ Her U.S. tour in 1936 was a triumph, but it was the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) who made her name familiar in every American household. In 1939 Anderson was scheduled to sing at Constitution Hall, owned by the DAR in Washington, but the organization decreed that no black singer could appear there. Eleanor Roosevelt resigned in protest, and newspapers carried the story across the country. When Anderson was asked to sing at the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday that year, 15,000 people gathered before the steps, and the incident marked a turning point for black artists. Anderson married in 1943, but she continued to concertize all over the world. She
—HELENE KOON
ANDREW, Joseph Maree See BONNER, Marita
ANDREWS, Eliza Frances Born 10 August 1840, Washington, Georgia; died 21 January 1931, Rome, Georgia Wrote under: Elzey Hay Daughter of Garnett and Annulet Ball Andrews Eliza Frances Andrews was born at Haywood, the plantation home of her parents. The family was moderately wealthy by
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Southern standards, owning about 200 slaves. Andrews attended the Washington Seminary for Girls and graduated in the first class from the LaGrange Female College in 1857. When Georgia seceded from the Union in January 1861, Andrews’ father achieved notoriety for his uncompromising opposition to secession and his subsequent refusal to support the new Confederacy. Although he permitted three of his sons to join the Confederate army, he did not tolerate the secessionist views of his daughters, which led to many family arguments. In December 1864, Andrews began her diary, published as The War-time Journal of a Georgia Girl (1908), with an account of a trip to visit her sister near Albany, Georgia. Andrews and a younger sister had to travel over rough, partially destroyed roads, with the ever-present fear of ambush by Sherman’s men. Once at their sister’s, however, the two girls enjoyed a round of visits and parties, strangely gay for a time of political and military disintegration. Andrews’ fine eye for detail gives the reader a fascinating portrait of social life in the rural Confederacy. Occasionally she lapses into girlish concerns, reporting all the compliments she received on her appearance, but her natural skepticism always rescues her and the diary from silliness. In March 1865 Andrews returned to Washington, Georgia, to witness the fall of the Confederacy. There she met Jefferson Davis on his flight from his pursuers. After her father’s death in 1873, Andrews began teaching school. She served as principal of the Girl’s High School in Yazoo City, Mississippi, later became principal of a girl’s seminary in Washington, Georgia, and from 1885 to 1896 taught French and literature at the Wesleyan Female College in Macon, Georgia. Andrews then returned home to Washington to teach botany in the public high school. After her retirement from teaching, she published two textbooks on botany. Andrews’ literary career began in 1865 with an article on Reconstruction in Georgia published in the New York World. A second article on women’s life and fashions appeared in Godey’s Lady’s Book the following year. Her first novel, A Family Secret (1876), quickly became a bestseller. This mystery, set in the immediate postwar south, revolves around the romance between Audley Malvern and Ruth Harfleur and their attempts to discover the secret of Ruth’s parents and the unusual ring she wears. It is filled with such typical 19th-century literary conventions as a ghost in a graveyard, mistaken identities, and a last chapter entitled ‘‘Everybody Gets Married and Lives Happy Forever After.’’ A Family Secret is of interest to the modern reader for its strong statements on the position of women. Audley’s sister, Julia Malvern, an unsuccessful teacher, writer, and clerk, concludes that marriage for money is the only way out of her financial dilemma. She is not happy about this, however: ‘‘Marrying for money never makes people better, but it leaves us so poor in our own estimation, so mean in spirit, so hollow, so empty, and, after all, so unsatisfied, that sometimes I almost doubt whether it pays.’’ A few pages later she exclaims, ‘‘Oh, the slavery it is to be a woman and not a fool!’’
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Two other novels, A Mere Adventurer (1879) and Prince Hal; or, the Romance of a Rich Young Man (1882), were equally successful with readers. OTHER WORKS: Botany All the Year Round; a Practical Textbook for Schools (1893). Seven Great Battles of the Army of Northern Virginia: A Program of Study and Entertainment (1906). A Practical Course in Botany, With Especial Reference to Its Bearings on Agriculture, Economics, and Sanitation (1911). The War-time Journals of a Georgia Girl, 1864-1865 (reissued, 1997). The papers of Eliza Frances Andrews are in the Garnett Andrews Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina Library, Chapel Hill, North Carolina. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Coulter, E. M., Travels in the Confederate States (1948). Hart, B. S., Introduction to Georgia Writers (1929). King, S. B., Jr., ed., Wartime Journal of a Georgia Girl (1960 ed.). Tardy, M. T., ed., The Living Female Writers of the South (1872). Reference works: NAW 1607-1950 (1971). A Woman of the Century, F. E. Willard and M. A. Livermore (1893). Other references: NYT (23 Jan. 1931). —JANET E. KAUFMAN
ANDREWS, Jane Born 1 December 1833, Newburyport, Massachusetts; died 15 July 1887, Newburyport, Massachusetts Daughter of John and Margaret Demmon Rand Andrews Jane Andrews was born and raised in the midst of the vigorous nationalism of mid-19th century New England. She inherited from her family a spirit of intellectual concern and benevolence which, taken together with a broad outlook, led her to become one of the earliest proponents of internationalism in education. Andrews’ school friends at the Newbury Massachusetts Putnam Free School and the State Normal School at West Newton, Massachusetts, included a sister-in-law of education reformer Horace Mann. Mann persuaded Andrews that she would find the kind of education she wanted at his new college, Antioch, where, subsequently, she was the first student to register. However, the onset of a neurological disorder described as ‘‘spinal affection’’ cut short her education in the middle of the first year and left her an invalid for the next six years. Nonetheless, Mann’s influence reinforced her commitment to believing in one’s responsibility to society, a commitment that influenced the direction of the teaching and writing she practiced during the remainder of her life. In 1860, sufficiently recovered from her illness to work, Andrews founded a primary school in her home. This school, characterized by advanced educational methods including experiments, plays, games, and stories, was extremely successful and continued to be Andrews’ focus for the next 25 years. In her school she cultivated observation, individual responsibility, and
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creative expression in the hope of molding responsible citizens for life in a society where all people were equal. Andrews’ first book, Seven Little Sisters Who Live on the Round Ball That Floats in the Air (1861), grew out of stories she created to supplement the geography lessons in her school. Each story focuses on a little girl in a different culture and emphasizes that although the external circumstances of life are very different for each child, each is happy and is one of God’s family. The same motive held for the sequel, Each and All: Seven Little Sisters Prove Their Sisterhood (1877) and for a historical counterpart, Ten Boys Who Lived on the Road From Long Ago to Now (1886), which traces ‘‘our race from its Aryan sources to the present.’’ Through these books, all of which emphasize the kinship of children throughout the world, Andrews hoped to offset the effect of books like Peter Parley’s, in which children from other lands were characteristically made to look strange and unlike the children for whom the books were intended. The books also provided an alternative morality to that of the McGuffey readers which depicted virtue as being of personal rather than of social concern. The Stories Mother Nature Told Her Children (1889) emphasizes the wonder of nature, and although Andrews tends at times to humanize nature and to moralize (‘‘Mother Nature. . . is she to whom God has given the care of the earth. . . just as he has given to your mother the care of her family of boys and girls’’), the stories in this volume and those collected in Only a Year and What It Brought (1888) and The Stories of My Four Friends (1900) reflect her close observation of nature and her excitement at its processes. OTHER WORKS: Geographical Plays for Young Folks at Home and School (1880). The Child’s Health Primer (1885). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Green, N. K., A Forgotten Chapter in American Education: Jane Andrews of Newburyport (1961). Hopkins, L. P., foreword to Jane Andrews’ Seven Little Sisters Who Live on the Round Ball That Floats in the Air (1897 ed.). Spofford, H. P., A Little Book of Friends (1916). Other references: EngElemR (May 1936).
most of her married life in Syracuse, New York, spending her summers in the family’s wilderness camp in Quebec, which provided the setting for much of her fiction. Her only son, Paul Shipman Andrews, became dean of the College of Law of Syracuse University. Andrews’ first published story, ‘‘Crowned with Glory and Honor’’ (1902), appeared in Scribner’s Magazine, and it was in the short story genre that she was to achieve distinction. From 1902 until 1929 her many stories appeared, chiefly in Scribner’s, but also in other leading journals. Most of these stories were later published in book form, in such collections as The Militants (1907), The Eternal Masculine (1913), and The Eternal Feminine (1916). Some of her best known stories, such as The Perfect Tribute (1906), appeared first in Scribner’s and were later published as separate books. She also wrote novels, notably The Marshal (1912), a historical novel set in Napoleonic times; a book of World War I poetry, Crosses of War (1918); and a biography of Florence Nightingale, A Lost Commander (1929). However, it is her short tales which are of interest to the literary historian. Andrews’ bestselling book The Perfect Tribute, illustrates the qualities of her writing that accounted for her popularity with her contemporaries but which have resulted in her obscurity today. This fictional account of Abraham Lincoln’s disappointment over the reception of his Gettysburg Address was the first of several Lincoln stories written by Andrews. The tale is embellished with Andrews’ own ‘‘historical facts’’ and is a sentimental tale of Lincoln’s aid to a dying young Confederate soldier, through whom Lincoln learns of the true greatness of his speech. Bathos, didacticism, and superpatriotism characterize this story, whose hero, Captain Blair, is virtually interchangeable with the young, handsome, perfect heroes of many of Andrews’ other works. Yet, the author’s instinct for drama, her sincerity, and her vivid description of Lincoln caused contemporary critics to overlook the story’s faults. The book went into many printings, eventually selling more than 600,000 copies. It has been often anthologized, and its version of Lincoln has been read by thousands of American schoolchildren.
Born 2 April 1860, Mobile, Alabama; died 2 August 1936, Syracuse, New York Daughter of Jacob Shaw and Ann Louise Gold Johns Shipman; married William Shankland Andrews, 1884; children: Paul Shipman Andrews
In addition to her successful Lincoln tales, Andrews wrote a variety of stories which exemplify the types of magazine fiction popular with the American reader of the early 1900s. Whereas the stories varied in content from love stories to adventure yarns to patriotic war tales, they shared the common traits of superficiality, sentimentality, and melodrama—along with the ability to entertain the reader. The best of them were her outdoor stories, many of which appeared in two collections, Bob and the Guides (1906), written for and about young boys, and The Eternal Masculine, for adults. These stories of hunting, fishing, and camping adventures have a vitality which stems from Andrews’ own love of the outdoors; in them, melodrama is kept to a minimum.
Mary Shipman Andrews, a popular fiction writer of the early 20th century, was raised and educated in Lexington, Kentucky, the oldest child of an Episcopalian minister. Her husband was a lawyer who later became a distinguished judge. Andrews lived
Although most of Andrews’ fiction features male protagonists and takes place in the so-called masculine worlds of the courtroom, the battlefield, and the wilderness, she wrote several stories from a woman’s point of view. Most of them are collected
—KATHARYN F. CRABBE
ANDREWS, Mary (Raymond) Shipman
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in The Eternal Feminine, and vary in quality from the simplistic title story to the moving ‘‘A Play to the Gallery.’’ In her last years, Andrews realized that the audience for her type of writing was declining and tried, unsuccessfully, to develop a more modern approach. In themselves the stories have little appeal for the modern reader; their interest lies primarily in their reflection of popular literary taste of the early 20th century.
OTHER WORKS: Vive L’Empereur (1902). A Kidnapped Colony (1903). A Good Samaritan (1906). The Enchanted Forest (1909). Counsel Assigned (1912). August First (with R. I. Murray, 1915). Three Things (1915). Old Glory (1916). Joy in the Morning (1919). His Soul Goes Marching On (1922). Pontifex Maximus (1925). White Satin Dress (1930).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hopkins, J. G. E., The Scribner Treasury (1953). Reference works: The Junior Book of Authors, S. J. Kunitz, and H. Haycraft, eds. (1934). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Twentieth Century Authors, S. J. Kunitz, and H. Haycraft, eds. (1942). Other references: Newsweek (17 Oct. 1936). NYT (3 Aug. 1936). —MARLENE KONDELIK
ANDREWS, V(irginia) C(leo) Born 6 June 1924, Portsmouth, Virginia; died 19 December 1986, Virginia Beach, Virginia Wrote under: V. C. Andrews Daughter of Lillian Lilnora (Parker) and William Henry Andrews V. C. Andrews’ series of horror/gothic novels made her a worldwide bestselling author over her seven-year writing career. Catering mainly to adolescent females, Andrews’ stories deal with young, frustrated, imprisoned, desperate characters who manage to overcome their tragic situations and obtain revenge against their oppressors. The novels tend to revolve around forbidden love (particularly incest), rape, and child abuse. Their popularity has been attributed to Andrews’ ability to capture the feelings of adolescents who simultaneously feel the helplessness of childhood and the negative side of adulthood. Andrews spent almost her entire childhood in Portsmouth, Virginia, with a brief sojourn in Rochester, New York. The youngest of three children and the only daughter, Andrews secured her first library card and the opportunity to take art classes at the local junior college at the age of seven. She later completed a correspondence course in art over four years, going on to become a successful commercial artist and selling every piece she painted.
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Andrews was confined at home partly due to an accident she had as a teenager. She fell down the stairs at school, causing back pain and spinal spurs, and it was years before the problem was accepted and treated by physicians. She spent her teenage years on crutches and her adult life in a wheelchair because walking was so painful. Giving up her dream of becoming an actress, she turned to writing so that she could become many different characters in her imagination. For seven years Andrews stayed up late writing, either by sitting up in bed with a typewriter, or standing to write while wearing a back brace. By writing obsessively, sometimes as many as 40 pages a night, Andrews produced 9 books and 20 short stories. She marketed them all but sold only a fictional piece for a confessional magazine. Andrews’ big break came in 1979 when Pocket Books encouraged her to edit and then resubmit her 290,000-word novel, The Obsessed. After she had trimmed it down to 98 pages, she was then asked to expand the novel by making it more sexually explicit and grotesque. Renamed Flowers in the Attic, the novel became a bestseller in two weeks. Detailing the lives of four children, Cathy, Chris, Carrie, and Cory Dollanganger, who must live hidden away in an attic, the novel was classified as horror. All the children are products of incest, and their mother imprisons them because their grandfather might learn of their existence and cut her out of his will. Incest between the older son and daughter is also hinted at. Andrews immediately began a sequel, and in 1980 Flowers in the Attic was released as a hardcover and its sequel, Petals on the Wind, was released as a paperback. Both appeared on the bestseller lists that year, selling over seven million copies in two years. Andrews’ advances surged from $7,500 to $35,000 to $75,000 for the third book in the series, If There Be Thorns, published in 1981. Again within two weeks, Andrews’ third novel appeared on the bestseller lists. In 1982 Andrews took a break from the Dollanganger series to write My Sweet Audrina. Despite its status as a stand-alone novel, it made sales comparable to those of her first three books, perhaps because of name recognition. My Sweet Audrina deals with a girl’s bizarre childhood in which she is forced by her family to forego her own identity for that of her dead sister. In 1984 Andrews completed the saga of the Dollangangers with Seeds of Yesterday. She went on to begin another saga, this one concerning the Casteel family of West Virginia. Heaven (1985) was followed by Dark Angel (1986), which went to number one on the best sellers chart two days after its release. Andrews was declared the top bestselling author by the American Booksellers Association. Andrews died of breast cancer in 1986, but her name continues to be placed on the covers of new family sagas. Shortly before her death, Andrews stated that she had written down 63 synopses of novels she planned to write. Four books published after 1986 may have been completed by Andrew Neiderman, who continues to publish novels under her name.
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ANGELOU
OTHER WORKS: Garden of Shadows (1987). Fallen Hearts (1988). Gates of Paradise (1989). Web of Dreams (1990). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Huntley, E. D., V. C. Andrews: A Critical Companion (1996). Winter, D., Faces of Fear (1985). Reference works: CA 97-100 (1981). CANR 21 (1987). Other references: LAT (obituary, 21 Dec. 1986). NYT (obituary, 21 Dec. 1986). —ROSE SECREST
ANGELOU, Maya Born Marguerite Johnson, 4 April 1928, St. Louis, Missouri Daughter of Bailey and Vivian Baxter Johnson; married Tosh Angelou (divorced); Paul Du Feu, 1973 Upon the breakup of her parents’ marriage, Angelou and her older brother were sent to live with their paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson, in Stamps, Arkansas. She lived there until her graduation with honors from Lafayette County Training School in 1940. Angelou then moved to San Francisco to live with her mother. In 1944, after graduation from Mission High School, she gave birth to a son, Guy, the product of an affair with a neighbor’s son. As a teenager Angelou studied dance and drama in San Francisco. In the 1950s she performed in nightclubs in San Francisco and New York, and appeared in Porgy and Bess as part of a 22-country tour of Europe and Africa. In 1966, Angelou joined the Theatre of Being in Hollywood, and by 1970 she was a writer-in-residence at the University of Kansas and lecturer at Yale University. In this year she published the first of her autobiographical works. Angelou’s first autobiographical novel, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970), is an account of her childhood in Stamps, a year in St. Louis when at the age of seven she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend, her return to Stamps, and finally a move to San Francisco. The novel records the growth of Angelou from an awkward, insecure young girl to a teenage mother. Although essentially a novel of affirmation and hope, I Know Why excellently portrays Angelou’s plight. ‘‘If growing up is painful for the Southern black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat.’’ Against the insecurity stemming from blackness, however, Angelou counters the security provided by her grandmother’s general store and her grandmother’s hope of salvation as promised by her church. In these two settings—store and church—are placed some of the graphic images which are the real strength of this book, and it is here that some of Angelou’s fine humorous scenes appear. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings has been cited as a significant work in the black autobiographical tradition. It has received numerous honors, been reprinted many times, and stayed on the New York Times paperback nonfiction bestseller list for over two years. It is generally considered Angelou’s best work.
Gather Together in My Name (1974) is the second of Angelou’s autobiographical novels, and continues the story of her search for meaning and security in an unstable world. Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas (1976) is the third autobiographical novel, and it traces Angelou’s rise to prominence as a performer. Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ’Fore I Diiie (1971) is a collection of 39 poems, divided into two parts: one group gentle and personal, the other much more militant. Though this poetry collection, her first, received less critical attention than her novels, it was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Angelou’s career as poet, writer of autobiographical narratives, dramatist, and teacher continued in the 1980s and 1990s in much the same energetic vein as her earlier career. Appointed to a lifetime chair as Z. Smith Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in 1981, Angelou has since published more autobiographical narratives, volumes of poetry, and a book-length poem for children entitled Life Doesn’t Frighten Me (1993). She has also authored the screenplay for a television drama and hosted and written a series of documentaries, Maya Angelou: A Journey of the Heart. During the 1993 inaugural ceremony of President Clinton, Angelou read her celebratory poem. The Heart of a Woman (1981), Angelou’s fourth autobiographical narrative, describes her beginnings as a serious writer and her involvement with the Harlem Writers Guild. It also traces her career as a performer during the period of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1950s and 1960s and her move to Egypt with her husband, a South African revolutionary. Becoming increasingly active politically, she shifted away from the pacifist politics of Martin Luther King towards the nationalist philosophy of Malcolm X. Much of the book is concerned with the question of gender roles in her relationships to her son, Guy Johnson (born 1944), and to her husband. The book ends with the breakup of her marriage and her decision to take a job at the University of Ghana. Angelou’s fourth collection of poetry, Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing? (1983), consists primarily of short lyrics marking personal and broader social losses. The poems often strike a muted ‘‘blues’’ tone, describing the effects of racism and disappointed, betrayed, or faded love. A number of poems as well as the title—taken from the song ‘‘John Henry’’—invoke the culture and history of African Americans in the South. All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986) continues the story of Angelou’s life in Ghana, describing her search for and encounters with an African heritage as well as with the patriarchal aspects of postcolonial African society and her difficulties in raising her son. Concluding the book with a description of African oral memory of the slave trade and its losses, Angelou reaffirms her African inheritance as she returns to the United States. Now Sheba Sings the Song (1987), a single long poem illustrated by Tom Feeling, is an answer to the biblical Song of Solomon, praising the beauty of all women from the woman’s point of view. The moods of Angelou’s fifth collection of poetry, I Shall Not Be Moved (1990), vary considerably from poem to
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poem. Some are celebratory chronicling personal and general African American survival in the face of racism and the decay of urban America; others are elegiac. A number reflect the legacy of colonialism and the international slave trade and what she sees as continuing American neocolonialism. As elsewhere, Angelou seeks to establish the continuity of African American culture and the struggles for freedom on the part of black women from slavery to the present, most notably in ‘‘Our Grandmothers.’’ While Angelou’s poetry and prose writings are arguably uneven, her autobiographical narrative, viewed in its entirety, forms a moving chronicle of a black woman’s very personal engagement with the great movements and moments of African American history since the 1940s. It is also perhaps the most important modern extension of the tradition of African American autobiography that reaches back to the 18th century. Collections of short autobiographical essays still are a staple of Angelou’s art. Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now (1993) discusses in 24 pieces her faith and spirituality as they relate to death of loved ones, her personal style, racism, and pregnancy. In it she inspires her readers with her sense that life is a neverending adventure. The sister volume to this work Even the Stars Look Lonesome (1997) examines the mixed blessings of success in 20 brief commentaries. It is intellectually provocative and presented with humor and humility. Angelou’s writing for children, which was prompted by children’s responses to her appearance on Sesame Street, resulted in My Painted House, My Friendly Chicken, and Me (1994) and Kofi and His Magic (1996). The first is the story of a young Ndebele girl’s favorite things in her South African village; the second is about a seven-year-old West African boy who uses the magic of closing his eyes and opening his mind to move from place to place. Both works combine photographs of Africa with the stories and show Angelou’s propensity for incorporating vivid visual images with her work. Her interest in images has led her to become involved with various media projects. The most important of these was her first film directing experience with Down in the Delta (1998). This film, about a Chicago-based African American family moving back to the strength and security of their ancestral home in Mississippi, gave Angelou an opportunity to focus on presenting her familiar themes of self-sacrifice and love in a new way. Other undertakings she participated in included writing for Oprah Winfrey, writing poetry for and appearing in John Singleton’s film Poetic Justice (1993) as well as appearing as the master quilter in Jocelyn Moorhouse’s movie How to Make an American Quilt (1995). Angelou’s work reflects her interest in the inexhaustible capacity of African Americans and human beings in general to survive injustice, hardship, and defeat and to go on with renewed hope and love. She infuses a needy world with this positive message in as many forms and to as many age groups and types of people as she can. As a result, she remains one of America’s leading African American female spokespersons.
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OTHER WORKS: Georgia, Georgia (1972). Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well (1975). And Still I Rise (1978). Lessons in Living (1993). The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou (1994). Phenomenal Woman: Four Poems for Women (1995). A Brave and Startling Truth (1995). Plays: Cabaret for Freedom (1960), The Least of These (1966), Gettin’ Up Stayed on my Mind (1967), Ajax (1974). Screenplays: Georgia, Georgia (1972), All Day Long (1974). The papers of Maya Angelou are housed in the Z. Smith Reynolds Library of Wake Forest University. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Davis, T. and T. Harris, eds., Afro-American Writers After 1955: Dramatists and Prose Writers (1985). Elliott, J. M., ed., Conversations with Maya Angelou (1989). Evans, M., ed., Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation (1984). Gates, H. L., ed., Reading Black, Reading Feminist (1990). McPherson, D., Order Out of Chaos: The Autobiographical Works of Maya Angelou (1990). Tate, C., ed., Black Women Writers at Work (1983). Thompson, K., Black Women in America (1993). Weixlmann, J., ed., Belief vs. Theory in Black American Literary Criticism (1986). Reference works: ANR (1998). CA (Online, 1999). CANR (1987). CB (1974, 1994). FC (1990). Modern American Women Writers (1991). NBAW (1992). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: America (7 Feb. 1976). Atlantic Monthly (Sept. 1990). Black American Literature Forum (1988). Booklist (1 Oct. 1994, 1 Mar. 1997, Aug. 1997). Ebony (Feb. 1982). Kansas Quarterly (1975). Massachusetts Review (1989). Maclean’s (9 Oct.1995). America (7 Feb. 1976). National Review (29 Nov. 1993). NR (23 Aug.1993). NYT (15 Nov. 1998, 25 Dec. 1998). NYTBR (24 March 1972). Poetry (June 1976). PW (27 Sept. 1993, 4 Aug. 1997). SR (30 Oct. 1976). SHR (1973). Writer’s Digest (Jan. 1997). —ANNE ROWE, UPDATED BY JAMES SMETHURST AND PAULA C. MURPHY
ANGIER, Natalie Born 1958, Bronx, New York Married Rick Weiss; children: Katherine Natalie Angier is a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer for the New York Times and the author of three books about scientists and scientific discovery. She is known for making complicated subjects understandable and interesting to the lay reader, often adding her own personal slant. Bronx, New York-born Angier was one of four brothers and sisters in a working-class family. She first attended the University of Michigan and then Barnard, where her work in literature, physics, and astronomy foreshadowed her future multidisciplinary interests. She received her B.A. degree in 1978 and embarked on
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ANNEKE
two years of graduate studies in medieval literature before accepting her first writing job as a technical writer at Texas Instruments.
ever, we need good interpreters, and Natalie Angier is one who is constitutionally incapable of writing a boring sentence.’’
In 1980 she became a researcher at Discover, a magazine being launched by Time Inc., where she was soon promoted to writer and began specializing in evolutionary biology. Angier left Discover for a brief tenure at a women’s magazine before becoming Time’s science writer from 1984 to 1990.
Angier’s latest book, Woman: An Intimate Geography (1999), is a feminist work that tears down many tenets of evolutionary psychology dealing with male-female relationships and is supplemented by Angier’s personal experiences. Sharon Begley of Newsweek called the book ‘‘a treasure chest of did-you-knows.’’
When the New York Times’ molecular biology writer retired in 1990, Angier assumed that position and, within a year, had won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for science reporting. She has also received a science journalism award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a Lewis Thomas Award.
In Discover, Polly Shulman wrote, ‘‘[Woman] combines lyrical descriptions of the female body with a spirited defense of science done right.’’ She added, ‘‘Linguistic puritans who believe that the only scientifically valid description is a dry one will find plenty of lush, metaphoric language to cringe at, but they will have a harder time finding flaws in the reasoning.’’ Schulman echoes the views of other critics who find Angier’s writing style occasionally over the top, although they consistently praise her scientific arguments.
Angier’s first book, Natural Obsessions: The Search for the Oncogene (1988), examines the work of two teams of molecular biologists competing to be first to isolate the gene for retinoblastoma, a juvenile eye cancer. Angier’s approach, analogous to that of an anthropologist, resulted in a book as much about the scientists’ personal traits, good and bad, as it was about the discovery itself. Reviewer Anthony Van Niel, M.D., writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, took issue with her fast-paced portrayal of science, which ignores the painstaking tedium so much a part of the discipline, as well as with her definition of success in the world of science. ‘‘The significance of cancer-fighting discoveries tends to get lost here amid soul-searching, petty rivalries and tentative experiments,’’ he wrote. He continued, however, by saying, ‘‘She does a superb job of educating the reader in the basics of molecular biology pertinent to oncogenes (a formidable task!), so that it is easy to follow the sequence of investigations and share in the highs and lows of difficult experiments. What she seems to enjoy even more is populating the laboratory with an assortment of the most uncommon characters. All have a story, perhaps only remotely related to their work, that serves to make them human.’’ Angier’s second book, The Beauty of the Beastly: New Views on the Nature of Life (1995), is a collection of essays, many of which first appeared in the New York Times, offered there in a revised and more personal form. She offers an evolutionary view of subjects, including parental and sexual behavior of various species, among other issues. One primary theme, which appears throughout much of her writing, is that the ugly can be beautiful, and vice versa. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly wrote, ‘‘Not afraid to anthropomorphize, she even sees molecules as characters in little plays; the decadence of orchids, she says, would make Oscar Wilde wilt. . . .From cockroaches to cheetahs, DNA to elephant dung, Angier gives us intimate and dramatic portraits of nature that readers will find rewarding.’’ The New York Times Book Review praised Angier’s knowledge of science and her ability to put forth new theories rather than simply summarize others. ‘‘Graphic description and colorful simile, traditional tools of natural history popularizers, are not found wanting. . . . But the touch of urbane irony, the ever-present smile in the fold of the phrase—these are rare gifts that shine with unaccustomed splendor in this most engaging writer. More than
Marilyn Yalom, on the other hand, is one of the many observers who enjoy Angier’s way with prose. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Yalom found Angier’s ‘‘flights into poetic rapture’’ to be one of the book’s strengths, adding, ‘‘The book is a rollicking celebration of womanhood.’’ In Publishers Weekly, Ann Darby wrote of Angier, ‘‘Tackling unusual, sometimes even repugnant topics in vivid, playful and acrobatic prose, she has developed a style and an approach to stories that are distinctly hers. Gifted with a voracious and wide-ranging curiosity, she is always on the watch for exotic and sometimes whimsical subjects.’’ In interviews, Angier has commented on her tendency to personalize the topics about which she writes, noting that she approaches her subject ’’idiosyncratically, with my biases, impressions and desires flapping out like the tongue of an untucked blouse.’’ BIBLIOGRAPHY: Other references: Discover (May 1999). Newsweek (12 Apr. 1999). New England Journal of Medicine (6 Apr. 1989). NYTBR (10 Jul. 1988, 18 June 1995, 8 Apr. 1999). PW (22 Apr. 1988, 8 May 1995, 22 Mar. 1999). —KAREN RAUGUST
ANNEKE, Mathilde Franziska Giesler Born 3 April 1817, Lerchenhausen, Westphalia; died 25 November 1884, Milwaukee, Wisconsin Also wrote under: Mathilde Franziska Daughter of Karl and Elizabeth Hulswitt Giesler; married Alfred von Tabouillet, 1836; Fritz Anneke, 1847 The oldest of 12 children, Mathilde Franziska Giesler Anneke received a strict Roman Catholic education. Her marriage, at age nineteen, to a loose-living and autocratic French wine merchant ended soon in divorce. Anneke spent the next 10 years writing and
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translating poetry, and writing a drama and two prayer books for Catholic women. Anneke’s second marriage was to a discharged Prussian artillery officer with revolutionary ideals. During the political activity of 1848, Anneke published Neue Kölnische Zeitung, a revolutionary journal, and Deutsche Frauen Zeitung, the first women’s publication in western Europe. Both journals were quickly suppressed, the first because it advocated the rights of the people over the aristocracy, and the second because it championed the social emancipation and equality of women. Fritz Anneke led a force of soldiers in the German Palatinate during the Revolution of 1848, and Anneke rode by his side into battle. After defeat, however, the two fled Germany and eventually settled in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1849.
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Home Cemetery simply reads: ‘‘We have never bent the knee before false Gods; / We have never cowered in strong weather.’’ OTHER WORKS: Deutsche Frauenzeitung (1852-1855). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Heinzen, H. M. et al, ‘‘Biographical Notes in Commemoration of Fritz Anneke and M.F. Anneke’’ (manuscript in the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 2 vols. 1940). Krueger, L., ‘‘Madame Anneke: An Early Wisconsin Journalist,’’ in WMH 21 (1937). Reference works: National Cyclopedia of American Biography (1892 et seq.). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Other references: Milwaukee Historical Messenger (1967). —DIANE LONG HOEVELER
Anneke’s first writings, published under the name Mathilde Franziska, reveal her strict Catholic upbringing. Her poems in Heimatsgruss (1840) display the dreams and longings of a woman reared in an oppressive atmosphere. Anneke left the Catholic church after her divorce in 1839, but it was not until 1847, the year of her marriage and her father’s death, that she became a freethinker. That year saw the publication of her pamphlet Das Weib in Konflikt mit den sozialen Verhältnissen (‘‘Women in Conflict with Social Conditions’’), a pamphlet advocating suffrage for women. After settling in Milwaukee with her husband and their six children, Anneke founded Deutsche Frauenzeitung, a feminist journal published monthly at a press that utilized women as printers. In an effort to sabotage the journal, a German typographical union formed and demanded that printing firms fire any women who worked as printers and compositors. Although Anneke attempted to fight the union, she and her husband decided to move east, settling in Newark, New Jersey, where she published her journal weekly for two-and-a-half years. Anneke also furthered the issue of women’s rights by public speaking. She addressed more than 500 Milwaukeeans in 1850, and spoke at the woman’s rights convention held in New York in 1853. After separating from her husband in 1861, Anneke spent the Civil War years in Switzerland with a friend, Mary Booth, to whom she dedicated one of her best known poems, ‘‘The Last Song.’’ Anneke returned to Milwaukee in 1865 as a correspondent for German newspapers, but she quickly dedicated herself again to women’s activities by cofounding with Cecilia Kapp and Amalia von Ende the Töchter Institut in 1865. Anneke not only acted as principal, she also taught courses in every area of the curriculum—social problems, economics, and languages. Anneke remained active in suffrage activities by helping to found the Wisconsin woman suffrage association in 1869. Two years before her death in 1884 she saw her drama, Othone, oder die Tempelweihe (1844, The Dedication of the Temple), performed at the Milwaukee Stadt Theater. Her headstone in Forest
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ANPETU WAŚTE See DELORIA, Ella Cara
ANTHONY, Susan B(rownell) Born 15 February 1820, Adams, Massachusetts; died 13 March 1906, Rochester, New York Daughter of Lucy (Read) and Daniel Anthony Susan B. Anthony was the daughter of a Quaker father and Baptist mother. She received a thoroughly Quaker education, which influenced her belief in equality between men and women as well as her interest in other social issues. She began her professional life as a schoolteacher, discovering firsthand the effects of disproportionate wages. In 1849 she decided to quit teaching and returned to her family’s farm. Although she is strongly linked with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the two women did not meet until 1850, two years after the famous Seneca Falls convention during which Stanton introduced a woman suffrage amendment. From the moment of their meeting, however, the women were friends and colleagues. Anthony had already been drawn to other reform movements, especially temperance and abolition, in part because her family’s household was frequently populated by noted agitators such as Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. One of the most dramatic moments in her conversion to the women’s rights movement, in fact, came through her participation in other reform work; in 1852 she was prohibited from speaking, by virtue of her sex, at a temperance meeting. Her response was to form the Woman’s New York State Temperance Society. Within another year, she had committed herself wholeheartedly to women’s rights, especially suffrage, and this cause was to occupy her for the rest of her life. As a reformer, she was frequently held up to parody and scorn. She was ridiculed because of her physical appearance, her dress—she adopted for a time the ‘‘Bloomer’’ outfit—and her
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status as an unmarried woman. In part because of this response, she did not enjoy appearing on stage as a public speaker, but she remained relentless in her work for justice. During the decade preceding and during the Civil War, Anthony became increasingly committed to abolition; beginning in 1856, she served as a New York agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society. Contemporary critics frequently cite her for failing to wholeheartedly support the 14th amendment to the Constitution, providing black men the right to vote, though she had supported the 13th, which abolished slavery. Anthony’s goal, however, was universal suffrage, and she was severely disappointed a suffrage amendment would pass that did not include women. She did argue that if achievement of the right to vote should be staggered among various groups, white women should receive it before black men, because white women of the time tended to be more highly educated than black men. She also predicted antagonism to woman suffrage would grow if more men were allowed to vote and that black male suffrage would be a roadblock rather than a step on the way to woman suffrage. Through the funding of George Francis Train, Anthony helped to establish the suffrage newspaper Revolution. Its first issue was published in January 1868. Anthony was listed as publisher, with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Parker Pillsbury serving as editors. Unfortunately for Anthony’s enduring reputation, the paper strongly opposed the 14th amendment because it did not include women. The amendment, in other words, was not radical enough, and the paper supported additional radical ideas, especially as they related to issues of gender, such as equal pay for men and women, better education for girls, more professional options for women, and easier access to divorce. The paper quickly ran into financial difficulties, however, especially after Train withdrew his support. By 1870 the paper had acquired $10,000 of debt, which Anthony retained in selling the paper to Laura Curtis Bullard. In 1869 Anthony and Stanton had formed the National Woman Suffrage Association. Later that year, other suffragists who opposed some of the tactics and philosophies of Anthony and Stanton formed the American Woman Suffrage Association; the two groups would not reunite for 20 years. To urge the suffrage issue forward, Anthony voted illegally in the 1872 presidential election. She was arrested and pronounced guilty in a highly questionable decision by a judge who refused to acknowledge the role of the jury. Anthony refused to pay her fine but was prohibited from carrying the case to the Supreme Court, which she had hoped would exonerate her. Anthony’s primary publication is the History of Woman Suffrage (1881-1902), which she coauthored with Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage. The complete edition of this work continues to function as a crucial historical document for scholars working in this area. In 1892 Anthony moved in with her sister in Rochester, New York, where she remained for the rest of her life, though she remained active in local, state, and national politics. By the time of her death in 1906, she had become more of a national heroine than an object of ridicule. In her will she named the suffrage movement
ANTHONY
as heir to her savings of $10,000. She is buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, New York.
OTHER WORKS: The personal papers of Susan B. Anthony are housed in a number of institutions, including the Library of Congress, Radcliffe College, and the Susan B. Anthony Memorial in Rochester, New York
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Anthony, K. S., Susan B. Anthony: Her Personal History and Her Era (1954). Barry, K., Susan B. Anthony (1988). Dorr, P. C., Susan B. Anthony, The Woman Who Changed the Mind of a Nation (1928). DuBois, E. C., Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of the Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848-1869 (1978). DuBois, E. C., ed., Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches (1981). Harper, I. H., The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (3 vols., 1898-1908). Lutz, A., Susan B. Anthony (1959). Reference works: Appleton’s Cyclopedia of American Biography (1888). DAB (1929, 1957). NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —LYNN DOMINA
ANTHONY, Susanna Born 25 October 1726, Newport, Rhode Island; died 23 June 1791, Newport, Rhode Island Daughter of Isaac and Mercy Chamberlin Anthony Susanna Anthony was the sixth of seven daughters in a goldsmith’s family. Her life was devoted to God. She left Newport only during the revolutionary war, when she taught school in the countryside, and for brief periods of time to regain her health. Anthony’s only writings are published excerpts from her diaries and her personal correspondence, both published posthumously by prominent figures in the Congregationalist church in the hope that her thorough commitment to Christ would inspire piety in others. The noted Samuel Hopkins, D.D., found ‘‘a remarkable example of devotion’’ in Anthony’s writings, which consist mainly of self-examination of her ‘‘sinful’’ nature and pleas to God to forgive her for her sins. Although Anthony’s writing is not sophisticated, her philosophical arguments are—if not formidable—precocious, especially in view of her lack of schooling. Permeated with religious fervor, her work tends toward the monotonous and didactic, appealing to emotion rather than intellect. Before Anthony had committed herself to religion, however, she tried to arrive at the truth in a rational manner. It is in these questioning passages of her
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diary that her writing is most interesting and most intellectual. In attempting to discern the benefits of a religious life, Anthony postulated a dialogue between her soul and an objector. The soul argued for a religious life; the objector warned that if she were to choose a strictly holy life, she would be disdained by society. The soul concluded the discussion, stating, ‘‘I value the approbation of the most high God before the esteem of poor mortals.’’ Anthony’s choice of a devoutly religious life involved more than simply embracing the Christian faith with renewed ardor; it required a break with her parents’ religion, for they were Quakers and she was about to be baptized in the Congregationalist church. In her diaries, Anthony has recorded her agitation over telling her parents of her choice and employed logical arguments in support of the Congregationalist faith to assuage her feelings of guilt. Her parents, however, were quite content to let Anthony make up her own mind and she broke with the Quakers at the age of fifteen. Her intellectual dialogue was written when she was seventeen, a time at which her arguments for religion were rational and appeal to the intellect, while her arguments for abandoning religion and embracing society appeal to the emotions. Once Anthony had accepted religion as a way of life, her writing became less intellectual, consisting mainly of exhortations to God to keep her from sinning and castigations of herself for not being truly faithful to God, despite her devout behavior and reputation for piety. In publishing her memoirs, Reverend Hopkins stated that Anthony’s writings were proof of the truth of the Christian religion. Anthony’s letters, however, give a better insight into her life than do the diaries, for they contain comments on daily living, and explore her relationships with her friends. They are less self-concerned than the diaries, and clearly less self-conscious. Anthony’s writing is neither elegant nor profound, but it serves a greater purpose than merely exemplifying Christianity in its most devout aspect; it illustrates graphically the role of religion in the life of a single woman in 18th-century New England.
OTHER WORKS: The Life and Character of Miss Susanna Anthony, who died in Newport (R.I.) June 23, MDCCXCI, in the sixty-fifth year of her age consisting chiefly in Extracts from Her Writings, with some Brief Observations on them (ed. S. Hopkins, 1769). Familiar Letters, written by Mrs. Sarah Osborn, and Miss Susanna Anthony, late of Newport, Rhode-Island (1807). Memoirs of Miss Susanna Anthony consisting chiefly in extracts from her writings and observations respecting them (ed. E. Pond, 1844).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: A Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors (1858-1871). American Biographical Dictionary (1857). —RISA GERSON
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ANTIN, Mary Born 1881, Polotzk, Russia; died 15 May 1949, Suffern, New York Daughter of Israel and Esther Weltman Antin; married Amadeus William Grabau, 1901 Mary Antin’s father, frustrated by czarist restrictions and Jewish orthodoxy, immigrated to Boston in 1891. Antin’s education progressed spectacularly in America and her teachers encouraged the prodigy; her family, despite worsening poverty, supported her continued education at the Girls’ Latin School. As a member of the Natural History Club, she met and later married geologist Amadeus William Grabau, a descendant of Lutheran pastors. Moving to New York in 1901 Antin attended Teachers College, Columbia and Barnard (1901-1904), though without taking a degree. In these years Antin was introduced to transcendentalism, liberal Jewish thought, and sympathy with women’s issues. In The Promised Land (1912, reissued 1997), first serialized in the Atlantic Monthly, Antin argued against the growing clamor for restrictive immigration laws (which she later explicitly opposed in her polemical essay, ‘‘They Who Knock at Our Gates,’’ 1914). Praising American democracy and its institutions as conducive to individual development and expression, Antin characterized her assimilation as a journey from medieval to modern thought. She included material from her girlhood narrative, From Polotzk to Boston (1899, reissued 1986), which was based on letters to her Russian uncle. Describing conditions in Russia, the passage to America, and subsequent acculturation, Antin speaks to a gentile, native-born American audience, while reproducing her childhood emotions and psychology. Successful as a chronicler, she often fails to acknowledge or adequately analyze the problems of marginality evidenced in her autobiography. Though speaking for past generations as well as contemporary fellow immigrants, Antin views the act of narration as a ‘‘release’’ from her ‘‘clinging past.’’ She deals with the disintegration of family life, threats to moral education and religious integrity in slum conditions, and assimilation; but such problems are drowned in her paean to American opportunities. With some self-irony, Antin depicts her girlhood rejection of Judaism for Americanism, but concludes she values the ‘‘living seed’’ of her religion when freed from its ‘‘prickly husk’’ of orthodoxy. Antin’s work, though not presenting incisive social criticism, provides a sensitive and idealistic chronicle of immigrant experience in the early 20th century.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Handlin, O., foreword to M. Antin’s The Promised Land (1969). Lindenberg, K., ‘‘The Effects of Gender on the Americanization of Jewish Immigrants: A Case Study of Mary
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Antin’’ (honors thesis, 1995). Salz, E., ‘‘The Letters of Mary Antin: A Life Divided’’ (thesis, 1995). Reference works: Dictionary of American Biography, National Cyclopedia of American Biography (1892 et seq.). NAW 1607-1950 (1971). Other references: The Independent (22 Aug. 1912). NYT (14 Apr. 1912, 18 May 1949). Outlook (June 1912). Yale Review (Oct. 1912).
Racism,’’ contains several earlier pieces, an unfortunate indicator the problems identified in Bridge persist. More recent essays focus on new forms of racism and the appropriation of discourse on difference. Anzaldúa’s introduction addresses the continuing marginalization of women of color and the silencing of their voices, and her essay, ‘‘En rapport, in Opposition: Cobrando cuentas a las nuestras’’ contributes to the significant debate on colorism and cross-racial hostility.
—HELEN J. SCHWARTZ
The first six essays on Borderlands/La Frontera introduce the concept of mestizaje, or hybridity, and inscribe a serpentine movement through different kinds of mestizaje of races, genders, languages, and the mind/body dichotomy. These mestizajes break down dualisms in the production of a third thing that is neither the one nor the other but something else: the mestiza, Chicano language, the lesbian and gay, the animal soul, the writing that ‘‘makes face.’’
ANZALDÚA, Gloria Born 26 September 1942, Jesus Maria of the Valley, Texas Daughter of Urbano and Amalia García Anzaldúa Gloria Anzaldúa , a seventh-generation American, grew up in the Río Grande Valley of South Texas. In the hardship of fieldwork, Anzaldúa found a love and respect for the land and the people who work it. She received her B.A. from Pan American University (1969) and an M.A. in English and Education from the University of Texas at Austin (1972). She has done further study at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Anzaldúa has been a contributing editor of the journal Sinister Wisdom since 1984. As a working-class Chicana lesbian, Anzaldúa experiences multiple sources of oppression; her writing traces the complex interrelations among them in texts that blend poetry and theory, analysis and visceral engagement, Spanish and English. Besides her collections of essays and poems, Borderlands: La Frontera— The New Mestiza (1987; second edition forthcoming October 1999), Anzaldúa has edited two anthologies of writing by U.S. women of color, both of which commonly appear as required reading on Women’s Studies syllabi. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981), is coedited with Cherríe Moraga. The book grew out of the experiences of women of color active in the women’s movement who were politicized by the need to develop a feminist analysis of all structures of domination, including race, class, culture, and sexual practice as well as gender. Besides calling attention to the absence of gender and sexuality in Ethnic Studies research paradigms, Bridge has also played a crucial role in the shift of white feminist theory from an exclusive focus on gender oppression and ‘‘sexual difference’’ to differences among and within women. In ‘‘Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers,’’ Anzaldúa writes of the need for women of color to legitimize the voice that emerges from their specific experiences, rather than imitating dominant literary models. ‘‘La Prieta’’ (the dark girl or woman) foreshadows Borderlands in its focus on her relationship to the dark, Indian part of her self and the place of the indigenous in her culture and her sexuality. In 1990, Anzaldúa edited Making Face/Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creating and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color, intended ‘‘to continue where This Bridge Called My Back left off.’’ The first section, ‘‘Still Trembles Our Rage in the Face of
‘‘Homeland’’ relates the history of the border between the U.S. and Mexico. Problematizing the concept of ‘‘home’’ in the second essay, Anzaldúa records her rebellion against her culture’s betrayal of women and rejection of the Indian side of Mexican cultural identity. To remain within the safe boundaries of ‘‘home’’ required the repression of her gender, her dark-skinned self, and her lesbian identity. Paradoxically, she must leave home to find home. In her next two essays, Anzaldúa formulates her project as self-writing subject: to create a new home, a new mythology, a new mestiza culture, to ‘‘fashion my own gods out of my entrails.’’ Firstly, ‘‘How to Tame a Wild Tongue’’ recounts both Anzaldúa’s refusal to remain silent and the ways in which her language is not ‘‘appropriate’’ according to dominant norms. The language of the border transgresses the boundaries between Spanish and English, high and low decorum, insider and outsider speech, forming another kind of homeland. Using the Nahuatl notion of writing as creating face, heart, and soul, Anzaldúa elaborates the notion that it is only through the body that the soul can be transformed. In her last essay, Anzaldúa defines ‘‘mestiza’’ or ‘‘border’’ consciousness: not relativism or pluralism, not repositioning of the subject as Other or Different in binary relationship to the Same or Dominant, but rather the ‘‘tolerance for contradictions.’’ The new mestiza is the site or point of confluence of conflicting subject positions. Images in Anzaldúa’s poetry in Borderlands show the mestiza consciousness ‘‘in the flesh.’’ In ‘‘Letting Go,’’ the female subject—part fish, part woman, is produced through the transgression of body’s borders. The mestiza survivors of the nuclear holocaust have newly evolved double eyelids that give them the power to ‘‘look at the sun with naked eyes’’ in ‘‘No se raje, Chicanita,’’ and the border crossing between the ‘‘alien’’ and the ‘‘human’’ occurs in ‘‘Interface.’’ Up to now Anzaldúa’s Borderlands has been her most powerful published work. With minor exceptions, this difficult to classify and quite bold work that uses the metaphor of the borderlands well, has received very favorable reviews by its critics. The text as a whole is rich, quite potent at times, and thought-provoking to the point of posing an intellectual and
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emotional challenge to the reader, to revise, re-identify with, rethink concepts of race, sexuality and relationships, to better understand language itself, myths and religion, sexuality, ethnicity and cultures. At the same time, it is accessible even if at times the style appears somewhat unpolished from an academic point of view and can use some editing. This is also her particular imaginative rhetoric, her eclectic way of communicating, of writing and crossing the borders of genre, her way of deconstructing cultural systems and visions, giving the us the readers a stronger taste of her authenticity and her perspectives as we connect with her multiple voices documenting her own experiences as: a woman, a Chicana of indigenous and multilingual roots, and as a lesbian writer—all selves struggling and redefining her selves and her roles in an antagonistic culture in a postcolonial era. Her borders, our borders are clearly not just geographic, but are spiritual while ever-present whenever cultures, races, different economic classes and languages inhabit the same environments and come into natural contact. Anchoring the sense of fragmented identity in the specific historical experience of the borderlands, Anzaldúa’s writing makes a crucial contribution to the development of theories of gender, diversity and subjectivity. Her books are read widely and are pretty standard readings in Women’s Studies and Chicana/o Studies courses. Anzaldúa’s Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color (Aunt Lute Books, 1990), won the Lambda Literary Best Small Book Press Award. Anzaldúa has also received many other awards and recognitions, such as the NEA Fiction Award, the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award for Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras the 1991 Lesbian Rights Award, and the Sapho Award of Distinction. She was also a Rockefeller Visiting Scholar in 1991 while at the University of Arizona. Today she continues teaching, giving invited lectures, and writing about culture, politics and interconnectedness. OTHER WORKS: Prietita and the Ghost Woman: Prietita y la Llorona (1986). Friends from the Other Side (also as Friends from the Other Side/Side/Amigos del otro lado, 1993). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Calderón, H., et al., eds., Criticism in the Borderlands, Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology (1991). Garcia, M., and E. McCracken, eds., Rearticulations: The Practice of Chicano Cultural Studies (1994). Gómez Hernández, A., ‘‘Gloria Anzaldúa: Enfrentando el desafío’’ in Cuadernos americanos (1996). González, A., et al., eds., Mujer y literatura mexicana y chicana: Culturas en contacto (1990). Sims, N., ed., Literary Journalism in the Twentieth Century (1990). Trimmer, J., and T. Warnock, eds., Understanding Others: Cultural and Cross-Cultural Studies and the Teaching of Literature (1992). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies (1993). Gender and Society (Sept. 1992). Matrix (May 1988).
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Third Woman (1989). Trivia (Spring 1989). Women and Language (1989). —YVONNE YARBRO-BEJARANO, UPDATED BY ANA ROCA
APPLETON, Sarah See APPLETON-WEBER, Sarah
APPLETON, Victor, II See ADAMS, Harriet Stratemeyer
APPLETON-WEBER, Sarah Born 14 April 1930, New York, New York Also writes under: Sarah Appleton Daughter of William C. and Ellen S. Merriman Appleton; married Joseph G. Weber, 1965; children: Elizabeth, David Sarah Appleton-Weber is a poet, scholar, and translator whose work is unified by a transforming movement into poetry, plant and animal life, and evolutionary forms. Preparation for this work has involved the study of poetry and sacred history, analogy and symbolism, and the natural sciences, as well as training in cosmic forms through making a new edition and translation of Teilhard de Chardin’s Le Phénoméne humain. Appleton-Weber’s poetry (published under the name Sarah Appleton) is marked by the ‘‘utter attentiveness, heart delicacy’’ with which we need to listen to and read the ‘‘book of the Earth.’’ Her first sequence of poems, A Plenitude We Cry For (1972), written in the rhetoric of a small horse chestnut tree outside her window in Northampton, Massachusetts, records the transformations of the tree and her own life through a season’s growth. Ladder of the World’s Joy (1977) was born from the energy and joy of reading Teilhard de Chardin’s Le Phénoméne humain, recording the stages, as she read, of human cosmic birth and transformation. After completing Ladder of the World’s Joy, AppletonWeber returned to Teilhard’s book, translating it word by word, to discover the secret of its energy. Out of this came a third sequence of poems, Book of My Hunger, Book of the Earth (unpublished; though many portions have appeared in poetry journals). This is an autobiographical sequence reflecting the work of the poet and the voice of the earth, the precariousness of ever bringing a work together, and the continuity of the call and the grace to do so. In
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her writing, Appleton-Weber explores the transforming correspondence between herself as a woman and poet—barren, fecund, nurturing, evolving—and the earth. Appleton-Weber was raised in a small hunting lodge in rural Rhode Island, where her life was nurtured by the pond, woods, and living things around her. She was educated at the Old Field School and received her B.A. from Vassar College (1952). She studied fiction writing at Vassar and spent a semester at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, leaving to join Dorothy Day at the Catholic Worker’s Maryfarm in Newburgh, New York. At the same time she began her growth as a poet under the guidance of Elizabeth Sewell. In 1953 she was received into the Roman Catholic church. She studied analogy and symbolism at Fordham University with William Lynch, S.J. (1955-56) and worked at a children’s shelter, then at the magazines Thought and Jubilee. Appleton-Weber received her M.A. (1957) and Ph.D. (1961) from Ohio State University and wrote her dissertation on medicinal liturgy and the relationship between sacred history and poetic form, as a way of integrating Christianity and her work of poetry. This study was published as Theology and Poetry in the Middle English Lyric (1969). She taught for three years at Smith College and from 1965-68 she was poetry editor of Literature East and West. Along with poetry readings and workshops at colleges and universities, Appleton-Weber has read poetry on tree walks sponsored by the Academy of American Poets in the New York area. Appleton-Weber has received grants and fellowships from Smith College (1964), the John Anson Kitteredge Educational Fund (1968-70), and the Creative Arts Public Service Program (1975-76). She was a Bunting Institute Fellow at Radcliffe College (1970-72) and has had residencies at Yaddo and Blue Mountain Center. In France from 1981-83 Appleton-Weber studied Chardin’s essays, correspondence, journal, and earlier texts of Le Phénoméne humain. On her return to the U.S. she began a new edition and translation of the work for an American publisher, to make the coherence and synthesis of the book available to readers, and also as a deeper training and tuning to the movements of cosmic evolutionary forms. OTHER WORKS: Contributor to anthologies and periodicals, including: Literature and the West (June 1966); Hand Book (1978); studia mystica (Fall 1979); Teilhard Perspective (Dec. 1985, Dec. 1987); ‘‘Le Christ universal et l’evolution selon Teilhard de Chardin’’ (Dec. 1990, Dec. 1991). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Appleton, S., Poetry Reading, 5 Feb. 1981, Hamilton College (recording, 1981). Commonweal (24 June 1977). Modern Philology (May 1971). NYTBR (11 Nov. 1973). North American Review (Spring 1977). Review of English Studies (Aug. 1971). —DARIA DONNELLY
ARENDT, Hannah Born 14 October 1906, Hanover, Germany; died 4 December 1975 Daughter of Paul and Martha Cohn Arendt; married Heinrich Bleucher, 1940 The only child of nonreligious, German-Jewish parents, Hannah Arendt received her formal education in Germany. She studied philosophy under Karl Jaspers at Heidelberg and took her doctorate in 1928, after completing a dissertation on St. Augustine. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, she fled to France then emigrated to the United States. Arendt made her greatest mark on the American academic community; an innovative and forceful political theorist, she taught at various universities across the country. Arendt’s best known work, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951, 1958), deals with the rise of totalitarianism in Germany and Russia. It offers a description of the fundamental structure of a totalitarian regime and presents an account of social and political conditions—such as the growth of imperialism and anti-Semitism— on which they were built. Above all, Arendt attributed the success of totalitarian movements to what she termed ‘‘organized loneliness.’’ Loneliness, for Arendt, is not merely solitude; it is a condition in which individuals have lost contact with the world as well as with one another. Worldless people do not understand themselves as belonging to the world because they no longer have the ability to add anything of their own to that world. Without a world shared between them, such people lack a ‘‘common sense’’— they cannot differentiate between reality and fiction—and are easily manipulated by the logic of totalitarian ideology. To Arendt, the rise of Nazism and Stalinism epitomized the crisis of the modern age. She treated totalitarianism as a radically new form of government, a form that was the outgrowth of experiences peculiar to modernity. Such experiences must be countered by a ‘‘new political principle’’ capable of upholding human dignity. In The Human Condition (1958), Arendt drew a picture of the classical polis, arguing that Periclean Athens made a sharp distinction between the public and the private realms: the private realm of the household was dominated by necessity, whereas human beings could be free in public. The separation of these two spheres signified to Arendt that certain activities thrive on concealment, while others demand a public audience. Delineating three basic modes of human activity—labor, work, and action— she suggested that only the last is a truly political activity. (In Between Past and Future, 1954, she held that ‘‘the raison d’être of politics is freedom, and its field of experience is action.’’) Only action is free, for it is the ‘‘spontaneous beginning of something new,’’ the capacity to initiate. In contrast, neither work nor labor belong in the public realm. Work—the creation of durable objects as opposed to articles of consumption—is dominated by a politically destructive meansends mentality. Labor—the ceaseless process in which we engage in order to insure our physical survival—is an activity to which we are driven by necessity. Arendt criticized the modern state that, in
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its preoccupation with matters such as the allocation of economic goods, gives public status to labor. This failure to distinguish between public and private has permitted the political sphere to be conquered by the forces of necessity and has deprived citizens of a public realm in which action is possible. Action requires an audience, for only through the presence—and the memory—of other people can individuals leave their personal marks in the world. To Arendt, only by appearing in the world in this manner can human beings guarantee the reality of their identities as separate and unique individuals. Thus human dignity is secured through the creation and maintenance of a public space. In On Revolution (1963), Arendt analyzed the character of revolutionary movements of the modern age. She was attracted to the American Revolution because she believed it had to do not just with liberation from oppression but with the foundation of political freedom. Limited government, Arendt insisted, was not the aim of the American founders: in order to forge a unity between 13 separate states, they had to create new power. In guaranteeing the space in which action could take place, the Constitution became the ‘‘foundation of freedom.’’ Arendt considered it unfortunate that revolutionary thought of the 19th and 20th centuries addressed the French Revolution rather than the American. The French Revolution was dominated by the need to alleviate mass poverty; it failed because no true political entity can be built where the citizenry lives in such destitution. While applauding the American Revolution as a political movement, Arendt deplored modern revolutions focusing on the amelioration of social ills rather than on the creation of a public realm. Although the concept of action plays a major role in Arendt’s work, she does not ignore the relationship between thought and action. Toward the end of her life, Arendt turned her attention increasingly to the phenomenon of thought. The New Yorker sent her to Jerusalem in 1961 to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Her report, which appeared first as a series of articles and then as Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), aroused considerable and bitter controversy. Arendt shocked her readers by asserting that while Eichmann’s behavior had been monstrous, his character was not. What struck Arendt most about the Nazi war criminal was his banality. The Life of the Mind (1977), suggests that Eichmann’s ability to commit monstrous crimes was related to his lack of thought. The capacity to judge between good and evil, in other words, is related to thought. In Thinking, the first volume of this two-part posthumously published work, Arendt maintained a distinction between reason and intellect, thinking and knowing. It is through thinking that human beings attempt to satisfy their quest for meaning. To some, Arendt was an elitist who cared little about the suffering masses around the world. To others, her sensitive writings on political action and the public arena, authority, tradition, violence, and truth provide insight into some of the most perplexing dilemmas of the modern era. It is in the nature of political theory to challenge old ways of thinking and to force its audience to think about political things from a new perspective. In
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the spirit of this tradition, Arendt may be controversial and frustrating, but she is never dull.
OTHER WORKS: Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin (1930). Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess (1947). Men in Dark Times (1968). On Violence (1969). Crises of the Republic (1969). Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman (1974).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Barnouw, D., Visible Spaces: Hannah Arendt and the German-Jewish Experience (1990). Benhabib, S., The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (1996). Bergen, B. J., The Banality of Evil: Hannah Arendt and ‘‘The Final Solution’’ (1998). Bowen-Moore, P., Hannah Arendt’s Philosophy of Natality (1989). Burks, V. C., A Speculative History of Freedom: Thoughts Inspired by a Reading of Hannah Arendt’s Theory (dissertation, 1994). Canovan, M., Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (1992). Canovan, M., The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt (1977). Clarke, J. P., Hannah Arendt: Revisioning a Politics of Action Through a Politics of Judgement (dissertation, 1993). Corvo, A., The World In-between: Hannah Arendt’s Philosophy of Education (dissertation, 1989). Curtis, K., Our Sense of the Real: Aesthetic Experience and Arendtian Politics (1999). Disch, L. J., Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy (1994, 1996). Dossa, S., The Public Realm and the Public Self: The Political Theory of Hannah Arendt (1989). Ettinger, E., Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger (1995). Felder, D. G., The 100 Most Influential Women of All Time: A Ranking Past and Present (1996). Gottsegen, M. G., The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt (1994). Hansen, P. B., Hannah Arendt: Politics, History and Citizenship (1993). Hinchman, L. P. and S. Hinchman, eds., Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays (1994). Honig, B., ed., Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (1995). Kateb, G., Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (1984). Kielmansegg, P. et al, eds., Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss: German Emigres and American Political Thought After World War II (1997). Kuracina, S. J., Hannah Arendt’s Phenomenology of Politics (dissertation, 1983). Lloyd, M. J., Liberalism and Republicanism and the Thought of Hannah Arendt (dissertation, 1993). May, D., Hannah Arendt (1986). May, L. and J. Kohn, eds., Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years Later (1996). McGowan, J., Hannah Arendt: An Introduction (1998). McGowan, J. P. and C. J. Calhoun, eds., Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics (1997). Nordquist, J., Hannah Arendt (1989). Nordquist, J., Hannah Arendt (II): A Bibliography (1997). Parekh, B. C., Hannah Arendt and the Search for a New Political Philosophy (1981). Passerin d’Entreves, M., The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt (1994). Pateman, C. and M. L. Shanley, eds., Feminist Interpretations and Political Theory (1991). Ring, J., The Political Consequences of Thinking: Gender and Judaism in the Work of Hannah Arendt (1997). StoneMediatore, S. R., Hannah Arendt, Experience, and Political Thinking: Storytelling as Critical Praxis (1997). Villa, D. R., Politics, Philosophy, Terror: Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt (1999). Washington, J., Hannah Arendt’s Conception of
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the Political Realm (dissertation, 1978). Waterman, R. D., Political Action: Dialogues with Hannah Arendt (dissertation, 1983). Watson, D., Arendt (1992). Young-Bruehl, E., Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (1982). Other references: NR (15 June 1963). NYTBR (19 May 1963, 28 May 1978). Political Theory 5 (May 1977). Review of Politics (Jan. 1953). Prins, B., Hannah Arendt: Totalitarianism, Domination, and Personal Responsibility (video, 1988). The Holocaust: Judgment in Jerusalem (video, 1987, 1998). —LAURA GREYSON
ARMSTRONG, Charlotte Born 2 May 1905, Vulcan, Michigan; died 18 July 1969, Glendale, California Also wrote under: Jo Valentine Daughter of Frank Hall and Clara Pascoe Armstrong; married Jack Lewi, 1928 Having begun as poet (several poems appeared in the New Yorker) and playwright (two plays ran briefly on Broadway), Charlotte Armstrong soon turned to writing suspense novels, her first three being conventional detective stories. The detective, MacDougal (‘‘Mac’’) Duff is a former history professor who has discovered he prefers real-life puzzles to academic ones. In Lay On, Mac Duff! (1942), and in The Case of the Weird Sisters (1943), he is the conventional outsider who solves other people’s mysteries and then moves on. In The Innocent Flower (1945), however, he becomes involved with a divorcee and her six children; with his commitment to them, Armstrong’s use of him ends. A number of Armstrong’s stories are inverted mysteries in which the identity of the criminal is revealed early. In other novels, suspense is created by a race against time. Sometimes, terror is evoked when an innocent person is trapped in an enclosed space with several people, at least one of whom poses a threat. The Case of the Weird Sisters, a Mac Duff mystery, falls into this group, as does The Albatross (1957), in which, ironically, the threatening characters are invited into the home of the victims. Other variants are The Girl with a Secret (1959), The Witch’s House (1963), and The Turret Room (1965). Another novel of particular interest is A Little Less Than Kind (1963), the Hamlet story reset in contemporary California. Using the Shakespearean situation, Armstrong examines motivations and relationships, and although her dénouement is quite different from Shakespeare’s, it develops logically from the situation and characters. A Dram of Poison (1956), despite its serious central situation, is a comic novel, with an unlikely set of characters uniting in a common purpose and discovering in the process much that is admirable in each other.
Along with family relationships, Armstrong was especially interested in children and old people. A recurring motif in her work is that of an innocent child thought to be responsible for a death. Concern over the impact of the accusation on the child leads others to seek out the truth, and an adult murderer is unmasked (The Innocent Flower, 1945, and The Mark of the Hand, 1963). Another recurrent theme in Armstrong’s novels is that of our responsibility toward one another. Characters are shown involving themselves in others’ problems because they know that if they do not help, no one else will. The title character in The One-Faced Girl (1963) defines ‘‘good guys’’ as those who ‘‘don’t want other people hurt. They feel it, themselves. So if any one is in pain or trouble, then they not only want to help, they are obliged. They just about have to.’’ This concept underlies much of Armstrong’s fiction; combined with her skill in handling complex plots and her interest in motivation and character, it helps to account for the consistent popularity her work has had. Armstrong’s novels have attracted filmmakers of three nations. The Case of the Three Weird Sisters was filmed by British National Films in 1948. Warner Brothers made The Unsuspected (1946) in 1947, and Twentieth Century-Fox filmed Mischief (1950) in 1952, under the title Don’t Bother to Knock. The latter is noteworthy for Marilyn Monroe’s portrayal of a deranged babysitter. More recently, French writer-director Claude Chabrol based his La Rupture (1970) on Armstrong’s The Balloon Man (1968).
OTHER WORKS: Ring Around Elizabeth, a Comedy in Three Acts (1942). The Chocolate Cobweb (1948). The Black-Eyed Stranger (1951). Catch-As-Catch-Can (1952). The Trouble in Thor (1953). The Better to Eat You (1954). Walk Out on Death (1954). The Dream Walker (1955). Murder’s Nest (1955). Alibi for Murder (1956). Duo: The Girl with a Secret and Incident at a Corner (1959). The Seventeen Widows of Sans Souci (1959). Something Blue (1959). The Mark of the Hand and Then Came Two Women (1963). Dream of Fair Woman (1966). The Gift Shop (1966). I See You (1966). Lemon in the Basket (1967). Seven Seats to the Moon (1969). The Protégé (1970). The Charlotte Armstrong Reader (ed. A. Cromie, 1970). The Charlotte Armstrong Treasury (ed. A. Cromie, 1972). The Charlotte Armstrong Festival (ed. A. Cromie, 1975).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cromie, A., preface to The Charlotte Armstrong Festival (1975). Cromie, A., preface to The Charlotte Armstrong Reader (1970). Cromie, A., preface to The Charlotte Armstrong Treasury (1972). Other references: NYHTB (13 Sept. 1959). NYTBR (25 June 1950, 15 July 1951, 28 March 1954, 16 Jan. 1955, 5 Aug. 1956, 10 Nov. 1957, 12 April 1959, 10 Nov. 1963, 11 April 1965, 7 May 1967, 29 Oct. 1967). —MARY JEAN DEMARR
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ARNOW, Harriette (Louisa) Simpson Born 7 July 1908, Wayne County, Kentucky; died 22 March 1986, Ann Arbor, Michigan Also wrote under: H. Arnow, Harriette Simpson, H. L. Simpson Daughter of Elias and Mollie Jane Denney Simpson; married Harold Arnow, 1939; children: Marcella, Thomas Harriette Simpson Arnow’s best fiction is rooted in Kentucky, her native ground. With both parents being descendants of original Kentucky settlers, Arnow grew up hearing family stories dating from the American Revolution. These kindled her desire to write fiction, and tell stories herself. She attended Berea College for two years, taught school for a year, then studied at the University of Louisville, where she received a B.S. degree in 1930. In an act her family viewed as scandalous, Arnow quit her job in 1934 and moved to a furnished room in downtown Cincinnati near the city library, resolving to read ‘‘the great novels’’ and to write. She supported herself with odd jobs and worked for the Federal Writers’ Project. After her marriage to newspaperman Harold Arnow, she moved with him to a farm in southern Kentucky. They later settled in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1950. Arnow received national attention in 1935 with two short stories published in little magazines. Both demonstrate her skill at characterization and at depicting shocking violence. In 1936, she published the novel Mountain Path. It is based on Arnow’s experience of boarding with a hill family in a remote Kentucky hollow and teaching in a one-room schoolhouse; her year there was her first prolonged stay with the people who were to become the primary subjects of her fiction. The novel received appreciative reviews from such respected critics as Alfred Kazin, who decried Arnow’s inclusion of Kentucky fiction’s stock material— a mountain feud—but praised the novel’s most notable accomplishments: its realistic, uncondescending portraits of the hill poor and its ‘‘intimate revelation and occasional power.’’ Although in this novel, as in her subsequent ones, Arnow accurately—at times excessively—documents hill customs and dialect, her primary concern is moral choice and responsibility. ‘‘The Washerwoman’s Day,’’ published in Southern Review (Winter, 1936), is Arnow’s best and most anthologized short story. She movingly depicts the self-righteousness and the arrogance church members feel toward the ‘‘poor white trash’’ who violate their notions of decency. This story anticipates Arnow’s fuller treatment of narrow piousness in Hunter’s Horn (1949) and The Dollmaker (1954). Hunter’s Horn, Arnow’s second novel, was a critically acclaimed bestseller. The story of a hill farmer’s obsessive chase after an elusive red fox, the book dramatizes the cost of a compulsion as maniacal and as mythic as Ahab’s stalking of Moby Dick. Its riveting subplot centers on the fox hunter’s daughter, Suse, who yearns to escape mountain provinciality and impoverishment. The inability of her father to defy ingrained community values causes her to be bound to a life that will ‘‘break
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her to the plow.’’ Compelling characters and fluid prose, described by Malcolm Cowley as ‘‘poetry of earth,’’ make this novel exceptional. Arnow’s third novel, The Dollmaker, is a masterwork. Another bestseller, it earned critical accolades, coming in second to Faulkner’s The Fable for the National Book Award. Gertie Nevels, the hulking heroine who tries to preserve her integrity and her family’s unity after their migration from the Kentucky hills to a wartime housing project in Detroit, is Arnow’s most arresting character. Arnow’s chronicle of Gertie grappling with religious and social prejudice, labor strikes, economic insecurity, family strife, and her own faintheartedness is a profound rendering of hope, disappointment, and anguish. A novel rich on many levels, The Dollmaker mirrors Gertie’s struggle in its primary symbol, the cherrywood man Gertie carves. The novel won Arnow the Friends of American Literature Award and was voted best novel of the year in the Saturday Review’s national critics’ poll. Paramount Pictures bought the film rights and Jane Fonda played Gertie in a made-for-television movie in 1983. Two social histories were the result of 20 years of research on the settlers in southern Kentucky and northern Tennessee from 1780 to 1803. Seedtime on the Cumberland (1960), which won an Award of Merit from the American Association of State and Local History and a citation from the Tennessee Historical Commission, celebrates the settlers’ resourcefulness in conquering a hostile environment—getting food, clothing, and shelter, and struggling to hold the land against Indians and governments. A companion piece, Flowering of the Cumberland (1963) focuses on the activities requiring social intercourse and an exchange of goods and services—language, education, household life, agriculture, industry, and trade. Besides demonstrating a command of several fields of learning, these volumes, containing vivid reenactments of the settlers’ everyday crises, are often as gripping as Arnow’s best fiction. Arnow’s more recent novels, The Weedkiller’s Daughter (1970) and The Kentucky Trace: A Novel of the American Revolution (1974), lack the full-bodied characters and the narrative drive that propel her earlier novels. The former has a new setting— suburbia—and the latter a different time from that of her distinguished fiction. Although Arnow’s work enjoyed a reassessment in the 1980s, it has still not achieved the stature her talent merits. Too often writers whose work is firmly rooted in one locale are relegated to a minor status by the term ‘‘regional,’’ which can suggest a limited appeal. Arnow’s regional association can be doubly damaging to her reputation. Since Kentucky is often excluded from ‘‘southern’’ literature, and ‘‘Appalachian’’ literature has only recently become a separate category, Arnow’s books are frequently not on lists of fiction demarcated by region. Far outdistancing other writers treating hill people from the southern Appalachian region, Arnow is the first and only American novelist to describe them with fidelity and justice and to place them in a setting authentic to the last detail. But Arnow does more than evoke an area no other writer has captured. Like Twain and
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Faulkner, she creates a private world whose inhabitants face dilemmas reaching beyond geographical boundaries. Her best fiction depicts the conflict between an individual conscience and society—whether it be family, community, or the wider world. If Arnow’s novels at times need streamlining, they contain worlds as palpable and as real as the reader’s own. If her hardy combatants fail to achieve their goals, they nonetheless take responsibility for the outcome of their lives, and endure. By the 1990s Arnow had been called a regionalist, an Appalachian writer, naturalist, realist, and transcendentalist—yet she resisted categorization. As she commented in an interview, she thought of ‘‘Appalachia’’ as a chain of mountains and didn’t like the appellation, ‘‘woman writer.’’ (‘‘Well, what’s so unusual about a woman writer?’’ she has said. ‘‘They’ve been around since Sappho and before.’’) Additionally, she wasn’t concerned ‘‘about posterity.’’ Nonetheless, she realized her place in American literature with The Dollmaker which was reprinted in 1999, while critical attention since the 1970s had influenced the reprinting of another of her five published novels, Hunter’s Horn (reprinted 1997), as well as her three nonfiction works. Her short stories and essays remain uncollected. In her later years, Arnow led writing workshops at the Hindman Settlement School Writers Workshop in Kentucky (1978-85) and other sites and was invited as a speaker on several occasions. From the interviews conducted in her later years, we learn about Arnow’s writing process. She always wanted to be a poet and ‘‘wasted a lot of time,’’ as she puts it, imitating the style of Robert Browning and John Milton. Unable to write poetry, she turned to Milton’s prose: ‘‘Reading (him) was like watching an incoming tide on a rocky beach. . . The whole sea carrying the burden of the tide, came crashing near me. So did Milton’s sentences.’’ Besides Milton, Arnow also admired Thomas Hardy and Mark Twain, and among her contemporaries Wilma Dykeman, Jim Wayne Miller, David H. Looff, and James Still. One of her concerns in her writing was that she was often ‘‘afflicted by too many words, like my characters.’’ As an example, she cited that it took 13 years to write Hunter’s Horn and 17 rewritings of the first chapter in order to hone ‘‘a style not exactly bleak, but not wordy, a narrative with no adverbs and few adjectives, a style ‘of self.’’’
ATHERTON
Frontiers, Mountain Life and Work, Nation, Wilson Library Bulletin, Writer’s Digest. Unpublished novels, short stories, journal, drafts of published works, and correspondence are in the Special Collection at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ballard, S. L., Harriette Simpson Arnow’s Central Novel: Hunter’s Horn (dissertation, 1987). Brooks, C., Approaches to Literature (1939). Chung, H. K., ed., Harriette Simpson Arnow: Critical Essays on Her Work (1995). Chung, H. K., ‘‘Harriette Simpson Arnow’s Authorial Testimony: Toward of The Dollmaker’’ in Critique (Spring 1995). Eckley, W., H. Arnow (1974). Groover, K. K., The Wilderness Within: American Women Writers and Spiritual Quest (dissertation, 1996). Haines, C. H., To Sing Her Own Song: The Literary Work of Harriette Simpson Arnow (dissertation, 1993). Hobbs, G., ‘‘Harriette Arnow’s Literary Journey: From the Parish to the World’’ (dissertation, 1975). Hobbs, G. ‘‘Harriette Arnow’s Kentucky Novels: Beyond Local Color,’’ in KCN, (Fall 1976). Hobbs, G., ‘‘Starting Out in the Thirties: Harriette Arnow’s Literary Genesis’’ in Literature at the Barricades: The American Writer in the 1930s (1982). Oates, J. C., afterword to Arnow’s The Dollmaker (1972). Turner, M. B., Agrarianism and Loss: the Kentucky Novels of Harriette Simpson Arnow (dissertation, 1997). Reference works: Bulletin of Bibliography (March 1989). CA. DLB. Other references: MELUS (interview, Summer 1982). MQR (Spring 1990). Nation (31 Jan. 1976). NYHTB (6 Sept. 1936). Harriette Simpson Arnow, 1908-1986 (video, 1987). —GLENDA HOBBS, UPDATED BY KAREN MCLENNAN
ASHLEY, Ellen See SEIFERT, Elizabeth
ATHERTON, Gertrude (Franklin Horn)
Most of Arnow’s critical attention still focuses on The Dollmaker and the complexity of Gertie Nevels. In a critical text edited by Haeja K. Chung (Critique Spring 1995), Arnow’s short stories, a journal, her social histories, and her other novels, including the unpublished ‘‘Between the Flowers,’’ are thoroughly examined.
Born 30 October 1857, San Francisco, California; died 15 June 1948, San Francisco, California Also wrote under: Asmodeus, Frank Lin Daughter of Thomas and Gertrude Franklin Horn; married George H. Bowen Atherton, 1876, children: two
OTHER WORKS: Old Burnside (1977, reprint 1996). Short stories include: ‘‘Marigolds and Mules’’ in Kosmos (Feb.-March 1935), ‘‘A Mess of Pork’’ in The New Talent (Oct.Dec. 1935), ‘‘The Two Hunters’’ in Esquire (Jul. 1942), ‘‘Love?’’ in Twigs (Fall 1971), ‘‘Fra Lippi and Me’’ in Georgia Review (Winter 1979); articles and essays in Appalachian Heritage,
The daughter of a Yankee businessman from California and a Southern belle, Gertrude Atherton spent the first 30 years of her life in and around San Francisco, a city whose history and destiny she utilized as subject and background for her favorite character, a new Western woman. She sporadically attended private schools, eloped at seventeen with a suitor of her mother’s, bore two children, and rebelled against the conventions of domestic life.
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Only after the death of her husband did she begin her serious writing career in New York in 1888. Atherton’s first significant novel was Patience Sparhawk and Her Times (1897), published in London where her novels at first attracted more critical attention than in the U.S. This novel introduced the new Western woman, who in three subsequent novels symbolized the evolution of Western civilization at the turn of the century. In Patience Sparhawk and Her Times, Atherton offered an ironic appraisal of American self-reliance and society in the 1890s from the point of view of an aspiring Western woman. Through her characterization of the heroine as an idealistic, self-reliant, but passionate woman, born into lowly, isolated circumstances in California, Atherton narrated a romantic-realistic and psychological version of the 19th century argument over the effect of heredity and environment on the development of the individual. In American Wives and English Husbands (1898), Atherton’s independent-spirited heroine, Lee Tarleton, proud of her Creole heritage and aristocratic California upbringing, is confronted with the ‘‘solid fact’’ of English tradition and convention, personified by Cecil Maundrell, scion of a landed English family, whom she marries and who expects her to become his second self. Their marriage tests the past and present values of the two civilizations in regard to the relationship between man and woman and to the perpetuation of the race. In this novel and also in The Doomswoman (1893), The Californians (1898), and Ancestors (1907), Atherton penetrated the facade of civilization that organizes the basic relationship between man and woman and between individuals and nature. She displayed a continually ironic stance toward the argument on heredity and environment by labeling as a ‘‘fool’s paradise’’ an individual’s excessive and illusory dependence on either inherited characteristics or a given environment as a path to happiness. Her independent and self-conflicted heroine challenges the assumption that a woman unthinkingly accepts a passive, procreative function as a definition of herself and of the relationship between herself and nature and between herself and civilization. Atherton enacted her criticism of Howells’ ‘‘dull’’ realism by a call for originality and imagination in American literature. From Hippolyte Taine, she borrowed the technique of lifting a type of character out of the commonplace conditions to which he or she was apparently doomed and transferring him or her to an environment, replete with change and opportunity, where latent potentialities could be developed. From her first novel to her last, Atherton’s genius lay in her ability to tell an exciting story about a character or characters worthy of attention as they confronted the environmental and psychological circumstances of their lives, the ‘‘fool’s paradise’’ which they could or could not manage. She believed an author was obligated to extend the knowledge of readers beyond their provincial existence. Not always successful in style and form according to current critical tastes, Atherton nonetheless told stories in the form of the novel according to the logic of sometimes invisible patterns of cause-and-effect and yesterday-today and expected her readers to apprehend and participate in them.
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OTHER WORKS: What Dreams May Come (1888). Hermia Suydam (1889). Los Cerritos, A Romance of the Modern Time (1890). A Question of Time (1891). Before the Gringo Came (1894, enlarged in The Splendid Idle Forties, 1902). A Whirl Asunder (1895). His Fortunate Grace (1897). A Daughter of the Vine (1899). Senator North (1900). The Aristocrats (1901). The Conqueror (1902). A Few of Hamilton’s Letters (1903). Mrs. Pendleton’s Four-in-Hand (1903). Rulers of Kings (1904). The Bell in the Fog, and Other Stories (1905). The Traveling Thirds (1905). Rezánov (1906). The Gorgeous Isle (1908). Tower of Ivory (1910). Julia France and Her Times (1912). Perch of the Devil (1914). California, an Intimate History (1914). Mrs. Balfame (1916). Life in the War Zone (1916). The Living Present (1917). The White Morning (1918). The Avalanche (1919). Transplanted (1919). The Sisters-in-Law (1921). Sleeping Fires (1922). Black Oxen (1923). The Crystal Cup (1925). The Immortal Marriage (1927). The Jealous Gods (1928). Dido, Queen of Hearts (1929). The Sophisticates (1931). Adventures of a Novelist (1932, reprinted 1980). The Foghorn (1934). Golden Peacock (1936). Rezánov and Doña Concha (1937). Can Women Be Gentlemen? (1938). The House of Lee (1940). The Horn of Life (1942). Golden Gate Country (1945). My San Francisco (1946). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bradley, J., Valedictory Performances of Three American Women Novelists (dissertation, 1981). Bryant, B., Late California Writers (audio cassette, 1960, 1969). Christensen, L. E., Gertrude Atherton: The Novelist as Historian (audio cassette, 1982). Courtney, W. L., The Feminine Note in Fiction (1904). Dickey, F.A., Gertrude Atherton, Family, and Celebrated Friends (archive manuscript, 1981). Forman, H. J. ‘‘A Brilliant California Novelist: Gertrude Atherton’’ in California Historical Society Quarterly (March, 1961). Forrey, C. D., ‘‘Gertrude Atherton and the New Woman,’’ in CHSQ 55 (Fall 1976). Jackson, J. H., Gertrude Atherton (1940). Knight, G. C., The Strenuous Age in American Literature (1954). Leider, E. W., California’s Daughter: Gertrude Atherton and Her Times (1991). McClure, C. S., ‘‘Gertrude Atherton, 1857-1948,’’ in ALR 9 (Spring 1976). McClure, C. S., Gertrude Atherton (Boise State University Western Writers Series, 1976). Parker, G. T., William Dean Howells: Realism and Feminism (Harvard English Studies, 1973). Phillips, N. P.,‘‘The Woman’s Tournament: Men and Marriage in Six Novels by Gertrude Atherton’’ (thesis, 1981). Shumate, A., A San Francisco Scandal: The California of George Gordon, ’49er, Pioneer, and Builder of South Park in San Francisco (1976, 1994). Starr, K. Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915 (1973). Underwood, J. C., Literature and Insurgency (1914). Weir, S., ‘‘Gertrude Atherton: The Limits of Feminism,’’ in SJS 1 (1975). Other references: The American West (July 1974). The Bookman (July 1929). —CHARLOTTE S. MCCLURE
ATOM, Ann See WALWORTH, Jeannette Hadermann
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
AUERBACH, Hilda See MORLEY, Hilda
AUSTIN, Jane Goodwin Born 25 January 1831, Worcester, Massachusetts; died 30 March 1894, Roxbury, Massachusetts Daughter of Isaac and Elizabeth Hammatt Goodwin; married Loring Henry Austin, circa 1850 Austin’s father died during her childhood and her mother moved to Boston, where Austin was educated in private schools. When her own three children were grown, she wrote novels, as well as fiction for such periodicals as Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly, Putnam’s, Lippincott’s, and the Galaxy. Austin lived for a short time (circa 1869) in Concord, where she knew Louisa May Alcott, Emerson, and the Hawthornes. Dora Darling; or, The Daughter of the Regiment (1864) is in many ways Austin’s most charming novel. Mrs. Darley, the mother of twelve-year-old Dora, sympathizes with the Union and hides a Union soldier even though she is dying. Dora’s ‘‘selfish and depraved’’ father and her brother support the Confederacy, and Dora is sent, after her mother’s death, to live with a cruel aunt. With the aid of an aged freedman, she escapes and joins the Union army as a vivandière. She is befriended by the soldier her mother had aided (who turns out to be her cousin from Massachusetts) and by the chaplain, who undertakes her education. Dora’s initiative and sterling character contrast sharply with the treachery of the villains in the novel. None of Austin’s novels involves more coincidences than Cipher (1869), on which Louisa May Alcott is supposed to have collaborated. It features bastardy and miscegenation, a doctor who poisons his wife, long-lost heirs, a poisoned Italian bracelet, a Spanish gypsy, voodoo, and more happenings that strain the reader’s credence. Inspired by William Bradford’s newly rediscovered history, Of Plymouth Plantation, printed in 1856, and by traditions handed down from her own Mayflower ancestors, Austin wrote several books about the Pilgrims: Standish of Standish (1889), Betty Alden (1891), A Nameless Nobleman (1881), David Alden’s Daughter (1892), and Dr. LeBaron and His Daughters (1890). In Standish of Standish, she is content to flesh out Bradford’s narrative with dialogue and characterization, making Myles Standish the hero and foreshadowing John Billington’s bad end by depicting the entire Billington family as coarse or troublesome. Standish’s two marriages are romanticized here and in the other books. ‘‘The Love Life of William Bradford,’’ in David Alden’s Daughter, is entirely fabricated and supported by fictitious documentation. Bradford’s one-sentence dismissal of Governor Carver’s wife—‘‘And his wife, being a weak woman, died within five or six weeks after him’’—becomes a tear-soaked 34-page saga, ‘‘The Wife of John Carver,’’ in David Alden’s Daughter.
AUSTIN
Giving prominence to Pilgrim mothers, Austin skillfully retells such stories as the wooing of Patricia Molines, the treachery of Oldhame and Lyford, and the ousting of Morton from Merry Mount. Details of geography, weaponry, dress, tableware, diet, and genealogy are carefully researched. The speech, particularly of those characters who are soldiers, sailors, or children, often seems unduly formal or literary. Although Austin’s works, like those of her friend Louisa May Alcott, show a decided split between edifying books for young people and sensational shockers, she signed her real name to all and seems always to delight in her story, whether contemporary or historical, probable or improbable. OTHER WORKS: Fairy Dreams; or, Wanderings in Elf-land (1859). Kinah’s Curse (1864). The Novice; or, Mother Church Thwarted (1865). The Tailor Boy (1865). Outpost (1866). The Shadow of Moloch Mountain (1870). Moonfolk (1874). Mrs. Beauchamp Brown (1880). The Desmond Hundred (1882). Nantucket Scraps (1882). It Never Did Run Smooth (1892). Queen Tempest (1892). The Twelve Great Diamonds (1892). The Cedar Swamp Mystery (1901). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Blanck, J., Bibliography of American Literature (1955). Cameron, K. W., Emerson, Thoreau and Concord in Early Newspapers (1958). Reference works: American Authors: 1600-1900 (1938). Dictionary of American Biography (1928). —SUSAN SUTTON SMITH
AUSTIN, Mary Hunter Born 9 September 1868, Carlinville, Illinois; died 13 August 1934, Santa Fe, New Mexico Daughter of George and Savilla Graham Hunter; married Stafford Austin, 1891 Mary Hunter Austin was born into a family that had little understanding of her unusual talents. Her father died from a malarial infection contracted during the Civil War, and with his death, Austin lost her one source of literary encouragement. In 1888 Austin graduated from Blackborn College and the family filed homestead claims in the Tejon district of Joaquin Valley, California. This landscape and way of life were to form the most important influence on Austin’s writing. Her first important book was The Land of Little Rain (1903), a study which drew heavily upon her experiences with nature. The Land of Little Rain is a collection of essays dealing with the Southwest—its people and its religion. A lover of the land, Austin writes: ‘‘One must summer and winter with the land and wait its occasions.’’ Austin does not like the term ‘‘desert,’’ which to her
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indicates a land which will support no man. The desert is full of that which will support life, although it is up to man to find this support, and the white man has not been blessed with this facility. Much of the collection is taken up with the struggle between life and death. It is not the land alone that interests Austin, but the people who inhabit it as well. Austin’s style reflects an intimacy with the earth itself. She uses Indian names to describe nature, and her descriptions are lyrical with an instinct for the precise word to convey natural phenomena. The Flock (1906) deals with the history of sheep-raising in the Southwest. Austin introduces into the work the allegorical idea of man being like sheep in possessing the instincts of the social ‘‘flock mind.’’ Of the flock mind Austin observes, ‘‘I cannot say very well what it is, except that it is less than the sum of all their intelligences.’’ Ecology is one of the major concerns of this work, and Austin is sympathetic to a land brutally abused by humans in their attempts to survive. Austin also wrote on the feminist concerns of the day, and her novels reflect the problems women face in both marriage and career. A Woman of Genius (1912) contains both semiautobiographical material and Austin’s strongest statement on the feminist choice between career and marriage. It has been compared favorably with Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street. Critic Edward Wagenknecht believes the work covers ‘‘everything that is important in woman’s rebellion against man, for on its deepest level the book is a study of creative power, of its connection with sexual power, and of the conflict between art and love.’’ The childhood background of its heroine, Olivia Lattimore, is obviously based on Austin’s own childhood. Olivia triumphs over hardship through her genius and becomes a success on the New York stage. The crisis of the novel is Olivia’s decision whether to marry and fulfill the conventions or to follow her genius. When her lover telegrams ‘‘Will you marry me?’’ Olivia can only reply, ‘‘If you marry my work.’’ He cannot accept this situation and marries another woman. Olivia faces a breakdown and eventually marries a playwright she has known for some time. She expects a good marriage between people of similar interests, but one lacking in the excitement of her early love. Earth Horizon (1932) chronicles the life of Austin and is written in third person, as was Austin’s style in nonfiction writing. The book describes the life of a gifted woman in a conventional world, and Austin makes a convincing case for the oppression of women through the examples of prejudice she personally experienced. Austin reports mystical experiences with God and nature that made her feel there was a particular pattern to her existence, a pattern which would make its shape known to her over the years. She concludes her story, ‘‘It is not that we work upon the Cosmos, but it works in us.’’ The feminist bias of the work is particularly strong in her observations on marriage. She works from knowledge of both her mother’s attitude toward marriage and her own unhappy experience. She deals with the struggle of women for equality in the Midwest of her own time, and speaks frankly of the instinctual sexual desire in women. The book also portrays Austin’s love for the Southwest, and her feelings that she had to come into a mystical rapport with the region before she could
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write about it. Her love for the Indian people and her efforts to preserve their life and culture are given an important place in her history. OTHER WORKS: Isidro (1905). Santa Lucia (1908). Lost Borders (1909). The Basket Woman, A Book of Fanciful Tales for Children (1910). Outland (1910). The Arrow Maker (1911). Christ in Italy (1912). Fire (1912). The Green Bough (1913). The Lovely Lady (1913). California, Land of the Sun (1914). Love and the Soul Maker (1914). The Ford (1917). The Trail Book (1918). The Young Woman Citizen (1918). No. 26 Jayne St. (1920). The American Rhythm (1923). The Land of Journey’s Ending (1924). Everyman’s Genius (1925). The Man Jesus (1925). The Children Sing in the Far West (1928). Taos Pueblo (1930). Starry Adventure (1931). Experiences Facing Death (1931). Indian Pottery of the Rio Grande (1934). Can Prayer Be Answered? (1934). One Smoke Stories (1934). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brooks, V. W., The Confident Years: 1815-1915 (1932). Campbell, J. L., ‘‘From Self to Earth and Back Again in the Fiction of Mary Austin’’ (thesis, 1997). Carew-Miller, A., Telling the Truth About Herself: Mary Austin and the Autobiographical Voice of Feminist Theory (dissertation, 1994). Church, P. P., Wind’s Trail: The Early Life of Mary Austin (1990). Dickson, C. E., Nature and Nation: Mary Austin and Cultural Negotiations of the American West,1900-1914 (dissertation, 1996). Luhan, D., and A. C. Henderson, ‘‘Search for Revolutionary Change in the Desert Southwest’’ (thesis, 1998). Farrar, J. C., ed., The Literary Spotlight (1924). Fink, A., Mary, a Biography of Mary Austin (1983). Ford, T. W., ‘‘The American Rhythm: Mary Austin’s Poetic Principle,’’ in Western American Literature 5. Hart, T. J., Tender Horizons: The American Landscapes of Austin and Stein (dissertation, 1996). Hoyer, M. T., Dancing Ghosts: Native American and Christian Syncretism in Mary Austin’s Work (1998). Jones, L. A., Uncovering the Rest of Herstory in the Frontier Myth: Mary Austin, Mabel Graulich. Klimasmith, M. & E., eds., Exploring Lost Borders: Critical Essays on Mary Austin (1999). Kircher, C. L., Women in/on Nature: Mary Austin, Gretel Ehrlich, Terry Tempest Williams, and Ann Zwinger (dissertation, 1995, 1998). Langlois, K. S., A Search for Significance: Mary Austin, the New York Years (dissertation, 1987). Lanigan, E. F., Mary Austin: Song of a Maverick (1989). Lyday, J. W., Mary Austin: The Southwest Works (1968). Milowski, C. P., Revisioning the American Frontier: Mary Hallock Foote, Mary Austin, Willa Cather, and the Western Narrative (dissertation, 1996). Nelson, B. J. D., Mary Austin’s Domestic Wildness: An Ecocritical Investigation of Animals (dissertation, 1997). Pearce, T. M., Mary Hunter Austin (1965). Stineman, E.,Mary Hunter Austin: An American Woman of Letters (dissertation, 1989 1987). Van Doren, C., in Contemporary American Novelists (1931). Wagenknecht, E., in Cavalcade of the American Novel (1952). Webster, B., ‘‘Owens Valley’s Mary Austin’’ in Album (Oct. 1992). White, W. A., The Autobiography (1946). Wynn, D., A Critical Study of the Writings of Mary Hunter Austin (abridged dissertation; 1941). —LOIS BURNS
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AYER
AVERY, Martha Moore
OTHER WORKS: The papers of Martha Moore Avery are collected at Xavier College, Sydney, Nova Scotia.
Born 6 April 1851, Steuben, Maine; died 8 August 1929, Medford, Massachusetts Daughter of Albion King Paris and Katherine Leighton Moore; married Millard Filmore Avery, 1880 (died 1890) After her mother’s death in 1864, Martha Moore Avery, the fourth of eight children, lived with her grandfather, Samuel Moore, a Maine politician, instead of with her father, a house builder. She attended the village school and a private girls’ school. In 1880 she joined the Unitarian church where she met her husband. When her husband left home to become a traveling salesman in 1886, she and her daughter moved to Boston. Her husband died in 1890. In Boston, influenced mainly by Dr. Charles D. Sherman, ‘‘a Master in Cosmic Law,’’ Avery became much involved with political ideas and movements. In 1891 she joined the Socialist Labor Party, quickly attaining some importance in its ranks. During the 1890s, Avery became associated with another socialist, David Goldstein, a cigarmaker born in England. She founded the Karl Marx Class in 1898 (which in 1901 became the Boston School of Political Economy) with Goldstein as secretary. However, both Avery and Goldstein became increasingly disenchanted with socialism and, simultaneously, drawn to Catholicism. After her daughter’s conversion to Catholicism and entrance into the Congrégation de Notre Dame, as Sister St. Mary Martha in 1900, as a result of the girl’s Quebec convent education, Avery herself became a Catholic in 1904, totally renouncing Marxism. Goldstein converted a year later. However, even before their conversions, they collaborated on Socialism: The Nation of Fatherless Children (1903), a critical exposition of the social and moral implications of socialism. Although the tone is strident in its Catholic bias, the content of the book reflects Avery’s and Goldstein’s intimate knowledge of the history and tactics of socialism. The authors’ use of quotations from Marx and Engels, followed by refutations, works effectively. They take a strong stand against many socialist credos; in particular, they charge that the result of irresponsible sexual unions would be homeless children who would become wards of the state. The result of Avery’s second collaboration with Goldstein, Bolshevism: Its Cure (1919), is dedicated to the Knights of Columbus; it launches not only an assault against socialism but also a campaign for Catholicism and patriotism. Working from the teachings of Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical Rerum Novarum, the authors elaborate on the basic differences between Marxism and Catholicism; advocate support of trade unions and collective bargaining; and try to promote reform, but reform through faith in God and love of country rather than through socialism. Avery turned more and more toward political activism. She and Goldstein took to the streets using the very tactics of the socialists. They founded the Catholic Truth Guild, a lay apostolate that preached Catholicism from auto vans, first in New England and then in other parts of the country. Avery was an active apostle on the streets of Boston until only a few days before her death.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Carrigan, D. O., ‘‘A Forgotten Yankee Marxist,’’ in NEQ (March 1969). Carrigan, D. O., ‘‘M. M. Avery: Crusader for Social Justice,’’ in Cath-HistRev (April 1968). Goldstein, D., Autobiography of a Campaigner for Christ (1936). Reference works: James, E. T. et all, eds., Notable American Women, 1607-1950 (article by J. P. Shenton, 1971). —SUZANNE ALLEN
AYER, Harriet Hubbard Born 27 June 1849, Chicago, Illinois; died 23 November 1903, New York, New York Daughter of Henry George and Juliet Smith Hubbard; married Herbert Copeland Ayer, 1865 (divorced) Businesswoman, journalist, and popular writer of beauty manuals, Harriet Hubbard Ayer was born to a prominent Chicago family, the third of four children. Considered shy and sickly as a child, minimally educated at a Catholic convent, married at sixteen to the conventional son of a Chicago industrialist, she astonished her society by developing within a few years into one of the city’s leading hostesses, renowned for her beauty and for her individuality in flaunting conventions by, for example, inviting actors to her home. Largely self-taught, she early displayed a driving will, a creative personality, and a flair for the dramatic that would enable her later to triumph over a series of severe reversals. In the early 1880s, left in financial straits by the bankruptcy of her husband and angered by his drinking and infidelities, Ayer defied Victorian conventions by divorcing her husband and, following the example of the many self-made men she had known in Chicago society, establishing her own New York City business, a cosmetic firm. Her chief product was a cream whose formula, she contended, she had bought from a Parisian chemist whose grandfather had originally invented it for the famed Napoleonic beauty, Juliet Récamier. Largely because of her advertising genius in connecting her products with glamourous French traditions of beauty, with her own socialite background, and with stage favorites like Lily Langtry who endorsed her products, for a time her company flourished. Of mercurial temperament, Ayer was subject to periodic emotional disorders—a condition which led to a probable morphine addiction. In the early 1890s disagreements with family members and especially with a vindictive male business associate were climaxed by her involuntary commitment for 14 months to a mental institution. Although her business and personal life were in
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shambles, in 1895 she persuaded the editor of the New York World to hire her to write a weekly column of beauty advice. Before long she also joined the reportorial staff, covering murder trials as well as writing exposés of city life, with a primary focus on women. In her books and columns on beauty, Ayer preached a protofeminist doctrine of attention to health, exercise, and mental discipline as the key to beauty. In an age of feminism and increasing freedom for women, she defined beauty as accessible to any woman who took proper care of her body. Responding to her own psychological difficulties and to the tenets of the 19th century natural health movement, she criticized tight-lacing and other artificial aids to beauty and often rejected the use of the commercial products she once had marketed. She wrote that she was ‘‘known world over as a physical culture crank.’’ As a professional woman she wore shortened skirts, masculine suits, and was a member of the Rainy Daisy moderate-dress reform group in New York City. She identified with the working women to whom her columns in the mass circulation World were directed. Yet Ayer never joined the suffrage movement. She protested that she was not really a dress reformer; she counselled women to wear corsets; and she advocated that older women use cosmetics to disguise their age, thereby furthering modern America’s fixation with youth as the epitome of beauty. She cautioned against tanned skin and vigorous exercise for women which might produce well-developed muscles. ‘‘The beautiful arm,’’ she wrote, should be ‘‘round, white, and plump,’’ and ‘‘should taper gently to the hand with an adorable curve at the small delicate wrist.’’ Ayer consistently advocated the conservative position that beauty was a woman’s greatest power. She argued that wives needed to pay attention to their looks to keep their husbands and working women to advance in their jobs. These attitudes were the ultimate rationale behind her columns on beauty. Ayer is an example both of the widespread influence of feminism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and of the enduring power of traditional attitudes about women, even among articulate, successful women who had experienced substantial discrimination in their own lives. Her life was unexpectedly cut short in 1903, when she died of pneumonia after a brief illness.
OTHER WORKS: Harriet Hubbard Ayer’s Book: A Complete and Authentic Treatise on the Law of Health and Beauty (1899). Woman’s Guide to Health and Beauty (1904).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ayer, M., and I. Taves, The Three Lives of Harriet Hubbard Ayer (1957). Bird, C., Enterprising Women (1976). Hamilton, H., ‘‘Harriet Hubbard Ayer’’ (ms., Chicago Historical Society, n.d.). Kirkland, C., Chicago Yesterdays (1919). Terhune, A., To the Best of My Memory (1930). —LOIS W. BANNER
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AYSCOUGH, Florence Wheelock Born 1878, Shanghai, China; died 24 April 1942, Chicago, Illinois Daughter of Thomas Reed and Edith Haswell Clark Wheelock; married Harley Farnsworth MacNair, 1935 Florence Wheelock Ayscough lived with her parents in China until she was nine years old, and then made her first trip to America to attend school in Boston. Subsequently she returned to China, delved into a study of China’s history and civilization and learned the Chinese language. One of Ayscough’s earliest publications, Fir-Flower Tablets (1921), is a translation of the Chinese poetry she so much admired. The polished translation was done with the help of her cherished friend, Amy Lowell. Friendly Books on Far Cathay (1921) is basically a compiled bibliography for young students but it also includes a brief summary of Chinese history. Most of Ayscough’s later writings were similarly devoted to young readers. A Chinese Mirror: Being Reflections of the Reality Behind Appearance (1925), gives an informal and easy-to-read description of China’s topography, social life, and customs. More specifically, it discusses the significance and symbolism of the Yellow and Yangtze rivers; of Tien Shan, the Great Mountain; and of the Purple Forbidden City. In addition to these descriptions, which may seem exotic to young American readers, Ayscough also describes such common sights as the gardens, city walls, and moats. One of Ayscough’s most thoroughly reviewed books is Chinese Women, Yesterday and Today (1937). Here she contrasts the women of old China with those of the 1930s. Again she gives an informal and charming description of Chinese culture; her intent, she explains, is to create for American readers a sense of identification and appreciation for peoples of other lands. Another important work is Firecracker Land: Pictures of the Chinese World for Young Readers (1932), in which Ayscough shares her personal experiences of China as well as the wealth of information that she has acquired. She expresses the hope that by telling of China’s great traditions and modern way of life she would cultivate a feeling of friendship between China and America. After Ayscough’s death, letters of tribute and other memorabilia were compiled in The Incomparable Lady, edited lovingly by Harley Farnsworth MacNair. OTHER WORKS: Liu, Sung Fu: Catalogue of Chinese Paintings Ancient and Modern by Famous Masters (1915). The Autobiography of a Chinese Dog Edited by His Missus (1927). Tu Fu, the Autobiography of a Chinese Poet, A.D. 712-770 (edited and translated by Ayscough, 1929-1934). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Damon, S. F., Amy Lowell. MacNair, H. F., The Incomparable Lady (1946). —PATRICIA LANGHALS
B BABB, Sanora Born 21 April 1907, Leavenworth, Kansas Writes under: Sylvester Davis Daughter of Walter and Jennie Parks Babb; married James W. Howe, 1949 During Sanora Babb’s early years, her family lived in Oklahoma, where Babb spent much time among the Oto tribe. Her father was at various times a farmer, baker, baseball player, and professional gambler. After Babb’s early years, the family led a nomadic life among the small towns and farms of Oklahoma, Kansas, and eastern Colorado. Babb attended the University of Kansas and Garden City (Kansas) Junior College. From 1925 to 1929 she worked on smalltown newspapers and a farm journal. After moving to California in 1929, Babb held various writing jobs and began publishing short stories. During the Depression, she hitchhiked across the country, lived for a while in Harlem, and traveled in Europe. After returning to California, she wrote articles about the dust-bowl families who were arriving in great numbers, and helped set up camps in the fields for them. Babb’s experiences with the migratory workers provided the substance of her first novel, Whose Names Are Unknown, written in 1939. She describes the uprooted farmers who became a cheap source of labor for the large industrialized farms. Women, too, bore the brunt of suffering; Babb describes half-starved women giving birth to dead infants on the floors of tents. Drawing on these same experiences with migrant workers in the Depression decades later, Babb wrote The Dark Earth and Other Stories from the Great Depression (1987). Babb’s second novel, The Lost Traveler (1958, reissued 1995), tells the tale of a smalltime gambler. Des Tannehill, based in part on Babb’s father, disdains working for others and tries to maintain his fierce independence through gambling. His choice of a trade prevents his family from being respected members of the community, a matter quite important to them. The story ends with the disintegration of a close family. An Owl on Every Post (1970, reissued 1994) is a memoir of Babb’s family and their relocation from smalltown Oklahoma to rural eastern Colorado. Told from a child’s perspective, the book recounts the family’s loss of nearly everything they owned and captures life on the Great Plains in the early 20th century. Cry of the Tinamou (1997) is a collection of 14 stories, some of which were previously published in magazines as diverse as the Saturday Evening Post and Seventeen. The tales are set in the West with strong female protagonists and characters of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. Babb’s recent work, Told in the Seed: Poems (1998), is her first published collection of poetry. Her poems and short stories have appeared in many anthologies, including CrossSection of
American Literature (1945, 1948) and American Childhoods (1987). ‘‘The Wild Flower’’ and ‘‘The Santa Ana’’ appeared in Best American Short Stories (1950, 1960). Babb received a Borestone Mountain Poetry Award in 1967 and served as the editor of the Clipper from 1940 to 1941 and the California Quarterly from 1951 to 1952. Prominent in all Babb’s writing is a respect and love for all people and their differing needs. She is sympathetic to their problems, regardless of racial and cultural backgrounds; her main characters are those who are in some way prevented from reaching their full potential. She is critical of any relationship that subordinates one person to another, including a marriage in which the husband dominates the family. It is the oldest daughter in her first two published books who represents this critical view. A recurring image of freedom is the great bowl of the sky, always luring those who love independence away from life-stifling relationships. Consistent with Babb’s regard for all life is her regard for art. Her books are carefully wrought, written with simplicity and directness. They give a detailed picture of some vanishing ways of life and may be read as historical as well as literary documents. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Saroyan, W., Letters to Sonora Babb (1932, 1941). Reference works: CA (1975). Other references: London Sunday Times (28 Nov. 1971). LAT (31 Mar. 1958). Madison (Wisconsin) Capital Times (22 Apr. 1971). NYHT (23 Mar. 1958). NYT (20 Mar. 1958). PW (22 Sept. 1997). TLS (9 May 1958, 12 Nov. 1971). —ANN STANFORD, UPDATED BY LEAH J. SPARKS
BABBITT, Natalie Born 28 July 1932, Dayton, Ohio Daughter of Ralph Z. and Genevieve Converse Moore; married Samuel F. Babbitt, 1954; children: Christopher, Thomas, Lucy Despite its intimacy, all of Natalie Babbitt’s work for young readers has a dramatic scope and is celebratory in nature. Her verbal pageantry, often accompanied by prologues and epilogues, imparts a sense of theatricality. The roots of theater go back to her earlier history. In high school, Babbitt coauthored a musical comedy; at Smith College, she began her studies as a theater major, although she soon changed her major to art, claiming she was a ‘‘wooden actress.’’ That Babbitt should venture into drawing as well as writing is consistent with her life history. Her mother, an amateur artist,
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encouraged Babbitt’s early painting efforts. Babbitt began her career illustrating books written by her husband, Sam. Eventually, he became too busy with his job as a president of Kirkland College to work with her, and she moved into illustrating her own works and then to writing longer prose. Even when her books provide no visuals, her imagistic language creates the landscape and brings substance and believability to the characters. Her settings have the majesty and sweep of the air, the sea, the forest, the woods; her characters have the dignity of individuals and the power of archetypes. The ritualistic quality inherent in place and person pervades her work; a mythic lyricism serves both to quiet and excite the reader. With her mastery of tone and mood, Babbitt’s stories resonate beyond their particulars to embrace the universal and to speak of broad truths. In her well-loved Tuck Everlasting (1975) the highly credible eleven-year-old Winnie faces ultimate questions about the meaning of life and death, and the novel speaks poignantly about the place of death in the life cycle. The book’s gentle and poetic wisdom places it among the classics in children’s literature. Despite the importance of her themes, Babbitt infuses her work with genuine levity, and her wry, humorous perspective attracts younger readers. Her early The Search for Delicious (1969), Kneeknock Rise (1970), a Newbery honor book, and The Something (1970) are the stages for her homey tales with levels of meaning beyond their apparent lightheartedness. Twice, in The Devil’s Storybook (1976) and The Devil’s Other Storybook (1987), Babbitt claims the devil as her protagonist. He is a comic earthbound fellow victimized by his mischievous pranks as he plots against others. Babbitt’s restrained satire renders him an endearing character. Babbitt enjoys providing her readers with characters outside the mainstream of children’s literature. In Eyes of the Amaryllis (1977) Jenny’s Gran, an irascible woman who has not made loving her easy, must grow in ways more expected of her young granddaughter. Reality and illusion crash up against one another along the stormy shoreline of the novel to challenge the readers’ belief in things they cannot explain. Her quirky Herbert Rowbarge (1982), Babbitt’s personal favorite, does not have an appealing character with whom young readers can identify. Even as a child, Herbert is distant and inaccessible. The novel’s philosophic truth about sense and self, and loss of self, remains more ambiguous, less tangible, though no less wise than her other writings. Although Babbitt’s canon has wide appeal to adults as well as children, the characters and theme of Herbert Rowbarge presume adult experience. Publishers Weekly proclaimed it ‘‘her crowning achievement.’’ In 1989 Babbitt returned to her painterly antecedents and produced her first full-color picture book since The Something (1970), Nellie: A Cat on Her Own. She says she ran out of ideas for longer works around this time, and she went on to publish another picture book in 1994, Bub: Or the Very Best Thing. The story of a king and queen’s search for the best thing for their child, Bub is set in medieval times, and Babbitt painstakingly hand-sewed costumes for her models in order to achieve the precision she wanted
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for her illustrations. The book took her four years to complete. After Bub, Babbitt became absorbed in smaller projects, such as composing acrostics for the children’s magazine, Horn Book. She also wrote another picture book published in 1999, Ouch! This adaptation of a story from Grimms’ fairytales was illustrated by Fred Marcellino. OTHER WORKS: The Forty-Ninth Magician (with S. Babbitt, 1966). Dick Foote and the Shark (1967). Phoebe’s Revolt (1968). Goody Hall (1971). Curlicues (1980). Illustrator for V. Worth titles: Small Poems (1972). More Small Poems (1976). Still More Small Poems (1978). Small Poems Again (1986). All the Small Poems and Fourteen More (1987). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Harrison, B. and G. Maguire, eds., Innocence and Experience: Essays and Conversations on Children’s Literature (1987). Haviland, V., ed., Children and Literature (1973). Silvey, A., ed., Children’s Books and Their Creators (1995). Ward, M. E., et al., Authors of Books for Young People (1990). Reference works: CA (1975). CANR (1987). CLR (1976). DLB (1986). SATA (1987). TCCW (1989). Other references: Horn Book (Nov./Dec. 1984, March/April 1986, Sept./Oct. 1988, Nov./Dec. 1989, Nov./Dec. 1990). NYTBR (14 Mar. 1999). PW (21 Feb. 1994). —SUSAN P. BLOOM, UPDATED BY ANGELA WOODWARD
BACON, Alice (Mabel) Born 26 February 1858, New Haven, Connecticut; died 1 May 1918, New Haven, Connecticut Daughter of Leonard and Catherine Bacon Alice Bacon wrote almost exclusively about Japan. This special interest began when she was only fourteen years old, when her father took under his guardianship one of a pioneering group of five young girls sent by the Japanese government to be educated in the U.S. Bacon soon became best friends with her adopted sister. In 1883 Bacon began teaching at Hampton Institute. In 1888 she was invited to teach at the Peeresses’ School in Tokyo, conducted by the Imperial Household Department for daughters of the nobility. While residing in Japan, she spent most of her time in Japanese society, experiencing many aspects of Japanese life rarely seen by Western visitors. In 1889 Bacon returned to her work at Hampton, where she concerned herself with the status of the black man. She founded the Dixie Hospital to provide nursing education and better medical care for the community, and expressed her views on racial
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problems in an article entitled ‘‘The Negro and the Atlanta Exposition.’’ Japanese Girls and Women (1891) is based upon Bacon’s many years of living in Japan. She felt the book was needed because, ‘‘While Japan as a whole has been closely studied, and while much and varied information has been gathered about the country and its people, one half of the population has been left entirely unnoticed, passed over with brief mention, or altogether misunderstood.’’ The information she gathered and the observations she made were not those of a casual superficial traveler, but are based upon the intimate friendships she developed with many native Japanese women. Bacon became acquainted with people of all classes and carefully noted the similarities and differences in their ideas and customs. Her first chapter deals with childhood and tells of the various ceremonies and traditions connected with infancy and child rearing. The author tells how children are dressed and treated, and particularly emphasizes their training in ‘‘good manners.’’ In another chapter, Bacon discusses the formal education of a Japanese girl. The reader learns of the high value placed upon education in general, as well as the details of the instruction which virtually all girls receive. In later chapters Bacon treats such topics as marriage, divorce, motherhood, old age, court life, ‘‘samurai’’ and ‘‘peasant’’ women, city life, and domestic service. The reader learns the details of arranged marriages and the standards of ‘‘a beautiful and accomplished maiden.’’ One also learns how after marriage, a young upper-class woman becomes almost a servant to her mother-in-law. The life of a countryman’s wife offers an interesting contrast to the life of the upper-class woman. Although the peasant woman undoubtedly works harder and grows older earlier, she is freer and more independent than her city sister. In discussing elderly women, Bacon emphasizes the respect given to the aged. She explains that an elderly woman proudly dresses as such and does not try to make herself appear younger. An aged mother is treated with love and tenderness and never regarded as a burden. When times are hard, children deprive themselves in order to give extra to their parents. Court life is the center of Japan’s finest drama, music, art, and literature. Similarly the city lies at the center of popular folk culture, and Bacon describes the various festivals of the common people. One of the most interesting occupations to be found in the city is that of the geisha. The Geisha ya are establishments where little girls are taken to be taught dance and song, the etiquette of entertaining guests, and ‘‘whatever else goes to make a girl charming to the opposite sex.’’ Sometimes geisha will leave the dancing in the teahouses to become the concubine of some wealthy Japanese or foreigner. Although Japanese Girls and Women is Bacon’s major work, she also published a collection of letters related to her experiences teaching in Tokyo (A Japanese Interior, 1893), and a collection of stories (In the Land of the Gods: Some Stories of Japan, 1905). Both books provide a rare insight into Japanese daily life.
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OTHER WORKS: Human Bullets, a Soldier’s Story of Port Arthur (1907). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Baldwin, T. W., Bacon Genealogy: Michael Bacon of Dedham, 1640, and His Descendants (1915). Peabody, F. G., Education for Life: The Story of Hampton Institute (1918). Reference works: DAB. NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Other references: Independent (30 Jan. 1896). New Haven Journal Courier (3 May 1918). New Haven Register (3 May 1918). Southern Workman (March 1926). —PATRICIA LANGHALS
BACON, Delia Salter Born 2 February 1811, Tallmadge, Ohio Territory; died 2 September 1859, Hartford, Connecticut Daughter of David and Alice Parks Bacon Daughter of Congregationalist missionaries, Delia Salter Bacon was born in a model community her father had established in the wilderness. Bankrupt in 1812, he returned to Connecticut and died in 1817, leaving his wife and seven children. After one year (1825-26) at Catharine Beecher’s Hartford school, where she was a classmate and literary rival of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Baker taught (1826-32) at schools in Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York. In 1833 she began a series of classes in the home of her brother Leonard, pastor of the First Church (Congregational) in New Haven. Her ‘‘Historical Lessons’’ proved successful in New Haven, New York, Albany, Boston, and Cambridge. Bacon’s eloquence and charm brought large audiences to her literary and historical surveys thirty years before female lecturers became common, and won her friends and admirers such as Elizabeth Peabody and Caroline W. H. Dall. The first fruit of Bacon’s intense literary ambition, Tales of the Puritans (1831) consists of three stories, ‘‘The Regicides,’’ ‘‘The Fair Pilgrim,’’ and ‘‘Castine.’’ All are based on historical events in 17th-century New England. ‘‘The Regicides,’’ about the escape to New England of Puritan judges who had sentenced Charles I, is the most effective. In 1832 Bacon’s sentimental romance ‘‘Love’s Martyr’’ was published in the Philadelphia Sunday Courier. It won first prize and was chosen over five stories by Poe. Based on the scalping of Jane McCrea by the Indians in 1776, the story, like those in Tales of the Puritans, makes a beautiful, romantic heroine the center of the action. Beginning in 1845, Bacon became more and more absorbed in her belief that the plays attributed to Shakespeare had been written by Sir Walter Raleigh or Francis Bacon, or by a group headed by these men. Family and friends, including Eliza Ware Rotch Farrar, attempted to dissuade her from this pursuit. But Charles Butler, a New York lawyer, gave her the ‘‘first fellowship on record to an American woman for advanced study abroad’’ (Hopkins), and she sailed for England in May 1853 to do research.
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In England she became increasingly isolated, obsessed with her theory and her attempts to publish it. In May 1856 Bacon appealed in despair to Elizabeth Peabody’s brother-in-law, Nathaniel Hawthorne, American consul at Liverpool. He could not believe in her theory, but he not only became her unpaid literary agent, secured English and American publishers for her book, wrote its preface, but spent over $1,100 of his own money on printing and editorial costs. The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded (1857) was ignored or ridiculed by contemporary reviewers, but Bacon was followed by numerous ‘‘Baconians,’’ and she is blamed for stirring up ‘‘the biggest mares’ nest in the history of the English-speaking world.’’ In 1858, completely insane, she was brought back to America from England to die at the Hartford Retreat for the Insane. OTHER WORKS: The Bride of Fort Edward: A Dialogue (1839). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Altick, R. D., ‘‘Delia Bacon,’’ in Ohio Authors and Their Books (1962). Bacon, T., Delia Bacon: A Biographical Sketch (1888). Beecher, C., Truth Stranger Than Fiction (1850). Dall, C. W. H., What We Really Know about Shakespeare (1886). Emerson, R. W., The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks (1960). Farrar, E. W. R., Recollections of Seventy Years (1866). Hopkins, V. C., Prodigal Puritan; a Life of Delia Bacon (1959) Pares, M., A Pioneer: In Memory of Delia Bacon, 2 Feb. 1811 to 2 Sept. 1859 (1959). Reference works: American Authors 1600-1900 (1938). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). —SUSAN SUTTON SMITH
BAGLEY, Sarah G. Born circa 1820 in Meredith, New Hampshire; death date unknown Sarah G. Bagley received a common school education and, if her sketch, ‘‘Tales of Factory Life, No. 1’’ is autobiographical, she may have been in domestic service before arriving in Lowell, Massachusetts. She may also have taught school. She worked at the Hamilton Manufacturing Company for over six years and for two years at the Middlesex Factory. For four of the years she worked in the mills, she conducted a free evening class for her fellow workers. She joined an ‘‘Improvement Circle’’ held in a Lowell Universalist church and contributed articles to the Lowell Offering, edited by Harriet Farley. When she became critical of the deteriorating working conditions and low wages in the mills, her articles were rejected. In a speech before 2,000 workingmen at an 1845 Independence Day rally in Woburn, Massachusetts, Bagley attacked the Offering, and later called Farley a ‘‘mouthpiece of the corporations.’’ The popularity of the Offering declined after these attacks, and it ceased publication late in 1845. Bagley helped to found and became the first president of the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association, and when the Voice of Industry, a labor weekly, moved to Lowell in October 1845, she
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became one of its three-person publishing committee. While editing the Voice of Industry and contributing to its pages, Bagley also ‘‘organized branches of the Female Labor Reform Association in other mill towns.’’ She gathered more than 2,000 signatures on petitions to the Massachusetts legislature that described the adverse effects of mill conditions on the health and minds of the workers and called for laws limiting the working day to 10 hours. The petition of the mill workers was rejected. In 1847 Bagley became the Lowell agent for The Covenant, a Baltimore monthly devoted to ‘‘Odd Fellowship and General Literature.’’ Bagley’s writings fall into two distinct groups: her early, genteel contributions to the Lowell Offering and her later militant articles in the Voice of Industry. She wrote ‘‘Pleasures of Factory Life’’ for the Offering (Dec. 1840), describing the joys of conversation, contemplation, plants, the power to assist one’s family, opportunities to meet new people from different parts of the country. Two short tales also written for the Offering, ‘‘Tales of Factory Life, No. 1’’ (1841) and ‘‘Tales of Factory Life, No. 2: The Orphan Sisters’’ (1841), present the stories of ‘‘Sarah T.’’ and ‘‘Catherine Bagley,’’ who are able to improve themselves and assist their needy families by working in the mills. The first story makes it plain the factory girl’s lot is far superior to that of the hired girl. In her reported speeches and writings as a labor organizer and editor, Bagley claimed the authority of 10 years’ experience in the mills, and the reported success of her speeches probably depended in part on their ring of sincerity and conviction. OTHER WORKS: Selections of Bagley’s work can be found in: History of the Labor Movement in the United States (P.S. Foner, ed., 1947). The Lowell Offering: Writings by New England Mill Women (ed. B. Eisler, 1977). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Eisler, B., ed., The Lowell Offering: Writings by New England Mill Women (1977). Foner, P. S., The Factory Girls (1977). Foner, P. S., History of the Labor Movement in the United States (1947). Josephson, H., The Golden Threads: New England’s Mill Girls and Magnates (1949). Lunardini, C. A., Women’s Rights (1996). Selden, B., The Mill Girls: Lucy Larcom, Harriet Hanson Robinson, Sarah G. Bagley (1983). Stern, M. B., We, the Women: Career Firsts of Nineteenth Century America (1963). Reference works: NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). —SUSAN SUTTON SMITH
BAILEY, Carolyn Sherwin Born 1875 in Hoosick Falls, New York; died 24 December 1961, Concord, Massachusetts Daughter of Charles H. and Emma F. Blanchard Bailey; married Eben C. Hill, 1936 Carolyn Sherwin Bailey was educated at home by her mother, herself a teacher and writer of children’s books, and at
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Lansingburg Academy, near Albany, New York. After graduating from Teachers’ College, Columbia, Bailey studied at the Montessori School in Rome. Returning to New York City, she began a career of writing, editing, teaching, and traveling. At the age of nineteen, Bailey began publishing poetry and short fiction in St. Nicholas and Youth’s Companion. Her early books were collections of short stories and poems that grew out of her work at the Warren Goddard House in New York. Bailey later dismissed these early works as ‘‘sentimental,’’ but one collection, For the Children’s Hour (1906), remained in print for more than 40 years. Bailey also began writing nonfiction at an early age: such books as Boys Make-at-Home Things (1912) and Boy Heroes in Making America (1919) demonstrate her predilection for combining instruction and entertainment in books for children. This duality of purpose is particularly apparent in Bailey’s works on Americana. In the years between 1935 and 1944, Bailey wrote four books about early American arts and handcrafts: Children of the Handcrafts (1935), Tops and Whistles, Stories of Early American Toys and Children (1937), Homespun Playdays (1940), and Pioneer Art in America (1944). Some critics consider these to be her greatest achievement. In preparing these books, Bailey used original research into ‘‘genealogical records, personal letters and diaries, rare village and county records, and. . .old maps.’’ Though the life of those early times is perhaps romanticized, Bailey has a keen eye for detail. She creates a feeling of immediacy and evokes a sensitive appreciation for the achievements of the artists and artisans whose stories she tells. Important as the books on American art were in establishing her reputation, Bailey is best known for a quite different work. The book that graces nearly every children’s library is Bailey’s 1947 Newbery award-winner, Miss Hickory (1946). The book’s greatest strength is Miss Hickory herself, an acerbic, ironic New England spinster whose body is a twig of applewood and whose head is a hickory nut. Bailey’s use of detail in evoking the New Hampshire countryside is so powerful, however, that her descriptions of Temple Mountain, the apple orchard, and the old place very nearly bring them alive. OTHER WORKS: Daily Program of Gift and Occupation Work (1904). Peter Newell’s Mother Goose (1905). The Jungle Primer (1906). Firelight Stories (1907). Stories and Rhymes for a Child (1909). Girls Make-at-Home Things (1912). The Children’s Book of Games and Parties (1913). For the Story Teller (1913). Every Child’s Folk Songs and Games (1914). Montessori Children (1915). Everyday Play for Children (1916). Letting in the Gang (1916). Stories Children Need (ed. by Bailey, 1916). Stories for Sunday Telling (1916). Boys and Girls of Colonial Days (1917). The Way of the Gate (with Sheath, Hodges, and Tweedy, 1917). Once Upon a Time Animal Stories (1918). The Outdoor Story Book (1918). Stories for Every Holiday (1918). Tell Me Another Story (1918). What to Do for Uncle Sam (1918). Broad Stripes and Bright Stars (1919). Everyday Stories (1919). Folk Tales and Fables (1919). Hero Stories (1919). Legends from Many Lands (1919). Stories of Great Adventures (1919). The Enchanted Bugle and Other Stories (1920). Wonder Stories (1920). Merry Tales for
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Children (ed. by Bailey, 1921). The Torch of Courage (1921). Flint, The Story of a Trail (1922). Bailey’s In-and Out-Door Playgames (1923). Friendly Tales (1923). Reading Time Stories (1923). Surprise Stories (1923). When Grandfather Was a Boy (1923). All the Year Playgames (1924). Boys and Girls of Pioneer Days (1924). In the Animal World (1924). Lincoln Time Stories (1924). Little Men and Women Stories (1924). Stories from an Indian Cave (1924). The Wonderful Tree and Golden Day Stories (1925). Boys and Girls of Discovery Days (1926). The Wonderful Window (1926). Untold History Stories (1927). Boys and Girls of Today (1928). Forest, Field and Stream Stories (1928). Sixty Games and Pastimes for All Occasions (1928). Boys and Girls of Modern Days (1929). Garden, Orchard and Meadow Stories (1929). Read Aloud Stories (1929). The Wonderful Days (1929). Plays for the Children’s Hour (1931). Stories Children Want (ed. by Bailey, 1931). Our Friends at the Zoo (1934). Tell Me a Birthday Story (1935). From Moccasins to Wings (1938). L’il Hannibal (1938). Country Stop (1942). The Little Rabbit Who Wanted Red Wings (1945). Merry Christmas Book (1948). Old Man Rabbit’s Dinner Party (1949). Enchanted Village (1950). A Candle for Your Cake (1952). Finnegan II (1953). The Little Red Schoolhouse (1957). Flickertail (1962). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bailey, C. S., ‘‘The Hundred Dresses’’ in A Newbery Christmas: Fourteen Stories of Christmas by Newbery Award-winning Authors (1998, 1991). Davis, D. R., Carolyn Sherwin Bailey, 1875-1961: Profile and Bibliography (1967). Miller, B. M., and E. W. Field, eds., Newbery Medal Books, 1922-1955 (1955). Reference works: Junior Book of Authors, S. J. Kunitz, and H. Haycraft, eds. (1951). Other references: NYT (25 Dec. 1961). PW (8 Jan. 1962). —KATHARYN F. CRABBE
BAILEY, Florence (Augusta) Merriam Born 8 August 1863, Locust Grove, New York; died 22 September 1948, Washington, D.C. Also wrote under: Florence Merriam Daughter of Clinton and Caroline Hart Merriam; married Vernon Bailey, 1899 Daughter of a Republican congressman, Florence Merriam Bailey grew up in a country home in northern New York. Interested in nature and particularly bird life at an early age, she began to publish papers about birds while still a student at Smith College. She married Vernon Bailey, a naturalist, in 1899. There were no children. Bailey and her husband traveled and worked together, writing about the natural history of the West. In 1931 she received the Brewster Medal of the American Ornithologists’ Union, and in 1933 the University of New Mexico awarded her an LL.D. Throughout her life Bailey published many papers about birds in such periodicals as Audubon Magazine, and her first book,
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Birds Through an Opera Glass (1889), is based on her early papers. It tells of her experiences as a bird watcher and gives some advice on how to recognize birds. It was quite popular, appearing in various editions throughout the 1890s, during the period when publishers were trying to satisfy the rising national passion for the outdoor life. Bird watching, plant identification, and rock study were popular pastimes of a new class of American amateurs. The outdoor life in all its healthy aspects, especially when associated with the American West, took the place in popular fancy of earlier nature study which was seen as an extension of religious piety or simply aesthetic appreciation. In 1902, after extensive travel with her husband in the West, Bailey published The Handbook of Birds of the Western United States, which remained the standard handbook in its field for about 25 years. A handsome book, organized by genus, this work is illustrated by the famous nature illustrator Louis Agassiz Fuertes. Perhaps her most significant work in ornithology, Birds of New Mexico (1928), was also illustrated by Fuertes. Bailey wrote about Western birds for some of her husband’s books, such as Wild Animals of Glacier National Park (1918), and also published Birds of the Santa Rita Mountains in Southern Arizona (1923) and Among the Birds in Grand Canyon Country (1939). While Bailey was not a professional ornithologist who made specific contributions to the science, she was a highly competent writer on birds for both popular and professional audiences. But Bailey’s career was not limited to ornithology. Her interest in social welfare and her love of nature and concern for the conditions of her fellow humans are especially revealed in a short book she wrote while in Utah in the summer of 1893. My Summer in a Mormon Village (1894) describes the town as ‘‘a haven of rest,’’ where she spent many delightful days listening to the reminiscences of the old pioneer Mormon women whom she characterized as good but suffering sisters. The intellectual poverty of their lives depressed her, although she knew they were not different in this respect from their female counterparts on back country farms. ‘‘I recalled with a shudder the statistics I had known about the number of farmers’ wives who go insane,’’ she wrote. Although, at the time she visited, polygamy had been outlawed, it was still practiced and taught in the area. She had a chance to observe the effects of polygamy on the women, and she felt these were almost always negative. Polygamy had brought great suffering to the women, yet most of them continued to believe in it. As she put it, ‘‘The spirit that is finest and best in woman—her power of selfsacrifice in the face of abstract right—has been used as a tool of torture, and it will be used successfully until education teaches her that there is a higher light for her to follow.’’ She was little more sympathetic when writing about other aspects of Mormon belief, presenting the prophets as some clever men who took advantage of the immigrant mentality for their own material and physical gain. Bailey belongs to the first generation of writers who wrote about the life sciences for the popular audience. Her graceful writing style and practical knowledge combined to bring the life
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sciences out of the 19th century parlors into the outdoors, creating an easy transition for many readers. OTHER WORKS: A-Birding on a Bronco (1896). Birds of Village and Field (1898). Cave Life in Kentucky (1933). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Stille, D. R., Extraordinary Women Scientists (1995). Reference works: Dictionary of American Biography, National Cyclopedia of American Biography (1892 et seq.). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). —BEVERLY SEATON
BAILEY, (Irene) Temple Born circa 1869, Petersburg, Virginia; died 6 July 1953, Washington, D.C. Daughter of Milo Varnum and Emma Sprague Bailey Many of Temple Bailey’s short stories and essays appeared in magazines, and her novels came out at regular intervals for several decades. All of her writing was amazingly popular. Several years before her death it was estimated that 3,000,000 copies of her books had been sold. She was also one of the highestpaid writers in the world; for one serial she received $60,000 from McCall’s magazine, and from Cosmopolitan $325,000 for three serials and several short stories. Reasons for her popularity can be surmised from the comments of critics and reviewers: she gave her readers the relaxation and pleasure of entering a delightful world where everything comes out right for the good and the true. Bailey upholds all the conventional standards of morality, and dramatizes, over and over again, her thesis that the rewards of virtue are many, lavish, and sure. ‘‘She writes of life as she would like to have it, rather than life as it is,’’ says one critic, and another characterizes one of her novels as ‘‘high-flown romance with a bland disregard for realities.’’ It is tempting to speculate as to the cause of her absorption in a bright Never-Never Land. We might find it in the fact that she herself was, from her birth, protected from the grimmer aspects of life. She may on the other hand have been shrewd enough to recognize that the average schoolgirl and housewife hunger for glamour, romance, gaiety, and a satisfying solution to every problem. Setting herself to provide these, she found a goal for a long and lucrative career. A successful business woman, she retained her solid background of Presbyterianism and Republicanism. Reviews of her novels combine weak praise and outright disparagement, with certain words recurring many times: ‘‘wholesome,’’ ‘‘sweet,’’ ‘‘sentimental,’’ and, perhaps most devastating of all, ‘‘harmless’’ and ‘‘innocuous.’’ On the plus side, Bailey is credited with skill in characterization and in devising of plots. Most of her fiction is concerned with young love, but at times she
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wrote of children, or of lonely people. Her style is clear and smooth, and she was fond of describing nature, elegantly furnished rooms, and beautiful clothes. She is to be respected for her careful craftsmanship.
OTHER WORKS: Judy (1907). Glory of Youth (1913). Contrary Mary (1915). Mistress Anne (1917). Adventures in Girlhood (1917). The Tin Soldier (1919). The Trumpeter Swan (1920). The Gay Cockade (1921). The Dim Lantern (1923). Peacock Feathers (1924). The Holly Hedge (1925). The Blue Window (1926). Wallflowers (1927). Silver Slippers (1928). Burning Beauty (1929). Wild Wind (1930). So This is Christmas (1931). Little Girl Lost (1932). Enchanted Ground (1933). The Radiant Tree (1934). Fair As the Moon (1935). I’ve Been to London (1937). Tomorrow’s Promise (1938). The Blue Cloak (1941). The Pink Camellia (1942). Red Fruit (1945).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Notable Boston Authors, Flagg, M., ed. (1960). Other references: Newsweek (20 July 1953). NYT (8 July 1953). PW (24 June 1933). Time (20 July 1953). WLB (Sept. 1953). —ABIGAIL ANN HAMBLEN
BAKER, Dorothy Dodds Born 21 April 1907, Missoula, Montana; died 17 June 1968, Terra Bella, California Daughter of Raymond Branson and Alice Grady Dodds; married Howard Baker, 1930
and marries Amy North, a medical student and ‘‘a complicated woman, the kind who knows how to strip the nerves and kick the will around.’’ Characters similar to Amy recur in Baker’s work, but this is the type’s most vivid incarnation. When Young Man with a Horn (1938) was filmed (1950), scriptwriters turned most of the hero’s black friends white, including the singer Jo Jordan, played by Doris Day. Romance with Doris gives the film its happy ending. Amy North, played by Lauren Bacall, suffers from the self-conscious Freudianism sweeping Hollywood at that time. Trio (1943), Baker’s second novel, presents the conflict experienced by Janet Logan when a young man evoking heterosexual love enters her life. Hitherto, she’d had a long-standing relationship with a domineering woman professor, whom she assisted while doing graduate work. Reviewers faulted it as overworked and lacking in humanity. Nevertheless, it won the Commonwealth Club of California medal for literature. The novel was developed out of an earlier story ‘‘Romance’’ (Harper’s Bazaar, 1941), which achieves a compelling tension the longer novel lacks. Baker and her husband rewrote Trio as a stage play, which opened in Philadelphia in 1944. A run on Broadway was dogged by censorship that triggered industry-wide protest and also attracted many reviewers. Most found it moral to the point of moralizing (the lesbian villain is disgraced and shoots herself), but dull. The controversy over its forced closing outlived the play by several years. Cassandra at the Wedding (1962), Baker’s last novel, recalls Trio in its triangular conflict between a dominant woman, a compliant woman, and a man; but the failures of the earlier work are recouped in this recasting. In Cassandra, the dominant woman overcomes her dependency on her supportive twin sister; her suicide attempt is thwarted. The novel ends with a gesture, not a debacle. ‘‘The mastery of technique here,’’ said a New York Times reviewer, ‘‘is just about absolute.’’
Dorothy Dodds Baker is best remembered for her ability to describe the excitement of music, especially jazz. She grew up in California, studying violin until she went to college. While studying in Paris in 1930, she began writing Trio—published as her second novel—and met and married poet Howard Baker. She earned an M.A. in French at UCLA and taught languages in a private school until her first short story was published; then she began writing full-time. All her early stories portray women in career situations.
Baker published many excellent short stories. Her vivid, precise style and knack for capturing human gesture became her hallmark. Her characters are often bent on some singleminded obsession: classical music in ‘‘The Jazz Sonata’’ (Coronet, 1937), boxing in ‘‘Private Lesson’’ (Yale Review, 1940), and gambling in ‘‘Grasshopper’s Field Day’’ (Harper’s, 1941). Though she received a National Institute of Letters Fellowship in 1964, Baker published little after Cassandra.
In 1937, Baker won a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship to complete Young Man with a Horn. This widely acclaimed novel follows the career of jazz musician Rick Martin, from the time he first cuts school in order to practice piano at an abandoned Los Angeles mission, till he dies at the peak of his fame in a quack ‘‘drying-out’’ hospital in New York.
OTHER WORKS: ‘‘Keeley Street Blues’’ in O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories (1939). Our Gifted Son (1948). The Ninth Day (with H. Baker, 1967).
The hero overcomes his racial prejudice in order to learn from black musicians who befriend him. In New York he meets
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Rule, J., Lesbian Images (1975). Other references: NYT (18 June 1968). —FRIEDA L. WERDEN
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BALCH, Emily Greene Born 8 January 1867, Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts; died 9 January 1961, Cambridge, Massachusetts Daughter of Francis Vergnies and Ellen Maria Noyes Balch Emily Greene Balch is one of the two American women (Jane Addams was the other recipient in 1931) to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (in 1946), yet her life and writings remain relatively obscure. Graduating in 1889 from Bryn Mawr in its first matriculated class, Balch was given its highest honor, the Bryn Mawr Fellowship for European Study. Her subsequent training in Europe, which brought her in contact with Emile Levasseur in Paris, resulted in a technical treatise on relief for the poor in France. Returning in 1890, Balch became one of the early social workers and two years later, with Vida Scudder and Helena Dudley, founded one of the first settlement houses, Denison House in Boston. Further European training in Germany in 1895 was concluded with Balch’s attendance at the International Socialist Workers’ and Trade Union Congress in London. Katherine Coman, a well-known economist and historian, returned to the U.S. on the same ship with Balch and offered her an academic position at Wellesley College, which Balch accepted. From 1897 until 1918, Balch was an outstanding member of the Wellesley faculty, working in the newly formed discipline of sociology as well as in economics. Around 1905 she undertook a Slavic journey which resulted in her major research book, Our Slavic Fellow Citizens. During these years she was an active supporter of many social reforms and changes, but from 1915 until her death, Balch’s most radical and absorbing social concern was pacifism. Balch’s first publication, Public Assistance of the Poor in France (1893), is a study of the historical development of care for the poor as well as an organizational study of the bureaucracy that administered the welfare programs. The types of services offered, the disabilities covered by the state programs, and the types of social pathologies found are all discussed. Combining cost with statistical and demographic information, the thesis was one of the earliest sociological studies of care for the poor and disabled. In 1895 Balch published a technical manuscript, Manual for Use in Cases of Juvenile Offenders and Other Minors in Massachusetts, that would be primarily of interest to historians of social welfare. In 1903 she published A Study of Conditions of City Life, a bibliography on urban areas. This extensive listing of writings on the city clearly anticipated much of the concern on the same topic which later emerged at the famous ‘‘Chicago School’’ of sociology. Balch’s most significant book was Our Slavic Fellow Citizens (1910). Convinced of the need to know her subject well, she ‘‘spent the greater part of the year 1905 in Austria-Hungary, studying emigration on the spot, and over a year in visiting Slavic colonies in the United States. . . . One autumn was spent as a boarder in the family of a Bohemian working man in New York City.’’ In this first major sociological work on immigration, she discusses the Slovenians, Croatians, Austrian Poles, and Ruthenians,
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and their ways of life in Europe and the United States. Accompanied by a variety of appendices with many statistical tables, the book is an outstanding example of early sociology. Predating and in many ways complementing the highly lauded volumes, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918-20) by W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, the lack of recognition received by this and other of Balch’s works on sociological topics is hard to explain. The remainder of Balch’s writings revolved around the topic of international peace, a particularly controversial subject immediately prior to and during World War I. In 1915 Balch, Jane Addams, and Alice Hamilton came to national prominence as delegates to the International Congress of Women at The Hague (which later evolved into the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom) and as members of peace envoys to countries around the world. Their joint publication of The Women at The Hague (1915) brought the meetings to worldwide attention and subsequently subjected the women to frequent personal ostracism and attack. Following a sabbatical from 1915 to 1917, when Balch gained national prominence as a pacifist, the Board of Trustees of Wellesley College failed to appoint her, terminating her academic career at fifty-two years of age after 20 years of service. Continuing her fight for a peaceful settlement to World War I, Balch edited Approaches to the Great Settlement (1918), a comprehensive volume containing major statements by various spokespersons and groups on ways to end the war. In 1919 the newly established Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (W.I.L.P.F.) elected Balch as international secretarytreasurer. This organization became the anchor for her future career as an international arbiter for peace. As a leader of a committee selected by the W.I.L.P.F., Balch edited and largely wrote Occupied Haiti (1927). The forcefulness and reasonableness of the committee’s arguments led to the adoption of their recommendations by President Hoover in 1930. In addition to these formal, abstract writings, Balch wrote a short book of verse, The Miracle of Living (1941), which provides an insight into some of her philosophy and the simplicity of her world view. Balch wrote voluminously in newsletters, academic journals, and popular magazines. Many of these writings are difficult to obtain and cover diverse topics. An excellent compilation of some of these works is available in Beyond Nationalism (1972), edited by Mercedes Randall, Balch’s biographer. Balch’s role as an academic, theorist, and international leader has yet to be systematically analyzed and evaluated. Nonetheless, recognition of her significance, work, and writings for world peace is evident in her status as a Nobel laureate. OTHER WORKS: The Papers of Emily Greene Balch, 1875-1961 (microfilm archives in Wilmington, Delaware, 1988) BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cavanaugh, B., The Earth is My Home: A Comparison of Two Women Pacifists, Emily Greene Balch and Jeannette
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Rankin (thesis, 1989). Kaufman, P.W., ‘‘The Simplest of New England Spinsters: Becoming Emily Greene Balch 1875-1961’’ in Women of the Commonwealth: Work, Family, and Social Change in Nineteenth-century Massachusetts (1996). Kenworthy, L.S., ‘‘Emily Greene Balch’’ in Living in the Light: Some Quaker Pioneers of the 20th Century (1984). Meinecke, M.F., Emily Greene Balch: An Overlooked Leader in the International Peace Movement and Her Travails for Peace from 1914 to 1929 (thesis, 1994). Hardy, G. J., American Women Civil Rights Activists: Biobibliographies of 68 Leaders, 1825-1992 (1993). Randall, M. M., Improper Bostonian: Emily Greene Balch (1964). Shane, M.P., Papers of Emily Greene Balch, 1875-1961: Guide to the Scholarly Resources Microfilm Edition (1988). Thomas, W. I., and Znaniecki, F., The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (2 vols., 1918-20). —MARY JO DEEGAN
BALLARD, Martha (Moore) Born 9 February 1735, Oxford, Massachusetts; died early June [before 9 June] 1812, Hallowell, Maine Daughter of Elijah and Doratha Larned Moore Ballard; married Ephriam Ballard, 1754; children: nine Little is known of Martha Ballard’s life before 1785, when she began writing the diary that would bring her into the historical record. Evidence suggests that she was a fairly typical goodwife. Although she came from a relatively educated family (her uncle was the first person from Oxford, Massachusetts, to graduate from college), her mother signed her name with a mark. Someone taught young Martha to write, but her spelling and orthography remained erratic even by the standards of her time. She had nine children, three of whom died in a diphtheria epidemic shortly before the seventh was born. Like other married women, she produced foods and textiles for neighborhood trade, nursed the sick, and attended births. A family story described her, during the pre-revolutionary tea boycotts, secretly preparing tea for a sick woman. Both she and her husband seem to have had little interest in revolutionary politics. In 1777 Ballard moved to Hallowell, Maine, and less than a year later acted as a midwife for the first time. At the time, childbirth was a social event. Ideally, a midwife arrived first and then three or more women gathered to assist—but of course things didn’t always go as planned. Hallowell, unlike Oxford, was near the frontier of European settlement, so after her move Ballard was one of the older women in the community. Her youngest child was eight, and her daughters were old enough to do the cooking, laundry, and weaving in her absence, so she was somewhat freed from the responsibilities of running a home. It was not surprising, therefore, that her younger neighbors called on her to help them with their births. Within a few years, Ballard was widely recognized as a midwife, and between 1778 and 1812 she would deliver 998 babies. Her success rates were impressive: only 14 babies
(including those with congenital defects) were stillborn, no women died at birth, and only five women died of infection afterward (often during epidemics). Ballard began her diary to record births, midwifery payments, and other economic activities—peas planted, cloth taken off the loom, and the gifts of food and home-produced goods that sustained a barter economy. Her early entries were short and noted little except the weather and the day’s production and exchanges. As the years went by, she wrote more, creating a remarkable record of her life: the days she did laundry or planted flax, braved river-crossings or blizzards or unpredictable horses to get to a woman in labor, treated a child’s illness or tried to help her neighbors survive a scarlet fever epidemic, testified in a rape trial or witnessed the aftermath of a murder/suicide, or coped with her husband’s imprisonment for debt or her grown son’s rages. Ballard’s writing remained remarkably matter-of-fact. Few adjectives interfered with her account of tasks accomplished and actions taken. In the early years she might punctuate her descriptions of especially stressful events with acknowledgments of a merciful divine Providence. Later she was more likely to intersperse expressions of exhaustion or helplessness. In both eras, however, the drama of her writing is to be found in its understatement and unremitting dailiness. Like most diarists, Ballard is widely known only because one historian took an interest in her writing and made it accessible to a larger audience. Many scholars have used Ballard’s diary in their studies of New England farm life, and some have quoted it at length. For the most part, however, they dismissed it as an exhausting account of the trivial details of domestic work. In her prize-winning book A Midwife’s Tale (1990), Laurel Thatcher Ulrich showed that Ballard’s concerns were not trivial at all, but the warp and woof of life in her time. Ulrich excerpted selections from the diary, and the full diary was published for the first time two years later. Ballard’s life was in many ways typical for a woman of her time and place. She participated in a household and neighborhood economy in which almost everything people needed was produced locally. She had more medical and herbal knowledge than most of her (younger) neighbors, but there were plenty of other midwives/herbalists with similar expertise. She grew old and fought against her increasing dependence on her son and daughter-in-law. What made her remarkable is that she left a record of her experience.
OTHER WORKS: The Diary of Martha Ballard, 1785-1812 (1992).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Nash, C., The History of Augusta (1961). Ulrich, L., A Midwife’s Tale (1990). —LORI KENSCHAFT
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BAMBARA, Toni Cade Born 25 March 1939, New York, New York; died 9 December 1995, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Wrote under: Toni Cade (prior to 1971) Daughter of Walter and Helen Brent HendersonCade II; children: Karma For Toni Cade Bambara, writing is one means of celebrating movements toward personal and political change. ‘‘The issue,’’ she has explained, ‘‘is salvation. I write to save our lives.’’ In her work as a writer of stories, a novel, essays, and film scripts, as well as a teacher and community organizer, Bambara transmits an African-American cultural heritage, records the strong communities and characters who struggle with the effects of racism, and envisions new and more humane conditions for our lives. Bambara began writing as a child, encouraged by her mother and inspired by visits to the Apollo Theater with her father. Listening to impassioned trade unionists, Pan-Africans, Father Divinists, Muslims, and Ida B. Wells supporters at Speakers Corner in Harlem, she learned the power of words to shape and share visions. Bambara earned a B.A. at Queens College and an M.A. at the City College of New York. She completed further graduate work in American Studies and studied commedia dell’arte, mime, linguistics, dance, and filmmaking at various institutions in Europe and the United States. Bambara’s early writing and editing redefined African American identities, particularly black women’s complex and varied selves, beyond the confines of racist and sexist stereotypes. The Black Woman (1970, as Toni Cade) is a groundbreaking anthology of essays, poems, and fiction that grapples with the intersections of race and gender in women’s lives. Tales and Stories for Black Folks (1971) offers children contemporary African American stories and black renditions of fairy tales reset in 20th-century America. The stories in Bambara’s first collection, Gorilla, My Love (1977), are primarily first-person vignettes of urban life narrated by an array of black girls and women in rhythmic, pointed, poetic, black-inflected language. Critics praised the depth and range of Bambara’s characters, and her nonpolemical emphasis on the strength of African American community in the face of racist patriarchal conditions. They also acclaimed Bambara’s language as sounding the musical improvisations of bop and the raptures of gospel throughout her stories. The collection Sea Birds Are Still Alive (1977) moves outward in scope to address other cultures, and focuses upon characters committed to more directly political struggles such as revolutions in Southeast Asia, and the civil rights and Black Power movements. Bambara’s novel, The Salt Eaters (1980), which won the American Book award from the Before Columbus Foundation, expands this vision of cultural and social transformation, portraying the intertwined lives of culture workers, political activists, and healers within a Southern community. The novel develops the interconnections between personal well being, spiritual growth, and political commitment. The Salt Eaters was highly
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praised by critics, particularly for its lyric and dreamlike experimental narration, which created complex webs of communal connections. Bambara’s interest in experimental narration led her into film work. She wrote historical scripts on figures such as Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, and activist Cecil B. Moore, as well as renditions of her own and others’ fictions. Bambara was also an active teacher and organizer. She taught and served as a consultant in a range of settings, from colleges and universities such as City College, Rutgers, Emory, and Spelman, to community centers, prisons, libraries, and museums. She conducted workshops on writing and community organizing and was an instructor at Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia, a media access facility, training community groups in the use of video as a tool for social change. ‘‘It’s a tremendous responsibility. . .to be a writer, an artist, a cultural worker,’’ said Bambara. In her later years, she focused on filmmaking and community organization in fulfilling what she saw as her most important role, ‘‘cultural worker.’’ She wrote, acted in, and directed television documentaries; taught filmmaking; and had three film adaptations made of her short stories. As a mentor she founded ‘‘Image Weavers, a collective of women media makers of color.’’ In a posthumous collection, Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversations(1996), Toni Morrison, her friend and original editor at Random House, gathered the stories that reveal ‘‘the heart cling of her fiction.’’ ‘‘Going Critical’’ and ‘‘Baby’s Breath,’’ one narrated from the perspective of the parent and the other from that of the adult child, play out the disparate expectations that mar the possibilities for intimacy and understanding. Essays such as ‘‘Language and the Writer’’ express her desire ‘‘to change the world’’ through the medium of film by connecting with communities and advancing her activism. ‘‘How She Came By Her Name’’ is an interview with Louis Massiah, with whom she collaborated on some documentaries. Her last novel, titled Those Bones Are Not My Child was published in 1999. Bambara’s films, however, received little critical attention. OTHER WORKS: Black Utterances Today (editor, 1975). Zora (film, 1971). The Johnson Girls (film, 1972). Transactions (film, 1979). The Long Night (film, 1981). Epitaph for Willie (film, 1982). Tar Baby (film, 1984). Raymond’s Run (film, 1985). The Bombing of Osage (film, 1986). Cecil B. Moore: Master Tactician of Direct Action (film, 1987). More Than Property (film, n.d.). The KKK Boutique Ain’t Just Rednecks (n.d.). ‘‘Black Theater’’ (1969). ‘‘What It is I Think I’m Doing Anyhow’’ (1980). ‘‘Beauty is Just Care. . .Like Ugliness is Carelessness’’ (1981). ‘‘Thinking About My Mother’’ (1981). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Evans, M., ed., Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation (1984). Flora, J. M., and R. Bain, eds., Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook (1993). Pearlman, M., ed., American Women
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Writing Fiction: Memory, Identity, Family, Space (1989). Tate, C., ed., Black Women Writers at Work (1983). Reference works: Black Writers (1989). CA (1978). CANR (1988). CLC (1981). DLB (1985). Encyclopedia of Black Women in America: Literature (1996). FC (1990). MTCW (1991). Other references: Booklist (15 Sept.1996). Callaloo (Spring 1996). KR (1996). Quarterly Black Review (1996). —RACHEL STEIN, UPDATED BY KAREN MCLENNAN
BANNING, Margaret Culkin Born 18 March 1891, Buffalo, Minnesota; died 4 January 1982 Daughter of William Edgar and Hannah Young Culkin; married Archibald Tanner Banning, 1914 (divorced); LeRoy Salsich, 1944; children: four (two died in early childhood) Raised in a Roman Catholic family, Margaret Culkin Banning spent most of her life in the Midwest. After graduation from Vassar College in 1912, she moved to Chicago, where she earned a certificate from the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy in 1913. Her first marriage ended in divorce. She gave birth to four children, two of whom died in early childhood. As a popular and financially successful writer, Banning raised her surviving two children alone. In the 1940s, most of Banning’s efforts reflected war issues and she devoted her talents primarily to nonfiction, offering studies of women’s participation in war and defense. Her novels reflect both a personal and a social history, as well as most of the major ethical and domestic issues which confront women. Her major characters are women. In her early novels, they face conflicts between marriage and career, social need and personal desire for birth control versus the church’s anticontraception stance, and the restrictions of the church on remarriage. From the mid-1940s on, her most frequent character is a middle-aged Catholic woman who, after an unhappy first marriage, successfully pursues a career and eventually marries her former lover. These circumstances offer Banning latitude to develop a variety of themes: women and work, divorce, fidelity, religious convictions, nature of love, sexuality, birth control, and two of her late favorites: difference of youth and age, and youth in different periods in history. In every novel, Banning explores serious social and personal issues, generally without moral judgements and from a perspective that suggests the complexities of those issues. In Spellbinders (1922), Banning presents another aspect of the theme: women’s participation in political affairs and its influence on sexual relations. The four ‘‘spellbinders’’ are women who undertake to organize other women to participate in politics. She portrays the conflicts of childbirth and Catholicism realistically and presents marriage primarily as an economic necessity
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for women. Since the 1950s, Banning has returned to earlier themes, investigating their many facets. The Will of Magda Townsend (1973) is a fictionalized autobiography in which all her earlier themes reappear and take on different meanings in the new context of youth in conflict with age. Banning’s fiction spans more than half a century. Taken together, her work presents an accurate picture of middle-class, white American women that serves as a social history. OTHER WORKS: This Marrying (1920). Half Loaves (1921). Country Club People (1923). A Handmaid of the Lord (1924). The Women of the Family (1926). Pressure (1927). Money of Her Own (1928). Prelude to Love (1929). Mixed Marriage (1930). The Town’s Too Small (1931). Path of True Love (1932). The Third Son (1933). The First Woman (1934). The Iron Will (1935). Letters to Susan (1936). You Haven’t Changed (1937). The Case for Chastity (1937). Too Young to Marry (1938). Enough to Live On (1939). Out in Society (1940). Salud: A South American Journal (1941). A Week in New York (1941). Letters from England (1942). Women for Defense (1942). Conduct Yourself Accordingly (1944). The Clever Sister (1947). Give Us Our Years (1949). Fallen Away (1951). A New Design for the Defense Decade (1951). The Dowry (1955). The Convert (1957). Echo Answers (1960). The Quality of Mercy (1963). The Vine and the Olive (1964). I Took My Love to the Country (1966). Mesabi (1969). Lifeboat Number Two (1971). The Splendid Torments (1976). Such Interesting People (1979) BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CB (1940). Twentieth Century Authors, First Supplement (1955). Other references: Margaret (1966). Margaret Culkin Banning (film, 1958). —MARCIA HOLLY
BARKER, Shirley Born 4 April 1911, Farmington, New Hampshire; died 18 November 1965, Penacook, New Hampshire A descendant of Massachusetts’s earliest settlers, Shirley Barker has spent most of her life in New England, the setting for nearly all of her novels. Educated at the University of New Hampshire, Radcliffe College, and the Pratt Institute, she has advanced degrees in English and library science. Her first book of poetry, The Dark Hills Under (1933), was selected for the Yale Younger Poets series. All of Barker’s novels are historical, and most of them are set in New Hampshire, where her family has lived since the 1670s. Peace My Daughters (1949) focuses on the Salem witch trials; Rivers Parting (1950) moves between an ancestral home in
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Nottingham and a newly established one in colonial New Hampshire; Fire and the Hammer (1953) involves Tory Quakers in revolutionary Bucks County, Pennsylvania; Tomorrow the New Moon (1955) traces the life of a Puritan minister and his cousins; Liza Bowe (1956) is set in Elizabethan England and is Barker’s only attempt at first person narrative; Swear by Apollo (1958) concerns a medical student who moves from revolutionary New Hampshire to the Hebrides; The Last Gentleman (1960) is the governor of New Hampshire during the American Revolution; Corner of the Moon (1961) is set in England at the time of the French Revolution; and Strange Wives (1963) traces the Jewish settlement of Newport, Rhode Island. Barker writes formula historical novels. The characters are subservient to the settings, which are rife with war, plagues, epidemics, spiritual crises, and historical personages such as Shakespeare and Washington. Almost every novel has an obligatory bastard, a smattering of occultism, and incipient madness. Although Barker varies the pattern, each novel contains a triangle—either the hero must choose between the undyingly faithful but commonplace woman and the exciting but capricious one (Rivers Parting, Tomorrow the New Moon, Swear by Apollo, Corner of the Moon) or the heroine must choose between the dull but dependable male and the dangerous, independent one (Peace My Daughters, Fire and the Hammer, Liza Bowe, The Last Gentleman, Strange Wives). The hero invariably chooses the faithful woman, but only after a little fling with the other, who usually turns up pregnant. After some harrowing moments while the hero wonders if the child is his and the faithful heroine threatens to reject him for fathering the child, the paternity is placed elsewhere and all is forgiven. In the other triangle, the heroine always chooses the dangerous man, who loves her but finds her too saucy and independent to make a good wife. Only after the heroine is subjected to Psyche-like trials of fidelity and endurance does the hero relent. Although Barker’s novels are not original, they are, as popular novels, a good indication of the moral attitudes still prevalent in the 1950s and early 1960s. Naughty girls are punished: they bear bastards, occasionally go mad, and never get their man. Good girls are rewarded for their morality and their fidelity. Men can have the naughty girls and marry the good girls providing they don’t father any bastards. Barker has reaffirmed that despite plagues, wars, and tyranny, a man’s life has always been more exciting. OTHER WORKS: A Land and a People (1952). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: TCA, First Supplement (1955). Other references: Newsweek (1 Jan. 1951). NYHTB (7 Jan. 1951). NYT (27 Feb. 1949, 22 Nov. 1953, 9 Jan. 1955, 24 Aug. 1958). SatRL (16 April 1949). —CYNTHIA L. WALKER
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BARNARD, A. M. See ALCOTT, Louisa May
BARNES, Carman Dee Born Carman Jackson, 20 November 1912, Chattanooga, Tennessee Daughter of James N. and Diantha Mills Jackson; married Hamilton F. Armstrong, 1945 (divorced) Carman Dee Barnes took her name from her first stepfather, Wellington Barnes. Her mother, Diantha Barnes, was well known in the South for her poetry and folklore. Educated at private schools, Barnes was forced to leave the Gardner School in New York City after the principal read her successful but scandalous first novel, Schoolgirl (1929), published when the author was sixteen. This was the end of Barnes’ formal education. With dramatist A. W. Pezet, Barnes adapted Schoolgirl for Broadway, where it opened on her eighteenth birthday. She also sold the film rights for a substantial sum. Schoolgirl had been an indictment of school practices, and thus Barnes was taken up in liberal circles as exemplifying a new realistic approach to American education. Based on Barnes’ experiences at a girls’ boarding school, Schoolgirl follows boy-crazy Naomi Bradshaw through her realistically described experiences with crushes, petting, and sexual experimentation. Sent away to school after she has tried to elope, Naomi matures from a spoiled, oversophisticated child to a slightly less spoiled, still cynical, but ‘‘sadder and wiser’’ young woman of almost sixteen. Language and technique are remarkable for a sixteen-year-old author, who combines sophistication with an air of innocence. Barnes’ occasional irony reveals she has so outdistanced Naomi she can no longer take her heroine seriously, but the book is mainly ‘‘honest narrative,’’ as a critic described it, portraying genuine emotions and real problems. The dramatization simplified and romanticized the plot, not only making the elopement partner and boyfriend at school one person, but having him still around at the end, anxious to marry Naomi. Brooks Atkinson’s New York Times review commented on the play’s ‘‘grim determination’’ to explain the younger generation sympathetically, no matter what the scandal. He complained that questions of right and wrong were left obscure. Beau Lover (1930) describes Gloria, a Southern girl searching for her ideal lover while determinedly remaining a virgin, no matter what the provocation. In this book, Barnes introduces the issue of a woman’s career versus marriage. She maintains women should not sacrifice themselves to men, but suggests the ideal man would be strong enough not to demand sacrifice. Barnes experiments with technique and point of view, telling the story as if Gloria were talking to herself in the second person. Critics complained of emotion without genuine impulse.
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In 1945 Barnes became the second wife of Hamilton Fish Armstrong, writer on international politics and editor of the journal Foreign Affairs. Together they wrote A Passionate Victorian, a play about English actress Fanny Kemble. The next year, 1946, Barnes published Time Lay Asleep, a novel based on her family history and childhood. Radically different from her previous work, it begins with a prologue introducing Barnes’ concept that if one could remember one’s whole past plus the past of one’s ancestors, there might be ‘‘a way to cheat Fate of her toll of cause and effect.’’ Moving beyond the slick simplicity of earlier books, Barnes attempts, like Faulkner, to create settings with intertwined physical, psychological, and symbolic elements, and to integrate different timelines. All Barnes’ novels show her ability to mold materials from her own background into technically proficient, engaging novels with social implications. With four novels published before she was twenty-two, one regrets Barnes did not continue her development as a writer. OTHER WORKS: Mother, Be Careful! (1932). Young Woman (1934). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Warfel, H. R., ed., American Novelists of Today (1951). Web sites: Hamilton Fish Armstrong Papers, available online at http://infoshare.princeton.edu:2003/libraries/firestone/ rbsc/findi. Women Playwrights, 1900-1950, online at http:// www.geocities.com/Broadway/Alley/5379/1900Ba.html.
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Taken from a real-life incident in Kentucky (which was later to become William G. Simms’ novel, Beauchampe), Octavia Bragaldi employed the format of the enormously popular romantic plays and recast the events in 15th century Italy. It won immediate success, played in almost every city in the U.S., and was later produced in London and Liverpool. The play offered a superb leading role which Barnes acted herself to great praise. After her marriage to the popular actor, E. S. Conner, the couple appeared together in Octavia Bragaldi many times. Barnes published La Fitte, or, The Pirate of the Gulf in 1838. The Forest Princess (1844), a version of the Pocahontas and Captain John Smith story, capitalized on a current interest in Indian dramas. Toward the end of her career Barnes adapted two French melodramas, A Night of Expectations (1848) and Charlotte Corday (1851). The Captive (1850), which has come down in title only, may have been based on a monodrama entitled The Captive—A Scene in a Madhouse, which Barnes often performed in the early days of her acting career when she was appearing with her parents. In 1848 Barnes published a collection, Plays, Prose and Poetry, which included the popular Octavia Bragaldi. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Durang, C., The Philadelphia Stage: From the Year 1749 to the Year 1855 (1855). Ireland, J. N., Records of the New York Stage from 1750 to 1860 (1866-67). Kritzer, A.H., ed., Plays by Early American Women: 1775-1850 (1995). —JOANN PECK KRIEG
—CAROL B. GARTNER, UPDATED BY LEAH J. SPARKS
BARNES, Djuna BARNES, Charlotte Mary Sanford Born 1818; died 14 April 1863 Daughter of John and Mary Creenbill Barnes; married Edmond S. Connor, 1846 Charlotte Mary Sanford Barnes’ success as a woman dramatist in the early days of the American theater was second only to that of Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie. It was a success that can be seen as the by-product of her parents’ ambitions for her theatrical career. The daughter of the well known and much admired acting pair, Mr. and Mrs. John Barnes, Charlotte was introduced to the public by her parents in her early teens. Thereafter she played with them often but received notices of the type that usually referred to her acting as ‘‘uninteresting’’ and ‘‘tedious.’’ Her thorough training in the theater, however, brought her success as a playwright and her earliest attempt, the Last Days of Pompeii (1835), based on the novel by Bulwer Lytton, was followed two years later by the best of her plays, Octavia Bragaldi, or, The Confession.
Born 12 June 1892, Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York; died 19 June 1982, Doylestown, Pennsylvania Wrote under: ‘‘A Lady of Fashion,’’ Lydia Steptoe Daughter of Wald and Elizabeth Chappell Barnes Best known for her enigmatic and stylistically dazzling novel Nightwood (1936), Djuna Barnes is regarded as a totemic figure of literary modernism and a forceful if challenging poet of the female consciousness. Nightwood’s nonlinear form, its pessimistic outlook on love and redemption, and its abundance of disturbing images have frustrated some readers and critics, while others have found the same qualities to be the source of the novel’s uncommon emotional impact. T.S. Eliot was an early champion of Nightwood who celebrated its poetic language and appreciated its gloomy philosophy. He wrote in his 1937 introduction, ‘‘It seems to me that all of us, so far as we attach ourselves to created objects and surrender our wills to temporal ends, are eaten by the same worm.’’ Brought up in modest circumstances in Huntington, Long Island, and subjected to sexual abuse (possibly of an incestuous nature), Barnes went on to become a prominent figure in international literary circles, befriending James Joyce and artists such as
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Berenice Abbott, Marsden Hartley, and Marcel Duchamp, as well as Eliot. Because her life story includes so many colorful personalities, and because the traumas of her early life directly influenced most of her literary output, Barnes offers ripe material for literary biography. Phillip Herring wrote, ‘‘Djuna Barnes’ artistic genius, like that of many writers, normally required adversity to produce work of artistic merit.’’ Indeed, Robin Vote, the central character of Nightwood, is generally acknowledged to be a fictional version of Thelma Wood, the longtime love interest of Barnes. Like Wood, Vote inspires the obsessive devotion of men and women alike, apparently without trying, and she always leaves her admirers in a state of inconsolable grief, apparently without feeling any remorse herself. During writing and revision, Barnes continued to nurse the emotional wounds inflicted by Wood, and her bitter conclusions about love determine every relationship in the novel. In Nightwood the idea that love is a disguised form of delusion or narcissism gets articulated by Dr. Matthew O’Connor, a transvestite who spends most of his time in bed—and one of the oddest characters in all modern literature. The middle chapters of the novel are largely made up of the rambling monologues of this fictionalized version of the Irish-American abortionist and drug dealer, Dan Mahoney. Nightwood is far and away Barnes’ best known work as well as her most powerful and original, but over the course of her 45-year literary career, though far from prolific, she wrote a wide variety of work consistent with Nightwood’s satirical and doom-ridden character. These secondary works include Ryder (1928), an early novel loosely based on Barnes’ childhood; a group of one-act plays; and a series of interviews with the famous and nearly famous, which appeared in popular newspapers and magazines. Barnes undertook the interviews to supplement the small annuity she received from her friend and patron, Peggy Guggenheim. Her choice of subjects was typically eccentric and ambitious. In 1915 she dutifully transcribed the haunting words of the controversial radio evangelist Billy Sunday: ‘‘War has been the best thing for religion in the last century; it has filled the churches, it has brought men to their knees in the trenches.’’ Barnes also held conversations with James Joyce, boxer Jess Willard, and others, publishing the results in popular publications like McCall’s and the New York Press. Ryder fictionalizes members of Barnes’ own family, in particular her grandmother Zadel Barnes, a journalist and activist. Barnes illustrated Ladies Almanack herself and published it anonymously the same year as Ryder. A mock biography focusing on the lesbian exploits of Evangeline Musset, it ends with the heroine’s death, at age 99, and the ritualistic cremation of everything but her tongue. Herring writes that the work ‘‘rivals Joyce’s Finnegans Wake for both obscurity and bawdiness.’’ Barnes’ plays show the influence of Oscar Wilde, especially his revisionist biblical fable Salomé, as well as John Millington Synge. The idiosyncratic dialect of Synge’s Irish peasants made an uneasy pairing with Barnes’ penchant for satire. The incongruity was in all probability intentional. Mary O’Brian, mother of the
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title character in ‘‘Maggie of the Saints’’ (1917; published in the New York Morning Telegraph Sunday Magazine), remarks, ‘‘If one lives long enough it is as good as being a child again.’’ A later play, The Antiphon (published in 1958 and premiered three years later), returned to the family themes of Ryder and transposed them to a setting reminiscent of Eliot’s The Family Reunion. Although her writing never achieved the same degree of renown enjoyed by some of her contemporaries, Barnes was considered a great beauty as well as an exceptional raconteur, and on those merits she did become fairly well known in her time. The passing of literary modernism and most of its central figures made her something of a living relic, a status she neither enjoyed nor encouraged. Paraphrasing Thomas Hobbes, she is recorded as saying, ‘‘Life is painful, nasty and short . . . in my case it has only been painful and nasty’’—a line which became the lengthy title of Hank O’Neal’s 1990 biography. Her reclusiveness only enhanced her reputation as a feminist maverick, and by the time of her death in 1982, the amount of reverence for Nightwood and curiosity about the raw material on which it was based showed no signs of subsiding. OTHER WORKS: The Book of Repulsive Women (1915). A Book (1923). Selected Works (1962). Creatures in the Alphabet (1982). Interviews (1985). At the Roots of the Stars (1995). BIBLIOGRAPHY: O’Neal, H., Life Is Painful, Nasty and Short . . . In My Case Only Painful and Nasty (1990). Herring, P., Djuna: The Life and Works of Djuna Barnes (1995). —MARK SWARTZ
BARNES, Linda J. Born 6 June 1949, Detroit, Michigan Daughter of Irving and Hilda Grodman Appleblatt; married Richard Allen Barnes, 1970; children: Samuel Best known for her mystery series featuring Carlotta Carlyle, Linda Barnes also wrote a previous series of four mystery novels starring Michael Spraggue. Her first Spraggue novel, Blood Will Have Blood, was published in 1982 (written under Linda J. Barnes). It introduced readers to the independently wealthy actor and amateur detective. Three more Spraggue books followed: Bitter Finish (1983), Dead Act, (1984) and Cities of the Dead (1986). Barnes ended the series because Spraggue was getting too depressing: since he was an amateur sleuth, and the only way to legitimately get him involved in a murder mystery was for the victim to be someone he knew. To keep him supplied with cases, everyone around him would eventually have to die. In addition, as the series continued, his involvement in the various cases was becoming more unbelievable. But the character was popular enough to spawn a made-for-television movie in 1984 loosely based on Blood Will Have Blood.
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Barnes calls the Spraggue novels her apprentice work. She always wanted to write a detective novel with a female lead, but the powers that be in publishing, who said such a semitough character would never sell, deterred her. But Barnes was determined, and between the second and third Spraggue novels she created Carlotta Carlyle. The six-foot-one, redheaded ex-cop, who is a part-time Boston cab driver and licensed private detective, came to life in ‘‘Lucky Penny’’ (1985). Written in 1983, Barnes sold the short story to several magazines that folded before ever publishing her piece, which means she was never paid. After ‘‘Lucky Penny’’ was finally published in the New Black Mask (which folded after five issues), it immediately earned critical acclaim. Nominated for all the major mystery honors, it won the 1986 Anthony award. This success proved to Barnes and her editor that a female character wasn’t such a bad idea after all. A Trouble of Fools (1987), the first Carlotta novel, enjoyed the same success as its short-story predecessor. It was nominated for the Edgar and Shamus awards and won the 1988 American Mystery award. The Snake Tattoo (1989), Barnes’ second outing with Carlotta, was named outstanding book of 1990 by the London Times. Critics praise Carlotta’s character for her sense of humor and wry outlook on life. While Barnes’ plots are strong and intriguing, the true strength of the successful series is Carlotta, who has been described as memorable, and her strong supporting cast. The secondary characters in the novels are as interesting in their own right: Carlotta’s tenant, Roz, an eccentric artist; Carlotta’s sometimes boyfriend, Sam Gianelli, son of the local mob leader; and Paolina, her young sister (through the Big Sisters organization). It is Carlotta’s strong emotional relationship with Paolina that stands out in the series and has led to a frequent underlying theme in the books of a concern for children. Barnes was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan. Her father was a mechanical engineer and her mother was a teacher and homemaker. When she was seventeen, Barnes won the National Council of Teachers of English Writing Award. She soon gave up writing, believing that something so easily mastered at such an age must not be worth much, so she decided to pursue acting. Barnes graduated from Boston University’s School of Fine and Applied Arts in 1971 with degrees in acting, English, and theater education. But when it came time to pursue her acting career, she opted to teach high school drama rather than starve in New York. While at Chelmsford High School in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, Barnes got back into writing when she penned a one-act play for the Massachusetts High School Drama Festival. This play, Wings, (1973) is still performed around the country. She wrote one other play, Prometheus, in 1974. Again unwilling to starve in New York, this time as a playwright, Barnes began writing mystery novels, never imagining they would be a series. Cold Case, her seventh novel in the Carlotta Carlyle series, was published in 1997. She says there will be at least one more because she tends to view the novels in sets of four and she intends to reevaluate the series after the eighth book. If she still has an interest in the character and feels she can make
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Carlotta grow, she’ll continue the series. Barnes currently resides near Boston with her husband and son. OTHER WORKS: Coyote (1990) Steel Guitar (1991) Snapshot (1993) Hardware (1995) Flashpoint (1999) BIBLIOGRAPHY: Book Review Digest 1996 (1997). CA (1997). Heising, W., Detecting Women 2 (1996). Swanson, J., and D. James, By A Woman’s Hand (1994). —KATHY HENDERSON
BARNES, Margaret Ayer Born 8 April 1886, Chicago, Illinois; died 26 October 1967, Cambridge, Massachusetts Daughter of Benjamin F. and Janet Hopkins Ayer; married Cecil Barnes, 1910; children: three sons. Descended on both sides from colonial English families who settled in America in the middle 1600s, Margaret Ayer Barnes attended the University School for Girls in Chicago and majored in English and philosophy at Bryn Mawr College, where she was influenced by the feminist president, M. Carey Thomas. While raising three sons, she appeared in performances of the Aldis Players in Lake Forest, Illinois, and of the North Shore Theater in Winnetka, Illinois. Her stories, published by the Pictorial Review, were later collected and published in book form as Prevailing Winds (1928). Barnes wrote three plays (two in collaboration with Edward Sheldon, a dramatist and personal friend) and five novels, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1931 for Years of Grace (1930). After the publication of her last novel, Wisdom’s Gate (1938), Barnes returned to writing occasional short stories and lecturing. Prevailing Winds shows evidence of the skills that would bring her critical acclaim, but the narrow focus that would cause her ultimate neglect by most literary critics can also be seen. From her theatrical experience she had learned to define character through conversations; her careful observations of character, however, were limited to the upper-middle-class society of Chicago in the first third of the 20th century. Distracted by the element of social history in Barnes’s fiction, many critics overlooked important underlying themes. Feminism, a major theme which grew out of her education at Bryn Mawr, appeared in early short stories through the portrayals of Martha Cavendish in ‘‘The Dinner Party’’ and of Kate Dalton in ‘‘Perpetual Care.’’ Both are women prominent in Chicago society who have chosen marriage and socially conventional lives, but each is confronted with a situation that leads her to question those choices and seek an opportunity to break with convention. Each resolves that the choice has come too late: Martha has learned to live in her thoughts and let the world go as it will; Kate in the end
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settles for memories to avoid upsetting her children by changing her life.
BARNES, Mary (Downing) Sheldon
Most of the women in Barnes’s novels follow the examples of these two women, but in each succeeding novel they seem less satisfied with the choice. In Years of Grace, which traces the life of Jane Ward Carver to the eve of the Great Depression, Jane abandons early adherence to the feminist principles instilled in her at Bryn Mawr and elects to fill the traditional roles of wife and mother. Already before her marriage, she had admitted she lacked the courage of her convictions: ‘‘She who thinks and runs away, lives to think another day. . . . I don’t act at all. . . . I just drift.’’ When she is offered an opportunity to defy convention and marry Jimmy Trent, she chooses to remain with her responsibilities. Only when her daughter Cicily breaks the pattern by divorcing her husband to marry Albert Lancaster, does Jane wonder if her ‘‘struggle to live with dignity and decency and decorum’’ had been a worthy goal.
Born 15 September 1850, Oswego, New York; died 27 August 1898, London, England Daughter of Edward Austin and Frances Bradford Stiles Sheldon; married Earl Barnes, 1885
Olivia Van Tyne Ottendorf in Westward Passage (1931) temporarily accepts her second chance at an artistic life with Nick Allen, but soon returns gratefully to her husband and the limited society she had known. She has been educated only for such a role, and the reader recognizes her, as the critic Lloyd C. Taylor, Jr., points out, as ‘‘a victim of an intricately structured social system that securely, if deceptively, deprives the woman of any training that does not contribute to the creation of the lady and the socialite.’’ In Within This Present (1933), Barnes explores Chicago society once again, this time through the character of Sally Sewall. From World War I through the Depression years, Sally struggles to maintain a failing marriage just as those around her struggle to preserve a disintegrating social structure. Barnes resolves her interest in feminist themes in her final novel, Wisdom’s Gate. She returns to the Carver family from Years of Grace and chronicles Cicily’s life after her marriage to Albert Lancaster. Cicily has broken the pattern of her past, and although she does not achieve greater fulfillment, she gains uncompromising clarity. The topics of divorce and adultery are examined objectively and honestly. While lacking the unity and scope of Barnes’s earlier novels, Wisdom’s Gate portrays a marriage based on the honesty of a woman who has the courage of her convictions. OTHER WORKS: Age of Innocence (1928). Jenny (with E. Shelton, 1929). Dishonored Lady (with E. Shelton, 1930). Edna His Wife (1935). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Barnes, E. W., The Man Who Lived Twice: The Biography of Edward Sheldon (1956). Lawrence, M., The School of Femininity (1936). Stuckey, W. J., The Pulitzer Prize Novels: A Critical Backward Look (1966). Taylor, L. C., Jr., Margaret Ayer Barnes (1974). Wagenknecht, E. C., Chicago (1964). Other references: North American Review (Jan. 1934). —THELMA J. SHINN
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An educator and historian, Mary Sheldon Barnes made her major contribution as a pioneer in the use of the source method of teaching history. Her first book was the innovative Studies in General History (1885). In this pioneering work, Barnes dealt with the period 1000 B.C. to 476 A.D. Her primary purpose was to teach the reader how to develop critical ability and to demonstrate how the essence of a culture could best be apprehended by the use of its documents and its art. To achieve this, she offered extracts from historical sources; presentation of basic events and personalities; and use of illustrative extracts, including literary works, art, architecture, and philosophy. She provided questions to guide the student’s development in critical judgment, for she was concerned primarily with the student’s ‘‘self-learning.’’ In later editions Barnes expanded her scope to include first the barbarian age, then the empire of Charlemagne, and, in more condensed form, the history of Europe up to the late 19th century. For the Carolingian era, she provided illustrations not only of European but also of Islamic life and culture. As for the more modern history, she dealt rather briefly with the French Revolution and Napoleonic era, but gave a more comprehensive account of the spread of Prussian power. In 1891 Barnes and her husband applied the same source approach in their joint work, Studies in American History (1891). Studies in American History followed the same principles of ‘‘training the student to think for himself’’ and also to ‘‘enter into living sympathy with others.’’ (It was, however, designed for younger students than Studies in General History.) The author used primary accounts, arguing ‘‘the drama of life is in the sources.’’ Barnes laid out the basis of her method in Studies in Historical Method (1896). She was concerned not merely with the understanding of the past but with developing qualities of mind that would allow citizens to form ‘‘independent, unprejudiced judgments as to men’s actions, opinions, acts, and social processes’’ of their own day. In American history she did raise some contemporary issues, such as the problem of immigrant adjustment to America and how ‘‘to change them into Americans.’’ But on other issues such as woman suffrage she did not provide information; she only raised questions. As a proponent of the source method, Barnes made her impact both through the histories she wrote, the accompanying separate teachers’ and students’ manuals, and her works on historical methodology. Her major educational work, however, probably occurred through the histories themselves. Through her organization and format, as well as the questions and explanatory comments, she communicated directly to the student that the responsibility for learning was primarily one’s own. The results of mastery of her method, Barnes argued, would be felt not only in the classrooms but in judgements which the student as citizen
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would bring to bear on contemporary questions. She sought to promote informed inquiry into public issues and intelligent, critical judgments. With her works Barnes did play an important pioneering role in the methodology of history teaching. OTHER WORKS: Studies in Greek and Roman History; or Studies in General History from 1000 B.C. to 476 A.D. (1886). Aids for Teaching General History (1888). General History in the High School (circa 1889). Proposal for the Study of Local History (circa 1889). Studies in American History: Teacher’s Manual (1892). Autobiography of Edward Austin Sheldon (edited by Barnes, 1911). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: American Women (1897). Dictionary of American Biography. National Cyclopedia of American Biography (1892 et seq.). NAW 1607-1950 (1971). Other references: AH (Oct. 1948, Nov. 1948). Journal of Education (15 Sept. 1898). Sequoia (30 Sept. 1898). Wellesley College Magazine (Oct. 1898). —INZER BYERS
BARNUM, Frances Courtenay Baylor Born 20 January 1848, Fort Smith, Arkansas; died 19 October 1920, Winchester, Virginia Wrote under: Frances Courtenay Baylor Daughter of James and Sophie Baylor Dawson; married George Sherman Barnum, 1896 Frances Courtenay Baylor Barnum carried her mother’s maiden name from her teen years on and wrote under that name even after her marriage. Her father was an army officer, so her childhood years were spent in such army posts as San Antonio and New Orleans. Barnum was educated by her mother, and after the Civil War she moved to her mother’s family home in Winchester, Virginia. The following several years were spent in England and on the continent with her sister’s family, which provided the background for Barnum’s international novels. After they returned to Virginia, Barnum began publishing with a play, Petruchio Tamed, which was put out anonymously. Closely following were articles in such newspapers as the Louisville Courier-Journal, Boston Globe, New Orleans Times-Democrat, and the London Truth. Her poetry, though never collected independently, was well known, especially ‘‘Kind Words to Virginia’’ and ‘‘The Last Confederate.’’ Barnum’s fiction, mostly directed at young people, reflected the aristocratic attitudes of her mother. Her earliest novel, On Both Sides (1885), reflects the lives of the ‘‘best people’’ of England and America and reveals Barnum’s true gift of realistic portraiture. Her situations, however, are idealized, and plot is almost nonexistent in most of her fiction. Barnum is at her best when her not-always-gentle humor reveals social and individual character, as when John’s friends are
incredulous at his grief over his wife’s death: ‘‘There were men on the mountain who had lost four wives and had never dreamed of such a thing as letting the light affliction of the moment work permanent injury to such graver interests as pigs, and potatoes, and wheat. . . .’’ Unfortunately, these gems are lost in the often pedantic or sentimental ramblings. Worth preserving, however, are the memorable characters of much of Barnum’s fiction. The young Juan and Juanita charm children and adults alike as they find their way home to Mexico alone; Claudia Hyde reflects the strength and natural aristocracy a Southern lady could display after the war had ravaged her home and her homeland; Miss Nina Barrow exemplifies the way not to raise a child; the Withers reveal that progress up the ladder of fortune often leads to emptiness. Because of her humor and insight, Barnum’s fiction remains eminently readable. OTHER WORKS: Behind the Blue Ridge (1887). Juan and Juanita (1888). A Shocking Example, and Other Sketches (1889). Claudia Hyde (1894). Miss Nina Barrow (1897). The Ladder of Fortune (1899). A Georgian Bungalow (1900). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Gordon, C. A., Jr., Virginia Writers of Fugitive Verse. Reference works: American Authors 1600-1900 (1938). Library of Southern Literature (1909). A Woman of the Century, F. E. Willard, and M. A. Livermore (1893). —THELMA J. SHINN
BARR, Amelia E(dith Huddleston) Born 29 March 1831, Ulverton, Lancashire, England; died 10 March 1919, New York, New York Wrote under: Amelia E. Barr Daughter of William Henry and Mary Singleton Huddleston; married Robert Barr, 1850; children: six (three died young) Amelia E. Barr was the second daughter of a Methodist clergyman. The family moved several times during her childhood, and she attended various small private schools. When she was just sixteen she felt the need to help the family financially, and after two years of teaching she entered a normal school in Glasgow. Here she fell in love with a prosperous young merchant and married him. In 1853 her husband was forced to declare bankruptcy, and a little later, in an effort to establish himself again, brought his wife and growing family to the United States. After living in several cities, the Barrs settled in Galveston, Texas, which appeared to her to be the promised land, as she extolled it in several of her works. In 1867 her husband and three sons died of yellow fever, and in 1868, with the three surviving children, all daughters, Barr moved to New York City. For 19 months she was a governess in New
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Jersey, where she began her writing career. For the rest of her life she wrote steadily and became quite successful. Her industry was remarkable. It is said that at the end of her life she herself had lost count of how many books she had produced. The National Union Catalog lists more than 75 works. In addition, she contributed a large number of short stories and essays to such periodicals as the Christian Union, the Illustrated Christian Weekly, Harper’s Weekly, Harper’s Bazaar, Frank Leslie’s Magazine, and the Advance. Her verses alone netted her a $1,000 a year for 15 years and were reprinted widely in periodicals. Most amazing, perhaps, is her endurance. Up to the time of her death at eighty-eight she was writing fiction not perceptibly inferior to what she had done in her prime. Barr was a woman of firm character and decided opinions. An extremely religious person, from her earliest years she believed she had psychic powers and was convinced her dreams foretold the future. Later she became an ardent believer in reincarnation. Additionally, she had strong convictions about the position of women. Her views on this occur again and again in her autobiography, All the Days of My Life (1913). ‘‘All my life long,’’ she says, ‘‘I have been sensible of the injustice constantly done to women.’’ In one place she remarks caustically that to a man his children are much more valuable than his wife; the former are of his flesh, but the latter is not, and can easily be replaced. It was a matter of course that she would applaud the efforts of the suffragettes, for whom she had nothing but praise. She was genuinely interested in history, and many of her novels have carefully researched historical backgrounds. One reviewer praised her use of historical data: ‘‘Mrs. Barr is very skillful in correlating the interests of the past and present. Not only do the incidents presage the situation of today, but the characters blend in themselves the quaintness of the long ago and the universality of all peoples.’’ Another critic said that her fiction may be read for its historical data alone. In spite of her use of historical facts, however, Barr’s work was not destined to last—it is too floridly romantic, too sentimental. One critic called it ‘‘extremely superficial,’’ and Barr’s own theory of fiction seems to bear him out: ‘‘I have always found myself unable to make evil triumphant. Truly, in real life it is apparently so, but if fiction does not show us a better life than reality, what is the good of it?’’ Barr’s personality, high-strung and fanatical though it was, is of more interest than her writings. Her existence was one of exhausting labor, many trials, and many sorrows (of her six children, only three lived to grow up, and one of these was mentally unbalanced). Yet she retained an eager enthusiasm for living up to the very end. OTHER WORKS: Romances and Realities: Tales of Truth and Fancy (1876). The Young People of Shakespeare’s Dramas (1882). Cluny MacPherson; A Tale of Brotherly Love (1883). Scottish Sketches (1883). Jan Vedder’s Wife (1885). The Hallam Succession (1885). A Daughter of Fife (1886). The Bow of Orange
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Ribbon (1886). The Squire of Sandal-Side (1886). The Household of McNeil (1886). A Border Shepherdess (1887). Paul and Christina (1887). Christopher, and Other Stories (1887). In Spite of Himself (1888). Master of His Fate (1888). The Novels of Besant and Rice (1888). Remember the Alamo (1888). Between Two Loves (1889). Feet of Clay (1889). The Last of the McAllisters (1889). Friend Olivia (1889). The Beads of Tasmer (1890). The Household of McNeil (1890). She Loved a Sailor (1890). Woven of Love and Glory (1890). Sister to Esau (1891). Love for an Hour is Love Forever (1891). A Rose of a Hundred Leaves (1891). The Preacher’s Daughter (1892). Michael and Theodora (1892). Mrs. Barr’s Short Stories (1892). Girls of a Feather (1893). The Lone House (1893). A Singer from the Sea (1893). Bernicia (1895). The Flower of Gala Water (1893). A Knight of the Nets (1896). Winter Evening Tales (1896). The King’s Highway (1897). Prisoners of Consciences (1897). Stories of Life and Love (1897). Maids, Wives, and Bachelors (1898). I, Thou and the Other One (1899). Trinity Bells (1899). Was It Right to Forgive? (1899). The Maid of Maiden Lane (1900). Souls of Passage (1901). The Lion’s Whelp (1901). A Song of a Single Note (1902). The Black Shilling (1903). Thyra Varrick (1903). The Belle of Bowling Green (1904). Cecilia’s Lovers (1905). The Man Between (1906). The Heart of Jessy Laurie (1907). The Strawberry Handkerchief (1908). The Hands of Compulsion (1909). The House on Cherry Street (1909). A Reconstructed Marriage (1910). A Maid of Old New York (1911). Sheila Vedder (1911). Three Score and Ten: A Book for the Aged (1913). Playing with Fire (1914). The Measure of a Man (1915). The Winning of Lucia (1915). Profit & Loss (1916). Christine, A Fife Fisher Girl (1917). Joan (1917). An Orkney Maid (1918). The Paper Cap: A Story of Love and Labor (1918). Songs in the Common Chord (1919). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Barr, A. E., All the Days of My Life (1913). Reference works: American Authors: 1600-1900, S. J. Kunitz and H. Haycraft, eds., (1938). Other references: Bookman (May 1920). Nation (14 Aug. 1913). NYT (12 March 1919). Review of Reviews (May 1919). —ABIGAIL ANN HAMBLEN
BARR, Nevada Born 1952, in Nevada Married and divorced Nevada Barr writes mysteries set in the unusual landscape of the National Park Service. Born in Nevada and raised in Susanville, California, 80 miles outside Reno, Barr received her B.A. from California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo and her M.A. from the University of California at Irvine. Her father was a pilot and her mother a pilot, mechanic, and carpenter. After her education ended, Barr pursued an acting career. She performed in the Classic Stage Company in New York City and
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appeared in off-Broadway shows. She also acted in television commercials and in corporate and industrial films. In 1978, during her acting career, Barr became serious about writing fiction. Her husband at the time, also an actor, eventually decided to quit the theater for the park service, and Barr joined him, ending her 18year foray into acting. She assumed a position as a law enforcement ranger at Guadalupe Mountains National Park in Texas. She subsequently worked as a ranger at Michigan’s Isle Royale, Colorado’s Mesa Verde, and Mississippi’s Natchez Trace Parkway National Parks, among others. Many of these were later featured in her mysteries. She continued as a ranger long after she had become a successful novelist. Barr’s first published book, Bittersweet (1984), is not a mystery but a historical novel, one of several she wrote but the only one released. It is about a Pennsylvania woman in the 1870s who is accused of having an affair with a young girl. She leaves her town and meets an abused wife with whom she begins a relationship. The two move to Nevada and set up an independent but difficult life as innkeepers. Although some reviewers felt the characters were flat, most praised the historical details and unusual premise.
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In Firestorm (1996), Barr creates a locked-room mystery in which a crime occurs among a finite group of people. She creates this situation in the context of a forest fire in Northern California’s Lassen Volcanic National Park. Each of a group of rangers hides in a personal fireproof tent to escape the onslaught of fire. When the inferno passes after 12 minutes, one of the characters has been stabbed to death. Endangered Species (1997) takes place in Cumberland National Seashore off the coast of Georgia. ‘‘Barr possesses that rare combination of talents: she can write a beautiful sentence and create a first-rate mystery,’’ wrote Publishers Weekly. ‘‘[She] evokes the minimally developed island’s shimmering beauty while spinning an absorbing tale of danger and deceit that embraces a realistic description of conservation work and a diverse, engaging cast.’’ Barr’s next novel, Blind Descent (1998) is set in New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns and is emblematic of the power of the author’s descriptions of nature. In the New York Times Book Review, Marilyn Stasio commented on Anna’s claustrophobic excursion into an underground cave: ‘‘Barr’s descriptions of this Stygian underworld—so beautiful, so mysterious and so treacherous—have a stunning visceral quality, largely because of her heroine’s affinity with the natural world.’’
Nine years passed before the publication of Barr’s next book, Track of the Cat (1993), which marked the debut of her series protagonist, park ranger Anna Pigeon. The novel earned the Anthony and Agatha awards for best first mystery. Barr and Anna are similar in some ways—both are National Park Service rangers; both have a sister Molly (who becomes a beloved character in the series through her phone conversations with Anna), although Anna’s Molly is a New York psychiatrist while Barr’s sister is a pilot; and both are single women, with Anna losing her husband in an accident and Barr being divorced.
Anna visits New York in Barr’s 1999 novel, Liberty Falling. While supporting her hospitalized sister, Molly, and staying with a ranger friend at the Statue of Liberty, Anna is faced with a crime to solve. Like Barr’s other books, Liberty Falling is replete with vivid descriptions of a park ranger’s job and the surrounding environment, as well as a page-turning plot featuring a realistic female character.
Some reviewers cited Track of the Cat for its ‘‘overripe’’ language and uneven writing, but all praised it for its realistic, beautiful, and sometimes activist descriptions of nature. The New York Times Book Review noted, ‘‘Although her human characters could use some stuffing, Ms. Barr describes plant and animal life with a naturalist’s eye for detail and with an environmentalist’s fury at the destruction of the wilderness and its creatures.’’
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference Works: CA 161 (1998). Other references: National Parks (Sept./Oct. 1995); NYTBR (18 Apr. 1993, 17 Apr. 1994, 2 Apr. 1995, 13 Apr. 1997, 5 Apr. 1998); Outside (Apr. 1996); PW (6 July 1984, 4 Jan. 1993, 14 Feb. 1994, 30 Jan. 1995, 6 Jan. 1996, 5 Feb. 1996, 24 Mar. 1997, 2 Feb. 1998); Southern Living (1999).
Barr is known for her colorful secondary characters and exciting endings, and for allowing her readers to share the experiences and point of view of the strong yet vulnerable Anna. ‘‘Barr develops a complex, credible, and capable heroine who believes in truth and justice while remaining conscious of the ambiguities of human existence,’’ a Publishers Weekly reviewer wrote. Barr’s second Anna Pigeon book is A Superior Death (1994), which takes place at Isle Royale. Ill Wind (1995) takes Anna to Mesa Verde, where she assists FBI Agent Frederick Stanton in solving a crime in the park and with whom she starts to develop a relationship, marking the beginning of Barr’s increasing focus on human interaction. Anna is noted for being a three-dimensional character with human foibles; this is demonstrated in Ill Wind by her struggle with remembrances of her husband and her tendency to drink too much.
—KAREN RAUGUST
BARTON, Clara (Harlowe) Born Clarisse Harlowe Barton on 25 December 1821, North Oxford, Massachusetts; died 12 April 1912, Glen Echo, Maryland Daughter of Stephen and Sarah Stone Barton Best known as founder of the American Red Cross, Clara Barton had several careers in her long life. Extended periods of intense activity and endurance alternated with severe physical and emotional exhaustion. She taught school for 18 years, then became the first full-time woman clerk in the U.S. Patent Office.
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During the Civil War she became a living legend as the ‘‘Angel of the Battlefield.’’ In defiance of the military prejudice against female nurses on the battlefield, Barton gathered vital supplies on her own initiative and followed the troops. Survival of wounded men often depended not so much upon skilled doctors as upon immediate first aid, food, and shelter for the stricken. In long battles, the wounded might lie neglected on the ground for two or three days before evacuation to a hospital. Barton learned to make campfires in drenching rain, cook huge pots of gruel and coffee, go without sleep for days while she and a few helpers fed each soldier, bandaged his wounds, and protected him if possible from the elements. She was never a hospital nurse like her famous contemporaries Dorothea Dix and Florence Nightingale. She was on hand, however, in the most desperate situations with exactly what was needed most, such as kerosene lanterns for a distraught frontline doctor operating at night by the uncertain light of one candle. She was close to fifty years old when she first heard of the Geneva Convention and the International Red Cross. Isolationist America was one of the few modern nations that had not ratified the Geneva Treaty. When the Franco-Prussian War broke out, she joined the Red Cross in the rehabilitation of the ruined Alsatian city of Strasbourg. When Barton returned home she launched a long and frustrating campaign for the ratification of the Geneva Treaty, which occurred finally in 1882. The first president of the American Red Cross (organized in 1881), she acted in that capacity for 23 years and served not only in Cuba during the Spanish-American War but also during great floods, fires, famines, and hurricanes. She is credited with expanding the functions of the International Red Cross to serve after natural disasters as well as on the battlefield. Except in periods of acute depression and illness, Barton recorded her experiences in diaries that contain a vivid account of her life and times, and provide a rich source for subsequent biographers and historians. These diaries, as well as letters and other papers, are in the Library of Congress, and are widely quoted in published works. William E. Barton’s biography reprints many of her letters. One of the best introductions to her prose is the last 100 pages of Illustrious Americans: Clara Barton, written by Barton, but with commentaries that put each excerpt in the context of her thought and action at that time. They include passages from The Story of My Childhood (1907), a small volume intended for young people—the extent of Barton’s efforts at writing an autobiography. Barton’s other two books, objective histories of the Red Cross, lean heavily on her personal experiences in disaster situations, described as she lived through them and recorded them in her diaries. Although her actions are, no doubt, more important than her words, effective action often depended on her powers of persuasion and skill in diplomacy, both in speaking and in writing. Moreover, even now her accounts are moving documents about human suffering among the people history soon forgets: the common soldier quietly bleeding to death in the mud, the homeless family on the flooded bayou, the destitute blacks of the
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hurricane-swept Sea Islands, the ragged survivors who creep out of the ruins of war-gutted cities, the bloated and mangled corpses piled high on funeral pyres after a tidal wave in Galveston. Her style is occasionally sentimental, and perhaps offensive to some modern readers, as in her remarks about the Sea Islanders: ‘‘The tender memory of the childlike confidence and obedience of this ebony-faced population is something that time cannot efface. . . .’’ On occasion, she has a gift for understated pathos. Four Sea Island blacks whose wounds she had dressed in the Civil War approached her one day, ‘‘One by one they showed their scars. There was very little clothing to hide them—bullet wound and sabre stroke.’’ In formal exposition, such as the first part of the longer volume, The Red Cross in Peace and War, her style is sometimes ponderous. Yet it soon moves into more personal narrative and acquires more vitality, covering the same territory as A Story of the Red Cross (1904), with additional details and photographs, as well as the formal reports and correspondence, and some of Barton’s inspirational but undistinguished poetry. The diaries, however, expose an element in Barton not apparent in her published works. Outwardly, even to close friends and relatives, she seemed always calm, efficient, good-natured, blessed with humor and wit. Inwardly, when not engrossed in her work, she suffered from depression and feelings of uselessness. This personal melancholy haunted her even when she was most honored at home and abroad. The demands made by her idealism and zeal for service seem to approach the pathological, driving her beyond physical endurance, making the necessary recuperative period unhappy and fretful. The writings of Clara Barton will remain a primary source of information on the development of the American Red Cross. They will also provide a more personal insight into the motivations and style of one of the most dynamic women of the 19th century. OTHER WORKS: The Red Cross (1898; reprinted as The Red Cross in Peace and War). Papers, 1834-1918 (microfilm, 1986). The papers of Clara Barton are in the Library of Congress. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Barton, W. E., The Life of Clara Barton (1922). Buckingham, C. E., Clara Barton, a Broad Humanity: Philanthropic Efforts on Behalf of the Armed Forces and Disaster Victims, 1860-1900 (1980, 1997). Burton, D. H., Clara Barton: In the Service of Humanity (1995). Downey, F., Disaster Fighters (1938). Dulles, F. R., The American Red Cross (1950). Epler, P. H., The Life of Clara Barton (1941). Marko, E., Clara Barton and the American Red Cross (1996). McCaslin, N., Angel of the Battlefield (1993). Oates, S. B., A Woman of Valor: Clara Barton and the Civil War (1995). Poor, S. R., Herstory (1990). Pryor, E. B., Clara Barton: Professional Angel (1988). Rogers, G. N., Clara Barton and Hightstown (1994). Ross, I., Angel of the Battlefield (1956). Welles, S., Illustrious Americans: Clara Barton (1966). Williams, B. C., Clara Barton, Daughter of Destiny (1941). Other references: American Women of Achievement Video Collection (video, 1995). Clara Barton (video, 1988). Clara
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Barton (video, 1995). Clara Barton: Eyewitness to the Civil War (video, 1997). Great Women in American History: Volume 1 (video, 1996). —KATHERINE SNIPES
BARTON, May Hollis See ADAMS, Harriet Stratemeyer
BATEMAN, Sidney (Frances) Cowell Born 29 March 1823, New Jersey; died 13 January 1881, London, England Daughter of Joseph and Frances Sheppard Witchett Cowell; married Hezekiah L. Bateman, 1839 The daughter of Joseph Cowell, English low comedian and well-known American-theater manager in the south and west, and of Frances Sheppard, Sidney Cowell Bateman was reared on a farm in Ohio and educated in Cincinnati. At the age of fourteen, she began her acting career in New Orleans. In St. Louis in 1839, she married Hezekiah Linthicum Bateman, actor and manager. In 1869 Bateman and her husband moved to London where they managed the Lyceum from 1871 until Mr. Bateman’s death. Henry Irving, whose distinguished career they helped launch, took over the management in 1878; and Bateman, having leased Sadler’s Wells, restored its prestige. To this theater she brought Joaquin Miller’s The Danites, the first all-American production in London. Self, written and produced by Bateman in St. Louis at the People’s Theater in 1856, is one of the first three ‘‘society’’ plays written by a woman for the American stage. During its run in New York at Burton’s Chambers Street Theater, a critic for the New York Times wrote: ‘‘Whether it will obtain a permanent place in the limited repertoire of the native drama admits of some doubt.’’ Later, the outstandingly creative performance of John E. Owens in the star role of John Unit, a true-blue Yankee banker, made a great success of the long and sometimes dull play. A social satire, Self employs local allusions, such as references to patent medicines, wildcat banks, slavery, daguerreotypes, and stereotyped characters, such as the New York merchant, the parvenus, and the faithful black servant. Melodrama, even farce, malapropisms, ‘‘tag’’ names, and a deus ex machina ending make this play less than great dramatic literature. Edgar Allan Poe, in the role of critic, spoke of its ‘‘lack of originality and inventiveness,’’ theatricality, dependence on opulent settings, and ‘‘almost burlesque upon the arrant conventionality of stage incidents.’’ The Golden Calf; or, Marriage à la Mode was published in 1857 by the St. Louis Republican Office. Because of Bateman’s
strong feeling for poetry, Geraldine; or, Love’s Victory, originally produced in Philadelphia in 1859 and at Wallack’s Theater, New York, is in blank verse. In 1865, with the alternate title changed to The Master Passion, it played the London Adelphi. Evangeline (1860), a dramatization of Longfellow’s poem, was written for Bateman’s daughter Kate. In 1871 Fanchette; or, The Will o’ the Wisp, adapted from Die Grille, a German version of George Sand’s La Petite Fadette, opened at the Theater Royal, Edinburgh, with Bateman’s daughter Isabel in the title role; later it played the Lyceum in London with Henry Irving in the cast. The Dead Secret (1877) was adapted by permission of Wilkie Collins. Sidney Cowell, niece of Bateman, wrote ‘‘in her youth [my aunt] was a delightful actress and a beautiful woman. She was gentle and retiring, but of very fair judgement and executive ability. She was always the power behind the throne in all the elaborate productions credited to her husband and daughter.’’ Clement Scott in The Drama of Yesterday and Today states that ‘‘Bateman thought his good wife was the best writer and judge of plays in existence. . . . She certainly was a very clever and charming woman.’’ She was much honored by the theatrical profession at her death.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hewitt, B., Theatre U.S.A.: 1665 to 1957 (1959). Hutton, L., Curiosities of the American Stage (1899). Meserve, W. J., An Outline History of American Drama (1965). Moses, A. J., Representative Plays by American Dramatists: From 1765 to the Present Day (1925). Scott, C., The Drama of Yesterday and Today (1899). Reference works: Dictionary of National Biography, L. Stephen, ed. Other references: London Academy 455. London Athenaeum 2779. —CHARLOTTE V. LORD
BATES, Katherine Lee Born 29 August 1859, Falmouth, Massachusetts; died 28 March 1929, Wellesley, Massachusetts Daughter of William and Cornelia Lee Bates Katherine Lee Bates, best known for her lyric poem ‘‘America the Beautiful,’’ attended Wellesley College and received her A.B. in 1880. After a year’s study at Oxford University, she was awarded an A.M. by Wellesley in 1881. After a brief career as a high school teacher, Bates joined the faculty of Wellesley, where she taught until her retirement in 1925. As an educator, she was a significant force in the movement toward liberalizing American pedagogy. In contrast to the philological approach that dominated literary study of the 1880s and 1890s, Bates’ approach was based on the assumption that the chief aim of a literature teacher should be ‘‘to awaken in the student a genuine love and enthusiasm for
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the higher forms of prose, and more especially for poetry.’’ She wanted her students to experience literature as dynamic, powerful, and relevant to all people. Her sprightly and anecdotal text, American Literature (1898), widely used as a high school and introductory college text, spread this philosophy, as did her anthology, Old English Ballads (1890), and the many other classics of English and American literature she edited, mostly for student use. Bates’ creative work, produced despite heavy teaching and administrative duties, comprises poetry, verse drama for children, and travel books. Those who defend her poetry describe it as characterized by grace and dignity and in the Longfellow tradition. Her detractors, on the other hand, point out that she shows a good eye for natural phenomena but tends toward a lush expansiveness rather than sparse, tightly controlled use of images and intellectual rigor. Bates’ juvenile fictions—Rose and Thorn, which won first prize in the 1889 juvenile fiction competition sponsored by the Congregational Publishing Society, and Hermit Island (1890)— are moralistic in intent, sentimental in outlook, and realistic in presentation. Though their moralizing makes them unsuited to modern taste, they have good pace and feature young heroes who are both educated and fun-loving, delighting in making puns and deploring them. The structure of the stories is comic romance, as is evident in Bates’ tendency to bring about rapid and complete conversions of antagonists in order to provide the necessary happy ending. In her travel books, both for adults and for children, and in her verse dramas for children, as in her fiction, Bates’ aim was always to combine instruction and enjoyment. A reviewer of In Sunny Spain (1913), which appeared in the Little Schoolmates series, wrote: ‘‘No child can read it without absorbing not only its spirit of patriotism and of gentle courtesy, but a really extraordinary amount of information regarding manners and customs of Spain.’’ Although Bates thought of herself as a poet and although her poetry was always her greatest love, her teaching and administrative duties kept her from devoting as much time and energy to it as she wished. Thus with the exception of her patriotic lyric, ‘‘America the Beautiful,’’ her poetry is unread, and her reputation rests on her achievements as an educator. OTHER WORKS: The Wedding Day Book (edited by Bates, 1881). The College Beautiful and Other Poems (1887). Goody Santa Claus on a Sleigh Ride (1889). Sunshine and Other Verses for Children (1890). English Religious Drama (1893). The Chap Book (ed. by Bates, 1896). Spanish Highways and Byways (1900). English History as Told by English Poets (ed. by Bates and K. Coman, 1902). From Gretna Green to Land’s End (1907). The Story of Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims (1909). America the Beautiful and Other Poems (1911). Sophie Jewett’s The Heart of a Boy (ed. by Bates, 1912). Shakespeare: Selective Bibliography and Biographical Notes (1913). Sophie Jewett’s Folk-Ballads of Southern Europe (ed. by Bates, 1913). Fairy Gold (1916). Sigurd Our Golden Collie and Other Comrades of the Road (1919).
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Yellow Clover (1922). Little Robin Stay-Behind and Other Plays in Verse for Children (1923). America the Dream (1930). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Burgess, D., Dream and Deed (1952). Converse, F., The Story of Wellesley (1915). Converse, F., Wellesley College: A Chronicle (1939). Other references: Boston Transcript (28 March 1929). SR (June 1952). —KATHARYN F. CRABBE
BAYARD, Elise Justine Born circa 1815, Fishkill, New York; died circa 1850 Wrote under: E. B.C., E. J. B. Daughter of Robert Bayard; married Fulton Cutting Evidently of French extraction, Elise Justine Bayard attained a brief local reputation through poems published in the New York Knickerbocker magazine. Little seemed to be known of her life, but she appeared a promising new writer to Sarah Josepha Hale, who included her in a section of comments on young authors in Woman’s Record (1853). Hale admired Bayard’s poems and implied that although there was no collection of Bayard’s works, her writing warranted one. Bayard’s poetry seems unremarkable today. She generally treats common subjects—mothers, children, lovers, time, history, death—but her techniques produce either standard, formal, even mechanical verse (as in ‘‘Funeral Chant for the Old Year,’’ reprinted in the Duyckincks’ Cyclopedia of American Literature), or startlingly raw efforts in simple rhymed couplets distributed in irregular stanzas (as in ‘‘Henri de la Roche Jacqueline,’’ one of her earliest poems, which appeared in the Knickerbocker in September 1834). The quantity of Bayard’s work is difficult to assess; much of it is apparently unsigned or merely initialed. She seems to have married early, for many poems almost definitely attributable to her are signed ‘‘E. B. C.’’ one of which is ‘‘Henri,’’ but because of its reference to the chevalier Bayard in stanza 1, we can guess its author with some safety. Other poems similar in subject—the romantic heroes and heroines of the past—are probably hers, as well, such as ‘‘Maria da Gloria’’ (Knickerbocker, September 1835) and ‘‘Napoleon’’ (Knickerbocker, Oct. 1837). Bayard also continued to use her maiden initials, however; for example, ‘‘Error,’’ a late poem published in the weekly Literary World (16 October 1847), is signed ‘‘E. J. Bayard.’’ The nature of the periodicals in which her only known works appear suggests why such a relatively minor figure should receive attention. A short and vague biography is included in the Duyckincks’ Cyclopedia probably because the Duyckinck brothers also edited Literary World (1847-53). The Knickerbocker
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(1833-65), a more significant magazine, similarly dedicated to literature and to the fine arts, must also have valued Bayard’s works, for it was one of the few magazines of the day to compensate writers. It published substantial critical essays as well as contemporary verse; for example, Thomas Cole was among its contributors of both poems and prose. And since the artistic circles of New York before the Civil War included few women (among them Susan Fenimore Cooper and Mary E. Field), Bayard’s presence seems worth noting. OTHER WORKS: Miscellaneous poems attributable to Elise Justine Bayard may be found in the Knickerbocker (1834-1850) and Literary World (1847-1855). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Cyclopedia of American Literature, E. A. and G. L. Duyckinck (1875). Woman’s Record, S. J. Hale (1853). —CAROLINE ZILBOORG
BEACH, Sylvia Born 14 March 1887, Baltimore, Maryland; died 6 October 1962, Paris, France Daughter of Sylvester Woodbridge and Eleanor Orbison Beach The second of three daughters born to a long line of ministers and missionaries, Sylvia Beach was reared in the First Presbyterian parsonage of Bridgeton, New Jersey. From 1902 to 1905, while she was a teenager, the family lived in Paris, where her father was an associate pastor of the American Church. She attended school briefly in Lausanne, but was largely self-taught. After her family settled permanently in Princeton, Beach made several extended trips to Spain, Italy, and France without her parents. In 1919 she returned to Paris to stay. On 19 November of that year she opened her bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, at No. 8 rue Dupuytren. Here she assembled the best in English and American literature. She established herself with the aid of Adrienne Monnier, owner of a bookshop and lending library frequented by André Gide, Paul Valéry, Valery Larbaud, LéonPaul Fargue, Jules Romains, and other eminent French writers. Beach and Adrienne Monnier were devoted friends; for many years they shared an apartment on the rue de l’Odéon. Shakespeare and Company, the first American bookshop in Paris, soon became the center of French and Anglo-American literary activities on the continent as Americans gravitated in increasing numbers to Paris. Early patrons of the lending library included Stephen Vincent Benét, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Archibald MacLeish, Robert McAlmon, James Joyce, Thornton Wilder, and Ernest Hemingway. The bookshop moved to its permanent address at No. 12 rue de l’Odéon, across the street from
Adrienne’s bookshop, in the summer of 1921. On this quiet little street, says Cyril Connelly, the bookshop was ‘‘hidden like a cache of dynamite in a solemn crypt.’’ Beach published for the first time the complete edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses, the first copy of which she delivered to Joyce on his birthday, 2 February 1922. Her intercession with the printer allowed Joyce to write a third of the novel on the page proofs. She promoted the book, mailed it all over the world, and arranged for copies to be smuggled from Canada into the United States. She named 16 June ‘‘Bloomsday’’ in honor of Leopold Bloom, the hero of Ulysses, whose life on that date is presented in the novel. In May 1930 she issued the 11th and her final edition of Ulysses. After the novel was cleared by the U.S. court of Judge John M. Woolsey, it was published by Random House in 1934. She also published Joyce’s Pomes Penyeach (1927) and Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (1929), a collection of critical articles on Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, edited and introduced by Beach. Although her fame is often associated with her publication of Joyce’s work, Beach’s genius lay in her ability to stimulate the interaction among the American, English, and French writers of Paris between the wars. With a sense of the genuine in literature and a devotion to literary talent, this young New Jersey minister’s daughter became the hub of Parisian literary activity. And she maintained her own identity in a crowd of dominant personalities. Her bookshop and lending library was a post office, bank, and meeting center for the great and soon-to-be-great artists of the 20th century. She encouraged them to write critical articles, influenced their reading, found them publishers, translators, rooms, and benefactors. She helped organize the English and French little magazines, in which the most distinguished writers of this century got their start, and distributed the magazines in her shop. In her rooms T. S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell, André Gide, Ernest Hemingway, Stephen Spender, Paul Valéry, and numerous others read their works. Beach occasionally translated the work of her French friends into English and of her English-speaking friends into French. She and Adrienne Monnier were the first to translate T. S. Eliot’s ‘‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’’ Although her bookshop was closed by the Nazis in December of 1941, she refused to leave Paris, for she was as much a Parisienne as an American. She was interned for six months in a detention camp at Vittel. After the war she did not reopen the bookshop; she did, however, continue her literary activities, writing, speaking, and lending books from her rue de l’Odéon apartment. In 1950 she received the Denyse Clairouin Award for her translation of Henri Michaux’s Barbarian in Asia. In 1959 she helped organize and contributed most of the materials for an outstanding exhibition of the Paris 1920s. The exhibition was shown in Paris and London. For her contribution to the exchange of literature between America and France, she was awarded the Doctor of Letters by the University of Buffalo (1959) and the French Legion of Honor (1938). When Beach died alone of a heart attack in 1962, Archibald MacLeish declared, ‘‘She is not alone, then or ever. She had that Company around her.’’
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OTHER WORKS: Beowulf (translated by Beach and Monnier, 1948). Shakespeare and Company (1959, reissued 1991). Writers of the Left Bank (cassette tape, 1962). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bryher, The Heart to Artemis: A Writer’s Memoirs (1962). Fitch, N. R., An American Bookshop in Paris: The Influence of Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company on American Literature (dissertation, 1970). Fitch, N. R., Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties (1983, 1985). Ford, H., Published in Paris (1975). Hemingway, E., A Moveable Feast (1963). Hoffman, A., ‘‘Private Presses and Literary Patrons as Symbols of Modernism: A Study of Contact Editions, Three Mountains Press and Shakespeare and Company’’ (thesis, 1998). Hutchinson, A. S., ‘‘Nancy Cunard and Sylvia Beach: Contrasting Expatriates’’ (thesis, 1987). Joyce, J., James Joyce to Sylvia Beach, 1921-1940 (1987, 1990). Monnier, A., Rue de l’Odéon (1960). Monnier, A., The Very Rich Hours (translated by R. McDougall, 1976). Parker, A.T., ‘‘The Unveiling of a Genius: Sylvia Beach and James Joyce’’ (thesis, 1990). Rogers, W. G., Ladies Bountiful (1968). Van Gessel, N. H., Recasting the Midwives of Modernism: Autobiographies of American Expatriate Women Publishers and Editors (dissertation, 1996). Wright, C. M., ‘‘Novel Women: Literary Expatriates of the 1920s’’ (thesis, 1988). Other references: Mercure de France (Aug.-Sept. 1963). —NOEL R. FITCH
BEARD, Mary Ritter Born 5 August 1876, Indianapolis, Indiana; died 14 August 1958, Phoenix, Arizona Daughter of Eli Foster and Marassa Lockwood Ritter; married Charles Austin Beard, 1900 Educated at DePauw University, then a rather conservative Methodist institution, Mary Ritter Beard received her Ph.D. in 1897. She spent her early married years in England in the circle around Ruskin Hall, a center for new economic thought, then moved to New York City and studied at Columbia University, where her husband, the most vital intellectual influence in her life, was to join the faculty. Beard’s earliest books, American Citizenship (1914, in collaboration with her husband), Woman’s Work in Municipalities (1915), and A Short History of the American Labor Movement (1920), reflect her lifelong interests: labor, sociology, and women’s studies. The books she wrote with her husband in the 1920s and 1930s, both the school texts and the enormously successful fourvolume The Rise of American Civilization (1927-1942), were highly influential. The first two volumes of The Rise of American Civilization were the product of two decades of progressive intellectual attack on the formalism of 19th-century American historical writing, which tended to see American institutions in an
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ideal, abstract way. The particular economic interpretation of the Revolution which pitted agrarian democrats against capitalist aristocrats, and the view of the Civil War as a second revolution, were widely accepted until after World War II, when Charles A. Beard came under attack for viewing earlier American history from the perspective of the progressive fight for reform against an entrenched capitalism. Indeed, the Beards modified their economic determinism in the 1940s and gave greater play to the force of ideas and ideals than they had before. But their most significant contribution was their salutory reminder that ideals do not exist outside of social contexts. While the great collaborative effort with her husband has now largely entered the realm of intellectual history, Beard’s pioneering work in women’s studies, notably in On Understanding Women (1931) and Woman as Force in History (1946), remains generative today. Encouraged by the nascent field of anthropology, which was producing work showing women as the originator of agriculture and the domestic arts, Beard studied social realities as disparate as women’s legal status in England and women’s contribution to Pythagorean philosophy in ancient Greece, in order to discover their true status and achievement. Such a vision was obscured, she argued, not only by male bias and social mythology, but by feminists who themselves promulgated a false view of women as a subject sex. The fullest and most important treatment of these views appears in Woman as Force in History. The questions she raises there remain with us, but her answers are sometimes problematic. While her argument against the idea of ‘‘equality’’ as the touchstone for woman’s relation to man points out the difficulties it engenders, the argument remains inconclusive. Nor does the book resolve a contradiction in her view of women’s contribution. While Beard sometimes seems to be saying women are a peculiarly civilizing force, at other times she seems to be saying only that they have been more of a force both for good and for bad than we have realized. Still, the book leaves us two important lines of thought: one is the definition of woman’s just role. Beard believed that the early imitation of men by feminists was in part a function of the individualism of 19thcentury America, and that as society moved toward more collectivist forms, alternatives for women would emerge. The other line of thought is that history is not simply the account of the politician, the banker, and the general. Until history describes events on the level of domestic economy and family relationship as well, woman’s true force, Beard believes, will not be understood, nor will the true causes and effects of history. OTHER WORKS: A History of the United States (with C. A. Beard, 1921). The American Labor Movement: A Short History (1931). America Through Women’s Eyes (edited by Beard, 1933). A Changing Political Economy as it Affects Women (1934). Laughing Their Way (ed. by Beard with M. B. Bruere, 1934). The Making of American Civilization (with C. A. Beard, 1937). America in Mid Passage (Vol. 3, The Rise of American Civilization, with C. A. Beard, 1939). The American Spirit: A Study of the Idea of Civilization in the United States (Vol. 4, The Rise of American Civilization, with C. A. Beard, 1942). A Basic History of the United States (with C. A. Beard, 1944). The Force of
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Women in Japanese History (1953). The Making of Charles A. Beard (1955).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Carroll, B. A., ‘‘Mary Beard’s Woman as a Force in History: A Critique’’ in Liberating Women’s History, Theoretical and Critical Essays (1976). Cott, N. F., ed., A Woman Making History: Mary Ritter Beard Through Her Letters (1991). Hofstadter, R., The Progressive Historians (1968). Lane, A. J., Mary Ritter Beard: A Sourcebook (1997, 1999). Steadman, B. J., ‘‘Woman’s Role in History: An Examination of the Life and Thought of Mary Ritter Beard with Special Consideration of her Theory of Woman’s Contribution to the Human Past’’ (thesis, 1981). Trigg, M. K., Four American Feminists, 1910-1940: Inez Haynes Irwin, Mary Ritter Beard, Doris Stevens, and Lorine Pruette (dissertation, 1989). Turoff, B. K., Mary Beard as a Force in History (1979). Turoff, B. K., ‘‘An Introduction to Mary Beard: Feminist and Historian’’ (thesis, 1978). Other references: NR (1946). NYT (27 Dec. 1931). PSQ (Sept. 1927). World Center for Women’s Archives [1913-1934] (microfilm, 1987). —LOIS HUGHSON
BEATTIE, Ann Born 8 September 1947, Washington, D.C. Daughter of James A. and Charlotte Crosby Beattie; married David Gates, 1973 (divorced); Lincoln Perry, 1988 Novelist and short story writer Ann Beattie has earned her critical reputation as a storyteller of the 1960s generation. While her work includes both a children’s book, Spectacles (1985), and a collection of essays in art criticism, Alex Katz (1987), her primary preoccupation is with fictional characters who came of age during the turbulent 1960s and are struggling with that legacy. Beattie’s spare and direct prose style, which has been linked to the social realism tradition of Hemingway and John Updike, is marked by pop culture references, quotidian details, spiritually lost characters, and deliberately open endings. Although generally praised as a skillful writer, she has been faulted for the apparent lack of purpose in her characters’ lives. Beattie notes that ‘‘If I knew what it was that was missing [in her characters’ lives], I’d certainly write about it. I’d write for Hallmark cards.’’ A self-described ‘‘artsy little thing’’ and only child of a housewife and a federal government administrator, Beattie grew up in suburban Washington, D.C. In 1968, while a student at American University (B.A., 1969), she was invited to serve as one of several student guest editors for Mademoiselle magazine. Beattie completed an M.A. in English at the University of Connecticut at Storrs (1970) and remained there until 1972 to do
further study in English literature. In 1973 she married musician and fellow graduate student David Gates. From 1975-77 Beattie was visiting writer and lecturer at the University of Virginia, and in 1977-78 she was the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer at Harvard University. While still a graduate student, Beattie began submitting her short stories for publication. In April 1974 the New Yorker accepted ‘‘A Platonic Relationship,’’ her 20th submission. Her first collection of 19 stories, Distortions, and her first novel, Chilly Scenes of Winter, both appeared in 1976. The novel, which she claims to have written in three weeks, is perhaps her best known work. Its main characters float through the book, incapable of decisive action that would change their unrewarding lives. Charles, mired in a dull job, longs to reestablish his broken relationship with Laura who left him to marry someone else. He is surrounded by his mentally unbalanced mother, by Sam, his best friend and Phi Beta Kappa graduate who cannot afford law school and so must settle for selling men’s jackets, and by Pete, his wellmeaning but tactless stepfather. The novel became a film entitled Head Over Heels (1979), with Beattie playing a minor role as a waitress. The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship in 1977, Beattie moved to Redding, Connecticut, and became a full-time writer. She published Secrets and Surprises, a collection of 15 stories in 1979. The idea for her next novel, Falling in Place (1980), came to her while she was contemplating a peach tree outside her Redding home. It chronicles a disconnected and disintegrating suburban Connecticut family. At the end of the novel, the family faces a crisis when John Joel, their ten-year-old son, accidentally shoots his sister with a gun belonging to his only friend. The novel received a literature award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1980. Beattie’s marriage to Gates ended in May 1982. She later told Kim Hubbard of People magazine, that ‘‘Getting divorced affected everything, my writing included. It affected the way I walked the dog. I did not recover from it quickly.’’ The Burning House,, 16 short stories published in 1982, was seen as evidence of Beattie’s growing artistic maturity and confirmation of the fact that the short story seemed the form that best suited her talents. After her divorce, Beattie lived in New York City until 1984 when she moved to Vermont for the summer and wrote her second novel, Love Always (1985), which chronicles the life of Lucy Spenser, editor of the humorous magazine Country Daze. It was followed in 1986 by Where You’ll Find Me and Other Stories. Beattie met her second husband, painter Lincoln Perry, in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she had moved following her brief sojourn in Vermont. He provided her with the title to her fourth novel, Picturing Will (1989), the story of five-year-old Will and his mother who moves him from Charlottesville to New York City to pursue her photography career, her boyfriend Mel, and Will’s ne’er-do-well father. Unlike many of her previous works, this novel took Beattie three years to complete and was ‘‘the single hardest thing I’ve ever worked on.’’ What Was Mine, another collection of short stories, appeared in 1991. It received
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praise for its ‘‘honest introspection’’ and ‘‘greater sympathy and tenderness.’’ While she continues to remain reticent about offering answers in her fiction to life’s most puzzling questions, in these stories Beattie again demonstrates her remarkable ability to recreate the anxiety and angst inherent in white, middle class 20th-century America.
BEECHER, Catharine Esther
Another You (1995) features an emotionally distant, middle-aged New England professor in a humdrum marriage. The book received largely negative notices, with critics pointing out that the main character’s boredom permeated the book and that the labeling and naming of pop culture icons, for which Beattie is known, was not enough to drive the story or characterization. The novel features a secondary narrative involving the revelation, through letters, of a story from the past. It was embraced by Publishers Weekly, however, which wrote, ‘‘Successfully avoiding the one-note, affectless deadpan to which her work was in danger of succumbing, Beattie provides plenty of dramatic tension in this absorbing narrative of a man emotionally distanced from his life.’’
Sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Catharine Esther Beecher was an educator and writer who attempted to expand the domestic power of women. Following the death of her mother, Beecher, age sixteen and the eldest of 13 children, assumed the family and household responsibilities.
The novel My Life, Starring Dara Falcon (1997) departed from earlier Beattie works in structure and tone. Yale Review’s Lorin Stein wrote, ‘‘Not only is it her most difficult novel, it is her most intriguing: a tissue of autobiography spun by a woman whose life eludes her.’’ With Park City: New and Selected Stories (1998) Beattie returned to her preferred medium. The title contained 36 short stories, eight of which were new. The new pieces returned to many of the themes of her earlier writing, with the addition of the comic sensibility on view in her last two novels. ‘‘All of what Beattie does well is here on brilliant display,’’ wrote Lorrie Moore in the New York Times Book Review. ‘‘The theatrical ensemble act of her characters; the cultural paraphernalia as historical record; the not quite grown up grown-ups playing house; the charming, boyish men with their knifelike utterances.’’ OTHER WORKS: Flesh and Blood: Photographers’ Images of Their Own Families (includes an essay by Beattie, 1992). Convergences (1998). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Murphy, C., Ann Beattie (1986). Reference works: CA 81-84 (1979). CANR 53 (1997). CLC 8 (1978), 13 (1980), 18 (1981), 40 (1986), 63 (1991). DLBY (1982). CBY (1985). FC (1990). Other references: America (12 Oct. 1991). Entertainment Weekly (29 Sept. 1995, 20 June 1997). NYRB (15 Aug. 1991, 5 Nov. 1998). NYTBR (26 May 1991, 24 Sept. 1995, 11 May 1997, 28 June 1998). People (5 Feb. 1990, 2 Oct. 1995). PW (28 Sept. 1992, 31 July 1995). Time (25 Sept. 1995), Yale Review (Oct. 1997, July 1998). —LISA STEPANSKI, UPDATED BY KAREN RAUGUST
BEEBE, Mary Blair See NILES, Blair Rice
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Born 6 September 1800, East Hampton, New York; died 12 May 1878, Elvira, New York Daughter of Lyman and Roxanne Foote Beecher
After the death of her fiancé, Alexander Metcalf Fisher, Beecher established the Hartford Female Seminary in May 1823 with the money inherited from him. She also organized the Western Female Institute in Cincinnati (1832-1837) and the Ladies’ Society for Promoting Education in the West, and helped to establish three female colleges (in Burlington, Iowa, in Quincy, Illinois, and in Milwaukee, Wisconsin). Although Beecher left the Hartford Female Seminary in 1831, it was considered one of the most significant advances made in early-19th-century education for women. It marked Beecher’s first attempt to redefine a new relationship with American culture for herself and for other women. The author of over 30 books, Beecher expanded the sentimental view of women as saintly and moral creatures, complements of their immoral and competitive mates. She maintained that the American woman had difficult and peculiar duties which derived mainly from the crudeness and disorder of an expanding nation. She asserted in Letters on Health and Happiness (1855) that ‘‘it is obvious that Providence designed that the chief responsibility of sustaining the family state, in all its sacred and varied relations and duties, should rest mainly on the female sex.’’ Beecher’s most popular volumes were A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841) and Domestic Receipts (1846). The former had three editions and 17 printings between 1841 and 1856, while the latter had ten editions and 17 printings. They were published for the use of young wives and reflect both the need for practical advice and the social milieu of mid-19th-century America. In The Elements of Mental and Moral Philosophy (1831), Beecher asserted that woman was the moral guardian of her culture. Common sense must be used to determine morality, and personal conscience must dominate over doctrine. This position moved theology to social grounds and placed Beecher in direct conflict with her father, the Reverend Lyman Beecher, a Calvinist. The major characteristic of Beecher’s Christianity, however, was passivity, not social activity. She spoke against active abolitionism, asserting in An Essay on Slavery (1837) that ‘‘Christianity is a system of persuasion, tending, by kind and gentle influence, to make men willing to leave their sins.’’ Beecher maintained women had a proper place, a proper sphere, and that place was out of politics and within the home, influencing men through quiet, proper petition and through the education of their children. One of Beecher’s concerns was the ill health of American women. She described reported symptoms of female invalidism in Woman Suffrage and Woman’s Profession (1871), frequently
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using the term ‘‘delicate.’’ She surveys women in various American cities, listing such symptoms as sick headaches, pelvic disorder, consumption, dyspepsia, asthma, bronchitis, liver disorder, palsy, scrofula, and chills, adding with alarming frequency: ‘‘Do not know one perfectly healthy woman in the place.’’ Because of Beecher’s conviction that the illness of American women was both symptom and cause of the disorder in American society, she wrote The American Woman’s Home (1869) with her sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, as coauthor. The home and the guardian of its healthful state, woman, was intertwined in Beecher’s mind with the state of American society. Thus she elevated the importance of women’s health and role to national importance. She asserted that women, like men who must be trained for professions, must be fully trained for their roles in the classroom and the family. Her religious language was a conscious attempt to invoke religious sanction of her assertion of the importance of woman’s role in the home. She perceived ‘‘the family state as the earthly illustration of the heavenly kingdom, and in it woman is its chief minister.’’ In this haven of secularized religion, the home, Beecher demanded better ventilation, the introduction of green plants, dress reform, proper food, and the avoidance of too much ‘‘intellectual taxation.’’ She and her sister provided many practical suggestions for yards and gardens, for infant care, for earth closets (commodes), for everything necessary for the maintenance of the home. As might be expected, Beecher was an avid opponent of woman’s suffrage, attempting instead to expand the woman’s base of domestic power. Although she advocated democracy, she did not feel it led to women’s active participation in politics and to furthering social change. Instead she asserted there was a social order based on age, health, and the most important distinction, gender; thus there was still hierarchy in the American democracy. Beecher is a transitional figure whose writings influenced women to move from a state of subordination to one in which they attempted to secure a greater role in their changing, shifting society. She was confronted by a competitive society in which men aggressively sought wealth and position, and she perceived this activity as unworthy of women. Women, unlike men, could effect change only by influence and passivity. Aggression and force were male prerogatives. Beecher’s solution was to create a quiet eye of the storm and to call it the ‘‘American Home.’’ There women could rule supreme and men could return for moral refreshment and rest. In this quiet haven, the American Home, Beecher placed her sentimentalized version of the American woman. She herself never married. OTHER WORKS: Suggestions Respecting Improvements in Education (1829). Arithmetic Simplified (1832). Primary Geography (1833). The Lyceum Arithmetic (1835). An Essay on the Education of Female Teachers (1835). Lectures on the Difficulty of Religion (1836). The Moral Instructor (1838). Letters to Persons Who Are Engaged in Domestic Service (1842). The Duty of American Women to Their Country (1845). Truths Stranger Than Fiction (1850). The True Remedy for the Wrongs of Women
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(1852). Physiology and Calisthenics (1856). Common Sense Applied to Religion (1857). Calisthenic Exercises (1860). An Appeal to the People (1860). Religious Training of Children in the School (1864). Principles of Domestic Science (with H. B. Stowe, 1870). Work for All, and Other Tales (1871). Woman’s Profession as Mother and Educator (1872). Miss B.’s Housekeeper and Healthkeeper (1873). The New Housekeeper’s Manual (1873). Educational Reminiscences and Suggestions (1874). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bruland, E. B., Great Debates: Ethical Reasoning and Social Change in Antebellum America: the Exchange Between Angelina Grimke and Catherine Beecher (1990, 1991). Cross, B. M., The Educated Woman in America (1965). Douglas, A., The Feminization of American Culture (1977). Grimke, A. E., Letters to Catherine E. Beecher: In Reply to an Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, Addressed to A. E. Grimke (1978, 1883). Harveson, E. M., Catharine E. Beecher (1932). Lindley, S. H.,Woman’s Profession in the Life and Thought of Catherine Beecher: A Study of Religion and Reform (1974). Sklar, K. K., Household Divinity: A Life of Catherine Beecher, (dissertation, 1969). Sklar, K. K., Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (1973). Woody, T., A History of Women’s Education in the United States (1966). Other references: AQ (Summer 1966). Civil War History (June 1971). —JULIANN E. FLEENOR
BENEDICT, Ruth (Fulton) Born 5 June 1887, New York, New York; died 17 September 1948, New York, New York Wrote under: Ruth Benedict, Anne Singleton Daughter of Frederick Samuel and Beatrice J. Shattuck Fulton; married Stanley Rossiter Benedict, 1914 Ruth Benedict’s father, a surgeon and cancer researcher, died before she was two, leaving her mother to bring up Benedict and her younger sister on their maternal grandparents’ farm in central New York. An attack of measles when she was a child left Benedict partially deaf, an infirmity from which she suffered personally and professionally throughout her life. Her father’s premature death and her mother’s fits of weeping traumatized her childhood, so that her mother came to personify fear and confusion, while the memory of her father’s translucent dead face became a symbol of calmness and beauty. Thus she yearned for the serenity of the world of death. As a child, she often played at being dead in a grave she built herself in the hay. This conflict of having to live in one world, while longing for the other, made her fabricate a world in which she kept to herself everything that mattered most. An outstanding student, Benedict won a scholarship to Vassar College, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1909. After graduation, she worked for charities and taught in girls’ schools.
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When she married, she discovered a woman’s power in her love for her husband and her desire to bear children, and she lived with a new ‘‘zest for life’’; but she soon became disillusioned, especially when the longed-for children never came. Her sense of loneliness and meaninglessness returned, and when her desire for a job of her own met with her husband’s discouragement, she slowly withdrew from him. In 1919 Benedict enrolled in the New School for Social Research where she studied anthropology under Elsie Clews Parsons and Alexander Goldenweiser. From there she went to Columbia and received her doctorate under Franz Boas in 1923, a time when cultural traits and their diffusion, rather than individuals, were the interest of anthropological study.
another. Benedict’s comparison of cultures and her application of clinical terms to them results in her realization that abnormality in any culture is simply an individual deviation from that culture’s norms. Thus cultures cannot be compared on an ethical basis but only on the relativity of their integrating principles.
Benedict started her teaching career in 1922 as an assistant to Boas in his undergraduate class at Barnard and began teaching at Columbia the following year. Her first anthropological interest was in American Indian religion, and her dissertation, The Concept of the Guardian Spirit in North America, was published in 1923. In it, Benedict deals with the variety of disparate cultural elements that are found juxtaposed within one culture—already forecasting her later concern with the integrating principles of the ‘‘rags and tatters’’ that make up culture. Her first fieldwork, done in 1922, was among the Serrano Indians of southern California. During the summers of 1924 and 1925, she collected folklore among the Pueblo Indians of Zuni and Cochiti, and the following summer among their neighbors, the Pima. Her partial deafness and extreme shyness made teaching an ordeal for her, and while doing fieldwork, she had to rely entirely on English-speaking informants and interpreters.
The war years brought a shift in her interests away from American Indians to one in humanism. In 1940 Benedict published Race: Science and Politics, a popular, relatively unacademic book, in which she presents theories and philosophies of race along with her own point of view on the subject of racism. She feels racism is a form of crude provincialism, and in order to understand it, one must first understand persecution as a whole, with all its economic and social causes. The Races of Mankind, written with Gene Weltfish, was published in 1943 and sold millions of copies. Translated into film and cartoon forms, it has proved to be one of the most popular educational materials on racial differences based on anthropological data.
Throughout these early years of anthropological apprenticeship, Benedict remained a sensitive and solitary person, expressing her inner battles with loneliness and the painful relationship with her husband in verse, some of which she published in Poetry and Nation under the pseudonym of Anne Singleton. In 1930 she and husband Stanley separated, and at that time Boas appointed her assistant professor at Columbia. Soon thereafter, her depressions lifted, the need for Anne Singleton faded, and slowly the separate lives she led became fused together in her work. In 1934 Patterns of Culture, her most famous book, was published. It has since been translated into 14 languages and is still regarded as one of the best introductions to anthropology. Combining problems of psychology and the individual with those of anthropology and culture, she evolved a theory stating that culture was not only the condition within which personality developed, but was itself a ‘‘personality writ large.’’ All culture, she postulated, is structured into patterns which impose a harmony upon the disparate components of life; for any one culture there is a dominant pattern, an overriding cultural temperament. Influenced by her reading of Nietzsche, and taking her data from her own work and that done by Boas and Reo Fortune, she compared three cultures and applied psychological terms to them. The Zuni of New Mexico she labeled as Apollonian in their sobriety, moderation, and self-possession. The Kwakiutl of Vancouver Island she saw as Dionysian in their commitment to a life of intoxicated frenzy and self-annihilation. They had paranoid delusions of grandeur, whereas the Dobu of Melanesia had a schizophrenic fear of their environment and a morbid suspicion of one
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In 1935, Benedict published two volumes of Zuni Mythology, a collection of her most massive fieldwork. It includes texts gathered by her and earlier fieldworkers, as well as a careful comparison of these texts. She concerns herself with themes in Zuni folklore, the relationship of these themes to the culture, and the literary problems of the Zuni narrator.
From 1943 to 1945, Benedict worked in Washington in the Office of War Information, concentrating on Romania, Thailand, and Japan. This led to her pioneering work with literate informants from urban centers and a new shift in anthropology to the analysis of complex modern societies. Benedict’s most gracefully and cogently written book is The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946). It expresses the final harmony of her two selves, the anthropologist concerned with the integrity of pattern, and the humanist who knows the suffering of the human spirit when it is trapped and limited. Based on an intensive analysis of interviews and literary material, it concerns itself with themes in Japanese culture, stressing primarily those that have to do with reciprocal relations between people. She deals with the hierarchical organization of Japanese life, portrays the structure of obligations to emperor, family, and self, and examines the strong sense of shame so dominant in the culture. The underlying humanist message of the book is that the only way Japan could be reintegrated into the world is by using the favorable Japanese patterns of culture as the building blocks rather than by imposing European values from without. The book had a tremendous impact in the U.S. In 1947, following its great success, the Office of Naval Research gave Columbia University an extensive grant to establish under Benedict’s direction a program of ‘‘Research in Contemporary Cultures,’’ the most ambitious program of anthropological research the U.S. had yet seen. In 1948, when she was 61, Columbia finally named Benedict a full professor. In the fall of that year she died of a coronary thrombosis. After Boas’s death, six years prior to her own, Benedict was the leading American anthropologist as well as the first American woman to become a prominent social scientist and leader in her profession. Her great contribution was her integration of the idea of patterns, which she slowly pieced together in
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her own life and applied to her work. In so doing, she gave her profession a theoretical orientation at a time when science for the first time was trying to deal with total cultures. Benedict’s critics accuse her of never having written a full ethnography and of having done fieldwork, either among people living in disintegrating cultures, or among literate informants from cultures far away. Some have criticized her patterns as overly simplistic. However, her deafness, shyness, and childhood traumas that cut her personal life off from others were probably not only responsible for her anthropological weaknesses, but are possibly what gave her both the ability to view cultures at a distance and the tolerance for deviance that led to her very great contributions. OTHER WORKS: Tales of the Cochiti Indians (1931). Rumanian Culture and Behavior (1946). Thai Culture and Behavior (1946). An Anthropologist at Work: Writings of Ruth Benedict (edited by M. Mead, 1959). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Mead, M., ed., An Anthropologist at Work: Writings of Ruth Benedict (1959). Mead, M., Ruth Benedict (1974). Modell, J. S., A Biographical Study of Ruth Fulton Benedict (dissertation, 1980). Reference works: National Cyclopedia of American Biography (1892 et seq.). NAW 1607-1950 (1971). Other references: AA (1949, 1957). Minzokugaku Kenkyu (Japanese Journal of Ethnology, 1949). Ruth Fulton Benedict: A Memorial (Viking Fund, 1949). —MARIAM KAHN
BENÉT, Laura Born 13 June 1884, Brooklyn, New York; died 17 February 1979, New York, New York Daughter of James and Frances Rose Benét The oldest child of an army family, Laura Benét moved often, from Brooklyn, New York, to Springfield, Massachusetts, to Washington, D.C., and other posts. She went to private schools, including the Emma Willard School in Troy, and graduated from Vassar College in 1907. At first working at a settlement house, Benét was also employed as a placement worker for the Children’s Aid Society in New York, a sanitary inspector for the Red Cross in Georgia during World War I, and an editorial assistant for the book pages of the New York Evening Post, the New York Evening Sun, and the New York Times. A freelance writer since 1930, she published 28 books, mostly biographies and fiction primarily intended for young people. The Boy Shelley (1937), one of nine of Benét’s books that had remained in print into the 1980s, was her favorite. Benét never married, although she said she was in love twice but ‘‘lost out.’’ After her father’s death, she remained with her
mother, a close companion whose death devastated her. Completion of Come Slowly, Eden (1942), a novel about Emily Dickinson, saved her from a nervous breakdown. After that, she lived alone in New York City. Benét received a medal from the National Poetry Center in 1936, had her poems recorded at the Library of Congress in 1958, and in 1967 received an honorary degree from Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. In 1978, the Empire State Chapter of the National Society of Arts and Letters gave her special recognition. Benét’s six slim books of poetry are only a small part of her output, but she considered herself a poet first. In Fairy Bread (1921), the poems are lyrical, light, and fanciful; several, like the riddle-poem ‘‘Circles,’’ accurately reflect a child’s world. Touches of her later depth and versatility appear, as in ‘‘The Dragon’s Grandmother,’’ with its thoughtfully realistic portrait of an old woman. In Noah’s Dove (1929) there are wryly amusing animal portraits, humanistic insights into ordinary events, and striking images, like church bells described as ‘‘hypodermics pricking the dulled stuff of thought.’’ Impressionism and understated humor continue in Basket for a Fair (1934), but formal aspects like rhyme seem forced, and the personal note is missing. Benét’s sharpest insights again occur in animal poems, where sly amusement toughens the rhymes. The poems in Is Morning Sure? (1947) are more solid, yet still characteristically delicate. Benét considered In Love with Time (1959), a Wake-Brook Foundation Award Book, the best example of her work. Many poems have a personal base, and some comment directly on her career and role as a woman. Two particularly effective poems are blank verse portraits of Benét’s grandmothers, with acute commentary on their ways of life. Bridge of a Single Hair (1974), published when Benét was 90, has quiet and simple poems that range widely, linking everyday life with deeper meanings and emotions, and otherworldly presences. There are still disturbing off-rhymes and inconsistent rhythms, but most of the poems transcend them with an evocative strangeness or strong lyrical statement. Benét also wrote full-length biographies of Poe, Stanley, and others. Although originally published as books for young people, Benét rightly felt they can be enjoyed by anyone. Except for occasional preciousness and sentimentality, these full-length works contain a wealth of specific detail, sharp characterization, and lively dramatized incident. Reviewers commented on the thorough research and skillful writing, one calling Thackeray: Of the Great Heart and Humorous Pen (1947) an ‘‘astonishingly satisfying book’’ with character analysis and descriptions ‘‘so detailed. . .that the reader feels that he would recognize Thackeray at any party.’’ Benét first wrote about Emily Dickinson in the novel Come Slowly, Eden (1942), a well-researched and imaginative recreation of Dickinson’s love affairs. The Mystery of Emily Dickinson (1974) was a response to her publisher’s request for a documented biography. Benét also wrote six collections of short biographies, of which Famous American Poets (1950) was best received. They are good for reference or quick but sympathetic characterizations.
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When William Rose, Stephen Vincent and I Were Young (1976) is a visit with Benét and her brothers during their childhood. She vividly recreates characters and incidents ranging from their nurse’s objection to her ‘‘Spanish eyes’’ to the serious illnesses of brothers William, eighteen months younger, and Stephen, born 12 years later. Benét has the gift of fantasy. As a New York Times reviewer wrote of the stories in Goods and Chattels (1930), ‘‘she has a child’s imagination and a child’s faith along with an adult’s comprehension of human happiness and misery.’’ These qualities keep biographies and novels engrossing and moving, and make her poetry worth repeated reading. Benét herself knew her limits. ‘‘I am a good poet,’’ she said, ‘‘not a great one like my brothers.’’ She wrote of her grandmother words that can be applied to herself: ‘‘It was a grief to her that she had talent /Yet never that rare jewel known as genius.’’ Benét had a life of considerable accomplishment and modest recognition, but personally and professionally lived in the shadows of two famous brothers. OTHER WORKS: The Hidden Valley (1938). Enchanting Jenny Lind (1939). Roxana Rampant (1940). Young Edgar Allan Poe (1941). Caleb’s Luck (1942). Washington Irving, Explorer of American Legend (1944). Barnum’s First Circus and Other Stories (1949). Coleridge, Poet of Wild Enchantment (1952). Stanley, Invincible Explorer (1955). Famous American Humorists (1959). In Love with Time (1959). Famous Poets for Young People (1964). Horseshoe Nails (1965). Famous English and American Essayists (1966). Famous Storytellers for Young People (1968). Famous New England Authors (1970). The papers of Laura Benét are at the Lockwood Memorial Library, State University of New York at Buffalo, and in the Brooklyn College Manuscripts Collection. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Modern Maturity (Feb.-March 1978). Vassar Quarterly (Winter 1977). —CAROL B. GARTNER
BENÍTEZ, Sandra (Ables) Born 26 March 1941, Washington D.C. Daughter of James Q. and Marta A. Benítez Ables; married James F. Kondrick, 1980; children: Christopher, Jonathan Sandra Benítez may be little known because she only began writing at age thirty-nine. She did not participate in a national writer’s workshop; her stories just came out at one point in her life as she reached back to her varied childhood experiences. She is of Puerto Rican descent through her mother and Midwestern descent through her father. She was born in Washington, D.C., where her father worked as a diplomat, then grew up in Mexico, El Salvador, Puerto Rico, and Missouri. She now lives in Edina, Minnesota. In
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1994 she won the Minnesota Book award for her first novel, A Place Where the Sea Remembers (1994), which is based in a small village on the Mexican coast. Three years later she published her second novel, Bitter Grounds (1997), which spans three generations of women’s lives in El Salvador. Reviewers note Benítez’s talent in describing the lives and telling the stories of native people and small-town life in Mexico and El Salvador. Chicana novelist Denise Chávez said the world of Benítez’ first novel is ‘‘poignant, passionate, bittersweet. There are no small lives. Her characters are magnificent, merciful, soul-rooted creatures clinging to the shore.’’ The Boston Sunday Globe called the novel ‘‘tender and gripping.’’ Cuban-American writer Cristina García added that A Place Where the Sea Remembers is a quietly stunning book that leaves soft tracks in the heart.’’ The first novel weaves several characters’ lives through the possibilities of work and life in a small coastal village. Love and anger, on the order of a Gabriel García Márquez story, influence the decisions of three principal characters, while each moves through the aspirations and disillusionments of their limited options. Candelario Marroquín is filled with pride and respect for his role when he is promoted to salad maker at the tourist-stop restaurant where he works. He feels he can finally provide well for his wife and the family they have always desired; since they have been unable to have their own child, they plan to adopt the baby his wife’s younger sister will have. She was raped and now wants to leave the baby behind in good hands and go to the U.S., where she can earn good money. When Candelario is fired because of his boss’ own error and embarrassment, he returns home to discover that his wife is now pregnant. He will have to return to a life of fishing and selling each day’s catch to the restaurants in order to provide for his family. He and his wife know he cannot provide for two children. A quarrel ensues between the sisters, triggering a series of events that affect the lives of many members of their village. The lyrical quality of this short (160-page) novel is reminiscent of Latin American literature of the 1950s and 1960s. Benítez writes only in English, but the essence of her stories is Latin American. She aptly paints descriptions of peasants, small-town life, and a people’s rootedness to their land and their region, whether coastal Mexico or the small country of El Salvador. In her second novel, she contrasts the lives of wealthy women with their maids, but it is the servant women and their families whose portraits come alive, as well as their connection to their land. The 1930s’ uprising and the revolution of the 1970s are only the backdrop to this story of the people. New Mexican writer Demetria Martínez called Benítez’s second novel ‘‘a beautiful story and a major contribution to the literature of the Americas.’’ Isabel Allende found it ‘‘a story of passion, politics, death, and love written with suspense; a country’s tragic story seen by four strong women. This is the kind of book that fills your dreams for weeks.’’ And Chris Bohjalian, a reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, found Bitter Grounds ‘‘like a recipe for a novel by Laura Esquivel, the rhythms reminiscent of Sandra Cisneros. Ms. Benítez certainly merits placement beside some of the mesmerizing new literature with its roots in Latin America.’’ Her 445-page second
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novel is an epic that celebrates the Salvadoran people of the 20th century in their history, their land, and their beauty. While Benítez seems difficult to categorize ethnically, she is truly a Latina writer: she writes in English and her themes are often of women’s issues and Latin American origin. She has said that being an avid reader in her childhood helped lead her to story writing, and she seems to be collecting her Latin American experiences to share with a North American audience. Benítez has written several short stories, which have appeared in various anthologies, including Do You Know Me Now?, edited by Elizabeth Rosenberg (1992), and Speaking in Tongues, edited by Carolyn Holbrook-Montgomery (1993). Her awards and honors include the Loft Mentor award for fiction, 1987; Loft-McKnight award for fiction, 1988; Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant for literature, 1989; Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship for fiction, 1991; Minnesota Hispanic Heritage Month award, 1992; Loft-McKnight award of Distinction for prose, 1993; Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers award, 1993; and Minnesota Book award for fiction, 1994. Benítez is also a teacher of creative writing. OTHER WORKS: Women’s Voices from the Borderlands (ed. by Lillian Castillo-Speed,1995). BIBLIOGRAPHY: CA 144; WRB15 (June 1998); PW (19 July 1993). Other references: Boston Globe (19 Dec. 1993). Gac-Artigas, P., ed., Reflexiones: 60 Essays on Spanish American Women Writers (1999). NYTBR (31 Oct. 1993). WPBW (5 Sept. 1993). Web page:
[email protected] —ELIZABETH COONROD MARTINEZ
BENNETT, Gwendolyn B. Born 8 July 1902, Giddings, Texas; died 1891
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poems utilize a blues-spiritual format; they are chant-songs— rhythmic and repetitious. Musical instruments in her poems are the piano and the banjo, of African origins. Almost all of Bennett’s poems are imagistic word paintings: ‘‘Brushes and paints are all I have / To speak the music in my soul . . . / A copper jar beside a pale green bowl.’’ Similarly, ‘‘Heritage’’ simulates an etching: ‘‘I want to see lithe Negro girls / Etched dark against the sky / While sunset lingers.’’ Bennett’s run-on lines simulate a brush-stroke-on-canvas effect: ‘‘I want to see the slim palm-trees, / Pulling at the clouds.’’ ‘‘Sonnet-2’’ is evocative of a watercolor: ‘‘. . .flowers bathed by rain / . . .patterns traced upon the sea.’’ Bennett creates a luminous dream world as in ‘‘Fantasy’’: ‘‘A slim-necked peacock. . . / In a garden of lavender hues.’’ Her poems are terse, compact, and vivid. The militant 20-line ‘‘Hatred’’ is the best example: ‘‘I shall hate you / Like a dart of singing steel.’’ It has all the collective sensory elements of Bennett’s poems. ‘‘To a Dark Girl’’ is openly sensual, inviting an appreciation of the female body: ‘‘I love you for your brownness / And the rounded darkness of your breast.’’ Bennett saw beauty and mystery in blackness, celebrating a glorious black present based on an idealized African past, symbolized by the female: ‘‘Something of old forgotten queens / Lurks in the lithe abandon of your walk.’’ In ‘‘Song’’ she comes close to romanticizing the primitive: ‘‘. . .heads thrown back in irreverent mirth.’’ But ‘‘Song’’ is never sentimental or maudlin; it penetrates the mask of minstrelsy: ‘‘Abandon tells you / That I sing the heart of a race;’’ to arrive at the essence: ‘‘While sadness whispers / That I am the cry of the soul.’’ Of strong, independent voice and reflective mind, Bennett has to be considered vis-à-vis the development of a methodology explaining the philosophical and artistic meaning of similarly oriented poetry in defining the Harlem Renaissance and its mythic reverberations. Her poetry suggests that she is aware of psychosocial and political relevance, and historical realities, both as determinants and as results of her work. She has a richly mature voice that goes beyond that of a mere cultist. Her dispassionate poetic intellect gives her protest poems resonance, depth, and complexity.
Gwendolyn B. Bennett’s writing career spans the years 1922 to 1934. Although she studied at Columbia University and in France, Bennett graduated from Pratt Institute, then taught watercolor and design at Howard University. Author of ‘‘The Ebony Flute,’’ a literary column in Opportunity, and also a frequent contributor to Crisis and The Messenger, Bennett has no collected volume of her verse. Her poems, dealing with nature, love, race, death, and romance, vary in length from six lines to her 39-line free verse ‘‘Song.’’ Although she is overly identified with her often anthologized lyric, ‘‘To a Dark Girl,’’ she wrote ballads, sonnets, and protest poetry. Her poems—whether racial, expressionistic, or impressionistic—are characterized by a heavy reliance on visual imagery.
OTHER WORKS: Selections of Bennett’s work can be found in: The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922). The New Negro (1925). Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1926 (1926). Caroling Dusk (1927). Ebony and Topaz (1927). Anthology of American Negro Literature (1929). American Negro Poetry (1963). An Introduction to Black Literature in America from 1746 to the Present (1969). Afro-American Literature (1970). The Poetry of the Negro, 1946-1970 (1970). The Poetry of Black America (1973). Black and Unknown Bards (n.d.). The Sleeper Wakes: Harlem Renaissance Stories by Women (1993). Women, Men, and the Great War: An Anthology of Stories (1995). The Soul of a Woman (1998).
Bennett’s racial poems reflect an African tradition: ‘‘I want to hear the chanting / Around a heathen fire.’’ Significantly, these
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Beckner, C., 100 African-Americans Who Shaped American History (1995). Eleazer, R. B., ed., Singers in the
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Dawn: A Brief Supplement to the Study of American Literature (1934). Govan, S. Y., Gwendolyn Bennett: Portrait of an Artist Lost (dissertation, 1989). Lewis, D. L., The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader (1995). —ERLENE STETSON
BENSON, Sally Born 3 September 1900, St. Louis, Missouri; died 21 July 1972, Woodland Hills, California Daughter of Alonzo Redway and Anna Prophater Smith; married Reynolds Benson, 1919 (divorced) After Sally Benson’s family had moved to New York, she attended the Horace Mann School, started working at seventeen, married at nineteen, had a daughter, and later divorced her husband. She wrote newspaper interviews and movie reviews and in 1929 contributed the first of her 108 stories to the New Yorker. Benson also edited a volume of myths, wrote mystery reviews for the New Yorker and more than 20 screenplays. People are Fascinating (1936) includes almost all the stories Benson had published in the New Yorker and four from American Mercury. ‘‘The Overcoat’’ and ‘‘Suite 2049’’ were O. Henry prize stories for 1935 and 1936. The title story offers an ironic perspective on the volume: a woman dramatist reads drama into mundane lives. Benson reveals the mediocrity of self-deluded and self-indulgent characters but is compassionate about their attempts to deal with their own mediocrity, with poverty and aging, with meaningless lives. In Emily (1938) Benson writes somewhat longer stories that allow for character development and elicit compassion for those caught in dilemmas, particularly those of growing up. ‘‘Professional Housewife’’ scathingly reveals the emptiness of the role, as well as that of a door-to-door salesman. When scattered in the New Yorker these stories seem witty; in this collection they seem depressing. Despite libraries’ classification, Junior Miss (1941) is not a children’s book. Each story humorously shows a young girl’s attempt to learn about herself and the world; collectively, the stories reveal the human condition. Benson’s light touch does not hide the seriousness of Judy’s problems and the inadequacies of most adult strategies for coping with them. The dramatization by Jerome Chodorov and Joseph Fields (1942) achieved success by hardening the delicacy gained by Benson’s stream-of-consciousness technique; it has the ‘‘rounded ends’’ and ‘‘climaxes’’ Benson disliked, and creates a popular stereotype. Readers of the stories will perceive Junior Miss as a rare account of female rites of passage. Benson’s Meet Me in St. Louis (1942) is a collection of 12 stories published in the New Yorker as ‘‘5135 Kensington.’’ They deal with family life and are based on the diaries of Benson’s sister at the time of the World’s Fair in St. Louis at the turn of the century. Benson has ironically used her family name of Smith for
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this obviously autobiographical work in which she appears as Tootie, age six. The collection focuses on an older sister and her determinedly sophisticated friends. It was made into a popular movie starring Judy Garland. Benson published Women and Children FIRST in 1943. The title originally proposed for the volume, ‘‘Danger: Women at Work,’’ accurately describes the focus on women frittering away their lives, manipulating each other and men. The stories centering around male central characters are equally bleak in their portrayal of human selfishness and pettiness. The book exposes a society which fosters useless lives by its role expectations. Benson’s stories are ‘‘slices of life’’ in which characters, through stream-of-consciousness or dialogue, reveal foolish pretenses; swift narration and irony preclude sentimentality but sometimes result in cruel revelations. Cumulatively her women are stereotypes of frivolous, stupid, and wasteful upper-middleclass New Yorkers. But Benson also described the male selfdeception and use of power that compel women to utilize manipulative strategies. Her portraits of young girls reveal the anguish of their socialization. OTHER WORKS: Stories of the Gods and Heroes (1940). Shadow of a Doubt (1943). Experiment Perilous (1944). National Velvet (1944). Anna and the King of Siam (1946). Come to the Stable (1949). No Man of Her Own (1950). Conspirator (1950). The Belle of New York (1952). The Farmer Takes a Wife (1953). Seventeen by B. Tarkington (dramatization by Benson, 1954). The Young and the Beautiful by F. S. Fitzgerald (dramatization by Benson, 1956). The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1960). Bus Stop (1961). Summer Magic (1962). Viva Las Vegas (1963). Signpost to Murder (1963). The Singing Nun (1966). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ferguson, M.A., ed., Images of Women in Literature (1991). Writers and Writing (22 July 1972). NYT (22 July 1972). —MARY ANNE FERGUSON
BERG, Gertrude Born 3 October 1899, New York, New York; died 14 September 1966, New York, New York Daughter of Jacob and Diana Goldstein Edelstein; married Lewis W. Berg, 1918 A second-generation American raised in New York City, Gertrude Berg drew observations of Jewish family life from her own childhood as well as from exhaustive research into urban Jewish folkways. Berg attended New York City public schools and took extension courses in playwriting at Columbia University from 1916 to 1918. She spent her childhood summers in the Catskill Mountains of New York, where she wrote and performed sketches to amuse the guests at her father’s hotel. For three years after her marriage, Berg lived on a sugar plantation in Louisiana,
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spending most of her time reading and writing. She began writing for radio after her return to New York. Berg’s first attempt at a radio series was Effie and Laura (1927), a story about two worldly young women who worked in a five-and-ten and talked about everything from economics to the meaning of life. Berg’s first success was The Rise of the Goldbergs (1929-1931), renamed The Goldbergs in 1931. Over the years, The Goldbergs included over two hundred characters, though only five characters sustained the series. The central character, Molly Goldberg (played by Berg), was a powerful and benevolent Jewish mother absorbed with finding sensible solutions for her family’s problems. She was an amalgam of characteristics drawn from Berg’s mother, grandmother, and various hotel guests. Her humor, derived from malapropisms and Yiddish dialect, was lovingly authentic and never patronizing or condescending. The Goldberg children, Rosalie and Sammy, typified firstgeneration Americans trying to make sense of their dual heritage. Though always devoted to their parents, Sammy and Rosie also were dedicated to modernizing them and to correcting their pronunciation. Their zeal was seldom appreciated by the elder Goldbergs. Berg wrote five 12-and-a-half-minute scripts per week. Each week’s scripts worked toward a climax designed to arouse enough curiosity on Friday to make listeners tune in on the following Monday. In addition to its durable humor, The Goldbergs is noted for its realism. The program eschewed sound ‘‘effects’’ in favor of real eggs frying or real water running in the studio. Programs requiring sounds too complicated for the studio were broadcast from appropriate external locations. When Sammy was called to active duty in World War II, his departure was broadcast from Pennsylvania Station. The troop train he boarded was genuine, as was his departure for duty. Such use of events from the actors’ lives contributed realism of the highest dramatic value. Except for a few brief interruptions, The Goldbergs remained on the air until 1950, through more than 5,000 scripts. Then the show moved to television, where some three million viewers assured the success of the program for nearly 10 years. Berg wrote several versions of The Goldbergs for various media: a book, The Rise of the Goldbergs (1931), a play, Me and Molly (1948), and a film, Molly (1950), written with N. Richard Nash. Throughout her works, Berg asserts the importance of domestic life for both men and women. To Molly Goldberg ‘‘a home, full of hearts and faces dat’s yours and you is deirs’’ is paramount. Her husband also acknowledges his need for marriage: ‘‘You got right, Molly. I vouldn’t be notting but a shadow; I vouldn’t be a real man. I can’t even picture to mineself dat I should be a single man.’’ The Goldberg family adjusts to changing times, but its integrity as a family never falters. Though The Goldbergs is ethnic comedy at its finest, the program’s warmth and authenticity give it universal appeal. Molly and Me (1961), a memoir written with Berg’s son Cherney, is a straightforward account of the people important in Berg’s life and, ultimately, in her writings. The book reveals Berg’s penchant for glib generalizations about people and
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events. The most interesting characters are men—waiters, guests, storekeepers, relatives. Though the women characters generally are less sympathetically drawn, their strength and power are unmistakable. Berg’s works, however, pose two major problems for critics. Almost every story Berg wrote is about the Goldbergs, and the Goldbergs are Berg’s family. Accordingly, the distinction between Berg and Molly is elusive. A second problem compounds the first, namely, that Berg’s writing relies heavily on the actor’s skill in bringing characters to life. The realization of Molly’s character, for example, depends upon Berg’s performance as much as upon Berg’s writings. Therefore, the greatness of Berg’s achievement cannot rest solely upon the strength of her writing. The ultimate critical and commercial success of Molly and her family is the result of Berg’s command of the total creative process—from writing, to production, to performance. OTHER WORKS: House of Glass (radio drama, 1935). Make a Wish (film, released 1937). Kate Hopkins (radio drama, 1941-1942). The Molly Goldberg Cookbook (1955). ‘‘Let God Worry a Little Bit’’ in From the Wise Women of Israel: Folklore and Memoirs (1993). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Barnouw, E., A Tower in Babel: A History of Broadcasting in the United States to 1933 (1966). Barnouw, E., The Golden Web: A History of Broadcasting in the United States 1933-1953 (1968). Edmondson, M. and D. Rounds, From Mary Noble to Mary Hartman: The Complete Soap Opera Book (1976). O’Dell, C., Women Pioneers in Television: Biographies of Fifteen Industry Leaders (1997). Weber, D., ‘‘The Jewish-American World of Gertrude Berg: The Goldergs on Radio and Television, 1930-1950’’ in Talking Back: Images of Jewish Women in American Popular Culture (1998). Weber, D. ‘‘Memory and Repression in Early Ethnic Television: The Example of Gertrude Berg and the Goldbergs’’ in The Other Fifties: Interrogating Midcentury American Icons (1997). Reference works: CBY (1960). National Cyclopedia of American Biography (1892 et seq.). Other references: Commentary (April 1956). NYT (15 Feb. 1959, 15 Sept. 1966). Newsweek (11 April 1949). SR (26 May 1956). Time (26 April 1943, 26 Sept. 1949, 8 March 1948). Theatre Arts (Spring 1948, Spring 1951). —CAREN J. DEMING
BERGMAN, Susan H. Born5 May 1957, Bloomington, Indiana Daughter of Donald and Nancy Pricket Heche; married Judson Bergman, 1979; children: Elliot, Elise (Elizabeth), Natalie, Bennet In two different years, the Pushcart Prize (Best of Small Presses) essay award went to Susan Bergman for her short pieces
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destined to be parts of a longer one: these short essays, chapters in fact, were ‘‘Anonymity,’’ honored in 1991-92, and ‘‘Estivation,’’ honored in 1993-94. These are not the only awards Bergman has won for her writing: her work was included among Best American Essays in both 1987 and 1992 as a winner of Tri-Quarterly’s essay prize in 1990; moreover, her poems were recognized by the American Academy of Poets (1987-88) and Discovery/The Nation Contest (where she was a finalist in 1990). The two Pushcart Prize essays evolved into Anonymity: The Secret Life of An American Family (1994), where Bergman reveals in memoir form the shattering experience her family suffered when, upon the death of Susan’s father, Donald Heche, at the age of forty-five, they learned he was one of the earliest victims of the AIDS epidemic that swept homosexual communities between 1983 and 1989. Anonymity is not a long book, but its power is deeply felt by reader and author alike. Bergman has a mature style and serenity that is comforting given the plain awful facts of her story. And her technique of weaving past and present events together with paragraphs of self-discovery and personal revelation produces an authentic poetic formula of presentation— where the reader is carried along the narrative by the pace and choice of words Bergman uses to tell her truths. She is a born teller of stories. She writes: ‘‘At first no one believed me and I knew it. On Sunday nights until I was at least ten (not every week) my parents spanked me for my week’s worth of lies, until I cried so hard I would lose my breath. Eventually I learned how to simulate breath loss so they’d stop before the welts rose. I practiced on the gullible until, satisfied that even skeptics would not doubt, I told the one about my father’s performance at Carnegie Hall.’’ And later, as she removes the layers of untruth: ‘‘You must understand that lying is a temporal invisibility.’’ Bergman’s memoir shook the very foundations of America’s love affair with ‘‘the family.’’ In a review for Christian Century, Suzanna Ruta addressed what it meant from the outside to acknowledge ‘‘the family of a father who died of AIDS. . . .A strict disciplinarian, church organist, head of a fundamentalist family in which love was expressed, he led a double life of cruising and promiscuity.’’ Each reader or reviewer confronts the same horror and must likely draw the same conclusion: that behind the statistics and the labels, behind the name-calling and the blame, lie real people (often children) whose lives are changed forever. We learn from Bergman herself in Anonymity that she wished to attend a college where her artistic and writing skills could be honed and developed. She hoped for Cornell University. Her parents insisted on a Christian college, however, so her B.A. degree (1979) is from Wheaton College in Illinois. Later, as her choices were less bound by parental restrictions, Bergman earned M.A. (1988) and Ph.D. (1992) degrees in English from Northwestern University. She has managed for several decades to juggle motherhood (four children), a successful career as a writer, and service as a teacher. She was visiting writer at her alma mater, Wheaton College, in 1997-98; at Notre Dame University in 1996; and conducted personal writing workshops for the Ragdale Foundation and River Oaks Arts in Illinois. Her poems have been published since 1985 in such widely known periodicals as Prairie
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Schooner, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, and Indiana Review. She speaks frankly and regularly about writing and about AIDS, not always at the same time but always with the same courtesy and attention to her audience’s need to understand. In an interview with Richard Ford, broadcast by National Public Radio in 1998, Bergman talked about her dedication to writing, its importance to her life. Ford praised her work for its clarity, its integrity, its subtle yet strong grip on what really matters about language—its power to communicate. Bergman is on the board of directors of the Modern Poetry Association, and a contributing editor for Books and Culture and North American Review. She has written and developed liturgical materials—textual, visual, and musical—for church performance. Her meditation on the life and death of Saint Perpetua, ‘‘Called by Name,’’ appears in a volume of essays, A Tremor of Bliss (1994), celebrating the way that ‘‘the idea and the ideal of sanctity, as it has been lived in certain lives over the centuries, persist in our significantly secular time.’’ Bergman says: ‘‘I cling to the promises that if we seek God we will find him, that if we knock the door will be opened. In these words lie powerful incentives to an active life of faith.’’ OTHER WORKS: Buried Life (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Anthem (National Public Radio, Oct. 1998). NYTBR (1994). —KATHLEEN BONANN MARSHALL
BERNAYS, Anne Born 14 September 1930, New York, New York Daughter of Edward L. and Dorothy Fleischman Bernays; married Justin Kaplan, 1954; children: Susanna, Hester, Polly Born into a prominent family, Anne Bernays was a grandniece of Freud and the younger of two daughters of the founding father of the public relations field. Bernays was raised in the Sherry Netherlands Hotel during the Depression, which, she was told, ‘‘was happening to poor people.’’ She attended the Brearley School in New York City, then Wellesley for two years, transferring to Barnard where for the first time, she made friends outside a limited social circle. In 1953 Bernays worked as an editor of Discovery for Vance Bourjaily. In 1954 she married critic Justin Kaplan and left publishing in 1957 to give birth to the first of her three daughters. The same year, she started writing and completed 10 short stories. In 1959 Bernays moved with her family to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she has taught fiction workshops, written novels, and worked as a part-time editor for David Godine. Bernays’ first novel, Short Pleasure (1962), tells the story of an heiress who runs away from her wedding but claims she was
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kidnapped and stuffed into a car trunk. Bernays uses the story, based on a newspaper item, to illustrate the extravagant lengths to which a ‘‘poor little rich girl’’ will go to escape the confines of her family. One of Bernays’ best books, Growing Up Rich (1975), deals again with the need to escape the family—this time, however, without having the characters resort to tales of dramatic kidnapping or to suicide, as in The New York Ride (1965). In Growing Up Rich, Bernays accurately records the characteristics of the rich and the trappings of their wealth. The narrator, another ‘‘poor little rich girl,’’ cannot, as Bernays herself could not, make friends in her private school. The pudgy schoolgirl who lacks self-assurance is confused by her divided loyalties—to her natural father, a Christian, and her stepfather, a Jew; to her German parents and her Russian guardians. When disaster strikes, she is sent to live with the same Russian Jews who were formerly held in contempt by her family. In her new home, her makeshift bedroom is a converted porch without heat, and she goes to public, not private school. She becomes a debutante in a new sense of the word as she enters a more public, less private society. Growing Up Rich is written with wit, sophistication, and a sense of pain and poignancy, holding up to ridicule the false values of upper class society. With Growing Up Rich, Bernays hits her stride as a social satirist; she maintains the pace in The School Room (1979). In a central episode, children in a Cambridge, Massachusetts, private school, spying on their teachers through a crack in a wall, catch them in a compromising situation. Multiple plots and the contrasting positions of children either thrust out of, or secure in, their families are deftly handled. Bernays’ humor brings levity to the pain of adolescence. These books ensured Bernays’ reputation; she is one of few writers to deal with mother/daughter relationships, showing that the child belongs to the nurturing, and not necessarily the natural, parent. Parents in her novels are often weak: mothers are too intrusive, evasive, or too busy with their own concerns; nor can fathers help their sons. Bernays writes about children and about women who are both professionals and involved family members. Bernays’ wit, her acute ear for dialogue, her compassion for the adolescent, her ability to handle intricate plots, and her awareness of the life of the mind as well as her knowledge of the domestic scene make her work mature, womanly, and literate. Bernays has explored in her fiction the culture of social privilege in America. From New York City’s high society (The New York Ride and Growing Up Rich) to the cloistered environment of an exclusive Cambridge boarding school (The School Book, 1980), Bernays has exposed with humor and poignancy these often hermetic institutions of privilege. In two novels in the 1980s, Bernays turned her attention to issues concerning professional women. The Address Book (1983) features a successful, middle-aged editor at a Boston publishing house who is offered a new job with a top New York firm. As Alicia Baer—wife, mother, professional woman—struggles with the decision to move on in her career or to remain with her family, she is confronted by her own fears of loneliness and death, as well as by her repressed ambition and sexuality. Submerged elements of her inner life
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become personified as mysterious old acquaintances who make claims upon her. The Address Book successfully portrays the conflict between Alicia’s genuine love of and attachment to her family and her longings to escape the personal restrictions it imposes upon her. Professor Romeo (1989) deals with sexual harassment on the college campus. Assuming a male voice, Bernays tells the story of compulsive sexual exploitation from the point of view of the perpetrator, psychology professor Jake Barker, and reveals the profound emptiness looming behind Barker’s accomplished facade. Finally called to account for his unethical behavior, Barker faces his dismissal from Harvard, and the professional demise it represents, with bewildered incomprehension. A shallow man from beginning to end, he shows no sign of reform or redemption. In 1990 Bernays took another direction, publishing a creative writing manual for students with Pamela Painter. Composed of 83 lessons in 12 sections, each addressing a facet of fiction writing, What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers avoids theoretical and technical jargon, focusing instead on practical exercises, revision, and the study of great authors. The next year, 1991, Bernays joined the faculty at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts. With her husband, Kaplan, she jointly holds the Jenks Chair in Contemporary Letters. Bernays and Kaplan collaborated on The Language of Names in 1997, which provides scholarly information about names in an easily accessible style. The authors discuss the importance of names as ‘‘cultural universals’’ used throughout history and provide a wealth of trivia about names from literature, history, films, racial and ethnic groups, and the business world. In addition to pursuing her own writing career, Bernays is busy on behalf of other writers. She is a founding and active member of PEN New England, a regional offshoot of the national anticensorship and writer advocacy organization. She is chair of the Fine Arts Work Center, which funds writers and visual artists for a year’s stay in Provincetown; she also serves on the board of the National Writers Union. OTHER WORKS: Prudence, Indeed (1966). The First to Know (1974). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1967). CANR (1982, 1999). SATA (1983). Other references: Boston Magazine (Dec. 1975). College Composition and Communication (Feb. 1992). Hudson Review (Autumn 1984). NYT (19 July 1989). NYTBR (13 Nov. 1983, 23 July 1989). Ploughshares (Spring 1976). —E. M. BRONER, UPDATED BY MELISSA BURNS AND NICK ASSENDELFT
BERNE, Victoria See FISHER, M. F. K.
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BETHUNE, Mary McLeod Born 10 July 1875, near Mayesville, South Carolina; died 18 May 1955, Daytona, Florida Daughter of Samuel and Patsy McLeod; married Albertus Bethune, 1898 Born to former slaves, Mary McLeod Bethune realized early the importance of education in improving the quality of life. Upon graduating from Mayesville Institute, she attended Scotia Seminary in Concord, North Carolina, and pursued further studies at Moody Institute in Chicago. Two black women, Emma Wilson, Bethune’s first teacher, and Lucy Laney, her first principal and employer, inspired her by giving her an educational opportunity and by serving as models in opening schools for blacks. Moreover, the teachers at Scotia taught her about the evils of discrimination. Following these examples, Bethune devoted her life to offering others educational opportunities and to combating ‘‘color, caste and class distinctions.’’ After marrying, Bethune taught in mission schools in the South, and in 1904 she opened the Daytona Educational and Industrial School for Training Negro Girls; in 1923 the school merged with Cookman Institute and became Bethune-Cookman College, and Bethune remained head of the school until 1942. It was as an educator and founder of a school that Bethune first achieved recognition, but she refused to confine her talent and effort to one institution or to one group of people—she became a national and international leader in the cause of equality, peace, and brotherhood. In 1920 she was elected to the Executive Board of the National Urban League. In ‘‘The Problems of the City Dweller’’ (Opportunity, 3 Feb. 1925), Bethune pointed out the discrepancy between the El Dorado of the ‘‘country lad’s dreams’’ and the economic, social, and educational oppression found in urban centers. She urged the Urban League to focus attention on the problems of the city dweller, calling equally for the ‘‘breaking down of racial barriers’’ and for the aiding of immigrants. Bethune served as vice president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and formed the National Council of Negro Women. She was also president of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and urged scholars and researchers to discover, interpret, and disseminate the truth ‘‘in the field of Negro life.’’ She reminded them that the ‘‘social usefulness of scholarship and its findings depends upon its translation into the common tongue.’’ Focusing upon this same theme in a 1939 speech, ‘‘The Adaptation of the History of the Negro to the Capacity of the Child’’ (Journal of Negro History, Jan. 1939), she pointed out that children must have ‘‘a true picture of races’’ because ‘‘peace is based on international understanding and good will.’’ Bethune’s talent, energy, and resources were drawn upon by two U.S. presidents. President Hoover invited her to the White House Conference on Child Health and Protection and to the President’s Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership. Under Franklin D. Roosevelt she served as Director of the
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Division of Negro Affairs in the National Youth Administration and as a representative to the San Francisco Conference to draw up a permanent charter for the United Nations. At that conference she helped draft a statement calling for a World Bill of Rights and urging nations ‘‘to face what is one of the most serious problems of the 20th century—the question of race and color.’’ Throughout her career Bethune asserted her belief in the promise of the American dream, pointed out the discrepancy between the ideal and reality, and sought to extend the promise to all groups. Moreover, her travels and living through two world wars made her aware of America’s role in the world and of the ties that bind all people. In ‘‘Certain Unalienable Rights,’’ she brings these realizations together, asserting that the black American’s desire for equality was rooted in the American principles of democracy and that the black Americans who were angry were analogous to the Boston Tea Party patriots. To Bethune these black Americans were among the ‘‘depressed and repressed masses all over the world’’ who were ‘‘swelling to the breaking point against the walls of the ghettoes.’’ She concluded that America and the world had two alternatives in reacting to the cry for equality: to act ‘‘in keeping with American ideals’’ or to ‘‘mimic Hitler.’’ Bethune’s leadership in education and in the cause of ‘‘Peace, Progress, Brotherhood and Love’’ brought her national and international acclaim, as attested by the numerous honors and awards she received, including the Spingarn Medal, the Drexel Award, the Thomas Jefferson Award, the Honor Merit of Haiti Award, and the Star of Africa Award from Liberia. In 1974 a memorial to her was erected in Washington, D.C. Although she published rarely, and never in volume form, Bethune’s essays appeared in Opportunity and in the Journal of Negro History. To reach a more popular audience, she turned to Ebony with ‘‘My Secret Talks with Franklin D. Roosevelt’’ (April 1949) and ‘‘My Last Will and Testament’’ (10 August 1955). OTHER WORKS: Mary McLeod Bethune, Her Own Words of Inspiration (1975, reprinted1990). Mary McLeod Bethune Papers, 1923-1942 (microfilm, 1976). Mary McLeod Bethune Papers, Bethune Foundation Collection, Part 2: Correspondence Files, 1914-1955 (1997). ‘‘My Last Will and Testament’’ in Can I Get a Witness? Prophetic Religious Voices of African American Women: An Anthology (1997). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ashby, R. and D. G. Ohrn, eds., Herstory: Women Who Changed the World (1995). Blackwell, B. G., The Advocacies and Ideological Commitments of a Black Educator: Mary McLeod Bethune, 1875-1955 (dissertation, 1978). Boehm, R., A Guide to the Microfilm Edition of Mary McLeod Bethune Papers: The Bethune-Cookman College Collection, 1922-1955 (1995). Brawley, B., Negro Builders and Heroes (1937). David, S. I., Women Builders (1931). Embree, E. R., Thirteen Against the Odds (1944). Felder, D. G., The 100 Most Influential Women of All Time: A Ranking Past and Present (1996). Greenfield, E., Mary McLeod Bethune (1977). Hall, J. B., ‘‘Segregation and the Politics of Race: Mary McLeod Bethune and the National Youth
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Administration, 1935-1943’’ (thesis, 1996). Hanson, J. A., The Ties that Bind: Mary McLeod Bethune and the Political Mobilization of African-American Women (dissertation, 1997). Hardy, G. J., American Women Civil Rights Activists: Biobibliographies of 68 Leaders, 1825-1992 (1993). Holt, R., Mary McLeod Bethune: A Biography (1964). McCluskey, A. T., Mary McLeod Bethune and the Education of Black Girls in the South, 1904-1923 (dissertation, 1991). Newsome, C. G., Mary McLeod Bethune in Religious Perspective (dissertation, 1982). Peare, C. O., Mary McLeod Bethune (1951). Poole, B. A., Mary McLeod Bethune (1994). Reynolds, M. D., Women Champions of Human Rights: Eleven U.S. Leaders of the Twentieth Century (1991). Russell, D., Black Genius and the American Experience (1998). Skorapa, O. L., Feminist Theory and the Educational Endeavor of Mary McLeod Bethune (dissertation, 1989). Seller, M., ed., Women Educators in the United States, 1820-1993: A Biobibliographical Sourcebook (1994). Smallwood, D., Profiles of Great African Americans (1998). Young, J. A., A Study of the Educational Philosophies of Three Pioneer Black Women and their Contributions to American Education (dissertation, 1993, 1987). Other references: JNH (1975). Light in the Southern Sky (video, 1994). Mary McLeod Bethune as Shaper of Social Reality (audiocassette, 1986). Mary McLeod Bethune: Educator (video, 1997). Mary McLeod Bethune: Political & Social Development at Home and Abroad (video, 1996). Mary McLeod Bethune: The Spirit of a Champion (video, 1996). Portraits: The Americans (video, 1997). Southern Workman (March 1912). The Story of Mary McLeod Bethune from Cotton Fields to the White House (video, 1990). —JO HOWZE
BETTS, Doris Born 4 June 1932, Statesville, North Carolina Daughter of William E. and Mary Ellen Freeze Elmore Waugh; married Lowry M. Betts, 1952; children: Doris, David, Erskine Since winning a Mademoiselle college fiction contest in 1953, Doris Betts has published nine novels and three volumes of short stories. She has been a journalist at several North Carolina newspapers and a professor at a number of colleges in North Carolina and Indiana. Betts has also been active in her town of Sanford, North Carolina, and is the Alumni Distinguished Professor of English at the nearby University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has won several literary awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction in 1958-59 and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Medal of Merit in 1989. The Gentle Insurrection, and Other Stories (1954), though published when the author was twenty-two, shows mature understanding of human powers and limitations. In the title story, the daughter of a sharecropper, out of both fear and family loyalty,
rejects her chance to escape with a lover; other stories show characters coping with handicaps, poverty, aging, and racial discrimination. There is no sentimentality; a chain gang, murder, maternal rejection, patriarchal ruthlessness, bitter sexual frustration are dispassionately presented. Betts’ characteristic use of interior monologue for ironic self-revelation, her concern for morality and religion, her use of animal symbols, and her humor are all already apparent. Betts’ second book of short stories, The Astronomer, and Other Stories (1966), is actually a novella whose central character, a widower, tries to fill his life by pursuing astronomy but finds he cannot fill the emptiness without involvement with other people. Betts’ increased control of her medium is evident in the economy with which several lives are simultaneously revealed. In the other stories in this collection, Betts succinctly portrays people who deal with life the best they can but not always effectively. It is unfortunate Betts yielded to writing novels, because it is in her short stories that she succeeds in catching whole lives quickly. Tall Houses in Winter (1957), Betts’ first novel, is overplotted and melodramatic, and only somewhat redeemed by convincing character portrayal. The Scarlet Thread (1964), a historical novel, is noteworthy primarily for its vivid scenes and biblical symbolism. The River to Pickle Beach (1972) skillfully uses symbols of nature to make this novel a powerful affirmation of life. With Beasts of the Southern Wild, and Other Stories (1973), for which Betts was a 1974 National Book award finalist, and Heading West (1981), is a collection of seven stories representing both a culmination of her previous work and a new departure. More comic, more fantastic, these stories are nonetheless as revelatory of ordinary people as Betts’ other fiction. Using animal images and female central consciousnesses, Betts creates a world in which awareness of mortality heightens experience. Betts’ characters, often grotesque, gain dignity from confronting loneliness, family and racial tensions, aging, and death. She achieves rare authenticity about women through detailing graphically with the birth process, the emotional effects of abortion, hysterectomy, and childlessness. Betts’ discussions of the aesthetics of writing reflect her award-winning teaching. Between 1954 and 1973 Betts produced three volumes of short stories and three novels, all focused on her native North Carolina. She has always been well received in her region: each novel won the Sir Walter Raleigh award for the best fiction of its year by a North Carolinian. The aforementioned Beasts of the Southern Wild and Other Stories (1973), broadened her reputation; it was widely reviewed, and one of the stories, ‘‘The Ugliest Pilgrim,’’ was filmed for the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) as Violet, with Betts writing the screenplay. In Heading West (1981), a Book-of-the-Month selection, the author’s wider scope is paralleled by that of her female epic hero, Nancy Finch, an unmarried librarian in a small North Carolina town desperate to escape her dull life. Maintaining the comic voice evident in many of her short stories, Betts makes her story of Nancy’s journey to the Grand Canyon a mock epic. The Grand Canyon parallels
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Melville’s white whale as a symbol of the American quest for meaning, which Betts locates, finally, in the American dream of family. Instead of Melville’s mad hero, Betts’ protagonist is the victim of a mad kidnapper who introduces himself with the words ‘‘Call me Dwight,’’ echoing Melville’s ‘‘Call me Ishmael.’’ Nancy’s vocation as librarian gives Betts ample opportunity for other literary parallels and allusions; the Bible, Pilgrim’s Progress, Paradise Lost, proverbs, fairytales, and popular songs furnish opportunities for irony and also deepen the universality of Nancy’s predicament and ambivalence. Betts subverts the myth of the ‘‘imperial hero,’’ a loner who ruthlessly prevails over all obstacles. Like Odysseus, Nancy returns home to complete her spiritual journey before heading west for good. Through irony and the witty inner voice of her protagonist, Betts makes Nancy’s adventures credible and the characters convincing. Using the form of a suspenseful mystery story in which the good guys win, Betts has solved the dilemma of writers in a democracy of how to make a serious work accessible to many levels of readers. A published excerpt from a novel in progress, Souls Raised from the Dead, makes it clear Betts has mastered the novel form as well as she had already mastered that of the short story. Betts remained busy throughout the rest of the 1980s and early 1990s with both her teaching and writing. She contributed articles, poems, short fiction, and literary reviews to various magazines; her short stories were also anthologized in various local and national works, including Best American Short Stories and A New Southern Reader. Souls Raised from the Dead (1994) was Betts’ first novel in over a decade and received overwhelmingly favorable reviews. Set in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the novel’s protagonist is 12-year-old Mary Grace Thompson, whose mother abandoned Mary Grace and her highway patrolman father, Frank, three years before. Mary Grace has a minor riding accident early in the novel and the ensuing hospitalization leads to her diagnosis with chronic renal failure. Frank already has one damaged kidney due to a gunshot wound received while in the line of duty years earlier, and Mary Grace must therefore rely upon her mother Christine as the most likely donor. Christine is afraid of undergoing surgery, however, and so denies her kidney by pretending that Mary Grace will be fine without it. Mary Grace’s slow physical decline is mirrored in the spiritual decline of her family. Just as her kidneys cannot serve as an adequate filter for her body’s toxins, Mary Grace herself can no longer serve as a spiritual and emotional filter for her dysfunctional extended family. Betts, a Presbyterian elder and devout Christian, gives the child an ample share of the grace for which she is named, and shows her meeting her impending death with courage and conviction. A child’s death also figures in Betts’ next novel, The Sharp Teeth of Love (1997), whose characters include a ghost and a young runaway. Heroine Luna Stone leaves her fiancé midway through their trip to their prospective new home in California. She camps out in the Desolation Wilderness where the ill-fated Donner Party met its end and is soon haunted by the ghost of
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Tamsen Donner. Meanwhile, she meets 12-year-old Sam, who has run away from his would-be kidnappers, and another camper, newly deaf Paul Cowan. The group forms a makeshift family until Sam is kidnapped by his pursuers and Luna and Paul must go to his rescue. The Sharp Teeth of Love received a mixed reception from critics, who praised its appealing characters but generally agreed the various plotlines didn’t completely mesh. OTHER WORKS: Halfway Home and a Long Way to Go: The Report of the 1986 Commission on the Future of the South (1986). The papers of Doris Betts are housed at Boston University, in Boston, Massachusetts. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Carr, J., ed., Kite-Flying and Other Irrational Acts: Conversations with Twelve Southern Writers (1972). Dantzler, K. L. N., Writings of Religious Rebellion: Doris Betts’ Early Fiction (dissertation, 1989). Evans, E., Doris Betts (1997). Kimball, S. L. and L. V. Sandler, eds., The Home Truths of Doris Betts (1992). Prenshaw, P. W., ed., Women Writers of the Contemporary South (1984). Wilson, M. J., Southern, Female and Christian: A Comparative Study of Christian Orthodoxy in the Short Fiction of Flannery O’Connor and Doris Betts (dissertation, 1987). Reference works: CANR (1998). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Chapel Hill Weekly (3 May 1972). Christian Century (8 Oct. 1997). Critique (1975). PW (25 Apr. 1994). Red Clay Reader (1970). The Sanford (5 Dec. 1974). Southern Quarterly (Summer & Winter 1983). —MARY ANNE FERGUSON, UPDATED BY LEAH J. SPARKS
BIANCO, Margery Williams Born 22 July 1881, London, England; died 4 September 1944, New York, New York Also wrote under: Margery Bianco, Margery Williams Daughter of Robert and Florence Harper Williams; married Francesco Bianco, 1904 Margery Williams Bianco was born in London, where she early developed the interest for studying animals reflected in many of her books. Bianco’s father died when she was seven and two years later the remaining members of the family sailed for New York. From there they moved to a farm in Pennsylvania, where Bianco reveled in ‘‘berry picking, corn husking, coasting in winter—all the country things one had read about in St. Nicholas.’’ At seventeen, Bianco began to write and occasionally publish short stories. Her first novel, The Late Returning, appeared in 1902 and was followed by two more adult novels, The Price of Youth (1904) and The Bar (1906). A. C. Moore has described these early novels as ‘‘absorbing stories’’ of human loyalties and
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conflicts in which Bianco’s characteristic concern for ‘‘the mystery of nature’’ was already present. In 1922 Bianco published her first novel for children, The Velveteen Rabbit. This fantasy about a toy rabbit that becomes real through the power of love has long been acknowledged as a work of rare distinction. A tale of patient love, willing sacrifice, and bittersweet reward, it is reminiscent of Hans Christian Andersen’s literary fairy tales, which Bianco greatly admired. Her style, which is tender and yet humorous, is well suited to the story of the velveteen rabbit, and to the stories of toys and their people that followed it: Poor Cecco (1925), The Little Wooden Doll (1925), The Skin Horse (1927), and The Adventures of Andy (1927). Bianco’s success in these early children’s books was in her ability to create secondary realities—worlds and characters parallel to but different from our own. Her charming style and use of facts made animals into individuals. But Bianco’s later children’s books demonstrate that she was also able to draw upon realistic settings, and create realistic human characters. In Winterbound (1936), the four Ellis children spend a hard winter alone in a drafty Connecticut farmhouse. The two older sisters use good sense, good spirits, and good character to bring the family through a series of potential disasters. Bianco’s hand with characterization is so sure that not only are the Ellises all fully realized as individuals, but each member of the supporting cast is also clearly and memorably defined. Throughout Winterbound, Bianco’s love for the colors and the inhabitants of the countryside brings landscape, flora, and fauna into the fabric of her story. A frequent contributor to Horn Book magazine, Bianco brought high standards of criticism to her consideration of children’s books, and she was as demanding of herself as she was of others. She had a keen awareness of the role of literature in educating the imagination, and wrote that ‘‘Imagination is another word for the interpretation of life.’’ OTHER WORKS: Paris (1910). The Thing in the Woods (1913). The Apple Tree (1926). All About Pets (1929). The Candlestick (1929). The House That Grew Smaller (1931). A Street of Little Shops (1932). The Hurdy-Gurdy Man (1933). The Good Friends (1934). More About Animals (1934). Green Grows the Garden (1936). Tales from a Finnish Tupa (with J. C. Bowman, 1936). Rufus the Fox (1937). Other People’s Houses (1939). Franzi and Gizi (with G. Loeffler, 1941). Bright Morning (1942). The Fiveand-a-Half Club (1942). Penny and the White Horse (1942). Forward Commandos! (1944). Herbert’s Zoo (1949). The New Five-and-a-half Club (1951). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Moore and Miller, eds., Writing and Criticism: A Book for Margery Bianco (1951). Reference works: Junior Book of Authors, S. J. Kunitz, and H. Haycraft, eds. (1951). Other references: EngElemR (June 1935). Horn Book (May 1945). PW (23 Sept. 1944). Weekly Book Review (1 Oct. 1944). —KATHARYN F. CRABBE
BISHOP, Claire Huchet Born circa 1899, Brittany, France; died 11 March 1993 married Frank Bishop Born into a family and a culture where storytelling, particularly of traditional tales, was a normal part of life, Claire Huchet Bishop seems to have come naturally to her career as a children’s librarian and author. After studying at the Sorbonne, Bishop opened the first French children’s library, L’Heure Joyeuse, in the years following World War I. There, in a library sponsored by an American Committee headed by Mrs. Herbert Hoover, she began to tell stories to children. When she married pianist Frank Bishop and accompanied him to New York City in the 1930s, she took a position in the New York Public Library, where she was also invited to be a storyteller. Her first book, The Five Chinese Brothers (1938), was a written version of a tale she had told children on two continents. The Five Chinese Brothers, as befits a written version of an oral tale, has a simple, dramatic storyline; it makes extensive use of repetitions (‘‘Your Honor, will you allow me to go and bid my mother good-bye?’’ asks each of the brothers. ‘‘It is only fair,’’ the judge always replies); and it celebrates personal resourcefulness over social order. The Five Chinese Brothers has acquired the status of a modern classic. The same structural qualities of the traditional oral tale appear in The Man Who Lost His Head (1942), which is also a picture book. This droll tale is about a man who, waking one morning without his head, sets out to find it. He tries three alternative heads—a pumpkin, a parsnip, and a piece of wood— before he regains his own through the help of a young and ragged magician with a penchant for extraordinary words. Bishop’s other picture books include The Ferryman (1941), Augustus (1945), and Twenty-two Bears (1964). Bishop is best known for The Five Chinese, but her short novels for children are also major achievements. In such books as Pancakes-Paris (1947), Twenty and Ten (1952), All Alone (1953), and A Present from Petros (1961), Bishop manages to simultaneously evoke the uniqueness of various cultures and the universality of childhood. Pancakes-Paris, for example, is the story of Charles, a ten-year-old postwar Parisian who wants desperately to make crêpes for his mother for Mardi Gras. But he has no milk, no eggs, no oil—nothing. Although two American soldiers provide a happy ending, the reality of Charles’s life and its contrast with our own comes through. The humanitarian impulse, evident in the soldiers who bring packages of food and supplies to Charles’s family, is strong in Pancakes-Paris. A similar morality is at work in All Alone, the story of two young cowherds in the French Alps who, by example, persuade a village to give up rugged individualism and minding
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one’s own business for a sense of community and brotherhood. Here, as in all her novels, Bishop celebrates courage, caring, and acceptance of responsibility, both for self and for others. Accepting responsibility for others is a major theme in Twenty and Ten, the children’s novel most closely connected to Bishop’s writing for adults. It’s the story of 20 French fifthgraders who have been sent to a country house to wait out the occupation, and of the 10 Jewish children they hid from the Nazis. In this book Bishop has used the device of a children’s Christmas game called ‘‘The Flight into Egypt’’ to propose the oneness of Christians and Jews. This concern for religious harmony is also the force behind two later accomplishments: her noble foreword to an English edition of Jesus and Israel (Jésus et Israël) by the French historian Jules Isaac, and her own How Catholics Look at Jews (1974). The foreword to Jesus and Israel (1970) reveals Bishop’s commitment to the battle against anti-Semitism and her conviction that even Vatican Council II did not go far enough in trying to eradicate anti-Jewish prejudice in the teachings of the Roman Catholic church. The importance Bishop places on religion is reflected in her recreation of the life of Christ, Yeshu, Called Jesus (1966), and in her three saints’ lives, Christopher the Giant (1950), Bernard and His Dogs (1952), and Martin de Porres, Hero (1954), all written for children. These books also reveal her ability to speak candidly about defects in the Catholic church, as in Martin de Porres, Hero which contains several depictions of the dandyism and selfindulgence that characterized some religious houses in the 16th and 17th centuries. Bishop’s spare style and dry wit are admirable. She is most effective in creating a sense of place and an awareness of cultural differences in her novels and in echoing the oral tradition in her picture-story books. It is also in her fiction that she most successfully integrates moral themes into the fabric of the work.
OTHER WORKS: French Children’s Books for English Speaking Children (1938). The King’s Day (1940). France Alive (1947). Blue Spring Farm (1948). All Things Common (1950). The Big Loop (1955). Happy Christmas (ed. by Bishop, 1956). Toto’s Triumph (1957). French Roundabout (1960). Lafayette: FrenchAmerican Hero (1960). Here is France (1969). The Truffle Pig (1971). Johann Sebastian Bach (1972). Georgette (1974).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hopkins, L. B., Books are by People (1969). Schwartz, A. V., ‘‘On The Five Chinese Brothers,’’ in Interracial Books for Children Bulletin 3 (1977). Smaridge, N., Famous Modern Story Tellers for Young People (1969). Reference works: The Junior Book of Authors, S. J. Kunitz and H. Haycraft, eds, (1951). Other references: LJ (Oct. 1977). PW (10 May 1947). —KATHARYN F. CRABBE
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BISHOP, Elizabeth Born 8 February 1911, Worcester, Massachusetts; died 6 October 1979, Boston, Massachusetts Daughter of Gertrude May Bulmer and William Thomas Bishop (the Bulmer family name was pronounced with a silent ‘‘l’’ and had the variant spelling of Boomer) When Elizabeth Bishop was eight months old, she lost her father to Bright’s disease after he had been ill off and on for six years. The death had a disastrous effect on her mother. Unable to cope with the tragedy, her mother became increasingly disoriented and was in and out of mental hospitals during Bishop’s early childhood. In 1916 she was permanently institutionalized and never saw her daughter again before she died in 1934. As an only child growing up, Bishop was continually aware that she did not provide her mother with sufficient consolation or sense of purpose to keep her from leaving yet again. The memory of what seemed to be maternal neglect and rejection stayed with Bishop all her life and surfaced in her poetry, a particularly clear instance being an unpublished draft of a poem called ‘‘A Drunkard,’’ where it is associated with the beginnings of her lifelong problem with alcoholism, her ‘‘abnormal thirst.’’ The uncertainty surrounding her mother’s condition was mitigated by the stable and loving relationship Bishop had with her maternal grandparents. After being widowed, Bishop’s mother had taken her daughter and returned home to live with them in Great Village, Nova Scotia, a tiny and close-knit community filled with relatives and neighbors. When Bishop was six years old, however, the warmth and liveliness of life in Great Village came to an end following the arrival of her father’s parents, the prosperous Bishops, whose wealth had been made from a successful contracting firm noted for building such landmarks as the Boston Public Library and Museum of Fine Arts. The Bishops were intent on taking their granddaughter back with them, and so she was returned, against her will, to her birthplace in Worcester, Massachusetts. The contrast between the cold and proper opulence of the Bishop home and her country existence in Nova Scotia could not have been greater. The sudden isolation and boredom were terrible experiences for a sensitive child who had already suffered more than her share of misfortune. She became ill with a number of severe ailments including bronchitis, asthma, and eczema, all of which plagued her for the rest of her life. Her miserable stay with the Bishops lasted only nine months, but it represented a profound turning point. Her famous poem ‘‘In the Waiting Room’’ recalls it as a fall from innocence into a painfully acute and alienating consciousness of time and self. Her health became so poor that the Bishops allowed her to be rescued by her aunt, Maud Bulmer Shepherdson, her mother’s older sister. In 1918 Bishop moved to Revere, Massachusetts, to live with Maud and her husband. Although she loved her aunt and was deeply grateful for her generosity, she continued to suffer
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from the sense of having no rightful place or home of her own. During an interview with Elizabeth Spires in 1978 (published in Paris Review, Summer 1981), Bishop said, ‘‘. . .my relationship with my relatives—I was always a sort of guest, and I think I’ve always felt like that.’’ Before the age of fourteen Bishop had little formal education, but with the help of her aunt she developed her literary interests through independent reading. At fourteen she began attending high school and day school, and from 1927 to 1930 she went to Walnut Hill, a college prep boarding school in Natick, Massachusetts. In 1930 she entered Vassar College and became part of a group of gifted students that included Mary McCarthy, Eleanor Clark, and Muriel Rukeyser. During her senior year, she was introduced to poet Marianne Moore, who was forty-seven at the time. Moore befriended the young Bishop, and their relationship—as mentor and apprentice initially and then as colleagues— lasted through the years, despite the many travels and changes of residence that characterized Bishop’s nomadic life. A second key friendship with a fellow poet took shape when Bishop met Robert Lowell in 1947. As two up-and-coming writers, they established a relationship of peers. Both had just published highly acclaimed collections—North & South (1946) for Bishop and Lord Weary’s Castle for Lowell—and they sensed in each other a kinship that would develop into a mutually sustaining exchange of ideas, drafts, and advice. In 1951 Bishop embarked on a trip around South America. During a stop in Rio de Janeiro, she suffered a violent allergic reaction to the fruit of the cashew tree and had to abandon her plans and recover there. She was cared for by the friends she had been visiting, and with one of them, Lota Costellat de Macedos Soares, the friendship deepened into an intimate relationship. She ended up living with Soares in Brazil for 15 years. For much of that period she led a settled and happy existence, combining domesticity with creative production. Bishop’s second collection of poems was published with a reissuance of her first collection, and the combined volume, Poems: North & South—A Cold Spring (1955), won the Pulitzer Prize in 1956. Her third collection, Questions of Travel (1965), was followed by The Complete Poems (1969), which received the National Book award in 1970. After the tragic death of Soares in 1967, apparently by suicide, Bishop made arrangements to take up residence in the U.S. and spent the final decade of her life writing and teaching, primarily at Harvard University. In 1976 she became the first American and the first woman to receive the Books Abroad/ Neustadt International Prize for Literature. That same year saw the publication of the final collection to appear in her lifetime, Geography III, which won the National Book Critics Circle award in 1977. After her death in 1979, Bishop’s reputation continued to grow and she has come to be considered one of the preeminent poets of the 20th century. OTHER WORKS: Brazil (with the editors of Life, 1962). The Ballad of the Burglar of Babylon (1968). The Complete Poems, 1927-1979
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(1983). The Collected Prose (1984). One Art: Elizabeth Bishop (letters edited by Robert Giroux, 1994). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brown, A., ‘‘An Interview with Elizabeth Bishop,’’ in Shenandoah 17 (Winter 1966). CANR 61 (1998). CLC 32 (1985). DLB 5 (1980), 169 (1996). Goldensohn, L., Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poet (1991). Kalstone, D., Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell (1989). Millier, B. C., Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It (1993); ‘‘The Prodigal: Elizabeth Bishop and Alcohol,’’ in Contemporary Literature 39 (Spring 1998). Paton, P. M., ‘‘Landscape and Female Desire: Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Closet’ Tactics,’’ in Mosaic 31 (Sept. 1998). Showalter, E., ed., Modern American Women Writers (1991). —MARLENE M. MILLER
BLACK, Katherine Bolton Born 7 November 1903, Boston, Massachusetts; died 13 November 1962, Boston, Massachusetts Daughter of Henry and Margaret Weed Bolton; married Joseph R. Black, 1928; children: four Katherine Bolton Black, daughter of a wealthy Boston businessman and a socialite mother, spent much of her early childhood abroad in the British and French countryside. The lovely scenery of rural Europe figured prominently in her early poetry and in By the Riverbank (1954). Black attended Miss Brody’s School for Girls, then Simmons College, from which she graduated with honors in 1924. Her marriage to Joseph Black, a lawyer, produced four children. Black began her writing career at Simmons, composing verse in which the recurring theme of ‘‘a Natural Paradise’’ figured heavily. Her first published poem, ‘‘The Greenest Pastures,’’ ran in the July 1930 issue of McCall’s. Her verse was subsequently published in miscellaneous ladies’ magazines, but was never collected in volume form. In 1942 Black’s first attempt at fiction, a long short story, ‘‘At the Village Gate,’’ was selected to run in the anthology, Best Short Stories of the Year: 1942. In this story a British naval officer falls in love with Jenny, who is obviously modeled after Black. On leave, he visits Jenny at her small-town New England home, only to find she is in love with another man. His despair at the discovery is moving, although the tone of the whole is sentimental. Black’s vivid descriptions of nature and the outdoors, however, are the saving grace of this otherwise very ordinary love story. Black continued to write verse and stories, but her household and wifely duties interfered with her writing. In 1949 her husband died, and Black turned to writing with a seriousness and energy not previously evident in her work. In the next few years she wrote
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her most highly acclaimed stories, ‘‘John, Forever Mine,’’ and ‘‘Another Hillside Vacation,’’ both solidly written, unsentimental looks at married life. Her first novel, By the Riverbank (1954), created little stir in the literary world, but one critic called it, ‘‘a thoughtful study of human jealousy and greed.’’ The book centers around a newlywed couple who have emigrated to England from France shortly before World War II. The tensions of living in a foreign land quickly create strong jealousies between the two young people, who are both aspiring writers. Sarah accuses her husband Stephen of involvement with the daughter of a neighboring farmer, and Stephen grows increasingly jealous as he realizes his wife’s creative talents are greater than his own. In By the Riverbank Black presents an interesting psychological study of a loving marriage that is nearly destroyed by jealousy. Black’s second novel, As the Crow Flies (1957), lacks the fine characterization found in her first novel. Here, Black tends to bog down in endless description of natural settings as she presents arguments in favor of ecological conservation. The story centers around a young girl growing up in New England, who witnesses the destruction of natural beauty around her: farms and waterways are destroyed as the metropolis of Boston spreads into the surrounding countryside. Although Black presents a convincing argument for conservation, the storyline is sacrificed to the novel’s message. Black’s work is characterized by poetic description and a keen eye for detail. Evidence of her early interest in poetry can be found in the graceful phrasing of her later prose works. Although not a major writer, Black deserves more recognition than she has hitherto received. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Good Housekeeping (13 May 1954). Life (March 1958). NYHTB (June 1954). NYT (16 May 1954, 23 May 1954). —MAUREEN MACDONALD
BLACKWELL, Alice Stone Born 14 September 1857, Orange, New Jersey; died 15 March 1950, Cambridge, Massachusetts Daughter of Henry Blackwell and Lucy Stone Alice Stone Blackwell was born into a unique family of reformers because the women were more distinguished than the men. Blackwell’s aunt, Elizabeth Blackwell, was the first woman in America to receive a medical degree; another aunt, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, was the first woman ordained as a minister by a recognized denomination in the U.S.; and her mother, Lucy Stone, was president of the country’s largest suffrage organization and publisher of its suffrage newspaper. The Blackwell family lived and worked for the cause of female equality. This made life difficult for Blackwell—shy,
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homely, and unsure, she was the only child of her demanding parents. In her youth, Blackwell had rebelled against the cause that demanded so much of her mother’s attention. But after graduation from Boston University, she gladly joined the suffrage ranks. For the next 35 years, she edited the Woman’s Journal, the longest running, widest circulating feminist newspaper. She solicited contributions, cajoled advertisers, and wrote copy. Her editorials, along with her numerous suffrage tracts and pamphlets, were coolly logical arguments for the enfranchisement of women. Those same arguments are found in the Woman’s Column, a fourpage collection of suffrage items also edited by Blackwell, sent weekly to 1,000 newspaper editors in the United States. Blackwell’s other contribution to suffragism was uniting the warring factions of the movement. The quarrel between the American Woman Suffrage Association, led by her parents, and the National Woman Suffrage Association of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony had begun in 1870. The split was prompted by the problem of black versus woman suffrage. Although the problem had long been solved, the division remained. By 1890, personalities, not philosophies, separated the two factions. Blackwell, guided by her mother, brought them together in the National American Woman Suffrage Association. When Lucy Stone died in 1893, Blackwell took over the family business of suffrage and suffrage journalism. Her other reformist impulses, long suppressed in the atmosphere created by her parents, became visible. Blackwell put aside her causes long enough to write a laudatory biography of her mother. It was no doubt published to balance the bulk of suffrage history that Blackwell believed had been written by the Stanton-Anthony faction totally ignoring the contributions of the Blackwell family. Blackwell’s only brush with romance led her into another genre. In 1893, she met an Armenian theological student. She was entranced by him and his tales of the oppression of Armenia. When he died a few years later, Blackwell dedicated herself to his people, helping them find refuge in the U.S. She also translated the works of Armenian poets into English. A volume of these pieces, Armenian Poems, is heavily laced with patriotic outpourings. The offerings include ‘‘Let Us Live Armenians,’’ ‘‘Let Us Die Armenians,’’ ‘‘The Lament of Mother Armenia,’’ and ‘‘The Wandering Armenian to the Swallows.’’ Her interest in Armenian verse led Blackwell to translate poetry of other suppressed peoples. During her middle years, she published the verse of Russian, Yiddish, Hungarian, and Spanishspeaking writers. Although in the original these poems may have been inspired, the translations are not. This no doubt reflects the fact that Blackwell’s literary tastes and talents were extremely conventional. Blackwell’s support of socialism culminated the increasingly radical drift of her affiliations. Her first hesitant steps away from wholehearted adherence to suffragism had taken her to the Woman’s Christian Temperance Movement, the Anti-Vivisection Society, and the Woman’s Trade Union League. In later years she
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joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the American Peace Society, and the movement to save Sacco and Vanzetti. To the end of her life at the age of ninety-three, Blackwell’s concerns embraced America and Armenia, feminism and socialism.
OTHER WORKS: Songs of Russia (1906). Songs of Grief and Gladness (1906). The Yellow Ribbon Speaker (with A. H. Shaw and L. E. Anthony, 1909). The Little Grandmother of the Russian Revolution: Reminiscences and Letters of Catherine Breshkovsky (1917). A Hungarian Poet (1929). Some Spanish-American Poems (1929). Lucy Stone: Pioneer of Women’s Rights (1930). Growing Up in Boston’s Guilded Age: The Journal of Alice Stone Blackwell 1872-1874 (1991).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hays, E. R., Morning Star: A Biography of Lucy Stone (1961). Hays, E. R., Those Extraordinary Blackwells (1967). Howe, J. W., ed., Representative Women of New England (1904). Martin, J. L., Alice Stone Blackwell: Soldier and Strategist for Suffrage (1993). Rolka, G. M., 100 Women Who Shaped World History (1994). Reference works: Grolier Library of Women’s Biographies (1998). National Cyclopedia of American Biography (1892 et seq.). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). —LYNNE MASEL-WALTERS
BLACKWELL, Antoinette Brown Born 20 May 1825, Henrietta, New York; died 5 November 1921, Elizabeth, New Jersey Daughter of Joseph and Abby Morse Brown; married Samuel Blackwell, 1856 Antoinette Brown Blackwell, the seventh of 10 children, grew up in a small town in New York. Valuing education, her parents sent her to the Monroe County Academy, where, with the exception of Greek, she quickly mastered the same subjects as the male students preparing for Dartmouth. The Brown family was deeply religious—Blackwell’s father was a Congregational deacon. At age nine, Blackwell publicly confessed her own religious faith and joined the Congregational church. In 1830 she attended Oberlin, the country’s only coed college. Despite parental objections, Blackwell persisted in following her brother into graduate study in theology. Her name was not listed among the students in the department, and she was denied a job teaching younger students to support herself. Although Blackwell completed her studies in 1850, she was not awarded a degree, and the faculty refused to arrange for her
ordination (belatedly she was granted the A.M. in 1878 and in honorary D.D. in 1908). Blackwell became a lecturer on abolition, temperance, and women’s rights. At Oberlin she had written an exegesis of 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 (‘‘Let your women keep silence in the churches. . .’’) and 1 Timothy 2:11-12 (‘‘I suffer not a woman to teach. . .’’), which the school’s president had published in the scholarly Oberlin Quarterly Review—followed by a counterargument by the school’s Bible professor. E. C. Stanton’s History of Woman Suffrage notes that at every early women’s rights convention ‘‘Antoinette Brown was called on as usual to meet the Bible argument.’’ Brown ‘‘made a logical argument on woman’s position in the Bible, claiming her complete equality with man, the simultaneous creation of the sexes, and their moral responsibilities as individual and imperative.’’ In 1853 Blackwell realized her dream of becoming the first woman ordained by a recognized denomination in this country. She became minister of First Congregational Church in Butler and Savannah, New York. Less than a year later, however, she was relieved of her duties ‘‘at her own request.’’ The difficulties of translating theology into the complexities of day-to-day interpersonal relationships got the better of her: she comforted a dying boy with God’s love rather than pressing him into a conversion experience through fear of hell; she refused to preach on infant damnation at the funeral of an illegitimate child. After Oberlin, Blackwell had tried to work in New York City at the Methodist Five Points Mission, but some there were offended by her outspoken feminism. In 1855 she returned to the city to work in the slums and prisons, because, as she said, ‘‘I pity the man or woman who does not choose to be identified with the cause of the oppressed.’’ She verbalized her social protest in Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, and the article series was later collected in Shadows of Our Social System (1856). For 18 years after her marriage in 1856, Blackwell rarely appeared on a public platform. She continued her writing, however, and completed two novels, A Market Woman (1870) and The Island Neighbors (1871). Unlike most fiction of the period, these are not moralistic in tone, but rather portray universal foibles. Blackwell also began to write a series for Lucy Stone’s Woman’s Journal on woman’s capacities and abilities to work, think, and learn, which were collected into The Sexes Throughout Nature (1875). In The Sexes Throughout Nature as well as in many other works, Blackwell wrestled to harmonize the new evolutionary hypothesis and its social implications, as expounded by Darwin and Spencer, with her own religious and social views. The Philosophy of Individuality (1893) represents her final attempt to write a cosmology reconciling mind and matter, revealing the ‘‘possible emergence of the Relative from the Absolute by the intervention of Beneficent and Rational Causation.’’ After her husband’s death in 1901, Blackwell helped to found All Souls’ Unitarian Church in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where she
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served as pastor emeritus from 1908 until her death. She continued faithfully to attend suffrage meetings, and on 2 November 1920, she became the only one of the original generation of women’s rights leaders to cast a vote under the 19th amendment.
OTHER WORKS: Studies in General Science (1869). The Physical Basis of Immortality (1876). Sex Injustice (1900). Sea Drift (1902). The Making of the Universe (1914). The Social Side of Mind and Action (1915). The papers of Antoinette Brown Blackwell are at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, and at the Library of Congress.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ashby, R. and D. G. Ohrn, Herstory: Women Who Changed the World (1995). Banwell, N., ‘‘Antoinette Brown Blackwell: An Individual Search for Religious Truth’’ (thesis, 1984). Cazden, E., Antoinette Brown Blackwell, A Biography (1983). Hays, E. R., Those Extraordinary Blackwells (1967). Kerr, L., Lady in the Pulpit (1951). Matthews, L. F., ‘‘Women in Ministry, 1853-1984’’ (thesis, 1985). Mermes, M. B., ‘‘Three Women of the Nineteenth Century: Studies in Transcendence— Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, Reverend Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Lucy Stone’’ (thesis, 1976). Siles, W. H., ed., Studies in Local History: Tall Tales, Folklore and Legend of Upstate New York (1986). Stanton, E. C. et al., History of Woman Suffrage (1881). Stone, L., Soul Mates: The Oberlin Correspondence of Lucy Stone and Antoinette Brown, 1846-1850 (1983). Stone, L., Friends and Sisters: Letters Between Lucy Stone and Antoinette Brown Blackwell, 1846-93 (1987). Reference works: NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). A Woman of the Century, F. E. Willard and M. A. Livermore (1893). —NANCY HARDESTY
BLACKWELL, Elizabeth Born 3 February 1821, Counterslip, England; died 31 May 1910, Hastings, England Daughter of Samuel and Hannah Lane Blackwell Elizabeth Blackwell’s independence of thought, pioneer spirit, and reform interests were promoted in her parents’ home. She was the third daughter among nine children. When Blackwell was eleven, her father’s sugar refinery was lost by fire and the family sailed from England to settle first in New York City and later in New Jersey and Cincinnati, Ohio. Blackwell’s father was an active dissenter and lay preacher in the ‘‘Independent’’ church and was vitally concerned with social reform, the abolition of slavery, women’s rights, and temperance. Reformers such as William Lloyd Garrison were visitors to the Blackwell home and
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Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe were counted as friends in Ohio. In this liberal family atmosphere, the Blackwell daughters and sons received their education at home from private tutors. In 1847 Blackwell was refused admission to Harvard, Yale, Bowdoin, and medical schools in Philadelphia and New York City. Jefferson Medical College suggested she might attend classes disguised as a man, but Blackwell believed her moral crusade ‘‘must be pursued in the light of day, and with public sanction, in order to accomplish its end.’’ Finally, Geneva Medical College, an undistinguished rural school in New York, admitted Blackwell to study in November 1847. The 150 male students at Geneva had unanimously treated her application as a ‘‘joke’’ and Blackwell faced ridicule and discrimination in her classes. In the summer of 1848, however, she was given the opportunity to do work with patients at the Philadelphia Hospital of the Blockley Almshouse. There she treated typhus among Irish immigrants and became convinced of the need for sanitation and personal hygiene. Her convictions were recorded in her thesis, published in 1849 in the Buffalo Medical Journal and Monthly. In 1849, graduating at the head of her class, Blackwell became the first woman in America to earn a degree from a medical college. Eager to increase her medical knowledge, Blackwell set out for study in Europe after becoming a naturalized American citizen. In Paris she enrolled as a student midwife in La Maternité. There she contracted purulent ophthalmia and lost sight in one eye; all hopes of becoming a surgeon were dashed. During work in England, she began a lifelong friendship with Florence Nightingale and shared interests in sanitation and hygiene. In 1851 Blackwell returned to New York but faced serious difficulties in establishing a private practice. She turned to lectures and writing on good hygiene. ‘‘The Laws of Life, with Special Reference to the Physical Education of Girls,’’ published in 1852, drew a favorable response from Quakers. By 1853 Blackwell had a one-room dispensary in the tenement district of New York and in 1857 was renamed the New York Infirmary for Women and Children. Blackwell’s plans for a medical college for women were delayed by the Civil War, but in 1868 the Women’s Medical College was opened and Blackwell was appointed to the first chair of hygiene. Blackwell returned to England in 1869, leaving management of the infirmary and college to her sister. She resided there for the rest of her life with her adopted daughter. She established a successful practice in London and in 1871 helped found the National Health Society with the motto ‘‘Prevention is better than cure.’’ In 1875 she was awarded the chair of gynecology at the New Hospital and London School of Medicine for Women. Blackwell continued to write and lecture on moral reform. Her ‘‘Counsel to Parents on the Moral Education of Their Children’’ (1879) was rejected by 12 publishers as too controversial and had to be printed privately. In a plain and direct manner Blackwell argued that there was no physiological necessity for a double
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standard of morality, but Victorian England and America were shocked by her position.
BLAKE, Lillie Devereux
Blackwells’ attention focused on economic and social reform in her pamphlet Christian Socialism (1882). In this document she called for a more just distribution of income, improved efficiency in government, workers’ insurance, and the establishment of agrarian communities where women could play major roles.
Born 12 August 1833, Raleigh, North Carolina; died 30 December 1913, Englewood, New Jersey Also wrote under: Lillie Devereux Umsted Daughter of George and Sarah Johnson Devereux; married Frank Umsted, 1855; Grenfill Blake, 1866
Blackwell’s autobiography, Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women (1895), provides a vivid picture of the challenges she faced in her moral crusade. In the closing chapter she wrote of her ‘‘hope for the future: the study of human nature by women as well as men commences that new and hopeful era of the intelligent co-operation of the sexes through which alone real progress can be attained and secured.’’
For the first 25 years of Lillie Devereaux Blake’s writing career (1857-1882) she concentrated on fiction, publishing several novels and novellas and hundreds of short stories. After 1882, most of her published work took the form of essays and lectures on women’s rights.
OTHER WORKS: Essays in Medical Sociology (2 vols. 1892-1902). The Blackwell family papers are in the Library of Congress and the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College. Letters from Elizabeth Blackwell to her friend Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon are in the Columbia University Library. Other letters and documents may be found in Fawcett Library, London; Sophia Smith Research Room, Smith College; Library of Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, New York; Boston Public Library; New York Infirmary; Medical Library, St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London; Royal Free Medical School Library, London. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Fancourt, M., They Dared to Be Doctors: Elizabeth Blackwell, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (1965). Felder, D. G., The 100 Most Influential Women of All Time: A Ranking Past and Present (1996). Flexner, E., Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the U.S. (1975). Hays, E. R., Those Extraordinary Blackwells (1967). Lovejoy, E. P., Women Doctors of the World (1957). Morantz-Sanchez, R. ‘‘Feminist Theory and Historical Practice: Rereading Elizabeth Blackwell’’ in Feminists Revision History (1994). Robinson, V., Pathfinders in Medicine (1929). Ross, I., Child of Destiny; The Life Story of the First Woman Doctor (1949). Sahli, N. A., Elizabeth Blackwell, M.D., 1821-1910: A Biography (1982). Shearer, B. F. and Shearer, B. S., ed., Notable Women in the Life Sciences: A Biographical Dictionary (1996). Walsh, M. R., Doctors Wanted: No Women Need Apply: Sexual Barriers in the Medical Profession, 1835-1975 (1977). Weprin, J. G., ‘‘The Young Elizabeth Blackwell: Why She Became the First Woman to Graduate from an American Medical School’’ (thesis, 1992). Wilson, D. C., Lone Woman (1970). Wright, M., Elizabeth Blackwell of Bristol: The First Woman Doctor (1995). Other references: Elizabeth Blackwell: First Woman Doctor (video, 1997). —JEAN M. WARD
BLAISDELL, Anne See LININGTON, Elizabeth
Blake was born into a distinguished Southern family. When her father died in 1837, her mother moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where Blake attended a girls’ school and received private tutoring in the Yale undergraduate course. Mother and daughter were very close and remained so throughout their lives. When Blake debuted at age 17, she became renowned for her beauty and led a strenuous social life. In her writings she often refers to this period of her life, noting that she was taught to regard social success as the only worthwhile goal for a woman. ‘‘I was always a belle, flattered and fêted. I only wonder that I was not entirely ruined by an ordeal that would be pretty certain to turn the head of a fairly well-balanced man.’’ She portrays in her fiction many young women enfeebled by flattery, enforced idleness, and what she calls ‘‘false education.’’ In 1869 Blake became involved in the women’s rights movement, to which she devoted the rest of her life and most of her subsequent writings. From 1879 to 1890 she was president of the New York State Woman Suffrage Association and from 1886 to 1900 president of the New York City Woman Suffrage League. She was an excellent speaker, and her writings on women’s rights are remarkable for their wit and humor; they are often in the form of satire or parable. Blake ran for president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in 1900, but was forced to withdraw in favor of Susan B. Anthony’s choice, Carrie Chapman Catt. Blake’s philosophy and approach differed from Anthony’s in several respects. She was often true to her aristocratic background, expressing concern that suffrage workers be well-dressed, well-behaved ‘‘ladies,’’ and she inaugurated such events as the Pilgrim Mothers’ Dinners, held annually at the Waldorf-Astoria. More importantly, she believed suffrage was only one means of improving women’s status. As chair of NAWSA’s Committee on Legislative Advice, she advocated campaigning to secure legislation favorable to women and agitating for the appointment of women to new positions (e.g., school trustees, factory inspectors, physicians in mental hospitals, and police matrons). She was instrumental in achieving many of these gains in New York State. When Blake’s legislative committee was dissolved by NAWSA, she founded and became president of the National Legislative League. This organization carried on the legislative
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approach from 1900 until 1905, when illness prevented Blake from continuing her work. Although she avoids the worst excesses of the sentimental fiction of the times, Blake writes much to the general pattern. Spirited young women develop fatal fascinations for evil Lovelace types in her stories and may or may not be saved by their honorable suitors; young lovers are separated, reunited, and then part forever when they discover they are siblings. In Blake’s early writings, characters who espouse feminist sentiments are punished. For instance, in Southwold (1859), the protagonist, when rejected by a man she loves, becomes embittered and ‘‘bold and even unfeminine’’ in her opinions. She shocks other characters by not taking every word of the Bible literally and by claiming Christianity has harmed women’s status. The book ends with her suicide. Interestingly enough, Blake later was to espouse the opinions her protagonist had expressed. ‘‘Dogmatic theology, founded on masculine interpretation of the Bible,’’ was the subject of attack in her Woman’s Place To-Day (1883), a series of lectures delivered in response to a misogynist theologian. Blake was also one of the contributors to Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s controversial Woman’s Bible (1895). Blake’s last novel, Fettered for Life; or, Lord and Master (1874), is a feminist work in which wife abuse, unjust marriage laws, discrimination in employment, and lack of educational opportunities for women are illustrated and discussed by the characters. Female friendships are strong in the novel, and the ‘‘hero,’’ a successful reporter who frequently rescues the female characters, turns out to be a woman in disguise. When she adopted male attire, she found that ‘‘my limbs were free; I could move untrammelled, and my actions were free; I could go about unquestioned. No man insulted me, and when I asked for work, I was not offered outrage.’’ OTHER WORKS: Rockford; or, Sunshine and Storm (1863). Forced Vows; or, A Revengeful Woman’s Fate (1870). A Daring Experiment and Other Stories (1892). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Blake, K. D., and M. L. Wallace, Champion of Women: The Life of Lillie Devereaux Blake (1943). Stanton, E. C. et al., History of Woman Suffrage (1881). Reference works: NAW (1971). —BARBARA A. WHITE
BLAKE, Mary E(lizabeth) McGrath Born 1840, Dungarven, Ireland; died 1907, Boston, Massachusetts Wrote under: Marie of the Pilot, Mary Elizabeth McGrath Blake Daughter of Patrick and Mary Murphy McGrath; married John G. Blake, 1865; children: 11 Mary E. McGrath Blake’s parents emigrated to Quincy, Massachusetts, in about 1850. A marble worker and businessman,
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her father sent her to local schools and to Emerson’s Private School in Boston. Blake later studied music and modern languages at the Academy of the Sacred Heart in Manhattanville, New York. Before she married a Boston physician, she was a schoolteacher. The Blakes had eleven children. Blake’s poetry was widely published in Roman Catholic periodicals and in a number of Boston papers, including the Boston Gazette and the Boston Transcript. Her ‘‘Rambling Talks’’ were a regular feature in the Boston Journal. She was an ardent, sentimental Irish-American with conservative views about religion and American politics. Blake gained a local reputation as an occasional poet and she wrote poems to commemorate notable Bostonians such as Wendell Phillips, Admiral David Dixon Porter, and the Most Reverend John J. Williams, Archbishop of Boston. Blake also wrote poems to commemorate the Golden Jubilee of the Sisters of Charity and the 150th anniversary of the Charitable Irish Society. Oliver Wendell Holmes remarked of her lyrics, ‘‘You are one of the birds that must sing,’’ and Theodore Roosevelt was said to be an admirer of her work. Blake’s first book of poetry, Poems, was issued in 1882. Her themes range from Catholic devotion to nature and the seasons, but her most representative work celebrates family life. Several poems on the death of children depict the anxiety of the times about childhood mortality. Some poems reflect an ambivalent attitude toward women’s roles: ‘‘Simple Story’’ and ‘‘What the Wife’s Heart Said’’ urge women to be content serving their husbands and families, while ‘‘The Ballad of Elizabeth Zane’’ and ‘‘Isabella of Castille’’ clearly expresses admiration for spirited, independent women. Although conscientious about her obligations to home and family, Blake was an enthusiastic traveler who reminded her reader that a housewife must not stop to think of her responsibilities, or ‘‘the stay-at-home weight will be so overwhelming in proportion that she could not be propelled away by anything short of a catapult.’’ On the Wing, an account of her trip across America, serialized in the Boston Journal in 1882 and published in 1883, is a view of the American West through the eyes of a partisan New Englander. A Summer Holiday in Europe (1890), based on Blake’s five trips to Europe—three of them walking tours with her children—went into a third printing. Outside of her home and her work, Blake was active in the American Peace Society. Her pamphlet The Coming Reform: A Woman’s Word, which criticized ‘‘the absurdities of old fashioned militarism at home and abroad,’’ was widely circulated during the Spanish-American War.
OTHER WORKS: An Epic of Travel (1884). Poem: A Memorial of Wendell Phillips (1884). The Merry Months All (1885). Youth in Twelve Centuries (1886). Mexico: Picturesque, Political, Progressive (with M. F. Sullivan, 1888). Verses Along the Way
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(1890). A Memoir of Patrick McGrath 1812-1894 (1894). In the Harbour of Hope (1907). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Conway, K. E., ‘‘Mary Blake: Woman and Poet’’ in In the Harbour of Hope (1907). Cullen, J. B., Story of the Irish in Boston (1890). Other references: Boston Globe (7 Feb. 1907). PW (9 March 1907). —MAUREEN MURPHY
BLAND, Eleanor Taylor Born 31 December 1944, Boston Daughter of Leroy and Mildred Gershefski Taylor; married (divorced); Children: Kevin, Todd, two grandchildren Mystery writer Eleanor Taylor Bland is the author of a series of novels featuring the reported first African-American female police detective, Marti MacAlister. Bland’s works not only include the gritty detective work of her main character, but they also detail the personal life of this working woman and the problems she faces as trying to operate effectively in a traditionally male profession. Each of the novels delves into the dark secrets that lead to the murders of seemingly ordinary members of the community. They are filled with social comment and a grim look at the reality of the modern-day suburban/urban crime scene. Bland began her writing career after an early marriage at age fourteen to a sailor, rearing two children, and working various jobs with disabled and abused children. In 1972, after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer, she pursued a college degree, which she completed in accounting and education. It was also at this time that she became determined to publish a book. The character of streetwise MacAlister was introduced in Dead Time (1992) as a recently widowed South Side Chicago police officer who moves with her children to suburban Lincoln Prairie, Illinois, and becomes a member of this small community’s police detective force. Investigating the mysterious flophouse murders of a wealthy, schizophrenic woman and a pair of potential witnesses leads her in search of some abandoned children who also saw the woman’s murder. The tense relationship of MacAlister with her white male partner and the plight of children in peril and the mentally ill are revealed by Bland in what critics called a ‘‘detached and often flat manner’’ and with ‘‘sensitivity and humor.’’ Bland’s next work Slow Burn (1993), continues the life of MacAlister with another social commentary surrounding the death of two medical workers killed in a clinic fire connected to a child pornography scheme. Issues of sexism, racism, and the ill treatment of children again are interlaced in the plot. This work was hailed for its strong and engaging character development, on the one hand, but panned for ‘‘overshadowing’’ the story with social issues.
Gone Quiet (1994) and Done Wrong (1995) reveal the more personal side of MacAlister’s sleuthing. In the first, she deals with the complexities of a scandal in a community held together by religion when she helps an old friend unravel the mysterious death of a Baptist deacon who is secretly a pedophile. The second novel finds MacAlister engaged in investigating the real circumstances and secrets surrounding the apparent suicide of her late Chicago police narcotics squad husband. Both works also explore the personal side of the main character’s life as she interacts with her children, her family, her friends, and the community and as she comes to grip with her loneliness as a widow. Critics found Bland’s writing low key and understated, but with keen insight and plenty of action. All of them agreed that the Marti MacAlister character was the cornerstone for all of Bland’s works. Two unrelated murder cases are linked together by another older case concerning the disappearance of a young abused girl in Keep Still (1996). This time Bland explores the evil that exists in a dysfunctional family as she exposes the realities of child abuse. Again the main character, Marti MacAlister, fascinates readers with her ability to seek justice and not lose her own humanity as she juggles her work with her personal relationships with her children and her new boyfriend. Called by Booklist’s Stuart W. Miller ‘‘her most sophisticated, complex and successful work yet,’’ See No Evil (1998) finds a psychopathic killer visiting the MacAlisters’ household and plotting to murder the entire family. At the same time, Marti and her partner struggle to solve the case of a young drug-addicted and abused girl’s murder, with Marti unaware of her family’s peril because of worrying about protecting her children and educating them about the real world. The counterpoints of the subplots of this novel heighten the suspense for the reader and established Bland as ‘‘one of today’s most talented mystery writers.’’ In Tell No Tales (1999), Marti finds herself newly married and in a new home. Her honeymoon is abruptly ended by the discovery of the dead body of an African-American woman who seems to have lost her life in the 1960s and the murder of a recluse in the basement of a building owned by his family. Marti and her partner, Vic, struggle with their own personal problems but eventually find a connection between the two murders. The complexity of the plot keeps the reader enthralled. In an article in the Chicago magazine, Bland said, ‘‘I want to write about things that matter.’’ She also stated, ‘‘. . .if you no longer look at the world exactly the way you looked at it before you read my book, that’s good enough.’’ As the life of Marti MacAlister continues to unfold, Bland achieves these goals. Her mysteries with a social conscience are engaging and enlightening. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA 166. Other works: Chicago (Feb. 1999). Booklist (1 June 1994, 1 June 1995, July 1996, 15 Dec. 1997, 1 Jan. 1999). Cogdill, O. H., ‘‘A Biography of Eleanor Taylor Bland,’’ in Sun-Sentinel South Florida (8 Apr. 1998, www.sun-sentinel.com/freetime/mysteries/ blandbio.htm, accessed April 7, 1998). LJ (Jan. 1998, Jan. 1999).
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PW (3 Feb. 1992, 14 June 1993, 13 June 1994, 15 May 1995, 27 May 1996, 22 Dec. 1997). —PAULA C. MURPHY
BLATCH, Harriot Stanton Born 20 January 1856, Seneca Falls, New York; died 20 November 1940, Greenwich, Connecticut Daughter of Henry Brewster and Elizabeth Cady Stanton; married William Henry Blatch, 1882 One of seven children of noted suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Harriot Stanton Blatch attended Vassar College. After a year in Europe (1880-81), she assisted her mother and Susan B. Anthony in preparing their History of Woman Suffrage. They had originally planned to deal only with the National Woman Suffrage Association, which the authors led, but Blatch urged inclusion of an account of the American Woman Suffrage Association. Her moderate treatment of this ‘‘Boston wing’’ of the movement appeared in Volume II of the History (1881) and contributed to ending the ‘‘internecine war’’ between the two leading groups in the suffrage movement. After marriage to William Henry Blatch, an English businessman, she lived 20 years in England where she knew such reformers as Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Ramsay MacDonald, G. B. Shaw, and Emmeline Pankhurst. She returned to the U.S. in 1902, and in 1907 organized the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women (later the Women’s Political Union), a group designed to draw nonprofessional women, especially women trade unionists, into the suffrage movement. This group increased the numbers and visibility of the suffragists. It organized the first suffrage parades (1910) so that ‘‘the enemy’’ could ‘‘see women marching in increasing numbers year by year out on the public avenues, holding high their banner, Votes for Women.’’ Blatch became convinced that the war which had broken out in Europe would advance the cause of equal rights for women. Her book, Mobilizing Woman-Power (1918), published with a laudatory introduction by Theodore Roosevelt, describes ‘‘German Kultur’’ as the enemy of freedom because it worships ‘‘efficiency, cramps originality and initiative’’ and is ‘‘unjust to women.’’ Always interested in the relation between economics and suffrage, Blatch notes that the war increased employment opportunities for women and consequently helped free them from ‘‘service for the love of service,’’ i.e., unpaid labor in the home. Payment, she felt, changes women’s status: with the ‘‘pay envelope’’ women are ‘‘welcome everywhere.’’ At the war’s end Blatch wrote A Woman’s Point of View: Some Roads to Peace (1920), which became a major contribution to ‘‘the library against all war.’’ She encouraged women to unite in preventing another such devastation and argued that just as women should be given a role in political decisionmaking, so too labor, formerly voiceless, should now be given a place in management.
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Blatch joined the Socialist Party in the 1920s and in 1924 endorsed Robert M. LaFollette’s presidential campaign. To the end of her life she was active in liberal causes. Her autobiography, Challenging Years (1940), gives a lively account of her political activities. Herein she notes that women ‘‘were the first group in history to be enfranchised before gaining their economic independence.’’ Because of her practical orientation and familiarity with the tactics employed by English suffrage leaders, she widened the appeal of the American suffrage movement in the early 20th century. OTHER TITLES: Elizabeth Cady Stanton as Revealed in Her Letters, Diary and Reminiscences (ed. by Blatch with T. Stanton, 1922). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Flexner, E., A Century of Struggle (1959). Lutz, A., Created Equal (1940). Stanton, E. C., Eighty Years and More (1898). Reference works: Dictionary of American Biography, National Cyclopedia of American Biography (1892 et seq.). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). —JANE BENARDETE
BLEECKER, Ann Eliza Schuyler Born October 1752, New York, New York; died 23 November 1783, Tomhanick, New York Daughter of Brandt and Margaret Van Wyck Schuyler; married John J. Bleecker, 1769; children: Margaretta Bleecker Faugeres Encouraged by her wealthy lawyer husband, Ann Eliza Schuyler Bleecker wrote steadily throughout her life, although much of her work was lost in manuscript. The couple settled in the wilderness at Tomhanick, where the sensitive Bleecker was subjected to Indian raids and the general isolation of the frontier. A series of disasters connected with General Burgoyne’s invasion in 1777 caused the deaths of her infant daughter, her mother, and her sister in rapid succession. Chronically depressed after these tragedies, she received an additional shock when her husband, active in the militia, was kidnapped by Tories in 1781 and by mere chance was rescued before being taken over the Canadian border. Bleecker’s declining physical and mental health was exacerbated by a disillusioning trip to war-ravaged New York after the peace in 1783, and she died in November. Her daughter, Margaretta Faugeres, prepared Bleecker’s work for posthumous publication in 1793. A narrative of sufferings undergone by captives during the French and Indian War, The History of Maria Kittle (1779), is presented as a ‘‘true history,’’ but the dramatic dialogue, psychological portraiture, and rounded plot of Bleecker’s version are possible only in fiction. Personifications and mythological references contrast strangely with events: ‘‘Ceres’’ presides over fields through which screaming Indians run, killing and tearing off scalps. The tomahawking of the pregnant Comelia, with details of
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her cleft white forehead, the dead staring of her ‘‘fine azure eyes,’’ and the ripping out of her fetus and dashing it to pieces are unusually concrete, if grim, visualizations. Purple passages describe Maria’s sorrows as her abductors drag her to their allies in Montreal. The History has the virtue of its genuine and direct testimony of horror, unlike the sentimental and stylized fragment, Story of Henry and Ann. Bleecker’s poetry is derivative from earlier British authors, but purposely so in the neoclassical tradition. Of most value are her nature poems. ‘‘To Mr. Bleecker, on his passage to New York’’ is a long topographical piece in which Fancy takes a water journey down the Hudson, scenes of mountains and animals giving way to the first outcrops of civilization. Bleecker’s patriotic panegyric on the Hudson River valley shows great love of the land, the majesty of the natural setting, and the beauty of human life within it. ‘‘A Pastoral Dialogue’’ turns into a hymn to American industry and liberty, which are contrasted with the envy and barbarity of the British and Indians. Idealistic rural scenes of prosperity, static ‘‘word paintings’’ of peasants reliefed against a monumental and fertile landscape, are suddenly ablaze with the terrifyingly dynamic howls and murders of the attacking Indians. Desolation again brings stasis, but it is the unnatural silence of ashes and death. But the moral superiority of the sons of freedom revives their hope of victory. Not all Bleecker’s pastoral poetry is ideological; ‘‘Return to Tomhanick’’ is naturalistic, and ‘‘An Evening Prospect’’ displays a mystic and divine connection with nature, Wordsworthian in feeling if not in form. Poetic natural scenes are ubiquitous in her letters and prose, and her descriptions often evoke the idealistic landscape paintings of Cole or Doughty of the next century’s Hudson River School. The meditative narrative of Bleecker’s ‘‘Written in the Retreat from Burgoyne’’ shows an unresigned anguish over her daughter’s death, and her ‘‘naturally pensive’’ sensibility influenced her to write a number of elegies and thanatopses. In ‘‘A Prospect of Death,’’ death is a raging sea from which ‘‘Virtue’’ (on wings) may rescue her. The charnel-house imagery of ‘‘A Thought on Death’’ gives way to a more personal musing on her own dissolution in ‘‘Complaint,’’ ‘‘The Storm,’’ ‘‘Despondency,’’ and ‘‘Recollection.’’ But the inherent sprightliness of Bleecker’s imagination can be seen in many little ironic and satirical poems and passages. The best of these comic pieces is the mock journal in which Susan Ten Eyck’s fashionably frivolous day and neglect of her sister’s weighty letter is projected in Rape of the Lock style. Bleeker’s Letters, the remnants of her prolific correspondence, repeat the themes and motifs of her more formal work in a manner most likely to suit modern taste. In Bleecker’s work, there is a schizophrenic contrast between the idyllic Eden of her imagination, based upon love of nature, culture, intellect, and family, and the savage reality of treachery, war, death, isolation, anomy, and insanity that plagued her life. She could not adjust to the unfairness and incompletion of actual human existence. As a ‘‘good’’ woman of her era, she clung to the bulwarks of Divine Providence and family love for security and
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identity. These proved to be too feeble to counteract the harshness of fate. The struggle was not only against the outer world of frontier America but against the soul-destroying disillusionment of an inner nature too idealistic to accept sordid and savage reality: ‘‘Alas! the wilderness is within,’’ she wails. Her essential intellectual value resides in her biography. We read her work for the fascination of her personality and greater empathetic understanding of the trials undergone by the human and feminine spirit. OTHER WORKS: The Posthumous Works of Ann Eliza Bleecker (1793). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Faugeres, M., ‘‘Memoirs of Mrs. Ann Eliza Bleecker’’ in The Post-humous Works of A. E. Bleecker (1793). Griswold, R., The Female Poets of America (1848). Hendrickson, J., ‘‘Ann Eliza Bleecker: Her Life and Works’’ (Master’s thesis, Columbia Univ., 1935). Losche, L., The Early American Novel (1907). Munsell, J. The Annals of Albany (1855). Schuyler, G., Colonial New York (1885). Tyler, M., The Literary History of the American Revolution, 1763-1783 (1897). Reference works: Cyclopedia of American Literature (1855). DAB (1929). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). —L. W. KOENGETER
BLOOMER, Amelia Jenks Born 27 May 1818, Homer, New York; died 30 December 1894, Council Bluffs, Iowa Daughter of Ananias and Lucy Webb Jenks; married Dexter C. Bloomer, 1840 Amelia Jenks Bloomer’s parents were natives of Rhode Island. She received only a few years’ schooling at the district school in Courtland County, New York, but was evidently well enough educated to teach in another school when she was seventeen years old. Her husband, a lawyer and editor of the Seneca County Courier, encouraged her to contribute articles on social, political, and moral subjects to his paper. She also began to take an active part in the temperance movement, writing frequently for the Water Bucket, an organ of the temperance society of Seneca Falls, New York. She attended the first meeting on women’s rights held in Seneca Falls in 1848 but did not actively participate. In 1849 she began the publication of a periodical called Lily, writing on such subjects as temperance, education, unjust marriage laws, and woman suffrage. By 1853 Lily had a circulation of some 4,000 subscribers. It was the first newspaper owned, edited, and controlled by a woman and devoted solely to the interests of women. Through Lily she met Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. She also met Elizabeth Smith Miller, a cousin of Mrs. Stanton, who was the first to wear the short skirt and full Turkish trousers that came to be known as ‘‘bloomers.’’ Several of the women adopted the costume, finding it more comfortable, more
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sanitary, and better adapted to the active life they were leading than the corsets and voluminous skirts that were the fashion. They ceased wearing the costume only when they discovered their attire was distracting from the message of women’s rights. In 1852 Bloomer began lecturing on temperance and women’s rights, never speaking extemporaneously but always carefully writing out and delivering her speeches from manuscript. The following year her husband purchased an interest in the Western Home Visitor and the Bloomers moved to Mount Vernon, Ohio. She continued publishing Lily, served as assistant editor of the Western Home Visitor, a literary weekly with a fairly large circulation, and lectured occasionally. Early in 1855, when her husband decided to relocate in Council Bluffs, Iowa, it was necessary to cease publication of Lily, but she did not discontinue writing and speaking on behalf of temperance and women’s rights. She was instrumental in organizing the Iowa Woman’s State Suffrage Society and worked zealously for her church and community. As a writer Bloomer produced prose that was graceful, clear, and often infused with passion. Her early writings were devoted to temperance, imploring women to unite in that cause. Warning all those who supported it not to relax their vigilance, she wrote in one early essay: ‘‘Those who feel most secure will find to their dismay that the viper has only been crushed for a time, and will rise again upon his victim with a firmer and more deadly grasp than before.’’ In starting her journal she made it clear in her first editorial that ‘‘it is woman that speaks through Lily. . . .Like the beautiful flower from which it derives its name, we shall strive to make the Lily the emblem of ‘sweetness and purity’; and may heaven smile upon our attempt to advocate the great cause of Temperance reform!’’ Always a woman of strong opinions on almost every subject, she introduced herself to the readers of the Western Home Visitor by saying: ‘‘What I have been in the past, I expect to be in the future,—an uncompromising opponent of wrong and oppression in every form, and a sustainer of the right and the true, with whatever it may be connected.’’ The causes Bloomer advocated included employment and education for women. She considered the failure to educate women for meaningful occupations a serious ‘‘wrong’’ and insisted ‘‘parents do a great injustice to their daughters when they doom them to a life of idleness or, what is worse, to a life of frivolity and fashionable dissipation.’’ She considered, in fact, that the education of women might be a cure for some of the ills of the nation. Replying to an article on corruption in the state legislature, she demanded: ‘‘Where then shall the remedy for purifying and healing the nation be found? We answer, in the education and enfranchisement of woman! Loose the chains that bind her to the condition of a dependent, a slave to passion and the caprices of men. Open for her the doors of our colleges and universities and bid her enter. Hold up before her a pattern for womanly greatness and excellence and bid her to occupy the same positions held by her brothers.’’ Bloomer’s lecture on suffrage, written originally in 1852 and delivered and revised many times through the years, is perhaps
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one of the finest examples of the clear, forceful, and logical arguments presented in the cause. She ends this stirring speech by calling woman’s admission to the ballot box ‘‘the crowning right to which she is justly entitled’’ and states that ‘‘when woman shall be thus recognized as an equal partner with man in the universe of God—equal in rights and duties—then will she for the first time, in truth, become what her Creator designed her to be, a helpmeet for man. With her mind and body fully developed, imbued with a full sense of her responsibilities, and living in the conscientious discharge of each and all of them, she will be fitted to share with her brother in all of the duties of life; to aid and counsel him in his hours of trial; and to rejoice with him in the triumph of every good word and work.’’ It is indeed unfortunate Bloomer’s skill as a writer is overshadowed by the association of her name with a short-lived and ridiculed experiment in female attire.
OTHER WORKS: Life and Writings of Amelia Bloomer (ed. D. C. Bloomer; 1895).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Appleton’s Cyclopedia of American Biography (1888). DAB (1929). A Woman of the Century (1893). —ELAINE K. GINSBERG
BLOOMFIELD-MOORE, Clara (Sophia) Jessup Born 16 February 1824, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; died 5 January 1899, London, England Wrote under: Clara Moore, Clara Jessup Moore, Clara Moreton, Mrs. H. O. Ward Daughter of Augustus Edward and Lydia Eager Mosley Jessup; married Bloomfield Haines Moore, 1842 Clara Jessup Bloomfield-Moore was raised in an atmosphere of good breeding, charity, and devotion to learning. She was educated at Westfield Academy and at Mrs. Merrick’s School in New Haven, Connecticut. After her marriage to a Philadelphia Quaker, she and her husband joined their efforts in civic and philanthropic causes. Her dedication to a life of social duty continued throughout her career, both in her writing and in her private pursuits; income from her publishing was always consigned to charities and related concerns. After her husband’s death, Bloomfield-Moore emigrated to London, where she maintained her ties to the literary world. In a climate of security, based on wealth, gracious living, and good works, writing was the natural pursuit of a society woman of leisure and position, a genteel way of living a useful life. With the
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publication of several prize-winning stories and novellas written under pen names, Bloomfield-Moore found herself a public figure and a member of the Philadelphia literary circle. Following these successes, her Philadelphia home became a retreat and salon for the literary figures of the day. Her output of fiction and poetry spans a period of 40 years, featuring such titles as On Dangerous Ground: A Romance of American Society (1876), ‘‘The Estranged Hearts,’’ and ‘‘The Hasty Marriage.’’ These are now considered to be light, sentimental works of a topical and period-piece nature. Bloomfield-Moore’s observations, advice, rulings, and ideology in the field of etiquette had the greatest interest and the most enduring appeal. In 1873 she anonymously published an article entitled ‘‘Some Unsettled Points of Etiquette’’ in Lippincott’s Magazine. In this piece she posed the basic problem of American manners: the lack of a uniformly established or accepted code applicable to every region and reach of society, one which can be relied on as a standard of common courtesy. In this context, Bloomfield-Moore cited classic cases of the wide variations of custom between American cities, regions, and generations. The articulation of this perplexing difficulty is a key statement in the history of American sociability. Bloomfield-Moore’s own compilation, Sensible Etiquette of the Best Society (1878), was published under the pen name of Mrs. H. O. Ward. It soon became the most popular and authoritative text of manners after the reigning standard, Mary Elizabeth Sherwood’s Manners and Social Usages. Bloomfield-Moore’s handbook, written for the generation of the new rich in the postCivil War era, provides a fully detailed account—both real and ideal—of the rise to elegance and the aspiration (or pretension) to European manners. This book was one of many produced in a period of American social history influenced by European ‘‘civilized elegance.’’ The upwardly mobile classes looked to writers like Bloomfield-Moore to create the image, if not the reality, of good breeding appropriate to those entering society life for the first time. In Sensible Etiquette of the Best Society, Bloomfield-Moore was obviously of the ‘‘ethics-and-character’’ school of manners, believing, in contrast to more secular pragmatists like Mrs. Sherwood, that the fundamental purpose of manners is to create and sustain good moral character. Bloomfield-Moore extended this thesis on a decidedly religious set of values, attributing to etiquette the role of making possible a truly Christian civilization by encouraging a ‘‘spiritual existence’’ for the ‘‘happiness of our earthly home.’’ In a later work, Social Ethics and Society Duties: Through Education of Girls for Wives and Mothers and for Professions (1892), Bloomfield-Moore’s view of learning as necessary for the progress of women reinforces the image of a good society founded on an education in good behavior. OTHER WORKS: Tight Times; or, The Diamond Cross and Other Tales (1855). Miscellaneous Poems, Stories for Children, The Warden’s Tale, and Three Eras in a Life (1875). The Young
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Lady’s Friend (reissue of E. Farrar’s 1836 title, 1880). Gondaline’s Lesson. . . and Other Poems (1881). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Female Prose Writers of America (1852). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). A Woman of the Century (1893). Other references: Lippincott’s Magazine (March 1873). NYT (6 Jan. 1899). —MARGARET J. KING
BLUME, Judy Born 12 February 1938, Elizabeth, New Jersey Daughter of Rudolph and Esther Rosenfeld Sussman; married John Blume, 1959 (divorced); Thomas Kitchens, 1976 (divorced); George Cooper, 1987; children: Randy Lee, Lawrence Andrew. Best known for her realistic fiction for adolescents, Judy Blume is one of the most popular authors in the contemporary history of children’s books. She creates frank, straightforward stories that focus characteristically on the immediate social and emotional concerns of her mainly female characters. Her taboo-breaking books address topics like menstruation, wet dreams, and premarital sex, but Blume also writes of friendship, divorce, peer group approval, religion, and death. Blume’s books accurately, honestly, and with great earnestness capture the speech, emotions, and private thoughts of adolescents. Blume received a B.A. from New York University (1960). Her earliest books were the result of her participation in a graduate writing course. The One in the Middle is the Green Kangaroo (1969), a picture book, involves a second grader who feels neglected by his family until he lands a part in his school play. Iggie’s House (1970) deals with the impact of a black family moving into an all-white neighborhood. When both books met a cool reception from reviewers, Blume decided to write a book about adolescence based on her vivid memories of her own sixth grade experience. The resulting book, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (1970), explores a young girl’s private thoughts about the onset of menstruation, her acceptance by a new peer group, and her struggle to find a religion. Blume’s almost complete recall of how it felt to be young spoke directly to readers and the book was immediately successful. Although it stirred some controversy among parents, librarians, and teachers for its unflinchingly honest treatment of a topic like menstruation, the book made Blume’s reputation: hundreds of letters from preteen girls attested to the fact that they identified with Margaret. Blume’s books address subjects that children’s books tend to disregard, leading critics to label her an issue-oriented author, an author of ‘‘problem novels.’’ Despite her critics, Blume believes there is nothing one should not or cannot tell a child. ‘‘I don’t care about rules and regulations of writing for children,’’ Blume has commented. ‘‘My responsibility to be honest with my readers is
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my strongest motivation.’’ Many of Blume’s books are about coping with difficult situations. Told in the first person, they foster a strong sense of intimacy and immediacy, convincing the reader Blume writes the truth about what kids think and feel. Then Again, Maybe I Won’t (1971) deals with a twelve-year-old’s budding sexual identity; It’s Not the End of the World (1972) documents the effects of divorce on a preteen girl; in Deenie (1973) a seventh grader copes with scoliosis; while Blubber (1974) is the story of a fat girl who becomes the target of ridicule in her class. Forever (1975), a book consistently placed on censored lists, explicitly details the joy and frustration of a first sexual relationship; a young girl in Tiger Eyes (1981) struggles to overcome grief after her father’s violent death; and Just as Long as We’re Together (1987) depicts teenage girls grappling with friendship and other issues. Blume leavens the seriousness of her often heavy-handed ‘‘problem’’ books with humorous dialogue and wit, while her books for younger readers include humor in the broad, sometimes slapstick manner many kids find so appealing. Tales of A Fourth Grade Nothing (1972) and Superfudge (1980) relate the hilarious stories of ten-year-old Peter and the antics of his mischievous little brother Fudge. Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great (1972), a story of overcoming fears, delights with its funny verbal sparring and the outrageous lies children tell to impress each other. Fudgea-Mania (1990) features Peter as well as Sheila Tubman, otherwise known as ‘‘Sheila the Great.’’ While their families share a summer vacation house, Peter and Sheila have great fun being enemies. The popularity of the Fudge and Sheila books led to a television series on ABC (1994-96) and CBS (1997). Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing had sold more than six million copies by 1996, making it the third highest-selling children’s trade paperback. It also was staged by the Kennedy Center for a national tour beginning in 1998. In her career as an author of children’s books, Blume has achieved both unprecedented popularity and fierce criticism, primarily for the content of her books rather than their execution. Reviewers have commended her for her close observation of childhood, for the honesty and lack of condescension with which she writes, for her warm sense of humor, and for her courage in breaking taboos and convention. Her critics cite flawed character development, permissive attitudes, the use of issues as starting points for creative writing, uninhibited language, thin narrative, and a lack of social consciousness. Most agree, however, that she has made reading easy and agreeable for many children. Her ability to communicate with her audience has endeared her to a loyal readership, and she receives thousands of letters a month from them. The most moving of these are collected in Letters to Judy (1986). On her website (www.judyblume.com), Blume encourages readers and fans to leave her messages and offers information about her books and their creation. Blume has also written books for adults, some of whom may have first discovered her as children reading her books. Summer Sisters (1998) traces the friendship between dissimilar women during 20 summers, beginning when they are twelve-year-old girls, while Smart Women (1983) explores the complicated relationships among two divorced friends and their teenage daughters
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when one woman falls in love with her friend’s ex-husband. Wifey (1978) was Blume’s first novel for adults. The sensitive, often controversial themes of Blume’s children’s books have not dampened their popularity but have limited their use in the classroom and restricted their presence in some libraries. Criticism of her books has been softened by society’s greater openness to discussions about adolescent sexuality and peer relationships since her first books were published in the early 1970s. In 1996 Bloom received the American Library Association’s Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement. She remains an active spokesperson for the National Coalition Against Censorship, is the founder and trustee of the charitable and educational foundation Kids Fund, and is a board member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. By 1998 her books had been translated into 20 languages and had sold more than 65 million copies. OTHER WORKS: Freckle Juice (1971). Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself (1977). The Judy Blume Diary (1981). The Pain and the Great One (1984). The Judy Blume Memory Book (1988). Here’s To You, Rachel Robinson (1993). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Rees, D., ed., The Marble in the Water (1980). Smith, S. N., ‘‘Father Doesn’t Know Best Anymore: Realism and the Parent in the Junior Works of Judy Blume, E. L. Konigsburg, and Richard Peck’’ (thesis, 1981). Reference works: CA 29-32 (1978). CANR 13 (1984). CLC 12 (1980), 30 (1984). DLB 52 (1986). MTCW (1991). TCCW, 3rd ed. (1989). Other references: Elementary English (Sept. 1974). HB (Jan./ Feb. 1985). SL (May 1987). NYTBR (16 Nov. 1997, 19 July 1998). —CAROLYN SHUTE, UPDATED BY JANETTE GOFF DIXON
BLY, Nellie See SEAMAN, Elizabeth Cochrane
BOGAN, Louise Born 11 August 1897, Livermore Falls, Maine; died 4 February 1970, New York, New York Daughter of Daniel Joseph and Mary Shields Bogan; married Curt Alexander, 1916 (died 1920); Raymond Holden, 1925 (divorced 1937); children: one daughter Louise Bogan was educated at Mount St. Mary’s Academy in Manchester, New Hampshire, the Boston Girls’ Latin School, and for a year at Boston University. Her first husband, an army officer, died in 1920, shortly after the birth of their daughter, Bogan’s only child. Her second husband was a poet and, from 1929 to 1932, managing editor of the New Yorker; the couple was divorced in 1937. For most of Bogan’s adult life her home was New York City.
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Reluctant to offer details about her personal life, Bogan valued privacy and close friendships. Published letters to Edmund Wilson, Rolfe Humphries, Morton Zabel, Theodore Roethke, May Sarton, and others reveal a warm, witty, spontaneous side of Bogan, not often evident in her poetry. They also refer to recoveries from nervous breakdowns in 1931 and 1933, as well as to the severe difficulties she experienced in the mid-1930s supporting herself by writing. Besides poetry, Bogan wrote some fiction and collaborated on translations from German and French. Two volumes of her criticism consist mainly of articles and reviews from Nation, Poetry, Scribner’s, Atlantic Monthly, and the New Yorker, for which she was a regular reviewer of poetry from March 1931 to December 1968. While Bogan advocated primarily formal poetry—in Eliot’s words, ‘‘verse as speech’’ and ‘‘verse as song’’—her critical judgment was far from orthodox. She opposed women’s attempts to imitate ‘‘a man’s rougher conduct’’ in life and art, observing that there were no authentic women Surrealists, since Surrealism’s ‘‘frequent harsh eroticism, its shock tactics, and its coarse way with language, comes hard to women writers, whose basic creative impulses usually involve tenderness and affection.’’ The younger women poets she praised were, in following Moore, ‘‘close but detached observers of the facts of nature,’’ able to ‘‘display a woman’s talent for dealing intensely and imaginatively with the concrete.’’ The qualities most frequently cited in Bogan’s poetry are those her friend Léonie Adams noted in a 1954 review of Collected Poems: firmness of outline, prosodic accomplishment in traditional metrics, purity of diction and tone, concision of phrase, and concentrated singleness of effect. Allen Tate, Ford Madox Ford, and Roethke compared her lyrics to those of the Elizabethan metaphysical mode. Abjuring free verse and experimental forms, Bogan worked in consciously controlled lyric form with a restraint and precision which contained passionate feeling. ‘‘Minor art,’’ she wrote, ‘‘needs to be hard, condensed and durable.’’ A few critics of her work have found that control scrupulous to the point of limitation and perhaps the result of unwillingness to reveal herself entirely. There is a clear distancing of poet from subject in the early works of Dark Summer (1929); and in all but a few poems Bogan objectifies responses to experience and ideas through the use of third person or of a persona. Bogan’s greatest skill lies in metric variation and in rendering descriptions in taut language whose sound values are brilliant yet seemingly effortless as in ‘‘Night,’’ ‘‘Song for the Last Act,’’ ‘‘Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral,’’ ‘‘Roman Fountain,’’ ‘‘After the Persian.’’ The subject matter of Bogan’s poetry includes love, loss, grief, mutability, the struggle of the free mind, marriage, and dream. There is no mention of the city or society; settings and imagery are drawn from nature—the country or sea, seasons and storms. Landscape and weather are sometimes menacing as in ‘‘The Flume,’’ where autumn can be a positive, glowing season of endings. There is tension between passion of mind and flesh in
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early poems such as ‘‘The Alchemist’’ and ‘‘Men Loved Wholly Beyond Wisdom,’’ where the earth and love triumph over intellect. There is also a recurrent interest in women: struggling to maintain a free mind and independent being (‘‘Sonnet,’’ ‘‘The Romantic,’’ ‘‘For a Marriage,’’ ‘‘Betrothed’’); failing to imagine and risk (‘‘Women’’); breaking into fury and madness (‘‘The Sleeping Fury,’’ ‘‘Evening in the Sanitarium’’); experiencing love and surviving its endings (‘‘Men Loved Wholly Beyond Wisdom,’’ ‘‘Fifteenth Farewell,’’ ‘‘My Voice Not Being Proud,’’ ‘‘Portrait’’). Adrienne Rich has justly called attention to ‘‘the sense of mask, of code, of body-mind division, of the ‘sleeping fury’ beneath the praised, severe, lyrical mode.’’ Bogan received many awards for her poetry, among them the Bollingen Prize in poetry (shared with Léonie Adams) for Collected Poems in 1955; the Academy of American Poets Award in 1959; and in 1967 one of five awards of the National Endowment for the Arts to ‘‘distinguished senior American writers.’’ She was a Fellow in American Letters at the Library of Congress in 1944, and from 1945 to 1946 held the Chair of Poetry. She was elected a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1952) and of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1968). OTHER WORKS: Body of this Death (1923). The Sleeping Fury (1937). Poems and New Poems (1941). Achievement in American Poetry, 1900-1950 (1951). Selected Criticism (1955). The Glass Bees by Ernst Juenger (trans. by Bogan, 1961). Elective Affinities by Goethe (trans. by Bogan, 1963). The Journal of Jules Renard (trans. by Bogan with E. Roget, 1964). The Golden Journey: Poems for Young People (ed. by Bogan with W. J. Smith, 1965). The Blue Estuaries: Poems, 1923-1968 (1968). A Poet’s Alphabet: Reflections on the Literary Art and Vocation (eds. R. Phelps and R. Limmer, 1970). The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe (trans. by Bogan, 1971). Novella by Goethe (trans. by Bogan, 1971). What the Woman Lived: Selected Letters of Louise Bogan, 1920-70 (ed. R. Limmer, 1973). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bowles, G. L., ‘‘Suppression and Expression in Poetry by American Women: Linda Bogan, Denise Levertov and Adrienne Rich’’ (dissertation, 1976). Couchman, J., ‘‘Linda Bogan: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Materials, 1915-1975: Parts I-II’’ in BB 33 (1976). Olson, E., ‘‘Linda Bogan and Léonie Adams’’ in ChiR 8 (Fall 1954). Perlmutter, E. P., ‘‘Doll’s Heart: The Girl in the Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Linda Bogan’’ in TCL 23 (May 1977). Ramsay, P., ‘‘Linda Bogan’’ in Iowa Review 1 (1970). Roethke, T., ‘‘The Poetry of Linda Bogan’’ in MAQR 67 (Aug. 1960). Smith, W. J., Linda Bogan: A Woman’s Words (1971). Woodard, D., This More Fragile Boundary: The Female Subject and the Romance Plot in the Texts of Millay, Wylie, Teasdale, Bogan (dissertation, 1993). —THEODORA R. GRAHAM
BOLTON, Isabel See MILLER, Mary Britton
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BOLTON, Sarah Knowles Born 15 September 1841, Farmington, Connecticut; died 21 February 1916, Cleveland, Ohio Also wrote under: Sarah Knowles Daughter of John Segar and Elizabeth Miller Knowles; married Charles Edward Bolton, 1866 Sarah Knowles Bolton traced her ancestry to the New England colonists. After her father’s death in 1852, she moved with her mother to an uncle’s house in Hartford, Connecticut. There Bolton met Harriet Beecher Stowe and Lydia Sigourney, both lasting influences. Bolton’s poetry appeared in Waverly Magazine when she was fifteen. Following her graduation from the Hartford Female Seminary in 1860, she taught in Natchez, Mississippi. The outbreak of the Civil War, however, sent her home to keep school in Meriden, Connecticut. Her first book, Orlean Lamar, and Other Poems (1864), published when she was twenty-three, received mixed reviews. Wellesley (1865), a novel about the Hungarian patriot Kossuth, was serialized in the Literary Recorder a year later. In 1866 Bolton and her husband settled in Cleveland, Ohio, where they became deeply involved in the Woman’s Temperance Crusade. As assistant corresponding secretary of the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Bolton publicized the Union’s goals and wrote a history of the crusade for the centennial temperance volume. In 1874 she brought out a novel on the temperance theme entitled The Present Problem, but only 250 copies were sold. In 1873 Charles Bolton lost his real estate business in the financial panic. Their struggle to repay his debts spurred Bolton’s developing career as a journalist and author. From 1878 to 1881, she served as an editor of the Boston paper, The Congregationalist. While accompanying her husband on business trips to England in 1878 and 1881, she investigated women’s higher education and factory working conditions. In 1883 she presented her findings on British labor relations in an influential paper delivered before the American Social Science Foundation. Bolton published two other books of poetry, From Heart and Nature (1887, written with her son Charles Knowles Bolton), and The Inevitable, and Other Poems (1895). Her fiction includes Stories from Life (1886). The literary value of these works is obscured by their didacticism and sentimentality. Bolton’s real talents lay in journalism and reform, two fields which coalesced in her series of biographies for children. Collected under titles such as Famous Men of Science (1889), Lives of Poor Boys Who Became Famous (1885), and Lives of Girls Who Became Famous (1886; Bolton recognized that femininity was as great an obstacle as poverty), these studies were written in a straightforward, vigorous style. The books sold well in the U.S. and several were reprinted in England. Toward the end of her life, Bolton added animal welfare to a list of humanitarian interests which included labor relations, woman suffrage, temperance, and higher education. While Bolton’s
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books shed light on 19th- century reform movements and the rise of popular education, they are perhaps most valuable to students of women’s history. In Some Successful Women (1888), Famous Leaders Among Women (1895), and other collections, Bolton demonstrates that a woman can win self-respect and worldly fame through intelligence and hard work. Like the fictional Horatio Alger stories, these biographies stress the importance of education, discipline, and self-reliance. According to them, the rapidly changing modern world offers many opportunities for the selfmade woman, and stands to benefit from her humanizing influence. Yet Bolton’s work reveals the strain of reconciling traditional female roles with ambition and leadership. In presenting individual women as models, she carefully balances their ‘‘masculine’’ achievements with ‘‘feminine’’ qualities: self-sacrifice, piety, sympathy. Mary Livermore’s career, for example, ‘‘illustrates the work a woman may do in the world, and still retain the truest womanliness.’’ Helen Hunt Jackson will be remembered because ‘‘she forgot self and devoted her strength to the cause of others.’’ Bolton’s championship of intellectual training, economic independence, and assertive roles for women, however, is much more vigorous than her dutiful nods to the ‘‘cult of true womanhood.’’ Her deeper feelings about a woman’s proper role appear in her portrayal of male/female relations. While convention requires her repudiation of George Eliot’s unmarried living arrangement with George Henry Lewes, Bolton goes on to present a laudatory portrait of their relationship, noting especially Lewes’s support of Eliot’s career. Her study of the Brownings also stresses their equality and mutual respect: ‘‘Their marriage was an ideal one. Both had a grand purpose in life. Neither individual was merged in the other.’’ Bolton’s treatment of women who preferred to remain single is equally sympathetic. Bolton encouraged young women to take themselves—their minds and their ambitions—seriously. While she showed women could achieve success in fields such as medicine, literature, education, art, and politics, she also reassured her audience that ‘‘true’’ womanliness and professionalism were compatible. Men, she argued, preferred educated, independent women—it was a ‘‘libel’’ on the sex to think otherwise. Although Bolton’s skills as a publicist may have gained the upper hand, her optimistic vision bolstered feminine resolve. Her biographies of strong, fully realized women gave American girls crucial models on which to pattern their lives. OTHER WORKS: Facts and Songs for the People. Prepared Specially for Use in the Blaine and Logan Campaign (1884). How Success is Won (1885). Social Studies in England (1886). Famous American Authors (1887). Famous American Statesmen (1888). Ralph Waldo Emerson (1889). Famous English Authors of the Nineteenth-Century (1890). Famous European Artists (1890). Famous English Statesmen of Queen Victoria’s Reign (1891). Famous Types of Womanhood (1892). Famous Voyagers and Explorers (1893). Famous Leaders Among Men (1894). Nuggets; Or, Secrets of Great Success (with F. T. Wallace, 1895). Famous Givers and Their Gifts (1896). The Story of Douglas (1898). Every-day Living (1900). Our Devoted Friend the Dog (1902). Charles E. Bolton; A Memorial Sketch (1907). Sarah K. Bolton;
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BOMBECK
Pages from an Intimate Autobiography, Edited by Her Son (1923). What to Read and How to Write (n.d.). Selections from the Journal or Diary of the Late Sarah Knowles Bolton, 1894-1915 (1936).
trust in God and live for the joy of the day but uncomplainingly accept life’s disappointments (‘‘When It Rains, Let It Rain’’). She was also a supporter of women’s rights. Her best known poem, ‘‘Paddle Your Own Canoe,’’ argues for a sturdy independence and self-trust.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bolton, C. K., The Boltons in Old and New England (1890). Reference works: National Cyclopedia of American Biography (1892 et seq.). A Woman of the Century, F. E. Willard and M. A. Livermore (1893).
In her lifetime, Bolton was much praised. Her fellow Hoosier writers Lew Wallace and James Whitcomb Riley thought highly of her work, and William Cullen Bryant included ‘‘Left on the Battlefield,’’ a trite and extremely sentimental poem, in his selection of the 50 finest war poems ever written. In 1941, a plaque honoring her was placed in the rotunda of the Indiana capitol building. Almost completely forgotten today, in her life and work Bolton epitomized the contradictions of an intelligent and thoughtful woman of the 19th-century Midwest who was a child of the frontier and a world traveler, who managed to hold concurrently both radical and conventional ideas, and who achieved success and fame while never being considered unwomanly.
—SARAH WAY SHERMAN
BOLTON, Sarah T(ittle Barrett) Born 18 December 1814, Newport, Kentucky; died 4 August 1893, Indianapolis, Indiana Daughter of Jonathan B. and Esther Pendleton Barrett; married Nathaniel Bolton, 1831 Sarah T. Bolton published her first poem at the age of fourteen and continued writing during most of her life. During her travels, including four trips to Europe, she was a voluminous letter writer, and she twice tried her hand at fiction (one novel was written when she was sixteen and then destroyed; in her last year, she returned to the form, beginning a religious novel). But her preferred form was verse, and it was as a poet that she achieved fame. Although she was versatile in her use of poetic forms and sometimes inventive in rhyming, her poetry today seems to be characterized by its sentimentality, triteness, and excesses of diction, while her rhythms often approach doggerel. A number of Bolton’s poems deal with places visited on her European travels (for example, ‘‘A Day at Ouchy, on Lake Leman,’’ ‘‘Leaving Switzerland,’’ and ‘‘To the Arve at Its Junction with the Rhone’’). She apotheosized such political and literary heroes as Charles George Gordon, the Girondists, veterans of the Mexican War, Edgar Allan Poe, Hawkeye Burdette (a contemporary comic writer), and John Howard Payne (writer of ‘‘Home Sweet Home’’). She also composed many poems to and about friends. Still other poems praised frontier life and pioneers. ‘‘Indiana,’’ which compares the state favorably to many storied places, was formerly extremely popular throughout that state. Bolton’s most interesting poems today, however, are those which reveal her awareness of injustice and her hatred of oppression. A number of poems touch on the need for political freedom; and she created many pathetic portraits of the poverty-stricken, especially children. She argued against capital punishment in ‘‘The Doomed Anarchists’’ and praised those such as Martin Luther who have had the courage to defy received opinion. Her most frequent tones are indignation (in the poems of social protest), sentimentality (in narrative poems), rhapsodic praise (in poems on places and on nature), and happy idealism (in poems on pioneers and Indiana, and in those in which she predicts the future). Bolton’s personal philosophy seems to have been to
OTHER WORKS: Poems (1865). The Life and Poems of Sarah Tittle Bolton (1880). Songs of a Life-Time (1892). Paddle Your Own Canoe and Other Poems (1897).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Downing, O. I., Indiana’s Poet of the Wildwood (1941). Wallace, L., ‘‘Sketch of Mrs. Sarah Tittle Bolton’’ in Paddle Your Own Canoe and Other Poems (1897). Reference works: American Women (1897). A Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors (1858-1871). Dictionary of American Biography. National Cyclopedia of American Biography (1892 et seq.). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Other references: ‘‘The Life of Sarah T. Bolton’’ in The Life and Poems of Sarah T. Bolton (1880). Impressions of Indiana: Sarah T. Bolton. (audiocassette, 1993). —MARY JEAN DEMARR
BOMBECK, Erma (Louise) Born 21 February 1927, Dayton, Ohio; died 22 April 1996, San Francisco, California. Daughter of Erma and Cassius Fiste; married William Bombeck, 1949; children: Betsy, Andrew, Matthew. ‘‘Mostly I worry about surviving,’’ Erma Bombeck wrote in the introduction to one of her books. ‘‘Keeping up with the times in a world that changes daily. Knowing what to keep and what to discard. What to accept and what to protest. That is what this book is about. Surviving.’’ Bombeck taught her readers, mostly housewives, to survive boredom, frustration, and alienation through laughter, exaggeration, truth, parody, and sarcasm.
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The product of a secure, middle class family, Bombeck found her life changed in 1936 when her father died suddenly. Her young mother and nine-year-old Erma moved into one bedroom of her grandmother’s home. As a growing child, Bombeck interpreted her mother’s preoccupation with work and her later remarriage as desertion. She reconsidered as an adult, and the cruel self-centeredness of children recurs as a theme in her writing. Because she was a shy child, her mother enlisted her in tap-dancing lessons. Bombeck developed a stage presence and remained a local radio performer, singing and tapping, for almost eight years. Bombeck’s writing career began with a humor column for the junior high school newspaper. During high school she contributed to the newsletter at the department store where she worked. She started secretarial courses after high school and worked at the Dayton Herald as a copy girl. She studied at Ohio University in Athens until her money ran out, went back to work, and entered the University of Dayton, where William Bombeck was also a student. Upon graduation (1949) the Dayton Herald hired her as a reporter. Her marriage in 1949 and the subsequent plunge into suburban tract housing became the building blocks of her writing. Leaving her job to stay home with her children, Bombeck became aware of the people around her. In the 1950s a child-filled home in a suburban tract was advertised as the family dream. Bombeck knew the isolation that came with the mortgage and subsequently wrote about it. For many years her syndicated columns targeted child rearing, marriage, friends, cups of coffee, car pools, pets, holidays, and common worry. The house-bound housewives read and realized they were not alone. Although other female writers wrote humorously about being a housewife, Bombeck was the first to focus on middle class women living in the new suburbs. In 1963, Bombeck started a weekly column for the KetteringOakwood Times. Two years later, in 1965, she was offered two columns a week at the Dayton paper. Three weeks later her column was acquired by the Newsday syndicate. Through a much wider audience, Bombeck’s column flourished and she published a number of humorous books throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Beginning in 1979, Bombeck had been named annually to the list of 25 Most Influential Women in America by The World Almanac. She held 15 honorary doctorates, was a member of the Society of Professional Journalists, and was the first woman named to the American Academy of Humor Columnists. She was appointed to the President’s Advisory Committee for Women in 1978 and was grand marshal of the 1986 Rose Bowl Parade. By the 1990s Bombeck was writing her ‘‘At Wit’s End,’’ column and filling three television slots each week from the family’s Paradise Valley, Arizona, home. She had also served as a commentator on ABC’s Good Morning America for 11 years, beginning in 1975. As William Bombeck retired from his job as school teacher and administrator and her children became adults, the focus of her columns changed and Bombeck wrote of the working woman, grown children, retirement, and aging. Her commentaries astutely combined humor and poignancy.
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Although her writing focused on home-related activities, Bombeck actively supported various public causes and organizations. She campaigned for two years for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, and expressed some impatience with women who didn’t realize the precariousness of equality. A convert to Roman Catholicism when she was twenty-two, Bombeck had strong religious and political beliefs, but did not use her columns as a vehicle to promote them. She also lent her support to the Arizona Kidney Foundation, a cause rather close to home as she had suffered from kidney ailments herself, having been diagnosed with polycystic kidney syndrome when a young adult. Bombeck’s own health problems spurred her to try and help others. Her book of interviews with children surviving cancer, I Want to Grow Hair, I Want to Grow Up, I Want to Go to Boise (1989) received the American Cancer Society’s 1990 Medal of Honor. Bombeck first suffered kidney failure in 1993, only 15 months after undergoing a mastectomy for breast cancer. Despite her illness, she wrote three columns a week until 1994, then continued with two weekly columns, while completing two more books. She shared her health problems with her readers, but always with a sense of humor and a refusal to accept pity. Bombeck died in April 1996 in a San Francisco hospital from complications following a kidney transplant. Published after her death, Forever, Erma (1996) is a collection of Bombeck’s most popular columns and tributes from some of her many admirers, including contemporary columnists, loyal fans, people with whom she had worked tirelessly for public causes, friends, and family. During her career, Bombeck wrote more than 4,500 columns and 12 books, which were on bestseller lists for years. Appearing in 600 newspapers, she was indisputably the most widely syndicated humorist. Since her death, no humor columnist has been able to match her wide appeal. The size and homogeny of her early, loyal audience of homemakers contributed to her success. She reigned in their world of household chaos by making fun of herself as she battled the trials of daily life. Bombeck became a well-loved next door neighbor who understood and helped readers laugh about their own lives.
OTHER WORKS: At Wit’s End (1967). ‘‘Just Wait till You Have Children of Your Own!’’ (1971). I Lost Everything in the PostNatal Depression (1973). The Grass is Always Greener over the Septic Tank (1976). If Life is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits? (1978). Aunt Erma’s Cope Book (1979). Motherhood: The Second Oldest Profession (1983). Family Ties That Bind. . .and Gag! (1987). When You Look Like Your Passport Photo It’s Time to Go Home (1991). A Marriage Made in Heaven—or, Too Tired for an Affair (1993). All I Know About Animal Behavior I Learned in Loehmann’s Dressing Room (1996).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Astor, D., ‘‘Is There a Successor to Erma Bombeck?’’ in Editor & Publisher (28 March 1998). Dressner, Z., ‘‘Domestic Comic Writers,’’ in Women’s Comic Visions (1991).
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Edwards, S., Erma Bombeck: A Life in Humor (1997). Hubbard, K., ‘‘Remembering Erma’’ in People (28 April 1997). Walker, N., and Z. Dressner, Redressing the Balance (1989). Reference works: CA 21-24 (1977). CANR 12 (1984), 39 (1992). Celebrity Register (1990). MTCW (1991) WWAW (1991). —JANET M. BEYER, UPDATED BY JANETTE GOFF DIXON
BOND, Carrie Jacobs Born 11 August 1862, Janesville, Wisconsin; died 28 December 1946, Hollywood, California Daughter of Hannibal Cyrus and Mary Emogene Jacobs; married E. J. Smith, 1880; Frank Lewis Bond, 1889; children: one son Carrie Jacobs Bond’s kinship to John Howard Payne (a cousin on her grandmother Jacobs’ side), composer of ‘‘Home, Sweet Home,’’ provides the key to her life and work. In both, she exemplified the traditional, simple values extolled by the song. In 1889 Bond married Frank Lewis Bond, a physician, who took her to live in the mining town of Iron River, Michigan. Bond considered these the happiest years of her life. But Bond died in 1895 of injuries from a fall, leaving his wife to care for her son and herself. Without money, but with her usual courage and determination, Bond sold most of her possessions, except her piano, and moved herself and her son to Chicago. For a time she supported herself and her son by running a rooming house, painting china, and sewing. Bond gradually began to receive recognition and took over the publication and marketing of her songs. She established her own company in 1906, and eventually became the wealthiest woman songwriter in the country, owning several homes. She published her most successful song, ‘‘A Perfect Day,’’ in 1910. It was the pinnacle of Bond’s career, selling more than five million copies in 14 years. Bond was not trained as a singer, but she began singing her songs at events simply to have them heard. She half talked, half sang, in what she referred to as her ‘‘composer’s voice.’’ With the success of her songs came demands for her performance. She appeared before both Roosevelt and Harding at the White House, and once sang on the same program with Caruso. Bond’s later years brought both worldwide recognition and tragedy. She received many honors and awards, notably an honorary master’s of music degree from the University of Southern California in 1930 and the Forest Lawn Award for achievement in music. The latter established a scholarship at the University of Southern California School of Music in her name in 1945. Bond published about 170 songs, though she wrote as many as 400. Her first published collection, Seven Songs As Unpretentious As the Wild Rose (1901), is typical of the kind of song and verse she wrote throughout her life. Two of her most famous
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songs, ‘‘I Love You Truly’’ and ‘‘Just a Wearyin’ for You,’’ appeared in this collection. In addition to her songs and verse Bond wrote articles, children’s books, and an autobiography. Her memoir, The Roads of Melody (1927), details her early struggle against poor health and poverty, but attests to her optimistic spirit. In 1940, at the age of seventy-eight, Bond published The End of the Road, a miscellany of philosophy and verse. It is easy to dismiss Bond’s work, with its conventional symbols and artless sentiments, as naive and simplistic. Nevertheless, her writing remains a monument to a state of mind and feeling lost after World War I; for this reason, it is to be treasured. In her life and work Bond paid tribute to the power of the traditional homespun virtues—hard work, perseverance, and faith. Her success is a testimony to the efficacy of those ideals. OTHER WORKS: The Path o’ Life (1909). Tales of Little Cats (1918). Tales of Little Dogs (1921). A Perfect Day and Other Poems (1926). Little Monkey with the Sad Face (1930). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Smith, C. C., Corney’s Mission Inn (1993). Reference works: National Cyclopedia of American Biography (1892 et seq.). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Other references: American Magazine (Jan. 1924). Independent Woman (Nov. 1945). LAT (13 Aug. 1978). NYT (29 Dec. 1946). Just Folk: A Carrie Jacobs Bond Evening (video, 1979). —JANETTE SEATON LEWIS
BONNER, Marita Born 16 June 1898, Brookline, Massachusetts; died 6 December 1971, Chicago, Illinois Wrote under: Joseph Maree Andrew Daughter of Joseph and Mary Anne Bonner; married William A. Occomy, 1930; children: William, Jr.; Warwick, Marita Marita Bonner was among the foremost artists, educators, and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. She began her writing career as a student at Brookline High School where her contributions to the student magazine drew the attention of a faculty member who encouraged her to enroll at Radcliffe. There she majored in English and comparative literature and studied creative writing with the celebrated Professor Charles ‘‘Copey’’ Copeland. A lifelong student of music and German language and literature, Bonner received a B.A. from Radcliffe in 1922. She went on to publish a host of plays, essays, reviews, and short fiction, some of which received long-overdue publication in the prize-winning collection, Frye Street and Environs (1987), edited by Bonner’s daughter with Joyce Flynn. While residing in Boston, Washington D.C., and then Chicago, Bonner taught English, participated in a theater company, and
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was actively involved in an eminent literary ‘‘salon.’’ A regular contributor to the major journals of the Harlem Renaissance, Crisis and Opportunity magazines, Bonner won the 1925 Crisis Award for her essay, ‘‘On Being Young—a Woman—and Colored’’ and the 1927 Crisis Contest Award for four other works in three genres. She received honorable mention in the 1925 Opportunity Awards for her short story, ‘‘The Hands’’. Bonner’s heightened awareness of her role as a black woman artist surfaces in ‘‘On Being Young.’’ She boldly articulates the unenviable and taxing position of a relatively privileged black woman who is deeply concerned with the spiritual and political welfare of her ‘‘people,’’ particularly those who are socially and economically impoverished, less fortunate than herself. Bonner’s drama and short stories are marked by a diverse range of literary devices and strategies. Experimentally and thematically expansive, her fiction explores on one level the psychological states of black American women enduring the yoke of racial, sexual, and class oppression. On another level, her short fiction—commonly set in Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s—treats the experiences of the historically disenfranchised black community engaged with the racist American society at large. Her bestknown play, The Purple Flower (1928), is a vexing allegorical portrayal of racism in America. In several of her stories, Bonner meticulously examines the problems of class and complexion within the black community; here, she is a thematic associate of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen. Also evident in Bonner’s work is her penetrating vision of the human condition, manifested through her symbolic thoroughfare, Frye Street. The quilt, by now a familiar icon of black women’s writing, most faithfully symbolizes the colorful and complex body of Bonner’s works. The quilt epitomizes as well her snugly interwoven place in the black women’s writing tradition. OTHER WORKS: Exit, an Illusion (1923). The Pot Maker: A Play to Be Read (1927). Short fiction in Opportunity (Aug. 1925, Dec. 1927, July 1933, Aug. 1933, Sept. 1933, July 1934, March 1936, July 1938, Jan. 1939) and in Crisis (Sept. 1926, May 1928, June 1939, Dec. 1939, March 1940, Feb. 1941). The papers of Marita Bonners are housed in the Radcliffe College Archives. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Abramson, D. E., Angelina Grimkél, Mary Burrill, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Marita Bonner: An Analysis of Their Plays (1985). Dana, M. W., ‘‘Working Women in Depression-Era Short Fiction: The Short Stories of Tess Slesinger, Dorothy Parker and Marita Bonner’’ (dissertation, 1999). Flynn, J. Marita Bonner Occomy (1987). Roses, L. E., and R. E. Randolph, Marita Bonner: In Search of Our Mothers’s Gardens (1987). Roses, L. E., Harlem Renaissance and Beyond: Literary Biographies of 100 Black Women Writers 1900-1945 (1990). Reference works: DLB 51 (1987). Dictionary of the Harlem Renaissance (1984). Early Black American Playwrights and
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Dramatic Writers (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Black American Literary Forum (Spring/ Summer 1987). Saga (1985). —SHARON A. LEWIS
BOOTH, Mary Louise Born 19 April 1831, Millville, Long Island, New York; died 5 March 1889, New York, New York Daughter of William Chatfield and Nancy Monsell Booth Mary Louise Booth’s one major work, her History of the City of New York (1859), was the first complete history of the city from its Dutch origins to its Empire City status in the 1850s. In it, Booth stressed the impact of the Dutch on New York life, maintaining that the period of Dutch control, particularly the period of the ‘‘pacific rule of Stuyvesant,’’ produced the ‘‘marked individuality’’ which set New York apart from other eastern cities. She saw in ‘‘the broad and liberal nature of the first settlers’’ the foundation for the ‘‘extended view of men and things’’ which characterized the later city. As a 19th-century historian, Booth gave due attention to the political and military history of the city. She stressed the role of New York in the American Revolution, dealing with both political and social issues. She underscored the political leadership of revolutionary leaders and assessed the cost to the city of the long British occupancy. Perhaps Booth’s strongest contribution, however, lay in her stress on social and cultural developments. She gave attention both to the growth of slavery and to the underlying racial prejudice in the city. She cited the ‘‘despotic regulations’’ controlling the lives of the early-18th-century slaves and discussed at some length the tragic consequences of the alleged ‘‘Negro Plot of 1741.’’ That alleged conspiracy, she argued, belonged ‘‘in the foremost rank of popular delusions.’’ In tracing New York’s growth as an economic and financial center, Booth emphasized the city’s response both to newcomers and to new ideas. In New York, she noted, the original pioneer type did not entrench itself in isolated power but proved able to blend with other races and groups. In the tolerance for new ideas and persons she saw a major source of the city’s vitality. While appreciative of the position of eminence New York had attained by the 1850s, Booth also wrote with a degree of nostalgia. She regretted certain lost cultural values and warned that the city’s very individuality was in danger. She saw New York as being at a cultural crossroads in 1859. While the city had the potential to become ‘‘the Athens of America,’’ New Yorkers had to choose whether to stress economic and financial power or ‘‘the wealth of brains.’’ Booth’s other work was of a varied nature. She began writing early for educational and literary journals and newspapers. After the Civil War, she became editor of the newly inaugurated Harper’s Bazaar. She was also a prolific translator of books, her
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first work being The New and Complete Clock and Watchmakers’ Manual (1860). She was particularly interested in books about French history and French reactions to the American Civil War and Reconstruction. She also translated fairy tales, including those of Édouard Laboulaye. Although not a trained historian, Booth showed in her History of the City of New York that she had a sound historical perspective. While she was primarily a narrative historian, she sometimes gave a critical analysis of events. She had an easy fluent style and kept in balance local concerns and matters of general interest. In her view, New Yorkers lacked a true sense of history, valuing achievements but disregarding the process involved in attaining those goals. Booth’s broad-gauged work provided a solid basis for appreciation of the city’s past. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Boltin, S. K., Successful Women (1888). Spofford, H. P., Our Famous Women (1884). Spofford, H. P., A Little Book of Friends (1916). Reference works: Appleton’s Cyclopedia of American Biography (1888). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Supplement to the Cyclopedia of American Literature (1865). —INZER BYERS
BORG, Dorothy Born 4 September 1902, Elberon, New Jersey; died 25 October 1993 Daughter of Sidney C. and Madeleine Beer Borg Dorothy Borg dedicated her life and career to the study and teaching of American-East Asian relations. After graduating from Wellesley College in 1923, she pursued more advanced studies and received her Ph.D. from Columbia in 1931. Her doctoral dissertation was published in 1947 under the title, American Policy and the Chinese Revolution, 1925-1928. Not only is it a work of great scholarship, but, unlike most dissertations, is enjoyable reading. Through personal consultation with such leading participants as Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg, as well as through an examination of State Department documents and various unofficial publications, Borg produced a fascinating study. It is particularly noteworthy for its portrayal of the interrelated pressures and counterpressures of public opinion at home, the rising nationalism in China, and the national interests of other treaty powers. Borg masterfully shows how all of these factors complicated policy problems in Washington. The book received outstanding reviews by fellow scholars and was credited as having made an invaluable contribution to the field of diplomatic history. Unfortunately, however, the late 1940s and early 1950s, which encompassed the era of Cold War McCarthyism, was a controversial if not dangerous time for a scholar to be commenting on America’s policy toward China. China lobbyists were actively
denouncing many China specialists for their critical views of Chiang Kai-shek and the support given to him by the U.S. As China correspondent of the Institute of Public Relations, Borg, however, remained unintimidated. She published articles critical of Chiang Kai-shek’s corrupt and unpopular government in which she questioned America’s unconditional support. She explained how the student protests in Kuomintang China, which she observed, were ‘‘symptomatic of the unrest among all classes.’’ Their insistence that the civil war must stop was an important expression of popular opinion. Chiang Kai-shek’s power struggle against the communists was a losing battle, and for the U.S. to give financial assistance to him under these circumstances was useless and detrimental to future Sino-American relations. After the McCarthy furor had subsided, Borg went on to work with the East Asian Research Center at Harvard University, from 1959 to 1961. Then, in 1962, she became the senior research associate of American Far Eastern policy at Columbia University’s East Asian Institute. Borg’s next major work, The United States and the Far Eastern Crisis of 1933-1938: From the Manchurian Incident through the Initial Stage of the Undeclared Sino-Japanese War, was published in 1964. In analyzing the effects of Japan’s growing power on the interests and policies of the U.S. in East Asia. Borg points out how the Roosevelt administration worked very hard at doing nothing. Although there was a great deal of lofty rhetoric on international responsibilities, the U.S. acquiesced to Japanese expansion and was not willing to champion China’s independence. The major concern was not to antagonize Japan. Thus assistance to China was restricted to what the Japanese would not find objectionable. On the other hand, for fear of it appearing that the U.S. was condoning Japanese aggression, Franklin Roosevelt avoided taking positive steps to improve relations with Japan. The State Department Archives Borg examined reveal the attitudes of American officials toward the Chinese communists, and clearly illustrate many of the erroneous assumptions that account for much of America’s failure in China. Borg masterfully used documents and periodicals to recreate the environment in which America’s China policy was determined. By being craftsmanlike, fair-minded, and even-tempered, she was able to make another valuable contribution to our understanding of a most exasperating period in the history of American foreign policy. She concludes that policy decisions need to be better informed of the realities of the situation if they are to be creative and successful. For her outstanding scholarship, Borg received the Bancroft History Prize in 1965. Another of Borg’s publications of major significance is a work she edited along with Shupei Okamota entitled Pearl Harbor as History: Japanese-American Relations, 1931-1941 (1973). Some 24 scholars contributed essays that analyze culture, political process, and government structure as they related to Japanese-American relations during the 1930s. In this way the editors hoped to offer fresh answers to the questions concerning why the U.S. and Japan went to war in 1941. The organization of
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the volume includes an introduction and summary by Richard Leopold of discussions at a 1969 conference, and detailed essays analyzing the role of prime ministers, congresses, the president, private economic groups, financial defense bureaucracies, liberal and right-wing organizations, the press, and intellectuals. Borg’s own essay is a discourse on policymakers in Washington, analyzing various kinds of inevitable interrelationships and conflicts. The work has been praised for the new data made available on Japanese politics and diplomacy, and for its value as a guide to secondary and archival sources. In recognition for her lifelong dedication to U.S. foreign relations, Borg was awarded the Norman and Laura Graebner Award in 1986. She died in 1993 at the age of 91. BIBLIOGRAPHY: New Frontiers in American-East Asian Relations: Essays Presented to Dorothy Borg (1983). —PATRICIA LANGHALS
BOTTA, Anne C(harlotte) Lynch Born 11 November 1815, Bennington, Vermont; died 23 March 1891, New York, New York Wrote under: Anne Lynch Botta, Anne Lynch Daughter of Patrick and Charlotte Gray Lynch; married Vincenzo Botta, 1855 Anne C. Lynch Botta’s father, an Irish patriot who emigrated to America rather than swear allegiance to the British crown, died in 1819. Botta attended the Albany Female Seminary, one of the most progressive schools for women in the early-19th century. While at school, she received class honors and awards for her poetry. After teaching for a short time at the Seminary, Botta worked as a tutor and in 1845, she moved to New York City with her mother. There she wrote for the popular press, made her reputation as hostess to the literati, and taught young women in her home and at the Brooklyn Academy for Young Ladies. In 1850 Botta left New York and stayed in Washington, D.C., for four seasons, where she successfully petitioned Congress for the unpaid portion of her grandfather’s military pay and worked as Henry Clay’s private secretary. In 1855 she married an Italian Dante scholar then visiting in the U.S. and they made their home in New York City, where Botta continued her salon and her writing. Botta published three books and miscellaneous prose and verse in magazines and journals. The Rhode Island Book (1841), compiled during her residence in Providence, is an anthology of the writings of prominent citizens of the state from the time of Roger Williams to her own. Poems appeared in 1849 and went through three editions. Though Poe complimented poems like ‘‘The Ideal’’ and ‘‘The Ideal Found’’ for ‘‘vigor of rhythm. . .dignity and elevation of sentiment. . .and in energy of expression’’ in
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his Literati, most of Botta’s work is typical of the sentimental verse of the day. Many of the poems are dedicated to her mother and to friends, treating the themes of life’s battle and death in a sentimental, romanticized fashion. Botta’s most substantial work, the Handbook of Universal Literature (1860), was prepared for popular reading and attempted to give a unity to the history of literature that illustrated Botta’s holistic notion of the universe. Botta’s insights into the writing of contemporary American authors, many of them personal friends, are still interesting to students of American literature. The Handbook went through several editions and was a favorite college text through the end of the century. Miscellaneous poems and articles, often published anonymously, appeared in the Democratic Review, the Home Journal, Godey’s Lady’s Book, and Graham’s Magazine, as well as in gift annuals and albums. The most interesting of these is ‘‘The Diary of a Recluse,’’ an autobiographical narrative of Botta’s years as a tutor to the Gardiner family of Shelter Island, New York. One of the least sentimental of Botta’s published pieces, it chronicles her mental and emotional development and her attempts to understand it. As a hostess of one of the most exciting literary salons of the 19th century, Botta made her mark on her era and in America’s social history. Her passionate interest in people, her tact, her eagerness to serve all contributed to her success in drawing together artists, reformers, and statesmen for lively discussion and witty repartee. In the 1840s and 1850s, her salons were largely literary, a meeting place for notables like Edgar Allan Poe, Margaret Fuller, and William Cullen Bryant. After the war, when salons were becoming more social than intellectual, she maintained her standards and became especially popular with foreign visitors like Thackeray and Trollope. Botta’s salons provided the environment where art, intellect, and society could meet, and where individuals could enjoy stimulating conversation at its best. Botta’s work, however, indistinguishable from that of other sentimental women authors, can be classified as popular literature, and is now of interest primarily to literary and cultural historians. OTHER WORKS: ‘‘Diary of a Recluse’’ in The Gift (1843). Memoirs of Anne Charlotte Lynch Botta Written by Her Friends with Selections from Her Correspondence and from Her Writings in Prose and Poetry (ed. V. Botta, 1893). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Botta, V., ed., Memoirs of Anne C. Lynch Botta (1893). Dolan, A. M., ‘‘The Literary Salon in New York, 1830-1860’’ (dissertation, 1957). Fenton, M. B., ‘‘The Life and Letters of Anne Lynch Botta’’ (thesis, 1940). Hemstreet, C., Literary New York (1903). Sherwood, M. E., An Epistle to Posterity (1898). Walker, C., American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology (1992). Reference works: American Women, F. E. Willard and M. A. Livermore (1897). Cyclopedia of American Literature, E. A. and
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G. L. Duyckinck, eds. (1855). Dictionary of American Biography, National Cyclopedia of American Biography (1892 et seq.). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). A Supplement to Allibone’s Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors (1891). Other references: New York History (1942). —KAREN SZYMANSKI
BOURKE-WHITE, Margaret Born 14 June 1904, New York, New York; died 27 August 1971 Daughter of Joseph White and Minnie E. Bourke; married Everett Chapman, 1924; Erskine Caldwell, 1939 Margaret Bourke-White attended several universities before receiving her degree in biology from Cornell in 1927. The death of her father during her senior year forced her to earn her own way, so she did photo work for the Cornell Alumni News. After graduation she moved to Cleveland, Ohio, and began a professional career, not in biology, but in photography. She began to make a name for herself as an industrial photographer at a time when the U.S. was falling in love with the machine. She helped develop the techniques needed for dark/high intensity light situations such as those found in foundaries. In the spring of 1929 Henry Luce asked Bourke-White to work as an associate editor for the yet-unborn Fortune magazine. The magazine would serve as an ideal vehicle for Bourke-White’s adulation of machines and factories. In the early 1930s Bourke-White executed photo murals in RKO Radio City, took her first trip to Russia, and put together her first book, Eyes on Russia (1931). A 1934 Fortune assignment to photograph the effects of the Depression on Midwestern farmers led to Bourke-White’s awareness that people are more than figures useful for establishing relative size in photos. Her newfound social compassion led to a collaboration with Erskine Caldwell in documenting the plight of southern tenant farmers and sharecroppers, You Have Seen Their Faces (1937). This book represented a new form of journalism that integrated picture and word as well as being one of the earliest depictions of the Depression’s effects on human existence. In 1936 Bourke-White gave up her associate editorship at Fortune to become one of the four original photographers for the new Luce photographic magazine called Life. From the 1930s on, Bourke-White’s work was constantly before the public: she displayed her work in the 1930 exhibit ‘‘Men and Machine,’’ shot the first cover of Life, published photo-essays in dozens of magazines, filmed two moving pictures on Russia, and wrote several books. At the outbreak of World War II, Bourke-White, accredited as an official Air Force photographer, did work for the Air Force and Life simultaneously. She was in Russia when the Germans invaded, taking incredible risks to shoot pictures, develop them, and get them to America. She was in a ship torpedoed on the way to Africa, flew aerial missions, and was with General
George Patton when he opened Buchenwald. Her reputation was great, and Bourke-White, appreciative of the value of being slightly notorious, allowed myths about herself to spread. By 1957 after 21 years at Life, Bourke-White was forced to resign because of the crippling effects of Parkinson’s disease. Unable to use her camera, she wrote Portrait of Myself (1963), an autobiography that records her struggle against the disease. She was able to hold the disease at bay temporarily with constant exercising, but an accident that forced her into bed finally allowed the disease to overcome her indomitable spirit. While no theoretician, Bourke-White’s photo-essays exhibit clarity, warmth, and crispness. She believed fact and beauty were the keystones for good pictures, especially when the images captured the similarities between people. While initially almost exclusively a photographer, Bourke-White wrote the text of her later books in the same crisp, clear, warm style her pictures illustrate. OTHER WORKS: The Story of Steel (with D. Kulas, 1928). U.S.S.R. Photographs (1934). Freighters of Fortune (with N. Beasley, 1930). The Book of Sunnybank (with A. P. Terhune, 1934). The Terhune Omnibus (ed. M. J. Herzberg, 1937). North of the Danube (with E. Caldwell, 1939). Say, is This the U.S.A.? (with E. Caldwell, 1941). Shooting the Russian War (1942). They Called It ‘‘Purple Heart Valley’’ (1944). ‘‘Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly’’ (1946). Halfway to Freedom (1949). A Report of the American Jesuits (with J. LaFarge, 1956). The Photographs of Margaret Bourke-White (1973). Margaret Bourke-White: The Cleveland Years, 1927-1930 (1976). The Taste of War (1985). Margaret Bourke-White, 1904-1971: Photographs (1988). Double Exposure: The Story of Margaret Bourke-White (video, 1989). Power and Paper: Margaret Bourke-White, Modernity, and the Documentary Mode (1998). Margaret Bourke-White: Photographer (1998). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ashby, R. and D. G. Ohrn, Herstory: Women Who Changed the World (1995). Brown, T. M., Margaret BourkeWhite: Photo-Journalist (1972). Callahan, S., ed., The Photographs of Margaret Bourke-White (1972). Daffron, C., Margaret Bourke-White (1988). Felder, D. G., The 100 Most Influential Women of All Time (1996). Flavell, M. K., You Have Seen Their Faces: Gisele Freund, Walter Benjamin and Margaret BourkeWhite as Headhunters of the Thirties (1994). Goldberg, V., Bourke-White (1988). Hood, R. E., ‘‘The Compleat BourkeWhite’’ in 12 at War (1967). Howard, W. L., Dear Kit, Dear Skinny: The Letters of Erskine Caldwell and Margaret BourkeWhite (1988). Kirkland, W. M. and F. Kirkland, ‘‘Margaret Bourke-White, Photographer of Steel,’’ in Girls Who Became Artists (1934). McEuen, M. A., Changing Eyes: American Culture and the Photographic Image, 1918-1941 (dissertation, 1991). Pollack, P., ‘‘Margaret Bourke-White: Roving Recorder’’ in The Picture History of Photography (1969). Raymond, M. T., ‘‘Girl with a Camera,’’ in Topflight Famous American Women (1946). Rolka, G. M., 100 Women Who Shaped World History (1994).
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Rubin, S.G., Margaret Bourke-White: Her Pictures Were Her Life (1999). Silverman, J., For the World to See: The Life of Margaret Bourke-White (1983). Tucker, A., ed., The Woman’s Eye (1973). Reference works: The Encyclopedia of Photography (1963). Other references: Life (10 Sept. 1971). NYT (26 Oct. 1930, 28 Aug. 1971, 10 Jan. 1971, 5 Sept. 1971, 12 Sept. 1971). —MIRIAM Z. LANGSAM
BOWEN, Catherine Drinker Born 1 January 1897, Haverford, Pennsylvania; died 1 November 1973, Haverford, Pennsylvania Daughter of Henry Sturgis and Aimee Beaux Drinker; married Ezra Bowen, 1919 Although Catherine Drinker Bowen began her career as a writer of fiction, including a novel, Rufus Starbuck’s Wife (1932), she early chose the role of biographer. It is in her biographical works that her major contributions as a writer lie. Music gave a central focus for Bowen’s early biographical works, Beloved Friend: The Story of Tchaikowsky and Nadejda von Meck (1937), and Free Artist: The Story of Anton and Nicholas Rubinstein (1939). The first work involved interweaving letters by the composer and his patron into a biographical narrative; the second portrayed the Rubinsteins’ interaction with the musical and political world of late tsarist Russia. In these works, Bowen revealed her skill in characterization. In the 1940s Bowen found a new biographical focus: men of law and their role in the development of free government. From this concern came three biographies. Yankee from Olympus: Justice Holmes and His Family (1944), is a three-generational study, reaching back for the ‘‘roots that permitted so splendid a flowering’’ in Holmes’s own life. In her portrait of Holmes as legal pioneer, judicial dissenter, and man of ideas and passion, Bowen impressively achieved her aim ‘‘to bring Justice Holmes out of legal terms into human terms.’’ In John Adams and the American Revolution (1950), Bowen concentrated on the lawyer as political leader. She stressed Adams’s commitment to British constitutional principles and his growing disillusionment with British practices. And she depicted with force and clarity his role in the colonies’ growth toward independence. With The Lion and the Throne: The Life and Times of Sir Edward Coke, 1552-1634 (1957), Bowen turned to the English roots of American constitutionalism. Her account centered on Coke’s transformation from chief prosecutor for the Crown to ardent champion of the House of Commons and the Petition of Right. Her portrait of this ‘‘difficult but impressive man’’ gives full due to the complexity of his nature and his role as jurist and legal authority. Bowen followed with Francis Bacon: The Temper of a Man (1963), a study of Coke’s great rival. Although this book was written as a biography, Bowen saw it as ‘‘essays of personal reflection’’ on a man and his thought.
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With Miracle at Philadelphia: The Story of the Constitutional Convention, May to September, 1787 (1966), Bowen returned to the theme of emerging free government in America. She stressed not so much the intricacies of the debates themselves as the interactions of the men, the compromises achieved, and the factors that made the adoption of the Constitution both crucial and possible. Her last work was The Most Dangerous Man in America: Scenes from the Life of Benjamin Franklin (1974). In this account of five periods of Franklin’s life, Bowen traced his change from adherent to critic of Great Britain and explored the complexities of his personality and roles. The book is also a personal document, essays of personal reflection indicating her own affirmative response to this Enlightenment man. Bowen wrote several works on biographical writing itself, including Adventures of a Biographer (1959), a series of informal essays; and Biography: The Craft and the Calling (1968), a study of biographical problems and techniques. Bowen also wrote Friends and Fiddlers (1935), informal, anecdotal essays on chamber music by amateurs; and Family Portrait (1970), a history of the Drinker family. Bowen took the narrative approach to biography, focusing both on the individual personality and the age itself. The intricacies of personal development concerned her most, rather than the critical exploration of historical issues. In her early work, Bowen often utilized fictional devices, such as transposing letters and diary entries into conversation. With the Coke biography, however, she abandoned such techniques, relying henceforth on a skilled use of documents and mastery of detail to convey the sense of reality. As a biographer, Bowen revealed both a keen sense of the complexities of human nature and the problems of personal interactions. In her handling of historical eras, she is perceptive in judgement and makes graphic use of detail. Ultimately Bowen’s strength as a biographer resides in her vivid and dramatic portraiture and her sensitive conveyance of the spirit of an age.
OTHER WORKS: The Story of an Oak Tree (1924). A History of Lehigh University (1924). On Being a Biographer: An Address (1950). The Writing of Biography (1951). The Biographer Looks for News (1958). The Nature of the Artist (1961). The Historian (1963).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Luckham, W. R., ‘‘Passionate History: Catherine Drinker Bowen and the Narrative Biography’’ (thesis, 1992). ‘‘Yankee from Olympus: Justice Holmes and his Family’’ in Reader’s Digest Great Biographies (1987). Other references: AHR (Oct. 1957). Atlantic (July 1957). NR (29 May 1944, 2 Nov. 1974). NYT (18 June 1950, 23 June 1963, 20 Nov. 1966). SRL (11 June 1950). Catherine Drinker Bowen: Other People’s Lives (film, 1971). —INZER BYERS
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BOWEN, Sue Petigru Born 1824, Charleston, South Carolina; died 1875 Also wrote under: Sue Petigru King Daughter of James L. Petigru; married Henry King Sue Petigru Bowen published her novels, all set in the deep South, just before the Civil War. Lily (1855), her longest novel, presents the tragic tale of the eponymously named young heroine who, orphaned at ten, becomes the richest heiress in her county. She is adopted by friends of her father, eventually grows to maturity, but falls in love with a weak man who loves her but cannot restrain his promiscuous appetites. The day before her wedding to the repentant Clarence Tracey, Lily is murdered by his mistress as she is trying on her bridal dress. A good part of the narrative is devoted to descriptions of Lily’s genteel Southern education—her French lessons, dance instruction, and needlework—and also to her fashionable clothes, parties, and picnics. Later works, such as Sylvia’s World; and Crimes Which the Law Does Not Reach (1859), also deal with the fashionable life. In the latter, rich, virtuous girls are contrasted with coquettes. Interesting here is the presentation of Southern social life at a rich resort and the portrait of Mrs. St. Clair, a former coquette who learns through hard experience that love lasts longer than admiration. In Sylvia’s World, a rash but virtuous young girl has her heart broken by trusting the wrong young man. He cares more for her fortune than for her. Bowen deals with the fashionable world of resorts and balls and with the maturation of young girls into womanhood. Her male characters are charming but weak and untrustworthy, and her novels have didactic rather than happy endings. The vision of young, trusting girls destroyed or embittered through their experiences with men haunts her novels. —ROSE F. KAVO
BOWER, B. M. See SINCLAIR, Bertha Muzzy
BOWERS, Bathsheba Born circa 1672, Massachusetts; died 1718, South Carolina Daughter of Benanuel and Elizabeth Dunster Bowers Noted for its eccentricity, Bathsheba Bowers’s life has attracted more attention than her writing. She was born to English Quakers who settled in Charlestown. Though they endured the Puritan persecution of Quakers themselves, the Bowers sent their daughters to Philadelphia to escape it. Bowers remained single all her life, building a small house, which became known as ‘‘Bathsheba’s Bower,’’ at the corner of Little Dock and Second Streets. Furnishing her home with books,
a table, and little else, she became a gardener, a vegetarian, and, according to her niece Ann Bolton, as much of a recluse ‘‘as if she had lived in a Cave under Ground or on the top of a high mountain.’’ Although Bowers was a Quaker by profession, Bolton’s diary reports that she was ‘‘so Wild in her Notions it was hard to find out of what religion she really was of. She read her Bible much but I think sometimes to no better purpose than to afford matter for dispute in w[hich] she was always positive.’’ Bowers eventually became a Quaker preacher, taking her ministry to South Carolina. Though records exist today for only a single volume, Bowers is said to have written a number of books: Bowers, in fact, spoke of her ‘‘Works’’ in the plural. Bowers’ extant volume, An Alarm Sounded to Prepare the Inhabitants of the World to Meet the Lord in the Way of His Judgments (1709), used the conventions of spiritual autobiography to trace her life as a seemingly endless series of fears to be overcome. Making an analogy between herself and Job, Bowers outlined a progression of divinely ordained tests which served to place her in a special relationship with God. One by one, Bowers conquered her terrors of death, of hell, of her own strong pride, of writing and publishing, of preaching, even of nudity. Her spiritual progress toward a kind of self-control dictated by God is presented in An Alarm as an example others may follow. Interestingly, Bowers perceived her most difficult task to be the struggle against her own ambition, her ‘‘chief evil’’ and ‘‘very potent Enemy.’’ Paradoxically, she viewed the publication of An Alarm as a triumph over this personal ambition. Though presenting her life to the public as an example for emulation may seem an act of pride, Bowers emphasized the ‘‘Scorn and Ridicule’’ her audacity would bring: ‘‘’tis best known to my self how long I labored under a reluctancy, and how very unwilling I was to appear in print at all; for it was, indeed, a secret terror to me to think of making a contemptible appearance in the world. . . . [But] now I can hear my Reputation called in question, without being stung to the heart.’’ Public response to An Alarm went unrecorded, but perhaps Bowers’s fears were close to the mark. She mentioned in her preface that she had met with ‘‘Repulses in [her] proceeding to Print,’’ which ‘‘made a very profound and ungrateful Impression upon [her]. . . .’’ Such ‘‘Repulses’’ may explain why An Alarm was finally printed in New York rather than in Bowers’s hometown, Philadelphia. Whatever the reaction of her contemporaries, readers today may be interested in Bowers’s use of a conventional spiritual autobiography for her own unconventional activities in writing, publishing, and preaching.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cowell, P., Women Poets in Pre-Revolutionary America, 1650-1775 (1979). Paige, L. R., History of Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1630-1877 (1877). Potts, W. J., ‘‘Bathsheba Bowers,’’ in PMHB 3 (1879). Watson, J. F., Annals of Philadelphia, and Pennsylvania, in the Olden Times. . . (1905). —PATTIE COWELL
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BOWLES, Jane Auer Born 22 February 1917, New York, New York; died 4 May 1973, Malaga, Spain Daughter of Sydney and Clair Stajer Auer; married Paul Bowles, 1938 After attending public schools in Long Island, Jane Bowles was tutored by a French professor in Switzerland. In 1935 she finished Le Phaeton Hypocrite, a novel in French which was never published and which has disappeared. After 1938 she and her husband lived in Central America, Europe, Mexico, and New York City. From 1947 they spent most of their time in Tangier, Morocco. Bowles finished her only novel, Two Serious Ladies in 1941, and from 1944 to 1953 was engaged in writing and revising her only full-length play, In the Summer House, ultimately produced in New York City in 1953 by the Playwrights’ Company. Most of the short stories which constitute the remainder of Bowles’s works were written during the 1940s. According to Paul Bowles, Jane became hypercritical of her writing in the 1950s. In 1957 she suffered a cerebral hemorrhage which deprived her of her ability to read and write. Her health worsened slowly, and she died in 1973, in Malaga, Spain. All of Bowles’ stories are about women and their attempts at independence; male characters are seldom important, even as blocking characters. When Bowles’ women characters cannot find themselves, it is other women who are holding them back. The essential Bowles plot presents a woman who sees to break away from tradition and find new adventures in the outside world, and a second woman—sister, companion, lover—who tries to keep her at home within the old habits of dependence. In Two Serious Ladies, (1943), Christina Goering tries to earn salvation by leaving her home and her female companion to challenge the hated outside world. There she takes up with a series of increasingly menacing male strangers, the last of whom abandons her. The second serious lady is Frieda Copperfield, who leaves her husband for a prostitute named Pacifica, who ultimately forces Frieda to share her with a young man. The promiscuity, bisexuality, and sadomasochism in this novel are seldom erotic, but tend instead to illustrate the hidden horror in human relationships, most of which consist of greedy individual truth-seekers bouncing their needs off each other. The menace inherent in human interdependence is also the subject of Bowles’ play, which concerns two mother/daughter pairs. Vivian Constable rejects her mother and attaches herself to Mrs. Cuevas, whose jealous daughter Molly murders Vivian. Mrs. Cuevas abandons Molly to get married, and when Mrs. Cuevas later returns to reestablish the old dependency, Molly chooses to go off with her own husband. Mrs. Cuevas threatens to tell Mrs. Constable about the murder, but it becomes clear that Mrs. Constable doesn’t really care. It is the relationship between sisters Bowles examines in her best short story, ‘‘Camp Cataract,’’ part of the collection Plain
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Pleasures (1966). Harriet leaves her sisters every year to stay at Camp Cataract, in hopes she can get used to the outside world and ultimately leave home permanently. Her sister Sadie tries to convince her that ‘‘you don’t grow rich in spirit by widening your circle but by tending your own.’’ When Sadie panics and comes after Harriet, Sadie realizes it is she who is going on that journey from home, not Harriet. Sadie is perhaps the only Bowles character who gets to the end of her search for herself, but the quest ends in her death. Rather than emerging free from her clinging sister, Harriet appears to exchange her for an aggressively dependent friend. Bowles introduced almost the same plot in overtly lesbian form in her unfinished story ‘‘Going to Massachusetts,’’ which appears with other fragments from Bowles’s notebooks in a posthumous collection called Feminine Wiles (1976). Through her constant resetting of these pairs of warring women, Bowles presents a full picture of the female psyche and the extremes to which the personality is driven by the pressures of modern society. Her representative woman tries to realize her potential within a world that tells her to be chaste, experienced, loyal to her family, supportive of her man, and independent. Bowles describes this fragmented world and its absurd expectations in a style which is eccentric, and sometimes almost surrealistic. Characters form attachments and abandon each other rapidly and unreasonably; they speak their minds to each other with a frankness which the reader does not expect in the middle-to upper-class world that Bowles portrays. These sudden twists force the reader to share in the sense of menace and confusion that the freedom-seeking Bowles heroine feels in her relationship to the world.
OTHER WORKS: Collected Works of Jane Bowles (1966). ‘‘A Day in the Open’’ in The Granta Book of the American Short Story (1992). The Collected Works of Jane Bowles: With a New Introduction (1989). ‘‘In the Summer House’’ in Plays by American Women, 1930-1960 (1994). My Sister’s Hand in Mine: The Collected Works of Jane Bowles (1966, reissued 1995). Out in the World: Selected Letters of Jane Bowles, 1935-1970 (1990). ‘‘Plain Pleasures’’ in Infinite Riches: Classic Stories by 20thcentury Women Writers (1993). ‘‘Senorita Cordoba’’ in The Graywolf Annual Two: Short Stories by Women (1986).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bowles, P., The Portable Paul and Jane Bowles (1994). Dillon, M., ‘‘Jane Bowles: Experiment as Character’’ in Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction (1989). Dillon, M., A Little Original Sin: The Life and Work of Jane Bowles (1981, 1998). Gentile, K. J, Speaking the Ineffable Name: The Novels of Emily Brontë, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Djuna Barnes, and Jane Bowles (dissertation, 1987). Knight, B., ed., Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists, and Muses at the Heart of Revolution (1996). Lacey, R. K., and F. Poole, eds., Mirrors on the Maghrib: Critical Reflections on Paul and Jane Bowles and Other American Writers in Morocco (1996). Maier, J. R., Desert Songs: Western Images of Morocco and Moroccan Images of the
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West (1996). Skerl, J., A Tawdry Place of Salvation: The Art of Jane Bowles (1997). Reference works: World Authors 1950-1970 (1975). Other references: Life (16 Dec. 1966). Mlle. (Dec. 1966). Novel (1968). SR (14 Jan. 1967). —PAULA L. BARBOUR
BOYD, Blanche McCrary Born 1945, Charleston, South Carolina married (divorced) Blanche McCrary Boyd is a novelist, essayist, and writer of short fiction. Her stories take place in the American South, where Boyd was born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina. Her fiction and nonfiction are known for their humor, but also deal with difficult themes such as drinking and mental instability. Boyd’s first book, Nerves (1973), for example, concerns a mother and daughter who are isolated emotionally from each other, even as the mother, Lena, loses her best friend to suicide and begins to go mad. Boyd’s works also feature female characters, often including the protagonist, who are in the midst of addressing their sexuality and dealing with their romantic desires for other women. Mourning the Death of Magic (1977), Boyd’s second book-length work of fiction, is about three characters dealing with the ramifications of the civil rights movement, one of whom is unable to come to terms with her own lesbianism. In 1981 Boyd published a collection of candid essays, many of which had been seen first in the Village Voice, dealing with her departure from and eventual return to the South. The book was called The Redneck Way of Knowledge: Down-Home Tales. The ‘‘contemplative and beer-soaked essays,’’ in the words of Library Journal, touch on her leaving Charleston for college at Duke University, her imperfect marriage in the suburbs of California, her life in a commune in Vermont during the 1960s, her relationships with female lovers in New York during the 1970s, and her mixed feelings toward her native South and her gradual acceptance of her heritage and past. A reviewer in Nation wrote that the book was ‘‘a redneck rubberneck tour of the Rockettes, Pope John Paul II at Yankee Stadium, stock car races, a Tough Man contest, the Ku Klux Klan shoot-up of those Commies in Greensboro, North Carolina, and the 1980 Democratic National Convention.’’ The magazine, which praised Boyd’s serious articles on violence and politics as ‘‘superb,’’ termed the more personal essays ‘‘bantamweight’’ and called the author ‘‘a bit of a lesbian tease.’’ After the publication of The Redneck Way of Knowledge, Boyd stopped drinking and lost the courage to write fiction again for nearly 10 years, during which time she effectively remained in hiding, as she later admitted. Eventually, the editor of the Voice
Literary Supplement encouraged her to submit some work, which she did. Three of her stories for the Voice became the first chapters of her novel The Revolution of Little Girls (1991). The book deals with a protagonist, Ellen Burns, who begins to understand and accept her lesbianism and Southern roots after years of drinking, enduring a poor marriage, getting mixed up in a series of love affairs, going through several career changes, and testing out different lifestyles. Michael Dorris, writing in the New York Times Book Review, said, ‘‘A mood of what might be called wise nostalgia permeates this brief novel’s nine chapters, most of which could easily stand on their own as short stories. . . . Just when we think we have identified a somber tone in The Revolution of Little Girls, however, the author springs a scene so funny that we laugh out loud.’’ A reviewer in Publishers Weekly added, ‘‘Ellen’s story is fascinating and spirited, but hard to grasp, and her experience becomes elusive.’’ Boyd revisited Ellen Burns in Terminal Velocity (1997), which focuses on Ellen’s four years during the 1970s when she was part of the lesbian-feminist movement and called herself Rain. The tale involves Rain’s nervous breakdown, eventually leading to electroshock treatments, and drug abuse. Andrea Barnet wrote in the New York Times Book Review, ‘‘As it crisscrosses the country, Boyd’s story moves from comic high jinks through seduction, betrayal and finally violence with a speed that at times feels dizzying.’’ While noting that the novel was difficult to read at some points but ended up with a redemption of sorts, Barnet continued, ‘‘[Boyd’s] is a voice that never wavers in its authority or its fierce sexual politics.’’ In addition to her books and her contributions to the Voice Literary Supplement, Boyd has written essays, reviews, and short stories for publications including Esquire, New York Times Magazine, and Premiere. She has also taught writing at several locations, including at Connecticut College. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1998). Other references: Christopher Street (20 Oct. 1991). Ms. (June 1982). NYTBR (30 June 1991, 24 Aug. 1997). PW (16 Apr. 1982, 15 Mar. 1991, 19 May 1997). Nation (19 June 1982). —KAREN RAUGUST
BOYD, Nancy See MILLAY, Edna St. Vincent
BOYLE, Kay Born 19 February 1902, St. Paul, Minnesota; died 27 December 1992, Mill Valley, California Daughter of Howard P. and Katharine Evans Boyle; married Richard Brault, 1922; Laurence Vail, 1931; Joseph Von
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Franckenstein, 1943; children: Sharon, Apple-Joan, Kathe, Clover, Faith, Ian Kay Boyle studied music and architecture before marrying a French engineering student and moving to his home in Brittany. The marriage had crumbled by 1926, but Boyle remained in Europe until after the fall of France in 1941. In 1946 she returned to Europe as a foreign correspondent for the New Yorker, while her third husband served with the War Department in occupied Germany. She later taught at various American universities and was professor of English at San Francisco State. She received Guggenheim Fellowships in 1934 and 1961, and the O. Henry Prize for best short story in 1935 (‘‘The White Horses of Vienna’’) and 1941 (‘‘Defeat’’). Boyle’s settings are frequently European. Her novel, Plagued by the Nightingale (1931) is loosely based upon a summer with her Breton relatives. At first, the novel was praised as a sensitive treatment of an American abroad, but today it has taken on new interest as the story of a young couple who decide not to have children (because of hereditary disease) and are bitterly opposed by their rigid, provincial family. Boyle’s acute awareness of European social and political conditions is revealed in ‘‘The White Horses of Vienna,’’ where swastika fires bloom at night on the Austrian mountains, prefiguring Nazi domination; the Lippizaners (the famed white stallions) symbolize a lost nobility; and a tamed fox foreshadows the savage future. Two of her finest novellas are The Crazy Hunter (1940) and The Bridegroom’s Body (1940). The former is a horse that is suddenly struck blind, but its young owner refuses to allow it to be destroyed. Boyle carefully works through the blindness-sight motif, interweaving it with complex relationships between a weak father, a strong-willed mother, and a budding daughter. The latter dwells on the fatal attraction and isolation of love. Fascinated by ‘‘the subtlety in human relations,’’ Boyle is often concerned with political issues, which she has always met fearlessly; for Boyle, ‘‘silence is not a position.’’ Her book The Smoking Mountain: Stories of Germany During the Occupation (1951) has been called ‘‘the finest interpretation of that place and time. . .written in English.’’ Though Boyle clearly does not sympathize with the Nazis, she exhibits compassion for a proud and defeated people. Perhaps her best-known novel is Generation without Farewell (1960), written from the viewpoint of a German journalist who identifies with the Americans and rejects his own countrymen, only to discover that he really belongs to neither world. Although Boyle began as a poet, her prose is far more skillful than her verse. Her novels, always technically well constructed, often contain brilliant passages. Her strongest prose form is the novella. Here she can create a single, sustained theme, and embroider and enrich upon it. Boyle, whose first book appeared in 1929, continued until her death to write with the same enthusiasm and dedication. Her publications after 1980 included two collections of stories, a volume of essays, a book of poems and a collected edition of her poems, and a translation. She also continued her work on books about Irish and German women, projects she had saved for her
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‘‘very old age.’’ An excerpt from the first book, the story of an Englishman’s insensitivity on Dublin’s ‘‘St. Stephen’s Green,’’ appeared in Atlantic (June 1980). A retrospective of Boyle’s work is emerging as her writing is introduced to a new generation; several novels have been reprinted in Modern Classics editions. Both Fifty Stories (1980, 1992) and Life Being the Best and Other Stories (1988) offer representative short fiction from five previous collections, stories both personal and political, shaped by her years in pre- and postwar Europe, blazing with anger and compassion. Most of the essays in Words That Must Somehow Be Said (1985) first appeared in magazines, from early book reviews in transition to the sharper political essays of the postwar and Vietnam era. In contrast, the poems in This Is Not a Letter and Other Poems (1985) represent her writing from the late 1960s to the 1980s. The mellowing in these poems (‘‘Dwell. . .on the courage of the dead’’) reflects a new acceptance of age, but never a surrender. In a sense, Boyle’s emphasis shifted from her initial concern with the word to a concern with the world, though both were always of great importance to her. She believed that ‘‘writers. . .must bear the full weight of moral responsibility.’’ Biographer Sandra Whipple Spanier argues that Boyle’s ‘‘reputation as a serious writer has suffered precisely because she has taken her writing so seriously,’’ often leading her to choose unpopular positions, although her passionate defense of human dignity seems better understood now in the light of history. Boyle finally achieved the recognition she should have received long ago. In the 1980s she was honored for her lifetime of writing, with grants and fellowships from the Before Columbus Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fund for Poetry, and in 1989, its first year of awards to ‘‘writers who have made significant contributions to English-language literature,’’ a special award for outstanding literary achievement from the Lannan Foundation. Boyle said, ‘‘Camus demanded that the voices of all those who could speak must ring out above the clamor of a world, ring out in the doomed silence of the persecuted, and in this way make the destiny of other men less lonely than before.’’ Her life and writing were a testament to this ideal. She was at her best when writing about highly complex human beings caught in political, social or psychological turmoil, struggling to maintain identity and balance. Her outrage at the violation of human dignity was carefully muted, revealed rather than preached. She wrote with consummate skill and passionate sincerity, and is recognized as a major novella writer in American fiction.
OTHER WORKS: Short Stories (1929). Wedding Day, and Other Stories (1930). Landscape for Wyn Henderson (1931). Don Juan (by J. Delteil, translated by Boyle, 1931). Mr. Knife, Miss Fork (by R. Crevel, translated by Boyle, 1931). Devil in the Flesh
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(by R. Radiguet, translated by Boyle, 1932). A Statement (1932). Year Before Last (1932). The First Lover, and Other Stories (1933, (1991). Gentlemen, I Address You Privately (1933, 1991). My Next Bride (1934). The White Horses of Vienna, and Other Stories (1936). Death of a Man (1936, reprinted 1989). Monday Night (1938, 1977) A Glad Day (1938). The Youngest Camel (1939). Primer for Combat (1942). Avalanche (1944). American Citizen: Naturalized in Leadville, Colorado (1944). A Frenchman Must Die (1946). Thirty Stories (1946). 1939 (1948). His Human Majesty (1949). The Seagull on the Step (1955). Three Short Novels (1958). The Youngest Camel Reconsidered and Rewritten (1959). Breaking the Silence: Why a Mother Tells Her Son about the Nazi Era (1962). Collected Poems (1962). At Large (with H. Kubly (1963). Nothing Ever Breaks Except the Heart (1966). Pinky, the Cat Who Liked to Sleep (1966). The Autobiography of Emanuel Carnevali (editor, 1967). Being Geniuses Together: 1920-1930 (with R. McAlmon (1968). Pinky in Persia (1968). The Lost Dogs of Phnom Penh (1968). The Long Walk at San Francisco State, and Other Essays (1970). Testament for My Students, and Other Poems (1970). Enough of Dying! An Anthology of Peace Writings (editor, 1972). Underground Woman (1975). A Poem for February First 1975 (1975). Four Visions of America (with E. Jong, et al. (1977). Collected Poems of Kay Boyle (1991). Winter Night (1993). Most of Kay Boyle’s manuscripts and other papers are at the Morris Library of Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bell, E., Kay Boyle: A Study of the Short Fiction (1992). Clark, S., Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word (1991). Elkins, M. R. ed., Critical Essays on Kay Boyle (1997). Elkins, M., Metamorphosizing the Novel: Kay Boyle’s narrative Innovations (1993). Ford, H., Four Lives in Paris (1987). Gado, F., Kay Boyle: From the Aesthetics of Exile to the Polemics of Return (dissertation, 1968). Hamalian, L., D. H. Lawrence and Nine Women Writers (1996). Jackson, B. K., The Achievement of Kay Boyle (dissertation, 1968). Madden, C. F., ed., Talks with Authors (1968). Mellen, J., Kay Boyle: Author of Herself (1994). Moore, H. T., Age of the Modern and Other Literary Essays (1971). Smith, N.A., War, Gender, and Silence in the Works of Katherine Anne Porter, Carson McCullers, and Kay Boyle: ‘‘We Have Become Articulate’’ (dissertation, 1996). Spanier, S. W., Kay Boyle: Artist and Activist (1986). Thompson, J. C., A Re-Evaluation of Kay Boyle’s Wartime Novel Avalanche (dissertation, 1994). Tooker, D., and R. Hofheins, Fiction: Interviews with Northern California Novelists (1976). Yalom, M., ed., Women Writers of the West Coast: Speaking of Their Lives and Careers (1983). Reference works: CAAS (1984). CANR (1990). CLC (1990). DLB (1980, 1981, 1986). FC (1990). Great Women Writers: The Lives and Works of 135 of the World’s Most Important Women Writers, from Antiquity to the Present (1994). MTCW (1991). TCL (Fall 1988). Other references: CE (Nov. 1953). Criticism (1965). Kenyon Review (Spring 1960). NYT (10 July 1966). —JOANNE MCCARTHY
BOYLSTON, Helen Dore Born 4 April 1895, Portsmouth, New Hampshire; died 30 September 1984 Daughter of Joseph and Fannie Dore Boylston An only child, Helen Dore Boylston attended Portsmouth public schools and trained as a nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital. Two days after graduating, she joined the Harvard medical unit that had been formed to serve with the British Army. After the war, she missed the comradeship, intense effort, and mutual dependence of people upon one another when under pressure, and joined the Red Cross to work in Poland and Albania. This work, often in isolation and with little apparent effect, wasn’t satisfying. Returning to the U.S., Boylston taught nose and throat anaesthesia at Massachusetts General for two years. During this time Rose Wilder Lane read Boylston’s wartime diary and arranged for it to be published in the Atlantic Monthly. In the diary, Boylston wonders if the narrower, traditionally feminine world would have contented her if there had been no war: ‘‘I might even have married, as the final Great Adventure— which now seems to me a terrifying and impossible thing to do.’’ Coming into a small inheritance, she spent several years living in Europe. When her money was lost in the Depression, she returned again to nursing but, in the meantime, began trying to earn a living by writing. The short stories Boylston sold to the Atlantic and elsewhere are small narrative moments, with carefully controlled viewpoints and a detailed perception of the surface of reality. ‘‘Dawn’’ is about a girl’s first kiss; several others are told through the eyes of a dog, cat, or horse. Failing to discover any important adult subject matter, Boylston began to reproduce, for girls, the milieu she knew best. Sue Barton, Student Nurse, published in 1936, was the first of a series of seven in which Boylston intended to supply accurate information about a much-romanticized profession. Four ‘‘Carol’’ books in the early 1940s did the same for the stage; Boylston’s friend and neighbor, Eva LeGallienne, supplied her with the necessary background. The Sue Barton books are not written to formula; some are episodic while others answer a single dramatic question. Although the first is undoubtedly the best—longest, most careful in characterization, richest in detail—all are technically well above the level of series fiction. They also reflect the times in which they were written. In the early novels, Sue Barton is an acceptable 1930s career woman, who postpones marriage first to develop her own talents and then for financial reasons. In Visiting Nurse (1938) she does socially conscious work in the slums and in the next book (1939) creates her own job by persuading farm women to fund a rural nurse service. By 1949, however, she is the mother of three children under six, and wondering whether her training is wasted now in her role as wife and mother. The next book, Neighborhood Nurse (1949), insists that it is not and ends with a new pregnancy as answer to the problems of a restive wife, although in the final book, written in 1952, Boylston arranges for Sue’s husband to be stricken with tuberculosis so she can happily
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return to hospital work. She also makes a point of demonstrating that Sue’s children are not harmed by having a working mother. The Sue Barton books remain in print and the earlier ones, at least, are still much read by girls between eight and twelve. Like Boylston’s wartime diary, the books are full of cocoa-parties and female comradeship. Sue Barton, though technically an adult, is actually a big girl with whom preadolescents identify; she is jolly, frank, competent, mischievous, and rather timid about facing her superiors. The only thing she does with the man she loves is work with him, as friends, to bandage a burn or track down a typhoid carrier. The books are kept moving by minor crises in which Sue takes a bus downtown and is afraid she will get lost, must stay alone in the dark, is unsure of her ability to take on responsibility, has misunderstandings with her friends, or must deal with authority figures who are sometimes unfair or mistaken. In other words, Sue is confronted with the crises which loom large in the lives of preadolescents, rather than the actual social and emotional difficulties of the late teens and twenties. Sue solves most of her problems without adult—or male—help. Nursing is portrayed as woman’s ideal career because it is useful, caritative, and supervised. It is not glamorized, however: the books give brisk and bracing accounts about operations, dirty work, and insanity. Each book emphasizes supportive female friendship; several reach an emotional climax in the heroine’s relationship with some admirable older pioneer of nursing or public health. This conception, however, becomes more obviously artificial as the demands of mature womanhood are not met; Sue is neither so convincing nor so interesting as an adult as she is in the early books. OTHER WORKS: ‘‘Sister’’: The War Diary of a Nurse (1927). Sue Barton, Senior Nurse (1937). Sue Barton, Rural Nurse (1939). Sue Barton, Superintendent of Nurses (1940). Carol Goes Backstage (1941). Carol Plays Summer Stock (1942). Carol on Broadway (1944). Carol on Tour (1946). Sue Barton, Staff Nurse (1952). Clara Barton, Founder of the American Red Cross (1955). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Lane, R.W., Travels with Zenobia: Paris to Albania by Model T Ford: A Journal (1983). Reference works: CB (1942). The Junior Book of Authors (1951). Twentieth-Century Authors (1978). —SALLY MITCHELL
BRACKEN, Peg Born 25 February, circa 1918, Twin Falls, Idaho Daughter of John Lewis and Ruth McQuesten Bracken; married Parker Edwards, 1966 (second marriage) Peg Bracken grew up in St. Louis and graduated from Antioch College in 1940, where she was editor of The Antiochian magazine. Her writing career began with advertising copy and
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grew with short stories, light verse, a syndicated newspaper column, and articles on a wide range of ‘‘female’’ topics in periodicals such as Atlantic, McCall’s, Ladies’ Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, Redbook, and the Saturday Evening Post. Known primarily as a humorist who appealed mainly to women, Bracken’s impact on popular culture deserves more attention and credit. A benevolent facetiousness and lively spirit of parody mark her tone. She provokes a new, more realistic perspective on sociability, especially with respect to the increasingly independent role of women as the major actors, instigators, and interpreters of social drama. Discoursing lightly but authoritatively on subjects such as housekeeping, childrearing, travel, the telephone, rites of passage, and the art of conversation, Bracken established herself as a popular social commentator on the practical matters of human relations. She wrote The I Hate to Cook Book (1960) for the harried cook who refuses to be tied to the kitchen, and The I Hate to Housekeep Book (1962) for the growing class of occasional housekeepers. I Try to Behave Myself (1964) was a bestselling manual on common sense manners. Bracken is an iconoclastic member of that overwhelmingly female elite of social arbiters led by Emily Post and Amy Vanderbilt. Her effort has been to challenge, soften, and humanize some of the more traditional aspects of etiquette in its stiffest interpretation of white gloves and calling cards. She arrives at a more informal, adaptable code based on good intentions and good character. In this interpretation, etiquette is granted a wider range and a more active role in everyday life, rather than a ritual to be reserved for rare occasions. This code, which Bracken calls the ‘‘intelligence of the heart,’’ accommodates the radical shifts in taste and class that have occurred since the beginning of the century and especially since the early 1960s. Bracken recommends a pragmatic, inventive approach to the problems of daily living, distinguishing between the letter of an older social law and the more enduring spirit of any sound etiquette system. She advocates a social interaction made humane and comfortable through the predictability that comes from shared understandings among people. The ‘‘new etiquette’’ acknowledges broadly based norms suited to a pluralist society in flux, where once-hard-and-fast distinctions of social status, age, sex, and education are now blurring and converging. Bracken seeks to resolve the conflict of old rules encountering new values without giving up the battle against the rising tide of barbarism in a steadily more crowded, uncaring, and competitive world. In this way, Bracken wrestles with unanswerable questions of contemporary living: what is ‘‘correct’’ (or appropriate) behavior, and how can it be defined, judged, and performed? How is the individual to manage a system of behavior which can only work if the majority understands and shares in it? In the exploration of these questions, Bracken’s role is that of a nonexpert, antihero housewife who tries to demonstrate that the
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individual temperament is the true measure of action. Individuals cannot and should not be forced into imposed patterns of do’s and don’ts. Ironically, however, Bracken has devised her own imperatives and prohibitions: e.g., ‘‘108 Transgressions’’ (based on Buddhist beliefs) and ‘‘13 Things Children Should Learn and the Sooner the Better.’’ Always a realist, Bracken’s concern is not with how people ought to behave but how they do and would like to. Ultimately, Bracken’s devotion is to the art of civilized living in a society which has left one set of standards behind and is badly in need of another. OTHER WORKS: Peg Bracken’s Appendix to The I Hate to Cook Book (1966). I Didn’t Come Here to Argue (1969). But I Wouldn’t Have Missed It for the World: The Pleasures of an Unseasoned Traveler (1973). The I Hate to Cook Almanack: A Book of Days (1976). The Compleat I Hate to Cook Book (1986). The I Still Hate to Cook Book (1967, reissued 1980). On Getting Old for the First Time (1997). A Window Over the Sink: A Mainly Affectionate Memoir (1981). BIBLIOGRAPHY: PW (25 May 1964). SR (5 Sept. 1964). WD (May 1970). —MARGARET J. KING
BRACKETT, Leigh (Douglass) Born 7 December 1915; died 1978 Married Edmond Moore Hamilton, 1946 Leigh Brackett is identified with the science fiction, fantasy, and mystery fields, but is less known for her work in films, which is also stellar. Her first science fiction story, ‘‘Martian Quest,’’ appeared in the pulp magazine Astounding Science Fiction in 1940, launching a rash of stories in science fiction magazines throughout the decade, including appearances in Thrilling Wonder Stories and Planet Stories. She became known for her swashbuckling adventure stories, usually set on Mars. Unlike Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars series, there was no continuity in most of Brackett’s stories until she created Eric John Stark. The first Stark story appeared as a serial called ‘‘Queen of the Martian Catacombs’’ (1949), followed by ‘‘Black Amazon of Mars’’ (1951), both in Planet Stories. They were later expanded into books as The Secret of the Sinharat (1964) and People of the Talisman (1964), respectively, and collected in the Eric John Stark: Outlaw of Mars (1982) omnibus. Stark would eventually move on to Venus in ‘‘Enchantress of Venus’’ (1949) and then into the galaxy in The Ginger Star (1974), The Hounds of Skaith (1974), and The Reavers of Skaith (1976), the latter three becoming The Book of Skaith: The Adventures of Eric John Stark (1976). Many of the stories were also collected in The Coming of the Terrans (1967) and The Halfling and Other Stories (1973). Other
visits to Mars include ‘‘Shadow over Mars’’ (1944), published in book form under the same title in England in 1951, and renamed The Nemesis from Terra (1961) in the United States; and ‘‘Ark of Mars’’ (1953), renamed Alpha Centauri—or Die! (1963). What is arguably Brackett’s best story, ‘‘Sea-Kings of Mars’’ (1949), was renamed The Sword of Rhiannon (1953) in its book form and is loosely connected to ‘‘Sorcerer of Rhiannon’’ (1942). Brackett’s first novel was No Good from a Corpse (1944), a mystery, which was followed in that genre by other crime novels such as Stranger at Home (1946, ghostwritten with actor George Sanders); An Eye for an Eye (1957); The Tiger Among Us (1957), which was reprinted as Fear No Evil (1960) and as 13 West Street (1962); and Silent Partner (1969). In 1946 Brackett married fellow science fiction writer Edmond Hamilton. Critic John Clute contends that Brackett may have influenced Hamilton’s writing, which seems to improve noticeably after World War II. Brackett also collaborated with a young Ray Bradbury on a novelette, ‘‘Lorelei of the Red Mist,’’ in Planet Stories. In the 1950s Brackett penned science fiction novels like The Starmen (1952), renamed twice as The Galactic Breed (1955) and The Starmen of Llyrdis (1976); The Big Jump (1955); and The Long Tomorrow (1955), a postapocalyptic novel. Late in the decade she wrote a western novel, Rio Bravo (1959), and then the screenplay, which went on to become a hit film that year directed by Howard Hawks, starring John Wayne, Dean Martin, Angie Dickinson, Ricky Nelson, Walter Brennan, Ward Bond, and Claude Akins. This successful western was followed by another novel in the same genre, Follow the Free Wind (1963), a fictional account of James Pierson Beckwourth (1798-1866). Rio Bravo was later remade as Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), directed by John Carpenter, and spawned a sequel film, El Dorado (1967), also starring John Wayne, along with Robert Mitchum, James Caan, and Ed Asner. The screenplay was written by Brackett and directed by Hawks. It was not the only time Brackett would work with the legendary director; she also cowrote the screenplay for The Big Sleep (1946) with William Faulkner and Jules Furthman, based on the Raymond Chandler character Philip Marlowe and starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall; Hatari (1962), which starred Wayne and Red Buttons; and Hawks’ final film, Rio Lobo (1970), again with Wayne, Jennifer O’Neill, and Jack Elam. Brackett also penned the screenplay for The Long Goodbye (1973), Chandler’s penultimate novel, starring Elliott Gould and directed by Robert Altman, and a stinker called The Vampire’s Ghost (1945). In the 1970s, the last decade of her life, Brackett edited The Best of Planet Stories #1: Strange Adventures on Other Worlds (1974). She also worked on her last screenplay, The Empire Strikes Back (1980), second in the acclaimed Star Wars series, finished by Lawrence Kasdan, for which she received a posthumous Hugo award. She would also edit The Best of Edmond Hamilton (1977), the same year Hamilton edited The Best of Leigh Brackett, and the same year he passed away. The following year, Brackett was gone too, but her work continues to appear in print in
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anthologies, as well as in numerous re-releases of her film work on videocassette, laser disc, CD-ROM, and DVD. OTHER WORKS: The Jewel of Bas (1944). Works anthologized in: Dozois, G., ed., The Good Old Stuff: Adventure SF in the Grand Tradition (1998). Gorman, E. et al, eds., American Pulp (1997). Pronzini, B., and J. Adrian, eds., Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories (1995). Sargent, P., ed., Women of Wonder: The Classic Years—Science Fiction by Women from the 1940s to the 1970s (1995). Staicar, T., ed., The Feminine Eye: Science Fiction and the Women Who Write It (1982). Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays: Star Wars—A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi (1997). Weinberg, R. et al., eds., Tough Guys & Dangerous Dames (1993). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Arbur, R., Leigh Brackett, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Anne McCaffrey: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography (1982). Benson, G., Jr., Leigh Douglass Brackett and Edmond Hamilton: A Working Bibliography (1986). Carr, J. L., Leigh Brackett: American Writer (1986). Clute, J., and P. Nicholls, eds., The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993). Mallett, D. F., and R. Reginald, Reginald’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards: A Comprehensive Guide to the Awards and Their Winners, 2nd edition (1991), 3rd edition (1993). Reginald, R., Science Fiction & Fantasy Literature, 1975-1991: A Bibliography of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Fiction Books and Nonfiction Monographs (1992). —DARYL F. MALLETT
BRADLEY, Marion Zimmer Born 3 July 1930, near Albany, New York; died 25 September 1999 Also writes under: Lee Chapman, John Dexter, Mariam Gardner, Valerie Graves, Morgan Ives, Alfrida Rivers, John J. Wells Daughter of Evelyn C. and Leslie Raymond Zimmer; married Robert A. Bradley 1949 (divorced); Walter Breen, 1964 (divorced); children: David, Patrick, Dorothy Marian Zimmer Bradley grew up on a farm in upper New York state, where she very early developed a love for reading and writing. Having won a National Merit Scholarship, she attended New York State College for Teachers (1946-48), but left to marry a fellow science fiction fan, Robert Bradley, many years her senior, and moved to Texas. She had begun writing as a teenager, and after her marriage and the birth of David began a prolific output, mostly romances, gothics, and fantasies, to help support her family and pay for her return to college. Beginning in 1952 she published under a number of pseudonyms. She used her own name, however, when she published (with Gene Damon) Checklist: A Complete, Cumulative Checklist of Lesbian, Variant, and
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Homosexual Fiction, in English, or available in English Translation, with Supplements of Related Material, for the Use of Collectors, Students, and Librarians in 1960, with supplements in 1961 and 1962, which foreshadowed her later openness about her own sexual orientation. Bradley graduated from Hardin-Simmons College in Abilene in 1964 and went on to do graduate work at Berkeley (1966-67). Divorced from Robert Bradley, she married Walter Breen, had two more children, and continued her writing career. She has continued to live in California, and, despite several strokes, acted as the doyenne of a productive group of younger fans and writers, continued to produce novels, and edited two series of anthologies, Greyhaven and Sword and Sorceress. In 1988 she began to publish and edit Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, which encourages tales of ‘‘sword and sorcery,’’ the fantasy subgenre with which she is popularly associated. Bradley’s most popular series of novels, beginning with The Planet Savers and The Sword of Aldones in 1962, are set on Darkover, a snowy and forbidding planet originally settled by colonists from Earth. In the centuries following, the ‘‘lost’’ settlers have developed a patriarchal feudal society ruled by an aristocracy that holds power partly through hereditary psychic abilities. The planet’s rediscovery leads to interesting conflicts between Earth’s modern technology and Darkover conservatism. The Darkover novels are almost ideal illustrations of the ways in which attitudes toward women as writers and subjects of science fiction have changed. The earliest, designed to appeal to a young and almost entirely male audience, are essentially exotic adventure stories centered on white male heroes, with few female characters. But beginning with The Heritage of Hastur (1975), Bradley began to write more complex novels focused on personal relationships and politics rather than action, and gradually to shift from male to female protagonists. Acknowledging her own lesbianism, she began to explore sexual roles and show both male and female homosexuals in a positive light. Particularly influential has been her invention of the Free Amazons (or Renunciates) in The Shattered Chain (1976). These are women who in a malecentered world have freed themselves from a dependence on men. Their lives are not easy or trouble-free, but their community offers an alternative to Darkover’s oppressed women. A young adult series involving three princesses faced with dangerous quests and self-revelation began with Black Trillium (1990), coauthored with Andre Norton and Julian May; Bradley was sole author of the fourth in the series, Lady of the Trillium (1995). Bradley teamed up again with Norton and Mercedes Lackey to produce Tiger Burning Bright, about the women in three generations of a ruling house who must flee and travel in disguise when an evil emperor overthrows their city-state. The novel was not critically acclaimed, but the elements of feminism, magic, romance, and action-adventure are characteristic of Bradley’s writing. Ghostlight (1995), Witchlight (1996), Gravelight (1997), and Heartlight (1998) are departures from Bradley’s outer space settings; they feature Truth Jourdemayne, a researcher into the
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paranormal, who finds herself drawn into mysteries involving occult phenomena. Bradley has written and edited at least 40 other novels and anthologies. Of particular interest to women are The Ruins of Isis (1979), an ambiguous depiction of a society in which women dominate men, and two historical novels. The Mists of Avalon (1983) became hugely popular and influential, skillfully retelling Arthurian legend from the point of view of Morgan Le Fay. Dramatizing the struggle between traditional Goddess-worship paganism and the spread of Christianity, Bradley presents a fascinating revision of the motivations and agonies of a familiar cast made new: Arthur, Merlin, Lancelot, Gwenhwyfar, Vivian. It is a powerfully feminist novel, depicting both the prosaic and the magical aspects of the lives of the women who provide the novel’s emotional punch. Avalon led to a resurgence of interest in the Matter of Britain in fantasy fiction, not omitting Bradley’s own later The Forest House (1994), a romance set in Roman Britain, and Lady of Avalon (1997). Bradley performed a similar transformation of myth in The Firebrand (1987), which tells the story of Kassandra against the backdrop of the Trojan War and, as in Avalon, of a matriarchal society overpowered by the patriarchal rule of the Greeks and their male pantheon.
OTHER WORKS: Selected: The Door Through Space (1961). I Am a Lesbian (1962). Seven from the Stars (1962). The Colors of Space (for children, 1963). The Bloody Sun (1964). The Brass Dragon (1969). Darkover Landfall (1972). The Jewel of Arwen (short stories, 1974). The Forbidden Tower (1977). Stormqueen (1978). The Endless Voyage (1979). House Between the Worlds (1981). Sharra’s Exile (1981). Hawkmistress (1982). Thendara House (1983). City of Sorcery (1984). The Best of Marian Zimmer Bradley (edited by M. Greenberg, 1985). Lythande (short stories, 1986). The Best of Marion Zimmer Bradley (1988). The Heirs Hammerfell (1989). Sword and Sorceress: An Anthology of Heroic Fiction (editor, 1992). Rediscovery (1993, with M. Lackey). The papers of Marian Zimmer Bradley are collected at Boston University.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Arbor, R., Leigh Brackett, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Anne McCaffrey: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography (1982). Arbor, R., Marion Zimmer Bradley (1986). Benson, G. and P. Stephensen-Payne, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Mistress of Magic: A Working Bibliography (1991). Merlin’s Daughters (1987). Breen, W., The Gemini Problem: A Study in Darkover (1975). Staicar, T., ed., The Feminine Eye: Science Fiction and the Women Who Write It (1982). Weedman, J. B., ed., Women Worldwalkers: New Dimensions of Science Fiction and Fantasy (1985). Wise, S., The Darkover Dilemma: Problems of the Darkover Series (1976). Reference works: CANR (1990). FC (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Twentieth
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Century Science Fiction Writers (1991). St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers (1996). Other references: Interzone (1990). Science Fiction Studies (March 1980). —LYNN F. WILLIAMS, UPDATED BY FIONA KELLEGHAN
BRADSTREET, Anne Dudley Born 1612, Northampton, England; died 1672, Andover, Massachusetts Wrote under: A Gentlewoman in Those Parts; A Gentlewoman in New-England Daughter of Thomas and Dorothy Yorke Dudley; married Simon Bradstreet, 1628 Anne Bradstreet lived for 60 years, a long life for one who was in chronic ill health and who reared eight children. Her youth was spent in England in a particularly fortunate time. Though the queen had died, the times were still Elizabethan and it was still an era of exploration and expansion, of political and cultural growth. Bradstreet had the advantage of living in the household of the Earl of Lincoln, where her father was trusted steward and friend of the earl. Dudley, called by Bradstreet a ‘‘magazine of history,’’ believed in the education of his daughter. She had complete access to the excellent library of the earl. Here, too, she learned to know and love another protégé of the earl, Simon Bradstreet, whom she married two years before the Dudleys and the Bradstreets sailed on the Arbella for Massachusetts Bay in 1630. Bradstreet’s father was governor of Massachusetts, and her husband succeeded him after she had died. Bradstreet was the first British-American to have a volume of poetry published, and at a time when the Puritan woman’s place was in the home. Governor Winthrop, in 1645, was certain that the wife of the Governor of Hartford had lost her wits because she ‘‘gave herself wholly to reading and writing. . . if she had attended her household affairs and such as belong to women and not gone out of her way and calling to meddle in such things as are proper for men, whose minds are stronger, etc., she had kept her wits and might have improved them usefully and honorably in the place God had set her.’’ But Bradstreet did write poems which would not have seen the light of day had not an admiring brother-in-law, with family connivance, carried them off to England and had them published under the astonishing title of The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650). There have been several editions of her work, even into the 20th century. Three are most important: the original British edition of The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America; the second edition (Boston, 1678), with corrections by the author
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and the addition of her original lyrics; and the complete edition of her works, edited by John Harvard Ellis (1867), to which were added her prose pieces. As was becoming to a Puritan woman, Bradstreet’s first poetry was about biblical themes. Her models were Du Bartas’s Divine Weeks and Works (1605), a widely read account of the creation, and Sir Walter Raleigh’s History of the World (1614), a popular book that began with the creation and continued the history of mankind to show God’s divine purpose in human events. The long 174-page first poem in The Tenth Muse consists of quaternions of ‘‘The Foure Elements,’’ ‘‘The Foure Humors of Man’s Constitution,’’ ‘‘The Foure Ages of Man,’’ ‘‘The Foure Monarchies,’’ all written in closed couplets, all slavishly imitative of Du Bartas. Only in ‘‘Choler’’ is there any emotional content, as if the poet were angry at an injustice, perhaps against the treatment of Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams. Following the ‘‘four times four poems’’ is ‘‘ Dialogue between Old England and New, concerning the present troubles, Anno 1642,’’ which is original in content and bold in her political concern. Bradstreet was not pleased with her poems in print. She set about revising her first poetry, and she continued writing anew, this time with freedom and originality in thought and structure. The second (American) edition, with these changes and additions, appeared in 1678, six years after her death. It is upon these new poems that her reputation as a poet of excellence rests. They are free in subject matter, depending upon her own experiences, and are lyric in form. They compose religious meditations, domestic poems, love poems, and elegies upon lost members of her family. The most highly regarded poem of all is ‘‘Contemplations,’’ composed of 33 stanzas, skillfully wrought, each stanza an entity, yet all interrelated and all expressing the poet’s recognition of God in Nature, a subject so rare it didn’t find its fruition until the romantic period. An equally remarkable poem in the second edition is ‘‘The Flesh and the Spirit,’’ which S. E. Morison called ‘‘One of the best expressions in English literature of the conflict described by St. Paul in the eighth chapter of his Epistle to the Romans.’’ The Ellis edition shows still another facet of Bradstreet’s writing, her prose. There is a brief but moving autobiography, revealing the spiritual doubts of a good Puritan woman. Her ‘‘Meditations’’ were short prose pieces showing the influence of the aphoristic essays of Bacon, emblems similar to those of Quarles, and spiritual commentaries like the Psalms, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes.
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1965). The Works of Anne Bradstreet (ed. J. Hensley, 1967). Poems of Anne Bradstreet (ed. R. Hutchinson, 1969). The papers of Anne Bradstreet are at Houghton Library at Harvard University. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Berryman, J., Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1956). Daggett, J. E., ‘‘Another Eighteenth Instance of Anne Bradstreet’s Continuing Appeal’’ (Essex Institute Historical Collections, 3). Fuess, C. M., ‘‘Andover’s Anne Bradstreet, Puritan Poet,’’ in Andover Symbol of New England (1959). Irvin, W. J., ‘‘Allegory and Typology ‘Imbrace and Greet’ Anne Bradstreet’s ‘Contemplations,’’’ in EAL 10. Morison, S. E., Builders of the Bay Colony (1930). Phillips, E., ‘‘Women Among the Moderns Eminent for Poetry,’’ in Theatrum Poetarum (1675). Piercy, J. K., Anne Bradstreet (1965). Rosenfeld, A., ‘‘Anne Bradstreet’s ‘Contemplations’: Patterns of Form and Meaning,’’ in NEQ 43. Tyler, M. C., A History of American Literature During the Colonial Period (1897). Vancura, Z., ‘‘Baroque Prose in America,’’ Studies in English, Charles University (Prague), 4 (1935). Whicher, G. F., ed., Alas, All’s Vanity, or, A Leaf from the First American Edition of Several Poems by Anne Bradstreet (1678). White, M. W., Anne Bradstreet, The Tenth Muse (1971). —JOSEPHINE K. PIERCY
BRANCH, Anna Hempstead Born 18 March 1875, New London, Connecticut; died 8 September 1937, New London, Connecticut Daughter of John Locke and Mary L. Bolles Branch Anna Hempstead Branch, the younger of two children, was born at Hempstead House in New London, Connecticut, where her mother’s family, the Hempsteads, had lived since 1640. Her father was a New York lawyer; her mother wrote popular children’s stories and poems. Following Branch’s graduation from Smith College in 1897, she studied dramaturgy at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, training which is reflected in her numerous verse plays and dramatic monologues.
The estimate of Bradstreet’s later poetry has grown with the years. Moses Coit Tyler and John Harvard Ellis were two scholars who recognized her worth (in the 19th century). Conrad Aiken was the first to include her in his anthology of American literature; Samuel Eliot Morison, the distinguished historian, pronounced her the best American woman poet before Emily Dickinson.
Branch was connected with a number of philanthropic, social work, and art organizations, but most of her time was divided between the Christodora House, a lower east side settlement house, and Hempstead House, where she lived with her mother. At Christodora, Branch established and directed the activities of the Poet’s Guild, an association organized to bring poetry to the neighborhood, especially the children, but which also provided occasions for such poets as Edwin Arlington Robinson, Vachel Lindsay, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Sara Teasdale, Ridgely Torrence, Margaret Widdemer, and Branch herself to read and discuss poetry.
OTHER WORKS: The Works of Anne Bradstreet, in Prose and Verse (ed. J. Harvard, 1867). The Tenth Muse (ed. J. K. Piercy,
Branch’s poems have a variety of subjects and settings, but even those poems with apparently secular subjects are tinged with a religious and mystical apprehension. In Branch’s eclectic first
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volume, Heart of the Road (1901), many of the poems are ‘‘road’’ poems in which the road symbolizes transience. The dramatic monologue ‘‘The Keeper of the Halfway House,’’ for instance, depicts an ironically dependent relationship between the transient and the permanent. An innkeeper, a priestly figure who points ‘‘the way’’ to travelers, sits beside a vacant chair, knowing someone will come and fill it and then move on. As the transients rely on the innkeeper’s abiding presence, so does the innkeeper rely on the succession of travelers to fill his vacant chair. In the same volume Branch takes a hard look at the question of mortality and probes the nature of poetic inspiration. In this volume, the reader is struck by the haunting precision of some of Branch’s lines and by her ability to sustain a mood. Branch’s second volume, The Shoes That Danced (1905), contains a strange mixture of settings (e.g., fairyland, New York City, a monastery) and of characters (e.g., Watteau, shop girls, a Puritan minister). Although in sections of the volume Branch indulges in greeting card sentiments, the title verse drama is intriguing and suggestive. Along with some masterful poems expressing metaphysical doubt and some unexceptional reworkings of great Romantic poems (‘‘Selene’’ of Keats’s ‘‘Endymion’’ and ‘‘The Wedding Feast’’ of Coleridge’s ‘‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’’), Rose of the Wind (1910) contains Branch’s longest and most famous work, ‘‘Nimrod,’’ a Miltonic epic named after the Babylonian king. Although it was highly regarded by Branch’s contemporaries, the diction now seems strained and some of the imagery imitative. The interest of the epic centers on Branch’s curious depiction of language. The work reflects Branch’s private symbolism, her mystical apprehension of language. Branch’s most satisfying volume is Sonnets from a Lock Box (1929). In the title sequence of 38 sonnets, Branch sheds her personae and speaks in the first person. The sequence is distinguished from some of Branch’s earlier work by its directness of expression and originality. It moves from a portrayal of various types of entrapment and enslavement to a search for a means of escape. Branch seeks liberation in mystical systems, invoking alchemy, astrology, cabalistic symbolism, numerology, and ‘‘Holy Logic.’’ Yet Branch intimates that the problem and the solution are secondary to the poetry, the ‘‘music,’’ that they inspire. Branch’s posthumous volume, Last Poems (1944), edited by Ridgely Torrence, her longtime associate at Christodora House, contains some extreme expressions of the mystical preoccupations evident in ‘‘Nimrod’’ and Sonnets from a Lock Box. The most striking poems and the verse drama draw their metaphors from alchemy and numerology. Yet Branch employs these esoteric images in order to approach her final subject—the equation of language, words, and poetry with the Divine. Although Branch’s poetry is at times derivative and contains a large population of fairies, kings, clouds, shepherds, along with the archaic diction appropriate to such a poetic population. Branch had a genuine gift and an authentic voice. Her deepest subjects are language and what is to her its truest expression, poetry—‘‘the changeless reflection of the changing dream.’’ For Branch, words are divine manifestations that not only create, order and give meaning to reality, but that are the very stuff of life: ‘‘I say that
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words are men and when we spell / In alphabets we deal with living things.’’ In her time, Branch was compared to Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, and the metaphysical poets. E. A. Robinson and other contemporaries regarded Branch as a major figure, repeatedly including her name in discussions of poets of the day. Although she was not as successful as were Blake and Yeats in universalizing a private mystical system, she holds a secure place among the minor poets of the United States. OTHER WORKS: A Christmas Miracle and God Bless this House (1925). Bubble Blower’s House (1926). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bolles, J. D., Father Was an Editor (1940). Cary, R., The Early Reception of E. A. Robinson: The First Twenty Years (1974). Widdemer, M., Golden Friends I Had (1964). Reference works: NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). TCA (1942). Other references: NYT (9 Sept. 1937). —ELLEN FRIEDMAN
BRAUN, Lilian Jackson Born circa 1916, Massachusetts Also writes as: Ward Jackson Married Earl Bettinger, 1979 Lilian Jackson Braun’s The Cat Who. . . series has a loyal following of fans, and it is no wonder why to those who have enjoyed her mystery series over the years. Braun’s series follow the life changes and adventures of newspaperman Jim Qwilleran, affectionately known as Qwill to characters in the series and readers alike. Qwill is an amateur detective, and with the aid of his trusty companions, two Siamese cats named Koko and Yum Yum, he solves the most complex of murders. Braun’s first work was published when she was just sixteen and did not involve cats or murder mysteries at all. Instead, she sold articles on baseball, a secret love of hers, to Baseball magazine and the Sporting News under the pseudonym Ward Jackson, believing the sports writing field would accept a man more seriously than a woman. Braun had began reading and writing at the early age of three, inspired by her mother who wanted her to be able to correspond with her grandmother who lived far away. And in fact, though she was not actually writing, she composed her first poem at the age of two: ‘‘Mother Goose is up in the sky, and these are her feathers coming down in my eye.’’ As she has said herself, ‘‘Not bad for a two-year-old.’’ Braun began a career as an advertising copywriter, and her first ‘‘cat story’’ was a short story inspired by the unfortunate death of her Siamese named Koko, who fell from a 10-story window. Neighbors suspected foul play, and thus Braun wrote a short story, ‘‘The Sin of Madame Phloi,’’ to memorialize her beloved cat: ‘‘I was forty years old when my husband gave me a
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Siamese kitten for a birthday present. . . . I named him Koko, after a character in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado.’’ Braun wrote other cat short stories, many of which appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Her fictional writing career truly began in 1966 with the release of The Cat Who Could Read Backwards, in which Qwill, assisted only by Koko in this first novel, solves his first mystery. The first novel introduces Qwilleran, a former crime reporter in the city, who is down and out after a bitter divorce and a history of drinking. He finds a job as a features writer with a Midwestern newspaper, the Daily Fluxion, and in tandem with his job covering the local art beat, he solves the murder of an artist. Braun was immediately recognized as a promising new mystery writer and quickly followed her first novel with two more: The Cat Who Ate Danish Modern (1967), in which Yum Yum is rescued by Qwill after being abandoned, and The Cat Who Turned On and Off (1968). Bored with the lonely life of a writer, Braun soon began work writing columns for the Detroit Free Press on many of the hobbies that would become subjects for her fictional counterpart’s writings, including antiques, interior decorating, art, and food. She remained in this position for 30 years, and after an 18-year hiatus from The Cat Who. . . series, picked up her pen to begin again. In 1986 she released The Cat Who Saw Red, a manuscript she had written two decades before. This newest volume in the series proved that Braun’s work had lost none of its appeal. She earned a nomination for an Edgar award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1986. Braun went on to write many more mysteries starring Koko and Yum Yum and their companion, Qwill. There were 21 by early 1999, and a new one, The Cat Who Robbed the Bank, was due in 2000. Braun says that keeping the series fresh has never been a problem; she follows the changes in the lives of Qwill and the townsfolk of Pickax in Moose County, ‘‘400 miles north of everywhere,’’ evolving the characters with each new novel. Braun writes characters ‘‘like patchwork quilts of all the people I’ve known,’’ she says. Carol Barry wrote in the St. James Guide to Crime and Mystery Writers, ‘‘Braun’s ability to introduce and sustain a strong cast of supporting characters keeps the reader eagerly awaiting the next book. . . . The murders are both surprising and shocking, but the dialogue, the local color, and the characters make up more of the story than the act of murder itself.’’ Braun herself says her twist to the mystery story is the uncanny knack of the two Siamese to uncover clues, ‘‘although it is a tongue-in-cheek theme, that is my premise: that cats are smarter than people, take it or leave it.’’ Her narration is always vivid, lending a feeling to the reader that they actually know the characters and the town of Pickax. Braun’s fans are not only loyal because of the stories of the unique detective work of Qwill and his cats, but also because Braun is able to capture their attention and keep it until the end of the story and even instill anticipation for the next installment. Braun lives with her husband, Earl Bettinger, and her two cats, Koko III and PittiSing, in the mountains of North Carolina near the town of Tryon, only promoting her books at nearby bookstores and cat shows. Braun commented in an article entitled
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‘‘Why Cats?’’: ‘‘As subjects for mysteries, cats are clever, funny, independent, subtle, wily, profound, inscrutable, and—yes— mysterious. And there are no two alike. But if you’re going to write about them, it helps to be part-cat.’’ And as friends know, and readers would agree, Braun must be part-cat to write so well about the felines as she does. OTHER WORKS: The Cat Who Played Brahms (1987). The Cat Who Played Post Office (1987). The Cat Who Knew Shakespeare (1988). The Cat Who Had Fourteen Tales (1988). The Cat Who Sniffed Glue (1988). The Cat Who Went Underground (1989). The Cat Who Talked to Ghosts (1990). The Cat Who Lived High (1990). The Cat Who Knew a Cardinal (1991). The Cat Who Wasn’t There (1992). The Cat Who Moved a Mountain (1992). The Cat Who Went into the Closet (1993). The Cat Who Came to Breakfast (1994). The Cat Who Blew the Whistle (1995). The Cat Who Said Cheese (1996). The Cat Who Tailed a Thief (1997). The Cat Who Sang for the Birds (1998). The Cat Who Saw Stars (1998). BIBLIOGRAPHY: ‘‘The Bumbler and the Silken Sleuths: ‘The Cat Who’ Mysteries of Lilian Jackson Braun,’’ in North Carolina Literary Review (1996). PW (19 Oct. 1998). Reference works: Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (1994). St. James Guide to Crime and Mystery Writers (1996). CA Online (1999). —DEVRA M. SLADICS
BRECKINRIDGE, Sophonisba Preston Born 1 April 1866, Lexington, Kentucky; died 30 July 1948, Chicago, Illinois Daughter of William Campbell Preston and Issa Desha Breckinridge Born of a respected, intellectual family, Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge graduated from Wellesley College in 1888 but experienced a period of uncertainty characteristic of educated women at this time, who were seen as anomalies with few career opportunities available to them. Breckinridge taught high school in Washington, D.C. until 1894, when she returned to her father’s home and law office. By 1895, being the first woman to successfully pass Kentucky’s bar exams, Breckinridge decided to return to school because she could not obtain legal clients; thus began a lifelong career at the University of Chicago. In 1901 Breckinridge earned a Ph.D. in political science and a J.D. in 1904. Simultaneously she worked as an assistant dean of women, and as a faculty member, first in the department of Household Administration, and later in the Social Services Administration. In 1907 Breckinridge moved into Hull House, the social settlement, together with a graduate-school friend, Edith Abbott, and lived there intermittently until 1920. Casting off her previous academically safe style of research, Breckinridge plunged into socially involved observations and analyses. At age forty-one, she
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turned her life and career fully to the study of social welfare and change. Women’s rights soon emerged as a central concern in her writing and everyday life. She became vice president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1911, and as a lawyer she helped draft bills regulating women’s wages and hours of employment. She was also an active member of the National Trade Women’s League, the Women’s League, the Women’s City Club of Chicago, the American Association of University Women, and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Breckinridge was a major force, along with Edith Abbott, in the founding of the Graduate School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. Training large numbers of students (by 1935, 1300 students had registered in the program), she helped shape the profession of social work through rigorous course work, the introduction of the case history method, and her concern with a holistic, political approach to the solution of social problems. In 1927 Breckinridge and Abbott helped found the distinguished professional journal Social Service Review, setting a high standard for scholarly studies of social problems and the profession of social work. Evidence of Breckinridge’s and Abbott’s close friendship and professional support abounds. They were not only members of the same faculty, coadministrators, and coresidents of Hull House for 13 years, but also coauthors and coeditors. In a world hostile to intelligent, assertive women, they established a strong personal network as unique then as it is today. The Modern Household (1912), coauthored by Breckinridge and Marion Talbot, Breckinridge’s colleague and supervisor at the University of Chicago, is an introductory text intended for housewives and college students to help them adapt to social changes affecting the home in modern society. The book covers a variety of topics ranging from the mundane care of the house to ethical concerns in consumerism and the community. Abbott and Breckinridge collaborated in writing Truancy and Non-attendance in the Chicago Schools: A Study of the Social Aspects of the Compulsory Education and Child Labor Legislation of Illinois (1917). Highly committed to the need for education until age sixteen, the authors examine the many factors leading to school absence, such as poverty, mental and physical defects, lack of knowledge of the immigrant parents and child, and delinquency. Documenting the existence and extent of missed school days and the historical development of compulsory education, remedies are suggested. Read today, the authors’ arguments are still timely and the controversy still lively. The continual conflict between young people who do not wish to be educated, and the state which demands they attend educational institutions, is as problematical today as it was 60 years ago. New Homes for Old (1921) is a fascinating account of difficulties encountered by immigrant women in American society. Chapters on altered family relationships, housecleaning, saving and spending money, and child care provide information on the dramatic changes in everyday life facing the foreign-born housewife. Organizations established to help mitigate the stress
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created by these situations are discussed, presenting a historical view of social services in this area. Both Breckinridge and Abbott, as founders in social work education, generated a remarkable series of six books (each authoring three), containing selected documents and case records on a variety of social problems. These texts helped establish the case work method of study and reporting in social work and provided a vivid account of individual lives as they were affected by social change, legislation, and public agencies. Public Welfare Administration in the United States (1927), Breckinridge’s first contribution to this series, notes early (1601) origins of legislation and institutions concerning the destitute and mentally ill. Subsequent changes and the resulting hodge-podge of control and disorder, a legacy to today’s welfare state, are noted in legal precedents and in statements made by leading authorities of the day in agency management and administration. In the revised edition (1938), the expanding but still chaotic role of the federal government is noted. Another volume in the series, Family Welfare Work (1924), presents problems or strains on the ‘‘modern’’ family: physical and mental illnesses; widowhood; the deserted family; unmarried mothers; industrial injuries; care of family members, especially the very young or old. Legislation and the difficulty of enforcing it for each of the above family problems is presented in document, case history form. Breckinridge’s Marriage and the Civic Rights of Women (1932) discusses the relationship between marital status and citizenship. A key legislation reviewed is the Cable Act of 1922: for the first time American women could retain their citizenship when marrying an alien. This book is an astute combination of law, social relations, and women’s rights. The terseness and clarity of the text, the comprehensive work done by women internationally, the case studies of foreign-born women in America, make this an early classic on the legal status of women and the social barriers they encountered in obtaining citizenship rights. Any student and scholar of women’s role in society from 1890 to 1933 will find Women in the Twentieth Century: A Study of Their Political, Social and Economic Activities (1933) a must on their reading lists. The growth of women’s participation in life outside the home emerged from women’s clubs, increased access to institutions for higher education, the suffrage movement, and concern with the political arena. Data is given on income and the distribution of women in various occupations, with a number of tables providing an invaluable baseline for assessing changes or stability in income, and distribution in occupations over time. Since this historical period is remarkable for its relatively high proportion of women professionals, the chapters discussing professional and near-professional women, women’s earnings, and women in business offer factual information that gives a uniquely comparative, historical base to issues still vital to women today. Detailed accounts of early women politicians and women’s voting behavior are also provided. This book in many ways is a handbook of women’s status from 1890 to 1933. The Tenements of Chicago, 1908-1935 (1936) is a massive study of housing conditions and poverty in Chicago. The book, a
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result of 25 years of research, is based on house-to-house canvassing in 151 city blocks, and visits to 18,225 apartments. As a result, Edith Abbott, the primary author, and Breckinridge, the secondary author, actually act as editors for a large number of studies done by their students over the years. The problems noted: lack of enforcement of housing regulations, too few city inspectors, high rents for substandard housing, and large numbers of unemployed people suffering from social stress such as broken families, ill health, and lack of education, are as relevant today as they were back then. The documentation of these problems provides an excellent historical base for understanding these same problems today. Breckinridge’s career is remarkable for its productivity, diversity, and quality. As a woman completely dedicated to social equality, her life was deeply enmeshed with those of the other women who were associated with Hull House: Jane Addams, Julia Lathrop, and Grace and Edith Abbott. Reading and evaluating Breckinridge’s writings, one must consider them products of her contacts with this group, with other intellectuals such as Marion Talbot, and with her students. At the same time, Breckinridge’s influence on others was overwhelming, as documented by her bibliography cards that occupy nearly an inch in the library card catalog at the University of Chicago. Her contributions to education and social reform attest to her success at being a dedicated and intelligent scholar and educator. OTHER WORKS: Administration of Justice in Kentucky (1901). Legal Tender (1903). The Child in the City (1912). The Delinquent Child and the Home (with E. Abbott, 1912). Madeline McDowell Breckinridge (1921). Social Work and the Courts (1934). The Illinois Poor Law and Its Administration (1939). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: DAB (1892 et seq.). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Other references: SSR (Dec. 1948, March 1949, Sept. 1949). —MARY JO DEEGAN
BRÉE, Germaine Born 2 October 1907, Lasalle, France Daughter of Walter and Loïs Andrault Brée Teacher and critic of French language, literature, and culture, Germaine Brée was the first of six children born to her French Protestant mother and the third of eight children born to her British clergyman father. Both Brée’s parents were bilingual so she grew up fluent in both languages. She studied at the Jersey Ladies College on the island of Jersey (1917-22), the Ecole Normale at Nîmes (1922-26), the Faculty of Letters at the Sorbonne (1926-31), and Bryn Mawr College (1931-32). Brée began her teaching career at the Lycée of Oran in Algeria (1932-36) and then returned to Bryn Mawr, where she
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taught from 1936 to 1953. During World War II, Brée served in the French army as an ambulance driver in North Africa and as an intelligence officer in France. From 1953 to 1960 she was chairperson of the Department of French and head of the Romance Languages Department at New York University, and from 1960 to 1973 she was Vilas Professor of French and a permanent member of the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. In 1973 she accepted a Kenan professorship in the humanities at Wake Forest University. Brée has received over two dozen honorary degrees and has lectured widely in the U.S., Europe, and Australia. She has been appointed to a large number of national academic and scholarly committees and was president of the Modern Language Association of America in 1975. Brée is the author of numerous books, major anthologies, innumerable articles, introductions, prefaces, and book reviews. Many of her doctoral students have become the leading teacher-scholars of their generation. What is most characteristic of Brée’s criticism is her suspicion that systems tend to mystify rather than clarify. Although she is well versed in all the ‘‘isms’’ that have informed 20th-century French culture, she does not expound a single truth. Rather, she invites her readers and students to remain open to the richness of competing discourses in literary studies. Her books on Proust (1950, 1966), Gide (1953), and Camus (1959) are exemplary introductory studies to the major texts of these writers. Brée always situates the literary text in its cultural context and gives particular attention to its intellectual and ethical preoccupations, but her emphasis is on the text as a literary construct, as a piece of fiction. She insists on the pleasures of reading, the sensuous aspect of literary discourse, and the intellectual reward found in discovering relationships between parts. Her book on Women Writers in France (1973) was one of the first attempts in English to trace the main lines of the feminist debate in France and the position of French women writers vis-à-vis the debate and their craft. Brée’s most impressive published work, Le XXe siècle II, 1920-1970 (1978), is a synthesis of the French cultural scene. It ranges from linguistics and the cinema to cybernetics and molecular biology. The volume is divided into five parts: history, politics, social climate, intellectual currents, and literary movements. The last part is the most original. Brée chooses two figures to illustrate each decade: for the 1940s she chooses Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus; for 1950-70 she chooses Marguerite Duras and Claude Simon. Very infrequently does an academic critic who is not explicitly feminist select women writers as part of the mainstream of contemporary literature. It is a sign of Brée’s commitment to her own point of view, as well as a sign of her sense of timing. As she did in her study of Camus and Sartre: Crisis and Commitment (1972), Brée reformulates contemporary problems by demystifying them. She is one of the rare literary critics who present both text and context; she views literature both as a game of words and as a human document. Brée is an outstanding representative of the humanist tradition in academic criticism and in teaching. By the beginning of the 1980s, Brée had established a firm position for herself in the field of French literature. She holds membership in nearly a dozen academic and writing associations,
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including the Writer’s Guild and PEN, and received a National Book Award nomination for Camus and Sartre: Crisis and Commitment. Although retired since 1984 from her position as the Kenan Professor of Humanities at Wake Forest University, Brée has continued to make important contributions to this field. In 1983 she updated and revised her 1978 work, Literature Française, 1920-1970, published in English as Twentieth Century French Literature. This ‘‘nimble, if promiscuous, study of literary history,’’ as one critic called it, covers a vast amount of territory. Brée is at her strongest when speaking of the writers she knows well, such as Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir, and Duras. In 1990, at the age of eighty-three, Brée published Le Monde Fabuleux de J. M. G. Le Clézio, a study of the French author and his works. Bettina Knapp commented: ‘‘Clarity and cogency, two of Germaine Brée’s many remarkable characteristics as a critic, serve her well in her latest volume. . . . The novels. . .are all explored by Brée in her typically scrupulous manner, underscoring their thematic significance, artistic value, and fascination for young and old.’’ Brée continued editing and penning forewords and introductions to scholarly volumes into the 1990s, as well as editing a series of translated French poetry books for Wake Forest University Press. As a critic whose reviews and critical essays remained in demand, Brée is in little danger of falling into obscurity. Her early contributions to the field, such as her works on Proust and Gide, are still considered among the most comprehensive and clearly written books on these much discussed authors. Truly a grande dame of French literary study, Brée has continued to provide the academic world with fresh work and to tackle new problems, for which the scholars in her field can be truly grateful. OTHER WORKS: Du temps perdu au temps retrouvé: Introduction à l’oeuvre de Marcel Proust (1950). Marcel Proust and Deliverance from Time (trans. by C. J. Richards and A. D. Truitt, 1956). André Gide, l’insaisissable Protée: Etude critique de l’oeuvre d’André Gide (1953). An Age of Fiction: The French Novel from Gide to Camus (with M. Guiton, 1957). Camus (1959). Contes et nouvelles: 1950-1960 (with Georges Markow-Totevy, 1961, revised edition published as Contes et nouvelles: 1950-1970). Gide (1963). Albert Camus (1964). Voix d’aujourd’hui (with Micheline Dufau, 1964). The World of Marcel Proust (1966). Essays in Honor of David Lyall Patrick (1971). Women Writers in France: Variations on a Theme (1973) BIBLIOGRAPHY: Lesage, L., and A.Yon, eds., Dictionnaire des critiques littéraires: Guide de la critique française du XXe siècle (1969). Marks, E., ‘‘Germaine Brée: A Partial Portrait,’’ in University Women (1979). Stambolian, G., ed., Twentieth Century French Fiction: Essays for Germaine Brée (1975). Wakeman, J., ed., World Authors (1975). Reference works: CA (1981, 1992). CANR (1981). Other references: NYT (31 July 1983, 9 Dec. 1984). NYTBR (5 Apr. 1959). ‘‘Retired Professor a Renaissance Woman,’’ Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service (1995). Poirot-Delpech, B., ‘‘Littérature française 1920-1970,’’ in Le Monde (30 June 1978).
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Virginia Quarterly Review (Winter 1984). World Literature Today (Autumn 1991). —ELAINE MARKS, UPDATED BY LISI SCHOENBACH AND LEAH J. SPARKS
BRENNAN, Maeve Born 1917, Dublin, Ireland Daughter of James Brennan and wife; married St. Clair McKelway The daughter of an Irish partisan, Maeve Brennan spent most of her early life in Dublin. In 1934 her family emigrated to America where, in the early 1940s, Brennan joined the staff of Harper’s Bazaar and then the New Yorker. She originated the ‘‘long-winded lady’’ column featured in the New Yorker’s ‘‘Talk of the Town,’’ and published most of her stories in the magazine. Her marriage to fellow staffer St. Clair McKelway lasted seven years. In 1973 Brennan received a literature award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Brennan’s first book, In and Out of Never-Never Land (1969), is a collection of stories published between 1953 and 1968. Outstanding tales include ‘‘The Eldest Child,’’ concerning the death of a newborn son and his parents’ separate grief; ‘‘Stories of Africa,’’ wherein a gentle Irish-woman nervously entertains an elderly bishop and both find themselves surprisingly comforted. The Long-Winded Lady (1969) includes 47 nonfiction vignettes from the New Yorker. Writing about the city she loves, however, Brennan confesses in her introduction that ‘‘if she has a title it is one held by many others, that of a traveler in residence.’’ Brennan’s third collection, Christmas Eve (1974), introduces waspish American critic Charles Runyon, a not-always-welcome guest at fashionable Herbert’s Retreat. Runyon, petty in a delightfully vicious sort of way, is at his best in a story such as ‘‘The Stone Hot-Water Bottle,’’ where his hostess faces a crisis of major proportions over which guest will use the heirloom which Runyon has appropriated for his personal comfort. While her ‘‘long-winded lady’’ sketches may endear her to the hearts of New Yorkers, Brennan’s real strength lies in her short stories: in the psychological complexity of her characters, and in her wit and careful detail. She has the power to move her reader by means of ordinary circumstances, to probe the inner fears of her characters, to illuminate their hearts. The ambivalence of love and the breakdown of communication are also frequent themes in Brennan’s work. She examines with precision those loveless marriages between two essentially good, decent people who grow apart without ever really knowing why. One does not actively dislike her characters—even the worst are only poor souls who set off on the wrong foot and were never able to get right again. Brennan’s best work is crystalline; the reader perceives a brilliant clarity until another facet is turned to the light, and then
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realizes he/she is looking not through the crystal but into it. Nothing is ever quite as simple as it appears to be; this is the essence of Brennan’s art. OTHER WORKS: The Springs of Affection (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Atlantic (Oct. 1969). NYTBR (23 Feb. 1969, 4 Aug. 1974). Time (1 July 1974). —JOANNE MCCARTHY
BRENT, Linda See JACOBS, Harriet
BRES, Rose Falls Born 1869, New Orleans, Louisiana; died 14 November 1927, Jacksonville, Florida Also wrote under: Rose C. Falls Daughter of Isaac W. and Rosetta Falls; married William A. Bres, 1902 Little is known about Rose Falls Bres’ childhood, which was apparently spent in New Orleans. In her early teens she lived in Paducah, Kentucky, where she worked for a newspaper and read law. Admitted to the bar in Kentucky (circa 1889), Bres found that such credentials did not transfer to Louisiana when she returned to New Orleans to practice law there. While waiting to be admitted to the Louisiana bar, Bres worked as a secretary and a journalist. Her first copyrighted work was ‘‘Cheniere Caminada, or The Wind of Death’’ (1893), a narrative account of a storm that killed 1607 persons in the Grand Isle area of Louisiana. During her almost 18 years of law practice in Louisiana, Bres was active in politics and journalism. She was also associate editor of the ERA, a woman’s publication. In 1907 Bres copyrighted three plays from New Orleans, one of which, ‘‘The Law and the Lady Down in Dixie,’’ reflects many of her experiences as a woman professional in 19th century Southern society and in politics. When Bres moved to New York City in 1910, she became a member of the National Women Lawyers Association and later national president (1925-27) and editor of their publication, The Women Lawyers’ Journal (1921-24). She served as counsel to the Lucy Stone League and was editor of a short-lived (due to World War I) magazine, Oyez!, published by women lawyers in 1916. Throughout her career, Bres worked for passage of uniform divorce and marriage laws and for women to have the right to use their own names. Labor laws, property rights, treatment of immigrants, and capital punishment laws were also major concerns of hers. The Law and the Woman (1917), dedicated to the Women’s Press Club of New York, was favorably reviewed by the New York
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Times: ‘‘As the first attempt to present in a single volume the status of women in the United States under the Federal and the State Laws, Mrs. Bres’ book has unique value and interest. . . . Her digest and discussion of the present legal status of women in this country is scholarly and readable and makes a worthwhile addition to feminist literature.’’ Bres’ ‘‘lost’’ Louisiana plays seem never to have been produced or published. The longest of the three, ‘‘The Law and the Lady Down in Dixie,’’ is a three-act melodrama of almost classic mode for the type, although the playwright uses a series of ironic touches which modernize the melodrama form. In the play, a politician expresses his fondness for the ladies and says they can always find him when they need him. But when questioned directly on whether he will support legislation to change the Civil Code of Louisiana ‘‘which has come down from Napoleon,’’ he declares, rather regretfully: ‘‘The time is not yet right for the ladies.’’ OTHER WORKS: ‘‘Turn of the Wheel: A Humorous One Act Sketch’’ (unpublished; 12 Jul. 1907). ‘‘A Fairy Tale: A One Act Sketch’’ (unpublished, 9 Aug. 1907). Maids, Wives and Widows: The Law of the Land and of the Various States as It Affects Women (1918). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bres, R. F., ‘‘Oyez! from Paducah,’’ in Everybody’s Magazine (Dec. 1916). Wilkins, Z. P., ‘‘Portias Undisguised,’’ in The Woman Citizen (Sept. 1924). Other references: Women Lawyers’ Journal 16 (1928). —DOROTHY H. BROWN
BREUER, Bessie Born 19 October 1893, Cleveland, Ohio; died 26 September 1975 Daughter of Samuel A. and Julia Bindley Freedman; married Mr. Breuer; Carl Kahler; Henry Varnum Poor, 1925 After graduating from the Missouri State University School of Journalism, Bessie Breuer worked for several years as a newspaper reporter, first for the St. Louis Times and subsequently for the New York Tribune, where she was editor of the women’s department and briefly, Sunday editor. After staff work for the American Red Cross publicity department, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Harper’s, she went to France where her friendships with Kay Boyle and Laurence Vail encouraged her to turn her attention toward fiction writing. She wrote for such periodicals as World’s Work, Pictorial Review (often in collaboration with Henry Ford), House Beautiful, Mademoiselle, and the New Yorker until the 1960s. She received second prize in the O. Henry Memorial Award for short fiction in 1944. In 1948, her only play, Sundown Beach, was produced by Elia Kazan at the Actor’s Studio in New York City. The play ran for seven performances after having been dismissed by the critics as an ‘‘emotional vaudeville.’’
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Breuer’s early publications often centered on the significance and implications of postsuffrage feminism. One of these articles, ‘‘Feminism’s Awkward Age’’ (Harper’s, April 1925), a discussion of the difficulty the modern woman faces in attempting to integrate personal and sexual needs with vocational and political goals, provides an excellent introduction to concerns which were crucial in Breuer’s later fiction. She often concentrates on the fate of women who flounder in endless introspection, unsatisfying jobs, and painful relationships; women who lack either the consolations of a conventional identity or a mass movement in which to submerge themselves. In her autobiographical sketch for Twentieth Century Authors, Breuer describes her fictional priorities: ‘‘Somewhere Freud has said that psychologists have frank records of the male, but the female is shrouded and secreted and known to no man. That has been to me our great sin as writers, those of us who are women: that nowhere in our history as artists have we been the earth shakers because we dared not. So I try, oh, just a tiny bit, to write of what I truly see and have known; and not being a member of some powerful literary clan, am scolded for my lack of morality, or ignored.’’ Following these priorities, Breuer’s fiction is sexually explicit and unsparing in its delineation of her heroine’s confusion. These tendencies, as well as her experimental style, caused the critical reception to her novel to be frequently negative. Breuer’s first novel, Memory of Love (1934), is written in the voice of a married man as he remembers an affair he had years before with a woman separated from her husband. For the narrator, a man who prides himself on his sexual exploits, this woman is unexpectedly captivating. Alternating between equally intense moments of attraction and repulsion, the narrative recounts their passionate, tempestuous affair. Finally, the protagonist is forced to abandon this woman when his wealthy parents threaten to cut off his income unless he returns to his more socially prestigious wife. The novel seems to stand as Breuer’s commentary on the extreme vulnerability of the sexually active ‘‘new’’ woman. Breuer’s most successful novel, The Daughter (1938), is the story of a young woman, Katy, and her divorced mother. Living on an income provided by Katy’s prominent father (with the stipulation that no acknowledgment of the connection be made public), the two women drift from one second-rate resort to another. The mother enjoys a series of casual affairs while the daughter retreats more deeply into a carefully constructed aesthetic artifice of classical music and contemporary poetry. Most of the action takes place in a west coast Florida hotel where the daughter has her first affair. Lacking her mother’s resiliency, this purely physical involvement almost destroys her and she attempts suicide. In addition to its remarkable characterization of Katy, The Daughter is memorable because of Breuer’s repeated juxtaposition of the aimless resort world of her characters and the wider panorama of world events. If her characters do not care, Breuer seems to, and insistently reminds her readers of the sociopolitical background against which her novel is set. Only Katy has any sense of the significance of this wider world. The best she can do,
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however, is to fantasize that in a different place, with a different personality, she too could have been a Jane Addams or a La Pasionaria. Joanna Trask, the heroine of Breuer’s The Actress (1955), seems at first to be a continuation of the passive, introspective, and excessively vulnerable heroines typical of Breuer’s early fiction. But the novel traces Joanna’s gradual development, a process characterized by Breuer as a movement toward assuming responsibility for her own actions and control over her own fate. She becomes more active than acted upon and, for the first time in Breuer’s fiction, sexual experience is viewed as necessary and healthy. The novel ends with the optimistic assertion that Joanna will not only combine a career and a family, but do it well. Breuer’s fiction will strike the modern reader as unexpectedly contemporary, in part because of Breuer’s innovative narrative techniques and her interest in the relationship between woman’s sexual and social identities. Breuer is an often fascinating writer who deserves more serious attention than she has yet received. OTHER WORKS: The Bracelet of Wavia Lea and Other Stories (1947). Take Care of My Roses (1961). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Blake, F., The Strike in the American Novel (1972). Cormany, S., The Common Orchestra: The Role of the Artist in the Fiction of Bessie Breuer and Tess Slesinger (dissertation, 1993). Hill, V., Strategy and Breadth: The Socialist-Feminist in American Fiction (dissertation, 1979). Reference works: American Women, D. Howes, ed. (1939). TCA (1942). Other references: CW (24 Sept. 1948). NR (20 Sept. 1948). NY (18 Sept. 1948). Newsweek (20 Sept. 1948). SR (16 April 1938, 28 Dec. 1946, 17 Jan. 1949). Theatre Arts (Jan. 1949). WLB (Oct. 1938). —VICKI LYNN HILL
BREWSTER, Martha Wadsworth Born circa 1730s; died date unknown Married Oliver Brewster; children: Ruby, Wadsworth Martha Wadsworth Brewster is one of only four colonial women who published volumes of their verse before the Revolution. Materials for reconstructing the life of Brewster are meager: we know only what is included in the Poems on Divers Subjects (1757). Her acrostic verses name her family, husband Oliver, and children Ruby and Wadsworth, but they tell little more about them than Brewster’s concern for their spiritual development and good conduct. Brewster probably lived for most of her life in Lebanon, Connecticut. Beyond these sketchy details of family connection, Brewster’s life remains an enigma. Her 21 poems vary widely in theme and form: the more than 1100 lines include letters, farewells to friends
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who are moving, epithalamiums, eulogies, scriptural paraphrases, a love poem, a quaternion, a dream (in prose), and meditations. Conventional religious and family themes predominate, but other materials—the violence of military encounter, the schisms of the Great Awakening, the muted stirring of personal ambition—are treated as well. The untitled verse preface to Brewster’s Poems detailed the risks a literary woman undertook in colonial society: ‘‘Pardon her bold Attempt who has reveal’d / Her thoughts to View, more fit to be Conceal’d / Since thus to do was urged Vehemently, / Yet most no doubt will call it Vanity. . . .’’ The possibility of incurring blame for stepping outside customary women’s roles was clearly in Brewster’s thoughts. She opened her preface humbly, even defensively, protesting that her ‘‘Muse had but a single Aim, / My self and nearest Friends to Entertain. . . .’’ Recognizing the unusual nature of her ambition, Brewster asked only the opportunity to develop her literary skills. No recorded response to Brewster’s Poems documents the volume’s reception, but it appeared in two editions, one in New London, Connecticut (1757), and another in Boston (1758). Such reprinting suggests an audience beyond Brewster’s immediate circle of family and friends. Before the poems were published, however, they apparently attracted less favorable notice. Some of Brewster’s readers were sufficiently impressed by her work to doubt its authenticity. The headnote to her verse paraphrase of II Chronicles 6:16-18 notes that ‘‘It being falsly Reported that the Author borrowed her Poetry from Watts and others; the following Scripture was presented to her, to Translate into Verse, in a few Minutes Extempore, as a vindication from that Aspersion; which was accordingly Performed. . . .’’ Women poets in colonial America must have been considered rare indeed to excite such skepticism. But whatever the response from Brewster’s contemporaries, her Poems on Divers Subjects will interest readers today as a representative voice from the early history of American poetry. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cowell, P., Women Poets in Pre-Revolutionary America, 1650-1775 (1981). Silverman, K., Colonial American Poetry (1968). Watts, E. S., The Poetry of American Women from 1632 to 1945 (1977). —PATTIE COWELL
BRIGGS, Emily (Pomona) Edson Born 14 September 1830, Burton, Ohio; died 3 July 1910, Washington, D.C. Wrote under: Olivia Daughter of Robert and Mary Polly Umberfield Edson; married John R. Briggs, Jr., circa 1854 During the Civil War, Emily Edson Briggs’s husband was a clerk in the U.S. Congress under John W. Forney, owner of the
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Washington Chronicle and Philadelphia Press. Forney asked her to write for the Philadelphia paper after he discovered she had written an anonymous letter on behalf of women government clerks. Under the pseudonym Olivia, Briggs wrote social news columns for the Philadelphia Press from 1866 to 1882. In 1882 she became the first president of the short-lived Woman’s National Press Association. By the 1880s, however, Briggs had given up journalism to become a well-known Washington hostess. In her old age she collected her favorite columns into a book, The Olivia Letters (1906). Briggs’s column established her as a leading ‘‘literary lady’’ of post-Civil War Washington, along with Mary Clemmer Ames, Sara Clarke Lippincott, and Mary Abigail Dodge. Unlike some of her contemporaries, however, Briggs restricted herself primarily to society news and issues affecting women. As a woman she felt she should not—or could not—compete with men. In a column on Charles Sumner, she explained: ‘‘This article is not written with the attempt to portray that which makes Charles Sumner the central figure of the American Senate. No woman possesses the gift to explore his mind. . . .’’ Given her pseudonym, ‘‘Olivia,’’ by a Philadelphia editor, Briggs always wrote under it, although she made no attempt to hide her true identity. Leaving the narration of actual events to male correspondents, Briggs explained that her aim was to ‘‘depict the delicate life currents and details.’’ To this end she composed ‘‘pen pictures’’ of leading political figures, made up lists of ‘‘matrimonial eligibles’’ among Capital bachelors, and covered the White House festivities. Equivocal on woman suffrage, Briggs nevertheless covered suffrage conventions in minute—if not always flattering—detail. Although she was one of the first women offered admittance to the congressional press gallery, she did not make use of the privilege. She felt that, as a woman, she was not really welcome there, and she gained news from her social contacts with political figures. Conscious of the changes wrought by the war on the Capital’s political atmosphere, Briggs expressed sympathy for freed blacks. Even in these more serious moments, however, she would ask wittily, ‘‘What business have they to be born? Isn’t it a crime of the darkest dye?’’ Briggs claimed to look askance on society, warning readers, ‘‘All is glare, glitter and pomp.’’ In view of her own career as a hostess, however, her comments may have been intended to assure readers who lacked access to society that they would not care to participate even if they could. Valuable as a source of social history, The Olivia Letters contain reprints of columns on personalities involved in the Johnson impeachment trial and gossipy portrayals of other notables. Her writing suffers from typical Victorian failings—gushy sentiment and flowery metaphors. But Briggs merits attention because she was the first, and one of the best known, of a long line of Washington society reporters. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Beasley, M. H., The First Women Washington Correspondents (George Washington University Studies No. 4,
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1976). Ingersoll, L. D., The Life of Horace Greeley (1873). Marzolf, M. T., Up From the Footnote (1977). Reference works: NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Other references: Washington Evening Star (4 July 1910). WP (10 July 1994, 5 July 1910). Washington Times (1 Nov. 1903). —MAURINE BEASLEY
BRINK, Carol Ryrie Born 28 December 1865, Moscow, Idaho; died 15 August 1981, La Jolla, California Daughter of Alexander and Henrietta Watkins Ryrie; married Raymond W. Brink, 1918 Carol Ryrie Brink grew up in the West she later used for the settings of some of her works. Her father was a Scotsman who emigrated to Idaho, helped to plan and lay out the town of Moscow, and became its first mayor. Her mother’s family were also pioneers, moving gradually westward from Boston to Missouri, to Wisconsin, and then to Idaho. Brink lost both parents before she was eight and went to live with her aunt and her maternal grandmother, who told her stories about her childhood in Wisconsin. A lonely child, Brink amused herself by reading, drawing, making up stories, and riding for hours about the countryside. While still in high school, she published poems in small magazines. She attended the University of Idaho and the University of California at Berkeley, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1918. After Brink’s marriage she moved with her husband to St. Paul, Minnesota, where the couple spent most of their lives. After their son and daughter were born, Brink began to compose stories for children. Altogether Brink wrote about 30 books of fiction and nonfiction, mostly for children, and more than 150 short stories, articles, poems, and plays. Among her numerous awards are a Litt.D. from the University of Idaho, and in 1954 Hamline University named her one of Minnesota’s most outstanding women. Brink’s first book, Anything Can Happen on the River! (1934), a fictionalization of some actual family adventures along the Seine, won praise from reviewers, but its appeal has not endured. Caddie Woodlawn (1935) received many awards, among them the Newbery Medal and the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, and is now regarded as a modern classic of children’s literature. Based upon the reminiscences of Brink’s grandmother, Caddie Woodlawn recreates Wisconsin pioneer life through the lively doings of spunky eleven-year-old Caddie and her brothers, Tom and Warren. The characters are memorably drawn and their conversations are fresh and individualized. Rich details fill out the episodic story to vividly depict life on the Wisconsin frontier during the Civil War. Brink’s own grandmother, Caroline Woodhouse, is the Caddie of the book; most of the other characters also existed, and the events find their source in actual occurrences. The work has been translated into a dozen languages, and Caddie Woodlawn, A Play (1945) has been produced many times.
Magical Melons (1944) offers 14 more stories about this family and their homesteading neighbors during 1863-66. Less unified, it has never achieved the popularity of Caddie Woodlawn. While high in entertainment value, few of Brink’s early books have retained the original level of readership. Although the dialogue and episodes are true to a child’s point of view, the plots are contrived, climaxes are predictable, and language and incidents seem dated and occasionally patronizing. The frivolous fantasy, Baby Island (1937), reprinted more than a dozen times, tells the comic adventures of two young girls shipwrecked with four babies and cast upon a desert island in the Pacific. In The Highly Trained Dogs of Professor Petit (1953), young Willie finds jobs for the professor’s dogs in the little town of Puddling Center, restoring the professor’s fortunes and leaving the town a happier place. The Pink Motel (1959) also reveals fantasy overtones as it plays with form in bringing together an engaging combination of eccentrics in a Florida seaside motel. Brink’s All Over Town (1939), which relates the wellintentioned efforts of several children to help out their townspeople, was based on memories of her own childhood in a small Idaho town. Family Grandstand (1952) and Family Sabbatical (1956) concern the escapades of a professor’s children at home in their small, midwestern university town and while on leave for a few months in France. In spite of being spun out, these lightweight entertainments project a certain old-fashioned charm. Their abundance of action and warm humor offset the predictable plots and stereotyped characters. Two Are Better Than One (1968) and Louly (1974), about life around 1908 in Warsaw, Idaho, from the point of view of three girls in their early teens, find their source in Brink’s own youth. Fun-loving, flirtatious, resourceful Louly is a strong and memorable figure. Brink’s books for adults include Harps in the Wind (1947), a biographical study of the singing Hutchinson family, and Château Saint Barnabé (1963), an intriguing account of the five weeks Brink, her husband, and small son spent in a French pension where an American ex-patriot told them her strange story. Also with a French setting is The Headland (1955), a curiously flawed novel about five young people to whom World War II brings tragedy. Brink’s other adult novels include Buffalo Coat (1944), about the family of a physician in the Idaho town of Opportunity in the 1890s, and Strangers in the Forest (1959), concerning exploitation of western pine forests. Also set in Opportunity is Snow in the River (1964), which Brink has said is her own favorite; although ‘‘freely fictionalized, it is probably as near to an autobiography as I shall ever write.’’ This uneven story of the need for order and propriety, with its fine picture of ambitious Uncle Douglas, received the National League of American Pen Women award for fiction in 1966. Brink’s writing is marked by a graceful, leisurely narrative style, an ability to capture the atmosphere of places, careful research, warmth, and a good sense of humor. Although her children’s books sometimes tend to be cute and melodramatic, they speak to the secret desire of the young for fun and adventure in a world in which good and evil are easily identified and good
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inevitably triumphs. The most substantial of Brink’s works are her period stories, and it is the best of these, Caddie Woodlawn, winning her a position among the most distinguished and bestloved of American writers for children and young people.
OTHER WORKS: Mademoiselle Misfortune (1935). Lad with a Whistle (1941). Narcissa Whitman (1945). Lafayette (1946). Minty et Compagnie (1948). Stopover (1951). The Twin Cities (1961). Andy Buckram’s Tin Men (1966). Winter Cottage (1968). The Bad Times of Irma Baumlein (1972).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: The Junior Book of Authors, S. J. Kunitz and H. Haycraft, eds. (1951). More Books by More People: Interviews with 65 Authors of Books for Children (1974). Newbery Medal Books: 1922-1955 (1955). SAA (1971). —ALETHEA K. HELBIG
BRISTOW, Gwen Born 16 September 1903, Marion, South Carolina; died August 1980 Daughter of Louis Judson and Caroline Winkler Bristow; married Bruce Manning, 1929 From childhood, Gwen Bristow intended to be a writer; her first story was written when she was six and her first appearance in print came when she was twelve. At Judson College in Alabama she wrote plays and ghostwrote required essays for her friends. After a year at the Pulitzer School of Journalism, Columbia University, she joined the staff of the New Orleans TimesPicayune, for which she reported a wide variety of stories. Her first published novels were four detective stories, written in collaboration with her husband Bruce Manning, also a journalist. One of them, the Invisible Host (1930), was filmed by Columbia in 1934 under the title, The Ninth Guest. In 1934 the Mannings moved to Hollywood, where Bristow’s husband began a career as a screenwriter. Around 1934 Bristow began the Plantation Trilogy (1937-40), her most important and most original work. The series, set in significant historical moments and using succeeding generations of the same family, epitomizes Southern history. Deep Summer (1937) shows how pioneering white settlers came from the southeast and from New England to the east bank of the Mississippi River. The land and their experiences change them, and the central family develops several branches: two wealthy, plantation-owning lines of descent, one landless poor white line, and one black line. The Handsome Road (1938), set in Civil War times, centers around an aristocratic young woman and a poor white girl,
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whose lives parallel each other in a number of aspects. Both are deeply hurt by the war and Reconstruction, although in different ways. Their growing enmity symbolizes the gulf between the classes they represent. This Side of Glory (1940), set around World War I, tells of the marriage between a young man from the aristocratic family and a young woman from the poor white (now middle class) one. He is portrayed as a representative of the Old South, while she is a representative of the New; as Bristow says, he is a Southerner and she is an American. Their relationship is difficult because of their differences in character and heritage, but their successful alliance is meant to signify the eventual alliance of the traditions they represent. Tomorrow Is Forever (1943; filmed by RKO in 1946) is a World War II propaganda novel, which uses a variant of the Enoch Arden story. Here the central character’s first husband, thought dead in World War I, returns at the start of the second war. Concealing his identity, he permanently changes the life of his wife and her second family. Bristow’s other three novels are all historical, and they all deal with young women who lack the support of families but who are strong and find enough resources within themselves to build good lives. Jubilee Trail (1950; filmed by Republic in 1954) and Calico Palace (1970), both set in California during Gold Rush days, have very similar plotlines: a headstrong young woman rashly enters into a marriage that is happy but ends abruptly. Forced to fend for herself and her baby, the heroine discovers new strengths and develops old skills; her vitality and generosity enable her to form strong friendships with both women and men. Both novels conclude with the conventionally happy solution of marriage, but for neither woman is the marriage a retreat from autonomy and each man recognizes the value of the woman’s assertiveness and strength. Celia Garth (1959), set in South Carolina during the revolutionary war times, contains another such protagonist; although the plotline is somewhat different, her character develops in a similar way. Bristow’s work is popular, of the sort generally considered romantic women’s fiction. But her female protagonists are more rounded, more assertive and independent, more interesting than most in that genre. Her depiction of Southern history from the perspective of the poor white is a complement to the familiar myth of the magnolia-laden Old South. Her contribution is modest but significant.
OTHER WORKS: The Alien, and Other Poems (1926). The Gutenberg Murders (with B. Manning, 1931). The Mardi Gras (with B. Manning, 1932). Two and Two Make Twenty-Two (with B. Manning, 1932). Gwen Bristow: A Self Portrait (1940).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Taylor, M. G. S., ‘‘Gwen Bristow’s Portrayal of the South in Times of Crisis’’ (thesis, 1972). Theriot, B. J., Gwen
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Bristow: A Biography with Criticism of Her Plantation Trilogy (dissertation, 1994). Reference works: American Novelists of Today (1951). CB (1940). Other references: NYHTB (12 Feb. 1950). Wings (Literary Guild) (March 1950). Gwen Bristow: Historical Novelist (videocassette, 1976). —MARY JEAN DEMARR
BRODY, Jane E. Born 19 May 1941, Brooklyn, New York Daughter of Lillian Kellner and Sidney Brody; married Richard Enquist, 1966; children: Lee Erik and Lorin Michael Hailed as ‘‘The High Priestess of Health’’ by Time magazine, writer and journalist Jane Brody began her career by obtaining her B.S. from New York State College in 1962. Followed by a masters in journalism from the University of Wisconsin in 1963, Brody then went on to receive honorary degrees from Princeton University (H.H.D., 1987) and Hamline University (L.H.D., 1993). Straight out of college in 1963, Brody went to work as a reporter for the Minneapolis Tribune, where she spent two years learning the ropes. She moved to New York City in 1965 where she began writing for the New York Times, elevated to the position of science writer. She started the ‘‘Personal Health’’ column, for which she has become best known, in 1976. Ironically, Brody originally believed her weekly column on health would be a burden, and committed to writing it for only three months. Fortunately for many health-conscious people, it quickly became the most popular feature on the New York Times news service. Brody has spent her days since then writing about everything from cancer and dental sealants to stress management and healthy cooking. In 1966 Brody married Richard Engquist, with whom she would go on to write her first book, Secrets of Good Health (1970). With Arthur Holleb, Brody would also write You Can Fight Cancer and Win (1977), both of which have gone out of print. Several years later, Brody had gained enough name recognition and clout at the New York Times to get top billing in her publications, releasing Jane Brody’s Nutrition Book: A Lifetime Guide to Good Eating for Better Health and Weight Control (1981), covering nutrition and diet, weight control, complete with complex carbohydrate-based recipes (rice, potatoes, pasta, and beans, for example) and calorie and nutrition charts. It became a bestseller, and her success hasn’t wavered since. Jane Brody’s The New York Times Guide to Personal Health (1982) collected selections from Brody’s column, covering health and medicine from November 1976 to the date of publication. More books soon followed: Jane Brody’s Good Food Book: Living the High Carbohydrate Way (1985), a cookbook containing more than 350 simple and healthy recipes based on complex
carbohydrates, as well as information about maintaining a balanced lifestyle; Jane Brody’s Good Food Gourmet: Recipes and Menus for Delicious and Healthful Entertaining (1990), a collection of more than 500 recipes designed for entertaining, including appetizers, entrees, vegetable dishes, and desserts, as well as cooking techniques, ingredients, and equipment; Jane Brody’s Good Seafood Book (1994), written with collaborator Richard Flaste, a primer on seafood and a collection of 200 recipes, with everything from sources of dietary protein to a comprehensive overview of seafood lore—including debunking the American myth that fish comes in one of two incarnations: fish sticks or tuna on rye; Jane Brody’s Cold and Flu Fighter (1995), offering everything there is to know about preventing and coping with colds and flu, including the author’s own chicken soup recipe; and Jane Brody’s Allergy Fighter (1997), a guide to understanding the causes of allergies, from prevention to the most effective antihistamines, decongestants, and topical sprays. Although The New York Times Book of Health: How to Feel Fitter, Eat Better, and Live Longer (1997) was written by a group of reporters from the New York Times, Brody gets top billing. The huge tome (496 pages), edited by Nicholas Wade, covers everything from health and popular medicine to physical fitness and nutrition, from menopause and vitamins to HMOs and jogging. In addition to her own books, Brody’s works appear in numerous anthologies, collections, cookbooks, and health books. She also designed Cooking á la Heart Cookbook: Delicious Heart Healthy Recipes to Reduce the Risk of Heart Disease and Stroke (1992), by Linda Hachfeld, Betsy Eykyn, and the Mankato Heart Health Program Foundation. The recipient of numerous awards during her career, Brody counts among them the Howard Blakeslee Award from the American Heart Association (1971), the Science Writer’s Award ADA (1978), and a Lifeline Award from the American Health Foundation (1978). She continues to write from her home in New York. OTHER WORKS: Jane Brody’s Weight Loss Program (cassette, 1987). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Who’s Who in America, 1998. ADA Daily News (19 Feb. 1998). Karp, J., ‘‘No Fries for You: A Checkup with the High Priestess of Health,’’ in At Random Magazine (Sept. 1998). —DARYL F. MALLETT
BRONER, E. M. Born Esther Masserman, 8 July 1930, Detroit, Michigan Daughter of Paul and Beatrice Weckstein Masserman; married Robert Broner, 1948; children: four E. M. Broner’s father was a journalist and a Jewish historian, while her mother had acted in the Yiddish theater in Poland. Both activities were to influence Broner’s plays, novels, and short
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stories, into which are woven many of the themes and traditions of Jewish culture.
heritage, Broner suggests something of women’s present goals and future prospects.
Broner’s first book, Summer Is a Foreign Land (1966), is a verse drama portraying a strong female character who works a particular kind of woman’s magic. A Russian Jewish matriarch, who earlier in life inherited three magical wishes from a pious ancestor, lies dying of leukemia. She has already used two wishes to get her family safely out of Russia, and in the course of the play, she must decide how to use the last wish and to whom to bequeath her powers. Her daughters, sons-in-law, and grandchildren gather at her deathbed, each hoping to inherit the wish that might make their future a little easier. The play ends with both a death and a wedding, emphasizing the perpetuation of life.
As a novelist, playwright, and teacher, Broner is concerned with establishing spiritual and artistic traditions for women. In the late 1970s and 1980s her interest in tradition led to explorations of women and Judaism. A feminist, she maintains that male authority in both the literary and the religious traditions has excluded women from positions of equality.
An early feminist work, the title piece of Journal/Nocturnal and Seven Stories (1968), decries the passivity of women. The protagonist of the novella, the Wife, leads a double life, which is effectively epitomized by the separate columns in which the tale is written. One half of each page represents the woman’s journal, the other her nocturnal pursuits. The Wife is married to a liberal professor who spends most of his time working against the Vietnam war. At night, she sleeps with the Guest, who defends the war. She agrees with both men, both political positions. The war becomes a metaphor for her life and her life becomes a symbol for the way the country as a whole was split during the war. In Her Mothers (1975, reissued 1985), Beatrice Palmer searches for her wayward, runaway daughter. In the process, she also searches for herself and for her literary, historical, and biological mothers. There is a powerful scene near the conclusion of the book where mother and daughter struggle in the ocean, the mother almost drowning her child. Ultimately, however, there is a kind of reconciliation. The novel ends with a paean to women, to women finding themselves and each other. Broner’s fourth book, A Weave of Women (1978, reissued 1985), provides a spiritual conclusion to the search initiated in her previous works. In the book, Broner creates a model for a woman’s utopian society. Significantly set in Jerusalem, land of the prophets, the novel describes a society where women are supportive, understanding, strong, and inventive. Twelve women and three confused girls come together to make ‘‘corrections’’ in their lives and to restore dignity to one another. The book celebrates women and womanhood, glorifying the female passages from birth to menses, marriages, motherhood, menopause, and death. Like Broner’s earlier writing, A Weave of Women discovers traditions for women, and where traditions are lacking, creates new ones. Aside from these published volumes, Broner has written essays, reviews, short fiction, and drama. She has also created new rituals for women, including ‘‘A Woman’s Passover Haggadah’’ (with Naomi Nimrod) published in Ms. (April 1977). Broner’s work is exciting and innovative in both form and content. Although her vision is basically tragic, as a feminist writer she is well aware of the comedy of androcentric manners. She does not simply lament woman’s current social state but celebrates woman’s strength and dignity. By placing her protagonists in an almost mythic context, and by giving them a cultural and a literary
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In 1980 Broner and Cathy Davidson jointly edited The Lost Tradition: Mothers and Daughters in Literature, a large and diverse selection of essays by female scholars. In the introduction, the editors assert that the patriarchal tradition in literature has separated mothers from daughters. The essays discuss the depiction of women in literature from the ancient Near East and ancient Greece, the Old Testament, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance through to the 20th century. In recent years Broner has worked to reconcile her feminism with her religious faith. After her father’s death in 1986, she participated in an Orthodox prayer ceremony to mourn his passing. She recounts her experience at the Orthodox synagogue in Mornings and Mourning: A Kaddish Journal (1989). Prohibited because of her gender from participating fully in the ceremony, Broner resisted the sexist precepts of the Orthodox ritual, even as she became a part of the small group of men who participated in the Kaddish. With a straightforward style and a good deal of humor, the story chronicles her attempt to bring women into the religious community as full partners. In diary entries in the book, Broner talks of feeling like ‘‘half a man’’ during services. The women were separated from the men by quite unsophisticated dividers like drapes hung on a makeshift rack and plastic shower curtains. About the experience, Broner said: ‘‘I won that battle with the Mechitzah. I wouldn’t submit. I wouldn’t sit separately from them (the men in the minyan). It no longer had anything to do with separation, but total obliteration. Faithfulness is doing mitzvot, not being submissive.’’ Broner treats the same experience in her play Half-a-Man (1989), which was performed in both Los Angeles and Detroit. Two other plays, Letters to My Television Past (1985) and The Olympics (1986), have been performed in New York City. Broner’s interest in Judaism and feminism continues in a work-in-progress, tentatively titled The Repair Shop, which features a female rabbi; she received support for her work on this novel from the National Endowment for the Arts (1987) and a MacDowell Fellowship (1989-90). The Telling (1993) charts the spiritual journey of a group of Jewish women, which includes Broner herself, Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, and other prominent feminists. It includes Broner’s earlier ‘‘A Woman’s Passover Haggadah’’ originally published in Ms. in 1977, which had created quite a stir. Audiences at readings booed her, and Broner admitted, ‘‘It was too shocking for audiences. A potential publisher called it a ‘trick Haggadah.’’’ Once published, though, it became the pattern for other projects by other authors. In Broner’s recent book, Ghost Stories (1995), she tells the tale of a daughter who encounters her mother’s ghost and forges a deeper relationship with it than the one she had with her mother
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when she was alive. Leila meets her mother’s ghost during the ritual 11 months of mourning following death. As she attends synagogue, the two strike up conversations about family history, recipes, life, and news about neighbors and relatives. Broner’s humorous tale explores a mother-daughter relationship that doesn’t end with death. Broner continues to be an active teacher and lecturer as well as a writer. She is professor emeritus at Wayne State University, where she taught English and creative writing from 1964 to 1987. During the 1980s she was a guest writer at Sarah Lawrence, Columbia, Ohio State, Tulane, and City College of New York. She is a contributing editor of Tikkun and Lilith, and a regular book reviewer for Women’s Review of Books. Broner also has been a contributor to Epoch, Jewish Review, Commentary, North American Review, Letters and Heresies. OTHER WORKS: Colonel Higginson (musical drama, with M. Zieve, 1968). The Body Parts of Margaret Fuller (play, 1978). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Barkowski, F., Feminist Utopias (1989). Heschel, S., ed., On Being a Jewish Feminist (1983). Reddy, M., and B. Daly, eds., Narrating Mothers (1991). Roreck, R., and E. Hoffman-Baruch, eds., Women in Search of Utopia (1984). Reference works: CA (1976). CANR (1983, 1989). CLC (1981). CN (1986). DLB (1984). FC (1990). Other references: Booklist (15 Mar. 1967, 1 Dec. 1975). Choice (Nov. 1967). Commentary (Apr. 1969). Dispatch (Fall 1988). Kalliope (1985). KR (15 July 1975). LJ (1 Dec. 1966, Aug. 1975). MELUS (Winter 1982). Ms. (July 1976, July/Aug. 1991). PW (11 Aug. 1975, 12 July 1976). Regionalism and the Female Imagination (special Broner piece, Winter 1977-78). Studies in American Jewish Literature (Spring 1991). —CATHY N. DAVIDSON, UPDATED BY MELISSA BURNS AND NICK ASSENDELFT
BROOKS, Gwendolyn Born 7 June 1917, Topeka, Kansas Daughter of David and Keziah Wims Brooks; married Henry Blakely, 1939 Gwendolyn Brooks attended public schools in Chicago and graduated from Wilson Junior College in 1936. A poetry workshop at Chicago’s South Side Community Art Center in the early 1940s introduced her to the rigors of poetic technique; her extraordinary talent was soon recognized. In 1945 her first volume, A Street in Bronzeville, appeared. A plethora of prizes quickly followed: grants from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Academy of Arts and Letters, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and, in 1950, the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. She was the first black poet so honored. A similar kind of recognition came in 1968 she was named poet laureate of Illinois.
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In addition to numerous honorary degrees, Brooks achieved an unusual distinction when in 1971 black poets of all ages contributed to a volume, To Gwen With Love. The presence of so many young writers was, in part, a response to a shift in Brooks’ political stance. From a rather apolitical integrationist in the 1940s, she became a strong advocate of black consciousness in the 1960s. This process of change is described in her autobiography, Report from Part One (1972). In A Street in Bronzeville Brooks penned memorable vignettes of the residents of Bronzeville, the black neighborhood of Chicago. Significantly, although the characters in these poems are poor, the emphasis is not on their material poverty but on their struggle to sustain their spiritual and aesthetic well-being. In ‘‘The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith,’’ a narrative poem which is a marvel of technical proficiency, the protagonist draws on his considerable imaginative powers to create a world on Sundays which contrasts sharply to the drudgery of his workdays. The poem celebrates Smith’s resourcefulness, his sensuality, and his keen aesthetic sense, yet it reveals the lack of substance underneath the style. The dislocations and uncertainties brought about by World War II are strongly conveyed throughout A Street, most profoundly in the sonnet series, ‘‘Gay Chaps at the Bar.’’ Even in a volume wherein Brooks handled diverse forms masterfully, these 12 off-rhyme sonnets are notable for their technical innovativeness. Her concern with the alienation, depersonalization, and terror accompanying war and modern life in general aligns her with the mainstream of 20th-century poetry. Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize for Annie Allen, her most experimental work. Its subject is akin to her earlier poems: a young black girl comes of age, hoping to live out the drama and romance she fantasies. But the poverty and powerlessness which she kept at bay in her girlhood threaten her womanhood. Brooks’ only novel, Maud Martha (1953), illumines the life of a young black woman who must ward off continual, often petty, assaults to her human dignity. It was one of the first novels to portray a black girl’s coming of age. Written during the height of the civil-rights war, The Bean Eaters (1960) contained more topical poems than Brooks’ earlier books; her subjects include lynching and Emmett Till, school integration and Little Rock, and the violence accompanying the arrival of a black family in an all-white neighborhood. The epic title poem of In the Mecca (1968) brilliantly captures the mood of disillusionment and defiance of urban America in the 1960s. It is Brooks’ most richly textured poem. In her typical fashion, she combines formal eloquence and ordinary speech, and they are perfectly fused. Brooks employs various forms, but free verse and blank verse predominate. Visually rich as well, the poem projects razor-sharp images and a gallery of memorable and diverse characters. It is a tour de force. Riot (1968), Family Pictures (1970), and Beckonings (1975) follow the direction established by 1968’s In the Mecca. More overtly political and verbally less complex, these poems are, by Brooks’ own testimony, written primarily for a broadly based black audience. She intended they be read by the people whose lives she has celebrated throughout her career.
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Brooks was the first black American woman to achieve critical recognition as a poet. Observers have noted influences on her work as diverse as T. S. Eliot and Robert Frost, Langston Hughes and Wallace Stevens. Stylistically, she often remolds traditional verse forms such as the ballad and the sonnet to suit her poetic purposes; she also employs modern forms brilliantly. Philosophically, she is a humanist, particularly concerned with exploring the strengths and travails of black women in her work. By any reckoning, hers is and has remained one of the major voices of 20th-century American poetry. Brooks’s seventieth birthday in 1987 occasioned an outpouring of public affection and gestures of critical respect for this still-vital and productive poet. That year also saw the publication of Blacks, an anthology collecting Brooks’ writing of four decades. The volume’s succinct title expresses a unity in Brooks’s canon to which critics, readers, and perhaps Brooks herself had been blind. Bearing the imprint of the David Company, founded by Brooks, the volume testifies to her commitment to build alternative publishing institutions. Paradoxically, Brooks’ principled stance resulted in her work’s being less accessible to the reading public at the moment when it might have been in greatest demand. Generated by the burgeoning interest in black women’s writing, demand for the book was enhanced by Brooks’ enormous success as a lecturer. Visiting scores of colleges and universities annually, she has brought to enthusiastic audiences her message that ‘‘poetry was life distilled.’’ Her later work has distilled the most urgent and fundamental issues of contemporary life. Whether in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa or racism in the U.S., Brooks extracted for her poetry profiles of both heroic action and wary resistance. Among the public figures she has reimagined in verse are freedom fighter Winnie Mandela, poet Haki Madhubuti, social reformer Jane Addams, and child-abuse victim Elizabeth Steinberg. Sensitive as ever to the extraordinary dimensions of ordinary lives, Brooks has written poems narrating experiences of ‘‘the near-Johannesburg boy’’ fighting the ‘‘Fist-and-the-Fury’’ and of Lincoln West, the black American child who is liberated from self-hatred when he learns his African features make him the ‘‘real thing.’’ Although she rued the decline of activism in the 1980s—in her coinage, ‘‘a giantless time’’—she has continued to etch vivid portraits of those who ‘‘take today and jerk it out of joint.’’ In Report from Part One Brooks had promised not to imitate the voices of the young black poets of the 1960s, but to extend and adapt her own voice. Determined to address a black audience that did not normally read poetry, she abandoned the sonnet and rhyme generally for free verse and sparer diction. The results were uneven, as Brooks’ repeated revision of several poems seemed to concede, and the output was slender. Yet the best work fused formal eloquence and colloquial speech into a poetic language that was inimitably ‘‘Brooksian.’’ The first monograph analyzing Brooks’ writing appeared in 1980; subsequently, in two critical biographies, a collection of essays, and numerous journal articles and chapters in books, critics and scholars began to give Brooks’ work its due. She was
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inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1988 and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1989. Perhaps the critics’ most striking discovery was that Brooks’ aesthetic had always been ‘‘black.’’ Devoted from the start to representing the lives of the black urban poor, Brooks had drawn them as complex, spiritual, and contradictory human beings. Revisiting her early work, feminist critics noted that Brooks had pioneered in portraying multidimensional black female characters. Most important, her words almost always retain the capacity to surprise, delight, and instruct. Brooks prefers the word ‘‘B-L-A-C-K, which comes right out to meet you, eye to eye,’’ she said during a Jefferson Lecture in Washington, D.C. She travels through the states reading her works, much of which is on audio for all to enjoy. Her reading of her works resonates with urban imagery and wry social comment. Her cutting observations have made her one of the most well-known poets of our time. Brooks’ daughter, Nora Brooks Blakely, describes her not only as a loving mother, but also as a woman who ‘‘opens places for people—new doorways and mindpaths.’’ Brooks has had an extraordinary career; in addition to being the first black author to win the Pulitzer Prize, she holds over 70 honorary degrees. Among her other honors are Consultant in Poetry from the Library of Congress (1985-86); Jefferson Lecturer, NEH; National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters; and National Medal of Arts presented by President Bill and Mrs. Hilary Clinton. In addition, she has been inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York, joining another great black women’s writer, Maya Angelou. She has been honored by the naming of the Gwendolyn Brooks Cultural Center at Western Illinois University and the Gwendolyn Brooks Junior High School in Harvey, Illinois. OTHER WORKS: Bronzeville Boys and Girls (1956). Selected Poems (1963). The World of Gwendolyn Brooks (1971). Aloneness (1971). Primer for Blacks (1980). Young Poet’s Primer (1980). To Disembark (1981). Mayor Harold Washington and Chicago, the I Will City (1983). Very Young Poets (1983). The Near-Johannesburg Boy (1986). Gottschalk and the Grande Tarantelle (1988). Winnie (1988). Children Coming Home (1991). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Juhasz, S., ‘‘A Sweet Inspiration . . . of My People: The Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks and Nikki Giovanni,’’ in Naked and Fiery Forms: Modern American Poetry by Women—A New Tradition (1976). Kent, G., Blackness and the Adventure of Western Culture (1972). Kent, G., A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks (1990). Madhubuti, H., ed., Say That the River Turns: The Impact of Gwendolyn Brooks (1987). Melhem, D. H., Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic Voice (1987). Miller, R. B., Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks: A Reference Guide (1978). Mootry, M. K. and G. Smith, eds. A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks, Her Poetry and Fiction, (1987). Shands, A. O., ‘‘Gwendolyn Brooks as Novelist,’’ in BlackWomen (June 1973).
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Shaw, Harry B., Gwendolyn Brooks (1980). Voices From the Gap: Women Writers of Color (1999). Reference works: African American Writers (1991). Black Writers (1991). CANR (1989). CLC (1980, 1988). DLB (1988). FC (1990). Modern American Women Writers (1991). MTCW (1991). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Black American Writer (1969). Black Scholar (Summer 1972). CLAJ (Dec. 1962, Dec. 1963, Sept. 1972, Sept. 1973). Jet (30 May 1994). SBL (Autumn 1973). Contemporary Literature (Winter 1970). —CHERYL A. WALL, UPDATED BY DEVRA M. SLADICS
BROOKS, Maria Gowen Born circa 1794, Medford, Massachusetts; died 11 November 1845, Mantanzas, Cuba Wrote under: Maria del Occidente Daughter of William and Eleanor Cutter Gowen; married John Brooks, 1810 When Maria Gowen was orphaned in her childhood, she came under the protection of John Brooks, a Boston merchant. In 1810 the fifty-year-old merchant married his fifteen-year-old ward. The marriage was evidently an unhappy one, and she threw herself into her studies. Brooks’ dissatisfaction with her marriage was exacerbated when John suffered financial losses and moved the family to backwater Portland, Maine. There she met the Canadian officer who became her romantic fixation. John died in 1823, and Maria moved to Cuba where relatives owned coffee plantations. On a subsequent visit to Canada, she became engaged to the Canadian officer, but they were estranged through a series of misunderstandings. Maria attempted suicide twice. In 1826 she began a correspondence with the British poet laureate Robert Southey. After trips to England and Europe, Maria returned to Cuba, where she died of a tropical fever. In 1820 some of Brooks’ poetry was published in a volume titled Judith, Esther, and Other Poems. By a Lover of the Fine Arts The personae in these poems are all female. In ‘‘Judith’’ and ‘‘Esther,’’ Brooks deals with the psychological aspects of the trials of these biblical heroines. ‘‘The Butterfly’’ presents an analogue to relationships between the sexes: a poet is too wrapped up in his own concerns to save an exquisite butterfly from the flame. The frank but almost naive ‘‘Written after passing an evening with E. W. R. A******, Esq., who has the finest person I ever saw’’ warmly describes the physical charms of the Canadian officer with whom Brooks had fallen in love. In 1833 Robert Southey supervised publication of Zophiel; or the Bride of Seven, which tells the story of a fallen angel’s love for a mortal woman. In it, Brooks was not afraid to include many passionate and ‘‘forbidden’’ scenes, or to vividly describe human physical beauty. Zophiel is ‘‘dense’’ in the manner of Milton and
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contains full and learned notes on Middle-Eastern history, sorcery, and biblical tradition, with many literary, botanical, cultural, and geographical references, as in the work of Yeats and Eliot. Deeply scholarly in one sense, its actual expression is similar to the sensuality of Keats’s Eve of St. Agnes and Coleridge’s symbolistic uncanniness in Christabel. In 1838 Brooks’s Idomen: or the Vale of Yumuri was published serially in the Boston Saturday Evening Gazette. Several publishers refused the fictionalized autobiography as ‘‘too elevated to sell,’’ so Brooks published it privately in New York in 1843. Idomen, the heroine, is ‘‘formed in every nerve for the refinements of pleasure,’’ although her real life is a round of ‘‘duties’’ and ‘‘wearisome employments.’’ For Brooks, virtuous passion is a sign of intellectual and emotional consciousness. The almost hallucinatory clarity of Idomen’s imagery heightens the impression that many of its images and scenes must be interpreted symbolically, even as archetypes. The Edenic myth is everywhere apparent—in the idyllic Cuban scenes, but also in the celestially majestic frozen glory of the rivers and mountains of Canada. Idomen herself seems a pattern of the human soul. Caught in a dull marriage as the soul is caught in the mortal body, she yearns for the Ideal Absolute as personified by Ethelwald, a character based on Brooks’s Canadian officer. Yet Idomen cannot have Ethelwald in this world, for some mysterious inability to communicate with him intervenes even after she is freed by the death of her husband. This is one manifestation of a continuing theme of psychic or supernatural fates or impulses which leads to an exploration of suicidal tendencies and the hypersensitive imagination. Idomen acts out the Christ-like cycle of death, resurrection, and ascension, although such an allegory may have been unconscious on Brooks’s part. It is as a psychological novel of considerable subtlety that Idomen will capture the modern imagination. It can hardly be explained why Brooks is not better known and studied. Her work is good, at times great, but she was too large for her assigned role in the social and intellectual world of her time. In this and in the continued lack of recognition of her worth, she is an archetype of the early American woman writer. OTHER WORKS: The papers of Maria Gowen Brooks are in the Boston Public Library, Yale University Library, and the Library of Congress. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Grannis, R., An American Friend of Southey (1913). Griswold, R., Southern Literary Messenger (1913). Gustafson, Z., introduction to Maria Gowen Brooks’ Zophiel (1879). Southey, R., The Doctor (1834). Reference works: Appleton’s Cyclopedia of American Biography (1888). Cyclopedia of American Literature (1855). DAB (1929). NAW (1971). Other references: American Collector (Aug. 1926). Graham’s Magazine (Aug. 1848). Medford Historical Register (Oct. 1899). —L. W. KOENGETER
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BROUMAS, Olga Born 6 May 1949, Syros, Greece Daughter of Nicholas and Claire Pendeli Broumas; married Stephen E. Bangs, 1973 (divorced) Olga Broumas’ poems are voluptuous, exuberant, lyrical, rooted in history, and charged with political meaning. Poetry is for her both socially meaningful and a source of deep personal pleasure. Even when the poems concern pain and suffering, they take pleasure in their own sounds, shapes, and rhythms. Because of this play in language, there is more joy in Broumas’ poetic world than sorrow. Born in Greece in 1949, Broumas lived briefly in the U.S. as a child and returned in 1967 to attend college. She earned her B.A. in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania (1970) and a M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Oregon (1973). She has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and has taught widely—at the University of Oregon, the University of Idaho, Goddard College, Boston University, and Brandeis University. In 1982 she helped found Freehand, a learning community of women artists and writers, in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Broumas is currently the Fanny Hurst poet-in-residence at Brandeis and the director of creative writing. In ‘‘Demeter,’’ Broumas honors her poetic maternity—Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, and Adrienne Rich—but she has forged her own feminist, poetic idiom that is neither despairing nor homiletic. Rejecting the poetry of the crazy lady, the ‘‘Classic, almost Plathian stance that I’d been taught,’’ she seeks instead to affirm women’s power and health. In pursuit of the ‘‘adequate myth’’ to accomplish this affirmation, she reinscribes Greek myths in terms of ordinary women’s lives in the opening sequence, ‘‘Twelve Aspects of God,’’ of Beginning with O (1977) and reclaims god as a feminine principle. Broumas is a bodywork therapist who has practiced in Provincetown since 1983, and her aesthetic is intertwined with this work; the human body has a mythic, immediate presence in her poems. In ‘‘The Moon of Mind against the Wooden Louver’’ she writes to and honors a dying friend: ‘‘the pluck and humor of the song / your bones thrum while the blood still leaves / their broadside and their flank. / I kiss your bones.’’ The female body is powerfully and vitally erotic. In Caritas (chapbook, 1976), she regrets the lack of language for female sexuality: ‘‘A woman-made language would / have as many synonyms for pink / light-filled / holy as / the Eskimo does / for snow.’’ She seeks free and joyful language and imagery for lesbian love poems, in which the woman is both beloved and lover, giver and recipient. Since Beginning with O, she has published eight volumes of poetry, Soie Sauvage (1979), Pastoral Jazz (1983), Black Holes, Black Stockings (1985), Perpetua (1989), Sappho’s Gymnasium (1994), Helen Groves (1994), Unfolding the Tablecloth of God (1995), and Ithaca: Little Summer in Winter (1996). Black Holes, Black Stockings is a collection of prose poems written with poet Jane Miller. The last four volumes of Broumas’ poetry were
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written with poet T. Begley, with whom she also translated three books of Odysseas Elytis’ Greek poems, the last of which is Open Papers (1994). Broumas’ approach to poetry is expansive and syncretic. Her formal considerations derive from architecture and music, as well as from literary sources: she conceives of stanzas as spatial forms, words on the page ‘‘as notation for the voice.’’ To create her art, Broumas draws on the many parts of her life: her Greek and European background; her experiences as a woman; her feminist and liberation politics; her massage work. Her poems take daring leaps, almost greedily appropriating and juxtaposing disparate images, words, and experiences. OTHER WORKS: Restlessness (in Greek, 1967). Lyricism: Some Notes on Pleasure (1978). Namaste (1978). What I Love: Selected Poems of Odysseas Elytis, 1943-1978 (translation, 1986). The Little Mariner, poems by Odysseas Elytis (translation, 1988). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Abel, E. et al., eds., The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development (1983). Casto, E. K., Reading Feminist Poetry: A Study of the Work of Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, and Olga Broumas (dissertation, 1990). Duncan, E., Unless Soul Claps Its Hands: Portraits and Passages (1984). Reference works: CA (1980). CANR (1987, 1999). CLC (1979). FC (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: American Poetry Review (Jan.-Feb. 1979). Atlantic (Oct. 1977). Book Forum (1977). Christopher Street (Mar. 1977). Chrysalis (1977). Emergency Librarian (Nov. 1977). Hudson Review (Autumn 1977, Summer 1980, Summer 1983). LJ (15 May 1977). Northwest Review (1978, 1980). NYT (24 June 1977). Off Our Backs (June 1978). VV (29 Aug. 1977). Yale Review (Autumn 1977). —DEANNA STEVENSON, UPDATED BY NORA MITCHELL AND LEAH J. SPARKS
BROWN, Abbie Farwell Born 21 August 1871, Boston, Massachusetts; died 5 March 1927, Boston, Massachusetts Daughter of Benjamin F. and Clara Brown A descendant of the earliest New England settlers, Abbie Farwell Brown lived all her life in the family home on Beacon Hill in Boston. She was educated at Boston Girls’ Latin School, where she formed a close friendship with Josephine Prescott Peabody, and graduated from Radcliffe College in 1894. Although Brown had written verse for St. Nicholas, feature stories for the St. Louis Globe Democrat, and ‘‘Quits’’ (1896), a one-act comedy set in a women’s college, it was a visit in 1899 to Chester Cathedral, England, which inspired her first children’s book, The Book of Saints and Friendly Beasts (1900), and led to her career as a juvenile author. In 1902, after the success of The
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Lonesomest Doll (1901), the publishers Hall and Locke engaged her as editor of their Young Folks Library series. In addition to juvenile books, poetry, and plays, Brown also wrote two volumes of poetry for adults and composed lyrics for songs. Her poem ‘‘On the Trail,’’ set to music by Mabel Daniels, became the Girl Scouts’ anthem. The best of Brown’s children’s books derive their charm from her appreciation of traditional popular literature—legend, myth, and folktale, which includes, of course, the fairy tale. Her first and perhaps best work, The Book of Saints and Friendly Beasts, retells episodes from saints’ legends, illustrating the affectionate relationship between beasts and holy men and women. Without resorting to quaintness, the flavor of the medieval legend is preserved, while the material is ordered and simplified for the secular modern child. In the Days of Giants (1902) introduces young people to the action, drama, and intrigue of Nordic myths as recounted in Icelandic sagas. Tales of the Red Children (1909), a collection of Canadian Indian stories coauthored by James MacIntosh Bell, faithfully adheres to the spirit and style of the folktale. The choice of stories reflects the importance of the trickster tale in Indian folklore. Besides adapting traditional popular literature to the level and tastes of a modern juvenile audience, Brown also employed well known narrative formulas from fairy tale and legend to create her own stories. In the title story of The Flower Princess (1904), Fleurette establishes a test for suitors: she will marry the man who can identify her favorite flower. Of course, the princes fail; only the minstrel Joyeuse has the wit, traditionally associated with the humble, to discover her secret. The hero of John of the Woods (1909) is the mistreated boy of fairy tales who, aided by friendly animals and a mysterious old man, finds his identity. That he also learns to be kind and have faith in the eventual triumph of goodness is part of the gentle didacticism of the tale. The Lucky Stone (1914) departs from the romanticism of Brown’s earlier books and translates the fairy tale into a realistic setting, but not however, without some creaking of the narrative machinery. Maggie Price, a slum child who believes in fairies, discovers a fairy palace in the country, receives mysterious gifts, finds a queer old woman, embarks on a quest, and is captured by an ogre. All the events are the amusements of a bored young woman, who finally does become a fairy godmother by opening her home to needy children. Brown’s one excursion into juvenile biography, The Boyhood of Edward MacDowell (1924), reflects her appreciation for summers spent in the MacDowell Colony, but it is too sentimental and speculative to be seriously recommended.
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Read and Pieces to Speak (1908). The Christmas Angel (1910). Their City Christmas; a Story for Boys and Girls (1912). Songs of Sixpence (1914). Kisington Town (1915). Surprise House (1917). The Gift; a Christmas Story (1920). Heart of New England (1920). The Rock of Liberty; a Pilgrim Ode (1920). What Luck! A Study in Opposites (1920). The Green Trunk; a Masque (1921). Round Robin (1921). The Lights of Beacon Hill; a Christmas Message (1922). The New England Poetry Club; an Outline of Its History, 1915-1923 (1923). Our Christmas Tree (1925). The Silver Stairs; Poems (1926). Under the Rowan Tree (1926). The Lantern and Other Plays for Children (1928). The Little Friend (1960). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Meigs, C., A Critical History of Children’s Literature (1969). Reference works: NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). TCA (1942). Other references: Horn Book (1927). Poetry Review (1931). —PHYLLIS MOE
BROWN, Alice Born 5 December 1857, Hampton Falls, New Hampshire; died 21 June 1948, Boston, Massachusetts Also wrote under: Martin Redfield Daughter of Levi and Elizabeth Lucas Brown After graduating from Robinson Female Seminary, Alice Brown taught school in New England, but soon decided on a literary career. She wrote for the Christian Register, then joined the staff of The Youth’s Companion in 1885. In Boston, Brown belonged to a group of young Bohemian artists led by poet Louise Imogen Guiney. The collaborations of the two close friends included a biography of Robert Louis Stevenson (1896) and the founding of the Women’s Rest Tour Association. During these years Brown wrote in support of women’s rights and prison reform movements. An advocate of American involvement in World War I, she often commented on politics, criticizing the direction of modern life. In her later years, her passionate privacy and religious mysticism carried her further from the mainstream. Highly praised as late as the 1920s, Brown’s work was virtually forgotten by the time of her death. During a career spanning seven decades, Brown wrote in almost every genre, including criticism, biography, and sketches. She considered herself primarily a poet, but the Victorian idealism and strained diction of her verse has not aged well.
Nourished by myth, legend, and the folk tale, Brown contributed to children’s literature of the early 20th century a number of well-written, imaginative stories, some pleasant verse, and two distinguished versions of saints’ legends and Nordic myths.
Brown’s greatest public recognition came to her as a dramatist. In 1914, amid much publicity, she won the $10,000 Winthrop Ames prize for the best play submitted by an American author. Her entry, Children of Earth (1915), later opened on Broadway to mixed reviews and a short run. Brown’s one-act plays, often adapted from her stories, were more successful.
OTHER WORKS: A Pocketful of Poesies (1902). The Curious Book of Birds (1903). The Star Jewels (1905). Brothers and Sisters (1906). Friends and Cousins (1907). Fresh Posies; Rhymes to
Brown’s fiction is now considered her best work, particularly her early local color stories. Meadow-Grass made her literary reputation in 1895; Tiverton Tales confirmed it in 1899. Both
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consist of loosely connected sketches portraying the fictional village of Tiverton, a farming community close to the sea and modeled after Hampton Falls. These and subsequent stories were compared favorably to the work of Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman. Although Brown’s portraits of spinsters and rebellious wives (especially in ‘‘A Day Off’’ and ‘‘The Other Mrs. Dill’’) are as fine in their way as Freeman’s, her goodnatured humor, idealism, and careful craftsmanship bring her closer to Jewett’s more pastoral regionalism. However, Brown’s work can stand easily without such comparisons. Described as a ‘‘little masterpiece,’’ ‘‘Farmer Eli’s Vacation’’ demonstrates Brown’s gentle irony, control of plot, and psychological acuity. Having dreamed all his life of seeing the ocean, only six miles from his pastures, Eli makes the journey at last. The vision is more than he can bear; ‘‘He faced [the sea] as a soul might face Almighty Greatness, only to be stricken blind thereafter.’’ Leaving his family camping by the shore, Eli hurries home gratefully to his cows and barns, the world he knows and loves best. ‘‘Local color’’ is too narrow a category for this fine story. As public interest in regional writing waned at the turn of the century, Brown experimented with other genres. Unlike many local colorists, she made the transition successfully. Between 1900 and 1920, she published over 130 stories in prominent magazines. In these short pieces and her many novels, Brown attempts more urban settings and sophisticated characters. Her themes concern the strain of reconciling city and country, the industrial future with the values of the agrarian past. Critical opinion of this later work is mixed. Brown’s growing skill as a storyteller and firmer control of structure has been noted by one critic, who observed, however, that she mistakenly adopted an elaborate figurative style beyond her powers. Only when she returned to her New England characters, with their earthy straightforward dialect, did she regain the grace and authenticity of her early work. Although such novels as Old Crow (1922) and John Winterbourne’s Family (1910) achieve a greater philosophical and psychological depth than the more charming local color stories, Brown’s artistry could not keep pace with her ambition; her characters, puppetlike, mouth lofty ideas instead of embodying them. A devoted artist, Brown’s local stories hold their own against the more famous work of Jewett and Freeman and represent a distinctive contribution to the genre. Through a synthesis of symbolic and realistic representation, her work conveys an essentially romantic pastoralism. Brown’s sentimentality is, however, offset by knowing humor; her idealism is expressed with subtlety. Fresh, evocative, and lovingly detailed, her sketches of country life show a disciplined literary craft. Her New Englanders speak and act with authenticity; their dilemmas are universal, their resolutions sometimes wise and always human. OTHER WORKS: Stratford-by-the-Sea (1884). The Fools of Nature (1887). Three Heroines of New England Romance (with L. I. Guiney and H. P. Spofford, 1894). Robert Louis Stevenson (with
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L. I. Guiney, 1896). The Rose of Hope (1896). By Oak and Thorn (1896). Women of Colonial and Revolutionary Times—Mercy Otis Warren (1896). The Road to Castalay (1896). The Day of His Youth (1897). King’s End (1901). Margaret Warrener (1901). Judgement (1903). The Mannerings (1903). The Merrylinks (1903). High Noon (1904). The County Road (1906). The Court of Love (1906). Chap. XI of The Whole Family (a novel by 12 authors, 1908). Rose MacLeod (1908). The Story of Thryza (1909). Country Neighbors (1910). The One-Footed Fairy (1911). My Love and I (1912). The Secret of the Clan, A Story for Girls (1912). Vanishing Points (1913). Robin Hood’s Barn (1913). Joint Owners in Spain; A Comedy in One Act (1914). Children of Earth; A Play of New England (1915). The Prisoner (1916). Bromley Neighborhood (1917). The Flying Teuton and Other Stories (1918). The Loving Cup, A Play in One Act (1918). The Black Drop (1919). Homespun and Gold (1920). The Wind Between the Worlds (1920). One-Act Plays (1921). Louise Imogen Guiney (1921). Ellen Prior (1923). Charles Lamb: A Play (1924). The Mysteries of Ann (1925). Dear Old Templeton (1927). The Golden Ball (1929). The Marriage Feast, A Fantasy (1931). The Diary of a Dryad (1932). The Kingdom in the Sky (1932). Jeremy Hamblin (1934). The Willoughbys (1935). Fable and Song (1939). Pilgrim’s Progress (1944). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Langill, E. D., ‘‘Alice Brown: A Critical Study’’ (dissertation, 1975). Overton, G., The Wowen Who Make Our Novels (1922). Pattee, F. L., The New American Literature, 1890-1930 (1930). Toth, S. A., ‘‘Alice Brown (1857-1948),’’ in ALR (Spring 1972). Toth, S. A., ‘‘More Than Local Color: A Reappraisal of Rose Terry Cooke, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Alice Brown’’ (dissertation, 1969). Walker, D., Alice Brown (1974). Westbrook, P., Acres of Flint: Writers of Rural New England, 1870-1900 (1951). Williams, B., Our Short Story Writers (1920). Williams, Sister M., ‘‘The Pastoral in New England Local Color: Celia Thaxter, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Alice Brown’’ (dissertation, 1972). Wood, A. D., ‘‘The Literature of Impoverishment: The Women Local Colorists in America, 1865-1914,’’ in WS (1972). Other references: Atlantic (July 1906). Book Buyer (Nov. 1896). —SARAH WAY SHERMAN
BROWN, Hallie Quinn Born circa 10 March 1845, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; died 16 September 1949, Wilberforce, Ohio Daughter of Thomas and Frances Scroggins Brown Born the fifth of six children to parents of mixed blood who were freed slaves, Hallie Quinn Brown reminisces in her unpublished autobiography, ‘‘As the Mantle Falls,’’ that her childhood home in Philadelphia was the center of many activities both for the African Methodist Episcopal Church and for the Underground Railroad for runaway slaves on their flight to Canada. In 1873
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Brown received her B.A. degree from Wilberforce University in Ohio, where she first came under the tutelage of professional elocutionists. She was awarded an honorary Master of Science (1890) and an LL.D. (1936) from Wilberforce. After graduation, Brown taught in several Southern schools. While in Dayton, Ohio, she enrolled in elocution classes and it was at this time that her career in public speaking began. As an elocutionist she toured several cities in Ohio and Indiana; favorable reception encouraged her to continue on to New York, Philadelphia, and various Southern states. In 1888 Brown took the first of several tours abroad, speaking and singing spirituals in an effort to raise funds for Wilberforce. On her return to the U.S. in 1892 she accepted the position of Lady Principal at Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute and in 1893 was appointed professor of elocution at Wilberforce. In this same year, Brown was instrumental in forming the Colored Women’s League, later known as the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, and was its president from 1920 to 1924. She also became actively involved with the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and spoke at several of its meetings and conferences. Among Brown’s works is a textbook on elocution called First Lessons in Public Speaking (1920). It gives little or no concrete help to the neophyte orator, but rather is filled with exhortations to lead a Christian life and imitate the many examples of perseverance given in the book. In Tales My Father Told (1925), Brown retells stories with which her father, who worked on Mississippi riverboats, entertained the family on long winter nights in their Canadian home. The first three stories are highly romanticized tales of young women’s escapes from slavery and their finding of true happiness in Northern climes. In each of these stories the narrator-hero appears to be Brown’s father, who contrives, though never by violence, to secure freedom and eventually idyllic happiness for each young woman. Another selection in Tales My Father Told is a history of black spirituals that compares them to Hebrew songs of captivity. The final story in the collection is a didactic, melodramatic morality tale about the effects of whisky on a young man. Homespun Heroines, and Other Women of Distinction (1926) is a compilation of biographical sketches written by Brown and several other women. In the greeting to her readers, Brown says she hopes to preserve for future reference the life and character of ‘‘the history-making women of our race.’’ The 55 sketches are brief; they tend to be subjective, though not completely lacking a factual basis, and almost all earnestly exhort the reader to emulate these women. Brown’s life had two centers of focus—her religion and Wilberforce University. Her dedication to both led her to support the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and to advocate justice and equality for her race, especially for the women. She made use of her oratorical skills to further these ends and the political involvement of her later years can likewise be traced to both these interests.
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OTHER WORKS: Bits and Odds: A Choice Selection of Recitations (1880). Our Women: Past, Present and Future (1925). Pen Pictures of Pioneers of Wilberforce (1937). ‘‘As the Mantle Falls’’ (unpublished; at the Hallie Quinn Brown Memorial Library, Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Daniels, S. I., Women Builders (1970). Davis, E., Lifting As They Climb (1933). Dunlop, M. E., ‘‘A Biographical Sketch of Hallie Quinn Brown,’’ in the Wilberforce University Alumni Journal (1 June 1963). McFarlin, A. S., ‘‘Hallie Quinn Brown—Black Woman Elocutionist: 1845 (?)-1949’’ (dissertation, 1975). Reference works: NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Noted Negro Women (1893). —MARILYN LAMPING
BROWN, Margaret Wise Born 23 May 1910, Brooklyn, New York; died 13 November 1952, Nice, France Also wrote under: Timothy Hay, Golden MacDonald, Juniper Sage (the last being used by Brown and Edith Thacher Hurd on collaborative works) Daughter of Robert B. and Maude Johnson Brown The middle child of a prosperous manufacturer, Margaret Wise Brown spent most of her formative years in solitary play on the beaches and in the woods at Whitestone Landing, Long Island, New York. There she developed an enduring love for animals and the outdoors, which she later faithfully recreated in almost 100 books written for young children. After attending New York schools until 1923, she spent the next two years at the Chateau Brilliantmont School in Lausanne, Switzerland, and graduated from Dana Hall in Wellesley, Massachusetts, in 1928. In 1932, Brown earned her B.A. in English Literature from Hollins College in Virginia. Interested in a career as a professional writer, Brown enrolled at Columbia University for postgraduate work, but did not find her niche until she became a student teacher in an innovative program sponsored by the Bureau for Educational Experiment (the Bank Street School) in 1935. Lucy Sprague Mitchell, who headed the group, initiated a technique for telling children’s stories from the child’s point of view, which gave Brown an opportunity to observe young children’s fresh reactions to their world. She related to the preschoolers in an almost symbiotic fashion, so she often said some of her stories were ‘‘their stories transcribed onto paper.’’ Although she did continue to write adult poetry (never published) for the rest of her life, it is as the ‘‘Laureate of the Nursery’’ that she earned fame, fortune, and a permanent place in American literature. Brown felt strongly that although her books were written for adults to read to small children, their illustrations should be so inextricably bound to the texts that a preschooler could ‘‘retell’’
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the story to himself just by looking at the pictures. Some 38 different artists worked closely with her, and although she was very demanding of them, she frequently altered her text to accommodate their illustrations as well. The results in many instances were stunning. From 1937 to 1952, Brown wrote four to eight books a year, did a children’s page for Good Housekeeping, contributed to some school primers, and maintained her association with young children as the basis for continuing a viable contact with the child within herself. Engaged to be married, Brown died quite suddenly at age forty-two, due to complications following an appendectomy. It is not a simple matter to single out particular books by Brown as ‘‘classics,’’ but consensus would have it that in addition to the Noisy Book Series, a few titles deserve special mention. The Dead Bird (1938) is noteworthy as a forerunner of realistic treatments of subjects only recently considered suitable for children’s books. At a very fundamental level, this story treats death, grief, and a return to normal living after a suitable time lapse. The Little Island (1946) is particularly interesting since the little kitten who visits the island learns from a fish that the Little Island is ‘‘a part of the world and a world of its own.’’ This philosophical idea, expressed by such writers as Shakespeare and John Donne, is here set down in very concrete terms completely within a small child’s frame of reference. Perhaps the all-time favorite, however, is Goodnight Moon (1947, reprinted dozens of times, the latest in 1994), meant to be read as a bedtime story. Done in simplest rhyme, and featuring alternate pages of black-and-white and colored illustrations, there is a very tiny mouse to be found by the youngster in each colored picture. As the mouse is never in the same spot twice, children actively participate in the reading experience be locating the mouse. Many of Brown’s books sold millions of copies and remain deservedly popular today. A number have been translated into foreign languages; but what is more significant than her prolificness or popularity, is that a number of her stories have rightfully been termed classics. In addition to Runaway Bunny, many of her tales have been reissued throughout the decades and into the late 1990s. Compilations also abound, with numerous collections like 1992’s Three Best-Loved Tales and John Speirs’ Margaret Wise Brown Treasury: Fourteen Classic Stories and Poems (1994). Brown’s first publisher, William Scott, perhaps best summed up the writer and her work when he wrote in 1955, ‘‘All her books have an elusive quality that was Margaret Wise Brown. . . . They have simplicity, directness, humor, unexpectedness, respect for the reader, and a sense of the importance of living.’’ OTHER WORKS: The Children’s Year (edited and translated by Brown, 1937). When the Wind Blew (1937). Bumble Bugs and Elephants (1938). The Fish with the Deep Sea Smile (1938). The Little Fireman (1938). The Log of Christopher Columbus (ed. by B. de las Casas and Brown, 1938). The Streamlined Pig (1938). Home in the Wilderness (ed. by Brown, 1939). Little Pig’s Picnic (1939). Noisy Book (1939). The Comical Tragedy or Tragical
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Comedy of Punch & Judy (ed. by J. P. Collier and Brown, 1940). Country Noisy Book (1940). The Fables of LaFontaine (ed. and trans. by Brown, 1940). Baby Animals (1941). The Polite Penguin (1941). The Poodle and the Sheep (1941). The Seashore Noisy Book (1941). A Child’s Good Morning (1942). Don’t Frighten the Lion (1942). The Indoor Noisy Book (1942). Night and Day (1942). The Runaway Bunny (1942). Big Dog Little Dog (1943). A Child’s Good Night Book (1943). The Noisy Bird Book (1943). SHHhhh. . .BANG (1943). The Big Fur Secret (1944). Black and White (1944). Horses (1944). Red Light Green Light (1944). They All Saw It (1944). Willie’s Walk to Grandmama (1944). The House of a Hundred Windows (1945). The Little Fisherman (1945). Little Lost Lamb (1945). Little Fur Family (1946). The Man in the Manhole and the Fix-it Man (1946). The Bad Little Duckhunter (1947). The First Story (1947). The Sleepy Little Lion (1947). The Winter Noisy Book (1947). Little Cowboy (1948). The Little Farmer (1948). Sleepy Book (1948). Wait Till the Moon Is Full (1948). Wonderful Story Book (1948). The Color Kittens (1949). Five Little Firemen (1949). The Important Book (1949). Little Chicken (1949). My World (1949). Pussycat’s Christmas (1949). Two Little Miners (1949). Two Little Trains (1949). The Dark Wood of the Golden Birds (1950). The Dream Book (1950). The Little Fat Policeman (1950). Peppermint Family (1950). The Quiet Noisy Book (1950). The Wonderful House (1950). Fox Eyes (1951). Pussy Willow (1951). The Summer Noisy Book (1951). The Train to Timbuctoo (1951). Two Little Gardeners (1951). Christmas in the Barn (1952). Doctor Squash the Doll Doctor (1952). The Duck (1952). Mister Dog (1952). The Noon Balloon (1952). Seven Little Postmen (1952). Where Have You Been? (1952). The Dead Bird (1953). The Golden Bunny (1953). The Hidden House (1953). Little Frightened Tiger (1953). The Sailor Dog (1953). Sleepy A B C (1953). The Friendly Book (1954). The Little Fir Tree (1954). Little Indian (1954). Wheel on the Chimney (1954). Willie’s Adventures (1954). The Little Brass Band (1955). Seven Stories about a Cat Named Sneakers (1955). Young Kangaroo (1955). Big Red Barn (1956). David’s Little Indian (1956). Home for a Bunny (1956). Three Little Animals (1956). Whistle for the Train (1956). Nibble Nibble (1959). The Diggers (1960). Four Fur Feet (1961). On Christmas Eve (1961). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Allen, M. N., One Hundred Years of Children’s Books in America: Decade by Decade (1996). Blos, J. W., The Days Before Now: An Autobiographical Note (1994). Greene, C., Margaret Wise Brown—Author of Goodnight Moon (1993). Marcus, L. S., Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened by the Moon (1999). Marcus, L. S., The Making of Goodnight Moon: A 50th Anniversary Retrospective (1997). Rylant, C., Margaret, Frank, and Andy: Three Writers’ Stories (1996). Sheel, E. M., ‘‘M. W. Brown’’ (thesis, 1969). Tobias, T., A Wild and Private Place (1992). Reference works: DAB (1977). Junior Book of Authors (1951). Other references: Biography (Summer 1993). Hollins Alumnae Magazine (Winter 1949). Horn Book (June 1958). Life (2 Dec. 1946). NYT (15 Nov. 1952). PW (24 Nov. 1952). —EDYTHE M. MCGOVERN, UPDATED BY NELSON RHODES
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BROWN, Nancy See LESLIE, Annie Brown
BROWN, Rita Mae Born 28 November 1944, Hanover, Pennsylvania Daughter of Ralph and Julia Buckingham Brown. Orphaned at an early age, Rita Mae Brown ‘‘escaped’’ from high school and college, then went to film school. She was a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. and in 1968, when Brown joined the New York chapter of National Organization for Women (NOW), she insisted women confront the issue of lesbian rights and was one of the Radicalesbians to write ‘‘The Woman-Identified Woman’’ (1970). Active in the women’s movement, she frequently lectured on feminism and gay liberation. The Hand That Cradles the Rock (1971), Brown’s first published collection of poetry, consists of 56 short poems with a brief statement by Brown that women will no longer accept the limiting definitions of their work imposed by men. Male culture and men are repeatedly associated with images of death and destruction, but women, ‘‘having slumbered,’’ are now ready to ‘‘break and run.’’ The image most frequently associated with women is that of the nourishing, life-giving sea, ever-changing and yet unchanged. Striking a recurrent theme throughout all her works, Brown insists change will occur not only from the rising strength of the individual woman but through the sisterhood of women. In ‘‘Sappho’s Reply,’’ Sappho’s voice ‘‘rings down through thousands of years’’ and Brown writes: ‘‘Tremble to the cadence of my legacy / An army of lovers shall not fail.’’ Although Coletta Reid, in an introduction to Brown’s first book, says Brown ‘‘works out of a tradition of carefully structured language and form,’’ this attention to language is more noticeable in Songs to a Handsome Woman (1973), perhaps because Brown focuses on one theme—love. Although loving another person brings sorrow and pain as well as joy, ‘‘a society or individual who denies love is a state away from denying life.’’ Brown’s best known book is her semiautobiographical Rubyfruit Jungle (1973), one of the first novels to feature a strong lesbian who feels no need to dissemble or apologize for her sexual preference. Molly Bolt grows up a dirt-poor illegitimate Southern child who quickly learns that survival depends on her own feelings and assertive actions. She refuses the conventional limitations of being a girl. Molly grows into a young woman who would lose her scholarship and be expelled from college rather than deny her love for her roommate. She works at menial jobs to earn money to continue her education, and battles the male chauvinism of the university where she is constantly frustrated in obtaining the materials and equipment readily available to men in the film department. Several episodes in the novel are comic, and lend themselves readily to Brown’s oral readings. As Jane Rule points out in
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Lesbian Images, ‘‘the earnestness would weigh heavily if the book were not lifted by arrogant humor, never-mind-the-consequences fury, and transcending tenderness.’’ Flashing wit and lively language is evident throughout the novel. A Plain Brown Rapper (1976) collects Brown’s essays and political writings originally published in Quest, Rat, Come Out!, The Ladder, The Furies, Woman, and other feminist journals. Throughout the essays on politics, economics, and feminism, Brown emphasizes the common struggles of oppressed people. In ‘‘Take a Lesbian to Lunch,’’ Brown argues not for separatism, but for understanding among all people, to ‘‘make a better life for ourselves individually and collectively.’’ In Six of One (1978) Brown continues the irreverent, jaunty style of Rubyfruit Jungle. Many of the scenes are improbable, a combination of fantasy and slapstick, but as one character observes, ‘‘You have to be absurd sometimes. Nothing is more deadly than routine rationality.’’ Concentrating her efforts on fiction—she would publish 19 novels between 1979 and 1999, in addition to several screenplays and an autobiography—Brown’s more recent fiction has appealed to a wider, more mainstream audience than her early work. Rubyfruit Jungle made her America’s best known ‘‘lesbian author’’ by the 1980s, and Brown consciously and vociferously fought such categorization, saying in a 1978 interview that ‘‘classifying fiction by race, sex, or sex preference of the author is a discreet form of censorship’’ that ghettoizes fiction and insults its authors. While moving toward a larger readership, Brown has seen her literary reputation suffer somewhat in the hands of critics attempting to categorize her work as that of a ‘‘lesbian,’’ ‘‘woman,’’ or ‘‘Southern’’ writer. Characterizing Brown as ‘‘impudent, iconoclastic, individualistic, [and] egotistical,’’ Deborah T. Meem noted in Feminist Writers that Brown ‘‘insists on her right to set her own literary, political, and personal agenda,’’ and has made an effort to separate herself from any social or political movement or dogma that interferes with this independence. The fluctuation in Brown’s literary stature was largely the result of the publication of two flawed novels—Sudden Death (1983) and Venus Envy (1993)—and of a style of wit many critics insist on reading as a lack of seriousness. Developments in the field of lesbian literature in the 1980s and 1990s also played a part. The emergence of a larger body of works emboldened lesbians and feminist reviewers to feel more comfortable delivering harsh criticism, yet this collection of works was still small enough to burden individual works with higher expectations. Further, mainstream reviewers remained more critical of work they perceived as noncanonical. The most persistent criticism of Brown’s oeuvre has been that she is overpresent and obvious as a narrator and that she resolves crucial issues too simplistically or avoids resolution altogether. From Nickle Smith of Six of One (1978) and Bingo (1988) to Frazier Armstrong of Venus Envy, Brown is more likely to tell, or have her protagonists tell, who her characters are and what’s happening than to let readers discover for themselves. And although Brown’s conclusions are sometimes rushed, critics often overstate the problem. In her review of Southern Discomfort
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(1983), an historical novel set in 1918 and 1928 Alabama, Charlotte Meyer makes a common complaint: ‘‘the private and social costs involved’’ in the affair between the aristocratic protagonist and a young black man ‘‘are not worked out. . .because Hercules is accidentally—and conveniently—killed.’’ Yet this apparent solution complicates in some ways rather than simplifies. Hercules’ death may save Hortensia from a public reckoning, but the circumstances of his death must bring a more painful personal reckoning. She has refused to run away with him to the North; the very social structure that gives her the power and position she is unable to relinquish for him is directly responsible for his death. A ‘‘whites only’’ ambulance refuses to take him to the hospital and leaves him bleeding to death on the ground. Tragedy here, as elsewhere in Brown’s works, is relieved by comedy in most other sections of the novel; slapstick humor and witty dialogue abound. Brown’s strength is in her sense of humor and her ability as a storyteller. Her characters are vividly drawn and the situations she places them in usually outrageous and entertaining. With access to a wider audience than most so-called ‘‘lesbian’’ writers, Brown tries to use her wit as a weapon, to present readers with both strong lesbian and gay characters and issues of race, class, and gender with which they may be uncomfortable. She also assails social conventions she sees as being at odds with human nature, but in a generally humorous and therefore less threatening format. If the risk is that those issues then become easier to dismiss—and that critics will consequently find Brown herself easier to dismiss—it seems a risk Brown is willing to take. In the early 1990s Brown joined the growing ranks of mystery novelists with the publication of Wish You Were Here (1990) and Rest in Pieces (1992). ‘‘Coauthored’’ with her cat, Sneakie Pie Brown, and featuring investigative postmistress Harry Haristeen, these books marked the beginning of a series of novels featuring feline sleuths Mrs. Murphy (a overfed tiger), the gray-furred Pewter, and their erstwhile corgi companion Tee Tucker. Taking place in Crozet, Virginia, the ‘‘Sneakie Pie’’ novels are imbued with Southern intrigue and a rural charm that have gained them a growing readership, despite some criticism that noncat lovers would find the novels less entertaining due to the frailty of their human characters. Reviewer Marilyn Stasio noted that despite the artifice of having the books narrated by a cat, Brown’s ‘‘solid storytelling and tart regional voice . . . keep her mysteries from congealing in their own cuteness.’’ Other novels by Brown with a Southern slant include Dolley: A Novel of Dolley Madison in Love and War (1995) and Riding Shotgun (1997). Dolley is Brown’s fictionalization of a year (1814) in the life of Dolley Madison, wife of President James Madison. Painting her protagonist as a protofeminist, Brown ‘‘breaths life into her historical characters’’ and the politics of the day, according to reviewer Marie Kuda, who praised Brown’s portrayal of Dolley Madison as ‘‘full-blown and vibrant, no longer a static silhouette on a cupcake wrapper.’’ Riding Shotgun, a novel mixing time travel and a 1990s protagonist into its historic plot, was less well received by critics, who found its plot confusing and implausible.
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Breaking with fiction, in 1997 Brown published Rita Will: Memoir of a Literary Rabble-Rouser, a look back at her life as a writer and a lesbian feminist. The book focuses on Brown’s celebrity status due to her notorious love affairs with several female athletes and gains its appeal from its author’s candid discussion of her ‘‘poverty-stricken upbringing’’ and ‘‘minutiae about those romantic escapades of tabloid fame,’’ in the opinion of critic Charlotte Innes. However, Brown’s iconoclastic attitude, her strongly voiced moral and political views, and her tendency toward sentimentality put off some critics, who continue to look to her fiction for signs of continued development as an author. OTHER WORKS: In Her Day (1976). High Hearts (1986). Poems (1987). Starting from Scratch: A Different Kind of Writers’ Manual (1988). Pay Dirt; or, Adventures at Ash Lawn (1996). Murder She Meowed (1997). Murder on the Prowl (1998). Cat on the Scent (1999). Loose Lips (1999). Screenplays: Slumber Party Massacre (1982); I Love Liberty (coauthor, 1982); The Long Hot Summer, Part One (1985) and The Long Hot Summer, Part Two (with Dennis Turner, 1985); My Two Loves (1986); Rich Men, Single Women (1989). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ward, C. M., Rita Mae Brown (1993). Reference works: CANR 35 (1992). CLC 43 (1987), 79 (1994). CBY (1986). FW (1996). Other references: Amer. Book Rev. (Jan./Feb. 1983). Booklist (15 Mar. 1994). Choice (Sept. 1972). Conditions (April 1977). HudR (Spring 1972). Lambda Rising Book Report (Dec. 1988/ Jan. 1989). LATBR (23 Aug. 1997). Ms. (June 1974). NYTBR (21 Mar. 1982, 19 June 1983, 20 Apr. 1986, 16 Dec. 1990, 8 Dec. 1996, 3 May 1998). PW (2 Oct. 1978). Signs (Summer 1984). Sinister Wisdom (Fall 1976). VV (April 1974). WPBW (17 Feb. 1974). —LOIS MARCHINO, UPDATED BY BETH GRIERSON AND PAMELA SHELTON
BROWN, Rosellen Born 12 May 1939, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Daughter of David H. and Blossom Lieberman Brown; married Marvin Hoffman, 1963; children: Adina, Elana In ‘‘A Fragment of Autobiography,’’ Rosellen Brown recounts her first memories of writing while her older brother was at school. It was during World War II and her memories include air raid drills, ration books, and ‘‘terrifying thunder.’’ Even before she learned to write, Brown practiced letters imagining a story to suit her mood. She also remembers early reading, and her grade school librarian’s policy of having children ‘‘sell’’ books they enjoyed to other classmates. Reading and writing focused much of her childhood, and Brown has said that she felt, even as a child, the
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need to ‘‘replenish, just a little bit, the pool of words I’m drinking from, to give back a book or two.’’ Both her parents respected learning. Her mother, who mastered English in a few months after arriving from the Ukraine, became a teacher for other immigrants, and Brown says that she was a ‘‘natural poet’’ even though she never wrote a word. Her father supplemented his eighth grade education by voracious reading and writing. He sold many of his poems to New York newspapers and wrote articulate and sensible letters to the editor. His reading journals, Brown says, were monuments to a writing talent he could not pursue while supporting his family. Despite the seeming security in the family, Brown felt keenly her rootless childhood, moving from town to town for her father’s job. When she was nine, they moved to Los Angeles, where Brown was frightened, lonely, and depressed. To compensate, she turned to writing. Brown remembers herself as obnoxious in her self-advertisement, but she wrote and imagined, even at age nine and with no women’s movement, that she could combine marriage and family with writing. During her years at Barnard (B.A., 1960) Brown wrote and worked with Robert Pack and George P. Elliot, who encouraged her talent, and Pack obtained a place for her in the Cummington Writers’ workshop. She published her first poem, a sestina, in Poetry magazine when she was a senior in college. Brown’s marriage in 1963 initiated a return to the rootless life she had known as a child. She and her husband lived first in California, then in Mississippi, the setting for Civil Wars (1984), and subsequently in Boston, in Brooklyn, the neighborhood of her book of short stories, Street Games (1974, 1991), in New Hampshire, and finally in Houston, where she taught creative writing at the University of Houston. Of her constant relocation, both as a child and as an adult, she comments that it has given the theme of exile to her writing. She says this exile ‘‘can be just as deep an obsession as devotion to (or aversion to) home’’: the theme is seen in almost all of her work—poetry, short stories, and novels. Brown’s first novel, Autobiography of My Mother (1976), pits two women against one another. The mother, Gerda Stein, is a successful civil rights lawyer; her daughter, Renata, has become a flower child and has a baby out of wedlock. The two women not only represent poles of the political spectrum, but they also show readers how far apart and how hurtful mothers and daughters can be to each other. Tender Mercies (1978), the story of a young woman paralyzed in a boating accident caused by her husband, again rubs raw the nerve connecting people. The marriage of Dan Courser and Laura tests the strength of both and illustrates how people survive after they have committed monumental acts of carelessness. Civil Wars (1984), perhaps Brown’s most ambitious novel, combines political and personal themes and explores the public and private histories of a group of civil rights workers in Mississippi. Jessie and Teddy Carll are two 1960s liberals trying to survive and to keep their marriage together when the raison d’être
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of their lives, the civil rights movement, seems no longer to exist. The book is about families and about the politics that bring them together and drive them apart. Before and After (1992) again makes use of a 1960s liberal couple: Ben, who is a sculptor, works at home and does the cooking; Carolyn, his wife, practices medicine in a small New Hampshire town. Both are trying to live without losing the aura that the 1960s brought to their lives. When their teenaged son, Jacob, murders his girlfriend, the family must begin the long journey to reconstitute itself with this enormous burden. Like Tender Mercies, Before and After tears people’s lives apart and examines how the characters mend themselves. The novel has been translated into 23 languages, and a film version (with screenplay by Ted Tally) was released in 1996 that greatly distorted both the plot and the intercultural conflict driving it. In her two books of poetry, Some Deaths in the Delta (1970) and Cora Fry (1977), Brown again combines public politics and private dreams. Some Deaths is a series of trenchantly critical poems about the new South, and the tone often foreshadows Civil Wars. Cora Fry, a series of narrative poems about marriage and family, reveals the ways in which personal relationships recapitulate larger social forces. Cora, wanting only freedom, runs away with her children, but returns to her marriage and the risk that her husband may well destroy them all. Brown also collaborated on the Whole World Catalogue, a compendium of creative writing ideas for elementary and secondary schools. Here, as in her fiction, she replenishes the pool of words. In 1994 Brown continued to replenish the supply of her well-wrought words with Cora Fry’s Pillow Book, which includes Cora Fry and the sequel of the title. With elegant brevity, Brown continues the tale of Cora’s life in smalltown New England as well as that of her neighbors, packing rich imagery and deep emotion into very few words. In 1996 Brown moved from Houston to Chicago, where she teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is at work on a new novel. She reviews for the Women’s Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, the Boston Globe, the New Leader, and the American Book Review. An occasional travel piece appears in the New York Times as well and she has contributed to a number of anthologies, including A Place Called Home: Twenty Writing Women Remember (edited by Mickey Pearlman, 1997), Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales (edited by Kate Bernheimer, 1998), and From Daughters to Mothers: I Always Meant to Tell You (edited by Constance Warhoe, 1998), an anthology of letters from 75 writers to their mothers. John Updike has selected her superbly wry and painful short story ‘‘How to Win’’ for a volume tentatively titled The Best Short Stories of the Century. OTHER WORKS: A Rosellen Brown Reader (1992). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Howe, F., ed., Meridian, The Salt Eaters, Civil Wars (1991). Howe, F., ed., Tradition and the Talents of Women
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(1991). LeClair, T., and L. McCaffery, Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists (1983). Pearlman, M., ed., Mother Puzzles: Daughters and Mothers in Contemporary American Literature (1989). Reference works: CA (1979). CAAS (1989). CANR (1985). CLC (1985). FC (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: American Imago (Summer 1988). Chicago Review (Winter 1983). Contemporary Literature (Summer 1986). South Atlantic Quarterly (Summer 1991). WRB (July 1989). —MARY A. MCCAY, UPDATED BY MARTHA ULLMAN WEST
BROWN, Sandra Born 12 March 1948, Waco, Texas Also writes under: Laura Jordan, Rachel Ryan, Erin St. Claire Daughter of Jimmie and Martha Cox; married Michael Brown, 1948; children: Rachel, Ryan Sandra Brown has been among the most prolific and commercially viable authors of romance and mainstream fiction throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Her current books contain many of the elements associated with the romance genre where she became established first, but also feature traits common to crime and political thrillers and mysteries. She is a rare example of a romance writer who has been able to make a successful transition into mainstream novels. A native Texan, Brown was the oldest of five daughters of a father who wrote editorials for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and a mother who counseled emotionally disturbed children. Brown attended Texas Christian University, Oklahoma State University, and the University of Texas at Arlington, although she never graduated. She met her husband, a video producer, while employed as a dancer at the Six Flags over America amusement park in Arlington. Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, she was employed as a model, weather reporter, and entertainment reporter. Brown began writing in 1981 at age thirty-three and sold her first book, Love’s Encore, within the year under the pseudonym Rachel Ryan. This was followed the same year by Love Beyond Reason. In 1982, five of her titles were released and she was soon writing for all the major romance publishers, including Harlequin/ Silhouette, Dell, Bantam, Berkley/Jove and Richard Gallen/Pocket, under her own name and three pseudonyms. Romance readers loved the fact that her books were set in the American South rather than among European royalty, as was the norm. Some of her early genre novels included Eloquent Silence (1982) and A Treasure Worth Seeking (1982) under the pseudonym Rachel Ryan; Not Even for Love (1982), Hidden Fires (1982) and The Silken Web (1982) under Laura Jordan; A Kiss Remembered (1983) and Seduction by Design (1983) under Erin St.
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Claire; and Breakfast in Bed (1983), Prime Time (1983), and Heaven’s Price (1983) under her own name. Brown began to feel locked in by the conventions demanded by publishers and readers of romances, including the prohibition of graphic sex scenes and bad language and required happy endings. In 1988 she wrote her first mainstream novel, published by Warner Books. Her loyal romance readers were furious by the change at first, but she managed to keep most of her audience as well as adding even more fans. She became a fixture on the New York Times Bestseller List, where she was just the second female writer, after Danielle Steele, to have three titles appear simultaneously. As of 1998, Brown had produced more than 60 novels, including 36 bestsellers, and boasted well over 50 million copies in print. Her works have been translated into 30 languages. Brown’s first mainstream novel was Slow Heat in Heaven (1988), followed by Best Kept Secrets (1989); Mirror Image (1990), which represented her first appearance on the New York Times list; Breath of Scandal and Another Dawn (both 1991); French Silk (1992), which was developed into a made-for-television movie; Where There’s Smoke and Shadows of Yesterday (both 1993); Charade (1994); The Witness (1995); Exclusive (1996); Fat Tuesday (1997); Unspeakable (1998); and The Alibi (1999). She has also written three books known collectively as the Texas! trilogy, including Texas! Lucky (1990), Texas! Chase (1990), and Texas! Sage (1992). As a rule, critics love Brown’s plots but are less enamored of her writing style. Publishers Weekly noted of French Silk, ‘‘Despite occasionally stilted and didactic dialogue, the novel is adroitly plotted and sleekly paced, and has just the right mix of menace and sex to keep pages turning.’’ Similarly, the publication called Fat Tuesday a ‘‘suspenseful, if rarely subtle, tale of revenge and corruption’’ and Unspeakable a ‘‘fast-paced and romantically charged, if stiffly written, thriller. . . . Brown’s deftly plotted narrative twists and turns without losing hold of its suspense.’’ Brown’s work typically features a large number of fleshed-out characters, including a career-oriented female protagonist looking for love; lots of what one reviewer terms ‘‘raunchy sex scenes’’; complicated plots, often involving family issues, in which unanticipated secrets are revealed and the heroine is placed in dangerous situations; and settings in the American South, from Texas to New Orleans to Washington, D.C. Readers and critics alike laud her ability to create fresh plots with every new book and to keep readers guessing right up to the last page. OTHER WORKS: Relentless Desire (1983). Tempest in Eden (1983). Tomorrow’s Promise (1983). In a Class by Itself (1984). Send No Flowers (1984). Sunset Embrace (1984). Bittersweet Rain (1984). Words of Silk (1984). Thursday’s Child (1985). A Sweet Anger (1985). Led Astray (1985). Another Dawn (1985). Riley in the Morning (1985). Tiger Prince (1985). Above and Beyond (1986). The Rana Look (1986). Honor Bound (1986). 22 Indigo Place (1986). The Devil’s Own (1987). Sunny Chandler’s Return (1987). Demon Rumm (1987). Two Alone (1987). Fanta C (1987). Tidings
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of Great Joy (1988). Adam’s Fall (1988). Hawk O’Toole’s Hostage (1988). Long Time Coming (1989). Temperatures Rising (1989). Thrill of Victory (1989). A Whole New Light (1989). A Secret Splendor (1992). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference Works: CANR (1998). Other references: Forbes (2 June 1997). NYTBR (31 May 1992). People (4 July 1994, 21 Sept. 1998). PW (30 Aug. 1985, 15 Apr. 1988, 21 Dec. 1990, 7 June 1991, 16 Mar. 1992, 15 May 1995, 10 July 1995, 6 May 1996, 9 Sept. 1996, 31 May 1997, 25 May 1998, 8 June 1998). Texas Monthly (Oct. 1991). Writer’s Digest (Sept. 1984). —KAREN RAUGUST
BROWNE, Martha Griffith Born date unknown; died 25 May 1906 Wrote under: Martha Griffith, Mattie Griffith Daughter of Thomas and Martha Young Griffith; married Albert Gallatin Browne Daughter of slaveowners, Martha Griffith Browne freed the slaves she inherited, and over the protests of her relatives used her own resources to give her ex-slaves a start as free persons. Moving to Boston in 1860, she wrote for Boston and New York antislavery publications and participated in William Lloyd Garrison’s American Anti-Slavery Society. Browne’s principal work, Autobiograpby of a Female Slave, was first published anonymously in 1857 (reprinted 1998), but the author’s identity was soon made known by Garrison’s the Liberator, which on 9 January 1857 printed an extract. Since its first publication readers have sometimes taken the Autobiograpby to be an authentic slave narrative, sometimes an edited or shaped narrative, and sometimes a completely fictionalized story. Browne herself reported in 1904 that it was totally composed of ‘‘recited’’ and ‘‘well-known’’ facts. It is clear that Browne’s account of slave life in Kentucky is accurately based on her firsthand experiences, but she made the book readable by creating dialogue and shaping a plot. The value of the Autobiography is twofold. First, despite its touches of sentimentality and interspersed abolitionist polemic, it provides insight into day-to-day Kentucky slave life, both in country and city. The broad range of characters’ survival accommodations to slavery—from obsequiousness to militancy in the slaves, and from extreme cruelty to strong antislavery opinions in the whites—gives a comprehensive picture of human interaction with the ‘‘peculiar institution.’’ Second, having a female as the central character from whose first-person point of view the stories of many other females are told, is a needed addition to the ‘‘authentic’’ slave narratives, of which scores were published but in which women’s stories were sadly underrepresented. When comparing Browne’s novelized Autobiography with the slaves’ description of slavery culled from firsthand narratives,
one finds many similarities. Legally enforced illiteracy was the bane of slaves, and a mainstay of the system. Slave leaders or high achievers were those who, by subterfuge or luck, received some schooling. Violence was a second, less successful, mainstay of slavery. Mistresses and professed Christians were as cruel or more cruel than tobacco-chewing, whisky-drinking masters. Even though they whip slaves with impunity, even to death, for such sins as loss of a silver fork, slave loyalty is tied not to punishment, but to rewards. Slaves were not well-provided with clothing, food, shelter, or medical care. It was especially hard for childbearing women, who were severely punished for resisting white men’s advances, and were expected to do field work and housework while pregnant or nursing; they kept their children alive only to see them beaten or sold. Children were not properly cared for, and had no chance to develop self-esteem. Their mortality rate was extremely high. As a novel, the Autobiography is inevitably compared to Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which preceded it by four years. The Autobiography of a Female Slave is less derivative than might be expected, depending less than Stowe’s work on sentimental reaction for its antislavery impact, and being much more blunt and realistic about the majority of slaveholders than is Stowe’s depiction of Southern aristocrats. OTHER WORKS: Madge Vertner (1859-60). Poems (1852, 1853). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bayliss, J., Black Slave Narratives (1970). Dumond, D., A Bibliography of Anti-Slavery in America (1967). Loggins, V., The Negro Author, His Development in America to 1900 (1931). Lystar, K. J., ‘‘Two Female Perspectives on the Slave Family as Described in Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Mattie Griffith’s Autobiography of a Female Slave’’ (thesis, 1995). McPherson, J., The Struggle for Equality (1964). Nichols, C., Many Thousands Gone: The Ex-Slaves’ Account of Their Bondage and Freedom (1963). Ruchames, L., ed., The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison (From Disunion to the Brink of War, vol. 4, 1975). —CAROLYN WEDIN SYLVANDER
BROWNMILLER, Susan Born 15 February 1935, Brooklyn, New York Susan Brownmiller, best known as a feminist and activist, attended Cornell University from 1952-55. She began her career as an actress in New York City, but after four years she turned to editing for Coronet where she worked her way from assistant to managing editor. She pursued this path and worked as an editor for the Albany Report (1961-62), before becoming a national affairs researcher for Newsweek (1963-64). With experience in newswriting, she worked as staff writer for the Village Voice (1965) and then on to reporting for NBC-TV (1965) and network newswriting for ABC-TV (1966-68). During this time in the
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1960s, Brownmiller became one of the earliest politically active feminists in New York City. Acutely aware of the need for improved women’s rights, she was a founding member of the New York Radical Feminists in 1968. Their protest demonstrations, along with Brownmiller’s freelance journalism experiences led her to help organize a 1971 ‘‘Speak-Out on Rape’’ which became the focus of much of her subsequent work. She also was an organizer of Women Against Pornography. Her activism, and both nonfiction and fiction have garnered her respect as a leader of the feminist movement and an adversary of pornography. Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (1981) is the result of four years of research and writing in which Brownmiller explores the subject of rape in a way it had never been done before. This controversial work explores the history of rape, the political use of rape in wartime, and the cultural and social permutations of rape. The thesis of the work, which caused both outrage and introspection, states that rape ‘‘is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear,’’ an act of brute power, ‘‘a thoroughly detestable physical conquest from which there could be no retaliation in kind.’’ Heavily researched, Brownmiller relies on government statistics, historical accounts, and cultural myths to construct a view of rape as not a sexual act but as an act of power and oppression. While the book gained her celebrity, it was received very differently by different people. Many, especially women, saw the work as eye-opening and liberating by offering them a way to understand an otherwise unexplainable act of barbarism, while others felt it vindictively, angrily, and wrongfully accused all men of heinous crimes against women. The controversy of Against Our Will brought Brownmiller widespread attention and the book became a national bestseller. Her ultimate hope for her book was to give women a way to fight back against rape and to let all women together find a way ‘‘to redress the imbalance and rid ourselves and men of the ideology of rape. . . . My purpose in this book has been to give rape its history. Now we must deny it a future.’’ Brownmiller has since produced additional feminist writings, in addition to her foray into the novel with Waverly Place (1989). This novel again broaches a difficult subject by examining child abuse. Unlike with Against Our Will, she chose to set this work in fiction because ‘‘I wanted the freedom to invent dialogue, motivations, events, and characters based on my own understanding of battery and abuse.’’ Where she based herself entirely on fact and statistic in her first work, here she delves into the other side of abuse to emotionalize and personalize the unimaginable. Turning to a new genre, Seeing Vietnam; Encounters of the Road and the Heart (1994) she chronicles her experiences as an American in Vietnam. According to one critic, she ‘‘is a determined aggressive reporter with a fine sense for both background and detail. She makes the point of journeying off the beaten track. . . . And she manages to convey the flavor of ordinary life in Vietnam.’’ However, all reviews were not as favorable, and another critic found Brownmiller loses the beauty and joy of the curious moment when she interrupts her narrative ‘‘to give a history of the Vietnamese alphabet and discuss the faults of the Communist regime.’’ While she turns largely away from her
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Western feminist focus, she nevertheless maintains the focus of a newswoman and the passion of an activist. Hurled into the public eye, and surrounded by both criticism and applause alike, Brownmiller’s background as a newswriter and her passionate struggle for women’s rights have preserved her a place in the feminist cannon.
OTHER WORKS: Shirley Chisholm (1972). Femininity (1984).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hoy, P. C., et al., eds., Women’s Voices (1990). Reference works: CA (Online, 1999). Complete Marquis Who’s Who (1995). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Book Review Digest (1995). —JULIET BYINGTON
BROWNSON, Sarah N(icolena) Born 7 June 1839, Chelsea, Massachusetts; died 30 October 1876, Elizabeth, New Jersey Wrote under: An American, Sarah M(aria) Brownson, One of Themselves Daughter of Orestes A. and Sally Healy Brownson; married William J. Tenney, 1873; children: two daughters The daughter of a leading Roman Catholic thinker of 19thcentury America, Sarah N. Brownson spent almost her entire life in her father’s home. She shared his religious interests, contributing anonymous literary criticism to his Brownson’s Quarterly Review. Brownson also wrote articles, stories, and poems—many still unidentified—for other periodicals. Only three novels and a biography have been recognized as hers. In 1873 Brownson married an elderly widower, and, after giving birth to their second daughter, died, just six months after her father. In Marian Elwood, or How Girls Live (1859), the young author, identified only as ‘‘One of Themselves,’’ states that the book was ‘‘begun in an idle moment’’ with no thought of publication. Against a background of viciously competitive upper-class young ladies who flirt with and reject suitors, the heroine matures, falls in love with a good man, and atones for her former frivolity through suffering and good works. At Anchor, A Story of Our Civil War, by ‘‘An American’’ (1865), again deals with upper-class courtship and marriage. Georgie Vane, the New England heroine, marries a Southern gentleman and settles in the Confederacy with him, where she remains through much of the Civil War. In this story it is the horrors and suffering of war which lead the heroine to maturity and an ability to love deeply. The third novel, Heremore-Brandon, or the Fortunes of a Newsboy (1868), appeared only in serialized
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form in the Catholic World; its episodic quality makes it inferior to its predecessor in unity, coherence of plot, and motivation. All three of Brownson’s novels have contrived plots: chance meetings with unknown or forgotten relatives, sudden reappearances of supposedly dead lovers or husbands. Yet the novels show an ability to develop complex characters, especially women, as well as an understanding of human growth and an increasing awareness of social problems. Although Catholicism runs through all of Brownson’s fiction, it is most explicit in Marian Elwood, where a sensible and wise priest is contrasted with a fatuous and infatuated Protestant minister. In the later novels Catholicism serves as a force in the characters’ lives, urging them toward good works, sympathy for the needy, and a relative simplicity of life. The work for which Brownson is most generally known, and the only book published under her own name, is the Life of Demetrius Augustine Gallitzin, Prince and Priest (1873), a biography of the intellectual Russian prince who converted to Roman Catholicism and served as a priest in the mountains of Pennsylvania. Brownson’s careful research resulted in the first in-depth study of Gallitzin. A French translation appeared posthumously. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Maynard, T., Orestes Brownson: Yankee, Radical, Catholic (1943). Other references: BrQR (1873). Catholic World (1873). CHR (1940). —ARLENE ANDERSON SWIDLER
BRYAN, Mary Edwards Born 17 May circa 1838, Lloyd, Florida; died 15 June 1913, Clarkston, Georgia Daughter of John D. and Louisa C. Houghton Edwards; married Iredell E. Bryan, 1854 Mary Edwards Bryan spent her early years on her father’s plantation near Tallahassee, Florida. Her childhood was given to outdoor sports and horseback rides through the wild woods surrounding her home. At age eleven Bryan was sent to the Fletcher Institute, a boarding school near Thomasville, Georgia. Before she was sixteen, she had already published poems and a story in the local paper. Mystery surrounds Bryan’s marriage at the age of fifteen or sixteen. An hour before she was married, she was sitting in her own room, studying her Latin lesson. Two hours afterward, she was on her way to her husband’s home on the banks of the Red River. For reasons unknown, she left her husband after a year. The separation was only partial, however, because her husband was devoted to her, and visited her frequently. The couple had at least five children. In 1858 Bryan began contributing to the Georgia Literary and Temperance Crusader, filling three to five columns every
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week. The expanded Crusader moved to Atlanta in 1859, and Bryan followed, serving as its literary editor. In 1868 Bryan worked for Scott’s Magazine of Atlanta, and her novel The Mystery of Cedar Bay was serialized in its pages. From 1874-84, Bryan served as associate editor of Sunny South, a popular Atlanta family weekly, and began to publish her novels in book form. Bryan moved to New York City in 1885 to become assistant editor of two magazines published by George Munro, Fireside Companion and Fashion Bazaar. In her spare time, she completed at least nine novels, most of which Munro published. Manch (1880) typifies the style and content of Bryan’s fiction. Fifteen-year-old Milly Brown goes into convulsions when her husband is accused of murder. Climaxes include a race to the gallows and a scaffold confession from the heroine’s supposed father, who reveals he had killed her true father for having married the woman he loved. Bryan supplements her sensational plotting with fairly believable descriptions of the bayous and border settlements. In Wild Work (1881), purportedly based on actual incidents in recontruction Louisiana, a heroine falls in love with a carpetbagger, is disowned by her family, and dies of consumption while her husband neglects her to pursue wealth and power. Despite the melodramatic plot, Bryan’s local color and history generally ring true. She stresses the credulity, superstition, and shiftlessness of the freedmen and the rapacity of the Yankees. Bryan’s poems were characterized by contemporaries as ‘‘brilliant and passionate.’’ Although derivative, her poetry is often strong and sensitive, and its earnestness recalls the religious fervor of her youthful years. In her 1860 essay, ‘‘How Should Women Write?’’ Bryan discusses her aspirations as a writer, and calls upon women to write honestly about ethical and social questions. If Bryan’s poems and novels generally fail to live up to her early promise and the serious aspirations of ‘‘How Should Women Write?’’ they offer valuable glimpses of the south both before and after the war. Bryan’s achievement as a well-paid editor of Northern magazines still seems remarkable today. OTHER WORKS: The Bayou Bride (1886). Kildee; or, The Sphinx of the Red House (1886). Munro’s Star Recitations for Parlor, School, and Exhibition (ed. by Bryan, 1887). Stormy Wedding (1887). My Own Sin; A Story of Life in New York (1888). Uncle Ned’s White Child (1889). The Ghost of the Hurricane Hills, or, A Florida Girl (1891). Ruth the Outcast (1891). His Legal Wife (1894). The Girl He Bought (1895). Nan Haggard, the Heiress of Dead Hopes Mine (1895). Poems and Stories in Verse (1895). Maple Leaf Amateur Reciter, a Book of Choice Dialogues for Parlor, School and Exhibition (ed. by Bryan, 1908). Bayou Tree (n.d.). A Fair Judas (n.d.). Fugitive Bride (n.d.). Her Husband’s Ghost (n.d.). His Greatest Sacrifice (n.d.). His Wife’s Friend (n.d.). Sinned Against (n.d.). Three Girls (n.d.). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Davidson, J. W., The Living Writers of the South (1869). Forrest, M., Women of the South Distinguished in Literature (1861). McVoy, L. C., and R. B. Campbell, A Bibliography of
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Fiction by Louisianians and on Louisiana Subjects (1935). Raymond, I., Southland Writers (1870). Raymond, I., The Living Female Writers of the South (1870). Reference works: American Women (1897). Dictionary of American Biography, National Cyclopedia of American Biography (1892 et seq.). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). —SUSAN SUTTON SMITH
BRYANT, Anita Born 25 March 1940, Barnsdall, Oklahoma Daughter of Warren and Lenora Berry Bryant; married Robert Green, 1960 (divorced 1980); Charlie Dry, 1990; children: four Anita Bryant’s husband once remarked to his wife: ‘‘I don’t think you had a childhood.’’ Bryant’s father was nineteen, her mother eighteen, when Bryant was born. They were divorced by the time she was two, remarried one another when she was three, and were divorced again when she was thirteen. Later both parents remarried others. Bryant and her younger sister were frequently uprooted as their father, a laborer in the oil fields, moved from job to job, and the family experienced periods of severe poverty. According to her autobiography, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory (1970), however, Bryant’s singing talent was noticed early. Before finishing high school, she was appearing on network radio and she later dropped out of Chicago’s Northwestern University because of heavy career demands. Bryant met her managerhusband, Bob Green, while promoting a highly successful record in Miami. Many of Bryant’s works are coauthored with her husband. Before 1977, Bryant was known as a wholesome and patriotic entertainer, a devoted wife and mother of four children, an author of religious books, and a promoter of orange juice for the Florida Citrus Commission. In January 1977, however, she became a highly controversial public figure, identified primarily as a crusader against homosexual rights. The books Bryant wrote before 1977 are much like Christmas family newsletters, filled with photos, anecdotes, and news of the Green family. Loosely organized, chatty, and platitudinous, the books lack profundity, but are sincere expressions of Bryant’s outlook on life and her personal understanding of the Christian faith. Bless This House (1972) presents Bryant’s philosophy of Christian marriage and includes four chapters written by her husband. Fishers of Men (1973) tells of the Green family’s efforts to spread their Christian faith; while Running the Good Race (1976) describes the family’s efforts at physical fitness. In the foreword to her second book, Amazing Grace (1971), Bryant’s publishers state Bryant ‘‘never considered herself an author’’ but was persuaded to write as one way to ‘‘witness to thousands . . . how the Lord had touched her life.’’
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All of Bryant’s books reflect her comfortable upper-middleclass lifestyle and the particular conservative Christian subculture of which she is a part. Her writings indicate a dogmatic conviction that her view of life is the right way, the biblical way, God’s way. If socialization agencies such as schools or the media are permitted to present alternative world views—especially on certain social issues—Bryant fears children may make wrong choices. Thus in The Anita Bryant Story (1977), Bryant, who believed God had tapped her on the shoulder and given her ‘‘direct marching orders,’’ and her husband claim that an ordinance guaranteeing homosexual civil rights provides children with the mistaken idea ‘‘that there is an alternative way of life—that being a homosexual or a lesbian is not really wrong.’’ Since Bryant admits before this time she had given no thought or study to homosexuality, The Anita Bryant Story contains a great deal of misinformation, sensationalism, and unsubstantiated generalizations about homosexuality, which Bryant hastily put together in the emotional heat of seeking repeal of the ordinance. In At Any Cost (1978), coauthored with her husband, Bryant explains that at the outset of her involvement in the homosexual controversy, ‘‘there wasn’t even time to try to inform myself,’’ and claims since then she ‘‘endeavored to become more knowledgeable.’’ The Greens felt they were misunderstood and mishandled by the media and thus wrote the book to tell their side of the story. The intent of At Any Cost is, apparently, to justify the political stance they have taken all along, to describe what they have ‘‘been through as a family’’ because of it, and to challenge others to ‘‘stand up’’ for what the Greens believe is right. Bryant describes homosexuality as ‘‘a cancer on the soul of society’’ and is convinced it was promoted (along with abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment) as part of a program of ‘‘revolutionary women’’ whose goal is to ‘‘destroy the social structure on which America rests.’’ She characterizes the 1977 National Women’s Year Convention held in Houston as being ‘‘antimale, antiwhite, antifamily, anti-Christian, and anti-American from start to finish.’’ At the same time, Bryant writes that it saddens her to be accused of bigotry, adding, ‘‘I truly do love the homosexual, and all sinners for that matter.’’ Bryant writes with surprising candor. She does not hesitate to disclose the details of her emotional breakdown and the psychological help that enabled her to work through childhood resentments. Both Bryant and her husband freely speak of their hot tempers, and the ongoing struggles they have in following what they believe is the biblical model for marriage, i.e., male leadership and wifely submission. At one point, Bryant considered supporting the ERA, but her husband and others convinced her that ‘‘the Equal Rights Amendment was not God’s will for the women of America.’’ Nevertheless, an unbidden feminist spirit shows up at various points in Bryant’s writings. At the beginning of her marriage, time hung ‘‘unbearably heavy’’ on her hands until she left her full-time homemaker role to return to the entertainment world. Bryant’s autobiography speaks of an ‘‘intense ambition and a relentless drive to succeed,’’ and most of her books contain lengthy confessions of her struggle to be a submissive wife.
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Bryant and Green’s struggle for a biblical marriage ended in divorce in 1980, and Bryant remarried in 1990, to a childhood pal who told her he’d been in love with her for 40 years. A New Day was published in 1996, presenting a mellower Bryant than her previous books, especially those written with former husband Green. OTHER WORKS: Light My Candle (with B. Green, 1974). Bless This Food: The Anita Bryant Family Cookbook (1975). Raising God’s Children (with B. Green, 1977). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Melgaard, M. J., ‘‘The New Politics of Fear: The 1977 Dade County Gay Rights Referendum and the Regeneration of the Radical Right, 1969-1980’’ (thesis, 1992). Scot, D. C., Something in Orange (1978). Reference works: CB (1975). Other references: Anita Bryant & The Protect America’s Children Campaign (Formerly Save Our Children) (1978). Playboy (May 1978). People (5 July 1999). Today’s Christian Woman (Fall/Winter 1978-79). —LETHA SCANZONI
BUCHANAN, Edna (Rydzik) Born circa 1939, Paterson, New Jersey. Married Emmett Miller (divorced); Jim Buchanan (divorced) Edna Buchanan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who covered the police beat for the Miami Herald for nearly two decades, as well as a bestselling crime novelist. She is known for her punchy writing style, which has carried over from her newspaper reporting into her fiction. She is also renowned for her attention to detail and her portrayals of Miami—which plays the role of a major character in her novels. Buchanan was born in Paterson, New Jersey. Her mother, taking Buchanan and her younger sister with her, left Buchanan’s father, who worked in a factory and later ran a tavern, when Buchanan was seven. When Edna was twelve, she took a position in a coat factory to help her mother with the family finances. This was followed by several other blue-collar jobs. Due to monetary concerns, she never attended college. Eventually Buchanan and her mother both became switchboard assemblers at Western Electric. During their first vacation, they visited Miami and decided to move there. In 1964 Buchanan took a position at the Miami Beach Sun, a small local newspaper where she received intensive on-the-job training as a reporter. She moved to the Miami Herald in 1970 and worked as a news and court reporter before transferring to the police beat in 1973, becoming the first woman to fill the position full-time. She quickly gained a reputation for her tenacity in gathering information and compassion for victims, about whom
she tried to find out as much as possible, and ultimately earned grudging respect from members of the police force. She also was acclaimed for her gripping writing style, particularly her leads. Over the course of 15 years, Buchanan covered more than 5,000 crimes, predominantly murders, winning awards from the National Newspaper Association, the American Bar Association, and the Society of Professional Journalists. She won the Pulitzer for general reporting in 1986. Buchanan’s first book, published in 1979, was Carr: Five Years of Rape and Murder, From the Personal Account of Robert Frederick Carr III. While in prison, the eponymous Carr confided to Edna details from his years of criminal behavior. The book achieved some critical acclaim, particularly for its psychological insight, but it did not sell well, and it was eight years before Buchanan released another book-length work. In 1987 Buchanan’s memoir of her years as a crime reporter, The Corpse Had a Familiar Face: Covering Miami, America’s Hottest Beat, became a bestseller, thanks in part to the publicity from her recent Pulitzer. Although some reviewers found her newspaper style irritating in book form, most embraced it. One example of Buchanan’s trademark prose: ‘‘Many of the corpses have had familiar faces: cops and killers, politicians and prostitutes, doctors and lawyers. Some were my friends.’’ Two made-for-television films based on The Corpse Had a Familiar Face were aired on CBS in 1994 and 1995, both featuring Elizabeth Montgomery as Buchanan. Buchanan then published a subsequent memoir, Never Let Them See You Cry: More from Miami, America’s Hottest Beat. Her first novel, Nobody Lives Forever, was published in 1990. It received somewhat mixed reviews but was nominated for an Edgar award for best first mystery. As in later novels, Buchanan featured Miami almost as a character in its own right and created believable characters who echoed the real lives of the people featured in her memoirs. Buchanan’s second novel, Contents Under Pressure, was published in 1992, the same year as Never Let Them See You Cry. It introduced Britt Montero, a Cuban-American reporter for a fictional Miami newspaper, who the author has admitted is somewhat of an alter ego. Or, as Buchanan puts it, Montero is what she would like to be. Contents Under Pressure was a commercial success, as were her subsequent novels, many of which feature Montero. They include Miami, It’s Murder (1994), Suitable for Framing (1995), Act of Betrayal (1996), and Margin of Error (1997). Most received mixed reviews from critics, although nearly all praised her journalistic eye and ability to create a good story and capture Miami’s atmosphere. Publishers Weekly wrote of Margin of Error: ‘‘Buchanan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning eye doesn’t miss much in Miami. She knows its poshest precincts, its poorest projects and the troubles lurking in both. She also knows how to reveal the vulnerable heart beating within Britt’s tough exterior.’’ Buchanan’s recent novel, Pulse (1998), was praised by reviewers as a character study containing both suspense and
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emotion. Miami again plays a starring role, but the book’s lead character (not Montero this time) also travels to Seattle, which the author portrays with equal believability. In addition to her novels, Buchanan also writes articles for publications including Cosmopolitan, Fame, Family Circle and Rolling Stone.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference Works: CA 132 (1991). CBY (1997). Other references: New Yorker (17 Feb. 1986). NYTBR (20 Feb. 1994, 24 March 1996). PW (19 Sept. 1994, 16 Jan. 1995, 2 June 1997, 30 March 1998). Time (28 Sept. 1987). —KAREN RAUGUST
BUCK, Pearl S(ydenstricker) Born 26 June 1892, Hillsboro, West Virginia; died 6 March 1973, Danby, Vermont Also wrote under: John Sedges Daughter of Absalom and Caroline Stulting Sydenstricker; married John L. Buck, 1917; Richard J. Walsh, 1935 The daughter of American missionaries who took her to China at the age of three months, Pearl S. Buck grew up in close contact with the Chinese and had no intention of ever leaving China except for periods of study, such as taking her degree at Randolph-Macon Women’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia. In 1917 she married an agriculturist employed by the Presbyterian Mission Board, and in 1924 the two attended Cornell, where Buck won the Laura Messenger Prize for an essay, ‘‘China and the West.’’ This was an omen for her future, for she was to explain China to the West again and again, from her first published work, East Wind: West Wind (1930), to the time of her death, when she was working on a novel, Red Earth, which was to tell the story of the modern descendants of Wang Lung, the protagonist of her famous novel, The Good Earth (1931). Many of her books concerned other countries of Asia and also the U.S., but her love for the China in which she was brought up lasted all her life. Twentieth-century struggles, however, destroyed traditional China and made it impossible for her to continue living in the country. In 1932 Buck returned to the U.S., divorced her husband, and in 1935 married her publisher, Richard J. Walsh. The original incentive for her to earn money by writing had come in 1928, when she realized her daughter Carol was incurably retarded. But Buck did not stop at providing care for this one child. Like her mother supporting Chinese famine refugees, she felt that any suffering was her concern. Selecting Amerasians, who were hard to place, she brought up nine adopted children. In 1941 she founded the East-West Association; in 1949, Welcome House (a non-profit organization which provided care for children of Asian
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women and American servicemen); and in 1963, the Pearl S. Buck Foundation. Buck has always been popular with the general public. Her simple style, her feeling for traditional values, and her skill in writing on universal themes account for her appeal to the general reader. Buck herself never felt the novel was a branch of great literature, intended for an elite. Her Confucian tutor had taught her to consider the novel a form of popular entertainment, unworthy of the scholar, and she wished to be popular, because she liked ordinary people. The Good Earth, acknowledged as her best book, was written out of sympathy with the Chinese peasants. Wang Lung, the farmer, marries the slave girl, O-Lan, who becomes a devoted wife and a tireless worker. As she helps him on his farm, his prosperity grows, and he begins to buy land. O-Lan also presents him with children—two boys and a girl. Then famine comes. OLan kills a fourth child at birth, a girl, because there is no food, and the family, together with the old grandfather, heads south. In a big city, they eke out a miserable living and the surviving daughter is retarded. Then, during an insurrection, O-Lan finds some jewels in a house being looted. These jewels make it possible to return to the farm, and Wang Lung becomes more and more prosperous. OLan bears twins, a boy and a girl. Then Wang Lung takes a concubine and forces O-Lan to give up two pearls, which were all she had kept for herself. He wants to give them to his other woman. His oldest son trifles with the concubine. After that, OLan dies. Finally, Wang Lung and his family are established in the great house where O-Lan once worked as a slave, in conditions of wealth and ease. The whole story is told with love and understanding, and without a trace of praise or blame. People everywhere identified with these Chinese peasants, and The Good Earth became a worldwide bestseller. It won Buck the Pulitzer Prize in 1931 and the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1935. The 1937 film based on the book, and directed by Sidney Franklin, was also a great success, with Paul Muni as Wang Lung and Luise Rainer, who won an Academy Award for her touching performance of O-Lan. It was a beautiful film, although its happy ending was not faithful to the book. In 1938 Buck received the Nobel Prize ‘‘for rich and genuine epic portrayals of Chinese life and for masterpieces of biography.’’ The Nobel Prize was thus awarded not only for The Good Earth but also for Sons (1932) and A House Divided (1935), which carry the saga of Wang Lung’s family through three generations. Other works were East Wind: West Wind, The Young Revolutionist (1932), The First Wife, and Other Stories (1933), her translation of a Chinese novel, Shui Hu Chuan, All Men Are Brothers (1933), and The Mother (1934). The ‘‘masterpieces of biography’’ were Buck’s accounts of her mother, The Exile, and her father, Fighting Angel (both 1936). Her portraits of her parents are fresh, vivid, and true. She describes her father and his evangelical fervor with tenderness,
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understanding, and an admiration that is not lessened by a touch of humor. The same qualities appear in her portrait of her mother, along with a fellow feeling of sympathy for the trials her mother had to endure. Buck’s mother deeply felt the loss of a child who succumbed to tropical diseases, but she took almost as hard her husband’s refusal to treat her as an equal. After these biographies, Buck’s most outstanding work of nonfiction also concerned her own family, especially The Child Who Never Grew (1950), which tells the heartrending story of her retarded child. The Good Earth has tended to overshadow all Buck’s other writings, a circumstance that irritated her considerably, and with reason, for she wrote much of value. Among her lesser novels, of particular interest are the following: Pavilion of Women (1946), which tells how a Chinese lady finds fulfillment in a spiritual love for an Italian priest; Peony (1948), which presents the assimilation of the Chinese Jews; and Imperial Woman (1956), which tells the story of Tzu Hsi, who was dowager empress of China when Buck was a child. Buck was forged by two great traditions—China and the evangelical Christianity of her missionary parents. Her writings, with their simple, eloquent, somewhat archaic style and their taste for a clear message based on real experience, have reminded people of the Bible. But she was too earthy for a missionary, and too accepting of all religions. She refused her father’s doctrines (for her mother was more loving and less dogmatic) as too harsh and narrow, and she tempered her parents’ ideal of Christian love and service with Confucian tolerance and calm. Whatever her subject, she sought to convey these dual lessons to the world. And in this task she had set herself, she was as untiring and as impossible to discourage as her father had been in his mission work. Her obituary in the New York Times said that by her 80th birthday, in 1972, she had published more than 85 novels and collections of short stories and essays, and that more than 25 volumes still awaited publication—a staggering output. Although it was never her ambition to rival the great writers of the world, the quality of her work is remarkable. When one also thinks of her humanitarian endeavors, of which only the briefest account has been given in this article, one wonders how a single human being could have done so much.
OTHER WORKS: East and West and the Novel (1932). Is There a Case for Foreign Missions? (1932). The Laymen’s Mission Report (1932). The Writing of East Wind: West Wind (1932). Far and Near (1934, pub. as Twenty-seven Stories, 1943). Today and Forever (1934). The Gifts They Bring (with G. T. Zarfoss, 1935). House of Earth (containing earlier works, 1935). On Discovering America (1937). This Proud Heart (1938). The Chinese Novel (1939). The Patriot (1939). Other Gods (1940). Stories for Little Children (1940). Of Men and Women (1941). Stories of China (containing earlier works, 1941). American Unity and Asia (1942). Asia and Democracy (1942). China Sky (1942). The Chinese Children Next Door (1942). Dragon Seed (1942). Freedom for All (1942). Freedom for India Now! (with Lin Yutang, K. Shridharani et al.; 1942). Pearl Buck Speaks for Democracy (with foreword
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by E. Roosevelt, 1942). The Promise (1943). The Water-Buffalo Children (1943). What America Means to Me (1943). The Dragon Fish (1944). The Spirit and the Flesh (containing earlier works, 1944). The Angry Wife (1945). China Flight (1945). China in Black and White (1945). Portrait of a Marriage (1945). Talk About Russia (with M. Scott, 1945). Tell the People (with J. Yen, 1945). The Townsman (1945). Yu Lan: Flying Boy of Japan (1945). Can the Church Lead? (1946). The Big Wave (1947). How It Happens (with E. von Pustau, 1947). This Proud Heart (1948). American Argument (with E. C. Robeson, 1949). Kinfolk (1949). The Long Love (1949). New Evidence of the Militarization of America (1949). One Bright Day (1950). God’s Men (1951). What the Peoples of Asia Want (1951). Bright Procession (1952). The Hidden Flower (1952). Come, My Beloved (1953). The Man Who Changed China (1953). Voices in the House (1953). The Beach Tree (1954). Johnny Jack and His Beginnings (1954). My Several Worlds (1954). A Certain Star (1957). The Christmas Miniature (1957). The Christmas Mouse (1957). Letter from Peking (1957). American Triptych (containing earlier works, 1958). Friend to Friend (with C. P. Romulo, 1958). Command the Morning (1959). The Christmas Ghost (1960). The Delights of Learning (1960). Fourteen Stories (1961). A Bridge for Passing (1962). Hearts Come Home and Other Stories (1962). Satan Never Sleeps (1962). The Living Reed (1963). The Big Fight (1964). Children for Adoption (1964). Escape at Midnight and Other Stories (1964). Joy of Children (1964). Welcome Child (1964). Death in the Castle (1965). Fairy Tales of the Orient (1965). My Mother’s House (1965). For Spacious Skies (with T. F. Harris, 1966). Little Fox in the Middle (1966). Matthew, Mark, Luke and John (1966). The People of Japan (1966). The Time Is Noon (1966). To My Daughters, with Love (1967). The New Year (1968). Elements of Democracy in the Chinese Traditional Culture (1969). The Good Deed and Other Stories of Asia (1969). The Three Daughters of Madame Liang (1969). China As I See It (1970). The Kennedy Women (1970). Mandala (1970). The Chinese Story Teller (1971). A Gift for The Children (1971). Pearl Buck’s America (1971). The Story Bible (1971). China Past and Present (1972). A Community Success Story: the Founding of the Pearl Buck Center (1972). The Goddess Abides (1972). Once Upon a Christmas (1972). Pearl Buck’s Oriental Cookbook (1972). All Under Heaven (1973). Mrs. Starling’s Problem (1973). Pearl S. Buck’s Book of Christmas (1974). The Rainbow (1974). Words of Love (1974). East and West; Stories (1975). Secrets of the Heart (1976). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Doyle, P. A., Pearl S. Buck (1965). Harris, T. E., Pearl S. Buck: A Biography (1969-71). Spencer, C., The Exile’s Daughter, a Biography of Pearl S. Buck (1936). Stirling, N., Pearl Buck: A Woman in Conflict (1983). Thompson, D. W., ‘‘Pearl Buck,’’ in American Winners of the Nobel Literary Prize (1968). Van Doren, C., The American Novel, 1789-1939 (1940). Van Gelder, R., Writers and Writing (1946). Walsh, R. J., A Biographical Sketch of Pearl S. Buck (1936). Zinn, L., ‘‘The Works of Pearl S. Buck: A Bibliography,’’ in Bulletin of Bibliography 36 (1979). —BARBARA J. BUCKNALL
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BUCKMASTER, Henrietta Born Henrietta Henkle, 10 March 1909, Cleveland, Ohio; died April 1983 Daughter of Rae D. and Pearl Wintermute Henkle; married Peter John Stephens Henriette Buckmaster grew up in New York City, where she attended the Friends’ Seminary and the Brearley School. In addition to writing historical studies and novels, Buckmaster wrote book reviews for the Saturday Review of Literature and the New York Times. Buckmaster’s works reveal a fascination with history. They include two history books—Let My People Go (1941), the story of the underground railroad, and Freedom Bound (1965), which describes the Reconstruction period from 1865 to 1877—as well as numerous historical novels. A major concern of Buckmaster’s historical novels is human freedom. American slaves and women are often her subjects. In Deep River (1944), Buckmaster presents opposition to slavery from the perspective of the mountain people of western Georgia. The strong-willed main character, Savanna Bliss, finds in her husband Simon a man strong enough to accept her strength. He allows her to share in his struggle against slavery in the Georgia legislature in order to advance the economic situation of the poor white mountain farmer. The issues of the emancipation of women and slaves come together again in the novel, Fire in the Heart (1948), which tells the story of Fanny Kemble, the great 19th-century English actress. Fanny saves her family from bankruptcy and at the same time becomes famous by playing Juliet at Covent Garden. At the death of her first love, the renowned artist Thomas Lawrence, Fanny travels to America with her father and aunt. The theatrical tour is highly successful, but Fanny leaves the stage to marry a wealthy Philadelphia lawyer and businessman. Always something of a misfit in his conventional and prestigious family, Fanny finds her love sufficient to overcome all difficulties except one: she must live with the uncomfortable knowledge that their land in the South is farmed by slaves they own. In Fire in the Heart, Buckmaster creates another free-spirited woman in conflict with the customs and attitudes of her day. Simultaneously, she reminds her readers of the involvement in slavery of northerners who derived wealth from the Southern system. The Lion in the Stone (1968) is the story of Devar Moragoda, secretary-general of the United Nations, and his colleagues as they struggle to maintain peace in the post-Vietnam era. The absence of China from the Security Council complicates their efforts when Mongolia, by declaring itself independent of Russian influence, shatters the tenuous balance of power between Russia and China. Buckmaster achieves an atmosphere of tension and
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reality as the leaders of great nations recognize their inadequacy in the face of potential nuclear catastrophe. Unless every nation makes peace its top priority, any nation can destroy all. Thus, the threat Buckmaster has presented lingers beyond the end of the novel. In The Walking Trip (1972), an American girl, Molly Sayers, comes to London to accompany her brother on a walking trip through Scotland. He disappears, and in an effort to find him, she becomes enmeshed in Rhodesian politics. Here Buckmaster uses a contemporary political situation in which black Africans seek to overthrow the power of colonialism in Rhodesia as the background against which to present the ideal feminine personality. Molly’s courage enables her to find a man who respects her as a person and helps rescue her brother. The style is straightforward, and the story is fast moving. It is not great literature but it is good popular fiction. The Rhodesian situation in The Walking Trip, like the United Nations and international politics in Lion and the Stone, demonstrates Buckmaster’s use of contemporary history. She uses the biblical era in And Walk in Love (1956), a novel about the Apostle Paul; the 16th century in All the Living (1962), an imaginary account of a year in the life of Shakespeare; and the 19th century in many works concerned with slavery and abolition. Buckmaster is careful with the facts of history and is true to the spirit of the times about which she writes. Buckmaster writes for the common reader. She makes American ideals engrossing and edifying. Sacrificing neither truth nor reality, she holds up to her readers the ideals of political democracy and human worth. Her novels combine the scholarship of the historian with the concern of the civil libertarian.
OTHER WORKS: Tomorrow Is Another Day (1934). His End Was His Beginning (1936). Bread from Heaven (1952). Lucy and Loki (1958). Walter Raleigh: Man of Two Worlds (1964). Paul: A Man Who Changed the World (1965). The Seminole Wars (1966). Women Who Shaped History (1966). The Fighting Congressmen: Thaddeus Stevens, Hiram Revels, James Rapier, Blanche K. Bruce (1971).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1974). SAA (1974). Other references: Best Sellers (1 July 1968). CSM (5 May 1966, 6 June 1968). NYTBR (14 July 1968). Variety (19 Aug. 1970). Young Reader’s Review (April 1966). Author Henrietta Buckmaster Discusses Her Book, The Lion in the Stone, with Robert Cromie (audiocassette, 1971). —GWENDOLYN A. THOMAS
BURKE, Fielding See DARGAN, Olive Tilford
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BURNETT, Frances (Eliza) Hodgson Born 24 November 1849, Manchester, England; died 29 October 1924, Plandome, New York Daughter of Edwin and Eliza Boond Hodgson; married Swan Moses Burnett, 1875 (divorced 1898); Stephen Townsend, 1900 (until 1907) Frances Hodgson Burnett, the middle of five children, lived until she was sixteen in Manchester, England. A dame school she attended there provided her only formal education. In 1865, after her businessman father died, the family joined a relative in Knoxville, Tennessee, where financial need prompted Burnett to sell her first story, published when she was nineteen. In 1873 she married an eye specialist, with whom she had two sons. Burnett’s writing proved a major means of the young family’s support, and her success as a writer of popular fiction made her a celebrity which allowed her family to enjoy an expensive international lifestyle. In 1898 Burnett and her husband were divorced. From 1900 to 1907 she was married to Stephen Townsend, whose theatrical aspirations she had been championing since 1889 in London, while she was overseeing the stage production of her stories. Burnett’s career was productive as well as long. Her 55 titles include five bestsellers, and 13 of her stories and novels were adapted for the stage in England or America. After her first story was published in Godey’s Lady’s Book in 1868, Burnett wrote formulaic love stories for fashionable magazines before graduating to novels. Several of these, novels of working-class and political life such as That Lass o’ Lowries (1877), Louisiana (1880), and Through One Administration (1883), gained her critical recognition as a serious artist. American reviewers compared her work favorably with that of George Eliot and placed her in the front rank of young American fiction writers. Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), based on her son Vivian, established Burnett’s reputation as a popular writer. Intended primarily for children, the book became a bestseller and was soon translated into more than a dozen languages. Burnett’s stage version was popular in England and France as well as in America; in 1924, Mary Pickford starred in a film version. After this success, Burnett wrote more books for children, two of which continue to find an appreciative audience: A Little Princess (1905), which has been made into several film adaptations, including in 1939 starring Shirley Temple; and The Secret Garden (1911), a pastoral novel considered a juvenile classic. The books that found their way onto annual lists of bestsellers, however, were novels of fashionable social life written for adults: A Lady of Quality (1896), the story of a strong-willed woman in early 18th-century England; The Shuttle (1907), a novel about an Anglo-American marriage; T. Tembarom (1913), a Horatio Alger-type sequel to The Shuttle; and The Head of the House of Coombe (1922), a portrayal of social life in London before World War I. Burnett’s life and writing were characterized by tensions between the serious artist and the popular writer, the independent
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woman and the self-sacrificing wife and mother. While she was laboring over a 512-page portrayal of Anglo-American relationships (The Shuttle), she would shock her readers with a heroine who has been reared as a boy and later kills her husband with a riding whip (A Lady of Quality), then dash off a novella about a woman who, through self-abasing humility, wins the hand of a wealthy nobleman (The Making of a Marchioness, 1901). A Burnett biographer, Ann Thwaite, suggests that Burnett’s first bestseller changed her from a talented realist comparable to Elizabeth Gaskell into a pen-driving machine turning out inferior romances. But it can also be argued that Burnett excelled when she stayed close to the fairy tale, as in her best-known children’s works, or when her tensions as artist and woman were allowed to inform and discipline her work, as in The Making of a Marchioness, which contains within the literary context of a romantic Cinderella tale a scathing portrayal of women’s plight in the Edwardian marriage market. OTHER WORKS: Dolly (1877, reprinted as Vagabondia, 1883). Pretty Polly Pemberton (1877). Surly Tim (1877). Theo (1877). Earlier Stories, First and Second Series (1878). Kathleen (1878). Miss Crespigny (1878). Our Neighbor Opposite (1878). A Quiet Life (1878). The Tide on the Moaning Bar (1878). Haworth’s (1879). Jarl’s Daughter (1879). Natalie (1879). Esmeralda (1881). A Fair Barbarian (1881). Editha’s Burglar (1888; dramatization, Nixie, 1890). The Fortunes of Philippa Fairfax (1888; dramatization, Phyllis, 1889). The Real Little Lord Fauntleroy (1888). Sara Crewe (1888). A Woman’s Will; or, Miss Defarge (1888). The Pretty Sister of José (1889; dramatization, 1903). Little Saint Elizabeth (1890). The Drury Lane Boys’ Club (1892). Giovanni and the Other (1892). The Showman’s Daughter (1892). The One I Knew the Best of All (1893). Piccino, and Other Child Stories (1894). The Two Little Pilgrims’ Progress (1895). The First Gentleman of Europe (1897). His Grace of Osmonde (1897). In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim (1899; dramatization, That Man and I, 1904). The Methods of Lady Walderhurst (1901). In the Closed Room (1905). The Dawn of a Tomorrow (1906; produced 1909). Racketty Packetty House (1906; produced 1912). The Troubles of Queen Silver-Bell (1906). The Cozy Lion (1907). The Good Wolf (1908). The Spring Cleaning (1908). Barty Crusoe and His Man Saturday (1909). The Land of the Blue Flower (1909). My Robin (1912). The Lost Prince (1915). Little Hunchback Zia (1916). The White People (1917). Robin (1922). In the Garden (1925). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bixler, P., Frances Hodgson Burnett (1984). Burnett, C. B., Happily Ever After (1969). Burnett, V., The Romantick Lady (1927). Koppes, P. B., ‘‘Tradition and the Individual Talent of Frances Hodgson Burnett,’’ in Children’s Literature 7 (1978). Laski, M., Mrs. Ewing, Mrs. Molesworth, and Mrs. Hodgson Burnett (1950). Mollson, F. J., ‘‘Frances Hodgson Burnett, (1828-1924),’’ in American Literary Realism (Winter 1975). Thwaite, A., Waiting for the Party: The Life of Frances Hodgson Burnett (1974). —PHYLLIS BIXLIR KOPPES
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BURNHAM, Clara L(ouise) Root
BURR, Esther Edwards
Born 26 May 1854, Newton, Massachusetts; died 21 June 1927, ‘‘The Mooring,’’ Bailey’s Island, Casco Bay, Maine Daughter of George F. and Mary Woodman Root; married Walter Burnham, 1873
Born 1732, Northampton, Massachusetts; died April 1758, Princeton, New Jersey Daughter of Jonathan and Sarah Pierrepont Edwards; married Aaron Burr, 1752
Clara L. Root Burnham’s father composed songs and cantatas, one of his most famous pieces being the Civil War marching song, ‘‘The Battle Cry of Freedom.’’ Burnham attended Chicago public and private schools where she developed an ambition to become a musician.
Esther Edwards Burr was the third of 11 children of Sarah Pierrepont and the prominent minister, Jonathan Edwards. At the age of twenty she married Aaron Burr, pastor of the Presbyterian church at Newark, New Jersey, and later a founder and second president of Princeton College. At twenty-six years of age, Burr, having been widowed a year, died from the results of an innoculation against the small pox.
At age nineteen Clara married a lawyer, Walter Burnham, and began a long and fruitful writing career. Burnham turned out an amazing amount of work. Not only did she write poems and stories for numerous magazines, but she also produced the texts for many of her father’s cantatas. The list of Burnham’s novels is impressively long. She had been writing girlish love stories for some time when she was suddenly inspired to incorporate her Christian Science convictions into her fiction. The Right Princess (1902) was the first tale in which she did so, and it was followed by many others carrying similar religious messages. Jewel: A Chapter in Her Life (1903), a bestseller, was Burnham’s own favorite. ‘‘These cheery optimistic books,’’ says one critic of her novels, ‘‘well-laden with propaganda for the faith, appealed to Christian Scientists and to admirers of the Pollyanna type of romance.’’ Reviewers consistently labeled the novels ‘‘pleasant,’’ and commented on the pervasive, yet not obtrusive, strain of Christian Science philosophy in each. Her plot structures and clear style were praised. Burnham seems to have benefited personally from the beliefs she so earnestly tried to promulgate: the all-embracing love of God who works everything out harmoniously, and on whom one could rely with faith, love, and humility. Her fiction is not great literature but it is the reflection of a happy, serene spirit, and in its day, it gave pleasure and refreshment to many readers. OTHER WORKS: No Gentlemen (1881). A Sane Lunatic (1882). Dearly Bought (1884). Next Door (1886). Young Maids and Old (1888). The Mistress of Beech Knoll (1890). Sweet Clover (1894). The Wise Woman (1895). Miss Archer Archer (1897). A Great Love (1898). A West Point Wooing (1899). Miss Pritchard’s Wedding Trip (1901). Jewel’s Story Book (1904). The Opened Shutters (1906). The Leaven of Love (1908). Clever Betsy (1910). The Inner Flame (1912). The Right Track (1914). Instead of the Thorn (1916). Hearts Haven (1918). In Apple Blossom Time (1919). The Keynote (1921). The Queen of Farrandale (1923). The Lavarous (1925). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: TCA (1942). Other references: NYT (22 June 1927). Outlook (9 Nov. 1912). —ABIGAIL ANN HAMBLEN
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In 1754 Burr began a journal of her daily life and exchanged it periodically with one kept by her friend, Sarah Prince, of Boston. Burr’s journal is valuable for the views it gives of the Puritan woman’s life in the mid-18th century and for the insights into how Puritan values and habits of mind helped a woman to understand and evaluate the world in which she lived. The dominant themes of the journal are the loneliness and hardship of everyday existence which are only made endurable by the knowledge of God’s providential guidance of human affairs. For example, when her second child was born, Burr was entirely alone, but her faith in God helped her to meet the ordeal: ‘‘I felt very gloomy when I found I was actually in labour to think that I was, as it were, destitute of earthly friends—no mother, no husband, and none of my particular friends that belong to the town . . . only my dear God was all of these relations to me.’’ On another occasion she was visiting her father in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where the community was expecting an Indian attack. She had a momentary crisis of faith: ‘‘I want to be made willing to die in any way God pleases, but I am not willing to be butchered by a barbarous enemy nor can’t make myself willing.’’ Ultimately she trusted in Providence and prayed for survival: the Indians never attacked. In the Puritan manner the journal records events large and small—for God’s will was manifest in every activity of life. Thus the journal tells of visitations to the sick, attendance at sermons, entertainment of the governor’s wife with ‘‘cakes’’ on militia day, the depradations of the French and the Indians, the political maneuverings of the Newark community, the circumstances of the religious revival of the mid-1750s, and the problems of moving to Princeton and of establishing the college—all given with frank, moral assessments of what Burr thinks of the behavior of her contemporaries. Her commentary on the protestations of the local government as it prepared to meet the threatened advance of the French and the Indians is typical: I am perplexed about our publick affairs, the Men say (tho not Mr. Burr, he is not of that sort) that women have no business to concern themselves about ’em but to trust to those that know better and be content to be destroyed—because they did all for the best—Indeed, if I was convinced that our great men did as they really
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thought was for the Glory of God and the good of the country, it would go a great ways to make me easy. As a result of this personal evaluation of the events and interests of her time, Burr’s journal has a warm, emotional quality which makes the incidents of the past come alive. She is frank and explicit, never falsely sentimental or literary. Like the preachers she heard regularly, Burr kept to the plain style, proudly asserting that the ‘‘busy housewife’’ had no time to be ‘‘literary.’’ The journal is, then, a sensitive, lively account of God’s way with the Puritan woman. It is a moving story of a woman’s growth to maturity within the Puritan tradition of provincial America. OTHER WORKS: Esther Burr’s Journal (1754-1757). A Document of Evangelical Sisterhood (edited by L. Crumpacker and C. Karlsen, in preparation). Esther Burr’s Journal (edited by J. Rankin, 1902), an untrustworthy edition containing many pages that appear to be fabrications. The papers of Esther Edwards Burr are at Yale University, Andover-Newton Theological School (Newton, Massachusetts), and Princeton College. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Axtell, J., A School Upon a Hill (1974). Cott, N., The Bonds of Womanhood: Woman’s Sphere in New England, 1780-1835 (1977). Fisher, J., ‘‘The Journal of Esther Burr,’’ in NEQ 3 (1930). —MAUREEN GOLDMAN
BURTON, Katherine Kurz Born March 1890, Cleveland, Ohio; died 22 September 1969, Bronxville, New York Daughter of John and Louise Bittner Kurz; married Harry P. Burton, 1910 After graduating from Western Reserve University and teaching for a year in rural Pennsylvania, Katherine Kurz Burton married a journalist and editor in 1910. From this point forward she devoted herself to freelance writing and, for a short period, to magazine editing. From 1928 to 1930 Burton served as associate editor of McCall’s, and from 1930 to 1933 she worked at Redbook. On the basis of this experience, in 1935 she was invited to edit a women’s page for Sign, a Catholic monthly; according to the editor, it was the magazine’s most popular feature. Some of these pieces are collected in Woman to Woman (1961). Burton was a prolific writer. Her essays and poems were published in many religious periodicals, first Episcopalian and, after her reception into the Roman Catholic church in 1930, in Roman Catholic magazines. Her verse, light but controlled, also appeared in F. P. Adams’s ‘‘Conning Tower’’ in the New York Herald Tribune, some examples of which are included in her autobiographical The Next Thing (1949).
Burton did her most important work in the field of popular biography, a genre she pioneered only after her entrance into the Roman Catholic church. Her first book, Sorrow Built a Bridge (1937), which remained a favorite with both the author and her readers, narrates the life of Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, the youngest child of Nathaniel Hawthorne. With her husband, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop became a Roman Catholic. After being widowed, she formed a Dominican community devoted to the care of poor and incurable victims of cancer. Other biographies of converts followed; Burton chose for these early works native-born Americans, usually of New England birth and upbringing, in an attempt to show that good Americans could be good Catholics. Because Burton had been attracted to the Roman Catholic church for its ‘‘continuity of doctrine,’’ she often chose as subjects converts with similar motivations. In her conversion narratives there is little tendency to denigrate other churches, for Burton was greatly moved by charitable works undertaken by any faith. Her books, however, are clearly intended to edify a Catholic readership, and their appeal outside this communion has been limited. The style of informal biography which Burton developed was reviewed with qualified praise by such scholars as Theodore Maynard and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Burton made no attempt, however, to be exhaustive or to document her sources, and she did little archival research. Burton was sensitive, however, to the charge that her stories were ‘‘fictional.’’ Her biographies included dialogue, but she insisted that, except for feed lines, any words within quotation marks were taken from letters, diaries, books, or conversations. Burton’s success in avoiding the piety and sentimentality of older biography was uneven. Much of the appeal of her earlier books lay in their portrayal of well-known figures, i.e., the Concord literary circles with which the Hawthornes associated, or the Brook Farm group. Such literary figures also provided Burton with considerable material for the construction of dialogue. Many of her later books, however, portrayed Catholic women who inhabited a less intellectual and more pious world; Burton’s life of Mother Butler of Marymount (1944), for example, was criticized in Commonweal as ‘‘sugar-coated and iced over.’’ Burton had strong feminist leanings, and she did not conceal the problems of women confronting male Catholic structures. According to the Pattern (1946) is the story of Cardinal Manning’s efforts to get a young woman admitted to medical school. It focuses on the Catholic woman’s long struggle to convince Vatican authorities that nuns should not be forbidden to become doctors. OTHER WORKS: Paradise Planters (1939). His Dear Persuasion (1940). In No Strange Land (1942). Brother Andre of Mount Royal (1943). Celestial Homespun (1943). No Shadow of Turning (1944). His Mercy Endureth Forever (1946). Difficult Star (1947). Three Generations (1947). Mightily and Sweetly (1948). Chaminade, Apostle of Mary (1949). So Surely Anchored (1949).
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The Great Mantle (1950). Feast Day Cookbook (with H. Ripperger, 1951). Where There Is Love (1951). The Table of the King (1952). Whom Love Impels (1952). So Much, So Soon (1953). Children’s Shepherd (1954). The Stars Beyond the Storms (1954). In Heaven We Shall Rest (1955). My Beloved to Me (1957). The Golden Door (1957). Lily and Sword and Crown (1958). With God and Two Ducats (1958). Witness of the Light (1958). Faith Is the Substance (1959). Make the Way Known (1959). Cry Jubilee! (1960). The Dream Lives Forever (1960). One Thing Needful (1960). Wheat for This Planting (1960). Leo the Thirteenth (1962). The Door of Hope (1963). The Bernardines (1964). Bells on Two Rivers (1965). Valiant Voyager (1965). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Black Friars (March 1938). CathLibW (Feb. 1944). CHR (Oct. 1939, Oct. 1944). CW (1943, 19 March 1946). NEQ (Sept. 1943). —ARLENE ANDERSON SWIDLER
BURTON, Virginia Lee Born 30 August 1909, Newton Center, Massachusetts; died 15 October 1968, Boston, Massachusetts Daughter of Alfred E. and Lena Dalkeith Yates Burton; married George Demetrios, 1931 Daughter of an English poetess and musician, Lena Dalkeith, and the first dean of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Virginia Burton lived in Newton Center until she was eight years old, when her family moved to California. She received one of three state scholarships to the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco as a junior in high school. After a year of studying art and ballet in San Francisco, she returned to the Boston area in 1928. When her father broke a leg, Burton forfeited a contract with a traveling ballet company, and remained in the Boston area to care for him. At age twenty-one, she enrolled in a sculpture and drawing class at Boston Museum School, and married her teacher the next spring. Burton wrote and illustrated seven books for children, published between 1924 and 1962, and illustrated several others. Convinced children were distinct from adults in their comprehension of subject matter, she nevertheless thought aesthetics should be of utmost importance for either audience. The subjects she selected were indeed appropriate for children, and several related to the industrial technology of the time. She used a train, a steam shovel, a tractor-snow plow, and a cable car, and demonstrated how these personified machines could be nonconformist and creative. Even her first unsuccessful attempt at a children’s book had an inanimate character—a piece of dust, named ‘‘Jonnifer Lint.’’ Rejected by 13 publishers, however, the story bored even her three-and-a half-year-old son. Choo Choo; the Story of a Little Engine Who Ran Away (1935), Burton’s first published book, tells the adventure of a train
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that followed tracks not assigned to him. The hero of Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel (1939) digs himself into a hole, and the story’s innovative ending was provided by one of Burton’s neighborhood children. Burton satisfied her son’s curiosity about steam shovels by inserting a diagram of the machine with appropriate terms in the published book. The Little House (1942) describes a dwelling which becomes engulfed by the encroaching city, and is transported to the countryside. The background surroundings change over the years as the house becomes more dilapidated; it is then restored in its new location. When Burton considered writing on the subject of snowremoval equipment, she drove to Gloucester during a snowstorm to observe and sketch. She rejected the snowblower as being too dull, and instead expanded on a tractor with a plow attached, resulting in Katy and the Big Snow (1943). Mabelle, the Cable Car (1952) is based on Burton’s fond memories of the San Francisco cable car. She dedicated the book to the ‘‘People of San Francisco and Mrs. Hans Klussman,’’ who in 1951 rallied their efforts to retain the cable car when threatened as unsafe and a public nuisance. Burton also wrote stories about things other than inanimate objects. Calico, the Wonder Horse; or, the Saga of Stewy Slinker (1941) was motivated by her observing childrens’ fascination with comic books. She concluded that it was the spellbinding story and special format which claimed their interest, and she was determined to create a children’s book that would possess appealing illustrations as well as captivating content. The innovative horse in the story brings glory to his rider, Hank, and trouble to the villain. Folk humor is incorporated into the prose. Eight years of research were necessary to complete Burton’s final book, Life Story (1962). The evolution of the earth unfolds during five acts of a play, with the stage serving as the border for the illustrations. Burton’s family life through the seasons at Folly Cove is woven into the last chapter. Burton illustrated several books she did not write, including Arna Bontemps’s railroad yarn, Fast Sooner Hound (1942), and Anne Malcomson’s Song of Robin Hood (1947), for which Burton, after three years of research, meticulously prepared an illustration for each page. She also retold and illustrated Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes (1949), which had been read to her by her father during her childhood. Of all Burton’s works, The Little House achieved the greatest fame, for it received the Caldecott award as the most distinguished picturebook for children published during 1942. It has been translated into several languages and published in more than a dozen countries. However, Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel is the favorite of children. Burton always conceived the illustrations for her books before writing the text. She made sketches, which had to be complete within themselves, as well as fitting into the whole, and arranged them on the wall of her barn studio as a ‘‘story board.’’ She then worked on the text, relating each page precisely to the pictures until overall clarity and accurate detail were attained.
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Elements of design, such as rhythm and repetition, were characteristic of both her illustrations and her story. Furthermore, her humor and imagination are inherent in both the situation, such as the steam shovel at the bottom of a hole, and in the plot, such as the schemes of the villain, Stewy Slinker. Burton’s training as a dancer and as an artist demanded fine form, and she incorporated these high standards in her children’s books. OTHER WORKS: The original manuscript and sketches for Katy and the Big Snow are in the Gloucester, Massachusetts, Public Library; The Life Story in the Free Library of Philadelphia; Mabelle, the Cable Car in the San Francisco Public Library; and The Little House in the Kerlan Collection at the University of Minnesota. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Burton, V. L., ‘‘Making Picture Books; Acceptance Paper,’’ and Hogarth, G. A., ‘‘V. L. Burton, Creative Artist,’’ in Caldecott Medal Books: 1938-1957, Miller, B., and E. Field, eds. (1957). Reference works: Authors and Illustrators of Children’s Books; Writing on Their Lives and Works (1972). Children and Books (1976). Illustrators of Children’s Books, 1744-1945 (1947). The Junior Book of Authors (1951). SAA (1971). Other references: Children’s Literature Review (1976). Horn Book (1970, 1971). —KAREN NELSON HOYLE
BUTLER, Octavia E(stelle) Born 22 June 1947, Pasadena, California Daughter of Laurice and Octavia Guy Butler Hailed as the first African-American woman science fiction writer, Octavia E. Butler began writing what would become the first draft of her Patternmaster series at age twelve after ‘‘watching a bad science fiction movie and [deciding] I could write a better story than that.’’ She admits, however, that she kept on writing science fiction because she needed ‘‘fantasies to shield her from the world.’’ Butler grew up in a strong matriarchal family with strict Baptist morals. Her mother and grandmother were the primary influences in her life; her father, a shoeshine man, died when she was an infant. Butler’s mother, who had worked as a maid, was born on a sugar plantation in Louisiana. At age ten, she was taken out of school so she could work. It was perhaps this hard life and history that made Butler’s family worry that a writing career would not be reliable employment for her. One of her aunts, the first in the family to earn a college degree, agreed, but encouraged her niece to do what she wanted. After earning an associate degree at Pasadena City College in 1968, where a creative writing teacher once asked her, ‘‘Can’t you write anything normal?,’’ Butler went on to California State
College (CSC) at Los Angeles. She left CSC when she couldn’t major in creative writing and began taking evening writing classes at UCLA. While at CSC, Butler met Harlan Ellison, who encouraged her to attend the summer 1970 Clarion Science Fiction Writer’s Workshop. Her first two stories were written during this intensive Pennsylvania workshop. In 1980 Butler won the YWCA Achievement Award for Creative Arts; in 1984, at the 42nd World Science Fiction Convention, her short story ‘‘Sounds’’ won a Hugo award, and at the next World Science Fiction Convention, Butler’s peers voted her the winner of the Nebula Award for best novelette for Bloodchild. She received another Nebula award nomination in 1987 for her novelette The Evening and the Morning and the Night. Butler’s first five novels are part of her Patternist saga, based on imposing generations of Patternists, the telepathic humans who wrestle for control of the Earth. Her novel Kindred (1979), though set apart from the serial stories and marketed as a mainstream novel by Butler’s publisher, continues the Patternist tradition of independent women of color who challenge the power structures of their societies and are embroiled in intense social relationships, and for whom self-expression and leadership roles are vital. Butler probes female experiences in terms of women’s survival, sexual objectification, threats to their autonomy, and full expression of their psychic and healing talents, as well as their strong, abiding kinship ties. Her female characters represent a dazzling array of experience and origins—both futuristic and historically grounded. Anyanwu of Wild Seed (1980) is a 300-year-old woman whom Butler fashioned after a mythological Onitsha Ibo woman named Atagbusi; Mary of Mind of My Mind (1977), a 20th-century woman and descendant of Anyanwu, is a gifted telepath who has survived physical abuse to become the mother of a new race of beings. Both Alanna, the Afro-Asian heroine of Survivor (1978), and Lilith, the matriarch of a small dislocated group of humans, forge bonds between different ethnic groups and species within their futuristic societies. Dana, the modern African-American heroine of Kindred, is repeatedly dragged back into her family’s slavery past and becomes an elusive, but nevertheless affected accomplice, victim, and link between her enslaved and free ancestors and her own, less-peopled, postslavery American future. Butler began a new series with Parable of the Sower (1993), a futuristic tale of an America decimated by violence and environmental catastrophes. In Los Angeles, small numbers of workers barricade themselves behind walls to hide from the mobs of desperate unemployed homeless. One of these workers is Lauren Olamina, a black teenager who suffers from hyperempathy, a condition causing her to literally feel the pain of others. Lauren escapes when her community is overrun and heads north, hoping that Earthseed, the religion she created, will guide her to better times. Lauren’s story is continued in Parable of the Talents (1998) when her community of believers must go to war against the fanatical terrorists in newly elected U.S. President Reverend Andrew Steele Jarret’s right-wing sect Christian America. Butler wrote Parable of the Talents partly on the proceeds of a $295,000
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grant from the MacArthur Foundation (‘‘genius’’) she received in 1995. Butler’s love of writing poetry is evident in both Parable of the Sower and its sequel in the form of poetry written by Lauren, the books’ protagonist. One of the signs Butler has posted above her desk reminds her that ‘‘tension and conflict can be achieved through uncompromising characters in a death struggle.’’ Indeed, the societies and communities of Butler’s fiction are inundated by a host of unpredictable, unrelenting individuals. The human, mutant, or hybrid life forms in Butler’s works are often engaged in violent struggles for power and mental freedom. Butler’s central female characters are not always protectors or mediators in these intense, high-stake struggles; women such as Mary in Mind of My Mind rely heavily on their warlike, competitive natures to reach positions of formidable power. Yet in places so diverse as the Patternist domains and the floating Oankali nations of Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rights (1988), and Imago (1989), Butler also suggests there are nurturing environments that can be culled from besieged nations and embattled histories. Butler capitalizes on the science fiction genre most dynamically in her representations of history as a layered entity—one that can be traversed, reentered, and never separated. Kindred and the works forming Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy, Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago, are especially gripping because of the ways in which Butler constructs versions of historical reality. Of Butler’s central characters, the women are especially imposing figures, whose identities as women, consorts, and childbearers are under siege by the social, racial, or genetic chaos of their communities. For the individuals—remnants of nations, and newly forming societies—drawn into such timeless and time-laden environments, tortured contemplation and mourning are inevitable. Yet the historical burdens and traditions of which they are so conscious also propel them to achieve increasingly symbolic victories against their oppressors. In her treatment and revisions of history, and her consistent development of evolving multiracial women, Butler puts a most distinctive mark upon the science fiction genre. She grounds her work in African-American history and complements her fictional plots with realistic debates on such contemporary issues as race, bigotry, sexism, and expansionism.
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The ways in which Butler’s characters have to resolve their ‘‘otherness’’ with their essential membership within groups may be seen as a telling metaphor for her own place within the realm of science fiction. Butler and writer Samuel Delany are the only well-known African-American science fiction writers, and Butler is perhaps the only African-American woman science fiction writer. Although she believes science fiction is ‘‘potentially the freest genre in existence,’’ she acknowledges the confines and preferred foci that have been encouraged for writers of the genre. Describing science fiction as having begun ‘‘in this country as a genre for young boys,’’ she argues it is this fact that explains the traditional exclusion of issues of race or sex from science fiction texts of the past. Butler uses powerful historical fact, African-American experience, and facets of the science fiction genre itself to challenge these narrow parameters. Her compelling stories masterfully blend traditional aspects of the genre and innovative futuristic designs with sobering contemplations of the realities of the world’s racial and historical present and past.
OTHER WORKS: Patternmaster (1976). Clay’s Ark (1984).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Black Writers (1989). CANR (1988, 1990). CLC (1986). DLB (1984). FC (1990). MTCW (1991). NBAW (1992). St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers (1996). Twentieth Century Science Fiction Writers (1991). Other references: Black American Literary Forum (Summer 1984). Black Scholar (Mar.-Apr. 1986). Callaloo (1991). Emerge (June 1994). Equal Opportunity Forum Magazine (1980). Essence (April 1979). Extrapolation (Spring 1982). Life (July 1984). MELUS (Spring-Summer 1986). PW (13 Dec.1993). Salaga (1981). Sanus (Winter 1978-79). Thrust: Science Fiction in Review (Summer 1979). —LOIS BROWN, UPDATED BY LEAH J. SPARKS
C CABEZA DE BACA, Fabiola Born 16 May 1894, La Liendra, New Mexico; died 1991, Albuquerque, New Mexico Also wrote under: Fabiola Cabeza de Baca Gilbert, Fabiola C. Gilbert Daughter of Graciano and Indalecia Delgado Cabeza de Baca; married Carlos Gilbert, 1939 (separated) Four years after Fabiola Cabeza de Baca was born on her family’s northeastern New Mexico land grant, her mother died, and Cabeza de Baca was raised by her paternal grandmother, a traditional Hispanic woman of the patrón class. Cabeza de Baca attended schools in Las Vegas, New Mexico, earning a degree in pedagogy from New Mexico Normal University in 1921. After a year of study in Spain, Cabeza de Baca taught in New Mexico public schools for several years. She became intensely interested in ‘‘Domestic Science’’ after she was assigned to teach it, earned her B.S. in Home Economics at New Mexico State University, and immediately began work with the New Mexico State Extension Service. As a home demonstration agent, Cabeza de Baca visited the Hispanic and Pueblo villages of northern New Mexico, organizing clubs for women and children, teaching canning techniques, and developing skills and markets for craft products. Cabeza de Baca lost her right leg in an automobile accident, but continued her strenuous career. Her marriage to an insurance agent ended in their separation. In 1951, UNESCO sent her to Mexico to establish a home economics program among the Tarascan Indians and to instruct Latin Americans in her techniques. She has received many awards for outstanding achievement in her field. After retiring in 1959, she lectured widely, wrote newspaper articles on folklore and food, and trained Peace Corps volunteers in extension methods. Cabeza de Baca’s writing career grew from her home economics work, beginning with pamphlets in Spanish on food preparation and canning. Her article, ‘‘New Mexican Diets’’ (1942), stresses the nutritional value of traditional foods, and counsels extension agents to respect and understand those they serve. Her interest in New Mexican food, which blends Indian, Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo influences, led her to publish Historic Cookery (1939, reprinted 1970), an Extension Service cookbook that sold more than 100,000 copies and was reissued several times. Cabeza de Baca collected the recipes by watching village cooks and experimenting in her own kitchen to determine precise measurements. She pragmatically recommends using time-honored techniques or modern appliances according to their superiority for each particular dish. Cabeza de Baca’s book conveys the untranslatable Spanish ‘‘guisar,’’ which loosely means ‘‘to dress up food,’’ with spices and, more important, with caring. In The Good Life (1949, revised in 1982 as The Good Life: New Mexico Traditions and Food), Cabeza de Baca recounts the
yearly cycle of seasons and festivals in a fictionalized Hispanic village in contemporary northern New Mexico. Cabeza de Baca emphasizes the cultural context of cookery and the folklore associated with food preparation and herbal medicine. Without romanticizing the hard work rural living entails, Cabeza de Baca stresses the cooperative spirit and close relationships among village women that give The Good Life its quality. The second half of the book includes recipes for many of the traditional foods described in the text. Cabeza de Baca moves out of the kitchen in We Fed Them Cactus (1953, reprinted in 1954, 1989, and 1994); the title refers to keeping cattle alive during a drought. While strong in defense of the patrón system, Cabeza de Baca describes the life of all settlers on the plains in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She includes stories narrated by ‘‘El Cuate’’—the Twin, cook on her family’s rancho—concerning life on the llano before longhorn cattle replaced buffalo and sheep. Cabeza de Baca supplemented her memory with interviews with older residents and archival research, and produced a fascinating blend of folklore, history, and autobiography. She compares traditional Hispanic women’s roles with those of Anglo homesteaders, and with her own experience as a rural schoolteacher. Cabeza de Baca’s perspective as participant makes this a valuable work, especially became little has been written about this region’s Hispanos, in a period of drastic change. Cabeza de Baca’s contribution to the literature of the Southwest consists in imaginatively depicting the integrity and vitality of Hispanic culture. Her early books show food, and the women who prepare it, as central to an integrated social system that she explains in more detail in We Fed Them Cactus. She reveals the strength of the Hispanic woman, in her works and in her life.
OTHER WORKS: Los Alimentos y su Preparacion (1934; revised editions, 1937, 1942). Boletin de Conservar (1935; revised editions, 1937, 1941).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: American Association of University Women, Albuquerque Branch, Women in New Mexico (1976). McShane, B. J. G., ‘‘In Pursuit of Regional and Cultural Identity: The Autobiographies of Agnes Morely Cleaveland and Fabiola Cabeza de Baca’’ in Breaking Boundaries: New Perspectives on Women’s Regional Writing (1997). Ponce, M., The Life and Works of Fabiola Cabeza de Baca, New Mexican Hispanic Woman Writer: A Contextual Biography (1997). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Women in Education (1977). Other references: Albuquerque Journal (24 June 1959). California Farmer (16 Oct. 1954). El Palacio (June 1949). New
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Mexico Historical Review (Jan. 1956). New Mexico Magazine (Oct. 1958). Santa Fe New Mexican (6 Feb. 1966, 19 May 1968). —HELEN M. BANNAN
almost paranoiac conviction that freedom has steadily decreased since Teddy Roosevelt was president. Caldwell can be thought of as a modern Jeremiah, bewailing our fall from grace and its resultant consequences.
Born Janet Miriam Caldwell, 7 September 1900, Manchester, England; died 30 August 1985 Also wrote under: Marcus Holland, Max Reiner Daughter of Arthur F. and Anna Marks Caldwell; married William Combs, 1919; Marcus Reback, 1931
OTHER WORKS: The Eagles Gather (1939). The Earth Is the Lord’s (1940). The Strong City (1941). The Arm and the Darkness (1943, 1982). The Turnbulls (1943). The Final Hour (1944). The Wide House (1945). This Side of Innocence (1946, 1974, 1984). There Was a Time (1947). Melissa (1948). Let Love Come Last (1949). The Balance Wheel (1951). The Devil’s Advocate (1952). Never Victorious, Never Defeated (1954, 1982, 1984). Tender Victory (1956). The Sound of Thunder (1957). The Listener (1960). A Prologue to Love (1962). To See the Glory (1963). The Late Clara Beame (1964). Dialogues with the Devil (1968). On Growing Up Tough (1971). The Romance of Atlantis (1975). Ceremony of the Innocent (1976, 1983). Bright Flows the River (1978, 1983). Answer as a Man (1981). Yours Sins and Mine (1983).
CADE, Toni See BAMBARA, Toni Cade
CALDWELL, Taylor
Born of Scottish parents in England, Taylor Caldwell was educated at the University of Buffalo, New York. She wrote her first novel, ‘‘The Romance of Atlantis,’’ when she was twelve and wrote for many years before the publication of her first book, Dynasty of Death (1938). In addition to her own work as a novelist, Caldwell collaborated with psychic Jess Stearn and served as secretary on the Board of Special Inquiry of the U.S. Department of Immigration and Naturalization. She won many awards from such groups as the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), and the National League of Penwomen. From childhood she suffered from severely impaired hearing. Caldwell published over three dozen novels in the last 50 years, most of which attained popular if not critical success. In general her subjects alternate between power-hungry upper-class American families of the late-19th and early-20th centuries and historical figures of the ancient world. Successes from the 1960s and 1970s include Testimony of Two Men (1968; later serialized for television and reprinted in 1983), a saga of Dr. Jonathan Ferrier’s pioneering attempts to improve the medical profession; Captains and the Kings (1972; later serialized for television and reprinted in 1982), about a Kennedy-like family of Irish immigrants who build a dynasty and spawn a president; A Pillar of Iron (1965, 1983), with Cicero as protagonist; Glory and the Lightning (1974, 1983), centering on Pericles; Dear and Glorious Physician (1959, 1981), employing the gospel according to St. Luke as its storyline; Great Lion of God (1970, 1985), a portrait of St. Paul; and I, Judas (1978), a novel about the betrayal of Jesus Christ. An early reviewer stated that Caldwell had a gift for storytelling but lamented that she lacked the style to go with it; his evaluation still holds. Caldwell is adept at building suspense and at setting scenes, particularly those of ancient Greece, Rome, and Palestine. However, her prose is florid and her characters tend to borrow the more famous statements of Shakespeare, Emerson, Kennedy, and Hopkins, to name a few. In addition, her personal philosophies are obtrusive; many of her protagonists possess a Coriolanian contempt for the lower classes, regarded as destructive rabble, incapable of thought or feelings. Her American protagonists assert an
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BIBLIOGRAPHY: Schnabel, M. An Annotated Bibliography of the Works By and About Taylor Caldwell in the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library, 1938-1981 (1983). Stearn, J., In Search of Taylor Caldwell (1981). Reference works: American Novelists of Today (1951). Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia (1991). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCA (1942). Other references: Life (6 April 1959). Newsweek (3 Oct. 1938). NYT (18 Sept. 1938, 15 March 1959). NYTBR (28 April 1946 to April 1949, 27 June 1965). PW (15 Oct. 1938). Time (9 Jan. 1956). Saturday Review of Literature (6 Jan. 1940). WLB (Feb. 1940). —CYNTHIA L. WALKER
CALHOUN, Lucy See MONROE, Lucy
CALISHER, Hortense Born 20 December 1911, New York, New York Daughter of Joseph H. and Hedvig Lichtstern Calisher; married Heaton B. Heffelfinger, 1935 (divorced); Curtis A. Harnack, 1959; children: Bennet, Peter The older child of a German-born mother and a Southern father, Hortense Calisher was reared in an upper-middle class Jewish family. After earning her B.A. in 1932 at Barnard College, she worked as a sales clerk, model, and social worker in New York City. She began publishing short stories in 1948. In Herself (1972), an aptly titled autobiographical journal and meditation on her life as a writer, Calisher proclaims her emphasis on the individual, based on self-trust and acceptance. She rejects controversy in literature as well as group action in
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politics. Her stories and novels intelligently and sensitively chronicle the experiences of the self: the loneliness of individual consciousness, epiphanies of communication, and pain of ‘‘tiny knife-moves,’’ especially within families and between lovers. In the Absence of Angels (1951) includes Calisher’s best short stories. ‘‘In Greenwich There Are Many Gravelled Walks’’ affirms the potential for love between two young people, emotionally deprived but old in responsibility. ‘‘The Woman Who Was Everybody’’ and ‘‘A Wreath for Miss Totten’’ show the sensitive individual and the ‘‘unsolicited good [act]’’ against the mask of the self-satisfied average. The title story affirms the moral importance of observing oneself and others fairly despite political differences. In this and subsequent short story collections—Tale for the Mirror (1962) and Extreme Magic (1963)—Calisher includes semiautobiographical stories of the Elkin family. She develops themes from her Southern and Jewish heritage in ‘‘May-ry’’ and ‘‘Old Stock,’’ explores the familial tensions of her girlhood in ‘‘The Coreopsis Kid,’’ and ‘‘The Gulf Between.’’ Textures of Life (1963) accomplishes Calisher’s aim to portray ‘‘that dailiness which subtly pushes our lives on while we wait for the overt event.’’ Two married women, mother and daughter, learn fundamental lessons; the bourgeois mother learns to accept her artistic daughter’s rebelliously austere lifestyle, while the daughter lowers her artistic goals and modifies her austerity. Only their husbands, however, consciously perceive that they all tread ‘‘the path between surprise and compromise’’ amidst the joys and inexorabilities of life. Three disappointingly unfocused novels explore the older generation’s puzzlement over the younger generation’s entry into adulthood: Queenie (1971) lightheartedly describes the heroine’s sexual coming of age as she rejects commercial and political sex for true love and revolution; in Eagle Eye (1973), young Bunty Bronstein tries to evaluate his past and build his future through a computer; while Standard Dreaming (1972) finds plastic surgeon Neils Berners agonizing over his lost son, seeking emotional support from a sensitivity group of deserted parents and intellectual relief from a theory that runaways signal downward human evolution. He finally continues his healing vocation and accepts his wandering son’s freedom. On Keeping Women, Calisher’s 1977 novel, shows the breakup of the family as liberation. She sensitively depicts the independent decisions of Lexie and Ray, as well as their four children, to leave the family home to achieve self-fulfillment. In her work in the 1980s Calisher expanded the range of her fictional forms and subjects. Mysteries of Motion (1983) imagines the first civilian space travel. In what Calisher claims is the first novel of ‘‘character’’ rather than science fiction set in space, six lives are revealed on a space journey. In 1985 she published short works under the title Saratoga, Hot, including ‘‘Gargantua Real Impudence,’’ ‘‘The Library,’’ ‘‘The Sound Track,’’ ‘‘The Passenger,’’ ‘‘The Tenth Child,’’ ‘‘Survival Techniques,’’ and the title story. The strict roles assigned to both sexes and the complexities of gender and sexuality are recurrent themes in Calisher’s work, as are loneliness and individuality. The Bobby Soxer (1986) takes these themes to the limit, narrating, through the eyes of a teenage
CALISHER
girl, her discovery that Aunt Leo, a maiden aunt, had male and female organs. Although Aunt Leo is the pivotal character, she has little to do with the story that unfolds; that of the girl, her town, her extended family, her genteel Southern mother, her father, and his business ventures. The book won the Kafka Prize in 1987. In Age (1987) an aging couple, Gemma and Rupert, agree each should keep a diary for the other to read after the partner’s death. Their awareness that they are facing the end of life is reinforced through the suicide of two friends and the death of Rupert’s first wife. They abandon the diaries when they realize one will have to read alone. This deepening sense of loss that comes with advancing age continues as a theme in Kissing Cousins (1988), a memoir in which Calisher pays tribute to both her Southern and Northern heritages, as she has done in other novels, and to the value of memory. Nurse Katie Pyle is a relative only through the connection of their Southern families and their Southern Jewish heritage; she and Calisher remained emotionally close throughout their lives. The independent Pyle went to war as an army nurse and later continued a nursing career. As they reminisce, Southern expressions color New York memories and the extended family appears loving and eccentric. Pyle dies, Calisher has her memories. Kissing Cousins, as well as in most of Calisher’s work, is sorrowful, rich in language, loving in tone. Her language is powerful, her dialogue accurate, her memories vivid. The people in her stories are not terrible, eccentric, or bizarre, but believable in their faults and virtues. In the 1990s Calisher received a little of the critical attention she has long deserved. Her writing, alternately characterized as difficult, exasperating, pretentious, exciting, superlative, beautiful, Byzantine, or linguistically exuberant, depending on who’s doing the reviewing, both challenges and rewards. What no one has disputed is that she continues to produce highly original and intelligent work. Calisher’s In the Palace of the Movie King (1994), moves over and through the tale of displaced Russian filmmaker. The novel examines the loss of meaning and self, as well as that of language and place within a societal context. It is about immigrant experience and, to an extent, the experience of every person ever subject to a sense of marginality. The book is as much concerned about what it is to be dissident and newly American in the latter half of the 20th century as it is with the meaning of meaning. The Novellas of Hortense Calisher (1997) collects seven of Calisher’s short novels, peopled with complex characters caught up variously in infidelity, growing up, and family secrets. The collection includes one previously unpublished novella, ‘‘Women Men Don’t Talk About,’’ which finds a woman weaving a compelling myth around her absent husband, until a fascinating stranger threatens to rupture its fabric. In the Slammer with Carol Smith (1997) shows that Calisher, nearing ninety, maintained a perceptive and lively interest in the cadence of contemporary life. It is the story of a young woman of color who falls in with some bourgeois white revolutionaries and takes the fall for them, spending a good portion of her life in prison. When she is released, she must refind her memory and herself. Though many critics found the novel disjointed, others
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praised its kaleidoscopic quality and the way in which it slowly, but ultimately thrillingly, makes the reader privy to the protagonist’s growing sense of self. In a 1992 article, Calisher wrote of how a writer’s psyche is in part formed by the anecdotes they hear about their culture when they are children. Such a premise is vintage Calisher: a subtle, elusive, deeply refractive notion with its roots in both epistemological thinking and a playful interest in the tone and tenor of the culture in which she lives. OTHER WORKS: False Entry (1961). Journal from Ellipsia (1965). The Railway Police and The Last Trolley Ride (1966). The New Yorkers (1969). The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (1975). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Islas, A., ‘‘The Work of Hortense Calisher: On Middle Ground’’ (thesis, 1971). Minnesota Review (1973). Segal, D., ed., Short Story Criticism: Excerpts from Criticism of the Works of Short Fiction Writers 15 (1994). Snodgrass, K., ‘‘Rites of Passage in the Works of Hortense Calisher’’ (thesis, 1987). Snodgrass, K., The Fiction of Hortense Calisher (1993). Reference works: CA Online (1999). CANR (1986). Contemporary Novelists (1976, 1986). FC (1990). Jewish American Women Writers: A Biobibliographical and Critical Sourcebook (1994). MTCW (1991). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Oxford Illustrated Literary Guide to the United States (1982). Reference Guide to American Literature (1987). Other references: Bulletin of Bibliography (Mar. 1988). CB (1973). Iowa Review (1994). Nation (25 May 1963, 1 Dec. 1997). New Criterion (Feb. 1983). NYT (18 Dec. 1988, 20 Feb. 1994, 27 July 1997). NYTBR (13 Apr. 1969, 1 Oct. 1972, 6 Nov. 1983, 20 May 1984, 30 Mar. 1986). Saturday Review (28 Oct. 1961, 25 Dec. 1965, July/Aug. 1985). Southwest Review (interview, Spring 1986). Texas Studies in Literature (Winter 1989). Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature (Summer 1965). —HELEN J. SCHWARTZ, UPDATED BY JESSICA REISMAN
CAMPBELL, Helen Stuart Born 4 July 1839, Lockport, New York; died 22 July 1918, Dedham, Massachusetts Wrote under: Helen C. Weeks, Campbell Wheaton Daughter of Homer H. and Jane E. Campbell Stuart; married Grenville M. Weeks, 1860 Under the name Helen Weeks, Helen Stuart Campbell wrote five children’s books as well as stories in Riverside Magazine and Our Young Folks. After 1877 Campbell adopted her mother’s maiden name (Campbell) and she wrote works mainly for an adult audience: novels, magazine articles, cookbooks, studies of poverty and women workers. Experience as a teacher in cooking
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schools qualified Campbell to become household editor of Our Continent (1882-84). From 1894 to 1912 Campbell was closely associated with Charlotte Perkins Gilman. They coedited Impress in San Francisco and worked in Unity Settlement in Chicago. Eventually Campbell lived with the Gilmans in New York. During this period she lectured on home economics at the University of Wisconsin in 1895, and at Kansas State Agricultural College in 1897 and 1898. Her final years were spent in Massachusetts. The Ainslee Series, consisting of Grandpa’s House (1868), The Ainslee Stories (1868), White and Red (1869), and Four and What They Did (1871) reveal Campbell’s ability to create troublesome, lively children who tumble from one misadventure to another as they explore their New England or Midwestern surroundings. The liveliest and most amusing are Ainslee, five-yearold hero of the second book, and Sinny, his black friend. Although no more than a collection of stories, the book is unified by its temporal frame and by the background of New England village life. While Harry in White and Red is hardly an interesting hero, the account of his journey and the description of Indian characters and customs in Red Lake capture the imagination and make the tale a valuable portrait of the American past. Six Sinners (1877), a boarding-school story written under the name Campbell Wheaton, lacks the freshness of Campbell’s earlier work, but maintains her characteristic flashes of humor. His Grandmothers (1877), which marks Campbell’s transition from juveniles to the adult novel, is a lighthearted sketch of a household turned upside down by a flint-hearted New England grandmother. It stands in lively contrast to Campbell’s subsequent novels, which often (to the detriment of the fiction) attempt to treat such social themes as the role of heredity, the economic plight of women, the relation of diet to disease, the greed and corruption of postwar America. In 1886’s Mrs. Herndon’s Income, Campbell’s most important novel, there are too many characters and a poorly constructed plot, manipulated to suit the author’s moral vision. It is partially redeemed, however, by the comic presence of Amanda Briggs and by the realistic description of New York slums. Miss Melinda’s Opportunity (1886) uses a smaller canvas and a simpler plot, but is equally didactic. For the modern reader the interest lies less in the scheme for cooperative housekeeping than in the characterization of Miss Melinda and the evocation of New York in the Gilded Age. Campbell’s reform writing, as Robert Bremner points out, places her in the company of propagandists ‘‘who hoped to alter conditions by rousing the conscience of the nation.’’ The Problem of the Poor (1882) and Darkness and Daylight (1891) describe life in New York’s slums and McAuley’s Water Street Mission. Prisoners of Poverty (1887) attacks the exploitation of women in New York sweatshops and department stores, employing case histories to illustrate the effects of starvation wages. Prisoners of Poverty Abroad (1889) feebly echoes its predecessor in a superficial survey of women workers in Europe. Less emotional than the earlier studies and buttressed by statistics, Women Wage-Earners (1893), which received an award from the American Economic Association, treats the plight of women factory workers across
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America, condemning low wages, long hours, and poor sanitation. Campbell concludes by recommending the organization of women’s labor clubs and the appointment of women inspectors, as well as higher wages and a shorter working week.
insistence on wearing the most expensive foreign fashions. The second brother can reestablish his fortune because he has a loving, loyal wife and daughter, both with simple tastes. They work for him until his business is lucrative once again.
As a fiction writer, Campbell was a minor figure, memorable only for the local color and abundant humor of her children’s stories. Her role as reformer, however, was more significant. Campbell’s studies of women wage-earners stirred the conscience of her age and led to the formation of consumers’ leagues in the 1890s, which monitored retail stores to assure fair labor practices.
The heart of the collection of tales is ‘‘Catherine Clayton.’’ In this short story, the father dies leaving his wife, their daughter Catherine, and several younger children with only a small inheritance. Catherine learns to develop the skills that enable her to be a good governess. The story recounts her humiliations, defeats, and her growing self-respect as she finally learns to support her family. Campbell contrasts Catherine’s efforts with the frivolous lives of other teenage girls who waste rather than earn money.
OTHER WORKS: An American Family in Paris (1869). Unto the Third and Fourth Generation (1880). Patty Pearson’s Boy: A Tale of Two Generations (1881). The Housekeeper’s Year Book (1882). Under Green Apple Boughs (1882). A Sylvan City or Quaint Corners in Philadelphia (with others, 1883). The American Girl’s Home Book of Work and Play (1883). The What-To-Do Club: A Story for Girls (1885). Good Dinners for Every Day in the Year (1886). Roger Berkeley’s Probation (1888). Anne Bradstreet and Her Time (1891). Some Passages in the Practice of Dr. Martha Scarborough (1893). In Foreign Kitchens (1893). Household Economics (1896). The Heart of It: A Series of Extracts from the Power of Silence and The Perfect Whole (ed. H. Campbell and K. Westendorf, 1897).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bremner, R. H., From the Depths: The Discovery of Poverty in the U.S. (1956). Darling, F. L., The Rise of Children’s Book Reviewing in America, 1865-1881 (1968). Gilman, C. P., The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1935). Taylor, W. F., The Economic Novel in America (1942). Wright, L. H., American Fiction, 1876-1900 (1966). Reference works: Literary Writings in America: A Bibliography (1977). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971).
Campbell’s tales are heavily charged with moral messages. Her diction is solemn and authoritative, and she launches clear, consistent attacks against a society that does not encourage its women to work. She is thoroughly opposed to an education that promotes extravagance and frivolity as well as the pursuit of profit at the expense of social conscience. In most of her tales a rich man takes care of an infant who is not his own, and marriages are across class lines, demonstrating that a true American community is based on work and personal merit. —ROSE F. KAVO
CAMPBELL, Juliet (H.) Lewis Born 1823; died date unknown Wrote under: Judith Canute
Born circa 1820s; died date unknown
Juliet Lewis Campbell’s only novel (she also wrote nonfiction) was published in 1857 under the title Eros and Antieros; or, The Bachelor’s Ward, and in 1858 as The Old Love and the New. It opens with a tribute to the hero of the narrative, Arthur Walsingham, and to the great Susquehanna River. Walsingham, a dreamy, romantic poet and scholar, has been in love for years with the saintly Viola, even though she has married his closest friend. At her deathbed, soon after the death of her husband, Walsingham agrees to raise her daughter, also called Viola. Eventually the daughter grows to be as lovely and virtuous as her departed mother; Walsingham and she fall in love and marry.
Jane C. Campbell published two collections of short tales, the first initially under the title The Money-Maker, and Other Tales (1845), then in 1856 as American Evening Entertainment; or, Tales of City and Country Life. The second, Evenings at Home; or, Tales for the Fireside, was published in 1859. The first volume presents a series of didactic tales aimed mainly at a young female audience. It includes the story of two brothers who both experience serious financial setbacks. The first loses his fortune because he is married to a woman who ruins his thriving business by her
What is notable about the novel is not the sentimental plot line, but the closeups of patriotic American life around Lake Erie. Campbell’s ideal world is rural, pastoral, and communal. As a result, she defines heroism through kindness and charity, not through courageous deeds. Also of interest is the detailed chronicle of Viola’s education in French, dance, and needlework at Madame de Fleury’s boarding school. In all, Campbell provides a coherent view of the daily life of a rich American girl of her day. Campbell attributes much of Viola’s charm to her elitist education but balances the elegant frivolity of that education with simple
—PHYLLIS MOE
CAMPBELL, Jane C.
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American values. Viola is as welcome in the homes of the poor and infirm as she is at a ball with her fashionable set. Some of the most vivid scenes in the novel have to do with the sick and dying. Campbell’s strong point is the depth of her observations and descriptions. Her works are directed at young girls, and her intentions are largely didactic: she clearly wishes to encourage girls to be useful, loving people as well as charming creatures of fashion. In Walsingham, Campbell portrays a rarely seen American hero, one who is esteemed for his gentleness and quiet strength. —ROSE F. KAVO
writing with courage and honor. Hers was a minor gift but ‘‘The Honest Wine Merchant,’’ ‘‘The Lost Governess,’’ ‘‘The Wedding,’’ ‘‘The Rake,’’ and ‘‘Oblivion’’ are memorable stories. OTHER WORKS: History of Boswell’s Tavern (circa 1900). The Social Record of Virginia (edited by Caperton, 1937). Like a Falcon Flying (1943). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Carpenter, M. N., Virginia Authors’ Yearbook (1957). Parker, D., ‘‘A Few Words’’ in Helena Lefory Caperton’s Legends of Virginia (1950). Other references: Richmond Times Dispatch (26 March 1950). —MAUREEN MURPHY
CAPERTON, Helena Lefroy Born 1878, Richmond, Virginia; died 1962, Richmond, Virginia Daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Lefroy; married Mr. Caperton The child of an Irish father and an American mother, Helena Lefroy Caperton wrote local history, edited The Social Register of Virginia, and reviewed books for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the Louisville Courier-Journal and the Louisville Times. Her reputation, however, rests on her short stories. ‘‘The Honest Wine Merchant’’ was an O. Henry Memorial Award winner in 1930. ‘‘The Lost Governess’’ was listed in Edward O’Brien’s Anthology of the Best Short Stories of 1930. Both stories appeared in Legends of Virginia (1931). In her introduction to this book Dorothy Parker characterizes it as ‘‘. . . strange, swift, tense, emotional. . . . But there is more about them. There is a wildness, a fierce rush of drama, a long-spreading terror, a passionate championship of the lovely and the innocent and then a sudden curious tenderness.’’ Caperton’s preface to Legends of Virginia names her Virginian maternal grandfather as ‘‘the inimitable storyteller from whom came these tales. . .unconscious of preserving in an adolescent mind the tenderness and gallantry of a past generation.’’ A Southern regional writer, Caperton’s subject is honor, the affirmation of a way of life of a ruined people who had heroically fought a war they were destined to lose. In ‘‘The Lost Governess,’’ a Confederate doctor tirelessly attends his patients despite their inability to pay. A mysterious woman arrives in a storm, takes charge of his children’s education for five years, and then disappears again. Later, while visiting an asylum, the doctor discovers his governess is a violent psychopath who had escaped for five years but recommitted herself lest she harm someone. Caperton’s stories are slight but intensely dramatic. The need for grace in her characters in the face of their defeat informs her
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CARLSON, Natalie Savage Born 3 October 1906, Winchester, Virginia; died 23 September 1997 Daughter of Joseph H. and Natalie Villeneuve dit Vallar Savage; married Daniel Carlson, 1929 When Natalie Savage Carlson was eight years old, her first story was published on the children’s page of the Baltimore Sunday Sun. Later, the family moved to Long Beach, California, and after majoring in journalism, Carlson spent three years as a newspaper reporter for the Long Beach Morning Sun. Carlson’s mother was of French-Canadian extraction, and this French influence is evident in Carlson’s choice of subjects and geographic details. Carlson’s The Talking Cat, and Other Stories of French Canada (1952), Sashes Red and Blue (1956), and The Letter on the Tree (1964) are among others with French Canadian settings. Wings Against the Wind (1955) was first written as a French class composition. The Family Under the Bridge (1958) has a Parisian setting, in which the Tournelle Bridge serves as a shelter for a fatherless family. Befana’s Gift (1969) has an Italian setting, while The Song of the Lop-Eared Mule (1961) takes place in southern Spain. The Tomahawk Family (1960) is the least successful, as it describes a locale which Carlson apparently did not know thoroughly—South Dakota. Diverse family patterns appear in Carlson’s books, but there is always warmth. The white girl in Ann Aurelia and Dorothy (1968) lives in a foster home, since her mother left to marry Mr. Lacey. The three children in The Family Under the Bridge (1958) are fatherless. In The Happy Orpheline (1957) 20 orphans live with Madame Flattot and are upset with the possibility that the favorite, Brigitte, might be adopted. Carlson’s autobiographical books, The Half Sisters (1970) and Luvvy and the Girls (1971), tell of a closely knit family. In Carlson’s books, situation and dialogue are filled with humor. Albert and Pierre kick each other as they pull the church bell rope, and it tolls crazily at a funeral in The Letter on the Tree (1964). The orphan Brigitte in The Happy Orpheline lets the dogs
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CARMICHAEL
loose, thinking this the most wicked thing she could do, and they upset the marketplace. The Family Under the Bridge was a Newbery honor book, and has been published in paperback and a number of translations, as have many of Carlson’s other books. Carlson was nominated as the U.S. candidate for the International Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1966. Most of her books have remained in print, particularly those with strong setting, family ties, and humor. OTHER WORKS: Alphonse, That Bearded One (1954). Hortense, the Cow for a Queen (1957). A Brother for the Orphelines (1959). Evangeline, Pigeon of Paris (1960). Carnival in Paris (1962). A Pet for the Orphelines (1962). Jean-Claude’s Island (1963). School Bell in the Valley (1963). The Orphelines in the Enchanted Castle (1964). The Empty Schoolhouse (1965). Sailor’s Choice (1966). Chalou (1967). Luigi of the Streets (1967). Marchers for the Dream (1969). Marie Louise & Christophe (1974). Marie Louise’s Heyday (1975). Runaway Marie Louise (1977). Jaky or Dodo? (1978). Time for the White Egret (1978). The papers of Natalie Savage Carlson are in the Kerlan Collection at the University of Minnesota. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Carlson, J., ‘‘Family Unity in N.S.C.’s Books for Children’’ in Authors and Illustrators of Children’s Books; Writing on Their Lives and Works (1972). Reference works: SAA (1971). More Books by More People (1974). More Junior Authors (1963). Other references: ChildL (1976). —KAREN N. HOYLE
CARMICHAEL, Sarah E(lizabeth) Born 1838, Setauket, New York; died 10 November 1901, Salt Lake City, Utah Also wrote under: S. E. Carmichael, Miss S. E. Carmichael Daughter of William and Mary Ann Carmichael; married Jonathan M. Williamson, 1866 (died 1882) Converts to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Williamson’s family joined the Mormons at Nauvoo, Illinois, and in 1850 moved to Salt Lake City, where her father worked as a carpenter. Despite frontier hardships and the absence of public schools, Williamson gained an education and began writing poetry. Her objection to polygamy, then practiced by the Latter-Day Saints, and her marriage to an army doctor of non-Mormon background, alienated her, to some extent, from the local community. Not long after her marriage, Williamson experienced a severe mental decline, the cause of which is unknown. Although she lived on for more than 30 years, her career as a poet was over. Widowed in 1882, Williamson spent her last years in a mental hospital. She had no children. Williamson’s first signed poem, ‘‘Truth,’’ appeared in the Deseret News on 10 March 1858. The Mormon newspaper
published more than 50 of her poems during the next eight years. Her poetry also appeared in the Daily Union Vedette, published at Camp Douglas, where her future husband was stationed, and the Woman’s Exponent, a feminist newspaper edited and published by Mormon women. Because so much of her poetry was published in newspapers, the full extent of her work may never be known. The early poems of Williamson do not emphasize a distinctively Mormon subject matter. Often homiletic in character, the verses treat friendship, love, integrity, writing, Indian pride, and similar topics from a humanistic, nonsectarian point of view. Even in the poem ‘‘Pharoah’’ (Deseret News, 30 March 1859), where man’s dependent relationship to God is explored, she avoided heavy-handed parallels between the exodus of the Israelites and that of the Mormons. And in a rare poem on a Mormon subject— ‘‘Brigham Young’’ (Deseret News, 17 October 1860)—Williamson retained control over her topic, refusing to be overawed by his power, as were some of her contemporaries. The result is a poem that praises but is not cloying. By the early 1860s, Williamson had won local recognition for her efforts, and community leaders called on her for occasional verse. Most of the praise she received was uncritical, although Edward W. Tullidge, Utah editor, writer, and historian, saw her as a genius whose powers of improvisation carried her to the heights, although patient shaping and reworking could not ‘‘justly be accredited among her higher poetic gifts and graces.’’ Williamson’s career was short, but her powers did mature. She began to see her subjects in dramatic terms, using conflict, contrast, and irony in an increasingly sophisticated way. Three poems published in the Deseret News, ‘‘The Daughter of Herodias’’ (22 October 1862), ‘‘Esau’s Petition’’ (11 March 1863), and the ‘‘Feast of Lucrezia Borgia’’ (6 May 1863), reveal a growing command of her art. Williamson’s advancing skill eventually brought her recognition outside of Utah. William Cullen Bryant anthologized ‘‘The Stolen Sunbeam,’’ retitling it ‘‘The Origin of Gold’’ (A Family Library of Poetry and Song, 1878). Another anthologizer, May Wentworth, included Williamson’s poems ‘‘A Christmas Rhyme’’ and ‘‘Sorrow’’ in her collection (Poetry of the Pacific, 1867). There have been claims that Williamson’s poems were often reprinted without credit by the Eastern press. Williamson was profoundly moved by the Civil War, about which she wrote vivid, dramatic poems, including her best-known poem, ‘‘President Lincoln’s Funeral’’ (Poems, 1866). The elegy attracted national recognition; it was reprinted and read many times at public functions. Its expression of grief achieves a solemn dignity that, reportedly, pleased Mrs. Lincoln. Williamson’s only book of poetry, Poems, was published in San Francisco to favorable reviews. The slim volume of 26 poems received similar notice in the East. Included in the collection are several of her best descriptive poems: ‘‘Moonlight on the Wasatch’’ and the haunting ‘‘April Flowers,’’ which seems to foreshadow her mental collapse in these lines: ‘‘Pale, blighted flowers, the summer time / Will smile on brighter leaves / They will not wither
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in their prime / Like a young heart that grieves.’’ Williamson’s friends arranged for the book’s publication and sale. The proceeds of almost $600—considerable for the time—were to be used to finance the poet’s further education at Vassar, a project that her marriage and mental decline prevented. Of the many women and men in Utah who wrote poetry in the 19th century, Williamson stands above all. She avoided the common faults of sentimentality, didacticism, and dogmatism to produce poems of genuine merit that, despite changing literary fashion, can be read with some pleasure today. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Selby, C., Sarah Elizabeth Carmichael (M.A. thesis, University of Utah, 1921). Other references: Relief Society Magazine (Sept. 1928). Salt Lake Tribune (16 Feb. 1836, 8 Mar. 1936). Utah Historical Quarterly (Winter 1975). Western Galaxy (May 1888). —MIRIAM B. MURPHY
CARRIGHAR, Sally Born 10 February 1898, Cleveland, Ohio; died October 1985 Daughter of George B. and Perle Harden Wagner In Home to the Wilderness (1973), Sally Carrighar tells a sad story. Partially disfigured at birth by a high-forceps delivery, she was abhorrent to her mother, who once attempted to strangle her. The psychotic woman, loathing even her daughter’s touch, sought to deprive Carrighar of all love and openly urged her to commit suicide. Carrighar was rescued from utter wretchedness by her father’s devotion, her own remarkable determination, and the supportive atmosphere of Wellesley College. She tried various artistic careers: pianist, dancer, and film production assistant, only to have her mother repeatedly snatch success from her. While undergoing psychoanalysis, Carrighar attempted to establish herself as a fictionalist, failed, and ‘‘abandoned words.’’ Convalescing in San Francisco from depression and heart disease, she began feeding the birds outside her window. The birds became fellow creatures; a mouse nesting inside her radio actually sang to her, and in a revelation she understood her vocation: nature writing. Words need not be abandoned, only the bizarre human world of madness, violence, greed. After seven years of study, Carrighar published One Day on Beetle Rock (1944), a narrative treating the interaction of various species in a Sierra Nevada habitat. Carrighar discovered that she could portray this interaction effectively by adopting in successive chapters the point of view of specific organisms and describing how a dramatic natural event (e.g., a flash flood) affects them. To present the ‘‘consciousness’’ of a female mosquito is of course risky, for the writer appears to be anthropomorphizing nature. But the literary strategy of Beetle Rock proved itself in One Day at Teton Marsh (1947), about the Grand Tetons; Icebound Summer (1953), about the north coast of Alaska; and The Twilight Seas (1975), about the blue whales.
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These objective narratives, in which the narrator never speaks in her own voice, are only a portion of Carrighar’s corpus. Her personal writings give a good introduction to the land and people of northern Alaska. Moonlight at Midday (1958) narrates her adventures researching Icebound Summer in the tiny village of Unalakleet; it examines Eskimo life, both the traditional ways and the changes wrought by the white man. Wild Voice of the North (1959) is the story of her husky, Bobo, whom she rescued and cared for while living and writing in Nome. Carrighar has worked in other genres as well: a play, As Far as They Go (1956), celebrates Alaskan history and pioneer life. An historical novel, The Glass Dove (1962), portrays a young girl whose farm home in southern Ohio becomes a station on the Underground Railroad. Wild Heritage (1965) is Carrighar’s most ambitious work. It synthesizes much of the pioneering work in the field of ethology and includes many of Carrighar’s own observations from her years in various wildernesses. The work treats life experiences which humans share with animals: parenthood, sex, aggressiveness, and play. She is especially concerned with what tendencies of animals are learned. In reporting her observations, she uses the technique of her nature narratives, dramatizing the behavior of a single individual of the species. But one finally returns to Carrighar’s autobiography, Home to the Wilderness, for her most deeply felt writing, for her observations that man’s morality originates in nature, for her comments about females as naturalists. Nature was Carrighar’s healer and vocation; she could approach it with naive joy, reverence, and awe. But she also knew it as a scientist who relies only on objective observation. That Carrighar successfully combined these two modes of cognition is perhaps her greatest achievement. OTHER WORKS: Exploring Marin (1941). Prey of the Arctic (1951). Blue Whale (1978). BIBLIOGRAPHY: NYHTBR (28 Sept. 1947, 19 July 1953). NYT (10 Dec. 1944). NYTBR (28 March 1965). San Francisco Chronicle (25 Sept. 1947). SR (20 March 1965). SRL (24 Feb. 1945). Weekly Book Review (26 Nov. 1944). —MARGARET MCFADDEN-GERBER
CARRINGTON, Elaine Sterne Born 1892, New York, New York; died 4 May 1958, New York, New York Also wrote under: John Ray, Elaine Sterne Daughter of Theodore and Mary Henriques Sterne; married George D. Carrington, 1920 While growing up in New York City, Elaine Sterne Carrington’s earliest ambition was to become a musical comedy star. Instead, she became the most prolific writer of radio serials, though she also wrote short stories, plays, and songs.
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At eighteen, Carrington sold her first story, ‘‘King of the Christmas Feast,’’ to St. Nicholas magazine. At nineteen, she won the first prize in a scenario-writing contest sponsored by the New York Evening Sun in cooperation with Vitagraph for a script entitled Sins of the Mothers. Two more prizes that year—one in a New York Morning Telegraph scenario contest and another in a Collier’s magazine short story contest—launched Carrington’s professional career. Nightstick, a play written under the name of John Ray, was lengthened and produced as a film under the title Alibi (1929). The most frequent topic of Carrington’s plays is romance and marriage in the middle class. Five Minutes from the Station: A Comedy of Life that Comes Close to Being a Tragedy (1930), features Carrie Adams, a harried but spunky housewife who secures a promotion for her husband Bert by cooking dinner for his employer. Like the plays, Carrington’s stories concern courtship, marriage, and child rearing. Plots based on secret engagements, elopements, hopeless love between people of different classes, and friction between child and stepparent are common. The central characters generally are of the middle class—wives who ‘‘like to gossip,’’ storekeepers whose shops are ‘‘clean as a whistle,’’ young women with ‘‘milk-white skin’’ and ‘‘ash-blond hair,’’ and steady young men who like to do ‘‘the deciding.’’ Ten of Carrington’s short stories are collected in a volume entitled All Things Considered (1939). The sentimentality of the stories is redeemed by some incisive and devastating portraits in situations critics have deemed worthy of Evelyn Waugh or John Collier. Carrington’s fondness for ambiguity caused some reviewers to find ‘‘a streak of sharp satire running under the gloss.’’ A cool, sparse style allows the characters occasionally to break free of humdrum plots. Carrington moved to radio scriptwriting with her first series, Red Adams (1932), later renamed Red Davis. The series starred Burgess Meredith as Davis, a ‘‘supposedly typical, happy-golucky, middle class teenager, who lived in the supposedly typical small town of Oak Park.’’ Carrington drew the plots from her own experiences as a wife and mother, incorporating (in her words) ‘‘all the pangs of adolescence from both the children’s and parents’ points of view.’’ Under the sponsorship of Proctor & Gamble, the program was renamed Forever Young, and then Pepper Young’s Family (1936-56). The setting became the town of Elmwood, and Red Davis became Pepper. What began as a comedy had emerged as a thoroughgoing soap opera. In 1938 it was on the air at three different hours every day and was carried by both the NBC and CBS networks. Variety rated Pepper Young’s Family ‘‘above average both in quality and popularity. . . .Its story stresses everyday family situations, with little or no melodrama and nothing lurid or emotionally upsetting. If anything, the action is too mild for maximum dramatic effect. The pace is relatively slow and the dialogue is inclined to be a trifle innocuous.’’ When a Girl Marries (1939-56) became the serial that drew perhaps the largest of all cumulative radio soap opera audiences.
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The marriage of wealthy Joan Field to poor-but-promising Harry Davis was central but other marriages were also featured. Rosemary (1944-55) was, as the show’s opening announcement proclaimed, ‘‘dedicated to all the women of today.’’ Each episode began with ‘‘This is your story—this is you.’’ The serial told the story of the Dawson family and centered upon Rosemary Dawson’s marriage to Bill Roberts. A young working woman at series open, Rosemary quickly became the woman of domestic experience, the wife and mother endowed with the goodness and kindness required of soap opera heroines. Carrington’s intense patriotism (she also wrote scripts for the U.S. Treasury Department) manifested itself in appeals to listeners to buy war bonds. In addition, Carrington’s characters urged each other to buy Easter Seals, to help returning prisoners of war, or to support some other worthy cause. Acknowledged as the originator of the radio soap opera, Carrington established a simple principle for plots that often were complex: ‘‘the life of a middle class family and the bringing up of children in an understanding way.’’ This principle led Carrington to focus on youthful characters, complete with current slang, a focus which television soap operas of the 1970s have reestablished, The ‘‘understanding way’’ of bringing up children involved humor, which was often present in Carrington’s scripts. Plots—in which illogic was not uncommon—were always subordinate to characters. In Carrington’s words, ‘‘The story must be written about people you come to know and like and believe in. What happens to them is of secondary importance. Once characters are firmly established and entrenched in the hearts of listeners, the latter will have to tune in to find out what becomes of the characters because of what they feel for them.’’ For over 20 years Carrington succeeded in creating characters that evoked such loyalty from listeners. Without question, the ‘‘Queen of the Soapers,’’ as Carrington was known, had earned her title. OTHER WORKS: Follow Your Heart (TV drama, 1953). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Edmondson, M., and D. Rounds, From Mary Noble to Mary Hartman: The Complete Soap Opera Book (1976). Reference works: CB: Who’s News and Why 1944 (1945). Other references: NYHT (19 Nov. 1939). New York Post (25 Jan. 1940). NYT (12 Nov. 1939, 11 Feb. 1940, 5 May 1958). Newsweek (20 Oct. 1941, 3 May 1954). Parents’ Magazine (June 1942). Time (26 Aug. 1946). Variety (8 May 1940, 16 June 1943). —CAREN J. DEMING
CARROLL, Gladys Hasty Born 26 June 1904, Rochester, New Hampshire Daughter of Warren and Frances Hasty; married Herbert Carroll, 1925 Growing up in South Berwick, Maine, Gladys Hasty was educated at Bates College, where she graduated in 1925. That
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same year she married Herbert Carroll, who became a professor of psychology at the University of New Hampshire. Carroll has been awarded honorary degrees from Bates College, the University of New Hampshire, and the University of Maine. Carroll’s most famous book is As the Earth Turns (1933), a story of the Shaw family. A selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, it was second on the fiction bestseller list, and was translated into many languages. The heroine of As the Earth Turns, Jen Shaw, is an ‘‘earth mother’’, slow, calm, and capable. Together with her father, Mark, Jen holds the Shaw family together. Mark lives for his farm work, and Jen apparently lives for her housework: ‘‘if there’s anything I like, it’s cleaning something awful dirty!’’ The action of the story focuses on various family crises and the relationship between the Shaws and the Janowskis, a Polish family newly moved into the area. As the Earth Turns was filmed by Warner in 1934. Directed by Alfred Green, the production starred Jean Muir and Donald Woods as Jen and Stan, with David Landau playing Mark Shaw. The New York Times reviewed it favorably. After the 1930s, Carroll’s novels are of little interest. Most of them are preachy, often centering on conservative women residing in Maine. One of her later novels, Man on the Mountain (1969), is a science fiction social satire, showing how America is destroying itself. A constant theme is cultural tolerance, whether it be of Poles, Irish Catholics, or French Canadians. Of more interest are her autobiographical works, beginning with Dunnybrook (1943), a social history of South Berwick from its founding to World War II. Only Fifty Years Ago (1962) is the story of her childhood; To Remember Forever (1963) is a journal of a year at Bates College. The Years Away from Home (1972) tells of her early married life through 1933. These autobiographical works, like her later novels, are repetitious and laced throughout with World War II poster-style patriotism, but they can serve as documents of local and cultural history. Carroll used her novels to express her own conservative Republican, rural, New England values, but much of her work cannot be rated as literature. She is a writer who had one major theme: the spell of the land, and she wrote it out in her first three novels. As the Earth Turns is a great popular novel, however, and it fully deserves its acclaim. OTHER WORKS: Cockatoo (1929). Land Spell (1930, reissued as A Few Foolish Ones, 1935). Neighbor to the Sky (1937). Head of the Line (1942). While the Angels Sing (1947). West of the Hill (1949). Christmas Without Johnny (1950). One White Star (1954). Sing Out the Glory (1957). Come With Me Home (1960). The Road Grows Strange (1965). The Light Here Kindled (1967). Next of Kin (1974). Unless You Die Young (1977). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hall, V. S., ‘‘Down East Today’’ (thesis, 1938). Nation (21 June 1933). NYT (7 May 1933). SRL (6 May 1933). —BEVERLY SEATON
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CARSON, Rachel (Louise) Born 27 May 1907, Springfield, Pennsylvania; died 14 April 1964, Silver Spring, Maryland Daughter of Robert Warden and Maria Frazier McLean Carson One of the most famous environmentalists of all time, Rachel Carson combined literary talent with scientific knowledge in her writings about the fragile state of nature. Her warnings about the havoc that humanity and its careless ways were wreaking on the environment led to new policies designed to protect nature. Written for both the scientist and the layperson, Carson’s works sought to show readers the wonder of nature and instill in them a sense of responsibility for protecting it. Carson was raised in rural Pennsylvania and doted on by her mother, a former schoolteacher who passed on her love of literature and nature to her youngest daughter. Rachel loved to write from an early age and had published articles in St. Nicholas magazine by the time she was ten. She entered Pennsylvania College for Women (later renamed Chatham College) with the intention of becoming a professional writer. Yet she switched her major to zoology by the end of her junior year against the advice of her professors, who told her there was no future for a woman in science. In 1929 Carson graduated magna cum laude and was awarded a fellowship for a summer at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. It was the first time she had seen the ocean. She continued to study at Woods Hole in the summers while earning an M.A. in zoology at Johns Hopkins University, where she wrote a thesis on the development of the catfish. After a brief stint teaching at Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland, Carson took a position as a junior aquatic biologist at the Bureau of Fisheries in Washington, D.C. She was one of the first two women hired by the Bureau for nonclerical jobs, and she wrote and edited high-quality radio broadcasts and Bureau publications for many years. Elmer Higgins, Carson’s supervisor at the Bureau of Fisheries, turned down a radio script she wrote about the sea but recommended she submit it to Atlantic Monthly. The resulting article, ‘‘Undersea,’’ (1937) came to the attention of Quincy Howe, an editor at Simon & Schuster, who asked her to write a book about the ocean. A thorough researcher and careful writer, Carson had an appealing descriptive style that appears throughout her works. Her first book, Under the Sea Wind: A Naturalist’s Picture of Ocean Life, was published in late 1941 just before the outbreak of World War II and sold poorly, despite its favorable reviews. The book made the bestseller list upon its reissue in 1952, however, after Carson had achieved fame for subsequent works. At the end of the war, Carson was promoted to chief editor of the newly renamed United States Fish & Wildlife Service. She still managed to find time to write and The Sea Around Us was published in 1951 after an overwhelmingly favorable response to excerpts published in the Yale Review and the New Yorker. The Sea Around Us utilized new information about the ocean to
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describe it and was referred to by Carson as a ‘‘biography of the sea.’’ The book remained on the bestseller list for 86 weeks and eventually won both the John Burroughs and the National Book awards.
1963. Silent Spring was immediately attacked by chemical companies and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which denounced the book’s findings of DDT’s ill effects on the environment as false.
The Sea Around Us’s three sections provide a detailed look at life beneath the ocean’s surface, yet Carson’s principal focus is still to provide readers with scientifically accurate information about the sea couched in her now trademark dramatic style. This work won Carson the National Book award; and she famously noted in her acceptance speech that ‘‘if there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave [it] out.’’
Carson herself was painted as an unreliable, hysterical woman by critics and attacked repeatedly in the media. Yet the furor over Silent Spring died down when it became apparent that Carson’s critics had misinterpreted the book’s message. In Silent Spring, Carson called for increased control over the distribution and use of pesticides like DDT as well as the development of biological controls as an alternative to spraying pesticides from the air. Her dramatic presentation of humanity’s destruction of the environment through DDT and other pesticides shocked a public that had heretofore been unaware of any reason for concern.
In 1953, two years after publication of The Sea Around Us, Carson became the first science writer in 13 years to be elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. RKO’s production of a full-length documentary of the book won an Oscar the same year, although Carson never approved of the film because of some scientific inaccuracies. Honorary degrees and other accolades continued to pour in along with royalties from the book’s eventual translation into 32 languages. With her financial well-being ensured, Carson resigned from the Fish & Wildlife Service to devote herself full time to writing. The Edge of the Sea was published in 1955 and became another instant bestseller. In this book Carson describes the fragility and interdependence of the creatures living along the ocean’s shore. Carson continued to provide occasional scripts for radio and television broadcasts, including one for an Omnibus program on clouds. Yet she had little time to write in the late 1950s due to family responsibilities. Her mother and niece died within a year of one another and the never-married Carson adopted Roger, her five year-old great-nephew. Roger was the inspiration for Carson’s fifth book, The Sense of Wonder, which grew out of an article for Women’s Home Companion. (The book was published posthumously in 1965 and urged parents to instill a love of nature in their children.) Carson was concerned about the effects of the chemical fertilizer DDT for many years and tried unsuccessfully to publish articles about the pesticide’s negative effects on plants and animals. Her concern grew in the years after World War II when DDT became widely available to farmers. Other scientists had noted the deterioration in the environment and the death of wildlife due to DDT, but none had Carson’s fame or respect. She pondered the topic of her next book in a letter to a friend in February 1958: ‘‘It seems time someone wrote of Life in the light of the truth as it now appears to us. And I think that may be the book I am to write. . . . As man approaches the ‘new heaven and the new earth’—or the space-age universe, if you will—he must do it with humility rather than arrogance.’’ Shortly after Carson began work on the book that would become Silent Spring, she was diagnosed with a malignant breast tumor. The cancer spread throughout her body, which made writing difficult, but a condensation of the book was published in the New Yorker in June 1962 and the entire book in September
The overwhelming interest and anxiety about the situation presented in Carson’s book led President John F. Kennedy to announce a federal investigation into the problem. The report of the President’s Science Advisory Committee in May 1963 agreed with Carson’s conclusions in Silent Spring. Later that year, Carson became the first woman to win the Audubon Medal. Within four months of Silent Spring’s publication, there were over 40 bills in state legislatures calling for stronger restrictions on the use of pesticides. Carson’s impact upon environmental policy did not cease with her death in 1964. In November 1969, five years after her death, the U.S. government took steps to phase out the use of DDT over a two-year period, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was established a year later. There have been two new posthumous publications of Carson’s writings in addition to either renamed partial or complete reprints of her earlier works. Always, Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman was published in 1995 to great acclaim. Freeman, a naturalist and former teacher, had written to Carson in 1952 after the publication of The Sea Around Us when she learned Carson was building a summer home near the Freemans’ on Southport Island in Maine. The women later met and became close friends for the remainder of Carson’s life. Carson’s compassionate nature and joy in life shines through these letters, as does her concern for her family and the pain of her later illness. Near the end of her niece’s struggle with diabetes, Carson wrote to Freeman: ‘‘I think I wrote you a year ago that my great problem was how to be a writer and at the same time a member of my family. . . . It is that conflict that just tears me to pieces. Now, so near the end, I wonder why I can’t have peace for even ten days, but I have thought of no practical solution.’’ Always, Rachel reveals that Carson’s courage in the face of personal tragedy was as striking as her bravery in facing public criticism and her graciousness in acknowledging eventual public triumph. Lost Woods: The Discovered Writings of Rachel Carson (1998) is a collection of brief essays, talks, field notes, acceptance speeches, magazine articles, and personal letters. The selections in Lost Woods range from Carson’s first Atlantic Monthly article,
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‘‘Undersea,’’ which was the inspiration for the book Under the Sea Wind, to her final letter to Dorothy Freeman (1964). In this letter, which Freeman received after Carson’s death, the latter wrote: ‘‘My regrets, darling, are for your sadness, for leaving Roger, when I so wanted to see him through to manhood. . . . I have had a rich life, full of rewards and satisfactions that come to few, and if it must end now, I can feel that I have achieved most of what I wished to do. That wouldn’t have been true two years ago, when I first realized my time was short.’’ Rachel Carson was a gifted scientist and talented writer whose works introduced readers around the world to the delicate balance of nature and society’s responsibility for preserving it. Carson was one of the few women of her time able to achieve success in the male-dominated world of science. Through her inspirational and scientifically sound writings she convinced her colleagues and the general public of both the need for sound environmental policy and the capability of female scientists. Often hailed as the mother of the environmental movement, her impact on literature and environmental policy is still felt today. Yet her characteristic modesty did not allow her to believe her work would bring about lasting change. Shortly before the publication of Silent Spring, Carson wrote in a letter: ‘‘I have felt bound by a solemn obligation to do what I could—if I didn’t at least try I could never again be happy in nature. But now I can believe I have at least helped a little. It would be unrealistic to believe one book could bring a complete change.’’ As writer Paul Brooks noted in Speaking for Nature, ‘‘It may have been unrealistic, but history has proved it true.’’
OTHER WORKS: Food from the Sea: Fish and Shellfish of New England (1943). Food from Home Waters: Fishes of the Middle West (1943). Fish and Shellfish of the South Atlantic and Gulf Coasts (1944). Fish and Shellfish of the Middle Atlantic Coast (1945). Life Under the Sea (1968). The Rocky Coast (1971). The House of Life: Rachel Carson at Work (1972). Silent Spring Revisited (1987).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brooks, P., The House of Life: R. Carson at Work (1972). Brooks, P., Speaking for Nature (1980). Graham, F., Jr., Since Silent Spring (1970). Sterling, P., Sea and Earth: The Life of R. Carson (1970). Stille, D. R., Extraordinary Women Scientists. Veglahn, N., Women Scientists (1991). Whorton, J., Before Silent Spring: Pesticides and Public Health in Pre-DDT America (1974). Reference works: CANR 35 (1992). Current Biography (1951, 1964). CBY (1951). Notable Women in the Life Sciences (1996). Reader’s Companion to American History (1991). Twentieth Century Authors, 1st supp. (1955). Other references: American Forests (July 1970). ‘‘The Spirit of Rachel Carson,’’ in Audubon (July-August 1992). SatR (16 May 1964). Science (26 May 1995). —LEAH J. SPARKS
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CARVER, Ada Jack Born 7 April 1890, Natchitoches, Louisiana; died 1 December 1972, Minden, Louisiana Daughter of Marshall H. and Ada W. Jack Carver; married John B. Snell, 1918 Born into an upper-middle-class Baptist family, Ada Jack Carver was raised in an atmosphere of distinction and cultivated ease with the myths that continue to inform the girlhoods of the region. The soil of her native Natchitoches, a river town in northwest Louisiana, was enriched by multicultural strata—Indian, French, Spanish, and Anglo-American, with the usual Southern admixture of African-American. Carver remembered the locus and people of her childhood as colorful and exciting, especially in comparison to Minden, where she lived after she married. On the negative side, Carver’s heritage endowed her with a sense of propriety that became more fanatical after her marriage, and which may have impaired her ability to deal with materials related to her own class, race, and sex. It was as an insider jealously guarding the gate that she wrote such stories as ‘‘The Joyous Coast’’ (Southern Women’s Magazine, 1917), ‘‘Treeshy’’ (Harper’s, 1926), and ‘‘Maudie’’ (Harper’s, 1926). The last two are saved by the eccentricity of the protagonists, the bizarre circumstances of their lives, and Carver’s skill in delineating the interaction of inner and outer landscapes. A sense of cultural and moral ambivalence emerges from the confrontation of distinct socioeconomic classes and life styles that allows the reader to place in proper focus the supercilious attitude of the main narrative voices. A bright spot in the congenial but repressive milieu of Carver’s youth was a French grandmother who elected Carver from the family group to share her stories and perceptions, thereby stimulating the child’s intellect and literary imagination. Carver’s best stories deal with grandmothers or older women, e.g., ‘‘The Raspberry Dress’’ (The Century Magazine, 1926) and ‘‘The Old One’’ (Harper’s, 1926); or other cultures, e.g., ‘‘Redbone’’ (in A. Turner’s Southern Stories, 1925), and the one-act play, The Cajun (1926). The last two both won prestigious prizes. With the exception of ‘‘Redbone’’ the interest in these works centers on the perceptions and experiences of women, and on the construction of a cultural context. For the women in the stories, socialization provides a closed system that prevents communication with others and inhibits participation in the life that is offered to them. In ‘‘The Raspberry Dress’’ the grandmother is able to break through the barriers of her fantasy world and, instead of going back as she had intended, moves forward into life with her granddaughter. The dress itself is a central metaphor that reveals first the disjuncture and then the consonance between inner and outer worlds. The prospect is a good deal more bleak in The Cajun. Carver projects a wasteland situation in the play where ordinary ‘‘innocent’’ human acts tend to mutilate rather than further life’s purposes.
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CARY
Carver began to publish in 1915, but her most intense creative activity occurred in the mid-1920s. There are numerous unresolved mysteries surrounding the relationship between her life and her work. She virtually stopped publishing after 1928, with the exception of a children’s play, The Clock Strikes Tomorrow, written and produced in 1935, and a story, ‘‘For Suellen with Love,’’ which appeared in a college review in 1949. All of Carver’s personal papers are believed to have been destroyed at her death upon her request, so it’s unknown what manuscripts remained. She did work for a period of time on a novel, but we will probably never know whether or at what point her creative energies were stifled, or why.
which had already taken two of Cary’s sisters and which eventually occasioned her death following a lengthy illness.
What critics are now calling the ‘‘politics of greatness’’ has denied Carver a place in the annals of literary history she deserves to occupy. Although only one of her stories remained in print, Carver’s short fiction should be collected and studied in classes and by scholars interested in Southern or regional literature and women’s writing. Her work reflects a sensibility that conjoins time and place in a unique and enlightening way.
Cary was a firm believer in abolition and women’s rights, although many of her poems show woman’s noblest role to be that of wife and mother. Despite her illness and her self-imposed rigorous writing schedule, she served as the first president of the first women’s club in America, later kown as Sorosis. A prolific writer, Cary authored five volumes of poetry, as well as several novels and books of sketches and short stories. Although generally too didactic for modern sensibilities, her poetry was better than most of her contemporaries, and her prose retains a remarkable freshness. Clearly, her best works are the sketches based directly upon her recollections of western life.
OTHER WORKS: The Cajun (1926). Bagatelle (1927). The Clock Strikes Tomorrow (1935). The Collected Works of Ada Jack Carver (1980). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bowman, M. I., ‘‘The Negro in the Works of Three Contemporary Louisiana Writers’’ (thesis, 1931). Dodson, A., ‘‘Ada Jack Carver’’ (thesis, 1930). Ford, O. L., Ada Jack Carver: A Critical Biography (dissertation, 1975). Houston, M. A., ‘‘The Shadow of Africa on the Cane: An Examination of Africanisms in the Fiction of Lyle Saxon and Ada Jack Carver’’ (thesis, 1986). Taylor, D. M. W., Louisiana’s Literary Legacy: A Critical Appraisal of the Writings of Ada Jack Carver (dissertation, 1994). —ALICE PARKER
CARY, Alice Born 26 April 1820, Mount Healthy, Ohio; died 12 February 1871, New York, New York Also wrote under: Alice Carey, Patty Lee Daughter of Robert and Elizabeth Jessup Cary Growing up in what was then considered the far western area around Cincinnati, Ohio, Alice Cary’s educational opportunities were limited to those offered by a small country school, from which she was removed altogether quite early. Remarkably, with neither education, books, literary friends, nor encouragement, Cary and her sister Phoebe developed and sustained their literary talents. Lack of intellectual stimulation was not the only obstacle to Cary’s career as a writer. In 1835 her mother died of tuberculosis,
Alice and Phoebe began to publish first in western and then in eastern newspapers and journals.In 1850 Cary moved to New York, where Rufus W. Griswold praised her work in his Female Poets of America. It was also admired by other writers, including Edgar Allan Poe and Whittier, whose poem ‘‘The Singer’’ is about her. Phoebe joined Cary in 1851, and by 1856 both women had well-established literary reputations. Their home in New York City became the center of a literary salon that for 15 years met each Sunday.
Throughout Cary’s poetry there are recurring themes and personae. Much of her poetry is religious or is designed to teach a moral, with an overall dark tone. As she writes in ‘‘Life,’’ the world is ‘‘desolate and dreary,’’ ‘‘poor and pitiful,’’ and ‘‘fruitless and fruitionless.’’ Yet, not all of her poetry is pessimistic; her love poems, especially those in the 1873 volume, are vivid and powerful. In ‘‘Snowed Under,’’ for example, she stresses the sensuality of the older woman: ‘‘You would nip the blushing roses; / They were blighted long ago, / But the precious roots, my darling, / Are alive beneath the snow.’’ The most interesting personae of Cary’s poetry are the women. A recurring figure is that of the unmarried but pregnant woman. This figure in ‘‘Morna’’ and later in ‘‘No Ring’’ is ‘‘not mother, wife, nor bride.’’ Seduced and abandoned, she dies of a broken heart. Consistently, Cary urges understanding, offers poverty as both explanation and excuse, and stands quietly on the woman’s side. A second figure is the strong woman, who although she looks happily upon marriage, retains her own identity. Such a woman is found in ‘‘The Bridal Veil,’’ in Ballads, Lyrics, and Hymns (1866): We’re married! Oh, pray that our love do not fail! I have wings flattened down and hid under my veil: They are subtle as light—you can never undo them, And swift in their flight—you can never pursue them, And spite of all clasping and spite of all bands, I can slip like a shadow, a dream, from your hands. It is in Cary’s prose, however, that the modern reader would be most interested. Clovernook (1852, later appearing in five pirated editions printed in England), Clovernook Children (1855), and Pictures of Country Life (1859) taken together make a
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significant contribution to our understanding of early western community life. The sketches are not romantic; they depict lives that were deprived, hard, and marked by early deaths. There is ample material for study in Cary’s prose, especially for those interested in the folklore of women. Material incidental to the story lines gives fascinating glimpses into a world in which, as Aunt Caty in Clovernook Children tells us, ‘‘widders [are] sometimes better off than wives,’’ and in which an unmarried woman of 25 is a local tragedy. These stories are simple but satisfying, and especially remarkable for their vivid portrayal of life in the west.
OTHER WORKS: Poems of Alice and Phoebe Cary (1850). Hagar: A Story for Today (1852). Lyra and Other Poems (1852). Poems (1855). Married, Not Mated; or, How They Lived at Woodside and Throckmorton Hall (1856). Adopted Daughter and Other Tales (1859). The Josephine Gallery (edited by Cary with Phoebe Cary, 1859). The Bishop’s Son (1867). Snow-Berries: A Book for Young Folks (1867). A Lover’s Diary (1868). The Born Thrall (1871). The Last Poems of Alice and Phoebe Cary (edited by M. C. Ames, 1873). Ballads for Little Folks (edited by M. C. Ames, 1874). The Poetical Works of Alice and Phoebe Cary; with a Memorial of Their Lives (edited by M. C. Ames, 1877).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ames, M. C., A Memorial to Alice and Phoebe Cary, with Some of Their Later Poems (1873). Derby, J., Fifty Years Among Authors, Books, and Publishers (1884). Greeley, H., ‘‘Alice and Phoebe Cary’’ in Eminent Women of the Age (1869). Griswold, R. W., Female Poets of America (1859). Kolodny, A., The Land Before Her (1984). Venable, W. H., Beginnings of Literary Culture in the Ohio Valley (1891). Wyman, M., ‘‘Women in the American Realistic Novel, 1860-1893’’ (dissertation, 1950). Reference works: American Women (1897). Cyclopedia of American Literature (1855). Essex Institute Historical Collections 109 (Jan. 1973). National Cyclopedia of American Biography (1892 et seq.). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). A Supplement to Allibone’s Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors (1891). —BILLIE J. WAHLSTROM
CARY, Phoebe Born 4 September 1824, Mount Healthy, Ohio; died 31 July 1871, Newport, Rhode Island Daughter of Robert and Elizabeth Jessup Cary Phoebe Cary grew up in a rough farmhouse eight miles north of Cincinnati, Ohio. Her meager education, like her sister Alice’s,
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was based on The Trumpet, a Universalist journal, the Bible, and a few sentimental or sensational novels popular at the time. Cary started writing poetry at the age of thirteen. Like her sister’s poems, Cary’s are also filled with sudden deaths, meditations on graves, and lingering illness, characteristics not difficult to understand when one realizes Cary’s two sisters and mother succumbed to tuberculosis within two years of each other. Phoebe’s poems were included with those of her sister Alice in Rufus W. Griswold’s edition of The Female Poets of America (1849), and her early poems were collected with her sister’s for Poems of Alice and Phoebe Cary (1850). Following Alice to New York City, Cary settled there in 1851 and began to earn her living by her pen. Like her sister, she contributed to newspapers and religious journals. Within six years the two sisters had earned enough to purchase their own home on 20th Street, where they lived for the rest of their lives. Cary was not as prolific a writer as her sister Alice, a fact that put additional burdens on Alice, who was their main financial support. Cary’s poems are collected in two volumes, Poems and Parodies (1854) and Poems of Faith, Hope, and Love (1868). Most of her poems are sketches of simple country people or prayers for strength and God’s forgiveness. In a few poems she develops her attitudes toward women’s role. Critics of her day regarded Cary’s greatest gift to be her wit and keen parodic streak. Ironically, her best verse is that which parodies the sentimental works of Longfellow and the popular ballads of the day. Along with her sister, she also presided over the Sunday-evening receptions held for artistic and literary figures for 15 years in their 20th Street house. Sipping sweetened milk and water, the sisters presided over ‘‘the nearest approach to the first ideal blue-stocking reception in America.’’ Cary believed in temperance, human rights, and women’s social and civil enfranchisement. She briefly worked as assistant editor for Susan B. Anthony’s suffrage paper, The Revolution. Her attitude toward women, however, contained typical Victorian features. Cary and her sister, although vastly different in temperament, appearance, and productivity, were totally dependent on each other, and Cary often talked of the marriage proposals she rejected in order to continue living with Alice. After Alice’s death, Cary rapidly declined and died five months later. Their biographer Ames asserts: ‘‘It is impossible to estimate either sister without any reference to the other—as impossible as to tell what a husband and wife would have been, had they never lived together.’’
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ames, M. C., A Memorial of Alice and Phoebe Cary, with Some of Their Later Poems (1873). Greeley, H., ‘‘Alice and Phoebe Cary’’ in Eminent Women of the Age (1869). Pulsifer, J., ‘‘Alice and Phoebe Cary, Whittier’s Sweet Singers of the West’’ in Essex Institute Historical Collections (January 1973). Reference works: American Women (1897). Cyclopedia of American Literature (1855). National Cyclopedia of American Biography (1892 et seq.). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). A Supplement
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CASPARY
to Allibone’s Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors (1891). —DIANE LONG HOEVELER
CASPARY, Vera Born 13 November 1904, Chicago, Illinois; died 13 June 1987 Daughter of Paul and Julia Cohen Caspary; married I. G. Goldsmith, 1949 Vera Caspary began her career by writing promotional booklets for an advertising agency, operating her own mail order ballet school, and editing trade magazines. She later drew from these experiences as well as from her Chicago background in her writings. Laura (1943) established Caspary’s reputation for suspenseful psychological studies and introduced one of her strongest fictional devices: multiple points of view. A unique treatment of the Pygmalion myth, the novel is especially satisfying in its adroit blending of clue and symbol. Caspary dramatized Laura (with G. Sklar, 1945), and J. Mankiewicz’s movie adaptation starred Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, and Clifton Webb. The film was nominated for four Academy Awards, and the musical theme was an instant success that is still heard today. Stranger Than Truth (1946) employs multiple points of view. As a result, all the narrators are rounded characters despite Caspary’s use of stereotypes. The novel is a blend of mystery and romance, and through Noble Barnes, the messiah of self-help psychology, Caspary castigates all simplistic reformers. Final Portrait (1971) includes serious discussion of painters’ ethics as it describes the search for the killer of Henry Leveret. The posthumous use of the victim’s own tape-recorded comments contributes to Caspary’s most sensational multiple point of view. The book is skillfully wrought, and its opening sentence, ‘‘I was refused admittance to my father’s funeral,’’ establishes an interest sustained throughout. The Husband (1957) offers a variant of the multiple viewpoint technique by reporting events twice—first as interpreted by Jean McVeigh, a wealthy spinster who marries to assuage loneliness, and then by Stuart Howell, entrepreneur and fraud. The device is largely responsible for the novel’s success. Bedelia (1945; film adaptation, 1947), False Face (1954), and Evvie (1960) are personality studies as well as mysteries. Bedelia focuses on the changes suspicion works in Charlie Horst when he learns that his almost perfect wife may be a murderer. A garish black pearl ring and a blizzard are among Caspary’s deftly handled symbols of deceit and growing uneasiness. False Face recounts the delayed maturation of Nina Redfield as she confronts the true personality of her childhood sweetheart, a fascinating combination of ‘‘simple faith and criminal blood.’’ The novel makes good use of angel and demon imagery; economical,
realistic dialogue provides sound characterization. Evvie examines murder within a triangular love affair and is very successful, especially in its depiction of the friendship between Evvie Ashton and Louise Goodman. Caspary’s nonmysteries, often centering on lonely urban girls, are realistic and moving portraits of young female wage earners. The White Girl (1929), Caspary’s first novel, is spare, unemotional, but powerful. Solaria Cox, having decided to pass for white, moves to New York. Her guilt and fear of discovery are dramatized in the blackmail scheme of a black man who turns seemingly innocent invitations to Harlem rent parties into extortion. Solaria’s relationships with her friend, Dell Findlay, and with her white fiancé complicate her masquerade. A Chosen Sparrow (1964), the story of Leni Neumann, survivor of Nazi prison camps, is Caspary’s interpretation of the aftereffects of the Holocaust. Taught to repress all memory of the horrors, Leni remains immature, easy prey for her ex-Nazi husband who symbolizes corruption in both wartime and postwar Germany. When Leni flees from him, she learns to know herself, to face her prison camp experiences, and to accept the fact of her survival without guilt. The novel is straightforward and unsensational, and Leni’s memories, forced to the surface by her husband, provide powerful flashbacks. During a 30-year period, Caspary was associated with more than 20 motion pictures. She adapted the story for A Letter to Three Wives which received outstanding critical reviews and appeared on the New York Times list of 10 Best Films of 1949. Other well known Caspary films are Claudia and David (1946), The Blue Gardenia (1953), Les Girls (1957), and Bachelor in Paradise (1961). Noted for her skill at characterization, her vivid evocation of setting, and her expert manipulation of tension, Caspary was considered a major talent: a sound novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. OTHER WORKS: Ladies and Gents (1929). Music in the Street (1930). Blind Mice (with W. Lenihan, 1931, film adaptation asWorking Girls, 1931). Geraniums in My Window (with W. S. Ornitz, 1934). The Murder in the Stork Club (1946). The Weeping and the Laughter (1950). Thelma (1952). Wedding in Paris (musical with H. May, 1956). The Man Who Loved His Wife (1966). The Rosecrest Cell (1967). Secrets of Grown-Ups (1979). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Klein, K. G., Great Women Mystery Writers: Classic to Contemporary (1994). McNamara, E., Laura as Novel, Film, and Myth (1992). Warren, A. L., Word Play: The Lives and Work of Four Women Writers in Hollywood’s Golden Age (dissertation, 1988). Reference works: Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection (1976). St. James Guide to Crime and Mystery Writers (1996). Other references: Bookman (Sept. 1932). NYHTB (4 Sept. 1960). NYTBR (20 Jan. 1929, 18 Jan. 1940). SR (17 Sept. 1932). —JANE S. BAKERMAN
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CASTILLO, Ana Born 15 June 1953, Chicago, Illinois Daughter of Ramón (Ray) and Raquel (Rocha) Castillo; children: Marcel Ana Castillo grew up in Chicago, where she received a B.A. from Northwestern University (1975) and an M.A. from the University of Chicago. In 1991 she completed a Ph.D. in American studies at the University of Bremen, Germany. The voices populating Castillo’s texts speak from a multiplicity of positions that at times complement and at times contradict one another. Their subjectivity is a weave of differences, complex and potentially transformative. The epistolary novel The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986) explores the geographic and psychic borderlands between the U.S. and Mexico as internalized by Chicanas. It also maps the borderlands between women and women and women and men. Much of the bonding, both positive and negative, between Teresa and Alicia is established through their relationships with men, while they struggle with the differences between them. Teresa begins Letter 13, ‘‘Alicia, why i hated white women and sometimes didn’t like you,’’ and ends balancing Alicia’s class-and skin-privilege against her inferior physical attractiveness. While Teresa feels betrayed by Alicia’s ignorance of Mexican culture, she in turn hides from Alicia her perception that men are more attracted to her because she has internalized femininity as submissive. The text’s structure insists on polyvalence, presenting four possible combinations of the letters. As published, the ending foregrounds the bonding between the two women through failed relationships with men. The other endings represent the triumph of maternal and cultural dictates, the confirmation of women’s betrayal of women, and the quixotic preparations for yet another trip to Mexico. Castillo’s second novel Sapogonia (1990) positions women readers not to identify with the male subject Maximo, yet it is the story of Pastora, whose contradictory subjectivity is both revealed and concealed by the narrative. Maximo’s subjectivity is constructed in opposition to woman as inaccessible enigma and vagina dentata. He both desires the primordial unity he projects onto Pastora and is terrified of being absorbed by her. Although various alternative narratives are available to her, Pastora is complicit in her own objectification as enigma and object of desire. Her opacity also functions as a shield from intimacy; she is both contemptuously independent of men and dependent on them. Sapogonia explores male fantasy, its potential violence to women, and the female subject’s struggle to interpret herself both within and outside of this discourse on femininity. My Father Was a Toltec: Poems (1988), monolingual poems in English and Spanish, explores a subjectivity of marginalization: what it means to be poor, to be hated because of skin color and
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culture, to be the daughter of a Mexican woman and a Mexican man. The first section, ‘‘The Toltec,’’ focuses on what was received and rejected from father and mother; ‘‘La Heredera’’ on the ways heterosexual relationships have been culturally defined; ‘‘Ixtacihuatl Died in Vain’’ presents female bonding as a nonutopian possibility. The last section of My Father Was a Toltec documents the collective struggle against domination. ‘‘A Christmas Gift. . .’’ exposes literary authority as male, white, and privileged: ‘‘so these are not poems, i readily admit, / as i grapple with nonexistence, / making scratches with stolen pen.’’ The book ends with ‘‘In My Country,’’ a utopian vision of a world that has put an end to multiple oppressions: ‘‘In my world the poet sang loud / and clear and everyone heard / without recoiling. It was sweet / as harvest, sharp as tin, strong / as the western wind, and all had / a coat warm enough to bear it.’’ An expanded edition of the collection was published in 1995 as My Father Was a Toltec: New and Collected Poems. Castillo’s next work, Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma (1994), is a series of 10 essays examining the roles of Mexican and Amerindian women in a sociological, historical, and political context. She challenges the notion of black-and-white race relations and advocates the need for Xicanisma—a brand of politically and socially active Chicana feminism. A collection of short stories followed in 1996 with the publication of Loverboys: Stories. The medley varies greatly in setting, narrative, and structure, but each examines an aspect of love. Women in the stories deal with issues of race, culture, love lost and love gained. Her latest work takes a different approach to Mexican history with a series of essays, poetry, fiction, and historical writings on the Virgin Guadalupe. Goddess of the Americas, La Diosa de Las Americas; Writings on the Virgin Guadalupe (1996) brings together the work of Octavio Paz, Sandra Cisneros, Denise Chavez, and others to examine the impression this figure has had on the people and history of Mexico and in countries far beyond in art and literature. Castillo has been recognized for her work from nearly the beginning of her career. She was given the American Book award, Before Columbus Foundation (1986 for The Mixquiahuala Letters), was honored in 1987 and in 1988 by Women’s Foundation of San Francisco, was granted a California Arts Council fellowship for fiction in 1989 and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for poetry in 1990, and received a New Mexico Arts Commission Grant in 1991. For So Far From God, she was awarded the Carl Sandburg Literary Award in Fiction (1993) and the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award (1994). Castillo’s work continues to cast light on an often forgotten theme, refusing to let her issues drown in the sea of multiculturalism.
OTHER WORKS: Zero Makes Me Hungry (1975). I Close My Eyes (to See) (1976). Otro canto (1977). The Invitation (1979). Keats, Poe, and the Shaping of Cortazar’s Mythopoesis (1981). This
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Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (coedited and collected with C. Moraga and G. Anzaldúa, 1981). Women Are Not Roses (1984). Esta puente, mi espalda. Voces de mujeres tercermundistas en los Estados Unidos (coeditor, 1988). Third Woman 4: The Sexuality of Latinas (coeditor, 1989). So Far from God (1993).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Horno-Delgado, A., et al, eds., Breaking Boundaries. Latina Writing and Critical Readings (1989). Alarcón, N., ed., Critical Approaches to Hispanic Women’s Literature (1994). Reference works: CA (1991). CA (Online, 1999). Hispanic Writers (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). WW of Hispanic Americans (1991, 1992). Other references: Americas Review (1992). Booklist (15 Sept.1994, 19 Aug. 1996, 15 Oct. 1996). Discurso Literario: Revista de Estudios Iberoamericanos (1990). MELUS (22 Sept. 1997). —YVONNE YARBRO-BEJARANO, UPDATED BY CARRIE SNYDER
CATHER, Willa Sibert Born 7 December 1873, Gore, Virginia; died 24 April 1947, New York, New York Daughter of Charles F. and Virginia Boak Cather Willa Cather, the first of seven children, was born to parents who owned a farm in the hilly country of northern Virginia. The family was dominated by Cather’s mother, a vigorous woman, backed up by Cather’s maternal grandmother, who made her home with them. Cather was to retain strong familial attachments all her life. In 1883 the family moved to the Nebraska frontier, and in 1884 to Red Cloud, a ‘‘bitter, dead little western town,’’ where Cather lived for the next six years. Cather, educated at home until high school, later attended the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. From 1895 to 1906, Cather lived in Pittsburgh, working first as a journalist on the Pittsburgh Leader and then as the principal of a Pittsburgh high school. Here she formed a friendship with Isabelle McClung, which was to last until McClung’s death. In 1906, Cather joined the staff of McClure’s Magazine in New York City and for the next six years assisted S.S. McClure as managing editor, staff writer, and general factotum. In these years she also formed a lifelong relationship with Edith Lewis. Between 1912 (the year she left McClure’s) and 1922, Cather wrote five novels, all of which derive from her childhood memory of the people and lifestyle she had observed in Nebraska. These are O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), My Ántonia (1918), One of Ours (1922), and A Lost Lady (1923). The least
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distinguished of these—One of Ours—was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. A novel of World War I, it tells the story of Claude Wheeler, a young man who has spent a dreary life on a Nebraska farm and has a brief experience of beauty and fulfillment in France before he is killed in action. In the years between 1922 and 1925, Cather seems to have suffered the kind of crisis bearing different names, according to one’s circumstances, e.g., midlife crisis, anomie, a fall from grace, acedia, depression, alienation. Cather attributed it to the times, a plausible interpretation since her melancholy was similar to the spiritual dislocation experienced by so many Americans after World War I. The new America that under Warren Harding was returning to normalcy seemed to her a vulgar and drab wasteland. Her despondency may also have stemmed from events in her personal life. Around 1923, Isabelle McClung, recently married to the violinist Jan Hambourg, went to live permanently in France. Cather’s recovery seems to have been related to a spiritual rebirth, marked externally by joining the Episcopalian Church in 1922. The Professor’s House (1925), My Mortal Enemy (1926), Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), and Shadows on the Rock (1931)—the four great works of her highwater period— illustrate her feeling that religion is the best life has to offer humankind. In the last 16 years of her life Cather wrote little. Deaths of loved ones, illness, housing difficulties, physical disabilities, the clouds of the Great Depression, and World War II all seem to have sapped her magnificent vitality. The more closely one looks at Cather’s works in the context of her life, the more clearly one sees Cather was always writing about herself. ‘‘Life began for me when I ceased to admire and began to remember,’’ she said. This reserved woman, who went to unusual lengths to maintain privacy, was driven by an inexorable need to give form to and reveal, albeit indirectly, her inner self. Some of the power in her works surely comes from this tension—the romantic confessional temperament writing in the classical restrained mode. Cather’s most widely read novel is My Ántonia, a fact lamented by many Cather critics. Ántonia is a daughter in an immigrant family struggling to survive on a farm on the Nebraska plains of the 1890s. Needing money, Ántonia enters domestic service and is seduced and abandoned by the son of her employer. Left with her child, she returns to the farm. By the end of the novel, Ántonia has triumphed. Married to the mild-tempered Anton Cuzak, she reigns, among a brood of children, over a prospering farm. The story is told by Jim Burden, Ántonia’s childhood friend. Now a weary middle-aged man, returning to Nebraska on a visit, he has experienced little joy from his successful law practice or his marriage. Jim sees Ántonia on many levels—as a childhood friend and fulfilled woman, as the apotheosis of the pioneer woman who conquered the land, as a personification of eternal values. To Jim, Ántonia symbolizes an America of the past, one in which there was heroism in everyday life. It seems safe to suggest here that Jim is Cather’s alter ego.
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A Lost Lady, set at the end of the era of transcontinental railroad expansion, is the story of Marion Forrester, the beautiful, young wife of Daniel Forrester, a dynamic railroad builder in the great days of the conquest of the West. As Daniel’s health and fortunes fail, Marion’s world is restricted to Sweet Water, a small railway-junction town. Because of her determination to return to a life style congenial to her, she accommodates herself to Ivy Peters, who becomes her business manager and her lover. Marion’s designs work. She escapes Sweet Water and in the end seems to have found happiness as the wife of a wealthy old Englishman in Argentina. By the end of the novel, word of her death reaches Sweet Water. On another level, A Lost Lady tells the story of Niel Herbert, the central observer. The nephew of Daniel’s lawyer and friend, Niel has been fiercely committed to the Forrester family in adolescence and young manhood. The emotion of the novel stems from Niel’s disillusionment with Marion and sadness about the passing of a greater era. With all the passion of idealistic youth, Niel cannot accept the fact that beautiful people adjust to the ugly and the sordid. Niel wants Marion to be a high priest of beauty. But Marion is a realist; she gets what she wants. This slender book is surely one of the high points of American fiction. Cather’s unaffected, powerful, and lucid style is the result of her untiring struggle for, as she formulated it herself, the correct and appropriate word, which makes possible ‘‘the gift of inner empathy.’’ In the course of The Professor’s House, Godfrey St. Peter (the professor) experiences a central passage. The setting is Hamilton, a college town in Michigan, about 1923. In the good days, now in the past for Godfrey, he had written a highly acclaimed work, an eight-volume historical chronicle of the Spanish adventurers in North America. He had enjoyed his teaching, had been blessed with a happy family life, and responded gratefully to a variety of good fortune. One of the most rewarding episodes in his life was his friendship with his student Tom Outland, a young man endowed with unusual gifts of mind and character. At the beginning of the novel Godfrey finds himself in a spiritual crisis. He is unable ‘‘to account for the fact that he now wanted to run away from everything he had intensely cared for.’’ He cannot return to the past. Nor can he face the future—a future with a once-beloved wife, now increasingly worldly and opportunistic, with daughters blighted by money, with uncongenial sonsin-law, with students and colleagues fettered by the materialistic values of the age. Only death can liberate Godfrey from his plight. The climax occurs on the night that gas infiltrates the attic room in which he is sleeping. Aware of what is happening, he passively drifts off to sleep, but he is saved by Augusta, the German Catholic seamstress who functions as a dea ex machina. Cather elliptically presents the change Godfrey undergoes. ‘‘He had let something go—and it was gone. . . .’’ His family, on a European holiday at the time, would probably not ‘‘realize that he
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was not the same man they had said goodbye to.’’ He muses on Augusta and himself after his encounter with death. ‘‘Augusta was like the taste of bitter herbs; she was the bloomless side of life that he had always run away from.—Yet when he had to face it, he found that it wasn’t altogether repugnant.’’ At the center of the novel lies Tom Outland’s account of the discovery of the ruins of the cliff dwellers on the Blue Mesa in the southwest. Living in their towns, examining the artifacts, Tom has a revelation of a life hitherto undreamed of. How much to be admired were the cliff dwellers. Living in a communal society in the midst of secure, spectacularly beautiful, natural surroundings, they spent harmonious days creating exquisite objects of daily use and worshiping their gods in reverential ritual, and also peaceably procuring the necessities of life. The Professor’s House is commonly held to be Cather’s autobiography, and apparently, through Godfrey, Cather wrote of what lay close to her heart. The novel may be looked at as a double autobiography—one in which Cather juxtaposed the young Willa as Tom Outland and the middle-aged Willa as Godfrey. Tom is very much like Jim Burden in My Ántonia and Niel Herbert in A Lost Lady. Myra Driscoll, the protagonist of My Mortal Enemy is the beloved heir apparent of a wealthy and powerful Roman Catholic uncle until she marries Oswald Henshawe against her uncle’s wishes. A fierce and unrelenting man, her uncle rejects and disinherits her. She gradually realizes how much she resembles her uncle: ‘‘I can feel his savagery strengthen inside of me.’’ In spite of Oswald’s gentle devotion, and the fact that his life, even his business affairs, have suffered from Myra’s tormented temperament, she begins to feel he is her mortal enemy. And also that she herself has been her own mortal enemy. ‘‘Violent natures like hers sometimes turn against themselves and all their idolatries.’’ Unreconciled to her fate, this magnificent, bitter woman meets a grim, lonely death at the end of the novel. Cather’s most mysterious work derives its impact from what remains unsaid, from the depths that seem constantly to be assaulting the cool surface. Religion, Myra comes to believe, ‘‘is different from everything else; because in religion seeking is finding.’’ Through a variety of images, Cather suggests that Myra’s sin was to have sought and found false gods, the most deceitful of which is romantic love. By rejecting the Roman Catholicism of her childhood and the position she was born to, she has lost herself. Cather does full justice to the compelling lure of eros, which continues to exert its power over Myra and Nellie Birdseye, the narrator of the story. Death Comes for the Archbishop—based on the lives of Bishop Jean Baptiste L’Amy (1814-88) and his vicar, Father Joseph Machebeut—is the chronicle of two French priests who are assigned to set up an apostolic vicariate in the territory of New Mexico, a work that could be accomplished only by long, arduous travels and devotion to their commitment. Father Jean-Marie Latour, later archbishop of Santa Fé, is patrician, intellectual, and
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introverted. He is loved and admired for his quiet courage, for his courtesy, and for the respect with which he listens to the Indians’ tales of their old religion. His vicar, Father Joseph Vaillant, practical, companionable, is unswerving in his faith in God’s providence, in his zeal to convert people to Christianity. United in their love of France and their common purpose, they succeed in organizing the new diocese of Sante Fé despite the apathy of the Indians, the opposition of the Spanish priests, and the adversities that are the lot of all pioneers. The symbol of their success lies in the building of the cathedral. Technically, Death Comes for the Archbishop is perhaps best viewed as a picaresque novel, though the journeys made here are in the service of God. The framework gave Cather scope to communicate what she found compelling—biographies of many characters, recapitulation of miracles and saints’ legends, transmission of old documents, depiction of rituals and beliefs of the Roman Catholic church, description of landscapes and interiors. The unity of the novel derives from the characters of Bishop Latour and Father Vaillant, and the religious drama being enacted. It is a richly sympathetic creation of a golden world in which all ideals are realized. The particular nature of her achievement is viewed thus by Louis Auchincloss: ‘‘But the real common denominator is the glory of the southwest landscape described in a lyric prose that is the summit of the author’s achievement. There is nothing more vivid in American fiction that this series of brilliant pictures of an arid, glowing country.’’ It is Cather’s lot to be America’s least comprehended major novelist. Wallace Stevens said about her that ‘‘we have nothing better than she is.’’ But the particularity of her genius is elusive, and comments about Cather’s work often focus on its less central aspects. On Cather’s style, there is little dissent—her prose is of the highest quality, variously described as classical, restrained, wonderfully transparent. Cather wrote language of a kind that is not indigenous to American letters, yet the nature of her genius was such that the prose sounds impeccably American. Cather’s lyrical and profound evocations of nature in its many forms are not surpassed in American letters, and she is one of the few American writers who can take her place among the great European writers who have gloriously pictured the natural world. Cather has, as could not be otherwise, been recognized as a religious writer. It was Henry Steele Commager who wrote: ‘‘And all her novels and stories . . . were animated by a single great theme, as they were graced by a single felicitous style. The theme was that of the supremacy of moral and spiritual over material values, the ever recurrent but inexhaustible theme of gaining the whole world and losing one’s soul.’’ Cather may have been a mystic who saw this world as a prism of God.
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Many critics of the 1920s considered her to be the best American writer of her day. Cather’s rank is more qualified today, but the tide has started to turn, and Cather’s work is apparently to be revived with vigor and enthusiasm, as the majority of her works have been reprinted throughout the 1990s. When her work receives its just desserts, Cather will take her rightful place as one of America’s great writers.
OTHER WORKS: April Twilights (1903). The Troll Garden (1905). Alexander’s Bridge (1912). My Autobiography: S. S. McClure (ghost written by Cather, 1914). Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920). April Twilights, and Other Poems (1923). Obscure Destinies (1932). Lucy Gayheart (1935). Not Under Forty (1936). The Novels and Stories (1937-41). Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940). The Old Beauty, and Others (1948). On Writing (1949). Writings from Willa Cather’s Campus Years (edited by J. Shively, 1950). Willa Cather in Europe; Her Own Story of the First Journey (edited by G. N. Kates, 1956). Early Stories (edited by M. R. Bennett, 1957). Willa Cather’s Collected Short Fiction, 1892-1912 (edited by M. R. Bennett, 1965). The Kingdom of Art: Willa Cather’s First Principles and Critical Statements, 1893 to 1896 (edited by B. Slote, 1966). The World and the Parish. Willa Cather’s Articles and Reviews, 1893-1902 (edited by W. M. Curtin, 1970). Uncle Valentine, and Other Stories (edited by B. Slote, 1973). Willa Cather in Person: Interviews, Speeches, and Letters (1986, 1990). The Willa Cather Reader (1997).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Auchincloss, L., Pioneers and Caretakers, A Study of Nine American Women Writers (1965). Bennett, M., The World of Willa Cather (1961). Bloom, H., ed., Willa Cather (1999). Bloom, E. A., and L. D. Bloom, Willa Cather’s Gift of Sympathy (1964). Dennis, H. M., ed., Willa Cather and European Cultural Influences (1996). Downs, M. C., Becoming Modern: Willa Cather’s Journalism (1999). Durham, M., History, Women and Cultural Transmission in the Work of Willa Cather (dissertation, 1991). Edel, L., Willa Cather: The Paradox of Success (1960). Faulkner, C., Putting Down the Rebellion: The Narrative Repression of Class in Willa Cather’s Fiction (disseration, 1993). Funda, E. I., ‘‘‘Every Word Counted for Twenty’: Storytelling and Intimacy in Willa Cather’s Fiction’’ (dissertation, 1994). Giannone, R., Music in Willa Cather’s Fiction (1968). Hacker, J. L. H., ‘‘Building a Cathedral of Alienation: A Study of Despair in Willa Cather’s Fiction’’ (dissertation, 1997). Heilbrun, C. G., Women’s Lives: The View from the Threshold (1999). Kvasnicka, M., ‘‘Education in the Parish, Preparation for the World: The Educational Tradition in the Life and Works of Willa Cather’’ (dissertation, 1997). Lewis, E., Willa Cather Living (1953). Lindemann, M. Willa Cather: Queering America (1999). McDonald, J., The Incommunicable Past: Willa Cather’s Pastoral Modes and the Southern Literary Imagination (dissertation, 1994). McDonald, J., The Stuff of Our Forebears: Willa Cather’s Southern Heritage (1998). McFarland, D. T., Willa Cather (1972). McLendon, M. J., ‘‘That Indefinable Something’’:
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The Role of Passion and Desire in the Works of Willa Cather (dissertation, 1993). Murphy, J. J., ed., Five Essays on Willa Cather (1974). O’Brien, S., ed., New Essays on Cather’s My Antonia (1999). O’Connor, M. A., Willa Cather: The Critical Reception (in preparation). Randall, J. H., III, The Landscape and the Looking Glass: Willa Cather’s Search for Value (1960). Rapin, R., Willa Cather (1930). Reynolds, G., Willa Cather in Context: Progress, Race, Empire (1996). Schroeter, J., ed., Willa Cather and Her Critics (1967). Sergeant, E. S., Willa Cather: A Memoir (1963). Slote, B., ‘‘Willa Cather’’ in Sixteen Modern American Authors (1974). Slote, B., and V. Faulkner, eds., The Art of Willa Cather (1974). Stouck, D., Willa Cather’s Imagination (1975). Urgo, J. R., Willa Cather and the Myth of American Migration (1995). Winters, L., Giving the Land a Voice: The Demands of Multiple Landscapes in Five Cather Novels (dissertation, 1990). Woodress, J., Willa Cather: Her Life and Art (1970). Wooten, S. M., Willa Cather: Writer of the Prairie (1998). Wurzel, N., ‘‘Gender and Myth: Willa Cather’s Affirmative Modernism’’ (dissertation, 1993). Reference works: Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia (1987). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —LINA MAINIERO
CATHERWOOD, Mary Hartwell Born 16 December 1847, Luray, Ohio; died 26 December 1902, Chicago, Illinois Also wrote under: Mary Hartwell Daughter of Marcus and Phoebe Thompson Hartwell; married James Catherwood, 1877 After graduation in 1868 from Granville Female College in Granville, Ohio, Mary Hartwell Catherwood taught in Ohio and Illinois before she was able to support herself by writing. Her early work combined strands of critical realism and melodrama. She published many short stories and long serials in magazines such as the Atlantic and Lippincott’s. Two of the early serials, A Woman in Armor (1875) and Craque-o-Doom (1881), were published as novels. She also wrote a number of juveniles in the early years, which, while not well plotted, contain some fine local color; the best of these, Rocky Fork (1882), remained in print until the middle of this century. In 1889, with the publication of The Romance of Dollard, an historical romance based on the work of Francis Parkman, Catherwood took a new direction. From then until her death, she wrote romantic historical fiction, using the French settlement of the West and Canada as background. While remaining in the Midwest (in 1886 she helped found the Western Association of Writers), she turned her back on realistic treatment of Midwestern material. At her famous confrontation with Hamlin Garland at the
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Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, she argued for ‘‘the aristocratic in literature.’’ As an historical novelist Catherwood is somewhat of a contradiction; meticulously accurate about details, writing under the influence of Parkman, she nevertheless committed one of the cardinal sins of the careless historical novelist: she wove fact with fiction in recounting the lives of actual persons. Catherwood’s most popular novel, Lazarre (1901), is based on the claims of Eleazar Williams (1789-1858) that he was the lost dauphin of France. The novel is well written and exciting, with violence, dramatic scenes such as a visit with Napoleon, traditional American characters such as Johnny Appleseed, and a romantic ending in which Lazarre gives up the throne of France for the woman he loves and the freedom of the western plains. Otis Skinner dramatized Lazarre in 1902 and the play had a successful if not spectacular run. Historians of American fiction suggest that Catherwood’s importance lies in her having been the first novelist to write popular romantic historical novels, forecasting the bestselling genre at the turn of the century. Catherwood was the first woman novelist born west of the Alleghenies and the first woman novelist to be a college graduate. As a writer, however, she is much more important today because of her works of critical realism and her pioneering regional material. Her two early novels, A Woman in Armor and Craque-o-Doom, contain tantalizing hints of the social realist she might have become. A Woman in Armor, despite its melodramatic plot, has a detailed if satiric description of the town in which the action is set, Little Boston. It also has a slight feminist theme, although she never developed it much beyond that novel. Catherwood’s major literary achievement as a regionalist/ realist can be found in her short stories; three volumes of which remained in print into the 1980s. Her relentless portrayal of various Midwest towns, from Ohio to Indiana and Illinois, attest to her craftsmanship. Surrounded by the glamour of nature and the seasons, her towns are dreary cultural wastelands peopled with squalid characters whose little dramas often illustrate such basic beauties of human nature as parental love. Her most realistic stories, except for ‘‘The Spirit of an Illinois Town,’’ are not collected and can only be found in periodicals. When Catherwood abandoned realism, however, she did not leave the short story behind; in fact, she was one of the few writers who tried to use the materials of historical romance in the short-story form. Catherwood has a remarkable record of ‘‘firsts’’ to her name, and her early work is worth reading. It is ironic that perhaps her career as a serious writer was betrayed by her disdain for those prairie villages that she so realistically portrayed. ‘‘The aristocratic in literature’’ has lost its charms for the modern reader, who eagerly looks for evidence of just such provincial experience which Catherwood (and her characters) longed to escape.
OTHER WORKS: Lower Illinois Valley: Local Sketches of Long Ago of Mrs. Mary Hartwell Catherwood (1875). The Dogberry
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Bunch (1879). Old Caravan Days (1884). The Secrets at Roseladies (1888). The Story of Tonty (1890). The Lady of Fort St. John (1891). Old Kaskaskia (1893). The White Islander (1893). The Chase of St. Castin and Other Stories (1894). The Days of Jeanne d’Arc (1897). Bony and Ban: The Story of a Printing Venture (1898). Heroes of the Middle West: French (1898). Mackinac and Other Lake Stories (1899). The Queen of the Swamp and Other Plain Americans (1899). Spanish Peggy (1899). ‘‘The Stirring Off’’ in Home Material: Ohio’s Nineteenth-Century Regional Women’s Fiction (1998). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Dondore, D. A., The Prairie and the Making of America (1926). Garland, H., Roadside Meetings (1931). Pattee, F. L., A History of American Literature Since 1870. Price, R., A Critical Biography of Mary Hartwell Catherwood: A Study of Middle Western Regional Authorship, 1847-1902 (dissertation, 1944). Treece, P. B., ‘‘The Characterization of the Nineteenth Century Woman in the Selected Works of Mrs. Mary Hartwell Catherwood’’ (thesis, 1975). Wilson, M. L., Biography of Mary Hartwell Catherwood (1900, 1983). Reference works: DAB, NCAB (1892 et seq.). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Other references: American Literature 17 (1945). Bulletin of Cincinnati Historical Society (1964). Michigan Historical Magazine 30 (1946). —BEVERLY SEATON
CATT, Carrie (Lane) Chapman Born 9 January 1859, Ripon, Wisconsin; died 9 March 1947, New Rochelle, New York Daughter of Lucius and Maria Clinton Lane; married Leo Chapman, 1885; George W. Catt, 1890 A key architect of the woman-suffrage victory in 1920, Carrie Chapman Catt was essentially an activist-lecturer rather than a writer. In 1917, she edited her first book, Woman Suffrage by Federal Constitutional Amendment, a series of six essays, four of which Catt wrote herself. Here she analyzed briefly the political obstacles women faced and focused on the practical reasons why the federal amendment route seemed the only truly feasible one. She discussed the problems of fraud women encountered in seeking state suffrage amendments and the causes of failure of the three 1916 referenda. She concluded with a chapter countering objections to the federal amendment. In 1923 came her major work, Woman Suffrage and Politics which she coauthored with Nettie Rogers Shuler. Writing immediately after the 1920 victory, Catt gave major attention not to the history of the woman suffrage drive itself, nor even to her own role in devising the final winning strategy. Rather she dealt with the question of why this victory had been so long delayed. Catt contended the delay was not caused by a hostile or indifferent
public opinion; instead, it was the result of political maneuvering, ‘‘the buying and selling of American politics.’’ Twice, according to Catt, women found the suffrage movement tied in with other major reforms: black rights in the 1860s and the Prohibition campaign later. Twice politicians gave precedence to the other issues. Catt focused particularly on the long period 1870-1910 when, she argued, the major obstacle was Prohibition. She denied any necessary linkage of suffrage with Prohibition. But the liquor forces, along with their allies, the political bosses, believed woman’s suffrage would adversely affect their interests. These two groups worked actively if often secretly against woman suffrage and for two generations thwarted it. Not till the rise of the Progressive Party in 1910 did proponents of woman suffrage secure a major political ally nationally. Then politicians of the two major parties began to break their long silence and opened the door for the successful new campaign. The final woman suffrage victory, however, Catt argued, was essentially a triumph for women acting from outside politics. She did pay limited tribute to male insiders who finally rescued woman suffrage from ‘‘the party trap.’’ Apart from these two books, Catt’s other publications were generally speeches later issued as pamphlets. Prior to 1920, woman suffrage dominated her concern; later, her major cause became world peace. One of the most significant suffrage pamphlets was The Winning Strategy, a 1916 speech in which Catt presented her blueprint for the final victory campaign: a double effort for state enfranchisement and the federal amendment. The thrust of her concern as proponent of world peace is seen in The Status Today of War vs. Peace, an address to the Third Conference on the Cause and Cure of War (1928). She defined the two great causes of war as being first, the dependence on ‘‘war preparedness as the way to peace’’ and second, economic colonialism with its underlying racism. The hope for peace she found in antiwar treaties between civilized nations and in an educated public opinion in which women must play a key part. Catt’s writings generally reflect the cool, logical style that hallmarked her political action. She avoids rhetorical flashes, relying instead on perceptive analysis and the weight of historical evidence. She saw suffrage as an evolutionary step, the logical outcome of an earlier commitment to democracy. She did reveal an underlying conservative cast of thought in her suffrage arguments. She indicted the major parties for offering the vote to unprepared black males and to uneducated Southern European males, many only on ‘‘first papers.’’ Though generally objective in her writings, Catt in Woman Suffrage and Politics often spoke as a partisan deeply wounded in the political struggle. The cost of the long-delayed victory for many women, she argued, was disillusionment with political parties. It is perhaps a mark of the struggle’s cost to herself that after 1920 her major cause was a nonpartisan one, world peace. OTHER WORKS: Woman Suffrage and Its Basic Argument (Interurban Woman Suffrage Series, no. 2, 1907). Woman Suffrage and
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the Home (Interurban Woman Suffrage Series, no. 4, 1907). A Bit of History (Interurban Woman Suffrage Series, no. 5, 1908). Perhaps (circa 1910). Do You Know? (1912). Woman Suffrage (1913). Feminism and Suffrage (1914). Address to the Congress of the United States (1917). Objections to the Federal Amendment (1919). Then and Now (1939). Who Can Answer? (1939). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Fowler, R. B., Carrie Catt: Feminist Politician (1986). Library of Congress Manuscript Division, The Blackwell Family, Carrie Chapman Catt, and the National American Woman Suffrage Association (1975). Peck, M. G., Carrie Chapman Catt (1944). Stanton E. C. et al, History of Woman Suffrage (1881). Van Voris, J., Carrie Chapman Catt: A Life (1987). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: American Political Science Review (Aug. 1923). NYT (13 May 1923). —INZER BYERS
CAULKINS, Frances Manwaring Born 26 April 1795, New London, Connecticut; died 3 February 1869, New London, Connecticut Daughter of Joshua and Fanny Manwaring Caulkins Frances Manwaring Caulkins centered her literary attention on two radically different areas of concern: the religious education of young people and local history. She began her work in the 1830s writing for the American Tract Society, which published a wide range of her work over the next 30 years, including The Child’s Hymn Book (1835), Children of the Bible: as Examples and as Warnings (1842), and Eve and Her Daughters of Holy Writ (1861). Representative of her religious educational work was The Bible Primer (1854), also issued under the title Youth’s Bible Studies. In the six short volumes, Caulkins gave brief practical lessons, utilizing question-and-answer techniques, narrative, and inspirational material. She addressed herself particularly to the individual student seeking ‘‘self-cultivation.’’ Accordingly, she deliberately omitted ‘‘what is bulky, heavy or wearisome’’ and utilized biblical texts rather than commentaries. Caulkins’s major achievements as a writer, however, came in the area of local history. She wrote first The History of Norwich, Connecticut, from Its Settlement in 1660 to January, 1845. A second, revised edition carried the history to 1866. She also wrote The History of New London, Connecticut (1852), with a second edition continuing to 1860. In the early sections of both works, Caulkins dealt with the local Indian tribes, their leadership conflicts, and their relationships with the new English settlers. In her view, ‘‘the providence of God’’ had prepared the way for peaceable settlement, for the tribes, weakened by conflict, eagerly sought new allies. Her perspective on the Indians is sympathetic, although at times
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condescending, and she stresses their dependent qualities. She underscores what she sees as the paternalistic concern of Norwich leaders for the Indians. Caulkins stressed the early religious focus of town life, the decline of fervor in the late 17th century and the impact of the 18th-century Great Awakening. She stressed the work of Tennent, Davenport, and Whitefield, citing the positive impact of revivalism as well as the problems of church division and separatism. She also noted in New London the role of the Rogerene sect, typical of religious extremists in their ‘‘determination to be persecuted.’’ While her primary focus is on political and religious history, Caulkins also has a sound grasp of local, social, and economic history. She noted the close hold on town leadership by descendants of the early town fathers; not until the end of the 18th century was there substantial expansion in the Norwich leadership ranks. Her history of New London concentrated on the pre-1815 period, with an account of the expansion of the whaling industry in the 19th century. The Norwich history dealt in some detail with 19th-century events, including the expansion of manufacturing in Norwich itself and neighboring valley towns. Caulkins underscored the towns’ roles in the various wars, particularly the Revolutionary War. In the revised edition of the Norwich history, she paid tribute to the town’s role in the Civil War. Of the two histories, that of New London has the more localized view, stressing personalities and incidents often of purely local concern. In both histories, Caulkins takes the view that events of local history ‘‘illustrate classes of men and ages of time.’’ She writes with ease; her tone is at times romantic. While she does not escape totally the self-congratulatory notes of the native, she does attempt to evaluate events within a broader historical perspective. Though the material differs sharply, there is a common denominator in her two types of writing. Both in her writing for the American Tract Society and in her histories, Caulkins has in mind young people and their concerns. A sense of God’s providence informs both types of works and she seeks to arouse through history ‘‘a more affectionate sympathy for your ancestors.’’ OTHER WORKS: The Tract Primer (circa 1848). Memoir of the Rev. William Adams, of Dedham, Mass., and of the Rev. Eliphalet Adams, of New London, Conn., and Their Descendants, with the Journal of William Adams, 1666-1682 (1849). Bride Brook, A Legend of New London, Connecticut (1852). Ye Antient Buriall Place of New London, Conn. (1899). The Stone Records of Groton (edited by E. S. Gilman, 1903). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Haven, H. P., ‘‘Memoir,’’ in History of Norwich (1874). Trumbull, H. C., A Model Superintendent: A Sketch of the Life . . . of Henry P. Haven (1880). Wilcox, G. B., In Memoriam, Miss Frances Manwaring Caulkins (1869). Reference works: NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Other references: New London County Historical Society Records (1890-94). —INZER BYERS
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CAZNEAU, Jane McManus Born 6 April 1807, Troy, New York; died 12 December 1878, near Cape Hatteras, North Carolina Wrote under: Mrs. William Leslie Cazneau, Cora Montgomery, Corinne Montgomery Daughter of William T. and Catharina Coons McManus; married Allan B. (or William F.) Storms, 1825; William L. Cazneau, circa 1848 Jane McManus Cazneau’s major work is Eagle Pass; or, Life on the Border (1852), a first-person narrative of her months in a Texas border town. It is, as Cazneau states in her preface, mainly a protest against the government’s Native American policy, which she labels a system of ‘‘despoilment and extermination.’’ She also wants to alert the public to the Mexican government’s policy of imprisoning American citizens living in Mexico and along the border. In her opening chapter, Cazneau urges her countrymen to pressure Congress to act in the aid of these citizens; she blames their imprisonment as much on the U.S. government as on the Mexican regime. Her work also provides fascinating accounts of her conversations with the Native Americans and slaves living in Eagle Pass. Perhaps most compelling is her description of Wild Cat, the Seminole chief. Cazneau recounts his warm eloquence in talking with her as well as his resigned, yet devastating assessment of the White Man’s role in destroying his people. Eagle Pass closes with stunning predictions of the Red Man’s threatened extermination and of the inevitability of a revolution in Mexico. Cazneau, solidly on the side of the oppressed, pleads for Congress to stand behind the spirit of freedom in Mexico. She also attacks the abolitionists for their ‘‘hypocritical’’ attitudes, accusing them of ignoring the great injustice done to the Indians and the white servant classes. Cazneau’s other works include two companion pieces: The Queen of Islands (1850) and The King of Rivers (1850). In the former, Cazneau proposes aid to the Cuban people in their revolution against Spain. She further urges that Cuba be annexed and eventually granted statehood. Her treatise provides a comprehensive study of the Cuban economy, with charts, diagrams, and governmental statistics to document Cuba’s potential for economic growth and therefore its benefits to the U.S. In The King of Rivers, Cazneau argues against slavery along the states bordering the Mississippi River, again using her research to support the position that slavery would prove an economic, as well as a moral, disaster. She predicts the imminent emancipation of the slaves, and also denounces the abuse of the Native American and his land. Cazneau’s style is simple and direct. Even though she apologizes in her preface to Eagle Pass for her lack of rhetorical flourish, her clear-thinking, straightforward prose style is her strength. Cazneau presents her arguments in practical terms, basing her convictions on her research and knowledge of economic facts. She believes passionately in the cause of oppressed peoples who attempt to claim their freedom, and she thinks the historic revolutionary struggle of her own nation obligates the U.S. to
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support the claims of the Native American, the slave, and the oppressed everywhere. Cazneau attacks Congress for being incompetent and corrupt, charging politicians with being more concerned with reelection than with moral issues. —ROSE F. KAVO
CERVANTES, Lorna Dee Born 6 August 1954, San Francisco, California Lorna Dee Cervantes was born in the Mission District of San Francisco. She traces her ancestry to the Chumash tribe of the Santa Barbara coast on her mother’s side, and to the Tarascans of Michoacán, Mexico, on her father’s. After her parents separated when she was five years old, her mother resettled with Cervantes’ grandmother in San Jose, California. Cervantes has written poetry since she was eight, her love of language fed by the books she found in the houses her mother cleaned. In 1974 she founded Mango Publications, editing Mango, a literary review, and also publishing poetry chapbooks in order to broaden not only horizons but also the definitions of Chicana literature. A feminist ‘‘since I knew what that was’’ and activist in the Chicano cultural movement, Cervantes sees herself as a ‘‘cultural worker.‘‘ In 1978 she received a National Endowment for the Arts grant and subsequently spent nine months at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. After completing her B.A. at California State University, San Jose, Cervantes studied in the Ph.D. program in the history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She joined the creative writing department of the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1989; she has also coedited the crosscultural poetry magazine Red Dirt. In 1998 Cervantes received a Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Foundation Award. The title of Cervantes’ first book of poetry, Emplumada (1981), combines connotations of ‘‘feathered’’ (emplumado/a) and ‘‘flourish with the pen’’ (plumada); bird imagery abounds, resonant in both Mexican and U.S. cultures. The poems of this collection explore what it means to be connected to nature and to the urban wasteland, to be female and brown, in a voice remarkable for its clarity, depth of passion, and striking imagery. In ‘‘Visions of Mexico While at a Writing Symposium in Port Townsend, Washington,’’ the poetic voice expresses the urgent need to speak for those who have been silenced, to rewrite history from the point of view of the oppressed, and to challenge racist stereotypes of Mexican and Chicano people: ‘‘I come from a long line of eloquent illiterates / whose history reveals what words don’t say. / Our anger is our way of speaking, / the gesture is an utterance more pure than word.’’ Other poems explore the multiple facets of Chicana identity, for example the clash between her mirror image (‘‘bronzed skin, black hair’’) and the loss of the mother tongue (‘‘My name hangs about me like a loose tooth’’). In the process of self-naming, the poetic voice juxtaposes her experience with that of other Chicanas. In ‘‘To Virginia Chavez’’ class differences are momentarily balanced by gender solidarity: ‘‘ignoring what / the years had brought between us: / my diploma
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and the bare bulb / that always lit your bookless room.’’ In ‘‘Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway’’ the granddaughter prefers her grandmother’s ways to her mother’s hard pragmatism: ‘‘I tie up my hair into loose braids, / and trust only what I have built / with my own hands.’’ After a prolonged period of introspection following a family tragedy in 1982, Cervantes began producing the poems that form her second collection, From the Cables of Genocide (1991). The subtitle cues the book ’s thematic concerns: Poems of Love and Hunger. In some ways very like her first collection thematically, Cables is at the same time more personal and less readily accessible. ‘‘Pleiades from the Cables of Genocide’’ exemplifies the poems’ layered fusion of the personal and the political, referring simultaneously to the heritage of the Chumash, who believed they descended from the Pleiades, and to the ‘‘Seven Sisters’’ constituted by the seven major oil companies: ‘‘The power / peace / Of worthless sky that unfolds me—now—in its greedy / Reading: Weeder of Wreckage, Historian of the Native / Who says: It happened. That’s all. It just happened. / And runs on.’’ Her childhood passion for poetry has been collected in an as yet unpublished book of poetry for middle school and high school children. This collection of poetry written as a child between eight and fifteen includes work from a manuscript Cervantes first put together in her mid-teens. During this time, both poetry and her manuscript were a ‘‘fanatical obsession’’ for Cervantes; her youthful creative intensity led her to write prolifically, often at least five poems a day. This collection seeks to preserve the integrity of the child’s poetic voice and to connect with other young creative voices. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Harris, M. and K. Aguero, eds., A Gift of Tongues: Critical Challenges in Contemporary American Poetry (1987). Contemporary Chicana Poetry (1985). Reference books: CA (1991, 1999). DLB (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Latin American Literature and Arts (JulyDec. 1991). MELUS (Summer 1984). Tecolote (Dec. 1982). Third Woman (1984). Web site: Interview, ‘‘Calling Lorna Out,’’ available online at: www.colorado.edu/creativewriting/lornaint. —YVONNE YARBRO-BEJARANO, UPDATED BY JULIET BYINGTON
CHA, Theresa Hak Kyung Born 4 March 1951, Pusan, Korea; died 5 November 1982, New York, New York Daughter of Cha Hyung Sang and Huo Hyung Soon; married Richard Barnes, 1982 Particularly considering that an early and tragic death put an end to her career after the publication of just one book-length
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work, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s influence as a writer is extraordinary. Her book Dictée (1982), which combines poetry, prose, and visual art in unique and radical ways, has been a source of inspiration and empowerment for many artists and writers, and continues to be cited, excerpted, and viewed as a seminal text in the tradition of Asian and Asian-American women’s writing. Cha was not only a writer, but a prolific video, film, and performance artist as well. Her video and film work won numerous awards, including the Eisner Prize for Video and Film from the University of California at Berkeley (1975), the Stuart McKenna Nelson Memorial Award for the Photographic Medium (1977), and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1981). Cha was born in Pusan, Korea in 1951, the third of five children. Her parents had been raised in a Korean community in Manchuria, but returned to Korea during World War II. In 1962, when Cha was eleven, the family left Korea for the U.S., settling first in Hawaii, then in 1964 moving to San Francisco, where Cha attended Catholic schools and learned French as well as classical literature. She attended the University of San Francisco beginning in 1968, then transferred to the University of California at Berkeley, where she received a B.A. in comparative literature in 1973, a B.A. in art in 1975, and an M.F.A. in art in 1977. In the mid-1970s, Cha began performing and showing her works regularly; in a curriculum vita, she designated the year 1974 as the beginning of her career as ‘‘producer, director, performer, writer in video and film productions, installations, performances and published texts.’’ Works created between the mid-1970s and 1980 include the performance pieces Barren Cave Mute (1974), A Secret Spill (1974), A Blé Wall (1975), Aveugle Voix (1975), Life Mixing (1975), Vampyr (1976), and Reveille dans la Brume (1977), and the black-and-white videos Mouth to Mouth (1975), Passages Paysages (1978), Re Dis Appearing (1980) and Exilée (1980). In 1976 Cha went to France to study film at Centre d’Etudes Américaine du Cinéma á Paris, and also visited Amsterdam, where she met and became involved with international artists. In 1977 Cha became a naturalized U.S. citizen. She traveled to Korea in 1979 for a visit, the first time since her family had left 18 years earlier that she’d been back. In 1980 Cha moved to New York City, where she began work as an editor and writer at Tanam Press, and edited Apparatus, Cinematographic Apparatus: Selected Writings (1980), which included a piece by her, ‘‘Commentaire.’’ In 1981 she returned to Korea to begin gathering material for a film which was to be called White Dust from Mongolia. That same year she was appointed instructor in video art at Elizabeth Seaton College in New York. The year 1982 was perhaps Cha’s busiest year, and the year, ironically, that she began to get real critical notice. She was an artist-in-residence at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, her video Passages, Paysages was shown in New York and The Hague, her 16 mm film Permutations was shown at the San Francisco Art Institute, and Dictée was published by Tanam Press. In May she married freelance photographer Richard Barnes. Dictée broke with tradition in a number of important ways. Formally the work used a nonnarrative sequence, and was structured in nine sections, each one titled for one of the nine Greek
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muses. Dictée used a variety of both prose and poetry forms in its textual presentation, as well as using a fascinating array of graphic images (photographs, maps, drawings, illustrations). The use of non-English text (Korean and French) in numerous segments throughout the book added yet another layer of interest relating to language, and confronted the reader with an unexpected, and instructively uncomfortable, foreignness. The content of Dictée, or the ‘‘theme’’ to the extent that concept can or should be applied, is autobiographical. It is an examination of self, of memory and remembering, of family, of ethnicity, of history, of nationality, of the concept of home and ‘‘mother country.’’ It is a book about women in particular—Ya Guan Soon (a young Korean hero who spoke and acted out against the Japanese occupation), Cha’s own mother, and Joan of Arc—and women’s lives— predicaments, joys, sorrows—in general. It is also, as noted, very much a book about language, about learning language, acquiring it, having it, identifying with it, using it, being understood or misunderstood because of it. Cha was murdered by a stranger in the basement of a New York building in November of 1982. She had a number of works in progress at the time of her death, including the film about memory, White Dust from Mongolia, another book project, and a piece on the representation of hands in Western painting. OTHER WORKS: Audience Distant Relatives (1978). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hagedorn, J., ed., Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction (1993). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Afterimage (Summer 1986). —JESSICA GRIM
CHANDLER, Elizabeth Margaret Born 24 December 1807, Wilmington, Delaware; died 2 November 1834, Tecumseh, Michigan Daughter of Thomas and Margaret Evans Chandler The youngest child and only daughter of a prosperous Quaker farmer of English stock, Elizabeth Margaret Chandler lost her mother in infancy, was orphaned at nine, and was raised by her grandmother and three Quaker aunts in Philadelphia. She attended Quaker schools until only twelve or thirteen and was an avid reader all her life. At an early age she showed her talents as a poet: at nine she produced a poem called ‘‘Reflections on a Thunder Gust,’’ at sixteen she began to publish a few poems in the public press. At eighteen ‘‘The Slave Ship’’ brought her a prize from the editors of Casket, in which it was published. Benjamin Lundy, the antislavery publisher, noticed ‘‘The Slave Ship’’ and reprinted it in the Genius of Universal Emancipation. Lundy recruited Chandler as a regular contributor, and two years later she became the editor of the ‘‘Female Repository,’’ the
women’s department of his paper. Chandler moved with her brother to the Michigan frontier in 1830, but continued as editor of the Genius’s women’s department until her death, despite Lundy’s complaints about the difficulties of regular communication with a forest outpost. Chandler was the first American woman author to make slavery the principal theme of her writing. Half of her published poems and essays dealt with slavery, African life, the emancipation movement, or the American Indian. ‘‘The Slave Ship’’ employed a poignant theme which she used repeatedly: the wrenching despair and horror experienced by proud and independent Africans snatched from their native shores and transported in chains to the Americas and lifelong slavery. In ‘‘The Afric’s Dream’’ she shows the fettered slave remembering his former home where he lay under his own banana tree: ‘‘My own bright stream was at my feet, / And how I laughed to lave, / My burning lip and cheek and brow, / In that delicious wave!’’ Chandler showed amazing empathy with the black slave of whom she could have had no direct knowledge. Most of her poems have strong rhythms as well as vivid imagery. Frequently they were sung as hymns at antislavery meetings, or recited as dramatic presentations. Chandler also wrote about nature, especially the wilderness beauty of her beloved Michigan. Lundy, in the preface to Chandler’s collected works, has high praise for her poetic skill: ‘‘Though she was by no means deficient in prose, either for elegance of diction, or force of expression, she excelled in poetry. Her style was easy and graceful, while the flights of her fancy were lofty and soaring and her imagery natural and pleasing.’’ The romantic intensity of Chandler’s poetry sometimes approaches sentimentality, but she evoked vivid imagery in describing the natural world. In her essays Chandler emphasized the contradiction between slavery and the Declaration of Independence, the degrading effect of slavery on master as well as slave, and the need to destroy the economic base of slavery by refusing to use products which were produced by slave labor. In a series of lively pieces, ‘‘Letters to Isabel,’’ published in the Genius, Chandler berates an imaginary friend for hesitating to forego the pound cakes and ice creams made with slave-produced sugar, for ‘‘devotion to the cause of justice and mercy.’’ Chandler was also an early believer in the need for women to champion humane causes. In her essay ‘‘To the Ladies of the United States,’’ which appeared in Genius, she chided women for deceiving themselves when they protested that they had no power to ameliorate the horrors of slavery: ‘‘American women! Your power is sufficient for its extinction! And, oh! by every sympathy most holy to the breast of women, are ye called upon for exertion of that potency.’’ In Opinions she wrote that emancipation might require ‘‘the energies of men, but it requires also the influence of women.’’ Her articles were extensively reprinted in the U.S., Canada, and the British Isles by the more popular periodicals of the time. William Lloyd Garrison wrote her obituary for the Liberator: ‘‘There is not a female in the United States, who has labored so assiduously, or
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written so copiously in the cause of the oppressed.’’ Lundy placed her only after Elizabeth Heyrich of England among women writing in the antislavery cause and believed had she lived longer her fame would easily have rivaled that of Heyrich. OTHER WORKS: Essays, Philanthropic and Moral (1836). The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Margaret Chandler (1836). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Clark, G., The Liberty Minstrel (1844). Dillon, M. L., ‘‘E. Chandler and the Spread of Anti-slavery to Michigan,’’ in MichH (Dec. 1955). Griswold, R. W., The Female Poets of America (1859). Lundy, B., ‘‘A Memoir of Her Life and Character,’’ in The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Chandler (1836). Reference works: DAB. NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Woman’s Record (1853). —RUTH BORDIN
CHAPELLE, Georgette Meyer Born 14 March 1918, Milwaukee, Wisconsin; died 4 November 1965, Chu Lai, Vietnam Wrote under: Dickey Chapelle, Georgette Louise Chapelle, Georgette Louise Meyer Daughter of Paul and Edna Meyer; married Tony Chapelle, 1940 (divorced 1955) Georgette Meyer Chapelle was born to Quaker parents and grew up in suburban Milwaukee. She began studying aviation as an adolescent and at sixteen left her family to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There she worked more on developing writing skills at the Boston Traveler, however, than on completing engineering degree requirements. Returning to Milwaukee at eighteen, she learned to fly while working as a publicist for small barnstorming and air show companies. Moving to New York in 1939, she freelanced and learned photography from Tony Chapelle, whom she married in 1940. In the early years of World War II, Chapelle was a journalist for Look in the Panama Canal Zone, wrote six books on aviation (two of them for adolescents), and published stories and photographs about women in unusual war jobs. In 1945, as a war correspondent for Fawcett Publications in the Pacific, Chapelle shot some of her most widely distributed photographs of wounded soldiers. Soon after the war ended she joined her husband in Europe to cover stories on refugees for humanitarian agencies. Divorced in 1955, Chapelle accepted an assignment from Life in late 1956 covering the flight of Hungarians into Austria during the Hungarian revolution. In the next nine years, she covered revolutions and combat in Korea, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Algeria, Lebanon, Kashmir, and Vietnam for publications such as National Geographic, National Observer, and Reader’s Digest. She also interviewed revolutionary leaders, including Fidel Castro. For an account of her imprisonment in Hungary, Chapelle received the Reader’s Digest First Person Award in 1957 and, in
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1962, she was given the Overseas Press Club’s award for ‘‘reporting requiring exceptional courage and enterprise.’’ On an assignment for the National Observer, covering Operation Black Ferret with marines near Da Nang, Vietnam, Chapelle was mortally wounded by a land mine fragment which lodged in her neck. Fellow photographer Henry Huet (who was a Vietnam casualty in 1971), along with several wounded marines, observed as Chaplain John McNamara administered last rites. Huet’s photograph of the dying Chapelle, along with many of her own, were immortalized in Requiem: By the Photographers Who Died in Vietnam and Indochina (1997). She was forty-seven. Chapelle’s first photojournalism work appeared in Look in the early years of World War II, a six-page article on the ‘‘life throughout every hour of one day’’ of a woman sewing fabric onto the wings of RAF fighter planes in an aircraft plant in New Jersey. She also published books on women in aviation and in government service. The latter included a combination of patriotic propaganda and ‘‘dramatic picture’’ accounts of specific women holding ‘‘useful and profitable jobs’’ during the war. In the final years of World War II, Chapelle’s photographs received major attention, especially her work on wounded soldiers aboard hospital ships in the Pacific where, except for nurses, she was often the only woman aboard. Throughout the war, Chapelle encountered consistent difficulties in ‘‘going forward,’’ military officers explaining that there were ‘‘no facilities for women’’ in the field. Chapelle’s work followed typical patterns of war reporting, with a heavy emphasis on the human interest story of the individual soldier. Her reportage was widely used in government efforts to involve the civilian back home in the war effort. Chapelle’s major work is her autobiography, What’s a Woman Doing Here?: A Combat Reporter’s Report on Herself, published in 1961, just as she began to cover the American involvement in Southeast Asia. The autobiography is an important document in regard to understanding the American photojournalist’s role as a ‘‘chronicler of wars’’ during World War II and the Cold War which followed. In the opening pages of the autobiography, Chapelle described herself as a ‘‘pacifist by heredity.’’ She developed a ‘‘mad passion for the movies’’ and the adventure they portrayed, however, at the same time as she was ‘‘well taught that violence in any form was unthinkable.’’ Violence became for Chapelle ‘‘as attractive a mystery. . .as sex seemed to be to other teenagers.’’ As an adult woman she identified herself as an ‘‘interpreter of violence’’ and a person with a ‘‘need for recognition and a place.’’ Chapelle’s autobiography recounts a series of incidents which portray her conflicts between patriotism and a desire to show the truth, and between sympathy for subjects and a need to get a good story. She ended her association with Fawcett Publications when they refused to publish photographs of blood transfusions in battle: ‘‘Whatever suffering men could undergo in the name of the folks back home, surely anyone could endure to merely look at!’’ Chapelle refused to rely on government press releases, choosing to observe firsthand the ‘‘violence and want’’ which existed in
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developing nations. Her famous photograph of the execution of a Vietcong soldier in 1962, considered by the military as representative of the American Cold War perspective, was among the earliest published in America displaying the brutality of the Vietnam War. Yet Chapelle remained committed to the idea of American military forces as ‘‘freedom fighters’’ against communism. OTHER WORKS: Needed—Women in Government Service (1942). Needed—Women in Aviation (1942). How Planes Are Made (1945). The papers of Georgette Meyer Chapelle are at the Wisconsin State Historical Society in Madison, Wisconsin. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ellis, F., ‘‘D. C.: A Reporter and Her Work’’ (thesis, 1968). Faas, H. and T. Page, eds., Requiem: By the Photographers Who Died in Vietnam and Indochina (1997). Knightly, P., The First Casualty—From the Crimea to Vietnam: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker (1975). Marzolf, M., Up From the Footnote: A History of Women Journalists (1977). Other references: NYT (4 Nov. 1965). Harper’s (Sept. 1972). —JENNIFER L. TEBBE
CHAPIN, Katherine Garrison Born 4 September 1890, Waterford, Connecticut; died 30 December 1977, Devon, Pennsylvania Daughter of Lindley H. and Cornelia Van Auken Chapin; married Francis Biddle, 1918 Educated at private schools and Columbia University, Katherine Garrison Chapin was a poet, playwright, translator, reviewer and lecturer. In the late 1920s, she published poems in such magazines as Harper’s, Scribner’s, Saturday Review, North American Review, Poetry, and the Ladies’ Home Journal. Some of her poems were set to music and performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Orquesta Sinfonica de Mexico. Among these are ‘‘Lament for the Stolen’’ (1938), ‘‘And They Lynched Him on a Tree’’ (1940), and ‘‘Plain Chant for America’’ (1943). Chapin’s readings of her poems have been recorded in the Library of Congress Series (1945-60) and for Harvard’s Lamont Library (1961). Chapin’s subjects and opinions are typical of the times between 1930 and 1960, though she makes little direct reference to World War II. She treats such American subjects as Nancy Hanks; Gettysburg, and describes the landscapes of Maine, New Mexico, and New Orleans. She also gives accurate pictures of foreign places, often those significant in the history of Western civilization (Stonehenge, the Tiber, the Nile). Sometimes she speaks in the generalized voices of woman: as a bereaved mother in ‘‘Lament for the Stolen,’’ a poem on the Lindbergh kidnapping, as an anxious mother in ‘‘Nancy Hanks,’’ and as an affectionate and dependent lover in ‘‘Maine Night.’’
Chapin’s most ambitious poem is the long title poem of her last book, The Other Journey (1959). In it she explores the primal generic self. She sees poetry’s function as vatic and invokes the natural powers of bird and sea and sun on the self’s outward journey into space. Then her ‘‘heart returns on the other journey,’’ the inner journey, ‘‘To reach a source serene or ominous / . . .Where the unfinished revelation starts.’’ The two journeys are actually one, going backward into time, through history and prehistory, into preconsciousness. The circular movement from life into death into life again is the ultimate truth. In poetic technique Chapin is barely influenced by the modernist poets. Her lyrics are chiefly in rhyme and meter, controlled but not exceptionally tight or brilliant, and in no way innovative. Though she does use some free verse, its freedom consists mostly in varied line lengths. It is still largely iambic, often metrical, and employs frequent rhyme. Throughout, her imagery tends to be traditional and the metaphoric structures simple. In her poems Chapin shows that she is an aware member of her world, has an appropriate and dignified concern for its defects and possibilities, and indulges in no self-pity. In the words of Allen Tate, ‘‘Miss Chapin’s poems . . . will not give the reader the shock he has come to expect from our present ‘cult of experience.’’’ But they will give him or her a feeling of calm, the kind of calm that results from witnessing an educated, intelligent woman face an intractable universe with no help but her own resolution and her skill with tested tools. OTHER WORKS: The Tapestry of the Duchess (1925). Outside of the World (1930). Bright Mariner (1933). Time Has No Shadow (1936). Sojourner Truth (1948). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1963). Other references: A.B. Bookman’s Weekly (20 Feb. 1978). NR (9 May 1960). NYT (2 Jan. 1978). NYTBR (10 April 1960). WP (31 Dec. 1977). —ALBERTA TURNER
CHAPLIN, Jane Dunbar Born 11 February 1819, Scotland; died 17 April 1884 Wrote under: Hyla Daughter of Duncan Dunbar; married Jeremiah Chaplin II, 1841 Jane Dunbar Chaplin’s first major novel, Gems of the Bog: A Tale of Irish Peasantry (1869) was set in Ireland one generation before it was written. The narrative follows members of the Sheenan family through their hardships in Ireland to their final settlement in America. The major characters—such as Mammy Honey, the wise old matriarch of the family, Paddy and John, the struggling brothers, and Peggy O’Canty, the courageous young orphan beloved and adopted by the family—are realistically and affectionately drawn. As Kelleyrooke changes from a pastoral ideal to a place of ‘‘death and emigration,’’ Chaplin traces her
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characters’ endurance and emotional growth through long feuds, religious battles, famine, and death. Chaplin also carefully documents their triumphs in the course of daily life. In her easy, straightforward style, Chaplin sprinkles her narrative with pertinent allusions to Irish history, relating her characters’ struggles to larger social issues. Her tone throughout is one of measured melancholy, but it is also tender and optimistic. Perhaps Chaplin’s most interesting work is Out of the Wilderness (1870). It relates the history of Zeke and Weza, two poor but heroic southern blacks who migrate to New England after the Civil War. Weza’s story is a tale tinged by the sorrow of separation and oppression. In her dreams of freedom, Weza expresses the deep cruelty behind the slave system. As the tale progresses, it becomes clear that Weza’s sorrows are not finished with the end of the war, for she and Zeke are searching for her lost sons. Although the end of the novel is sentimental and ineffective (Weza comes ‘‘out of the wilderness’’ with her family intact and gains ownership of her former master’s plantation), most of the novel presents a realistic portrait of the life of southern blacks. Particularly memorable is Zeke and Weza’s wedding scene at a camp meeting, with the eccentric Preachin’ Jack officiating. Also impressive is Chaplin’s acute evaluation of the economic decline in the south during the last phases of the war. Chaplin’s works are effective in portraying a sympathetic and realistic vision of the darker side of the American experience: the lot of blacks, poor whites, and immigrants. Her historical and economic sense adds intelligence and depth to the emotional sketches of these people and their hard struggles for dignity in the American system. Her point of view is clear and consistent: the disadvantaged are men and women with the same potential and aspirations as the rich; only prejudice and lack of money impede their growth. Chaplin paints colorful backgrounds for her lively characters, and she introduces dialect and vernacular speech, thus lending added legitimacy to language patterns other than standard English. —ROSE F. KAVO
CHAPMAN, Lee See BRADLEY, Marion Zimmer
CHAPMAN, Maria Weston Born 25 July 1806, Weymouth, Massachusetts; died 12 July 1885, Weymouth, Massachusetts Daughter of Warren and Anne Bates Weston; married Henry Grafton Chapman, 1830 The oldest of six children, Maria Weston Chapman grew up in Weymouth and spent several years in England with the family of her maternal uncle, a London banker. When she returned to Boston at twenty-two, she became ‘‘lady principal’’ of Ebenezer Bailey’s Young Ladies’ High School. She married a fellow
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Unitarian, Henry Chapman, and joined him and his parents as an ardent abolitionist and supporter of William Lloyd Garrison. In 1832 Chapman joined 12 other women to found the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. She became their leader and the editor of their annual report, Right and Wrong in Boston (1836-38). When the ‘‘blue-coat mob’’ threatened the meeting of the Society on 21 October 1835, Chapman said: ‘‘If this is the last bulwark of freedom, we may as well die here as anywhere.’’ Chapman was ‘‘of inestimable help in editing the Liberator, taking charge with Edmund Quincy during Garrison’s absences and illnesses.’’ Beginning in 1834, she and her sisters ran yearly abolitionist fundraising fairs in Boston. For these fairs, Chapman edited the annual gift book, The Liberty Bell, ‘‘to which better versifiers and poets than herself contributed.’’ She also helped to edit the Non-Resistant, the periodical of Garrison’s New England Non-Resistance Society, from 1839 to 1842. After the 1840 split in the American Anti-Slavery Society, Chapman, as member of the executive committee of the national organization, helped establish and finance the National AntiSlavery Standard in New York. Although she took her children to Europe in 1848 and spent the next eight years chiefly in Paris, she kept in touch with abolitionists in the U.S. and Great Britain, and continued to contribute to The Liberty Bell. She returned to Boston in 1855 and accepted Garrison’s view that ‘‘with the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation and the enactment of the 13th Amendment, the time had come to disband the antislavery societies.’’ Believing that the crusade against slavery could be aided by music, Chapman edited Songs of the Free, and Hymns of Christian Freedom (1836), and contributed many songs and poems to this collection and to The Liberty Bell. Her hymns in Songs of the Free are frankly occasional and singable because they follow well-worn metrical and rhetorical paths. Chapman’s poetic contributions to The Liberty Bell are also conventional, sincere but derivative examples of sentimental religious poetry. Chapman’s polemics far outshine her poetry. Her Right and Wrong in Boston for 1837, the annual report of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, includes a long argument for sex equality. Her controversial pamphlet Right and Wrong in Massachusetts (1839) addressed the question of divisions within the antislavery movement and attributed the split to differences over women’s rights. Chapman sketched the history of the movement in Massachusetts, pointing out that women had staunchly supported antislavery in 1835, when few had rallied to the cause. Chapman contributed competent narratives and informational essays as they were needed by the cause, but her longest and most interesting prose work is her Memorials of Harriet Martineau (1877). Chapman met Martineau, the influential English writer who advocated unitarianism and abolition of slavery, when she visited America in 1835. The two became good friends, and in 1856 Martineau wrote to Chapman saying that her death was imminent, and asked Chapman to finish her autobiography and become her literary executor. Although Martineau lived until 1876, Chapman provided a 460-page supplement to Martineau’s
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Autobiography. It is a well-organized, sensitive biography including judicious selections from Martineau’s journals (1837-39) and letters. OTHER WORKS: Pinda (1840). Ten Years of Experience (1842). Trial and Imprisonment of Jonathan Walker, at Pensacola, for Aiding Slaves to Escape (1846). How Can I Help to Abolish Slavery? (1855). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Filler, L., The Crusade Against Slavery (1960). Kraditor, A. S., Means and Ends in American Abolitionism (1969). Lader, The Bold Brahmins (1961). Pease, J. H. and W. H. Pease, Bound Them with Chains: A Biographical History of the Anti-Slavery Movement (1972). Reference works: DAB, NCAB (1892 et seq.). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: New England Quarterly (March 1934). —SUSAN SUTTON SMITH
CHARNAS, Suzy McKee Born 22 October 1939, New York, New York Daughter of Robinson and Maxine Szanton McKee; married Stephen Charnas; children: Charles, Joanna Suzy McKee Charnas earned a B.A. from Barnard College in 1961 and an M.A.T. from New York University in 1965. As a member of the Peace Corps, she taught English and economic history at various schools in Nigeria from 1961 to 1963. Returning to New York, she taught ancient history and African studies at the junior high level from 1965 to 1967. After working in curriculum development at New York’s Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital in the Division of Community Mental Health from 1967 to 1969, she launched her writing career. Charnas never forgot these formative experiences, though; she has instructed at the science fiction Clarion Workshops and chaired the Archive Project Committee of the National Council of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers beginning in 1986. Her first novel, Walk to the End of the World (1974), made a big splash, appearing as a finalist for the science fiction John W. Campbell award. This first of the Holdfast Chronicles was followed by Motherlines (1978), The Furies (1994), and The Conqueror’s Child (1999). These are savagely feminist novels depicting a postapocalyptic world in which women are enslaved and terribly abused. To produce children, they are raped; to feed their fellow ‘‘fems,’’ they are milked like cows. In Walk to the End of the World, Alldera, a slave message-runner, escapes this oppressive patriarchal society and heads west, following a legend of women who live freely on the plains without men. In Motherlines, Alldera finds these Riding Women, and Charnas explores the possibilities of a female society that
reproduces by cloning. It is not a utopian culture, however; the characters are prone to conflict and the distresses of stagnation in which a clone society results. In The Furies, Alldera leads a cavalry of horse-women against the Holdfast, where they kill or enslave all the men they find there. Disagreements about how to build a new civilization point the way toward the fourth novel. The 1970s and 1980s saw much feminist science fiction published, but Charnas’ work commanded attention because of the brutality she portrayed and the spotlight she focused upon dominance/submission politics. While her women can be as aggressive and manipulative as men, wreaking terrible vengeance upon their former masters, Charnas plainly shows testosterone-based thinking as barbaric and women as more likely to strive for a noble vision of a creative, nurturing community. Unicorn Tapestry earned the Science Fiction Writers of America’s Nebula award in 1980. The novella became the centerpiece of the novel The Vampire Tapestry, a Nebula finalist. This novel also investigates themes of dominance and submission, here dramatized as the relationship between predator and prey. It depicts five episodes in the life of one Dr. Weyland, a vampire. Charnas subverts vampire clichés, however; Weyland is no supernatural undead ghoul, but a unique biological mutation. While he considers humans inferior and calls them ‘‘cattle,’’ he also fears that if he is discovered, they will rise against him as ‘‘peasants with torches.’’ He is complexly drawn—Charnas feminizes him at times, inflicting upon him in some scenes the powerlessness and degradation that women endure. In the poignant drama of the Unicorn Tapestry segment, Weyland must undergo psychological therapy in order to regain the university post from which he was fired. In their pas de deux, during which Dr. Floria Landauer realizes Weyland is not delusional but a true vampire, Weyland refuses her encouragements to empathize with his prey, because then he would be unable to feed himself. But they form a rapport that allows him to find a human, even a feminine, side of himself. Weyland’s anagnorisis in Vampire Tapestry occurs when he attends the opera Tosca and discovers that he can, after all, be greatly moved by human passion and art. Charnas’ interest in music and opera often enriches her fiction, as such titles as the Nebula nominee ‘‘Listening to Brahms’’ (1991) and ‘‘Beauty and the Opera, or, The Phantom Beast’’ (1996) suggest. The occult novel Dorothea Dreams (1986) features a middle-aged artist of Taos, New Mexico (where Charnas lives), haunted by nightmares of revolutionary France during the Terror, while her house is haunted by an ancient ghost. Dorothea’s desire to live in solitude, creating her masterwork, is inevitably disrupted by the outside world. Charnas has also written novels for young adults. The Sorcery Hall trilogy—The Bronze King (1985), The Silver Glove (1988) and The Golden Thread (1989)—features Valentine, a New York City teenager who uses magic to protect mundane reality from evil invading from the Otherworld. In The Kingdom
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of Kevin Malone (1993), teenaged Amy is drawn into a dangerous fantasy world in Central Park, created by bully Kevin Malone as an escape from his abusive father. Charnas’ oft-reprinted short story ‘‘Boobs,’’ which won the 1989 Hugo award of the World Science Fiction Society, is narrated by a girl who discovers that during her first menses she is inflicted not merely with the usual pangs of puberty but also, unusually, with lycanthropy, the ability to transform oneself into a werewolf. Delighting in her newfound talent, she avenges herself upon the boys at her high school who torment her because of her budding breasts. Charnas’ fiction is clearly and crisply told in unornamented prose. She is praised for the characterization of her protagonists and antagonists, who alike are sympathetic and believable. Her skill at describing the feminine point of view in conflict with both the supernatural and with men is nonpareil. She is an extremely popular and well-respected author in science fiction and fantasy and has gained critical adulation among feminist theorists.
OTHER WORKS: Women in Science Fiction: A Symposium, with Suzy McKee Charnas et al. (ed. by J. D. Smith, 1975). ‘‘A Woman Appeared,’’ Future Females: A Critical Anthology (ed. by M. S. Barr, 1981). ‘‘No-Road,’’ Women of Vision (ed. by D. DuPont, 1988). ‘‘In Pursuit of Pure Horror: Robert Bloch, Suzy McKee Charnas, Harlan Ellison, Gahan Wilson,’’ Harper’s (1989). Moonstone and Tiger Eye (1992). ‘‘Meditations in Red: On Writing The Vampire Tapestry,’’ Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture (J. Gordon and V. Hollinger, eds., 1997). The Slave and the Free (contains Walk to the End of the World and Motherlines, 1999).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Barr, M., Suzy McKee Charnas; Octavia Butler; Joan D. Vinge (1986). Bartkowski, F., ‘‘Toward a Feminist Eros: Readings in Feminist Utopian Fiction’’ (thesis, 1982). Bartkowski, F., Feminist Utopias (1989). Shugar, D. R., Separatism and Women’s Community (1995). Seven by Seven: Interviews with American Science Fiction Writers of the West and Southwest (1996). Reference works: Readers’ Guide to Twentieth-Century Science Fiction (1989). Articles about Charnas featured in American Horror Fiction: From Brockden Brown to Stephen King (1990), Feminism and Science Fiction (1989), Feminism, Utopia, and Narrative (1990), Science Fiction Roots and Branches (1990), The Feminine Eye: Science Fiction and the Women Who Write It (1982), Women and Utopia (1983). Other references: Extrapolation 27 (Spring 1986). Janus 15 (Spring 1979). Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 5 (1993). Locus (May 1990). Midnight Graffiti (Fall 1989). Science-Fiction Studies10 (July 1983). Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels (1985). SATA (1990). —FIONA KELLEGHAN
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CHASE, Ilka Born 8 April 1905, New York, New York; died 15 February 1978, Mexico City Daughter of Francis D. and Edna Wollman Chase; married Louis Calhern, 1926; William Murray, 1938; Norton S. Brown, 1946 A descendant of revolutionary-war diarist John Woolman, Ilka Chase spent her life among the wealthy, fashionable New Yorkers who people her writings. Educated in French convents and U.S. private schools after her parents’ divorce, Chase was a Broadway actress (over 20 roles), a film star (over 30 movies), and a radio and television personality (Luncheon at the Waldorf, Penthouse Party, Kraft Theater, The Defenders). Civilized and witty rather than profound, Chase’s twovolume autobiography (Past Imperfect, 1942; Free Admission, 1948) anecdotally describes her stage and screen experiences, as well as her relationships with her husbands and with such literary and theatrical personalities as Clare Booth Luce and Dorothy Thompson. Disturbed in a conventional way by the horrors of fascism and war, Chase reacts even more strongly to their trivial intrusions upon her civilized life: dirty trains, boring army towns, inexplicable delays, and the inevitable depersonalization of the time. Chase’s In Bed We Cry (1943) and I Love Miss Tilli Bean (1946), her first two novels, provide coolly cynical insights into the cosmetics and fashion industry of the period: Chase’s characters are self-deceiving as well as customer-deceiving. Like all her heroines, Devon Wainwright and Tilli Bean are handsome and gifted women seeking success in a man’s world. Chase adapted In Bed We Cry for the stage, playing the lead herself to popular though not critical acclaim in Boston and Philadelphia, before bringing the show to Broadway, where it failed. Chase’s subsequent novels are less successful than the first two, with the exception of The Island Players (1956). This novel mingles gossipy revelations about the private lives of oftenmarried and divorced theater people and their defenses against aging with moments of brilliant slapstick comedy. As in all Chase’s novels, brittle sophistication and assumed cynicism do not preclude a happy ending; her heroines always end up with the man of their dreams. In a series of travel books, illustrated by her husband’s photographs, Chase socializes with the international set, interviews leaders of newly emergent nations, and admires most what is least Westernized in each country visited. Despite Chase’s sympathy for the aspirations of her hosts, however, she expresses a typically ethnocentric pessimism about their chances for survival. Chase’s other works, Always in Vogue (with her mother, 1954), Lady’s Pleasure (an anthology, 1946), and The Care and Feeding of Friends (recipes and social behavior, 1972), posit an audience with the time, money, and inclination to create a private world of gaiety and sophistication within the surrounding chaos of 20th-century America.
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Charming at first, Chase’s writing soon becomes predictable, formulaic, unexciting. Aware of the major issues of her time, Chase lacks both the ability to treat them profoundly and the discretion to avoid them. Her frequent stylistic device of twisting clichés (‘‘he worshipped the ground she trotted on’’) wears thin, yet reflects accurately the repartée of New York in the 1930s and 1940s. As a self-proclaimed feminist who refused to join any movement, Chase is thus a valuable source of anecdotes from that world, in which women carved out individual careers in fields where their gender was the focus of their profession: fashion, theater, radio, and television. OTHER WORKS: New York 22: That District of the City Which Lies between Fiftieth and Sixtieth Streets, Fifth Avenue, and the East River (1951). Three Men on the Left Hand (1956). Carthaginian Rose (1961). Elephants Arrive at Half-Past Five (1963). Second Spring and Two Potatoes (1965). Fresh from the Laundry (1967). The Varied Airs of Spring (1969). Around the World and Other Places (1970). The Sounds of Home (1972). Worlds Apart (1972). Dear Intruder (1977). BIBLIOGRAPHY: NYT (19 Feb. 1978). —AMY K. LEZBURG
CHASE, Mary Coyle Born 25 February 1906, Denver, Colorado; died October 1981 Daughter of Frank and Mary McDonough Coyle; married Robert L. Chase, 1928; children: three sons Mary Coyle Chase’s mother was Irish and her brothers brightened her childhood with tales of Irish folklore. This love of myth was reinforced by a major in classics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her first job, however, was writing society notes and ‘‘sob sister’’ stories for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver. After her marriage she retired and invested her energy in volunteer work. She founded a chapter of the American Newspaper Guild, and worked for the rights of Colorado’s SpanishAmericans. Her writing career began and continued sporadically while she reared three sons. Nevertheless, she wrote several plays, a short story for Ladies’ Home Journal—‘‘He’s Our Baby’’—and a motion picture script, ‘‘Sorority House.’’ Chase is famous for Harvey (1944), a whimsical comedy named for a man-sized rabbit who is the constant companion of the amiable alcoholic, Elwood P. Dowd. Elwood’s insistence on Harvey’s presence so humiliates his sister, Veta Louise, that she attempts to have Elwood committed. After a series of comic mistakes, she gains a new appreciation of Elwood’s gentleness and prevents the doctors from turning him into a normal, dissatisfied person, like everybody else. Harvey was performed in London and Europe, filmed in 1950, and revived for the stage in 1970 by the American National Theater and Academy (ANTA) starring James Stewart and Helen Hayes. It won the 1944-45 Pulitzer Prize
and also placed second for the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. Mrs. McThing (1952), a runner-up for the 1951-52 New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, was Chase’s second success. It was Chase’s attempt to create a full-length play for children that would provide a theatrical experience similar to the Christmas pantomimes that British children enjoy. Pleased with this aim, ANTA undertook production of the play despite very limited expectations, and audiences and critics were charmed by the production. The play is a fantasy about a witch, Mrs. McThing, who provides the wealthy Mrs. Larue and her son Howay an opportunity to become real human beings. Following Mrs. McThing was Bernardine (1952). Again Chase was writing for young people—her sons in particular. Bernardine presents a sympathetic view of the painful experiences of adolescence. A group of boys from respectable families fancy themselves as hoodlums and bolster their egos with tall tales of conquest. Critics found the production warm and moving. The best of Chase’s work, despite uneven writing, reveals a world of whimsy, good humor, and kindness. Elwood in Harvey sets the tone with his dignified courtesy and his guileless friendliness in a crass, unaccepting world. Mrs. McThing adds a touch of magic as the witch turns into a beautiful fairy to bid farewell to her tearful daughter. Bernardine carries forth Chase’s humor with the character of Wormy, who, by refusing to obey his mother’s threatening commands, causes her to realize the value of the boys as allies. Thus Chase’s vision is complete: love is victorious in a pleasant world of fancy. OTHER WORKS: Now I’ve Done It (1937). The Next Half Hour (1945). Loretta Mason Potts (1958). Midgie Purvis (1961). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CB (1945). Other references: Cosmopolitan (Feb. 1945). NYT (8 May 1945). Saturday Evening Post (1 Sept. 1945). —LUCINA P. GABBARD
CHASE, Mary Ellen Born 24 February 1887, Blue Hill, Maine; died 28 July 1973, Northampton, Massachusetts Daughter of Edward E. and Edith Lord Chase Mary Ellen Chase was the second of eight children in a family that preserved a 200-year heritage of New England maritime village life. Entering the University of Maine at seventeen and pausing at eighteen for a year of teaching in two one-room schools in Maine villages, Chase graduated cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa at twenty. At thirty she entered the graduate school of the University of Minnesota, where she received her doctorate in 1922, and became assistant professor of English at the university.
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By 1926 Chase’s fame as a provocative teacher at Minnesota won her a post at Smith College that would last for 30 years. Her short stories and essays were also appearing frequently in the top literary magazines, launching her as a writer on a larger scale. In 1927 she published Thomas Hardy from Serial to Novel, which was adapted from her doctoral dissertation. Teaching and lecturing about the Bible as literature led Chase to write several enduring volumes of inspired, interpretive analysis: The Bible and the Common Reader (1944), Life and Language in the Old Testament (1955), The Psalms for the Common Reader (1962), and The Prophets for the Common Reader (1963). Chase’s regional novels of crisis and decline in maritime Maine began with Uplands (1927) and reached their full greatness in Mary Peters (1934), Silas Crockett (1935), Windswept (1941), and The Edge of Darkness (1957). Her novels show the destruction and regeneration of a region undergoing upheaval as a result of the cultural changes of the 19th and 20th centuries. Inspired to become a writer by Sarah Orne Jewett, whom Chase met as a young girl, the younger woman followed her mentor in observing nature and in presenting it and the land as determinants of character. Discussing the influence of the Maine coast on her writings, Chase said in her polished, classical style, ‘‘. . .to have sprung from Maine seafaring people; to have spent my childhood and. . .later years on a coastline unsurpassed in loveliness; to have inherited a wealth of thrilling history and tradition—such an inheritance of imperishable values imposes a debt which cannot possibly either be underestimated or ever fully discharged.’’ But Chase did discharge this debt to her Maine heritage and surroundings through her novels and reminiscences. Through the use of lyrical imagery, affection for words, and flowing sentence structure, she presented her philosophy that reflection on experience brings more reality than the experience itself. Her autobiographical reminiscences, The Golden Asse, and Other Essays (1929), A Goodly Heritage (1932), A Goodly Fellowship (1939), and The White Gate (1954), proved to be her most lasting works. OTHER WORKS: His Birthday (1915). The Girl from the Big Horn Country (1916). Virginia of Elk Creek Valley (1917). The Art of Narration (with F. K. Del Plaine, 1926). Mary Christmas (1926). The Writing of Informal Essays (1929). Constructive Theme Writing for College Freshmen (1929, rev. ed. 1938). The Silver Shell (1930). This England (1936). Dawn in Lyonesse (1938, dramatization by T. Job 1946). Jonathan Fisher, Maine Parson, 1768-1847 (1948). The Plum Tree (1949, dramatization by L. McMahon and R. Sengel 1953). Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (1950). Readings from the Bible (1952). Recipe for a Magic Childhood (1952). Sailing the Seven Seas (1958). Donald McKay and the Clipper Ships (1959). The Lovely Ambition (1960). The Fishing Fleets of New England (1961). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cary, R., ‘‘A Bibliography of the Published Writings of Mary Ellen Chase,’’ in CLQ (March 1962). Dorio, J. J., ‘‘Mary Ellen Chase and the Novel of Regional Crisis,’’ in CLQ
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(March 1962). Duckett, E. S., ‘‘A Portrait: 1962,’’ in CLQ (March 1962). Milbank, H. K., ‘‘Mary Ellen Chase: Teacher, Writer, Lecturer,’’ in CLQ (March 1962). Westbrook, P. D., Mary Ellen Chase (1965). Reference works: Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia (1987). —EVELYN HYMAN CHASE
CHEHIA See SHAW, Anna Moore
CHENEY, Ednah (Dow) Littlehale Born 27 June 1824, Boston, Massachusetts; died 19 November 1904, Boston, Massachusetts Daughter of Sargent Smith and Ednah Dow Littlehale; married Seth Wells Cheney, 1853 (died 1858); children: one daughter Writer, activist, and self-proclaimed jack-of-all-trades, Ednah Littlehale Cheney was the third daughter of a New England family of comfortable means and liberal sentiments. The independent spirit she displayed as a child found a home when, as a very young woman, Cheney came under the influence of transcendentalists Theodore Parker, Bronson Alcott, and, above all, Margaret Fuller. As ardent an abolitionist as her mentors, Cheney led the way after the Civil War in recruiting Boston teachers for freedmen’s schools in the South. But for most of her eighty years, her energies as a reformer were devoted primarily to improving the educational, occupational, and political opportunities available to women. Through her long association with the New England Hospital for Women and Children, Cheney helped establish women’s rights to medical training as well as to proper health care and information. She was the moving force behind a school of design and a school of horticulture (both for women) and chairman of the New England Women’s Club committee that founded Boston’s distinguished Girls’ Latin School. As pamphleteer, public speaker, and clubwoman, she campaigned widely for female suffrage. In 1853 Ednah married portrait artist Seth Wells Cheney. His death five years later left her with an infant daughter who herself died at the age of twenty-six. For all her reform activities, Cheney thought of herself first as a writer. Three of her early books, Faithful to the Light (1871), Sally Williams (1874), and Child of the Tide (1874), are betterthan-average children’s fiction. Though marred by the besetting sins of the period and the genre—sentimentality, didacticism, and unlikely coincidence—they are absorbing stories which often correct conventional sexist stereotypes. In 1875 Cheney published a memoir of [surgeon] Susan Dimock, the first of several elegies written in tribute to family, friends, and colleagues. The finest, clearly a labor of love, is the
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sketch of her idol, Margaret Fuller. Rich in anecdote and personal reminiscence, it shows Cheney at her sensible, insightful, generous best. Cheney’s skills as a biographer again show to advantage in the Journals of Louisa May Alcott (1889), which she edited and extensively annotated. Later biographers are indebted to this fine work not only because it includes some journal entries now lost in the original, but because Cheney does not shrink from presenting the author of Little Women ‘‘without disguise.’’ Alcott’s passionate dissatisfactions are laid bare, as is the compulsive self-denial that embittered her life. Feminist interpretation, however appropriate it might seem, enters only indirectly, perhaps because of Cheney’s desire to lay no blame, especially on Bronson Alcott. But Nora’s Return (1890), a nondramatic sequel to Ibsen’s Doll’s House, is avowedly feminist. It is also outrageously simplistic, contrived, and, inadvertently, very funny. The delightful opening of Cheney’s last major work, Reminiscences (1902), recalls a time when Boston was all but an island, town criers called out descriptions of lost children, and Election Day was celebrated with oysters, lobster, and baked beans on the Common. Personally revealing detail abounds— Cheney staying awake in church by pricking her finger and writing in blood in her prayer book, Cheney being asked to leave a Beacon Hill school because of her ‘‘bad influence on the other girls.’’ Later sections of the autobiography, however, are flat and strangely impersonal. Colleagues like Julia Ward Howe attributed much of Cheney’s success as a reformer to her judiciousness, calm disposition, and broad-mindedness. The same qualities illuminate her writing, which is consistently lucid, unpretentious, and humane. Much of it deserves notice today only as social history, but her children’s fiction still entertains, and her biographies of Alcott, Fuller, and parts of Reminiscences hold their own as literature. At moments, Cheney achieved the kind of originality that sometimes blossoms out of diligent research and honest, compassionate reporting. OTHER WORKS: Handbook for American Citizens (1866). Patience (1870). Social Games (1871). Memoir of Susan Dimock (1875). Memoir of Seth Wells Cheney (1881). Gleanings in the Field of Art (1881). Memoir of John Cheney, Engraver (1888). Memoir of Margaret Swan Cheney (1889). Stories of Olden Times (1890). Memoirs of Lucretia Crocker and Abby W. May (1893). Life of Christian Daniel Rauch (1893). The letters of Ednah Cheney are at the Boston Public Library, the Massachusetts Historical Society, Smith College, and the Schlesinger Library of Radcliffe College. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Representative Women of New England, Howe, J. W., ed. (1904). A Woman of the Century (1893). Other references: Memorial Meeting of the New England Women’s Club, Ednah Cheney, 1824-1904 (1905). Women’s Journal (26 Nov. 1904). —EVELYN SHAKIR
CHERNIN, Kim Born 7 May 1940, Bronx, New York Daughter of Paul and Rose Chernin Kusnitz; married David Netboy, 1958 (divorced); Robert Cantor, 1971 (divorced); children: Larissa Kim Chernin, daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants, spent the first five years of her life in New York City, before moving with her father (an engineer) and her mother (a radical organizer) to Los Angeles after an older sister died. Her early life was profoundly influenced by the loss of her sister, her mother’s political activism, and the incarcerations and trials of the McCarthy years. Chernin’s writings reflect this heritage, joining the poetic intuition of the child’s memory to a political voice, and presenting a mother-daughter conflict embedded in the modern woman’s search for self and the immigrant’s search for home. While a student at the University of California at Berkeley, she met and married David Netboy. They traveled to England and Ireland, where Chernin studied at Oxford and at Trinity College in Dublin. Returning to the U.S., she received her B.A. from the University of California in 1965 and an M.A. in psychology from New College of California in 1990. Chernin’s dual career as writer and therapist and the tension of her political and poetic sensibilities are evident in her publications, which include poetry, fiction, fictional autobiography, and meditative studies on women’s psychological issues. Work as a consultant on writing projects and on women’s eating disorders led her to focus initially on a series of books about contemporary problems of female development: The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness (1981), The Hungry Self: Women, Eating, and Identity (1985), and Reinventing Eve: Modern Woman in Search of Herself (1987). In this trio of autobiographically framed works, Chernin addresses first the middle-class ideal of slenderness as a problem with women’s power, and then the mother-daughter bonds and patriarchal culture as influences on female development. Through these books she evolves a visionary yet theorizing form to describe the essential psychological challenge, coming in Reinventing Eve, with its formulation of modern woman as the ‘‘Woman Who Is Not Yet,’’ to insist that theory be developed out of experience, particularly of the body. Her thesis leads her to challenge traditional psychoanalytic interpretation with the voices of the women who have come to her for consultation and to confront Judeo-Christian mythologies with the narrative of her own identity crisis, attempting to find the form that will successfully realize the female self and unite its conflicting voices. Chernin both uses and revises traditional psychology in her volume of poetry, The Hunger Song (1982), presenting childhood memory as a tool for the reimagination and recovery of a female goddess. Chernin’s use of story to present psychological ideas is pronounced in her fiction and fictionalized autobiographies, which develop the themes of ethnic identity and modern intergenerational conflict. In My Mother’s House (1983) begins when Rose Chernin asks her to write about her Communist party activities. Chernin
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uses this request to make a point about identity and interconnection, as she weaves a narrative that is as much a story of mother-daughter encounters as a transcription of the tales she and her mother tell. Different voices allow the author both to reclaim her heritage, beginning with life in the Russian shtetl, and proclaim her difference from it. Furthermore, as the two women’s stories of themselves as daughters and mothers come into counterpoint, the presumed narrative of Rose Chernin’s life becomes Chernin’s own tale, the story of four generations of immigrant Jewish women and their intimate connection. The Flame-Bearers (1986) and Sex and Other Sacred Games (1989) also reflect the themes of Chernin’s psychological writings. The Flame-Bearers tells the story of Rae (Israel) Shadmi, the rebellious inheritor of leadership in a mystical Jewish women’s sect. Once again exploring the relationships between several generations of Russian-Jewish immigrant women and tracing their heritage back to the Old World, Chernin both claims for her heroine the wisdom of a matriarchal spiritual tradition and identifies the reasons why this tradition must be reformulated. Sex and Other Sacred Games connects this spiritual drama directly to the social world. Chernin and coauthor Renate Stendahl tell a story of relationship by tracing conversations on women’s sexuality. Using two voices, plus written letters and journals, to reinvent the Platonic dialogue on eros and beauty, they participate in a project that both utilizes tradition and creates a new and uniquely feminine narrative. One very powerful contribution to Chernin’s work is its demonstration of the way women’s narratives are reinventing form and in so doing are beginning to integrate the conflicting voice of personal and political, psychological, and literary consciousness. In Crossing the Border: An Erotic Journey (1994), Chernin uses third person to recall her 1971 stay on an Israeli border kibbutz and her ensuing relationships with male and female Israelis. She explores the cultural conflict between herself and her lovers, who include a young soldier, a fellow kibbutz member, and her married Hebrew teacher. In A Different Kind of Listening: My Psychoanalysis and Its Shadow (1995), Chernin chronicles her therapy with three different analysts over a period of 25 years. She joins traditional psychology and literary narrative in her reminiscences about her search for self through psychoanalysis. Chernin’s next book, In My Father’s Garden: A Daughter’s Search for a Spiritual Life (1996), complements her earlier work In My Mother’s House. The former reveals Chernin’s growing awareness of her father as a kindred spirit and her appreciation of his quiet expressions of love. The second and third parts of this three-part book provide accounts of Chernin’s guidance of a dying woman through the process of death and of the author’s spontaneous trip to Germany to meet a spiritual guru. My Life as a Boy (1997) continues Chernin’s search for self-identity through literary memoirs. She writes about her affair with an elegant, worldly German Jewish woman and the eventual breakup of her second marriage. The title comes from her desire to break out of her old life by discovering ‘‘the capacity to act, the freedom to take, the license to choose desire’’ that she believes
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requires ‘‘the instinctive wholly natural ruthlessness of a boy.’’ Chernin switched gears for her next book, Cecilia Bartoli: The Passion of Song (1997), a part scholarly, part psychoanalytic, and part enraptured fan’s account of the life and performances of opera singer Bartoli. Chernin and coauthor Renate Stendhal include biographical information on Bartoli, transcripts of interviews with the singer, and plot summaries of operas in which she has appeared. Chernin returned to psychoanalysis and the quest for self in The Woman Who Gave Birth to Her Mother: Seven Stages of Change in Women’s Lives (1998). This volume provides fictionalized accounts of six mother-daughter stories Chernin obtained through private counseling of one or both of the women. The title comes from Chernin’s belief that women go through seven stages in their relationships with their mothers. The final stage of ‘‘giving birth’’ occurs when women learn to understand and accept their mothers after gaining a greater understanding of themselves. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1983). CANR (1998). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Feminist Studies (Spring 1991). PW (5 July 1985). Women’s Studies (1987). WRB (Mar. 1990) —KAREN E. WALDRON, UPDATED BY LEAH J. SPARKS
CHERRY, Kelly Born 21 December 1940, Baton Rouge, Louisiana Daughter of J. Milton and Mary Spooner Cherry; married Jonathan Silver, 1966 (divorced 1969) Kelly Cherry was born into a home filled with music. Her father taught music theory at Louisiana State University and both he and her mother were accomplished violinists specializing in the string quartets of Beethoven. When she was four, the family moved from Baton Rouge to Ithaca, New York, to enable her parents to further their careers. Although it was often a struggle to survive economically, they demonstrated an unflagging dedication to their art, and this sense of the importance of creative work was communicated to Cherry and her brother, who became writers, and to her sister, who became a solo concert flutist. After receiving a B.A. from Mary Washington College in 1961, Cherry was awarded a Dupont Fellowship and pursued a Ph.D. in philosophy until 1963. She then attended the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she earned an M.F.A. in 1967. Prior to taking her degree, she had gotten married in 1966 to Jonathan Silver, who was a visiting lecturer in art history. In The Exiled Heart: A Meditative Autobiography (1991), Cherry looks back on her decision to marry and sees it as an error in judgement due in part to an uncertainty about her future. ‘‘Women’s lives were so proscribed then, especially in the South. I had ambitions
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but no understanding of how they might be spelled out in a professional life and very little encouragement and no guidance.’’ Another underlying factor was the vulnerability she had been feeling over what she believed to be the end of her relationship with Imant Kalnin, the Latvian composer she had met and fallen in love with during a visit to Moscow in 1965. She had not heard from him in several months and assumed he had lost interest. But the relationship was in fact far from over, and the story of how it continued to unfold is the central subject of The Exiled Heart. After Cherry and her husband were divorced in 1969, the correspondence with Kalnin resumed. Through letters they affirmed and further developed their sense of deep connection, which was personal and also professional, as they collaborated on projects that combined music and words. In 1975 she was able to obtain a visa for a few days to see him a second time. Their hope had long been to marry and live in Latvia, but the Soviet authorities continually found ways to prevent them from going forward. In the end, after every recourse had been exhausted over a period of 15 years, there was nothing to do but go their separate ways, an abiding friendship between them. When Kalnin was in the U.S. years later to attend the premiere of his fifth symphony in Boston, they got together briefly in New York City. Cherry writes about the moment at the airport when he glanced up and saw her: ‘‘I looked into his eyes and realized, for the third time in nearly twenty-five years, that this was the most remarkable man I had ever known.’’ While she was contending with Cold War bureaucracy and living with her parents, who had moved to England, Cherry received an invitation to teach at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. She accepted a visiting lectureship for 1977-78 and remained on the staff, eventually becoming a full professor and writer-in-residence. She was named Eudora Welty Professor of English and Evjue-Bascom Professor in the Humanities. As she teaches the various forms of literature—poetry, short story, essay, and novel—she continues to write in all of them herself, because she believes that each form has its own particular uses. Her first collection, Benjamin John and Other Poems, was done as her M.F.A. thesis, and the years since have seen a steady outpouring of poetry works. For Cherry, poetry is closely allied with philosophy and the act of thinking. She commented in Writers Digest, ‘‘To be a poet is to be wholeheartedly committed to the search for meaning.’’ Indeed, as she sees it, all literature is a kind of knowing, one that urges us to go beyond our solipsistic selves. In this regard, literature has a kinship with science, another of her keen interests: ‘‘Both make it possible for us to recognize one another as real beings moving in the real world.’’ Cherry’s prose works include four novels. Her short fiction has been selected for Best American Short Stories, the Pushcart Prize, and Prize Stories 1994: The O. Henry Awards. Her collection of essays, Writing the World (1995), explores the art of writing and what it means to be a woman writer and a Southern writer. In 1989 she was awarded the James G. Hanes Poetry Prize presented by the Fellowship of Southern Writers for a distinguished body of work. The citation naming her as recipient states,
CHESEBROUGH
‘‘Kelly Cherry’s poetry is marked by a firm intellectual passion, a reverent desire to possess the genuine thought of our century— historical, philosophical, and scientific—and a species of powerful ironic wit that is allied to rare good humor.’’ OTHER WORKS: Lessons from Our Living Past (coauthor, 1972). Teacher’s Guide to Lessons from Our Living Past (1972). Sick and Full of Burning (1974). Lovers and Agnostics (1975). Relativity: A Point of View (1977). Conversion (1979). Augusta Played (1979). Loneliness: Words for a Secular Canticle (1980). Songs for a Soviet Composer (1980). In the Wink of an Eye (1983). The Lost Traveller’s Dream (1984). Natural Theology (1988). My Life and Dr. Joyce Brothers: A Novel in Stories (1990). God’s Loud Hand (1993). Time Out of Mind (1994). Death and Transfiguration (1997). BIBLIOGRAPHY: CANR 68 (1998). DLBY (1983). Georgia Review (Spring 1994, Winter 1996). Midwest Quarterly 35 (Winter 1994). New Literary History 23 (Winter 1992). Writer’s Digest 76 (July 1996). —MARLENE M. MILLER
CHESEBROUGH, Caroline Born 30 March 1825, Canandaigua, New York; died 16 February 1873, Piedmont, New York Wrote under: Caroline Cresebro’ Daughter of Nicholas G. and Betsey Kimball Chesebrough Caroline Chesebrough attended Canandaigua Seminary and taught English at the Packer Collegiate Institute, Brooklyn, New York, from 1865 until her death in 1873. She wrote novels and short stories for both adults and children, publishing them in daily newspapers and magazines such as Knickerbocker, Putnam’s, Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, and Appleton’s Journal. Chesebrough’s work can be classified as domestic-sentimental and highly moralistic. Some of it depicts seduction and betrayal (The Children of Light, 1853), but most of her fiction portrays women as agents of moral regeneration. Peter Carradine (1863), probably Chesebrough’s best work, falls in the latter category. It opens with a conflict between the schoolteacher, Miranda Roy, and the school’s patron, Peter Carradine. Roy has disciplined one of Carradine’s favorite students, and he decides to dismiss her. Roy’s position as a female teacher is tenuous and Carradine succeeds in removing her; to overcome her resistance he has her pupils vote on her exposition. The novel make a strong statement, with its setting grounded in a social milieu in which teaching was the only respectable employment for middle-class women. Chesebrough explored a variety of religious experiences in her fiction. The Foe in the Household (1871) depicts Delia Rose’s secret marriage to a man outside her Mennonite sect and the
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disastrous consequences of this act. The setting of the short story, ‘‘Victory and Jacqueline,’’ is France; the conflict is between the Protestants and the Roman Catholics. In Victoria (1856), Chesebrough attacks the Calvinist who bases his religion only upon justice, not mercy. She contrasts Calvinist justice with the compassion found in such women as Mercy Fuller (Peter Carradine), whose aid to a family in distress is subtle but powerful. For Chesebrough wisdom does not come from the intellect but from dreams which tell of a better world to come. God speaks through these dreams to the sleeping mind which was previously closed by the intrusion of the outside world. Women are the source of this knowledge and thus possess a power uniquely theirs and uniquely female. The ‘‘True Woman’’ of the 19th century is presented in Chesebrough’s fiction. She is merciful, long-suffering, pious, composed, and forgiving. She is never angry, vengeful, passionate, or egotistical. She might be initially poor or orphaned, but is usually rewarded for her spiritual goodness. Chesebrough’s fiction for children is primarily allegorical and features orphans who live in poverty and rural, remote settings. Death and loss are frequent events in these stories, and here, too, the female is the agent for moral regeneration. Even though Lucy Fitzhugh is an orphan raised without Christian instruction, she eventually brings spiritual enlightenment to Gamp’s Island (The Fishermen of Gamp’s Island, 1865). Her stories at times capture a child’s traumatic religious awakening as in ‘‘A Story of a Cross,’’ where young Fanny wonders at night what will be her affliction while watching the shadows of crosses formed on her bedroom wall shaped by the canes of a rose bush outside her window. In Chesebrough’s fiction the women are the primary characters and possess superior qualities. Although she wrote in a period that spans the Civil War, no mention is made of this or other political events. Her focus is on the spiritual world within and not on the social world without. Except for Peter Carradine, her fiction projects an inner world in which women reign; characterization replaces events. Although Chesebrough’s work offers some interest to the critic of American culture, it must be remembered that the cult of true womanhood represented in her fiction might have no relationship to the realities of 19th-century American women. Chesebrough’s novels and short stories remove the reader briefly to a world of female moral superiority where the male is incomplete without his spiritual complement. Calvinism, the religion of justice, is replaced by a religion of mercy in a society feminized by writers like Chesebrough. It is a world of camphor, of family Bibles, of fainting couches, and of moralistic, allegorical fiction. OTHER WORKS: Dream-land by Daylight (1851). Isa, A Pilgrimage (1852). The Little Cross-Bearers (1854). Susan, The Fisherman’s Daughter (1855). The Beautiful Gate, and Other Stories
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(1855). Philly and Kit (1856). The Sparrow’s Fall (1863). Amy Carr (1864). The Glen Cabin (circa 1865). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Baym, N. Women’s Fiction (1978). Brown, H. R., The Sentimental Novel in America, 1789-1860 (1940). Douglas, A., The Feminization of American Culture (1977). Papashvily, H. W., All the Happy Endings (1956). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —JULIANN E. FLEENOR
CHESLER, Phyllis Born 1 October 1940, Brooklyn, New York Daughter of Leon and Lillian Hammer Chesler; married Nachmy Bronstein, 1973; children: Ariel, 1978 In 1972 Phyllis Chesler published the controversial Women and Madness, a book which quickly became seminal to 20thcentury feminism. Chesler is a psychology professor and psychotherapist as well as a feminist activist and writer. She attended Bard College and the New School for Social Research, from which she earned a Ph.D. in 1969. She has written and lectured widely on a variety of subjects, especially those dealing with the cultural and psychological significance of male and female roles. Chesler has taught at the Institute for Developmental Studies, at the New School for Social Research, and at City University of New York. She is politically active in the women’s movement and is the founder of the Association for Women in Psychology (1970) and the National Women’s Health Network (1976). Women and Madness takes the feminist position that, throughout history, women have been assigned a secondary and aberrant status in society; consequently, they have often been seen as mad—simply by definition. According to Chesler, mental illness in women is the result either of a dysfunctional exaggeration of the prescribed sex role or of its unacceptable rejection. Chesler devotes a chapter to the way female patients are viewed clinically and points out that mental health in women is measured by the extent to which they adjust to a role which demands guilt, conservatism, passivity, and self-hatred. She exposes a double standard of diagnosis and treatment of mental illness in women and men, and discusses in some detail the relationship between the female role and the psychiatric symptoms of depression, frigidity, and attempted suicide. Women, Money and Power (1976), was coauthored with Emily Jane Goodman, a lawyer and also a feminist. It too asks provocative questions but only implies the answers. The book, relying heavily on statistics and documented case studies, begins by dispelling the notion that American women either control money or have the power to manipulate it. In alternating chapters, Chesler and Goodman discuss in psychological and legal terms
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the economic powerlessness of women. Both conclude that ‘‘women, by definition, have been shut out of the male aristocracy, in which a few have greater power than the many, but in which all members, as men, have more power than almost all women.’’ Chesler deals with the ways women have found for surviving in a society which deprives them of all social and economic control; she emphasizes that whatever status and economic privilege women have, they have ‘‘by association’’ with husbands and fathers. Chesler’s 1978 book, About Men, has been hailed by feminists as a classic—the first book ever to be written about the masculine experience as such. Unlike the preceding books, About Men is speculative rather than scholarly. Here Chesler relies heavily on the insights of myth, art, literature, and personal experience. She suggests men, to an even greater extent than women, have failed to come to terms with the essentiality of human relationships. She depicts the bitterness of unresolved conflict between fathers, sons, and brothers being projected on women in the form of hostility and envy—thus isolating men in a society where only males have value. Chesler writes: ‘‘A sexual revolution might destroy what men do so well together, away from women: the making of Hisstory, the making of war, the triumph of phallic will. . . . I write in the belief that understanding can weaken the worship of death— that has dominated patriarchal consciousness and human action for so long.’’ In 1977, before About Men was published, Chesler became pregnant with her first child, son Ariel. Chesler’s With Child: A Diary of Motherhood was published in 1979, a journal of her experiences during pregnancy, childbirth, and her first year as a mother. In this work, punctuated with insights as well as unresolved questions, Chesler gives voice to rarely expressed ambivalence of motherhood, the intensity with which a mother both loves and hates her child. This book marked a turn in Chesler’s career, and the beginning of a series of books concerned with mothering. While With Child explores the personal aspects of mothering, her next two works examine the legal side of motherhood. In Mothers on Trial: The Battle for Children and Custody (1986), Chesler exposes gender biases in the child-custody decision process. Refuting the popular belief mothers are given preference in custody cases, Chesler shows that in the contested custody cases she studied, fathers were awarded custody more often than were mothers, even when the father was abusive. Chesler’s concerns and arguments about motherhood and custody were crystallized in a single case. Sacred Bond: The Legacy of Baby M. (1988) discusses the Baby M. surrogatemother case of the 1980s as it reflected wider societal patterns of paternal rights and maternal obligations, the abuse of women by the legal system, and of women and children through the practice of adoption. Chesler also describes her own involvement in the case, which extended beyond the role of author to that of supporter and advocate for the biological mother, Mary Beth Whitehead. In Patriarchy: Notes of an Expert Witness (1994), Chesler chronicles the negative effects of bias against women in the health care and criminal justice systems. This collection of previously
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published essays includes tales of women on trial, women in psychiatric institutions, and women in custody battles. Chesler also contends that the media contributes to this patriarchal bias. She followed up this title with Feminist Foremothers in Women’s Studies, Psychology, and Mental Health (1995), which she coedited with Esther D. Rothblum and Ellen Cole. Letters to a Young Feminist (1997) contains brief essays about such diverse topics as marriage, the pro-choice movement, abuse, the working world, and political oppression, which Chesler directs ‘‘loving voice’’ to a new generation of women. She wants to help feminists and potential feminists alike ‘‘to see [their] place in the historical scheme of things’’ and to ‘‘choose whether and how to stand [their] feminist ground in history.’’ Chesler recounts not only what feminists have accomplished, but what still remains to be done, while arguing for solidarity against the patriarchal bias she documented in earlier works. Chesler is a provocative and controversial writer whose work has been both hailed and dismissed by critics. Reviewers have criticized her books as messy, biased, and inconclusive, while others have found the same books to be groundbreaking, courageous, and convincing. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CANR (1998). Other references: American Scholar (1973). Journal of Marriage and the Family (Aug. 1980). LJ (1 Sept. 1976). NYTBR (31 Dec. 1972, 4 April 1976, 5 Jan. 1986, 26 June 1988). Psychology Today (Feb. 1986). PW (13 May 1988). WS (1973). —JUDITH P. JONES, UPDATED BY EILEEN M. ANDERSON AND LEAH J. SPARKS
CHESNUT, Mary (Boykin) Miller Born 31 March 1823, Camden, South Carolina; died 22 November 1886, Camden, South Carolina Daughter of Stephen D. and Mary Boykin Miller; married James Chesnut, 1840 (died 1885) Mary Miller Chesnut was the oldest daughter of the Nullification Governor of South Carolina. In 1859 her husband was elected U.S. senator, only to resign his seat a year later. He returned to South Carolina to serve in the secession convention and was appointed a delegate to the Confederate Constitutional Convention and Provisional Congress in Montgomery, Alabama. Chesnut began keeping a daily journal in December 1860. In manuscript form, it runs to over 400,000 thousand words, She willed the diary to her friend Isabella Martin who edited it with Myrta Lockett Avary in 1905. This edition is roughly one-third of the original and focuses on Chesnut herself. Much interesting gossip was omitted for fear it would offend former Confederates or their descendants. In 1949 novelist Ben Ames Williams edited a more complete edition which is twice the length of the former; Williams restored all of the rumors and gossip which make the diary so fascinating.
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A Diary from Dixie is perhaps the most valuable source for the study of the social history of the Confederacy. Because of her husband’s position and her own charm, Chesnut was accepted everywhere and was on intimate terms with the most important people in the Confederate government. Their wives and daughters gravitated to her, and from this web of acquaintances emerges a detailed portrait of life in the Civil War South. The diary gives the reader an insider’s view of the war. Despite death and military reversals, romance and pleasure continued. Unlike other Confederate diarists who confidently predicted victory, Chesnut saw that, unless quarreling and jealousy among members of the administration and the army ceased, there would be defeat. While she was usually fair in her judgements of people and events, she reflects a definite bias in favor of Jefferson Davis, whom her husband served as aide. Chesnut’s own personality is clearly revealed in the diary. Though she loved and respected her husband, she admits that after 20 years of marriage, she did not really know him. There are some tender moments between them, but it appears that Chesnut was too stern and unbending for his vivacious wife. Whenever they returned to the Chesnut family plantation in Camden, she was seized by fevers and headaches which were probably psychosomatic. She was highly critical of her tyrannical ninety-year-old father-in-law, for he represented the epitome of the slaveholding Southerner. She detested slavery, claiming it forced white women not only to compete sexually with their husbands’ slave mistresses, but also to pretend that the mulatto offspring ‘‘drop from the clouds.’’ Chesnut’s diary explores the problems of an intelligent woman in a society which did not expect women to be more than wives and mothers. Chesnut believed a woman must defer to her husband, but she herself did not do so happily and often violated Chesnut’s explicit instructions about spending money for entertainment and luxuries. Her devious attempts to outwit her husband are comical and remind the reader of early television husbandwife situation comedies. Chesnut bemoaned the fact she did not have children, yet did not envy other women their confinements and responsibilities. Though somewhat vain and pampered by modern standards, Chesnut had a delightful sense of humor and a keen eye for the absurdities of life. These qualities, combined with her literary style, make the diary a pleasure to read. After the war, the Chesnuts returned to Camden. James became involved in state and local politics while Chesnut ran a butter business and revised her diary. James Chesnut died in 1885, and she died a year later in 1886. OTHER WORKS: Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (1981). The manuscript edition of Mary Chesnut’s A Diary from Dixie is in the South Carolina Library at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, South Carolina. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Avary, M. L., and I. Martin, eds., A Diary from Dixie (1905). Muhlenfield, E., Mary Boykin Chesnut: A Biography (1981). Wiley, B. I., Confederate Women (1975). Williams,
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B. A., ed., A Diary from Dixie (1949). Wilson, E., Patriotic Gore (1962). Woodward, C. V. ‘‘May Chesnut in Search of her Genre’’ in Yale Review (Winter 1984) —JANET E. KAUFMAN
CHIDESTER, Ann Born 1919, Stillwater, Minnesota Raised and educated in Minnesota, Ann Chidester graduated from St. Catherine’s College in St. Paul. She began to write during her teens, and in 1942, at age twenty-three, published her first novel. By 1950 Chidester had published five novels and numerous short stories in well-recognized magazines. Chidester’s novels show a concern for women and for the lower classes, but are frequently flawed by unnecessary dramatic and thematic complications, creating a lack of focus. They contain a strong commitment to the American scene, particularly the Midwest where she grew up. Young Pandora (1942), Chidester’s first novel, is largely autobiographical; a young Midwestern girl attends an area university, has a love affair, begins her career as a writer, and sets off to see the country. No Longer Fugitive (1943) repeats the theme of travel from and return to the Midwest. The main character, a young man who refuses to be drafted, travels widely but ultimately returns to his ancestral home in Minnesota. The novel is dominated by the young man’s grandfather, a pioneer of the Midwest, now living with grandchildren and great-grandchildren in the old homestead. But the potential drama of this patriarch is lost in a confusion of unresolved issues, including war and pacifism, women’s rights, the rights of blacks and Chicanos, Catholicism, and extramarital love. The Long Year (1946) begins with the return of another wanderer to her childhood home in Minnesota. Kay Hasswell is an attractive, sophisticated business woman, married three times but now ‘‘belonging to no man.’’ Feminists might cheer, but as Kay manipulates and subdues her brother, fires the employees of the company, arranges for the dismissal of a schoolteacher with leftist tendencies, and tries jealously to win her niece away from her boyfriend, we see that Chidester has damaged the image of the liberated female. Kay Hasswell finally leaves town without her niece, feeling old and lonely. The novel suffers from being overwrought; it includes threats of union activities and riots, two murders, a trial, and a suicide, all with undeveloped social implications. But with Mama Maria’s (1947) Chidester achieves focus and control, making it the most effective and moving of her novels. Mama Maria, an ailing widow whose only son was killed in the war, owns a rundown truck stop on a highway in mid-America. A veteran employed to pump gas and wait tables becomes a substitute son. Here Chidester’s concern for the lower class reaches maturity, and the theme of jealousy and loneliness in old age is sensitively developed. In Moon Gap (1950) a young Nevada
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woman, deserted by her husband, goes to live with her father in a Mojave Desert ghost town. The atmosphere is that of an inescapable past, both for the town and for the girl. The theme of women’s liberation is again unresolved as the choices for Cassie King seem limited to either husband or father. The Lost and the Found (1963) develops Chidester’s concern for the lower class in the story of a migrant worker’s child who is raped and killed. The novel shows the California town’s reaction to this crime: the newspaper writer is moved, the rich landowner is unconcerned, the young woman is appalled. A local un-American activities group hunts for communists but is finally ousted by a younger generation devoted to the highest ideals of the moderate left. The unnecessary profusion of characters and their superficiality prevents this novel from being successful, although we applaud its concern for the migrant workers’ plight. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Warfel, H. R., American Novelists Today (1951). —SUZANNE HENNING UPHAUS
CHILD, Julia Born 15 August 1912, Pasadena, California Daughter of John and Carolyn Weston McWilliams; married Paul Child, 1945 Author and television’s French Chef, Julia Child coauthored the influential and bestselling Mastering the Art of French Cooking (2 vols. 1961, 1970). She thereby translated French culinary techniques into an American idiom and established the standards for authoritative culinary writing in what has become known as America’s gastronomical coming of age. Enrolled in Smith College by her mother when she was born, Child majored in history and received her B.A. in 1934. Although she aspired to become either a basketball star or a novelist, she accepted a copywriting position at the W. & J. Sloane department store and lived in New York for three years before returning to the leisurely life of Pasadena and its Junior League in 1937. When World War II began, Child went to Washington to work as a typist in a government information agency. After six months, she joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, the precursor to the CIA), opted for duty in the Far East, and was in charge of document centers in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and later in China. While in Ceylon, she met Paul Child, a former painter and language teacher, who designed war rooms for the OSS in the Far East. After the war they married and lived in Washington, D.C. until Paul was assigned to the American Embassy in Paris in 1948 as the exhibits officer for the U.S. Information Agency. During the next four years in Paris, Child took French lessons at Berlitz, studied with Max Bugnard, Claude Thillmont, and Pierre Mangelette at the Cordon Bleu, and at the suggestion of
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Simone Beck became a member of an exclusive society of women known as Le Cercle des Gourmettes. ‘‘From the beginning, I fell in love with everything I saw,’’ Child said. Her life was irrevocably changed by the experience of living in France. Child’s culinary career began when a group of American friends asked her to give cooking lessons in her Left Bank apartment. Assisted by Simone Beck, Louise Bertholle, and chefs from the Cordon Bleu, the classes developed into L’Ecole des Trois Gourmandes. When Child’s husband was reassigned to the American embassies in Marseille, Bonn, and Oslo, classes were taught whenever and wherever they could be arranged. The school was so successful that the two Frenchwomen invited Child to collaborate in the writing of a cookbook adapting French culinary techniques to American ingredients and kitchens. Eight years in preparation, the first volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking was published by Knopf in 1961, one year after Child’s husband had retired and the Childs were established in their home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The book was hailed by the New York Times as ‘‘the finest volume on French cooking ever published in English,’’ and widely praised by the culinary establishment. Invited to appear on a book reviewing program at WGBH, Boston’s educational television station, Child demonstrated beating egg whites with a balloon whisk as she talked about her book. Letters requesting more of the same led to The French Chef series that premiered on 11 February 1963. More than 200 shows were added to the original series of 26 black-and-white programs during the next nine years. Child had invented the theater of cooking; ‘‘Julia’’ had become a household name. After the publication of The French Chef Cookbook in 1968, three subsequent television series were the basis for From Julia Child’s Kitchen (1975), Julia Child and Company (1978), and Julia Child and More Company (1979). Recipes and techniques from four years of monthly Parade magazine articles, six onehour videocassettes called The Way to Cook, segments from the television program Good Morning America, and the Dinner at Julia’s television series contributed to the comprehensive cookbook The Way to Cook (1989). Over more than 40 years Child has developed the techniques to master fine cooking and fulfilled the joint possibilities of television and culinary instruction. Recognition as a television celebrity tends to deflect attention from Child’s writing. Her many books, however, force their readers to reexamine the canon, to look at culinary writing as a genre with its own potential for excellence. She has insisted that each book be a ‘‘teaching’’ book rather than a collection of recipes. In the later books, however, her Olympian tone about utensils has given way to an informal and personalized discussion of options. Child’s favorite book is From Julia Child’s Kitchen, because she says, ‘‘It is entirely my own, written the way I wanted to do it.’’ Indeed, the book resonates with the truest authorial voice and tells the most compelling stories of all of her books. The reader comes to know the narrator intimately, her voice inspires confidence, and every recipe becomes the beginning of a plot in whose denouement the reader participates.
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Yet the book that represents the culmination of Child’s career, however, is The Way to Cook. She breaks with conventional organization by structuring the chapters around master recipes, provides over 600 color photographs to illustrate the methods employed, and blends classic techniques with freestyle American cooking. The award-winning book is her magnum opus, and the distinction it has achieved ranks with the Peabody (1965) and Emmy (1966) awards and the Careme Medal (1974) that have also celebrated her culinary career. Even well into her 80s, Child continues to produce books that are highly prized for their helpfulness and down-to-earth handling of sometimes complicated cooking techniques. In Cooking with Master Chefs (1993), Child introduces the average cook to 16 of America’s top chefs with an accompanying lesson on each one’s prized recipes. A PBS television series covering the same topics followed shortly after the book’s release. Following along the same line, In Julia Child’s Kitchen with Master Chefs (1995) features 26 chefs from the U.S.’s top restaurants, but this time right in Child’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, kitchen. In typical fashion, the creation of the specialty dishes was captured for the television audience. Sidebars and special explanations in the book again simplify the preparation and adapt the restaurant meals to the home dining room. With recipes formerly featured in Julia Child and Company and Julia Child and More Company, Child pulls together a tutorial on menu planning in Julia’s Delicious Little Dinners (1998). With depth she leads the reader through six dinners for six and suggests occasions to use each menu. A similar book published with Little Dinners is Julia’s Menus for Special Occasions (1998). The recipes are from the same source and also include six dinner plans for six, but focus on special dinner party situations such as buffets, cocktail parties, and serving low fat or vegetarian fare. Nearing 90, Child continues to guide American eating traditions through both her books and her television tutorials.
OTHER WORKS: Julia Child’s Menu Cookbook (reprinted, 1991). Julia Child’s papers (professional and personal correspondence, scripts and proofs, fan letters, research notes, and various newspaper and magazine articles) are at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Chase, Chris, The Great American Waistline (1981). Fitch, N. R., Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (1997). Fussell, Betty, Masters of American Cookery (1983). Booklist (15 April 1995). New Yorker (23 Dec. 1974). There also hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles from 1963 to 1999. Reference works: CA 41-44 (1979). CB (1967). WWAW (1974-75). Who’s Who in Television and Cable (1983). The Women’s Book of World Records and Achievements (1983). —JOAN REARDON, UPDATED BY CARRIE SNYDER
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CHILD, Lydia Maria (Frances) Born 11 February 1802, Medford, Massachusetts; died 20 October 1880, Wayland, Massachusetts Wrote under: L. Maria Child, Mrs. Child Daughter of David C. and Susanna Rand Francis; married David L. Child, 1828 Lydia Maria Child was the youngest of six children born to a prosperous baker and real estate broker and his wife. At twelve Child lost her mother and lived with her sister Mary and her husband. On her eighteenth birthday, announcing her independence, she moved to Watertown, Massachusetts, to stay with her brother Convers Francis, a Unitarian minister. She opened a girls’ school and startled parents by encouraging her pupils’ independent spirit. Child’s literary work included light romances, domestic books for women and children, and historical tracts advocating the rights of black slaves, Indians, and women. Hobomok (1824), Child’s early attempt to write an American romance, presents the Indian as a noble savage, and makes a plea for tolerance. The Rebels (1825) portrays the tensions leading up to the Revolution. In 1826 Child began the Juvenile Miscellany, the first periodical for children in the U.S., which ran successfully for eight years. With the wide reception of her practical American Frugal Housewife (1830), Child became well known and respected as a literary figure in New England. This reputation was dashed almost overnight with the publication of An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans in 1833. In her preface to this historical antislavery document, Child wrote: ‘‘I am fully aware of the unpopularity of the task I have undertaken; but though I expect ridicule and censure, it is not in my nature to fear them.’’ Child not only suffered financial ruin and social ostracism, but was forced to end her Juvenile Miscellany. Child’s constant and selfless devotion to abolitionism was supported by her husband David Lee Child, a founder of the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1832. In addition to writing many pamphlets in support of the cause, financing slave biographies, such as Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), and editing the National Anti-Slavery Standard from 1841 to 1849, Child, along with her husband, sheltered fugitive slaves at their residence in Wayland, Massachusetts. Her courageous zeal persisted late into her career when she published the Freedmen’s Book (1865), the profits of which she donated to the Freedmen’s Aid Association. Used as a text in schools for freed slaves, the book stressed the importance of moral principles, good health, neatness, thrift, and politeness, citing black heroes as inspiring examples. Child’s approach to reform was well thought out and literary. Her documents combined strong argument, carefully researched analysis, and sincere compassion. These faculties are also evident in her feminist works. For a Ladies Library series she wrote biographies of exemplary women and a History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations (1835), in which she argued for female equality. In 1837 she was the Massachusetts
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delegate to a women’s rights convention in New York, though she generally avoided public attention. Best acknowledged as an abolitionist writer, Child’s versatility with feminist tracts, historical romances, and domestic books for women and children points to the principal motive behind all of her work: educating her readers and helping them to adopt a moral and humane way of life. She appealed to the young in her Flowers to Children (1844, 1846, 1855), which contains the famous ‘‘Boy’s Thanksgiving’’ poem beginning with ‘‘Over the river and through the woods / To grandfather’s house we go.’’ She addressed the elderly in Looking Toward Sunset (1864), a miscellaneous collection designed to give ‘‘some words of consolation and cheer to my companions on the way,’’ which was applauded by Whittier and Bryant. Even in her romances, she incorporated her ideas on social reform: feminism in Philothea (1836) and antislavery in The Romance of the Republic (1837). Hers was a lifelong commitment to humanitarian values. OTHER WORKS: Correspondence Between Lydia Marie Child and Gov. Wise and Mrs. Mason, of Virginia (1860). An Appeal for the Indians (1868). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Baer, H. G., The Heart Is Like Heaven: The Life of Lydia Maria Child (1964). Clifford, D. P., Crusader for Freedom: A Life of Lydia Maria Child (1992). Milton, M. and P. G. Holland, eds., Lydia Maria Child: Selected Letters, 1817-1880 (1982). Yellin, J. F., Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Literature (1989). Reference works: Cyclopedia of American Literature (1855). DAB (1852). NCAB (1892 et seq.). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Woman’s Record (1853). —BETTE B. ROBERTS
CHILDRESS, Alice Born 12 October 1920, Charleston, South Carolina; died 14 August 1994, Queens, New York Granddaughter of Eliza Campbell; married (second) Nathan Woodard, 1957; children: Jean Alice Childress moved north to Harlem at the age of five to be raised by her dynamic grandmother, Eliza Campbell. She deems her grandmother’s influence immeasurable for exposing her at an early age to New York’s cultural and artistic offerings. Campbell would take Childress to art galleries and private showings and, according to Childress, say ‘‘Now this is my granddaughter and we don’t have any money, but I want her to know about art. If you aren’t too busy, could you show us around?’’ Afterwards, her grandmother would quiz her about what she had learned. These initial experiences helped form a love for art Childress was able to
translate into her own literary and dramatic career. After finishing only two years of high school, her beloved grandmother died, and Childress was forced to leave school to begin supporting herself as an actress. By 1941 she had joined the American Negro Theatre in Harlem and was on her way to becoming not only an accomplished actress but in time a playwright, screenwriter, novelist, director, and a crusader for striving artists. Childress was married briefly in 1940 and had one daughter. While struggling to support herself and her daughter on an actress’s wages, she also worked as a domestic and in other low-paying jobs. Her experiences during this period shaped her career-long interest in portraying working class African American women caught in oppressive situations, yet maintaining their dignity. Her 1956 book, Like One of the Family: Conversations from a Domestic’s Life uses selections and inspirations from her ‘‘Here’s Mildred’’ column, which ran in the Baltimore AfroAmerican from 1956-58, to explore these working class issues and successfully used satire to underscore the realities of the black domestic worker’s life. Although Childress has written plays, novels, young adult fiction, television scripts, and a screenplay, she is best known as a dramatist. While working with the American Negro Theatre, she began to write for the company because, in her words, ‘‘We needed things. We needed good writing.’’ Her first play, Florence (1949), (which she wrote in one night) draws on her early acting years and the stereotyping of African Americans. Like most of her subsequent plays, it revolves around black female protagonists struggling in a contradictory, often racist environment. (The play is set at a segregated train station). In a 1967 essay Childress described her characteristic and memorable heroines as ‘‘created and constructed on what hurts and what heals, slowly built and put in order out of the conflict which comes from the daily search for bread, love, and a place in the sun.’’ Consistently, Childress’ black women characters possess a depth and sensitivity rarely granted to black subjects in American theater. Childress’ second play, Just a Little Simple (1950), was based on stories by Langston Hughes. Gold Through Trees (1952), her third play, was the first play by an African American woman to have a professional production, meaning it was performed by equity actors. Childress’ 1955 play, Trouble in Mind, ran for 91 performances and won an Obie Award, the first presented to a woman playwright. The play also draws on her acting career, showing black actors resisting stereotypical portrayals of black characters. One critic says of Trouble in Mind that ‘‘Writing in 1955 . . . Alice Childress used the concentric circles of the play-within-the-play to examine the multiple roles blacks enact in order to survive.’’ But on being lauded as the first woman—and first African American woman—to receive the honors she did, Childress says ‘‘I never was ever interested in being the first woman to do anything. I always felt that I should be the 50th or 100th,’’ and explains how being the first means so many women before her of talent and importance were regretfully and unalterably shut out. In the 1960s Childress challenged convention with Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White, focusing on an
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interracial relationship between a black man and a white woman in South Carolina in 1918. Initial attempts to mount a production met with resistance; the first production took place at the University of Michigan in 1966. In 1973 the play was adapted for television, but a number of stations refused to carry the broadcast. Also facing widespread censorship, her comedy-drama contradicting image and role stereotypes, Wine in the Wilderness (1969), appeared as part of a television series, ‘‘On Being Black.’’ The entire state of Alabama banned this telecast. Aware of the tradition of African American drama that had long produced plays in schools, churches, and in community centers across the country, Childress sought to bring this tradition to the forefront of the American theater. In addition to her work as a playwright, she has also been an active supporter of her fellow artists. During the 1950s, her crusades in the Dramatists Guild led to union contracts for black performers and stagehands. Since the 1970s Childress wrote and produced works specifically for young adults. Ferdinand Monjo, editor and author of children’s books, suggested Childress write her first young adult book on the timely subject of drug use. The result, A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich (1973), was a novel about a black thirteen-year-old heroine user that met acclaim as well as censorship. The novel was nominated for a 1974 National Book Award and named a Notable Book by the American Library Association, as well as banned in the Savannah, Georgia school library (the first since Catcher in the Rye). A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich propelled Childress into the role of screenwriter for the 1977 film featuring Cicely Tyson and Paul Winfield. Childress’ later work includes another controversial young adult novel Those Other People (1989). This novel is told from several outsider’s points of view and addresses difficult issues including sexual abuse, homosexuality, and suicide. Called by one critic ‘‘a penetrating examination of bigotry and racism,’’ another critic claims this to be ‘‘a disturbing, disquieting novel that reflects another side of life.’’ With her husband, composer Nathan Woodward, Childress has written two plays focusing on the Gullah-speaking people who live off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, Sea Island Song (produced 1979) and Gullah (produced 1984). Moms, based on the life of blues singer and humorist Moms Mabley, appeared in 1986. Childress has received numerous acknowledgments for her contributions to American theater. In 1965 she appeared with James Baldwin, Leroi Jones (Imiri Baraka), and Langston Hughes on a British Broadcasting Corporation panel discussion on ‘‘The Negro in the American Theatre.’’ She received a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship in 1967 and from 1966-68 was a fellow at the Radcliffe (College) Institute for Independent Study. In 1984 she received the Radcliffe Graduate Society Medal; in 1986 she received the Audelco Pioneer Award; and before her death from cancer in 1994, she received the 1993 Association for Theatre in Higher Education Lifetime Achievement Award. OTHER WORKS: String (1969). The Freedom Drum (1970). Mojo: A Black Love Story (1970). Mojo and String: Two Plays (1971).
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Black Scenes (editor, 1973). A Short Walk (1979). Rainbow Jordan (1981). Many Closets (1987). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brown-Guillory, E., Their Place on the Stage: Black Playwrights in America (1988). Keyssar, H., Feminist Theater (1984). Patterson, L., ed., Anthology of the American Negro in the Theatre: A Critical Approach (1968). Reference works: Black American Writers Past and Present (1975). Black American Playwrights (1976). Black Playwrights (1978). Black Writers (1989). Children’s Books and Their Creators (1995). CA (1974, 1999). CANR (1981, 1989). CLC (1980, 1997). FC (1990). MTCW (1991). More Black Playwrights (1978). Notable Women in American Theater (1989). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). SATA (1975, 1995). Other references: Freedomways (Winter 1966). Sage (Spring 1987). Southern Quarterly (Spring 1987). —CAROL ALLEN, UPDATED BY JULIET BYINGTON
CHILTON, Eleanor Carroll Born 11 September 1898, Charleston, West Virginia; died 8 February 1949, New York, New York Daughter of William E. and Mary Tarr Chilton; married Herbert Agar, 1933 (divorced) Eleanor Carroll Chilton, the daughter of a U.S. senator, was educated at private schools in Charleston and New York, and graduated from Smith College in 1922. She published her first novel, Shadows Waiting in 1926, and then moved to London, where her second novel, The Burning Fountain appeared in 1929. There Chilton also published, with Herbert Agar, a volume of poetry, a book of criticism, and several plays. In 1933, Chilton married Agar, a poet, critic, newspaper columnist, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for history. Chilton’s last novel Follow the Furies appeared in 1935; it was later adapted into a play produced in New York in 1940. Chilton died, divorced and childless, after a long illness. Chilton’s primary literary importance is as a novelist. As a critic her work is negligible; The Garment of Praise (1929), which she coauthored, lacks theoretic originality and perception into individual poems. As a poet Chilton’s output is slight and uneven, bound by conventional forms and vague imagery. Yet there is a strength of feeling, particularly in the sonnet sequence in Fire and Sleet and Candlelight (1928). These 15 love sonnets frequently describe an internal conflict between proud independence and passionate love. The poet is reluctant to surrender her secret spirit that ‘‘walks alone, inviolate and unwed.’’ She is aware of the ultimate separateness of lovers, the failure of love’s illusions, the inevitable loneliness and futility of a life that moves ‘‘toward a hungry grave and gaping night.’’ But when Chilton deals with this same theme of the ultimate separateness of lovers in her first novel, her talent becomes
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apparent. Shadows Waiting (1926) introduces a young writer who resents total involvement with his lover and retreats to his separate and inviolable art, writing a novel within the novel peopled by purely private dreams and memories. Reviewers applauded the thematic depth and technical experimentation which make this an exceptional first novel, while recognizing its often slowmoving and artificial style. Chilton’s second novel demonstrates the limitations of reason and the power of the natural and instinctive in our lives. In The Burning Fountain (1929) a young couple planned to have two children to raise in a wholly rational environment. But a third child, born during a fierce thunderstorm, disrupts their orderly lives with her wild and ungovernable ways. In spite of parental restraint she finally runs off into a storm, returning to the elements. The descriptions of nature are powerful, but the effect is weakened by contrived symbolism. In Follow the Furies (1935) the same struggle of intellect vs. emotion is explored but here it is internalized and intensified into a private hell. Barbara Linton is the daughter of a freethinking rationalist who has raised her to have no illusions, no religion, no conscience, no belief in anything except the ultimate dignity and rationality of man. Because her father has taught her to be rational above all else, Barbara poisons her paralyzed and increasingly incompetent, fatally ill, mother. Although this mercy killing was intellectually justifiable, emotional justification is a different matter. Barbara becomes increasingly haunted by the killing, and by the fact that, in her illness, her mother had returned to the Catholic church of her childhood, rejecting her husband’s rationalism. Although Barbara can intellectually explain this deathbed conversion as a psychological phenomenon, she cannot explain away the fears which follow her, her nightmares, her new, doubting, and unwilling fascination with religion. Returning to her home and forced by an overflow of guests to sleep in her dead mother’s bed, Barbara imagines poisoning her father, champion of the rationality which has failed her; horrified by this thought, she kills herself. Chilton’s strength as a writer is in her willingness to confront serious philosophical issues, while refusing to accept easy answers. In her last novel the reader senses Chilton’s intensely honest but futile effort to answer unanswerable ultimate questions. BIBLIOGRAPHY: WLB (May 1929). —SUZANNE HENNING UPHAUS
CHIN, Marilyn Born Mei Ling Chin, 14 January 1955, Hong Kong Daughter of George and Rose Chin; married Charles Moore, 1993 Poet and professor Marilyn Chin was born in Hong Kong and raised in Portland, Oregon. She received a B.A. in Chinese
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American Literature from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1977 and worked as a translator and editor in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa from 1978 to 1982. She earned her M.F.A. from the University of Iowa in 1981 and was coeditor of the Iowa Review in 1984. Chin taught in the creative writing department at San Diego State University from 1988 to 1996, when she became a professor of English and Asian American studies. Chin is the director of San Diego State’s Hugh C. Hyde Living Writer Series, which brings respected authors to the university to discuss their works. She has been a visiting professor at several other California universities. Since graduating from the University of Massachusetts, Chin has translated or edited several volumes of Asian poetry and prose, including Devil’s Wind: A Thousand Steps or More by Gozo Yoshimasu (1980), Selected Poems of Ai Qing (1982), Writing from the World (1985), and Dissident Song: A Contemporary Asian American Anthology (1991). Chin’s own writings have appeared in anthologies like Two Hundred Contemporary Poets (1981) and Breaking Silence: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Poets (1984). She has also contributed to periodicals, including Yellow Silk, Massachusetts Review, and Ms. Among her awards are National Endowment for the Arts grants in 1984 and 1991 and a Yaddo Writer’s Colony fellowship from 1990 to 1994. Chin’s first volume of original poetry, Dwarf Bamboo, was published in 1987 to critical praise. Like much of her writing, the poems in Dwarf Bamboo focus on what it means to be a first-generation Asian American (‘‘I’m Ten, Have Lots of Friends, and Don’t Care’’) and the subjugation of Asian women in a male-dominated society (‘‘Homage to Diana Toy’’). The latter is a friend institutionalized in a mental hospital to whom Chin writes: ‘‘Remember, what they deny you won’t hurt you. / What they spare you, you must make shine, / so shine, shine, shine. . . .’’ Other verses comment on the cultural stereotypes of Asian Americans or, as in ‘‘Chinaman’s Chance,’’ the difficulty in integrating both American and Chinese cultures: If you were a Chinese born in America, who would you believe, Plato who said what Socrates said, Or Confucius in his bawdy way: ‘‘So a male child is born to you I am happy, very very happy.’’ The railroad killed your great-grandfather. His arms here, his legs there. . . How can we remake ourselves in his image? Cultural assimilation is a particularly strong theme in Chin’s second work, The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty (1994), a collection of prose and verse. Among the pieces in this work is ‘‘How I Got That Name: An Essay on Assimilation,’’ in which Chin writes of her restaurant-owner father’s obsession with Western culture and mores. Her father became so enamored of film star Marilyn Monroe that he changed his daughter’s name from Mei Ling to Marilyn. Chin recalls her name change to that of ‘‘some tragic white woman / swollen with gin and Nembutal’’ with a mixture of bitterness and sorrow.
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Chin’s ability with language is revealed in other verses, which are by turns funny, earthy, and bleak, but always clever in their use of spare imagery and symbolism. Chin made the following comments on her writing in an interview for Contemporary Women Poets: ‘‘I believe that my work is daring, both technically and thematically. . . . My work is seeped with the themes and travails of exile, loss and assimilation. What is the loss of country if it were not the loss of self?’’ In discussing the compulsion to write, she also explained that ‘‘you know you’re a poet when you can’t live without it.’’ BIBLIOGRAPHY: Wang, L. L., and H. Y. Zhao, Chinese American Poetry: An Anthology (1991). Reference works: CANR (1999). CWP (1997). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —LEAH J. SPARKS
CHOPIN, Kate (O’Flaherty) Born 8 February 1851, St. Louis, Missouri; died 22 August 1904, St. Louis, Missouri Daughter of Thomas and Eliza Faris O’Flaherty; married Oscar Chopin, 1870 (died 1882); children: five sons Descended on her mother’s side from the French and Creole elite of St. Louis and on her father’s side from Irish newcomers, Kate Chopin, after her father’s death in 1855, was raised in a household dominated by three generations of widowed women. Her mother filled the home with people attracted to her unusual beauty and vivacity; her grandmother reinforced the religious atmosphere of the home; her great-grandmother enthralled the young girl with many stories ‘‘of the characters and characteristics, often quite intimate, of the city’s founders.’’ Although a child during the Civil War, Chopin strongly supported the South and was deeply affected by the death of her half-brother George. After her graduation from Sacred Heart Convent, she married Oscar Chopin, a native of Louisiana, in 1870. Chopin moved with her husband to New Orleans, where she bore five sons in the next 10 years. The family then settled in Cloutiersville in the Natchitoches Parish, the setting of many of her best stories. Chopin’s husband died in 1882, and she then returned to her mother’s home in St. Louis to begin a new life as a writer. Her first poem, ‘‘If It Might Be,’’ was published in 1899; her first novel, At Fault, appeared in 1890. Chopin wrote most of her small canon of two collections of short stories and two novels in 10 years. The hostile reception of her second novel, The Awakening (1899), seemed to have silenced its author who thereafter wrote only 10 more stories, mostly for young people. Chopin’s earliest writing, ‘‘Emancipation: A Fable’’ dates from 1869, and tells of the confinement and subsequent escape of an animal ‘‘born in a cage,’’ prefiguring her concern for the themes of freedom and nature vs. civilization. Because her central
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character is often a woman in search of freedom, Chopin is admired by feminist critics of today, but not by the moralistic critics of her own day. Chopin’s first novel, At Fault, despite its pedestrian style, is notable for its unromantic characters and its absence of moralizing. The first American novel to treat divorce amorally, it tells of a young widow’s attempts to apply the morality she has been taught to life itself. When she learns her suitor had divorced a weak, alcoholic wife in the past, she insists he return to mend the damage he had done. The subsequent remarriage proves destructive to everyone involved, ultimately leading to the wife’s death. Our heroine must admit it was she who was ‘‘at fault,’’ learning ‘‘there is rottenness and evil in the world, masquerading as right and morality—when we learn to know the living spirit from the dead letter.’’ Allowing her characters to live ‘‘in the world’’ produced the bold realism of the short stories collected in Chopin’s next two books, Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897). These stories, many of them published earlier in magazines, established her reputation as a local colorist because of her vivid recreations of the lives and language of Creoles and Acadians in Louisiana. Both collections further explore the theme of nature vs. civilization, and they also show an increasing concern with women’s quest for self-fulfillment. Chopin’s exploration of this women’s quest began with her first published stories. In ‘‘Wiser Than a God’’ Paula Van Stolz chooses a career over a marriage which could have provided love and economic security, but then succeeds both in becoming a famous pianist and in gaining the love of her music professor. Another story worth noting, ‘‘The Maid of Saint Phillippe,’’ is set in 1765 and tells the story of a young girl who chooses to join the Cherokees, asserting that ‘‘hardships may await me, but let it be death rather than bondage.’’ Through this heroine, Chopin establishes a history of independence for American women. Unfortunately, however, Chopin’s women are not free of biology, and in her highly praised masterpiece, ‘‘Desiree’s Baby,’’ Chopin tells of a woman who drowns herself and her baby when her husband inaccurately suspects her of having the black blood that manifested itself in their child. Biology is also the key to understanding Edna’s fate in The Awakening. Edna, the strongest and most controversial of Chopin’s heroines, has immersed herself in an empty marriage and a confusing maternity. Awakening to a sense of herself through her exposure to the more natural Creole society and through the attentions of Robert LeBrun, she chooses to express herself artistically and sensually despite social and personal repercussions. But although Edna walks away from her marriage and from her children, she cannot escape the biological reality of motherhood. Neither can she achieve her artistic goals, because the artist in Chopin’s novel can only gain her career at the expense of both her social and her sensual self. Edna chooses to save the self she has discovered, but she must do so at the cost of the life she owes her children. As she walks to the beach to join herself with the eternal flux of Nature symbolized by the sea, ‘‘the children appeared before her like antagonists who had overcome her; who
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had overpowered and sought to drag her into the soul’s slavery for the rest of her days. But she knew a way to elude them.’’ Chopin’s superb psychological insight, especially into the lives of her women, her vivid descriptions of Creole and Acadian life, and her deep-felt concern with human relationships and social institutions will preserve her reputation long after the initial excitement of her rediscovery by contemporary critics has passed. OTHER WORKS: The Complete Works of Kate Chopin (edited by P. Seyersted, 2 vols. 1969). Kate Chopin’s papers are in the Missouri Historical Society in St. Louis, as well as in the Eugene Watson Memorial Library of Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bloom, H., ed., Kate Chopin (1987). Bonner, T., The Kate Chopin Companion: With Chopin’s Translations from French Fiction (1989). Boren, L. and S. Davis, eds., Kate Chopin Reconsidered: Beyond the Bayou (1992). Boyd, V. D., ‘‘The Rhetoric of Gender Politics in ‘At Fault’ and Selected Short Stories of Kate Chopin’’ (dissertation, 1995). Chelte, J. S., Philomela’s Tapestry: Empowering Voice Through Text, Texture, and Silence (dissertation, 1996). Dickson, R. J., Ladies Out of Touch: Kate Chopin’s Voiceless and Disembodied Women (dissertation, 1998). Dyer, J., The Awakening: A Novel of Beginnings (1993). Ewell, B. C., Kate Chopin (1986). Fick, T. H., and E. Gold, eds., Kate Chopin (1994). Green, S. D., Kate Chopin: An Annotated Bibliography of Critical Works (1999). Green, S. D., Knowing Is Seeing: Conceptual Metaphor in the Fiction of Kate Chopin (dissertation, 1998). Hoffman, P. E., ‘‘The Search for Self-Fulfillment: Marriage in the Short Fiction of Kate Chopin, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Sarah Orne Jewett’’ (thesis, 1991). Koloski, B., Kate Chopin: A Study of the Short Fiction (1996). Leary, L., Southern Excursions: Essays on Marks Twain and Others (1971). Martin, W., ed., New Essays on The Awakening (1994). Petry, A. H., ed., Critical Essays on Kate Chopin (1996). Podlasli, H. M., Freedom and Existentialist Choice in the Fiction of Kate Chopin (dissertation, 1991). Russell, K. E., Hidden Darkness: Landscape as Psychological Symbol in Kate Chopin’s Fiction (dissertation, 1998). Seyersted, P., Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography (1990). Sparks, L. V., Counterparts: The Fiction of Mary Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Kate Chopin (1993). Springer, M., Edith Wharton and Kate Chopin: A Reference Guide (1976). The Awakening: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical and Historical Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Five Contemporary Critical Perspectives (1993). Toth, E., Kate Chopin (1993). Toth, E., Unveiling Kate Chopin (1999). Van Sittert, B. C., Social Institutions and Biological Determinism in the Fictional World of K. Chopin (dissertation, 1975). Reference works: Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia (1987). DAB. NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Twayne’s Women Authors on CD-ROM (1995). Other references: Kate Chopin (video, 1994). Kate Chopin and the 19th-Century Woman (audiocassette, 1987). Kate Chopin
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Newsletter. Markham Review (1968). Perspectives on Kate Chopin: Proceedings from the Kate Chopin International Conference, 6-8 April 1989, Northwestern State University, Natchitoches, Louisiana (1990).Southern Review (1975). The Courage to Write: Women Novelists of the Nineteenth Century (audiocassette, 1993). —THELMA J. SHINN
CHURCH, Ella Rodman (McIlvane) Born 1831; death date unknown Wrote under: Ella Rodman Ella Rodman Church’s publications include novels, children’s stories, and pamphlets on gardening, needlework, and bird life. Church’s major novel is The Catanese; or, The Real and the Ideal (1853). Set in southern Italy, the novel presents an interesting blend of sentimental and gothic modes. Characters such as the depraved priest, Father Roberts, and the pious heroine, Phillippa, are standard Gothic types; however, in the portraits of the King and Queen of the Castel Novo, Church presents characters whose complex, imperfect relationship suggests her strong interest in exploring the subtleties of male-female liaisons. Flights of Fancy (1853) is Church’s collection of short fiction. In ‘‘First Impressions,’’ one of the simplest but best tales, a husband and wife affectionately recall their initial negative impressions of each other. In several other tales, Church experiments with the dramatic monologue form. The best is ‘‘The Widower,’’ in which Church traces the emotional life of a spinster through her journals and interior monologues. Of central interest in the collection is the two-part saga of the Clavers family. In the first tale, ‘‘The Wife’s Revenge,’’ a young wife leaves her husband to become a famous actress. Whereas the reader’s sympathy should go to the abandoned husband who must rear their infant daughter alone, Church deftly reverses this attitude through a series of flashbacks illustrating how Duncan Clavers’ obsessive drive for power, money, and a more beautiful wife created his tragedy. Eventually, his teenage daughter learns of his coldness to her mother and deserts him to live with her. The second part of the narrative, ‘‘Minna Clavers,’’ is the story of the daughter’s maturity and the backstage world of the theater. Church is skilled in creating complex characters. She is particularly good at sketching intelligent, creative women with sophisticated patterns of motivation and conflict. Her writings deal thoughtfully with many different types of relationships between men and women. Her consistent theme is the distinction between what is possible and what is only desirable, and she prefers reality with its imperfections to unrealistic expectations. —ROSE F. KAVO
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CHUTE, Beatrice J(oy) Born 3 January 1913, Minneapolis, Minnesota; died 1987 Wrote under: B. J. Chute Daughter of William Young and Mary Pickburn Chute The youngest of three literary sisters, Beatrice J. Chute worked for 10 years in her father’s Minneapolis realty office until his death in 1930 prompted her to move to New York City with her scholarly sister Marchette and their forceful, English-born mother. As professor of writing at Barnard College, Chute also worked as a volunteer for 35 years with the New York Police Department’s youth recreation program. At nineteen Chute established her pen name with a juvenile sports story. Readers assumed B. J. Chute, author of over 50 formulaic stories about young male athletes, was a man. Her first novel, Blocking Back (1938), sets a prep school’s tense popularity contest on the football field. The same rivalry in Shattuck Cadet (1940) divides a Minnesota Episcopal military academy between the letter and the spirit of its disciplinary code. While Chute’s sports stories were appearing regularly in Boy’s Life and in her own collections, Shift to the Right (1944) and Teen-Age Sports Parade (1949), she adjusted the formula to popular romance for McCall’s, Redbook, and Woman’s Home Companion. In 1944, however, she abandoned formula writing. In her most successful novel, Greenwillow (1956), Chute writes a lyric pastoral fantasy. Two ministers in amiable conflict preach delight and damnation to an innocent and isolated community. In an elegant style precisely descriptive of woodlands, kittens, and kitchen smells, Chute collects a pastiche of warm affections—from a farm boy’s pride in a cow to the devotion of two aging spinster sisters. At its heart lies a love story of freshness and appealing charm. In 1960 Greenwillow was produced as a musical play by Lesser Samuels with a score by Frank Loesser. It played almost 100 performances in New York, winning praise for the energetic Halloween ballet, a real cow, and actor Anthony Perkins, who played Gideon. In The Moon and the Thorn (1961) Chute makes a new statement with a courtship novel that unfolds three love stories. She imaginatively creates a folklore to reinterpret the theme of her realistic novels: the fault of infidelity is not love of one person but neglect of another. The sexual passion which can break family ties resolves into a memory under the power of a sister’s understanding affection. Lecturing to young writers in 1962 (‘‘When the Writer Comes of Age’’), Chute examined the subjective style she developed to study inner experience. This style controls most of the collected short stories in One Touch of Nature (1965), an anthology portraying temporary solutions to perpetual domestic conflicts. In Katie (1978), Chute creates a sexual comedy in the eloquent, whimsical style of her best work. Katie rebels against her mother’s and sisters’ doctrine of free love by chastely demanding a
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marriage proposal from every suitor until the acceptable bridegroom, like his devoted cat, unobtrusively joins her affectionate female ménage. Chute has a genius for making believable characters perceive in poetry and speak in clever prose. She wrote her first stories in male disguise and returns frequently to the male protagonist, although her female characters are consistently brighter, more attractive, and more genuine than their lovers and husbands. Chute finds her fictional voice in the popular magazine but modulates it beautifully to describe comfortable people who win small victories for their better selves. OTHER WORKS: Camp Hero (1942). The Fields Are White (1950). The End of Loving (1953). The Blue Cup and Other Stories (1957). Journey to Christmas (1958). The Story of a Small Life (1972). The Good Woman (1986). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Chute, M., Minnesota Writers (1961). Coffin, R. W., ed., New York Theatre Critics Reviews (1960). Wylie, G. M., ‘‘B. J. Chute: Theory and Practice’’ (thesis, 1966). Reference works: CA (1962). More Junior Authors (1963). Other references: WLB (Sept. 1950). Marchette and B.J. Chute (videocassette, 1958). —GAYLE GASKILL
CHUTE, Carolyn Born 14 June 1947, Portland, Maine Daughter of Joseph R. and Annie Prindall Penny; married James Hawkes, 1963 (divorced 1971); Michael Chute, 1978; children: Joannah, Reuben (died in infancy) The oldest of three children, Carolyn Chute grew up in a military housing development in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. At sixteen, after dropping out of high school, she married a factory worker, James Hawkes, who was as disenchanted with school as she was. Divorced at twenty-four, Chute picked potatoes, scrubbed floors, cleaned chickens, and performed low-paying jobs to supplement the meager child support Hawkes could provide for their daughter, Joannah. She rarely made more than $2,000 per year. In 1978 Chute married a sometimes-employed woodsman eight years her junior, Michael Chute—a man slow with words because of illiteracy and a mild speech impediment. Though Chute completed high school by taking evening classes and then took several courses at the University of Southern Maine, she is a slow reader and probably had read no more than 30 books by the time her first novel was published. Her novels and her stories are authentic, powerful regional fiction about what it means to be poor in backwoods Maine. Some critics have denounced the novels for wallowing in deprivation, while others commend Chute’s humor, sensitivity, and compassion for those who do not take part in the American dream.
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Clearly, it is not the social implications of her characters’ lives that interest her, for she wrote, ‘‘Ever since the beginning of time, and until the world ends, there will be some people who will get everything and others that don’t.’’ It is rather the struggle, and the human dignity of those, like Chute herself, who have lived in hunger, shame, and deprivation that she wants to make known. Despite their enraged, violent, incestuous, tacky, frustrated, and ignorant ways, the characters in The Beans of Egypt, Maine (1985) and Letourneau’s Used Auto Parts (1989) exact from the reader not only attention but also respect. Poverty and human connectedness are central themes in Chute’s fiction, as in the author’s life. The first novel is dedicated to her son, Reuben Chute, who died in infancy from the negligent medical attention available to the poor. Chute began writing it as self-help. She gave her son’s name to the worst Bean character, whose rage is bred by poverty. Often the violence is against women. Reuben used to beat his ex-wife; his cousin, Beal, rapes Earlene Pomerleau. Earlene drifts into marriage with Beal, but ends up Reuben’s woman, after Beal is killed before her eyes and Reuben has come home from prison for nearly beating a game warden to death. In contrast to Reuben and his rage is green-thumbed Roberta Bean, earth mother to a brood of adoring children, some of them Beal’s. Chute got some publicity when, in a December 1992 interview in Spin, singer Kurt Cobain and his wife, Courtney Love, named their daughter Frances Bean Cobain, supposedly after the novel, which the interviewer described as ‘‘the ultimate white trash novel.’’ Just down the road from Egypt is Miracle City, the setting of Chute’s second novel, whose name reflects the heart of gold of Big Lucien Letourneau, who fills his home with stray individuals along with all the children he sires. He operates a trailer park free of charge for the down-and-outs in his battle against the book’s only real villain, the housing code man. With the third book set in the area, Merry Men (1994), Booklist reviewer Donna Seaman coined the phrase ‘‘Egyptmainea’’ for the series. This time we follow the life of Lloyd Barrington. We see him as an eight-year-old boy whose mother has died, leaving him and his womanizing father and uncles to fend for themselves. Thinking himself a young Johnny Appleseed, he is Super Tree Man, planting maple tree seedlings in the yards of less fortunate neighbors by night. We watch him grow into a very young grandfather. Along with Lloyd’s strange Uncle Walt (Unk Walty), who makes life-sized sculptures of the residents of Egypt, Maine, Chute’s staples appear throughout the book, with an ex-con (Carroll Plummer) and violent death (a housewife is shot to death in her backyard). She deviates from her poverty-ridden path to tell the story of Gwen, a rich widow who returns to Egypt and pursues Lloyd. The book came about as a result of Chute’s leadership, in the early 1990s, of her own movement of the poor and underrepresented, which most called ‘‘The Second Maine Militia,’’ but which she referred to as her ‘‘Wicked Good Militia.’’ The book also tells about the militia and offers a fascinating and deep look into the tensions which exist between Maine natives and those from ‘‘away.’’ Two additional novels, The School on Hearts Content Road and Snow, were as yet forthcoming from Harcourt at the time of this writing.
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Photography books have also been the focus of two of Chute’s recent works, as she puts words to the pictures. The first of the pair, Up River: The Story of a Maine Fishing Community, teamed the regional writer with photographer Olive Pierce and focused on the real people of Maine, mostly hard-working, mostly poverty-stricken, so she doesn’t stray far from her usual tree. Well-known novelist Peter Matthiessen said of the book, ‘‘It conveys sharply and poignantly, in text as well as photographs, the gritty culture of a last outpost of the beleaguered commercial fishing communities on our diminished coasts.’’ The second, Elmer Walker: Hermit to Hero, was due for publication in mid-1999. But her poverty-stricken upbringing and erratic schooling have not resulted in someone ignorant. Quite the contrary, the shy, genial personality, combined with a disarmingly rumpled-looking exterior, contains a sharp mind within. Active in local politics, she talks about everything from the American economic climate to shoddy product workmanship in numerous public appearances. She also teaches creative writing classes, including at the University of Southern Maine, and has gained words of praise and recognition from colleagues such as Joyce Carol Oates. Chute started writing, the only activity for which she felt qualified, when she was eight years old. As a part-time correspondent for the Portland Evening Express, she learned to edit and to detach herself emotionally from what she was writing. Her widely disparate narrative styles, as in Earlene’s rural first-person, next-to-articulate narration in Beans, together with the anecdotal prose of Auto Parts, belie a meticulous writing process. Chute considers herself a perfectionist who edits her work painstakingly, particularly at its inception. In Chute, the state of Maine has a powerful native voice. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1988). CLC (1986). Other references: Ms. (April 1986). New England Review and Bread Loaf (Winter 1985, interviews). People Weekly (25 March 1985). —ELISABETH SANDBERG, UPDATED BY DARYL F. MALLETT
CHUTE, Marchette (Gaylord) Born 16 August 1909, Hazelwood, Minnesota; died 6 May 1994 Daughter of William Young and Mary Pickburn Chute The second of three daughters born to a Minneapolis realtor and his English-born wife, Marchette Chute studied at the Minneapolis School of Art before earning her B.A. from the University of Minnesota in 1930. After her father’s death in 1939, Chute moved to a Manhattan apartment with her mother and younger sister, novelist Beatrice J. (B. J.) Chute. Chute’s diligently researched reconstructions of the lives of Shakespeare and Chaucer have contributed a great deal to scholarship about the ages in which they wrote. In Shakespeare of
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London (1949), still in print after 30 years, Chute surveys wills, law suits, council minutes, and church registers to detect the affections and jealousies that reveal late Elizabethan personalities, and then threads them into historical speculations. The remarkable absence of lawsuits in Shakespeare’s company, for example, suggests harmonious personal loyalties. Chute’s Shakespeare is a successful theatrical investor, an actor-writer who knows his craft, his company, and all the classes of his audience; he is also a householder who must remain aloof from his Stratford neighbors. Chute’s imagination occasionally produces dubious assertions: from excuses for slow mail she contrives a lonely Stratford death for little Hamnet Shakespeare while his unknowing father tours the provinces. Generally, however, she offers her wide audience encyclopedic research with novelistic relish. Chute had discovered her writing forte in Geoffrey Chaucer of England (1946), a popular literary biography growing ingeniously from her wide contextual research. Details of international diplomacy and wine trade reveal Chaucer’s social status; of King Edward’s courts, his audience’s attitudes; and of the Romance of the Rose, his literary prototypes. Chute’s commentaries are sound and feminist, alert to Chaucer’s sympathy for faithless Criseyde, his bitterness in the Merchant’s tale of courtly lust, and his portrait of marriage as loving partnership in the Franklin’s tale. Chute’s practical criticism and rich storytelling introduce Chaucer to a popular audience. The artful scholarship that portrays Shakespeare or Chaucer as practical, friendly men of their times meets an obstacle in Ben Jonson of Westminster (1953). Chute describes Jonson’s environment with entertaining detail—the lot of a poor scholar in Camden’s school, the grim struggle of a soldier in the Low Countries, the controversial Elizabethan theater, and the Jacobean court where Jonson acted and wrote—but despite earnest diligence, she cannot quite approach her subject. She accepts Jonson’s self-proclamation as dictator of a moral, truly classical English theater without acknowledging the dramatic inadequacies, classical misreadings, and sheer self-promotion. Though she has read Jonson’s vituperative satires, she discounts their revelation of his bitter jealousy, vulgarity, and self-disgust. In Jonson’s eulogy to Shakespeare— ‘‘He was not of an age but for all time’’—Chute is so pleased to find practical friendship that she overlooks the triumph of critical acumen that makes his words a tribute to both men. With Two Gentle Men: The Lives of George Herbert and Robert Herrick (1959), Chute turns her careful, sympathetic personality research to two rural poet-priests of the 17th-century Church of England, defining itself between reformation and civil war. With her usual understated style, Chute frames her subjects with the London and Cambridge of their early development and contrasts their difficult lives as country priests with their forsaken ambitions in politics and Jonsonian poetry. Though she interprets Herbert’s struggling sacred colloquies and Herrick’s classical imitations of country pleasures largely as biographical evidence, she gives a popular audience her sure grasp of historical context. Throughout her writing career, Chute applied her investigative talents to reconstructions of events of biblical stories. The
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Search for God (1941) is a biblical commentary using the techniques of the New Criticism: by placing familiar lines of Scripture into their original contexts, she evokes the personalities of writers behind the words. Chute identifies the Genesis conflict of creative love with punishable sin as an ancient dissatisfaction with human ignorance of the God who would be found in Jesus, the teacher who overcame not only death but irritation with his slow-witted disciples. She initiates her study with Job, who sanctifies intellectual struggle with ecclesiastical authority. Adroit quotation and lucid style compensate for theological simplicity. A sequel to this work, The End of the Search (1946), is a guide to the New Testament history of the early church. Chute emphasizes the Jewish tradition within Christian doctrine, practice, and factionalism. Her contextual approach allows her to overlook Paul’s pharisaical admonitions to women and to admire his panegyric on love, but it gives her little help in decoding the mystic metaphors of Revelation. Chute begins and ends her biography of Jesus of Israel (1961) with messianic prophecies and conflates conflicting gospels to show the son of God as an orthodox, 1st-century Jew under Roman rule. Chute’s diligent, colorful scholarship releases a new historical subject from reverent myths in The First Liberty: A History of the Right to Vote in America, 1619-1850, which she abridged and updated for high school readers in The Green Tree of Democracy (1971). Her detailed colonial history links the hesitant growth of individual political responsibility to English tradition and capitalist expansion. Regressive property requirements dog every extension of the franchise, so Jefferson’s radical Declaration of Independence wins grudging colonial approval chiefly as an access to French aid. Chute treats the suffrage of women and blacks as part of a ceaseless struggle of all citizens to achieve democratic identity. Chute’s many works for children include rhymes about city and country life and juvenile historical romances. In The Wonderful Winter (1954), a runaway young baronet joins Shakespeare’s company for Romeo and Juliet. Because her plot line permits Chute to explore the London theater with a bright child’s delight, its incredible coincidences are excusable. Chute summarizes Shakespeare’s exciting plots in Stories from Shakespeare (1956), a reference work as useful for the young scholar as for the casual adult theatergoer. It is a convenient home reference book that stirs the general reader with an expert’s knowledge. With patient, observant discipline and imagination, Chute lovingly creates historical personalities from her library research, and, in a style that is gracious, gently humorous, unimpassioned, and lucid, presents them to general readers as sympathetic, lively souls concerned with the temporal and timeless issues of their own experience. OTHER WORKS: Rhymes About Ourselves (1932). Rhymes About the Country (1941). The Innocent Wayfaring (1943). Rhymes About the City (1946). An Introduction to Shakespeare (1951). Around and About (1957). ‘‘The Fun of Writing a Book’’ in
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Bulletin of the New York Public Library (1957). The Worlds of Shakespeare (with E. Perrie, 1963). Rhymes About Us (1974).
he broke the door when his foot went through, though on most days he is okay. Except he won’t let her talk on the telephone. And he doesn’t let her look out the window.’’
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Armor, J., ‘‘Bio-bibliography of Marchette Chute’’ (thesis, 1959). Dobbs, P. J., ‘‘Marchette Chute’s Biographies: A Critical Analysis and Definition of Her Life-Writing Style’’ (thesis, 1974). Reference works: CA (1962). CB (1950). Everyman’s Dictionary of Literary Biography (revised edition, 1969). More Junior Authors (1963). SAA (1971). TCA: First Supplement (1955). Other references: Marchette and B. J. Chute (videocassette, 1958).
By the end of the book, Esperanza’s journey toward independence merges two central themes, that of writing and a house of her own. Her rejection of woman’s place in the culture involves not only writing but also leaving the barrio, raising problematic issues of changing class and cultural identity. But Esperanza concludes the book with the promise to return, understood metaphorically, through her writing: ‘‘They will not know I have gone away to come back. For the ones I left behind. For the ones who cannot get out.’’
—GAYLE GASKILL
CISNEROS, Sandra Born 1954, Chicago, Illinois Daughter of Elvira C. Anguiano and Alfredo Cisneros del Moral The daughter of a Mexican father and a Mexican-American mother, and sister to six brothers, Sandra Cisneros has worked as a teacher to high school dropouts, a poet-in-the-schools, a college recruiter, and an arts administrator. She has also taught as a visiting writer at a number of universities around the country. Cisneros is a graduate of the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop and recipient of four writing fellowships for poetry and fiction, two from the National Endowment for the Arts, one from the Lannan Foundation (1991), and one from the MacArthur Foundation (1995). She is the first Chicana writer to be published by a mainstream press (Random House). Told through the point of view of a young girl, Cisneros’ first book of fiction, The House on Mango Street (1984), is characterized by a deceptively simple, accessible style and structure. The novel’s short sections are marvels of poetic language that capture a girl’s vision of the world she inhabits. Esperanza is already painfully aware of the racial and economic oppression her community suffers, but it is the fate of the women in her barrio that has the most profound impact on her, especially as she begins to develop sexually and learns that the same fate might be hers. The parade of women victimized by their culture’s rigid gender roles begins with her great-grandmother, ‘‘a wild horse of a woman, so wild she wouldn’t marry until my great-grandfather threw a sack over her head and carried her off. And the story goes she never forgave him. She looked out the window all her life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow. . . I have inherited her name, but I don’t want to inherit her place by the window.’’ Esperanza bears witness to the hard lessons taught Chicanas about being women and belonging to men: Rafaela whose husband locks her up because she is too beautiful, Minerva who takes her husband back every time he leaves her, Sally whose father beats her. Sally gets married before the eighth grade to escape her father’s domination, only to fall under the control of her husband: ‘‘She is happy except sometimes her husband gets angry and once
Mango Street captures the dialectic between self and community in Chicana writing. Esperanza finds her literary voice through her own cultural experience and that of other Chicanas. She seeks self-empowerment through writing, while recognizing her commitment to Chicanas. Her promise to pass down to other women the power she has gained from writing is fulfilled by the text itself. In Cisneros’ 1984 collection of poetry, My Wicked Wicked Ways, the young voice of Mango Street coexists with that of a grown woman/poet struggling with her contradictory desires. The narrator of these poems wants to be independent and an artist. While she takes many lovers, she prefers to ‘‘dance alone.’’ As Theresa Martínez notes, ‘‘Poetry—both painful and miraculous emerges from a lonely and sometimes isolated self who is, at the same time, truly her core being, a woman who is well worth knowing for her own sake.’’ This struggle to find her place not only as a woman but also as an artist is carried through in Woman Hollering Creek (1991), a collection of short stories. Set on both sides of the border, the stories of Woman capture the ‘‘in-between’’ of Chicano identity, as in ‘‘Mericans,’’ when gringo tourists are disappointed to learn that the picturesque children they have photographed are Americans visiting their Mexican grandmother. It is in these stories that Cisneros first gives full rein to her biting sense of humor: the grandmother’s full moniker is ‘‘the awful grandmother,’’ and the child narrator passes her time in church counting the awful grandmother’s nose hairs. In ‘‘One Holy Night,’’ Cisneros lightens an otherwise depressing tale with confessions like: ‘‘I don’t know how many girls have gone bad from selling cucumbers. I know I’m not the first.’’ In ‘‘My Tocaya,’’ the narrator, Patricia, has a Chicana schoolmate who changes her name to Trish and affects a British accent. ‘‘A girl who wore rhinestone earrings and glitter high heels to school,’’ Patricia observes, ‘‘was destined for trouble that nobody—not God or correctional institutions— could mend.’’ The stories in Woman mine the rich vein of popular culture, as in ‘‘Little Miracles, Kept Promises,’’ and continue Cisneros’ thematic concern with male/female relationships, whether spiraling in old patterns (‘‘Never Marry a Mexican’’) or telling the story of a woman’s escape from a battering husband through the legend of La Llorona in the title story ‘‘Woman Hollering Creek.’’ The woman’s savior appeared in the form of a loud, laughing, pickup truck driving comadre named Felice (Happiness). Felice doesn’t
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need a man. She’s got her truck, and she makes the payments herself. In Loose Woman (1994), a book of love poems, Cisneros poetic voice has grown stronger and more self-assured. Most of the bravado of Wicked Ways has worn off, and the poet who is left alone sometimes finds herself wishing ‘‘books loved back.’’ But she picks herself up and shakes off self-pity in the catalogue poem, ‘‘You Bring Out the Mexican in Me,’’ a rollicking, Whitmanesque howl at love’s power to affirm life. OTHER WORKS: Bad Boys (1980). Hair: Pelitos (1994). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Calderón, H. and J. D. Saldívar, eds., Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology (1991). García, M. and E. McCraken, eds., Rearticulations: The Practice of Chicano Cultural Studies (1994). HornoDelgado, A., et al eds., Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writing and Critical Reading (1989). Kester-Shelton, P., ed., Feminist Writers (1996). López-González, A., et al, eds. Mujer y literatura mexicana y chicana: Culturas en contacts (1990). Quintana, A. E., Chicana Discourse: Negations and Meditations (dissertation, 1990). Reference works: CA (1991). Hispanic Writers (1991). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Americas Review (Fall-Winter 1990, Spring 1990). Critica (1986). Midwest Quarterly (Autumn 1995). Revista Chicano-Riquena (1985). —YVONNE YARBRO-BEJARANO AND HELENA ALONSO
CLAMPITT, Amy (Kathleen) Born 15 June 1920, New Providence, Iowa; died 10 September 1994 Daughter of Roy Justice and Lutie Pauline Felt Clampitt; married Harold L. Korn Amy Clampitt grew up in Iowa on a 125-acre farm, gaining an appreciation for nature but at the same time becoming cognizant of feelings of isolation and unhappiness. Both her love for the natural world and her awareness of the darker emotions are evident throughout her densely literate and allusion-filled work. She has often been hailed as one of the leading contemporary poets in America, a fact especially notable given that her first major collection of poetry was not published until she was sixty-three. While attending Grinnell College in Iowa, she discovered poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who became a major influence. After graduating in 1941, Clampitt moved to New York and studied briefly at Columbia University and later at the New School for Social Research. Never viewing herself as an academic, she dropped out of Columbia and found a job as a secretary at Oxford University Press, where she eventually rose to promotion
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director for the college textbook division. In 1952 she moved to the National Audubon Society, where she served as research librarian. The 1950s were an unhappy period for Clampitt, who felt herself somewhat of a misfit. She wrote several novels during this decade, but none were ever published. In 1959 she returned to Iowa to be closer to her family, but after six months returned to New York. The 1960s, with the decade’s anything-goes acceptance, was a happier time for Clampitt who found success as a freelance editor, writer, and researcher for the next 17 years. In 1977 she accepted a position as editor at E. P. Dutton, where she remained until 1982. During the 1960s and 1970s Clampitt began to concentrate on writing poetry. After being unable to secure a publisher, Clampitt paid Washington Street Press to publish a limited edition of her first collection, Multitudes, Multitudes, which was released in 1973. In 1978 the poetry editor at the New Yorker, Howard Moss, noticed her work and began to publish her frequently, as did other magazines, including the Atlantic Monthly, Kenyon Review and Yale Review. In 1981 the Coalition of Publishers for Employment published her second limited-edition collection, The Isthmus. Two more limited editions of Clampitt’s poetry followed, The Summer Solstice in 1983 and A Homage to John Keats in 1984. Meanwhile, Clampitt’s first major collection, The Kingfisher—the title inspired by a Hopkins poem—was published in 1983 and was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award. The collection is organized around the four elements of fire, water, earth, and air, focusing on natural themes and contains examinations of negative emotions (although rarely of relationships). The sixty-three-year-old’s reputation as a leading contemporary American poet was immediate. Clampitt’s second collection, What the Light Was Like, was published in 1985 and contains 40 poems organized into five sections. Like The Kingfisher and all of her subsequent work, it garnered nearly unanimous critical approval, although some reviewers took issue with individual poems. Clampitt’s poetry is full of allusions to modern and classical literature. A poem in the second collection, ‘‘Voyages: A Homage to John Keats,’’ for example, requires knowledge not only of his poetry but of his correspondence and the facts of his life. Clampitt purposely included some poems on lighter subjects in What the Light Was Like, although the overall darkness of the collection persisted. Three other collections followed, Archaic Figure (1987), Westward (1990), and A Silence Opens (1994), the latter of which was published the year Clampitt died from cancer. Publishers Weekly wrote of the last, ‘‘Clampitt’s gravely luminous fifth volume of poems dwells, with an extraordinary certainty of language, on the uncertain texture of living.’’ The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt (1997) contains excerpts from all of her five previous works but none of the new poems that had surfaced since her death. All of Clampitt’s poetry is challenging to the reader on many levels. Its rich vocabulary includes many unfamiliar words; its
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syntax is complicated; and its allusions, which are central to the poems’ meanings, require an educated audience. While her themes are universal, her topics are wide-ranging and her work brings together travel, science, psychology, metaphysics, myth, foreign language, commerce, nature, art, and, in some instances, humor. Her dense poems defied the 1980s’ trend toward plain-language poetry. Clampitt won a number of awards after her late start as an acclaimed poet, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, membership in the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a MacArthur Foundation grant, and a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s award. She was a writer-in-residence at several colleges, including the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the College of William and Mary, and Amherst. OTHER WORKS: The Essential Donne (ed., 1988). Predecessors, Et Cetera (a collection of essays, 1991). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference Works: Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature (1991). CANR 29 (1990). CBY (1992, 1994). Other references: Economist (15 Aug. 1998). Nation (3 Nov. 1997). New Republic (19 and 26 Sept. 1994, 6 March 1995). NYT (12 Sept. 1994). NYTBR (9 Nov. 1997). Poetry (July 1998). PW (31 Jan. 1994). Time (26 Sept. 1994). Wall Street Journal (7 Nov. 1997). —KAREN RAUGUST
CLAPP, Margaret Antoinette Born 11 April 1910, East Orange, New Jersey; died 3 May 1974, Tyringham, Massachusetts Daughter of Alfred Chapin and Anna Roth Clapp Margaret Antoinette Clapp, who was for many years president of Wellesley College, is primarily known as an educator. In 1948, however, she won a Pulitzer Prize for Forgotten First Citizen: John Bigelow (1947), a biography of the versatile 19thcentury New Yorker who early on found that one career could not absorb all his emotions or energies. Thus Bigelow pursued such diverse careers as practicing law, editing the New York Evening Post with William Cullen Bryant, taking part in Democratic and Republican party politics, and serving as minister to France during the Civil War. He had a lifetime interest in progressive change and was involved in prison reform, abolition, and urban reform. He ended his career as a founder of the New York Public Library. Clapp wrote with a keen eye for character and was sensitive to the changing aspirations of a man who ‘‘never did completely fulfill the worldly promise he showed as a young man.’’ In
Clapp’s view, the crucial event in Bigelow’s life was his discovery, at age thirty-seven, of Swedenborgian philosophy. This discovery coincided with a critical time of questioning in Bigelow’s personal life. Under Swedenborg’s influence, Bigelow increasingly turned his attention to public service. In Forgotten First Citizen, Clapp focuses primarily on the public, rather than the private, figure. She argues that the ‘‘public arena of disinterested service’’ was the focus of Bigelow’s life. Although Clapp draws on Bigelow’s extensive journals, she does not trace the actual development of his thought. Instead, she stresses the practical consequences of his theories. Clapp had a firm grasp of the internal workings of the American political system and of the role that the political publicist plays in American life. Her grasp of political reality and her perceptive approach to the life of public service gave strength and focus to her portrait of Bigelow. With clarity and understanding she portrayed the growth of the private individual’s commitment to public interest. She noted that both Bigelow and Bryant viewed the primary role of the newspaper to be the formation of public opinion. Both men stressed the influence the press could have in shaping the quality of life in democratic America. Clapp saw Bigelow as a man of ‘‘singularly balanced qualities of mind and spirit.’’ He was, she contended, a man of idealism and practicality, of realism and integrity. Though he had a clear sense of the power of money, he was not committed to obtaining wealth. In the end, it was Bigelow’s long-term, clear-headed commitment to public welfare in New York City that won him the city’s high praise as ‘‘first citizen.’’ Clapp edited The Modern University in 1950, and in it she shares with Bigelow a concern for educating American society. In the one chapter Clapp herself wrote, she focuses on the postWorld War II demand for the democratization of higher education. She clearly evaluates the immediate opportunities and problems associated with that dream, and discusses the difficulty of financing such a commitment. She stresses the need to balance enthusiasm for scientific research with a concern for education as the transmission of culture. As an educator, Clapp was responsive to the difficult task Bigelow set for himself, the task of educating the American society of his day to issues of public concern. As she reveals in The Modern University, Clapp shared Bigelow’s concern for determining long range goals and devising practical day-to-day actions to translate vision into reality. Clapp’s most important biographical achievement lies in taking a relatively minor figure in the American political scene and demonstrating convincingly the impact that such a man can have in shaping the quality of American life. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CB (1948). Other references: NYT (22 June 1947, 4 May 1974). NYHTB (22 July 1947). Saturday Review of Literature (26 July 1947). —INZER BYERS
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CLAPPE, Louise (Amelia Knapp) Smith
CLARK, Ann Nolan
Born 28 July 1819, Elizabethtown, New Jersey; died 9 February 1906, Morristown, New Jersey Wrote under: Dame Shirley Daughter of Moses and Lois Lee Smith; married Fayette Clappe, 1848 or 1849
Born 1898, Las Vegas, New Mexico; died 13 December 1995 Daughter of Patrick F. and Mary Dunn Nolan; married Thomas P. Clark, 1919
Shortly after Louise Smith Clappe’s marriage to her physician husband the couple migrated to the California gold fields where, they believed, there would be a great need for the services of a physician. The couple lived in Rich Bar and the neighboring gold camp of Indian Bar until near the end of 1852. From this experience came Clappe’s observations of life in the gold camps, The Shirley Letters (1854-55). Although she wrote other letters and verse both before and after The Shirley Letters, none came even close to the latter’s literary quality. The Shirley Letters were written to Clappe’s sister Mary in 1851-52 while Clappe was living in the gold camps. Their purpose was ‘‘. . . to give you a true picture (as much as in me lies) of mining life and its peculiar temptations, ‘nothing extenuating nor setting down aught in malice.’’’ The letters reflect a spirit of spontaneity and vitality, giving detailed observations and vivid commentary on daily life in the gold camps. Ferdinand Clappe Ewer, editor of The Pioneer; or California Monthly Magazine, published them serially from January 1854, to December 1855, and described them as ‘‘. . . penned in that light, graceful, epistolary style, which only a lady can fall into; and as they are a transcript of the impressions which the condition of California affairs, two years ago, made upon a cultivated mind, [they] cannot fail to be of general interest.’’ In the 1933 edition of the letters Carl I. Wheat wrote in the introduction: ‘‘. . . the ‘Shirley Letters’ were at once recognized as the first literary production of outstanding merit inspired by the gold rush. Men who had lived through those earliest mad years of California’s peopling found in them a faithful and accurate portrayal of scenes which they themselves had witnessed. . . . In her words we of today may in truth see and come . . . to understand life in the California mines as it was. . . . Her woman’s eye caught and recorded an array of intimate details which no man would have noticed. These . . . elements . . . lend brilliancy and verisimilitude to the picture which she painted. . . . With the ‘Shirley Letters’ Clappe created a real masterpiece.’’ BIBLIOGRAPHY: Oglesby, R. E., introduction to Louise Clappe’s The Shirley Letters (1970). Paul, R. W., ‘‘In Search of ‘Dame Shirley,’’’ in Pacific Historical Review 33 (May 1964). Russell, T. C., introduction to The Shirley Letters from California in 1851-52 (1922). Walker, F., San Francisco’s Literary Frontier (1939). Wheat, C. I., introduction to California in 1851: The Letters of Dame Shirley (1933). Reference works: NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). —LOIS E. CHRISTENSEN
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A shy young girl, Ann Nolan Clark first attended convent schools and later majored in education at Highland University. Her early life in Las Vegas was inculcated with the attitudes and lifestyles of four distinct cultural groups: Indian, Spanish, French, and Anglo-European. This influence later contributed to Clark’s belief in cultural understanding and to her acceptance of divergent peoples. Her interest in minority children caused her to enter the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1930 as a junior high school teacher. Since then Clark taught Indian children throughout the Southwest, completed education-oriented UNESCO assignments in South America, and authored several children’s books. Clark’s first significant books were published by the Bureau of Indian Affairs as bilingual texts after she began working as a teacher for the Tesuque Pueblo Indian children. Written in English and Tesuque, these simple stories reflect Indian culture, traditions, and history. In simple, poetic, rhythmic prose, these early stories relate the lifestyles of the Plains Indians, the Papapa, the Pueblo, and the Navaho. One of Clark’s early Navaho readers, In My Mother’s House (1941), was published in a trade edition, and helped Clark gain national recognition. It reflects the Navaho respect for nature and pride in their culture. Throughout her works Clark has maintained a reverent attitude toward minority cultures and has depicted them as quiet people with great human dignity. Their cultural heritage always remains intact, and the pride within the group is finally acclaimed by the new generation. Clark’s primary concern is to inform her young readers of the strengths found within the many different ethnic groups living in the U.S. She is intent upon portraying each group as a strong, positive culture whose only threats come from outside. Winner of the Regina Medal for her continued distinguished contribution to children’s literature and of the Newbery Medal for her book The Secret of the Andes (1953), Clark maintained a high standard. In her adult book Journey to the People (1969), she says ‘‘I believe children need children’s books that have been written with honesty, accuracy, and reality . . . that enrich imagination and foster appreciation.’’ Some of her finest later works (e.g., Circle of Seasons, 1970; Year Walk, 1975) concern the yearly patterns of a cultural group, and depict a changing community whose rituals, goals, and aspirations are being affected by other nationalities within their particular geographic region. Clark’s early books were heralded for their honesty and their sympathy with Native American Indians in a period when there were no valuable children’s materials written that espoused the Indian’s viewpoint. Her early books remain eloquent, lasting portraits of American Indians and of South Americans. Clark’s books in the later 1970s deal with immigrants to the U.S. and their adjustments, including Spanish (Year Walk, 1975), Finnish (All This Wild Land, 1976), and Vietnamese (To Stand Against the
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Wind, 1978) peoples. While these stories contain the same positive theme of respect and understanding, they are less significant to children’s literature. Her earlier stories, which were written largely for nonreading Indian children, are more skilled in plot, characterization, and tone. Her early writing style reflects the quiet simple attitudes of American Indian tribes and helps young readers to respect and understand Native Americans. OTHER WORKS: The Slim Butte Raccoon (1942, 1996). Little Navajo Bluebird (1943). Bringer of the Mystery Dog: A Story of a Young Boy, Who in His Quest for Bravery Brought the First Horse to His People, the Antelope Band, a Plains Indian tribe, About the Year 1700 (1943, 1996). Young Hunter of Picuris (1943, 1996). Blue Canyon Horse (1954). Third Monkey (1956). The Little Indian Basket Maker (1957). Santiago (1957). There Still Are Buffalo (1958, 1996). The Pine Ridge Porcupine (1958). Little Boy with Three Names (1959). A Santo for Pasqualita (1959). A Child’s Story of New Mexico (1960). World Song (1960). Looking-for-Something (1961). The Desert People (1962). Paco’s Miracle (1962). A Keepsake (1963). Bear Cub (1963). Brave Against the Enemy (1963). Medicine Man’s Daughter (1963). Tia Maria’s Garden (1963). Father Kino; Priest to the Pimas (1963). Who Wants to Be a Prairie Dog? (1964, 1996). This for That (1965). Little Herder in Autumn (1965). Little Herder in Summer (1965). Brother Andre of Montreal (1967). Summer Is for Growing (1968). Sun Journey; A Story of Zuni Pueblo (1968, 1988). Little Herder in Winter (1969). Along Sandy Trails (1969). These Were the Valiant; A Collection of New Mexico Profiles (1969). Little Herder in Spring (1970). Hoofprint in the Wind (1972). Ann Nolan Clark Manuscripts (mixed materials, 1962). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Miller, B. M., and E. W. Field, eds., Newbery Medal Books: 1922-1955 with Their Authors’ Acceptance Papers and Related Material Chiefly from the Horn Book Magazine (1955). Whitehouse, J. C., ‘‘The Early Life of Ann Nolan Clark: A Contextual Biography’’ (thesis, 1987). Other references: WLB (Nov. 1960). —JILL P. MAY
CLARK, Eleanor Born 6 July 1913, Los Angeles, California; died February 1996 Daughter of Frederick H. and Eleanor Phelps Clark; married Robert Penn Warren, 1952 Although born in California, Eleanor Clark grew up in Roxbury, Connecticut, and describes herself as an ‘‘unregenerate Yankee.’’ She attended a one-room country school in Roxbury, convent schools in Europe, and then Rosemary Hall. After her graduation from Vassar in 1934, she wrote essays and reviews for a number of periodicals including the Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, New Republic, and the Nation. Her writing demonstrated
the control and conciseness which the essay demands. From 1936 to 1939, Clark was a member of the editorial staff of W. W. Norton; in 1937, she edited with Horace Gregory a collection of works by young writers called New Letters in America. It included her first published short story. After the publication of her first novel, The Bitter Box (1946), Clark received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and an award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. The Bitter Box, a heavily symbolic novel, deals with the acceptance of life as it is and the possibility of redemption through love and suffering. Clark carefully manipulates point of view, balancing surrealism and stream of consciousness with a commentary by an objective narrator who is more interested in ideas than events. In 1952 Clark finished the first of her unusual ‘‘travel’’ books produced during long periods abroad, Rome and A Villa. Although it is concerned with setting, the book’s effect is meditative rather than descriptive. It reveals a keen awareness of atmosphere and the passing of time. Clark’s observations are not limited to place but encompass the political, literary, and personal as well. Katherine Anne Porter has said that Rome and A Villa is ‘‘autobiographical in the best sense’’ because it reflects the impact of the outer world upon the inner. For her next book, The Oysters of Locmariaquer (1964), Clark was awarded the National Book Award for nonfiction. Oysters, too, is a book about a place, and it too belongs to a unique genre. It combines the techniques of the essay and the novel to portray life in a little town on the northwest coast of France which nurtures and produces most of the world’s oysters. As she describes, Clark writes of history, ecology, and philosophy with a profusion of detail enriched by allusions to modern and classical literature. Eyes, Etc.: A Memoir (1977), like so much that Clark has written, belongs in a class of its own. It is a moving but never sentimental account of a brief period in her life, shortly after she learned she was rapidly going blind. Eyes tells of the author’s angry and always realistic response to ‘‘the event,’’ her ‘‘affliction.’’ But the book is also an opinionated and wry commentary on contemporary life, especially on our melodramatic and simplistic methods of coping with frustration and disaster. Against this background are woven the events of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Clark constantly contrasts Homer’s tough-minded portrayal of suffering and heroism with feeble modern attempts to cope with life. The book contains the familiar themes of past and present, renewal, suffering, and survival. Her style is even more cryptic than usual, due, perhaps, to the circumstances under which she was writing. OTHER WORKS: Dark Wedding by Ramón José Sender (trans. by Clark, 1943). Song of Roland (adaptation by Clark, 1960). Baldur’s Gate (1970). Dr. Heart: A Novella and Other Stories (1974). Tamrart: 13 Days in the Sahara (1984). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Miller, V. T., The Literary Achievement and Reputation of Eleanor Clark (dissertation, 1991). Writers at
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Work: A Tribute to Elizabeth Bishop, Eleanor Clark, Mary Crapo Hyde and Muriel Rukeyser: An Exhibit, June 1-July 30 (1984). Other references: CW (13 June 1952). Ms. (Nov. 1977). Nation (27 April 1946). NYRB (30 July 1964). SR (29 Oct. 1977). —JUDITH P. JONES
CLARK, Mary Higgins Born 24 December 1929, New York, New York Daughter of Luke Joseph and Nora C. Durkin Higgins; married Warren F. Clark (died 1964); Raymond Charles Ploetz, 1978 (annulled); children: Marilyn, Warren, David, Carol, Patricia. Mary Higgins Clark’s work portrays average people unsuspectingly tossed into terrifying situations. Appealing primarily to women, her novels involve a woman and/or her children being threatened with kidnaping, murder, or abuse. A combination of suspense and mystery, Clark’s novels show the fear of her characters and provide clues for the solving of myriad crimes. Clark was born on 24 December 1929, a middle daughter between two sons. Her father, the owner of a bar, died when she was ten years old. Her mother did menial jobs to support her children, and the children took part-time jobs while still in school. Foregoing college, Clark went to secretarial school and secured a job in the field of advertising. After working for three years, she met with a friend who was an airline stewardess and listened to her friend describe and complain about conditions in faraway countries. Clark quit her job and signed on as a stewardess for Pan Am. A witness to much political unrest, she was on the last American flight out of Czechoslovakia before it turned communist. Only a year was devoted to world travel. After that, Clark married her childhood sweetheart and raised five children. At the same time, she decided to write fiction. Attendance at a creative writing class at New York University led Clark to write a short story based on her experiences as a stewardess. Entitled ‘‘Last Flight from Danubia,’’ the story involves a stowaway from Czechoslovakia and the stewardess who discovers him and must decide his fate. Forty rejection slips later, the story was sold to Extension magazine for $100. Clark’s husband died of a heart attack in 1964. Faced with the same situation her mother had faced when Clark was ten, the new widow sought work as a writer, turning to radio shows about American history, cooking, and feature news stories. She wrote prodigiously, turning out approximately 15 stories a week. She also spent this time writing short fiction, getting up at five o’clock a.m. so she could have two hours to write before the children went to school. Using her experiences from the radio show ‘‘Portrait of a Patriot,’’ Clark wrote Aspire to the Heavens: A Portrait of
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George Washington (1969). Though not a success, the experience encouraged her to write book-length fiction. Going from a hired writer of radio shows to a partner in her own radio show production company, Clark looked over the fiction she enjoyed reading—it was almost all mysteries—and decided to write thrillers. Based on a news story about a mother who murdered her children to keep them out of her ex-husband’s custody and then claimed that they had been kidnaped, Where Are the Children? (1974) began Clark’s successful writing career. Earning a $3,000 advance in hardcover, Clark in three months was able to obtain a $100,000 advance for paperback rights. She used the money for her children’s education as well as her own, obtaining a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1978. Clark also remarried in 1978 to Raymond Ploetz, but the marriage was later annulled. While pursuing her education, Clark followed her first novel with A Stranger Is Watching (1978), which garnered her over $1 million in paperback rights. This time she portrayed the kidnaping of a man’s son and lover by the stranger who killed his wife. The Cradle Will Fall (1980), A Cry in the Night (1982), and Stillwatch (1984) followed in turn, all involve a woman who is threatened by someone planning on killing her. Weep No More, My Lady (1987), in contrast, is a more traditional murder mystery set in a California health spa. All Clark’s books became bestsellers, and in 1988 she received monetary recognition of this fact when she obtained a record-breaking $10.1 million contract from Simon & Schuster for four novels and a collection of short stories. In 1992 she received a contract for $35 million for five novels and a memoir. Along with her financial success, Clark obtained honorary degrees from Villanova University and Rider College. She also won the New Jersey Author Award in 1969, 1977, and 1978, the French Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in 1989, the Gold Medal of Honor from the American Irish Society in 1993, and a Gold Medal in Education from the National Arts Club in 1994. Clark continued to write novels well into the 1990s, accompanied by her daughter Carol Higgins Clark, who also writes bestselling suspense novels. OTHER WORKS: While My Pretty One Sleeps (1989). The Anastasia Syndrome and Other Stories (1991). Loves Music, Loves to Dance (1991). All Around the Town (1992). The Lottery Winner: Alvira and Willy Suspense Stories (1994). I’ll Be Seeing You (1993). Remember Me (1994). Let Me Call You Sweetheart (1995). Silent Night (1995). Moonlight Becomes You (1996). My Gal Sunday (1997). Pretend You Don’t See Her (1997). Stillwatch (1997). All Through the Night (1998). You Belong to Me (1998). We’ll Meet Again (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Pelzer, L. C., Mary Higgins Clark: A Critical Companion (1995). Reference works: CANR 51 (1996). Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers (1991). Beacham’s Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction (1996). Great Women Mystery Writers (1994). —ROSE SECREST
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CLARKE, Rebecca Sophia Born 22 February 1833, Norridgewock, Maine; died 16 August 1906, Norridgewock, Maine Wrote under: Sophie May Daughter of Asa and Sophia Bates Clarke Rebecca Sophia Clarke, who as ‘‘Sophie May’’ delighted child readers for four decades, was educated at the Norridgewock (Maine) Female Academy and at home, where she had private tutors in Latin and Greek. Subsequently, she taught school for several years in Evansville, Illinois, until increasing deafness caused her to retire to her family home in Norridgewock. Clarke quickly became a regular contributor to the Little Pilgrim (a juvenile magazine) and to the Congregationalist. Following the practice of the time, she then collected her periodical stories and republished them as series books. In the introduction to the first volume of Little Prudy stories (1863), she greets her young readers, saying, ‘‘You who have read of Prudy Parlin, in the Congregationalist and Little Pilgrim, and have learned to love her there, may love her better in a book by herself, with pictures.’’ Little Prudy was the first and title volume of Clarke’s first series. Her second, and most popular, series was Dotty Dimple, which appeared from 1867 to 1869. Her other principal juvenile works include Little Prudy’s Flyaway Series (1870-73), the Quinnebasset Series (1871-91), the Flaxie Frizzle Stories (1876-84), and Little Prudy’s Children (1894-1901). Clarke’s greatest strength as a writer for children is her ability to create characters. Her children—some say they were modeled on family members or other residents of Norridgewock— are buoyant, natural, good-hearted, and often naughty. That is, realistic. Whether rationalizing their own naughty behavior by comparing themselves to friends, or suffering through the death of a friend, Clarke’s children remain firmly grounded in reality. Their charm is, however, somewhat lessened for modern readers by Clarke’s custom of having her young children use baby-talk in which, for example, ‘‘the respect of a friend’’ becomes ‘‘spec of a fend.’’ Along with other juvenile writers of her time, Clarke had a tendency to moralize. Although she clearly expects her children to be childishly irresponsible and lacking in understanding, she also lets them understand such behavior is not a part of responsible adult life. Children in her books are not expected to behave as adults, but it is also clear that adults will not be allowed to act like children. Responsible adults, usually parents, are obliged not only to demonstrate and train children in virtuous behavior but also to protect children from whatever danger their own thoughtlessness may bring to them. In addition to her very successful juveniles, Clarke wrote adult novels in which pert and lively heroines are involved in highly romanticized plots. These novels, without exception highly moral, were thought to be appropriate reading for ‘‘middle’’ readers—those ready to graduate from juveniles to general novels.
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OTHER WORKS: Christmas Fairies (1860). The Doctor’s Daughter (1871). Our Helen (1874). The Asbury Twins (1875). Honey (1878). Janet: A Poor Heiress (1882). A Christmas Breeze (1886). The Campion Diamonds (1897). Pauline Wyman (1898). Santa Claus on Snow Shoes, and Other Stories (1898). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: American Authors: 1600-1900 (1938). American Women (1897). DAB (1929). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Other references: Boston Transcript (17 Aug. 1906). Kennebec Journal (18 Aug. 1906). Lewiston Journal (2 Feb. 1924). —KATHARYN F. CRABBE
CLEARY, Beverly Born 1916, McMinnville, Oregon Daughter of Chester L. and Mabel Bunn Lloyd; married Clarence T. Cleary, 1940 In one of her many laudatory reviews of Beverly Cleary’s work, critic E. L. Buell said, ‘‘Few writers for children can handle everyday comedy so briskly and so realistically.’’ Cleary claims that from childhood on she wanted to read ‘‘funny stories about the sort of children I knew,’’ and she began writing such stories. Her experience (1939-40) as a children’s librarian in Yakima, Washington, gave her a good grounding in the conventions of juvenile literature, and her own children, boy-girl twins, provided her with additional insights into the world of childhood. Two books for preschoolers, The Real Hole (1960) and Two Dog Biscuits (1961), follow twins Jimmy and Janet through their sometimes heated debate over the nature and purpose of backyard holes and through their grand discovery that cats eat dog biscuits. Older twins in Mitch and Amy (1967) learn to help each other through the trials of school life. These books are, as Horn Book magazine noted, realistic and unsentimental. A group of Cleary’s books are written about and for adolescent girls and have been consistently praised for their understanding of the teenager. ‘‘This is good comedy, underlaid with common sense and insight,’’ Buell wrote of Fifteen (1956), the story of Jane Purdy’s search for a boyfriend. Jean of Jean and Johnny (1959) discovers and learns to live with the pangs of unrequited love, and in The Luckiest Girl (1958), Cleary expertly handles the mother-daughter relationship. In Sister of the Bride (1963), she brings her usual sane observation to the problem of early marriages. Cleary’s most universally acclaimed books, however, have been about grade school children. In Ellen Tebbits (1951), Otis Spofford (1953), and the quieter Emily’s Runaway Imagination (1961), Cleary reveals the gift, for which the Saturday Review praised her ‘‘for making the children in her stories funny and pathetic at the same time.’’ Her earliest and most famous character, Henry Huggins, keeps his verve and individuality through five
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books: Henry Huggins (1950), Henry and Beezus (1952), Henry and Ribsy (1954), Henry and the Paper Route (1957), and Henry and the Clubhouse (1962). The world Henry inhabits with his dog, Ribsy, his friend Beezus, and her unquenchable little sister, Ramona, is superficially close to that of Dick, Jane, and Sally, but Cleary’s wit and superior observation transform the everyday events. Spin-offs from this series are Ribsy (1964), which gives the adventures of the dog while lost, Ramona the Pest (1968), Ramona the Brave (1975), Ramona and Her Father (1977), and several other Ramona novels. Ramona may turn out to be Cleary’s most memorable character. Anyone who followed the woes she caused Henry Huggins is delighted to meet Ramona in other books and to learn of her tribulations as a kindergarten dropout who finally makes good. Ramona Quimby is one of American letters’ truly comic characters and deserves her popularity with readers and her book awards. Although lighthearted realism is one of Cleary’s strengths, she ventured into fantasy with an anthropomorphic mouse in The Mouse and the Motorcycle (1965) and Runaway Ralph (1970). Another animal story, Socks (1973), a return to realism, is a gently humorous account of a cat’s temporary jealousy of a new baby. Cleary is one of those rare children’s writers who is able to amuse adult as well as young listeners. ‘‘Parents chuckle and boys [and girls] laugh out loud,’’ said L. S. Bechtel. Most critics would agree with the authority on children’s literature, May Hill Arbuthnot, who finds Cleary’s stories ‘‘hilarious commentaries on modern life.’’ As an author of more than 30 books for young people, Cleary has established herself as a humorist of enduring appeal who has amply fulfilled her often-reiterated desire to capture on her pages the humor in the everyday lives of children. She is able to blend a healing laughter into even the more serious moments in her fiction. Cleary’s 1984 Newbery Medal winner, Dear Mr. Henshaw (the letter-and-diary account of young Leigh Bott’s struggle to come to terms with his parents’ separation), is, as Natalie Babbitt said, a ‘‘first-rate poignant story’’ in which Cleary ‘‘never allows Leigh’s writing to slide a millimeter away from the natural humor and unconscious pathos that make it work so honestly.’’ Dear Mr. Henshaw also won the 1984 Christopher award and made many best books lists. Throughout her career, Cleary has won numerous awards from both juvenile readers and professional critics, including the American Library Association’s Laura Ingalls Wilder Award (1975) and the Everychild Award from the Children’s Book Council (1985) for her 35-year contribution to children’s literature. Cleary’s later books both present new protagonists and add further sequels. A new character appears in Lucky Chuck (1984), in which Chuck, unable to learn from that adolescent primer, the traffic regulations manual, must learn through on-the-road experience that motorcycles and laws deserve respect. Muggie Maggie (1990), a book with another new character, deals humorously with that bane of school children’s lives, cursive writing. Cleary adds herself as a child character in her warmly praised memoir of her own growing-up years, A Girl from Yamhill.
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New sequels feature the twins Janet and Jimmy, the unquenchable Ramona, and her fantasy character, Ralph the motorcycle mouse. In Ralph S. Mouse (1982), Ralph serves as a peacemaker at school. The twins return in The Growing-Up Feet (1987), a book whose emphasis on the virtues of red boots will recall an incident in Ramona the Pest (1968). In Janet’s Thingamajigs (1987), Janet learns to share with her twin brother. Cleary has added three books to the six in which Ramona Quimby either appears or is featured. Ramona and Her Mother (1979) deals sympathetically with the family conflicts engendered when Mrs. Quimby retains her job even after Mr. Quimby finds an interim job and then decides to return to college. In Ramona Quimby, Age Eight (1981) Ramona shows a maturing attitude about her parents’ problems and about four-year-old Willa Jean, a minor-league pest with whom Ramona must contend after school each day. Ramona Forever (1984) takes the Quimby family saga through the wedding of Aunt Bea, the birth of a third girl, and an acceptable if not ideal resolution of the father’s job situation. Observing all that her baby sister has to learn, Ramona speculates, ‘‘It is hard work to be a baby,’’ and her father pronounces, ‘‘Growing up is hard work.’’ This respect for the difficulties of childhood runs through all of Cleary’s books, keeping the humor sound and strong. The Ramona stories became a television series, an experience Cleary recounts in Ramona Quimby: The Making of a Television Film (1988). A Ramona paper-doll book and two children’s diaries also appeared in the 1980s. Ramona seems well on her way to joining the pantheon of humorous characters in American literature. Readers first met Ramona when she was only four. At the time, she was a major bother to her older sister, Beezus (Beezus and Ramona, 1955.) Over 40 years later and well into her second generation of adoring readers, Cleary, in her eighties, continues to represent the fears, ideas, and viewpoints of children with intelligence, humor, and mischievousness. Her most recent book will see Ramona turn ten (Ramona’s World, 1999.) Eleanor Cameron, in her book, The Green and Burning Tree, states that ‘‘a child goes back to characters he loves as if they were his own family or friends.’’ Children continue to find—in the worlds created by Cleary—friends with whom they resonate and have fun. Cleary’s beloved characters have entered the upper echelon of classics in children’s literature. Henry Huggins, Ramona, and Ribsy were recently immortalized in the Beverly Cleary Sculpture Garden for Children in Portland, Oregon. The statues are only four blocks from the real Klickitat Street, location of numerous Cleary adventures. Young people who struggle to make sense of the challenges life presents captivate Cleary’s imagination. She engages younger readers in The Hullabaloo ABC (1998), a rhyming alphabet book. Older readers as well as adults will enjoy losing themselves in Cleary’s second installment of her memoirs, My Own Two Feet (1995), the sequel to 1988’s A Girl from Yamhill (1988). Despite her popularity, Cleary’s books have been criticized because they don’t provide any racial or ethnic mix in the
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characters nor do they confront any of the serious problems of childhood. Cleary does not attempt to create a world different from the white, middle-class one in which she grew up. Yet Anita Trout of the University of Tennessee contends, ‘‘The incidents in her books are common to the lives of most children.’’ Most of the Ramona books, Dear Mr. Henshaw (1983), which won the prestigious Newbery Medal, and the well-received Strider (1991) are all available in Spanish translations. In April of 1997 Cleary spoke at the reopening and rededication ceremonies for the Central Library, the main branch of Multnomah County’s libraries in her home state of Oregon. Seventy-five years after her first visit to the library, Cleary recalled what it was like to be a six-year-old girl awed by the grandeur of the library. She painted a credible, heartwarming sight: a young girl, walking through the massive building, yanking at slouching stockings with one hand and clutching library books to her chest with the other. The young Beverly Cleary, she said, might ask the adult Beverly Cleary: ‘‘Did you always know that you would write books for children?’’ After conferring with the child, the adult would answer: ‘‘I knew I would be a children’s librarian, and with luck, write books to help fill the library shelves.’’ It was the child’s hope and determination that fueled the adult’s years of success. OTHER WORKS: Cutting Up with Ramona (paper dolls, 1983). The Ramona Quimby Diary (1984). The Beezus and Ramona Diary (1986). Here Come the Twins (1989). The Twins Again (1989). Petey’s Bedtime Story (1993). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Arbuthnot, M. H., The Arbuthnot Anthology of Children’s Literature (1961). Arbuthnot, M. H., Children and Books (1964). Reference works: DLB 52. Other references: Booklist (1 Sept. 1959). Children’s Literature Association Quarterly (Fall 1988). Horn Book (Dec. 1959, Oct. 1962, June 1967, Aug. 1970, Aug. 1984). Language Arts (Jan. 1979). NYHT (27 Sept. 1953). NYTBR (26 Sept. 1954, 16 Sept. 1956, 23 Oct. 1983). Saturday Review of Literature (10 Nov. 1951). —CELIA CATLETT ANDERSON, UPDATED BY CELESTE DEROCHE
CLEGHORN, Sarah Norcliffe Born 4 February 1876, Norfolk, Virginia; died 4 April 1959, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Daughter of John D. and Sarah Hawley Cleghorn After the death of her sister and mother, Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn was sent to Vermont where she was raised by two unmarried aunts. Even in adolescence, Cleghorn was deeply disturbed by human cruelty and became a quiet opponent of vivisection and of atrocities against blacks. In 1912 she began to write protest poetry and essays, coauthoring two collections of
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essays with her close friend Dorothy Canfield Fisher. She organized an unsuccessful campaign against capital punishment in Vermont, and became involved in prison reform. Cleghorn’s strong religious faith was the basis for all of her political action. After the war, unable to sell her writing because of its strong pacifist bias, Cleghorn (in her mid-forties) began teaching at Manumit Farm, an experimental school with socialist backing primarily for workers’ children. Here an interracial and international group of children were taught according to the Dalton method and shared farm chores and housework with the staff. Cleghorn retired because of ill health, and, at the age of sixty, published her autobiography. This was followed, before her death at eighty-three, by a collection of poetry and a volume of inspirational essays. Cleghorn’s early poetry and her first novel, The Turnpike Lady (1907), avoid political themes, concentrating instead on the charm of the rural past and the natural world, particularly Vermont. In her autobiography Cleghorn explains the nonpolitical nature of her early work, telling us that at this time she could not write coherently on a subject about which she felt powerfully. While it was popular at the time, the contemporary reader finds Cleghorn’s work of this period soft, vague, and sentimental. But with her increasing commitment to socialism and pacifism Cleghorn’s poetic themes change, and the 1917 collection of her poetry, Portraits and Protests, contains many political poems written between 1912 and 1916. Cleghorn’s protest poetry is far more direct in style, avoiding the artificial diction of the early poetry. This quatrain, written in 1914, became her most famous poem: ‘‘The golf links lie so near the mill / That almost every day / The laboring children can look out / And see the men at play.’’ Cleghorn’s most explosive poem, ‘‘The Poltroon,’’ was published during the war in the Tribune, causing threats upon the publisher and hundreds of irate letters. Cleghorn’s later poetry, collected in Poems of Peace and Freedom (1945), includes ballads, written for her students, about Harriet Tubman, Eugene Debs, and other lesser known figures, and a series of sonnets with a strong sense of personal mysticism. Cleghorn’s second novel, The Spinster (1916), has strong autobiographical overtones. But far more successful is the actual autobiography, published in 1936. Threescore successfully conveys the cheerful, generous, and sensitive disposition of its author. Presented with a disarming honesty and humility, this autobiography shows the quiet courage of a gentle reformer who lacks the bitter shrillness which so often accompanies political protest. In the introduction to Threescore, Robert Frost calls Cleghorn ‘‘a saint, a poet and a reformer.’’ OTHER WORKS: Fellow Captains (with D. C. Fisher, 1916). Nothing Ever Happens and How It Does (with D. C. Fisher, 1940). The Seamless Robe (1945). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cook, H. W., Our Poets of Today (1918). Smith, L., ed., Women’s Poetry Today (1929). —SUZANNE HENNING UPHAUS
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CLIFF, Michelle Born 2 November 1946, Kingston, Jamaica Michelle Cliff spent her early years in Jamaica and in New York City, where her parents emigrated when she was a child. Although legally an American born abroad, Cliff claims a Jamaican identity. She calls herself ‘‘Jamaican by birth, heritage and indoctrination,’’ an indoctrination she sees as separating Jamaicans into a hierarchy based on the gamut of skin tones from white to red to dark. Cliff went to a girls’ private school on the island conducted by English women. Her experience there confirmed her sense of the divisive effects of color. Cliff received a B.A. in European history at Wagner College in New York City (1969). Subsequently, at the Warburg Institute in London she earned a master’s in philosophy (1974) for her work in languages and comparative historical studies. Between 1969 and 1979 she held a variety of positions in publishing in New York City. Very light skinned, one of the fairest in her family, Cliff uses this relationship to society as a ‘‘white’’ woman of color as a central theme in her writing. Her characters are frequently based on herself and members of her family who are challenged by the dualities of colonialism and revolution, white and black, America and the Third World. Cliff’s first publication, The Winner Names the Age (1978), is an edition of antiracist writings by the Southern American writer Lillian Smith. Raised in the South, Smith was acutely aware of its racial divisions and uneasy with the privileges that came with whiteness. Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise (1980) brings together poetry and prose, autobiography and history, to evoke the colors of Jamaica and memories of her family and to ‘‘conjure a knowledge’’ and vivid portrayal of her past. Cliff’s The Land of Look Behind: Prose and Poetry (1985) demonstrates her strengthening feminist voice against colonialism. In ‘‘The Laughing Mulatto (Formerly a Statue) Speaks,’’ she speaks of the link between passing for white and heterosexual in society despite the fact that she is in reality black and lesbian. The idea that it is impossible to separate aspects of one’s identity like race and sexuality is a theme throughout her work Cliff explained her views on feminism and what the feminist movement gave her in an interview with African American Review in Summer 1994: ‘‘I think that liberation has to begin with oneself. The feminist movement allowed me certain things, like choosing to live alone, which was frowned on in the world in which I lived. Feminism for me was a way of looking in a mirror and seeing possibilities. It gave me support for my choices. One of these choices ultimately was to become a writer, which was something not at all encouraged in the world in which I grew up.’’ In her first novel, Abeng (1984), Cliff writes of a light-skinned Jamaican girl, Clare Savage, and her relation to the dark-skinned Zoe. The story focuses on the status and the damages with which Clare’s lightness is associated; within the power her skin color
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gives her, she sees the true history of colonialism, racism, and privilege. At the novel’s end, Clare is left unsure of herself and her place in society. Cliff describes the book as ‘‘emotionally an autobiography.’’ No Telephone to Heaven (1987), the sequel to Abeng, follows the Savage family’s decision to leave Jamaica and migrate to America, leaving a predestined life in a racist and classist society for a place where so much more could belong to them. Tracing the adjustment of each family member to a new life, she focuses again on Clare who, like Cliff, moves through America, Europe, and back to Jamaica. On the island she is brought through an old friend into a group of revolutionaries; embracing their beliefs, Clare rejects the privilege of her skin color and turns to her community to find wholeness. Cliff’s sense of history and its effects on the present recurs in a collection of reflective short stories, Bodies of Water (1990), which looks at how ordinary people cope with extraordinary events like the Holocaust and the Civil Rights Movement. Cliff’s next volume of short stories, The Store of a Million Items (1998), contains 11 stories about tragedy, grief, and the joy of everyday living. Her protagonists may experience sorrow, but they also celebrate life in small ways like the children in the title story, who note the passing of time through the changing displays in a store window. Cliff’s understanding of the destructiveness of racism informs her feminist voice. As editor (1981-83) with her longtime companion Adrienne Rich of Sinister Wisdom, she enabled the publication of significant lesbian feminist writing. She has also written of the influence on her of Simone Weil and of the work of black women visual artists, and provided the introduction to Audre Lorde and Rich’s book on black feminism in Germany, Macht und Sinnlichkeit (1983). Free Enterprise (1993), Cliff’s third novel, is about two African American women, the legendary Annie Christmas and the real historical figure Mary Ellen Pleasant, who join forces to assist John Brown’s antislavery efforts. Like Cliff herself, the Caribbean-born Annie has very light skin, but is determined to reject the privileges that come with it in favor of an active role in the antislavery movement. Annie finds a mother figure in Mary Ellen, an entrepreneur who owned property in California that provided refuge to runaway slaves. The two women are contrasted with two white women, Alice and Clover Hooper, whose race enables them to openly oppose slavery and yet who are themselves proven racist in the end. Once again, Cliff’s theme is the challenge to maintain one’s identity when one is a minority, whether sexual or racial or both, in an oppressive, racist, homophobic society. Cliff’s work has been recognized by fellowships from the MacDowell Colony (1982), the National Endowment of the Arts (1982, 1989), and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation (1984); she was Eli Kantor Fellow at the Yaddo Writer’s Colony in 1984. She has taught at the New School for Social Research (1974-76), Hampshire College (1980 and 1981), the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (1980), Norwich University (1983-84), Vista College (1985), San Jose State University (1986), University College of Santa Cruz (1987), Stanford University (1987-1991), and at Trinity College in Connecticut (1991-92). In addition to
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teaching, Cliff has been an invited participant at workshops and symposiums around the world and a member of the editorial board at Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society (1981-89). Her stories and essays have appeared in Chrysalis, Conditions, Sojourner, Heresies, Feminist Review, Black Scholar, and other journals. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Black Writers (1989). CA (1986). CANR (1999). FC (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: African American Review (Summer 1994, Spring 1995, Winter 1998). Conditions (1986). NYTBR (15 July 1987). WRB (Nov. 1987). —SUZANNE GIRONDA, UPDATED BY LEAH J. SPARKS
CLIFTON, Lucille Born Lucille Sayles in 1936, Depew, New York Married Fred Clifton (died 1984); children: six ‘‘What I knew was true about me was that I could breathe and I made poems,’’ Lucille Clifton said about herself as a child, in a Belles Lettres interview with Naomi Thiers in 1994. But she never aspired to be a professional poet because, she said ‘‘I hadn’t thought it possible. . . . The only poets I ever saw or heard of were . . . old dead white men from New England with beards.’’ Today Clifton is a prolific, prize-winning poet and writer of children’s books, who in recent years has been awarded Pulitzer recognition. Known for her simple verses and quiet, powerful tone, Clifton illuminates the ordinary with a life-affirming vision that is widely celebrated by critics. Lucille Clifton was born in 1936 near Buffalo in Depew, New York, a place she described as ‘‘a small town, . . .all its life turned like a machine around the steel mill.’’ Her parents were part of the Southern African-American migration north. Clifton explained: ‘‘We were poor but not downtrodden. We didn’t have much money, but we had a lot of love.’’ Her mother wrote poetry that she would read aloud to her four children. Clifton once said, ‘‘From Mama I knew one could write as a way to express oneself.’’ In her autobiography, Generations: A Memoir (1976), which was reprinted in a later book of collected works, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980 (1987), Clifton wrote, ‘‘When the colored people came to Depew they came to be a family. Everybody began to be related in thin ways that last and last ’’ Jean Anaporte-Easton said that, thematically and spiritually, Clifton’s work is shaped by a ‘‘vision of the web which connects us’’ and a strong rootedness in her ancestry. In particular, Clifton often cites her great-great-grandmother, Ca’line, who was captured in the Dahomey Republic of West Africa and brought to
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New Orleans as a slave in 1830, as an inspirational and mythical presence in her life. Clifton attended Howard University in Washington, D.C. (1953-1955) and Fredonia State Teacher’s College (now State University of New York at Fredonia) in Fredonia, New York (1955), where as a drama major she performed plays, developed a writing style, and first met and associated with an emerging class of black intellectuals that included LeRoi Jones, A. B. Spellman, and others. In 1958 she married Fred Clifton. They were married for 27 years and had six children together when he died in 1984. One of the most important influences on Clifton’s writing was the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which advocated the use of the arts as a means of overcoming racial oppression and actively promoted African-American cultural and political nationalism. Clifton’s work expresses a strong affirmation of African-American experience and identity, consistently addresses the problems of racial injustice, and advocates for black children and families in the language, metaphors, and rhythms of black vernacular speech. As critic Haki Madhubhuti put it, Clifton is a ‘‘black cultural poet. We see in her work a clear transmission of values.’’ Clifton’s style is spare: she uses little punctuation; her use of words and space is economical; the words and lines tend to be short, as do the poems themselves. She writes in free verse and frequently uses only lowercase letters. She deliberately uses simple words in her poetry because, she says, ‘‘I am interested in trying to render big ideas in a simple way. I am interested in being understood, not admired.’’ Critics, including Madhubhuti often agree with her: ‘‘Clifton’s style is simple and solid, like rock and granite.’’ This apparent simplicity is belied, however, by the resonant imagery and lyrical rhythms that characterize her poems. Like other 20th-century black women poets, Clifton’s verses have often been stylistically compared to black women’s blues music. Audrey McClusky wrote that she takes a ‘‘moral stance’’ and is ‘‘guided by the dictates of her own consciousness rather than the dictates of form, structure and audience.’’ The result is poetry that is often richly imagistic, emotive, and a clear expression of Clifton’s perspective and integrity as a woman of color. Clifton’s first published collection, Good Times: Poems (1969), won the Discovery award and was cited by the New York Times as one of the best books of 1969. Like her second collection, Good News About the Earth: New Poems (1972), these early volumes reflect the political climate of their time. They pointedly examine racial issues, focusing on contemporary African-American public figures like Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, Angela Davis, and the Black Panthers. At the same time she began publishing her poetry, Clifton was also the mother of six children under the age of ten and began to write children’s books. She has often credited her children and her role as a mother as among her most important influences as a poet, saying, for example, ‘‘Having six children kept me human.’’ In 1970 Clifton’s first children’s book, The Black BC’s came out, followed by nearly 20 other books, including the well-known Everett Anderson series, which celebrates pride in black history and heritage.
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While her first two books of poetry were critically successful, the critical success of the next two, An Ordinary Woman (1974) and Two-Headed Woman (1980), confirmed Clifton’s place as a major ‘‘contemporary African-American poet.’’ Coinciding in time with the women’s movement, these two volumes turn away from broad racial issues to take up the more personal subject of Clifton’s life as a woman of color. Subsequent volumes of poetry follow the trajectory of Clifton’s life as an aging poet, widow, and grandmother, and continue her commentary on contemporary life from her trademark life-affirming vision. Most recently, The Terrible Stories: Poems (1996) details her own experiences with breast cancer and mastectomy. Embracing the good with the bad and always reaching for wholeness and healing, she wrote, ‘‘All night it is the one breast / comforting the other.’’ Madhubuti wrote, ‘‘She is always looking for the good, the best, but not naively so. Her work is realistic and burning with the energy of renewal.’’ Clifton was the Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1989 to 1991 and in the late 1990s was the Distinguished Professor of Humanities at St. Mary’s College in St. Mary’s City, Maryland. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Anaporte-Easton, J., ‘‘‘She Has Made Herself Again’: The Maternal Impulse as Poetry’’ in 13th Moon 9 (1991). Belles Lettres (Summer 1994). Evans, M., ed., Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation. Metzger, L., et al, eds., Black Writers: A Selection of Sketches from Contemporary Authors (1989). Middlebrook, D. and M. Yalow, eds., Coming to Light: American Women Poets in the Twentieth Century (1985). WRB (Mar. 1997). Reference works: CA (1994). CLC (1991). DLB (1985). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995).
Coatsworth has written for both children and adults, but all her novels and verses are notable for their poetic charm and lucidity of style. Grown-ups can take pleasure in reading such charming tales as The Cat Who Went to Heaven (1939), and young people can understand the subtle lesson of Silky, An Incredible Tale (1953). Many of her stories for children have historical settings and involve actual historic figures: Boston Bells (1952) and Old Whirlwind; a Story of Davy Crockett (1953) are two examples. Invariably, Coatsworth’s books for young readers drew praise from reviewers who spoke of her ‘‘excellent character development and realistic dialogue.’’ One critic makes the general statement that ‘‘the books of Elizabeth Coatsworth are remarkable for their evocative period and regional sense as well as immediacy of action.’’ Again and again Coatsworth was praised for her graceful style and the poetic quality of her prose. Edmund Fuller, reviewing Silky, An Incredible Tale, says ‘‘as with all Miss Coatsworth’s work, it is a poet’s book, mystic, delicate, lovely.’’ He goes on to explain how Coatsworth has ‘‘created a rich, fresh medium that is at once original and yet the revival of a tradition neglected or distorted in this material age.’’ Readers also praise the accuracy of her historical data and the vividness of her descriptions. Through everything Coatsworth writes breathes a love of living, an ever-fresh appreciation of nature and children, a real compassion for men and women who suffer, and a delight in those who rise above their suffering. There is no taint of solemn moralizing, only an implied lesson that human beings are capable of conquering the obstacles that circumstances put before them. Coatsworth’s work is an excellent example of what is best and most wholesome in American writing.
—DENISE BAUER
COATSWORTH, Elizabeth Jane Born 31 May 1893, Buffalo, New York; died August 1986 Daughter of William T. and Ida Reid Coatsworth; married Henry Beston, 1929 After attending Buffalo Seminary, Elizabeth Jane Coatsworth graduated from Vassar College with a B.A. in 1915, and earned an M.A. from Columbia University in 1916. She was later granted two honorary degrees: Litt.D. (University of Maine, 1955) and L.H.D. (New England College, 1958). Following her years at college, Coatsworth traveled widely and came to know such countries as England, France, China, Egypt, and Mexico ‘‘as a leisurely visitor, not as a tourist.’’ In 1931 Coatsworth was awarded the Newbery Medal for fiction, and in 1967 the Golden Rose Award of the New England Poetry Club. In 1968 she was the first runner-up for the Hans Christian Andersen Award, and also earned the Maine Arts and Science Award.
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OTHER WORKS: Fox Footprints (1923). Atlas and Beyond (1924). Compass Rose (1929). The Cat and the Captain (1930). The Golden Horseshoe (1935). Sword of the Wilderness (1936). Aliceall-by-herself (1937). Five Bushel Farm (1939). The Fair American (1940). Country Poems (1942). Country Neighborhood (1944). Maine Ways (1947). Summer Green (1948). South Shore Town (1948). Here I Stay; The Enchanted (1951). Night and the Cat (1950). Mountain Bride (1951). Dollar for Luck (1951). The Sod House (1954). The Sally Series, beginning with Away Goes Sally; Horses, Dogs and Cats (1957). Poems (1957). The White Room (1958). The Peaceable Kingdom (1958). The Cave (1958). Indian Encounters (1960). Lonely Maria (1960). Desert Dan (1960). The UNICEF Christmas Book (1960). The Noble Doll (1961). Ronnie and the Chief’s Son (1962). The Princess and the Lion (1963). Jock’s Island (1963). Cricket and the Emperor’s Son (1965). The Secret (1965). The Hand of Apollo (1965). The Sparrow Bush (1966). The Fox Friend (1966). The Place (with H. Beston, 1966). Chimney Farm Bedtime Stories (1966). Maine Memories (1968). Bess and the Sphinx (1968). Light-house Island (1968). George and Red (1969). Indian Mound Farm (1969). Grandmother Cat and the Hermit (1970). Good Night (1972). The Wanderers (1972). Daisy (1973). Pure Magic (1973). All of a Sudden Susan
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(1974). Marra’s World (1975). Personal Geography: Almost an Autobiography (1994).
Coit’s more powerful and penetrating portrait is of Calhoun, the man who did risk political action, though he failed in his ultimate aim.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Sturges, F. M., Elizabeth Coatsworth Beston: A Tribute (1978). Reference works: The Junior Book of Authors (1951). Other references: Horn Book (1936, May 1951). KR (1 Feb. 1951). NYHTB (20 May 1951). NYT (12 Nov. 1950).
Coit also coauthored two accounts of the early American nation, The Growing Years: 1789-1829 (1963) and The Sweep Westward: 1829-49 (1963). The Growing Years focuses primarily on the political and military history of the early republic. The Sweep Westward is centered on the transformation of America through geographical expansion and the growth of industrialization. Both books capture the sense of movement and energetic growth of early national history. Again, Coit reveals her gift for incisive analysis of national character and mood.
—ABIGAIL ANN HAMBLEN
COIT, Margaret L. Born 30 May 1919, Norwich, Connecticut Daughter of Arch W. and Grace Trow Coit It is as a biographer that Margaret Coit made her major impact as a writer. Her two most influential works are John C. Calhoun: American Portrait (1950, reprinted in 1977), for which she won a Pulitzer Prize in 1951, and Mr. Baruch (1957). Her biography of Calhoun involved a significant recasting of the story of his life. Rejecting the traditional stress on Calhoun as sectionalist, Coit argued that his great concern throughout his career was to preserve his section within the Union and ‘‘to make democracy work.’’ From the time of the triumph of Jacksonian democracy, Calhoun tried to avert the consequences of unlimited majority rule, eventually posing the concurrent majority concept. In Coit’s view, interest in slavery was not at the center of Calhoun’s concern for the South. Rather, his defense of slavery reflected his view of human nature. Calhoun, she contends, ‘‘loved [freedom] too much to surrender it to those who he thought might endanger it,’’ as he felt blacks must inevitably do. Her portrait of Calhoun is of a man of tragic vision desperately trying to avert an unavoidable future. In her second biography, Mr. Baruch, Coit deftly depicts the transformation of a post-Reconstruction South Carolinean into the Wall Street entrepreneur. The primary focus of the biography, however, is on Baruch’s extended period of public service beginning with World War I. Baruch’s relations with the presidents he served are perceptively analyzed. Coit stresses Wilson’s crucial role in capturing Baruch’s imagination and enlisting his talents in the wartime mobilization of industry. In the Roosevelt years, the relationships were more strained and Baruch’s contributions to the nation more indirect. According to Coit, between Roosevelt and Baruch was ‘‘the uneasy truce of two extraordinarily able men’’ whose dominant personalities made collaboration difficult. Baruch’s last major contribution came in the Truman years with the formulation of the Baruch Plan for international control of atomic energy. Coit’s picture of Baruch is of a proud individualist, an intensely private person creating his own myth. In her view, Baruch’s chief weakness was that he would not put himself to the political test and seek the public office where his talents might most significantly have been put to use. Of the two biographies,
In all her writing, Coit displays a gift for portraiture and a sense of drama. Her sensitivity to the spirit of the age enables her to evoke past issues and national mood, and to deal perceptively with the changes in America. She contrasts the frontier world of Calhoun’s youth with the new industrializing, consolidating nation against which he struggled; the post-Reconstruction South of Baruch’s youth with the precision-oriented, standardized America which he promoted during World War I. As a political biographer, Coit had a strong grasp of political reality, adroitly weaving together both public action and the maneuvers behind the scenes. Her gift for individual character analysis is particularly striking, whether in short sketches or fullfaceted studies. While she often utilizes bold, dramatic colors, she is also sensitive to the play of light and shadow within a personality. As a biographer, she depicts with grace and insight the private as well as the public world of fully realized human beings.
OTHER WORKS: The Fight for Union (1961). Andrew Jackson (1965). Massachusetts (1967). John C. Calhoun (edited by Coit, 1971). ‘‘The Continuing Relevance of John C. Calhoun’’ in Continuity: Special Issue—Recovering Southern History (Fall, 1984).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Annals of the American Academy (Nov. 1950). Nation (1 April 1950). NYT (5 March 1950, 24 Nov. 1957). Political Science Quarterly (June 1950). SRL (4 Jan. 1958). —INZER BYERS
COLUM, Mary Maguire Born 13 June 1887, Derryhollow, County Fermanagh, Ireland; died 22 October 1957, New York, New York Daughter of Charles and Maria Gunning Maguire; married Padraic Colum, 1912 Reared in northwest Ireland by elderly relatives, Mary Maguire Colum was sent at thirteen to a convent boarding school where she
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received the traditional, multilingual education on which she drew for the rest of her life. At the height of the Irish revival she graduated from the National University, Dublin, where she knew such figures as Yeats, Maude Gonne, Lady Gregory, and Joyce. Yeats advised her to take up criticism, although she had already published fiction; he also suggested she adopt a masculine pen name, which she did not. In 1914, two years after her marriage to poet Padraic Colum, Colum came to the United States. She wrote ‘‘ghost’’ reviews and in 1916 joined Women’s Wear as translator and reporter. Though she regarded writing as ‘‘a very risky business’’ and criticism even more so, she gradually won her place, contributing regularly to Forum, Saturday Review, Dial, Scribners, and other periodicals. Colum received Guggenheim Fellowships in 1930 and 1938, was honored by Georgetown University and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 1953 was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. From These Roots (1937) is Colum’s attempt to render ‘‘an account of the ideas that have gone into the making of modern literature,’’ beginning in mid-18th century with the works of Lessing and Herder, tracing parallel development in England and France. Her book is not a history of criticism, but an examination of ‘‘patterns.’’ Colum identifies true criticism as a creative force, ‘‘a principle through which the world of ideas renews itself,’’ and literary criticism as ‘‘that branch of literature whose most important office is the originating of . . . ideas.’’ She argues that modern literature has reached a dead end, that a new criticism is required to stimulate new and original literature. Her thesis places undue emphasis upon the role of criticism as a generative force and makes no allowance for individual genius of the creative writer. Her evaluation of American literature is also questionable; firmly rooted in European culture, Colum cannot recognize the folk tradition in American writing, and ranks the influence of Poe above that of Hawthorne and Melville. Her autobiography, Life and the Dream (1947), sensitively portrays the austerity of rural Irish life and the excitement of the Irish revival in Dublin. Colum offers sketches of the literati of Dublin, New York, and Chicago, along with a great many opinions. She attacks American materialism, education, and marriages; she lauds Elinor Wylie and feuds with Harriet Monroe. In a world where she struggles constantly for acceptance as an intellectual equal, Colum is impatient with women who fail to utilize their full abilities. She is always independent, dogmatic, and passionately Irish. Colum’s reputation as a respected critic rests upon her first book and the many reviews she contributed to periodicals during her long career. Her autobiography and Our Friend James Joyce (1958) reveal a more personal side. Although her style is still formal, her writing is frequently anecdotal, displaying a sometimes awkward humor. Her prejudices are strong; she loves a good fight. Yet all her books indicate she is still very much outside American thought. As she herself writes: ‘‘I feel an exile always, everywhere, including the land in which I was born.’’
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BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Catholic Authors: Contemporary Biographical Sketches 1930-1947 (1948). Other references: NY (22 March 1947). NYHTB (19 Dec. 1937). NYT (20 March 1947). NYTBR (19 Dec. 1937). SR (13 Nov. 1937, 27 Nov. 1937). —JOANNE MCCARTHY
COMAN, Katharine Born 23 November 1857, Newark, Ohio; died 11 January 1915, Wellesley, Massachusetts Daughter of Levi P. and Martha Seymour Coman Katharine Coman’s father, a graduate of Hamilton College, was a teacher, a lawyer, and a Civil War veteran. Coman graduated from the University of Michigan in 1880 with the Ph.B. degree. She immediately joined the faculty of Wellesley College in Massachusetts, and remained there all her life, teaching rhetoric, economics, history, and sociology. She retired in 1913 as professor emeritus. Coman was able to convince the college administration that economics was both suitable and necessary to the education of women. She was coauthor of four textbooks on English history, but wrote alone when she turned to economics. Her writings were of a practical bent, based on personal observation during her extensive travels. The Industrial History of the United States (1905) was widely used as a textbook through 11 editions. In recognition of Coman’s contribution, the Katharine Coman Professorship of Industrial History was established at Wellesley in 1921. The twovolume Economic Beginnings of the Far West (1912) was the result of a four-year leave of absence for travel and research. It gives the reader an absorbing account of the explorers, the colonizers, the Mormon migration, the missionary priests in California, the Gold Rush, and the spread of slavery. Coman makes it clear that history proved the superiority of the free settler: ‘‘In competition with the fur traders and gold seekers, with Spaniards exploiting Indian labor, and Southern slave holders, the homesteaders, working with his family in liberty, everywhere won the land.’’ Coman’s life was active in pursuit of social improvement. She helped to develop the Young Women’s Christian Association at Wellesley in 1884. In 1881, when her friend Jane Addams was starting Hull House in Chicago, eastern colleges were talking about similar settlement houses. In 1891 the Wellesley Chapter of the College Settlements Association was organized by Coman, Vida Scudder, Katherine Lee Bates, Emily Balch, and other faculty members. In 1892 they opened Denison House, a college
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settlement in Boston. It was used as a center for union organizing as well as for child and adult education classes. Wellesley students worked here and in other settlement houses in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. In addition to the practical social work experience it provided for students, the real purpose of college sponsorship was to arouse interest and sympathy on social questions and provide moral and financial support for the operation. When Coman was visiting in Chicago in 1910 she came to the aid of the United Garment Workers in their strike against makers of ready-made men’s clothing in Chicago. She acted as chairman of the grievance committee, and she wrote a stirring introduction to a booklet detailing the grievances. As a result, favorable publicity and public sympathy for the strike were achieved. Throughout her life Coman was attached to her ‘‘family’’ on the faculty at Wellesley. She lived there with her closest friend, Katherine Lee Bates, who published a book of poems, Yellow Clover, as a memorial to Coman. It is a loving tribute to their companionship of 35 years. OTHER WORKS: The Growth of the English Nation (with E. Kendall, 1894). A History of England for High Schools and Academies (with E. Kendall, 1899). History of England for Beginners (1901). English History Told by English Poets (with K. L. Bates, 1902). History of Contract Labor in the Hawaiian Islands (1903). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bates, K. L., Yellow Clover: A Book of Remembrance (1922). Burgess, D., Dream and Deed (1952). Hackett, A. P., Wellesley: Part of the American Story (1949). Halsey, O. S., ‘‘Katherine Coman 1857-1915,’’ in The Survey (23 Jan. 1915). Henry, A., The Trade Union Woman (1915). Scudder, V., On Journey (1937). Reference works: NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). —JOAN M. MCCREA
provided income or personal potential. Both her autobiographical account, The Comstocks of Cornell (posthumously published in 1953), and reminiscences of Cornell students reflect a determinedly cheerful woman who once observed, ‘‘our usual way has ever been to pretend that we like whatever happens.’’ Comstock’s early work in science writing was as collaborator with her husband, a faculty member at Cornell. She began as his assistant and clerk but later turned to drawing and wood engraving, for which she won exposition prizes and was elected a member of the American Association of Wood Engravers. Working steadily, she illustrated John Comstock’s college textbooks, An Introduction to Entomology (1888) and A Manual for the Study of Insects (1894); in the latter she was presented as the ‘‘junior author’’ and credited with some written work as well. Her contribution was even more evident in Insect Life (1897), a simplified textbook on entomology. In the 1890s Comstock became involved in the nature study movement, lecturing and writing leaflets on special natural history topics for classroom use. State support for the Cornell extension programs permitted her unprecedented appointment as assistant professor for the summer session in 1898. After protest by some trustees her rank was changed to lecturer, but in 1913 she was again named assistant professor, and in 1920, professor. Like other leaders in the nature study movement, Comstock insisted that her goal was not to teach scaled-down species hunting or microscopical work but rather ‘‘to give pupils an outlook regarding all forms of life and their relationship one to another.’’ Nonetheless, her work was accurate, unlike much natural history writing of the period, and Comstock often included taxonomic terms. How to Know the Butterflies (1904), for example, begins with an elementary account of butterfly characteristics, outlines methods for collecting, and then discusses 12 families in detail. Such manuals as How to Keep Bees (1905), The Pet Book (1914), and Trees at Leisure (1916) contained anecdotal and literary materials as well as practical advice.
Born 1 September 1854, Otto, Cattaraugus County, New York; died 24 August 1930, Ithaca, New York Also wrote under: Marion Lee Daughter of Marvin and Phebe Irish Botsford; married John H. Comstock, 1878
Much of Comstock’s own energy went into popular lectures and essays which were romantic without being sentimental and suggested her belief in moral education. Ways of the Six-footed (1903) contained 10 stories illustrating the social organization of insects, their communication by sound, their use of mimicry as a defense strategy, and other adaptive features. The chapter on ants, bees, and wasps is entitled ‘‘The Perfect Socialism.’’ Comstock did not belabor the analogy here nor ascribe human characteristics to the insects; she did, however, use human experience to describe animal behavior as an educational device.
While attending Cornell University from 1874 to 1876 Anna Botsford studied zoology under John Henry Comstock, whom she married. In 1885 she completed a B.S. degree in natural history and about that time began systematic study of wood engraving with John P. Davis of Cooper Union in New York City. Childless, Comstock had several overlapping careers which were unplanned, the apparent result of her patient application to tasks which
Many of Comstock’s essays appeared in The Chautauquan and Country Life in America. She briefly edited Boys and Girls (1903-07), a nature study magazine, before turning it over to her Cornell colleague Martha Van Rensselaer. For years she contributed to the educational Nature Study Review (1906-23), serving as its editor from 1917 until its merger with Nature Magazine. Typically, her contributions underscored the value of all life, the
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importance of understanding nature, and the interrelationship among creatures. Personal anecdote was a prominent feature.
CONANT, Hannah (O’Brien) Chaplin
Comstock’s single most important volume was a compendium of her earlier work consolidated into the 900-page Handbook of Nature Study (1911). Not discouraged by the skepticism of her husband and her coworker Liberty Hyde Bailey about the need for such a text, Comstock provided a teaching guide for elementary teachers dealing with animal life, plant life, and the ‘‘earth and sky.’’ The Handbook outlined programs for nature study in the classroom and outside, provided review questions, and suggested additional references. Vindication of her initiative came in 24 editions and translation into eight languages of the Handbook. Comstock’s text became known as the ‘‘nature Bible’’ because of her sensitive counseling on such topics as children’s attitude toward death when dealing with predatory behavior, and because of her concern that living creatures be returned to their natural habitat after study.
Born 5 September 1809, Danvers, Massachusetts; died 18 February 1865, Brooklyn, New York Daughter of Jeremiah and Marcia S. O’Brien Chaplin; married Thomas J. Conant, 1830; children: ten
Only once did Comstock attempt to write fiction. Confessions to a Heathen Idol (1906), written under the pseudonym Marion Lee, is a romantic fantasy without any reference to Comstock’s daily work of science. The ‘‘heathen idol’’ was a teakwood Japanese figure to whom a forty-year-old widow mused in her evening diary. It is a book in the sentimental tradition of the 19th century, high-minded in its morality and without any surprises in its development. It is, however, suggestive of Comstock’s own marriage, describing as it does, continuity and satisfaction, but also a fundamental loneliness. More strictly autobiographical is The Comstocks of Cornell, edited and published two decades after Comstock’s death; the narrative centers on family life and indicates Comstock accepted her role as homemaker and helpmate without much question. She remained detached from suffrage and other feminist activity. In 1923 the League of Women Voters named Comstock one of the 12 greatest women in the United States. Popular yet scholarly in her science writing, she was a key figure in the nature study movement, and a moving force on the Cornell campus.
OTHER WORKS: Nature Notebook Series (1920). The papers of Anna Botsford Comstock are at the Cornell Collection of Regional History and University Archives, Cornell University.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Herriar, G. W., and R. G. Smith, eds., The Comstocks of Cornell (1953). Needham, J. C., ‘‘The Length and Shadow of a Man and His Wife,’’ in ScM (1946). Smith, E. J., ‘‘The Comstocks of Cornell: In the People’s Service,’’ in Annual Review of Entomology (1975). Reference works: NCAB (1892 et seq.). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). —SALLY GREGORY KOHLSTEDT
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From her father Hannah Chaplin Conant learned several foreign languages, which turned out to be important in her later career. Her parents filled the Baptist parsonage in Danvers with 10 children, and in 1818 the family moved to Waterville, Maine, to head the struggling Baptist institution, Waterville (later Colby) College. Conant was well prepared to be a true ‘‘helpmeet’’ for her husband, the college’s professor of languages. In 1835 they both accepted positions at Hamilton Literary and Theological Institution in Hamilton, New York (later to become Colgate University). In addition to college and domestic duties—which included the care of 10 children by 1853—Conant edited the Mother’s Monthly Journal of Utica from 1838 to 1839 and continued to write for it thereafter. In 1850 the family moved to Rochester where Conant’s husband taught Hebrew, biblical criticism, and interpretation at the Rochester Theological Seminary. During this period Conant pursued her own parallel interests, translating three ‘‘popular practical commentaries’’ on Philippians, James, and John by the eminent German biblical scholar Augustus Neander. While in Rochester she also wrote her own two major works—a biography of Baptist missionary Adoniram Judson and a history of the English Bible. Conant’s first original work, The Earnest Man; or the Character and Labors of Adoniram Judson (1856), was designed as a more popular ‘‘life’’ to complement the scholarly Memoir by Francis Wayland. Conant’s most important work, which became a standard text in courses on the English Bible, quite popular in the proliferating religious colleges, was The English Bible (1857). In it she traces the history of English translations from Wycliffe through the version authorized by King James. Interestingly, the book contains a chapter on ‘‘Anne Boleyn: the Royal Patroness.’’ Conant concludes with an acknowledgment of the wealth of earlier manuscripts and translations becoming available to biblical scholars and raises the possibility of a new translation to replace the King James Version.
OTHER WORKS: Lea; or, the Baptism in Jordan by G. F. A. Strauss (trans. by Conant, 1844). The Epistle of Paul to the Philippians by Augustus Neander (trans. by Conant, 1851). The Epistle of James by Augustus Neander (trans. by Conant, 1852). The First Epistle of John by Augustus Neander (trans. by Conant, 1852). Erna, the Forest Princess; or Pilgrimage of the Three Wise Men to Bethlehem by G. Nieritz (trans. by Conant, 1855). The New England
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Theocracy: A History of the Congregationalists in New England to the Revivals of 1740 by H. F. Uhden (trans. by Conant, 1855). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: NCAB. NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Other references: NYT (20 Feb. 1865). —NANCY A. HARDESTY
CONWAY, Katherine Eleanor Born 1852, Rochester, New York; died 2 January 1927, Boston, Massachusetts Daughter of James and Sarah Conway Katherine Eleanor Conway’s parents were Irish Catholic immigrants and Conway received a traditional Catholic girls’ school education. After graduation from Sacred Heart Academy in New York City, she began her career as a teacher, but she soon left the field to become an assistant editor at the Buffalo Catholic Union and Times. Conway later successively became the editor of three Catholic newspapers: the Catholic Union, the Pilot, and the Republic. During her editorial career Conway lectured, taught at St. Mary’s College for Women in Indiana, traveled, and wrote. She remained single and was active in Catholic intellectual and literary circles. In 1907 she was awarded the Laetare Medal by Notre Dame University; this award, founded in 1883, was given each year to an American Catholic for distinguished accomplishments on behalf of the Church and/or the nation. A similar, higher honor was awarded to Conway in 1912 when Pope Pius X conferred upon her the decoration Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice, for Church and Pope. Conway’s nonfiction and poetry best characterize the style and intent of her work. The major motivation behind her nonfiction writing was to reinforce the traditional role of Catholic wife and mother. Even though Conway herself worked outside of the home and never married, she expended a tremendous amount of literary effort to promote woman’s domestic roles. In the late 1890s she wrote The Family Sitting Room Series, a five-volume collection of books directed toward young Catholic women. Although Conway posed insightful questions concerning many turn-of-the-century, upwardly mobile, Catholic women, she answered those questions in a traditional Catholic manner. She asked rhetorically in The Christian Gentlewoman (1904), ‘‘What is the good—the highest good—for a woman? Simply, the perfection of her womanhood.’’ For Conway a woman’s power and ability came from her ‘‘natural charms,’’ ‘‘large-hearted simplicity,’’ ‘‘lack of self-consciousness.’’ A woman’s role in activating social change was limited to exerting influence on her children and husband. Conway’s poetry almost exclusively explored the relationship between God and human in the face of hardships, especially death. Life might be bitter, but death was sweet, for it brought the intimate meeting between God and his children. Conway used
specifically religious images to convey her message of meaningful death, such as the Resurrection and the death of Joseph of Nazareth. But it was in her poem ‘‘Her Little Dying Son’’ that she most explicitly expressed the delights of death. Drawing from the Victorian leitmotif of the dying child, Conway created the scene of a dying son telling his mother not to grieve: ‘‘His arm is underneath my head!—Oh, it is splendid—being dead!’’ One cannot fully evaluate the significance and creativity of Conway’s writing without analyzing her role as journalist. Her active life as editor, lecturer, teacher, and writer stood in conflict with her perceived standard of womanhood. As a member of the emerging Catholic middle class, Conway articulated many of the important questions facing Catholic women. Her answers, however, were traditional and inattentive to women’s needs. Although Conway’s own life was filled with professional achievement and intellectual stimulation, she did not regard it to be a viable life style for all women. OTHER WORKS: On the Sunrise Slope (1881). The Good Shepherd in Boston (1892). A Dream of Lilies (1893). A Lady and Her Letters (1895). Making Friends and Keeping Them (1895). Questions of Honor in Christian Life (1896). New Footsteps in WellTrodden Ways (1899). The Way of the World and Other Ways . . . Bettering Ourselves (1899). A Story of Our Set (1900). Lalor’s Maples (1901). In the Footprints of the Good Shepherd (1907). Charles Francis Donnelly; A Memoir (1909). The Woman Who Never Did Wrong, and Other Stories (1909). Fifty Years with Christ, The Good Shepherd (1925). The Color of Life: A Selection from the Poems of Katherine E. Conway (1947). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Romig, W., Guide to Catholic Literature 1888-1940 (1940). Other references: Catholic World 124. —M. COLLEEN MCDANNELL
COOEY, Paula Marie Born 21 March 1945, Hays, Kansas Daughter of Edward Wilton and Polly Miller Cooey, Jr.; married Philip C. Nichols Jr.; children: Benjamin Paula Cooey’s writings during her distinguished academic career have ranged from her systematic analysis of Jonathan Edwards, a colonial American Puritan preacher, on nature and destiny, to works of feminist theory that focus on the significance of the body in the context of religious experience, law, and domestic abuse. Most recently she has published a highly readable and generally accessible book in which she takes a look at the American family in the late 20th century. In her creative and sensitive themes, she has used current social theory and critique, cognitive psychology, contemporary fiction and arts, and women’s accounts of religious experience. Cooey, who writes and speaks passionately about things that concern her, began writing
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as a primary means of thinking when she was seven years old. At that time, she wrote her first short story and began to keep a journal. She once claimed the greatest limitation and the greatest strength of the body of her written work are one and the same: its experimental quality. This is reflected not only in the content and the topics but also in her writing style and her choice of words and images.
family values.’’ She proposes a constructive theological position that supports concern for family life in the context of secularity, religious and political diversity, and social justice, and she specifically addresses ways that confessing and civic communities can identify avenues ‘‘that empower more and more people . . . to take charge of and to contribute responsibly to the communal processes that govern their lives.’’
Born in 1945 in Georgia, she received her B.A. in philosophy from the University of Georgia (1968), continuing doctoral work there in comparative literature. She transferred to the Harvard Divinity School, where she received a Master of Theological Studies in 1974. In 1981 she received a Ph.D. in the study of religion from Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. After serving one year as a full-time visiting instructor at Connecticut College in 1979-80 and as a part-time instructor at the University of Massachusetts, Harbor Campus, in 1980-81, Cooey joined the faculty of Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas, in August 1981. During her 18 years at Trinity, she was promoted through the ranks to become professor of religion in 1993. In 1999 she was appointed the Margaret W. Harmon Professor of Christian Theology and Culture at Macalester College, St. Paul, Minnesota.
In addition to her books, Cooey has written more than 20 scholarly articles and essays, numerous book reviews, and various other writings, such as ‘‘Transformations of Humanistic Studies in the 21st Century’’ in Religious Studies News (1998) and ‘‘The Messiness of Dying,’’ in the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion (1999). With her commitment to scholarship, research, and writing, Cooey also devotes enormous time and energy to the teaching of undergraduate students. She is a creative and highly respected teacher, always seeking new ways to communicate with students. She received the Sears-Roebuck Foundation Award for Excellence in Teaching and Campus Leadership in 1991; was codirector of the Southwest Regional American Academy of Religion Workshop on Teaching for Junior Faculty, funded by the National Endowment of the Humanities and the Lilly Endowment (1994-96); and was the Trinity University nominee for the CASE award for outstanding teaching (1988).
One often finds variations of the word ‘‘transformation’’ in her writings. From the first publication, Jonathan Edwards on Nature and Destiny: A Systematic Analysis (1985), which was based on her doctoral dissertation, she wrote, ‘‘Grace is the only word I know that captures both the commonness and the specialness of reality. It takes human misery and sorrow seriously and transforms them.’’ The subtitle of the edited volume After Patriarchy (1991), on which she worked with William R. Eakin and Jay B. McDaniel, was Feminist Transformations of the World Religions. In her essay in this volume, ‘‘The Redemption of the Body,’’ she wrote, ‘‘The body provides a source of seemingly never-ending conflict and a locus for social and environmental violence. . . . A post-patriarchal understanding of incarnation must be committed to a redemption of the body. In so doing, it must recognize that the transfiguration of pain begins with giving voice or bearing witness to injustice with a view to healing and nurture.’’ Again, in Embodied Love: Sensuality and Relationship as Feminist Values (1987, edited by Cooey, Sharon A. Farmer, and Mary Ellen Ross), in Cooey’s essay, ‘‘Woman’s Body, Language, and Value,’’ she sees women’s toughest choice in the extent to which they assume responsibility for what they value, ‘‘for our acts of valuing ultimately define our identities.’’ She discusses indiscriminate love and concludes, ‘‘Whereas to love indiscriminately perpetuates women’s subordination to men as definitive of woman’s identity as ‘woman’ in a negative sense, to love with integrity is to participate in a revolution in value that transforms identity in ways yet to be imagined.’’ Cooey’s book on the American family in the late 20th century, Family, Freedom & Faith: Building Community Today (1996), deals with the public discussion of family life. She discusses human religious and political diversity as well as private stories of domestic violence, believing ‘‘the connecting point is
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She actively participates in professional organizations, serving in leadership roles in almost every group. These include the American Academy of Religion, the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies, the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, and the American Association of University Professors. In addition, she frequently presents papers, gives endowed lectures, and addresses diverse groups nationally and internationally. Referring to herself as an ‘‘itinerant teacher,’’ she speaks and teaches in churches and in various community and civic settings. Truly involved with her roots and her family, she frequently notes the intellectual, editorial, and personal contributions and support offered by her spouse, Philip Nichols, and her son, Benjamin. She also speaks of her grandparents and parents. In 1985 she poignantly described her grandparents, Mary Isabelle and Ora Irl Miller, who ‘‘helped me to see grace at work in the Bible and nature. . . . Together with Ora, [Mary] taught me to garden, milk cows, feed chickens, and candle eggs. With them I touched soil, held up earthworms for scrutiny, looked for rainbows on the Georgia horizon, and watched tornadoes cross the Oklahoma plains’’ (from Jonathan Edwards on Nature and Destiny). Later she would write in Family, Freedom, and Faith (1996), ‘‘Not a perfect family. . . . Our private stories, as opposed to our public faces, are sometimes stories of near defeat, temporary defeat, and finally the small triumphs that build slowly into survival and partial healing.’’ OTHER WORKS: Religious Imagination and the Body: A Feminist Analysis (1994). Contributed to, among others: Created in the Image: Religious Values and the Shaping of Identity (audio & videocassette, 1994). Imagining Faith: Essays in Honor of Richard R. Niebuhr (1995). Dictionary of Feminist Theologies (1996).
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Horizons in Feminist Theology: Identity, Tradition, and Norms (1997). Encyclopedia of Women and World Religion (1998). No Easy Task: Dilemmas Confronting Contemporary Mothers (1999). The Liberating Spirit of Truth (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Modern Theology (January 1993). —LOIS A. BOYD
COOK, Fannie Born 4 October 1893, St. Charles, Missouri; died 25 August 1949, St. Louis, Missouri Daughter of Julius and Jennie Frank; married Jerome E. Cook, 1915 Fannie Cook grew up and attended school in St. Louis. She received her B.A. from the University of Missouri in 1914, and her M.A. from Washington University in 1916. Though Cook published widely and was a painter of some distinction, she is largely remembered for her novel, Mrs. Palmer’s Honey (1946), which was judged the most important literary contribution ‘‘to the importance of the Negro’s place in American life.’’ Cook was dedicated to defining and improving the Negro’s ‘‘place’’ and that of other oppressed groups. She was a member of the Mayor’s Committee on Race Relations, an adviser to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the 1940 chairperson of the Missouri Committee for Rehabilitation of Sharecroppers. Cook resigned her position as instructor of English at Washington University and began to write articles, short stories, and novels. Her first literary success came in 1935 when she won first prize in a Reader’s Digest contest for new writers. Most of her works are regional but they are also timely and universal, reflecting the plight of the dispossessed and oppressed. Though her landscape is usually confined to Missouri, the colonized situations there mirror those of oppressed people everywhere. Her characters, however, are never the do-nothing kind who sorrowfully accept their lot. Rather, they struggle to make America live up to its promise of democracy, freedom, and equality for all. Through their struggles, they come of age as individuals, thereby attaining a new selfhood through which they can look at the light of day and not be ashamed. Cook’s characters rise above their miseries to demand what is rightfully theirs. Cook’s short works, published between 1940 and 1946, reflect her conviction that unions are the only solution for the ailments of struggling people. In ‘‘Killer’s Knife Ain’t Holy,’’ Ambor, the preacher-protagonist, is asked to choose between the church and the union. He chooses both, aiming to serve his people in every way possible. Whereas he had once preached that black men would achieve their kingdom after death, now that he has joined the union and understood what unionization made possible,
he preaches the possibility of kingdom on Earth. One must ‘‘organize fer Jesus.’’ Cook’s theme in all her novels is basically the same: the coming of age of the individual and, often by extension, of the group to which he or she belongs. Boot-Heel Doctor (1941) and Mrs. Palmer’s Honey (1946) best illustrate this point. In Mrs. Palmer’s Honey the blacks in the Ville have dreams of breaking out of their stifling, overcrowded confines into a place where they can with dignity ‘‘move about as full citizens.’’ ‘‘The Ville exists, a real place within a real city.’’ It is the CIO—the brotherhood of men and women groping toward a common goal— that makes some of these things possible, though none occurs without a long, heart-and-body-rending fight. This novel has been criticized for its labor propaganda. One reviewer for the New Yorker said that what started as a ‘‘quietly perceptive study of a very lovable Negro girl’’ abruptly shifts to ‘‘a sort of labor tract with characters are not so important as people as they are as espousers of the cause for democracy, unionization, justice for all. Though Cook, by making the reader privy to Honey’s thoughts, suggests Honey’s potential as an individual, she never allows her fully to realize that potential. Rather, Honey, like the other characters in the novel, remains just beyond the grasp of the reader, fathomable, but subjugated to the wishes of the author. Though the master-servant relationship is clearly upheld and therefore seemingly sanctioned in Cook’s works, it should be pointed out that the black maids, or their male counterparts working in the factories and the fields, somehow appear to be more capable than their white ‘‘charges.’’ They are always ‘‘looking after’’ their white employers as though they needed ‘‘tending to’’ as much as the cooking and cleaning. In fact, it is to Cook’s credit that she endows her maids, whether they are serving blacks or whites, with so much dignity that, like them, we too pity those who must be cared for and we become convinced that the white world would be in dire straits without the input of blacks. Cook always renders reality as she sees it, but manages to suggest that reality can be changed, that it must be improved upon. She writes simply, lovingly, using regional dialects and regional prejudices and shortcomings to convey verisimilitude. Her main characters are ‘‘big people spiritually who are lesser people in society.’’ They are always neighborly, always engaging, gently nudging themselves, even when not fully developed as characters, into the reader’s life for keeps. OTHER WORKS: The Hill Grows Steeper (1938). Storm Against the Wall (1948). The Long Bridge (1949). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: American Novelists of Today (1951). CB (1946, 1949). Other references: NYT (26 Aug. 1949). PW (23 Feb. 1946, 17 Sept. 1949). WLB (10 Oct. 1949). —LILLIE HOWARD
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COOKE, Rose Terry Born 17 February 1827, Hartford, Connecticut; died 18 July 1892, Pittsfield, Massachusetts Also wrote under: Rose Terry Daughter of Henry Wadsworth and Anne Hurlburt Terry; married Rollin H. Cooke, 1873 Born into an old New England family, Rose Terry Cooke at sixteen graduated from the Hartford Female Seminary. Following her conversion that year, she became a lifelong member of the Congregational church. To support herself, she taught school, and in 1848 a legacy gave Cooke leisure to write. Although she considered herself primarily a poet, she is remembered mainly as a local colorist. Cooke’s published works include two volumes of poetry, a novel, children’s stories, religious sketches, and more than 100 short stories. Her verse now seems conventional and spiritless; only her short stories endure. For almost 40 years Cooke’s fiction appeared in prominent magazines, where it had a decisive impact on the development of regional or local-color writing. Although the local colorists she influenced soon overshadowed her, Van Wyck Brooks felt some of Cooke’s tales were never surpassed by later authors. Rich in realistic detail and shrewd social observation, these stories recreate rural New England before and during the 19thcentury migration to cities and prairies. Cooke knew the regional mind as it was shaped by Calvinism and hard work, bleak landscapes, and scanty resources. Although she could treat her characters with broad Yankee humor, she took their ‘‘controversies with Providence’’ seriously and reviewed their eccentric behavior with the sympathetic but critical eye of the insider. Cooke describes New England’s woods and seasons with poetic sympathy, but deliberately refutes its nostalgic, pastoral image. Life on her farms centers on work, ranging from bitter drudgery to quiet self-fulfillment. Although the mills loom on the periphery, her setting is preindustrial. Husband and wife share responsibility for their family’s survival, and a woman’s skill within her sphere is highly prized. Domestic scenes, rendered lovingly, dominate Cooke’s fiction. Critical of women’s rights activists, she often reminds readers that a woman’s place is in her home, under the ‘‘headship’’ of a good husband. However, in ‘‘Mrs. Flint’s Married Experience,’’ a miserly deacon works his wife nearly to death, grudging her even food and clothing; Cooke’s repudiation of the patriarchy which supports him is compelling. In ‘‘How Celia Changed Her Mind’’ and ‘‘Polly Mariner, Tailoress,’’ Cooke characterizes outspoken and self-determined spinsters with evident sympathy. Although many of Cooke’s stories are too didactic, the best probe the Puritan psyche with considerable sophistication.
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Cooke’s respect for Calvinism’s moral seriousness is reflected in her careful analysis of character and motivation. Nevertheless, she criticizes the Puritan tradition’s legalism and emotional repression and argues that its ‘‘sour sublimity’’ should be sweetened with mercy and human love, the Christian nurture of social bonds. Cooke’s importance as an innovator is increasingly clear. A major influence on local-color writing, Cooke turned the dialect story to serious themes and gained it a place in respectable literary magazines. Her portrayal of spinsters, deacons, handymen, and farm women opened new possibilities for the representation of everyday life. Cooke smoothed the transition from the sentimental romances of the 1850s to the realism of William Dean Howells—a role evidenced by Cooke’s style, which swings from florid romantic rhetoric to vernacular dialect and concrete historical detail. Although her tales are loosely structured and occasionally plotless, their focus on character is a hallmark of the modern short story. Read primarily for her impact on later writers, and for her depiction of a lost time and place, Cooke offers a significant handful of stories valuable in their own right.
OTHER WORKS: Poems (1861). Groton Massacre Centennial Poem (1881). Somebody’s Neighbors (1881). A Lay Preacher (1884). Root-Bound and Other Sketches (1885). No (1886). The Sphinx’s Children (1886). The Deacon’s Week (1887). The Deacon’s Week. And What Deacon Baxter Said (1887). Happy Dodd (1887). The Old Garden (1888). Poems (1888). Steadfast, the Story of a Saint and a Sinner (1889). Polly and Dolly, and Other Stories (1890). Huckleberries Gathered from New England Hills (1891). Little Foxes (1904).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brooks, V. W., New England: Indian Summer (1940). Donovan, J., New England Local Color Literature: A Women’s Tradition (1983). Downey, J., ‘‘A Biographical and Critical Study of Rose Terry Cooke’’ (dissertation, 1956). Elrod, E. R., ‘‘Reforming Fictions: Gender and Religion in the Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rose Terry Cooke, and Mary Wilkins Freeman’’ (thesis, 1991). Jobes, K. T., ‘‘The Resolution of Solitude: A Study of Four Writers of the New England Decline’’ (dissertation, 1961). Martin, J., Harvests of Change: American Literature 1865-1914 (1967). Patee, F. L., The Development of the American Short Story (1923). Spofford, H. P., A Little Book of Friends (1916). Toth, S. A., ‘‘More Than Local Color: A Reappraisal of Rose Terry Cooke, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Alice Brown’’ (dissertation, 1969). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: American Transcendental Quarterly (Summer-Fall 1980). BB (Summer and Fall 1955). KCN (1976). Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers (Fall 1992). WS (1972). —SARAH WAY SHERMAN
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COOK-LYNN, Elizabeth Born Elizabeth Bowed Head Irving, 17 November 1930, Fort Thompson, South Dakota Daughter of Henry Renville and Hulda Petersen Irving; married Melvin T. Cook, 1953 (divorced 1970); Clyde J. Lynn, 1975; children: David, Mary, Lisa, Margaret Elizabeth Cook-Lynn is one of the leading figures in the 20th-Century Native American Literary Renaissance. As a writer, editor, teacher, and consultant in native studies, she has pursued literary, scholarly, and political interests that connect deeply to her heritage. She was born in the Government Hospital on the Sioux Reservation at Fort Thompson, South Dakota, and grew up in an extended family environment along the Crow Creek, a tributary of the James and Missouri rivers. She was named Elizabeth Bowed Head Irving after two grandparents, both of whom figured as influences and role models in her life and work. Her grandmother, Eliza Renville Irving, was from the Sisseton-Wahpeton Sioux Reservation near the North Dakota/Canada border. During Cook-Lynn’s childhood, she lived only a few miles away and they were able to spend a great deal of time together. She had been a bilingual writer who worked in the Dakotah language of her people and published in some of the early Christian newspapers. In her dedication to the written word, Cook-Lynn followed in the literary footsteps of her father, Gabriel Renville, a native linguist who was instrumental in developing early Dakotah language dictionaries. Cook-Lynn’s other namesake was her grandfather, Joe Bowed Head Irving, a tribal leader and someone she characterized as a ‘‘great talker.’’ He was a longtime member of the Crow Creek Sioux Tribal Council. Cook-Lynn’s father, Jerome Irving, was a rancher who also served as a member of the Council. Her mother, Hulda Irving, was a teacher whose example she would follow when she became involved in the educational field for many years. In 1952 Cook-Lynn received a B.A. in English and journalism from South Dakota State College (now University). The next year she married Melvin Cook of Eagle Butte, South Dakota, a fellow student and a Sioux from the Cheyenne River Reservation. They started a family and had a son and three daughters. During this period, Cook-Lynn worked as a newspaper editor and writer from 1952 to 1964 in South Dakota and New Mexico. From 1965 to 1969, she pursued a career as a high school teacher. She did graduate studies at New Mexico State University and Black Hills State College and in 1971 received a Masters of Education in psychology and counseling from the University of South Dakota. She and her husband were divorced in 1970 and Cook-Lynn accepted a professorship in 1971 at Eastern Washington University in Cheney. She remained on the faculty teaching English and Native American studies until 1990, when she was named Professor Emerita. While at EWU, she founded The Wicazo Sa Review in 1985 along with her colleagues Roger Buffalohead, Beatrice
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Medicine, and William Willard. Translated as ‘‘Red Pencil,’’ Wicazo Sa is a journal focusing on the scholarship associated with developing Native American studies as an academic discipline. Cook-Lynn has served as the journal’s editor and has contributed numerous articles on topics ranging from land issues to Native American literature. In 1975 she married Clyde Lynn, a teacher and a Spokane Native American from Willpinit, Washington. The following year, she was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship at Stanford University. She also studied in the doctoral program in comparative literature at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln from 1977 to 1978. Cook-Lynn’s work became widely recognized when her mixed-genre collection, Then Badger Said This (1977), had excerpts included in Geary Hobson’s The Remembered Earth: An Anthology of Native American Literature (1979) and was reissued in 1983. Then Badger Said This explores the theme of the destruction of native lands as a result of the damming of the Missouri River in 1952. It is influenced by the writing of Kiowa novelist N. Scott Momaday, an author Cook-Lynn admires for his pioneering technique of combining oral tradition, multiple genres, personal narrative, and tribal history to express a Native American worldview. Over the years, Cook-Lynn has continued to create stories and poems that depict her people’s way of life and at the same time show the effects white culture has had on it. In her novella From the River’s Edge (1991), she explores her central concerns from the point of view of John Tatekeya, a cattleman who seeks reparation for the theft of 45 head of his cattle and finds himself the one accused in the white man’s legal system. From the River’s Edge was reissued as the first work in the novella collection Aurelia: A Crow Creek Trilogy (1999). It is followed by Circle of Dancers, which features a character from the first book, Aurelia Blue, John Tatekeya’s lover of many years. Aurelia searches for her identity as a Dakotah Sioux woman even as she is trying to survive the consequences of the damming of the Missouri River, one of the worst environmental disasters ever visited on the region. In the final novella of the trilogy, In the Presence of River Gods, Aurelia has been witness to events including the birth of the American Indian Movement and the 1974 uprising at Wounded Knee. Her perspective spans the years 1930 to 1990, and like the Corn Wife of Sioux legends, she carries within her the history of her people. In nonfiction, Cook-Lynn’s political and cultural thinking achieved powerful expression in Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays: A Tribal Voice (1996), which received the Myers Center award for the Study of Human Rights in North America in 1997. She was also the recipient in 1995 of the Oyate Igluwitaya award at South Dakota University, given by Native American students to those who aid in the ability of the people to see clearly in the company of each other. OTHER WORKS: Seek the House of Relatives (1983). The Power of Horses and Other Stories (1990). I Remember the Fallen Trees:
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New and Selected Poems (1998). The Politics of Hallowed Ground: Wounded Knee and the Struggle for Indian Sovereignty (1998). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Allen, P. G., ed., Spider Woman’s Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women (1989). Bruchac, J., and J. Witalec, eds., Smoke Rising: The Native North American Literary Companion (1995). Swann, B., and A. Krupat, eds., I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers (1987). Witalec, J., ed., Native North American Literature (1994). Reference works: CA (1991). CLC (1996). DLB (1997). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: American Indian Quarterly (Winter 1996). Journal of American Ethnic History (Summer 1995). —MARLENE M. MILLER
COOLBRITH, Ina Donna Born Josephine D. Smith, 10 March 1842, Nauvoo, Illinois; died 29 February 1928, San Francisco, California Daughter of Don Carlos and Agnes Coolbrith Smith; married Robert B. Carsley, 1859 (divorced) Ina Donna Coolbrith was four months old when her father died and with his death, Coolbrith’s mother moved the family to St. Louis, Missouri, where she married printer William Pickett. In 1849, two years after the gold rush began, Pickett took his wife and children to California. They settled in Los Angeles where Coolbrith spent her early teens and twenties. At eleven, she began writing verses and publishing in the local paper, the Los Angeles Star. The California Home Journal also printed many of her early poems. After a disappointing marriage to Robert Carsley, a partner in the Salamander Iron Works, Coolbrith divorced her husband and moved to San Francisco. Here she broke all associations with her unpleasant past and adopted her pseudonym, Ina Coolbrith. Soon her writings attained a local reputation, and when, in 1868, Bret Harte founded the Overland Monthly, he named her as one of the coeditors. Primarily a poet, though she did write reviews on occasion, Coolbrith wrote for the Californian, Harper’s Weekly, Century, Scribner’s and other magazines and became a close associate and friend of Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, and Joaquin Miller. With George Stoddard and Bret Harte, she was said to complete the ‘‘Golden Gate Trinity’’ of authors. After being acclaimed by critics in England and America, Coolbrith planned to go to New York and eventually to London. However, she was suddenly left with the responsibility of rearing a niece and nephew, and was forced to stay in California where she worked for the Oakland Library, the San Francisco Mercantile Library, and the San Francisco Bohemian Club. In 1915 Coolbrith was summoned to a World Congress of Authors, and named poet laureate of California.
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Despite Coolbrith’s rich personal history, she wrote little of her poetry from autobiographical or topical experiences. An early poem about the ambush of Sheriff Barton, written when she was sixteen and published in the Los Angeles Star, is a rare exception to her later sentimental lyrics. Of Coolbrith’s mature work, done primarily for the Overland Monthly and her books, only four poems refer to her personal past: ‘‘Retrospect,’’ ‘‘Fragment of an Unfinished Poem,’’ ‘‘Unrest,’’ and ‘‘A Mother’s Grief.’’ ‘‘Fragment of an Unfinished Poem’’ (Poetry of the Pacific, 1867) illustrates the unfortunately brief retrospective period when Coolbrith molded a sensuous perception of her disillusioning past: ‘‘The soft star closes to the golden days / I dreamed away, in that far, tropic clime, / Wherein Love’s blossom budded, bloomed and died.’’ In ‘‘Unrest’’ Coolbrith’s topic is her failed marriage; the poet ‘‘cannot sleep’’ for the ‘‘mourning memory / Her dream domains.’’ She searches for hopes that have perished on ‘‘ruined footpaths’’ and ‘‘by the grave of Love’’ kneels and ‘‘sheds no tear.’’ No doubt Coolbrith could make such resolves by forging a new identity in San Francisco where she kept her past a secret, even from close friends. Yet a poem like ‘‘A Mother’s Grief’’ (Outcroppings, 1866), which mourns the loss of an infant, perhaps Robert Carsley’s child, hint that the wounds were permanent. Because of her reticence on subjects of her past, Coolbrith’s ‘‘Blossom Time,’’ her second published poem in the Overland Monthly, is viewed as typical of the majority of her work in theme and style; it celebrates the coming of spring. What was a personal passion in the autobiographical poems becomes a wistful sadness mixed with love of nature. These lines from ‘‘Longing,’’ published in 1868, exemplify this sadness: And I could Kiss, with longing wild, Earth’s dear brown bosom, loved so much, A grass-blade fanned across my hand Would thrill me like a lover’s touch. Coolbrith continued to pipe this same theme—unhappiness abated in the simple pleasures of nature—in her books, A Perfect Day, and Other Poems (1881), The Singer by the Sea (1894), and Songs from the Golden Gate (1896), a collected edition of her work. But despite the single-mindedness of her poems, she emerges as a top writer of the San Francisco literary group. When evaluating Coolbrith, one must remember the fixed literary tastes that influenced the poetry of the period and the attitudes that conditioned women writers. There is a strength in Coolbrith’s imagery which takes her beyond the sentimental lyricists of her day. In fact, many of her images—sensuous, yet wistful—are analogous to Theodore Roethke’s perception of man and nature in the 20th century. As George Stoddard said of her work: ‘‘She has no superior among the female poets of her own land, and scarcely an equal. Her poems are singularly sympathetic; I know of none more palpably spontaneous. The minor key predominates; but, there are a few lark-like carols suffused with the ‘unpremeditated art’ of heavenly inspiration.’’ BIBLIOGRAPHY: Rhodehamel, J., and R. Wood, Ina Coolbrith, Librarian and Laureate of California (1973). Walker, F., San
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Francisco’s Literary Frontier (1939). Walker, F., A Literary History of Southern California (1950). Other references: Pacific Historian (1973). Westward (1928). —SHELLEY ARMITAGE
COOLIDGE, Susan See WOOLSEY, Sarah Chauncey
COOPER, Anna Julia (Haywood) Born 10 August 1858, Raleigh, North Carolina; died 27 February 1964, Washington, D.C. Daughter of George Washington and Hanna Stanley Haywood; married George A. C. Cooper, 1877 Anna Julia Cooper had a lengthy career which she depicted as a conscious attempt to rectify the ‘‘one muffled strain in the Silent South,’’ the voice of blacks. She believed that the black woman, in particular, had been ‘‘mute.’’ Cooper’s life and work provided a voice for the ‘‘hitherto voiceless black woman of America.’’ Born a slave in Wake County, North Carolina, Cooper began her remarkable career at the age of six when she entered St. Augustine’s Normal and Collegiate Institute (an Episcopalian school) in Raleigh. There she became a ‘‘Pupil Teacher’’ when only nine years old. From that time until her death at age 105, Cooper dedicated her life to teaching. The education of others and herself defined the pattern of Cooper’s career. In 1881, Cooper enrolled at Oberlin College in Ohio, where she received both a B.A. (1884) and an M.A. (1887). During her matriculation, she continued to teach, holding a position at the college preparatory, Oberlin Academy. In 1884, she returned to the South and to her alma mater, St. Augustine’s, as an instructor of Latin, Greek, and mathematics. St. Augustine’s became the springboard for Cooper’s career as a writer. Her first book, A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South (1892), is a collection of essays, treatises, and reflections, based upon keen feminist insights and heightened racial awareness, which resulted from Cooper’s own experiences. Her literary reputation rests primarily upon this pioneering volume. Divided into two parts, ‘‘Soprano Obligato’’ and ‘‘Tutti Ad Libitum,’’ A Voice from the South contains eight essays which address the issues related specifically to the position of women and blacks in society. In her preface, ‘‘Our Raison d’Etre,’’ Cooper announces that she has raised her voice as a black woman who ‘‘can more sensibly realize and more accurately tell the weight and the fret’’ of black life in the South. Her objective is to
present the woman’s point of view, the ‘‘other side’’ by one who ‘‘lives there,’’ and who is ‘‘sensitive . . . to social atmospheric conditions.’’ Cooper’s emphasis emerges out of an awareness that just as whites ‘‘were not to blame if they cannot quite put themselves in the dark man’s place, neither should the dark man be wholly expected fully and adequately to reproduce the exact Voice of the Black Woman.’’ Her vision is clear, intelligent, and forceful. Cooper’s essays are not merely impassioned pleas by a woman for the equitable treatment of her race. Thoughtful and scholarly, her work evidences a comprehensive understanding of the position of women in America. Written in an energetic yet graceful prose, her essays are as engaging as they are persuasive. They constitute a significant contribution to the cultural and intellectual history of women and blacks in the U.S. It is fortunate that her collection, reprinted in 1969, is available to contemporary readers. The fighting yet rational spirit of Cooper’s essays carried over into her private life. She was the second woman appointed as principal in the Washington, D.C., public school system, and headed ‘‘M’’ Street (later renamed Dunbar) High School from 1901 to 1906. It was in this capacity that she made her most farreaching contribution to education. When Congress proposed a ‘‘special colored curriculum’’ in vocational education, it did not foresee strident opposition. Cooper, however, opposed the proposal because she believed it was based upon a conception of mental inferiority of blacks. She fought for, and won, an equal course of study for black youths. As a principal, Cooper was ahead of her times in educational theory, just as she was in 1929 when she became president of Frelinghuysen University for employed adults in Washington. She was among the first educators to recognize the need for an evening college for working people. Cooper served as president of Frelinghuysen from 1929 to 1941, and worked actively for its accreditation. Not only was Cooper a pioneer in education for blacks, but she was also a pioneer in life styles for women. At the age of sixtyseven, she received a doctorate from the Sorbonne, University of Paris. The year was 1925, and few women, especially black women, of any age held a doctorate. Cooper allowed neither age nor convention to deter her personal development. Two books in French are the result of her graduate research at the Sorbonne, Le Pèlerinage de Charlemagne: Voyage à Jérusalem et à Constantinople (1925) and L’Attitude de La France a L’Egard de L’Esclavage Pendant La Révolution (1925). When Cooper died a centenarian in 1964, she left an inspirational legacy of activism for which she was eulogized at funeral services held, appropriately, in the chapel of St. Augustine’s College where her career had begun. She left, as well, an impressive collection of unpublished and privately printed works which provide a rich field for further study. OTHER WORKS: Legislative Measures Concerning Slavery in the United States (1942). Equality of Races and the Democratic
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Movement (1945). The Life and Writings of the Grimké Family (1951). The Third Step (n.d.). The papers of Anna Julia Cooper are at the MoorlandSpingarn Research Center at Howard University in Washington, D.C. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bogin, R., and B. J. Lowenberg, ‘‘Anna Julia Cooper,’’ in Black Women in Nineteenth-Century American Life (1976). Harley, S., ‘‘Anna Julia Cooper: A Voice for Black Women’’ in The Afro-American Woman: Struggles and Images (1978). Hutchinson, L. D., Anna J. Cooper: A Voice from the South (1981). Lerner, G., ed., Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (1972). Majors, M. A., Noted Negro Women: Their Triumphs and Activities (1893). Reference works: Afro-American Encyclopedia (1976). Notable Black American Women (1992). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Baltimore Afro-American (14 March 1964). Parent-Teacher Journal (May 1930). —THADIOUS M. DAVIS
COOPER, Jane Born 9 October 1924, Atlantic City, New Jersey Daughter of John C. and Martha Marvel Cooper Although Jane Cooper worked ‘‘strenuously and perfectly seriously on a book of poems’’ between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-six, she did not publish her first book until she was in her mid-forties. Since then, she has published several collections of poems and a long poem, Threads: Rosa Luxemburg from Prison (1979). Cooper lived until she was ten in Jacksonville, Florida, and spent summers in the North Carolina mountains. In 1934 she and her family moved north to Princeton, New Jersey, where she attended Miss Fine’s School (1934-42). She studied at Vassar College from 1942 to 1944 and received a B.A. in comparative literature from the University of Wisconsin in 1946, completing an honors thesis on García Lorca’s ‘‘vocabulary of images.’’ The following year, Cooper attended the first Oxford (England) Summer School, where she began to think about writing ‘‘a book of war poems from a woman’s point of view.’’ Some of these poems appeared in a section of Maps and Windows (1974) called ‘‘Mercator’s World (Poems 1947-1951).’’ After a stint of freelance editing, Cooper began teaching literature and creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College in 1950 and remained a faculty member there until 1987. She spent a year at the University of Iowa (M.A., 1954), where she worked on her poems and did a creative thesis with Robert Lowell and John Berryman. The structure of Cooper’s books is architectural, like a house she has built to which she keeps adding rooms and wings. Her own ‘‘vocabulary of images’’ includes many doors, windows, roofs, and walls. Cooper has always seen her poems as parts of a larger
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whole, and all of her books have included earlier poems reprinted from previous books as well as new ones. Her poems often use architecture as metaphor, and two of her books use the language of building as a title, Maps and Windows and Scaffolding (1984). As in Emily Dickinson’s poems, the house in Cooper’s work is also the body. People often appear in the protective shells of their houses— ‘‘Houses, houses, we lodge in such husks’’ (‘‘Souvenirs,’’ 1971)—and in the context of their ‘‘fragile human settlement’’ (‘‘The Blue Anchor,’’ 1978). The language of house construction serves for both private and public spaces—both our mortal bodies and the imperiled world. Cooper’s first book of poems, The Weather of Six Mornings (1969), won the Lamont Poetry Award of the Academy of American Poets (then a first-book prize) in 1968. The award gave Cooper’s work the approval of some of the leading male poets of the 1960s (the judges included Hayden Carruth, Donald Hall, and James Wright) and brought her critical attention. Cooper was also at this time part of a vigorous and supportive group of women writers whose companionship and guidance she has continued to acknowledge in all of her works. They included Sarah Appleton, Grace Paley, Adrienne Rich, Muriel Rukeyser, and Jean Valentine. The poems of The Weather of Six Mornings show the tension of a generous political vision struggling with anger and of an imagination struggling to work freely despite the press of the diurnal. In the title poem, Cooper addresses the courage it takes for a woman writer simply to come to speech at all: ‘‘I try to speak / of what is so hard for me.’’ Maps and Windows includes poems from 1947-51, new poems, and the first printing of Cooper’s essay, ‘‘Nothing Has Been Used in the Manufacture of This Poetry That Could Have Been Used in the Manufacture of Bread.’’ Here she writes of ‘‘the sort of upper-middle class education that encourages writing, painting, music, theater so long as they aren’t taken too seriously,’’ and poses a central question about her early work: ‘‘Why, then, didn’t I publish? And why, even more, did I give up writing poems?’’ In this essay, Cooper traces her ‘‘poetry of development,’’ which the poems themselves demonstrate, and confronts honestly women’s need to be modest or generous at the expense of full creative exploration. Scaffolding (published in England in 1984 and republished as Scaffolding: Selected Poems in the U.S. in 1993) includes most of the poems from her two earlier books as well as five ‘‘Reclaimed Poems’’ from 1954-1969 and new poems from 1970-1983, including her long poem ‘‘Threads: Rosa Luxemburg from Prison.’’ Cooper does here the feminist work of retrieval on herself by resurrecting poems she had earlier discounted as unfinished or unimportant. Welcoming the ‘‘opportunity to see my work arranged chronologically,’’ Cooper wrote ‘‘Scaffolding gives a sense of the continuous journey the work has been for me all along.’’ Her fourth collection, Green Notebook, Winter Road (1994), is in the author’s words, ‘‘a book that is meant to be very fluid, as the private and public worlds intersect.’’ While a melancholy undercurrent weaves the poems together, critics assert that there remains a balancing sense of hope. The works make Cooper’s
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maturity her greatest strength by pulling the present into the light of the past. Her newest venture, The Flashboat: Poems Collected and Reclaimed, was not yet published in late 1999.
life in Cooperstown, which was founded by her grandfather. She later moved with her family to Mamaroneck, New York. Her education was received in boarding schools in New York and Paris.
Cooper has also coedited and authored forewords for a number of publications, including Senior English Reading (1980, with Malcolm Cooper), Extended Outlooks: The Iowa Review Collection of Contemporary Women Writers (1981, coeditor and author of introduction), The Sanity of Earth and Grass: Complete Poems (1994, coeditor and author of foreword), and The Life of Poetry (1997, author of foreword). Her work is also found in periodicals like the New Yorker, Transatlantic Review, and American Poetry Review.
In 1833 Cooper returned to Cooperstown, where she remained till her death. She never married. Most of her community activities centered on humanitarian efforts. Devoted to her father, Cooper served for many years as his copyist. Her literary achievements include fiction, articles, biographical sketches, a series of prefaces for the edition of her father’s works, and her best known work, Rural Hours (1850). Her novel, Elinor Wyllys; or, The Young Folk at Longbridge (1946), was published under the pseudonym Anabel Penfeather, and was originally thought to be the work of her father, who edited it and wrote the preface.
Cooper’s many awards include grants from the Guggenheim Foundation (1960), the Ingram Merrill Foundation (1971), the National Endowment for the Arts (1981), and a Bunting Fellowship from Radcliffe College in 1988. In 1978 she was the corecipient of the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Award. She has frequently been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Blue Mountain Center. She received the Maurice English Poetry award for a book of poems by a writer in her sixth decade or older for Scaffolding. Honors continue into her seventies. Cooper earned an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts in Letters in 1995, and was chosen New York State Poet for 1996-97. Green Notebook was also a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Cooper’s poems document a journey in search of ‘‘necessary truths.’’ In his juror’s statement for the English award, poet Galway Kinnell wrote, ‘‘Looking at the whole body of Jane Cooper’s work, one sees an artist who changes: who confronts unsettling experience and learns to see the world and herself in new ways.’’ Never afraid to take the next surprising turn, Cooper has written, ‘‘If my poems have always been about survival—and I believe they have been—then survival too keeps revealing itself as an art of the unexpected.’’ BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1977). CA Online (8 May 1999). CANR (1986). CP (1985, 1991). Other references: Belles Lettres (1985). Booklist (15 Sept. 1994). Parnassus (1989). WRB (1986). Web site: The Academy of American Poets available online at poets.org/LIT/POET/jcooper (8 May 1999). —MAGGIE ANDERSON, UPDATED BY CARRIE SNYDER
Rural Hours is a year-long journal of life in a rural American community. Its concerns are mainly the natural events of the four seasons which structure the work. In this it bears a great resemblance to Thoreau’s Walden, published four years later, and, in its treatment of local folklore and Indians, to his A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Its gentle humor often brings to mind Emily Dickinson’s similar treatment of birds, bugs, and other natural subjects. An 1851 illustrated edition included color plates of birds and plants native to the region of Cooperstown. There were two English editions in 1850 and 1855. After Rural Hours Cooper took on a number of editing tasks culminating with Pages and Pictures from the Writings of James Fenimore Cooper (1861), a volume of selections from 25 of her father’s writings. For this volume she wrote an introduction including a biography of James Fenimore Cooper. OTHER WORKS: Country Rambles in England; or, Journal of a Naturalist by J. L. Knapp (edited by Cooper, 1853). The Rhyme and Reason of Country Life; or, Selections from Fields Old and New (edited by Cooper, 1854). Mount Vernon: A Letter to the Children of America (1858). Worthy Women of Our First Century (1877). William West Skiles: A Sketch of Missionary Life at Valle Cruis in Western North Carolina: 1842-1862 (1890). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Birdsall, R., The Story of Cooperstown (1917). Cooper, J. F., Legends and Traditions of A Northern County (1921). Cunningham, A. K., ‘‘Susan Fenimore Cooper, Child of Genius,’’ in NYH (July 1944). Jones, D., introduction to Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Rural Hours (1968 ed.). Other references: Otsego Farmer (4 Jan. 1895). —JOANN PECK KRIEG
COOPER, Susan Fenimore CORBETT, Elizabeth Frances
Born 17 April 1813, Scarsdale, New York; died 31 December 1894, Cooperstown, New York Also wrote under: Anabel Penfeather Daughter of James Fenimore and Susan de Lancey Cooper
Born 30 September 1887, Aurora, Illinois; died January 1981 Daughter of Richard W. and Isabelle Adkins Corbett
Susan Fenimore Cooper, the daughter of the great American novelist, James Fenimore Cooper, lived the first four years of her
One of three children, Elizabeth Corbett grew up on the grounds of a Civil War veterans’ home near Milwaukee where her
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father was a member of the staff. She received her B.A., Phi Beta Kappa, from the University of Wisconsin in 1910. After her father’s death in 1927, she and her mother moved to New York City. Corbett has authored more than 50 novels. She has also written short stories, plays, and many articles. Her best known character is the spry octogenarian, Mrs. Meigs, who was introduced in 1931 in The Young Mrs. Meigs. The Mrs. Meigs novels deal with typical Corbett themes: the necessity of maintaining one’s independence and the importance of overcoming obstacles such as ill health and onerous social demands. Mrs. Meigs appears as the central character in A Nice Long Evening (1933); she finds a love interest at 82 in Mrs. Meigs and Mr. Cunningham (1936) and marries him in Excuse Me, Mrs. Meigs (1943). The character’s early life is treated in She Was Carrie Eaton (1938) and Mr. and Mrs. Meigs (1940). Another series of novels concerns the residents of Mount Royal, a fictional small town in Illinois, and is set in the 19th century. The novels in this series include Mount Royal (1936), The Langworth Family (1937), Light of Other Days (1938), and Charley Manning (1939). Corbett has also written a number of stories for girls about the three Graper sisters and their family. Corbett’s novels provide pleasant, undemanding reading and offer an afternoon’s diversion for a feminine audience. The conflict in her novels comes from family pressures and the difficulties of finding an appropriate mate in the white uppermiddle classes of the small Midwestern communities she describes. Though many of Corbett’s novels were written and set during the Depression, the realities of poverty, work, violence, and lack of education receive little attention. The conventional roles of men and women in society are not challenged and conventional values are upheld. Corbett’s ingénues and heroines accept ‘‘a woman’s life is spent waiting on men. . . . indeed a woman’s life is best spent that way.’’ And in turn, her male characters willingly take on the responsibilities of supporting wives and families. In The Constant Sex (1935) a woman of 32 frees herself from the serfdom of running a household for her six brothers to find happiness in marrying and reforming an irresponsible artist. Ingénues such as Elva in Mr. Underhill’s Progress (1934) and Cecile in The Young Mrs. Meigs have nothing much to do after high school but wait for the young, brash, usually somewhat insouciant bridegroom Corbett is sure to provide. If Corbett’s young men and women tend to be indistinguishable from novel to novel, her middle-aged and older characters are highly individualized and presented with great sympathy and optimism. Charley Manning is drawn as an attractive and sympathetic figure, but Corbett cannot permit his adultery to go unpunished. This conflict generates a characterization more complex than her portrayals of younger people. In A Nice Long Evening Corbett presents the threat of Mrs. Meigs’s blindness realistically and confronts the problems of old age with objectivity. Corbett has written one volume of reminiscences about her early years at the national soldiers’ home, Out at the Soldiers’
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Home (1941) and one autobiographical novel, The Red-Haired Lady (1945). OTHER WORKS: Cecily and the Wide World (1916). The Vanished Helga (1918). Puritan and Pagan (1920). Walt: The Good Gray Poet Speaks for Himself (1928). ‘‘If It Takes All Summer,’’ the Life Story of Ulysses Grant (1930). The Graper Girls (1931). After Five O’Clock (1932). The Graper Girls Go to College (1932). Growing Up with the Grapers (1934). The House Across the River (1934). Beth and Ernestine Graper (1936). The Far Down (1939). The Queen’s Holiday (1940). Faye’s Folly (1941). Early Summer (1942). The Kimball Collection (1942). Golden Grain (1943). Lady with Parasol (1946). Immortal Helen (1948). Eve and Christopher (1949). The Duke’s Daughter (1950). Portrait of Isabelle (1951). The Richer Harvest (1952). In Miss Armstrong’s Room (1953). Family Portrait (1955). The Head of Apollo (1956). Professor Preston at Home (1957). The President’s Wife (1958). Hamilton Terrace (1960). The Wainwright Inheritance (1960). Hidden Island (1961). The Paige Girls (1962). The Distant Princess (1963). The Heart of the Village (1963). Anniversary (1964). Lisa Kinnerley’s Husband (1964). The Continuing City (1965). The Crossroads (1965). The Old Callahan Place (1966). Harry Martin’s Wife (1967). Ladies’ Day (1968). The Three Lives of Sharon Spence (1969). Hotel Belvedere (1970). Sunday at Six (1971). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Pfeifer, W. E., A Guide to the Collection of Elizabeth Corbett—A Milwaukee Author: Her Letters, Business Papers, Drafts of Stories, Manuscripts, Newspaper Clippings, and Photos (1980). Warfel, H. R., American Novelists of Today (1951). Reference works: TCA (1942). Other references: NYHTB (10 June 1945). NYTBR (27 Sept. 1931, 17 Sept. 1939). TLS (20 May 1939). —HEDDY A. RICHTER
CORNWELL, Patricia Born 9 June 1956, Miami, Florida Daughter of Marilyn and Sam Daniels; married Charles Cornwell, 1979 (divorced 1990) With the publication of her first novel, Postmortem, in 1990, Patricia Cornwell staked claim to territory distinctly her own in the field of the crime novel. Bringing to bear her knowledge of forensic pathology and the informational and analytical capabilities of modern computer technology (as well as some old-fashioned legwork), Dr. Kay Scarpetta, chief medical examiner of Virginia and Cornwell’s fictional alter ego, tracked down the serial killer terrorizing the women of Richmond, but not before she herself had become his intended target. The novel’s curious blend of creepy suspense and scientific investigation thrilled readers and earned accolades from her peers, sweeping five major
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mystery awards that year: the John Creasy Award from the British Crime Writers Association; the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America; the Anthony and Boucheron awards from the World Mystery Convention; the Macavity from the Mystery Readers International; as well as France’s Prix du roman d’aventure. Scarpetta’s eight subsequent forensic investigations have not diminished her appeal; they have made her one of the most successful contemporary crime writers. Only a childhood filled with personal trauma and a dream in adolescence of becoming an archaeologist could have foreshadowed Cornwell’s preoccupation with detection and with law and order. Two years after her parents’ separation, when she was five, Cornwell moved with her mother and two brothers from her Miami, Florida, birthplace to Montreat, North Carolina. Suffering from a crippling bout of depression two years later, her mother tried to give her children to the evangelist Reverend Billy Graham and his wife, Ruth, who lived nearby. Ruth, who temporarily placed the children with a missionary family, became Cornwell’s mentor and the subject of her first published work, A Time for Remembering: The Story of Ruth Bell Graham (1983). Tough and resilient, but not without her vulnerabilities, like Scarpetta, Cornwell excelled at her studies and, following a battle with anorexia nervosa and bulimia, graduated in 1979 with a degree in English from Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina. After marriage to an English professor 17 years her senior, Cornwell began a career as a journalist for the Charlotte (North Carolina) Observer, eventually becoming a crime reporter. A 1981 move to Richmond, where her husband pursued his studies for the ministry, brought her into contact with a Virginia medical examiner, Marcella Fierro, who inspired Cornwell to become a volunteer police officer to gain access to the autopsy room. ‘‘When she started talking about how you could make the body talk to you, I was just blown away,’’ Cornwell explained. Soon she had worked her way into a job as a technical writer and then as a computer analyst in the Richmond medical examiner’s office. Her six years of experience in the world of the morgue accounts for the authenticity that characterizes her well-researched novels. Postmortem, Cornwell’s first crime novel, was quickly followed by Body of Evidence (1991), in which Scarpetta investigates the stabbing death of a Richmond-area romance writer. All That Remains (1992) found Scarpetta examining the skeletal remains of two college students, victims of a serial killer targeting young lovers. In Cruel and Unusual (1993), her next Scarpetta adventure, Cornwell introduced readers to Temple Gault, a serial killer who would elude law enforcement officers and reappear again in The Body Farm (1994) and From Potter’s Field (1995). Scarpetta’s three subsequent investigations—Cause of Death’s (1996) tale of nuclear terrorism, Unnatural Exposure’s (1997) inquiry into the smallpox deaths of two women, and Point of Origin’s (1998) story of racial hatred and murder—all bear Cornwell’s trademarks: multiple murders; detailed descriptions of forensic procedures that convey the violence perpetrated against the victims, who are usually women; and her formidable heroine, who must not only battle the kind of person who kills for sport, but also confront the prejudices of a male-dominated justice system. The latest Scarpetta thriller, Black Notice (1999), takes readers
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from Virginia to Paris and back again for another of Cornwell’s chilling adventures. As a crime writer, Cornwell differs from practitioners of the genre who are interested in the mind of the psychopath. ‘‘In America we’ve become so focused and so curious about these aberrant people, we almost celebrate them,’’ she says. Instead, she focuses on science and law enforcement and, like her heroine, lives with a palpable sense of evil. Like Scarpetta, she also sleeps with a gun by her side and carries others on her person, and she lives within a high-security, gated community in Richmond in a home equipped with motion sensors and other security devices, facts which may provide some insight into the series’ increasing tone of paranoia. In 1997 Cornwell launched a second series of police procedurals with the publication of Hornet’s Nest, the clearly autobiographical tale of a rising young crime reporter for the Charlotte Observer assigned to ride with the city’s deputy chief of police. In their first outing together, they work with Charlotte’s beleaguered police chief, Judy Hammer, to track a serial killer preying on visiting businessman. In their second outing, detailed in Southern Cross (1998), the trio must find the link between the desecration of a Confederate memorial and the murder of an elderly woman as well as clean house in a corrupt Richmond police force. Satirical in tone, this series, which has garnered little critical approval, lacks the verve and authenticity of the Scarpetta series but is still a hit with fans. Clearly, in the male-dominated world of police procedurals and crime novels, Cornwell and her female crime fighters are equal to their tasks. OTHER WORKS: Ruth: A Portrait (1997). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Biography (May 1998). Great Women Mystery Writers: Classic to Contemporary (1994). Miller, M., and K. Ames, ‘‘A League of Her Own,’’ in Newsweek (22 July 1996). New York Times Magazine (14 July 1996). Reference works: ANR 53. CBY (1997). —LINDA C. PELZER
CORTEZ, Jayne Born 19 May 1936, Arizona Married Ornette Coleman (divorced); children: Denardo Jayne Cortez, a poet of extraordinary musicality, was born in Arizona but reared in the Watts section of Los Angeles. A participant in writers’ workshops in Watts during the 1960s, she published her first volume of poems, Pissstained Stairs and the Monkey Man’s Wares in 1969. Since then, she has published six volumes of poetry, made three recordings of readings of her work, and has had her poems included in numerous anthologies, magazines, and journals. In 1979 she received a National Endowment
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for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. A performing poet, Cortez has lectured and read widely in the U.S., Latin America, and Africa, often reading to musical accompaniment. Cortez has been described as a ‘‘surrealist’’ poet because of her startling use of symbol and imagery. In her poems, colors have tastes, sounds have texture and shape, odors are visible and audible. Cortez yokes opposites and contradictories, such as ‘‘signifying stones’’ and ‘‘tattooed holes.’’ She juxtaposes the beautiful and the ugly, the sublime and the disgusting, often in the same line or phrase. Cortez’s images combine with her use of language and sound. Often the poems have a sense of incantation achieved through a judicious use of repetition. In addition, she is a student of black musical traditions, ancient and modern, grounding poems in African rhythms, blues lines, and avant-garde jazz structures. Orality is central to Cortez’s art. The sounds of the words reinforce their sense. In Cortez’s performances, the English language also becomes tonal as she varies pitch and duration of syllables to enhance the musicality of her lines. Vocalized breaths provide rhythmic punctuation for other lines in the mode of the traditional African American preacher. A high priestess for the human race, Cortez has nonetheless a black woman’s vision. She is seer and healer, singer and chastiser. She self-consciously assumes a ‘‘griot’’ stance, singing praise of such cultural figures as Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington, Cuban drummer Chano Pozo, Martinican poet Leon Damas, and South African freedom fighter Solomon Mahlangu. Praises for the works of people such as these who have joined the ancestors commingle with exhortations to the living. Cortez orates from a pulpit of Pan-African cultural identity, environmental concerns, and human rights advocacy. ‘‘Push back the catastrophes,’’ she urges in her poem of the same name. Her poems see as catastrophic all ideas and actions that prevent the actualization of human potential, dignity, and creativity. Beginning her career as a writer during a period when poets often took to the public platform, Cortez has become known as a highly polished performer. In 1975 she recorded her first album, Celebrations and Solitudes: The Poetry of Jayne Cortez, with bassist Richard Davis. Subsequent recordings have featured other noted jazz musicians, including her son, Denardo Coleman. In her sixth book, Somewhere in Advance of Nowhere (1996), Cortez again presents life in her streetwise, musical, and rhythmic style. In this collection, as in her other work, the poetry ranges from the clearly political to the grim; full of insight into life and some of its darker moments. Critics continue to praise Cortez’s work as a tribute to human resilience and a showcase of poetic confrontation. Cortez continues to merge art, music, and poetry in her life and work. Involved in a wide range of creative efforts, Cortez has worked on films such as Tribeca (1993) and music videos including Mandela is Coming (1991). Her verse reflects her extensive travels, which have included lecture tours throughout Africa, Europe, Canada, and the U.S. and tours with her jazz ensemble to Brazil, Germany, Italy, Zimbabwe, the British Isles,
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and Japan. She also appears at jazz festivals in the U.S., London, and Germany. In addition to her artistic efforts, Cortez has taught at Rutgers University (English) and was writer-in-residence at the Writers’ Community in New York. She also serves on the advisory board of Poets House, the executive board of PEN, the governing board of the Poetry Society of America, and the board of directors of the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines. Together with Ama Ata Aidoo, a resident of Zimbabwe, she formed the Organization of Women Writers of Africa (OWWA) to establish links between professional African women writers and to promote interest in the literature of African women. Continually active in her chosen artistic fields, Cortez offers the following on her own creative process: ‘‘I use dreams, the subconscious, and the real objects, and I open up the body and use organs, and I sink them into words, and I ritualize them and fuse them into events. I guess the poetry is like a festival. Everything can be transformed.’’ OTHER WORKS: Festivals and Funerals (1971). Scarifications (1973). Mouth on Paper (1977). Firespitter (1982). Coagulations: New and Selected Poems (1984). Poet Magnetic (1991). Fragments (1994). Recordings: Unsubmissive Blues (1980). There It Is (1982). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Melhem, D. H., ed., Heroism in the New Black Poetry (1990). Redmond, E. B., Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry—A Critical History (1976). Reference works: CA (1978). CANR (1984). DLB (1985). FC (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Callaloo (1986). MELUS (Spring 1996). PW (3 June 1996). Yardbird Reader (1976). —FAHAMISHA PATRICIA BROWN, UPDATED BY REBECCA C. CONDIT
COTT, Nancy F. Born 8 November 1945, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Daughter of Max F. and Estelle Hollander Falik; married Leland Cott, 1969; children: Joshua, Emma Nancy Falik Cott is a historian, educator, editor and writer specializing in women’s history. She is recognized as an influential feminist scholar and is credited with contributing a great deal to the body of knowledge on women’s roles, both social and political, throughout the history of the United States. Cott received her B.A. from Cornell University in 1967 and her Ph.D. from Brandeis in 1974. She held teaching positions throughout the early 1970s, including at Wheaton College, Clark University, and Wellesley. In 1975 she joined Yale University as an assistant professor and has remained there, rising to full
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professor of both history and American studies. She has served as the chair of both the American studies and women’s studies programs at Yale, where she helped establish the latter. She also lectures at other colleges and universities and at the Boston Public Library.
of publications, including Feminist Studies, William and Mary Quarterly, Journal of Social History, Psychohistory Review, Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Journal of American History, Yale Review, American Quarterly, and American Historical Review.
Cott’s first book was Root of Bitterness: Documents of the Social History of American Women (1972), which was reissued in 1996 in an edition coedited with Jeanne Boydston, Ann Braude, Lori D. Ginzberg, and Molly Ladd-Taylor. Cott’s second book, The Bonds of Womanhood: ‘‘Woman’s Sphere’’ in New England, 1780-1835, was based on research conducted while she was a student at Brandeis.
As a reviewer and essayist, Cott has written for Yale Review, American Quarterly, New York Review of Books, American History, American Bar Foundation Research Journal, American Quarterly, American Historical Review, Business History Review, Intellectual History Newsletter, International Labor and Workingclass History, Journal of American History, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, New York Times Book Review, Pacific Studies, Signs, Times (London) Literary Supplement, and Women’s History Review.
In 1979 Cott coedited, with E. H. Pleck, A Heritage of Her Own: Towards a New Social History of American Women. The book gathered 20 popular and scholarly essays by women from many periods of U.S. history and from diverse walks of life; many of the essays are considered classics in the field of American women’s history. The selections included Cott’s ‘‘Passionless,’’ which held that Victorian society’s demand that women be sexless may have offered advantages and rewards, contrary to the dominant view that the period was predominately negative for women. A Heritage of Her Own was praised for its carefully chosen essays, its range and variety, and its focus on controversial milestones. Cott’s The Grounding of Modern Feminism (1987) offers a historical context for modern feminists, presenting a discussion of the factionalism that developed within the women’s movement even before the 19th amendment was passed. Critics praised the book. Nation wrote, ‘‘Nancy F. Cott has given us a new way to understand the paradoxes of modern feminism. Her brilliant book literally grounds feminism in history, both as an ideology and as a social movement, and clarifies its inescapable dilemma.’’ Joanne Meyerowitz, in the Journal of American History, added, ‘‘Cott’s complex work stands among the most important books on United States women’s history. It recovers the broad range of the early 20th-century women’s movement and uncovers the neglected roots of contemporary feminism. Spiced with insight and irony, this is subtle and sophisticated fare.’’ Joan Scott, writing in Ms. magazine, agreed: ‘‘Yale historian Nancy Cott traces the history of this period in an engaging and intelligent book, packed with fascinating details, new information, and wonderfully pointed quotations. She also offers a profoundly important interpretation crucial for understanding contemporary feminism.’’ In A Woman Making History: Mary Ritter Beard through Her Letters (1991), Cott compiled 141 letters from more than 30 correspondents, gleaned from a number of archives, which provide an overview of Beard’s life from 1912 to 1955. The letters are chronological and enhanced by Cott’s notes explaining the historical context surrounding each missive. The book offers a rare glimpse into the life of Beard, who was often overshadowed by the attention paid to her husband. Cott also edited an 11-volume series of books for young readers, The Young Oxford History of Women in the United States (1995). In addition to her book-length works, Cott has published articles on women’s social issues and feminist history in a number
She has contributed essays to historical compilation books edited by others, including What is Feminism? (1986), A New Perspective: Southern Women’s Cultural History from the Civil War to Civil Rights (1989), Women, Politics and Change (1990), One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement (1995), Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America (1990), Conflicts in Feminism (1990), La Storia Delle Donne (1992), Suffrage & Beyond (1994), U.S. History as Women’s History (1995), and Justice and Injustice (1996). She has also supplied essays on Mary Ritter Beard and other women to various biographical anthologies and contributed afterwords, introductions, editorials, interviews and commentary to a range of scholarly books and journals. Cott has earned numerous honors throughout her career, including fellowships, grants, and awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, Harvard Law School, Radcliffe, Yale, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment of the Humanities. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference Works: CANR (1998). Other references: Journal of American History (Dec. 1988). Ms. (Sept. 1980, Oct. 1987, Mar./Apr. 1995). NYTBR (2 Mar. 1980, 24 Mar. 1991). Nation (6 Feb. 1988). PW (18 Jan. 1991). —KAREN RAUGUST
COYLE, Kathleen Born 1886, Derry, Northern Ireland; died 25 March 1952, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Married Charles O’Maher; children: a son and a daughter The oldest of five children, Kathleen Coyle describes her youth as a ‘‘tragic Brontë sort of childhood.’’ Educated at home by a French governess and by her father’s library, Coyle started writing when she was very young. Although Magical Realm (1943) describes her early years, Coyle was reticent about her private life and few details are known. She lived in Paris for many years before moving to New
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York at the beginning of World War I. She married Charles O’Maher who predeceased her; she had a daughter and a son. Although she suffered from poor health, Coyle was a prolific writer. Coyle’s first novel was published in 1923, but it was her fifth and best known novel Liv (1929) that established her reputation. It was translated into Italian as Come un Volo d’uccelli (1944). In the novel Liv Evensen asks to go to Paris to study cooking before marrying Harold Christensen. In Paris she meets the Dadaists and falls in love with Per Mazons who will not dissolve his loveless marriage because of the financial security it offers. While Liv experiences an intense relationship with Per, there is no affair. She leaves Paris and returns home to Norway to a sympathetic aunt. Liv’s life in Paris touches the expatriate experience, the moral consequences of rootlessness: ‘‘We feel that we can do what we like and people won’t know, our own people I mean.’’ Liv is passionate but reason is her greater strength. Coyle judged A Flock of Birds (1930) to be her best book. A critical success, it is a mother’s story. Catherine Munster’s son Christy is sentenced to death for shooting a British soldier in Dublin in 1919. His older brother Valentine, a former British Army officer, disapproves of Christy but tries to intercede on his behalf. Christy’s sister Kathleen carries a petition to well-known Dublin literary figures. Only Catherine Munster is willing to see her son die for his ideals. ‘‘He was dying at the right moment, at twenty-one, with one thing well done and nothing undone.’’ Frank about her possessive love for her son, Catherine realizes that she’d rather see Christy die while he is hers. Coyle was widely read but she never emerged from the ranks of minor novelists. Able powerfully to evoke emotion, she sacrificed clarity for intensity. Most of Coyle’s women have too much spirit and intelligence for the lives they are given. Failing to find an acceptable focus, their energy is usually destructive. Liv, the heroine of her most successful book, is an exception; she is saved by her self-possession. It is Coyle’s examination of her past, a past that was responsible for her tragic mode, that is of lasting interest. Explaining her preoccupation with the past, she says in Magical Realm (1943), ‘‘Why, at the end of life, we return so insistently to the mould of our childhood is simply because it is only at the end that we are capable of comprehending the beginning.’’ OTHER WORKS: Picadilly (1923). The Widow’s House (1923). Youth in the Saddle (1927). Shule Agra (1927). It is Better to Tell (1927). There Is a Door (1931). The French Husband (1932). The Skeleton (1933). Morning Comes Early (1934). Undue Fulfillment (1934). Immortal Ease (1939). Brittany Summer (1940). Who Dwells with Wonder (1940). Josephine (1942). To Hold Against Famine (1942). Major (1942). BIBLIOGRAPHY: West, R., preface to Kathleen Coyle’s Liv (1929). Reference works: TCA (1942, 1955). Other references: NYT (29 March 1952). WLB (May 1952). —MAUREEN MURPHY
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CRAIG, Elisabeth May Born 19 December 1888, Coosaw Mines, South Carolina; died 15 July 1975, Silver Spring, Maryland Also wrote under: May Craig Daughter of Alexander and Elizabeth Adams; married Donald A. Craig, 1909 Elisabeth May Craig was the sixth of nine children born to parents who left England for a small South Carolina mining town. Her mother died when she was five, and she was raised by Frances and William Weymouth, one of the owners of the phosphate mines in which her father was a blacksmith. In 1900 the Weymouths moved to Washington, D.C., where Craig attended Central High School, enrolled in George Washington Hospital Nursing School, and worked at developing fiction and nonfiction writing skills. After marriage to journalist Donald Craig in 1909, Elizabeth began to publish feature articles and in 1923 to assist her husband with the column he wrote for the Gannett chain of newspapers in Maine. When her husband died in 1936, she kept his Maine column, retitling it ‘‘Inside in Washington’’ and writing it almost seven days a week until her retirement in 1965. In the 1940s Craig began radio broadcasts, and in 1949 appeared on the first televised ‘‘Meet the Press’’ broadcast. She received national prominence as the lady with the hats and the ‘‘dodgeproof’’ questions during her tenure of 18 years. The best of Craig’s reportage appeared in the Gannett column ‘‘Inside in Washington,’’ which was published in four major Maine newspapers. For this column she developed a vast store of political knowledge about complex bills, laws, and issues relevant to the national and local Maine environments. The column’s topic was introduced within the first few sentences, or else a ‘‘chatty’’ description of Washington social events was followed by an abrupt shift to a political theme. Readers were presented with a large array of political facts organized within a framework of personal opinion. Generally approving of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal reforms because they were efforts ‘‘to do something for the forgotten man,’’ Craig also kept her readers aware of the various interest groups who stood to benefit from each new piece of legislation. Legislative ‘‘samples’’ explained political philosophies and practical politics. Discussions of the ‘‘milk imbroglio,’’ the ‘‘homestead idea,’’ or the ‘‘medical trust’’ illustrated issues of an ideal ‘‘American standard of living’’ and ‘‘the little local grafters who saw to it that they got theirs.’’ Throughout her journalistic career Craig covered presidential and congressional politics; she attended press conferences, legislative sessions, political conventions, and diplomatic conferences. In World War II, Craig was in the European theater, where she wrote about the Normandy campaign, London during the buzzbomb raids, and Paris the day after its liberation. She was the first woman correspondent to fly in the Berlin Airlift and the first to fly over the North Pole. During Truman’s Administration she was the only woman present at the Kaesong ceasefire talks in Korea and the first woman correspondent to receive accreditation by the U.S.
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Navy. During the 1950s and 1960s she wrote about Cold War politics in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia. Despite the difficulties being a woman journalist presented (such as exclusion from ‘‘stag’’ White House correspondents’ gatherings), Craig was part of the ‘‘established’’ Washington press corps. This gave her a powerful vantage point from which she did not hesitate to criticize officials’ behavior. In her most widely read article, ‘‘Decline of the United States—And Fall’’ (reprinted in several magazines and newspapers in 1964), she castigated the American government for being ‘‘incapable of giving leadership.’’ This column called for a ‘‘strong man to lead us’’ in ‘‘worthy’’ causes of ‘‘schools for the young, care for the elderly, strength so that none will dare attack us.’’ Craig was an active member of the journalists’ union, the American Newspaper Guild, and she served as an executive officer of the local Washington Newspaper Guild. An articulate feminist, Craig was a vocal member of the board of governors of the Women’s National Press Club and an elected president in 1943. She was the first woman elected to the Standing Committee for Congressional Press Galleries (1944-46). As an ‘‘able journalist’’ Craig was presented with an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from the University of Maine in 1946, and in 1952 she received the Business and Professional Women’s Association Award for Distinguished Service. Ahead of her male colleagues on issues of equal rights in the profession of journalism, Craig was in other matters a journalist critically attuned to the times in which she lived. Her columns are a unique personal reflection on nearly 40 years of American domestic and foreign policymaking.
OTHER WORKS: Elisabeth May Craig’s column ‘‘Inside in Washington’’ appeared during the years 1925-65 in Maine’s Portland Press Herald, Evening Express, Kennebec Journal, and Waterville Sentinel. She also shared a byline with Donald Craig for the Maine column from 1925 until 1936. The papers of Elisabeth May Craig are at the Library of Congress, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, the Gannett Publishing Company, and the archives of ‘‘Meet the Press.’’
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Marzolf, M., Up from the Footnote: A History of Women Journalists (1977). Ross, I., Ladies of the Press (1936). Other references: Down East (Aug. 1959). Look (26 April 1962). Newsweek (12 Aug. 1957). NYT (15 July 1975). Time (14 June 1943). —JENNIFER L. TEBBE
CRAIG, Kit See REED, Kit
CRAIGIE, Pearl (Mary Teresa) Richards Born 3 November 1867, Boston, Massachusetts; died 13 August 1906 Wrote under: John Oliver Hobbes Daughter of John M. and Laura Arnold Richards; married Reginald W. Craigie, 1887 Born into a respectable Bostonian family, Pearl Richards Craigie was educated by private tutors in America and at schools in Paris and London. Most of Craigie’s life was spent in Europe, and her writing reflects her familiarity with European culture. Although she returned frequently to the U.S. for visits, Craigie never took up residence. With the publication of Some Emotions and a Moral in 1891, Craigie embarked on a 15-year literary career that ended abruptly with her death at the age of thirty-eight. Her plays were performed at many British theaters, including the St. James in London. But although Craigie’s writings were popular, they elicited negative comments from the literary critics of her time. One major complaint was that she imitated the literary style of George Meredith, an author whose influence she acknowledged. One reason for the popularity of Craigie’s writings was their continuity of theme, setting, and purpose. In more than 25 novels, dramas, and travelogues, Craigie adhered to one basic formula. Her stage is the French chateau, English castle, or London home. Her characters are wealthy, influential, and intellectual—the men are virile, but foolish; the women beautiful, but cunning. Craigie’s purpose was always the same: to illustrate how wealthy, influential, and intellectual people initially lose themselves in romantic games of love, but in the end discover truth. Craigie believed that through the maze of love, self-actualization occurred: ‘‘The passion of love invariably drives men and women to an extreme step in one direction or another. It will send some to cloister, some to tribune, some to the stage, some to heroism, some to crime, and all to their natural calling.’’ Craigie created several types of women characters which she used over and over in her plays and novels. One type is beautiful, self-indulgent, and jealous; her polar opposite is unmarried, homely, and intelligent: ‘‘theology was her recreation,’’ Craigie wrote, ‘‘discrete; coldblooded.’’ Usually a third woman, older and more mature, functions as a mediator between these two types: she has the dignity, self-confidence, and wisdom that comes with age. Sometimes this character might be male, as in The Bishop’s Move. In this play it is the bishop who, through gentle manipulation, is able to untangle the situation of an older woman falling in love with an insecure younger man. This pattern of discovering truth through love can be found throughout Craigie’s work. In The School for Saints (1897) and its sequel Robert Orange (1899) an up-and-coming politician discovers that his wife was married to another man for five years of their marriage. What action should the politician now take? In The School for Saints he continues living with his wife; in Robert
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Orange, he leaves her and his political career for religious sanctuary. Craigie’s theme is again repeated: through trials and tribulations Robert Orange discovers his destiny. Craigie was one of the many women writers who captured the popular imagination at the turn of the century. She drew attention away from prevailing social tensions and created a world of unthreatening romantic escapades. OTHER WORKS: The Sinner’s Comedy (1892). A Study in Temptations (1893). The Gods, Some Mortals and Lord Wickenham (1894). A Bundle of Life (1894). The Herb-Moon, a Fantasia (1896). The Ambassador (1898). A Repentance (1899). The Wisdom of the Wise (1900). The Serious Wooing, a Heart’s History (1901). Tales About Temperaments (1902). The Vineyard (1903). Love and the Soul Hunters (1903). Imperial India, Letters from the East (1903). Letters from a Silent Study (1904). The Science of Life (1904). The Artist’s Life (1904). The Flutes of Pan, a Romance (1905). The Dream and the Business (1906). Tales (1909). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Richards, J. M., The Life of John Oliver Hobbes Told in Her Correspondence (1911). Reference works: Catholic Encyclopedia (1914). NCAB. Other references: Catholic World 84.
Crapsey had long been experimenting with poetic forms. She filled her commonplace book with poems by W. S. Landor, T. L. Beddoes, Oscar Wilde, and Lionel Johnson. Many of her poems show the influence of these and earlier poets, even as they exhibit her own reticence, humor, and interest in experiments in sound and form. Although her consciousness of contemporary poetic and artistic developments is important, it is also essential to recognize the role of Crapsey’s own informed craftsmanship and studies in metrics in shaping her poetry, which shows affinities with the Georgian and Imagist movements. The cinquain, a five-line poetic form invented and named by Crapsey, is ‘‘built on stresses, one for the first line, two for the second, three for the third, four for the fourth, with a drop back to one for the fifth line. In the poet’s opinion this made the most condensed metrical form in English that would hold together as a complete unit.’’ Although the cinquain is built of stresses rather than syllables, it resembles such Japanese forms as the haiku and tanka in its brevity and in its juxtaposition of images. Crapsey’s finest cinquains, including ‘‘Amaze,’’ ‘‘Niagara,’’ ‘‘Roma Aeterna,’’ and ‘‘Snow,’’ involve a superposition of ideas or intersection between the eternal and the momentary, the motionless and the moving. These qualities, and the distinctive compression of Crapsey’s best work, have led Louis Untermeyer to describe her as an ‘‘unconscious Imagist’’ and Yvor Winters to state she ‘‘achieves more effectively than did most of the Imagists the aims of Imagism.’’
—M. COLLEEN MCDANNELL
Crapsey’s unfinished work on prosody, on which she worked so hard while in England and at Smith, was published after her death with a preface by Esther Lowenthal. A Study in English Metrics (1918) divides English poets into three classes according to the proportions of monosyllabic, dissyllabic, and polysyllabic words used.
Born 9 September 1878, Brooklyn, New York; died 8 October 1914, Rochester, New York Daughter of Algernon S. and Adelaide Trowbridge Crapsey
The reticence and firm control characteristic of her finest poems marked Crapsey’s own conduct. Her letters to her family and friends provide a rare opportunity to study a person always private and elusive, although never reclusive or withdrawn until her health had been seriously impaired. Her letters from Saranac Lake show her fighting bravely and humorously what she herself knew to be a losing battle; ‘‘vital, vivid, and detailed,’’ they ‘‘seldom fail to convey an extremely alert intelligence and a sensitivity to what she perceived was going on in the intellectual world.’’
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Adelaide Crapsey was taken to Rochester in 1879 when her father became rector of St. Andrew’s Church. In 1893 Crapsey and her sister Emily were sent to Kemper Hall, an Episcopal boarding school in Kenosha, Wisconsin. After graduation from Vassar in 1901, Crapsey spent one year at home in Rochester and then returned to Kemper Hall to teach history and literature. Around 1903 Crapsey first began to suffer from the fatigue caused by tuberculosis, the disease that would eventually take her life at the age of thirty-six. From 1906 to 1908 she served as instructor of literature and history at a preparatory school in Stamford, Connecticut. Failing health caused Crapsey to give up teaching, however, and in December 1908 she went to Europe, living in Rome, London, and Kent. In London Crapsey continued her work on the ‘‘application of phonetics to metrical problems.’’ In 1911 she returned to America and began work immediately as an instructor in poetics at Smith College. From September 1913 to August 1914 Crapsey underwent treatment for her tuberculosis in a private nursing home at Saranac Lake, New York. After returning to her family’s home in Rochester she suddenly grew worse and died.
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OTHER WORKS: Verse (1915). The Last of the Heretics (1924). The Complete Poems and Collected Letters of Adelaide Crapsey (edited by S. S. Smith, 1977). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bragdon, C., Merely Players (1929). Bragdon, C., More Lives Than One (1938). Fletcher, I., ‘‘Adelaide Crapsey’s Cinquains,’’ in Adam: International Review (1970). Fraser, G. S., ‘‘Two Rochester Muses,’’ in Adam: International Review (1970). Kawanami, H., ‘‘A. Crapsey and Michel Revon: Their Connection with Japanese Literature,’’ in University of Osaka College of Commerce Festschrift (n.d.). O’Connor, M. E., ‘‘Adelaide Crapsey: A Biographical Study’’ (thesis, 1931). Osborn, M. E., Adelaide
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Crapsey (1933). Smith, S. S., The Complete Poems and Collected Letters of Adelaide Crapsey (1977). Winters, Y., Forms of Discovery (1967). Winters, Y., In Defense of Reason (1947). Other references: TLS (5 May 1978). Vassar Miscellany (1915). —SUSAN SUTTON SMITH
CRAVEN, Margaret Born 13 March 1901, Helena, Montana; died July 1980 Daughter of Arthur J. and Clara Kerr Craven Author of numerous short stories and two novels, Margaret Craven grew up in the Puget Sound area. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford in 1924, she worked for the San Jose Mercury Herald for three years, beginning as a secretary but swiftly establishing herself as an editorial writer. She continued to write features for the paper after moving to San Francisco but discontinued this means of financial support two years later when her short stories began to sell. The most significant factor in Craven’s career was her almost total loss of eyesight from a bus accident when she was in her twenties. As a result, Craven limited her writing to short stories which could be written in her mind and then rapidly transferred to paper. Faced with the necessity of earning a living during the Depression and supporting her mother, Craven found a market for her short stories in the popular magazines of the period: Delineator, Collier’s, Ladies’ Home Companion, American Magazine. The Saturday Evening Post was her major avenue of publication for more than 22 years. Just as hard work and personal sacrifice are most certainly elements in Craven’s triumph over adversity, so too are her short stories and novels dominated by this theme. Characters are faced with difficulties which they determine to surmount: the struggle builds character and leads to success. Craven’s numerous stories, published from 1930 to 1962, attest to the popularity of this theme throughout the years of economic depression, World War II and postwar adjustment. Although Craven’s stories sold, they were relegated to the ‘‘delightful little stories’’ category and largely ignored by serious critics. Inadvertently, Craven pointed to the major source of this dearth of critical attention when she commented that ‘‘a short story comes out exactly right, like a soufflé, or it falls flat on its face.’’ Craven’s stories are like soufflés, light and delectable, but rarely filling. Major characters, generally women, too often confront adversity and achieve success that is predictable and banal. If Craven’s female characters are frequently professional women or young girls aspiring to this status, ‘‘true’’ success is identified with marriage to respectable, affluent, and preferably ‘‘self-made’’ men. If character is developed by working one’s way through college, wisdom lies in the recognition that intelligence must be hidden and achievement curtailed for ‘‘true’’ success. As a character in ‘‘Pardon My Round Shoulders’’ advises about men, ‘‘you have to attract them first and show them
how bright you are afterward. Or better yet, never show them how bright you are.’’ Craven’s competence in her craft and her ability to write more than delightful little stories which reflect earlier cultural norms became evident with the publication of her first novel in 1973, I Heard the Owl Call My Name. When, in the 1960s, an eye operation improved her vision, she traveled to Kingcome, an Indian village in British Columbia. What Craven saw and heard is transformed, in the novel, into the insights of her protagonist, a young Anglican priest. Although the theme is familiar—the development of character through a courageous struggle with adversity—Craven transcends the banal with the choice of a male protagonist, sensitive use of Indian mythology, and lyrical descriptions of nature. The Christian Science Monitor described the novel, in double-digit printings, as ‘‘a shining parable. . .rare and memorable.’’ In 1973 General Electric Theater dramatized the novel in a television production. In her second novel, Walk Gently This Good Earth, published in 1977, Craven incorporates characters, incidents, and truisms from earlier short stories. Although the descriptions of the Puget Sound area and the Montana wilderness are beautifully written, characters are flat and homilies substitute for dialogue. In this work Craven’s dismay over the disintegration of traditional values in the modern world has resulted in the celebration of traditional male-female roles and the virtue of hard work. Inspirational and didactic, the novel is marred by narrowness of scope. Craven died in July of 1980, and in the following year a longawaited compilation of her stories entitled The Home Front: Collected Stories by Margaret Craven (1981) became available. OTHER WORKS: Again Calls the Owl (1984). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Robbins, M. L., A Literature Unit for I Heard the Owl Call My Name,by Margaret Craven (1994). Troy, A., Teacher Guide:I Heard the Owl Call My Name [by] Margaret Craven (1987). Other references: Atlantic Monthly (April 1980). Booklist (May 1980). CSM (30 Jan. 1974, 28 Dec. 1977). LAT (25 May 1981). LJ (1 Jan. 1978). NYTBR (3 Feb. 1974). PW (10 Oct. 1977). San Diego Union (25 June 1978). Time (28 Jan. 1974). Wilson Library Bulletin (Feb. 1978). —JOYCE FLINT
CRIST, Judith Born 22 May 1922, New York, New York Daughter of Solomon and Helen Schoenberg Klein; married William P. Crist, 1947 (died 1993); children Steven Judith Crist attended Hunter College (A.B., 1941) and Columbia College (M.S., 1945). She began her career of film reviewer and critic as a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune
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in 1945, moving on to editor for the arts (1960-63), film critic and associate drama critic (1963-66), and then to film critic for the New York World Journal Tribune (1966-67). Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Crist could be found almost everywhere as her reputation became firmly established as a film commentator for NBC-TV’s Today Show (1963-73); contributing editor and film critic for TV Guide (1966-87); contributor and critic-at-large for Ladies’ Home Journal (1966-67), as well as a contributor to Vogue, Look, The Washingtonian, and other mass-market publications. She was also a film critic for New York magazine (196875), Palm Springs Life (1971-75), Saturday Review (1975-77), and the New York Post (1977-78). Through her collected New York Herald Tribune reviews, key events in the film world are documented in a first book, The Private Eye, the Cowboy and the Very Naked Girl: Movies from Cleo to Clyde (1968), followed by a second book on film, TV Guide to the Movies (1974). Crist also contributed to several other books written during the 1970s, including Censorship: For and Against (1971), Marriage: For and Against (1972), and Favorite Movies (1972). Beginning in 1971, she organized a series of Judith Crist Film Weekends in Tarrytown, New York, to allow film professionals, including actors, directors, producers, and screenwriters, to interact with movie buffs and academics. Crist collected transcripts from several of these sessions for a book called Take 22: Moviemakers on Moviemaking (1984, reissued 1991), which she edited with Shirley Sealey. The book includes illuminating anecdotes about both the creative and business angles of the movie industry. While working on her books, Crist was still reviewing for a number of magazines and organizations, including the Saturday Review (she left in 1977 and returned for 1980-84). In the late 1980s, she was the arts critic for WWOR-TV (Channel 9 News) from 1981-87, and provided film reviews for both Coming Attractions and Hollywood magazine from 1985 through 1993. Crist is a charter member of an important cultural group: that of women film critics, including such luminaries as Pauline Kael, Penelope Gilliatt, Renata Adler, and Susan Sontag, who lead the burgeoning art form not only by virtue of their extensive backgrounds in film history but also as innovators in prose style (often sardonic, opinionated, and personal), in a serious yet ironic attitude toward their subject, and in setting forth new definitions, standards, and ideals of film aesthetics and effects. Writing for the general audience of the mass media—the film and, increasingly, the television-movie audience—and feeling she was serving a broad popular readership rather than the elite circles of critics and intellectuals who see movies as ‘‘filmic art,’’ Crist is known for her Consumer Reports-style orientation toward film. These reports address the external meanings of subject matter, values, and impact, rather than the film’s internal symbolism and aesthetic; hence, her concern with issues of sex, violence, and stereotyping of all kinds. As a self-proclaimed ‘‘journalistic critic with no pretensions to esoterica,’’ Crist’s position is one of spokesperson for the
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moviegoer and ‘‘fan,’’ not for the elite cineast type of film expert. Crist’s ascerbic critical style as a ‘‘snide, sarcastic, supercilious bitch’’ earned her the enmity of film and news industries alike. Her scathing review of the then-huge budgeted Cleopatra, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, for example, caused an uproar and an upset in news and film industry relations. Her brash outspokenness, in the face of studio and film advertising agencies’ reprisals, was naturally accompanied by a concern with freedom of speech for the film critic. Crist’s own experiences have made her a crusader against the low state of newspaper criticism, whose content is all too easily compromised by the film industry through advertising dollars and the influence of movie moguls on publishers. Crist attributes her anti-industry breakthroughs in film reviewing to the liberal and progressive policies of John Hay Whitney, whose 1960 acquisition of the Herald Tribune ‘‘began an era of critical freedom that had not and has not been equaled.’’ These practices and principles give Crist’s work a mandate going well beyond providing recommendations for good films and criticisms against bad ones. Believing with critic James Agee that ‘‘film criticism is a conversation between moviegoers,’’ Crist dedicates her work to the idea that the first purpose of criticism is to stimulate the audience’s response by offering judgements purposefully controversial and volatile, provoking the individual to draw upon their own responses to make personal judgements of film either in accord with or in conflict against those of the assertive and self-assured critic. In her years of film criticism, Crist has also taught journalism at Hunter, Columbia, and Sarah Lawrence Colleges. A host of awards for film criticism, including the George Polk award (1951), have come from the American Newspaper Guild, the Educational Writers Association (1952), the New York Newspaper Guild (1955), the New York Newspaper Women’s Club (1955, 1959, 1963, 1965, and 1967), and Columbia Graduate School of Journalism Alumni award (1961). She has been a longtime member of the New York Film Critics Circle, the National Society of Film Critics, and Sigma Tau Delta, and received an honorary M.HL. from the State University of New York (SUNY) at New Paltz in 1994. In 1996, she contributed ‘‘Where Does It Go?’’ to the book What We Know So Far: Wisdom Among Women. Crist continues to reside in New York City, where her son is now an editor and publisher.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Censors and Free Speech: Judith Crist, Paul Krassner and Dr. Isidore Rubin (audiocassette, 1971). Judith Crist (audiocassette, n.d.). Reference works: CANR (1986). Holiday (Mar. 1976). Other references: SR (4 Oct. 1975). Saturday Review of the Arts (Mar. 1973). —MARGARET J. KING, UPDATED BY LEAH J. SPARKS
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CROCKER, Hannah Mather Born 27 June 1752, Boston, Massachusetts; died 11 July 1829, Roxbury, Massachusetts Wrote under: A Lady of Boston Daughter of Samuel and Hannah Hutchinson Mather; married Joseph Crocker, 1779 With Cotton and Increase Mather, her great-grandfather and grandfather respectively, Hannah Mather Crocker has claims to a particular sort of American blue blood. Her husband was a captain in the revolutionary army and a Harvard graduate. It was not until after her children were grown that Crocker turned to writing and more public concerns. ‘‘When child-rearing duties are past,’’ she said, ‘‘this is a fully ripe season’’ for older women to deliver their ‘‘well-digested thoughts for the improvement of the rising generation.’’ Crocker’s initial publication, A Series of Letters on Free Masonry (1815), was written to support her old friends, the Society of Free Masons, when they came under attack in 1810 for carousing in Boston lodges. In the year before her marriage, Crocker had organized a number of her friends into a female Mason society. Crocker not only defended the Masons in her treatise, but took the revolutionary position of encouraging women to ‘‘promote science and literature’’ in formal societies, as more suitable to their dignity than those frivolous activities ordinarily thought appropriate for female leisure. The next year, in The School of Reform, or: The Seaman’s Safe Pilot to the Cape of Good Hope (1816), Crocker extends an enthusiastic but occasionally graceless exhortation to seamen against drinking. Crocker’s Observations on the Real Rights of Women, with Their Appropriate Duties, Agreeable to Scripture, Reason and Common Sense was published by subscription in 1818. Crocker is clearly familiar with the foremost feminist thinking of her day and she dedicates her Real Rights of Women to Hannah More, an eminent English evangelical writer. Crocker even praises Mary Wollstonecraft as ‘‘a woman of great energy and a very independent mind,’’ although she does ‘‘not coincide with her opinion respecting the total independence of the female sex.’’ Using Christian justice as her basis, Crocker uncompromisingly insists men and women have equal powers and faculties. Women’s minds are equal to the tasks of the statesman, lawyer, or minister, and only ‘‘local circumstances and domestic cares’’ have prevented them from being as productive as men. But Crocker does concede to what she takes to be social reality and political necessity: ‘‘For the interest of their country, or in the cause of humanity, we shall strictly adhere to the principle and the impropriety of females ever trespassing on masculine ground: as it is morally incorrect, and physically improper.’’ Women’s roles, according to Crocker, lie in the training of men, and in the teaching of peace and virtue. They must be the psychological counselors who ‘‘convince by reason and persuasion,’’ who are ‘‘calm and serene’’ under all crises, and who ‘‘soothe and alleviate the anxious cares of men.’’ Additionally, ‘‘right’’ takes on the meaning of duty and obligation; ‘‘every
CROLY
female’’ has the ‘‘right’’ to cover the faults of those around her with the ‘‘mantle of meek charity.’’ Women have ‘‘rights’’ to be virtuous, loving, religious, and sympathetic, and thus support and improve human society. Harmonious relations between the sexes are the basis not only of family life, but the greatness of the nation as well. Crocker maintains it was the ‘‘mutual virtue, energy, and fortitude of the sexes’’ that accomplished the American Revolution, and insists their proper union will preserve it. The title Observations on the Real Rights of Women (1818) is a misnomer. It is, rather, a commonplace book generally imparting advice on the sensible and Christian conduct of life. As a consistent discussion of women’s particular issues, it is certainly a failure. Crocker was a natural patriot and reformer, and her sincere convictions of the efficacy of human will and energy in solving problems is in the best American tradition. It is her great energy and force of character that appears through the occasionally clumsy form of her writing to convince us of her essential genius as a person, if not as a writer. OTHER WORKS: The papers of Hannah Mather Crocker are at the New England Historic Genealogical Society in Boston, and the American Antiquarian Society in Worchester, Massachusetts. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Evans, S., Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America (1989). Flexner, E., Century of Struggle: The Women’s Rights Movement in the United States (revised edition, 1975). Hill, B., ed., The Diary of Isaiah Thomas, 1805-1828 (1909). Riegel, R., American Feminists (1963). Reference works: DAB, NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: New York Historical Magazine (March 1965, May 1865). —L. W. KOENGETER
CROLY, Jane Cunningham Born 19 December 1829, Market Harborough, Leicestershire, England; died 23 December 1901, New York, New York Wrote under: Jennie June, Mrs. J. C. Croly Daughter of Joseph and Jane Cunningham; married David G. Croly, 1856 The Unitarianism of Jane Cunningham Croly’s father was illreceived by his English neighbors and in 1841 the family moved to Poughkeepsie and then to Wappinger’s Falls, New York. Croly studied at home, taught district school, kept house for her older brother, a Congregationalist minister, and wrote a popular semimonthly newspaper for his congregation. In 1855 she moved to New York City and began her career as a professional journalist.
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Unable to win employment as a regular staff member on a city newspaper because she was a woman, Croly was assigned to write a regular column on fashion for ladies. In 1857, she became one of the earliest syndicated female columnists, and was carried in newspapers in New York, New Orleans, Richmond, Baltimore, and Louisville. In 1856 Croly married an Irish immigrant on the staff of the New York Herald. In 1859 he bought, edited, and published the Rockford Daily News in Illinois, where Croly’s official duty was to write a column entitled ‘‘Gossip with and for Ladies.’’ Croly’s first child, Minnie, was born before the Crolys moved back to New York in 1860 to work on the World, where Croly wrote the women’s column from 1862 to 1872. In addition to newspaper work, Croly contributed to Graham’s Magazine, Frank Leslie’s Weekly, and Demorest’s Monthly Magazine, coediting the latter for many years. She produced a popular cookbook, several sewing manuals, and three collections of her newspaper columns. She supported the family with her writing and by teaching journalism when her husband, due to illness, left newspaper work in 1875. Croly developed an interest in the woman’s club movement of her day. She became an influential member of many clubs, including the Woman’s Endowment Cattle Company, the Association for the Advancement of Women, the Women’s Press Club of New York, the Association for the Advancement of Medical Education for Women, and, most important, a founder of the literary club, Sorosis. Later in life, Croly edited clubwomen’s magazines and wrote organizational histories. Croly’s collected articles, like Jennie Juneiana (1864), provide vignettes of the domestic world, some as harmless as descriptions of Christmas day and patchwork quilts, but others filled with anger at male arrogance and thoughtlessness. Husbands who opened their wives’ mail, fussed about meals, and demanded pristine households when they themselves were shamefully careless, won her scorn. Croly also found fault with women, describing them as ‘‘hidden under clouds of dyspepsia, nervousness, overeating, personal neglect, personal abuse, vanity, deceit, treachery, fibbing, equivocation, and a hundred other signs of equal magnitude.’’ For all her criticism, however, Croly felt women had a special potential to become loving, loyal, morally superior, sensitive, perfect beings. Croly’s observations enabled her to define the sources of women’s shortcomings. She considered education for girls in the ornamental arts to be useless, a restriction keeping them from the path of perfection. Croly also faulted women’s behavior, clothing, and ambitions; instead, she advocated devotion to home duties, declaring that they prepared women to extend their superior influence beyond family life to identify and rectify injustice. Use of domestic handbooks like her own would minimize household duties and allow women to enter the clubs where they would broaden their education, confidence, friendships, and abilities to analyze and solve social problems. Croly’s brand of women’s rights, less shocking than the radical and militant woman suffrage movement, won greater
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numbers of supporters. The club magazines Croly edited won adherents for her movement, and in speech, as Sorosis’ presiding officer, she alluded to the success of her writing and club activity: ‘‘We shall live. . .to see the Woman’s Club the conservator of public morals, the uprooter of social evils, the defender of women against women as well as against men, the preserver of the sanctities of domestic life, the synonym of the brave, true, and noble in women.’’ Croly’s History of the Woman’s Club Movement in America (1898) is further testimony to the appeal of her analysis and solution to women’s oppression in the nineteenth century. The work is a staggering 1190-page reference work, with entries describing 1000 clubs—a careful compendium of their programs, leaders, and histories. Croly’s introduction is an ambitious and early work in women’s history, looking back as far as 5th-century monasticism for precedents to women’s organizations. Croly’s modesty, however, caused her to minimize her own contribution to the movement of women’s club development.
OTHER WORKS: Jennie June’s American Cookery Book. . . (1866). For Better or Worse (1875). Knitting and Crochet: A Guide to the Use of the Needle and the Hook (1885). Needle Work: A Manual of Stitches and Studies in Embroidery and Drawn Work (1885). Ladies Fancy Work: A Manual of Designs and Instructions in All Kinds of Needlework (1886). Letters and Monograms for Marking on Silk, Linen, and Other Fabrics, for Individual and Household Use (1886). Sorosis, Its Origin and History (1886). Thrown on Her Own Resources (1891). Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly (1904). The papers of Jane Cunningham Croly are at the Arthur and Elizabeth B. Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College; in the Sorosis Papers, Sophia Smith Collection at the Smith College Library; and in the Caroline M. Severance Papers at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Blair, Karen J., ‘‘The Clubwoman as Feminist: The Woman’s Culture Club Movement in the U.S., 1868-1914,’’ (dissertation, 1976). Bolquerin, M. J., ‘‘An Investigation of the Contributions of David, June and Herbert Croly to American Life—with Emphasis on the Influence of the Father on the Son’’ (thesis, 1948). Forcey, C., The Crossroads of Liberalism (1961). Hanaford, P. A., Daughters of America (1883). Hays, F., Women of the Day (1885). June, J., Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly (1904). Mott, F. L., History of American Magazines (1957). Wells, M., Unity in Diversity: The History of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (1953). Winant, M. D., A Century of Sorosis, 1868-1968 (1968). Wingate, C. F., Views and Interviews on Journalism (1875). Wood, M. I., The History of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (1912). Reference works: American Women (1897). DAB, NCAB (1892 et seq.). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Other references: Demorest’s Monthly Magazine (Jan. 1871). Journalism Quarterly (Spring 1963). New York History (Oct.
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CROSBY
1961). NYT (24 Dec. 1901). Woman’s Journal (4 Jan. 1902, 11 Jan. 1902). —KAREN J. BLAIR
CROSBY, Caresse Born Mary Phelps Jacob, 20 April 1892, New York, New York; died 24 January 1970, Rome, Italy Daughter of William and Mary Phelps Jacob; married Richard R. Peabody, 1915 (divorced); Henry G. Crosby, 1922 (died 1929); Bert Young, 1937 Caresse Crosby grew up with a ‘‘crystal chandelier background.’’ Her life was that of a young socialite: debutante parties at Sherry’s, Yale proms, and London court presentations. Her first marriage was to a Back Bay Bostonian; the couple had two children and were divorced in 1921. Her second marriage—when she embarked on a life in Paris, escaping with her husband from proper Boston—was the starting point of her literary career. In 1925 she changed her first name to ‘‘Caresse’’ and began publishing her poetry. Although a friend and promoter of many avant-garde artists and writers, Crosby’s own poetry tends toward conventional forms and topics. Almost all of her poems are love poems, reflecting her relationship with her second husband. Her other major theme, an offshoot of her romantic passion, is the search for Beauty and Life (in capital letters). This theme is present in most of her short descriptive poems, her panegyrics to other artists, and several of her short prose poems, particularly ‘‘Wisdom of the East,’’ where the wise Oriental artist directs the young sculptress: ‘‘You must live before you can work. . .you must understand what beauty really is before you can portray it.’’ Crosses of Gold (printed in Paris, 1925) is typical of Crosby’s poetic works, consisting mainly of love poems. The majority of these are rhymed, resulting in occasional distortions and anachronisms. Her best poems, such as ‘‘With You I Have Known Beauty in the Night,’’ result from the successful use of sonnet form rather than a break with conventional forms. Although Crosby is quick to note the physical element of love, she loses her reader in romanticized and abstract passion rather than in her use of imagistic realism. Crosby’s Painted Shores (1927) exemplifies her careful sequencing of poems to reflect the path of her love relationship. Particularly in the first third of this volume, Crosby links the poems thematically as well as technically. The final line of each poem is repeated (with minor variation) as either the title or first line of the succeeding poem. The poems progress from the departure of two lovers from New York, follow their crossing to
Europe, trace their love’s development to the recognition of a betrayal, and conclude with their decision to remain together. In 1927 the Crosbys founded Black Sun Press, which published original works by Joyce, Lawrence, Proust, Pound, and Hart Crane throughout the 1930s. After Henry G. Crosby’s death in 1929, Crosby maintained Black Sun Press and expanded her interests by founding Crosby Continental Editions, which published and reprinted the works of French and American writers. Crosby was also an active publisher of other modernist writers. However, her career as a poet ended with Poems for Harry Crosby (1930). Published after his suicide, the love poems seek to reassure and reassert her belief that their love was so strong, so passionate, the two are fated ‘‘Forever to be Harry and Caresse.’’ Much of Crosby’s life, through World War II, is covered in her autobiography, The Passionate Years (1953). As she indicates in her foreword, she worked from memory, not notes, using only the information ‘‘lined upon the tablets of the mind.’’ As a result, her first-person memoirs are extremely anecdotal, focusing on personalities and her response to them. Many remembrances are of short personal encounters, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald intentionally dropping his gloves in her stateroom, hoping to accompany her abroad, and Hemingway’s irate response to being called ‘‘precious.’’ Crosby’s recall is idiosyncratic. She writes as a reporter of scenes and feelings rather than as an analyzer. Her autobiography is spritely, and provides the reader with interesting glimpses into both the woman and the milieu. Crosby’s final publishing venture was the editing and producing of Portfolio, a mixed-media magazine published in Washington and designed to ‘‘present to an imaginative public, lively and varied examples of work by modern authors.’’ Although Portfolio had a shorter lifespan than Crosby’s earlier enterprises, its contributors and its critical reception were exciting. The later years of Crosby’s life were spent in active support of both the arts and humanitarian causes. She ran an art gallery in Washington, D.C., established an artists’ colony near Rome, maintained and sought out new friendships with artists and writers, founded the Citizens of the World organization, and was an active member of Women Against War. Although Crosby was not a major poet in her own right, her interest and support of modernist writing as a publisher make her a fascinating character. She lived her life by the motto she believed in: ‘‘The answer to the challenge is always ‘Yes.’’’
OTHER WORKS: The Stranger (1927). Impossible Melodies (1928).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Nin, A., The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume 5 (1975). Wolff, G., Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby (1976). Other references: Newsweek (15 Jan. 1945). SR (4 July 1953). —MELODY M. ZAJDEL
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CROTHERS, Rachel
CROSS, Amanda See HEILBRUN, Carolyn G.
Born 12 December 1871, Bloomington, Illinois; died 5 July 1958, Danbury, Connecticut Daughter of Eli K. and Marie Louise dePew Crothers
CROSS, Jane (Tandy Chinn) Hardin Born 1817, Harrodsburg, Kentucky; death date unknown Wrote under: Jane T(andy) H. Cross Daughter of Judge Chinn; married James P. Hardin, 1835 (died); Reverend Cross, 1848 Married at the age of eighteen, Jane Hardin Cross was widowed with three children at twenty-five. She remarried six years later and began a nomadic life traveling around Europe and the South, teaching at various colleges together with her husband. This mode of living seemed to suit her, for she remarked with good humor that her life was ‘‘as roving as that of an Arab.’’ Soon after her remarriage Cross began publishing her four-volume collection of children’s tales and her tales for ‘‘sorrowful women.’’ She also wrote poetry and was a prolific contributor to religious magazines. Cross’ collections of works for children—Heart Blossoms for My Little Daughter (1855), Wayside Flowerets (1850), Bible Gleanings (1853), and Driftwood (1851)—are composed of short, whimsical prose sketches illustrating one specific mood or theme. Typical of her work is ‘‘Scarlet Geraniums,’’ in which Cross tries to capture the essence of a ‘‘day made for joy.’’ The sketch, which runs only a few pages, conveys mood rather than plot. ‘‘La Petite Fée,’’ another mood piece, is a panegyric to a close female friend whose charm and good nature have the much-appreciated effect of bringing the author from depression to joy. By analogy, Cross praises all close female friendships she feels are nurturing. ‘‘Manangel’’ recounts the death of a good man who, facing death, shows his true courage and moral strength. He ends his life without fear of bitterness, praising God’s will with equanimity. Other sketches, such as ‘‘The Magic Ring,’’ are fantasies for children. Cross’ prose style is ornate, elegant, and poetical. It is steeped with references to religious persons and events. Her most frequent images deal with flowers, sunlight, precious jewels, pretty colors, and sweet fragrances. Yet there is also a darker, more morbid side to her sketches. Grief, sorrow, and death are not absent from Cross’ awareness, but she would rather soothe sorrow than expose it.
OTHER WORKS: Duncan Adair; or, Captured in Escape (1864). Azile (1868).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Freeman, J. D., Women of the South Distinguished in Literature (1866). —ROSE F. KAVO
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Rachel Crothers’ childhood, not surprisingly, was lonely— first, because she was much younger than her eight siblings; secondly, because her mother decided at age forty to become the first woman physician in central Illinois, so Crothers was sent to an aunt in Wellesley, Massachusetts, for four years while her mother attended medical school in Philadelphia. Somewhat precocious, Crothers ‘‘made up’’ people, and produced a five-act, nine-scene play, Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining, or The Ruined Merchant, at age twelve, staging it in the family parlor. After graduating from Illinois Normal in 1892, where she formed a theater group, she attended Wheatcroft School of Acting in New York against her family’s wishes. Her first four professional efforts at playwriting failed, but in 1906 John Golden produced The Three of Us, and Crothers’ Broadway career was launched. Some 24 full-length plays (plus some one-acts for amateurs) followed, most of them commercially successful, almost all of them cast and directed by the playwright. During World War I, Crothers headed the Stage Women’s War Relief, which raised money for entertainments in soldiers’ camps, produced by George M. Cohan and Sam Harris. In 1932, with John Golden, she founded the Stage Relief Fund to assist unemployed actors, remaining a member of its governing board until it disbanded in 1951. In 1933 Crothers received the Megrue Prize, awarded by the Dramatists Guild, for her play When Ladies Meet (1932), and in 1939 she was given the Chi Omega National Achievement Award, in the presence of President and Mrs. Roosevelt at the White House. In 1940 she helped form the American Theater Wing for British War Relief, an organization which operated the Stage Door Canteen after the U.S. entered the war. Although Crothers asserted her plays would comprise a kind of ‘‘Comédie Humaine de la Femme,’’ many seem closer to what Joseph Wood Krutch characterized as ‘‘dramatization of the works of Mrs. [Emily] Post,’’ being for the most part amusing, well-made pieces about comfortably situated, refined people. Only rarely does Crothers touch more than obliquely on problems confronting women, despite claims that feminine concerns were her major focus. A number of her plays deal with marital problems, although she remained single throughout her life. Basically reflecting her genteel, conservative roots, her work as a whole is not socially critical. However, her keen sense of ‘‘audience readiness’’ was helpful in prompting the idea that Americans who wished to spend a pleasant evening in the theater did not have to look to Europe for ‘‘social comedies,’’ but could enjoy locally created material instead. Crothers was consistent in taking a stand against the ‘‘double standard’’ in sexual behavior. In Let Us Be Gay (1929) she made it clear in the prologue that a man’s infidelity was cause for divorce. She does have the couple reunited by the play’s end, but only after
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the wife has had three years as a gay divorcée. Along the same thematic line, Crothers wrote When Ladies Meet (1932), in which an independent woman, Mary Howard, has accepted assurances from her married lover that a divorce is imminent until she meets Claire Rogers, the wife, neither woman knowing who the other is. After the true situation becomes known, both women renounce Rogers: Mary returning him to his wife, and Claire realizing she can never forgive him for having deceived Mary, just one in a long line of ‘‘affairs’’ for him. Despite concern with fair play in sexual conduct, most of Crothers’ plays show women happy in the traditional wife-mother role, frequently eschewing a career and independence in favor of resting comfortably in the arms of a strong man who will take care of them. In her best-known play, Susan and God (1937), the protagonist, Susan Trexel, returns from Europe after having taken a keen interest there in the Oxford Movement. She spouts the philosophy, but, in reality, is interested primarily in associating with prominent people in the group and becoming a power in the movement’s American version. Her alcoholic husband takes her at her word and tries to reform through faith. Susan then spends her summer pretending to make a real home for him and their lonely adolescent daughter and is surprised to find that she herself has changed through a recognition of the power of genuine faith from within. The final curtain descends on a chastened mother, a now-strong father, and a happy teenager. For more than 30 years Crothers wrote prolifically and staged a Broadway play almost every season, no small achievement for a woman, particularly prior to World War I. Her dialogue sounds natural, but her tendency to manipulate characters to achieve a predetermined plotline detracts from their theatrical effectiveness and from the plays as literature. When compared with other playwrights of both sexes writing at the same time, it cannot be said that Crothers made more than a modest contribution to the American theater.
CROUTER
1924, Aug. 1931). Women’s Journal (April 1931, May 1931). World Today (June 1908). —EDYTHE M. MCGOVERN
CROUTER, Natalie (Corona) Stark Born 30 October 1898, Dorchester, Massachusetts; died October 1985 Daughter of Frederick J. and Bertha Scott Stark; married Erroll E. Crouter, 1927 (died 1951); children: two Natalie Stark Crouter grew up in a comfortable household of a Boston suburb. Her early experiences as a polio victim (which began at nine and left her mildly crippled) and later as a participant in the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti endowed her with considerable moral and physical fortitude. These qualities, plus her strong sense of social commitment and her enduring curiosity about human nature, prepared her well for her internment in a Japanese civilian camp in Baguio, Philippine Islands. Along with her husband, an American businessman in the Philippines, and their two children, Crouter was confined in the camp with 500 American and British citizens throughout World War II. After the war, widowed since 1951, she lived in the Midwest and remained active in liberal, social, and political causes. Her activism led to friendships with Mme Sun Yat-sen and journalist Edgar Snow, and to worldwide travel, including trips to China and to many African countries.
OTHER WORKS: Nora (1903). Point of View (1904). Criss Cross (1904). Rector (1905). The Coming of Mrs. Patrick (1907). Myself Bettina (1908). A Man’s World (1910). Ourselves (1913). Young Wisdom (1914). The Heart of Paddy Whack (1914). Old Lady ’31 (1916). Mother Carey’s Chickens (with K. Douglas Wiggin, 1917). Once Upon a Time (1918). A Little Journey (1918). 39 East (1919). He and She (1920). Nice People (1921). Everyday (1921). Mary the Third (1923). Expressing Willie (1924). A Lady’s Virtue (1925). Venus (1927). Bon Voyage (1929). Caught Wet (1931). As Husbands Go (1931). We Happy Few (1955).
Crouter’s A Diary of Internment, 1941-45 (1979), her only published book, is not a narrative of horror and torture, but a daily account of courage, grace, and ingenuity under the pressures of privation. The Diary, begun by coincidence two days before the bombing of Pearl Harbor and kept for three-and-a-half years, was originally written in microscopic script on scraps of paper, carefully concealed from her captors. The complete version, which took Crouter two postwar years to transcribe, totaled 5,000 pages. The published edition, about one-tenth of the original, retains Crouter’s perceptive understanding of her milieu, as it chronicles the daily activities, occupations and preoccupations, hopes and fears of the captives and their Japanese captors. The diary emphasizes the social organization and humanity of the people involved, captors and captives alike. Except for the bombing of Manila (the internees had been moved to Manila at the war’s end), major battles are subordinate, atrocities almost nonexistent.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hackett, F., Horizons, A Book of Criticism (1918). Mantle, B., American Playwrights of Today (1929). Other references: Good Housekeeping (Nov. 1911). Harper’s Bazaar (Jan. 1911). Independent Woman (Jan. 1946). Literary Digest (16 June 1917, 15 Aug. 1936). Mentor (1 March 1923). Nation (23 Oct. 1937). NYT (23 June 1933, 6 July 1958, 12 July 1958). NYT Magazine (4 May 1941). Pictorial Review (June 1931). Theatre Arts (Dec. 1932). Theatre Magazine (March 1931). Touchstone (Oct. 1918). Women’s Home Companion (Feb.
The Diary, laced with its author’s wit, New England morality, social philosophy, and realistic pragmatism, comments on the immediate: the issues and problems of family and communal living, marriage, child rearing, work and play; the surroundings, vast mountain and ocean beauty juxtaposed with crowded barracks and regimented activities; precious food, precarious health, rumors about the war, longings for freedom and for communication with the outer world, whether ‘‘liberated’’ Filipino friends, American GIs, or stateside relatives. Like so many prison diaries, this work was written to maintain the author’s mental agility and
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sense of self; yet it avoids the self-pity, religious zeal, or despondent fatalism characterizing many such works. Paramount are Crouter’s common sense and identification of the revealing minutiae as well as the human universals.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: American Heritage (April/May 1979). —LYNN Z. BLOOM
CROWE, F. J. See JOHNSTON, Jill
CRUGER, Mary Born 9 May 1834, Westchester County, New York; died 1908, Montrose, New York Daughter of Nicholas and Eliza Kortright Cruger Although biographical information about Mary Cruger is scarce, she remains of interest to the literary historian because her five novels are emblematic of the variety and scope of socially conscious fiction written by American women during the final decades of the 19th century. Each of Cruger’s novels examines one or more social issues and posits a theory of reform. Her emphasis is primarily Christian; social problems are resolved through faith in a more egalitarian afterlife and the model of idealized behavior is that of the Christian committed to a social gospel of salvation. Cruger’s first novel, Hyperaesthesia (1886), centers on several vacationers at an upstate New York resort. Each of her major characters suffers from an incapacitating form of ‘‘hyperaesthesia,’’ an almost morbid nervous sensitiveness affecting them physically, emotionally, and mentally. Cruger’s novel treats the problem of the ‘‘hysterical woman,’’ a widespread medical problem which first attracted public attention due to the work of S. Weir Mitchell. Recent historians, among them Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and Kathryn Kish Sklar, have studied the social implication of this female hysteria and invalidism, and their orientation is similar to Cruger’s. The treatment prescribed in her novel is that of wider activity and charity work in one case and a more responsive marriage in the other. Cruger’s temperance novel, A Den of Thieves (1886), focuses on the efforts of a newlywed couple to convince their neighbors to join with them to destroy the liquor trade. These middle-class reformers quickly recognize alcohol abuse explains all of the problems in their town: the inability of factory workers to live on
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their wages, bad marriages, and poor church attendance. Alice, the heroine, is Cruger’s most overtly political character. She rejects standards of female behavior which prescribe decorum and propriety rather than public involvement and she chooses her husband on the basis of his position on numerous social issues. Both Alice and her husband die as a result of their temperance work, consistent with Cruger’s general emphasis on a heavenly resolution to social problems, but the townspeople vow to continue their work. Information about Cruger’s life may be surmised from her novel, How She Did It; Or, Comfort on $150 a Year (1888). In her introduction to this novel about how a recently impoverished daughter of a prominent family builds her own home and lives off the land, Cruger assures her readers that ‘‘The author of this little book wishes to say, as strongly and impressively as words can express it, that its story is not merely founded on fact, but is an actual portrayal, step by step, of her own experience, her own wonderful success in carrying out a long cherished theory of comfortable economy.’’ Complete with blueprints of the house, detailed account books, recipes, carpentry and horticultural guidelines, and nutrition advice, the novel is memorable less for its plot than for its attempt to provide a fully realized plan for living. Cruger’s last novel, Brotherhood (1891), was written in response to the militant labor organizing and social unrest so frequent in the latter 19th century. Although sympathetic to the problems created by inadequate wages and unsafe working conditions, the novel takes a stand against labor unions. Brotherhood contrasts a charismatic labor leader, who preaches industrial brotherhood, with a domestic heroine, who preaches Christian brotherhood. The heroine convinces the workers that a Christian faith is the only viable social philosophy. Justice will be found in heaven, if not in the factory. Cruger’s fiction is often characterized by a certain confusion of intention. She repeatedly begins a novel with an indictment of existing social conditions, only to abandon this focus and write what appears to be first a ghost story and later a pastoral romance. These frequent convolutions of plot and purpose prove detrimental to any lasting interest in her fiction.
OTHER WORKS: The Vanderheyde Manor House (1887). Labor, the Divine Command, by Leo Tolstoy (translated by Cruger, 1890).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hill, V. L., Strategy and Breadth: The SocialistFeminist in American Fiction (dissertation, 1979). Taylor, W., The Economic Novel in America (1942). Reference works: DAB, 1600-1900 (1904). A Woman of the Century (1893). Other references: Chautauquan (April 1886). Critic (14 Jan. 1885). Literary World (21 Aug. 1886, 20 March 1886). —VICKI LYNN HILL
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CUMMING, Kate Born 1828, Edinburgh, Scotland; died 5 June 1909, Birmingham, Alabama Daughter of David and Jessie Cumming Kate Cumming’s family moved from their native Scotland to Mobile, Alabama, when she was a child. There she attended school and became attached to her adopted homeland and its way of life. After the war, Cumming, who never married, moved to Birmingham with her father. There she taught school and did religious and charitable work. Later in life she was active in Confederate veterans organizations. Early in the Civil War, Cumming was one of a number of women who volunteered their services to the Confederacy as nurses. The government was at first reluctant to accept them: 19th-century conventions held that a woman’s delicate nature would not allow her to tolerate the sights, sounds, and smells of a hospital without permanent damage to her central nervous system. In addition, because of women’s alarming propensity to faint at the slightest distress, physicians feared they would be more trouble than the patients they were assigned to tend. However, Cumming and other women soon proved themselves sturdier than was imagined and were quickly accepted as an integral part of the Confederate medical system. Cumming was not a nurse in the modern sense of the term. The morality of the day did not permit women to bathe or dress male patients, nor could they administer medications or treatments. The former was done by male nurses and convalescent patients, the latter by the physicians themselves. The women were, rather, matrons—the administrators of the wards and supervisors of the kitchens. It was their job to see that beds were prepared for incoming patients, diets prepared by the kitchen staff according to the physician’s instructions, laundry done, and the patient kept as comfortable as possible by all those under their command. Often the matrons wrote letters home for the soldiers, read the Bible to them, and prayed with them in the absence of chaplains. In death, they gathered up the personal belongings, cut off a lock of hair, and sent them back to grieving families. The matron’s work was not easy. In her journal, published in 1866 as A Journal of Hospital Life in the Confederate Army of Tennessee, Cumming describes a typical day: ‘‘Mrs. Williamson and I live like Sisters of Charity; we get up in the morning about 4 o’clock, and breakfast by candle-light, which meal consists of real coffee without milk, but sugar, hash, and bread; we eat it in our room. Unless we get up early, we find it impossible to get through with our duties. Mrs. Williamson prepared toddies and egg-nogs; I see that the delicacies for the sick are properly prepared. After the duties of the day are over, we then write letters for the men, telling their relations they are here, or informing them of their decease; other times mending some little articles for them. Mrs. Williamson is up many a night till 12 o’clock, working for her ‘dear boys,’ as she calls them.’’ Cumming served in a number of hospitals in Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Georgia. While some of the hospitals
CUMMINS
were well equipped, others were hastily thrown together to accommodate increasing numbers of wounded, and abandoned just as quickly when the enemy drew too close. Confederate medical care in general was often a compromise between what one wanted and what one could obtain under difficult conditions. It was not always possible to obtain delicacies like coffee or milk to tempt the appetites of wounded men, or the drugs to ease their pain. The Journal reflects Cumming’s helplessness, anger, and final acceptance of death which she cannot prevent or even make less painful. Cumming’s journal does not display the wit or fine eye for characterization of many other Civil War diaries. It is a straightforward account of life in Confederate hospitals, and does not tell the reader much about Cumming herself. We know that she was devoted to the Confederacy and took her work and responsibilities seriously, but learn little about her hopes and dreams for the future or what she did during off-duty hours. Cumming appears to us quiet and capable, rather than engaging or passionate.
OTHER WORKS: Gleanings from the Southland (1895).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Harwell, R., ed., Kate, The Journal of a Confederate Nurse (1959). Massey, M. E., Bonnet Brigades: American Women and the Civil War (1966). Scott, A. F. The Southern Lady (1971). —JANET E. KAUFMAN
CUMMINS, Maria Susanna Born 9 April 1827, Salem, Massachusetts; died 1 October 1866, Dorchester, Massachusetts Daughter of David and Mehitable Cave Cummins Both of Maria Susanna Cummins’ parents were descendants of prominent New England families. The Cummings family (the name was originally spelled with a ‘‘g’’) can trace their roots to Isaac Cummings, a Scottish immigrant who settled in Ipswich shortly before 1638. Cummins’ father, a man of cultivated taste, made certain she received a classical education, and he encouraged his daughter’s writing talents. After his death she lived quietly in Dorchester, devoting the rest of her life to her writing and to church work. Cummins’ first novel, The Lamplighter, was published in Boston in 1854 and shortly afterward in London. It was the most talked about novel of the year and an immediate bestseller. The average sale during the first two months after publication was 5000 copies a week; by the end of the first year it had sold 70,000
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copies. Her second novel, Mabel Vaughan (1857), was not so popular, but in 1858 both novels were selected for publication by the Leipzig-based Tauchnitz Library of British and American Authors, an indication of her international fame. Cummins’ novels are filled with pious sentiments and moral formulae, typical of the genre, called ‘‘folk fiction’’ by some, which led to Hawthorne’s comment in 1855 that ‘‘America is now wholly given over to a d——d mob of scribbling women. . . .’’ Specifically he asked, ‘‘What is the mystery of these innumerable editions of The Lamplighter?’’ The success of Lamplighter is no mystery at all. Relying liberally on Dickens and the Bronté sisters, it tells the story of an abandoned and mistreated orphan, Gerty, befriended by a kindly old lamplighter (aptly named Trueman Flint) and then by a wealthy young blind woman, Emily Graham, who becomes her patron and teacher. The story recounts Gerty’s transformation from a ragged, ignorant orphan into a self-reliant and virtuous young woman, ‘‘the image of female goodness and purity.’’ By the novel’s end Gerty has found her long-lost father (who turns out to be Emily Graham’s stepbrother and former lover) and will marry her childhood sweetheart, now a successful businessman. Cummins’ second novel, Mabel Vaughan (1857), features a heroine who is not a poor orphan waif but who is nevertheless the victim of a series of calamities. Once a pampered child of fashion, she finds herself nearly penniless and charged with the care of two incorrigible nephews, a melancholic father, and an alcoholic brother. A great part of this novel is set in the West and the reader is introduced to some interesting pioneer characters as well as, in the city scenes, such stock characters as a dying orphan who exemplifies piety and submissiveness to God’s will. Both of these novels relied upon the bestselling formula of the sentimental-domestic novel for their appeal: the plots feature calamities, sudden reversals of fortune, long-lost relatives, and the reform of profligates; the central characters are young women who grow in strength and piety throughout the novel, enabling them to accomplish the gentle subjugation and reform of rogues, alcoholics, and conscienceless men. El Fureidis (1860), Cummins’s third novel, is a story of Palestine and Syria, and her fourth, Haunted Hearts (1864), is a rather pedestrian sentimental tale. Neither of these approached Lamplighter in popular appeal.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Baym, N., Women’s Fiction (1978). Hart, J. D., The Popular Book (1950). Kelley, M., Private Women, Public Stage (1984). Koch, D. A., introduction to Maria Susanna Cummins’ The Lamplighter (1968). Mott, F. L., Golden Multitudes (1947). Reference works: American Authors, 1600-1900 (1938). DAB (1929, 1934). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —ELAINE K. GINSBERG
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CURTISS, Mina (Stein) Kirstein Born 13 October 1896, Boston, Massachusetts; died October 1985 Daughter of Louis E. and Rose Stein Kirstein; married Henry T. Curtiss, 1926 (died 1928) Daughter of a prosperous Boston merchant and noted philanthropist, Mina Kirstein Curtiss was tutored at home by a governess until the age of ten. She completed her secondary education with two years of prep school, received a B.A. from Smith College in 1918, and an M.A. from Columbia University in 1920. During three periods (1920-34, 1940-41, and 1977) Curtiss taught in the English Department at Smith, where she attained the rank of full professor. Her younger brother, Lincoln, became director of the New York City Ballet, while George became a publisher of the periodical, Nation. In 1928 Curtiss’ husband died. From 1935-38, she worked as a research assistant for the Mercury Theater and Mercury Theater of the Air, and during World War II edited and wrote radio scripts for the Office of War Information. Between 1947 and 1957, Curtiss spent many months in France researching the letters of Marcel Proust and the life of Georges Bizet. For her subsequent books on these subjects and for her donation to the Bibliothèque Nationale of her Bizet collection, she was awarded the Legion of Honor by the French Government in 1960. Curtiss’ first publication, Olive, Cypress and Palm, An Anthology of Elegiac Verse (1930), is a selection of nearly 150 poems by authors including Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dryden, Donne, Spenser, Shelley, Byron, Poe, Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Christina Rossetti. Letters Curtiss wrote to her husband were compiled in The Midst of Life: A Romance (1933), excerpts of which ran serially in the Atlantic Monthly. In her 1978 autobiography, Other People’s Letters, Curtiss wrote: ‘‘Femme de Lettres, if it had an English synonym, would most accurately describe my profession. For letters have literally been the driving force behind every book I have produced.’’ She traced her interest to a childhood incident when she was caught looking at a packet of her parents’ love letters, which her mother quickly snatched away from her. After this she concluded that letters intended for someone else held clues to a person’s secret life and the creative process. The first book of other people’s letters she edited, Letters Home (1944), was an anthology of enlisted men’s letters about their lives in various branches of the armed services. Next she edited and translated the Letters of Marcel Proust (1949), which, she indicated, were ‘‘chosen primarily, to provide readers of Remembrance of Things Past with clues to the development of the personality and the creative process out of which the novel grew.’’ Curtiss’ research in France also led to her first biography, Bizet and His World (1958), and to her editing and translating Daniel Halévy’s Degas parle. . . , published in English as My Friend Degas (1964). A second biography was about Anna Ivanovna, the 18th-century ruler whose encouragement of European and native artists laid the foundations for the flourishing of Russian ballet, opera, music, and drama. Called A Forgotten
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CURTISS
Empress (1974), it was inspired by Curtiss’ travels in Russia with her brother’s ballet company. Curtiss recounts the incidents which led to her books and to some of her periodical articles in her autobiography, with emphasis on her Proust research in France. Curtiss’ writing is characterized by its lively character portraits; its judicious evaluation of people within the contexts of their cultures, periods, and relationships; and its combined tone of scholarship and enthusiasm. Reviewing Other People’s Letters in the New York Times Book Review, Nancy Milford referred to Curtiss’ ‘‘having lived passionately more lives than one, in eras other than [her] own,’’ and concluded that Curtiss ‘‘has become a source to the very past she once sought.’’
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Smith Alumnae Quarterly (April 1977).
of the Tiger (1958), innocent Lou Fabian finds herself suspected of kidnapping for the second time. The device for the concealment of the child is brilliantly simple, and the characterization of the baby’s mother is especially incisive and touching. Sarah Trafton, in So Dies the Dreamer (1960), must find the murderer of her husband’s stepmother in order to solve his apparent suicide. The incorporation of information about pheasant breeding adds interest, and the use of the beautiful birds as symbols of danger is effective. Three of Curtiss’ best novels combine two of her most common—and most compelling—devices. In ‘‘inverted’’ mysteries (the murderer’s identity being known from the outset), Curtiss depicts women lacking some civilizing element of introspection, imagination, or gentleness. The tension depends entirely upon the author’s skill at ever more horrifying characterization, deft enough to preserve realism. Curtiss is masterful at this difficult technique.
—HOLLY HILL
CURTISS, Ursula Reilly Born 8 April 1923, Yonkers, New York; died October 1984 Daughter of Paul and Helen Kieran Reilly; married John Curtiss, Jr., 1947
In The Stairway (1957) Madeline Potter copes with financial and psychological blackmail by seemingly meek Cora Applegate, actually a killer. Among Madeline’s difficulties is her struggle not to act from jealousy of her child’s affection for Cora, a factor adding depth to the characterization. The Forbidden Garden (1962) traces the disintegration of elderly Elsa Marrable’s murderous personality. The portraits of Alice Dimmock, avenger turned victim, and Harriet Crewe, entangled innocent bystander, are overshadowed only by that of little James Crewe, who knows how to turn sickliness into advantage. Here, storm-driven tumbleweeds symbolize the forces driving the characters.
Ursula Reilly Curtiss’ novels are psychological studies seasoned with suspense and detection. Her heroines are often endangered young career women barred by uncertainty, self-doubt, or promises from seeking police aid. Several novels also incorporate gothic overtones, for example, The Second Sickle (1950, British title The Hollow House), The Wasp (1963), and The Birthday Gift (1976, British title Dig a Little Deeper).
Celia Brett in Letter of Intent (1971) commits crimes to escape from her slum background into comfort and security. Much of the novel’s strength lies in the portraits of the Vestry sisters—weak, loving Mary Ellen and strong, loyal Susan—who are contrasted with Celia. The conclusion provides a double twist and is chillingly appropriate, as is the quiet, measured tone.
The Second Sickle tries the imagination through Victoria Devlin’s stubborn insistence on keeping a promise even in the face of murder. Yet the tension never flags and the book shows Curtiss’ potential. In The Wasp, Curtiss uses the common horror of insects as an unusual weapon threatening the sanity and the life of Kate Barlow. The ending is particularly clever: the murderer dead but lionized. Lydia Peel of The Birthday Gift finds a simple errand complicated by false identities and murder. Here, three of Curtiss’s cleverest characterizations stop just short of caricature: chainsmoking Mrs. Chilton, her femme fatale daughter, and her frightful little grandson. In all three novels, as is usual in Curtiss’ work, a dash of romance lends spice.
Curtiss’ portraits of children are always intriguing and psychologically sound, and in Out of the Dark (1964, British title Child’s Play), perhaps her best novel, she presents a broad range of children’s personalities. The five Mannering youngsters, lively, mischievous, and innocent, are imperiled by and contrasted with their guest, teenaged Kit Austen. Kit, sensual and selfcentered, unwittingly triggers murder with a prank phone call. The reader meets the killer early, and the suspense builds as he ‘‘detects’’ the whereabouts of his tormentor. Though reviewers deplored Curtiss’ reliance on sometimes awkward adverbial constructions, she is recognized as a skillful writer, particularly adroit at sustained tension, characterization, and the ‘‘end-of-the-chapter hook.’’
In Curtiss’ fiction, an old murder frequently spawns new deaths. Katie Meredith of Voice Out of Darkness (1948) suddenly finds herself accused of the murder of her foster sister, accidentally drowned years before. The book is neatly crafted, and here, as elsewhere, Curtiss makes good use of blizzards to symbolize isolation and danger. In one of Curtiss’ strongest novels, The Face
OTHER WORKS: The Noonday Devil (1951). The Iron Cobweb (1953). The Deadly Climate (1954). Widow’s Web (1956). Hours to Kill (1961). Danger, Hospital Zone (1966). Don’t Open the Door (1968). In Cold Pursuit (1977). The Menace Within (1979). The Poisoned Orchard (1980). Dog in the Manger (1982). Death
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of a Crow (1983). The House of Plymouth Street and Other Stories (1985). A manuscript collection of Ursula Reilly Curtiss is in the Mugar Memorial Library at Boston University in Boston, Massachusetts.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (1994). Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detections (1976). St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery (1996). Other references: NY (24 July 1971). NYHTB (19 April 1953). NYTBR (19 March 1950, 14 June 1964). —JANE S. BAKERMAN
CUSTER, Elizabeth Bacon Born 8 April 1842, Monroe, Michigan; died 4 April 1933, New York, New York Also wrote under: Elizabeth B. Custer Daughter of Daniel S. and Sophia Page Bacon; married George Armstrong Custer, 1864 (died 1876) In 1863 Elizabeth Bacon Custer met Captain George Armstrong Custer, then visiting Monroe on leave from Civil War duty. Overcoming paternal opposition to Custer’s involvement with a soldier, they courted by mail and married. Custer accompanied her husband to the Virginia front, where he became a major general. His postwar military career took Custer to posts in Texas, Kansas, Kentucky, and Dakota Territory, where she learned of his fatal ‘‘last stand.’’ Although Custer’s life extended 57 years beyond her husband’s she kept her marriage vows, fulfilling what she believed were her ‘‘responsibilities’’ as ‘‘the widow of a national hero’’ by writing and lecturing. She wrote to perpetuate her husband’s memory, scrupulously avoiding army political disputes by focusing on the domestic aspects of frontier cavalry life. Her first book, Boots and Saddles (1885), describes her life in Dakota with General Custer from 1873 to 1876. Custer emphasizes the closeness within and among army couples as both result of and defense against wilderness isolation. Although she tried to appear ‘‘plucky,’’ Custer expresses her overwhelming fear of the Native Americans and often gives thanks that, as a woman, she was not required to be brave. Women were, however, required to wait; Custer compellingly presents the shared anxiety of wives left at Fort Lincoln while husbands fought and died at Little Big Horn. The enthusiastic reception of her first book led Custer to write her reminiscences of earlier campaigns. In Tenting on the Plains (1887), Custer describes her experiences following General Custer in Kansas and Texas from 1865 to 1867. Insects, illness,
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and scorpions dominate Custer’s recollections of the march to Texas, and her Kansas memories include prairie fire, flood, and cholera. Racism pervades her accounts of blacks in Reconstruction Texas, Mexican mule drivers, and American Indians; class bias colors her portraits of those who attained officers’ positions through war service rather than West Point. She alludes to postwar dissension in the ranks, but ends her book before the court-martial and suspension that interrupted her husband’s career. In Following the Guidon (1890), Custer picks up the story when her husband returned to duty in Kansas in 1868 to join the campaign culminating in the Battle of Washita. Custer vividly recalls her fearful visits with captured Native Americans and tribal peace council delegates, while glorifying her husband’s honest treatment of those he helped defeat. She also explains how constantly menacing rattlesnakes and Native Americans impair enjoyment of recreational hunting, riding, and horse and mule racing. Her posthumously published letters to husband and family reveal the pampered, pious, and principled aspects of her personality. Custer’s works provide important insights into one woman’s attempt to redefine ‘‘lady’’ to fit the regimen of cavalry life. The closeness she depicts among army wives balances the traditional emphasis on military male bonding. While marred by prejudice, self-deprecation, and repetition, and intentionally incomplete by avoidance of controversy, Custer’s writings are lively and lucid accounts of an unusual female life style. OTHER WORKS: General Custer at the Battle of Little Big Horn, June 25, 1876 (1897). The Boy General: Story of the Life of Major-General George A. Custer (edited by M. E. Burt, 1901). The Custer Story: The Life and Intimate Letters of General George A. Custer and His Wife Elizabeth (edited by M. Merington, 1950). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Frost, L. A., General Custer’s Libbie (1976). Stewart, J. R., introduction to Elizabeth B. Custer’s Boots and Saddles (1961 ed.). Reference works: American Women (1897). Other references: Collier’s (29 Jan. 1927). Harper’s (Jan. 1891). Nation (30 April 1885). NYT (11 May 1888, 5 April 1933). Winner’s (30 June 1935). —HELEN BANNAN
CUTHRELL, Faith Baldwin Born 1 October 1893, New Rochelle, New York; died 18 March 1978, Norwalk, Connecticut Wrote under: Faith Baldwin, Faith B. Cuthrell Daughter of Stephen C. and Edith Finch Baldwin; married Hugh H. Cuthrell, 1920 Faith Baldwin Cuthrell spent a fashionable girlhood in Manhattan and Brooklyn Heights. She could read at three, and at six
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was writing a drama, ‘‘The Deserted Wife.’’ She first published verse in her teens, prose in her twenties. Cuthrell’s books, stories, poems, and articles appeared steadily from 1921 to 1977, bringing her enormous popular and financial success. Many of her novels were made into films. She was a founder and faculty member of the Famous Writers School in Westport, Connecticut. Cuthrell’s family history emerges in The American Family (1935), based on her grandfather’s diaries. Tobias Condit takes his wife to China in the 1860s to work as a missionary. Their son is sent to America to be educated, returning to China as a doctor. The sequel, The Puritan Strain (1935), centers on Dr. Condit’s daughter Elizabeth. Courtship and marriage with their attendant joys and crises are Cuthrell’s favored themes. Her first novel, Mavis of Green Hill (1921), shows the maturation of a childlike bride, once an invalid, into a passionate wife. Something Special (1940) explores the threats to a union of 14 years. Satisfactory resolutions are always brought about. Cuthrell’s novels are usually told from the woman’s viewpoint and reveal an intimate group of women’s problems. Salient problems are the work women do and its relation to love and marriage. Cuthrell’s heroines are secretaries, hostesses, nurses, actresses, real estate brokers. They sell bonds and securities, design dresses, and run beauty salons. White Collar Girl (1933) speaks of the wasted talent of girls from affluent families who stay in their hometowns to wrap up fudge in the Goodie Shoppe. Private Duty (1935) describes the working girl’s lot, the long days, the social life crammed into after-hours, the little sleep. Rich girls might work for pleasure: ‘‘To be a working girl and socially secure gave one a certain cachet. Working without the social security made all the difference.’’ Career By Proxy (1939) queries whether a wealthy girl ought to work, thus taking employment from one who needs it. In Hotel Hostess (1938), an unsympathetic male supposes women usually work for frivolous reasons, or because they are ‘‘exhibitionists.’’ Conflict between career and marriage is a frequent theme. Cuthrell’s suitors and husbands generally regard the woman’s work as unnecessary, or inimical to their mutual happiness. Cuthrell writes searchingly of the emotion on both sides. More often Cuthrell’s heroines vainly strive to keep both marriage and career going, finally abandoning the career. In Self-Made Woman (1939) the clash is acute, the resolution uneasy. The wife capitulates to her dominant, sexually magnetic husband with ‘‘an awareness of defeat.’’ The West Wind (1962) patiently explores the corrosive effect on a childless marriage of a husband’s single casual act of infidelity. The wife, fear-ridden and bitter, forgives her husband daily and thus makes their life impossible. Their spiritual isolation and agony ultimately give way to acceptance. Cuthrell’s nonfiction, following her husband’s death, includes the inspirational, semiautobiographical Face Toward the Spring (1956) and Many Windows: Seasons of the Heart (1958).
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From July 1958 to December 1965 she wrote the monthly feature ‘‘The Open Door’’ for Woman’s Day magazine, which she expanded to produce Testament of Trust (1960), Harvest of Hope (1962), Living by Faith (1964), and Evening Star (1966). Reflective and discursive, these ‘‘almanac books’’ follow the year’s cycle. Cuthrell shares her thoughts on the seasonal activities and weather, on gardens and rooms, on love, sorrow, books, travel, memories, prayer, and people. Among Cuthrell’s last works are the six Little Oxford novels: Any Village (1971), No Bed of Roses (1973), Time and the Hour (1974), New Girl in Town (1975), Thursday’s Child (1976), and Adam’s Eden (1977). Seasons are breathtakingly beautiful in this suburban town, a ‘‘collage’’ of Westchester, Connecticut, and Long Island. Life is friendly and comfortable. A cast of characters reappears; new people pass through or settle, usually the heirs, relatives, or friends of the inhabitants. The principal action is the forming of a marriage, or an adjustment to marriage of a sympathetic young pair (maturer lovers marry or remarry offstage), who will in subsequent novels have already started a family and become part of the backdrop for the next set of lovers. Cuthrell produced highly professional popular fiction, skillfully plotted, swift-paced, and entertaining. She captures the accents of daily speech, from plain talk to breezy dialogue. Her characters are middle- and upper-class Americans, living in Manhattan penthouses, luxurious country estates, and suburban communities. Cuthrell explores matters of concern to women— work, money, love, marriage, motherhood, divorce, dignified age. Her heroines are self-possessed women of mettle, some quietly independent, others spitfires. Individuals, couples, families, and neighbors resolve their difficulties. Cuthrell’s inspirational works praise the seasons, the pleasures of books, dwellings, and precious objects, and the importance of solitude and friendship alike.
OTHER WORKS: Laurel of Stonystream (1923). Magic and Mary Rose (1924). Sign Posts (1924). Thresholds (1925). Those Difficult Years (1925). Three Women (1926). Departing Wings (1927). Rosalie’s Career (1928). Betty (1928). Alimony (1928). The Incredible Year (1929). Garden Oats (1929). Broadway Interlude (with Achmed Adullah, 1929). Judy: A Story of Divine Corners (1930). Make-Believe (1930). The Office Wife (1930). Babs: A Story of Divine Corners (1931). Skyscraper (1931, film version, 1932). Today’s Virtue (1931). Mary Lou: A Story of Divine Corners (1931). Self-Made Woman (1932). Week-End Marriage (with Achmed Adullah, 1932, film version, 1933). Girl on the Make (1932). District Nurse (1932). Myra: A Story of Divine Corners (1932). Beauty (1933, film version, 1933). Love’s a Puzzle (1933). Innocent Bystander (1934). Within a Year (1934). Wife vs. Secretary (1934). Honor Bound (1934). The Moon’s Our Home (1936, film version, 1936). Men are Such Fools! (1936, film version, 1938). Girls of Divine Corners (1936). Omnibus:
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Alimony; The Office Wife; Skyscraper (1936). The Heart Has Wings (1937). That Man Is Mine (1937). Twenty-Four Hours a Day (1937). Manhattan Nights (1937). Enchanted Oasis (1938). Rich Girl, Poor Girl (1938). White Magic (1939). Station Wagon Set (1939). The High Road (1939). Letty and the Law (1940). Medical Center (1940). Picnic Adventures (1940). Rehearsal for Love (1940). Temporary Address: Reno (1941). And New Stars Burn (1941). The Heart Remembers (1941). Blue Horizons (1942). Breath of Life (1942). Five Women in Three Novels (1942). The Rest of My Life With You (1942). You Can’t Escape (1943). Washington, USA (1943). Change of Heart (1944). He Married a Doctor (1944). Romance Book (1944). A Job for Jenny (1945). Second Romance Book (1945). Arizona Star (1945). No Private Heaven (1946). Woman on Her Way (1946). Give Love the Air (1947). Sleeping Beauty (1947). They Who Love (1948). Marry for Money (1948). The Golden Shoestring (1949). Look Out for Liza (1950). The Whole Armor (1951). The Juniper Tree (1952). Widow’s Walk (1954). Three Faces of Love (1957). Blaze of
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Sunlight (1959). The Lonely Man (1964). There Is a Season (1966). The Velvet Hammer (1969). Take What You Want (1970). One More Time (1972). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cooper, P., Faith Baldwin’s American Family (1938). Van Gelder, R., ‘‘Interview with Faith Baldwin’’ in Writers and Writing (1946). Reference works: TCA (1942, 1955). CA (1969). Other references: CSM (11 Jan. 1947). Colliers (27 May 1944). Cosmopolitan (Aug. 1959). Good Housekeeping (Oct. 1943). NRTA Journal (Sept.-Oct. 1975). NY Post (2 Sept. 1972). NYT (25 Oct. 1973, 20 March 1978). Pictorial Review (Dec. 1935). Saturday Evening Post (14 March 1936). Saturday Review of Literature (11 April 1936, 29 April 1939). Time (8 July 1935). Writer (May 1940). —MARCELLE THIÉBAUX
D DAHLGREN, Madeleine Vinton Born Sarah Madeleine Vinton, 13 July 1825, Gallipolis, Ohio; died 28 May 1898, Washington, D.C. Wrote under: Corinne Daughter of Samuel F. and Romain Bureau Vinton; married Daniel Goddard, circa 1855 (died); John A. Dahlgren, 1865 (died 1870); children: five Madeleine Vinton Dahlgren was educated in Philadelphia’s Monsieur Picot’s boarding school and in the Convent of the Visitation in Georgetown, D.C. After her mother and brother died during her childhood, Dahlgren assumed the role of companion and hostess for her father, a veteran congressman from Ohio. Her husband, Daniel C. Goddard, was assistant secretary of the Interior Department. Widowed five years after her marriage, she returned to her father’s Washington house with her two children. She published her first collection of writings, Idealities (1859), under the name of Corinne. Until her second marriage to John Dahlgren, she helped support her family by writing and translating a variety of political and religious essays from French, Spanish, and Italian. She and Dahlgren had three children; and when widowed for a second time in 1870, Dahlgren again returned to her father’s home and to writing. An extremely conservative, traditional Catholic view permeates Dahlgren’s fiction and nonfiction. In 1871 she wrote a letter to Congress and a pamphlet, Thoughts on Female Suffrage, arguing woman suffrage was a burden added to the distinct and sacred duties, including motherhood, that women were already responsible for by a law ‘‘higher’’ than the U.S. Constitution. To Dahlgren marriage was a sacred unity in which the family with the husband at the head was the foundation of the state. She believed the 19th amendment, on the other hand, proposed marriage as a mere compact in which each family member required individual representation, leading to diversity and discord rather than unity and peace. In the 1880s Dahlgren turned from nonfiction to fictionalized sketches and highly didactic melodramatic novels, often serialized in popular magazines. South Mountain Magic (1882), perhaps her most interesting book, is a fascinating account of the mysterious beliefs and supernatural symbols of the South Mountain descendants of the German settlers in a Maryland community. A Washington Winter (1883), an involved romance set in a typical ‘‘Washington season,’’ reflects the political and social manners of Dahlgren’s world. Her strong religious convictions and their ramifications in the political world surface in Lights and Shadows of a Life (1887), which upholds the American prejudice against racial and social intermixture as a providential means of preserving the superiority of the Republic’s governing race. The novel traces the complicated life of a young Southern girl and her relationship with a Frenchman who might have a black ancestor.
As a founder of the Literary Society of Washington and president of the Ladies’ Catholic Missionary Society, Dahlgren remained a noted literary and religious leader of Washington society until her death. OTHER WORKS: Pius IX and France by Montalembert (translated by Dahlgren, 1861). An Essay on Catholicism, Authority and Order by J. Donoso Cortes (translated by Dahlgren, 1862). Memoir of Ulric Dahlgren (1872). Etiquette of Social Life in Washington (1873). The Executive Power in the United States by A. de Chambrun (translated by Dahlgren, 1874). South Sea Sketches (1881). Memoir of John A. Dahlgren (1882). The Lost Name (1886). Divorced (1887). Chim: His Washington Winter (1892). Samuel Finley Vinton (1895). The Secret Directory (1896). The Woodley Lane Ghost and Other Stories (1899). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Washington Evening Star (30 May 1898). WP (29 May 1898). —SUZANNE ALLEN
DALL, Caroline (Wells) Healey Born 22 June 1822, Boston, Massachusetts; died 17 December 1912, Washington, D.C. Daughter of Mark and Caroline Foster Healey; married Charles Appleton Dall, 1844 (died 1886); children: son and a daughter Daughter of a prosperous Boston merchant who had ‘‘desired a son’’ and was ‘‘determined I should supply the place of one,’’ Caroline Healey Dall received a thorough education and was devoted to her father until her desire to spend her life in charitable and religious work conflicted with her father’s desire that she pursue a literary career. Her marriage to Reverend Dall produced a son and a daughter but the union was not happy. In 1855 he went as a Unitarian missionary to India, where he remained, except for occasional visits, until his death in 1886. Dall helped Pauline Wright Davis organize the woman’s rights convention in Boston in 1855, and she organized and delivered one of the principal addresses at the 1859 New England woman’s rights convention, also in Boston. She was one of the founders of the American Social Science Association. Essays and Sketches (1849) collects Dall’s early essays on moral and religious subjects, which had been published in newspapers and periodicals since she was thirteen. In Liberty Bell (1847), another collection of her writings, she holds, in contrast to her later writings and actions, that political activity for women is ‘‘utterly incompatible with the more previous and positive duties of the nursery and the fireside.’’ A series of nine lectures,
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delivered between 1859 and 1862, was described in the New York Evening Post as ‘‘the most eloquent and forcible statement of the Woman’s Question which has been made.’’ Dall calls for the removal of educational and legal barriers so that each human being can fully develop, and insists on a woman’s right to work and to receive equal pay for equal work: ‘‘If low wages, by actually starving women and those dependent upon them, force many into vicious courses, so does the want of employment lower the whole moral tone, and destroy even the domestic efficiency of those whose minds seek variety and freedom. More than once have I been to insane asylums with young girls whom active and acceptable employment would have saved from mania; and scores of times have young women of fortune asked me, ‘What can you give me to do?’ And to this question there is, in the present state of the public mind no possible answer.’’ Her convincing historical analysis, well supplied with examples, shows women have ‘‘since the beginning of civilization’’ shared the hardest and most unwholesome work, that they have been the worst paid, and that their efforts to find ‘‘new avenues of labor’’ (e.g., efforts to train women as watchmakers) have often been met ‘‘by the selfish opposition of man.’’ She feels that such opposition will be overcome and that all the work woman asks for ‘‘will inevitably be given.’’ A consistent advocate of coeducation and higher education for women, Dall responded to Dr. Edward H. Clarke’s book Sex in Education (1873), in which he claimed women’s health could not withstand the strain of a college education. Her review affirms her belief that no ‘‘greater difference of capacity, whether physical or psychical, will be found between man and woman than is found between man and man,’’ that a proper coeducational system will make possible the fullest development of both sexes, and that ‘‘whatever danger menaces the health of America, it cannot, thus far, have sprung from the overeducation of her women.’’ She calls upon women, ‘‘contented in ignominious dependence, restless even to insanity from the need of healthy employment and the perversion of their instincts, and confessedly looking to marriage for salvation,’’ to ‘‘make thorough preparation for trades or professions’’ and to abide by the consequences of their resolutions. Dall was, in later years, a prolific writer of obituary tributes, devotional pamphlets, genealogical studies, and quasihistorical works. OTHER WORKS: What We Really Know About Shakespeare (1855). Woman’s Right to Labor; or Low Wages and Hard Work (1860). A Practical Illustration of ‘‘Woman’s Right to Labor’’; or, A Letter from Marie E. Zakrzewska (edited by Dall, 1860). Historical Pictures Retouched (1860). Woman’s Rights Under the Law (1861). Sunshine; A New Name for a Popular Lecture on Health (1864). The Bible Story Told for Children (1866). Nazareth (1866). The College, the Market, and the Court (1867). Egypt’s Place in History (1868). Patty Gray’s Journey: From Boston to Baltimore (1869). From Baltimore to Washington (1870). On the Way; or, Patty at Mount Vernon (1870). Genealogical Notes and Errata to Savage’s Genealogical Dictionary (1873). Sex and Education (1874). The Romance of the Association (1875). The
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Whittingham Genealogy (1880). My First Holiday (1881). Sordello: A History and A Poem (1886). The Life of Dr. Anandabai Joshee (1888). Barbara Fritchie (1892). Otis; The Story of an Old House (1892). Margaret and Her Friends (1895). In Memoriam. Susan Wadden Turner et al. (1896). Transcendentalism in New England (1897). In Memoriam, Alexander Wadsworth (1898). Alongside (1902). Memorial to Charles Henry Appleton Dall (edited by Dall, 1902). Of ‘‘Lady Rose’s Daughter’’ (1903). The Story of a Boston Family (1903). Fog Bells (1904). Charles Lowell, Pastor. . .of the West Church, Boston (1907). The papers of Caroline Healey Dall are in the Schlesinger Library of Radcliffe College, and at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Buell, L., Literary Transcendentalism (1973). Conrad, S. F., Perish the Thought: Intellectual Women in Romantic America, 1830-1860 (1971). Leach, W., True Love and Perfect Union: The Feminist Reform of Sex and Society (1980). Riegel, R. E., American Feminists (1963). Stanton, E. C. et al., History of Woman Suffrage (1881). Reference works: NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: HLB (Oct. 1974). New England Quarterly (March 1969). —SUSAN SUTTON SMITH
DALY, Elizabeth Born 15 October 1878, New York, New York; died 2 September 1967, Port Washington, New York Daughter of Emma (Barker) and Joseph Francis Daly Elizabeth Daly was the author of 16 crime novels popular during the 1940s and 1950s, all featuring Henry Gamadge, a genteel, intelligent, upper-class man who was an expert on antiquarian books, maps, prints, autographs, and other documents. Agatha Christie once named Daly her favorite American mystery writer, and in fact Daly’s work has often been compared to Christie’s and those of other writers from the British Golden Age of detective fiction, including Arthur Conan Doyle. Daly was born in 1878 in New York City. Her father was a County of New York Supreme Court justice and her uncle was Augustin Daly, a noted 1890s playwright and theatrical producer. Daly’s writing career began during her teens, when periodicals such as Puck, Life, and Scribner’s published her short prose and poetry works. After graduating with a B.A. from Bryn Mawr College in 1901 and an M.A. from Columbia University in 1902, Daly worked as a tutor and a producer of amateur theater. She did not write a detective story until she was in her thirties. She was in her sixties when her first book, Unexpected Night (1940), was published. She went on to write 15 more crime novels and one general fiction title, all from 1940 to 1951. Daly won an Edgar Allan Poe award in 1960 from the Mystery Writers of America.
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Unexpected Night introduces Henry Gamadge, who returned as the protagonist of all her full-length detective stories. Gamadge is the opposite of the ‘‘hard-boiled’’ fictional detectives popular at the time. ‘‘He’s the semi-bookish type, but not pretentious,’’ Daly said of Gamadge. ‘‘He’s not good-looking, but eye-catching. . . . He knows a lot, but doesn’t talk about it. He is basically kind, but at times can be ruthless.’’ Over the course of the 16 novels in which he stars, Gamadge acquires a staff, a wife, a family, and two pets, all of which become recurring characters. Gamadge lives in New York’s fashionable Murray Hill district and is essentially unemployed, but accepts frequent commissions as an expert on old books and papers. Nearly all of Daly’s novels hinge on a work of literature or a literary situation. Murders in Volume 2 (1941) features the poetry of Byron, The Book of the Dead (1944) revolves around Shakespeare’s The Tempest, The Wrong Way Down (1946) centers on a Bartolozzi engraving of a Holbein portrait, The Book of the Lion (1948) involves a lost Chaucer manuscript, and the solution of Death and Letters (1950), one of her last and most acclaimed novels, relies on the discovery of the secret sale of a Victorian poet’s love letters. Daly is probably best known for her complex plots, which involve crimes of forgery, theft, and murder and incorporate everything from reincarnations to apparitions, in addition to literary clues. She was especially commended for her unexpected resolutions. Will Cuppy of the New York Herald Tribune said of Deadly Nightshade (1940): ‘‘The plot thickens amazingly toward the end, with a flurry of romantic gambits, and Miss Daly proves herself as deft at juggling hints as the armchair sleuth could wish.’’ Similarly, Isaac Anderson commented in the New York Times Book Review on Evidence of Things Seen (1943): ‘‘So ingenious is the plot of this story that we feel safe in predicting that most readers will be completely fooled and will then wonder how they ever happened to muff the solution.’’ The Gamadge novels take place among wealthy New York society, a group of individuals who are not greatly interested in or affected by the lower classes, crime, or even World War II. At times, both Daly’s writing style and her character Gamadge were criticized as ‘‘over-urbane,’’ ‘‘precious,’’ and ‘‘self-consciously literary,’’ but readers and reviewers generally felt compensated for those drawbacks by her ingenious plotting. While her work was most often considered light and civilized, Daly herself felt detective fiction was a high form of literature that brought with it great responsibilities for the author. Other books featuring Gamadge include The House Without the Door (1942), Nothing Can Rescue Me (1943), Arrow Pointing Nowhere (1944), Any Shape or Form (1945), Somewhere in the House (1946), Night Walk (1947), And Dangerous to Know (1949), and The Book of the Crime (1951). In 1941 Daly wrote her only nonmystery and her sole book without Gamadge. Called The Street Has Changed, the novel (her fourth) was a 40-year saga set in the world of New York theater. The work was praised—in part for her supposed extensive research, which Daly claimed was not necessary since she had grown up in a theatrical family—but she never broke away from the detective genre again.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature (1991). CANR 60 (1998). CLC 52 (1989). 20th Century Crime and Mystery Writers (1985). World Authors 1900-1950 (1996). Other references: NYT (3 Sept. 1967). —KAREN RAUGUST
DALY, Mary Born 16 October 1928, Schenectady, New York Daughter of Frank X. and Anna Catherine Morse Daly In her first book, The Church and the Second Sex (1968), Mary Daly examines Simone de Beauvoir’s accusations against Christianity (particularly Catholicism) found in the book The Second Sex. Daly supports her indictment of the church as an oppressor of women by citing its denial of women’s full participation in the affairs of society, thereby restricting their maturity, as well as excluding women from the church’s hierarchy. Underlying this oppression, according to Daly, is the church doctrine that denies women equality in this life while promising they will be equal souls in heaven. In addition, she analyzes the impact of the women’s liberation movement on nuns and Catholic women in general. Daly’s examples are well organized and lucid, and are drawn from scripture, patristic doctrine, historical evidence, and specific papal documents on marriage and abortion. In a chapter entitled ‘‘The Pedestal Peddlars,’’ she traces the church’s identification of woman with nature rather than culture, with Eve rather than Mary. She also shows how woman is oppressed through what the church calls her ‘‘place’’ in the divine plan, a term Daly feels silences and awes the critical faculty of most women. Her language of reform is rather strong: she would ‘‘exorcise’’ the idea of man’s superiority and use ‘‘radical surgery’’ on the theology that genderizes God and sustains a static world view. This idea of man’s superiority wounds the marriages of its members through insistence on the inferiority of woman. She calls for the ordination of women priests and a movement away from the masculine principle in the hierarchical patterns of society. Daly also advocates the release of nuns from the cloister into the service of their societies and champions universal coeducation. Daly hopes theological wounds can be healed from within the church. While this book was accused by some reviewers as ‘‘overkill,’’ it is actually a clear, well-documented statement of what Roman Catholicism has done to women. Daly’s second book, Beyond God the Father (1973), sparkles with brilliant, original concepts. Although it did not receive critical acclaim, its importance lies in its setting forth seminal philosophical and theological ideas. Whereas her first book is derivative of another thinker (Simone de Beauvoir), the second reflects her own deep understanding of ancient, medieval, and modern theologians, philosophers, and social scientists. She evaluates their ideas by showing that their thinking would have been
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more fruitful had they taken decisive issue with the universal oppression of women. Although theologians have feared woman as the antichrist (a fear manifested in witch hunts and the burning of Joan of Arc), Daly believes woman’s realization of her authentic self will constitute the Second Coming, as women will create new dimensions of concern for all humanity. Daly sees the tolerance for diversity and many forms of becoming as part of the Mary archetype stripped of patriarchal values. She believes Mary to be the last remnant of the Mother goddess who was human and fallible and hence could have love also for the irregular and the imperfect. She rejects Christ as an exclusively masculine symbol for incarnation. Daly is attacked by some critics for not defining precisely what the feminine element will be in her androgynous vision of the future, but her point is that women cannot yet know who they will be. Nevertheless, she does discuss several positive aspects that the ‘‘Cosmic Sisterhood’’ will bring and warns that women will have to be aroused to their plight before they will be able to assert these new dimensions of becoming. Although Daly’s writing is at times so complex it borders on scholasticism, her sardonic wit and vivid imagery help carry the reader along. As Betty Graf, her most appreciative reviewer, says, although Daly uses language that may shock uninformed laity and clergy and may outrage the uncritical, orthodox religious adherent, the book is ‘‘good news’’ for modern woman and man. As a radical feminist theorist, Daly, who holds doctoral degrees in philosophy (1965) and theology (1963) from the University of Fribourg, and a doctorate in theology from St. Mary’s College, Indiana (1954), has taught for years as an associate professor in the Department of Theology at Boston College. The corpus of her writing is central in shaping the questions and debates of feminist theology/religious studies and theory. The Church and the Second Sex was reissued in 1975 with a ‘‘Feminist Postchristian Introduction.’’ including a chapter-bychapter review from Daly’s transformed post-Christian vantage point. Her ‘‘New Archaic Afterwords’’ to a 1985 reissue, greatly influenced by her later development of ‘‘New Words’’ to describe women’s experience, offers a further reflection on her departure from Christianity. Here, Daly views ‘‘the earlier Daly as a foresister whose work is an essential source.’’
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and ‘‘Possessions’’ (deception, pride, and avarice). Pure Lust (1984) deals with ‘‘Aggression’’ and ‘‘Obsession’’ (anger and lust). The third volume, Outer-Course: The Be-Dazzling Voyage (1993) addresses ‘‘Assimilation,’’ ‘‘Elimination,’’and ‘‘Fragmentation’’ (gluttony, envy, and sloth), also tacitly dealt with in the 1987 Wickedary of the English Language. In Gyn/Ecology Daly crisscrosses cultures and continents painstakingly exposing Indian suttee, Chinese foot binding, African genital mutilation, European witch burning, and the development of American gynecology to show that gynocidal practices are universal. She begins here her journey of creating womenidentified Time/Space. Daly differentiates between Background, ‘‘the divine depth within the Self,’’ and Foreground, ‘‘surface consciousness,’’ analytical distinctions upon which she draws in her later work. In Pure Lust, Daly journeys into the Background through three realms: (1) archespheres, uncovering ‘‘the Archimage—the Original Witch—within our Selves,’’ (2) pyrospheres, the space of Elemental E-motions and ontological Passions, and (3) metamorphospheres, the center of Belonging and Be-friending. The discussion of each realm ensues with the exposure of the foreground that patriarchy has created to mask the spheres: sadospirituality, potted passions and plastic virtues, and patriarchal, inauthentic belonging and befriending. Daly retrieves ‘‘lust’’ from a phallocentric lechery and renews it with its other meanings of eagerness, craving, and intense longing. Websters’ First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language brings together a collection of Daly’s New Words and their various meanings. The volume has preliminary articles on spelling, grammar, pronunciation, and guides that mirror the image of a dictionary but are actually theoretical pieces. The presentation of words and meanings, woven ‘‘in cahoots with Jane Caputi,’’ appears in the second phase of the book. Readers unfamiliar with Daly’s work will be impeded from using Wickedary as a reference tool because the words are divided into three different word-webs that depend upon a basic understanding of her thought. A third phase, ‘‘Appendicular Webs,’’ contains four further essays by Daly
In her 1985 ‘‘Original Reintroduction’’ to Beyond God the Father Daly maintains most of the views expressed in her second book, but rejects traditional theological vocabulary. In her later work, language becomes paramount. While always passionate, her words become increasingly lyrical, alliterative, and specialized. Irregular capitalization in her works are used to delineate words she has revitalized and reclaimed.
In Outer-Course: The Be-Dazzling Voyage (1992) Daly intertwines both autobiographical and philosophical material to portray her intellectual voyage in four interconnected spiral galaxies. These spirals roughly correspond to the writing of each of her books, although the first spiral includes many memories from preexistence through the writing of The Church and the Second Sex. The volume focuses on the power that recollections of a woman who has journeyed through the spirals and understands their interrelatedness can have to energize women and Daly herself for further voyaging.
Daly’s 1975 article, ‘‘The Qualitative Leap beyond Patriarchal Religion,’’ provides the trajectory of a new constructive phase. In the ‘‘New Intergalactic Introduction (1990)’’ of Gyn/Ecology Daly reiterates a plan for a three-volume work based on the identification of eight Deadly Sins of the Fathers. Gyn/Ecology (1978) deals with ‘‘Processions,’’ ‘‘Professions,’’
In 1979 Audre Lorde penned the most well-known criticism of Daly, citing Daly’s failure to include the writings and experiences of women of color except as victims. Daly publicly acknowledged the criticism in Gyn/Ecology’s second edition and in Outer-Course. In Pure Lust and Wickedary Daly does try to address diversity. The 1990 edition of Gyn/Ecology also includes
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an afterword by Bonnie Mann portraying the usefulness of Daly’s analysis in Mann’s work with battered women, an effort to show the accessibility of the work to different classes. Writers of feminist criticism and texts on theory generally label Daly as cultural feminist, an appellation Daly does not espouse in her own self-descriptions. She prefers Positively Revolting Hag, i.e., ‘‘a stunning, beauteous Crone, one who inspires positive revulsion from phallic institutions and morality, inciting Others to Act of Pure Lust.’’ In 1999, while still teaching at Boston College, Daly made the news when the administration, apparently responding to a threatened affirmative action suit, insisted she allow men in her ‘‘Introduction to Feminist Ethics’’ course. Her policy had always been to teach separate classes to men and to women. Professor Daly responded by taking a semester’s leave while considering her retirement. Ironically, the all-male student body of 1969 successfully demonstrated for her reinstatement and tenure when the administration did not renew her contract. Student support in the recent controversy was represented in a letter signed by 14 women and printed in the campus newspaper: ‘‘Throughout her 33-year career at Boston College, Professor Daly has provided insight, inspiration and mentoring. . .the administration is silencing Mary Daly and negating the very ideals that it proclaims invaluable.’’ During her sabbatical, however, Daly wasn’t idle— she continued work on a sequel to her 1998 book, Quintessence. . .Realizing the Archaic Future: A Radical Elemental Feminist Manifesto . The value and power of language led Daly to writing, as she indicates in her autobiographical essay, ‘‘Sin Big’’ (1996), where she describes her early experiences and decisions about her education. ‘‘Ever since childhood, I have been honing my skills for living the life of a Radical Feminist Pirate and cultivating the Courage to Sin.’’ Her eighth book, a futuristic, millennial journey, Quintessence, completes the quest begun in Gyn/Ecology and Pure Lust by imagining a world beyond the patriarchal history. As she recounts the situation, the oppression of women, the exhaustion of natural resources, and the dominance of fundamentalist thought characterize life at the end of the 20th century. The title page of Quintessence includes the additional inscription that explains the circumstances of the text: ‘‘2048 B.E. (Biophilic Era) Edition: Containing Cosmic Comments and Conversations with the Author, Published on Lost Found Continent by Anonyma Network (An Intergalactic Enterprise of Anonyma Network) In Celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Work.’’ Daly structures a fictive context in which Annie (Anonyma), the future editor, writes a preface and records her ‘‘transtemporal’’ dialogues with the author, Mary Daly. Daly’s chapters enumerate women’s experiences of Diaspora in the patriarchal, postmodernist world. Following each chapter are Annie’s commentary and conversations with the author that describe this world inhabited by women and a few enlightened men who live out Daly’s feminist dreams, unencumbered by the patriarchal world they left behind in 2012 B.E.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY: Lorde, A., ‘‘An Open Letter to Mary Daly,’’ in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, C. Moraga and G. Azaldúa, eds. (1981). Spencer, M. L., M. Kehoe, and K. Speece, eds., Handbook for Women Scholars: Strategies for Success (1982). Reference works: CANR (1990). FC (1990). MTCW (1991). Other references: America (Jan. 1974). Boston Globe (25 Feb. 1999, 28 Feb. 1999, 23 Mar. 1999). Christian Century (Jan. 1974). CW (Feb. 1974). Critic (Jan.-Feb. 1974). LJ (1 Oct. 1998). National Catholic Reporter (5 Feb. 1999, 5 Mar. 1999). Off Our Backs (1998). On The Issues (1998). PW (17 Aug. 1998). WRB 16:6. —STEPHANIE DEMETRAKOPOULOS, UPDATED BY BARBARA ANNE RADTKE AND KAREN MCLENNAN
DALY, Maureen Born 15 March 1921, County Tyrone, Ireland Daughter of Joseph D. and Margaret Kelly Daly; married William P. McGivern, 1948 Maureen Daly began her writing career at a young age. While still a high school senior, her short story ‘‘Sixteen’’ placed first in a student contest in Scholastic magazine, and was selected for the O. Henry Prize Award Collection of 1938. While a student at Rosary College (now Dominican University) in River Forest, Illinois, she worked as a reporter and columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Upon graduation in 1942 she went on to the Ladies’ Home Journal as an associate editor, reporter, and foreign correspondent, and in the early 1950s, she began writing for the Saturday Evening Post. Throughout her career, Daly interposed magazine and newspaper work with writing for films and television. Daly’s stories have been widely published in national magazines such as Vogue, Mademoiselle, Cosmopolitan, and Woman’s Home Companion. Her writing for the magazine audience centers on problems relating to the socialization process and the psychology of adolescence. Daly’s stories, novels, articles, and columns hold a prominent place among works designed to advise and reassure young women in their struggle for identity throughout adolescence. Among her works of these genres are ‘‘Sixteen,’’ ‘‘What’s Your P. Q.? (Personality Quotient),’’ a syndicated column for teenagers, and a cultural commentary in ‘‘Meet a SubDeb’’ installments for the Ladies’ Home Journal. Daly’s first novel, Seventeenth Summer (1942, 1985) is by far her best known and most highly acclaimed publication. Described as the Little Women of the 20th century, it has gone through innumerable printings since its first publication. Set in the author’s own hometown of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, the story relates the hope, joy, pain, and sadness of a first young love.
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Accolades for the book called it serious, sensitive, charming, and original, with appreciation of and insight into youthful emotions. The novel is written in an expert but simple style, and is notable for creating a Midwestern summer ambience of evocative nostalgia for growing up in the American heartland. Reviewers regarded Seventeenth Summer the start of a promising career for a young writer with a keen sense of emotional states and inner feelings. To this day, Daly is viewed as offering an exceptionally fresh approach to a genre customarily dominated by clichéd formulas. Daly’s individual and memorable treatment of the theme of young love shows how a writer’s imagination and personal insight can bring overused literary themes alive. Daly’s repertoire also includes children’s books, light foreign-locale fiction, and anthologies of classic short stories for young adults. Daly’s reputation is based on her flair for translating personal experience and memory of teenage life—with its hopes, frustrations, and inhibitions—into a popular and sympathetic vernacular. Her first story, ‘‘Sixteen,’’ was not originally intended for publication, but was a personal exercise in introspection and catharsis meant to ‘‘relieve the tense hurt feelings inside.’’ Daly believes her empathy for adolescence depends on her gift for remaining psychically close to the experiences of that period. A collection of her news column commentaries, Smarter and Smoother: A Handbook on How to Be That Way (1944), drew its effectiveness from Daly’s involved but mature identification with her audience. It has been reviewed as ‘‘the best, all things considered, of our high school manners and ethics.’’
OTHER WORKS: My Favorite Stories (edited by Daly, 1948, 1965). High School Career Series (1948-). The Perfect Hostess: Complete Etiquette and Entertainment for the Home (1948, 1951). Profile of Youth (edited by Daly, 1951). What’s Your P.Q.— Personality Quotient? (1952, 1970). Twelve Around the World (1957). Mention My Name in Mombasa: The Unscheduled Adventures of a Family Aboard (with W. P. McGivern, 1958). Patrick Visits the Farm (1959). Patrick Takes a Trip (1960). Spanish Roundabout (1960). Sixteen and Other Stories (1961, 1972). Moroccan Roudabout (1961). Patrick Visits the Library (1961). Patrick Visits the Zoo (1963). The Ginger Horse (1964). Spain’s Wonderland of Contrasts (1965). The Small War of Sergeant Donkey (1966, 1969). My Favorite Mystery Stories (edited by Daly, 1966). Rosie, the Dancing Elephant (1967). My Favorite Suspense Stories (edited by Daly, 1968). The Seeing (1981). Acts of Love (1986). First a Dream (1990).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Martens, A. C., Seventeenth Summer, A Play in Three Acts (1949). Martens, A. C., You Can’t Kiss Caroline; A Comedy in Three Acts (1963). Reference works: CB (1946). Other references: Scholastic (20 March 1944, 22 Oct. 1945). Ladies’ Home Journal (June 1951, Jan. 1968). —MARGARET KING
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DANIELS, Dorothy Born 1 July 1907, Waterbury, Connecticut Also writes under: Angela Gray, Danielle Dorsett, Cynthia Kavanaugh, Helaine Ross, Suzanne Somers, Geraldine Thayer Daughter of Judson R. and Mary Guilfoile Smith; married Norman Daniels (died) Dorothy Daniels’ writing career commenced shortly after her marriage to Norman Daniels, a prolific detective and spy-story author. She began by writing romantic short stories and doctor/ nurse novels, but when their healthy sales figures declined, Daniels’ publisher suggested she turn to the gothic romance. Daniels is best known for her work in this genre. Her first gothic novel, Shadow Glen, was published in 1965. From that year through 1975, Daniels had sales figures of over 10 million copies, with more than 150 titles in print. Daniels’ originally helped her late husband with his writing by editing and typing his manuscripts. He later aided her in getting her own career started, and has been widely and wrongly credited with writing much of her work. Daniels achieves originality in a narrowly defined genre by paying close attention to detail and vividly recreating an era into which the reader can escape. The depiction of women in Daniels’ gothics is very traditional. Home and marriage are often the end result of the storyline. Generally written in the first person, the plots are predictable—the reader is aware that the heroine will ultimately survive and be far better off by the conclusion of the final chapter. It is this very predictability, however, that seems to draw readers. Gothic devotees are searching for variations on established themes, and Daniels achieves this variation through careful and precise characterization. Her novels uphold the traditions and attitudes of a solid middle-class experience where age and sex role expectations are clearly defined. The characters in the gothics pose no threat to the beliefs of the readers; Daniels receives popular acceptance because she treats the values of ordinary people with respect. Her insistence on happy endings reinforces the concept that good, by its very nature, must ultimately triumph over evil. For a reading audience experiencing many challenges to traditional modes of behavior in the 1970s, the gothic novel was a comforting assurance that certain standards never change. And despite rampant changes in society and mores in the 1980s and 1990s, Daniels is still a favorite among readers of gothic novels, or as they are frequently labeled, escapist literature. The immense response to her writing, however, stands as testimony to her ability to know and fulfill the desires of her reading audience. Rather than debate the merits or shortcomings of escapist literature, it is more important to study Daniels for her insight into the American psyche. OTHER WORKS: Selected: The Caduceus Tree (1961). The Dark Rider (1961). Leland Legacy (1965). Cliffside Castle (1965). The Templeton Memoirs (1966). Mystic Manor (1966). Lily Lily Pond (1966). Midday Moon (1967). House of Stolen Memories (1967). House of the Seven Courts (1967). Candle in the Sun (1968). The
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Spanish Chapel (1969). Voice on the Wind (1970). The Attic Rope (1970). The Tormented (1970). Journey into Terror (1970). Willow Weep (1971). House of Many Doors (1971). Diablo Manor (1971). House on Circus Hill (1972). Dark Island (1972). The Dark Stage (1972). The Stone House (1973). The Larrabee Heiress (1973). Apollo Fountain (1974). Ghost Song (1974). The Unlamented (1975). Illusion at Haven’s Edge (1975). The Possessed (1975). Whistle in the Wind (1976). Vineyard Chapel (1976). Woman in Silk and Shadows (1977). Juniper Hill (1977). In the Shadows (1978). The Lonely Place (1978). Perrine (1978). Cormac Legend (1979). Yesterday’s Evil (1979). Legend of Death (1980). Bridal Black (1980). House of Silence (1980). Nicola (1980). The Purple and the Gold (1980). Monte Carlo (1981). The Sisters of Valcour (1981). Saratoga (1981). For Love of Valcour (1983). Crisis at Valcour (1985).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Dorothy Daniels Memorial Children’s Book Collection: Selected Catalogue (Riverside Public Library [CA], 1981). Twentieth Century Romance & Historical Writers. —KAREN M. STODDARD
DARGAN, Olive Tilford Born 1869, Grayson County, Kentucky; died 22 January 1968, Asheville, North Carolina Also wrote under: Fielding Burke Daughter of Elisha F. and Rebecca Day Tilford; married Pegram Dargan (died 1915) Raised in Kentucky and Missouri in an academic family, Olive Tilford Dargan was educated at George Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville, and later at Radcliffe College, where she met her future husband, Pegram Dargan. She began her writing career as a poet and lyrical dramatist living in New York, but, following her husband’s death by drowning in 1915, she returned to Kentucky and wrote about the southern mountain people. Her literary approach ranged from bemused local color anecdotes written during the 1920s to angry Marxist novels written during the Depression. Throughout her long life, Dargan published social fiction under the pseudonym Fielding Burke while using her real name for poetry and local color stories. In 1916 Dargan was awarded the Southern Society of New York Prize for the best book written by a Southerner, and in 1924 she received the Belmont-Ward Fugitive Prize and an honorary doctorate from the University of North Carolina. Dargan’s early lyrical dramas give some clues to the intensely political nature of her mature fiction. The Mortal Gods (1912), though archaic in form and remote in setting, is nevertheless a powerful study of the oppression of the working class in modern industrial society. In her collection of plays, The Flutter of the Gold Leaf (1922), Dargan explores conflicting emotional and
intellectual loyalties, and the different impulses created by personal and public roles. The plays were not well received by critics. Dargan’s more conventional poetry was treated admiringly. The sonnet collection, The Cycle’s Rim (1916) was described by one reviewer as ‘‘in a class with Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese.’’ The extent of Dargan’s left-wing intellectual leanings becomes apparent in Highland Annals (1925), a collection of short stories about the poor white inhabitants of the southern mountains. Although these sketches exhibit many of the traditional features of Southern local color writing—tall tales, extravagant humor, rhapsodic appreciation of nature, quaintness of language and custom—they also note the ominous threat of the exploitative cotton mill and the vulnerability of the poor white woman who suffers both for her class and for her sex. A bloody strike among hitherto docile workers in a textile mill in Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1929 gave Dargan the ideal setting for her first novel. Call Home the Heart (1932) is about the predicament of Ishma, a Southern poor white woman who is torn between her love for her husband, family, and mountain life, and an overwhelming desire to seek freedom from the obligations they heap upon her. But when Ishma deserts her family for an urban, industrial life with a lover, she only finds a new set of duties. She discovers the poor worker trapped by the cruel paternalism of the textile factories, and she slowly educates herself in the intricacies of Marxist socialism until she is ready to participate fully in strike organization. However, just when Ishma’s intellectual principles appear to have triumphed, she flees back to her husband and family, driven by ancient prejudices against the black workers who embrace her, and drawn by her yearning for a husband’s love and the tranquil beauty of the mountains. Many critics applauded what they called the novel’s final ‘‘retreat into art’’ after Marxist and feminist ‘‘propaganda.’’ Dargan, however, leaves no doubt that Ishma’s retreat, though passionate and consoling, is a failure of principle—a step backward from the new consciousness she seemed to be approaching. The novel implies there can be no reconciliation of pleasure and principle, that one must always be subordinate to the other. Dargan returned to the predicament of Ishma in her second proletarian novel, A Stone Came Rolling (1935). Here the heroine achieves the triumph of principle, but only at the cost of the death of her beloved husband. She returns to dedicate her energy to revolutionary activities with a new sense of the danger of a wasted life. Though Dargan’s novels show a clear Marxist emphasis, their power lies in their sensitivity to the circumstances of an intellectual and passionate woman who discovers personal happiness is the price demanded by both the traditional feminine role and the revolutionary feminist one. After the 1930s, Dargan, like most other leftward-leaning American writers, retreated from extreme ideological concerns. She returned to anecdotal fiction of the mountain people in From My Highest Hill (1941), and to a liberal treatment of labor warfare among organizing mine workers in Sons of the Stranger (1947). Yet it is in the earlier novels of political engagement that Dargan produced her finest and most original work.
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OTHER WORKS: Path Flower, and Other Verses (1904). Semiramis, and Other Plays (1904). Lords and Lovers, and Other Dramas (1906). Lute and Furrow (1922). The Spotted Hawk (1958). Innocent Bigamy, and Other Stories (1962). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Polsky, T., North Carolina Authors: A Selective Handbook (1952). Rideout, W. B., The Radical Novel in the U.S. 1900-1954: Some Interrelations of Literature and Society (1956). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). WW of Women (1914). Other references: Nation (8 Jan. 1936). NR (29 Jan. 1936). NYTBR (15 Dec. 1935). North Carolina Librarian (Spring 1960). SRL (16 April 1932). Writers’s Markets and Methods (interview, 1950). —SYLVIA COOK
D’AULAIRE, Ingri Mortenson Born 27 December 1904, Königsberg, Norway; died 24 October 1980, Wilton, Connecticut Daughter of Per and Line Sandsmark Mortenson; married Edgar D. d’Aulaire, 1925; children: two sons Ingri Mortenson d’Aulaire met her husband while at art school in Munich, where they married. They returned to the U.S. in 1930, and embarked on a joint career of writer and illustrator that endured for many years. Although it is hard to ascertain where the creative spark came from, it was d’Aulaire’s childhood that overflowed with wild antics and childish pranks. She herself said their first seven books capture the experiences of her childhood, while the later books present childhood through the youthful activities of their two sons. This husband/wife team shared in the creation of both texts and illustrations. When asked to separate their roles, Edgar replied, ‘‘When you find something amusingly expressed in our books it has been said by Ingri.’’ Winners of the Caldecott Medal for their illustrations of Abraham Lincoln (1939), and of the Regina Medal from the Catholic Library Association (1970) for their continual contribution to children’s literature, the d’Aulaires have created the most significant biographical series available concerning early U.S. heroes. Their style is highly evocative of folklore traditions. Their simple stories of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Benjamin Franklin contain humorous details often unknown to children. While the characters remain great, these are portraits of people rich in human foibles; and the biographies are also beautifully illustrated. The illustrations, while in complete complement with the text, do not tell the same story; the two media reflect and support each other, but do not necessarily dwell on the same single event. Thus the text can be effectively used without the illustrations. Because of d’Aulaire’s childhood in Norway, the couple also produced excellent books concerning the Norse people. Ola (1932) is a beautiful folk picture of the Norwegian fishing village. The tale combines a joyous text with brilliant illustrations. Later
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books, Nils (1948) and Don’t Count Your Chicks (1943), reflect d’Aulaire’s Norwegian heritage. The couple’s contributions cannot be separated in the field of children’s literature. Yet certain important aesthetic elements must be acknowledged to d’Aulaire. It was her early happy childhood that was the wellspring for the spontaneity so vividly captured in their early books. Her practical eye kept text at a minimum, but helped it retain all its vitality. OTHER WORKS: (co-authored with Edgar d’Aulaire): The Magic Rug (1931). Ola and Blakken and Line, Sine, Trine (1933). The Conquest of the Atlantic (1933). The Lord’s Prayer (1934). Children of the Northlights (1935). George Washington (1936). East of the Sun and West of the Moon (1938). Leif the Lucky (1941). Wings for Per (1944). Too Big (1945). Pocahontas (1946). Foxie (1949). Benjamin Franklin (1950). Buffalo Bill (1952). Animals Everywhere (1954). Columbus (1955). The Two Cars (1955). The Magic Meadow (1958). Book of Greek Myths (1962). Norse Gods and Giants (1967). D’Aulaire’s Trolls (1972). The Terrible Troll-Bird (1976). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Miller, B. M., and E. W. Field, eds., Caldecott Medal Books: 1938-1957 with The Artists’ Acceptance Papers and Related Material Chiefly from the Horn Book Magazine (1957). Other references: Catholic World (Feb. 1970). Horn Book (Oct. 1964). Children of the Northlights (film interview, Weston Woods, Weston, Connecticut). —JILL P. MAY
DAVENPORT, Marcia Gluck Born 9 June 1903, New York, New York; died January 1996 Daughter of Alma Gluck and stepdaughter of Efrem Zimbalist, Sr.; married Russell Davenport, 1929 Marcia Davenport was the daughter of Alma Gluck, celebrated soprano of the concert stage and the Metropolitan opera. Davenport’s husband exited from her life when their child was five, and she began supporting herself by writing for the New Yorker. Later Davenport became the music critic for Stage, and went on to be the musical commentator for NBC and the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts. Davenport’s life was many-faceted. She had an almost mystical attraction for the land and culture of Czechoslovakia, that started years before she ever met and loved Jan Masaryk, a Czech foreign minister. The country became her second homeland, and she gave in to the lure of Prague, where she took up residence after World War II. Davenport’s career as an author started with her love for Mozart, whose biography she published in 1932. Her first novel, Of Lena Geyer (1936, reprinted 1982), is the story of a poor Czech girl and of her ascent to fame and fortune, triumph and tragedy. It
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is a work of fiction, yet Lena is only partly the child of imagination: she is a composite figure of several singers Davenport had known intimately, among them her own mother. The background of the novel opens a wide vista on the golden age of opera both in New York and in Europe. Davenport’s most significant book is her autobiography, Too Strong for Fantasy (1967, reprinted 1992), dedicated to ‘‘J. M. In Memoriam.’’ It is a bouquet of reminiscences, an easy-flowing parade of the people in Davenport’s life, a mosaic that is a Who’s Who of the musical, literary, and political worlds of New York and Prague. The feminine touch comes through in Davenport’s descriptions of places and architecture, and in her attachment to her feline companion, Tam. It is equally clear, however, that Davenport is first and foremost an independent soul; she is never a mere appendage to her mother or to the men in her life. Historically, the most meaningful part of the memoirs is the last third of the book, dealing with the international situation. It describes the regrettably one-sided struggle between East and West over Czechoslovakia, and the mysterious death of Jan Masaryk, who either committed suicide or was assassinated a few days before his planned marriage to Davenport. She quotes firsthand information no other source provides about the political crisis of 1948 and the communist coup. She also draws a clear picture of Masaryk, the ‘‘playboy of the Western world,’’ who in his last days became the ‘‘latter-day Hamlet.’’ By her own admission, Davenport never had the genius to make literary history with her novels: she was driven by a need to write what she knew rather than what she was. Only in her autobiography does Davenport open up and give of herself. She is a superb craftsman of the pen and a captivating reconteur. OTHER WORKS: Mozart (1932, 1995). Valley of Decision (1942, 1969, 1989; video versions 1945 and 1994). East Side—West Side (1947, video versions 1949 and 1991). My Brother’s Keeper (1954, 1982). The Constant Image (1960, 1960). Jan (1980). BIBLIOGRAPHY: ‘‘The Revival of Bel Canto’’ in Curtain Call for Opera News: Articles from Recent Issues of the Metropolitan Opera Guild’s (1964). Canadian Forum (Nov. 1936). LJ (1 Oct. 1967). NYTBR (13 Sept. 1936, 22 Oct. 1967). SR (25 Nov. 1967). SRL (19 Sept. 1936). —VERA LASKA
DAVIDSON, Lucretia Maria Born 27 September 1808, Plattsburg, New York; died 27 August 1825, Plattsburg, New York Daughter of Oliver and Margaret Miller Davidson After her early schooling at home, Lucretia Davidson was sent to Troy Female Academy. Coming from a household ‘‘with the sickbed as focal point,’’ Davidson’s delicate health was
further undermined by the school’s excessively ambitious curriculum; by the eight to ten hours’ daily study in ill-ventilated rooms; by the virtual absence of outdoor exercise; and by insufficient sleep, further curtailed, before examinations, by rising at two a.m. or midnight to study until four. Despite her mother’s concern, her father approved of sending her back to school, this time at Miss Gilbert’s Albany Academy. Within three months Davidson returned home to die. Restricted by her inexperience, Davidson sensibly drew her writing subject matter either from her daily life or from her studies. From history, biblical and national, came ‘‘David and Jonathon,’’ ‘‘Ruth’s Answer to Naomi,’’ the prose ‘‘Columbus,’’ and the spirited ‘‘Vermont Cadets’’—from the classroom, the humorous ‘‘Week Before Examination’’ which was deservedly popular with her schoolmates; from her brief but poignant personal encounters with suffering, mental and physical, poems like ‘‘Headache’’ and ‘‘Fears of Death.’’ These latter, especially, have the ring of sincerity, transcending her usual level of stock images and poetic diction. Amir Khan and Other Poems, selected by her mother and with a biographical introduction by the artist and inventor Samuel Morse, was published in 1829. Copies were sent by Morse to a number of leading writers. In his covering letter to Robert Southey, poet laureate of England, Morse invited comparison with other youthful prodigies such as Chatterton and White, of ‘‘this new genius which sprang up and bloomed in the wilderness, assumed the female form and wore the features of exquisite beauty and perished in the bloom.’’ Southey’s response was an 11-page review in the prestigious London Quarterly (1829), the conclusion of which, Poe protested, was ‘‘twice as strong as was necessary to establish her fame in England-fearing America.’’ Within 30 years, no less than 15 editions appeared on both sides of the Atlantic, all but the first preceded by the biographical sketch by Catherine Sedgwick, the first American woman novelist. A German translation was published in 1844, and an Italian edition in 1906. Washington Irving, in his introduction to the poetry of the younger Davidson sister, Margaret, confessed to finding ‘‘a popular font of tears. . .in the blissful agony. . .of these lovely American girls who after giving promise of rare poetic excellence [were] snatched from existence.’’ Had these sophisticated and otherwise discerning contemporaries, upon encountering the romantically tragic young poet, abandoned all sense of proportion and critical judgement to wallow ‘‘like mawkish donkeys’’ in sentimentality, asks Irving’s biographer? His own explanation is the reasonable one that attuned as they were to the mind of their generation, they responded to the prevailing philosophy of sentiment as we do to that of criticism. But how is Davidson’s permanent contribution to literature to be determined? Edgar Allan Poe’s review, challenging Southey’s ipse dixit, suggests one reasonable line of approach. We must, he says, distinguish a heart-felt love of her ‘‘worth’’ from an intellectual ‘‘appreciation of [her] poetic ability.’’ Additionally, this ‘‘distinction, would have spared us much twaddle on the part of commentators.’’
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But such a distinction is one very difficult to make. In the case of Davidson, writing before there was much American poetry to judge by and dying before her own poetic skills and critical powers could be properly formed, it is virtually impossible to be so completely objective. OTHER WORKS: Poetical Remains of the Late Lucretia Maria Davidson (edited by M. Davidson with biography by C. Sedgwick, 1846, revised edition with Biographical and Poetical Remains of the Late Margaret Miller Davidson, 1857, revised 1860). Poems by Lucretia Maria Davidson (edited by M. O. Davidson, 1871). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brooks, V. W., The World of Washington Irving (1944). Curry, K., ed., New Letters of Robert Southey (1965). Dewey, M. E., Life and Letters of Catherine Sedgwick (1871). Lutz, A., Emma Willard: Daughter of Democracy (1929). Mabee, C., Samuel Morse; The American Leonard (1944). Poe, E. A., Complete Works, Harrison, J., ed. (1902). Sparks, J., ed., The Library of American Biography (1837). Williams, S., Life of Washington Irving (1925). —MARION NORMAN
DAVIDSON, Margaret Miller Born 26 March 1823, Plattsburg, New York; died 25 November 1838, Saratoga, New York Daughter of Oliver and Margaret Miller Davidson Margaret Miller Davidson received the best education at home from her chronically ill mother. Anxious to assume the family poetic mantle bequeathed her by her dying sister Lucretia, she eagerly absorbed the ideas, tastes, and moral and religious standards of her mother toward whom she formed an exceptionally close attachment. This attachment was then reflected in innumerable verses. Frequent extended vacations and changes of residence proved unable to arrest Davidson’s fatal tuberculosis. Her verses, highly autobiographic, reflect her pathetic attempts to conceal from her family the extent of her suffering, and, despite a mature acceptance of death and strong faith in immortality, her wistful clinging to life: ‘‘Oh my dear, dear Mother, I am so young.’’ She was fifteen when she died. Mrs. Davidson who, three years earlier when negotiating for a new edition of Lucretia’s poetry, had introduced her younger daughter to Washington Irving, now provided him with all that remained of Margaret’s poems. She also gave him copious memoranda which he used, often verbatim, for his biographical introduction to Davidson’s Poetical Remains (1841). A second edition was called for in the same year, one each in London and Philadelphia the following year, and by 1864, there were 20 editions in all.
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Davidson’s poems, as is hardly surprising, reflect two main influences: Lucretia whom she idolized and emulated as far as she could, and her mother whom she reflected so completely that it is difficult to determine if there was anything of her own. Davidson’s poems are, on the whole, longer than most of her sister’s, written in quatrains rather than rhyming couplets and express stronger religious faith and devotion. Many deal with her various homes and the flowers, trees, rivers, and mountains surrounding them. Despite her mother’s disapproval of extensive memorizations, echoes (perhaps unconscious) of Cowper, Thomson, and Scott constantly recur. Among Davidson’s better efforts are the paraphrases of the 23rd and 42nd psalms, the ‘‘Hymn of the FireWorshippers,’’ and ‘‘The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah’’— but these are clearly inferior to Lucretia’s handling of similar biblical material. Faced with the task of evaluating her contribution to American literature and women’s writing, one is apt (while making due allowance for her youth and narrowness of experience) to dismiss Davidson as a fainter echo of her more promising elder sister. Many believe she has been lifted to an entirely undeserved eminence because of the compassion of distinguished family friends like Irving and that this eminence has been perpetuated by the next quarter-century’s sentimental bad taste. Poets, as they mature, usually have the sense to destroy juvenilia. In Davidson’s case, there was no time and her mother’s blind urge to preserve every slightest memento of a beloved gifted child, inadvertantly did Davidson a disservice in exposing indiscriminately to the harsh glare of the judgement of posterity what should have been reserved for the loving, uncritical eyes of family and close friends. OTHER WORKS: Biographical and Poetical Remains of the Late Margaret Miller Davidson (ed. by W. Irving, 1841, revised edition, 1846, revised with Poetical Remains of the Late Lucretia Maria Davidson, 1857). Life and Poetical Remains (1945). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Griswold, R., Female Poets of America (1848). May, C., The American Female Poets (1848). Poe, E. A., Complete Works, Harrison, J., ed. (1902). —MARION NORMAN
DAVIS, Adelle Born 25 February 1904, Hendricks County, Indiana; died 31 May 1974, Palos Verdes Estates, California Also wrote under: Jane Dunlap Daughter of Charles E. and Harriet McBroom Davis; married George E. Leisey, 1943; Frank V. Sieglinger, 1960 The youngest of five daughters, Adelle Davis attended Purdue University and then the University of California at Berkeley where she received her B.S. in dietetics in 1927. She then moved to New York and was a dietician for the Yonkers public schools,
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and a consulting nutritionist at the Judson Health Center. Davis returned to California in 1931 to be a consulting nutritionist for the Alameda County Health Clinic in Oakland and for the William E. Branch Clinic in Hollywood. She attained her M.S. in biochemistry from the University of Southern California School of Medicine in 1939. After writing several bestselling books Davis resigned from her consulting practice in order to devote time to the lectures and television appearances made during the last years of her life.
often accused by the medical profession of being grossly inaccurate and of distorting her facts. On the other hand, she has been commended by professionals in her field as well as by her readers and those she personally helped through diet and vitamin therapy. Writing in her exuberant yet conversational style, Davis has perhaps done more to make Americans aware of nutrition and change their eating habits than has any other individual.
Davis first became well known with the publication in 1947 of her cookbook, Let’s Cook It Right, which offers the novice in nutrition an enthusiastic introduction to the preparation of healthful foods. She stresses the use of protein and natural foods in cooking. Recipes are simple, easy to follow, and have innumerable variants depending upon what the cook happens to have in stock. The introduction gives sound nutritional cooking principles, and Davis includes a lengthy section on meat, recognizing that failures in this category are a major hurdle for most cooks. Also included are sections on meat substitutes, leftovers, fish, eggs and cheese, vegetables, soups, salads, bread, and healthful desserts. This is the most popular and successful of Davis’ books, devoid as it is of the contradictions and repetitions found so often in her later books. Let’s Cook It Right offers cooking advice and directions in a clear, concise, and direct style.
OTHER WORKS: Optimum Health (1935). You Can Stay Well (1939). Vitality Through Planned Nutrition (1942).
Let’s Have Healthy Children came out in 1951. Here Davis stresses diet and vitamin supplements for the woman before conception, during pregnancy when extra vitamin B-6 and folic acid are required, and during lactation. The book also centers on proper diet for babies and young children. A staunch advocate of breastfeeding for the first six months of life, Davis also provides formula recipes. Let’s Have Healthy Children was generally well received by the public, but with the publication of Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit in 1954 Davis came under increasing attack from the medical profession for her bold assertions that proper diet with vitamin supplements could prevent most diseases and abnormalities. Here she details the vitamin and mineral contents of foods and thoroughly explains what one must eat to prevent illness, describing, by way of example, her own regimen. In 1961 Davis published Exploring Inner Space (under the pseudonym of Jane Dunlap) which describes her experiences while under the influence of LSD. The book is written in an extravagant, even gushing style, as Davis describes her revelations of God and her visions; yet she is open, honest, and sincere. When later medical reports surfaced about LSD’s harm to the genes and body, Davis continued to claim the drug’s benefits. Finally, in Let’s Get Well (1965) Davis describes most common illnesses and diseases and prescribes specific vitamin and dietary cures for them. She bases her findings, as always, on case studies, personal testimonials, and a wealth of scientific data, painstakingly cross-referenced. This is her most controversial book, since Davis orders as cures heavy vitamin doses which doctors warn can be dangerously toxic. In all of her books, Davis attempts to act as an intermediary between the medical profession and the lay nutritionist. Thus she takes the plethora of medical data, synthesizes it, simplifies it, and offers it to the public in an understandable language. Davis was
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CB (1973). Other references: BiogNews (Feb. 1974). Life (22 Oct. 1971). NYT (1 June 1974). NYTM (20 May 1973). Reader’s Digest (Oct. 1973). Time (18 Dec. 1972). —ANN RAYSON
DAVIS, Angela Yvonne Born 26 January 1944, Birmingham, Alabama Daughter of Nebjamin F. and Sallye Bell Davis Born to a middle-class African-American family whose social circle included Communist Party members, Angela Davis became one of the most prominent political activists of the 1960s and 1970s. An American Friends Service Committee scholarship allowed her to leave Birmingham to attend the progressive Elizabeth Irwin High School in New York City, where she became active in a Marxist-Leninist youth group and supported the antinuclear and civil rights movements. Later, at Brandeis University she became a student of Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse. Davis spent her junior year in Paris at the Sorbonne and returned to Europe after graduation from Brandeis (B.A. 1965) to continue her education at the University of Frankfurt (1965-67). Davis received a master’s degree in philosophy from the University of California at San Diego in 1968, working again with Marcuse. She has held faculty positions in a number of universities in the U.S. and abroad. By the late 1960s, the civil rights movement was in full swing. Davis joined several activist groups, including the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the Communist Party of the United States, and the Black Panthers. While working on her doctoral dissertation, she was hired to teach philosophy at UCLA. Then Governor Ronald Reagan, citing a law that banned Communist Party members from teaching at state universities, protested her appointment and Davis was dismissed. The law was ultimately declared unconstitutional, while the ensuing controversy propelled Davis into the political spotlight. As a champion of the work of the Black Panthers, Davis became involved with the plight of black prison inmates. She was an especially strong advocate of a group called the Soledad Brothers and of their leader, George Jackson. In August 1970 Jackson’s younger brother, Jonathan, sought to force his release
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by taking hostages at gunpoint in a California courthouse. During the shootout that followed, the judge and several others were killed. Police accused Davis of purchasing the guns used in the shooting and charged her with conspiracy, kidnapping, and murder. Fleeing underground, Davis was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List for several months until her capture. With the rallying cry, ‘‘Free Angela,’’ the civil rights movement and the activist left rallied to her defense through her imprisonment and a lengthy court trial. If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance (1971) collects Davis’ prison writings and those of other black activists, including Erika Huggins, Black Panther leader Bobby Seale, and George Jackson. It is a firsthand account of political, racial, class, and economic oppression focusing primarily on the plight of African Americans in the U.S. prison system in the 1960s. Davis was acquitted of all charges in 1972. Angela Davis, an Autobiography (1974; reprinted as Angela Davis: With My Mind on Freedom, 1974), written in the wake of her exoneration, is a compelling book that chronicles her life as it intersected with the emergence of the civil rights movement. The book also details the rise of the Black Panther party and Davis’ involvement with the group. Davis continued her activist work on behalf of black prisoners and against racism. Remaining in the Communist Party, she ran for vice president on the party ticket in 1980. Davis’s groundbreaking feminist analysis of the intersecting oppressions of race, class, and gender in American culture, Women, Race, and Class appeared in 1982. The book provides an overview of oppression as it is constructed, conducted, and institutionalized by the dominant majority. Women, Culture, and Politics (1988) is a collection of Davis’ lectures, essays, and commentary on the changing social order in the 1980s. Her topics include violence against women, nuclear disarmament, apartheid in South Africa, health care, and the role of black artists. In the 1990s, Davis persevered as an ardent voice of social and cultural critique. A tenured professor of the history of consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz, Davis lectures widely and continues to write with radical, scholarly vision. In 1995, amid controversy, she was appointed a presidential chair. Her book Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude ‘‘Ma’’ Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (1998) argues a new understanding of the singers’ music and its effects on the black middle class and on U.S. culture more widely. Davis’ analysis is informed by social commentators like Carl Van Vechten, Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, and by feminist writers and jazz critics. Her work on oppression, racism, and the prison system continues, with a focus on the privatization of prisons, prison populations as a growing source of cheap labor without rights or unions, and the preponderance of African-American men as the main source of prison labor ‘‘raw material.’’ In numerous articles she addresses and delineates the invisible experiences of black inmates and the workings of the prison system’s entrenched racist structure.
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The Angela Y. Davis Reader (1998), a collected works that brings together excerpts of Davis’ writings from 1971 through 1998, provides an impressive documentation of Davis’ unfailing courage and analytical rigor as a radical intellectual, whether she is writing of prisoners’ rights, Marxism and antiracist feminism, or culture. Her articles have appeared in scholarly journals and popular press, and her writing, which sometimes analyzes and sometimes agitates, has pushed the boundaries and redefined the compass of social philosophy and political theory. Davis is a passionate social and cultural critic whose writing is consistently informed by a black, radical, and feminist consciousness. In addition to her writing and teaching, Davis lectures widely in the U.S. and abroad on numerous progressive issues ranging from antiapartheid efforts to reproductive rights. OTHER WORKS: Women & Capitalism: Dialectics of Oppression and Liberation (1971). Violence Against Women and the Ongoing Challenge to Racism (1985). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Aptheker, B., The Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela Davis (1975). Ashman, C., The People vs. Angela Davis (1972). David, J., ed., Growing Up Black: From the Slave Days to the Present—25 African-Americans Reveal the Trials and Triumphs of Their Childhoods (1968). Dicks, V. I., ‘‘A Rhetorical Analysis of the Forensic and Deliberative Issues and Strategies in the Angela Davis Trial’’ (thesis, 1976). Finke, B. F., Angela Davis: Traitor or Martyr of the Freedom of Expression (1972). Lanker, B., I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America (1989). Major, R., Justice in the Round: The Trial of Angela Davis (1973). Nelson, R., Who is Angela Davis?: The Biography of a Revolutionary (1972). O’Connor, M., ‘‘The Reardon Standards and the Angela Davis Trial’’ (thesis, 1973). Olden, M., Angela Davis (1973). Parker, J. A., Angela Davis: The Making of a Revolutionary (1973). Smith, N. J., From Where I Sat (1973). Smith, J. C., ed., Epic Lives : One Hundred Black Women Who Made a Difference (1993). Smith, R. A., ‘‘The Angela Davis Case and Public Opinion’’ (thesis, 1971). Timothy, M., Jury Woman: The Story of the Trial of Angela Y. Davis, Written by a Member of the Jury (1974). Reference works: African-American Orators : A Bio-Critical Sourcebook (1996). Afro-American Encyclopedia (1974). Bearing Witness: Selections from African-American Autobiography in the Twentieth Century (1991). Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia (1991). CA 57-60 (1976). CA Online (1999). CANR (1983). Contemporary Black Biography (1994). Encyclopedia of the American Left (1990). Encyclopedia of World Biography: 20th Century Supplement (1987). FC (1990). NBAW (1992). Newsmakers, 1998 Cumulation: The People Behind Today’s Headlines (1999). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Essence (Aug. 1986). Feminist Review (Spring 1989). New Moon (July/Aug. 1995). New Statesman (14 Aug. 1987). New York Magazine (31 Jan. 1993). —EVELYN C. WHITE, UPDATED BY JESSICA REISMAN
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DAVIS, Dorothy Salisbury Born 26 April 1916, Chicago, Illinois Daughter of Alfred J. and Margaret Greer Salisbury; married Harry Davis, 1946 Dorothy Salisbury Davis is a writer of mysteries and crime fiction, adept at both novels and short stories. She is known for her interest in the psychological forces behind criminal activity, for her avoidance of violence, and for her sympathetic treatment of her villains as well as her protagonists. Davis was born in 1916 and grew up in Chicago. After graduating in 1938 from Barat College in Lake Forest, Illinois, she took a position as a writer for Swift & Company, later becoming a research librarian and editor at the Merchandiser. Her first novel, The Judas Cat, was published in 1949 by Scribner’s—which remained her publisher throughout her career—and was followed by The Clay Hand in 1950. Her third book, A Gentle Murderer (1951), a suspenseful story of a killer and the priest who tries to find him, is the book that established Davis’ reputation. Unlike many writers in the mystery genre who create central protagonists appearing in novel after novel, Davis has created few recurring characters. Those who come back are featured in just a few books. They include Mrs. Norris, who stars in Death of an Old Sinner (1957), A Gentleman Called (1958), and Old Sinners Never Die (1959); Jasper Tully, who appears with Mrs. Norris in the first two of those stories; and Detective Marks, who is featured in The Pale Betrayer (1965), among others. Her best-known character is probably her most recent, Julie Hayes, the central figure in A Death in the Life (1976), Scarlet Night (1980), Lullaby of Murder (1984), and The Habit of Fear (1987). All of Davis’ protagonists are recognized as much for their eccentric personalities as for their sharp minds. Davis cowrote God Speed the Night with Jerome Ross (1968) and has edited collections of mysteries, including A Choice of Murders (1958) and Crime Without Murder (1970). The latter was inspired by her belief that a good mystery did not have to feature graphic violence (although some of Davis’ books do contain violent elements). Davis has also written several mainstream novels, though they weren’t as popular as her mysteries. Applauded for her talent as a writer of short stories as well as novels, Davis is particularly fond of psychological studies, some of which were included in her Tales for a Stormy Night: Collected Crime Stories (1984). She has contributed to anthologies including Mirror, Mirror, Fatal Mirror, edited by Hans Santesson (1973), When Last Seen, edited by Arthur Maling (1977), and Mistletoe Mysteries, edited by Charlotte MacLeod (1989). She has also had her stories published in periodicals ranging from Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine to Modern Maturity. In addition, Davis is a member of the Adams Round Table, a group of mystery writers who gather for monthly dinners and have produced several mystery collection, including Missing in Manhattan (1992) and Justice in Manhattan (1994), to which Davis has contributed.
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Known for her fascination with the workings of the criminal mind and with the circumstances or character flaws that can turn a person to crime, Davis creates a range of well-defined characters who participate in complicated plots and often face religious crises as the plot heads toward its resolution. As noted in Publishers Weekly, ‘‘Two themes have recurred in the Davis mysteries, sometimes as minor counterpoints, sometimes as major elements in the plot: Roman Catholicism and psychotherapy.’’ Another common thread in her books and stories—whether they take place in the U.S. or Europe, are set in big cities or small towns or feature male or female detectives—is the similarity between the villain and the protagonist, with the two often coming to an understanding of one another before the dénouement. Among the books dealing with this ambiguity include Death of an Old Sinner (one of Davis’ best-loved books), The Pale Betrayer, Enemy and Brother (1966), and Where the Dark Streets Go (1969, filmed for CBS as Broken Vows, 1986). A founding director of Sisters in Crime, Davis was president of the Mystery Writers of America (MWA) from 1955-56 and its executive vice president from 1977-78. She won the Grandmaster award for lifetime achievement from MWA in 1989 and has been nominated for seven Edgar awards, four times for her novels and three times for short stories, demonstrating her facility in both forms. OTHER WORKS: A Town of Masks (1952) The Evening of the Good Samaritan (1961) Black Sheep, White Lamb (1963) Men of No Property (1965). Shock Wave (1972) The Little Brothers (1973) BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference Works: CANR 32 (1991). St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (1991). St. James Guide to Romance & Historical Writers (1990). Other references: NYTBR (28 Sept. 1980). PW (13 June 1980, 23 Oct. 1987, 31 Aug. 1992). —KAREN RAUGUST
DAVIS, Elizabeth Gould Born 1910, Kansas; died 31 July 1974, Sarasota, Florida When Elizabeth Gould Davis’ The First Sex appeared in 1971, it was barely reviewed and apparently ignored by the reading public. Yet three years later it was producing enormous sales in its paperback edition. Highly controversial, it was called everything from the ‘‘nut book of the year’’ to the ‘‘Bible of the Women’s Movement,’’ and has since become one of the essential documents of twentieth-century feminism. Davis attended Randolph-Macon College in Virginia and the University of Kentucky from which she received a master’s in 1951. She went to work as a librarian in Sarasota, Florida, and remained there until the time of her death.
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Davis wrote two other major books, The Female Principle and The Founding Mothers, which were never published. Yet at the time of her death—thanks to The First Sex—she had become something of a celebrity, surrounded by fans and devotees. It was the product of years of work and of commitment to an idea that Davis said she felt compelled to put into writing. She, like many modern feminists, was convinced history, as we know it, is grossly distorted because it has been written by men in a way perpetuating a tradition male view.
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The book challenges ‘‘male history’’ with the assertion that women, not men, were the deities, educators, architects, artists, and civilizers of the world in our most distant and most peaceful past. She supports her thesis with a monumental amount of evidence (although she said the book was drastically cut by her editors) taken from all sorts of scholarly and literary sources including mythology, psychiatry, linguistics, archaeology, and anthropology.
An only daughter in a family of nine children, Mollie (née Mary) Moore Davis grew up in rural Alabama and on a plantation near San Marcos, Texas, which later provided rich material for her poetry and fiction. In 1860 her first poems appeared in the local newspaper, the Tyler (Texas) Reporter. Between 1861 and 1865, her poetry, inspired by the Civil War, was printed in the Reporter and a number of Southern newspapers. During the 1880s, Davis turned increasingly to the writing of fiction for publication in national literary magazines.
The First Sex is heavily influenced by the Mother-centered mythological interpretations of history developed in part by Johann Jacob Bachofen, Robert Graves, and Robert Briffault. Davis postulates women developed and dominated the earliest civilizations and that the Celtic races were able to preserve and pass on some of the values and skills of these matriarchies despite the onslaught of barbarian Germanic tribes and the surge of Christianity. She believes the abuse of woman by the succeeding patriarchies validates her theory of former female dominance— ‘‘a dominance that man felt compelled to stamp out and forget.’’ In Part I of the book, Davis establishes the existence and superiority of the peaceful Golden Age of the matriarchies. She speculates males were eventually able to overthrow them because the women, in selecting the largest and strongest males as mates, contributed to superior physical development in men. It is clear Davis believes female society was destroyed and replaced by something infinitely inferior: ‘‘When man substituted God for the Great Goddess, he at the same time substituted authoritarian for humanistic values.’’ According to Davis, a war is still being waged between the physical superiority of the patriarchal male and the inherent moral and mental superiority of the female. Part II deals in some detail with the patriarchal takeover, especially as it is recorded in mythology and reflected in the continuing hostility between men and women. Part III demonstrates the extent to which remnants of female dominance survived in pre-Christian and Celtic societies. The conclusion treats the ‘‘Tragedy of Western Woman,’’ who has fallen so far from her rightful place. Although The First Sex is neither the most sensible nor the most scientific book to come out of the contemporary women’s movement, it seems destined to be one of the most influential. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Best Sellers (15 Sept. 1971). Ms. (Dec. 1974). NR (22 Oct. 1971). The Social Studies (Nov. 1972). —JUDITH P. JONES
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Born Mary Evelyn Moore, 12 April 1852, Talladage, Alabama; died 1 January 1909, New Orleans, Louisiana Also wrote under: Mrs. M. E. M. Davis, Mollie Evelyn Moore Davis, Mollie E. Moore Daughter of John and Marian Crutchfield Moore; married Thomas E. Davis, 1874
Davis’ more popular poems typify her musical, energetic versification and skillful handling of rhyme. A number of poems after 1869 suggest a shift in her interests from short lyrics to narratives and monologues, such as ‘‘The Golden Rose,’’ ‘‘The Ball (A True Incident),’’ and ‘‘Eleanor to Arthur,’’ which is possibly autobiographical. In War Times at La Rose Blanche (1888), her first book of prose and her best-known work, is a semiautobiographical story sequence, which now, however, appears superficial. Under the Man-Fig (1895), Davis’ first and most fully realized novel, is a Southwestern tale of mystery and romance that reveals her fascination with the past. The intricate plot, characteristic of all her novels, involves a wide spectrum of characters spanning several generations and every social class in a small Texas town. The work is most effective in its deft use of regional dialect, historical detail, and humorous characters. An Elephant’s Track, and Other Stories (1897) serves as a sampler of Davis’ work in short fiction, in which she is technically at her best. This volume contains 15 stories depicting rural Texas folk, Louisiana Creoles, and plantation blacks. Among the more memorable are ‘‘A Bamboula,’’ and ‘‘The Love Stranche,’’ which delve into the mysterious world of voodoo, and ‘‘At La Glorieuse’’ and ‘‘The Soul of Rose Dédé,’’ which treat ghosts as an everyday reality. Davis’ achievement in the stories lies in her subtle handling of regional settings, faithful rendering of rural mores, and vivid delineation of the different socioeconomic levels of Southern society. The Wire Cutters (1899), a novel set primarily in a rural Texas community, is reminiscent of the work of Charles Dickens in its ingenious plot complications and numerous secret identities. This work contains Davis’ most controversial subjects—divorce and physical abuse in marriage—and her most complex characterizations, particularly of women who, though entangled in some stock situations, emerge convincingly as strong individuals. Concerned with the struggle against the fencing in of pasture lands and water sources, The Wire Cutters reflects Davis’s interest in Texas history. Texas history was also the subject of Under Six Flags:
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The Story of Texas (1897), a simple rendering of Texas history with an emphasis on the dramatic human dimensions. An untechnical, well-written book for young readers, it was used previously in Texas schools and reissued in 1953. New Orleans Creole society inspired two of Davis’ major works, The Little Chevalier (1903), a historical novel regarded as her best, and The Price of Silence (1907), her most popular novel. Set in the French Louisiana territory of the mid-18th century, The Little Chevalier is an adventure story of intrigue and love on a grand scale. It realistically depicts the manners and milieu of the early Creoles. The Price of Silence focuses on a Creole family in contemporary New Orleans whose surviving matriarch guards a family secret. Davis effectively portrays the attitudes, activities, and speech of the upper-class French Creoles, but her treatment of the theme of miscegenation is weak in conception and execution. Equally adept at portraying Texas or Louisiana, plantation or city, Davis is exact in locating her work in time, and faithful to contemporary conditions of dress, travel, worship, and entertainment. She has a discerning eye for visual details and paints accurate pictures of background scenes, natural landscapes, and physical appearance of characters, though her tendency is toward the more appealing details. Her skillful use of local flora, in particular the lush flowering plants of the Southwest, creates a convincing verisimilitude, despite her melodramatic plots which overemploy coincidence and improbable turns of events. Her painstaking attention to exteriors does not compensate for her seeming avoidance of much beneath the surface in human beings and personal interactions, and this is perhaps why her work lacks vitality. Yet Davis is an engaging storyteller whose romances and adventures consistently hold the reader’s attention. OTHER WORKS: Minding the Gap and Other Poems (1867). Poems By Mollie E. Moore (1869). Poems by Mollie E. Moore (1872). A Christmas Masque of Saint Roch; Père Dagobert (1896). Throwing the Wanga (1896). The Queen’s Garden (1900). Jaconetta: Her Love (1901). Tulane Songs (1901). The Mistress of Odd Corner (1902). The Yellow Apples (with P. Stapleton, 1902). A Bunch of Roses, and Other Parlor Plays (1903). A Bunch of Roses (1907). Christmas Boxes (1907). A Dress Rehearsal (1907). His Lordship (1907). The New System (1907). Queen Anne Cottages (1907). The Flagship Goes Down: A Broadside Poem (1908). The Moons of Balcanca (1908). Selected Poems by Mollie Moore Davis (1927). The Ships of Desire (1955). Ode to Texas: Written for the Occasion of the Ladies’ Bazaar for the Benefit of San Jacinto Battle Ground (n.d.). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Anderson, J. Q., ‘‘Notes on Mary Moore Davis,’’ in LaS (Summer 1962). Davidson, J. W., The Living Writers of the South (1896). Wilkenson, C., ‘‘The Broadening Stream: The Life and Literary Career of Mary E. Moore Davis’’ (dissertation, 1947). Reference works: DAB (1909). The Library of Southern Literature (1909). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Other references: Texas Monthly (April 1930). —THADIOUS M. DAVIS
DAVIS, Natalie Zemon Born 8 November 1928, Detroit, Michigan Daughter of Julian L. and Helen Lamport Zemon; married Chandler Davis, 1948; children: Aaron, Hannah, Simone Long admired for bringing the lives of obscure people to life, Natalie Zemon Davis is a historian with an international reputation. Her books are published in multiple languages, and The Return of Martin Guerre (1983) had more than 78,000 copies in print at the end of the 1990s, and she served as historical consultant for the film version of Le retour de Martin Guerre. The recipient of many awards and fellowships, including 20 honorary degrees, Davis served as president of the American Historical Association in 1987. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the British Academy. In July 1996, Davis took early retirement from Princeton and moved to Toronto, where her husband lives and where she is a research associate in the Comparative Literature Department at the University of Toronto. Of Polish Jewish and Russian Jewish ancestry, Davis was influenced by growing up a Jew in a neighborhood where only two Jewish families had homes. In an interview with Roger Adelson, Davis recalled, ‘‘The ability to identify anti-Semitism became a part of my life without anyone sitting down and giving me a lesson in it.’’ Davis’ father was a successful businessman in the Detroit textile industry. He was also an amateur playwright and an avid reader and writer. Davis’ mother was a homemaker and businesswoman. Davis attended elementary school at the Hampton School in Detroit. She then went to Kingswood, a private girls’ school in suburban Detroit. Davis quickly learned what it meant to have outsider status, because she was one of only two Jewish girls in her class. She turned her attention to her studies. She received outstanding grades and developed leadership skills, serving as president of the student council. And most important she learned that she loved history, ‘‘especially the Enlightenment and the American Revolution.’’ Davis attended Smith College and continued to not only take her intellectual pursuits seriously but her student activism as well. She applied questions raised by her political work to her honors program in history. She received her bachelor’s degree in 1949, a year after she eloped with Chandler Davis, a graduate student in mathematics at Harvard University. Davis and her husband Chandler remained committed to and active in political work. They protested the Korean War and the work of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Davis continued her education at Radcliffe and completed a master’s degree in 1950. She found her intellectual interests turning more toward the history not of elites but of merchants, artisans, laborers, and peasants. Without neglecting her political work, she pursued a Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, completing the dissertation in 1959. Her first academic appointment at Brown University coincided with her husband’s six-month term in Danbury Prison for charges brought against him by the House
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Un-American Activities Committee. Chandler Davis was blacklisted in U.S. universities after serving his term, and consequently both Davises took jobs at the University of Toronto, he in 1962 and she in 1963. Natalie went on to teach at the University of California at Berkeley and at Princeton University, where she was named Henry Charles Lea Professor of History in 1978. Arthur Quinn in the New York Times Book Review noted, ‘‘Ms. Davis’ published work is. . .modest. She abstains from the big book, the grand synthesis, on which academic historians usually make their reputations. She prefers instead to produce exquisite miniatures whose scale reflects the lives she seeks to represent.’’ Over the course of her career, Davis has helped to transform our understanding of both the common people and the elite. She argues that ‘‘lower- and upper-class worlds were reacting and reflecting on each other and even sometimes sharing rules and readers.’’ While Davis’ early work focused on class dimensions in early modern Europe, particularly in France, she went on to explore both literary and anthropological materials and approaches. She tries to exemplify in her work what she calls a multidimensional view of society. This approach is well represented in Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (1995). Davis uses diaries, letters, and a rich array of supporting documents to illuminate the very different lives of three women. Glikl bas Judah Leib is a Jewish businesswoman in Hamburg, Germany; Marie de L’Incarnation is an ascetic nun and missionary among the Huron Native Americans; and Maria Sibylla Merian joined a radical Protestant sect and illustrates texts on insects. This book brings together Davis’ reverence for history as narrative and, as Lorna Sage noted in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, ‘‘its patient and imaginative narrative.’’ As a triptych of 17th-century women, Davis presents a multilayered history where her three subjects come alive. The women’s lives may have indeed been lived on the margin, but their history is far from marginal. Like her other books, Women on the Margins will be translated into several languages, including Italian, German, and Finnish. Davis has received tremendous scholarly acclaim, yet her focus remains on the common people, both in history and contemporary society. She contends, ‘‘I think that people simply want to know more about the common people of the past.’’ With incisive analysis and challenging scholarship, Davis brings the pleasures of reading history to new readers.
OTHER WORKS: Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays (1975). Frauen und Gesellschaft am Beginn der Neuzeit (1986). Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth Century France (1987).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works:American Women Historians, 1700s-1990s: A Biographical Dictionary (1996). CA (1997). —CELESTE DEROCHE
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DAVIS, Paulina (Kellogg) Wright Born 7 August 1813, Bloomfield, New York; died 24 August 1876, Providence, Rhode Island Daughter of Captain Ebenezer and Polly Saxton Kellogg; married Francis Wright, 1833 (died 1845); Thomas Davis, 1849 Paulina Wright Davis spent her early childhood in the opening territories of western New York state. When her parents died, before she was seven, Davis was sent to LeRoy, New York, to live with her aunt who reared her in orthodox Presbyterianism and encouraged her to become a missionary. Instead, Davis married Francis Wright, a Utica, New York, merchant, and with him began her life’s work of activism on behalf of the causes of antislavery, temperance, and women’s rights. The rights of married women and health reform were particular interests of hers. After Wright’s death in 1845, Davis supported herself by lecturing about health and physiology, illustrating her talks with a female anatomical model that shocked many of her audience (and inspired others). In 1849 Davis married Thomas Davis, a Providence, Rhode Island, jewelry manufacturer and member of the Rhode Island legislature. A beautiful and charming woman, Davis was admired by the Providence community, although her ideas were more radical than her neighbors’. Davis helped organize and presided at the first National Woman’s Rights Convention in Worcester, October 1850, and at many later conventions she was similarly involved. In February 1853 she began to publish, almost entirely at her own expense, the monthly woman’s magazine, the Una, ‘‘A Paper Devoted to the Elevation of Woman,’’ as an alternative to the current popular magazines, commenting: ‘‘Women have been too well, and too long, satisfied with Ladies’ Books, Ladies’ Magazines and Miscellanies; it is time they should have stronger nourishment.’’ For two years, with the help of a sister, Davis undertook the full responsibility for the publication; when this became too burdensome, she planned to discontinue the journal but was enabled to carry on an additional nine months through the editorial assistance of Caroline Dall, a regular contributor. Issues which elicited Davis’ editorial comments were equal pay for equal work, the need for equality within marriage, the opening of professions to women, and the need for respect and equal treatment of women in all phases of life. These were ideals shared by all feminists of the period, and Davis gave them intelligent and forceful expression: ‘‘Women have to exchange the noblest rights of their humanity for the paltry privileges and fulsome flatteries which they. . .receive. . . .Why need women be cramped, crippled and crushed into idiocy to make them lovely and beloved?’’ After the demise of the Una, Davis, suffering increasingly from rheumatic gout, traveled in Europe, studied painting, and continued to work for women’s rights. In 1868 she helped found the New England Woman Suffrage Association, and served as president of the Rhode Island suffrage association until 1869. She supported Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony when
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the national suffrage association split, contributing lively articles to their short-lived journal, The Revolution. Davis died at sixty-three. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the chief speaker at a memorial service held for a large group of friends at Davis’s home. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Frankel, N., and N. S. Dye, eds., Gender, Class, Race, and reform in the Progressive Era (1991). Hanaford, P., Daughter of America (1882). Harper, I. H., The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (1898). Lutz, A., Created Equal: A Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1940). Lutz, A., Susan B. Anthony (1959). O’Connor, L., Pioneer Women Orators (1954). Riegel, R. E., American Feminists (1963). Stanton, E. C., et al., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. I (1881). Wyman, L. B. C. and A. C. Wyman, Elizabeth Buffum Chace, 1806-1899 (1914). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: American Phrenological Journal (July 1853). NEQ (Oct., 1930). —KAREN F. STEIN
DAVIS, Rebecca Harding Born 24 June 1831, Washington, Pennsylvania; died 29 September 1910, Mt. Kisco, New York Daughter of Richard and Rachel Leet Harding; married Lemuel C. Davis, 1863 Rebecca Harding Davis’s major work ‘‘Life in the Iron Mills’’ was published in the April 1861 Atlantic Monthly. ‘‘Life in the Iron Mills’’ depicts the hardships of Hugh Wolfe, a sensitive artist fated to a life of deprivation, harshness, and futility as a furnace tender in a Virginia mill. Although occasionally veering toward emotionalism, in spite of Davis’ conscious effort to write objectively, the novella has a gripping quality that earned it an enthusiastic reception. Grimly naturalistic, ‘‘Life in the Iron Mills’’ is a landmark in the history of American literature. Also noteworthy are ‘‘John LaMar’’ and ‘‘David Gaunt,’’ the country’s first realistic accounts of the horrors of the Civil War, published in 1862 in the Atlantic Monthly. In them Davis expressed her reaction to the ‘‘filthy spewings’’ of the war. Sadly, Davis did not live up to her promise. Her career had begun with the publication in little magazines of a few book reviews, verses, and stories of ‘‘dark conspiracies’’ and ‘‘stately romances.’’ She continued to write in the prevailing sentimental and melodramatic modes. Davis wrote essays for the New York Tribune, the North American Review, and Harper’s Bazaar, numerous children’s stories, historical essays for the Youth’s Companion, and gothic thrillers for Peterson’s. Of her longer works, the most significant is Waiting for the Verdict (1868), a melodramatic study of the problems that befall a prominent Philadelphia surgeon when he reveals he is part black.
Awkward rendition of the black dialect and unconvincing characterization brought uncomplimentary reviews. Davis, undeterred by the criticism, brought out another novel the same year—Dallas Galbraith. In Davis’ middle years, her views became exceedingly conservative. In Pro Aris et Focis (1870), for example, she declared that a woman’s ordained role is motherhood, and only the woman with ‘‘no chance of rest in a husband’s house’’ should enter the professions. In her lifetime Davis was best known for her journalistic observations. She was never again to achieve the artistry of ‘‘Life in the Iron Mills.’’ Today, few of her works have survived, and her career is of interest only within the context of American literary history. OTHER WORKS: Margaret Howth (1862). Berrytown (1872). John Andross (1874). Kitty’s Choice (1874). A Law Unto Herself (1878). Natasqua (1886). Kent Hampden (1892). Silhouettes of American Life (1892). Dr. Warrick’s Daughters (1896). Frances Waldeaux (1897). Bits of Gossip (1904). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Langford, G., The Richard Harding Davis Years: A Biography of Mother and Son (1961). Quinn, A. H., American Fiction (1936). Sheaffer, H. W., ‘‘Rebecca Harding Davis, Pioneer Realist’’ (dissertation, 1947). Wann, L., The Rise of Realism (1942). Wyman, M., ‘‘Women in the American Realistic Novel’’ (dissertation, 1950). Reference works: American Authors 1600-1900 (1938). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Legacy (Fall 1990). NYT (30 Sept. 1910). —DOROTHY KISH
DAWIDOWICZ, Lucy S. Born 16 June 1915, New York, New York; died 5 December 1990, New York, New York Daughter of Max and Dora Ofnaem Schildkret; married Szymon M. Dawidowicz, 1948 In her lifetime, Lucy S. Dawidowicz was widely regarded as one of the foremost historians of the Holocaust and of Eastern European Jewish life. Her profound identification with her subject and groundbreaking research, marked by her distinctive use of the Yiddish language and traditional Jewish sources, continue to shape the course of Holocaust and Jewish scholarship today. She was born Lucy Schildkret in New York City in 1915 to Polish Jewish immigrants who had emigrated from Poland in 1908. After graduating with a B.A. from Hunter College in 1936, she took up a postgraduate fellowship at the Jewish Scientific Institute (YIVO) in Vilna, Poland, in August of 1938, where she studied the Yiddish language and Jewish history. ‘‘One of the last people to see Vilna before its destruction in the fires of the
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Holocaust,’’ as she later wrote, she was finally forced to flee one week before Nazi Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. After returning to the U.S. in 1939, Dawidowicz became assistant to the research director of YIVO in New York in 1940. In 1946 she went to postwar Germany to serve as an education officer in displaced persons’ camps for the American Joint Distribution Committee. She also worked to recover the remnants of YIVO’s library. Decades later she wrote a memoir of her prewar year in Vilna and of her postwar return to Europe. Entitled From That Time and Place: A Memoir, 1938-1947 (1989, reprinted 1991), the memoir was awarded the National Jewish Book Award. In 1948 she assumed a lecturing post at Yeshiva University in Manhattan and married Szymon Dawidowicz. Three years later, in 1951, she received her M.A. from Columbia University. Together with L. J. Goldstein she published Politics in a Pluralist Democracy: Studies of Voting in the 1960 Election (1963, revised 1974). Her anthology, The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe, chronicles the evolution of Jewish culture and religion from the end of the 18th century up to the Holocaust through the memoirs of Jewish spiritual and intellectual leaders. Published in 1967 (reprinted 1972), The Golden Tradition marked the beginning of Dawidowicz’s singular scholarly pursuit of Jewish themes. In 1969 she became professor of social history at Yeshiva University. Between 1970 and 1975 she held the Paul and Lea Lewis Chair in Holocaust studies and, beginning in 1976, the Eli and Diana Zbrowski Chair in Interdisciplinary Holocaust Studies, both at Yeshiva University. Dawidowicz published her most celebrated work, The War Against the Jews, 1933-45 in 1975 (reissued 1990). This book, her masterpiece, surpassed previous research conducted on the Holocaust through its use of a wide range of source materials in Yiddish and other languages to support her groundbreaking, critical theses. She challenged a number of prevailing scholarly conceptions of the Holocaust, most significantly those claims holding the Jews responsible for too little resistance against and too much collaboration with the Nazis. In addition, she countered the assertion that Nazi antisemitism had no roots in European history, and pioneered the thesis that Hitler’s antisemitism was, indeed, part of his deepest aims, dating back to Germany’s surrender in World War I. She maintained the Final Solution was central to Nazi ideology and war aims, as crucial as the conquering of Europe. This argument ran counter to other scholarly assertions that the Final Solution began in 1941 as an evolving response to particular events and circumstances. The War Against the Jews was awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Prize in 1976; the same year, Dawidowicz received a Guggenheim Fellowship. With the publication of A Holocaust Reader in 1976, Dawidowicz presented many of the little known public and private sources employed in The War Against the Jews. This collection proved to be a wealth of resources for later researchers. She also published countless articles, especially in the Jewish intellectual magazine Commentary, on subjects of historical and topical interest, including the sociology of American Jewry. In 1977 she published a widely praised collection of her articles in
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The Jewish Presence: Essays on Identity and History. In The Holocaust and the Historians, published in 1981, she refuted revisionist theories of the Holocaust. From That Time and Place was her last published book. At the time of her death, she was working on a history of American Jewry. Her last article, in Commentary (February 1990), was a critique of Arthur Hertzberg’s book on the same subject. Dawidowicz’s entire career was devoted to chronicling the history, influences, and ideas of Jewish culture in Eastern Europe and wherever that culture was transplanted. Her theme was consistently that of Eastern European Jewish culture attempting to reconcile the conflict of modernity and traditionalism. She claimed that whenever Jews compromised traditional values for modernity, whether in Europe or in the U.S., they confused and weakened their identity. Yiddish culture was the only solution to the conflict, but its leaders and practitioners were totally annihilated by Hitler. Because her historical view sees sacrifice of traditionalism as self-defeating to Jewish survival, her position on women is that tradition should prevail, and ‘‘in Judaism, women are assigned to primacy in the home, not in shul.’’ Her own life, however, exemplified the fruits born of women’s prominence in the world of scholarship. Dawidowicz died of cancer at the age of seventy-five. OTHER WORKS: The 1966 Elections: A Political Patchwork (1967). For Max Weinreich on His Seventieth Birthday: Studies in Jewish Language, Literature and Society (edited by Davidowicz, with J. A. Fishman et al., 1964). What is the Use of Jewish History? (1980, 1992). Babi Yar’s Legacy (1981). On Equal Terms: Jews in America, 1881-1981 (1982). American Jews and the Holocaust (1982). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Altshuler, D. A., Hitler’s War Against the Jews: A Young Reader’s Version of ‘‘The War Against the Jews, 19331945,’’ by Lucy S. Dawidowicz (1978). Reference works: CA (1977). Other references: Commentary (Feb. 1990, May 1992). Jewish Quarterly (Spring 1968). Lilith (Fall 1977). NYTBR (26 Nov. 1967). —SHANA PENN
DAY, Dorothy Born 8 November 1897, Bath Beach, New York; died 29 November 1980, New York, New York Daughter of John and Grace Satterlee Day; married (commonlaw) Forster Battingham; children: Tamar As an eight-year-old, Dorothy Day first experienced that ‘‘sweetness of faith’’ in a Methodist Sunday school which later caused her to become a devout Roman Catholic. After the San Francisco earthquake, which destroyed the newspaper plant for which Day’s father worked, the family moved to Chicago, where
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Day spent her girlhood years. In 1914 she went to the University of Illinois at Urbana. During her high school years, Day became affected by the plight of the underprivileged and read the stories of Eugene Debs, of the Haymarket anarchists, of Kropotkin, and of the Russian revolutionists. Feeling she had received a call, Day directed her life toward practical means of improving conditions among the poor. During her two years at college she began writing for a local newspaper, joined the Socialist club, and in general pursued her own way. At age eighteen, Day began a serious journalistic career as a reporter for the Socialist New York Call. She joined with others in 1917 in Madison Square Garden to celebrate the Russian Revolution, traveled to Washington with Columbia University students to protest Woodrow Wilson’s draft of young men into the armed services, and then went to work for Max Eastman’s revolutionary publication, The Masses. After the suppression of The Masses by the government, Day went to Washington with a group of militant suffragists, who were arrested and sentenced to 30 days in prison. This was the first of a number of imprisonments which Day underwent throughout the years for her activism in the causes of peace and justice. During 1918 Day came to know the Provincetown Players and talked long hours with Eugene O’Neill about religion and death as they walked the streets or ‘‘sat out the nights in taverns, in waterfront back rooms.’’ With $5,000 for the movie-rights to her novel The Eleventh Virgin (1924), Day bought a small bungalow on Raritan Bay, Staten Island. There she had a daughter by her common-law husband, Forster Battingham, an anarchist, who parted with her when she later had the child baptized in the Catholic Church. In From Union Square to Rome (1938) she tells the story of her conversion, and in her autobiography, The Long Loneliness (1952), of her struggle against Catholic priests whose vision did not extend beyond their parish. Like many other writers in the 1920s, Day spent some fruitless months on a screenwriting assignment in Hollywood, thereafter going with her daughter, Tamar, to Mexico City, where she supported herself by writing articles about the life of the people for Commonweal. Back in New York, she met Peter Maurin, whose ideas dominated the rest of her life. He encouraged her to start a paper for the workingman, extolling ‘‘personalist action’’ and using love as a means of changing institutions to enable each individual to lead a full life. In Union Square on 1 May 1933, a day of massive celebration of Russian and worldwide communism, Day heroically hawked the first issue of the Catholic Worker, a four-page tabloid-sized paper, which urged social Christian action in place of the Marxist communism of the Daily Worker. For almost half a century, she continued to publish every month this liberal voice of the Catholic Church. Among the many charitable farms and houses of refuge for the poor and homeless which she helped found are the Maryfarm Retreat House, Newburgh, New York; St. Joseph’s House of
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Hospitality, New York City; Peter Maurin Farm, Pleasant Plains, Staten Island; Maryfarm, Easton, Pennsylvania; Chrystie Street House, New York City; and the Tivoli Farm Retreat on the Hudson. The Catholic Worker offices on Mott Street have also served as soup kitchen for the hungry. This tough-minded but gentle-hearted woman, who seemed a saint to wanderers lacking food and shelter, has been the inspiration for numerous Worker Groups, where friendship as well as food is shared. OTHER WORKS: House of Hospitality (1939). On Pilgrimage (1948). I Remember Peter Maurin (1958). Thérèse (1960). Loaves and Fishes (1963). On Pilgrimage: The Sixties (1972).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Avitabile, A., ‘‘A Bibliography on Peter Maurin, Dorothy Day, and the Catholic Worker’’ (available from A.A., Fordham University). Coles, R., A Spectacle Unto the World: The Catholic Worker Movement (1973). Ellsberg, R., ed., By Little and by Little: Selected Writings of Dorothy Day (1983). Hennacy, A., Autobiography of a Catholic Anarchist (1945). Hennacy, A., The Book of Ammon (1970). Klejment, A. and A., Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker: A Bibliography and Index (1986). Maurin, P., Catholic Radicalism: Phrased Essays for the Green Revolution (1949). Miller, W. D., A Harsh and Dreadful Love: Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement (1973). Miller, W. D., Dorothy Day: A Biography (1982). O’Brien, D. J., American Catholics and Social Reform: the New Deal Years (1968). Roberts, N., Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker (1984). Sheehan, A., Peter Maurin: Gay Believer (1959). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Catholic Worker (1933 to present). NY (4 Oct. 1952, 11 Oct. 1952). NYRB (28 Jan. 1971). —WINIFRED FRAZER
DE ANGELI, Marguerite Lofft Born 14 March 1889, Lapeer, Michigan; died June 1987 Daughter of S. C. and Ruby Tuttle Lofft; married John de Angeli, 1910 Marguerite Lofft de Angeli perfected her contralto voice and planned for a musical career, but her inclination to draw was stronger. After 15 years of illustrating for magazines such as Country Gentleman and books such as Elizabeth Vining’s Peggy MacIntosh, her editor, Helen Ferris, encouraged her to write the text of a book and illustrate it herself. She created a series of short picture books for six-year-olds based on family situations, which were also the inspiration for later stories, but expanded into chapter-length episodes. De Angeli recreated her father’s childhood in Lapeer, Michigan, in Copper-Toed Boots (1938). Fiddlestrings (1974) is a fictionalized biography of her husband.
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Jeffrey, de Angeli’s six-year-old grandson, was the model for Just Like David (1951). Butter at the Old Price (1971) is her autobiography, written in her eighties. In addition to family stories, her subjects have been ethnic, traditional, and historical. She pioneered in introducing immigrant groups in Pennsylvania to children through literature. Two books—Henner’s Lydia (1936) and Yonnie Wondernose (1944)— are about Amish children on Pennsylvania Dutch farms. De Angeli captured the quaintness of the language in her dialogue. The pioneer days of William Penn and the Pennsylvania woods was the background for Skippack School, Being the Story of Eli Shrawder and of One Christopher Dock, Schoolmaster about the Year 1750 (1939). She illustrated a book of prayers and graces and then selected 50 songs for Marguerite de Angeli’s Book of Favorite Hymns (1963). She excerpted from the King James version of the Bible and illustrated The Old Testament (1960). She also wove Bible verses into her books. Bright April (1946) ends with ‘‘Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.’’ Skippack School concludes with, ‘‘The word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.’’ De Angeli’s most ambitious work is Marguerite de Angeli’s Book of Nursery and Mother Goose Rhymes (1954). She selected 376 rhymes for which she did 260 illustrations. After World War II, de Angeli traveled to England and sketched churches, castles, inns, and scenery for two months. She specialized in the 13th century under the rule of Edward III. De Angeli’s strength is in the setting of her stories and character development. She researched each book to recreate the time and place correctly. Her carefully drawn characters are developed with insight, and they inevitably mature through the story. The Newbery award was given to her in 1966 for The Door in the Wall (1949), while Black Fox of Lorne (1956) was later an honor book. Yonnie Wondernose and her Book of Nursery and Mother Goose Rhymes were Caldecott honor books. She was the first recipient in 1963 of the Drexel award for children’s literature given by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1968 she was awarded the Regina Medal by the Catholic Library Association for a ‘‘lifetime of devotion to literature for children.’’ OTHER WORKS: Ted and Nina Go to the Grocery Store (1935). Ted and Nina Have a Happy Rainy Day (1936). Petite Suzanne (1937). A Summer Day with Ted and Nina (1940). Thee, Hannah! (1940). Elin’s Amerika (1941). Up the Hill (1942). Turkey for Christmas (1944). Jared’s Island (1947). A Pocket Full of Posies (1961). The Ted and Nina Storybook (1965). The Empty Barn (with A. de Angeli, 1966). The Old Testament (1967). The Door in the Wall: A Play (1969). The Lion in the Box (1975). Whistle for the Crossing (1977). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hoffman, M., and E. Samuels, Authors and Illustrators of Children’s Books (1972). Hopkins, L., More Books by More People (1974). Miller, B., Illustrators of Children’s
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Books (1947). Miller, B., and E. Field, eds., Newbery Medal Books: 1922-1955 (1955). Reference works: Junior Book of Authors (1951). SATA (1971). Other references: Children’ Literature Review (1976). —KAREN NELSON HOYLE
DE BURGOS, Julia Born 17 February 1914, Carolina, Puerto Rico; died 6 July 1953, New York, New York Daughter of Paula Garcia de Burgos and Francisco B. Hans; married Rubén R. Beauchamp, 1934 (divorced); Armando Marín, circa 1943 Julia de Burgos revealed herself in her poetry and her life as a woman ahead of her times. In both, she challenged the social conventions that ruled over the Puerto Rican women of her epoch. Her humble origins in the rural barrio of Santa Cruz in Carolina, Puerto Rico, where she grew up as the eldest of a large family, gave her the strong unity with nature appearing constantly in her poetry. When her family moved to Rio Piedras in 1928, de Burgos enrolled at the University of Puerto Rico High School where her studiousness won her recognition. In 1931 she entered the University of Puerto Rico, earning a teaching certificate in 1933. Financial difficulties prevented her from continuing her studies. In 1934, the year of her first marriage, she started working for the Puerto Rico Economic Reconstruction Administration in a daycare center. The following year (1935), she taught in another rural area in Naranjito and took courses during the summer at the university. Although poets like Luis Palés Matos, Evaristo Ribera Chevremont, and Luis Llorens Torres would influence her work, it was the revolutionary patriotism of the president of the Nationalist party, Pedro Albizu Campos, that inspired her early poems which called for social and political reform. Her first collection, Poemas exactos a mí misma (Exact Poems to Myself), was published in 1937 in a private edition. Apparently dissatisfied with this work, she tried to suppress it. Poema en veinte surcos (Poem in Twenty Furrows), containing her famous poem ‘‘Río Grande de Loíza,’’ appeared in 1938. The river of her childhood is a powerful image throughout her work; it is in the river that the poet seems to search for her essence. Her recurrent themes of the eternal search for her true self, love, social reform, and art as a means of liberation first appear in this collection. Canción de la verdad sencilia (Song of the Simple Truth, 1939), which received an award from the Institute of Puerto Rican Literature, presents love as its central theme. The river is present in various poems, now also as a rival of her lover. In ‘‘Confesión del Sí y del No’’ de Burgos repeats her resistance to the imposition of social values, earlier seen in ‘‘Á Julia de Burgos.’’ In an attempt
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to free herself from social constraint, in 1940 de Burgos moved first to New York and then to Cuba with the man who had inspired her love poems. In Havana she met the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, the writer who most deeply influenced her work. In 1942, a love disillusionment that marked her for the rest of her life occasioned her return to New York. While living there, she actively collaborated in the publication of Pueblos Hispánicos, founded and directed by the Puerto Rican poet Juan Antonio Correjer. Although she continued to write, in her last years alcoholism weakened both her spirit and health. She spent most of this time in various hospitals. Collapsing on a Harlem street in 1953, she died, and her body was taken to Puerto Rico for burial near the river she had made famous. A posthumous volume El mar y tú, y otros poemas (1954) pays tribute again to her one great love and reflects her disillusionment and final disintegration. The sea, symbol of the infinite and witness of the cosmic union of the lovers, becomes the deathbed that called her. A compilation of her works, Obra Poética, appeared in 1961. Critics have seen influences of modernism in de Burgos’s work. José Emilio González, pointing out imperfections in her poetry, contrasts her lack of interest in the discussion of aesthetics with her deep concern with social problems. The importance she placed on truth and justice, and her understanding of poetry as an instrument for social and political change, gave priority to the message rather than to the form. The result was the revelation of the essence of the poet herself, making her poetry so strikingly unique. OTHER WORKS: A Rose Made of Water: Ten Selected Poems of Julia de Burgos; Translated by Rafael Ramos Albelo, from the Original Spanish (1994). Roses in the Mirror (1992). Song of the Simple Truth: Obra Completa Poetica (The Complete Poems) (1997). BIBLIOGRAPHY: A Dream of Light & Shadow: Portraits of Latin American Women Writers (1995). Cabrera, F. M., Historia de la Literatura Puertoriquena (1971). González, Jose E., La Poesía Contemporánea de Puerto Rico, 1930-1960 (1972). Jiménez de Baez, L., Julia de Burgos: Vida y Poesía (1966). Julia de Burgos, 1914-1953 (1986). Price, J., ‘‘Faces of Rebellion: Critical Commentary and Translation of the Poetry of Julia de Burgos, Rosario Castellanos, Clementina Suarez’’ (thesis, 1981). Reference works: Inventing a Word: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Puerto Rican Poetry (1980). NAW (1980). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Puerto Rican Authors: A Biobibliographic Handbook (1974). Spanish American Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Source Book (1990). Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology (1996). Other references: La Torre (Sept.-Dec. 1965). Sin Nombre (Oct.-Dec. 1976). —AMIRIS PEREZ-GUNTIN
DE CLEYRE, Voltairine Born 17 November 1866, Leslie, Michigan; died 6 June 1912, Chicago, Illinois Daughter of Auguste and Eliza de Cleyre As a young woman, Voltairine de Cleyre began to earn fees as a free-thought lecturer in Philadelphia, where she taught foreign languages and conducted classes in English for workers. The Haymarket bombing trial of 1887 had converted de Cleyre to anarchism: she, like many others, was radicalized by the martyrdom of innocent workers, whose fate showed her the flaws in American law and trial by jury. Despite physical weakness, de Cleyre gained a reputation as a lecturer and writer on such subjects as ‘‘Anarchism and the American Tradition,’’ ‘‘Crime and Punishment,’’ ‘‘Thomas Paine,’’ ‘‘In Defense of Emma Goldman,’’ and ‘‘Modern Educational Reform.’’ She urged greater freedom for the individual, and in one tract entitled ‘‘Sex Slavery,’’ she called every married woman ‘‘a bonded slave, who takes her master’s name, her master’s bread, her master’s commands, and serves her master’s passion; who passes through the ordeal of pregnancy and the throes of travail at his dictation—not at her desire; who can control no property, not even her own body, without his consent.’’ At other times, de Cleyre blasted the church, which ‘‘from its birth has taught the inferiority of women,’’ and the state, which holds women in unpropertied thralldom. Sounding a modern note on education, she condemned Mrs. Grundy for demanding women must cover their ‘‘obscene’’ bodies with long ‘‘prison’’ skirts and high necks, and for decreeing little girls must not climb trees or swim (activities inappropriate to their subservient role). Her articles and poetry appeared in such magazines as Open Court, Twentieth Century, Boston Investigator, Chicago Liberal, Liberty, Magazine of Poetry, Free Society, Mother Earth, and the Independent. She translated from the French Jean Grave’s ‘‘Moribund Society and Anarchy’’ and Louise Michel’s work on the Paris Commune. In Mother Earth appeared her translations from the Yiddish of Libin and Peretz. Some 30 of de Cleyre’s poems and a dozen short stories and sketches are included in Selected Works (1913), along with a biographical sketch by Hippolyte Havel, an old anarchist companion of Emma Goldman and a barroom friend of Eugene O’Neill. Leonard D. Abbott highly praised de Cleyre’s life and her writing, calling her ‘‘a priestess of Pity and Vengeance.’’ De Cleyre’s words were often high-flown, but never empty: ‘‘Liberty! Out of the dungeon, out of the sorrow, out of the sacrifice, out of the pain grew this child of the heart; and pure and strong she grew until the sabled plumes have tottered on the despot’s brow.’’ De Cleyre illustrated liberty in her own life and fought for it on behalf of the world’s imprisoned. When she died, she was buried in Chicago’s Waldheim Cemetery beside the Haymarket martyrs.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY: Drinnon, R., Rebel in Paradise (1961). MacDonald, G. E., Fifty Years of Freethought (1931). Symes, L., and T. Clement, Rebel America (1934). —WINIFRED FRAZER
Mille’s historical research was meticulous, as it was for her earlier, illustrated Book of the Dance (1963). After a careful exploration of the scene of Lizzie Borden’s crime, de Mille conducts the reader through her own transformation of historical fact into dance-drama. Accidents, personality clashes, and economic obstacles make of the creative process itself a taut, suspenseful narrative. In her Russian Journals (1970), de Mille recalls the stunned appreciation of Soviet audiences for this ballet when it was performed by American Ballet Theater on its USSR tour.
Born 1905, New York, New York; died October 1993 Daughter of William C. and Anna George de Mille; married Walter Prude, 1943
Speak to Me, Dance With Me (1973) goes back in time to de Mille’s 1933-34 stay in London, which had been telescoped into three chapters in Dance to the Piper. The text consists of lively letters she wrote to her mother, interspersed with a running commentary on affairs about which she could not write home.
DE MILLE, Agnes
Agnes de Mille’s mother was the daughter of political economist Henry George. Her father was a successful playwright, but after an unexpected flop on Broadway he went West to join his younger brother, Cecil B. de Mille, and became a movie director. De Mille’s first book, Dance to the Piper (1951), begins with her family’s move from New York City to Hollywood in 1914, covers her difficult years of struggle to become a dancer and to launch a career, and culminates with her first two solid choreographic successes, Rodeo (1942) and Oklahoma! (1943). The book ranges from child’s-eye sketches of personalities who frequented the de Mille household, such as Geraldine Farrar, Ruth St. Denis, Elinor Glyn, and Charlie Chaplin, to more detailed portraits of those who affected de Mille’s dance career—Martha Graham, Argentina, Marie Rambert, Antony Tudor, Lucia Chase. Enthusiasm and honesty are the keynotes of de Mille’s literary style. Her greatest enthusiasm is for other accomplished artists, and her most brutal honesty concerns her own limitations. At fifteen, she says, ‘‘I considered my body a shame, a trap and a betrayal. But I could break it. I was a dancer.’’ She is absolutely forthright in her advice on careers in dance, with constructive suggestions for dance teachers and critics, in To A Young Dancer (1962). In several of her books, she discusses how the development of professional dance, like the development of female consciousness, has been retarded by social, religious, and economic restraints. The balancing of de Mille’s own emotional and professional life in an especially turbulent period, 1942-45, is the basis of her second book, And Promenade Home (1956). She describes her whirlwind courtship, marriage to Lt. Walter F. Prude, and their subsequent two-year wartime separation, in counterpoint to her choreographic work on Oklahoma!, One Touch of Venus, TallyHo, Bloomer Girl, and Carousel. The nightmarish process of getting a Broadway show opened is reported by means of humorous anecdotes, fond portraits of collaborators, and some unabashed diatribes. Lizzie Borden: A Dance of Death (1968) is a book-length study of the creation of her 1948 folk ballet, Fall River Legend. De
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In Where the Wings Grow (1978), de Mille covers the earliest period in her life, before she had any serious thought of becoming a dancer. In this childhood memoir of summers at Merriewold, in Sullivan County, New York, de Mille evokes a turn-of-thecentury way of life innocent of indoor plumbing and refrigeration, with home remedies, Irish Catholic house servants, lemonade and embroidery on the verandah, and ladies—like her mother—who prided themselves on their sheltered, genteel public image, even though it masked a great deal of anguished drudgery. She also writes of Sho-Foo-Den, the exotic Japanese mansion at Merriewold, and the story of its inhabitants, the Takamine family, first glimpsed through the child’s eyes, later understood on an adult level. This latest book is a landmark in de Mille’s literary career, because its lyricism and passion and the interest it sustains depend not at all upon the author’s reputation as a dancer/choreographer. In 1973, de Mille, who was an authority on Anglo-American folklore, founded the Agnes de Mille Heritage Dance Theater for the purpose of giving theatrical life to American folk-dance forms. She also received numerous professional awards and honorary degrees. Long recognized for her energetic contributions to American dance theater, de Mille was respected as a serious and prolific writer as well. Nearly half of her books were autobiographical; the others, like most of her magazine articles and speaking engagements, deal more specifically with dance as an artistic and social form of expression. De Mille was much in demand as a speaker, known for her engaging zeal and wit, and remained active until her death in 1993. OTHER WORKS: American Ballet Theatre, 35th Anniversary Gala (with L. Chase, 1975). Dance to the Piper & Promenade Home: A Two-Part Autobiography (1980). Reprieve: A Memoir (1981). Scrapbook (clippings, 1987, 1993). Agnes de Mille [Speech on the Arts in America] (video, 1987). Agnes de Mille Talks About Martha Graham, Women and Fashion (audiocassette, 1987). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brosnan, P. L., Agnes de Mille Interview (video, 1985). Cavett, D., Agnes de Mille Interview (video, 1980). Edwards, A., The de Milles: An American Family (1988). Felder, D. G., The 100 Most Influential Women of All Time: A Ranking Past and
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Present (1996). Getz, L., Dancers and Choreographers: A Selected Bibliography (1995). Gherman, B., Agnes de Mille: Dancing Off the Earth (1994). Speaker-Yuan, M., Agnes de Mille (1990). Reference works: CB (1943). International Dictionary of Ballet (1993). International Dictionary of Modern Dance (1998). Notable Names in the American Theatre (1976). Other references: Ballet Review (Winter 1994). Dance Chronicle (1996, 1998). Dance Magazine (Oct. 1971, Sept. 1973, Nov. 1974, June 1974, Jan. 1998). NYTBR (13 Jan. 1952, 12 Oct. 1968). Agnes: The Indomitable de Mille (video, 1987). Agnes de Mille Rehearsing Rodeo and Fall River Legend (videocassette, 1991). City Edition: Agnes de Mille (video, 1979). The Creative Process: Agnes de Mille (video, 1988). The De Mille Dynasty: A Brief History of the Life and Times of Henry C. de Mille, William C. de Mille, Cecil B. de Mille, Agnes George de Mille (video, 1985). The Frail Quarry [excerpt] (video, 1990). Good Morning America: Agnes de Mille (video, 1991). Profile of Agnes de Mille (video, 1979). —FELICIA HARDISON LONDRÉ
DE MONDRAGON, Margaret Randall See RANDALL, Margaret
DÉGH, Linda Born 19 March 1920, Budapest, Hungary Daughter of Karoly and Folan Engl Dégh; married Andrew Vazsonyi, 1958 Linda Dégh studied with the eminent folklorist, G. Ortutay, at Pázmány Peter University in Budapest and received a Ph.D. in ethnography in 1943. Her first major publication was her dissertation, Pandur Péter meséi (Tales of Peter Pandur, 1942), a collection of folktales with an analytical essay and annotation. After graduation, Dégh conducted fieldwork and research for various scholarly institutions in Hungary, investigating primarily two major problems: urban/industrial folklore as it relates to the rural peasantry, and the folk traditions of the Hungarian revolution of 1848. Her research and publication on the latter demonstrated how historical facts have become ‘‘folklorized’’ through oral circulation over time, especially in lyrical and narrative folksongs. Later Dégh did extensive fieldwork throughout eastern Europe examining ethnic change and interethnic relations as well as traditional narratives, world view, and folk religion. Dégh eventually focused her European fieldwork on collecting the oral traditions of the Bukovina Székely villagers who were resettled in western Hungary after World War II. This fieldwork resulted in a major study on the sociology of storytelling, Märchen, Erzähler und Erzählgemeinschaft, dargestellt an der ungarischen Volksüberlieferung (1962), which was awarded the international
DÉGH
Pitré prize in 1963 and was later published in the U.S. as Folktales and Society: Storytelling in a Hungarian Peasant Community (1969). This is Dégh’s most widely known work in America and it is used as a textbook in many colleges and universities. A ‘‘major classic of folklore analysis,’’ it treats the inclusive narrative art of the villagers of Kakasd as well as the general process of transmission and innovation of oral tradition. The book also deals authoritatively with the interplay of print and oral tradition in the modern world. In 1951 Dégh was appointed to the faculty of the Folklore Department of Eötvös-University in Budapest. She also served on various national boards and commissions dealing with folklore and ethnography. Dégh published extensively during this phase of her career, but since most of her books and articles are in Hungarian, they are not generally accessible to an American audience. In 1964 she was invited to Indiana University as a visiting professor in the Folklore Institute. After a year of fieldwork among the Hungarian ethnic colony in the industrial region of northwest Indiana, Dégh returned to Indiana University as a full professor. Since coming to the U.S., Dégh’s folklore interests continued to develop in two major areas: interethnic relations in North America and the modern American legend. Her research among U.S. and Canadian ethnics has been supported by various national organizations including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Canadian Centre for Folk Culture Studies. Although she published numerous articles dealing with different aspects of this fieldwork, her major contribution so far has been a monograph, People in the Tobacco Belt: Four Lives (1975). This work is comprised of the translated life histories of Hungarians now living in Canada with annotation and an analytical essay dealing with each. Dégh examines, among other things, the techniques by which the narrators structured their stories and the world view revealed by them. The transcribed life histories depart from standard anthropological practice because they have not been rearranged and edited to fit conventional chronologies. Although her work with ethnicity is extensive, Dégh is best known in the U.S. for her research and publication dealing with the folktale (Märchen) and the legend. In 1968 she founded and began editing a scholarly journal, Indiana Folklore, specializing in the publication and analysis of legends and legend-telling. Using her own meticulous fieldwork and publications as examples, Dégh has trained a whole generation of Indiana University graduate students in the theories and techniques of dealing with folk legendry. Dégh is also a member of a committee of the prestigious International Congress of Folk Narrative Studies which has undertaken the classification and intensive study of the legend in the U.S. and Europe. OTHER WORKS: Pandur Péter hét bagi meséje (Seven Tales by P. Pandur from Bag, 1940). Bodrogközi mesék (Tales from Bodrogköz, 1945). Ütmutató 48-as hagyo-mány gyüjtéséhez (Fieldworkers’
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Guide for Researching Historical Traditions of 1848-49, 1947). A magyar népi szinjáték kutatása (Hungarian Folk Drama Research, 1947). Történeti énekek és katonadalok (Historical Songs and Soldiers’ Songs, with I. Katona and L. Péter, 1952). A szabadságharc népköltészete (Folklore of the War of Independence, 1952). Szépen szól a Kossuth muzsikája (Selected Songs from the Revolution of 1848, 1953). Népköltészet (Folk Literature, 1953). Magyarországi munkásdalok (Workers’ Songs from Hungary, with T. Dömötör and I. Katona, 1955). Kakasdi népmesék (Folktales from Kakasd, 1955). Magyar népmesék (Hungarian Tales, 1960). Gonaquadate a viziszörny (North American Indian Tales, 1960). A világjáró királyfi (North European Folktales, 1961). Tolna megyei székely népmesék (Szekely Folktales from Tolna County, 1965). Folklore Today: A Festschrift for Richard M. Dorson (edited by Dégh with F. Oinas and H. Glassie, 1976). East European Folk Narrative Studies (edited by Dégh, 1977). Articles: ‘‘Ethnology in Hungary’’ in Anthropology in EastCentral and Southeast (1970), ‘‘Folk Religion as Ideology for Ethnic Survival: The Hungarians of Kipling, Saskatchewan’’ in Ethnicity on the Great Plains (1980).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Burlakoff, N., et al, eds., Folklore on Two Continents: Essays in Honor of Linda Degh (1980). Other references: Canadian-American Review: of Hungarian Studies (1977). JAF (1971, 1978). —SYLVIA ANN GRIDER
DELAND, Margaret (Wade) Campbell Born Margaretta Campbell, 28 February 1857, Allegheny, Pennsylvania; died 1945, Boston, Massachusetts Daughter of Sample and Margaretta Wade Campbell; married Lorin F. Deland, 1880 At sixteen, after attending private schools, Margaret Campbell Deland was sent for a year to Pelham Priory, a strict boarding school near New Rochelle, New York, and then enrolled in the Cooper Union, New York City, for a course in design, perspective, freehand, and geometrical drawing. After finishing her studies at the Cooper Union, she was appointed assistant instructor in drawing and design at Girls’ Normal School (now Hunter College). Deland’s first novel, John Ward, Preacher (1888), is a story of religious doubt and adamant orthodoxy. Deland had been brought up a strict Presbyterian, but in the years following her marriage she found herself painfully questioning her earlier religious attitudes. She finally left her family’s denomination and, with her husband, was confirmed in the Episcopal church. It was many years, however, before she was at peace with her convictions, and John Ward, Preacher was the result of her own soul
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searching. It made her suddenly famous, for it was much discussed, and often angrily denounced as wicked and immoral. Deland followed this first novel with a steady output of fiction so popular that she became one of the best-known writers of her day. Four honorary doctorates were awarded to her: Rutgers, 1917; Tufts, 1920; Bates, 1929; and Bowdoin, 1931. She was also one of the first women elected to membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1926). ‘‘Essentially a novelist of character,’’ as one writer calls her, Deland created a group of likable men, women, and children who appear time after time in her various novels and short stories. These are inhabitants of a small town, ‘‘Old Chester,’’ which was modeled on Manchester, where she grew up. Dominating the Old Chester scene is the all-wise, all-compassionate Dr. Lavendar, Rector of St. Michael’s Church. The plots are concerned with sin and its expiation, self-sacrifice, maternal love, pride, and oddly assorted marriages. Through them all runs a strong current of religion, for Deland’s people conceive of a deity who is intensely personal. Also apparent is a delightful appreciation of nature—the shifting seasons, flowers, hills, rivers. Though Deland’s fiction is definitely dated, it is extremely useful to any student seeking to understand the values and mores of a bygone era. Further, while its faint gloss of sentimentality, its assertions regarding extramarital relations, and its firm insistence on the need for renouncing ‘‘sin’’ may seem quaint and unreal to the modern reader, Deland’s work does portray the timeless qualities of personal integrity, devotion, and courage. OTHER WORKS: The Old Garden (1886). A Summer Day (1889). Philip and His Wife (1890). Sidney: The Story of a Child (1892). The Wisdom of Fools (1894). Mr. Tommy Dove and Other Stories (1897). Old Chester Tales (1899). Dr. Lavendar’s People (1903). The Common Way (1904). The Awakening of Helena Richie (1906). An Encore (1907). The Iron Woman (1911). The Voice (1912). Partners (1913). The Hands of Esau (1914). Around Old Chester (1915). The Rising Tide (1916). The Vehement Flame (1922). New Friends in Old Chester (1924). The Kays (1926). Captain Archer’s Daughter (1932). Old Chester Days (1935). If This Be I (1935). Golden Yesterdays (1941). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Dodd, L. H., Celebrities at Our Hearthside (1959). Overton, G., The Women Who Make Our Novels (1928). Reep, D. C., The Rescue and the Romance: Popular Novels before World War I (1982). Smith, H. F., The Popular American Novel, 1865-1920 (1980). Welter, B., Dimity Convictions: The American Women in the Nineteenth Century (1976). Williams, B. C., Our Short Story Writers (1920). Reference works: NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCA (1942). Other references: American Literature (June 1990). NYT (14 Jan. 1945). —ABIGAIL ANN HAMBLEN
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DEL OCCIDENTE, Maria See BROOKS, Maria Gowen
DELORIA, Ella Cara Born Anpetu Waśte (Dakota name), 31 January 1889, at White Swan on the Yankton Sioux Reservation, South Dakota; died 12 February 1971, Vermillion, South Dakota Daughter of Philip and Mary Sulley Bordeaux Deloria Anpetu Waśte (which means Beautiful Day) was Ella Cara Deloria’s Dakota name. Her father was a deacon in the Episcopal church and Deloria was greatly influenced by the church as well as by her Sioux heritage. Dakota was the primary language spoken in her home, and Sioux culture was practiced there alongside Christianity. Deloria grew up on the Standing Rock Reservation, and graduated from the All Saints boarding school in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Following her graduation in 1910, she attended Oberlin College in Ohio, and then transferred in 1913 to Columbia Teachers College, receiving a B.S. in 1915. About 1927 Deloria began a long collaboration with Franz Boas, the distinguished anthropologist, with whom she had worked and studied while at Teachers College. She produced for him an immense body of research notes on Plains Indian language and culture. Speaking of Indians (1944) is Deloria’s analytical description of Sioux culture. Waterlily (1988), first published 17 years after her death, is based on her ethnographic work, but written in the form of a novel in order to convey the details of her culture to a wide range of readers. Those who wish to know more about Native American women, as well as about Sioux culture, change, and more important continuity, will find the novel richly rewarding. Deloria was bilingual as well as bicultural. Her work reveals the value of an insider’s perspective, providing a bridge of understanding about Sioux society for those outside her tradition, as witnessed through the eyes of a Sioux woman. The paucity of books written by Native American women also makes her work an important contribution to Native American studies as well as to American literature. The major part of Deloria’s work is focused on the period just prior to white settlement on the western plains of North America in the mid-19th century. Much of it challenges the still commonly held stereotypes of Native American peoples and especially the images of Indian women. Deloria’s Waterlily offers answers to questions about the role of women by providing a platform on which they speak for themselves. Deloria also provides perspectives on tribal history as well as the social and religious ideas centered on the obligations of reciprocity to one’s kin that are evident in Sioux tradition to the present day. Unlike her extensive ethnographic and linguistic work, Waterlily explores a series of important concepts in an intriguing fictional narrative. Engaging anecdotes alternate with serious commentary on issues that arise while contemplating life
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in the mid-19th century Teton (Tiyospaye) extended family camp circle. Enriched with her own experiences and views, and the insights of a writer who combines previous research on her own culture with the skills of the trained insider, the author creates excellent fiction. No one was better qualified than Deloria to draw a series of Sioux female characters such as the ones central to this novel. Against the exaggerated representation of the Sioux Nation as fabricated by contemporary media imagemakers, Deloria’s work stands firmly and honestly, portraying Sioux tradition and especially Sioux women in the visibly important roles they held and continue to hold within their culture. OTHER WORKS: Dakota Texts (1932). Dakota Grammar (with F. Boas, 1941). Some Notes on the Santee (1967). Deer Women and Elk Men: The Lakota Narratives of Ella Deloria (edited by J. Rice, 1992). Articles: ‘‘The Sun Dance’’ in Journal of American Folklore (1929), ‘‘From Waterlily’’ in Growing up Native American (1993). The unpublished manuscripts of Deloria, including her voluminous correspondence with Franz Boas, are in the Library of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. Manuscript pages of Waterlily are at the Dakota Indian Foundation in Chamberlain, South Dakota. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Finn, J. L., ‘‘Ella Cara Deloria and Mourning Dove: Writing for Cultures, Writing Against the Grain’’ in Women Writing Culture (1995). Mead, M., Cooperation and Competition Among Primitive Peoples (1937, chapter by J. Mirsky based on Deloria’s research). Morgan, K. J., ‘‘The Depiction of Lakota Culture in Waterlily’’ (thesis, 1990). Murray, J. K., ‘‘Ella Deloria: A Biographical Sketch and Literary Analysis’’ (dissertation, 1974). Rice, J., Deer Women and Elk Men: The Lakota Narratives of Ella Deloria (1992). Rice, J., Lakota Storytelling: Black Elk, Ella Deloria, and Frank Fools Crow (1989). Sligh, G. L., Activism, Accommodation, and Autobiography: The Novels of Sophia Alice Callahan, Mourning Dove, and Ella Cara Deloria (dissertation, 1998). Reference works: NAW (1980). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Introducing Ella C. Deloria (1988). Meridel LeSueur, Ella Deloria (video, 1984). —INÉS TALAMANTEZ
DEMING, Barbara Born 23 July 1917, New York, New York; died 2 August 1984, Sugarloaf Key, Florida Daughter of Harold S. and Katherine Burritt Deming Barbara Deming’s fiction, essays, and poetry were all grounded in her personal experiences. From the age of sixteen when she
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realized she was a lesbian and began to write, Deming’s life and writing were joined in a Gandhian struggle to ‘‘cling to the truth’’ (satyagraha). This struggle later led Deming to perceive herself as a lifelong activist, even though she did not enter public politics until 1960. Writing, Deming felt, ‘‘could itself be named activism’’ because it was a process through which she discovered and ‘‘affirmed’’ what she knew about herself and the world around her. Living her life as a lesbian—defying the homophobic society that tried to define her—was another aspect of her activism. Although literary periodicals published some of her poems, short stories, and reviews in the 1940s and 1950s, it was not until Deming began writing news articles about the peace and civil rights movements that her work steadily reached a large audience. These pieces, initially published in left-wing journals, detailed her own and others’ participation in social movements and offered her reflections on nonviolence and other issues. Whether because of the reputation she had gained or because changes in American society made personal narratives and social analysis more acceptable, both her earlier and new work reached print after the late 1960s. Deming’s powerful feminist critiques, veiled in her early work and central after the early 1970s, gained her a devoted audience among women. Her almost spiritual theorizing about the connections among people and political movements continues to challenge readers to claim their lives as their own while respecting the same right of others. Deming and her three brothers grew up in New York City and New City, New York. Her father was an admiralty lawyer, her mother a former singer. When Deming was sixteen, she fell in love with an older woman and began writing poetry. Their relationship probably lasted until Deming went to Bennington College where she majored in drama (B.A. 1938) and learned that a ‘‘woman’s sensibility’’ was incongruent with good writing. She earned an M.A. from Cleveland’s Western Reserve University (1941) and became an analyst for the Library of Congress film project at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (1942-44). In 1945 she decided to become a full-time freelance writer. Her theater essays, film reviews, and some poetry were published in New Directions, Chimera, New Yorker, and other periodicals, and in 1950 she finished a book analyzing the dreams and heroes portrayed in American films of the 1940s. A work of sociocultural criticism, Running Away from Myself: A Dream Portrait of America Drawn from the Films of the Forties was not published until 1969. Deming notes that this ‘‘psychological study of America’’ had taken on greater relevance in the wake of a national crisis of faith and a concomitant desire by the U.S. to impose its will in Vietnam. Deming traveled to Europe in 1950 to recover from the painful breakup of a love relationship. When she returned she began a ‘‘fictional’’ chronicle of her emotional and physical ‘‘travail,’’ but friends discouraged her from going beyond the first chapter. She turned to writing short stories. When Deming returned to the novel in 1972 she realized that it, like others of her rejected works, held great promise—the lesbian protagonist, like her powerful social commentaries, made friends (and publishers) uncomfortable, but the story was strong. A Humming Under My Feet: A Book of Travail was published in 1985.
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In 1959 Deming discovered the writings of Mahatma Gandhi while she was traveling through India. The following year she went to Cuba, and then attended a Peacemakers workshop. These experiences launched Deming into a new phase of her life marked by public activism and a commitment to practicing and writing about nonviolence. Her personal activism made it easier for her to empathize with the struggles of other people (Cuban, Vietnamese, African American) and she joined a community that Leah Fritz describes as ‘‘cling[ing] to a whole complexity of political truths.’’ Active in the New England Committee for Nonviolent Action and the War Registers League, Deming demonstrated, sat in, walked for peace and social justice, went to jail for acts of civil disobedience, and wrote about her experiences. Prison Notes (1966) grew out of her participation in the Quebec-Washington-Guantanamo Walk for Peace and Freedom and her arrest and imprisonment in Alabama. Revolution and Equilibrium (1971) includes essays that stemmed from her journeys to Cuba and to North Vietnam (1966-67). The essays in both volumes provide ‘‘a series of studies of nonviolent action and its possibilities’’ as well as a history of ‘‘The Movement’’ for peace and social change as it evolved during the 1960s. Deming’s essays remain among the most significant writings on nonviolence. In 1971, a near-fatal car crash curtailed her physical activism, but her writings continued to be publicly political for the rest of her life. In the mid-1970s Deming became a radical feminist and ‘‘came out’’ publicly during a Catholic Worker meeting. Through letters, several of which were then printed as ‘‘dialogues,’’ she debated women’s rights and sexuality with such civil rights and peace activists as Dave Dellinger and Arthur Kinoy and nonviolent tactics with feminist Jane Alpert. We Cannot Live Without Our Lives (1974) reprints these and an exchange of letters on ‘‘confronting one’s own oppression,’’ which recognizes the common roots of racism, sexism, and homophobia, and the importance of claiming one’s own identity. The book is dedicated to ‘‘all those seeking the courage to assert ‘‘I am—and especially to my lesbian sisters’’; it makes clear Deming’s defiance of the attempts of a homophobic and sexist society to define her. In 1983 she took part in actions organized by the Women’s Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice near Seneca Falls, New York, and served her final jail term. Deming died in her home on Sugarloaf Key of cervical cancer. She was survived by partners in two long-term relationships: painter and writer Mary Meigs (Deming’s companion in the late 1950s and early 1960s) and artist Jane Gapen (Watrous) Verlaine, Deming’s lover since the late 1960s. OTHER WORKS: Wash Us and Comb Us: Stories by Barbara Deming (1972). Remembering Who We Are: Barbara Deming in Dialogue with Gwenda Blair, Kathy Brown, Arthur Kinoy, Bradford Lyttle, Susan Sherman, Leah Fritz, Susan Saxe (1981). We Are All Part of One Another: A Barbara Deming Reader (edited by Jane Meyerding, 1984). I Change, I Change: Love Poems of Barbara Deming (1996). Articles in the 1940s and 1950s in Charm, Chimera, City Lights, Hudson Review, Partisan Review, New Directions, New
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Yorker, Paris Review, Tulane Drama Review, Voices, Wake; in the 1960s and 1970s in the Nation, the Catholic Worker, Liberation (of which she was an editor), WIN, Kalliope, and other magazines; ‘‘Militant Nonviolence’’ in The Witness (July 1995). The major collection of Deming’s papers is in the Schlesinger Library of Radcliffe College; additional papers are in the Twentieth Century Collection of Boston University. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Combellick, K. A., Feminine Forms of Closure: Gilman, Deming, and H.D. (dissertation, 1989). Reference works: CANR (1998). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Broadside (1984). Gay Community News (25 Aug./1 Sept. 1984, obituary). Kalliope: A Journal of Women’s Art (1984). NYT (4 May 1984, obituary). Ms. (Nov. 1978, article by Leah Fritz). —KIMBERLY HAYDEN BROOKES
DENISON, Mary Andrews Born 26 May circa 1826, Cambridge, Massachusetts; died 15 October 1911, Cambridge, Massachusetts Wrote under: N. I. Edson, Clara Vance Daughter of Thomas and Jerusha Robbins Andrews; married Charles W. Denison, 1846 Mary Andrews Denison’s first publications were short sketches printed in the Boston Olive Branch where her husband, a Baptist minister and active abolitionist, was assistant editor. In 1847 Denison published her first novel, Edna Etheril, the Boston Seamstress. This potboiler began her prolific career as author of pulp fiction and dime novels. Denison published over 80 novels during her lifetime. Many of them do not deserve close scrutiny; they can be divided into a few groupings. Denison exploited the convention of the spotless heroine, extolled on one of her book covers as ‘‘purer, sweeter, and nobler than [women] are often found in real life.’’ The epitome of this genre is her most famous novel, That Husband of Mine (1877), quickly followed by That Wife of Mine (1878). Both novels, along with dozens of her others, celebrate the domestic ideal and were dedicated to ‘‘All Who Love Happy Homes.’’ In addition to championing marital bliss, Denison also crusaded against alcohol in her Gertrude Russel (1849), published by the American Baptist Publication Society. Another group of her novels depicted stereotypical situations and stock formulas. Chip, the Cave Child (ca. 1860) presented the story of a little white boy captured by Native Americans, while The Prisoner of La Vintresse (ca. 1860) exploited a tropical setting with conventional political intrigues. Eventually, Denison wrote novels reinforcing religious conservatism and piety, such as Out of Prison (1864), Victor Norman, Rector (1873), and John Dane (1874). They all depict the temptation of evil, sin, and lust, but always conclude, anticlimactically,
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with the triumph of the powers of good. The majority of Denison’s readers probably read these works not for their high-minded preachings but for their thrilling and graphic portrayals of evil. Denison was also a continual contributor to a number of periodicals, chiefly Frank Leslie’s Monthly, Harper’s Weekly, the People’s Home Journal, and Youth’s Companion. She worked as a volunteer nurse during the Civil War and was a charter member of the League of American Penwomen. OTHER WORKS: Raphael Inglesse (1848). Home Pictures (1853). The Mad Hunter (circa 1860). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography (1888). A Critical Dictionary of English Literature, and British and American Authors (1858). Notable American Women, 1607-1950 (1971). Other references: Boston Transcript (17 Oct. 1911). Home (Dec. 1856). Magazine of Poetry and Literary Review (Feb. 1895). —DIANE LONG HOEVELER
DENNETT, Mary Ware Born 4 April 1872, Worcester, Massachusetts; died 25 July 1947, Valatie, New York Daughter of George W. and Livonia Ames Ware; married William H. Dennett, 1900 (divorced 1913); children: three sons (one of whom died young) Mary Ware Dennett came from an old and by her account ‘‘deadly respectable’’ New England family. She received her education at both public and private institutions in Massachusetts and at the school of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. At twentytwo, she began working at the Drexel Institute in Philadelphia, where she was to serve as head of the School of Design and Decoration. Desiring to practice what she was teaching, Dennett opened a shop with her sister in Boston. The beauty of the work they sold, particularly gilded leather, brought her to the attention of other artists in the area. They elected her a director of the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts. Her marriage to architect Dennett was at first a happy one; they had three sons, only two of whom lived to maturity. They collaborated in business; Dennett worked with her husband as a consulting home decorator. Increasingly interested in the campaign to enfranchise women, Dennett became field secretary of the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association. In 1910 she was elected corresponding secretary of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), and spent three years in the New York City office. As organizer of the literary department, she sent out millions of pamphlets, books, and reprints of speeches advocating enfranchisement for her sex. Dennett’s husband did not share her interest in suffrage, nor did he appreciate the geographical separation. The couple was divorced in 1913; she retained custody of the two boys.
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It was for these boys that Dennett wrote an essay describing, in a straightforward way, human reproduction and the sexual experience. Called ‘‘The Sex Side of Life,’’ it was published in the Medical Review of Reviews in 1918. Dennett received requests for reprints and had sent out approximately 25,000 copies when the postmaster general deemed the pamphlet obscene and banned it from the mails. Dennett, who continued to fill requests for the piece, was found to be in violation of the law by a district court. The American Civil Liberties Union took on Dennett’s case, and secured a reversal of the decision in the district court of appeals. Dennett’s book, Who’s Obscene (1930), is a bright and fascinating account of these experiences with the courts. Dennett’s interest in sex education and birth control caused her to work with, and ultimately against, Margaret Sanger. In 1915 Sanger violated the federal obscenity statutes by publishing her magazine, the Woman Rebel. She fled to Europe to avoid prosecution. During her absence, Dennett took over the fledgling contraceptive movement, organized in the National Birth Control League (NBCL), repudiating Sanger and her tactics. Sanger returned to set up her own organization. It and the NBCL clashed throughout the 1920s. Dennett believed that a question of basic civil liberty was involved in the birth control campaign and therefore worked through the legislature to eliminate all legal constraints on the distribution of contraceptive material. Birth Control Laws, which she wrote in 1926, explains her position. Although certainly not an objective account of the obscenity rulings existing then, the book contains a detailed and well-researched delineation of the statutes, as well as thoughtful arguments for their repeal. Dennett’s final contribution to the cause was The Sex Education of Children, published in 1931. During and after her participation in the birth control movement, Dennett was also involved in other causes. Always interested in the campaign for world peace, she worked from 1914 to 1916 to keep the U.S. out of the European war, serving as field secretary of the American Union Against Militarism. When American involvement in the conflict caused her to break with the Democratic party, she joined the radically antiwar People’s Council. Years later, she was a member of the World Federalists and served as their first chairman from 1941 to 1944. Illness forced Dennett to withdraw from active participation in her beloved movements. But only death, which came in 1947 in a New York nursing home, could quench her interest in reform and social change. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Dienes, C. T., Law, Politics and Birth Control (1972). Kennedy, D., Birth Control in America (1970). Lader, L., The Margaret Sanger Story (1955). Sanger, M., An Autobiography (1938). Reference works: Notable American Women, 1607-1950 (1971). Other references: The Prosecution of Mary Ware for ‘Obscenity’ (1929). —LYNNE MASEL-WALTERS
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DERRICOTTE, Toi Born Toinette Webster, 12 April 1941, Hamtramck, Michigan Daughter of Benjamin S. and Antonia Baquet Webster; married C. Bruce Derricotte, 1964; children: Anthony In 1983, having published two books of poetry and more than 200 poems and several articles in periodicals and anthologies, given countless readings, and conducted numerous seminars for students of all ages, Toi Derricotte remarked, ‘‘I want my work to be a wedge into the world, as what is real and not what people want to hear.’’ In 1991 she flatly declared, ‘‘Definitely my teaching and writing is about making change,’’ yet in a ‘‘Letter to an Editor Who Wants to Publish a Black Writer’’ she said, ‘‘To be published as a woman of color makes me fear I will be ignored by most white people, treated as if I don’t exist’’ (Callaloo). Happily, Derricotte has been far from ignored and her writing acknowledged as much too compelling to be treated as if it does not exist. Publishing widely in journals and anthologies, she was recognized by Maxine Kumin as a poet who ‘‘transforms the raw stuff of experience into a language we can all treasure and continue to draw on.’’ The Village Voice’s review of Captivity (1989), her boldest examination of contemporary black female experience, proclaimed it an ‘‘outstanding example of personal exploration yielding truths that apply to all of us—if we admit them.’’ An African American feminist poet, Derricotte speaks from a position particularly attuned to American culture’s racism and sexism. Yet in doing so, she speaks to men as well as to women, to whites as well as to blacks; indeed, the profound paradox in Derricotte’s work is that by repeatedly examining states of poverty, abuse, motherhood, and sexual pleasure that could only be known by women, she manages also to explore experiences of fear, pain, struggle, and ecstasy common to people of all races, sexes, nations, and creeds. At twenty-one Derricotte was sent to a home for unwed mothers to bear a son; 17 years later she wrote a book of poems about this experience, Natural Birth (1983). After receiving her B.A. in special education in 1965 from Wayne State University in Detroit and marrying Bruce Derricotte, she moved to New York City. There she continued her education by participating in numerous writers’ workshops and by studying English literature and creative writing at New York University (M.A. 1984). An associate professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh since 1991, she was a visiting professor of creative writing at NYU in 1992. Derricotte lived for nearly two decades in New Jersey before moving to Maryland in 1986. Between 1974 and 1991, she held diverse teaching positions, including Poet-in-the-School in both New Jersey (1974-88) and Maryland (1987-88), writer-inresidence for Cummington Community and School of the Arts (1986), associate professor of English literature at Old Dominion University (1988-90), and Commonwealth Professor of English at George Mason University (1990-91). Derricotte is currently an associate professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. Among Derricotte’s awards are first prizes from the Academy of American Poets in 1974 and 1978, the Lucille Medwick
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Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America in 1985, National Endowment for the Arts grants in 1985 and 1990, a Pushcart Prize in 1989, a Nicholas Roerich Poets’ Prize nomination in 1990, a Distinguished Pioneering of the Arts award in 1993, and the 1998 Paterson Prize for poetry. She has also contributed to various anthologies and numerous periodicals, including Iowa Review, American Poetry Review, Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, and Feminist Studies. Derricotte served as a member of the editorial staff of the New York Quarterly from 1973 to 1977 and cofounded Cave Canem, a summer workshop retreat for African American poets, in 1996. Since her first book in 1978, Derricotte has courageously examined the powers and influences, agonies and ecstasies of family relations. Dedicated to a grandmother who owned a funeral home and who never offered her Cadillac Fleetwood to drive her granddaughter and daughter-in-law home after their weekly visits, Empress of the Death House (1978) does more than relay the pathos of mother and daughter always being forced to take the bus and to remember their lower status. In this book, formal experimentations abound—‘‘disappeared’’ punctuation, radically staggered lines, stanzas of varying and unpredictable length, ampersands and abbreviations employed for suggestively casual diction (‘‘yr’’), capitalization used only for emphasis. These disruptive techniques complement the volume’s forbidden topics—deep and abiding anger toward the family all black women are expected to protect and raw articulations of being hurt and stifled by one’s own people. Natural Birth explores subjects considered too ‘‘low’’ and socially transgressive for poetry—childbirth and an unwed mother’s responses to being hidden away from public knowledge in a special home, to being pummeled by an impatient doctor’s procedure, and to being separated from the life her womb had protected for nine months. Though she incorporates the period into her technique much more frequently than before, Derricotte uses italics, prose segments, staggered and rhythmically commanding schemes for lineation, and titles underscoring conflations of objective and subjective time so readers are reminded that meanings are never simply a matter of word choice. When she reads from this collection, the texts are transformed into rocking, rolling, rhythmic, erotic performances. Through her near ecstatic readings, Derricotte implicitly reminds her audience of the truth of the situation: what is unnatural is not the birth out of wedlock but society’s systematically abetted brutal, slashing response to it. In Captivity, Derricotte speculates more boldly on the debilitating effects of a perpetually powerless status. Though her technique is somewhat more conventional than in the previous two volumes, prose segments, arresting lineation, and unpredictable stanzaic division still underscore subject matter that is even more unconventional. In the prose poem ‘‘Abuse,’’ Derricotte portrays a daughter seeking maternal protection by speaking out about abuse by the janitor and abuse by ‘‘Daddy.’’ ‘‘Mama’’ seeks to fend off consciousness, responding: ‘‘Don’t tell me that, you / make me suffer.’’ ‘‘On the Turning up of Unidentified Black Female Corpses,’’ a nine-stanza poem of regular, never disrupted four-line stanzas, mirrors ‘‘Mama’s’’ attitude of desperate resignation.
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Poignantly, Derricotte’s most radical subject is examined in the most formally regularized poem, as if to emphasize the fact that the victims are held captive even in death, where they are scrutinized anonymously and only within the confines of the television. Yet this poem’s speaker dares to ask the type of question ‘‘Mama’’ refuses her battered little girl: ‘‘Am I wrong to think / if five white women had been stripped, / broken, the sirens would wail until / someone was named?’’ The speaking of lost lives long overlooked, their tragedies denied, is equated with exhuming those rendered a ‘‘living dead’’ through neglect. Tender (1997), Derricotte’s fourth book of poetry, is divided into seven sections on topics ranging from the violence of slavery to contemporary domestic violence. The title poem serves as a hub from which each section radiates as Derricotte explores how violence destroys mind, body, and spirit. Derricotte, a selfdescribed ‘‘white-appearing Black person,’’ focuses largely on the varied identities a woman takes on through her roles as wife, mother, sister, and daughter, and how each of these identities can lead to violent outcomes. The psychology of race and gender also comes into play as Derricotte’s poetry speaks of what it means to pass for white in today’s society. Derricotte’s racial identity forms the core of The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey (1997), which contains excerpts from the journals she kept following her 1974 move to an all-white upper-neighborhood in New Jersey. She expresses both her pride in her blackness and her shame and self-hatred in allowing others to think her white in passages like the following: ‘‘All my life I have passed invisibly into the white world, and all my life I have felt that sudden and alarming moment of consciousness there, of remembering I am black.’’ Derricotte unflinchingly reveals the emotional turmoil caused by the constant internal struggle over her identity. She describes the ways in which her ambivalent appearance affected every aspect of her life, from riding in a cab to her relationship with her husband. The deeply intimate and impassioned journal entries that make up The Black Notebooks are by turns moving, hilarious, and painful. Derricotte won several awards for The Black Notebooks, including the 1998 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and the 1998 Black Caucus of the American Library Association Literary Award for nonfiction. Tackling bloody, bruising, and bruised subjects in her poetry, Derricotte launches complex and caring critiques of American society in her persistent poetic attention to lives of disenfranchised African American women. In doing so, she forces readers to grapple with her contention, proclaimed in her 1991 Callaloo interview, that ‘‘a lot of what doesn’t get talked about gets translated into violence—racism, sexism—and gets worked out in families as physical and emotional abuse.’’ She still believes ‘‘we are prisoners of what we don’t know, of what we don’t acknowledge, what we don’t bring out, what we aren’t conscious of, deny.’’ And thus Derricotte has dedicated her formidable talents to producing poetic work that is indisputably ‘‘a wedge into the world.’’
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OTHER WORKS: Creative Writing: A Manual for Teachers (with Madeline Tyger,1985). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1985). CANR (1991). Oxford Companion to African-American Literature (1997). WW Among African Americans, 1998-1999 (1997). WW of Writers, Editors and Poets (1989). Other references: Callaloo (1991). Ikon (1986). Kenyon Review (1991). Paris Review (1992). —MARTHA NELL SMITH, UPDATED BY LEAH J. SPARKS
DEUTSCH, Babette Born 22 September 1895, New York, New York; died November 1982 Daughter of Michael and Melanie Fisher Deutsch; married Avrahm Yarmolinsky, 1921 Of German descent, Babette Deutsch grew up in New York City, where she received her B.A. from Barnard College in 1917. Although best known as a poet, Deutsch published novels, translations, literary criticism, and children’s books. In 1919, Deutsch published her first volume of poems, Banners, whose title piece celebrates the Russian Revolution as ‘‘new freedoms, and new slavery.’’ Honey Out of the Rock (1925), Deutsch’s second book, contains a number of short imagistic poems, biblically inspired ballads, and poems to her son. Both volumes display the influence of imagism, Japanese haiku, and Greek and Jewish culture. Considered by some critics to be Deutsch’s best work, Epistle to Prometheus (1930), is a letter written by a contemporary to the Greek god. It is a survey of human history, beginning with his creation and tracing the Promethean spirit as it has inspired humanity in 5th-century Greece, 18th-century France, and 20th-century Russia. Deutsch’s final three volumes of poetry, One Part Love (1939), Take Them, Stranger (1944), and Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral (1954), all reveal her rage at the destruction of World War II. In ‘‘To Napoleon’’ she asks, ‘‘But who will cut the growth/ That gnaws at Europe now?’’ Deutsch’s poetry has been collected in two volumes: Collected Poems, 1919-62 (1963) and Coming of Age: New and Selected Poems (1959). As a novelist, Deutsch began her career with A Brittle Heaven (1926), a thinly veiled autobiography about a young woman’s youth, education, and marriage. The novel reveals the major conflicts facing a woman struggling to define herself both as a professional writer, and a wife and mother. Deutsch’s second novel, In Such a Night (1927), is essentially a series of character sketches showing the influence of Virginia Woolf’s stream-ofconsciousness technique in Mrs. Dalloway. Deutsch’s other novels are Mask of Silenus (1933), a historical novel based on
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Socrates’ life, and Rogue’s Legacy (1942), a tale patterned after the life of the French poet, François Villon. Deutsch’s critical writings are concerned with the correlation between modern poetry and modern society. Potable Gold: Some Notes on Poetry and This Age (1929) discusses the influence of technology on poetry and the poet’s relationship to his public. This Modern Poetry (1935) and Poetry in Our Time (1952) both analyze major poetic figures and study the interrelationship between poet and politics. According to Deutsch, the modern poet must ‘‘create a myth beyond the power of man’’ and therefore be a ‘‘true revolutionary.’’ OTHER WORKS: Fire for the Night (1930). Poetry Handbook: A Dictionary of Terms (1956). Articles: ‘‘An Unhabitual Way’’ in Critical Essays on Kay Boyle (1997), ‘‘Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951)’’ in Langston Hughes: Critical Perspectives Past and Present (1993) Audio recordings: Babette Deutsch Reading Her Poems in the Recording Laboratory (1947), Babette Deutsch Reading Her Poems in the Coolidge Auditorium (1961), Babette Deutsch Reading Her Poems with Comment at Station WRVR (1961). The papers of Babette Deutsch are in the New York Public Library in New York City. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Davis, R. H., Jr., ‘‘Something Truly Revolutionary: The Correspondence of Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinsky from Russia, November 1923 to March 1924’’ in Biblion: The Bulletin of the New York Public Library (1993). Drake, W., The First Wave: Women Poets in America (1987). Driscoll, M. C., ‘‘Babette Deutsch and Her Contribution to American Letters’’ (thesis, 1944). Gould, J. American Women Poets: Pioneers of Modern Poetry (1980). Reference works: Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia (1987). CA (1977). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Kresh, P., ed., Babette Deutsch, Louise Bogan, Leonore G. Marshall, Stephen Vincent Benet, and Malcolm Cowley Reading Their Poems (audio recording, 1970). NYHTB (12 July 1959). Poetry (1964). SR (25 July 1959). TLS (18 June 1964). VQR (1964). —DIANE LONG HOEVELLER
DeVEAUX, Alexis Born 24 September 1948, New York Daughter of Richard Hill and Mae DeVeaux Feminist, poet, playwright, fiction and children’s book writer, illustrator, and political journalist, Alexis DeVeaux places African Americans, most often black women, at the center of her artistic world. Her work concentrates on the personal struggles and resolve of women, especially as they deal with love and sexuality. DeVeaux focuses on intimate relationships, whether
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they involve lesbian lovers (‘‘The Sister’’), contending forces in a love triangle (Don’t Explain, 1980), or a daughter and her parent (‘‘Adventures of the Dread Sisters’’). Because she believes that an understanding of the self in relationship with the intimate other leads to an understanding of the community, the nation, the world, DeVeaux’s work also gives testimony to black culture. As Mary Helen Washington notes, Nigeria, the central character in ‘‘Dread Sisters’’ (1989), is then not ‘‘an isolated teenager but a collective protagonist.’’ DeVeaux’s writing projects her feminist perspective that the personal is the political. DeVeaux grew up in Harlem and the South Bronx, which serve as the settings for most of her work. Both Na-Ni (1973), which received an Art Books for Children Award from the Brooklyn Museum (1974-75), and Spirits in the Streets (1973) are set in Harlem and revolve around the theme of ‘‘preserving spiritual vitality in a ghetto environment.’’ While DeVeaux’s stories often embrace the harsh realities of poverty and exploitation, they are also infused with hope and beauty. Spirits in the Streets (1973) reflects DeVeaux’s array of artistic talents. It integrates innovative use of language within narrative, lyric, and dialogue, with illustrations and variations of typography. Spirits is at once a poem, a mural, and a song. Music has a great influence on DeVeaux’s writing. ‘‘The Riddles of Egypt Brownstone’’ (1977), she explains, ‘‘is like jazz, each instrument/character playing variations on the melody so that the story is told not as a linear experience but as a holistic one.’’ Jazz and language come together fully in Don’t Explain: A Song of Billie Holiday (1980), a fictionalized biography of the singer, written in lyric form for young adults. DeVeaux earned a B.A. from the State University of New York-Empire State College (1976) and a Ph.D. from the SUNY at Buffalo (1992). She has been a community worker, an instructor of reading and English, and a teacher of creative writing and theater workshops in New York and Connecticut. A freelance writer since 1974, she has also been a contributing editor and editor-at-large of Essence magazine. DeVeaux has written a number of essays for Essence in which she reasserts her global feminist perspective, calling for the political and social liberation of black and Third World women. Her stories and poems have appeared in several publications, including Black Creation, Conditions: Five, and the Iowa Review. As a playwright, DeVeaux’s Tapestry and Circles were produced for the television series Visions in 1976, while three other plays were produced by different theatre groups: A Season to Unravel (1979), No (1981), and Elbow Rooms (1987). In the late 1990s, DeVeaux was back at SUNY Buffalo, where she’d completed her Ph.D., to teach in the American Studies Department. OTHER WORKS: Li Chen/Second Daughter, First Son (1975). Blue Heat: a Portfolio of Poems and Drawings (1985). An Enchanted Hair Tale (1987). The Woolu Hat (1997). Audre Lorde (1997). Contributor to: Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983); Black-Eyed Susans; ‘‘The Tapestry’’ in 9 Plays by Black Women (1986); ‘‘An Enchanted Hair’’ in The Lady with the Ship
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on Her Head (videocassette and book, 1987, 1991); Midnight Birds: Stories by Contemporary Black Women (1990); Memory of Kin: Stories About Family by Black Writers (1991); and others. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Clarke, C., ‘‘Blue Heat by Alexis DeVeaux’’ in Conditions, Thirteen: International Focus I (1986). Kraft, M., ‘‘Alexis De Veaux: The Riddles of Egypt Brownstone’’ in The African American short story, 1970-1990: A Collection of Critical Essays (1993). Tate, C., ed., Black Women Writers at Work (1983). Washington, M. H., ‘‘Commentary on Alexis De Veaux,’’ Memory of Kin. Wilkerson, M. B. ed., Nine Plays by Black Women (1985). Reference works: Black Authors and Illustrators of Children’s Books (1988). Black Writers (1989). CA (1977). CANR (1989). DLB (1985). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Ms. 8 (June 1980). —DALE A. DOOLEY, UPDATED BY NELSON RHODES
DEXTER, John See BRADLEY, Marion Zimmer
DIAZ, Abby Morton Born Abigail Morton, 22 November 1821, Plymouth, Massachusetts; died 1 April 1904, Belmont, Massachusetts Daughter of Ichabod and Patty Weston Morton; married Manuel Diaz, 1845 Abigail Diaz was the only daughter of Ichabod Morton, a shipbuilder, liberal Unitarian, and social reformer. In 1842 he took his family to the Transcendental utopian community, Brook Farm, where Diaz remained until 1847, teaching in the association’s infant school. She later taught school in Plymouth and began writing. In May 1861 her first story appeared in Atlantic Monthly, and she eventually published in many leading juvenile and domestic magazines of the day. Diaz was a founder and, from 1881 to 1892, president of the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union of Boston, which she saw as a ‘‘sisterhood’’ allying urban women of means with country girls seeking work in the city. In the 1880s and 1890s, Diaz traveled widely, organizing women’s unions and lecturing at women’s clubs. She was active in the woman suffrage movement, which she saw as an outgrowth of the abolition of slavery. In her later years, she became interested in Christian Science and published articles on religious subjects. Diaz’s best, and most successful, juvenile fiction is The William Henry Letters (1870), first published in 1867 in the magazine Our Young Folks. Epistolary in form, it recounts the adventures of a mischievous redheaded boy raised by his loving grandmother. Overall, the Letters sentimentally evoke family life and simple fun in an idealized New England village. Theodore
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Roosevelt in his Autobiography described this book, one of his favorites, as a ‘‘good healthy’’ story, ‘‘teaching manliness, decency and good conduct.’’ Two sequels were popular: William Henry and His Friends (1871) and Lucy Maria (1874). The latter, apparently loosely autobiographical, concerns a girl who took up ‘‘school-keeping with too much self-confidence’’ and soon concluded that it is a ‘‘very solemn thing’’ to give ‘‘even one life its first direction.’’ Lucy Maria wants to do ‘‘heart-teaching,’’ rather than headteaching; like Diaz at Brook Farm, she takes her students into the woods to interest them in ‘‘flowers, trees, insects—all natural objects.’’ On woman suffrage, Lucy Maria, again like Diaz at this time, disclaims personal interest in the vote (except on ‘‘some neighborhood affair’’ such as the ‘‘location of a schoolhouse’’) but feels that other women should have the vote if they want it, as suffrage is a natural right. Diaz’s interest in improving home life and the instruction of young children is evinced in several of her most effective books: The Schoolmaster’s Trunk (1874), A Domestic Problem (1875), Bybury to Beacon Street (1887), and Only a Flock of Women (1893). These novels are set in small towns with little social life. Isolated and repressive, they are halfway stations between the old-fashioned village and the modern city. Families struggle to maintain ‘‘decent’’ standards and parents wear themselves out with work. To reform these conditions, Diaz proposes various domestic economies, simplifying women’s chores so they may devote more time to their children and to self-improvement. Men, she feels, should share household tasks so they may appreciate the difficulty of women’s work. The community should meet convivially to discuss its problems. These ideas found their practical outlet in Diaz’s work for the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union, which provided personal guidance and legal protection for working girls and women in Boston. Because of this affiliation alone, she is described as an ‘‘industrial reformer’’ in Willard and Livermore’s American Women (1897). Through more than 20 years, Diaz was a prolific author of juvenile stories and essays. These consistently reflect her affection for children and a charming delight in games and pastimes. The volumes of domestic advice are pleasantly stated, chatty, down-to-earth. Many of the household reforms Diaz suggests have since been accomplished by labor-saving machinery, but her comments testify to the physical difficulty of farm and village life for women a century ago. Her early exposure to Transcendental or Emersonian idealism is evident to the end of her life in her views of children, education, and the prospect of moral improvement. OTHER WORKS: The Entertaining Story of King Bronde, His Lily and His Rosebud (1869). A Storybook for the Children (1875). Neighborhood Talks, As Reported by Mr. Codding (1876). Birds of Prey (with N. A. Calkins, 1878). Cat Family (with N. A. Calkins, 1878). The Jimmyjohns and Other Stories (1878). Scratching Birds (with N. A. Calkins, 1878). Swimming Birds (with N. A. Calkins, 1878). Wading Birds (with N. A. Calkins, 1878). Brave Little Goose-girl: Little Stories for Little Folks (1880). Christmas Morning (1880). Merry Christmas (1880). Molasses Candy (1880).
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Simple Traveller (1880). The Story of Boxberry (1880). King Grimalkin and Pussyanna (1881). Polly Cologne (1881). Chronicles of the Stimpcett Family and Others (1882). Spirit As Power (1886). The Law of Perfection (1886). The John Spicer Lectures (1887). Leaves of Healing (1887). Conventions During the Anti-Slavery Agitation (1889). In the Strength of the Lord (1889). Mother Goose’s Christmas Party (1891). The Law of Perfection (1895). The Religious Training of Children (1895). The Flatiron and the Red Cloak (1901). ‘‘Those People From Skyton’’ and Nine Other Stories (1906). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Codman, J. T., Brook Farm (1884). Croly, J. C., History of the Women’s Club Movement in America (1898). Donham, S. A., History of the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union (dissertation, 1955). Swift, L., Brook Farm (1900). Reference works: NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). A Woman of the Century (1893). Other references: Women’s Journal (14 Apr. 1904). —JANE BENARDETE
DICKINSON, Emily Born 10 December 1830, Amherst, Massachusetts; died 15 May 1886, Amherst, Massachusetts Daughter of Edward and Emily Norcross Dickinson Emily Dickinson’s American ancestry began with Nathaniel Dickinson, a religious dissenter who settled in Connecticut in 1630. Dickinson’s grandfather was a founder of Amherst College, and her father, Edward Dickinson, became a Massachusetts judge, member of the state legislature, and a U.S. congressman. A formidable parent, and an exemplar of the Puritan ethic of industry and public service, he was for the most part aloof; his daughter observed that he was ‘‘too busy with his briefs’’ to notice his children. Her mother, Emily Norcross Dickinson, appears to have been an equally remote parent, a semi-invalid for much of her children’s lives and, in Dickinson’s view, a failure as a mother. Dickinson once wrote a friend, ‘‘I never had a mother.’’ In childhood Dickinson suffered from a shyness and an emotional sensitivity she recognized as marking her ‘‘different from the others.’’ She grew up companioned mainly by her older brother and younger sister, who were to remain her closest ties. In accordance with the family emphasis upon education—for daughters as well as sons—she attended Amherst Academy and was sent for a year to Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before her father decided her precarious health made further formal education unwise. Returning home, Dickinson developed the literary interests that suited her preference for isolation—reading, corresponding with a few friends, and writing poems. Except for occasional visits to neighboring cities and a trip with her father to Washington, D.C., she did not leave her birthplace again. By her thirtieth year, she had withdrawn even from the life of Amherst. To the townspeople she became a legendary figure, an eccentric spinster
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who dressed always in white, rarely received a visitor, and refused to venture beyond the family house and garden. Found in her room after her death was a manuscript, in the style of homemade pamphlets, of almost 900 poems, only seven of which she had published. All were short lyrics, often no more than a quatrain or two; almost all were untitled and undated; some were unfinished; some appeared in variant versions. The labor of collecting additional manuscripts and of publishing selections of her verse was undertaken first by family and friends, none of whom suspected their actual value. The first Poems by Emily Dickinson appeared four years after her death, to mainly hostile reviews. Periodically, as new poems originally sent to friends were discovered, new collections followed. In this century, the number of poems has continued to increase; more than 650 were published for the first time as late as 1945. The authoritative text of all known poems, numbering almost 1,800, is the three-volume edition by Thomas H. Johnson, which finally appeared in 1955. (The poems cited below are identified by their numbers in the Johnson edition. The text has been normalized.) The subjects of Dickinson’s poetry are, broadly, the subjects of lyric tradition: love, nature, death, and God. Her religious attitudes, in all their bewildering variety, permeate the bulk of her verse. Except for a brief conversion experience in adolescence, she resisted both family pressures and the revivalist fervor that moved through New England in her time. In some poems she is seemingly the orthodox believer, ‘‘Given in marriage unto Thee’’ (317). More often she acknowledges herself the disbeliever whom ‘‘Christ omitted,’’ observing of her exclusion that ‘‘The abdication of belief/ Makes the behavior small’’ (1551). Characteristically, she is both doubter and quester, probing the mysteries of death, immortality, and eternity, appropriating biblical sources of Calvinist theology, but preferring to question on her own terms— ‘‘Infinitude, hadst thou no face/ That I might look on Thee?’’ (564). The grand abstractions come to hand as readily as her metaphors for God, whom she may address with a familiarity that would have scandalized her ancestors. He is her ‘‘Visitor,’’ ‘‘our old neighbor, God,’’ ‘‘Banker,’’ ‘‘Shopmall,’’ even the remorseless ‘‘Inquisitor,’’ who withholds from his victims the release of death. There is another God, the one the unbeliever cannot approach, the withdrawn God she knows ‘‘exists/ Somewhere, in silence.’’ And the silence is unendurable—a jest that has ‘‘crawled too far’’ (338). Death, on the other hand, is the ‘‘mighty’’ reality. She contemplates it with chilling comprehension, both in the abstract and in the particular. As in other poems, Dickinson’s fascination with death is not macabre; it is prompted by her awareness of the irreducible separation of the dead from the living. The tragedy lies in the inability of the living to come to terms with the separation— with what she elsewhere calls ‘‘the distance/ On the look of Death’’ (258). When Dickinson imagines her own death, she explores the other side. The viewpoint is reversed; it is that of the corpse, which must try to accept the separation of the living from the dead. In one of her most famous poems, ‘‘Because I could not stop for Death’’ (712), death appears personified, and with the eerie ‘‘civility’’ of a
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gentleman caller, escorts her to her grave: ‘‘The carriage held but just ourselves/ And Immortality.’’ The prospects of immortality are left uncertain. Its significance is that it is her only companion in her isolation from the world left behind. In some poems, death may be simply a welcome release into oblivion; in others it contains the tantalizing possibility of salvation. In this poem it is a horrifying sentence to the solitude of unending existence. Dickinson’s love poems are also usually about parting, separation, and loss. They support the biographical evidence that she suffered from a secret and hopeless love explaining her years of seclusion. The identity of the man has not been established. Circumstantial evidence suggests Charles Wadsworth, a married minister with whom she corresponded for many years. Other candidates have been argued. The most impassioned poems are the ‘‘renunciation’’ and ‘‘bridal’’ poems of the 1860s, in which earthly separation is a prelude to spiritual reunion in heaven. In these, the theological doctrines of Divine Election and the Marriage Covenant are applied to a spiritual ‘‘contract’’ with a temporal groom. The subject is sometimes handled with an ingenuity reminiscent of John Donne, as in ‘‘I cannot live with you’’ (640), and ‘‘’Twas a long parting’’ (625). The poems, however, are highly generalized and, without sustaining particulars, tend to be unconvincing. At their worst, as in ‘‘Mine by the right of the white election’’ (528), they become a series of ecstatic assertions, an abandonment to excess verging on mental unbalance. The best poems are those that are least reliant upon religious vocabulary and which deal simply, often very movingly, with the grief of separation. Many of Dickinson’s nature poems are slight, whimsical exercises describing the particulars available in her own garden— a caterpillar, a garden snake, a robin, or butterfly. Their charm is in their metaphorical exactitude. A snake becomes a ‘‘whip-lash,/ Unbraiding in the sun’’ (986). In its larger aspects, nature may be responsive to her moods, but it never becomes the surrogate divinity of Emersonian transcendentalism. It remains remote, a ‘‘haunted house’’ from which man is excluded. It is an ominous reminder of transiency and human isolation, for which Dickinson supplies her own religious analogues. An impressive example is the poem beginning, ‘‘There’s a certain slant of light,/ Winter afternoons,/ That oppresses like the heft/Of cathedral tunes’’ (258). Nature is here sealed in seasonal death, but for man, death translates as ‘‘the seal, Despair,’’ or spiritual death. This is one of Dickinson’s finest poems. Dickinson’s letters supplement her poetry. They relate her early reactions to death, notably the death of a girlfriend her own age, and the religious stresses of adolescence when she saw herself ‘‘standing alone in rebellion.’’ She often refers to her loneliness, but there are early hints, too, that her highly sensitive nature found refuge in isolation. As her letters increasingly become her only contact with the world, her dependency upon her father and brother extends to other men, with whom she establishes a pupil-teacher relationship. The letters to Charles Wadsworth have been lost, but there is evidence his move to California precipitated an emotional crisis. His departure coincides with the beginning of her serious dedication to poetry and of her most
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productive years. About the same time, the friend who ‘‘saved her life’’ appears. This was Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a poetry critic for Atlantic Monthly, to whom she submitted four of her poems. Higginson’s response initiated a correspondence lasting more than two decades, during which he served as friend and literary mentor. Unfortunately, he appears to have been a man of conventional tastes, and his limited appreciation of her work may have confirmed her fear of publication. Aside from biographical interest, the letters are marked very early by Dickinson’s talent for language. She recreates in detail the limited world she knew—Amherst, the meeting house, daily family life—and she entertains with a surprising flare for witty appraisals of neighbors and family members. She shows little interest in external matters, even a civil war. The personality is present in her need for warm, human exchange and in her sensibility; but the inner life, which is the life of her poetry, rarely surfaces. The strengths, as well as the strangeness, of Dickinson’s poetry derive in large measure from her Puritan heritage. She saw, as she said, ‘‘New Englandly.’’ In the waning years of Puritanism, life remained for her a spiritual drama. She lived the drama, and she recorded it with the terseness of her native idiom. She did not translate the terms of the conflict simplistically into those of good and evil—evil did not interest her—but into the shifting oppositions of doubt and belief, of the known and the unknowable. Even her major themes—denial and renunciation—were the themes of the Puritan pulpit, enacted in the rigorous lives and other-worldliness of her ancestors. Her favorite verse forms were the short lines and stanza patterns of the hymnal. Dickinson is noted for the technical irregularities that aroused the scorn of some of her 19th-century reviewers—and caused drastic revisions by early editors: off-rhymes, broken meters, curious punctuation, and ungrammatical phrasing. These are given less importance by the less conventional-minded critics of today. The flaws rarely obtrude on her better poetry, and when they do, they hardly outweigh its virtues. At her best, she is a skillful prosodist, who adapted rhyme and meter to her purposes, achieving emotional shadings unobtainable by conventional means. Her elliptical grammar remains troublesome. It adds to an already highly abbreviated style the mark of mannerism, of private note-taking. In this century, Yvor Winters, Alan Tate, and R. P. Blackmur were among the first important critics to recognize her stature as a major poet. Winters’ assessment that she is ‘‘one of the greatest poets of our language’’ has stood. At extremes, she is childish or overdramatic. The ‘‘oddity’’ of her verse is more often than not the oddity of her genius for powerful expression, unexpected turns, and striking phrases. Her great achievement is that she confronted implacable truths with dreadful honesty and—in the words of another woman poet, Louise Bogan—had the ‘‘power to say the unsayable.’’ OTHER WORKS: Selected titles: Poems by Emily Dickinson, Second Series, edited by M. L. Todd and T. W. Higginson (1891).
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Poems by Emily Dickinson, Third Series, edited by M. L. Todd (1896). The Single Hound, edited by M. D. Bianchi (1914). The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by M. D. Bianchi and A. L. Hampson (1924). Further Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by M. Bianchi and A. L. Hampson (1929). The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by M. D. Bianchi and A. L. Hampson (1930). Unpublished Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by M. D. Bianchi and A. L. Hampson (1935). Poems by Emily Dickinson, edited by M. D. Bianchi and A. L. Hampson (1937). Ancestors’ Brocades: The Literary Debut of Emily Dickinson, edited by M. T. Bingham (1945). Bolts of Melody: New Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by M. L. Todd and M. T. Bingham (1945). The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by T. H. Johnson (1955). The Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by T. H. Johnson and T. Ward (1958). The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson, edited by J. Leyda (1960). Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson’s Poems, edited by T. H. Johnson (1961). The Master Letters of Emily Dickinson (1986). Selected Letters of Emily Dickinson (1986). Eleven Poems by Emily Dickinson (1988). A Brighter Garden: Poetry (1989). Inland Souls: Emily Dickinson Poems, Mary Beth Fogarty Paper Drawings (1989). Emily Dickinson Journal (1992). The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson (1993). The Works of Emily Dickinson (1994). Emily Dickinson’s Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing (1995). Seven Poems of Emily Dickinson (1995). Skies in Blossom: The Nature Poetry of Emily Dickinson (1995). Emily Dickinson: Selected Poems (1996). A Light Exists in Spring, and Other Poems (1996). The Essential Dickinson (1996). Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson’s Poems (1997). Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson (1998). The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1999). Both the Jones Library at Amherst College and the Houghton Library at Harvard University house collections of Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Alfrey, S., The Sublime of Intense Sociability: Emily Dickinson, H. D., and Gertrude Stein (1999). Anderson, C. R., Emily Dickinson’s Poetry: Stairway of Surprise (1960). Blackmur, R. P., Language as Gesture (1952). Cameron, S., Choosing Not Choosing (1992). Caze, A., ed., Emily Dickinson (1997). Chase, R., Emily Dickinson (1951). Cunningham, J. V., Collected Essays (1976). Donoghue, D., Emily Dickinson (1969). Eberwein, J. D., ed., An Emily Dickinson Encyclopedia (1998). Farr, J., The Passion of Emily Dickinson (1994). Franklin, R. W., ed., The Mansucript Books of Emily Dickinson (2 volumes, 1981). Frye, N., Fables of Identity (1963). Fuller, J., The Diary of Emily Dickinson (1993). Fulton, A., Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry (1999). Grabher, G., et al eds., Emily Dickinson Handbook (1998). Gelpi, J., Emily Dickinson: The Mind of the Poet (1965). Griffith, C., The Long Shadow: Emily Dickinson’s Tragic Poetry (1964). Higgins, D., Portrait of Emily Dickinson: The Poet and Her Prose (1967). Juhasz, ed., Feminist Critics Read Emily Dickinson (1983). Loeffelholz, M., Dickinson and the Boundaries of Feminist Thought (1991). Longsworth, P., The World of Emily Dickinson (1997). Lundin, R.,
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Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief (1998). Miller, C., Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar (1987). Pearce, R. H., The Continuity of American Poetry (1961). Perkins, C. N., 100 Authors Who Shaped World History (1996). Petrino, E. A., Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries: Women’s Verse in America, 1820-1885 (1998). St. Armand, B. L., Emily Dickinson and her Culture: The Soul’s Society (1984). Sewall, R. B., The Life of Emily Dickinson (1974). Simon, M., and T. H. Parsons, eds., Transcendentalism and Its Legacy (1966). Small, J. J., Postitive as Sound: Emily Dickinson’s Rhyme (1990). Smith, M. N., Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson (1992). Stein, E., A Ribbon at a Time: A Portrait of Emily Dickinson (1996). Strait, D. H., The Work of Community: Solitude, Service, and Experience in Selected Prose and Poetry of George Herbert and Emily Dickinson (dissertation, 1998). Tanter, M. L., ‘‘Behind the Wall of Sense’’: Emily Dickinson and her Nineteenth-Century British Writers (dissertation, 1996). Tate, A., Collected Essays (1959). Teegarden, L. M., ‘‘The Search of the Circumferencial Poet: A Study of the Religious Questionings of Emily Dickinson’’ (thesis, 1994). Ward, T., The Capsule of the Mind: Chapters in the Life of Emily Dickinson (1961). Winters, Y., Maule’s Curse (1938). Wolff, C. G., Emily Dickinson (1986). Other references: American Literature (Sept., 1994). Architectural Digest (July, 1992). Perspectives USA (Spring 1956). Legacy (1998). Journal of American History (1999). NYRB (May 1990, 1999). NYTBR (December 1998). New England Quarterly (June 1993, 1997). —MARGARET PETERSON
DIDION, Joan Born 5 December 1934, Sacramento, California Daughter of Frank R. and Eduene Jerrett Didion; married John Gregory Dunne, 1964 Joan Didion graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a B.A. in English in 1956, and in the same year became an associate feature editor with Vogue magazine in New York City. She remained at Vogue until 1963, the year in which she published Run River, her first novel. Between 1963 and 1969, Didion wrote essays and feature articles for Vogue, the National Review, Harper’s, Holiday, and, most regularly, the Saturday Evening Post. Her first collection of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem was published in 1968, and in the same year she became a contributing editor of Life magazine. Slouching Towards Bethlehem’s essays, all published previously (the majority in the Saturday Evening Post) make a powerful statement about American society in the 1960s. The title essay describes the variety of young people Didion met in 1967 when she spent some time in Haight-Ashbury. It is a vivid narrative, a
recording of actual dialogue conveying the pathetic naiveté of the ‘‘flower children,’’ drifting through drug-filled days, their lives circumscribed by a few vague ideas rendered only in pale and repetitious platitudes. The other essays that comprise the first section of the collection, entitled ‘‘Life Styles in the Golden Land,’’ are companion pieces to the title essay in that they either dramatize a desperation for immediate gratification or recall with nostalgia the old American values of courage, self-sufficiency, and privacy. In all of these essays, California emerges as the last frontier of American idealism, the place where people act out their largely vain hopes for peace, for community, for eternal romance. The two final sections of Slouching Towards Bethlehem consist of five personal essays and seven that seek to capture the peculiar spirit and flavor of a geographical place. These 12 essays mingle the objective and the frankly personal; they provide an insight into Didion’s background and her character, which is observant, self-critical, unsentimental, and keenly sensitive to all types of irony and incongruity. Didion has all the qualities of a brilliant essayist. Her themes are clear, her anecdotes dramatic, her style swift and crisp. In addition to their merit as models of prose style, her essays increase our understanding of her fiction. ‘‘Notes from a Native Daughter’’ narrates the history of the Sacramento Valley, the setting for Run River, and ‘‘Los Angeles Notebook’’ depicts this city as one of impersonal tensions, while providing sketches of the barren relationships we find in Play It as It Lays. Between 1971, the year in which her second novel, Play It as It Lays appeared, and 1977, Didion concentrated primarily on her fiction, pausing only to do an occasional screenplay with her husband. (Didion and Dunne collaborated on the screenplay for the film version of Play It as It Lays, and on the script for the Barbra Streisand version of A Star Is Born.) Her novel A Book of Common Prayer appeared in March 1977. In 1972 Didion alienated many feminists with an essay in the New York Times Book Review that attacked feminists for their tendency to become obsessed with trivia. The essay makes explicit a view of women that is pervasive in her fiction; women share, she believes, a ‘‘sense of living one’s deepest life underwater, that dark involvement with blood and birth and death.’’ In the same essay, Didion attacked narrow feminist interpretations of literature, expressing the view that since the writer is committed to the ‘‘exploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities,’’ all political interpretations of literature must of necessity represent a distortion. Ironically, there is much in Didion’s fiction to appeal to the true feminist. Each of her novels concerns the experience of women—their relationships with men, with their parents and children, and with each other. Maria Wyeth, the central character of Play It as It Lays, feels her closest bonds with her daughter and her dead mother; Grace Strasser-Mendana, the narrator of A Book of Common Prayer, is not only the strongest and most rational character in the novel, but also feels a sisterly bond with Charlotte Douglas, whose life and death form the subject of the book.
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Didion’s deepest concern, however, is with the illusions on which people build their lives, illusions made necessary by the death of old values and the absence of viable new ones. Her novels dramatize the consequences of social, economic, and political change that occurs so rapidly as to produce disorder in individual lives, in families, and, ultimately, in whole societies. In Run River, set in the early 1940s, Didion studies the younger generation of two old families of California’s Sacramento Valley. In this work, Didion demonstrated the qualities for which her fiction has become known—swift action, convincing dialogue, and the ability to render complex female characters struggling to find purpose in a disordered society. The chief weakness of the book is the wooden character of Everett; as the pivotal male figure loved desperately by the two central female characters, he required sharper delineation than Didion gave him. Play It as It Lays is a biting portrayal of a world in which people use each other to gain success, recognition, or sensual pleasure. Because men possess most of the power, women are especially likely to be victims. As narrator of the novel, Didion is unobtrusive, completely neutral; she simply presents Maria’s thoughts and actions. As a consequence of her technique, the reader is not sure of her attitude toward her central character. Some reviewers of the novel considered Maria the victim of a brutal society; others considered her malevolent. The truth lies somewhere between these extreme interpretations. As a child/ woman, Maria is far too fragile for the society in which she lived; however, through her passivity she participates in her own exploitation so her breakdown becomes, in effect, a self-confirming prophecy. In A Book of Common Prayer, Didion’s strongest female character yet serves as narrator. This is Didion’s most ambitious novel in several respects; it has the most complex narrative structure: since the narrator met Charlotte Douglas late in both their lives, she must convincingly reconstruct all the previous action involving her. It also has the most complex cast of characters, four of whom—Charlotte, Grace, and Charlotte’s two husbands—are fully developed, and the most complex setting, with scenes in San Francisco, New York City, and several Southern cities, all interlaced with scenes in Boca Grande, a fictitious Central American country Didion renders as convincing as any of the other locales. In these two novels, Didion has refined a tight and colloquial style, stripped of any expansive descriptions or explanations. The strength of her fiction resides in this dramatic style, bringing the reader close to the events and characters and to render complex, often ironic, relationships through pure dialogue. Since 1979, most of Didion’s work has been nonfiction; she has published only one novel, Democracy (1984), which is fiction appearing as nonfiction, even journalism. Didion places herself in the book as a narrator recounting the story of the Christian and Victor families and of their rise and eventual fall. Deliberately blurring the distinctions between fiction and journalism, Didion creates a convincing narrative, especially in its climax against the backdrop of the U.S. evacuation of Saigon and the fall of the city.
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The White Album (1979) is Didion’s second collection of essays, most of which were previously published in such magazines as Esquire and Life. The essays record her response to events of the late 1960s and early 1970s, including reflections on the Manson family, and a return to the subject of Hollywood, described here ironically as ‘‘the last extant stable society.’’ The volume also reprints Didion’s essay on the women’s movement, which caused considerable controversy among feminists when it first appeared in 1972. Didion takes less political looks at Georgia O’Keeffe, writes about personal experiences with migraines and travels in Hawaii and Bogotá and even includes her own psychiatric evaluation. Salvador (1982) is a difficult, extended essay documenting Didion’s two-week stay in the country. In one sense a travel diary, the book seeks to provide insight into the complexities plaguing Central America. She presents the conflict in El Salvador with little explanation or background; the confusion of the narrative mirrors the senselessness of the violence and hate she finds there. Often the people she meets who are involved in the fighting do not seem to understand the conflict themselves. Quite scathingly critical of American involvement in the crisis, Didion finds the ‘‘mechanism of terror’’ to be beyond irony. Salvador is Didion at her most despairing. In Miami (1987), Didion analyzes the many complexities of the society, culture, and politics of a city of exiles and racial groups deeply at odds. Within the context of the history of U.S.Cuban relations and its many failures, she explores the diverse views and feelings of Cuban exiles and the impact of the experience of exile. The book richly demonstrates Didion’s ability to see the many sides of a difficult and confusing situation. Didion’s ability to recognize, imagine, and capture a variety of viewpoints and her mastery of the language establish her as a major writer. As critic Joan Zseleckzy concluded, ‘‘It is not any journalist who can write a novel. It is not any journalist who can tell a story.’’ Didion has continued to contribute to a variety of magazines, particularly the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and to write screenplays with her husband (including 1996’s Up Close and Personal starring Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer). All of her work takes an honest, often cynical view of politics, society, personal relationships, even of Didion herself. A master of language and prose, she conveys ideas succinctly in a spare but eloquent style. Believing that ‘‘we tell ourselves stories in order to live,’’ her work continues to be driven by her sense of moral urgency. In Didion’s recent literary offering, The Last Thing He Wanted (1996), she weaves a web of covert operations and cloaked assassination attempts in a stunningly written arms-deal-for-hostages story making it all too clear that American foreign policy is not always created by branches of the government. Told in the objective, almost disembodied voice of investigative journalist Lilianne Owen, the reader follows along as the reporter reconstructs the story 10 years after its actual occurrence. Didion’s format in The Last Thing He Wanted is quite effective. The reader is led through the journalist’s reconstruction
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of the story and, in effect, eavesdrops on the ‘‘raw notes’’ dictated into the journalist’s tape recorder. Lilianne is an enigma. She very often seems to be the protagonist Elena, but reminds the reader she (Lilianne) is only reconstructing Elena’s story. An interesting approach, especially since the reader is never given much information about Lilianne. When asked why she wanted to write a thriller such as Last Thing, Didion replied, ‘‘I had never written anything that depended totally on working out a plot, where everything has to mean something. It was a technical exercise. It is quite hard to do, but quite interesting.’’ The result is some of Didion’s finest work.
OTHER WORKS: Telling Stories (1978). After Henry (1992, in the U.K. as Sentimental Journeys). Some Women (1992).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Friedman, E. G., Joan Didion: Essays and Conversations (1984). Gender Studies: New Directions in Feminist Criticism (1986). Hanley, L. T., Writing War: Fiction, Gender, and Memory (1991). Henderson, K. U., Joan Didion (1981). Merivale, P., ed., Innocence, Loss, and Recovery in the Art of Joan Didion (1989). Pearlman, M., ed., American Women Writing Fiction (1989). Winchell, M. R., Joan Didion (1980). Reference works: CA (1969). CANR (1985). CLC (1973, 1975, 1978, 1980, 1985). CB (1978). DLB (1978). DLBY (1981, 1986). FC (1990). MTCW (1991). Modern American Women Writers (1991). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: America (5 April 1997). American Literature (Oct. 1987). Booklist (July 1996). Commentary (July 1977). Critique (Spring 1984). Esquire (June 1990, Mar. 1996). Harper’s (Dec. 1971). Hollins Critic (Oct. 1989). Ms. (Jan. 1973). Massachusetts Review (Spring 1983). NR (25 Mar. 1996). NYTBR (3 Apr. 1977, 17 May 1992). PW (13 Nov. 1987, 24 June 1996). Saturday Review (Apr. 1982). South Carolina Review (Spring 1989). Working Woman (April 1982). —KATHY HENDERSON,
forces its way through the picturesque. Annie Dillard’s writings beautifully depict earthly places, but she is no tourist. Nor, as some would have it, is she a sort of roving regionalist. Raised in the city, she adopted the Blue Ridge creeks, valleys, and hills around Roanoke, Virginia, during and after her days at Hollins College. She now is scholar-in-residence at Western Washington State College and lives on northern Puget Sound. Dillard startled critics with Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974. Viewed by many as a naturalist who brilliantly revealed nature’s fecundity and violence, Dillard was compared to writers as disparate as Thoreau and Melville. Nature is not her real focus, however. She says of her work, ‘‘Art is my interest, mysticism my message, Christian mysticism.’’ Indeed, the ultimate meaning of all her work is missed if Dillard is interpreted as a Thoreauvian transcendentalist. The faults identified by many commentators—her extreme allusiveness and toodense imagery, her obliviousness to what humans have done to nature, her ‘‘escapism’’—can all be accounted for if the reader understands that Dillard’s main subject is not creation (nature), but Creator. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is, she says, ‘‘really a book of theology’’ it records the changing patterns of nature over a year in a few acres on Tinker Creek, in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The year is as liturgical as it is natural, and this ‘‘journal’’ is a mystic meditation on the terror and glory of creation. The terror is captured in such episodes as the giant water bug sucking out the frog’s life blood or the praying mantis consuming her mate as he couples with her. Also revealed is creation’s glory, experienced only in unselfconscious instants, where the ego is diminished in selfless epiphanies of complete understanding. Dillard’s mission is to see fully. Tickets for a Prayer Wheel (1974) presents several visionary and difficult poems that use private religious symbolism. Other poems in the volume are more accessible, excellent topical works which focus on a quotation. The title poem of the volume prefigures the ideas and images of Holy the Firm (1977). The prayer wheel ‘‘tickets’’ are various prayers, as the narrator begins: ‘‘Our family is looking / for someone who knows how to pray.’’
UPDATED BY SHAUNA SUMMERS AND REBECCA C. CONDIT
DILLARD, Annie Born 30 April 1945, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Daughter of Frank and Pain Lambert Doak; married Richard Dillard, 1965. For the tourist, places are ends in themselves, scenes to be consumed by the ravishing eye. For the pilgrim, places are means—of refreshment, of soul-building, of education about the Way. To the pilgrim, allegory dissolves mere scenery, the picture
A parable of creation and the incarnation, a revelation of grace in the face of the suffering and evil of the world, Holy the Firm is concentrated, spare, deep, intensely poetic. The emphasis is still on the narrator’s relationship with the Creator. The work is a very personal explanation of the doctrines of immanence and emanation. To immanence, ‘‘Christ is redundant, and all things are one,’’ while to emanation, the world is wholly other, linked to God through Christ. Dillard, like many mystics, opts for a reconciliation of these two views: ‘‘And the universe is real and not a dream, not a manufacture of the senses; subject may know object, knowledge may proceed.’’ Describing the ‘‘writing life’’ Dillard asserts that ‘‘the art must enter the body.’’ From her Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek she establishes this relationship with both her
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writing and the environment it reflects. Rather than objectively observing the scenes of her life, she experiences them as religious encounters. Her early work, up through Holy the Firm, secured Dillard a place among both naturalist and mystical essayists. Within her natural descriptions, Dillard theologizes on creation and its creator. A searching spirituality tempers her acute physical perceptions to create works heavy in allusionary and abstract meaning. After Holy the Firm, Dillard began to change her focus from external to internal environments. With the 1982 publications of Living by Fiction and Teaching a Stone to Talk, the grand spiritual abstraction that characterized her early natural vision gave way to a more personal and human intimacy. Living by Fiction explores the landscape of fiction as a natural sphere of influence and means of personal definition, while Teaching a Stone to Talk continues to rely on nature as landscape. Although her earlier work suggests that meaning is present and observable in nature, Dillard’s later work begins to examine her personal interactions with the landscape, recognizing that most meaning is humanly imposed on a scene. Dillard clarified this movement with the 1984 publication of Encounters with Chinese Writers, a collection of essays based on her experience as a member of the U.S. Cultural Delegation to China in 1982. Describing a foreign landscape and people, Dillard seeks personal definition within cultural difference. In her autobiography, the National Book Critics Circle-nominated An American Childhood (1987), Dillard brings that search back to the most familiar of all landscapes—childhood. Both works exhibit a fluid exchange between the writer and her landscape. The writing itself becomes more concrete and accessible. By the time of publication of The Writing Life (1989) Dillard has struggled to identify the tracks of her thoughts and the fissures they leave in the observed landscapes. Her writing no longer exposes only the interaction of God and nature as creator and creation, but the human mind as both creator and creation. Dillard’s movement into fiction attests to her attempt to understand the complex relationship between the human mind and the natural world. The Living (1992) chronicles the growth of Bellingham Bay and its inhabitants. Although the novel is historical, Dillard concentrates on the parallel evolutions of the personal and the physical landscapes. Literary critics have commented on the difficulty of pinning Dillard down. Indeed, ambivalence is the engine that powers her work: the strength with which she can make an argument and then subsequently (or even simultaneously) present an opposing view with equal conviction. A Dillard trademark is the uninhibited, unbridled awe with which she views the world, and this marvel extends to its apparent contradictions. She depicts the wonder of God’s creation, at the same time wondering if He gives a hoot about it. In a recent essay, ‘‘Sand and Clouds,’’ she quotes the Mahabarata: ‘‘Of all the world’s wonders, which is the most wonderful? That no man, though he sees others dying all around him, believes that he himself will die.’’
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In ‘‘The Wreck of Time, Taking our Century’s Measure,’’ Dillard piles on statistic after statistic (130,000 drowned in Bangladesh, 69 suns in the universe for every living person), hammering home the idea of our insignificance; at the same time she makes clear her belief that while her readers may be moved by these numbers, they will nonetheless be unable to give up the idea that their individual lives matter. Death has always been ubiquitous in Dillard’s writing; it has perhaps been especially morbid dating back to The Living, in which she fills a small cemetery with dead characters. This millennial essay is steeped in morbidity— horrible natural disasters juxtaposed with the man-made horrors of Holocaust and purge. She makes a strong case, concluding: ‘‘We arise from dirt and dwindle to dirt, and the might of the universe is arrayed against us.’’ Yet beside this she sets the strong possibility that all life is sacred. Perhaps Dillard’s writing should be seen as not only ambivalent but provisional, as suggested by the title of her 1999 collection of essays, For the Time Being. Mornings Like This (1995) is a collection of poems constructed from sentences Dillard lifted from sources as various as an antique medical text and the New Testament Apocrypha. ‘‘Sarcasm has no place in literature,’’ Dillard told an interviewer in 1996, ‘‘but irony has the highest place.’’ She introduces Mornings Like This with: ‘‘Half the poems seek to serve poetry’s oldest and most sincere aims with one of its newest and most ironic methods, to dig deep with a shallow tool. The other half are just jokes.’’ True to her word the book is alternately heartbreaking and hilarious, irony in service of ambivalence. Dillard’s older work continues to find new readers. In addition to being heavily anthologized, it has been collected in Three by Dillard (1990) and The Annie Dillard Reader (1995). She was the 1988 editor of The Best American Essays and editor of the 1995 anthology, Modern American Memoirs. Her latest project was a new book, ‘‘a personal narration about God and the problem of pain.’’ Dillard resides in Middletown, Connecticut, with her husband and daughter. A writer-in-residence and professor at Wesleyan University, she has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1980-81) and the Guggenheim Foundation (1985-86).
OTHER WORKS: ‘‘Sand and Clouds,’’ Raritan (fall 1998).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bawer, B., ‘‘Quiet—Author Suffering,’’ in American Scholar (Summer 1990). Clark, S., ‘‘Annie Dillard: The Woman in Nature and the Subject of Nonfiction,’’ in Literary Nonfiction (1989). Guenther, C., ‘‘Dillard Finds Poems in Others’ Work,’’ in St. Louis Post-Dispatch (25 June 1995). Johnson, S. H., The Space Between: Literary Epiphany in the Work of Annie Dillard (1992). Kingsolver, B., ‘‘Whipsawed in Washington,’’ in Nation (25 May 1992). Scheick, W., ‘‘Annie Dillard: Narrative Fringe,’’ in Contemporary American Women Writers: Narrative
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Strategies (1985). Suhl, G., ‘‘Ideas are Tough; Irony is Easy,’’ in Yale Herald (online, 4 Oct. 1996). Smith, P. A., ‘‘The Ecotheology of Annie Dillard,’’ Cross Currents (Fall 1995.) Other references: America (8 Oct. 1977). Amer. Lit. 59:1 (March 1987). Belles Lettres 8 (Fall 1992). Booklist, (1 June 1995). Commentary (Oct. 1974). CW (24 Oct. 1975). J. Feminist Studies in Religion 6 (Spring 1990). Harper’s (Jan. 1998). Hungry Mind Review (1 Nov. 1995). LA Times (25 May 1992). LATBR (25 Sept. 1988). Ms. (June 1985). Nation (16 Oct. 1989, 25 May 1992). NewR (6 Apr. 1974). NYTBR (24 Mar. 1974, 25 Sept. 1977, 9 May 1982, 23 Sept. 1984, 27 Sept. 1987, 18 Nov. 1990). Sewanee Review 92 (Winter 1984). Signs 15 (Spring 1990). So. Atl. Q. 85 (Spring 1986). VQR (Fall 1974). WRB (Jan. 1988). —MARGARET MCFADDEN-GERBER, UPDATED BY JULLIE ANN FIORE AND VALERIE VOGRIN
DINNIES, Anna Peyre (Shackelford) Born 7 February 1805, Georgetown, South Carolina; died 8 August 1886, New Orleans, Louisiana Also wrote under: Moina, Rachel, Mrs. Anna Peyre Daughter of W. F. Shackelford; married John C. Dinnies, 1830 A lifelong resident of the South, Anna Peyre Dinnies showed at an early age the promise of genius and a talent for poetry. Her father, a judge and a distinguished scholar, supported her literary ambitions and is said to have ‘‘happily and effectively’’ influenced her literary taste. Fortunate enough to be educated at the Female Seminary of the Miss Ramsays in Charleston, South Carolina, Dinnies was further encouraged and her talents developed. In 1826 Anna and John C. Dinnies began a four-year correspondence, but Anna did not meet her husband-to-be until a week before their wedding. Sarah Josepha Hale wrote in her anthology, The Ladies’ Wreath (1837), that the Dinnies’ marriage contract was ‘‘entered into solely from sympathy and congeniality of mind and taste.’’ Although Dinnies wrote before she was married, her published poetry comes chiefly after 1830. Known as a poet of ‘‘Domestic Affections’’ because she relied heavily on themes of married life, contemporary critics took her work to be a reflection of her own happily wedded state. Hale commented that Dinnies’ poetry ‘‘breathes the tender, trusting, and devoted feeling of conjugal love, in a manner very flattering to her husband.’’ Whether or not Dinnies’ poems reflect her personal happiness, they do present an idealized vision of marriage. Dinnies’ most famous and frequently anthologized poem, ‘‘The Wife,’’ is typical of her work. In it she tells of the dependency of a wife upon her husband:
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I could have stemmed misfortune’s tide, And borne the rich one’s sneer, Have braved the haughty glance of pride, Nor shed a single tear. I could have smiled on every blow From Life’s full quiver thrown, While I might gaze on thee, and know I should not be ‘alone.’ Others of Dinnies’ poems are as unremittingly romantic. Focusing as they do on the modesty of woman and the perfections of marriage, they strike the modern reader as excessively emotional. For example, in her poem, ‘‘The Blush,’’ she defines a blush as ‘‘A gush of feeling from the soul!’’ Dinnies often uses emotion to a didactic end, as in ‘‘To My Husband’s First Gray Hair.’’ Here the wife of the poem first laments the gray hair and later sees in it a reminder that all things must pass away. Dinnies’ work is not entirely without humor, depth, and an occasional sharp edge. In ‘‘Wedded Love,’’ the wife of the poem lifts her husband out of his depression not by praising his virtues but by affirming her own good taste. He is superior to other men because she would not have ‘‘stooped to bind / Her fate unto a common mind.’’ The poem ‘‘Addressed to My Daughter While She Slept’’ shows another side of Dinnies’ work. Although the first stanza gives the reader the traditional image of a mother and her sleeping child, the next six stanzas focus on the unhappy changes that accompany childhood and young womanhood. The last stanza alludes to the difficult life of an adult woman and all the ‘‘sorrows woman must sustain.’’ The majority of Dinnies’ literary work appeared in various Southern journals. She wrote for the Illinois Quarterly under the name of Moina, and she contributed a series of didactic articles called ‘‘Rachel’s What Not’’ for the weekly Catholic Standard, edited by her husband. Dinnies also published an illustrated volume called The Floral Year (1847), containing 100 compositions in 12 groups, along with illustrations of different bouquets, one for each month. This volume was typical of the many early 19th-century anthologies of ‘‘flower sentiment,’’ in which poetry is combined with pictures of flowers. Although she published only one book, Dinnies’ poetry was frequently anthologized in such volumes. Today her book and others like it seem literary curiosities. Nonetheless, Dinnies and other traditional poets of the early 19th century take their place as precursors of more significant American poets, Emily Dickinson among them. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Coggeshall, W. T., The Poets and Poetry of the West: With Biographical and Critical Notes (1861). Griswold, R. W., The Female Poets of America (1873). Hale, S. J., Flora’s Interpreter; or the American Book of Flowers and Sentiments (1848). Hale, S. J., The Ladies’ Wreath (1837). Stedman, E. C., ed., An American Anthology, 1787-1900 (1900). Watts, E. S., The Poetry of American Women from 1632 to 1945 (1977). Reference works: A Cyclopedia of Female Biography (1857). Woman’s Record (1853). —BILLIE J. WAHLSTROM
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DiPRIMA, Diane Born 6 August 1934, Brooklyn, New York Daughter of Francis and Emma Mallozzi DiPrima; married Alan S. Marlowe, 1962 (divorced); Grant Fisher, 1972 (divorced); children: Jeanne, Dominique, Alexander, Tara, Rudra Since the late 1950s, Diane DiPrima has earned recognition for writings marked by a spirit of rebellion and countercultural exploration. Perhaps best known as a poet and editor, she has also published novels, plays, and translations. Her early writing chronicles the experiences of the Beat Generation, with special attention to the female dimensions of this culture. Together with LeRoi Jones (Imiri Baraka), DiPrima coedited the Floating Bear (1961-69), a monthly poetry newsletter that became one of the most influential publications of its kind, featuring many important Beat writers. In all her work, she has maintained a strong consciousness of her identity as a woman writer, depicting through personal relationships, political tensions, and mythological images a particularly female experience or truth. DiPrima was born in Brooklyn, New York, a second generation American of Italian descent. She began writing at the age of seven and had decided to become a poet by the age of fourteen. Enrolling in Swarthmore College at seventeen, DiPrima dropped out two years later and returned to New York, to Greenwich Village and the emerging Beat scene there. She published her first book of poems, This Kind of Bird Flies Backwards, with LeRoi Jones’s Totem Press in 1958. These poems make generous use of the Beat idiom, in such lines as ‘‘Like man don’t flip, I’m hip you / cooled this scene.’’ The book also reveals DiPrima’s early interest in myths and fables, which become central motives in Loba: Parts I-VII (1973), one of her major works of poetry. DiPrima’s autobiographical novel Memoirs of a Beatnik (1969) describes her experience among the Beats. Some critics consider her ‘‘female’’ experience circumscribed in comparison to the rambling adventures of such male Beats as Jack Kerouac. Others see DiPrima’s work as adding an important dimension to our understanding of the Beat world, reminding us, George Butterick notes, ‘‘that the generation spent as much time in urban ‘pads’ as it did ‘on the road,’ and that one can travel as far by human relationships as by thumb.’’ Along with the Floating Bear, DiPrima worked with several other influential poetry journals of the time, including Kulchur and Yugen. She and husband Alan Marlowe founded the Poets Press (1964-69) and the New York Poets Theatre (1961-65), which produced plays by Frank O’Hara, Robert Duncan, James Schuyler, and others. Her own plays were performed at the Living Theater in New York. In 1965 DiPrima moved to upstate New York, where she joined Timothy Leary’s psychedelic community at Millbrook. She continued to write and received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1973 and 1979. DiPrima’s poetry is often highly accessible in language and emotion, revealing ‘‘a willingness to trust language with deep
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feelings even if it is to declare more than explore those feelings.’’ Her most challenging poems use a complex symbolism that is both idiosyncratic and archetypal. These poems, Butterick writes, ‘‘represent private feelings revealed in the tradition of symbolism, if not in traditional symbols themselves.’’ In ‘‘The Waiting Room’’ (The New Handbook of Heaven, 1963) she writes: ‘‘Every human skull / uncovered, is one more home / for the spirits of darkness. / I leave the dice at the rat hole every night / no one keeps score.’’ In Loba, DiPrima turns her symbolizing to the task of creating an epic of the female principle. ‘‘Loba’’ is a protean character, transforming from spirit to beast to human, alternately representing a Lilith- and an Eve-figure. This mythic persona embodies female power in a variety of forms, as in these first lines: ‘‘O lost moon sisters / crescent in hair, sea underfoot do you wander / in blue veil, in green leaf, in tattered shawl do you wander / with goldleaf skin, with flaming hair do you wander / on Avenue A, on Bleecker Street do you wander.’’ The full 16 parts of Loba were published for the first time in 1998 to critical acclaim. Reviewer William Gargon noted that the strength of this epic poem ‘‘lies in DiPrima’s ability to ‘make it new’—to synthesize mythological elements from a wide range of cultures into a unique vision based on Navajo wolf mythology.’’ Critic Armand Schwerner argues that DiPrima’s verse is not always equal to her task: that ‘‘in the attempt to particularize within the context of ‘the life of mankind,’’’ her language ‘‘sometimes falls into banality.’’ Yet, he acknowledges, ‘‘the attempt, the order of inclusiveness, the mythopoetic reach are a contribution to that profound ongoing process of poetry which. . .continues the self-transformative aims of our alchemical fathers.’’ For the past 20 years, DiPrima has lived in Northern California, where she has written, taught, and practiced Buddhism and healing arts. From 1980 to 1986 she taught hermetic and esoteric traditions in poetry at New College of California’s short lived but important program. She now resides in San Francisco, where she is a cofounder and teacher at the San Francisco Institute of Magical and Healing Arts. Her works in progress currently include a book on Percy Bysshe Shelley as both poet and magician; a satire of life in California titled Not Quite Buffalo Stew, whose narrator is a drug smuggler named Lynx; and an autobiographical memoir called Recollections of My Life as a Woman.
OTHER WORKS: Murder Cake (1960). Like (1960). Paideuma (1960). The Discontent of a Russian Prince (1961). Dinners and Nightmares (1961, reprints 1974, 1977). The Monster (1961). Poets Vaudeville (1964). Like (1964). Combination Theater Poem and Birthday Poem for 10 People (1965). Spring and Autumn Annals (1966). Some Haiku (1966). Haiku (1967). Earthsong: Poems, 1957-1959 (1968). Audre Lord, The First Cities (1968). Monuments (1968). Hotel Albert: Poems (1968). New Mexico Poems, June-July 1967 (1968). War Poems (1968). Revolutionary
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Letters (1969). L.A. Odyssey (1969). Notes on a Summer Solstice (1969). The Book of Hours (1970). Kerhonkson Journal 1966 (1971). New As 1966 (1971). Prayer to the Mothers (1971). So Fine (1971). XV Dedications: Poems (1971). The Calculus of Variation (1972). Discovery of America (1972). Freddie: Poems (1974). North Country Medicine (1974). Brass Furnace Going Out: Song after an Abortion (1975). Whale Honey (1975). Selected Poems, 1956-1975 (1975). Loba as Eve (1975). Loba, Part 2 (1976). Revolutionary Letters, etc. (1979). Pieces of a Song: Selected Poems (1989). Zipcode: The Collected Plays of Diane DiPrima (1992). Manuscripts of Diane DiPrima are housed in the Manuscript Collection of the Southern Illinois University, in Carbondale, Illinois.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Knight, A. W., ed., The Beat Road (1984). Reference works: CANR (1984). CP (1980, 1991). DLB (1980, 1983). FC (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: American Book Review 2 (May 1980, June/ July 1991). LJ (Aug. 1998). MELUS (Fall-Winter 1987). NYTM (5 Nov. 1995). Rocky Ledge (Feb.-Mar. 1981). VV (13 June 1974, 9 May 1989). Web site: ‘‘Diane DiPrima Interview,’’ available online at http://www.rahul.net/joem/works/i-DiPrima.html (22 Sept. 1993). —MARY BURGER, UPDATED BY LEAH J. SPARKS
DISNEY, Doris Miles Born 22 December 1907, Glastonbury, Connecticut; died 9 March 1976, Fredericksburg, Virginia Daughter of Edward L. Hart and Elizabeth Malone Miles; married George J. Disney, 1936 (died); children: one daughter Doris Miles Disney was a prolific, versatile writer of mystery and suspense; she has been praised for never repeating herself, and for skillfully varying her approaches. Disney created three detectives; each is a fully realized and distinct character. Jim O’Neill, a county detective; Jefferson DiMarco, an insurance claim adjuster, the most famous; and David Madden, a U.S. postal inspector. In Disney’s fiction, suspense evolves from both plot and character. Her characters are round and consistently portrayed, their relationships and motivations often creating complex plots. She was particularly adept at characterizing children. For example, Jenny, an eight-year-old girl in Don’t Go into the Woods Today (1974), and Sandy, a sevenyear-old boy recuperating from rheumatic fever in Heavy, Heavy Hangs (1952), are sometimes cranky, frequently confused by the
grown-up world, occasionally disobedient, but often charming and always believable. Disney began with true mysteries, in which the criminal’s identity is withheld until the climax (see, for example, A Compound for Death, 1943, and Murder on a Tangent, 1945, both Jim O’Neill mysteries). Dark Road (1946), a Jeff DiMarco story, is an inverted mystery, in which the murderer’s identity and motivation are revealed early. Hazel Clements causes her husband’s death because of her desire to be reunited with an old lover. Her greed and ambition are clearly shown, but so is the awful background that helps to explain her actions. At the end, the question of responsibility is paramount, her lover recognizing he has been her unwitting accomplice. Freely adapted, this novel was the basis of a film called Fugitive Lady (released through Republic in 1951). Straw Man (1951; filmed by United Artists, 1953), a Jeff DiMarco novel, begins a true mystery but reveals the criminal’s identity midway. Loosely paralleling Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (which is alluded to), it movingly shows the alienation and withdrawal of a man wrongly convicted of murder. For several novels Disney turned to the past. At Some Forgotten Door (1966), a variation on gothic romance, has a partly predictable plot but builds suspense gradually, as the heroine fits together clues to help her understand both her origins and her present danger. Both mysteries are clarified in a powerful climactic scene. Dark Lady (1960) blends past and present; a young professor rents a cottage in which the wife of a gifted young writer had been murdered 75 years earlier. Becoming obsessed with the writer’s beautiful sister-in-law, he solves the old mystery and learns to see his own present more clearly. Disney skillfully manipulated tone as well as plot, as in Family Skeleton (1949), a Jeff DiMarco story, showing what happens when a family first conceals the accidental killing of a cantankerous uncle and then frantically tries to reclaim his body in order to collect his insurance. Their macabre misadventures were filmed by Fox as Stella (1950). More gently comic is Room for Murder (1955), set in a boarding house run by Irish spinsters, one of whom is addicted to true crime magazines and tries to solve the case for the police. The Day Miss Bessie Lewis Disappeared (1972) is more purely comic but also more astringent; Miss Bessie is an elderly termagant, and her former husband, an unsuccessful opportunist, is almost as comically inept as the two goons who trail him. Disney’s novels are consistently interesting and readable— the originality of her plots, the effectiveness of her characterizations, and her skill in controlling tone made her a leader among mystery writers. In addition, her ability to show how victims sometimes precipitate their own fates and how the commission of a crime affects the criminal gives her work a depth often lacking in this genre.
OTHER WORKS: Who Rides a Tiger (1946). Appointment at Nine (1947). Enduring Old Charms (1947). Testimony by Silence
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(1948). That Which Is Crooked (1948). Count the Ways (1949). Fire at Will (1950). Look Back on Murder (1951). Do Unto Others (1953). Prescription: Murder (1953). The Last Straw (1954). Trick or Treat (1955). Unappointed Rounds (1956). Method in Madness (1957). My Neighbor’s Wife (1957). Black Mail (1958). Did She Fall or Was She Pushed? (1959). No Next of Kin (1959). Mrs. Meeker’s Money (1961). Find the Woman (1962). Should Auld Acquaintance (1962). Here Lies. . . (1963). The Departure of Mr. Gaudette (1964). The Hospitality of the House (1964). Shadow of a Man (1965). The Magic Grandfather (1966). Night of Clear Choice (1967). Money for the Taking (1968). Voice from the Grave (1968). Two Little Children and How They Grew (1969). Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate (1970). The Chandler Policy (1971). Three’s a Crowd (1971). Only Couples Need Apply (1973). Cry for Help (1975). Winifred (1976). Papers of Doris Miles Disney can be found in the Mugar Memorial Library of Boston University.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (1994). St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (1996). LJ (15 May 1966). NYHTB (31 Oct. 1948, 21 Oct. 1951). NYTBR (13 Jan. 1946, 22 May 1949, 15 Dec. 1968). WLB (June 1954). —MARY JEAN DEMARR
DIVAKARUNI, Chitra Banerjee Born 29 July 1956, Calcutta, India Daughter of Tatini and R. K. Banerjee; married S. Murthy Divakaruni, 1979; children: Anand, Abhay Born in India, living in America, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, as one of the new authors of Indian-American life, uses her poetry and prose to form a bridge from Calcutta to California. As quoted in an interview in India Currents, ‘‘We, Indian-Americans, are still an early immigrant culture. We remember the old country and lament the loss of our roots, which adds poignancy to our writing.’’ In the same interview she spoke of crossing the boundaries from prose to poetry: ‘‘Writing poetry has taught me how to craft language carefully, whereas fiction writing has made me aware of the elements of story, characters, and drama that must exist even in poetry.’’ Divakaruni was born in Calcutta and, though Hindu, was educated at a convent school. She received her B.A. in English at the University of Calcutta and then immigrated to the United States at the age of twenty. She continued her English literature studies at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, and then at the University of California at Berkeley, where she wrote her Ph.D. thesis (1985) on the plays of Christopher Marlowe. In the late 1990s she was a creative writing professor at Foothill College in
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Los Altos Hills, California, and a writer whose works have won many awards and are translated into many languages. Divakaruni wrote three books dealing with issues of Indian women: arranged marriages, immigration, domestic violence, racism, interracial relationships, abortion, divorce, and often ultimate independence for the women. Her writings come from her own experience as well as her encounters with South Asian women through Maitri (Friendship), a helpline she was instrumental in starting in 1991. The service offers counseling and referral to women suffering from domestic violence, depression, and cultural alienation. After enrolling in a fiction writing class, she produced a book of short stories, Arranged Marriage (1995), which won the Bay Area Book Reviewers and PEN/Oakland awards for fiction, as well as the prestigious 1996 American Book Award for Fiction. These stories, according to Francine Prose, ‘‘are full of the details of Indian and Indian-American life: . . .the marriage dots on the forehead, the saris, the curries, the Hindi musical films, the marriages contracted after just a few modest minutes of ‘brideviewing,’’’ indeed the ‘‘characters are performing the strenuous balancing act of having one foot in one country, the other foot in another.’’ Ultimately, as Elaine Kim wrote in a review, these women ‘‘find out what ‘being themselves’ means, learn to take care of themselves in a new country,’’ and by doing so, ‘‘discover and understand their complex womanhood.’’ One story, ‘‘The Ultrasound,’’ about two female cousins and their subsequent pregnancies, has been expanded into her most recent novel, Sister of My Heart (1999). Divakaruni’s first novel, Mistress of Spices (1997), was wildly successful and translated into many different languages. The narrator is an ageless woman who learns the magical properties of spices and treats the people in the Oakland, California, neighborhood she inhabits as a storekeeper. Then she falls in love and must choose between her customers or her own life. As Lara Merlin put it, ‘‘Addressing the immigrant experience in particular, she [Divakaruni] asks how to negotiate between the needs of each [the self and the community] under the earth-moving stress of desire. . . .She conjures up a new American identity.’’ Mistress of Spices was shortlisted for the Orange Prize in England and called by the Los Angeles Times one of the best books of 1997. Sister of My Heart has already won praise from reviewers. It is the story of two Indian women who are born in the same home and regard themselves as sisters. They grow up, have arranged marriages, and one moves to the U.S. while the other stays home in India. This novel encompasses many of the issues women face, such as abortion, love affairs, class issues, and emotional involvement between two women. In India Currents, Divakaruni answers a question about romance in the following way: ‘‘In Sister of My Heart I wanted to show how romance complicates the lives of Anju and Sudha, though, ultimately it doesn’t destroy their bond. Our [women’s] friendships are just as important as our marriages and we should make every attempt to nurture them.’’ Divakaruni has also compiled and edited multicultural anthologies, which include stories from immigrant perspectives, for
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her students to widen their knowledge about the world and the women that inhabit a particular space in it.
OTHER WORKS: ‘‘Searching for the Goddess,’’ Woman Of Power (1990). Searching for the Goddess (1990). The Reason for Nasturtiums (1990). Black Candle: Poems about Women from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh (1991). Leaving Yuba City: New and Selected Poems (1997). English 1302 Fiction Reader: Thinking Critically About the Short Story (coeditor, 1994). Multitude: Cross-Cultural Readings for Writers (editor, 1997). We, too, Sing America: A Reader for Writers (editor, 1998).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: India Currents (interview, Feb. 1999). Reference works: Asian American Almanac (1995). Who’s Who Among Asian Americans (1994). Other references: Amerasia Journal (Spring 1996). Black Issues in Higher Education (18 Sept. 1997). Confrontation (Spring-Summer 1996). English Journal (Sept. 1997). Ethnicity and the American Short Story (1997). Ms. (July-Aug. 1995). Poets & Writers (Sept.-Oct. 1998). NYTBR (13 Apr. 1997, 1 Mar. 1998). TLS (21 Mar. 1997). Virginia Quarterly Review (Spring 1998). World Literature Today (Winter 1998). WRB (Mar. 1996) —JACQUELYN MARIE
DIX, Beulah Marie Born 25 December 1876, Kinston, Massachusetts; died 25 September 1970, Hollywood, California Daughter of Henry and Marie Dix; married George M. Flebbe Descended from Puritan settlers of Plymouth, Beulah Dix studied literature, the classics, and English history at Radcliffe College, which may have suggested the themes and events that dominated her dramas, comedies, novels, historical romances, and juvenile stories. She graduated summa cum laude and was the first woman to be awarded Harvard’s prestigious George B. Sohier Literary Prize. The date of her marriage is not known, but it was before she moved in 1916 to Hollywood, where she wrote movie scripts for the next 30 years. Dix’s popularity as a novelist derived from Hugh Gwyeth (1899), based on the English civil war between the Cavaliers and the Roundheads. Thereafter, the history of the 17th century provided settings for much of Dix’s work. The juvenile novels Merrylips (1906), Fighting Blade (1912), Maid Melicent (1914), and Blithe McBride (1916), center around a hero or heroine maturing in England during the Cromwell period or in America during the settling of the Puritan colonies. Human dignity poised against the ruthless demands of war, as well as authentic heroism
against popular notions of bravery, also constitute a central theme in Dix’s work. Dix’s first success in drama was A Rose o’Plymouth Town (1903), on which she collaborated with Evelyn Greenleaf Sutherland. A romantic comedy taking place in the home of Miles Standish in Plymouth, it was popular on Broadway and introduced Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., to the New York stage. With the advent of World War I, Dix turned from war as a physical setting for individual assertions of heroism toward unmitigated condemnations of it. Her characters are not always superior to mass violence and genocide, but are often corrupted by opportunities to unleash their predatory and sadistic proclivities. Across the Border (1915) is a one-act drama that opens with the gunning down of an idealistic young soldier risking his life to save his battalion. Awakening, he finds himself in a pleasant and impressive house, where he is received cordially, and gradually he realizes he is ‘‘across the border’’ in the spiritual realm of the dead. He is told gently that he must soon leave, for the other inhabitants are fearful of his past willingness to murder women and children, and to bomb cities and villages without warning. The soldier requests a return to the battlefield to convince those still fighting to put down arms, but, though this is granted, his words of admonishment to other soldiers are dismissed as the gibberish of a seriously wounded man. Returning ‘‘across the border’’ in defeat, the protagonist is jubilant his efforts have qualified him to remain in the House of God. Although one individual repents of his aggression, the war continues. An intensely vituperative condemnation of patriotic declarations that war can be fought for the sake of humanity is found in Moloch (1916). The prologue of this drama presents a professor’s family, characterized by warmth, intelligence, harmony, familial love, and cordiality. The epilogue exposes the disastrous effects of war upon this family, now reduced in number, with conjugal, paternal, and romantic ties severed. The greatest irony, however, is the anticipation of some members toward a second imminent war in which their former enemy is now their ally. Whether in drama, the novel, or historical romance, Dix’s style is swiftly paced and concise, replete with skillfully drawn characters who confront the challenges of political and historical realities. These same qualities, accompanied by a vigorous and lively style and poignant dramatic confrontations, made Dix a successful screenwriter in Hollywood, where she wrote scripts for such silent movies as Black Magic, Their Own Desire, The Hostage, Hidden Pearls, and They Made Me a Criminal.
OTHER WORKS: Cicely’s Cavalier (1897). The Beau’s Comedy (with C. A. Harper, 1902). The Life, Treason, and Death of James Blount of Breckenhow (1903). The Breed of the Treshams (with E. G. Sutherland, 1903). Fair Maid (1905). Soldier Rigdale (1905). The Fair Maid of Graystones (1905). Young Fernwald (1906). Allison’s Lad and Other Martial Interludes (1910). Friends in the End (1911). Betty Bide-at-Home (1912). The Gate of Horn
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(1912). Mother’s Son (1913). The Legend of St. Nicholas (1913). Little God Ebisu (1914). The Enemy (1915). The Making of Christopher Ferringham (1915). A Pageant of Peace (1915). The Battle Months of George Daurella (1916). Clemency (1916). The Glorious Game (1916). Where War Comes (1916). Hands Off! (1919). The Captain of the Gate (1921). Turned About Girls (1922). The Road to Yesterday (1925). A Little Captive Lad (1926). The Girl Comes Home (1927). Pity of God (1932). Ragged Enemy (1934). Wedding Eve Murder (1941).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Logan, M. S., American Women: Images and Realities (1972). Scott, E. F., Hollywood When Silents Were Golden (1972). Other references: NYT (30 Sept. 1902, 18 Oct. 1914, 21 Sept. 1915, 3 Dec. 1916). —MIRIAM FUCHS
DIX, Dorothea Lynde Born 4 April 1802, Hampden, Maine; died 17 July 1887, Trenton, New Jersey Daughter of Joseph and Mary Bigelow Dix Dorothea Dix was early acquainted with both poverty and privilege. Her father had become estranged from his family by dropping out of Harvard to marry Mary Bigelow, a poorly educated woman 20 years his senior, and by moving to the frontier territory of what was then northern Massachusetts to pursue his preferred vocation as itinerant Methodist minister. ‘‘I never knew a childhood,’’ Dix was later to write, and in the grim wilderness settlement she spent her early years stitching religious tracts for her father and caring for her two younger brothers. Occasional visits with her grandparents in Boston whetted her appetite for education and culture, however, and at the age of twelve she ran away from home to live with her widowed grandmother, a strict disciplinarian who initiated Dix’s formal education. In 1816 Dix began her career as a teacher by opening a school for young children, a precocious endeavor which lasted for three years until she returned to Boston to be with her aging grandmother. Between 1824 and 1836, Dix devoted herself to teaching when she was physically able and to writing when she was not. On the advice of her physician, Dix spent more than a year in England. For four years after her return to America Dix traveled, visited with friends, and studied as she searched for a vocation that would provide the stimulation and sense of purpose she had lost. In 1841, asked by a young Harvard divinity student to teach a Sunday school class for the female inmates of the East Cambridge jail, Dix discovered her mission. Incarcerated with the criminals, deprived not only of dignity but of even the most elemental
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necessities of warmth and adequate clothing, were the indigent insane. Horrified by what she observed that Sunday, Dix waged a campaign, using the newspaper as her primary forum, and aroused enough public indignation to alleviate the abuses at the jail. This was the first such victory for the woman who was to write in one of her memorials: ‘‘I am the hope of the poor crazed beings who pine in cells and stalls and cages and waste rooms—shut out, cut off from all healing influence, from all mind-restoring cures.’’ In ‘‘Memorial to the Legislature of Massachusetts,’’ Dix enumerated in considerable detail conditions in jails, asylums, poorhouses, and private homes in which the insane were housed. Her catalogue of appalling abuses was direct, concrete, logical, persuasive—impassioned only in eloquent appeals to the humanitarian impulses of the legislators, who, as a result of her investigation, voted to expand the state facility for the mentally ill at Worcester. From Massachusetts, Dix proceeded to Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, and on, in each state anticipating her pleas for reform by a thorough, keen-sighted study of existing facilities. In 1845, a hospital was established at Trenton, New Jersey, the ‘‘first-born child’’ of a woman who was to bear many such offspring. In 1848 Dix began a crusade for national legislation to set aside a tract of land (ultimately, 12.5 million acres) for care of the impoverished insane, and during the next six years, she lobbied, met with congressmen, and worked on her memorial for the proposal. In 1854 Dix’s bill finally passed both houses of Congress, only to be vetoed by President Franklin Pierce. Discouraged by this defeat, Dix returned to England. This excursion, however, to the Old World was no vacation: rather, the ‘‘American Invader,’’ as she was called, persisted in her efforts for reform, making forays into Scotland to promote better care for the insane, moving on to the continent to Italy, Russia, and Turkey. Returning to America in 1856, Dix, now well known and in much demand, resumed her travels for five years. Interrupted by the chaos of war, she was made superintendent of nurses for the Union forces in 1861. In 1866, the war over, Dix continued her tours of hospitals and penal institutions, concentrating for a time on the ravaged South. In 1881 she retired to Trenton Hospital, where she died, six years later. Although Dix never associated herself with the women’s movement, judging any such involvement a distraction from her humanitarian efforts on behalf of the mentally ill, her achievements did much to reveal what one woman could accomplish. By working contrary to accepted mores of the feminine role and destiny, Dix fought for the humane and fair treatment of a powerless minority. She helped to establish 32 state institutions and 15 training schools, and provided the inspiration for numerous other facilities, both public and private, thereby earning the encomium conferred upon her at her death by a friend: ‘‘. . .the most useful and distinguished woman America has yet produced.’’ OTHER WORKS: Conversations on Common Things (1824). Hymns for Children (1825). Evening Hours (1825). Meditations for
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Private Hours (1828). Garland of Flora (1829). American Moral Tales for Young Persons (1832). Remarks on Prisons and Prison Discipline (1845). Letter to the Convicts in the Western State Penitentiary of Pennsylvania, Allegheney (1848). On Behalf of the Insane Poor: Selected Reports (Poverty, U.S.A.: The Historical Record Series, edited by D. J. Rothman, 1971). The papers of Dorothea Lynde Dix are housed in the Houghton Library of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brooks, G., Three Wise Virgins (1957). Dain, N., Concepts of Insanity in the United States, 1789-1865 (1964). Hurd, H. M., ed., Institutional Care of the Insane in the United States and Canada (4 vols., 1916-1917). Marshall, H. E., Dorothea Dix: Forgotten Samaritan (1937). Tiffany, F., Life of Dorothea L. Dix (1890). Tuke, D. H., Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles (1882). Tuke, D. H., The Insane in the United States and Canada (1885). Wilson, D., Stranger and Traveler: The Story of Dorothea Dix, American Reformer (1975).
The literary style of Gail Hamilton, Dodge’s pen name, is characteristically lively, opinionated, and often argumentative. Several of her books are feminist in tone. Dodge often proclaims her personal and professional independence, and encourages a similar spirit in others. Country Living and Country Thinking (1861), based upon Dodge’s experience as a woman running her family’s farm, urges women to consider careers other than marriage, and especially to consider writing, despite the ‘‘fine, subtle, impalpable, but real’’ prejudice against ‘‘female writers.’’ The economic argument for independence appears again in Woman’s Worth and Worthlessness (1872), in which Dodge notes that a woman is not ‘‘supported’’ by a man ‘‘when she works as hard in the house as he does out of it.’’ For many years, Dodge was closely associated with Blaine: she worked with him on his Twenty Years of Congress (1884-86) and many believed that she also drafted his speeches. Her biography of Blaine, undertaken as a tribute, is eulogistic and nonanalytical. Her verse, collected and published posthumously by her sister H. Augusta Dodge, in Chips, Fragments and Vestiges (1902), is derivative.
—KRISTIN MCCOLGAN
DIX, Dorothy See GILMER, Elizabeth Meriwether
DIXON, Franklin W. See ADAMS, Harriet Stratemeyer
DODGE, Mary Abigail Born 31 March 1833, Hamilton, Massachusetts; died 17 August 1896, Hamilton, Massachusetts Wrote under: Gail Hamilton Daughter of James B. and Hannah Stanwood Dodge Mary Abigail Dodge spent her early adult years teaching, and in 1858 she became governess to the children of Gamaliel Bailey, editor of the antislavery National Era in Washington, D.C. With his help she established herself as a writer. From 1865 to 1867, she was an editor of Our Young Folks. After 1871 she spent much of each year in Washington in the home of Congressman James G. Blaine, whose wife was Dodge’s first cousin. Blaine was Speaker of the House and a frequent presidential hopeful. In his household, Dodge met politicians, writers, and numerous famous persons of the day. In these years, she wrote on political issues, especially civil service reform.
Dodge’s most characteristic theme, derived from her own experience as a writer, is the need to train woman for spiritual and economic independence. Given her insistence on the need for independence, it seems ironic that Dodge’s own career, as well as her social contacts, depended to a great degree upon her association with Blaine, and that much of her work for him cannot be recognized as independent from that framework.
OTHER WORKS: Courage! (1862). Gala Days (1863). A Call to My Countrywomen (1863). Stumbling-Blocks (1864). A New Atmosphere (1865). Scientific Farming (1865). Skirmishes and Sketches (1865). Red Letter Days in Applethorpe (1866). Summer Rest (1866). Wool Gathering (1868). Woman’s Wrong (1868). Memorial to Mrs. Hannah Stanwood Dodge (1869). A Battle of the Books (1870). Little Folk Life (1872). Child World (1873). Twelve Miles from a Lemon (1874). Nursery Noonings (1875). Sermons to the Clergy (1876). First Love Is Best (1877). What Think Ye of Christ (1877). Our Common School System (1880). Divine Guidance (1881). The Spent Bullet (1882). The Insuppressible Book (1885). A Washington Bible Class (1891). English Kings in a Nutshell (1893). Biography of James G. Blaine (1893). X-Rays (1896). Gail Hamilton’s Life in Letters (edited by H. A. Dodge, 1901).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Beale, H. S., ed., Letters of Mrs. James G. Blaine (1908). Dodge, M. A., Memorial to Mrs. Hannah Stanwood Dodge (1869). Spofford, H. R., A Little Book of Friends (1916). Tryon, W. S., Parnassus Corner: A Life of James T. Fields (1963). Reference works: A Woman of the Century (1893). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —JANE BENARDETE
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DODGE, Mary Mapes
DOMAN, June
Born 26 January 1830, New York, New York; died 21 August 1905, Onteora Park, New York Daughter of James J. and Sophia Furman Mapes; married William Dodge, 1851 (died); children: two sons
Born 23 April 1930, Bath, England Writes under: Meryle Secrest Daughter of Albert E. and Olive Edith May Love Doman; married David W. Secrest, 1953 (divorced 1965); Thomas G. Beveridge, 1975; children: Cary, Martin, Gillian
Mary Mapes Dodge’ family moved often, finally settling in Irvington, New Jersey, where, on a large farm overlooking Staten Island and Manhattan, her father conducted horticultural experiments and edited a magazine called the Working Farmer. When Dodge rejoined her family at the farm after the death of her husband, her father started her writing for his magazine in order to occupy her time and assuage her grief. Dodge also began telling stories to her two young sons, and thus, with natural talent and great devotion, a long and successful career of one of America’s first and best women writers and editors was inaugurated. In 1864 Dodge was prompted to write a children’s book. She had been reading Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic, and her boys had been captivated by the Dutch sport of skating, which was just becoming popular in the United States. Dodge was also acquainted with a Dutch family whom she visited often, listening to their memories and stories of Holland. Putting all this together, she wrote Hans Brinker (1865), which is still a bestseller after more than 100 years and many translations. From 1865 on, Dodge helped to edit a magazine called Hearth and Home, until asked by Roswell Smith of the Century Company to start a children’s magazine for them. So in 1873, Dodge became the editor of St. Nicholas, the greatest children’s magazine of all time. Hans Brinker and St. Nicholas established Dodge’ top-notch reputation, but she also produced a number of other books: A Few Friends (1869), Rhymes and Jingles (1874), Theophilus and Others (1876), Along the Way (1879), Donald and Dorothy (1883), and The Land of Pluck (1894). St. Nicholas set a new and lasting pattern for children’s literature: Kipling wrote The Jungle Books and Frances Hodgson Burnett Little Lord Fauntleroy for the magazine. Other top authors, among whom were Robert Louis Stevenson, Samuel Clemens, Alfred Tennyson, eager to be published in this vital periodical also sent Dodge their work. Many reputations were made in these pages. St. Nicholas was still thriving when, at age seventy-five, Dodge died at her summer residence in Onteora Park, New York. OTHER WORKS: Irvington Stories (1864). When Life Is Young (1894). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: American Women (1897). DAB (1892). NCAB (1892). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Century (Nov. 1905). Critic (Oct. 1905). Current Literature (Oct. 1905). NYT (22 Aug. 1905). St. Nicholas (Oct. 1905). —CATHERINE MORRIS WRIGHT
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June Doman is a writer of lengthy biographies of prominent artists and art critics, beginning with fairly obscure ones but quickly moving on to world-famous personages such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Salvador Dali. When dealing with people from the early 20th century, Doman’s writing is a tribute to extensive research of personal documents. When writing about people of the late 20th century, she relies on extensive interviewing, not only of the person themselves, but also every conceivable connection they might have. Despite the possibility of having too many corroborated details in her biographies, Doman rejects the view that the writer’s style should take second place in the struggle for accuracy. Instead, she believes that the biographer should be interesting to read as she writes in a way that reflects her own point of view. While growing up in Bath, England, as an only child, Doman found herself in a college-bound curriculum after being tested at the age of eleven. At the age of eighteen, however, she emigrated to Canada with her parents. Immediately she began working on the Hamilton, Ontario, newspaper, writing about city politics before being named editor of women’s news. After a brief return to England in 1950, Doman married David W. Secrest on 23 September 1953 and moved to Columbus, Ohio, where she raised three children while working as the food editor for the Columbus Citizen. In the late 1950s, she moved to Washington, D.C. because her husband had secured a political science fellowship. For a time, she wrote freelance for the Washington Post before being signed on as a full-time reporter. At first she remained a writer of women’s news; then in 1969 she was granted the privilege of writing for the arts and entertainment page. At last she had found her niche. Doman wanted to be a novelist, but after a single attempt, she gave it up. Fascinated by the life of a fairly obscure early 20th-century Italian portrait painter by the name of Romaine Brooks, she decided to try to write a biography. Between Me and Life: A Biography of Romaine Brooks (1974) received superb reviews in both the United Kingdom and the U.S., but did not sell well. Despite this, Doman quit her job to be a full-time freelance writer in 1975. Still enamored with art and people connected with it, Doman selected the noted Russian-American art critic and appraiser of Italian Renaissance art, Bernard Berenson, as the subject of her next book. Being Bernard Berenson (1979) was praised for its psychological acuity and vivid portraiture. It was nominated for both the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. While
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researching for her book about Berenson, Doman met with Sir Kenneth Clark, a British baron also known for his knowledge of Italian Renaissance art. For two years during his youth he studied under Berenson. Doman was so impressed with his personality that she chose him as the subject of her next biography. Kenneth Clark: A Biography (1985) was beset with many problems, most notably by the fact that Clark objected to what was written about him, forcing a rewrite that did not remain true to Doman’s intent. After writing a biography of the world’s best-known surrealist painter called Salvador Dali (1986), Doman chose to write Frank Lloyd Wright (1992). For the first time, a biographer of the famous architect had access to the complete microfiche Wright archives, and Doman was praised for producing a definitive one-volume biography that could only be superseded by a multivolume scholarly study. Next Doman turned to music to write Leonard Bernstein: A Life (1994), a biography of the famous American conductor and composer. In 1998 she remained in the field of music to write Stephen Sondheim, a biography about the famous American composer and lyricist for the Broadway stage. For this book, Doman received Sondheim’s cooperation and massive amounts of information from his friends, family, and colleagues. Critics noted that the book was exemplary in its attention to detail and its successful portrayal of Sondheim’s inner life. The revelation of his homosexuality drew the most notice, to Doman’s surprise. In addition to awards from the Canadian Women’s Press Club and the Hamilton Press Club in 1950 and 1951, respectively, Doman was selected for a Guggenheim fellowship for the years 1981-82.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CANR (1996). —ROSE SECREST
DOMINI, Rey See LORDE, Audre
DOMINIC, R. B. SeeLATHEN, Emma
DONOVAN, Frances R. Born 1880; died 1965 For years, the places and dates of birth and death of this American sociologist were a mystery, though a birthdate of 1880
and death in 1965 are now accepted as fact. Until recently, she was not listed in the usual or even the more obscure sources; biographical information was often obtained from personal correspondence or from the Special Collections of the University of Chicago library. From 1923 to 1927, Frances R. Donovan attended some classes at the University of Chicago as well as evening meetings of the Society for Social Research. At these meetings, which were open to students, faculty, and those outside the formal university network, some kind of presentation of research was given with informal discussion following. The distinguished sociologist Robert Park was nearly always present at these gatherings and talked with Donovan then as well as later discussing her books in his classes. During this period the urban behavior research emphasis was particularly strong in Chicago, culminating in almost two dozen books in less than two decades. Many of these were published as part of the University of Chicago Sociological Series. Donovan’s second book, The Saleslady (1929), became part of this series. She also wrote The Woman Who Waits (1920) and The Schoolma’am (1938), but except for these three books (all of which were reprinted in the 1980s), Donovan’s work has disappeared. Ryan’s Womanhood in America (1975) makes scattered references to her books, although there are minor inaccuracies regarding dates and places of her research. Donovan was a qualitative sociologist who focused on three social worlds in her writings: that of the waitress, salesperson, and teacher. Her major contribution is in the area of the sociology of work occupations, particularly those held traditionally by women. She moves from the largely descriptive The Woman Who Waits and The Saleslady to a greater analytical emphasis in The Schoolma’am. She was a keen observer, with a sense of humor, and her perceptions of women as a devalued group are particularly incisive. The Woman Who Waits is based on Donovan’s experiences as a waitress from the ‘‘hash houses’’ in the Loop to tea rooms and department store lunchrooms, to some of the more fashionable places in other parts of the city. Throughout this work the following threads prevail: (1) a perceptive analysis and recognition of the lowly, nonprestigious occupation of waitress; (2) a recognition that the problems of waitresses must be solved from within by organizing, and, when necessary, from the outside by legislation. Within this context, Donovan discusses the Waitresses Alliance, formed in 1915, whose objectives included trying to obtain proper working conditions for members as well as protecting them from unjust treatment; (3) general observations on the status of women in this occupation (many are equally germane today): the lack of security, ‘‘the sex game,’’ the ‘‘costs’’ of emancipation. The Saleslady is based on two summers Donovan spent in New York playing the role of ‘‘saleslady’’ or ‘‘salesgirl.’’ Although pseudonyms are used, evidence points to prominent New York department stores as places of employment. While this role is somewhat more prestigious than that of waitress, the salesperson has, nonetheless, little bargaining power in her interactions
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with employees and customers. Donovan’s conceptualization of the store as theater is an insightful one; subtle distinctions and hierarchies both within the role of ‘‘saleslady’’ as well as in her interaction with others in her world are noted. The Schoolma’am, Donovan tells the reader, is largely ‘‘personal testimony’’ from one ‘‘who has spent 19 years as a teacher’’ and ‘‘three years as a department manager of a large teachers’ agency.’’ Her trenchant observations on women in the teaching occupation include the following: the preponderance of male administrators; the discriminatory practices against hiring or retaining married women (they neglect home and children, and are not as prompt or regular in school attendance); the view of women as poor marriage risks by some men ‘‘who insist upon gentle, appealing, little girls like Copperfield’s Dora who can’t add up the grocery bills.’’ With the reappearance of Donovan’s books it is to be hoped that her circle of readers will be considerably enlarged.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Kurent, H. P., ‘‘Frances R. Donovan and the Chicago School of Sociology: A Case Study in Marginality’’ (dissertation, 1982). Ryan, M., Womanhood in America (1975). Other references: Nation (23 Oct. 1929). NR (21 Sept. 1938). Survey (5 Feb. 1921). —VIRGINIA K. FISH
DOOLITTLE, Antoinette Born Mary Antoinette Doolittle, 8 September 1810, New Lebanon, New York; died 31 December 1886, Mt. Lebanon, New York Daughter of Miles and Esther Bennett Doolittle A middle child in a family of five girls and five boys, Antoinette Doolittle lived from age ten to thirteen at an aunt’s home, with her maternal grandmother, a religious woman and ‘‘a strong magnet’’ for her. After Doolittle’s conversion to Shakerism at age fourteen, she did routine work for 10 years at the Shakers’ major community, Mt. Lebanon, and was then appointed assistant deaconess. Two years later, at twenty-six, she was made second (or assistant) eldress. At thirty-eight, she attained the highest office, eldress, and held this post at Mt. Lebanon until her death. In 1873, she became coeditor of the Shaker and Shakeress, the official Shaker periodical. Doolittle had important executive responsibilities, such as traveling to New York City to buy supplies to be shipped to the South Union (Kentucky) Society, then beleaguered by the Civil War. A practical administrator, Doolittle was also deeply involved in mystical and emotional Shaker experiences: spiritualism and speaking in tongues. The Autobiography of Mary Antoinette Doolittle (1880) provides a vivid picture of Doolittle’s growing commitment to a
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religious vocation. In it, she also promotes Shaker feminism by presenting Shaker principles with parenthetical feminist comments added to them. For example, in explaining the system of trusteeship for Shaker property, she writes: ‘‘the laws of the land were framed and executed by men exclusively—women having no part nor lot in the matter, except to be taxed without representation.’’ In her journalism, too, Doolittle supported feminism. When she became coeditor of the official Shaker periodical, its title was changed from the Shaker to the Shaker and Shakeress. Doolittle also advanced feminism outside Shaker communities. In a letter to the Brooklyn Eagle, republished in the Shaker Manifesto, Doolittle wrote in 1881: The voice of woman is not heard in legislative halls. . . . Why this bondage and servitude on the part of woman?. . . Is she destitute of reasoning powers, and unable to plead her own cause, and the cause of her downtrodden and oppressed sisters, who do not find redress from wrongs inflicted upon them at the tribunals, where male rulers alone preside, judge and decide? A change must and will come in this respect. Women possess latent powers that need to be brought into action, both for her own benefit and the good of the community. Apart from her feminism, Doolittle’s autobiography is notable in parts I and II for its fresh, concrete detail as she describes her childhood and conversion. The growth of her commitment, her adolescent struggle, and her final choice of a life antithetical to her family’s views elicit sympathy and sustain interest. Part III, added for a second edition, is more didactic and polemical, a public rather than a private document, advocating Shaker principles. Its purpose seems to be to educate and possibly convert the public. Nevertheless, Doolittle’s is the best-known and best-written autobiography of a Shaker woman. BIBLIOGRAPHY: White, A., and L. S. Taylor, Shakerism: Its Meaning and Message (1904). Other references: In Memoriam, Affectionately Inscribed to the Memory of Eldress Antoinette Doolittle, by Her Loving and Devoted Gospel Friends (1887). The Shaker Manifesto (1881). —HELEN DEISS IRVIN
D(OOLITTLE), H(ilda) Born 10 September 1886, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; died 27 September 1961, Zurich, Switzerland Daughter of Charles L. and Helen Wolle Doolittle; married Richard Aldington, 1915 (divorced 1938) Hilda Doolittle was the daughter of a professor of astronomy and the granddaughter of the principal of a local Moravian
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seminary, who was a descendant of a member of the original 18th-century mystical order known as the Unitas Fratrum, or Moravian Brotherhood. Since the founding of the order, the concept of Unitas Fratrum has been identified with ‘‘the Mystery which lay at the center of the world.’’ Young Doolittle participated in Moravian religious exercises and rituals, all of which had a profound effect upon her. In Tribute to Angels (1945), more than 40 years after her childhood experiences, she returned to the enigmatic ‘‘Mystery,’’ the essence of Moravian belief, describing it as ‘‘the point in the spectrum / where all light becomes one / . . .as we were told as children.’’ Educated chiefly in private schools, Doolittle spent a year and a half at Bryn Mawr, withdrawing in 1906 due to a ‘‘slight breakdown.’’ She became engaged briefly to Ezra Pound, who encouraged her to pursue her classical studies and to continue to write serious poetry. Soon after, Doolittle left for London to begin the life of an expatriate, and rarely returned to America. In 1913 Doolittle married the British poet Richard Aldington. Later (1917) she assumed the editorship of the Egoist while she earnestly pursued her career as a poet. The period between 1915 and 1920 was filled with personal crisis: a miscarriage in 1915, the death of her older brother in combat in 1918, separation from Aldington (final divorce in 1938), and the death of her father in 1919. She found herself essentially alone, seriously ill, and pregnant. She wrote from her flat in war-torn London: ‘‘Death! Death is all around us!’’ The foregoing events precipitated a severe breakdown, and Doolittle eventually sought the help of Sigmund Freud, whom she refers to as the ‘‘blameless physician’’ in her brilliant psychobiography, Tribute to Freud, published in 1956. Following World War I, Doolittle wrote 13 volumes of poetry, along with translations, essays, dramas, film criticism, and novels. When her Collected Poems, the volume that established her reputation, was published in 1925, many of the vital experiences that tempered her writing had occurred. The early tightly honed, discrete Imagist poems are familiar to most readers. In them with clarity, precision, and control, Doolittle described pear trees with ‘‘flower-tufts / thick on the branch,’’ with sea poppies ‘‘spilled near the shrub pines / to bleach on the boulders,’’ or grapes ‘‘red-purple / their berries dripping / with wine.’’ Doolittle’s final, major modern poetic sequences, Helen in Egypt (1961), is less well known. Throughout her work, however, from the slender Imagist verse to the final monumental poetic sequence, Doolittle was in search of what she dimly defined as ‘‘a myth, the one reality.’’ This would permit her not only to articulate her emotions but would also allow her the freedom to create an ‘‘organizing structure’’ in which she could function as both a woman and an artist. Related to the search for ‘‘structure which permits freedom’’ was an acute awareness on the part of Doolittle of the importance of identity to survival. Identity, self-definition, a ‘‘signature,’’ were imperative. Doolittle emphasized this in a letter to her friend
DOOLITTLE
Amy Lowell on 5 March 1917: ‘‘My signature is H. D. for poetic purposes. Please let it be just that. I have always wanted to keep R.’s [her husband] and my literary personalities absolutely distinct. . . . I must keep H. D. clear from R. A.’’ Later she expressed her conviction in this way: ‘‘I have something I own. I own myself.’’ The search for personal identity and self-definition was contemporaneous with Doolittle’s realization of her own creative talents, and eventually her poetry became, in a sense, a projection of herself. Doolittle ingeniously shaped the classical world to her own temperament, weaving and reweaving the legends of the past into modern form, emulating myth in order to gain a sense of the spiritual, the timeless. For Doolittle, events, emotions, experiences, became continuations of a simpler, more structured mythic past, which she found more manageable than the immediate, chaotic contemporary scene. As she developed her skills, Doolittle was able to transfer mythic patterns from one culture to another, as reflected in her wide-ranging vision of Woman throughout the ages, which is included in Tribute to Angels. More notable, however, in The Walls Do Not Fall (1944), she comfortably mingles classical allusions with observations of the shell-shocked, bombed-out, devastation of London: ‘‘There as here, ruin opens / the tomb, the temple. . . / the shrine lies open to the sky / the rain falls. . . / sand drifts, eternity endures.’’ Typically Doolittle emphasizes once again her concept of identity and self-possession in the lines: ‘‘living within / you beget, self-out-of-self / . . .that pearl-of-great-price.’’ Inevitably, as the woman artist strives for self-fulfillment, tension develops. In Doolittle’s case, tension was generated gradually between physical love and artistic performance; it manifested itself in a conflict between desire and creativity. Doolittle compares this experience to a tableau vivant with two wrestlers standing ready for a match, with muscles and tendons taut and motionless. In her effort to deal with the tension and conflict in both her personal and artistic life, Doolittle reveals on the one hand her complete awareness of the need for love and compassion as she writes, ‘‘I was not unaware. . .I was not dull dead.’’ On the other hand, she firmly maintains that even love itself should be resisted if it threatens to diminish one’s creative talent. Notwithstanding the contradictions inherent in this situation, Doolittle was determined, as she stated, to control her ‘‘very modest possessions of mind and body.’’ Resolution, reconciliation, control, she realized could be achieved, perhaps by means of some ‘‘intermediate ground’’: an organizing structure, mythical patterns, legends, and symbols. These were all part of her ‘‘classical repertoire,’’ and methods for making meaningful use of them had been reinforced during her experience as ‘‘student-analysand’’ with Dr. Freud. The search for ‘‘a myth, the one reality,’’ was successfully achieved by means of the pervasive, legendary figure of Helen in Doolittle’s last major work. In the earlier Imagist poem, ‘‘Helen,’’
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the heroine, a wan maiden with ‘‘still eyes in [a] white face’’ is clouded with subtle ambiguities—she is the Helen Greece could love ‘‘only if she were laid / white ash amid funereal cypresses.’’ In Helen in Egypt, the mature, intelligent, confident Helen struggles for self-definition following the cataclysmic Trojan War. With ‘‘things remembered forgotten / remembered again,’’ Helen assembles and reassembles her thoughts and emotions and resolves: ‘‘I must fight for Helena.’’ In this long poem, Doolittle artfully weaves and reweaves the mythic pattern until the legendary figure of Helen (the Woman who will not now be denied) achieves her identity: ‘‘I am awake / . . .I see things clearly at last, / the old pictures are really there.’’ With Helen in Egypt, Doolittle herself achieves self-definition and brings to a close her search for an identity, ‘‘the one reality,’’ for which she had been striving all her life. Strong-willed, self-possessed, inherently female, the American expatriate Doolittle’s poetic realm has been described as ‘‘the perfect, timeless hieroglyph world.’’ Whatever the realm, Doolittle realized the sense of her own worth as a woman and as an artist; and concedes in her ‘‘Epitaph’’ that she ‘‘died of living / . . .soliciting illicit fervor / . . .following intricate song’s lost measure.’’ For more than five decades, Doolittle devoted her life to the writing of poetry. Though she has regrettably been labeled ‘‘the perfect Imagist’’ and ‘‘the Greek publicity girl,’’ her poetry defies classification. Tending on occasion to an obscurantism typical of modern poetry, Doolittle’s work transcends the limitations and prescriptions of the Imagist movement, for which she allegedly was not only the inspiration but, together with Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington, also a formulator of its principles. Currently she is, and justifiably so, identified as a modern. Norman Holmes Pearson, Doolittle’s literary executor, contends that Doolittle is in ‘‘the very center of the modern poetic movement. . .and will increasingly be recognized’’ when her audience not only learns how to read her poetry but becomes familiar with classical mythology.
OTHER WORKS: Sea Garden (1916). Hymen (1921). Heliodora, and Other Poems (1924). Hippolytos Temporizes (1927). Hedylus (1928). Red Roses for Bronze (1932). The Flowering of the Rod (1946). By Avon River (1949). Selected Poems of H. D. (1957). Hermetic Definition (1958). Bid Me to Live (1960).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Alfrey, S., The Sublime of Intense Sociability: Emily Dickinson, H. D., and Gertrude Stein (1999). Burnett, G., H. D. Between Image and Epic: The Mysteries of Her Poetics (1990). Chisholm, D., H. D.’s Freudian Poetics: Psychoanalysis in Translation (1992). Coffman, S. K., Imagism—A Chapter for the History of Modern Poetry (1951). DuPlessis, R. B. H. D.: The Career of That Struggle (1986). Freidman, S. S., Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H. D.. (1981). Freidman, S. S. and R. B. DuPlessis, eds., Signets: Reading H. D. (1990). Guest, B., Herself
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Defined: The Poet H. D. and her World (1984). Hughes, G., Imagism & the Imagists (1931). King, M., ed., H. D.: Woman and Poet (1987). Mearns, H., H. D. (1926). Monroe, H., Poets & Their Art (1932). Quinn, V., H. D. (1968). Swann, T. B., The Classical World of H. D. (1962). Taupin, R., L’influence du symbolisme français sur la poésie Américaine (1929). Vigier, R., Women, Dance, and the Body: Gestures of Genius (1994). Waggoner, H. H., American Poets—From the Puritans to the Present (1968). Zilboorg, C., ed., Richard Aldington and H. D. (1992). Reference works: FC (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Contemporary Literature (Autumn 1969). H. D. Newsletter (1987- ). Poetry (June 1962). —CLAIRE HEALEY
DORR, Julia (Caroline) Ripley Born 13 February 1825, Charleston, South Carolina; died 18 January 1913, Rutland, Vermont Wrote under: Julia C. R. Dorr, Caroline Thomas Daughter of William Y. and Zulma Thomas Ripley; married Seneca M. Dorr, 1847 Julia Ripley Dorr’s mother’s family fled from Santo Domingo to the U.S. during a slave uprising. Her father was a bank president, and she spent most of her formative years in Vermont receiving her education there at Middlebury Seminary. Dorr enjoyed the friendship of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edmund Clarence Stedman, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, among others. She was a founder of the Rutland Library, and received a Litt.D. from Middlebury College in Vermont. Dorr’s first novels, Farmingdale (1854), Lanmere (1856), and Sibyl Huntington (1869), deal with young women living in New England villages who are subject to a grinding routine of home chores. These novels are noteworthy for their realistic depiction of family bitterness and the round of household activities: tubs filled with laundry, milk pans to be scalded, rag rugs to be pieced, work baskets piled with mending. Each novel contains pointed discussions on books, learning, literature, and libraries, offered as the heroines’ reprieve from woman’s toil. Expiation (1873) views domestic tragedy from the stance of a neighborly female narrator who is middle-aged, tranquil, unmarried. The plot involves hereditary insanity, its concealment by a young wife, an adolescent son’s attempt to kill his mother, a coffin that yields up its supposed corpse. Gothic horrors come to light amidst the beauties of the Vermont countryside, descriptions of which Dorr excels in: the riot of green, the meadows and uplands, brawling trout streams, the barefoot boy and the singing thrush, wild roses and honeysuckles under a sapphire sky.
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Dorr’s poetry appeared in newspapers and magazines such as Scribner’s, Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, and Sartain’s Union Magazine of Literature and Art. Her poems were anthologized in Emerson’s Parnassus (1874), and Stedman’s An American Anthology (1900). Dorr experimented with a variety of forms— narratives, dramatic monologues, patriotic and war verses, historic celebrations, sonnets, hymns, and ballads. Poems (1872) includes themes of women’s isolation or loss (‘‘Vashti’s Scroll’’), a lament by a fallen queen (‘‘Elsie’s Child’’), and prayers and poems about death. A book lover, Dorr acknowledges in ‘‘My Friends’’ the influence of authors from Dante and Shakespeare to the Brontës and Mrs. Browning. ‘‘The Cherry Tree’’ introduces the recurrent theme that maturity is richer, more resonant than youth. The titles of Dorr’s subsequent poetry volumes reflect this view: Afternoon Songs (1885), Afterglow (1900), Beyond the Sunset (1909). Dorr’s travel books are companionable, anecdotal, and historically informative. Bermuda appeared in 1884. The Flower of England’s Face; Sketches of English Travel (1895) takes the reader from Wales to Scotland with a long stop at Haworth to collect firsthand reminiscences about the Brontës. A Cathedral Pilgrimage (1896) revels in rustic gardens, chapels, spires, ‘‘ruined arches, forsaken courts open to all the sky, and columns ivy-grown and lichen clad.’’ It imaginatively recreates medieval life and recounts legends of martyrs and warriors. Despite Dorr’s dislike of suffering women poets as expressed in Farmingdale, she was not able to keep lachrymose strain out of her own last works. Her poetic diction includes the formalized lyrical utterance of her shorter poems, as well as the colloquial forthrightness of her dramatic monologues. The same chatty directness is evident in her books of travel and advice, and recalls the vigor of her early domestic novels. Her interest in family problems arising from cruelty, pride, or error enters into her narrative poems. Like many women poets of her time, she tended to give them exotic, medieval, Germanic, or oriental settings; however, the regional locales of her New England fiction bestow a more enduring value on her portrayals of family life. OTHER WORKS: Bride and Bridegroom (1873). Friar Anselmo and Other Poems (1875). Poems (1892). The Fallow Field (1893). In Kings’ Houses; A Romance of the Days of Queen Anne (1898). Poems, Complete (1901). Last Poems (1913). W.Y.R. A Book of Remembrance BIBLIOGRAPHY: Baym, N., Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870 (1978). Carleton, H., Genealogy and Family History of Vermont (1903). Crockett, W. H., Vermont the Green Mountain State (1921). Morse, J. J., ed., Life and Letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes (1896). Ripley, H. W., Genealogy of a Part of the Ripley Family (1867). Stedman, L., and G. M. Gould, eds., Life and Letters of E. C. Stedman (1910). Reference works: American Authors: 1600-1900 (1938). American Women (1897). DAB (1929). —MARCELLE THIÉBAUX
DORR, Rheta Childe Born 2 November 1866, Omaha, Nebraska; died 8 August 1948, New Britain, Pennsylvania Daughter of Edward and Lucie Childe; married John P. Dorr, 1892; children: one son The daughter of Episcopalian parents, Rheta Childe Dorr joined the National Woman Suffrage Association at twelve, attended the University of Nebraska for one year, and enrolled at the Art Students’ League in New York City in 1890. She took her first reporting job on the New York Evening Post and was a muckraker at Everybody’s Magazine and Hampton’s from 1907 to 1912. Briefly a member of the Socialist Party, she became active in the Republican Party in 1916. A militant suffragist, she edited the Suffragist, and from 1913 to 1916 was a member of the Heterodoxy, an early feminist discussion group. As a foreign correspondent, she covered the Pankhursts’ suffrage struggle in England, the Russian Revolution, World War I, and Mussolini’s march into Rome. Dorr was the author of several books, most of which (aside from her autobiography) consisted of materials previously published in newspapers and magazines. As an autobiography, A Woman of Fifty (1924) represented both a highly successful creative act and a ‘‘self-revelation.’’ Illustrating the traditional effort of an American intellectual to relate personal experience to the pattern of cultural change, Dorr sketched a political journey— one that led from a progressive vision of cooperative millenialism to a conservative faith in a ‘‘sane, practical democracy,’’ with the ‘‘Great War’’ acting as the important transforming experience. However, Dorr was firm in her commitment to feminism; the chronological narrative revolves around her own early awakening to feminism and her struggle as a journalist to support herself and her son. Throughout her lifetime, Dorr worked to bring others from a perception of women as a ‘‘ladies’ aid society to the human race’’ to an affirmation of their ‘‘breaking into the human race’’ with ‘‘full freedom.’’ In What Eight Million Woman Want (1910), Dorr dealt with ‘‘woman’s invasion of industry’’ as a permanent factor in the American economy, carefully employing data obtained from reporting on all social classes of women in Europe and America. Having investigated various employments by working as a laundress, seamstress, department store clerk, and assembly-line worker, Dorr sympathetically revealed the ‘‘intimate lives of the factory workers in order to tell their story as they would tell it themselves if they had a chance.’’ She also emphasized the social-reform activities of educated middle-class women’s organizations, concluding that the fulfillment of their demands for women’s economic, social, and political freedom was in the best interest of a democratic society. Dorr reiterated these beliefs in Susan B. Anthony (1928), a witty and sympathetic biography and history of women’s life in America that dramatically situated Anthony within the social context of the post-Civil War era.
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Dorr was a war correspondent from 1917 to 1918. Inside the Russian Revolution (1917) condemned Bolshevik politics and marked her break with New York socialist friends. Interpreting events in terms of ‘‘excesses’’ of an ‘‘unruly, unreasoning, sanguinary mob’’ intent on disengaging from the ‘‘Great War,’’ Dorr recommended a large dose of American economic aid and the ‘‘help and guidance’’ of strong leaders with pragmatic republican values. Dorr ably captured the feeling of a country at war in her description of the July Revolution and the ‘‘women’s battalion of death’’—but Inside the Russian Revolution was marred by its strong ethnocentric bias. Dorr was among the first journalists to report ‘‘hard news’’ about all classes of women, and she was among the best of the muckraking journalists. While her war correspondence was not consistently outstanding, she was among only a few women who obtained western-front reporting assignments during World War I. Her autobiography must be considered not only an ‘‘extraordinarily revealing’’ document but also a provocative commentary on American culture.
OTHER WORKS: A Soldier’s Mother in France (1918). Drink: Coercion or Control? (1929).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Banner, L. W., Woman in Modern America: A Brief History (1974). Filler, L., Crusaders for American Liberalism (1939). Marzolf, M., Up from the Footnote: A History of Women Journalists (1977). Ross, I., Ladies of the Press (1936). Reference works: NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Bookman (11 Mar. 1911). Books (21 Oct. 1928). —JENNIFER L. TEBBE
DORSETT, Danielle See DANIELS, Dorothy
DORSEY, Anna (Hanson) McKenney Born 12 December 1815, Washington, D.C.; died 26 December 1896, Washington, D.C. Daughter of William and Chloe Lanigan McKenney; married Lorenzo Dorsey, 1837; children: five Descended from prominent Maryland colonists on both sides of her family, Anna McKenney Dorsey was always much involved in both governmental affairs and moral and religious
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questions. Educated entirely at home, she published verse in magazines even before her marriage in 1837. Both she and her husband converted to Catholicism in 1840 as a result of the influence of the English Oxford Movement in America. Their marriage produced five children, and the youngest daughter, Ella Loraine, became as popular a Catholic writer as her mother. Though well received in their day, Dorsey’s highly melodramatic, Catholic novels are now out of print. An early novel, The Student of Blenheim Forest (1847), is an account of the alienation of a Catholic son from his anti-Catholic father, an important Virginian. Secretly baptized by his Catholic mother, the student reflects the author’s own conversion to Catholicism. The plot is typically Victorian with its discovery of hidden relationships, and the point of view is blatantly pro-Catholic. The book is noteworthy, however, for its presentation of the history of Catholicism in Maryland as well as the detailed but readily understandable explanations of various Catholic traditions, such as confession, the Virgin Mary, high Mass, vestments, benediction, and convents. Zoe’s Daughter (1888), another historical tale, is set in the days of Lord Baltimore in Maryland. Other historical novels, noteworthy for their use of dialect, describe the Irish in Ireland or Boston: Nora Brady’s Vow (1869), Mona the Vestal (1869), and The Old House at Glenara (1887) trace the history of Christianity in Ireland from the time of the druids through the time of the British landlords to the Irish immigration to America. The intricate plots stress the joys of conversion to Christianity from paganism. Palms (1887), though set in ancient Rome with a wealth of historical detail, follows the same basic scheme. Although most of Dorsey’s stories are predictable in their Catholic bent, she manages to maintain suspense through a clever handling of the plot complications. For example, in Coaina, Rose of the Algonquins (1867), which has twice been dramatized and translated into German and Hindustani, a beautiful young Native American maiden, Coaina, is thwarted in her romance with a young chief through the machinations of her slanderous aunt, a jealous cousin Winonah, and a would-be suitor from another tribe. They are ultimately stymied and confess their guilt because of Coaina’s charity and forgiveness. While Christianity predictably triumphs, the marriage is not between Coaina and the young chief but between Coaina and Christ. In other tales, such as The Old Gray Rosary and Tangled Paths (1879), Dorsey mocks the contradiction between Catholic belief and racial prejudice. Dorsey’s tales are sentimental and nostalgic as well as edifying, especially for young people. Consequently, she twice received special blessings from Pope Leo XIII, and the University of Notre Dame awarded her the Laetare Medal. OTHER WORKS: A Tale of the White and Red Roses (1846). Oriental Pearl (1848). Flowers of Love and Memory (1849). Guy, the Leper (1850). Woodreve Manor (1852). May Brooke (1856). ‘‘They’re Coming, Grandad!’’ A Tale of East Tennessee (1865). The Flemings or Truth Triumphs (1869). The Heiress of Carrigmona (1887). Beth’s Promise (1887). Adrift (1887). Ada’s Trust (1887). Warp and Woof (1887). The Fate of the Dane and Other Stories
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(1888). Tomboy (1891). The Two Ways (1891). Tears on the Diadem: or, The Crown and the Cloister BIBLIOGRAPHY: Donnelly, E. C., Round Table of Representative American Catholic Novelists (1897). Reference works: Catholic Encyclopedia (1976).
Arapaho’s celebration of the spring sun because the dance contained ferocious tests of courage and endurance. The account is beautifully explicit and describes movingly ‘‘the long ceremony, of praise and prayer to that Lord of the white men and the Native American whom the Arapaho calls The Man Above.’’
—SUZANNE ALLEN
Other articles, ‘‘Women in the Patent Office,’’ ‘‘Women in the Pension Office,’’ and ‘‘Women in the Land Office,’’ recognize the contributions of usually unacclaimed women who work in governmental offices. All of Dorsey’s work is now out of print and difficult to find.
Born 2 March 1853, Washington, D.C.; died 1935, Washington, D.C. Daughter of Lorenzo and Anna McKenney Dorsey
OTHER WORKS: Midshipman Bob (1887). Jet, the War-Mule (1894). The Taming of Polly (1897). Pickle and Pepper (1898). Pocahontas (1906). A Biographical Sketch of James Maccubbin, One of the Original Proprietors (1909). The Census and Its Lesson (1924). The Children of Avalon, n.d. Da-h-pi-ki, n.d. The Jose-Maria, n.d. Saxty’s Angel, n.d. The Two Tramps, n.d.
DORSEY, Ella Loraine
A descendant of old and illustrious Maryland colonists and, like her mother, a pioneer of light Catholic fiction, Ella Lorraine Dorsey showed great interest in both political and religious concerns, which continually surface in her writings. From early childhood she was inundated with political literature and history. All of her relatives supported the Confederacy except her only brother, who fought and died for the Union cause, and her father. Educated at Madame Burr’s School and Visitation Convent in Georgetown, Dorsey began writing in 1871 as ‘‘Vanity Fair’’ for the Washington Critic and worked for 10 years on Washington newspapers. Later she was a special correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and for papers in Boston and in Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1886 at the urging of Catholic magazine editors, Dorsey began writing Catholic children’s fiction. Her first stories, ‘‘The Knickerbocker Ghost,’’ ‘‘The Tsar’s Horses,’’ and ‘‘Back from the Frozen Pole,’’ were published in Catholic periodicals such as Ave Maria and Catholic World but also in secular publications such as Harper’s. They were praised for their accuracy of detail. During the Spanish-American War, Dorsey served as a volunteer assistant in the Hospital Corps for the Daughters of the American Revolution. The experience gained there resulted in several other pieces of edifying juvenile boys’ fiction that became very popular. Like her mother’s melodramatic Catholic writings for adults, Dorsey’s children’s fiction is pro-Catholic, clever in plot manipulation, and accurate and fascinating in historical detail. In her work, conversion to Christianity is always a great joy. Dorsey demonstrated her historical acumen and moral concern in the societies to which she belonged. She was on the board for Trinity College, the first Catholic college for the higher education of women in America, a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Marquette League, the Pocahontas Memorial Association, corresponding secretary of the Club of Colonial Dames, and an honorary member of the Association of Spanish-American War Nurses. Many of her writings, not meant only for children, grew out of these affiliations. ‘‘The Forbidden Dance,’’ published in the Messenger in 1908, deals with the lack of understanding of the Native American culture by the U.S. government in banning the
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Donnelly, E. C., et al., Round Table of Representative American Catholic Novelists (1897). Reference works: A Woman of the Century (1893). —SUZANNE ALLEN
DORSEY, Sarah (Ann) Ellis Born 16 February 1829, Natchez, Mississippi; died 4 July 1879, New Orleans, Louisiana Wrote under: Filia Ecclesiae, Filia Daughter of Thomas G. Percy and Mary Routh Ellis; married Samuel W. Dorsey, 1853 (died 1875) Sarah Ellis Dorsey was descended from the leading planting families of Louisiana and Mississippi. Her father died when she was nine years old, and her mother married another wealthy planter. Dorsey’s childhood education was extensive; she had private tutors to teach her foreign languages and the fine arts, and a European grand tour capped her formal training. In 1853 she married a lawyer and the overseer on one of the family plantations. The young couple moved to Tensas Parish, Louisiana, and Dorsey settled into the life of a Southern wife and plantation mistress. During the Vicksburg campaign of 1863, the Dorsey home was raided by Grant’s men. After the city fell and the area was overrun by the Union army, the Dorseys took their slaves and trekked to Texas. Samuel Dorsey died in 1875 and Dorsey moved to their summer home, Beauvoir, near Biloxi, Mississippi. One of Dorsey’s childhood friends had been Varina Howell Davis, the wife of the former Confederate president. Jefferson Davis was Dorsey’s guest at Beauvoir in 1876 while visiting near Biloxi and later settled into a cottage on the estate to write his memoirs, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (1881). Dorsey served as his secretary and confidante, transcribing his notes, keeping his correspondence, and entertaining his
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guests. Mrs. Davis, who was in Europe with her daughter, somewhat resented Dorsey’s close association with her husband and refused to visit the house for several months after her return. Eventually, though, she joined them. The Davises were so enchanted with the estate Dorsey sold it to them in 1879. She also bequeathed two Louisiana plantations to Davis in her will. Dorsey’s writing career had begun in the 1850s with a series of articles on the religious education of her slaves for the New York Churchman. Her first book was a biography of Louisiana’s Confederate governor, Henry Watkins Allen, published in 1866. A family friend, Allen had left notes and personal papers with Dorsey before his flight into exile in Mexico. The biography is very complimentary toward the late governor, stressing his cooperation with the Confederate government and his attempts to relieve the distress of the state’s civilian population during wartime. In Lucia Dare (1867), a novel dealing with the adventures of an English heiress during the Civil War, Dorsey used her own experiences as a refugee in Texas as the basis for the narrative. Dorsey’s most famous novel was Panola, a Tale of Louisiana (1877). The heroine of this romance was a young, ‘‘proud, shy, slowly-maturing, half-Indian maiden. The chastity and continence of her blood through long lines of famous warriors had kept cool and as yet unwarmed by passion.’’ The novel is set in the home of Dr. Canonge just before the Civil War. Panola, who is related to the doctor in some way, yet is also a servant in the household, falls in love with Victor, the doctor’s grandson. The plot revolves around the marriage, separation, and reunion of the lovers. True love, not unexpectedly, conquers all. Panola is typical of Dorsey’s fiction. Sentimental and heavily romanticized, it is also poorly plotted. Characters disappear from the stage only to be resurrected, usually in disguise, for dramatic effect. The writing is stilted and peppered with French pseudodialect. Its appeal was to a generation of readers who wanted pretty illusions in the face of the grim realities of Reconstruction. OTHER WORKS: Recollections of Henry Watkin Allen, Brigadier-General Confederate States Army, Ex-Governor of Louisiana (1866). Agnes Graham (1869). Athalie; or, A Southern Villeggiatura (1872). On the Philosophy of the University of France. First Paper Prepared for the Academy of Sciences of New Orleans, April 13, 1874 (1874). The Aryan Philosophy. Second Paper Prepared at the Request of the Academy of Sciences of New Orleans (circa 1875). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Davis, V., Jefferson Davis, Ex-President of the Confederate States of America: A Memoir by His Wife (1890). Strode, H., Jefferson Davis: Tragic Hero (1964). Reference works: NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Other references: BJRL (1954). Journal of Mississippi History (1944). —JANET E. KAUFMAN
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DOUBLEDAY, Nellie Blanchan (De Graff) Born 23 October 1865, Chicago, Illinois; died 21 February 1918, Canton, China Wrote under: Neltje Blanchan Daughter of Liverius and Alice Fair De Graff; married Frank N. Doubleday, 1886 Author of several very popular bird and nature books, Nellie Blanchan Doubleday was educated at St. John’s School in New York and the Misses Masters’ School in Dobbs Ferry. In 1886 she married Frank N. Doubleday (1862-1934), who later founded the publishing firm of Doubleday, Doran and Company. An exuberant, enthusiastic woman, Doubleday was no great authority on birds, but her work was part of the foundations of the conservation movement made during the early years of the 20th century. She died in Canton while on an assignment for the Red Cross. Nature enthusiasts at the turn of the century often mixed interest in Native American lore, birds, plants, and camping skills. Although Doubleday’s first book was a study of the Piegans, one of the Blackfoot tribes of the West, her bird writing soon took precedence. Bird Neighbors (1897), her first bird book, is an elementary field book including information on habitats and bird families. Introduced by John Burroughs, the volume went through many printings. The following year (1898), she published Birds That Hunt and Are Hunted: Life Histories of One Hundred and Seventy Birds of Prey, Game Birds and Water-Fowls, again not a work of important new observations but a book for the amateur. In the preface, Doubleday points out that when the public learns about birds, they will willingly back laws to protect them. Her writing style in these two books is informative and lively. In her chapter on the bob white, in Birds That Hunt, for example, she portrays in very effective scenes the devastation of the little families by ‘‘sportsmen.’’ Doubleday was not against limited hunting but favored proper conservation laws. Another of her popular nature guides was on plants, Nature’s Garden (1900), which is a guide to wildflowers arranged by their color. This work also includes information about insects associated with the flowers. Doubleday lists all the common names of a given plant and has short essays of appreciation about each one; in these she quotes poetry, cites folk beliefs, and explains the relationship between the flower and its insect visitors. Another of Doubleday’s enthusiasms was gardening. The American Flower Garden (1909) appeared in many editions over a period of 25 years. Well illustrated with photographs, and beautifully printed, this book covers the topic of American gardening from a decidedly upper-class point of view. Chapters on various garden topics (such as ‘‘The Naturalistic Garden’’) and chapters of plant advice (such as one on annuals) made this a practical handbook for those with enough money to garden on Doubleday’s scale. In one chapter, ‘‘The Formal Garden,’’ Doubleday extols Italian gardening and the sophisticated delights of continental garden skill. In another, she writes: ‘‘When we remember that the masses of our population are but lately landed
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immigrants, it is scarcely surprising that crowds gaze with rapture upon a life-sized elephant, done in uniform cactus rosettes, on the greensward of a public park.’’ Although Doubleday is a minor figure in American nature writing, her books are typical of those associated with the conservation movement of the turn of the century. At that time, nature study of both flora and fauna became more than just a proper pastime for a genteel country woman; it became part of a growing national consciousness to preserve a magnificent natural heritage.
OTHER WORKS: The Piegan Indians (1889). How to Attract the Birds (1902). Birds Every Child Should Know (1907). Birds Worth Knowing (1917).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: McFarland, M., Memoirs of a Rose Man (1949). Swanberg, W. A., Dreiser (1965). Dreiser, T. A., Letters (1959). Reference works: DAB (1891). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). —BEVERLY SEATON
DOUGLAS, Amanda Minnie Born 14 July 1831, New York, New York; died 18 July 1916, Newark, New Jersey Daughter of John N. and Elizabeth Horton Douglas Amanda Douglas was educated at the City Institute in New York City, and in 1853 moved to Newark, New Jersey, where she spent the rest of her life. At one time she considered a career as a designer and engraver, but illness in her family forced her to remain at home and she began to write for publication. She soon established herself as a prolific author of both short stories and book-length fiction. Her first novel, In Trust, was published in 1866. From then until almost the end of her life, she produced steadily, frequently publishing more than one book a year. She was a member of the New Jersey Woman’s Press Club and the Ray Palmer club, a women’s literary organization. In 1893 her novel Larry won a prize from Youth’s Companion for the year’s best piece of fiction for young people. As an author Douglas developed several commercially successful series, two of which are distinctly juvenile. The Kathie stories, popular in the 1870s and 1880s, concern a ‘‘sunshiny’’ little girl who in a childish way exemplifies popular conceptions of womanly virtue—cheerful industry, love of ‘‘home life,’’ and the desire to exert an improving influence on boys about her. The Little Girl books (from A Little Girl in Old New York, 1896, to A Little Girl in Old Pittsburg, 1909) are saccharine tales built around references to local and national history, reflecting the buoyant patriotism of the Teddy Roosevelt era.
The later Helen Grant series (beginning with Helen Grant’s Schooldays in 1903) is designed for slightly older girls and offers an idealized version of the ‘‘new woman’’—Helen is a noble, intelligent girl, universally admired, who educates herself, attends college, chooses a profession, and becomes a teacher. She is interested in politics in a high-minded nonpartisan way, ‘‘now that suffrage is an issue,’’ and she finds higher education is no barrier to aesthetic refinement and elegant womanly taste. Douglas’ final series, the long-running Sherburne series (beginning with Sherburne House, 1892) projects a conventional domestic romance through several generations in one wealthy family. Through her novels, Douglas (like her friend Louisa May Alcott in Little Women) often compares life to the ‘‘progress’’ of Christian in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and describes human trials as ‘‘burdens’’ to be borne for their moral instruction. Though never explicitly feminist, Douglas repeatedly enjoins her readers to respect ‘‘single women,’’ remembering they too may lead ‘‘good and useful lives’’ and that marriage is not the only career of service for a woman. Her stories, though repetitive and obviously commercial, are lively and well plotted, effectively designed to entertain and instruct.
OTHER WORKS: Stephen Dane (1867). Sydney Adriance (1867). Claudia (1868). With Fate Against Him (1870). Kathie’s Stories (1871). Kathie’s Summer at Cedarwood (1871). Lucia: Her Problem (1872). Seven Daughters (1874). There’s No Place Like Home (1875). Drifted Asunder (1876). Nelly Kinnard’s Kingdom (1876). From Hand to Mouth (1878). Hope Mills (1880). Lost in a Great City (1880). Kathie’s Aunt Ruth (1883). Kathie’s Soldiers (1883). Kathie’s Three Wishes (1883). The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe (1883). Whom Kathie Married (1883). Floyd Grandon’s Honor (1884). Out of the Wreck (1884). A Woman’s Inheritance (1886). Foes of Her Household (1887). The Fortunes of the Faradays (1888). In the Ranks (1888). Heroes of the Crusades (1889). Osborne of Arrochar (1890). Bertha Wray’s New Name (1893). Lyndell Sherburne (1893). In the King’s Country (1894). Sherburne Cousins (1894). A Sherburne Romance (1895). In Wild Rose Time (1895). A Little Girl in Old Washington (1896). The Mistress of Sherburne (1896). The Children at Sherburne House (1897). Hannah Ann (1897). Her Place in the World (1897). A Little Girl in Old Boston (1898). Sherburne Girls (1898). The Heir of Sherburne (1899). Kathie’s Harvest Days (1899). A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia (1899). Almost as Good as a Boy (1900). A New ‘‘Sherburne’’ Book (1900). Home Nook (1901). A Little Girl in Old New Orleans (1901). A Question of Silence (1901). A Sherburne Inheritance (1901). A Little Girl in Old Detroit (1902). A Sherburne Quest (1902). How Bessie Kept House (1903). A Little Girl in Old St. Louis (1903). Helen Grant’s Friends (1904). Honor Sherburne (1904). A Little Girl in Old Chicago (1904). The Heirs of Bradley House (1905). Helen Grant at Aldred House (1905). A Little Girl in Old San Francisco (1905). An Easter Lily (1906). A Little Girl in Old Quebec (1906). Helen Grant, Senior (1907). A Little Girl in Old Baltimore (1907). In the Sherburne Line (1907). Helen Grant, Graduate (1908). A
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Little Girl in Old Salem (1908). Helen Grant, Teacher (1909). Helen Grant’s Decision (1910). Helen Grant’s Harvest Year (1911). The Red House Children at Grafton (1913). The Red House Children’s Year (1915).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: A Woman of the Century (1893). DAB (1929). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Book News Monthly (Sept. 1893, Jan. 1898). On Critical Analysis (video, 1995). —JANE BENARDETE
DOUGLAS, Ann Born 1942, Morristown, New Jersey Also writes under: Ann Wood Daughter of Malcolm D. Watson and Margaret Wade Taylor; married Peter H. Wood, 1965 (to 1974) Ann Douglas received her B.A. degree in English literature in 1964 from Harvard College, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. From 1964 to 1966, she studied Victorian literature at Linacre College, Oxford, England. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1970, writing her dissertation on ‘‘Piers Plowman and the Monastic Vision Tradition.’’ In 1974, she became a member of the faculty at Columbia University, where she currently teaches American literature and culture. She has been a member of the editorial boards of Women’s Studies since 1972 and of American Quarterly since 1974. The Feminization of American Culture (1977) is Douglas’ first book and her major work, although she has published widely in periodicals. The first two sections (‘‘The Sentimentalization of Status’’ and ‘‘The Sentimentalization of Creed and Culture’’) present her dominant thesis. Douglas maintains that the many similarities between women and clergy in America from 1820 to 1875 constituted an alliance that nurtured a popular literature and a sentimental society—in both of which we can see the beginnings of modern mass culture. In the book’s third section (‘‘Protest: Case Studies in American Romanticism’’), Douglas explores the work of Margaret Fuller and Herman Melville and suggests alternative responses to ‘‘feminization’’ (a rather arbitrary and even sexist term), however, ultimately unsuccessful. Douglas’ appendices suggest the solidity of a sociological study, and in the lengthy scholarly notes she reveals both her extensive reading of 19th-century popular literature and her familiarity with secondary sources. But Douglas’ thesis—the most innovative aspect of her study—seems tenuous in the end. Despite the similar plight of clergy and women at the time, a
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forceful alliance is not convincingly substantiated, although the economic, political, and intellectual parallels are compelling evidence of a shared ‘‘disestablishment.’’ Similarly, the author’s perceptive exploration of clerical and female ‘‘self-denial’’ is enlightening, while not quite persuading the reader of the larger connections for which Douglas argues. As Gerda Lerner notes, however, ‘‘the textual richness and methodological sophistication of this intellectual and literary history compensate for its overstatement, its lack of historical perspective, and its excessive display of erudition.’’ For the most part strikingly well written, The Feminization of American Culture draws attention to important aspects of 19thcentury life all too frequently ignored by the student of literature. Douglas introduces the reader to many writings (particularly those by women) undeservedly overlooked and to others worth probing—if not for their literary excellence, for their significance as part of the main body of American letters. Douglas’ treatment of the two ‘‘case studies’’ with which the book concludes is persuasively astute and profits greatly from the contexts she suggests in the rest of her work. Her examination of Margaret Fuller is particularly perceptive; she analyzes Fuller’s difficulties as a writer and a woman whose central problem is the absence of an audience and whose options become increasingly limited. At her best when dealing at some length with individual writers—Fuller, Melville, Stowe, Buckminster, Park, Henry Ward Beecher—Douglas is always provocative in The Feminization of American Culture, which has gone through several subsequent editions (1978 and 1988) since its 1977 publication. The book’s ultimate value lies in the wide range of materials she examines and in Douglas’ fresh view, whose coherence is at once a weakness and a strength. After The Feminization of American Culture, Douglas went on to write articles for a myriad of publications as well as the introduction for a new edition of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1981. Douglas’ next book, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s was published in 1995, and she wrote the introductions to Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader in 1998, and Joyce Johnson’s Minor Characters in 1999. Douglas celebrated 25 years of teaching at Columbia University in 1999. OTHER WORKS: Articles in: Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Los Angeles Times, Modernism/Modernity, New Republic, New York Times, Raritan,Vogue and others. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing (1995). Atlantic (May 1977). Other references: CSM (2 Aug. 1977). LJ (Aug. 1977). Nation (30 May 1977). Newsweek (13 June 1977). NYRB (14 July 1977). NYTBR (26 June 1977). On Critical Analysis (interview on video, 1995). —CAROLINE ZILBOORG, UPDATED BY NELSON RHODES
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DOVE, Rita Born 28 August 1952, Akron, Ohio Daughter of Ray and Elvira Hord Dove; married Fred Viebahn, 1979; children: Aviva As the second African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and the only African American to serve as Poet Laureate of the United States, Rita Dove has acquired an eager following among critics and the general public alike. Dove was born and grew up in Akron, Ohio, and early distinguished herself as a scholar. She attended Miami University of Ohio as a National Merit Scholar and graduated with her B.A. summa cum laude. She subsequently received a Fulbright Fellowship, which she used to study at Germany’s University of Tubingen. Returning to the U.S., she earned an M.F.A. from the well-known University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop. Her other awards include grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a General Electric Foundation award for Younger Writers, a National Book award, and several honorary doctorates. She has taught at Arizona State University and is currently on the faculty at the University of Virginia. Dove’s early publications include two chapbooks published soon after she graduated from the University of Iowa. Her first full-length poetry collection was The Yellow House on the Corner (1980); many of the poems in this book achieve their effects through precise imagery and detail. Like many first collections, The Yellow House on the Corner addresses a variety of subject matter, from personal coming-of-age narratives, to more political descriptions of historically significant events, including the American slave trade. In her second collection, Museum (1983), Dove continues this trend, relying on sensual imagery to examine such historical figures as Catherine of Alexandria, Catherine of Siena, and Boccaccio. To the extent that readers are familiar with the lives of the figures Dove evokes and the events to which she refers, her poems are generally accessible. Her language itself is direct and occasionally deceptively simple. Ironically, Dove has been criticized both for focusing too much on race and for failing to focus enough on race. And in a climate when confessionalism has become the easiest of targets, Dove has nevertheless been criticized for not revealing enough of her personal characteristics. These contradictory criticisms reveal Dove is comfortable working among several traditions, that she is familiar with both her African heritage and with the traditional Western literary and cultural canon. To the extent her poetry erupts from personal experience, the content of her poems, in other words, reveal the complicated nature of identity in the late 20th century. Dove is probably most well known for Thomas and Beulah (1986). This book, which won the Pulitzer Prize, consists of two sequences, one from either character’s perspective, which together explore the individual lives of Thomas and Beulah, Dove’s maternal grandparents, as well as their life together. Like many sequences, this book is most effectively read in its entirety. More decidedly narrative than some of Dove’s work, Thomas and Beulah has the effect of multigenerational novels. It is nevertheless a work of its time, for the characters are more antiheroic than
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classically heroic, more disappointed than fulfilled, more ordinary than extraordinary. Yet the book also addresses many of the major events in America’s 20th century, most especially World War II and its aftermath. Thomas is a man disappointed not to be a soldier and disappointed to be the father exclusively of daughters rather than sons, although he hopes to fulfill this longing with a son-in-law and grandson. Thomas’ stroke in the driver’s seat of his automobile and his subsequent death are among the most poignant scenes in the book. Beulah, on the other hand, longs for solitude, quiet. When her children are napping, she sits out behind her garage, relishing her time to herself. Together, the lives of Thomas and Beulah exemplify not only the details of racial struggles but also of gendered struggles during the middle of this century. To some extent, Dove continued this attention to ordinary lives, and more specifically to her own experience in Grace Notes (1989). A recent collection is Mother Love(1995), dedicated to her daughter and relying on the myth of Demeter and Persephone; and her latest is On the Bus with Rosa Parks published in 1999. Throughout her work, Dove elevates ordinary experience to memorable event through her use of striking detail. She has yet to write a book of poetry that has not been well received. Dove has also written in other genres. She has published one novel, Through the Ivory Gate (1992), and a play, The Darker Face of the Earth: A Verse Play in Fourteen Scenes (1994). Critics continue to treat her primarily as a poet, however, not only because the bulk of her work is in that genre, but also because even in her prose she attends to language with the precision of a poet. OTHER WORKS: Ten Poems (1977). The Only Dark Spot in the Sky (1980). Mandolin (1982). Fifth Sunday (1985). Selected Poems (1993). The Poet’s World (1995). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CANR (1998). —LYNN DOMINA
DREW, Elizabeth Born 16 November 1935, Cincinnati, Ohio Daughter of William J. and Estelle Jacobs Brenner; married J. Patterson Drew, 1964 (died 1970); David Webster, 1981. Upon graduation from Wellesley College in 1957, Elizabeth Drew worked for two years as an associate editor at the Writer, and then went on to write for the Congressional Quarterly. In 1967, she became the Washington editor for the Atlantic Monthly, and by 1973 was a regular contributor to the New Yorker with her ‘‘Letter from Washington.’’ In 1971, Drew began interviewing public figures on her radio program ‘‘Thirty Minutes With. . . ,’’ and since 1973 has been a commentator for the Washington PostNewsweek stations and a panelist for ‘‘Inside Washinton’’ (formerly ‘‘Agronsky and Company’’). Among other honors, Drew
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has received the Society of Magazine Writers Award for Excellence (1970), the Dupont-Columbia Award for Broadcast Journalism (1972-73), The Newswomen’s Club of New York Award (1983), the Washington Monthly Political Books Award (1984), and the Edward Weintal Prize for Diplomatic Reporting (1988). As a political journalist, Drew has been described as ‘‘the American Boswell’’ and ‘‘the Samuel Pepys of Washington.’’ Drew has often directed her attention to the ‘‘complexities of governing’’ and the ‘‘protracted, strange, disturbing and somewhat comic process of choosing a president.’’ Her articles and books have focused on specific topics such as presidential campaigns, congressional ethics, lobbying, regulatory commissions, foreign policy, and the events of the Watergate period. Drew combines a consistently understated tone with a restrained style and often organizes a series of focused interviews around a central question. Using the journal form of expression, she carefully describes what has happened and why, as well as providing a feeling for the atmosphere surrounding the events. Drew deftly juxtaposes the ludicrous and the profound on the American political scene. Her analytical and critical stance is tempered by her ironic and humorous sensibility. Drew’s highly praised Washington Journal: The Events of 1973-1974 developed from a journal which she kept during the Watergate years. Drew felt that ‘‘being a journalist in Washington [during Watergate] was like being at the battlefront,’’ and her text depicts daily confrontations with ‘‘one stupefying event after another.’’ Recognizing early in 1973 that the nation would have to deal with the question of impeaching a president, Drew meticulously observed key figures on the Judiciary Committee and developed an evocative case study of the process of decisionmaking during crisis. Drew interprets Watergate abuses in the context of a modern representative democracy confronted with unaccountable executives, reactive congresses, and citizens too easily prone to ‘‘acquiescence, inattention, [and] cynicism.’’ Washington Journal graphically recalls to mind the ‘‘difficult, frightening and fumbling struggle’’ to resolve the question of ‘‘whether our constitutional form of government would continue.’’ Drew’s second book, American Journal: The Events of 1976 (1977), was drawn from material previously published in the New Yorker. Written in journal form, it examines the process of choosing a president during the nation’s bicentennial year. Based on firsthand observation of the pressured candidates during the election period, Drew offers evidence that the big question of how candidates would be at governing is given insufficient consideration in the American political process. With the focus ‘‘on such things as a candidate’s smile, and his affability and how he is doing in Illinois,’’ candidates have accepted a process that prohibits any possibility of articulating a ‘‘broad and worthy vision of the American future.’’ Drew is unique in her ability to discern and pursue the ‘‘important questions facing the country.’’ Her interviews with national leaders reveal their personalities as well as their process of thought. Drew explores the complexity behind and below the surface realities of the contemporary political experience. For
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future scholars who seek a sense of national politics since 1960, her work proves invaluable. In Senator (1979), Drew recounts 10 days in the congressional life of John Culver in the Senate and in his home state, Iowa. The book is written as a case study, realistically detailing the trivial and morally problematic aspects of political life without offering synthesis or analysis. The book is frequently excerpted in anthologies assigned for college political science courses. In Portrait of an Election: The 1980 Presidential Campaign (1981), Drew explains that she is taking a journalistic approach that ‘‘constitutes a history of the period—an account of the realities of the time, unguided, and also undistorted, by hindsight.’’ The goal is to show ‘‘how people in politics think, calculate, react’’ and to capture how it looks and feels. One reviewer applauded her ‘‘cool, lucid style’’ and ‘‘reasoned fairminded approach’’ to her interviews with political actors and their advisors. Another reviewer, however, sees Drew spending time ‘‘lovingly describing Democratic programs or tearing apart Republican rhetoric.’’ A perception by Drew’s colleagues that she is a ‘‘serious, humane, responsibly liberal, one-track-minded, mildly workaholic veteran’’ Washington insider, is especially borne out in Politics and Money: The Road to Corruption (1983). Drew carefully synthesizes the intricacies of the role of money in the American political system and provides a specifically argued analysis of what should be done to ‘‘bring the nation back closer to the fundamental principles of democracy.’’ Her investigation into the ‘‘great rivers of money that were essentially unaccounted for, and legally questionable, flowing into both our congressional and presidential elections’’ has been consistently credited as one of the first journalistic attempts to document the problems inherent in the process of reforming campaign finance laws. With Campaign Journal: The Political Events of 1983-1984 (1985), Drew returns to the detailed diary entries, recording a presidential election campaign with much of the focus on strategies used by Democratic Party candidates trying to win back the White House. Election Journal: Political Events of 1987-1988 (1989) offers more discursive judgements of events and people than her previous books on presidential campaigns, assigning to Ronald Reagan, for instance, the role of ‘‘dominant figure’’ in the 1988 election. Both books reflect what a reviewer called her ‘‘extraordinary capacity for eliciting the informed observations of insiders.’’ Since 1989 Drew has continued to contribute the ‘‘Letter from Washington’’ for the New Yorker as well as to write articles for such publications as the New York Times Sunday Magazine. Her subjects have included the role of Congress in the post-Cold War era, politics in the Soviet Union, the 1992 presidential election campaign, and the politics of campaign finance reform. In 1993 she began work on a book about the first year of the Clinton administration. For On the Edge: The Clinton Presidency (1994), Drew interviewed every high official in the White House, along with
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Cabinet officers, Capitol Hill staff, and other Washington insiders. Although criticized for the number of anonymous quotes, this method allowed her to deliver an accumulation of painstaking detail that enhances the book’s credibility and paints one of the fullest pictures of the Clinton Administration’s creation of its ambitious but ill-fated health care proposal. Showdown: The Struggle Between the Gingrich Congress and the Clinton White House (1996) offers a similarly detailed portrait, this time of then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. The exhaustive work—a journalist colleague described her ‘‘lichen-like attachment’’ to Gingrich—followed the Speaker’s fall from triumph to failure within the space of one year. The book highlights a criticism of the type of journalistic reportage Drew utilizes; it creates an accurate picture of a moment in time but lacks the potential for the kind of reliable analysis that a historical work can provide. In Whatever It Takes: The Real Struggle for Political Power in America(1997), Drew was applauded for her insight that the interests of a political party may conflict with those of its candidate: Bob Dole’s presidential campaign was abandoned by the Republicans to increase their chances of winning the House and Senate. The book, a look at the activities and ethics of several powerful conservative lobbies, was panned by some for shining light on the conservatives at the same time that the Clinton Administration’s ethical difficulties were coming to light. Yet critics agreed that Whatever It Takes offers Drew’s usual fair—if slightly left-leaning—portrait, teeming with insider information. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Marzolf, M., Up from the Footnote: A History of Women Journalists (1977). Reference works: CA 104 (1982). WWAW (1997/1998). Other references: American Spectator (July 1996). BW (26 May 1997). CSM (9 Nov. 1977). JAS (Aug. 1983). National Review (9 Aug. 1985). NR (30 Dec. 1981, 13 Mar. 1995). NYRB (21 Jan. 1982, 6 June 1996, 14 Aug. 1997). NYTBR (14 Sept. 1975, 9 Nov. 1977, 13 May 1979, 8 Nov. 1981, 11 Sept. 1983, 17 March 1985, 2 April 1989, 27 Nov. 1994). Newsweek (18 Dec. 1971, 13 Oct. 1975). PW (26 Sept. 1994). Reason (Dec. 1997). Washington Journalism Review (Dec. 1981). —JENNIFER L. TEBBE, UPDATED BY KAREN RAUGUST
DREXLER, Rosalyn Born 26 November 1926, New York, New York Also writes under: Julia Sorel Daughter of George and Hilda Sherman Bronznick; married Sherman Drexler, 1946; children: one daughter, one son Rosalyn Drexler, who writes under both her own name and her pseudonym Julia Sorel, offers readers plays and novels that share pathos and satiric wit, mundaneness and magic, comedy and
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the blunt grimness of newspaper tragedy. She describes her feminist blend of ‘‘reality and fantasy’’ as ‘‘in the tradition of the Russian absurdists/surrealists such as Zamyatin, Gogol, and Bulgakov.’’ Her writing is structured by plot development motivated by character, located in a world like ours—though the rules differ, and characters sometimes follow the spotlight or turn into angels. Drexler’s drama has been well received critically, and three of her plays (Home Movies, 1967; The Writer’s Opera, 1979; Transients Welcome, 1984) were awarded Obies. Her short story ‘‘Dear’’ won a Paris Review humor prize (1966), and in 1974 she received an Emmy Award for writing a television special for comedian Lily Tomlin. Drexler has been the recipient of fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation (1965, 1968, 1974, 1986), Guggenheim Foundation (1970), and Yaddo (1980); she has also received grants from the NEA (1989, 1991), the New York Foundation for the Arts (1990), and the New York State Commission on the Arts (1993). Her creative interest in both literature and art has led to membership in numerous dramatic and theatrical organizations, including the Dramatists Guild, the New York Theatre Strategy, and Actors Studio. Drexler’s artistic versatility has translated into a successful career as a painter. She has presented one-women art shows at New York and Boston galleries, among others, and has been a part of group shows in such prestigious venues as the Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum. Her visual work Rosalyn Drexler: Intimate Emotions appeared in the Grey Art Gallery at New York University in 1986. In addition to her own creative outlets, Drexler employs her critical and scholarly command by contributing to such periodicals as Esquire, Village Voice, and Mademoiselle, and by reviewing films for Vogue. Largely self-educated, Drexler has worked as a wrestler, singer, college teacher, director, and sculptor; as well as a noted painter. All of these occupations are preoccupations to her writing, which she describes as ‘‘very much concerned with the artist, creativity, and the relationship of the artist to life,’’ with ‘‘human relationships’’ and questions of ‘‘what is real life and who’s trying to squelch it.’’ Critics have compared her to the Marx Brothers (whose movies she saw as a child), commenting on her honesty and the playfulness of her sight gags, song, silliness, and puns. But Drexler’s writing is not just farcical, as critics who have likened her to Kafka, Joyce, and Pynchon recognize. Drexler ‘‘loves Beckett’’ and Ionesco, and her worlds’ darker ironies and isolation reflect this. Her irreverence is iconoclastic. Her use of streamof-consciousness reveals characters who are not having fun, whose desires lead only to loss. Her writing focuses on the theatricality of life, the ways characters script each other and adopt roles, revealing in the process that much of human identity is artificial and implying that these roles are inadequate or damaging. Verbal and physical violence are also important technical and thematic issues in Drexler’s work, animating her interest in dysfunctional families, gender relations, and the impact of the arts and media. Her later work includes Bad Guy (1982, 1988), a novel about a therapist who uses dream interpretation and psychodrama
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to treat a teenage rapist/murderer whose role models have all been television characters. Drexler’s work is art and entertainment, and her characters resemble circus grotesques, paradoxically evoking tenderness and laughter. Her style is both compassionate toward them and merciless in detailing their lives. These criminals and victims, healers and patients, social misfits and apparently normal characters—whose psychological deformities and scars Drexler reveals—are both archetypal and idiosyncratic. Her writing is memorable for these characters and their wordplay; it is poignant when we see them achieve a momentary self-awareness or transcend their fragmentation in an act of intimacy or kindness— perhaps because the meanings of self and action remain ambiguous. Drexler’s writing is almost always political. The point of view is often feminist, as when she focuses on the commodification of the female body (Line of Least Existence, 1967; Cosmopolitan Girl, 1975) or mythologizes male rule as the rape/murder of a queen who incarnates her country (She Who Was He, 1973). But Drexler’s social critiques are broader than any label, ranging from parodies of class and racial stereotypes and witty indictments of commercialism, materialism, and egotism to trenchant satire of such topical issues as the American involvement in Panama (Cara Piña, 1992). OTHER WORKS: I Am the Beautiful Stranger (1965). The Investigation & Hot Buttered Roll (1967). One or Another (1970). To Smithereens (1972). Starburn: The Story of Jenni Love (1979). Art Does (Not!) Exist (1996). Dear (1997). Fiction as Julia Sorel: Unwed Widow (1975). Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway (1976). Rocky (1976). Alex: The Other Side of Dawn (1977). See How She Runs (1978). Essays, short stories and essays in Arts & Antiques, Black Ice, Esquire, Los Angeles Times, Mademoiselle, Ms., New American Revue, New York Times, Paris Revue, Sports Illustrated, Vogue, Village Voice, Viva and others. Included in the following anthologies: Theater Experiment (1967), Collision Course (1968), The Off-Off Broadway Book (1972), 100 Monologues (1989), Women on the Verge (1993), From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Drama, 1960-1995 (1998). Unpublished plays in Drexler’s possession (dates are for first production): The Ice Queen (1965). Was I Good? (1972). Vulgar Lives (1979). The Writer’s Opera (1979) Graven Image (1980). The Mandrake (1983). Starburn (1983). Delicate Feelings (1984). A Matter of Life and Death (1986). The Heart That Eats Itself (1987). The Flood (1992). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Abraham, T. T., ‘‘Carnivalesque and American Women Dramatists of the Sixties.’’ (dissertation, 1990). Betsko, K., and R. Koenig, Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights (1987). Brown, J., Feminist Drama: Definition and Critical Analysis (1979). Dasgupta, G., and B. Maranca, eds., American Playwrights: A Critical Survey (1981). Gottfried, M., A Theater Divided: The Postwar American Stage (1967). Keyssar, H.,
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Feminist Theatre (1984). Sontag, S., ‘‘Going to Theater, Etc.’’ in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966). Reference works: American Women Dramatists of the Twentieth Century (1982). CA (1979, 1999). CD (1988). CLC (1974, 1976). Notable Women in the American Theater (1989). . Other references: American Theatre (1993). Art in America 74 (Nov. 1986). Art News (March 1964; interview, Jan. 1971). george jr. (1996). Mademoiselle (interview, Aug. 1972). Massachusetts Review (interview, Winter 1972). New Yorker (23 May 1964). NYT (interview, 27 Feb. 1978). Plays and Players 17 (April 1970). PW (1996). Theater (Winter 1985) —DANA SONNENSCHEIN, UPDATED BY JULIET BYINGTON
DRINKER, Elizabeth Sandwith Born 1734, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; died 24 November 1807, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Daughter of William and Sarah Jervis Sandwith; married Henry Drinker, 1761 Born to a successful merchant family, Elizabeth Sandwith Drinker was educated by Anthony Benezet at a girls’ school that offered a curriculum similar to that available to boys in other schools. Such an education was so unusual in colonial America that Drinker’s obituary in 1807 made note of it. In October 1758 Drinker began her diary, a record which she kept faithfully until shortly before her death. Never intended for publication, the diary filled 36 manuscript volumes with almost daily entries. Drinker chronicled births, deaths, visits, price lists, travels, illnesses, medical advice, character sketches, family matters, religious activities, military movements, and political developments. In fact, she recorded thousands of Philadelphia events, both trivial and momentous. A series of entries made in 1777 and 1778, for example, detailed the British occupation of Philadelphia during the American Revolution. True to her Quaker pacifism, Drinker seems to have maintained a careful neutrality: her cryptic judgements spared neither side in the controversy. On May 18, 1778, she commented on the lavish celebration with which the British marked the departure of General Howe from Philadelphia: ‘‘This day may be remembered by many from the scenes of folly and vanity, promoted by the officers of the army under pretense of showing respect to Gen. Howe. . . .How insensible do these people appear, while our land is so greatly desolated, and death and sore destruction has overtaken and impends over so many.’’ Yet the Continental Army hardly merited Drinker’s higher esteem either. On 2 September 1777, Henry Drinker and other Friends had been arrested and exiled to Virginia for refusing on religious grounds to swear allegiance to the new government and contribute to its support. Due to his prominence, Henry was released after eight months without ever coming to trial, but
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Drinker’s diary entries for April 1778 document her trip to George Washington’s headquarters at Valley Forge to secure his release. After the Revolution, Drinker quite consciously directed her attention away from politics. In 1795, with one of the many verse entries in her diary, she characterized her interests as homebound: ‘‘I stay much at home, and my business I mind,/ Take note of the weather, and how blows the wind.’’ But although Drinker describes her interests as limited, the variety and detail of her 36-volume diary suggest wider concerns; her record has yet to be fully explored by scholars of early America. Elizabeth Drinker’s diary (kept from 1758 to 1807) is in the possession of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
OTHER WORKS: Extracts from the Journal of Elizabeth Drinker (edited by H. D. Biddle, 1889).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cowell, P., Women Poets in Pre-Revolutionary America, 1650-1775 (1981). Drinker, C. K., Not So Long Ago: A Chronicle of Medicine and Doctors in Colonial Philadelphia (1937). Other references: PMHB (1889, 1891). —PATTIE COWELL
DuBOIS, Shirley Graham See GRAHAM, Shirley
DuJARDIN, Rosamond Neal Born 1902, Fairland, Illinois; died 27 March 1963 Daughter of Edgar and Ida May Neal; married Victor DuJardin, 1925 Rosamond Neal DuJardin, a popular writer best remembered for her honest, direct novels about teenagers, began her career as a fiction writer for the Chicago Daily News in 1930, but soon moved on to sell more than 100 stories to magazines such as Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, Redbook, and McCall’s. DuJardin’s first novels, published between 1935 and 1946, were written for adults and often appeared first in magazine serial form. Honorable Estate (1943), like many of DuJardin’s works, takes place in a small town in Illinois. A young man brings his bride of a day home to the unwelcoming astonishment of his mother and tyrannical grandfather. Although the year is 1940, their lives revolve around petty, small-town gossip, not world events. The narrowness of convention destroys the newly formed
marriage contract by demanding suffocating sacrifices that the young wife cannot accept. Malicious tongues also account for two unnecessary deaths and the destruction of a doctor’s previously unblemished reputation. Only those who are able to break out from social bonds find love and happiness, leaving those behind locked in a suspicious prison of their own making. DuJardin writes a solid and engaging narrative that may lack depth but nonetheless brings the value of skepticism and open-mindedness within popular reach. Her characters are easy to identify with, her language is vivid, and her plots are filled with the unpredictable. In 1949 DuJardin wrote her first book for teenagers entitled Practically Seventeen, and she enjoyed the experience so much that she never went back to writing for adults. She followed this first young adult novel with 16 others, all of which were greeted with enthusiastic reviews. DuJardin takes teenage novels beyond their usual insipid level of romance and morality to create natural, authentic fiction that deals honestly with the problems of adolescence. She stresses the need for teenagers to lend a helping hand to each other themselves, understanding that there are some aspects of being 17 that adults know nothing about. In Double Wedding (1959), DuJardin writes a tale of believable romance. The novel does not end with the finding of true love, but begins with it. Pam and Peggy have already found their prospective husbands, and DuJardin explores the challenges and problems that come up in every serious relationship. There is no starry-eyed romance here. It is rather the awakening of two young girls learning to cope with love, learning how to fit it into their individual career dreams, their need for personal space, and their need for friends. DuJardin is writing for teenagers but she is dealing with the adult problems adolescence is all about; she understood and respected her audience as individuals and there is no condescension in her narratives.
OTHER WORKS: All Is Not Gold (1937). Only Love Lasts (1943). Brief Glory (1944). Tomorrow Will Be Fair (1946). Wait for Marcy (1950). Class Ring (1951). Double Date (1952). Marcy Catches Up (1952). Boy Trouble (1953). Double Feature (1953). A Man for Marcy (1954). Showboat Summer (1954). The Real Thing (1956). Senior Prom (1957). Wedding in the Family (1958). Junior Year Abroad, with J. DuJardin (1960). One of the Crowd (1961). Someone to Count on (1962). Young and Fair (1963).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: More Junior Authors (1963). Other references: Chicago School Journal (14 May 1951). PW (8 Apr. 1963). WLB (June 1953, May 1963). —CHRISTIANE BIRD
DUNLAP, Jane See DAVIS, Adelle
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DuPLESSIS, Rachel Blau Born 14 December 1941, Brooklyn, New York Daughter of Joseph L. and Eleanor Weslock Blau; married Robert Saint-Cyr DuPlessis, 1968; children: Richard, Kore Feminist literary critic and poet Rachel Blau DuPlessis lives in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, and teaches at Temple University. She describes herself as ‘‘an off-white feminist, resisting even ‘enlightenment’ Judaism, a radical but middle-class U.S. inhabitant in a professional job category.’’ Well known for her poetry in such collections as Gypsy/Moth(1984) and Drafts (3-14) (1991), DuPlessis is also the editor of the recently published Feminist Memoir Project (1998). DuPlessis attended Barnard College and Columbia University. She received her Ph.D. in 1970. She taught at Rijksuniversiteit te Gent in Ghent, Belgium, and Universite de Lille III in Lille, France, in the early 1970s. She then taught at Rutgers University and began teaching at Temple University in 1974. She received a Fulbright professorship in 1985 and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1986 and 1988. She was awarded a poetry fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts in 1990. Feminism infuses all of DuPlessis’ work. She contends that ‘‘if I had not become a feminist, I would not have been able to write much or to think anything especially interesting in any original way.’’ She sees her work in literary criticism as the psychosocial analyses of literary production. DuPlessis’ own writing seeks to invent an endless number of forms, structures, and ‘‘linguistic ruptures’’ in order to cut through and beyond the ‘‘narrative-business-as-usual.’’ Her engagement in experimental writing is part of a larger task of cultural change and revolution. While writing alone cannot bring about change, DuPlessis is adamant that writing exerts a continuous destabilizing pressure. Language and textual structures must help cause and support the changes in consciousness. Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (1985) defines one major project of 20th-century women writers: the critique of the (heterosexual) romance plot. DuPlessis challenges the classic relation of romance and quest; she seeks to invent narrative strategies to erode and replace the heterosexual couple as an adequate fictional ending. This book was written as a cross between feminist humanism and the neo-Marxist analysis of Raymond Williams. DuPlessis is also known as an authority on the life, work, and influences of Hilda Doolittle. In H. D.: The Career of That Struggle (1986), she wrote a critical exploration of Doolittle. DuPlessis collaborated with Susan Stanford Friedman on Signets: Reading H. D. (1990), a collection spanning two decades of Hilda Doolittle criticism by the most influential critics. Well reviewed, the anthology is a representative collection of essays, some classics and others more recent, including bibliographies, chronology, and photographs. Meryl Altman in a review for the Women’s Review of Books wrote,‘‘More easily available than
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Michael King’s H. D. Woman and Poet (1986), which it partly supersedes, and in all respects superior (of course) to Harold Bloom’s H. D., this comprehensive and balanced gathering of clearly written articles is the one critical anthology anyone writing about or teaching H. D. should certainly buy.’’ DuPlessis collected a decade of her essays for inclusion in The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice (1990). She examines such questions as: Isn’t ‘‘feminist aesthetic’’ a contradiction in terms? And why has feminist criticism throughout its brief history searched so diligently for an aesthetic? Since literary study as an intellectual and institutional practice can’t seem to manage without these measuring rods, how can there be a feminist literary criticism at all? The volume starts with her famous essay ‘‘For the Etruscans,’’ and critics claim the power of this essay derives from its borderline status, described as coming from the two author positions that DuPlessis delineates for herself, ‘‘part sisterhood is powerful, part meaning is constructed through discursive practices.’’ Throughout the essays in The Pink Guitar, DuPlessis marshals her feminist anger through a radical writing practice that constantly questions its own discursive status while upending issues of language, women, and authority. As one reviewer remarked, ‘‘DuPlessis’ sentences dart, rest, turn, twist, reveal, and disappear.’’ In 1998 DuPlessis collaborated with Ann Snitow on an anthology called the Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women’s Liberation. As she did in The Pink Guitar, DuPlessis once again exhibits her abiding commitment to giving voice to the widest range possible of women’s expression. In this case, the focus is a collection of memoirs from feminism’s ‘‘second wave’’ of the 1960s and 1970s. While assembling the collection, the editors were lectured by a member of a younger feminist generation about the need to move forward. ‘‘It is time for the old to let go of ’70s politics. To practice a little strategic forgetfulness.’’ Contrary to this stance, DuPlessis sees the history of feminism as a necessary building block for further activism. ‘‘Ignorance of that time. . .is also an odd handicap,’’ the editors wrote in the Feminist Memoir Project, ‘‘like running a relay race with no ideas of what’s being handed on to you from the runner just behind.’’ Through all of her work, poetry, and criticism, DuPlessis constantly engages the past in order to create not cultural revision but revolution. She seeks to create and preserve a narrative of feminism that stands against historical forgetting.
OTHER WORKS: Poetry Wells (1980). Tabula Rosa (1987). Draft X: Letters (1991).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). American Book Review (Apr./May 1991). CA (1993). Choice (1992). WRB (July 1991, July 1992). —CELESTE DEROCHE
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DUNBAR-NELSON, Alice (Ruth Moore)
an unknown plane of life to avoid work,’’ and reassures readers that an independent, intelligent woman, a lawyer or doctor, does not lose her ability to love when she gains a vocation.
Born 19 July 1875, New Orleans, Louisiana; died 18 September 1935, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Also wrote under: Alice Dunbar, Alice Ruth Moore Daughter of Joseph and Patricia Wright Moore; married Paul L. Dunbar, 1889 (divorced); Robert J. Nelson, 1916
During the period of her marriage to Dunbar, Dunbar-Nelson published her second collection, The Goodness of St. Rocque, and Other Stories (1899), 14 local-color stories of New Orleans life. These are crisply written sketches, portraying struggling, heroic characters trapped in difficulties. Most have a surprise twist at their conclusions.
The younger of two daughters of middle-class working parents, Alice Dunbar-Nelson attended public schools and Straight College, New Orleans. After graduation, she began to teach and to submit poetry to the Boston Monthly Review. One of these poems and the accompanying photograph attracted Paul Dunbar, then a young poet. He wrote her, conversationally raising literary issues, and enclosed a copy of his ‘‘Phyllis.’’ This began a friendship that led to marriage. Dunbar-Nelson separated from Dunbar after a quarrel in 1902, and returned to teaching—she had taught kindergarten at Victoria Earle Matthews’ White Rose Mission in New York— becoming head of the English Department at Howard High School in Wilmington, Delaware. She retained this position for 18 years until she was fired for defying an order to abstain from political activity. During World War I, Dunbar-Nelson became involved in organizing black women on behalf of the U.S. Council of National Defense. She was the first black woman to serve on Delaware’s Republican State Committee. She became associate editor of the Wilmington Advocate, a weekly newspaper published by her second husband and dedicated to the achievement of equal rights for blacks. She also wrote a weekly column for the Washington (D.C.) Eagle and contributed occasional pieces to the American Methodist Episcopal Church Review. Her later years were devoted to social work, especially with delinquent black girls, and to the cause of world peace. Dunbar-Nelson’s reply to Dunbar’s first letter to her set forth her views on the literary use of ‘‘the Negro problem’’: ‘‘I haven’t much liking for those writers that wedge the Negro problem and social equality and long dissertations on the Negro in general into their stories. It is too much like a quinine pill in jelly. . . .Somehow when I start a story I always think of my folk characters as simple human beings, not of types of a race or an idea, and I seem to be on more friendly terms with them.’’ Dunbar-Nelson’s letter also mentioned the forthcoming publication of her first book, Violets, and Other Tales (1895). In accord with her philosophy, the book presents ‘‘simple human beings’’ caught in universal dilemmas such as poverty and love betrayed. While many of the 12 and 17 tales and sketches in Violets, and Other Tales are romantic and slight, they give evidence of a fresh, lively style. Noteworthy in this collection for their sprightliness and originality are the humorous ‘‘In Unconsciousness,’’ a mock epic inspired by a tooth extraction, and ‘‘The Woman,’’ a lively meditation on the independent woman. This piece decries ‘‘this wholesale marrying of girls in their teens, this rushing into
While teaching at Howard High School, Dunbar-Nelson edited two collections of poems and prose for oratory students, Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence (1914) and The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer (1920). Included in the latter are several pieces by Dunbar-Nelson, many of them (such as the one-act play Mine Eyes Have Seen) expressing conventional patriotic sentiments and racial pride. The short lyric ‘‘I Sit and Sew,’’ while sharing the conventional patriotism of the others, is also a statement of a woman chafing at the limited range of appropriate female activity; it has an intensity, freshness, and power that the other pieces lack. Dunbar-Nelson was a pioneer in the black short story tradition. Her second volume shows an increase in power, which promised further development, had she continued to write in this genre. Instead, an energetic woman of diversified talents, she devoted her later life to journalism and political and social activism. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bernikow, L. The World Split Open: Four Centuries of Women Poets in England and America (1974). Brawley, B., Paul Laurence Dunbar (1936). Brown, H. Q., Homespun Heroines, and Other Women of Distinction (1926). Hull, G. T., ed., The Works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson (3 vols., 1988). Kerlin, R. T., Negro Poets and Their Poems (1935). Loggins, V., The Negro Author (1931). Martin, J., ed., A Singer in the Dawn (1975). Shockey, A. A., Afro-American Writers, 1746-1933 (1989). Stetson, E., ed., Black Sister (1981). Whiteman, M., A Century of Fiction by American Negroes, 1853-1952: A Descriptive Bibliography (1955). Reference works: NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Delaware History (Fall—Winter 1976). —KAREN F. STEIN
DUNCAN, Isadora Born 26 May 1877, San Francisco, California; died 14 September 1927, Nice, France Daughter of Joseph and Dora Gray Duncan; married Sergei Essenin, 1922 (separated by 1924); children: two, both died in 1913 One of the great originators of modern dance and an articulate proponent of her art, Isadora Duncan grew up in circumstances which encouraged her independent spirit. Her father abandoned
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his family when Duncan was an infant, and her mother was forced to support the family by giving music lessons. Duncan left school at age ten to study dance and perform in the natural, graceful, and seemingly improvisational manner that later made her famous. Although she always considered her dance American in spirit, Duncan never met with much success on the stage in her own country. She lived most of her life in Europe, where she achieved enormous critical and popular acclaim, began the first of several schools of the dance, and bore two children. The ghastly deaths of her children in 1913 in an automobile accident haunted the dancer throughout her life and lent a tragic dimension to her highly personal art. In 1921 Duncan was invited to found a school of dance in Russia, where before the Revolution her tours had inspired innovations in the Russian ballet. During this Russian visit, Duncan met and married Russian poet Sergei Essenin, an unstable man much younger than she. But by 1924, the economically troubled Soviet government had withdrawn support for the school, and Duncan had separated from Essenin and left Russia. Thereafter she lived precariously, performing less often but creating a lasting impression when she did. In 1927 Duncan died tragically when the fringe of her shawl caught in a wheel of a sports car, breaking her neck. Duncan’s memoirs up until her 1921 departure for Russia were written during her last months and published posthumously in 1927 as My Life. There have been claims Duncan did not write these unaided, but the exuberant style is that of her essays and of the impromptu speeches she made at the end of every dance recital. (Her miscellaneous writings are collected in The Art of the Dance, 1928.) There are inaccuracies in My Life, and the writing is marred by a banality of expression—Duncan’s medium was movement, not words—but Duncan did have storytelling ability and a gift for putting herself in exalted mythical contexts. Paperback editions of the autobiography, prompted by a popular 1968 film about Duncan’s life, have introduced a new generation of readers to the innovative dancer. In My Life and elsewhere Duncan articulates the conflict between art and life for the woman artist, and there is ample evidence she suffered greatly from these opposing demands. Her biographers have tended to stress the disparity between the dancer’s exquisite art and her untidy personal life, but Duncan’s unconventional and at times irresponsible lifestyle helped make possible her innovative art. The dance she created was a response to her need to express herself as a woman. Although My Life appears to have been commissioned by Duncan’s publishers because of the author’s notoriety, and although many complained it tells the story of her loves rather than of her art, the book does reveal the interdependence of Duncan’s life and her work. In her personal life Duncan demanded freedoms usually granted only to men, but nonetheless her image of herself was conventionally feminine. In My Life she describes herself as an instrument inspired to movement by great works of music, poetry, and painting (always created by men) and she revels in her role as the darling muse of male artists. At times Duncan betrayed an understandable ambivalence about the feminine role, as was
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revealed in her occasional neglect of her pupils. But in general, it appears Duncan was able to use her very feminine version of the woman artist as a more or less culturally permissible way of achieving her own autonomy. Duncan’s version of the woman genius was powerful: she considered herself to be not merely a performer or muse but an artist whose movements came from her soul. Thus she never practiced with mirrors, as do ballet dancers whose mechanical and prescribed movements Duncan rejected. Duncan found her model in the concepts of self-reliance, inner inspiration, and American transcendental romanticism. Like Whitman, she rejected the duality of soul and body, which is potentially damaging to the integrity of women. She called on women to learn about and take control of their own bodies: to become the sculptors, painters, and architects of themselves. Social commentator and novelist Floyd Dell was correct when he included Duncan in his 1913 book about feminists, and he was also correct when he labeled her feminism an extension of the feminine role itself. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Dell, F., Women as World Builders: Studies in Modern Feminism (1913). Duncan, I., Duncan Dancer: An Autobiography (1966). Duncan, I., and A. R. Macdougall, Isadora Duncan’s Russian Days and Her Last Years in France (1929). Getz, L. Dancers and Choreographers: A Selected Bibliography (1995). Macdougall, A. R., Isadora: A Revolutionary in Art and Love (1960). Schneider, I. I., Isadora Duncan: The Russian Years (1968). Seroff, V., The Real Isadora: A Biography (1971). Steegmuller, F., ed., ‘‘Your Isadora’’: The Love Story of Isadora Duncan and Gordon Craig (1974). Terry, W., Isadora Duncan: Her Life, Her Art, Her Legacy (1963). Vigier, R., Gestures of Genius: Women, Dance, and the Body (1994). Reference works: Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia (1991). International Dictionary of Modern Dance (1998). —LINDA PANNILL
DUNIWAY, Abigail Scott Born 22 October 1834, Groveland, Illinois; died 11 October 1915, Portland, Oregon Daughter of John T. and Ann Roelofson Scott; married Benjamin C. Duniway, 1853 The second daughter among 12 children, Abigail Scott Duniway grew up on the Illinois frontier. At seventeen, she accompanied her family on the overland trail to Oregon, keeping a journal of their 1852 crossing that is one of the best of the genre. Her mother and baby brother died of cholera on the way, and the family arrived virtually destitute in Oregon. Duniway’s first novel, Captain Gray’s Company (1859), is a fictionalized account of her wagon trail journey to Oregon and her early life in an Oregon town. It reveals as much about its author and her attitudes as about her milieu. Agrarian as well as feminist
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in principle, Duniway was writing for ‘‘the world’s workers, the stay and strength of our land,’’ and hoped her book would ‘‘be instrumental in causing the sterner to look more to the welfare of the weakest of the tried and suffering of the weaker sex.’’ More realistic than many other women’s novels of the time, the book was nevertheless criticized by Duniway’s political and religious opponents for being too romantic. It remains of interest for its pervasive wit and its historical detail. Between May 1871 and January 1887, Duniway published and edited a weekly newspaper called the New Northwest. It advocated both women’s rights and human rights and circulated throughout the Pacific Northwest and to women in other parts of the country. Its lively style, strong opinions, revelations of political and social scandals, and fervent advocacy of legal reforms and woman suffrage made it a particularly influential and controversial publication. In it Duniway also serialized 16 more of her own novels. These were essentially polemical, featuring strong, mistreated female heroines who suffer numerous adversities and finally triumph over refined ladies and antisuffragist enemies. Though flawed as literature, the stories include extraordinary details of frontier family life and social relationships. Many passages show a fine gift for writing dialogue and humor. Duniway also lectured extensively, bringing her message to isolated women and men with fervor and courage. Each year she averaged 200 lectures, and traveled 3,000 miles by steamboat, mud wagon, stagecoach, horseback, and railroad. She lectured her way across the country six times and became vice president of the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1884. Duniway’s ‘‘editorial correspondence’’ now constitutes a unique historical record of the people and places she saw. Though Duniway almost succeeded in winning woman suffrage in Oregon and Washington during the 1880s, the closing of the frontier led to changes that delayed it for another generation. From 1887 until her death, Duniway continued to write and lecture, publishing in the Portland Oregonian, the Pacific Empire (which she edited), and the Coming Century. When woman suffrage was declared in 1912, she wrote the official proclamation of victory and became the first woman voter in Oregon.
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to 1915’’ (TV script, Wilderness Women Project, University of Montana, 1978). Morrison, D. N., Ladies Were Not Expected: Abigail Scott Duniway and Women’s Rights (1977). Moynihan, R. B., Abigail Scott Duniway of Oregon (dissertation, 1979). Roberts, L. M., ‘‘Suffragist of the New West: Abigail Scott Duniway and the Development of the Oregon Woman Suffrage Movement’’ (thesis, 1969). Richey, E., Eminent Women of the West (1975). Ross, N. W., Westward the Women (1944). Smith, H. K., The Presumptuous Dreamers (1974). —RUTH BARNES MOYNIHAN
DUPUY, Eliza Ann Born ca. 1814, Petersburg, Virginia; died December 1880, New Orleans, Louisiana Wrote under: Annie Young Daughter of Jesse and Mary Sturdivant Dupuy Eliza Ann Dupuy’s fiction, designed to appeal to popular tastes, has few literary pretensions. Combining elements from the domestic novel, the melodramatic romance, and the Richardsonian novel of sentiment, her works abound with coincidences and stock characters and situations. Some favorite subjects, such as the young heiress forced to marry against her will, appear regularly over a 30-year span from The Conspirator (1843) to The Gypsy’s Warning (1873). Dupuy’s narrative ingredients remain constant whether the novel is based on the traditions of her own family (The Huguenot Exiles, 1856), Corsican vendettas (All for Love; The Outlaw’s Bride, 1873), or the life of Marshal Ney (Michael Rudolph, 1870). Their frequent twists of plot, through 500 pages of dark adventures, teetering suspense, long-hatched vengeances, consumptive heroines, providential heroes, and descents into lurid crime and sordid mystery, recall the exigencies of their original serial publication. Her products are carefully adjusted to the desires and expectations of her readers.
OTHER WORKS: My Musing (1875). David and Anna Matson (1876). From the West to the West: Across the Plains to Oregon (1905). Path Breaking (1914).
The Planter’s Daughter (1857) is described by a contemporary critic as ‘‘in an eminent degree sensational.’’ With all their alluring depictions of vice, however, Dupuy’s works conform to and enforce accepted mores. Although entire novels, such as The Country Neighborhood (1855), are said to be based on ‘‘actual life’’ in Mississippi or Louisiana (where Dupuy herself had lived and where she wrote many of her works), stock elements such as persecuted or seduced females, glittering rakes, and avaricious parents, supernatural devices, and the heavy use of coincidence strain the reader’s belief in her realism. In general, however, Dupuy’s Southern characters are presented with less of the heavy-handed satire that attends her descriptions of the ‘‘high society’’ of the nouveaux riche in New York City or in Newport.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bandow, G. R., ‘‘In Pursuit of a Purpose: Abigail Scott Duniway and the New Northwest’’ (thesis, 1973). Capell, L., ‘‘Biography of Abigail Scott Duniway’’ (thesis, 1934). McKnight, J., and J. M. Ward, ‘‘Abigail Scott Duniway, 1834
Many of Dupuy’s works remain satisfying as sensational light fiction, though modern readers will probably object to the extreme credulity of her heroines and the regularity with which young men and women in her novels allow filial duty to persuade them into acts against all reason or probability.
Duniway’s ambition and achievement as a writer was undoubtedly affected by her lack of formal education. Her historical role is more significant than her literary achievements because she never had the leisure, economic means, or intention to write for art’s sake. Nevertheless, the quality of Duniway’s vigorously amusing polemics is worthy evidence of her strong convictions and forceful, talented personality.
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OTHER WORKS: Morton: A Tale of the Revolution (circa 1828). Celeste: The Pirate’s Daughter (1845). The Separation; The Divorce; And the Coquette’s Punishment (1851). Adventures of a Gentleman in Search of Miss Smith (1852). Florence; or, The Fatal Vow (1852). Emma Walton; or, Trials and Triumph (1854). Annie Selden; or, The Concealed Treasure (1854). Ashleigh: A Tale of the Olden Time (1854). The Mysterious Marriage: A True Romance of New York Life (1858). The Hidden Sin (1866). Why Did He Marry Her (1870). How He Did It; Was He Guilty (1871). The Canceled Will (1872). Who Shall Be Victor? (1872). The Dethroned Heiress (1873). The Mysterious Guest (1873). The Clandestine Marriage (1875). The Discarded Wife; or, Will She Succeed (1875). A New Way to Win a Fortune (1875). The Shadow in the House; A Husband for a Lover (1881). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Davidson, J. W., The Living Writers of the South (1869). Forrest, M., Women of the South Distinguished in Literature (1861). McVoy, L. C., and R. B. Campbell, A Bibliography of Fiction by Louisianians and on Louisiana Subjects (1935). Raymond, I., Southland Writers (1870). Tardy, M. T., ed., The Living Female Writers of the South (1872). —SUSAN SUTTON SMITH
DURANT, Ariel Born Ida Kaufman, 10 May 1898, Proskurov, Russia; died 25 October 1981, Hollywood Hills, California Daughter of Joseph and Ethel Appel Kaufman; married William J. Durant, 1913 Ariel Durant emigrated with her mother, three sisters, and one brother to New York City in 1900 and became a naturalized citizen in 1913. She attended public schools and the Ferrer Modern School in New York. At the latter institution she fell in love with her twenty-seven-year-old teacher, William James Durant. The couple were married in a civil ceremony in 1913, when Ida was fifteen years of age. In 1927 Ida Durant was affectionately and informally renamed Ariel by her husband because, he claimed, ‘‘she was as strong and brave as a boy, and as swift and mischievous as an elf.’’ Ariel later became Ida Durant’s legal name. After the publication of The Age of Napoleon (vol. XI) in 1975, the U.S. Senate, on a motion by Senator Hubert Humphrey, voted the Durants a scroll of recognition and applause. The French government presented them with two medallions in appreciation of their recording of French civilization and, in January 1977, Ariel and Will each received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Durant herself received several honorary doctoral degrees; in 1965, she was named Woman of the Year in Literature by the Los Angeles Times. Ariel and Will’s marriage in 1913 launched a dual career as the two began collaborating on the series The Story of Civilization. Volumes I, III, and V (Our Oriental Heritage, Caesar and Christ,
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The Renaissance) were dedicated to Ariel, but Will alone was named as the author. In his introduction to The Age of Reason Begins (vol. VII, 1961) Will noted that Ariel’s contributions to the series had become so substantial that both their names had to appear on the title page. In succeeding years, Ariel coauthored with Will four additional volumes: The Age of Louis XIV (1963), The Age of Voltaire (1965), Rousseau and Revolution (1967), and The Age of Napoleon (1975). In their dual autobiography, Ariel characterized her work on the early volumes of The Story of Civilization—Our Oriental Heritage and The Life of Greece—as serving the subsidiary but immensely important function of organizing and classifying Will’s material. In addition to performing these tasks, Ariel began, with volume IV, The Age of Faith, to gather data for the manuscript. She describes how, while collating material for The Age of Faith, an enthusiastic interest in the history of the Middle Ages was awakened within her. Ariel was largely responsible for encouraging Will to overcome his antipathy for this historical period and for convincing him of the need to portray the medieval Jews in a full and lively manner. Published materials about the couple stress the importance of Ariel’s contribution to the entire Story of Civilization series. While she initially served largely as a proofreader and moralelifter to Will, by 1961 Ariel was coauthor of the seventh and Pulitzer Prize-winning volume. Ariel is credited with checking Will’s tendency to romanticize women’s roles in history, and, in 1965, Will asserted in an interview that Ariel was certainly capable of finishing the rest of their work (volumes X and XI) alone. The Story of Civilization series is generally regarded as good, solid popular history. The writing style is genial and relaxed; the series is, on the whole, reliable and thoroughly researched. Certain volumes have been criticized for some factual errors and for a fondness for anecdotes which can blur perspective. The work is recognized, however, as a massive universal history, one carrying Western civilization from its very beginnings through the Age of Napoleon. The reader who wishes to encounter the personality of Ariel would be well advised to read Will and Ariel Durant: A Dual Autobiography. In this work, Ariel speaks for herself, and the reader is able to compare her views with Will’s, since each writes separate and clearly delineated sections. Ariel’s strength, wit, and astonishing candor about all matters, especially the sexual, infuse the portions written by her. Her accounts of her married life, including times of crisis and conflict, reveal her to be an independent woman with a refreshing sense of humor and perspective. Readers of a feminist bent might be wont to criticize Ariel for the apparent submersion of her unique identity in her husband’s life and work. It is true that if one concentrates exclusively on The Story of Civilization, Ariel, however unfairly, certainly seems to play a secondary role in the evolution of this work. The reader who consults the autobiography, however, will find an astonishingly complex and assertive woman who, from her early youth, exhibited an unusual sensitivity to women’s needs, problems, and struggles.
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In the first chapter of the autobiography, entirely written by Ariel, she recounts her childhood allegiance to her mother, Ethel Appel. Ariel’s comments about her mother’s personal ambitions reveal a sympathy for the struggles of this immigrant woman who helped support a family by selling newspapers but who ultimately chose an independent life of her own. Ariel tells, with sensitivity and candor, how her mother, worn out by childbearing and ignorant of contraceptives, discouraged her husband’s attentions and caused a lasting alienation between them. After absorbing the radical views of lecturers and reading Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Ethel Appel cried, ‘‘Am I never to have any freedom, never a day of happiness or rest?’’ Ariel’s mother then moved from the family apartment and established a separate residence and, soon, a full life of her own. Ariel we are told, ‘‘was the only one in the family who sympathized with her.’’ Ariel, asserts that her mother was ‘‘stranger than fiction. . . aggressive and strong’’ and that she, Ariel, takes after her mother alone. The strength and determination of Ariel are implicit in The Story of Civilization’s evolution and explicit in her portions of the autobiography. The full dimension of Ariel’s remarkable personality will only be revealed, when the papers of the Durants are opened for general scrutiny. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Johnson, D., Practical History: A Guide to Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization (1990). Other references: Life (18 Oct, 1963). National Review (16 Jan. 1968). NYT (7 May 1968). Reader’s Digest (Oct. 1969). Time (13 Aug. 1965). Will and Ariel Durant: The Famous Historians Discuss Their Life and Career with James Day (audio cassette). —SUSAN E. SIEFERT
DWORKIN, Andrea Born 26 September 1946, Camden, New Jersey Daughter of Harry and Sylvia Spiegal Dworkin; married 1969 (divorced) As a child, Andrea Dworkin aspired to be a writer or lawyer to ‘‘really change society.’’ Arrested at eighteen for demonstrating for civil rights, she was held four days in the New York Women’s House of Detention and forced to undergo a painful internal examination. She hemorrhaged vaginally for two weeks, then went to the media to publicize the atrocity. The experience informed her later passionate feminist militancy and polemical writing. Retreating to Crete (1965-66), Dworkin published her first book, Child (1966). She completed her B.A. in literature and philosophy at Bennington College in 1968. Dworkin then left for five years in Amsterdam, where she began Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality (1974), aiming to incite revolution in conventional sex roles and cultural institutions by tracing the roots of sexism through psychology and pornography as a means by which men control and possess
women. Her generalizations about all men as neurotically dominant brutes and all male-female relationships as pathological led critics to lambaste her extremist separatist ideology. Dworkin emerged as one of the most strident voices of radical feminism, calling in a speech at a National Organization for Women (NOW) Conference on Sexuality for heterosexual sex without erection or penetration, leading opponents to coin the term ‘‘castrating feminists.’’ Dworkin developed this argument in the book Intercourse (1987). Radical lesbians criticized her bisexuality, and Dworkin rejected political lesbianism as a personal politic reminiscent of biological determinism. She said of the latter that it ‘‘justified atrocity’’ and attacked the militancy of ‘‘prescribers’’ who ‘‘enforce sexual conformity’’ that impels the search for new enemies, dividing women from women in the name of sexuality. While denying a biological basis for sexism, the ‘‘essentialist’’ Dworkin universalizes concepts of women and motherhood, misogyny and sexism. She favors the concept of androgyny. The nine essays in Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourse on Sexual Politics (1976) describe destructive male dominance and the artificial sex roles permeating cultures in Asia, Europe, and America, citing manifestations of ‘‘gynocide’’ in fairytales, customs, religion, pornography, and other literature as leading to deprivation of women’s rights. Dworkin focuses on pornography as the chief agency perpetuating the violent male power system. Her essay in the volume Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography (1980) and her Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981) reject the notion that pornography creatively expresses eroticism, seeing it as a violent instrument by which men subjugate women, deprive them of individuality, and keep them safe, secure, but subservient. Putting theory to practice, Dworkin teamed with attorney Catharine MacKinnon in 1983 to draft a controversial model civil ordinance defining pornography as illegal sex discrimination. It passed in Indianapolis; but despite Dworkin’s testimony before the Minnesota attorney general, published as Pornography Is a Civil Rights Issue for Women (1986), the law was overturned in Minneapolis as violating freedom of speech. Dworkin and MacKinnon coauthored Pornography and Civil Rights: A New Day for Women’s Equality (1988), outlining the history of women’s legal status and describing their ill-fated law. New organizations like Women Against Pornography drew upon Dworkin for the slogan ‘‘Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice.’’ Dworkin remained in the forefront of the antipornography movement with public appearances and Letters from a War Zone, 1976-1987 (1988, revised 1989). Right-Wing Women: The Politics of Domesticated Females (1983) argues that the 1970s antifeminist backlash from the political right stemmed from status anxiety, fear of personal consequences resulting from feminism’s questioning of traditional roles in which many American women had invested a sense of self, and even greater fears of what their status would be outside the home. The political right ‘‘makes certain metaphysical and material promises to women that both exploit and quiet some of women’s deepest fears. These fears originate in the perception
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that male violence against women is uncontrollable and unpredictable. Dependent on and subservient to men, women are always subject to this violence. The right promises to put enforceable restraints on male aggression, thus simplifying survival for women.’’ Dworkin worries about a ‘‘coming gynocide,’’ a grim future for all women but particularly for the poor and elderly. Dworkin’s short stories in New Woman’s Broken Heart (1980) as well as her novel Ice and Fire (1986) are, like much new women’s fiction, autobiographical, polemical, and experimental in style, sometimes finding black humor in the dilemmas of women’s lives voiced from a militant feminist perspective. Critics faulted Ice and Fire for graphically describing sex, drugs, and urban violence, seeing her ‘‘calculated nastiness’’ as akin to pornography. Her intent was to shake up her readers’ consciousness, contrasting the contemporary squalor to a woman’s origins in a typical American childhood to underscore the impact of pornography on lives. Mercy (1991), her second novel, is equally caustic. With Sexual Harassment: Women Speak Out (1993), Dworkin returned to nonfiction with an anthology of sexual harassment stories published in the wake of the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings. Dworkin cointroduces this volume, in which over 70 women share their sexual harassment experiences and the ways they responded. In Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings on the Continuing War Against Women (1997), Dworkin offers a collection of speeches and essays drawing upon her experiences as a victim of both rape and spousal abuse. The harrowing pieces relate tragedies as diverse as the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson, the oppression Orthodox Jewish women face in Israel due to strict religious laws, and sexual assault in Bosnian refugee camps. Dworkin alternately pleads and demands for justice, while arguing that not only the acts themselves, but also the impulses which gave rise to them, must be addressed. Dworkin has contributed to periodicals such as Ms., Heresies, Social Policy, Village Voice, America Report, Gay Community News, and Christopher Street. She served for a time as an editor of Ms. magazine and lectures frequently around the country. OTHER WORKS: Morning Hair (1967). Marx and Gandhi Were Liberals: Feminism and the ‘‘Radical’’ Left (1977). Why So-called Radical Men Love and Need Pornography (1978). The Reasons Why: Essays on the New Civil Rights Law Recognizing Pornography as Sex Discrimination (1985). In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearing (with C. MacKinnon, 1997). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Assiter, A., Pornography, Feminism and the Individual (1989). Reference books: CA (1979). CANR (1986, 1992). CLC (1987). FC (1990). MTCW (1991). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Choice (Oct. 1974). Ms. (Feb. 1977, June 1980, Mar. 1981, June 1983, Apr. 1985). NR (21 Feb. 1983, 15 June 1984). New Statesman (6 Nov. 1981, 29 July 1983). NYTBR
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(12 July 1981, 3 May 1992). TLS (1 Jan. 1982). VV (15-21 July 1981). WPBW (21 June 1981). WRB (May 1986). —BLANCHE LINDEN-WARD, UPDATED BY LEAH J. SPARKS
DYKEMAN, Wilma Born 20 May 1920, Asheville, North Carolina Also writes under: Wilma Dykeman, Wilma Dykeman Stokely Daughter of Willard J. and Bonnie Cole Dykeman; married James R. Stokely, Jr., 1940 (died 1977) Wilma Dykeman’s works betray a twofold love of Southern Appalachia: the fervid love of an immigrant for the new land, and the comfortable, well-rooted love of one whose forebearers have shaped a region’s history. Her father came from New York state but married into a long-established Asheville family, thus partially removing the ‘‘newcomer’’ stigma. After graduating from Northwestern University, Dykeman returned home to marry poet/ writer James Stokely. They remained in Appalachia, writing, teaching, raising a family, and lecturing. Stokely died in 1977. Dykeman continued her work, living in the village of Newport, Tennessee, as well as in Asheville, North Carolina. The South—but most especially the Appalachian South—is Dykeman’s subject. Her novels, biographies, histories, and regional landscapes explore such themes as the mountain woman’s unique social role, technology and ‘‘progress’’ as threats to mountain environments, the interconnectedness of blacks and whites, the crucial impact of Protestantism. Dykeman’s first work, The French Broad (1955, yet which remains in print today), nicely showcases her talent for social history. The French Broad River rises in the mountains of Transylvania County, North Carolina, changes directions through the region several times, and finally joins the Holston to form the Tennessee River at Knoxville. A river study, says Dykeman, is the best kind of travel book, for it enables one to get the feel of the region. The French Broad is structured both chronologically and thematically; central figures of the region’s past and present are detailed, as anecdotes illuminate such topics as the divisiveness of the Civil War, Appalachian religiosity, the fashionable watering places of the 19th century, or the prototypical mountain midwife. Dykeman’s other social histories combine the same informality and personal engagement. Neither Black nor White (1957), coauthored with husband James Stokely, responded to the Brown school desegregation decision of 1954. It tried to understand ‘‘the many Souths’’ and ‘‘discover, record and interpret a republic of the human mind.’’ For its contribution to race relations, the book received the Hillman Award. Dykeman and Stokely later produced The Border States (1968), and in 1975 Dykeman’s bicentennial history of Tennessee appeared. The book depicts that state’s three geographical regions and shows how Tennessee remains in many ways a frontier area.
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Dykeman’s storytelling knack is apparent in her novels, all of which explore regional themes. Centering on the character Lydia McQueen, The Tall Woman (1962, in its 39th printing in 1999) portrays the special functions mountain women performed during the Civil War and Reconstruction. The Far Family (1966) delineates the mountain woman’s importance in preserving tradition and family; sociologically, her role resembles both that of the heroically strong black woman and the southern plantation wife. Return the Innocent Earth (1973) explores the impact of industrial development on the region. Dykeman’s biographies manifest her talent for social history and strong characterization. Seeds of Southern Change (1962), coauthored with Stokely, traces the life of Will Alexander (1884-1956), a Southern white liberal who, as director of the ‘‘Commission on Interracial Cooperation,’’ and later as chief of Roosevelt’s Farm Security Administration, did as much as any one person to direct the South toward economic and racial justice. Prophet of Plenty (1966) explores the life and work of W. D. Weatherford (1875-1970), a champion of Appalachia whose fundraising work at Berea College gave it national renown. Edna Rankin McKinnon is the subject of Dykeman’s third biography, Too Many People, Too Little Love (1974). The younger sister of Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to Congress, Edna began lobbying in Washington in 1936 for birth control and then worked in Appalachia and around the world, establishing birth control and family planning clinics. Dykeman says Edna’s story interested her because it combined the three most important issues of the 20th century—the population explosion, the changing status of women, and the necessity for world peace. Dykeman, not often given a careful reading because of her ‘‘regionalism,’’ deserves a wider critical audience. She uses an easy and flowing style, perfectly suited to the anecdotal character of much of her work. She excels in describing folkways and vividly captures mountain speech. Her themes—though regional at base—are in the best sense universal human concerns. OTHER WORKS: Look to This Day (1968). Tennessee, a Bicentennial History (1976). At Home in the Great Smokies (with J.
DYKEMAN
Stokely III, 1977). With Fire and Sword: The Battle of Kings Mountain (1978, reprinted 1991). The Appalachian Mountains (with D. Stokley, 1980). Tennessee (1983, reprinted 1993). Explorations (1984). Haunting Memories (with C. Patterson’s paintings, 1996). Tennessee Woman: An Infinite Variety (1993). Essay ‘‘The Past is Never Dead: It’s Not Even Past’’ in Bloodroot: Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers (1998). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brosi, G., Contemporary Appalachian Writers (1988). Crouse-Powers, A. J., ‘‘Ecofeminist Theory and Appalachian Literature: A Praxis?’’ (thesis, 1995). Gantt, P. M., Appalachia in Context: Wilma Dykeman’s Search for the Souths (dissertation, 1992). Gantt, P. M., ‘‘A Mutual Journey: Wilma Dykeman and Appalachian Regionalism’’ in Breaking Boundaries: New Perspectives on Women’s Regional Writing (1997). Jones, O. K., ‘‘Social Criticism in the Works of Wilma Dykeman, with a Primary and Secondary Bibliography of Her Work’’ (thesis, 1989). McGhee, J. H., ‘‘The Appalachian Feminist Vision of Wilma Dykeman’s The Tall Woman’’ (thesis, 1992). Nash, L. R., ‘‘The Presence of Land in the Novels by Wilma Dykeman’’ (thesis, 1992). Nelson, S. L., ‘‘The Space They Love: Reconstruction in the Works of Appalachian and African-American Women Writers’’ (thesis, 1997). Other reference: A Conversation With Wilma Dykeman (video, 1992). A Writer’s Life: It Began with the French Broad (video, 1993). An Evening with Wilma Dykeman, 16 November 1993 (video, 1993). Chicago Sunday Tribune (29 July 1962). CSM (5 May 1955). Local Color: A Conversation Between Wilma Dykeman and Richard Marius (audiocassette, 1978). Higgs, R. J., Transcendentalism in the Hills Three Appalachian Novelists (video, 1981). Local Color: A Conversation Between Wilma Dykeman and Richard Marius (audiocassette, 1978). NYHTB (1 May 1955). NYTBR (1 July 1962, 3 June 1973, 8 Sept. 1974). Pembroke Magazine (tributes, 1993). Saturday Evening Post (April 1974). Tell It On the Mountain: Appalachian Women Writers (audiocassette, 1995). Wilma Dykeman (videocassette, 1995). Wilma Dykeman: Prose Reading (videocassette, 1983). —MARGARET MCFADDEN-GERBER
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Second Edition
VOLUME 2 E-K Editor Ta r y n B e n b o w - P f a l z g r a f
Taryn Benbow-Pfalzgraf, Editor Glynis Benbow-Niemier, Associate Editor Kristin G. Hart, Project Coordinator Laura Standley Berger, Joann Cerrito, Dave Collins, Steve Cusack, Nicolet V. Elert, Miranda Ferrara, Jamie FitzGerald, Laura S. Kryhoski, Margaret Mazurkiewicz, Michael J. Tyrkus St. James Press Staff Peter M. Gareffa, Managing Editor, St. James Press Mary Beth Trimper, Composition Manager Dorothy Maki, Manufacturing Manager Wendy Blurton, Senior Buyer Cynthia Baldwin, Product Design Manager Martha Schiebold, Art Director Ronald D. Montgomery, Data Entry Manager Gwendolyn S. Tucker, Project Administrator
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data American women writers : from colonial times to the present : a critical reference guide / editor: Taryn Benbow-Pfalzgraf. -- 2nd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-55862-429-5 (set) — ISBN 1-55862-430-9 (vol.1) — ISBN 1-55862-431-7 (vol.2) — ISBN 1-55862-432-5 (vol.3) — ISBN 1-55862-433-3 (vol.4) 1. American literature-Women authors-Bio-bibliography Dictionaries. 2. Women authors, American-Biography Dictionaries. 3. American literature-Women authors Dictionaries. I. Benbow-Pfalzgraf, Taryn PS147.A42 1999 810.9’9287’03—dc21 [B]
Printed in the United States of America St. James Press is an imprint of Gale Group Gale Group and Design is a trademark used herein under license 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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EDITOR’S NOTE American Women Writers, Second Edition is an important resource for many reasons, the least of which is to disseminate information about hundreds of women writers who have been routinely overlooked. A veritable treasure trove of knowledge, the women profiled in this series have literally changed the world, from Margaret Sanger’s quest for reproductive freedom to Jane Addams and Hull House, from Sylvia Earle and Rachel Carson’s environmental concerns, to the aching beauty of poems by Olga Broumas, Emily Dickinson, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath, Sara Teasdale, Lorrie Moore, and many others. There are writers who are immensely entertaining (M.F.K. Fisher, Jean Craighead George, Sue Grafton, Helen MacInnes, Terry McMillan, C. L. Moore, Barbara Neely, Danielle Steel), some who wish to instruct on faith (Dorothy Day, Mary Baker Eddy, Catherine Marshall, Anne Morrow Lindbergh), others who revisit the past to educate us (Gwendolyn Brooks, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Paula Allen Gunn, Carolyn Heilbrun, Mary Johnston, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Mary White Ovington, Sherley Ann Williams, Mourning Dove), and still more who wish to shock us from complacency of one kind or another (Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Lillian Hellman, Shirley Jackson, Harriet Jacobs, Shirley Jackson, Carson McCullers, A.G. Mojtabai, Bharati Mukherjee, Carry A. Nation, Flannery O’Connor, Anne Sexton, Phillis Wheatley, and more). The women filling these pages have nothing and everything in common; they are female, yes, but view their lives and worth in vastly different manners. There is no census of ethnicity, class, age, or sexuality—the prerequisites for inclusion had only to do with a body of work, the written word in all its forms, and the unfortunate limits of time and space. Yes, there are omissions, none by choice: some were overlooked in favor of others (by a voting selection process), others were assigned and the material never received. In the end, it is the ongoing bane of publishing: there will never be enough time nor space to capture all—for there will (hopefully) always be new women writers coming to the fore, and newly discovered manuscripts to test our conceptions of life from a woman’s eye. Yet American Women Writers is just what it’s title implies, a series of books recounting the life and works of American women from Colonial days to the present. Some writers produced far more than others, yet each woman contributed writing worthy of historical note, to be brought to the forefront of scholarship for new generations to read. Last but never least, thanks to Peter Gareffa for this opportunity; to Kristin Hart for her continual support and great attitude; to my associate editor Glynis Benbow-Niemier; to my editorial and research staff (Jocelyn Prucha, Diane Murphy, and Lori Prucha), and to the beloveds: Jordyn, Wylie, Foley, Hadley, and John.
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FOREWORD In a memorandum to contributors, Lina Mainiero, the founding editor of American Women Writers described the project she envisioned in 1978: Written wholly by women critics, this reference work is designed as a four-volume survey of American women writers from colonial days to the present. . . Most entries will be on women who have written what is traditionally defined as literature. But AWW will also include entries on writers in other fields. . . I see AWW as a precious opportunity for women—those who write it and those who read it— to integrate at a more self- conscious level a variety of reading experience. The result was a document of its time, a period when feminism was associated with building sisterhood and raising consciousness. Even a commercial publishing venture might take on the trappings of a consciousness raising session in which readers and writers met. The idea now seems naive, but the ideal is worth remembering. In 1978 Mainiero was neither young nor revolutionary. She was hesitant about pushing too far; she was content to let traditional definitions stand. But the very inclusion of Rachel Carson and Margaret Mead, Betty Smith and Ursula LeGuin, Rebecca Harding Davis and Phillis Wheatley, Gertrude Stein and Dorothy Parker in a reference work entitled simply and profoundly American Women Writers spoke eloquently. Without ever referring explicitly to ‘‘canon revision,’’ these four volumes contributed to the process. Having the books on the shelves testified to the existence of hundreds of women who had written across the centuries. Including those whose work was perceived to be ‘‘literary’’ alongside those whose work was not, prefigured debates that continue today both inside and outside of the academy. Mainiero was especially concerned that contributors not aim their entries at the academic specialist. The ‘‘putative reader’’ was a college senior, who was conversant with literary history and criticism, feminism, and the humanities. This emphasis provoked criticism, because it was expressed during the heyday of academic feminism. American Women Writers appeared the same year as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar published The Madwoman in the Attic, their influential study of 19th-century English women writers. Nina Baym’s American Women Writers and Women’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and About Women in America had appeared the year before. In retrospect, however, the reader Mainiero targeted is precisely the young woman she hoped would join the consciousness session organized by her elders, a woman who would not become an academic, but who would find in women’s writing the ‘‘necessary bread’’ to sustain her in living her life. Ideals and realities clashed in a project that was clearly intended to make money, but declined to pay honoraria to individual contributors. Instead, the publisher promised to contribute a percentage of any profits to ‘‘women’s causes.’’ The desire to reach the common reader was one reason the volumes were published without a scholarly overview. The decision not to address an academic audience meant the entries contained no critical jargon, but it also meant no authorities checked facts. In fairness, few facts were known about many of the women in the book. Numerous articles profiled women about whom no one had written. One way to gauge the success of feminist scholarship over the past two decades would be to compare the bibliographies of women in this edition with those in the original edition. What we know now about women’s writing in the United States is more than we realized there was to know two decades ago. Let me use my contributions as examples. I wrote entries on Gwendolyn Brooks, Frances Watkins Harper, Nella Larsen, and Anne Spencer. These black women lived and worked across almost two centuries. Harper, an abolitionist and women’s rights advocate, had been the most popular African American poet of the mid-19th century. Larsen and Spencer published fiction and poetry, respectively, during the Harlem Renaissance. Of Brooks, I concluded, ‘‘by any reckoning, hers is one of the major voices of 20th-century American poetry.’’ Yet no biographies existed for any of them. All of the information in print on Harper referred to a single source. Twenty years later, scholars have explored Harper’s life in depth; digging through the archives, Frances Smith Foster discovered three lost novels and a treasure trove of poems. In search of the women of the Harlem Renaissance, scholars have unearthed much more information concerning Larsen and Spencer. Now the subject of a biography by Thadious Davis, Larsen and her novels—Passing in particular—have become key texts in the formulation of feminist theory and queer theory. Ironically, though Spencer’s oeuvre was the most slender, she was the only one of these writers to have been the subject of a book: J. Lee Greene’s Time’s Unfading Garden, a biographical and critical treatment of the poet along with a selection of her poems. Brooks has begun to receive her due in five biographical and critical studies. As scholars have continued their work, readers have found a valuable reference tool in American Women Writers. The fourth and final volume of the original edition appeared in 1982. Soon afterward, Langdon Lynne Faust edited an abridged version, including a two-volume edition in paperback. In part because the original edition concentrated on writers before 1960, a supplement, edited by Carol Hurd Green and Mary G. Mason, was published in 1993. The writers included were more diverse than ever, as a more inclusive understanding of ‘‘American’’ grew. Fostering that understanding has been a priority of this project since the beginning. That new editions continue to be published confirms the existence of a need that these volumes fill. The explosion of feminist scholarship has enriched each subsequent edition of American Women Writers. In this venue at least, the gap between academic specialist and common reader has narrowed. One development that no one would have predicted is the re-emergence of the literary society, a common feature in 19th-century American life. The name has changed; it is now more often called the reading group. But the membership remains mostly female. Such groups have grown up in every segment of American society. Indeed, ‘‘Oprah’s Book Club’’ is a macrocosm of a widespread local phenomenon. I hope and suspect members of reading groups, as well as the undergraduates who remain its putative readers, will find this new edition of American Women Writers a resource that can be put to everyday use. CHERYL A. WALL Professor of English Rutgers University
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BOARD OF ADVISORS Roger Blackwell Bailey, Ph.D. Professor of English San Antonio College Alanna K. Brown, Ph.D. Professor of English Montana State University Pattie Cowell Professor of English Colorado State University Barbara Grier President and CEO Naiad Press, Inc. Jessica Grim Reference Librarian Oberlin College Library
Kathleen Bonann Marshall Assistant Director, Center for the Writing Arts Northwestern University Margaret (Maggie) McFadden Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies Editor, National Women’s Studies Association Journal Appalachian State University Kit Reed Novelist, Teaching at Wesleyan University
Carolyn G. Heilbrun Avalon Professor in the Humanities, Emerita Columbia University
Cheryl A. Wall Professor of English Rutgers University
Marlene Manoff Associate Head/Collection Manager Humanities Library Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Barbara A. White Professor Emeritus of Women’s Studies University of New Hampshire
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BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS Aarons, Victoria Allegra Goodman Alice Hoffman Faye Kellerman Lesléa Newman Tillie Olsen Francine Prose Adams, Barbara Aimee Semple McPherson Adams, Pauline Marion Marsh Todd Alldredge, Betty J. Katherine Mayo Katharine Pearson Woods Allen, Carol Alice Childress Allen, Suzanne Martha Moore Avery Madeleine Vinton Dahlgren Anna McKenney Dorsey Ella Loraine Dorsey Susan Blanchard Elder Caroline Gordon Laura Z. Hobson Lillian Smith Alonso, Helena Julia Álvarez Sandra Cisneros Achy Obejas Anderson, Celia Catlett Beverly Cleary Marguerite Henry Florence Crannell Means Cornelia Meigs Anderson, Eileen M. Phyllis Chesler Anderson, Kathryn Murphy Beth Henley Marsha Norman Anderson, Maggie Jane Cooper Anderson, Nancy G. Dorothy Scarborough Lella Warren
Antler, Joyce Lynne Sharon Schwartz Armeny, Susan Mary Sewall Gardner Lillian D. Wald Armitage, Shelley Ina Donna Coolbrith Anne Ellis Assendelft, Nick Lisa Alther Anne Bernays E. M. Broner Marilyn Hacker Joy Harjo Maureen Howard Florence Howe Susanne K. Langer Meridel Le Sueur Bach, Peggy Evelyn Scott Bakerman, Jane S. Vera Caspary Ursula Reilly Curtiss Dorothea Canfield Fisher Lois Gould Elisabeth Sanxay Holding Emma Lathen Ruth Doan MacDougall Margaret Millar Toni Morrison May Sarton Elizabeth Savage Susan Fromberg Schaeffer Gene Stratton-Porter Mary Sture-Vasa Dorothy Uhnak Jessamyn West Bannan, Helen M. Fabiola Cabeza de Baca Elizabeth Bacon Custer Elaine Goodale Eastman Helen Hunt Jackson Mary Harris Jones Kathryn Anderson McLean Franc Johnson Newcomb Anna Moore Shaw Elizabeth G. Stern xi
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Banner, Lois W. Harriet Hubbard Ayer
Barr, Marleen S. Deborah Norris Logan
Benet, Sydonie Janet Flanner Mary McCarthy Josephine Miles Edna St. Vincent Millay Virginia Ramey Mollenkott Linda Pastan Katherine Paterson Marilyn Sachs Elizabeth Spencer Ruth Stone Michele Wallace Mae West Sherley Anne Williams
Baruch, Elaine Hoffman Susan Sontag Diana Trilling
Berke, Jacqueline Harriet Stratemeyer Adams Eleanor Hodgman Porter
Bauer, Denise Lucille Clifton Alicia Ostriker Alix Kates Shulman
Berry, Linda S. Georgia Douglas Johnson
Barbour, Paula L. Jane Auer Bowles Barbuto, Domenica Anne Warner French Amanda Theodocia Jones Barnhart, Jacqueline Baker Sarah Bayliss Royce Elinore Pruitt Stewart
Baytop, Adrianne Margaret Walker Phillis Wheatley Beasley, Maurine Mary E. Clemmer Ames Emily Edson Briggs Kate Field Beecher, Maureen Ursenbach Susa Young Gates Bell, Alice Paula Fox Belli, Angela Frances Winwar Ben-Merre, Diana Helen McCloy Benardete, Jane Harriot Stanton Blatch Abby Morton Diaz Mary Abigail Dodge Amanda Minnie Douglas Malvina Hoffman Elizabeth Palmer Peabody Lydia Huntley Sigourney Sophie Swett Benbow-Niemier, Glynis Jane Kenyon Lorine Niedecker Jean Valentine xii
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Berube, Linda Susan Griffin Alice Hoffman Maxine W. Kumin Valerie Miner Grace Paley May Swenson Beyer, Janet M. Erma Bombeck Ellen Goodman Lois Gould Doris Grumbach Nicole Hollander Biancarosa, Gina Erica Jong Bienstock, Beverly Gray Anita Loos Shirley MacLaine Cornelia Otis Skinner Thyra Samter Winslow Biguenet, John Valerie Martin Bird, Christiane Rosamond Neal DuJardin Josephine Lawrence Harper Lee Harriet Stone Lothrop Alice Duer Miller Bittker, Anne S. Mary Margaret McBride
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Blair, Karen J. Jane Cunningham Croly Ella Giles Ruddy Blicksilver, Edith Leslie Marmon Silko Bloom, Lynn Z. Natalie Stark Crouter Bloom, Steven F. Wendy Wasserstein Bloom, Susan P. Natalie Babbitt Eloise Greenfield Boisvert, Nancy L. Judith Rossner Bonazoli, Robert Kit Reed Bordin, Ruth Elizabeth Margaret Chandler Mary Rice Livermore Anna H. Shaw Boyd, Karen Leslie Patricia Highsmith Nora Roberts Boyd, Lois A. Paula Marie Cooey Boyd, Zohara Sophia Robbins Little Josephine Pollard Martha Remick Mary Jane Windle Brahm, Laura Judy Grahn Mary Oliver Breitsprecher, Nancy Zona Gale Bremer, Sidney H. Lucy Monroe Elia Wilkinson Peattie Eunice Tietjens Edith Franklin Wyatt Brett, Sally Inglis Clark Fletcher Bernice Kelly Harris Edith Summers Kelley Ida Tarbell Broner, E. M. Anne Bernays
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Brooker-Gross, Susan R. Ellen Churchill Semple Brookes, Kimberly Hayden Barbara Deming Brostoff, Anita Gladys Schmitt Brown, Alanna Kathleen Mourning Dove Brown, Dorothy H. Rose Falls Bres Elma Godchaux Margaret Landon Mary Lasswell Mary Ashley Townsend Jeannette Hadermann Walworth Brown, Fahamisha Patricia Jayne Cortez Carolyn M. Rodgers Ntozake Shange Brown, Lois Octavia E. Butler Terry McMillan Brown, Lynda W. Caroline Whiting Hentz Octavia Walton Le Vert Anne Newport Royall Jennette Reid Tandy Bryer, Marjorie Michele Wallace Buchanan, Harriette Cuttino Corra May Harris Helen Kendrick Johnson Agnes C. Laut Blair Rice Niles Marie Conway Oemler Josephine Pinckney Lizette Woodworth Reese Mary Howard Schoolcraft Bucknall, Barbara J. Pearl S. Buck Ursula K. Le Guin Phyllis McGinley Hannah Whittal Smith Evangeline Walton Burger, Mary Diane DiPrima Burns, Lois Mary Hunter Austin xiii
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Burns, Melissa Anne Bernays E. M. Broner Mary McCarthy Helen Hennessy Vendler
Challinor, Joan R. Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams
Butery, Karen Ann Karen Horney
Chew, Martha Mary Henderson Eastman Sallie Rochester Ford Maria Jane McIntosh
Butler, Francelia Harriet Taylor Upton Byers, Inzer Annie Heloise Abel Mary Sheldon Barnes Mary Louise Booth Catherine Drinker Bowen Carrie Chapman Catt Frances Manwaring Caulkins Margaret Antoinette Clapp Margaret L. Coit Angelina Grimké Sarah Moore Grimké Louise Kellogg Adrienne Koch Martha Nash Lamb Alma Lutz Nellie Neilson Martha Laurens Ramsay Constance Lindsay Skinner Margaret Bayard Smith Byington, Juliet Susan Brownmiller Lorna Dee Cervantes Alice Childress Rosalyn Drexler Eloise Greenfield Catharine A. MacKinnon Kate Millett Andrea Nye Susan Sontag Campbell, Mary B. Carolyn Forché Carl, Lisa Nikki Giovanni Mary Lee Settle Carlin, Sandra Louella Oettinger Parsons Carnes, Valerie Janet Flanner Carroll, Linda A. Jean Craighead George xiv
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Chase, Evelyn Hyman Mary Ellen Chase
Chou, Jerome Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Cathy Song Eudora Welty Kate Wilhelm Christensen, Lois E. Louise Smith Clappe Clark, Susan L. Mignon G. Eberhart Doris Grumbach Mary R. Higham Mabel Seeley Cleveland, Carol Patricia Highsmith Cohn, Amy L. Lois Lowry Cohn, Jan Mary Roberts Rinehart Coleman, Linda S. Mollie Dorsey Sanford Condit, Rebecca C. Ai Jayne Cortez Joan Didion Frances FitzGerald Paula Fox Sandra M. Gilbert Ellen Gilchrist Marita Golden Mary Catherine Gordon Lois Gould Joanne Greenberg Beth Henley Pauline Kael Alison Lurie Marge Piercy Rosemary Radford Ruether Linda Ty-Casper Dorothy Uhnak Ann Belford Ulanov
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Cook, Martha E. Virginia Hamilton Annie Fellows Johnston George Madden Martin Katherine Bonner McDowell Mary Murfree Cook, Sylvia Olive Tilford Dargan Grace Lumpkin Coultrap-McQuin, Susan Eliza Leslie Catharine Arnold Williams Cowell, Pattie Bathsheba Bowers Martha Wadsworth Brewster Elizabeth Sandwith Drinker Anna Young Smith Annis Boudinot Stockton Lydia Fish Willis Anna Green Winslow Cox, Virginia Erica Jong Crabbe, Katharyn F. Jane Andrews Carolyn Sherwin Bailey Katherine Lee Bates Margery Williams Bianco Claire Huchet Bishop Rebecca Sophia Clarke Clara F. Guernsey Lucy Ellen Guernsey Theodora Kroeber Elizabeth Foreman Lewis Ella Farman Pratt Susan Ridley Sedgwick Monica Shannon Eva March Tappan Louisa Huggins Tuthill Elizabeth Gray Vining Eliza Orne White Crumpacker, Laurie Sarah Prince Gill Cutler, Evelyn S. Rose O’Neill Dame, Enid Edna St. Vincent Millay Darney, Virginia Maude Howe Elliott Laura Howe Richards
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Dash, Irene Carolyn G. Heilbrun Davidson, Cathy N. E. M. Broner Laura Jean Libbey Tabitha Tenney Davis, Barbara Kerr Ellen Moers Davis, Thadious M. Anna Julia Cooper Mollie Moore Davis Shirley Graham Mary Spring Walker Rhoda E. White Deegan, Mary Jo Edith Abbott Emily Greene Balch Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge Helen Merrell Lynd Marion Talbott DeMarr, Mary Jean Charlotte Armstrong Sarah T. Bolton Gwen Bristow Doris Miles Disney Janet Ayer Fairbank Rachel Lyman Field Alice Tisdale Hobart Agnes Newton Keith Alice Hegan Rice Mari Sandoz Anya Seton Ruth Suckow Elswyth Thane Agnes Sligh Turnbull Carolyn Wells Demetrakopoulos, Stephanie Mary Daly Mary Esther Harding June K. Singer Ann Belford Ulanov Deming, Caren J. Gertrude Berg Elaine Sterne Carrington Agnes E. Nixon Irna Phillips xv
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Denler, Heidi Hartwig Alice French Tina Howe Kristin Hunter-Lattany Alice McDermott Anne Tyler Denniston, Dorothy L. Paule Marshall DeRoche, Celeste Beverly Cleary Natalie Zemon Davis Rachel Blau DuPlessis Sylvia A. Earle Louise Erdrich Gail Godwin Katharine Graham Carolyn G. Heilbrun Linda Hogan Nicole Hollander Barbara C. Jordan Nancy Mairs Maria Mitchell Robin Morgan Gloria Naylor Anne Firor Scott Joan Wallach Scott Vida Dutton Scudder Jane P. Tompkins Dorothy West Dixon, Janette Goff Judy Blume Erma Bombeck Betty Friedan Barbara Tuchman Helen Hennessy Vendler Dobbs, Jeannine Hildegarde Flanner Hazel Hall Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck Leonora von Stosch Speyer Jean Starr Untermeyer Marya Zaturenska Domina, Lynn Dorothy Allison Susan B. Anthony Rita Dove Anne Lamott Denise Levertov Sojourner Truth xvi
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Donnelly, Daria Sarah Appleton-Weber Joy Harjo Naomi Shihab Nye Linda Pastan Donovan, Josephine Annie Adams Fields Louise Imogen Guiney Sarah Orne Jewett Lucy Larcom Celia Laighton Thaxter Dooley, Dale A. Ai Alexis DeVeaux Dorenkamp, Angela Mary Catherine Gordon Dorenkamp, Monica Kathy Acker Alicia Ostriker Dykeman, Amy Kate W. Hamilton Cecilia Viets Jamison Adeline Trafton Knox Eliasberg, Ann Pringle Annie Brown Leslie Josephine Preston Peabody Dorothy Thompson Victoria Woodhull Estess, Sybil Maxine W. Kumin Etheridge, Billie W. Abigail Smith Adams Mercy Otis Warren Evans, Elizabeth Josephine Jacobsen Helen MacInnes Frances Newman Margaret Junkin Preston Anne Tyler Eudora Welty Ewell, Barbara C. Sarah McLean Greene Fannie Heaslip Lea Eliza Jane Poitevent Nicholson Eliza Phillips Pugh Faust, Langdon Frances Willard
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Ferguson, Mary Anne Lisa Alther Sally Benson Doris Betts Tess Slesinger Finger, Mary E. Josephine Herbst Madeleine L’Engle Fiore, Jullie Ann Annie Dillard Fish, Virginia K. Frances R. Donovan Annie Marion MacLean Fitch, Noel R. Sylvia Beach Fleche, Anne Adrienne Kennedy Fleenor, Juliann E. Catharine Esther Beecher Caroline Chesebrough Susan Hale Emily Chubbuck Judson Margaret Sanger Ann Winterbotham Stephens Flint, Joyce Margaret Craven Florence, Barbara Moench Lella Secor Fowler, Lois Eleanor Flexner Frances Dana Gage Ida Husted Harper Julia McNair Wright Franklin, Phyllis Judith Sargent Murray Elsie Clews Parsons Jean Stafford Frazer, Winifred Dorothy Day Voltairine de Cleyre Emma Goldman Freiberg, Karen Kate Wilhelm Freibert, Lucy Georgiana Bruce Kirby Jessica N. MacDonald Marianne Dwight Orvis
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Friedman, Ellen Anna Hempstead Branch Bettina Liebowitz Knapp Dilys Bennett Laing Fuchs, Miriam Beulah Marie Dix Maude McVeigh Hutchins Gabbard, Lucina P. Mary Coyle Chase Clare Boothe Luce Galanter, Margit Barbara Tuchman Gallo, Rose Adrienne Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald Garson, Helen S. Jacqueline Susann Sophie Kerr Underwood Gartner, Carol B. Carman Dee Barnes Laura Benét Mary Putnam Jacobi Kate Jordan Myra Kelly Gaskill, Gayle Isabella MacDonald Alden Beatrice J. Chute Marchette Chute Mathilde Eiker Sarah Barnwell Elliott Jean Kerr Gensler, Kinereth Sandra M. Gilbert Gentilella, Dacia Paula Gunn Allen Gerson, Risa Susanna Anthony E. L. Konigsburg Eliza Buckminster Lee Gibbons, Christina Tischler Mary Palmer Tyler Gibbons, Sheila J. Mary McGrory Gilbert, Melissa Kesler Gloria Steinem Giles, Jane Elizabeth Elkins Sanders Catharine Maria Sedgwick xvii
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Ginsberg, Elaine K. Amelia Jenks Bloomer Maria Susanna Cummins Hannah Webster Foster Mary Jane Hawes Holmes Betty Smith E. D. E. N. Southworth Gironda, Suzanne Michelle Cliff Jill Johnston Meridel Le Sueur Gladstein, Mimi R. Ayn Rand Gleason, Phyllis S. Alice Adams Alison Lurie Goldman, Maureen Esther Edwards Burr Hannah Flagg Gould Hannah Sawyer Lee
Griffith, Susan Nicholasa Mohr Grim, Jessica Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Lucy R. Lippard Eileen Myles Rosmarie Waldrop Groben, Anne R. Ella Wheeler Wilcox Grove, Shari Linda Hogan Hall, Joan Wylie Ruth McEnery Stuart Eudora Welty Halpern, Faye Joanne Greenberg Maureen Howard
Grant, Mary H. Florence Howe Hall Julia Ward Howe
Hamblen, Abigail Ann Eleanor Hallowell Abbott Temple Bailey Amelia E. Barr Clara L. Root Burnham Elizabeth Jane Coatsworth Margaret Campbell Deland Mary E. Wilkins Freeman Honoré McCue Morrow Louise Redfield Peattie Lucy Fitch Perkins Margaret E. Sangster Elsie Singmaster Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard Nelia Gardner White Ola Elizabeth Winslow
Green, Carol Hurd Eve Merriam
Hamblen, Vicki Lynn Helen M. Winslow
Greene, Dana Sophia Hume Martha Shepard Lippincott Lucretia Mott Sara Vickers Oberholtzer
Hannay, Margaret P. Marabel Morgan
Gottfried, Erika Rose Pesotta Gottlieb, Phyllis Lucy Hooper Lucy Jones Hooper Graham, Theodora R. Louise Bogan Grace Elizabeth King Josephine Miles Harriet Monroe
Greyson, Laura Hannah Arendt Grider, Sylvia Ann Linda Dégh Grierson, Beth Rita Mae Brown Alma Routsong xviii
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Hardesty, Nancy Antoinette Brown Blackwell Hannah Chaplin Conant Sarah Ewing Hall Phoebe Worrall Palmer Elizabeth Payson Prentiss Elizabeth Cady Stanton Emma Willard Hardy, Willene S. Katharine Fullerton Gerould
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Harlan, Judith Sue Grafton Shere Hite Diane Johnson Sarah Winnemucca Naomi Wolf Harris, Miriam Kalman, Ph.D Jean Houston Claire Myers Owens Florida Scott-Maxwell Harvey, Mary E. Mari Evans Sally Miller Gearhart Marita Golden Kristin Hunter-Lattany Healey, Claire H. D. Amy Lowell Heilbrun, Carolyn G. A. G. Mojtabai Helbig, Alethea K. Carol Ryrie Brink Eleanor Estes Lucretia Peabody Hale Irene Hunt Madeleine L’Engle Myra Cohn Livingston Emily Cheney Neville Ruth Sawyer Kate Seredy Caroline Dale Snedeker Zilpha Keatley Snyder Elizabeth George Speare Anne Terry White Ella Young Henderson, Kathy Linda J. Barnes Joan Didion Martha Grimes Susan Minot
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Hill, Vicki Lynn Bessie Breuer Mary Cruger Helen Hamilton Gardener Ursula N. Gestefeld Marie Howland Ellen Warner Kirk Theresa S. Malkiel Myra Page Martha W. Tyler Marie Van Vorst Mary Heaton Vorse Bessie McGinnis Van Vorst Hobbs, Glenda Harriette Simpson Arnow Hoeveler, Diane Long Mathilde Franziska Giesler Anneke Phoebe Cary Mary Andrews Denison Alice Bradley Haven Eleanor Mercein Kelly Juliette Magill Kinzie Marya Mannes Jessica Mitford Frances Crosby Van Alstyne Babette Deutsch Holbrook, Amy Alice McDermott Holdstein, Deborah H. Harriet Livermore Vienna G. Morrell Ramsay Dora Knowlton Ranous Itti Kinney Reno Mae West Holly, Marcia Margaret Culkin Banning
Hepps, Marcia María Irene Fornés Tina Howe Megan Terry
Hornstein, Jacqueline Jenny Fenno Sarah Symmes Fiske Susannah Johnson Hastings Elizabeth Mixer Sarah Parsons Moorhead Sarah Wentworth Morton Sarah Osborn Sarah Porter Eunice Smith Jane Turell Elizabeth White
Hill, Holly Mina Kirstein Curtiss
Horton, Beverly Harriet Jacobs
Henning, Wendy J. Marie Manning
xix
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Howard, Lillie Fannie Cook Alice Walker Howze, Jo Mary McLeod Bethune Hoyle, Karen Nelson Virginia Lee Burton Natalie Savage Carlson Marguerite Lofft de Angeli Jean Lee Latham
Jones, Judith P. Phyllis Chesler Eleanor Clark Elizabeth Gould Davis Gayl Jones Kafatou, Sarah Ellen Bryant Voigt Kahn, Mariam Ruth Benedict Margaret Mead
Hudspeth, Cheryl K. Rodello Hunter
Kaledin, Eugenia Carolyn Kizer Elizabeth Spencer
Hughson, Lois Mary Ritter Beard Barbara Tuchman
Karp, Sheema Hamdani Adrienne Rich
Humez, Jean McMahon Rebecca Cox Jackson Hunter, Edith F. Sophia Lyon Fahs Irvin, Helen Deiss Antoinette Doolittle Anna White Johnson, Claudia D. Olive Logan Clara Morris Johnson, Lee Ann Mary Hallock Foote Johnson, Robin Marianne Moore Jones, Allison A. Maxine W. Kumin Rhoda Lerman Lois Lowry Paule Marshall Terry McMillan A. G. Mojtabai Katherine M. Rogers Susan Fromberg Schaeffer Ntozake Shange Jones, Anne Hudson Kate C. Hurd-Mead Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Esther Pohl Lovejoy Gail Sheehy xx
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Kaufman, Janet E. Eliza Frances Andrews Mary Miller Chesnut Kate Cumming Sarah Ellis Dorsey Rebecca Latimer Felton Constance Cary Harrison Sarah Stone Holmes Mary Ann Webster Loughborough Judith Brockenbrough McGuire Elizabeth Avery Meriwether Phoebe Yates Pember Sara Rice Pryor Sallie A. Brock Putnam Eliza M. Ripley Cornelia Phillips Spencer Susie King Taylor Katharine Prescott Wormeley Kavo, Rose F. Sue Petigru Bowen Jane C. Campbell Juliet Lewis Campbell Jane McManus Cazneau Jane Dunbar Chaplin Ella Rodman Church Jane Hardin Cross Keeney, William María Irene Fornés Tina Howe Keeshen, Kathleen Kearney Marguerite Higgins Ada Louise Huxtable Miriam Ottenberg
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Kelleghan, Fiona Marion Zimmer Bradley Suzy McKee Charnas Anne McCaffrey Vonda N. McIntyre Andre Norton Kit Reed Elizabeth Ann Scarborough Sheri S. Tepper Connie Willis
Koengeter, L. W. Ann Eliza Schuyler Bleecker Maria Gowen Brooks Hannah Mather Crocker Margaretta V. Faugeres Rose Wilder Lane Adah Isaacs Menken
Kenschaft, Lori Martha Ballard Barbara Ehrenreich Charlotte Perkins Gilman Frances Kellor Carson McCullers Ann Lane Petry Ida B. Wells-Barnett
Kolmerten, Carol A. Frances Wright
Kern, Donna Casella Frances Fuller Victor Kern, Edith Ann Landers Kessler, Carol Farley Elizabeth Stuart Phelps King, Margaret J. Clara Jessup Bloomfield-Moore Peg Bracken Judith Crist Maureen Daly Pauline Kael Elizabeth Linington Madalyn Murray O’Hair Emily Post Mary Wilson Sherwood Amy Vanderbilt Kish, Dorothy Rebecca Harding Davis Klein, Kathleen Gregory Susan Griffin Ruth McKenney Anne Nichols Bella Cohen Spewak Megan Terry Klein, Michael Jean Valentine Knapp, Bettina L. Anaïs Nin
Kohlstedt, Sally Gregory Anna Botsford Comstock Almira Lincoln Phelps
Kondelik, Marlene Mary Shipman Andrews Koon, Helene Marian Anderson Ruth Gordon Anna Mowatt Ritchie Elizabeth Robins Catherine Turney S. S. B. K. Wood Koppes, Phyllis Bixlir Frances Hodgson Burnett Kouidis, Virginia M. Mina Loy Krieg, Joann Peck Charlotte Mary Sanford Barnes Susan Fenimore Cooper Mary Baker Eddy Kroll, Diane E. Jean Fritz Katherine Paterson Krouse, Agate Nesaule Rhoda Lerman Kuenhold, Sandra Leta Stetter Hollingworth Kuznets, Lois R. Esther Forbes Lois Lenski Lamping, Marilyn Hallie Quinn Brown Pauline Hopkins Maria W. Stewart Fannie Barrier Williams Langhals, Patricia Florence Wheelock Ayscough Alice Bacon Dorothy Borg xxi
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Langsam, Miriam Z. Margaret Bourke-White Laska, Vera Marcia Gluck Davenport Elisabeth Elliot
Ludwig, Linda Kathryn Cavarly Hulme Margaret Mitchell MacDonald, Maureen Katherine Bolton Black
Lauter, Estella Diane Wakoski
MacKay, Kathryn L. Maurine Whipple
Levy, Ilise Alice Hamilton Jane Jacobs
MacPike, Loralee Emily Kimbrough Maxine Hong Kingston Mary Jane Ward
Lewandowska, M. L. Marilyn Hacker Lewis, Janette Seaton Carrie Jacobs Bond Joanne Greenberg Lewis, Sharon A. Marita Bonner Lezburg, Amy K. Ilka Chase Linden-Ward, Blanche Andrea Dworkin Marilyn French Robin Morgan Loeb, Helen Inez Haynes Irwin Lohman, Judith S. Crystal Eastman Londré, Felicia Hardison Agnes de Mille Edith Ellis Anne Crawford Flexner Harriet Ford Rose Franken Ketti Frings Dorothy Kuhns Heyward Jeannette Augustus Marks Frances Aymar Mathews Adelaide Matthews Marguerite Merington Lillian Mortimer Martha Morton Josefina Niggli Charlotte Blair Parker Lillian Ross Lillie West Rida Johnson Young Lord, Charlotte V. Sidney Cowell Bateman xxii
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Madsen, Carol Cornwall Louisa Greene Richards Emmeline Woodward Wells Maida, Patricia D. Lillian O’Donnell Mainiero, Lina Willa Sibert Cather Maio, Kathleen L. Anna Katharine Green Mary R. Platt Hatch Lenore Glen Offord Metta Fuller Victor Mallett, Daryl F. Leigh Brackett Jane E. Brody Carolyn Chute Emma Lathen Ursula K. Le Guin Reeve Lindbergh Bobbie Ann Mason Rachel Pollack Anne Rice Kristine Kathryn Rusch Joanna Russ Jessica Amanda Salmonson Lee Smith Margaret Truman Marchino, Lois Rita Mae Brown Marcus, Lisa bell hooks Sherley Anne Williams Margolis, Tina Eva LeGallienne Marie, Jacquelyn Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Marks, Elaine Germaine Brée Marshall, Kathleen Bonann Susan H. Bergman Elizabeth Hardwick Linda Kaufman Kerber Bette Bao Lord Lorrie Moore Sara Paretsky Elaine Showalter Mona Van Duyn Edith Wharton Martinez, Elizabeth Coonrod Sandra Benítez Rosa Guy Demetria Martínez Cherríe Moraga Judith Ortiz Cofer Esmeralda Santiago Helena María Viramontes Masel-Walters, Lynne Alice Stone Blackwell Mary Ware Dennett Miriam Follin Leslie Inez Haynes Irwin Mason, Mary Grimley Betty Friedan Carolyn G. Heilbrun Nancy Gardner Prince Mason, Sarah E. Pauline Kael Masteller, Jean Carwile Annie Nathan Meyer Elizabeth Seifert Masters, Joellen Gayl Jones Masters, Jollen Susan Fromberg Schaeffer Matherne, Beverly M. Alice Gerstenberg
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
McCarthy, Joanne Kay Boyle Maeve Brennan Mary Maguire Colum Hedda Hopper Betty MacDonald Kathleen Thompson Norris McCay, Mary A. Rosellen Brown Louise Erdrich Kaye Gibbons Ellen Gilchrist Patricia Highsmith Barbara Kingsolver Bobbie Ann Mason Brenda Marie Osbey Anne Rice Helen Yglesias McClure, Charlotte S. Gertrude Atherton McColgan, Kristin Dorothea Lynde Dix McCrea, Joan M. Katharine Coman McDannell, M. Colleen Katherine Eleanor Conway Pearl Richards Craigie Amanda Smith Frances Fisher Tiernan Ellen Gould White McFadden-Gerber, Margaret Sally Carrighar Annie Dillard Wilma Dykeman Fannie Hardy Eckstorm Josephine Winslow Johnson Harriet M. Miller Louise Dickinson Rich
May, Jill P. Ann Nolan Clark Ingri Mortenson d’Aulaire Maud Fuller Petersham Marilyn Sachs
McGovern, Edythe M. Margaret Wise Brown Rachel Crothers Susan Glaspell Lorraine Hansberry Sophie Treadwell Charlotte Zolotow
Mayer, Elsie F. Anne Morrow Lindbergh
McKay, Mary A. Lee Smith xxiii
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
McLennan, Karen Harriette Simpson Arnow Toni Cade Bambara Mary Daly Louise Glück Virginia Johnson-Masters Audre Lorde Patricia Meyer Spacks McQuin, Susan Coultrap Sarah Ann Evans Medeiros, Kimbally A. Sandra Harding Eleanor Munro Anne Truitt Anne Waldman Menger, Lucy Ruth Shick Montgomery Jane Roberts Susy Smith Mercier, Cathryn M. Yoshiko Uchida Cynthia Voigt Miller, James A. Margaret Randall Miller, Marlene M. Elizabeth Bishop Kelly Cherry Elizabeth Cook-Lynn M. F. K. Fisher June Jordan Mitchell, Nora Olga Broumas Louise Glück Sharon Olds Mitchell, Sally Francesca Alexander Helen Dore Boylston Margaret Mayo Cora Baggerly Older Mary Green Pike Rose Porter Molly Elliot Seawell Mary Ella Waller Moe, Phyllis Abbie Farwell Brown Helen Stuart Campbell Eliza Cabot Follen Emily Huntington Miller Sarah Chauncey Woolsey xxiv
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Mollenkott, Virginia Ramey Grace Livingston Hill-Lutz Sarah Smith Martyn Marjorie Hope Nicolson Rosemond Tuve Montenegro, David Linda Ty-Casper Morris, Linda A. Marietta Holley Frances Berry Whitcher Mortimer, Gail Katherine Anne Porter Mossberg, Barbara A. Clarke Sylvia Plath Genevieve Taggard Moynihan, Ruth Barnes Abigail Scott Duniway Murphy, Maureen Mary E. McGrath Blake Helena Lefroy Caperton Kathleen Coyle Blanche McManus Mansfield Mary L. Meaney Asenath Hatch Nicholson Florence J. O’Connor Jessie Fremont O’Donnell Katharine A. O’Keeffe Clara M. Thompson Murphy, Miriam B. Sarah E. Carmichael Martha Spence Heywood Murphy, Paula C. Maya Angelou Eleanor Taylor Bland Nora Ephron Barbara Kingsolver Barbara Neely Mussell, Kay Phyllis A. Whitney Nance, Guin A. Gail Godwin Nancy Hale Virginia M. Satir Elizabeth Spencer Clara M. Thompson Neils, Patricia Langhals Emily Hahn Charlotte Y. Salisbury Mary Clabaugh Wright
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Neville, Tam Lin Ruth Stone Newman, Anne Julia Mood Peterkin Elizabeth Sewell Amélie Rives Troubetzkoy Nichols, Kathleen L. Miriam Coles Harris Ellen Peck Harriet Waters Preston Anne Sexton Nix, E. M. Gail Godwin Nochimson, Martha Carry A. Nation Martha Harrison Robinson Norman, Marion Lucretia Maria Davidson Margaret Miller Davidson O’Connor, Christine Martha Ostenso O’Loughlin, James Tillie Olsen Ockerstrom, Lolly Mona Van Duyn Pannill, Linda Isadora Duncan Parker, Alice Ada Jack Carver Edith Hamilton Passty, Jeanette Nyda Isabella Oliver Sharp Sarah Pogson Smith Sukey Vickery Watson Payne, Alma J. Louisa May Alcott Pelzer, Linda C. Patricia Cornwell Martha Gellhorn Anita Shreve Penn, Patricia E. Del Martin Annie Smith Peck Penn, Shana Lucy S. Dawidowicz Perez-Guntin, Amiris Julia de Burgos
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Peterson, Margaret Emily Dickinson Janet Lewis Pettis, Joyce Zora Neale Hurston Philips, Elizabeth Sarah Helen Whitman Phillips, Elizabeth Elizabeth Ellet Annie Somers Gilchrist Estelle Robinson Lewis Frances Sargent Osgood Caroline Ticknor Mabel Loomis Todd Piercy, Josephine K. Anne Dudley Bradstreet Pogel, Nancy Constance Mayfield Rourke Poland, Helene Dwyer Julia Henrietta Gulliver Susanne K. Langer Pool, Gail Cynthia Ozick Dawn Powell Pouncey, Lorene Vassar Miller Marguerite Young Preston, Caroline Annie Trumbull Slosson Pringle, Mary Beth Léonie Fuller Adams Charlotte Perkins Gilman Puk, Francine Shapiro Elizabeth Akers Allen Victoria Lincoln Dorothy Parker Frances Gray Patton xxv
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Radtke, Barbara Anne Mary Daly Rosemary Radford Ruether Ratigan, Virginia Kaib Isabella Marshall Graham Mary Agnes Tincker Raugust, Karen Kathy Acker Natalie Angier Nevada Barr Ann Beattie Blanche McCrary Boyd Sandra Brown Edna Buchanan Amy Clampitt Nancy F. Cott Elizabeth Daly Dorothy Salisbury Davis Elizabeth Drew Carolyn Forché Jean Garrigue Kaye Gibbons Doris Kearns Goodwin Jorie Graham Jane Hamilton Lyn Hejinian Laurie R. King Ray, Sandra Rosa Guy Mildred Pitts Walter Nancy Willard Rayson, Ann Adelle Davis Ann Lane Petry
xxvi
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Rhodes, Nelson Margaret Wise Brown Alexis DeVeaux Ann Douglas Susan Griffin Lillian Hellman Zenna Henderson Jill Johnston Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Madeleine L’Engle Harper Lee Anne Morrow Lindbergh Shirley MacLaine Nancy Mairs Del Martin Marsha Norman Rochelle Owens Sylvia Plath Ayn Rand Hannah Whittal Smith Gertrude Stein Megan Terry Phyllis A. Whitney Richardson, Susan B. Mitsuye Yamada Hisaye Yamamoto Richmond, Velma Bourgeois Anne Fremantle Frances Parkinson Keyes Ruth Painter Randall Agnes Repplier Richter, Heddy A. Elizabeth Frances Corbett Olive Higgins Prouty Roberts, Audrey Caroline M. Stansbury Kirkland
Reardon, Joan Julia Child
Roberts, Bette B. Lydia Maria Child
Reisman, Jessica Hortense Calisher Angela Yvonne Davis Rachel Hadas Anne Moody Ann Rule Cynthia Voigt Alice Walker Kate Wilhelm
Roberts, Elizabeth Fannie W. Rankin Maggie Roberts Harriet Winslow Sewall Eliza Ann Youmans
Reuman, Ann E. Janice Mirikitani
Rogers, Katharine M. Lillian Hellman
Roca, Ana Julia Álvarez Gloria Anzaldúa Achy Obejas
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Rosenberg, Julia Emma Manley Embury Mary E. Moore Hewitt Rebecca Rush Caroline Warren Thayer Rosinsky, Natalie McCaffrey Anne McCaffrey Judith Merril C. L. Moore Rowe, Anne Maya Angelou Elizabeth Madox Roberts Constance Fenimore Woolson Rudnick, Lois P. Mabel Dodge Luhan Rushin, Kate Audre Lorde Ryan, Rosalie Tutela Jane Starkweather Locke Salo, Alice Bell Marjorie Hill Allee Mabel Leigh Hunt Elizabeth Yates Sandberg, Elisabeth Carolyn Chute Ruth Seid Scanzoni, Letha Anita Bryant Virginia Ramey Mollenkott Schiavoni, Andrew Rochelle Owens Susan Sontag Schleuning, Neala Yount Meridel Le Sueur Schoen, Carol B. Hannah Adams Rebekah Bettelheim Kohut Emma Lazarus Penina Moise Ruth Seid
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Schoenbach, Lisi Germaine Brée Schofield, Ann Helen Marot Schull, Elinor Adela Rogers St. Johns Schwartz, Helen J. Mary Antin Hortense Calisher Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer Margaret Thompson Janvier Margaret Woods Lawrence Tillie Olsen Grace Paley Schweik, Joanne L. Marilyn French Isabella Gardner Vivian Gornick Hettie Jones Gloria Steinem Scura, Dorothy M. Mary Johnston Seaton, Beverly Florence Merriam Bailey Gladys Hasty Carroll Mary Hartwell Catherwood Nellie Blanchan Doubleday Mateel Howe Farnham Margaret Flint Helen Morgenthau Fox Mary Griffith Susan Huntington Louisa Yeomans King Elizabeth L. Lawrence Alice Lounsberry Helen Reimensnyder Martin Sarah Edgarton Mayo Josephine Clifford McCrackin Helen Matthews Nitsch Frances Dana Parsons Grace Richmond Gladys Bagg Taber Anna Bartlett Warner Susan Bogert Warner Mary Stanbery Watts Adeline D. T. Whitney Kate Douglass Wiggin Laura Ingalls Wilder Louise Beebe Wilder Mabel Osgood Wright xxvii
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Secrest, Rose V. C. Andrews Mary Higgins Clark June Doman Katherine V. Forrest Nancy Freedman Carolyn G. Hart Joyce Maynard Sharon McCrumb Bharati Mukherjee Frances Perkins Belva Plain Patricia Polacco Sylvia F. Porter Pamela Sargent Shaffer-Koros, Carole M. Willystine Goodsell Helen Hazlett Ruth Putnam Shakir, Evelyn Ednah Littlehale Cheney Abigail May Alcott Nieriker Sharistanian, Janet Florence Howe Elizabeth Janeway Helen Waite Papashvily Katherine M. Rogers Shelton, Pamela Rita Mae Brown Nikki Giovanni Harriet Jacobs Sherman, Sarah Way Sarah Knowles Bolton Alice Brown Rose Terry Cooke Gertrude Battles Lane Louise Chandler Moulton Mary Alicia Owen
xxviii
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Shostak, Elizabeth Bette Bao Lord Jayne Anne Phillips Kate Simon Shur, Cherri L. Marianne Wiggins Shute, Carolyn Judy Blume Mildred Delois Taylor Siefert, Susan E. Ariel Durant Fannie Merritt Farmer Skaggs, Peggy Helen Keller Catherine Marshall Sladics, Devra M. Lilian Jackson Braun Gwendolyn Brooks Tess Gallagher Doris Grumbach Sonia Sanchez Dana Stabenow Wendy Wasserstein Sylvia Watanabe Jade Snow Wong Charlotte Zolotow Slaughter, Jane Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Smelstor, Marjorie Fanny Kemble
Shinn, Thelma J. Margaret Ayer Barnes Frances Courtenay Baylor Barnum Kate Chopin Martha Finley Lucy Smith French Shirley Ann Grau Mary Dana Shindler Harriet Prescott Spofford
Smethurst, James Maya Angelou Marilyn Hacker Maxine Hong Kingston Sonia Sanchez Alice Walker Margaret Walker
Shortreed, Vivian H. Elizabeth Oakes Smith Jane Grey Swisshelm
Smith, Martha Nell Toi Derricotte
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Smith, Susan Sutton Elizabeth Cabot Cary Agassiz Jane Goodwin Austin Delia Salter Bacon Sarah G. Bagley Mary Edwards Bryan Maria Weston Chapman Adelaide Crapsey Caroline Healey Dall Eliza Ann Dupuy Harriet Farley Eliza Rotch Farrar Margaret Fuller Caroline Howard Gilman Caroline Gilman Jervey Elizabeth Dodge Kinney Sara Jane Lippincott Harriet Hanson Robinson Phoebe Atwood Taylor Mary Hawes Terhune Jean Webster Sneller, Jo Leslie Rosemary Sprague Snipes, Katherine Clara Barton Laura Jackson Carson McCullers Snyder, Carrie Ana Castillo Julia Child Jane Cooper Mari Evans María Irene Fornés Shirley Ann Grau Bertha Harris Erica Jong Sandra McPherson Valerie Miner Alma Routsong Anya Seton Gail Sheehy Leslie Marmon Silko Zilpha Keatley Snyder Cathy Song Danielle Steel Mildred Pitts Walter Sonnenschein, Dana Rosalyn Drexler Jorie Graham Sandra McPherson
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Sparks, Leah J. Sanora Babb Carman Dee Barnes Doris Betts Germaine Brée Olga Broumas Octavia E. Butler Rachel Carson Kim Chernin Phyllis Chesler Marilyn Chin Michelle Cliff Judith Crist Toi Derricotte Diane DiPrima Andrea Dworkin Suzette Haden Elgin Carol Emshwiller Marjorie Garber Sally Miller Gearhart Donna Haraway Lillian Hellman Susan Isaacs Molly Ivins Shirley Jackson Gerda Lerner Del Martin Alice Notley Martha Craven Nussbaum Flannery O’Connor Joyce Carol Oates Camille Paglia Margaret Randall Harriet Beecher Stowe Lois-Ann Yamanaka Spencer, Linda Jayne Anne Phillips Eleanor Roosevelt Judith Rossner Sprague, Rosemary Sara Teasdale Sproat, Elaine Lola Ridge Stackhouse, Amy D. Edith Maud Eaton Lorine Niedecker Staley, Ann Jane Hirshfield Stanbrough, Jane Elizabeth Manning Hawthorne Hildegarde Hawthorne Rose Hawthorne Lathrop xxix
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Stanford, Ann Sanora Babb Sarah Kemble Knight May Swenson Staples, Katherine G. M. Flanders Louisa Park Hall Caroline E. Rush Alma Sioux Scarberry Stauffer, Helen Bess Streeter Aldrich Bertha Muzzy Sinclair Dorothy Swain Thomas Steele, Karen B. Elizabeth W. Latimer Mary Lowell Putnam Stein, Karen F. Paulina Wright Davis Alice Dunbar-Nelson Abbie Huston Evans Phebe Coffin Hanaford Elinor Hoyt Wylie Stein, Rachel Toni Cade Bambara Stepanski, Lisa Ann Beattie Stetson, Erlene Gwendolyn B. Bennett Stevenson, Deanna Olga Broumas Stiller, Nikki Helaine Newstead Stinson, Peggy Jane Addams Agnes Smedley Ella Winter Anzia Yezierska Stoddard, Karen M. Dorothy Daniels Summers, Shauna Joan Didion Anne Tyler Swan, Susan Jamaica Kincaid xxx
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Swartz, Mark Djuna Barnes bell hooks Susan Howe Ann Lauterbach Cynthia Ozick Swidler, Arlene Anderson Sarah N. Brownson Katherine Kurz Burton Aline Murray Kilmer Sister Mary Madeleva Helen Constance White Sylvander, Carolyn Wedin Martha Griffith Browne Jessie Redmon Fauset Frances Noyes Hart Helen Hull Mary Britton Miller Mary White Ovington Laura M. Towne Szymanski, Karen Anne C. Lynch Botta Eliza Woodson Farnham Talamantez, Inés Ella Cara Deloria Tebbe, Jennifer L. Georgette Meyer Chapelle Elisabeth May Craig Rheta Childe Dorr Elizabeth Drew Barbara Ehrenreich Frances FitzGerald Anne O’Hare McCormick Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman Anna Louise Strong Terris, Virginia R. Alice Henry Sarah Bryan Piatt Jessie B. Rittenhouse Lillian Whiting Thiébaux, Marcelle Faith Baldwin Cuthrell Julia Ripley Dorr Ellen Glasgow Anne Green Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Thomas, Gwendolyn A. Henrietta Buckmaster Charlotte L. Forten Pauli Murray
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Thompson, Ann Rosemary Radford Ruether Thompson, Dorothea Mosley Mary Cunningham Logan Ruth Bryan Owen Irma von Starkloff Rombauer Caroline White Soule Thornton, Emma S. Marion Marsh Todd Tipps, Lisa Bertha Harris Tobin, Jean Hilda Morley Adrienne Rich Ruth Whitman Townsend, Janis Mildred Aldrich Gertrude Stein Alice B. Toklas Treckel, Paula A. Alice Morse Earle Gerda Lerner Emily Smith Putnam Lucy Maynard Salmon Eliza Snow Smith Fanny Stenhouse Narcissa Prestiss Whitman Ann Eliza Young Turner, Alberta Katherine Garrison Chapin Ruth Herschberger Barbara Howes Muriel Rukeyser Uffen, Ellen Serlen Fannie Hurst Uphaus, Suzanne Henning Ann Chidester Eleanor Carroll Chilton Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn Pamela Frankau Maureen Howard Marge Piercy Vasquez, Pamela Judith Ortiz Cofer
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Vogrin, Valerie Alice Adams Annie Dillard Jamaica Kincaid Maxine Hong Kingston Carole Maso Toni Morrison Sharon Olds Grace Paley Ann Patchett Amy Tan Wahlstrom, Billie J. Alice Cary Anna Peyre Dinnies Betty Friedan Zenna Henderson Andre Norton Joanna Russ Waldron, Karen E. Kim Chernin Walker, Cynthia L. Shirley Barker Taylor Caldwell Edna Ferber Eleanor Gates Caroline Pafford Miller Myrtle Reed Florence Barrett Willoughby Wall, Cheryl A. Gwendolyn Brooks Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Nella Larsen Gloria Naylor Anne Spencer Ward, Jean M. Elizabeth Blackwell Ella Rhoads Higginson Bethenia Owens-Adair Welch, Barbara A. Alice James Werden, Frieda L. Dorothy Dodds Baker Kate Millett Bernice Love Wiggins West, Martha Ullman Rosellen Brown Lynne Sharon Schwartz xxxi
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
White, Barbara A. Lillie Devereux Blake Sarah Josepha Hale Sara Willis Parton Marilla M. Ricker Caroline Slade
Yee, Carole Zonis Leane Zugsmith
White, Evelyn C. Angela Yvonne Davis
Yongue, Patricia Lee Zoë Akins Anne Douglas Sedgwick Helen Hennessy Vendler
Williams, Donna Glee Diane Wakoski Williams, Lynn F. Marion Zimmer Bradley Joanna Russ Wolff, Ellen Harriet E. Adams Wilson Jade Snow Wong Wolfson, Rose Klara Goldzieher Roman Wollons, Roberta Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg Woodward, Angela Natalie Babbitt Ellen Goodman Elizabeth Gray Vining Diane Wakoski Wright, Catherine Morris Mary Mapes Dodge Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne Gloria Anzaldúa Ana Castillo Lorna Dee Cervantes Sandra Cisneros Cherríe Moraga Helena María Viramontes
xxxii
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Yglesias, Helen Amy Tan
Young, Melanie Harriette Fanning Read Caroline H. Woods Zajdel, Melody M. Caresse Crosby Zilboorg, Caroline Elise Justine Bayard Ann Douglas Maud Wilder Goodwin Sarah Sprague Jacobs Charlotte A. Jerauld Mary Elizabeth Lee Dolley Madison Louisa Cheves McCord Maria G. Milward Agnes Woods Mitchell Mrs. H. J. Moore Martha Read Catherine Ware Warfield Amelia Coppuck Welby Zimmerman, Karen Marcia Muller
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS Abbott, Edith Abbott, Eleanor Hallowell Abel, Annie Heloise Acker, Kathy Adams, Abigail Smith Adams, Alice Adams, Hannah Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, Léonie Fuller Adams, Louisa Catherine Johnson Addams, Jane Adisa, Giamba See Lorde, Audre Agassiz, Elizabeth Cabot Cary Ai Akins, Zoë Alcott, Louisa May Alden, Isabella MacDonald Aldon, Adair See Meigs, Cornelia Aldrich, Bess Streeter Aldrich, Mildred Alexander, Francesca Allee, Marjorie Hill Allen, Elizabeth Akers Allen, Paula Gunn Allison, Dorothy Alther, Lisa Álvarez, Julia Ames, Mary E. Clemmer Anderson, Marian Andrew, Joseph Maree See Bonner, Marita Andrews, Eliza Frances Andrews, Jane Andrews, Mary Shipman Andrews, V. C. Angelou, Maya Angier, Natalie Anneke, Mathilde Franziska Giesler Anpetu Waśte See Deloria, Ella Cara Anthony, Susan B. Anthony, Susanna Antin, Mary Anzaldúa, Gloria Appleton-Weber, Sarah Appleton, Sarah See Appleton-Weber, Sarah Appleton, Victor, II See Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Arendt, Hannah Armstrong, Charlotte Arnow, Harriette Simpson Ashley, Ellen See Seifert, Elizabeth Atherton, Gertrude Atom, Ann See Walworth, Jeannette Hadermann
Auerbach, Hilda See Morley, Hilda Austin, Jane Goodwin Austin, Mary Hunter Avery, Martha Moore Ayer, Harriet Hubbard Ayscough, Florence Wheelock Babb, Sanora Babbitt, Natalie Bacon, Alice Bacon, Delia Salter Bagley, Sarah G. Bailey, Temple Bailey, Carolyn Sherwin Bailey, Florence Merriam Baker, Dorothy Dodds Balch, Emily Greene Ballard, Martha Bambara, Toni Cade Banning, Margaret Culkin Barker, Shirley Barnard, A. M. See Alcott, Louisa May Barnes, Carman Dee Barnes, Charlotte Mary Sanford Barnes, Djuna Barnes, Linda J. Barnes, Margaret Ayer Barnes, Mary Sheldon Barnum, Frances Courtenay Baylor Barr, Amelia E. Barr, Nevada Barton, Clara Barton, May Hollis See Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Bateman, Sidney Cowell Bates, Katherine Lee Bayard, Elise Justine Beach, Sylvia Beard, Mary Ritter Beattie, Ann Beebe, Mary Blair See Niles, Blair Rice Beecher, Catharine Esther Benedict, Ruth Benét, Laura Benítez, Sandra Bennett, Gwendolyn B. Benson, Sally Berg, Gertrude Bergman, Susan H. Bernays, Anne Berne, Victoria See Fisher, M. F. K. Bethune, Mary McLeod xxxiii
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Betts, Doris Bianco, Margery Williams Bishop, Claire Huchet Bishop, Elizabeth Black, Katherine Bolton Blackwell, Alice Stone Blackwell, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Elizabeth Blaisdell, Anne See Linington, Elizabeth Blake, Lillie Devereux Blake, Mary E. McGrath Bland, Eleanor Taylor Blatch, Harriot Stanton Bleecker, Ann Eliza Schuyler Bloomer, Amelia Jenks Bloomfield-Moore, Clara Jessup Blume, Judy Bly, Nellie See Seaman, Elizabeth Cochrane Bogan, Louise Bolton, Isabel See Miller, Mary Britton Bolton, Sarah T. Bolton, Sarah Knowles Bombeck, Erma Bond, Carrie Jacobs Bonner, Marita Booth, Mary Louise Borg, Dorothy Botta, Anne C. Lynch Bourke-White, Margaret Bowen, Catherine Drinker Bowen, Sue Petigru Bower, B. M. See Sinclair, Bertha Muzzy Bowers, Bathsheba Bowles, Jane Auer Boyd, Blanche McCrary Boyd, Nancy See Millay, Edna St. Vincent Boyle, Kay Boylston, Helen Dore Bracken, Peg Brackett, Leigh Bradley, Marion Zimmer Bradstreet, Anne Dudley Branch, Anna Hempstead Braun, Lilian Jackson Breckinridge, Sophonisba Preston Brée, Germaine Brennan, Maeve Brent, Linda See Jacobs, Harriet Bres, Rose Falls Breuer, Bessie Brewster, Martha Wadsworth Briggs, Emily Edson Brink, Carol Ryrie Bristow, Gwen Brody, Jane E. xxxiv
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Broner, E. M. Brooks, Gwendolyn Brooks, Maria Gowen Broumas, Olga Brown, Abbie Farwell Brown, Alice Brown, Hallie Quinn Brown, Margaret Wise Brown, Nancy See Leslie, Annie Brown Brown, Rita Mae Brown, Rosellen Brown, Sandra Browne, Martha Griffith Brownmiller, Susan Brownson, Sarah N. Bryan, Mary Edwards Bryant, Anita Buchanan, Edna Buck, Pearl S. Buckmaster, Henrietta Burke, Fielding See Dargan, Olive Tilford Burnett, Frances Hodgson Burnham, Clara L. Root Burr, Esther Edwards Burton, Katherine Kurz Burton, Virginia Lee Butler, Octavia E. Cabeza de Baca, Fabiola Cade, Toni See Bambara, Toni Cade Caldwell, Taylor Calhoun, Lucy See Monroe, Lucy Calisher, Hortense Campbell, Helen Stuart Campbell, Jane C. Campbell, Juliet Lewis Caperton, Helena Lefroy Carlson, Natalie Savage Carmichael, Sarah E. Carrighar, Sally Carrington, Elaine Sterne Carroll, Gladys Hasty Carson, Rachel Carver, Ada Jack Cary, Alice Cary, Phoebe Caspary, Vera Castillo, Ana Cather, Willa Sibert Catherwood, Mary Hartwell Catt, Carrie Chapman Caulkins, Frances Manwaring Cazneau, Jane McManus Cervantes, Lorna Dee Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Chandler, Elizabeth Margaret Chapelle, Georgette Meyer Chapin, Katherine Garrison Chaplin, Jane Dunbar Chapman, Lee See Bradley, Marion Zimmer Chapman, Maria Weston Charnas, Suzy McKee Chase, Ilka Chase, Mary Coyle Chase, Mary Ellen Chehia See Shaw, Anna Moore Cheney, Ednah Littlehale Chernin, Kim Cherry, Kelly Chesebrough, Caroline Chesler, Phyllis Chesnut, Mary Miller Chidester, Ann Child, Julia Child, Lydia Maria Childress, Alice Chilton, Eleanor Carroll Chin, Marilyn Chopin, Kate Church, Ella Rodman Chute, Beatrice J. Chute, Carolyn Chute, Marchette Cisneros, Sandra Clampitt, Amy Clapp, Margaret Antoinette Clappe, Louise Smith Clark, Ann Nolan Clark, Eleanor Clark, Mary Higgins Clarke, Rebecca Sophia Cleary, Beverly Cleghorn, Sarah Norcliffe Cliff, Michelle Clifton, Lucille Coatsworth, Elizabeth Jane Coit, Margaret L. Colum, Mary Maguire Coman, Katharine Comstock, Anna Botsford Conant, Hannah Chaplin Conway, Katherine Eleanor Cooey, Paula Marie Cook, Fannie Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth Cooke, Rose Terry Coolbrith, Ina Donna Coolidge, Susan See Woolsey, Sarah Chauncey Cooper, Anna Julia Cooper, Jane
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Cooper, Susan Fenimore Corbett, Elizabeth Frances Cornwell, Patricia Cortez, Jayne Cott, Nancy F. Coyle, Kathleen Craig, Elisabeth May Craig, Kit See Reed, Kit Craigie, Pearl Richards Crapsey, Adelaide Craven, Margaret Crist, Judith Crocker, Hannah Mather Croly, Jane Cunningham Crosby, Caresse Cross, Amanda See Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Cross, Jane Hardin Crothers, Rachel Crouter, Natalie Stark Crowe, F. J. See Johnston, Jill Cruger, Mary Cumming, Kate Cummins, Maria Susanna Curtiss, Mina Kirstein Curtiss, Ursula Reilly Custer, Elizabeth Bacon Cuthrell, Faith Baldwin Dahlgren, Madeleine Vinton Dall, Caroline Healey Daly, Elizabeth Daly, Mary Daly, Maureen Daniels, Dorothy Dargan, Olive Tilford d’Aulaire, Ingri Mortenson Davenport, Marcia Gluck Davidson, Lucretia Maria Davidson, Margaret Miller Davis, Adelle Davis, Angela Yvonne Davis, Dorothy Salisbury Davis, Elizabeth Gould Davis, Mollie Moore Davis, Natalie Zemon Davis, Paulina Wright Davis, Rebecca Harding Dawidowicz, Lucy S. Day, Dorothy de Angeli, Marguerite Lofft de Mille, Agnes de Burgos, Julia de Mondragon, Margaret Randall See Randall, Margaret de Cleyre, Voltairine Dégh, Linda xxxv
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Deland, Margaret Campbell del Occidente, Maria See Brooks, Maria Gowen Deloria, Ella Cara Deming, Barbara Denison, Mary Andrews Dennett, Mary Ware Derricotte, Toi Deutsch, Babette DeVeaux, Alexis Dexter, John See Bradley, Marion Zimmer Diaz, Abby Morton Dickinson, Emily Didion, Joan Dillard, Annie Dinnies, Anna Peyre DiPrima, Diane Disney, Doris Miles Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee Dix, Beulah Marie Dix, Dorothea Lynde Dix, Dorothy See Gilmer, Elizabeth Meriwether Dixon, Franklin W. See Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Dodge, Mary Abigail Dodge, Mary Mapes Doman, June Domini, Rey See Lorde, Audre Dominic, R. B. See Lathen, Emma Donovan, Frances R. Doolittle, Antoinette D(oolittle), H(ilda) Dorr, Julia Ripley Dorr, Rheta Childe Dorsett, Danielle See Daniels, Dorothy Dorsey, Anna McKenney Dorsey, Ella Loraine Dorsey, Sarah Ellis Doubleday, Nellie Blanchan Douglas, Amanda Minnie Douglas, Ann Dove, Rita Drew, Elizabeth Drexler, Rosalyn Drinker, Elizabeth Sandwith DuBois, Shirley Graham See Graham, Shirley DuJardin, Rosamond Neal Dunbar-Nelson, Alice Duncan, Isadora Duniway, Abigail Scott Dunlap, Jane See Davis, Adelle DuPlessis, Rachel Blau Dupuy, Eliza Ann Durant, Ariel Dworkin, Andrea Dykeman, Wilma xxxvi
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Earle, Alice Morse Earle, Sylvia A. Eastman, Crystal Eastman, Elaine Goodale Eastman, Mary Henderson Eaton, Edith Maud Eberhart, Mignon G. Eberhart, Sheri S. See Tepper, Sheri S. Eckstorm, Fannie Hardy Eddy, Mary Baker Egan, Lesley See Linington, Elizabeth Ehrenreich, Barbara Eiker, Mathilde Elder, Susan Blanchard Elgin, Suzette Haden Ellet, Elizabeth Elliot, Elisabeth Elliott, Maude Howe Elliott, Sarah Barnwell Ellis, Anne Ellis, Edith Embury, Emma Manley Emshwiller, Carol Ephron, Nora Erdrich, Louise Estes, Eleanor Evans, Abbie Huston Evans, Mari Evans, Sarah Ann Evermay, March See Eiker, Mathilde Fahs, Sophia Lyon Fairbank, Janet Ayer Fairfield, A. M. See Alcott, Louisa May Farley, Harriet Farmer, Fannie Merritt Farnham, Eliza Woodson Farnham, Mateel Howe Farquharson, Martha See Finley, Martha Farrar, Eliza Rotch Faugeres, Margaretta V. Fauset, Jessie Redmon Felton, Rebecca Latimer Fenno, Jenny Ferber, Edna Field, Kate Field, Rachel Lyman Fields, Annie Adams Finley, Martha Fisher, Dorothea Canfield Fisher, M. F. K. Fiske, Sarah Symmes Fitzgerald, Zelda Sayre FitzGerald, Frances Flanders, G. M.
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Flanner, Hildegarde Flanner, Janet Fletcher, Inglis Clark Flexner, Anne Crawford Flexner, Eleanor Flint, Margaret Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley Follen, Eliza Cabot Foote, Mary Hallock Forbes, Esther Forché, Carolyn Ford, Harriet Ford, Sallie Rochester Forester, Fanny See Judson, Emily Chubbuck Fornés, María Irene Forrest, Katherine V. Forten, Charlotte L. Foster, Hannah Webster Fox, Helen Morgenthau Fox, Paula Frankau, Pamela Franken, Rose Freedman, Nancy Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins Fremantle, Anne French, Alice French, Anne Warner French, Lucy Smith French, Marilyn Friedan, Betty Frings, Ketti Fritz, Jean Fuller, Margaret Gage, Frances Dana Gale, Zona Gallagher, Tess Garber, Marjorie Gardener, Helen Hamilton Gardner, Isabella Gardner, Mariam See Bradley, Marion Zimmer Gardner, Mary Sewall Garrigue, Jean Gates, Eleanor Gates, Susa Young Gearhart, Sally Miller Gellhorn, Martha Genêt See Flanner, Janet George, Jean Craighead Gerould, Katharine Fullerton Gerstenberg, Alice Gestefeld, Ursula N. Gibbons, Kaye Gilbert, Fabiola Cabeza de Baca See Cabeza de Baca, Fabiola
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Gilbert, Sandra M. Gilchrist, Annie Somers Gilchrist, Ellen Gill, Sarah Prince Gilman, Caroline Howard Gilman, Charlotte Perkins Gilmer, Elizabeth Meriwether Giovanni, Nikki Glasgow, Ellen Glaspell, Susan Glück, Louise Godchaux, Elma Godwin, Gail Golden, Marita Goldman, Emma Goodman, Allegra Goodman, Ellen Goodsell, Willystine Goodwin, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Maud Wilder Gordon, Caroline Gordon, Mary Catherine Gordon, Ruth Gornick, Vivian Gottschalk, Laura Riding See Jackson, Laura Gould, Hannah Flagg Gould, Lois Grafton, Sue Graham, Isabella Marshall Graham, Jorie Graham, Katharine Graham, Shirley Grahn, Judy Grant, Margaret See Franken, Rose Grau, Shirley Ann Graves, Valerie See Bradley, Marion Zimmer Gray, Angela See Daniels, Dorothy Green, Anna Katharine Green, Anne Green, Olive See Reed, Myrtle Greenberg, Joanne Greene, Sarah McLean Greenfield, Eloise Greenwood, Grace See Lippincott, Sara Jane Griffin, Susan Griffith, Mary Grimes, Martha Grimké, Angelina Grimké, Sarah Moore Gruenberg, Sidonie Matzner Grumbach, Doris Guernsey, Clara F. Guernsey, Lucy Ellen Guiney, Louise Imogen xxxvii
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Gulliver, Julia Henrietta Guy, Rosa H. D. See D(oolittle), H(ilda) Hacker, Marilyn Hadas, Rachel Hahn, Emily Hale, Lucretia Peabody Hale, Nancy Hale, Sarah Josepha Hale, Susan Hall, Florence Howe Hall, Hazel Hall, Louisa Park Hall, Sarah Ewing Hamilton, Alice Hamilton, Edith Hamilton, Gail See Dodge, Mary Abigail Hamilton, Jane Hamilton, Kate W. Hamilton, Virginia Hanaford, Phebe Coffin Hansberry, Lorraine Haraway, Donna Harding, Mary Esther Harding, Sandra Hardwick, Elizabeth Harjo, Joy Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Ida Husted Harris, Bernice Kelly Harris, Bertha Harris, Corra May Harris, Miriam Coles Harrison, Constance Cary Hart, Carolyn G. Hart, Frances Noyes Hasbrouck, Lydia Sayer Hastings, Susannah Johnson Hatch, Mary R. Platt Haven, Alice Bradley Hawthorne, Elizabeth Manning Hawthorne, Hildegarde Hazlett, Helen Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Hejinian, Lyn Hellman, Lillian Henderson, Zenna Henissart, Martha See Lathen, Emma Henley, Beth Henry, Alice Henry, Marguerite Hentz, Caroline Whiting Herbst, Josephine Herschberger, Ruth xxxviii
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Hewitt, Mary E. Moore Heyward, Dorothy Kuhns Heywood, Martha Spence Higgins, Marguerite Higginson, Ella Rhoads Higham, Mary R. Highet, Helen MacInnes See MacInnes, Helen Highsmith, Patricia Hill-Lutz, Grace Livingston Hirshfield, Jane Hite, Shere Hobart, Alice Tisdale Hobson, Laura Z. Hoffman, Alice Hoffman, Malvina Hogan, Linda Holding, Elisabeth Sanxay Hollander, Nicole Holley, Marietta Hollingworth, Leta Stetter Holm, Saxe See Jackson, Helen Hunt Holmes, Mary Jane Hawes Holmes, Sarah Stone hooks, bell Hooper, Lucy Jones Hooper, Lucy Hope, Laura Lee See Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Hopkins, Pauline Hopper, Hedda Horlak, E. E. See Tepper, Sheri S. Horney, Karen Houston, Jean Howard, Maureen Howe, Florence Howe, Julia Ward Howe, Susan Howe, Tina Howes, Barbara Howland, Marie Hull, Helen Hulme, Kathryn Cavarly Hume, Sophia Humishuma See Mourning Dove Hunt, Irene Hunt, Mabel Leigh Hunter, Rodello Hunter-Lattany, Kristin Huntington, Susan Hurd-Mead, Kate C. Hurst, Fannie Hurston, Zora Neale Hutchins, Maude McVeigh Huxtable, Ada Louise Hyde, Shelley See Reed, Kit
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Ireland, Jane See Norris, Kathleen Thompson Irwin, Inez Haynes Isaacs, Susan Ives, Morgan See Bradley, Marion Zimmer Ivins, Molly Jackson, Helen Hunt Jackson, Laura Jackson, Rebecca Cox Jackson, Shirley Jackson, Ward See Braun, Lilian Jackson Jacobi, Mary Putnam Jacobs, Harriet Jacobs, Jane Jacobs, Sarah Sprague Jacobsen, Josephine James, Alice Jamison, Cecilia Viets Janeway, Elizabeth Janvier, Margaret Thompson Jerauld, Charlotte A. Jervey, Caroline Gilman Jewett, Sarah Orne Johnson, Diane Johnson, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Helen Kendrick Johnson, Josephine Winslow Johnson-Masters, Virginia Johnston, Annie Fellows Johnston, Jill Johnston, Mary Jones, Amanda Theodocia Jones, Edith See Wharton, Edith Jones, Gayl Jones, Hettie Jones, Mary Harris Jong, Erica Jordan, Barbara C. Jordan, June Jordan, Kate Jordan, Laura See Brown, Sandra Judson, Emily Chubbuck Kael, Pauline Kavanaugh, Cynthia See Daniels, Dorothy Keene, Carolyn See Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Keith, Agnes Newton Keller, Helen Kellerman, Faye Kelley, Edith Summers Kellogg, Louise Kellor, Frances Kelly, Eleanor Mercein Kelly, Myra Kemble, Fanny
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Kennedy, Adrienne Kenyon, Jane Kerber, Linda Kaufman Kerr, Jean Keyes, Frances Parkinson Kilmer, Aline Murray Kimbrough, Emily Kincaid, Jamaica King, Grace Elizabeth King, Laurie R. King, Louisa Yeomans Kingsolver, Barbara Kingston, Maxine Hong Kinney, Elizabeth Dodge Kinzie, Juliette Magill Kirby, Georgiana Bruce Kirk, Ellen Warner Kirkland, Caroline M. Stansbury Kizer, Carolyn Knapp, Bettina Liebowitz Knight, Sarah Kemble Knox, Adeline Trafton Koch, Adrienne Kohut, Rebekah Bettelheim Konigsburg, E. L. Kroeber, Theodora Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth Kumin, Maxine W. Laing, Dilys Bennett Lamb, Martha Nash Lamott, Anne Landers, Ann Landon, Margaret Lane, Gertrude Battles Lane, Rose Wilder Langdon, Mary See Pike, Mary Green Langer, Susanne K. Larcom, Lucy Larsen, Nella Lasswell, Mary Latham, Jean Lee Lathen, Emma Lathrop, Rose Hawthorne Latimer, Elizabeth W. Latsis, Mary Jane See Lathen, Emma Laut, Agnes C. Lauterbach, Ann Lawrence, Elizabeth L. Lawrence, Josephine Lawrence, Margaret Woods Lazarus, Emma Le Guin, Ursula K. Le Sueur, Meridel Le Vert, Octavia Walton xxxix
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Lea, Fannie Heaslip Lee, Eliza Buckminster Lee, Hannah Sawyer Lee, Harper Lee, Marion See Comstock, Anna Botsford Lee, Mary Elizabeth LeGallienne, Eva L’Engle, Madeleine Lenski, Lois Lerman, Rhoda Lerner, Gerda Leslie, Annie Brown Leslie, Eliza Leslie, Miriam Follin Levertov, Denise Lewis, Elizabeth Foreman Lewis, Estelle Robinson Lewis, Janet Libbey, Laura Jean Lincoln, Victoria Lindbergh, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Reeve Linington, Elizabeth Lippard, Lucy R. Lippincott, Martha Shepard Lippincott, Sara Jane Little, Sophia Robbins Livermore, Harriet Livermore, Mary Rice Livingston, Myra Cohn Locke, Jane Starkweather Logan, Deborah Norris Logan, Mary Cunningham Logan, Olive Loos, Anita Lord, Bette Bao Lorde, Audre Lothrop, Amy See Warner, Anna Bartlett Lothrop, Harriet Stone Loughborough, Mary Ann Webster Lounsberry, Alice Lovejoy, Esther Pohl Lowell, Amy Lowry, Lois Loy, Mina Lucas, Victoria See Plath, Sylvia Luce, Clare Boothe Luhan, Mabel Dodge Lumpkin, Grace Lurie, Alison Lutz, Alma Lynd, Helen Merrell MacDonald, Betty MacDonald, Jessica N. xl
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Macdonald, Marcia See Hill-Lutz, Grace Livingston MacDougall, Ruth Doan MacInnes, Helen MacKinnon, Catharine A. MacLaine, Shirley MacLean, Annie Marion Macumber, Marie S. See Sandoz, Mari Madeleva, Sister Mary Madison, Dolley Mairs, Nancy Malkiel, Theresa S. Mannes, Marya Manning, Marie Mansfield, Blanche McManus March, Anne See Woolson, Constance Fenimore Marks, Jeannette Augustus Marot, Helen Marshall, Catherine Marshall, Gertrude Helen See Fahs, Sophia Lyon Marshall, Paule Martin, Del Martin, George Madden Martin, Helen Reimensnyder Martin, Valerie Martínez, Demetria Martyn, Sarah Smith Maso, Carole Mason, Bobbie Ann Mathews, Frances Aymar Matthews, Adelaide May, Sophie See Clarke, Rebecca Sophia Maynard, Joyce Mayo, Katherine Mayo, Margaret Mayo, Sarah Edgarton McBride, Mary Margaret McCaffrey, Anne McCarthy, Mary McCloy, Helen McCord, Louisa Cheves McCormick, Anne O’Hare McCrackin, Josephine Clifford McCrumb, Sharon McCullers, Carson McDermott, Alice McDowell, Katherine Bonner McGinley, Phyllis McGrory, Mary McGuire, Judith Brockenbrough McIntosh, Maria Jane McIntyre, Vonda N. McKenney, Ruth McLean, Kathryn Anderson McMillan, Terry McPherson, Aimee Semple
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
McPherson, Sandra Mead, Kate C. See Hurd-Mead, Kate C. Mead, Margaret Meaney, Mary L. Means, Florence Crannell Meigs, Cornelia Meloney, Franken See Franken, Rose Menken, Adah Isaacs Merington, Marguerite Meriwether, Elizabeth Avery Merriam, Eve Merril, Judith Meyer, Annie Nathan Meyer, June See Jordan, June M. Miles, Josephine Millar, Margaret Millay, Edna St. Vincent Miller, Alice Duer Miller, Caroline Pafford Miller, Emily Huntington Miller, Harriet M. Miller, Isabel See Routsong, Alma Miller, Mary Britton Miller, Vassar Millett, Kate Milward, Maria G. Miner, Valerie Minot, Susan Mirikitani, Janice Mitchell, Agnes Woods Mitchell, Margaret Mitchell, Maria Mitford, Jessica Mixer, Elizabeth Moers, Ellen Mohr, Nicholasa Moise, Penina Mojtabai, A. G. Mollenkott, Virginia Ramey Monroe, Harriet Monroe, Lucy Montgomery, Ruth Shick Moody, Anne Moore, C. L. Moore, Lorrie Moore, Marianne Moore, Mary Evelyn See Davis, Mollie Moore Moore, Mollie E. See Davis, Mollie Moore Moore, Mrs. H. J. Moorhead, Sarah Parsons Moraga, Cherríe Morgan, Claire See Highsmith, Patricia Morgan, Marabel Morgan, Robin Morley, Hilda
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Morris, Clara Morrison, Toni Morrow, Honoré McCue Mortimer, Lillian Morton, Martha Morton, Sarah Wentworth Mother Goose See Walworth, Jeannette Hadermann Mott, Lucretia Moulton, Louise Chandler Mourning Dove Mukherjee, Bharati Muller, Marcia Munro, Eleanor Murfree, Mary Murray, Judith Sargent Murray, Pauli Myles, Eileen Nation, Carry A. Naylor, Gloria Neely, Barbara Neilson, Nellie Neville, Emily Cheney Newcomb, Franc Johnson Newman, Frances Newman, Lesléa Newstead, Helaine Nichols, Anne Nicholson, Asenath Hatch Nicholson, Eliza Jane Poitevent Nicolson, Marjorie Hope Niedecker, Lorine Nieriker, Abigail May Alcott Niggli, Josefina Niles, Blair Rice Nin, Anaïs Nitsch, Helen Matthews Nixon, Agnes E. Norman, Marsha Norris, Kathleen Thompson Norton, Alice See Norton, Andre Norton, Andre Norton, Katherine LaForge See Reed, Myrtle Notley, Alice Nussbaum, Martha Craven Nye, Andrea Nye, Naomi Shihab Oates, Joyce Carol Obejas, Achy Oberholtzer, Sara Vickers O’Connor, Flannery O’Connor, Florence J. O’Donnell, Jessie Fremont O’Donnell, Lillian Oemler, Marie Conway xli
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Offord, Lenore Glen O’Hair, Madalyn Murray O’Hara, Mary See Sture-Vasa, Mary O’Keeffe, Katharine A. O’Neill, Egan See Linington, Elizabeth Older, Cora Baggerly Olds, Sharon Oliphant, B. J. See Tepper, Sheri S. Oliver, Mary Olsen, Tillie O’Neill, Rose Orde, A. J. See Tepper, Sheri S. Ortiz Cofer, Judith Orvis, Marianne Dwight Osbey, Brenda Marie Osborn, Sarah Osgood, Frances Sargent Ostenso, Martha Ostriker, Alicia Ottenberg, Miriam Ovington, Mary White Owen, Catherine See Nitsch, Helen Matthews Owen, Mary Alicia Owen, Ruth Bryan Owens, Claire Myers Owens-Adair, Bethenia Owens, Rochelle Ozick, Cynthia Page, Myra Paglia, Camille Paley, Grace Palmer, Phoebe Worrall Papashvily, Helen Waite Paretsky, Sara Parker, Charlotte Blair Parker, Dorothy Parrish, Mary Frances See Fisher, M. F. K. Parsons, Elsie Clews Parsons, Frances Dana Parsons, Louella Oettinger Parton, Sara Willis Pastan, Linda Patchett, Ann Paterson, Katherine Patton, Frances Gray Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Josephine Preston Peattie, Elia Wilkinson Peattie, Louise Redfield Peck, Annie Smith Peck, Ellen Pember, Phoebe Yates Penfeather, Anabel See Cooper, Susan Fenimore Percy, Florence See Allen, Elizabeth Akers xlii
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Perkins, Frances Perkins, Lucy Fitch Pesotta, Rose Peterkin, Julia Mood Peters, Sandra See Plath, Sylvia Petersham, Maud Fuller Petry, Ann Lane Phelps, Almira Lincoln Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart Phillips, Irna Phillips, Jayne Anne Piatt, Sarah Bryan Piercy, Marge Pike, Mary Green Pinckney, Josephine Pine, Cuyler See Peck, Ellen Plain, Belva Plath, Sylvia Polacco, Patricia Pollack, Rachel Pollard, Josephine Porter, Eleanor Hodgman Porter, Katherine Anne Porter, Rose Porter, Sarah Porter, Sylvia F. Post, Emily Powell, Dawn Pratt, Ella Farman Prentiss, Elizabeth Payson Preston, Harriet Waters Preston, Margaret Junkin Prince, Nancy Gardner Prose, Francine Prouty, Olive Higgins Pryor, Sara Rice Pugh, Eliza Phillips Putnam, Emily Smith Putnam, Mary Lowell Putnam, Ruth Putnam, Sallie A. Brock Raimond, C. E. See Robins, Elizabeth Rampling, Anne See Rice, Anne Ramsay, Martha Laurens Ramsay, Vienna G. Morrell Rand, Ayn Randall, Margaret Randall, Ruth Painter Rankin, Fannie W. Ranous, Dora Knowlton Rawlings, Marjorie Kinnan Read, Harriette Fanning Read, Martha Reed, Kit
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Reed, Myrtle Reese, Lizette Woodworth Remick, Martha Reno, Itti Kinney Repplier, Agnes Rice, Alice Hegan Rice, Anne Rich, Adrienne Rich, Barbara See Jackson, Laura Rich, Louise Dickinson Richards, Laura Howe Richards, Louisa Greene Richmond, Grace Ricker, Marilla M. Ridge, Lola Riding, Laura See Jackson, Laura Rinehart, Mary Roberts Ripley, Eliza M. Ritchie, Anna Mowatt Rittenhouse, Jessie B. Rivers, Alfrida See Bradley, Marion Zimmer Rivers, Pearl See Nicholson, Eliza Jane Poitevent Robb, J. D. See Roberts, Nora Roberts, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Jane Roberts, Maggie Roberts, Nora Robins, Elizabeth Robinson, Harriet Hanson Robinson, Martha Harrison Rodgers, Carolyn M. Rogers, Katherine M. Roman, Klara Goldzieher Rombauer, Irma von Starkloff Roosevelt, Eleanor Roquelaure, A. N. See Rice, Anne Ross, Helaine See Daniels, Dorothy Ross, Lillian Rossner, Judith Rourke, Constance Mayfield Routsong, Alma Royall, Anne Newport Royce, Sarah Bayliss Ruddy, Ella Giles Ruether, Rosemary Radford Rukeyser, Muriel Rule, Ann Rusch, Kristine Kathryn Rush, Caroline E. Rush, Rebecca Russ, Joanna Ryan, Rachel See Brown, Sandra Sachs, Marilyn St. Johns, Adela Rogers
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
St. Claire, Erin See Brown, Sandra Salisbury, Charlotte Y. Salmon, Lucy Maynard Salmonson, Jessica Amanda Sanchez, Sonia Sanders, Elizabeth Elkins Sandoz, Mari Sanford, Mollie Dorsey Sanger, Margaret Sangster, Margaret E. Santiago, Esmeralda Sargent, Pamela Sarton, May Satir, Virginia M. Savage, Elizabeth Sawyer, Ruth Scarberry, Alma Sioux Scarborough, Dorothy Scarborough, Elizabeth Ann Schaeffer, Susan Fromberg Schmitt, Gladys Schofield, Sandy See Rusch, Kristine Kathryn Schoolcraft, Mary Howard Schwartz, Lynne Sharon Scott, Anne Firor Scott, Evelyn Scott, Joan Wallach Scott, Julia See Owen, Mary Alicia Scott-Maxwell, Florida Scudder, Vida Dutton Seaman, Elizabeth Cochrane Seawell, Molly Elliot Secor, Lella Sedges, John See Buck, Pearl S. Sedgwick, Anne Douglas Sedgwick, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Susan Ridley Seeley, Mabel Seid, Ruth Seifert, Elizabeth Semple, Ellen Churchill Seredy, Kate Seton, Anya Settle, Mary Lee Sewall, Harriet Winslow Sewell, Elizabeth Sexton, Anne Shange, Ntozake Shannon, Dell See Linington, Elizabeth Shannon, Monica Sharon, Rose See Merril, Judith Sharp, Isabella Oliver Shaw, Anna Moore Shaw, Anna H. Sheehy, Gail xliii
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Sheldon, Ann See Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Sherwood, Mary Wilson Shindler, Mary Dana Showalter, Elaine Shreve, Anita Shulman, Alix Kates Sidlosky, Carolyn See Forché, Carolyn Sigourney, Lydia Huntley Silko, Leslie Marmon Simon, Kate Sinclair, Bertha Muzzy Sinclair, Jo See Seid, Ruth Singer, June K. Singleton, Anne See Benedict, Ruth Singmaster, Elsie Skinner, Constance Lindsay Skinner, Cornelia Otis Slade, Caroline Slesinger, Tess Slosson, Annie Trumbull Smedley, Agnes Smith, Amanda Smith, Anna Young Smith, Betty Smith, Eliza Snow Smith, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Eunice Smith, Hannah Whittal Smith, Lee Smith, Lillian Smith, Lula Carson See McCullers, Carson Smith, Margaret Bayard Smith, Rosamond See Oates, Joyce Carol Smith, Sarah Pogson Smith, Susy Snedeker, Caroline Dale Snyder, Zilpha Keatley Solwoska, Mara See French, Marilyn Somers, Suzanne See Daniels, Dorothy Song, Cathy Sontag, Susan Sorel, Julia See Drexler, Rosalyn Soule, Caroline White Southworth, E. D. E. N. Souza, E. See Scott, Evelyn Spacks, Patricia Meyer Speare, Elizabeth George Spencer, Anne Spencer, Cornelia Phillips Spencer, Elizabeth Spewak, Bella Cohen Speyer, Leonora von Stosch Spofford, Harriet Prescott Sprague, Rosemary Stabenow, Dana xliv
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Stack, Andy See Rule, Ann Stafford, Jean Stanton, Elizabeth Cady Steel, Danielle Stein, Gertrude Steinem, Gloria Stenhouse, Fanny Stephens, Ann Winterbotham Stephens, Margaret Dean See Aldrich, Bess Streeter Steptoe, Lydia See Barnes, Djuna Stern, Elizabeth G. Stewart, Elinore Pruitt Stewart, Maria W. Stockton, Annis Boudinot Stoddard, Elizabeth Barstow Stone, Ruth Story, Sydney A. See Pike, Mary Green Stowe, Harriet Beecher Stratton-Porter, Gene Strong, Anna Louise Stuart, Ruth McEnery Sture-Vasa, Mary Suckow, Ruth Sui Sin Far See Eaton, Edith Maud Susann, Jacqueline Swenson, May Swett, Sophie Swisshelm, Jane Grey Taber, Gladys Bagg Taggard, Genevieve Talbott, Marion Tan, Amy Tandy, Jennette Reid Tappan, Eva March Tarbell, Ida Taylor, Mildred Delois Taylor, Phoebe Atwood Taylor, Susie King Teasdale, Sara Tenney, Tabitha Tepper, Sheri S. Terhune, Mary Hawes Terry, Megan Thane, Elswyth Thanet, Octave See French, Alice Thaxter, Celia Laighton Thayer, Caroline Warren Thayer, Geraldine See Daniels, Dorothy Thomas, Dorothy Swain Thompson, Clara M. (b. c. 1830s) Thompson, Clara M. (1893-1958) Thompson, Dorothy Thorndyke, Helen Louise See Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Ticknor, Caroline
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Tiernan, Frances Fisher Tietjens, Eunice Tilton, Alice See Taylor, Phoebe Atwood Tincker, Mary Agnes Todd, Mabel Loomis Todd, Marion Marsh Toklas, Alice B. Tompkins, Jane P. Towne, Laura M. Townsend, Mary Ashley Treadwell, Sophie Trilling, Diana Troubetzkoy, Amélie Rives Truitt, Anne Truman, Margaret Truth, Sojourner Tuchman, Barbara Turell, Jane Turnbull, Agnes Sligh Turney, Catherine Tuthill, Louisa Huggins Tuve, Rosemond Ty-Casper, Linda Tyler, Anne Tyler, Martha W. Tyler, Mary Palmer Uchida, Yoshiko Uhnak, Dorothy Ulanov, Ann Belford Underwood, Sophie Kerr Untermeyer, Jean Starr Upton, Harriet Taylor Valentine, Jean Valentine, Jo See Armstrong, Charlotte Van Alstyne, Frances Crosby Vandegrift, Margaret See Janvier, Margaret Thompson Vanderbilt, Amy Van Duyn, Mona Van Vorst, Bessie McGinnis Van Vorst, Marie Vendler, Helen Hennessy Victor, Frances Fuller Victor, Metta Fuller Vining, Elizabeth Gray Viramontes, Helena María Voigt, Cynthia Voigt, Ellen Bryant Vorse, Mary Heaton Wakoski, Diane Wald, Lillian D. Waldman, Anne Waldrop, Rosmarie Walker, Alice
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Walker, Margaret Walker, Mary Spring Wallace, Michele Waller, Mary Ella Walter, Mildred Pitts Walton, Evangeline Walworth, Jeannette Hadermann Ward, Mary Jane Warfield, Catherine Ware Warner, Anna Bartlett Warner, Susan Bogert Warren, Lella Warren, Mercy Otis Wasserstein, Wendy Watanabe, Sylvia Watson, Sukey Vickery Watts, Mary Stanbery Weber, Sarah Appleton See Appleton-Weber, Sarah Webster, Jean Weeks, Helen C. See Campbell, Helen Stuart Welby, Amelia Coppuck Wells, Carolyn Wells, Emmeline Woodward Wells, John J. See Bradley, Marion Zimmer Wells-Barnett, Ida B. Welty, Eudora West, Dorothy West, Jessamyn West, Lillie West, Mae Wetherall, Elizabeth See Warner, Susan Bogert Wharton, Edith Wheatley, Phillis Wheaton, Campbell See Campbell, Helen Stuart Whipple, Maurine Whitcher, Frances Berry White, Anna White, Anne Terry White, Eliza Orne White, Elizabeth White, Ellen Gould White, Helen Constance White, Nelia Gardner White, Rhoda E. Whiting, Lillian Whitman, Narcissa Prentiss Whitman, Ruth Whitman, Sarah Helen Whitney, Adeline D. T. Whitney, Phyllis A. Wiggin, Kate Douglass Wiggins, Bernice Love Wiggins, Marianne Wilcox, Ella Wheeler Wilder, Laura Ingalls xlv
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Wilder, Louise Beebe Wilhelm, Kate Willard, Emma Willard, Frances Willard, Nancy Williams, Catharine Arnold Williams, Fannie Barrier Williams, Sherley Anne Willis, Connie Willis, Lydia Fish Willoughby, Florence Barrett Wilson, Harriet E. Adams Windle, Mary Jane Winnemucca, Sarah Winslow, Anna Green Winslow, Helen M. Winslow, Ola Elizabeth Winslow, Thyra Samter Winter, Ella Winwar, Frances Wolf, Naomi Wong, Jade Snow Wood, Ann See Douglas, Ann Wood, S. S. B. K. Woodhull, Victoria Woods, Caroline H.
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Woods, Katharine Pearson Woolsey, Sarah Chauncey Woolson, Constance Fenimore Wormeley, Katharine Prescott Wright, Frances Wright, Julia McNair Wright, Mabel Osgood Wright, Mary Clabaugh Wyatt, Edith Franklin Wylie, Elinor Hoyt Yamada, Mitsuye Yamamoto, Hisaye Yamanaka, Lois-Ann Yates, Elizabeth Yezierska, Anzia Yglesias, Helen Youmans, Eliza Ann Young, Ann Eliza Young, Ella Young, Marguerite Young, Rida Johnson Zaturenska, Marya Zolotow, Charlotte Zugsmith, Leane
ABBREVIATIONS A style of all or nothing (initials or complete title) has been employed in this new edition; partial abbreviations have been purged, to limit confusion. In cases where two well-known periodicals have the same initials, only one has the initials and the other is always spelled out in its entirety (i.e. NR is New Republic, and National Review is spelled out).
KR
Kirkus Reviews
LATBR
Los Angeles Times Book Review
LJ
Library Journal
APR
American Poetry Review
MTCW
Major Twentieth–Century Writers
CA
Contemporary Authors
NAW
Notable American Women
CAAS
Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series
NAW:MP
Notable American Women: The Modern Period
CANR
Contemporary Authors New Revision Series
NBAW
Notable Black American Women
CB
Current Biography
NR
New Republic
CBY
Current Biography Yearbook NYRB
New York Review of Books
NYT
New York Times
NYTM
New York Times Magazine
NYTBR
New York Times Book Review
CLAJ
College Literary Association Journal
CLC
Contemporary Literary Criticism
CLHUS
Cambridge Literary History of the United States
CLR
Children’s Literature Review
CN
Contemporary Novelists
PMLA
Publication of the Modern Language Association
CP
Contemporary Poets
PW
Publishers Weekly
CPW
Contemporary Popular Writers
SATA
Something About the Author
CWD
Contemporary Women Dramatists
SL
School Librarian
CWP
Contemporary Women Poets
TLS
[London] Times Literary Supplement
DAB
Dictionary of American Biography TCCW
Twentieth–Century Children’s Writers
WP
Washington Post
WPBW
Washington Post Book World
VV
Village Voice
DLB
Dictionary of Literary Biography
DLBY
Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook
DAI
Dissertation Abstracts International
FC
Feminist Companion
FW
Feminist Writers
WRB
Women’s Review of Books
GLB
Gay & Lesbian Biography
WWAW
Who’s Who of American Women xlvii
E EARLE, Alice Morse Born Mary Alice Morse, 27 April 1851, Worcester, Massachusetts; died 16 February 1911, Hempstead, New York Daughter of Edwin and Abigail Clary Morse; married Henry Earle, 1874 (died); children: four Alice Morse Earle, antiquarian and social historian, was a descendant of men important in the history of New England and Massachusetts. She was educated at Worcester High School and at Dr. Gannett’s boarding school in Boston. After her marriage, Earle moved to Brooklyn Heights and remained there her entire life. Her early life was devoted to her husband and the care of her four children, with little thought to a career in writing or history. After the death of her husband, Earle traveled extensively through Europe with her sister. It was about this time that family members, particularly her father, began urging her to write professionally. True to her heritage, Earle was an active member of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Society of Colonial Dames. She was also a supporter of the woman suffrage movement. The publication of The Sabbath in Puritan New England (1891) marked the beginning of Earle’s writing career, and during the next 12 years, she authored, edited, and contributed to the publication of 17 books and over 30 articles describing various aspects of early American history. All of Earle’s works deal with the human, domestic side of American history. Utilizing primary source materials—wills, letters, journals, newspapers, court records—Earle pieced together an accurate picture of what everyday life was like in colonial America. Earle had a particular interest in the role played by women in early America. All of her books contain a great deal of information on the economic and social activities of women in families and their respective communities. In The Diary of Anna Green Winslow: A Boston School Girl of 1771 (1894) and Margaret Winthrop (1895), Earle views her subjects as representative women of their times and utilizes them as focal points for discussing the everyday lives, duties, and responsibilities of women in the colonial era. Earle’s articles and books were widely read and appreciated by her contemporaries. Celebration of the Revolutionary centennial in 1876 had reawakened popular interest in early American history. This popular interest demanded a new kind of historical literature devoted to the life of American society, and Earle’s books and articles found a welcoming audience. She never sacrificed her scholarship and historical integrity to meet the demands of her public, however. Her research was always of the highest quality, and she shared an interest in unearthing historical truths with professionally schooled historians. As the early New England Puritans’ lives were centered around their religion and church attendance, so too is The Sabbath
in Puritan New England. A compendium of material on the Puritan sabbath, it ranges from a discussion of the New England meeting house to the duties of the church deacon; from the history of music in Puritan services to a commentary on the seating arrangements of our forefathers. In her discussion of the Puritans, Earle reveals the human side of their lives and of their religion. She utilizes the diaries, letters, sermons, and writings of men like Judge Sewall and Cotton and Increase Mather for material on the customs of New England religion and the daily lives of the Puritans. Humorous anecdotes and tales also fill the book’s pages, and we are clearly reminded that our Puritan forefathers were much more than the two-dimensional figures of history textbooks. Colonial Dames and Good Wives (1895) deals with the roles played by women in America from first settlement to the American Revolution. Primarily devoted to investigation of the women of New England, Earle also makes reference to notable women who lived in the middle and southern colonies. As a general work on the history of women in America, it is a valuable and informative book even today. Earle begins Colonial Dames and Good Wives with a discussion of the importance of women, both economically and socially, in the settlement process. Women were vital both as workers in a labor-scarce economy and as transmitters of English culture and civilization to the North American wilderness. Various devices were used to lure women to the New World: Maryland’s proprietors provided women with free lands if they would voyage to their colony, while other entrepreneurs recruited and sometimes kidnapped young women for service in the colonies. Once in America, however, Earle states, these women played elemental roles in the development of the American colonies. A considerable portion of Colonial Dames and Good Wives is rightfully devoted to recreating the domestic and social lives of colonial women. Beginning with her chapter ‘‘Boston Neighbors,’’ Earle attempts to reconstruct the Boston of Governor Winthrop’s time as seen through the eyes of his wife, Margaret. Using a variety of diaries and journals written by women of all regions in America, Earle describes the lifestyles of later colonial women. As expressed in their own words, these women come alive for the reader and add a new dimension to our knowledge of the life of women in this period. Colonial Dames and Good Wives is an important work for the student of American women’s history. It was written at a time when little scholarly interest was paid to the activities and function of women in American history. Yet the devotion of Earle to her subject and her high standard of scholarship made the book valuable for the people of her age as well as ours. Margaret Winthrop is, in theory, a biography of the third wife of Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts. In reality, the book is a history of the Puritans prior to their departure to America, of their settlement in Massachusetts, and an account of their domestic and religious life in the colony. Relying primarily upon the journal of Governor Winthrop and his correspondence
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with his wife for information on Margaret Winthrop’s life, Earle also utilized diaries, letters, wills, and religious tracts written by other men and women to provide a setting for the book. Margaret Winthrop illustrates the changes Puritan colonists faced as a result of their movement from England to America in search of religious freedom. Earle devotes two chapters to the lives of Puritans in England under the reign of James I. We learn the details of life in the English country manor Margaret inhabited with her husband. Her experiences exemplify the duties and economic responsibilities of country women, as well as the customs and fashions of the age in which she lived. This picture contrasts sharply with life in early Massachusetts. Facing the harsh physical conditions of life on the Massachusetts frontier, it is little wonder many women were hesitant to leave the relative comforts of their English homes to join their husbands in the New World. The most widely read and referred to book written by Earle, Home Life in Colonial Days (1898) is an informative and entertaining account of daily life in colonial America. It remains ‘‘the most detailed and comprehensive account of the life and customs of those times—how the colonists made their homes, raised their families, worked and worshiped—that we have to this day.’’ Beginning with an account of the variety of homes lived in by the early settlers and how they were constructed, Earle devotes chapters to the histories of such subjects as the lighting, food, drink, clothing, and gardens of the first settlers of America. After Earle discusses the evolution of lighting in colonial homes from pine-knots to whale-oil lamps, we can better appreciate the religious dedication of Puritan ministers who wrote hundreds of their sermons by the flickering light of candlewood torches. We can also understand the pride colonial women had in their tallow and bayberry candles when we realize the work that went into their making. The examples presented in Home Life in Colonial Days make it quite evident why the Puritans considered laziness a sin. In colonial America, survival depended upon industry. In the book, Earle pays particular attention to the domestic tasks of the American settlers. The bulk of the volume encompasses the domestic duties of colonial women. Earle considered Two Centuries of Costume in America, 1620-1820 (2 vols., 1903) her finest work. A classic study of the fashions of America from the settlement of New England to the early years of the American republic, these two volumes are invaluable to students of American history, design, and art history. In the 77 years since its publication, no other work of its accuracy and detail has been published. With her in-depth knowledge of the lifestyles and activities of early Americans, Earle was better able to discuss and convey the significance of the costumes worn by the American colonists with respect to their lives. Her gift of description is at its best here. Readers can truly see the fine ladies and gentlemen ‘‘ruffling in Silks, Velvets, Satins, Damaske, Taffetas, Gold, Silver and what not’’ walking down the muddy streets of colonial Jamestown or Boston. Earle begins Two Centuries of Costume in America, 1620-1820 with a discussion of the apparel of Puritan and Pilgrim men and women. Although these men and women professed purity and
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simplicity in their religion, their dress was as opulent as their purses and station in life would allow. While changes in style did occur in colonial times, they did not take place with such rapidity as they do today. As Earle notes, clothing was an important part of a man or woman’s estate, the more valuable pieces being willed to a succession of generations until they wore out. Thus knowledge of the clothing of early Americans is a key to understanding their way of life and their attitudes about themselves. Reviewers of Two Centuries of Costume in America, 1620-1820 saw its principal value as a glossary of terms. Earle did an excellent job of researching the names of various obsolete items of clothing and searching out articles of costume for which she had names but had no idea what they were. But perhaps the most helpful aspect of this book is its illustrations. The work contains over 350 illustrations, some presenting details of specific articles and items like lace, gloves, sedan chairs, or gowns. The most outstanding are the portraits that Earle uses to illustrate examples of clothing worn by the colonists and to note gradual changes in styles as the years progressed. It is a very effective use of illustration that broadens the scope of the book to include the history of art and portraiture from 1620 until 1820. Considered together, all of Earle’s works are remarkable for the careful insight they give us of life in colonial America. She was able to take advantage of the many fine collections of documents acquired or unearthed by American historical societies as a result of the revival of interest in the American past during the last decade of the 19th century. Yet, because she was a woman working in the male-dominated field of history, Earle’s scholarship did not receive the professional appreciation it deserves. If there is any flaw in Earle’s work in general, it is that perhaps she was too prolific. She published 17 books and over 30 articles in 12 years. The popularity of her books with the reading public was certainly a factor in this amazing rate of productivity. Yet, unfortunately, Earle’s works suffer for it. If one reads all of her books, and not just selected volumes, one notes there is often repetition of materials and subject matter. Perhaps because of her own heritage and her familiarity with the archives of New England libraries and antiquarian societies, Earle tends to emphasize the history of New England and New York in her writings. Though she is too responsible a historian to state that the customs of all the American colonies were the same, the less informed reader might be misled into believing the Cavaliers of Virginia lived like the Puritans of Boston or the Dutch of New York. It is unfortunate Earle did not see fit to devote more time to rigorous investigation of the social development of the southern as well as the northern colonies of America. Despite this criticism of Earle’s works on the customs and everyday life in colonial America, they are, with few exceptions, valuable books. Though first written in the 1890s and early 1900s, they still enjoy a popular readership, which is apparently growing, as public interest in social and women’s history increases. Many of Earle’s volumes are currently in print. Certainly this is proof enough that as a writer and a historian, Earle contributed greatly to expanding our knowledge of colonial America and colonial Americans.
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OTHER WORKS: China Collecting in America (1892). Customs and Fashions of Old New England (1893). Costume of Colonial Times (1894). Colonial Days in Old New York (1896). Curious Punishments of Bygone Days (1896). Historic New York (1897). Chap Book Essays (1897). In Old Narragansett: Romances and Realities (1898). Child Life in Colonial Days (1899). Stage Coach and Tavern Days (1900). Old Time Gardens (1901). Sun Dials and Roses of Yesterday (1902). The papers of Alice Morse Earle are housed in the American Antiquarian Society of Worcester, Massachusetts, and in the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College, Massachusetts. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: DAB (1929). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: NYT (18 Feb. 1911). NYHT (18 Feb. 1911). Old Time New England (Jan. 1947). Worcester (Mass.) Telegram (18 Feb. 1911). —PAULA A. TRECKEL
EARLE, Sylvia A. Born 30 August 1935, Gibbstown, New Jersey Daughter of Lewis R. and Alice Earle; married Graham Hawkes (divorced) When Sylvia Earle was a little girl, her mother would show frogs to Earle and her brothers. As Earle recounted to Scientific American, ‘‘I wasn’t shown frogs with the attitude ‘yuk,’ but rather my mother would show my brothers and me how beautiful they are and how fascinating it was to look at their gorgeous golden eyes.’’ The affinity for the outdoors that both parents encouraged in their daughter continued to develop when they moved the family to the west coast of Florida. With the Gulf of Mexico as her laboratory, Earle received her B.S. degree in the spring of 1955 from Florida State University. She obtained a master’s degree in botany from Duke University. Her master’s thesis, a detailed study of algae in the Gulf, is a project she still follows. While her parents totally supported her interest in biology, they also wanted her to get her teaching credentials and learn to type, ‘‘just in case.’’ As a former chief scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and a leading American oceanographer, Earle’s abilities have moved her well beyond her parents’ early trepidations. Earle stayed at Duke University and earned her Ph.D. in 1966. She immediately accepted a position as resident director of the Cape Haze Marine Laboratories in Sarasota, Florida. The following year, she moved to Massachusetts to accept dual roles as research scholar at the Radcliffe Institute and research fellow at the Farlow Herbarium at Harvard University, where she was named researcher in 1975. Earle moved to San Francisco in 1976
and became a research biologist at and curator of the California Academy of Sciences. During that same year, she was named a fellow in botany of the Natural History Museum at the University of California at Berkeley. Earle could have pursued a purely academic career, but her deep love of the ocean and life within it was too strong. In 1970 she and four other oceanographers lived in an underwater chamber for 14 days as part of the government-funded Tektite II project, designed to study undersea habitats. Underwater technology would play a major part in Earle’s future. Thanks to underwater breathing apparatus developed in part by Jacques Cousteau and refined during the time Earle was involved in her scholarly research, she was one of the first researchers to don a mask and oxygen tank. Expanding her research from the ocean’s surface to literally new depths, she was able to observe the various forms of plant and animal habitats beneath the sea. She identified many new species of each. Earle’s mission in her research and underwater explorations was to expose the necessity for living in harmony with the earth’s oceans. One of her earliest books, Exploring the Deep Frontier: The Adventure of Man in the Sea (1980) chronicled the history of diving, from the most primitive forms, such as the Japanese Ama fisherwomen, to today’s advanced submarines and other underwater habitats. Accompanied by compelling underwater photography, Earle argues that the habits and life forms of plants and animals beneath the ocean’s surface must be understood and preserved from the destruction caused by human intrusion. Understanding these deep-water habitats and gaining access to their complexities continued to occupy a great deal of Earle’s intellectual energy. She recognized the serious depth limitations to SCUBA diving. Her goal, to study deep-sea marine life, required the assistance of a submersible craft that could dive far deeper than diving equipment allowed. Earle and her former husband, British-born engineer Graham Hawkes, founded Deep Ocean Technology, Inc. and Deep Ocean Engineering, Inc. in 1981 to design and build submersible craft. Earle and Hawkes rough-sketched the design for a submersible they called Deep Rover, which would serve as a viable tool for ocean scientists. Earle told Discover magazine; ‘‘In those days we were dreaming of going to thirty-five thousand feet. The idea has always been that scientists couldn’t be trusted to drive a submersible by themselves because they’d get so involved in their work they’d run into things.’’ Driving accidents notwithstanding, Deep Rover was built and continues to operate as a mid-water machine in underwater depths ranging to 3,000 feet. Over the course of her career, Earle has logged more than 6,000 hours underwater. She has been an unflagging proponent of the critical importance of public education regarding the importance of the oceans as an essential environmental habitat. As the first woman to serve as chief scientist at NOAA, Earle spent 18 months leading the agency that conducts underwater research, manages fisheries, and monitors marine spills. She left the position because she felt more could be accomplished working independently of the government.
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Calling for more research money to be spent on deep-sea studies, Earle wishes the U.S. government would make as substantial a commitment to ocean technology and science as the Japanese government. In 1993 she worked with a team of Japanese scientists to develop the equipment to send first a remote, then a manned submersible to 36,000 feet. Earle has plans to lead the $10,000,000 deep-ocean engineering project, Ocean Everest, to take her to a similar depth. Earle’s message to scientist and nonspecialist alike is that the biodiversity of the world’s marine habitats needs greater protection. In Sea Change: A Message of the Oceans (1995), she eloquently reviews the history of ocean exploration and makes an impassioned plea for conservation of the world’s marine resources. As she has done throughout her career as marine biologist, diver, high-level government scientist, political activist, and businesswoman, Earle seeks to dispel human ignorance about the oceans. The magnitude of our unawareness of marine ecosystems is the biggest obstacle to their protection. OTHER WORKS: Humbrella, a New Red Alga of Uncertain Taxonomic Position From the Juan Fernandez Islands (with Joyce Redemsky Young, 1969). Results of the Tektite Program, Coral Reef Invertebrates and Plants (with Al Giddings, 1975). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1998). Other references: Who’s Who in America (1999). Discover (1986). Scientific American (1992). —CELESTE DEROCHE
EASTMAN, Crystal Born 25 June 1881, Marlboro, Massachusetts; died 28 July 1928, Erie, Pennsylvania Daughter of Samuel and Annis Ford Eastman; married Wallace Benedict, 1911; Walter Fuller, 1916 Crystal Eastman was the daughter of feminist parents. Her mother was a Congregationalist minister and a prominent suffragist. After graduation from Vassar College in 1903, Eastman received a master’s degree in sociology from Columbia University and a law degree from New York University. In 1907 she was hired by the Russell Sage Foundation to investigate work accidents in Pittsburgh. This study, the first systematic analysis of industrial accidents, established her reputation as a social investigator. In 1909 she was appointed to be the sole woman member of the New York State Employers Liability Commission, which, between 1909 and 1911, wrote the New York Workman’s Compensation Law. In 1912 Eastman joined the Congressional Union (later the Women’s Party) in advocating a federal suffrage amendment. When World War I began in 1914, she helped found the New
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York Women’s Peace Party, becoming its president in 1915. She also became the executive secretary of the American Union against Militarism. In 1917 Eastman’s socialism and support of conscientious objectors caused a split in the AUAM. Eastman, with Roger Baldwin and Norman Thomas, organized the Civil Liberties Bureau, which later became the American Civil Liberties Union. She also became coeditor, with her brother Max, of the Liberator, a literary magazine dedicated to revolutionary ideas. In 1922 Eastman moved to London and devoted the next five years to writing about the feminist movement. Dissatisfied with the course of her writing career there, she returned to New York in 1927. After helping to organize the 10th anniversary celebration of the Nation, her health failed and she died at the age of forty-seven. Eastman’s first published works were reports of her investigations into work accidents in Pennsylvania. She demonstrated the frequency of industrial accidents and the insufficient compensation received by workers. Eastman proposed that workers be compensated for accidents according to a fixed rate regardless of responsibility. In these articles, she showed a familiarity with and respect for workers that reinforced her growing revolutionary consciousness. The subject of most of Eastman’s writing was feminism. She felt that the vote was only the first step toward women’s liberation. True liberation also depended on birth control, nonsexist education for children, state support of mothers, and an Equal Rights Amendment. To Eastman, domestic labor was oppressive because the home was a symbol of resignation to male will. She advocated independence within marriage, urging wives to retain their own names and pointing out the advantages of separate residences. Eastman also opposed special industrial protection for women. In articles written between 1922 and 1927, she charted the increasing tension between equal rights advocates and protectionists, which eventually split the feminist movement. Another major concern of Eastman’s was the spread of militarism, which she felt was inimical to democracy. In her view, women could contribute much toward the abolition of war because of their greater respect for human life. This respect stemmed from the experience of childbirth and childrearing, which were the largest roles of a woman’s life. Eastman’s pacifism was an integral part of her feminism. As a Marxist and a critic of the dilatory reformism of the American socialist movement, Eastman’s report on communist Hungary showed, however, that she had few illusions about revolutionary governments. She described the bleakness and repression of Hungary in 1919, but was heartened by the abolition of class structure and private property and by the lack of crude nationalism in appeals for army recruits. At the same time, she noted sadly that war and starvation gave birth to revolution and revolutionary governments were conditioned by these factors as well as by idealism. Eastman also recognized that communist movements and states were not automatically feminist. Feminism, though not hostile to the workers’ struggle, was different in its
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objects and methods. Eastman justified both feminist reforms and separate women’s organizations on these grounds. She wanted the social revolution to be a woman’s as well as a worker’s victory.
married Santee Sioux Dr. Charles A. Eastman (Ohiyesa), and resigned her position, dedicating herself to her husband and his people.
Eastman’s feminism conditioned both her Marxism and her pacifism. In her recognition of the inherent oppressiveness of home labor and the ideological causes of woman’s position, and in her effort to raise the feminist consciousness of the socialist movement, Eastman foreshadowed the concerns of modern feminists. She found the weakness in both Marxist theory and in socialist politics when she pointed out the inadequacies of the purely materialist analysis of woman’s oppression. Eastman intended to write a theoretical work on women but died before she could begin. This work could have been a significant contribution to the ongoing attempts to synthesize feminist and socialist theory.
Thirty years of marriage brought Eastman six children, and frequent relocations due to her husband’s fluctuating career. Eastman attempted to augment her family income by writing, editing Carlisle Indian School’s newspaper and her husband’s works, arranging his lectures, and running a summer camp. Financial tension, editorial resentment, and her husband’s rumored infidelity ended Eastman’s marriage in 1921, although both kept their separation secret. Eastman returned to the Berkshires, continuing to write until shortly before her death at ninety.
OTHER WORKS: Work Accidents and the Law (1911). Some of Crystal Eastman’s papers from World War I are housed in the Swarthmore College Peace Collection. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cook, B. W., Toward the Great Change (1976). Cook, B. W., ed., Crystal Eastman on Women and Revolution (1978). Cott, N., The Grounding of Modern Feminism (1987). Eastman, M., Enjoyment of Living (1948). Eastman, M., Love and Revolution (1964). Showalter, E., ed., These Modern Women: Autobiographical Essays from the Twenties (1978). Sochen, J., The New Woman: Feminism in Greenwich Village, 1910-20 (1972). Sochen, J., Movers and Shakers (1973). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Nation (8 Aug. 1928). NYT (29 July 1928). Survey (15 Aug. 1928). —JUDITH S. LOHMAN
EASTMAN, Elaine Goodale Born 9 October 1863, Mount Washington, Massachusetts; died 22 December 1953, Hadley, Massachusetts Also wrote under: Elaine Goodale Daughter of Henry S. and Dora H. Read Goodale; married Charles A. Eastman, 1891 (separated 1921); children: six For her first 18 years, Elaine Goodale Eastman’s world was Sky Farm, the Goodales’ Berkshire homestead. There she learned about literature from her mother, about nature from her father, and started combining these lessons in poetry at the age of seven. In 1883, after the single year of boarding school that family finances allowed, Eastman began teaching Native American students at Hampton Institute in Virginia. Visiting Dakota convinced Eastman reservation schools would accelerate Native American assimilation, and she established a government day school among the Sioux in 1886. Her teaching success earned her appointment in 1890 as Supervisor of Education in the Dakotas. In 1891 Eastman
Eastman’s literary career began early, when three volumes of poetry she and her younger sister Dora had written for family gatherings were published and enthusiastically received. Eastman’s development of death and rejuvenation themes, her love imagery, and her deft use of language and rhyme belie her youth. In Journal of a Farmer’s Daughter (1881), she romantically celebrates in prose and poetry an annual cycle of rural life. Nearly 50 years later, Eastman collected her subsequently published verse in The Voice at Eve (1930), which reflects the broadened interests and insight of her maturity. Her dominant themes include woman as giver, the painful joy of loving, the noble vanishing Native American, and intercultural understanding. When Eastman embraced the cause of Native American education, she moved from poetry to polemics, writing many articles and pamphlets urging establishment of reservation day schools and Protestant missions. Although she admitted everyone could learn ‘‘Some Lessons from Barbarism’’ (1890) regarding women’s dress, equality, and generosity, she constantly emphasized the goal of assimilating Native Americans into American culture. In her biography of Carlisle boarding school’s founder, Pratt: The Red Man’s Moses (1935), Eastman praises his efforts, but voices her preference for day schools and condemns policies contrary to the assimilationist philosophy she and Pratt shared. Consistent with this emphasis, Eastman appraised the value of Native American oral traditions narrowly, as stories for children. With her husband, she published two collections of Sioux tales, and she simplified folklore selected from various anthropological collections in Indian Legends Retold (1919). Eastman’s first works of sentimental prose fiction were also intended for children, despite their sophisticated vocabulary. In Little Brother o’ Dreams (1910), a lonely, crippled boy finds a friend. A land-poor Yankee family’s united effort establishes a successful summer camp in The Luck of Oldacres (1928). In Yellow Star (1911), a Sioux girl orphaned at Wounded Knee, adopted and raised in New England, returns to the reservation as field matron, teaching domestic skills to Sioux women. Eastman’s only adult novel, Hundred Maples (1935), focuses upon Ellen Strong who, regretting her early marriage, wanders in search of herself. She eventually accepts her complicated ties to family, and to the Vermont landscape hallowed by her foremothers. A growing awareness of life’s complexity infuses Eastman’s autobiographical writings. In ‘‘All the Days of My Life’’ (The
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Voice at Eve), Eastman emphasizes her idealistic dedication to motherhood and Native Americans, and the difficult adjustment required of the poet as reformer and wife. Eastman’s posthumously published memoirs, Sister to the Sioux (1978), describe her childhood and reservation years, stressing her appreciation of the Sioux people as well as her determination to educate them. Eastman’s writings provide much insight into the ambiguities of intercultural relations and of the female sacrifice of career for motherhood. Eastman’s inability to reconcile both her sincere regard for the Sioux with her ethnocentrism, and her need for selfexpression within her marriage, describes one women’s experience of the eternal conflict between ideals and reality. OTHER WORKS: Apple Blossoms: Verses of Two Children (with D. R. Goodale, 1878). In Berkshire with the Wild Flowers (with D. R. Goodale, 1879). All Round the Year: Verses from Sky Farm (with D. R. Goodale, 1881). The Coming of the Birds (1883). Wigwam Evenings: Sioux Folktales Retold (with C. A. Eastman, 1909). Smoky Day’s Wigwam Evenings: Indian Stories Retold (with C. A. Eastman, 1910). The Eagle and the Star: American Indian Pageant Play in Three Acts (circa 1916). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Graber, K., ed., Sister to the Sioux: The Memoirs of Elaine Goodale Eastman (1978). Wilson, R., ‘‘Dr. Charles Alexander Eastman (Ohiyesa), Santee Sioux’’ (dissertation, 1977). Reference works: NCAB (1904). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Atlantic (Aug. 1928). Great Plains Quarterly (Spring 1988). Mississippi Valley Historical Review (March 1936). NYT (23 Dec. 1953). NYTBR (26 May 1935). —HELEN M. BANNAN
EASTMAN, Mary Henderson Born 1818, Warrenton, Virginia; died 24 February 1887, Washington, D.C. Daughter of Thomas and Anna Truxton Henderson; married Seth Eastman, 1835 Mary Henderson Eastman spent her youth, ‘‘that calm, pleasant period of my life,’’ in her birthplace in Virginia until her mother and army surgeon father moved the family of nine children to Washington, D.C. At seventeen she married a West Point drawing teacher from Maine, who had already begun the sketching of Native Americans that was to lead to his illustrations for his wife’s Native American studies. Six years later they moved to his new military command, Fort Snelling, Minnesota, where Eastman learned the Sioux language, attended Sioux ceremonies, and patiently questioned their chiefs and medicine men about ‘‘their religion, laws, and sentiments.’’ She published the results of her seven years of research in 1849,
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the year the family returned to Washington. From 1855 to 1867 her husband was sent to various military outposts, and Eastman remained for the most part in Washington with their children. Unable to continue her research, but resolved not to be ‘‘condemned to babies, dust, and puddings,’’ she produced several more collections of Native American studies, a proslavery novel, a collection of short stories and personal reminiscences, and two volumes of poetry. Aunt Phillis’s Cabin (1852), one of many novels written in reply to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, uses a romantic plot to present an idealized picture of slave life and to introduce stock defenses of slavery. Curiously, Eastman’s sentimental and blatantly unrealistic picture of the loving treatment of slaves includes an elderly woman’s story of being kidnapped in Guinea and chained to a dead woman on the slave ship. Of historical interest as a proslavery novel, the work is also biographically interesting in its revelation of Eastman’s obsessive need to justify what she uneasily termed a ‘‘necessary evil.’’ Dahcotah (1849), Eastman’s first work, recounts the legends of the Dahcotah, or Sioux, told to her by her friend Chequered Cloud, a ‘‘medicine woman and legend-teller.’’ Eastman writes in a flowery, sentimental style and fictionalizes the legends by adding conversations and thoughts, but she also includes detailed first-hand observations of Sioux life, in particular the violence, the poverty, and the ‘‘degraded state’’ of the women, who did most of the work. Eastman wrote 15 selections for an edition of The Iris (1852), an annual magazine, and along with her Sioux pieces, she included historical accounts of other tribes based on secondary sources. The American Aboriginal Portfolio (1853) continues to add pieces based on secondary sources, and Chicora (1854) presents only a few Sioux works. Fashionable Life (1856) contains two moralistic romances, a Chequered Cloud legend, an anecdote of Eastman’s failure to prove to a ‘‘woman-hater’’ that ‘‘a literary life did not unfit a woman for domestic duty,’’ and a story about a woman who rejects ‘‘fashionable life’’ in the East and goes off to become ‘‘the first female teacher’’ in St. Paul, Minnesota. In this story Eastman insists ‘‘when a woman breaks down the bars of conventionalism that society has put up, to shut her out from energy, from hope. . .she is a heroine.’’ Eastman’s literary career reveals her to be that sort of heroine, particularly in her research among the Sioux. She sees the Sioux as human beings, both in their strengths and in their weaknesses, and she recognizes the value of their history, legends, and religious beliefs. Her pleas for their conversion to Christianity often appear to be merely a conventional way of introducing her demands for legislative action to save ‘‘the original owners of the country’’ from starvation. Eastman’s accounts are weakened by her sentimental language and fictional embroidering, but they preserve the legends she heard and present in realistic detail the events and customs she saw. Although her later collections rely increasingly on secondary sources, they contain some of the legends and firsthand observations giving Dahcotah its historical and literary value.
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EATON
OTHER WORKS: The Iris, an Illuminated Souvenir (1852, reprinted as The Romance of Indian Life, 1853). Jennie Wade of Gettysburg (1864). Easter Angels (1879). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brown, H. R., The Sentimental Novel in America, 1789-1880 (1940). McCracken, H., Portrait of the Old West (1952). McDermott, J. E., Seth Eastman (1961). Mott, R. L., Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the U.S. (1947). Tardy, M. T., The Living Female Writers of the South (1872). Reference works: A Critical Dictionary of English Literature, and British and American Authors (1858). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995).
Eaton felt at odds with both mainstream American culture and Chinese culture. As a Chinese woman she was not accepted by American society, yet Americanized Chinese did not accept her as a member of their race. Rather than synthesizing the two cultures in herself, Eaton felt caught between East and West. Realizing that she could not survive this liminal existence, she claimed her mother’s heritage as her own. While a champion of her people, Eaton wrote about the universality of human experience. She was convinced that in the nature-versus-nurture argument, nurture or the environment was more influential than nature. She did not accept that differences in human beings were inherently due to race; rather, she believed the individual had the power to control his own behavior and that, in the end, all human beings were basically the same.
—MARTHA CHEW
EATON, Edith Maud Born 1865, England; died 7 April 1914, Montreal, Canada Wrote under: Sui Sin Far Daughter of Edward and Grace Trefusius Eaton The daughter of an English father and a Chinese mother, Edith Maud Eaton neither spoke nor wrote Chinese. According to her autobiography, ‘‘Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of a Eurasian,’’ published in the Independent, 21 January 1909, she could have passed as Caucasian. At a time when it was not advantageous to be Chinese, Eaton embraced her missionary mother’s nationality and through her writings in magazines in Canada and the U.S., became the champion of Chinese-American culture, taking the pen name Sui Sin Far. Her younger sister, Winnifred (1875-1954), adopted the Japanese pen name of Onoto Watanna; she published several popularly successful romances set in Japan and also wrote for films. Eaton was the first Chinese-American to publish fiction. Her writing was widely read and, for the most part, received favorable reviews. Unlike her contemporaries, she did not create stereotypical Chinese characters. Instead, her characters are based on the people she met as a newspaper woman enlisting subscribers in Chinatown throughout the western United States. Eaton wrote sketches and vignettes about common Chinese Americans, many of which were collected in Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912). Others appeared in a variety of popular magazines. Her purpose in writing was to bridge the gap between Chinese immigrants and their descendants and North Americans by allowing Americans to see the Chinese as real people. She wrote about universal themes such as love between man and woman, parent and child, and the forces that attempt to obstruct this love. Some of her stories are intentionally charming and spirited, while others are ironic or bitter. She is most ironic when expressing her outrage at the conditions of the Chinese in the U.S. and especially the condition of the Chinese woman. In such pieces as ‘‘The Inferior Woman,’’ (1910) and in stories of marriage, her interpretation is frequently feminist.
OTHER WORKS: Stories and sketches in: Overland (Jul. 1899). Century Magazine (Apr. 1904). The Chataquan (Oct. 1905). Delineator (Feb. 1910, Jul. 1910). Dominion Illustrated (1888, 7 Jun. 1890). Good Housekeeping (Mar. 1909, May 1909, May 1910). Hampton (Jan. 1910, May 1910). Independent (21 Jan. 1909, 2 Sept. 1909, 10 Mar. 1910, 18 Aug. 1910, 3 Jul. 1913). Land of Sunshine (Jan. 1897, Jul. 1900). New England Magazine (Aug. 1910, Sept. 1910, Dec. 1911, Jan. 1912, Feb. 1912). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ammons, E., Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century (1991). Bloom, H., ed., Asian American Women Writers (1997). Chiu, M. E., Illness and Self-Representation in Asian American Literature by Women (dissertation, 1998). Ferens, D., ‘‘Edith and Winnifred Eaton: The Uses of Ethnography in Turn-of-the-Century Asian American Literature’’ (dissertation, 1999). Ling, A., Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry (1990); ‘‘Chinese American Women Writers,’’ in Redefining American Literary History (1990). Moser, L. T., ‘‘Chinese Prostitutes, Japanese Geishas, and Working Women: Images of Race, Class and Gender in the Work of Edith Eaton/Sui Sin Far and Winifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna’’ (dissertation, 1997). Patterson, M. H., ‘‘Survival of the Best Fitted: The Trope of the New Woman in Margaret Murray Washington, Pauline Hopkins, Sui Sin Far, Edith Wharton and Mary Johnston, 1895-1913’’ (thesis, 1996). Song, M., ‘‘The Height of Presumption: Henry James and Sui Sin Far in the Age of Nation-Building’’ (dissertation, 1998). Spaulding, C. V., ‘‘Blue-Eyed Asians: Eurasianism in the Work of Edith Eaton/Sui Sin Far, Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna, and Diana Chang’’ (dissertation, 1996). White Parks, A., Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography (1995). White-Parks, A., Sui Sin Far: Writer on the Chinese-Anglo Borders of North America, 1885-1914 (dissertation, 1991). Reference works: CLHUS (1988). Dictionary of North American Authors Deceased Before 1950 (1968). FC (1990). Macmillan Dictionary of Canadian Biography (1963, 1978). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the Untied States (1995). Other references: American Literary Realism (Autumn 1983). Arizona Quarterly (Winter 1991). MELUS (Spring 1981). —AMY D. STACKHOUSE
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EBERHART, Mignon G(ood) Born 6 July 1899, Lincoln, Nebraska; died 8 October 1996 Daughter of William Thomas and Margaret Hill Good; married Alanson C. Eberhart, 1923, 1948 (twice); John H. Perry, 1946 (died) Mignon G. Eberhart attended Nebraska Wesleyan University and received a Litt. D. from that same institution in 1935. Although she published plays (Eight O’Clock Tuesday, 1941, with Robert Wallsten; 320 College Avenue, 1938, with Frederick Ballard) and short stories during the first half of her career, Eberhart later wrote only novels of suspense, for which the Mystery Writers of America named her their Grand Master in 1970 (the second woman to receive such an honor after Agatha Christie in 1954). In more than 60 of her novels and short stories, mystery is linked with romance, and the reissue of many of her earlier works attests to her continued popularity. A reviewer of Escape the Night (1944) best summed up Eberhart’s approach to mystery writing as an ‘‘expertly wrought combination of murder, thrills by night, and fervid romance with a well-hidden killer and an exciting finish.’’ Although several of Eberhart’s novels are historical (The Cup, the Blade or the Gun, 1961, and Family Fortune, 1976, set during the Civil War; Enemy in the House, 1962, set during the American Revolution), the majority are contemporary in setting and display considerable patriotism, particularly during the war years (The Man Next Door, 1943, Wings of Fear, 1945, Five Passengers from Lisbon, 1946). Although Eberhart has traveled widely in the U.S. and in foreign countries, she rarely chooses a setting other than the continental U.S. or the West Indies. Her settings offer the additional advantage of variable climate, with the result that most of her novels feature some sort of inclement weather as a commentary to the human conflicts. Eberhart’s style is leisurely, with dialogue that serves to reiterate rather than advance the plot; these techniques not only increase the atmosphere of suspense that is her trademark, but also buy time for character development. Eberhart’s main characters are women who find antagonists in jealous female rivals or relatives and show respect to older women. With only one exception (Another Man’s Murder, 1957), Eberhart’s novels are told from a female character’s point of view. Her heroines are primarily cast in the roles of marriageable young women suddenly confronted with love triangles bound up in death or financial ruin (Dead Men’s Plans, 1952). They may work for their living (The White Dress, 1945, Danger Money, 1974), but they rarely hold positions of power. Eberhart’s murderers are, with few exceptions, male. If the murderer is female, as in The White Dress, she is described as possessing traditional stereotypical masculine characteristics. Eberhart’s heroines are not always virginal but they are always passive. They are often married to older men who physically abuse them (Strangers in Flight, 1941, Woman on the Roof, 1963) or to men who practice a type of psychic torture (Fair Warning, 1936). Sometimes the husband exercises crippling
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control even in his absence (Message from Hong Kong, 1969, The Unknown Quantity, 1953, Never Look Back, 1950). Invariably, these husbands become the victims of murder, and the progress to their various deaths goes hand-in-hand with awakening on the part of their wives. The path to a newfound consciousness in a married Eberhart heroine is twofold: the woman initially learns to understand and reject her present subordinate position to her husband, but in the second stage of the process she voluntarily begins to rely upon another man—generally younger and always more physically attractive than her spouse. This man usually becomes her husband at the conclusion of the novel. In the characters of Susan Dare in The Cases of Susan Dare (1934) and Nurse Sarah Keate in The Patient in Room 18 (1929), however, Eberhart develops a different type of female protagonist, a woman who relies more on her brains than on her ability to be attractive to a man. Dare and Keate are not sexless beings, but they value their own quick thinking and prefer not to play the helpless female. The romantic element is not absent entirely but it is underplayed. Susan Dare and reporter Jim Byrne are coworkers and do not march off to the altar at the end of a case; Sarah Keate routinely assembles evidence that she and policeman Lance O’Leary will evaluate. The difference between these two heroines and the prototype Eberhart heroine lies in intelligence as well as in professionalism; Dare and Keate may not relish being caught up in murder plots, but they work to dispatch the problems as quickly as possible. Furthermore, Dare and Keate deal with murder repeatedly, whereas other Eberhart heroines confront murder as a one-time rite of passage to true love and marriage. Moreover, Dare and Keate are not humorless creatures; unlike their confused counterparts in the other novels, they have a feel for the good joke, for the ludicrous situation, and for comedy in tragedy. Man Missing (1954) provides an excellent example of what an Eberhart heroine can do in this respect. While Eberhart’s novels lack the compassion of those of Charlotte Armstrong, the plotting of those of Agatha Christie, or the lively literacy and profundity of those of Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, or Ngaio Marsh, they offer a blend of mystery, suspense, and romance not found in the works of those other authors, as well as an appeal to a different audience. In this light, Eberhart noted in an interview with Jean Mercier (who called Eberhart ‘‘the doyenne of American mystery writers’’), ‘‘I have always felt liberated and I am in sympathy with women’s demands for equality. But oh, I do believe in marriage. Marriage is forever, or should be.’’ Eberhart’s novels speak to this conviction and garnered her a wide and continuing readership. Many of her works were reissued throughout the mid- and late-1990s.
OTHER WORKS: While the Patient Slept (1930). The Mystery of Hunting’s End (1930). From This Dark Stairway (1931). Murder by an Aristocrat (1932). The Dark Garden (1933). The White Cockatoo (1933). Murder of My Patient (1934). The House on the Roof (1935). Danger in the Dark (1936). The Pattern (1937). The Glass Slipper (1938). Hasty Wedding (1938). The Chiffon Scarf
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ECKSTORM
(1939). Brief Return (1939). The Hangman’s Whip (1940). With This Ring (1941). Wolf in Man’s Clothing (1942). Unidentified Woman (1943). Sisters (1943). Another Woman’s House (1947). House of Storm (1949). Five of My Best: Deadly Is the Diamond, Bermuda Grapevine, Murder Goes to Market, Strangers in Flight, Express to Danger (short story collection, 1949). Hunt with the Hounds (1950). Deadly Is the Diamond (1951). Postmark Murder (1956). Deadly Is the Diamond and Three Other Novelettes of Murder: Bermuda Grapevine, The Crimson Paw, Murder in Waltz Time (1959). The Crimson Paw (1959). Melora (1959). Jury of One (1960). Run Scared (1963). Call After Midnight (1964). R.S.V.P. Murder (1965). Witness at Large (1966). El Rancho Rio (1970). Two Little Rich Girls (1971). The House by the Sea (1972). Murder in Waiting (1973). Nine O’Clock Tide (1978). The Bayou Road (1979). Casa Madrone (1980). Family Affair (1981). Next of Kin (1982). The Patient in Cabin C (1983). Alpine Condo Crossfire (1984). A Fighting Chance (1986). Three Days for Emeralds (1988). The papers of Mignon G. Eberhart are housed in the Muger Memorial Library of Boston University.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Haycraft, H., Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story (1941). Reference works: Detecting Women (1994). Ecyclopedia Mysteriosa (1994). St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (1996). TCA (1942). Other references: PW (16 Sept. 1974, 1995). —SUSAN L. CLARK
EBERHART, Sheri S. See TEPPER, Sheri S.
ECKSTORM, Fannie Hardy Born 18 June 1865, Brewer, Maine; died 31 December 1946, Brewer, Maine Daughter of Manly and Emeline F. Wheeler Hardy; married Jacob A. Eckstorm, 1893 (died 1899); children: two Fannie Hardy Eckstorm devoted her life to preserving the heritage of the Penobscot region in Maine—its wildlife, folkways, ballads and stories. She absorbed the lore of lumbermen and trappers, of Native Americans and old settlers, of river and forest. From her father she learned to see with the precise eyes of the naturalist, to revere wilderness and the Native American, and to battle for resource conservation. At Smith College, Eckstorm refined her interest in bird observation and began her study of Native Americans. After
graduation in 1888, she returned to Brewer as superintendent of schools, but resigned over the issue of inadequate funding. Thereafter she devoted herself to writing as a means of persuasion and livelihood. Wed at age twenty-eight to an Episcopalian clergyman, Eckstorm bore two children before her husband died six years after their marriage. She returned to her old home in Brewer and continued writing. Her works treat three subject areas: birds, ballads and stories, and native Americans. Eckstorm’s first book-length works were on ornithology. Birdwatching had become an acceptable avocation for women. The Woodpeckers (1901) introduces the techniques of birdwatching, using the woodpecker family because these birds are so easily identified and studied. A larger, more philosophic concern informs the book, as well. She argues that evolutionary theories do not eliminate God but rather strengthen theistic faith. By 1904 Eckstorm had turned her attention to recording various aspects of traditional culture in northern Maine. She saw this culture as threatened by technology, expanding population and industry, and unconcerned young people. She joined her father in campaigns to save wildlife and commenced research on ballads, place-name history, and folktales. The Penobscot Man (1904) was the first published book in this vein—a collection of tales of the daring men who ran the Penobscot River, men who kept the logs rolling downstream from the time the ice broke up in the spring until midsummer. The tales are of heroic, almost mythic figures whom Eckstorm observed as a child when they worked for her father. The Penobscot man, be he Native American or Irish or Italian, always puts his work first; lives for the ideals of honor, friendship, duty, sport, and ‘‘grim, stern, granite obstinacy’’; and dies cheerfully—according to Eckstorm. The stories themselves are fascinating evocations of the region and period. Collaborating with well-known scholars, she published two important works: Minstrelsy of Maine (1927) and British Ballads from Maine (1929). The latter work, based on Child’s classification of English and Scottish ballads, collects both texts and airs from traditional singers in Maine. Before this pioneering work, it had been thought that New England had no ballad tradition like southern Appalachia and illiteracy was a necessary factor in the continued existence of balladry. The collaborators discovered that the Maine texts were preserved in the oldest British forms, often identical to those already collected in the southern Appalachians. They theorized that the Maine settlers and the southern highlanders had arrived at about the same time from the same locale in the British Isles. Both groups were relatively isolated until the 20th century, thus maintaining the more traditional forms. Eckstorm’s career as a regionalist culminated in her publication of the scholarly Indian Place-Names of the Penobscot Valley and the Maine Coast (1941). In this work she listed all the variants for place names and the histories of name changes, using the comparative analytic method as well as her own vast knowledge of the region. The work (reprinted several times) is still significant in the field. Eckstorm’s last work, also about the Native Americans of Maine, was published when she was eighty-one. Old John Neptune and Other Maine Indian Shamans (1945) is a narrative of a
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family of Penobscot Native Americans Eckstorm and her family had known for generations. These shamans or wizards were known for their clairvoyance. Eckstorm’s own interest in psychic phenomena, as well as her fierce loyalty to Native American traditions, explains her belief in the shamans’ powers. With this and her other works, Eckstorm left an invaluable written legacy that will long preserve the cultural traditions of northern Appalachia.
OTHER WORKS: The Bird Book (1901). David Libbey, Penobscot Woodman and River-Driver (1907). The Handicrafts of the Modern Indians of Maine (1932). The papers of Fannie Hardy Eckstorm are at the Bangor (Maine) Public Library and at the Smith College Archives.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Who Was Who in America (1950). Woman’s Who’s Who of America (1914-15). Other references: Bangor Daily News (10 Dec. 1910, 1 Jan. 1947). CSM (20 Oct. 1945). Nation (14 March 1928). NEQ (March 1953). SRL (19 April 1930). TLS (6 Feb. 1930). YR (Sept. 1928). —MARGARET MCFADDEN-GERBER
EDDY, Mary Baker (Glover) Born 16 July 1821, Bow, New Hampshire; died 3 December 1910, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts Daughter of Mark and Abigail Ambrose Baker; married George W. Glover, 1843; Daniel Patterson, 1853; Asa G. Eddy, 1877 Founder of the Christian Science movement and of the Church of Christ, Scientist, Mary Baker Eddy was originally a member of the Congregational church. In 1862 she received treatment for a nervous ailment from Phineas P. Quimby, noted Massachusetts practitioner of ‘‘animal magnetism,’’ and became interested in mind cure. In 1866 Eddy sustained a serious spinal injury, from which she recovered through what she later described as the total conviction that her life was in God and God was Life. In the same year, her husband deserted her and for the next three years she lived with various friends and relatives. In 1870 she wrote a textbook, The Science of Man, and began teaching in Lynn, Massachusetts. She published the first edition of Science and Health (1875, revised and expanded, 1983) and organized the Christian Science Association in 1876. The year 1879 saw the establishment of the Church of Christ, Scientist, and 1881 the chartering of the Massachusetts Metaphysical College. Both were dissolved in 1889 in preparation for the founding in Boston of the Mother Church in September 1892. By 1900 a network of 600
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churches existed, and Christian Science was no longer a sect but an organized religion. Known chiefly for its emphasis on psychical healing, Christian Science embraces a full theology. Though Eddy firmly professed herself and her religion to be Christian, orthodox Christianity rejected both. Basic to Christian Science is the doctrine that God is All, Life, and Mind. Since God is Spirit, the only manifestation of life is in Spirit, not in matter. Matter, sin, pain, and death are all erroneous concepts, part of the great error, the belief in evil. Healing, then, is an important part of overcoming the error involved in the belief in the ills of the flesh. The unreality of evil is believed to have been demonstrated in the life of Jesus, whose acts of love cast out error. Jesus, who illustrated the spiritual agreement between God and man, is the Christ only in the sense that he alone demonstrated the spiritual nature, which is the true nature of every man but which is veiled by the belief in man’s materiality. Though not a part of godhead, Jesus is believed to be true Man, the man of Spirit. Christian Science rejects all anthropomorphic and personal ideas associated with God; thus the Trinity becomes Life, Truth, and Love, a trinity in unity known through the three offices: God the Father-Mother; Christ, the spiritual idea of sonship; and divine Science, or the Holy Comforter. Eddy’s identification of Christian Science as the Holy Comforter linked it to the aspect of God that she saw as feminine. At one point in the evolution of Science and Health, she went so far as to speak of God as ‘‘She,’’ but the reference was dropped from succeeding editions. Eddy, who claimed her teaching was a divine revelation, never considered her religion as extrabiblical. She intended it to be understood as a scientific demonstration of universal divine law, the spiritual truth behind the literal scriptural accounts. As organizer and leader of the only American religious movement founded by a woman, Eddy’s contributions to feminism were chiefly her own accomplishments. In addition, her emphasis on the Motherhood as well as the Fatherhood of God forced a new consciousness on her followers. In Science and Health, the textbook of Christian Science, she advocates equality of the sexes, female suffrage, and the right of a woman to independently hold and dispose of property. Eddy recognized the power of the written word in disseminating doctrine. In her life there were close to 400 editions of Science and Health published. The monthly Christian Science Journal began in 1883; in 1898 the weekly Christian Science Sentinel appeared; and in 1908 the daily newspaper Christian Science Monitor was established. The Monitor continues to be one of the most respected among international periodicals. At one time the object of severe criticism (McClure’s magazine’s 1906-07 series of articles, among others) and of direct ridicule (Mark Twain’s Christian Science, 1907), Christian Science is now a recognized part of the religious institution in America, a denomination whose members maintain more than
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2,500 churches. Eddy served as pastor of the Mother Church in Boston for many years and never relinquished leadership of the movement until her death. Her Manual of the Mother Church (1895) still provides the framework of government for the churches, and Science and Health remains the religion’s basic text. Thus Eddy’s imprint on Christian Science is as strong now as it was when she founded it.
OTHER WORKS: Christian Healing (1880). The People’s God (1883). Historical Sketch of Metaphysical Healing (1885). Defense of Christian Science (1885, 1983). Christian Science: No and Yes (1887). Rudiments and Rules of Divine Science (1887). Unity of Good and Unreality of Evil (1888, 1994). Retrospection and Introspection (1891). Miscellaneous Writings (1896). Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1910, 1994). The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany (1913). Letters of Mary Baker Eddy to Augusta E. Stetson, C.S.D., 1889-1909 (1990). Mary Baker Eddy: The Concord Years, 1889-1908: A Chronology (1993).
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of Christian Science (1991). Thomas, R. D., ‘‘With Bleeding Footsteps’’: Mary Baker Eddy’s Path to Religious Leadership (1994). Tomlinson, I. C., Twelve Years With Mary Baker Eddy: Recollections and Experiences (1996). Von Fettweis, Y. C., Mary Baker Eddy: Christian Healer (1998). Wilbur, S., The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (1913). Williams, J. K., Christian Scientists (1997). Wills, G., Certain Trumpets: The Call of Leaders (1994). Wright, H. M., If Mary Baker Eddy’s Manual Were Obeyed (1989). Wright, H. M., Mary Baker Eddy, Leader Forever (1992). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: American Literature (1998). Christian Century (November 1991). Church History (1996, 1997). Comparative Drama (Winter 1995). Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (June 1994). Journal of American History (1995). NYRB (1996). —JOANN PECK KRIEG
EGAN, Lesley BIBLIOGRAPHY: Carpenter, G. C., Mary Baker Eddy: Her Spiritual Footsteps (1990). Cather, W., ed. The Life of Mary Baker Eddy and the History of Christian Science (1971). Dyck, L. L.Darwin and Mary: Redemption and Evolution in Christian Science (dissertation, 1993). Gardner, M., The Healing Revelations of Mary Baker Eddy: The Rise and Fall of Christian Science (1993). Gill, G., Mary Baker Eddy (1998). Gottschalk, S., The Emergence of Christian Science in American Religious Life (1973). Hansen, P., Woman’s Hour: Feminist Implications of Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science Movement, 1885-1910 (dissertation, 1982). Keyston, D. L., ed., The Healer: The Healing Work of Mary Baker Eddy (1996). Knee, S. E., Christian Science in the Age of Mary Baker Eddy (1994). Meyer, D. B., The Positive Thinkers: Popular Religious Psychology from Mary Baker Eddy to Norman Vincent Peale and Ronald Reagan (1988). Miller, R. M. and P. A. Cimbala, eds., American Reform and Reformers: A Biographical Dictionary (1996). Morgan, J. L., Mary Baker Eddy’s Other Writings (1984). Nenneman, R. A., Persistent Pilgrim: The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (1997). Oakes, R., The Story of the Chicago Addresses of Mary Baker Eddy (1988). Oakes, R., Mary Baker Eddy’s Lessons of the Seventh Day (1989). Orcutt, W. D., Mary Baker Eddy and Her Books (1913). Peel, R., Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Discovery, 1821-1875 (1966). Peel, R., Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Trial (1971). Powell, L. P., Mary Baker Eddy: A Life-Size Portrait (1991). Rolka, G. M., 100 Women Who Shaped World History (1994). Sass, K., Mary Baker Eddy: A Special Friend (1983). Satter, B., Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement, 1875-1920 (1999). Smaus, J. S., Family, the Carolina Years: A Six-Part Series About Mary Baker Eddy and Her First Husband, George W. Glover (1991). Smith, C. P., Historical Sketches, From the Life of Mary Baker Eddy and the History of Christian Science (1992). Smith, L. A., Mary Baker Eddy: Discoverer and Founder
See LININGTON, Elizabeth
EHRENREICH, Barbara Born 26 August 1941, Butte, Montana Daughter of Ben Howes and Isabel Oxley Isley Alexander; married John H. Ehrenreich, 1966; Gary Stevenson, 1983; children: Rosa, Benjamin Lecturer, journalist, feminist critic, and socialist activist Barbara Ehrenreich is the daughter of ‘‘blue-eyed, Scotch-Irish Democrats’’ whom she credits as the ‘‘ultimate sources’’ of much of her radicalism and feminism. She graduated from Reed College (1963) with a B.S. in chemistry and physics and completed her Ph.D. in cell biology at Rockefeller University (1968). Ehrenreich began her career as a writer and social justice activist as a research analyst for the Health Policy Advisory Center (Health-PAC) in New York City. Among the first social critics to speak of the ‘‘health-care crisis’’ in the late 1960s, Ehrenreich spent much of the 1970s writing about women’s health issues and teaching in the Health Sciences department at the State University of New York (SUNY) College at Old Westbury (1971-74) and at New York University (1979-81). During the 1980s she became a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities (1980-82) and the Institute for Policy Studies (1982-present) and broadened the scope of her social activism to encompass an analysis of the whole of American culture and society. Ehrenreich has received a number of awards and honors including the National Magazine Award for Excellence in Reporting (1980), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1987), and honorary degrees from Reed College and
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SUNY, Old Westbury. She has held offices and board memberships in activist organizations including the Democratic Socialists of America, the National Women’s Health Network, and the National Abortion Rights Action League, and has been on the editorial board of Ms., Mother Jones, Sociology of Health and Illness: A Journal of Medical Sociology, and Radical America. Long March, Short Spring: The Student Uprising at Home and Abroad (1969, with John Ehrenreich), the first of a number of coauthored books or ‘‘pamphlets’’ with a social activist agenda, focuses on student movements in Germany, England, France, Italy, and the United States. Eschewing any human interest or first person accounts, her book analyzes student life in the late 1960s on a general level, including the ‘‘substratum of discontent’’ and the reasons why external issues, such as the Vietnam War, ‘‘set off the struggle,’’ both violent and nonviolent. The American Health Empire: Power, Profits, and Politics (1970, with John Ehrenreich) grew out of her work with HealthPAC. The book offers a critical analysis of such dramatic changes in the health care system as the collapse of public hospitals, the rise of the ‘‘medical-industrial complex,’’ the quest for national health insurance, and consumer attacks on the health system for its inhumanity. While careful in their analysis of data, the authors are clear in their polemical stance that the American health care system is ‘‘not in business for people’s health.’’ In the debate over health care reform that erupted in the 1970s and 1980s, The American Health Empire was consistently referenced as a starting point by academics and the media. For Her Own Good: 150 Years of Experts’ Advice to Women (1978) grew out of Ehrenreich’s experiences as a college teacher and activist in the early women’s health movement. ‘‘Working from a kitchen table office,’’ Ehrenreich and Deirdre English coauthored a booklet, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers which they paid to have printed and mailed to people who asked for it. The Feminist Press published the booklet as a pamphlet along with Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness in 1973. Reader response was diverse and enthusiastic. In For Her Own Good Ehrenreich and English went on to develop a new ‘‘conceptual framework,’’ demonstrating how ‘‘rationalist’’ scientific experts gained power over women’s lives through their defense of sexual romanticism, a ‘‘systematic ideology’’ whereby women in the home became refuge and consolation to men engaged in the ‘‘savage scramble’’ of the marketplace. The book looks at 19th century medical theory, the development of the domestic science movement, and 20th century notions of scientific motherhood within the context of a ‘‘sexual politics of health.’’ It forces readers to look at the genre of ‘‘advice literature’’ from the new perspective of preventing women from competing with men in the larger world of economic labor, and urges them to ‘‘frame a moral outlook which proceeds from women’s needs and experiences but which cannot be trivialized, sentimentalized, or domesticated.’’ The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (1983) is ‘‘about the ideology that shaped the
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breadwinner ethic and how that ideology collapsed as a persuasive set of expectations, in just the last 30 years’’ as men themselves revolted against their breadwinner roles. Examining documents from popular and elite cultural sources Ehrenreich argues men began rejecting ‘‘commitment’’ during the 1950s. Subsequently, the psychology of the human potential movement, the ‘‘do-yourown-thing’’ philosophy of the Age of Aquarius, as well as the search for a ‘‘liberated heart’’ by blue collar men who abandoned ‘‘machismo’’ to achieve health and upward mobility outside their family, all reflected a new ‘‘moral climate that endorsed irresponsibility, self-indulgence, and an isolationist detachment from the claims of others.’’ Ehrenreich warns readers against nostalgia: ‘‘Even if we wanted to return to the feminine mystique, to the tenuous protection of the family wage system, there is no going back. . .there is no male breadwinner to lean on—and probably not much use in waiting for one to appear.’’ She hopes for a ‘‘reconciliation between men and women,’’ resting on the ‘‘ethical basis’’ of feminism. Also in 1983, Ehrenreich worked with coauthors on two pamphlets sponsored by the Institution for New Communications. Women in the Global Factory (with Annette Fuentes) and Poverty in the American Dream: Women and Children First (with Karen Stallard and Holly Sklar), aimed at getting people involved in grassroots political organizations, to document and analyze the problems of exploitation of women and children and propose ways for women to unite and resist government and business powers that exploit. Re-Making Love: The Feminization of Sex (1986) grew out of an article Ehrenreich coauthored with Elizabeth Hess and Gloria Jacobs for Ms. in 1980 to explore the subject of women’s sexual liberation. Based on interviews with middle class women and men and on popular media documents, the authors examine the sexual revolution not from the more predictable perspective of male sexuality, but as a revolution ‘‘of, by, and to a great extent, for women.’’ Exploring the ways in which dramatic changes occurred in ‘‘women’s sexual expectation and experience,’’ they point to the increasing success from the 1960s on of purveyors in the marketplace who ‘‘institutionaliz[ed]’’ the sexual revolution, offering women from all classes and political persuasions left and right, numerous opportunities to become ‘‘consumers of sexual pleasure.’’ In the context of feminist ideology similar to that which Ehrenreich articulates in The Hearts of Men, the authors of Re-Making Love conclude contemporary American women recognized that the women’s sexual revolution had become ‘‘unraveled from the larger theme of women’s liberation. For women, sexual equality with men has become a concrete possibility, while economic and social parity remains elusive.’’ As a political goal, women need to reunite sexual liberation and women’s liberation for their mutual benefit. Ehrenreich contributed a lengthy essay on the subject of ‘‘The New Right Attack on Social Welfare’’ to The Mean Season: An Attack on the Welfare State (1987, with Fred Block, Richard
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Cloward, and Frances Fox Piven). She describes the New Right as presenting an ‘‘odd and even self-contradictory blend of themes and issues,’’ trying at once to support the interests of the rich while also ‘‘champion[ing] the ‘little man’ against forces that would destroy his way of life,’’ advocating ‘‘unfettered free market capitalism’’ while also representing ‘‘a kind of moral authoritarianism that is reminiscent of European fascism.’’ Ehrenreich advocates ‘‘a reformed and expanded welfare state’’ that affirms ‘‘alternative values. . .the old small-R republican values of active citizenship, democratic participation, and the challenge and conviviality of the democratic process.’’ Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (1989) focuses on the journey of the professional middle class from the ‘‘generosity and optimism’’ of the 1960s to the ‘‘cynicism and narrowing self-interest’’ of the 1980s. As in previous books, Ehrenreich examines popular media artifacts—television, books, magazines, and movies. She argues that class tension had grown stronger between the professional middle class and the working class and that ‘‘nervous’’ professionals had isolated themselves from contact with those outside their ranks, turning to an increasingly conservative right-wing politics and adopting postures protective of their privileges and defensive of their status. Possibilities for ‘‘creating new opportunities or strengthening the U.S. economic system as a whole’’ have thus been lost, and Ehrenreich encourages professionals to have faith in a ‘‘more egalitarian future,’’ to pursue a ‘‘revival of conscience and responsibility’’ toward public life. She also urges that an allegiance to crass consumerism and economic growth be replaced with an effort to develop jobs across classes that offer ‘‘good and pleasurable and decent work: the work of caring, healing, building, teaching, planning, learning.’’ Reviewers praised Fear of Falling but differed in their perceptions of the book’s ideological stance. While a critic from the right called her ‘‘anti-business bias’’ a ‘‘form of snobbery,’’ a review from the left credited the author for ‘‘asserting the value of pleasurable work’’ for the professional and middle class as a ‘‘modest, humane and (I’m tempted to say) neoconservative suggestion.’’ In The Worst Years of Our Lives: Irreverent Notes from a Decade of Greed (1990), Ehrenreich presents a selection of reprinted articles from publications as diverse as Mother Jones, Ms., the Nation, the New Republic, the New York Post, the New York Times, and New York Woman. Essays with titles such as ‘‘The Unbearable Being of Whiteness,’’ ‘‘The Unfastened Head of State,’’ ‘‘Stop Ironing the Diapers,’’ ‘‘Profile of a Welfare Cheat,’’ and ‘‘How to Help the Uptrodden’’ illustrate Ehrenreich’s analysis of the 1980s as a decade of greed, neglect, pain, racism, and class polarization as well as her ability to depict it in language that one critic described as ‘‘elegant, trenchant, savagely angry, morally outraged and outrageously funny.’’ Ehrenreich has written numerous columns for newspapers and magazines, including the weekly ‘‘Hers’’ column for the New York Times, and monthly columns in Ms., New York Woman, and
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Mother Jones. In the 1990s, her essays have also appeared regularly in Time. Frequently engaged as a public speaker at colleges and universities in the U.S. and abroad, Ehrenreich also often appears on radio and television. A novel, Kipper’s Game, appeared in 1993. In the mid- and late 1900s, Ehrenreich has continued to write both as a journalist and as, in her words, an ‘‘amateur scholar.’’ Her essays—sometimes humorous, sometimes not—still appear regularly in Time and the Progressive as well as Nation, Harpers, Ms., Life, Working Woman, and an edited volume titled Debating PC: The Controversy over Political Correctness on College Campuses (1992). With titles such as ‘‘Sex and the Married Woman,’’ ‘‘Real Babies, Illegitimate Debates,’’ and ‘‘Confessions of a Recovering Statist,’’ Ehrenreich frequently focuses on issues of gender, sexuality, family life, class, and economic and social policy. She also regularly comments on topical matters of media interest—from Lorena Bobbitt to drug policy to the Starr Report. Often written with a wry sense of humor, these essays place the enthusiasms of the moment in a larger historical and cultural context. In 1995 Ehrenreich published a collection of her essays under the title The Snarling Citizen. Ehrenreich’s early training as a biologist is evident in her study of the passions of war, Blood Rites (1997). Human beings, she points out, are vulnerable creatures and were probably prey to large carnivores during most of our evolutionary history. Only gradually did we—or at least some of us—make the transition from prey to predator. Early humans who gathered together in the face of threat, making noise and challenging the predator, were more likely to survive than those who scattered. Human predators therefore selected other humans who felt a strong sense of solidarity, even thrill, in the face of danger. As a result, Ehrenreich suggests, war can evoke some of the most sublime emotions known to humanity. The first half of Blood Rites examines early humans’ ecological, social, and psychological experiences of human and nonhuman violence. Hunting, it concludes, probably became a predominantly male activity only after large game animals became rare, due at least in part to human predation. The second half of the book ambitiously examines changing patterns of war since the beginning of written history. Social structures, Ehrenreich argues, reflect the ‘‘means of destruction.’’ For example, the development of missile weapons gave rise to larger armies, since only a large barrage of arrows or bullets was effective. These larger armies required larger geographical territories to support them, so they helped generate the modern nation-state. In a final, subtly argued, chapter, Ehrenreich suggests war has become a predator beast with ‘‘a life of its own.’’ BIBLIOGRAPHY: Apple, R.D., ed., Women, Health, and Medicine in America: A Historical Handbook (1990). Reference works: CA 73-76. CANR (1986, 1992). CB (1995). CLC 110. Other references: Atlantic Monthly (Sept. 1986). Commentary (Jan. 1990, Apr. 1994). Humanist (Jan./Feb. 1992). Journal
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of American History (Sept. 1990). Journal of Marriage and the Family (May 1984). LATBR (2 Apr. 1995, 21 Apr. 1996). LJ (15 Apr. 1995, 1 May 1997).Ms. (May/June 1997). Nation (24 Dec. 1983, 28 Feb. 1987). NR (11 July 1983). New Statesman and Society (17 May 1991). NYRB (1 July 1971). NYT (16 Aug. 1983).NYTBR (7 March 1971, 5 June 1983, 14 Sept. 1986, 6 Aug. 1989, 20 May 1990, 28 May 1995, 25 May 1997, 7 Dec. 1997). Progressive (Feb. 1995, Oct. 1997). Psychology Today (Aug. 1986, Oct. 1989). PW (26 July 1993, 20 Feb. 1995, 7 Apr. 1997). Signs (Spring 1986). TLS (10 Apr. 1998). VV (5 Feb. 1979, 23 Aug. 1983). Vogue (Sept. 1986). WWA (1992-93). WRB (Oct. 1995, Dec. 1997).
young man’s worship. The ruthless dowager justifies her character with amused self-knowledge, but the literal-minded bride conscientiously sacrifices her chivalrous lovers to a false ideal of her own perfection. Eiker plots The Brief Seduction of Eva (1932) like a tidy drawing room farce. Irked that her husband adores the details of patent law and substitutes a big, belated check for thoughtful birthday flowers, beautiful Eva welcomes an admirer whose suit is contrived by her amused sister-in-law. When her husband shows no jealousy. Eva abandons the lover, who elopes with her daughter. Eva shares more affection with her knowing sister-inlaw than with either of the men who have social forms for their commitments. The novel is Eiker’s clever spoof on romantic love.
—JENNIFER L. TEBBE, UPDATED BY LORI KENSCHAFT
EIKER, Mathilde Born 5 January 1893, Washington, D.C.; died January 1982 Also wrote under: March Evermay Daughter of John T. and Mattie Etheridge Eiker The eldest of four children born to a chief clerk of engineers in the U.S. War Department and an Episcopalian of long American ancestry, Mathilde Eiker was reared in the embassy section of northwest Washington, D.C. After earning her B.A. from George Washington University in 1914, she published short stories pseudonymously with her father’s encouragement, and in 1922 had a play accepted for production. From 1924 to 1926, Eiker taught in Washington but, disappointed with the public schools’ misunderstanding of gifted children, she resigned after her first novel’s success. Mrs. Mason’s Daughters (1925) portrays three bourgeois sisters freed by their mother’s death from strict emotional restraints to realize their own natures. A devoted spinster joins a Catholic convent; a young mother wins a divorce; and F. Mason, high school teacher, leaves her well-disciplined class to become Fernanda, an unwed mother and successful restaurateur. Through Fernanda, Eiker studies the complex personality of the female teacher who deliberately arms her sensitivity against the thoughtless barbarities of children and adults. Eiker’s accurate vignettes of a bickering Sunday supper or an obedient child’s guilt at her classmates’ deceit redeem clumsy plotting. In The Lady of Stainless Raiment (1928), Eiker wittingly depicts the humor and anguish caused by fashionable social hypocrisy. Artist Julian Haldane, the pleased heir to a Washington mansion, idolizes an artful, aging Carolina belle and woos her artless granddaughter. Through glittering dimmer party dialogue and muted tone poems about women among flowers, Eiker contrasts two generations of self-centered ladies who demand a
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The Heirs of Mrs. Willington (1934) investigates a psychological legacy with the plot control of detective fiction. Forbidden remarriage by her husband’s will, a bold dowager takes her chauffeur as her lover, guardian, and heir. At her death, three stepchildren discover they have lost their father’s wealth; two grow vicious, but a third, Avis, shyly hires the chauffeur and overcomes her frigidity toward her husband. With polished style, Eiker dramatizes the vile pettiness and timorous love which deflect each other in a wealthy family. Eiker’s last psychological novel, Key Next Door (1937), portrays a successful woman writer. Safely ensconced in her family home, Agnes Thomason brings the nurse Ernestine, her close, jealous friend, through the anguish of betrayed love, but loses her to marriage with a wealthy employer. The object of Agnes’s own controlled devotion is a printer strangled by domestic ties. Every character feels locked away from the ideal happiness next door. The printer’s meditation on offices emptied by the Depression, or Agnes’s on the fierce beauty of an airplane or a lion’s roar, marks Eiker’s best, suggestive style. Modern writers fail, Agnes says epigrammatically, because they write in first person or too easily explain behavior through economics. As March Evermay, Eiker wrote three detective novels. Like British contemporaries, she minimizes brutality to emphasize motive and intellectual process. In They Talked of Poison (1938), scrupulous, sentimental Inspector Glover patiently solves a murder for a university seminar of expert suspects. In This Death Was Murder (1940), he explains three suspicious deaths despite the jealous quarrels and loyal deceptions of five sibling heirs. A final mystery, Red Light for Murder (1951), ended Eiker’s writing career. Eiker’s novels explore the complexities of power, pettiness, love, and guilt in suburban American families. Eiker is so alert to the psychological suggestiveness in clothing, phrasing, furnishing, and eating that the domestic minutiae which reveal character almost overwhelm the lines of action. Careful to motivate every event, Eiker overplots her novels, but abandons their conclusions to awkward coincidences. Although she is a witty parodist of romantic love, Eiker prefers to represent seriously the restrained happiness of practical persons learning to abandon unmanageable ideals.
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ELGIN
OTHER WORKS: Over the Boat-Side (1927). Stranger Fidelities (1929). My Own Far Towers (1930). The Senator’s Lady (1932). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Authors Today and Yesterday (1934). TCA (1942). Other references: NR (29 April 1925). NYHTB (9 Oct. 1927). NYT (12 Aug. 1934). SR (1 Nov. 1930). —GAYLE GASKILL
ELDER, Susan Blanchard Born 9 April 1835, Fort Jessup, Louisiana; died 3 November 1923, Cincinnati, Ohio Wrote under: Hermine Daughter of Albert G. and Susan Thompson Blanchard; married Charles D. Elder, 1855 Daughter of Captain Albert G. Blanchard of the U.S. Army (later a brigadier general in the Confederate Army), Susan Blanchard Elder attended the Girls’ High School and St. Michael’s Convent of the Sacred Heart in New Orleans. In 1855, at the time of her marriage, Elder converted to Catholicism. Even before then, writing under the name Hermine, she was contributing to Southern newspapers stories and poems such as ‘‘Babies’’ and ‘‘First Ride,’’ young outpourings of love and admiration of the beauty of life. During the Civil War, she expressed her sympathy for the Southern cause in vivid and indignant patriotic war lyrics and in the establishment of a hospital in her home in Selma, Alabama, where the Elders had fled after the capture of New Orleans by Union troops. After the war, they returned to New Orleans. From 1882 through 1890, Elder was on the editorial staff of the Morning Star as well as a literary critic and editorial contributor for other Catholic publications. Her work includes historical and literary criticism, biographies, stories, poems, and plays written especially for Catholic colleges. The primary themes in Elder’s work are love for the South, particularly New Orleans and Louisiana, and love for the church. Though acclaimed in her own time, Elder’s verse now seems dated because of its melodrama and forced rhymes. For example, in ‘‘Cleopatra Dying,’’ once called ‘‘her most admired poem,’’ the excess emotion of the persona Cleopatra is expressed mainly through the use of 33 exclamation points. ‘‘Chateaux en Espagne,’’ noted as a ‘‘pleasantly turned lyric of the times,’’ claims the South will never really be defeated because of its imagination. Southerners all possess castles in the air, ‘‘Which they never can lose by tyrannical power, / And where Hope smiles serene through the gloomiest hour!’’ A novel, Ellen Fitzgerald (1876), portrays events in the life of Dr. R. D. Williams, Irish patriot and poet, who died at her home at Thibodeaux, Louisiana, before the war. This work was quite popular in the South because it is filled with Southern scenes and sentiments. Probably Elder’s most noteworthy contribution, however, is her careful biographical study, The Life of Abbé Adrien
Rouquette (1913), which reverently traces the history from childhood to death of the poet-priest and missionary to the Louisiana Choctaw Native Americans. In it she describes the beauty of the natural environment of Louisiana, the political and religious history of the Crescent City, the literary works of Abbé Rouquette, and the customs and history of the Choctaw Native Americans. Elder’s scholarship in the biography keeps her for the most part from the excessive emotion of her verse, allowing her to create an inspiring portrait of a man of faith.
OTHER WORKS: James the Second (1874). Savonarola (1875). The Leos of the Papacy (1879). Character Glimpses of the Most Reverend William Henry Elder, D.D. (1911). Elder Flowers (1912). A Mosaic in Blue and Gray (1914).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Davidson, J. W., The Living Writers of the South (1869). Tardy, M. T., ed., The Living Female Writers of the South (1872). Other references: Cincinnati Enquirer (4 Nov. 1923). —SUZANNE ALLEN
ELGIN, Suzette Haden Born Patricia Anne Suzette, 18 November 1936, Louisiana, Missouri Daughter of Gaylord and Hazel Lewis Lloyd; married Peter Haden, 1955 (died); George Elgin, 1964; children: Michael, Rebecca, Christopher, Patricia, Benjamin Suzette Haden Elgin is a retired professor of linguistics and the author of numerous nonfiction works on linguistics and communication as well as a number of science fiction novels. In addition to her writing, Elgin has founded several associations devoted to the study of linguistics, including the World Verbal Self-Defense League and the Linguistics & Science Fiction Network. Elgin also founded the Science Fiction Poetry Association and served for a time as the editor of its newsletter, Star*Line. She runs the Ozark Center for Language Studies, which she founded in 1980. The Ozark Center provides information on linguistics to the public and publishes the bimonthly newsletter of the Linguistics & Science Fiction Network. Elgin grew up in Missouri, the daughter of a lawyer and a teacher. She attended the University of Chicago from 1954 to 1956, but quit after her marriage to Peter Haden, who died several years later. While at the University of Chicago, Elgin won an Academy of American Poets award. She also received a Eugene Saxon Memorial Trust fellowship in poetry from Harper’s magazine in 1958 and was a corecipient of the Rhysling Award from the Science Fiction Poetry Association.
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Elgin remarried in 1964 and obtained her B.A. in linguistics from Chico State College (now California State University at Chico) in 1967. She received her M.A. (1970) and her Ph.D. (1973) in linguistics from the University of California at San Diego. While in school, Elgin held a variety of jobs, from folk guitar instructor to French teacher to writer for a local California news station. She became an associate professor of linguistics at San Diego State University in 1972 and retired as associate professor emeritus in 1980. Elgin’s first book, Syntax and Semantics, was published in two volumes in 1972. This title was quickly followed by a number of other nonfiction works on linguistics, including What is Linguistics? (1973), Beginning Linguistics Workbook (1974), and Pouring Down Words (1975). The Grandmother Principles (1998) is a departure from Elgin’s previous nonfiction works. This title seeks to instruct today’s young women in proper behavior by urging them to imitate their grandmothers. The 21 principles Elgin pushes in this low-key title range from ‘‘The grandmother way is the easy way’’ to ‘‘Grandmothers don’t have to be politically correct.’’ Elgin’s best-known nonfiction work may be The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense (1980) and its successors, which include Success With the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense (1989), Genderspeak: Men, Women, and the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense (1993), and The Martial Art of Verbal Self-Defense (1997). Elgin has written and lectured frequently on the topic of verbal self-defense. Her books on this topic deconstruct such familiar verbal attacks such as ‘‘If you REALLY loved me, you wouldn’t want to leave’’ and ‘‘Don’t you even CARE about your health?’’ Elgin uses linguistic techniques from her years of study and research in applied psycholinguistics to show how native English speakers automatically use techniques such as emphasis on certain words, particular word orders, and body language when trying to hurt someone’s feelings. She teaches readers how to avoid taking the bait in a verbal attack by a spouse, colleague, or boss, and instead recognize, avert, or turn around a verbal attack in an attempt to have a productive conversation. The Gentle Art of Communicating with Kids (1996) teaches parents how to express thoughts and feelings to children using appropriate language behavior and communications skills. Elgin instructs parents in the skills needed to defuse verbal battles in order to create a healthy home environment in which both parents and children are treated with respect. She provides models of appropriate language using modern, hot-button issues like dating, sex, and cyberspace. Elgin believes ‘‘language is our best and most powerful resource for bringing about social change [and] that science fiction is our best and most powerful resource for trying out social changes before we make them, to find out what their consequences might be.’’ She views science fiction as a laboratory in which writers and linguists can experiment with language in a way not possible in the real world. Elgin points to the Klingon language that evolved from Star Trek and the Láadan language
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she created for her Native Tongue novels as examples of linguistic experimentation through science fiction. Elgin has written two science fiction series in addition to her Native Tongue novels. The Communipaths (1970), Furthest (1971), At the Seventh Level (1972), and Star-Anchored, Star-Angered (1979) center around Coyote Jones, an agent for the Tri-Galactic Intelligence Service, which is responsible for maintaining communications for the Three Galaxies universe. Jones’ ‘‘mind-deafness,’’ or lack of telepathy, and ability to project powerful hallucinations upon others ensure his success in a variety of adventures. The Ozark Fantasy Trilogy (1981), which consists of Twelve Fair Kingdoms, The Grand Jubilee, and And Then There’ll Be Fireworks, tells the story of 12 Ozark families who abandon the dying Earth for another planet. Their new planet, named Ozark, runs on a magical, grammar-based system of governance. Yonder Comes the End of Time (1986) is a crossover between the world of Coyote Jones and Planet Ozark. Native Tongue (1984), Native Tongue II: The Judas Rose (1987), and Native Tongue III: Earthsong (1993) are set in an alternate near-future United States in which a group of linguists and their families are the only ones capable of communicating with the alien civilizations that trade on Earth. The conflict between the linguists and the government form one plotline that runs throughout the books, as does the female linguists’ attempts to create Láadan, a language that will express the thoughts of women more effectively than existing languages. Elgin has written A First Dictionary and Grammar of Láadan (2nd ed., edited by Diane Martin,1988) to provide formal instruction in this fictional language. Elgin’s short fiction includes a novella, Lest Levitation Come Upon Us (1982), and pieces published in Alternative Histories (1986), Space Opera (1996), and the annual Fantasy and Science Fiction (multiple years). A short story called ‘‘Weather Bulletin’’ is available online, as are excerpts from various articles she has written for the Linguistics & Science Fiction Network. Also available online is the first chapter of an in-progress textbook version of The Martial Art of Verbal Self-Defense. Other nonfiction works in progress include The Gentle Art of Verbal Defense at Work, an extensively revised and updated second edition of Success With the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense and The Language Imperative, a book on multilingualism and the power of language. Elgin is also writing a new, as yet untitled novel, and attempting to market The Peacetalk Solution, which she calls ‘‘an inspirational novel [or] extended parable.’’ She is also working ‘‘in fits and starts’’ on an autobiography and a book of psalms. Elgin is a self-taught artist who enjoys playing the guitar, singing, drawing, embroidery, and making gourd art in her spare time.
OTHER WORKS: A manuscript collection of Suzette Haden Elgin’s papers is housed in the Chater Collection of the Love Library of
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San Diego State University; additional papers are in the University of Oregon Library in Eugene, Oregon. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CANR (1983). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers (1996). Other References: Booklist (1 Feb. 1996). PW (10 May 1993, 12 Dec. 1994). Whole Earth Review (Winter 1989). Web page: http://www.sfwa.org/members/elgin. —LEAH J. SPARKS
ELLET, Elizabeth (Fries Lummis) Born circa 1812, Sodus Point, New York; died 3 June 1877, New York, New York Daughter of William N. and Sarah Maxwell Lummis; married William H. Ellet, circa 1835 Overlooked in traditional chronicles of military and political events, Elizabeth Ellet is the first historian of American women. She is also important as an early social historian. Her first significant work was The Women of the American Revolution in two volumes (1848), supplemented by a third volume (1850), and by the Domestic History of the American Revolution (1850, the two original volumes were reprinted in 1974 as The Eminent and Heroic Women in America). Noting a dearth of sources, fragmentary anecdotes, meager correspondence and documents, the distortions of reminiscences, and other scholarly handicaps, Ellet also observed that ‘‘women’s sphere is secluded’’ and ‘‘in very few instances does her personal history, even though she may fill a conspicuous position, afford sufficient incident. . .and salient points for description,’’ in contrast to the actions of men. Ellet’s work, then, is primarily episodic, and the methodology of it a result of the limitations she recognized. Scrupulous in the use of reliable accounts, Ellet provides contexts and settings for the remarkably varied activities of women in the ‘‘heroic age of the republic.’’ While she concentrates on the wives, sisters, mothers, and daughters whose existence was devoted to the men fighting the war of American independence and forming a new nation, Ellet also presents many remarkable instances of the independent exploits of women. Beyond the pervasive sympathies for the American cause by which the subjects are measured in contrast to British and Native American ‘‘depredation,’’ Ellet speculates on whether the matrons of the republican era were intrinsically superior in strength and spirit to ‘‘those of the present,’’ or whether the same circumstances would ‘‘now create such heroines.’’ She dares one generalization: almost all the women were ‘‘noted for piety. The spirit that exhibited itself in acts of humanity, courage, magnanimity, and patriotism was a deeply religious one.’’
Achieving success with the histories, Ellet further explored the lives of American women by writing three books that obviously reflect the range and vigor of a developing country: Pioneer Women of the West (1852), The Queens of American Society (1867), and The Court Circles of the Republic (1869). Having grown up on the Lake Ontario frontier and having lived in both the South and the North, Ellet took a broad, liberal view of regional and human diversities. She also had an eye for the specific: she reported on food (sometimes boiled acorns); furnishings (the first carpet on the floor or the first piano west of the Alleghenies); the oppressive silence and the influence of solitude (appropriate for reading the Bible and hearing wild birds sing or Native Americans powwow); and the chores (making cartridges, grinding wheat, splitting wood, looking for lost children—the responsibilities of pioneer women). But what of the queens of American society? A Boston woman entertained 300 officers of the French fleet at breakfast; others shaped or controlled public events and fashions, ‘‘although never desirous of the distinctions of the female politician.’’ Some were patrons of public or private charities—and one of them, Marcia Burns Van Ness, who founded the Washington City Orphan Asylum, was the first American woman to be buried with public honors, in 1832. The thesis of Court Circles is that ‘‘a fair idea’’ of a political administration can be gained from the fashionable life and everyday habits of a president and those who surround him. Consequently, Ellet describes the attitudes, practices, and influence of successive social circles from Washington to Grant. Antics and the ambience of entertainments, conversations and orations, balls, teas, weddings, funerals, and inaugurals suggest differences in the character and spirit of the nation’s leaders. Perhaps the best written of Ellet’s books, Court Circles is based on letters, journals, and gossip with a bold and easy style. There are good moments—one president has his butcher to dinner, another a country merchant; the black servant of an American foreign minister speaks French or German or Russian so guests will feel at home; a president’s wife reports that Charles Dickens looked bored when he visited her, and she preferred the company of Washington Irving; two suffragettes argue on the street about whether women should wear pantaloons. It is ironic Ellet is often remembered as a gossip; she was expert at putting together true stories for the historical record.
OTHER WORKS: Poems, Translated and Original (1835). Rambles About the Country (1847). Family Pictures from the Bible (1849). Summer Rambles in the West (1853). The Practical Housekeeper (1857). Women Artists in All Ages (1859).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bayless, J., Rufus Wilmot Griswold (1943). Beard, C., and M. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization (1927). Conrad, S. P., Perish the Thought (1976). Conway, J. K., The Female Experience in Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-Century
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America (1982). Moss, S. P., Poe’s Literary Battles (1963). Poe, E. A., The Complete Works of Poe (1902). Reference works: Cyclopedia of American Literature (1855). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —ELIZABETH PHILLIPS
ELLIOT, Elisabeth Born 21 December 1926, Brussels, Belgium Daughter of Philip E. and Katharine Dillingham Howard; married James Elliot, 1953 (died); Addison Leitch, 1969 (died); Lars Gren, 1977 Born of American missionary parents in Belgium, Elisabeth Elliot graduated from Wheaton College, Illinois, in 1948. After attending Prairie Bible Institute, she went as a missionary to Ecuador in 1952. Her first husband was also a graduate of Wheaton College and a missionary in Ecuador. When he and four of his colleagues were killed by the Auca Indians, Elliot decided to follow her call and to carry out her husband’s unfinished mission to pacify the Aucas. With her baby daughter Valerie and sister of one of the slain men, she entered the Aucas’ village in 1958, the first white person to do so. She kept meticulous notes of her observations of the Aucas’ lifestyle and recorded their language. Since her return to the U.S. in 1963, Elliot devoted her life to writing, lecturing, and teaching. After losing her second husband in the early 1970s, she became visiting professor at the GordonConwell Theological Seminary in Hamilton, Massachusetts. The Savage My Kinsman (1961, reprinted in 1981 and a 45th anniversary edition in 1996) is an oversize book, with photographs by Elliot and Cornell Capa. It is a verbal and pictorial record of her day-by-day life among the Aucas. Here the 20th century met head-on with the stone age, the process observed and interpreted by a sensitive and perceptive woman. While Elliot was impressed by the skills of the Aucas in filling the needs of their daily lives, they in turn were puzzled by her lack of them. She did not know how to make fishnets or pots, or how to plant manioc. She could not even snare a bumblebee for the children to fly on a palm fiber. Elliot’s sharp perception for the slightest nuances in the natives’ behavioral patterns opened unknown vistas into the psyche of primitives. She comprehended and was capable of communicating the divergencies between their concepts and those of the civilized world. While telling the Aucas about Christ, she also established a written form for their writing. Among Elliot’s evangelical writings, Let Me Be a Woman— Notes on Womanhood for Valerie (1976) stands out as a crisply written, down-to-earth bouquet of advice not only to her daughter, but to all young Christian women. Elliot analyzes the male-female
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relationship from several angles, examining discipline and submission in marriage. Her ever-present logic and her faith do not seem to clash in her credo: ‘‘You can’t make proper use of a thing unless you know what it was made for, whether it is a safety pin or a sailboat. To me it is a wonderful thing to be a woman under God—to know. . .that we were made for something.’’ Let Me Be A Woman is a conscious analysis of Christian womanhood. Elliot firmly adheres to the intellectual and spiritual equality of the sexes except in marriage, where women must carry out their predestined fate; only one partner leads in the dance. This type of submission Elliot does not see as a weakness, but as obedience to the voice of God. For her missionary activities, Elliot gained world fame of a sensational nature. As an evangelical writer, she has a wide audience of readers. Several of her books have been translated into foreign languages. They are both inspiring and provocative, in an easy flowing style, and always testifying to her ‘‘mature bedrock of faith.’’ Elliot has a felicitous gift of blending the factual with the spiritual, matters of the mind with those of the soul, not missing the quaintness and humor of a situation. She can detect as few others, the bond between all creatures of God. Where a lesser believer would acknowledge only a common denominator of birth, joy, sorrow, and death, Elliot sees with the eyes of a true believer that ‘‘all of us. . .were created by the same God, all of us were broken by the same Fall, and all of us might be redeemed by the same Grace.’’
OTHER WORKS: Through Gates of Splendor (1957, 1996). Shadow of the Almighty (1958). No Graven Image (1966). Who Shall Ascend (1968). Furnace of the Lord (1968). The Liberty of Obedience (1968). A Slow and Certain Light (1973). These Strange Ashes (1975). Twelve Baskets of Crumbs (1976). Discipline: The Glad Surrender (1983, 1998). Loneliness: It Can Be a Wilderness, It Can Be a Pathway to God (1988). On Asking God Why: Trusting God in a Twisted World (1989, 1997). A Path Through Suffering (1990, 1997). Passion and Purity: Learning to Bring Your Love Life Under Christ’s Control (1994). Keep a Quiet Heart (1996). Quest for Love (1996). Gateway to Joy: Reflections That Draw Us Nearer to God (1998). The Stay-atHome Mom (1995). Other: A Balanced Family (audiocassette, 1995). A Peaceful Home (video, 1994). Family Management (audiocassette, 1995). Forget Me Not: A Grandmother’s Influence (video, 1992). Glenda’s Story (audiocassette, 1995). Growing Through Loneliness (audiocassette, 1999). Obedience (audiocassette, 1998). Spiritual Opposition (audiocassette, 1994). Suffering Is Not for Nothing (audiocassette, 1988). Teaching Your Child Self-Discipline (1995). The Shaping of a Christian Family (audiocassette, 1958, 1995).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Chicago Sunday Tribune (3 Dec. 1961). Christian Century (21 May 1969). LJ (1 May 1961, 15 May 1969). NYHTB (23 July 1961). —VERA LASKA
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ELLIOTT, Maude Howe Born 9 November 1854, South Boston, Massachusetts; died 19 March 1948, Newport, Connecticut Wrote under: Maude Howe Daughter of Samuel G. and Julia Ward Howe; married John Elliot, 1887 Maude Howe Elliott was born at her father’s Perkins Institute for the Blind in South Boston and grew up in the midst of the literary and reform worlds of Boston, with Theodore Parker, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Florence Nightingale, and John Brown as family friends. After two years of publishing short stories, travel notes, and art reviews in the popular press, Elliott published A Newport Aquarelle in 1883. She often used travel as inspiration and setting for her works, producing San Rosario Ranch (1884) after a trip to Southern California, Atalanta in the South (1886) after a stay at the New Orleans Cotton Centennial, and a series of travel books after several European trips. Elliott also wrote a syndicated letter for several American papers during her European travels of 1894-1900 and 1906-1910. She was active in the suffrage movement as president of the Newport Woman Suffrage Association. Elliott’s first novel, A Newport Aquarelle (1883), was published anonymously as part of the Roberts Brothers’ No Name Author series. The novel establishes what was to become the pattern of Elliott’s novels: a young woman without female relatives to raise and advise her finds herself caught between two suitors, one a struggling artist sensitive to the heroine, and the other a dandy who covets the heroine’s fortune. An older woman enters the scene to guide the heroine, and the outcome is almost as predictable as the plot: the heroine marries the artist, or, rejected by him, she pines away. Margaret Ruysdale, heroine of Atalanta in the South, (1886) is a stranger from the North. A sculptor, she is as hard of heart as the Atalanta she creates, a ‘‘maiden, in whose veins flowed the pure cool blood of the Puritans.’’ The Southern setting is important to the novel, as Elliott uses it to initiate her judgments of the South and of the Civil War (‘‘a mistake’’). Margaret’s two suitors are Dr. Philip Rondelet, a soft-spoken physician, gentle to women, composed of ‘‘the stuff of which martyrs are made,’’ and Robert Feuardent, a passionate Creole. In a complicated subplot of murder, intrigue, and secret marriages, Philip is accused of murder; when acquitted, he leaves New Orleans to help fight the plague in nearby Thebes. Like her own Atalanta, Margaret is caught by the fruit rolled at her feet by Robert. They marry at her family farm in New England. Philip dies of the plague shortly thereafter. Although Margaret’s friends feel she made an unwise choice (Elliott’s sympathies obviously lie with Philip), it is clear that by following her heart, Margaret Ruysdale has made the right choice. Elliott’s Art and Handicraft in the Woman’s Building (1893) remains the definitive description of women’s activities at the World’s Columbian Exposition. In it, Elliott collected essays by Mrs. Potter Palmer, Julia Ward Howe, Candace Wheeler, and
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others describing all the exhibits in the building and the women’s congresses held there. A history of women’s participation in the World’s Columbian Exposition is also included. Elliott’s biographies of her family are recognized as her best work. Life and Letters of Julia Ward Howe (1915), which she wrote with her sisters, Laura E. Richards and Florence M. Howe Hall, won the Pulitzer Prize. Her autobiographies Three Generations (1923) and This Was My Newport (1944) offer views of Newport society at the turn of the century. Elliott’s novels provide important insights into American women of the 19th century. She presents the strong and independent American girl on her own in society. Forced to depend on herself for moral guidance, Elliott’s American girl is not completely sure of herself until she has met her mate. Elliott’s ambivalence about independent women leads her first to exalt the freedom of self-sufficiency and then to deflate this freedom with doubts and insecurity. Elliott’s resolution to this insecurity is invariably a loving marriage with a sensitive, artistic man. Elliott’s biographies of her remarkable family and her detailed description of women’s activities at the World’s Columbian Exposition are important contributions to American letters. As both a member and a chronicler of one of America’s most important families, Elliott was aware of her role in history. OTHER WORKS: Phillida (1891). Honor (1893). The Story of Laura Bridgman, Dr. Howe’s Famous Pupil; and What He Taught Her, with F. M. Howe Hall (1903). Roma Beata (1904). Two in Italy (1905). Sun and Shadow in Spain (1908). Sicily in Shadow and Sun (1910). The Eleventh Hour in the Life of Julia Ward Howe (1911). Lord Byron’s Helmet (1927). My Cousin, F. Marion Crawford (1934). John Elliott, the Story of an Artist (1930). Uncle Sam Ward and His Circle (1938). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Deland, M., Golden Yesterdays (1941). Reference works: NCAB. NAW (1971). —VIRGINIA DARNEY
ELLIOTT, Sarah Barnwell Born 29 November 1848, Beaufort, South Carolina; died 30 August 1928, Sewanee, Tennessee Daughter of Stephen and Charlotte Barnwell Elliott The youngest of five children, Sarah Barnwell Elliott was born at her grandparents’ plantation on the South Carolina coastal plains while her father, an Episcopal bishop, toured with his Georgia diocese. Leading a liberal, aristocratic family, Elliott’s father resisted hostile antebellum politics and helped to found the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, where Elliott lived most of her life. In 1866 she enrolled at Johns Hopkins, and by 1895 was supporting herself by writing in New York, where
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she became a suffragist. In 1902 she returned to Sewanee to rear orphaned nephews in the family home. A polite duty to Episcopal dogmatism restrains Elliott’s first novel, The Felmeres (1879). Virtually isolated in a mansion on the desolate coastal marshes, beautiful Helen Felmere swears to her father’s agnostic creed, studies logic instead of sewing, and lovelessly marries her cousin instead of supporting herself as an artist. A visiting painter stirs her repressed spirit with instruction and respect for her art, and a black servant urges charity work, but Helen joins her husband in New York society. Helen attacks conventional piety in the Gilded Age until a long-lost brother baptizes her baby, and she casts herself beneath carriage wheels. Dialogues on doctrinal controversy intrude on gloomy, gothic settings. A Simple Heart (1887), which portrays a self-sacrificing frontier ministry, is Elliott’s tribute to her brother, the Episcopal missionary bishop of west Texas. In a dialect study, she shows an itinerant carpenter fulfilling his dream of building a church, only to be rejected as his congregation grows more sophisticated. The carpenter’s wife teaches him to read the Book of Common Prayer and invites a passing Episcopal bishop to ordain him deacon before she dies gazing at a man-sized cross. A quiet, ‘‘naytral’’ grasp of scripture contrasts the preacher with both wild prayer meetings and fashionable church raffles, but her pious pathos diminishes her local color. No longer restrained by denominationalism, Elliott returns to the frontier setting for her longest, most successful novel, Jerry (1891). Young Jerry escapes a brutal home in the Tennessee mountains to be reared by an isolated Western miner and educated by a guilt-driven doctor, who inspires him to be a gentleman. Founding a school, holding off railroad speculators, and organizing a mining collective, Jerry is a folk hero until an unexpected inheritance corrupts his ambition. Serializing Jerry for Scribner’s magazine, Elliott shifts her attitude repeatedly. Frontiersmen are innocent yet disgusting; wealth is corruptive yet the entrance to gracious society; leadership is self-serving yet self-sacrificing. Jerry’s closing shootout does not decide Elliott’s romantic dilemma in favor of either heroic force or social compassion. Elliott compares two smug, isolated societies of Sewanee in The Durket Sperret (1898). In their ancient pride of family spirit, Cumberland mountaineers scorn the fastidious new university people, but young Hannah rejects her drunken mountain suitor to become a lady’s maid in town. Defying the Durket matriarch leaves Hannah vulnerable to her employer’s patronizing improvement projects and to her vengeful suitor’s gossip until she escapes both through a farming career. The elaborate rituals of a mountain death, ‘‘buryin’,’’ and will-reading show Elliott as anthropologist, and Hannah’s silent attention to a professor’s discourse on the Sewanee caste system displays Elliott’s psychological acumen. In Hannah and the Durket matriarch, Elliott builds her two strongest character studies. Elliott’s strongest novel, The Making of Jane (1901), challenges the womanly self-sacrifice that defines heroism in her early books. Fighting her childhood homesickness in New York, young Jane lets her aunt’s strict tutelage repress all personality until she
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rebels into maturity by returning to the South for a business career. Investments supplant a lost love, and Jane’s millionaire proposes well after she has discarded her dependence on him. Though she exaggerates Jane’s stoicism and success, Elliott naturalistically exposes facets of a lady discovering her power of self-reliance. By traveling, working, and investing earned income with her own authority, Jane makes herself into a satisfied, independent person. Retired in Sewanee, Elliott championed the South and woman suffrage while writing criticism for the Sewanee Review and Forensic Quarterly Review. In 1907 she praised Ibsen’s stress on individual will restricted in a Norway mirroring the South. In a sentimental literary period, Elliott’s measured transition from romanticism to naturalism portrays the local color of Texas frontiersmen and Tennessee mountaineers before it confidently realizes a self-sufficient womanly ideal. Disciplining her insights to make a significant statement, Elliott turns from family doctrines and regional viewpoints to her own experience as a sensitive woman in turbulent times. Through all the expansive plots and symbolic settings, Elliott’s distinctive character is a lonely outsider earnestly working to build a new home in a puzzling, hostile world.
OTHER WORKS: John Paget (1893). An Incident and Other Happenings (1899). Sam Houston (1900).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Mackenzie, C. C., Sarah Barnwell Elliott (Dissertation, 1971). Maness, D. G., The Novels of Sarah Barnwell Elliott.: A Critical Study (Dissertation, 1974). Wiggins, B. L., Library of Southern Literature (1909). Reference works: AA (1938). DAB (1931). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: NYT (31 Aug. 1928). —GAYLE GASKILL
ELLIS, Anne Born 1875, Missouri; died August 1938, Denver, Colorado Daughter of Albert L. and Rachel Sweareangen Heister; married G. Fleming, 1895; Herbert Ellis, 1901 When still a child, Anne Ellis traveled with her family behind an oxen team to Silver Cliff, Colorado. As Ellis remembers: ‘‘I went up the gulch at the age of six and came down at the age of sixteen.’’ When she came down, a seasoned veteran of life in Colorado’s mining towns, it was with the first batch of experiences that would make her a writer. Soon after the family’s move from Missouri, Ellis’ father left his wife for a job in Buffalo and never came back. One of Ellis’
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earliest memories is of the abject poverty that drove her mother to take one of her pieced quilts door to door trying to trade it for food. In 1882 her mother married a miner and the family moved to Bonanza. Here, though never free of want, they survived the ups and downs of the mining business chiefly through her mother’s ingenuity as a cook and seamstress. Miners (with names like ‘‘Si Dore’’ and ‘‘Picnic Jim’’), fancy women, cliff-climbing, first love, a first milk cow, dances, tales of women’s rights, and dresses made of cabin curtains—all these filled Ellis’ life and later her writings. Though school consisted primarily of home mastery of a fifth grade reader, Ellis remarked that ‘‘when one cannot read, one thinks a lot.’’ Shortly after her mother’s death in 1893, Ellis married and moved to a new mine, the Only Chance, to stake a claim. Living from hand to mouth most of these years, Ellis spent much of her spare time writing. In 1938, her friends rallied to pay for the necessary clothes and traveling expenses, when she received a telegram invitation to appear at the University of Colorado to receive an honorary Master of Letters degree. At that time, she had published her three autobiographical works: The Life of an Ordinary Woman (1929), Plain Anne Ellis (1931), and Sunshine Preferred (1934). The Life of an Ordinary Woman gives a valuable firsthand description and analysis of the mining West. It focuses on the variety of characters and activities characteristic to a mining town: ‘‘A New Mine,’’ ‘‘The Baby’s First Bed,’’ ‘‘Theatricals,’’ ‘‘Seeing a Prize Fight,’’ ‘‘Cripple Creek Troubles,’’ and ‘‘The First Telephone.’’ In Plain Anne Ellis, Ellis details house-building, contracting with the government to travel with and cook for a telephone gang, sheep shearing, race relations, Indian maneuvers, county politics, and equal rights conventions. Sunshine Preferred, though not as interesting as Ellis’ earlier works, nevertheless offers a rare insight into sanitariums of the 1920s and 1930s and a few glimpses of life in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, New Mexico. One of the most refreshing rewards of reading Ellis’ books is the abundant humor that characterizes her style. She also has a talent for putting herself in perspective, which greatly enhances the psychological insight that her works provide. Ellis’ observations are often straightforward accounts of an active mind and a vibrant body for whom the Victorian mores of her era fell by the wayside. Of her political experiences, she writes: ‘‘These men, who were supposed to be my friends, tried to make it hell for me; but I, who recognize no hell, was neither worried, frightened nor disturbed; in fact, I rather enjoyed it; holding the whip hand was for me a new experience.’’ It’s no surprise that this is the same woman of whom Irene McKeehan, professor of English at the University of Colorado, said: ‘‘Out of hardships and limitations she had made comedy and tragedy, touching the commonplace with the magic of interest, transmuting ordinary life into literature.’’ BIBLIOGRAPHY: Colorado Quarterly (Summer 1955). NYT (30 Aug. 1931, 19 Aug. 1934). NYTBR (29 Sept. 1929). —SHELLEY ARMITAGE
ELLIS, Edith Born 1876, Coldwater, Michigan; died 27 December 1960, New York, New York Also wrote under: Edith Ellis Baker, Edith Ellis Furness Daughter of Edward C. and Ruth McCarthy Ellis; married Frank A. Baker (died 1907); C. Beecher Furness Ellis began her stage career as a child of three, performing with her parents’ touring company in the Midwest and South. Before she was twelve, three plays were written with starring roles for ‘‘Little Edith Ellis, the Rising Star.’’ Her varied theatrical experience on the road included everything from performing in vaudeville to heading her own stock companies. Ellis and her first husband leased the Park Theater and later the Criterion Theater, both in Brooklyn, where she directed plays for several years before her audacious move to the Berkeley Lyceum in New York as director and leading lady of her own play, The Point of View (1903). According to a New York Times reviewer, it could ‘‘not be said that at present she shines in any of her three capacities.’’ After her husband’s death in 1907, Ellis resumed her maiden name to avoid confusion with actress Edith Barker. She acted less frequently, but continued to write and direct. Of her approximately 35 plays, eight of them produced in New York, the best was Mary Jane’s Pa (1908). A resourceful mother of two girls runs a smalltown printing press and struggles to make ends meet. When the scholarly ne’er-do-well who had abandoned her and their daughters 10 years earlier turns up, down on his luck, she hires him out of compassion as a cook and household help, without revealing his identity to their children. The town gossips are scandalized at the idea of a male live-in servant in a household of women. In Act III, he is almost tarred and feathered by rioting townspeople who have destroyed her press because of the politics of her newspaper. This moment of danger determines her true feelings. She acknowledges her husband, relinquishing a promising relationship with a young politician. Laurette Taylor starred in Ellis’ Seven Sisters (1911), adapted from the Hungarian of Ferencz Herczegh. The play was criticized for a situation that depended too heavily upon customs and manners considered alien to American audiences. Ten years later, in Betty’s Last Bet, Ellis transparently attempted to transfer the plot of the Hungarian play, which involves getting four sisters married off to men of means and ideals, to an American milieu. But the situation is even more strained in that Ellis reduced the time span of the action—introductions, courtships, and engagements—from nine months to one day. A forceful and outspoken personality, Ellis felt she had been handicapped by her sex. Her favorite character type, like the mother in Mary Jane’s Pa, was a mature woman. ‘‘After all,’’ said Ellis, ‘‘she is the only person about whom a play or a story can be written. This is the day of the mature woman in real life and on the stage.’’
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Speaking of her own work, Ellis told an interviewer: ‘‘I know the forms of drama. I have eaten and drunk and slept them, but I don’t believe in being hampered by them. I belong to a club of women dramatists, but I do not feel akin to them, for they discuss the forms and how to remain within the forms. I try to get on without them. I remember the forms, but am controlled by the impulse of character and the impetus of action.’’ However, Ellis’ instinct for the dramatic was not as sure as that of her model, G. B. Shaw, and she too often fell back on tired contrivances. OTHER WORKS: A Batch of Blunders (1897). Mrs. B. O’Shaughnessy (Wash Lady) (1900). Because I Love You (1903). Ben of Broken Bow (1905). Contrary Mary (1905). Mary and John (1905). The Wrong Man (1905). He Fell in Love with His Wife (1910). My Man (with F. Halsey, 1910). Partners (1911). The Love Wager; Vespers; Fields of Flax; The Man Higher Up (1912). The Amethyst Ring (1913). Cupid’s Ladder; Make-Believe; Man with the Black Gloves; The Devil’s Garden (1915). Making Dick Over (1916). Mrs. Clancey’s Car Ride (with Edward Ellis, 1918). Bravo, Claudia (1919). Whose Little Bride Are You? (1919). Mrs. Jimmie Thompson (with N. S. Rose, 1920). The White Villa (1921; produced in London as The Dangerous Age, 1937). The Illustrious Tartarin (1922). The Judsons Entertain (1922). The Moon and Sixpence (1924). White Collars (1924). The Last Chapter (with Edward Ellis, 1930). Open the Door! by W. Brandon (dramatization by Ellis, 1935). Incarnation; a Plea from the Masters by W. Brandon (dramatization by Ellis, 1936). The Lady of La Paz (1936). We Knew these Men by W. Brandon (dramatization by Ellis, 1943). Love in the Afterlife by W. Brandon (dramatization by Ellis, 1956). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Björkman, E., ed., Mary Jane’s Pa (1914). Patterson, A., ‘‘Edith Ellis—A Woman Insurgent Dramatist,’’ in Theatre Magazine (May 1909). Other references: New York Dramatic Mirror (19 Feb. 1913). —FELICIA HARDISON LONDRÉ
EMBURY, Emma (Catherine) Manley Born 1806, New York, New York; died 10 February 1863, New York, New York Wrote under: Emma C(atherine) Embury, Ianthe Daughter of James Manley; married Daniel Embury, 1828 After her marriage to Daniel Embury, president of the Atlantic Bank of Brooklyn, Emma Embury lived in Brooklyn the rest of her life. She established a salon and published tales, poems, and essays in prodigious quantity. Embury’s work appeared in the leading popular magazines of the day for a period of years, and she was on the editorial staff of Godey’s, Graham’s, and Ladies’ Companion. In 1848 a serious illness ended her writing career and rendered her an invalid the rest of her life.
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Embury’s first collection, Guido: a Tale; Sketches from History and Other Poems (1828), contains some of her more interesting poetry, as well as much which is conventional in rhyme, subject matter, and expression. Poems with titles such as ‘‘Love,’’ ‘‘Absence,’’ ‘‘Friendship,’’ and ‘‘I Loved Thee Not’’ reflect Embury’s adherence to the standard rhyme schemes and idealized sentiments of her day. At times, however, especially when her narrative skill comes to her aid, her poems can command respect. Although hampered by its inflexibly rhymed couplets and stereotyped ‘‘pale and shrunken’’ poet-protagonist, Guido captures the attention. The occasional variation of the rhyme pattern and the sometimes moving, sometimes exasperating story of Guido’s unrequited love for the beautiful Floranthe overcome the poem’s defects. Unrequited love and silent suffering are two of Embury’s favorite themes; they are also in evidence in the other interesting experimental work in this collection, the ‘‘Sketches from History.’’ Generally in the form of a monologue and preceded by an explanatory headnote, these poems often have a power and vitality not found in her more abstract ones. ‘‘Jane of France’’ records that queen’s cry of despair when her husband divorces her and she hears ‘‘the harsh decree that robbed her of a throne.’’ ‘‘Scenes in the Life of a Lover’’ are scenes in the life of Henry Percy, lover of Anne Boleyn. Embury often does her best work when she takes on a male persona or when a man is the protagonist, as occurs in this successful poem. Embury was well known for her poetry, but her best work is in her tales and short stories. The collection Constance Latimer, or the Blind Girl, with Other Tales (1838) contains some energetic and compelling prose, although the title story is not one of Embury’s best efforts. Her abilities are better displayed in two shorter tales from the collection, ‘‘The Son and Heir’’ and ‘‘The Village Tragedy.’’ Her use of male protagonists provide her with a range of emotions and actions she seems unable to allow her women. Two other collections of short stories were published during Embury’s lifetime—Pictures of Early Life, or Sketches of Youth (1830) and Glimpses of Home Life, or Causes and Consequences (1848). These stories demonstrate the same strengths and weaknesses as her earlier ones. Unrequited love, silent suffering of various kinds, and the moral lessons to be learned when material wealth departs, are her most persistent themes, generally presented in a conventional manner. Her description and characterization of women is essentially drawn from one conventional model, that of the blond, pale, liquid-eyed maiden, causing a certain lack of distinction among her heroines. At times, Embury suggests to the reader that she is capable of portraying a wider range of characters and situations. ‘‘Flora Lester,’’ for example, a story about a reformed belle, provides some tantalizing hints that Embury understood human behavior better than she generally cared to reveal. The Poems of Emma Catherine Embury (1869) and Selected Prose Writings of Mrs. Emma Catherine Embury (1893) were published posthumously. The latter is notable chiefly for Embury’s essay on American literature, which pleads for financial support for artists so America may have ‘‘a literary class in society and a
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national literature.’’ Embury’s ‘‘Female Education,’’ an 1831 address, was published in Anna C. Brackett’s Woman and the Higher Education (1893). Although Embury is a proponent of education for women, she attacks Wollstonecraft and other feminists and finds education’s benefits to be in creating the best mothers possible. In this, Embury is typical of a time when women writers were exalting and perpetuating the values and ideas that limited them most. Nevertheless, in her work Embury at times goes beyond the restrictions of her culture. OTHER WORKS: American Wild Flowers in Their Native Haunts (1845). Love’s Token Flowers (1845). The Waldorf Family, or Grandfather’s Legend (1848). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Griswold, R. W., The Female Poets of America (1848). Poe, E. A., article in Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s Book (Aug. 1846). Rollins, J. A., Mrs. Emma C. Embury’s Account Book: A Study of Some of Her Periodical Contributions (1947). Reference works: American Authors, 1600-1900 (1938). Cyclopedia of American Literature (1855). DAB (1934). Other references: Catherine Graham’s Magazine (Aug. 1843). —JULIA ROSENBERG
EMSHWILLER, Carol Born 12 April 1921, Ann Arbor, Michigan Daughter of Charles C. and Agnes Carswell Fries; married Edmund Emshwiller, 1949 (died 1990); children: Eve, Susan, Peter Carol Emshwiller, an adjunct assistant professor in continuing education at New York University, is the author of three books of short stories and three novels. Her writings borrow elements from science fiction and fantasy to conceive highly original and often outrageous plots. Told from a feminist perspective, Emshwiller’s works comment upon the state of women in contemporary society. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction states that ‘‘in her hands science fiction conventions become models of our deep estrangement from ourselves (especially women) and from the world.’’ Raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Emshwiller earned a B.A. in music from the University of Michigan in 1945 and another B.A. in design four years later. She then attended Ecole nationale superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France. This was followed by marriage to filmmaker Edmund Emshwiller (who died in 1990), with whom she had three children. Emshwiller has taught workshops at the Clarion Science Fiction Writing Workshop in East Lansing, Michigan, and the Science Fiction Bookstore in New York, and taught at New York University since 1978. Joy in Our Cause (1974), Emshwiller’s first book, is comprised of short stories previously published in literary and science fiction magazines. This was followed by Verging on the Pertinent: Stories (1989) and The Start of the End of It All (1990,
revised in 1991), two more collections of short stories. The latter won the World Fantasy Award for the best short story collection of 1991. In ‘‘Yukon,’’ a woman abandons her husband and home in order to live with a bear in the forest. In the title story, aliens determined to conquer the Earth form an alliance with divorced women to fight the ruling male establishment. In ‘‘Looking Down,’’ a half-bird, half-man is transformed by the power of love. Love, whether or not it triumphs in the end, is a theme throughout this book as Emshwiller’s motley collection of bizarre characters defy their mundane existence by embracing the unexpected and extraordinary. Carmen Dog (1990), Emshwiller’s first novel, also incorporates elements of the fantastic. The novel is set in a world in which human women are degenerating into various animals, while animals are developing the characteristics of human women. Although critics panned this as silly, formulaic, and confusing, most praised the humor in Emshwiller’s allegorical tale. Her second novel, Ledoyt, was a departure from her usual reliance on plot elements from science fiction and fantasy. Instead, Ledoyt is a realistic novel set in the American West of the early 1900s. In the novel, Oriana Cochran and her hired man, Beal Ledoyt, fall in love and marry despite their radically different backgrounds and personalities. The story focuses on Lotti, Oriana’s daughter, who tries to break up her mother’s marriage. The first person narrative switches between the main characters and allows the reader an intimate knowledge of each. Leaping Man Hill (1998) is the sequel to Ledoyt. Venus Rising (1992), a novella about an exiled alien who falls in love with a being with a very different lifestyle, was shortlisted for the 1992 James Tiptree Jr. Award, an award given to science fiction novels and short stories that explore and expand gender. Venus Rising was also published in Flying Cups and Saucers, an anthology of Tiptree award winners and nominees. Among Emshwiller’s other awards are a MacDowell Colony fellowship in 1973, a New York State Creative Artist Public Service grant in 1975, a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1980, two New York Council grants, the Pushcart Prize, and the 1999 Gallun award from the ICON Science Fiction Convention. In addition to her position at NYU, Emshwiller makes frequent appearances at science fiction conventions around the country and offered writing workshops like the one at Clarion West in Seattle during the summer of 1998. Emshwiller is also a contributor of short stories to literary and science fiction magazines, including Omni, Science Fiction and Fantasy, Century, Crank, Epoch, Croton Review, and TriQuarterly. Her stories have also appeared in various anthologies like the seventh annual The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and the Penguin Book of Erotic Stories by Women. Works in progress include Boots, a novel combining fantasy with horses and the Old West. OTHER WORKS: Pilobolus and Joan (1974). Family Focus (1977). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CANR (1992). Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993). Oxford Companion to the Women’s
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Writing in the United States (1995). St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers (1996). Other references: PW (26 Jan. 1990, 26 Apr. 1991, 28 Aug. 1995, 15 Apr. 1996). —LEAH J. SPARKS
EPHRON, Nora Born 19 May 1941, New York, New York Daughter of Henry and Phoebe Wolkind Ephron; married Dan Greenburg, 1967 (divorced); Carl Bernstein, 1976 (divorced 1979); Nicholas Pileggi, 1987; children: Jacob, Max Nora Ephron’s career has been a diverse one. She has worked as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter, as well as a film director and producer. In doing so she has brought humor, romance, and her own personal story to her audiences. Born the first of four daughters to stage- and screenwriters Phoebe and Henry Ephron of Carousel, Desk Set, and Take Her, She’s Mine fame, she grew up with the understanding that ‘‘everything is copy.’’ Her childhood was spent in Beverly Hills. After graduating from Wellesley College in 1962, Ephron worked as a journalist, writing for the New York Post, Esquire, New York magazine, and Good Housekeeping, as well as numerous other national publications. She wrote freelance articles and became a contributing editor for New York and a senior editor for Esquire in the 1970s. Her work as a journalist led her to publish several books of essays. In 1970 she published Wallflower at the Orgy, which explores her clever interpretation of topics relating to the ‘‘popular culture’’ of the times. In 1975 she compiled 25 pieces on the women’s movement. This work, Crazy Salad: Some Things About Women, irreverently approaches the feminist movement from the perspective of the everyday frustrations of women in their quest for freedom. The year 1978 brought yet another set of witty words in her Scribble, Scribble: Notes on the Media, in which she presents lively profiles, parodies, anecdotes, and interviews on the written and broadcast media and how it ought to work. In 1983 Ephron published her first novel, Heartburn. This poignant and humorous story of a well-known cookbook author, who is seven months pregnant with her second child and discovers her journalist husband is having an affair, was met with critical controversy and acclaim when it was released. Material for the story came directly from Ephron’s own divorce from Washington Post investigative reporter Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame. Although it was a bestseller, critics questioned Ephron’s choice of mixing fiction with reality. At the time of her divorce from Bernstein in 1979, Ephron realized she needed to get a job that would support her and her two
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young sons. She chose screenwriting, which was not entirely unfamiliar to her. In 1978 she had written a CBS television movie called Perfect Gentlemen about four women hotel thieves. She had also written an episode of the ABC series Adam’s Rib in 1973. Her first film writing assignment came when she cowrote Silkwood with Alice Arlen, about real-life union activist Karen Silkwood. The film’s conclusion, about Silkwood’s controversial death in an automobile accident, became the focus for much discussion when it was released in 1983. It also won Ephron and Arlen an Academy Award nomination. Ephron’s screenwriting took many forms. In 1986 Mike Nichols directed Ephron’s screenplay of Heartburn, which starred Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson in the well-received but not highly acclaimed movie version of her book. In 1989 she wrote the lighthearted romance about friendships between males and females, When Harry Met Sally, which again earned her an Oscar nomination and began her reputation as a writer of romantic comedies. Her second collaboration with Arlen, Cookie (1989), and her 1990 My Blue Heaven (both critical failures) are funny gangster films that taught her the importance of directing one’s own script. She and her sister Delia then wrote her first directorial effort, the under-attended This Is My Life (1992), the comic story of a single mother juggling her show business career with bringing up two girls. In 1993 she cowrote (with David S. Ward and Jeffrey Arch) and directed the highly acclaimed comic love story Sleepless In Seattle (starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan), which won her a third Oscar nomination for screenwriting. Ephron’s next project was a script (again written with her sister Delia) called Mixed Nuts (1994), a black comedy about volunteers at a suicide hot line. This was followed by the box office hit Michael (1997), written with Delia, Peter Dexter, and Jim Quinlan and starred John Travolta as an imperfect angel traveling with three tabloid reporters. Ephron’s latest highly acclaimed work, You’ve Got Mail, is another romantic comedy based on the Ernst Lubitsch comedy The Shop Around the Corner. The film (the result of another cooperative script produced with Delia) reunites Sleepless in Seattle stars Hanks and Ryan, who now portray warring bookstore owners in an e-mail love affair. Ephron’s writing career has led her where few women have tread. In journalism and fiction she was frank, witty, and unafraid to say what she thought; in film she took control of her writing and became one of the few women directors in Hollywood. It is difficult to say where her writing will lead her next, but it is pretty certain it will be a place touched by her brand of humor and ‘‘copy’’ from her life.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: ANR 39 (1992). CBY (1990). Contemporary Theatre, Film and Television 15 (1996). Other References: Maclean’s (9 Mar. 1992). New Republic (3 Mar. 1997). NYT (13 Dec. 1998, 18 Dec. 1998). Rolling Stone (8 July 1993). Time (27 Jan. 1992, 21 Dec. 1998). —PAULA C. MURPHY
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
ERDRICH, Louise Born 6 July 1954, Little Falls, Minnesota Daughter of Ralph L. and Rita Joanne Gorneau Erdrich; married Michael Dorris, 1981; children: Reynold, Jeffrey, Madeline, Persia, Pallas, and Aza Louise Erdrich continues to be one of our most important contemporary writers. She writes poetry and some of the most sophisticated fiction and nonfiction being produced in the United States. Many of her characters grow out of her own background as a Native American woman who grew up off the reservation. Yet her writing is accessible to any reader willing to put forth a bit of effort. Erdrich covers the range of human experience in her work: accidents of birth and parentage, falling in love, generosity, greed, psychological damage, joy, alienation, vulnerability, differentness, parenting, aging, and dying. Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Tribe, grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota, where her German-American father and her Chippewa mother were teachers for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The eldest of seven children, Erdrich spent much time on the nearby Turtle Mountain Chippewa Reservation visiting her maternal grandmother and learning about the conflict between the white and native cultures from which she had sprung. She attended the Wahpeton Indian Boarding School where both her parents taught, and throughout her childhood she wrote stories for which her father paid her a nickel and her mother bound into books. In 1972 Erdrich entered Dartmouth College, where she met her future husband, Michael Dorris, also part Native American, who later became her agent and collaborator. After her graduation in 1976, she returned to North Dakota and conducted poetry workshops for the Poetry in the Schools Program. She attended Johns Hopkins University and received an M.F.A. in creative writing in 1979. In 1981 she was named writer-in-residence in Dartmouth’s Native American Studies Program, which Dorris directs. Erdrich credits her ability to address both sides of her heritage to her collaboration with her husband. Erdrich has published poetry, short stories, and three novels that have won critical acclaim. A series of short stories won the Nelson Algren award in 1982 and a Pushcart Prize in 1983; one was anthologized in Best Short Stories in 1983. She also won an O. Henry award in 1985. Her first volume of poetry, Jacklight (1984), shows the same narrative force and sense of place that make her fiction so powerful. Erdrich’s poems have a mythic sense, gained from her Chippewa and German ancestry; they pay particular attention to the details of family, tribal history, and nature in connecting the individual to the universal experience. Writing about both her maternal grandmother and her Chippewa ancestors, Erdrich attempts to integrate the two sides of her own experience in the poems. A second volume of poems, Baptism of Desire, appeared in 1989. While the poems have strength, humor, and a sense of the past in the present, it is in the series of family chronicles, Love Medicine (1984), The Beet Queen (1986), and Tracks (1988), that
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Erdrich fills in the canvas of Native American/Anglo experience. As Alice Walker made a crazy quilt of black women’s experience, Erdrich weaves a tapestry of Native American, half-breed, and Anglo experience. Tracks, chronologically the earliest (1912-24), sets much of the background for Love Medicine. The conflict between Native American and Anglo beliefs in Tracks is highlighted by Fleur Pillager and Pauline Puyat. Fleur, who possesses life-giving and creative powers granted her by the water god for having twice drowned, acts as a counterbalance to the destructive power of the Catholic church as represented by Pauline, a part-Canadian, part-Chippewa, who has forsaken her Native American past and her grasp on reality; she studies to become a nun with an order that does not take Native American girls. When the loggers of the Anglo logging companies, helped by the government, defraud the Native Americans of their land, Fleur disappears into the wilderness with her shamanic possessions and Pauline takes her final vows. Tracks, like Erdrich’s other novels, is told by several narrators, adding light and shadow to the story of loss of the land, loss of loved ones, and loss of heritage. The Beet Queen focuses mainly on the white settlers of Argus, North Dakota, but there is a connection with the other books and with Erdrich’s own past. The central action takes place in the town where Fleur Pillager had worked briefly, and much of the story revolves around a butcher shop like the one in which Fleur worked. The shop also recalls Erdrich’s own German ancestors who were butchers. Further, ancillary, characters from Love Medicine populate the center of The Beet Queen, which covers the years from 1932, when the 11-year-old abandoned Mary Adare hops on a freight train to find her aunt and uncle who are butchers in Argus, to 1972, when her grandniece is elected Beet Queen of the town. More than the other two novels, The Beet Queen is a woman’s book. The men father children, die, or have strokes, but essentially lack the enduring power of Mary, her friend Celestine, and their child, Wallacette (Dot) Adare. Love Medicine, Erdrich’s first novel, has a cast of characters who have endured, despite the deprivations of reservation life, and have become, like many of the poor the world over, rich in humanity. The large extended families of the Kashpaws, the Lamartines, and the Morrisseys add color to the North Dakota landscape. The novel begins with the death of June Kashpaw and proceeds through a series of minor tragedies to the announcement by Lulu Lamartine that Lipsha Morrissey is June Kashpaw’s son. All the characters are interconnected. Erdrich finds a humorous vantage point that takes the despair out of her characters’ lives. It is, as she says, survival humor. She also has a mythic perspective that enriches even the smallest acts. Like Leslie Marmon Silko and James Welch, Erdrich portrays the painful and destructive side of Native American life, but she is also able to create those moments of true love and enrichment that give people’s lives meaning—the moment when Lipsha finds his mother, or when Grandma Kashpaw serves up the Love Medicine with a garnish of lettuce and peas. Within the prose of the novels the characters can escape the alcohol sold to them by whites, the convents forced upon them in place of their gods, the wars they
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have been sent to by the army, and the ever-present prisons to which they are taken by their white jailers. Sometimes painful, sometimes surrealistic, and always honest, Erdrich’s language frees all her characters from the death that whites would impose upon them—the denial of their heritage.
stretches over 100 years, centers on two Ojibwa families living in modern-day Minneapolis, and covers themes familiar to Erdrich’s readers: love, family, history, and the complex ways these forces both bind and separate the generations. Erdrich offers pain and exhilaration in equal measure.
In Tracks and Love Medicine, Erdrich successfully began to chronicle the tragedy and the glory of the Chippewa nation. The Beet Queen shows Erdrich is also well aware of the special tragedies that befall strong and enduring women no matter what their race, and her writing gives a lasting voice to them all.
In the first of a cycle of novels partly based on her own family history, The Birchbark House (1999) is a story told from the point of view of a young Ojibwa girl on an island in Lake Superior in 1847. Her novel Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse will be available in 2000.
Erdrich’s collaboration with Michael Dorris on The Crown of Columbus (1991) is the culmination of her own critical approach to her work. The story of two Dartmouth professors, the novel seems in many ways to parallel the lives of its authors, although both have insisted that the narrators, Roger Williams and Vivian Twostar, are the products of a truly collaborative effort. Both writers wrote sections for both characters, read each other’s drafts, and worked, revised, and edited together to create a seamless whole. The tone of the book quite closely resembles both Erdrich’s Beet Queen and Dorris’s A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, so it might be argued that the two authors have submerged their individual voices into one voice that speaks for both. Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, Erdrich’s work has grown in depth and luminosity. Readers of her North Dakota saga were rewarded with its continuation in The Bingo Palace (1994), as well as more poetry with Baptism of Desire (1989). Many of the poems were written, according to an author’s note, ‘‘between the hours of two and four in the morning, a period of insomnia brought on by pregnancy,’’ and several of the poems refer to pregnancy, birth, growth, and loneliness. Erdrich more fully explored the rhythms of pregnancy in The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Birth Year (1995). Using essays, thoughts, reflections, recipes, and assorted snippets, Erdrich chronicles her thoughts about being pregnant and raising her three daughters. The title piece is about a blue jay who audaciously faces or ‘‘dances’’ down an attacking hawk to win its own right to life. Erdrich writes a captivating account of her attempt to juggle the joys and demands of selfhood, writerhood, and motherhood. She says,‘‘A woman needs to tell her own story, to tell the bloody version of the fairy tale.’’
OTHER WORKS: Route Two (with Michael Dorris, 1991).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: ‘‘A Bibliography of Writing by Louise Erdrich,’’ in American Women Writing Fiction: Memory, Identity, Family, Space (1989). Coltelli, L., ed., Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak (1990). Reference works: CA (1985).CANR (1997). CB (1989). CLC (1984, 1989). CLCY (1985). DLB (1997). FC (1990). MTCW (1991). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: American Audio Prose Library (1986). Booklist (15 Feb. 1995, 1 May 1996). LJ (15 Apr. 1996). Missouri Review (1988). Mother Jones (May/June 1991). Nation (26 Nov. 1990). NYT Magazine (21 Apr. 1991). North Dakota Quarterly (1985, 1987). Western American Literature 22 (1987). —MARY A. MCCAY, UPDATED BY CELESTE DEROCHE
ESTES, Eleanor Born 9 May 1906, West Haven, Connecticut; died 15 July 1988 Daughter of Louis and Caroline Gewecke Rosenfeld; married Rice Estes, 1932
Tales of Burning Love (1996) is comprised of 46 stories, all revolving around Jack Mauser and his four wives. Yet, by the design of the novel, Erdrich keeps the point of view of women in the forefront of her reader’s consciousness. The novel is far less about Jack than it is about the reactions of women to him. Erdrich creates women who are quirky, passionate, and unpredictable. She sometimes pushes her sensuous descriptions over the top, yet the resulting near-parody is always entertaining. Also in 1996 Erdrich published the 30-page Grandmother’s Pigeon, with lush illustrations by Jim LaMarche. An almost-mythical children’s story, Erdrich draws on her range as poet and novelist to create for children the magic her adult readers have come to expect.
After high school, Eleanor Estes served as a librarian in the children’s department of the New Haven Public Library, of which she became head in 1928. For her outstanding work, in 1931 she was awarded the Caroline M. Hewins scholarship for library study at Pratt Institute, subsequently serving as a children’s librarian with the New York Public Library. After the publication of her first book, The Moffats, in 1941, Estes devoted full-time to her writing, eventually producing fifteen books for children, one novel for adults, The Echoing Green (1947), and a number of magazine articles.
When The Antelope Wife (1998) opens, a cavalry soldier pursues a dog with an Ojibwa baby strapped to its back. The story
The most highly regarded of Estes’ writings are her amusing stories of everyday family life, the earliest and best of which are
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the books about the Moffat family: The Moffats, The Middle Moffat (1942), and Rufus M. (1943), none of which is a proper novel. Set in Cranbury, Connecticut, just before and during World War I, each book consists of a series of episodes told from the child’s point of view and are presented as a whole with neither climax nor suspense. The Moffats introduces Sylvie, Joey, Jane, Rufus, and their widowed, dressmaker mother; the family is hard pressed for money, but rich in affection for one another. The tie that binds the various adventures together is the threat of the sale of their yellow house on New Dollar Street. Next came The Middle Moffat, and it mainly concerns Jane’s involvement with Mr. Buckle, the oldest inhabitant of Cranbury, and his 100th birthday celebration, while Rufus M. focuses on the doings of the youngest Moffat and has World War I as its background. Although scarlet fever, lack of money, and similar problems trouble the family occasionally, the books are never gloomy. Mostly, the children have simple adventures at school, about the town, or in their own neighborhood, usually distinguished by some fresh and original twist. Characterization is full and deep, strengthened by the accumulation of details as the books proceed, so that the Moffats appear today as one of the best-loved families in literature for children. Warm, cozy stories which have been translated into several languages, the Moffat books hold out the assurance that good times will inevitably follow bad and people of good will and perseverance will eventually win through. Another family story, Ginger Pye (1951), won the John Newbery Award from the American Library Association in 1952. The Alley (1964) succeeds with characterization but never fulfills its potential for interest, even though it offers the mystery of who burglarized the Ives’ home in the alley on the campus of Grandby College. Its sequel, The Tunnel of Hugsy Goode (1972), one of Estes’ last books, plods along, characters fail to engage the emotions, and conversation seems seriously anachronistic and inept. Among Estes’ other, less successful writings are her short realistic pieces and her fantasies, all of which lack the freedom, spontaneity, and believability of her longer family stories. Of the short realistic writings, the most highly regarded is The Hundred Dresses (1944), about a Polish immigrant girl who is teased about her foreign name and old, blue dress. Although skillfully told from the child’s point of view, it is too obvious an attempt at promoting intercultural understanding and tolerance.
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The Witch Family (1960). Miranda the Great (1967). The CoatHanger Christmas Tree (1973). The Lost Umbrella of Kim Chu (1978). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hopkins, L. B., More Books by More People (1974). Lowe, C., ‘‘Eleanor Estes: A Bio-Bibliographical Study’’ (thesis, 1958). Townsend, J. R., A Sense of Story (1971). Reference works: The Junior Book of Authors (1951). Newbery Medal Books 1922-55 (1955). SAA (1975). Other references: Children’ Literature Review (1976). Eleanor Estes (videocassette, 1991). Eleanor Estes and Margaret K. McElderry (video, 1975). Horn Book Reflections (1969). —ALETHEA K. HELBIG
EVANS, Abbie Huston Born 20 December 1881, Lee, New Hampshire; died October 1983 Daughter of Lewis D. and Hester Huston Evans Abbie Huston Evans grew up in Maine where she learned to love nature. The sparse but tenacious vegetation of the Maine mountains and seacoast was to form the principal subject of her poetry. Evans’ father, who had been a coal miner in Wales as a boy, was a congregational minister in Camden where Evans taught Sunday school. Among her pupils was Edna St. Vincent Millay. Millay (whose poetry was known earlier and more widely) wrote in the foreword to Evans’ first volume, Outcrop (1928): ‘‘These are the poems of one more deeply and more constantly aware than most people are, of the many voices and faces of lively nature. . . . In reading them, you will find yourself stock-still before some object with which you have rubbed elbows all your life but which you have never truly seen until that moment.’’ Evans received her B.A. (1913, Phi Beta Kappa) and M.A. (1918) from Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was a social worker in a Colorado mining camp during World War I, and later taught dancing, art, and dramatics at the Settlement Music School in Philadelphia (1923-53), and College Settlement Farm-Camp in Horsham, Pennsylvania (1953-57).
Estes was at her best in her earliest books, those about real people in warm, close, family situations. In the Moffat books particularly, she revealed her talent for writing about the world of children from their point of view in language typical of children, without nostalgia, condescension, cuteness, or sentimentality. After the Moffats, she was never able to achieve quite the same degree of authenticity and inventiveness, and it is generally conceded that the Moffats built her reputation and that it rests upon them.
Like the tenacious, slow-growing junipers Evans celebrated, her output has been small and slow, yet her talent is substantial and enduring. Author of a total of four widely spaced volumes of poetry, Evans received many awards and honors such as the Guarantor’s Prize (Poetry, Chicago) in 1931, the Loines Memorial Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1960, and the New England Poetry Club Golden Rose Award in 1965. She received an honorary Litt.D. from Bowdoin College, Maine, in 1961, and she served as a member of the Advisory Board of Contemporary Poetry from 1940 onward. Her poems appeared in the Nation and the New Yorker, and were recorded for the Library of Congress in 1964.
OTHER WORKS: The Sun and the Wind and Mr. Todd (1943). The Sleeping Giant (1948). A Little Oven (1955). Pinky Pye (1958).
Celebrating craggy hills, storms, the seasons, rocks, icebergs, and even dinosaurs, Evans’ poems share the hard, austere beauty
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of the subjects they evoke. ‘‘The Mineral Collection’’ flashes with color; even the flinty rocks are part of the living earth. Evans wrote in a spare, alliterative style. In her Collected Poems (1970), Evans, at age ninety, was still exploring new facets of natural science, such as the Martian landscape. She rejoiced in the sheer pleasure of sensory experience and of life itself: This is what it is To be alive;. . . . No edge but is lit, no cobble but glows. Wakings beset; wherever I turn Flarings play close within reach of my hand. OTHER WORKS: The Bright North (1938). The Poems of Jean Batchelor (edited by Evans and F. S. Esdall, 1947). Fact of Crystal (1961). Abbie Huston Evans Reading Her Poems in the Recording Laboratory (audio recording, 1964). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brandon, G., Quintet: Essays on Five American Women Poets (1967). Saul, G. B., Quintet: Essays on Five American Women Poets (1967). Reference works: CA (1976). Contemporary Poets (1975). —KAREN F. STEIN
EVANS, Mari Born 16 July 1923, Toledo, Ohio children: William, Derek Poet, dramatist, short story writer, and author of children’s books, Mari Evans has made significant contributions to the tradition of 20th-century African American literature. Influenced as a child by the writing of Langston Hughes, her own poetic voice emerged out of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, exploring both personal and political struggles within the black community. Dedicated to the promotion of black pride, Evans uses vibrant images and powerful language to analyze, inform, and inspire. Her first story, written when she was in the fourth grade, appeared in her school newspaper. Her father, an upholsterer who was Evans’ primary caretaker after the death of her mother when Evans was seven, saved the story, showing her ‘‘an impressionable black youngster, . . .the importance of the written word.’’ She discovered Langston Hughes’ The Weary Blues when she was ten and was greatly inspired by his words. He later became a mentor and a friend who, with her father, encouraged her to aspire to become part of the black American literary tradition. As an undergraduate at the University of Toledo, Evans wrote a column for a black-owned weekly. Her discipline as a writer was further enhanced by an apprenticeship as an editor at a predominantly white manufacturing plant, despite the racism that plagued her while there. Her first published poetry appeared in
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1963 in Phylon, Negro Digest, and Dialog. In 1965 Evans received the John Hay Whitney Fellowship, the first of her many writing awards. The poems in Where Is All the Music? (1968), Evans’ first collection, explore individual struggles for human closeness in direct language and powerful images. Her second and best-known poetry collection, I Am a Black Woman (1970), shows a shift in theme from personal struggles to the wider political issues of the African American community and asserts black pride: ‘‘Who can be born / black / and not exult.’’ Highly praised for its sense of realism and authentic voice, the book received many awards, including the Black Academy of Arts and Letters First Poetry award (1970). Like Hughes, Evans draws on African American oral traditions to make her poems speak to and for the community. A third collection, Nightstar: Poems from 1973-1978 (1981), contains powerful explorations of earlier themes and contemporary tragedies. While primarily a poet—with poems appearing in over 200 anthologies, textbooks, and periodicals—Evans is also known for her stories and contributions to theater, television, and other media. She has written six children’s books and seven plays including Eyes (1979), a musical adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Much of her writing has appeared on record albums and in television specials and off-Broadway productions. In 1968 Evans began to produce, direct, and write a highly acclaimed weekly television series The Black Experience. The series, which focused on political and social issues from an African American perspective, aired on WTTV, Indianapolis, from 1968 to 1973. It was one of the first television shows produced by an African American woman. Evans is also known as editor of an extensive anthology of biographical and critical essays entitled Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation (1984). This collection highlights 15 black women poets, novelists, and playwrights, including Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde. Black Women Writers was welcomed by critics as a much-needed addition to African American literary study. Since 1969 Evans has taught or been writer-in-residence at a number of colleges and universities, including Purdue, Indiana University, Northwestern, Washington University at St. Louis, Cornell, State University of New York at Albany, and Spelman College. Besides editing her own anthology, Evans has contributed her poetry to numerous collections gathered by others, particularly in the late 1960s and the 1970s. Dark Symphony: Negro Literature in America (1968) and Black Voices: An Anthology of Afro-American Literature (1968) were the earliest of her career, while The Premier Books of Major Poets: An Anthology, Anthology of Children’s Literature, and 3000 Years of Black Poetry: An Anthology followed in 1970. The year 1972 brought contributions to Afro-American Writing: An Anthology of Prose and Poetry, New Black Voices: An Anthology of Contemporary Afro-American Literature, and The Magic of Black Poetry. Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Music as Poetic References (1973) and Black Out Loud: An Anthology of Modern Poems by Black Americans (1975) completed the series.
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In 1975 Evans received an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Marion College. Among her other awards and honors are a Woodrow Wilson Foundation grant, 1968; Indiana University Writers Conference Award, 1970; Outstanding Woman of the Year (Bloomington, Indiana), 1976; and a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Award, 1981-82. Evans’ recent book, A Dark and Splendid Mass (1992), further explores social issues in the context of the African American culture. While not widely known, the book reinforces her strength and depth as an author on this subject. An anniversary edition of Singing Black, published in 1998 as Singing Black: Alternative Nursery Rhymes for Children, is a poetry book for children aimed at encouraging young African Americans to take pride in their heritage. Evans currently lives in Indianapolis. Although not as active publishing as in the past, she continues to draw the respect of the literary community for her contributions to African American writing. OTHER WORKS: J. D. (1973). I Look at Me! (1974). Rap Stories (1974). River of My Song (1977). Jim Flying High (1979). Whisper (1979). New World (children’s musical, 1984). Boochie (one-woman performance, 1985). Portrait of a Man (1985). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CANR (1989). CP (1991). DLB (1985, 8 May 1999). FC (1990). Negro Almanac (1989). NBAW (1992). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). WW in Black Americans (1992). WW in Writers, Editors and Poets (1992). —MARY E. HARVEY, UPDATED BY CARRIE SNYDER
EVANS, Sarah Ann Born circa 1800; died date unknown Wrote under: A Lady Married Mr. Lemonoskey Sarah Ann Evans is the supposed author of Resignation: An American Novel, By a Lady (1825). The National Union Catalogue Pre-1956 Imprints reports that ‘‘Miss Evans’’ later became ‘‘Mrs. Lemonoskey,’’ but beyond this there are no published details about her life. Like many sentimental novels, Resignation focuses on private lives and how people interact with one another. It is the story
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of Elizabeth Ellison and the intertwining lives of her numerous friends and relatives. Throughout the novel, family and friends are of primary importance and much time is spent together in rural retreats. Although public events like the Revolution, slave uprisings, and English indenture practices occur, they only affect the characters incidentally. Events of the private, domestic world carry much more import. Resignation is filled with remarkable coincidences and cases of poetic justice. It dramatizes the vicissitudes of fate, and those characters who maintain appropriate moral behavior throughout all changes are ultimately rewarded. Consequently, the honorable Elizabeth regains her lost family estate and is free to marry her true love. Christianity is a primary theme in Resignation. In her preface, Evans justifies the publication of the novel by stating its aim is to ‘‘direct the eye of youth to heaven.’’ Therefore, the story narrative illustrates a necessity for piety, fortitude, cheerfulness, and abstinence. Elizabeth demonstrates the appropriate response to the inexplicable nature of life is resignation to God’s will— hence, the novel’s title. To woman is given the role of preserving Christian morality, and Evans is concerned with defining the female’s ‘‘proper sphere.’’ In addition to being religious guides, women are to be teachers and pleasant companions to men. They should cultivate simplicity and gentleness. Women can fill their proper sphere by learning the ‘‘accomplishments of their sex’’ (singing, painting, versifying), as well as useful skills (cooking, sewing, tending the sick). A female writer’s work should show sweetness, dignity, elegance, and piety. She should concentrate her descriptive talent on knowledge of the heart and on moral and religious lessons. Resignation is a patriotic novel. During the story, loyal Americans support the Revolution, praise the virtues of the young nation, and utilize American-made products. Both men and women are interested in discussing the republic’s future, and they generally agree that Christianity and the elevated sphere of woman are central to America’s glory. Resignation does not display literary genius but it is an interesting cultural document. The novel is conventional in content and form, bound by the definition of the sphere of the female writer. Nevertheless, Resignation illustrates the interests of many writers and readers of the early 19th century. —SUSAN COULTRAP McQUIN
EVERMAY, March See EIKER, Mathilde
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F FAHS, Sophia (Blanche) Lyon
director of the experimental Union School of Religion until it closed in 1929.
Born 2 August 1876, Hangchow, China; died 14 April 1978, Hamilton, Ohio Also wrote under: Gertrude Helen Marshall Daughter of David and Mandana Lyon; married Charles H. Fahs, 1901; children: five, two of whom died young
In 1937 Fahs began her long association with the Unitarian denomination (which became the Unitarian Universalist Association in 1961). She served as editor of curriculum, assuming less responsibility in 1954, and finally retiring fully in 1964, when she was eighty-eight years old. During those years she wrote and edited the religious education materials known as the New Beacon Series in Religious Education. These materials, books for children and adults, and guide books for teachers and parents, revolutionized religious education in the liberal churches, including branches of the Quakers, the Ethical Culture Society, several Jewish groups, and some of the more liberal mainline Protestant denominations, as well as the Unitarian-Universalists for whom they were produced. During all these years Fahs was a frequent and effective speaker at churches and conferences. In 1959, at the age of eighty-two, she was ordained into the liberal ministry.
The fourth child of missionary parents, Sophie Lyon Fahs returned to the U. S. with her family in 1880. Her mother remained in America when her husband returned to China, so that Fahs grew up in Wooster, Ohio, and graduated from Wooster College in 1897. Fully intending to go out as a Christian missionary soon after college, Fahs first taught high school and then worked in the Student Volunteer Movement recruiting other students for the missionary cause. In 1898 she became engaged to Charles Harvey Fahs, who also expected to follow a missionary career, but for reasons of health these plans did not materialize. Before the marriage, Fahs did graduate work at the University of Chicago studying the higher criticism of the Bible; thus began a broadening of her orthodox religious beliefs which continued for the rest of her long life. When she died in 1978 at the age of 101, she had become a symbol of the most progressive, liberal position in the field of religious education. In 1904, following her marriage and a move to New York City, Fahs received her M.A. from Columbia University, where she studied in an atmosphere charged with excitement from the ideas of the great progressive educator, John Dewey. Fahs began at once to apply the methods of the progressives to the message of Christian orthodoxy, and during the next 20 years the method completely transformed the message. The articles and books she wrote between 1906 and 1976 reflected the progression of her beliefs, which moved like the colors of the rainbow from the pallid, somber purples of orthodoxy through to the brilliant reds of radical unorthodoxy. Fahs was the mother of five children, three of whom grew to adulthood. The process of educating these children was another major liberalizing force in her thinking. During the childrearing years she was torn between her role as wife and mother and the dream that possessed her of transforming the Sunday schools of America into educationally significant institutions. She once wrote: ‘‘I tremble before the task I am trying to make for myself.’’ During these years Fahs worked as a teacher and director of religious education in various churches. In 1927, she graduated with a B.D. from Union Theological Seminary and was the
Fahs’ book, Today’s Children and Yesterday’s Heritage: A Philosophy of Creative Religious Development (1952), is a summary of her matured philosophy and examines the ideas behind the many children’s books she produced. The books she wrote and edited all display her hard-won conviction that ‘‘we cannot give our children a growing and creative religious life. A fine religion is a personal achievement.’’ A person’s religion is built on experience, primarily, and this experience can be enriched and interpreted through books, Fahs believed. Her style of writing was deeply influenced by a course she took in 1904 with Dr. Walter Pitkin at Columbia University, which emphasized that when writing for children every sentence should be composed of concrete words rather than of descriptions and summaries, and the younger the child for whom one was writing the more specific the concrete detail should be. For this reason, Fahs demanded of herself and all who worked under her painstaking research and fidelity to the facts.
OTHER WORKS: Uganda’s White Man of Work (1907; revised edition, 1970). Red, Yellow, and Black (1918). Racial Relations and the Christian Ideal (1923). Exploring Religion with Eight Year Olds (with H. F. Sweet, 1930). Beginnings of Earth and Sky (1937). Beginnings of Life and Death (with D. T. Spoerl, 1938; revised edition, with Beginnings of Earth and Sky, 1958). Martin and Judy in Sunshine and Rain (with V. Hills, 1940). Consider the Children: How They Grow (with E. Manwell, 1940). Growing Bigger (with E. Manwell, 1942). Leading Children in Worship (1943). Jesus: The Carpenter’s Son (1945). The Church Across the Street (with R. D. Manwell, 1947; revised edition 1962). From Long Ago and Many Lands (1948). The Old Story of Salvation
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(1955). Worshipping Together with Questioning Minds (1965). George Fox: The Man Who Wouldn’t (1971). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hunter, E. F., Sophia Lyon Fahs: A Biography (1966). Other references: Religious Education (Sept.-Oct. 1956, July-Aug. 1966, Jan-Feb. 1968, Nov.-Dec. 1976). —EDITH F. HUNTER
FAIRBANK, Janet Ayer Born 7 June 1878, Chicago, Illinois; died 28 December 1951, Wauwautosa, Wisconsin Daughter of Benjamin F. and Janet Hopkins Ayer; married Kellogg Fairbank, 1900 The older sister of novelist Margaret Ayer Barnes, Janet Ayer Fairbank was educated in private schools and attended the University of Chicago. A dedicated worker for woman suffrage, Fairbank was a member of the executive committee of the Democratic National Committee (1919-20), served as Illinois Democratic national committeewoman (1924-28), and was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1932. During World War I she was a member of the Woman’s National Liberty Loan Committee and of the Illinois Committee of the Woman’s Division of the Council for National Defense. Before World War II, she was a national officer of the America First Committee, and in 1940 she campaigned for Willkie. Fairbank’s most notable philanthropic activity was her 24 years on the board of the Chicago Lying-in Hospital, including service as its president. Three of Fairbank’s novels form a trilogy. The Cortlandts of Washington Square (1922) introduces Ann Byrne, ten-year-old ward of a wealthy New Yorker, and follows her growing up in the years prior to and during the Civil War. The novel concludes with her marriage to Peter Smith, a young worker from Chicago who promises they will be ‘‘partners.’’ The Smiths (1925), set in Chicago, stretches from the Civil War almost to World War I, the story of a marriage: Ann’s shattering discovery that to Peter being ‘‘partners’’ does not mean involving her in his business; the birth and rearing of children; and Peter’s growth in wealth and status. Throughout, Ann’s increasing strength and wisdom parallel the rise of the city. Rich Man, Poor Man (1936) centers on Ann’s grandson, Hendricks Smith, and his wife, Barbara, tracing their involvement in Roosevelt’s Progressive Party, World War I, and the suffragist movement. Though sometimes described as a ‘‘suffrage novel,’’ the book does not depict the movement fully, and the portrayal of Barbara, the suffragist, is not completely sympathetic. Fairbank’s interest was in character delineation, not in propaganda. Her two other novels of note both bear thematic relationships with the trilogy. The Lions’ Den (1930), a political novel, has as its protagonist an idealistic young Wisconsin congressman. His
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disillusionment, partial corruption, and eventual courageous behavior when tested make up the substance of the novel. The Bright Land (1932), perhaps Fairbank’s finest novel, tells the life story of Abby-Delight Flagg, child of New England Puritans, brought up in a world where women face hard work and, all too often, early death in childbirth. Partly to escape her dour father, she elopes, and the second half of the novel tells of her married life in Galena, Illinois, during its years first as a boom town and then in decline. Like Ann Smith, Abby-Delight grows in strength and wisdom, but she has more humor and is less idealized than Ann. Once popular, Fairbank’s fiction is neglected now. Her favored Illinois settings during the 19th and 20th centuries are objectively presented, and her characters, particularly her women, are sharply and believably delineated. The novels move at a leisurely pace, sometimes with little action, although Fairbank occasionally attempted even battle scenes. In The Cortlandts of Washington Square, her impressionistic presentation—from the point of view of a young woman caught up in it—of the Battle of Gettysburg is gripping. Her studies of historical trends and political issues are serious and perceptive. Although the quantity is not great, the quality of her work is high; her claim upon our attention is greater than has been recognized in recent times. OTHER WORKS: At Home (1910). In Town, & Other Conversations (1910). Three Days More (1910). Report of National Woman’s Liberty Loan Committee for the Victory Loan Campaign, April 21st to May 10th, 1919 (compiled by Fairbank, 1920). Idle Hands (1927). The Alleged Great-Aunt by H. K. Webster (completed by Fairbank, with M. A. Barnes, 1935). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: NCAB, 39. TCA. Other references: Chicago’s Authors Celebrate Chicago (cassette, 1988). The Grolier Library of Women’s Biographies (1998). Literary Digest International Book Review (Sept. 1925). NYTBR (15 Oct. 1922, 28 June 1925, 7 Dec. 1930). SR (7 Jan. 1933, 12 Dec. 1936). —MARY JEAN DEMARR
FAIRFIELD, A. M. See ALCOTT, Louisa May
FARLEY, Harriet Born circa 18 February 1813, Claremont, New Hampshire; died 12 November 1907, New York, New York Daughter of Stephen and Lucy Saunders Farley; married John I. Donlevy, 1854 The sixth of 10 children of a congregational minister and his wife, who became ‘‘harmlessly insane’’ after bearing the children, Harriet Farley began contributing to her family’s support when she was fourteen. After plaiting straw for hats, binding
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shoes, and engaging in other home manufacturing, she made a brief and unrewarding attempt to teach, and then went to work in the Lowell textile mills in 1837. In Lowell, as the autobiographical ‘‘Letters from Susan’’ show, she felt free to attend lectures, sample different churches, and join an improvement circle. In spite of the 13-hour working day and the crowded corporation boardinghouse, she felt that the work offered the best economic rewards for women and didn’t require ‘‘very violent exertion, as much of our farm work does.’’ When the two products of the improvement circles, the Lowell Offering and the Operatives Magazine, were bought by a local Whig newspaper in 1842 and combined under the name of the Lowell Offering, Farley and Harriott Curtis, assisted by Harriet Lees, became editors and, later, owners. Under attack from Sarah G. Bagley and others, Farley denied that her magazine was supported by the corporations, but Farley’s father and brother both received help from mill-owner Amos Lawrence, and the Hamilton Company bought up $1,000 worth of back numbers during the Lowell Offering’s last year. Determinedly genteel and noncontroversial, the Lowell Offering lost its audience as the 10-hour movement gained in strength, and its appeal waned even further when the well-written labor paper, the Voice of Industry, appeared in Lowell in October 1845. The Offering ceased publication in December, but after the failure of the 10-hour movement in 1847, it was revived as the New England Offering, with Farley as both editor and publisher. Her efforts, however, again proved unsuccessful with the operatives. After the failure of the Offering in 1850, Farley moved to New York City, where she became a contributor to Godey’s Lady’s Book. After her marriage, Farley gave up her writing, since her husband did not approve. Farley’s avowed intention in the publications she edited was to bring a little ‘‘cheer’’ into the lives of female operatives, and the literary nature of the magazines was, she thought, above sordid issues. Her first signed editorial said of the operatives: ‘‘We should like to influence them as moral and rational beings. . . .Our field is a wide one. . . .With wages, board, etc., we have nothing to do—these depend on circumstances over which we have no control.’’ Farley assumed her readers were too ladylike to press for reforms by surrounding ‘‘City Hall in a mob, but, if wronged, would seek redress in some less exceptionable manner.’’ Farley’s essays and stories, though sometimes self-consciously literary and ‘‘tiresomely inspirational,’’ often provide insights into the lives and aspirations of the female factory workers. Her most interesting sketches—because most realistic and closely based on her own experience—are the ‘‘Letters from Susan,’’ which appeared in the 1844 editions of the Lowell Offering. ‘‘Susan’’ gives her first impressions of Lowell, of the crowding and noise as well as the economic and intellectual independence. Such stories as ‘‘The Sister’’ and ‘‘Evening before Pay-Day’’ use factory and boardinghouse backgrounds for sentimental homilies of self-sacrificing sisters or daughters. In ‘‘Abby’s Year in Lowell,’’ the dutiful daughter returns home with ‘‘some little books for the children, and a new calico
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dress for mother’’ and ‘‘a nice black silk handkerchief’’ for her father to wear around his neck on Sundays. All of the rest of her savings have been deposited in the bank, and her father bursts into tears over the bankbook—proud of her prudence, self-command, and filial affection. Farley’s poetry, like most of the poetry in her magazines, is undistinguished: lacking true details, it is more removed than her other writing from the real experience of the workers’ lives. OTHER WORKS: Shells from the Strand of the Sea of Genius (1847). Operatives Reply to. . .Jere. Clemens (1850). Happy Nights at Hazel Nook; or, Cottage Stories (1854). Fancy’s Frolics; or, Christmas Stories Told in a Happy Home in New England (1880). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Eisler, B., The Lowell Offering: Writings by New England Mill Women (1977). Foner, P. S., The Factory Girls (1977). Josephson, H., The Golden Threads: Near England’s Mill Girls and Magnates (1949). Robinson, H. H., Loom and Spindle; or, Life Among the Early Mill Girls (1898). Reference works: DAB. NAW. NCAB. —SUSAN SUTTON SMITH
FARMER, Fannie Merritt Born 23 March 1857, Boston, Massachusetts; died 15 January 1915, Boston, Massachusetts Daughter of John F. and Mary Watson Farmer An attack of paralysis, which maimed her for life, prevented the seventeen-year-old Fannie Farmer from attending college. For a time, she worked in the family kitchen, where her interest in cooking found an outlet in the preparation of meals for boarders in the home. Her health improved, and, at twenty-eight, she enrolled in the Boston Cooking School. After her graduation in 1889, she was appointed assistant to the principal, Carrie M. Dearborn. Upon the latter’s death in 1891, Farmer became director of the Boston Cooking School. In 1902 she established her own school, Miss Farmer’s School of Cookery. The school’s curriculum emphasized the practice rather than the theory of cooking, and it specialized in cooking for the sick and convalescent. In addition to her work at the school, Farmer wrote a popular cookery column for the Woman’s Home Companion and lectured to such diverse groups as nurses, women’s clubs, and the Harvard Medical School. In 1908 Farmer suffered a stroke that completely paralyzed her legs, but she continued to fulfill her professional commitments up to the time of her death. Just 10 days before she died, Farmer delivered her final lecture. One of Farmer’s chief contributions to the art of cooking was the standardization of measurements. In an age when haphazard measurements prevailed and cookbooks listed the vaguest of
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rules—a ‘‘pinch,’’ a ‘‘lump the size of an egg’’ or ‘‘walnut’’ were common terms—Farmer insisted upon exact proportions. In her books, quantities are accurately stated. While women were still considered emotional and unscientific, Farmer transformed cookery from mere guesswork into a science. The style of Farmer’s writing is lucid, concrete, and clear. She assumes nothing and takes pains to educate the reader regarding elementary cooking terminology and measurements. In Food and Cookery for the Sick and Convalescent (1904), her recipes for invalids are accompanied by advice and recommendations regarding their care. Although Farmer considered her life’s work to be the development of cooking and diets for the sick, including the diabetic, she is best known today for her immensely popular first work, The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896). This work ran into 21 editions before her death, and continues to be a standard work today. Although H. L. Mencken, in 1930, criticized the work for its ‘‘provinciality’’ and Yankee practicality and simplicity, most readers would agree with K. Smallzried’s assessment in The Everlasting Pleasure: ‘‘It is doubtful whether any home or any food company has escaped the influence of Fannie Merritt Farmer, indirect if not direct.’’ OTHER WORKS: Chafing Dish Possibilities (1898). What to Have for Dinner (1905). Catering for Special Occasions, with Menus and Recipes (1911). A New Book of Cookery (1912). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hopkinson, D., Fannie in the Kitchen (1999). Smallzried, K. A., The Everlasting Pleasure (1956). Vare, E. A., Women Inventors & Their Discoveries (1993). Reference works: DAB. NAW. NCAB 22. Other references: American Mercury (July 1944). Time (29 May 1978). —SUSAN E. SIEFERT
FARNHAM, Eliza Woodson (Burhans) Born 17 November 1815, Rensselaerville, New York; died 15 December 1864, New York, New York Wrote under: Eliza W. Farnham Daughter of Cornelius and Mary Wood Burhans; married Thomas Jefferson Farnham, 1836; William Fitzpatrick, 1852 While her first husband was away on exploring expeditions in the Far West, Eliza Woodson Farnham developed her interests in reform. Her most controversial work was at Sing Sing prison where, as matron from 1844 to 1848, she revolutionized the treatment of female prisoners through her phrenological approach to the problem of rehabilitation. She resigned after frequent conflicts with conservative staff members who denounced her environmentalism and determinism. In California, where she went in 1849 to settle her first husband’s estate, she visited and criticized San Quentin prison and lectured on various subjects. In 1858 she addressed the New York Women’s Rights Convention
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on her theory of female biological and moral superiority. During the Civil War, she became involved in the Women’s Loyal National League, which sought a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery. She also nursed the wounded at Gettysburg. Farnham’s writing shows the independence of mind, the curiosity, and the strength that she exhibited in her life. Life in Prairie Land (1846) is a vivid account of her experiences in Illinois. The account of her life in the West, California, In-Doors and Out (1856), is colorful and compelling. The reader is drawn into the world of California after the Gold Rush, when a woman’s appearance brought crowds of gaping men to the street. In this very fluid, primitive society, Farnham bought her own ranch, built her own house, and traveled on horseback unchaperoned. The last part of the book, which describes and evaluates California society and culture, tends to be moralistic, although Farnham’s analysis of the particular problems of women in frontier society is penetrating. Eliza Woodson (1864; a revision of My Early Days, 1859) is an autobiographical novel treating Farnham’s life as a foster child in a home where she was treated as a household drudge and denied the benefits of a formal education. The fictional heroine reflects Farnham’s own character as a tough, determined individual who works hard to achieve her goals, overcoming all obstacles. Clearly, Farnham’s independence of thought and her interest in biological evolution originated in her childhood. Woman and Her Era (1864), Farnham’s major work, argues that women are not only morally superior to men but biologically superior as well. Her position is based on the following syllogism: ‘‘Life is exalted in proportion to its Organic and Functional complexity; Woman’s Organism is more complex and her totality of Function larger than those of any other being inhabiting our earth; Therefore her position in the scale of Life is the most exalted, the Sovereign One.’’ Reproductive functions, commonly cited to demonstrate female inferiority, are used in Farnham’s philosophy to place woman far above the male. The same idea dominates The Ideal Attained (1865). This novel’s heroine, Eleanora Bromfield, is an ideal, superior woman who tests and transforms the hero, Colonel Anderson, until he is a worthy mate who combines masculine strength with the nobility of womanhood and is ever ready to sacrifice himself to the needs of the feminine, maternal principle. In a society that defined the true woman as submissive, pure, and weak, Farnham forged her own definitions of female selfhood and lived by her own standards. Both her theory and practice (sometimes contradictory) provided alternatives for women unsatisfied with the narrow lives laid out for them by their culture. OTHER WORKS: Rationale of Crime by M. Sampson (introduction by Farnham, 1846). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bower, K. S., Eliza Farnham, Western Adventurer, 1815-1865 (slideshow, 1982). Dawes, J. A., Women Writers and the American Wilderness: Responses to the Frontier in Caroline Kirkland’s ‘‘A New Home Who’ll Follow?’’ and Eliza Farnham’s ‘‘Life in Prairie Land’’ (thesis, 1997). Davies, J. D.,
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FARRAR
Phrenology, Fad and Science (1955). Kirby, G. B., Years of Experience (1887). Lewis, W., From Newgate to Dannemora: The Rise of the Penitentiary in New York, 1796-1848 (1965). Mount Pleasant State Prison Annual Report of the Inspectors (1846). Prison Association of New York First, Second and Third Reports (1845, 1846, 1847) and First Report of the Female Department (1845). Woodward, H. B., The Bold Women (1953). Reference works: DAB. HWS. NAW. NCAB. Other references: Atlantic (Sept. 1864). New York Tribune (16 Dec. 1864). NYT (18 Dec. 1864). —KAREN SZYMANSKI
FARNHAM, Mateel Howe Born 1883, Atchison, Kansas; died 2 May 1957, Norwalk, Connecticut Daughter of Edgar W. and Clara Frank Howe; married Dwight T. Farnham, 1910 Daughter of an editor and novelist, and named after a character in her father’s most famous novel, The Story of a Country Town (1883), Mateel Howe Farnham wrote a number of popular novels herself. Little is known about her education, except that she attended Mount Vernon Seminary in Washington, D.C. She married an engineer who wrote three humorous autobiographical books about their country home and garden. Her first novel, published rather late in life, won a $10,000 prize. Of her novels, the three set in the Midwest are her best work. Rebellion (1927), her prize-winning first novel, has an interesting background and the fascination of autobiographical revelations. Dedicated to her mother, ‘‘whom I have never known to do a selfish or an unkind thing,’’ the novel clearly exposes some of the tensions and morbidity of the Howe family life. Like Howe, the father in the novel is a depressed and bitter man who takes out his unhappiness on his family. While the family sketched in this book, the Burrells, does not parallel the Howe family in many outward circumstances, the central conflict of the story also pits the strongminded girl Jacqueline against her domineering father. Set in New Concord, Kansas, the novel champions the right of the daughter to live her own life—go to college, get a job, and marry the man of her choice. Her vain, egotistical father would like her to be a Southern belle. After many conflicts, she marries suitably, despite her father’s abnormal jealousy, and gets her inheritance by blackmailing him. Farnham’s two other Midwest novels, Lost Laughter (1933) and Great Riches (1934), both focus on the rise of young men in country towns, with a suitable complement of domineering parents and scheming women. Farnham’s work is shot through with gothic elements— family secrets, letters withheld from dependents, and rich, eccentric visitors—in the same way that her father’s work is. Her novels also share with her father’s a tendency to preach, as is most
evident in Ex-Love (1937), an exposé of the ‘‘alimony racket.’’ Here, a greedy and jealous woman gratuitously divorces her loving husband and then holds him to a large alimony settlement, although she is wealthy herself and he has been ruined by the Depression. Again, blackmail saves the day, but does not save the hero from a stint in jail and the loss of his new wife’s child. Three other novels are set in the Susquehanna valley. MarshFire (1928) is the story of another scheming woman, who gets ahead in business by abject flattery of males. Wild Beauty (1930), made into a movie (Wayward) in 1932 by Paramount, is another tale of domineering parents and children seeking their own lives. Farnham’s last novel, The Tollivers (1944), mixes social comedy with eccentric characters. These novels by Farnham are not very well written, and perhaps most of their interest lies in their autobiographical elements. In their depiction of marriage, small-town society, and business adventures, they are fairly typical of their times. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bucco, M., E. W. Howe (1977). Farnham, D. T., A Place in the Country (1936). Farnham, D. T., Be It Ever So Humble (1942). Farnham, D. T., The Embattled Male in the Garden (1941). Sackett, S. J., E. W. Howe (1972). Other references: NYT (3 May 1957). Saturday Evening Post (25 Oct. 1941). —BEVERLY SEATON
FARQUHARSON, Martha See FINLEY, Martha
FARRAR, Eliza (Ware) Rotch Born 12 July 1791, Dunkirk, France; died 22 April 1870, Springfield, Massachusetts Wrote under: Eliza Farrar Daughter of Benjamin and Elizabeth Barker Rotch; married John Farrar, 1828 (died 1853) Daughter and granddaughter of Nantucket Quakers who had emigrated to France to establish a tax-free whaling port, Eliza Rotch Farrar went with her family to England during the Reign of Terror. At her father’s estate near Milford Haven she received an excellent education and grew up among eminent European and American visitors. When her father lost his fortune in 1819, she went to live with her grandparents in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Disowned as too liberal by the Quaker meeting there, she became a Unitarian. Except for trips to England to visit her parents, she spent the rest of her life in Massachusetts. In her ‘‘Address to Parents’’ at the beginning of The Children’s Robinson Crusoe (1830), Farrar praises Defoe’s work for its ‘‘spirit’’ and ‘‘naturalness’’: ‘‘It seems to be exactly what it
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purports to be, the narrative of a profane, ill-educated, runaway apprentice of the 17th century.’’ Farrar then asks, ‘‘Can such a tale, though perfect in itself, be suited to children who have been carefully guarded from all profaneness, vulgarity, and superstition?’’ Her version of Crusoe is accordingly cleansed of such faults as his ‘‘disobedience to his parents, and his inordinate love of adventure’’ and endowed with qualities parents would wish their children to admire and cultivate: ‘‘industry, perseverance, resignation to the will of God.’’ To increase the utility of her hero’s adventures, Farrar adds ‘‘as much information about domestic arts as could well be interwoven with the story’’ and makes Friday into a native ‘‘of a mild, affectionate, and tractable nature.’’ Farrar presented another proper hero to be emulated by children in The Story of the Life of Lafayette as Told by a Father to His Children (1831). Henry Moreton tells his father he wishes he lived in the days of Alexander or Caesar and could see these great men; his father takes issue with Henry’s idea of these men as great, and reminds him that he has seen on Boston Common ‘‘one of the most extraordinary men that ever lived!’’ Again, the hero’s life acquires value as an example and lesson, but his actions are generally left to speak for themselves without intrusive moralizing. The tale takes 17 evenings. Stirring events are briskly and clearly related, the moral intent doesn’t interfere with the often exciting story and interesting anecdotes, and many vignettes of Moreton family life provide humor. A manual of advice, The Young Lady’s Friend (1836), was Farrar’s most important work, widely popular in England and America and reprinted as late as 1880. Farrar addresses her work to middle-class girls who have finished school. It opens with a brisk chapter of warning to those who assume that their intellectual life ends when they leave the schoolroom and a second chapter ‘‘On the Improvement of Time.’’ It closes with a chapter on ‘‘Mental Culture’’ and impressive lists of books for a ‘‘course of reading’’ on history, biography, and travel. In between, she holds to an essentially conservative view of ‘‘woman’s peculiar calling,’’ but emphasizes practical details of behavior and treats these with gentle amusement and, above all, common sense. The Young Lady’s Friend provides valuable insight into the activities and preoccupations of the 19th-century American middle class. Recollections of Seventy Years (1865), Farrar’s last book, furnishes fascinating glimpses of life in England and France between 1783 and 1819. Her method is anecdotal, and many of her lively anecdotes seem, in themselves, to furnish enough material for entire novels. Farrar cared for her invalid husband for 14 years before his death in 1853. These are the tales she told to enliven his sickroom. They remain beguiling entertainment today. OTHER WORKS: John Howard (1833). The Youth’s Letter-Writer (1834). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Carson, G., The Polite Americans (1966). Hopkins, V. C., Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon (1959). Lynes, R. J., The Domesticated Americans (1963).
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Schlesinger, E. B., ‘‘Two Early Harvard Wives: Eliza Farrar and Eliza Follen,’’ in NEQ (June 1965). Reference works: Female Prose Writers of America, with Portraits, Biographical Notices, and Specimens of Their Writing (1852). NAW. NCAB. —SUSAN SUTTON SMITH
FAUGERES, Margaretta V. (Bleecker) Born 11 October 1771, Tomanick, New York; died 14 January 1801, Brooklyn, New York Daughter of John J. and Ann Eliza Schuyler Bleecker; married Peter Faugeres, 1792 Margaretta V. Faugeres was an heiress to both the wealth and the intellectual traditions of two of the most respected families in New York. Against her father’s wishes, she married a French physician, Peter Faugeres. Called an ‘‘infidel,’’ Faugeres was actually a member of the popular Jacobin circles. Margaretta was an enthusiastic supporter of what she took to be the new millenium of human freedom; her choice of Bastille Day as marriage day shows the whole bent of her alliance; she was marrying a movement rather than a man. Unfortunately, her husband abused her and quickly ran through the fortune left to her by her father. Faugeres and her infant daughter were reduced to living in a granary for some time in 1796. Her husband died of yellow fever in 1798, and Faugeres thereafter supported herself by teaching school in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Brooklyn, New York. Broken in health and spirit, she was only twenty-nine years old when she died. The majority of Faugeres’s work was produced before she was twenty. In 1793, Faugeres prepared The Posthumous Works of Ann Eliza Bleecker, a collection of her mother’s work supplemented with Faugeres’s own poetry and prose, including an affecting ‘‘Memoir.’’ After 1795, she wrote some pieces for the New York Monthly Magazine and the American Museum and, in 1797, published ‘‘The Ghost of John Young,’’ but her literary output was hampered by her family problems. Her tendency towards sentimental melancholy, the sadness sincere, is expressed in highly artificial language in the early poems included in The Posthumous Works. Although rendered fairly obscure by an abundance of private references, her poetic language is very formal, with few naturalist touches. There is an excessive use of the infelicitous neoclassical poetical devices: ‘‘fleecy tribe’’ is substituted for sheep, birds are the ‘‘feather’d choir,’’ personifications are overabundant. The unhappy and short life of her mother, acting upon an immature imagination, to which the pose of melancholy seemed the height of human delicacy, contributed to the themes that would now seem morbid for an eighteen-year-old girl. Supplementing these sad strains are several lively patriotic poems. Faugeres was genuinely convinced of the noble renewal of
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human liberty embodied by the American and French revolutions. In her long topographical poem, ‘‘The Hudson’’ (1793), one of the few pieces in which she employs natural description, Faugeres’s primary purpose is to give an account of the political history of the Hudson River during the American Revolution. In 1795 she offered Belisarius: A Tragedy to the John Street Theatre. It was refused, but published by subscription the same year. Written simply and tastefully in blank verse, the message of pacifism, antimaterialism, and the vanity of power is extraordinary for the times. In a clear analogy with French politics, Belisarius is the just man caught between corrupt courtiers on the one hand, and heartless and cruel revolutionists on the other. Belisarius represents uncompromising human values. The play quietly exposes the vanity of fame and pomp and maintains the sacredness of ordinary human life. The further development of Faugeres’s maturity of mind and political opinion can be seen in ‘‘The Ghost of John Young,’’ a monody opposing capital punishment, ‘‘shewing how inconsistent sanguinary Laws are, in a Country which boasts of her Freedom and Happiness.’’ Faugeres appears to have been an extraordinarily fair and good woman, ‘‘a favorite among her literary acquaintances’’ whose life of early genius and promise so quickly disintegrated into ruin. Her political idealism is typical of many talented women of this era; so is the personal tragedy that prevented many of them, Faugeres included, from living long enough to develop maturity of literary judgement and production. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bleecker, A. E.,The Posthumous Works of Ann Eliza Bleeker in Prose and Verse to Which is Added a Collection of Essays, Prose and Poetical (1993). Reference works: Biographie Universelle, M. Michaud (1855). CAL (article on Ann Eliza Bleecker, 1877). FPA. NAW (article on Ann Eliza Bleecker by L. Leary). Nouvelle Biographie Generale, J. C. F. Hoefer (1958). —L. W. KOENGETER
FAUSET, Jessie Redmon Born 27 April 1882, Camden County, New Jersey; died 30 April 1961, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Daughter of Redmon and Annie Seamon Fauset; married Herbert Harris, 1929 Jessie Redmon Fauset was the youngest of seven children born to an African Methodist Episcopal minister in Philadelphia. Fauset’s family was poor, but her father’s black church position and interest in books and art kept the family ‘‘working, aspiring, and discussing.’’ The children were educated as much as biases would permit. With opportunities nearer to home shut off because of her race, Fauset, the first black woman at Cornell University,
graduated Phi Beta Kappa and spent many years teaching French at an all-black high school in Washington, D.C. Correspondence from 1903 with W. E. B. DuBois, the black sociologist, led Fauset to early involvement with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In 1919 DuBois persuaded her to move to New York City to work with The Crisis, of which he was the editor. As its literary editor from 1919 to 1926, Fauset discovered and published Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, and other ‘‘Harlem Renaissance’’ writers. She also published her own work, held and attended innumerable literary soirees with black and white writers, and traveled abroad with DuBois’s Pan-African conferences. Fauset edited and did most of the writing for the Brownies’ Book, a delightful monthly magazine for black children. Fauset also contributed to black American literature a large body of her own creative writing. Her poetry, frequently anthologized, her short stories, and her essays—which show sensitivity to racism and sexism worldwide—were published primarily in The Crisis, 1912-29, and in the Brownies’ Book, 1920-21. It is for her novels, however, that Fauset is primarily remembered. There Is Confusion (1924) was written in response to the picture drawn of black life by a white writer, T. S. Stribling, in Birthright. Fauset believed she could more accurately and honestly depict characters of her own race. Through the story of Joanna Marshall and Peter Bye, from childhood to marriage, she makes clear her themes and concerns. History, heredity, and environment impinge on the free will of Fauset’s characters, and their roles as women and black Americans come close to limiting and defining them. Joanna and Peter’s growth is seen in their being freed of their obsessions with bitterness, respectability, and success. Fauset’s execution is often weak in her first novel, but the subjects she explores make the book worthwhile. Fauset’s second novel, Plum Bun (1929), deals with a topic frequent in black literature: Angela Murray, the lighter of two sisters, ‘‘passes’’ for white. Attention by critics to the subject matter of the book has led to their ignoring its formal strengths, which represent a distinct improvement over the writing in Fauset’s first novel and which make Plum Bun the best of her four novels. The Chinaberry Tree (1931) concentrates in a rather nostalgic way on black home and community life in a small New Jersey village. Formally, it takes Greek mythology and drama as its most immediately recognizable analogue. The comparison with Greek drama is evident, from a tragically inescapable family curse with overtones of incest, to the seasonal pattern of death and rebirth. Fauset’s last published novel zeroed in on the ironies of American black life with more directness and less sentimentality than any of her earlier work. In Comedy: American Style (1933), racial discrimination is internalized in the black characters, particularly in the destructive power of Olivia Carey. Themes have not changed much from Fauset’s 1924 novel, but what has changed is her willingness to unstintingly depict those who are destroyed by their environments, as well as those who overcome
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them. Olivia’s actions, destructive to her children, are motivated entirely by her desire to be white and her hatred of blacks. At the same time, Comedy: American Style discusses a strong, positive black culture, supporting those characters, such as Olivia’s husband and oldest son, who embrace it. Formally, the novel is divided into dramatic elements: ‘‘Plot,’’ ‘‘Character,’’ ‘‘Teresa’s Act,’’ ‘‘Oliver’s Act,’’ ‘‘Curtain.’’ The bitter comedy of American life is played out to a bitter end. Fauset’s literary strengths are those of her own character. Intelligence and curiosity are supplemented by kindness, generosity, graciousness, and tolerance. She had no dominating passion, no driving opinions which scattered all else before them. Her books are more exploratory than dogmatic, more searching than protesting. The facts of her life and her time make clear the struggle and hard work which gave her strength.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Aptheker, H., ed., The Correspondence of W. E. B. DuBois (1973). Bone, R., The Negro Novel in America (1966). Bontemps, A., The Harlem Renaissance Remembered (1972). Braithwaite, W., in The Black Novelist (1970). Davis, A., From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers, 1900-1960 (1974). Gayle, A., The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America (1976). Huggins, N., Harlem Renaissance (1971). Hughes, L., The Big Sea (1940). Sylvander, C. W., Jessie Redmon Fauset, Black American Writer (1980). Reference works: Black American Writers Past and Present: A Biographical and Bibliographical Dictionary (1975). Profiles of Negro Womanhood (1966). TCA, TCAS. Other references: CLAJ (1971, 1974). Freedomways (Winter 1975). Phylon (June 1978). Southern Workman (May 1932). —CAROLYN WEDIN SYLVANDER
FELTON, Rebecca Latimer Born 10 June 1835, DeKalb County, Georgia; died 24 January 1930, Atlanta, Georgia Also wrote under: Mrs. W. H. Felton Daughter of Charles and Eleanor Latimer; married William H. Felton, 1853 Rebecca Latimer Felton’s father, a tavern keeper and the local postmaster, believed his daughters should be as well educated as boys and helped build a school in the community. Felton graduated from the Madison Female College in 1852, and the following year married a widowed physician and Methodist minister. The first years of Felton’s married life were uneventful. She devoted herself to caring for her stepdaughter and raising her own three children. During the Civil War, the Feltons were in the path of Sherman’s invading army and were forced to flee to
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Macon, Georgia. When the war ended, they returned to Cartersville to find their home and fields destroyed. Undaunted, Felton and her husband rebuilt their property and acquired more land. To bring in money, they ran a school for young children. In 1874 Dr. Felton entered politics as the congressional candidate of the Independent Democrats, those revolting against the conservative Bourbons, who dominated state politics. Felton was in her element in the rough-and-tumble world of politics. Because it was considered improper for a woman to participate openly in politics, Felton worked behind the scenes, writing her husband’s speeches and attacking the Bourbons in newspaper articles. Felton won the election and they moved to the capital. Felton was so skillful a politician and publicist that her husband’s opponents claimed the Seventh District had two representatives in Congress, both husband and wife. Dr. Felton was reelected in 1876 and 1878, but was defeated in his bid for a fourth term. In 1884 he was elected to the state legislature, where he served three terms. After her husband’s retirement from politics, Felton began a career as a reformer. She spoke out against the brutal convict lease system, both because of the institution’s barbarity and because most of the contracts were held by her Bourbon enemies. A devout Methodist, she joined the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and became one of its most effective speakers. She appealed to women to work to have liquor outlawed, citing the shame and brutality visited on innocent women whose men drank. She also shrewdly utilized racism by raising the spectre of drunken black men lusting after white women. Her efforts were rewarded in 1908 when Georgia passed statewide prohibition. Later, Felton campaigned for woman suffrage and against the League of Nations. Felton’s literary career began while her husband was in politics. She enjoyed her verbal duels with the Bourbon leadership, playing a sort of hit-and-run game by attacking them unmercifully and then hiding behind her dignity as a woman when they responded in kind. In 1885 she and Dr. Felton purchased the Cartersville Free Press as a campaign organ. They renamed it the Courant, and Felton ran it singlehandedly for over a year. For 28 years she wrote a column for the Atlanta Journal, offering household hints and advice on personal problems and etiquette, and publicizing her reforms. Felton had a long memory and never forgave her enemies. Her first book, My Memoirs of Georgia Politics (1911), pays tribute to Dr. Felton and the Independents and denounces the Bourbons, most of whom had died years ago. While her accusations of fraud and corruption were true, they were presented in a partisan manner and with little attempt to check the accuracy of the sources. Country Life in Georgia in the Days of My Youth (1919) is primarily a record of her middle years and her husband’s political campaigns. The Romantic Story of Georgia’s Women (1930) offers brief biographies of Revolutionary War heroines and contemporary reformers and an extended autobiography of herself.
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Felton achieved a lifelong dream to hold political office herself in 1922, when she was appointed to fill the brief term of the late Senator Thomas E. Watson. By special arrangement with Walter George, Watson’s elected successor, Felton was allowed to appear on the floor of the Senate, present her credentials, and be sworn in. The next day, she made a brief speech and retired, allowing George to take his seat. She returned to Georgia, the first woman U.S. senator, if only for a day. Felton should be remembered more for what she did than for her writing. In many ways, she was the prototype for such modern women activists as Bella Abzug. Though forced by the conventions of the postwar South to use her literary talents in traditional areas, she managed to extend these conventions to include politics and social reforms. If Felton’s autobiographical writings were somewhat self-serving, this may be forgiven, for she had much of which to be proud. OTHER WORKS: On the Subjugation of Women and the Enfranchisement of Women (1915). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Talmadge, J. E., Rebecca Latimer Felton: Nine Stormy Decades (1960). Thompson, C. M., Reconstruction in Georgia; Economic, Social, Political 1865-1872 (1915). Vann Woodward, C., Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (1951). Reference works: NAW. Other references: Georgia Historical Quarterly (March 1946, June 1946). Georgia Review (1955).
critically ill at death’s door, but God had sent her back to finish her work. She compares her book to the pebble with which David slew Goliath, hoping its religious attitudes will ‘‘be so slung as to smite one philistine.’’ Fenno’s subjects in both poetry and prose are mostly traditional and religious. Her religious tone is one of sweet selfassurance; her persona expresses neither tension nor doubt about the state of her soul or God’s mercy. Some poems exhibit an early romanticism; however, each nature poem ends conservatively with praise of the Deity. Indeed, graveyard romanticism is prevalent in many of Fenno’s ostensibly religious verses. Occasionally a feeling of sweetness and languor, enhanced by her smoothrhymed couplets, invades a poem, contradicting the harsh tones of traditional New England religious expression. Unfortunately, her childish metrics often devalues the serious ideas which she expresses. The last third of her collection is organized as a series of short sermonic essays. Many of these subjects duplicate those found in her sentimental and religious verse. As in her poetry, the tropes in Fenno’s prose reflect the influence of early romanticism. Fenno’s verse and prose reveal a dedicated attempt to experiment with the sophisticated and complicated literary modes and ideas of her age while remaining within a religious context. Her simple but often skillfully atmospheric works show that by the late 18th century, American women had begun to consider themselves as serious writers and had consciously accepted their expanding roles as spiritual and moral guides for the young republic.
—JANET E. KAUFMAN
—JACQUELINE HORNSTEIN
FENNO, Jenny FERBER, Edna Born circa 1770; died death date unknown Jenny Fenno, a resident of Boston, Massachusetts, and a Baptist by religious persuasion, wrote during the last quarter of the 18th century. Biographical information is practically nonexistent, but Fenno’s choice of subject, style, and diction reflects a fairly substantial education and indicates the influence of the diversified middle class cultural ambience flourishing in postrevolutionary New England. Original Compositions in Prose and Verse; on Subjects Moral and Religious (1791) reveals a dedicated, ambitious writer. Subjects range from the simply religious to areas of contemporary philosophical and literary interest. Typical of most early American women writers, Fenno’s preface attempts to draw attention away from her evident ambition and sophistication as a writer. She presents an image of feminine piety and shy modesty; she insists she avoided public exposure of her ‘‘private thoughts’’; and she finds in an act of Providence her excuse for such an aggressively unfeminine act as publishing: once she had been
Born 15 August 1887, Kalamazoo, Michigan; died 16 April 1968, New York, New York Daughter of Jacob C. and Julia Neuman Ferber Edna Ferber began her writing career as a newspaper reporter in Appleton, Wisconsin, as well as in Milwaukee, and Chicago, but wrote her first novel, Dawn O’Hara (1911), during a prolonged illness. She earned sudden success and great popularity with her stories of Emma McChesney, a traveling saleswoman. In 1925 Ferber won the Pulitzer Prize for So Big (1924), her best novel, and a few years later saw her novel Show Boat (1926) transformed into a classic American musical. Her love of the theater was further indulged through her successful collaboration with George S. Kaufman, with whom she wrote such popular plays as Royal Family (1928), Dinner at Eight (1932), and Stage Door (with G. S. Kaufman, 1936, film version 1937). Royal Family was successfully revived in 1975. Ferber was seriously
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disillusioned by World War II; her postwar novels were more idea-laden and contrived, although she remained a popular novelist to her death. In So Big, Selina Peake, the properly raised daughter of a gambler, is forced to make her own way in the world after her father is accidentally killed. She takes a teaching position in High Prairie, a Dutch farming community outside Chicago, and spends the rest of her life there. After the death of her husband, Selina struggles by herself to run their truck farm and to raise her son, Dirk, nicknamed ‘‘So Big.’’ Dirk’s youth is the counterpoint in every respect of Selina’s. Where she cherishes life, he cherishes success; where she reveres beauty, he reveres money. By the novel’s end, Dirk is an immensely wealthy, successful, miserable young man. Show Boat deals with three generations of women—Parthenia Ann Hawks, Magnolia Hawks Ravenal, and Kim Ravenal—but the novel centers on Magnolia, her bizarre childhood on her father’s showboat, her idyllic love affair with Gaylord Ravenal, her marital difficulties as she learns that her husband is a confirmed gambler, and her determination to provide for her daughter after Gaylord’s desertion. As in many Ferber novels, the heroine’s daughter is not nearly her mother’s equal. Also as in most Ferber novels, there is a subplot concerned with racist attitudes, here about the mulatto showboat actress Julie, whose role was expanded in the musical. Cimarron (1929) is Ferber’s most overtly feminist novel. Sabra Venable Cravat moves with her husband Yancey to the recently opened territory of Oklahoma. Despite his many talents, Yancey is impractical and irresponsible and seems unable to stay in one place longer than five years at a time. In addition to the housework and the raising of her children, Sabra finds herself helping with Yancey’s newspaper—the first in Oklahoma—and, on those occasions when Yancey abandons her, running it herself.Yancey is the dreamer; Sabra the doer. She becomes Oklahoma’s first U.S. congresswoman. Clio Dulaine Maroon, the protagonist of Saratoga Trunk (1941, film version 1945), is as close as Ferber ever came to creating an antiheroine. Clio, the illegitimate daughter of an established Creole family (the Dulaines) on her father’s side and a series of ‘‘loose’’ women (including a free woman of color) on her mother’s, returns from France to New Orleans to avenge herself on the Dulaines and to make her fortune by marrying a millionaire. Clio realizes at the last minute that love is more important than money, but luckily Clint Maroon, a Texan adventurer who has been making his fortune among the detested railroad men while Clio tries to marry one of them, can now provide both love and money. Giant (1952) is much like Cimarron in its treatment of place: Texas. Leslie Lynnton Benedict, genteel Virginian, who must adapt to her amazing husband Bick (a male of mythic proportions), is believable and engaging, particularly as a young bride in rebellion against the Texan gentry’s lifestyle. But she matures too
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quickly, and Ferber switches the conflict from Virginian vs. Texan lifestyles to a conflict between cattle and oil. Giant contains devastating portraits of wealthy Texans and acid social criticism of their treatment of Mexican Americans. Ferber’s writing remained untouched by the innovations of her contemporaries. She was neither responsible for any innovations of her own, nor did her own work appreciably evolve in terms of style, content, or structure. Still, her work deserves serious consideration for her treatment of the land, her feminism, and her egalitarianism. Even when Ferber writes about the land, her novels are first and foremost about women—strong women, pioneer women, women determined to hold on to the land and to keep their families together. The women always triumph and often survive their men; the visionaries see their dreams come true, and the practical ones see the present inexorably improving toward the future. Although Ferber is not in the tradition of the great American literary experimenters, she is a solid member of another tradition, that of the celebrators of America.
OTHER WORKS: Buttered Side Down (1912, recording, 1995). Roast Beef, Medium: The Business Adventures of Emma McChesney (1913). Personality Plus: Some Experiences of Emma McChesney and Her Son, Jock (1914). Emma McChesney and Co. (1915). Fanny Herself (1917, recording, 1995). Cheerful by Request (1918, recording, 1995). Half Portions (1920). $1200 a Year (with N. Levy, 1920). The Girls (1921). Gigolo (1922, film version, 1926). Eldest (1925). Minick (with G. S. Kaufman, 1925; film versions, 1925, 1932). Mother Knows Best: A Fiction Book (1927, film version, 1928). American Beauty (1931, reissue, 1997). They Brought Their Women: A Book of Short Stories (1933, Braille, 1998). Come and Get It (1935, film version, 1936, recording, 1998). Nobody’s in Town (1938). A Peculiar Treasure (1939). The Land is Bright (with G. S. Kaufman, 1941). Great Son (1945). One Basket: Thirty-One Short Stories (1947). Bravo (with G. S. Kaufman, 1949). Ice Palace (1958, film version, 1960). A Kind of Magic (1963). Saratoga: Roman (1993). Edna Ferber: Stories (1996). One Basket, 31 Short Stories (1996). Personality Plus (recording, 1997).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Anderson, G. T., Edna Ferber’s ‘‘Showboat’’: As Literature and as Film (1991). Freytag, B. A., The Tip of the Iceberg (1988). Shaughnessy, M. R., Women and Success in American Society in the Works of Edna Ferber (1976). Reference works: CA (1969, 1971). TCA, TCAS. Wisconsin Writers: Sketches and Studies (1974). Other references: A Christmas Sampler: Classic Stories of the Season, from Twain to Cheever (1992). Chicago’s Authors Celebrate Chicago (cassette, 1988). Chicago Jewish Forum 13. MTJ 13. NYTBR (5 Oct. 1952). Six Prairie Authors Biographies (audiovisual, 1991). —CYNTHIA L. WALKER
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FIELD, Kate Born Mary Katherine Keemle Field, 1 October 1838, St. Louis, Missouri; died 19 May 1896, Honolulu, Hawaii Daughter of Joseph M. and Eliza Riddle Field The daughter of an actor and newspaper publisher and an actress, Kate Field became the ward of a millionaire uncle, Milton L. Sanford, following her father’s death when she was eighteen. The Sanfords financed her education at Lasell Seminary in Auburndale, Massachusetts, and took her to Italy, where she was the darling of Anthony Trollope and other members of the writers’ colony in Florence. Her support for the Union in the Civil War caused Sanford, a Southern sympathizer, to change his mind about making her his heir. To support herself she turned to journalism, writing travel letters for the Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican and other newspapers. She lectured on the lyceum circuit, wrote humorous accounts of various journeys to Europe, and undertook a mildly successful theatrical career. She also did commercial publicity. The Drama of Glass (n.d.) was a slick advertisement for the Libby Glass Company disguised as a brief ‘‘history’’ of glassmaking. Although she received valuable stock for publicizing the newly invented telephone, she lost the proceeds in an unsuccessful dressmaking venture to promote simpler styles. Desiring a platform for her views, she founded a weekly newspaper, Kate Field’s Washington, which lasted from 1890 to 1895. She died a year later in Hawaii, where she had gone to regain her health after the newspaper failed. Her literary work reflected her eclectic interests. She published scores of articles in journals such as Atlantic Monthly; Pen Photographs of Charles Dickens’s Readings (1868) contains flattering descriptions of Dickens’s readings on his lecture tour of America and served as the basis of her own successful lecture on Dickens; and Planchette’s Diary (1868) presents a shallow account of her experiences with the Victorian forerunner of the Ouija board. Genuine gifts of humor and social satire characterize HapHazard (1873), a collection of letters from the New York Tribune featuring the trials of a lady lecturer and poke fun at both the British monarchy and the nouveau riche American tourists. Ten Days in Spain (1875) bristles with her American middle-class prejudices displayed on travels through Spain during a political upheaval. Kate Field’s Washington focused on her own personality and special interests. It featured book reviews, theatrical news, novelettes, and drawing-room comedies, often written by Field herself. Although slight in content, several of her plays were produced. Her kaleidoscopic opinions championed numerous causes: temperance (not abstinence); the right of the rich to conspicuous consumption; cremation; prohibition of Mormon polygamy; international copyrights; the arts; and tariff and civil service reform. She weakly endorsed woman’s suffrage.
FIELD
Although Field demonstrated considerable literary talent, her importance lies less in what she wrote than in what she represented—the accomplishments of an intelligent and independent American woman in the late Victorian era. Her significance as a journalist stems from her views on the news, including reform efforts and politics, in an era when it was unusual for a woman to found and run a newspaper.
OTHER WORKS: Adelaide Ristori (1867). Mad on Purpose: A Comedy (1868). Charles Albert Fechter (1882).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Beasley, M. H., The First Women Washington Correspondents (George Washington University Studies, 1976). Field, K., Kate Field: Selected Letters (1996). Moss, S. P., American Episodes Involving Charles Dickens (1999). Sadlier, M., Anthony Trollope (1927). Trollope, A., An Autobiography (1883). Whiting, L., Kate Field: A Record (1899). Woodward, H., The Bold Women (1953). Telling Travels: Selected Writings by Nineteenth-Century American Women Abroad (1995). Reference works: DAB, III, 2. NAW. NCAB, 6. Other references: NYT (31 May 1896). Records of the Columbia Historical Society (1973-74). —MAURINE BEASLEY
FIELD, Rachel Lyman Born 19 September 1894, New York, New York; died 15 March 1942, Beverly Hills, California Wrote under: Rachel Field Daughter of Matthew D. and Lucy Atwater Field; married Arthur S. Pederson, 1935 Descended from a distinguished family, Rachel Lyman Field was educated in public schools. She attended Radcliffe College and later wrote synopses for a silent film company. For about the first two-thirds of Field’s writing career, she was primarily a writer of juvenile literature for children of varying ages. Her oneact plays (many separately published in acting versions) include farces, comedies, serious and poetic dramas, modern reinterpretations of old stories, and nostalgic period pieces. Lacking literary pretension, they are nevertheless stageworthy. Field’s juvenile poems also show her versatility, for she worked in a number of forms and types, but tendencies toward sentimentality and rhythmic monotony lessen their effectiveness. The best of Field’s work for young people is to be found in three juvenile novels. Hitty: Her First Hundred Years (1929) was awarded the Newbery Medal for children’s literature. Set in the 19th century, it is the history of a wooden doll, narrated by herself.
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The parts depicting the Maine Field loved are especially vivid and evocative. Calico Bush (1931) covers one year (1743-44) in the life of a French girl indentured to an English family who settle in Maine. Her sense of isolation, both as a foreigner and as a pioneer, is well conveyed, as are the terrors and delights of frontier life. Hepatica Hawks (1932) has as its protagonist a fifteen-yearold girl who is 6′4′ tall and a member of a freak show. The novel takes her from an early acceptance of her differentness through a period of desperate yearning for friends of her own age and participation in normal society. Eventually she finds a place (as a Wagnerian soprano) where her size is not a hindrance. Told with restraint, the novel movingly conveys its message, that it is all right to be different. In her last years, Field turned to writing novels for adults. To See Ourselves (1937), written with her husband, is a comic Hollywood novel of little significance. More ambitious are two historical novels: Time Out of Mind (1935), set in Maine, shows the decline of a shipbuilding family as seen by a young woman intimately connected with it. It is a story of family conflict, pitting young against old and artistic against materialistic values. All This, and Heaven Too (1938) is Field’s imaginative and sympathetic reconstruction of the experiences of a young Frenchwoman who was involved in a celebrated 19th-century murder trial and later came to the U.S. and married Field’s great-uncle. Less substantial is And Now Tomorrow (1942), the story of a wealthy young woman temporarily afflicted with deafness; it is played out against the contemporary background of the Depression and labor strife. The female protagonists of the three latter novels are all forced by circumstances to find in themselves strength, endurance, and breadth of sympathy and understanding. They learn, in an image Field uses several times, to become trees and not vines. Field’s work, in many genres, shows her concern for craftsmanship and her broad sympathies. The single most frequently occurring image in her work, the patchwork quilt, is indicative: peculiarly a woman’s image, it suggests women’s creativity, nostalgia for the past, and the creation of something new, beautiful, and useful from old and heterogeneous materials. Field tended toward sentimentality, and her three major works are all oldfashioned ‘‘romantic’’ novels. Nevertheless, they are mature studies of human relationships and of suffering and growth. These novels, with the best of her work for young people, should secure for her a lasting, if modest, literary reputation.
OTHER WORKS: Six Plays (1922). The Pointed People: Verses & Silhouettes (1924). An Alphabet for Boys and Girls (1926). Eliza and the Elves (1926). Taxis and Toadstools: Verses and Decorations (1926). A Little Book of Days (1927). The Magic Pawnshop: A New Year’s Eve Fantasy (1927). The Cross-Stitch Heart, and Other One-Act Plays (1928). Little Dog Toby (1928). Polly Patchwork (1928). The White Cat and Other Old French Fairy Tales by Mme. d’Aulnoy (arranged by Field, 1928). American
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Folk and Fairy Tales (edited by Field, 1929). Pocket-Handkerchief Park (1929). A Circus Garland (1930). Patchwork Plays (1930). Points East: Narratives of New England (1930). The Yellow Shop (1931). The Bird Began to Sing (1932). Fortune’s Caravan by L. Jean-Javal (adapted by Field, 1933). Just Across the Street (1933). Branches Green (1934). God’s Pocket: The Story of Captain Samuel Hadlock, Junior, of Cranberry Isles, Maine (1934). Susanna B. and William C. (1934). People from Dickens: A Presentation of Leading Characters from the Books of Charles Dickens (1935). Fear Is the Thorn (1936). All Through the Night (1940). Ave Maria: An Interpretation from Walt Disney’s ‘‘Fantasia,’’ Inspired by the Music of Franz Schubert (1940). Christmas Time (1941). Prayer for a Child (1944). Christmas in London (1946). Poems (1957). The Rachel Field Story Book (1958).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CB (May 1942). Junior Book of Authors (1951). NAW. Newbery Medal Books, 1922-1955 (1955). TCA, TCAS. Other references: NYHTB (31 May 1942). NYTBR (13 Nov. 1932, 7 April 1935, 30 Oct. 1938, 31 May 1942). SR (15 Nov. 1930, 22 Oct. 1938). —MARY JEAN DEMARR
FIELDS, Annie Adams Born 6 June 1834, Boston, Massachusetts; died 5 January 1915, Boston, Massachusetts Wrote under: Annie Fields, Mrs. James T. Fields Daughter of Zabdiel B. and Sarah Holland Adams; married James T. Fields, 1854 Daughter of a distinguished Boston physician, Annie Adams Fields established a literary salon in her Boston home after her marriage. Most of the literary celebrities of the day were entertained there—Hawthorne, Longfellow, Holmes, Emerson, Whittier, Dickens—as well as theatrical stars such as Ole Bull and Charlotte Cushman. Fields also enjoyed the friendship of several women writers, who formed an informal literary circle of their own. Among them were Sarah Orne Jewett, Celia Thaxter, Louise Imogen Guiney, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. In her later years, Fields became heavily involved in Boston charity work and wrote a social-welfare manual, How to Help the Poor (1883). Fields’ intimate friendship with Jewett began in the early 1880s and lasted until Jewett’s death in 1909. During this time the two women were virtually inseparable companions; their travels together included four trips to Europe and two to the Caribbean. Jewett considered Fields’ Charles Street house her second home and lived part of each year there. She dedicated The Mate of the Daylight, and Friends Ashore (1884) to Fields, and Fields edited the Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett (1911).
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FINLEY
Fields’ literary importance lies primarily in two areas: one is the influence she exerted over her husband in the selection of works to be published by Ticknor & Fields, the major publishing house of the time. He valued her judgement as reflecting a woman’s point of view. Second, Fields edited important collections of letters and biographical sketches. Her subjects included James T. Fields, John Greenleaf Whittier, Celia Thaxter, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, as well as the Jewett letter collection. While these are not critical, scholarly works (the Jewett collection, especially, is heavily edited), they do provide primary material for the researcher. Her Authors and Friends (1896) is a series of sketches, the best of which are of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Celia Thaxter. Fields’ diaries remain unpublished, except for excerpts published by Mark DeWolfe Howe in 1922.
FINLEY, Martha
Fields remains a somewhat puzzling figure. Her writings reflect a traditional orientation toward sentimentalism and the cult of true womanhood. However, she was a supporter of ‘‘women’s emancipation,’’ and her association with Jewett, Cushman, and others suggests a less traditional side. She left for posterity a carefully polished public persona, that of the perfect hostess, the genteel lady, and it is difficult to find the real person underneath.
Popular success and financial security came with Elsie Dinsmore (1867). The tremendous popularity of this book, both in America and in England, led Finley to write a series of juvenile novels exploring the life of her heroine from childhood to old age. In 28 volumes, Elsie captured the religious and feminine devotion of the 19th-century reading public. By 1876 Finley was able to buy her own home in Elkton, Maryland, where she lived out her 80 years comfortably. The Elsie books alone earned her a $250,000. None of Finley’s other works can compare in importance with the Elsie Dinsmore series, which has challenged psychologists and literary historians to define its formula of success. Despite what critics have seen as Finley’s ‘‘amateurish craftsmanship, superficial moralizing, and lame scholarship,’’ despite even the character of the heroine who, in the eyes of one critic, is ‘‘a nauseous little prig,’’ Elsie Dinsmore captured the attention of more than 25,000,000 readers.
OTHER WORKS: Ode (1863). Asphodel (1866). The Children of Lebanon (1872). James T. Fields, Biographical Notes and Personal Sketches (1881). Under the Olive (1881). Whittier, Notes of His Life and of His Friendship (1883). A Week Away from Time (written anonymously, with others, 1887). A Shelf of Old Books (1894). The Letters of Celia Thaxter (edited by Fields with R. Lamb, 1895). The Singing Shepherd, and Other Poems (1895). Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe (edited by Fields, 1897). Nathaniel Hawthorne (1899). Orpheus: A Masque (1900). Charles Dudley Warner (1904). Memories of a Hostess (edited by M. D. Howe, 1922). The unpublished diaries of Annie Adams Fields are at the Massachusetts Historical Society.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cather, W., Not Under Forty (1936). Davis, A. E., ‘‘A Recovery of Connectedness in Annie Adams Fields’ Authors and Friends and A Shelf of Old Books’’ (thesis,1998). Howe, H., The Gentle Americans, 1864-1960: Biography of a Breed (1965). Howe, A. D., Memories of a Hostess (1922). Fields, A., Microfilm Edition of the Annie Adams Fields Papers, 1852-1912 (microfilm, 1981). Matthiessen, F. O., Sarah Orne Jewett (1929). Nigro, C. L., ‘‘Annie Adams Fields: Female Voice in a Male Chorus’’ (thesis,1996). Richards, L., Stepping Westward (1931). Roman, J., Annie Adams Fields: The Spirit of Charles Street (1990). Spofford, H. P., A Little Book of Friends (1916). Tryon, W. S., Parnassus Corner: A Life of James T. Fields (1963). Winslow, H. M., Literary Boston of Today (1902). Reference works: AA, DAB. NAW. NCAB. Other references: Atlantic (July 1915). —JOSEPHINE DONOVAN
Born 26 April 1821, Chillicothe, Ohio; died 30 January 1909, Elkton, Maryland Also wrote under: Martha Farquharson Daughter of James Brown and Maria Brown Finley Both of Martha Finley’s parents, first cousins of Scotch-Irish descent, died before she was twenty-five. Finley supported herself by teaching and writing. Beginning in 1856, Finley published more than 20 Sunday-school books under the name of Martha Farquharson for the Presbyterian Board of Publication in Philadelphia. (Farquharson is Gaelic for Finley.)
Some of the elements that attracted young readers to the Elsie books are easy to explain: This fairytale heroine is a blonde heiress, unjustly mistreated by the relatives who take her in while her father is in Europe and after her beautiful mother has died. Uncompromisingly moral, unfailingly sweet, Elsie reminds us of Cinderella and Snow White. The fundamentalist religious values that emerge in her meditations and the Biblical quotations render the fairytale acceptable to the Christian society of 19th-century America. With Elsie’s Southern heritage, Finley also provided a topical attraction. What could be more glamorous to her predominantly Northern audience immediately after the Civil War than the echo of a lost world—the world of plantations and delicate Southern ladies such as Elsie’s mother had been, the world of black mammies such as ‘‘poor old Aunt Chloe,’’ with her heavy dialect and unswerving devotion to young Elsie? Ruth Suckow, writing for an October 1927 Bookman article, goes so far as to suggest that when Elsie saves her Southern father, she is really saving the whole South and committing the rebels to the fundamentalist religious values of her creator, Finley herself. The father-daughter theme which permeates the Elsie books has been seen as psychologically excessive. Elsie worships her
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father, and even though she does marry (a friend of her father’s who is himself much older than she), after her husband’s death she is once again with her devoted parent. Some have seen this theme as reinforcing the ‘‘father knows best’’ attitude prevalent in Victorian society, but in fact, Elsie gains power over the most powerful person in her life, her own father, by her religious devotion. One might argue, as Suckow does, that Elsie represents the truth that ‘‘a woman craves a master,’’ yet within the religious framework Elsie Dinsmore controls the lives of all around her. The 19th-century woman could hardly hope to achieve more than Elsie held out to her: beauty, riches, the love of her father, a husband, and children. Best of all, she exemplified victory after victory over the oppressors of the world, even over that all powerful demigod, her father. Only God was more powerful than Elsie Dinsmore—and He was on her side.
OTHER WORKS: Cassella; or, The Children of the Valleys (1867). Elsie’s Holidays (1869). An Old Fashioned Boy (1870). Wanted: A Pedigree (1870). Elsie’s Girlhood (1872, 1997). Our Fred; or, Seminary Life at Thurston (1874). Elsie’s Womanhood (1875, 1997). Elsie’s Motherhood (1876, 1998). Elsie’s Children (1877, 1998). Mildred Keith (1878, 1996). Signing the Contract and What it Cost (1878). Mildred at Roselands (1879, 1996). Elsie’s Widowhood (1880, 1998). The Thorn in the Nest (1880). Mildred and Elsie (1881). Grandmother Elsie (1882). Mildred’s Married Life (1882, 1998). Elsie’s New Relations (1883). Elsie at Nantucket (1884). Mildred at Home (1884). The Two Elsies (1885). Elsie’s Kith and Kin (1886). Mildred’s Boys and Girls (1886). Elsie’s Friends at Woodburn (1887). Christmas with Grandma Elsie (1888). Elsie and the Raymonds (1889, 1997). Elsie Yachting with the Raymonds (1890, 1997). Elsie’s Vacation (1891, 1997). Elsie at Viamede (1892, 1997). Elsie at Ion (1893). The Tragedy of Wild River Valley (1893). Elsie at the World’s Fair (1894). Elsie’s Journey on Inland Waters (1894). Mildred’s New Daughter (1894). Elsie at Home (1897). Elsie on the Hudson (1898). Twiddledetwit: A Fairy Tale (1898). Elsie in the South (1899). Elsie’s Young Folks (1900). Elsie’s Winter Trip (1902). Elsie and Her Loved Ones (1903). Elsie and Her Namesakes (1905).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brown, J. E., ‘‘The Saga of Elsie Dinsmore,’’ in University of Buffalo Studies (1945). Ely, W. A., The Finleys of Bucks (1902). Suckow, R., ‘‘Elsie Dinsmore: A Study of Perfection, or How Fundamentalism Came to Dixie,’’ in Bookman (Oct. 1927). Zahn, B.,On the Banks of Big Elk Creek: The Life of Martha Finley, Beloved Author of the Elsie Books (1997). Reference works: American Authors (1894). DAB, III, 2. Indiana Authors and Their Books, 1816-1916, ed. R. E. Banta (1949). NAW. NCAB, II. Ohio Authors and Their Books, edited by W. Coyle (1962). Other references: Baltimore Sun (31 Jan. 1909). NY (14 March 1936). —THELMA J. SHINN
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FISHER, Dorothea (Frances) Canfield Born 17 February 1879, Lawrence, Kansas; died 9 November 1958, Arlington, Vermont Also wrote under: Dorothy Canfield Daughter of James H. and Flavia Camp Canfield; married James R. Fisher, 1907 After extensive formal education (Ph.B., Ohio State; Ph.D., Columbia; graduate work at the Sorbonne), Dorothea Canfield Fisher and her husband traveled widely, eventually settling in Vermont, home of Fisher’s ancestors. During World War I, Fisher did relief work in France, and she remained active in public life throughout her career, serving as secretary of New York’s Horace Mann School; as the first woman on the Vermont Board of Education; and on the editorial board of the Book-of-the-Month Club (1926-51). Fisher’s interest in education and her love of the U.S. and of Vermont are steadily reflected in her works, which include textbooks, commentaries on education (A Montessori Mother, 1912; The Montessori Manual, 1913), patriotic reflections (American Portraits, 1946; Our Independence and the Constitution, 1950), translations (Papini’s Life of Christ, 1923; Tilgher’s Work, 1930), Vermont, poetry (Another Night for America, 1942), and fiction. Perhaps Fisher’s most lastingly popular work, Understood Betsy (1917), is the story of a fearful, sickly little girl who, through a change of guardians and environments, becomes an independent, capable child. Written in a pleasant conversational tone, the book codifies some of Fisher’s major ideas: the importance of early training, the value of work, the necessity for self-confidence, and the virtues—as she perceived them—of the American heritage. These ideas, as well as attacks on big business and materialism, are central to The Bent Twig (1915), the story of Sylvia and Judith Marshall. Tested sorely, the sisters grow from their experiences, primarily through an awareness of their mother’s dictum that if life is to be good, both joys and sorrows must be accepted. In an episode about a mulatto family passing for white, Fisher makes a plea for racial understanding without glossing over the biases and limitations of the period. Seasoned Timber (1939) sets Fisher’s attack on anti-Semitism within the narrative frame of Timothy Hulme’s romance in middle age. The relationship between Timothy and his Aunt Lavinia illustrates Fisher’s realism. Both characters are as capable of selfdelusion as they are of self-sacrifice. Flashbacks based upon oral tradition vivify the Vermont setting. Marriages in transition are a frequent plot device. The Brimming Cup (1921) compares and contrasts the marital relationships of Neale and Marise Crittenden and of Gene and Nelly Powers. Both women are mothers, both are clearly at the hub of their families, and both are tempted by attractive, sensual, single men.
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
While the resolution of the Powers’ difficulty is melodramatic, Marise’s decision that sexual union is valid only when it nourishes personal growth is a convincing presentation of a basic Fisher theme. Another theme, the importance of woodland reclamation, appears here also, and regional customs are well drawn. The Home-Maker (1924) vividly depicts the tensions arising from Evangeline Knapp’s distaste for housework and from her husband’s inability to succeed in business. When circumstances dictate an exchange of roles, the family achieves happiness, and Fisher’s frequent point—that nurturing is vital work—is made neatly and unconventionally. Fisher’s The Deepening Stream (1930) traces the growth of Matey Gilbert from childhood through motherhood. Damaged by faulty understanding of her parents’ flawed marriage, Matey is a good example of the Fisher protagonist whose character strengthens throughout adulthood. Integrated with the story of Matey’s maturation is Fisher’s splendid evocation of World War I Paris. Two of Fisher’s short story collections, Hillsboro People (1915) and The Real Motive (1916), join with the nonfiction Vermont Tradition (1953) as tributes to her home state. The latter traces Vermont history by means of anecdotes drawn from the state’s written and oral histories and stresses individual freedom. For Fisher, this principle was the key to real maturity and crucial to successful childrearing. A woman of extraordinary energy, Fisher was one of the most popular writers of her day and is considered particularly adroit at exploring the drama of everyday life, portraying the inner growth of thoughtful, sensitive characters, and employing skillful variations of the interior monologue.
OTHER WORKS: Emile Augier, Playwright-Moralist-Poet (1899). Corneille and Racine in England (1904). Elementary Composition (with G. B. Carpenter, 1906). Gunhild: A Norwegian American Episode (1907). The Secret of Serenity (1908). The Squirrel Cage (1912). Mothers and Children (1914). A Peep into the Educational Future (1915). Fellow Captains (with S. N. Cleghorn, 1916). Self-Reliance (1916). Home Fires in France (1918). The Day of Glory (1919). Rough-Hewn (1922). What Grandmother Did Not Know (1922). The French School at Middlebury (1923). Raw Material (1923). Made-to-Order Stories (1925). Her Son’s Wife (1926). Why Stop Learning? (1927). Learn or Perish (1930). Basque People (1931). Our Children: A Handbook for Parents (edited by Fisher, with S. M. Gruenberg, 1932). Vermont Summer Homes (1932). Bonfire (1933). Moral Pushing and Pulling (1933). Tourists Accommodated (1934). Fables for Parents (1937). On a Rainy Day (with S. F. Scott, 1938). The Election on Academy Hill (1939). A Family Talks about War (1940). Liberty and Union (with S. N. Cleghorn, 1940). Nothing Ever Happens and How It Does (with S. N. Cleghorn, 1940). In the City, and In the City and on the Farm (with E. K. Crabtree and L. C. Walker, 1940). My First Book (with E. K. Crabtree and L. C. Walker, 1940). Runaway Toys (with E. K. Crabtree and L. C. Walker, 1940). Tell
FISHER
Me a Story (1940). To School and Home Again (with E. K. Crabtree and L. C. Walker, 1940). Under the Roof (with E. K. Crabtree and L. C. Walker, 1941). Under the Sea (with E. K. Crabtree and L. C. Walker, 1941). Our Young Folks (1943). BookClubs (1947). Highroads and Byroads (with E. K. Crabtree and L. C. Walker, 1948). Four-Square (1949). Something Old, Something New (1949). Paul Revere and the Minute Men (1950). A Fair World for All (1952). Dorothy Canfield Fisher on Vermont (1955). A Harvest of Stories (1956). Memories of Arlington, Vermont (1957). And Long Remember (1959). Report on Old Age (n.d.).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: McCallister, L., Dorothea Canfield Fisher: A Critical Study (dissertation, 1969). Yates, E., Pebble in a Pool (1958). Reference works: NCAB, 44. TCA, TCAS. Other references: Educational Forum (Nov. 1950). SatR (11 Oct. 1930, 29 Nov. 1958). —JANE S. BAKERMAN
FISHER, M(ary) F(rances) K(ennedy) Born 3 July 1908, Albion, Michigan; died 22 June 1992, Glen Ellen, California Also wrote under: Mary Frances Parrish, Victoria Berne Daughter of Rex B. and Edith Holbrook Kennedy; married Alfred Fisher, 1929 (divorced); Dillwyn Parrish, 1939 (died); Donald Friede, 1945 (divorced); children: Anne, Kennedy M. F. K. (Mary Frances Kennedy) Fisher was two years old when she moved with her family from Albion, Michigan, to Whittier, California, the state she would come to think of as her native home. In Among Friends (1971), she chronicles her growing up in Whittier, a predominantly Quaker community. Her Quaker neighbors—the Friends referred to ironically in her title— never accepted the Kennedys, who were Episcopalian, and she learned early on what it meant to be an outsider. She also learned what it meant to survive the condition with resiliency and humor—what she called ‘‘my inner jaunty detachment’’—a bent of personality that would serve her well through an eventful and often difficult life. The reason for the move to Whittier was the purchase of the Whittier News by Fisher’s father, a fifth-generation newspaperman. Her mother also came from five generations of journalists and was a cultured woman in her own right, having studied and traveled widely in Europe before her marriage. From her parents Fisher absorbed a love of literature and ideas. She also developed an avid interest in culinary books and food preparation, which she learned from the family cook. By the age of ten, she was thinking up dishes and preparing meals for the household.
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AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
After graduating from high school in 1927, she attended several colleges, including Illinois College in Jacksonville, Illinois, Occidental College in Los Angeles, and the University of California at Los Angeles. In 1929 she married Alfred Fisher, a doctoral candidate in literature at UCLA, and they went to live in Dijon, France, where he was working on his dissertation. The move proved to be a particularly fortunate one, since Dijon, regarded as the gastronomic center of France, inspired her to pursue her interest in food more seriously and begin putting her thoughts down on paper in the form of journals, letters, and stories.
Friede and went with her daughters to the Kennedy ranch in Whittier, where they lived with her father. After his death in 1953 they moved to the Napa Valley, a locale that would serve as Fisher’s home base for the rest of her life.
In 1932 she returned with her husband to California and they had as their neighbor the painter Dillwyn Parrish, who encouraged her writing on culinary themes. Her first book, Serve It Forth, came out in 1937 and included her pieces on cooking and dining experiences, along with her historical essays based on old cookbooks she had researched at the Los Angeles Public Library. Serve It Forth introduced the public to Fisher’s amalgam of food writing, personal anecdotes, and storytelling, a lively and distinctive style she would continue to hone during the course of a long career.
In 1971 she moved to her final home, a Napa Valley house designed to her specifications and located on the grounds of the Bouverie ranch in Glen Ellen. For the two decades until her death in 1992, it provided her with a congenial place to write, cook, and entertain fellow authors and culinary enthusiasts. Despite the encroachment of Parkinson’s disease during her last years, Fisher pursued her engagement with the world nearly to the end. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1991 and is generally acknowledged to be one of the nation’s finest writers and also one of the most unusual, taking the humble theme of food and casting it as a metaphor for the great mysteries of human hunger and desire.
The friendship with Parrish had deepened by 1937 into the great love of Fisher’s life. She moved with him to Vevey, Switzerland, and they were married after she obtained her divorce from her first husband in 1938. Her days in Switzerland with Parrish were filled with tending their house and vineyard, entertaining friends, and collaborating on a romantic novel, Touch and Go (1939), which was published under the joint pseudonym of Victoria Berne. The happiness of this period was cruelly disrupted when Parrish was stricken with Buerger’s disease in 1939. They returned to America and purchased a ranch in Hemet, California, where Fisher cared for him. In 1941, pain-ridden and terminally ill, he committed suicide. The grief that followed was made all the greater by the suicide of her brother David a year later. As a way of contending with tragedy and as a means of supporting herself, Fisher turned to her writing and produced a succession of culinary works: Consider the Oyster (1941), How to Cook a Wolf (1942), The Gastronomical Me (1943), and An Alphabet for Gourmets (1949). These four books were collected with her first book and published in 1954 as The Art of Eating, a classic in its field and a perennial favorite with readers. In 1945 Fisher married the literary agent Donald Friede. She had two daughters, Anne, born in 1943, and Kennedy, born in 1946. At Friede’s urging, she wrote the novel Not Now But Now (1947), even though she did not consider extended fiction to be one of her strengths, a view that is shared by most critics. During the same period, she also produced an acclaimed translation of The Physiology of Taste (1949) by Brillat-Savarin and wrote articles and stories for such magazines as Gourmet, House Beautiful, and McCall’s. The pressure of work, deadlines, and child care, along with the death of her mother, contributed to the deterioration of her health and her marriage. In 1949 she separated from
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In 1958 she decided to pay a lengthy visit to Europe as a way of broadening her children’s education and helping them become proficient in French and Italian. During the four years they lived in Aix-en-Provence and Lugano, she wrote a book of folk remedies, A Cordiall Water (1961), and composed sketches and stories that would serve as a basis for later work, including many pieces published in the New Yorker.
OTHER WORKS: Here Let Us Feast (1946). The Story of Wine in California (1962). Maps of Another Town: A Memoir of Provence (1964). The Cooking of Provincial France (1968). With Bold Knife and Fork (1969). A Considerable Town (1978). As They Were (1982). Sister Age (1983). Spirits of the Valley (1985). The Standing and the Waiting (1985). Dubious Honors (1988). Answer in the Affirmative and The Oldest Living Man (1989). Boss Dog (1990). Long Ago in France: The Years in Dijon (1991). Stay Me, Oh Comfort Me (1993). Last House (1995). M. F. K. Fisher: A Life in Letters (1997). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ferrary, J., Between Friends: M. F. K. Fisher and Me (1991). Lazar, D., Conversations with M. F. K. Fisher (1992). Mooney, L., ed., The Annual Obituary 1992. (1993). Reference works: CANR (1994). CLC (1993, 1995). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: American Scholar (Spring 1998). Biblio (Feb. 1999). —MARLENE M. MILLER
FISKE, Sarah Symmes Born 1652, Charleston, Massachusetts; died 2 December 1692, Braintree, Massachusetts Daughter of Williams Symmes; married Moses Fiske, 1671; children: 14 Sarah Symmes Fiske was the granddaughter of the noted minister Zachariah Symmes and the daughter of a justice of the
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peace for the county of Middlesex. Her mother, whose name is unknown, died when she was very young. Her husband was ordained minister of the Braintree (now Quincy), Massachusetts, congregation. He had a profitable ministry, which included a house and six acres, as well as a substantial yearly income. Fiske and her husband had 14 children, which probably contributed to her early death. Fiske’s only published work is her spiritual autobiography, a document which she prepared for admission to church membership. A Confession of Faith; or, A Summary of Divinity (1704) was written in 1677, when Fiske was twenty-five years old. The manuscript circulated among her acquaintances for many years after her death, until it was printed. Such posthumous publication was common for works by early American women writers. Whereas most spiritual autobiographies of the 17th century express the inner turmoil of the writer in the struggle for salvation, Fiske’s confession is notable for its impersonal tone and religious erudition. Its highly structured form evidences her familiarity with Ramist logic, the system of reasoning used by the New England Puritans in their theological discourses. The form and content which Fiske chose for her confession reflect intense religious study. Each topic she discusses is broken into subtopics or subsets for definition and analysis; then each subset is further analyzed. Fiske’s topics include the truth of the Bible, God’s creation of the natural world, the Fall and its consequences, sin and death, grace and predestination, and the nature of Christ. She also discusses the organization of the church and the significance of the sacraments. She concludes with a brief but striking apocalyptic vision. Puritan historiography—that is, history viewed as God’s redemptive scheme—provides the organizing principle for her beliefs, as she discusses events from the beginning of time to the end of the world. Fiske’s work is not outstanding for its originality of thought or style, but the purpose of the document—admission to church membership—precluded creativity. The posthumous publication of her theological discussion and review is important because it indicates an early recognition of women’s ability to contribute to religious subjects in an intellectual and educative manner. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Pierce, F. C., Fiske and Fisk Family (1896). Vinton, J. A., The Symmes Memorial (1873). —JACQUELINE HORNSTEIN
FITZGERALD, Frances Born 21 October 1940, New York, New York Daughter of Desmond and Mary E. Peabody FitzGerald Born into an old Boston family that included scholar and explorer Francis Parkman, FitzGerald spent her childhood in America and Europe. Her mother was an urban planner and a former U.S. representative to the United Nations, and her father was a former deputy director of the CIA. With Middle Eastern
studies as her major, FitzGerald graduated magna cum laude from Radcliffe in 1962. After graduation, during a two-year stay in Paris, she worked on a novel and published magazine articles for the Congress for Cultural Freedom. After her return to New York in 1964, she wrote a series of profiles, including one about Amelia Peabody—her maternal grandmother who had been jailed for participation in a civil rights demonstration at the age of seventytwo—for the New York Herald Tribune Magazine. In 1966 she went to South Vietnam as a freelance journalist, publishing articles on politics in Saigon during the following year for the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Village Voice, and Vogue, receiving the Overseas Press Club award for interpretative reporting in 1967. Returning to America, FitzGerald spent the next five years researching and writing Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (1972, reissued 1984). Informed by study with the Indochinese scholar Paul Mus at Yale, historical research at Harvard, reading in sociology and psychology, and another five-month trip to South Vietnam, Fire in the Lake earned FitzGerald (among other awards) the Pulitzer Prize for contemporary-affairs writing (1973), the National Book Award (1973), and the Bancroft Prize for History (1973). After the book’s publication, FitzGerald made a speaking tour on behalf of the Indochina Peace Campaign. Since 1973 FitzGerald continued to write about American society and culture. Most of her articles (appearing in the New Yorker, Redbook, the New York Review of Books, Ms., Harper’s, and the New Republic) have focused on social conflicts in terms of historical and cultural origins, political leadership, and effects on ordinary people in such areas as the Middle East, Ireland, and Cuba. Fire in the Lake was greeted with widespread critical acclaim not simply because it was the best scholarly effort by an American to interpret Vietnamese culture and the American presence in Vietnam for a general audience, but also because of its superior analysis of the political and social nature of the Vietnamese response to foreign occupation, particularly the Saigon governments’ ‘‘desire for, and hostility to, the American presence.’’ Not interested in being a war correspondent ‘‘attached to the U.S. government forces,’’ FitzGerald focuses on the political activity of the war and on the people and the country. Dividing her study into two parts, she first explores Vietnamese culture and national character within a historical perspective, relying—too much at times—on Western sociological and psychological modes of analysis in explaining national behavior. Second, FitzGerald examines the politics of leadership practiced by the National Liberation Front, the Saigon governments, and the Americans, effectively illustrating a ‘‘complete circle of self-deception.’’ Within the double frame, FitzGerald presents a compelling explanation of the American sense of ‘‘righteous mission’’ in Vietnam, an attitude originating in a ‘‘definite historical and mythological perspective.’’ At the same time she depicts the particular effects on human lives of the American attempt to fulfill their mission. She carefully builds an awareness of the perspectives of both soldiers from small American towns finding themselves ‘‘among people with whom they could make no human
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contact’’ and the Vietnamese in isolated villages, refugee camps, and cities seeing one another separated from ‘‘family, friendship, our manner of expressing ourselves.’’ FitzGerald’s prose is restrained rather than detached. Her empathy for the Vietnamese is apparent, yet she does not sentimentalize. While some generalizations concerning national character seem to have been too easily inferred, her analysis, especially as it is supported by carefully chosen and well-drawn anecdotal illustrations, makes the study a major source for a deeper understanding of the Vietnam conflict. In 1979 FitzGerald again explored changing representations of American culture and national identity through a study of elementary and secondary American history textbooks. In America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century (1980), she focuses on the special functions and traditions of schoolbooks for American children during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, emphasizing how texts of the 1960s and 1970s were not ‘‘written’’ but ‘‘developed’’ within a context of conflict and compromise among publishing, educational, and political institutions. She concludes that contemporary efforts to present ‘‘the world, or the country, as an ideal construct,’’ or a ‘‘utopia of the eternal present’’—a place ‘‘without conflicts, without malice or stupidity’’—rather than achieving the purpose of ‘‘creating good citizens’’ may ‘‘give young people no warning of the real dangers ahead.’’ FitzGerald published Cities on a Hill: A Journey Through Contemporary American Culture (1986, reissued 1987) in an effort to understand change in America since 1960 by looking at four ‘‘communities or cultural enclaves’’ in which individuals ‘‘deny the power of the past’’ by seeking to ‘‘cut all ties.’’ These include the ‘‘first gay neighborhood in the country,’’ the Castro in San Francisco; the ‘‘separatist’’ Liberty Baptist Church ministered by Jerry Falwell in Lynchburg, Virginia; the retirement community of Sun City Center in Tallahassee, Florida, ‘‘radical in the sense that never before in history had older people taken themselves off to live in isolation from the younger generation’’; and Rancho Rahneesh, an eastern Oregon ‘‘New Age Commune’’ of ‘‘doctors, lawyers, accountants, and the like led by an ‘Indian guru.’’’ The book studies the complexities of everyday life and moral conflicts for individuals in each community and illustrates FitzGerald’s consistent focus on the role of family in the relationship of individuals and communities in American life. While critics saw the book as a contribution to the study of the changing ‘‘American Dream,’’ they often disagreed with her efforts to find similarities among the four groups in their expression of ‘‘quintessentially American behavior and values,’’ or to discover valid roots in nineteenth-century utopian social experiments. For the remainder of the 1980s and throughout the 1990s FitzGerald continued to write regularly for the New Yorker, as well as Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, the Nation, Rolling Stone, and Vogue on diverse subjects. A sampling of FitzGerald’s Vietnam-era journalism appears in Reporting Vietnam: American Journalism (1998), a twovolume set from the Library of America presenting pieces written
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in and about Vietnam by several journalists, spanning the years 1959 through 1975. On 31 January 1999, FitzGerald appeared on the C-Span television program, Booknotes along with Peter Kann (another Vietnam-era journalist) to discuss Reporting Vietnam and the era’s reporting in general. FitzGerald discussed her trips to Vietnam in 1969, 1971, 1973, and 1974, and her now-classic book, Fire in the Lake. On the subject of reporters in Vietnam expressing biased views, Fitzgerald observed a progression or development closely tied to the war effort itself. The journalists who went to Vietnam in 1959 went there with assumptions formed in World War II as to the actions required of journalists reporting U.S. involvement in wars. Their style was reconstructed, says FitzGerald, by Neil Sheehan and others who found themselves playing the roles of critics as a result of the lies they were told by American representatives in Vietnam. They were unpopular with the embassy, their investigative efforts were deemed threatening, and they were perceived as being either Hawks or Doves when in fact, it was the difficulty in getting an accurate story that made them appear so. In 1999 FitzGerald continued her work on a book about Ronald Reagan, Star Wars, and the end of the Cold War, a project she’s been researching for several years and hopes to complete in the near future. OTHER WORKS: A Reporter at Large: A Disciplined, Charging Army (1981). America’s Spirit Dream, Myth and Reality (recording, 1982). School Book Banning (recording, 1983). Vietnam Reconsidered (recording, 1984). Cultural Dimensions of U.S. Foreign Policy (audiovisual, 1993). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Barker, W. P., ‘‘Literary Techniques Employed by Three Writers on the Vietnam War: Norman Mailer, Michael Herr, Frances Fitzgerald’’ (thesis, 1981). Elwood-Akers, V., Women War Correspondents in the Vietnam War, 1961-1975 (1988). Estrangement: America and the World (1985). Frederick, J., ‘‘Textbook Shock’’—A Critique of Frances Fitzgerald’sAmerica Revised (1980). Proceedings of Ralph Nader’s Second Annual Journalism Conference on Investigative Reporting, Mar. 19-21, 1982, Washington, D.C. (recording, 1982). The Vietnam Reader (1991). 1984 Revisited: Walter Cronkite Looks at Orwell’s Novel, and Interviews Anthony Burgess, William Lutz, David Burnham, Anthony Pole, Jose Delgado, Richard Riel, Jonathan Sanders, Phillip Goetz, Ronald Plesser, Malcolm Muggeridge, James Thornwell, Inge Kempkehefke, Frances Fitzgerald, Marvin Rosenbloom, Bernard Crick, and Jacobo Timmerman (recording,1983). To Reason Why: The Debate about the Causes of U.S. Involvement in the Vietnam War (1990). Reference works: CA (1974). CANR (1991). CBY (1987). WW of Writers, Editors, and Poets (1989). Other references: Journal of American Studies (1973). Life (27 Oct. 1972). Nation (8 March 1993). NR (16 Sept. 1972, 29 April 1985, 20 Oct. 1986). NYRB (5 Oct. 1972, 29 Jan. 1987). NYTBR (27 Aug. 1972, 12 Oct. 1986). PW (16 Oct. 1972). Redbook (March 1975). Vogue (Jan. 1973, Oct. 1986).Who Will
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Protect the Family? With Reporter Frances FitzGerald (audiovisual, 1981). Booknotes web site: http://www.booknotes.org. CSpan web site: http://www.c- span.org. —JENNIFER L. TEBBE, UPDATED BY REBECCA C. CONDIT
FITZGERALD, Zelda Sayre Born 24 July 1900, Montgomery, Alabama; died 10 March 1948, Asheville, North Carolina Daughter of Anthony and Minnie Machen Sayre; married F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1920; children: daughter, Frances Scott ‘‘Scottie’’ Fitzgerald Smith Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, the youngest of six children, was the daughter of a distinguished legislator and judge. She attended Montgomery public schools, graduating from Sidney Lanier High School in 1918. She married novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald and had one daughter. The Fitzgeralds lived in Europe and were part of the expatriate group including Ernest Hemingway and Gerald and Sara Murphy. From 1928 to 1930, Fitzgerald struggled to develop her talent in dancing, writing, and painting. Her obsessive determination to become a professional dancer contributed to her first psychological collapse in 1930. A pattern of insanity followed by periods of calm continued throughout Fitzgerald’s life. In the 1920s and early 1930s, Fitzgerald wrote a number of articles and short stories for various periodicals. Some of these were revised by or written in collaboration with her husband, and some appear under a joint byline. Others were printed under Scott Fitzgerald’s name alone, but in his ledger he credits Fitzgerald with the authorship. Save Me the Waltz (1932), Fitzgerald’s only published novel, was written while she was at a psychiatric clinic in Baltimore, Maryland. It is a fictional account of Fitzgerald’s experiences, first as a vivacious Southern belle, then as the glamorous wife of a flamboyant, popular writer. Fitzgerald makes little attempt to disguise the autobiographical elements of her novel. Her protagonist, Alabama Beggs, is determined to escape her father’s suffocating morality and adopts a lawless philosophy. She marries David Knight, a professional artist who achieves a phenomenal success, but by retreating to the citadel of his art, he is as inaccessible to Alabama as was the impregnable fortress of her father’s idealism. Alabama feels excluded by her lack of accomplishment and therefore attempts to emulate her husband’s success through the medium of dance. A few days before her debut as a dancer, Alabama’s foot becomes seriously infected and she is told she will never dance again. As the novel ends, Alabama and David, united only in their physical proximity, face a restless and unfulfilling future together. Alabama, however, becomes at last the choreographer of her own destiny. Accepting the emptiness of her future with her husband, she resolves to whip the ‘‘broken staccato’’ of their lives into the ordered configurations of the dance. Save Me the Waltz is not a good novel. Fitzgerald’s writing is pretentious, turgid, and sometimes unintelligible. Fitzgerald’s
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descriptions are fraught with disjointed images and strained comparisons, and the imagery is strange, even grotesque. When Alabama falls in love with David, she imagines herself crawling ‘‘into the friendly cave of his ear’’ and stumbling hysterically through the ‘‘vast tortuous indentations’’ of his medulla oblongata! ‘‘It is more the expression of a powerful personality,’’ wrote Scott Fitzgerald, ‘‘than the work of a finished artist.’’ The novel nevertheless occupies a unique place in literary history. Rarely has a marriage been so well documented as the Fitzgeralds’, both in biography and fiction. In Tender is the Night (1934), Fitzgerald presents the deterioration of a brilliant young doctor as a direct result of his marriage to a beautiful madwoman, who saps her husband’s energies as she gradually regains her equilibrium. This novel is considered, in part, to be Fitzgerald’s response to the oblique charges made against him through the character of David Knight in Fitzgerald’s novel, published two years earlier. In Save Me the Waltz, Fitzgerald reveals the agonizing insecurity and the futile grasping for self-expression underlying the spectacle and drama of her marriage. Despite serious technical flaws, the novel memorably recreates the searing experiences of a tortured soul. Fitzgerald may have fallen short of imposing artistic form upon her material, but her sensitive presentation of the tragedy of blighted lives makes absorbing reading. OTHER WORKS: Bits of Paradise: Uncollected Stories of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (edited by S. F. Smith and M. J. Bruccoli, 1974). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bruccoli, M. J., F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Descriptive Bibliography (1972). Bruccoli, M. J., et al., eds., The Romantic Egoists (1974). Callaghan, M., That Summer in Paris (1963). Colum, P., and M. Cabell, eds., Between Friends (1962). Cooper, D. M., ‘‘Form and Function: The Writing Style of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald’’ (thesis, 1986). Gabriel, C. A., ‘‘Social and Personal Conflicts in the Lives and Works of the Fitzgeralds’’ (undergraduate research paper, 1996). Hemingway, E., A Moveable Feast (1964). Love Letters to Remember: An Intimate Collection of Romance and Passion (1996). Mayfield, S., Exiles from Paradise: Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald. Milford, N., Zelda (1970). Mizener, A., The Far Side of Paradise (1965). Piper, H. D., F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Critical Portrait (1965). Shafer, C., ‘‘To Spread a Human Aspiration: The Art of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald’’ (thesis, 1994). Smith, S. F., ‘‘The Maryland Ancestors of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald’’ in Maryland Historical Magazine (1983). Tomkins, C., Living Well is the Best Revenge (1972). Turnbull, A., Scott Fitzgerald (1962). Vigier, R., Women, Dance, and the Body: Gestures of Genius (1994). Volkert, G., An Assessment of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald’s Novel Caesar’s Things (thesis, 1989). Other references: Catalogue of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Manuscript Material (1982). Milford, N., Zelda (recording, 1982). Bookman (Oct. 1932). SR (Oct. 1932). —ROSE ADRIENNE GALLO
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FLANDERS, G. M.
FLANNER, Hildegarde
Born no information found; died date unknown
Born 3 June 1899, Indianapolis, Indiana; died May 1987 Daughter of Frank W. and Mary-Ellen Hockett Flanner; married Frederick Monhoff, 1926
No information about G. M. Flanders’ life, background, or views has survived; only one novel, The Ebony Idol (1860, reprinted 1969), remains of her work. The combination of sentimental romance with biting social satire, however, makes the novel of special interest as a literary and cultural document. Set in a small New England town, The Ebony Idol shows how the Reverend Mr. Carey divides his congregation and his community by preaching militant abolitionism. His followers, mostly women, are either impractical do-gooders or swinish Jacksonian egalitarians. Chief among Mr. Carey’s supporters are Miss Dickey, an elderly feminist schoolmarm, and Mr. and Mrs. Hicks, a loutish farm couple. Flanders characterizes the abolitionist position as hysterical, impractical, and uncharitable. Mr. Carey’s pro-slavery opponents, on the other hand, are sensible, practical, and discerning in their concern for others. Represented by Squire Bryan, a wealthy lawyer and landholder, the pro-slavery faction supports both a Jeffersonian democracy and the orderly relations, advocated by St. Paul, between slave and master, man and woman, husband and wife. Like Squire Bryan, the pro-slavery supporters argue the South, which is, after all, run by gentlemen and Christians, is entitled to its own customs and economy. Into this turbulent controversy comes Caesar, a runaway slave who is at first idolized by Mr. Carey’s abolitionists. Caesar’s huge size and appetite and his laziness, vanity, and dishonesty lead to a series of comic episodes which illustrate that abolitionists hypocritically fear and despise the blacks with whom they profess equality. A sentimental subplot revolves around Frank Stanton, a Southern dandy who is studying law with Squire Bryan, and Mary, the beautiful, gentle, and ladylike adopted daughter of the loutish Mr. and Mrs. Hicks. As The Ebony Idol ends, the lovers are united, the North is reconciled with the South, the town’s pro-slavery status quo is restored, Caesar gratefully returns to his master, and a sadder but wiser minister learns to leave politics out of the pulpit in the interests of peace and social order. While Flanders’ unflattering characterizations of feminists, abolitionists, and blacks may be offensive to a modern reader, they illustrate an important issue in women’s literature of the period: woman’s role as a submissive Christian allowed her spiritual beauty and transcendence, hence also spiritual authority and superiority. If women (temperamentally inferior to men) could and should accept their lot in order to create domestic harmony, slaves (temperamentally inferior to whites) could and should accept their lot in order to create social harmony in the South. Similar pro-slavery and antifeminist arguments appear in contemporary works by Caroline Lee Hentz, Mary Eastman, and Caroline Rush. —KATHERINE STAPLES
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Sister of author Janet Flanner (Genêt), Hildegarde Flanner attended Sweet Briar College, Virginia, from 1917 to 1918, and then the University of California at Berkeley until 1923. She lived in California after her marriage to Frederick Monhoff in 1926. Flanner’s first book of poems, Young Girl (1920), published when she was twenty-one, won the Emily Chamberlain Cook prize at the University of California. In addition to books of poetry, she published several plays (Mansions, 1920, and The White Bridge, 1938), essays on poets and poetry, and articles about the Southwest. Poems written out of Flanner’s own experience or about other women are extraordinary but rather few in number. Two of these are found in the aforementioned Young Girl. In ‘‘Dianthus’’ the narrator recalls that her grandmother, who picked Dianthus (commonly called Sweet William), ‘‘Did Vergil into French / And then had seven children.’’ ‘‘I shall not pick you, / Dianthus,’’ the narrator concludes. ‘‘Discovery’’ tells of a girl whose aunts have praised her ‘‘mild’’ and ‘‘gentle soul,’’ but who finds, when looking in a mirror for this phenomenon, ‘‘a joyful little sin’’—a female body with sexual desires. The subtle, understated rejection of traditional female roles in ‘‘Dianthus’’ and the open, honest treatment of female sexuality in ‘‘Discovery’’ are rare to poetry of this period; both poems portray the realistic, feminist persona of a kind that Edna St. Vincent Millay and other women poets of the 1920s were to choose. Flanner’s one-act play Mansions is another feminist work. Lydia, twenty-seven, and her younger brother Joe are dominated by their Aunt Harriet, who is trying to make Lydia like herself, a recluse dedicated to the memory of all the old, dead men of the family, and to making Joe follow their profession. Lydia is resentful and rebellious in a childlike manner, until Joe, who is mysteriously dying, teaches her one must have one’s own work— that she must be strong and leave her aunt in order to live her own life. If There Is Time (1942) contains successful poems involving women and the female experience. In ‘‘Hawk is a Woman’’ and ‘‘Rattlesnake,’’ wild creatures are the ostensible subjects, but they become metaphors for human behavior. The two poems are actually attacks on certain kinds of women—they are hate poems, revenge poems—but they are strong and powerful. ‘‘Never Ask Why,’’ which uses the same metaphorical technique, is on the surface a poem about cruelty in nature—a lion killing a doe—but on another level it expresses rage and sorrow for the helpless condition of women, for the use of them as sexual objects: the doe is ‘‘gentle meat’’; ‘‘the riding lion’’ feeds on her ‘‘soft loin.’’
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Flanner’s poetic subjects include nature, love, city and surburban life, patriotism, and religious faith. Her prosodic techniques range from free verse to traditional forms. Critical reception of her work has been as varied as her subjects and styles; at her best she is, as one critic put it, ‘‘right and honest.’’ OTHER WORKS: This Morning (1921). A Tree in Bloom and Other Verses (1924). Time’s Profile (1929). In Native Light (1972). The Harkening Eye (1979). A Vanishing Land (1980). A Christmas Keepsake (1983). For A Clean House (1984). Brief Cherishing: A Napa Valley Harvest (1985). At the Gentle Mercy of Plants: Essays and Poem (1986). Different Images: Portraits of Remembered People (1987). Poems (1988). The Berkeley Fire: Memoirs and Mementos. . . (1992). Various short stories, ‘‘Arrived’’ on The Ahsahta Cassette Sampler (audiocassette, 1983), ‘‘What Is That Sound?’’ (broadside, 1986), ‘‘Bamboo: An Honest Love Affair’’ in Roots and Branches: Contemporary Essays by West Coast Writers (1991), and ‘‘A Vanishing Land’’ in Natural State: A Literary Anthology of California Nature Writing (1998). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Other references: Janet Lewis Talks to Hildegarde Flanner (video, 1995). Nation (13 Nov. 1929), NYT (23 Aug. 1942). Poetry (Sept. 1942). —JEANNINE DOBBS
FLANNER, Janet Born 13 March 1892, Indianapolis, Indiana; died 7 November 1978, New York, New York Also wrote under: Genêt Daughter of Francis and Mary-Ellen Hockett Flanner Born to Quaker parents, Janet Flanner attended preparatory school in Tudor Hall, Indianapolis, spent a year in Germany with her parents, then entered the University of Chicago in 1912. After being expelled from the university as a ‘‘rebellious influence’’ in the dormitory, she returned to Indianapolis and began writing for the Indianapolis Star, becoming, in her own words, ‘‘the first cinema critic ever invented.’’ A trip to Greece, Crete, Constantinople, and Vienna ended with her settling down in Paris in 1922. Harold Ross, a former New York acquaintance, asked her to write a small ‘‘Paris Letter’’ for a newly conceived magazine called the New Yorker. For 14 years Flanner wrote all of the New Yorker’s Paris letters, and in the 1930s, all of its London letters, under the pseudonym of ‘‘Genêt.’’ When Flanner returned to the U.S. in 1939, she continued writing her profiles and sketches for the New Yorker. After the fall of France, her articles became more overtly political; she also began speaking and writing extensively on France and French culture and politics. She then wrote for the New Yorker a more
ambitious series (under her own name) on conditions in unoccupied France, on the ‘‘bitter civil war of words’’ between the generations of the two world wars, and on the revival of the Church in the wake of the poverty and deprivation suffered by postwar France. In February 1941 she broadcast a hortatory speech to the French by shortwave radio, and in a radio address for Columbia’s Lecture Hall that same year, told an audience of American women: ‘‘There isn’t a woman in France today who wouldn’t work herself to the bone to earn the rights which every American woman enjoys, yet which so many of them let go to waste.’’ Flanner’s books include a novel, The Cubical City (1926), which she describes as ‘‘really a character sketch and not a novel at all.’’ Three volumes—An American in Paris (1940), Paris Journal, 1944-65 (1966, reissued 1988), Paris Journal, 1965-71 (1971, reissued with former volume in 1988)—comprise the collected New Yorker ‘‘Paris Letters’’ and represent, in many ways, the best of Flanner’s achievement. She invented the formula for her Paris letters: a mixture of incisive epigram, personal and political profiles, and news, mixed with critical reviews of cinema, theater, opera, and gallery openings. Flanner wrote of this form: ‘‘Because I was easily intimidated by and distrustful of French officialdom and because, as at first a fortnightly correspondent, I was in no condition to compete with daily cable New York newspapers, in my helplessness I invented for my New Yorker letters a formula which dealt not with political news itself but with the effect public political news had on private lives.’’ Always it is the characteristic blend of the personal and the political, the temper of the times and the mood of the streets, that marks her writing. The ripening of the mushrooms called les trompettes de la mort is detailed no less meticulously than the rise and decline of General de Gaulle’s political fortunes. Details become significant in a way that mere reportage is not. Current fashions in the streets and shops, vegetables in the market, holiday celebrations, and even a run of good weather signal, as stockmarket reports could not do, France’s economic recovery from the war. And the death of Colette, a nationally loved figure, is in Flanner’s hands more than the occasion for reporting the funeral of a noted author; it is, quite literally, the end of an era in literary and social history. Paris Journal exemplifies, at its best, the blend of memoir and reportage, as well as the keen sense of irony, that Flanner had by then perfected. Flanner’s honors included the French Legion of Honor in 1947 for the ‘‘Letter From Paris’’ columns as well as a Litt. D. from Smith College (1958) and a National Book Award (1966) for Paris Journal: 1944-1965. She died in 1978. OTHER WORKS: Chéri by Collete (translated by Flanner, 1929). Maeterlinck and I by G. Leblanc (translated by Flanner, 1932). Souvenirs; My Life with Maeterlinck by G. Leblanc (translated by Flanner, 1932). Petain: The Old Man of France (1944). Men and Monuments (1957, 1990). Paris Was Yesterday, 1925-1939 (edited by I. Drutman, 1972, translated into French, 1981, original reprint, 1990). London Was Yesterday, 1934-1939 (edited by I. Drutman, 1975). Janet Flanner’s World: Uncollected Writings,
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1932-1975 (edited by I. Drutman, 1979, 1981). Darlinghissima: Letters to a Friend (1985, reissued 1988).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ames, K. B., ‘‘American Voices in Paris: Kay Boyle, Djuna Barnes, and Janet Flanner’’ (thesis, 1985). Colette, Cheri (1983). McWilliams, M. E.D., ‘‘Janet Flanner’s 1945 Blue Radio Broadcasts from Paris: This is the Time for Speaking More Than for Writing’’ (thesis, 1994). Morath, I., Photographer Inge Morath Comments on Her Subjects: Janet Flanner, Alexander Calder, Arthur Miller, Marilyn Monroe, William Styron, Jayne Mansfield, Lola Picasso, Eleanor Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson in a Double Portrait, Isaac Stern and Vladimir Horowitz Together (recording, 1987). Wineapple, B., Genêt, A Biography of Janet Flanner (reissue, 1994). Wineapple, B., Janet Flanner & the New Yorker (1991). Wright, C. M., ‘‘Novel Women: Literary Expatriates of the 1920s’’ (thesis, 1988). Reference works: Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia (1987). CB (May 1943). Indiana Authors and Their Books, 1816-1916 (1949). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). WA. Other references: Chanteusen: Stimmen der Grossstadt (1997). Lost Generation Journal (Winter 1976). New York Post (3 Oct. 1941). New York World Telegram (21 Jan. 1941). Time (22 April 1940, 9 Nov. 1942). Women Come to the Front: Journalists, Photographers, and Broadcasters (1985). —VALERIE CARNES, UPDATED BY SYDONIE BENET
FLETCHER, Inglis Clark Born 20 October 1879, Alton, Illinois; died 30 May 1969, Charleston, South Carolina Daughter of Maurice W. and Flora Deane Chapman Clark; married John G. Fletcher, 1909 Inglis Clark Fletcher was widely traveled, but the home of her maternal ancestors—coastal North Carolina—provided the stuff of her successful fiction and the home of her later years. The eldest of three children, Fletcher grew up in Edwardsville, Illinois, a small town populated by many displaced Southerners. As a child she preferred reading, debating, and writing novels to other pastimes, but it was her drawing talent that sent her to study as a teenager at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts at Washington University. Fletcher displayed some aptitude, but frankly said she was more interested in marriage than sculpture. Her marriage to a mining engineer sent her directly to some of the roughest of the mining camps in California, Nevada, Colorado, and Alaska. Like many pioneer women isolated on male-dominated frontiers, Fletcher turned to writing as a way of coming to terms with experience. She sold film synopses and wrote poetry, articles, and reviews. When the Fletcher family
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moved to Oakland (1911) and San Francisco (1925-38), Fletcher found she enjoyed running a lecture bureau. In 1944 the Fletchers moved to historic Bandon Plantation, near Edenton, North Carolina. When Bandon burned in 1963, Fletcher retired to Charleston, South Carolina. In 1928, Fletcher began her much-publicized tours of Africa, which she had wanted to see, she said, since she had been a child of twelve reading about Livingstone and Burton. From those tours came Fletcher’s first novels: The White Leopard (1931) and Red Jasmine (1932). Both offer excellent observation of native craft, culture, and ritual. The documents she found while researching her Tyrrel County ancestors and the Carolina campaigns of British General Cornwallis sparked her interest in the history of eastern North Carolina. Further research in Carolina libraries and extensive reading in public and private records of the period produced Raleigh’s Eden (1940). The novel, the first of Fletcher’s meticulously researched Carolina series of historical fiction, uncovered long-forgotten cultural facts of coastal Carolina settlement: Moorish architecture and Arabic residents, Oriental settlers and great estates. Many contemporary readers insisted that much of the novel’s setting and events was imaginary, when in fact the novel was faithful to history. Each novel of Fletcher’s Carolina series studies a specific era, beginning with the first attempted settlement in the 1580s. The past provided Fletcher with plots, settings, and characters; it was also the inspiration for her themes. Through individual characters, Fletcher articulates her recurring theme: Land represents freedom and life, especially for Americans. Fletcher was intrigued by the possibility for altering identity that settling the colonies offered Europeans; she also studied the complex interaction of person and environment. The process of settlement provided a metaphor for individual experience: to attain knowledge of land is to attain knowledge of self. This focus on the individual is circumscribed, however, by Fletcher’s greater interest in—and skill in using as narrative— historical detail and fact. Thus, her works are most accurately titled historical romances; and melodramatic as some of her stories are, they attract readers decades after first publication, probably because they imaginatively recreate historical events—a form of fictional verisimilitude that comforts the average reader. OTHER WORKS: Men of Albermarle (1942). Lusty Wind for Carolina (1944). Toil of the Brave (1946). Bennett’s Welcome (1950). Queen’s Gift (1952). The Scotswoman (1954). The Wind in the Forest (1957). Cormorant’s Brood (1959). Pay, Pack, and Follow: The Story of My Life (1959). Wicked Lady (1962). The papers of Inglis Clark Fletcher are in the manuscript collection of East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Green, J. W., ‘‘Inglis Fletcher: A Personal Perspective’’ (thesis, 1984). Hester, E., ed., Cultural Change in Eastern North Carolina As Reflected in Some of the Novels of I.
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Fletcher and Ovid Pierce. Platt, H., I. Fletcher of Bandon, Chronicler of North Carolina. Walser, R., I. Fletcher of Bandon Plantation. Wilcox, S. K., ‘‘The American Revolutionary War in Fiction: An Evaluation of the Works of Winston Churchill, Inglis Fletcher, and John Jakes’’ (research paper, 1983). Wooten, S., ‘‘Identification of African Ritual in the Writings of I. Fletcher’’ (thesis, 1976). Reference works: CA (1969). CB (1947, July 1969). Other references: North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame (audiovisual, 1995). North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame Proudly Presents Inglis Fletcher, 1879-1969, Novelist, Tyrell County, North Carolina (1996). —SALLY BRETT
FLEXNER, Anne Crawford Born 27 June 1874, Georgetown, Kentucky; died 11 January 1955, New York, New York Daughter of Louis G. and Susan Farnum Crawford; married Abraham Flexner, 1898; children: two daughters After her graduation from Vassar College in 1895, Anne Crawford Flexner supported herself by tutoring for two years in Louisville, Kentucky, until she had saved enough money to go to New York City. There, she attended the theater regularly and began writing plays. After a two-year engagement, she married Abraham Flexner, a prominent educator. In his 1940 autobiography, he wrote of their union: ‘‘We agreed at the outset of our married life that her interest and work were as sacred as mine; and for over 40 years we have tried to respect each other’s individuality and that of our two daughters.’’ Encouraged by Flexner, her younger daughter Eleanor Flexner also became a writer and published books on American drama and the woman suffrage movement in America. In 1901, Harrison Grey Fiske opened his Manhattan Theater with Flexner’s first professionally produced play, Miranda of the Balcony, which featured Minnie Maddern Fiske in the title role. The New York Times review stated ‘‘Mrs. Flexner has written a strong emotional drama of modern style and the audience of last night was quick to recognize its value.’’ This success enabled Flexner to obtain the rights to dramatize Alice Hegan Rice’s Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch in 1904. Flexner took a number of liberties with the original plot in order to sustain a narrative line throughout the three-act play structure, but she preserved all the flavor of the novel in her sprightly, humorous dialogue and characterizations. It became Flexner’s most frequently performed play. The Marriage Game (1913) was set on a yacht during a threeday cruise, for which Flexner brought together three married
couples and a charming ‘‘other woman,’’ Mrs. Oliver, invited by one of the husbands who didn’t realize the wives would be aboard. Flexner’s flair for writing good dialogue and her unhackneyed treatment of a standard farcical situation lifted the play out of the ordinary. It is, however, rather heavy-handed in the manner in which Mrs. Oliver teaches the three wives all about marriage, about how they should work at their marriages as if they were jobs. Aged 26, Flexner’s last play, was produced in 1936. In the 17 years since her latest produced play, Flexner had traveled extensively in Europe with her husband. Her abiding interest in British literature is reflected in this interpretation of the romance of John Keats and Fanny Brawne. The action spans the year between the publication of Keats’ Endymion and his departure for Italy, where he was to die six months later at age twenty-six. There is an artificial quality to the opening scene in which Keats, Byron, Shelley, Gifford, Lockhart, and Fanny’s mother are all brought into the reception room of Keats’ publisher. The audience is won over in subsequent scenes, however, by Flexner’s deft characterization, and by dialogue in which even the incorporation of familiar lines from Keats’s poetry is made to sound natural. Flexner departed from the traditional view of Fanny Brawne by treating her as sensitive and sincere in her love for Keats, even to the point that she spends the night with him on the eve of their separation. The sympathetic interpretation of her character was vindicated by the publication a few months later of Fanny Brawne’s letters to Keats’ sister. Flexner’s plays included comedy, mystery, and biographical drama. All Soul’s Eve (1920), a sentimental drama about spiritualism, was enlivened by the device of having one actress play both the role of the young mother who dies and that of the Irish maid into whom the mother’s soul passes. Flexner’s plays were audience-pleasers and might be summed up, in the words of one reviewer, as ‘‘crisp, clean, wholesome, and refreshing fun.’’ Seven of Flexner’s plays were produced in New York over a 35year period. They reveal a variety of interests and a better-thanaverage talent as a dramatist for the pre-World War I period. OTHER WORKS: A Man’s Woman (1899). A Lucky Star (dramatization of the novel, The Motor Chaperone, by C. N. and A. N. Williams, 1909). Wanted—An Alibi (1917). The Blue Pearl (1918). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Flexner, A., I Remember: An Autobiography (1940). Other references: Nation (2 Jan. 1937). Theatre Arts Monthly (Feb. 1937, June 1937). —FELICIA HARDISON LONDRÉ
FLEXNER, Eleanor Born 4 October 1908, New York, New York; died 25 March 1995 Daughter of Abraham and Anne Crawford Flexner Eleanor Flexner grew up in an intellectual world; her father was an educator and writer, her mother a playwright. After
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graduation from Swarthmore College (1930) she spent a year at Somerville College, Oxford (1930-31). Although Flexner’s first book, American Playwrights, 1918-1938 (1939), survives as a substantial piece of research and criticism, her prominence derives chiefly from writings on the women’s movement. Century of Struggle: The Women’s Rights Movement in the United States (1959), with 13 paperback printings followed by revised editions in 1975 and 1996 (expanded, with E. Fitzpatrick), is often used as a basic text for the history of the modern American feminist movement. Flexner said that in 1954 she looked for a book about the women’s rights movement in the U.S. and, unable to find an adequate one, she decided to write one. The book’s dedication to the memory of her mother is apt: she describes Anne Crawford Flexner as one whose ‘‘life was touched at many points by the movement whose history I have tried to record. . . . She marched in the New York suffrage parades. She made her mark as a playwright at a time when such an achievement was still unusual for a woman.’’ Flexner’s Century of Struggle chronicles much that her mother either knew or hoped for. Comparisons of the original preface with that of the revised edition reveal both Flexner’s concern with women’s rights in 1959, at a time when such concerns were virtually unvoiced, as well as searching questions about the status and prospects of the movement in the 1970s. There she speaks of ‘‘a host of new issues’’ and reflects on their origins and their implications for historians today and women in the future. As in all her work, her informal narrative style in Century of Struggle holds the reader while she conveys a textbook’s burden of information. Early in the book, as Flexner approaches the famous Seneca Falls Convention, her participants become a cast of characters. The event itself comes vividly alive as these women launch their new movement to ‘‘leave its imprint on the lives of their daughters and of women throughout the world.’’ Century of Struggle covers well the intellectual progress of women, the battles and achievements of suffrage, and most impressive, women in American labor. As Flexner says in her own bibliographical summary of the six-volume History of Woman Suffrage, it ‘‘stands in a class by itself’’; so these words apply, if more modestly, to her own work. Century of Struggle established Flexner’s stature as a historian of feminism; her Mary Wollstonecraft: A Biography (1972) adds to her prestige in that area. The reader is carried through a ‘‘life of struggle’’ in the psychological study of a woman, externally a feminist, internally dependent on men for love and approval, sometimes so beaten by circumstances that suicide attempts and irrational behavior seem expected; yet she is brilliant and strong enough to rise above the turbulence of her life in order to create what remains a classic, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Flexner portrays a living woman, Mary, as she refers to her, who struggles for independence, for love, for family life, for a place in her society, for stability perhaps, so clear when one notices, as Flexner does, that she can also write Maria, a quasiGothic work replete with the sentimentality of her times.
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With Mary, Flexner draws a parallel between the life of the woman she portrays and her own, having been ‘‘kicked around the job market’’ in World War II. Thus, in feeling and in its value as social history, Mary Wollstonecraft emerged as one of the feminine biographies receiving excellent reviews. Though Flexner is best known for her work as a feminist historian, she goes beyond this definition in her writing and scholarly interests: she contributed, for example, to Volume I of Shelley and His Circle, from which her interest in Mary Wollstonecraft, mother of Mary Shelley, may have grown. From her home in Northampton, Massachusetts in the early 1980s, she described herself as ‘‘a moderate’’ who believes strongly in equal opportunities and equal pay for women; and, in personal terms, as a scholar, writer, and woman who would continue, until 1995 when she died, to follow the affairs of women. OTHER WORKS: Women’s Rights: Unfinished Business (Public Affairs Committee pamphlet, 1971). Journey: Poems (1984). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1974). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: A Century of Struggle & Enterprising Women (audiocassette, 1976). —LOIS FOWLER
FLINT, Margaret (Leavitt) Born 22 December 1891, Orono, Maine; died 27 February 1960, West Baldwin, Maine Daughter of Walter and Hannah Ellis Leavitt; married Lester W. Jacobs, 1913, children: six Margaret Flint was educated at Tome Institute in Port Deposit, Maryland, and attended the University of Maine. After raising a family of six children, she began to write at the age of forty-four. Her first novel, The Old Ashburn Place (1936), won the Dodd Mead-Pictorial Review prize for the best first novel of 1935. During the 1930s there was, as in all times of serious economic depression in America, considerable interest in returning to the land. The times were right for novels about farm life and country values, and thus Flint began her career at a time especially disposed to value her material. All of her novels, except her second, Valley of Decision (1937), concern rural life in the fictional town of Parkston, Maine. Her last published work, Dress Right, Dress! (1943), is not so much a novel as a piece of propaganda, written for the Women’s Army Corps, in the form of a recruit’s diary. The Old Ashburn Place is probably Flint’s best novel. The hero, Charles Ashburn, a fifty-year-old bachelor, recalls his life as he wonders how it happened that he’s lonesome and old. There
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were six children in his family, and the chronicle of their fortunes makes up this book. At the heart of the plot is Charles’s love for a neighboring rich girl, Marian Parks, who of course marries someone in her own class, and his affair with his brother Morris’ wife. This novel is a family chronicle seen from the point of view of the least successful of the family, a bachelor who raises Rhode Island Reds and lives by a code set down by his mother (who had been a schoolteacher) that all must be clean and good in his life. While Flint’s novels do not have happily-ever-after endings, they do uphold traditional values: the land, the home, marriage, children. Her best people are solid, responsible types who flirt with other ways but come back to the land. Charles Ashburn, for instance, should have married a woman like himself, but he was attracted to another type and could not compromise. In Deacon’s Road (1938), young Eph Squire should marry Lois Ashburn, Charles’s niece, but first falls in love with her cousin Shirley Wells, a city girl. He comes to his senses, however, gets the family farm, marries Lois, and thus does not end up like Charles Ashburn. Two female leading characters, Thurlow Parks in Breakneck Brook (1939) and Judith Squire in Enduring Riches (1942), have to face difficult decisions on whom to marry. Thurlow finally realizes that her childhood sweetheart, Henry Witham, is the man for her; her older, harder sister, a city person, gets the man Thurlow thought she wanted. Judith Squire marries at thirty-four, stays in her rural family home, has children, and, like Charles Ashburn raises chickens, but has a real struggle to manage her impossible, exuberant husband. Flint makes it clear men are expected to be difficult, but a real woman doesn’t want a nambypamby man (like the minister who falls in love with Judith). The land serves as the background for the values of Flint’s characters, but her major focus is on individuals coming to terms with what life has brought them. Her novels do not offer the reader escape into pastoral retreats. She takes the country life as it is, and writes about people living it. OTHER WORKS: Back o’ the Mountain (1940). Down the Road a Piece (1941). October Fires (1941). BIBLIOGRAPHY: NYT (28 Feb. 1960). —BEVERLY SEATON
FLYNN, Elizabeth Gurley Born 7 August 1890, Concord, New Hampshire; died 5 September 1964, Moscow, USSR Daughter of Thomas and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn; married Jack A. Jones, 1908 (separated 1910, divorced 1920) The daughter of first-generation Irish immigrants, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was raised in an atmosphere of concern for social
and political issues. Her parents were both members of the Socialist Party, and her mother was a strong women’s rights advocate. When the family moved to the South Bronx, New York, in 1900, Flynn was introduced to city poverty and to radical political activity. At twelve she won the prize in a Socialist Party debate, and at sixteen gave her first public speech, ‘‘What Socialism Will Do for Women,’’ at the Harlem Socialist Club. Later that year she was arrested in New York City (the first of many arrests) for speaking without a public permit. In 1906 Flynn joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and a year later quit school to travel throughout the U.S. as one of the IWW’s most effective speakers and organizers. Flynn had a son in 1910, and in that same year she separated from her husband (with formal divorce notice in 1920) because she was not prepared to give up her political activity to settle into a more limited domestic life. Both her mother and her sister Kathie provided an important home base for Flynn and her son after the separation. During World War I and in the postwar years, as government arrests of radical political leadership increased, Flynn was the moving force in several labor defense leagues. She became seriously ill in 1927 and for about 10 years lived in semiretirement with a friend in Portland, Oregon. Against the advice of her doctor, she returned to the East Coast in 1936, joined the Communist Party of the U.S., became a columnist for the Daily Worker in 1937, and in 1938 was elected to the party’s national committee. In 1952, she was arrested for subversive activities under the Smith Act and served from January 1955 to May 1957 at the women’s prison in Alderson, West Virginia. Upon her release she returned to party activity and was elected to the national chair in 1959, a post she held until her death while on a visit to the USSR. All of Flynn’s writing relates directly to her political activism and focuses on the rights and problems of workers, on the status and corresponding activities of working women, and on civil liberties in general. Underlying all these works is the attempt to acquaint future generations with the historical legacy of the workers’ struggle in the U.S. and with the role of working-class leadership in this struggle. Referring to a speech made to the party in 1945, Flynn noted that it had been ‘‘partly biographical, partly confessional, and partly an evaluation of our weaknesses.’’ The perspective expressed in this statement—combined with a continued advocacy of working-class rights and a belief in socialism as the solution to economic, social, and political problems—characterizes all of her writing. Flynn’s strength as a writer rested on her ability to present ideas with clarity, simplicity, and personal fervor. In addition to numerous pamphlets, journal and newspaper articles (in Political Affairs and Solidarity, for example), and regular columns in the Daily Worker and Sunday Worker from 1937 to 1964, Flynn also wrote two major works that are primarily autobiographical. I Speak My Own Piece (1955, reprinted in 1973 as The Rebel Girl, incorporating Flynn’s own editorial comments) describes her life, her contemporaries, and the events of radical
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working-class history from 1906 to 1926, using amusing and pertinent anecdotal material. At times the events and people are idealized, in keeping with her purpose to insure that the heroic struggle of those early days would not be lost to history. At the time of her death, Flynn had completed only the notes and outlines for the sequel to this volume, to cover what she called her ‘‘second life.’’
1964, Nov. 1964). Radical America (Jan.-Feb. 1975). Women Who Dared: 1992 Calendar (1992).
The Alderson Story (1963) details the experiences of Flynn’s 1952 trial and the following period of imprisonment. It is of more than autobiographical significance because Flynn tries to record, in a series of prison poems, the voices and emotions of other women with whom she associated in the prison. The book thus becomes a document on women’s prison experience in addition to a chapter in her life.
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Flynn’s associates and friends considered her a ‘‘great political leader and a great human being.’’ Her ability to express complex issues in simple, unassuming, yet convincing language made her one of the most effective popular leaders of her time. Her autobiographical and political writings are among the best sources available for the history of women’s involvement in radical U.S. politics.
OTHER WORKS: Women in the War (1942). Women Have a Date With Destiny (1944). Women’s Place in the Fight for a Better World (1947). The Twelve and You (1948). The Plot to Gag America (1950). Communists and the People (1953). Horizons of the Future for a Socialist America (1959). Freedom Begins at Home (1961). The McCarran Act: Fact and Fancy (1963). The largest collection of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s writings and personal records is located at the American Institute for Marxist Studies in New York City.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Camp, H. C., ‘‘Gurley’’: A Biography of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, 1890-1964 (1984). Camp, H. C., Iron in Her Soul: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and the American Left (1995). Cole, S. C., ‘‘Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: A Portrait’’ (thesis, 1991). Dixler, E. J., The Woman Question: Women and the American Communist Party, 1929-41 (dissertation, 1974). Hardy, G. J., American Women Civil Rights Activists: Biobibliographies of 68 Leaders, 1825-1992 (1993). Holzkamper, C. O., Rebel Girl, Radical Woman: A Biography of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (1980). Joyce, M. H., ‘‘Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Irish Nationalism’’ (thesis, 1995). Maupin, J., Labor Heroines: Ten Women Who Led the Struggle (1974). Motherland: Writings by Irish American Women about Mothers and Daughters (1999). Post, D. ‘‘The Crucible: The Heresy Trial of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Within the American Civil Liberties Union’’ (1991). Trautmann, W. E., Direct Action & Sabotage: Three Classic IWW Pamphlets from the 1910s (1997). Wertheimer, B. M., We Were There: The Story of Working Women in America (1977). Words on Fire: The Life and Writing of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (1987). Other references: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the Rebel Girl (audiovisual, 1993). Nation (17 Feb. 1926). Political Affairs (Oct.
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—JANE SLAUGHTER
Born 15 August 1787, Boston, Massachusetts; died 26 January 1860, Brookline, Massachusetts Wrote under: Eliza Lee Follen, Mrs. Follen, Mrs. C. T. C. Follen Daughter of Samuel and Sally Barrett Cabot; married Charles T. Christian Follen, 1828 (died 1840) One of 13 children, and assured by her family’s prominence of a stimulating social and intellectual environment, Eliza Cabot Follen early became a friend and follower of William E. Channing and taught in his Unitarian Sunday school. She married a German political refugee who, from 1830 to 1835, was professor of German literature at Harvard. A son was born in 1830. During the Harvard years, the couple became friends of Harriet Martineau and worked actively in the antislavery cause. Because Follen had previously written two works of fiction, edited the Christian Teachers’ Manual, and composed poems and stories for children, it was natural for her, after her husband’s death in 1840, to turn to her pen for a livelihood. She edited Gammer Grethel (1840), the first American edition of Grimm’s fairy tales, and the Child’s Friend, a juvenile periodical, from 1843 to 1850. In addition to writing a biography of her husband, she composed poetry, plays, and stories for children. Until her death she remained active in the abolition movement, working on committees and writing numerous tracts. The first and most popular of Follen’s stories for children was The Well Spent Hour (1827-28), in which nine-year-old Catherine Nelson learns through benevolence and self-control the meaning of a sermon text: ‘‘Let them show their piety at home.’’ Although this didactic tale, suitable for the Sunday school library, substitutes conversations for action and episodes for plot, its kindly tone and benign view of childhood are winning. The Birthday (1832) takes up the history of Catherine just before her fourteenth year, when her father’s financial losses force the mother and children to move to a country cottage. The ensuing idyll of family life, which includes stories told during a party, suffers from a contrived plot and the heavy-handed contrast of good and evil so typical of early 19th-century children’s literature. Simpler in content and more graceful in execution are Follen’s short tales, such as True Stories about Dogs and Cats (1855), The Old Garret (1855), and The Peddler of Dust Sticks (1855), later collected with other tales in the 12-volume Twilight Stories (1858). In The Old Garret, where discarded objects—a
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wig, a musket, a broadsword, a tea kettle—give their biographies, Follen adopts the technique associated with Hans Christian Andersen of having inanimate objects assume a narrator’s role. Although her children’s poetry is now almost forgotten, Follen was a pioneer who turned from the harsh, morbid verse characteristic of early 19th-century American children’s poetry to rhymes frankly meant to give more pleasure than instruction. Little Songs (1833 and 1985), reprinted as the final volume of Twilight Stories, was intended, she tells us, ‘‘to catch something of that good-natured pleasantry and musical nonsense which makes Mother Goose so attractive to children of all ages.’’ Even though the verse in this volume lacks the vigor of traditional nursery rhymes, it is remarkable both for its response to children’s tastes and for its gentle vision of childhood. Follen’s adult fiction, The Skeptic (1835) and Sketches of Married Life (1838), deals ostensibly with marriage. The first work, however, resembles a religious tract both in the account of Alice Grey’s efforts to save her husband from the influence of his freethinking cousin and in Follen’s recommendations of Dr. Channing’s Unitarian writings. In the second work, a domestic novel, Follen creates a heroine who demonstrates, as Helen Papashvily points out, ‘‘the marked ability of women in the practical concerns of everyday life.’’ Follen’s Life of Charles Follen (1840), for which she traveled to Germany to obtain additional material, is a sympathetic but unsentimental treatment of her husband’s life. A woman of conviction, both in her support of religion and in her opposition to slavery, Follen is notable for bringing to American children’s literature of the pre-Civil War period a sensitive concern for the feelings and tastes of her young readers.
OTHER WORKS: Selections from the Writings of Fénelon (edited by Follen, 1829). Hymns, Songs, and Fables for Children (1831). Words of Truth (1832). Hymns and Exercises for the Federal Street Sunday School (1839). Nursery Songs (1839). Poems (1839). Sacred Songs for Sunday Schools, Original and Selected (1839). The Liberty Cap (1840). The Works of Charles Follen with a Memoir of His Life (1841-1842). Made-up Stories (1855). Poems (1855). To Mothers in the Free States (1855). Conscience (1858). May Morning and New Year’s Eve (1858). Piccolissima by A. Montgolfier (translated by Follen, 1858). Travellers’ Stories (1858). What Animals Do and Say (1858). Home Dramas for Young People (compiled by Follen, 1859, reissued 1989). Our Home in the Marsh Land; or, Days of Auld Lang Syne (1877).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Meigs, C., A Critical History of Children’s Literature (1969). Papashvily, H. W., All the Happy Endings (1956). Wright, L. H., American Fiction, 1774-1850 (1969). Reference works: AA, DAB. NAW. NCAB. Other references: ElemEngR 8 (1931). NEQ 38 (1965). —PHYLLIS MOE
FOOTE, Mary Hallock Born 19 November 1847, Milton, New York; died 25 June 1938, Hingham, Massachusetts Daughter of Nathaniel and Anne Burling Hallock; married Arthur De Wint Foote, 1876; children: three The youngest child of Quakers, Mary Hallock Foote was raised on the family farm in the Hudson River valley. After completing her schooling in 1864, she took the step, unusual for a young lady of her era, of enrolling at New York City’s Cooper Union to study art. Over the course of three years at Cooper, she prepared herself for a career in black-and-white illustration. Her professional debut came in 1867 with the publication of four of her drawings in A. D. Richardson’s Beyond the Mississippi. During the following 25 years, Foote enjoyed fame as one of the most accomplished of American illustrators. She executed drawings for many of the prominent giftbooks of the period, including Longfellow’s The Skeleton in Armor, Whittier’s Mabel Martin, and Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Her illustrations were published regularly in St. Nicholas and Century magazines; ‘‘Pictures of the Far West,’’ her most celebrated series, appeared in the latter during 1888 and 1889. By the 1890s, Foote’s position as ‘‘the dean of women illustrators’’ was secure, and she was elected to the National Academy of Women Painters and Sculptors. Foote’s success as an illustrator was ultimately eclipsed by her achievements as an author. After her marriage to a civil engineer, she spent much of her life in Western mining camps, whose picturesque aspects invited literary as well as visual interpretation. Her first attempt at serious prose, ‘‘A California Mining Camp,’’ appeared in Scribner’s in 1878 and highlighted her experiences in New Almaden, California; it was followed by descriptive sketches of other locales where her husband’s profession took them. From a stay in Leadville, Colorado, came The Led-Horse Claim (1883), Foote’s first novel and a modest bestseller. Between 1883 and 1925, Foote published 11 more novels and four volumes of short stories; she also wrote an excellent autobiography and numerous uncollected tales and sketches. Most of her fiction derived from material rooted deeply in her own experience: in particular, the tension between the urbane East and the boisterous West—between the genteel security of the East Coast and the pioneer existence beyond the Rockies—informed her writing. Foote, approaching her material more sympathetically as her appreciation for the West grew, made the frontier a subject of realistic interest and of romance. As Owen Wister observed, hers was the first voice ‘‘lifted to honor the cattle country and not to libel it.’’ Foote’s finest writing came after 1895, once she had retired from professional illustration and had settled comfortably with her husband and three children in Grass Valley, California. Especially noteworthy is The Desert and the Sown (1902), a novel
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inspired in part from Foote’s experiences in Idaho between 1884 and 1894. Although the plot covers only the three years between the arrival of Emily Bogardus in Idaho and the death of her estranged husband Adam in New York, the tale spans the family fortunes for three generations. A biblical framework reinforces the story’s symbolic reconciliation of East and West, past and present. Two other significant works by Foote are Edith Bonham (1917) and The Ground-Swell (1919). Both are poignant tributes to the past—the former dedicated to the memory of Foote’s best friend, Helena Gilder, and the latter designed as a tribute to Agnes Foote, the author’s youngest daughter, who died in 1904. After 1919 Foote ceased to publish, although during the 1920s she undertook a project that served as the capstone to her career. Written when she was nearing eighty, Foote’s Reminiscences (1972) is a truly distinguished autobiography of interest to historians as well as to literary scholars. From the quiet milldams of Milton to the noisy mining stamps of Leadville, from the frustration and disappointments of Idaho to the comforts and acclaim of the Grass Valley years, this personal account of a genteel Quaker ‘‘irretrievably married into the West’’ makes compelling reading. In 1932 Foote returned with Arthur to the East, living in Hingham, Massachusetts, until her death six years later. To her 20th-century successors Foote bequeathed a legacy of Western fiction which, at its best, provided fresh perspectives, substituted sensitivity for sentimentality, and strove for fidelity. At a time when the West was still subject to humorous exploitation, Foote was the first to achieve the stance of a discerning literary observer, while as a gifted illustrator she also contributed memorable interpretations of the frontier.
OTHER WORKS: John Bodewin’s Testimony (1886). The Last Assembly Ball and The Fate of a Voice (1889). The Chosen Valley (1892). Coeur d’Alene (1894). In Exile, and Other Stories (1894). The Cup of Trembling, and Other Stories (1895). The Little FigTree Stories (1899). The Prodigal (1900). A Touch of Sun, and Other Stories (1903). The Royal Americans (1910). A Picked Company (1912). The Valley Road (1915).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bickford-Swarthout, D., Mary Hallock Foote: Pioneer Woman Illustrator (1996). Cothern, L., ‘‘Becoming Western: Gender and Generation in Mary Hallock Foote’s Dual Career’’ (thesis, 1997). Edwards, C., ‘‘That Violent and Promiscuous Birth’’—A History of the West in Four Voices: Roosevelt, Turner, Foote and Rolvaag (1995). Hatheway, D. M., ‘‘The Last Remove: Women, Mourning, and the American West’’ (thesis, 1994). Johnson, L. A., Mary Hallock Foote (1980). Maguire, J. H., Mary Hallock Foote (Boise State College Western Writers Series #2, 1972). Marschean, A. L., ‘‘Romance and Reality on the Mining Frontier: The Life of Mary Hallock Foote’’ (thesis, 1985). Milowski, C. P., Revisioning the American Frontier: Mary Hallock Foote, Mary Austin, Willa Cather, and the Western Narrative (1996). Northwest Passages: A Literary Anthology of the Pacific
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Northwest from Coyote Tales to Roadside Attractions (1994). Parra, J. M., ‘‘Altered Vision: Three Nineteenth-Century Western Authors: Caroline Kirkland, Mary Hallock Foote and Mary Austin’’ (thesis, 1995). Stegner, W., Angle of Repose (1971). Taft, R., Artists and Illustrators of the Old West, 1850-1900 (1953). Reference works: DAB. NAW. NCAB. Other references: Colorado Magazine (April 1956). Idaho Yesterdays (Summer 1976). University of Wyoming Publications (15 July 1956). WAL (May 1975). —LEE ANN JOHNSON
FORBES, Esther Born 28 June 1891, Westborough, Massachusetts; died 12 August 1967, Worcester, Massachusetts Daughter of William T. and Harriette Merrifield Forbes; married Albert L. Hoskins, 1926 (divorced) Esther Forbes was the youngest of five children; her father was a judge, her mother a historian. She graduated from Bradford Academy in 1912 and studied at the University of Wisconsin (1916-18) before serving as a farmhand in Virginia in response to the war effort. Returning to New England, she became an editor from 1920 until her marriage. During her marriage, Forbes traveled extensively abroad and continued to write. At the time of her divorce in 1933, she had already made a literary reputation as a historical novelist with O Genteel Lady! (1926) and A Mirror for Witches (1928). The height of her fame came in the 1940s when she won first the Pulitzer Prize in History for Paul Revere and the World He Lived In (1942) and then the Newbery Medal for Johnny Tremain: A Novel for Young and Old (1943). Forbes was the first woman member of the American Antiquarian Society and received seven honorary degrees. The self-consciously historical area in which she grew up, family legends (especially those about an ancestor named Esther, an accused witch who died in a Salem prison), and Forbes’ mother’s professional interest in old gravestone inscriptions, diaries, and logs all contributed to making Forbes ‘‘a novelist who wrote like a historian and a historian who wrote like a novelist,’’ as the New York Times described her. All of Forbes’ works are set in New England; both her short novels and her longer fiction and nonfiction exhibit the same meticulous attention to historic details—culinary, artistic, legal, and others. Forbes’ earliest works are brief and focused upon the development of their heroines, who are of various types and fates. Several of these early novels explore the expression of female sexuality and its psychological connection with the attraction to
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the demonic in a repressive society that is part of, or heir to, the Puritan tradition. Lanice Bardeen in O Genteel Lady! is a sensual and intellectual Boston editor and writer of the late 19th century who gives up both her passion for a Lawrence-of-Arabia type and for writing in order to marry a staid Harvard professor. In A Mirror for Witches, set in the late 17th century, Doll Bilby has a love affair with the ‘‘devil’’ and dies in childbirth, an accused witch, in a Salem prison. The novel is purportedly written by an 18th-century apologist for the Salem witchcraft trials. In Miss Marvel (1935), the title character is an eccentric spinster of Forbes’ mother’s era; she leads an uneventful outer life and an eventful, romantic inner one, depicted in letters to an imaginary lover. The novel examines her total acceptance and romanticizing of sexual repression. Side by side with the story of Miss Marvel’s social and emotional development is an extensive, contrasting description of physiological changes, at a cellular level, taking place in her body. The contrast between the central Miss Marvel and her less colorful maiden sister, another Miss Marvel, illustrates Forbes’ concern with the individuality of her characters. She avoids stereotypes of either historical periods or the people who dwell in them. Johnny Tremain is the briefer, focused, and fictionalized outgrowth of Paul Revere and the World He Lived In, on which Forbes and her mother collaborated. Both the life of the real silversmith and the now-famous story of the silversmith’s apprentice who adjusts to the handicap of a maimed hand and participates in the Boston revolutionary movement, display Forbes’s intense interest in the part that individuals, significant or insignificant, play in historical events. Both books clearly owe their immediate inspiration to Forbes’ concern with the meaning and nature of human freedom in the context of World War II. Rainbow in the Road (1954), which was made into a musical in 1969, is Forbes’ last published work. It is a lyric lament for the unspoiled New England countryside before the coming of the railroad, and for the ephemeral popular arts practiced by itinerant artists, ‘‘limners’’ (portrait painters), like its hero, Jude Rebough, and his ballad-making friend, Mr. Sharp. Although she was working on a study of witchcraft at the time of her death, Rainbow in the Road seems an appropriate swan song for Forbes herself, whose own choice of a rather popular art form, the historical novel, helped her to win immediate but perhaps transient recognition. Even in her nonfiction, Forbes’ sole analytical thrust is psychological and somewhat Freudian. Forbes considers personalities and social relationships among personalities, rather than broader social, political, or economic issues. She saves her sharp sense of irony, expressed often in wry comments, for individual foibles and generally accepts learned but conventional interpretations of events. Perhaps only in A Mirror for Witches, with its craftily delineated narrator, and in Johnny Tremain, where the problems of an adolescent and of a new society reflect upon each other, do her talents as a novelist and a historian mesh artistically enough to transcend the limits of her genre. Here her efforts to depict the human universal in a particular period and place will probably earn her longer-lasting aesthetic esteem.
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OTHER WORKS: Paradise (1937). The General’s Lady (1938). The Boston Book (with A. Griffin, 1947). The Running of the Tide (1948). America’s Paul Revere (with L. Ward, 1948).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Addington, L. E., Patriot Games: A Curriculum of Democratic Principles in American History as Seen in Children’s Literature (1997). Bales, J., Esther Forbes: A Bio-Bibliography of the Author of Johnny Tremain (1998). Dobrow, V., Johnny Tremain:A Study Guide (1995). Forbes, E., America’s Paul Revere, Esther Forbes (1991). Frazier, A. S., Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes: Curriculum Unit (1997). Haack, J. L., A Literature Unit for Johnny Tremain, by Esther Forbes (1994). Kingsland, T., I Want to Know More About Good Books (audiovisual, 1980). Krueser, C. M., Johnny Tremain:By Esther Forbes (1989). Power, G., Johnny Tremain: Study Guide (1993). Snodgrass, M. E., Johnny Tremain: Esther Forbes (1995). Troy, A., Johnny Tremain (Esther Forbes): Teacher Guide (1988). Novel Guide to Johnny Tremain, by Esther Forbes (1991). Study Guide for Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes: Strategies for Teaching the Novel Based on an Unabridged Version (1989). Reference works: CA (1971, 1975). Newbery Medal Books 1922-55 (1955). SAA (1971). TCA, TCAS. Other references: LJ (15 May 1944). NYT(13 Aug. 1967). —LOIS R. KUZNETS
FORCHÉ, Carolyn Born 28 April 1950, Detroit, Michigan Writes under: Carolyn Sidlosky Daughter of Michael Joseph and Louise Nada Blackford Sidlosky; married Harry Mattison, 1984; children: Sean Christoph. Poet, translator, essayist, activist, and teacher, Carolyn Forché was raised in rural Michigan and educated at Justin Morell College of Michigan State University (B.A., 1972) and Bowling Green State University (M.F.A., 1975). She won the Yale Younger Poets Award the year of her graduation from Bowling Green, for Gathering the Tribes (1976), a ceremonial, sometimes-cosmic collection of lyrics about people and places, written in a densely simple language centered on nouns and names. She has published frequently and fairly steadily since then—poems, translations, essays, reviews, interviews, and prefaces—and won many prizes and fellowships, including the Lamont Poetry Selection Award for her bestselling second book of poetry, The Country Between Us (1981). Appropriately for a distinguished translator and reader of many languages, her own poetry has been translated into German, Swedish, Russian, Spanish, Czech, Greek, Dutch, and Japanese. Forché’s status as an international figure in the arts and politics is based in her identification as a ‘‘poet of witness’’: she has lived in and written about many areas of the world where
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poverty and oppression are social norms, from the Mojave Desert to Johannesburg and, perhaps most crucially for her work, El Salvador. After spending the summer of 1977 on Mallorca with the self-exiled Salvadoran poet Claribel Alegria, translating Alegria’s poems for the volume Flowers from the Volcano (1982), Forché was encouraged by Alegria’s cousin to go to El Salvador as a journalist and to bring back testimony to North America. This she did, in many forms: in magazine articles; in speeches, radio programs, panel discussions, international conferences; in her teaching; and in the poems of The Country Between Us. Forché’s interest in other languages and other cultures has been a constant, starting perhaps from the important childhood relationship with her grandmother Anna, an immigrant Slovak peasant about whom Forché has written regularly since her death in 1968 (see especially ‘‘Burning the Tomato Worms’’ in Gathering the Tribes). Her first book of poems includes a long section based on her experiences living close to Native Americans in the Southwest and British Columbia. This urge toward contact and empathy with those outside her own region, nation, and native tongue, took on the focus of a mission once she began the ‘‘moral and political education’’ (‘‘El Salvador’’) offered by her harrowing years in El Salvador. As she put it in a 1987 essay (‘‘Letters to an Open City’’), ‘‘there are. . .two human worlds and the bridges between them are burning.’’
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authorship in 13 years, and it marked a departure from her previous style. The book is divided into five numbered sections, dealing with war in France, Japan, and Germany as well as her own experiences in war-torn Beirut and El Salvador. She focuses on Hiroshima and the Holocaust as two defining events of our generation and assumes that past atrocities predict current ones. Angel of History is placed within the contexts of history, art, and philosophy. It reflects the poet’s personal vision, incorporates the words of characters both real and fictional, and is influenced by Forché’s reading, taking in snatches of texts by the likes of Elie Wiesel, Franz Kafka, Elias Canetti, Georg Trakl, and Ren Char. The experimental style, which received mostly favorable reviews from critics, is characterized by long lines as well as a combination of finished and unfinished thoughts and a lack of closure. A review in Publishers Weekly noted that ‘‘though Forché’s previous books have been groundbreaking works of political and moral depth, this new volume may be the most remarkable.’’ Don Bogged, writing in the Nation, agreed: ‘‘The collection represents a deeper and more complex engagement with her political concerns and a startling departure in style to achieve this. It’s clearly a breakthrough.’’ Intended not to explain but to prevent forgetting, Angel of History has been described as powerful but not easily understandable. Despite its difficulty and the horrors inherent in the subject matter, critics praise the book as poetry of exceptional beauty.
Two of these bridges are poetry and translation: in addition to that of Claribel Alegria, Forché has also brought the poet Robert Desnos into English (The Selected Poems of Robert Desnos, with William Kulik, 1991) and completed an anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (1993). She has also written prefaces and forewords to a number of books by lesserknown poets as well as translations. Photography is another important, if problematic, medium of ‘‘translation.’’ Forché, who is married to the war photographer Harry Mattison, has written prose texts for two collections of photographs, El Salvador: Work of Thirty Photographers (1983) and Shooting Back: Photography by and about the Homeless (1991). Her poem, ‘‘In the Garden of Shukkei-en,’’ provided the text for a 1991 exhibit of photographs at the Arizona State University School of Art.
OTHER WORKS: Women in American Labor History, 1825-1935: An Annotated Bibliography (with Martha Jane Soltow, 1972). History and Motivations of U.S. Involvement in the Control of the Peasant Movement of El Salvador (with Rev. Philip Wheaton, 1980). Essays (selected): ‘‘El Salvador: An Aide Memoire,’’ American Poetry Rev. (July-August, 1981). ‘‘A Fantasy of Birches,’’ Singular Voices: American Poetry Today, (ed. by Stephen Berg, 1985). ‘‘A Lesson in Commitment,’’ The Writer in Our World; ( ed. by Reginald Gibbons, 1986). Foreword to Janet Levine, Inside Apartheid (1988).
Among her talents, Forché is also a teacher. Like many contemporary poets she has held visiting positions at colleges and universities across the country. Since 1989 she has been a tenured faculty member at George Mason University, where she teaches the literature of witness as well as the craft of writing. In her public life Forché has claimed every available forum for her testimony: speeches, conferences, readings, classrooms, radio, television, film, photography, arts journals, newspapers, and newsweeklies. Hers is a voice apparently compelled to speak, coming from the heart of one who has seen much that is unspeakable in places where, often enough, speech is against the law. Her Angel of History (1994), begins with a long poem, ‘‘The Recording Angel,’’ which aptly names the function Forché has come to share with other ‘‘poets of witness’’ in the global village of a genocidal century.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA 109 (1983), 117 (1986). CAN 50 (1996). CLC 25 (1983), 83 (1994). Contemporary Poets 4 (1985). DLB 5 (1980), 193 (1998). FC (1990). WWAW, 11th ed. (1979). Other references: APR 22:2 (March/April 1993). Book Forum 2:3 (1976). Carolyn Forché (film, 1990). Commonweal (Nov. 1977). Five Fingers Review 3 (1985). Library Journal (1 Feb. 1996). Ms. (Jan. 1980, Sept. 1982). Nation (May 1982, Oct. 1982, Oct. 1994). Nightsun 9 (Fall 1989). NYRB (24 June 1993). Progressive (Oct. 1993). PW (31 Jan. 1994). Rolling Stone (April 1983). Salmagundi (Spring 1984). TVAR: Literarni Tydenik 10 ([Prague] 1990). Time (March 1982). Whole Earth Review (Spring 1996). Witness in El Salvador (film, 1982).
Angel of History, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry, was Forché’s first full-length book of sole
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—MARY B. CAMPBELL, UPDATED BY KAREN RAUGUST
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FORD, Harriet Born 1863, Seymour, Connecticut; died 12 December 1949, New York, New York Daughter of Samuel and Isabel Stoddard Ford; married Fordé Morgan, 1930 Harriet Ford’s earliest goal was to become an actress—not an entirely respectable pursuit for a young lady whose New England ancestors ran to, in her own words, ‘‘theologians and college presidents, a long, grim, wonderful line of unusual men.’’ Buoyed by her ambition and by the conviction she too was unusual, Ford left home to train at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where David Belasco was one of her teachers. Her difficulties in getting an acting engagement after graduation were later to impel her, as a successful playwright, to make protégées of numerous hopeful young actresses and bring them, like homeless kittens, to her producers. Ford’s 10-year struggle to become known as an actress culminated in a season in London, where she appeared in several plays by her friend William Gillette. Reviewers acknowledged the American ingenue’s attractiveness, but deplored her acting. Her ambition switched to writing that year, when she won the prize in a British competition for the best poem celebrating the return of Henry Stanley from Africa. The poem was printed on silk and read at a banquet for the heroic explorer. After her return to New York, Ford’s first produced play, The Greatest Thing in the World (1900), brought stage stardom to Sarah Cowell LeMoyne, for whom it was written. Popular performers Eleanor Robson and Kyrle Bellew assured the gallery’s approval of A Gentleman from France (1901), which Ford later ruefully described as ‘‘the last of the swashbucklers’’ and ‘‘the slaughter of eighteen.’’ In 1923, Ford collaborated on a mystery play, In the Next Room, with Eleanor Robson. The most flourishing period in Ford’s quarter-century as a produced playwright on Broadway was 1912 through 1914, when she collaborated with Harvey O’Higgins on, among their many jointly authored plays, two murder-mystery comedy-thrillers, The Argyle Case (1912) and The Dummy (1914). To research the first, she and O’Higgins relentlessly pursued nationally prominent detective William J. Burns, who was at the time, said Ford, ‘‘in continual danger, as the people against whom he was working were particularly bitter against him.’’ They grilled Burns in daily interview sessions about his real-life experiences, eking out the play’s improbable plot with ‘‘interesting details in crime detection, playful little bits of business with thumbmarks and the like to pique curiosity and satisfy a craving for the unusual.’’ Ford described to interviewer Ada Patterson her methods of work with her two major collaborators: ‘‘When Mr. Patterson and I wrote The Fourth Estate we equally divided our labor. He wrote the first act while I was working on the second. Then he wrote the third while I was writing the fourth. Mr. O’Higgins and I have a slower and more satisfactory method. . . . We talk over a scene until we decide upon the lines. If he thinks of one upon which we
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agree he writes it, or if I hit upon one that pleases us I write it. I sit at my desk and Mr. O’Higgins does a great deal of walking around.’’ Ford felt her particular skill as a dramatist lay in her ‘‘constructive faculty, the power to build.’’ Because of this technical acumen, producers frequently called upon her to ‘‘doctor’’ scripts by other writers. Although 1924 was the year of her last professionally produced play, Sweet Seventeen, Ford continued to write plays, mostly innocuous one-act comedies, published by Samuel French. OTHER WORKS: Audrey (with E. F. Boddington, 1902). The Honour of the Humble (1902). A Little Brother of the Rich (with J. M. Patterson, 1909). Dickey Bird (with H. O’Higgins, 1914). Polygamy (with H. O’Higgins, 1914). Mr. Lazarus (with H. O’Higgins, 1916). The Land of the Free (with F. Hurst, 1917). On the Hiring Line (with H. O’Higgins, 1919). Main Street (with H. O’Higgins, 1921). The Bride (1924). Where Julia Rules (with C. K. Duer, 1924). The Happy Hoboes (with A. S. Tucker, 1928). Mrs. Susan Peters (1928). Wanted—Money (with A. S. Tucker, 1928). What Imagination Will Do (1928). Christopher Rand (1929). Mysterious Money (1929). What Are Parents For? (1930). The Divine Afflatus (1931). Are Men Superior? (1933). Heroic Treatment (1933). Youth Must Be Served (1934). With no date: The Hold-up, Old P. Q., Orphan Aggie, Under Twenty, When a Feller Needs a Friend. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Current Opinion (Nov. 1916). Green Book Magazine (May 1912, Aug. 1913). Strand Magazine (May 1915). Theatre Magazine (July 1914). —FELICIA HARDISON LONDRÉ
FORD, Sallie Rochester Born 1 October 1828, Rochester Springs, Kentucky; died 1910 Daughter of James H. and Demoretta Pitts Rochester; married Samuel H. Ford, 1855; children: five (two died in early childhood) The Baptist faith and theology that inform Sallie Rochester Ford’s novels were an integral part of her life from early childhood. After her mother’s death, Ford, then four, was brought up by her maternal grandmother, a strong farm woman who, Ford recalled, cherished ‘‘those principles which, in orphan childhood, I learned from her lips.’’ Continuing her early interest in reading and theology, Ford graduated at the head of her class from the Female Seminary in Georgetown, Kentucky; two years later she publicly professed her faith in Christ and was baptized. At twenty-six Ford married a Baptist minister and editor of the monthly Christian Repository, which she began to coedit and in which she serialized her first novel, Grace Truman (1857). Living in St. Louis, Missouri, Mobile, Alabama, and Memphis,
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Tennessee, where he held pastorates and she was president of two missionary societies, they had five children, the second and third of whom died in early childhood. Ford produced several more religious novels, a fictionalization of the ‘‘raids and romances’’ of a Confederate Army band, and in her old age, a memorial volume on Rochester, her firstborn son.
Ford’s religious romances are flawed by her sentimental style, wooden characterization, and weak plots. But the suspense, the analysis of theology, and the emotional power of Fannie’s baptism scene make Ford’s first novel, Grace Truman, worth reading.
Grace Truman dramatizes Grace’s conflict between her love for her Presbyterian husband and her belief in Baptist theology, a conflict echoed in two romantic subplots. Her husband’s family, who believe in ‘‘sprinkling,’’ try to ‘‘make a Presbyterian’’ of Grace, who believes in ‘‘dipping,’’ and her troubles increase when her husband begins to backslide. All ends well when the husband, his sister Fannie, the fiancé of Grace’s best friend, and even the Presbyterian minister become Baptists and are dipped in the river.
OTHER WORKS: The Battle of Freedom, Including Seven Letters on Religious Liberty, Addressed to Bishop Spaulding (with S. H. Ford, 1855). Raids and Romances of Morgan and His Men (1863, reissued 1980). Evangel Wiseman; or, The Mother’s Question (1874). The Inebriates: A Story of Love, Suffering and Triumph (1884). Rochester Ford: The Story of a Successful Christian Lawyer (with S. H. Ford, 1904).
Although Ford partially compensates for the limitations of the plot by creating suspense over each stage of Grace’s dilemma, her style is sentimental, her dialogue stilted, and the long-suffering Grace is merely a cardboard figure in both her romantic and her theological trials. Ford’s theological arguments show an analytical mind; a knowledge of scripture, doctrine, and historical and contemporary scholarship; and in the homely analogies made by Aunt Peggy, the black servant, a knack for the concrete illustrations that characterize Puritan sermons.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Lamb’s Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. (1900). Living Female Writers of the South (1872). NCAB. Twentieth Century Biographical Dictionary of Notable Americans (1904). Women of the South Distinguished in Literature (1865).
What makes the novel more than a theological discourse tacked onto a romance is the baptism of Fannie, who incurs her father’s ‘‘sore displeasure’’ when she becomes a Baptist. Although the occasion is one of spiritual rejoicing, Fannie is ‘‘severing herself from all of her early associations’’ and she is ‘‘racked beneath the conflict of contending emotions.’’ The conflict between love and principle so unconvincingly treated in Grace’s trials is here movingly portrayed, largely because the scene is psychologically realistic in its suggestion of the emotional consequences of parent-child conflict. The theme of happiness mixed with pain is underlined by Ford’s device of ending the novel, as it began, with a wedding, for the second bride wonders if her life will be ‘‘full of alternating joy and sorrow.’’
FORESTER, Fanny
Mary Bunyan, the Blind Dreamer’s Daughter (1860, reissued 1990) also combines romance and religion, this time in a historical novel focusing on Mary’s devotion to her imprisoned father and her romance with a dissenter, whose execution causes her to die of grief. Religion and romance alike come off as sentimental and insipid; the only readable passages are the brief ones giving biographical information about Bunyan and quotations from his works. Ernest Quest (1878) chronicles Ernest’s dual quest for salvation and a wife. He avoids the snares of Spiritualists and Masons to become a Baptist, and he marries Alice, whom he has rescued from a divorced man. Ernest finds both ‘‘the truth’’ and ‘‘all of earthly happiness’’ in an ending ushered in by the flurry of weddings climaxing the subplots. In spite of occasional moments of suspense (the villainous divorced man plots with the cunning of a Lovelace to trap Alice into marriage), Ernest Quest, like Mary Bunyan, has all of the faults and none of the virtues of Grace Truman.
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—MARTHA CHEW
See JUDSON, Emily Chubbuck
FORNÉS, María Irene Born 14 May 1930, Havana, Cuba Daughter of Carlos L. and Carmen H. Collado Fornés María Irene Fornés has been a powerful moving force in the experimental theater scene since the early 1960s. ‘‘A major voice in American drama,’’ according to Scott Cummings, and ‘‘the truest poet of the theater,’’ according to Erika Munk. Born and educated in Cuba, Fornés came to the U.S. in 1945 and became a naturalized citizen in 1951. Since then, her work has earned her such accolades as official citation as a ‘‘national treasure’’ by the American National Theatre, which commissioned her to write a play. She has received awards from the Rockefeller (1971) and Guggenheim (1972) foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts (1974, 1984, 1985), and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1985). She has also won seven of her eight Obies since 1977, including one (1982) for Sustained Achievement. She also won the Playwrights U.S.A. award in 1986 for her translation of ‘‘Cold Air.’’ Fornés was a founding member of the Women’s Theatre Council and the New York Theatre Strategy, an organization of off-off Broadway playwrights; she served as president of Theatre Strategy from 1973 until it disbanded in 1980. Although never explicitly feminist, Fornés’ plays explore women’s role in society, examining power relations inherent in
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sexuality, households, and in all human relationships. Trained early in American Method acting under Lee Strasberg in the Playwrights’ Unit of the Actors Studio, Fornés soon began developing plays in collaboration with performers, often in workshop. She decided that it was important to direct her own works, a part of a natural, continuing process that she likens to cooking and then eating the same meal. ‘‘I never saw any difference between writing and directing,’’ she said in a 1985 interview. ‘‘Of course, they are different things, but they are sequentially and directly connected.’’ The workshops Fornés designs and leads are aimed at ‘‘inducing inspiration.’’ As she told David Savran, ‘‘I have invented exercises that are very effective and very profound.’’ Her own work ‘‘does not present a formulated thesis,’’ but rather arrives as ‘‘messages that come’’ to her out of the inarticulate parts of her consciousness or unconsciousness. Fornés’ plays do not revolve around clear plots but instead present moments of intense engagement among characters. Fefu and Her Friends (1977) was performed, under Fornés’ direction, with the audience divided into groups to move around a loft that served as theater space, seeing the scenes in different sequences. ‘‘From the first,’’ John Kuhn writes, ‘‘Fornés’ broad and playful sense of attention and of verbal and visual images poked audiences with freakishly or theatrically exalted characters, both innocent and experienced.’’ These characters are often limited by constricted environments or by their inability to articulate their experience, but even her simplest characters have a wisdom that transcends these limitations. And whatever their limitations, one senses in Fornés a great compassion and deep respect for the characters. Fornés says her plays become ‘‘crystallized’’ when she ‘‘feels the presence of a character or person. . . . I get it like click.’’ Then she sees ‘‘a picture of the set with the characters in it.’’ Having begun as a painter and textile designer, she says, ‘‘The colors are very, very important for me. And the clothes that people wear. When it finally happens, the play exists; it has taken on its own life.’’ The result is a style most often described as realism, a realism Susan Sontag says eschews both the ‘‘reductively psychological’’ and ‘‘sociological explanations’’ and Bonnie Marranca characterizes as ‘‘emphasizing the interior lives of her characters, not their exterior selves.’’ Fornés’ plays often present an unromanticized sexuality, raw and violent and at the same time casual. Sexuality is rarely the subject, however. The subject is rather the ramifications of sexuality on human relationships, sexuality as power and as a fact of life, another part of her characters’ natural existence. Her recent play, The Summer in Gossensass (produced 1998), is another piece very different from the expected. In it, the two main characters play American actresses living in England who are trying to piece together a play that they have not yet read. Performed through the Women’s Project and Productions at the Judith Anderson Theatre in Manhattan, it received mixed reviews for its unusual perspective. College theater troupes continue to produce the plays of Fornés, and she has been known to travel from her home in New York to visit college campuses for lecture
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and discussion of her work. She also remains an active teacher of the subject at home and abroad. As interest in Fornés’ work continues to surface in the theatrical community, the playwright has been the subject of three books: Fornés: Theater in the Present Tense by Diane Lynn Moroff (1996), Maria Irene Fornés and her Critics by Assunta Bartolomucci Kent (1996), and The Theater of Maria Irene Fornés, edited by Marc Robinson (1999). All are noteworthy for students, directors, and actors exploring American theater and cultural and women’s studies. Her best-known plays include Promenade (1969), Fefu and Her Friends (1977), described by the playwright as ‘‘a breakthrough for me,’’ and Mud (1983), which Bonnie Marranca calls a play centering on ‘‘the act of a woman coming to thought.’’ Largely because they are products of workshops and have been performed off-and off-off-Broadway, Fornés’ plays are often difficult to come by, many never having made it to publication. OTHER WORKS: The Widow (produced 1961, published as La Viuda). Tango Palace (also produced as There! You Died, 1963, published 1966). The Successful Life of 3: A Skit for Vaudeville (produced 1965, published 1971). The Office (produced 1966). A Vietnamese Wedding (produced 1967, published 1971). The Annunciation (produced 1967). Dr. Kheal (produced 1968, published 1971). The Red Burning Light; or, Mission XQ3 (produced 1968, published 1971). Molly’s Dream (produced 1968, published 1971). Promenade and Other Plays (published 1971, includes Dr. Kheal; The Successful Life of 3; A Vietnamese Wedding; The Red Burning Light; and Molly’s Dream). The Curse of the Langston House (produced 1972). Dance (produced 1972). Aurora (produced 1974). Cap-a-Pie (produced 1975). Washing (produced 1976). Lolita in the Garden (produced 1977). In Service (produced 1978). Eyes on the Harem (produced 1979). Evelyn Brown (a Diary) (produced 1980). Blood Wedding (translation and adaptation of García Lorca, 1980). Life Is a Dream (translation and adaptation of Calderón, 1981). A Visit (produced 1981). The Danube (1982, published 1986). Sarita (1984, published 1986). Abingdon Square (produced 1984). No Time (produced 1985). The Conduct of Life (1985, published 1986). Cold Air (translation and adaptation of Pinera, 1985). Drowning (1985, published 1986). Lovers and Keepers (produced 1986). The Trial of Joan of Arc on a Matter of Faith (produced 1986). The Mother (title later changed to Charley, produced 1986). Art (produced 1986). María Irene Fornés: Plays (1986, includes The Danube; Mud; Sarita; The Conduct of Life). Hunger (produced 1985). Three Pieces for a Warehouse (produced 1988). Springtime (1989, published 1991). The manuscript collection of María Irene Fornés is in the Lincoln Center Library of the Performing Arts in New York City. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brater, E., ed., Feminine Focus (1989). Chen, L., ‘‘Violence in the Spotlight: Exploring the Violent and Violated Female Characters in Selected Plays of Marsha Norman and María Irene Fornés’’ (thesis, 1993). Kent, A. B., María Irene Fornés and her Critics (1996). Moroff, D. L., Fornés: Theater in
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the Present Tense (1996). Robinson, M., ed., The Theater of María Irene Fornés (1999). Redmond, J., ed., Theatrical Space (1987). Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights (1987). Reference works: American Women Dramatists of the Twentieth Century (1982). CA (1977, Online, 1999). CANR (1990). CLC (1986, 1990). Contemporary Dramatists (1973, 1977, 1982, 1988). DLB (1981). FC (1990). Hispanic Writers (1990). MTCW (1991). Notable Women in American Theatre (1989). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: NR (25 Feb. 1978). Newsday (9 Apr. 1998). Newsweek (4 June 1969). New York (18 Mar. 1985). NYT (5 June 1969, 14 Jan. 1978, 22 Jan. 1978, 25 Oct. 1983, 13 Mar. 1984). Performing Arts Journal (1983, 1984). Studies in American Drama, 1945-Present (1989). Theater (Winter 1985). VV (25 Jan. 1973, 23 Mar. 1977, 23 Jan. 1978, 29 Aug. 1986). Wisconsin State Journal (7 Nov. 1998). —MARCIA HEPPS AND WILLIAM KEENEY, UPDATED BY CARRIE SNYDER
FORREST, Katherine V. Born 20 April 1939, Windsor, Ontario, Canada Daughter (adopted) of Leland W. and Mary Gilhuly McKinlay Katherine V. Forrest has written novels and short fiction in a wide variety of genres, all dealing with lesbian protagonists and intended primarily for lesbian readers. Although she is best known for a series of mystery novels involving a lesbian police detective, she has also written science fiction, erotica, and romances. Forrest is also a noted editor of lesbian fiction, holding the position of senior fiction editor for Naiad Press, the largest publisher of lesbian fiction in the United States. Forrest was adopted as a young child. Her adoptive parents both died while she was in high school. In 1957 she moved from Canada to the U.S., where she attended Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. She later moved to California and attended the University of California at Los Angeles. She eventually became an American citizen and continued to live in California, primarily in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Forrest worked a variety of jobs before becoming a full-time writer in 1979. Within five years, she established herself as one of the most popular authors of lesbian fiction in the U.S. Her first novel, Curious Wine (1983), was an erotic romance detailing the relationship between two women, Diana Holland and Lane Christianson. Curious Wine sold more than 100,000 copies and is said to be the most widely read lesbian novel since Radclyffe Hall’s early classic The Well of Loneliness (1928). In 1994 Curious Wine became the first lesbian novel to be recorded on audiotape. In 1984 Forrest published two more bestselling novels, in very different genres. Daughters of a Coral Dawn was a science fiction novel in which a group of women leave Earth and establish a lesbian utopia on the planet Materna. Amateur City introduced
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Kate Delafield, a detective for the Los Angeles Police Department. In addition to dealing with the challenges of investigating murder cases, Delafield must keep her lesbianism a secret in order to avoid jeopardizing her career in a field dominated by heterosexual males. Amateur City was the first lesbian novel to be offered by the Century Book Club of Los Angeles, the first book club for gay and lesbian readers. Although Forrest continued to write short stories and novels in many different genres, the novels about Kate Delafield quickly became her most famous works. The second novel in the series, Murder at the Nightwood Bar (1987), was one of the most popular. It has been frequently used as a text in college classes dealing with mystery fiction, women writers, or gay and lesbian literature. The novel involves the murder of Dory Quillin, a young woman who had been rejected by her family because she was a lesbian. Plans commenced in 1996 to adapt Murder at the Nightwood Bar into a motion picture. All the Delafield novels use realistic, suspenseful mystery plots to deal with serious social issues. In The Beverly Malibu (1990), the long-term effects of the political repression of the McCarthy Era of the 1950s are seen in a case involving the murder of movie director Owen Sinclair. Murder by Tradition (1991) deals directly with homophobia as Delafield investigates the murder of Teddie Crawford, an openly gay young man. In addition to confronting the homophobia of her police partner, Ed Taylor, Delafield faces the possibility that her lesbianism may be exposed. Both The Beverly Malibu and Murder by Tradition won the Lambda Literary award for lesbian fiction. The Beverly Malibu was the first hardcover book published by Naiad Press, winning it greater attention from mainstream reviewers than previous novels in the series. While remaining in the suspense genre, Forrest’s fiction took a new direction with the publication of Flashpoint in 1994. A political thriller set in California in the early 1990s, this novel again succeeded in discussing controversial topics while entertaining readers with a fast-paced, carefully plotted story. By the late 1990s, the popularity of Forrest’s novels had increased to the point where they began to be published by mainstream publishers in addition to Naiad Press. As an editor, Forrest collaborated with Barbara Grier on three anthologies of lesbian fiction. The Erotic Naiad (1992), The Romantic Naiad (1993), and The Mysterious Naiad (1994) proved there were many talented authors writing for a lesbian audience. The success of Forrest’s work also encouraged many writers of lesbian fiction, particularly in the genre of mystery fiction. OTHER WORKS: An Emergence of Green (1986). Dreams and Swords (1988). Liberty Square (1996). Apparition Alley (1998). Sleeping Bones (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: CA (1991). Completely Queer (1998). Gay and Lesbian Literature (1993). Great Women Mystery Writers (1994). St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (1996). —ROSE SECREST
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FORTEN, Charlotte L. Born 17 August 1837, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; died 23 July 1914, Washington, D.C. Wrote under: Charlotte Forten, Lottie Daughter of Robert B. and Mary Virginia Forten; married Francis J. Grimké, 1878; children: one, who died in infancy Charlotte L. Forten, a member of Philadelphia’s most prestigious black family, was tutored at home until 1854, when she went to live with black abolitionist Charles Lenox Remond, in Salem, Massachusetts, where she attended Higginson Grammar School. She graduated from Salem Normal School in 1856 and taught white students at Epes Grammar School. Despite ill health, Forten was a member of the Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society. She read widely, studied French and German, and wrote occasional poems and essays. In 1862 Forten secured employment in a Port Royal, South Carolina, school for the children of ex-slaves. She also taught adults and thus contributed to the success of the Port Royal Experiment, an effort to prove ex-slaves were educable and could be trained as soldiers. Forten returned to Philadelphia in 1864 and published an account of her Southern experience in the Atlantic Monthly. Forten married a Presbyterian minister and abolitionist. They had one child, who died in infancy. Except for a brief period in Florida, Forten lived in Washington until her death. Forten’s poetry, sometimes published under the pseudonym ‘‘Lottie,’’ expresses the sentimentality and piety characteristic of poetry catering to the poorest of popular Victorian tastes. Her essays generally lack literary merit. The best is ‘‘Life on the Sea Islands’’ (Atlantic Monthly, May/June 1864), which presents material also contained in the Journal account of her years in the South. Only Forten’s Journal entitles her to a place among significant women writers of the 19th century. Forten’s dedication to the abolitionist cause brought her into contact with all the leading abolitionists; so the Journal contains personal responses to Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, Jonathan Parker, and William Wells Brown. Her record of literary figures whom she knew includes Whittier, who became her valued friend, and Lowell and Emerson, whose lectures she attended. The first half of the Journal is useful as a record of the day-to-day activities of a genteel, young black woman of the 19th century. The entire journal is pervaded by Forten’s racial awareness. Though her family has been free for three generations, Forten identified with the slaves. For her, the Fourth of July was a mockery of the principle of democracy as no man, white or black, could be free in a land where slavery existed. She deplored the transatlantic telegraph because it brought England ‘‘so very near this wicked land.’’ Similarly, she preferred Salem to Philadelphia because of the indignities blacks experienced in Pennsylvania, where they were barred from restaurants and denied seats on public conveyances and where captured slaves were dragged
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through the streets. Yet she was so sensitive to the lack of total acceptance in Salem that she made no friends among her schoolmates, who could not accept her wholeheartedly. The final sections of the Journal are valuable for their picture of the transition of ex-slaves into free people. There are anecdotes about slave experience, about precarious escapes from masters evacuating their homes in the face of Union advances, and accounts of children dying from whooping cough. But the closing entries also tell the story of Forten’s appreciation of the music of the freed slaves; of her satisfaction at seeing children and adults learn to read and write, though their spoken language was Gullah; and of her pride while watching field hands become brave soldiers determined to defend their freedom. The language of the Journal is informal except for the convention of addressing it as ‘‘dear A.’’ It seldom lapses into colloquialisms, and the only example of such freedom is in the use of ‘‘Secesh’’ for the secessionists or an occasional military expression. Its tone is made personal by such private observations as Forten’s wondering if Browning—or any man—could really merit the devotion in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poetry; her thoughts about her ill health and its interference with her ambitions; and the realistic descriptions of her hospital experience, with her sincerely expressed response to death and injury. The Journal ends on 15 May 1864, when Forten made her last entry at the Oliver Fripp Plantation in Port Royal. The Journal is written with candor and clarity. The New England entries reveal a sensitive person determined to study and learn all that she can in order to be a living demonstration of the capabilities of black people. The Journal is the record, as well, of a talented and gracious young woman as outsider—because she is black. OTHER WORKS: The Journal of Charlotte Forten: A Free Negro in the Slave Era (reissue, 1981). The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké (reissue, 1989). The Poetry of Charlotte L. Grimké (database, 1995). A Free Black Girl Before the Civil War: The Diary of Charlotte Forten, 1854 (2000). The papers of Charlotte L. Forten are at Howard University in Washington, D.C. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Barksdale, R., and K. Kinnamon, Black Writers of America (1972). Braxton, J. M., Charlotte Forten Grimké (18371914) and the Search for a Public Voice (1985). Burchard, P., Charlotte Forten: A Black Teacher in the Civil War (1995). Hughes Wright, R., A Tribute to Charlotte Forten, 1837-1914 (1993). Katz, W. L., ed., Two Black Teachers during the Civil War (1969). Longsworth, P., Charlotte Forten, Black and Free (1970). Oden, G., The Journal of Charlotte L. Forten, the Salem-Philadelphia Years (1854-1862) Rexamined (1983). Rider, J., ‘‘Charlotte Forten and the Port Royal Mission’’ (thesis, 1995). Rose, W. L., Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (1964). Wilson, E., Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (1962). Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays
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on Women’s Diaries (1996). Woman’s ‘‘True’’ Profession: Voices from the History of Teaching (1981). Reference works: Black American Writers Past and Present (1975). NAW. Other references: African-American Poetry of the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology (1992). African American Profiles in History Volume Three (recording, 1995). Charlotte Forten’s Mission Experiment in Freedom (audiovisual, 1991). Half Slave, Half Free Part 2: Charlotte Forten’s Mission (audiovisual, 1992). Historic Black Abolitionists (audiovisual, 1996). Richard Allen Story; Charlotte Forten (recording, 1987). —GWENDOLYN A. THOMAS
FOSTER, Hannah Webster Born 10 September 1758, Salisbury, Massachusetts; died 17 April 1840, Montreal, Canada Wrote under: A Lady of Massachusetts Daughter of Grant and Hannah Wainwright Webster; married John Foster, 1785 Little is known of either Hannah Webster Foster’s childhood or education, but the numerous historical and literary allusions in her books suggest she was well-educated for her time and sex. Foster is best known for her novel The Coquette; or, The History of Eliza Wharton (1797). After the publication of her second book, The Boarding School; or, Lessons of a Preceptress to Her Pupils (1798), Foster wrote only short articles for newspapers. Upon her husband’s death she moved to Montreal to live with two of her five children, two daughters who also wrote. The Coquette, which is ‘‘founded on fact,’’ was based on the life of Elizabeth Whitman of Hartford, Connecticut, a distant cousin of Foster’s husband. It is a seduction novel in epistolary form (obviously much influenced by the novels of Samuel Richardson, such as the epistolary seduction novel, Clarissa Harlowe) with the typical strengths and weaknesses of this genre. Incidents are reported several times by different people, a technique that reveals character through a comparison of points of view. Many of the letters seem natural and spontaneous. Others, however, suffer from excessive length, didactic digressions, and an overemphasis on sentiment and sensibility. From the novel’s beginning Eliza emerges as a strongwilled young woman delighting in a newly found freedom from her parents and a dull fiancé. She is convincingly indecisive about her two new suitors, the admirable Mr. Boyer, a clergyman, and Major Sanford, who, she is warned, is ‘‘ a second Lovelace’’ (the seducer in Clarissa). Sanford, too, is a convincing and complex character. Seduction to Sanford is a game; he sees Eliza as a coquette and determines to ‘‘avenge [his] sex by retaliating the
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mischiefs she meditates.’’ He writes: ‘‘If she will play with a lion, let her beware the paw, I say.’’ Sanford is confident of his powers, but his pride is hurt by her friends’ warnings against him and by her attraction to Boyer. These make him even more determined to win Eliza, which he does eventually, even though he has, in the meantime, married for money. Justice appropriate to the seduction-novel genre is meted out to Eliza and Sanford, accompanied by lengthy confessions and moral lectures. The lessons are taught by the characters themselves, however, and their contrition seems real enough, a fact which makes The Coquette one of the better American examples of the genre and the book went through 13 editions in its first 40 years. The Boarding School was not so popular. It is dedicated to ‘‘the young ladies of America’’ and demonstrates how a clergyman’s widow, Mrs. Williams, educates young girls to fulfill their future roles as well-bred ladies, wives, and mothers. Lacking plot, the letters in The Boarding School can only be read as a series of thinly disguised lectures on female education and deportment that repeat the accepted wisdom of 18th-century America. A contemporary critic reproached Foster for having failed to establish at least a model of good letter-writing, since she had said nothing original in the book. The book does, however, contain the warning, implied in The Coquette, against the accepted maxim that ‘‘reformed rakes make the best husbands.’’ Foster argues society has been too lenient with seducers and pleads for more tolerance for their victims.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Akgun, D. A., ‘‘Expressions of Oppression or Power?—Reconsidering the Texts of Hannah Webster Forster and Tabitha Gilman Tenny’’ (thesis, 1996). Bornstein, S., ‘‘Masquerading as the Decrees of Fate: The Fate of Society and the Will of Law in The Coquette and The Awakening’’ (thesis, 1994). Brown, H. R., The Sentimental Novel in America, 1789-1860 (1940). Groves, S. M., ‘‘Machiavels in Petticoats: Feminist Messages in Three Didactic Sentimental Novels: Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte: A Tale of Truth, Hannah Foster’s The Coquette, and Helena Wells’ The Step-mother’’ (thesis, 1990). Hikel, J., ‘‘Educating the ‘Republican Daughter,’ Early American Novels and Conduct Literature, 1789- 1800’’ (thesis, 1995). Matzke, C. K. B., ‘‘The Woman Writes as if the Devil Was in Her: A Rhetorical Approach to Three Early American Novels’’ (thesis, 1993). Mott, F. L., Golden Multitudes (1947). Osborne, W. S., ed., The Power of Sympathy and The Coquette (1970). Petter, H., The Early American Novel (1971). Stern, J. A., The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel (1997). Tassoni, J. P., ‘‘A Thousand Conversations: Genre Placement and Social Relations in American Sentimental Narratives’’ (thesis, 1992). Telfer, T. A., ‘‘Writing as a Revolutionary Activity: Five Writers of the American Revolutionary Era’’ (thesis, 1992). Reference works: AA, DAB. NAW. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: AL (Nov. 1932). —ELAINE K. GINSBERG
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FOX, Helen Morgenthau Born 27 May 1884, New York, New York; died 13 January 1974, Mt. Kisco, New York Daughter of Henry and Josephine Sykes Morgenthau; married Mortimer Fox, 1906; children: three Helen Morgenthau Fox, one of America’s foremost garden writers, was the daughter of the immigrant financier/philanthropist/politician Henry Morgenthau. Encouraged by her family to become involved in some serious lifework, she spent some time in social work (with the Henry Street Settlement and such institutions) after her graduation from Vassar College and marriage to an architect. However, as she explains in Adventure in My Garden (1965), from the time she was fourteen she believed her vocation was to work with plants. ‘‘In my social work I learned a good deal about human nature and human problems, but gradually I realized this work was not for me. It did not fill me with joy, as if music were playing in my heart, which is how I always felt when I worked in my garden,’’ she wrote. Along with raising three children, Fox studied botany at Columbia University and worked at the New York Botanical Garden with Dr. A. B. Stout, who encouraged her to write her first garden book, a study of lilies, Garden Cinderellas (1928). Thereafter she devoted her life to the study of plants and the writing and translating of garden books. Fox frequently lectured on horticulture and appeared on radio and television broadcasts. She held membership in many horticultural associations, receiving the distinguished service award from the New York Botanical Garden in 1960. In a 1928 article in the National Horticultural Magazine, Fox stated that ‘‘the best garden book’’ should ‘‘give one a sense of gardening as an art and make us feel its relation to the other arts.’’ Her books do just that. A cultured woman, with a background of travel, study, and work, Fox always presented gardening as one of the popular arts, setting it in a historical and cultural context. Most of her work falls into two groups: studies of European gardening (including translations from the French) and practical treatises with an informal, autobiographical emphasis. Fox translated a book of essays and sketches by the 20th-century garden designer Jean Forestier, who was an expert in restoring the lost gardens of Moorish Spain. Fox’s study of Spanish gardens, Patio Gardens (1929), relates to his work. Yet characteristically, she made her book more than the usual study of foreign gardens. The history, culture, and lifestyle of the people became part of the study; in addition, the book offers practical suggestions, particularly for the modern gardener in America’s Southwest. André Le Notre (1962) is a biography of the landscape architect who created Versailles, an introduction to his work, and a piece of cultural history. Fox is best known for works about her own gardens and gardening experiences. Gardening with Herbs for Flavor and Fragrance (1933), an introduction to herb growing, is still in print, although it has had many imitators. A similar book about
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growing vegetables, Gardening for Good Eating (1943), was no doubt encouraged by the victory-garden campaign. In both, Fox presumes that the reader takes a scholarly interest in the subject and includes chapters on historical considerations and literary associations. In The Years in My Herb Garden (1953), a more personal account of her herb gardens, Fox again combines historical, horticultural, and literary material. Organized mainly by plant families (‘‘The Mints and Their Relatives’’), with an emphasis on garden design, this book is an American classic for herb growers. Fox’s last garden book, Adventure in My Garden, contains the most complete descriptions of her own gardens. To Fox, gardening was a lifetime ‘‘adventure’’ that she shared with others through her books. OTHER WORKS: Gardens by J. C. N. Forestier (translated by Fox, 1924). The Dancing Girl of Shamakha by J. A. Gobineau (translated by Fox, 1926). A Delectable Garden by B. Palissy (translated by Fox, 1931). Abbé David’s Diary by D. Armand (translated by Fox, 1949). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Morgenthau, H. All in a Lifetime (1922). Other references: NYT (14 Jan. 1974). —BEVERLY SEATON
FOX, Paula Born 22 April 1923, New York, New York Daughter of Paul H. and Elsie de Sola Fox; married Richard Sigerson (divorced); Martin Greenberg, 1962 A ‘‘traveling child,’’ Paula Fox seldom lived any place longer than a year or two and seldom saw either of her parents. Following high school, she worked at a variety of jobs before she married, had two sons, then obtained a divorce. After attending Columbia University, Fox taught elementary school for several years. She began to write seriously after her second marriage. Fox has written television scripts, short stories, and novels, but she is known chiefly for her children’s books. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship (1972), an award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1972), and the Hans Christian Andersen Award in recognition of her entire body of writing (1978). For readers under ten, Fox pictures a stable society administered by solicitous adults who lavish restrictive attention on imaginative and venturesome little boys. These stories are spiced with dry humor, witty but realistic dialogue, and fanciful but improbable characters or episodes. In Maurice’s Room (1966), the parents of a dedicated junk collector finally move to the country after their son’s possessions overcrowd his bedroom in their city
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apartment. When Lewis’s parents (A Likely Place, 1967) take a trip to Chicago, he gains greater freedom and acquires self-confidence by helping an elderly Spanish shoemaker communicate with his overly protective son-in-law. For older juvenile readers, Fox explores the terror and loneliness of preadolescent youths who must prove themselves in the mysterious world outside the home. In How Many Miles to Babylon (1967), The Stone-Faced Boy (1968), Portrait of Ivan (1969), Blowfish Live in the Sea (1972), and The Slave Dancer (1973), a journey of adventure and self-discovery tests ingenuity, courage, comprehension, or endurance and culminates in personal growth as well as increased understanding of, or achievement in, the adult world. Skillful blending of the actual and the symbolic entices the reflective reader to delve beneath the surface story and ponder such perennial puzzles as illusion and reality or the enigma of human behavior. These are Fox’s best books. The Slave Dancer, Fox’s only historical novel, won the Newbery Medal in 1974. Thirteen-year-old Jessie is kidnapped, taken aboard a slave ship, and forced to play the fife while the slaves dance for exercise. The revolting picture of the brutality of the seamen and the inhumanity of the slave trade is softened slightly by Jessie’s compassion for the captives. In her adult novels, Fox portrays lonely, confused, rootless New Yorkers ensnared in the misery of unfulfilling work, unrewarding relationships, and unsatisfying marriages. She offers astute, sensitive observation, but only tentative resolution and cheerless conclusion. She has been praised for her original talent, lucid style, technical skill, incisive wit, and penetrating analysis of character. Since 1980 Fox has produced six books for young readers and two novels for adults. Reviewers and critics have continued to praise her ability to depict the inner life of young protagonists, to create realistic characters and authentic settings, and to write clear, graceful prose. Fox excels in portraying the emotions and perceptions of children and adolescents as they grow in understanding themselves, their peers, and the adults around them. In A Servant’s Tale (1984), Fox skillfully records the childhood experiences and relationships of Luisa de la Cueva while evoking the locale and lore of the West Indies. The adult Luisa, however, is less interesting and less believable than the child. In her juvenile fiction, Fox never stints on complexity nor avoids difficult, even tragic, themes. The novels of this period explore guilt, grief, divorce, alcoholism, and death. In each book, the protagonist confronts a complicated individual who exhibits attractive qualities but who also causes another discomfort, unhappiness, humiliation, injury, or loss. Each carefully crafted plot leads to a resolution in which the young person comes to terms with this individual in a manner that will foster future growth and happiness. The ‘‘difficult’’ person in A Place Apart (1980) is a talented, arrogant, and wealthy high school student who befriends newcomers—and attempts to control their lives. Victoria Finch escapes his manipulation, but another student, who tries to regain his self-respect by driving up a dangerous, snow-covered mountain
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road, is seriously injured. In One-Eyed Cat (1984), eleven-year-old Ned believes he has injured a wildcat when he disobeyed his father and fired his new air rifle. Fox examines how Ned’s burdened conscience affects his relations with his parents, his friends, an elderly neighbor, and the cat. On one level, the discordant character in the novel is the housekeeper, but the tale also demonstrates that a genuinely good person (Ned’s father, Reverend Wallis) can cause discomfort for those who exhibit less patience and forbearance. When fifteen-year-old Catherine Ames (The Moonlight Man, 1986) spends a month in Nova Scotia with her charming but irresponsible alcoholic father, she gains insight into her parents’ divorce and realizes she cannot change her father’s behavior. While the Corey family (Lily and the Lost Boy, 1987) is living on a Greek island, twelve-year-old Lily feels left out when her older brother becomes friends with Jack, a rootless American youth whose father dances superbly but drinks too much. While riding his bicycle near the edge of a cliff, the reckless Jack causes the death of a Greek child. Despite her dislike for Jack, Lily overcomes her fear and goes out alone at night to befriend him. Obsessed with old family jealousies, ten-year-old Emma’s acid-tongued Aunt Bea (The Village by the Sea, 1988) has an unkind word for everyone. At the climax of the novel, the elderly woman destroys the miniature village Emma and her friend have painstakingly built from debris found on the beach. Emma’s uncle restrains her from immediate retaliation, and she later gains greater understanding of her unhappy aunt. Considered one of America’s outstanding writers for young readers, Fox continued to receive numerous literary awards, including an American Book Award for A Place Apart and Newbery Honor awards in 1985 and 1989. Her sensitive treatment of tough subjects in juvenile literature continues in The Eagle Kite (1995), where she tackles a tremendously weighty subject for individuals of any age—AIDS. Liam’s father is dying of AIDS; he is told by his family this is a result of a recent blood transfusion, but the educational system’s efforts at sex education have made it impossible for Liam to accept this explanation. Forced to recall an incident he has tried his best to forget—seeing his father embracing a young man on a beach several years before—he finds his shame and anger at his family’s well-intentioned lies difficult to live with. His father withdraws to a cabin by the sea where Liam is able to spend time alone with him and where both their wounds can begin to heal. Western Wind (1993) presents the story of Elizabeth, who has been sent away for the summer to stay with her aging grandmother, an artist living on a secluded island off the Maine coast. Elizabeth’s family has recently had a new addition—a baby boy who she is certain has become more important to her parents than she, causing her banishment for the summer. The island, itself a character in this story, is brooding, stark, and inhabited only by Elizabeth’s grandmother and one other family, the Herkimers, who have an eccentric, overprotected son named Aaron. During her month on the island, Elizabeth learns a good deal about friendship, relationships in general, and the real reason for her trip—to spend some final time with her grandmother, who is quite ill.
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Radiance Descending (1997) involves a particularly painful situation for children and an often popular subject of children’s literature—the mentally disabled sibling. Paul Coleman’s younger brother Jacob has Down’s syndrome. Paul attempts to ignore him, becomes an overachiever in class, and refuses to discuss his ‘‘retard’’ brother with his friends. When he is given responsibility for taking Jacob to the doctor for weekly allergy shots, he is forced to work within Jacob’s limitations and finds his brother has a wonderful circle of caring friends. Paul learns compassion, begins to notice the trials of those around him, and discovers that he is not alone in his struggle to blend Jacob into his life. OTHER WORKS: Poor George (1966). Dear Prosper (1967). Hungry Fred (1969). The King’s Falcon (1969). Desperate Characters (1970). Good Ethan (1973). The Western Coast (1973). The Widow’s Children (1976). The Little Swineherd and Other Tales (1978). Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon (1984). The God of Nightmares (1990). Monkey Island (1991). Azmat and His Brothers: Three Italian Tales Remembered (1993). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Arbuthnot, M. H., and Z. Sutherland, Children and Books (1972). Kingman, L., ed., Newbery and Caldecott Medal Books, 1966-1975 (1975). Short Shorts: An Anthology of the Shortest Stories (1983). Townsend, J. R., A Sounding of Storytellers (1979). Reference works: CLR (1976). CA (1978). CANR (1987). CLC (1974, 1978). Dictionary of American Children’s Fiction, 1960-1984 (1986). DLB (1986). Fourth Book of Junior Authors and Illustrators (1978). SATA (1979, 1990). Values in Selected Children’s Books of Fiction and Fantasy (1987). Other references: Alan Review (Winter 1987). Booklist (1 Feb. 1995, 1 Sept. 1997). Good Conversation! A Talk with Paula Fox (audiovisual, 1992). Horn Book (April 1984, Mar.-Apr. 1994). Interracial Books for Children (1974). NYRB (27 June 1985). NYTBR (8 Oct. 1972, 20 Jan. 1974, 9 Nov. 1980, 11 Nov. 1984, 18 Nov. 1984, 5 Feb. 1989, 8 July 1990, 10 Nov. 1991). Paula Fox (recording, 1993). Paula Fox (audiovisual, 1987). Paula Fox Interview with Kay Bonetti (recording, 1986). PW (6 Apr. 1990, 23 Aug. 1993, 20 Feb. 1995, 21 July 1997). TLS (21 Feb. 1986, 15 Jan. 1988). —ALICE BELL, UPDATED BY REBECCA C. CONDIT
FRANKAU, Pamela Born 1908, London, England; died 9 June 1967, London, England Also wrote under: Eliot Naylor Daughter of Gilbert and Dorothea Black Frankau; married Marshall Dill, Jr., 1945 (divorced) Pamela Frankau and her older sister were raised by their mother, who was separated from their novelist father. At eighteen,
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Frankau took a job as copywriter with a London publisher. She published her first novel at nineteen. During the war she served in the army, entered the Catholic church in 1942, and moved to the U.S. in 1945 with her husband, from whom she was divorced in 1961. Frankau’s fiction divides into two distinct groups, separated by the war and her conversion to Catholicism. In her literary autobiography, Pen to Paper (1962), she ruthlessly assesses the earlier works, describing the style as a ‘‘carefully erected screen of words,’’ where ‘‘descriptions became longer and fancier.’’ Her extremely popular first novel, Marriage of Harlequin (1927), portrays a young girl trapped in role-playing relationships in the amoral atmosphere of London in the 1920s. Subsequent novels often concentrate on love affairs, with flirtatious and witty dialogue, never frank sexuality. In She and I (1930) and Born at Sea (1932), Frankau attempts psychological complexity (split personality, neuroticism) without notable success, and in The Devil We Know (1939) her main character is a young Jewish writer struggling with feelings of inferiority and persecution. Most of these novels have negligible plots. The best gently satirize the superficiality and hypocrisy of British high society, but when the satire fails we are left with the superficiality alone. Frankau, aware of the shortcomings in her writings of this period, explains the ease and enjoyment with which she wrote, and the attraction of money, encouraged her to publish prolifically. The books written after the war and Frankau’s conversion are stylistically and thematically different. Written in what Frankau calls ‘‘straight English,’’ they often have an overt religious message, frequently portraying the emptiness of life without religious faith. Several of these novels use clumsy religious symbolism. The Offshore Light (1952) contrasts consecutive chapters of third-person realism with first-person symbolism presented as the notebooks of a divorced and dying statesman. His notebooks represent the religious viewpoint as an ‘‘island,’’ of which he is ‘‘The Guardian,’’ with his close friend ‘‘Peter.’’ Wreath for the Enemy (1954) is the story of a young girl’s confused search for values in the social sophistication of the Riviera. The three parts of the book are each told by a separate narrator attempting to interpret the same events, but these separate viewpoints are never successfully resolved. The search for spiritual values is also the subject of The Bridge (1957), but again the viewpoint, in which the main character reviews his life from an otherworldly perspective, is unconvincing. Road Through the Woods (1961) is more successful. It introduces a young amnesiac who, looking exactly like his father, arrives in the Irish town where his father grew up, causing varied responses from the parish priest, the woman his father jilted, and an old man searching for a mysterious manuscript. Through mystical remembrances of events that occurred before his birth, the boy acquires a sense of Catholic heritage and decides to stay on in the town, even after his nihilistic father comes to bring him home. He rights the older generation’s wrongs, choosing the church and a girl from the parish. Frankau’s most ambitious effort, a trilogy called Clothes of a King’s Son (1964, 1965, 1967), has a similar young man as hero,
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distracted by worldliness but retaining a mysterious clairvoyance and the power to heal. The three volumes trace his history from boyhood to his miraculous return home after he has been assumed dead during the war. Frankau’s last novel, published posthumously, is her best. Colonel Blessington (1969) is a quickly paced suspense mystery, almost Shakespearean with its riddles, disguises, twins seemingly separated, a close father-daughter relationship, and even a death by water. Here Frankau’s attraction to the occult is incorporated into a genre that uses psychological enigmas to their best literary effect. Her work has been admired for its wit and stylistic charm by many critics, including Noel Coward and Orville Prescott. OTHER WORKS: Three (1929). Letters from a Modern Daughter to Her Mother (1931). I Was the Man (1932). Women Are So Serious (1932). Foolish Apprentices (American title: Walk Into My Parlour, 1933). Tassell-Gentle (American title: Fly Now Falcon, 1934). I Find Four People (1935). Fifty-Fifty, and Other Stories (1936). Jezebel (1937). A Democrat Dies (American title: Appointment with Death, 1940). Shaken in the Wind (1948). The Willow Cabin (1949). To the Moment of Triumph (1953). Ask Me No More (1958). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Catholic Authors (1952). TCA, TCAS. Other references: NY (29 Nov. 1958, 25 Feb. 1967). NYT (24 March 1957, 9 June 1967). NYTBR (22 Jan. 1961, 18 Feb. 1962, 26 Feb. 1967, 15 June 1969). SR (1 Jan. 1966). Time (29 Dec. 1958). —SUZANNE HENNING UPHAUS
FRANKEN, Rose Born December 1898, Gainesville, Texas; died 1988 Also wrote under: Margaret Grant, Franken Meloney Daughter of Michael and Hannah Younker Lewin; married Sigmund Franken, 1915 (died 1933); William B. Meloney V, 1937 Rose Franken’s parents were separated when she was a few years old, and her mother took the four children to New York City to live with Franken’s grandparents and several aunts, uncles, and cousins in a large house in Harlem. She attended the Ethical Culture School, but, having failed a sewing course, did not obtain a high school diploma. At sixteen, she married a prominent oral surgeon 10 years her senior. Two weeks later, they learned that he was tubercular. Their first year of marriage was spent in a sanitarium. To take her mind off constant worrying about her husband’s health, Franken began writing short stories. After the publication of a novel, Pattern (1925), her husband suggested she try playwriting. Her first dramatic effort, Fortnight, was optioned but never produced or published. Her second play, first presented
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under the title Hallam Wives in a summer 1929 production in Greenwich, Connecticut, later became the very successful Another Language (1932). After Sigmund Franken’s death in 1933, Franken moved with her three sons to California. She married and collaborated with her second husband on a number of screenplays, then moved the family to a Connecticut farm. Using the pen name Franken Meloney, they regularly published novels and magazine serials, to which he contributed the plots and she wrote the dialogue. Another Language is a comedy-drama about the dangerously self-righteous attitudes of a middle-class family dominated by a possessive matriarch who encourages their tasteless and materialistic instincts. When Franken brought the same family back to the stage in 1948 with her sixth and last professionally produced play, The Hallams, the characters had not changed. Beginning with her dramatization of Claudia (1941), Franken directed all of her own plays. Her second husband produced her third Broadway play, Outrageous Fortune (1943), and all subsequent ones. The latter play departed from her established style by raising questions about such social concerns as homosexuality, the treatment of black servants, marital difficulties in middle age, and anti-Semitism. Despite misgivings about Franken’s attempt to handle so many themes in one play, some critics believed it to be her best work for the stage. Her ‘‘Claudia’’ novels, begun in 1939 as a series of stories for Redbook magazine, became the basis for a play, a radio series, and two motion pictures, and they were widely published in translation abroad. It was Claudia that made Franken’s name familiar to the public for two decades. Beginning with the first days of Claudia’s marriage at eighteen to David Naughton, the series of novels chronicles, with humor and sentimental appeal, the gradual maturation of a child-wife. Eternally artless, impulsive, and charming, Claudia comes to grips with such problems as hiring servants, testing her sex appeal, becoming a mother, shopping in a posh dress salon, and coping with her own mother’s death. Although the Claudia novels rely heavily upon illness, accidents, and death for the emotional upheavals that lead Claudia toward increasing self-awareness, they are essentially the saga of a blissful marriage. Referring to her 20-year involvement with Claudia, Franken wrote in her autobiography, When All Is Said and Done (1963), that ‘‘the sheer technical task of remaining within her consciousness became increasingly onerous and demanding.’’ Franken, however, was able to draw upon her own notably successful marriages. Her particular skill as a novelist and playwright is the ability to inject sparkle into trivial nuances of everyday life, and to unfold a narrative action largely through dialogue. The formula is suggested in the second chapter of Claudia: ‘‘They were all bestsellers, but for the life of her, Claudia couldn’t see why. She wished petulantly, that somebody would write a plain story about ordinary people like herself, with as little description as possible, and a lot of everyday conversation.’’ As an inexperienced screenwriter in Hollywood, Franken acquitted herself honorably for several years in that rarefied
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atmosphere, perfecting the formula for light fiction from which she later rarely deviated. The ease with which Franken achieved success as a writer of popular fiction and plays could well be attributed to the spontaneity and freshness of her style. OTHER WORKS: Mr. Dooley, Jr.; a Comedy for Children (with J. Lewin, 1932). Twice Born (1935). Call Back Love (with W. B. Meloney, 1937). Of Great Riches (1937). Claudia and David (1939, screenplay by Franken, 1946). Strange Victory (with W. B. Meloney, 1939). When Doctors Disagree (with W. B. Meloney, 1940, dramatization by Franken, 1943). American Bred (with W. B. Meloney, 1941). The Book of Claudia (containing Claudia and Claudia and David, 1941). Another Claudia (1943). Beloved Stranger (with W. B. Meloney, 1944). Soldier’s Wife; a Comedy in Three Acts (1944). Young Claudia (1946). The Marriage of Claudia (1948). From Claudia to David (1950). The Fragile Years (also published as Those Fragile Years; a Claudia Novel, 1952). Rendezvous (English title, The Quiet Heart, 1954). Intimate Story (1955). The Antic Years (1958). The Complete Book of Claudia (1958). Return to Claudia (1960). You’re Well Out of a Hospital (1966). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Mantle, B., Contemporary American Playwrights (1938). Reference works: American Novelists of Today (1951). CB (1947). TCA, TCAS. Other references: NYT (8 Jan. 1933). NYTMag (4 May 1941). Players Magazine (Spring 1974). —FELICIA HARDISON LONDRÉ
FREEDMAN, Nancy Born 4 July 1920, Chicago, Illinois Daughter of Hatley F. and Brillianna Hintermeister Mars; married Benedict Freedman, 1941; children: Johanna, Michael, Deborah Nancy Freedman has written numerous books, each distinct from the others. Besides writing five plays and several novels with her husband, Benedict, including the worldwide bestseller Mrs. Mike (1947), Freedman has also written a number of novels on her own. Her most famous books include Joshua, Son of None (1973), a story about the cloning of John F. Kennedy, and Prima Donna (1981), a story of the trials and tribulations of an opera star. Freedman’s childhood until the age of ten was a lonely one. Although a recipient of dancing lessons at the age of seven, she was a sickly child who was forbidden to go to school. A succession of tutors was enlisted to teach her a variety of elementary school subjects, but the insistent child usually persuaded them only to read fiction to her. The lonely child would also invent stories based on children whose tombstones she discovered during visits to a graveyard with her grandmother.
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While still a teenager, Freedman landed acting jobs, working in summer stock in Maine during the years 1937 and 1938. She also was granted the opportunity to act in famous plays such as Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello under the guidance of the great Austrian theatrical director, Max Reinhardt. Freedman credits him for teaching her subtlety that she could apply to her style of writing. After attending the Chicago Art Institute, Los Angeles City College, and the University of Southern California, where she usually would not complete courses, Freedman met and married Benedict Freedman on 29 June 1941. He was the son of David Freedman, a successful Broadway playwright. Benedict, although a professor of mathematics in his chosen career, followed in his father’s footsteps, writing for radio as well as writing novels, plays, textbooks, and scholarly works. Freedman began to join her husband in his writing ventures in the early 1940’s. An early success was Mrs. Mike. Set in northwest Canada, it is the story of Katherine Mary Flannigan, an invalid married to a Mountie. A bestseller, the novel was translated into 27 languages and made into a motion picture in 1949. Subsequent hardcover editions continued to sell well into the 1990s, and it could be found on reading lists for high school students 50 years after its publication. Freedman continued writing novels with her husband until well into the 1960s, when she decided to write about her family history in the novel Cyclone of Silence (1969). An accident led to her being in the hospital with a broken back. As she lay in bed with a body cast, she remembered John F. Kennedy had once broken his back and had recovered. Encouraged, once out of bed she attended classes in genetics at the California Institute of Technology to research a novel about cloning that eventually became Joshua, Son of None. Achieving a novel on the forefront of current events both politically and scientifically, Freedman’s novel concerns the cloning of the assassinated president. Exploring the ethics of creating a being identical to another, Freedman presented the dilemma of a clone who needs to search for his identity once he learns of his true origins. With a daughter who, as an opera singer, wrote voluminous letters to her mother about life backstage, Freedman felt that she had the makings of a novel that detailed the sacrifices in relationships a woman must make in order to succeed in her career, and hence Prima Donna was born. Around the same time, she felt compelled to write a novel depicting the life of Sappho, the Lesbian poet of 6th century B.C. Greece. For five years Freedman researched for her new novel, studying archaeological evidence and reading history books as well as literature of the period. When the book was completed, Freedman, who had never experienced rejection of her work before, had to face the fact that no publisher would take it. She placed the manuscript in the Benedict and Nancy Freedman collection at the Mugar Memorial Library of Boston University in hopes it might be published someday. In 1998 Sappho: The Tenth Muse was published. Critics have noted that Sappho’s lesbianism is downplayed while her rebellious nature is emphasized. The book, they claim, is mostly faithful to its era, but parts of the narrative read like modern feminist theory.
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OTHER WORKS: Back to the Sea (with Benedict Freedman, 1942). This and No More (with Benedict Freedman, 1950). The Spark and the Exodus (with Benedict Freedman, 1954). Lootville (with Benedict Freedman, 1957). Tresa (with Benedict Freedman, 1958). The Apprentice Bastard (with Benedict Freedman, 1966). The Immortals (1977). Crescendo (1980). The Seventh Stone (1992).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CANR (1987). Other references: Booklist (Nov. 1973). Booksellers (Oct. 1973). CSM (Feb. 1947). Commonweal (March 1947). KR (15 May 1998). LAT (Feb. 1981). NYHTBR (March 1947). NYT (1947). TLS (Aug.1947). WP (Feb. 1981). —ROSE SECREST
FREEMAN, Mary E(leanor) Wilkins Born 31 October 1852, Randolph, Massachusetts; died 15 March 1930, Metuchen, New Jersey Also wrote under: Mary E. Wilkins Daughter of Warren E. and Eleanor Lothrop Wilkins; married Charles M. Freeman, 1902 (legally separated 1921) Mary Wilkins Freeman was an attractive, rather introspective child. In 1867 her father, a builder, moved his family to Brattleboro, Vermont. Freeman attended the Brattleboro high school; she also attended Mt. Holyoke Seminary and Mrs. Hosford’s Glenwood Seminary in West Brattleboro, for one year each. In 1883 she returned alone to Randolph, her mother, father, and only sister all having died. Here she lived with friends, the Wales family. She did not, however, confine herself to Randolph, but visited friends in the U.S. and traveled in Europe. After her marriage, Freeman settled in Metuchen, New Jersey. In 1921 Freeman obtained a legal separation from her husband, who had become an alcoholic requiring institutionalization. The year 1926 brought honors to Freeman: she was awarded the Howells medal for distinction in fiction by the American Academy of Letters, and she was elected to membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Freeman established herself as a children’s author in the early 1880s. Decorative Plaques (1883) collected in an ornamental format 12 of her poems from the children’s magazine, Wide Awake. In 1882 the first adult story she sold won a prize in a contest sponsored by the Boston Sunday Budget. ‘‘A Shadow Family’’ has been lost, but Freeman said later it was ‘‘quite passable as an imitation of Charles Dickens.’’ Winning the contest caused her to concentrate on adult fiction, and her stories began to appear frequently in Harper’s Bazaar and Harper’s Weekly. Freeman’s capacity for work was enormous, and in the years that followed she became an exceedingly popular author of both adult and juvenile short stories (including some eerie tales of the supernatural), novels, and poetry for children.
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Her best stories and novels are about New England people and deal with several themes characteristic of them: stoical endurance in the face of hopeless poverty and adversity, unshakeable pride, and the fierce flame of Calvinistic religion. A typical short story is ‘‘Calla-Lilies and Hannah,’’ in which a girl, shielding her lover, courageously bears the villagers’ reprobation for a theft she has not committed. Another is ‘‘A Taste of Honey,’’ in which a young woman denies herself everything in the way of comfort and luxury to pay off a mortgage, even losing her fiancé because of the length of time involved. Of the novels, Pembroke (1894) is Freeman’s greatest achievement, a novel that deserves to be recognized as an American classic. It is densely peopled, with every facet of the New England character in evidence: greed, parsimony, tenacity of purpose, industriousness, sexuality, fanaticism, unselfishness, even heroism. Symbolism is occasionally employed in a way that has reminded critics of Hawthorne’s fiction. An early play, Giles Corey, Yeoman (1893), is based on a true incident in the Salem witchcraft trials. Here Freeman skillfully tells the story of a farmer and his wife who are put to death; she does it so well the drama, as she wrote it, may be effectively performed, though it has not often been produced on the stage. As Freeman wrote more voluminously and her work appeared constantly in magazines, her style changed. Losing its distinctive New England flavor, it became increasingly elaborate, elegant, and, at times, unbearably precious. Although she continued to use New England locales and characters, she began to write also of prosperous suburban life in New Jersey. In addition, she tried to keep in step with fashions in fiction, writing a historical romance set in Virginia (The Heart’s Highway, 1900), and a labor novel (The Portion of Labor, 1901). Both were embarrassing failures. Freeman’s significance lies in those of her stories and novels portraying a deglamorized New England life. She never wrote anything one could call sordid, but her early work conveys the appalling poverty of remote New England farms and villages, the constriction of the lives there, the suffering, the meanness, and the occasional flashes of real nobility. Granville Hicks has said that ‘‘her stories made the record of New England more nearly complete.’’
OTHER WORKS: The Adventures of Ann; Stories of Colonial Times (1886). A Humble Romance, and Other Stories (1887). A New England Nun, and Other Stories (1891). The Pot of Gold, and Other Stories (1892). Young Lucretia, and Other Stories (1892). Jane Field (1893). Comfort Pease and Her Gold Ring (1895). Madelon (1896). Jerome: A Poor Man (1897). Once Upon a Time, and Other Child-Verses (1897). The People of Our Neighborhood (1898). Silence, and Other Stories (1898). In Colonial Times (1899). The Jamesons (1899). The Love of Parson Lord, and Other Stories (1900). Understudies; Short Stories (1901). Six Trees; Short Stories (1903). The Wind in the Rose-Bush, and
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Other Stories of the Supernatural (1903). The Givers; Short Stories (1904). The Debtor (1905). By the Light of the Soul (1906). ‘‘Doc’’ Gordon (1906). The Shoulders of Atlas (1908). The Fair Lavinia, and Others (1909). The Winning Lady, and Others (1909). The Green Door (1910). The Butterfly House (1912). The Yates Pride; a Romance (1912). The Copy Cat, and Other Stories (1914). An Alabaster Box (with F. M. Kingsley, 1917). Edgewater People (1918).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Avila, C. M. ‘‘A Study of Socio-Economic Issues in the Novels of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’’ (thesis, 1980). Barnes, M. H., ‘‘Realism in the Early Works of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’’ (thesis, 1986). Critical Essays on Mary Wilkins Freeman (1991). Donner, R. S. ‘‘Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: Techniques and Themes’’ (thesis, 1989). Donovan, J., New England Local Color Literature: A Woman’s Tradition (1983). Dullea, G. J., ‘‘Two New England Voices: Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman’’ (thesis, 1996). Ellsworth, M. E. T., ‘‘Two New England Writers: Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mary Wilkins Freeman’’ (thesis, 1981). Elrod, E. R., ‘‘Reforming Fictions: Gender and Religion in the Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rose Terry Cooke, and Mary Wilkins Freeman’’ (thesis, 1991). Evans, M. A., ‘‘Deep Havens and Ruined Gardens: Possibilities of Community and Spirituality in Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman’’ (thesis, 1992). Fishinger, S. M. B., ‘‘The Life of Her Work the New Jersey Years of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’’ (thesis, 1991). Foster, E., Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1956). Glasser, L. B., In a Closet Hidden: The Life and Work of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1996). Hamblen, A. A., The New England Art of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1966). Hicks, G., The Great Tradition (1935). Kendrick, B. L., The Infant Sphinx: The Collected Letters of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1985). Kim, I., The Revolt of Mother: A Life of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1982). McGrew, S. E., ‘‘Reweaving the Scripts: Feminist Elements in the Short Stories of Mary Wilkins Freeman’’ (thesis, 1994). O’Boyle, W. P., ‘‘Objective Optimism: The Vision of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’’ (thesis, 1981). Pattee, F. L., The New American Literature (1930). Pattee, F. L., Sidelights on American Literature (1922). Quinn, A. H., American Fiction (1936). Reichardt, M. R., Mary Wilkins Freeman: A Study of the Short Fiction (1997). Reichardt, M. R., A Web of Relationship: Women in the Short Stories of Mary Wilkins Freeman (1992). Sparks, L. V., Counterparts: The Fiction of Mary Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Kate Chopin (1993). Terryberry, K. J., ‘‘Cultural Feminism in the Works of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’’ (thesis, 1989). Westbrook, P.D., Mary Wilkins Freeman (1967). Reference works: DAB. Modern American Women Writers (1990). NAW (1971). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing (1995). TCA. Other references: Atlantic (May 1899). Local Color—Bret Harte and Mary Wilkins Freeman (audiovisual, 1983). Westbrook, P. D., Mary Wilkins Freeman: Twayne’s Women Authors on CDROM (CD, 1995). —ABIGAIL ANN HAMBLEN
FREMANTLE, Anne (Jackson) Born 15 June 1910, Tresserve, Savoie, France Daughter of Frederick H. and Clara Duff Jackson; married Christopher Fremantle, 1930; children: three sons Anne Fremantle belonged to a prominent English family and grew up in an atmosphere of social, artistic, and political awareness. Three-Cornered Heart (1970) provides a richly detailed, affectionate account of the Victorian girlhood of Fremantle’s mother and of her own Georgian childhood, with some references to her adult life. Fremantle attended Cheltenham Ladies College, and was a scholar of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where she obtained an M.A. in history. With her artist husband, Christopher Fremantle, she had three sons. Her career as a journalist began in 1931 in London, where she worked on the London Mercury and New Statesman and reviewed regularly for the Times Literary Supplement. She was defeated as a Labour Party candidate in the 1935 general election. At the beginning of World War II, Fremantle drove an ambulance for the London County Council and made broadcasts in French and German for the BBC. In 1940 she came to the U.S. and worked in the British Embassy in Washington, D.C., becoming an American citizen in 1947. Fremantle worked for 10 years at the United Nations as an editor. Fremantle combined journalism with academic positions at Fordham University in New York (1948-61) and New York University (1971-79) and was a fellow at Wesleyan University Center for Advanced Studies in Connecticut (1966). She has been an editor for the Catholic Book Club and Commonweal, and made frequent radio and television broadcasts, for NBC’s The Catholic Hour and CBS’ Invitation to Learning, among others. Religion has always been central in Fremantle’s life. She was baptized in the Church of England, became a Muslim at age nine under the influence of Marmaduke Pickthall and a Catholic catechumen while a girl living in France. Fremantle converted to Roman Catholicism in 1943. Her Catholic interests are reflected in two novels, Come to Dust (1941) and By Grace of Love (1957); and in Desert Calling (1949), a biography of Charles de Foucauld exploring the effect of religious conviction; and in the many anthologies she edited. Fremantle early showed her skill at editing. Volumes edited by her include selections from the Church Fathers, medieval philosophy, Bible stories, papal encyclicals, Christmas stories, and Catholic thoughts, as well as selections from such diverse sources as the Protestant mystics, Mao Tse-tung, and contemporary Latin American writers. Among her translations are two hagiographies, Face of the Saints (1947) and Lives of the Saints (1951). Fremantle’s European background informs her writing, which is rich in literary and historical allusions. Widely read herself, she
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provides easy access into many areas. Europe: A Journey with Pictures (1954) and Holiday in Europe (1963) introduce Americans to complex cultures by explaining the past but emphasizing present vitality. Fremantle’s knowledge of and fascination with the Middle Ages appears in James and Joan (1948), a semifictional study of a 14th-century Scottish poet-king. Without sentimentalizing, Fremantle’s widely disseminated The Age of Faith (1957), like her collection of philosophy, The Age of Belief (1955, 1984), convincingly argues that the European Middle Ages have significance today. In Pilgrimage to People (1968), Fremantle combines travel information with international sympathy and Catholic awareness. Joining the historian’s grasp of detail with a delight in words, Fremantle writes in a clear and fluent style, frequently enlivened by wit. She makes accessible to the nonspecialist complex ideas, attitudes, and experiences drawn from her own extensive reading and wide range of interests.
OTHER WORKS: Poems, 1921-1931 (1931). George Eliot (1933). Sicily by F. H. Jackson (edited by Fremantle, 1935). The Wynne Diaries, 1789-1820 (edited by Fremantle, 1936, 1937, 1939). Loyal Enemy: The Life of Marmaduke Pickthall (1938). The Commonweal Reader (edited by Fremantle, 1949). The Greatest Bible Stories: A Catholic Anthology from World Literature (edited by Fremantle, 1951). Mothers: A Catholic Treasury of Great Stories (edited by Fremantle, 1951). Christian Conversation: Catholic Thought for Every Day of the Year (edited by Fremantle, 1953). A Treasury of Early Christianity (edited by Fremantle, 1953). Visionary Novels: Lilith and Phantastes by G. Macdonald (edited by Fremantle, 1954). Christmas Is Here: A Catholic Selection of Stories and Poems (1955). The Papal Encyclicals in Their Historical Context (edited by Fremantle, 1956). Oddsfish! by R. H. Benson (edited by Fremantle, 1957). Fountain of Arethusa by M. Zermatten (translated by Fremantle and C. Fremantle, 1960). This Little Band of Prophets: The British Fabians (1960). Mao Tse-tung: An Anthology of His Writings (edited by Fremantle, 1962). The Social Teachings of the Church (edited by Fremantle, 1963). The Island of Cats (1964). The Protestant Mystics (edited by Fremantle, 1964). A Primer of Linguistics (1973). The Misused Love Letters and Regula Amrain and Her Youngest Son by G. Keller (translated by Fremantle, 1974). Latin American Literature Today (edited by Fremantle, 1977). Woman’s Ways to God (1977). Saints Alive: The Lives of Thirteen Heroic Saints (1978). In Love with Love (edited by Fremantle, 1978). ‘‘St. Basil’’ in Saints and Ourselves (1981).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Censorship and Sense: Authorities Discuss Conflicting Views on the Banning of Books (audiocassette, 1971). Other references: NYTBR (22 June 1941, 29 Feb. 1948, 27 Nov. 1949, 6 March 1960, 29 Nov. 1970). SR (24 Feb. 1968). TLS (19 Nov. 1964). —VELMA BOURGEOIS RICHMOND
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FRENCH, Alice Born 19 March 1850, Massachusetts; died 9 January 1934 Wrote under: Octave Thanet Alice French, writing under the pseudonym Octave Thanet, was widely read at the turn of the 20th century. She was one of the highest paid writers of her time. Considered to be a Midwestern regional writer, she wrote some of the most significant novels and short stories in the regional and local color genres. French wrote during the post-Reconstruction era in America, a time of expansion, economic prosperity, and industrial growth that included America’s Gilded Age. Populists and suffragists were the newsmakers of the day, replacing the hawks and doves of the Civil War and Reconstruction years. The huge increase in immigrants, coupled with black enfranchisement debates, led to new kinds of racism. All of these issues factor into French’s novels and short stories. The relationship between labor and capital also figures often in her works. French was a modernist in terms of her writing as well as her contemporaries, and was well respected as an author. French was born in Massachusetts and later moved to Arkansas and Iowa, splitting her time between her homes in both states. Many of her stories take place in either Arkansas or Iowa. Her life partner, with whom she lived for 50 years, was Jane Crawford. During World War I, French was politically active as the chairman of the Committee on Patriotic Meetings for the Women’s Committee of the Council of National Defense of Iowa. She was also the Regent of the Colonial Dames of Iowa. She was instrumental in organizing meetings of German Americans in Iowa, helping them to identify the duties of German American citizens during World War I. A collection of 684 of French’s papers, dating from 1871 to her death in 1934, can be found at the Newberry Library in Chicago, Illinois. Among these papers are correspondence (including some with Edith Roosevelt, the widow of Theodore Roosevelt), diaries, manuscripts of her novels, plays and short stories, copies of her speeches, and miscellaneous souvenirs of her life. The majority of French’s work is short story collections such as Knitters in the Sun (1887). Some of the stories in this collection are ‘‘The Bishop’s Vagabond,’’ ‘‘Schopenhauer on Lake Pepin,’’ ‘‘Half a Curse,’’ ‘‘A Communist’s Wife,’’ and ‘‘Mrs. Finlay’s Elizabethan Chair.’’ Stories of a Western Town (1893) includes ‘‘The Face of Failure,’’ ‘‘An Assisted Providence,’’ ‘‘The Besetment of Kurt Lieders,’’ and ‘‘Mother Emeritus.’’ A Captured Dream, and Other Stories (1897), like Stories of a Western Town, is a collection of stories dealing with frontier and pioneer life in Iowa and Arkansas. The Missionary Sheriff (1897) was illustrated by A. B. Frost and Clifford Carleton and includes ‘‘The Cabinet Organ,’’ ‘‘The Hypnotist,’’ and ‘‘The Defeat of Amos Wickliff.’’ These are stories of an ordinary man simply trying to do his duty. A Book of True Lovers (1897) is another collection of French’s earlier stories with locations in Arkansas and Iowa.
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Short stories included in this book are ‘‘The Judgment on Mrs. Swift’’ and ‘‘The Dilemma of Sir Guy the Neuter.’’ The Heart of Toil (1898) is a book of short stories dealing with social life and customs of the 19th century, including ‘‘The Way of an Election,’’ ‘‘Johnney’s Job,’’ and ‘‘The Conscience of a Business Man.’’ Business themes are found in some of her writing. For example, The Man of the Hour (1905) is historical fiction about the strikes and lockouts of railroads and the ensuing Chicago Strike of 1894. Later works include Stories That End Well (1911) and A Step on the Stair (1913). French’s stories appeared in several popular magazines of the time: ‘‘The Canada Thistle’’ in Midland Monthly (1894); ‘‘The Defeat of Amos Wickliff’’ in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (Christmas 1896); and ‘‘The Next Room’’ in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (November 1896). Today French’s stories are in reprint editions. Her short story ‘‘My Lorelei: A Heidelberg Romance’’ can be found in Two Friends and Other Nineteenth Century Lesbian Stories by American Women Writers, edited by Susan Koppelman. Other books in reprint are Heart of Toil (1969), The Missionary Sheriff (1969), A Book of True Lovers (1969), Stories of a Western Town (1972), The Man of the Hour (1977), My Name is Masak (1992), and The Restless Nomad (1992). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Dougan, M. B. and C. W. Dougan, By the Cypress Swamps: The Arkansas Stories of Octave Thanet (1980). Rushton, L. E.,‘‘The Arkansas Fiction of Alice French’’ (thesis, 1988). Tigges, S. A. H., ‘‘Alice French, A Noble Anachronism’’ (thesis, 1988). Web sites: information available online at: http://cavern.uark.edu/hbnio/speccon/brochoct.html; http://h-net2.msu.edu/~shgape/discllist/busfict.html; http://twist.lib.uiowa.edu/8-247-f97/queries.html; http://www.eskimo.com/~demian/famous.html; http://www.geocities.com/Wellesley/7327/modernism.html; http://www.kanebooks.com/web144.html; http://www.scry.com/ayer/WOM_HERO/4404819.htm; http://www.traverse.com.com/people/dot.regs.html. —HEIDI HARTWIG DENLER
FRENCH, Anne Warner Born 14 October 1869, St. Paul, Minnesota; died 3 February 1913, Dorset, England Wrote under: Anne French, Anne Richmond Warner French, Anne Warner Daughter of William P. and Anna Richmond Warner; married Charles E. French, 1888 Anne Warner French’s paternal and maternal family roots could be traced back to Massachusetts in the 1630s. French was
educated at home by her mother, a clever, widely read woman, and a French tutor. During her childhood she associated almost entirely with adults, and in the quiet scholarly atmosphere imposed by her father, she developed a love of reading and selfexpression. At the age of eighteen, French married a Minneapolis flour manufacturer who was 25 years her senior. Four years later, after the death of her infant daughter, she began her literary career by compiling a genealogy—An American Ancestry (1894)—for her son, Charles. French traveled to Europe in 1901 to experience firsthand the places she had read about. She spent two years in Tours, France, with her two children and published His Story, Their Letters (1902). French returned to St. Paul in 1903, but finding it difficult to write there, she chose to live in Europe for the rest of her life, making several brief visits to America. She published novels and several collections of short stories. In His Story, Their Letters, an unnamed young man recounts the conversations of himself and a young woman, identified as A., over several days as they walk through Tours. They flirt, finally declare their love, and talk of marriage before he gets a telegram stating he must come home because his father has lost the family fortune in the stock market. They promise to write, but while he is on the way home he gets word his father has made another fortune and decides to marry a girl he has met on the boat. Meanwhile, A.’s cousin returns from a trip to Russia and she marries him. They both decide not to write to each other, and their story ends. A Woman’s Will (1904) tells the story of a young American widow traveling through Europe who is courted by a German musical genius. In The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary (1905), Mary Watkins disinherits her carefree nephew Jack after he is expelled from college for the second time. In an effort to reestablish himself in his aunt’s good graces (and in her will), Jack and his friends escort Aunt Mary around town. She is grateful for having discovered there is more to life than her old farm; Jack is reinstated and able to marry his true love. As was true with His Story, Their Letters, the dialogue in both A Woman’s Will and The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary is bright, charming, and humorous. In 1904 French published Susan Clegg and Her Friend Mrs. Lathrop. Susan Clegg’s homely humor was a great success, prompting French to write four more collections of Susan Clegg stories. Each of the stories is a series of conversations in which Susan relates the local gossip and the adventures and misadventures of the other residents of the town to her friend Mrs. Lathrop, who spends most of her time asleep in her rocking chair. Although the plots and characterizations in these stories are slight, they are original and amusing, and the dialogue is especially well written. French excelled at writing light novels that successfully blended comedy with a satisfying love story, and A Woman’s Will and The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary are excellent examples of her work. French’s Susan Clegg stories are a refreshing contribution to American humorous literature.
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OTHER WORKS: Seeing France with Uncle John (1906). Susan Clegg and Her Love Affairs (1906). Susan Clegg and Her Neighbors’ Affairs (1906). Susan Clegg and a Man in the House (1907). An Original Gentleman (1908). The Panther: A Tale of Temptation (1908). Seeing England with Uncle John (1908). In a Mysterious Way (1909). Your Child and Mine (1909). Just Between Themselves: A Book About Dichtenberg (1910). Susan Clegg, Her Friend and Her Neighbors (1910). How Leslie Loved (1911). When Woman Proposes (1911). The Gay and Festive Claverhouse: An Extravaganza by Anne Warner (1914). Sunshine Jane (1914). The Taming of Amaretti: A Comedy of Manners (1915). The Tigress (1916). My Name is Masak (reissue, 1992). The Restless Nomad (1992).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Rushton, L. E., ‘‘The Arkansas Fiction of Alice French’’ (thesis, 1988). Tigges, S. A. H., ‘‘Alice French, A Noble Anachronism’’ (thesis, 1988). Warner, L. C., and J. G. Nichols, The Descendants of Andrew Warner (1919). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —DOMENICA BARBUTO
FRENCH, Lucy (Virginia) Smith Born 16 March 1825, Accomac County, Virginia; died 31 March 1881, McMinnville, Tennessee Wrote under: L. Virginia French, L’Inconnue, Lucy Smith Daughter of Mease W. and Elizabeth Parker Smith; married John H. French, 1853 Lucy Smith French was born into a wealthy and cultured family. After her mother’s death, she went to live with her maternal grandmother in Washington, Pennsylvania, where she was educated at Mrs. Hannah’s School. She and her sister returned to their father in 1848, but, unhappy with his remarriage, they left within the year for Memphis, Tennessee, where both taught and French began publishing pieces in the Louisville Journal under the name ‘‘L’Inconnue.’’ In 1852 French became editor of the Southern Ladies’ Book, and in the following year she married Colonel French, who had sought her out after reading her poetry. Her later literary career included editing several newspapers and magazines (most notably, the Crusader and Ladies’ Home in Atlanta, Georgia), and writing poetry, one play, and two novels, as well as a collection of legends, before she died in her husband’s home town. French’s first collection of poetry, Wind Whispers (1856), is romantic and sometimes sentimental. It was followed in the same year by a five-act tragedy in blank verse, Istalilxo: The Lady of Tula (1856), set in Mexico. French’s collection, Legends of the South (1867), was also written in verse for the most part, and one legend reveals her interest in exploring the position of women. In
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‘‘The Legend of the Lost Soul,’’ she tells of an Indian woman whose husband leaves their child alone to look for her and both come back to find it gone: ‘‘It is the cry of Woman, / And hers the really lost and wandering soul, / Seeking, amid the god-like, yet the human, / To find her destined goal.’’ Despite romantic trappings, the novel My Roses (1872) realistically explores the plight of the prostitute. The heroine, Henriette de Hauterive, is an independent young woman who, because of her ‘‘woman’s faith in women,’’ risks social condemnation (‘‘I am content to be ‘unnatural’ semi-occasionally if I only can be true to nature!’’) by disguising herself as a man and entering a brothel to save a woman she doesn’t know. She recognizes ‘‘the world judges us all, and to women it is a bitter censor,’’ but her courage to act saves two women from a life they have either been forced into or have chosen through disillusionment and economic deprivation. As one of these, Marguerite, asserts: ‘‘By your woman’s faith, your woman’s courage, and your woman’s love, you have redeemed a wayward and erring nature, although you intended it not. If ever there is any good accomplished for women like me, it will be done by women like you.’’ In French’s fiction, the exploration of woman’s position takes prominence. French’s sophisticated treatment calls for the sisterhood of women to provide alternatives for women victimized by society. OTHER WORKS: Darlingtonia (1879). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: DAB. LSL. The Living Female Writers of the South (1872). The Living Writers of the South (1869). NCAB, 7. Other references: American Illustrated Methodist Magazine (July 1900). Nashville Daily American (3 April 1881). —THELMA J. SHINN
FRENCH, Marilyn Born 21 November 1929, New York, New York Also writes under Mara Solwoska Daughter of D. Charles and Isabel Hazz Edwards; married Robert M. French Jr., 1950 (divorced 1967); children: Jamie, Robert M. III Marilyn French worked her way through Hofstra University (in Hampstead, New York) to a B.A. and M.S. in English (1951-64), regretting that she did not major in philosophy. While supporting her husband through law school, she began to write seriously. After her divorce, she returned to Harvard University for her doctorate (1972) and taught at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts (1972-76).
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In The Book as World: James Joyce’s Ulysses (1976), literary criticism adapted from her dissertation, French suggests a new reading of Ulysses focusing on its deliberately diverse successive styles and the role of the ‘‘scandalously unreliable’’ narrator as malevolent, contemptuously refusing ‘‘to mediate the events in the book for the reader who is thereby forced to engage in that process himself.’’ French’s argument is schematic, focusing on Ulysses’ rhetorical effect. Her first political novel of ideas, The Women’s Room (1977), was a bestseller, called representative of the 1970s’ ‘‘women’s renaissance’’ and the major novel of the women’s liberation movement. Although a bitter, cynical, semiautobiographical fiction and polemic about how heterosexual relations exploit and manipulate women, it touched a chord in a generation of women disillusioned by the failure of early marriages, the suburban ideal, and problems of motherhood in a changing age. The Women’s Room details its protagonist’s struggle over four decades for identity, intellectual independence, and a career, from the conformity and submissiveness of 1950s New Jersey suburbanites to the difficulties of a divorced older woman coming to Harvard as a graduate student, struggling to be taken seriously, liberated but lonely. Mira expresses the author’s own perspective: ‘‘Sometimes I get as sick of writing this as you may be in reading it. . . . I get sick because, you see, it’s all true, it happened, and it was boring and painful and full of despair.’’ The Cambridge feminist Val voices a more militant feminist rhetoric informed by consciousness raising. Male characters are one-dimensional, revealing French’s belief ‘‘that the white middle-class male is really hollow: a sort of walking uniform, making the expected jokes, maintaining the expected postures.’’ She believes there is a chasm of exploitation, incomprehension, and mistrust between women and men; while women were ‘‘expentant in the 1940s, submissive in the 1950s, enraged in the 1960s, they have arrived in the 1970s independent but somehow unstrung, not yet fully composed after all they’ve been through.’’ The Women’s Room was made into a movie for television in 1980. In French’s novels, the reader hopes for a happy ending despite her powerfully stated thesis that there is little future for coexistence between men and women. The narrative rambles as characters appear and disappear. French deliberately loosens control over her narrative, seeing her books as more documentary than fiction, thus strengthening their political impact, making them more autobiographical than creative, and confronting the reader’s preconceptions mercilessly. The Bleeding Heart (1980) is a polemical story about an affair between two Americans living in Britain for a year, overcoming their individual barriers for mutual growth yet separating in the end. French returned to literary criticism with Shakespeare’s Division of Experience (1981), examining his ‘‘horror at female sexuality.’’ She has also provided introductions for reprints of novels by Edith Wharton. In Beyond Power: On Women, Men, and Morals (1985), French shifted to an encyclopedic, interdisciplinary, feminist theoretical analysis of the demise of matriarchy, the origins of social organization, and the rise of patriarchy lusting for power and its consequences over the last 2,400 years. French
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draws on anthropology, philosophy, and history as well as literature ‘‘to urge the creation of a new morality,’’ based on feminism’s ancient origins: ‘‘A new ‘world’ does not imply that we will invent new values.’’ It is a jeremiad, predicting dire economic, environmental, and even criminal consequences unless the value system is revised. A later novel, Her Mother’s Daughter (1987), probes the experience of four generations of women over half a century, examining the relationships of mothers and daughters and the desire to overcome fears to be autonomous. Like French’s more theoretical works, it calls for a reassessment of values. French also published books in Israel in 1980, 1989, and 1991. The War Against Women (1992) continues French’s analysis of the inevitable conflict between women’s needs and societal norms with a catalog of the religious, sociological, institutional, and physical oppression of women throughout the world. In 1994 French published Our Father, a novel about four daughters of a privileged and famous man, Stephen Upton, longtime adviser to Republican presidents. The daughters, each by a different woman, three of whom were Upton’s wives, come together when their father suffers a debilitating stroke and discover that they each had been sexually abused by him in their childhood. The novel continues French’s practice of weaving polemical feminism with an analysis of social evils, yet through her characterization of the four sisters, and especially of the illegitimate and lesbian youngest, Ronnie, and her exploration of how they are all redeemed by learning to love each other, French produces a moving and powerful work. A fourth novel, My Summer With George, appeared in 1996. Here French again, as one reviewer put it, ‘‘refuses to renounce her insurrectionist ways,’’ by telling the story of sixtyish Hermione Beldame, a twice-divorced and twice-widowed successful romance novelist who has a short-lived intense relationship with George Johnson, a newspaper editor in his mid-fifties. The book has ‘‘an invigorating new wryness’’ for French (so says the New York Times reviewer). And, accordingly, the affair ends with the end of summer. In 1998 came A Season in Hell, A Memoir. Six years after the ordeal, the book chronicles French’s battle with esophageal cancer, and how she was cured by simultaneous radiation and chemotherapy. Subsequently, and possibly with the treatment as cause, she suffered a six-week coma, life-threatening kidney infections, pneumonia, compression fractures of her back, and a heart attack. At the end of the book she describes herself, not as an invalid, but as one who ‘‘has less strength,’’ taking life very easy, with limited energies, yet happy. ‘‘[I am at] a better place than I have been before. I am grateful to have been allowed to live long enough to experience it.’’ Since her illness she has completed a work which had been in progress for more than 10 years, Women’s History of the World for publication in 1999. French has been one of the important thinkers and writers of the feminist movement of the last half of the 20th century. She has distinctive skills, including the notable one of being able to encapsulate in a few pages or even a few paragraphs the completeness of a problem, as she did in Her Mother’s Daughter with a
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lesson against racism provided by Anastasia for her children; in Our Father with a brief but all-inclusive catalogue of good manners; and in A Season in Hell with an account of a ‘‘magnificent period in American history’’ when ‘‘[m]y country had begun to forge a world more people could breathe in’’ but which was then ‘‘shattered by greed and mendacity’’ under a succession of Republican presidents who ‘‘lazily let the new right-wing thrust continue.’’ Every one of French’s ten books is still in print, two decades after The Women’s Room was first published.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1978). CLC (1979, 1981, 1990). FC (1990). MTCW (1991). Other references: Harper’s (Nov. 1995). LJ (15 Nov. 1977, 1 May 1992, 15 Nov. 1993, Aug. 1996). Modern Language Review (Jan. 1979). Modern Philology (May 1979). Ms. (Jan. 1978, Apr. 1979, July 1985, May 1992, Sept. 1996). NYT (17 Oct. 1977, 9 March 1980, 10 Mar. 1980, 17 Jan. 1990, 9 July 1995). NYTBR (16 Oct. 1977, 13 Nov. 1977, 5 July 1992, 21 Mar. 1993, 16 Jan. 1994, 2 July 1995, 9 July 1996, 13 July 1997). People (20 Feb. 1978). TLS (18 Feb. 1977, 21 Apr. 1978, 9 May 1980). WPBW (9 Oct. 1977, 9 March 1980, 28 Mar. 1993, 23 Jan. 1994). —BLANCHE LINDEN-WARD, UPDATED BY JOANNE L. SCHWEIK
FRIEDAN, Betty Born 4 February 1921, Peoria, Illinois Daughter of Harry and Miriam Horowitz Goldstein; married Carl Friedan, 1947 (divorced 1969); children: Daniel, Jonathan, Emily Credited with having begun the current women’s movement with her earliest book, The Feminine Mystique (1963), Betty Friedan represents a middle ground in the various ideological differences in the movement since the 1970s and remains a devoted advocate for a more equitable society. She describes the different stages of the movement as part of an evolutionary force. Writing in 1983 in her introduction to the 20th-anniversary edition of The Feminine Mystique, she claims that she has become ‘‘increasingly convinced that the whole process [the women’s movement]. . .is not really a revolution at all, but simply a stage in human evolution, necessary for survival.’’ One of three children of parents who encouraged neither her reading nor her feminism, Friedan attributed her later awareness of oppression partly to being Jewish. In high school Friedan founded a literary magazine and graduated as class valedictorian. At Smith College she studied psychology with noted Gestalt psychologist Kurt Coffee and graduated summa cum laude in 1942. After winning her second research fellowship at the University of California at Berkeley, she realized that to go on would commit her to a doctorate and a career as a psychologist. She gave
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in to what she called the pressure of the feminine mystique, quit Berkeley for a nonprofessional job in New York City, and soon married and began raising her three children. By the mid-1950s Friedan was deeply dissatisfied with her life. Approaching the resulting crisis thoughtfully, she wondered if other women shared her dissatisfaction. Through a questionnaire sent to her Smith College classmates, she discovered her ailment was widespread, and she began several years of research which culminated in The Feminine Mystique. She analyzed the post-World War II pressures that forced promising young women out of colleges and into suburbs to raise children. Its central thesis is that those forces supposed to be ‘‘the chief enemies of prejudice’’—that is, education, sociology, psychology, and the media—have, in effect, conned American women into believing their entire identity and worth could be derived from being wives and mothers. Her revolutionary book focused national attention on ‘‘the problem that has no name.’’ After publishing The Feminine Mystique, Friedan actively campaigned against the feminine mystique in its variety of guises. She founded NOW, the National Organization for Women, in 1966. NOW has remained the largest and most visible feminist organization in the U.S., although it has been criticized since its start by more radical women’s groups who believe it is too middle class, hierarchically structured, and conservative in its aims. After leaving the presidency of NOW in 1970, Friedan continued her activism through writing, lecturing, and teaching. She wrote a column for McCall’s, ‘‘Betty Friedan’s Notebook,’’ and contributed to many magazines, including Saturday Review, Harper’s, the New York Times magazine, Redbook, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Working Women. In 1976 Friedan published It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women’s Movement. In a series of essays and open letters, Friedan assesses the progress of the women’s movement and her relationship with it. The book provides a personal as well as a movement history. While arguing that women have demanded and received new opportunities and more equality, she warns that their gains are threatened by divisiveness among themselves. Friedan sees that a necessary change in the women’s liberation movement is needed: it must transcend polarization and become ‘‘human liberation.’’ She has been attacked not only as a radical but for not being radical enough by those who want her to speak out strongly against men and in support of lesbians, and for black and working women. Friedan feels that to denounce men and to have the issues involving homosexuals become a major concern of the women’s movement is counterproductive, that ‘‘an overfocus on sexual issues, on sexual politics, as opposed to the condition of women in society in general, may have been accentuated by those who wish to immobilize the movement politically.’’ In The Second Stage (1981), Friedan further pursues the goal of human liberation. She states that the failures of the women’s movement are due to ‘‘our blind spot about the family.’’ After years of activism, research, and observation of women’s lives, she concludes many women are now caught in a new ‘‘feminist mystique,’’ where they’re doing two demanding jobs: the work of
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the family and the work of a career. They are forced to be ‘‘superwomen,’’ juggling two roles and feeling guilty about both. The solution, she argues, is to take control of the family policy agenda and restructure family and work so both men and women are freer to share roles. She insists men will become allies when they see that changing outmoded institutions will also improve their lives. Citing the specific issues of flexible work schedules, parental leave, and child care as the new agenda for the women’s movement, she calls for reclaiming the family as ‘‘the new feminist frontier.’’ Reaction to her new agenda ranged from calling her a ‘‘repentant feminist’’ to reaffirming her importance in the movement and to recognizing, as Marilyn French did in an Esquire article in December 1983, that the affirmation of the family in The Second Stage was a ‘‘passionate plea for general awareness of the inclusive nature of feminism.’’ In the 1983 anniversary edition of The Feminine Mystique, Friedan angrily denies the media’s pronouncements that the ‘‘postfeminist generation’’ has abandoned feminist ideas: ‘‘Of course the postfeminist generation is in a different place. The women’s movement put it there.’’ Sounding the theme of evolutionary change, she wrote, ‘‘It’s hard to go on evolving, as we all must, just to keep up with a revolution as big as this when some. . .want to lock it in place forever, as an unchanging ism.’’ In this stage of her life, she sees the importance of linking the redefinition of the family with issues and interests of single women and older women. In The Fountain of Age (1993), Friedan urges older people to draw on their strengths and not ‘‘forfeit these years with a preoccupation with death.’’ She also notes her feelings of déjà vu when she hears geriatric experts talk about the aged ‘‘with the same patronizing, ‘compassionate’ denial of their personhood’’ she heard 20 years before when the experts talked about women. During the 1980s Friedan saw the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment in Congress, but despite the setback she was hopeful about the new political power of women represented by the vice presidential nomination of Geraldine Ferraro at the 1984 Democratic National Convention, to which she was a delegate. In ‘‘Back to the Feminist Mystique,’’ published in the Humanist in 1991, Friedan notes that the decade of the 1980s had made it more difficult to move to the ‘‘second stage’’ because the support systems and social programs so necessary to restructure work and home had been almost destroyed in a political environment hostile to change. In Beyond Gender: The New Politics of Work and Family (1997), Friedan focuses her attention on the plight of American workers. While a guest scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Institute in 1994, Friedan brought together in the New Paradigm Seminars a diverse assortment of leaders in labor, women’s organizations, business, social movements, and other groups. Participants tackled important issues facing American workers, including corporate downsizing, options for flexible work schedules, welfare reform, and changes in affirmative action programs. Using direct quotations of seminar participants and her own commentary, Friedan again argues in Beyond Gender that society must go
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beyond issues of men vs. women and sexual politics if it wants to create a ‘‘new community.’’ Equality of opportunity, care for children, and economic restructuring to reduce income inequality remain cornerstones of Friedan’s vision for a better society, but she now emphasizes their importance for the American worker in general, not solely for women. Despite the wide-ranging and often conflicting opinions shared within the seminar itself, Friedan steadfastly believes a consensus on these important issues is necessary and possible. OTHER WORKS: Contributed to Anatomy of Reading (ed. by L. L. Hackett and R. Williamson, 1966). Voices of the New Feminism (ed. by M. L. Thompson, 1970). ‘‘The Mystique of Age’’ in Productive Aging: Enhancing Vitality in Later Life (1989). The papers of Betty Friedan are in the Schlesinger Library of Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Dubin, M., ‘‘At 75, Betty Friedan Remains an Independent Thinker Who Has More to Write,’’ in Knight-Ridder/ Tribune News Service (6 Mar. 1996). Gardels, N., ‘‘The New Frontier of Feminism’’ in New Perspectives Quarterly (Winter 1998). Janeway, E., Man’s World, Woman’s Place (1971). Lerner, G., The Female Experience: An American Documentary (1977). Ryan, M. P., Womanhood in America from Colonial Times to the Present (1975). Sochen, J., Herstory: A Woman’s View of American History (1974). Sochen, J., Movers and Shakers: American Women Thinkers and Activists, 1900-1970 (1973). Reference works: CANR 18 (1986). CB (1970, 1989). Other references: Esquire (Dec. 1983). Feminist Review (Autumn 1987). LAT (26 Apr. 1992). Nation (14 Nov. 1981, 1 Dec. 1997). National Review (5 Feb. 1982). NR (20 Jan. 1982). NYT (5 July 1981, 25 Apr. 1983, 27 Feb. 1983). NYTBR (22 Nov. 1981). TLS (30 July 1982). —BILLIE J. WAHLSTROM AND MARY GRIMLEY MASON, UPDATED BY JANETTE GOFF DIXON
FRINGS, Ketti Born Katharine Hartley, 28 February 1909, Columbus, Ohio; died February 1981 Daughter of Guy H. and Pauline Sparks Hartley; married Kurt Frings, 1938; children: two Ketti Frings is the daughter of a paper box salesman. During Frings’ childhood the family lived in 13 different cities, but after their mother’s death, Frings and her two sisters stayed with an aunt in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where she attended Lake School for Girls. Frings enrolled at Principia College for one year, then left to take a job as advertising copywriter at a Newark, New Jersey, department store. After several years of writing radio scripts, movie magazine articles, and advertising copy for New York agencies, Frings
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decided to spend a year in the south of France and write a novel. There she met her future husband, a German-born lightweight boxer who gave her the nickname Ketti, a diminutive for Katharine, which became her professional name. The painful two-year hiatus before Frings was allowed to enter the U.S. is chronicled fictionally in Frings’s first novel, Hold Back the Dawn (1940). The setting is Tijuana, Mexico, where a German husband resides while waiting for an immigration quota number. His American wife commutes between the immigrant colony, on weekends, and her one-room Hollywood apartment, where she writes the fan magazine stories to support them both. The book is an early indication of Frings’ flair for the dramatic because she succeeds in bringing the tension of life to an essentially static situation. Once settled in Beverly Hills, Frings’ husband became an actors’ agent and they had two children. She continued to produce numerous magazine stories, as well as screenplays. With her second novel, God’s Front Porch (1944), Frings said she hoped ‘‘to try to dispel some of the world’s gloom, to make those who are frightened a little less frightened.’’ The arrival in Heavenly Bend Junction of a young soldier killed in the war is the occasion for Frings’s sentimental fantasizing about how God might welcome those who have unwillingly left the world of the living and how He might even perform a little miracle for the war-ravaged earth. Frings’s first play, Mr. Sycamore, based on a 1907 short story by Robert Ayre, was produced by the Theater Guild in 1942. Critical reaction was more favorable toward leading players Stuart Erwin and Lillian Gish than toward the young dramatist. Brooks Atkinson, however, said of this gentle fantasy about a postman who turns himself into a tree: ‘‘Give Mrs. Frings credit for having tried something original and having stirred up some unhackneyed humor.’’ Mr. Sycamore closed after 19 performances. In contrast, Frings’s next venture onto Broadway had a solid run of 564 performances and remains her best-known work. Her dramatization of Thomas Wolfe’s novel, Look Homeward, Angel, opened in 1957 and was unanimously praised by the critics. Richard Watts, Jr., called it ‘‘a rich, beautiful, moving and fullbodied play.’’ John McClain thought it was ‘‘quite simply, one of the best evenings I’ve ever had in the theater,’’ and said Frings ‘‘should receive the loudest praise, for she has most ingeniously telescoped a few chapters from the long autobiographical novel into an overpowering consideration of a young man’s escape from adolescence.’’ Frings has discussed (Theatre Arts, Feb. 1958) the difficulties she experienced in paring down the overflowing images and speeches of the novel. Professional recognition for Look Homeward, Angel included the Pulitzer Prize in Drama and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, and she was selected as the Los Angeles Times ‘‘Woman of the Year.’’ A 1960 dramatization of Richard Wright’s novel about racial discord, The Long Dream, was poorly received. Mixed reactions greeted Walking Happy, a 1966 musical adaptation of Harold Brighouse’s play, Hobson’s Choice. In 1978 Frings collaborated with Peter Udell on a musical version of Look Homeward, Angel.
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Frings’s style might best be described as unpretentiously workmanlike. It is competent, direct, and always appropriate to her material, the range of which includes suspense melodrama, fictional treatments of topical issues, fantasy, and, her staple, romance. OTHER WORKS: Let the Devil Catch You (1947). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Grubbs, J. G., ‘‘The Role of Eliza Gant in Ketti Frings’ Look Homeward, Angel: A Production Thesis in Acting’’ (thesis, 1993). Reference works: CB (Jan. 1960). Ohio Authors and Their Books (1962). Other references: Collier’s (26 April 1947). Newsweek (6 March 1944). Saturday Evening Post (20 Nov. 1943). SR (26 Feb. 1944, 6 Sept. 1958). —FELICIA HARDISON LONDRÉ
FRITZ, Jean Born 16 November 1915, Hankow, China Daughter of Arthur M. and Myrtle Chaney Guttery; married Michael Fritz, 1941; children: David, Andrea Jean Fritz has been heralded for her work in several genres of children’s literature, but she is best known for her lively, engaging biographies. She has won numerous prestigious awards including the Children’s Book Guild Nonfiction Award for ‘‘total body of creative writing’’ (1978), and Boston Globe/Horn Book awards in 1984 for The Double Life of Pocahontas (1983), and in 1990 for The Great Little Madison (1990). Fritz graduated from Wheaton College in 1937 and continued with graduate studies at Columbia University. She worked as a researcher, book reviewer, and editor while her husband served in the army during World War II. A prolific writer, Fritz began late; her first book was published when she was thirty-nine. In 1952 while working as a children’s librarian at her local library in New York she discovered she not only wanted to read children’s books, but write them as well. Fritz’s first picture book, Fish Head (1954), had its genesis in the fantasies of escape she invented when feeling overwhelmed by the task of caring for her two young children. Fritz expected to continue writing picture books, but simple curiosity along with her awareness of textbook inadequacies motivated her to begin writing biographies. ‘‘Textbooks are so often both inaccurate and dull, a place where dead people just stay dead,’’ she told an interviewer. ‘‘I think of my job as bringing them back to life.’’ Critics have praised her for her success at this task; she is noted for her ability to captivate a young audience not only by focusing on the accomplishments of historical figures, but
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also by revealing them as the idiosyncratic, imperfect, and often humorous people that they were. Fritz shares interesting anecdotes and reveals weaknesses while still paying meticulous attention to accuracy and maintaining the integrity of both the reader and the subject. In her biographies she is ‘‘always looking for outof-the-way details, for the little things that seem so trivial but throw such light on a personality.’’ Fritz’s devotion to the exploration of American history stems from her childhood, which she shares in one of her most critically acclaimed novels, Homesick: My Own Story (1982). Fritz lived in China with her missionary parents until the age of eleven. Despite her loneliness and isolation during this unstable time in China, Fritz was a thoughtful, often precocious child, writing once in a letter to her grandmother, ‘‘I’m not always good. Sometimes I don’t even try.’’ She was also extremely patriotic. On one occasion, she sang the words to America while all of the other children in her British classroom sang God Save the King. Reflecting on this experience in 1988, she explained: ‘‘No one is more patriotic than the one separated from his country; no one is as eager to find roots as the person who has been uprooted.’’ Over a long career, Fritz has translated that eagerness into biographies for children of such quintessential American figures as George Washington, Ben Franklin, Sam Houston, and Theodore Roosevelt.
OTHER WORKS: 121 Pudding Street (1955). Hurrah for Jonathan (1955). Growing Up (1956). The Late Spring (1957). The Cabin Faced West (1958). Champion Dog, Prince Tom (1958). The Animals of Doctor Schweitzer (1958). How to Read a Rabbit (1959). Brady (1960). Tap, Tap Lion, One, Two, Three (1962). San Francisco (1962). I, Adam (1963). Magic to Burn (1964). Early Thunder (1967). George Washington’s Breakfast (1969). And Then What Happened, Paul Revere? (1973). Why Don’t You Get a Horse, Sam Adams? (1974). Where was Patrick Henry on the 29th of May? (1975). Who’s That Stepping on Plymouth Rock? (1975). Will You Sign Here, John Hancock? (1976). What’s the Big Idea, Ben Franklin? (1976). Can’t You Make Them Behave, King George? (1976). Brendan the Navigator (1979). Stonewall (1979). The Man Who Loved Books (1980). Where Do You Think You’re Going, Christopher Columbus? (1980). Traitor: The Case of Benedict Arnold (1981). The Good Giants and the Bad Pukwudgies (1982). China Homecoming (1985). Make Way for Sam Houston (1986). Shh! We’re Writing the Constitution (1987). China’s Long March (1988). Bully for You, Teddy Roosevelt! (1991). George Washington’s Mother (1992). The Great Adventure of Christopher Columbus (1992). Surprising Myself (1992). Around the World in a Hundred Years (1993). Just a Few Words, Mr. Lincoln (1993). Worlds of Childhood: The Art and Craft of Writing for Children (contributing editor, 1990). The World of 1492 (contributor, 1992).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bradford, H., ‘‘The Move Toward Identity in the Juvenile Biographies of Jean Fritz, F. N. Monjo, and Milton Meltzer’’ (thesis, 1989). Hostetler, E., Jean Fritz: A Critical Biography (1982). Pillar, A. M., A Resource Guide for Jean
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Fritz’s American History Books (1982). Senick, G. J., ed., Children’s Literature Review (1988). Other references: Boston Sunday Globe (6 Jan. 1991). A Talk with Jean Fritz (video, 1993). A Visit with Jean Fritz (video, 1987). Jean Fritz (audiocassette, 1991). —DIANE E. KROLL
FULLER (MARCHESA D’OSSOLI), (Sarah) Margaret Born 23 May 1810, Cambridgeport, Massachusetts; died 19 July 1850, off Fire Island, New York Wrote under: S. M. Fuller, S. Margaret Fuller, J. Daughter of Timothy and Margaret Crane Fuller; married Giovanni Angelo, Marchese d’Ossoli, 1850; children: Angelo Margaret Fuller’s father was a lawyer and politician; her mother bore nine children, seven of whom survived infancy. Having hoped for a son, Fuller gave his oldest child a masculine education. Pushed by her father’s ambitions and by her own growing sense that she could achieve greatness, Fuller read Horace, Ovid, and Virgil in the original at seven and continued reading widely in her father’s library until she first attended school at fourteen. Two unhappy years at school in Groton, Massachusetts, made clear the social problems caused by what she herself considered her lack of a normal childhood. Back in Cambridge, she studied French, German, Italian, Greek, and philosophy, and made friends with future transcendentalists Frederick Henry Hedge and James Freeman Clarke. In 1833 Fuller’s father retired from public life and moved his family to a farm at Groton, 40 miles from Boston. For two years, Fuller took care of the house and of her younger brothers and sisters while teaching four of the children five to eight hours a day. She also continued her ambitious ‘‘self-culture,’’ reading widely in history, literature, philosophy, and religion. When Fuller’s father died in 1835, she became breadwinner and head of the family. She taught at Bronson Alcott’s school in Boston (1836-37) and the Greene Street School in Providence, Rhode Island (1837-39). In 1839 she moved her family to Jamaica Plain and began her ‘‘Conversations’’ in Boston and Cambridge, which continued until 1844. In 1836 Fuller had begun her friendship with Ralph Waldo Emerson. A passage from Emerson’s 1837 journal typifies the mixture of affection and exasperation she could arouse: ‘‘Margaret Fuller left us yesterday morning. Among many things that will make her visit valuable and memorable, this is not the least that she gave me five or six lessons in German pronunciation never by my offer and rather against my will, each time, so that now spite of myself I shall always have to thank her for a great convenience— which she foresaw.’’ From July 1840 until July 1842, at the urging of Emerson and other transcendentalist friends, Fuller edited the Dial.
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In 1843 Fuller accompanied James and Sarah Clarke on a trip to Illinois and Michigan. In December 1844 she went to New York City as a correspondent for Horace Greeley’s Daily-Tribune. In part because of an unfortunate romantic involvement with James Nathan, Fuller sailed in August 1846 for Europe and subsequently traveled in England, Scotland, and France, still acting as a Tribune correspondent. In Rome in 1847 she met her future husband, the Marchese d’Ossoli. Her son Angelo was born in September 1848. Ossoli supported the Roman Republic, and the family stayed in Rome throughout the French siege. Fuller directed a hospital and cared for the wounded. After the republic fell, the family went to Florence and then sailed for America. All three were drowned when their ship broke up in a storm off Fire Island. Fuller began writing with translations of Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe (1839) and the Correspondence of Fräulein Günderode and Bettina Von Arnim (1842); some unhappy attempts at fiction; and rhapsodic, sentimental verse of little merit. Her first successful and original work, Summer on the Lakes (1844), used the frame of her Western visit with the Clarkes for a mixture of realistic reporting, autobiography, historical and philosophical musings, and literary criticism. The result resembles Thoreau’s later A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). Using a journal she had kept on the trip, Fuller provides fresh and perceptive comments on places and people from Chicago and the prairie settlements of Illinois to Milwaukee and Mackinaw. Whatever is rhapsodic or overly Romantic in her approach to the West usually succumbs before her own observations and her commonsense good will. Fuller admires the spirit of the new land, even as she recognizes the cruelty with which the Native Americans had been forced from their country. She mourns the vanished romance and vanishing beauties, but admires the new democracy: ‘‘In the West, people are not respected merely because they are old in years. . . . There are no banks of established respectability in which to bury talent there; no napkin of precedent in which to wrap it. What cannot be made to pass current, is not esteemed coin of the realm.’’ Fuller pities the loneliness of the settlers, particularly the women, whose training she feels has made them less able to bear solitude. She observes that the desire to be fashionable can only slow progress toward adjustment and enjoyment. Educational methods ‘‘copied from the education of some English Lady Augusta, are as ill-suited to the daughter of an Illinois farmer, as satin shoes to climb the Indian mounds.’’ Fuller herself adapted admirably. In Pawpaw Grove, Illinois, she slept on the supper table in a barroom ‘‘from which its drinking visitors could be ejected only at a late hour.’’ She captures the incongruities and cruelties of the Western scene in vignettes—the daughter of a famous ‘‘Indian fighter’’ playing the piano at the window of a boarding house in Milwaukee as Native Americans pass by selling baskets of berries; 2,000 Chippewas and Ottawas encamped at Mackinaw to receive their annual payments from the American government—or in a single sentence: ‘‘Whenever the hog comes, the rattlesnake disappears.’’
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Horace Greeley admired the book enough to offer Fuller a job on his Tribune, and Evert Duyckinck wrote in his diary for 1844 that Summer on the Lakes was the only genuinely American book he had seen published. Papers on Literature and Art (1846) collected Fuller’s critical pieces, but the only other book she wrote was Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), a revision and amplification of her July 1843 Dial article, ‘‘The Great Lawsuit—Man versus Men; Woman versus Women.’’ Fuller’s transcendental tract endorses above all the idea that the powers of each individual should be developed through his or her apprehension of an ideal. Her insistence on the godlike possibilities of all humans differs little from the same radical idealism in the writings of Emerson and Thoreau, but Fuller emphasizes that the fullest possible development of man will not come without the fullest possible development of woman. Fuller also feels that woman has so far been given fewer chances to realize her possibilities: ‘‘The idea of Man, however imperfectly brought out, has been far more so than that of Woman; that she, the other half of the same thought, other chamber of the heart of life, needs now to take her turn in the full pulsation, and that improvement in the daughters will best aid in the reformation of the sons of this age.’’ Fuller says that women must not wait for help from men, continuing their old, bad habits of dependence, but must help themselves; self-reliance and independence are the best ways of aiding themselves and their sisters. The capacity for economic independence is prerequisite to moral and mental freedom, and the freedom to choose celibacy over a degrading or unequal and merely convenient marriage is essential. Late in her book, she makes her famous statement that women should be able to do anything for which their individual powers and talents fit them— ‘‘let them be sea-captains if they will.’’ Woman in the Nineteenth Century thus mixes transcendental idealism and insistence on an economic basis for equality; it discusses prostitution and property rights for women along with the true ends and aims of the ideal marriage. Fuller’s broad social sympathies lead her to point out that the degradation of white women in 19th-century America equals that of red and black men and women. But, she says, what women want is not ‘‘poetic incense,’’ not ‘‘life-along sway,’’ ‘‘not money, not notoriety, not the old badges of authority which men have appropriated to themselves,’’ but ‘‘the freedom, the religious, the intelligent freedom of the universe to use its means, to learn its secret, as far as Nature has enabled them, with God alone for their guide and judge.’’ Fuller is radical because she argues that ‘‘Man’’ encompasses both man and woman, and that both should be allowed equal opportunity to develop. The myths that have grown up around Fuller’s brief life and her relatively small oeuvre make her contributions difficult to assess. Some contemporary and many later critics have maintained that the genius she displayed in conversation, whether natural or guided, never became fully evident in her writings: ‘‘Ultimately she should be remembered for what she was rather than what she did’’ (Blanchard). The Dial has always been seen as central to the transcendentalist movement; some contend that the
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magazine reflects Fuller more than it does ‘‘the generality of transcendentalist thought’’ (Rosenthal). Fuller’s writings for the Dial and the Tribune gave her a chance to introduce European culture to America, to promote American literature, and to diffuse her social ideals while contrasting them with harsh reality. With Poe she must be considered America’s first major literary critic, but her reporting gives evidence of a livelier, more supple prose that might have matured given time. Undoubtedly, she contributed much to American Romanticism and the feminist movement. OTHER WORKS: Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (edited by R. W. Emerson, et al., 1852). At Home and Abroad (edited by A. B. Fuller, 1856). Art, Literature, and the Drama (edited by A. B. Fuller, 1860). Life Without and Life Within (edited by A. B. Fuller, 1860). Margaret and her Friends (edited by C. W. H. Dall, 1895). Love-Letters of Margaret Fuller, 1845-1846 (1903). The Writings of Margaret Fuller (edited by M. Wade, 1941). The papers of Margaret Fuller, Marchesa d’Ossoli, are housed in the Boston Public Library and the Houghton Library, of Harvard University. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Blanchard, P., Margaret Fuller: From Transcendentalism to Romanticism (1978). Boller, P. F., American Transcendentalism 1830-1860: An Intellectual Inquiry (1974). Brown, A. W., Margaret Fuller (1964). Buell, L., Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance (1973).
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Chevigny, B. G., The Women and the Myth: Margaret Fuller’s Life and Writing (1976). Cooke, G. W., An Historical and Bibliographical Introduction to Accompany the Dial (1961). Deiss, J. J., The Roman Years of Margaret Fuller (1969). Durning, R. E., Margaret Fuller, Citizen of the World (1969). Gilman, W. H., et al., The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1960- ). Harding, W., and C. Bode, The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau (1958). Hudspeth, R. N., ed., The Letters of Margaret Fuller (5 vols., 1983-88). Miller P., The American Transcendentalists (1957). Miller, P., The Transendentalists (1950). Myerson, J., Margaret Fuller: A Descriptive Bibliography (1978). Myerson, J., Margaret Fuller: A Secondary Bibliography (1977). Simpson, C. M., ed., The American Notebooks (1972). Spender, D., ed., Feminist Theorists: Three Centuries of Key Women Thinkers (1983). Stern, M. B., The Life of Margaret Fuller (1942). Swift, L., Brook Farm (1900). Urbanski, M. M. O., Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century: A Literary Study of Form and Content, of Sources and Influence (1980) Wade, M., Margaret Fuller: Whetstone of Genius (1940). Wilson, E., Margaret Fuller: Bluestocking, Romantic, Revolutionary (1977). Reference works: AA. The Female Prose Writers of America (1855). NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: ELN (Sept. 1970). SAQ (Autumn 1973). —SUSAN SUTTON SMITH
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G GAGE, Frances Dana (Barker) Born 12 October 1808, Marietta, Ohio; died 10 November 1880, Greenwich, Connecticut Wrote under: Aunt Fanny, F. D. Gage, Frances Gage, Mrs. Frances Dana Gage Daughter of Joseph and Elizabeth Dana Barker; married James L. Gage, 1829; children: eight Frances Dana Gage, whose parents emigrated from New Hampshire to Ohio in 1788, was born on a farm, the fifth daughter and the ninth of 10 children. Although her education was limited to that of most rural children in a large, hard-working family, she gained the habit of independence of thought and an interest in reform. Her mother, daughter of an educated New England family, encouraged her to learn as much as she could under the difficult circumstances of frontier life in Ohio; the parents’ aid to fugitive slaves underscored their concern with social issues. Gage drew from her background a toughness that served her well in life. After her marriage to a lawyer and businessman, she managed to rear eight healthy children while educating herself further, gaining respect as a prolific journalist and writer, and becoming increasingly active in reform. Gage’s concern over slavery extended to the problems of slaves freed during the Civil War. She spent some time during 1862 in a part of South Carolina controlled by the Union; here she worked with freed slaves who needed help in starting new lives. After the war, when she became better known as a journalist, she continued to urge northerners to give aid to the freedmen. Here, as in all her speaking and writing, she drew on her vigorous homely style to make telling points and to make the unfamiliar acceptable. Her impact on audiences was especially dramatic in her appeals for temperance, in which she used case histories to move women to tears and men to new resolutions. Her spontaneous, conversational manner helped her to win her audiences. These gifts served her well in the women’s rights movement. So eloquent was Gage at the important Akron Convention (1851), she unanimously won the election as president of the convention. Gage’s reminiscences (in the National Anti-Slavery Standard, May 1866) provide the tone and feeling of the dramatic episode in which Sojourner Truth (a former slave, unable to read or write, but a moving speaker) rose to speak at the Akron convention, against the advice of some of the participants. Gage’s own language does not lack color as she describes the importance of woman suffrage: she speaks of ‘‘war cries,’’ the ‘‘advance-guarde,’’ the ‘‘rebellion,’’ and in a somewhat less militant tone, ‘‘most unwearied actors.’’ Gage also wrote to support her large family. Under the pseudonym of Aunt Fanny (whose real identity was no secret) she wrote letters of advice to women in Amelia Bloomer’s Lily, Jane Grey Swisshelm’s Saturday Visiter, and other papers, especially
feminist ones. Aunt Fanny’s words about practical household matters often contained shrewd wit, especially in her reflections on the roles of men and women in daily life. As she counsels her readers on the making of soap, the use of practical clothing, the churning of butter, the efficient use of time, Aunt Fanny amuses herself and them with (often satiric) replies to antisuffrage male correspondents about female frailty. For a time Gage also served as associate editor of both the Ohio Cultivator and Field Notes, farmers’ weekly papers that disappeared after the Civil War. With eight children and an ailing husband, Gage’s need for money grew. She wrote a novel, Elsie Magoon (1867), in which the heroine suffers as victim of an intemperate husband who, though he has the best of intentions, is weak and unable to sustain a job. He succumbs easily to the drinking habits of his friends who take him to bars (Gage, like her sisters, sees the bar as an evil place), and tragedy, really melodrama, results in his death and the suffering of his family. The moral seems to be that a woman must be careful not to marry a ‘‘drunkard,’’ but if she inadvertently does, then she should have no children. She also wrote a volume of poems in 1867—sentimental verse to be sure, but they were accurate descriptions of farm life especially as it reflects the position of women. Gage stands as one of those active, resourceful 19th-century women, who—without the formal education of some of her contemporaries, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton or Susan B. Anthony—succeeded in becoming an influential writer and a force in the women’s rights movement. She exerted her influence through work in antislavery, temperance, and women’s organizations, but even more through the homely, pithy writing with which she spread her ideas. Her work had perhaps its greatest impact on rural women, with whom she could easily establish rapport because of her similar background. OTHER WORKS: Christmas Stories (1849). The Man in the Well: A Temperance Tale (1850). Fanny’s Journey (1866). Fanny at School (circa 1866). Poems (1867). Gertie’s Sacrifice; or, Glimpses at Two Lives (1869). Steps Upward (1870). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brockett, L. P., and M. C. Vaughn, Woman’s Work in the Civil War (1867). Hanson, E. R., Our Woman Workers (1882). Yellin, J. F., and J. C. Van Horne, eds., An Untrodden Path: Antislavery and Women’s Political Culture (1993). Reference works: AA. AW. DAB. Eminent Women of the Age (1869). HWS. NAW (1971). NCAB. Ohio Authors and Their Books (1962). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: New York Tribune (13 Nov. 1884). —LOIS FOWLER
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GALE, Zona Born 26 August 1874, Portage, Wisconsin; died 27 December 1938, Chicago, Illinois Daughter of Charles F. and Eliza Beers Gale; married W. L. Breese, 1928 An only child, Zona Gale grew up in the sheltered smalltown environment that became the setting for her fiction. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1895. After working as a journalist in Milwaukee, Gale went on to New York in 1900 and began selling stories and poems. She returned permanently to Wisconsin after winning the 1910 Delineator short story prize of $2,000. A longtime friend of Jane Addams, Gale was active with the Women’s Peace Party, woman suffrage, La Follette Progressivism, the Wisconsin Dramatic Society, and the growing community theater movement. Throughout the 1930s, she continued to write fiction and to work for social reform and peace. She saw to the publication and wrote the introduction to The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1935. The women in Gale’s work are remarkable for the consistency of their development. Calliope Marsh, the leading personality of the Friendship Village stories, was based on Gale’s mother and represents the wisdom that Gale saw as basic to an ideal maternal model. Heart’s Kindred (1915) and A Daughter of the Morning (1917) are declarations of Gale’s own feminist awareness. Her most successful novel is Miss Lulu Bett (1920), an unsentimental look at family and marriage customs. Lulu Bett, family ‘‘beast of burden,’’ is shown in rebellion against the life her time and place have thrust upon her: this is a story of growth. There is no overt moralizing to interrupt the flow of the plot. Gale adapted this novel herself for the stage, and in 1921 won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. There was some controversy about the changes Gale made in the ending of the play after a trial run, but in a letter to the editor of the New York Tribune, Gale made it clear she understood the feelings that keep many Lulus locked in their shells for years until a dramatic emotional event sets them free. Gale’s short stories appeared in popular magazines and were then put out in book form; her novels were often serialized before appearing in complete form. She was a regular contributor to magazines, often on feminist topics. Besides adapting some of her other novels for the theater, she wrote a one-act play, The Neighbors (1914), which had great success with college and community groups across the country. Gale published one book of poetry, The Secret Way (1921), which reveals her search for deeper-than-surface reality. Working from life as she observed it, Gale took ordinary occurrences and invested these events with power to affect the inner lives of her characters. Gale expressed her own basic philosophy as ‘‘life is more than we can ever know it to be.’’ Consequently, some of her work is flawed by too heavy a reliance on mysticism: the stories cannot always sustain the transcendent
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events within their framework. When Gale is successful, however, she touches a response in the reader that rises above the sentimental. OTHER WORKS: Romance Island (1906). The Loves of Pelleas and Etarre (1907). Friendship Village (1908). Friendship Village Love Stories (1909). Mothers to Men (1911). Christmas (1912). Civic Improvement in the Little Towns (1913). When I Was a Little Girl (1913). Neighborhood Stories (1914). Birth (1918; dramatization by Gale, Mister Pitt, 1915). Peace in Friendship Village (1919). Uncle Jimmy (1922). What Women Won in Wisconsin (1922). Faint Perfume (1923; dramatization by Gale, 1934). Preface to a Life (1926). Yellow Gentians and Blue (1927). Portage, Wisconsin, and Other Essays (1928). Borgia (1929). Bridal Pond (1930). The Clouds (1932). Evening Clothes (1932). Old Fashioned Tales (1933). Papa La Fleur (1933). Light Woman (1937). Frank Miller of Mission Inn (1938). Magna (1939). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Derleth, A., Still Small Voice: The Biography of Zona Gale (1940). Gard, R., Grassroots Theater: A Search for Regional Arts in America (1955). Herron, I., The Small Town in American Literature (1939). MacDougall, P., Some Will Be Apples (film, 1974). Simonson, H. P., Zona Gale (1962). Sochen, J., Movers and Shakers: American Women Thinkers and Activists 1900-1970 (1974). Reference works: DAB. NAW (1971). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCA. Other references: American Magazine (June 1921). Madison (Wisconsin) Capital Times (29-31 May 1974, 3- 4 June 1974). Turn of the Century Women (Winter 1984). Yale Review (March 1987). —NANCY BREITSPRECHER
GALLAGHER, Tess Born 21 July 1943, Port Angeles, Washington Daughter of Leslie O. and Georgia Marie Morris; married Lawrence Gallagher, 1963 (divorced 1968); Michael Burkard, 1973 (divorced); Raymond Carver, 1988 (died 1988) Tess Gallagher was born and raised between the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Olympic Mountains in northwestern Washington, the oldest of five children of a logger turned longshoreman. Her early writing was born during the rise of feminist awareness and the emergence of feminist literature in the United States. Gallagher’s writing, however, moves beyond feminine words to express the journey of what it means to be merely human. Like many authors, her poetry reflects back to her childhood memories of the natural beauty of Washington and fishing with her father on the ranch the family owned. Gallagher began her writing career at an early age, working as a reporter for the Port Angeles Daily News at the age of sixteen. She wanted to continue her career as a journalist and enrolled at
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the University of Washington. Yet while attending a poetry writing class taught by Theodore Roethke, she found this kind of writing very satisfying. She left school to marry Lawrence Gallagher, a sculptor, in June 1963, but the marriage ended in 1968. That part of her life sparked new poems, many of which are included in her most well-known collection, Instructions to the Double (1976). Her first poem was published in the Minnesota Review in 1969. She received her B.A. in English from the University of Washington in 1968 and her M.A. in 1970, then graduated from the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop with an M.F.A. in 1974. In 1973 she married Michael Burkard, a poet, but this marriage also ended in divorce. In 1979 she began living with writer Raymond Carver, whom she married shortly before his death in 1988. Instructions to the Double reflects a woman in transition and change, just as Gallagher’s own life was going through a change. The four sections of the book are rather autobiographical, defining four distinct phases of growth in her life: her traditional upbringing, her uncertain rejection of the traditional values of her youth, the new offerings the literary world can offer, and her new identity as a poet. The book is divided by many doubles, the first being the kind of poems: at once very literal and written in a testimonial or confessional manner, reflecting on childhood to adulthood memories; and later very philosophical and abstract, more surreal and focusing more on the inner self. Another example of a double is her use of discussing general subjects versus more real subjects from her past. Poems such as ‘‘Breasts’’ and ‘‘Black Money’’ explore her youth, specifically her blossoming into womanhood and her relationship with her father, respectively. The title poem of the collection, ‘‘Instructions to the Double,’’ brings the author to her acceptance of her role as a poet. It is symbolic of her liberation from her past and a fitting theme to the collection. Gallagher wrote six other volumes of poetry, including Under Stars (1978), a further exploration of discovery through the relationships of the writer. This volume is divided into two sections. The first, ‘‘The Ireland Poems,’’ finds Gallagher writing descriptions of the Irish landscape, searching the land of her ancestors for identity in a land she really knows nothing about. The second section, ‘‘Start Again Somewhere,’’ lays a foundation for examining her relationships with men in later poems and collections. In subsequent volumes she studies the themes of morals, death (in Willingly [1984] following the death of her father), travel, and again, family memories. Her poetry is mostly a reflection of herself, yet it is a reflection of self through the love of others. In this way she is able to emphasize the human experience. At one time Gallagher admitted, ‘‘I feel most at home writing poems, but not now.’’ She shifted to fiction, short stories, and essays as a way to ‘‘get out into foreign and surprising waters.’’ After Moon Crossing Bridge and Portable Kisses, she began to dig deeply into writing short stories, realizing that writing prose has a very different ‘‘tempo’’ than writing poetry. She had to become more acutely aware of human nature. And she did, and finds she feels at ease writing both prose and poetry: ‘‘Writing
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fiction is more like sitting in a clearing and waiting to see if the deer will come. . . . Poetry to me is lightning of the moment. It’s second nature.’’ Gallagher has had a long, noteworthy career as both a writer and a teacher, teaching at both St. Lawrence University and Kirkland College, among others. She said, ‘‘It is wonderful to be able to go into a classroom and talk about what you love. To read poems and to listen to young people recite them from memory. In that way I’m like the Poetry Baron—I make students memorize poems. But they love it.’’ ‘‘The Poetry Baron’’ is part of her short story collection, At the Owl Woman Saloon (1997). Gallagher’s career and life as a writer of prose and poetry has been recognized through a number of awards, including a Creative Artist Public Service Grant from the New York State Arts Council (1976), the Elliston Award (1976), National Endowments for the Arts Grants (1976 and 1981), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1978-79), and the Chancellor’s Citation from Syracuse University, where she also taught.
OTHER WORKS: Stepping Outside (1974). On Your Own (1978). Dostoevsky: A Screenplay (with Raymond Carver, 1985). A Concert of Tenses: Essays on Poetry (1986). The Lover of Horses (1986). Amplitude: New and Selected Poems (1987). My Black Horse (1995).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bolick, K., ‘‘A Conversation with Tess Gallagher,’’ in Atlantic Unbound (July 1997). Reference works: Contemporary Poets (1996). DLB: American Poets Since World War II, Third Series (1992). Writers Directory (1997). —DEVRA M. SLADICS
GARBER, Marjorie Born 11 June 1944 Daughter of Allen H. and Rhoda Kanner Garber English professor and Shakespeare scholar Marjorie Garber graduated with the highest honors from Swarthmore College in 1966 and received a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1969. She served as assistant professor of English at Yale University from 1969 to 1975 and associate professor from 1975 to 1979. Garber then accepted a position as professor of English at Haverford College in Haverford, Pennsylvania, and worked there for two years before moving to Harvard University’s English Department in 1981. In her current position, Garber is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English at Harvard, the Associate Dean for Affirmative Action, and a member of the Academic Deans’ Council.
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Garber has also been the director of Harvard’s Center for Literary and Cultural Studies (CLCS) since 1986. The CLCS was founded in 1984 with an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant and provides a place for interdisciplinary study and discussion on topics ranging from history to philosophy to archaeology. The CLCS sponsors ongoing faculty-graduate student seminars as well as lectures, conferences, and workshops for Harvard and Boston-area graduate students and scholars. Among Garber’s awards and honors are a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in 1966, a Morse Fellowship for Younger Scholars in the Humanities in 1972, and American Council of Learned Societies Fellowships in 1977 and 1989. Garber is well known at Harvard for her popular Shakespeare courses, and the Bard also formed the subject of her first three books: Dream in Shakespeare: From Metaphor to Metamorphosis (1974), Coming of Age in Shakespeare (1981), and Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Casualty (1987). Shakespeare has also been the subject of many of Garber’s articles, which have been published in journals and newspapers like Harper’s, the New York Times, Shakespeare Quarterly, Renaissance Drama, Hebrew University Studies in Literature, Yale Review, and Mosaic. Garber has also contributed essays on Shakespeare and other topics to works edited by other scholars. In Garber’s fourth book, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (1992), she explores the practice of cross-dressing by discussing examples from films, history, popular culture, music, literature, and anthropology. The vast quantity of data and her theories support her assertion that ‘‘the definition of the grounds of human gender will always involve more, and less, than any clearly decidable bottom line.’’ Garber notes that cross-dressing blurs the dresser’s gender, challenging the natural human tendency to categorize individuals as male or female. She cautions against dwelling on the reasons for cross-dressing (economic, social, cultural) in order to explain it away. Instead, she argues for a recognition of the cross-dresser as a ‘‘figure that disrupts’’ because it cannot always be explained with logic. As David Kaufman wrote in his review of Vested Interests in Nation: ‘‘Garber suggests that the transvestite is rather symbolic of an Otherness, ‘a third term’ with the inherent capacity—if not necessarily the ambition—to upset more normal or regimented assignments imposed by social and cultural structures as well as by political systems. This is what the ‘cultural anxiety’ in her subtitle alludes to and what her recurring focus on a ‘category of crisis’ is about.’’ Garber manages the difficult task of making her theoretical arguments accessible to the lay reader not only through her clear prose, but through the tie-ins with popular culture. Her examples—from Yentl to Tootsie to Phantom of the Opera—are familiar ones and ground her arguments in a way accessible to the layperson. Garber’s next work, Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life (1996), continues some of the arguments advanced in Vested Interests but focuses primarily on the concept of
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bisexuality. Once again, she cautions against the tendency to classify individuals into one of two categories—in this case heterosexual or homosexual. She does not believe, however, that bisexuality is a third category on a par with heterosexuality or homosexuality. She asserts instead that bisexuality can be an acceptable, adult way of living one’s sexual life rather than a period of confusion or experimentation, as is often supposed. Garber believes that bisexuality reveals the continuum of sexuality from heterosexual to homosexual along which many individuals move throughout their lives. Garber uses examples from her own experiences as a bisexual and from the lives of musicians, actors, artists, and writers to show the ways individuals can move along this continuum of sexuality. After discussing the marriage of a well-known bisexual actor, for example, Garber writes that ‘‘bisexuality is not a fixed point on a scale but an aspect of lived experience, seen in the context of particular relations.’’ Although most critics praised the accessibility of Vested Interests and Vice Versa, some complained that it presupposed a knowledge and experience of literary criticism beyond the layperson’s grasp. Other critics believed that Garber too easily dismissed the human tendency to categorize individuals as something that can be easily vanquished from the reader’s mind. Garber switched gears with her next title, Dog Love (1996), which focuses on the cultural obsession with canines. Garber— the owner of two golden retrievers—looks at the myths and misconceptions about dogs and the human-dog bond. She discusses the seldom-asked question of why humans spend so much money keeping their dogs healthy and happy when there is so much suffering elsewhere that could command our attention. Garber also traces the dog’s relatively recent rise in popularity and looks at some famous canines in literature and film. Her general argument is that society relies on dogs to bring out its humanity. Although not a new argument, Garber’s wit and clear prose make for enjoyable reading. Garber’s latest work, Symptoms of Culture (1998), is yet another departure from her earlier books. Each chapter presents a new look at an American cultural phenomenon or ‘‘symptom’’ representative of American culture. Garber writes that each symptom reveals ‘‘a fantasy of control. . .of a powerful agency, divine or other. . . .The political logic of this is as disturbing as its psychology.’’ Among the chapters or ‘‘symptoms’’ Garber discusses are Richard Nixon, the Wizard of Oz, Charlotte’s Web, anti-Semitism, the Promise Keepers, and the theory of evolution from the Scopes trial to the present. Although too theoretical for a mainstream audience, Garber’s light touch with these difficult and touchy subjects has appeal for the scholarly reader.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Boston (June 1995). Nation (24 Feb. 1992, 17 July 1995). PW (24 Apr. 1995, 23 Sept. 1996, 13 Apr. 1998). —LEAH J. SPARKS
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GARDENER, Helen Hamilton (Chenoweth) Born Alice Chenoweth, 21 January 1853, Winchester, Virginia; died 26 July 1925, Washington, D.C. Daughter of Alfred G. and Katherine Peel Chenoweth; married Charles S. Smart, 1875; Selden A. Day, 1902 The initial impetus to Helen Hamilton Gardener’s public career as an author, freethinker, suffragist, and political lobbyist came from her father, whose abolitionist activities and rejection of formal Episcopalian thought instilled in Gardener a strong commitment to independent scientific inquiry, sociological analysis, and concomitant activism. Gardener acknowledged this debt to her father in her last novel, An Unofficial Patriot (1894), a slightly fictionalized biography focusing on her father’s conversion to the Methodist church and on his Civil War activities. After an extensive education at various private schools in the Washington, D.C., area and two years of school teaching, Gardener moved with her husband to New York City, where she studied biology at Columbia University and lectured in sociology at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. In 1884, prompted by her friendship with the prominent agnostic and skeptic, Robert G. Ingersoll, Gardener gave a series of lectures devoted to the principles of free thought and a discussion of the relationship between heredity and environment. Her first book-length publication, Men, Women, and Gods (1885), contains many of these lectures. It was published under the name Helen Hamilton Gardener, a name that she subsequently adopted in both her personal and professional life. It is not known whether she rejected her given name and her married name to further her assertion of individual independence, to shield her family from the uproar which accompanied many of her publications, or to underscore a growing dissatisfaction with her marriage. From 1885 to 1890, Gardener published numerous essays and short stories in a wide variety of periodicals. Many of these pieces were collected in Pushed by Unseen Hands (1890) and A Thoughtless Yes (1890). In the former, Gardener describes the scope of her subject matter as ‘‘unanalyzed varieties of mental, moral, social, industrial, or other aberrations of what is by courtesy called civilized society.’’ Here, as in all of her writings, Gardener insists that her readers formulate independent conclusions, conclusions invariably counterposed to their previous passivity. Gardener continued this work in two essay collections, Pulpit, Pew, and Cradle (1892) and Facts and Fictions of Life (1893). Exploring such diverse topics as insurance fraud, penal reform, labor disputes, hypocrisy in religion and philanthropy, the subservient position of women, and tenement living conditions, these two books make Gardener one of the earliest of the American muckrakers. The most significant and widely discussed of
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these essays was ‘‘Sex in Brain,’’ the result of a 14-month biological study conducted to refute the contention of Dr. W. A. Hammond, surgeon general of the U.S., that the brains of men and women are structurally different. Gardener originally presented the conclusions reached through this research to the International Council of Women in Washington, D.C., in 1888. During the 1890s, when she served as contributor, associate editor, and, briefly, coeditor of B. F. Flower’s reform-oriented magazine, The Arena, she was chiefly responsible for the journal’s progressive stance on a wide variety of feminist issues. Gardener’s two novels, Is This Your Son, My Lord? (1891) and Pray You Sir, Whose Daughter? (1892), explicitly confront and condemn the sexual double standard. The first of these attacks the hypocritical upbringing of young American men, especially with respect to the emphasis on external respectability rather than moral convictions and independent thought. Gardener’s condemnation of institutionalized Christianity as abettor of this false social system figures heavily in her argument. The companion novel, Pray You Sir, Whose Daughter?, focuses on the lives of three young women. Here Gardener writes a strident but effectively argued denunciation of an attempt by the New York state legislature to lower the age-of-consent law; she also condemns the low wages paid to working women, and attacks the inferior position of women in the marital relationship. The novel is especially significant for its memorable portrait of a ‘‘new-woman’’ heroine, Gertrude Foster. Although Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s prediction that Gardener’s writings would do for the women’s rights movement what Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for the abolitionist cause was not fulfilled, the two novels were frequently reprinted and were the subject of widespread controversy. Gardener traveled extensively in Europe and Asia during the first six years of her marriage to Selden Day. Although she no longer wrote for publication, after her return to Washington in 1907 she became active in the agitation for woman suffrage and drafted many platform papers in conjunction with her work with Anna Howard Shaw and Carrie Chapman Catt. In 1920, President Wilson nominated Gardener to the U.S. Civil Service Commission. She was the first woman to hold such a high federal position. Throughout her long and varied career, Gardener’s commitment to feminism was a prominent aspect of her self-proclaimed separation from conventional thought and action. Possibly Gardener’s most significant contribution lay in her attack on the standards of propriety and respectability imposed upon the woman writer. In her essay, ‘‘The Immoral Influence of Women in Literature’’ (Arena, February 1890), for example, Gardener cites the need for an uncensored and distinctly female literary voice. She claims such a voice depends upon the gains of the women’s rights movement, gains which she celebrated repeatedly and saw as part of an ongoing struggle, inseparable from wider social advancement and reform.
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OTHER WORKS: The papers of Helen Hamilton Gardener are in the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Flexner, E., Century of Struggle (1959). Gordon, L., Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right (1976). H. H. G. (Alice Chenoweth Day) 1853-1925 (privately printed memorial booklet, 1925). Hill, V. L., ‘‘Strategy and Breadth: The Socialist-Feminist in American Fiction’’ (1979). Park, M., Front Door Lobby (1960). Putnam, S., 400 Years of Freethought (1894). Reference works: A W. DAB HWS NAW NCAB. Other references: American Journal of Physical Anthropology (Oct.-Dec. 1927). Arena (Jan. 1891, June 1892, Dec. 1894). Business Woman (Jan. 1923). Free Thought Magazine (Jan. 1890, Jan. 1897, March 1901, July 1902). Independent (8 Sept. 1892). Literary World (13 Aug. 1892, 9 Sept. 1893). Nation (16 June 1892). Woman Citizen (2 May 1925). —VICKI LYNN HILL
GARDNER, Isabella Born 7 September 1915, Newton, Massachusetts; died 7 July 1981, New York, New York Daughter of George Peabody and Rose Grosvenor Gardner; married Harold van Kirk, 1938 (marriage ended); Maurice Seymour, 1943 (divorced 1947); Robert H. McCormick Jr., 1947 (divorced 1957); Allen Tate, 1959 (divorced 1966); children: Rose, Dan In the poetically rich quarter century between 1950 and 1980, Isabella Gardner earned a wide-ranging and considerable reputation in poetry, her chosen vocation. She was raised in Boston, one of six children of a wealthy society family with a strong New England heritage. She was a cousin of poet Robert Lowell and was often confused with the other Isabella Stewart Gardner, the Boston art patron and collector, who was her great-great-aunt and godmother. At one time in her life she even lived in her godmother’s house, and, according to many, with her red hair and snub nose, she also looked like her. Gardner’s education included the Foxcroft School in Middleburg, Virginia, from 1931 to 1933, the Leighton Rollins School of Acting in East Hampton, New York, and in 1937, the Embassy School of Acting in London, England. For a few years she pursued an acting career, specializing in character roles ‘‘where her shy stutter would be less liable to obtrude.’’ After marriage and the birth of her children, she resumed the writing of poetry, which she had begun in her early teens and had given up because she believed herself to be ‘‘too facile’’ at the craft. Once renewed, however, her position as a poet-contemporary of such writers as Howard Shapiro, John Logan, Richard Eberhardt, John Frederick Nims, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop was secured. Although her output was comparatively slim (about 100 published poems), her work appeared in such prestigious literary
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journals and magazines as Poetry magazine, Partisan Review, Paris Review, the New Yorker, Nation, and Atlantic Monthly. There were five books of poetry: Birthdays from the Ocean (1955), Un Altra Infanzia (in Italy, 1959), The Looking Glass (1961), West of Childhood: Poems 1950-1965, and posthumously, The Collected Poems (1985). Her work was anthologized in, among others, A Pocket Book of Modern Verse (1955), Imagination’s Other Place (1955), Erotic Poetry (1963), Eight Lines and Under (1967), and Honey and the Gall (1967). Sound and rhythm are crucial elements in Gardner’s poetry. She makes extensive use of rhyme, including internal rhyme and ‘‘near-rhyme,’’ and there is an exuberant musicality in her poems, even while many of them explore death-related themes. There are echoes of Gerard Manley Hopkins and similarities to Dylan Thomas, but these are not so much derivative as independently original. According to one biographer, ‘‘Gardner’s early work is often compared to that of Dylan Thomas, particularly in terms of her vital, unself-conscious love for words.’’ She has also been compared to Muriel Rukeyser and Sylvia Plath in her ability to use words with significant import. According to Marian Janssen, author of a major biographical article in Kenyon Review on Gardner, ‘‘She controlled the chaos of life by end rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and, often, strictly metered iambic lines, as well as [in Gardner’s words] ‘symbology, inter-relating, universal + associative, of Christianity + myth + magic (+ Freud).’’’ All of her poems were inspired by the incidents of her life—both happy and tragic, as indeed her life became. In her earlier years she often used forms—the sestina, terza rima, triolet, even the obligatory sonnet. After the breakup of her marriage to the difficult Tate (at his instigation, not hers), she withdrew to a somewhat reclusive existence in the Chelsea Hotel in New York City and a self-imposed poetic silence of 15 years. Her later poems, in a slight nod to changing poetic fashions and trends, went to longer lines and even an abandonment of the brilliant end rhyme that had been so characteristic of her. From 1951 to 1956 Gardner was associate editor of Poetry, while Karl Shapiro was editor. There she became known for her caring concern for the success of younger poets she worked with, even providing monetary help in some cases. Shapiro praised her first volume of poetry and thought the second (The Looking Glass) was even better: ‘‘Nearly every poem in the volume deserves applause,’’ he wrote in the New York Times Book Review. ‘‘It is an outstanding book. If I had anything to do with it, I would nominate it for the Pulitzer Prize.’’ In fact, both Birthdays from the Ocean and The Looking Glass were nominated for the National Book Award (Birthdays was runner-up in the year that W. H. Auden won the award), That Was Then was nominated for the 1980 American Book Award, and in 1981 Gardner was selected as the first recipient of the New York State Walt Whitman Citation of Merit for Poetry. In ‘‘The Fellowship with Essence: An Afterword’’ to her last book, Gardner wrote: ‘‘If there is a theme with which I am particularly concerned, it is the contemporary failure of love. I don’ t mean romantic love or sexual passion, but the love which is the specific and particular recognition of one human being by
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another—the response by eye and voice and touch of two solitudes. The democracy of universal vulnerability.’’ During her poetry years Gardner gave poetry readings throughout the U.S. and in Europe. The Library of Congress has three tapes of her readings, one with John Logan. Her manuscript papers are at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference Works: CA 97-100 (1975), 104 (1982). CP (1970, 1975). Other References: Booklist (15 Mar. 1955, 1 Mar. 1966). Carroll, P., The Poem in Its Skin (1968). Harper’s (6 Aug. 1966). Kenyon Review (Summer 1991). LJ (1 Apr. 1955). Modern Age (Winter 1961-62). NYT (10 July 1981). NYTBR (22 May 1950, 21 Sept. 1980). Poetry (Oct. 1966). Poulin, A. Jr., ed., Contemporary American Poetry, 4th ed. (1951). Saturday Review (9 July 1955). Sewanee Review (Jan.-Mar.1956). Virginia Quarterly Review (Spring 1966). Yale Review (Sept. 1955). —JOANNE L. SCHWEIK
GARDNER, Mariam See BRADLEY, Marion Zimmer
GARDNER, Mary Sewall Born 5 February 1871, Newton, Massachusetts; died 20 February 1961, Providence, Rhode Island Daughter of William Sewall and Mary Thornton Gardner As a girl, Mary Sewall Gardner moved with her well-to-do family from Massachusetts to Providence, where she lived and worked all her life. Gardner credited her father and half-brother, both of them lawyers and judges, with teaching her to think clearly and to feel a sense of civic responsibility. In 1890, Gardner graduated from Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut. She entered the Newport Hospital Training School for Nurses when she was over thirty. In 1905, soon after graduating, Gardner became director of the Providence District Nursing Association, which she headed until her retirement in 1931. Worried that the boom in publichealth work was leading to employment of poorly trained nurses, Lillian D. Wald, Gardner, and others prodded the two national nurses’ groups to establish a standard-setting body. The result was the National Organization for Public Health Nursing (NOPHN), founded in 1912. Gardner helped draft its constitution, was active on its first board of directors, and succeeded Wald as NOPHN president from 1913 to 1916. Like the NOPHN, Gardner’s first book, Public Health Nursing (1916), aimed to guide, restrain, and standardize the efforts of
nurses and lay people caught up in the enthusiasm for public health. The first systematic treatment of the subject, it was revised in 1924 and 1936 and was in print until 1945. In a demonstration of the worldwide influence of American nursing methods it was translated into French, Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese. Although used in classrooms, the book served a wider audience by offering advice on how to found and manage a district nursing association, how to run a one-woman public-health program, and how to deal with lay boards of managers. After she retired, Gardner published two works of fiction. So Build We (1942) presents episodes in the life of Mary Melton, director of a district nursing association. Episodes inculcate proper procedures and awareness of social factors, and conversations sometimes degenerate into lifeless expositions of administrative problems, but the book transcends didacticism in its portrayal of an all-female world. Melton benevolently guides her women subordinates, giving each the guidance she needs. So Build We depicts a world where women’s good intentions, intelligence, professionalism, and nurturance suffice to create harmony. The absence of conflict and of more-than-fleeting references to suffering—astonishing in a study of nursing—weaken the book but suggest Gardner’s vision of the ideal life. Katharine Kent (1946), a better book, follows a nurse from graduation to middle age. Like Gardner, Katharine Kent is an upper-class New Englander, a daughter and sister of lawyers who eventually heads a public-health nursing association in her own city. Like Gardner, she writes an influential book while sick and sets up a program to train public-health nurses in Italy. (Gardner used parts of letters she wrote after World War I when she served with the American Red Cross Commission for Tuberculosis in Italy in her account of Kent’s European nursing ventures.) Other elements in the book apparently derive less from autobiography than from Gardner’s conception of an ideal career. This book ends, as did So Build We, with its heroine affirming her delight in her chosen work. Gardner’s fiction and many of her speeches, articles, and reports celebrate the value of work in women’s lives. Professional work creates cherished ties of comradeship and discipleship between women, and egalitarian relationships between women and men or women and their families. Gardner tried to portray women who are happy as stay-at-home wives and mothers, but they remain shadowy figures, alive only in their volunteer service to public-health nursing. In her books it is participation in nursing’s ‘‘long war against disease and suffering and death’’ which makes women happy. Gardner’s writings, although sometimes amateurish and preachy, are valuable documents in the history of nursing, professional women, and American civic conscience. No other leader in the effort to make American nursing a profession wrote so openly about her motives and rewards. Despite its wooden dialogue, its narrow, upper-class perspective, and its easy resolution of conflicts, Katharine Kent offers a moving portrait of a woman who pursues autonomy and a fundamentally maternal and Christian ideal of service.
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OTHER WORKS: The papers of Mary Sewall Gardner are at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts. BIBLIOGRAPHY: American Journal of Public Health 36 (Oct. 1946). Providence Journal (22 Feb. 1961). Nursing Outlook (Dec. 1953, Jan. 1954, March 1961). NYTBR (28 July 1946). Survey (July 1942). —SUSAN ARMENY
GARRIGUE, Jean Born Gertrude Louise Garrigus, 8 December 1914, Evansville, Indiana; died 28 December 1972, Boston, Massachusetts Daughter of Allan Colfax and Gertrude Heath Garrigus. Jean Garrigue was a respected poet, critic, and teacher of poetry. Born in Evansville, Indiana, she received her B.A. from the University of Chicago and M.A. from the University of Iowa, where she subsequently taught creative writing. Iowa was just one of the institutions where Garrigue instructed during her career. Others included Bard College, Queens College, The New School for Social Research, the University of Colorado, the University of Connecticut, Smith College, and the University of Washington. She was poet-in-residence at both the University of California at Riverside and Rhode Island College during the year preceding her 1972 death, at age fifty-nine, of Hodgkin’s disease. Garrigue was first published in 1941 in the Kenyon Review. In 1944 her initial large collection, ‘‘Thirty-Six Poems and a Few Songs,’’ appeared in an anthology called Five Young American Poets. Her book-length debut was The Ego and the Centaur, a collection released in 1947. As a poet, Garrigue—who changed her name from Gertrude Louise Garrigus in 1940, both to acknowledge the French roots of her last name and to assume what many viewed as a deliberately gender-ambiguous first name—was known for her complicated, technically excellent works. Most centered on the themes of love and the heart, but many also incorporated other interests, such as music, architecture, nature, and especially travel. She was reputed for her ability to craft unique phrasing from a precise choice of words. She wrote in a passionate, lyrical style that drew generously from the influence of poets before her, but remained her own. Laurence Lieberman wrote in Poetry that Garrigue was ‘‘perhaps more skilled than any other poet writing today with the power to dramatize emotional thresholds between jeopardy and renewal. . . . In poem after poem her subject is the failure of events in daily life ever to measure up to her spirit’s esthetic craving for perfectability.’’ In American Poetry Since 1945, Stephen Stepanchev noted that ‘‘although her commitment to verbal magic sometimes draws her into a forest of rhetoric from which too much contemporary reality is banned, she succeeds in conveying, in her best poems, a sense of the world’s danger and delights.’’ Babette
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Deutsch, in Poetry in Our Time, wrote, ‘‘Miss Garrigue finds her subject matter in the give-and-take between the physical presence and the ideas, or more often, the emotions that attach to it. If she wears her feelings upon her sleeve, the embroidery can dazzle.’’ Garrigue’s earliest works were generally considered her best. Her later collections each contained masterful individual poems but were not viewed as being as solid in their entirety as past efforts. Some critics were annoyed by her mannerisms and circuitous language, which was sometimes called ‘‘Jamesian’’ or ‘‘Wordsworthian.’’ Some felt that her strong emotions were excessive, although all agreed that her confidence in her ability to manipulate language was warranted. Her lengthy travel poems represent some of her most highly commended work. These include ‘‘Pays Perdu’’ from Country Without Maps (1964) and ‘‘The Grand Canyon’’ from Studies for an Actress and Other Poems (1973), published posthumously. Other book-length collections include The Monument Rose (1953), Chartres and Prose Poems (1958), A Water Walk by Ville d’Este (1959), and New and Selected Poems (1967). After Garrigue’s death, her poetry gradually went out of the public consciousness until two decades later, when Selected Poems: Jean Garrigue (1992) was published and revived her reputation. The book contained four previously uncollected poems in addition to reprinted works from each of her earlier books. Phoebe Pettingell pointed out in the New Leader that Garrigue was a hyper-romantic who believed that an artist should be completely passionate in all aspects of life, even when that passion leads to hurt. The latter is an emotion that recurs throughout her poems. Selected Poems illustrates Garrigue’s evolution from the beginning to the end of her career: in the early days she focused mainly on internal issues, but she later examined some of the political matters of her time. Examples include ‘‘Lead in the Water’’ and ‘‘Resistance Meeting: Boston Common,’’ both first published in Studies for an Actress. In addition to writing her own collections, Garrigue contributed poems to Cross-Sections, edited by Edwin Weaver (1947). She was the editor of Translations by American Poets (1970) and compiled Love’s Aspects: The World’s Great Love Poems (1975). She wrote a novella, The Animal Hotel (1966), and a work of nonfiction, Marianne Moore (1965). Garrigue was also a poetry critic, essayist, and fiction reviewer, contributing to the New Leader, the New Republic, Saturday Review of Literature, Kenyon Review, and Tomorrow. Among the other publications to which she contributed poems or prose were Botteghe Oscure, Poetry, Commentary, Arts magazine, and the New York Herald Tribune. During her career Garrigue won a number of awards and honors, including Rockefeller Foundation, Guggenheim, National Academy of Arts and Letters, Hudson Review, and Radcliffe Institute fellowships and grants. She also won a Union League Civic and Arts Foundation prize, a Longview award, an Emily Clark Balch first prize, and a Melville Cane award, as well as being nominated for a National Book award for Country Without Maps.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY: Thompson, D. E., ed., Indiana Authors and Their Books, 1917-1966 (1974). Reference works: Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature (1991). CA, 37-40 (1973). CANR 20 (1987). CLC 2 (1974), 8 (1978). World Authors 1900-1950 (1996). Other references: LJ (15 Apr. 1992). New Leader (29 Jan. 1968, 13-27 July 1998). NR (2 Nov. 1953). NYRB (4 Oct. 1973). NYT (28 Dec. 1972). Parnassus (Winter 1975). Poetry (Dec. 1953, May 1960, June 1965, May 1968). SR (19 June 1948, Spring 1954). YR (Autumn 1973).
Peter, but since she is a eugenist and plans to have seven perfect children, she cannot love him and maintain her principles. While acting as escort Peter discovers that Diantha’s aunt’s secretary is bilking her of money, reveals the crime, and, as a result, reveals himself as a healthy, sound, ‘‘ideal’’ father-to-be of seven children. We Are Seven was dramatized by the author from her short story ‘‘Agatha’s Escort,’’ contained in The Justice of Gideon (1910). Gates was a popular novelist and dramatist in the first decades of this century, but her novels and plays can today be characterized as little more than sentimental schlock.
—KAREN RAUGUST
GATES, Eleanor Born 26 September 1875, Shakopee, Minnesota; died 7 March 1951, Los Angeles, California married Richard Walton Tully, 1901; Frederick F. Moore, 1941 The title of Eleanor Gates’ most famous novel, The Poor Little Rich Girl (1912), has become a cliché. In the novel, sevenyear-old Gwendolyn is at the mercy of her servants, because her businessman father and socialite mother have no time for her. Midway through the novel she falls ill and hallucinates an encounter in which all of her previously unanswered questions are answered, her bullying servants banished, and her parents brought to her side. Although initially cute, the 200-page hallucination is far too long and quickly cloys. Naturally, Gwendolyn’s dream comes true. Ten years later, Gates attempted to cash in on her previous success with The Rich Little Poor Boy (1922). Almost as good as The Poor Little Rich Girl is bad, the novel covers the horrid early life of Johnny Smith/Blake, who had been kidnapped by Tom Barber, a selfish brute, to provide free geriatric care for Tom’s father. Johnny is forced to stay in the apartment all day, wears Tom’s made-over clothes (woefully too large for him), and is not permitted to attend school. In fact, any rotten thing that could happen to a child (except child molesting) happens to Johnny, but he has a heart of gold, a spine of steel, and a diamond-in-the-rough mind, which is why he’s a rich little poor boy. His friends and saviors are his stepsister, a one-eyed cowboy, a priest, and a Boy Scout leader. As it turns out, Johnny’s father was a hero, and because he is a hero’s son, Johnny has been given a large scholarship by Dale Carnegie. But, a hero himself, Johnny decides to postpone using the scholarship while his ‘‘Grampa’’ (Barber’s father) needs him. We Are Seven (1915) is typical of Gates’s plays. Subtitled a three-act whimsical farce, it is built around Diantha Kerr, an independent young woman who is writing a master’s thesis in sociology and who is forced by her aunt to accept an escort for her research expeditions. Enter Peter Avery, a practical joker, who, after one glimpse of Diantha, pretends to be deaf and dumb, a prerequisite for the escort job. Diantha begins to fall in love with
OTHER WORKS: The Biography of a Prairie Girl (1902). Buenas Noches (1906). The Plow-Woman (1906). Cupid: The Cow-Punch (1907). The Justice of Gideon (1910). Swat the Fly (1915). Apronstrings (1917). Phoebe (1919). Piggie (1919). Pa Hardy (1936). Fish-Bait(n.d.). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: NCAB, 15. —CYNTHIA L. WALKER
GATES, Susa Young Born 18 March 1856, Salt Lake City, Utah; died 27 March 1933, Salt Lake City, Utah Wrote under: Amelia, Maggie Farnham, Mary Foster Gibbs, Homespun, Mary Howe, Dr. Snuffbottle Daughter of Brigham and Lucy Bigelow Young; married Alma Dunford, 1872; Jacob F. Gates, 1880, children: 13, but only five survived to adulthood An aristocrat among the Mormons in the intermountain West, Susa Young Gates was raised in the Lion House, polygamous household of territorial governor and church leader Brigham Young. Educated beyond the usual for the time and place, at fourteen she was editor of the University of Deseret (now Utah) literary magazine, and at twenty-two she established the music department at the newly founded Brigham Young University, as well as instituting classes there in phonography (shorthand). A mixed career of writing and editing began in 1889 with her publication of the Young Woman’s Journal, which lasted until 1929. In the interim she also directed the founding of the Relief Society Magazine. Both were monthly magazines aimed at Mormon women. Gates contributed heavily to both, generally under one of her several pseudonyms. She also wrote for the North American Review, the Pacific Bureau Service, and the Utah Genealogical and Historical Magazine. Her involvement with women’s issues, including the successful campaign to include universal suffrage in the Utah constitution, 1896, took Gates as far afield as London (1889) and Copenhagen (1902) as a speaker and participant in conventions of
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the International Council of Women. By no means a radical feminist, she reflected a conservative position of human rights within a patriarchal hierarchy. Her early marriage ended in divorce after the birth of two children. A subsequent marriage produced eleven more children, whose births and deaths were interspersed among the heavy professional schedule Gates maintained. Of the 13 children, only five survived to adulthood. Her literary output is varied. Two novels, one full biography, a genealogical handbook, a play, a raft of short stories, and countless short personal essays are in print; her papers contain manuscripts of a history of women and several other unfinished projects. Her commitment to the Mormon belief is the unifying thread through all, a commitment expressed most effectively through her characters’ adherence to basic 19th-century Christian morality, or their defiance thereof, with the subsequent, and predictable, dire consequences. Her own favorite of the novels, John Stevens’ Courtship (1909), tells of two young Mormon women of the 1850s and the clash with ‘‘the world outside’’ in the form of eastern soldiers stationed in Utah. The book is often didactic, its message of ‘‘virtue rewarded’’ very openly acknowledged in the disgrace and death of the morally careless Ellen and the happily-ever-after marriage of the steadfast Diantha to Mormon stalwart Stevens. Superior to the earlier work, however, is the imaginative Prince of Ur, published posthumously in 1945. Through the travails of Hebrew Abram the book presents conflicts of love and religion. The protagonist is a virile statesman-priest, set off against the bestial Nimrod and the cunning Mardan. Sarai is saintly, but markedly less interesting than the provocative, determined Ischa, whose warmth and a certain pathetic quality save her from a stereotyping that would have marred the book. It was through her short stories, however, that Gates won her reputation among her contemporaries. Didactic, moralistic pieces, they often ran as serials in the journals she edited. Slanted at an audience immature in age or in literary sophistication, they reflected nothing so much as Gates’s religious conviction. More effective in the moralistic purpose for which she wrote were the personal essays Gates often included as editorials or notes in the magazines. Often impassioned, they ranged far afield from religious tenets, though they retained a gloss of Christian, more specifically Mormon, mores. Her dramatic writing and her poetry generally were not significant beyond their moment. The Life Story of Brigham Young (1930), Gates’s biography of her father, though no longer standard, was appraised by contemporaries as, understandably, written ‘‘in the nature of a vindication, but indeed polygamy is the only thing. . .that needs vindicating.’’ Not Mormonism’s nor Utah’s finest writer, Gates was in several aspects a worthy pioneer: as novelist, essayist, short fiction writer, and editor-journalist, she set some models which long survived her in the mountainous West.
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OTHER WORKS: Lydia Knight’s History (1883). Heroines of Mormondom (1884). History of Young Ladies’ Mutual Improvement Association. . . (1911). Surname Book and Racial History (1918). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Burgess-Olson, V., ed., Sister Saints (1978). Bushman, C., ed., Mormon Sisters: Women in Early Utah (1876). Cracroft, R. P., ‘‘Susa Young Gates’’ (thesis, 1951). Reference works: Latter-Day Saint Biographical Encyclopedia, A. Jensen, ed. (1901). NCAB. Other references: Dialogue (1971). —MAUREEN URSENBACH BEECHER
GEARHART, Sally Miller Born 15 April 1931, Pearisburg, Virginia Daughter of Kyle M. and Sarah Gearhart A feminist utopian novelist and professor of speech and communication studies, Sally Miller Gearhart describes her politics as lesbian-feminist and her religion as Philogyny. She received her B.A. in English from Sweet Briar College in Sweet Briar, Virginia (1952) and continued her education at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio, where she received an M.A. in public address in 1953. In 1956 she was awarded a Ph.D. in theater from the University of Illinois and completed additional study at the University of Kansas from 1969 to 1970. In 1974 Gearhart edited and coauthored with William R. Johnson a piece entitled Loving Women/Loving Men: Gay Liberation in the Church. Her only novel, The Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women, was published in 1978 and has been reprinted several times. Wanderground depicts a lesbian utopian society of ‘‘hill women’’—a group of antiviolent people who have escaped ‘‘in City’’ in a revolt against technology and male domination. Offering an essentialist portrayal of men and women as polar opposites, Gearhart writes of the hill women’s relationships to each other and to the planet Earth, which is depending on them for its survival. Critic Bonnie Zimmerman calls the novel ‘‘an extreme example of the idealization of the lesbian myth of community.’’ She regrets the occasional artistic lapses that result from Gearhart’s idealism, but notes the strength with which Gearhart ‘‘and those inspired by her revere the virtues of equality, balance, harmony, and complete respect for all entities.’’ Gearhart has held a variety of teaching positions, including assistant professor of speech at the Stephen F. Austin State University in Texas (1956-59) and associate professor of speech and drama and department head at Texas Lutheran College from 1960 to 1970. She became a lecturer and associate professor at San Francisco State University before becoming a professor of speech from 1972 to 1992. She is now retired and a professor emerita at San Francisco State.
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Gearhart has contributed short stories and essays to numerous anthologies. She has also served as a member of the board of directors of the San Francisco Family Service Agency; as cochairperson of the Council on Religion and the Homosexual; as lecturer and consultant for the national Sex Forum; and as a member of the San Francisco Women’s Centers, PETA, the ACLU, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, and the San Francisco Women’s Centers. OTHER WORKS: A Feminist Tarot: A Guide to Intrapersonal Communication (1977). Questioning Technology: Tool, Toy, or Tyrant (1991). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Rosinsky, N., Feminist Futures: Contemporary Women’s Speculative Fiction (1987). Zimmerman, B., Safe Sea of Women (1990). Reference works: CA (1976). CANR (1998). FC (1990). Feminist Writers (1996). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Alternatives (Oct.-Nov. 1989). —MARY E. HARVEY, UPDATED BY LEAH J. SPARKS
GELLHORN, Martha Born November 1908, St. Louis, Missouri; died 15 February 1998, London, England Daughter of George and Edna Fischel Gellhorn; married Bertrand de Jouvenel, 1933; Ernest Hemingway, 1940 (divorced 1945); T. S. Matthews, 1953; children: George. By the time she was twenty-one, Martha Gellhorn had already begun the journalistic career that would, during the next 60 years, make her ‘‘an unscathed tourist of wars.’’ Rather than return to Bryn Mawr College for her final year of studies, Gellhorn began writing for the New Republic in the summer of 1929 and then, following a short stint as a cub reporter for the Albany Times Union, bartered her passage to Europe in February 1930 by writing a brochure for the Holland America Line. Returning to the U.S. during the dark years of the Depression, Gellhorn convinced Harry Hopkins, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s confidant, to hire her as an investigator for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. She transformed her year’s experience in the field reporting on the plight of ordinary people whose industry and respectability had been debased by hunger, disease, and despair into the stories published in her first collection, The Trouble I’ve Seen (1936). Gellhorn discovered her true subject, however, in 1937 when she arrived in Madrid with nothing but a knapsack and $50 during the height of the Spanish Civil War. There she met veteran war correspondents Ernest Hemingway (whom she married in 1940
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and divorced in 1945) and Robert Capa, and submitted an unsolicited article to Collier’s Weekly. From that point on, Gellhorn won acclaim for her ability to convey the face of war, to render the suffering of ordinary people in spare prose and powerful imagery, defying convention to become one of the first female war correspondents. By 1939 Gellhorn had reported on Nazi encroachment into Czechoslovakia and the Russo-Finnish war. A year later she trekked across China with Hemingway, in all likelihood the ‘‘Unwilling Companion’’ of the often humorous recollections of excursions to the Caribbean, Asia, and Russia published in her autobiographical Travels with Myself and Another (1978). During World War II she defied military regulations and stowed away on a hospital ship to witness the Normandy invasion and even accompanied British pilots on night bombing raids over Germany. When the Allies liberated Dachau, Gellhorn was there to record the truth. During the Cold War, when the arena of combat shifted, she reported on the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Vietnam War, the Nicaraguan contras, and at the age of eighty-one, the U.S. invasion of Panama. Only when war came to Bosnia did she admit she was ‘‘too old’’ to bear witness. Military tactics and the exploits of generals, as the title of her collection of front-line dispatches, The Face of War (1959, 1988), suggests, held little interest for Gellhorn. As a war correspondent she focused instead on the common soldier and civilians, on the telling details by which to make real their lives and experiences. While her cool, detached prose and almost photographic delineation of person, place, and event suggested utter objectivity, Gellhorn’s personal perspective was never in doubt. In fact for Gellhorn journalism, carefully written, was a ‘‘form of honorable behavior.’’ Although she made her reputation as a journalist, Gellhorn also achieved her goal of becoming a successful fiction writer, publishing six novels and seven short fiction collections, many of which depicted the same events and explored the same issues covered when she was a reporter. While the lines between fiction and nonfiction were seemingly blurred in her work, fiction clearly afforded Gellhorn the freedom to transform subjects into characters, events into plot, and to invest both with her decidedly personal perspective. Ranging widely like their author in physical geography, Gellhorn’s stories, novellas (a form at which she was particularly adept), and novels examine political and personal conflicts to illustrate her recurring themes: the human cost of poverty and war, the necessary struggle to invest life with meaning, the cruelty of oppression, the delicate balance between freedom and responsibility. Gellhorn’s first two novels, What Mad Pursuit (1934) and A Stricken Field (1940), loosely transformed autobiography into fiction, dramatizing in the first instance her three years at Bryn Mawr and her subsequent experiences in Europe’s pacifist youth movement, and her exploits as a journalist in Czechoslovakia on the eve of Nazi occupation in the second. The publication of Liana (1944), however, a novel about the oppressive marriage of a powerless mulatto woman to a wealthy white man set in the
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French Caribbean, demonstrated Gellhorn’s ability to imagine herself into the lives and minds of others. In 1948 she published her most accomplished novel, The Wine of Astonishment (reissued in 1989 as Point of No Return), the parallel stories of two American soldiers involved in the Battle of the Bulge who must confront not only their own terror, sorrow, and prejudices but also the insanity of a world at war. Gellhorn’s mature fiction is among her most artistic and complex. The stories collected in The Honeyed Peace (1953) and Pretty Tales for Tired People (1965), the novellas published in Two by Two (1958) and The Weather in Africa (1978), and the novel His Own Man (1961) are dramas of social, cultural, and psychological dislocation that expose the complexities of modern life. Like her dispatches in war and in peace (collected in 1988 as The View from the Ground), Gellhorn’s fiction bears witness to the human predicament, simultaneously commanding her readers’ sympathy and outrage. Taken together, her fiction and nonfiction offer persuasive evidence that Gellhorn did indeed keep faith with her journalistic credo to ‘‘write what you see and how it is.’’ OTHER WORKS: The Heart of Another (1941). Love Goes to Press (with Virginia Cowles, 1947). Vietnam: A New Kind of War (1966). The Lowest Trees Have Tops (1969). The Novellas of Martha Gellhorn (1993). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Kert, B., The Hemingway Women (1983). Lassner, P., ‘‘‘Camp Follower of Catastrophe’: Martha Gellhorn’s World War II Challenge to the Modernistic War,’’ in MFS 44 (1998). Rollyson, C., Nothing Ever Happens to the Brave: The Story of Martha Gellhorn (1990). Reference works: CA 77-80. CLC 14, 60. DLBY (1982). Other references: NYT (17 Feb. 1998). —LINDA C. PELZER
GENÊT See FLANNER, Janet
GEORGE, Jean Craighead Born 2 July 1919, Washington, D.C. Also writes under: Jean Craighead, Jean George Daughter of Frank and Carolyn Johnson Craighead; married John L. George, 1944 (divorced 1963); children: three Jean Craighead George, writer, illustrator, and naturalist, attended Pennsylvania State University and edited its literary magazine. During World War II she worked as a reporter for the International News Service (1941-43) and the Washington Post and Times-Herald (1943-45). She worked as an artist for Pageant
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magazine (1945-46) and as reporter-artist for the Newspaper Enterprise Association (1946-47). George married a conservationist and ecologist with whom she had three children; they were divorced in 1963. In the 1960s and 1970s alone, George wrote 33 books (and illustrated some of them), mostly for children. She also published many articles on nature subjects in Reader’s Digest, for whom she was a roving editor, and in other magazines. An unusual characteristic of George is that, if at all possible, she lives with the animals she writes about; she reports having raised at least 173 wild pets. Vulpes, the Red Fox (1948) begins with the birth of Vulpes in a chill spring rain and ends with his death. The book is steeped with details about the foxes’ lives, the seasons, and the locale; the dangers and deaths that occur are handled calmly and matter-offactly as part of nature’s cycle. My Side of the Mountain (1959, film version 1969) is the story of adolescent Sam Gribley, who is tired of living with his large family in a cramped city apartment and wants to go live in the Catskills on his great-grandfather’s homestead. He does so for 13 months, where he collects and cooks his own food, makes himself a home inside a tree trunk, and figures out a source of heat for protection against the cold mountain winters. He has a variety of animal friends, including Frightful, a young falcon he trains. The life is difficult and sometimes lonely, but Sam succeeds, and the story is told so realistically and with such detail it all seems very credible. The conflicts of adolescence are further explored in many of George’s books, including The Summer of the Falcon (1962), a story that seems to incorporate some of George’s own biography. It is told through the cycle of a family’s return, three summers in a row, to the grandfather’s Victorian house in the mountains. The heroine struggles toward self-discipline; in one scene she uses her wits to complete a cave rescue only after she has admitted her nearly overwhelming fear. Perhaps the ending is too pat, but this is more than outweighed by the book’s basic strengths, including fascinating hawk lore. Julie of the Wolves (1972) is the story of an adolescent Eskimo girl who is befriended by a wolf pack while searching for her lost father and a lost cultural tradition. George captures the conflict of Eskimo life, the desire on the part of some to retain the old ways of living in harmony with the earth, and the desire of others to enjoy some of the luxuries of ‘‘civilization’’—such as radios, refined foods, alcohol, and high-powered rifles. Julie of the Wolves, with its sections of fine naturalistic writing, won the 1973 Newbery Medal and was voted among the 10 best children’s books of the last 200 years by members of the Children’s Literature Association. Hook a Fish, Catch a Mountain (1975), like the earlier Who Really Killed Cock Robin? (1971), are ecological mysteries, but like many other books by George, it is also a story of an adolescent trying to be accepted as an individual. Again, the protagonist is female, and again she is trying to shake off her lack of experience
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and her fears in order to become an able and independent outdoorsperson. George’s successful mixing of nature stories with novels centering on adolescents and their concerns works to the advantage of both genres. The adolescent concerns of learning to manage physical danger and fear, to take responsibility, to discipline oneself and to become a part of a group, as well as to develop independence, are set against the backdrop of the need for all humans to be aware of the interconnectedness of all the ecosystems of this earth. A deep understanding of nature’s harmonies— beautiful and death-causing alike—pervades each of the books. George is a fine writer who has chosen to write books primarily appropriate for young people, but at her best she is equally interesting to adults. Still going strong in the 1980s and 1990s, George created several new series, like her perennially popular Moon series from the 1960s. The Moon books (The Moon of the Owls, The Moon of the Salamanders, The Moon of the Wild Pigs, etc.) totaled 13 animal-and-nature tales from 1967 to 1969, all of which were reprinted in the early 1990s. Her next large-scale series was the One Day books, which included journeys into a myriad of natural settings, including One Day in the Desert (1983) and One Day in the Alpine Tundra, as well visits into the prairie, woods, and tropical forest, all published between 1983 and 1990. Yet one of her most enduring protagonists, Julie, was also brought back in two additional books: Julie (1995) and Julie’s Wolf Pack (1997). Eagerly awaited, the former begins shortly after the 1972 novel left off with Julie finding her father and the loss of Amaroq; she must now deal with the realities of community life and the breakdown of Eskimo traditions. The latter title finds Julie older and wiser, with a wolf pack led by her beloved Amaroq’s son, Kapu. George has also written several cookbooks and guidebooks, as well as her autobiography, Journey Inward (1982). Though she is now in her eighties, there is little doubt the award-winning George will continue to produce well-written, fascinating books for children of all ages. If and when she does slow down, her books will remain on the shelves, for they are continually reprinted and will entertain generations to come. OTHER WORKS: Vision, the Mink (with J. L. George, 1949). Masked Prowler: The Story of a Racoon (with J. L. George, 1950). Meph, the Pet Skunk (with J. L. George, 1952). Bubo, the Great Horned Owl (with J. L. George, 1954). Dipper of Copper Creek (with J. L. George, 1956). The Hole in the Tree (1957). Snow Tracks (1958). Red Robin, Fly Up (1963). Gull Number 737 (1964). Hold Zero (1966). Spring Comes to the Ocean (1966). The Moon of the Bears (1967). The Hole in the Tree (1967). Coyote in Manhattan (1968). The Moon of the Chickadees (1968). The Moon of the Fox Pups (1968). The Moon of the Monarch Butterflies (1968). The Moon of the Mountain Lions (1968). The Moon of the Alligators (1969). The Moon of the Deer (1969). The Moon of the Gray Wolves (1969). The Moon of the Moles (1969). The
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Moon of the Winter Bird (1969). All Upon a Stone (1971). Beastly Inventions: A Surprising Investigation into How Smart Animals Really Are (1971). Everglades Wildguide: The Natural History of Everglades National Park, Florida (1971). All Upon a Sidewalk (1974). Walking Wild Westchester (1974). Hook a Fish, Catch a Mountain (1975). Going to the Sun (1976). Wentletrap Trap (1977). American Walk Book: An Illustrated Guide to the Country’s Major Historical and Natural Walking Trails from the Northeast to the Pacific Coast (1977). Dirty Work, Inc. (1978). The Wounded Wolf (1978). River Rats (1979). Wild Wild Cookbook (1982). The Grizzly Bear with the Golden Ears (1982). The Cry of the Crow: A Novel (1982). The Wild, Wild Cookbook: A Guide for Young Wild-Food Foragers (1982). Exploring the Outof-Doors (1983). The Talking Earth (1983). How to Talk to Your Animals (1986). How to Talk to Your Cat (1986). How to Talk to Your Dog (1986). Water Sky (1987). Shark Beneath the Reef (1988). One Day in the Woods (musical, 1989). On the Far Side of the Mountain (1990). The Summer of the Falcon (1990). The Missing Gator of Gimbo Limbo: An Ecological Mystery (1992). The Firebay Connection: An Ecological Mystery (1993). The First Thanksgiving (1993). Dear Rebecca, Winter is Here (1993). The Fire Bug Connection: An Ecological Mystery (1993). The Everglades (1995). Animals Who Have Won Our Hearts (1994). There’s an Owl in the Shower (1995). To Climb a Waterfall (1995). Acorn Pancakes, Dandelion Salad, and 38 Other Wild Recipes (1995). The Wild, Wild Cookbook: A Guide for Young Wild-Food Foragers (1982). Exploring the Out-of-Doors (1983). The Tarantula in My Purse (1996). The Case of the Missing Cutthroats (1996). Look to the North: A Wolf Pup Diary (1997). Arctic Son (1997). Giraffe Trouble (1998). Dear Katie, the Volcano is a Girl (1998). Gorilla Gang (1998). Elephant Walk (1998). Rhino Romp (1998). Morning, Noon, and Night (1999). Incredible Animal Adventures (1999). Frightful’s Mountain (1999). Snow Bear (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cary, A., Jean Craighead George (1996). Greenberg, M. H., and Waugh, C., eds., A Newbery Zoo: A Dozen Animal Stories by Newbery Award-Winning Authors (1995). Huck, C. and D. Kuhn, eds., Children’s Literature in the Elementary School (1968). Lyon, T. J. and Stine, P., eds., On Nature’s Terms: Contemporary Voices (1992). Minor, W., On Illustrating Everglades (1995). Sutherland, Z., and M. H. Arbuthnot, Children and Books (1977). Vick, D., Favorite Authors of Young Adult Fiction (1995). White, J., ‘‘Novel’’ Enrichment (1984). Reference works: Authors of Books for Young People (1964). CA (1963). More Junior Authors (1963). SATA (1971). WW in Children’s Books: A Treasury of the Familiar Characters of Childhood (1975). Other references: A Visit with Jean Craighead George (audiovisual, 1994). Adventurous Spirit: Jean Craighead George on Journal Writing (audiovisual, 1990). Good Conversation! A Talk with Jean Craighead George (audiovisual, 1992). Elementary English (Oct. 1973). Horn Book (Aug. 1973). Writers Digest (March 1974). —LINDA A. CARROLL
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GEROULD, Katharine Fullerton Born 6 February 1869, Brockton, Massachusetts; died 27 July 1944, Princeton, New Jersey Daughter of Bradford M. and Julia Ball Fullerton; married Gordon H. Gerould, 1910; children: two Educated at Miss Folsom’s School and at Radcliffe College (B.A. 1900, M.A. 1901), Katharine Fullerton was a reader in English at Bryn Mawr from 1901 to 1910, when she married Gordon H. Gerould, the distinguished medieval scholar. They settled in Princeton, where he was teaching, and they had two children. For many years, Gerould an extremely successful woman of letters. In 1900 she won the Century prize for the best short story by an undergraduate, and throughout her career she wrote for Century, the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, and Scribner’s. In 1923 she lectured at Yale, in 1927 at the University of California at Berkeley. Her stories were included in The Best Short Stories of 1917, 1920, 1921, 1922, and 1925. Gerould’s 1925 story, ‘‘An Army with Banners’’ appeared in The Fifty Best Short Stories, 1915-1939. Gerould’s essays perhaps deserve the obscurity which time brings to all but the very best of periodical literature; nor are the novels entirely successful. But it is unfortunate the stories, too, go now unnoticed. Gerould worked in the tradition of James, Wharton, Kipling, and Conrad, and her stories display a mastery of her craft. Gerould was from an old New England family, and her attitudes were influenced by the clerical and academic puritanism of the privileged classes. In the essays her style is graceful, at times witty, always concrete and straightforward, but the toofrequent displays of snobbishness repel more than the genuine insights attract. She deplores the consequences of democracy, especially the state universities, and she finds Louisa Alcott’s little women ‘‘under-bred.’’ The best of Gerould’s essays are in Hawaii (1916) and The Aristocratic West (1925). She is better with ‘‘scenes and impressions’’ than with criticism and arguments; she is more effective, finally, in fiction than in exposition. Her talent for storytelling is apparent in the novels, for they contain memorable scenes and characters, even though they fail as a whole. The short stories, however, are a real achievement. Generally, they were praised for their power, sincerity, and realism. Some critics, not surprisingly, complained they offered no solution, had no ‘‘soul,’’ but it is to the credit of the serious artist not to offer solutions where none are plausible. Gerould is honest in her examination of human nature and the human condition, as well as in her analyses of conduct. Many of the stories hinge upon an act of sacrifice. A father, for example, rejects a unique opportunity for success and happiness for the sake of his son (‘‘The Bird in the Bush’’). There is no joy in the act; the mother reflects unhappily that the son, though loved, will not be the man his father is, that he is not, in short, worth the sacrifice. ‘‘Vain Oblations’’ and ‘‘The Great Tradition,’’ similarly, demonstrate that great acts of self-sacrifice may be required of superior natures, even though virtue often goes unrewarded and suffering is not alleviated. The world of the
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stories is often harsh, and so are many of the characters; but there is tenderness, too, in ‘‘The Miracle’’ of Rosina Sayle’s love for her stepchild, forced and conventional at first, spontaneous and genuine at last. Most often Gerould’s stories are of careful lives led in accordance with complex rules, or of difficult moral choices analyzed by intelligent and detached narrators. Her characters tend to be consistent and strong, whether good or evil. But she is also capable of writing about people who simply botch things, as does Sadie Lampson Chadwick in ‘‘Wesendonck.’’ She attended what Gerould considers one of those deplorable state universities and she lacks ‘‘the constructive sense.’’ Unable to cope with giving a dinner for an eminent visiting scientist—her general ineffectiveness is compounded by poverty and plain bad luck— she abruptly and without warning flees to her Midwestern home for a visit. Upon her return she gradually draws from her now uncommunicative husband the information that by her flight she delivered the coup de grace to his hope for advancement and thereby to her own hope for a better life. Gerould is of historical interest as a successful woman writer and as an essayist whose work reflects the attitudes of a relatively small segment of early 20th-century society. By the mid-1930s, her work was regarded as dated. The stories, however, are another matter, for they are not dated. Their value is literary, and they should be better known. OTHER WORKS: The Great Tradition (1915). Vain Oblations (1915). A Change of Air (1917). Modes and Morals (1920). Lost Valley (1922). Valiant Dust (1922). Conquistador (1923). The Light That Never Was (1931). Ringside Seats (1937). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Sherman, S. P., ‘‘The Superior Class,’’ in The Genius of America (1923). Reference works: NAW (1971). TCA, TCAS. —WILLENE S. HARDY
GERSTENBERG, Alice Born 2 August 1885, Chicago, Illinois; died 28 July 1972, Chicago, Illinois Daughter of Erich and Julia Wieschendorff Gerstenberg Alice Gerstenberg’s grandparents on both sides of the family were Chicago pioneers. From her father she inherited endurance, and from her mother a love of theater. She attended the Kirkland School in Chicago and Bryn Mawr College. Before writing plays, Gerstenberg was interested in writing novels. Her first full-length play, a three-act version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, opened in 1915 at both the Fine Arts Theatre and the Booth Theatre in New York. Gerstenberg’s next play, the one-act Overtones, her most original and best known work, was produced
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in 1915 by the Washington Square Players at the Bandbox Theatre, New York, under the direction of Edward Goodman. It also played in London, starring Lily Langtry. In 1922 Gerstenberg wrote a three-act version of Overtones which she directed herself at Powers Theater in Chicago. In Overtones Gerstenberg created two lines of action to tell the story of Harriet and Margaret. Harriet has married for money and longs for the man she loves, while Margaret has married for love (the same man Harriet, too, had loved) and now longs for money. The surface action of the play, which reveals only the ‘‘civilized’’ selves of these women, is shown in conventional dramatic form, while the action below the surface reveals the subconscious selves of the two women in two characters named Hetty and Maggie. Harriet and Margaret exist in the present in a world as it appears to be; Hetty and Maggie speak of the past and life as they honestly feel them. The two actions placed side by side create not just a conventional conflict between two women, but a compelling irony and a conflict within each character, HarrietHetty and Margaret-Maggie. Overtones was heralded as representing a new formula in theater. Today it is still seen as a forerunner of later psychological drama by major playwrights, including Eugene O’Neill, who acknowledged its influence on his work. This same concern for the dramatic ‘‘representation’’ of the subconscious is obvious in Strange Interlude (1928) and in Days Without End (1932), both of which use masks to draw the conflict between the false outer self and the painfully honest subconscious self. The Pot Boiler (later titled Dress Rehearsal), a comedy about the pretensions of conventional theater, and Fourteen, a light satire on the pettiness of high society dinner parties, along with Overtones—all appearing in Gerstenberg’s second collection, Ten One-Act Plays (1921)—are Gerstenberg’s most popular plays. They have appeared in numerous anthologies of one-act plays and have been produced by little theaters all over the U.S., England, and Australia. In Gerstenberg’s next collection of short plays, Comedies All (1930), the most forceful is The Puppeteer. In this play, the grandmother is a Strindbergian vampire who sucks the creative individuality out of her own family but discovers in her grandson Walter a will stronger than her own. Most of Gerstenberg’s one-act plays reflect her role in the little theater movement, which popularized the one-act experimental play that could be played in the home as well as on the stage. The Puppeteer, for example, takes place on a staircase. Gerstenberg saw these plays, which could be produced without much expense, as a means of fund raising for communities wanting to found little theaters. Gerstenberg was one of the original members of the Chicago Little Theatre, the first little theater in the U.S., which was founded by Maurice Browne in 1912. In 1921, she and Annette Washburne founded the Chicago Junior League Theatre for children. For two years Gerstenberg was this theater’s director. Using her early model for children’s theater, junior leagues have developed in communities all over the country.
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Gerstenberg’s most significant contribution to the little theater movement is her founding of the Playwright’s Theatre of Chicago (1922-45), which was designed to offer the local playwright an opportunity to produce plays. For her work as playwright and producer, Gerstenberg won the Chicago Foundation for Literature Award in 1938. Her articles on little theater appear in Townsfolk Magazine, The Little Theatre Monthly, and The Drama. Gerstenberg has also enjoyed a modest career as an actress. Gerstenberg’s characters, mostly women, inhibited by outworn institutions and by their own fears, make choices that lead to honest self-expression. Needing new dramatic forms to express the daring of her unconventional characters, Gerstenberg took the comic form and gave it not only a variety of structures but a modern psychological dimension as well. Gerstenberg’s dramaturgy reflects her own vitality as a woman and as a playwright dedicated to a new theater which placed artistic integrity as its highest goal. OTHER WORKS: A Little World (1908). Unquenched Fire (1912). The Conscience of Sarah Platt (1915). Four Plays for Four Women (1924). The Land of Don’t Want To by L. Bell (dramatization by Gerstenberg, 1928). Water Babies by C. Kingsley (dramatization by Gerstenberg, 1930). Star Dust (1931). When Chicago Was Young (with H. Clark, 1932). Glee Plays the Game (1934). Within the Hour (1934). Find It (1937). London Town (dramatization by Gerstenberg, 1937). The Queen’s Christmas (1939). Time for Romance (with M. Fealy, 1942). Victory Belles (with H. Adrian, 1943). The Hourglass (1955). Our Calla (1956). On the Beam (1957). The Magic of Living (1969). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Barlow, J., Plays By American Women: 1900-1930 (1981). Dean, A., Comedies All (1930). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Sievers, D., Freud on Broadway (1955). Other references: NR (20 Nov. 1915). —BEVERLY M. MATHERNE
GESTEFELD, Ursula N(ewell) Born 22 April 1845, Augusta, Maine; died 22 October, Kenosha, Wisconsin Married Theodore Gestefeld; children: four Little biographical information about Ursula Newell Gestefeld’s early life is available. By the 1880s, Gestefeld, her husband, and four children were living in Chicago. During these years, Gestefeld, a survivor of many childhood illnesses and several difficult pregnancies, became intrigued by the principles of Christian Science elaborated by Mary Baker Eddy in Science and Health. Gestefeld’s involvement with Christian Science is the most significant factor in any evaluation of her career. Not only did she find her own health markedly improved by the application
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of this philosophy, but her writings all advocated ideas that developed as a consequence of her initial support of Eddy’s religion.
rights movement, and it is especially significant for its frank discussion of sexuality, prostitution, and marriage.
In 1884, Gestefeld studied personally with Eddy, who considered Gestefeld one of her most able students and active supporters. In 1888, under her own authority, Gestefeld published Ursula N. Gestefeld’s Statement of Christian Science, a book which she considered a logical explanation and continuation of Eddy’s thought, omitting Eddy’s rhetorical embellishment. Eddy saw the book as a direct attack on her absolute and inviolable authority, and she had Gestefeld dismissed from the church. Gestefeld responded with a clever pamphlet, Jesuitism and Christian Science (1888), which attacked Eddy’s claim to unquestioned spiritual and scriptural authority. Gestefeld’s emphasis on the right and duty of individual questioning and searching became central to all of her later works.
OTHER WORKS: Which Shall It Be? Mind or Medicine? A Plea for the Former (1886). What Is Mental Medicine (1887). The Science of Christ (1889). A Chicago Bible Class (1891). A Modern Catechism (1892). The Leprosy of Miriam (1894). And God Said (1895). The Breath of Life (1897). How We Master Our Fate (1897). The Metaphysics of Balzac (1898). Reincarnation or Immortality (1899). How to Control Circumstances (1901). The Science of the Larger Life (1905). The Master and the Man (1907).
Gestefeld gradually codified her separation from Christian Science and eventually elaborated her own system of philosophy, which she named the ‘‘Science of Being.’’ In addition to founding the Gestefeld Publishing Company in Pelham, New York, and publishing a monthly magazine, Exodus (1896-1904), she founded the Church of New Thought, the College of the Science of Being, and her own religious, social, and educational organization, the Exodus. The Builder and the Plan (1901) is the most significant and fully developed of Gestefeld’s philosophical writings. It contains a point-by-point comparison of the key tenets of Christian Science and the Science of Being, in which Gestefeld demonstrates the superiority of her own system as founded upon reason and logic, independent from the absolute authority of any individual or church. An introduction to Gestefeld’s thought is most readily accessible in her novel, The Woman Who Dares (1892), an explicitly feminist work. Gestefeld’s heroine, Murva Kroom, moves from dependence upon her tyrannical father to a similar, if less painful, dependence upon her husband, a man who wants a wife to be no more than an echo of his own ideas and needs. Her manifesto-like declaration that her identity as a woman must be given precedence over her identity as a wife is the catalyst for most of the action in the novel. Eventually Murva sees woman’s sexual subservience as the most crippling aspect of her identity. She demands the right to abstain from sexual intercourse, believing the excessive emphasis on physical intimacy impedes true union between men and women. She links this demand to a critique of established religions and of the economic inequality of women, and she makes sweeping demands for women’s rights. Certain that one day her husband will accept and benefit from her vision, Murva leaves his house and establishes a refuge for abused women. In this asylum, she teaches other women the principles of freedom and selfrespect she has learned, and sees in this work the beginning of a widespread program for social reform. This novel, more than any other text in Gestefeld’s generally forgotten oeuvre, deserves renewed attention. It is among the most vigorously argued and perceptive of the 19th-century novels devoted to the popularization of issues important to the women’s
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BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bates, E., and J. Dittemore, Mary Baker Eddy (1932). Braden, C., Spirits in Rebellion: The Rise and Development of New Thought (1963). Dakin, E., Mrs. Eddy (1929). Hill, V. L., ‘‘Strategy and Breadth: The Socialist-Feminist in American Fiction’’ (dissertation, 1979). Reference works: American Blue-Book of Biography (1915). NAW (1971). Other references: Arena (Dec. 1892). Catholic World (Jan. 1893). Literary World (11 Feb. 1893, 23 Feb. 1895). Mind (Jan. 1902). Picayune (9 Oct. 1892). —VICKI LYNN HILL
GIBBONS, Kaye Born 5 May 1960, Nash County, North Carolina Daughter of Charles Bennett and Alice Gardner Batts; married Michael Gibbons (divorced); children: Mary, Leslie, Louise. Born and raised in North Carolina, Kaye Gibbons attended Rocky Mount High School and started college on a scholarship at North Carolina State University. She transferred to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she studied American literature with Louis Rubin and began writing her first novel. While she never finished her degree at Chapel Hill, she did receive the university’s Distinguished Alumna Award. She became writer-in-residence at the Library of North Carolina State University in 1993. All of Gibbons’s novels are steeped in a sense of place and history, revealing an understanding of women’s struggles to ‘‘shoulder extraordinary burdens’’ and to maintain their compassion, humor, and self-esteem in a culture that values those qualities very little in women. Understanding, strong, resourceful, and independent, all the women in Gibbons’s fiction represent what one critic has called ‘‘a fictional oral history of female wishes [and] hopes.’’ Generations of Gibbons’s women share the vision of finding a place for themselves in the world without compromising their sense of self. Ellen Foster (1987), which Gibbons herself says is ‘‘emotionally autobiographical,’’ won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and
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Letters and a special citation from the Ernest Hemingway Foundation. Its particular strength lies in the resilient character of Ellen herself, who endures the suicide of her mother, her father’s sexual advances, and the meanness of her grandmother and aunt to emerge triumphant in a happy home. Her quest for place is determined and persistent: she will find a safe harbor. In her search she is forced to throw off her own racial prejudice and realize that, despite her poverty, her black friend Starletta has something she envies—a loving family. Women are the center of all of Gibbons’s novels, and A Virtuous Woman (1989) carefully orchestrates past and present so that the voice of a dead woman becomes the center of the novel. Ruby Pitt Woodrow has left her freezer stocked with food for her husband, Blinking Jack Ernest Stokes. She knew that, while some would think it morbid, men cannot really do all that much for themselves, and ‘‘if you want to see a man afraid just put him in a room with a sick woman who was once strong.’’ Women’s strength resonates throughout the pages of Gibbons’s work, from the strength of eleven-year-old Ellen Foster to the power of Charlie Kate, medicine woman of Charms for the Easy Life (1992). Gibbons grounds her fiction in the knowledge that ‘‘this world is built up on strong women, built up and kept up by them too, them kneeling, stooping, pulling, bending, and rising up when they need to go and do what needs to get done.’’ Women talking to each other, remembering the talents of their foremothers, surviving—all of Gibbons’s women endure and pass on their power to the next generation: Charlie Kate, midwife and healer, leaves her legacy of herbs and cures with her granddaughter, Margaret, the narrator, who chooses her grandmother’s calling as part of her heritage. A Cure for Dreams (1991), which won the Pen/Revlon Award for the best work of fiction by a writer under thirty-five, is, like her fourth book, Charms for the Easy Life, a generational novel. Grandmothers, mothers, and daughters all share the same hopes for themselves. Their struggles to endure hard times are given meaning by their stories. Told as gossip, recounted as family history, and preserved as the marrow of family life, these stories are the lives of the Randolph women. Marjorie Polly Randolph cherishes the stories told by her mother, Betty Davies Randolph, and her grandmother, Lottie O’Cadhain Davies. Marjorie need only say to her mother:‘‘‘Tell me about your mother and you, and Kentucky and Virginia and the wild way I was born. Tell me about the years that made you.’ Then she would talk. Talking was my mother’s life.’’ The women in Gibbons’s novels represent a large extended family of Southerners who have not been defeated; their stories represent a history of the South that deconstructs the history of Southern womanhood and revitalizes the traditions of independence and self-reliance. Sights Unseen (1995) is, like Ellen Foster, written from the perspective of a child, in this case twelve-year-old Hattie, whose mother struggles with mental illness. It deals with the central role of the disease on the family’s life, as Hattie experiences a lack of mothering and endures the reactions of friends and neighbors. Gibbons, who has been diagnosed as a manic-depressive herself,
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has told interviewers she wrote this story to imagine what her daughters might think of her if the disease overtakes her. Gibbons’ lack of sentimentality and tenderness toward her characters and their complex situation are typical of her work. In On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon (1998), narrator Emma Garnet Tate sums up her life from old age. As a child she protected her mother from her violent and racist father—he murdered one of the family’s slaves in 1842, when Emma was twelve—but ultimately married a loving, even martyr-like, husband, in part to escape her father. When she departed, she brought with her the slave Clarice. Yet after Clarice and Emma leave, Emma’s mother dies, and Emma spends the rest of her life facing her guilt. On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon is vintage Gibbons in its strong portrayal of a child heroine, in the way the narrator loses her mother and then courageously faces her difficult life, and in the lively portrayal of Southern life. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA 151 (1996). CLC 50 (1988), 88 (1996). Other references: Christian Century (23 Sept. 1992). English Journal (Nov. 1996). Entertainment Weekly (4 Aug. 1995). Kenyon Review 10 (Winter 1988). LJ (1 Nov. 1996). New Yorker (21 June 1993, 21 & 28 Aug. 1995). NYTBR (30 April 1989, 12 May 1991, 11 April 1993, 24 Sept. 1995, 19 July 1998). People (15 June 1998). PW (Feb. 1993, 29 Apr. 1998). School Library Journal (Nov. 1995). Southern Quarterly 30:2-3 (Winter/Spring 1992). Time (12 Apr. 1993). —MARY A. MCCAY, UPDATED BY KAREN RAUGUST
GILBERT, Fabiola Cabeza de Baca See CABEZA de BACA, Fabiola
GILBERT, Sandra M(ortola) Born 27 December 1936, New York, New York Daughter of Alexis J. and Angela Caruso Mortola; married Elliot L. Gilbert, 1957 (died 1991); children: Roger, Katherine, Susanna Sandra M. Gilbert is a widely published and influential feminist literary critic; she is also a poet with four collections of poetry. Her major critical works, beginning in 1979 with Shakespeare’s Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets and The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination, have been written in collaboration with Susan Gubar. The collaboration has been a fruitful one. Shakespeare’s Sisters marked the beginning of Gilbert’s wide-ranging examination of what it has meant to be a woman writing in English in a culture whose literary values have been determined by men, and in which ‘‘woman poet’’ has been considered a
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‘‘contradiction in terms.’’ The book is a compilation of 19 essays about women poets, from pre-19th-century writers to contemporary. The effort is to recover lost poets, to reassess women’s poetry, and to trace the outlines of a distinctively female poetic tradition. In The Madwoman in the Attic Gilbert and Gubar scrutinized problems of literary heritage, of women writers’ alienation from male predecessors who depicted women as either ‘‘angels or monsters.’’ They explore the ‘‘anxiety of authorship’’ that confronted women novelists of the 19th century: Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and poets Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. As critic Walter Kendrick noted, the madwoman image serves ‘‘as an emblem of the confinement inflicted on Victorian women who wished to write.’’ The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women (1985), edited by Gilbert and Gubar, was designed to serve as a ‘‘core-curriculum’’ text for courses in literature by women. While the principle of selection of this comprehensive and somewhat unwieldy volume has been challenged by some reviewers, it is a valuable compilation of women’s work in every period and genre and provides useful editorial material. No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century continues Gilbert’s and Gubar’s reassessment of the literary landscape, using ‘‘the battle of the sexes’’ metaphor as a way to approach changes in the modern period. A reviewer described the first volume, The War of the Words (1987), as documenting ‘‘a war on women’s words waged by male writers who felt their tradition invaded by alien female talents.’’ The second volume, Sexchanges (1989), approaches the post-World War I territory more intensively, comparing texts by men and women, and providing studies of Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather and a chapter on Gertrude Stein and lesbian writers of the 1920s. The third volume, Letter From the Front, published in 1994, completed the much-anticipated trilogy. Gilbert received a B.A. from Cornell University in 1957, an M.A. from New York University (1961), and a Ph.D. from Columbia University (1968). Since 1989 she has been professor of English at the University of California at Davis, where she had taught earlier (1975-80). She held a similar position at Princeton University from 1985 to 1989. Previously she was an associate professor at Indiana University (1973-75), where her collaborative work with Susan Gubar began. From 1963 to 1972, she taught at colleges in New York and California. Gilbert has also published more than 50 essays in a wide range of scholarly and literary journals and essay collections. Gilbert and Gubar joined forces with Diana O’Hehir on Mothersongs: Poems for, by, and About Mothers (1996), a collection of poems spanning various phases of motherhood. The editors have collected poems covering several centuries and have incorporated an interesting mix of poets, including Walt Whitman, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, and John Donne. In the words of one critic, ‘‘There’s no subject more personal yet more universal than the emotional subject of motherhood, and this vital anthology reflects that depth and variation.’’
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Gilbert’s recent volume of poetry, Ghost Volcano: Poems (1997), includes poems written while she was working on the memoir of her husband’s unexpected death. The poems are arranged in five unrelated sections and appear as a series of diary-type entries describing her ‘‘widow’s walks,’’ each titled with reference to the location (‘‘Outside Saratoga Springs’’). These works are peppered with descriptions she can no longer share with her mate and the grief of a spirit that is, surprisingly enough, able to go on in the face of tragedy. Wrongful Death: A Medical Tragedy (1997) is the aforementioned memoir of her husband Elliot’s untimely death in 1991, a few short hours after routine surgery for prostate cancer. Her suspicions were raised when her questions were avoided or responded to with lies. Gilbert describes her feelings and actions during the time following the series of ‘‘medical mishaps’’ (including poor management of a postoperative hemorrhage) that resulted in this senseless and avoidable loss. Although the case was settled out of court with admitted negligence on the part of the medical professionals involved, the emotions of the experience are painfully clear in Gilbert’s account. Gilbert continues to write for magazines and periodicals such as Poetry, Times (London) Literary Supplement, Women’s Review of Books, and Novel: A Forum on Fiction. She has received numerous awards and fellowships, including an honorary D.Litt. from Wesleyan University in 1988, a Guggenheim fellowship in 1983, a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship in 1982, and a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship in 1980-81. She received the International Poetry Foundation’s Charity Randall Award in 1990 and Poetry’s Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize in 1980. With Susan Gubar she shared the Woman of the Year Award from Ms. magazine in 1986. OTHER WORKS: Shakepeare’s Twelfth Night (1964). Two Novels by E. M. Forster (1965). D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1965). The Poetry of W. B. Yeats (1965). Two Novels by Virginia Woolf (1966). Acts of Attention: The Poems of D. H. Lawrence (1973, 2nd edition, 1990). In the Fourth World (1979). The Summer Kitchen: Poems (1983). The Awakening and Selected Stories of Kate Chopin (edited by Gilbert, 1984). Emily’s Bread: Poems (1984). The Female Imagination and the Modernist Aesthetic (1986). Feminism and Modernism (1987). Blood Pressure (1988). Orlando, by Virginia Woolf (edited by Gilbert, 1993). Masterpiece Theatre: An Academe Melodarama (1995). The House is Made of Poetry (1996). Want: New and Selected Poems (2000). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1979). CANR (1991). FC (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: American Literature (Mar. 1990). Booklist (15 Jan. 1995, 1 May 1995). British Medical Journal (19 Oct. 1996). College English (Nov. 1988). Commentary (July 1988). Comparative Literature (Spring 1991). Contemporary Sociology (July 1990). Criticism (Fall 1989). English Language Notes (Sept. 1990). Journal of American Studies (Apr. 1991). Journal of
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Modern Literature (Fall-Winter 1989). Journal of English and Germanic Philology (July 1989). Modern Fiction Studies (Winter 1988, Winter 1989). Nation (2 July 1988). National Review (28 Oct. 1988). NYRB (31 May 1990). NYTBR (7 Feb. 1988, 19 Feb. 1989, 12 Mar. 1989). Poetry (Dec. 1996). PW (27 Mar. 1995). Studies in the Novel (Spring 1989, Winter 1990). Texas Studies in Literature and Language (Fall 1990). TLS (3 June 1988, 2 June 1989). Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature (Spring 1989).
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subjects at war within herself: a slavocracy in which life was good for her, and her aspirations for success in a society that denied the realities of racism to which she could not have been blind. She permits one young Southerner in her first novel, Rosehurst, to argue that the South should have been defeated; no one speaks for him in Katherine Somerville.
Born 1841, Hardin County, Tennessee; died 2 February 1912, Nashville, Tennessee Daughter of James and Ann McFarland Somers; married John A. Gilchrist, 1860; children: one son
The Night-Rider’s Daughter (1910) is a novel of social protest. The main characters are ten-year-old Gracie Gaylor and her parents, decent, common people who become victims of ruthless economic change and uneven justice in backwoods Samburg County, Tennessee. Developers deprive them and their neighbors of access to the lake where they fish for a livelihood; their lawyers betray them for bribes of land; the outraged fishermen organize as night riders to counterattack. The father learns of the destructive plans for the attack and withdraws, but is wrongfully imprisoned, and the mother, worn down by work, fear, and hopelessness, dies. Going to see her father, who has contracted a fever in prison, Gracie finds him chained to a hospital bed; the chain is removed only on the morning of his death.
Annie Somers Gilchrist grew up at ‘‘The Oaks,’’ the Somers plantation, near Dresden, Tennessee, and graduated from Mary Sharpe College in Winchester, Tennessee. She lived with her husband in New York until 1865 when they moved to Nashville where he operated a hotel. They had one son. Gilchrist was a member of the South’s first woman’s club, named in honor of Margaret Fuller Ossoli.
The impact of these events on Gracie, the resourcefulness of which she is capable, the pluck and resilience that helps her endure sorrows she cannot comprehend are depicted with restraint. Gilchrist transforms what might have been a tearjerking tale into the characterization of a child whose admirable bearing is a measure of the worth of a devastated family. This poignant minor novel, in which people talk like people who deserve to be heard, is a testament to a mature author and woman.
—KINERETH GENSLER, UPDATED BY REBECCA C. CONDIT
GILCHRIST, Annie Somers
Gilchrist’s novels depict the emotional life of heroines whose histories are related to the fortunes of their families and changes in circumstances that test and prove character. She believed in an aristocracy of merit, often confirmed by wealth but qualified by Christian charity. Her first major novel, Rosehurst; or, The StepDaughter (1884), delineates the trauma of a rejected daughter, Marion Lawrence, whose father prefers his son and neglects her for her stepmother. Later Marion misjudges her husband’s relationship with his cousin; when he fails to perceive her jealousy, she leaves him for a man who loves her. The husband convinces everyone she is deranged, and Marion, in her flight, does become disoriented. Through the help of an old friend, she recovers her sanity and returns, aged and scarred, to her husband. Fusing the novel of manners and a psychological study, Gilchrist writes with acumen. Fascinated by the costumes and ‘‘consummate masks’’ of society, she knows the stratagems by which people preserve the appearance of propriety and morality. She views those pretensions and appearances in conflict with the true heart: better insanity than adultery. And she evokes both the longing and ‘‘voiceless anguish’’ of a daughter who cannot become a woman—even with a husband whose enduring love should outweigh his momentary obtuseness—or live unscathed by years of parental rejection. Katherine Somerville; or, The Southland Before and After the Civil War (1906) is probably autobiographical. The subjects indicated in the title are not effectively joined. Perhaps the point of the novel is that zest went out of life in the South after the war; it is more likely that Gilchrist refused to come to grips with the large
—ELIZABETH PHILLIPS
GILCHRIST, Ellen Born 20 February 1935, Vicksburg, Mississippi Daughter of William G. and Aurora Aford Gilchrist; married Marshall Walker (twice); Freddie Kullam; children: Marshall, Garth, Pierce Although she calls herself a poet and philosopher, Ellen Gilchrist is best known for her short stories and novels. The daughter of an engineer, Gilchrist spent some of her childhood in Indiana during World War II, but has lived most of her life in the South of her ancestors and of her own creation. Her childhood is a series of memories of the Hopedale Plantation where her mother’s family lived and where Gilchrist was born. It is, she says, ‘‘THE RICHEST LAND IN THE WORLD and we are happy there.’’ Gilchrist attended Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi (B.A., 1967) and has worked as a journalist and as a weekly commentator on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition. Mother of three sons and several times a grandmother, Gilchrist asserts that children are much more important than writing and that she would burn all her books to save one finger joint of one of her children or grandchildren. It is not surprising, then, to find many of her stories peopled by adolescents who are struggling to find themselves, parents who live only to help their
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children survive, and family retainers who create an optimistic perspective on the possibility of family endurance. Gilchrist herself says she is a happy person and an optimist. Gilchrist’s first book of short stories, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams (1981), was published by the University of Arkansas Press because Gilchrist was afraid to let her teacher give it to a New York agent; the underground success of the book led Little, Brown to reissue it in 1985. The stories are set among the vacuous rich of New Orelans or the dying aristocracy of the Mississippi Delta where Gilchrist spent much of her childhood. Stories about surviving, and sometimes not surviving, they all have a quality of vision about them. They are rampant with children whose lives are sprinkled with moments from Gilchrist’s own childhood; even those who die live a rich moment in her fiction. Two other short story collections, Victory Over Japan (1984), which won the American Book award for fiction, and Drunk with Love (1986), brought Gilchrist further recognition as a writer in control of her Southern material. In these volumes, some characters from In the Land of Dreamy Dreams return and Gilchrist writes about their lives with perception and humor. Perhaps the most important character in Victory Over Japan is Traceleen, a black maid who, despite the fact Gilchrist often waxes too poetic about the dedication of servants, is wise beyond Gilchrist’s own wisdom. The Annunciation (1983), Gilchrist’s ambitious but flawed first novel, features Amanda McCamey, who is too stereotypically New Orleans rich, too egotistical. Finally, when she retreats to Arkansas to live simply and be a writer, she is simply unbelievable. The eternally dedicated Lavertis, another version of Traceleen and Amanda’s ever faithful maid, strains the book’s credulity, but the effort is grand, and Gilchrist tries to deal with large issues of loss (Amanda was forced, as a teenager, to give up a child for adoption) and creativity. Her pictures of New Orleans capture the heart of the city’s richness and vacuity. With the publication of The Anna Papers (1988), Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle (1989), and I Cannot Get You Close Enough (1990), Gilchrist began to transcribe what her characters told her to and thus to lose the control she had over her best fiction. There are some excellent adolescent characters in the Hand family who people much of The Anna Papers and I Cannot Get You Close Enough, but the artist character, Anna Hand, who seems to be a side of Gilchrist herself, is too self-advertising and often too self-absorbed to see how her actions affect her family. In Net of Jewels (1992) Gilchrist once again incorporates pressing issues into her fiction. She asks, through the character of Rhoda Manning, how a woman can save herself from drowning in the limited and limiting culture of the South. A cousin of Anna Hand, Rhoda struggles through a series of attempts to find herself in marriage, affairs, diet pills, booze, and political movements— none of which can help her dispel her desperate sense she is not really alive. Gilchrist has a fine talent for capturing the voices of rich, dissatisfied Southern ladies; she has a real empathy for her adolescents; and she has a Southerner’s eye for the landscape
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outside and inside her characters. The author of one book of poetry, The Land Surveyor’s Daughter (1979), she told an interviewer she would one day stop writing fiction and return to poetry, a way, perhaps, for her to regain the control she demonstrated in her earlier work. In Starcarbon: A Meditation on Love (1994), Gilchrist resurrects the Hand family, which first appeared in I Cannot Get You Close Enough. Starcarbon focuses on Daniel Hand’s second daughter, Olivia, a half-Cherokee who has completed her first year in college. As usual, Gilchrist’s theme is love. She follows a number of relationships through this novel, including Olivia’s relationship with Bobby Tree, the Navajo boyfriend she left behind in Oklahoma to live in wealth with her father. Olivia returns to her Native American family to study their ways and rekindle her relationship with Bobby. Gilchrist tackles a period piece in Anabasis: A Journey to the Interior (1995). The lyrical novel is set in ancient Greece when Pericles ruled Athens. Auria, a young slave girl, is placed in the hands of an herbalist, Philokrates, from whom she escapes and joins a band of runaway slaves who are planning a rebellion. This is the story of an assertive, independent heroine as found in many of Gilchrist’s novels. The author began developing the story as a child when her mother read Greek myths to her. In Rhoda: A Life in Stories (1995), Rhoda Manning, the fictional author who appears in all of Gilchrist’s previous short story collections, rates her own anthology. This volume presents all 21 Rhoda stories, an excerpt from Net of Jewels (the novel in which she appeared), and two new short story offerings arranged chronologically by Rhoda’s age, covering her life from age 8 to age 60. In The Age of Miracles (1996), Gilchrist returns to short stories after several novels. In keeping with her previous collections, these tales feature characters with strong personalities and conflicting emotions. The Courts of Love (1996) includes a novella and nine short stories. The novella and a few of the stories focus on the recurring character Nora Jane, first encountered in Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle. The novella, Nora Jane and Company, is full of action, including a brush with a terrorist, an emergency in the California wilderness, and the spirit of Leonardo da Vinci. Gilchrist continues to produce wonderful prose and passionate characters. Sarah Conley (1997) is a novel with a new character, Sarah Conley, a 52-year-old journalist, successful and independent in true Gilchrist form. She is called back to Nashville, where her best friend, Eugenie Moore, is dying, and encounters Eugenie’s husband, Jack McAllen, whom she has always loved and who is her ex-husband’s brother. When Sarah flies off to Paris to write and Jack pursues her, she is faced with a choice between the career in which she has submerged herself for years and her love for Jack. Flights of Angels (1999) is another collection of 18 Gilchrist short stories presenting several new characters and some popular characters from her past works, including Rhoda and her family and Crystal and her maid, Traceleen. Throughout these tales, a theme emerges of desire on the part of the characters to make their lives meaningful beyond their immediate environments. The
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protagonists are largely women raised as Southern belles who break from their controlling male relatives to move on with their lives in independence. OTHER WORKS: Falling through Space: The Journals of Ellen Gilchrist (1987). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1985, 1986). CLC (1985, 1988). CLCY (1984). DLB (1984). FC (1990). MTCW (1991). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: BL (15 Jan. 1994, 1 Sept. 1994, 1 Apr. 1995, 15 Oct. 1996, Aug. 1997, Aug. 1998). LJ (1 Sept. 1997, 15 Sept. 1996). New Orleans Review (Spring 1988). New Orleans Times Picayune (14 Oct. 1990). PW (31 Jan. 1994, 8 Aug. 1994, 18 Sept. 1995, 26 Aug. 1996, 7 July 1997, 14 Sept. 1998). Southern Quarterly (Fall 1983). —MARY A. MCCAY, UPDATED BY REBECCA C. CONDIT
GILL, Sarah Prince Born 1728, Boston, Massachusetts; died 5 August 1771, Boston, Massachusetts Daughter of Thomas and Deborah Denny Prince; married Moses Gill, 1759 Sarah Prince Gill grew up in an extremely religious family. Her father, a champion of evangelical Protestantism, was minister of Boston’s Old South Church and was instrumental in introducing the Great Awakening to Boston in 1740. Evangelicism often liberated women because it maintained that graceful souls were equal regardless of class or sex, and because evangelicals were encouraged to share their pious reflections and religious experiences. Some of Gill’s religious meditations were published posthumously as Devotional Papers (1773). Gill and Esther Edwards Burr kept a letter-journal from 1754 to 1757, but only Burr’s letters survive. They encouraged each other to write and even to publish their thoughts and experiences as models for other women. Gill also kept a daily journal of thoughts and meditations, parts of which survive in manuscript form. Because few other avenues of written expression were open to 18th-century women, we must look to these religious diaries for details of women’s lives during this period. Gill’s journal includes her reflections on proper conduct for religious men and women—she advises industry and thrift as well as piety—and provides a view of the spiritual and emotional struggles of a colonial woman. As a Christian woman who found it difficult not to complain of her lot in life, she was tortured with fears of ‘‘backsliding.’’ Her struggles intensified in 1759 when she married a merchant, later the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, and became mistress of a large house, mother to Gill’s two sons, and hostess for her husband’s business and political
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contacts. She feared her husband’s piety might be secondary to his interest in material well-being. A few months after her marriage, Gill confided to her journal: ‘‘I have been the subject of mixed dispensations since I came to housekeeping. . .tried with lameness, with froward ungovernable ungodly Servants. . .but the greatest trial of all is the unsettled malloncholly state of the church I belong unto.’’ At her death in 1771, Gill was eulogized not only as a pious woman but also as a patriot. She and her husband had been part of an intellectual circle of early republicans which included John Adams. Gill and her women friends formed prayer groups, to comfort and support each other in times of trial and loneliness and to encourage each other in charitable works. Prayer groups of the 18th century were precursors of the women’s organizations of the 19th century involved in moral reform and abolition. More important, the writings of these women catalogue the frequently successful attempts of colonial women to define their own talents and activities independently of the men who ruled their social and political world. OTHER WORKS: The papers of Sarah Prince Gill are in the collection of the Boston Public Library. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cott, N. F., The Bonds of Womanhood: ‘‘Woman’s Sphere’’ in New England, 1780-1835 (1977). Crumpacker, L., ‘‘Esther Burr’s Journal 1754-1757: A Document of Evangelical Sisterhood’’ (dissertation, 1978). Letzring, M., ‘‘Sarah Prince Gill and the John Adams-Catharine Macaulay Correspondence,’’ Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society (1976). Other references: Boston Evening-Post (12 Aug. 1771). —LAURIE CRUMPACKER
GILMAN, Caroline Howard Born 8 October 1794, Boston, Massachusetts; died 15 September 1888, Washington, D.C. Wrote under: Caroline Gilman, Caroline Howard, Clarissa Packard Daughter of Samuel and Anna Howard; married Samuel Gilman, 1819; children: seven, three died in infancy Caroline Howard Gilman’s father died when she was two, her mother when she was ten. She had an irregular education, as the family moved from one Boston suburb to another. After her marriage to a Unitarian minister she moved to Charleston, South Carolina. Three of her seven children died in infancy. In 1832, Gilman began publication of the Rose-Bud; or, Youth’s Gazette, one of the earliest American magazines for children. Renamed the Southern Rose-Bud in 1833 and the Southern Rose in 1835, it gradually became a general family magazine before ceasing publication in 1839. Many of Gilman’s writings appeared first in its pages.
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In Recollections of a Housekeeper (1834), ‘‘Clarissa Packard’’ gives a brief account of her education and then describes her first years of marriage. Because its first person narrator is solidly middle class (Mr. Packard is an attorney), Clarissa Packard’s chronicle presents a ‘‘case history’’ of the ‘‘disestablishment’’ of the American woman as described by Ann Douglas in The Feminization of American Culture. Her duties as a housekeeper seem to consist largely of training cooks, hired girls, or nursemaids; and the domestic crises of her early marriage usually involve the unexpected departure of one or more of these servants. She emphasizes throughout that she can roast and boil, make puddings and pies, sweep and dust, and she is pleased her mother has educated her for usefulness: ‘‘My mother was proud to say that I could manufacture a frilled shirt in two days, with stitches that required a microscope to detect them.’’ She is busy, however, teaching others to do her cooking, sweeping, and washing. No sooner does she train women than they tire of devoting themselves to her and her family and want to get married and have lives of their own. Much of the humor in the Recollections of a Housekeeper is afforded by the vocabulary and accents of the rustic New Englanders who come to serve and by their inability to grasp the forms (and perhaps the spirit) of such service. When Gilman wrote her chronicle of a New England housekeeper, she had already been living in Charleston for many years. The disestablishment of the middle-class housewife and the attitudes towards servants revealed in the first book reach a logical culmination in its companion piece, Recollections of a Southern Matron (1838), which depicts all for the best in that best of all possible worlds, the Southern plantation. The first person narrator of this second book supplies more information on her background and early life, and a romantic plot with a subplot involving a secondary heroine, but the focus is again on scenes of domestic life. Gilman places great emphasis on the contentment of the slaves (they are always called ‘‘servants,’’ but they stay around once they are trained), and she claims their lot is better than that of Northern servants and millhands. Gilman’s letters to her children after the Civil War show her still unchanged in the opinion that slavery had benefitted the slaves. In The Poetry of Travelling in the United States (1838), Gilman sets out to ‘‘present something in the same volume which might prove attractive to both the Northern and Southern reader’’ and ‘‘to increase a good sympathy between different portions of the country.’’ The details of the 19th-century means of travel are often absorbing. Gilman admits that listening to members of Congress in Washington excites her ‘‘state feelings’’ and that ‘‘a word against Carolina is a personal offence to me,’’ but it is still 20 years before Brooks’s attack on Sumner: ‘‘Amid the clanship, however, there is a general and beautiful courtesy, which in private leads to the happiest results; a pleasant jest is the very hardest weapon used, and that sparingly. The extreme Northern and Southern members are on terms of the most agreeable intercourse.’’ Gilman also published collections of short stories, poetry (some with her daughter Caroline Howard Jervey), and novels. She prided herself most on her writings for children and young
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people, but these are now of interest mostly as indications of what Americans of the 1830s thought suitable reading for their children. Her position as a humorous chronicler of middle-class domesticity, North and South—a sort of early Erma Bombeck— became more and more difficult to sustain, as this New Englandborn Unitarian gave her sympathies to her adopted South. OTHER WORKS: The Lady’s Annual Register and Housewife’s Memorandum Book (1838). Letters of Eliza Wilkinson (edited by Gilman, 1839). Tales and Ballads (1839). Love’s Progress (1840). The Rose-Bud Wreath (1841). Oracles from the Poets (1844). Stories and Poems for Children (1844). The Sibyl; or, New Oracles from the Poets (1849). Verses of a Life Time (1849). A Gift Book of Stories and Poems for Children (1850). Oracles for Youth (1852). Recollections of a New England Bride and a Southern Matron (1852). Record of Inscriptions in the Cemetery and Building of the Unitarian. . .Church. . .Charleston, S.C. (1860). Stories and Poems by Mother and Daughter (with C. H. Jervey, 1872). The Poetic Fate Book (1874). Recollections of the Private Centennial Celebration of the Overthrow of the Tea (1874). The Young Fortune Teller (with C. H. Jervey, 1874). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Saint-Amand, M. S., A Balcony in Charleston (1941). Reference works: DAB. The Living Writers of the South (1869). NAW (1971). NCAB, 13. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Women of the South Distinguished in Literature (1861). Other references: NCHR (April 1934). SAQ (Jan. 1924). —SUSAN SUTTON SMITH
GILMAN, Charlotte Perkins Born 3 July 1860, Hartford, Connecticut; died 17 August 1935, Pasadena, California Daughter of Frederick Beecher and Mary A. Fritch Perkins; married Charles Walter Stetson, 1884 (divorced 1894); George Houghton Gilman, 1900; children: one daughter Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s father left the family soon after she was born. Although he made infrequent visits home and provided meager support for his family, he was largely responsible for Gilman’s early education, emphasizing reading in the sciences and history. Her only formal education consisted of brief attendance at the Rhode Island School of Design. Like her great aunt, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Gilman was a reformer. At an early age, she recognized the plight (particularly the economic servitude) of her mother and many New England housewives. By age twenty-one, she was writing poetry that described the limitations of being female in late-19th-century New England. As a teenager, Gilman was a commercial artist, art teacher, and governess. Ten months after her marriage to Charles W. Stetson, also an artist, their only daughter was born. Gilman
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suffered extreme depression after the birth and made a recuperative trip to California. She moved there in 1888 and divorced Stetson in 1894. Gilman did not establish her reputation as a forceful writer and lecturer until the last decade of the century when she published a series of satiric poems in the Nationalist. She also began lecturing on a wide variety of topics. For a time she was a member of the National Movement, during which her writing and lectures reflected this group’s nationalistic fervor. In 1893, Gilman collected about 75 poems into a small volume entitled In This Our World. Gilman designed the cover, ‘‘based on Olive Screiner’s Three Dreams in a Desert.’’ The book was first published in England but enjoyed scanty success in the U.S., where, besides Gilman’s family and friends, William Dean Howells first recognized its greatness. He called Gilman ‘‘the only optimist reformer he ever met.’’ The poems outline Gilman’s economic and social views and are considered by many to be a classic statement on the women’s movement. Women and Economics, originally titled Economic Relation of the Sexes as a Factor in Social Development, appeared in 1898 (reprinted 1998). This book’s arguments in behalf of women’s rights arise out of a firm and broad philosophical and historical base. Gilman calls American society ‘‘androcentric’’ and illustrates how traditionally male values have dominated almost every aspect of American life. It is considered one of the most important works on the women’s movement. Written in 1890 but not published as a separate work until 1899, The Yellow Wall-Paper is a fictional though partially autobiographical treatment of a woman artist’s nervous breakdown. Having recently given birth, she is forced by her husband and physician to spend the summer in isolation in a Gothic-style country estate. She is forbidden to write, which is the one thing she truly wants to do. The result is the woman’s madness, her delusion that another woman is trapped behind the wallpaper in her attic bedroom. Gilman’s Concerning Children (1900) and The Home (1904) expand on arguments originally advanced in Women and Economics. Both suggest children’s lives can be stunted instead of enriched by a home in which the mother’s sole occupation is housekeeping. Gilman argues instead for day care centers where children are well cared for, and where they can continue to explore the ‘‘thrilling mystery of life.’’ Gilman called The Home ‘‘the most heretical—and the most amusing—of anything I’ve done.’’ In 1900 Gilman married her first cousin, George H. Gilman, a lawyer from New York. During their honeymoon, Gilman read him the book she had been writing, Human Work (1904). It attempts to make the same claim for work that Cardinal Newman made for knowledge: that it is intrinsically valuable, its own end. According to Gilman, work is both a responsibility and a pleasure. One does it because one is obligated to the human community. In 1909 Gilman began a seven-year editorship of her own monthly periodical, the Forerunner. Written entirely by Gilman and containing 21,000 words per issue, Gilman figured the
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Forerunner equaled four books a year, of 36,000 words apiece. The periodical contained articles on social and economic issues (invariably about women) and some poetry and fiction. It published two full-length novels by Gilman: What Diantha Did (1910) and The Crux (1911). The Man-Made World (1911) was also published in Forerunner. It juxtaposed male and female values: women, Gilman wrote, are peace-loving and concerned with community. Contrarily, the prevailing values in our society are male: aggressiveness, competition, and destructiveness. His Religion and Hers (1923) was published six years after Gilman had resigned from the Forerunner. In it, Gilman compares the male conception of the world (a postponement and preparation for the afterlife) with the female (heaven in the present time and place). She directs her argument toward current social considerations, suggesting that if women controlled society, they would place greater emphasis on practical issues: how to live comfortably and peacefully from day to day. Her autobiography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1935), is an excellent source for understanding Gilman’s life, work, and death. Suffering from cancer and surviving her husband’s unexpected death in 1934, Gilman lived quite peacefully for a time near her daughter in Pasadena, then committed suicide by chloroform. The conclusion of her autobiography is an appropriate epitaph and was part of a letter left to her survivors: ‘‘The one predominant duty is to find one’s work and do it, and I have striven mightily at that. The religion, the philosophy, set up so early, have seen me through.’’ Interest in Gilman exploded in the 1980s and 1990s with numerous new editions of her writings—including her previously unpublished diaries—and an outpouring of critical literature. Many of these writers suggested that Gilman was a woman before her time: she articulated questions that seemed irrelevant to most of her contemporaries, but are vital and unresolved a century later. Some critics have focused on Gilman’s fiction. Her short story, ‘‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’’ has become a classic. It is often read in literature and women’s studies classes as a launching point for discussing domesticity, work and activity, sanity and madness, relationships between husbands and wives, and/or the power of medical authority. Gilman’s utopian novels, Herland (serialized 1915) and With Her in Ourland (serialized 1916), explore what a society of women might be like and how a person from such a society might react to ours. Critics have used these novels to deepen conversations about separatism, differences between men and women, and the role of imagination in cultural change. Other people—and sometimes the same people—have focused on the more material aspects of Gilman’s work. She believed the root cause of women’s subordination is their economic dependence. The stand-alone single-family home, she argued, mires women in the endless tasks of cooking, cleaning, and child care. In order to free women to participate in the work of the world, living spaces must be redesigned to allow domestic work to be done collectively and efficiently. As feminists have become more aware of how economic structures and physical surroundings shape women’s lives, they have become more interested in Gilman’s insights into these issues.
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Gilman is a complex figure, and most of the recent scholarship does not attempt to address all aspects of her life and work. One exception is Ann Lane’s biography, To Herland and Beyond: The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1990), which uses a psychological analysis of Gilman’s early family experiences to illuminate her later actions, motivations, and priorities. OTHER WORKS: Moving the Mountain (1911). The Diaries of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1994). A Journey From Within (1995). The Later Poetry of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1996). The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories (1997). Unpunished (1997). The Abridged Diaries of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1998). Herland and Selected Writings (1999). The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader (1999). Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Utopian Novels (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Allen, P., Building Domestic Liberty: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Architectural Feminism (1988). Dell, F., Women as World Builders (1913). Golden, C., The Captive Imagination: A Casebook on The Yellow Wallpaper (1992). Karpinski, J., Critical Essays on Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1992). Kessler, C., Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Her Progress Toward Utopia with Selected Writings (1995). Meyering, S., Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Woman and Her Work (1989). Peyser, T., Utopia and Cosmopolis (1998). Wellington, A., Women Have Told: Studies in the Feminist Tradition (1930). Reference works: DAB (Supplement 1). HWS (V, VI). NAW. NCAB (13). Other references: AQ (Spring 1956). Canadian Magazine (Aug. 1923). Century Magazine (Nov. 1923). PMLA (1996). Poet-Lore (Jan.-March 1899). Women’s Studies (1989, 1991). Utopian Studies (1995, 1997). —MARY BETH PRINGLE, UPDATED BY LORI KENSCHAFT
GILMER, Elizabeth Meriwether Born 18 November 1870, Woodstock, Tennessee; died 16 December 1951, New Orleans, Louisiana Wrote under: Dorothy Dix Daughter of William and Maria Winston Meriwether; married George Gilmer, 1888 Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer’s career as a newspaper columnist and reporter stemmed from her tragic marriage. The daughter of impoverished Southern gentry, Gilmer had little formal training and no work experience when, shortly after her marriage, she had to assume financial responsibility for herself and her husband, a victim of an incurable mental disease. Rejecting the idea of divorce, she began working as a woman’s-page writer on the New Orleans Picayune in 1896. Successful as a columnist and reporter, Gilmer moved to the New York Evening Journal in 1901, where she continued her column, ‘‘Dorothy Dix Talks,’’ and covered sensational murder trials (usually involving women) and vice investigations. From 1917 until her death, she
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confined her newspaper writing to her advice column, first for the Wheeler syndicate and from 1923 for the Ledger syndicate. Between 1912 and 1914, Gilmer, a supporter of woman suffrage, wrote three pamphlets on the subject. She also published a number of books of advice, some fictional in technique and southern in setting, like Mirandy (1914) and Mirandy Exhorts (1922), but mostly drawn from her columns, like Fables of the Elite (1902), Hearts à la Mode (1915), and How to Win and Hold a Husband (1939). In addition, she published travel books describing the customs and problems in the places she visited. Best known for her column, reaching an estimated 60 million readers worldwide with sympathy, humor, and common sense, Gilmer dispensed sermonettes on courtship and marriage as well as answers to letters. She advised women to develop a positive self-image and know how to work at a job, but also retain femininity, good nature, and adaptability. Beginning many columns with ‘‘Men are a selfish lot,’’ Gilmer accepted the reality of a sexual double standard and advised her readers how to deal with it. Convinced of the healthy and life-enriching power of love, Gilmer nevertheless explained how to achieve that goal with imagery taken from games, hunting, and marketing, with what one reviewer has called ‘‘hardboiled realism that would do credit to a brothel keeper.’’ For example: ‘‘A young girl who lets any one boy monopolize her, simply shuts the door in the face of good times and her chances of making a better match.’’ ‘‘Few grafts are more profitable than comforting a widower. But remember that fast work is required.’’ And in a ‘‘recipe’’ book for marriage: ‘‘All wives should encourage their husbands in dough-making. It keeps them out of mischief and promotes domestic felicity.’’ Coexistent with the pragmatism, however, is the pride, independence, and self-worth Gilmer advocates for all women. In Woman’s Lack of Pride (circa 1912), she writes about how women lack sex pride ‘‘when they permit themselves to be classed politically with the offscourings of the earth [the criminal, the idiot, the insane]. . . All of woman’s failures are due to her shame of her sex, and she will never succeed until she [realizes] she is entitled to stand side by side with man, not to have to trail along in his wake like a humble slave.’’ Sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd in their study of middle America, Middletown (1929), assess Gilmer’s column as the best single available source to represent Middletown’s views about marriage, and also as ‘‘perhaps the most potent single agency of diffusion from without shaping the habits of thought of Middletown in regard to marriage.’’ Gilmer defined the ideal of love and marriage, acknowledged the reality, and wrote pragmatic advice reflecting but also shaping the behavior and mores of her readers. OTHER WORKS: What’s Sauce for the Gander Is Sauce for the Goose (circa 1912). Dorothy Dix on Woman’s Ballot (1914). My Trip Around the World (1924). Dorothy Dix, Her Book (1926). Mexico (1934). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Criss, D. ‘‘Eliza Nicholson, Elizabeth Gilmer, and the New Orleans Daily Picayune, 1876-1901’’ (thesis, 1994).
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Kane, H. T., Dear Dorothy Dix: The Story of a Compassionate Woman (1952). Lynd, R. S. and H. M. Lynd, Middletown (1929). McDonald, J. Dorothy Dix Speaks! Murders, Mayhem and Advice to the Love Lorn Housewife, Tricks and Simple Recipes for the Novice Gourmet (1992). Reference works: CB (1940, 1952). DAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Dorothy Dix: A Symposium Sponsored by Austin Peay State University (videos, 1991). NYT (17 Dec. 1951). Proceedings of the Contributed Papers Session of the Dorothy Dix Symposium (1993). Time (14 Aug. 1939). —HELEN J. SCHWARTZ
GIOVANNI, Nikki Born Yolande Cornelia Giovanni, 7 June 1934, Knoxville, Tennessee Daughter of Jones and Yolande Cornelia Giovanni; children: Thomas Nikki Giovanni did not have the kind of poverty-stricken, uncertain childhood typical of a number of other black writers. Hers was a close family enriched by loving relatives. While at Fisk University, she reinstated a chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which had been forbidden to operate on campus. After her 1967 graduation with an honors degree in history, she planned the first Black Arts Festival in her hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio. As an extension of her community activism, with assistance from a Ford Foundation grant she attended the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work; she later enrolled in Columbia University’s School of Fine Arts. In 1968, Giovanni received a National Foundation for the Arts grant; she was then teaching English at Queens College and continuing her activist work in the black community. A year later, Giovanni became an associate professor at Livingston College, Rutgers University. Although Giovanni desired children, she had no wish to be married; in 1969, determined to succeed as a single mother, she bore her son Thomas Watson Giovanni. Her 1971 book, Spin a Soft Black Song (reprinted 1987), written for black American children, was dedicated to him. A subsequent book of poems for children (Vacation Time, 1980) and poems in other books reveal her intense dedication to her family life. In Sacred Cows and Other Edibles, she devotes a large section of an autobiographical essay to the joys and frustrations of living with her then fourteenyear-old son. Though she is best known as a revolutionary poet who writes poems asking, ‘‘Nigger / Can you kill?,’’ Giovanni is also a very private, very personal poet. She had been creating stories since her childhood and had published a few poems in various magazines, but she didn’t realize a notable literary success until the publication of her first book of poetry, Black Feeling, Black Talk (1968). This and Black Judgement (1968) place the individual in the middle of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Even in this
early volume Giovanni is trying to balance her own personal concerns (mostly with love) with the pressing concerns of the group, and she is searching for the exact role she can play in the revolution. In Re-Creation (1970, 1973), one critic has said there is a new lyricism, but the feelings expressed are ‘‘less parochial and more universal in their blackness.’’ My House (1972) explores the ‘‘rooms inside’’ and the ‘‘rooms outside.’’ The first section is filled with vividly endearing reminiscences about family, friends, and lovers. The poems are about napping, nighttime, sleeping, cuddling, soothing hot baths, and loving. There is a groping, though contented, aloneness (which is different from loneliness) about most of the poems. In ‘‘The Rooms Outside,’’ however, Giovanni ventures out of the sheltering cocoon of the nest into the harsher realities of life. The poems here are disturbing, harder to understand, the tone more impersonal and factual. Ego-Tripping, and Other Poems for Young People (1973, 1993) was written for adolescents. One critic found the poems ‘‘sly and seductive, freewheeling and winsome, tough, sure and proud.’’ Here, as everywhere, the author reveals ‘‘a boundless enthusiasm for the essences of black life.’’ Women and Men (1975) includes poems written between 1970 and 1975. The section ‘‘The Women’’ consists mainly of startling, honest portraits that define black womanhood. ‘‘And Other Places’’ contains several short, vivid images of life in Africa. Giovanni has also published prose. The subtitle of Gemini (1971), explains it all: ‘‘An Extended Autobiographical Statement on My First 25 Years of Being a Black Poet.’’ Here Giovanni uses her incredible imagination to blend fact with fiction, myth with history, hindsight with perhaps no sight. As with most of her works, the personal accompanies the impersonal so that there are not only touching autobiographical chapters but also critical and political chapters about Charles Chesnutt, as the father of black literature, and about the oral tradition and history of blacks. Her book jackets call Giovanni ‘‘our most widely read living black poet,’’ and indeed her many volumes of poetry, a book of essays, and several recordings attest to her continued popular appeal. In the 1980s and 1990s her alternately provocative and elegant speeches keep her in demand as a public speaker and have helped earn her the title ‘‘Princess of Black Poetry.’’ Giovanni’s close family is featured in a few sketches in Sacred Cows and Other Edibles (1988), and Those Who Ride the Night Winds (1982) is composed primarily of meditations: on public figures, personal friends, social injustice throughout American history, and loved relationships. The book is an innovative experiment in form. The pieces are written in short paragraphs, punctuated with ellipses. As such, they have the telegraphic immediacy of Emily Dickinson’s dash-punctuated poems, as if the poet’s thoughts are scribbled down as they flash across her mind. At the same time, the form implies an uncertainty, a care lest the reader miss a subtlety of thought or image. Dedicated to those courageous people ‘‘who in sonic solitude or the hazy hell of
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habit know—that for all the devils and gods. . .life is a marvelous, transitory adventure,’’ these poems are written for Lorraine Hansberry, John Lennon, Robert Kennedy, Billie Jean King, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Phillis Wheatley. Of the latter, Giovanni writes, ‘‘The critics. . .from a safe seat in the balcony. . .disdain her performance. . .reject her reality. . .ignore her truths. . . . How dare she. . . . Why couldn’t she. . .be more like. . .more like. . . . The record sticks. . . . Phillis was her own precedent.’’ In Racism 101 (1994, 1995) the poet continues to surprise readers with her range of viewpoints, again in prose. Examining American life from her perspective as an introspective, educated, independent-minded black woman, Giovanni ranges in her focus from reminiscences on her childhood to the role of education and her dismay over the attitudes of affluent African Americans like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and their rejection of the affirmative action policies that enabled their success. While Racism is classic Giovanni in its provocative, sometimes intimate, but often totally unapologetic political slant, she provides a balance with her edited collection Grand Mothers: Poems, Reminiscences, and Short Stories about the Keepers of Our Traditions (1994, 1996). Compiled for both children and adults of many cultural and ethnic traditions and containing works by authors ranging from writers Gloria Naylor and Kyoki Mori to civil rights leader Mary Elizabeth King, the volume refrains from the sentimentality usually bestowed upon well-loved older relatives and treats grandmothers as women valuable for their personal insight and their ability to place daily trauma’s into a perspective based on strong traditions. Whether in prose or poetry, Giovanni continues to create an honest, charming, idiosyncratic, and alert persona. Her voice now marks the pulse, not only of black America, but of the country’s diverse peoples and cultures. She has been praised highly and damned highly, but Giovanni lives on, ego-tripping, ‘‘flying high like a bird in the sky.’’ She has the power to anger, to humor, and to bring tears to the reader’s eyes; much of her power lies in her ability to negotiate distances between herself and the reader. Giovanni is a product of the chaotic 1960s, but she manages to retain her individuality, while urging others to recognize their obligations to the black cause. She is at her best when she is private and personal, but she is a multidimensional poet who records the pulse of life for the benefit of all. OTHER WORKS: All I Gotta Do (1970). Poem of Angela Yvonne Davis (1970). Black Feeling, Black Talk/Black Judgement (combining the two former books, 1970, 1972). Night Comes Softly: An Anthology of Black Female Voices (editor, 1970). A Poetic Equation: Conversations Between Nikki Giovanni and Margaret Walker (1974, 1983). James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni: A Dialogue (1975). Old Thoughts, New Voices (1982). Appalachian Elders: A Warm Hearth Sampler (editor, with C. Dennison, 1992). Conversations with Nikki Giovanni (edited by V. Fowler, 1992). Covers (1993). Knoxville, Tennessee (1994). The Genie in the Jar (1996, 1998). The Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni (1996). Shimmy, Shimmy, Shimmy Like My Sister Kate (editor,
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1996). The Sun is So Quiet (1996). Blues: For All the Changes— Poems (1999). Grand Fathers: An Anthology (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Carroll, R., I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like: The Voice and Vision of Black American Women Writers (1994). Evans, M., ed., Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation (1984). Fowler, V., ed., Conversations with Nikki Giovanni (1992). Fowler, V. C., Nikki Giovanni (1992). Gaffke, C. T., ed., Poetry Criticism: Excerpts From Criticism of the Works of the Most Significant and Widely Studied Poets of World Literature (1997). Georgoudaki, E., Class, Race, and Gender Consciousness in Gwendolyn Brooks’ and Nikki Giovanni’s Poems for Children (1990). Georgoudaki, E., Race, Gender, and Class Perspectives in the Works of Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, Rita Dove, Nikki Giovanni, and Audre Lorde (1991). Hufnagel, J., ‘‘Seeing Things as We Are: The Universal in the Poetry of Nikki Giovanni’’ (thesis, 1992). Jago, C., Nikki Giovanni in the Classroom: ‘‘The Same ol’ Danger But a Brand New Pleasure’’ (1999). Lee, D. L., Dynamite Voices: Black Poets of the 1960s (1971). Rediger, P., Great African Americans in Literature (1996). Smith, J. C., ed., Epic Lives: One Hundred Black Women Who Made a Difference (1993). Strickland, M. R., African-American Poets (1996). Tate, C., ed., Black Women Writers at Work (1983). Weixlmann, J. and C. J. Fontenot, eds., Belief vs. Theory in Black American Literacy Criticism (1986). Whitlow, R., Black American Literature: A Critical History (1973). Reference works: Black Literary Criticism (1992). CB (April 1973). CP (1975). Crowell’s Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry (1973). DLB (1985). FP (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: African American Review (Fall 1994, Spring 1995). Black Issues in Higher Education (Jan. 1993). Black World (Feb. 1971). Book World (Feb. 1994). Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books (July 1994). CLAJ (Sept. 1971). CSM (1 May 1974). Ebony (Feb. 1972). Essence (Mar. 1994, May 1999). Harper’s Bazaar (July 1972). Ingenue (Feb. 1973). MELUS (Winter 1982, Winter 1994). NYTBR (5 May 1975). PW (1999). —LISA CARL AND PAMELA SHELTON
GLASGOW, Ellen (Anderson Gholson) Born 22 April 1873, Richmond, Virginia; died 21 November 1945, Richmond, Virginia Daughter of Francis T. and Anne Gholson Glasgow Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow was the eighth of her parents’ 10 children. Her father was director of the Tredegar Iron Works, chief armaments factory during the Civil War. His dour Scotch-Irish Calvinist background instilled in her qualities of strength Glasgow was to sum up as a ‘‘vein of iron.’’ This phrase and the staunch values it implied occur approvingly in over half her novels; yet she hated her father for his tyranny, his religious severity, and his philandering. He was, she wrote, ‘‘more patriarchal than paternal.’’ She adored her generous, long-suffering
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mother, a ‘‘perfect flower of the Tidewater’’ aristocracy. In her autobiography, The Woman Within (1954), Glasgow described her own nature as deeply divided between this gentle mother and stern father. Glasgow acquired her learning at home. She was excused early from a formal education because of shyness and headaches at school. Considered sickly, she always thought of herself this way. All her life she sought refuge in books—both in reading and in writing. As a girl she loved the novels of Scott, generally admired in the South. She read Fielding, Austen, the Brontës, Dickens, Hardy, Balzac, and Maupassant. Her sister’s husband, Walter McCormack, introduced her to 19th-century historians, biologists, and social philosophers. As a budding novelist, Glasgow immersed herself in these; she especially valued Darwin. At a later stage of personal crisis, she sought solace in mysticism: the Upanishads, the Buddhist Sutras, the Bhagavad-Gita, as well as philosophers from Plotinus to Schopenhauer. Glasgow never married. Her observations of her parents’ marriage, as well as a desire to remain independent to devote herself to her art, probably influenced her decision. Her writings reflect a distrust of marriage and tend toward satire, both bitter and lighthearted, on the subject. Of her many male friends, the most important was Henry W. Anderson, an attractive, successful Richmond lawyer, who also served as a Red Cross colonel in Rumania during World War I. Their affection, sometimes stormy, survived a broken engagement; their friendship continued for nearly 30 years until Glasgow’s death. Friends remember Glasgow as a diminutive woman with a radiant smile who could charm if she chose, a witty, well-read conversationalist with a sarcastic edge. Outstanding among her literary friends was the Richmond writer James Branch Cabell. There is disagreement as to how much critical assistance he gave Glasgow, whether in her plan for a social series on Virginia, in her prefaces (collected as A Certain Measure, 1943), or in her last novel, written in the shadow of her death. Cabell at any rate felt she did not acknowledge his aid sufficiently. Glasgow held her work and literary reputation uppermost; these compensated for what she called ‘‘the long tragedy of my life.’’ An especial burden was her deafness, which assailed her in adolescence and worsened. It isolated her, and plunged her into profound depressions. She consulted psychoanalysts and aurists. Eventually her hearing devices improved, but she never ceased to complain. Allusions in the novels to a ‘‘soundless tumult,’’ a ‘‘rustling vacancy,’’ apparently grow out of this affliction. Glasgow’s home life from 1911 until 1945 was spent chiefly with her companion, secretary, housekeeper, and nurse, Anne Virginia Bennett, sharing not so much a love of letters as a capacity for coexistence and an affection for Glasgow’s dogs, who were treated with a human respect. Glasgow lived nearly all her life in the big grey Greek Revival house at One West Main Street. She traveled often to Europe, especially in her younger days; lived in New York for years at a time; and escaped the Southern heat in the summer. With all her mobility, Glasgow remained devoted to Richmond and Virginia. Virginia is the scene
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of nearly all her novels; those set in New York are about uprooted Southerners. Glasgow’s first two novels, The Descendant (1897) and Phases of an Inferior Planet (1898), together with The Wheel of Life (1906), wrestle with, among other things, the plight of the woman as artist. All are based in New York which, to Glasgow, meant intellectual Bohemia. The first two novels both show obvious signs of her deep reading of Darwin, Nietzsche, Henry George, Mill, Haeckel, Weismann, and other writers on heredity, milieu, class struggle, evolution, and survival. Gradually, the social concerns of these apprenticeship novels would be more skillfully integrated into her Virginia novels; and Glasgow’s successes enabled her to drop the anxious woman artist theme. While Glasgow did not choose to incorporate these novels in her collected Old Dominion and Virginia editions, they are of biographical interest. With her Virginia novels, Glasgow was breaking new ground. She wished to correct the sentimental picture of ‘‘Ole Virginia’’ perpetrated by romances of plantation life and the glorious defeat of the Civil War. The South suffered from what Glasgow termed ‘‘evasive idealism.’’ The Battle-Ground (1902) gently satirizes the prewar fable: honey-voiced belles, picturesque Negroes, a crusty old major and an enlightened governor disputing the virtues of slavery by a comfortable library fire. The Deliverance (1904) deals with tobacco farming and the moral struggles of a destroyed planter family in the post-Reconstruction period of 1878 to 1890. Fortunes are reversed: the once-rich Blakes live in penury in an overseer’s cottage, while the shady former overseer lords it in Blake Hall. Glasgow continues her concern with heredity: ‘‘Blood will out, even at the dregs.’’ But the overseer’s vital daughter, refined by education and an imperfect marriage, will through love and literacy redeem the vengeful, demon-ridden younger Blake. A new order of Southern society will result, Glasgow hopes, from the joining of the two white classes. In writing about the New South, Glasgow liked to show an underdog hero fighting his way to personal acceptance and public service. This pattern of action is found in several of Glasgow’s novels of Virginia political life. The Voice of the People (1900), Glasgow’s first Virginia novel, is one of the earliest fictional treatments of the Southern poor white. Nick Burr, a farmer’s son, strives against entrenched upper-class prejudice and snobbery. He becomes governor of the state, and is known as ‘‘the Man with the Conscience,’’ only to be murdered when he intervenes in a lynching. Political assassination also cuts short the career of the hero of One Man in His Time (1922). A political novel on which Glasgow collaborated with her fiancé, Henry Anderson, was The Builders (1919). Anderson probably penned the speeches emanating from the misunderstood, patrician hero, David Blackburn, for whom he also posed as the model. A strain of pessimism permeates these novels. Glasgow celebrates Virginia heroines in Virginia (1913), Life and Gabriella (1916), and Barren Ground (1925). One of her best works, Virginia traces the dawning self-knowledge—too late—and lifelong disillusionment of a Southern woman bred conventionally and decorously to a romantic ideal of marriage.
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Growing up in the 1880s, she is subjected to the educational principle that ‘‘the less a girl knew about life the better she would be prepared to contend with it.’’ While social codes bar women from interesting lives and work, the adventuresome male surges ahead. Sunk in domesticity, Virginia watches her husband flourish, professionally and sexually, at her emotional cost. Glasgow’s writing sustains a delicate tone of irony that does not withhold sympathy from the heroine. Life and Gabriella forms a companion portrait to Virginia. Here Glasgow gives us a less malleable heroine, although, misguidedly, Gabriella marries a rake. Left with two children and no money, she carves her way out of misfortune. Through somewhat self-righteous fortitude Gabriella emerges as a millinery businesswoman, while her former husband dies a vagrant alcoholic. There is even a daredevil chance of her dashing off into the future with a virile Irishman. Of Barren Ground and the novels that followed it, Glasgow wrote this was the work upon which ‘‘I like to imagine that I shall stand or fall as a novelist.’’ The novel is among her best, and probably her most renowned. Seduced, pregnant, and abandoned, Dorinda Oakley leaves her Virginia farm home. Fortuitously she miscarries; upon her return she adjusts her nature to the demands she establishes for her life: to remain aloof from love and all entanglements, to labor unremittingly to control the fertility of the worn and wasted land as it had controlled her parents’ lives, and to prosper richly. At the last, as a strong, white-haired woman, Dorinda watches her erstwhile lover die. ‘‘For once in Southern fiction,’’ wrote Glasgow, ‘‘the betrayed woman would become the victor instead of the victim.’’ The people of Barren Ground seem to grow out of the soil, the rhythms of their lives paralleling those of nature’s blooming and decay. Desolate though it is to humans, the land readily produces a weed called broomsedge. Broomsedge flames across the earth, ‘‘a kind of fate,’’ however farmers may try to root it out. It becomes also symbolic of the smothered fire of Dorinda’s nature. In the first transports of despair her soul is ‘‘parched and blackened, like an abandoned field after the broomsedge is destroyed.’’ Her tormented dreams of her lover ripple with broomsedge, a growth to be eradicated from soil and soul. As Dorinda learns to dominate the land, she also brings her woman’s nature under control. ‘‘Oh if the women who wanted love could only know the infinite relief of having love over.’’ As she gains in ascendancy, the specter of rampant broomsedge gives way to the serene image of the harp-shaped pine. It is a triumph of Dorinda’s, as of other of Glasgow’s heroines, to labor, to live ‘‘without happiness,’’ to become themselves sexually barren ground while transferring energies to their work and forcing it to flower. It may be noted that in a quarter of the novels a woman nurses, survives, or slays the depleted man, who languishes or dies in her house, in her arms, or at her feet. Leaving the Virginia countryside, Glasgow comes indoors with her Queenborough (i.e., Richmond) novels of manners: The Romantic Comedians (1926), They Stooped to Folly (1929), and the somber The Sheltered Life (1932). The Romantic Comedians centers on the fatuous, aged, would-be lover, Judge Gamaliel Honeywell, whose ‘‘withered heart urgently craves to be green again.’’ He is surrounded by women, from the hovering shade of
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his dead wife Cordelia to the winsome girl of twenty-three whose youth leads him to overidealize her and whom he fancies he can please. Undaunted by sickness and the desertion of his girl-wife, the Judge at the last reacts to the charms of his nurse. As a mirror image reproach to his way of life there is his outrageous twin sister, the much-married and much-loved Edmonia, who lives to please herself. Glasgow’s gallery of female caricatures is superb. The word ‘‘happiness’’ recurs with ironic frequency. Glasgow’s satiric vision is both classic and fresh in this work, whose aphoristic dialogue is reminiscent of theater. The comic possibilities of youth’s encounters with age in a framework of sexual morality are also explored in They Stooped to Folly. Glasgow introduces diverse women characters, focusing on the seduced and fallen women of three generations. These women are observed from the perspective of the central couple, Virginius and Victoria Littlepage, who are conventionally, virtuously, tediously married. Unfree themselves, their perceptions of the others are imperfect; their plight is subject to Glasgow’s overarching assessment. The novel counterpoints the themes of self-deceit, hypocrisy, and the standards of moral conduct. In her preface, Glasgow refers to the ‘‘woman myths. . .invented by man’’ to flatter his own self-esteem and diminish women. Women couldn’t have bothered with a mythology for themselves since they have been so busy with ‘‘planning, contriving, scheming to outwit an adverse fortune, and tilling the fertile soil of man’s vanity.’’ The Sheltered Life observes the interaction of three generations of Southerners before World War I. Courtly General Archibald reflects on the polite hypocrisies that warped lives in his youth. His own poetic temper was quashed by a barbarous upper-class training, his hope of true love thwarted by a forced, scandalaverting marriage. He is sedulously deferential to women, especially to his beautiful neighbor, Eva Birdsong. Once a belle, she now strains to uphold the cult of beauty, to which she has sacrificed autonomy and happiness. Imprisoned by old standards of feminine decorum, she affects to ignore her insouciant husband George’s infidelities; she devotes her whole being to her gowns and her lovely smile, which droops only when she thinks herself unobserved. Eva’s garden continues to die while she inwardly dies. The General’s granddaughter is the ecstatic Jenny Blair. Impelled by a narcissistic sensuality, which the life of privilege has sheltered in its heedless innocence, she entices George with furtive embraces; at the same time, she adores Eva. Tragedy peaks when Eva, hollow and ‘‘maimed’’ from an operation, levels her sporting husband’s gun at him and brings him down amid his ducks. Family and friends close in and call it an accident. Pervading this crumbling world of deluded upper-class gentility is a chemical reek that corrodes the quality of living. It is the new Queenborough factory, giving off the industrial and moral nerve gas of the future. Youth and age and the insufficiency of love are themes pervading all three Queenborough novels. In this last, the General and Eva have allowed themselves to be molded by an older morality. Jenny Blair and George are the new happiness seekers who trample on those they love, but don’t ‘‘mean anything.’’
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Vein of Iron (1935) documents the lives of the Scotch-Irish ‘‘good people’’ of Ironside, a village of the Upper Valley of the James River in Virginia. The surrounding mountains loom as personal presences. Glasgow takes her much-tried heroine Ada Fincastle from girlhood to middle age, from 1901 to 1933. The vision produced by the novel is one of nostalgia and of perpetual accommodation to necessity in the face of futility. In Vein of Iron, Glasgow is best when extolling ancestral values, for she saw the future as a dying age. Despite its being awarded a Pulitzer Prize, a belated consolation for the committee’s having passed over The Sheltered Life, In This Our Life (1941) is a minor achievement. The portrayals of the elderly weary hero and his desperate daughters betray Glasgow’s declining health and her difficulty in coming to grips with the modern world. Beyond Defeat (1966), its posthumously published sequel, is of academic interest only. Glasgow’s social perspectives and her thirst for realism made her a precursor of writers she failed to appreciate, notably a stylist like Faulkner. She was outspoken about newer writers, whom she characterized as amateurs and illiterates. As she grew older she found it difficult to cast aside the values she had once lightheartedly satirized. She saw the modern world as ‘‘distraught, chaotic, grotesque. . .an age of cruelty without moral indignation, of catastrophe without courage.’’ Her efforts to embrace the young within her artistic vision, even to deal with contemporary argot, turn out shrill and awry. Despite awards and honors during her lifetime, Glasgow’s literary reputation suffered after her death. Glasgow’s best writing is in the comic spirit. There are fine humorous characterizations, many buried in the subplots of her novels. As an innovator, she rejected the South’s codes and genteel fables to write about politics and industry rising up out of the Virginia soil. Race and stock are for her determinants of character in the battle for survival. Work, whether of the grower, the tycoon, or the artist, brings salvation. Manners are both valued and criticized. Glasgow drew her chief inspirations from the land that bred the vein of iron and from the tremors of society. Past and present, the conflict of generations, the uneasy commerce between an older patriciate and the new working classes, mores and wars, ceremony and the fresh winds of change—these were the broad concerns of Glasgow’s writing which she treated with the ‘‘blood and irony’’ she had prescribed for Southern fiction. OTHER WORKS: The Freeman, and Other Poems (1902). The Ancient Law (1908). The Romance of a Plain Man (1909). The Miller of Old Church (1911). The Shadowy Third, and Other Stories (1923). The Old Dominion Edition of the Works of Ellen Glasgow (8 volumes, 1929-1933). The Virginia Edition of the Works of Ellen Glasgow (12 vols., 1938). Letters of Ellen Glasgow (edited by B. Rouse, 1958). The Collected Stories of Ellen Glasgow (edited by R. K. Meeker, 1963). Beyond Defeat: An Epilogue to an Era (edited by L. Y. Gore, 1966). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Auchincloss, L., Pioneers and Caretakers (1965). Carpenter, L., Haunting the House of Fiction: Feminist Perspectives on Ghost Stories by American Women (1991). Ekman, B.,
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The End of a Legend: Ellen Glasgow’s History of Southern Women (1979). Godbold, E. S., Jr., Ellen Glasgow and the Woman Within (1972). Goloboy, J. L., ‘‘Marrying the Future: Kate Langley Bosher, Mary Johnston, Ellen Glasgow, and the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia’’ (thesis, 1995). Harrison, E. J., Female Pastoral: Women Writers Re-Visioning the American South (1991). Holman, C. H., Three Modes of Southern Fiction (1966). Inge, M. T., ed., Ellen Glasgow: Centennial Essays (1976). Jessup, J. L., The Faith of Our Feminists: A Study in the Novels of Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, Willa Cather (1950). Kelly, W. W., Ellen Glasgow: A Bibliography (1964). Kraft, S., No Castles on Main Street: American Authors and Their Homes (1979). McDowell, F. P. W., Ellen Glasgow and the Ironic Art of Fiction (1960). Parent, M., Ellen Glasgow: Romancière (1962). Raper, J. R., Without Shelter: The Early Career of Ellen Glasgow (1971). Raper, J. R., From the Sunken garden: The Fiction of Ellen Glasgow (1980). Raper, J. R., ed., Ellen Glasgow’s Reasonable Doubts (1988). Ribblett, D. L., From Cross Creek to Richmond: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Researches Ellen Glasgow (1986). Richards, M. K., Ellen Glasgow’s Development As a Novelist (1971). Rouse, B., Ellen Glasgow (1962). Santas, J. F., Ellen Glasgow’s American Dream (1965). Wanless, T. C., ‘‘Soil and Soul: The Experience of Southern Rural Womanhood in Selected Novels by Edith Summers Kelley, Ellen Glasgow and Elizabeth Madox Roberts’’ (thesis, 1984). Reference works: CB (Jan. 1946). DAB. LSL. NAW (1971). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCA, TCAS. Other references: Ellen Glasgow Newsletter (Ashland, Virginia). —MARCELLE THIEBAUX
GLASPELL, Susan Born 1 July 1876, Davenport, Iowa; died 27 July 1948, Provincetown, Massachusetts Daughter of Elmer S. and Alice Keating Glaspell; married George C. Cook, 1913; Norman Matson, 1925 Susan Glaspell began her career writing numerous short stories—for popular magazines—in line with the sentimental and escapist mode popular at the time, and two conventional romantic novels. When she met and married her first husband, George C. Cook, her lifestyle and the direction of her work changed radically. Her novel Fidelity (1915) is thematically connected to this love affair. With Eugene O’Neill, she and Cook became the founders of and prime contributors to the Provincetown Players, an experimental group begun on Cape Cod in 1915 to provide a place where native drama could develop freely outside the fetters of commercialism. The company, which moved to New York’s Greenwich Village (as the Playwrights Theatre) in the fall of 1916, proved to be one of the most important and seminal forces in the history of American theater.
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Glaspell’s first one-act play, written with Cook, was part of the Provincetown Players’ initial season. Her second one-act play, Trifles was produced in 1916 during the second summer season. (Glaspell’s short story adaptation of it, ‘‘A Jury of Her Peers,’’ appeared in Best American Short Stories of 1916). On a bleak Iowa farm, dour farmer John Wright has been found dead in his bed, his own rope around his neck. His wife, Minnie, who never appears onstage, is in custody pending investigation of the murder. The tacit agreement of two women onstage to conceal the telltale evidence of guilt implies that Wright was a man who deserved to die as he did, and their sympathy (with that of the audience) goes to the abused wife. After 50 years, this piece is still deservedly cited as an example of expert craftsmanship. For the next two seasons Glaspell continued to write, act in, and direct plays. Her first full-length play, Bernice (1920), in which again the heroine never appears onstage, was produced in 1919. Glaspell returned in The Inheritors (1921) to a favorite theme: the desirability of preserving the best values of pioneer character. The only character who represents the true spirit of her forefathers (the founders of a liberal college) and of America itself is the granddaughter Madeline Morton, who goes to jail for the rights of Hindu students protesting British domination of India. In The Verge (1921), Glaspell deals with a ‘‘new woman’’ again. However, Claire Archer is very different from Madeline. Claire is so intent on attaining her own freedom—an ‘‘otherness,’’ she calls it—that she is driven over the edge of sanity when she rejects the past and present (ancestors, husband, and daughter) in hopes of a new future. Glaspell dramatizes the subject of the artist’s life and connection to society in her final two plays, The Comic Artist (1928) and Alison’s House (1930). The latter, dealing with the posthumous disposition of the poetry of a woman much like Emily Dickinson, was produced at the Civic Repertory Theatre, with Eva LeGallienne playing the role of the niece who favors publication. It won the Pulitzer Prize. Glaspell had only minor connections with the theater after 1931. She had returned to the novel in 1928 with Brook Evans. In Ambrose Holt and Family (1931), Glaspell clearly connects the ‘‘free woman’’ of the 20th century with the best qualities of the pioneer, as in her play The Inheritors. This novel and the following, The Morning Is Near Us (1939), have philosophical depth, but little relevance to the time of the Great Depression. It was not until Norma Ashe (1942) and then Judd Rankin’s Daughter (1945) that Glaspell took cognizance of failures inherent in Midwestern isolationist attitudes, appropriate though they may have been for the original pioneers. Because her work in the theater was of necessity much more experimental than her work in other genres, Glaspell’s main significance stems from her Provincetown connection, not only as a playwright, but, more importantly, as an innovator instrumental in changing the course of American drama forever. The most striking hallmark of her best writing is her consistent emphasis on the need for human beings to fulfill their highest potential by utilizing what is desirable from the past and applying it with faith
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and courage to the future. Because she developed a broad humanistic viewpoint, she never became a typical Midwestern regionalist in the narrow sense; she eschewed always the 20th century provincialism, superpatriotism, and fatuousness that evolved as Main Street, USA. OTHER WORKS: Glory of the Conquered (1909). The Visioning (1911). The Road to the Temple (1927). Fugitive’s Return (1929). Cherished and Shared of Old (1940). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Gelb, A., and B. Gelb, O’Neill (1960). Goldberg, I., Drama of Transition (1922). Gould, J., Modern American Playwrights (1966). Hapgood, H., A Victorian in a Modern World (1939). Lewisohn, L., Expression in America (1932). Quinn, A. H., History of American Drama from the Civil War to the Present Day (1927). Schlueter, J., ed., Modern American Drama: The Female Canon (1990). Vorse, M. H., Time and the Town (1942). Waterman, A. E., Susan Glaspell (1966). Reference works: Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia (1991). DAB. NAW (1971). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCA, TCAS. Other references: Arts and Decoration (June 1931). Bookman (Feb. 1918). Commonweal (20 May 1931). Drama (June 1931). Independent Woman (Jan. 1946). Nation (3 Nov. 1920, 6 April 1921, 4 April 1923). NR (17 Jan. 1923). NYT (12 April 1931, 10 May 1931). Palimpsest (Dec. 1930). Review of Reviews (June 1909). SR (30 July 1938). WLB (Dec. 1928). Women’s Journal (Aug. 1928, June 1931). —EDYTHE M. MCGOVERN
GLÜCK, Louise Born 22 April 1943, New York, New York Daughter of Daniel and Beatrice Grosby Glück; married John Dranow, 1977 (divorced); children: Noah Louise Glück’s parents lost their first child, a daughter, seven days after her birth. This loss irrevocably altered the family that might have been, and in her poetry Glück examines the intimate dramas of family life as loss reverberates across generational lines. She treats private pain with relentless, lyrical intensity, yet maintains a paradoxical reticence. In Glück’s work, confessional poetry meets restrained classicism; her poems are tragic in a traditional sense, yet imbued with the psychological awareness of Freud and Jung. During the years she might have been at college, she undertook psychoanalysis. She attended Sarah Lawrence College for six weeks and later took courses, almost entirely poetry workshops, at Columbia University’s School of General Studies. She worked with Léonie Adams, Stanley Kunitz, and briefly with Adrienne Rich. Glück is one of the foremost American lyric poets. She has taught in a variety of institutions, including Goddard College, the
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universities of North Carolina, Virginia, Iowa, Cincinnati, and California (Berkeley, Davis, and Los Angeles), Columbia University, and Williams College. She has received grants from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim foundations and from the National Endowment for the Arts. Glück’s work has been recognized with many awards and prizes, including the Poetry Magazine Eunice Tietjens Prize, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters award in literature, the National Book Critics Circle award, the Boston Globe Literary Press award for poetry, and the Poetry Society of America Melville Kane award. Firstborn, published in 1968, bears the imprint of the confessional sensibility, and Glück assumes the stance of the embittered outsider. She uses short, trenchant sentences, rhyme and off-rhyme, and colloquial diction, much like Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton. In her late twenties, Glück wrote nothing for over a year. In the poems that follow this silence she abandons her more formal approach with its implied harmony and its authorial virtuosity. The hot drama of the confessional style yields to increasing control and plainness of speech. Calvin Bedient says of The House on Marshland (1975): ‘‘Its ornament proved chastely limited; besides, the figurative. . .simply and hallucinatingly asserted itself as the real.’’ The poems, authoritative, beautiful, and reticent, resemble folktale and myth. In ‘‘The School Children,’’ the mothers must offer their children to the schools, like propitiatory apples, and are helpless to keep them from hurt: ‘‘And the teachers shall instruct them in silence / and the mothers shall scour the orchards for a way out, / drawing to themselves the gray limbs of the fruit trees / bearing so little ammunition.’’ In Descending Figure (1980) and The Triumph of Achilles (1985), she draws heavily on what Helen Vendler calls an ‘‘eclectic mythology’’ to elucidate private matters. In Ararat (1990), a series of lyrics that composes a balanced narrative about the death of her father, bereavement, and the surviving family, the mythic references are less explicit, but the resonances remain. Her family of origin appears as the archetypical family over which looms an ancient, unalterable tragedy. In Wild Iris (1992), which won the Pultizer Prize for Poetry, Glück explores questions of faith and the place of the human in the natural order through a series of meditative poems in the tradition of Emily Dickinson and George Herbert. Framed by the diurnal and seasonal cycles, the book locates itself in Glück’s own garden, where everything has a voice. Characteristically, these voices are not gentle but tough and demanding. ‘‘Poems are autobiography, but divested of the trappings of chronology and comment, the metronomic alternation of anecdote and response,’’ wrote Glück in the introduction to The Best American Poetry (1993). Her poetry represents a quest for the self in its relation to domestic and natural life, and emotional and spiritual perception. Metaphor and myth authenticate the loss and transgression that are her poetic resources while they also replicate the predicament of paradox inherent in human knowledge. Her language is stark and inward yet lyrical. As Allen Hoey noted, she is ‘‘a devoted lyricist in the tradition of Hopkins and Donne.’’ Her questions are pragmatic and secular, essential to survival, yet ultimately unanswerable.
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In a description of ‘‘the religious mind,’’ in Glück’s essay on T. S. Eliot (1994), she reveals the transformative power of her own poetry: ‘‘Its hunger for meaning and disposition to awe, its craving for the path, the continuum.’’ Glück’s poems explore this space between the material and spiritual realms. Unlike Eliot’s tendency to ultimate beliefs, Glück’s impulse is toward the paradox at the center of her poetic seeking: the continuing cycle of loss and the search for meaning without end. She writes, in Hoey’s view, ‘‘to know the world, to get closer to the mystery.’’ The poems in Meadowlands (1996) replay the decline of a contemporary marriage in juxtaposition with the marriage of Odysseus and Penelope. These figures, with Telemachus, take on the characteristics of a family’s struggle to come to terms with conflict and betrayal and the needs of the self versus the needs of relationship: husband/wife, father/son, and mother/son. Vita Nova (1999) explores the loss of love and relationship in that time and space beyond the waiting, longing, and hope represented in Meadowlands. Dido and Aeneas, Orpheus and Eurydice, and Odysseus and Penelope represent the finality of one kind of relationship and the subsequent confrontation with the self alone. The season is spring. The poet in the first poem, ‘‘Vita Nova,’’ remembers the sounds she heard as a child: ‘‘Laughter for no cause, simply because the world is / beautiful.’’ Later these sounds seem out of reach, perhaps lost: ‘‘Crucial / sounds or gestures like / a track laid down before the larger themes / and then unused, buried,’’ until one morning she wakes ‘‘elated, at my age / hungry for life, utterly confident.’’ The last poem, also titled ‘‘Vita Nova,’’ describes ‘‘the splitting up dream’’ figured by the dog named Blizzard who symbolizes the breach when a relationship ends. She addresses the dog: ‘‘O Blizzard, / be a brave dog— this is / all material; you’ll wake up / in a different world. / you will eat again, you will grow into a poet.’’ Glück’s recent honors for Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry (1994) include the 1995 PEN/Martha Albrand award for first nonfiction and honorary Doctors of Letters from Middlebury College (1996), Skidmore College (1995) and Williams College (1993). In July 1998 she became the Preston S. Parish lecturer in English at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. OTHER WORKS: The Garden (chapbook, 1976). The First Four Books of Poems (1995). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brown, M. L., The Love of Form is a Love of Endings: Poetic Hunger and the Aesthetic Body in Louise Glück (dissertation, 1997). Dodd, E., Reticence and the Lyric: The Development of a Personal Classicism among Four Women Poets of the Twentieth Century (dissertation, 1990). Vendler, H., Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets (1980). Williamson, A., Introspection and Contemporary Poetry (1984). Reference works: CA (1978). CLC (1977, 1982, 1989). Contemporary Poets (1970, 1975, 1980, 1991). DLB (1980). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). World Authors (1970). Other references: APR (Jan.-Feb. 1997). Beall Poetry Festival, Baylor University Department of English: Online, 1999.
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Bulletin of Bibliography (Dec. 1987). Contemporary Literature (Spring 1990). Hollins Critic (Oct. 1982). Literary Review (Spring 1988). Mid-American Review (1994). Midwest Quarterly: American Journal of Contemporary Thought (Summer 1983). NR (17 June 1978). NYTBR (22 Dec. 1985, 2 Sept. 1990). Parnassus: Poetry in Review (Spring-Summer 1981). Sewanee Review (Spring 1976). —NORA MITCHELL, UPDATED BY KAREN J. MCLENNAN
GODCHAUX, Elma Born 30 November 1896, Napoleonville, Louisiana; died 3 April 1941, New Orleans, Louisiana Daughter of Edward and Ophelia Gumbel Godchaux; married Walter Kahn (n.d., divorced); children: one daughter Elma Godchaux, daughter of a prominent Louisiana planter and granddaughter of a Jewish planter and philanthropist, was raised at the Godchaux sugar plantation. The family owned one of the largest sugar refineries in the world in 1938. Godchaux attended Radcliffe College and remained in the East for a number of years, marrying and giving birth to a daughter. The marriage ended in divorce, and Godchaux again used her maiden name. After living in New York City for a time, she moved to New Orleans, where she resided until her death. Godchaux published five short stories and a novel and was at work on a second novel at the time of her early death. In Stubborn Roots (1936), a novel of the Old South, Godchaux describes the operation of a sugar cane plantation in the 1800s. Her portrayal of the herculean efforts, by landowner and workers alike, to protect the sugar cane crop from devastation by floods indicates Godchaux’s ability to realistically depict people from all classes. The novel was reviewed with a considerable amount of praise. The Saturday Review of Literature called it ‘‘a remarkable novel,’’ and the London Times described its characters as being ‘‘drawn with bold decision.’’ The uncommon background and the vivid way in which the author presents it were noted by the Chicago Daily Tribune. Godchaux dedicated her novel to ‘‘the memory of Edward Godchaux, Louisiana planter,’’ and the book was written after the death of her father. The focus of the novel seems to be on the planter, Anton, who is drawn from memories of her father and her grandfather. Some critics, perhaps looking for a more romantic figure than Anton, seemed to misread and felt the central figure to be his cruel undisciplined wife, Marie Elizabeth, but it is likely the epic quality of the story of Anton is exactly what the author was seeking to portray, and what readers of the novel today may find most interesting in it. Godchaux’s short stories were first published by the Southern Review and the Frontier and Midland, and then were included in the Best Short Stories of 1935, the Best Short Stories of 1937, the O. Henry Memorial Prize Stories of 1936, and other anthologies.
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In one of Godchaux’s short stories, ‘‘Chains,’’ the protagonist is a poor Cajun who owns only a small patch of swampland. Quite different from Anton, the leading character in Stubborn Roots, he is a most unusual sort of landowner in that, although he loves the land, he does not actually work it. Both the Cajun man and Anton, however, are indicative of many of the writer’s characters, who act on their principles and become defined by those actions, rather than by tangible rewards or achievements. Critics praised both Godchaux’s novel and short stories in her own lifetime. She believed ‘‘all ordinary experience is fleeting. . . . Writing is something to live for. If it is your work you can hold it with you. Everything else somehow always escapes.’’ Unfortunately, Godchaux’s writing career, although noteworthy, was very brief. She did not begin to write until her daughter was in college, and she died prematurely at the age of forty-four. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Goldstein, A., ‘‘The Creative Spirit,’’ in The Past As Prelude: New Orleans 1718-1968 (1968). McVoy, L. C., and R. Campbell, eds., A Bibliography of Fiction by Louisianians and on Louisiana Subjects (1935). Other references: New Orleans Times-Picayune (5 April 1936, 4 April 1941). —DOROTHY H. BROWN
GODWIN, Gail Born 18 June 1937, Birmingham, Alabama Daughter of Mose W. and Kathleen Krahenbuhl Godwin; married Ian Marshall, 1965 (divorced) Gail Godwin received her B.A. (1959) in journalism from the University of North Carolina and her M.A. (1968) and Ph.D. (1971) in English from the University of Iowa. From 1967 to 1971 she taught English at the University of Iowa, and she has lectured at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Godwin worked as a reporter for the Miami Herald (1959-60) and as a writer for the U.S. Travel Service at the U.S. Embassy in London (1962-65). She has contributed short stories to Cosmopolitan, North American Review, Paris Review, and Esquire. Godwin’s first novel, The Perfectionists (1970), depicts the disintegration of a marriage constructed on philosophical and psychological theories. The perfectionists in the novel are John Empson, a British psychotherapist, and his new American wife, Dane; they are an obsessively analytical couple who use Hermann Keyserling’s Book of Marriage as a yardstick against which to measure their own relationship. What the novel reveals as it explores the dynamics of their relationship is that union and invasion are two sides of the same coin. John sees marriage as a union in which both of the partners reveal the internal moments of their lives; Dane wants something akin to a Victorian marriage of form and individual privacy, and regards her husband’s rage for union as a personal invasion.
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The tensions resulting from their attempts to realize not only the ideal of a perfect marriage but also some rather vague conceptions of personal transcendence are compounded by the presence of John’s three-year-old illegitimate son. Dane comes to hate the implacable child for his refusal to contribute to the picture of the ideal family; and when, finally, she almost beats the child to death, one part of her analytical mind is already translating the cruelty into evidence of a cosmic experience which she can later share with her husband. In her second novel, Glass People (1972), Godwin again explores the relationship of marriage, moving away from the representation of the wife as both victimizer and victim to a portrayal of the wife as the passive possession of a remote and self-assured husband. Here Godwin evokes the boredom and malaise afflicting Francesca Bolt, of whom her husband, Cameron, requires nothing except she be his flawlessly beautiful wife. Francesca seeks emancipation from the stifling atmosphere of her marriage in brief affairs with chance acquaintances and a temporary job as an amanuensis to an eccentric writer until Cameron rescues her from the dismal consequences of her attempts at independence and restores her to her place as his adored objet d’art. Godwin returns to this depiction of the woman as frustrated and powerless to act affirmatively in the collection of stories that comprises Dream Children (1976). Most of the women in these stories are victims—either of men or of their own unrealized expectations—who escape into the marginal world of dreams. Godwin appropriates from George Gissing the title of her third and best-known novel, The Odd Woman (1974), and relies upon the meaning of ‘‘odd’’ in the sense of ‘‘unpaired’’ to suggest the plight of her protagonist. Armed with a Ph.D. in English literature and a collection of melodramatic family stories, Jane Clifford visualizes the events of her life either in terms of fictional plots or as a kind of mythologized family history. She finds in the example of George Eliot and G. H. Lewes substantiation for her belief in a lasting and creative love, and she sees in the tale of her great-aunt’s elopement with the villain from a traveling melodrama an appealing prototype of daring passion. Yet as she attempts to construct her life out of ‘‘real’’ materials and to give it a comprehensive shape, she realizes that novels can have happy endings and myths can remain beautiful only because, unlike life, they omit all the loose ends and most of the mundane details. Traces of The Odd Woman shadow into Godwin’s next novel, Violet Clay (1978), where the protagonist who gives the book its title resembles Jane Clifford in gauging her own life by those of her relatives who figure significantly in a family myth. Unlike The Odd Woman, however, which offers no resolution to the protagonist’s quest for order and beauty in a lasting relationship, Violet Clay demonstrates the possibility of laying to rest the ghosts from the past and achieving a personal vision of balance and proportion. In this significant novel, Godwin, often viewed as a ‘‘woman’s novelist,’’ has achieved a satisfying picture of a ‘‘new woman’’—one who realizes successfully her own possibilities. Godwin has continued to examine the inner workings of the family, especially those families with some connection to the
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American South. Many of her recent works open with the death or removal of a family member. This loss drives Godwin’s characters to create new and more meaningful families around the resulting void. In A Mother and Two Daughters (1982), the sisters Lydia and Cate Strickland help their mother, Nell, through the aftermath of the death of their universally loved father. Cate, an English professor teaching in the Midwest, returns to the North Carolina town of Mountain City where Lydia has remained. Mountain City is also the setting of A Southern Family (1987); Clare Quick, a successful author in New York City, visits her childhood home and becomes embroiled in the travails of her family after the violent death of her brother Theo. In the novella Mr. Bedford and the Muses (1983), another expatriate Southerner, Carrie Ames, attempts to build a new family in an old house in London. This story and the five published with it address issues surrounding familial bonding and the creation of art. Each work in this volume concerns the inspiration of the artist, and Godwin includes an author’s note identifying her own inspiration for each story. The themes of family, art, and inspiration reappear in The Finishing School (1985), in which Justine Stokes, a successful actress, looks back on the summer when her father’s death caused her and her mother to move from Virginia to the suburban North. There Justine meets and is fascinated by Ursula De Vane, a middle-aged woman who introduces her to the beauty and treachery of art. Father Melancholy’s Daughter (1991) also takes the perspective of a grown woman looking back on her girlhood. In this richly textured work, Margaret Gower reflects on life changes precipitated by her young mother’s unexpected decision to leave her and her father, an Episcopalian priest, to explore the art world. Margaret’s recollections blend religion and ritual with Godwin’s ideas about art, inspiration, and family. In addition to her published fiction, Godwin has provided the texts for musical compositions by composer Robert Starer and the libretto for his ‘‘musical morality play,’’ The Last Lover (1977). Since the 1980s, her work has received increasing critical attention. Violet Clay and A Mother and Two Daughters both had National Book award nominations. In 1981 Godwin received an Award in Literature from the American Institute and Academy of Arts and Letters. An accomplished novelist, Gail Godwin is most interested in creating characters who operate at a high level of intelligence and feeling as they go about trying to make sense of their world. In her fiction she most often concentrates on depicting the choices that modern women make. These choices necessitate compromise, and rarely bring complete happiness. Godwin’s characters often explore their options through art as they create or analyze images that may reveal or even change reality. Over the course of 11 novels, collections of short stories, and three plays, Godwin draws from her own experience to broaden the scope of contemporary fiction. The struggles of women who seek both an independent life and a productive connection to others are central to her work. Godwin strives in her novels and
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short fiction to place those efforts within a larger context, especially within the framework of modern theories of art and psychology. As was often true of the central characters in several of Godwin’s earlier novels, Magda Danvers is facing a transformative event. At the center of Godwin’s complex story of loss and mortality, Magda faces what she calls her ‘‘final examination’’ in The Good Husband (1994). Under the tutelage of ovarian cancer, Magda, a star professor at a college in upstate New York, faces her death with wit and her usual flamboyant and penetrating intelligence. She is tended by a thoughtful but unreflective husband, Francis Lake, who left the seminary at age twenty-one to dedicate himself for nearly a quarter-century to Madga rather than God. As Magda’s condition worsens, another grieving couple is drawn into her orbit: Hugo Henry, the college’s writer-in-residence, and his second wife, Alice, formerly his editor, who have just lost their only child in a tragic home birth. Godwin creates a meditation on the nature of intimacy and influence, and the differences between good matches and good mates. Sequels, whether in books or movies, can often be a disappointment. Godwin risks the challenge in Evensong (1999). Margaret Gower, who first appeared as the motherless daughter of a smalltown Episcopal priest in Father Melancholy’s Daughter (1991), returns. Margaret herself has also become a priest and is serving All Saints High Balsam, a parish with a reputation for being rich and old-fashioned, nicknamed ‘‘All Saints High Horse’’ by the surrounding community. Margaret’s life is stable though a bit stale. Godwin weaves an eclectic collection of supporting characters as the yeast leavening this tale of work, family, and growing spiritual responsibility. Godwin draws upon her rich expertise to examine the daily lives of people alive with conflicts, complexities and frailties. OTHER WORKS: Gail Godwin’s papers are in the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hill, J., Gail Godwin (1992). Pearlman, M., ed., American Women Writing Fiction: Memory, Identity, Family, Space (1989). Pearlman, M., ed., Mother Puzzles: Daughters and Mothers in Contemporary American Literature (1989). Reference works: Bloomsbury Guide to Women’s Literature (1992). CA (1972). CANR (1985). CLC (1978, 1982, 1985). CN (1986). DLB (1980). Great Women Writers (1994). Larousse Dictionary of Women (1996). Larousse Dictionary of Writers (1994). Other references: Contemporary Literature (Spring 1983). Hollins Critic (Apr. 1988). Iowa English Bulletin (1987). Iowa Journal of Literary Studies (1981).Mississippi Quarterly (Winter 1988-89). NYTBR (7 June 1970, 9 Sept. 1990, 3 Mar. 1991). Southern Literary Journal (Spring 1989, Spring 1995). Southern Quarterly (Summer 1983). —GUIN A. NANCE, UPDATED BY E. M. NIX AND CELESTE DEROCHE
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GOLDEN, Marita Born 28 April 1950, Washington, D.C. Daughter of Francis S. and Beatrice Reid Golden; children: Michael Marita Golden was educated in the 1960s, a time of great political turmoil and change in America. The daughter of a taxi driver father and landlord mother, Golden’s African American background and the tumultuous times of her schooling years influenced her writing. Though originally trained as a journalist, she has written novels, poetry, and an autobiography. In her own words, ‘‘I write essentially to complete myself and to give my vision a significance that the world generally seeks to deny.’’ Golden entered American University in Washington, D.C., in 1968, the year the black consciousness movement in America was reaching its peak. After receiving her B.A. in 1972, she interned at the Baltimore Sun newspaper. In 1973, she received a master’s degree from Columbia University School of Journalism and worked as associate producer at WNET in New York City, from 1974 to 1975, before her marriage to a Nigerian man led her to Africa. In Lagos, Nigeria, she taught as assistant professor of mass communication at the University of Lagos from 1976 to 1979. Upon Golden’s return to the U.S., a literary agent who was impressed with her writings about Africa encouraged her to write her first book, an autobiography entitled Migrations of the Heart (1983). While Golden found the prospect of writing an autobiography at the age of twenty-nine somewhat scary, she explains that she wanted ‘‘to meditate on what it meant to grow up in the 1960s, what it meant to go to Africa for the first time, what it meant to be a modern black woman living in that milieu. I had to bring order to the chaos of memory.’’ One of the first accounts of a contemporary African urban experience by a young black American, the book focuses on her years in Africa and on her marriage and its dissolution, but also tells of her relations with her family. It met with mostly favorable reviews. Golden’s first novel, A Woman’s Place (1986), traces the lives of three black women who meet and become friends at a prestigious American college in the 1960s. The novel explores their relationships and the numerous problems and challenges that confront them during 15 years of friendship. The novel was widely praised, especially for its believable characters. Long Distance Life (1989) illustrates the transformation of black American culture throughout the 20th century by tracing the lives of four generations of a black American family. Golden traces the changes and growth of this family as they move from North Carolina in the 1920s, to Washington, D.C., in mid-century, through the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and finally into the tragedies and promises of contemporary America. Golden has also written poetry and her work has been included in many anthologies. Her writing has appeared in Ms., Essence, National Observer, Black World, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and many other publications. Executive
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director of the Institute for the Preservation and Study of African American Writing from 1986 to 1987, Golden is also a founding member of the African American Writers’ Guild and has been president of the guild since 1986. She has taught at Roxbury (Massachusetts) Community College and was professor of journalism at Emerson College, Boston. In a stunning nonfiction effort, Saving Our Sons: Raising Black Children in a Turbulent World (1994), Golden paints a frighteningly clear picture of the trials facing parent raising black children. Through the use of her own diaries and interviews with ‘‘psychologists, writers, . . .and young black men—criminals and scholars both. . .’’ Golden presents the story of her fight to raise her son in a world where children of color face incredible challenges. After her divorce, and 10 years in the child’s native Nigeria, Golden took her son to the Washington, D.C. area, away from the comfort of a warm, extended family. The book, written in four sections, details the realities of single motherhood, regardless of race. The Edge of Heaven (1997), Golden’s fourth novel, is set in Washington, D.C. and deals with the issues facing three generations of black women, one of whom is on trial, and one of whom is a law student. The story unfolds in a mixture of first and third person narrative, but is primarily the story of the law student, Teresa. Well-developed characters and commentary on the plight of black families in America mark this offering. Revisiting the issues of American single mothers, Golden’s A Miracle Every Day: Triumph and Transformation in the Lives of Single Mothers (1999) seeks to counter the often negative stereotypes of families headed by single mothers. Merging her own experiences in a household headed by a woman and her experience as a single mother with interviews of other single mothers and adults raised by single mothers, Golden creates an inspiring tribute to the adaptive skills of both mother and child and the novel support systems they develop to survive and flourish. OTHER WORKS: Keeping the Faith: Writings by Contemporary Black American Women (contributor, 1974). And Do Remember Me (1992). Wild Women Don’t Wear No Blues; Black Women Writers on Love, Men, and Sex (editor, 1992). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Metzgar, L., et al eds., Black Writers: A Selection of Sketches from Contemporary Authors (1989). Reference works: Black Writers (1989). CA (1984, 1999). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). WW of Black Americans (1992). Other references: Black American Literature Forum (Winter 1990). Black Issues in Higher Education (26 June 1997). Book List (15 Nov. 1997, 15 Feb. 1999). Essence (Nov. 1989). LJ (1 Mar. 1999). PW (27 Oct. 1997). WP (22 May 1983, 4 June 1983, 30 July 1986, 5 May 1991). —MARY E. HARVEY, UPDATED BY REBECCA C. CONDIT
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GOLDMAN, Emma Born 27 June 1869, Kovno, Russia; died 14 May 1940, Toronto, Canada Daughter of Abraham and Taube Bienowitch Goldman; married Jacob Kersner, 1887; James Colton, 1926 Born to Jewish parents in Russian-dominated Lithuania, Emma Goldman was unwelcome to a father who made a precarious living as manager of the government stagecoach and later as an innkeeper. Her mother, whose first husband had died leaving two small daughters, had married Goldman out of economic need and was just as unhappy at the arrival of another child—especially of a female, when it was her husband’s fervent wish to have a son. After several family moves and haphazard schooling in German and Russian, Goldman was taken to St. Petersburg, where at the age of thirteen she was forced by the family’s poverty to work long exhausting hours in glove and corset factories. She nevertheless found time to read German, French, and Russian literature and to absorb the radical anticzarist ideas abroad in the Russian capital. At seventeen she came to America, where an older married sister had settled in Rochester, New York. In the late 1880s she began to attain, as an active anarchist, a charismatic speaker, and a proficient writer and editor, the notoriety which increased until her deportation by federal authorities at the end of 1919. Although her name appeared less often in American newspapers after World War I, she continued her battles against injustice everywhere in the world: at the time of her death she was in Canada collecting funds for the Spanish Loyalists whose cause she espoused. Throughout the last decade of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th century, Goldman flailed the society which knowingly espoused poverty and discrimination, and the state which exploited the laborer and turned women into minor citizens. She could be counted on to come to the defense of accused labor leaders and radicals, who were, in her opinion, usually unable to get a fair trial. In her lecture tours of the country, she spoke on such varied subjects as women’s rights, birth control, political violence, the needs of labor, prejudice in the American courts, the somber condition of American prisons, the social significance of the Continental and British playwrights, and the failure of justice in America, where she had come, like so many others, with high hopes. These are also the subjects on which Goldman wrote hundreds of pamphlets and articles. Goldman’s little monthly publication, Mother Earth, which ran from 1906 to 1917, when it was confiscated by the police, was a ‘‘gadfly’’ that stung liberals into radical thinking and furnished a voice for anarchists from coast to coast. It was consequently subject to harassment by various officials of justice departments who believed in the kind of law and order that disregarded civil rights. Besides espousing the cause of women, it was so heretical as to satirize the great evangelist Billy Sunday and to castigate the puritanical Comstocks of America who interfered with personal freedom and looked at sex as obscene. Mother Earth, ‘‘devoted to social science and literature,’’ also sought to encourage ‘‘the
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various art forms in America’’ by printing poetry, literary excerpts, and book reviews. Goldman did much personally, as well, to bring knowledge of the contemporary unpublished foreign drama to Americans through many lectures, included in The Social Significance of the Modern Drama (1914). Her autobiography, Living My Life (1931), begins with what she considers the unjust execution of anarchists following the Haymarket Riot in Chicago in 1887 and continues through various instances of perversions of justice up to the Sacco-Vanzetti case in 1920. Writing of the denial of their appeal, she grieved: ‘‘It seemed impossible that the State of Massachusetts would repeat in 1923 the crime Illinois had committed in 1887.’’ Although supporting the suffragists, Goldman knew true emancipation would come only when there evolved ‘‘a great race of women who could look liberty in the face.’’ She stressed the need for birth control, condemned the white slave traffic, and saw marriage itself as a kind of enslavement of women, a social arrangement not synonymous with love but actually antagonistic to it. She claimed woman ‘‘has been lulled into a trance by the songs of the troubadours. . . . And though she is beginning to appreciate that all this incense has befogged her mind and paralyzed her soul, she hates to give up the tribute laid at her feet by sentimental moonshiners of the past.’’ She was many years ahead of her time in advocating social, economic, and sexual freedom and equality for women—a cause which was embodied in her philosophy that individual liberty for all must prevail against the coercive state. Viewing all government as repressive—whether it be capitalistic or Marxist—she opposed the war fervor of World War I by holding anticonscription meetings, for which she and her longtime friend and comrade Alexander Berkman were sentenced to two years in prison and then deported. In spite of appeals from Americans as prominent as H. L. Mencken, Goldman was never allowed in the country again except for a brief lecture tour of 90 days in 1934. After the publication of Goldman’s My Disillusionment in Russia (1923), Mencken wrote that the U.S. sustained a loss by exiling Berkman and Goldman. He praised their books on Russia and their ability to write ‘‘simple, glowing, and excellent English,’’ and concluded America was not so rich in literary talent and honest criticism that she could afford to kick them out of the country. But an exile this heroic woman remained until her death, when the Immigration Service allowed her to be buried in Chicago’s Waldheim Cemetery near the graves of her Haymarket comrades.
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Rebel in Paradise: A Biography of Emma Goldman (1961). Duberman, M. B., Mother Earth: An Epic of Emma Goldman’s Life (1991). Eastman, M., Enjoyment of Living (1948). Shulman, A. K., ed., Red Emma Speaks (1972). Shulman, A. K., To the Barricades: The Anarchist Life of E. Goldman (1971). Shulman, A. K., ed., Traffic in Women, and Other Essays on Feminism (1971). West, R., Introduction to My Disillusionment in Russia by E. Goldman (1970). Reference works: CB (Jan.-July 1940). DAB. NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Investigative Activities of the Department of Justice, 66th Congress, Vol. 12, Document no. 153 (17 Nov. 1919). —WINIFRED FRAZER
GOODMAN, Allegra Born 1967, Brooklyn, New York Daughter of Madeleine and Lenn Goodman; married David Karger, 1989; children: Ezra, Gabriel In an address given at the1994 meeting of the Modern Language Association, Allegra Goodman acknowledged that ‘‘my most intimate and immediate audience comes from the American Jewish community, that in many ways when I write fiction I am writing not only about them but also for them.’’ In so defining both her readership and the source of her fiction, Goodman confirms her place in the evolving tradition of American Jewish writers at the close of the 20th century. These writers draw equally from the legacy of Yiddish writers such as Sholom Aleichem and I. B. Singer, who carried the burden of representation of the world of the Eastern European Jew, and those postwar American Jewish writers such as Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Grace Paley, and Cynthia Ozick, who emerged beyond ethnicity into mainstream American letters.
OTHER WORKS: Anarchism, and Other Essays (1911). My Further Disillusionment in Russia (1924). My Disillusionment in Russia (combining the two former books, 1925). Voltairine De Cleyre (1933).
As an American Jewish writer whose fiction is patterned on a long tradition of both scriptural and secular storytelling, Goodman draws from the collective memory of the past, ‘‘a memory, real or imagined’’ (from ‘‘One Down’’), to contextualize the paradoxes of contemporary Jewish life. Her fiction resounds with the ‘‘thundering of history’’ (‘‘The Four Questions’’), with Jewish history, a mythic, often religious, at times onerous, certainly contentious legacy. As a result her fiction turns on the complex tensions surrounding the place of ancient Jewish law and learning in contemporary American life and thought, tensions between old and new, between orthodoxy and reform, between piety and secularism, between Judaism and modernism, between tradition and change.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Anderson, M., My Thirty Years War (1930). Berkman, A., Bolshevik Myth (1925). Berkman, A., Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (1912). Chalberg, J., Emma Goldman: American Individualist (1991). Drinnon, R., Introduction to Anarchism, and Other Essays by E. Goldman (1969). Drinnon, R.,
Goodman has so far produced three volumes of fiction: the short story collections, Total Immersion(1989) and The Family Markowitz(1996), and a novel, Kaaterskill Falls(1998). All revolve around the preoccupations of the American Jewish community and all show the influence of this fluid tradition of Jewish letters from which she draws. In her first collection of short
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stories, Total Immersion, published when she was a twentyone-year-old Harvard College undergraduate, Goodman brings to the more established settings and climate of the urban American Jewish writer a distinctive twist, the environment of the Jewish community of Hawaii in which she was raised. For, although born to an Orthodox Jewish family in Brooklyn, Goodman moved at the age of two to Honolulu, where her parents were academics at the University of Hawaii. Hawaii forms the exotic setting for most of the stories in Total Immersion, a seemingly incongruous backdrop for Jewish ritual and custom, in which Goodman ‘‘chose to present the exotic as familiar.’’ Indeed, a sense of familiarity, of the quotidian, of daily, recognizable attitudes and responses to contemporary life permeates Goodman’s fiction, whether the setting is England, Hawaii, California, or the East Coast. In large part she draws upon the familiar as a source of satiric commentary. The Family Markowitz, in which Goodman creates recurrent, evolving characters whose lives are played out in interlocking, successive stories, is a kind of postmodern epic in which three generations of Markowitzes— from immigrant matriarch Rose to the American-born granddaughter Miriam, whose return to the orthodoxy mystifies her liberal, well-educated parents, Sarah and Ed Markowitz—struggle to maintain autonomy in the midst of the constraints of family life. Her characters and their responses to the upheavals and vagaries of contemporary life become a source of comedy. No one escapes Goodman’s ironic parody, not the tolerant academic, nor the would-be converts, nor the expatriate Anglophile, and least of all the politically correct, all targets of her satiric wit. While The Family Markowitz gets at the heart of tensions specific to American Jews at the end of the century—interfaith marriages, religious observance—it also speaks to the concerns of contemporary American life in general: the place of the aged, the intrusions of popular culture, and the possibilities for self-transformation within the politics of everyday living. Goodman’s novel, Kaaterskill Falls, on the other hand, takes us inside the conscripted and insular world of the ultra Orthodox, the followers of the Rav Elijah Kirshner, who leave the city to summer in a small community in upstate New York. With biblical resonance, Goodman contemporizes the struggle between two brothers vying for their father’s blessing. The tension between pious succession and secular transgression, while located in the dichotomous polarizing of the brothers, permeates the Jewish community at large, where the Rav believes there is ‘‘no room for compromise, there is no sustenance outside the community.’’ This position, as Goodman so acutely and compassionately articulates, inevitably is threatened by the seductions of the outside world. Goodman is among the new generation of American Jewish writers whose fiction embraces the subtleties of American postmodernity while recognizing the continuing place of Jewish history and identity. While, as Ed Markowitz concedes, ‘‘the generations are sort of flipping over’’ (‘‘Fantasy Rose’’), there is, as Andras Melish insists, finally ‘‘no way to conceive, to picture, someone else’s life. . .no way to transfer memories’’ (Kaaterskill Falls). Goodman, however, does exactly that: she recreates believable characters whose stories, past, present, and future, converge indelibly on the pages of her fiction.
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The recipient of a Whiting Foundation Writers award in 1991, the Salon magazine award for fiction, and a Mellon fellowship, Goodman received her Ph.D. in English literature from Stanford University in 1997. Her short fiction continues to appear in a number of journals and periodicals, including Commentary and the New Yorker. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. OTHER WORKS: ‘‘Writing Jewish Fiction In and Out of the Multicultural Context,’’ in Daughters of Valor: Contemporary Jewish American Women Writers (1997). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Jewish American Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical and Critical Sourcebook (1994). Other references: Baltimore Jewish Times (4 Jan. 1991). Commentary 106 (Dec. 1998). Forward (8 Dec. 1989, 6 Nov. 1992). NYT (21 Aug. 1998). NYTBR 103 (30 Aug. 1998). Poets and Writers 26 (Sept./Oct. 1998). PW 245 (27 July 1998). Studies in American Jewish Literature 11 (1992). Vogue (Aug. 1998). —VICTORIA AARONS
GOODMAN, Ellen (Holtz) Born 11 April 1941, Newton, Massachusetts Daughter of Jackson J. and Edith Wienstein Holtz; married Anthony Goodman, 1963 (divorced 1971); Robert Levey, 1982; children: Katherine Syndicated columnist Ellen Holtz Goodman has lived all but a short period of her life in the Boston area and uses her family, neighbors, politics, the daily news, and social change as her subject matter. She is an observer and commentator who tries to make sense of the world; she explores and questions, and although she offers opinions, she does not always present answers. Goodman’s social conscience and curiosity were honed in a family that valued an individual’s decisions, and political action. Her father was a lawyer and politician who served as a state legislator while in his twenties and later ran for Congress. Her mother, a homemaker, had a strong sense of the importance of fostering the individual. Goodman and her sister, Jane, who became an architecture critic and journalist, were encouraged to do whatever they wanted to do, but doing well in school was expected. Goodman grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts, attended the private Buckingham School in Cambridge, and graduated cum laude from Radcliffe College with a degree in history (1963). A week after graduation she married a medical student and moved to New York, where she was hired at Newsweek as a researcher. All the researchers were women, Goodman notes. Only men received reporter jobs, a fact she found disturbing. During her two years at the magazine, she did some freelance work for the New York weeklies.
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When the couple moved to Michigan, Goodman became a reporter for the Detroit Free Press. They returned to Boston in 1967, where she was hired by the Boston Globe and assigned to the women’s pages. Her daughter was born shortly after. When she divorced in 1971, Goodman’s ties with Boston, family, and friends tightened. In 1972 she began her column, ‘‘At large,’’ in the Globe. It attracted broad readership, and by the 1990s was syndicated in over 440 newspapers. Goodman chronicles the changing society in which she lives and tries to make sense of a complicated world. Her 750-word column is like a conversation with a friend whose opinions are open-ended and who waits for your response. After receiving the Pulitzer Prize in 1980, Goodman wrote that she ‘‘had a sense of how much things had changed. Ten years ago, what I write about—values, relationships, women’s issues, families, change— would not have been taken seriously by the newspaper world.’’ Later, in the same piece she wrote that her articles ‘‘deal with life-and-death issues in my own home and in the Congress. They discuss matters which are both public and private, argued in the bedroom and the boardroom, the kitchen and the court: love, work, sexuality, children, war, peace. . . .The one constant is a desire to find a context and a meaning.’’ In 1973-74 Goodman spent a year at Harvard University as a Nieman Fellow, researching the dynamics of social change in personal lives. Subsequently, between 1975 and 1978 she interviewed more than 150 people. The result was Turning Points: How People Change Through Crisis and Commitment (1979), a book about how change affects people’s lives, particularly the changes brought about by a reexamination of traditional sex roles. It is her only publication that is not a compilation of previously published newspaper columns. Goodman has won a myriad of awards, including the New England Women’s Press Association Woman of the Year Award in 1968, the Catherine L. O’Brien Award in 1971, the Media Award of the Massachusetts Commission on Status of Women in 1974, and the New England Women’s Press Association Columnist of the Year award in 1975. In 1980 she won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary, as well as the Distinguished Writing Award from the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the Headliners Best Local Column award. In 1988 Goodman received the Hubert H. Humphrey Civil Rights award for dedication to the cause of equality. Goodman continued to write her column throughout the 1990s, garnering many more awards, including the President’s Award from the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1993. She also taught at Stanford University in 1996 as the first Lorry I. Lokey Visiting Professor in Professional Journalism. Goodman’s voice continued to be one of moderation, and she deplored what she saw as the polarization of politics in the 1990s, which pitted extreme left against extreme right. She insisted such clear-cut views were not the norm for most Americans, who were ambivalent, undecided, or open to question on many major issues. Goodman noted that she was often asked to participate in call-in radio shows where she was expected to give the women’s point of view, as if she could represent all female America. But personal
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insight, not grand pronouncement, was what was most important to her. In the late 1990s she began work on a nonfiction book about women and friendship, coauthored with the novelist Patricia O’Brien. She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts with her husband. OTHER WORKS: Close to Home (1979). At Large (1981). Keeping in Touch (1985). Making Sense (1989). Value Judgments (1993). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Braden, M., She Said What? Interviews with Women Newspaper Columnists (1993). Mills, K., A Place in the News (1988). Reference works: CA (1982). Biographical Dictionary of American Newspaper Columnists (1995). WWC (1989-90). Other references: Boston Women (Winter 1990). Christian Science Monitor (10 Nov. 1981). Harvard Independent (9-15 Apr. 1981). Harvard (Mar.-Apr. 1979). Utne Reader (Jan.-Feb. 1999). —JANET M. BEYER, UPDATED BY ANGELA WOODWARD
GOODSELL, Willystine Born 8 January 1870, Wallingford, Connecticut; died 31 May 1962, New York, New York Daughter of Jacob and Jennie Clark Goodsell Willystine Goodsell received her education at the Welch Normal Training School, New Haven, Connecticut, and Teachers College, Columbia University. Her arrival at Columbia was shortly preceded by that of John Dewey. Goodsell’s early interest in philosophy is evident in her master’s dissertation, ‘‘The Relation of the Individual to Society in the Social Theories of Rousseau’’ (1906). The following year William James came to Columbia to give a highly successful lecture series on pragmatism. Heavily influenced by Dewey and James, Goodsell’s first book, The Conflict of Naturalism and Humanism (1910), is a history of philosophy tracing its relation to educational theory and practice in different periods. In a concise, clear style Goodsell traces the division between humanists and natural scientists from the Renaissance, a period dominated by the humanists, to 1910, an era when scientists were predominant in the U.S. In a final chapter, Goodsell proposes a pragmatic solution to the conflict, one which relates science (testing of knowledge) and the humanities (study of the past) to the appreciation of the depth and beauty of everyday human life. Goodsell’s next book, A History of the Family as a Social and Educational Institution (1915, revised 1939), established the direction the rest of her books were to take. Her interest now moved toward anthropological or sociological topics. With The Education of Women (1923), feminist overtones became obvious. With the hopes that more attention would be given to the improvement of the education of women, Goodsell published Pioneers of
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Women’s Education in the United States: Emma Willard, Catherine Beecher, and Mary Lyon (1931). In this volume Goodsell summarizes women’s education before 1820, provides detailed biographical information on each woman studied, and also includes selections written by all three. A History of Marriage and the Family (1935) is a meticulously detailed study of the family from primitive times through those of the patriarchal Greeks and Romans, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance. Because of the dominant cultural influence, the English family is studied in detail from the 17th to the 20th centuries. The greatest attention is given to the American family from colonial times to the present. An entire chapter outlines the difficulties of modern marriage, but Goodsell expresses optimism for improved family relationships. Her final chapter deals with governmental and social aid that may help ‘‘in the interest of [family] stability and happiness.’’ Since Goodsell expresses one of her goals as being ‘‘to reveal existing injustices and evils in the marriage relation,’’ she deserves to be ranked as an early feminist. At the same time, the breadth and scope of her writing—philosophical, historical, and critical—earn her a place among scholars in the fields of the history of education and social anthropology. —CAROLE M. SHAFFER-KOROS
GOODWIN, Doris Kearns Born 4 January 1943, Rockville Center, New York Daughter of Michael Alouisius and Helen Witt Miller Kearns; married Richard Goodwin, 1975; children: Joseph, Michael, and Richard. Doris Kearns Goodwin is a critically praised writer of historical-biographical books. She is cited for her ability to capture the private details of her subjects’ lives, to show how their personal histories affected their leadership style and ultimately were intertwined with the events that occurred during their period of governance. Goodwin was born in 1943. Her father, a state bank examiner, instilled in her a love of baseball that would later become the theme for her memoir of the 1950s, Wait Till Next Year (1997). In 1964 Goodwin received her B.A. from Colby College in Waterville, Maine, and attended the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard on a full scholarship, earning her Ph.D. in 1968. In 1967 she worked as special assistant to W. Willard Wirtz, the secretary of labor, as part of a White House fellowship. While working at the White House Goodwin met President Lyndon Johnson, with whom she had a long and close relationship. She soon became Johnson’s special assistant and, through many late-night conversations toward the end of his term, learned much about him and his life. After Johnson’s term ended in 1969, Goodwin visited him often in Austin, Texas, to assist him in writing his memoir. The resulting book, called The Vantage
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Point: Perspectives of the Presidency, 1963-1969, was published in 1971, yet it does not include many of the personal details Goodwin had discovered through her association with the former president. Many of these more intimate facts are documented, however, in Goodwin’s first book, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, which was released in 1976. The book is typical of her work in the way it describes details from her subject’s life, such as Johnson’s relationship with his parents, and demonstrates how these traits affected his policymaking and method of governing. In 1975 she married Richard Goodwin, an attorney, political consultant, and former speechwriter for Presidents Johnson and Kennedy. Goodwin began to research a book on John F. Kennedy in 1977, which was intended as a biography but blossomed into a history of the Kennedy and Fitzgerald families that took a decade to research and write. The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: An American Saga, published in 1987, contains information to which Goodwin was able to gain access partly through her husband’s connection to the family. She delved into a great many unpublished papers and conducted interviews with John F. Kennedy’s mother, Rose. Goodwin’s account, which starts with the birth of John’s maternal grandfather and ends with the Kennedy inauguration, was lauded by reviewers for its mass of background information and fascinating character studies. A 1990 ABC-TV miniseries, The Kennedys of Massachusetts, was adapted from the book. Goodwin next tackled the Roosevelts in No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt; The Home Front in World War II, which came out in 1994 and won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for History. It focuses on the couple’s private lives and especially the relationship between the Roosevelts themselves as well as with their associates. Structured more like a novel than her previous books and including some previously unpublished material, No Ordinary Time is sympathetic to its subjects, as is all of Goodwin’s work, yet does not ignore the darker sides of the time or the couple’s lives. Goodwin is known for her objectivity, despite her obvious admiration for—and sometimes personal relationship with—the people about whom she writes. Each book is cited for its painstaking research and inclusion of information that adds to the public record. Critics also applaud her emphasis on her subjects’ relationships with their colleagues, friends, and family, shedding light on how history unfolded at the time. Her accessible writing style has made her books popular with the general public as well as historians, and most titles became bestsellers. Wait Till Next Year, Goodwin’s memoir of her childhood as a Brooklyn Dodger fan, describes the events of the 1950s as filtered through her recollections. Despite being a memoir of her own life, Goodwin bolstered her account with research, including interviews and a review of her extensive collection of carefully filledin scorecards. This book met with mixed reviews. Florence King in American Spectator, for example, faulted her reliance on scorecards and interviews rather than her own remembrances, writing, ‘‘Goodwin brings nothing to the task except the maniacal thoroughness of her scorecard technique.’’ Ann Hulbert, in the New York Times Book Review, disagrees: ‘‘Goodwin recounts an exemplary coming-of-age story from an often maligned era.’’
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Goodwin has written articles for many publications including the New Yorker and New Republic, and contributed to Marc Pachter’s Telling Lives: The Biographer’s Art, published in 1979. She is a guest commentator on NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and other programs, briefly appeared as a television hostess in Boston during the 1970s, and was featured in the 1994 Ken Burns documentary, Baseball. Goodwin has taught at Harvard, was assistant director of the university’s Institute of Politics, and held various political posts early in her career. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference Works: CANR 53 (1997). CBY (1997). Other references: American Spectator (Apr. 1998). Journal of American History (Sept. 1995, Dec. 1995). National Review (21 Nov. 1994). NYTBR (26 Oct. 1997). People (31 Oct. 1994). —KAREN RAUGUST
GOODWIN, Maud Wilder Born 5 June 1856, Ballston Spa, New York; died 5 February 1935, New York, New York Daughter of John and Delia A. Wilder; married Almon Goodwin, 1879 Maud Wilder Goodwin did not begin to write until the age of thirty-three and evidently ceased to write for publication at sixtythree, 16 years before her death. Her 30-year literary career was productive and varied, but her motivation remains unclear, for few details of her life are recorded. Goodwin clearly writes for a young or at least naive audience. Her phrasing is frequently quaint, formally correct, and occasionally intimate. Her interest in the past seems in part nostalgic, but she is at the same time a solid if occasionally sentimental scholar. The Colonial Cavalier (1894) contains scholarly notes as well as a ‘‘List of Authorities’’ on Southern life before the American Revolution. The account is entertaining, factual, and suggestive of a mind actively interpreting colonial history. Historic New York, which Goodwin edited in four volumes in 1898, is also competent history and hints at a society and a past that fascinated Goodwin in much the same way these forces captivated her contemporary, Edith Wharton. Goodwin’s finest factual work is her biography of her relative, Dolly Madison (1896). It is affectionate, generous, and occasionally sentimental, but throughout Goodwin presents impressive insights along with sound evidence and numerous quotations from Dolly Madison’s letters and from those of her friends. Despite its dated qualities, it is a penetrating study of one woman by another and still seems the best available biography of Dolly Madison. Goodwin’s historical novels are generally mechanical, predictable, and forced. The Head of a Hundred (1895) chronicles the
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courtship of Dr. Humphrey Huntoon, who flees England for Virginia in the first years of the 17th century because of a silly misunderstanding with his lover, Elizabeth Romney, who soon also flees to ‘‘James City.’’ The conversation is particularly stilted and pretentious. Sir Christopher (1901) is an unfortunate sequel; but Goodwin’s attempt to reconcile Catholic and Protestant beliefs and her honest treatments of anti-Catholic sentiment in colonial Maryland are interesting. White Aprons (1896) is a similar romance, set during Bacon’s rebellion in Virginia in 1676, and Veronica Playfair (1909) is clearly from the same pen; set in England during the reign of George I, the novel follows the trials of a hero and heroine who are ultimately secretly married at Alexander Pope’s villa. Goodwin’s impressive contemporary novels reveal a sharp wit and penetration of character, while her historical fiction of the same time is pedantic and formulaic. Flint (1897) is the study of a misperceived young man, Jonathan Edwards Flint, who appears harsh and cold but is actually generous and reflective. Goodwin’s treatment of the independent woman he finally marries, Winifred Anstice, is compelling. While Flint is still slow and rough, Four Roads to Paradise (1904) and Claims and Counterclaims (1905) are accomplished novels of wit and satire. The latter is at times coincidental and farfetched, but it is psychologically sound and sprinkled with epigrammatic wit. Four Roads to Paradise is certainly Goodwin’s best work. The author studies several characters with delicate penetration, and various figures come to the fore, gain the reader’s sympathies—or at least understanding—and then fade properly into the background, as the most admirable characters dominate the end of the book. Thus the young, finally self-centered Episcopal priest, Stuart Walford, controls the first chapters as he follows Bishop Alton’s advice and defers his desire to minister to the lepers at Molokai; the bishop, wise in the ways of the world, tells him that ‘‘Selflove. . .has many forms. One of them is altruism.’’ To learn the world he thinks he wants to reject, Walford goes to New York and then to Europe, where much of the novel takes place, and is attracted to Anne Blythe, the bishop’s niece. Initially selfish, Anne is, unlike Walford, a basically good character who befriends by stages her dead husband’s illegitimate child and finally marries her shy, reflective, honorable lawyer, Fleming. Even Goodwin’s minor characters are realistically developed. This fine novel reminds one most of Edith Wharton in its deft handling of characters and their society. Along with Goodwin’s Dolly Madison it perhaps best deserves to be read today. OTHER WORKS: Open Sesame! Poetry and Prose for School Days (edited by Goodwin, 1889). Dutch and English on the Hudson (1919). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: A Dictionary of American Authors (1904). A Guide to Historical Fiction (1914). A Guide to Historical Literature (1936). —CAROLINE ZILBOORG
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GORDON
GORDON, Caroline
innocence, while religion became a means of confronting the abyss, a terrifying image permeating her fiction.
Born 6 October 1895, Merry Mount Farm, Kentucky: died April 1981 Also writes under: Caroline Tate Daughter of James M. and Nancy Meriwether Gordon; married Allen Tate, 1924 (divorced 1959); children Nancy
The literary milieu at Benfolly Farm appears in several works, particularly The Strange Children (1951), Gordon’s first novel after her conversion to Catholicism in 1947. It traces the search for grace in a fallen world. The central intelligence of nineyear-old Lucy Lewis records the despair and materialism of the skeptical intellectual world and the need for an order only religious belief can provide. As Lucy struggles with her own growing religious awareness, her artist-parents Stephen and Sarah perceive their own shallowness after their friend Kevin Reardon converts to Catholicism. When a compromised poet runs away with Reardon’s mad wife, Reardon’s disciplined belief provides a vision of the mysterious nature of grace. In the last passage, Stephen Lewis recognizes in Reardon’s Catholicism a possible salvation for the cynical strange children of the modern South and of all the ‘‘desert’’ countries.
Born on her mother’s ancestral farm in the Kentucky tobacco region near Tennessee, the setting for much of her fiction, Caroline Gordon was tutored by her father until she was ten. She then attended his all-boys classical school. In 1916 she received a B.A. from Bethany College in West Virginia. After teaching high school until 1920, she became a journalist for the Chattanooga News. While there she met many of the Agrarians, including Allen Tate. Gordon readily identified with the Agrarians’ traditional conservative values, favoring a stable, hierarchical society based on Christianity over an urban, technological society. Gordon became deeply involved in Tate’s literary world; both spent much of the late 1920s in Europe on Guggenheim Fellowships. The Tates raised their daughter Nancy at Benfolly Farm, Tennessee, entertaining many artistic visitors. Although Gordon and Tate were divorced in 1959, in 1960 they coedited a second edition of their successful and influential The House of Fiction: An Anthology of the Short Story (1950, 1960). Both this and Gordon’s How to Read a Novel (1957) adapt many New Critical poetic principles to fiction. Gordon has spent much of her life as professor and writer-inresidence at various colleges. She worked on what she characterized as her ‘‘last’’ novel in the years before her death in 1981, a portion of which, The Glory of Hera, appeared in book form in 1972. Gordon’s short stories and novels, long out of print, were reprinted in the early 1980s. As Ford Madox Ford’s literary secretary, Gordon finished her first novel, Penhally (1931, reissued 1991), acclaimed by Ford as ‘‘the best novel that has been produced in modern America.’’ It chronicles one hundred years of antebellum Southern culture by tracing the decline of the Penhally estate and the Llewellyn family. The ancient virtues violently conflict with the inevitability of change. In Aleck Maury, Sportsman (1934, reissued 1996), her most popular novel, an old classics teacher, modeled on Gordon’s father, spends every spare moment hunting and fishing. Maury’s ritualistic, almost sacramental devotion to sport allows him a dignity rarely possible in the chaos of the wasteland world which has replaced the Old South. Only the quest for love—apparent in many of Gordon’s women characters, like Maury’s wife Molly— provides a similar dignity. Gordon’s fiction of the late 1930s and the 1940s continued to develop her ancestral, regional material; it also reflected a growing emphasis on sophisticated knowledge in contrast to primitive
The salvation that is possible in The Strange Children becomes real in The Malefactors (1956). Tom Claibourne, a nonproducing poet, must reevaluate the direction of his life after he leaves his wife Vera for the ambitious and intellectual poet, Cynthia Vail. Through the influence of Catherine Pollard, a symbol of Christian charity, Claibourne discovers that he is bound nowhere unless he can return to his wife. While in her earlier work the classical Greek world subtly patterned Gordon’s vision, in The Malefactors it is the archetypal world of Jungian psychology that prepares for Claibourne’s religious conversion, reversing the pattern of action in Gordon’s fiction from death and destruction to grace. Gordon’s worth as a novelist has been too often ignored by critics. She is more frequently identified as coeditor of The House of Fiction and as Allen Tate’s former wife than as a creative artist in her own right. In addition, because her work is usually set in the South and because of her close association with the Agrarians, critics have tended to dismiss her too easily as a regionalist. Her talent for dealing with religious themes and with the themes of male/female relationships and the possibility of creativity in a wasteland world has been virtually overlooked by critics who miss the broader implications of the South in her fiction. Though Gordon is enjoyed a renewal of interest in the 1980s, her novels, particularly The Strange Children and The Malefactors, have not received the attention they deserve. She was as fine a fiction writer as Robert Penn Warren and Allen Tate and should share equally in the acclaim so often accorded the Agrarians and New Critics as the generators of the Southern Renascence.
OTHER WORKS: None Shall Look Back (1937, reissued 1992). The Garden of Adonis (1937). Green Centuries (1941, reissued 1992). The Women on the Porch (1944, reissued 1993). The Forest of the South (1945). A Good Soldier: A Key to the Novels of Ford Madox Ford (1957). Old Red, and Other Stories (1963). The Collected
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Stories of Caroline Gordon (1981, reissued 1999). The Southern Mandarins: Letters of Caroline Gordon to Sally Wood, 1924-1937 (1984). A Literary Friendship: Correspondence Between Caroline Gordon and Ford Madox Ford (1999). The papers of Caroline Gordon (manuscripts and correspondence) are housed at the Princeton University Library. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Boyle, A. M., The Unendurable Feminine Consciousness: A Study of the Fiction of Caroline Gordon (dissertation, 1984). Brinkmeyer, R. H., Three Catholic Writers of the Modern South (1985). Chappell, C. M., The Hero Figure and the Problem of Unity in the Novels of Caroline Gordon (dissertation, 1987). Fraistat R. A., Caroline Gordon as Novelist and Woman of Letters (1984). Golden, R. E., and M. C. Sullivan, Flannery O’Connor and Caroline Gordon: A Reference Guide (1977). Hall, T. R., Escape from the Abyss: Order in the Fiction of Caroline Gordon (dissertation, 1986). Henderson, M. K. B., Network of Resemblances: Fictional Technique in Caroline Gordon’s The Malefactors (dissertation, 1984). Jones, P. W., ‘‘The Captive’’: Caroline Gordon’s Telling of the Jennie Wiley Legend (thesis, 1989). Jonza, N. N., A Hunger for Home: The Life and Art of Caroline Gordon (dissertation, 1993). Jonza, N. N., The Underground Stream: The Life and Art of Caroline Gordon (1995). Landess, T. H., The Short Fiction of Caroline Gordon: A Critical Symposium (1972). Makowsky, V. A., Caroline Gordon: A Biography (1989). McDowells, F. P., Caroline Gordon (University of Minnesota Pamphlet, 1966). Pfohl, D. M., The Search for Identity in the Fiction of Caroline Gordon and Robert Penn Warren (thesis, 1989). Smrcka, T. S., Revisioning the South: Caroline Gordon and the Female Pastoral (dissertation, 1997). Stuckey, W. J., Caroline Gordon (1972). Waldron, A., Close Connections: Caroline Gordon and the Southern Renaissance (1987). Weaks, M. L., A ‘‘Little Postage Stamp of Native Soil’’ in the Upper South: The Poetry and Fiction of Caroline Gordon, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren (1992). Reference works: American Women Fiction Writers, 1900-1960 (1997). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Short Story Criticism (1994). TCA, TCAS. Other references: Criticism (Winter 1956). Renascence (Fall 1963). SR (Summer 1946, Autumn 1949, Spring 1971, 1980). Southern Quarterly (1990). —SUZANNE ALLEN
GORDON, Mary Catherine Born 8 December 1949, Far Rockaway, New York Daughter of David G. and Anna Gagliano Gordon; married James Brain, 1974 (annulled); Arthur Cash, 1979; children: Anna, David Described as a ‘‘humane, masterly novelist,’’ Mary Catherine Gordon combines a rich moral imagination with a prose style
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whose sentences ‘‘burst with metaphoric energy.’’ Writing within the contexts of Roman Catholicism, the Irish-American experience, and feminism, Gordon’s work poses increasingly complex problems, often centering on the struggle to balance the competing claims of the sacred and the profane, of particular and universal love, of the need for personal freedom and connection. ‘‘The Church of my childhood that was so important for my formation as an artist,’’ she noted in 1988, ‘‘is now gone.’’ Although she regrets the loss of connections with the past—in The Other Side (1989) the power of the Irish immigrant experience has been dissipated by the fourth generation—she often looks to children as the hope of the future. The only child of an Italian-Irish Catholic mother and a Jewish father who converted to Catholicism, Gordon attended Catholic schools in Valley Stream, Long Island. Her father died when she was seven, but his faith and commitment to the intellectual life were long-lasting influences. In 1967 Gordon entered Barnard College (B.A. 1971), where Elizabeth Hardwick encouraged her to write fiction rather than poetry. After Barnard, Gordon earned an M.A. (1973) at Syracuse University and began work toward a Ph.D. in English. While teaching freshman composition at Dutchess Community College in Poughkeepsie, New York, she began writing Final Payments (1978), which was accepted for publication after Hardwick suggested she change the point of view from third to first person. Gordon’s work often chronicles the attempt to find a moral center in a decentered age. In Final Payments, Isabel Moore, an Irish-American woman, puts her own life aside to minister to her ailing father. When he dies, she reenters the world and adapts to the new sexual mores, but seeks expiation for the guilt this causes her by taking responsibility for the care of her father’s former housekeeper, a selfish and difficult woman. Ultimately, Isabel frees herself from the moral imperative of ‘‘loving the unlovable’’ by making a less costly but hopefully final payment. The demands of charity are also addressed in Men and Angels (1985) but with greater complexity and outside the Catholic context. Anne Foster, who is not religious, hires Laura, a fundamentalist Christian, to care for her children while she works on an exhibition catalog. Anne tries to like Laura, but cannot; Laura, out of affection, plots Anne’s religious conversion. The chapters alternate between Anne’s and Laura’s points of view, providing a compelling counterpoint between and among the requirements of the flesh and the spirit. Gordon’s characters are also faced with the social expectations of women in a patriarchal society. Anne struggles to balance motherhood with scholarship, Isabel to escape the grudging self-sacrifice of the caretaker role. In The Company of Women (1980) five women are united in friendship by their devotion to a conservative priest, Father Cyprian, who grooms Felicitas, the daughter of one of the women, to be his intellectual heir. At college, however, Felicitas joins another company, also led by a male guru, a professor who believes in free love. When Felicitas
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becomes pregnant, she returns to the company of women, though no longer an acolyte, and her child becomes the group’s hope for the future. Good Boys and Dead Girls (1991), a collection of more than two dozen reviews, essays, and journal entries written between 1978 and 1989, manifests clearly what the Economist’s reviewer called Gordon ’s ‘‘fierce intelligence’’ and her own struggle to define the moral life. Her ambivalence toward Catholicism—a rejection of authoritarianism and patriarchy but an acceptance of mystery—as well as her insights into contemporary social and literary issues are evident here. The title essay extends Leslie Fiedler’s observation that in literature by American males, men avoid domesticity by heading for the frontier in the company of other men. In a review, Wendy Martin pointed out antinomianism, ‘‘the conviction that subjective experience is as important as religious doctrine,’’ not only explains this phenomenon more fully but also reflects Gordon’s own tendency to trust experience over dogma. Gordon has also written introductions for reprints of writings by Virginia Woolf, Stevie Smith, and Edith Wharton. Gordon’s short fiction, most of it collected in Temporary Shelter (1987), has been received somewhat less enthusiastically than her novels and criticism. Several of the short stories, including the title story, are memorable, however, as are the three novellas included in The Rest of Life (1993). The Shadow Man: A Daughter’s Search for Her Father (1997) presents Gordon’s quest to ‘‘know’’ her father, who died when she was seven years of age. The book details the results of the author’s agonizing journey and the surprising results of her research. The man with whom Gordon had spent most of her first seven years (father and daughter were inseparable) was not the Harvard-educated intellectual she believed him to be, but rather a high school dropout and rabid anti-Semite who had been supported almost exclusively by his disabled wife, a victim of polio. Gordon summarizes her feelings: ‘‘I confronted that ghost, and he is both more terrible than I had thought and not as terrible as I had feared. And I think in giving up an idealized father, I stopped being, most importantly, a daughter.’’ Praised by critics as ‘‘erotic and highly intelligent,’’ Spending: A Utopian Divertimento (1998) takes the protagonist, Monica Szabo, on a ride to the heights of the art world. Szabo, a painter in her fifties, jokingly laments in a public lecture that female artists are rarely the beneficiaries of a ‘‘muse’’—one who offers physical and financial support to the career artist. When a handsome, wealthy audience member challenges her statement and offers his services, she is launched into the most productive period of her career. True to the religious overtones of Gordon’s work, Szabo’s rise to fame results from a set of eight paintings that depict Christ’s condition after removal from the cross as postcoital rather than dead. In order to create her subject in realistic terms, Szabo enthusiastically embarks on appropriate research. If there is a message here, it is that despite her lifelong quest to experience ‘‘the REAL thing’’ in life, Szabo ultimately learns that the real things in life are some of the simplest. Mary McCarthy, Ford Madox Ford, J. F. Powers, and Virginia Woolf are among the writers Gordon admires, John Updike
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among those she finds dispensable. Although a few critics find some of her plotting a bit contrived, some of her characters lacking in development, and some of her prose uneven, Gordon’s intelligence, her deep and passionate moral sense, and her keen eye for nuance and detail have earned her a large following among the reading public. She received the Janet Kafka Prize for Fiction in 1979 and 1982 and her books have been widely translated. She is currently the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English at Barnard College and teaches there three times a week, stating that her students give her hope.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cooper-Clark, D., ed., Interviews with Contemporary Novelists (1986). Day, F., ed., Mary Gordon (1996). Reference works: CA (1981). CBY (1981). DLB (1980). DLBY (1981). FC (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: America (14 May 1994, 15 Aug. 1998). Christian Century (20 Nov. 1985). Commentary (June 1985). Commonweal (12 Aug. 1988, 17 May 1991). Critique (Summer 1986). Cross Currents (Summer/Fall 1987). Economist (15 June 1991). Essays in Literature (Spring 1990). Literary Review (Fall 1988). Newsweek (1 Apr. 1985). NYTBR (31 Mar. 1985, 28 Apr. 1991, 8 Aug. 1993). Ploughshares (Fall 1997). Poets and Writers (July-Aug. 1997). PW (8 Aug. 1994). Sewanee Review (Spring 1979). Signs (Autumn 1988). Time (27 May 1996). TLS (1 Sept. 1978). —ANGELA DORENKAMP, UPDATED BY REBECCA CONDIT
GORDON, Ruth Born 30 October 1896, Wollaston, Massachusetts; died August 1985 Daughter of Clinton and Anna T. Ziegler Jones; married Gregory Kelly, 1927 (died); Garson Kanin, 1942 An only child, Ruth Gordon grew up in a small New England town. At eighteen, she went to New York hoping for a career on the stage and the next year won her first professional role as Nibs in Maude Adams’s 1915 production of Peter Pan. Several years of playing ingenues in touring companies followed, until Guthrie McClintic cast her as the shy spinster, Bobbie, in the 1927 Broadway production of Saturday’s Children. This was succeeded by a long series of varied roles. After the death of her first husband she married Garson Kanin, with whom she wrote and produced plays. The two of them also coauthored scripts for three films: A Double Life (1947), The Marrying Kind (1952), and Pat and Mike (1952).
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Her writing is largely based on autobiographical material and reflects a strong theatrical sense. Her plays are comic in structure, revealing a good ear for the clever line, but the total effect evolves more from situation than from witty dialogue. Over 21 (1944) was derived from her early marital experience with Kanin, when he served in the army during World War II. The leading characters— Gordon herself, Kanin, Herbert Bayard Swope, and a number of army acquaintances—were easily recognized by New York audiences. Topical references, amusing situations, and her own highly stylized characterization combined to make it a Broadway Success. In 1939 Gordon found a diary she had kept as a stagestruck high school girl and at the suggestion of Edward Sheldon, used it as the basis for several articles published in Forum and the Atlantic Monthly. She returned to the material again for another successful comedy, Years Ago (1946). In this play, the setting is Wollaston, the characters are called by their actual names, and the only alteration of fact is in the compression of time to fit the dramatic form. Gordon’s third play, The Leading Lady (1948), written with Kanin, was not as popular as the other two. Here, too, she utilizes events from her own life to demonstrate a favorite thesis, namely, the necessity for an individual to be self-sufficient. The plot, however, is thin, the scenes so romanticized as to lack substance, and, except for a nostalgic portrait of Alexander Woollcott, the characters are sentimental recreations of companions she knew in her years of touring companies. Gordon wrote several autobiographical books, including Myself Among Others (1971) and My Side: The Autobiography of Ruth Gordon (1976, reissued 1986), are collections of reminiscences, mostly of persons and events connected with Gordon’s professional life. The first, written in a rapid-fire, staccato style, is a series of brief sketches, personal glimpses of well known people, descriptions of places, and comments on the world at large, punctuated with observations directed to the reader. It is essentially a self-portrait revealing an energetic woman who unashamedly enjoys the fact she has achieved her ambitions and has no intention of retiring into a comfortable oblivion.
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OTHER WORKS: Years Ago (1946). Ruth Gordon: An Open Book (1980). Shady Lady (1981, 1983). Children of Darkness: A True Story (1988).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Groutt, K. M., ‘‘A Metahealth Analysis of the Lives of Gwendolyn Brooks, Dorothy Day, Ruth Gordon, Anaïs Nin, and Georgia O’Keeffe’’ (dissertation, 1986). Reference works: CB (April 1943, April 1972). Other references: Cinema (1976). NYTM (12 Jan. 1947, 5 Oct. 1969). Ruth Gordon: My Side (audiocassette, 1970, 1979). Ruth Gordon Talks About Greta Garbo and Her Own Life (audio, 1977). —HELENE KOON
GORNICK, Vivian Born14 June 1935, Brooklyn, New York Daughter of Bess and Louis Gornick; married (divorced) Vivian Gornick earned a B.A. from the City College of the City University of New York in 1957 and an M.S. from New York University in 1960. Like many of her female writing colleagues, she began her career as a teacher, as an instructor in English at the State University of New York at Stony Brook (1966-67), then at Hunter College of the City University of New York (1967-68). Periodically throughout her career she has had one-year guest teaching appointments, such as one at Yale University, where she taught literature from a feminist perspective. Her writing career began with a position as staff writer for the Village Voice in New York City from 1969 to 1977; since then she has worked freelance. She is a member of P.E.N. and the Authors Guild.
My Side is a vivid recounting of Gordon’s life, although not in chronological order. The emphasis is almost entirely on her professional experience, and the personal elements are related only as they relate to the theater. She is frank, almost brutally honest in discussing her early struggles and failures, her marriage to Kelly, her abortions, and her love affairs with Arthur Hopkins and Jed Harris. It is an uneven, at times confusing story, but it is a unique view of a kaleidoscopic and genuinely theatrical personality.
Gornick’s first book, Women in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness (1971), was coedited with Barbara K. Moran. She collaborated on the introduction and contributed the article ‘‘Woman As Outsider,’’ which became one of the two most widely read books from the early years of feminism’s ‘‘second wave’’ (beginning in the 1960s and, in some ways, still continuing). Along with the Sisterhood is Powerful anthology, edited by Robin Morgan, Women in Sexist Society formed a framework from which early women’s studies courses were launched.
Gordon’s work is neither profound nor timeless, but it is amusing, distinctly theatrical, and representative of an important as well as fascinating era of American drama. Yet she is probably best known as ‘‘Maude’’ from the quirky film Harold and Maude, first released in 1971, which on to become a cult classic and was released on home video in 1994.
Gornick and Moran’s book included such famous essays as ‘‘Psychology Constructs the Female’’ by Naomi Weisstein, ‘‘The Paradox of the Happy Marriage,’’ by Jessie Bernard, and ‘‘Why Are There No Great Women Artists?’’ by Linda Nochlin. Gornick’s feminism has continued to fuel her writing. She had an essay in the first regular (July 1972) issue of Ms. and continued to write for it.
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She was a regular contributor to the Nation and the New York Times Magazine, where her ‘‘Who Says We Haven’t Made a Revolution?’’ (about the feminist movement) was the cover story on 15 April 1990. Other venues for her critical or analytical pieces have been the American Scholar, Utne Reader, and the New York Times Book Review. Gornick is the author of seven other books. In Search of Ali Mahmoud: An American Woman in Egypt (1973) resulted from a sojourn in Egypt, where Gornick lived with the family of a close Arab friend of hers. The book, according to reviewer Sara Blackburn in Ms., is about a society ‘‘in which family relationships and personal friendships take precedence over the acquisition of material goods, success, and the abundance of leisure activities that some other cultures find so appealing.’’ Gornick observes and describes the sexism ‘‘that locks Egyptian women into a definition of themselves only in relation to their male counterparts.’’ Yet, as an outsider, Gornick’s chief interest during the Egyptian visit was the male society where she, as an American journalist, ‘‘could be and was. . .eagerly accepted.’’ In The Romance of American Communism (1977), Gornick reported on a year of interviewing Americans who had been involved with American Communism, either as ‘‘card-carrying members,’’ ‘‘fellow-travelers,’’ sympathizers, or simply interested observers. Gornick’s interest in the subject came from the fact that her parents had been sympathizers and that she herself had been a member of the Labor Youth League, and from her sudden realization in the mid-1970s that the subject fascinated her. ‘‘I wanted to show how human they [her interviewees] were and how varied their experiences had been,’’ Gornick said. ‘‘The great thing about them all was their tremendous vitality. They were people who cared very deeply about living and about living serious lives.’’ It wasn’t until the 1980s that the subject of the dearth of women in the scientific professions moved to the front consciousness of feminists and others concerned with the exclusion of talent from sex-biased workplaces. Gornick stepped in with a significant book, Women in Science: Portraits from a World in Transition (1983). Drawing on both careful research and interviews with 100 women of all ages who have pursued or are trying to pursue scientific careers in a variety of disciplines, Gornick produced a book that Ruth Schwartz Cowan in the Quarterly Review of Biology said was ‘‘not a sociological study of women scientists, in the sense that the sample is not random, and the questionnaire not standardized. . . .Yet it is sensitive, insightful, stimulating, and thought-provoking. . . .’’ Women in Science is full of sobering statistics on the low percentages of women earning science degrees at all academic levels, on the high unemployment rate of those same women, and on the inequity in promotion and tenure for women in science. Because of these statistics and the stories of the women themselves, Cowan recommended that the book be assigned to students to read, because it is ‘‘career counseling of the most salient sort: reminding us that there are living, breathing, painful, joyous lives
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[of women in science]. . .and that recently some of those lives have started. . .beating time to a new tune.’’ Since 1983 Gornick has published Fierce Attachments: A Memoir (1987), Approaching Eye Level (1996), from which her essay on fearing loneliness was published in Utne Reader, and The End of the Novel of Love (1997), a series of critical essays on novelists (Kate Chopin, Jean Rhys, Willa Cather, Grace Paley, George Meredith, Raymond Carver, Jane Smiley, and others) that aim to prove Gornick’s thesis that romantic love can no longer be ‘‘the center of a novel,’’ that today, ‘‘love as a metaphor is an act of nostalgia, not of discovery.’’ As the range of her publication indicates, Gornick is proof again that those who want to be writers, if they pursue it with discipline and without distraction, can succeed. By her own testimony, she was not immune to the distraction and lack of focus that so many women writers testify to, but she apparently had two means of salvation: first, she did not have the responsibilities of marriage and motherhood that seem to frequently hobble women’s career pursuits, and second, she was and is ‘‘passionate about ideas.’’ In an interview in Publisher’s Weekly she said her Yiddish teacher told her: ‘‘Ideas, dolly, ideas. Without them, life is nothing. With them, life is everything.’’ ‘‘The explosion of an idea inside you, that sudden consciousness, is everything,’’ she continued. In addition, she apparently found her life’s passion in feminism, which, in turn, helped to fuel the ideas which have driven her writing commitments.
OTHER WORKS: Essays in Feminism (1978). Women in Science: 100 Journeys into the Territory, revision of the 1983 book, with a new title (1990). Fierce Attachments (1988, reprinted 1997).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: American Literary History (Spring 1998). American Scholar (Winter 1999). Atlantic (June 1979). CA 101 (1981). Commonweal (23 Apr. 1982, 13 Feb. 1998). Ms. (July 1979, Apr. 1982, Oct. 1983, June 1987). Nation (23 Sept. 1978, 18 Nov. 1978, 6 Nov. 1995, 21 Oct. 1996, 22 Sept. 1997, 26 Jan. 1998). NYTBR (16 Jan. 1983, 2 Oct. 1983, 22 Nov. 1987, 16 Sept. 1990, 31 July 1994, 13 Oct. 1996). NYT Magazine (10 Jan. 1971, 14 Jan. 1973, 15 Apr. 1990, 2 Mar. 1997). New Yorker (9 Sept. 1996). Physics Today (Sept. 1984). Quarterly Review of Biology (June 1991). Utne Reader (Sept.-Oct. 1989, Nov.-Dec. 1996). Yale Review (Oct. 1998). —JOANNE L. SCHWEIK
GOTTSCHALK, Laura Riding See JACKSON, Laura
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GOULD, Hannah Flagg Born 3 September 1789, Lancaster, Massachusetts; died 5 September 1865, Newburyport, Massachusetts Daughter of Benjamin and Griselda A. Flagg Gould Hannah Flagg Gould lived most of her life in Newburyport, as the housekeeper and companion of her widowed father. A quiet and retiring person, she was nevertheless a central figure in the intellectual life of the community. She contributed poems to periodicals which her friends collected and published as Poems (1832). After the unexpected success of this book, she published several more volumes of poetry. Although her poems were fairly popular, her reputation did not endure. Gould was best known for her short, simple poems about the child’s world. She wrote about children because she saw them as closest to the spirit of God. In her poems, children express moral truth, and their innocence makes them receptive to the Divine Will. Gould’s interest in the child’s spiritual sensibility may have been stimulated by the work of William Blake. She copied into her commonplace book his poems about children, most notably ‘‘The Chimney Sweeper’’ and ‘‘The Tyger.’’ She quoted admiringly Blake’s remark that ‘‘my business is not to gather gold, but to make glorious shapes expressing God-like sentiments.’’ But where Blake’s children show ‘‘A world in a grain of sand / Heaven in a wild flower,’’ Gould’s children express conventional pieties. She lacked Blake’s imagination, power, and skill, and so the children in her poems are often merely pathetic rather than visionary—their insights sentimental and didactic rather than profound. Gould also wrote about the American past, contemporary manners, and nature. The historical poems are mostly about the American Revolution or America’s religious and ethnic minorities—the Quakers, the Native Americans, and others. The most famous was The Rising Monument (1840), a poem commemorating the battle of Bunker Hill, which in dignified iambic pentameter tells of the ‘‘Patriot souls / That from thy native spot arose to God. . . / This last high place by freedom’s martyrs trod.’’
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Gould’s work: ‘‘Alone I walked the ocean strand; / A pearly shell was in my hand: / I stooped and wrote upon the sand / My name— the year—the day. / As onward from the spot I passed. / One lingering look behind I cast; / A wave came rolling high and fast, / And washed my lines away.’’ Simple and moral, these poems have a gentle charm in which the didacticism is mellowed by the author’s unassuming tone.
OTHER WORKS: The Golden Vase: A Gift for the Young (1843). Gathered Leaves (1846). New Poems (1850). The Diosma (1851). The Youth’s Coronal (1851). The Mother’s Dream, and Other Poems (1853). Hymns, and Other Poems for Children (1854). Poems for Little Ones (1863). Poems for Children (1870).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Gould, B. A., The Family of Zaccheus Gould of Topsfield (1895). Reference works: Career Women of America, 1776-1840 (1972). Daughters of America (1883). NCAB. Oxford Companion of Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Poets of Essex County, Mass. (1889). Woman’s Record (1853). Other references: Baltimore Literary Monument (Nov. 1838). New England Historical and Genealogical Register (Jan. 1866). North American Review (Oct. 1835). Southern Literary Messenger (Jan. 1836). —MAUREEN GOLDMAN
GOULD, Lois Born New York, New York Also writes under: Lois Benjamin Daughter of Jo Copeland; married Robert E. Gould (divorced); another marriage (divorced); children: two
The poems about the contemporary scene focus on manners and morals. While the patriots of the historical poems were virtuous and valued honor, Gould’s contemporaries, she thought, were caught up with ‘‘progress’’ and preoccupied with wealth. As with most of her works, those poems about American history and contemporary manners are marred by excessive sentiment and didacticism.
Lois Gould’s nonfiction is both graceful and biting. A feminist who operates effectively both inside and outside the establishment, Gould celebrates the women’s movement with insight and without parochialism. A collection of her magazine pieces, Not Responsible for Personal Articles (1978), refutes the charge that feminism lacks humor; it surveys many aspects of the contemporary scene (such as charge accounts, health club addiction, burglary) with penetrating insight, thoughtfulness, and wit.
The best of Gould’s poems are the nature poems, many of which were written for the ‘‘entertainment and instruction’’ of children. The most attractive are ‘‘The Frost,’’ ‘‘The Pebble and the Acorn,’’ ‘‘The Ground Laurel,’’ and ‘‘A Name in the Sand.’’ The latter illustrates the quiet gentleness which marks the best of
Gould’s fiction depicts urban women and their feelings about themselves, often capturing them in moments of crisis. Using both realistic and fabulistic styles, Gould effectively conveys the ambience of slick people leading slick lives. The typical protagonist often struggles against this fakery. Gould is not afraid of
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happy endings; a note of restrained optimism underscores the difficulty of achieving fully realized humanity in an essentially inhumane society. Julie Messinger in Such Good Friends (1970) must face the end of the marriage that served her as a symbol of emancipation from a self-loathing traceable to one of fiction’s most damaging mothers. As her husband lies in a coma—the result of medical miscalculation during purportedly simple surgery—Julie is forced to reevaluate their relationship and their corps of glib friends. Discovering Richard’s secret record of extramarital affairs, she learns many of the women in their circle have been his partners. Once deciphered, the diary is childishly explicit, and it symbolizes the false ‘‘code’’ of their union, which has caused her to blame herself for Richard’s failures as husband and father. In the course of the novel, Julie struggles through stages of self-pity, disbelief, retaliation, and anger toward self-sufficiency and understanding. She is at least partially successful. Full of blunt sexuality, pain, humor, and truth, Such Good Friends is a remarkable book. The Lowen sisters, protagonists of Necessary Objects (1972), never seek genuine understanding; instead, they collect possessions, counting among them husbands and children. Each of the four sisters was once potentially capable and productive, but the society about them, symbolized by their father, has transformed them into cold champion consumers, destructive to themselves and to others. Less successful than Such Good Friends, this novel nevertheless offers some fascinating characterizations (Alison’s husband, Chad Batchelder, for instance) and some memorable scenes, including the staff conferences at Lowen’s department store. Gould’s Final Analysis (1974) takes its unnamed protagonist through therapy, which includes a long-term affair with her equally troubled analyst. Each of the lovers must achieve some valid sense of self before the relationship can become healthy, and their struggle to do so is touching and funny. Gould’s central character suffers Dr. Foxx’s immaturity a bit longer than is wholly believable, but she remains convincing largely through the telling passages depicting the writer coming to terms with her real work. A Sea-Change (1976) is a commanding and powerful fable tracing Jessie Waterman’s transformation from photographer’s model and model wife into the founder of a new family living a vastly different life. As Jessie comes to understand social and sexual power as it is used against her, she also learns to use it herself. Couched in mythic terms, making vivid use of sexual and name imagery, the book depicts the emergence of the new Jessie from the eye of Hurricane Minerva. It is a stunning variation of the maturation novel. Jessie’s strength and determination also effect profound changes in her daughters, Robin and Diane, and in her friend and lover, Kate. In her novels since 1980, Gould’s style has continued to move toward the fanciful, a mix of reality and fantasy. As she turns to historical figures and mythical kingdoms, her language becomes rich and sensuous, her imagery deeper and more obscure. Mythology acted out for the love of the lower middle class
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was Jorge Luis Borges’ description of the power of Juan and Eva Perón over Argentina. Referencing this observation and reflecting the magic realism of contemporary Latin American fiction, in La Presidenta (1981) Gould follows the progress of an impoverished, beautiful girl detailing her power over the media, her life with the president, her hold over her country, her untimely death. Corruption, sex, abuse, intrigue, and violence play against a background of poverty and wealth, hope and despair. Gould’s rich use of language and imagination and of history that borders on fantasy and her vivid characterizations make it possible to put truth at a distance without judgement. We know we are not meant to take the story literally. Subject to Change (1988) is entirely myth; least like Gould’s other novels, it was accurately called by one critic an ‘‘adult fairytale.’’ A childish king, a childless queen, an aging mistress, a mystical dwarf, and a wandering sorcerer inhabit a medieval kingdom. The marks of a classical fairy tale are here: magical herbs, potions, secret gardens, labyrinths, foolish battles, stolen property, and a mysterious birth. The pope and a heretical cult play a mysterious role. The dwarf Morgantina—‘‘A tiny monster. A gargoyle’’—is sent to the queen as a gift: Morgantina is the queen’s toy and she is cruelly treated. Her limbs are severed by the queen in sport, and grow back. Morgantina also has the significant power and great cunning of a sorceress. Gould’s language and syntax add to the intrigue. Questions are asked and not answered. The ending, the last line tells us, is subject to change. Medusa’s Gift (1991) combines the styles of La Presidenta and Subject to Change. Fame, sex, power, history, and myth are again the means Gould uses to tell the story. Marilyn Monroe could, but might not be the lead character, Magdalen. Medusa, the coldly beautiful Gorgon, swims in the waters off an Aegean island; her poisonous sting can be fatal. The island is the reality where playboys, power brokers, has-beens, artists, and writers live and where Magdalen comes seeking privacy. Or is it Magdalen? Filmmakers and movie historians follow, pursuing the rumor and her legend or myth. Sex, mystery, and carefully placed hints are the tools she uses to keep them interested. Medusa, the myth, strikes and apparently destroys the vulnerable Magdalen. Gould again asks questions that have no answers, plays with syntax, illuminates and hides through lush language. Gould’s eighth novel No Brakes (1995) is set at a car rally in the dark countryside of Northern Ireland. The protagonist, an American woman named MaryJo, joins her son’s best friend, Ludo, as navigator for the event. She is fascinated by the charismatic Ludo. Unable to resist the chance to spend several days with him, she embarks on an adventure that slowly reveals itself to be fraught with more danger than simply that supplied by speed. One of the participants is Princess Victoria, a rebellious British royal who may be the target of terrorists, or who may herself be hatching a plot to terrorize the family she hates. It also appears Ludo may not only be part of the plot but may be carrying explosives in his car.
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Gould is the daughter of Jo Copeland, America’s first famous fashion designer. Sixteen years after her mother’s death, Gould wrote Mommy Dressing: A Love Story, After a Fashion (1998), a retrospective of her life as the daughter of the noted designer. Brought up in wealth and with the best of everything, Gould’s parents were divorced when she was three. Her mother had a difficult time with intimacy, which comes through loud and clear in this tale. Gould was often lonely, her parents never attending a school function or birthday party. She describes Mommy Dressing as an account ‘‘of my mother; of her mysterious, splendid life in fashion; of my own sad childhood at the dark fringes of that shining world.’’ It is done with ‘‘applaudable equanimity’’ in Gould’s stunning prose, and is an interesting, honest read, regardless of whether the reader is familiar with its characters. Gould is an able writer with a fine mastery of detail and dialogue; her observations are cogent and worthy of continuing close attention. OTHER WORKS: Sensible Childbirth (with W. L. Fielding, 1962). So You Want to Be a Working Mother! (1966). X: A Fabulous Child’s Story (1978). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1990). CANR (1990). MTCW (1991). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). WW in Writers, Editors and Poets (1989). Other references: Book World (21 June 1970). Chicago Tribune Book World (19 September 1976). LJ (15 Feb. 1997). Ms. (Feb. 1978, July 1981). NYTBR (15 Oct. 1972, 14 Apr. 1974, 19 Sept. 1976, 26 Feb. 1978, 31 May 1981, 10 July 1988, 27 Oct. 1991). People (7 July 1997). PW (3 Feb. 1997). Time (4 July 1988). WPBW (24 May 1981, 17 July 1988). —JANE S. BAKERMAN, UPDATED BY JANET M. BEYER AND REBECCA C. CONDIT
GRAFTON, Sue Born 24 April 1940, Louisville, Kentucky Daughter of Cornelius W. and Vivian Harnsberger Grafton; married twice and divorced; Steven F. Humphrey; children: three Sue Grafton changed the face of fictional hardboiled private eyes with the introduction of Kinsey Milhone, a Southern California private investigator who is savvy, irreverent, and female. For this heroic adaptation of the previously male-centered genre, Grafton has been called a pioneer, and her book A Is for Alibi (1982) a ‘‘landmark novel.’’ Grafton grew up amidst detective stories in a book-filled household. Her mother, a high school chemistry teacher, was a voracious reader; and her father, an attorney, wrote one novel and three detective mysteries. Grafton has frequently acknowledged
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her father’s influence on her literary life, telling a 1995 People reporter she had ‘‘regrets’’ that she had never, as an adult, discussed writing techniques with him. She’s also been open about her parents’ alcoholism and her feeling that she coped with it by becoming self-reliant. Before Grafton turned to the detective genre, she wrote two published novels, Keziah Dane (1967) and The Lolly-Madonna War (1969). The first was reviewed as promising; the second was panned. It led, however, to a spot in Hollywood adapting The Lolly-Madonna War to a screenplay for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. From there, Grafton moved on to further screenplay writing. Over the next 12 years, she scripted episodes for a variety of television series, including the popular situation comedy Rhoda. Grafton never liked working in Hollywood, telling a 1998 Publishers Weekly interviewer she ‘‘hated the democratic process [of the industry’s writing collaborations] where everybody got a vote.’’ She especially hated the fact that nonwriters had clout over her scripts. Nevertheless, while in Hollywood, she accrued numerous screen credits, including Sex and the Single Parent (1979) and a television movie adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Caribbean Mystery (1983). In 1978 one of her teleplay cowriters, Steven F. Humphrey, became her third husband. She had married the first time while still an English major at the University of Louisville; from this marriage, she has one child. She married a second time in 1961, moved to California the next year, and has two children from that marriage. She wrote A Is for Alibi while working through the rage of a six-year child custody battle with her second husband. Routing her anger through the novel, she created a hero fashioned after herself, a twice-divorced, brunette Southern California woman. At the time, with little knowledge of the real world of a private eye, she built her alphabetical world, instead, around the character. ‘‘Being female was the one area where I felt I knew what I was talking about,’’ Grafton said in a 1990 Publishers Weekly interview, ‘‘and what I did in essence was to make myself my prime character.’’ At the end of A, Kinsey Milhone emerges from a garbage can and, at point-blank range, shoots the bad guy, who is modeled after Grafton’s second husband. Though Kinsey Milhone has aged only one year every two-and-a-half books, beginning at age 32 in 1982, the character has evolved. In fact, one of Grafton’s goals for her hero, she told the New York Times, was to ‘‘let her grow and change.’’ And she has, with new relationships and situations being informed by those in previous books. At the same time, her deepening expertise is fueled by Grafton’s aggressive research into guns, self-defense, and police procedure. Grafton has portrayed her belief that detective genre heros can be more than light entertainment. She told Publishers Weekly she sees the fictional private eye as ‘‘an observer. . .who comments on society and on family relationships and on the state of justice.’’ Indeed, as her hero moves through Santa Teresa, a town based on Santa Barbara, California, she sees the underside of society and does her utmost to clean it up—a hero’s efforts.
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Grafton has won numerous awards for her alphabetical series, including at least five Doubleday Mystery Guild awards (DMGA). The series includes A Is for Alibi (Mysterious Stranger award), B Is for Burglar (Shamus and Anthony awards, 1985), C Is for Corpse (1986), D Is for Deadbeat (1987), E Is for Evidence (DMGA, 1988), F Is for Fugitive (DMGA, Falcon award, 1989), G Is for Gumshoe (DMGA, Shamus and Anthony awards, 1990), H Is for Homicide (DMGA, American Mystery Award, 1991), I Is for Innocent (DMGA, 1992), J Is for Judgment (1993), K Is for Killer (Shamus award, 1994), L Is for Lawless (1995), M Is for Malice (1996), N Is for Noose (1998), and O Is for Outlaw (1999). Grafton’s detective books have financed a lifestyle she herself characterizes as simple but that includes a home near Santa Barbara on the California coast as well as one in Louisville, Kentucky. By 1998 Publishers Weekly was reporting close to 10 million copies of her books in print and translations into 26 languages. Her publisher, Holt, announced a one million-copy first printing for M Is for Malice, a first for the publisher as well as the author. One of the most common questions asked of Grafton is what will happen when she reaches ‘‘Z’’? That day is projected to come at about 2018; Kinsey Milhone will be 40; Grafton will be 78. Echoing the manner of her hero, Grafton answered the question on her web site in 1999: ‘‘Your guess is as good as mine on this one.’’ BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1997). CBY (1995). WW in America (1998). Other references: NYTBR (28 July 1991, 17 May 1998). People (30 Oct 1995). PW (13 Apr. 1990, 20 Apr. 1998). WSJ (18 May 1998). Web site: http://www.suegrafton.com. —JUDITH HARLAN
GRAHAM, Isabella Marshall Born 29 July 1742, Lanarkshire, Scotland; died 27 July 1814, New York, New York Daughter of John and Janet Hamilton Marshall; married John Graham, 1765 (died 1772); children: three daughters and a son
Antigua in 1772, leaving Graham with three daughters under five years and a son who was born shortly after his father’s death. Returning to Scotland, Graham taught and successfully administered a large boarding school in Edinburgh. It was upon the recommendation of Dr. Witherspoon that Graham moved to New York City and in 1789 established a school for young women. Other institutions in New York for which she was instrumental in founding and supporting were the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children (1797), the Orphan Asylum Society (1806), the Magdalen Society (for the mentally ill, 1811), the Society for the Promotion of Industry Among the Poor (1814), and the Sunday School for Adults (1814). Graham’s works do not have a consciously literary purpose; they chronicle the events of her life in the context of revolutionary America. The Power of Faith (1817), edited by Graham’s daughter, Joanna Graham Bethune, includes correspondence, meditations, journal entries, and a small number of religious poems. The volume went through four editions; the final one contains the narrative which Graham composed on her husband’s death. Her daughter also edited a second volume, The Unpublished Letters and Correspondence of Mrs. Isabella Graham (1838). All of Graham’s works appear to serve the purpose of furthering her own understanding of her faith in the practical and pressing concerns of her life. Graham’s approach to humanity and to God is clear; she sees her service to God primarily as service to others. In both devotional materials and correspondence there are signs of her familiarity with the Scriptures. Fragments of Psalms, Proverbs, Letters, and Gospels are intermingled consistently, creating a kind of biblical stream of consciousness. Graham’s correspondence with her husband between 1767 and 1772 constitutes an important body of the collected letters. Here Graham deals with a strong sense of dependence on her husband. She appears to live in the shadow that John would die, at which time she felt her life would be ‘‘insupportable.’’ The correspondence after 1772 is Graham’s record of the slow process of accepting death and resolving to make the remainder of her own life worthwhile. Another large segment of correspondence concerns Graham’s activity in initiating her work for the poor and oppressed in New York. The rationale, plans, and organization of a variety of institutions are submitted to local public officials to enlist the needed funds and support.
During Isabella Marshall Graham’s early years her intense interest in religion brought her to study under John Witherspoon, pastor of the Presbyterian congregation of Paisley, Scotland, and later president of the College of New Jersey (Princeton). By age seventeen, Graham had arrived at firm religious convictions and was admitted to the Lord’s Supper, which she considered to be a full commitment to her church and those it served.
One of Graham’s most engaging pieces is a meditation entitled ‘‘My Last Journey through the Wilderness.’’ After summarizing the journeys of the Israelites and of the early Christian community, she sees herself as part of this history in her present struggle. This theme of the journey is also present in her poetry, which is strongly reminiscent of 19th-century hymns. The language, style, and imagery in Graham’s writings are similar to those of the preachers and religious personalities of her period, but her work provides a unique view into one woman’s faith and experience.
Two years after her marriage to a physician, a move was made to Canada due to her husband’s appointment as surgeon of the Royal American Regiment. John Graham died on a mission in
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Belden, E. P., New York: Past, Present, and Future (1849). Bethune, J. G., The Life of Mrs. Isabella Graham
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(1839). Lamb, M. J., History of the City of New York, Vol. 2 (1881). Mason, J. M., Christian Mourning: A Sermon Occasioned by the Death of Mrs. Isabella Graham (1814). Scott, A. F. Natural Allies: Women’s Associations in American History (1991). Reference works: NAW (1971). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: New York Evening Post (27 July 1814). —VIRGINIA KAIB RATIGAN
GRAHAM, Jorie Born 9 May 1950, New York, New York Daughter of and Curtis Bill and Beverly Stroll Pepper; married James Galvin, 1983; children: Emily Jorie Graham grew up in Europe; she attended the Sorbonne, New York University (B.F.A. 1973), Columbia, and the University of Iowa (M.F.A. 1978). She has taught at Murray State, Humboldt State, and Columbia universities; since 1983 she has been on the faculty of the Writer’s Workshop, at the University of Iowa. Her first book, Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (1980), won the Great Lakes Colleges Association Award, and her work has generally been well received; John Ashbery describes her as ‘‘one of the finest poets writing today.’’ Graham’s work has been compared to that of Laura Jensen, Wallace Stevens, and Rainer Maria Rilke, and her poems have won prizes from the Academy of American Poets, Poetry Northwest, the American Poetry Review, and the Pushcart Press. She has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, from the Guggenheim, Whiting, Ingram Merrill, and MacArthur Foundations, and a fellowship from the Bunting Institute, Radcliffe College (1982). Graham’s poems have been frequently anthologized and appeared in such journals as the Iowa Review, the Nation, New Yorker, Paris Review, and Ploughshares. Graham’s study of philosophy and her love of art are central to her poetry, which is both imagistic and abstract, rejecting the confessional for the metaphysical and rhyme and meter for variable length lines whose enjambment stresses and fractures syntax but creates the shapes of stanzas. Her subjects range from quotidian experiences (sewing, drawing, gardening, looking in a mirror) to investigations of historical violence and complicity, from explorations of identity through mythical figures to meditations about saints, artists, and philosophers. But her true focus is always the ‘‘spiritual questing’’ of writing itself, which gives her poetry the ascetic passion of the visionary or mystic. Images fragment into ideas; specific details and words are transcended in visions of light, of infinity, of what cannot be said. Consequently, these insights must be felt or intuited—her language is simultaneously flattened and allusive or, like T. S. Eliot’s, interwoven with others’ words. In The End of Beauty (1987) she incorporates ‘‘_____s,’’ underlined spaces that may be blanks the reader is to fill in, or
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signs for an inability to speak, an ‘‘accurate failure’’ (‘‘Some Notes on Silence’’), or for what escapes language—consciousness, the world. Each __ may also be read as a ‘‘line,’’ in much the same way that her algebraic variables may be puns (y on ‘‘why’’ and x as ‘‘ex-’’ or ‘‘cross ’’), though they also function as markers (and disruptions) of the schematic nature of narrative. These signs, like the dashes and ellipses that permeate and end some of her poems, also function as an acknowledgment of silence, into and against which the poet speaks. Graham defines silence as existing in consciousness and the world, as ‘‘doubt, madness, fear,’’ or ‘‘awe or astonishment,’’ and as all ‘‘forms of death and mystery.’’ This idea is suggested by the poems’ synaesthetic figures, where sound (including the poetic line) is a fabric, tapestry, scrim, or shroud that she weaves and sees woven (by Penelope, for example) and, more importantly, sees cut, torn, or unraveled to reveal the silence all around it. Because Graham perceives the most important task of poetry as enacting a struggle with silence, her imagery of gaps, rents, wounds, and openings is invested with sacred language and an oracular tone. Silence is her Kali, her Great Mother, giving birth to and destroying the line (‘‘Imperialism,’’ The End of Beauty), her home’s inaudible ‘‘voiceover keeping on (come in, in)’’ to a pair of juncoes who may die trying to escape, ‘‘aiming for the brightest spot, the only clue,’’ a sunlit window or white space (‘‘The Phase After History,’’ Region of Unlikeness). In Materialism: Poems (1994) Graham brings together disparate topics into a unified, albeit difficult, whole. The work incorporates texts by other writers, including Emerson, Wittgenstein, and Dante, as well as social imagery and themes ranging from Tiananmen Square to a gun-toting New York subway passenger. All of this ‘‘allows the reader to encounter a thinking poet’s thought,’’ according to Commonweal’s Suzanne Keen. In 1995 Graham’s work was discussed in two books (In the Given and the Made and The Breaking of Style) by Harvard professor Helen Vendler, who particularly appreciates Graham’s rhythms. That same year Graham published her Pulitzer Prizewinning Dream of the Unified Field, Selected Poems 1974-1994, an anthology featuring 10 poems from each of her previous five books. The following year, 1996, Graham edited a collection called Earth Took of Earth: 100 Great Poems of the English Language. Many critics consider The Errancy: Poems (1997) Graham’s most rewarding and challenging work. Concerned with the relationship of the subjective and the objective, it has been called intellectually and emotionally deep, as well as beautiful. Graham’s work has historically attracted mixed reviews, with each critic coming up with his or her own unique interpretation of the poetry. The Economist said of Dream of the Unified Field, ‘‘It is self-consciously obscurantist; written in ‘open form,’ it lacks any sense of containment that some adherence to metrical rules gives; and its subject matter is so nebulous and shifting, so to do with the inner logic of the poet’s own deeply complicated and oppressively serious life, that it scarcely ever emerges into the clear daylight of discourse of any kind.’’
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The opposite view is taken by James Longenbach in the Nation. Of The Errancy he wrote, ‘‘Jorie Graham stands among a small group of poets (Dickinson, Hopkins, Moore) whose styles are so personal that the poems seem to have no author at all: they exist as self-made things. Each of her books has interrogated the one preceding it, and The Errancy feels like a culmination. It is her most challenging, most rewarding book. Graham has not simply forged a style; she is exploring the very notion of what it means for a poet to have a style—an exterior mark of an interior vision.’’ OTHER WORKS: Erosion (1983). ‘‘Some Notes on Silence’’ New American Poets of the Golden Gate (ed. by Philip Dow, 1984). ‘‘Pleasure,’’ Singular Voices: American Poetry Today (ed. by Stephen Berg, 1985). The Best American Poetry, 1990 (editor with David Lehman, 1990). Region of Unlikeness (1991). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA 111 (1984). CANR 63 (1998). CBY (1997). CLC 48 (1988). Contemporary Poets (1985). FC (1990). Other references: APR (Jan.-Feb. 1982, Nov.-Dec. 1983). American Imago (Winter 1995). Black Warrior Rev. (Spring 1989). Boston Review (Aug. 1983). Commentary (Jan. 1992). Commonweal (2 Dec. 1994). Economist (13 July 1996). Georgia Review (Winter 1983). Hollins Critic (Oct. 1987). Literary Review (Spring 1988). Nation (5 Sept. 1987, 21 July 1997). NR (27 Jan. 1992, 11 July 1994). New Yorker (27 July 1987). NYRB (21 Nov. 1991). NYTBR (17 July 1983, 26 July 1987, 31 July 1994, 5 May 1996). Parnassus (Spring/Summer 1983). People (5 May 1997). Poetry (April 1982, July 1998). Southwest Review (Summer 1982). —DANA SONNENSCHEIN, UPDATED BY KAREN RAUGUST
GRAHAM, Katharine Born 16 June 1917, New York, New York Daughter of Eugene and Agnes Ernst Meyer; married Philip L. Graham, 1940 (died 1963); children: Elizabeth, Donald, William, Stephen As a reporter for the San Francisco News, Katharine Graham’s first serious assignment was to lure delegates attending the convention of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union to a bar with the simple proposition that they visit the scene of the crimes they railed against. They agreed and she got her story. Years later, as publisher of the Washington Post, she was instrumental in enabling other reporters to get the story of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate. Graham’s father, Eugene Meyer, came from a distinguished Jewish family with roots going back many generations in Alsace-Lorraine, France, while her mother, Agnes Ernst Meyer,
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came from a long line of Lutheran ministers. From each parent Graham received a passion for learning, ideas, strength, and leadership. Her father was a millionaire investor and her mother an intellectual and writer. Graham received an elite education. She attended Madeira, a private high school for girls in Virginia, outside Washington, D.C., where her family resided. She went on to Vassar College and received her undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago in 1938. Rather than starting right away at the Washington Post, which her father bought in 1933 for $825,000, Graham worked in San Francisco for a year. In 1939 she returned to Washington and began her tenure with the Post as an editorial-page employee. As the most junior member of the editorial team, Graham’s assignments were on the least important issues of the day—so-called light editorials. The titles themselves revealed just how light: ‘‘On Being a Horse,’’ ‘‘Brains and Beauty,’’ ‘‘Mixed Drinks,’’ and ‘‘Spotted Fever.’’ But work at the Post brought her into contact with experienced reporters. Through these developing friendships, Graham became involved in an increasingly lively social life with women and men whose life experience and backgrounds were quite different from her own. A pivotal introduction was to Philip Graham, who was then a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Stanley Reed while waiting to clerk for Felix Frankfurter the following year. Phil Graham had been editor of the Harvard Law Review and was seen as brilliant, charismatic, and fascinating by this extended circle of determined young people. After a brief and intense courtship, Katharine and Phil married on 5 June 1940. From the start, Phil Graham was apprehensive about his father-in-law’s enormous wealth. He was determined that he and his new wife would live on his salary. Eugene Meyer was eager to have his bright and capable son-in-law employed at the Post and finally convinced him to come on board as associate publisher in 1946. After a few months, Meyer promoted him to publisher. In 1948 Meyer sold the paper to Katharine and Phil for a token sum. But believing a man should not be his wife’s employee, Meyer gave Phil Graham three times the amount of Post stock held by Katharine. The newly formed Washington Post Company, with Philip as its president, began to enlarge in circulation and influence. Katharine’s role during these years was behind the scenes and clearly subservient to Phil’s leadership and direction. Her life changed dramatically when Phil began suffering from mental illness and committed suicide in August of 1963. Fresh from this tragedy, Graham became president of the Post’s parent company. She felt unprepared for the challenge. ‘‘It’s hard to describe how abysmally ignorant I was,’’ she related in her memoir Personal History (1997). ‘‘I was also uneducated in even the basics of the working world.’’ Nevertheless, she was knowledgeable enough to surround herself with a capable staff. She built the Post into a competitor of the New York Times. She named Benjamin C. Bradlee as managing editor in 1965, and he was instrumental in luring talented journalists away from other papers. As publisher and chairperson of the board during these years, Graham was instrumental in guiding the decisions that determined
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the role the Post assumed. Two years after she became the paper’s publisher; the Post became involved in the fight to publish the Pentagon Papers. The New York Times had been ordered by the U.S. government to refrain from publishing any more of the documents. Despite the risk of a restraining order on themselves as well as a violation of the injunction that had restricted the Times, Graham and the Post decided to publish the papers. Graham later pointed out: ‘‘The decision had to be made quickly. There had never before been prior restraint of the press. Weighing all factors, it seemed like the right thing to do. And I still feel the same.’’ The Post did go to court for its action, but the Supreme Court eventually ruled in favor of the two newspapers and their right to publish. Graham and the Post regained national attention with coverage of the Watergate scandal. Two Post reporters, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, were the foremost investigators of the crimes of the Nixon administration. Despite threats from the White House and warnings and criticism from her friend Henry Kissinger, Graham supported the reporters throughout. In 1973 the Post received a Pulitzer Prize for public service in uncovering the Watergate conspiracy. Graham turned her journalistic skills to her own life in her autobiography Personal History. In a volume described as ‘‘disarmingly candid and immensely readable,’’ she chronicles her personal transformation. She also provides an invaluable inside glimpse of some of the most critical turning points in American journalism. Graham describes her personal and professional growth with charm, intelligence, and grace, much the same way she lived her life. Personal History received a Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1998. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Davis, D., Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and the Washington Post (1979). Felsenthal, C., Power, Privilege, and the Post: The Katharine Graham Story (1993). Reference works: CA (1982, 1999). Larousse Dictionary of Women (1996). Who’s Who in America (1999). Who’s Who in the East (1997-1998). Other references: Time (1997). —CELESTE DEROCHE
GRAHAM, Shirley Born 11 November 1907, Evansville, Indiana; died 27 March 1977, Peking, China Also wrote under: Shirley Graham DuBois Daughter of David A. and Lizzie Bell Graham; married Shadrach T. McCanns, 1921 (died); W. E. B. DuBois, 1951 Shirley Graham, a lifelong advocate of human rights, was born on the farm of her great-grandfather, a freed slave and blacksmith who used his home as an Underground Railroad
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station for runaway slaves. Graham and her four brothers grew up in a variety of cities—New Orleans, Colorado Springs, and Spokane—in which their father, an African Episcopal minister, received pastoral assignments. Graham married a year after completing high school, but within three years she became a widow with two sons to support. Graham studied music theory and composition at the Sorbonne. While there, she also learned about African music from West African students studying in France. In 1931, Graham matriculated at Oberlin College, where she received both the B.A. and M.A. degrees. Her years there marked the beginning of her career as a dramatist and composer. Graham’s one-act play, Coal Dust, and her three-act comedy, Elijah’s Ravens, were performed during this period; both had been written in 1930. A musical drama, TomTom (1932), was based upon Graham’s knowledge of African rhythms; it was later revised into an opera for which Graham wrote the libretto and music. Appointed head of fine arts and drama at Nashville’s Tennessee State College in 1935, Graham continued to write plays and compose music. Between 1935 and 1938, she was affiliated with the Chicago Federal Theater as supervisor of the ‘‘Negro Unit.’’ Her major works during this period were Little Black Sambo (1937), a children’s drama for which she wrote music, and The Swing Mikado (1938), a jazz adaptation of the Gilbert and Sullivan opera and her most successful musical composition. Awarded a Julius Rosenwald fellowship in 1938, Graham studied at the Yale School of Drama, where two of her plays were presented: It’s Morning (1940), the tragedy of a slave mother who kills her daughter rather than have her sold away, and Dust to Earth (1941), a three-act drama about the futile efforts of a coal miner to rescue his son from a mining accident. Although she was a successful dramatist, Graham’s major literary contribution was made in the field of biography. Her decision to research and record the lives of significant black people was influenced indirectly by her cultural and political activities with the NAACP, which appointed her a national field secretary in 1942, and directly by the death of her son Robert, who because of his race, was mistreated in an army camp and denied proper hospital care. Graham’s biographies combine history and fiction in celebrating black life during a period of general neglect. They are primarily popular books recognizing the contributions made by blacks to American culture and preserve the history of black achievement for the world. Because Graham’s biographies delineate heroic qualities for emulation and seem especially suited for young adults, they have become categorized as ‘‘juvenile’’ literature and have not received the critical attention they deserve. Graham’s fictional biographies are lyrical, rather than analytical, in technique. They derive their power from her control over form and dramatic structure. Graham has explained her method in these works as that of a storyteller constructing a
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narrative ‘‘within the framework of little known true facts,’’ by documenting dates and main events, but also by creating probable incidents in order to ‘‘illustrate character, reveal trends, or bring actual facts into juxtaposition so as to emphasize them.’’ Unfortunately, her achievement has been obscured by a wider familiarity with black history among contemporary readers, and her effort has been overshadowed by more scholarly works. Graham wrote 12 biographies. Among the most successful is Paul Robeson, Citizen of the World (1946), which traces the life of the famous singer from his boyhood through his forty-sixth birthday. Graham uses the musical patterns of a classical concerto and modern blues to orchestrate the details of Robeson’s life. In There Was Once a Slave: The Historic Story of Frederick Douglass (1947), Graham relies on an association between the North Star and liberty as the controlling metaphor for her poignant narrative. Your Most Humble Servant (1949), the first book-length treatment of Benjamin Banneker, a late 18th-century astronomer, mathematician, and surveyor, is Graham’s major work on a historical figure. Graham married the famous Harvard-trained social scientist, Dr. W. E. B. DuBois, four days after his eighty-third birthday and on the eve of his indictment as an ‘‘agent of a foreign principle.’’ Their marriage culminated a 30-year friendship during which Graham was guided by DuBois’ emphasis on ‘‘Beauty, Accomplishment, and Dignity’’ as the criteria of Black art. Throughout the years of her marriage, Graham devoted much of her attention to political work against oppression and to cultural activities for peace. She was also her husband’s companion-helpmate on his final project, a massive Encyclopedia Africana, yet she did not live in his shadow; she helped to found Freedomways, a magazine on the African-American freedom movement, and was selected its first editor. Her last three books, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Son of the Nile (1972), Zulu Heart (1974), and Julius K. Nyerere: Teacher of Africa (1975), reflect Graham’s international perspective after a decade of living on the African continent. His Day Is Marching On: A Memoir of W. E. B. DuBois (1971) is essentially Graham’s own biography. In it, she emerges as the exemplar of the values and virtues defining the heroic men and women of her biographies. The book is notable for its quiet celebration of love, loyalty, conviction, and courage. Sensitive and vivid in language, Graham’s memoir documents a personal experience and outlines a cultural history. In her final years, Graham was acclaimed for her contributions as writer, scholar, teacher, and activist to black and thirdworld cultures. Her life and her art stand as testimony to the vitality of DuBois’ ideals of ‘‘Beauty, Accomplishment, and Dignity.’’
OTHER WORKS: I Gotta Home (1939). Track Thirteen (1942). Dr. George Washington Carver, Scientist (with G. D. Lipscomb, 1944). The Story of Phillis Wheatley (1949). Jean Baptiste Pointe de Sable, Founder of Chicago (1953). The Story of Pocahontas
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(1953). Booker T. Washington: Educator of Hand, Head, and Heart (1955). The papers of Shirley Graham are housed in the W. E. B. DuBois Manuscript Collection at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, as well as at the Washington Conservatory of Music Collection at Howard University in Washington D.C.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bedini, S. A., The Life of Benjamin Banneker (1972). Hamalian, L. and J.V. Hatch, eds., The Roots of African American Drama (1991). Miller, E., ed., The Negro in America (1970). Perkins, K. A., Black Female Playwrights: An Anthology of Plays Before 1950 (1989). Reference works: Afro-American Encyclopedia (1974). Black American Writers: Bibliographical Essays (1977). Black Playwrights, 1823-1977: An Annotated Bibliography of Plays (1977). CB (Oct. 1946). DLB:AAW (1988). Negro Almanac (1976). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Crisis (Aug. 1932). NYT (5 June 1973, 5 April 1977). —THADIOUS M. DAVIS
GRAHN, Judy Born 28 July 1940, Chicago, Illinois Daughter of Elmer August and Vera Davis Grahn For over three decades, Judy Grahn has helped forge a new tradition of lesbian feminist literature in the United States. Adrienne Rich wrote in her introduction to Grahn’s The Work of a Common Woman (1978) that ‘‘more than any other poet today,’’ Grahn has accepted the challenge ‘‘to ask questions that never occurred to a Donne or a Yeats, or even to an Elizabeth Barrett Browning. . .questions about taboo, integrity, the fetishization of the female body, the world-wide historical violence committed against women by men, what it means to be ‘true to one another’ when we are women, what it means to love women when that love is denied reality, treated as perversion, or, even more insidiously ‘accepted’ as a mirror-image or parallel to heterosexual romance.’’ After being discharged from the army in 1961 for lesbianism, Grahn began her career as a poet, writing openly and proudly about lesbian themes. In 1965 she wrote Edward the Dyke, a satire about a lesbian and the psychoanalyst who diagnoses her as deviant. Since no publisher would print the work, Grahn was inspired to cofound the Women’s Press Collective in Oakland, California, in 1969, which eventually published Edward in 1971. Grahn has said she thinks of her work ‘‘as one long thought that has many facets and methods for developing itself.’’ Indeed, her writing has taken a wide variety of forms: poetry, prose, audio
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recordings, plays, and nonfiction. Her earliest published work, The Common Woman Poems (1969), consisted of seven poems describing ‘‘regular, everyday women without making us look either superhuman or pathetic.’’ In A Woman is Talking to Death (1974), for which she was awarded the 1979 American Poetry Review Poem of the Year award, Grahn reflects on witnessing a fatal motorcycle accident and on the issues of racial, gender, and class injustice it evokes. Grahn’s work as a writer and publisher had a profound effect on the nascent women’s movement. With the publication of The Common Woman Poems and Edward the Dyke, her name quickly spread among women’s rights activists. Her words were memorized, set to music, and reprinted on posters, pamphlets, and t-shirts. She, along with other pioneering writers such as Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde, paved the way for the genre of contemporary lesbian-feminist literature. With The Queen of Wands, winner of a 1982 American Book award, Grahn began an ambitious four-part cycle of poems inspired by the four queens of the tarot deck. Based upon the mythic ‘‘story of a queen who has been stolen. . .a lamentation for a female power gone,’’ the Queen of Wands is represented in figures from Helen of Troy to Marilyn Monroe. The second book of the series, a poetic play entitled The Queen of Swords, appeared in 1987. Grahn continued to expand the scope and form of her work, embarking on her vocation as a ‘‘renegade scholar of gay life’’ with Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds (1984), a nonfiction genealogy of the history of gay culture. With The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition (1985), which traces the connections between Sappho and modern lesbian poets, Grahn ventured into literary theory and criticism. In a similar vein, Really Reading Gertrude Stein: A Selected Anthology (1989), pairs writings by Stein with Grahn’s commentary. Blood, Bread, and Roses (1993), her most recent book of nonfiction, presents a provocative feminist reinterpretation of the development of culture and history, placing menstruation at its center. Drawing from mythology and anthropology, Grahn argues that the practices that evolved from menstruation rituals gave birth to mathematics, astronomy, cosmetics, and even cooking utensils. In addition to writing, Grahn has been involved as a political activist (in the early 1960s she was a member of the Mattachine Society and later in the decade helped to organize the West Coast Lesbian Feminist Movement); instructor of writing, women’s literature, and gay and lesbian studies; and editor of several literary anthologies, as well as on the board of the Lesbian Review of Books.
OTHER WORKS: She Who: A Graphic Book of Poems with Fifty-Four Images of Women (1972). Elephant Poem Coloring Book (1972). True to Life Adventure Stories, Vol. I (contributor and editor, 1978). True to Life Adventure Stories, Vol. II (contributor and editor, 1980). Spider Webster’s Declaration: He is
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Singing the End of the World Again (1983). Descent to the Roses of the Family (1986). Mundane’s World (1988). Butch/femme (contributor, M. G. Soares, ed., 1995).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Case, S., ‘‘Judy Grahn’s Gynopoetics: The Queen of Swords,’’ in Studies in the Literary Imagination (Fall 1988). Donnelly, N., ‘‘A Conversation with Judy Grahn,’’ in Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review (Spring 1995). Grimstad, K., and S. Rennie, eds., The New Woman’s Survival Sourcebook (1975). Yalom, M., ed., Women Writers of the West Coast: Speaking of Their Lives and Careers (1983). Reference works: CA (1986, 1988). Gay and Lesbian Literature (1994). The Gay 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Gay Men and Lesbians, Past and Present (1995). Other references: LJ (1 Nov. 1993). Ms. (May 1975). PW (18 Oct. 1993). —LAURA BRAHM
GRANT, Margaret See FRANKEN, Rose
GRAU, Shirley Ann Born 8 July 1929, New Orleans, Louisiana Daughter of Adolph E. and Katherine Onions Grau; married James K. Feibleman, 1955; children: Ian, Nora, William, Katherine Daughter of a dentist, Shirley Ann Grau describes her family as ‘‘ordinary middle class. White. Protestant.’’ She also admits, however, family members were well enough set financially that they could choose not to work. Her mother was in her middle forties when Grau was born, yet she had another daughter even later. Grau attended the Booth Academy in Montgomery, Alabama, until she transferred to the Ursuline Academy in New Orleans as a senior. She attended Sophie Newcomb, the ‘‘girl’s wing’’ of the all-male Tulane University, where she took many of her classes and met her future husband, a philosophy professor 26 years her senior. They were married in New York City, where Grau had moved to pursue her writing career, and lived in New Orleans with their four children. Grau’s first collection of short stories, The Black Prince (1955), won immediate acclaim and was compared in its importance to J. D. Salinger’s Nine Stories and to Eudora Welty’s A Curtain of Green. These stories reveal concerns and characters that would dominate her later fiction. The first of these are her
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primitives, living—like young Joshua in the story of that name— in tune with nature, sharing its creative violence and heroically, if hopelessly, defying its destructive forces. These primitives burst forth in her first novel, The Hard Blue Sky (1958), a flawed work but with moments of great power. The Louisiana island fishermen of the novel take on mythic proportions, similar to the Aran Islanders in Synge’s plays, owing to Grau’s simple and realistic dialogue, her vivid recreation of their daily struggles with nature, and her concentration on their awareness rather than on their innocence. Synge’s characters are aware of the human condition and accept it; Grau’s primitives are aware of it and rebel, even when the only rebellion possible is symbolic: Cecile throwing a half-brick at that ‘‘hard blue sky.’’ The early short stories also introduce Grau’s concern with the city-bred Southerners, individuals locked away from nature within the artificiality of society, unaware that nature in all its violence is within as well as outside. Two of the short stories particularly focus on women trapped between the stereotypes of the past and the confusion of the present. The anachronism of the Southern lady appears twice, in mother and daughter, in ‘‘The Girl with the Flaxen Hair.’’ The excessive fragility and eventual destruction of the daughter, Rose, reflect the inadequacies of the stereotype, at least today. Contrasted to this are the modern mother and daughter in ‘‘Fever Flower,’’ but society still has little to offer its daughters. The pleasure-loving mother is described as a ‘‘superb animal. But she was not quite human. She did not need anyone.’’ Rose Ramond may have been a dying blossom, but Maureen Fleming, the ‘‘fever flower,’’ the blossoming of her parents’ sickness, scarcely improves the garden. The modern woman steps forth again in Grau’s next novel. Trapped in The House on Coliseum Street (1961) is Joan Caillet, who floats into an abortion only to be tossed and torn by its psychological aftermath. The emptiness within reflects the emptiness outside, and Joan’s growing awareness of this emptiness, this lack of values within the surviving shell of Southern society— perhaps of American society as a whole—leads her to destructive violence. Grau seems to argue that unless individuals live in tune with nature, as do her primitives, their violence will destroy rather than recreate the world. A similar violence is produced by Abigail Tolliver’s discovery of hypocrisy in The Keepers of the House (1964). This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel combines Grau’s primitives with her Southern lady and blacks with whites, as she traces the heritage of a family that rises above the prejudices of the stereotypes to assert the integrity of the individual. Abigail has been taught the role of the Southern lady, but her grandfather, William Howland, has given her an even more important legacy. The evidence of his love for his black housekeeper, Margaret, a hardy primitive reminiscent of the folk-heroine Alberta in ‘‘The Black Prince,’’ destroys Abigail’s illusions of safety, thus exposing her to the violence of life itself. But William has also provided in his actions an example of humanity that keeps Abigail from being destroyed by her own rebellious violence, which enables her to be born again into a new awareness of life.
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Grau’s next set of novels, The Condor Passes (1971) and Evidence of Love (1977), as well as many of the stories from her first collection The Wind Shifting West (1973), continue her interest in family and social heritage, but they concentrate more than ever on character studies. Each novel opens with an old man and ends with his death, in between examining the people and experiences of his life. Each also explores the interactions of love and money. The economic security of the central characters allows Grau to touch only lightly on the social context except in flashbacks; the characters struggle instead with the complexity of human relationships and of personal identity. The 1980s brought another collection of stories called Nine Women (1985). Grau departed somewhat from her concentration on the South to describe the lives of nine very different characters. One critic noted that almost every woman is on the verge of great change and is looking back on the memories of her life. Some reviewers expressed disappointment with the women’s fatalistic and hopeless attitudes, while others contended that they were simply overcome by fate. In either case, the compilation was not as well received as Grau’s previous work. It would be almost 10 years before Grau’s next publication, this time the novel Roadwalkers (1994). The novel tells the story of Baby, a young orphaned black girl living in the South in 1934. Baby grows up in an orphanage but escapes poverty as a young adult by becoming a fashion designer. The prose then veers to the tale of Nanda, Baby’s daughter, as an adult. The sudden shift in narration puzzled many, as did the emotional distance employed by Grau. Most, however, continue to admire Grau’s control and mastery of language, and her narrative abilities are frequently praised. Grau’s most recent writing was as a contributor to Clarence John Laughlin’s pictorial account of New Orleans, published as Haunter of Ruins (1997). She has also contributed to journals and magazines including Atlantic, New Yorker, Redbook, Mademoiselle, and Reporter. Grau displays throughout each novel her consummate skill at manipulating point of view, and her unique ability to empathize with each character. Above all, she is a superb storyteller, creating her Louisiana world in rich detail and letting her characters live, speak, and argue for themselves. She has been criticized for her traditional style, but her symbolic realism, with its roots in the Louisiana bayous of Kate Chopin, still rises far above imitation. Her originality is evident in her consistent philosophy of nature and in her uniquely female imagery, from the caverns of emptiness which haunt Joan in The House on Coliseum Street to the vivid description of his own birth offered by Edward Milton Henley as the first scene of Evidence of Love. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Gossett, L. Y., Violence in Recent Southern Fiction (1965). Reference works: CA (1967). CA Online (1999). CB (1959). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Crit. (1963, 1975). Insula: Revista Bibliografica de Ciencias y Letras (Madrid) (1966). KR (15 May
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1994). NR (18 Apr. 1964, 24 Nov. 1973). NYRB (2 Dec. 1971). NYTBR (22 Mar. 1964). SR (1962, 21 Mar. 1964). —THELMA J. SHINN, UPDATED BY CARRIE SNYDER
GRAVES, Valerie See BRADLEY, Marion Zimmer
GRAY, Angela See DANIELS, Dorothy
Mr. Leavenworth is found murdered in his locked study. The suspects include his servants, employees, and two nieces. The sleuth is Ebenezer Gryce—a kind, rheumatic man and Green’s most frequently used detective. The Leavenworth Case was very popular; the Pennsylvania Legislature even debated its authorship, consensus being that ‘‘the story was manifestly beyond a woman’s powers.’’ Miss Hurd: An Enigma (1894) is a powerful mysterymelodrama in which the woman is the mystery to be solved. Vashti Hurd had wanted a ‘‘broad, free life.’’ Instead, she was forced to marry the rich Mr. Murdoch. The murder puzzle that eventually develops is a subplot to the greater problem of Vashti’s hatred for her husband and her need for freedom. Contemporary male critics found Miss Hurd an unsympathetic character. But feminist readers will find Vashti both sympathetic and heroic. Despite its rather sensational plot elements, the novel transcends its identity as a mystery novel and becomes a women’s novel.
Born 11 November 1846, Brooklyn, New York; died 11 April 1935, Buffalo, New York Daughter of James W. and Catherine Whitney Green; married Charles Rohlfs, 1884; children: three
That Affair Next Door (1897) introduces Green’s prototype spinster sleuth, Miss Amelia Butterworth. A sharp, independent woman, Miss Butterworth works both with and against the police, as personified by the now-elderly Mr. Gryce. Amelia’s own, rather satirical, narration makes the book a delight. It is also one of Green’s most challenging mysteries. Miss Butterworth would make two more appearances: a starring role in Lost Man’s Lane (1898) and a cameo appearance in The Circular Study (1900).
Anna Katharine Green was the youngest child of a lawyer father and a mother who died when Green was three. She received a B.A. from the Ripley Female Seminary in Poultney, Vermont, and began publishing poetry in Scribner’s, Lippincott’s, and other journals.
The Golden Slipper, and Other Problems for Violet Strange (1915) is a short story collection featuring a professional woman detective. Violet Strange is worthy of respect both as an investigator specializing in women’s ‘‘problems’’ and for her motivation in becoming an investigator—to support a dearly loved but disinherited older sister.
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Although not the first American detective novel, The Leavenworth Case (1878) has been our most famous early mystery. Because of the decided success of The Leavenworth Case, Green gradually turned away from poetry writing. Only two of her 40 books are not mysteries: a volume of verse, The Defense of the Bride, and Other Poems (1882), and a verse drama, Risifi’s Daughter (1887). In 1884 Green married a tragedian turned furniture designer. They made their home in Buffalo, New York. Over the next eight years, Green produced three children and eight books. The last two decades of the century were her most fertile writing years. She produced 22 published volumes between 1880 and 1900 for an ever-widening audience. Green’s popularity grew with each new published thriller. She soon became the grande dame of the American mystery novel; her global fame made her an effective lobbyist for international copyright. The Leavenworth Case was, for many years, considered both the first American detective novel and the first detective novel by a woman, although it is neither. It is, however, a well-plotted, vastly entertaining murder puzzle of a type now classic. The rich
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Green brought detective fiction to a more ‘‘cultured’’ reading public. She frankly and proudly wrote for a popular audience, but her books were published in hardbound editions by respected houses. No longer was the American mystery relegated to dimenovel status; prime ministers, presidents, and honored writers were avowed fans. Green’s long and prolific career spanned from the infancy of the genre to its golden age. But changing tastes within this fast-growing fiction formula dealt harshly with Green at the end of her career. Soon her poetic touches, her fondness for melodrama, her Victorian verbiage were judged worthless by the jaundiced eye of the interwar reading public. The genre became rigidly formularized, lean, and cynical. By the 1940s, Green’s work was forgotten, or remembered only to ridicule. Green is worthy of reexamination, both as a female forerunner in a largely male genre and as a writer with a real respect for women. Her female characters are strong, brave, and resolute against evil and largely male violence. There is a recurrent theme of sisterhood in her works among women who pool their energies for survival. Green gave us some of the first female sleuths, both
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amateur and professional. Unlike many 20th-century mystery writers who think of women only as victims or secondary characters, Green portrayed women as characters of primary importance who refused to be victimized.
OTHER WORKS: A Strange Disappearance (1880). The Sword of Damocles (1881). Hand and Ring (1883). X Y Z: A Detective Story (1883). The Mill Mystery (1886). 7 to 12: A Detective Story (1887). Behind Closed Doors (1888). The Forsaken Inn (1890). A Matter of Millions (1890). The Old Stone House (1891). Cynthia Wakeham’s Money (1892). Marked ‘Personal’ (1893). The Doctor, His Wife, and the Clock (1895). Dr. Izard (1895). Agatha Webb (1899). A Difficult Problem (1900). One of My Sons (1901). Three Women and a Mystery (1902). The Filigree Ball (1903). The Amethyst Box (1905). The House in the Mist (1905). The Millionaire Baby (1905). The Woman in the Alcove (1906). The Chief Legatee (1906). The Mayor’s Wife (1907). The House of Whispering Pines (1910). Three Thousand Dollars (1910). Initials Only (1911). Dark Hollow (1914). To the Minute/Scarlet and Black (1916). The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow (1917). The Step on the Stair (1923). The papers of Anna Katharine Green are housed in the Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Harkins, E. F., and C. H. L. Johnson, Little Pilgrimages among the Women Who Have Written Famous Books (1901). Overton, G., The Women Who Make Our Novels (1928). Reference works: Detecting Women (1994). Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (1994). St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (1996). Other references: Bookman (1929). Reading and Collecting (1938). Writer (1888).
her Southern ancestry. She and Julian passed the war years (1940-45) with Baltimore relatives. She became a Catholic convert in 1947. The Greens’ circle included many celebrated artists and intellectuals. A translator and a correspondent for American and English magazines, Green also wrote comic/romantic novels, autobiography, and historical fiction. Her novels usually focus on the family life of American expatriates in France and incorporate her mother’s nostalgia for the South. This nostalgia surfaces in memories, dreams, or visits to and from American relatives. Childhood is a pervasive theme. Her autobiography, With Much Love (1948), shows that her fictional families are based on Green’s own—the gauche and sprightly sisters, the obedient little brother who, like Julian, displays an early interest in the devil, and the harried, loving parents just scraping by. Green represents the adult brothersister bond fictionally by siblings who seem to be lovers, in 16 rue Cortambert (1937)—in fact an address of the Greens; by the married couple who seem to be siblings, in The Delamer Curse (1940); and by the fated heroine of Marietta (1932), her thoughts like hothouse flowers, who loves her brother-in-law. Green’s heroines are occasionally vulnerable but determined to grasp at happiness and self-sufficiency. They are young women who read Cosmopolitan, smoke to stay thin, rip and twist their clothing into ropes for escaping from high bedrooms, rouge their cheeks, carry their own latchkeys, engage in unhappy love affairs, get jobs selling books or drudging as companions to the tyrannical rich, whistle American spirituals in taxis, write notes in lipstick, and plan their novels. The sense of being truly not so scatterbrained as one is willing to appear is ruefully expressed by one heroine playing the pixie role: ‘‘Men will only love me for what they think I am.’’ Green’s archly innocent modern girl of the 1930s appears in such novels as The Selbys (1930), Reader, I Married Him (1931), Fools Rush In (1934), and That Fellow Perceval (1935).
—KATHLEEN L. MAIO
GREEN, Anne Born 11 November 1891, Savannah, Georgia; died circa 1975 Daughter of Edward Moon and Mary Hartridge Green Taken to France in 1893 after her father’s financial ruin, Anne Green grew up in Le Havre and in Paris. Of the seven bilingual Green children the youngest was Julian, who became a noted French writer. Green’s mother wrote ‘‘Letters from a Housekeeper in France’’ for a newspaper, and spun visions of her Savannah girlhood that would haunt Green’s and Julian’s writing. She and her sister served as nurses during World War I; ‘‘angels in their uniforms,’’ wrote Julian, they were awarded the Médaille des Épidémies. After their father’s death in 1927 Green and Julian lived together. Green traveled to America in 1922 to rediscover
Green writes about French families in A Marriage of Convenience (1933), Just Before Dawn (1943), and Paris (1938). The heroine of Paris is a poor, lame, but lovely girl, dedicated to her milliner’s art, who hesitates between yielding to the man’s control and becoming ‘‘a light eager soul, obliged to create.’’ Here as elsewhere Green indulges her taste for decor: the primrose and white boudoir with its Venetian mirrors and ebony bed, a boat to carry the milliner into a sea of dreams. In her French novels of the 1950s and 1960s, Green reverts to the material of these and other earlier works in English. La Porte des songes (1969), for example, sets the action of Paris in an American city. Atmosphere deepens menacingly in The Delamer Curse. The curse on the Southern family, living now as Parisian expatriates, descends from their slaveholding days and is transmitted through African beads soldered into a vermeil family coffeepot. The curse lifts, once these have been pried out and cast into the Seine and the heroine has expiated the ancestral guilt through her infants’ deaths. Green’s psychic fantasies, her summoning of evil presences, resemble her brother’s literary preoccupations. Where
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Julian narrowly probes the anguished mind, however, to lay bare authentic nightmares of the spiritually and sexually tormented, Green’s hallucinations are temporary, depending upon theatrical props and scenery. True horror is absent in Green, who, moreover, cannot keep the comic spirit from breaking through the fabric. For example, in the earlier Fools Rush In, the heroine’s troubled quest for a demented father and the death of her mother are events interspersed with uncontrollable whimsy. Green’s difficulties are with plotting and pacing, with evenness of tone and the creation of convincing characters. She succeeds as a social documentarian of the milieu and manners she knows. Her works show a liking for the comic, the spontaneous, and the incongruous, and also reveal an interest in childhood and the lives of women at different periods. Love is often treated with ambivalence. Her characteristic subject matter—Americans abroad at their provincial worst, or the expatriate Paris family whose history belongs to the American South—is, as she has said, largely autobiographical.
OTHER WORKS: A Crime by G. Bernanos (translated by Green, 1936). Winchester House (1936). The Silent Duchess (1939). France Speaking by R. de Saint Jean (translated by Green, 1941). The Lady in the Mask (1942). Basic Verities by C. Péguy (translated by Green, with J. Green, 1943). Men and Saints by C. Péguy (translated by Green, with J. Green, 1944). The Old Lady (1947). Le Goret (1954). Adeline (1956). A Certain Smile by F. Sagan (translated by Green, 1956). La Lanterne magique (with D. Mesnil, 1956). God Is Late by C. Arnothy (translated by Green, 1957). The Transgressor by J. Green (translated by Green, 1957). Le Vestiaire des anges (1958). Each in His Darkness by J. Green (translated by Green, 1961). Wonderful Clouds by F. Sagan (translated by Green, 1961). L’Or et l’argent (1962). Diary: 1928-1957 by J. Green (translated by Green, 1964). La Fille du grand marais (1964). La Bonne aventure (1966). Corinne et le prince persan (1967). To Leave Before Dawn by J. Green (translated by Green, 1967).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Gaddis-Rose, M., Julien Green: Gallic-American Novelist (1971). Green, J., Diary: 1928-1957 (translated by Anne Green, 1964). Green, J., Memories of Happy Days (1942). Green, J., Personal Record: 1928-1939 (translated by J. Godefroi, 1939). Saint Jean, R. de, Julien Green par lui-meme (1967). Reference works: Catholic Authors (1952). NCAB. TCA, TCAS. Other references: Bookman (Aug. 1932). Time (26 April 1948). —MARCELLE THIEBAUX
GREEN, Olive See REED, Myrtle
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GREENBERG, Joanne Born 24 September 1932, Brooklyn, New York Wrote under: Hannah Green Daughter of Julius and Rosalie Bernstein Goldenberg; married Albert Greenberg, 1955; children: David, Alan Formerly an elementary school teacher, Joanne Greenberg is a successful novelist and short story writer who also happens to be a professor of anthropology and creative writing at the Colorado School of Mines. Born in Brooklyn, Greenberg graduated from American University in Washington, D.C., where she had majored in anthropology and literature. She continued her studies at the University of London and the University of Colorado. Yet the most pivotal years of her life may be from 1948 through 1951, when she was treated for schizophrenia by the famous psychoanalyst Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. Greenberg had planned to write a book with her before the analyst’s sudden death in 1957. Five years later, Greenberg began writing (alone) I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1964), publishing it under the pseudonym Hannah Green. Only when she realized, four years later, there was another Hannah Green, also a writer, did Greenberg acknowledge authorship of the book. Greenberg’s first book, The King’s Persons (1963), is a historical novel exploring the causes of the conflict resulting in the 1190 massacre of the Jews of York. The book’s theme is the danger of creeds as a source of misunderstanding. Her second novel, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, is Greenberg’s most successful. A sensitive study, not overly sentimental or melodramatic, of a psychotic teenage girl, the book appealed to a wide range of readers and became something of a cult classic. Both the girl, with her strange, troubled fantasy world, and her doctor, a woman with great patience and understanding, are carefully drawn. Greenberg avoids easy answers, carefully depicting the world of the mentally ill, but her final prognosis is optimistic. In The Monday Voices (1965), Greenberg uses a case-history format to follow the day-to-day professional life of Ralph Oakland, a caseworker at a state department of rehabilitation (Greenberg’s husband was a vocational rehab counselor, often working with hearing-impaired clients). Oakland’s cases represent a cross-section of society’s ills. Following his failures and successes, the reader can empathize with the pressures that drive the best people from such work, as Oakland struggles against despair, guilt, and an ulcer. Alienation and lack of communication arise from a physical disability in Greenberg’s novel, In This Sign (1970), an insightful depiction of the world of the deaf. This carefully researched, painfully accurate narrative follows a deaf couple, the Ryders, from the early stages of their marriage through their roles as grandparents facing retirement. Exploited by the hearing world, shut out by themselves as much as by others, they nevertheless persist and survive.
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In Summering: A Book of Short Stories (1966), Greenberg’s favorite themes of isolation and imperfect communication are especially apparent. In ‘‘You Can Still Grow Flowers,’’ a woman is recording a dying dialect she herself cannot speak. Similarly isolated is the mild, white librarian of ‘‘Gloss on a Decision of the Council of Vicea,’’ jailed with a group of militant blacks, with whom she sympathizes but cannot reach. In Greenberg’s second collection of short stories, Rites of Passage (1971), the reader is introduced to an extraordinarily varied assortment of characters. Only the element of change—sometimes painful, sometimes welcome, always inevitable—links these narratives, whose subjects range widely within the scope of the 12 stories. Greenberg’s novel Founder’s Praise (1976) is a return to her original subject, for it, like her first novel, recognizes the dangers of creeds. The religious phenomenon she explores here is the birth and growth of a sect based on the unique vision of a farmer, Edgar Bisset. He does not live to see the religion, founded on his personal experience, institutionalize his vision and turn it into something he would not have recognized. Like The King’s Persons, Founder’s Praise underscores the irony inherent in allowing love of God to create hatred and conflict among people. Greenberg chooses themes of isolation and loneliness, of the difficulties in overcoming countless obstacles—physical, spatial, temporal, emotional, psychological—in order to realize one’s best self and to know and communicate with others. The problem of understanding is central to Greenberg’s books, and she is especially adept in her ability to show that much of our failure is due to our own preconceptions and the barriers we construct out of our fears. Greenberg does not opt for simple answers, but she raises questions which must be faced if society is to survive. Greenberg is also a master of making the extraordinary accessible. Although she has been criticized on occasion for lacking in art, or seen as merely a special-interest author (like in her most famous novel, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden), Greenberg’s consistently understated style lends a matter-of-fact quality to characters and experiences far from the ordinary reader’s experience. However odd her characters, they exist within complex networks of interpersonal relationships; families, especially, are never far from the center of her stories. Her books are as much about connections as about isolation, as much about rich identities as about fractured selves. While her prose hesitates to announce itself, Greenberg’s plotting and narrative devices are prominent. In Simple Gifts (1986), Greenberg’s use of multiple points of view is appropriate for a novel that explores the endless emotional and moral valences of a family who find themselves transformed when a government program turns their dilapidated farm into a vacation spot for jaded yuppies. A Season of Delight (1981) also examines the dynamics of competing family values. Vivian Sanborn in Age of Consent (1987) embarks on a pilgrimage to find out about the life of her adopted, recently assassinated brother, Daniel, healer, saint, and a man incapable of
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ordinary human interaction. Attempts at fixing one meaning to an event or person prove as fruitless as finding the incinerated pictorial documentation of Sanborn’s work. Yet the plotting of this intricate novel is so tidy as to conflict with the complexity of the characters and events. Another perhaps overly plotted but richly textured novel is The Far Side of Victory (1983), which constructs itself around two focal points—the car accidents that mold Eric Gordon’s life. Of Such Small Differences (1988) departs from Greenberg’s other works in its creation of a different language, appropriate for the reality experienced by the deaf-blind. Greenberg returns here to an old concern—how ‘‘unfamiliar’’ worlds intersect with, conflict with, and question other realities. The poet John, deaf-blind and independent, falls into a relationship with the hearing and sighted Leda. Isolation, disability, and even ‘‘the self’’ as static, limpid categories have no place in Greenberg’s fiction, which always finds people striving among others, choosing among conflicting ideas of duty and fulfillment. The extraordinary inheres in both everything and nothing in works that treat the ‘‘oddest’’ and most ‘‘normal’’ of characters and events not from a stance of wonder or condescension but from the perspective of familiarity. Greenberg uses a series of letters written between family members to construct her novel Where the Road Goes (1998). Tig Warriner is a sixty-two-year-old grandmother and environmental activist who is on a year-long, cross-country walk to evaluate the nation’s feelings on environmental issues. While she is gone, she corresponds with her husband, Marz, her daughters, Justice and Solidarity, and her granddaughter, Hope, Justice’s daughter. The distance and resultant correspondence brings the family closer than they had been when living together in Colorado and provides the foundation and format for the book. In her letters, Tig describes the walk across the U.S. in detail. The letters she receives provide not only the issues and relationships on which the stories are based, but the different perspectives found when more than one person tells the same tale. Hope becomes pregnant and marries Larry, who is of Native American heritage and has a drinking problem. Marz writes of challenges, new beginnings, and introspection brought about by his relationship with his grandson, Ben. The theme of the tribe weaves throughout Where the Road Goes as it relates to communities in general—families, gays, activists, idealists. As always, Greenberg presents a good story through complex characters and simple, elegant prose for a truly memorable offering. Greenberg is the recipient of a myriad of awards, including the Community Grange Award for Citizenship, the H & E Daroff Memorial Award for fiction (1963), William and Janice Eppstein Fiction Award (1964), Fromm Reichmann Award (1967), Kenner Award (1971), Rocky Mountain Women’s Institute Award (1983), and the Denver Public Library Bookplate Award (1990). Greenberg has also been awarded several honorary degrees, from Gallaudet College, Western Maryland College, and the University of Colorado.
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OTHER WORKS: High Crimes and Misdemeanors (1979). Leah (with Seymour Epstein, 1987). With the Snow Queen (1991). No Reck’ning Made (1993).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1969). CANR (1985, 1991). CLC (1977,1984). SATA (1981). Other references: Booklist (1 Jan. 1998). LJ (Jan. 1998). Psychology Review (1972). PW (23 Sept. 1988, 8 Dec. 1997). NYTBR (27 Dec. 1987, 30 Oct. 1988). —JANETTE S. LEWIS, UPDATED BY FAYE HALPERN AND REBECCA C. CONDIT
GREENE, Sarah (Pratt) McLean Born 3 July 1856, Simsbury, Connecticut; died 28 December 1935, Lexington, Massachusetts Daughter of Dudley B. and Mary Payne McLean; married Franklin L. Greene, 1887 (died 1890) The second youngest of five children, Sarah McLean Green grew up on a Connecticut farm. Taught by her mother and in local schools, she attended Mt. Holyoke College for two years and then accepted a teaching appointment at Cedarville, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. Intrigued by the eccentricity of Cape Cod life, she set down her impressions of it. When a Boston relative who had noted the quality of her correspondence urged her to publish something, she submitted these recollections to a Boston publisher. Her writing career began with the publication of Cape Cod Folks (1881), followed by Towhead: The Story of a Girl (1883) and Some Other Folks (1884), a collection of stories. Greene married a former Annapolis midshipman. The couple lived first near Chihuahua, Mexico, where Greene was involved in a silver mining operation; later they lived in the Washington Territory and in California. In 1890, when her husband died, Greene moved back to New England to write. Greene’s literary career was based largely on the notoriety of her first novel, Cape Cod Folks. Essentially personal reminiscences of a community that had fascinated her, the book has for its plot a set of romantic involvements and is characterized by a perceptive rendering of local humor and by vivid depictions of Codder life and mores. Some of the accounts were a little too realistic, however, since Greene had described certain characters under their real names and a series of lawsuits ensued, some culminating in settlements against her. Nevertheless, published at a point when regionalism was all the rage, the novel went through 11 printings in its first two years and established Greene as a local-color writer. Vesty of the Basins (1892), Greene’s second most successful work, also employs the themes and techniques of Cape Cod Folks,
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but with greater sophistication. The tale concerns the beautiful Vesty, whose strength and good sense make her a quiet center of the isolated Basin community. Loved by three men, she marries one, the simple and devoted Gurd, to save another, the rich Notely, from his own folly. After Gurd has died trying to save Notely in a storm, and after Notely (married to another) dies as well, Vesty finally acknowledges the love of Major Henry. Henry, a lamed and scarred summer visitor to the Basin, narrates most of the action. His point of view effectively serves to reveal his silent love for Vesty and to provide a distanced commentary on the Basin lifestyle. When Greene introduces an omniscient narrator to delineate other relationships, however, the alternation of viewpoint is sometimes strained. Several of Greene’s characters are skillfully drawn. Vesty, for example, despite some idealization, is an appealing woman in her quiet strength. The Basin folk are distinguished by a broad— even slapstick—humor and by a somewhat self-conscious dialect. Nevertheless, the story is true to the complexity of emotion and catches the flavor of a rural New England community. In later novels, such as Lastchance Junction, Far, Far West (1889) and Leon Pontifex (1890), Greene tried the West as a setting, but she was always most attuned to the quirks and language of New England, and novels like Towhead and Flood-Tide (1901), despite faults of exaggeration, exhibit Greene’s talent most effectively. Greene’s gift was for humor and the exact rendering of the manners of her New England country men and women. Her characters often verge on vivid caricature, a quality winning her the private praise of Mark Twain, and a skill by which she frequently captures the essence of her region. OTHER WORKS: Stuart and Bamboo (1897). The Moral Imbeciles (1898). Winslow Plain (1902). Deacon Lysander (1904). Power Lot (1906). The Long Green Road (1911). Everbreeze (1913). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Howe, J. W., Representative Women of New England (1904). Smith, H. N., and W. Gibson, eds., Mark TwainHowells Letters (1960). Reference works: NAW (1971). Other references: Boston Globe (30 Dec. 1935). Boston Transcript (30 Dec. 1935). Harper’s (Nov. 1881). Harvard Graduates Magazine (June 1931). Nation (22 Sept. 1881, 14 July 1892). New Orleans Picayune (8 Jan. 1882, 4 June 1893). —BARBARA C. EWELL
GREENFIELD, Eloise Born 17 May 1929, Parmele, North Carolina Daughter of Weston W. and Lessie Jones Little; married Robert J. Greenfield, 1950 (separated); children Steven, Monica Passionate about language and the rhythms of words, Eloise Greenfield has devoted her career to writing children’s books
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offering African American children a positive and self-affirming view of the minority experience. Greenfield writes: ‘‘I want to be one of those who can choose and order words that children will want to celebrate. I want to make them shout and laugh and blink back tears and care about themselves.’’ Her extensive list of prestigious awards is one indication that she has succeeded in this goal. After what Greenfield describes as a childhood she looks back on with pleasure, she attended Miner Teachers College from 1946-49. She then began a career as a clerk typist at the U.S. Patent Office (1949-56). From 1956 to 1960, Greenfield was a supervisory patent assistant, after which she worked in a variety of capacities in the Washington D.C. area until 1968. In the 1970s Greenfield became involved in the District of Columbia Black Writer’s Workshop, where she started as the codirector of adult fiction (1971-73) and then became director of children’s literature (1973-74). She served as the District of Columbia Commission on the Arts and Humanities’ writer-inresidence for 1973 and 1985-86. She continues to write and participate in numerous school and library programs and workshops for both children and adults, striving to address realistic childhood issues—African American issues in particular—by stressing the importance of family and positive alternative methods of solving problems. Early in her career, Greenfield commented on how ‘‘it has been inspiring. . .to be part of the struggle’’ to create quality books for African American children. In picture books, novels for young readers, biographies of famous African Americans, memoirs of childhood, and poetry, Greenfield’s work has been infused with warmth, hope, and joy. Her vision has always pointed in two directions: back to a past rich with strength and courage and forward to a future brimming with possibilities. Greenfield’s young protagonists are often dreamers whose quiet time spent imagining and dreaming is growing time. In Nathaniel Talking (1989), her third Coretta Scott King Award winner, young Nathaniel B. Free raps philosophically about his family, his friends, his life. Despite losing his mother, Nathaniel feels strongly connected to his father and his extended family. Familial connections are always important in Greenfield’s writing, and she lovingly explores alternatives to the traditional nuclear family. Family provided Greenfield with personal strength as she faced societal hostility and rejection. With her mother, Lessie Jones Little, she wrote Childtimes: A Three Generational Memoir (1979) dedicated to the memory of her grandmother who had dictated material for the book. This autobiography, which many consider Greenfield’s best work, traces the history of the three women against the landscape of their times. An intimate personal history shapes the book’s quiet theme that childhood can and should be happy, a time of building self-esteem supported by a caring family and community: ‘‘a childtime is a mighty thing.’’ The book received the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for nonfiction and the Carter Book Award for outstanding merit. Greenfield created her first book, a scrapbook put together with household paste, when she was three and views this act as the
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beginning of her life. As a creator, she thrilled to the sentence ‘‘Home is where the music is,’’ and continues to feel a mission to celebrate those words. Home and music continue as constant themes, anchors to which she and her characters return. Her first book of poetry, Honey, I Love: and Other Love Poems (1978), a Reading Rainbow selection, includes the music of skipping rope and the rhythm of riding trains; all poems are home bound, safe and secure. Nathaniel Talking contains the literal music of ‘‘bones’’ and blues. Most of Greenfield’s picture books address everyday traumas and delight: the arrival of a new sibling, parent separation, a grandmother’s sadness about moving, buying a present for a mother’s birthday. Sometimes the resolution seems too easy and predictable, but Greenfield’s determination that children feel good about themselves transcends these considerations. Two novels for young readers, Sisters (1974) and Talk About a Family (1978), record the anger and sadness of their young female protagonists as they try to make sense of their fears and confusion. Both novels conclude realistically: with a potential for a better future, but with no facile solution to present difficulties. Her commitment to providing good role models for African American children has drawn Greenfield toward biography. Lucid writing and artful selection of detail makes her books on heroic Americans Mary McLeod Bethune, Rosa Parks, and Paul Robeson accessible to young readers, and she has won numerous awards for these documents of resilience and courage. They are an important part of Greenfield’s share in building a significant body of excellent literature for all children. OTHER WORKS: Sister (1969). The Last Dance (1971). Love, Oh Love (1972). Bubbles (1972, reissued as Good News, 1977). Rosa Parks (1973, 1995). She Come Bringing Me That Little Baby Girl (1974). Me and Nessie (1975). Paul Robeson (1975). First Pink Light (1976, reissued 1991). Africa Dream (with L. J. Little, 1977). Mary McLeod Bethune (1977). I Can Do It Myself (with Lessie Jones Little, 1978). Darlene (1980). Grandmama’s Joy (1980, 1999). Daydreamers (1981). Alesia (with Alesia Revis, 1981). Grandpa’s Face (1988). Under the Sunday Tree (1988). My Doll, Keshia (1991). Night on Neighborhood Street (1991, 1996). Big Friend, Little Friend (1991). Daddy and I (1991). I Make Music (1991). Koya Delaney and the Good Girl (1992). William and the Good Old Days (1993). Aaron and Gayla’s Counting Book (1993). Sweet Baby Coming (with J. S. Gilchrist, 1994). On My Horse (1995). Easter Parade (1997). For the Love of the Game: Michael Jordan and Me (1997). Kia Tanisha (1997). Kia Tanisha Drives Her Car (1997). Angels (1998). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Black Authors and Illustrators of Children’s Books (1992). CA (Online, 1999). Children’s Books and Their Creators (1995). Children’s Literature Review (1996). TCCW (1983, 1989). SATA (1990). CLR (1982). Other references: Horn Book (Dec. 1975). —SUSAN P. BLOOM, UPDATED BY JULIET BYINGTON
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GREENWOOD, Grace See LIPPINCOTT, Sara Jane
GRIFFIN, Susan Born 26 January 1943, Los Angeles, California Daughter of Walden and Sarah Colvin Griffin; married John Levy, 1966 A self-defined radical feminist, Susan Griffin graduated from San Francisco State University (B.A. 1965, M.A. 1972). She has been variously employed as a waitress, switchboard and teletype operator, house painter, teacher, assistant editor of Ramparts, artists’ model, and an actor and director in San Francisco. She is a supporter of the Feminist Writers’ Guild. In Like the Iris of an Eye (1976), which includes her three earlier volumes of poetry, Griffin writes in a first-person, conversational style underscoring the intensity of the poems’ emotional content. The first section—‘‘Early Poems’’ (1967-73)—includes the title poem, ‘‘Love Should Grow Up Like a Wild Iris in the Field’’ and it deliberately and ironically rejects the romantic stereotype to locate love in ‘‘the iris of an eye,’’ which is probably watching out for a child, checking a cooking dinner, and seeing the tame, familiar, and restricted life that is the antithesis of a wildflower. Most of the poems in this section are concerned with contradictions either between stereotypes and reality or between expectations and reality. The woman whose feelings Griffin identifies recognizes her affinity with the black American slave (‘‘I like to think of Harriet Tubman’’), Native American (‘‘White Bear’’), war protesters (‘‘To Gather Ourselves’’), and political revolutionaries (‘‘Letter to the Revolution,’’ ‘‘Poem in the Form of a Letter’’). She is an outsider whose search for power leads her into conflict with unaware men who ‘‘won’t know the half of it, not in a million years’’ (‘‘An Answer to a Man’s Question, ‘What Can I Do About Women’s Liberation?’’’). The second section—‘‘Family’’ (1967-76)—is a verbal portrait album; descriptions are almost visual in the ordering of heretofore insignificant details that assume mythic proportions in linking four generations of women and some of the men who shared their lives. The six poems of section three—‘‘The Tiredness Cycle’’ (1973-74)—reflect disappointment and disillusionment, which are allowed neither to deepen into despair nor to vanish through avoidance (‘‘I dwell on the line’’). Structurally more varied than the earlier sections, the works of the final group—‘‘New Poems’’ (1973-76)—focus primarily on selfdiscovery and acceptance; on evolving a vivid understanding of the woman-self. Though varied, the experiences examined are central to women’s existence and awareness; Griffin’s works bear witness to the common base of women’s real lives. Griffin’s Emmy award-winning radio drama Voices (1975) presents five women whose ages (nineteen to seventy) and experiences span 20th century American life—as it is allowed to
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women. Despite their differences, the characters share underlying fears and frustrations; at the conclusion of the play, speaking in chorus they identify themselves with womankind, from slave to socialite. Only Rosalinde, the youngest, seems not to share the others’ feelings of suppression, but to remain apart she must employ tactics of deliberate avoidance. Her exaggerated lifesketch and her impassioned rejection of the emotions of the others only underscore reality’s threat, which she subconsciously recognizes. The women finally reject death-suicide-endless sleep, and the vitality of the play’s poetic form emphasizes the resilience and renewal of the women’s spirits. Uniting feminism and ecology, Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (1978) is an elegant prose poem, and its design allows for both continuous reading and random sampling. In the four sections—‘‘Matter,’’ ‘‘Separation,’’ ‘‘Passages,’’ and ‘‘Her Vision’’—Griffin blends science, literature, history, religion, myth and more, to reexplore the limitations of patriarchy and the limitlessness of the woman-centered universe. ‘‘Matter’’ compares and contrasts patriarchal judgements about nature and women with ludicrous and absurd conclusions; ‘‘Separation’’ focuses attention on the enforced distance between humans and nature. Moving through ‘‘Passages’’ to ‘‘Her Vision,’’ Griffin describes a new way of seeing a woman-identified view of nature and women which challenges and encompasses the reader. The power of Griffin’s works comes from the clarity of her perceptions of the role, conditions, existence, and aspirations of ordinary women. The domestic details, the historical stereotypes, and the contemporary dilemma are carefully integrated in her well-crafted, fully accessible poetry, drama, fiction, and essays. She neither excuses nor accuses; she investigates with sympathy and understanding, and she speaks for the experience of us all. Griffin’s career has included a range of genres: poetry, plays, stories, and essays. By 1980, after almost a decade of publication, she had garnered such awards as the Ina Coolbrith Prize in poetry and a National Endowment for the Arts grant, as well as her Emmy for Voices. Her work in the 1980s and 1990s engaged with subjects of a global nature—rape, pornography, and war. Emphatically feminist in politics and writing, Griffin has increasingly become a theorist and interpreter of women’s condition. This trend is especially clear in Rape: The Power of Consciousness (1979), a collection of essays, and Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revolt Against Nature (1981). Rape includes a version of her well-known 1971 essay, ‘‘Rape: The All-American Crime,’’ in which, like Susan Brownmiller, Griffin analyzes rape as the chief tool of patriarchy in maintaining power: a crime carried out by a few men on behalf of many. Calling it ‘‘a male protection racket’’ where a woman is made to feel unsafe and therefore dependent on ‘‘her man,’’ she also connects the crime of rape with national aggressions, such as American imperialism, particularly in Vietnam. Her other essays look at encouraging changes in the attitude toward the prosecution of rape since the women’s movement in the 1970s but warn the crime of rape is still statistically increasing. In Consciousness she closes on a hopeful
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note, choosing ‘‘hope over dread,’’ with a vision of the possibility of change for women when they learn to confront and overcome fears keeping them from full self-realization: ‘‘I have tasted freedom from fear, a world we imagine, and this small taste means more to me than large fears.’’ In Pornography and Silence, a groundbreaking work, Griffin denies the conventional notion women are subservient and enjoy subservience and argues forcefully that women do not welcome domination—a necessary message at the time. She also interprets the male psyche, perceiving it as separated from emotion and, ultimately, from women. This disassociation, as well as the belief in the subservience of women, creates the environment for pornography. Although some critics argued the ferocity of Griffin’s tone and language diminished the impact of her message, her work was prophetic, opening the way to a feminist analysis of pornography. A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War (1992, reissued 1994) is a moving and profoundly multilayered meditation on history—especially the history of war and weapon making, on family secrets and the connections between public and private, and on the destructiveness this silence and denial create, both in war and in families. Firmly joining the personal to the global, Griffin ranges over wars and countries to demonstrate connection. ‘‘As social concepts, war and gender evolved together,’’ Griffin once told an interviewer. ‘‘To change either, we have to change both.’’ The stones of the title are a paradoxical symbol: though silent, they ‘‘reveal traces from fires suffered thousands of years ago.’’ So, too, human beings carry ‘‘our own history and the history of the world embedded in us, we hold a sorrow deep within and cannot weep until that history is song.’’ Griffin has also published essays on such topics as chronic fatigue syndrome. In addition to writing, she sought a doctorate degree at the Starr King School of Ministry.
OTHER WORKS: Dear Sky (1971). Let Them Be Said (1973). Letters (1974). The Sink (1974). Made from This Earth: An Anthology of Writings (1983). Unremembered Country (1987). Gourmet Expose: Revealing Favorite Restaurant Recipes of the Wasatch Front (1994). The Eros of Everyday Life: Essays on Ecology, Gender and Society (1995, reprint 1996). Bending Home: Selected & New Poems, 1967-1998 (1998). What Her Body Thought: A Journey into the Shadows (1999). Has contributed to the following books: Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism (1990); Revisioning Philosophy (1992); Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature (1997); Women on Hunting (1994); Images of Women in Literature (1991); Transforming a Rape Culture (1993); Issues in Feminism: An Introduction to Women’s Studies (1995); and Readings in Ecology and Feminist Theology (1995).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Freedman, D. P., ‘‘Writing in the Borderlands: The Poetic Prose of Gloria Anzaldua and Susan Griffin’’ in
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Constructing and Reconstructing Gender: The Links Among Communication, Language, and Gender (1992). Howe, R., ed. No More Masks!: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Women Poets (1993). Shima, A., Skirting the Subject: Pursuing Language in the Works of Adrienne Rich, Susan Griffin, and Beverly Dahlen (dissertation, 1993). Ysunza, A., ‘‘Embracing Chaos: A Literary Analysis of Susan Griffin’s Women and Nature’’ (thesis, 1989). Reference works: CA 49-52 (1975). CANR (1981, 1989). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Women Writers of the West Coast (1983). Other references: NYTBR (22 Nov. 1992). PW (10 Aug. 1992). Whole Earth Review (Summer 1989). LJ (July 1987). —KATHLEEN GREGORY KLEIN, UPDATED BY LINDA BERUBE AND NELSON RHODES
GRIFFITH, Mary Born date unknown; died 1877 Wrote under: The Author of ‘‘Our Neighborhood,’’ Mrs. Griffith Very little is known of Mary Griffith’s life. Records of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society show that she became an honorary member of the Society in 1830 and that she died in 1877. In response to Griffith’s gift of her first volume the editor of the New England Farmer tells a little more about her. Griffith had ‘‘long been distinguished for her extensive, interesting, and valuable experiments as a practical cultivator of the soil.’’ She was known also for her contributions to horticultural literature, although he does not tell us what they were. He does call her, in light of Our Neighborhood (1831), ‘‘the first female author on tillage.’’ About her personal life he tells us only that she was left a widowed mother ‘‘in the prime of life’’ and boldly attempted to support herself at the practice of agriculture. She signs her address simply Charlies Hope, New Jersey, a place which does not appear in modern atlases. Griffith’s published books number four, one of which, Discoveries in Light and Vision (1836, reprinted in 1993 by the Classics in Opthamology Library), testifies to her interest in science. Her other three books are fiction, throughout which she often stops for a ‘‘scientific’’ observation about light, soil, or phrenology. Our Neighborhood and The Two Defaulters (1842) are novels, while Camperdown; or, News from Our Neighborhood (1836) is a collection of tales. All three works are lightly interconnected, being supposedly about the same ‘‘neighborhood,’’ although there is only slight mention of people who appear in other stories to connect the works. Horticulture is not really a major feature of her stories, except as infrequent asides in Our Neighborhood, in which she tells how to plant grapes or potatoes while devoting most of the book to a silly romance between the narrator and a mysterious girl.
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Griffith’s writing style is weak in plot and organization; for instance, some of the tales in Camperdown are not at all clear, in plot or meaning, except as vehicles for her social concerns. One of the tales, ‘‘The Little Couple,’’ tells of two very short people who marry and who are given money by a rich uncle who expects (and gets) the privilege of ridiculing their size and naming their first daughter Glumdalclitch. The punch line is that they have a happy life and six normal-sized daughters. Another story caricatures a man who has no regard for his 13 daughters and is bitterly disappointed not to have any sons. Probably the most interesting story in Camperdown is ‘‘Three Hundred Years Hence,’’ a utopian story in which her main character is frozen in a block of ice and awakens 300 years later in the same place. He finds all sorts of marvels: Griffith’s 22ndcentury America is powered by a mysterious sort of engine invented by a woman. Among other reforms, dogs are extinct, ending the threat of massive outbreaks of hydrophobia. Men are educated for business life, while women have the right to earn money and control their own property. Griffith was very concerned with the economic security of women. She had no interest in politics or public life for women, only asking such things as they be allowed to clerk in retail stores and do tailoring. In Our Neighborhood she devotes pages to a lecture on ‘‘Woman’’ given by one of the characters who is obviously voicing Griffith’s own opinions. Various other of her works show her constant concern with respect due to women and the needs of women to be economically independent. She was both a critic of the business community for its treatment of women and its dishonest practices, and a true believer in the opportunities offered by the American way. A woman of strong opinions, Griffith despised dogs, bankers, society doctors, and any man who let women work to support him, such as young men who allow church women to raise scholarships for them to study for the ministry. Women’s work, she felt, should benefit women. Her fiction gives a fascinating picture of contemporary life highly colored by her earnest solicitation of the reader’s opinion. The three works of fiction by Griffith are well worth the attention of a student of early American fiction, especially her utopian romance. But perhaps the most interesting aspect of her work after all is its critical comment on woman’s place in the business world. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Adkins, N., Introduction to Three Hundred Years Hence by M. Griffith (1950). Jones, L., F., and S. W. Goodwin, eds., Feminism, Utopia, and Narrative (1990). Rohrlich, R. and E. H. Baruch, eds., Women in Search of Utopia (1984). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: History of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society (1880). New England Farmer (May 1831). Transactions of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society (1876, 1877). Women’s Studies (1982). —BEVERLY SEATON
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GRIMES, Martha Born Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (birthdate not available) Daughter of D. W. and June Dunnington Grimes; married and divorced; children: Kent Van Holland The popular English-mystery series Martha Grimes has written features Scotland Yard Inspector Richard Jury and his sidekick, amateur sleuth Melrose Plant. Inspired by the name of a British pub for her debut mystery novel (The Man with a Load of Mischief, 1981), Grimes continued the theme with all of the Richard Jury novels that followed. The pub names serve not only as the title but also as part of the setting in each book. In 1983 Grimes told a reporter, ‘‘Unless I have the pub name first, I can’t write the book.’’ She has also said she often doesn’t know who the murderer is until she’s halfway through writing the book. Her mystery novels are truly a series in that the characters continue from one book to the next with relatively little introduction, and previous events are frequently alluded to. Grimes’ main characters, Richard Jury, the tall, cultured and quiet professional, and Melrose Plant, the agreeable, aristocratic amateur, have been called an unusual duo. Plant’s American-born, interfering Aunt Agatha is another recurring character. Commended for her sense of humor and graceful writing style, Grimes has been described as a literary descendant of Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie. But unlike her native-Briton predecessors, Grimes, a devout Anglophile, relies on research and frequent trips to England to gather material for her settings and characters’ backgrounds. While her plots have been described as complex and convoluted, the depth of plot and the strong emotional appeal of her eccentric characters have made Grimes a favorite in America. There are those, however, particularly British readers, who take pleasure in pointing out factual errors in her books, such as trains leaving from the incorrect London station. These errors, however, have decreased as the series has progressed. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where her father was the city solicitor, Grimes spent summers at her mother’s hotel in Mountain Lake Park, Maryland. Her favorite memories of that time include the theatrical productions her brother staged in the garage behind the hotel. She earned her B.A. and M.A. at the University of Maryland and went on to teach English at the University of Iowa and at Frostburg State College in Maryland, where she was an assistant professor. In the late 1990s Grimes was an English professor at Montgomery College in Tacoma Park, Maryland, and on occasion she also teaches detective fiction at Johns Hopkins University. She has residences in both Washington, D.C., and Santa Fe, New Mexico. After introducing readers to Richard Jury in The Man with a Load of Mischief, discovered in an unsolicited manuscripts pile by an editor at Little, Brown in 1979 and published with a first printing of three thousand copies, Grimes published The Old Fox
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Deceiv’d in 1982. The following year, 1983, Grimes’ third novel in the series, The Anodyne Necklace, earned her the Nero Wolfe award for best mystery of the year along with critical acclaim. The Five Bells and Bladebone put Grimes on the New York Times bestseller list in 1987. Her next two books in the series, The Old Silent (1989) and The Old Contemptibles (1991), also made the bestseller list. In 1992 Grimes broke from her fans’ beloved Jury series with The End of the Pier, which combined a serial-murder mystery in Maryland with the touching exploration of a mother and son relationship. Though it was praised by critics, Richard Jury fans felt betrayed and reacted much more negatively. In 1993 Grimes told a reporter, ‘‘Perhaps I should have published under a pseudonym.’’ Twice during the 15-book Jury series, Grimes brought her Scotland Yard inspector to America. The Horse You Came In On (1993) was titled after a pub she came across in Baltimore. ‘‘I knew I would have to figure out some way to get Jury and Melrose to come over [to America],’’ Grimes said in 1993, ‘‘purely on the basis of the name of this pub.’’ Fan reaction was so positive that her characters crossed the Atlantic again in Rainbow’s End (1995). In 1999 Grimes published Biting the Moon, the first in a series of novels that explores animal welfare, a topic of keen interest to her, with most of her royalties going to animal charities. On why she wrote Biting the Moon, Grimes says, ‘‘While the characters are fictional, the practices are not. This is my way of reaching people. So many people can be reached through fiction.’’ OTHER WORKS: The Dirty Duck (1984). Jerusalem Inn (1984). Help the Poor Struggler (1985). The Deer Leap (1985). I Am the Only Running Footman (1986). Send Bygraves (1989). Hotel Paradise (1996). The Case Has Altered (1997). The Stargazey (1998). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Book Review Digest 1997 (1998).CA (1986). Heising, W., Detecting Women 2 (1996). Swanson, J., and D. James, By a Woman’s Hand (1994). —KATHY HENDERSON
GRIMKÉ (WELD), Angelina (Emily) Born 20 February 1805, Charleston, South Carolina; died 26 October 1879, Hyde Park, Massachusetts Also wrote under: A. E. Grimké, Angelina Grimké Weld Daughter of John F. and Mary Smith Grimké; married Theodore D. Weld, 1838 An abolitionist and women’s rights pioneer, Angelina Grimké launched her meteoric career in the abolitionist movement in a letter to William Lloyd Garrison published in The Liberator (1835).
Grimké’s first pamphlet was Appeal to Christian Women of the Southern States (1836). In the Appeal she attacked the traditional religious justifications of slavery and focused instead on the God-given equality of the slave as human being. The most powerful and original part of the Appeal was her call to Southern women to take action against slavery. Though women lacked political power, they could free slaves who were their own property, ameliorate the conditions for other slaves, and petition legislatures for emancipation. Such actions might lead to fines or imprisonment; nevertheless, she called women to civil disobedience. She contended: ‘‘If a law commands me to sin, I will break it; if it calls me to suffer, I will let it take its course unresistingly.’’ Grimké’s Appeal was the only abolitionist message by a Southern woman addressed specifically to Southern women. As such it aroused violent opposition in the South. Grimké’s second pamphlet, An Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States (1837), stressed women’s particular responsibility to their fellow women in bondage. Female slaves are in fact ‘‘our countrywomen. . .our sisters.’’ Both free and slave women suffered from discrimination; because of alleged mental inferiority, both were denied educational opportunities. Grimké denounced not only slavery but also Northern race prejudice. She condemned segregation patterns as a ‘‘wicked absurdity’’ in a republic. Such prejudice, she contended, radically limited Northern influence on the South. Letters to Catharine E. Beecher (1838) came in response to Beecher’s Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism with Reference to the Duty of American Females (1837). Beecher had attacked Grimké both for advocating abolition and for urging women’s involvement therein. In the Letters, first published serially in the Liberator and the Emancipator in 1837, Grimké concentrated primarily on a detailed defense of the efficacy of immediate abolition. She condemned the gradualism Beecher advocated and called for a program of immediate abolition including equal rights to education and equal protection under the laws. Such a program, she acknowledged, would bring major changes in Northern society as well as Southern. And Grimké welcomed the prospect. In the two letters which dealt specifically with Beecher’s concept of women’s limited sphere, Grimké developed a strong feminist argument based on a doctrine of human rights. According to Grimké, ‘‘human beings have rights because they are moral beings.’’ As moral beings, women no less than men must act publicly on moral issues. As human beings, women should participate in making all laws concerning their own condition. She saw a new cause emerging out of the abolitionist controversy, a broad drive to reclaim the usurped rights of all disadvantaged persons, including women and slaves. When she married Theodore Weld, her career as a writer came to an end. She collaborated with him and her sister, Sarah, in compiling American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (1839). Some speeches and a letter on women’s rights were later published. But it is upon the three works written between 1836 and 1838 that her reputation rests.
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As a writer, Grimké has a forceful and clean-cut style. Her arguments are lucid and cogent, and she writes with ease and directness. She utilizes 18th-century reformist ideas to support her arguments, drawing heavily on environmentalist theories to explain the perversion of original equality. She also draws on 18th-century republican ideology with its stress on the imperative necessity for moral virtue among citizens if the republic is to survive. Above all, however, as a 19th-century evangelical reformer, she relies on religious arguments. The Bible offered the standard of judgement by which to determine the evils of slavery. It offered the religious-historical role models for women undertaking responsible moral action against slavery. In her religious convictions, Grimké found the basis for the formulation of the doctrine of human rights. In so doing, she finally fused the two causes with which her private life and her public career became identified, abolition and women’s rights.
OTHER WORKS: The papers of Angelina Grimké Weld are housed in the Moorhead-Springarn Research Center of Howard University in Washington, D.C.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Barnes, G. H., and D. L. Dumond, eds., Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké Weld, and Sarah Grimké: 1822-1844 (2 vols., 1934). Birney, C., The Grimké Sisters, Sarah and Angelina Grimké: The First Women Advocates of Abolition and Woman’s Rights (1885). Ceplair, L., ed., The Public Years of Sarah and Angelina Grimké: Selected Writings, 1835-1839 (1989). Hull, G. T., Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance (1987). Lerner, G., The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels Against Slavery (1967). Lumpkin, K. Du Pre, The Emancipation of Angelina Grimké (1974). Miller, E. M., The Other Construction: Where Violence and Womanhood Meet in the Writings of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Angelina Grimké Weld, and Nella Larsen (1999). Weld, T. D., In Memory: Angelina Grimké Weld (1880). Reference works: HWS, I. NAW (1971). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —INZER BYERS
GRIMKÉ, Sarah Moore Born 26 November 1792, Charleston, South Carolina; died 23 December 1873, Hyde Park, Massachusetts Daughter of John F. and Mary Smith Grimké Sarah Moore Grimké made her impact upon American history and literature as an abolitionist and advocate of women’s rights. Her first publication was a pamphlet, An Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States (1836). In it, Grimké stresses the
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inherent conflict between slavery and Christianity, basing her argument against slavery on the premise that God had created all men equal. Referring to state laws and practices, she effectively demonstrates how the law kept ministers from meeting religious obligations to slaves, and she calls on the Southern clergy to act as moral leaders against slavery. Grimké’s second publication came out of an antislavery lecture tour of New England in 1837 and 1838. Because Grimké and her sister Angelina lectured publicly on abolition to both men and women, they were sharply criticized, especially by the Congregationalist Ministerial Association of Massachusetts. Grimké responded with 15 letters, first published serially in 1837 in the New England Spectator and later collected as a book. In the Letters on the Equality of the Sexes (1838), Grimké rejects indignantly the contention that women should not speak publicly on moral issues, asserting that as morally responsible individuals, they cannot do otherwise. She further argues women should themselves become ministers. She went on to develop a full-fledged argument for women’s equality. Again, she started with the religious premise. God had created man and woman with equal moral rights and duties; original equality and responsibility remained unaltered by the Fall. Nor did Christ distinguish between male and female virtues. The biblical message is clear: ‘‘Whatever is right for man to do, is right for woman.’’ Grimké contrasted this original equality with the oppression women historically have endured around the world. Throughout history man has imposed his authority over woman. In nonWestern countries, he treats woman as a slave or a toy to amuse himself. In America and Europe, male dominance is generally cloaked in terms of protection, but the oppression is no less real. The weight of inequality varies according to women’s social status. In America, Grimké argued, working women felt economic consequences most keenly; for middle class women, legal disabilities and intellectual deprivation were the crucial problems. After the Letters, Grimké largely withdrew from writing. She collaborated with her sister and brother-in-law in compiling American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (1839); she wrote occasionally for newspapers and did a translation of Alphonse de Lamartine’s Joan of Arc (1867). Of the two publications of 1836-38, the Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States is essentially a minor work. It added little to the antislavery argument, and the often turgid style of writing further limited its appeal. The Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, on the other hand, is a significant pioneering work written with power and originality. In it her style is forthright and lucid, the tone grave and dispassionate. Her arguments are lit with occasional flashes of ironic humor and anger. In explaining women’s historical inequality, Grimké particularly stressed the environmentalist argument. She contrasted the role women in general were allowed to play with the role women in authority showed themselves capable of fulfilling. Especially she denounced the deliberate efforts to ‘‘debase and enslave’’ women’s intellect. ‘‘All I ask of our brethren is that they take their
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feet from off our necks and permit us to stand upright.’’ Only then can the validity of male assumptions about women’s nature and abilities be tested. Grimké also used the American revolutionary tradition of protest against usurpation of rights. She thus offered a basis for attacking inequality that the women of Seneca Falls would utilize in 1848. Above all, Grimké recognized the importance of putting the argument for equality in religious terms, which were the terms most crucial for her own generation. She boldly staked out the claim that equality itself was God’s will, built into creation. As God’s gift, this equality could and must be reclaimed. The Letters on the Equality of the Sexes stands as a major achievement, the first significant defense of women’s rights by an American woman.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Barnes, G. H., and D. L. Dumond, eds., Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké Weld, and Sarah Grimké: 1822-1844 (2 vols., 1934). Bartlett, E. A., ed., Sarah Grimké: Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and Other Essays (1988). Birney, C., The Grimké Sisters, Sarah and Angelina Grimké: The First Women Advocates of Abolition and Woman’s Rights (1885). Ceplair, L., ed., The Public Years of Sarah and Angelina Grimké: Selected Writings, 1835-1839 (1989). Hull, G. T., Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance (1987). Lerner, G., The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels Against Slavery (1967). Reference works: DAB. NAW (1971). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —INZER BYERS
GRUENBERG, Sidonie Matzner Born 10 June 1881, Vienna, Austria; died 11 March 1974, New York, New York Daughter of Idore and Augusta Bassechés Matzner; married Benjamin C. Gruenberg, 1903 The oldest of four girls and two boys, Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg was raised in a large family villa outside Vienna. In 1895, her father brought the family to New York, where they began a lifelong association with Felix Adler’s Ethical Culture Society, a ‘‘religious society, imbued with the spirit of religion but without the dogmas.’’ After studying at the Ethical Culture schools, Gruenberg took graduate courses at Teachers College, Columbia University. In 1907 she began her association with the Federation of Child Study, a group of Ethical Culture women encouraged by Felix Adler to study new ideas in child development. In 1924, the federation expanded and became the Child Study Association of
America; Gruenberg was named director, a post she held until her retirement in 1950. She taught parent education at Teachers College and New York University between 1928 and 1936. In her first book, Your Child Today and Tomorrow (1913), Gruenberg exhibited her talent for synthesizing the best sources of child development information and translating them into language parents could understand and trust. The combination of conventional wisdom and a willingness to experiment with new ideas which characterizes this book is also representative of Gruenberg’s style throughout her work. Sons and Daughters (1916), in a similar format, addressed itself to the training of older boys and girls. Here she drew from innovative psychological theories that isolated adolescence as a unique stage of development. We, the Parents (1939), written in the shadow of World War II, won the Parents’ Magazine award in 1940 as the outstanding publication of that year. In addition to advice on child rearing, an important theme of this book and throughout her work is the ambivalence inherent in women on the subject of work vs. family. Gruenberg recognizes the complex needs of modern women and warns mothers to prepare for a number of life stages. ‘‘We have to choose not once, but many times and at each stage with the same degree of uncertainty.’’ She felt women need no longer be martyrs to their families and suggested ‘‘marriage does not necessarily entail parenthood,’’ but she also discussed a vast range of possibilities for working out a balance between parenting and personal growth. Gruenberg and her daughter, Hilda Krech, continue examining the problem of women’s choices in The Many Lives of Modern Women (1952). They confront the intellectual and physical isolation of modern housewives and the conflicts involved in being educated but unable to pursue a career. Gruenberg’s own ambivalence is expressed in a picture of women both as victims of conflicting social expectations and yet personally responsible for finding their own ‘‘appropriate’’ solution. Gruenberg and her biologist husband coauthored The Wonderful Story of How You Were Born (1952), a masterful book of sex education for children. It is told in story form with illustrations, explaining not only the entire reproduction process but also the unique complex of emotions parents feel toward the birth of their child. The book went through several printings; it was revised in 1970 and translated into several languages. Her major editorial work, climaxing years of parent education work, is The Encyclopedia of Child Care and Guidance (1954). She was able to draw together in this 1,000-page compendium a massive quantity of facts and ideas on child rearing, by such experts as Margaret Mead and Benjamin Spock. Gruenberg also edited several anthologies of children’s stories. Gruenberg’s writing represents a social history of the first half of the 20th century, in that it reflects the evolution of attitudes and conventions toward the child, the family, and women. Further, the whole of her work chronicles child development theories
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as they were interpreted and popularized in journals and magazines. Gruenberg had an intuitive ability to absorb changes and ideas and was skilled at communicating in clear, persuasive language, although she was less successful when attempting a personal or philosophical analysis. While some of her writing has become outdated, the children’s anthologies, many of the child rearing topics, and her insights into family relations remain contemporary and instructive.
OTHER WORKS: Our Children: A Handbook for Parents (edited by Gruenberg, with D. C. Fisher, 1932). Parents, Children, and Money (with B. C. Gruenberg, 1933). Parents’ Questions (edited by Gruenberg, 1936; revised edition, 1947). The Use of Radio in Parent Education (1939). The Family in a World at War (edited by Gruenberg, 1942). Favorite Stories Old and New (edited by Gruenberg, 1942; revised edition, 1955). More Favorite Stories Old and New (edited by Gruenberg, 1948; revised 1960). Your Child and You (1950). Our Children Today: A Guide to Their Needs (edited by Gruenberg, with the CSAA, 1952). Children for the Childless (with B. C. Gruenberg, 1954). Let’s Read a Story (edited by Gruenberg, 1957). Guiding Your Child from Five to Twelve (1958). Parent’s Guide to Everyday Problems of Boys and Girls (1958). Let’s Read More Stories (edited by Gruenberg, 1960). The Wonderful Story of You (with B. C. Gruenberg, 1960). Let’s Hear a Story (edited by Gruenberg, 1961). Stories for Little Girls and Little Boys (edited by Gruenberg, 1961). All Kinds of Courage (edited by Gruenberg, 1962). Your Child and Money (Public Affairs Pamphlet #370, 1965). The papers of Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg are at the Library of Congress, Manuscript Division in Washington, D.C.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Wollons, R. L., ‘‘Educating Mothers: Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg and the Child Study Association of America, 1881-1929’’ (dissertation, 1983). Reference works: CA (1975). CB (May 1940). Other references: Child Study Magazine (Spring 1950, Fall 1956). NYT (9 June 1962, 13 March 1974). —ROBERTA WOLLONS
GRUMBACH, Doris Born 12 July 1918, New York, New York Daughter of Leonard W. and Helen Oppenheimer Isaac; married Leonard Grumbach, 1941 (divorced); children: Barbara, Jane Doris Grumbach, retired professor of literature at the American University in Washington, D.C., has written several novels, literary biography, numerous critical articles, and hundreds of book reviews for the New York Times Book Review, Commonweal, New Republic, America, and Saturday Review.
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The characters in the academic (The Spoil of the Flowers, 1962; The Short Throat, the Tender Mouth, 1964) and semiacademic (Chamber Music, 1979) settings of Grumbach’s novels are a dimension of her concern with the mind at work, for these are often men and women who for all their intelligence and learning, reflect but gain little pleasure from reflection, think but cannot act effectively on their thoughts, and create but cannot share. The rivalries in The Spoil of the Flowers, the frustrated lives in The Short Throat, the Tender Mouth, and the unhappy marriages in Chamber Music all speak to the fragmentation characterizing the lives of many of Grumbach’s characters. In Chamber Music, one finds composers who have no desire to share with their wives ‘‘the old talk, the old making of music together, four hands at the same keyboard, four hands and two mouths and our whole beings engaged in the same loving act.’’ Only in the extraordinary loving relationship of Caroline and Anna, sketched so economically and sensitively in this introspective novel, does the reader find an integrated, unified relationship. Yet even this relationship is continually in the process of being reshaped and redrawn by Caroline. At the work’s conclusion, she notes, ‘‘I think the historian’s view always superimposes itself upon history.’’ Asked to write the history of her famous composer husband, Caroline ‘‘managed to produce merely a sketch of the chamber of one heart’’ and continues to live only because her memory of Anna has ‘‘grown, reached up, covered, and supported the rest of [her] life.’’ Grumbach’s exposure to socialism as a student surfaces both in The Short Throat, the Tender Mouth and in a sensitive essay on McCarthyism, and her memory of a nun in an undergraduate class appears as a vignette in a novel and as a touchstone in an essay on her own conversion to Catholicism. This is not to imply Grumbach is primarily a biographically inspired writer. Rather, it is to say her works, as diverse as they appear to be, are of one piece and reflect upon each other in terms of themes and techniques. One watches Grumbach as an essayist explore the relationship of the experience to the written word, as a biographer study the bond between the life and the work of Mary McCarthy (a woman who, like herself, was also a novelist and outstanding critic), as a novelist show awareness of the reviewer, and as a literary critic analyze the works of others. Grumbach’s literary concerns initially seem unrelated—the Catholic layperson’s role in the Church, the academician’s scrutiny of the teaching profession and the Modern Language Association, the feminist’s consideration of women writers, the biographer’s perspective on her subject—but the primary and unifying thrust behind all of Grumbach’s work is that of reflection. An experience is considered and transformed in the retelling so that a continual sense of evaluation and reevaluation informs Grumbach’s fiction as well as her nonfiction. Grumbach’s roles gather their shape from her varying responses to the printed word, as teacher, critic, reviewer, essayist, and novelist, and it is possible to see in her literary production her own contention that a good teacher lets students see her mind in
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the process of grappling with an idea. In ‘‘The Art of Teaching: Some Minor Heresies,’’ Grumbach notes that ‘‘the student sees that learning is a continuous process, not a matter of authority or imposition of views’’ (Catholic World, Oct. 1964). In the controlled, evocative language and characterization of Chamber Music, Grumbach best illustrates the active, reflective spirit that characterizes her own literary production. Grumbach’s active, reflective spirit is especially obvious in Coming into the Endzone (1991), a memoir and a reflection on the seventieth year of her life. ‘‘Growing old means abandoning the rituals of one’s life, not hardening into them as some people think,’’ she writes. And so, in the summer of 1989, the year following her seventieth birthday, Grumbach and her longtime companion, Sybil Pike, moved from Washington, D.C., to Sargentville, Maine. Her active mind is not hardened against new ideas. The computer provides both assistance and simile: ‘‘My memory is diminished, like a hard disk that suddenly fails to deliver. . . . I operate with floppy intelligence.’’ She continues to believe that to help students learn, you ‘‘hold their coats while they go at it.’’ Grumbach collects, she says, metaphors for death—caged lions, a dead goldfish. Young friends are dying of AIDS, older ones are becoming frail. She is starting a new life, this time on the ocean, much as she and Sybil Pike did in 1972 when they moved to Washington to start their life together. Reflecting the freedom of form that memory enables, the book moves through sadness and loss to affirmation in a voice that is distinctively Grumbach’s own. During the 1980s, Grumbach published three novels. The Missing Person (1981) traces, through second-person references, the life of Franny Fuller, a movie queen much in the Jean Harlow and Marilyn Monroe molds. Although reviewers frequently assume that the subject is Monroe, Grumbach has said, ‘‘I really was not writing about Marilyn Monroe, as everyone assumed, but simply about someone who might have been almost anyone. I erred in staying too closely to the biographical facts.’’ The missing person is a Hollywood star, manipulated, used, abused, superficial, and enormously beautiful. We do not hear her speak, but see her only through narrators, just as we see movie stars only through their pictures; she is a prototype for all people who are missing, especially to themselves. The Ladies (1984) fictionalizes historical figures. Two Irish-born women, Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, move to a small Welsh village so they can live as they wish to, as a married couple, rather than as society wishes them to. The women become renowned for their independence, and their visitors include such people as William Wordsworth, who dedicated a poem to them, Edmund Burke, and Walter Scott. Lonely, they are forbidden by Eleanor’s father to step foot inside Ireland again; they farm their land, make friends with and enemies among the local townfolk, become sick, aged, and die. Their marriage has all the incumbent difficulties and pleasures. Eleanor, tutored and
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bright, teaches the shy, unlettered Sarah; as Eleanor becomes crotchety and loses her sight, Sarah is increasingly in charge. While some critics argue that the novel is an admirable departure from more pessimistic lesbian novels, others see it as predetermined, placing joy where it may not have existed. The Magician’s Girl (1987) tells of three college roommates in the 1940s. The title is taken from a line by Sylvia Plath: ‘‘I am the magician’s girl who does not flinch.’’ Grumbach is acutely aware of the pains endured unflinchingly by young women: Maud, poor and unattractive, Minna, middle class and overprotected but haunted by fears, and Liz, whose parents were Communist sympathizers, scoffing at the world outside their apartment. This is the first direct use of autobiographical material in Grumbach’s work. Liz, the photographer who does not flinch, who survives, has Grumbach’s socialist, Jewish, New York childhood. She is the survivor, recording the world through her lens. In addition to her work as a novelist, Grumbach has had a distinguished career as a teacher and a critic. In 1972 she became literary editor for the New Republic, a position that occasioned her move to Washington from upstate New York where she had taught at the College of St. Rose. After two ‘‘magical’’ years at the New Republic, she returned to teaching, becoming professor of literature at the American University. Grumbach retired from teaching in 1984, but remained very active as a reviewer for both print and radio. From 1982 to 1990, her distinctive voice and carefully considered reflections on books were familiar to listeners of National Public Radio. Grumbach has completed a second volume of memoirs, Extra Innings, published in 1993. Extra Innings: A Memoir has been said to be more of a ‘‘hodgepodge’’ than Endzone, but whatever it is, it is the recollections of a woman who has lived her long and speckled life through words. Fifty Days of Solitude (1994) explores what Grumbach did when left alone while her companion went on a book-buying trip—she listened to music, sat in silence, and looked inside herself, what Gerard Manley Hopkins calls the ‘‘inscape, the deep meandering landscape of an interior life.’’ Again in Life in a Day (1996), she writes introspectively about solitude and her gratitude for everyday, common things, as the reader follows her through a day in her seventyseven-year-old life. The Book of Knowledge (1995) takes a turn to study four central characters, teens during the stock market crash of 1929, and follows them through to adulthood. The book deals head-on with sexuality issues, which some critics have attacked, but others feel followed closely the tragedy of that generation. Grumbach’s The Presence of Absence: On Prayers and Epiphany (1998) explores a subject many explore in their later years: God. Grumbach specifically reflects on her ongoing search for God, sparked by a revelation that occurred over 50 years ago. She delves into the works of writers and philosophers—such as Simon Weil, Thomas Merton, and Kathy Norris—as she does in her other works, to make sense of her thoughts. She is waiting for God to return to her life, to come back to her spiritually.
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OTHER WORKS: The Company She Kept: The Fiction of Mary McCarthy (1967).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Arnold, K., The Presence of Absence: On Prayers and Epiphany (Mar. 1999). Reference works: CAAS (1985). CA (online, 1999). CANR (1983). CLC (1982; 1991). Gay & Lesbian Literature (1994). Other references: Key Reporter (Autumn 1991). WRB (Dec. 1991). —SUSAN CLARK, UPDATED BY JANET M. BEYER AND DEVRA M. SLADICS
GUERNSEY, Clara F(lorida) Born 1 October 1836, Pittsford, New York; died 20 June 1893, Rochester, New York Daughter of James T. and Electa Guernsey Clara F. Guernsey, sister of Lucy Ellen Guernsey, lived all her life in the Rochester area of upstate New York. Her father was well known in the area as a friend of the Seneca, including chiefs Red Jacket and Corn Planter. When the Senecas traveled east from their homes, they would often spend the night at the Guernsey place in Pittsford. Guernsey followed her father in befriending the Senecas, and she is remembered for organizing wagonloads of food to be taken to the reservation during a period of famine. She also wrote many articles for periodicals about the Senecas and was eventually adopted as a member of the tribe. Guernsey wrote initially for periodicals. Her first publication was in Gleason’s Pictorial of 1850, and she was later a contributor to the Atlantic, Lippincott’s, and Cosmopolitan. Her book-length publications include collections of fairytales (Christmas Greens, 1865; The Merman and the Figure Head, 1871), domestic fictions (Aunt Priscilla’s Story, 1867; Elmira’s Ambitions, 1875), and adventure stories (The Silver Rifle, 1871; The Shawnee Prisoner, 1877). All of the aforementioned are for children and almost all of them were published by the American Sunday School Union. One tends to think of American Sunday School Union publications as pamphlets, but Guernsey’s form is most often the novel, and her books usually run to about 200 pages. The defining characteristic of ASSU publications, whether short or long, is the turning of the story so that it illustrates a clearly enunciated spiritual principle, i.e., they are clearly didactic. Elmira’s Ambitions is representative of both Guernsey’s strengths and her weaknesses in this form. It is primarily a story about spiritual pride. Elmira, about fifteen, has learned at school to think of herself as ‘‘superior’’ and as ‘‘called’’ to a life of
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philanthropy. She tries to train her younger sister by bullying her to give up sewing for her dolls and to take up sewing for the poor, though of course Elmira herself does not sew. She tries to entertain and comfort their invalid mother by carrying on ‘‘intellectual’’ conversation, but succeeds only in giving her mother a lecture and a headache. Finally, she adopts a child whose mother has just died, but finds herself incapable of managing either its care or education. It is not until her youthful foolishness allows the child’s ne’er-do-well father to rob a house and kidnap the child that Elmira realizes her limitations and sees she must learn before she can teach. The major weakness of Elmira’s Ambitions is that it is too long, rambling, and repetitious for the slight plot. Every episode makes the same point about Elmira’s pride, so that the theme is much too mechanically tacked onto the action. The strengths of the novel are present in the cleverly sketched supporting characters—the younger sister, the grandmother, the adopted child and her mother—and in the natural-sounding dialogue, Guernsey’s most effective means of creating character. Clearly didactic in purpose and rather limited in their literary achievement, Guernsey’s novels are perhaps most important as reflections of the values and attitudes the American Sunday School Union and its supporters wished to inculcate in American children in the latter years of the 19th century. OTHER WORKS: The Drifting Boat (1860). Lucy and Her Friends (1865). The Silver Cup (1865). Berty’s Visit (1867). Chip and Kitty (1867). The Coveted Bonnet (1867). The Hem-Stitched Handkerchief (1867). Mark’s Composition (1867). Stingy Lewis (1867). The Stone House (1867). The Sunday School Picnic (1867). Theodora’s Trouble (1867). Dulcie’s Lonesome Night (1868). Out of the Orphan Asylum (1869). Perverse Pussy (1869). Out in the Storm (1870). Scrub Hollow Sunday School (1870). Alice Fenton (1871). Boys of Eaglewood (1872). The Mallory Girls (1875). A Spirit in Prison (1875). Washington and SeventySix (with L. E. Guernsey, 1876). Betsey’s Bedquilt (1878). Sibyl and the Sapphires (1879). The Trying Child (1886). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: NCAB. Other references: Rochester Democrat (21 June 1893). Rochester Union Advertiser (22 June 1893). —KATHARYN F. CRABBE
GUERNSEY, Lucy Ellen Born 12 August 1826, Pittsford, New York; died 3 November 1899, Rochester, New York Daughter of James T. and Electa Guernsey Lucy Ellen Guernsey was the fifth daughter of a Rochesterarea businessman and philanthropist and the sister of Clara
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Florida Guernsey. Her father’s philanthropic bent was reflected in Guernsey, who was an active member of the Episcopal church and who for 11 years (1888-99) edited a religious publication, the Parish Visitor, intended for distribution in prisons, homes, and hospitals. In the 30 years that were her most productive (1855-85), Guernsey wrote more than 60 books, most of them published by the American Sunday School Union (ASSU). Often the ASSU publications were no longer than pamphlets, but Guernsey’s were juvenile novels, frequently running to more than 200 pages. The speed with which she wrote took its toll on her work; most of her novels are loosely plotted at best. However, she does have a good ear for natural-sounding dialogue, and her novel The Chevalier’s Daughter (1880) was praised in the Saturday Review for its accurate portrayal of the manners and customs of the people. Tabby’s Travels (1858) provides a good example of Guernsey’s ability to combine accurate observation and didacticism. Tabby is a ‘‘heedless and disobedient’’ kitten who thinks she is mistreated, although in fact she is only spoiled. She runs away from home and, as she travels from house to house and from family to family, she sees her own faults reflected in the people about her. Through Tabby, the child reader learns the value of being good-natured, hard-working, self-respecting, and obedient. What makes the book interesting and almost overcomes its didactic spirit and episodic plot is Guernsey’s eye for the physical behavior of cats. Most of Guernsey’s novels are best described as domestic fictions—stories about contemporary young people and their families and the problems of reaching responsible maturity. The ASSU novels characteristically conclude with an apt biblical quotation to reinforce the moral point. Guernsey also wrote, however, many historical fictions, including the multivolume ‘‘Stanton Corbet Chronicles.’’ Like the ASSU novels, the historical fictions are episodic, but they are redeemed to some extent by a richness in subject and character reminiscent of Sir Walter Scott. In The Foster-Sisters (1882), two English girls, raised in a French convent, return to a Church of England household just in time to meet Charles Wesley and become Methodists. At their ancestral home they discover that their relatives, although English, are avid Jacobites, and they escape harm and forced marriages by fleeing to the Scots housekeeper, a Presbyterian. Religion is the most important theme, but the successful feature of the book is the characterization, especially of the narrator, Lucy Corbet, who is at once devout, witty, and capable of being acerbic. After quoting St. Ignatius on the decay of the physical body (‘‘You will become that for which there is no name in any language!’’), Lucy Corbet observes in a footnote: ‘‘Bossuet has the same phrase. I don’t know who stole it.’’ A prolific writer, Guernsey is most distinguished by her close observations of people and animals, her natural dialogue, and her wit. Her books are marred, however, by the looseness of the plots. Yet especially in those novels published by ASSU, she clearly
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reflects the values and attitudes a significant segment of the community wished to inculcate in children of the time.
OTHER WORKS: Irish Amy (1854). Duty and Inclination (1856). Ready Work for Willing Hands (1856). The Sign of the Cross (1856). Sophie Kennedy’s Experience (1856). Upward and Onward (1856). Jenny and the Insects (1857). Kitty Maynard (1857). Meat-eaters, with Some Account of Their Haunts and Habits (1858). The Christmas Earnings (1859). Straight Forward (1859). Jenny and the Birds (1860). The Straight Path (1860). The Blue Socks (1862). The Tattler (1863). Charlie (1866). Milly (1866). Abbey (1867). Lolla (1867). Nelly (1867). Opposite Neighbors (1867). The Twin Roses (1868). Cousin Deborah’s Story (1869). Lady Lucy’s Secret (1869). Mabel (1869). Winifred (1869). The Child’s Treasure (1870). The School Girl’s Treasury (1870). The Dark Night (1871). Ethel’s Trial in Becoming a Missionary (1871). The Fairchilds (1871). The Langham Revels (1871). Only in Fun (1871). Lady Betty’s Governess (1872). On the Mountain (1872). Percy’s Holidays (1872). The Red Plant (1872). The Sunday School Exhibition (1872). Claribel (1873). Rhode’s Education (1873). The Tame Turtle (1873). Lady Rosamond’s Book (1874). Benny the Beaver, and Other Stories (1875). Grandmother Brown’s School Days (1875). The Heiress of McGregor (1875). School Days in 1800 (1875). Guy Falconer (1876). Washington and Seventy-six (with C. F. Guernsey, 1876). The Story of a Hessian (1877). Cub’s Apple (1878). The Mission Box (1879). No Talent (1880). The Old Stanfield House (1880). Phil’s Pansies (1880). Loveday’s History (1885). Oldham (1885). Through Unknown Ways (1886). A Lent in Earnest (1889). The Soldiers of Christ (1889). The Hidden Treasure (1890).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: NCAB. Other references: Rochester Democrat (4 Nov. 1899). Rochester Union Advertiser (4 Nov. 1899). Parish Visitor (Dec. 1899). —KATHARYN F. CRABBE
GUINEY, Louise Imogen Born 7 January 1861, Boston, Massachusetts; died 2 November 1920, Chipping Camden, England Also wrote under: Roger Holden, P.O.L. Daughter of Robert P. and Janet Doyle Guiney An Irish Roman Catholic and daughter of a Civil War general, Louise Imogen Guiney was something of a literary novelty in late 19th-century Boston, yet she was warmly received into the by then well-established literary circle of Annie Adams Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett. Fields eventually bequeathed a large portion of her estate to Guiney
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Guiney’s health was never excellent; she had a hearing impairment which grew steadily more severe. She collapsed twice from overwork, once in 1896 and again in 1897. These breakdowns were partially precipitated by the hostile reception she received after her appointment as postmistress of Auburndale, Massachusetts, in 1894. A combination of anti-Irish, antiCatholic, and antifemale sentiment led local citizens to organize a boycott to force her resignation. Later she was employed in the Catalogue Room of the Boston Public Library. Guiney emigrated to England in 1901 and devoted her later years to scholarly research at Oxford. At the same time, she moved toward a more reclusive lifestyle, as her religious dedication deepened. Her closest friends included Fred Holland Day, with whom she uncovered some important Keats material, Grace Denslow, and Alice Brown, with whom she traveled abroad. Brown dedicated her The Road to Castaly (1896) to Guiney and wrote her biography. They also collaborated on a book on Robert Louis Stevenson (1896). Guiney published her first lyrics under pseudonyms (‘‘P.O.L.’’ and ‘‘Roger Holden’’) in 1880. Her first collection of poems, Songs at the Start, appeared in 1884; and her first collection of essays, Goose-Quill Papers, in 1885. She considered A Roadside Harp (1893) her best poetical effort, while critics estimate Patrins: A Collection of Essays (1897) to include her most important critical work. Especially significant are the essays ‘‘On the Rapid versus the Harmless Scholar’’ and ‘‘Wilfull Sadness in Literature,’’ in which she rejects Arnoldian ‘‘disinterestedness’’ as a proper critical attitude. Her collected lyrics, Happy Endings, were published in 1909 and reissued in 1927. Guiney was also a dedicated biographer and scholar. Robert Emmet (1904) is about an Irish nationalist, and Blessed Edmund Campion (1908) is about an English Jesuit martyr. She also put forth several important critical editions of relatively minor figures, such as Katherine Philips, ‘‘The Matchless Orinda’’ (1904). One volume of her magnum opus of scholarship, an anthology of Catholic poets from Thomas More to Alexander Pope, entitled Recusant Poets, was published posthumously in 1938. Guiney favored the cavalier rather than the puritan spirit; her letters suggest a lively, engaged personality. In her works, she was attracted to flamboyant gypsy-like women such as Carmen. In 1896 she wrote a critical preface to Merimée’s short story, and ‘‘Martha Hilton,’’ a vivacious Cinderella figure drawn from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, history, was Guiney’s contribution to Three Heroines of New England Romance (1896), which also included sketches by Harriett Prescott Spofford and Alice Brown. Some consider that Guiney’s unpublished letters contain her finest writing. Two volumes of her letters were published in 1926. Yet even among her published works the consensus is that her religious lyrics are among the finest American contributions to the genre, and that her criticism contains much that is still of value.
OTHER WORKS: Brownies and Bogles (1887). Monsieur Henri: A Footnote to French History (1892). A Little English Gallery
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(1894). Lover’s Saint Ruth’s, and Three Other Tales (1895). Robert Louis Stevenson (with A. Brown, 1896). England and Yesterday (1898). The Martyr’s Idyl, and Shorter Poems (1900). Hurrell Fronde (1904). Letters (2 vols., 1926). Many of Louise Imogen Guiney’s unpublished letters are housed at the Dinand Library of Holy Cross College, Worcester, Massachusetts, and at the Library of Congress.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Adorita, Sister M., Soul Ordained to Fail: Louise I. Guiney, 1861-1920 (1962). Brown, A., Louise I. Guiney (1921). Fairbanks, H. G., Louise I. Guiney: Laureate of the Lost (1973). Guiney, G. C., Letters of Louise I. Guiney (1926). Tenison, E. M., Louise I. Guiney; Her Life and Works (1923). Reference works: AW. DAB. NAW (1971). NCAB. TCA, TCAS. —JOSEPHINE DONOVAN
GULLIVER, Julia Henrietta Born 30 July 1856, Norwich, Connecticut; died 25 July 1940, Eustis, Florida Daughter of John P. and Frances W. Curtis Gulliver A member of the first graduating class of Smith College in 1879, Julia Gulliver received her Ph.D. from Smith in 1888. Two years later she was appointed head of the department of philosophy and biblical literature at Rockford Female Seminary, predecessor of Rockford College, in Rockford, Illinois. In 1892 and 1893, by special permission because she was a woman, she studied under the noted Wilhelm Wundt at the University of Leipzig; in 1898 her translation of Part I of his Ethics was published. From 1902 to 1919 she served as president of Rockford College, and during her tenure helped to shape the course of American women’s education by creating a curriculum that fused liberal studies with a program of home economics, which Gulliver saw not as limiting women to the home but as enabling them to work for the health and well-being of the entire society. Gulliver’s essay ‘‘The Substitutes for Christianity Proposed by Comte and Spencer’’ (New Englander, 1884) represents some of the work done in fulfillment of her doctorate. In it she defends Christianity against the cosmic theism of Herbert Spencer and the positivism of Auguste Comte by using a test that Spencer himself had proposed, that progress is the change from a lower level of differentiation and integration to a higher one. In Gulliver’s view, positivism fails because by finding divinity in the collective existence of humanity it offers a unity without difference. Spencer’s cosmic theism, on the other hand, offers difference without unity, since no true union seems possible between the human person and an impersonal unknowable Deity. Christianity alone exhibits the
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progress Spencer outlines, and it brings to perfection what is good in positivism and cosmism: the love of neighbor and the rejection of anthropomorphism. Gulliver’s commitment to Christian principles characterizes all her writings, and hers was a religion that went far beyond mere piety. Religious maxims often became metaphors of current social issues, as when she applied the notion that ‘‘no man liveth unto himself and no man dieth unto himself’’ to the issue of infectious diseases, and when she expressed hope that some day the work of men and women would be ‘‘like the seamless cloak of Jesus.’’ She saw the incarnation as continuing through human action, and exhorted women to take an active role in social reform, since ‘‘God himself fails of fulfillment unless you fulfill your destiny.’’ In praising the economic, civic, and legislative advances wrought by American women, she rejoiced at ‘‘how grandly. . .the transcendent God of the 18th and even of the 19th century [has] become the immanent God of the 20th century through these devoted efforts of the women of our country!’’ Gulliver’s educational philosophy rested on a conviction that the human personality is an organic whole, and that therefore the liberal arts should not be isolated from practical or vocational courses. She felt that the forte of Midwestern women is for executive achievement, and she departed from the practice in eastern women’s colleges of emphasizing ‘‘cultural subjects’’ exclusively, believing that women should not so much ‘‘be accomplished’’ as ‘‘be able to accomplish.’’ A number of Gulliver’s essays in psychology, philosophy, and literature were published in the New Englander, the Andover Review, the Philosophical Review, and New World. In her book Studies in Democracy: The Essence of Democracy, the Efficiency of Democracy, American Women’s Contribution to Democracy (1917), consisting of three addresses given on various occasions, Gulliver argues democracy is not founded on equality in the sense of uniformity but on the opportunity of each individual to reach his or her full potential; the great democratic ideal is ‘‘that everyone should have the chance he is capable of availing himself of.’’ In discussing women’s contribution to democracy, Gulliver points out the ways in which women have incarnated the spirit of democracy and shaped the social conscience of America. Gulliver’s most lasting contribution is no doubt her pioneering work in women’s education. While insisting that the role of ‘‘homemaking’’ must be reinterpreted to embrace the welfare of the entire society, she at the same time helped provide the means by which women could prepare for such a role. She thus incorporated in herself that which she always advocated, the union of the theoretical and the practical. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: NAW (1971). Other references: American Political Science Review (May 1917). Boston Transcript (29 May 1917). Springfield Republican (29 July 1917). —HELENE DWYER POLAND
GUY, Rosa Born 1 September 1925, Trinidad, West Indies Daughter of Henry and Audrey Gonzales Cuthbert; married Warner Guy, 1941; children: Warner A powerful writer who makes delight out of difficulties in life, Rosa Guy has written numerous insightful children’s books. She is a native of Trinidad who left the island as a child with her sister to join their parents in Harlem. The adjustment from island life to city life was difficult for them. Although black and of African Caribbean culture, Guy found herself set apart by black and white children because of her West Indian dialect and customs. When her mother became ill shortly after her arrival, Guy was sent to the Bronx to stay with cousins. Here she was introduced to Marcus Garvey’s fervent views extolling the dignity of all blacks and his belief in black nationalism, themes that proved to be major forces stimulating Guy intellectually and politically. The premature deaths of their parents left Guy and her sister orphans. Experiences in a series of institutions and foster homes intensified her feeling of being an outsider. By fourteen Guy had dropped out of school and had become a factory worker. At sixteen she married Warner Guy. In searching for ways to enrich her life and to express her creativity, Guy found herself drawn to the American Negro Theater, then to the Committee for the Negro in the Arts. Experiences with the latter group led Guy to write and to become a cofounder of the Harlem Writers Guild. Affiliation with the guild deepened Guy’s commitment to black affairs by giving her the opportunity to meet and work with influential members of the community. Guy’s response to the waste of bright minds being ‘‘channeled into a life of crime and self-destruction by the crushing confinement of prejudice and poverty’’ inspired her first book, Bird at My Window (1966). Then, wanting to know how the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the turmoil of the 1960s affected Southern black children, Guy collected taped interviews and essays that became Children of Longing (1971). This work, cited as bringing together Guy’s activism and writing interests, advanced her writing skills to a new level. Guy’s theme of trying to find one’s place in a hostile environment while struggling for self-identity and self-affirmation arises from her early childhood and adolescent experiences. Her forte is her compassionate ability to portray the adversity ghetto children face. In her acclaimed trilogy The Friends (1973), Ruby (1976), and Edith Jackson (1978), Guy insightfully presents the lives of three adolescents as they mature fighting the odds in a deteriorating community. The Disappearance (1979), which won Guy the American Library Association award for best book for young adults, and its
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sequels, New Guys Around the Block (1983) and And I Heard a Bird Sing (1987), complete a second trilogy, each with a mystery involved. The protagonist, Imamu Jones, is a young man determined to vindicate himself and escape the hopelessness of a now-corrupt Harlem.
are regularly published in paperback or reprinted. Her acute sensitivity to issues faced by inner-city children has made her a timeless and successful young-adult author who gives hope and books to a readership too frequently overlooked.
In her first picture book, Guy translated the Senegalese folktale Mother Crocodile (1981), successfully dipping into the richness of African folklore. She has also written two juvenile books, Paris, Pee Wee, and Big Dog (1985) and The Ups and Downs of Carl Davis III (1979), which confirm the need for parental acceptance.
OTHER WORKS: Venetian Blinds (1954). Mirror of Her Own (1981). A Measure of Time (1983). Billy the Great (1991). The Music of Summer (1992).
Guy’s tightest and most poignant story, however, is one written for a general readership, My Love, My Love; or, The Pheasant Girl: A Fable (1985). In this short tale, Guy expresses all the mystique of her West Indian heritage while carefully showing the impenetrable barriers of color and caste. This book was the basis for a musical by Lynn Ahrens, Once on This Island, which opened in New York in 1990. Guy’s ventures into African tradition, which flow with a special warmth and seamlessness, add a new depth and dimension to her writing. In 1999 the musical was performed at the Cab Calloway School of Performing Arts in Wilmington, Delaware, as a tribute to the legendary entertainer.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Norris, J., Presenting Rosa Guy (1988). Reference Works: Black American Fiction: A Biography (1978). Black American Writers Past and Present (1975). Black Writers 2. CA 17-20R. CANR 14, 34. Children’s Literature Review (1999). CLC (1983). DLB 33. Feminist Companion (1990). SATA 14, 62. Other references: Essence (Oct. 1979). Horn Book (Mar./ Apr. 1985). NYTM (16 Apr. 1972). Top of the News (Winter 1983).
Guy published The Sun, the Sea, a Touch of the Wind (1995) in the year of her seventieth birthday, and most of her early books
—SANDRA RAY AND ELIZABETH COONROD MARTINEZ
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HACKER, Marilyn Born 27 November 1942, New York, New York Daughter of Albert and Hilda Rosengarten Hacker; married Samuel R. Delany, 1961 (divorced); life partner, Karyn J. London; children: one daughter Marilyn Hacker attended the Bronx High School of Science, New York University, and the Art Students League in New York City. She has taught for a short time, sorted mail at a post office, and was an antiquarian bookseller in London for four years. Two interests, however, have dominated: editing and writing poetry. Hacker has edited paperback novels, a men’s magazine, engineering trade journals, and a poetry magazine. At present she is one of the editors of the Little Magazine. She and her husband, a noted science fiction writer from whom she is divorced, founded and coedited Quark, a speculative fiction quarterly. She has one daughter. She has published in numerous literary journals, including Poetry, Poetry Northwest and the American Poetry Review. Her first collection of poetry, Presentation Piece (1974), was chosen as the 1973 Lamont Poetry Selection and was the winner of the 1975 National Book Award. Most recently, Hacker has published in Conditions and Chrysalis, both feminist publications, affirming her strong feminist commitment. Presentation Piece, as the awards indicate, is an impressive collection of poetry. Hacker’s work is characterized by a strong command of traditional forms (the villanelle, the sestina, and the sonnet, among others); by an equally strong control of rhetoric, from the very formal to the most colloquial; and by a total commitment to emotional accuracy, whether rendered by imagistic detail or through the intensity of rhetoric or tone. Presentation Piece is a book of discoveries that probes many kinds of relationships—between persons and times or places, between private and public selves, between art and life. Hacker’s second collection, Separations (1976), is defined by its title: it is largely about learning to cope with the many kinds of distances one must endure. The first long sequence, ‘‘The Geographer,’’ presents the intense reactions of the speaker to the death of someone very close. Though there are moments of joy and tenderness in this collection, the strongest impressions are left by the poems chronicling the growing separation between the
speaker and her lover, in the section titled ‘‘The Last Time’’ and in the final sequence of sonnets from which the book takes its title. Hacker’s growing feminism is apparent in both works, though the personal commitment never overwhelms her art. The tone changes distinctly in her second collection, in ‘‘After Catullus,’’ and in ‘‘Two Farewells’’: ‘‘‘Try to turn / boys into men,’ Circe said, / ‘and they behave like pigs.’’’ The feminist statement is even more clear, however, in ‘‘The Regent’s Park Sequence,’’ a sonnet sequence published in the American Poetry Review (1976). Exploring again the pain of separation and of ‘‘women’s own solitude,’’ the persona tells us, in the coda: ‘‘It was not my mother or my daughter / who did me in. Women have been betrayed / by history, which ignores us, which we made / like anyone, with work and words, slaughter / and silver.’’ In an important article discussing recent work by younger American poets, Stanley Plumly begins with Hacker’s work, using her as an example of those poets who write out of an emotional imperative rather than from emblematic commitment. To Plumly and others, Hacker had become one of the major voices in contemporary American poetry. Hacker’s Taking Notice (1980) continues the formal and thematic concerns of her earlier work. Utilizing various traditional forms, particularly the sonnet sequence, and often using a colloquial diction, Hacker investigates private relationships of love, the semiprivate relationship of mother and daughter, and the public relationships among women in society. In this book Hacker begins clearly to articulate a lesbian eroticism that becomes an increasingly important part of her later works. Hacker’s fourth collection, Assumptions (1985), again considers questions of family, love, sexuality, and the place of a woman among other women in the world. The section ‘‘Inheritances’’ deals specifically with the poet’s history and her legacy to her daughter and from her mother, as well as her daughter’s inheritance from her father’s family. ‘‘Open Windows’’ is a sequence of love sonnets to other women. The book ends with ‘‘Ballad of Ladies Lost and Found,’’ which invokes a repressed history of women, recalling the losses and erasure of women ranging from ‘‘the gym teacher, the math department head’’ to such important writers as H. D. [Hilda Doolittle] and Zola Neale Hurston. Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons (1986, reprinted 1995) is a verse novel describing a love affair between two women. This sonnet sequence is rooted in the mundane events of life—eating, drinking, shopping—as transformed by romantic longing and anxiety. Going Back to the River (1990), a largely autobiographical collection of poems, traces the poet’s departure from the U.S. and her return to confront her often difficult past and present as an American. This journey is perhaps best epitomized
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by the first poem, ‘‘Two Cities,’’ where for the first three sections the poet in Paris is ‘‘the inventor / of my own life, / an old plane tree in new leaf, / a young woman almost forty-five.’’ In the final section, the poet and her daughter sit in a New York restaurant watching a scene of seemingly random street violence, a cry of despair addressed to nobody in particular. Hacker pays tribute to French writer Malraux through her translations of his poems in Edge: Contemporary French Poetry in Translation (1996). She compiled the pieces from various sources and provides the French and English phrasing. Hacker has been recognized often for her works. Winter Numbers: Poems (1994) won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize in 1995. She was the fifth woman to receive the award. Selected Poems, 1965-1990 (1994) won the Poet’s Prize. She received the Lambda Literary Award for Winter Numbers: Poems; Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons; Assumptions; Taking Notice; and Going Back to the River. Hacker also won the Bernard F. Conners Prize from the Paris Review, the John Masefield Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, and Presentation Piece was the Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets and a National Book Award winner. Hacker was editor of the Kenyon Review from 1990 to 1994. She has contributed works to the Yale Review, Paris Review, Poetry, Epoch, Feminist Studies, and London Magazine. She has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. Like Adrienne Rich, whose work serves as epigraph for many of Hacker’s poems, Hacker surveys the emotional and social terrain of women who love women. She skillfully mixes traditional, or even archaic, poetic forms with various levels of diction from the most formal to the colloquial, producing one of the most powerful voices of contemporary poetry.
OTHER WORKS: The Terrible Children (1967). Highway Sandwiches (with T. M. Disch and C. Platt, 1970). The Hang-Glider’s Daughter: Selected New Poems (1990). Squares and Courtyards (2000).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1979). CLC (1983). CP (1985, 1991). FC (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: American Poetry Review (Jan.-Feb. 1978). Denver Quarterly (Autumn 1976, Summer 1985). Dispatch (Fall 1988). Frontiers (1980). Hudson Review (Summer 1987). LJ (15 Apr. 1990). Ms. (Apr. 1975). Midwest Book Review. Nation (21 Jan. 1991). New Review (7 Sept. 1974). NYTBR (21 June 1987, 12 Jan. 1975). Poetry (Apr. 1975, July 1991). TLS (10 July 1987). WPBW (26 May 1974). —M. L. LEWANDOWSKA, UPDATED BY JAMES SMETHURST AND NICK ASSENDELFT
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HADAS, Rachel Born 8 November 1948, New York, New York Daughter of Moses and Elizabeth Chamberlayne Hadas; married Stavros Kondilis, 1970 (divorced); George Edwards, 1978; children: Jonathan A poet, essayist, translator, critic, and professor of literature, Rachel Hadas grew up in a literate and intellectual setting. Her father was a classical scholar and professor at Columbia University, her mother a Latin teacher. Hadas’ relationship with her father, with whom she spent many hours reading Latin texts and learning the Greek alphabet, was of particular importance in the formation and development of her writing. When her father died, Hadas was seventeen; this loss figured early, and lastingly, in the focus and themes of her work. The themes of loss, memory and legacy, the ways in which knowledge is passed from generation to generation, particularly in consideration of the uses of art, appear, transmute, and evolve throughout her poetry and essays. After receiving her B.A. from Harvard University in 1969, Hadas traveled to Greece on fellowship. There she first met, among others, poet James Merril, whose presence as friend and influence can be felt in Hadas’ later work, and her first husband, with whom she lived on the Greek island of Samos for some years. After returning to the U.S., she studied at Johns Hopkins, received an M.A. in poetry, and later her Ph.D. from Princeton, going on to teach literature at Rutgers University. Hadas’ first two collections of poetry have as their subject and setting her years in Greece. In the chapbook Starting from Troy (1975), the poems have a fragmentary feel, and the images and references, for all their debt to the classical, are very personal. The poem ‘‘That Time, This Place,’’ starting with the image of Troy and the ‘‘fossils of families and fates of war,’’ goes on to consider whether we must ‘‘build what was by tearing down / what is, beat down our celebrated towers / to our own stature, shut our eyes, and sing?’’ This poem’s repeated refrain, ‘‘the shell remains, the softer parts decay,’’ and final two lines, ‘‘All fighters, fathers, all departed heroes, / our house cries out for you,’’ address Hadas’ absorption with loss and legacy. Already present, as well, is her command of poetic form and structure. In Pass it On (1989), Hadas names the impulse found in her previous work: to pass on what we inherit from others, whether fathers, mothers, friends, or long-dead writers. That inheritance includes the memories, feelings, and legacies of their work in life, the complex lens of an individual’s experience and perceptions as it endures for those who continue on after their death. The poems range from what is passed on by an individual poet’s work to the passing on of legacy in more physical form, through Hadas’ son, to the larger passing on of language: ‘‘Not light but language shocks us out of sleep’’ (’’The End of Summer’’). Using a variety of meters and stanzaic forms, the poems in this volume, most particularly those that rely on a strict meter and rhyme, are
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effective, sustained meditations on large and abstract themes as they are found within the milk and carpentry of everyday life. Living in Time (1990) came out the same year in which Hadas was given a literature award by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. The book is a triptych, one long poem bracketed by two sections of prose essays. Each section examines the meaning of time and the ways in which art—in this case, writing and the poetic imagination—affects and changes our experience of it. The central poem, ‘‘The Dream Machine,’’ a sustained reflection on the nature of reality and our need for stories with which to understand our passage through it and time, stems from a question posed by Hadas’ son about whether a story she read him was ‘‘real.’’ Among the essays in the first and third sections there is ‘‘The Lights Must Never Go Out,’’ which relates Hadas’ experiences leading a poetry writing workshop for men with AIDS. The essay illuminates how writing poetry became a way of slowing down the time the men had left to live. In 1995 Hadas came out with The Empty Bed, a series of elegies for her recently deceased students and for her mother, poems which explore the emotional landscape of loss with some thoroughness. Hadas’ motif of art and its place in our lives threads through the elegiac explorations, as in these lines from ‘‘Benefit Night, New York City Ballet’’: ‘‘For as we raptly gaze / at limbs in cool blue light / sculpting a carnal maze / of intricate delight, / of passions sketched on air, / it is ourselves we see, / divested of despair.’’ Halfway Down the Hall (1998) collects selections from Hadas’ previous volumes, including her translations of poems by Beaudelaire, Valéry, Hugo, and Karyotakis, along with 33 new poems in the opening section. The new poems probe Hadas’ usual subjects, while exhibiting a finer, more exquisite balance than ever between adherence to formal constraints and an acute communion with the familiar and everyday. She addresses the minutia of visceral reality in an assured voice, giving the thoughts drawn from particular images a graceful strength. With each successive volume, Hadas, who is acknowledged as one of our best technical poets, has gained depth and resonance. Her work is literate and finely honed, reaching gently profound insights through a lyric conversation with the everyday. She has received numerous awards and been a Guggenheim fellow in poetry. OTHER WORKS: Trelles by Stephanos Xenos (translated by Hadas, 1978). Slow Transparency (1983). Form, Cycle, Infinity: Landscape Imagery in the Poetry of Robert Frost and George Seferis (1985). A Son from Sleep (1987). Unending Dialogue: Voices from an AIDS Poetry Workshop (1991). Poetry: Mirrors of Astonishment (1992). Other Worlds Than This: Translations (1994). The Double Legacy: Reflections on a Pair of Deaths (1995). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Collier, M., ed., The Wesleyan Tradition: Four Decades of American Poetry (1993). Reference works: American Poets Since World War II (1992). DLB 120. Other references: American Book Review (Aug. 1992). Bulletin of Bibliography (June 1994). Denver Quarterly (Fall 1998).
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Georgia Review (1984). NYTBR (6 May 1990). Poetry (Feb. 1997). Progressive (Feb. 1999). —JESSICA REISMAN
HAHN, Emily Born 14 January 1905, St. Louis, Missouri; died 18 February 1997 Daughter of Isaac N. and Hannah Hahn; married Charles R. Boxer, 1945 As a child, Emily Hahn developed an adventurous spirit and an independent mind. Scorning custom and convention, she became the first woman to enroll in and earn a degree from the University of Wisconsin’s College of Engineering. She also studied mineralogy at Columbia University, New York City, and anthropology at Oxford, England. Later, many Americans would be scandalized when Hahn openly introduced her lovers to her readers. Her first book, Seductio ad Absurdum: The Principles and Practices of Seduction; a Beginner’s Handbook (1928), had a mixed reception. Some critics did not find her rules and regulations very interesting or very subtle and others were astonished by the gossipy episodes, but most readers found the book delightfully entertaining. Having begun her writing career, Hahn took on a wide variety of projects, including documentary reports, histories, novels, biographies, children’s books, a guide book, a cookbook, and several autobiographical works. In 1930 Hahn began a two-year stay, the first of several, in Africa. She lived with a tribe of Pygmies in the Ituri Forest of the Belgian Congo, where she worked with a doctor at a medical mission. Congo Solo (1933) was based on her diary. Although her vocabulary and expression often seem too rough, her informal and amusing style proved appealing to many readers. Also based on her first African experience, With Naked Foot (1934) is a story of an African woman and her various white ‘‘masters.’’ In it Hahn sought to interpret the native viewpoint with sympathetic understanding; the scenes and the characters seem both realistic and picturesque. Africa to Me: Person to Person (1964), based on a later trip when she visited Jomo Kenyatta and Tom Mboya, addresses the problems accompanying Africa’s emergent nationalism. In 1935 Hahn set off on a world tour. She was to remain in China for nine years, settling in Hong Kong and beginning a career as the New Yorker’s China Coast correspondent. Her experiences amidst war and revolution had dramatic effects on her literary career, as well as on her personal life. The Soong Sisters (1941) is about Ch’ing-ling, Mei-ling, and Ai-ling (Madame Sun Yat-sen, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, and Madame Kung, wife of China’s financial wizard), with whom Hahn became intimate while in China. It tells of their father’s association with America, of his involvement with Sun Yat-sen,
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and of the key roles played by the family in the Chinese revolution. Intended as an entertaining narrative, the book also reveals her strong sympathy for the family’s controversial political activities. Hahn’s support of Chiang Kai-shek is unmistakable in China to Me (1944, reissued in 1988), a ‘‘partial autobiography’’ in which she recounts the dramatic political events as well as the trivial daily incidents that filled her days in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Chungking. Although she undoubtedly tried to be objective in the biography Chiang Kai-shek (1955), her admiration for her subject resulted in a very defensive account of the corruption in his government and his lack of inspirational leadership. She admits he could be stubborn and narrowminded, but she describes him primarily as a Christian crusader and gallant ally—consistent, faithful to his principles, and brave. Hahn continued to write on diverse topics. Animal Gardens (1967, reissued 1990) is a history of zoos from the pre-Christian era in China and Egypt to the construction of the Milwaukee Zoo. Breath of God (1971) examines world folklore. Once Upon a Pedestal (1974) is an account of prominent women in art and literature from colonial times to the present. In Lorenzo: D. H. Lawrence and the Women Who Loved Him (1975), she depicts the writer as a neurotic, self-centered genius, to whom a great number of women were eager to dedicate themselves. Like so many of Hahn’s earlier books, it is intriguing, gossipy, readable, and entertaining. In the charming and informative treatise, Look Who’s Talking (1978), Hahn examines ways in which animals communicate with each other and with humans. OTHER WORKS: Beginners’ Luck (1931). Affair (1935). Mr. Pan (1942). Hong Kong Holiday (1946). Picture Story of China (1946). Raffles of Singapore: A Biography (1946). Miss Jill (1947). England to Me (1949). Purple Passage: A Novel about a Lady Both Famous and Fantastic (1950). A Degree of Prudery (1950). Francie (1951). Love Conquers Nothing: A Glandular History of Civilization (1952). Francie Again (1953). James Brooke of Sarawak: A Biography of Sir James Brooke (1953). Mary, Queen of Scots (1953). Meet the British (1953). The First Book of India (1955). Diamond (1956). Francie Comes Home (1956). Leonardo da Vinci (1956). Kissing Cousins (1958). Aboab: First Rabbi of the Americas (1960). Around the World with Nelli Bly (1960). June Finds a Way (1960). Tiger House Party (1960). China Only Yesterday, 1850-1950: A Century of Change (1963). Indo (1963). Romantic Rebels: An Informal History of Bohemianism in America (1967). The Cooking of China (1968, reprinted 1981). Zoos (1968). Time and Places (1970). Fractured Emerald: Ireland (1971). On the Side of the Apes (1971). Mabel: A Biography of Mabel Dodge Luhan (1977). Love of Gold (1980). The Islands: America’s Imperial Adventure in the Philippines (1981). Eve and the Apes (1988, 1989). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cuthbertson, K. Nobody Said Not to Go: The Life, Loves, and Adventures of Emily Hahn (1998). Reference works: Authors of Books for Young People (2nd edition, 1971). CA (1967). CB (July 1942). NCAB. TCAS. —PATRICIA LANGHALS NEILS
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HALE, Lucretia Peabody Born 2 September 1820, Boston, Massachusetts; died 12 June 1900, Boston, Massachusetts Daughter of Nathan and Sarah Everett Hale Lucretia Peabody Hale came from a distinguished New England literary family. Her mother was a writer; her father, nephew of the famous revolutionary-war patriot, was owner and editor of the Boston Daily Advertiser. Among Hale’s six brothers and sisters were Edward Everett, Unitarian clergyman, abolitionist, and writer, best known for his ‘‘A Man without a Country’’ short story; Charles, consul general to Egypt at the time of the opening of the Suez Canal; and Susan, writer and traveler. Hale gained a reputation as a bright student at the highly regarded George B. Emerson School for Young Ladies, the graduates of which had the equivalent of a contemporary Bachelor of Arts degree. There she and four other girls comprised a group called the Pentad, maintaining their friendship for many years. When the Pentad visited one another, Hale often made up stories for amusement when they were in bed at night. After her schooling, Hale remained at home helping with the housework, sewing, attending cultural events, and writing. The only one of her immediate group never to marry, she became known as Aunt Lucretia to the children of her friends. She often visited their homes, telling stories to their children as she had to their mothers when she and they were children. After the deaths of her parents, Hale traveled in 1867 with her sister Susan to Egypt to visit Charles, then consul general. After enjoying the sights for some months, the two took a horseback trip through Palestine before returning home. In 1869 Hale settled again in Boston, where she involved herself in public affairs and in various educational and charitable causes. In 1874 she became the first woman elected to the Boston School Committee, a position she held for two years. She ran a dame school with Susan for a time, taught in correspondence school, promoted kindergartens and vacation schools, and introduced sewing and cooking into the public school curriculum. A prolific writer, Hale began wielding a pen at a very early age, because the Hale children were often called upon to help out with editorials, book reviews, and translations. Although much of her work consisted of editorials and fillers for the journals her brothers published, she wrote texts and Sunday-school books, edited collections of games and needlework, and produced several novels and books of short stories, sometimes in conjunction with other writers. After the death of her father in 1863, Hale supported herself by her writings. Her first venture into fiction, Margaret Percival in America (1850), written in collaboration with Edward, was a well-received religious novel and had modest sales. The first of her independent writings to attract attention was ‘‘The Queen of the Red Chessmen’’ (Atlantic Monthly, 1858), a short, fanciful tale in which a strong-willed red chess queen comes alive. A novel, Six of One by Half a Dozen of the Other (1872), a six-way collaboration with Harriet Beecher Stowe and Edward, among others, is an amusing
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comedy of manners, and in The New Harry and Lucy (1892), another novel done with Edward, Harry and Lucy write letters home about how they spend their time in the big city and how they come to meet and marry. Although they did not last, these tonguein-cheek lightweights are vivid with lively details of the times. Hale’s claim to literary distinction, though she never knew it, came through her stories about the Peterkin family. The first one, ‘‘The Lady Who Put Salt in Her Coffee’’ (1868), was made up to amuse Meggie, the daughter of Hale’s old school friend, Mrs. Lesley. One summer vacation, when Meggie was sick and forced to miss the family fun, Hale sat down by her bedside and on the spot created the story about Mrs. Peterkin’s problems with her cup of coffee. She later published it in the periodical Our Young Folks. Five more Peterkin stories were printed there, and still others followed in St. Nicholas, its successor. Some two dozen stories were first put out in book form in 1880, and 1886 saw a sequel of eight more, The Last of the Peterkins, with Others of Their Kin. The stories were called after Mr. Lesley, whose first name was Peter, his children forming the ‘‘kin,’’ while Mrs. Lesley herself was the wise Lady from Philadelphia. The first significant nonsense done for children in the U.S., the Peterkin stories became immensely popular throughout the nation, not only with children but with adults as well. Their gentle satire on American attitudes and ways tickled the national funny bone and helped people laugh at themselves. The lovable, foolish Peterkins of Boston consisted of Mr. and Mrs. Peterkin; Agamemnon, who had been to college; Elizabeth Eliza; Solomon John; and the three little boys, always nameless, but never without their India rubber boots. The stories concern the family’s efforts to cope with everyday problems, all of which develop into crises of major proportions because of their blundering attempts to deal with them. When the Peterkins get their new piano into the parlor, they discover the only way Elizabeth Eliza can play it is by sitting outside on the porch. The milk from the Peterkins’ new cow develops a queer taste after they decide the best place to keep it is by the kitchen chimney. They raise the parlor ceiling to accommodate their too-tall Christmas tree, get lost repeatedly at the Philadelphia Centennial, and never have enough plates and cups to serve the large groups they enthusiastically invite to their home. The humor of the stories arises from the absurdity of their predicaments and the family’s roundabout ways of attempting to come to grips. They are often assisted in extricating themselves from their dilemmas by the sensible and practical advice of the Lady from Philadelphia. Although the stories reflect the manners and attitudes of their period, in their revelation of character they ring true yet today, and it is upon the droll, whimsical adventures of this winning family of bumblers, still favorites with children, that Hale’s reputation as a writer rests. OTHER WORKS: Seven Stormy Sundays (1859). Struggle for Life (1861). The Lord’s Supper and Its Observance (1866). The Service of Sorrow (1867). The Wolf at the Door (1877). Designs in Outline for Art-Needlework (1879). More Stitches for Decorative
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Embroidery (1879). Point-Lace: A Guide to Lace-Work (1879). The Peterkin Papers (1880). The Art of Knitting (1881). Fagots for the Fireside (1888). Stories for Children (1892). Sunday School Stories (with B. Whitman, n.d.). An Uncloseted Skeleton (with E. L. Bynner, n.d.). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hale, E. E., A New England Boyhood (1893). Hale, N., Introduction to The Complete Peterkin Papers (1960). Reference works: AA. DAB. Junior Book of Authors (1934). NAW (1971). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). WW of Children’s Literature (1968). Other references: Horn Book (Sept.-Oct. 1940, April 1958). PW (28 Oct. 1957). —ALETHEA K. HELBIG
HALE, Nancy Born 6 May 1908, Boston, Massachusetts; died 24 September 1988 Daughter of Philip L. and Lilian Wescott Hale; married Fredson Bowers, 1942 The only child of two painters, Nancy Hale attended the Winsor School in Boston and the School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. She placed her first short story at the age of eleven with the Boston Herald and at twenty went to New York, the setting for her first novel. For five years Hale worked in New York as a journalist, first as assistant editor of Vogue (1928-32) and then as assistant editor of Vanity Fair (1932-33). In 1935 she became the first woman reporter for the New York Times. In 1937 Hale moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, and this piedmont area, with its historic traditions and aura of southern gentility, provides both the ambience and the central motif for several of Hale’s short stories and novels. The three locales that figure prominently in Hale’s life— New England, New York, and Virginia—also furnish the backdrop and often create the tensions in her fiction. Her first novel, The Good Die Young (1932), depicts the sophisticated ‘‘Manhattan types’’ of the 1930s with the attention to detail also given to the ‘‘Southern types’’ of Hale’s later novels. Her most popular novel, The Prodigal Women (1942, reissued 1988), follows the lives of three women—two of them Southern and one a New Englander—from childhood through the course of their love affairs and marriages. Categorized at the time of its publication as a ‘‘woman’s book’’ because of its concern with ‘‘the viciousness in men,’’ the novel portrays the warfare between men and women waged in the name of love. The scenes are laid in Boston, Virginia, and New York, and Hale deftly captures the sense of place and the inflections of speech that point to the geographical origins of her characters. In the novel Dear Beast (1959), and in the title story of her collection of short stories The Pattern of Perfection (1960), Hale exhibits especially well her considerable talent for evoking regional differences and for portraying the antagonism between
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northern and southern manners. In ‘‘The Pattern of Perfection,’’ Hale creates the climate of opposition between a Virginia matriarch and her New Jersey daughter-in-law; and with a restraint that avoids moral judgement, she highlights in Dear Beast the foibles of both southern provincialism and Yankee sophistication. For all the social implications of these regional tensions, however, Hale is essentially concerned with the individual in these settings. She shows the personal pretensions that render real communication between a New England wife and her Virginia husband almost impossible, and the private insecurities which cause a woman from Rochester to feel displaced in her new suburban home in Virginia. In her fiction of manners, Hale creates conflicts essentially personal but are accentuated by the differences in the outward trappings of everyday life from one region to another. In her most recent novel, Secrets (1971), Hale moves from her use of regional tensions as a correlative for personal conflict to portray a woman’s conflict in integrating her own world within. The middle-aged narrator tells how she grew from a lonely, sensitive child into a mature adult, capable of coping with both the past and the present. Hale has written that she has purposely attempted to conceal the seriousness of her work with ‘‘the light touch.’’ Yet in more than 50 years of publishing novels and short stories, she revealed herself to be a penetrating observer of the human scene. OTHER WORKS: Never Any More (1934). The Earliest Dreams (1936). Between the Dark and the Daylight (1943). The Sign of Jonah (1950). The Empress’s Ring (1955). Heaven and Hardpan Farm (1957). A New England Girlhood (1958). The Realities of Fiction: A Book about Writing (1962). Black Summer (1963). New England Discovery: A Personal View (edited by Hale, 1963). The Life in the Studio (1969, 1980). Secrets (1971). Mary Cassatt (1975, 1987). Birds in the House (1985). Wags (1985). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Peden, W., The American Short Story: Continuity and Change, 1940-1975 (1975). Reference works: NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCAS. —GUIN A. NANCE
HALE, Sarah Josepha (Buell) Born 24 October 1788, Newport, New Hampshire; died 30 April 1879, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Also wrote under: Cornelia, Mrs. Hale, A Lady of New Hampshire Daughter of Gordon and Martha Whittlesey Buell; married David Hale, 1813 (died 1822); children: five As editor for many years of Godey’s Lady’s Book, one of the leading periodicals of the 19th century, Sarah Josepha Hale was perhaps the most widely known and most influential woman of
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her time. Her enormously successful career as editor, novelist, poet, and essayist is the more remarkable for having commenced at the age of forty. In the years before she began her editorial work, Hale lived a quiet life in rural New Hampshire. She was educated at home by her mother, who, Hale later said, encouraged her ‘‘predilection for literary pursuits,’’ and by her older brother, who shared his college studies when on vacation from Dartmouth. Hale conducted a private school for children from 1806 until 1813, when she married a lawyer. By her own account, Hale’s married life was a model of domestic bliss. She admired her husband greatly and spent idyllic evenings with him in reading and study. In 1822, however, just before the birth of their fifth child, Hale died, leaving his wife in financial distress. She soon turned to writing and, with the assistance of her husband’s Masonic friends, published The Genius of Oblivion (1823), a thin volume of poetry. Although the poems are undistinguished, they contain the seeds of themes Hale was later to develop—the superiority of American character, the need for higher education for women, and the differing roles of the sexes (man ‘‘rides the wave’’ and ‘‘rules the flame,’’ while woman is the ‘‘star of home’’). In addition, the first line of the book, ‘‘No mercenary muse inspires my lay,’’ is Hale’s first pronouncement to the world of the self-image which, as skillful advertiser of herself and her magazines, she was to promote for the rest of her life. She claimed repeatedly that although she had published a few poems during her husband’s lifetime, she had never intended to become an ‘‘authoress’’: her chief aim was to prepare reading material for their fireside. She turned to writing and editing neither for financial gain for herself nor for fame or ego satisfaction, but only for funds to educate her children. Hale’s career was launched in 1827 with the publication of her first novel. Northwood is usually represented as one of the earliest novels to contrast American life in the North and South; however, the subtitle, A Tale of New England, more accurately describes Hale’s intent. Southern scenes and characters are introduced, like British ones, to point up the characteristics of Yankee life. Hale describes at great length the domestic customs and manners of the postcolonial period in New England. Food, clothing, and architecture receive detailed attention; pages are devoted to the description of a Thanksgiving dinner. There is little plot, except for a frenzied effort at the end, but much preaching. Moral homilies on subjects ranging from the proper education of children to the sins of greed and vanity are interspersed with speeches defending life in New England against typical foreign criticisms. Despite its flaws Northwood was original and became an instant popular success. Its renown brought Hale an offer to edit a new magazine, and the year after the publication of her novel she found herself in Boston, the editor of Ladies’ Magazine. Each issue contained stories, poems, essays, household hints, book reviews, and sketches of American life, the latter often written by Hale herself. In forming her editorial policy Hale simply brought together elements that had been present in her early work: emphasis on America, attention to domestic detail, and frank didacticism, particularly on the subject of women.
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In contrast to the current editorial practice of lifting entire articles from other (usually British) magazines, Hale sought original articles by Americans on national subjects. She dedicated the magazine to ‘‘female improvement,’’ promising to ‘‘cherish the effusions of female intellect’’ and educate women in domestic skills. Typically, while she reassured men nothing in the magazine would cause their wives and daughters to ‘‘encroach on the prerogatives of men,’’ she included a large amount of material on education for women—detailed notices of existing schools and seminaries and editorials advocating teaching as a profession for women and the establishment of infant schools. Although there had previously been female editors and periodicals for women, Ladies’ Magazine was the first one of quality and the first to last more than five years. It attracted the attention of Louis Godey, an enterprising publisher who was editing an inferior magazine in Philadelphia. Godey offered to buy out the Ladies’ Magazine and unite it with his Lady’s Book under Hale’s editorship. Hale accepted and began an association which lasted from 1837 until 1877. She edited Godey’s Lady’s Book until she was in her ninetieth year. Because Godey was able to finance the novel practice of paying contributors, Hale could attract better writers, such as Edgar Allan Poe. She also expanded the number of domestic departments begun in Ladies’ Magazine. In Godey’s can be found the forerunners of most departments existing in today’s home magazines: cooking and recipes, sewing and patterns, domestic architecture, interior decoration, etiquette, health advice, gardening, child psychology, beauty, and fashion. Godey’s was famous for its hand-colored fashion plates and steel engravings, the number of which increased rapidly through the years. Missing from Godey’s were essays on the political, economic, and religious questions of the day. Hale’s advocacy of education for women and other reforms was carried on principally in her editorial columns, for Godey, with an eye on circulation, forbade any controversial articles. Incredibly, the Civil War was never mentioned within the pages. The magazine was successful, however, as circulation climbed from 10,000 in 1837 to 150,000 by 1860, an astounding figure for the time. Godey’s was the arbiter of American taste and manners, and Hale’s name became literally a household word. During her career as editor, Hale continued to produce her own work. She published collections of her sketches; she compiled recipe books and household handbooks; she edited gift books, anthologies of verse and letters by women, and works for children. In her Poems for Our Children (1830) is ‘‘Mary Had a Little Lamb,’’ the poem for which she is best known today, although her authorship of the first stanza has been disputed. Hale’s major work is Woman’s Record; or, Sketches of All Distinguished Women from ‘The Beginning’ till A.D. 1850 (1853). This monumental biographical encyclopedia, still useful today, took her several years to write and contains some 2,500 entries. Hale also continued to write fiction. In 1852 the fifth edition of Northwood appeared, with revisions by Hale. She changed the subtitle to Life North and South: Showing the True Character of Both and added lengthy discussions of slavery. In the original
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version, slavery was mentioned as a temporary evil which should not disturb the harmony of North and South; in the later version Hale advances the view that slaves should be taught Christianity, whereupon they might be freed and sent to Africa ‘‘to plant Free States and organize Christian civilization.’’ This theory is further developed in her didactic novel, Liberia; or, Mr. Peyton’s Experiments (1853). While Hale has been criticized for her views on slavery, Northwood and Liberia have also been called antislavery novels. Interpretation of Hale has always varied widely. Some of her biographers claim she was a ‘‘militant feminist,’’ others a ‘‘true conservative.’’ Actually her philosophy, expressed repeatedly in her works, was internally consistent and explains many seeming contradictions. She believed God created women morally superior to men. Eve’s sin was less than Adam’s, as she fell because of desire for spiritual truth and he from sensual appetite. Eve did sin, however, and woman’s punishment is to be subordinate to her husband. She is required to work through him, elevating him and transforming his nature in order to save humanity. In America she is particularly to restrain his materialism and greed to save the nation. Woman’s sphere is restricted—she must use her influence only in the domestic realm because if she entered public affairs she might be contaminated. Thus Hale spoke against women’s rights and attacked those leaders who wanted the vote. However, because women had to be educated in order to use their moral powers effectively, she campaigned vigorously for higher education for women and supported educators like Mary Lyon, Emma Willard, and Matthew Vassar. Similarly, although Hale believed slavery was wrong, she thought the slaves should not be freed until their moral sense was developed (by female teachers, of course). Additionally, women could not properly support abolition because in their role as spiritual guardians they should cultivate only peace and harmony. Hale’s philosophy also explains the major contradiction in her life. She thought of herself as a reformer and indeed was an energetic and outspoken supporter of many causes. Yet apart from her advocacy of education for women, the causes for which she labored were essentially trivial ones, such as eliminating the use of ‘‘female’’ as a noun, having Thanksgiving declared a national holiday, and raising money to complete the Bunker Hill Monument. Hale wielded tremendous influence and could unite large numbers of women. She used her power to promote, in her words, women’s ‘‘happiness and usefulness in their Divinely appointed sphere.’’ OTHER WORKS: Sketches of American Character (1829). Conversations on the Burman Mission (1830). Flora’s Interpreter; or, The American Book of Flowers and Sentiments (edited by Hale, 1832, revised edition, Flora’s Interpreter, and Fortuna Flora, 1849). The School Song Book (edited by Hale, 1834, reissued as My Little Song Book, 1841). Tales for Youth (edited by Hale, 1835). Traits of American Life (1835). The Ladies’ Wreath (compiled by Hale, 1837, revised edition, 1839). The Good Housekeeper; or, The Way to Live Well and to Be Well While We
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Live (1839, reissued as The Way to Live Well, and to Be Well While We Live, 1847). My Cousin Mary; or, The Inebriate (1839). The Juvenile Budget Opened: Being Selections from the Writings of Doctor John Aiken (edited by Hale, 1840). The Pleasures of Taste, and Other Stories Selected from the Writings of Miss Jane Taylor (edited by Hale, 1840). Things by Their Right Names, and Other Stories. . .Selected and Arranged from the Writings of Mrs. Barbauld (edited by Hale, 1840). The Lady’s Annual Register, and Housewife’s Almanac, for 1842 (edited by Hale, 1842). The Little Boys’ and Girls’ Library (10 vols., edited by Hale, circa 1842). Alice Ray: A Romance in Rhyme (1845). Keeping House and House Keeping (1845). Modern Cookery, in All Its Branches. . .by Eliza Acton (edited by Hale, 1845). ‘‘Boarding Out’’: A Tale of Domestic Life (1846). Harry Guy, the Widow’s Son (1848). Three Hours; or, The Vigil of Love, and Other Poems (1848). Aunt Mary’s New Stories for Young People (edited by Hale, 1849). The Poets’ Offering: For 1850 (edited by Hale, 1850, reprinted with revised preface as A Complete Dictionary of Poetical Quotations, 1850). The Ladies’ New Book of Cookery (1852, revised as Mrs. Hale’s New Cook Book, 1857; English edition, Modern Household Cookery, 1863). The New Household Receipt Book (1853, revised as Mrs. Hale’s Receipts for the Million, 1857). The Bible Reading Book (compiled by Hale, 1854). The Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (edited by Hale, 1856, revised 1869). The Letters of Madame de Sévigné to Her Daughter and Friends (edited by Hale, 1856, revised 1869). Manners; or, Happy Homes and Good Society All the Year Round (1868). Love; or, Woman’s Destiny (1870). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Albertine, S., ed., A Living of Words: American Women in Print (1995). Entrikin, I. W., Sarah Josepha Hale and Godey’s Lady’s Book (1946). Finley, R. E., The Lady of Godey’s (1931). Fryatt, N. R., Sarah Josepha Hale (1975). The Story of Mary and Her Little Lamb (commissioned by H. Ford, 1928). Taylor, W. R., Cavalier and Yankee (1961). Wright, R., Forgotten Ladies (1928). Reference works: AA. CAL. DAB. NAW (1971). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Historian (Feb. 1970). Legacy (1985). NEQ (Jan. 1928, 1990). —BARBARA A. WHITE
HALE, Susan Born 5 December 1833, Boston, Massachusetts; died 10 September 1910, Matunach, Rhode Island Daughter of Nathan and Sarah Everett Hale The youngest of eight children, Susan Hale was born into a literary family. Her father and brothers were successively editors of the Boston Daily Advertiser. Her mother, a sister of Edward Everett, the well-known Unitarian clergyman, orator, author, and public official, was an author herself. Her sister Lucretia and her brother Edward Everett Hale were also writers.
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Hale’s education was conducted under various tutors until 1849, when she entered George B. Emerson’s prestigious school. She began teaching in 1850, when her family was experiencing financial difficulties, and continued to teach for the next decade. At thirty-two, following the deaths of her father and mother, Hale began to experience a degree of independence. She took up painting and traveled extensively, making trips to Europe, Algiers, California, Mexico, and Jamaica in the next two decades. During the 1870s she began to travel around the country giving literary readings to women’s groups. Hale’s published writings include the ‘‘Family Flight’’ series of travel books, coauthored with her brother, Edward Everett Hale. The travel books, such as The Story of Mexico (1889), authored solely by Hale, demonstrate an interest in the many strands that make up a national character. History, Hale apparently believed, is a continuous process, with the past always in part present in today. She sets the scene of her first view of Vera Cruz with the thought of Cortez looking over her shoulder. Men and Manners of the Eighteenth Century (1898) appears to be her series of literary readings. No clear connections exist between its ten parts except the desire to know ‘‘what man was like in the century before our own.’’ The writers she discusses— among them Pope, Charlotte Lennox, Addison, Richardson, Fielding, Goldsmith, and Anne Radcliffe—are frequently grouped with another writer, male or female, to show their relationship. The section ‘‘Mrs. Radcliffe and Her Followers’’ is the best. In it she discusses Radcliffe’s ability to describe places she had never been, noting ‘‘evidently she was a diligent reader, and wrote with the map before her.’’ It is clear Radcliffe, the nontraveler, intrigued Hale, the traveler: ‘‘I imagine her sitting comfortably in London and writing about crags and ravines in Southern France without any real knowledge of landscape outside England.’’ The essay, however, contains far too many long quotations and apparently was intended to be read aloud to an audience totally unfamiliar with the work. The other sections suffer from the same fault—too much original text and too few ideas. The advantage of the author’s unifying personality during an oral presentation is missing in the written text. In his introduction to the edition of her letters, Edward Everett Hale attempts to assess the personality of ‘‘the real Susan.’’ His assessment is contradictory. On the one hand, he writes of her restraint—‘‘in her invariable sympathy and interest in others there was frequent reserve’’—and suggests ‘‘her letters have rather more of her real self.’’ On the other hand, he adds: ‘‘She wrote a good deal in various ways—sometimes travelletters to the papers, sometimes books—but though there was a good deal of herself in these, they never impressed people as she did herself.’’ Similar comments have been made about Margaret Fuller, a woman whose brilliance, it is claimed, was never captured for posterity. Like Fuller, Hale’s method and focus were dictated by the social structure—the nation in her books of travel and her interaction with her audience in her readings and with friends and family
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in her letters. But unlike Fuller, what is left is insubstantial, a husk, and the personality within has vanished. OTHER WORKS: A Family Flight Through France, Germany, Norway, and Switzerland (with E. E. Hale, 1881). A Family Flight Over Egypt and Syria (with E. E. Hale, 1882). A Family Flight Through Spain (with E. E. Hale, 1883). A Family Flight Around Home (with E. E. Hale, 1884). Life and Letters of Thomas Gold Appleton (1885). Self-Instructive Lessons in Painting (1885). A Family Flight Through Mexico (with E. E. Hale, 1886). The Story of Spain (with E. E. Hale, 1886). Young Americans in Spain (1899). Inklings for Thinklings (1919). Letters of Susan Hale (edited by C. P. Atkinson, 1919). The papers of Susan Hale, part of the Hale Family Papers, are housed in the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Atkinson, C. P., ed., Letters of Susan Hale (1919). Clement, C. E., and L. Hutton, Artists of the Nineteenth Century and Their Works (1879). Hale, E. E., Jr., The Life and Letters of Edward Everett Hale (2 vols., 1917). Reference works: AA. NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —JULIANN E. FLEENOR
HALL, Florence (Marion) Howe Born 25 August 1845, Boston, Massachusetts; died 10 April 1922, High Bridge, New Jersey Daughter of Samuel G. and Julia Ward Howe; married David P. Hall, 1871; children: three sons, one daughter Florence Howe Hall was educated at home and in a variety of private schools. Because her husband’s legal practice flourished only intermittently, Hall went to work lecturing and writing for magazines. Her income enabled her three sons to attend college and her daughter to pursue advanced artistic training. Hall was also widely respected as an active suffragist and club woman. Hall’s writing falls into three categories: stories for children, memoirs and reminiscences, and etiquette books. She began her career as a writer for children, but her stories sold poorly, and she gradually abandoned the genre. Hall found an interested audience for her books of reminiscences, however. As the daughter of two influential reformers, she could call on memories of people, places, and events that were landmarks of American cultural and political life. She collaborated with her sisters on a prizewinning biography of their mother. They also wrote a biography of their father’s most famous pupil, Laura Bridgman, a blind deaf-mute whose education was a model for Helen Keller’s. Both volumes use the technique of quoting extensively from family letters and diaries, with the authors providing background information, transitional material, and occasional anecdotes from personal memory. Hall further exploited the public interest in her famous family
with a history of her mother’s poem, The Story of the ‘‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’’ (1916). In Julia Ward Howe and the Woman Suffrage Movement (1913), Hall selected documents and recounted events that would secure for her mother a place as a prominent suffragist. Memories Grave and Gay (1918) is an account of her own life. Although Hall abandoned the technique of quoting from letters and journals in this book, she continued to base her memoirs on the lives of her family and famous friends. Her simple, direct, and anecdotal style of writing, combined with glimpses into her own personal and professional life, explain the wide appeal of this book of reminiscences. Social Customs (1887) established Hall as a successful writer in the field of manners. It differed from other etiquette books in several respects. Hall tackled a broader range of topics than most writers, touching on the behavior of children at home, for example, as well as the behavior of adults in various social situations. Furthermore, Hall was amusing. She never hesitated to use a humorous anecdote or to poke fun at an outdated mode of behavior, and this boosted the popularity of her book. Thirdly, Hall opened her book with a brief discussion of the origin of manners. Although her sociological and anthropological information is limited, the chapter does provide insight into the value of an explicit code of manners from the point of view of the upper middle class. Hall hoped her work would enable people to see the justification for different social classes. She believed, too, that etiquette filled the gaps left by legislation, thus preserving order in a society where immigration, urbanization, and industrialization were challenging old social arrangements. Manners, in short, could provide a subtle form of social control that would strengthen the hand of the middle class and upper middle class. The Correct Thing in Good Society (1888) provided a convenient handbook of proper behavior. Hall’s brief and amusing directions were accessible to people without much leisure who needed information quickly. It extended the usefulness of the etiquette book as an instrument of social control by providing a means for the upwardly mobile to identify and adopt the forms of behavior considered correct by the existing elite. Hall continued to expand her career as an authority on etiquette well into the 20th century. She revised her books to take into account both the changing tastes in entertainment (automobile trips, for example) and the emergence of the ‘‘new woman.’’ For the benefit of the latter, Hall included advice on how to behave at college, how to handle business correspondence, and how to establish a woman’s club. Hall also added new titles covering the same general issues but with a different emphasis. Although Hall was aware of the varieties of class and region in American society, she never revealed any awareness of the impracticality of her advice for many ethnic groups or for rural and working-class people. Fundamentally a conservative, she limited herself to describing social arrangements of the upper middle class. She never questioned them, and she never advocated
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any change; instead, she employed her direct and amusing style to strengthen and extend the values she shared with the elite of her day.
OTHER WORKS: Little Lads and Lassies: Stories in Prose and Verse about and for Them (1898). Laura Bridgman; or, Howe’s Famous Pupil and What He Taught Her (1903). Flossy’s Play-Days (1906). Social Usages at Washington (1906). A Handbook of Hospitality for Town and Country (1909). Boys, Girls, and Manners (1913). Good Form for All Occasions: A Manual of Manners, Dress, and Entertainment for Both Men and Women (1914). Julia Ward Howe, 1819-1910 (with L. Richards and M. Elliott, 1915). ABC of Correct Speech and the Art of Conversation (1916).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hall, F. H., L. R., and M. Elliott, Julia Ward Howe, 1819-1910 (1915). Reference works: CB (Aug. 1943). DAB. NCAB. —MARY H. GRANT
HALL, Hazel Born 7 February 1886, St. Paul, Minnesota; died 11 May 1924, Portland, Oregon Daughter of Montgomery G. and Mary Garland Hall As a child, Hazel Hall was taken by her parents to Portland, Oregon, where she remained throughout her short life. At twelve, she became permanently confined to a wheelchair as a result of either a fall or an attack of scarlet fever; thus her formal public school education terminated with the fifth grade. She contributed to her own support by doing needlework; she also wrote poetry and prose under a pseudonym. By thirty, failing eyesight led her to devote herself more to writing, and her poetry began to appear under her own name. She continued pseudonymous publication, however, perhaps because she felt, as she wrote, that ‘‘my poetry should be given more attention than my life.’’ Her pseudonym remains undisclosed. Hall’s contemporaries regarded her highly both as a person and as a poet. The individuality of her poetry was frequently noted. Her poems were sought after by the leading periodicals, and many of them were anthologized. She won several prizes including, in 1921, a first prize from Contemporary Verse and the Young Poet’s Prize from Poetry magazine. Hall never mentioned her affliction explicitly, but she used her confinement and the repetitive, monotonous domestic employment as subject and metaphor in many of her poems. In her
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first book, Curtains (1921), the poems from the title section use immediate objects—door, window frame, stairway—symbolically. The objects lead to the wider world, which is denied the speaker. The mood of these poems is a mixture of resignation and longing. Unsentimentally, the poems reveal flashes of Hall’s struggle to accept confinement bravely and without resentment. In the ‘‘needlework’’ section, Hall used her occupation in a variety of ways. In the poem ‘‘Monograms,’’ she juxtaposes the details of a seamstress’s work—the cold linen, the repetitive nature of the sewing and its long duration—with small, warm details of a bride’s experience—‘‘June, real flowers. . .like flesh’’— to create a poignant sense of the barrenness of the speaker’s life, a life that has been representative of many women’s. In ‘‘Instruction,’’ she makes a direct correlation between herself and ‘‘All the tired women, / Who sewed their lives away.’’ Hall created fresh and original analogies between nature and the seamstress’s world: ‘‘The wind is sewing with needles of rain’’ (‘‘Two Sewing’’); ‘‘the dawn unfolds like a bolt of ribbon’’ (‘‘Heavy Threads’’). The subjects of Walkers (1923) are sometimes seen from a window, sometimes only heard. These passersby reveal themselves in the way they walk. They are perceived as being concerned with their individual, temporal matters and as being unaware of how they resemble each other, how ultimately each is moving toward the same destiny. While ‘‘they are always seeking a road,’’ the one who observes them is always seeking a word; yet the goal for all is to ‘‘strive to give the understanding wings / And to make the brilliant flight of it enough’’ (‘‘Summary’’). Hall knew she was dying when she composed some of the poems found in Cry of Time (1928), published posthumously. There is a restlessness here, but there is awareness, too, that reflection and perception and song have been wrought from pain and silence. These poems are less personal and more varied. Hall more clearly portrayed herself as a representative of other women, sharing with them ‘‘hands never still’’ (‘‘Woman Death’’), sorrow, and a search for peace and repose. In ‘‘Tract on Living,’’ Hall approached total reconciliation to life and death with her recognition that ‘‘the only answer is the call.’’ Hall’s verse was usually traditional in form, but occasionally she experimented with newer techniques. She used a subtle juxtaposition of images to good effect, and she spoke to more modern sensibilities than do many of her contemporaries. Although her work is fairly limited in range, it is slight only in terms of quantity.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Franklin, V. P., A Tribute to Hazel Hall (1939). Reference works: DAB. NCAB. Other references: Bookman (Feb. 1929). NYHTB (3 Mar. 1929). Oregon Daily Journal (12 May 1924). Overland Monthly (Aug. 1924). —JEANNINE DOBBS
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HALL, Louisa (Jane) Park
HALL
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hanaford, P. A., CAL, Daughters of America (1882). Read, T., The Female Poets of America (1851). Reference works: NCAB.
Born 2 February 1802, Newburyport, Massachusetts; died 8 September 1892, Cambridge, Massachusetts Daughter of John Park; married Edward B. Hall, 1840 Louisa Park Hall began to compose verse at an early age, publishing it anonymously in newspapers around 1820. The first part of her verse drama Miriam (1837) was read at a literary gathering in Boston in 1825 and highly praised. Shortly after she and her family moved to Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1831, she developed an eye condition that almost completely blinded her for several years. Her disability, however, did not prevent her from enjoying literature; her father read aloud to her several hours a day and helped to record her own work. When she recovered her vision, Hall married a Unitarian minister and moved to Providence, Rhode Island. The Cross and the Anchor (1844), a collection of religious verse, was written to benefit a mission for sailors there. Hall also wrote three pieces of prose fiction: Alfred (1836) and The Better Part (1836), both didactic moral tales, and The Sheaves of Love (1861), a sentimental romance tracing the friendships and courtships of schoolgirls. Hall’s two verse plays, Miriam and Hannah, the Mother of Samuel the Prophet and Judge of Israel (1839), show that religion is the chief motivating force in life, and both illustrate the importance of women as teachers and examples of faith. Miriam depicts the doomed love between the son of a proud Roman governor and a devout young Christian girl ready to die for her faith, while Hannah shows the influence of the mother of a biblical prophet upon her son. Hall’s blank verse reflects her reading in 18th-century tragedy. The Memoir of Miss Elizabeth Carter (1844) is a carefully documented and lucidly written biographical tribute to Samuel Johnson’s scholarly friend. It was actually composed before Hall regained her sight, at about the same time as the historical drama Joanna of Naples (1838). The latter, based on Jameson’s Lives of the Female Sovereigns, is a florid romance with lavish passages of description. Several of Hall’s works were reprinted in her lifetime. Her short lyric poems were perhaps the most widely circulated of all her writings, since they were regularly printed in newspapers throughout the country. Her favorite themes in these poems are children, scenes in nature, and settings and situations dramatizing religious faith. Hall’s last works, My Body to My Soul (1891) and Verses (1892), express her love of nature, her full life, and her religious faith, as well as her calm acceptance of death. Hall’s large and varied body of work reflects her lifelong pleasure in reading and writing and her ability to discuss religion, the heart, and the home, all favorite subjects of domestic literature, in a variety of different ways.
—KATHERINE STAPLES
HALL, Sarah Ewing Born 30 October 1761, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; died 8 April 1830, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Wrote under: Constantia, Florepha, Mrs. Sarah Hall Daughter of John and Hannah Sargent Ewing; married John Hall, 1782; children: eleven (two died young) Although she was not formally educated, Sarah Ewing Hall’s active and inquisitive mind absorbed a great deal from conversations with her father, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia and provost of the University of Pennsylvania from 1779 until his death in 1802. Her favorite subject was astronomy, in which her father was expert. She acquired an extensive knowledge of Greek and Latin while listening to her brothers recite. In 1782 Hall married the son of a wealthy Maryland planter. They retired to the family estate for eight years, but returned in 1790 to Philadelphia, where John served as secretary of the land office and a U.S. marshal. Although they moved to New Jersey in 1805 and later were forced by financial reverses to move back to Maryland, the family returned to Philadelphia in 1811. Throughout her life, Hall continued her self-education through reading. In the midst of rearing 11 children (nine reached adulthood), she found little free time, so she borrowed ‘‘the hours which are usually appropriated for repose,’’ staying up until midnight or later. She wrote primarily for periodicals such as Port Folio, edited for 10 years by her eldest son, John. Another son, Harrison, collected Selections from the Writings of Mrs. Sarah Hall (1833). He included extracts from letters, book reviews, poems, prayers, and essays. Hall’s views on the role of women were quite conventional. In an essay ‘‘On Female Education,’’ she argues against another woman’s plea that she be allowed to learn Greek and Latin. The end of education, says Hall, is to qualify people ‘‘to act with propriety the part assigned to us by Providence.’’ Hall sees in the ‘‘wise and beautiful order of created being’’ a ‘‘different destination of man and woman.’’ While they share common moral duties, ‘‘the superior strength of the man declares that he is designated to wrestle with the world.’’ As for woman, ‘‘retirement is her element, domestic and social life is her proper sphere.’’ In another essay, ‘‘On the Extent of Female Influence,’’ she accepts the traditional view that ‘‘obedience in a wife is a scriptural doctrine.’’ A woman’s proper sphere of influence is as wife and mother; those without children can raise money for missions, distribute tracts, or write, as did British educator Hannah More. Hall did assert, however, that no talent should be
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wasted; and she sensed that times were changing. In the poem ‘‘Line for an Album,’’ she claims that while women have been denied the exercise of intellect, ‘‘Now, men are wiser grown— they see. . .that she may read and write, like man, / And every form of being scan.’’ A frequent subject of Hall’s writing was religion. Throughout her life, she studied the Bible, and at age fifty she began to learn Hebrew in order to more accurately research her only book-length publication, Conversations on the Bible (1818). The 365-page volume went through one British and three American editions in her lifetime. It is actually a commentary on the Old Testament and the Gospels, but since it would have been unusual for a woman and a nonscholar to write such a work, Hall styled hers as a series of conversations between ‘‘Mother,’’ ‘‘Catharine,’’ and ‘‘Fanny.’’ Mother begins with an interesting introduction to each book, and then, in response to questions, offers comments about the probable authorship; explanations of unusual words, places, or customs; a summary of the plot or argument; and sometimes a contemporary application or parallel. Under the heading ‘‘Song of Moses and Miriam’’ (Exod. 15:1-21), Fanny offers her own poem-paraphrase of the text. Although Conversations on the Bible represents precritical biblical scholarship, it is well researched and presented in a lively, cogent, clear, and careful manner. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hale, S. J., Woman’s Record Hanaford, P. A., Daughters of America (1882). Reference works: AA. DAB. NCAB.
(1853).
—NANCY A. HARDESTY
HAMILTON, Alice Born 27 February 1869, New York, New York; died 22 September 1970 Daughter of Montgomery and Gertrude Pond Hamilton A pioneer of American industrial medicine, Alice Hamilton was the second of four daughters in a family of five children. The family’s idealism and humanitarian interests led each of the sisters to pursue a professional career. Hamilton graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School in 1893. In her autobiography, she writes that she chose medicine ‘‘because as a doctor I could go anywhere I pleased, to far-off lands or to city slums, and be quite sure that I could be of use anywhere.’’ In 1897 Hamilton became the first woman professor at the Women’s Medical School of Northwestern University. During her time there, she resided at Hull House, a facility designed to give professional care and advice to the poor in Chicago’s slums. It was at Hull House that Hamilton first became aware of the problems of occupationally caused lead poisoning and other
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degenerative diseases that prevailed among the workers she treated. In 1910 Hamilton’s work won the recognition of the governor of Illinois, who made her the first managing director of the state’s Commission on Occupational Diseases. Hamilton’s report for the commission concerning the effects of phosphorus and lead fostered the legislation of the state’s workers’ compensation laws. In 1912 Hamilton and her sister Edith studied in Germany. The new insights Hamilton gained there led to a series of articles for the U.S. government’s Women’s Bureau. This research is still a valuable introduction to the study of industrial medicine. Hamilton became Harvard’s first woman professor of industrial medicine in 1919, and she was the only woman to serve as official delegate to the U.S.S.R. on a League of Nations health commission (1924). She continued her research and published her first book, Industrial Poisons in the United States, in 1925. The 590-page work summarized the first 40 years of Hamilton’s long and productive career by drawing upon case histories for both the diagnosis and treatment of industrial poisoning. Industrial Toxicology (1934) was a concise statement of the principles of industrial health and fundamental concerns of the field; it is regarded as an important primary text for medical students even today. At the same time that Hamilton’s elder sister, Edith Hamilton, published The Great Age of Greek Literature, Hamilton published her autobiography, Exploring the Dangerous Trades (1943). The book also featured illustrations by her sister Norah. Ironically, this book, the least technical of Hamilton’s works, received the greatest notoriety. The autobiography tells of Hamilton’s pioneering work in industrial medicine, her research in Munich and at Johns Hopkins University, and her residence at Hull House. Hamilton’s interesting life is discussed in a colorful, forthright manner. She candidly describes, for example, the trauma of being the only female student in the German universities, and how she was politely reminded that female faculty members were not seated at Harvard’s graduation exercises. She also gives touching accounts of her visit to the U.S.S.R. in 1924 and her return to Germany after World War I. Hamilton was honored after her retirement by numerous women’s organizations and medical societies. She continued to lecture in public until her death at the age of 101 years. BIBLIOGRAPHY: U.S. Dept. of Labor (Dec. 1977). Reference works: CB (May 1946, Nov. 1970). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: American Journal of Public Health (Oct. 1925, Aug. 1943). Booklist (15 Apr. 1943). Bookmark (16 May 1943). Book Week (2 May 1943). Nature (24 Oct. 1925). NR (19 Apr. 1943). NY (17 Apr. 1943). SR (8 May 1973). Survey (1 Nov. 1925, July 1943). TLS (13 July 1925). Weekly Book Review (11 Apr. 1943). —ILISE LEVY
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HAMILTON, Edith
intelligent, nonscholarly reader, and for high school and college humanities students.
Born 12 August 1867, Dresden, Germany; died 31 May 1963, Washington, D.C. Daughter of Montgomery and Gertrude Pond Hamilton
Her best-known work, Mythology (1942), recounts with authority and charm the stories of the (mainly Greek) gods, goddesses, heroes, and nymphs. One wishes she had made a greater effort to situate the myths historically and analytically. Cultural bias prevented her from looking beneath the outermost layer to determine possible sources, earlier forms, and cultural significance. Not surprisingly for her time, Hamilton subscribed to the ‘‘early science’’ and ‘‘primitive literature’’ theories of mythmaking. To her credit, she sensed these theories do not carry one very far.
In the record of Edith Hamilton’s work as an educator and writer, one glimpses strong models and an abiding confidence in herself and her traditions. Born abroad, Hamilton was only six weeks old when her parents returned with her to Fort Wayne, Indiana, where her Irish grandfather had settled in the early 1800s. There, in an affluent and cultivated atmosphere, she was early introduced to the classics. After attending Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut, she received her B.A. and M.A. (1894) from Bryn Mawr College, majoring in Latin and Greek. She was a fellow in Latin at Bryn Mawr the next year, and received a one-year fellowship to study in Leipzig and Munich, where she was the first woman ever admitted. From 1896 to 1922, Hamilton was headmistress of the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore, which set new standards for the intellectual potential and achievement of young women. Personal magnetism, an unquestioned faith in the value of classical learning, and the determination that all 400 of her girls would succeed made the school popular. Many of her former students remained her devoted disciples. After retirement, Hamilton published a series of articles on Greek theater later collected in The Ever-Present Past (1964), a posthumous volume including a prologue by her friend and companion, Doris Fielding Reid. Hamilton maintained she had been bullied into writing; urged by friends to record thoughts that had crystallized over decades of studying and teaching, Hamilton proceeded with an almost evangelical fervor to produce volume after volume of materials relating to the ancient world, especially Greece, but also Rome, the prophets and teachers of the Old Testament, and finally the world of Jesus Christ. Although aspiring to the objectivity of positivism, these works never question the supremacy of Western culture or the elitist conception of progress that is its underpinning. In The Greek Way (1930) and its updated version, The Great Age of Greek Literature (1943), Hamilton attempts to recreate the ‘‘Greek miracle’’ through the words of her favorite authors. (There is no mention of Sappho.) The question she does not pose is how to march forward from perfection. Readers may be disturbed by cross-cultural comparisons: ‘‘The English method is to fill the mind with beauty; the Greek method was to set the mind to work.’’ Her generalizing tendency, however, forces one to make interesting and provocative connections, and it is offset by copious textual examples. Normative implications remain a problem: comparing the amplification of Hebrew prose with the brevity of Greek, she merely cites as proof Pericles’ statement that ‘‘we are lovers of beauty with economy.’’ Hamilton neglects scholarly apparatus, but her works retain their validity as a general introduction to the ancient world for the
Witness to the Truth (1948) separates the experience of Christ, likened unto Socrates, from history, theology, and the church. Hamilton eliminates all religious phenomenology save faith in order to focus upon the ethics and the metaphysics of Christ-likeness. In her view, the gospel of love breaks ‘‘through all restrictions, family, nation, race.’’ Among other awards, Hamilton received the Golden Cross of the Order of Benefaction from King Paul of Greece in 1957, at ceremonies on the stage of the ancient theater of Herodes Atticus in Athens, and was proclaimed an honorary citizen of Athens. A member of many professional organizations and a well-known woman of letters in her own time, Hamilton is unjustifiably ignored by critics of ours. OTHER WORKS: The Klubwoman (1925). The Roman Way (1932). The Prophets of Israel (1936). Three Greek Plays (1937). Spokesmen for God: The Great Teachers of the Old Testament (1949). The Echo of Greece (1957). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cole, R. W., Mythology: A Critical Commentary (1966). Reference works: CB (Apr. 1963, July 1963). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCA, TCAS. —ALICE PARKER
HAMILTON, Gail See DODGE, Mary Abigail
HAMILTON, Jane Born 1957, Oak Park, Illinois Daughter of Allen B. and Ruth Hubert Hamilton; married Robert Willard, 1982; children: two. Jane Hamilton writes of small-town, Midwestern Americans who face extraordinary challenges. While her three novels are set
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in the sort of environment where Hamilton was raised and still lives—rural hamlets in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Minnesota—her characters lead lives very different from her own, which she describes as ‘‘ordinary.’’ Despite these divergent paths, Hamilton has said in interviews that she can relate to her characters emotionally, particularly their feelings of alienation. After graduating in 1979 with a B.A. from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, Hamilton planned to move to New York for a position with a publishing house. On the way, she took a job at a Wisconsin apple orchard, where she decided to remain, eventually marrying one of the business’s owners. In 1982 she began writing, winning grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Wisconsin Art Board and submitting autobiographical short stories to publications such as Harper’s. Hamilton’s first novel, The Book of Ruth (1989), won the Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award from the PEN American Center (Hamilton and Hemingway share the same birthplace, Oak Park, Illinois.) The book (published in England under the title The Frogs Are Still Singing) focuses on Ruth, a resilient woman who is emotionally abused by her husband, Ruby, and his domineering, live-in mother. The story and its violent and inevitable conclusion were inspired by a newspaper article about a man in a town near Hamilton’s who murdered his mother-in-law. In its first seven years, The Book of Ruth sold steadily, accruing sales of 75,000 copies. Sales jumped to over a million, however, when the book became the third selection of Oprah Winfrey’s televised ‘‘Book Club.’’ A Map of the World (1994), Hamilton’s second novel, is about Alice and Howard, a married couple who move to a rural community to follow Howard’s dream of becoming a dairy farmer. The pair are viewed as outsiders, a perception compounded by the fact that they once entertained a dreadlocked African American houseguest. When a friend’s young child drowns under Alice’s watch and another subsequently accuses Alice of sexual abuse at the elementary school where she is a nurse, the couple’s lives change drastically and Alice ends up in jail. A Map of the World—like The Book of Ruth, was inspired by real-life events, including a documentary about a couple falsely accused of child abuse and a neighborhood child who drowned in his family swimming pool. The novel garnered somewhat mixed reviews, although it was praised for its use of telling details, perceptive emotional currents, innovative manipulation of point of view, and moving and involving story. ‘‘This highly observant author articulates what is poetic in children, in the natural world, and in the rigors of farm life,’’ stated a review in the New Yorker. ‘‘But there are mixed signals and blurs in her depiction of character which finally rob this otherwise lovely story of its full impact.’’ John Skow, reviewing the book for Time, added, ‘‘This would be soap opera if the author were not unusually good at transforming acute, intuitive perceptions into sentences.’’ Hamilton’s third book, The Short History of a Prince (1998), is about a 1970s suburban Chicago teenager who loves ballet but lacks talent. He is also dealing with his own homosexuality and his brother’s battle with terminal cancer. The book’s second
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section jumps to the 1990s, when the protagonist, now HIVpositive, confronts regrets over how he spent his youth. He returns from New York to a town near his family’s summer home to teach high school and a surprise ending involves his redemption. Though known for her strong female characters, Hamilton was applauded for her depiction of a gay man. As Robert Plunket wrote in The Advocate, a publication written for a gay and lesbian audience, ‘‘It is quite a surprise to discover that in her new novel, The Short History of a Prince, Jane Hamilton paints a very credible and sympathetic portrait of not just a man but a gay man.’’ As with her previous characters, Hamilton was complimented for her compassion and her use of believable detail to describe her characters and their lives. ‘‘Hamilton has an amazing way with the varieties of human pain,’’ wrote Laura Shapiro in Newsweek. ‘‘Her characters live with ordinary and sometimes extraordinary torment, yet her writing remains buoyant and her sensibility full of light.’’ BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference Works: CA 147 (1995). Other references: Advocate (26 May 1998). English Journal (Sept. 1996). LJ (15 Sept. 1997). Newsweek (13 Apr. 1998). New Yorker (15 Aug. 1994). NYTBR (26 Apr. 1998). People (30 May 1994). PW (2 Feb. 1998). Time (27 June 1994). Writer’s Digest (Oct. 1990). —KAREN RAUGUST
HAMILTON, Kate W(aterman) Born 1841, Schenectady, New York; died 28 November 1934, Bloomington, Illinois Also wrote under: Fleeta Daughter of Farwell H. and Ruth A. Cady Hamilton Kate Waterman Hamilton resided in New Jersey and Massachusetts, although her childhood was spent in Steubenville, Ohio, and she spent much of her life in the Midwest. She began writing at an early age, and her first publications were Sunday school books, the majority of them published by the Presbyterian Board of Publication and written under the pseudonym Fleeta. Unlike many women writers who began as Sunday school writers and then wrote for commercial firms, Hamilton continued to publish works in the 20th century for juvenile readers by the religious publishers, even though she occasionally wrote for commercial companies. Aside from publishing at least 42 books, Hamilton also wrote short stories and poetry for Harper’s, Youth’s Companion, Hearth and Home, Golden Hour, and St. Nicholas. Two of Hamilton’s best-known works are The Parson’s Proxy (1896) and Rachel’s Share of the Road (1882). In the former, the new minister from the city, Reverend John Sterling, has a rude introduction to his new parish in the country. After officiating at a wedding in the back hills, he breaks his leg from a
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fall suffered when a drunken wedding participant, Nate, kicks him down a hill. Nate repents and offers to fill the pulpit while the parson recuperates; Nate’s conversion is one aspect of the story. The most interesting characters in The Parson’s Proxy are the minister’s sister, Nelson Sterling, and Granny Slocum. Nelson is an intelligent and independent young woman who befriends the country people. She wonders whether her real self is the ‘‘morning girl’’ who made mud pies with the poor children or the ‘‘afternoon girl’’ who dressed in finery. And at the end of the story she chooses to marry the man who says that a woman’s sphere is ‘‘what she needs to do, wants to do, and can do.’’ Nelson’s ideas may be noteworthy, but Granny Slocum is a far more interesting character. Hardly more than a stereotypical country hick at the novel’s beginning, she develops into a character of wit and wisdom. Rachel’s Share of the Road presents another woman who is willing to relinquish her wealth and status to help the country people of her town. Rachel is the daughter of the powerful and wealthy railroad magnate, Judge Lyndal. Hamilton emphasizes that unlike her father and her two city cousins, Rachel sees people as individuals rather than as classes. Initially, she convinces her father to hire a man who is responsible for a family and unable to find work. Later she supports a strike (both verbally and financially) at a foundry owned by her father. Rachel’s social consciousness is far more interesting than her romance, the outcome of which is certain from the beginning. Hamilton is a bit of a mystery. Many of her works are currently inaccessible. She wrote primarily for children, and these are precisely the most difficult works to locate. Her adult works were well received, but to today’s reader, her attempt to reproduce the vernacular speech of both upper- and lower-class people seems condescending; nonetheless, her characters do emerge as convincing people. Her writings suggest an interesting, but by no means unusual, view of religion; she believes that true spirituality lies in everyone and is best expressed by those furthest from organized religion. Hamilton’s scenes depicting those involved in organized religion are often the most humorous or sarcastic passages of the novels. On the other hand, her overt religious messages and the inclusion of quotations (often in conversation) from hymns and scripture make her work badly dated. Hamilton’s tendency toward complicated plots with hasty last-chapter resolutions also detracts from her work. OTHER WORKS: Mina Grey (1863). Frederick Gordon; or, Principle and Interest (1864). Norah Neil; or, The Way by Which He Led Thee (1864). The Old Brown House; or, Mother’s Birthday (1865). The Blue Umbrella (1866). The Shadow of the Rock (1866). Brave Heart (1868). Greycliff (1870). Chinks of Clannyford (1872). Robin Hood and Another Hood (1877). We Three (1877). Old Portmanteau (1878). Prue’s Pocket Book, and Other Stories (with E. F. Pratt, 1878). The House That Jack Built (1880). General Peg and Her Staff (1880). How the Buttoned Boots Marched (1880). Vagabond and Victor: The Story of David Sheldon (1880). Peg of the Royal Guard (1881). Tangles and Corners in Kezzie Driscoll’s Life (1882). Unity Dodge and Her Patterns (1883). Wood, Hay, and Other Stubble (1886). The Royal
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Service; or, The King’s Seal (1887). The Hand with the Keys (1890). Dick and His Cousins (1891). Giving and Keeping (with E. M. Hamilton, 1891). Nellie’s Red Book (1891). Tommy and Millie (with E. M. Hamilton, 1891). Two and a Half (1891). What Dolly and Robbie Did (1891). Dr. Lincoln’s Children (1892). Billy’s Motto (with E. M. Hamilton, 1894). Calendar of the Days (1894). Dolly’s Quest (1894). Dot’s Christmas (with E. M. Hamilton, 1894). How Billy Helped the Church (with E. M. Hamilton, 1894). In Search of a Fortune (with E. M. Hamilton, 1894). Like a Story (1894). Recitations and Exercises for Children’s Day and Other Occasions (1895). How Donald Kept Faith (1900). The Kinkaid Venture (1900). Mother’s Day: An Order of Service Arranged (1915). Thanksgiving Ann (n.d.). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: A Supplement to Allibone’s Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors (1891). NCAB. A Dictionary of North American Authors Deceased before 1950 (1951). Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of Bibliography (1900). —AMY DYKEMAN
HAMILTON, Virginia Born12 March 1936, Yellow Springs, Ohio Daughter of Kenneth J. and Etta Belle Perry Hamilton; married Arnold Adoff, 1960; children: one son, one daughter Virginia Hamilton’s heritage gives her an excellent perspective from which to view black history. She is only two generations removed from slavery; her maternal grandfather, born a slave, escaped with his mother to Ohio. Hamilton’s father experienced discrimination in finding a job suited to his business-college education. Hamilton herself, born in a place that once served as a station on the Underground Railroad, attended the African Methodist Episcopal Church as a child. Hamilton studied at Antioch College on a full scholarship and later at Ohio State University and the New School for Social Research. Hamilton went to New York City to further her career and, shortly after her twenty-fourth birthday, married a well-known white anthologist of black poetry. After living in New York for several years, the couple settled, with their son and daughter, in a rural home in Hamilton’s native Yellow Springs. Of the 10 books for children Hamilton has published, three are nonfiction: highly praised biographies of black activists W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson and a collection of Du Bois’ writings. Two of Hamilton’s fiction books, the Jahdu tales, are intended for the younger reader. Although these stories of the powerful creature Jahdu have been viewed as a portrayal of the growth of black consciousness in America, they lack a consistently developed mythic dimension. Hamilton’s most successful novels portray a child’s increased awareness of self and of the child’s heritage. Zeely (1967), which received the Nancy Block Memorial award for promoting
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interracial understanding, traces the maturing of 11-year-old Elizabeth Perry, who in her search for identity assumes the name Geeder. She becomes Elizabeth again through the wisdom of the beautiful and proud black woman, Zeely, who teaches her an important lesson about their African heritage. The House of Dies Drear (1968) is a very successful, somewhat gothic mystery, which received the Edgar award in 1968. Hamilton utilizes the setting, a small Ohio town where the abolitionist Dies Drear operated a station on the Underground Railroad, and the protagonist, 13-year-old Thomas Small, to communicate an important aspect of the history of blacks in America. Hamilton’s most highly acclaimed novel is M. C. Higgins, the Great (1974), which in 1975 received the Newbery Medal, the National Book award, and the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award. In this novel, set in the hills of Appalachia, Hamilton skillfully uses point of view to explore the consciousness of a maturing teenager who comes to understand his relationship to his family, its past, and Sarah’s Mountain, where his runaway-slave ancestor settled with her child. The element of black history is very significant; equally important, however, is Hamilton’s portrayal of the destruction of the mountain by strip miners and the subsequent effect on the hill people. Hamilton’s other novels are more experimental in theme and technique. In The Planet of Junior Brown (1971), set in New York City, Hamilton enters the world of the street-wise Buddy Clark and his friend, Junior Brown, a 300-pound musical prodigy who finally retreats into his own private world of madness. Arilla Sun Down (1976) utilizes the complexities of the stream-of-consciousness technique to mirror the confused identity of the part-black, part-Indian girl, Arilla Adams. The novel, however, is sometimes difficult to follow. In the 1980s and 1990s, Hamilton continued to produce wellwritten and well-received biographical and fictional books; in addition she published the phenomenally popular picture book, Jaguarundi in 1994. She stands at the forefront of children’s literature. In her many and varied works, she never condescends to her child reader in style, tone, or theme. These books will continue to appeal to adults and children because of the truth Hamilton sensitively and perceptively presents through her characters, settings, and creative storylines. OTHER WORKS: The Time-Ago Tales of Jahdu (1969). W. E. B. Du Bois: A Biography (1972). Time-Ago Lost: More Tales of Jahdu (1973). Paul Robeson: The Life and Times of a Free Black Man (1974). Illusion and Reality (lecture, 1976). The Justice Cycle: Justice and her Brothers (1978). Dustland (1980). The Gathering (1980). Jahdu (1980). Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush (1982). The Magical Adventures of Pretty Pearl (1983). Willie Bea and the Time the Martians Landed (1983). A Little Love (1984). Junius Over Far (1985). The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales (1985). The Mystery of Drear House (1987). A White Romance (1987). In the Beginning: Creation Stories from Around the World
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(1988). Anthony Burns: The Defeat and Triumph of a Fugitive Slave (1988). Bells of Christmas (1990). The Dark Ways: Stories from the Spirit World (1990). Cousins (1990). All Jahdu Storybook (1991). Drylongso (1992). Many Thousand Gone: African Americans from Slavery to Freedom (collection, 1993). Plain City (1993). Looking for America (1994). Her Story: Marican Folktales (1995). When Birds Could Talk (1996). A Ring of Tricksters (1997). Second Cousins (1998). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1971). MTCW (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: A Teleconference with Virginia Hamilton (video, 1993). CA (video, 1991 & 1993). English Elementary Reader (Apr. 1971). Horn Book (Dec. 1972, Aug. 1975). In Print: Maurice Sendak, Virginia Hamilton (video, 1984). Instructor (February, 1994). Meet Virginia Hamilton (video, 1988 & 1998). NYTBR (13 Oct. 1968, 22 Sept. 1974, 31 Oct. 1976). Virginia Hamilton (audiocassette, 1992). Virginia Hamilton (videos, 1978 & 1991). —MARTHA E. COOK
HANAFORD, Phebe (Ann) Coffin Born 6 May 1829, Siasconset, Massachusetts; died 2 June 1921, Rochester, New York Wrote under: Phebe A. Hanaford, Rev. Phebe A. Hanaford Daughter of George W. and Phebe Barnard Coffin; married Joseph H. Hanaford, 1849; children: two Phebe Coffin Hanaford’s father, a merchant and shipowner, traced his descent from Tristram Coffin, a founder of Nantucket, and her mother was descended from Gregory Priest, pilot of the Mayflower, and Peter Folger, grandfather of Benjamin Franklin. Hanaford’s mother died soon after she was born; her father then married Emmeline Barnard Cartwright, who brought a son, older than Hanaford, and then bore seven younger children. Raised a Quaker, Hanaford was accustomed to hearing women preach. The men of Nantucket were frequently away from home on whaling and mercantile trips, and women were important figures in the Nantucket community. Among the women preachers who inspired the young Hanaford to her ministerial vocation were Mary Farnum, Elizabeth Coggeshall, and her cousin, Lucretia Mott. Hanaford studied in both public and private schools on Nantucket and studied Latin and higher mathematics privately. She was undoubtedly a very serious, dedicated person: she signed the temperance pledge at eight, published her first piece at thirteen, and began to teach in Siasconset at sixteen. In 1849 Hanaford married a homeopathic physician and teacher 10 years older than she. She had two children, and later served in her capacity as minister at the marriage of her daughter, Florence, and
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at the ordination of her son, Howard, to the Congregational ministry. Hanaford became a Baptist after her marriage but joined the Universalist church after a crisis brought about by the death of a sister and brother. After marriage, she continued to teach and edited the religious magazines The Ladies’ Repository and The Myrtle from 1866 to 1868. In 1865 at her father’s request, she preached her first sermon in the Siasconset schoolhouse. With the urging and support of the Reverend Olympia Brown of South Canton, Massachusetts, Hanaford entered the ministry, becoming ordained in 1868. She served as minister to congregations in Hingham and Waltham, Massachusetts, New Haven, Connecticut, and Jersey City, New Jersey, apparently leaving her husband to take the pulpit in New Haven in 1870. She was a popular speaker, known for her ‘‘clarity of expression and well-modulated voice.’’ Writing her memoirs of 20 years of pastoral service in The Woman’s Journal (27 December 1890), Hanaford listed among her accomplishments ‘‘preaching four different sermons on one Sunday in four different towns, and riding in a carriage twenty-eight miles to do it,’’ citing this as evidence of woman’s capacity to undertake responsibilities as demanding as those of men. She was proud of being the first woman ordained in New England and the first woman to serve as chaplain in a state legislature (the Connecticut House in 1872 and the Connecticut Senate in 1872). Hanaford was active in the temperance and women’s movements as well. In 1869 she participated in the American Equal Rights Association Convention, helped organize the conservative American Woman Suffrage Association, and served as vice president of the Association for the Advancement of Women. Her church in New Jersey divided on ‘‘the woman question,’’ and Hanaford continued to serve as minister of the more radical branch. She preached at the funerals of her friends Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. At the age of eighty-nine, Hanaford drove eight miles to cast her first vote. After retiring from the ministry in 1891, Hanaford lived in New York City with her friend, a Sunday school teacher and hymn writer, Ellen E. Miles. She had hoped to live to 100 years of age, but died at ninety-two of hardening of the arteries and endocarditis at the home of a granddaughter. Hanaford was a prolific writer of inspirational fiction, biographies, and light verse for adults and children. In 1852 she wrote My Brother, a miniature volume of poems and essays addressed to brothers of different types: the orphan, the student, etc. Lucretia, the Quakeress (1853) was an abolitionist novel. Her Life of Abraham Lincoln (1865) sold 20,000 copies and was translated into German. Hanaford’s work of most enduring value is an American centennial celebration of women’s accomplishments, Women of the Century, 1877, reissued in expanded form in 1882 as Daughters of America. The introduction stresses the importance of freedom and equality and describes heroines of the Bible, ancient
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Rome, and Greece. The bulk of the book consists of biographical sketches of both major and minor American women, arranged by vocational categories such as lawyers, reformers, inventors, and journalists. It is a valuable and readable source of information. OTHER WORKS: Stories about Egypt (1856). The Best of Books and Its History (1857). Leonette; or, Truth Sought and Found (1857). Frank Nelson, the Runaway Boy (1865). The Soldier’s Daughter (1866). The Captive Boy of Tierra del Fuego (1867). Field, Gunboat, Hospital, and Prison (1867). The Young Captain (1868). George Peabody (1870). The Life of Charles Dickens (1870). From Shore to Shore, and Other Poems (1871). Our Home Beyond the Tide (1872). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Douglas-Lithgow, R. A., Nantucket: A History (1914). Hanson, E. R., Our Woman Workers (1882). Harper, I. H., The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (1898). Services at the Ordination and Installation of Rev. Phebe A. Hanaford (1870). Reference works: AW. DAB. HWS. NAW. NCAB. Other references: Nantucket Historical Association Proceedings (1929). —KAREN F. STEIN
HANSBERRY, Lorraine Born 19 May 1930, Chicago, Illinois; died 12 January 1965, New York, New York Daughter of Carl A. and Nannie Perry Hansberry; married Robert Nemiroff, 1953 Youngest of four children in a prosperous Republican, black family, Lorraine Hansberry spent two years at the University of Wisconsin, then went to New York City, where she studied African history under W. E. B. Du Bois and worked on a radical monthly, Freedom, published by Paul Robeson. In her words, her editor, Louis E. Burnham, taught her ‘‘all racism is rotten, black or white, that everything is political, and that people tend to be indescribably beautiful and uproariously funny,’’ tenets that are themes of her entire oeuvre. By 1959 she had attained fame as the youngest American and the only black dramatist to win the Best Play of the Year award, for A Raisin in the Sun (1959). Hansberry continued to write and work until her untimely death from cancer during the run of The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (1964). In addition to her dramatic works, essays, and journals, she made a significant contribution to the black movement by writing the text for a photographic journal, The Movement: A Documentary of a Struggle for Equality (1964), published shortly before she died. A landmark in American theater, A Raisin in the Sun ran for 530 performances, toured extensively, and has been published and
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produced in over 30 countries. Its title and theme are based on a poem by Langston Hughes that questions, ‘‘What happens to a dream deferred?’’ The play derives its power from the inevitable conflicts arising because each member of the Younger family has a different dream, an individual ‘‘plan’’ for escaping the dreary life of the Chicago ghetto in which they live. To Beneatha, the daughter, this means becoming a doctor. For Walter Lee, the son, the dream is to own his own business. But for Lena, the matriarch, the first order of business is to move out of their stultifying environment so the family may live and grow in dignity. The wherewithal to fulfill these dreams is a $10,000 insurance policy left by Lena’s husband, who had literally ‘‘worked himself to death.’’ After putting part of the money down on a house in a ‘‘white neighborhood’’ because it’s a good value, Lena entrusts the remainder to her son—half to be banked for Beneatha’s education, half for his business venture. Walter Lee, however, is bilked out of the entire sum by a black partner and so almost accepts the white ‘‘welcoming’’ committeeman’s offer to pay the Youngers for staying out of their neighborhood. Ultimately shamed by Lena, he decides against this cowardly solution, and the play ends as the family prepares to move. Two facts are noteworthy. Hansberry doesn’t assert it will be any easier for the Youngers to live in their new neighborhood than it was in fact for the Hansberrys to live in Englewood, Illinois, after they moved out of the Chicago ghetto. Nor does she arrange matters to make the white men the only villains. As in all her work, Hansberry shows that despite special feelings for her own people, she remains objective about race, with ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘bad’’ people in a spectrum totally unrelated to color. Hansberry’s second commercially produced play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, features a white protagonist, an engagé whose statements that he has always been ‘‘a fool who believes that death is waste and love is sweet’’ and that ‘‘hurt is desperation and desperation is energy and energy can MOVE things’’ sound like the playwright’s voice verbatim. Criticism by some reviewers on the basis that the characters are merely personifications of conflicting ways to view the world meant early closure, before giving the public a chance to estimate its value. Through Herculean efforts—donations and advertisements sponsored by distinguished people in the American theater—it remained open until over 80,000 people had seen the production. At Hansberry’s death, the sign came down in New York, but the play was successful on tour and has had subsequent productions in a dozen countries, including a particularly distinguished one in Paris with Simone Signoret as translator and producer. To Hansberry, her most important play was Les Blancs (1972), an accurate foretelling of what has happened in Africa in terms of black revolution. When produced posthumously (1970), there were cries of antiwhite bias, despite the fact it deals as fairly with opportunistic blacks as with white capitalists. In a similar vein, Hansberry’s 90-minute television drama, The Drinking Gourd (1960), commissioned by NBC for the Civil War centennial, was shelved as ‘‘too controversial,’’ although many of its
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scenes are forerunners of those done on television in such programs as Alex Haley’s Roots. Throughout her life, Hansberry kept diaries, journals, and letters and wrote many essays for newspapers and magazines. Bits and pieces of these, along with scenes from her plays, are well blended by Robert Nemiroff in To Be Young, Gifted, and Black (1969), a two-act drama. It was published as a book with extensive background notes and an introduction by James Baldwin. This playwright’s influence in the theater in terms of black performers, as well as black audiences—who saw themselves truthfully presented onstage for the first time in A Raisin in the Sun—was far greater than it might seem from the number of her works. Actually, since her death, there has been a growing interest in this woman whose philosophy was summed up in her address to young black writers. She said: ‘‘What I write is not based on the assumption of idyllic possibilities or innocent assessments of the true nature of life, but, rather, on my own personal view that, posing one against the other, I think that the human race does command its own destiny and that that destiny can eventually embrace the stars.’’ BIBLIOGRAPHY: Abramson, D. E., Negro Playwrights in the American Theatre, 1925-1959 (1969). Bigsby, C. W. E., Confrontation and Commitment: A Study of Contemporary American Drama, 1959-1966 (1968). Carter, S. R., Hansberry’s Drama: Commitment Amid Complexity (1991). Cheney, A., Lorraine Hansberry (1984). Brown-Guillory, E., Their Place on the Stage: Black Women Playwrights in America (1988). Reference works: CA (1971). CB (Sept. 1959, Feb. 1965). Black Theatre USA (1974). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Ebony (18 Sept. 1963). Freedomways (issue devoted to Hansberry, 1979). Newsweek (20 Apr. 1959). New York Amsterdam News (29 Jan. 1972). NY (9 May 1959). NYT (29 Nov. 1970). SR (31 Dec. 1966). Time (10 Jan. 1969). Vogue (June 1959). Lorraine Hansberry: The Black Experience in the Creation of Drama (video, 1975). —EDYTHE M. MCGOVERN
HARAWAY, Donna Born 6 September 1944, Denver, Colorado Daughter of Frank O. and Dorothy Maguire Haraway; married B. Jaye Miller, 1970 (divorced) Donna Haraway is a science historian whose works range from treatises on the study of primate behavior to thoughtful expositions on the influence of technology in our daily lives. Haraway has also written extensively on the concept of the cyborg and contributed to the cyberpunk culture. Her writings have influenced science fiction writers like Philip K. Dick and Octavia Butler.
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Haraway attended Catholic schools in her hometown of Denver and received a Boettcher Foundation scholarship to study at Colorado College. She graduated from college in 1966 with a major in zoology and philosophy and went to Paris on a Fulbright scholarship to study different theories of evolution. She received a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1972 for an interdisciplinary dissertation on the functions of metaphor in shaping research in developmental biology in the 20th century. Haraway was an assistant professor of general science at the University of Hawaii at Honolulu from 1970 to 1974 and an assistant professor of the history of science at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore from 1974 to 1980. Since 1980 she has been a professor in the history of consciousness department at the University of California at Santa Cruz. In addition to teaching feminist theory and science studies in her own department, she is also affiliated with the women’s studies, anthropology and environmental studies departments at UCSC.
purposes. She points to the androgynous status of the cyborg as a victory for femininity.
Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (1990) stems from Haraway’s ten-year investigation of the various studies of monkeys and apes that have been conducted in the 20th century. In this monumental and loosely chronological account of the history of primatology, Haraway notes the evolution of scientific views toward primates. She asserts monkeys and apes, which were once seen as nonhuman primates, are now viewed as our ancestors in part because of our embarrassment in claiming marginalized ‘‘others,’’ like primitive African tribesmen, as ancestors. She asserts ‘‘the commercial and scientific traffic in monkeys and apes is a traffic in meanings, as well as in animal lives.’’ This complex theoretical argument is grounded in case studies of American, British, Japanese, and Indian researchers and their differing methods and philosophies. Haraway also discusses the concept of feminist primatology and the ways in which women researchers have taken a different approach from their male counterparts. The concluding chapter, ‘‘Reprise: Science Fiction, Fictions of Science, and Primatology,’’ includes a reading from Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis series.
OTHER WORKS: Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology (1976).
Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1992) is a partly autobiographical account of what Haraway describes as the transformation of a ‘‘socialist-feminist, white, female, hominid biologist’’ into ‘‘a multiply marked cyborg feminist.’’ The 10 essays comprising the book were adapted from various articles published between 1978 and 1989. The essays in the first and second parts of this collection explore the definition and role of gender in scientific discovery and the ways in which the concept of both nature and the human body has been invented, altered, and redefined during the last several decades. The third section consists of ‘‘The Cyborg Manifesto,’’ arguably Haraway’s best and certainly her most infamous piece of writing. ‘‘A Cyborg Manifesto’’ discusses the problems contemporary men and women face as a result of their skewed perspective on society. Her solution, which she calls ‘‘cyborg embodiment,’’ is to be found in the dual perspective earned by a psychic melding of man and machine, the organic and the inorganic. Haraway insists that understanding the significance of technology in shaping our lives and identities is the only way to mold technological change for worthy and emancipatory
Haraway describes Modest Witness @ Second Millennium: Femaleman Meets Oncomouse: Feminism and Technoscience (1996) as ‘‘a landscape of cyborgs, patented lifeforms, computer-mediated representations, reproductive technologies, genetic engineering and nuclear research.’’ These essays explore the far-reaching cultural associations in the information and life sciences and question the boundaries between what we call ‘‘nature’’ and ‘‘science’’ and ‘‘culture’’ as well as the boundaries between scientists and laypersons. Along the way, she discusses such diverse aspects of science and technology as biology textbooks, computer simulations, science fiction, the Human Genome Project, the ability of science to effectively cloak racism in technical language, and the origins of copyrights and trademarks.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1978). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the Untied States (1995). Other references: Futures (Nov. 1991). Nation (5 Nov. 1990). PW (11 Jan. 1991). Science (18 May 1990). Technical Communication (Aug. 1998). Zygon (June 1996). —LEAH J. SPARKS
HARDING, Mary Esther Born 5 August 1881, Shrewsbury, England; died 4 May 1971, London, England Mary Esther Harding came from an educated Shropshire family. At the University of London, she experienced a typical rebuff to women medical students of the time as she was prevented from interning in any but the Royal Free Hospital. She received her M.D. in 1914 and served in hospitals during World War I. In the 1920s, Harding devoted herself to the practice and study of Jungian psychoanalysis. Jungians (and even Jung himself) credit her more than any other person with having brought analytical psychology to America. She (with the help of two other doctors, Kristine Mann and Eleanor Bertine) founded the first American Jungian Society in New York in 1936. She was also the first head of the training branch of the New York Institute for Analytical Psychology. Her first two books on psychology, The Way of All Women (1933) and Women’s Mysteries (1935), are her most original. The former has been translated into five languages, and both have come out in revised editions. Women’s Mysteries is almost a catalogue of myths and dreams that link woman’s psyche to the moon. Harding argues
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modern woman is out of touch with the deepest, most instinctual, and positive roots of her own feminine principle (as distinguished from the feminine principle of the male psyche), and that she has given her allegiance too exclusively to masculine forces of supposed reason and destructive dominion over nature and people. Harding concludes that our future depends on the balance between the feminine Eros and the masculine Logos. The book also reconstructs the Moon-Goddess and the nonrational, dark, yet redemptive side of life that she represents, making the book important also for religious studies on the goddesses or feminine godhead left out of the Christian concept of trinity. Another important point in the book is her analysis of ‘‘the sacrifice of the son’’ (the weaning of all children from the nest and the mother’s psyche) from the mother’s point of view so she may develop as a person. Women’s Mysteries is undoubtedly Harding’s most important work but is also her most difficult stylistically because the archetypal, mythic, and dream materials are not integrated gracefully into her own thoughts about their meaning and application. Jung himself asked Harding to assimilate the material more before publishing the book. In response, she first published The Way of All Women, which extrapolates in lucid and compassionate terms the meaning of her feminine archetypes in the lives of real women. Throughout both these books she emphasizes that women must grow beyond the image society has projected for them, that they must develop their minds to become persons, to ‘‘individuate.’’ In most of her later works, Harding emphasizes her concern with a predominantly Jungian construct, the religious urge as it surfaces in the latter half of life. Most important of her works for the dissemination of Jungian thought in America was the widely read Psychic Energy: Its Source and Its Transformation (1947), which emphasizes the introversion of the second stage of life in realizing the mandala and other symbols of psychic wholeness that connect the human psyche to the transpersonal. The I and the Not-I (1965) and Journey into Self (1956) are also graceful, remarkably jargon-free introductions to Jungian thought. Harding’s work has been neglected because her emphasis on the religious impetus of the older person is antithetical to American schools of psychology, mostly dominated by behaviorism and Freudian thought, and because her writings on women counter the bias of feminist thought of the 1960s and 1970s, which holds that all psychic differences between men and women are enculturated. Moreover, women in the Jungian school have tended to be disciples rather than thinkers, and Harding was an independent thinker, attracting from other Jungians such labels as ‘‘animus-bound’’ (a woman with an overdeveloped masculine side), opinionated, dogmatic, and assertive. Yet her popularizing Jungian books are perhaps the most gracefully written and elegant (even urbane) of all those that attempt to make Jung’s circumlocutory style and thought accessible to the layperson. Her studies on women reintroduced the feminine godhead lost under Judeo-Christianity; they systematized and synthesized myths about woman’s special biology and psyche; and they are among the first psychological studies to look
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at woman from a woman’s own point of view, as Harding experienced her in analysis as well as in myth, dream, and art. It is necessary to concede, however, Harding does echo the male Jungian ideology that thinking is less natural to a woman, though she must develop the faculty, and Harding holds to the idea that ‘‘relatedness’’ is more endemic to the feminine psyche than the masculine. She reflects her era as well as transcending it on some crucial concepts. OTHER WORKS: The Circulatory Failure of Diphtheria (1920). A Short Review of Dr. Jung’s Article ‘‘Redemptive Ideas in Alchemy’’ (1937). The Parental Image (1965). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Journal of Analytical Psychology (1972). Quadrant (Fall 1971). —STEPHANIE ANN DEMETRAKOPOULOS
HARDING, Sandra Born circa 1950; no other biographical data available Sandra Harding is an accomplished professor, philosopher, writer, and editor. For 20 years she taught at the University of Delaware and then joined UCLA in 1996. She currently is a professor of education and women’s studies for the graduate school at UCLA, where she lectures theories and philosophies on women’s issues concerning science, feminism, sociology, and philosophy. Dedicated to lecturing and writing, Harding has a countless list of accomplishments. She is the author or editor of 10 books and special journal issues including: Can Theories Be Refuted? (1976), Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology and Philosophy of Science (1983), The Science Question in Feminism (1986), Sex and the Scientific Inquiry (1987), Feminism and Methodology: Social Science Issues (1987), The Process of Science (1987), Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives (1991), The ‘‘Racial’’ Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future (1993), and Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms and Epistemologies (1998). She has lectured at over 200 universities and conferences in North America, Europe, South Africa, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and Central America. She has been a visiting professor at the University of Amsterdam, the University of Costa Rica, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) at Zurich. She has also been a consultant to several United Nations organizations, including the Pan American Health Organization, UNESCO’s World Science Report, the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), and the United Nations Commission on Science and Technology for Development. Harding focuses on the connection between women and science in her lectures and writings. In lectures for the World Health Organization, she concerned herself with women’s health
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and science issues pertaining to research and clinics. ‘‘In the ministries of health, they think of women as uteruses with feet,’’ she said. ‘‘If the feet can get the uterus into the clinic, they don’t care what happens to the woman. They’re only concerned with reproductive issues.’’ Harding was particularly concerned about this scientific research issue because women tend not to come to clinics because of this dehumanization, and their health, as well as the community as a whole, suffers. ‘‘It’s women who deliver health on an everyday basis,’’ she said. ‘‘Not only to their children but to the elderly and sick.’’ Harding explores science and the differences in feminist theory. According to Harding, there are two feminism theories: multicultural feminism and global feminism. Multicultural feminism studies cultural differences in American women compared to histories, cultures, concerns, and lives led by other women. Global feminism, on the other hand, focuses on how women are located in the global political economy and questions what the relationship is like between American women’s lives and the lives of women all over the world. ‘‘We need to develop in our science studies a more suitable multicultural global context,’’ Harding comments as she stresses the importance of the effect of women on science and the effect of science on women. The Process of Science discusses the same issues presented in The Science Question in Feminism. However, The Process of Science is more condensed. Harding states the feminism in science problem as seen by traditional science. She acknowledges feminism as a political movement for social change. Taking the ‘‘scientific approach’’ of the pursuit of value-neutral, objective, dispassionate, and disinterested scientific method, political feminism does not fit or belong in science. That is, according to the objectivity of the scientific method. Science is supposed to be protected from politics, according to Harding. To argue this, she presents the problem of male bias in scientific research just as science could claim feminist bias in research due to the political agenda of feminism. Harding is presenting, in essence, a two-way political agenda affecting science as a whole. The claims she makes in The Process of Science is that science and politics truly affect one another in regard to the feminism and nonfeminism movements. In Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?, Harding insists on sexual equality in the sciences, but not only for ethical reasons of equal opportunity between men and women. She sees feminism as a way to make science more truthful and resourceful in regard to the specific criteria and needs for women. ‘‘We can hold that our own account also has social causes,’’ she wrote. She believes that research should begin with the lives of women rather than of men, who are the dominant group. She also adds that women should take into consideration other oppressed groups when conducting scientific research and not listen to all dominant groups. Harding believes focusing on dominant classes creates a distortion in scientific theory and research. ‘‘They are the powerful tide against which women must swim,’’ she wrote. Finally, Harding emphasizes that feminism in science is not the complete answer to truth in science. She believes that the most objective research realm would be submitted in an egalitarian society, one without dominant and oppressed societal classes.
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OTHER WORKS: Contributor to: Beyond Domination: New Perspectives on Women and Philosophy (1984), The Process of Science: Contemporary Philosophical Approaches to Understanding Scientific Practice (1987), Feminism & Science (1989), Feminist Theory in Practice and Process (1989), Feminism/ Postmodernism (1990), (En)gendering Knowledge: Feminists in Academe (1991), Inventing Women: Science, Technology, and Gender (1992), The Centennial Review (1992), Signs (1992), Social Research (1992), American Feminist Thought at Century’s End: A Reader (1993), Feminist Epistemologies (1993), Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader (1994), Isis (1995), Missing Links: Gender Equity in Science and Technology for Development (1995), Synthese (1995), Women Writing Culture (1995), Knowledge, Difference, and Power: Essays Inspired by Women’s Ways of Knowing (1996), Reviews in Anthropology (1996), Radical Philosophy (1996), Science Wars (1996), Social Text (1996), Feminism, Science, and the Philosophy of Science (1997), Men Doing Feminism (1998), editor with U. Narayan of two special issues, Hypatia (Spring, 1998; Summer, 1998). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bulletin of the History of Medicine (Spring 1990). Contemporary Sociology (July 1992). Gender & Society: Official Publication of Sociologists for Women in Society (June 1993). Isis (September 1992). Library & Information Science Research (January 1993). Philosophical Review (April 1993). Philosophy of Science (September 1990). Sociology (August 1992). Zygon (1995). —KIMBALLY A. MEDEIROS
HARDWICK, Elizabeth Born 27 July 1916, Lexington, Kentucky Daughter of Eugene A. and Mary Ramsay Hardwick; married Robert Lowell, 1949 (divorced); children: one daughter Novelist and essayist Elizabeth Hardwick, still vigorous and opinionated at 83, writes in the New York Review of Books (22 April 1999) about the gripping drama which dominated national and international news during that winter. Her review of the specious book, Monica’s Story by Andrew Morton, displays a characteristically mordant wit and distaste for the vulgar and indecorous: ‘‘The shabby history of the United States in the last year can be laid at the door of three unsavory citizens,’’ she writes—describing one as ‘‘shallow and reckless,’’ another as ‘‘aggressive and exhibitionist’’ and the third as a ‘‘pale, obsessive Pharisee.’’ It is significant that Hardwick can and does make sweeping political statements in her ‘‘Head over Heels’’ column with complete confidence in both her own judgement and her audience. As founding partner at the New York Review of Books in 1963, as an advisory editor there still, a distinguished and respected woman of letters for more than 60 years, Hardwick is central to the literary and social commentary of the 20th century. Her undisputed position as Critic, in an age when fashionable criticism
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comes and goes, makes the appearance of a new book by her a cause for rejoicing. Joyce Carol Oates, no slouch of a writer herself, has written that Hardwick’s most recent collection of essays, Sight-Readings: American Fictions (1998), contains ‘‘commentary on literary biographies [that] is, quite simply, brilliant, the most reasoned and responsible thinking on the subject the general reader is likely to encounter. . .without ostentation or polemics.’’ Hardwick was born into a family of 10 brothers and sisters in Kentucky. She was educated at local schools, including the University of Kentucky where she earned both B.A. and M.A. (1939) degrees in English literature. When she moved to New York City shortly after, and enrolled at Columbia University, her orbit of friendship and influence grew to include the leading writers and critics of the era. With her marriage to the dashing but deeply disturbed poet Robert Lowell in 1949 she entered a family of American intellectual aristocrats, and the intimate company of the best poets and writers in the world. Together the Lowells traveled to meet Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil, to James Merrill in Greece, to writers’ conferences and colonies. They lived in Boston while he taught at Harvard. She later lived and taught in New York as an adjunct professor of English at Barnard College. Hardwick has won many awards and honors: an early Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction (1948), was followed by the George Jean Nathan Award for outstanding drama criticism (1967), a nomination to the National Book Critics Circle (1980), and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1989). If Lowell was brilliant and prolific; Hardwick was equally so. Her novels The Ghostly Lover (1945), The Simple Truth (1955), and Sleepless Nights (1979) emerge as a series of fictions that attempt to explain the dilemma of human emotional development. In the last of these she succeeds—through a judicious blending of semiautobiographical material and stream-of-consciousness motif (explored in the first novel)—to realize the promise of her own narrative line. The reflective nature of Hardwick’s immature work becomes the foundation of an explicit and comprehensive view of the human individual in her mature stories and essays. She was praised early and often for the quality of her prose as well as her gift for the nuances of casual discourse and a flair for description. Her literary and social criticism and her short stories are widely admired as quirky, compelling, and very smart. The amount of writing she has produced is substantial, its range enormous: three serious collections of essays including A View of My Own: Essays on Literature and Society (1962), Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature (1974), and Bartleby in Manhattan and Other Essays (1983) precede Sight-Readings (1998). These volumes include book reviews, social criticism, political commentary, biographical sketches, and trenchant remembrances that appeared, along with many short stories, in the New Yorker, Harper’s, Partisan Review, New Republic, Sewanee Review, and other varied periodicals. Two of her most successful endeavors remain relatively unknown: 18 volumes of Rediscovered Fiction by American Women: A Personal Selection (1977) which she carefully compiled and edited; and an edition of the letters of William James. These texts emphasize her range of mind, her breadth of interest and of knowledge. Anne Tyler has exclaimed
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that ‘‘Whatever her subject, Hardwick has a gift for coming up with descriptions so thoughtfully selected, so exactly right, that they strike the reader as inevitable.’’ Hardwick combines this intense critical scrutiny and what she herself has described as a ‘‘passion‘‘ for ideas with the roles of devoted mother to Harriet Lowell and of supportive wife to Robert Lowell (despite their divorce and his subsequent remarriage) until the last moments of his life, (when he died in a taxi returning with her to her apartment in New York City). She is most gracious still in answering the hundreds of questions about her more famous husband (winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for poetry), but in outliving him by two decades has surely influenced more writers, more often and more fully than he did. OTHER WORKS: Selected Letters of William James (edited by Hardwick, 1961). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Pinckney, D., ‘‘Elizabeth Hardwick’’ in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews (1986). Reference works: CA (1969). CANR (1991). CLC (1980). DLB (1980). Modern American Women Writers (1991). WA. Other references: Manchester Guardian Weekly (18 Sept. 1983). Nation (5 May 1945). NR (14 Feb. 1955). NYRB (24 September 1998). NYT (24 May 1983, 17 Aug. 1986). NYTBR (29 April 1979, 12 June 1983). Newsweek (30 May 1983). WPBW (29 May 1983). —KATHLEEN BONANN MARSHALL
HARJO, Joy Born 9 May 1951, Tulsa, Oklahoma Daughter Allen W. and Wynema Baker Foster; children: Phil, Rainy Dawn Joy Harjo is a poet, screenwriter, and musician, and is a member of the Muskogee (Creek) tribe. Raised in Oklahoma until leaving to attend high school at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Sante Fe, New Mexico, she received her B.A. from the University of New Mexico (1976) and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa (1978). Harjo’s love of the language is influenced by her mother, who wrote songs, and her father’s grandfather, who was a full-blooded Creek and a Baptist minister. Harjo’s Creek identity is central to her poetry. Her work is based on a duality she argues is distinctly Native American: to be Native American is to experience acutely the banality and injustice of the present and, at the same time, to have privileged access to the mythic world and its resources for empowerment and survival. Harjo beautifully indicates these resources in ‘‘Javelina,’’ where she gives voice to herself at seventeen: ‘‘I was born of a blood who wrestled whites for freedom, and I have lived dangerously in a diminished system.’’ She consoles this earlier desperate woman with a prediction of a future already achieved: ‘‘The mythic world will enter with the subtlety of a snake the color of
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earth changing skin. . .you who thought you could say nothing, write poetry.’’ Poetry directs self-destructive dangerous living into creatively dangerous struggle, dissent, and survival.
stories. In his review for Booklist, Pat Monaghan wrote: ‘‘Harjo melds the present with the mythic past, seeing through time and space into a timeless, spacious abode of spirit.’’
In her first book, What Moon Drove Me to This? (1980), Harjo demonstrates a variety of understandings of the mythic world in relation to present experience. Her palpable sense of the mythic both unites and separates her from the community of Indian peoples. Whereas much of Harjo’s early poetry labors on behalf of a social community, her later poetry finds her listening to the voices of those who also experience the power of myth, and needing that community for consolation and survival.
Notable among Harjo’s numerous awards are the American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation (1991); the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America for the best book of poetry (1990); the American Indian Distinguished Achievement in the Arts Award (1990); the Oakland PEN Josephine Miles Award (1990); the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award for In Mad Love and War, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native American Writers Circle of the Americas and from the Arizona Commission on the Arts (1989).
She Had Some Horses (1983) is a successful exorcism of personal, poetic, and historical fears that she describes intensely at the book’s opening. Harjo drives her duality or ‘‘doubleness’’ inward, into an intense vacillation between hope and despair that she indicates by the doubling of her poetic endings. The survivor poem, ‘‘The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window,’’ ends with the woman both falling to her death and pulling herself off the ledge into life. By the book’s end, Harjo embraces doubleness and argues that the triumph and tragedy of her personal and collective history are inseparable: ‘‘She had some horses she loved. / She had some horses she hated. / These were the same horses.’’ In Mad Love and War (1990) tells the story of powerful women—mythic and real—and their struggle to bring the world out of its current diminished state. The mythic deer dances naked in a bar, transforming the tawdry moment with the promising presence of the ancestors. In elegies extolling the transformative power of memory, Harjo (who renamed herself after her grandmother) keeps alive the work of Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, a woman active in the American Indian movement who was murdered in 1976, and Jacqueline Peters, a writer and activist lynched in California by the Ku Klux Klan in 1986. Being a part of a community of women is as central to Harjo as her Creek identity, and she counts among her mentors Audre Lorde, Leslie Marmon Silko, Meridel LeSueur, June Jordan, Simon Ortiz, Galway Kinnell, and Leo Remero. Harjo has written a series of prose poems on the Southwestern landscape, Secrets from the Center of the World (1989), which accompany photographs by Stephen Strom, and several screenplays. A teacher of poetry and Native American literature, she has taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts (1978-79), Arizona State University (1980-81), the University of Colorado (1985-88), and the University of Arizona at Tucson (1988-90). She joined the English Department of the University of New Mexico in 1991. Harjo has served as a writer and consultant for the Native American Public Broadcasting Consortium, the National Indian Youth Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts (1980-83). Many of Harjo’s writings deal with what she calls mythic space. She defines mythic space as that which is not easily explained, yet can’t be ignored. Many poems in The Last Song (chapbook, 1975) deal with mythic space, and she returns to that theme in The Woman Who Fell from the Sky (1994). In The Woman Who Fell from the Sky, she juxtaposes the present with the past to weave modern-day tales with ancient Native American
Harjo plays tenor saxophone in her band, Poetic Justice, whose music fuses rock and jazz with tribal sounds and rhythms. She is working on three books: The Good Luck Cat is a children’s book, A Love Supreme is a compilation of personal essays, and In the Beautiful Perfume and Stink of the World is a book of poetry. Harjo also edits the literary journals High Plains Literary Review, Tyuonyi, and Contact II. OTHER WORKS: Furious Light (audiocassette, 1986). Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Contemporary Native Women’s Writing of North America (1998). Spiral of Memories: Interviews (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Balassi, W. et al., eds., This Is about Vision: Interviews with Southwestern Writers (1990). Harris, M. et al., eds., A Gift of Tongues: Critical Challenges in Contemporary American Poetry (1987). Norwood, V., and J. Monk, eds., The Desert Is No Lady: Southwestern Landscapes in Women’s Writings and Art (1987). Survival This Way: Interviews with American Indian Poets (1987). Reference works: CA (1985). CANR (1992). FC (1990). Other references: American Indian Quarterly (Spring 1983). American West (Dec. 1989). Booklist (15 Nov. 1994). Christianity and Crisis (22 Oct. 1990). MELUS (Spring 1989). Ms. (July 1983). WRB (Oct. 1983, July 1990). World Literature Today (Winter 1991). Web sites: Academy of American Poets, Voices from the Gaps: Women Writers of Color (23 Nov. 1996, available online at www.poets.org), and www.hanksville.org. —DARIA DONNELLY, UPDATED BY NICK ASSENDELFT
HARPER, Frances Ellen Watkins Born 24 September 1825, Baltimore, Maryland; died 22 February 1911, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Wrote under: Frances E. W. Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins married Fenton Harper, 1860 (died 1864); children: one daughter Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, the author of the first novel published by an African American woman, was the most popular
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black poet of her day. She was a sought-after lecturer, as well, speaking on behalf of abolitionism, temperance, and women’s rights. Born to free parents, Harper was orphaned at an early age, then reared and educated by an aunt and uncle active in the antislavery movement. She became self-supporting at age thirteen. After working at various occupations—including nursemaid, seamstress, and teacher—Harper found her true calling on the lecture platform. She gave her first speech in 1854 in New Bedford, Massachusetts; her subject was ‘‘The Education and the Elevation of the Colored Race.’’ Few women in the abolitionist movement traveled so widely or spoke to so many audiences. Apparently no copies of Forest Leaves (circa 1845), an early book of poetry by Harper, are extant. Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854), with an introduction by William Lloyd Garrison, went through some 20 editions by 1874. Her dramatic readings of her verse were highlights of her lectures, and according to William Still, with whom she worked on the Underground Railroad, more than 50,000 copies of her books were sold. Harper married in 1860; she was the mother of one daughter. After her husband’s death in 1864, Harper resumed her career as a lecturer. With the end of the Civil War, Harper carried her message of education and moral uplift to the Southern states. Here she took the greatest interest in meetings called exclusively for black women, whose needs she felt were more pressing than those of any other class. Like many other 19th-century feminists, Harper believed in the temperance cause; for many years she held the office of superintendent of colored work in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. She was also active in the National Association of Colored Women, of which she was a founder and vice president until her death. Harper’s poems are of a piece with her oratory, determinedly propagandistic and emotional. In poems such as ‘‘The Slave Auction’’ and ‘‘The Slave Mother,’’ Harper presents the horrors of slavery from a female point of view. These poems are unabashedly sentimental but undeniably effective. Her frequently anthologized poem, ‘‘Bury Me in a Free Land,’’ derives its considerable strength both from its powerful theme and its balladlike simplicity. Harper’s is very much an oral poetry; it needs to be heard, not merely read. By all accounts, Harper herself was an outstanding performer, rendering her lines with dramatic voice and gesture, with sighs and tears. Her stage presence reflected her oratorical skill, but it was clearly derived as well from her profound commitment to the freedom struggle. The first novel by a black author to depict the Reconstruction, Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted (1892), drew heavily on Harper’s experiences in the South after the Civil War. Iola Leroy also contains frequent flashbacks to earlier periods and thus embraces the whole of 19th-century black experience. The main characters, Iola Leroy and Robert Johnson, are mulattoes whose actions are motivated specifically by their desire to reunite their families after emancipation and generally by their desire to uplift the race. As mulattoes they enjoy certain privileges not shared by other blacks, notably access to education, but they are steadfast in their refusal to set themselves apart from their fellows.
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Iola Leroy is not a well-written work; its weaknesses to a large degree are those of the sentimental novel, the literary genre to which it belongs. The plot is often confused and incredible, and the characters overly idealized. The novel is nevertheless valuable for its historical insights, especially its portrayal of the bravery of black soldiers during the war and of the sacrifices made by the black community during Reconstruction. In its Christian humanism and its dedication to the principle of equality, Iola Leroy dramatizes the ideals to which Harper devoted her life. OTHER WORKS: Moses: A Story of the Nile (1869). Sketches of Southern Life (1872). The Martyr of Alabama, and Other Poems (circa 1894). The papers of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper are located at the Springarn Research Center of Howard University and the New York Public Library. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Campbell, J., Mythic Black Fiction: The Transformation of Hisotry (1986). Carby, H., Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (1987). Christian, B., Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976 (1990). Foster, F. S., ed., A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances E. W. Harper Reader (1990). Graham, M., ed., The Complete Poems of Frances E. W. Harper (1988). Lerner, G., Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (1973). Montgomery, J. W., A Comparative Analysis of the Rhetoric of Two Negro Women Orators—Sojourner Truth and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1968). Robinson, W. H., Early Black American Poets (1971). Sillen, S., Women against Slavery (1955). Still, W. G., The Underground Railroad (1872). Reference works: AAW (1991). Black American Writers Past and Present (1975). DLB (1986). NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Black World (Dec. 1972). —CHERYL A. WALL
HARPER, Ida Husted Born 18 February 1851, Fairfield, Indiana; died 14 March 1931, Washington, D.C. Daughter of John A. and Cassandra Stoddard Husted; married Thomas W. Harper, 1871 (divorced 1890); children: one daughter Ida Husted Harper was a prolific writer and journalist and an active feminist. A suffragist of international reputation, Harper traveled throughout the U.S. and Europe with Susan B. Anthony, who asked her to become her official biographer. She handled publicity for the National American Woman Suffrage Association when Carrie Chapman Catt served as president. After leaving Indiana University to become principal of a high school in Indiana, Harper began her writing career at twenty by sending articles under a male pseudonym to the Terre Haute
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Saturday Evening Mail. Under her own name she then wrote a column, ‘‘A Woman’s Opinions,’’ for that same newspaper for 12 years. She simultaneously edited weekly discussions of women’s activities in the Locomotive Fireman’s Magazine, the official organ of the union of which her husband was chief counsel. After her divorce in 1890, she joined the staff of the Indianapolis News. From then on she devoted her life to her daughter, to writing, and to her activities in the woman suffrage movement. Her career in journalism led her from Indiana to New York, where she wrote a column for the New York Sun (1899-1903) and, best known, a woman’s page in Harper’s Bazaar (1909-1913). She devoted most of this writing to the suffrage movement; her interests, unlike those of Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucy Stone, centered on the primary importance of the vote for women. She offered detailed reports about the status of women and their right to vote in countries all over the world. Her insight into international politics gave to her work the standards of accurate social history. In Harper’s Bazaar, she reported on working women demanding suffrage, on women as officeholders in states with the vote, on the deaths of her friends who had ‘‘lived for the Movement,’’ and on the joys of seeing her dreams become a reality: ‘‘Yes, woman suffrage is becoming fashionable and it is all very amusing to veterans of the cause. They understand fully that, underlying the fashion, are years of hard and persistent work yet ahead before a universal victory.’’ Her spirit is striking as she writes that ‘‘women of today who are not helping in the effort for the franchise do not know the joy they miss. . .so vital, so compelling, so full of the progressive spirit of the age.’’ This same vigor appears in her two volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage, that monumental compilation begun by Anthony and Stanton. Harper helped Anthony edit volume four, and she alone edited volumes five and six, dealing with state and national activities from 1900 to 1920. While the History contains records rather than interpretations of documents, speeches, and state and national activities, it nevertheless forms a coherent pattern of immense value for historians. Harper was Susan B. Anthony’s Boswell: to her we owe a detailed study of Anthony’s life and activities in two long volumes published in 1898. During later life she continued her work on the Anthony biography; volume three was published in 1908. The searcher for psychological insight will be disappointed by The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony. Its deepest penetration in explaining Anthony’s personality and motivation is through its astute description of Anthony’s Quaker family background and of the encouragement in her education given by both parents. Otherwise, the biography remains largely a chronicle, dull at times and burdened with detail. Stylistically, it belongs to the tradition of sentimental 19th-century prose. Yet no historian concerned with Anthony’s role in the 19th-century women’s movement can ignore the intimate details of social history in Harper’s story: Anthony’s role as teacher, her support of both temperance and Amelia Bloomer, her acceptance of hydropathic medicine, and her relationships and correspondence with leaders of social reform, such as Garrison, Stanton, Stone, and Antoinette Brown.
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Though close to her daughter, who continued her mother’s work in the women’s movement, Harper remained independent, spending her last years working in the headquarters of the American Association of University Women in Washington, D.C. Using her journalistic talent to good effect, Harper served the suffrage movement well. The extent and variety of her writing is impressive; 14 large indexed volumes of her writings stand in the Library of Congress. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Lutz, A., Susan B. Anthony (1959). Reference works: AW. DAB. Indiana Authors and Their Books, 1816-1916 (1949). NAW. NCAB. Other references: Indianapolis News (16 Mar.1931). NYT (17 Mar. 1931). Terre Haute Star (17 Mar. 1931). —LOIS FOWLER
HARRIS, Bernice Kelly Born 8 October 1893, Mt. Moriah, North Carolina; died 13 September 1973, Seaboard, North Carolina Also wrote under: Bernice Kelly Daughter of William Haywood and Rosa Poole Kelly; married Herbert Harris, 1926 Born the third of six children in an established farming family, Bernice Kelly Harris spent her childhood and adult years in the coastal plains region that dominated her novels. Like other writers, including Carson McCullers, Harris’ first writing efforts were childhood plays performed for family and friends. Her subsequent attempts at poetry and novel writing were short-lived. She attended Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina, expressly to train as a teacher of English. After graduation, Harris taught for three years at an academy in the foothills of western North Carolina, instructing rural Baptist preachers in the rudiments of grammar. She then took a post with the Seaboard, North Carolina, public schools and remained in Seaboard the rest of her life. In 1919, a summer-school class introduced Harris to folk drama. Although she used her skills in drama primarily for pedagogical purposes, the years 1920 to 1926, when she encouraged students to write and to produce folk plays, provided an intense period of story collection and writing apprenticeship for herself. Her marriage and the obligatory retirement from teaching prompted her to write her own plays rather than to encourage others to write. From 1932 to 1938 she wrote folk drama, drawing from actual people and events in the North Carolina towns around her. Seven of the better plays were published collectively in 1940; almost all were produced at regional drama festivals. Harris’ novels grew out of her feature stories written on a free-lance basis for Raleigh and Norfolk newspapers. Encouraged by her editor, Harris began in 1937 the work which became Purslane, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1939. Also in 1939, Harris interviewed tenant farmers for four
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pieces appearing in These Are Our Lives, the Federal Writers Project publication. The nostalgic first novel impressed critics, but Harris’ second novel, Portulaca (1941), a realistic portrait of the rural and smalltown middle class, won even more support from the literary establishment on both sides of the Atlantic. It also necessitated the change to a commercial publisher, since the university press feared such blunt themes would offend southern readers. All of Harris’ novels have related characters and draw from real-life experiences of Harris and those she knew. She is the narrator of a region, with a thorough understanding of its people and mores; as such she can be compared to Cather or Faulkner in her ability to evoke time and place—to produce social history in novel form. So skillful is she at delineating character from life that reviewers of her one novel dealing exclusively with black farmers (Janey Jeems, 1946) failed to understand that the characters were not white because the depiction did not follow accepted stereotypes. The characters of her seven novels encompass all classes, races, ages, and personalities of the region. The strength of her novels clearly lies in their vivid characterization, which evokes not only a sense of regional identity and folkways but also of dynamic humanity. OTHER WORKS: Folk Plays of Eastern Carolina (1940). Sweet Beulah Land (1943). Sage Quarter (1945). Hearthstones (1948). Wild Cherry Tree Road (1951). A Southern Savory (1964). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Walser, R., B. K. H.: Storyteller of Eastern Carolina (1955). Reference works: American Novelists of Today. CA. CB. Other references: WLB (Jan. 1949). —SALLY BRETT
HARRIS, Bertha Born 17 December 1937, Fayetteville, North Carolina Daughter of John H. and Mary Z. Jones Harris; married Mr. Wyland, 1963 (ended 1964); children: one daughter Bertha Harris, born and raised in North Carolina, moved to New York City in 1959, immediately after completing a B.A. degree in English at the Women’s College of the University of North Carolina. In New York, she worked for about five years at essentially clerical jobs and explored the city, finding a particular fascination with the Metropolitan Opera. When her marriage disbanded in 1964, she supported herself and her daughter by proofreading, editing, and ghostwriting. During this time, Harris also began and finished her first novel, which she used as the thesis for an M.F.A. degree in writing when she returned to the University of North Carolina in 1967. Harris taught literature at
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East Carolina University and at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where she was also acting head of the Creative Writing Sequence from 1970 to 1973. After she returned to New York in 1973, she coordinated Women’s Studies at the College of Staten Island of the City University of New York. She also served as a part-time editor for Daughters, Inc., a women’s press located in Houston, Texas. Harris’s first novel, Catching Saradove (1969), is a brilliant portrayal of what it is like to be young, a woman, and lacking direction. The book begins with Saradove Racepath, who is raising a child by herself on the Lower East Side of New York City. Succeeding chapters move between Saradove’s memories of a childhood with lower-class parents in the South and a confused, almost desperate, young adulthood in New York. Following a nonlinear pattern of time, Harris emphasizes the workings of Saradove’s mind, reflecting the frailties of the human psyche. Events in the main character’s life correspond closely to those of the author’s, giving the plot an autobiographical quality. Harris’s characterization of Saradove is, however, much more than a fictionalized self-portrait. From Saradove’s isolation through the moment in which she realizes her capacity for self-actualization, Harris encompasses both the despair and the hope of the world. In her second novel, Confessions of Cherubino (1972), Harris tracks an elusive love through the lives of her characters while satirizing the American South with a warm humor. Cherubino is the embodiment of romantic love and is found throughout the book but is especially focused in the characters of Ellen and Margaret. These two young women find themselves enwrapped in the innocent aura of infatuation and eventually, through their struggles, experience what is perhaps love’s perfection. Harris is able to examine love as a romantic myth while simultaneously showing it as a very real force effecting significant changes. Her third novel, Lover (1976), is an experiment of sorts, in that Harris gives fact and fiction an equal validity. At the beginning of each chapter, she places anecdotes about women saints, some of which she fabricated and others she found in a hagiography. Unique to Lover is Harris’s constant changing of perspectives. Moving from first- to third-person narrative, Harris gives a whole (and more objective) view of the women in her book. With them, Harris dips into the subconscious world and then moves back out to express the reality that remains forever changed, once integrated with the archetypal essence from the subconscious. Harris is an artist with words; her fiction gives a patterned depth to something that was once shallow and flat. Her emphasis on the lives of women is probably related to her involvement with the women’s movement, in which she became active in 1972. Soon after, she began to apply movement principles and ideology to the study of literature and to her own writing. Harris has written several essays exploring literary history with a scholarly precision. As certainly as her fiction guides one through the realm of an evocative imagination, her essays unveil to the logical mind ideas of philosophical originality, and both essays and novels prove themselves to be part of the freshly broken ground of feminist theory.
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The 1980s and 1990s were a quiet time for Harris in terms of publishing. She wrote a biographical piece, Gertrude Stein (1996), as part of the Lives of Notable Gay Men & Lesbians series. The work, however, is no longer in print. Similarly, none of Harris’ earlier novels are currently in print, with the exception of Lover. This book, certainly her best known, was republished in 1993 with a new lengthy introduction by Harris criticizing Daughters, Inc., the original publishers, and provides much in-depth information about the book. The author herself notes in the Amazon.com web page for Lover some of the cultural context of the early 1970s when the novel was written. Harris’ works lack widespread appeal, but many appreciate her storytelling and writing skills. She is without a doubt better known within the homosexual community than among the general public. OTHER WORKS: Traveller in Eternity (1975). The Joy of Lesbian Sex (with E. Sisley, 1977). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Leonard, M., Battling Bertha: A Biography of Bertha Harris (1975). Leonard, M., The Lesbian in Literature: A Bibliography (1975). Reference works: Booknews, Inc. (1 Feb. 1994). CA (1972). CA (Online, 1999). Other references: Nation (19 May 1969). NYTBR (9 Mar. 1969). —LISA TIPPS, UPDATED BY CARRIE SNYDER
HARRIS, Corra May (White) Born 17 March 1869, Farm Hill, Georgia; died 9 February 1935, Atlanta, Georgia Also wrote under: Mrs. L. H. Harris Daughter of Tinsley R. and Mary Matthews White; married Lundy H. Harris, 1887 Corra May Harris’ childhood was spent in rural Georgia. After her marriage to a minister, her experience widened first to the world of a Methodist circuit rider’s wife and then to that of a college professor’s. The security of these worlds collapsed in 1898 when her husband suffered a mental breakdown and Harris had to assume responsibility for the support of the family. She tried teaching but gladly abandoned that when the publication in a New York magazine, the Independent (18 May 1899), of a letter defending the Southern white position on lynching launched her career as a prolific writer of articles, stories, and reviews for periodicals. Her first novel, A Circuit Rider’s Wife (1910), established both her publishing method and writing style. It was first published in serial form and then as a book. The style Harris
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established here was to devise a plot that served merely as a frame on which to hang her observations about people, life, love, and morality. The novel tells of Mary Thompson’s life as a struggling clergyman’s wife. Generously interspersed throughout are Harris’ long digressions about the social responsibilities of a rural minister’s wife and about the moral irresponsibility of the church hierarchy. This novel was so popular that Harris later wrote two sequels, A Circuit Rider’s Widow (1916) and My Son (1921). As the circuit rider’s widow, Mary Thompson fondly remembers her life with William and comments about the townspeople of rural Berton, Georgia. In My Son, Mary is the housekeeper and critical observer in the home of her son Peter, a successful Methodist minister. These novels about Mary Thompson were Harris’ most successful because Mary caught and held the popular imagination with her down-to-earth wisdom and sprightly comments about both congregation and church hierarchy. With her second novel, Eve’s Second Husband (1911), Harris established another of her major plot lines, namely, a wife’s efforts to deal with a problem husband. In this novel, as well as in Happily Married (1920), The Eyes of Love (1922), and The House of Helen (1923), the wife solves problems with an unfaithful or unstable husband, to the accompaniment of Harris’ digressions on women, marriage, and husbands. In all these novels, the wife’s resourcefulness and steadfastness win the day. The Recording Angel (1912), Harris’ third novel, was the first of her satires. Ruckersville, Georgia, comes under the barbed attack of Amy White, who amuses herself by chronicling the activities of its socially prominent citizens. Another satirical work, The Co-Citizens (1915), deals with the corrupt politics of a small town, against which the ‘‘co-citizens’’ must battle in order to win woman suffrage. In Search of a Husband (1913) introduces yet another of Harris’ themes—the taming and eventual domestication of a wild, misguided young woman by a strong, self-made man. As in this novel, the young women in Making Her His Wife (1918), A Daughter of Adam (1922), and Flapper Anne (1926) all learn that the social values of a large city are inferior to the values of rural Georgia, and in each case it is the strong man who stabilizes the flighty girl. With My Book and Heart (1924), Harris began a series of books that were more or less autobiographical. The underpinning of autobiography is, however, all that distinguishes these books from her fiction. Harris followed My Book and Heart with As a Woman Thinks (1925) and The Happy Pilgrimage (1927). In all these books, fact forms a loose base for the personal observations and prejudices of a highly opinionated woman. All of Harris’ writing was heavy with personal opinion. What would otherwise be interminable digressions within trite plots is made readable by her frequently witty style, her ironic humor, and her knack for aphoristic turns of phrase. It was this pungent expression of what her readers regarded as her great wisdom that sold her writings. In the last years of her life, as public taste began to change and her conservative morality and moralizing no longer spoke to the mass audience of the periodicals for which she wrote,
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Harris lost popularity and found it more difficult to publish. The papers of Harris are at the University of Georgia. OTHER WORKS: The Jessica Letters (with P. E. More, 1904). From Sun-up to Sun-down (with F. H. Leech, 1919). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Blackstock, W., Writers and Their Critics: Studies in English and American Literature (1955). Talmadge, J. E., Corra Harris: Lady of Purpose (1968). Reference works: LSL. NAW (1971). NCAB. Other references: Georgia Review (1951, 1963). Mississippi Quarterly (Fall 1972, Fall 1974, Fall 1975). —HARRIETTE CUTTINO BUCHANAN
HARRIS, Miriam Coles Born 7 July 1834, Glen Cove, New York; died 23 January 1925, Pau, France Wrote under Author of Rutledge; Mrs. Sidney S. Harris Daughter of Butler and Julia Weeks Coles; married Sidney S. Harris, 1864 (died 1892); children: two A descendant of Robert Coles of Suffolk, England, who accompanied John Winthrop to America in 1630, Miriam Coles Harris attended religious and exclusive private schools in New Jersey and New York City. After writing for periodicals and producing a bestseller at age twenty-six, Harris married a New York lawyer, raised two children, and continued to produce popular novels, as well as travel and devotional books. Widowed in 1892, she spent most of her remaining years in Europe. Harris’ first novel, the bestseller Rutledge (1860), has been called the ‘‘first fully American example’’ of the gothic romance. It is narrated by the unnamed orphan heroine, a passionately resentful teenager who, in Jane Eyre fashion, falls in love with Rutledge, the older brooding hero—her temporary guardian— whose ancestral home hides a dark family secret. After being introduced to fashionable society by her worldly permanent guardian, the rebellious heroine becomes involved in a series of jealous misunderstandings, including a rash engagement to a handsome social climber who turns out to be a murderer and who commits suicide after the heroine hides him in the secret room at the Rutledge estate where he discovers he is Rutledge’s illegitimate nephew. A period of penitence completes the education of the humbled heroine, who is finally reunited with the ‘‘masterful’’ Rutledge. Like Rutledge, Harris’s other fictions are characterized by psychological studies of negative feminine attitudes, religiously didactic themes, and sensational incidents. Anticipating in some ways the psychological realism of Henry James, Harris probes, with surprising honesty, the degrees of hostility, powerlessness,
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and masochism experienced by an unusual variety of 19th-century heroines: teenagers in Rutledge and in its juvenile counterpart, loosely based on Harris’s schoolgirl days, Louie’s Last Term at St. Mary’s (1860); unhappily married heroines in Frank Warrington (1863) and A Perfect Adonis (1875); a young widowed mother in Happy-Go-Lucky (1881); and middle-aged mother-wives in Phoebe (1884) and An Utter Failure (1891). Harris frequently resolves her plots by transforming her rebellious heroines into self-abnegating women who exemplify the author’s religious beliefs about renunciation of self and the world of vanity. Yet Harris’s mixed feelings about her humbled heroines can be seen in the conclusion of A Perfect Adonis: the new bride asserts, ‘‘I can’t see what I was created for,’’ to which her bridegroom replies, ‘‘I can’t either, except to make people want to possess you. To have and to hold you.’’ Then he silences all further questions with an all-absorbing kiss, a romantic conclusion that is immediately undercut by the author’s final remark: ‘‘It is a blessing that when you are a failure, you can forget it sometimes for a while. But the fact remains the same.’’ Her last novel, The Tents of Wickedness (1907), interweaves a love story with a defense of the Roman Catholic Church. Although melodramatic incident mars portions of her love plots, Harris’s use of topical subjects also marks her as a forerunner of realism. The Sutherlands (1862) is a proslavery novel, while Richard Vandermarck (1871) contains one of the earliest literary portraits of the Wall Street businessman hero. A murder trial, realistically depicted, makes up a major segment of Happy-Go-Lucky, which also covers prejudice against Irish immigrants and lower-class poverty. Her last three novels treat daring sexual issues such as premarital sex, resentment of maternal duties, near-adultery, and divorce, as well as other topical subjects such as tenement conditions, racial violence, politics, and alcoholism. Harris’ minor place in literary history has depended solely on her most romantically sensational novel, the best-selling Rutledge, but all of her fictions contain perceptive, slightly ironic studies of a particular type of feminine psychology, portraits which, in their own limited ways, contributed to the development of the realistic tradition. OTHER WORKS: St. Philips (1865). A Rosary for Lent; or, Devotional Readings (1867). Roundhearts, and Other Stories (1867). Dear Feast Lent: A Series of Devotional Readings (1874). Missy (1880). A Chit of Sixteen, and Other Stories (1892). A Corner of Spain (1898). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Baym, N., Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America (1978). Cole, F. T., The Early Genealogies of the Cole Families in America (1887). Mott, F. L., Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States (1947). Reference works: AA. DAB. NCAB. —KATHLEEN L. NICHOLS
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HARRISON, Constance Cary Born 25 April 1843, Lexington, Kentucky; died 21 November 1920, Washington, D.C. Daughter of Archibald and Monimia Fairfax Cary; married Burton Harrison, 1867 (died 1904) Constance Cary Harrison was a second child and only daughter. Her family moved to a plantation in Arlington, Virginia, and later to Cumberland, Maryland, where her father practiced law. Harrison received her elementary education first at a day school in Cumberland and then at the girls’ boarding school of Hubert Lefebre in Richmond. When her father died in 1854, the family returned to Vaucluse, the plantation. After war broke out in 1861, Harrison’s mother volunteered as a nurse, serving primarily at Camp Winder near Richmond. Harrison went to the Confederate capital to live with relatives and, with her cousins Hetty and Jennie Cary of Baltimore, became one of the most famous belles of the day. Here she met Burton Harrison, Jefferson Davis’ private secretary. The couple moved to New York City, where her husband practiced law. There Harrison became active in charitable and civic organizations. After her husband’s death in 1904, Harrison moved to Washington, D.C., to be near her sons. Harrison began writing short articles and verses for the Southern Illustrated News and the Magnolia Weekly during the Civil War. Her most famous piece, published in the News in 1864, was the ‘‘Blockade Correspondence,’’ a series of letters between ‘‘Refugitta’’ and ‘‘Secessia,’’ comparing wartime conditions in Richmond and Baltimore. After her marriage, Harrison translated and adapted several French plays to be performed for charity. One of these adaptations, ‘‘A Russian Honeymoon,’’ was so successful it was performed professionally. Harrison also wrote articles on George Washington and Colonel William Byrd for Century Magazine, a history of New York City, and a piece on social life in Richmond for Battles and Leaders of the Civil War. A great deal of Harrison’s fiction can be dismissed as pulp. Her novels and stories dealing with Southern life before the Civil War were, for the most part, poorly written. Filled with stock characters, predictable plots, and phony dialogue, works such as Flower de Hundred: The Story of a Virginia Plantation (1890) and The Carlyles: A Story of the Fall of the Confederacy (1905) were little more than mass-market teasers. Postwar readers were fascinated by anything dealing with the antebellum South, perhaps wanting to know why a social system they found repugnant had exercised such a hold over the imaginations of those who had lived under it. Therefore, Harrison and countless other writers found a ready market for otherwise undistinguished writing. More significant, and better written, however, are Harrison’s works dealing with the late 19th century. These novels and stories examined the socially conscious world in which Harrison lived, and found it wanting. Usually Harrison was faintly amused by her surroundings, but occasionally her style became cruelly satiric. In ‘‘Mr. Clendenning Piper,’’ one of the stories in A Daughter of the South, and Shorter Stories (1892), the title character is described
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as ‘‘no end of a swell,’’ and finds that his pretensions to fashion are the object of ridicule rather than envy. ‘‘Jenny, the Debutante,’’ Harrison’s version of the Cinderella tale, illustrates how kind, courteous Jenny wins fame, fortune, and a husband, while her nasty, more fashionable sister does not. Harrison’s best novel, both in style and content, is A Bachelor Maid (1894), which explores the problems of young women who choose not to rush into marriage. Marion Irving rejects a proposal from Alec Gordon, leaves her father’s house when he remarries, takes an apartment with another unmarried woman, and goes to work for the woman suffrage movement. Harrison employs the typical 19th-century convention of incorporating passages from feminist tracts in the guise of speeches and letters delivered by the characters. In this novel, however, the characters are finely drawn and believable. Eventually, Marion and Alec do marry, but the reader assumes that Marion is a better person for having been on her own. Despite the uneven quality of her fiction, Harrison will be remembered for her autobiography, Recollections Grave and Gay (1911). It is a valuable source of information about life in the highest circles of Confederate society. While Recollections lacks the impact of a diary kept during the war and is clouded by a tendency to romanticize the Confederate experience, it is nonetheless a fascinating historical document. Through Harrison’s eyes, the reader sees Lee, Davis, and others as men with all their human sorrows and failures, not as remote historical figures. Harrison’s recollections provide a valuable complement to those of Mary Boykin Chesnut and Virginia Clay-Clopton. OTHER WORKS: Woman’s Handiwork in Modern Times (1881). The Old-Fashioned Fairy Book (1884). Bar Harbor Days (1887). The Anglomaniacs (1890). The Well-Bred Girl in Society (1898). BIBLIOGRAPHY: De Leon, T. C., Belles, Beaux, and Brains of the Sixties (1907). Williams, B. A., ed., A Diary from Dixie (1949). Reference works: AA. AW. DAB. LSL. NAW (1971). NCAB. —JANET E. KAUFMAN
HART, Carolyn G(impel) Born 25 August 1936, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma Daughter of Roy W. and Doris Akin Gimpel; married Philip D. Hart, 1958; children: Philip, Sarah Carolyn G. Hart is an extremely popular and prolific author of mystery novels. Her work appeals mostly to fans of the traditional murder mystery, in which the reader matches wits with an amateur detective as a series of clues are presented that eventually reveal the identity of the murderer. Hart is best known for a series of novels in which the investigator is the owner of a mystery bookstore.
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Hart earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Oklahoma at Norman in 1958. She worked as a newspaper reporter for the Norman Transcript from 1958 to 1959 and as editor of Sooner Newsmakers, a newsletter for University of Oklahoma alumni, from 1959 to 1960. She became a freelance writer in 1961. Hart began her career as an author of fiction by writing mystery and suspense novels for young adults. Her first novel, The Secret of the Cellars (1964), won the ‘‘Calling All Girls’’ Prize from publisher Dodd Mead. Encouraged by this success, Hart wrote more juvenile novels, often involving serious themes. No Easy Answers (1970) dealt with the Vietnam war, and Danger! High Explosives! (1972) involved the controversy over the presence of the military on college campuses. After publishing two novels for adults and a history of the University of Oklahoma, Hart went through a time when her work went unpublished in the United States. Although she had five novels published in the United Kingdom from 1982 to 1984, four of these books were never reprinted in the U.S. She worked as an assistant professor at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Oklahoma from 1982 to 1985. Hart returned to freelance writing in 1986 with the publication of The Devereaux Legacy. Originally planned as a mystery novel, it was rewritten as a romance novel at the suggestion of Hart’s agent. At a time when publishers were purchasing very few mysteries by American women but the popularity of romances was at its height, the agent’s strategy worked. However, Hart would soon win great popularity with mystery novels that were not disguised as other types of fiction. In 1987 Hart published Death on Demand, the first in a series of humorous, traditional murder mysteries designed to appeal to avid readers of the genre. The series, set on a resort island off the coast of South Carolina, deals with the amateur investigations of Annie Laurence, owner of the Death on Demand bookstore. The novels are full of references to classic mystery stories. Hart also adds a touch of romance to the series with the relationship between Laurence and Max Darling, who are married in Honeymoon with Murder (1989). Hart reveals her knowledge and love of traditional mysteries throughout the series. The Christie Caper (1991) takes place during a conference on Agatha Christie, the epitome of the classic British mystery writer. Hart fills the novel with references to Christie and even includes a treasure hunt with clues based on Christie’s works, with answers included at the end of the book. Southern Ghost (1992) is an affectionate tribute to and parody of traditional Gothic mysteries. Hart began a new series with the publication of Dead Man’s Island in 1993. This series deals with the adventures of Henrietta O’Dwyer Collins, known as Henrie O, who is a retired journalist. Although the Henrie O series is similar to the Death on Demand series in its lighthearted tone, it differs from it in lacking the
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references to other mystery writers. The two series also differ in the fact that the Death on Demand books take place in a limited geographical area, while the investigations of Henrie O take her to locations ranging from Hawaii to the Caribbean. Dead Man’s Island was later adapted into a television movie. Hart has won numerous awards for her novels. She won the Agatha Award for Something Wicked (1988), Deadly Valentine (1990), Southern Ghost, and Dead Man’s Island. She won Anthony awards for Something Wicked, Honeymoon with Murder, The Christie Caper, and Southern Ghost. She won Macavity awards for A Little Class on Murder (1989), Deadly Valentine, The Christie Caper, and Southern Ghost. Hart has also been active as an editor of anthologies of mystery stories and as national director of the Mystery Writers of America. In 1986 she was one of the founding members of Sisters in Crime, an organization for women who read, write, publish, sell, or review mysteries. She served as president of the organization from 1991 to 1992.
OTHER WORKS: Dangerous Summer (1968). Rendevous in Vera Cruz (1970). Flee from the Past (1975). A Settling of Accounts (1976). The Sooner Story, 1890-1980 (with Charles F. Long, 1980). Escape from Paris (1982). Castle Rock (1983). Death by Surprise (1983). The Rich Die Young (1983). Skulduggery (1984). Brave Hearts (1987). Design for Murder (1988). Scandal in Fair Haven (1994). Mint Julep Murder (1995). Death in Lovers’ Lane 1997). Death in Paradise (1998). Yankee Doodle Dead (1998). Crime on Her Mind (1999). Death on the River Walk (1999). White Elephant Dead (1999).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CANR (1997). Detecting Women (1994). Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (1994). Great Women Mystery Writers (1994). St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (1996). —ROSE SECREST
HART, Frances Noyes Born 10 August 1890, Silver Springs, Maryland; died 25 October 1943, New Canaan, Connecticut Wrote under: F. N. Hart, Frances N. Hart, Frances Newbold Hart Daughter of Frank B. and Janet Newbold Noyes; married Edward H. Hart, 1921; children: two daughters Born on a farm outside Washington, D.C., with tiger skins on the floors and books on the shelves, Frances Noyes Hart was sent to a number of different private schools in the U.S. and in Europe. Her father was a longtime president of the Associated Press and
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editor and proprietor of the Washington Star. A YMCA canteen worker in France and a translator with the Naval Intelligence Bureau from 1917 to 1919, Hart made use of the experience in her first popular work, My A.E.F.: A Hail and Farewell (1920). Hart and her husband, a lawyer, had two daughters. Her death at fifty-three was unexpected.
entirely competent with English prose, and excellent with the telling detail. Her stories and novels remain entertaining, sophisticated light reading.
My A.E.F. was first published in McClure’s magazine in 1919 and then in book form a year later. Written as a second-person narrative, the short tribute honors the average American serviceman but is critical of his ungratefulness to organizations like the YMCA, which served him abroad, and is doubly critical of forgetful and ignorant people on the home front after the war. Written with appealing detail, the book is moving but not grossly sentimental.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Haycraft, H., Murder for Pleasure (1972). Symons, J., Mortal Consequences: A History from the Detective Story to the Crime Novel (1972). Reference works: Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (1994). St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (1996). TCA, TCAS. Other references: NYT (26 Oct. 1943). PW (23 May 1931). Saturday Evening Post (28 Jan. 1928).
Following the publication of many short stories in Scribner’s magazine, the Saturday Evening Post, the Ladies’ Home Journal, and a collection of them titled Contact and Other Stories (1923), Hart became famous for The Bellamy Trial (1927), which was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post, published in book form, and later dramatized. According to Julian Symons, the original publication of this book marked the start of serialized novels replacing short crime stories as commercial articles. Based loosely on the sensational 1922 Hall-Mills murders in New Brunswick, New Jersey, for which Mrs. Hall and three others were brought to trial and acquitted five years later, the novel is set entirely in a smalltown courtroom during eight days of testimony in the trial of Susan Ives and Stephen Bellamy, accused of murdering Bellamy’s wife. The point of view is primarily that of a writer reporting on the trial, reacting to its principals and its revelations. Reviewers in 1927 and today’s readers alike agree The Bellamy Trial is entertaining, spirited, and clever. Hart’s subsequent mystery novels—Hide in the Dark (1929) and The Crooked Lane (1934)—while entertaining and suspenseful, do not have the interesting form of The Bellamy Trial. Combining love stories with intrigue, the two books are notable for their female murderers, who are simultaneously self-possessed, clever, and lovable. Hart’s Pigs in Clover (1931, British title Holiday) is a travel record of a motor trip through France made by Hart and her husband; it is outstanding for its culinary descriptions. In reply to an attack on women’s popular literature, Hart wrote an article (Bookman, September 1921) that effectively summarized her literary philosophy. She contended that not only were female readers for the most part more open to contemporary literature than male readers of the time, but they also were more fully educated in cultural matters. Calling herself a ‘‘great reader and small writer,’’ Hart defended not only the work of women writers such as Willa Cather and Zona Gale, but also the ‘‘women’s magazine’’ and the popular forms in which some women’s work was published. It is clear Hart never thought of herself as a deep or profound writer. She was, however, widely educated, widely traveled,
OTHER WORKS: Mark (1913).
—CAROLYN WEDIN SYLVANDER
HASBROUCK, Lydia Sayer Born 20 December 1829, Warwick, New York; died 24 August 1910, Middletown, New York Wrote under: Lydia Sayer Daughter of Benjamin and Rebecca Forshee Sayer; married John Hasbrouck, 1856 Raised on a farm, Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck was educated at the Elmira High School and Central College in upstate New York. She attended a three-month course on hydropathic medicine at the Hygeio-Therapeutic College in New York City, afterwards practicing medicine, writing, and lecturing in the East. Shortly before her marriage to an editor and publisher, he established the Sibyl, a feminist journal, for her. Hasbrouck edited the Sibyl for nine years, producing two eight-page issues a month for the first six years and one a month thereafter. In addition to promoting women’s rights through Sibyl, Hasbrouck lived according to her feminist principles. Her special wedding vows included the sentiment: ‘‘Yet while in this covenant I ignore that part of the accustomed marriage ceremony which demands of woman undue subjection and obedience, I promise equally with you to walk by your side through life, meeting the duties and requirements devolving upon us in every sphere of action, not renouncing my individuality in yielding unto you the true wife’s love and duty.’’ In 1859 she refused ‘‘taxation without representation,’’ whereupon a tax collector entered her home and ‘‘levied upon, and advertised a pair of Bloomer pants.’’ In 1863 she worked on a local road crew rather than pay a road tax. When New York State enacted school suffrage in 1880, she was elected to the Middletown Board of Education. Still later she became a real estate developer in downtown Middletown. Although Sibyl promoted most women’s rights causes, such as increased educational opportunities and suffrage, it primarily advocated Hasbrouck’s favorite cause, dress reform. Hasbrouck had adopted the short skirt worn over pantaloons, the ‘‘Bloomer’’ dress, in 1849; and she had been denied admission to the Seward Seminary in Florida, New York, because she refused to abandon
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the outfit. Her editorials in Sibyl reveal her beliefs that women’s equality and women’s health depended upon liberation from the dictates of fashion—from the confining, deforming corsets and stays and the heavy, unwieldy hoops and crinolines. She describes the ease with which the reform dress allowed her to perform her daily chores—whether she was picking strawberries, cultivating her orchard, or cutting grass for the cow. Hasbrouck used Sibyl to promote a club among like-minded women, printing reports of the convention proceedings of the National Dress Reform Association, which she served as president from 1863 to 1864, and listing names of Sibyl subscribers (mostly from New York and the Midwest) who in spite of scorn and ridicule, wore the reform dress. Hasbrouck’s relationship to the readers of Sibyl was intense and intimate. She encouraged them to correspond with ‘‘Sister Lydia’’ about their problems, and she shared with them, through the pages of her paper, her own personal life. She was perhaps the only one of the early dress reformists who did not backslide: she wore the Bloomer outfit until her death. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: DAB. NAW (1971). Other references: AHR (July 1932). Lily (15 Sept. 1856). —JEANNINE DOBBS
HASTINGS, Susannah (Willard) Johnson Born 13 July 1730, Harvard, Massachusetts; died 1810 Daughter of Josiah and Hannah Willard; married James Johnson, 1747; Mr. Hastings, n.d; children: four With her first husband, Susannah Johnson Hastings had four children, a son and two daughters and a fourth, unnamed child, who was born and died during her captivity among the Native Americans. The Johnsons were a farming family; in 1750, they moved to the backwoods of New Hampshire, to a sparsely inhabited pioneering settlement near the Connecticut River, in order to increase their land holdings. In 1754, during one phase of the French and Indian War, Hastings (along with her sister, Miriam, and her children) was captured in a Native American raid on the poorly secured settlement. She spent about five months in captivity, traveling north as far as Quebec, before she was ransomed. Hastings became a widow when her husband was killed at the battle of Fort Ticonderoga and later married an unidentified Mr. Hastings. Beyond these scant personal details, no facts are available about the life of Hastings, her education, or her domestic circumstances. Hastings’ only extant work is A Narrative of the Captivity of Mrs. Johnson (1796). Although the style, organization, and prefatory material indicate the heavy hand of an editor, the narrative contains attitudes and ideas central to late 18th-century American
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women’s writing, thus deserving consideration, if only for its historical and cultural value. Lacking either the religious or propagandistic purposes of earlier captivity narratives, Hastings’ reads like an adventure story, evidencing a conscious desire to entertain through recounting hardships and unusual occurrences among Native American and French captors in New Hampshire, Quebec, and Montreal. Eighteenth-century American preoccupations with sentimentality, sensibility, the noble savage, and national history provide the ideological foundations for her reconstruction of experiences in New England forests, Native American camps, French-Canadian homes, and prisons. With its neat chapter divisions and carefully salted moments of suspense, the narrative becomes in part a late 18th-century sentimental romance. Notable among the attitudes Hastings emphasizes are her belief in the natural benevolence of the Native Americans (she shows how a Native American family of the royal blood adopts her and treats her as a true member of their group) and her strong feelings of patriotism for the young American republic. Her criticism of the causes and events of the French and Indian War serve as oblique criticism of the British in general and of British rule in America. To enhance her nationalistic themes, Hastings uses a historical perspective to show that the courage and perseverance of the American forefathers, as they faced the perils of settling the wilderness frontier, ensured a progressive culture in America. Through an artfully worded conclusion, she depicts the prerevolutionary period as the dark, uncivilized past moving inevitably into the sunshine of a civilized republic because of the moral strengths of the American colonists. Thus in her narrative Hastings carefully combines the personal and the national to create a simplistic presentation of a currently popular historical theory. Ultimately, her work becomes a vehicle to exhibit civilization thriving under the care of independent Americans, and a further example of the often ambitious nature of American women’s writing in the 1790s. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Davis, W. A., Records of the Town of Lunenburg, Massachusetts, 1719-1764 (1896). Nourse, H. S., History of the Town of Harvard, Massachusetts, 1732-1893 (1894). —JACQUELINE HORNSTEIN
HATCH, Mary R. Platt Born 19 June 1848, Stratford, New Hampshire; died 28 November 1935, Santa Monica, California Wrote under: M. R. P. Hatch, Mary R. P. Hatch, Mabel Percy Daughter of Charles G. and Mary Blake Platt; married Antipas M. Hatch, 1871 (died 1896); children: two sons Mary R. Platt Hatch was born and raised in the fertile Connecticut River valley of northern New Hampshire. She was educated at home and in the Stratford public schools; at fifteen,
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she entered advanced classes at the Lancaster Academy. By seventeen, Hatch was publishing widely in various journals and papers, first using the pseudonym Mabel Percy and later using her own name. Marriage, in 1871, transformed Hatch from a farmer’s daughter to a farmer’s wife. Her busy, demanding life soon included the care of two sons. Still, during the last two decades of the century, Hatch became an increasingly energetic and versatile writer. She published poems, ‘‘temperance pieces,’’ essays, and stories of local color about northern New England. In 1892 she and Celia Thaxter edited the New Hampshire section of A Woman of the Century, Frances Willard and Mary A. Livermore’s reference work. The Upland Mystery (1887) was first serialized in the Portland (Maine) Transcript; it is a murder mystery based on fact— the Bugbee arsenic murders of nearby Lancaster. Hatch next wrote The Bank Tragedy (1890), which features a locked-vault murder and a brave heroine/sleuth. The Missing Man (1892), a mystery involving impersonation and e.s.p., proved to be Hatch’s most popular novel, but The Strange Disappearance of Eugene Comstocks (1895) is perhaps her most compelling mystery. In the latter the missing bank teller is really a lesbian transvestite and the heroine is a gun-toting adolescent daughter of a Robin Hood-style bandit leader. The work is not only a mystery puzzle but also a fantasy fiction of a decidedly female character. Hatch’s The Berkeley Street Mystery, an 1895 serial, was published in book form in 1928. Hatch’s mystery-writing career was influenced by that of Anna Katharine Green, with whom she formed ‘‘a strong and enduring friendship’’ early in life. Hatch dedicated one of her novels to Green and wrote perhaps the finest biographical sketch of her friend in ‘‘The Author of The Leavenworth Case’’ (The Writer, 1888). After the death of her husband in 1896, Hatch sold the family farm in Northumberland and dedicated herself to the education of her sons and to her writing. She continued to write essays, poems, and short stories for serial publication. In 1905 Hatch published her Gossiping Guide to Dartmouth and to Hanover—Dartmouth being the alma mater of both of her sons. Hatch later moved to the Boston area, where she became an active and enthusiastic clubwoman. She was a member of the Boston Author’s Club—along with women like Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward and Mary Wilkins Freeman—and was one of the founders of the Harvard Woman’s Club. At the age of sixty-three, Hatch went back to college. She attended Radcliffe classes between 1911 and 1913, taking part in Dr. George P. Baker’s famous 47 Workshop (a school for playwrights). The first meeting of the Harvard Woman’s Club (in June of 1913) featured a presentation of one of Hatch’s plays, The Dreamer. Few of her plays were published, but many were performed in Boston and Washington, and several were made into films. One example, Mrs. Bright’s Visitor (1927), tells of a woman’s capable handling of a potential burglary. During the 1920s, Hatch’s civic and publishing activities gradually slackened, and in 1929 she moved to the home of her son, Jared Platt, in Santa Monica, California.
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Hatch was a modest writer. Yet the inventiveness with which she approached the mystery story is impressive. And her strong and unusual women characters still have the power to delight feminist readers. OTHER WORKS: Mademoiselle Vivine (1927). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: AW. Other references: Granite Monthly (1889). —KATHLEEN L. MAIO
HAVEN, Alice Bradley Born Emily Bradley, 13 September 1827, Hudson, New York; died 23 August 1863, Mamaroneck, New York Wrote under: Cousin Alice, Clara Cushman, Alice B. Haven, Alice G. Less Daughter of George and Sarah Brown Bradley; married Joseph C. Neal, 1846 (died); Samuel L. Haven, 1853; children: five Alice Bradley Haven lost her father when she was three and was adopted by her uncle J. Newton Brown, a Baptist minister. While a student at the seminary in New Hampton, New Hampshire, her classmates challenged Haven to submit one of her stories to a newspaper. Using the pseudonym of Alice G. Less, she sent her story to Joseph C. Neal, the Philadelphia editor of Neal’s Saturday Gazette and Lady’s Literary Museum. Neal accepted Haven’s story and enthusiastically encouraged her literary talent. Widowed seven months after her marriage to Neal, Haven worked for the next six years as an editor of the Gazette and wrote stories for children under the name of Cousin Alice. After her second marriage, Haven retired from editing and had five children, dying a month after the birth of the fifth. Her first novel, Helen Morton’s Trial (1849), concerns the ordeal of a young girl’s temporary blindness, a condition Haven herself had periodically experienced as a child. Her best-known work, The Gossips of Rivertown: Sketches in Prose and Verse (1850), reveals that beneath her saccharine surface, Haven possessed a gift for sarcastic ridicule of the religious hypocrisy and provincialism of the small town. The book includes a novel detailing the persecution of a pretty and lively girl who becomes the target of maliciously jealous gossips. The sketches that follow expose the same jaundiced view of domestic life, one being entitled ‘‘Ideal Husbands; or, School-Girl Fancies.’’ Haven followed this novel with a series of ‘‘Home Books’’ for children, each presenting a moral embodied in the title, such as Out of Debt, Out of Anger (1856) and A Place for Everything and Everything in Its Place (1857). Haven was eulogized by the Godey’s Lady’s Book for being a member of the ‘‘Sensible School, in the tradition of Jane Austen.’’ ‘‘She has not adopted the vulgar and pretentious maxim that it is
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better to do a great thing badly than a little thing well. . . . [She] trusts to nature to be interesting.’’ OTHER WORKS: No Such Word As Fail (1852). All’s Not Gold That Glitters (1853). Contentment Better Than Wealth (1853). Patient Waiting No Loss (1853). Nothing Venture, Nothing Have (1855). The Coopers (1858). Loss and Gain (1860). The Good Report: Morning and Evening Lessons for Lent (1867). Home Studies (1869). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: AA. CAL. DAB. NAW (1971). NCAB. —DIANE LONG HOEVELER
HAWTHORNE, Elizabeth Manning Born 7 March 1802, Salem, Massachusetts; died 1 January 1883, Beverly, Massachusetts Daughter of Nathaniel and Elizabeth Manning Hawthorne Except for three and one-half years spent in the remote, wooded area of Raymond, Maine, the older sister of Nathaniel Hawthorne lived all of her eighty-one years in Salem or in Beverly, a small community near Salem. A precocious child, Elizabeth Manning Hawthorne walked and talked when she was nine months old and read Shakespeare when she was twelve years old. She studied under a number of ‘‘preceptoresses’’ in Salem, including Mrs. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, only until she was about thirteen. She was essentially self-educated. Hawthorne’s letters allow spontaneous unfettered revelation of a many-faceted woman; they record her fervent responses to political events, her perceptive and often acid literary comments, her personal philosophy, her candid self-assessments and whimsical observations, her love affair with the woods. Most of Hawthorne’s literary efforts, however, were abortive ones. She wrote poetry in her youth but published only a poem or two in newspapers. She translated Bon Jardinier—for her uncle, a pomologist— and Cervantes’ Tales, but neither was ever published. She mentions in her letters her desire to review books for the Atlantic Magazine, but she never got the opportunity. There is ample evidence she would have liked a literary career, but the reality and pathos of her existence are epitomized in her acknowledgment: ‘‘I am utterly destitute of the ability to earn.’’ Hawthorne’s major pieces of published writing were unsigned and have been generally unrecognized. When her brother edited the American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge (March-August 1836), Hawthorne was his only contributor. Written entirely by the two of them, the six issues contain essays, extracts, and notes from other published material. While it is not always possible to distinguish her contributions from Nathaniel’s, much of the magazine’s writing reflects attitudes, interests, and expressions typical of Hawthorne: ‘‘Nothing is so intolerable as a
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little wit and a great desire of showing it.’’ Deeply interested in politics and history, she was unswervingly convinced of American superiority. ‘‘Alexander Hamilton,’’ her long essay in the May issue, is a eulogistic discussion of Hamilton’s early military career and his distinguished contribution to the American Revolution. The tone and attitudes of much of the writing in American Magazine are repeated in Peter Parley’s Universal History on the Basis of Geography (1837). Her brother, originally commissioned by editor Samuel Goodrich to write the history, offered Hawthorne the $100 fee to do the work, and it is probable the writing is entirely hers. Immediately successful, the book went through countless editions, was used in schoolrooms throughout the 19th century, and made its publishers a fortune. World history, from Eden to America, is narrated in an intimate, first-person manner and a lively, story-telling mode by Peter Parley, staunch Christian and American. Entertainingly and morally instructive, the narrator combines biblical myth, historical events, and geographic description to instruct young minds on the nature of good and evil in the progression of the world. A prime example of 19th-century American orthodoxy, the history integrates Christian ideology and American chauvinism. Through anecdotes about famous leaders in history and through generalizations, the Peter Parley text molded American minds for more than half a century. OTHER WORKS: The papers of Elizabeth Manning Hawthorne are in the Hawthorne collections at the Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley, the Beinecke Library at Yale University, the Boston Public Library, the Bowdoin College Library (Brunswick, Maine), the Essex Institute (Salem, Massachusetts), the Huntington Library (San Marino, California), and the New York Public Library. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hawthorne, J., Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife (1888). Lathrop, R. H., Memories of Hawthorne (1897). Loggins, V., The Hawthornes: The Story of Seven Generations of an American Family (1951). Other references: AL (Jan. 1945). Colophon (1939). Essex Institute Historical Collections (Oct. 1964). NEQ (June 1947). —JANE STANBROUGH
HAWTHORNE, Hildegarde Born 25 September 1871, New York, New York; died 11 December 1952, Ridgefield, Connecticut Daughter of Julian and Mary Amelung Hawthorne; married John M. Oskison, 1920 Granddaughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hildegarde Hawthorne was the first of nine children and the one who seemed most
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clearly destined to inherit the family impulse to earn literary recognition. She had little formal education—an occasional tutor or term of school as the family moved from New York to Dresden to England to Long Island to Jamaica during her childhood. Spirited and apt, Hawthorne capitalized on these moves by putting the family experiences into several of her numerous books. For example, Makeshift Farm (1925) describes their life on Long Island, and Island Farm (1926) tells of their Jamaica experiences. During World War I, Hawthorne volunteered for war work in France for the YWCA and the Red Cross, sending back to the New York Times and the Herald Tribune accounts of her observations of Paris under siege. She was a prolific book reviewer for both newspapers from 1917 to 1925. After her marriage, Hawthorne lived in California for many years and became an expert hiker and camper, seeking out remote spots of California wilderness and making friends with Natvie Americans and backwoodsmen. These experiences provided background for further literary ventures; she wrote several western novels and three books on California. Hawthorne’s youthful productions were published in St. Nicholas magazine. She established herself as a serious writer with ‘‘A Legend of Sonora,’’ a story appearing in Harper’s magazine when she was twenty. Throughout her life she published many poems, stories, articles, and book reviews, and more than 40 books. Hawthorne’s numerous biographies of famous men—including one of her grandfather, Romantic Rebel: The Life of Hawthorne (1932)—were imaginatively written with interesting dialogue designed to appeal to the adolescent audiences for whom they were published. She was effective in this genre, whether she wrote of Hawthorne and his friends Longfellow, Emerson, and Holmes, or of Western explorers such as Frémont, or of figures from the American Revolution such as Patrick Henry and Thomas Paine. She was clever at interweaving biographical data and conversation, which she no doubt based on research in letters and journals. Her six western novels, pitched to her usual adolescent reader, are in the style of Zane Grey narratives. Open Range (1932), a typical example, is filled with western novel clichés, idealizing the life of her cowboy hero, Slim, and his noble horse, Feathers. In contrast to Hawthorne’s informative and well-researched biographies, these westerns are superficial and hackneyed. The travelogues, such as Corsica (1926), are highly descriptive, personal accounts of Hawthorne’s travels. Of her histories, California’s Missions (1942) is a very interesting and directly related account of those missions and the men who founded them. It is a well-written work that still deserves to be read. Hawthorne’s simple, straightforward, and unaffected style gave her work a popular appeal. Both her biographies and her histories show evidence of greater artistic potential than she ever actually realized. OTHER WORKS: A Country Interlude (1904). Poems (1904). Essays (1907). The Lure of the Garden (1911). A Peep at New
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York (1911). Old Seaport Towns of New England (1916). Girls in Bookland (1917). Rambles Through College Towns (1917). Maybe True Stories (1926). Deedah’s Wonderful Year (1927). Mystery at Star C. Ranch (1929). Mystery of Navajo Canyon (1931). Street of Rancho del Sol (1931). Wheels Toward the West (1931). Riders of the Royal Road (1932). Lone Rider (1933). Tabitha of Lonely House (1934). Enos Mills of the Rockies (with E. B. Mills, 1935). Youth’s Captain: The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1935). On the Golden Trail (1936). Poet of Craigie House: The Life of Longfellow (1936). Phantom King: The Life of Napoleon’s Son (1937). Rising Thunder: The Life of Jack Jouett (1937). The Happy Autocrat: A Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes (1938). The Miniature’s Secret (1938). Romantic Cities of California (1939). Concord’s Happy Rebel: The Life of H. D. Thoreau (1940). No Road Too Long (1940). Williamsburg, Old and New (1941). The Long Adventure: Churchill’s Life (1942). Ox-Team Miracle: The Life of Alexander Majors (1942). Matthew Fontaine Maury, Trail Maker of the Seas (1943). Give Me Liberty: The Story of Patrick Henry (1945). Westward the Course: The Story of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1946). Born to Adventure: The Story of John Charles Frémont (1947). His Country Was a World: The Life of Thomas Paine (1949). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Junior Book of Authors (1951). —JANE STANBROUGH
HAZLETT, Helen Born circa 1820s; death date unknown Wrote under H. M. Tatem, M. H. Tatem An intensive search failed to reveal any biographical information about Helen Hazlett. Works listed in secondary sources are contradictory regarding titles and dates of publication. Since all Hazlett’s works were published in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, records of this city were investigated, but without results. Hazlett’s works are sentimental novels, replete with frail female characters who faint at any slight emotional agitation. Each follows the same formula, opening with a dialogue between two characters who are revealed indirectly through the conversation. Descriptive and narrative passages are minimal throughout the novels. Each of Hazlett’s novels has a unifying theme—the Christian religion. In her first novel, The Cloud with a Golden Border (1859), the Nesbit family laments the fact that their friend Solomon Mordecai, a rich banker, is Jewish. As Hazlett states in the introduction, she feels that ‘‘in regard to the Hebrew race. . .the chosen people of the Almighty will surely take their station among the Christian nations of the earth. . .and if the footsteps of one wanderer from the fold be led to recognize his own Shepherd in Him who hung on Calvary by means of this little work, she will feel her time has not been misspent.’’ The faith of Nellie Nesbit, a
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doubter who was to marry Mr. Mordecai’s son, is strengthened at the moment of death. Needless to say, one by one, all the members of the Mordecai family find ‘‘the golden border’’ and convert to Christianity. The setting of The Heights of (H)Eidelberg (1870) is a Swiss Protestant and Catholic community. Since Hazlett’s purpose is to ‘‘lead a misguided Romanist to seek truth as it is in Jesus,’’ the priest is portrayed as the devil himself, who ‘‘holds tyrannical sway under the mask of holy counsel.’’ Young Vanclive is publicly accused of possessing a Bible, and he admits to being a Protestant. Vanclive’s premature death leads to his father’s conversion to Protestantism at the moment of his own death. When the priest attempts to gain access to the father’s money, he is beaten as a scoundrel by a Protestant. Glennair (1869) deals with Hazlett’s Scottish ancestry. While the purpose of the novel is not to convert any definite group of nonbelievers, religion plays an enormous role in the book. When the matriarch, Mrs. Graeme, dies, ‘‘her soul winged its way to the home where Jesus was waiting with hosts of angels, to welcome it.’’ Again, dialogue, this time in Scottish dialect, is the principal form. Lord Glennair, whose faith has lapsed, is aroused to ‘‘true religion’’ (The Great I AM) under the pressure of difficult times. The religious overtones of Hazlett’s novels no doubt made her one of the less-read sentimental novelists of her day. Despite her intolerance toward nonbelievers, it is unfortunate no one cared to record her biographical data. OTHER WORKS: The Pastor’s Widow (Son); or, The Contract (1865). A Ray from the South BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: A Supplement to Allibone’s Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors (1891). Wright American Fiction 1851-1875. Research Publication Microfilm, No. 1147. —CAROLE M. SHAFFER-KOROS
HEILBRUN, Carolyn G. Born 13 January 1926, East Orange, New Jersey Also writes under: Amanda Cross Daughter of Archibald and Estelle Roemer Gold; married James Heilbrun, 1945; children: Emily, Margaret, Robert An only child, Carolyn G. Heilbrun went to private schools and graduated from Wellesley College. After earning an M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University, she taught at Brooklyn College and at Columbia, where she became a full professor in 1972. Known for her position on feminist issues, Heilbrun has been president of the Virginia Woolf Society; consultant for the University of Michigan Press Series on Women; a member of the
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editorial boards of Signs, Twentieth Century Literature, and Columbia University Press; and adviser to several radio and television productions. Heilbrun’s work ranges from scholarly books and articles to witty, leisurely, intellectual mysteries written under her pseudonym, Amanda Cross. In her first book, The Garnett Family (1961), Heilbrun presents the history of a literary family in England, particularly the three generations beginning with Richard Garnett (1835-1906). Richard’s son, Edward (1868-1937), and his wife, Constance, (1862-1946) are the key characters in this biography. As a publisher’s reader, Edward encouraged many of the literary talents from the 1890s to the time of his death, including Joseph Conrad and D. H. Lawrence. Constance, about whom Heilbrun writes with enthusiasm, was an independent woman who translated many of the major Russian novelists into English and who, after becoming a wife and mother, traveled alone to Russia to see the country for herself. Her education at Newnham College, Cambridge, is reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s description of a woman’s education in A Room of One’s Own. Woven through the book are other suggested parallels to Woolf: the elder Garnett is compared with Woolf’s father and family gatherings with those described by Woolf. Heilbrun’s interest in Woolf found greater expression in her very important work, Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (1973). Heilbrun believes ‘‘our future salvation lies in a movement away from sexual polarization and the prison of gender toward a world in which individual roles and the modes of personal behavior can be freely chosen.’’ Divided into three sections—‘‘The Hidden River of Androgyny,’’ ‘‘The Woman as Hero,’’ and ‘‘The Bloomsbury Group’’—her book concentrates on the novel, after tracing the history of androgyny in myth and early literature. A wide-ranging critical study, it perceptively reexamines the works of many of our major novelists. Heilbrun asks for a new approach, one that recognizes the ‘‘woman hero’’ as distinct from the ‘‘heroine.’’ She notes that in the late 19th- and early 20th-century novels, it is the women who speak against the antiandrogynous vision. She differentiates between the ‘‘feminist’’ novel and the androgynous novel. In Jane Eyre, an example of the former, one identifies only with the woman hero. In Wuthering Heights, an example of the latter, one is aware of the human waste because of sexual polarization. In the essay, ‘‘Marriage Perceived’’ (1977), Heilbrun continues to explore the meaning of the woman’s role. She seeks to tear down the facade, to destroy the shibboleths that say that marriage is the desired state. She believes that much of the criticism written between 1932 and 1960 misinterprets the writers’ intentions. As an example, she cites those critics who believe that Henry James supported the old ideas of marriage, when in fact he noted its painfulness and the close connection between economics and marriage. As Amanda Cross, Heilbrun won the Scroll of the Mystery Writers of America for In the Last Analysis (1964). Here Heilbrun created Kate Fansler, a professor from a large urban university, as the amateur sleuth. In a later work, The James Joyce Murder (1967), the protagonist professor spends the summer sorting the
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papers of the American publisher of James Joyce, when a crime is committed and a manuscript disappears. In these works, Heilbrun weaves her academic background into the story, either through plot devices or by creating intellectual, sophisticated characters. In 1983 Heilbrun was coeditor of The Representation of Women in Fiction, a collection of papers from the first English Institute program (1981) devoted to feminist criticism. Her own work at this time began to focus on women’s lives and particularly women’s autobiographies and biographies. In an important article, ‘‘Women’s Autobiographical Studies: New Forms’’ (1985), she argues that until the 1960s women had written only preautobiography, where ‘‘the individual. . .does not feel [her]self to exist outside of others.’’ This interest culminated in Writing a Woman’s Life (1988). In her characteristic combination of critical and textual analysis with autobiographical and biographical material, her essays focus on the necessity for women to write about their lives or to record the lives of others who have not been heard of before. She credits women poets, such as Denise Levertov, Jane Cooper, Maxine Kumin, Adrienne Rich, and Sylvia Plath, born between 1923 and 1932, with transforming ‘‘the autobiographies of women’s lives,’’ and notes that Rich, writing in prose, actually ‘‘practiced the new female autobiography directly’’ in her essay on her father, a subject Heilbrun argues women must write about in order to confront the patriarchal world. Other new forms and plots of women’s lives must be established, she argues, especially around marriage patterns and the story of friendship and love between women. Heilbrun, additionally, points out that in writing detective stories under a pseudonym, she was creating another identity for herself and another ‘‘possibility of female destiny.’’ Fansler was unmarried (though she later married the district attorney) and without children (Heilbrun has three children). She was also, Heilbrun notes, ‘‘unconstrained by the opinions of others, rich and beautiful.’’ Heilbrun produced five Fansler mysteries between 1981 and 1990. Death in a Tenured Position (1981), set at Harvard University’s English Department and featuring a victim who is the first tenured woman in the department, is characteristic of her novels in that it combines sharp social commentary with detective work and often solves the mystery through an analysis of literary texts. No Word from Winifred (1986), more than earlier novels, focuses on the effects of feminism on women’s lives, while The Players Come Again (1990) features literary detective work in the service of revealing a woman’s role in the work of a famous male writer. In her nonfiction Writing a Woman’s Life (1988), Heilbrun notes that alter ego Amanda Cross is no longer a fantasy figure ‘‘but an aging woman who battles despair’’ and who uses wit and humor and ‘‘the analysis of our ancient patriarchal ways’’ to find ‘‘a reason to endure.’’ In all of her writing, Heilbrun offers much more than mere endurance: she celebrates the lives and work of women who have the courage to live beyond convention and to tell their own stories. In the foreword to Hamlet’s Mother and Other Women (1990), Nancy Miller notes that Heilbrun has always identified with Virginia Woolf’s ‘‘Society of Outsiders.’’ In this collection
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of essays, beginning with her first published essay, ‘‘The Character of Hamlet’s Mother’’ (1957), Heilbrun reveals that from the beginning she was writing and thinking as ‘‘an opposing self’’ opposed to the male-centered culture of the university. All the other pieces were written between 1972 and 1988, during her life as a ‘‘declared and dedicated feminist.’’ They thus record her own history in the women’s movement as well as the spirit of ‘‘the revolution in its earlier years.’’ Most central in her literary criticism are the essays on Woolf, in one of which she argues that Woolf is a more revolutionary figure in modernism than James Joyce. Heilbrun includes two essays given at formal professional occasions, one her president’s address to the Modern Language Association and the other a University Lecture at Columbia. The two were, ‘‘collectively and separately, the bravest acts of my professional life,’’ because in them she confronted the male academic culture and spoke as a woman and not as ‘‘a genderless member’’ of the profession. In ‘‘The Politics of the Mind,’’ Heilbrun argues that ‘‘much of what passes for the life of the mind is, in fact, no more than the politics of the mind,’’ which has wasted the energies of women by too often silencing or hampering them. Heilbrun’s continuing promotion of feminist scholarship and the discussion of women’s issues particularly pertaining to the academic world was a central reason for her decision to retire from the faculty of Columbia University’s Department of English in 1992. Feminist critic Nancy Miller called Heilbrun a woman ahead of her generation and noted her passion ‘‘for the life in texts’’ and ‘‘from the beginning. . .has been writing the biography of literature.’’ Whether writing under her real name or under Amanda Cross, Heilbrun continues to earn widespread respect for her feminist theories. According to Nikki Lee Manos in Belles Lettres, Heilbrun has chosen to ‘‘interpret women’s literature from a woman’s perspective and thus to illustrate a critical means for validating female experience.’’ Los Angeles Times correspondent Kay Mills called Heilbrun ‘‘a pioneering mystery writer, not to mention one of the premiere translators of academic feminist concepts into language the rest of us can grasp and use. She’s influenced a generation of readers and writers with her belief that it’s vital to history to have women telling and honestly analyzing the stories of women.’’ In the decade since it was published, Writing a Woman’s Life (1988) has become essential reading in feminist literary theory. One reader who admired it was Gloria Steinem; when Steinem needed someone to write her authorized biography, she turned to Heilbrun. The result was The Education of a Woman: The Life of Gloria Steinem (1995). Steinem gave Heilbrun full cooperation on the manuscript but did not have the final say. The resulting work, according to Washington Post Book World contributor Grace Lichtenstein, ‘‘is an intriguing and unconventional portrait of this intriguing, unconventional and, above all, beloved leader. That the Steinem who emerges from this biography remains an admirable enigma in no way diminishes the book’s importance.’’ Other reviewers found the results of Heilbrun’s treatment of Steinem more uneven. Wini Breines in the Women’s Review of Books found ‘‘the story Heilbrun tells is strangely transparent, an
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unmessy narrative of Steinem’s admirable life with little attention to depth, complications, or contradictions.’’ Florence King, writing in the National Review, was blunt: ‘‘The only enjoyable parts of this book are the quoted passages by other writers. Miss [sic] Heilbrun is maddening.’’ Several reviewers felt a biography on Steinem was premature. The intellectual integrity Heilbrun has developed over a scholarly career serves her well when the subject is herself. In The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty (1997), she reflects on life after sixty. Her essays examine the unexpected pleasures of e-mail, her love for her dogs, a declaration of freedom from dresses and heels, the perils of finally getting a longed-for ‘‘room of one’s own,’’ her relationship with poet May Sarton, appreciation for the wisdom of the young, and the company of men. Rebecca Pepper Sinkler in the New York Times Book Review found that ‘‘one of the many honesties here is that Heilbrun makes the hard parts look hard.’’ Suitably reflective, this collection bears the clarity, humor, and deeply held feminist convictions that mark Heilbrun’s earlier works. As Amanda Cross, Heilbrun continues to allow Kate Fansler to stretch and grow. Fansler’s most recent challenge involved the kidnapping of her husband in The Puzzled Heart (1998). This was preceded by An Imperfect Spy (1995) and The Collected Stories of Amanda Cross (1997). Heilbrun’s major contribution is as scholar and feminist, overthrowing some of the sacred theories of an earlier generation and insisting on the influence of cultural bias in evaluations of literature. She has been criticized for her derogatory references to Freud and for the broadness of the field she covers. An articulate and original critic, Heilbrun brings a fresh perspective to literature. An encouraging teacher and generous colleague, she offers inspiration to women struggling to express their ideas in the academic world. OTHER WORKS: Christopher Isherwood (1970). Poetic Justice (1970). The Theban Mysteries (1972). The Question of Max (1977). Reinventing Womanhood (1979). Sweet Death, Kind Death (1984). A Trap for Fools (1989). Women’s Lives: The View from the Threshold (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Kress, S., Carolyn G. Heilbrun: Feminist in a Tenured Position (1997). Reddy, M., Sisters in Crime (1988). Reference works: CA (1974). CANR (1990, 1997). CLC (1983). Detecting Women (1994). Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (1995). FC (1990). Feminist Writers (1996). Great Women Mystery Writers (1994). St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (1996). Other references: Chronicle of Higher Education (11 Nov. 1992). Clues: American Journal of Detection (Fall/Winter 1982). Designs of Darkness (1983). LJ (15 Mar. 1997). National Review (29 Jan. 1996). NYTBR (6 Apr. 1997). NYTM (15 Nov. 1992). WRB (Dec. 1986, Dec. 1995). —IRENE DASH, UPDATED BY MARY GRIMLEY MASON AND CELESTE DEROCHE
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HEJINIAN, Lyn Born 17 May 1941, Alameda, California Daughter of Chaffee Hall Jr. and Carolyn Erskine Andrews; married John P. Hejinian, 1961 (divorced); Lawrence M. Ochs, 1977; children: Paull, Anna Lyn Hejinian is a contemporary poet and translator and a member of the ‘‘language writing’’ movement. As the founder and longtime editor of Tuumba Press and editor of Poetics Journal, she has also been an influential publisher of poetry, especially the early work of the language writers. Hejinian graduated from Harvard University with a B.A. in 1963. She began to write poetry seriously in the early 1970s, starting with the self-publication of a gRReat adventure (1972), a mixed-media creation of which Hejinian destroyed most copies. In the late 1970s, she became part of a group of San Francisco poets and writers among whom language writing began to evolve. Much of their poetry was published in journals such as This, Tottel, Ou, and Miam, as well as presses such as Berkeley-based Tuumba, which was founded by Hejinian in 1976. She remained editor until 1984, releasing a total of 50 books. As is typical of language writing, Hejinian’s work requires ‘‘resistant reading’’—as it is disruptive, demanding participation by the reader and rejecting the authority of the writer. It is deliberately unpredictable and seemingly out of control, and avoids poetic conventions. The primary technique used by Hejinian and other language writers to create disruptions in their poetry is the ‘‘new sentence,’’ a type of prose poem containing sentences without definite transitions to connect them. It moves from subject to subject and is open to interpretation by individual readers. Hejinian’s essay ‘‘The Rejection of Closure’’ (1985) develops her theory of an ‘‘open text,’’ which helps explain and define her previous and later work. Writing Is an Aid to Memory (1978) is Hejinian’s first book-length collection, composed of 42 sections of five- to eight-word phrases spread out over the page. Its eclectic content includes scientific references, bits of memory, and details of everyday life. The narrative voice that connects the sections focuses the reader on how the poem is constructed. One of the book’s themes is restlessness, a major concern throughout Hejinian’s work, especially as it relates to the mass media images that inundate the contemporary world. Hejinian’s poem ‘‘Gesualdo’’ (1978) reflects the autobiographical and biographical themes that are central to much of her work. It is an annotated prose poem that incorporates aspects of the life of the 16th- and 17th-century composer Don Carlo Gesualdo. As is typical in Hejinian’s poetry, the biographical details form the context for exploring sexual and literary passion. My Life (two versions, 1980 and 1987) is one of Hejinian’s best-known and most-studied works. The first edition was written in 1978 when Hejinian was thirty-seven and contained 37 sections with 37 sentences each. The revised edition, written when she was forty-five, integrated eight additional sentences into each section
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and featured eight new sections. Each section begins with a phrase or sentence that is repeated in the same or a slightly revised form later in the book. The work is autobiographical yet multiplicitous and ever changing, forcing the reader to use his or her powers of interpretation. A Library Journal reviewer wrote of My Life: ‘‘A language poet, [Hejinian] captures experience in discrete, brilliant bits of imagery and sound. The result is an intriguing journey that both illuminates and perplexes, teases and challenges, as it reveals an innovative artist at work.’’ In 1983 Hejinian traveled to Leningrad and Moscow, learned Russian, and began friendships with Russian poets who influenced her subsequent work. Leningrad (1991) is the result of one of her trips to Russia and is a collaborative effort, typical of language writing. In alternating voices, the poets describe their travels and add political and cultural commentary. Two of her next works, Oxota (1991) and The Cell (1992), are often considered, along with Leningrad, as a trilogy. Some stories appear in all three in different forms. Oxota is somewhat in the form of a novel, although it, like The Cell, uses the device of the new sentence. It also contains autobiographical elements, in some ways extending the poetry of My Life. The Cell is a book-length collection of poems containing five-word lines. Like much of Hejinian’s work, it combines observations of everyday life with global and political concerns and contains sexual undercurrents. Publishers Weekly wrote of The Cell: ‘‘The poet breaks up syntax until form becomes content, yet she works from a self-referential base, laying bare a life so disjointed that readers are left to piece it together. . . . Clearly, this is an American answer to the French écriture féminine, or body as text. As such, it is successful and provocative.’’ The Cold of Poetry (1994) is a collection of shorter poems that had gone out of print. It follows many of the tenets of language poetry and includes social and cultural concerns. The work contains ten long poems written over two decades, but holds together as if meant as a whole. Publishers Weekly noted: ‘‘Hejinian’s poems are philosophical reveries, matter-of-fact in their occasions and wryly meditative in tone. Reading her, we watch thoughts in formation as she rummages around in her mind to see what odds and ends she can turn up.’’ The book, PW continued, reflects ‘‘Hejinian’s characteristic interest in the consistency and inconsistency of memory and self, and the role that writing plays in preserving and transforming these. . . . Hejinian is certainly an intellectual and self-conscious poet, but her work is also appealingly alert to daily life in these penetrating, instructive and thoroughly enjoyable poems.’’ OTHER WORKS: A Thought is the Bride of What Thinking (1976). A Mask of Motion (1977). The Guard (1984). Redo (1984). Individuals (with K. Robinson, 1988). The Hunt (1991). Jour de Chasse (translated by P. Alferi, 1992). Two Stein Talks (1996). Wicker (with J. Collom, (1996). The Little Book of a Thousand Eyes (1996). Guide, Grammar, Watch, and the Thirty Nights (in Australia, 1996). A Book from a Border Comedy (1997). A Traveler and the Hill and the Hill (collaboration with E. Clark,
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1998). Sight (with L. Scalapino, 1999). A Border Comedy (1999). The Language of Inquiry (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1997). DLB (1996). Other references: LJ (15 Dec. 1980, Dec. 1987). PW (10 May 1991, 7 Dec. 1992, 28 Mar. 1994, 29 Aug. 1994, 29 Mar. 1999). —KAREN RAUGUST
HELLMAN, Lillian Born 20 June 1905, New Orleans, Louisiana; died 30 June 1984, Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts Daughter of Max B. and Julia Newhouse Hellman; married Arthur Kober, 1925 (divorced), lived with Dashiell Hammett Lillian Hellman, an only child, was both repelled and fascinated by the vital obsession with money of her mother’s family, who had become wealthy through shrewd and often unscrupulous business dealings; she had warmer feelings for her father’s family, particularly his two sisters. Hellman spent her childhood in New York City and New Orleans. After two years at New York University from 1922 to 1924 and a brief stint at Columbia University, she accepted a position as manuscript reader for Horace Liveright, Inc., a New York publisher. She worked as a theatrical playreader in New York from 1927 to 1930 and a scenario reader for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from 1930 to 1931 before returning to New York in 1932. Hellman met her future husband, press agent Arthur Kober, and became acquainted with the literary world while working in New York. Kober and Hellman also lived in Paris and Germany for several months, and Hellman later made extensive visits to Spain and the Soviet Union. Hellman’s observations of the political situation in Europe, coupled with her own Jewish faith, contributed to the dislike of fascism and anti-Semitism apparent in her later political works. After she and Kober got an amicable divorce, Hellman lived with Dashiell Hammett, the detective-fiction writer. An honest and severe critic, he read all Hellman’s work in progress and kept after her to rewrite it until it met his exacting standards. With the profits from her early plays, Hellman bought a large working farm in New York, where she spent her happiest years with Hammett. After both she and Hammett were investigated in the 1950s by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and were blacklisted, they lost their major sources of income and had to sell their farm. Hammett guided her to the source for her first produced play, The Children’s Hour (1934), an account of an actual libel suit in 19th-century Scotland. It tells the story of Karen Wright and Martha Dobie, owners of a successful girls’ school, who are ruined by a charge of lesbianism. Extremely successful, partly because of its then shocking theme, the play ran for 691 performances on Broadway. The Children’s Hour is a skillfully wrought melodrama deepened by psychological penetration and moral significance.
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The Children’s Hour was one of a number of Hellman’s plays made into highly successful films in the 1930s and 1940s. She received Academy Award nominations for her adaptation of The Little Foxes in 1941 and her original screenplay The North Star in 1943. Her other filmed plays include The Searching Wind, filmed in 1946. Among Hellman’s theatrical awards are the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1941 and 1960, a Gold Medal from the Academy of Arts and Letters in 1964 for Distinguished Achievement in the Theatre, and election to the Theatre Hall of Fame in 1973. The Little Foxes (1939) is a gripping drama about the Hubbards of Alabama, who display the greed and driving egotism Hellman saw in her mother’s family. Ben and Oscar Hubbard and their sister, Regina Giddens, form a partnership with a Northern industrialist to set up a profitable cotton factory in their town, but they cannot secure a controlling interest without obtaining money from Regina’s husband, Horace, which he refuses to advance because he is disgusted by the Hubbards’ ruthless greed. Throughout the play, mastery shifts between the brothers and their sister, depending upon who seems more likely to get control of Horace’s money. In the end, Regina gains control by deliberately provoking him into a fatal heart attack. The Little Foxes is even better constructed than The Children’s Hour. Throughout the play, every speech advances the action; the climactic scene in which Regina drives Horace into heart failure is both psychologically prepared for and superbly effective theatrically. Because the Hubbards are intended to be human beings as well as monsters of selfishness, Hellman decided to ‘‘look into their family background and find out what it was that made them the nasty people they were.’’ In Another Part of the Forest (1947), she went back 20 years to show Ben, Oscar, and Regina as young people dominated by their father, Marcus. Hellman found humor as well as evil in people like the Hubbards, and made this more obvious in her second play about them. In Watch on the Rhine (1941), Hellman turned to the current political situation in order to awaken Americans to the growing menace of fascism. The play is set in 1940, just before this country entered World War II. Its title, from a German marching song, suggests Nazism must be watched and fought not only in Europe but in the United States. Accordingly, Hellman brings the antifascist struggle into an upper-class American home. Her moral point overshadows artistic interest and realism, but her rather simplistic message was eagerly welcomed by a nation on the brink of war. Like Watch on the Rhine, The Searching Wind (1944) focused on the innocence of Americans and their inability to comprehend the growing power of fascism and anti-Semitism in the 1930s. The Autumn Garden (1951) is unlike Hellman’s earlier plays in emphasizing character over plot. In a handsome but shabby Southern resort hotel, she gathers 10 people who lack purpose, joy, and love. Hellman’s characterization here shows a notable advance in subtlety, as she views her people with more sympathy and less simple judgement. General Griggs, who wants a divorce from the wife with whom he is desperately bored, is a touching portrait of a decent, intelligent man trapped with a woman who cannot grow. The artist Nick Denery is no simple villain, despite
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his irresponsibility to others. He does not mean to hurt people; he just cannot resist the temptation to win their affection by charming compliments and well-intentioned but ill-considered interference. Since his own life is empty—his wife despises him, and he has not finished a portrait for 12 years—he has to fill it by establishing intimacy with others, yet he is too shallow and selfish for emotional commitment. Despite inadequate plotting, Hellman has powerfully developed her theme of people stalemated in middle age. Perhaps the most obvious characteristic of Hellman’s writing is her first-rate craftsmanship: the neat plotting of the Hubbard plays, where thrilling melodramatic climaxes are meticulously prepared for, as hints are dropped in the beginning, every one to be picked up by the end; the relief from this suspenseful melodrama through pathos or comedy; the sharp characterization and vividly authentic speeches, which at the same time economically move the plot along. In her last two original plays—The Autumn Garden and Toys in the Attic (1960), which also present middle-aged people who come to recognize the bleakness of their lives but find they cannot change them—Hellman’s artistry appears more in character development. Instead of presenting lively sketches of villainy or pathos, she probes the motivation of a shallow charmer like Nick Denery. Instead of presenting straightforward relationships of love or domination, she examines ambivalent ones of mutual dependency. She sacrifices neatness to subtlety: dialogue no longer proceeds so briskly, but it expresses more precisely the feelings between people. She relaxes her tight plotting to give her characters more room to develop, though she unfortunately retains some jarring melodramatic elements. Hellman is surely right in considering The Autumn Garden her finest play. Well made and popular as her plays have been, they are all redeemed from commercialism by their strong moral commitment. Hellman constantly makes the point, equally applicable to private and public affairs, that it is immoral to remain passive when evil is being done. She believes that a clear moral message ‘‘is only a mistake when it fails to achieve its purpose, and I would rather make the attempt, and fail, than fail to make the attempt.’’ Only in a few cases, such as the anticlimactic discussion after Martha’s death in The Children’s Hour and the antifascist plays, does the moral message become obtrusive. Generally, it is organically part of her artistic structure and characterization. Hellman’s works consistently demonstrated responsibility, courage, and integrity. Hellman turned from writing plays to teaching at various New England and New York universities in the 1960s. She taught and conducted seminars in literature and writing at Yale University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Hunter College, and the City University of New York. In the 1970s, Hellman gained considerable fame through the publication of her memoirs, the first of which was released in 1969 as An Unfinished Woman, and won a National Book Award. This vivid autobiography runs from her childhood in New Orleans to the death of Hammett in 1961. The whole book is characterized by painstaking honesty, as Hellman analyzes her rebellions and conflicts, her ambivalent attitudes toward money and the theater,
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and the tensions of her relationship with Hammett. Often she renders her experience in dramatic dialogues. The second volume of her memoirs, Pentimento (1973) is Hellman’s reconsideration of certain themes in her life not developed in An Unfinished Woman. It consists mostly of portraits, of which the most memorable is that of her beloved girlhood friend, ‘‘Julia,’’ a passionate anti-Nazi who involved Hellman in the mission (especially perilous for a Jew) of carrying $50,000 into Berlin to ransom political prisoners. Hellman’s innocence, played against the elaborate subterfuges undertaken to safeguard her mission, makes for taut suspense. Scoundrel Time (1976) describes Hellman’s experience of political persecution in the 1950s. These three memoirs were republished together as Three in 1979 with new commentary by Hellman. Her last volume of memoirs, Maybe: A Story, was published in 1980.
1926-1978 (1980). Rollyson, C., Lillian Hellman, Her Legend and Her Legacy (1988). Shannon, D. D., ‘‘Mothers and Daughters: The Quest for Psychological Wholeness in the Plays of Lillian Hellman and Marsha Norman’’ (thesis, 1994). Triesch, M., The Lillian Hellman Collection at the University of Texas (1968). Wright, W., Lillian Hellman: The Image, The Woman (1986). Reference works: American National Biography (1999). Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature (1991). CANR (1991). CB (May 1941, June 1960). Encyclopedia of World Biography (1998). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCA (1942). Other references: Contact (1959). Modern Drama (1960). Paris Review (1965, Spring 1981). Lillian Hellman: The Great Playwright Candidly Reflects on a Long, Rich Life (recording, 1977).
With the publication of Three and Maybe came controversy, when Hellman was called a liar by Mary McCarthy in a televised interview (Hellman later sued her), while Martha Gellhorn asserted that Hellman had fictionalized parts of An Unfinished Woman. In addition, another woman, psychoanalyst Muriel Gariner, who wrote Code Name Mary (1983), said Hellman appropriated her past as the basis of her ‘‘Julia’’ recollections in Penitmento. None of the charges or allegations were ever settled and Hellman died before her libel suit against McCarthy went to court. A film based on the relationship of Hellman and Hammett was produced by the Arts & Entertainment (A & E) network in 1999, appropriately titled Dash and Lil.
—KATHARINE M. ROGERS, UPDATED BY LEAH J. SPARKS AND NELSON RHODES
OTHER WORKS: Dear Queen (with L. Kronenberger, unpublished and unproduced play, 1931). Days to Come (1936). The North Star: A Motion Picture About Some Russian People (1943). Candide by Voltaire (dramatization by Hellman, with music by L. Bernstein and lyrics by R. Wilbur, J. LaTouche, and D. Parker, 1957). Four Plays (1942). Six Plays (1960). Collected Plays (1972). Eating Together: Recollections and Recipes (with P. S. Feibleman, 1984). The Lillian Hellman Collection is housed in the Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bryer, J. R., ed., Conversations with Lillian Hellman (1986). Dick, B. F., Hellman in Hollywood (1982). Estrin, M., Lillian Hellman: Plays, Films, Memoirs—A Reference Guide (1980). Estrin, M. W., ed., Critical Essays on Lillian Hellman (1989). Falk, D. V., Lillian Hellman (1978). Feibleman, P., Lilly (1988). Feibleman, P., Cakewalk (1993). Foster, K., ‘‘Detangling the Web: Mother-Daughter Relationships in the Plays of Marsha Norman, Lillian Hellman, Tina Howe, and Ntozake Shange’’ (thesis, 1994). Heilman, R. B., The Iceman, the Arsonist, and the Troubled Agent (1973). Heilman, R. B., Tragedy and Melodrama: Versions of Experience (1968). Holmin, L. R., The Dramatic Works of Lillian Hellman (1973). Lederer, K. Lillian Hellman (1979). Luce, W., Lillian (1986). Moody, R., Lillian Hellman: Playwright (1972). Nelson, R., Sensibility and Sense (1989). Riordan, M. M., Lillian Hellman: A Bibliography:
HENDERSON, Zenna Born 1 November 1917, Tucson, Arizona; died 11 May 1983 Daughter of Louis R. and Emily Rowley Charlson; married 1947 Zenna Henderson was born and educated in Arizona and has spent much of her life there. After being educated at Arizona State University (B.A. 1940, M.A. 1954), Henderson taught in schools throughout Arizona, including Eloy, where she lived until her death. She also taught at the Seaside, a tuberculosis sanitorium for children in Waterford, Connecticut. In the early 1950s, Henderson began her career as a writer by publishing her short stories. Her short fiction has appeared in periodicals such as the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Galaxy, and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. In her early collections of short stories, The Anything Box (1965) and Holding Wonder (1971), typical characters are the schoolteacher (often the narrator), the child with extraordinary gifts, the youngster who observes supernatural happenings and accepts them as natural, and persons who encounter the first alien arrivals to Earth. Pervasive themes include the notion of a universal quasi-Christian morality throughout time and space, the importance of children as a new generation of Homo superior, and the tentativeness of the world’s survival. Typical of these short stories is ‘‘The Anything Box,’’ in which the narrator, an elementary schoolteacher, notices that Suelynn, one of her students, is always looking at something concealed in her hands. It is the ‘‘anything box’’ in which one can see anything that is the most attractive or the most important to the person looking. The teacher recognizes ‘‘out of (Sue-lynn’s) deep need she had found—or created it’’ and no rational or scientific explanation is offered. It is Sue-lynn’s only source of solace after her father is convicted of robbery, because in the box she can see a happier world of the past. The teacher takes away the box because
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the child tries to escape into it, but after looking into it herself, the teacher realizes the power of the box will destroy her because she was not meant to have it. Later, she sees the child changed by a ‘‘maturity born of. . .sorrow and loneliness,’’ and she returns Suelynn’s property. The two become friends, for they recognize each other’s strengths and failings. Although all of her work has didactic overtones, some of it, like ‘‘The Closest School,’’ is decidedly satirical. The characters are faced with an extraterrestrial version of school integration. Because the law states children can attend the closest school regardless of their color, a school board is forced to deal with the new family in town, the Powdangs, who are purple and fuzzy, and with their daughter Vannie, who is a youngster by their terms although she was born on 12 October 1360. Henderson is most widely known for her series of stories about the People, who are humanoid aliens forced from their home because of a natural disaster and who have settled in various isolated communities on Earth. The stories are collected in Pilgrimage: The Book of the People (1961) and The People: No Different Flesh (1967). Although they are a gentle people, their gifts and talents—the ability to levitate, mind-read, heal, and experience others’ sensations empathetically—mark them as different, and their Earth history is one of persecution and destruction. They are forced to live in hiding, holding back the gifts they could use for all humanity, because they know from bitter experience that those without the gifts would destroy them. Henderson’s creation of people who are more than human, yet who are moral, kind, and thoughtful, and who might offer solutions to the world’s problems of illness and distress if they were allowed, makes a striking commentary on real life. Henderson is, moreover, a good storyteller, for by focusing on the personal and family lives of her aliens, she brings to science fiction a dimension it often lacks. Science fiction—especially in the 1950s, when Henderson began writing—took adventure as its primary subject matter. Stories dealt with monstrous aliens, space warfare, and adolescent male heroes; women were absent. Also missing were the details of everyday life—alien or not—that make all fiction moving and significant. Henderson’s contribution to science fiction is her integration of philosophy and the more mature concerns of the family into the adventure narrative. Henderson died in May of 1983, and a her People books were collected into one volume in 1991, aptly titled The People Collection. To her loyal fans from decades past as well as more recent admirers, Henderson’s works were gathered into a comprehensive new book, Ingathering: The Complete Stories of Zenna Henderson, released in 1995. Throughout the decade, Henderson’s stories continued to receive new acclaim and interest, with many appearing in anthologies and new books, including ‘‘As Simple As That’’ in the Norton Book of Science Fiction: North American Science Fiction, 1960-1990 (1993), ‘‘Subcommittee’’ in New Eves: Science Fiction About the Extraordinary Women of Today and Tomorrow (1994), ‘‘Through a Glass-Darkly’’ in Masters of Fantasy (1992, reprinted 1994), ‘‘Walking Aunt Daid’’ in Angels of Darkness: Tales of Troubled and Troubling
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Women (1995), and ‘‘The Anything Box’’ in A Magic Lover’s Treasury of the Fantastic (1998). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Calkins, E., and B. McGhan, Teaching Tomorrow: A Handbook of Science Fiction for Teachers (1972). Sargent, P., Women of Wonder (1974). Sheets, A. J. and L. Trudeau, eds., Short Story Criticism: Excerpts from Criticism of the Works of Short Fiction Writers (1998). Reference works: CA (1967). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the Untied States (1995). St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers (1996). —BILLIE J. WAHLSTROM, UPDATED BY NELSON RHODES
HENISSART, Martha See LATHEN, Emma
HENLEY, Beth Born Elizabeth Becker Henley, 8 May 1952, Jackson, Mississippi Daughter of Charles B. and Lydy B. Caldwell Henley The eldest of three daughters of an attorney and an actress, Henley started out as an actress before beginning to write plays during a dry spell in her acting career. She is one of the first women to have been acknowledged as a playwright on the national level since Lillian Hellman and Lorraine Hansberry. Henley’s plays, often described as Southern gothic or grotesque, are set in the Mississippi in which she was raised; they portray women and men and their complex, tragicomic relationships both within a family and between the family and the outside society that frequently disapproves of it. Her female characters are at their indecorous best when they gleefully or grimly sabotage societal expectations, and when they manage not to harm themselves too much. As a Southern writer whose characters are frequently grotesque and obsessive, Henley has been frequently compared with Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, and William Faulkner. Several sources note Henley first read the work of O’Connor only after the resemblances between their work had been commented upon by reviewers. Henley achieved early success with Crimes of the Heart (produced 1979, published 1981), which won the Pulitzer Prize and was later made into a movie. Crimes introduces several themes and characters that appear in Henley’s later work: the Magrath sisters, although they argue among themselves, bond together to defend themselves fiercely against all comers. Their social-climbing cousin, Chick, is mortified by Lenny, Meg, and Babe’s family skeletons (including suicides, false pretenses, and illicit sexuality); the sisters themselves are busy trying to recoup lost chances. Crimes has been compared to plays of Chekhov for
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its realism, its mixture of tragedy and comedy, and its portrayal of the force of the family against outsiders. That Henley began her career as an actress may in part account for the liveliness of her characters and dialogue and for the ensemble quality of many of her plays. Her characters onstage are obsessive, identified by their quirkiness. We see them at awkward or unpleasant moments (at a wake, having lost a beauty contest), and we see them inflicting pain on themselves senselessly, while imparting to their actions a kind of logic (such as in Debutante Ball [1985, 1988] when Teddy stabs her face and legs repeatedly with any sharp object at hand). Henley’s characters also tell stories of revelatory moments or formative experiences. In The Miss Firecracker Contest (1980, 1985), for example, Popeye tells the story of her nickname, which is also the story of her partial blindness and the beginning of her ability to hear voices in her eyes. Sometimes the grotesquerie or absurdity seems unfounded or unexplored, or to be only a hint at an unstated truth beneath the surface, as when Babe in Crimes explains she shot her husband ‘‘because I didn’t like his looks.’’ Efforts by characters to change society’s disapproval of them and their attempts at self-redemption recur in several of Henley’s subsequent plays. Carnelle in Miss Firecracker tries to restore her bad reputation with the locals by winning a beauty pageant. Debutante Ball focuses on a woman who is determined to distract the town from her reputation as a murderess by providing her awkward misfit daughter, Teddy, with the ideal debut night. The Wake of Jamey Foster (1983, 1985) is another ensemble piece in which each character is looking for love and disappointed at his or her inability to live up to others’ expectations. Henley’s later plays, The Lucky Spot (1986, 1987) and Abundance (1990, 1991), further her interest in characters’ lost loves and broken dreams while moving her focus to settings beyond Mississippi and the New South, and to characters in circumstances not solely brought about by family commitments. Several of Henley’s plays have been turned into movies, and she is the author of both unproduced and produced screenplays, notably as coscreenwriter with David Byrne and Stephen Tobolowsky of True Stories (Warner Brothers, 1986) and 1988’s Nobody’s Fool. Signature, written in 1990 but not produced until 1995, involves four characters who go into business with each other but end up at each other’s throats. The main character finally decides he can save his life by changing his signature. Henley wrote the play after having her handwriting analyzed while she was in the midst of a depressive state. The graphologist recognized this in her handwriting, which led her to develop the character. Henley appears to have changed perspectives to some degree in Impossible Marriage (1999). In contrast to the emotional disorder and confusion that marked the characters in her work of the 1980s, those in this tale of modern marriage have ‘‘grown up.’’ One critic termed the shift in Henley’s style to be in the realm of ‘‘Wildean satire.’’ Impossible Marriage revolves around two sisters, the youngest of whom (Pandora) is fast approaching her wedding day. The
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older sister, Flora, who is unhappy with her own situation— pregnant and feeling smothered by her narcissistic husband— plots to stop the marriage and is encouraged to do so by the girls’ mother. Pandora is marrying an older man, whose son shows up unannounced, also wishing to prevent the wedding in order to save his mother, who has threatened to throw herself from a window if the nuptials take place. The play courses with Henley’s slightly hysterical characters but with an underlying philosophical bent. Henley comments, ‘‘All these women are cursed with the ability to see the truth, if not live the truth.’’ Henley’s projects at the turn of the century have included collaborating with the play’s director on the casting of Impossible Marriage for its New York off-Broadway production and completing a screenplay about Canadian bank robbers. OTHER WORKS: Am I Blue? (1982). Beth Henley: Four Plays (1992). Control Freaks (1992). Monologues for Women (1992). The Revelers (1994). The L Play (1995). Collected Works, Volume I (1999). Collected Works, Volume II (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Betsko, K., and R. Koenig, Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights (1987). Jones, J. G., ed., Mississippi Writers Talking (1982). Schlueter, J., ed., Modern American Drama: The Female Canon (1990). Smith, L., Women Who Write: From the Past and Present to the Future (1989). Reference works: CANR (1991). CLC (1983). Contemporary Dramatists (1988). DLBY (1986). Notable Women in the American Theatre (1989). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: American Theatre (Nov. 1998). Back Stage (24 Mar. 1995). Conference of College Teachers of English Studies (Sept. 1989). Southern Quarterly (Summer 1984; Spring 1987). Studies in American Drama (1988; 1989). Variety (19 Oct. 1998). Women and Performance: American Journal of Feminist Theory (1986). —KATHRYN MURPHY ANDERSON, UPDATED BY REBECCA C. CONDIT
HENRY, Alice Born 21 March 1857, Richmond, Australia; died 14 February 1943, Melbourne, Australia Also wrote under: Alice Henry Daughter of Charles F. and Margaret Walker Henry Alice Henry’s Memoirs of Alice Henry (1944), in which she describes her childhood in the Beaconsfield District at the edge of the Australian bush, reveals her close and loving relationship with the natural world around her. While she was still very young, her family moved to Melbourne, where she was educated both in private schools and at home, and formally exposed to the
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Swedenborgian religion. From her earliest life, Henry was expected to earn her own living; she also received, during her growing years, instruction in physical training, a discipline new to women. Henry first supported herself by teaching, but soon began to write for the daily Melbourne Argus and for its weekly edition, the Australian. Her reading of Thomas Hare’s Representative Government convinced her of the importance of active democratic involvement. When both parents died, Henry sailed for England as Melbourne’s representative to a charity organization conference. In Britain, she interested herself deeply in women’s issues and became close friends with feminist leaders Christobel Pankhurst and Annie Kennedy. Unable to support herself in England while working for the women’s cause and the poor, in 1906 Henry left for the United States. She soon embarked on speaking tours where she discussed the social conditions in Australia. She frequently joined such well-known figures as Edwin Markham, Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Stanton Blatch, Julia Ward Howe, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson on the lecture platform. Jane Addams invited her to live at Hull House and work for the municipal vote; during her residence there, Henry also supported the many programs devoted to bringing the arts to working-class women. In Chicago, Henry took over the position of office secretary of the National Women’s Trade Union League and was soon in charge of the league’s column on women’s affairs in the Union Labor Advocate. Between 1911 and1915, she edited Life and Labor, the league’s journal, which she expanded to include information on suffrage and homemaking, as well as short stories and poetry. The Trade Union Woman (1915), a pioneering work, was conceived by Henry as a handbook to inform the public about the economic and biological vulnerabilities of the American working woman. She viewed industrial organization and suffrage as the two major issues facing the women of her day. She believed trade unionism to be the most viable means of strengthening working women’s relationships with their brothers in the labor movement. Tracing the history of labor organizing in this country from the early 19th century, the volume includes discussions of such topics as immigrant women in industry, major strikes, conflicts facing working women when they marry, and vocational training. Women and the Labor Movement (1923) expands and updates the material in the earlier volume. After returning to Australia in 1933, she wrote the Memoirs of Alice Henry, and thereafter devoted herself to medical projects, the education of bush children, and the compilation of a bibliography on Australian women writers. Henry was a woman devoted totally to the social causes she espoused, her personal life being inseparable from her professional dedication. An idealist, she lived in the fervent belief that the peace following World War I would offer opportunities for both the labor movement and the women’s movement ‘‘to come into their own.’’ In her vision, and in the energies she invested in trying to realize her vision, lies her major contribution to the improvement of the lives of working women.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY: Boone, G., The Women’s Trade Union Leagues in Great Britain and the U.S.A. (1942). Reference works: Biographical Cyclopedia of American Women (1924). DAB. NAW (1971). Other references: Life and Labor Bulletin (Apr. 1943). —VIRGINIA R. TERRIS
HENRY, Marguerite Born 13 April 1902, Milwaukee, Wisconsin; died 26 November 1997, Rancho Santa Fe, California Daughter of Louis and Anna Kaurup Breithaupt; married Sidney C. Henry, circa 1924 Daughter of a printer, Marguerite Henry was set up as a kitchen-corner writer at age ten and published her first sketch the next year. She took a degree in journalism at Milwaukee State Teachers College. Her husband’s interest in animals may have encouraged Henry to develop, years later, her strongest genre: animal-centered books for children. At first, Henry worked as a technical writer and journalist, perfecting her straightforward prose style. This talent for clear prose, her ability to see dramatic conflict, and her indefatigable energy as a researcher served Henry well when she turned to writing for children. Henry read, interviewed, and traveled to gather material, which she then filed in boldly marked manila folders, giving her a flexible outline and easy access to information as she wrote her books. This efficient approach may explain how, between 1940 and 1946, Henry could produce not only 12 geography books, but also nine other books, including what Henry considers her first serious work, Justin Morgan Had a Horse (1945), one of many books that grew out of her notes for An Album of Horses (1951). This story of the first Morgan horse won the Junior Scholastic Gold Seal Award and the Award of the Friends of Literature and was made into a Walt Disney movie in 1972. It also brought Henry together with illustrator Wesley Dennis for a longtime collaboration producing ‘‘some of the most beautiful and worthwhile books ever published for children.’’ Henry has written well on many subjects—her works include biographies of Robert Fulton and Benjamin West, albums on birds and dogs, several dog stories, and one book on a talking fox named Cinnabar—but she has gained the greatest popularity and acclaim for her horse books. King of the Wind (1948), a fictional account of Godolphin Barb, the Arabian ancestor of Man-o-War, won the Newbery Medal. The book reads like romantic fantasy, but is based on copious research, a ‘‘whole horse van of letters.’’ The mute stableboy, Agba, in his devotion to Godolphin, is typical of Henry’s young protagonists. Born to Trot (1950) tells the true story of Gibson White, the boy who owned and trained Rosalind, the ‘‘Queen of Trotters.’’ One critic has noted this type of story succeeds because of the skill with which Henry spins ‘‘a narrative of triumph mixed with tragedy.’’ Another young real-life hero, Giorgio Terni, was the
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basis of Gaudenzia: Pride of the Palio (1960), which describes his surprising victory in the hair-raising horse race tearing through the streets of Siena once a year. The most famous horse in Henry’s books appeared in Misty of Chincoteaque (1947) and introduced readers to the legend and modern reality of the wild ponies herded once a year on Pony Penning Day on this Virginia island. Misty, who played herself in a 1961 movie, is the type of plucky, intelligent horse every child hopes to own, and young readers must envy Paul and Maureen Beebe, who actually shared the adventure of capturing and training Misty. Further events in the lives of these two and the equally well-portrayed Grandma and Grandpa Beebe are followed in Sea Star: Orphan of Chincoteaque (1949), which tells of the saving of an abandoned foal, and in Stormy, Misty’s Foal (1963), in which the flooding of Chincoteaque, Misty’s stay in the Beebes’ kitchen during the catastrophe, and her eventual successful foaling are vividly recounted. In these Chincoteaque books Henry is at her best, using keen observation, careful recording and selection, and enough imagination to make the true stories flow like fiction. Henry brought loving research to each of her many books. She showed her respect for children by maintaining high standards of journalism; and her young audience, who voted her many of the awards she held, repays this respect with its enthusiasm. Her books remain in print; they are in demand at libraries, perhaps because, as Rudyerd Boulton said of Henry: ‘‘The author has happily chosen to present factual information in a joyous way.’’ OTHER WORKS: Auno and Tauno: A Story of Finland (1940). Dilly Dally Sally (1940). Birds at Home (1942; revised 1972). Geraldine Belinda (1942). Their First Igloo on Baffin Island (1943). A Boy and a Dog (1944). Robert Fulton: Boy Craftsman (1945). Always Reddy (1949). Little or Nothing from Nottingham (1949). Portfolio of Horses (1952). Brighty of Grand Canyon (1953; film version, 1966). Wagging Tails: Album of Dogs (1955). Cinnabar: The One O’Clock Fox (1956). Black Gold (1957). Muley Ears, Nobody’s Dog (1959). All About Horses (1962). Portfolio of Horse Paintings (with W. Dennis, 1964). White Stallion of Lipizza (1964). Mustang: Wild Spirit of the West (1966). Dear Readers and Riders (1969). San Domingo: The Medicine Hat Stallion (1972). The Pictorial Life Story of Misty (1976). One Man’s Horse (1977). The Marguerite Henry Misty Treasury: Three Complete Novels in One Volume (1998). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Collins, D. R., Write a Book for Me: The Story of Marguerite Henry (1999). Reference works: Authors and Illustrators of Children’s Books: Writings on Their Lives and Works (1972). CA (1976). CB (1947). Junior Book of Authors (1951). Newbery Medal Books, 1922-1955 (1955). Other references: Horn Book (Jan. 1950, Feb. 1954). Library Bulletin (Nov. 1947). Life (10 June 1955). NYTBR (22 Dec. 1957) PW (26 March 1949, obituary, 1997). —CELIA CATLETT ANDERSON
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HENTZ, Caroline (Lee) Whiting Born 1 June 1800, Lancaster, Massachusetts; died 11 February 1856, Marianna, Florida Daughter of John and Orpah Danforth Whiting; married Nicolas M. Hentz, 1824; children: five (one died as a child) Caroline Whiting Hentz was the eighth and youngest child of an old New England family directly descended from the Reverend Samuel Whiting, who settled in Massachusetts in 1636. Her father served as a colonel in the Revolutionary War. Two years after Hentz’s marriage to a French entomologist, her husband became chairman of modern languages and belles lettres at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. This move was the first of many the family made following his erratic teaching career. Hentz bore five children; the oldest son died when he was two years old. In addition to rearing the children, running the household, supervising boarding students, and helping her husband with teaching and insect collecting, Hentz wrote verse, drama, tales, and novels. Reputedly, she could write easily in the midst of household distractions. Her first novel, Lovell’s Folly (1833), was suppressed by her family as ‘‘too personal.’’ Some accounts say it was libelous. While in Kentucky, Hentz wrote a prize-winning play, DeLara; or, The Moorish Bride (1843). The five-act drama, set in a Spanish castle during the Moors’ conquest of Spain, was produced in Philadelphia and Boston. Of her poems written for special occasions, perhaps the most important one was composed for the visit of Andrew Jackson to Florence, Alabama, in 1836. Her husband read the poem for President Jackson. Although she began writing as a girl, Hentz did not become a well-known writer until the Philadelphia Saturday Courier serially published a domestic tale in 1844. It was later published in book form as Aunt Patty’s Scrap Bag (1846). When her husband became chronically ill in the late 1840s, Hentz, out of financial necessity, began the most prolific period of her writing at the age of fifty. Her novel Linda; or, The Young Pilot of the Belle Creole (1850) became a bestseller. Seven more domestic novels and six collections of stories were published in rapid succession. Her books remained popular after her death until the end of the century. Two novels, Eoline; or, Magnolia Vale (1852) and The Planter’s Northern Bride (1854), were reprinted in the 1970s. While living in Cincinnati, Hentz knew Harriet Beecher Stowe. Both women belonged to a literary group, the Semi-Colons. Although they might have shared cultural interests, the issue of slavery separated them. Hentz’s novel The Planter’s Northern Bride was written as an answer to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It is proslavery propaganda. In Marcus Warland (1852), probably composed before she had read Stowe’s work, Hentz made only a partial defense of slavery, but the later novel is a full-blown counterstatement to abolition. With other writers of antebellum novels, Hentz helped create and perpetuate an image of ideal plantation life. This fictional world of pious belles, gallant gentlemen, and happy slaves appeals so strongly to the popular mind that the myth persists.
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OTHER WORKS: Mob Cap (1848). Rena; or, The Snow Bird (1851). Helen and Arthur; or, Miss Thusa’s Spinning Wheel (1853). Wild Jack; or, The Stolen Child, and Other Stories (1853). The Victim of Excitement (1853). Robert Graham (1855). The Banished Son (1856). Courtship and Marriage (1856). Ernest Linwood (1856). The Lost Daughter (1857). Love After Marriage (1857).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ellison, R. C., Introduction to The Planter’s Northern Bride (1970). Papashvily, H. W., All the Happy Endings (1956). Williams, B. B., A Literary History of Alabama: The Nineteenth Century (1979). Reference works: AA. CAL. DAB. NAW (1971). NCAB. Ohio Authors and Their Books (1962). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: AL (1950). Alabama Review (1951). —LYNDA W. BROWN
HERBST, Josephine Born 5 March 1892, Sioux City, Iowa; died 28 January 1969, New York, New York Daughter of William B. and Mary Frey Herbst; married John Herrmann, 1925 (divorced, 1940) Josephine Herbst, a proletarian writer, is a major figure in the history of 20th-century literature and radicalism. Although less well known than her friends Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Anne Porter, and John Dos Passos, she is often regarded as their peer. Her most important work is a trilogy, a sweeping reconstruction of the life of an American family from the Civil War through the 1930s. Other works include four more novels, reports from the crisis areas of the 1930s, and numerous short stories and critical essays. Herbst grew up in Sioux City, Iowa, where her father sold farm implements. Neither of her parents had much formal education, but her mother, a strong influence in Herbst’s life, imparted a love of books to her four daughters, and the stories she told about her ancestors formed the beginning of Herbst’s trilogy. The family was always poor; consequently, Herbst’s college education was spread out over nine years and four different institutions, as she alternated periods of work with periods of study, eventually receiving her degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1919. After graduation, she moved to New York City and there became a part of the intellectual and political ferment of the 1920s. Maxwell Anderson, then a socialist journalist and poet, was her first serious lover; a pregnancy resulted, and at Anderson’s insistence, Herbst had an abortion. A few months later, her
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favorite sister died from an abortion. The pain from these two events was devastating for Herbst. Unable to resume her life in New York, she left her job as a reader for H. L. Mencken’s magazines and went to Europe to write. There she met and fell in love with John Herrmann, an expatriate writer, whom she later married. The farm they bought in Erwinna, Pennsylvania, continued to be Herbst’s home for the rest of her life. During the first 10 years at Erwinna, Herbst produced five novels. Herrmann, never as ambitious a writer as Herbst, began to write less and to increase his involvement in the Communist Party. Although Herbst never formally joined the Communist Party, her beliefs and activities were sympathetic to it. The trilogy Pity Is Not Enough (1933, reprinted 1998), The Executioner Waits (1934, 1985), and Rope of Gold (1939, 1984, 1986) tells the story of the Trexler and Wendel families and reveals the development of Herbst’s ideas. Walter Rideout pointed out that she views the families’ decline as a ‘‘tiny part of the dialectical process of world history,’’ and juxtaposes the deterioration of capitalism with the possibility of power for the proletariat. The political message is carried mainly in vignettes about farmers and workers, which give added breadth and force to the main story. Most of Herbst’s fiction is strongly autobiographical. The family of the trilogy is her own, thinly disguised. Two of the characters, Victoria and Jonathan Chance, closely resemble Herbst and Herrmann, and sometimes events in the author’s life were being written into the book almost as soon as they occurred. In Rope of Gold, Victoria and Jonathan are growing apart, as were Herbst and Herrmann, and the novel records the pain of their deteriorating relationship, which for Herbst and Herrmann resulted in divorce in 1940. During the 1930s, Herbst’s reports from crisis areas of the world were widely published. She talked with farm pickets in Iowa, reported on the sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan, went to Nazi Germany shortly after Hitler took power, was in Spain with the Loyalists in 1937, and visited Cuban radicals in their mountain hideout. Fired from a wartime job in Washington for political reasons, Herbst spent much of the 1940s and early 1950s at Erwinna, alone and suffering privately over the outcome of her marriage. The two novels published during this period were not given the attention of her previous books. Gradually, she renewed old friendships, and Erwinna became a gathering place for writers and intellectuals. A lesbian relationship with poet Jean Garrigue began during this period. From the mid-1950s until the time of her death, she was preoccupied with her memoirs, which were never completed because she could not arrive at a portrait of her times that was satisfying to her. Elinor Langer’s excellent biography is titled Josephine Herbst; The Story She Could Never Tell.
OTHER WORKS: Nothing Is Sacred (1928, 1977). Money for Love (1929, 1977). Satan’s Sergeants (1941). Somewhere the Tempest
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Fell (1947). New Green World (1954). The Starched Blue Sky of Spain: And Other Memoirs (1991, 1999). Josephine Herbst’s papers are housed in the Beinecke Library at Yale University, as is ‘‘A Bibliography and Checklist of Josephine Herbst,’’ prepared by Martha Elizabeth Pickering in 1968.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bevilacqua, W. F. Josephine Herbst (1977). Gourlie, J. M., The Evolution of Form in the Works of Josephine Herbst (dissertation, 1975). Cleppe, J., ‘‘Down Yesterday’s Road: The Radical Spirit and Revolutionary Novels of Josephine Herbst’’ (dissertation 1991). Cleppe, J., ‘‘Josephine Herbst’s Trilogy: A New Look’’ (thesis 1987). Davis, P. J., ‘‘Brokenwing’’ Ellen Glasgow, Josephine Herbst, and the Creation of Mourning (dissertation 1997). Kempthorne, D. Q., Josephine Herbst: A Critical Introduction (dissertation, 1973). Langer, E., Josephine Herbst: The Story She Could Never Tell (1984, 1994). Rasmussen, M. A., ‘‘Feminist Representation and Radical Ideology: The Writings of Josephine Herbst, 1917-1939’’ (dissertation 1991). Rideout, W., The Radical Novel in the United States (1966). Roberts, N. R., Three Radical Women Writers: Class and Gender in Meridel Le Sueur, Tillie Olsen, and Josephine Herbst (1996). Roehrig, E. L., Josephine Herbst and George Orwell: Two Lives, Two Political Journeys (1996). Wiedemann, B., Josephine Herbst’s Short Fiction: A Window to Her Life and Times (1998). Reference works: DAB (1988). DLB (1981). FC (1990). NAW (1980). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Great Plains Quarterly (Spring 1998). NYT (29 Jan. 1969). NYRB (27 Mar. 1969). —MARY E. FINGER
HERSCHBERGER, Ruth Born 30 January 1917, Philipse Manor, New York Also writes under: Josephine Langstaff Daughter of Clarence B. and Grace Eberhart Herschberger Daughter of two academic parents, Ruth Herschberg was educated at the University of Chicago and Black Mountain College, and later took courses at the University of Michigan and at the New School for Social Research and Union Theological Seminary, both in New York City. For years, she lived in New York and summered on Washington Island, Wisconsin. Herschberg’s career as a writer in both verse and prose has brought her considerable public attention. Her plays have been produced on radio and on stage. Her book of feminist essays, Adam’s Rib (1948), was published under the pseudonym Josephine Langstaff, first in England, then in Finland, Norway, and Sweden; and parts of it have been anthologized. Her poems have appeared
in over 30 national and literary magazines, including the feminist magazines Aphra and Feelings, and in more than a dozen anthologies. Her feminist lyrics for ‘‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’’ were sung on Walter Cronkite’s show in 1969 and at the 1970 Statue of Liberty sit-in. ‘‘A Sound in the Night,’’ first published in Harper’s Bazaar, is included in Best American Stories, 1949. Herschberg has received some well-known critical awards. Herschberg is a multifaceted author, who writes plays, poems, and feminist essays with equal vigor. She is not primarily an academic writer, does not depend heavily on learning, but neither is she a lazy or emotionally self-indulgent writer. She uses strong rather than restrained tones, but she is not flashy or superficial. In ‘‘A Day in Autumn,’’ she goads herself to be forthright, unsentimental, and energetic, an active combination of mind and body. She asks the Lord to dissatisfy her because merely to accept the goodness of bodily nature might anesthetize: ‘‘Dissatisfy me, Lord, / . . .Make me all muddy / . . .Make me unwieldy, / . . .What is to be done, how can we/ Simplify what is already / Simplified? Ah intellect, / . . .Get to work.’’ The body and its pleasures are but ‘‘slightly earned’’ and therefore not enough. Mind must discipline feeling and use it. Herschberg’s subjects are as varied as experience, especially female experience. Her overriding theme seems to be that the poet should celebrate all life’s contradictions by means of the full range of contradictory emotions available to her nature—except selfpity. The resulting tone of her writing is as various as her subject matter and often complex—tender and at the same time repulsed and horrified (‘‘A Sound in the Night’’); playful and macabre (‘‘A Dream Play’’); and angry yet somehow sympathetic (‘‘Is Rape a Myth?’’). Her most frequent tone is satiric, and she ejaculates rather than whispers. Herschberg’s diversity of genres makes one hesitate to give her only the label of ‘‘poet,’’ although two books of published poetry, several awards for poetry, and a number of verse plays have certainly earned her the title. Nevertheless, compared to poets who have concentrated solely on verse, her technical skills are somewhat underdeveloped. She seems to feel most comfortable with end-stopped iambic pentameter lines, often rhymed couplets, or four-line stanzas with alternate rhymes. In other words, though not unskilled, she has done nothing adventurous in prosody. Her diction is often ‘‘poetic’’—and not always for the sake of humor—and there are flat lines and awkward inversions. But at her best, when she writes epigrammatically, as in the sharply satiric sonnet ‘‘Americans All,’’ she fuses diction, rhythm, and metaphor into an intense and successful whole: ‘‘Zebras we, a plait of black and lighter, / Running through woodlands like the horse and ass, / With buff for background and jet stripes that pass / Over our sides in camouflage.’’ Though Herschberg will probably be most easily remembered as an energetic feminist, chiefly because of her book of feminist essays, Adam’s Rib, she should also be remembered as a poet whose voice is most often more eager than irate, and more hearty than shrill.
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OTHER WORKS: A Way of Happening (1948). Nature and Love Poems (1969). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1973). TCAS. Other references: Chicago Sun (28 March 1948). LJ (1 Jan. 1970), NYHTB (16 May 1948). NYT (9 May 1948, 1 Aug. 1948, 30 Nov. 1970). San Francisco Chronicle (13 June 1948). SR (25 Sept. 1948). —ALBERTA TURNER
HEWITT, Mary E(lizabeth) Moore Born 1808, Malden, Massachusetts; died death date unknown Wrote under: Mary Elizabeth Hewitt, Ione, Jane Daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Moore; married James L. Hewitt, circa 1827; Mr. Stebbins, n.d. Mary Elizabeth Moore Hewitt was born in a suburb of Boston. Her father, a farmer, died while she was quite young, and she and her mother moved closer to the city. In 1829 she and James L. Hewitt, a music publisher, moved to New York City, where Mary Elizabeth continued to live for most of her life. Known primarily as a poet, Hewitt published her first verses in Knickerbocker magazine under the pseudonyms Ione and Jane; most of her work appeared in magazines in the 1840s and 1850s. She became acquainted with many of the popular writers of her day. The Songs of Our Land, and Other Poems (1845), her first collection, was made up primarily of poems that had appeared in various publications; it was reissued, almost unchanged, as Poems: Sacred, Passionate, and Legendary (1853). Hewitt’s poetry has little to recommend it save perhaps an interesting variety in subject matter. In her collections, one finds fervently nationalistic poems as well as some translations from French poets and poems drawn from Greek and Norse legends. The poems deal with love and loss, with historical events, and with secular and religious themes. ‘‘The Songs of Our Land’’ is a long poem that echoes the mood of the nation in the mid-19th century. Taking her inspiration from the optimism and sense of achievement then existing in America, Hewitt’s theme is that the songs of her land, although not based on ancient traditions, are all one superior song, that of ‘‘Liberty.’’ Many verses on the American pioneer experience— such as ‘‘A Thought of the Pilgrims,’’ about the early experience on the ‘‘lonely Mayflower,’’ and ‘‘The Axe of the Settler’’— reflect the literary and political mood of Hewitt’s time. Titles such as ‘‘Love’s Pleading,’’ ‘‘Alone,’’ ‘‘A Wife’s Prayer,’’ and ‘‘The Lady to Her Glove’’ characterize Hewitt’s love poetry, which too often shows no originality or imagination. ‘‘I pine, my cherished one! for Thee! for Thee!’’—a line from ‘‘A Voice of the Heart’’—is typical of her sentimental verse. She is more successful when dealing with natural forces, such as the sea. A series of poems about mariners and the sea was praised by Poe. The ambitious ‘‘Myth,’’ one of her most interesting failures, is
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about fishermen ‘‘on the Ionian sea.’’ In ‘‘Myth’’ Hewitt attempts, through the use of a chorus, an invocation, and several alternating voices, to create the atmosphere of a Greek drama within a poem. Heroines of History (1856) is a series of prose sketches. In the preface, Hewitt says she wishes to present women ‘‘rendered illustrious by their heroism and their virtues.’’ The prose style of these tales is unremarkable, and the subjects seem to have been chosen because they had violent, unhappy lives; they include Semiramis, Zenobia, Beatrice Cenci, Anne Boleyn, Joan of Arc, and Charlotte Corday. Hewitt’s writing is characterized by her love of drama and her intense feeling, as evidenced most often by her use of the exclamation point and a short emphatic line. Praised for her ‘‘impassioned heart,’’ her ‘‘lyrical power,’’ and (by Poe) for her ‘‘poetic fervor,’’ Hewitt was valued more for her emotions than her poetry even in her day, and may today be appreciated primarily for the variety of her subject matter and a certain innocent intensity in some of her poems. OTHER WORKS: The Gem of the Western World (1850). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Poe, E. A., The Literati of New York (1860). Reference works: American Female Poets (1848). CAL. A Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors (1870). FPA. Woman’s Record (1853). —JULIA ROSENBERG
HEYWARD, Dorothy (Hartzell) Kuhns Born 6 June 1890, Wooster, Ohio; died 19 November 1961, New York, New York Wrote under: Dorothy Heyward, Dorothy Kuhns Daughter of Herman L. and Dora Hartzell Kuhns; married DuBose Heyward, 1923 Although best known for two plays written in collaboration with her husband, Dorothy Kuhns Heyward established herself as a dramatist and novelist in her own right. Her commitment to writing for the stage began shortly after her marriage, when Nancy Ann (1924), a prize-winning play she wrote for George Pierce Baker’s 47 Workshop, was produced on Broadway. Instructed to write about what she knew, Heyward filled the three-act comedy with ‘‘aunts, debuts, and theatrical waiting rooms.’’ Heyward attended the National Cathedral School in Washington, D.C., Columbia University, and Radcliffe College, where she took the famous Harvard playwriting course. On the strength of her writing for this class, she was invited to the MacDowell Colony for Artists in Petersboro, New Hampshire, during the summer of 1922. There she met her future husband, who was also spending his first summer at the colony. During the following
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year, Heyward toured as a chorus girl in a musical to gain firsthand experience in the theater. Similarities of taste, temperament, and appearance were frequently noted in Heyward and her husband by their acquaintances: both were tall, slender, fair, brown-eyed, and fragile-looking. DuBose Heyward was an insurance salesman who had published two volumes of poetry; Heyward persuaded him to become a full-time writer, and they went to live in a cabin in the Great Smokies. Drawing upon his youthful experience as a cotton checker among the Gullah-speaking blacks on the waterfront of his native Charleston, South Carolina, DuBose wrote his first novel, Porgy (1925). Heyward suggested a dramatization of Porgy, but DuBose was already working on his second novel, Angel (1926). Letting him think she was writing a mystery story, Heyward alone prepared a rough draft of the play, which he then helped to polish for production. For both of their collaborative dramatizations, Heyward supplied the technical knowledge of theater while her husband contributed his sense of local color and poetic language. Porgy, produced by the Theatre Guild, opened 10 October 1927 for a run of 217 performances; the following season, a revival ran for 137 performances. The folk-opera version, Porgy and Bess, was scored by George Gershwin and adapted by DuBose and Ira Gershwin in 1935. Mamba’s Daughters (1939), the Heywards’ dramatization of DuBose’s 1929 novel, was again set among the Gullah blacks of South Carolina. The play is melodramatic and awkwardly constructed. There are intervals of several years between some of the 10 short scenes. It was a popular success largely because of the use of Negro spirituals and the stirring performance of Ethel Waters as Hagar. Heyward was less fortunate in her collaborations with other dramatists. Jonica (1930), Cinderelative (1930), and South Pacific (1943) all reached Broadway, but were unfavorably reviewed. South Pacific, written with Howard Rigsby and with incidental music by Paul Bowles, is unrelated to the later Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. Heyward’s South Pacific maroons a black American seaman on a Japanese-held island, where an improbable encounter with native blacks helps him to appreciate the positive values of the American society that had exploited him. The play closed after five performances. In 1948 the Theatre Guild presented Set My People Free, a historical drama Heyward had written seven years earlier, based upon an aborted Charleston slave rebellion of the 1820s. The insurrection was led by a former slave named Denmark Vesey, but the focus of the play is on the dilemma of George Wilson, who is torn between loyalty to his race and devotion to his master. Despite encouraging reviews, the play had only 36 performances. Heyward’s two novels, like her plays, are uneven. The Pulitzer Prize Murders (1932), a haunted house mystery, is rambling and predictable. Three-a-Day (1930) is more engaging; this romance set in a theatrical milieu has a standard plot enlivened by the local color and jargon of the world of vaudeville in the 1920s. These two novels and Set My People Free, the last play she
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wrote alone, demonstrate the overambitiousness of her approach and the compassion for human situations she brought to her collaborative efforts. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Durham, F., Dubose Heyward, the Man Who Wrote Porgy (1954). Miller, J. Y., American Dramatic Literature (1961). Nadel, N., A Pictorial History of the Theatre Guild (1969). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: NYT (1 Apr. 1924, 30 Dec. 1943, 14 Nov. 1948, 20 Nov. 1961). —FELICIA HARDISON LONDRÉ
HEYWOOD, Martha Spence Born 8 March 1812, Dublin, Ireland; died 5 February 1873, Washington, Utah Wrote under: Martha Spence Married Joseph L. Heywood, 1851; children: two Martha Spence Heywood emigrated to the U.S. in 1834, supporting herself by sewing, making hats, and teaching. Keenly interested in religion, she traveled as an Advent preacher before joining the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in 1849. A year later, she made the overland journey to Utah and became the third wife of a polygamist. Mormon leaders sent the couple to settle Nephi in central Utah, where Heywood’s two children were born. In 1861 Heywood relocated in southern Utah. She continued teaching and hat-making until her death at age sixty. Heywood wrote poetry and letters and kept a diary. She was also active in the founding of several literary and cultural organizations. Although the few extant examples of her poetry show little talent, her diary and letters reveal her as a keen observer capable of rare frankness and introspective insight. Her diary for 1850-56 demonstrates her ability to place events in perspective. Traveling to Utah after her conversion to the Mormon church, which was controversial at the time, she wrote: ‘‘Liberty of conscience and action I have had for years and it has placed me where I am. In embracing Mormonism I followed the dictates of my own judgment, in opposition to that of my best and dearest friends.’’ Independent of mind, Heywood chafed at the suggestion of Joseph Heywood’s first wife that she remain in Salt Lake City following her polygamous marriage to Joseph and called it ‘‘an interference in my affairs.’’ The unusual social relationships and conditions created by polygamy on the Western frontier, such as long absences from a spouse and the self-sufficiency of women, are well documented in Heywood’s writings. So too is her intellectual hunger for plays, lectures, readings, conversation, and classes, which she considered ‘‘a higher order of amusement than Balls.’’ Her eyewitness accounts of historical events are highly valued. To a well-known incident of the Walker War (1853-54) in Utah she brought another view, differing from the official account
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asserting the slain Native Americans acted aggressively and were killed in self-defense during a ‘‘skirmish.’’ Heywood wrote: ‘‘Nine Indians coming into our Camp looking for protection and bread with us, because we promised it to them and without knowing they did the first act in that affair [the earlier murder of three whites] or any other, were shot down without a minute’s notice.’’ Present-day historians give Heywood’s account greater credence. For the early years of Utah Territory, Heywood’s diary remains one of the richest sources of information on social conditions, polygamy, the difficulties of communal living, life in isolated towns, and the indispensable role of women in Mormon settlements. OTHER WORKS: Not by Bread Alone: The Journal of Martha Spence Heywood (1978). The papers of Martha Spence Heywood are in private possession of family members in Holbrook, Arizona. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ursenbach, M., ‘‘Three Women and the Life of the Mind,’’ in Utah Historical Quarterly (Winter 1975). —MIRIAM B. MURPHY
HIGGINS, Marguerite Born 3 September 1920, Hong Kong; died 3 January 1966, Washington, D.C. Daughter of Lawrence D. and Marguerite Godard Higgins; married Stanley Moore, 1940; William E. Hall, 1952; children two Marguerite Higgins was born in the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong to a globetrotting businessman and his French war bride. Marguerite was educated in France and England, and when the Higgins family returned to the U.S., she was enrolled in an exclusive private school in Oakland, California. After graduating from the University of California at Berkeley, with honors in 1940, she went to work as a cub reporter for the local Vallejo Times-Herald. She was hired by the New York Herald Tribune after receiving her master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism; she worked for the paper for the next 21 years. After three routine years on the Tribune reporting city visitors, suburban fires, and visiting royalty, Higgins won a coveted spot in the London bureau. Shortly thereafter, she transferred to the Paris bureau—largely because of her proficiency in French—and soon found herself reporting the wartime liberation of Europe. She made the front page regularly and built up a respected name for herself among the most experienced foreign correspondents in the world. She was twenty-five when the
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Tribune named her Berlin bureau chief. During the Korean War, Higgins was the Tokyo bureau chief and was with the first reporters who made their way into Korea on returning evacuation planes, the only woman correspondent in Korea. After her second marriage and the birth of two children, Higgins settled down to a less peripatetic schedule as a roving reporter for the Tribune and as a freelance writer for many periodicals. In the mid-1950s, Higgins reopened the Tribune’s Moscow bureau, and in 1956 she returned to Washington to cover the diplomatic beat. From then on, her competition claimed Higgins could be counted on to show up wherever a crisis occurred, from the Congo to the Dominican Republic. In 1963 Higgins resigned to become a syndicated columnist for Long Island’s Newsday. Out of her experiences covering the Korean conflict came War in Korea: The Report of a Woman Combat Correspondent (1951), which also appeared in a condensed form in Woman’s Home Companion in 1951. The book was a bestseller, and Higgins became an overnight sensation, touring and lecturing throughout the country. In Report of a Woman Combat Correspondent, Higgins recounted her experiences on the front in Korea with a lively style and the sense of adventurous excitement she felt. Although the book tends to provide an unbalanced view of history, reviews were favorable, and it enjoyed a wide readership. In 1954 Higgins received a Guggenheim Fellowship, allowing her to make a 10-week tour of Russia. Her experiences and reactions to life in Cold War Russia during the 13,500-mile trek are detailed in Red Plush and Black Bread, published in 1956. Higgins and her longtime personal friend, the late newsman Peter Lisagor, together wrote and published Overtime in Heaven: Adventures in the Foreign Service (1964), a series of behind-the-scenes true stories of 10 Foreign Service incidents. A highly entertaining set of adventure vignettes, the series won credits for its carefully researched and documented materials, although one critic noted they had created a ‘‘composite portrait of the Foreign Service man who looks suspiciously like a more moral James Bond.’’ Higgins became increasingly interested in Vietnam as the country opened up into one of the world’s most controversial hot spots, and she made 10 trips there. In late 1965, she was air ambulanced home, the victim of leishmaniasis, a disease brought on by the bite of a tropical sandfly, and within six weeks she was dead. Her Vietnam study, Our Vietnam Nightmare (1965), presented her research and conclusions on what was actually happening in Vietnam as a result of U.S. foreign policy and actions, covering the period from the Buddhist revolt and Diem’s fall in 1963 to the changing political tactics of the Viet Cong in the summer of 1965. Herman Dinsmore, former New York Times international edition editor, called it ‘‘superb.’’ He said, ‘‘She was not the most popular correspondent for one excellent reason: she was so brilliant she outshone every writer around her, men and women: and, of course, she was industrious, clever, and, of all things, patriotic.’’
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OTHER WORKS: News Is a Singular Thing (1955). Jessie Benton Frémont (1962). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Army Times editors, American Heroes of Asian Wars (1968). Fleming, A. M., Reporters at War (1970). Forese, A., American Women Who Scored Firsts (1958). Jakes, J., Great War Correspondents (1967). Kelly, F. K., Reporters Around the World (1957). Reference works: CA (1969, 1971). CB (June 1951, Feb. 1966). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Life (2 Oct. 1950). NYHT (16 Feb. 1946, 19 Oct. 1950, 8 May 1951). NYT (8 May 1951). Time (25 Sept. 1950). —KATHLEEN KEARNEY KEESHEN
HIGGINSON, Ella Rhoads Born circa 1860, Council Grove, Kansas; died 29 December 1940, Bellingham, Washington Wrote under: Ella Higginson, Ella Rhoads Daughter of Charles and Mary Ann Rhoads; married Russell C. Higginson, circa 1880 In the early 1860s, Ella Rhoads Higginson’s family crossed the plains from Kansas to the Grand Ronde Valley of Oregon. In 1870 they moved to Portland and then to a farm eight miles from town. Later they lived in Oregon City, where Higginson received her few years of education in a public school. The youngest of three children, Higginson enjoyed freedom from punishments and farm chores. Although the family was poor, their home was filled with good books, visitors, and conversation. Her father’s ability as a storyteller and her mother’s poetic sensitivity to the beauty of nature enriched Higginson’s childhood experiences. At the age of eight, Higginson wrote her first poem and was encouraged to continue writing by her mother and her sister, Carrie Blake Morgan, who later became known as a poet in her own right as the author of Path of Gold. Her father and her brother laughed at her early poetic attempts, but at fourteen Higginson published a love poem in the Oregon City paper. At sixteen she joined the newspaper staff to learn everything from typesetting to editorial writing. Early stories were contributed to the West Shore, a Portland literary magazine, and to the Salem Oregon Literary Vidette. In 1888 Higginson moved to Whatcom (now Bellingham), Washington, with her husband. A druggist from New York, he possessed charming ‘‘Eastern’’ manners but, according to Higginson, did not sufficiently encourage or appreciate her literary work. From Bellingham she edited a department entitled ‘‘Fact and Fancy for Women’’ for the weekly West Shore. Her first column, in 1890, presented advanced views on the controversial subject of divorce. For 25 years after the demise of the West Shore in 1891, Higginson contributed fiction to national magazines such as
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Century, Harper’s Weekly, Cosmopolitan, Short Stories, New Peterson, McClure’s, and Collier’s. Higginson’s stories were collected in several volumes. Her stories of common people of the Far West were praised by the Overland Monthly as ‘‘unpretentious tales. . .told simply and naturally, yet so vivid and graphic are they, that they charm the reader from the first to the last.’’ The Outlook described her as one of the best American short story writers, while the Chicago Tribune noted: ‘‘Mrs. Higginson has shown a breadth of treatment and knowledge of the everlasting human verities that equals much of the best work of France.’’ Higginson’s poetry appeared in magazines such as Atlantic, Harper’s, and Scribner’s and in the columns of many Pacific Coast and Eastern newspapers. Two of her most popular poems were ‘‘God’s Creed’’ and ‘‘Four Leaf Clover.’’ Many of her poems were set to music and performed by singers such as Caruso, McCormack, and Calve. The vivid imagery and singing quality of her poetry were achieved through diligence—she often rewrote a dozen times—and keen observation of nature. Many poems deal with the theme of the Pacific Northwest, and several, such as ‘‘The Grande Ronde Valley’’ and ‘‘The Evergreen Pine,’’ are specifically about Oregon. Higginson’s only published novel, Mariella, of Out West (1904), presents a young girl facing a hard frontier farming life, the economic boom of 1888-89, and the proposals of men who represent a variety of social backgrounds. The novel conveys a strong feeling for nature coupled with a sense of piety and spirituality. Alaska, the Great Country (1908), Higginson’s last book, is a combination of guide book, history, and romance. As a writer of poetry, short stories, travel articles, songs, and one novel, Higginson achieved prominence in the ranks of Pacific Northwest authors and earned national and international recognition for several of her works. The states of Oregon and Washington both claimed her as a daughter, and she was honored in 1931 as Washington’s poet laureate. Higginson realized her life’s ambition based on what she termed ‘‘the consuming desire to write.’’ As she explained, ‘‘It is the only thing I ever really wanted to do.’’ OTHER WORKS: A Bunch of Western Clover (1894). The Flower That Grew in the Sand (1896). The Forest Orchid (1897). From the Land of the Snow Pearls (1897). When the Birds Go North Again (1898). The Voice of April-Land, and Other Poems (1903). The Vanishing Race, and Other Poems (1911). The papers of Ella Rhoads Higginson are housed at the Oregon Historical Society in Portland, Oregon. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Horner, J. B., Oregon Literature (1902). Powers, A., History of Oregon Literature (1935). Smith, H. K., ed., With Her Own Wings (1948). Turnbull, G. S., History of Oregon Newspapers (1939). Reference works: AW. —JEAN M. WARD
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HIGHAM, Mary R. Born circa 1850; died death date unknown Verified biographical information on Mary R. Higham is unavailable, but it is likely she was born sometime around 1850 and was a Northerner. In addition to works of juvenile literature, Higham published several novels in which initially impetuous young women learn to bend their wills to the men they will ultimately marry. The process by which Higham’s heroines change on their way to the altar most often goes hand in hand with religious conversions or missionary zeal. In Cloverly (1875), rash Barbara Fox learns to read Thomas à Kempis and to like parish work, at Reverend Aymar’s instigations, before she weds the clergyman. The heroine of Agatha Lee’s Inheritance (1878) is led, with frequent reference by seminarian Paul Endicott to Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, to pledging her monetary resources to further Christian foreign missions, at which point Paul finally proposes. The Other House (1878) charts the love affairs of the Gallantin sisters, one of whom sweetly supports her family until she marries a clergyman, while her younger sister rages against a doctor until she sees and participates in his Christian witness to the poor. Athol’s (1873) Atholinda Derwint spends six months in a convent before seeking out, nursing, and marrying her guardian, a Civil War amputee burdened with a secret past and mercurial moods. Higham’s heroines advance toward matrimony at an irregular pace that is keyed directly to their spiritual development. They cannot be wives until they have subordinated themselves to divine will as manifested in their immediate circumstances, and Higham describes divine power in terms of the limitations that it places upon humans’ freedom and sense of control of their own lives. Her heroines are uniformly women who chafe under restraint only to the point where they adapt to their restrictions, so they view and proclaim them not as curbs on their freedom but rather as necessary bridles on their sinful natures. Accordingly, the heroines find themselves in the roles of perpetual daughters and children. Higham’s novels allow for temporary assertiveness and rebellion on the part of her heroines, but all, like Athol, come around to acknowledging the ‘‘manly vigor that one instinctively liked and recognized as superior.’’ These women are thus portrayed as marrying older men who are often explicitly father figures or implicitly spiritual fathers. The ‘‘unmitigated slavery of childhood’’ is an ongoing process, as Higham portrays it with considerable irony, for her heroines never progress beyond the state of being constantly instructed, chastised, and led to what their future spouses paternalistically feel is best for them. Higham’s novels, while they are typical of the period in their somewhat florid style, are atypical with respect to both the irony the author injects into her treatments of the subjection of young women and her subtle indictment of a society choosing to ignore
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in women the active qualities it values in its males. The novels thus chart and underscore, through their negative portrayal of the role of bright women in the mid-19th century, the need for social change; for while Higham’s plots affirm the current order, her most vividly crafted characters and her own authorial intrusions do not. —SUSAN CLARK
HIGHET, Helen MacInnes See MacINNES, Helen
HIGHSMITH, Patricia Born Mary Patricia Plangman, 19 January 1921, Fort Worth, Texas; died 5 February 1995 Also wrote under: Claire Morgan Daughter of Jay B. and Mary Coates Plangman Both of Patricia Highsmith’s natural parents were artists, as was her stepfather, Stanley Highsmith, whom her mother married when Patricia was three. By the time Highsmith graduated from Barnard in 1942, she had decided to put her creative energy into writing rather than painting. But she still sees with a painter’s eye; the landscapes and cityscapes of her crime novels are cleanly drawn and evocative. By 1949 she was able to travel to Europe, where she eventually settled, first in England, later in France. It has been recognized for some time, especially in Europe, that Highsmith writes crime novels of great psychological acuity. In 1964 Brigid Brophy ranked her with Georges Simenon, and critical opinion has increasingly confirmed Brophy’s judgement. Highsmith’s first novel, Strangers on a Train (1950), introduced a plot twist of considerable originality: an innocent, decent man meets a man who is evil, or mad, or both, and through this meeting and the collusion of events, the innocent becomes a murderer. The Blunderer (1954) repeats this configuration of main characters and lays heavy emphasis on the power of rumor and sensational publicity in modern society. The court of public opinion convicts Walter Stackhouse of a murder he has twice resisted the temptation to commit. The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) won the Mystery Writers of America Scroll and the Grand Prix de Littèrature Policière in 1957. It introduced a genuinely fascinating character, Tom Ripley, who also stars with chilling blandness in two later novels. Rarely has an amoral murderer been so likeable, had such good intentions, projected such pathos. Tom, having met Dickie Greenleaf, a man who has or is everything Tom wants, kills Dickie and then becomes him. Tom wears Dickie’s clothes and personality until he has acquired sufficient confidence to reassume his own name. Tom’s story is a sort of unholy rite of passage. These three novels introduce the main themes Highsmith’s crime novels explore and
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the central plot device on which she rings a number of variations. Several of her novels revolve around an increasingly compulsive relationship between a good and an evil man. Highsmith never exploits this device for the same thematic purposes twice. In The Cry of the Owl (1962), the former mental patient and voyeur turns out to be the beleaguered innocent, and the clean-cut American boy is revealed as a natural killer, waiting for the right combination of circumstances to trigger his violence. In The Two Faces of January (1964), which was the Crime Writers Association of England’s novel of the year, and Those Who Walk Away (1967), it is the innocent who attach themselves to the guilty and, for their own psychological purposes, haunt them. The main theme of A Dog’s Ransom (1972) is the breakdown of the social institutions meant to protect the decent from predators. In Tom Ripley, Highsmith created the first of several characters who unite terrible innocence and terrible guilt in one personality. Vic Van Allen’s well-earned reputation for being the most long-suffering of upright citizens protects him long enough to commit murder twice, in Deep Water (1957). In This Sweet Sickness (1960), when David Kelsey retreats into an imaginary life and personality in order to enjoy the success in love that reality has denied him, he begins a slow deterioration into dangerous madness. One of Highsmith’s major themes, then, is the ease with which a decent man can cross the line into criminality, or a sane one slip into insanity. In her world, society can be counted on to accelerate these disasters in a variety of ways: by protecting the guilty, harassing the innocent, brutalizing prisoners, enjoying innuendo, wallowing in sensationalism, and tolerating terrorism. As the 1980s approached, Highsmith continued to write psychological crime fiction. Yet it was increasingly not only the criminal mind that attracted her; rather, it was the mind of the person battling against stronger enemies—the shift in emphasis from good and evil to weakness and strength is an important one in much of her later fiction. Edith’s Diary (1977) and Little Tales of Misogyny (1977, published in German in 1974) both focus on the lives of women who are trapped by circumstances and by their own unwise choices. In Edith’s case, powerlessness is compounded by the character’s need to pretend. Edith escapes into her diary in which she creates a happy family with a successful and loving son. The diary becomes more fictitious as the events and the people in Edith’s life become more and more disappointing. Many of the sketches of women in Little Tales of Misogyny also highlight the failure of characters to look at reality squarely and to take control of their lives. The stories, in Andrew Macdonald’s words, seem ‘‘medieval misogynist tracts,’’ but they are also examinations of how women who are already socially stereotyped accept and abet their limited and limiting classifications. The two books illustrate Highsmith’s clear eye for the ways in which power is used to entrap and destroy women, and the author’s sense of menace, a hallmark of much of her earlier fiction, is present sometimes in physical, but mostly in psychological brutalization.
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With Ripley Under Water (1992), Highsmith returned to the Ripley stories begun in 1955. In this novel, almost the entire emphasis is on psychological one-upmanship as Pritchard, a full-blown sadist, torments Ripley about the one crime Tom wishes he had not committed, the murder of Dickie Greenleaf. The emphasis on weakness and power again displaces the conflict between good and evil, as Tom Ripley (remembered from the earlier books) is far more charming and sympathetic than Pritchard. While this latest Ripley novel is not nearly so satisfying as the earlier ones, it does create a sense of menace and psychological anxiety. The Ripley stories are, according to Julian Symons, Highsmith’s most popular because contemporary readers feel ‘‘that crime is more interesting than its detection, and that intelligent criminals are to be congratulated or at least admired.’’ Other books include two collections, Slowly, Slowly in the Wind (1979), a series of stories including tales of revenge, murder, and muggings, and Black House (1981), comprised of tales focusing on violence and the seemingly ordinary people who commit bizarre and outlandish acts. A novel, People Who Knock at the Door (1983), shifts her focus from crime to religion and analyzes the behavior, often malignant, of a fundamentalist religious colony. Highsmith’s last novels returned to the gay and lesbian theme. She had dealt with the topic in her 1952 lesbian novel, The Price of Salt, which was republished in 1991 with a new title, Carol. It is about a department store worker who initiates a relationship with a customer and eventually becomes her lover. Highsmith had originally published the book under the pseudonym Claire Morgan but acknowledged she was the author when the book was reprinted. Found in the Street (1986) is set in New York and is the story of a married couple, Jack and Natalia Sutherland, and their daughter, Amelia; Elsie Taylor, a waitress who is taken up by the Sutherlands and later murdered; and Ralph Linderman, a puritanical security guard. In this novel, too, gay and lesbian homosexuality is a strong issue. Her last novel, Small g: A Summer Idyll (1995), takes place in Switzerland and has both homosexual and heterosexual characters. Russell Harrison called it ‘‘her most plotless creation.’’ It was published in England, Germany, and France. Knopf rejected the manuscript in the U.S.; Highsmith felt they did so out of fear of offending conservatives. Highsmith had moved permanently to Europe in 1963 and spent her last years in Switzerland, living quietly with her cats and declining most interviews. Although many people know her as the author of Strangers on a Train, her work as a whole has been better known and honored in Europe than in her native United States. In February of 1995 Highsmith died in Switzerland of lung cancer and aplastic anemia. She left her $3 million estate to Yaddo, the artists’ community in Saratoga Springs, New York, where she completed Strangers on a Train, her first and most famous novel. According to Yaddo president Michael Sundell, quoted in Publishers Weekly, Highsmith ‘‘felt that she had gained her identity as an artist at Yaddo, and she wished by her gift to
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provide the same opportunity for future generations of Yaddo guests.’’ Highsmith should not be approached as a mystery or suspense novelist, since there are very few mysteries and little suspense in her books. At her best, however, she was a sensitive chronicler of psychological stress and deterioration and a clear-eyed observer of social tragedy. OTHER WORKS: A Game for the Living (1958). Miranda the Panda is on the Veranda (with D. Sanders, 1958). The Glass Cell (1964). The Story-Teller (English title, A Suspension of Mercy, 1965). Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (1966, 1983, revised 1990). The Tremor of Forgery (1969). Ripley Under Ground (1970). The Snail Watcher, and Other Stories (English title, Eleven, 1970). Little Tales of Misogyny (in German, 1974; in English, 1977). Ripley’s Game (1974). The Animal Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder (1975). The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980). Mermaids on the Golf Course (1985). The Mysterious Mr. Ripley (1985). Found in the Street (1986). Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes (1987). The Talented Mr. Ripley; Ripley Under Ground; Ripley’s Game; The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1994). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brophy, B., Don’t Never Forget (1966). Cavigelli, F. and F. Senn, eds., Über Patricia Highsmith (1980). Harrison, R., Patricia Highsmith (1997). Reference works: Concise Survey of Short Fiction (1991). CANR (1987). CLC (1974, 1975, 1980, 1987). CN (1976, 1991). Detecting Women (1994). Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (1994). FC (1990). MTCW (1991). St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (1996). Other references: Armchair Detective (Fall 1981). Clues (Spring/Summer 1984). London (June 1969, June-July 1972). Midwest Quarterly (Apr. 1984). NYTBR (29 Jan. 1989, 18 Oct. 1992). TLS (24 Sept. 1971, 4 Oct. 1991, 17 Apr. 1992). Vanity Fair (Mar. 1999). —CAROL CLEVELAND, UPDATED BY MARY A. MCCAY AND KAREN LESLIE BOYD
HILL-LUTZ, Grace Livingston Born 15 April 1865, Wellsville, New York; died 23 February 1947, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania Also wrote under: Grace Livingston Hill, Grace Livingston, Marcia Macdonald Daughter of Charles M. and Marcia Macdonald Livingston; married Frank Hill, 1892 (died); Flavius J. Lutz, 1916 (separated); children: two daughters Grace Livingston Hill-Lutz’s mother published four romances under the name of Mrs. C. M. Livingston, but devoted herself primarily to being a preacher’s wife. Apparently in order to honor
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her mother as an individual, Hill-Lutz published three novels under her mother’s given name, Marcia Macdonald. Hill-Lutz’s father, a Presbyterian minister, also did some writing, exclusively on theological topics. His influence is reflected in Hill-Lutz’s establishment and direction of a mission Sunday school in Swarthmore. Perhaps the strongest of all family influences was that of her aunt, Isabella Macdonald (‘‘Pansy’’) Alden, an author who not only encouraged Hill-Lutz to write but persuaded her own publisher to print the youngster’s first effort, The Esseltynes; or, Alpsonso and Marguerite. Hill-Lutz’s first husband, also a Presbyterian minister, died after seven years of marriage. Hill-Lutz was forced to publish enough to support herself and her two daughters. She began with Sunday school lessons in a column syndicated by 10 local newspapers, but soon turned to fiction. By 1904 she was successful enough to build herself a comfortable home in Swarthmore. Hill-Lutz’s second marriage was unhappy and soon led to separation, although she remained adamant in her opposition to divorce. She was active as a writer until the end of her life, her final novel being completed by her daughter Ruth for posthumous publication. Hill-Lutz worked in a wide range of genres, specializing in the adventure story and contemporary romance but also including fantasy (her first novel, A Chautauqua Idyll, 1887), nonfiction (The War Romance of the Salvation Army, 1919), historical romance (Marcia Schuyler, 1908), and mystery (The Mystery of Mary, 1912). She wrote 107 books, which sold over three million copies during her lifetime. Hill-Lutz was especially successful at writing fast-paced adventures featuring intelligent and resourceful heroines. A good example is The Red Signal (1919), set during World War I. When the German truck farm where young Hilda Lessing works turns out to be swarming with German spy activity, Hilda shows herself to be both brave and lucky as she saves the U.S. from a major disaster and wins a presidential medal. She also wins the reward reserved for all of Hill-Lutz’s finest heroines—marriage with a handsome and affluent young man. Although the historical perspective is simplistic—World War I is explained as the result of Germany’s ‘‘forgetting God’’—and although the plot turns on some very unlikely coincidences, the narrative is compelling enough to have thrilled many a reader. Hill-Lutz’s most popular books were contemporary romances, such as Matched Pearls (1933), Beauty for Ashes (1935), and April Gold (1936). The most widely read of all, The Witness (1917), brought her thousands of letters of gratitude. In it as in most of her books, she utilizes one-dimensional characterization in which Christian believers are sincere, brave, and atruistic while unbelievers are selfish and corrupt. Paul Courtland is the typical Hill-Lutz hero: rich, handsome, popular, athletic, a Phi Beta Kappa man. A rich girl, who parallels the biblical ‘‘scarlet woman’’ by attempting to seduce Paul away from his faith, possesses a ‘‘nasty little chin’’ with ‘‘a Satanic point.’’ She is contrasted with a poor orphan girl who, because of her modesty and integrity, wins the prize of marriage to the hero. Hill-Lutz manifests a lively sense of social justice by having Paul refuse a
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lucrative management position in a company that exploits its factory workers in unsafe conditions. The novel’s theme is the actual presence of Christ in any life devoted to human concern and justice. As one character puts it, ‘‘It’s heaven or hell, both now and hereafter.’’ Hill-Lutz knew how to wring human emotion and enlist current events to enliven her novels while she was making fairly overt attempts to convert her readers to Christ. For instance, a 1944 novel, Time of the Singing of Birds, features an attractive officer who returns wounded from World War II. When he eventually marries the most deserving of his Christian girlfriends, an observer comments, ‘‘Heavens! If I thought I could have a marriage like that it would be worth-while trying to be a Christian.’’
HIRSHFIELD
Crimson Mountain (1942). The Girl of the Woods (1942). The Street of the City (1942). The Sound of the Trumpet (1943). The Spice Box (1943). Through These Fires (1943). More Than Conquerer (1944). All Through the Night (1945). A Girl to Come Home To (1945). Bright Arrows (1946). Where Two Ways Met (1947). Mary Arden (completed by R. L. Hill, 1948). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Karr, J., Grace Livingston Hill: Her Story and Her Writings (1948). Reference works: DAB. NAW (1971). Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature (1962). TCA, TCAS. Other references: Book News Monthly (Oct. 1915). —VIRGINIA RAMEY MOLLENKOTT
Improbable coincidence, avoidance of moral ambiguity, unconscious sexism, and almost exclusive use of stock characters work together to keep Hill-Lutz’s fiction lightweight. But her fast-paced upbeat style has refreshed and relaxed many people. And there can be little doubt Hill-Lutz provided a shining ideal for younger readers by featuring so many heroines of unshakable standards and determined, triumphant integrity. OTHER WORKS: A Little Servant (1890). The Parkers-town Delegate (1892). Katharine’s Yesterday, and Other Christian Endeavor Stories (1895). In the Way (1897). Lone Point; a Summer Outing (1898). A Daily Rate (1900). The Angel of His Presence (1902). An Unwilling Guest (1902). According to the Pattern (1903). The Story of a Whim (1903). Because of Stephen (1904). The Girl from Montana (1908). Phoebe Deane (1909). Dawn of the Morning (1910). Aunt Crete’s Emancipation (1911). The Best Man (1914). The Man of the Desert (1914). Miranda (1915). The Finding of Jasper Holt (1916). A Voice in the Wilderness (1916). The Enchanted Barn (1918). The Search (1919). Cloudy Jewel (1920). Exit Betty (1920). The Tryst (1921). The City of Fire (1922). The Big Blue Soldier (1923). Tomorrow About This Time (1923). Re-Creations (1924). Ariel Custer (1925). Not Under the Law (1925). Coming Through the Rye (1926). A New Name (1926). The Honor Girl (1927). Job’s Niece (1927). The White Flower (1927). Blue Ruin (1928). Crimson Roses (1928). Found Treasure (1928). Duskin (1929). Out of the Storm (1929). The Prodigal Girl (1929). The Gold Shoe (1930). Ladybird (1930). The White Lady (1930). The Chance of a Lifetime (1931). Kerry (1931). Silver Wings (1931). Beggarman (1932). The Challengers (1932). Happiness Hill (1932). Her Wedding Garment (1932). The House Across the Hedge (1932). The Story of the Lost Star (1932). The Beloved Stranger (1933). The Ransom (1933). Amorelle (1934). The Christmas Bride (1934). Rainbow Cottage (1934). The Strange Proposal (1935). White Orchids (1935). Mystery Flowers (1936). The Substitute Guest (1936). Brentwood (1937). Daphne Deane (1937). Sunrise (1937). The Best Birthday (1938). The Divided Battle (1938). Dwelling (1938). Homing (1938). The Lost Message (1938). Maria (1938). Marigold (1938). The Minister’s Son (1938). Patricia (1939). The Seventh Hour (1939). Stranger Within the Gates (1939). Head of the House (1940). Partners (1940). Rose Galbraith (1940). Astra (1941). By Way of the Silverthorns (1941). In Tune with Wedding Bells (1941).
HIRSHFIELD, Jane Born 1953, New York, New York ‘‘Attentiveness,’’ writes Jane Hirshfield in the preface to her collection of essays, ‘‘only deepens what it regards,’’ and if Hirshfield’s opus is about anything, it is about this power of attentiveness and the resultant clarification of being. Her case for poetry is that words are a path into concentration, a state that is penetrating, unified, focused, yet also permeable and open; that writing begins when willed effort drops away, when the writer (and then the reader) enters the flow, the effortless effort. Jane Hirshfield’s poems are records of such attentiveness, intimacy, immersion, the self meeting the Self. Hirshfield’s work came to national prominence beginning in the mid-1980s. During this time, she lived in residence at Yaddo, McDowell, and Djerassi, and was awarded both Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships. Her poems written in free verse, American diction, have appeared in journals from Agni to ZYZZYVA, and in all notables between. In first grade, the poet wrote on a large sheet of unlined paper, ‘‘I want to be a writer when I grow up,’’ and, fatefully, the first book she ever bought, at age nine, was a collection of haiku. An undergraduate at Princeton, she created a dual major: creative writing and literature in translation, and though she won the poetry contest of Nation for work written while still an undergraduate, she did not pursue an M.F.A. Instead, she began to study Zen, entering an eight-year monastic practice, and including three years at Tassajara, a rural Zen community in Northern California. After leaving formal Zen training, Hirshfield published two collections of poetry, Alaya (1982) and Of Gravity & Angels (1988). She also returned to work begun as an undergraduate, the translation of Japanese women’s poetry. The poet’s third collection, The October Palace (1994), evoked this description from Women’s Review of Books: ‘‘These imagistically precise, celebratory poems reveal the interconnections between interior and exterior worlds,’’ and this comment, ‘‘A radiant and passionate collection,’’ from the New York Times Book Review. These
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poems owe much to Hirshfield’s commitment to both Buddhist meditation (a student of Zen since 1974) and to her practice of moving poetry forward with the fundamental energy of passion. The opening section, ‘‘What the Heart Wants,’’ announces this collection’s deep structure. Titles praise presence and mutability, the serene and the sensual: ‘‘Each Step,’’ ‘‘History as the Painter Bonnard,’’ ‘‘Floor,’’ ‘‘A Sweetening All Around Me As It Falls.’’ These opening lines from ‘‘The House in Winter’’ reveal the writer’s rhetorical stance, musicality, image and voice, the transforming arc of attention: ‘‘Here in the year’s late tide-wash, / a corner cupboard suddenly wavers / in low-flung sunlight, / cupboard never quite visible before. / Its jars of last summer’s peaches / have come into their native gold— / not the sweetness of last summer, / but today’s, / fresh from the tree of winter. / The mouth swallows peach, and says gold.’’ Jane Hirshfield has been honored with a Pushcart Prize, the Commonwealth Club of California’s Poetry Medal, the Poetry Center Book award, and, with the publication of The Ink Dark Moon: Poems by Ono no Komanchi and Isumi Shikibu (1988), Columbia University’s Translation Center award. In all her work, the poet pays tribute to her colleagues (translator Mariko Arantani, editor Hugh Van Dusen), her teachers (Lewis Hyde, Ono no Komanchi, Gary Snyder), her muses (Giotto, Novalis, Wu Feng, cucumber, egret, poppy), and ‘‘those whose voices have been lost.’’ To read her poems is to encounter not only the poet but the lives and hearts of others. Hirshfield’s inclusiveness, her spiritual and intellectual reach, led her to edit the anthology Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women (1994). A record of intimacy with the sacred, this book includes texts from Enheduanna (the earliest identified author of either sex in world literature), Makeda, Queen of Sheba, the Tamil saint Antal, Mechtild of Magdeburg, Mirabai, Anna Akhmatova, Nelly Sachs; each text is a reminder that the numinous does not discriminate, that spiritual experience is fundamental to human life. In her essay ‘‘The Question of Originality’’ (from Nine Gates), Hirshfield writes, ‘‘Originality requires an aptitude for exile,’’ and the ability to become invisible, ‘‘to offer oneself to the Other.’’ She reminds us that it is no accident that we speak of a body of knowledge because language begins in the facts of physical life. Like Yeats, she believes ‘‘When I write it is myself that I remake.’’ Lives of the Heart (l997), with its 80 poems, is surely blueprint and map, a daybook of the poet’s remaking. A sequence of 20 opens the volume: ‘‘Secretive Heart,’’ ‘‘Heart Stopped in Panic and Grace,’’ ‘‘Heart Pressing Further.’’ Among the 80, as well, a series of spells, ‘‘Spell for Inviting-in the New Soul,’’ poems that celebrate the concrete and illusory now, ‘‘A Thinking Stillness,’’ and, as always, Hirshfield’s lyric reckonings, ‘‘White Curtain in Sunlight and Wind.’’ The reader recognizes in these word-journeys that the real activity of poetry, as Hirshfield says, is ‘‘to discover wholeness and create wholeness, including the wholeness of the fragmentary and the broken’’ as in ‘‘A Month of Days and Nights’’—‘‘Days that could have / been anything, / nights that could have been anything, / turned with the leaves. / Then, someone played / the piano— / halting, unpracticed, and perfect. / I listened to pity / and lowered my head in shame. /
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Ashamed, not at my tears, / or even at what has been wasted, / but to have been dry-eyed so long.’’ Published in the same year, 1997, but written during the previous decade, Hirshfield’s book of essays on poetry, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, is described as, ‘‘doing for poetry what Pound intended to do at the turn of the century: through juxtaposition of the familiar and the unknown, it reinvigorates our thinking about the possibilities of the art.’’ The nine essays of this volume explore particular strategies of language and thinking, the ways a poem can illumine the circuitous passage between the inner and outer worlds and thus awaken consciousness. These essays are not abstract, not essays about criticism, but writing discoveries shared with the reader: ‘‘Metaphor isn’t embellishment; its way of thinking came first and was followed by abstract thought.’’ ‘‘Freedom from the words of the original combined with a deep love of its words lies at the heart of translation.’’ ‘‘No matter how the reader (or writer) concentrates, a poem can never be completely entered or known.’’ ‘‘It is the task of the writer to become permeable and transparent; to become, in the words of Henry James, a person on whom nothing is lost.’’ The poet, Jane Hirshfield, is just such a writer. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Other references: Atlantic Unbound (1997). LJ (1997). Ploughshares (Spring 1998). —ANN STALEY
HITE, Shere Born 2 November 1942, St Joseph, Missouri Daughter of Paul and Shirley Hurt Gregory, later adopted by stepfather Raymond Hite; married Friedrich Horicke, 1985 Shere (pronounced Share) Hite burst onto the scene with The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality in 1976. In it she challenged traditional theories about women’s sexuality and entered upon a life of controversy. Her subsequent work has continued on this path, questioning current views on male sexuality, women’s satisfaction with their roles, and family life. From the beginning, Hite’s work has met with criticism aimed at her feminist politics and her methodology. She is, indeed, a feminist, having embraced the movement in the late 1960s when the National Organization for Women (NOW) protested an advertisement featuring her posing as a typist. The caption read: ‘‘The typewriter is so smart she doesn’t have to be.’’ Hite joined NOW’s protest. Response by women to The Hite Report was tremendous. The book, based on anonymous interviews of approximately 3,000 women, revealed how female sexuality from a woman’s point of view was quite different from what was considered the norm. Clitoral stimulation, not sexual intercourse itself, was the key to orgasm for most women, according to the study. This was
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cataclysmic news at the time. What made the book hold even greater impact and interest were the intimate details and anecdotes from the survey respondees. Through her survey, Hite explored the political, cultural, and biological contexts of sexuality and concluded that heretofore women’s sexuality had ‘‘been seen essentially as a response to male sexuality and intercourse.’’ The book was a bestseller nationally and internationally and it provoked heated discussions. Hite responded to some of her critics in an article for the Journal of the American Society of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists. Her methodology, she explained, was indeed ‘‘innovative.’’ It sought to provide ‘‘a large forum in which women could speak out freely’’ and readers ‘‘could decide for themselves how they felt about the answers.’’ In this, it was reflective of the feminist culture of the early 1970s, one of open forums and egalitarian formats. Hite’s second report, The Hite Report on Male Sexuality, was published in 1981. Her methodology here was the same as for her book on women: questionnaires distributed through magazines and organizations. She reported men ‘‘were deeply frustrated, angry, or disappointed with their emotional relationships with women’’ but also ‘‘treasured’’ them. She attributed much of men’s dissatisfaction to a patriarchal culture that limited them to the role of being ‘‘emotionally reserved, in control at all times.’’ Criticism for this book, the second in the Hite Report trilogy, was similar to that of the first book, and the book’s popularity as a bestseller was similar as well. Hite’s final book in what is considered her trilogy, The Hite Report: Women and Love; A Cultural Revolution in Progress (1987), used the same approach and methodology of the first two. It immediately had the critics ‘‘gnashing their teeth,’’ according to Time magazine. And Time itself reported this new survey ‘‘often seems merely to provide an occasion for the author’s own male-bashing diatribes.’’ On the other hand, Time’s next sentence adds that ‘‘Hite has tapped into a deep vein of female dissatisfaction with love relationships.’’ In 1994 Hite’s book, The Hite Report on the Family: Growing Up Under Patriarchy, was published in the U.S. after having first been published in Great Britain. In this work, Hite anticipated her critics and took care to explain her methodology in the book: ‘‘My research methods can best be seen as a combination of sociology, psychology, and cultural history, together with innovations relating to feminist methodology,’’ she wrote. She also confessed it was becoming ‘‘more and more difficult. . .to work and publish in a climate of media hostility and suspicion.’’ The controversy over Hite’s ideas, examinations of patriarchy as an underlying factor in relationships, and her revelations about sexuality had often forced her into a defensive posture. Personal threats, she reported, had caused her to move to Europe in the early 1990s. She had married Friedrich Horicke, a German, in 1985, and in 1996 she relinquished her American citizenship to become a German citizen. In that year, 1996, the New York Times reported, ‘‘The hunted look she had during her last years in the United States has long gone, and she has regained her sense of humor—but only because she is, at last, being taken seriously.’’
HOBART
In addition to The Hite Reports, essays, and an early book on women’s sexuality, Hite’s books include a fictionalized autobiography, The Divine Comedy of Ariadne and Jupiter (1994), and an autobiography, The Hite Report on Hite: A Sexual & Political Autobiography (1996). She has often lectured at prestigious universities, including Harvard, Oxford, and the Sorbonne. In 1998 she was a visiting professor at Nikon University in Japan. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: ANR (1990). CB (1988). Journal of the American Society of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists (Winter 1978). NYT (7 Apr. 1996). People (4 July 1994). Time (12 Oct 1987). WSJ (13 Nov. 1987). WWAW (1998). —JUDITH HARLAN
HOBART, Alice (Nourse) Tisdale Born 28 January 1882, Lockport, New York; died 14 March 1967, Oakland, California Also wrote under: Alice Tisdale Daughter of Edwin H. and Harriett Beaman Nourse; married Earle Tisdale Hobart, 1914 Alice Tisdale Hobart grew up near Chicago, Illinois, and attended the University of Chicago. She then worked as a YWCA secretary, later joining her elder sister, a teacher, in China. She and her husband, an oil company executive, lived in China until 1927. The Hobarts later made their home in California. Despite frequent ill health, the result of childhood meningitis aggravated by a fall, Hobart loved travel and adventure. Her autobiography, Gusty’s Child (1959), gives a full account of her travels and literary career. Hobart reported on her experiences in China in her first three books. Although she returned to China only for brief visits after 1927, it was the setting for much of her fiction. She was fascinated by the effects on both Chinese and Westerners of their contacts with each other, as well as by the great difference between their cultures. Pidgin Cargo (1929; reissued in 1934 as River Supreme, Hobart’s preferred title) tells the story of a steamboat builder so determined to conquer the Yangtse River that he sacrifices his family to his obsession. Western affinity for machinery is contrasted with Chinese indifference to it, but both the Chinese and the Westerners are changed by their meeting. In Oil for the Lamps of China (1933), Hobart’s great bestseller (filmed twice, in 1935 and again in 1941 as Law of the Tropics), the subject is business, the experiences of Stephen and Hester Chase being loosely based on those of Hobart and her husband. Important themes are the relationship between the two alien cultures and the company’s exploitation of its employees. Yang and Yin (1936) studies the effect of cultural contact in the area of ideas; central characters are an American doctor and his protegé, a young Chinese aristocrat. The chasm between the two cultures is also dramatized by other characters, particularly the women. When, much later, Hobart returned to her Chinese materials, she examined recent Chinese history and the new communist
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society. Venture into Darkness (1955), a study in guilt, responsibility, and expiation, describes the experiences of an American banker who makes an ill-fated, illegal journey into communist China. The Innocent Dreamers (1963) centers on an interracial marriage, tracing the history of 20th-century China and the divergent forces at work in it through the establishment and dissolution of the family.
the hero of her 1964 novel First Papers, closely resembles her father, who felt he must earn the right to his naturalization papers as a liberal editor of a Yiddish newspaper and an adamant labor leader. The warm portrait of the Ivarin family is simultaneously accurately detailed and sentimental in its evocation of the lower East Side life as it moved from the relative calm at the turn of the century to the exciting, overcrowded pre-World War I period.
With one exception—The Peacock Sheds His Tail (1945), which is set in Mexico—Hobart’s remaining novels deal with American themes and problems. Their Own Country (1940), a sequel to Oil for the Lamps of China, brings Stephen and Hester back to the U.S. and describes their attempts to build a new life during the Depression. An important subplot shows the struggle of several women musicians to achieve success while maintaining integrity. The Serpent-Wreathed Staff (1951) centers on a family of doctors; it implicitly attacks the American Medical Association and argues for prepaid group preventive health care. Two other novels are specifically Californian: The Cup and the Sword (1942; filmed as This Earth Is Mine) centers on the wine country during and after Prohibition. In The Cleft Rock (1948), set in the Central Valley, much of the action deals with the vexed question of water rights and the conflicts between small and large farmers.
Hobson’s background in advertising and publishing greatly influenced her fiction. She worked as an advertising copywriter, as a reporter with the New York Evening Post, and until 1940 as promotion director of Time, as well as writing short stories for popular magazines such as Collier’s, Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, and Cosmopolitan. With her husband, Thayer, Hobson wrote two westerns. Divorced in 1935, she lived with her adopted sons Michael and Christopher in New York City, where she continued to contribute to popular magazines and newspapers as well as to publish short fiction throughout her career as a novelist.
The central theme in Hobart’s work is social change. She also consistently dramatized a need to break with tradition, though she often sympathetically depicted old values. She saw hope for social amelioration through united action (in cooperatives and the like). Her central characters often include both those who bring change and those who resist it most strongly; their interactions create the dramatic tension in her work. Hobart perceived change as painful and the results seldom totally desirable, but she always stressed as most important the need for improvement in the lot of ordinary people, be they Chinese, Mexican, or American. OTHER WORKS: Pioneering Where the World Is Old: Leaves from a Manchurian Note-Book (1917). By the City of the Long Sand: A Tale of New China (1926). Within the Walls of Nanking (1928). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: TCA. TCAS. Other references: NR (20 Sept. 1948). NYHTB (22 Aug. 1948, 4 Nov. 1951). NYT (15 Mar. 1967). NYTBR (8 Oct. 1933, 8 Nov. 1936, 31 Mar. 1940, 6 Sept. 1942). Saturday Review (20 Oct. 1945). —MARY JEAN DEMARR
HOBSON, Laura (Keane) Z(ametkin) Born 18 June 1900, New York, New York; died 1986 Also wrote under: Peter Field Daughter of Michael and Adella Kean Zametkin; married Thayer Hobson, 1930 (divorced 1935); children: Michael, Christopher Most of Laura Z. Hobson’s childhood was spent on Long Island with her mother and father, a Russian émigré. Stefan Ivarin,
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Hobson’s first adult novel written on her own, The Trespassers (1943), establishes the liberal tone and controversial subject matter of all of her work. The double plot involves both a love story and a moral stand on the part of a strong, successful woman and a powerful radio tycoon. Hobson is quite adept at presenting the minutia of the well-to-do New York liberal, including the psychological intricacies of the male/female relationship as the lovers take opposing sides on the issue of the quota system that prevented refugees from immigrating to the United States. One of the fascinating aspects of Hobson’s fiction is the consistent appearance of a strong-willed liberal female career woman who endangers her love relationship by supporting a cause—in this case the liberalization of the immigration laws. Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) analyzes the social and economic effects of anti-Semitism by tracing the experience of Phil Green, a Gentile magazine writer, pretending he’s a Jew to gather material for a series on anti-Semitism. Hobson dramatizes so sharply the pain caused by anti-Semitism in the lives of Phil and those involved in his research that the reader identifies with and understands the subtle permeation of prejudice throughout the American culture, particularly in the liberal Eastern establishment. The weakest element of the novel is the formulaic melodrama of the love relationship between Phil and Kathy Lacey, his editor’s niece. Her most successful novel, Gentleman’s Agreement sold millions of copies and was translated into many languages. The film version received the New York Film Critics Award and the Academy Award for best picture of 1947. The effects of the notoriety surrounding the literary success, including the Hollywood ordeal, supplied much of the subject matter and insight for Hobson’s 1951 novel, The Celebrity. Hobson’s Consenting Adult (1975) manifests the same optimistic liberal philosophy as her other work, and thereby allows for the same personal identification with the protagonist, Tessa Lynn, the mother of a homosexual son, Jeff. After extensive attempts to change Jeff, Tessa discovers she is the one who must change. Consenting Adult, however, does not have the powerful impact of Gentleman’s Agreement. The reader can readily empathize with
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Tessa and marvel at the exhausting research she does to publish a book for gay people and their parents. But Hobson’s style, the slick prose of popular magazines, still tends toward righteous passion, a sentimental if sincere cry for tolerance that might sear the conscience if it were not for the necessary pat ending: ‘‘Consenting adults, she thought, and a fullness rushed to her heart. To consent, to assent, to be in harmony, to give your blessing. I give my blessing, all my blessings. Then I am a consenting adult too.’’ Hobson’s fictional concerns reflect her personal zeal for tolerance and understanding. Her novels are for the most part propaganda novels and suffer artistically from the strength of the message overpowering the style. But Hobson is an effective storyteller, and Gentleman’s Agreement, though somewhat dated, still succeeds in creating a sharp awareness of the insidiousness and pain of bigotry. OTHER WORKS: Dry Gulch Adams (with T. Hobson, 1934). Outlaws Three (with T. Hobson, 1934). A Dog of His Own (1941). The Other Father (1950). I’m Going to Have a Baby (1967). The Tenth Month (1971). Over and Above (1979). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1976). CB (Sept. 1947). TCAS. Other references: Chicago Sun Book-Week (2 Mar. 1947). Life (27 Nov. 1964). NYHTB (9 Mar. 1947, 8 Nov. 1964). Saturday Review (27 Feb. 1965). Time (29 May 1950, 9 Nov. 1953). —SUZANNE ALLEN
HOFFMAN, Alice Born 16 March 1952, New York, New York Married Tom Martin; children: Jake, Zack Alice Hoffman grew up in Franklin Square, New York, where she began writing at an early age. Her parents, who divorced when she was eight years old, worked in real estate and social work. She attended Adelphi University in Garden City, New York (B.A., 1973), received a fellowship to the writing program at Stanford University (M.A., 1975), and shortly thereafter began to publish stories. In 1976 she was awarded a fellowship at Breadloaf; her first novel, Property of, appeared in 1977 (reprinted in 1985, 1998). In addition to writing fiction, Hoffman is also a scriptwriter and reviewer. Hoffman is particularly noted for infusing her realistic stories with the mythical, lyrical, and metaphorical. Settings, even the most ordinary, take on a surrealistic, dreamlike atmosphere where the reader is prepared for anything to happen. And almost anything does, for Hoffman has tackled a wide range of issues in her novels: gangs, incest, AIDS, suicide, promiscuity, aging, agoraphobia, cancer. Her mystical treatment of emotionally charged issues allows the reader a measure of distance where judgement
may be suspended for a time and even the most painful or objectionable subject can be contemplated. In Property of, set in the depths of the New York underground of drugs and gangs, Hoffman introduces a theme that recurs in subsequent novels: the outsider searching to belong in impossible situations. The narrator, a 17-year-old girl in love with a gang leader, tries initially to resist him and his world, where all the girlfriends are designated as property. Falling under the spell of violence and of heroin, she succumbs but ultimately extricates herself from this primitive and chaotic atmosphere. Hoffman’s second novel, The Drowning Season (1979, 1989), takes the reader to the other end of the social spectrum. Its 18-year-old protagonist, Esther the Black, struggles for identity and connection against the forces of her wealthy Long Island family, and specifically against her formidable grandmother, Esther the White. Hoffman explores irony in plot and setting in Angel Landing (1980, 1999), a romance about love in the face of destruction set at a nuclear power plant. Like Property of, White Horses (1982) places an outsider in pursuit of an impossible person in an impossible situation. Teresa Connors waits, as her mother had, for a savior, an ‘‘Aria’’ (her mother’s term) to lift her out of the uneventfulness of her life. She believes her brother, the odd and elusive Silver, is her Aria; the novel traces the dangerous attraction between them. The feeling of suspension, so dominant in Teresa’s life, is pursued through Fortune’s Daughter (1985, 1994). Tracing the stages of women’s lives on both a literal and symbolic level, Hoffman again explores the relationship between two women. Illumination Night (1987, 1994) focuses on the inner workings of the family and the stresses from outside that threaten it. Hoffman uses agoraphobia to symbolize not only the powerlessness of Vonny, the novel’s primary female character, but also the other characters’ loss of control in their lives. In At Risk (1988, 1998), her most realistic novel to date, Hoffman recounts the isolation and fragmentation of her family that results when Amanda, an 11-year-old star gymnast, contracts AIDS from a blood transfusion. Making use of a social issue that comes complete with its own power of myth, Hoffman transforms AIDS to the level of metaphor, detailing the stress not only to the family but also to the community. The community struggling against what is foreign is also explored in Seventh Heaven (1990, 1992). Turtle Moon (1992) moves away from this pattern to assemble what seems to be an entire town of outsiders, some new to Verity, Florida, some who have lived all their lives there. Hoffman again presents the readers with a surreal setting—a town in the grips of excruciating heat, its roads littered with fallen fruit and dying turtles following the moonlight—where anything might happen. It is not a total shock when a young mother is murdered, her baby daughter is missing, and Keith, a troubled adolescent boy, disappears. The novel follows the search of Keith’s mother for her son, a search that reveals both the truth of the dead woman’s past and of her own.
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Second Nature (1994, 1998) is Hoffman’s most surreal and fantastical novel to date. The story itself resembles an allegorical tale. Its central premise is based, in large part, on ancient myth: a wild man raised by wolves, living in the woods of northern Michigan, is caught by trappers and sent to the city where he is incarcerated, the source of medical study and observation, soon to be transferred to the state hospital, a place that would hold him forever. In many ways, this story is a nature myth: the mystical, lyrical texture of the wilds, where one is free, unbounded, symbiotic with nature, as opposed to the confines of the civilized world, where one is chained, bound to the distractions and unnatural acts of domesticated, cultured life. But the two environs meet in Hoffman’s tale of fantasy when Robin, a woman running from a bad marriage and her own disaffection and disappointment, rescues the ‘‘Wolf Man,’’ only later to be rescued by him. Practical Magic (1995), Hoffman’s 11th novel, establishes the strength and enduring power of a matriarchy, generations of women who pass along the secrets of living and loving through an array of psychological filters and interpretations. The novel tells the central story of two sisters, Gillian and Sally Owens, who are raised by their two elderly and exotic aunts. The sisters escape the perceived threat of the mysterious and potentially dangerous world of their aunts, women for whom love itself poses unseen but not unexpected peril, only to return, women bound together by magic. Hoffman has described the predominant theme of many of her novels as the search for identity and connection. By raising this quest to the mythical and metaphorical level, Hoffman allows the reader to look into the deepest fears and problems that are obstacles in the search.
OTHER WORKS: Independence Day (screenplay, 1983). Fireflies (1997). Scribner’s Best of Fiction Workshops (1997). Here on Earth (1998). Local Girls (1999).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Fiffer, S. S. and Fiffer, S., eds., Family: American Writers Remember Their Own (1997). Houston, P., ed., Women on Hunting (1994). Reference works: CA (1979). CANR (1991). CLC (1989). MTCW (1991). Other references: Architectural Digest (1997). Boston Magazine (Oct. 1988). Book World (Jan. 1994, June 1995). Boston Review (Sept. 1985, Oct. 1987, April 1995). Critique (1997). Glamour (Dec. 1994). Ms. (2 Aug. 1979, 8 Feb. 1981). Newsweek (20 Aug. 1979, 12 April 1982, 1 Aug. 1988). New Yorker (15 May 1985). NYT (14 July 1977, 25 July 1987). NYTBR (10 July 1977, 15 July 1979, 28 Mar. 1982, 24 Mar. 1985, 9 Aug. 1987, 26 Apr. 1992). Observer (29 May 1983). TLS (21 Apr. 1978). WP (21 Dec.1980, 19 May 1985, 2 Aug. 1987). Yale Review (Winter 1978). —LINDA BERUBE, UPDATED BY VICTORIA AARONS
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HOFFMAN, Malvina Born 15 June 1885, New York, New York; died 10 July 1966, New York, New York Daughter of Richard and Fidelia Lamson Hoffman; married Samuel Grimson, 1924 (divorced 1936) Daughter of a celebrated German-born concert pianist, Malvina Hoffman studied at the Brearley School and the Art Students’ League in New York. In 1910 she was accepted as a student by Auguste Rodin and was associated with him until his death in 1917. This was the most formative influence upon her work as a sculptor; on his advice she studied anatomy and dissection for three winters at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. Hoffman married a musician in 1924 and was divorced in 1936; there were no children. In 1930 Hoffman received what is believed to be the largest commission ever given a sculptor: over 100 bronzes depicting the races of mankind to be placed on exhibition at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. This project, which opened in 1933, established Hoffman’s reputation as a leading figure in American art. Other widely known pieces include a World War I memorial entitled ‘‘The Sacrifice’’ (1922), in Memorial Chapel at Harvard, and portrait heads of Wendell Wilkie (1944) and of Teilhard de Chardin (1948). Various individual works received numerous prizes and awards. Hoffman was a fellow of the New York Historical Society and a Chevalier of the Legion d’Honneur. Heads and Tales in Many Lands (1937) is Hoffman’s account of her around-the-world trip collecting and modeling ‘‘racial types’’ for the Field Museum’s Hall of Man. The collection was conceived as an artistic as well as scientific record of mankind, especially the primitive races which seemed to be endangered by the rapid diffusion of Western culture. Although she was assisted by ethnographers and anthropologists, each piece of sculpture was finally a record of the artist’s vivid impression. ‘‘I have tried,’’ she wrote, ‘‘both by the gestures and poise of the various statues, as well as by the characterization in the facial modeling, to give a convincing and lifelike impression. I watched the natives in their daily life. . . .Then I chose the moment at which I felt each one represented something characteristic of his race, and of no other.’’ Although a contemporary scientist praised her enthusiastic portrayal of Africans, the collection has been criticized both for the conception of racial type and for the glorification of the Nordic type. Curiously, the statue representing the ‘‘Nordic’’ is based upon a man Hoffman found in New York who had ‘‘the best and most evenly developed physique’’ she had ever seen. The Field Museum no longer displays the collection as a whole, but individual pieces are effective and reveal Hoffman’s gift for portraiture. This project, which occupied Hoffman for most of five years, is again discussed in her autobiography, Yesterday Is Tomorrow (1965), which also treats the years of study with Rodin, and the influence of distinguished contemporaries such as sculptor Ivan Mestrovic, pianist Paderewski, surgeon Dr. Harvey Cushing, and dancer Paul Draper and his sister Ruth, a monologist. There is an
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account of her friendship with the dancer Pavlova, which produced a major work, Hoffman’s 26 bas-relief panels depicting the Bacchanale (1924). Her textbook, Sculpture Inside and Out (1939), intended for beginning and amateur sculptors, shows her interest in the techniques of her art. As a sculptor Hoffman excelled in portraiture. Despite interest in modernism and exposure to Rodin, Hoffman’s work is essentially realistic, often sentimental. Many individual pieces have charm, and all her work is strengthened by her mastery of anatomy. Hoffman’s prose, like her sculpture, is restrainedly genteel. The two biographical volumes provide useful documentation of her social and artistic milieu, the lively New YorkLondon-Paris circuit of the first half of this century. OTHER WORKS: Heads and Tales (1936). A Sculptor’s Odyssey (1936). Map of Mankind (1946). Malvina Hoffman (1948). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Field, H., The Races of Mankind (1933). Reference works: CB (1940, Sept. 1966). NCAB. Other references: American Magazine of Art (Feb. 1934). Art Digest (15 Oct. 1936, 15 March 1937). Art News (Sept. 1966). —JANE BENARDETE
HOGAN, Linda Born 16 July 1947, Denver, Colorado Daughter of Charles C. and Cleona Florine Bower Henderson; married Pat Hogan (divorced); children: Sandra Dawn Protector, Tanya Thunder Horse Poet and novelist Linda Hogan centers herself and, consequently, her readers on what nature has to teach human beings and on the regenerative female forces that shape the world. A writer of Chickasaw heritage, Hogan draws from the matrilineal and matrilocal precontact history of her ancestry. In her works, Hogan seeks to restore the balance between male and female power altered by the domination of Christian Europeans. She offers ancient wisdom about nature in mythological yet contemporary terms. Although born in Colorado, Hogan has her Chickasaw roots in south central Oklahoma; she is descended from a family of storytellers, who influence her writing. Poet, novelist, and essayist, she writes and tells her story from a Native American perspective. Hogan began to write in her late twenties while working with orthopedically handicapped children. Reading Kenneth Rexroth’s work during her lunch hours gave her confidence to start writing. For her the process of writing tapped into her own life; she told an interviewer, ‘‘I write because the poems speak what I can’t say in my normal language.’’ Hogan received an M.A. from the University of Colorado at Boulder (1978), where she is currently a member of the faculty. Previously she taught American Studies/American Indian Studies
at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis (1982-84) and at Colorado College (1980-84). She was awarded both the Pushcart Prize and a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1986. She has also been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and of the Five Civilized Tribes Museum Playwriting award (1980) for A Piece of Moon. She was the D’Arcy McNickle Fellow at the Newberry Library in 1981, a faculty fellow at the University of Minnesota (1985), and the recipient of state arts grants from both Colorado (1984) and Minnesota (1985). Hogan’s first book of poetry, Calling Myself Home (1978), is about discovering herself. In her introduction she wrote, ‘‘These first poems were part of that return for me, an identification with my tribe and the Oklahoma earth, a deep knowing and telling how I was formed of these two powers, called ancestors and clay. Home is in the blood, and I am still on the journey of calling myself home.’’ In ‘‘Heritage’’ she deals with the ‘‘painful and also inescapable reality and knowledge of being mixed.’’ A later volume of poems, Seeing Through the Sun (1985), received an American Book award for poetry from the Before Columbus Foundation in 1986. In That Horse (1985), a collection of notable short stories, Hogan incorporates both her own and her father’s story about the same horse, pointing out that they are very different stories. Her goal is to show the history of the time: ‘‘That Horse deals with the historical fact of fiction and what’s happened with Chickasaw people and what’s happened in my own family particularly.’’ Red Clay: Poems and Stories (1991) brings together work previously published in Calling Myself Home and That Horse. Mean Spirit (1990), Hogan’s first novel, received the Oklahoma Book award for fiction (1990) and the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Association Fiction award. In this long, sad, historical novel, set in the early 1920s, Hogan chronicles the experience of two Osage Indian families during a time when ‘‘oil barons and government agents in Oklahoma swindle oil-rich, landowning Indians out of their land and rights.’’ Her writing style is spare and compact but rich in detailed descriptions of Native American rituals and customs. To write this novel, Hogan drew again from the history of her family. Like many Chickasaw and Choctaw people in the 1930s, her family lost everything when the government and the banks foreclosed on their land. When Hogan was growing up, she was very conscious of the land her family had lost and points out that the Ardmore Airport in Oklahoma was ‘‘my family’s ranch land.’’ Hogan re-creates Native American history and stories in her fiction; starting from this spiritual foundation, her poems seek images to embody its understanding of life and nature. Just as horses, turtles, birds, and small insects are prominent carriers of her poetic images, so too are ‘‘pollen blowing off the corn’’ or ‘‘yellow flowers’’ or the ‘‘yellow sun,’’ as well as ‘‘red clay,’’ and ‘‘brown earth.’’ Her poetry, with its distinctive drive and rhythm and life, is constantly manifesting its respect for the natural world. Hogan volunteers at wildlife rescue clinics to rehabilitate and to care for eagles, owls, and other birds of prey. She considers caretaking the basic work of living on earth and ‘‘sees a direct
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relation between how we care for the animal-people and the plants and insects and land and water, and how we care for each other, and for ourselves.’’ A recipient of the Lannan award in 1994, her Book of Medicines (1993) was a National Book Critics Circle finalist. This volume of poetry is divided into two long sections, ‘‘Hunger’’ and ‘‘Book of Medicines.’’ The poems lay out a plan, much as the New Testament gospels do, in which a new vision of the world takes shape. In Hogan’s poem, however, God resides not above, but within nature. A woman-centered environmentalist view emerges in Hogan’s poetry. Two books appeared late in 1995. Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World gathers 17 essays that express Hogan’s belief in the interconnectedness of all life forms. In the preface she says that she writes ‘‘out of respect for the natural world, recognizing that humankind is not separate from nature.’’ In the novel Solar Storms, she engages the story of five generations of Native American women and their struggle to preserve their way of life. Solar Storms won the Colorado Book award for fiction. It is at once a Native American coming-of-age story and a moving depiction of the ties that bind people to their roots and their land. Hogan is one of three editors for a multihued collection of writings by women on their kinship with animals. Through poems, reports from the field, ruminations, interviews, short stories, and formal essays, a variety of women nature writers and scientists examine the dialogue between species. Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and Animals (1999) gives readers the opportunity to glimpse the personal yet profoundly universal impact of animals on women’s lives. Many reviewers highlight Hogan’s eye for detail and the Native American rituals and customs depicted in her poems and novels. She approaches her characters with reverence and brings them to life with quick, spare phrases. Hogan says, ‘‘My writing comes from and goes back to the community, both the human and the global community. I am interested in the deepest questions, those of spirit, of shelter, of growth and movement toward peace and liberation, inner and outer.’’ Since 1989 she has taught in the American Indian Studies Program and the English Department at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In addition, she gives lectures, readings, and workshops at other universities, in Native American communities, and for Native American organizations. She is committed to environmental preservation and has worked as a volunteer in wildlife rehabilitation clinics in Minnesota and Colorado. OTHER WORKS: Daughters, I Love You (1981). Eclipse (1983). The Stories We Hold Secret: Tales of Women’s Spiritual Development (coeditor, 1986). Savings (1988). Wind Leans Against Those Men (1990). From Women’s Experience to Feminist Theology (1996). Power (1998). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Béranger, J., L’Ici et l’ailleurs: Multilinguise et Multiculturalisme en Amérique du Nord (1991). Bruchac, J., ed.,
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Survival This Way: Interviews with American Indian Poets (1987). Smith, P. C., ‘‘Linda Hogan,’’ in This Is About Vision: Interviews with Southwestern Writers (1990). Swann, B. and A. Krupat, eds., I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers (1987). Reference works: CA (1987). CANR (1995). DLB (1997). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Who’s Who of Writers, Editors, Poets (1989). Other references: American Indian Quarterly (Fall 1991). Journal of Ethnic Studies 16 (Spring 1988). LJ (1 Nov. 1990). NYTBR (24 Feb. 1991). Prairie Schooner (Fall 1983). Studies in American Indian Literature (Winter 1990). WRB (Apr. 1991). —SHARI GROVE, UPDATED BY CELESTE DEROCHE
HOLDING, Elisabeth Sanxay Born 8 June 1889, Brooklyn, New York; died 7 February 1955, Bronx, New York Daughter of Charles S. and Edith Hollick Sanxay; married George E. Holding, 1913 (died 1943); children: one daughter, one son After her marriage, Elisabeth Sanxay Holding lived in South America, the West Indies, and Bermuda, settings used in her fiction. Known primarily as a mystery writer, Holding also wrote romantic social criticism and short stories, two of which were filmed as The Price of Pleasure (1925) and The Bride Comes Home (1936). In both her first and last novels, Holding examines motherhood as a limiting factor in a woman’s life. Invincible Minnie (1920) is the story of Minnie and Frances Defoe, young orphans reared in a tradition of genteel poverty that forms Minnie’s destructive personality. Her determination to marry and her corrupt concept of motherhood excuse any untruth, even bigamy. Tillie MacDonald in Widow’s Mite (1953) hides facts in a murder case, using the welfare of her fatherless son as an excuse. Discussions contrasting detective fiction with the novel’s ‘‘reality’’ lend effective irony. Two nonmysteries denounce social attitudes rendering women useless and unproductive. Rosaleen Monahan and Nicholas Landry in Rosaleen Among the Artists (1921) avoid marriage because of class differences only to learn, years later, that love rooted firmly in sexual desire is a stronger force than social standards. The brisk portraits of Dorothy Mell and Enid Bainbridge, successful, self-supporting painters, and sound discussions of the genesis of real art subdue the plot’s sentimentality. The Unlit Lamp (1922) recounts the story of Claudine Mason Vincelle’s upwardly mobile marriage, which transforms her from a clever, independent girl into a dependent, ineffectual woman. Slowly paced, the novels are nevertheless successful because of sound characterizations.
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Holding’s mystery novels are suspenseful personality studies rather than detective stories, and they often incorporate gothic elements. Dark Power (1930) is wholly gothic: the story of penniless Diana Leonard, isolated in a dreary country house, at the mercy of dangerous relatives. Traditionally, Diana is courted by two young men, and justice triumphs. In Miasma (1929), however, Holding inverts the subgenre, for the isolated innocent is a young physician, Alexander Dennison, who is attractive to two very different girls. A repeated and effective Holding motif is the self-examination and reevaluation to which middle-aged women are forced when violence erupts into the domestic scene. The Old Battle-Ax (1943) depicts widowed Charlotte Herriott, who must sort out both damaging and enhancing self-concepts and separate false friends from true, all in the midst of a murder investigation. Lucia Holley of The Blank Wall (1947; filmed as The Reckless Moment) perceives herself only as wife and mother until she must try to conceal a murder and cope with unsought love. Lucia does not forsake her traditional attitudes, but she does alter them. Vividly rendered difficulties caused by the generation gap contribute to the success of both portraits. Some of Holding’s strongest novels explore damaged personalities and make splendid use of extended interior monologues. Net of Cobwebs (1945, reprinted in London 1952) tells of Malcolm Drake’s faltering return to mental health after the sinking of his merchant ship and his subsequent collapse. In contrast, Montfort Duchesne of The Virgin Huntress (1951) fights a losing battle against guilt and cowardice. The tension in both books arises primarily from the characterization of the protagonists. Another basic Holding plot device sets murder against the background of a failing marriage, focusing on protagonists who have married unwisely but try to keep their bargains. Honey Stapleton in Lady Killer (1942) has married disagreeable Weaver Stapleton for security and has lost almost all will of her own until she sets out to prevent a murder. Hack writer James Brophy in Too Many Bottles (1951, reprinted London 1952, retitled The Party Was the Pay-Off in 1953) has also traded independence for security, only to find himself accused of the murder of his unsuitable wife. Both Honey and James are realistic, tough-minded characters whose self-evaluation and personal growth provide subplots. Too Many Bottles’ analysis of the writing process is fascinating. An early practitioner of the psychological mystery, Holding is considered a solid craftsperson particularly good at characterization and sustained suspense. She is noted for her treatment of a continuing character, police-lieutenant Levy, generally not the protagonist but rather a symbol of sanity, order, and justice. OTHER WORKS: Angelica (1921). The Shoals of Honour (1926). The Silk Purse (1928). The Death Wish (1934). The Unfinished Crime (1935). The Strange Crime in Bermuda (1937). The Obstinate Murderer (1938, in Britain as No Harm Intended, 1939). The Girl Who Had to Die (1940). Who’s Afraid? (1940, alternate title Trial by Murder). Speak of the Devil (1941, alternate title Hostess
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to Murder, 1943). Kill Joy (1942, retitled Murder is a Kill-Joy, 1946). The Innocent Mrs. Duff (1946). Miss Kelly (1947). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (1994). Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection (1976). St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (1996). Other references: Ladies’ Home Journal (Sept. 1925). Mystery Fancier (Sept. 1977). NYTBR (3 May 1942, 3 June 1951). —JANE S. BAKERMAN
HOLLANDER, Nicole Born 25 April 1939, Chicago, Illinois Daughter of Henry and Shirley Mazur Garrison; married Paul Hollander, 1962 (divorced) One of the few female cartoonists whose work has been featured in comic pages throughout the U.S., Nicole Hollander is best known for the comic strip Sylvia. Complete with her trademark feather boa, cigarette, and open-heeled bedroom slippers, Sylvia first began appearing in Hollander’s work in 1979 when her first collection of cartoons, I’m in Training to Be Tall and Blonde was released by St. Martin’s Press. Sylvia has changed the way women are portrayed in mainstream comic strips. Sylvia, a fiftyish wisecracking woman, scrutinizes politics and society from her bathtub, her easy chair, a barroom stool, or lunch table. Her foils are conventional Beth Ellen, her lunch partner; Harry, the cynical bartender; Rita, her patient, health-conscious daughter; and her all-knowing pets. Rita’s father is away; where and why varies. She casts a critical eye on most men and on the occasional female such as conservative spokeswoman Phyllis Schlafly. Although newspaper editors were wary of publishing this hefty woman in bathrobe, backless mules, and dyed hair, the public recognized a folk heroine. Unlike other women in comics, Sylvia is neither glamorous nor upwardly mobile. Her wardrobe is limited, her tastes tend to pizza and beer, and her politics are liberal; she casts a jaundiced eye on the world and says so in 10 words or less. Sylvia is not an analyst; she is an observer and commentator. In one strip, a television announcer notes: ‘‘Studies show that women with ‘sexy names’ like Dawn and Cheryl are less likely to be promoted to managerial jobs than women with names like. . .’’ ‘‘Bill or Roger,’’ Sylvia comments from the bar stool. The strip’s characters also include a cast of Cops who have their own sets of rules and fly about the country trying to inflict them on other people; a fairy godmother, who anticipates women’s needs; Gernif the Venusian, who questions the habits of earth people; bright-eyed Patty Murphy, a fallible television commentator; Alien Lover, a sensitive male; the Devil, who bargains for souls; angels who determine who will enter heaven based on their behavior in the neighborhood supermarket and taste in movies;
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and Grunella, a fortune-teller whose crystal ball forecast can change to accommodate the listener. Sylvia’s cats, who do not speak, but listen, think, write, and act, play a large role. In 1992 Hollander published a book of their advice to cat owners, Everything Here Is Mine: An Unhelpful Guide to Cat Behavior. Hollander was educated in Chicago public schools. She received a B.F.A. from the University of Illinois (1960) and an M.F.A. from Boston University (1966). Growing up in a working-class Chicago neighborhood where the women had all the funny lines, she learned to read, she says, because she wanted to read the comics. As an adolescent, Hollander realized the comics were not relevant to her life because they were written by men and filled with male characters. Her first comic strip was published in Spokeswoman, a national feminist newsletter. The mainstream press resisted: men held decisionmaking positions in most newspapers and Sylvia was too feminist, too outrageous; she did not speak to or for the male point of view. As feminist humor began to command a wider audience, St. Martin’s Press printed the first book of Sylvia cartoons in 1979 and continued as her publisher until 1991. Hollander was first syndicated by the Toronto Syndicate in 1979 and by Field Syndications in 1981. She has been self-syndicated since then, doing both administrative and creative work for the strip. In the late 1980s Sylvia appeared in over 50 newspapers. Hollander was given a national Wonder Woman Award in 1983, an honor given to women over 40 who have advanced the cause of women. In 1985 she received a Yale University Chubb Fellowship for Public Service. Hollander was one of four cartoonists featured in the film Funny Ladies: A Portrait of Women Cartoonists by Pamela Briggs. Sylvia’s Real Good Advice, a musical comedy, first performed in 1991 in Chicago, won a 1991 Joseph Jefferson Award and a Chicago After Dark Award. Hollander remains a keen observer and commentator. In recent years, she has taken a break from putting out books about Sylvia and issued books with a cat focus. As illustrator, Hollander’s projects included 101 Reason Why a Cat is Better Than a Man (1992), Women Who Love Cats Too Much (1995), 101 Reasons Why Cats Make Great Kids (1996), and 101 More Reasons Why a Cat is Better Than a Man (1997). With author Allia Zobel, Hollander offers irreverent advice for the cat lover in all of us. Hollander expounded on her own inscrutable felines’ impeccable taste in My Cat’s Not Fat, He’s Just Big-Boned (1998). Her cats think too much, hypnotize their owners, plot dastardly deeds but get distracted, and are obsessed with food, food, food. But Hollander has not forgotten the acerbic and often feminist humor that created her passionate readers. In Female Problems: An Unhelpful Guide (1995) and Getting in Touch with Your Inner Bitch (1997), she provides provocative and funny commentary on being female. Female Problems offers reflections and cartoons on visits to gynecologists, hair problems, and identifying with the Evil Queen rather than Snow White. Getting in Touch recognizes that the Inner Bitch is the Bette Davis in every woman—that integral, powerful part which often goes unrecognized. Hollander writes for the woman who wants to laugh out loud and speak her mind.
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OTHER WORKS: Hi, This Is Sylvia; Ma, Can I Be a Feminist and Still Like Men? (1980). That Woman Must Be on Drugs (1981). My Weight Is Always Perfect for My Height—Which Varies (1982). Mercy, It’s the Revolution and I’m in My Bathrobe (1982). Sylvia on Sundays (1983). O.K., Thinner Thighs for Everyone (1984). Never Tell Your Mother This Dream (1985). The Whole Enchilada (1986). Never Take Your Cat to a Salad Bar (1987). You Can’t Take It with You, So Eat It Now (1989). Tales from the Planet Sylvia (1990). Everything I Learned About the Rat Race I Learned from My Cat (1999). Also: yearly calendars, the Sylvia Book of Days, mugs, dolls, and greeting cards.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Alley, P. W., ‘‘Hokinson and Hollander: Female Cartoonists and American Culture,’’ in Women’s Comic Visions (1991). Cantarow, E., ‘‘Don’t Throw Away That Old Diaphram,’’ in Mother Jones (June-July, 1987). O’ Sullivan, J., The Great American Comic Strip: One Hundred Years of Cartoon Art (1990). Walker, N., and Zita Dresner, eds., Redressing the Balance: American Women’s Literary Humor from Colonial Times to the 1980s (1988). Reference works: CA (1998). SATA (1999). —JANET M. BEYER, UPDATED BY CELESTE DEROCHE
HOLLEY, Marietta Born 16 July 1836, Jefferson County, New York; died 1 March 1926, Jefferson County, New York Wrote under: Samantha Allen, Jemyma, Joshia Allen’s Wife Daughter of John M. and Mary Taber Holley The youngest of seven children, Marietta Holley was born on the family farm where she lived her entire life. Financial difficulties ended her formal education at fourteen, but she maintained a lifelong fondness for reading. In the 1870s she augmented her family’s modest income by teaching piano lessons. Always inordinately shy, she was fifty years old before she left Jefferson County for the first time. Her shyness eventually prevented her from accepting invitations to read her work in public or to address the leading feminist reformers of the day. After the death of her parents, she lived alone with her unmarried sister, Sylphina, who died in 1915. Nothing about her private life reflects the fact that she was a celebrated humorist whose popularity rivaled Mark Twain’s. Although she initially wrote and published poetry under the pseudonym Jemyma, her contributions to the American vernacular humor tradition began with My Opinions and Betsey Bobbet’s (1873). Holley created in Samantha Allen, her commonsensical persona, an ideal spokesperson for her primary theme: women’s rights. Holley made relatively unpopular feminist ideas more acceptable by grounding them in the domestic perspective of a
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farm wife and stepmother. Even Samantha’s nom de plume, Josiah Allen’s Wife, served as an ironic comment on women’s subordinate social, political, and economic status. Two antagonists to Samantha’s feminism appear in the novel: Josiah Allen and Betsey Bobbet. Josiah’s views are suffused with sentimentality and male egoism, while Betsey, an aging spinster, holds that woman’s only sphere is marriage. Although Betsey soon disappeared from Holley’s work, Josiah continued as a comic foil to Samantha’s feminism and common sense. For her second novel, Josiah Allen’s Wife as a P.A. [Public Advisor] and P.I. [Private Investigator]: Samantha at the Centennial (1877), Holley’s publisher, Elisha Bliss, supplied her with extensive material about the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Thus began the practice that became characteristic of Holley’s humor; she wrote realistic descriptions of places she never visited in person. The travel motif gave Samantha increased opportunity to expound upon a variety of feminist issues, including women’s right to privacy, and to celebrate the wide range of talents displayed in the Woman’s Pavilion at the Exposition. In My Wayward Pardner; or, My Trials with Josiah, America, the Widow Bump, and Etcetery (1880), inspired by an open letter from the women of Utah to the women of the U.S., Holley responded to another contemporary issue, polygamy. She dramatized the abuses of polygamy by having Josiah, under the influence of a Mormon deacon, flirt with a widow. Although we never seriously believe Josiah will take a second wife, Holley came perilously close to destroying the strong family unit that served as the basis for Samantha’s domestic feminism. Holley’s fourth novel, Sweet Cicely (1885), dramatized the plight of women who married intemperate men. The novel was influenced by Holley’s correspondence with Frances Willard, head of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and it echoed the sentimental tone of temperance tracts. Because it dealt extensively with women’s legal status, it was a great favorite of the feminist leaders; Susan B. Anthony wrote Holley to tell her of the pleasure the novel gave her. It was not, however, a popular success. In contrast, her next novel, Samantha at Saratoga; or, Racin’ after Fashion (1887), was Holley’s most popular work. It features Samantha and Josiah vacationing at the country’s most fashionable resort, Saratoga. There Holley attacks, through humor, society’s preoccupation with the genteel values that were antithetical to her goals of full political and economic equality for women. Between 1887 and 1914, Holley wrote 14 more humorous novels that addressed a variety of social issues, ranging from women’s role in the Methodist church to American foreign policy. None of these, however, enjoyed the success of Samantha at Saratoga, and in many the quality of her humor declined. Nonetheless, Holley made important contributions to the American vernacular-humor tradition and to the feminist movement. No other humorist made the opponents of feminism the targets of her humor, and no other feminist used humor as her primary weapon
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for furthering the women’s rights movement. She gave to American literature one of its strongest and most eloquent heroines of the 19th century, and she was influential in making feminist principles acceptable to a wide audience of women. OTHER WORKS: Betsey Bobbet: A Drama (1880). The Lament of the Mormon Wife: A Poem (1880). Miss Richard’s Boy, and Other Stories (1883). Miss Jones’ Quilting (1887). Poems (1887). Samantha Among the Brethren (1890). The Widder Doodle’s Courtship, and Other Sketches (1890). Samantha on the Race Problem (1892). Tirzah Ann’s Summer Trip, and Other Sketches (1892). Samantha at the World’s Fair (1893). Samantha Among the Colored Folks (1894). Josiah’s Alarm, and Abel Perry’s Funeral (1895). Samantha in Europe (1895). Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition (1904). Around the World with Josiah Allen’s Wife (1905). Samantha vs. Josiah: Being the Story of a Borrowed Automobile and What Came of It (1906). Samantha on Children’s Rights (1909). Josiah’s Secret: A Play (1910). Samantha at Coney Island and a Thousand Other Islands (1911). Samantha on the Woman Question (1913). Josiah Allen on the Woman Question (1914). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Blair, W., Horse Sense in American Humor: From Benjamin Franklin to Ogden Nash (1962). Blyley, K. G., Marietta Holley (dissertation, 1936). Curry, J. A., Women As Subjects and Writers of Nineteenth-Century American Humor (dissertation, 1975). Curry, J., ed., Samantha Rattles the Woman Question (1983). Morris, L. A. Women Vernacular Humorists in Nineteenth-Century America: Ann Stephens, Frances Whitcher, and Marietta Holley (dissertation, 1978). Winter, K. H., Marietta Holley: Life with ‘‘Josiah’s Wife’’ (1984). Reference works: AA. AW. DAB. NAW. NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Critic (Jan. 1905). —LINDA A. MORRIS
HOLLINGWORTH, Leta Stetter Born 25 May 1886, Chadron, Nebraska; died 27 November 1939, New York, New York Daughter of John G. and Margaret Danley Stetter; married Harry L. Hollingworth, 1910 Leta Stetter Hollingworth graduated with highest honors in 1906 from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln in preparation for a teaching career. After teaching high school for a short period of time, she accompanied her husband to New York, where she attended Columbia University and received her Ph.D. in 1916 from its Teachers College. She was an instructor of educational psychology at Teachers College for the remainder of her career. While attending graduate school, she had an opportunity to replace Emily T. Burr in administering newly devised mental tests
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in a clinic for the mentally deficient. When Burr, an early worker in this field, returned to her post, Hollingworth was also retained, due to her excellence in carrying out this work. In 1914 Hollingworth was the first psychologist to be appointed under the newly formed Civil Service supervision. Early in her career, Hollingworth expressed a concern with problems connected with the social status of women. The subject of her doctoral dissertation was an experimental inquiry into the alleged limitations of women’s abilities. Many of her early writings, published primarily in the American Journal of Sociology and Medical Record, were concerned with sex differences at birth, variability in achievement as related to sex, sex differences as related to mental deficiency, and social control over the role of women. Functional Periodicity (1914) resulted from these early studies of women. She became an active and lifelong member of ‘‘Heterodoxy’’ and in 1917 was designated as a Watcher for the Woman’s Suffrage Party. Hollingworth was also an early writer in the area of the relationship between intelligence level and delinquency. She continued her association with Bellevue Hospital in New York throughout her career; in 1921 she was appointed psychologist of the classification clinic. Hollingworth is known for her innovative work in three major educational experiments. The first experiment was an analytic and remedial program with children having problems in particular school subjects. The Psychology of Special Disability in Spelling (1918) resulted from her work on this project. The second experiment, which involved children who were ‘‘highly endowed mentally,’’ was known as the Special Opportunity Class. It was concerned with providing the best educational opportunities possible and provided much of the material for Gifted Children (1926). The Speyer School project involved both slow learners (but excluding the mentally deficient) and exceptionally bright children; through this program the adaptation of the school to the needs and capacities of the individual was greatly enhanced. For the five-year experiment, Hollingworth was designated representative of Teachers College in charge of research and educational adviser for the two classes of exceptionally bright students; the school quickly became referred to as ‘‘Leta Hollingworth’s school for bright children,’’ even though they comprised a small minority of the classes. The school attracted much public attention not only in the U.S. but in foreign countries as well. Hollingworth was a prolific writer, who contributed over 80 articles and numerous reviews, reports, and summaries to the field of educational psychology. Materials from her courses taught at Teachers College were coordinated and published in a volume used as a standard text in her field, The Psychology of Subnormal Children (1920). In addition to scholarly works, a collection of poetry of an autobiographical nature was written by Hollingworth and published in Prairie Years (1940). Hollingworth was world renowned for her work in education and educational psychology, particularly in the area of the education of the gifted. Her many publications in this area were major
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contributions in the development of the field. In 1938 the University of Nebraska awarded her an honorary Doctor of Laws degree. In 1940 a Conference on the Education of the Gifted was held in her honor by Teachers College. A volume entitled Education and the Individual—In Honor of Leta S. Hollingworth was issued at the same time. OTHER WORKS: Special Talents and Defects: Their Significance for Education (1923). The Psychology of the Adolescent (1928). Public Addresses (1940). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hollingworth, H. L., Leta S. Hollingworth: A Biography (1943). Reference works: DAB. NAW. —SANDRA KUENHOLD
HOLM, Saxe See JACKSON, Helen Hunt
HOLMES, Mary Jane Hawes Born 5 April 1825, Brookfield, Massachusetts; died 6 October 1907, Brockport, New York Daughter of Preston and Fanny Olds Hawes; married Daniel Holmes, 1849 Mary Jane Hawes Holmes was the author of 39 novels and numerous stories and essays published in periodicals. Her uncle, Joel Hawes, was a well-known New England essayist and preacher whose influence may have contributed to the moral tone of her books. Encouraged by both parents in intellectual and literary pursuits, Holmes entered school at the age of three and at thirteen was teaching in a district school. She published her first story before she was sixteen. With her husband, a Brockport, New York, attorney, Holmes moved to Versailles, Kentucky, for a short period; later that area provided the Southern rural background of her first novel, Tempest and Sunshine (1854). The couple then made their permanent home in Brockport. Childless, Holmes spent her years writing and traveling. While producing novels at the rate of about one a year, she visited such distant places as England, France, Russia, the Mediterranean, and the Far East, gathering statuary, paintings, tapestries, and furniture on her travels. Generous with both her time and her money, she entertained young girls of the neighborhood with talks on her travels and on the art she collected; she also taught Sunday school, built the parish house for her church, was active in the temperance movement, gave financial aid to dependents of Civil War veterans, and paid for the education of two young Japanese girls.
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Though now depreciated for being a writer of mawkishly sentimental, simplistically didactic domestic tales, Holmes was an author whose works had enormous appeal for the unsophisticated reader of her time. Some individual titles sold over 50,000 copies and during her lifetime her book sales totaled more than 2,000,000 copies. In 1870 a writer in Appleton’s Journal claimed Holmes had ‘‘an immense constituency outlying in all the small towns and rural districts.’’ Indeed, small-town and rural life was what she knew best, and it was this life that provided the background for most of her stories. Typical of her work is her first, and most popular, novel, Tempest and Sunshine. The central characters are two young sisters, Julia and Fanny Middleton, who live on a farm about 12 miles from Frankfort, Kentucky. The plot revolves around the courtship complications of several young people, including the sisters, and is filled with such contrivances as intercepted letters, coincidental relationships, and long-lost brothers newly found. The emphasis, however, is upon the contrast of the personalities of the sisters. Fanny, the angelic ‘‘Sunshine’’ of the title, named after Holmes’ own mother, is all purity and kindness, while Julia, ‘‘Tempest,’’ is hot-tempered, deceitful, and cruel. When Fanny becomes engaged to a New Orleans doctor whom Julia wants for herself, ‘‘Tempest’’ intercepts their letters and forges others, which destroy the relationship. Finally, in true domestic novel fashion, goodness and justice triumph, and all the young people are happily paired off except the repentant Julia, who remains at home to care for her aged father. Although both Fanny’s angelic nature and Julia’s conversion strain the modern reader’s credulity, the portraits of some of the minor characters, especially the girls’ roughhewn father, are picturesque and vivid. Furthermore, the portraits of the two sisters echo the light-maiden, dark-maiden motif identified by many critics in the works of Cooper, Hawthorne, and other 19th-century American writers. Holmes’ 1856 novel, Lena Rivers, was second to Tempest and Sunshine in sales. Other popular titles were Meadow Brook (1857), Marian Grey (1863), and Ethelyn’s Mistake (1869). Many of her novels were issued as serials in the New York Weekly. Though her stories were derivative and the situations contrived, Holmes’ strength as a writer lay in her portraits of rural domestic life and in the straightforward simplicity of both her style and her moral code. OTHER WORKS: The English Orphans (1855). The Homestead on the Hillside, and Other Tales (1856). Dora Deane (1858). Maggie Miller (1858). Cousin Maude (1860). Rosamond (1860). Hugh Worthington (1863). Darkness and Daylight (1864). The Cameron Pride (1867). Rose Mather (1868). Millbank (1871). Edna Browning (1872). West Lawn (1874). Edith Lyle (1876). Mildred (1877). Daisy Thornton (1878). Forest House (1879). Chateau D’Or (1880). Red Bird (1880). Madeline (1881). Queenie Hetherton (1883). Bessie’s Fortune (1885). Gretchen (1887). Marguerite (1890). Dr. Hathern’s Daughters: A Story of Virginia, in Four Parts (1895). Paul Ralston (1897). The Tracy Diamonds (1899). The Cromptons (1902). The Merivale Banks (1903). Rena’s
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Experiment (1904). The Abandoned Farm (1905). Connie’s Mistake (1905). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Papashvily, H. S., All the Happy Endings (1956). Pattee, F. L., The Feminine Fifties (1940). Reference works: AA. AW. DAB. LSL. NAW (1971). NCAB. Other references: Bookman (Dec. 1907). Nation (19 Oct. 1907). —ELAINE K. GINSBERG
HOLMES, Sarah (Katherine) Stone Born 8 January 1841, Hinds County, Mississippi; died 28 December 1908, Tallulah, Louisiana Wrote under: Kate Stone Daughter of William and Amanda Ragan Stone; married Henry B. Holmes, 1869 Sarah Stone Holmes was the oldest daughter of seven children. Her father died in 1855, leaving his widow with substantial debts. On her own, her mother bought a new plantation, Brokenburn, in Madison County, Louisiana, engaged slaves, and produced enough cotton to settle the debts. In 1869 Holmes married the ‘‘Lt. Holmes’’ of her journal. They settled in Tallulah, Louisiana, where Sarah became a leader in social and civic affairs. Holmes began her journal in May 1861. It was published in 1955 as Brokenburn: The Journal of Kate Stone, 1861-1868, edited by John Q. Anderson. She was a rabid secessionist and confidently predicted an early Southern victory. Like most people living in the Gulf and Trans-Mississippi states, the Stones did not immediately feel the horrors of war. Life for Holmes and her family continued as it had before secession; parties, household duties, and church were their usual activities. The Stones’ complacency, however, was shattered in 1862 when Holmes’ two younger brothers joined the Confederate army. Both were dead within the year. In addition, the Union army began its first assault on the Mississippi River; the campaign failed, but the following year brought its return and new problems. Yankee raiders roamed throughout northern Louisiana, stealing horses and food and threatening to burn plantations. In March 1863, the Stones left Brokenburn for Texas. Holmes’ diary provides a vivid account of the refugee experience. Literally pursued by Union soldiers, Holmes and her family crossed the bayous by boat at night and then drove overland to safety. The journey in a rickety wagon, under blazing heat, was unpleasant, and was made more so by the hostility of the Texans and their refusal to shelter the refugees. Once settled in a rented house in Tyler, the Stones found goods scarce and prices high. Though refugees in general were resented, Holmes did make friends with local girls and was courted by the men. The family remained in Texas until the end of the war, returning to Louisiana in November 1865. Brokenburn, however, had been partially destroyed by war and floods.
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‘‘How I wish I could write well so that this old life could live in the imagination of my children, but I never had the gift of expression with my pen,’’ Holmes wrote in her 1900 retrospective to the journal. Her modesty is charming, but certainly unwarranted. While Holmes’ writing was unsophisticated, it was literate and striking. Her descriptive passages are so vivid that the reader feels the water through which the Stones had to wade in their escape from Louisiana and the heat of the Texas sun at midday. Interspersed with the narrative are flashes of humor and Holmes’ wry observations of her somewhat eccentric neighbors and friends. Brokenburn is one of the finest published Confederate diaries. Holmes herself was a charming and perceptive narrator, able to convey without false pride or sentiment the trials and accomplishments of her family. Unlike many Civil War diaries and memoirs, Brokenburn is unself-conscious in its depiction of Southern life. Holmes made no attempt to glamorize herself or her surroundings for posterity. Rather, we see life in the Trans-Mississippi Department of the Confederacy as it was: somewhat raw and unfinished and lacking the polish of the older Eastern states. For its charm and realism, Holmes’ diary deserves a place in the libraries of historians and literary scholars alike. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Massey, M. E., Refugee Life in the Confederacy (1964). Wilson, E., Patriotic Gore (1962). —JANET E. KAUFMAN
HOOKS, bell Born Gloria Jean Watkins, 25 September 1952, Hopkinsville, Kentucky Daughter of Rosa Bell Watkins Born in Kentucky to a Southern black working-class family, Gloria Jean Watkins grew up ‘‘talking back’’—childhood punishments left her feeling exiled from the adult community and thus she turned to books and discovered an imaginary community. In ‘‘Black Is a Women’s Color,’’ she says she began writing poetry, ‘‘using the poems to keep on living.’’ She has transformed the paradigm of ‘‘talking back’’ into an empowering metaphor for speech: ‘‘It is that act of speech, of ‘talking back,’ that is no mere gesture of empty words, that is the expression of our movement from object to subject—the liberated voice.’’ Watkins’ maternal great-grandmother, ‘‘a sharp-tongued woman’’ who ‘‘talked back,’’ was named Bell Hooks, and it was this name she chose as a pseudonym, in lower case because ‘‘claiming this name was a way to link [her] voice to an ancestral legacy of women speaking.’’ Demonstrating her own ability to ‘‘talk back’’ with authority and eloquence, hooks has published several volumes of social, cultural, and autobiographical criticism, a book of poetry, and numerous critical articles. Educated at Stanford, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of California, Santa Cruz (where she received her Ph.D. in 1983), hooks first and most polemical book, Ain’t I a
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Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981), is a self-proclaimed ‘‘book of the heart, expressing the deep and passionate longing for change in the social status of black women, for an end to sexist domination and exploitation.’’ A political gesture toward liberating the colonized mentality that fosters racism and sexism, this book provoked much critical commentary and debate and (although it took seven years to find a publisher) launched her prolific writing career as a ‘‘cultural worker’’ and social critic. In Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), hooks articulates the need for a feminist theory that addresses the mechanics of marginalization. Her consciousness of the impact of marginalization upon groups who exist outside of the center of white, middle-class, heterosexual feminism emerged from her own experience of the dividing railroad tracks in the small Kentucky town where she grew up. There, the tracks ‘‘were a daily reminder of [her] marginality’’ from the affluent world of the white middle class. The book articulates the need to bring women who have existed only marginally in the feminist movement into dialogue with those in the center. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (1989) articulates African American women’s struggle to emerge from silence: ‘‘Moving from silence into speech is for the oppressed, the colonized, the exploited. . .a gesture of defiance that heals, that makes new life and new growth possible.’’ The essays in this book ‘‘talk back’’ by addressing the politics of domination in institutions of cultural production. The politics of cultural production is also hooks’ subject in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (1990). The essays in this collection range across film, television, music, the consumer culture, the community, and postmodernism; hooks locates a yearning for radical social change in postmodern representations of race, class, gender, and sexual practice. A dialogue with the philosopher Cornel West, published as Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (1991), is an intense and wide-ranging discussion of black intellectuality and the crises of both African American women and men. With their discussion, hooks hopes to create a ‘‘community of comrades who are seeking to deepen our spiritual experience and our political solidarity.’’ In Black Looks (1992), ‘‘a series of essays about identity,’’ hooks extends her critical interest in representations of blackness in the media, particularly in film. A prolific public speaker who has lectured all over the country, hooks is also an accomplished teacher and a member of the faculty at Oberlin College. She demonstrates in her writing, speaking, and teaching an activism that testifies to her engagement with the community of whom she speaks so eloquently whenever she ‘‘talks back.’’ Throughout the rest of the 1990s, hooks continued to write prolifically and to lecture, addressing a widening range of subjects and refining her positions on race, feminism, and culture. Killing Rage (1995) is an argument for creating dialogue on difficult subjects. Subtitled Ending Racism, the book emphasizes a liberal approach to ongoing racial divisions. ‘‘I understand rage to be a necessary aspect of resistance struggle,’’ she wrote. Art on My Mind, from the same year, contains essays on Alison Saar, Jean
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Michel Basquiat, Carrie Mae Weems, and Lorna Simpson, along with polemic, personal recollections, and interviews. In it she wrote, ‘‘Art constitutes one of the rare locations where acts of transcendence can take place and have a wide-ranging transformative impact.’’ If her position as one of the premiere African American intellectuals has enabled hooks to be seen and heard in more places than her 1960s counterparts might have been, it has also exposed her to the criticism of conservatives who dismiss her social critique as outdated and liberals who want her to stop focusing on such popular culture topics as Madonna and to make better use of the attention she commands. Nevertheless, hooks’ book on the movies, Reel to Real, hardly fits into the category of conventional entertainment journalism. Two of her more recent books, Wounds of Passion and Remembered , tread the familiar ground of writers writing about writing, but hooks revitalizes some of the old questions by incorporating her contemporary take on race and gender. OTHER WORKS: And There We Wept (1978). Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery (1992). A Woman’s Mourning Song (1999). Happy to Be Nappy (1999). Important articles include: ‘‘Black Women’s Sexuality in the New Film,’’ Sage (1985). ‘‘Writing the Subject: Reading The Color Purple,’’ Modern Critical Views: Alice Walker (edited by Harold Bloom, 1987). ‘‘Black Is a Woman’s Color,’’ Callaloo (Spring, 1989). ‘‘Essentialism and Experience,’’ American Literary History (Spring, 1991). ‘‘Democracy, Inc.: The Hill-Thomas Hearings,’’ Artforum (January, 1992). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Florence, N., bell hooks’ Engaged Pedagogy (1998). Feminist Review (Autumn 1989). Signs (Summer 1986). —LISA MARCUS, UPDATED BY MARK SWARTZ
HOOPER, Lucy Born 4 February 1816, Newburyport, Massachusetts; died 1 August 1841, Brooklyn, New York Wrote under: L. H. Daughter of Joseph Hooper From an early age, Lucy Hooper’s educational and creative development was supervised and encouraged by her father. She was educated in botany, chemistry, French, Spanish, Latin, and English literature. In 1831 after her father’s death, the family moved to Brooklyn, where Hooper soon began contributing to the Long Island Star and the New Yorker. A devoted member of the Episcopal church, she wrote a prize-winning essay, ‘‘Domestic Happiness,’’ and two other pieces on religion and virtue for Dunning’s collection, Domestic Happiness Portrayed (1831). Hooper’s last year was spent editing The Lady’s Book of Flowers and Poetry (1842), a compendium of botanical information,
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poems, and illustrations, but she died of pulmonary consumption before its publication. Hooper’s more serious poems develop religious themes. ‘‘The Daughter of Herodias,’’ selected by William Cullen Bryant for inclusion in his volume of American poetry, recounts Salome’s sorrow and remorse on bearing the head of John the Baptist to her unpitying mother. Salome’s horror of death, her loss of innocence, and her forlorn desire for forgiveness are conveyed through the distraught voice of a young woman recounting ‘‘wild dreams of judgment and offended Heaven.’’ The skillful mixture of pentameter and trimeter lines and the unconventional rhyme pattern enhance this strange vision. In ‘‘The Queen’s Petition,’’ Hooper effectively uses blank verse to retell the story of Esther. Here the narrator abandons the ‘‘pages of old romance’’ to turn to the ‘‘inspired volume’’ where love between a man and a woman can become the means of a people’s salvation. Along with these two poems, contemporaries tended to favor such pieces as ‘‘Time, Faith, Energy,’’ ‘‘It is Well,’’ ‘‘The Summons of Death,’’ and ‘‘Life and Death,’’ all of which assure the reader that, in time, death will offer comfort and retribution for the hardships and sorrows of life. Too often Hooper allows her poetry to fall to the level of conventionally inconsequential romantic verse. Her editor recalls that she rarely revised, but her gift for easy meters and rhymes is not always a happy one. Her frequent use of variations on the ballad stanza relegates much of her output to light verse. She is too content to settle for facile rhymes such as ‘‘light/night’’ and ‘‘bloom/doom,’’ and tends to rely on trite refrains, such as ‘‘Lady, ’twas a dream,’’ to hold together her poems of knights and their ladies, of death and faithful love. Hooper’s prose is usually overtly didactic. ‘‘Scenes from Real Life,’’ for instance, is devoted to revealing the folly of such sins as pride and greed and to praising the attributes of loyalty, good taste, and reverence. One tale does show promise of a more original imagination. ‘‘Reminiscence of a Clergyman’’ presents the interesting moral dilemma of a man who, presumed lost at sea, returns after many years to find his wife now happily married to his brother. Having established this situation, however, Hooper is satisfied to have the man find peace by relying on the future happiness guaranteed in the next world. A contemporary critic evaluated Hooper’s work in what still appear to be valid terms. He wrote: ‘‘She was known to be capable of much more than she had ever accomplished. She chose, however, to make no struggle for fame; but preferred to sing occasionally a spontaneous song, and scatter flowers by the wayside.’’ Regretting that she did not make more effort, this critic continues: ‘‘What she left will be enough for memory with us, even if her fame was not matured for the world’s wider circle.’’ OTHER WORKS: Scenes from Real Life, and Other American Tales (1841). The Complete Poetical Works (1848). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: The American Female Poets (1848). Appleton’s Cyclopedia of American Biography (1887). A
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Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors Living and Deceased (1863). The Female Poets of America (1851). —PHYLLIS GOTTLIEB
HOOPER, Lucy (Hamilton) Jones Born 20 January 1835, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; died 31 August 1893, Paris, France Daughter of Bataile Muse Jones; married Robert E. Hooper, 1854 Born into a prominent Philadelphia family, Lucy Jones Hooper began her literary career as an extension of her social obligations. At the Great Central Sanitary Fair in Philadelphia, she helped edit the daily chronicle and presented 100 copies of her first book of poems and translations from the German. A reverse in her husband’s finances, however, compelled Hooper to make her literary dabbling into a source of additional revenue. From 1868 to 1870, she was both a contributor and assistant editor of Lippincott’s magazine, and a second book of poems was published in 1871. In 1874 her husband was appointed vice-consul general in Paris. There Hooper found herself a central member of the American colony and an active participant in literary, artistic, and intellectual circles. She maintained a regular correspondence with numerous American periodicals, among them the Post-Dispatch of St. Louis and Appleton’s Journal. Her column in the Philadelphia Daily Evening Telegraph, where she reported on the fashion, art, and politics of Europe, ran without interruption for 20 years. In addition to her journalistic work, Hooper wrote two plays—one, Her Living Image (1886), with French dramatist Laurencin, and another, Helen’s Inheritance, which was produced in Paris in 1888, and in New York, as Inherited, in 1889. She also wrote three novels. The first, Under the Tricolor; or, The American Colony in Paris (1880), raised quite a stir, as various publications attempted to identify the fictional characters with living Americans. Without this element of gossip, however, the plot, which involves a romance between two insipid young people of good family but inadequate finances, is extremely dull. The characters are not allowed to develop beyond their stock roles as cruel father, flighty widow, uncultured provincial, or benevolent patron. Hooper does not have sufficient control over the tone of the book, which swings from sentimental pathos to what seem to be aborted attempts at satire. The Tsar’s Window (1881), on the other hand, is still rather engaging. The story is told primarily through the journal of Dorris Romilly, a device employed less consistently and less successfully in Under the Tricolor. While the romantic plot at times verges on the melodramatic, Dorris’ confusion over the character and motives of various suitors awakens the reader’s curiosity. Moreover, her straightforward intelligence, her independence, her wit, and her ability to laugh at herself all gain immediate sympathy. Without unnecessary preaching, Dorris’ character provides a
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vigorous defense of the American system of education, which, unlike the European, allowed women to have at least a modicum of freedom. In addition, the detailed descriptions of life in St. Petersburg in winter give an authentic and interesting picture of aristocratic life in 19th-century Russia. Sentimental themes of melancholy and death are prominent in Hooper’s poems, but her poetry is most successful when she is able to maintain a tough-minded stance toward romantic clichés. A poem such as ‘‘The Duel’’ deftly conveys the façade of flippant bravado assumed by a man who has just killed another and is now trying to quiet his wife’s fears as well as his own. The rhyming iambic pentameter line is smoothly colloquial throughout. Similarly, ‘‘Gretchen’’ uses a simple four-line stanza and refrain to tell the story of a young woman who drowns her illegitimate baby to maintain her spotless reputation. Hooper had a sharp eye for contemporary issues and social mores, a sound knowledge of the arts, an honest wit, and a clear-headed intelligence. When she allows these qualities to dominate, her work still commands attention. Unfortunately, she too often succumbs to using sentimental conventions to defend the platitudes of proper moral behavior. OTHER WORKS: Poems with Translations from the German of Geibel and Others (1864). Poems (1871). Those Pretty St. George Girls (1883). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Scharf, J. T., and T. Westcott, eds., History of Philadelphia, 1609-1884 (1884). Reference works: AA. Appleton’s Cyclopedia of American Biography (1887). AW. CAL. DAB. NCAB. Other references: Philadelphia Evening Telegraph (31 Aug. 1893, 12 Sept. 1893). —PHYLLIS GOTTLIEB
HOPE, Laura Lee See ADAMS, Harriet Stratemeyer
HOPKINS, Pauline (Elizabeth) Born 1895, Portland, Maine; died 23 August 1930, Cambridge, Massachusetts Also wrote under: Sarah A. Allen Daughter of William A. and Sarah Allen Hopkins Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins was educated in the public schools of Boston. Before she graduated from the Girls High School, she had won a prize of $10 in gold, offered by the Congregational Publishing Society of Boston, for the best essay on ‘‘The Evils of Intemperance and Their Remedies.’’ Initially, she aspired to be a
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playwright, and in 1879 wrote the musical drama Slaves’ Escape; or, The Underground Railroad, also known as Peculiar Sam. Another play, One Scene from the Drama of Early Days, based on the biblical story of Daniel, was also written in this period. From 1892 to 1985, she worked as a stenographer and eventually won a civil service appointment to the Bureau of Statistics on the Massachusetts Decennial Census, where she worked from 1895 to 1899. In May 1900, she resumed her literary career with a short story in the inaugural issue of the Colored American magazine. By May of 1903, she had become the literary editor of the magazine and contributed many short stories and essays, one series of 12 biographical articles on ‘‘Famous Men of the Negro Race,’’ and another series on ‘‘Famous Women of the Negro Race.’’ Two of her novels, Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest and Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self, were serialized in the magazine in 1902. Another serialized novel, Hagar’s Daughter, was apparently also written by Hopkins, under the pen name Sarah A. Allen. Because of ill health, in 1904 Hopkins left the Colored American, which had moved to New York, and returned to the stenographic profession, this time at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her only literary endeavor after this was a series of articles, ‘‘Dark Races of the Twentieth Century,’’ which appeared in the Voice of the Negro from December 1904 through July 1905. Contending Forces (1900), Hopkins’ only novel published in book form, is a romance written in the typical genteel style common at the turn of the century. The plot centers on four young people in Boston who fall in love and, in spite of calamities, tragedies, and a complicated series of events, end up happily married and in possession of a lost family fortune. The ‘‘contending forces’’ in the novel are those problems and injustices African Americans encountered both in the North and in the South after the Civil War, such as the lack of political power, the difficulty in obtaining jobs, and most serious, the lynchings that were such a common occurrence in the South. In her frequently didactic style, she refers often to the inevitable and desirable mixing of the races through marriage. Mysticism and other psychic phenomena are important in the novel, existing concurrently with staunch, traditional Christianity. In the preface, she speaks of herself as ‘‘one of the proscribed race’’ and frequently uses the terms ‘‘inferior’’ and ‘‘superior’’ when referring to the black race and the white race, respectively. The serialized novels and numerous short stories share a similar style and subject matter; almost all have a strong mystical element, and many deal with interracial love and marriage. Many of her essays are biographical with an obvious didactic tone, and she invariably points out that perseverance and hard work have resulted in the various individuals’ success. In an essay in the Colored American of June 1900, she advocates limited suffrage for women. As one of the first black women writers, Hopkins has a secure niche among the ‘‘Talented Tenth’’ of the Negro race, as W. E. B.
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Du Bois designated the African American middle class of his day. Hers were not explicitly novels of protest, of which there were none at the turn of the century; she writes only of the black middle class and its problems. Her descriptive prose is often excessively florid, and when writing in dialect she falls short of authentic reproduction. Nonetheless, she occupies a unique place in the African American literary heritage as a woman who did no less herself than what she expected of her readers. OTHER WORKS: The papers of Pauline Hopkins are housed at the Fisk University Library in Nashville, Tennessee. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bone, R., The Negro Novel in America (1965). Campbell, J., Mythic Black Fiction: The Transformation of History (1986). Carby, H. V., Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Women Novelists (1987). Gloster, H., Negro Voices in American Fiction (1948). Loggins, V., The Negro Author: His Development in America to 1900 (1964). Pryse, M. and H. J. Spillers, eds., Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, Literary Tradition (1985). Reference works: Black American Writers Past and Present (1975). Dictionary of American Negro Biography (1982). DLB (1986). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Colored American (Jan. 1901). Phylon (Spring 1972). —MARILYN LAMPING
HOPPER, Hedda Born Elda Furry, 2 May 1885, Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania; died 1 February 1966, Los Angeles, California Daughter of David E. and Margaret Miller Furry; married DeWolf Hopper, 1913 (divorced 1922); children: one son The fifth of nine children, Hedda Hopper grew up in Altoona, Pennsylvania, where she left eighth grade to help at home and in her father’s butcher shop. She fiercely resented her autocratic father and grandfather and envied her brothers’ freedom. After seeing Ethel Barrymore on stage, Hopper vowed to become an actress. She studied music in Pittsburgh, then joined a road company in New York. In 1908, appearing in the chorus of The Pied Piper, she met actor DeWolf Hopper, 27 years her senior; she became his fifth wife and changed her name to Hedda. After the birth of her son in 1915, Hopper followed her husband to Hollywood, where he was to make a film. Although she had given up her career at marriage, she now accepted minor stage and screen roles offering her a security her husband could not. In 1922 Hopper divorced him on the grounds of adultery. In 1938 Hopper began a news column, later syndicated as ‘‘Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood.’’ Her background in films and theater provided excellent contacts; her innate sense of fashion
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helped her establish her personal trademark, the elaborate hat. She emerged as an awesome rival for gossip queen Louella Parsons— movie stars, with few exceptions, trod softly to avoid her wrath. She and Parsons became the Scylla and Charybdis of Hollywood. Columnist Hopper’s politics grew increasingly conservative, her morality sterner. She campaigned vigorously against communism in Hollywood and her personal feuds were legion. At her peak she claimed 35 million readers. Death came suddenly from complications of viral pneumonia. Hopper is frequently charged with having a ghostwriter for her column; in fact, she did not write it herself. The column was dictated to her staff (a rewrite woman, two secretaries, and two legmen), who then revised and typed it for her final approval. She could not spell, did not know grammar, and cared less. Hopper’s style is breezy and colloquial (‘‘Boy! Heck! ’’). Sunday feature articles are generally more focused and coherent; daily columns are breathless bits and pieces, with occasional acidic allusions to those currently out of her favor (such as Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, and Joan Bennett). Hopper’s From Under My Hat (1952) has been called ‘‘an amorphous autobiography.’’ Hopper officially eliminates five years from her life, omits dates, and ignores chronology wherever possible; thus her book becomes anecdotal and totally confusing. The Whole Truth and Nothing But (1963) resembles a dramatized gossip column bridging the years between the two books. Hopper’s organization is much tighter (perhaps because of her coauthor). The book also includes considerable grade-B dialogue, as Hopper offers counsel to erring film stars. There is an incredible scene in which Hopper summons Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Wilding to her home for prenuptial advice. (Wilding subsequently sued Hopper and her publisher for $3 million.) Hopper’s real influence came not through her books but through her column and her presence in a Hollywood now vanished. She recaptures some of that nostalgia, but the writing is frequently dull. Her view of women is not flattering; she praises Joan Crawford by writing that she ‘‘thinks like a man.’’ Hopper calls herself ‘‘The Bitch of the World,’’ delighting in her feuds, yet there is little of the well-turned phrase, the quick wit, in her work. At her best, Hopper recounts anecdotes; at her worst, she insinuates. She is no writer, but a talker, a gossip (albeit a powerful one), and too frequently a minor actress starring at last in her own books. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Eells, G., Hedda and Louella (1972). Reference works: CB (Nov. 1942, Mar. 1966). Other references: Chicago Sunday Tribune (24 Aug. 1952). NYT (14 Sept. 1952, 2 Feb. 1966). Time (28 July 1947, 15 Feb. 1963). —JOANNE MCCARTHY
HORLAK, E. E. See TEPPER, Sheri S.
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HORNEY, Karen (Danielsen) Born 16 September 1885, Hamburg, Germany; died 4 December 1952, New York, New York Daughter of Berndt and Clothilde Danielsen; married Oscar Horney, 1909 (divorced 1939); children: three daughters Karen Horney developed an early interest in foreign peoples, their cultures and customs, when in her teens she made several ocean voyages with her father, a devoutly religious Norwegian sea captain. Because of his long absences, however, it was Horney’s free-thinking Dutch mother who exerted the stronger influence and encouraged her to attend medical school at a time when professions were virtually closed to women. Horney received her medical degree from the University of Berlin in 1913. She married a Berlin lawyer, with whom she had three daughters before conflicting interests and her growing dedication to psychoanalysis resulted in separation in 1926 and divorce in 1939. After teaching for 12 years at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, Horney emigrated to the U.S. in 1932 and became a citizen in 1938. Horney codirected the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis (1932-34), taught at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute (1934-41), helped found the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis and the American Institute for Psychoanalysis, served on the teaching staff at the New School for Social Research, lectured at the New York Medical College, and was founding editor of the American Journal of Psychoanalysis. Horney’s most significant works include The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (1937), which stresses the impact of culture and environment on character development. New Ways in Psychoanalysis (1939) clarifies Horney’s position in relation to Freud. Our Inner Conflicts (1945) emphasizes the interpersonal dynamics of neuroses. Neurosis and Human Growth (1950), the most comprehensive explication of Horney’s mature ideas, focuses on the intrapsychic dynamics of neuroses. Horney’s break from Freud marks the beginning of her important contribution to the development of both psychological theory and therapy. It was triggered by her repudiation of Freud’s instinctivistic and male-oriented psychology. In a reversal of Freud’s concepts, Horney contends that neuroses may originate in adulthood as well as in childhood, that they are not an outgrowth of normal processes but a perversion of them, and that the dynamics of male and female neuroses are identical. Horney’s theory postulates a ‘‘real self’’ is the central motivating force of the psyche. It generates a ‘‘morality of evolution’’ whereby ‘‘man, by his very nature. . .strives toward self-realization, and. . .his set of values evolves from such striving.’’ It is the ‘‘blockage’’ of the real self Horney considers the first move toward neurosis. A ‘‘disturbance in one’s relation to self and to others,’’ neurosis results from a lack of love, security, belonging, and self-esteem. In an attempt to allay anxiety and cope with life, the individual develops a pseudo-‘‘solution.’’ This solution generates a complex system of defense mechanisms and a unique worldview
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with a corresponding system of values, needs, and taboos. The three types of solutions include the self-effacing solution, which puts a premium on love, the expansive solution, which exalts mastery, and the resigned solution, which idealizes detachment. Every neurosis incorporates all three solutions; but for the sake of inner harmony, the individual makes one solution predominant and represses the others. One of the most important functions of the solution is its compensation for a lack of healthy self-esteem by creating an ‘‘idealized image’’ in which the individual takes an unhealthy pride. Indeed, one makes an unconscious ‘‘bargain with fate’’ by which all wishes will be fulfilled and pride reinforced if one can become the idealized self. Thus, one abandons the real self and begins to develop in self-alienated ways in the course of this search for glory. Far from solving problems, however, the solution generates a host of difficulties on both intrapsychic and interpersonal levels. Problems arise on an intrapsychic level because the needs of the solution are compulsive and take on the authority of ‘‘shoulds’’ that produce self-hate if the individual fails to live up to them. Since the standards of the idealized self are superhuman, self-hate is inevitable. It is exacerbated, moreover, when circumstances bring the repressed solutions to the surface. Since the three solutions are incompatible, the surfacing of a repressed tendency involves the individual in a conflict by which the fulfillment of one set of needs violates a contradictory set. Instead of becoming the idealized self, the individual is forced by self-hate to identify with its counterpart—the despised self. Interpersonal problems are caused by the individual’s distorted view of others, seen according to the individual’s needs. Lacking self-esteem, the neurotic’s false pride depends totally upon the opinions of others. To avoid inner conflict, ‘‘shoulds’’ are externalized and become ‘‘claims’’ on others. To allay self-hate, the neurotic projects it either directly in the form of vengeance or passively by seeing himself or herself as victimized. In all these ways, the neurotic’s vulnerability, dependency, and hostility are augmented. Ultimately, the neurotic solution does not provide salvation but becomes a monster by which the individual is enslaved to inner dictates, snarled in unreconcilable conflicts, and tormented with self-hate. Horney compares the neurotic’s bargain with fate to ‘‘a pact with the devil, who promises him glory’’ but makes him ‘‘go to hell—to the hell within himself.’’ In spite of this ‘‘great tragedy,’’ Horney’s theory is optimistic. It is possible to free the real self from its crippling shackles, to recover the individual’s actual capabilities, and to revive spontaneous wishes and wholeheartedness so that once again one can head in the right direction on the road to self-realization. Not only is Horney’s work notable for its description and etiology of neuroses and for its advancement toward a theory of healthy self-actualization, but it is also notable for the great strides it has made in feminine psychology. It has contributed to the liberation of woman from the image of virgin/mother/goddess and to the recovery of her humanity, together with the challenge to
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develop her ‘‘human’’ potentialities for strength, creativity, and growth. On the basis of Horney’s great achievements and the future possibilities offered by her work, she not only holds a place of distinction in American psychology—to which the Karen Horney Psychoanalytic Institute in New York City stands as testimony— but she also claims an international reputation, as indicated by the translation of her books into 13 languages. Although she is a scientist, Horney also made an impact on the world of literature. Her style blends the imaginative ideas, easy flow of language, and intriguing sense of humor that lend it the beauty of art with the precision, documentation, and explication that give it the authority of science. In addition to the pleasure and self-understanding to be derived from Horney’s work, it is an invaluable tool to the student of literature. Because it deals with enduring elements in human experience, Horney’s theory is congruent with a great many characters from Western literature of many periods and cultures. By providing a means to explain the conflicts, inconsistencies, and contradictions of these characters, it can lead to a deeper understanding of complex characterization than criticism has hitherto afforded. Horney’s work holds open the doors to the self, to others, and to literature. Through these doors can be found a fuller life of one’s own and a place in the human struggle for communication, understanding, and empathy that will make life richer for everyone.
OTHER WORKS: Self-Analysis (1942). Feminine Psychology (1964).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Alexander, F. A. et al., eds., Psychoanalytic Pioneers (1966). Kelman, H., Helping People: Karen Horney’s Psychoanalytic Approach (1971). Paris, B. J., A Psychological Approach to Fiction (1974). Rubins, J. L., Developments in Horney Psychoanalysis (1972). Rubins, J. L., Karen Horney: Gentle Rebel of Psychoanalysis (1978). Reference works: CB (Aug. 1941, Jan. 1953). DAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCAS. Other references: American Journal of Psychoanalysis (1954, 1961). —KAREN ANN BUTERY
HOUSTON, Jean Born 10 May 1939, Brooklyn, New York Daughter of Jack and Maria Todaro Houston; married Robert Masters, 1965 Jean Houston, scholar, researcher, author of more than 17 books, calls herself a ‘‘midwife of the spirit.’’ Her work involves
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the study, collection, and application of human capacities developed around the world under different environmental and social conditions. Her books expand our understanding of human possibility through the examination of states of consciousness, sensory imageries, self-regulation of experiential time, and the exploration of the personal and collective unconscious. A ‘‘hybrid of hybrids,’’ Houston’s genetic background marries Scottish-Sicilian on her mother’s side with her father’s Texan and Cherokee heritage. Her father, a descendent of Texas hero Sam Houston, wrote comedy sketches for such notable personalities as Henny Youngman, Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Edgar Bergen, and others on the Hollywood scene of the 1940s and 1950s. ‘‘Gianuzza,’’ as her maternal grandmother called her, had a nomadic childhood, moving from one city and school to another as her father’s career moved them across the country. Rather than becoming the shy and reticent ‘‘new kid,’’ she learned to walk into the schoolroom and command control. Houston’s formidable talents as an evocateur of human capacities advance her vision of the highest achievement of individual potential, a key theme in the field of humanistic psychology. What makes Houston’s work unique is her ability to inspire individuals to see their own lives in terms of the larger world stage. Her experiential workshops, integrating imagery and creativity studies with exercises originally aimed at developing flexible body movement, result in improved memory, and the ability to think simultaneously on several tracks and reconnect with the mythic and symbolic realms of the deep self. The process contributes to both psychological and physical healing. In 1965 Houston and her husband, Robert Masters, started the Foundation for Mind Research in New York City to study methods of exploring human consciousness. She was among a team of experts who had grant money to study the effects of LSD on personality. When legalized tests of the substance ended, they focused on nondrug methods for exploring human consciousness, developing a sensory deprivation chamber, an audiovisual overload chamber, and an Altered States of Consciousness Induction Device (ASCID). That same year, they published their first book together, The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, elaborating on their mutual and separate studies. The book, featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review under the headline ‘‘Psychedelicious or Psychedelirious?’’ launched Houston’s career as a speaker on college campuses and talk shows. For the remainder of the 1960s she became a maverick against the indiscriminate use of psychedelic drugs, a proponent of controlled nondrug mind-expanding experiences, and an ersatz ‘‘drug counselor’’ trying to talk students on bad trips back to earth. Mind Games (1972) addresses much of Houston’s and Masters’ work in the 1960s, describing their attempts to utilize altered states of consciousness for educational purposes. The late mythologist Joseph Campbell, with whom Houston conducted seminars and workshops, wrote that Houston and Masters had ‘‘broken through to a new understanding of the. . .disciplines of inward-turned contemplation,’’ leaving behind Freudian techniques of the day. Their focus, he argued, was not on curing disease but
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on enlarging health and discovering the joy, mystery, and life-wisdom of the unconscious. A protégé of Margaret Mead, with a matching sense of curiosity, independence, and mettle, Houston learned the workings of organizations and power structures Mead had observed in her work as an anthropologist. ‘‘Go out and make the money [for the foundation] yourself,’’ Mead advised Houston. ‘‘Then the job you want to do gets done and you are beholden to no one.’’ Both Campbell and Mead served on the Foundation Advisory Board, as did Israeli physicist Moshe Feldenkrais, artist Leo Katz, and philosopher Alan W. Watts. In 1972 the Foundation moved to Pomona, New York, where it has become a center for ongoing classes, seminars, and workshops. As founder of the Mystery School, which meets nine times a year in upstate New York, Houston remains dedicated to teaching history, philosophy, the new physics, psychology, anthropology, and myth as well as ‘‘the many dimensions of our human potential.’’ Houston’s range of accomplishments is prodigious; awards and citations include the distinguished Leadership Award from the Association of Teacher Education (1985); the Gardner Murphy Humanitarian Award and the INTA Humanitarian of the Year award (1993); the Lifetime Outstanding Creative Achievement Award from the Creative Education Foundation (1994); and the Joseph Campbell Award for Contributions to the Understanding of Mythology (1996). During her 30-year career, she has lectured and taught at Hunter College of the City University of New York, the New School for Social Research, Marymount College, the University of California at Santa Cruz, and gave the William James Lecture at the Harvard Divinity School. Her work has fostered hundreds of teaching/learning communities throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe, Asia, South America, and Australia. In 1984 she founded the Possible Society, a nonprofit organization that encourages the solution of societal problems. She chaired the United Nations Temple of Understanding Conference of World Religious Leaders in 1975, served as president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology in 1977, and chaired the 1979 U.S. Department of Commerce symposium for government policymakers. As an adviser to UNICEF, she works to implement programs in education and health, primarily in Myanmar (Burma) and Bangladesh. Most recently, Houston made cross-cultural studies of educational and healing methods in Asia and Africa. ‘‘The world is set for a whole-system transition wherein all cultures have something of supreme value to offer the whole.’’ This holographic vision of the future speaks to the salvation of the planet and the human race. OTHER WORKS: Listening to the Body (with Robert Masters, 1978). Life Force: The Psycho-Historical Recovery of the Self (1980). The Possible Human (1982). The Search for the Beloved: Journeys in Sacred Psychology (1987). Godseed: The Journey of Christ (1988). The Hero and the Goddess: The Odyssey as Mystery and Initiation (1992). Public Like a Frog: Entering the
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Lives of Three Great Americans (1993). Manual for the Peacemaker: An Iroquois Legend to Heal Self and Society (with Margaret Rubin , 1994). The Passion of Isis and Osiris: The Union of Two Souls (1995). A Mythic Life: Learning to Live Our Greater Story (1996). A Passion for the Possible (1997). Erwachen (German, 1997). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Jean Houston website: www.JeanHouston.org —MIRIAM KALMAN HARRIS, PH.D.
HOWARD, Maureen Born 28 June 1930, Bridgeport, Connecticut Daughter of William S. and Loretta Burns Kearns; married Daniel Howard, 1954; Daniel J. Gordon, 1968 Maureen Howard attended Smith College (B.A., 1952) and was briefly employed in publishing. She is a novelist and has also been a frequent reviewer, particularly for the New York Times Book Review. Howard teaches at Columbia University. She has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner award three times: in 1983, 1987, and 1993. Howard is one of the most important female novelists in America today, yet she goes largely unrecognized by feminists and by the general public, probably because her work is neither didactic nor fast-paced. Instead, the action is almost entirely cerebral, with events perceived indirectly, often filtered through the consciousness of the main character. Howard’s characters are searching for liberation; they attempt to free themselves, not politically but psychologically, from a past to which they are tied by memories and commitments too strong to escape completely. Howard’s memoirs demonstrate the power of the past in her personal life. Facts of Life (1978) is oblivious to chronology; it circles and recircles Howard’s past in an attempt to unravel its mysteries, creating a cumulative effect. The product of a middle-class family, her parents were so strictly Catholic that when little Maureen inadvertently broke her fast with orange juice before her first communion, her white dress and veil were packed away for a later date and the family celebration was canceled. Her mother had an unfocused admiration for the arts, sending Howard off to piano, dancing, and elocution lessons, while her father ridiculed art as unrealistic and pretentious, purposefully discomfiting his family with coarse ostentation. As a little girl, Howard, like her mother, ‘‘did not want art confused with real life,’’ so it is to her credit that her novels have overcome this separation. The conjunction of art and life came gradually. Howard herself describes Not a Word About Nightingales (1961) as ‘‘mannered’’ and ‘‘academic’’; it demonstrates the formal and thematic belief that ‘‘our passion must be contained if we are not to be fools.’’ This first novel juxtaposes the cultural reticence of New England with the emotional effusion of Italy (not unlike the
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opposing commitments of Howard’s parents). A New England professor on sabbatical decides to stay in Perugia, while his wife returns home, maintaining her quietly controlled demeanor. But she sends their daughter to bring her father home. At first the daughter prefers the father as she finds him in Italy, extroverted and appetitive; but when she discovers his affair with a plump signorina, she stages a suicide scare to manipulate her father into returning home. He is, in any case, now bored with his poverty, his mistress, his role. His return marks the resumption by the whole family of the reticent and controlled lives of their past. Howard’s second novel is far more challenging both in form and subject matter. Bridgeport Bus (1966) is presented as the notebooks of Mary Agnes Keely, a 35-year-old Catholic virgin who lives with her demanding and obese mother in a tacky Bridgeport duplex. Mary Agnes runs off to New York, and in the permissiveness of that society the notebook’s style becomes as experimental as the heroine. Half the book deals with the personal histories of Mary Agnes’ roommate and cousin, but an attempt to focus the novel comes at the end, which returns us to the beginning, when Mary Agnes goes back to Bridgeport as the new ‘‘Fat Momma’’ of a baby girl. There is, it seems, no bus out of Bridgeport, no escape from the past. This is the pattern again repeated in Before My Time (1975), where Jim Cogan arrives at the beginning and leaves at the end of the novel, with Laura Quinn left standing at the airport having thought a lot but changed little. Jim is the 17-year-old son of Laura’s cousin, sent to stay with Laura and her husband while awaiting arraignment on drug-possession charges. As Laura and Jim trade memories, she begins to envy his freedom from a past that has committed her to inescapable patterns of behavior. Jim is able to shrug off the past, saying it is ‘‘before my time,’’ but she carries burdens: a dead older brother to live up to, a pattern of orderly repression (revealed by her journalism), her tasteful suburban home, and the man she married. Jim Cogan’s anarchy exposes her restraints, yet when she offers him money to escape entirely from the law, from his family, and from his past, he refuses and takes up the commitments that she finds so restrictive. Howard’s novels consistently show a skillful, yet unpretentious and unobtrusive, stylistic sensitivity, with a fine sense of descriptive monologue conveying subtle nuances of meaning. Reviewers compare her to Henry James and Virginia Woolf, and while she has not reached the artistry of either, she may yet do so. She writes in a way that calls readers’ attention to her works as written texts, documents of life. It is not just that she often writes both about writing and writers—Margaret Flood, protagonist of Expensive Habits (1986) is a writer; Jack, a character in Natural History (1992), is a would-be screenwriter; and almost all of the characters of her recent novels are compilers and editors of their own memories. It is also Howard’s round, sometimes-jagged, often-poetic narrative structures and prose augment our understanding of the setbacks, start-ups, and rich, enigmatic moments of her characters’ lives. Almost all of Howard’s more recent critics see her as a superb craftsperson, and many of them cite her precision of perception,
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her abundance of feeling, and occasionally, her tendency to judge. Her few negative reviews stem from what the critics see as her excessive ellipses and her penchant for leaping from person to person (both in terms of character and narrative point of view) and from story line to story line. In an interview, Howard commented, ‘‘The most exciting thing in the world to me is the idea of audience. The knowledge that someone has had to do some work on the other side—to understand what you’ve implied, to imagine something in a new way.’’ Grace Abounding (1982) features Maude Dowd, widow, childlike mother of Margaret, fantasizer, and finally, child psychologist. Maude’s character remains as unfixed as Howard’s narrative, which alights on Margaret, the eccentric LeDoux sisters, and an abused little boy, among others. Expensive Habits centers on, but hardly restricts itself to, another multifaceted, intelligent, struggling woman. Margaret Flood battles, perhaps tritely, an injured heart. The novel chronicles her attempted rewritings of her life, which are beautifully crafted and perceptive, but can never tell the whole story. In this and her other novels, Howard creates the paradox of adding more and more details that increase our understanding of the novel while simultaneously expanding the parameters of what we have to understand. Natural History is Howard’s biggest novel, both in scope and ambition. It chronicles the development of Bridgeport, Connecticut, and some of its inhabitants, especially the Bray family. One critic names Howard’s native Bridgeport as the protagonist, a good choice for those who insist that every good, big novel have one. The novel’s lack of a main character, and of linear chronology and a consistent mode of storytelling (it includes prose narrative, screenplay, and civic diary), challenges notions about the necessities of novel writing. Howard’s experimentalism is not merely for its own sake: her characters are also experimenting— adding meaning to the mystery of their lives and vice versa. Howard’s seventh novel A Lover’s Almanac (1998) is the first of a proposed trilogy of stories set in the year 2000. Howard follows Louise Moffett, born and raised on a Wisconsin farm, and her boyfriend, Artie Freeman, a Park Avenue-raised computer geek. On the dawn of the new millennium, the two break up and Howard traces their feelings and subsequent reunion using the style of an almanac. As she charts the lives of the main characters—and a secondary relationship between Artie’s widowed grandfather and a woman from his past with whom he begins a relationship—Howard weaves predictions from the Old Farmer’s Almanac to make her points. She also adds biographical tidbits about Alexander Graham Bell, Virginia Woolf, Bill Gates, facts about astronomy and ancient Egypt, and bits of astrology. ‘‘Nearly every culture has created an almanac of some kind, trying to set some pattern—like a calendar—on the chaos of our emotions,’’ Howard explained to the Seattle Times in a review of her latest work. OTHER WORKS: The Penguin Book of Contemporary American Essays (editor, 1984). Contributor to: O Pioneers!, The Son of the
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Lark & My Antonia (1998); Cabbage and Bones: An Anthology of Irish-American Women’s Fiction (1997). Numerous articles and book reviews in such publications as Yale Review, NYTBR, the Nation, and the Virginia Quarterly.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1975). CANR (1990). CLC (1988). CN (1991). DLB (1983, 1984). MTCW (1991). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Booklist (1 Jan. 1998). LJ (Dec. 1997). Newsweek (20 Jan. 1975). NR (4 Oct. 1982). NYTBR (19 Jan. 1975, 26 Sept. 1982, 21 Nov. 1982, 8 June 1986, 18 Oct. 1992). PW (27 Aug. 1982, 15 Oct. 1982, 13 Oct. 1997).SR (Winter 1975). Seattle Times (11 Feb. 1998). —SUZANNE HENNING UPHAUS, UPDATED BY FAYE HALPERN AND NICK ASSENDELFT
HOWE, Florence Born 17 March 1929, Brooklyn, New York Daughter of Samuel and Frances Stilly Rosenfeld; married Paul Lauter, 1967 Raised in Brooklyn in an orthodox Jewish family, Florence Howe received a B.A. from Hunter College (1950), an M.A. in English from Smith College (1951), and did further graduate work at the University of Wisconsin (1951-54). A teacher at Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland, from 1960 to 1971, Howe found the direction of her thinking and teaching altered by work in a Mississippi Freedom School during the summer of 1964; by participation in the anti-Vietnam War and student movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s; and by the desire to apply what she had learned from these experiences to writing and teaching, particularly to writing and teaching about women. A national leader in the field of women’s studies and one of its best-informed historians, Howe taught as a professor of humanities at the State University of New York at Old Westbury, and has been visiting professor of women’s studies at institutions here and abroad. She also served as editor of the Women’s Studies Newsletter, president of the Feminist Press, and coordinator of the Clearinghouse on Women’s Studies; she has been chairperson of the Modern Language Association’s commission on the status of women and division of women’s studies, as well as the association’s president. Howe’s essays and books are marked by several general characteristics: a recognition of the interrelationships between education, politics, and the teaching and writing of literature; a tendency to move from personal experiences (her own or those of others) to more general social analysis and then to the working out
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of practical strategies for change; and a willingness to speak to a wide variety of audiences both within and without the women’s movement and the educational establishment. In essays on contemporary British novelist Doris Lessing, Howe comments on the ways in which Lessing links the growth of her characters and their struggles with freedom and madness, with larger struggles against racism and war, and with the breakdown of Western culture. Similarly, her introduction to No More Masks! (1973), an anthology of modern American women poets, emphasizes connections between the personal and the political in poems in which these writers explore their identities as writers and as women. In more general essays on the connections between feminism and literature, Howe’s principal assumption is that there are important—indeed crucial—connections of class, race, sex, and ethnicity between literature and the lives of those who write and read it. Pointing to our ignorance of women writers of the past, of feminist polemical writing, and of women’s history, she asks us to search for what has been left out of the literary canon and to ask in what ways rediscovered works by women force upon us a revised sense of the value and function of literature. She argues that if women, blacks, or others whose viewpoints are absent from works deemed great by the literary establishment are exposed to a ‘‘vision of the power of language and idea’’ in literature expressive of their own experience, a growth in self-respect and self-awareness and a desire for social change will result. In detailing the extraordinary growth of women’s studies during the late 1960s and early 1970s, Howe has defined its goals as raising the aspirations of women as individuals and as a group working for social change, compensating for the omission of women from the curriculum, encouraging the development of research tools and skills, and working to discover the lost or neglected history and culture of women. Further, Howe insists the perspective of women’s studies must be brought to the elementary and secondary schools, where perceptions of self and society are formed, if feminist goals for education and society are to be achieved. On their broadest level, these recommendations stem from Howe’s conception of power, as described in Women and the Power to Change (1975), ‘‘not as a finite commodity through which one person or group controls another,’’ but as an instrument for social change that can be diffused throughout a group when those with the capacity to lead use their talents to energize others rather than to control them. Seeing women not simply as victims of socialization and discrimination, but as potential agents of their own deliverance. Howe followed up her No More Masks! with a revised and expanded edition in 1993, compiling selected works from more than 100 women poets. As editor, Howe compiled an anthology which represents culturally diverse poetry. Both the former and the new anthologies have met with critical praise from experts and fans for highlighting little-known female writers. But critic Adrian Oktenberg of the Kenyon Review says the revised edition could
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have been deeper and more provocative, missing an opportunity to delve deeper into areas only touched upon by earlier works. Yet Oktenberg still believes No More Masks! is a work worth reading nonetheless. Howe’s Feminist Press marked its 25th anniversary in 1995. ‘‘The books we have brought to light are essential if our daughters and their daughters are to continue to live in a society that values and esteems not only women writers, but also the history and culture their books record,’’ Howe remarked. The press publishes 15-20 books a year. In 1993 the Feminist Press published Women Writing in India: 600 BC to the Present. The 1,200-page, two-volume work distills the most critically conscious writing from one of the longest traditions of women’s literature in the world, according to the Press. It’s next project is Women Writing in Africa, a series of volumes of African women’s writings never before available. Other ongoing projects of the press include the Cross-Cultural Memoir series and the Helen Rose Scheuer Jewish Women’s Series. Howe was the recipient of the Mina Shaughnessy Award Fund for Improvement of Post-Secondary Education in 1982-83. In addition, she was an NEH fellow, 1971-73; a Ford Foundation fellow, 1974-75; Fulbright fellow in 1977; Mellon fellow at Wellesley College in 1979; and a U.S. Department of State grantee in 1983 and 1993. OTHER WORKS: The Conspiracy of the Young (with P. Lauter, 1970). Women’s Studies: Evaluation and Impact on Institutions (1979). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: WW in America (1998). Other references: Choice (Nov. 1973). Critic (May 1971). Harvard Educational Review (Feb. 1977). Kenyon Review (Summer 1994). Political Science Quarterly (Spring 1976). Radical Teacher (Dec. 1977). Saturday Review (19 June 1971). WHR (Winter 1974). Women’s Review of Books (Nov. 1993). —JANET SHARISTANIAN, UPDATED BY NICK ASSENDELFT
HOWE, Julia Ward Born 27 May 1819, New York, New York; died 17 October 1910, Newport, Rhode Island Daughter of Samuel and Julia Cutler Ward; married Samuel G. Howe, 1843; children: six Julia Ward Howe was born into a wealthy New York City family. A combination of tutors and private schools provided her with an excellent education in literature and the Romance languages. She later taught herself German and studied the German philosophers. During her sheltered childhood and youth, her only
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vent for her emotions was the writing of religious poetry. Howe’s life of seclusion ended when she married Samuel Gridley Howe, the director of the Perkins Institute for the Blind. She bore six children in 16 years. Throughout the 1850s and 1860s, Howe struggled to establish a literary career despite her husband’s disapproval. She felt required to publish her first book of verse, Passion Flowers (1854), anonymously. The poems, regular in meter and rhyme, vary in theme and purpose. Passion Flowers contains a number of powerful emotional poems with themes of conflict, disappointment, and inadequacy. Although some of the poems in Words for the Hour (1857) continue to reflect Howe’s inner turmoil and unhappiness, most of the verses are conventional in tone. Later Lyrics (1866) introduces what was to become Howe’s primary poetic form: commemorative verses designed to celebrate a public event or notable personality. Howe’s final book of poetry, From Sunset Ridge (1898), reprinted some of her early poems in addition to publishing new commemorative verse. Other writing ventures included articles for the abolitionist newspaper Commonwealth, a brief stint as editor of Northern Lights, two travel books, travel letters to the New York Tribune, two wordy and unsuccessful plays, and a series of philosophical essays designed to be read as parlor lectures. Howe’s one substantial literary success was the publication of her ‘‘Battle Hymn of the Republic,’’ in Atlantic Monthly (February 1862). The poem gained increasing popularity as the century progressed, but Howe’s publishers forced her to recognize that the audience for her poetry was dwindling. By 1870 Howe was casting around for other ways to express herself. In 1868 Howe embarked on two new projects that departed dramatically from the literary salonière image she had cherished for so long. She helped found the new American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). She was an officer of the AWSA and its successor, the National American Woman Suffrage Association, for 41 years. Howe also helped found the first woman’s club in the Northeast, the New England Woman’s Club, and served as its president for 38 years. In the early 1870s, Howe added to her list of causes by initiating a women’s campaign for world peace. She made speeches, wrote letters, and circulated brief addresses that she composed herself. None of this material found favor with any publisher, but it helped establish Howe’s reputation as a woman activist, her vocation for the rest of her life. During the decades of the 1870s and 1880s, Howe wrote prodigiously. She wrote personal letters, increasing the bonds between women’s organizations and encouraging the founding of new clubs. She took extended lecture trips several times a year, during which she spoke extensively on women’s issues. In 1873 she helped found the Association for the Advancement of Women, a forerunner of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. In connection with her presidency of this organization, she wrote numerous papers on topics of concern to women.
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Howe’s feminist theory pervaded her lectures, articles, and even her occasional sermons. It was an articulate blend of conventional notions about women’s natural domesticity and moral superiority with more radical views concerning women’s spiritual and intellectual equality with men. She saw traditional femininity as a power base that women should strengthen by broader education and work experience. As a means to these ends, she advocated a better distribution of power within the family and the state, opportunities for higher education for women, support for working women, and access to the professions. Howe believed that America would achieve the glory to which she aspired during the 19th century only when women had received the opportunities and respect they deserved. As her sermons and lectures gained renown, Howe came to see herself as a guardian of American virtue. Two of her published lectures—Modern Society (1881) and Is Polite Society Polite? (1895)—reflect her convictions concerning the manners and morals of the New England elite, combined with a new emphasis on woman’s role in maintaining these values. When, in the 1890s, old age limited Howe’s mobility, she began a new career as an essayist for popular and religious magazines. She wrote about everything from ‘‘The Joys of Motherhood’’ to ‘‘Lynch Law in the South.’’ The exposure that these publications provided built up a new, gratifying reputation for Howe as ‘‘Queen of America’’ and ‘‘America’s Grand Old Lady.’’ Although Howe’s writings for public consumption were numerous, very few of them were published by a commercial establishment. The small fraction of her work that was published is not her best writing. The reams of articles and lectures that were never published, however, contain lively images and vigorous, convincing arguments. Howe’s major contribution was her ability to galvanize thousands of women into cooperative action on behalf of their sex. Her flair for ‘‘finding the right word,’’ as she put it, helped improve the status of women for generations, long after her poems and plays were forgotten.
OTHER WORKS: The World’s Own (1857). A Trip to Cuba (1860). From the Oak to the Olive (1868). Memoir of Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe (1876). Margaret Fuller, Marchessa Ossoli (1883). Reminiscences, 1819-1899 (1899). At Sunset (1910). The papers of Julia Ward Howe are housed in the Schlesinger Library of Radcliffe College, the Houghton Library of Harvard University, and the Library of Congress.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Clifford, D., Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Biography of Julia Ward Howe (1979). Elliott, M., The Eleventh Hour in the Life of Julia Ward Howe (1911). Grant, M. H., Private Woman, Public Person: An Account of the Life of Julia Ward Howe from 1819-1868 (1994). Gray, J. and C. W. E. Bigsby, She Wields a Pen: American Women Poets of the 19th Century (1997).
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Hall, F., The Story of the ‘‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’’ (1916). Johnson, W. D., Serious Sentimentalism: A Rhetoric of Antebellum American Women’s Verse (dissertation, 1995). Kane, P., Poetry of the American Renaissance: A Diverse Anthology from the Romantic Period (1995). Kelly, M., ed., Woman’s Being, Woman’s Place: Female Identity and Vocation in American History (1979). Mead, E., Julia Ward Howe’s Peace Crusade (1910). Richards, L., and M. Elliott, Julia Ward Howe, 1819-1910 (1915). Richards, L., Two Noble Lives: Samuel Gridley Howe and Julia Ward Howe (1911). Schriber, M. S., Telling Travels: Selected Writings by Nineteenth-Century American Women Abroad (1995). Tharp, L., Three Saints and a Sinner (1956). Williams, G. Hungry Heart: The Literary Emergence of Julia Ward Howe (1999). ZinkSawyer, B. A., The Preachers and the Suffragists: The Role of Preachers in the Ideological Transformation of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States (dissertation, 1998). Reference works: AA. AW. CAL. DAB. FPA. NAW (1971). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —MARY H. GRANT
HOWE, Susan Born 1937, Ireland Susan Howe’s poetics are in some respects the opposite of Walt Whitman’s. Where Whitman sought to mythologize America by celebrating Abraham Lincoln, the common worker, and, most famously, himself, Howe has questioned American mythologies, digging up the roots of Americana and struggling to find a place for herself. Whitman’s poems demand to be read aloud; Howe’s ask to be seen arranged on the page. Howe was born in Ireland, and though her subject matter remains centered on America, she draws on Irish literature in the context of the immigrant experience, and her harsh, minimal language has been compared to that of Samuel Beckett. But another harsh, minimal voice has inspired Howe to a far greater extent. She explores and reinterprets this voice in a work of poetic criticism, My Emily Dickinson (1985), demonstrating Dickinson’s intense engagement with American social and intellectual currents and therefore rescuing her from the kid gloves of critics who insist on treating her like an effete hermit. Frame Structures (1996) anthologizes Howe’s early poems, drawing on chapbooks published between 1974 and 1979. Chanting at the Crystal Sea (1975) touches on the history of the Quincy family (descendants of President John Adams) and the ruination of American Indian culture, testing their congruity with the poet’s personal history and an assortment of jarring images: ‘‘children coiled like hedgehogs’’; ‘‘blankets congealed / into icicles’’;
and ‘‘fire hung up by threads.’’ Secret History includes such nontraditional elements as line drawings, appropriated text fragments, and typographical idiosyncrasies, all of which would proliferate in later work, but this poem also has its traditional, even lyrical moments: ‘‘Flakes of thick snow / fell on the open pages.’’ Howe has been grouped with the Language Poets, a designation that brings out her self-conscious use of words, but she never sacrifices feeling for form. Howe’s prose preface to Frame Structures deals obliquely with the autobiographical, familial, literary, and historical sources of her early poetry, swooping from Nigeria to Niagara and Egyptian tombs, to memories of her father and mother, to meditations on the intimacy of archives and antiquarianism. Defenestration of Prague (1983) begins with a 17th-century incident that set off the Thirty Years War and shifts to Ireland, where the poet proceeds to mingle personal history, the ongoing sectarian conflict that proves how little progress has been made in three centuries, and the person of Esther Johnson. Better known as the ‘‘Stella’’ figure in Jonathan Swift’s love poems, Johnson is an elusive, compelling muse, and Howe collages 18th-century texts with Shakespeare’s Cordelia and other works into a personal meditation on female identity miles away from pop psychology or historical romance. My Emily Dickinson followed, and the New England poet took Stella’s place, allowing for a wide-ranging study with a paradoxically narrow focus on a single poem, ‘‘My Life had stood—a Loaded gun—.’’ ‘‘She built a new poetic form,’’ wrote Howe, ‘‘from her fractured sense of being eternally on intellectual borders.’’ The book offers not only a reevaluation of Dickinson’s place in literary history but a virtuosic explication of the poem around which the study is based. According to Marjorie Perloff, ‘‘Howe’s aim is not so much to ‘explain’ Dickinson’s meanings as to relive them.’’ In another nonfiction work, Birth-Mark (1993), Howe explores the concept of wilderness in American literature, surveying a number of writers to determine how wilderness fits into American mythology. In revisiting and interrogating quintessentially American voices, Howe has developed one of her own. Bypassing Whitman, she takes on not just Dickinson but Thoreau, Emerson, and such modern counterparts as Hart Crane and John Cage. Sometimes she even collides her own voice against itself. The final page of ‘‘Scattering As Behavior Toward Risk,’’ from her Singularities (1990), is a dizzying vortex of diagonal lines, where ‘‘Freak inside the heart’’ and ‘‘Secret fact a title given’’ literally intersect and overlap. OTHER WORKS: A Bibliography of the King’s Book or, Eikon Basilike (1989). The Europe of Trusts (1990). The Nonconformist’s Memorial (1993). Pierce-Arrow (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Quartermain, P., Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe (1992). —MARK SWARTZ
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HOWE, Tina Born 21 November 1937, New York, New York Daughter of Quincy and Mary Post Howe; married Norman Levy, 1961; children: Eben, Dara Born in New York City to a family of writers, Tina Howe writes plays stretching dramatic forms and evoking her selfprofessed ‘‘obsession’’ with art. While these plays often feature artists as characters, their concerns are the integration of art and daily life, her themes the renewal and regeneration only art and children provide. After graduating from Sarah Lawrence College (B.A. 1959), where she wrote her first play, Howe spent a year in Paris where she ‘‘wrote around the clock. . .and the infatuation [with playwriting] began.’’ After returning, she earned her teaching credentials at Columbia Teachers College and Chicago Teachers College, then began teaching high school first in Monona Grove, Wisconsin, and later in Bath, Maine. There, she says, she learned her craft while running the drama department, a task she took on with the agreement that only her plays be produced. The Nest (1970) was Howe’s first professionally produced play. Often innovative and even experimental, Howe’s most critically successful works to date have been Painting Churches, which won the Outer Critics Circle Award for best Off-Broadway play, 1983-84, and was produced by PBS’ American Playhouse series in 1986, and Coastal Disturbances, which received a Tony nomination for best play, 1987. In 1983 Howe received an Obie for distinguished playwriting. Howe has always claimed an affinity with the absurdists. Her work, however, in its playful exploration of the absurd in a realistic setting, more resembles the early absurdists Pirandello and especially Giraudoux, than it does later, more minimalist absurdists such as Beckett and Genet. Her plays typically work through theme and variation based on musical forms rather than linear plot development. She moves her characters to epiphany incrementally, through accretion, in a series of large and small moments that build into a final, resonant image. This led to some unfounded accusations of formlessness in early reviews by critics more used to obvious moments of crisis and resolution. Howe’s plays develop a rhythmic energy that carry them beyond the ordinary and into a heightened realism bordering on the fantastic or absurd, ending in a release: unexpected silliness, poignant ecstasy, what she calls ‘‘the flamboyant in everyday life.’’ Howe’s plays are notable as well for their imaginative use of settings, from a full working kitchen in Art of Dining (1978) to the complete art exhibit of Museum (1983). Perhaps influenced by her mother’s work as a watercolorist, Howe’s stage directions often provide visual tableaux, as in the strikingly pictorial Coastal Disturbances, and an emphasis on the final image in the stage directions of each play. In The Art of Dining, Howe’s personal
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favorite, the characters huddle around a bonfire inside a restaurant ‘‘purified of their collective civilization and private grief’’ as they feast and the curtain falls. And in Approaching Zanzibar (1990), a young girl bouncing on a trampoline (made up to look like a bed) chants, ‘‘Paradise. . .paradise,’’ as she bounces higher and higher, until she ‘‘looks like a reckless angel challenging the limits of heaven.’’ Howe’s plays have been produced around the country and abroad and have premiered in such prestigious venues as the Los Angeles Actors Theatre, the New York Shakespeare Festival, the Kennedy Center, and the Second Stage. She has also received a Rockefeller grant, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Guggenheim fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and letters award in literature, and received two honorary degrees. Although her family has its roots in the Boston area, Howe has spent most of her life in and around New York City. She teaches playwriting at Hunter College and New York University, as well as at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, University of the South, Tennessee. Howe has served since 1990 on the council of the Dramatists Guild. Howe’s plays continue to document how the public perceives and interprets art and the arts. She acknowledges that women playwrights are often treated with disdain by what remains the largely male domain of the theater but continues to enjoy making the act of writing plays as difficult as possible via her selection of unexpected and untraditional situations and settings. Howe truly pushes the envelope more than the traditional, conservative playwright. Her absurdist comedy, One Shoe Off (1993), explores marriage, fidelity, and courage while also paying homage to the theatrical cliché that the show must go on no matter what else is happening. Her most recent offering is Pride’s Crossing (1997), produced at the Mitzi Newhouse Theatre of Lincoln Center. Called by most critics the best new play of the 1997-98 season, Pride’s Crossing is the story of Mabel Tiding Bigelow. The play opens when Mabel is ninety years old, as she tells the story of her failed attempt to escape from her upper-class Boston upbringing. Mabel moves from age ninety to ten, to thirty-three, to fifteen, to sixty, and finally back to ninety. The complex lead character of Mabel has clashed with society as she tried to make a place for herself in a world not quite ready for her feminist tendencies. Howe created the character of Mabel by blending her own eighty-nine-year-old Aunt Maddy with Gertrude Ederle, who at age nineteen swam the English Channel in 1924. The renegade Mabel of Pride’s Crossing, Massachusetts, swam the English Channel at the age of twentyfive, but rather than focusing on the swim, debated a marriage proposal instead. Pride’s Crossing was one of three plays nominated for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. Yet the 1997 jury believed none of the three had filled all the criteria for the Pulitzer and no award was given. Pride’s Crossing, however, did receive the 1998 New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best American play.
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OTHER WORKS: Closing Time (1960). Birth and After Birth (1974). Swimming (1991). The following pieces in: ‘‘Birth and After Birth’’ in The New Women’s Theatre (edited by H. Moore, 1977); ‘‘Antic Vision,’’ American Theatre Magazine (Sept. 1985); ‘‘Stepping Through the Frame,’’ Art and Antiques (Jan. 1987); ‘‘Teeth,’’ in Best American Short Plays (1990), and in Antaeus Plays in One Act (edited by D. Dalpern, 1991); ‘‘The Reluctant Exhibitionist,’’ Allure Magazine (Sept. 1991); One Shoe Off (produced 1993), and others.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brown, J., Feminist Drama, Definition and Critical Analysis (1979). Hart, L. ed., Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women’s Theatre (1989). Brater, E., ed., Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights (1989). Betsko, K., and R. Koenig, Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights (1987). Di Gaetani, John L., A Search for a PostModern Theatre (1991). Foster, K., ‘‘Detangling the Web: Mother-Daughter Relationships in the Plays of Marsha Norman, Lillian Hellman, Tina Howe, and Ntozake Shange’’ (thesis, 1994). Schlueter, J., ed., Modern American Drama: The Female Canon (1990). Reference works: CA (1983). CLC (1988). CD (1988). CBY (1990). FC (1990). Notable Women in the American Theater (1989). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: New York (28 Nov. 1983, 22-29 Dec. 1986). NYT (1 May 1983, 28 Nov. 1983, 16 Nov. 1986, 30 April 1989, 7 May 1989). Newsday (11 Jan. 1998). Otherstages (27 Jan. 1983). Studies in American Drama, 1945-Present (interview, 1989).Theatre Week (12 June 1989). —MARCIA HEPPS AND WILLIAM KEENEY, UPDATED BY HEIDI HARTWIG DENLER
HOWES, Barbara Born 1 May 1914, New York, New York; died 24 February 1996 Daughter of Osborne and Mildred Cox Howes; married William J. Smith, 1947 (divorced); children: two sons After graduating from Bennington College in Vermont, Barbara Howes lived in Italy, England, France, and Haiti; she lived the remainder of her life in Vermont, with frequent visits to the West Indies. She had two sons and was divorced. Howes was the recipient of many fellowships and awards. Her professional activities were literary rather than academic; she was editor of Chimera magazine from 1943 to 1947. In her essay in Poets on Poetry, Howes discussed the poets who have influenced her, her interest in translation and in adapting Old French and other literary forms to contemporary concerns, her purpose in writing, the importance in her work of
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domestic subject matter and of place, and her distrust of the ‘‘snarling little ego,’’ her aversion to writers who ‘‘give in to violence and spite.’’ The constants in Howes’ poetry are a detached, restrained tone that carries considerable tight-lipped intensity; an intellectual concern with physical and human nature and with the patterns and principles that underlie and relate their behavior; and a technique that is flexible, controlled, and relatively traditional. Unlike so many contemporary postmodernist poets, she did not write social protest about the women’s movement or the Vietnam War, and she was neither confessional nor surrealistic. Also unlike them, she manipulated rather than abandoned conventional prosody. Howes chose many traditional subjects, such as still-life; mythological personages; objects d’art; specific persons (‘‘To W. Howes Auden on His Fiftieth Birthday’’), places (‘‘On a Bougainvillaea Vine at the Summer Palace,’’ ‘‘Views of Oxford Colleges’’), and occasions; and nature interpreted by and for civilization: a deer in hunting season ‘‘dropped like a monument,’’ a dead toucan described as ‘‘a beak with a panache / chucked like an old shell back to the Caribbean.’’ Howes’ most insistent theme is that unrestricted emotion blinds and imprisons if allowed to dominate either life or art. In ‘‘The New Leda,’’ Howes speaks of the woman dedicated to the god, whether Zeus or Christ: ‘‘Her / limbo holds her like a fly in amber, / Beyond the reach of life.’’ In ‘‘For an Old Friend,’’ she imagines the friend thinking ‘‘ This hullabaloo about life / is not my forte’’; in ‘‘Radar and Unmarked Cars,’’ she writes, ‘‘our / Radar / Will hold us True: / We need / Love / At a constant speed.’’ Her aesthetic credo matches the personal one in ‘‘Portrait of the Artist’’: ‘‘For dear life some do / Many a hard thing, / Train the meticulous mind / Upon meaning, seek / And find, and yet discard / All that is not of reality’s tough rind / . . .To be / Ascetic for life’s sake, / Honest and passionate.’’ The effect of this personal and aesthetic credo on her work is both her poems’ strength and their weakness. In a poem like ‘‘Still-life: New England,’’ the tone of restrained disgust and assumed indifference is deliberately and successfully used to create horror, the ironic opposite of indifference. But when, in ‘‘Dream of a Good Day,’’ Howes puts all the action of the poem into conventional romantic dreams of sailing and discovering (i.e., making a poem), which are quite separate from reality, and then uses only the last line to state but not to experience reality (‘‘Then in the colloquial evening to come back to love’’), the poem suffers because the honesty is there without the passion. Yet it was passion that made her such a disciplined craftsperson. Howes speaks of the need to train the eye to notice and the ear to listen, to recognize the necessity of form (‘‘language must have discipline to have meaning’’), and to distinguish between the forms of art and journalism. It is this disciplined passion that enabled her to make her poetry ‘‘a way of life, not just an avocation,’’ a way in which ‘‘one orders and deepens one’s experience, and learns to understand what is happening in oneself and in others.’’
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Overall, Howes’ poetry strongly continues the ‘‘Apollonian’’ strain of Eliot, Stevens, and Wilbur, rather than the ‘‘Dionysian’’ strain of Whitman and Williams. But though she has not quite Eliot’s dramatic compression, nor Stevens’s mercurial imagination, nor Wilbur’s classical balance, her depth of perception, firm ironic tone, and technical control make her a worthy member of their company.
OTHER WORKS: The Undersea Farmer (1948). In the Cold Country: Poems (1954). Light and Dark: Poems (1959). Looking Up at Leaves (1966). The Blue Garden (1972). A Private Signal: Poems New and Selected (1977). The papers of Barbara Howes are at the Yale University Library in New Haven, Connecticut.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bogan, L., Selected Criticism (1955). Friedman, N., Contemporary Poets (1975). Nemerov, H., ed., Poets on Poetry (1966). Untermeyer, L., ed., Modern American Poetry (1962). Reference works: CA (1974). Contemporary Poets (1975). WA. Other references: Choice (Apr. 1978). NYHTB (15 Nov. 1959). NYT (4 Apr. 1954). SR (19 Mar. 1949). TLS (10 Feb. 1978). —ALBERTA TURNER
HOWLAND, Marie Born 1836, New Hampshire; Fairhope, Alabama Married Edward Howland
died
September
1921,
Marie Howland was employed as a millworker in Lowell, Massachusetts, and then after a normal-school education, as a school principal. Her career as an author, political propagandist, and pioneering architect began as a result of her involvement with followers of the utopian socialist Charles Fourier in New York City in the 1850s. Through these associations, Howland became convinced of the necessity of economic and industrial reform; she also was a champion of the ‘‘combined household’’ and free love. During the 1860s, Howland lived in the Familistère, or Social Palace, a Fourieristic community in Guise, France. While there, she became especially inspired by architectural reforms that greatly reduced and collectivized domestic work traditionally ascribed to women. Most significant of these reforms were centralized facilities for cooking, laundry, and children’s day care. Hoping to effect similar reforms in her own country, Howland returned to the U.S. in 1866. During the 1870s and 1880s, she worked with Albert Kimsey Owen and John J. Dewey in organizing the Pacific Colony, a self-sufficient, communitarian socialist
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community in Topolobampo, Mexico. Her involvement was directly instrumental in changing Owen’s initial plans for single-family dwellings to architectural designs stressing collective arrangements organized to reduce the domestic work of women, thus freeing them for more direct participation in the government of the community. In her studies of American women architects and social reformers, the historian Dolores Hayden has discovered and made public many of Howland’s original designs. They include ‘‘resident hotels, row houses linked to communal kitchen, and picturesque suburban houses with cooperative kitchen facilities.’’ Financial and administrative mismanagement prevented the construction of these buildings, but the plans were published in Integral Cooperation: Its Practical Application (1885). The book was originally released only under Owen’s name, but Robert Fogarty, in his introduction to the 1975 edition, revealed Howland’s substantial participation. Howland lived at the Pacific Colony for several years but eventually left because of hostility to certain aspects of her feminism, primarily her advocacy of free love. She subsequently lived in a Fairhope, Alabama, single-tax community, where she served as a librarian. Working with her husband, Howland for a brief period edited two journals devoted to the propagation of the principles of economic cooperation: the Credit Foncier of Sinaloa and Social Solutions. Howland’s 1873 translation of J. A. B. Godin’s Social Solutions, an in-depth presentation of the political philosophy responsible for the founding of the Social Palace in Guise, was serialized in 1887 in the Howland journal, Social Solutions. She also publicized the principles of utopian socialism in essays and short fiction written for Harper’s, Galaxy, Lippincott’s, and the Overland Monthly. In her only novel, Papa’s Own Girl (1874), Howland describes the establishment of a Fourieristic community in rural Massachusetts. According to a contemporary reviewer, ‘‘No novel has yet appeared so comprehensive in its range, bearing upon the great social questions of the day: the position of woman and the condition of labor.’’ Today the novel is regrettably a forgotten classic in the tradition of political fiction written by American women. In the first half of the novel, Howland describes how two women, Clara Forest and Susie Dykes, are converted to feminism. The two women—one separated from her still socially respectable husband and the other a mother unapologetic about her conspicuous lack of any husband—set up housekeeping, survive community ostracism, and operate a profitable greenhouse and nursery, an establishment that often serves as a refuge for other women. Howland is not content, however, with such a highly individualized resolution. In the novel’s second half, her analysis extends beyond the immediate problems faced by the two women and toward a reformation of the entire social organization, based on a utopian socialism that sees industrial reform and feminism as inseparable. In her work on Howland, Dolores Hayden has already established how Howland, like 19th-century women committed to
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domestic and economic reform, was attracted to communitarian socialism as ‘‘a concept which at once domesticated political economy and politicized domestic economy’’ and which held ‘‘special appeal for feminists because of their strategies to change traditional concepts of power and property.’’ A revival of interest in Howland’s writings should prove beneficial to anyone interested in the history of the ongoing study of the relationship between the social and sexual self-definition of American women. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Douglas, A. Feminization of American Culture (1977). Hill, V., ‘‘Strategy and Breadth: The Socialist-Feminist in American Fiction’’ (dissertation, 1979). Ransom, E., ‘‘Utopus Discovers America, or Critical Realism in American Utopian Fiction, 1798-1900’’ (dissertation, 1946). Reynolds, R., Cat’s Paw Utopia (1972). Stern, M., The Pantarch (1968). Torre, S., ed., Women in American Architecture (1977). Reference works: NCAB. Other references: AL (Jan. 1944). Chrysalis (1977). Fairhope (Alabama) Courier (23 Sept. 1921). Godey’s (Aug. 1874). New Orleans Picayune (14 June 1874, 26 Aug. 1894). SR (29 Aug. 1874). Signs (Winter 1978). Social Solutions (28 May 1886). —VICKI LYNN HILL
HULL, Helen (Rose) Born 1888, Albion, Michigan; died 15 July 1971, New York, New York Daughter of Warren C. and Louise McGill Hull Born of teachers, Helen Hull spent an early smalltown Michigan life dominated by books and brothers. She attended Michigan State College, the University of Michigan, and the University of Chicago, where she received a Ph.B. degree in 1912 and later did postgraduate work. Her subsequent teaching career included three years at Wellesley College, one at Barnard College, and 40 years at Columbia University, where she began as an extension teacher in 1916 and retired as emeritus professor of creative writing in 1956. Hull did much of her novel writing during her summers in a renovated farmhouse, ‘‘Bayberry Farm,’’ in the Blue Hill region of Maine. Her interests in flowers, boats, and dogs and her lack of interest in politics and publicity are reflected in her writing. She was active as teacher and creative writer in the literary currents of her time. At the time of her death, she had nearly finished her 21st novel. Hull’s 20 novels and two collections of short stories and novelettes (many of which appeared in popular magazines) explore in sensitive detail the ordinary, daily family and working-world relationships of children, parents, and spouses. Taken cumulatively, her novels are thematically Ibsenesque in exploring several sides to questions of marriage, divorce, remarriage, parenting, and career choices for women. Her first novel, Quest (1922), moves through the childhood and young adulthood of the
daughter of an unhappily married college teacher, chronicling her discoveries in sex and in childbirth. Labyrinth (1923) depicts with understanding the lack of supportive models for a woman combining marriage, career, and parenthood. ‘‘My mind is coated with fat, my thoughts creek. . . . The loneliest person in the world is a devoted mother,’’ laments an at-home Catherine. After she begins rewarding work, however, she is realistically faced with crises such as working when a child is sick. In one of her best books, Islanders (1927), Hull recognizes the isolation to which women have been relegated through three generations and presents a strong alternative to being ‘‘enisled’’ in ‘‘the sea of life’’ in Ellen Dacey, whose fiancé left for the gold fields when she was 18, who farmed the land of her absent father for 18 years, who lost unexpected wealth to her brother, land to her father and brother. Finally, years later, having her nephew’s daughter Anne to raise, she succeeds in breaking through Anne’s mother’s frail teaching, through finishing-school pretentions, to create in the young World War I suffragist a whole woman, capable of both essential love and essential independence. The Asking Price (1930) presents the negative possibilities of a strong but misguided woman, who dominates, represses, and organizes her husband’s life. Heat Lightning (1932), which gave Hull’s readership a large boost by being chosen as a Book-of-the-Month, reaffirms the loving and independent female model in Grandmother Westover, who is able to reinspire a granddaughter fleeing from a disintegrating Eastern marriage. Moving from the Midwestern setting of this book to the New York apartment of the Prescotts in Hardy Perennial (1933), Hull presents a woman who is the strength during the Depression of those—sons, daughter, husband—who surround her in the impersonal man-made city. Studies of various family relationships seem to culminate in The Hawk’s Flight (1946), which looks at four kinds of marriages. Throughout, the background hero is Gilbert Moore, a psychiatrist who sees and brings out the best in other characters. In departure from her previous work, A Tapping on the Wall (1960) and Close Her Pale Blue Eyes (1963) are entertaining, light, sophisticated mysteries. The former won the Dodd Mead Faculty Prize Mystery award. One cannot but be impressed by Hull’s literary productivity and her insight into human relationships. Emerging from her fiction, most of it favorably received, is a firm, healthy, and mature morality, unbuttressed by religious dogma or society’s moral codes. It is a morality opposed to possessiveness, domineering, condemning, and lack of recognition of others’ feelings, no matter where those negative qualities are found—in men, women, children, career women, housewives, professors, professor’s wives, or novelists. Hull’s books can lend wisdom to many everyday experiences. OTHER WORKS: The Surry Family (1925). Creative Writing (with M. L. Robinson, 1932). Morning Shows the Day (1934). The Art of Writing Prose (with R. S. Loomis and M. L. Robinson, 1936). Candle Indoors (1936). Uncommon People (1936). Frost Flower
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(1939). Experiment: Four Short Novels (1940). Through the House Door (1940). A Circle in the Water (English title, Darkening Hill, 1943). Mayling Soong Chiang (1943). Octave (1947). The Writer’s Book (1950). Landfall (1953). Wind Rose (1958). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Overton, G. M., Women Who Make Our Novels (1931). Reference works: American Novelists of Today (1951). CA (1972). CB (May 1940, 1971). TCA. TCAS. Other references: Bookman (May 1932). NYT (17 July 1971). Saturday Evening Post (1 June 1935). WLB (Oct. 1930). —CAROLYN WEDIN SYLVANDER
HULME, Kathryn Cavarly Born 6 January 1900, San Francisco, California; died August 1981 Daughter of Edwin P. and Julia Cavarly Hulme Kathryn Cavarly Hulme is one of those rare writers who write from self-knowledge, real knowledge, informed by truth and by universal realities of human behavior. The deep spirituality that marks her work derives to a large degree from her relationship with the mystic-philosopher Gurdjieff, a relationship that is described in detail in Undiscovered Countries: A Spiritual Adventure (1966), set in the exciting Paris of the 1930s. Writing and thinking came together for Hulme in the company of such writers as Janet Flanner, Solita Solano, Djuna Barnes, Jane Heap, Margaret Anderson, and Georgette Leblanc—many of whom were involved in the Gurdjieffian ideas and methods of self-study. Hulme credits Gurdjieff with having taught her, among other things, how to ‘‘unroll the reels and look at the shadows of forgotten selves buried in the unconscious memory.’’ Without this, We Lived As Children (1938), a fictionalized autobiography, might never have been written—or, at any rate, might not have been so poignantly written. The self (or selves) evoked is androgynous by nature, a wise child—as children tend to be before life dulls them—devastated by an elusive father. To sum up Gurdjieff’s influence, Hulme wrote: ‘‘He taught me. . .how to believe.’’ Travel, the discovery of unknown countries—both visible and invisible—is meaningful for Hulme, and is the basis for two books. Arab Interlude (1930) is a collection of North African sketches, a travelogue, and an amplification of her letters home. Look a Lion in the Eye (1974) describes a safari through East Africa Hulme took with two friends. But whereas Arab Interlude, which is pre-Gurdjieff, describes the places and atmosphere, Look a Lion in the Eye is distinguished by a deeper dimension of feeling and thinking, by Hulme’s conscious self. In contrast to the harmony evoked in Look a Lion in the Eye is the disharmony (caused by human misery) in The Wild Place (1953), for which Hulme won the Atlantic Nonfiction Prize. The account grew out of her experience as a deputy director of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and the
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International Refugees Organization field teams in the years following World War II. In this capacity she helped organize Wildflecken in Bavaria, a camp for Polish displaced persons. Though she never shies away from describing the harsh reality she witnessed, The Wild Place is, nevertheless, about the triumph of human dignity over life’s injustices. Characters appear and reappear in Hulme’s work, but no one so often as a Belgian nurse, whom we catch a glimpse of, as a fellow-traveler, in Look a Lion in the Eye and again in The Wild Place and in Undiscovered Countries. The Nun’s Story (1956), which won numerous awards and critical acclaim and was made into a film, is Gabrielle Van der Mal’s—or Sister Luke’s— extraordinary story of obedience and inner struggle of conscience. Framed on one side by a tyrannical father and on the other by Hitler, with a debonair Italian doctor in the middle, The Nun’s Story might never have been told had Hulme’s own personal struggle not been attuned by faith. Besides Gabrielle’s real-life counterpart and the beloved Gurdjieff, the most important person in Hulme’s life was her mother. Annie’s Captain (1961) is the fictional story of Hulme’s parents, their marriage and courtship. It describes a typically sexist marriage, the sexism heightened by the fact that the seafaring captain was absent more than most husbands, and by Annie’s obsession about giving him a son, but Hulme’s talent for detail and accuracy transforms the typical into the archetypal: the truth of family life, of the patriarchal mode of existence that cripples women and makes them lost to themselves, is all there. But there is no anger: Hulme has consistently been concerned with inner change, with self-knowledge as a precondition to understanding. In all this she has been highly successful. OTHER WORKS: How’s the Road? (1928). Desert Night (1932). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: The Book of Catholic Authors. CA (1975). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: America (15 Sept. 1956, 8 Dec. 1956). Atlantic (Nov. 1953). Commonweal (7 Sept. 1956). NYTBR (1 Nov. 1953, 20 Nov. 1966). Saturday Review (8 Sept. 1956). WLB (Nov. 1962). —LINDA LUDWIG
HUME, Sophia Born 1702, Charleston, South Carolina; died 26 January 1774, London, England Daughter of Henry and Susanna Bayley Wigington; married Robert Hume, 1721 (died 1737); children: two Born to a prosperous landowning family, Sophia Hume was raised in the Anglican tradition of her father and educated for a life
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of elegance in high society. She married a lawyer and prominent citizen of Charleston; they had two children. After her husband’s death in 1737 and a series of illnesses, she became increasingly preoccupied with religion and the necessity to convert to Quakerism, the religious tradition of her mother and her maternal grandmother, Mary Fisher (ca. 1623-1698). She subsequently moved to England and joined the Society of Friends. In 1747 Hume returned to Charleston, where in a series of public meetings she reproached the inhabitants for their sinful lives and called them to a life of simplicity as exemplified in Quakerism. In order to spread her concern for their salvation, she published, with the help of fellow Quakers in Philadelphia, An Exhortation to the Inhabitants of the Province of South Carolina (1748). This forcefully written but poorly organized appeal admonished Charlestonians to repent, to give up their diversionary, prideful, and ostentatious lives, and to seek good forms of recreation, live simply, and dress modestly. She made a special plea that females cease neglecting their children in their quest for diversion. Cognizant that others perceived her as a heretic and a deluded, ridiculous madwoman, Hume argued that her case carried the authority of God and reason. Although she was a woman subordinate to man, she was a feeble instrument of God who was used as He saw fit. Her statements of faith were bolstered with numerous scriptural and literary references that demonstrated her erudition. Hume described her own conversion from a life of ‘‘forgetfulness of God’’ to the life of greater holiness. As a Christian, she had compassion for fellow sinners, but she was obligated to call their sinful conduct into question. She pleaded with Charlestonians and all Christians not to deny their eternal happiness for the momentary pleasures of this life. Returning to England, Hume became a Quaker minister and wrote A Caution to Such As Observe Days and Times (1763). In this piece, she warned formal Christians, those who ‘‘observe days and times,’’ that God may bring them suffering as He did the Jews in order that they learn that His power was in the heart and not the world. Believing that the world would be reformed when the hearts of the mighty were changed, she appended to this work An Address to Magistrates, Parents, Mistresses of Families, etc. In this she urged magistrates not only to witness Christ in their actions, but to restrain both the lower orders and higher ranks in society. Parents, masters, and mistresses who in their homes had roles analogous to magistrates should set a good example, provide for the physical and spiritual welfare of their charges, and acknowledge Christ. She warned that her advice should not be dismissed because it came from a woman. In an attempt to reform the Society of Friends and help stave off the decline in membership, Hume published Extracts from Divers, Antient Testimonies (1766), a collection of early Quaker writings. In her introduction addressed to ministers, elders, and members of the Society, she urged them not to conform to the ways of the world but to become the ‘‘foundation for the church of Christ.’’ In 1767 Hume went back to Charleston in an attempt to revive Quakerism there. Unsuccessful, she returned to England, where she died in 1774.
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The principal theme of Hume’s writing is the call to repentance and nonworldliness which she found exemplified in Quaker life. Through rejection of worldly pleasures, one came to enjoy the fruits of the spirit—joy, love, and peace—the highest of all pleasures. The rewards of simplicity, the universality of God’s grace, and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in each person are emphasized in her work. While she maintained a very traditional attitude toward woman’s role, her Christian belief spurred her to write and speak publicly in defense of religion. OTHER WORKS: The Justly Celebrated Mrs. Sophia Hume’s Advice (1769). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bowden, J., The History of the Society of Friends in America (1850). Gummere, A. M., ed., The Journal and Essays of John Woolman (1922). Reference works: NAW (1971). —DANA GREENE
HUMISHUMA See MOURNING DOVE
HUNT, Irene Born 12 May 1901, Pontiac, Illinois; died August 1979 Daughter of Franklin P. and Sarah Land Hunt Irene Hunt grew up on the farm in southern Illinois that provided the setting for her Civil War novel, Across Five Aprils (1964). After her father died when she was seven, Hunt lived with her grandparents for five years. Her grandfather told many stories which later influenced her writing. For many years, Hunt taught French and English in Illinois public schools; she taught psychology briefly at the University of South Dakota. In her later years, she retired and moved to Florida. Hunt’s first novel, Across Five Aprils, was published when she was fifty-seven, after she had worked many years at her writing and accumulated many rejection slips. The novel received high critical acclaim, winning the Follett Award and being named the sole Newbery honor book of 1965 by the American Library Association. It was followed by Up a Road Slowly (1966), which received the Newbery Medal, among other honors. A story of great emotional appeal, Across Five Aprils was suggested by family letters and records and the stories of Hunt’s grandfather, who was a boy of nine at the beginning of the Civil War. Based on extensive research, it spans the five Aprils of 1861-65 to take the Creightons, a Southern Illinois farm family, through the war. Told from the point of view of nine-year-old
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Jethro, this tightly knit novel with its convincing, well-developed characters relates the problems the family faces when the sons enlist, one of them on the side of the South. Through experience and conversation, Jethro learns what the issues of the war are, and what it means to live in border country and be suspected of rebel leanings. Over the years, he gains in maturity and independence of judgement as he comes to realize there are two sides to every problem and that war is heartbreaking and divisive. Although no actual historical figures appear and historical events are recounted secondhand through letters and newspaper articles, Hunt conveys a good sense of the conflict and its effect on ordinary people. Hunt’s second novel, Up a Road Slowly, is a warm, sensitive, girl’s growing-up story, taking Julie Trelling from her seventh to her seventeenth years. After the death of her mother, Julie goes to live with her Aunt Cordelia, a schoolteacher who has never married. She learns to cope with the loss of her mother, jealousy, first love, her aunt’s strictness, and schoolgirl snobbishness as she matures into a gracious young woman, confident that she is ready for college and for whatever difficulties life may bring. The narrative is handled with restraint, and with the exception of the unconvincing Brett, Julie’s temporary love, characters are deep and memorable, particularly the dignified, egotistical, alcoholic Uncle Haskell and the dirty, underprivileged, learning-impaired Aggie Kilpin. The story is fiction, but Up a Road Slowly, like Hunt’s first novel, rose out of Hunt’s own personal experiences. Hunt’s next novels, although direct and unpretentious in style like the first two books, are judged by critics to be thin in plot and superficial in characterization. Better received critically was William (1977), a moving, compassionate story set recently on the Gulf Coast of Florida about three orphaned black children who are cared for by a young white girl, the four together forming a warm, closely knit family group.
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1966-1975 (1975). SAA (1971). Third Book of Junior Authors (1972). Other references: LJ (15 March 1967). —ALETHEA K. HELBIG
HUNT, Mabel Leigh Born 1 November 1892, Coatesville, Indiana; died 3 September 1971, Indianapolis, Indiana Daughter of Tighlman and Amanda Harvey Hunt Daughter of a smalltown doctor, Mabel Leigh Hunt enjoyed a happy childhood as one of eight children in a closely knit, book-loving Quaker family. She invented her first story when she was about three years old and throughout her childhood cherished the ambition of becoming an author. While Hunt was in high school, her father died and the family moved to Indianapolis, which remained her home for the rest of her life. After study at DePauw University and training in library science at Western Reserve University, Hunt served as a librarian until 1938, when she decided to devote herself full time to writing. Although she was in her forties when she wrote her first book, Hunt published 30 volumes for juvenile readers and contributed numerous stories, articles, and poems to magazines and anthologies. Have You Seen Tom Thumb? (1942) and Better Known As Johnny Appleseed (1950) were Newbery Medal honor books, while Billy Button’s Butter’d Biscuit (1941) and The Peddler’s Clock (1943) received awards in the New York Herald Tribune’s children’s book festivals.
Although Hunt’s earliest books are her best ones, all of them represent serious attempts to confront the problems of life in story form. They hold out the old-fashioned virtues of hard work, courage, compassion, integrity, and responsibility and stress the importance of education. In her Newbery acceptance speech, Hunt spoke of her motivations as a writer, gained from years of experience as a teacher and counselor. She has watched ‘‘books bring new dimensions of happiness, of confidence and enlightenment, to young people from the age of three up. . . . Children are not created fully equipped with such values as courage, compassion, integrity, and insights into the motives and needs of themselves and others. These attributes are often learned from the behavior of the characters who people the books they read. . . A fine book that mirrors life accurately and honestly—there is the effective substitute for. . .ineffective [adult] sermons.’’
Hunt wrote for juvenile readers of various ages, but children from eight to twelve years old were her favorite audience. She aptly described her books as ‘‘pleasant stories of family relationships, ideal, yet real.’’ She usually pictured a stable, affectionate family with four or five children surrounded by grandparents, cousins, and friends. Stories that drew upon her Quaker background were special favorites. Hunt’s books reveal her interest in nursery rhymes, folk songs, and poetry.
OTHER WORKS: A Trail of Apple Blossoms (1968). No Promises in the Wind (1970).
Her father’s childhood in North Carolina provided background material for Benjie’s Hat (1938), the tale of a lively Quaker boy whose thrifty family expects him to wear hand-me-down headgear. Tomorrow Will Be Bright (1958) recounts the adventures of a Quaker girl whose family moves from North Carolina to Ohio sometime before 1860. In each of these preemancipation
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1976). More Books by More People (1974). Newbery and Caldecott Medal Books:
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Lucinda, a Little Girl of 1860 (1934), Hunt’s first novel, is based on her mother’s Quaker childhood in central Indiana. Routine activities of the farm family are punctuated by events of the Civil War and by the arrival of a runaway slave, a fugitive soldier, and an elderly man who is searching for the grave of his little sister who died while the family was moving northward in a covered wagon.
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stories, Hunt pictures free blacks living as part of the Quaker community. Conversations with her ‘‘own private fairy’’ who visited Hunt during childhood illnesses may have been the inspiration for the delightful but imaginary playmate of the heroine of Sibby Botherbox (1945). In John of Pudding Lane (1941), a printer in Boston collects and publishes the nursery rhymes with which Grandmother Goose entertains his children. Benjamin Franklin appears as a minor character. Ladycake Farm (1952) depicts the struggles and successes of a contemporary black family that moves from the city to a small farm and overcomes initial prejudice to gain acceptance in the new community. For older readers, Hunt wrote narrative biographies of Tom Thumb, the famous midget, and John Chapman, Better Known as Johnny Appleseed, as well as three novels. Beggar’s Daughter (1963), Hunt’s only historical novel with a British setting, records the life of Quakers living under the threat of persecution, loss of property, and imprisonment during the reigns of Charles II and James II. Their religious faith, simplistic practices, and hard work set them apart from the excitement and violence of village activities as well as from the comfortable, leisured existence of the landed gentry. Hunt’s work shows careful research, exacting craftsmanship, and a sincere respect and affection for both her material and her audience. OTHER WORKS: The Boy Who Had No Birthday (1935). Little Girl with Seven Names (1936). Susan, Beware! (1937). Little Grey Gown (1939). Michel’s Island (1940). Corn Belt Billy (1942). Peter Piper’s Pickled Peppers (1942). Young Man of the House (1944). Double Birthday Present (1947). Such a Kind World (1947). Matilda’s Buttons (1948). Wonderful Baker (1950). The Sixty-Ninth Grandchild (1951). Singing Among Strangers (1954). Miss Jellytot’s Visit (1955). Stars for Cristy (1956). Cristy at Skippinghills (1958). Cupola House (1961). Johnny-Up and Johnny-Down (1962).
by her paternal grandparents because of a neglectful mother and an abusive stepfather. She grew up in a ‘‘strict Mormon home, a very loving home,’’ in the semirural mountain valley town of Heber, Utah. ‘‘Papa,’’ Hunter’s grandfather, beloved of family and townspeople alike, believed education for women after high school unnecessary. Under his persuasion, Hunter declined offers of scholarships to three Utah universities, instead attending high school an extra year so she could take every English, literature, and journalism class available. She subsequently entered nurse’s training for the college credits, and much later, after marriage and the birth of three daughters, at the age of thirty-six, entered the University of Utah. From 1958 until 1967, Hunter edited and wrote for the Utah Fish and Game magazine. For months at a time she edited the magazine alone but was never allowed the title of editor because she was a woman. Each monthly issue contained one of her ‘‘Read-Aloud Stories’’ or a segment of the ‘‘Babes in the Woods’’ series for young readers, for which she won local and national awards. The back covers carried her poetry linked to a photograph. While claiming to ‘‘know nothing about poetry,’’ Hunter somehow, sometimes, manages to match words exquisitely in various poetic forms. At least 200 poems have been published. Her themes are of the Western land and people, the old West and the new West. In ‘‘The Jubilant Desert,’’ for example, the reader is invited to participate in an intimate historical review as the Salt Lake Basin awaits and then receives her destiny. ‘‘And the wind swirled her sands like mists. / She knew only the claws of the scurriers / And the bellies of the crawling ones.’’ Until, ‘‘The sound of feet. . .the sounds of steel, / The sounds of suffering, and the silence of dying. . . / And the desert knew that she was not barren.’’
HUNTER, Rodello
Hunter’s first book, A House of Many Rooms (1965, reissued 1981), is a family memoir told in first-person narrative style. It is the most successful of her early major works. It charms the reader into taking another look at a less complicated era, when family and church were all-important. This particular family was not uncommon in the way they lived, loved, disagreed, hurt, helped, cried, and laughed with one another. They were amazing because there were so many of them. Nine ‘‘born’’ and five ‘‘borrowed’’ brothers and sisters lived in the house which ‘‘did with wood and plaster what the loaves and fishes did for the multitude.’’ In spite of what seems like a life of poverty and hardship, Papa convinced his children they were blessed with a ‘‘heritage of going without.’’ This is a work that in compelling and simple prose leaves us an accurate imprint of a people and a set of values well worn but perhaps never discardable.
Born 23 March 1920, Provo, Utah Daughter of Thomas R. and Venus Harris Hicken; married Ross Hunter, 1938; Frank J. Calkins, 1965; children: three daughters
Wyoming Wife (1969) is an entertaining account of Hunter’s middle-aged marriage and move to Freedom, Wyoming. Though witty and well written, it lacks the impact and substance of her prior and subsequent books.
Rodello Hunter was born two months after her father was killed in a mine accident. When eight years old, she was adopted
Dubbed ‘‘critic’’ by her family, Hunter is continually probing, prying, questioning, wondering, and making simple yet
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Eakin, M. K., Good Books for Children, 1948-61 (1962). Reference works: CA (1975). CB (1951). Indiana Authors and Their Books, 1917-1966 (1974). Junior Book of Authors (1951). SATA (1971). —ALICE BELL SALO
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profound observations. While loving her Mormon people and her pioneer heritage, she is not blinded to their idiosyncrasies and shortcomings. An iconoclast of sorts, she campaigns for the removal of blindfolds from all those who would seek to know the truths of things for themselves. A Daughter of Zion (1972, reissued in 1999) is the superb unraveling of Hunter’s own blindfold, a courageous standing at the mirror of the past, eyes open, ready for reckoning. Hunter is significant beyond the intermountain region as a refreshing voice in the present, chronicling a not-so-distant past already out of reach. She writes rapidly and rarely revises. In her prose, this creates a charming spontaneity; in her poetry, an uneven quality. She is not a trendsetter, nor does she consciously strive for effect. Her prose is characterized by homely diction and plain, sharp images. Hunter is an unself-conscious, if slightly sentimental, writer. Not a leader, not a follower of literary style, she reflects the archetype of the questioner facing the dogma, the skeptic weighing the moral values. OTHER WORKS: The Soul of Jackson Hole (1974). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Calkins, J., Jim and Rodello Hunter Calkins Interview (audio recording, 1973). Other references: Book Week (4 July 1965). LJ (July 1965). PW (28 Apr. 1969). —CHERYL K. HUDSPETH
HUNTER-LATTANY, Kristin Born 12 September 1931, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Daughter of George L. and Mabel Manigault Eggleston; married Joseph Hunter, 1952; John I. Lattany, 1968; children: two sons One of the most prominent writers for the often-neglected audience of African American youth, Kristin Hunter-Lattany provides a message of optimism and hope in her stories of inner city black life. From a middle class background herself, Hunter-Lattany was greatly influenced by the poorer inhabitants of Philadelphia among whom she grew up in the 1930s and 1940s; it is they who later became the focus of most of her fiction. Known for their realism and vitality, Hunter-Lattany’s novels and short stories for both adolescents and adults celebrate the positive values of black culture and encourage unity, self-reliance, ingenuity, and courage in the face of adversity. In the tradition of the women writers of the Harlem Renaissance, Hunter-Lattany explores particularly the African American female experience and provides new instruction and inspiration for contemporary black women writers. The only child of a school principal father and a schoolteacher mother, Hunter-Lattany became an avid reader and writer in
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early childhood, commenting later: ‘‘I believe these circumstances—onliness, loneliness and resultant fantasizing and omnivorous reading—are the most favorable for producing writers.’’ Hunter-Lattany wrote poetry and articles for school publications, and in 1946, at fourteen, she began a teenage social column for the Philadelphia edition of the Pittsburgh Courier. Continuing as a columnist and feature writer for the Courier until 1952, she later drew on her coverage of a story on the annexation by the city of Camden, New Jersey, of the all-black town of Lawnside to provide the basis for her novel The Lakestown Rebellion (1978). The novel depicts a black community’s unified resistance to the construction of an interstate highway that is to run through their town. Hunter-Lattany received a B.S. in education from the University of Pennsylvania in 1951. At her parents’ request, she taught elementary school but quit in less than a year to pursue a writing career. In 1952 she began working as an advertising copywriter with the Lavenson Bureau of Advertising in Philadelphia, the first of several similar positions that allowed her enough stability and spare time to continue to write. In 1955 she won a national competition for a television documentary produced by CBS, entitled ‘‘A Minority of One.’’ This recognition launched her career. Hunter-Lattany began her first novel, God Bless the Child (1964), while she was still at Lavenson. A poignant tale of a young black woman’s struggle to raise herself and her family out of poverty, it establishes many themes for Hunter-Lattany’s later works, particularly the importance of inner strength and selfsufficiency. As in much of her later fiction, Hunter-Lattany explores the dangers and vitality of the city and the complex social and economic forces that oppress families there. The novel won the prestigious Philadelphia Athenaeum award in 1964, went into a third printing within a month of its publication date, and had subsequent softcover printings throughout the 1970s. While working as an information officer for the city of Philadelphia, Hunter-Lattany produced The Landlord (1966), her most successful novel at the time. In this comical story about a young white landlord of an inner city tenement building and his relationships with his tenants, Hunter-Lattany uses slapstick, caricature, and parody to explore class distinctions and racial tensions. The ‘‘lightness’’ with which she treats serious issues here, along with her exaggerated, seemingly stereotypical portrayals of blacks, led to mixed reviews. Hunter-Lattany was praised nonetheless for her uniqueness of expression, and in the book was adapted into a well-received film starring Joe Pesci. The success of Hunter-Lattany’s witty, comic style in The Landlord prompted her publishers to suggest she write books for children and adolescents. The Soul Brothers and Sister Lou (1968), inspired by young street singers who performed in an alley below Hunter-Lattany’s apartment, tells the story of a young singing group’s struggle for survival and success. With honesty and compassion, Hunter-Lattany tackles such issues as police violence, gang warfare, and racial injustice as her protagonists demonstrate courage and strength of character. Widely praised for
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its affirmation of black culture and for providing hopeful alternatives to the violence and deprivation of the ghetto, Soul Brothers received many honors including the National Council on Interracial Books for Children award (1968) and the Lewis Carroll Shelf award (1971). Hunter-Lattany married for the second time in 1968 (changing her name from Kristin Hunter to its current hyphenated state) and became a stepmother to her husband’s two sons. She credits them with greatly influencing her understanding of children and encouraging her works for young people. Among these are Guests in the Promised Land (1973), a collection of short stories that won several awards, and the critically acclaimed Lou in the Limelight (1981), a sequel to Soul Brothers. Since early in her career, Hunter-Lattany’s poems, short stories, book reviews, and articles appeared in such publications as Philadelphia Magazine, Philadelphia Bulletin, Nation, Essence, Rogue, Black World, Good Housekeeping, and Seventeen. She was writer in residence at Emory University in 1979 and taught English and creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania from 1972 to 1995, when she retired; she held the title of senior lecturer in English at that university from 1983 to her retirement. Hunter-Lattany’s more recent work includes the novel Kinfolks, published in 1996. She continues to create realistic and optimistic depictions of African American urban life, similar to Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale. Kinfolks, written for adults, is the story of two African American women who, when their children meet, fall in love, and decide to marry, discover that the intended bride and groom are really sister and brother, sharing the same father. This circumstance was brought about by the political statement both mothers made in the 1960s when they chose to become single mothers as a show of support for the Black Power movement. The rest of the novel deals with African American life after the Civil Rights movement. The Charlotte (North Carolina) Post called Kinfolks a black First Wives Club. There are many lessons to be learned from the humorous yet touching novel, but the most weighty is the importance of fatherhood, as she believes this theme reflects her lack of close family ties and subsequent search for substitutes for her family. Hunter-Lattany likes to think of her young adult readers as an extended family. In 1996 the Philadelphia Congress of the National Political Congress of Black Women presented Hunter-Lattany with the Chisolm award (named for the National Political Congress of Black Women’s president, Shirley Chisolm) in honor of her contributions in literature and the arts. She also won the 1996 Moonstone Lifetime Achievement award. She won the 1981 Drexel Children’s Literature Citation, and fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts (1981-82 and 1985-86) and the Pennsylvania State Council on the Arts (1983-84). Hunter-Lattany is a member of the Authors Guild, the Authors League of America, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the University of Pennsylvania Alumni Association. In 1999 Hunter-Lattany was collaborating with her husband, John Lattany, on a memoir of successful lives of African Americans in the rural South. They hoped to offer suggestions for the
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present and the future for African Americans who are struggling to succeed. She was also working on a screenplay for a comedy and was considering another novel. Urban America, however, may no longer be her focus as she feels there is so much bad news emanating from the ghetto, and she prefers her writing to be optimistic. OTHER WORKS: Boss Cat (1971). The Pool Table War (1972). Uncle Daniel and the Raccoon (1972). The Survivors (1975). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Harris, T., From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature (1982). Tate, C., ed., Black Women Writers at Work (1983). Reference works: Black Writers (1989). CANR (1984). CLR (1978). Contemporary Novelists (1991). DLB (1984). FC (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). SATA (1977, 1990). TCCW (1989). Writers Directory (1990). Other references: Black Literature Forum (Winter 1986). Philadelphia Inquirer (24 Nov. 1974). Philadelphia Tribune (2 Mar. 1996, 15 Apr. 1996). Web sites: http://www.alternet.com/dunnovelhtm, Donnette Donbar’s Novel Ideas (2 July 1999). http://www.bookpage.com/ ala/9702bp/blackhistory/womenfiction.html (3 July 1999). http:/ /www.english.upenn.edu/~wh/archive96/11readers.html (3 July 1999). http://www.release2-0.com/BB/readerscircle/lattany/ guide.htm (2 July 1999). —MARY E. HARVEY, UPDATED BY HEIDI HARTWIG DENLER
HUNTINGTON, Susan (Mansfield) Born 27 January 1791, Killingworth, Connecticut; died 4 December 1823, Boston, Massachusetts Daughter of Achilles Mansfield; married Joshua Huntington, 1809; children: six Daughter of a minister and descended on her mother’s side from the noted native American apostle John Eliot, Susan Huntington was a worthy heir to generations of Puritan sensibility. She was educated at home, at the Killingworth common school, and for a short season at a ‘‘classical school.’’ Huntington married the junior, later senior, pastor at Old South Church, Boston; they had six children. Her husband died in 1819, and before her own death four years later, she lost two of her children. After Huntington’s death, the new pastor of Old South Church, Benjamin Wisher, wrote a biography of her, including copious quotations from her letters and from her journal, which she kept for years. Huntington published a few poems in the Boston Recorder. Little Lucy; or, The Careless Child Reformed (1820) is a book of moral instruction for children. A Short Address to Sick Persons Who Are Without Hope (n.d.) is a tract of the kind widely distributed door-to-door by devout church members and
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professional staff members of the tract society. These latter works are not easily available to scholars.
New England Hospital for Women and Children in Boston. In 1889-90, she studied in Paris, Stockholm, Berlin, and London.
To the modern reader, Huntington’s religion might seem morbid and negative. In a letter to her son at Andover, she wrote that young people always imagine that religion will make them unhappy; attempting to convince him to join the church, she argued that Christ is true happiness. The contents of her letters and journals, however, do not reveal a very positive point of view. She was tortured with her own sins and inadequacies, at one time crying out, ‘‘Oh, my leanness, my leanness!’’ She brooded on her attitudes, her thoughts, and on the danger of worldly contamination by such things as the Unitarian church and the Waverley novels of Scott. In keeping with her concentration on states of mind, there is remarkably little about action and event in her letters and journals.
In 1890, Hurd-Mead became medical director of the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore and founded the Evening Dispensary for Working Women and Girls of Baltimore City in 1891. After her marriage to William E. Mead, a professor of early English at Wesleyan University, she moved to Middletown, Connecticut, where she set up practice. In 1895, Hurd-Mead was an incorporator of Middlesex County Hospital, where she served as a consulting gynecologist from 1907 to 1925.
In a letter to a friend, which was published in a local newspaper at the time, Huntington argued that women should not be treated as frivolous, silly persons, or they might become just that. Resting her case on the Bible, she argued that intelligent women could reason out for themselves the place of women in the home and family, if treated as reasonable adults. But treated as less, their authority in the home would be destroyed and the management of the family disrupted. In his funeral sermon for her, preached on Romans 8:28 (‘‘And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to His purpose’’), Wisner characterized Huntington as a bright, well-educated woman who graced the important position in society to which God had called her. However, he pointed out that the joy she felt in her religion as a young girl had to be refined by suffering, and it was. The trials of her life, her morbidity of temperament, and her steadfast humility in face of these afflictions no doubt gave her a good return according to her thinking and Wisner’s. But the modern Christian tends to look for a peace of mind that seems lacking in such religious thinkers. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Wisner, B., Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Susan Huntington (1828). Reference works: Daughters of America (1883). —BEVERLY SEATON
HURD-MEAD, Kate C(ampbell) Born 6 April 1867, Danville, Quebec, Canada; died 1 January 1941, Haddam, Connecticut Also wrote under: Kate C. Mead, Kate C. H. Mead Daughter of Edward Payson and Sarah Campbell Hurd; married William E. Mead, 1893 Born in Canada, Kate C. Hurd-Mead moved with her family to Newburyport, Massachusetts, where she graduated from high school in 1883. She received her M.D. from Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1888 and interned the next year at the
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Hurd-Mead was active in many women’s medical organizations and was president of the Medical Women’s National Association (MWNA) from 1922-24. In 1925, Hurd-Mead gave up practice to devote herself to full-time research and writing on the history of women in medicine. She traveled extensively in Europe, Asia, and Africa, gathering information about women in medicine. Medical Women of America (1933), Hurd-Mead’s first book, was dedicated to the MWNA and was published only after the press received 200 advance subscriptions. The book was oversubscribed—not because it had a wide audience but because many readers ordered more than one copy. Hurd-Mead records the history of medical women in America from the early midwives who practiced in the colonies to the women physicians who served in various capacities during World War I. Hurd-Mead traces the careers of the first American women medical students and physicians, relating the achievements of these women in founding dispensaries, hospitals, and medical schools. She shows that women physicians did well as private practitioners, as teachers and professors—when given a chance, as researchers, and even as surgeons. Hurd-Mead insists that medical women fall short of men only in writing about their achievements. As a result, the world does not realize the extent of women physicians’ abilities and accomplishments. Hurd-Mead’s book is an attempt to remedy that situation. A History of Women in Medicine from the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century (1938) is Hurd-Mead’s magnum opus. The task that Hurd-Mead set for herself was great: to write the most complete history of women in medicine possible. Hurd-Mead spent two years doing research at the British Museum library and several more years consulting original manuscripts in many parts of the world. The result is an impressive compilation of facts presenting the story of women in medicine from 4000 B.C. in Egypt through the end of the 18th century in Europe. Volume II, still unpublished at Hurd-Mead’s death, was to have continued the story of women in medicine through the 20th century. This volume demonstrates convincingly that restrictions against women in medicine are relatively recent—a product of the Christian era and the founding of universities in the Middle Ages. From ancient times until about the 13th century, women were active in all aspects of medical care, surgery as well as midwifery. The book is extremely detailed; in fact, it is tedious to read. Hurd-Mead’s accomplishment in discovering and preserving facts about women in medicine in many countries throughout
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many centuries is extraordinary. She has restored to medical women their proper heritage. OTHER WORKS: The papers of Kate Campbell Hurd-Mead, including the unpublished manuscript of Volume II of her History of Women in Medicine, are at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: NAW (article by G. Miller). Other references: Bulletin of the History of Medicine (July 1941). Journal of the American Medical Women’s Association (April 1956). Nation (28 May 1938). NYT (15 May 1938). Women in Medicine (April 1941). YR (Summer 1938). —ANNE HUDSON JONES
HURST, Fannie Born 18 October 1889, Hamilton, Ohio; died 23 February 1968, New York, New York Daughter of Samuel and Rose Koppel Hurst; married Jacques S. Danielson, 1915 Fannie Hurst, daughter of American-born Jews of German descent, was raised and educated in St. Louis, Missouri (B.A. 1909, Washington University). In 1910, eager to observe the working people of whom and for whom she wrote, Hurst moved to New York City. There she took assorted jobs as saleswoman, actress, and waitress, and started bombarding publications with her fiction. Her marriage to a Russian-born pianist, in which they both pursued separate careers, endured successfully until her husband’s death in 1952. Hurst became an established writer while still in her twenties. She began as a short story writer, but she is best remembered for her bestselling novels, especially Back Street (1931) and Imitation of Life (1933). Her works have been widely translated, and many became successful films. Back Street is about the beautiful Ray Schmidt, who is mistress to a married man and for over 20 years is confined to the ‘‘back streets’’ of his life. After her lover’s death, Ray spends her last few years penniless at a European spa, surviving on the few francs that winners at the casino throw to her; she dies alone in her room. The novel’s enormous popularity was due largely to two factors: It appeared during the Depression, when escapist entertainment was assured a large following, and it deals with the especially titillating subject of sex, which Hurst handles most cleverly. She avoids graphic description, knowing that the lack of it would afford greater excitement for her audience and, therefore, greater readership for her. Although we remain uncertain why the selfish and immature lover is even attractive to the lovely Ray, this is calculated; we are not meant to focus on the relationship, but on Ray, her feelings and responses. She is dominated, used, and ultimately destroyed, yet throughout, the reader, perhaps recalling similar trials, identifies and empathizes profoundly.
In Imitation of Life, Beatrice Fay Chipley, widowed mother of a young daughter, sells maple syrup door-to-door with the help of Delilah, a black woman who also has an infant daughter. Beatrice becomes one of the most prominent businesswomen in America, but the novel ends with her realization that she must continue to live an ‘‘imitation of life’’ without a man to love. Imitation of Life, in rough outline, is a woman’s version of the timeless rags-to-riches American success story. But the specific type of irony evident at the conclusion, as well as its stereotyped characterization of the black ‘‘mammy’’ figure, places it solidly in its time. Feminists would be outraged at its underlying philosophy—that, regardless of professional achievements, life must be worthless without what Delilah terms ‘‘manlovin’’’. Hurst’s audience, however, was attracted by the novel’s sympathetic— today we would call it sentimental—depiction of the heroine; by its handling of the touchy matter of race relations; and by its ‘‘bittersweetness,’’ still one of the recognizable marks of the popular novelist. Hurst wrote for women and, accordingly, her books focus on women. These characters tend to be inarticulate and enigmatic, types whom she termed ‘‘artists without an art.’’ They are concerned most significantly with the need for a man. Professional success, when women achieve it, is regarded as compensation for the lack of male companionship and, thus, in emotional terms, a poor replacement for true happiness. The novels are replete with women who sacrifice themselves for men and with women who long to do so. They are ministers of mercy to the weak, egocentric, even cruel male figures. Because the female characters, in contrast, are always presented positively, when they are hurt—which is often the case—they retain the sympathy of the audience. The women, we are made to feel, are too good for the objects of their desire. In her time, Hurst was very popular with readers and was scarcely taken seriously by critics. Today she retains our interest primarily because her works are accurate gauges of her contemporary audience’s beliefs. OTHER WORKS: Just Around the Corner (1914). Every Soul Hath Its Song (1916). Land of the Free (1917). Gaslight Sonatas (1918). Humoresque (1919). Back Pay (1921). Star Dust (1921). The Vertical City (1922). Lummox (1923). Appassionata (1926). Mannequin (1926). Song of Life (1927). A President Is Born (1928). Five and Ten (1929). Procession (1929). Anitra’s Dance (1934). No Food with My Meals (1935). Great Laughter (1936). Hands of Veronica (1937). We Are Ten (1937). Lonely Parade (1942). Hallelujah (1944). Any Woman (1950). The Man with One Head (1953). Anatomy of Me: A Wonderer in Search of Herself (1958). Family! (1959). God Must Be Sad (1961). Fool—Be Still (1964). The papers of Fannie Hurst are primarily housed in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin; other manuscripts and letters can also be found at both Brandeis University and Washington University. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brandimarte, C., Fannie Hurst and Her Fiction: Prescriptions for America’s Working Women (1980). Koppelman, S., ed., Fannie Hurst—The Woman, the Writer:
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A Collection of Essays (1994). Koppelman, S., A Fannie Hurst Anthology: Stories Selected and Introduced by Susan Koppelman (1994). Reference works: CA (1971). NCAB. Ohio Authors and Their Books (1962). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the Untied States (1995). TCA, TCAS. Other references: Arts and Decoration (Nov. 1935). Bookman (May 1929, Aug. 1931). Mentor (Apr. 1928). NYTBR (25 Jan. 1942). Saturday Review (Oct. 1937). —ELLEN SERLEN UFFEN
HURSTON, Zora Neale Born 7 January 1891, Eatonville, Florida; died 28 January 1960, Saint Lucie County, Florida Daughter of John and Lucy Hurston Born in the first incorporated black town in America, Zora Neale Hurston was the only writer in the 1920s and 1930s from a Southern background who evaluated her Southern exposure, realized the richness of her racial heritage, and built her fiction on it. At a young age, Hurston lost nearly all of her childhood security when her mother died, and she had to live from relative to relative, deprived of formal schooling, drifting through several domestic jobs. Supporting herself, Hurston completed two years at Morgan College in Baltimore and enrolled at Howard University, where her first short fiction was published in a literary journal there. She moved to New York, became secretary to the popular novelist Fannie Hurst, and earned a scholarship to Barnard College, where she studied anthropology under Franz Boas. When she graduated in 1928, Dr. Boas had arranged a fellowship for Hurston to go south to collect folklore. The result of this Southern expedition was Mules and Men (1935). Throughout the 1920s Hurston had continued to write short fiction which had been published in Opportunity. Her best efforts were ‘‘Spunk,’’ ‘‘Sweat,’’ and ‘‘The Gilded Six-Bits.’’ Hurston’s first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), a narrative loosely based on the lives of her parents, chronicles the life of John Pearson, an itinerant preacher. Incorporating her knowledge of folklore into her fiction, Hurston depicts John’s second wife as a character reliant on conjure to speed the first wife to an early death and to snare the protagonist quickly into marriage, a marriage which crumbles once he discovers her tactics. Hurston is lauded for her utilization of folklore, the ripeness and realism of black dialect, the poetic sermon, and the distinct racial flavor of Jonah’s Gourd Vine. However, critics have faulted plot construction, characterization, and dialogue. Additionally, much of the criticism of Hurston’s fiction is the result of her choice of setting—Eatonville, Florida, a black town. Hurston’s critics accuse her of neglecting to confront the problems of racism
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which constituted a daily issue in the livelihood of blacks in the 1930s and 1940s. Hurston wrote in her autobiography that what she wanted to write was a story about a man, but from what she had read and heard, ‘‘Negroes were supposed to write about the Race problem. My interest lies in what makes a man or woman do such-and-so regardless of his color.’’ Hurston’s second novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), also set in Eatonville, is frequently acclaimed her best novel. It is the story of Janie, a young black woman who searches for happiness, self-realization, and love; she is a woman who refuses to settle for less than her own realistic appraisal of what love should be. After the death of her second husband, when Janie is forty years old, she marries a man much younger than she who is unpretentiously one of the ‘‘folk,’’ who loves and wants her without imposing restrictions on her. In the Florida Everglades where Janie and Teacake move after their marriage, they experience a few years of happiness working in the fields together, and Janie is serenely content being a part of the folk culture. Somewhat melodramatically, the novel ends, after a hurricane destroys the Everglades community and Teacake is bitten by a mad dog. Janie is forced to shoot and to kill Teacake because, mentally deranged by rabies, he tries to kill her. The characterization of Janie is excellent, and plot structure, depiction of the folk culture, and the use of black dialect are all equally fine. Her last novel, Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), the only one in which a Southern white woman is the protagonist, has received little critical attention. Nevertheless, Arvay Henson is the second of Hurston’s fully delineated protagonists. More than any other woman in her fiction, Arvay offers a psychologically complete view of the complex entanglement of forces which impinge on the Southern rural woman and make her life, both externally and internally, a continuous struggle. Both before her marriage to Jim Meserve and for some 20 years afterwards, Arvay Henson is plagued with feelings of insecurity, inferiority, and self-worthlessness. At sixteen she had accepted that happiness, love, and normal relationships were not meant for her; she had publicly denied the world, dedicated her life to foreign missionary service, and begun having hysterical spasms. Finally, Array realizes she cannot depend on her husband to define her ‘‘self’’ for her, and Jim—also aware of this— abruptly gives her this opportunity when he leaves her. Arvay returns to her hometown in a symbolic trip, for she realizes that neither her glorified image of her family nor her image of herself as someone no man would want has been realistic. True to the author’s incurable penchant for romantic love, Arvay and Jim are reunited. From the early autobiographical story, ‘‘Drenched in Light’’ (1924), to Seraph on the Suwanee, Hurston based her fiction on her own personal experiences and wrote about the kind of life of which she had firsthand knowledge. Although her fiction is filled with an assortment of characters, her female protagonists all possess an inner strength which helps them survive the most adverse situations. All of Hurston’s novels focus on character and suggest that maturity is necessary before one can reach an
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understanding of true values. Noteworthy in Hurston’s fiction is that escape to an urban environment is never suggested as a solution to any problem. The fact that Hurston chooses to place her characters in a Southern, rural, all-black setting suggests, also, that she wished to depict them as black men and women, not merely as reactors to racism. The additional inclusion of folk elements gives a uniquely Southern flavor to character and setting. As a writer who had grown up in the South, Hurston recognized the aesthetics of this particular setting and culture and utilized them as no other black writer of the 1920s or 1930s did.
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Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom (1998). Wall, C. A., Women of the Harlem Renaissance (1995). WitherspoonWalthall, M. L., The Evolution of the Black Heroine in the Novels of Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker (1988). Yates, J., Zora Neale Hurston: A Storyteller’s Life (1993). Young, J., Black Writers of the Thirties (1973). Reference works: CB (May 1942, April 1960). Norton Book of Women’s Lives (1993). Oxford Book of Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Short Story Criticism (1990). TCA, TCAS. Other references: Black World (Aug. 1972). NYHTB (22 Nov. 1943). NYT (2 Feb. 1960). SBL (Winter 1974). —JOYCE PETTIS
OTHER WORKS: Tell My Horse (1938). Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939). Dust Tracks on a Dirt Road (1942, 1995 and 1996). I Love Myself When I Am Laughing. . .and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader (1979). Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings (1995). Sweat (the original story and critical essays, edited by C. A. Wall, 1997). Go Gator and Muddy the Water: Writings (1999).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bloom, H., Major Black American Writers Through the Harlem Renaissance (1995). Bone, R., The Negro Novel in America (1958). Carson, W. J. Zora Neale Hurston: The Early Years, 1921-1934 (dissertation, 1998). Carter-Sigglow, J., Making Her Way with Thunder: A Reappraisal of Zora Neale Hurston’s Narrative Art (1994). Crawley, L.K., Zora Neale Hurston: Recordings, Manuscripts, and Ephemera in the Archive of Folk Culture and Other Divisions of the Library of Congress (1992). Cronin, G. L., ed., Critical Essays on Zora Neale Hurston (1998). Davis, R. P., Zora Neale Hurston: An Annotated Bibliography and Reference Guide (1997). Edwards, J. A. C., ‘‘Creative Reverence: Self-Defining Revisionary Discourse in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston’’ (thesis, 1998). Gates, H. L. and A. Appiah, eds., Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present (1993). Harrison, I. E. and F. V., eds., African-American Pioneers in Anthropology (1999). Hemenway, R., Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (1977). Huggins, N., Harlem Renaissance (1971). Howard, L. P., ed., Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston: The Common Bond (1993). Lowe, J., Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston’s Cosmic Comedy (1994). Meisenhelder, S. E., Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Race and Gender in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston (1999). Nathiri, N. Y., Zora! Zora Neale Hurston: A Woman and Her Community (1991). O’Banner, B. M., ‘‘A Study of Black Heroines in Four Selected Novels (1929-1959) by Four Black American Women Novelists: Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Paule Marshall, Ann Lane Petry’’ (thesis, 1985). Plant, D. G., Every Tub Must Sit On Its Own Bottom: The Philosophy and Politics of Zora Neale Hurston (1995). Rascher, S. R., The Neo-Slave Narratives of Hurston, Walker, and Morrison: Rewriting the Black Woman’s Slave Narrative (dissertation, 1998). Royster, B. H., The Ironic Vision of Four Black Women Novelists: A Study of the Novels of Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston and Ann Petry (1980). Smith, B., The Truth That Never
HUTCHINS, Maude (Phelps) McVeigh Born 4 February 1902 (?), New York, New York Daughter of Warren R. and Maude Phelps McVeigh; married Robert Maynard Hutchins, 1921 (divorced 1948) Maude McVeigh Hutchins was educated at St. Margaret’s School in Waterbury, Connecticut, and received a B.F.A. degree from Yale University in 1926. Divorced in 1948, Hutchins settled in Connecticut with her children. Talented not only in writing but also in the plastic arts, Hutchins published poems and short stories in the New Yorker, the Kenyon Review, Accent, Mademoiselle, Nation, Epoch, Poetry, and the Quarterly Review of Literature; and her sculpture was exhibited in one-woman shows in St. Louis, Chicago, San Francisco, and New York. A Diary of Love (1950), originally banned by British customs as well as by the police censor board in Chicago, is a three-part recollection of a young girl’s initiation into adulthood. The diary’s exordium explains that the entries are ex post facto, written years after the events took place. The gap in time allows Noel’s sophisticated and knowledgeable perspective to enhance and deepen her adolescent experiences. The first part presents the earliest stimuli and those persons who provide negative lessons in sensitivity. The second part takes place in a sanitarium in the desert, where Noel convalesces for a number of years from tuberculosis. Here, too, the propriety and routine do not preclude erotic undercurrents, and the more imminent death appears to the patients, the more important sensuality and eroticism become. After Noel returns home, in the final part, she falls in love with Dominick and they share an intimate awareness of sensual experimentation. Their near-perfect relationship continues until the honeymoon night, when Dominick’s unconscious desires are revealed. As he cries out, in his sleep, his mother’s mythical name, Leda, Noel immediately understands his incestuous feelings. Neither she nor Dominick can alter the spontaneous direction of eroticism, and she silently acknowledges the permanence of her rival. Noel’s remark, ‘‘I imagined love as a pie, a slice for each,’’ provides the title for Hutchins’ collection of short stories, sketches, plays, and monologues. Love Is a Pie (1952) is somewhat
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uneven in quality. A more sustained work is the novel Victorine (1959), which, like A Diary of Love, presents a young woman’s journey from innocence to experience. Various persons emerge from a multitude of impressions to guide Victorine through successive passages to maturity. Honey on the Moon (1964), like A Diary of Love, is written from the first person, Hutchins’ most successful point of view. Sigourney, a twenty-year-old girl from Connecticut, marries Derek, a forty-year-old suave bachelor from New York City. Lonely for the simplicity of her single life, Sigourney discovers on her honeymoon that Derek’s graciousness and élan are tempered by his aloofness from her and his fascination with haute fashion, homosexuals, and transvestites. Once she realizes that he has married her for her astonishing resemblance to a former lover, Sigourney’s sanity deteriorates. Aiming a pistol at her husband, Sigourney fires too late, and when a second shot is fired, the reader cannot be sure if Sigourney has killed herself or merely hallucinated.
HUXTABLE, Ada Louise Born circa 1920s, New York, New York Daughter of Michael L. and Leah Rosenthal Landman; married L. Garth Huxtable, circa 1942 Ada Louise Huxtable was born and raised in Manhattan, where her passion for cities and buildings flourished. She edited the student newspaper at Wadleigh High School, Manhattan’s high school for music and arts. At Hunter College, she majored in fine arts, was elected Phi Beta Kappa in her junior year, and graduated magna cum laude. Huxtable has said she ‘‘never chose a career. I began as a scholar, writing and researching for my own pleasure and enrichment in a field that was of great interest to me.’’ She has always found immense personal satisfaction in that academic research. In 1946 she became assistant curator for architecture and design at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. She worked there until accepting a Fulbright scholarship in 1950 (and in 1952) for study and advanced research in architecture and design in Italy.
Most of Hutchins’ novels trace the emerging sensuality of a young and acutely sensitive female protagonist. A Diary of Love opens as Noel delicately and deliberately crushes ripe raspberries against her tongue, relishing their ‘‘sweet disintegration.’’ Similarly, the protagonist of Honey on the Moon feels the physical vibrations down through her limbs from repeating the word ‘‘husband.’’ As the sensibilities of these women develop, random objects are supplanted by specific individuals, both male and female, who stimulate and refine new experiences and sensations. In Victorine, for example, the young girl is guided by her half-witted friend, ‘‘Fool Fred,’’ to share his vision of a magnificent white stallion, a vision poised ambiguously between their fantasies and reality. In Hutchins’ work, such epiphanies are crucial, but only intermittent, during the maturation process.
Her writing on art and architecture has been published in Art Digest, Progressive Architecture (where she was a contributing editor for almost 10 years), Art in America (again, a contributing editor for a decade), Interiors, Arts, and Architectural Review. Her work has also appeared in popular magazines such as Consumer Reports, Holiday, Horizon, and Saturday Review.
Hutchins balances her heroines’ perceptions between fantasy and the real, but sometimes they are too weak to maintain that balance; they are nevertheless consistently sensitive and appealing. It is through their ingenuous perceptions that Hutchins manages to combine a frank eroticism with succinct and elegant language. She was praised highly by Anaïs Nin (in The Novel of the Future) for her vivid and cinematic love scenes and for her attention to the senses and the emotions. Hutchins is at her best when suggesting evanescent moments of sensual apprehension that mark the transition from childhood to womanhood. For her honesty, subtlety, and graceful style, Hutchins deserves greater study from readers and critics.
Influential in the founding of New York’s Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1965, she defines preservation as ‘‘the retention and active relationship of the buildings of the past to the community’s functioning present.’’ The director of New York’s office of midtown planning and development has said he ‘‘would consciously go out of my way to get her advice on issues. . .she has such a keen understanding of the politics, the money, and the realities involved in any given situation that I can treat her as a peer.’’
OTHER WORKS: Diagrammatics (with M. J. Adler, 1932). Georgiana (1946). My Hero (1953). Memoirs of Maisie (1955). The Elevator (1963). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Nin, A., The Novel of the Future (1968). Reference works: CA (1976). WA. Other references: Book Week (15 Mar. 1964). Commonweal (3 Apr. 1964). NR (8 Dec. 1952). NYTBR (9 Feb. 1964). —MIRIAM FUCHS
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One of the many publications carrying her bylined articles in the 1950s was the New York Times magazine. In 1963, as her articles appeared with greater frequency, she was asked to take the newly created and prestigious post of architecture critic for the New York Times.
Her books include Four Walking Tours of Modern Architecture in New York City (1961), published by the Museum of Modern Art, and Classic New York: Georgian Gentility to Greek Elegance (1964). Both were intended as part of a six-volume series and represent years of painstaking research and personal reflections. Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard? (1970, 1972) is a collection of her articles from the Times. In one edition, her publishers labeled it ‘‘a primer on urbicide’’ as no one is immune from her caustic evaluations. She called the Pan Am building ‘‘a prime example of a New York specialty: the big, the expedient, and the deathlessly ordinary.’’
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Huxtable is an outstanding authority on urbanism. Besides being a member of the New York Times editorial board and winning the first Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism, she has received many significant awards from professional and cultural organizations and more than a dozen honorary degrees. The Wall Street Journal has noted her ability to get ‘‘everyone—the builders included—eating out of her hand and telling her everything she wants to know. Then she retreats behind a closed door and out comes this very gutsy critique.’’ Huxtable has no fear of attacking big city interests, such as building speculators and real estate developers, when the occasion warrants. Her work has been both praised and damned by the reading public; it is trenchant, lively, precise, and—clearly— influential.
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Secrets (1971). Lloyd, J., Ada Louise Huxtable: A Case Study (1975). Papadakes, A., Architecture of Today (1997). Papadakes, A., A Decade of Architectural Design (1991). Williams, H. M., ed., Making Architecture: The Getty Center (1997). Wodehouse, L., Ada Louise Huxtable, An Annotated Bibliography (1981). Reference works: CB (1973). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Architectural Record (Apr. 1993, May 1993). ARTnews (1997). CSM (9 Apr. 1969, 11 Nov. 1973). Harper’s Bazaar (Aug. 1972). House Beautiful (Sept. 1970). Interior Design (Feb. 1993). Metropolis (1998). New York (3 Nov. 1975). Newsweek (23 Aug. 1965). NY (17 Dec. 1973). NYT (5 May 1970, 26 Sept. 1973, 2 Jan. 1975, 13 Mar. 1977, 29 Sept. 1977). Opera News (July 1999). WSJ (7 Nov. 1972).
OTHER WORKS: Pier Luigi Nervi (1960). Kicked a Building Lately? (1976, 1988). Goodbye History, Hello Hamburger: An Anthology of Architectural Delights and Disasters (1986). Architecture Anyone? (1988). The Tall Building Artistically Reconsidered (1992). Inventing Reality: Architectural Themes and Variations (1993). The Unreal America: Architecture and Illusion (1997). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Angeletti, M., ‘‘The Architectural Criticism of Ada Louise Huxtable’’ (thesis, 1995). Diamondstein, B., Open
—KATHLEEN KEARNEY KEESHEN
HYDE, Shelley See REED, Kit
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I IRELAND, Jane See NORRIS, Kathleen Thompson
IRWIN, Inez Haynes Born 2 March 1873, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; died 30 September 1970 Daughter of Gideon and Emma Jane Hopkins Haynes; married Rufus H. Gillmore, 1897 (died); William H. Irwin, 1916 Inez Haynes Irwin was educated in Boston schools and attended Radcliffe College from 1897 to 1900. At the turn of the century, Radcliffe was a center of suffragist sentiment. Determined to extend this feeling to college alumnae, Irwin and Maud Wood Park founded the Massachusetts College Equal Suffrage Association in 1900. This group expanded into the National College Equal Suffrage League, an active force in the enfranchisement campaign. Irwin’s other feminist activities centered around the more radical wing of the suffrage movement, the National Woman’s Party. Led by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, the party was patterned after the British suffrage movement in its militancy and political tactics. Irwin was a member of the party’s advisory council; she wrote for the party’s publications and was the party’s biographer. The Story of the Woman’s Party (1921) is flawed by its lack of objectivity and the failure to mention the other wing of the suffrage movement, but it is the only record of the party’s activities, other than the stories repeated in Irwin’s more ambitious work on the history of American women, Angels and Amazons (1933). Irwin’s first fictional work was published in Everybody’s in 1904. She then became a regular contributor to British and American magazines and devoted herself to writing short stories and novels. Other than her feminist chronicles, Irwin’s only digressions from these genres occurred during World War I. Having become the wife of newspaperman Will Irwin after the death of her first husband, Inez visited the European fronts with Will. Her accounts of these visits were printed in the magazines of three countries. ‘‘The Spring Flight’’ was the O. Henry Memorial award first prize winner in 1924, a puzzling choice, for the story is a quasibiographical sketch of William Shakespeare trying to overcome writer’s block before composing The Tempest. It is ironic Irwin received the highest acclaim for this story, so far removed from her field of expertise. After a few ventures with highly sentimentalized and simplistic novels about orphaned children and an idealized brother
and sister, Irwin began writing fiction that addressed the issues with which she is now most often associated—those underlying the suffrage movement. Of her feminist fiction, The Lady of the Kingdoms (1917) has been undeservedly forgotten. This long novel presents two young heroines, the beautiful and self-assured Southward and the plain and self-effacing Hester. Irwin uses both heroines to examine the conventional moralities women have been forced into, as well as the unconventional, even ‘‘immoral,’’ ones women have chosen for themselves. Though Irwin may disapprove of the latter roles, she never condemns the women who choose them. Irwin published two books dealing with divorce, Gideon (1927) and Gertrude Haviland’s Divorce (1925). The heroine of the latter work is a fat, dull, sloppy woman who has further alienated her husband by being overly absorbed in her children. The book begins as Gertrude receives her husband’s request for a divorce, follows her through mental illness, watches her recover as she realizes she is pregnant, and witnesses her transformation into a woman of resolution, intelligence, self-reliance, and new beauty. Her final triumph occurs when she rejects her husband’s offer of remarriage; however, this victory is mitigated by the fact that Gertrude now realizes she loves and will marry another man. Also troubling is the assertion that having a baby is enough to end a woman’s suffering, an attitude no doubt affected by Irwin’s failure to have children of her own. In the 1930s and 1940s, Irwin returned to sentimental, descriptive novels and wrote upper-class-murder mysteries and moralistic children’s books. The strongest indictment to be made against Irwin comes from these books, the last she wrote. She had run out of good ideas, and no longer had the ability to write strongly, to state issues clearly, and to imagine vital characters. Irwin apparently decided that those qualities of authorship she still possessed were good enough for children’s books. She was a prolific writer whose finest works came early and whose mediocre later works have so thoroughly reduced her reputation as a writer of adult and children’s fiction that she is virtually forgotten in these fields. Between 1917 and 1927, however, she wrote several impressively direct novels about divorce and women’s roles. OTHER WORKS: June Jeopardy (1908). Maida’s Little Shop (1910). Phoebe and Ernest (1910). Janey (1911). Phoebe, Ernest, and Cupid (1912). Angel Island (1914). The Ollivant Orphans (1915). The Californians (1916). The Happy Years (1919). The Native Son (1919). Maida’s Little House (1921). Out of the Air (1921). Maida’s Little School (1926). P. D. F. R. (1928). Confessions of a Businessman’s Wife (1931). Family Circle (1931). Youth Must Laugh (1932). Strange Harvest (1934). Murder Masquerade (1935). The Poison Cross (1936). Good Manners for Girls (1937). A Body Rolled Downstairs (1938). Maida’s Little Island (1939). Maida’s Little Camp (1940). Many Murders (1941). Maida’s Little Village (1942). Maida’s Little Houseboat (1943).
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Maida’s Little Theatre (1946). The Women Swore Revenge (1946). Maida’s Little Cabins (1947). Maida’s Little Zoo (1949). Maida’s Little Lighthouse (1951). Maida’s Little Hospital (n.d.). Maida’s Little Farm (n.d.). Maida’s Little House Party (n.d.). Maida’s Little Treasure Hunt (n.d.). Maida’s Little Tree House (n.d.). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: NCAB. TCA, TCAS. —LYNNE MASEL-WALTERS AND HELEN LOEB
ISAACS, Susan Born 7 December 1943, Brooklyn, New York Daughter of Morton and Helen Asher Isaacs; married Elkan Abramowitz, 1968; children: Andrew, Elizabeth Susan Isaacs was born in Brooklyn, New York, on 7 December 1943 to Morton Isaacs, an electrical engineer, and Helen (Asher) Isaacs, a homemaker. Isaacs was raised in New York except for a brief period when her family lived in Ohio. She entered Queens College (now Queens College of the City University of New York) after graduating from high school. She switched majors from pre-med to economics and finally to English. Although Isaacs worked on the school newspaper, she did not consider becoming a professional writer until much later. She dropped out of Queens College in her senior year and became an editorial assistant in the reader mail department of Seventeen magazine in 1966. She married Elkan Abramowitz, a lawyer, two years later and was eventually promoted to senior editor, but quit in 1970 to stay home with her first child. Isaacs worked briefly as a freelance writer for various journals and had a brief stint as a speechwriter for local Democratic politicians, but was dissatisfied with her career. It was when her second child was in nursery school that she thought of writing a novel. Although she put the idea off at first, she eventually settled into a schedule of writing for three hours every morning. Her first book, Compromising Positions (1978), was finished a year later. A friend of her husband’s was an executive editor at Simon & Schuster, and he introduced Isaacs to an agent who sold the book to Times Books for its new fiction list. Compromising Positions centers on upper-middle-class Long Island homemaker Judith Singer’s amateur investigation into the brutal murder of Bruce Fleckstein, the local periodontist. In explaining her choice of her victim’s occupation, Isaacs said, ’’I just figured dentists cause pain, so they deserve to die.’’ Judith quickly finds herself entangled with the Mafia, an attractive policeman, and her suburban neighbors’ dirty secrets as she tries to solve Fleckstein’s murder. The book sold moderately well in hardback but received favorable reviews and was a Book of the Month Club main selection. The paperback and movie rights sold for large sums and the paperback version shot to the top of the bestseller lists.
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Isaacs’ second novel, Close Relations (1980), also focuses on a witty Jewish woman, although one remarkably different from Judith Singer. In Close Relations, Marcia Green is a divorced speechwriter working for an Italian New York gubernatorial candidate. During the campaign, Marcia becomes involved with both an Irish Catholic campaign manager and an eligible Jewish lawyer. The novel has been called a modern fairy tale and a ‘‘hilarious satire of ethnic stereotyping.’’ Isaacs’ next novel Almost Paradise (1984), is a contemporary Cinderella story with a twist. As in the majority of Isaacs’ work, the protagonist is a strong, independent female who nevertheless has trouble finding love. Jane Heissenhuber, who is poor and from an abusive home, falls in love with and marries handsome and wealthy Nicholas Cobleigh, who becomes a Hollywood superstar. Yet the couple’s story does not end happily. Critics’ reviews were mixed. Shining Through (1988), fared better with critics and became a successful motion picture in 1992 with Michael Douglas and Melanie Griffith. Its main character is feisty, intelligent, half-Jewish Linda Voss, a working girl who falls in love with her boss, handsome attorney John Berringer. The couple marry, but the marriage is not a happy one, and Linda eventually becomes an Allied spy working undercover in Nazi Germany. Unlike Almost Paradise, however, Shining Through has a Hollywood-style ending in which Linda finds the love and happiness she deserves. Magic Hour, Isaacs’ 1991 novel, features one of her few male protagonists, Long Island homicide detective Steve Brady. A Vietnam vet with a troubled past, Brady falls in love with a suspect in the murder of a movie producer. This novel has the same wickedly funny dialogue and eye for details that characterize Isaacs’ writing. Isaacs stuck with a mystery but returned to a female protagonist in After All These Years (1993). This novel’s heroine, Rosie, finds her husband murdered just after he announces he’s leaving her for a younger woman. She becomes the primary suspect and sets out to find the killer to clear herself of suspicion. Critics loved After All These Years but many didn’t care for 1996’s Lily White. The title character of the latter is a criminal defense attorney who defends a con man accused of murdering his latest victim. The book tells of Lily’s efforts to free her client while simultaneously presenting her family history in flashbacks. Some reviewers complained the two tales didn’t mesh and that Isaacs should have eliminated Lily’s history. In Red, White, and Blue (1998), Isaacs explores the questions of what it means to be an American by focusing upon an unlikely pair’s investigation of a radical Wyoming militia group. Charlie Blair, an FBI agent, and Lauren Miller, a New York reporter, are drawn together by their immigrant Jewish ancestry and American values. Tension escalates as Charlie infiltrates the hate group, but all ends well. Isaacs turns her writing skills to nonfiction with her latest book, Brave Dames and Wimpettes (1999). This title is part of the Library of Contemporary Thought series, in which popular authors write about intellectual subjects for a general audience. Isaacs examines the roles of women as depicted in books, television, and movies, dividing female protagonists into one of the two
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title categories and offers candid opinions on popular films and fellow novelists from Thomas Harris (Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal) and James Patterson (Along Came a Spider, Kiss the Girls) to Terminator 2 and the Alien movies. Isaacs has a remarkable eye for detail and a way with witty dialogue that make her novels come alive for readers. From Wyoming to Long Island and from contemporary Manhattan to Nazi Germany, her books are remarkably diverse in scope and setting. Quirky heroines and an occasional quirky hero are all ordinary people who encounter extraordinary situations that reveal their hidden strengths. As Isaacs herself once stated, ‘‘I like to show ordinary people reacting to ordinary circumstances. It’s an opportunity for adventure, and I like women to have adventures. There’s been far too little of it with women.’’
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CANR 20 (1987), 65 (1998). CBY (1993). Other References: People (30 Apr. 1984). PW (1 Feb. 1999). Writer (Feb. 1997).
frequent fits of hysterical laughter in those years.’’ She left the Observer in 1976 to become the Denver-based Rocky Mountain bureau chief for the New York Times, a position she held until 1982. She described this position by stating that ‘‘for three years, she covered nine mountain states by herself and was often tired.’’ After leaving the New York Times in February 1982, she became a columnist for the Dallas Times Herald until 1991, when she accepted her present position as columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Ivins once commented that her return to Texas ‘‘may indicate a masochistic streak, [but I’ve] had plenty to write about ever since.’’ The title of Ivins’ first book, Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She? (1991), grew out of one of her columns for the Dallas Times Herald. Ivins commented that if a state representative’s ‘‘IQ slips any lower, we’ll have to water him twice a day.’’ Offended by this remark, some members of the Dallas business community tried to force the Times Herald into censuring Ivins. The Times Herald refused and plastered Dallas billboards with the question Ivins later took as her first book title. Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She? was on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year.
—LEAH J. SPARKS
IVES, Morgan See BRADLEY, Marion Zimmer
IVINS, Molly Born Mary Tyler Ivins, 30 August 1944, Monterey, California Daughter of Margot (Milne) and Jim Ivins Molly Ivins is one of America’s most well-known syndicated political columnists. She writes for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, but her hilarious accounts of Texas and national politics may be found in over 100 other newspapers throughout the country. Her three bestselling books bring together collections of her wittiest and most scathing columns, essays, and magazine articles on politics and journalism. Ivins was born Mary Tyler Ivins on August 30, 1944, in Monterey, California, but she grew up in Houston, Texas, with her brother, Andy. She graduated from Smith College in 1966 and studied briefly at the Institute of Political Science in Paris before earning a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University in 1967. While still in school, she worked as a reporter for both the Houston Chronicle and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune newspapers. In 1970 she became a reporter and eventually coeditor of the liberal monthly Texas Observer. She covered the Texas legislature for the Observer, which accounts, as she puts it, ‘‘for her
Ivins’ second book, Nothin’ But Good Times Ahead (1993), continues her coverage of Texas politics, which she once called the ‘‘finest form of free entertainment ever invented.’’ In addition to the 1992 presidential campaign, she wrote about Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Texas and the Clarence Hill-Anita Thomas hearings. Publishers Weekly noted in its 23 August 1993 review of this book that Ivins ‘‘has a B.S. detector as sensitive as an electron microscope and a vocabulary that, when she is riled, goes beyond earthy.’’ In February, 1994, Ivins wrote an article in the Nation explaining why she had declined, against the urging of some, to enter the U.S. Senate race in Texas. Later that year she battled charges of plagiarism when staunch conservative Florence King, author of nine volumes on Southern humor, accused Ivins of copying from King’s 1975 title, Southern Ladies and Gentleman. Ivins had cited King throughout her work, but apologized for some passages in which she failed to adequately acknowledge the other author. In 1996 Ivins began a short-lived position on television’s 60 Minutes as the third member of a trio that included Stanley Crouch and P. J. O’Rourke. The three offered differing opinions in a point/counterpoint segment that was eventually dropped. Ivins’ third book, You’ve Got to Dance with Them That Brung You: Politics in the Clinton Years, was published in 1998 to the same critical acclaim as her previous titles. In this latest work, Ivins comments on the 1996 presidential campaign, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the O. J. Simpson case, in addition to her usual hilarious discourse on politics in her native Texas. The last section of this book, which Ivins dubs ‘‘Tributes to Souls Passing,’’ are farewells to the famous and the infamous. Particularly poignant and poetic is Ivins’ farewell to her own mother, which begins ‘‘My mother died the other day.’’ Her latest work, in progress and
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scheduled for a January 2000 publication, is a biography of Texas governor and Republican presidential hopeful George W. Bush. The book’s tenative title Shrub derives from an article Ivins wrote, in which she stated Bush had all the ‘‘charisma of a shrub.’’ In addition to her regular column, Ivins is a frequent contributor to such periodicals as the Nation, Esquire, Harper’s, Progressive, and Mother Jones and a frequent guest on network radio and television shows. Unabashedly liberal, Ivins is active in the Amnesty International Journalism Network and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. She also writes about press issues for the American Civil Liberties Union. Ivins has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist three times and has won numerous journalism awards, including Columbia University’s School of Journalism Outstanding Alumna award in 1976. She also served as a member of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize Jury. Yet, appropriately enough for Ivins, she wrote her two greatest honors are that ‘‘the Minneapolis police force named its mascot pig after
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her and that she was once banned from the campus of Texas A&M.’’ OTHER WORKS: Contributed to: The Edge of Texas and Other Texas Stories (1990). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CANR 138 (1993). Who’s Who in America (1998). Other References: ‘‘About Molly Ivins,’’ at http://creators.com/opinion/bio/bio-ivin.htm. ‘‘A Lifetime Prize for an Under-50 Writer,’’ in Editor & Publisher (16 July 1994). ‘‘Good Golly, Miss Molly,’’ in Entertainment Weekly (24 Nov. 1995). ‘‘Molly Ivins to Bring Her ‘Left-wing Populist’ Take to 60 Minutes,’’ in Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service (19 Feb. 1996). ‘‘My Friends, the Time Is Not Yet,’’ in Nation (7 Feb. 1994). —LEAH J. SPARKS
J JACKSON, Helen (Maria Fiske) Hunt Born 15 October 1830, Amherst, Massachusetts; died 12 August 1885, San Francisco, California Also wrote under: H. H., Saxe Holm, Helen Jackson, Marah, No Name, Rip Van Winkle Daughter of Nathan Welby and Deborah Vinal Fiske; married Edward Bissell Hunt, 1852; William Sharpless Jackson, 1875, children: two, both of whom died young The elder and more impetuous of two surviving children of a minister-turned-professor and his devout and educated wife, Helen Hunt Jackson was raised in an atmosphere of learning, piety, and enforced propriety. Although her parents both succumbed to tuberculosis while Jackson was a teenager, she continued to attend private schools until 1850. Jackson then married Lieutenant Hunt and began the restless life of an army wife and mother of two sons, only one of whom survived infancy. In 1863 Jackson’s husband was killed testing his newly invented torpedo. When, two years later, Jackson’s son died, she turned to writing poetry as an outlet for her grief. Jackson’s early poems won her recognition from the influential Thomas Wentworth Higginson; her subsequent prolific periodical publications gathered a wide popular audience and critical praise, even from Emerson. Jackson supported herself and traveled widely on the profits of her pen. Her generally pious and sentimental treatments of death, love, and nature themes date much of her poetry, but many of her Verses (1870) and Sonnets and Lyrics (1886) can still be appreciated for their skillful technique and use of language. Jackson’s first prose efforts were travel pieces, enriched by her flair for observation of detail in interior decoration and natural scenery. Her descriptions of unconventional people encountered along the way reveal the lingering influence of Jackson’s narrowly proper upbringing. While wintering in Colorado Springs in 1873 she met William Sharpless Jackson, a Quaker banker and railroad promoter, whom she married two years later. Jackson continued writing and experimented in prose fiction. Her passion for anonymity continued; ‘‘Saxe Holm’’ aroused popular curiosity as the author of two series of Jackson’s short stories (1874 and 1876), and she wrote two novels, Mercy Philbrick’s Choice (1876) and Hetty’s Strange History (1877), for her publisher’s ‘‘No Name’’ series. These works, set in New England, focus upon strong women characters dealing with complications wrought by love, death, family responsibility, and illness. For example, Draxy Miller, a memorable ‘‘Saxe Holm’’ heroine, arranges her sick father’s retirement, marries a minister, and takes over his pulpit after his death, all to the approval of the small-town community. Jackson’s love of children, undiminished by the deaths of her own, emerges in her children’s books. Her cat stories, particularly Letters from a Cat (1879), remain entertaining. In Nellie’s Silver
Mine (1878), Jackson incorporated her first impressions of Colorado into her story of unrelievedly good and resourceful Nellie and her somewhat petulant twin brother. The didactic asides prevalent in these works overwhelm Jackson’s Bits of Talk in Verse and Prose for Young Folks (1876). In 1879 Jackson heard Suzette ‘‘Bright Eyes’’ LaFlesche, an Omaha Native American, describe the wrongs suffered by Native Americans. Aroused by a righteous passion for justice for Native Americans comparable to abolitionist fervor, Jackson produced her most memorable works, and abandoned her pseudonyms to speak her mind. In A Century of Dishonor (1881), Jackson also abandoned fiction, writing impassioned history documenting several heinous examples of governmental perfidy practiced upon Native American tribes. Jackson’s strong indictment of the U.S. government and, by extension, its acquiescent populace, delighted reformers and enraged some critics who believed Jackson’s lack of objectivity damaged her case. Jackson was most appalled by the wrongful treatment inflicted upon California’s Mission Native Americans. She and Abbot Kinney served as official investigators, producing a Report on the Conditions and Needs of the Mission Indians (1883). Jackson was determined to publicize the situation of California’s natives and, since government documents reach few, she wrote Ramona (1884), a romance involving a half-Native American girl raised on a Spanish hacienda who elopes with a Native American, and subsequently shares his life as victim of land fraud and prejudice. Ramona enjoyed continuing popularity in over 300 reprintings, but unfortunately had little real impact upon Native American policy. Perhaps the outrage Jackson intended to arouse was lost in local color and drowned in tears, the very elements of Ramona’s story that have encouraged its frequent retelling in local pageants and national media productions. Ramona first reached the screen in a three-hour photoplay in 1916. A modified happy ending was added to the popular 1928 version, but in 1936, when a technicolor Ramona was released, one critic found the story ‘‘a piece of unadulterated hokum’’ far too sentimental for ‘‘these heartless days.’’ In spite of the sentimentality of much of her work, Jackson was widely respected in the literary and Native American reform circles of her era, and her death from cancer in 1885 was sincerely mourned. Her posthumously published stories return to eastern themes, and while they lack the fire of her Native American works, remain interesting for their powerful, independent women characters such as Sophy Burr in Zeph (1885), Victorene and Little Bel in stories included in Between Whiles (1887), and Pansy Billings and Popsy (1898). Although most modern critics fault Jackson’s obvious sentimentality, her works are important, both as an index for the taste of her times as well as for their focus upon women who act to determine their destiny. Marriage is not the end of their stories; Jackson shows them coping with widowhood, poverty, infidelity,
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and work. The presentation of Native Americans in her works deserves some criticism for its ‘‘noble savage’’ inclination and implications of Indian passivity, but the aim of her writing, to reach and arouse a white audience susceptible to such stereotypes, must be considered in any evaluation. Readers may weep at Ramona’s plight, but must still be subconsciously impressed by her strength of purpose. OTHER WORKS: Bathmendi: A Persian Tale (1867). Bits of Travel (1872). Bits of Talk about Home Matters (1873). Saxe Holm’s Stories (Series 1, 1874). The Story of Boon (1874). Bits of Travel at Home (1878). Saxe Holm’s Stories (Series 2, 1878). Mammy Tittleback and Her Family (1881). The Training of Children (1882). Easter Bells (1884). Glimpses of Three Coasts (1886). The Procession of Flowers in Colorado (1886). My Legacy (1888). A Calendar of Sonnets (1891). Poems (1891). Cat Stories (1898). Father Junipero and the Mission Indians (1902). Glimpses of California and the Missions (1902). Many of the papers of Helen Hunt Jackson are at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hardy, G.J., American Women Civil Rights Activists: Bibliographies of 68 Leaders, 1825-1992 (1993). Higginson, T. W., Contemporaries (1899). Higginson, T. W., Short Studies of American Authors (1906). Odell, R., Helen Hunt Jackson (1939). Reference works: Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Vol. 3 (1887). Authors at Home (1886). DAB, IX. Herringshaw’s National Library of American Biography, Vol. 3 (1914). NAW. Notable Women in History (1913). Twentieth Century Biographical Dictionary of Notable Americans, Vol. 6 (1904). Other references: American Literary Realism (Summer 1969, Summer 1973). AL (Jan. 1931). American Scholar (Summer 1941). Common Ground (Winter 1946). NYT (6 April 1916, 15 May 1928, 7 Oct. 1936). SR (Spring 1959).
America, where Laura met and married Schuyler Jackson (poet, farmer, and contributing editor of Time). For almost 30 years, she and Jackson worked on a reference work called the Dictionary of Exact Meaning. Schuyler Jackson died in 1970, and the work was finally published as Rational Meaning: A New Foundation for the Definition of Words, and Supplementary Essays in 1997. During the dozen years of Jackson’s association with Graves, the two collaborated on literary criticism and on one odd satirical novel, No Decency Left (1932). A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) is a perceptive discussion of innovative techniques in poetry, such as those practiced by e.e. cummings, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot. It analyzes the shortcomings of ‘‘temporary fads’’ such as Imagism and Georgianism and argues that modern experimental poetry, some of which they condemn to an early death, has been influenced by nonrepresentational art. Poets have too often simply abandoned coherent statement, creating abstract arrangements of emotionally laden phrases and sounds. Jackson also shared with Graves an interest in the Greco-Roman world and the status of women in ancient times, as evidenced by her novel A Trojan Ending (1937, reprint 1984) and her biographical sketches of famous women, Lives of Wives (1939, reissued 1995). Most of Jackson’s poetry is free verse, with a sensitive use of assonance and repetition and relatively little concern for rhyme. Each poem is a different problem, and each seeks to match sound to sense. In this Jackson has been compared with Gertrude Stein. Her poetry is often simultaneously playful and serious; sometimes there’s a trace of condescension toward nonpoetic thinking. In the first stanza of ‘‘Further Details,’’ for example, the poet, who presumably arrives at the ‘‘higher’’ truth intuitively and holistically, speaks to the analytical, rational pursuer of knowledge: ‘‘The reward of curiosity / In such as you / (Statistician of doubt) / Is increased cause of curiosity. / And the punishment thereof, / To be not a cat.’’
Born Laura Reichenthal, 16 January 1901, New York, New York; died 1991 Also wrote under: Laura Riding Gottschalk, Barbara Rich, Laura Riding Daughter of Nathaniel S. and Sarah Edersheim Reichenthal; married Louis Gottschalk, 1920; Schuyler Jackson, 1941 (died 1970)
Jackson is concerned with mental experience more than with sense experience. She favors philosophical subjects—the coexistence of multiplicity and sameness, the mysterious transformations of life and death, the ambiguous relationship between body and mind, the nature of love. Some readers find her poems obscure, but she implies this is the reader’s fault, not hers: ‘‘Doom is where I am and I want to make this plain because I know there are people to whom it can be plain’’ (preface to Poems: A Joking Word, 1930). She sometimes combines humor with metaphysical fantasy, as in the delightful creation story, ‘‘The Quids.’’ Other poems, like the enigmatic ‘‘Lucrece and Nara,’’ convey some eerie insight quite beyond rational explanation. In 1943 Graves referred to Jackson as writing in ‘‘the supreme female I, the original Triple Muse, who in her original Olympian mountain was mother of Apollo, not his chorus-girl troupe.’’
Laura Riding Jackson, raised in a nonreligious Jewish household actively espousing socialism, is best known for her strikingly original poetry, although she has also written criticism, novels, and biographical sketches. She attended Cornell University, married Louis Gottschalk (divorced, 1925), then spent 13 years abroad. She and Robert Graves were companions, establishing the Seizin Press in 1927 in Majorca. In 1939 they came back to
Her poetry has never achieved widespread popularity with general readers, but it is an important part of the modern flight from the conventions of 19th-century romanticism. Her diction shows a deliberate avoidance of traditional sentiments, a bare minimum of imagery and metaphor, a tendency to abstraction. The vocabulary is often deceptively simple, yet the reader must intuit meaning from limited clues. At its worst, this may require
—HELEN M. BANNAN
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sheer guesswork. At its best, it achieves a delicate precision and economy in the expression of complex meanings.
OTHER WORKS: The Close Chaplet (1926). Voltaire: A Biographical Fantasy (1927). Anarchism Is Not Enough (1928). Contemporaries and Snobs (1928). Love As Love, Death As Death (1928). Twenty Poems Less (1930). Laura and Francesco (1931, with R. Graves, 1932). The Life of the Dead (1933). Poet: A Lying Word (1933). Four Unposted Letters to Catherine (1933, 1993). Americans (1934). Progress of Stories (1935, 1994). Collected Poems (1938). Selected Poems (taken from 1938’s Collected Poems, 1970). The Telling (1970). Description of Life (uncorrected proof, 1980). How a Poem Comes to Be: A Poem for James F. Mathias (1980). A Poem (1980). Some Communications of Broad Reference (1983). The Poems of Laura Riding (1980, 1986). Experts Are Puzzled (reissue, 1985). The First Awakenings: The Early Poems (1992). A Selection of the Poems of Laura Riding (1994). Laura Riding: Selected Poems in Five Sets (reissue, 1995). A Short Sentence for Private Reflection on the Universal Length of Meaning (1995). The Word Woman and Other Related Writings (reissue, 1994).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Adams, B. B., The Enemy Self: Poetry and Criticism of Laura Riding (1990). Baker, D., In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding (1993). Graves, R. P., Robert Graves: The Years with Laura, 1926-1940 (1990). Seymour, M., The Telling (reissue, 1999). Van Hook, B. A., The Use of Myth in Laura Riding’s Selected Poems (1993). Wexler, J. P. Laura Riding’s Pursuit of Truth (1979). Wexler, J. P., Laura Riding, A Bibliography (1981). Reference works: Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia (1987). CAA (1944). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCA, TCAS. Other references: American Literature (1992). Critical Inquiry (Spring 1992). CQ (Spring 1971). Poetry (Aug. 1932, May 1939). Guide to the Laura (Riding) Jackson and Schuyler B. Jackson Collection at Cornell University (1998). Laura (Riding) Jackson and the Promise of Language: Catalogue of an Exhibition, October 1998-January 1999 (1998). —KATHERINE SNIPES
JACKSON, Rebecca Cox Born 15 February 1795, Hornstown, Pennsylvania; died 24 May 1871, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Daughter of Jane (Cox), later Wisson or Wilson; father’s name unknown; married Samuel S. Jackson (date unknown, before 1830; separated 1836) Rebecca Cox Jackson was a charismatic itinerant preacher, the founder of a religious communal family in Philadelphia, and a
religious visionary writer. Though an important example of African American female religious leadership and spirituality in the 19th century, she was virtually unknown from her death until the rediscovery and publication of her spiritual autobiography; Gifts of Power, in 1981. Virtually all that is known of her life is recorded in this autobiography and in Shaker archives. As the result of the powerful religious awakening experience in a thunderstorm in 1830 with which her spiritual autobiography begins, Jackson became active in the early Holiness movement and came to challenge the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church of her upbringing. She moved from leadership of praying bands to public preaching, stirring up controversy within AME circles not only as a woman preacher, but also because she had received the revelation that celibacy was necessary for a holy life. She criticized the churches, including the AME church and its leaders, for ‘‘carnality.’’ Her insistence on being guided entirely by the dictates of her inner voice led ultimately to her separation from husband, admired older brother (Joseph Cox, an AME preacher with whom she had lived since her mother’s death), and church. After a period of itinerant preaching in the later 1830s and early 1840s, in June 1847 Jackson joined the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing (the Shakers), at Watervliet, New York. She was attracted to their religious celibacy, their emphasis on spiritualistic experience, and their dual-gender concept of deity. With her younger disciple and lifelong companion, Rebecca Perot, Jackson lived at Watervliet until July 1851. Increasingly disappointed in the predominantly white Shaker community’s failure to take the gospel of their founder, Ann Lee, to the African American community, Jackson left Watervliet on an unauthorized mission to Philadelphia, where she and Perot experimented with séance-style spiritualism. They returned to Watervliet for a brief second residence in 1857, and at this time Jackson won the right to found and head a new Shaker ‘‘outfamily’’ in Philadelphia. This predominantly black and female Shaker family survived her death by at least a quarter of a century. Like several other African American women preachers in the 19th century, Jackson achieved her religious leadership role largely through visionary experience and her ability to communicate such experience to others, at first solely through oral testimonial. Illiterate into her middle age—‘‘the only child of my mother that had not learning’’—she depended immediately after her conversion on her literate elder brother to help her religious correspondence. Her autobiography records her increasing frustration with this dependency and her joy when she prayed for literacy and received it by divine gift. Gifts of Power records her spiritual journey as a woman with a divine calling, from her awakening through her discovery of Shakerism and the founding of her own community. She describes a wide variety of visionary experiences, including mysterious prophetic dreams and supernatural ‘‘gifts of power’’ (such as the ability to control the weather by prayer). The dream visions give access to a world in which laws of nature are violated with ease.
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The physical body left behind, the dreamer soars into the air, and is given flashes of understanding about both the physical universe and the spiritual world. Jackson’s visionary dreams also show her confronting fears of racial and sexual violence; working out an understanding of the mother aspect of the godhead; and even resolving conflicts that arose in her relationships with brother, husband, spiritual companions, and Shaker leaders. Alice Walker has described Gifts of Power as ‘‘an extraordinary document,’’ which ‘‘tells us much about the spirituality of human beings, especially of the interior spiritual resources of our mothers.’’ Writing of Jackson’s relationship to Perot, Walker coined the term ‘‘womanism’’ to distinguish a specifically black feminist cultural tradition that includes women’s love for other women but is not ‘‘separatist.’’ OTHER WORKS: Gifts of Power: The Writings of Rebecca Jackson, Black Visionary, Shaker Eldress (reissue, 1987). Manuscript writings include an autograph version of her incomplete autobiography in the Berkshire Athenaeum at the Public Library, Pittsfield, Massachusetts. A short booklet containing Perot’s dream accounts dictated to Jackson, a few of Jackson’s dreams, and a rough draft anthology of all Jackson’s extant writings, produced by her Shaker historian, Alonzo Hollister, are in the Shaker Collection, Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio. A fair copy of this anthology is in the Library of Congress Shaker manuscript collection. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Braxton, J., Black Women Writing Autobiography (1989). Gates, H. L., Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (1988). Williams, R. E., Called and Chosen: The Story of Mother Rebecca Jackson and the Philadelphia Shakers (1981). Duclow, G., ‘‘The Philadelphia Shaker Family,’’ in The Shaker Messenger (1994). Evans, J. H., Spiritual Empowerment in Afro-American Literature: Frederick Douglass, Rebecca Jackson, Booker T. Washington, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison (1987). Humez, J. M., ‘‘Visionary Experience and Power: The Career of Rebecca Cox Jackson,’’ in Black Apostles at Home and Abroad, D. M. Wills and R. Newman, eds. (1982). McKay, N. Y., ‘‘Nineteenth Century Black Women’s Spiritual Autobiographies: Religious Faith and SelfEmpowerment,’’ in Interpreting Women’s Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives, the Personal Narrative Group, ed. (1989). Sasson, D., ‘‘Life as Vision: The Autobiography of Mother Rebecca Jackson,’’ in The Shaker Spiritual Narrative (1983). Walker, A., ‘‘Gifts of Power: The Writings of Rebecca Cox Jackson,’’ in In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens (1983). Williams, R. E., Called and Chosen: The Story of Mother Rebecca Jackson and the Philadelphia Shakers (1981). Reference works: NBAW (1991). Black Women in the United States: An Historical Encyclodpedia. Encyclopedia of African American Culture and History. ANB. Other References: Jackson of Feminist Studies in Religion (Fall 1989). Tulsa Studies in Women’s Litertaure (Fall 1982). —JEAN MCMAHON HUMEZ
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JACKSON, Shirley Born 14 December 1919, San Francisco, California; died 8 August 1965, North Bennington, Vermont Daughter of Leslie H. and Geraldine Bugbee Jackson; married Stanley Edgar Hyman, 1940; children: Laurence, Joanne, Sarah, and Barry Shirley Jackson began to compose poems and short stories almost as soon as she could write. She won her first literary prize at the age of twelve when her poem ‘‘The Pine Tree’’ won a contest sponsored by Junior Home magazine. Two years later her family, which by this time included younger brother Barry, moved from Burlingame, California, to Rochester, New York. The following year she graduated from Brighton High School at the age of fifteen in the top quarter of her class. She enrolled in the liberal arts program at the University of Rochester in September 1934 but withdrew two years later. Jackson then spent a year at home in a self-imposed ‘‘apprenticeship in writing’’ in which she kept to a strict regimen of writing at least 1,000 words per day. By the end of the year, she was ready for more formal education and entered Syracuse University in September 1937. Although she began her studies as a journalism major, she eventually transferred to the English Department and graduated with her B.A. in 1940. During her time at Syracuse she wrote 15 pieces for the campus magazine. She met her future husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, while at Syracuse when they both joined the magazine’s staff. A lifelong champion of civil rights, Jackson used her position as editor on the magazine to write editorials questioning the lack of black students at Syracuse and the poor condition of student living quarters. She did not get along well with the administration at Syracuse because of its desire to exercise what she considered excessive control over the campus magazine. She consequently refused to donate her papers to Syracuse later in life, and Hyman instead gave them to the Library of Congress three years after her death. After their marriage on 3 June 1940, Jackson and Hyman moved to New York City, where he took an editorial assistant position with the New Republic and she wrote in between working at various clerical jobs. A job at Macy’s during the Christmas season became the subject of a witty short story, ‘‘My Life with R. H. Macy,’’ which was published the following year in the New Republic. Another short story, ‘‘After You, My Dear Alphonse,’’ was published in the New Yorker in January 1943 and concerned prejudice and misperceptions of black Americans. More short stories were subsequently published by the New Yorker, including ‘‘Come Dance With Me in Ireland,’’ which was selected for inclusion in Best American Short Stories, 1944. Other stories were sold to American Mercury, Mademoiselle, and a short story collection called Cross-Section. After several years as a staff writer for the New Republic and the New Yorker, Jackson’s husband accepted a position as professor at Bennington College and the family moved to North Bennington, Vermont. Their second child was born shortly after the
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move to Vermont in 1945 and Jackson worked as a substitute creative writing teacher at the college while continuing to write daily. The Road Through the Wall, Jackson’s first novel, was published in 1948 shortly before her most famous short story, ‘‘The Lottery,’’ was published in the June 26 issue of the New Yorker. It has been said that if Shirley Jackson had written nothing more for the rest of her life, she would still be famous for ‘‘The Lottery.’’ This much-anthologized and -dramatized short story tells of an annual ritual in a small New England town in which local residents draw names to see who among them will be stoned to death by the others. Reader reaction was intense; the story generated more mail than anything the New Yorker had published to date. Jackson’s dark view of human nature and her belief in its inherently greater capacity for evil than for good is a theme not only of ‘‘The Lottery’’ but of much of her fiction. In The Road Through the Wall, for example, Jackson wrote of the fictional families on Pepper Street in the Burlingame, California, of her youth. This first novel explores the twisted relationships between the individuals and households on the block and culminates in the murder of a three-year-old girl and suicide of a thirteen-year-old boy. ‘‘The Lottery’’ was included along with a number of Jackson’s other short stories in a collection published a year later in 1949 and titled The Lottery, or The Adventures of James Harris. Jackson continued to sell several short stories to women’s magazines, particularly Good Housekeeping and Women’s Home Companion. These pieces tended to be light, humorous tales based on her family’s exploits and without the ironic twists and black humor characterizing ‘‘The Lottery’’ and similar works. Jackson and her family moved to Westport, Connecticut, in 1950, in part because of her and her husband’s desire to be closer to the literary world of New York City. Hyman was himself a well-respected critic and author of nonfiction, and the two often critiqued each other’s work. Jackson and her family soon missed Vermont, however, and moved back to Bennington after only two years in Westport. Jackson published several short stories in 1950 and her second novel, The Hangsaman, in 1951. The Hangsaman, which received a favorable response from both critics and the public, was hailed by some as one of the outstanding books of the year. The novel centers on the slow mental breakdown of Natalie Waite, a bright seventeen-year-old who, unable to cope with being away from home during her first year in college, invents a friend named Tony. Life Among the Savages (1953, 1997) and Raising Demons (1957) are hilarious accounts of Jackson’s family and include most of her magazine articles on the exploits of her growing brood. These ‘‘family chronicles’’ were often excerpted in magazines or published in condensed form by Reader’s Digest. Jackson continued to write fiction, however, and her third novel, The Bird’s Nest, was published in 1954 to very good reviews. Jackson
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got the idea, which focuses on psychology and the inner workings of the mind, from reading a case study on multiple personality disorder. Jackson’s short stories continued to be well received, and ‘‘One Ordinary Day with Peanuts’’ was chosen for the Best American Short Stories, 1956. Her longtime fascination with witchcraft and the supernatural led her to accept an offer to write a nonfiction book for young people about the Salem witch trials. The Witchcraft of Salem Village (1956) is highly regarded as an interesting, accurate, and simplified history of witchcraft. In addition to this nonfiction title, Jackson also experimented with writing children’s plays. The Bad Children, originally written for her two daughters, with songs written by her son Laurence, was published in 1958 as a spoof on witchcraft. Jackson’s other deviations from her adult novels and short stories include Nine Magic Wishes (1963), a children’s picture book, and Famous Sally (1966), a juvenile novel written for her daughter Sarah. The Haunting of Hill House (1959) was a return to the world of gothic horror Jackson had successfully explored in The Sundial (1958) and to some extent in ‘‘The Lottery.’’ The Haunting of Hill House focuses on an investigation of an old estate house by a group of researchers who believe the building may be haunted. One of the women invited to participate becomes obsessed with, and perhaps obsessed by, the house. Unlike most gothic fiction writers, however, Jackson made the haunting real and the evil triumphant in the end. Though The Haunting of Hill House was made into an early black-and-white film (considered a masterpiece), a new variation was offered in 1999 with a big screen remake, complete with host of state-of-the-art special effects. Jackson’s last adult novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), was the second of her works to be named one of the year’s 10 best novels by Time magazine. The plot focuses on two sisters, Merricat and Constance Blackwood, who have survived the arsenic poisoning which killed four family members. Although Constance was acquitted of the murder, the sisters still face suspicion and hostility from townspeople. Cousin Charles arrives in the hope of wedding Merricat and controlling the family fortune. She rejects him and sets fire to the house, which the townspeople help Charles destroy. It is only at the novel’s close, when the two sisters return to live in the hulking ruin, that the reader learns a chillingly unrepentant Merricat is the poisoner. Jackson’s personal life and professional career are both starkly separate and intertwined. She presents portraits of bleakness, despair, and humanity’s inherent banality in her modern gothic fiction ‘‘The Lottery,’’ The Haunting of Hill House, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Yet she also wrote of her children’s humorous exploits in her family chronicles Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons. Although the latter may represent the real Jackson, it is the former, with her ability to point out the blackness in every heart, who will always be remembered. OTHER WORKS: Special Delivery (contributor, 1960). The Magic of Shirley Jackson (edited by S. E. Hyman, 1966). Come Along
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with Me (edited by S. E. Hyman, 1968). The Lottery and Other Stories (1991). The Masterpieces of Shirley Jackson (1996).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Aldridge, J. W., After the Lost Generation: A Critical Study of the Writers of Two Wars (1958). Argenziano, G., ‘‘Existentialism in Shirley Jackson’s Last Novels’’ (thesis, 1983). Burrell, D. L., ‘‘Shirley Jackson: Contexts, Intertexts, and New Conclusions’’ (thesis, 1993). Caminero-Santangelo, M. M., ‘‘The Madwoman Can’t Speak: Feminist Debates and American Women’s Writing, 1945-1993’’ (1995). Delea, C., ‘‘Feminists Have Always Lived in the Castle: Shirley Jackson and the Feminist Gothic’’ (thesis, 1991). Friedman, L., Shirley Jackson (1975, 1980). Hall, K. J., ‘‘The Lesbian Politics of Transgression: Reading Shirley Jackson’’ (thesis, 1991). Lape, S. V., ‘‘Hostage of ‘The Lottery’: The Life and Feminist Fiction of Shirley Jackson’’ (thesis, 1994). Levy, B. Ladies Laughing: Wit as Control in Contemporary American Women Writers (1997). Metcalf, L. T., ‘‘Shirley Jackson in Her Fiction: A Rhetorical Search for the Implied Author’’ (thesis, 1989). Nardacci, M. L., ‘‘Theme, Character, and Technique in the Novels of Shirley Jackson’’ (thesis, 1980). Noack, J. ‘‘Shirley Jackson— Escaping the Patriarchy Through Insanity’’ (thesis, 1994). O’Callaghan, C. M., ‘‘Reclaiming Women and Race in World War II Society: Shirley Jackson’s Fiction’’ (thesis, 1996). Oppenheimer, J. Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson (1989). Reinsch, P. N., ‘‘A History of Hauntings: A Critical Bibliography of Shirley Jackson’’ (thesis, 1998). Varner, D., ‘‘A Feminist Analysis of Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman and We Have Always Lived in the Castle’’ (thesis, 1988). Warren, R. J., ‘‘An Overview of Recurring Themes and Concerns and Usage of Genre Conventions Within the Fiction of Shirley Jackson’’ (thesis, 1992). Reference works: Benet’s (1991). Best Short Stories of the Modern Age (1982). First Fiction: An Anthology of the First Published Stories by Famous Writers (1994). Granta Book of the American Short Story (1992). CANR (1992). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCA, TCAS. Other references: Explicator (March 1954). Great Short Stories About Parenting: Stories by Jessamyn West, Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, D. H. Lawrence, and Other Great Writers of the World of Children (1990). Great Short Tales of Mystery and Terror (1982). Great Women Writers: The Lives and Works of 135 of the World’s Most Important Women Writers, from Antiquity to the Present (1994). The American Short Story: A Collection of the Best Known and Most Memorable Short Stories by the Great American Authors (1994). —LEAH J. SPARKS
JACKSON, Ward See BRAUN, Lilian Jackson
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JACOBI, Mary Putnam Born 31 August 1842, London, England; died 10 June 1906, New York, New York Also wrote under: Mary Putnam Daughter of George Palmer and Victorine Haven Putnam; married Abraham Jacobi, 1873 The descendant of American Puritan families and the eldest of 11 children, at fifteen Mary Putnam Jacobi traveled to the first public high school for girls in Manhattan, where her writing received critical attention. Her story ‘‘Found and Lost’’ was published in the Atlantic Monthly when she was seventeen, while another, ‘‘Hair Chains,’’ appeared there in 1861. The family expected Jacobi to be a writer, but she tended toward medicine. In 1863 Jacobi was the first woman to receive a degree from the College of Pharmacy in New York City. Since no male medical school would accept women, Jacobi attended the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania. Believing that only in Paris, where no woman had ever studied medicine, could she find proper training, Jacobi went there and fought to enter the École de Médicine. She supported herself by writing sketches, stories, and even a short novel for the New Orleans Times, the New York Evening Post, and both Putnam’s and Scribner’s magazines. Because she felt writing fiction took more from her and left her poorer, she began her prolific medical writing (printed in medical journals and collections) with a series of charming, literate medical letters from Paris. Jacobi won a bronze medal for her thesis and graduated in 1871. Returning home one of the best-prepared physicians in America, she was ready to teach at the fledgling women’s medical school of the New York Infirmary, to practice medicine, and to continue scientific research. From this point forward, Jacobi wrote no more fiction. Jacobi married a prominent physician and had two children, but continued her profession. In 1896 came the onset of Jacobi’s final illness. Brain tumors had been a subject of her medical writing, and she was the first to diagnose her own condition. Her description of her symptoms, published after her death, is a classic of medical literature. All but one of Jacobi’s magazine pieces were republished in Stories and Sketches (1907). The writing is graceful and lucid, with incident and character captured in concrete images. ‘‘Found and Lost’’ is a philosophical adventure story about a German who has found the source of the Nile, but loses it again when an American, seeking to commercialize it, goes with him. The best of this early writing, ‘‘Some of the French Leaders,’’ presents incisive portraits of ineffectual politicians. A critic considered it ‘‘one of the ablest ever printed in an American magazine,’’ with ‘‘intellectual grasp’’ and ‘‘grim and elucidating wit.’’ One of Jacobi’s many interests was improving primary education. She taught her own daughter, afterward writing Physiological Notes on Primary Education and the Study of Language
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(1889). She believed experiments in geometry and science came first, then language—direct contact with things before symbols of things. Languages were to be taught three at once. The description of her experience is pertinent and interesting, but the rest is dated. A rare attempt at popularizing scientific material was her expansion in 1874 of her husband’s book, Infant Diet. She felt the material deserved wider distribution, believing women wanted explanations as well as directions. Although some critics felt Jacobi’s material was too unsparing of detail, demand for Infant Diet required annual editions for many years. The remarkable Question of Rest for Women During Menstruation (1877), which won the prestigious Boyleston Prize from Harvard University, reflects classical background, research into medical literature, and questionnaires to women in all walks of life. Prepared with Jacobi’s thorough, commonsense approach and literary flair, it should have forever retired the belief that women must inevitably withdraw from ordinary activity during menstruation. In the excellent historical overview, she points out that only in women have normal functions been considered pathological. Beliefs in temporary insanity, instability, or inability to make decisions during menstruation are demolished. Some of the medical theory is no longer valid, but the conclusions and recommendations are sensible, still pertinent, and thoroughly convincing. Jacobi’s writings about women’s roles began with an article in the North American Review (1882), ‘‘Shall Women Practice Medicine?’’ In surveying the history of women in medicine, she noted it was not an innovation at all. Women practiced freely when medicine was unpaid. Her contribution to Century’s symposium on women in medicine (1891), part of the successful campaign to open the Johns Hopkins medical school to women, was followed by the extensive ‘‘Woman in Medicine,’’ in Annie Nathan Meyer’s pioneer compilation, Woman ’s Work in America (1891). An erudite factual history, it is full of original views, such as her comparison of the arguments against male midwives and those against women physicians. ‘‘Common Sense’’ Applied to Woman Suffrage (1894) combines history, clear dissection of the current situation, and incisive argument. ‘‘No one expected the vote to raise women’s wages or drastically reform the social order,’’ she wrote, ‘‘but what is. . .very seriously demanded, is that women be recognized as human beings.’’ Her letter on ‘‘Modern Female Invalidism’’ (1895) comments: ‘‘Too much attention is paid to women as objects’’ while they remain ‘‘insufficiently prepared to act as independent subjects.’’ Despite her talent for imaginative literature, Jacobi wrote little fiction and stopped entirely before she was thirty. She was a pioneer in medicine, both as a woman and simply as a physician, while successfully combining marriage and a profession and doing humanitarian social work. Commenting on her Paris thesis, a French medical journal noted her ‘‘poetic form, which does not detract from the value of the statement.’’ She excelled in clear, incisive writing on controversial topics. The voluminous medical writings are characterized by wit, clarity, and literate style.
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OTHER WORKS: De la graisse neutre et de les acides gras (1871). The Value of Life: A Reply to Mr. Mallock’s Essay, ‘‘Is Life Worth Living?’’ (1879). On the Use of the Cold Pack Followed by Massage in the Treatment of Anaemia (with V. A. White, 1880). Essays on Hysteria, Brain-Tumor, and Some Other Cases of Nervous Disease (1888). Uffelman’s Manual of Dietetic Hygiene for Children (edited by Jacobi, 1891). Found and Lost (1894). From Massachusetts to Turkey (1896). Mary Putnam Jacobi, M.D.: A Pathfinder in Medicine (1925). The papers of Mary Putnam Jacobi are at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Emerson, R., Journal of Ruth Emerson’s Travels in Greece, 1895- 1896 (1995). Hume, R. F., Great Women of Medicine (1964). Hurd-Mead, K. C., Medical Women of America (1933). Irwin, I. H., Angels and Amazons: A Hundred Years of American Women (1934). Marks, G., and W. K. Beatty, Women in White (1972). In Memory of Mary Putnam Jacobi (1907). Putnam, R., ed., Life and Letters of Mary Putnam Jacobi (1925). Reed, E.W., American Women in Science Before the Civil War (1992). Stille, D. R., Extraordinary Women of Medicine (1997). Truax, R., The Doctors Jacobi (1952). Creative Couples in the Sciences (1996). Reference works: DAB (Volume 1). NAW. Other references: Jour. Hist. Med. (Autumn 1949). Med. Life (July 1928). —CAROL B. GARTNER
JACOBS, Harriet Born Autumn 1813, Edenton, North Carolina; died 7 March 1897, Washington, DC Wrote under: Linda Brent Daughter of Deliah Horniblow and Daniel Jacobs; children: Joseph, Louisa Matilda The brief facts of Harriet Jacobs’ life—the date and place of her birth; the names of her parents and children; the year of her death—generate as many questions about the former slave, abolitionist, and author as they answer. Despite scholarly research into her life, it remains unclear how and when her last name became established as Jacobs. Her mother, Deliah, was a slave owned by a tavern keeper named John Horniblow. Jacobs’ father was reputed to be a carpenter named Daniel Jacobs, himself a slave owned by a Dr. Andrew Knox. It is unusual Harriet carried the name of her father; a slave was not characteristically given his or her father’s last name as paternity was often disputed or disregarded altogether. Her ‘‘naming,’’ then, proved as extraordinary as her life, conforming neither to the prevailing convention nor to the convention of ‘‘self-naming’’ common to such black men as Frederick Douglass upon undertaking literary excursions into slave narratives.
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Like 1845’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself (1861) utilizes standard abolitionist rhetoric to provide an account of her life as a slave, her efforts to resist the advances of her master, and her eventual achievement of freedom for her children and for herself. Unlike male-authored slave narratives that tend to frame a cause-and-effect relationship between the attainment of literacy and the desire for freedom, Jacobs’ work—written almost two decades after its author’s escape to the Northern states in 1842—simply documents the chronology of such activities: her first mistress taught the young black girl to read, write, and sew as a matter of practicality. She represents her desire for freedom as stemming from her experiences as a slave woman rather than from an enlightenment gained from an exposure to ‘‘book learning.’’ An attractive, light-skinned black woman who was subjected to the unwanted advances of her owner from the time she was an adolescent, Jacobs presents herself in Incidents as a sexual object as well as a mother, but even more significantly as a protofeminist when she writes: ‘‘Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women.’’ In the writings of Jacobs we are granted a rare perspective—a woman’s perspective—on a condition most commonly presented from the point of view of men. While Jacobs relates her story using the conventions of the sentimental ‘‘women’s’’ fiction of the 19th century, she breaks new ground in her candid portrayal of human sexuality and in expressing a personal fortitude, perseverance, and instinct for survival that was a far cry from the feminine ideal of the day. Hers, indeed, is a story of rebellion, not only against her powerlessness at the hands of a white owner, but also as a woman against a patriarchal society that equates a woman’s virtue with physical and emotional weakness. Matter of factly, Jacobs recounts her attempts to ward off continuous and unwanted sexual advances, her dispassionate selection of a white lawyer named Samuel Tredwell Sawyer as a proper father for her offspring, and her attempts to procure her two children’s freedom as exercises both of her agency and the collective agency of the African American community she was part of. As black feminist scholars such as Hazel Carby and Valerie Smith have noted, Jacobs’ adoption of many of the conventions of popular fiction caused several male literary critics and historians to challenge the authenticity of Incidents as a slave narrative. Fortunately, biographical details about Jacobs and her authorship were verified in 1980 through the research of Jean Fagan Yellin. Prior to the publication of Yellin’s discoveries, authorship of Jacobs’ narrative had been attributed to ‘‘Linda Brent,’’ the first person narrator who claimed the autobiographical Incidents had been ‘‘written by herself.’’ In addition to establishing the authenticity of Jacobs’ narrative in her introduction to recent editions of Incidents, Yellin traces the book’s complex history—Jacobs juggled work on her narrative with full-time work caring for the children of a white family and supporting the abolitionist cause in the years prior to the Civil War—and details the intricate editorial relations between Jacobs and prominent antislavery activists and writers Amy Post, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lydia Maria Child, and Frederick Douglass. She also documents Jacobs’ years as a fugitive from
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slavery, her flight to the North in 1842 and her settlement in Rochester, New York, where she was active in abolitionist politics. After the publication of Incidents in 1861, she and her daughter, Louisa Matilda, participated in Civil War relief efforts, bringing much needed supplies to soldiers stationed in Alexandria, Virginia, Washington, D.C., Savannah, Georgia, and even Edenton, until 1868. Several years after the war she moved to her daughter’s home in Washington, D.C., dying there in 1897 at the age of 84. OTHER WORKS: ‘‘Letter from a Fugitive Slave,’’ New York Tribune (21 Jun. 1853). The Deeper Wrong (British edition of Incidents, edited by Lydia Maria Child, 1862). Letters from Harriet Jacobs to Amy Post are in the Isaac and Amy Post Family Papers collection at the University of Rochester, Rochester, New York. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Andrews, W. L., To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865 (1988). Baker, H., Blues Ideology and Afro-American Literature (1984). Blassingame, J., The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (1979). Braxton, J., Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition within a Tradition (1993). Carby, H., Reconstructing Womanhood (1987). Davis, A., Women, Race, and Class (1981). Johnson, Y., The Voices of African American Women: The Use of Narrative and Authorial Voice in the Works of Harriet Jacobs, Zora Neale Hurston, and Alice Walker (1995). Smith, V., Self-Discovery and Authenticity in Afro-American Narrative (1987). American Literature (Nov. 1981). Reference works: FC (1990). Feminist Writers (1996). —BEVERLY HORTON AND PAMELA SHELTON
JACOBS, Jane Born 4 May 1916, Scranton, Pennsylvania Daughter of John and Bess Robinson Butzner; married Robert H. Jacobs, Jr., 1944; children: two sons and one daughter After graduating from high school, Jane Jacobs worked on the Scranton Tribune, where she exhibited a special interest in the problems of working-class districts. As a freelance writer in New York City, she continued her study of the problems of urban centers. In interviews, Jacobs has often stated that her husband, an architect, has been a major influence upon her work. They have two sons and a daughter. In 1952 Jacobs joined the staff of Architectural Forum as associate editor and specialized in analyzing the problems of cities such as Washington, Baltimore, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. Jacobs contributed to Columbia University Forum, the Reporter, and Harper’s. She also contributed to the new approach towards the study of city life in The Exploding Metropolis (1958). Jacobs’s essay entitled ‘‘Downtown Is for People’’ foreshadowed her future works in the study of urban affairs.
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In her first book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Jacobs sought to overturn the more conventional attitudes of urban planners and regional developers in the interest of preserving the vitality of cities, which she believes makes them both interesting and safe for their inhabitants. Jacobs’s fresh approach to the subject brings into focus the uses of parks, sidewalks, and diversity on city streets. She stresses the importance of mixing residential and commercial needs in the same area and decries the urban planner’s desire to change the character of urban communities by ‘‘cleaning them up,’’ instead of rehabilitating old buildings. Jacobs correctly assesses the result of demolition of old buildings followed by the construction of massive housing projects as a loss of goods and services which undermines both the comforts and commerce of the city. Jacobs perceives both vandalism and decreased domestic spirit as a direct offshoot from the ‘‘blank walls’’ of the projects. The problems at the heart of American cities are the lack of interest and understanding on the part of the theorists who control the future of the cities. Jacobs objects to the contemporary situation of urban planning, where actual programs derive their conceptual foundation from utopian cities, not found ‘‘in the streets’’ of the real world. Jacobs’s work is subjective, but although it avoids the stereotypical urbanologist jargon, it remains painfully aloof. It seems to some readers that Jacobs is trying to impose her own upper class values on the cities. Ultimately, her contribution to the contemporary field of urban studies remains imaginative, but represents no great progress over the work of her predecessors. Her portrayal of what she believes is the ‘‘real life’’ of cities appears sensationalist when juxtaposed against scholarly works; it is artificial and indeed almost a work of fiction when compared to other ‘‘real life’’ perceptions of the city. In The Economy of Cities (1969), Jacobs modifies her tone to present a historical account of the growth of cities. She maintains that cities are not a mere outgrowth of an expanded rural economy, but were nourished on manufacturing and trade, which brought further growth to agricultural communities. Industrial growth is reliant upon innovation and a variety of types of work within a geographic area. Jacobs attempts to reverse the traditional approach to the study of urban areas by setting forth her belief that industry originated not in the household crafts, but in the cities, and then spread to the countryside. She uses the example of electrical power, which is sent to the city from the rural areas, but was first used in the city. As in the case of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs portrays a far nicer fantasy than the utopian ‘‘City Beautiful’’ of other urbanologists, yet there is insufficient evidence for her claims that cities are diverse and original for the reasons she sets forth. As one critic has written, her analysis of urban growth is limited by its admiration for the innovative entrepreneur and its inattention to the role of corporations and government. Jacobs’s work accurately describes the ‘‘other half’’ of the current urban plight, which has been overlooked by experts, yet she has made little effort to provide a bridge between the two
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extremes of urban ideology. It is her courage in the face of overwhelming ‘‘superblocks’’ that has brought Jacobs recognition for her ideas. Her works have been characterized as ‘‘spunky and informative cautionary documents,’’ and they remain, for this reason, invaluable to the student of the modern city. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Apolinsky, S. J., ‘‘Reweaving the Fabric Jane Jacobs at East Lake Meadows’’ (thesis, 1993). Ethics in Making a Living: The Jane Jacobs Conference (1989). Glaeser, E. L., Cities and Ethics: An Essay for Jane Jacobs (essay, 1998). Hill, D. R., Jane Jabobs’ Ideas on Big, Diverse Cities: A Review and Commentary (journal, 1988). Ideas That Matter: The Worlds of Jane Jacobs (1997). Zotti, E., Eyes on Jane Jacobs (1986). Other references: Architectural Forum (July 1969). Atlantic (July 1969). Book World (18 May 1969). CSM (26 June 1969). Commentary (Aug. 1969). Commonwealth (5 Sept. 1969). LJ (1 June 1969). NR (7 June 1969). NY (14 June 1969). NYRB (1 Jan. 1970). NYTBR (1 June 1969). SR (5 July 1969). —ILISE LEVY
JACOBS, Sarah Sprague Born 1813, Pawtuxet, Rhode Island; died death date unknown Daughter of Bela and Sarah Sprague Jacobs Born while her father was minister to a Baptist congregation in Pawtuxet, Sarah Sprague Jacobs grew up in Massachusetts, where her father became pastor of the First Baptist Church in Cambridge. One of the reasons for the move seems to have been the parents’ concern for the children’s education, Pawtuxet having no adequate schools. A few remaining details of Jacobs’ life are gleaned from a careful reading of her father’s letters and journals, which she edited with decorously impersonal commentary in 1837, the year after his death. The Reverend Bela Jacobs was apparently a demanding yet indulgent father in the Congregational New England tradition. Frequently ill, deeply concerned with providential matters and his own spiritual estate, he evidently expected reflection, control, personal and social responsibility, and intellectual achievement from his daughter; she seems not to have disappointed him. Throughout what is finally a traditional spiritual biography of her father—the Memoir of Rev. Bela Jacobs, A.M. (1837)— Jacobs agrees with his judgements and thus suggests her own personality. She notes, for example, his disapproval of Letters of Charlotte, the Beloved of Werther: He ‘‘was always decidedly opposed to the reading, even occasionally [of] novels of this class, on account of the absolute waste not only of the time employed in their perusal, but of the sensibilities they so uselessly excite.’’ He approved of Jacobs’ religious work, however, and praised her lengthy trips (in 1832-34) to the South, where she attended Bible classes and became in her father’s eyes ‘‘completely Southernized.’’
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Jacobs was certainly aware of religion’s role in mid-19th-century America, and her biography reveals a restrained and pious New England mind in its elegant formality. The precise, concrete, anecdotal but factual work is Latinate and discreet in style and suggests the caring duty of a minister’s daughter. Nonantum and Natick (1853), reissued as The White Oak and Its Neighbors in 1869, is an informal, nostalgic, and occasionally conjectural history of the Massachusetts Native American tribes. The work’s intimate tone suggests the author is directing her remarks to children. The account is divided into three parts: the first focuses on Nonantum, the Christian Native American settlement near Newton; the second section focuses on Natick, a settlement 18 miles southwest of Boston, to which the Christian Native Americans moved in 1651; the final part includes details of King Philip’s War (1675-76) and concludes in the present as Jacobs notes the few Native American names still extant in Massachusetts.
them and, by making it their own, rise above it.’’ Other criticism includes discerning poetry reviews and essays on contemporary writers—Lowell, Frost, Cummings, Williams, and Salinger.
Despite some sentimental phrasing, Nonantum and Natick reveals scholarly and disciplined erudition as Jacobs details the life of the Puritan minister John Eliot (1601-90), a successful missionary to the Native Americans and the first translator of the Bible into their tongues. She draws heavily and explicitly on primary sources, quoting for example Roger Williams, John Winthrop, John Endicot, Thomas Shepard, Cotton Mather, John Wilson, and Eliot himself. The work ranges from history to biography to anthropology as Jacobs amasses and organizes with apparent ease a great deal of disparate material and ends each chapter with an evidently original if standard poem. It is finally Jacobs’ good mind that impresses the modern reader and that places her firmly in the tradition of reflective New England scholars.
A 1975 National Book Award nominee, The Shade Seller (1974) contains 42 new poems as well as generous selections from the previous volumes and represents Jacobsen’s best work. Subjects are drawn from history, from travel, from nature, from religion, and from an analysis of the relation of the poem to the reader and of the poem itself. Particularly effective are her poetic vignettes, such as ‘‘My Small Aunt’’ and ‘‘The Shade Seller.’’ In ‘‘Birdsong of the Lesser Poet’’ and ‘‘When the Five Prominent Poets,’’ Jacobsen examines the power of the Muse who inexplicably visits the lesser poet and who should never be summoned casually (‘‘they dropped the Muse’s name. / Who came. / It was awful. / The door in shivers and a path / plowed like a twister through everything. . .’’)
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CAL. Daughters of America (1882). FPA. Woman’s Record (1853). —CAROLINE ZILBOORG
JACOBSEN, Josephine Born 19 August 1908, Cobourg, Ontario, Canada Daughter of Joseph Edward and Octavia Winder Boylan; married Eric Jacobsen, 1932 Although born in Canada, Josephine Jacobsen lived in Baltimore, Maryland, and Whitefield, New Hampshire; frequent and extensive travel enriched her poetry and fiction. Her interest in the drama has produced two critical studies with William R. Mueller: The Testament of Samuel Beckett (1964) and Ionesco and Genet: Playwrights of Silence (1968). Written for the intelligent lay reader, the volumes give keen insight particularly into these dramatists’ position regarding man’s loss of faith in traditional values: ‘‘Beckett’s protagonists lament the loss; Ionesco’s either lament it or are oblivious to it; most of Genet’s clasp the loss to
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The five volumes of Jacobsen’s poetry span nearly 40 years and explore the themes with which she contends the best poetry must deal—frustration, helpless pain, betrayed integrity, and a desolate and piercing sense of dislocation. Never shirking the dark side of human experience, Jacobsen finds that a lack of communication and the isolation of individuals are responsible for the misery of humanity. The poems insist people face up to mortality, recognize their animal nature, struggle to communicate, and mourn the sadness of old age and distress as much as the loss of childhood and innocence. Still, Jacobsen remains a steady poet of affirmation; she insists on our moral obligation to humankind and to nature, and she undergirds her poetry with vigorous religious convictions.
Jacobsen’s short stories are set primarily in the city (Baltimore), in the Caribbean Islands, in Mexico, or in Morocco. All of the stories with foreign settings share a Jamesian theme of the American away from home (as one character remarks, ‘‘We are, after all, strangers’’). ‘‘On the Island’’ (1965), ‘‘The Jungle of Lord Lion’’ (1969), and ‘‘The Gesture’’ (1976) present violent deeds (murder, betrayal, threatened execution) juxtaposed against the beauty of exotic birds, lush flora, and island animals. The lives and sufferings of the natives, however, remain alien domains the visitors cannot enter. ‘‘A Walk with Raschid’’ (1972), Jacobsen’s most successful story, is set in Morocco; against the symbolic call of the muezzin, Jacobsen writes an agonizing story of betrayed integrity. The city stories, particularly ‘‘The Taxi’’ (1967), ‘‘Help’’ (1971), ‘‘Nel Bagno’’ (1974), and ‘‘A Stroll around the Square’’ (1974) center on radically different women who face epiphanies of imminent danger, injustice, temporary isolation, or an unexpected kinship with the past. Rich imagery and detail abound: Mrs. Birdsong runs to answer the telephone ‘‘that was ripping the hot night silence’’; Violet throws away her accusing note and watches it ‘‘splinter with a fine, mild contempt, pity,’’ Jacobsen’s short stories have been included among the O. Henry prize stories (1967, 1971, 1973, 1975), as well as in Fifty Years of the American Short Story (1970). Poetry consultant to the Library of Congress (1971-73), Jacobsen was one of four women
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so honored in the history of that post. As critic, poet, and short story writer, Jacobsen herself evinces the trait she praised in Julia Randall: ‘‘a quality of underlying radiance—a sort of receptive joy under the full recognition of suffering and even horror.’’ OTHER WORKS: Let Each Man Remember (1940). For the Unlost (1946). The Human Climate (1953). The Animal Inside (1966). A Walk with Raschid, and Other Stories (1978). Prize Stories of 1985: The O. Henry Awards (1989). Prize Stories of 1993: The O. Henry Awards (1993). The Instant of Knowing: Lectures, Criticisms and Occasional Prose (1997). "The Poet and the Poem’’, at the Library of Congress (recording, 1990). What Goes Without Saying: Collected Stories of Josephine Jacobsen (1996). World Up Baltimore: A Poetry Collection (recording, 1997). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ivey, J. E., Notes Toward Time: Mezzo-Soprano, Flute/Alto Flute Harp (musical score, 1984). Prettyman, E. S., ‘‘Josephine Jacobsen: Commitment to Wonder’’ (thesis, 1985). Laurels: Eight Women Poets (1998). Poetry Baltimore: Poems about a City (1997). Truthtellers of the Times: Interviews with Contemporary Women Poets (1998). Other references: NR (4 Jan. 1975). NYTBR (11 Dec. 1966). Poetry (May 1975). Winston-Salem Journal (13 Aug. 1978). The Writing Life: Roland Flint and Josephine Jacobsen (audiovisual, 1995). —ELIZABETH EVANS
JAMES, Alice Born 7 August 1848, New York, New York; died 6 March 1892, London, England Daughter of Henry and Mary Walsh James The fifth and last child and only daughter of the elder Henry James, the theologian and Swedenborgian, Alice James’ education was desultory. She spent some childhood years living in Europe with her family. Prior to the Civil War, the family settled in Newport, Rhode Island, and at the war’s end moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where James’ neurasthenia became apparent. She did some charitable work in Boston; then, in 1882, after her mother’s death, she cared for her ill father, who died within the year. In 1884 James joined her friend Katharine Loring on a trip to Europe. James spent her remaining years abroad, living for the most part with Loring, in various places in England. Her diary (The Diary of Alice James, reprinted on many occasions, most recently in 1999) on which her literary reputation rests, was kept from May 1889 until she died from a breast tumor. Limited as she was by ill health and the confines of her room, her reading, and her visitors, James’ chief subject, inevitably, is herself. Her dying was long and, at the end, painful. Still, a spirited and outward-looking woman comes through the self-absorption:
‘‘The difficulty about all this dying is that you can’t tell a fellow anything about it, so where does the fun come in?’’ But James explicitly offers the accomplishment of her death as the hardest family task of all in the year her brother William published Principles of Psychology and her brother Henry published The Tragic Muse and saw his adaptation of The Americans onto the stage. Although she is often ironic, James obviously relishes her strength of mind and will. Perhaps since her twenties, when she first knew that she, too, ‘‘sensitive’’ in that masculine family of strong sensibilities, James continued to be grateful for her power truly to ‘‘see. . .the quarter of an inch’’ that came under her eye. She speculates that a formal education would probably have deprived her of her sense of power and promise by substituting for the ‘‘reality of dreams’’ mere ‘‘relative knowledge.’’ She was also aware, however, that humor, common sense, and her refusal to live ‘‘on the cry’’ sustained her against the ‘‘deep sea’’ of depression, which she had experienced terribly when she was thirty. As a diarist, James adopts several guises: a frail, reclusive woman seeking to find her intellectual place in a distinguished family; a student of the ‘‘minute events. . .illustrative of the broadest facts of human nature’’; a comic ironist building a hedge against loneliness and apparent failure; a rebel against tyranny— social, political, and psychological. James quotes Henry’s loyal response to some critics of William’s ‘‘mental pirouettes and. . .daring to go lightly amid the solemnities’’ in Principles of Psychology: ‘‘They can’t understand intellectual larking,’’ James could. Lacking her brothers’ trained discipline and knowledge, she nevertheless offers in the Diary an intellectual lark. Though closely acquainted with the night, she could laugh at herself and at us, asking ‘‘which of us has not a red nose at the core of her being which defies all her philosophy?’’ Much of her correspondence and William James’ copy of Alice’s Diary, were privately printed by Katharine Loring, around 1894, and are at the Houghton Library of Harvard University. OTHER WORKS: Alice James, Her Brothers—Her Journal (edited by A. R. Burr, 1934). Alice James: Her Life in Letters (1996). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bewley, M., Masks & Mirrors: Essays in Criticism (1970). Cargill, O., Toward a Pluralistic Criticism (1965). Edel, L., Henry James (1962). Grant, S., ‘‘Rewriting the Body Politic: The Art of Illness and the Production of Desire in the Diaries and Journals of Alice James and Achsa Sprague’’ (thesis, 1993). James, H., Autobiography (1956). Edel, L., ed., Henry James Letters (1974, 1975). Lewis, R. W. B., The Jameses: A Family Narrative (1993). Matthiessen, F. O., The James Family (1947). Misra, K., ‘‘A Look at the Patriarchal Background of the Diary of Alice James’’ (thesis, 1993). Perry, R. B., The Thought and Character of William James (1935). Strouse, J., Alice James: A Biography (1980, 1992). The Sweetest Impression of Life: The James Family and Italy (1990). Wylie, B. J., A Native of the James
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Family (1990). Yeazell, R. B., The Death and Letters of Alice James (1981, 1999). Reference works: NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Virginia Quarterly Review (Winter 1976). —BARBARA A. WELCH
JAMISON, Cecilia Viets Born 1837, Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada; died 11 April 1909, Roxbury, Massachusetts Wrote under: Mrs. C. V. Hamilton, Mrs. C. V. Jamison Daughter of Viets and Elizabeth Bruce Dakin; married George Hamilton, circa 1860; Samuel Jamison, 1878 When Cecilia Viets Jamison was in her mid-teens, her family moved to Boston; she was educated in private schools in Canada, New York, Boston, and Paris. Her first ambition was to be an artist, and shortly after her first marriage she went to Rome to study art for three years. (What became of George Hamilton or of their marriage is unknown.) While in Rome, she met Longfellow, who encouraged her writing and arranged for the publication of her book, Woven of Many Threads (1872). Throughout her life, she pursued careers in both painting and writing. Her second marriage was to a New Orleans lawyer. Her later novels take place in the South, and her use of this setting established her as a local-color writer. She attended the famous literary salon of Mollie Moore Davis in New Orleans, along with George Washington Cable and Lafcadio Hearn. Jamison contributed to Harper’s, Scribner’s, Appleton’s Journal, St. Nicholas, and the Journal of American Folklore. After her husband’s death in 1902, she returned to Massachusetts and remained there until her death. Jamison’s literary output can be divided into two groups: those works published in the 1870s, and those published in the later 19th and early 20th centuries. Her earlier works were written for adults, and it is easy to find fault with them. Something to Do: A Novel (1871) begins as an interesting story of two sisters, Cecilia and Alice Wilding. They are well-educated women who must work for a living and, as they acknowledge, to give meaning to their lives. The Wildings’ conversations with each other and with their suitors are lively discussions of women’s rights, corrupt politicians, and Darwinism. Nonetheless, midway through the book, the story becomes bogged down in flowery prose and in a plot of lost loves, unrequited loves, and false loves. Cecilia’s behavior epitomizes the erratic course of the plot as she continually changes her job, her whereabouts, and her identity in order to avoid her husband. His transgression (which prompts her behavior) seems minor in comparison to the agony suffered in the name of love. Jamison seemed to find her sentimental tales better suited to the European continent, and most of her adult books are set on
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foreign soil. She was particularly fond of France (and French phrases); in A Crown from the Spear (1872), she seems intent on recreating Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The novel incorporates many of Hugo’s conventions, characters, names, and settings; the end result, as Jamison admitted, is an ‘‘unsatisfactory endeavor.’’ She is obsessed in her adult novels with maintaining a pure love between a man and a woman that by definition survives all calamities. Jamison’s last five works display considerable talent for children’s literature. Her most popular work, Lady Jane (1891), was reprinted several times and was translated into French, German, and Norwegian. This tale about the adventures of an orphan girl, nicknamed Lady Jane, is both fantastic and believable. The plot and style of the story are much more restrained than in Jamison’s earlier books, and Lady Jane’s neighborhood friends in New Orleans are an engaging and lively set of people of all ages, races, and classes. Lady Jane resembles the protagonist of the well-known work by Frances Hodgson Burnett, Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886); although both books are well written, they now share the same problem: the story of a beautiful and pampered child who wins the approval and affection of everyone seems too sugary. Jamison’s earlier works, whose plots prompt only yawns and pity, can be ignored. Her later works for children deserve a reappraisal. OTHER WORKS: Ropes of Sand, and Other Stories (1873). My Bonnie Lass (1877). The Lily of San Miniato: A Story of Florence (1878). The Story of an Enthusiast (1888). Toinette’s Phillip (1894). Seraph, the Little Violiniste (1896). Thistledown (1903). The Penhallow Family (1905). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: AA. DAB. LSL. Other references: Boston Transcript (13 April 1909). New Orleans Daily Picayune (13 April 1909). St. Nicholas (April 1894). —AMY DYKEMAN
JANEWAY, Elizabeth Born 7 October 1913, Brooklyn, New York Daughter of Charles H. and Jeanette F. Searle Hall; married Eliot Janeway, 1938; children: two sons The daughter of middle-class parents, Elizabeth Janeway attended Swarthmore College and graduated from Barnard College in 1935. She married a well-known economist and author and had two sons. The Janeways lived in New York City. Janeway’s first novel, The Walsh Girls (1943), is a psychological study of two sisters living in a New England town during the Depression. The younger, widow of a German intellectual killed at Dachau, experiences conflicting feelings about her new
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husband, a businessman, and about the institution of marriage. The elder, both prudish and independent, is committed to remaining single. The Walsh Girls is typical of Janeway’s novels in its focus on a small group, often a family, whose members are struggling with a crisis or through a period of transition, their personal dilemmas and relationships intersecting with events in a carefully delineated social and historical milieu. For instance, The Question of Gregory (1949), set partly in Washington, D.C., and New England, studies the effects of a young man’s death in wartime upon his parents and their marriage. Leaving Home (1953, reissued 1987) follows two young sisters and a brother as they make their way into the world during the years 1933 to 1940. In The Third Choice (1959), an elderly and crippled woman, once a reigning beauty, and her niece, who is unable to substitute satisfaction in motherhood for satisfaction in marriage, struggle to salvage the past and come to terms with the present and future. And in Accident (1964), a complacent young man, his mother, and his self-made father are forced to reassess their lives by an accident involving the son and a friend, now paralyzed for life. The strengths of Janeway’s best novels—The Walsh Girls, The Question of Gregory, and The Third Choice—are subtle and lucid handling of psychology, clean-cut writing, and precise depiction of milieu. Her treatment of relationships among women is particularly noteworthy. Her works have sometimes been criticized, however, for lacking a unifying theme or point of view. Unable to deal with some of the large social issues of the 1960s in the kind of fiction she writes, ‘‘in which theme is carried by character,’’ Janeway turned to nonfiction in her best-known work, Man’ s World, Woman’s Place: A Study in Social Mythology (1971). The book, much praised for its clarity and undogmatic thoughtfulness, is based upon wide reading in history, philosophy, and the social sciences, as well as upon considerable personal experience. Janeway’s focus is the assertion that a woman’s place is in the home. She treats this from a contemporary perspective, showing it no longer describes the experience of most women in the U.S., and from a historical one, showing its association with the development of the nuclear family. The book’s most important contribution, however, is its scrupulous and well-developed treatment of the ways in which this concept functions as a myth, a complex of feeling, fact, and fantasy that satisfies emotional and social needs despite—and because of—its historical inaccuracy. Between Myth and Morning: Women Awakening (1974) is a collection of 13 essays, originally addressed to various audiences, on public and private aspects of women’s lives. Janeway regards the women’s movement as ‘‘irrevocable’’ because it is ‘‘rooted in reality, and reality has changed formidably.’’ Partly because of this certitude, the book looks toward the future; it also suggests that the most significant aspect of women’s past is the notions and limitations that have been applied to them, not the actions of women themselves. Individual essays are good, particularly on the difficulties both sexes experience in dealing with changes in the relationship between private life and work, but the book as a whole does not represent a new stage in Janeway’s thinking. Her
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next work, however, Powers of the Weak (1981), studied power as a process of interaction and used women as a paradigm of all weak groups, dealing in an original way with issues that have engrossed Janeway since the beginning of her writing career. OTHER WORKS: Daisy Kenyon (1945). The Vikings (1951, 1981). The Early Days of Automobiles (1956). Angry Kate (1963). Ivanov Seven (1967). The Twentieth Century Woman (recording, 1983). Cross Sections from a Decade of Change (reissue, 1984). The Future of Difference (reissue, 1985). A Language for Women and What That Doesn’t Mean (recording, 1985). Improper Behavior (1987). Making the Most of Aging (recording, 1990). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: TCAS. Other references: Harper’s (Sept. 1971). MR (1972). Nation (6 Nov. 1943, 2 Aug. 1975). New Republic (12 Oct. 1974). NYHTB (21 Aug. 1941). NYT (29 Sept. 1974). NYTBR (17 Oct. 1943, 21 Aug. 1941, 3 May 1964, 20 June 1971). Saturday Review (31 Oct. 1953). TLS (8 April 1960). YR (1946). —JANET SHARISTANIAN
JANVIER, Margaret Thompson Born February 1844, New Orleans, Louisiana; died February 1913, Moorestown, New Jersey Wrote under: Margaret Vandegrift Daughter of Francis de Haes and Emma Newbold Janvier Born into a literary family of Huguenot descent, Margaret Thompson Janvier was educated at home and in New Orleans public schools, but she lived most of her life in Moorestown, New Jersey. Consistently using her pseudonym, she wrote children’s literature, stories, and verse from 1879 until near her death. Her work appeared in popular magazines such as St. Nicholas, Harper’s Young People, Youth’s Companion, Wide Awake, Century, Atlantic, and Scribner’s. Janvier’s verse appealed to adults as well as to children. The popular title poem of The Dead Doll, and Other Verses (1889) is a ‘‘babytalk’’ lament of a child for her doll. One of her best poems is ‘‘To Lie in the Lew’’ (Scriber’s, April 1913). Her prose work includes sentimental family tales and adventure stories of teenage protagonists, as well as more whimsical tales of fairies and princesses for younger children. The family stories include Clover Beach (1880), about the activities of a family of children at a summer resort, and Rose Raymond’s Wards (1885), a story of New England family life. The Queen’s Body-Guard (1883) chronicles how the widowed and financially destitute Mrs. Stanley decides, with her seven children, to live on an old farm in Delaware. The invariably good-natured and morally upright family members mature and some marry—happily, of
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course—even with the ‘‘queen,’’ Mrs. Stanley, as a live-in mother-in-law. Doris and Theodora (1884) is a curious combination of a teenage maturation story and a historical adventure. From the fifteen-year-old Doris’ jealousy of her baby sister, Janvier progresses predictably to teenage romance and marriage, but the background setting of Santa Cruz is enlivened with a melodramatic handling of the slave revolt, the subsequent financial failure and fatal illness of Doris’ father, and the entrepreneurship of Doris and her young friends in coping with economic mishap. Stories for younger readers include fantasies such as Umbrellas to Mend (1905), an allegorically oriented romance of princes and princesses, and The Absent-Minded Fairy (1884), which charmingly shows the moral education of Dulcintentia (good intentions) as she meddles in human affairs. In the realistically set Little Helpers (1889), the young children of the lively and affectionate Leslie family learn moral lessons for character development, such as being independent but listening to parents and following God’s law. Janvier’s books are often sentimental and unrealistic for modern readers; they succeed best with whimsy and fantasy. OTHER WORKS: The Original Chatterbox Album of Animals (1879). Under the Dog-Star (1881). Holidays at Home: For Boys and Girls (1882). Little Bell, and Other Stories (1884). Santa Claus’s Picture Gallery (1886). Ways and Means (1886). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: AA. DAB. NCAB. —HELEN J. SCHWARTZ
JERAULD, Charlotte A(nn Fillebrown) Born 20 April 1820, Old Cambridge, Massachusetts; died 2 August 1845, Boston, Massachusetts Also wrote under: Charlotte A. Fillebrown Daughter of Richard and Charlotte Fillebrown; married J. W. Jerauld, 1843; children: one The daughter of working-class parents, Charlotte A. Jerauld received her education in Boston’s common schools. Although she left school at fourteen to work in a bookbindery, she read widely and was familiar with Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton, while particular favorites were Byron, Scott, and Wordsworth. Jerauld soon began to publish poetry in the Universalist magazine, the Ladies Repository, and later her work appeared in the annual Rose of Sharon. Not until 1841, however, did she start to publish her prose sketches—the real beginning of her literary life, as her editor Henry Bacon notes. Jerauld had suffered for most of her life from ‘‘a determination of blood to the brain,’’ but it seems likely that complications
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after the birth of her son (born late in July 1845 and dying on 1 August) as well as a severe postpartum depression (Bacon writes that within days of her child’s birth she became ‘‘a raving maniac’’) contributed to her early death. Jerauld’s many letters to her close friend Sarah C. Edgarton Mayo reveal a sharp wit and sensitive eye for detail not often found in her poetry and abundant only in her later prose. This friendship produced dual poetic sequences and provided Jerauld with a confidant for the more personal reflections that were frequently absent from her published writings. Jerauld’s poetry does not reveal the increasing facility and acuity of her prose, but some of her efforts are clearly tighter and fresher than those of many of her contemporaries. Her subjects, forms, and themes are conventional, but the poems rise above the conventional when she assumes a voice different from her own (as in ‘‘The Meccas of Memory’’), when she experiments with form (‘‘No More’’ and ‘‘Isabel’’ echo Poe’s rhymes and rhythms), or when she adheres to the discipline of a strict form (her sonnets are generally better than her other poems, and those she writes with Mayo on alternate lines of ‘‘The Lord’s Prayer’’ are good poems). Thematically, her verse tends to be dull: She stresses heaven as a peaceful home where life’s problems are resolved; longs nostalgically for a happy childhood that will never return; and bewails sentimentally life’s tragedies—ill-fated lovers, general loss, and the cycles of nature. Jerauld’s early prose is much like her poetry; however, her later prose, as she moves away from heroines who die young and plots based on series of disasters, reveals a talented writer beginning to find herself. Her final prose sketches comprise two groups of tales—‘‘Lights and Shadows of Woman’s Life’’ and ‘‘Chronicles and Sketches of Hazelhurst.’’ In the first group, Jerauld explores different women’s lots. In each story the author uses a distinct tone—‘‘Our Minister’s Family’’ is essentially gay; ‘‘The Mother’s Heart’’ is grim but relatively unsentimental; ‘‘The Irish Daughter-in-Law’’ is light and witty. Jerauld’s concern with her characters’ inner lives dominates these tales. In ‘‘The Mother’s Heart,’’ she examines the jealous and obsessive personality of Isabel Sommers, who is unable to have a child until her 12th year of marriage. In ‘‘Caroline,’’ the protagonist becomes insane when forced to give up her daughter. Jerauld’s characters also grow more realistic in appearance: Hannah in ‘‘The Auld Wife’’ is rustically attractive if not beautiful by the standards of the 1840s; thus, Jerauld notes her ‘‘well-developed figure, which gave ample evidence that it had never suffered from compression or whalebone, or any other bones, save those which Nature had given her.’’ The conversational and intimate relationship Jerauld’s narrator creates with the reader pervades the tales of the first group and becomes a unifying element in ‘‘Chronicles and Sketches of Hazelhurst.’’ These connected stories prefigure in delicacy and tone Sarah Orne Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs, as Jerauld’s unsentimentally nostalgic speaker invites the reader to join her on a walking tour of the village and ‘‘to gossip. . .about people and events, past and present.’’ Jerauld’s final prose suggests she might have attained a high level of literary artistry.
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OTHER WORKS: Poetry and Prose by Mrs. Charlotte A. Jerauld, with a Memoir by Henry Bacon (1850). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Douglas, A., The Feminization of American Culture (1977). Mayo, S. C. E., Selections from the Writings of Mrs. Sarah C. Edgarton Mayo, with a Memoir by Her Husband (1849). Reference works: Daughters of America (1882). —CAROLINE ZILBOORG
JERVEY, Caroline (Howard) Gilman Born 1823, Charleston, South Carolina; died 1877, Charleston, South Carolina Wrote under: Caroline Howard, Mrs. Lewis Jervey Daughter of Samuel and Caroline Howard Gilman; married Wilson Glover, 1840; Lewis Jervey, 1865; children: four Caroline Gilman Jervey was the eldest of four surviving children of author and magazine editor Caroline Howard Gilman and a Unitarian clergyman. Jervey married a South Carolina planter in 1840 and was left a widow with three children in 1846. She returned to her family, began teaching, and ran a successful school for many years. She had one daughter by her second marriage to a Charleston admirer of many years. With the exception of several years in Greenville, South Carolina, during the Civil War, Jervey spent her entire life in Charleston. Although her mother disclaimed any ambition to write a novel, Jervey wrote two fully developed novels. Vernon Grove; or, Hearts As They Are (1859) tells the story of Richard Vernon, a wealthy man blinded by a fever, who moves from the city to the country. Near his country home lives a 10-year-old girl, Sybil Gray, who grows up to reform his character, fall in love, and marry him. A contemporary critic found it an ‘‘interesting story, of marked but not improbable incidents,’’ but modern readers may dispute the probability of some incidents, especially those that seem too obviously designed to demonstrate the selfishness or piety of various characters. Although Vernon Grove first appeared as a serial in the Southern Literary Messenger (January-August 1858), a magazine whose every cover proclaimed it ‘‘alone among the monthly periodicals of America, in defence of the Peculiar Institutions of the Southern Country,’’ it is carefully devoid of any specific background. Indeed, the poor living near the hero’s country seat are described as ‘‘cottagers,’’ so the setting seems a novelistic never-never land. Atlantic Monthly (Jan. 1859) approves this lack of realism, noting that ‘‘a leading characteristic of ‘Vernon Grove’ is the extremely good taste with which it is conceived and written.’’ In Jervey’s second novel, Helen Courtenay’s Promise (1866) is made to her dying father, who demands that his 18-year-old daughter swear to protect his lifelong reputation for probity by secretly substituting her own fortune for the one that he has embezzled, although it was left him in trust for a friend’s son. She
never betrays her secret, even to the young man who wins her hand in the final pages of the novel. Its plot is weaker and even more dependent on coincidence than that of Vernon Grove, and is further marred by overly melodramatic and clichéd scenes. But Helen Courtenay’s Promise is saved by its heroine. Helen is a brave and steadfast young woman with superior intellect and judgment; still, she and the hero both agree with Milton’s dictum: ‘‘He for God only, she for God in him.’’ During the four years in which Helen supports herself and earns enough money to make up the difference between the two fortunes, she studies acting and goes on the stage. Although she gives up her career, her exemplary character and actions convince the hero that his denunciations of the stage are in error. In allowing the heroine to become an actress, in describing her interpretations of her roles, and in emphasizing the physical and emotional dangers of acting, Helen Courtenay’s Promise may have been influenced by the life and novels of Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie. Jervey’s poems, a dreadful play for children—The Lost Children (1870)—and some anemic fairy tales hardly merit resurrection, but her two novels can still hold a reader’s interest. OTHER WORKS: Stories and Poems by Mother and Daughter (with C. Gilman, 1872). The Young Fortune Teller (with C. Gilman, 1874). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Wright, L. H., American Fiction 1851-1875 (1957). Reference works: The Living Writers of the South (1869). Women of the South Distinguished in Literature (1861). The Living Female Writers of the South (1872). Southland Writers (1870). Other references: Atlantic Monthly (Jan. 1859). —SUSAN SUTTON SMITH
JEWETT, Sarah Orne Born 3 September 1849, South Berwick, Maine; died 24 June 1909, South Berwick, Maine Also wrote under: Caroline, A. C. Eliot, Alice Eliot, Sarah O. Sweet Daughter of Theodore H. and Frances Perry Jewett Sarah Orne Jewett’s life and works are rooted in the southern tier of Maine. Her own life was a favored one: born into relative wealth, she was educated at Miss Raynes’s School and at Berwick Academy in South Berwick. She was, however, a somewhat listless student and later remarked that her real education came from her father, a country physician whom she often accompanied on house calls. He imparted his extensive knowledge of nature and literature to her, and it was to some extent through these house visits that she came to know the people of her region so intimately. Jewett earned success and modest fame as a writer at an early age. When she was eighteen, her story ‘‘Jenny Garrow’s Lovers’’
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was published in a weekly Boston periodical, The Flag of Our Union. Jewett was sustained throughout her life by a group of intimate female friends. In her earliest diaries (1867-79) she describes her intense emotional attachment to several young women. Her most important liaison was with Annie Adams Fields of Boston. Jewett lived part of each year at Fields’s Charles Street home, and the two traveled extensively together. Hundreds of letters remain to document the significance of this friendship; it seems likely many of Jewett’s stories were written at least in part for Fields’s amusement. Jewett also knew and corresponded with an extensive circle of artists, including Marie Thérèse Blanc, Violet Paget, Sara Norton, Sarah Wyman Whitman, Louisa Dresel, Louise Imogen Guiney, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Celia Thaxter, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and John Greenleaf Whittier. In her later years Jewett’s reputation was firmly established. Younger writers sought her advice, which she generously supplied. Her face was one of the few women writers on the ‘‘Authors’’ card deck of the time, which is supposedly where the young Willa Cather learned of Jewett. Some of Jewett’s most perceptive and poignant advice may be found in her letters to Cather, who later acknowledged the influence of her mentor by dedicating O Pioneers! (1913) to her, noting that in Jewett’s ‘‘beautiful and delicate work there is the perfection that endures.’’ Cather estimated Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896, latest reissued 1997) as one of three American works guaranteed immortality. Deephaven (1877), Jewett’s first book-length collection of stories, deals with a series of experiences and characters met by two young women during a summer vacation on the coast of Maine. The relationship between the two is handled somewhat sentimentally, but the character sketches display Jewett’s genius for the genre, although she later regarded this work as juvenile. Contemporary reviews were slight and mixed. Reviews were increasingly favorable for three subsequent story collections. Jewett’s first novel, A Country Doctor (1884, latest reissue 1999), perhaps her most feminist work, is semiautobiographical. It is a classic bildungsroman concerning the growth to maturity of a young woman whose ambition is to become a doctor. The woman faces considerable prejudice and discrimination in her pursuit. Eventually she rejects a suitor and resolves to pursue her career. A White Heron, and Other Stories (1886, 1997) marks the beginning of Jewett’s mature phase. Her mastery of style and a sophisticated sense of craft are quite evident in several of these stories, including the much-anthologized title story, ‘‘Marsh Rosemary,’’ and ‘‘The Dulham Ladies.’’ The title story, ‘‘A White Heron’’ is set in rural Maine and reflects Jewett’s intimate awareness of the natural environment. It concerns the dilemma a young country girl, Sylvia, faces when an ornithologist arrives at her farm looking for a rare white heron for his collection of stuffed birds. Sylvia is for awhile tempted to reveal the bird’s location, as she is swayed by the sophistication and authority of the urban visitor. However, she remains loyal to her woodland friend and preserves the secret of its whereabouts, as well as the sanctity of her pastoral world.
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This story expresses several of Jewett’s central themes. One is the clash between urban and rural values. In posing the clash as a male-female confrontation, she suggests what was a fairly common 19th-century notion, namely, that women are more in tune with life than men and are repulsed by killing, guns, and violence. The popularity of the story continues. A film version was produced in 1978 by Jane Morrison Productions, New York. In the decade following ‘‘A White Heron’’ Jewett put forth several further collections, and her best work is to be found among these. The Country of the Pointed Firs, generally considered Jewett’s masterpiece, is difficult to classify by genre. It is more unified than a collection of sketches but much looser than the traditional novel. Like Deephaven it uses the structural device of the relationship between two women, which anchors the character sketches to a continuing narrative event. The power of the work resides in the sense of mysterious personal depth many of the characters seem to possess. The protagonist, Mrs. Almiry Todd, one of Jewett’s enduring characters (prefiguring in many ways Willa Cather’s Antonia), is the town herbalist. She has a singular capacity for healing spiritual as well as physical ills, and is one of the prime sustainers of a sense of communication and of community among the scattered residents of the coastal settlement. Jewett’s own extensive knowledge of herbs is seen in this and other works. The Country of the Pointed Firs includes several vignettes of characters who have lost touch with the mainstream of human relationship. Jewett’s tone is elegiac; the lament is for these failed lives, and perhaps ultimately, as many critics have suggested, for the general economic and social decline of New England in the latter half of the century. There is, moreover, a sense of the fragility and fleetingness of human bonds, seen in the poignant parting scene between Mrs. Todd and the narrator, a thinly disguised persona for Jewett. But the work is not a tragedy, nor does it espouse the pessimism and fatalism of contemporary naturalistic novels. Rather, it conveys a sense of celebration, a sense of the triumph of the human community against the forces of spiritual destruction. Jewett’s last major work, a historical novel, The Tory Lover (1901), was by far her most popular (it went into five printings in its first three months), but it has received the least critical approbation. Jewett also wrote some verse published in her lifetime, a few selections of which were collected in a posthumous volume, Verses (1916). One of these lyrics, ‘‘Boat Song,’’ was set to music. She also wrote several works for children. Jewett was writing in the heyday of realism (the critical principles of her editor at the Atlantic Monthly, William Dean Howells, were those of the realists), but she can be classified as a realist only with qualifications. In her own critical comments she rejected slice-of-life ‘‘objectivity’’ as an artistic ideal and insisted personal point of view was an essential ingredient of competent fiction. Jewett wrote about ordinary people with gentle humor, respect, and compassion. Her mastery of style—her ability to fuse technique and content with her personality—has ensured her work will survive for years to come (many of her titles were reprinted again in the late 1990s).
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OTHER WORKS: Play Days (1878). Old Friends and New (1879). Country By-Ways (1881). The Mate of the Light, and Friends Ashore (1884). A Marsh Island (1885). The Story of the Normans (1887). The King of Folly Island, and Other People (1888, reissued 1998). Betty Leicester: A Story for Girls (1890). Strangers and Wayfarers (1890). Tales of New England (1890, reissued 1997). A Native of Winby, and Other Tales (1893). Betty Leicester’s Christmas (1894, reissued 1990). The Life of Nancy (1895). The Queen’s Twin, and Other Stories (1899). The Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett (edited by A. Fields, 1911, reissued 1994). Sarah Orne Jewett Letters (edited by R. Cary, 1967). The Uncollected Short Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett (edited by R. Cary, 1971). The Dunnet Landing Stories (1996). The Irish Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett (1996). Novels and Stories (latest reissue, 1996). The Country of the Pointed Firs; and, The Dunnet Landing Stories (latest reissue, 1997). The Complete Poems of Sarah Orne Jewett (1999). The most extensive collection of Sarah Orne Jewett’s papers is housed in the Houghton Library of Harvard University. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Auchincloss, L., Pioneers and Caretakers: A Study of Nine American Women Novelists (1965). Baum, R. M., A Descriptive Catalogue of the Sarah Orne Jewett Collection: The Parkman Dexter Howe Library (1983). Bicksler, M. R., ‘‘Women in the Fiction of Sarah Orne Jewett’’ (thesis, 1995). Blanchard, P., Sarah Orne Jewett: Her World and Her Work (1994). Buchanan, C. D., Sarah Orne Jewett: Stories (1994). Buseman, L. J., ‘‘The Realism of Sarah Orne Jewett’s Characterization of Men’’ (thesis, 1993). Cary, R., ed., Appreciation of Sarah Orne Jewett (1973). Cary, R., Sarah Orne Jewett (1962). Donovan, J., Sarah Orne Jewett (1980). Dullea, G. J., ‘‘Two New England Voices: Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman’’ (thesis, 1996). Evans, M. A., ‘‘Deep Havens and Ruined Gardens: Possibilities of Community and Spirituality in Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman’’ (thesis, 1992). Ferris, R. M., ‘‘Pure or Perverse? Women’s Romantic Friendships and the Life and Fiction of Sarah Orne Jewett’’ (thesis, 1996). Fields, A., ed., Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett (1911). Frost, J. E., Sarah Orne Jewett (1960). Gale, R. L., A Sarah Orne Jewett Companion (1999). Hoffman, P. E., ‘‘The Search for Self-Fulfillment: Marriage in the Short Fiction of Kate Chopin, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Sarah Orne Jewett’’ (thesis, 1991). Hulme, C., Sarah Orne Jewett: A Great, and Greatly Underestimated, Writer (thesis, 1988). Harkins, E. F., and C. H. L. Johnston, Little Pilgrimages Among the Women Who Have Written Famous Books (1902). Matthiessen, F. O., Sarah Orne Jewett (1929). McCauley-Myers, J. P., ‘‘The Silent Influences in the Works of Sarah Orne Jewett’’ (thesis, 1991). McGuire, M. A., ‘‘Sarah Orne Jewett’’ (thesis, 1995). Nagel, G. L. and J. Nagel, Sarah Orne Jewett: A Reference Guide (1978). Sargent, R. S., Always Nine Years Old: Sarah Orne Jewett’s Childhood (1985). Sherman, S. W., Sarah Orne Jewett, an American Persephone (1989). Silverthorne, E., Sarah Orne Jewett: A Writer’s Life (1993). Sparks, L. V., Counterparts: The Fiction of Mary Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Kate Chopin (1993). Stoddart, S. F., ‘‘Selected Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett: A Critical Edition with Commentory‘‘ (thesis, 1988). Thorp, M. F., Sarah Orne Jewett (1966). Weber, C. C., and C. J.
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Weber, A Bibliography of the Published Writings of Sarah Orne Jewett (1949). Westbrook, P. D., Acres of Flint, Writers of Rural New England 1870-1900 (1981). Reference works: AA. AW. American Short Story: A Collection of the Best Known and Most Memorable Short Stories by the Great American Authors (1994). DAB. Great American Short Stories I (1995). Great Women Writers: The Lives and Works of 135 of the World’s Most Important Women Writers, from Antiquity to the Present (1994). Modern American Women Writers (1993). NAW (1971). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Rediscoveries: American Short Stories by Women, 1832-1916 (1994). Other references: Sarah Orne Jewett Conference (1986). Sarah Orne Jewett’s Best Short Stories (recording, 1994). Stories of New England, Then & Now (recording, 1996). —JOSEPHINE DONOVAN
JOHNSON, Diane Born 28 April 1934, Moline, Illinois Daughter of Dolph and Frances Elder Lain; married B. Lamar Johnson, Jr., 1953; John F. Murray, 1968; children: four Diane Johnson has been published as a novelist, biographer, journalist and essayist. She grew up in the Midwest, received her B.A. from the University of Utah, and both M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California at Los Angeles. In her novels, she often writes of the conflicts that attractive and intelligent women face when they confront cultural ideals of femininity. In her essays she has chosen topics from travel to politics, often presenting them with a sharp eye for the satiric or comical in people or situations. Her first three novels—Fair Game (1965), Loving Hands at Home (1968), and Burning (1971), are dominated by the satiric impulse and a comic vision of society. Each heroine tries to measure up to society’s abstract ideals of womanhood and/or personhood, or just to survive. Her next two novels, The Shadow Knows (1974) and Lying Low (1978), are a marked departure from this early work: the capacity for reflection and the talent for richly inventive symbolic detail remain, and the themes are the same. But the later work comes to grips with feminine survival in circumstances more horrendous and for stakes more final than any in her first books. The satire grows sharper and the comedic turns of plot can no longer effect a complete rescue of the heroine from the tragic possibilities of her situation. Lying Low was nominated for a National Book Award, and in 1979 won a Rosenthal Foundation Award. In it, one of the three heroines is wanted on a capital charge by the F.B.I. and another is a fully credentialed refugee from the Third World. For both the fugitive and the refugee, every moment of every day is a test of resolve and resourcefulness. Like all of Johnson’s novels, it is full of victories that are breathtaking when perceived, but are for the
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most part invisible to a society that defines success in very simple terms. While Johnson continues this theme in her fiction, her work has lightened in tone. Persian Nights (1987) set in Iran just before the shah’s fall, demonstrates both her characteristic rich use of symbol and an incisive humor toward her heroine and the other characters who are perplexed by both political and personal revolutions. Persian Nights was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Health and Happiness (1990) relies on a triple focus to include the perspective of a male physician along with those of the two heroines. Humorous and graceful, it offers a softened satire on individual integrity, contemporary California culture, and the politics of the medical profession. Le Divorce (1997) follows two American women to Paris where one seeks a divorce and the other seeks both adventure and direction for her life. The novel was called ‘‘sexy, graceful, and funny. . .a witty two-way FrancoAmerican guide to manners and attitudes’’ by the New York Review of Books. The New York Times Review of Books declared it ‘‘a genuinely wise and humane novel.’’ Johnson has also written two biographies. Lesser Lives: The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith, published in 1973, explores the life of Mary Ellen Peacock Meredith, who divorced George Meredith, the famous novelist, and was much maligned by him. Dashiell Hammett: A Life (1983), Johnson’s second biography, received mixed reviews. The biographical story was declared excellent, but its depth was questioned. In writing it, Johnson had access to Hammett’s personal papers, but also had to work in cooperation with author Lillian Hellman, Hammett’s executrix, whose desire was to perpetuate the myth of their larger-than-life union and exploits. Johnson has also worked in other genres. In 1980, she collaborated with Stanley Kubrick on the screenplay of Stephen King’s The Shining. She has been a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review and writes regularly for the New York Review of Books, San Francisco Chronicle, and Washington Post; many of her essays from the late 1970s and early 1980s were collected in Terrorists and Novelists (1982). She has also coauthored articles on the medical profession and on AIDS with her physician husband; and she authored Natural Opium (1991), a collection of travel essays and what Johnson calls ‘‘auto-fiction.’’ She has received an impressive number of literary prizes and grants: a Woodrow Wilson Foundation grant in 1965, an American Association of University Women grant in 1968, and a Guggenheim Fellowship for 1977-78. In 1987 she was a recipient of a five-year Mildred and Harold Strauss Livings grant. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hargrove, A. C., and M. Magliocco, eds., Portraits of Marriage in Literature (1984). LeClair, T., and L. McCaffery, Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists (1983). Yalom, M., ed., Women Writers of the West Coast: Speaking of Their Lives and Careers (1990). Reference works: CA (1974, 1980). CANR (1986, 1998). CLC (1988). DLBY (1991). WW of Writers, Editors, and Poets
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(1991). MTCW (1981). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Booklist (1 Dec. 1996). Clues (Spring— Summer 1991). Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction (1974). LJ (15 Nov. 1996). NYTM (22 Feb. 1998). NYRB (6 Feb. 1997). Modern Fiction Studies (Winter 1985). Partisan Review (Fall 1988). Sewanee Review (Fall 1984). —JUDITH HARLAN
JOHNSON, Georgia Douglas (Camp) Born 10 September 1886, Atlanta, Georgia; died May 1966, Washington, D.C. Also wrote under: Paul Tremaine Daughter of George and Laura Jackson Camp; married Henry L. Johnson, 1903 Little is known about Georgia Douglas Johnson’s early childhood or her parents. She studied at Atlanta University (through the Normal program) and Oberlin College, Ohio. In 1909 she moved to Washington, D.C., with her lawyer husband. While living in the capital, Johnson wrote lyrics, poetry, short stories, and plays. She established the Literary Salon, a weekly Saturday night meeting place for a burgeoning group of young poets, including many of the Harlem Renaissance writers. Johnson was active in several literary organizations, the Republican party, the pan-African movement, and human rights groups connected with the Congregational church. Following her husband’s death in 1925, she became a commissioner of conciliation with the Department of Labor (1925-34), held other government positions, remained active in racial and political organizations in New York and Washington, and continued to publish individual poems sporadically. Johnson was the first black female to receive national recognition as a poet since Francis Harper, an abolitionist writer. Although her three major volumes were published within a 10-year span, each represents a distinctly different period in her life, flowing from the naive inquiry found in The Heart of a Woman (1918), through the pain and deprivation of being black recorded in Bronze (1922), to the mature acceptance of grief expressed in Autumn Love Cycle (1928). Johnson received many awards not only for her poetry but for her plays and short stories. Although Johnson’s literary strength is found in her poetry, her plays and short stories remain significant to the development of black American literature from a literary as well as from a political and a historical perspective. The 62 poems in The Heart of a Woman are four-, eight-, and 12-line queries regarding the nature of womanhood. While many of these poems are trite, Johnson expresses a haunting sensitivity toward women’s unfulfilled aspirations in ‘‘The Dreams of the Dreamer’’ and ‘‘Dead Leaves.’’ Although sadness prevails in this volume, Johnson does not paint a bleak picture of womanhood.
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She finds solace in nature (‘‘Peace’’ and ‘‘When I am Dead’’) and fulfillment in requited love (‘‘Mate’’). Johnson apparently believed that women were destined to the life of a voyeur— declaring that they lacked the freedom to express themselves openly, that they lacked the means of fulfilling their dreams, and that only through their lovers could they fully experience life. Bronze is an energetic expression of the pain, humiliations, and fears of a 1920s black woman. The 65 poems in this volume are grouped under nine headings. Johnson’s greatest literary contribution to an understanding of womanhood and of her era is found in the 10 poems in the ‘‘Motherhood’’ section. ‘‘Maternity’’ expresses a mixture of emotions as a child is awaited: pride is coupled with fear that, at worst, the child would be lynched and, at best, rejected by the world. ‘‘Black Woman’’ implies that it is cruel to bring black children into this world. In Autumn Love Cycle, an obvious stylistic and thematic maturity is displayed. Johnson’s dominant theme is the depth of mature love, as expressed in ‘‘I Want to Die While You Love Me,’’ ‘‘Autumn,’’ and ‘‘ Afterglow,’’ but there is the fear that lost youth can result in infidelity or in impotency. Many of these poems were probably written during the period when her husband suffered three strokes and eventually died. A dozen of the poems describe her adjustment to life without the physical presence of love. Johnson, together with other black writers after World War I, was responsible for bringing black poetry out of the bonds of dialect and into the realm of a high art form. The poets of her period eventually were overshadowed by the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, but their importance to the movement should not be underestimated. Johnson’s significance as both a black and a woman writer cannot be denied. OTHER WORKS: Blue Blood (1927). Plumes: Folk Tragedy (1927). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bontemps, A., ed., American Negro Poetry (1974). Bontemps, A., The Harlem Renaissance Remembered (1972). Henderson, D. F., ‘‘Georgia Douglas Johnson: A Study of Her Life and Literature’’ (thesis, 1995). Hull, G. T., Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance (1987). Johnson, J. W., The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922). King, E. C., ‘‘The Construction of the South by Southern Woman Playwrights’’ (thesis, 1996). Locke, A., The New Negro: An Interpretation (1968). Martin-Liggins, S. M., ‘‘Georgia Douglas Johnson: The Voice of Oppression’’ (thesis, 1996). Mays, B., The Negro’s God As Reflected in His Literature (1968). Shockley, A. A., Afro-American Women Writers (1988). White, N., and W. Jackson, eds., An Anthology of Verse by American Negroes (1924). Whitmore, W., ‘‘Georgia Douglas Johnson: An Artist Out of Time’’ (thesis, 1981). Reference works: Black American Writers Past and Present (1975). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Crisis (Dec. 1952). Journal of Negro History (July 1972). Obsidian (Spring/Summer 1979). —LINDA S. BERRY
JOHNSON, Helen (Louise) Kendrick Born 4 January 1844, Hamilton, New York; died 3 January 1917, New York, New York Also wrote under: Mrs. Rossiter Johnson Daughter of Asahel C. and Anne Hopkins Kendrick; married Rossiter Johnson, 1869 Helen Kendrick Johnson grew up in an academic environment and from girlhood was interested in writing. A visit to Georgia soon after the Civil War provided the material for her first publication, ‘‘A Night in Atlanta’’ (1867), which appeared in the New Hampshire Statesman, a newspaper edited by her future husband. Johnson’s earliest publications were children’s stories. Her first book, Roddy’s Romance (1874), was written for a prize competition. Although it did not win the prize, it was successfully published and was followed by Roddy’s Reality (1875) and Roddy’s Ideal (1876), the series of children’s books known collectively as the Roddy Books. Tears for the Little Ones (1878) is a collection of verses from which Johnson had drawn solace after the deaths of her first two children and which she published in order to help other parents through similar periods of grief. In the late 1870s, Johnson began Our Familiar Songs and Those Who Made Them (1881), a popular success that went through numerous editions. The contents are a combination of ancient and current ballads, sentimental songs, and nonsense songs. The writers include Robert Burns, Stephen Foster, and contemporary writers now forgotten; some writers are anonymous. Johnson divided the anthology thematically and gave biographical information about the writers, histories of the songs, and piano arrangements of the music. She included all the known verses and frequently indicated variant tunes for the songs. The completeness of her biographical and historical material varies greatly because her methods of gathering materials were not systematic. Her book does, however, have the virtue of presenting, in useful form, the words and music for popular songs of the day. Johnson’s next literary endeavor was the compilation of a series of small books called the Nutshell Series (1884). These were collections of sayings of famous men published under the titles Philosophy, Wisdom, Sentiments, Proverbs, Wit and Humor, Epigram and Epitaph. All were subsequently collected into a single volume, Short Sayings of Famous Men (1884). Johnson’s only novel, Raleigh Westgate (1889), is a humorous account of the development of a romantic young man into a pillar of his community. Westgate’s search for himself and the girl of his dreams takes him through the Maine countryside and provides Johnson with ample opportunities for local-color depictions of the Maine people and for satire of modern commercial methods and nouveau-riche pretensions. The plot works on stock sentimental devices, but Johnson’s satire is humorously effective. Johnson was editor of the American Woman’s Journal from 1894 to 1896. In this capacity, she became involved with the
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woman suffrage issue and published several articles favoring woman suffrage. Further consideration of these articles convinced Johnson of the error of their positions, and she began actively participating in the antisuffrage movement. This led to her most significant work, Woman and the Republic (1897), in which she analyzes the arguments of the suffragists, refuting each point by point. Johnson scorns all of their arguments concerning women’s equality with men on the grounds that women are already superior to men. In Woman and the Republic, Johnson argues that women do not need, and in fact should not have, the vote because the enforcement of laws depends on the power implied in the support of law and order by men who have the physical strength to provide police action. She also declares that woman suffrage is antidemocratic because in the American republic the social order has been established according to God’s wishes with women as the moral force, building human character through Christian mothering, and with men as the physical force, building the social bodies that protect order. Johnson was a conscientious editor, a writer of witty fiction, and an ardent supporter of women’s work in traditional areas. Her arguments against suffrage are carefully structured. However, for the modern woman, her premises seem to be in gross error. Her conviction that women do not need the vote because they already have all of the necessary rights and perquisites demands acceptance of the view that woman’s place is in the home and beside the cradle. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Johnson, R., Helen Kendrick Johnson (Mrs. Rossiter Johnson): The Story of Her Varied Activities (1917). Reference works: AA. DAB. NCAB. Other references: NYTBR (10 July 1897). —HARRIETTE CUTTINO BUCHANAN
JOHNSON, Josephine Winslow Born 20 June 1910, Kirkwood, Missouri; died 27 February 1990 Daughter of Benjamin and Ethel Franklin Johnson; married Thurlow Smoot, 1939; Grant G. Cannon, 1942 (died 1969); children: three Josephine Winslow Johnson was reared on a 100-acre farm in south-central Missouri. Reflecting on her mother’s lineage, Johnson has noted the long dominance of Franklins, i.e., AngloSaxon freeholders, untitled agrarians with a fervent attachment to specific pieces of land. The strength of this passion is intensified in Johnson. At the age of eight, Johnson wrote a poem to mark the end of the war and glimpsed her vocation as a writer. Her first novel, Now in November (1934 reprinted in 1991), brought her the Pulitzer Prize. Another novel—as well as poems and short stories—soon appeared, for in these years, Johnson says she ‘‘wrote, if not endlessly, then enormously.’’ Her first marriage, to a Labor
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Relations Board lawyer, only perpetuated her growing sense that (as she said in her autobiography, Seven Houses: A Memoir of Time and Places, 1973), ‘‘I seemed to be waiting to begin to live.’’ Later in Grant Cannon she found a partner whose hopeful nature temporarily dispelled her own profound pessimism. With Cannon, an editor of Farm Quarterly, she raised three children. His death in 1969 took from her one who, in her words, ‘‘made no lifelong truce with despair as I have made.’’ Although her work covers many decades and genres, the important themes almost all appear in the early fiction. Now in November celebrates the land and the self-sufficient farm family even while it deplores the Depression and the tyranny of weather. The work is lit by occasional set pieces of nature description and by a clear attention to the limited point of view of the narrator, the middle daughter on a small Missouri farm, as she remembers her childhood and her growing understanding of her sister’s mental illness. The private drama of sister Kerrin’s suicide and the mother’s death is played out against the social background of financial disaster for small farmers during the 1930s. Although the novel betrays the influence of the social protest fiction of Sinclair and Steinbeck, much of it is more reminiscent of the naturalism of Hardy or Zola. Johnson’s second novel, Jordanstown (1937), about a small-town newspaperman and community organizer during the Depression, is less successful because the didactic ideology of socialist realism is too little camouflaged. Still, Jordanstown has memorable elements: Stefan, the baker, whose obstinate hope buoys the protesters as much as his hot breads do; the stifling July death of the child whose sick, malnourished mother does not even realize the girl has died. Johnson’s third and fourth novels, Wildwood (1945) and The Dark Traveler (1963), are disappointing. Slips into omniscience only remind us of the strength of the earlier limited point of view. The anguish surfacing in the earlier fiction is here completely unrelieved, and the loss of the idealism of the socialist movements of the 1930s is reflected in the agnostic’s cry in Wildwood: ‘‘A voice mocking and mechanical, final and unanswerable: and the Lord said, Let there be no light.’’ Johnson’s short fiction, however, shows that more compact forms better display both her descriptive talents and her facility with surprise endings. ‘‘Gedacht,’’ her first published short story, is the best of the Winter Orchard (1935) collection. It concerns a World War I veteran who, having lost his sight from poison gas, regains it briefly. Johnson’s early poetry incorporates the themes of her fiction: social protest, loss of religious faith, love of nature, and the struggle with cynicism. A publishing hiatus of almost 20 years occurred in Johnson’s mid-career, and when she resumed publication, some very different genre preferences manifested themselves. She produced essays, memoirs, and diaries instead of fiction. Johnson’s vision became quieter, more introspective, more ameliorated by the natural world, although social concerns and pessimism are still there. Thus The Inland Island (1969, reprinted 1996), a kind of nature journal in the style of Walden, laments the Vietnam War and promotes the environmental movement in the midst of solitary meditations and exquisite observations on the natural
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year. With The Circle of Seasons (1974), the text for a book of nature photographs, Johnson reiterates the themes begun in Now in November. It is both an ode and an elegy that celebrates and questions: ‘‘Will there be any rhythm and difference of season left, any feeling of the great circular flow of living things [for our children]?’’ Johnson has contributed brilliantly to the ‘‘proletarian’’ tradition in American letters. Indeed, one is frequently tempted to rank her with the great shapers of that tradition, London, Sinclair, Norris, and Steinbeck. But Johnson’s activity displays other dimensions that make her difficult to categorize, for she is also a writer of naturalistic fiction, a didactic poet, a Thoreauvian essayist, and an anguished contemplative decrying militarism and the inhumanity of modern technology. In a time when the often divided currents of agrarianism, radical trade unionism, conservationism, and militant pacifism seem about to form a curious new merger, Johnson’s lifelong nurturing of these concerns may prompt a rediscovery of her achievement. OTHER WORKS: Unwilling Gypsy (1936). Year’s End (1937). Paulina: The Story of an Apple-Butter Jar (1939). The Sorcerer’s Son, and Other Stories (1965). The manuscripts and papers of Josephine Winslow Johnson are housed in the Rare Books Collection at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Carter, Q. R., ‘‘Josephine W. Johnson and the Pulitzer: The Shaping of a Life’’ (thesis, 1995). Reference works: CA (1971). CN (1976). NCAB. TCA. TCAS. Other references: Nation (21 Aug. 1935). NYHT (13 Sept. 1934, 13 Aug. 1935). NYT (16 Sept. 1934, 11 April 1937). NYTBR (2 Mar. 1969, 13 May 1973). Saturday Review (3 Apr. 1937, 15 Feb. 1969). —MARGARET MCFADDEN-GERBER
JOHNSON-MASTERS, Virginia Born 11 February 1925, Springfield, Missouri Daughter of Harry Hershel and Edna Evans Eshelman; married George Johnson, 1950 (divorced 1956); William H. Masters, 1971 (divorced 1993); children: Scott, Lisa Virginia Johnson-Masters, scientist and psychologist, contributed to the study of human sexuality in her work and writings with William H. Masters. Johnson-Masters began working with William H. Masters as a research assistant in 1957. They became the team known as Masters and Johnson, who pioneered the development of research methods, treatment of sexual dysfunctions, training of therapists, treatment of sexual offenders, and textbooks. Using a behavioral science approach, they defined human sexuality by extending knowledge about the physiology and
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psychology of sexual function. They cofounded the Masters Johnson Institute in 1970. Educated in music, Johnson-Masters studied at Drury College in Springfield, Missouri, from 1940 to 1942 and the University of Missouri in Columbia from 1944 to 1946. She continued with graduate study in voice directed toward operatic singing at Washington University in St. Louis from 1964 to 1965. Following her studies, she worked for the St. Louis Daily Record as an administrative assistant and editorial writer, and for radio station KMOX in St. Louis in the advertising department. Though she had no formal training whatsoever, from her position as a research assistant for Masters in reproductive biology in the obstetrics and gynecology department at the Washington University School of Medicine, she advanced to research instructor and lecturer. She held the positions of research associate, then assistant director when the Reproductive Biology Research Foundation was established in 1964. The Foundation became the Masters and Johnson Institute, with her as cofounder. She was codirector, then director and president, and then cochairman of the Board of Directors until 1994. Since 1983 she has been the president of MVM Enterprises, Inc., a video production company. As a scientist, she received two honorary Doctor of Science degrees from the University of Louisville in 1978 and the University of Rochester in 1987 and several awards, including the Paul H. Hoch award from the American Psychopathological Society in 1971; the SIECUS Citation award in 1971; the Distinguished Service award from the American Association of Marriage and Family Counselors in 1976; the Modern Medicine Award for Distinguished Achievement in 1977; the Biomedical Research award from the World Association of Sexology in 1979; she was named one of the Twenty-Five Most Influential Women in the American World Almanac for 1975, 1978, 1979, and 1980; and a Paul Harris Fellow from Rotary International in 1976. As coauthor with Masters, Johnson-Masters wrote the major textbooks in the study of human sexuality. Based on research in behavioral science and psychology, Human Sexual Response (1966) describes the sexual response cycle of men and women during intercourse and masturbation. A bestseller, the book took its place alongside the works of Sigmund Freud, Havelock Ellis, and Alfred Kinsey in its breakthrough in understanding human sexuality and in securing its study as a distinct discipline. Their next book, Human Sexual Inadequacy (1970), launched the field of sex therapy. Their later research and publications focused on the role of love and commitment, homosexuality, ethical issues, safe sex, AIDS, addictions, and aging. Although their work has received criticism for its masculinist bias, their influence in view of the presently extensive field of sexual research, therapy, and advice is evident in a remark by Johnson-Masters in a 1994 interview about their teamwork: ‘‘We are like Kleenex to tissue.’’ OTHER WORKS: Coauthored with William H. Masters and others: The Pleasure Bond: A New Look at Sexuality and Commitment (1975); Ethical Issues in Sex Therapy and Research, Volume 1
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(1977); Homosexuality in Perspective (1979); Textbook of Sexual Medicine (1979); Ethical Issues in Sex Therapy and Research, Volume 2 (1980); Crisis: Heterosexual Behavior in the Age of AIDS (1988); Heterosexuality (1994).
Colonel, starring Shirley Temple as Lloyd and Lionel Barrymore as old Colonel Lloyd. The story of the conflict of pretty, spunky Lloyd with her crusty old grandfather, who severed relations with his only daughter, Elizabeth, when she eloped with a Yankee, was a perfect vehicle for Temple’s talents.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bullough, V. L., Science in the Bedroom (1994). Fisher, W., and Azy Barak, ‘‘Bias and Fairness in the Diagnosis of Primary Orgasmic Dysfunction in Women,’’ in American Psychologis 44 (July 1989). Irvine, J. M., ‘‘From Difference to Sameness: Gender Ideology in Sexual Science, in Journal of Sex Research 27 (Feb. 1990). Schwartz, M. F., ‘‘The Masters and Johnson Treatment Program for Sex Offenders: Intimacy, Empathy and Trauma Resolution,’’ in Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity 1 (1994). Tiefer, L., ‘‘Historical, Scientific, Clinical, and Feminist Criticisms of ‘the Human Sexual Response Cycle’ Model,’’ in Annual Review of Sex Research 2 (1991). Reference works: Complete Marquis Who’s Who Biographies (1995). NYT (24 Mar. 1994). Virginia Johnson-Masters Web Page (1999).
Johnston’s work was commercially successful, and her publisher clearly took advantage of the popularity of the Little Colonel books. For example, in 1909 the Page Company issued The Little Colonel’s Good Times Book, with blank pages for children to record their ‘‘good times,’’ as Betty Lewis did in The Little Colonel’s House Party (1900). Many of the legends and tales in Johnston’s books were subsequently published as separate volumes, such as The Legend of the Bleeding Heart (1907) and The Road of the Loving Heart (1922), both of which first appeared in The Little Colonel’s House Party.
—KAREN J. MCLENNAN
JOHNSTON, Annie Fellows Born 15 May 1863, Evansville, Indiana; died 5 October 1931, Pewee Valley, Kentucky Daughter of Albion and Mary Erskine Fellows; married William L. Johnston, 1888; children: three Annie Fellows Johnston grew up on a farm outside Evansville, Indiana. Although her father, a Methodist minister, died when she was only two, Johnston was influenced by him, through his theological books, and by her mother, who had strong ideas about the importance of education for women. Johnston attended public schools in Evansville and the University of Iowa (for a year). After teaching for several years and working for a time as a private secretary, she married her cousin, a widower. After his death in 1892, Johnston turned to writing as a career. Eventually, she and her three stepchildren settled in Pewee Valley, Kentucky, which Johnston fictionalized as Lloydsboro Valley in her popular Little Colonel series. In 1899 Johnston’s stepdaughter Rena died; two years later Johnston moved to Arizona for her stepson John’s health, and then on to Texas, where they lived until his death in 1910. As a children’s author, Johnston was both prolific, with over 40 volumes, and popular—reportedly, at her death her books had sold over 1 million copies. Some readers today are still familiar with Johnston’s 13-volume Little Colonel series, which began with the publication of The Little Colonel (1896). Unlike many authors of series books, Johnston allows her characters to mature. For example, we see Miss Lloyd Sherman first as a five-year-old, impetuous and stubborn, and last as a young married woman, lovely and vivacious. Many people know Johnston’s most famous character only through David Butler’s 1935 Fox film, The Little
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Johnston’s works have the flaws of many children’s books of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The characters are idealized; the conflicts, resolved too easily; the themes, simplistic and naive. The typical world of Johnston’s fiction is one of wealth and aristocracy, in which separation of the races and the inferiority of blacks are assumed. But, interestingly, it is a world in which women are not automatically relegated to the life of wife and mother or to unfulfilled spinsterhood. Especially through the experiences of Lloyd Sherman and her friends, Johnston emphasizes the importance for women of education in academic subjects; likewise, she allows her young women the option of independence, through characters such as unmarried Joyce Ware, pursuing her career as a commercial artist in an apartment in New York. A strong moral code underlies every work by Johnston. Through legends and tales, some traditional and others original, she cleverly makes points her young characters are never allowed to miss. Readers of an earlier, simpler day took these lessons to heart and were inspired to model their lives after Lloyd, Betty, Joyce, and other characters; contemporary readers in our complex age often find Johnston’s stories more didactic than inspiring or entertaining. These tales, are nonetheless, still popular today with Johnston’s original The Little Colonel reissued once again in 1998. OTHER WORKS: Big Brother (1894). Joel: A Boy of Galilee (1895). The Little Colonel’s Holiday (1901). The Little Colonel’s Hero (1902). The Little Colonel at Boarding School (1903). The Little Colonel in Arizona (1904). The Little Colonel’s Christmas Vacation (1905). The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor (1906). The Little Colonel’s Knight Comes Riding (1907). The Little Colonel’s Chum: Mary Ware (1908). Mary Ware in Texas (1910). Mary Ware’s Promised Land (1912). Miss Santa Claus of the Pullman (1913). Georgina of the Rainbows (1916). It Was the Road to Jericho (1919). The Land of the Little Colonel: Reminiscence and Autobiography (1929). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Browne, R. B., et al., eds., Challenges in American Culture (1970). Duin, J. Waiting for True Love: And Other Tales of Purity, Patience, and Faithfulness (1998). McGuire, S. L.,
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The Little Colonel: A Phenomenon in Popular Literary Culture (1991). Reference works: Arizona in Literature: A Collection of the Best Writings of Arizona Authors from Early Spanish Days to the Present Time (1971). DAB. Indiana Authors and Their Books, 1816-1916 (1949). Junior Book of Authors (1934). NAW (1971). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCA. Other references: St. Nicholas (Dec. 1913). —MARTHA E. COOK
JOHNSTON, Jill Born 17 May 1929, London, England Also writes under: F. J. Crowe Daughter of Olive Margaret Crowe and Cyril F. Johnston; married Richard J. Latham, 1958 (divorced); children: Richard, Winifred Jill Johnston’s mother, an American nurse, and her father, an English bell founder, lived together for four years but never married. Raised in England, Johnston was educated in an exclusive Episcopalian boarding school. In Autobiography in Search of a Father: Motherbound (1983), the first of two autobiographical volumes, Johnston details the pain of her early life. As a result of her father’s failure to marry Olive Crowe, her mother lived a life of deception and lies to hide her daughter’s illegitimacy. Led by her mother to believe that he had died years before, Johnston never met her father. Her perception of reality shifted in 1950 when she read of his death that year. By then he had married and had other children. From this moment on Johnston focused on discovering an identity, yearning to fill the paternal void. Johnston attended college in Massachusetts and in Minnesota, and received an M.F.A. (1954) from the University of North Carolina before making her home in New York City. She went to Columbia University to study dance, and, she says, worked in the ‘‘female slave market’’ to support herself. Trying to fight the desire she felt for women, Johnston conceded to societal pressure and married in 1958. The marriage did not last because of her resistance to convention and her husband’s infidelity. The Village Voice launched Johnston’s career as a writer and public figure, publishing her weekly ‘‘Dance Journal’’ column from 1960 to 1970; Marmalade Me (1974, reprinted 1998) is a collection of the columns. One of the original free spirits of the 1960s, Johnston used the column as a medium to celebrate nonconformity. Her debut article was the first review of the new avant-garde dance and choreography group at the Judson Memorial Church. Gradually, she reviewed less dancing and more of her private life, using the column one week to ‘‘come out’’ as a lesbian and increasingly converting it to an open theater of the wild behavior and public disturbances that by then had come to be expected of her. Johnston’s writing took on a confessional, fractured style eventually leading to the termination of her career as a critic. She was later hospitalized for an emotional breakdown.
Volume Two: Paper Daughter (1985), the second of her autobiographical series in search of a father, begins with an account of her first nervous breakdown and commitment to Bellevue Hospital. The book depicts her journey to gain control over her life, and the experience of another breakdown, as she tries to move in new directions. In 1973 Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution had brought Johnston into the feminist/women’s movement. This collection of journal entries and stories tracks her evolving consciousness as a political lesbian. Her attempts to force the issue of lesbianism into the public forum resulted in establishment portrayals of her as an anarchist outcast. Her next publication, Gullible’s Travels (1974) reflects Johnston after her second breakdown, in motion, open to revolutionary ideas. Feminism and lesbianism create the backdrop for a mixture of fiction and true stories. An experimental style is used to disrupt the readers’ preconceived ideas about fiction, sex, and reality. Between 1984 and 1991, Johnston wrote a review column for Art in America, covering artistic events and books on the arts. Throughout the years, she has also contributed to other periodicals, including Ballet Review, as well as books on dance (particularly the Judson Dance Theater). In this vein, she published Secret Lives in Art: Essays on Art, Literature, Performance (1994), followed by a trek away from dance into the art world with Jasper Johns: Privileged Information (1996). Her most recent work goes back to themes present in 1973’s Lesbian Nation, with Admission Accomplished: The Lesbian Nation Years (1970-75) (1998). OTHER WORKS: ‘‘Twentieth Century Sappho’’ (audio cassette, 1979). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Getz, L., Dancers and Choreographers, A Selected Bibliography (19995). Hapgood, S., Neo-Dada: Redefining Art, 1958-1960 (1994). Jowitt, D., Jill Johnston: The Critic Deconstructed by Art? (1993). Roy, S., Jill Johnston’s Marmalade Me (1998). Tomko, L., ed., Of, By, and For the People: Proceedings (1993). Thorne, B., et al eds., Language, Gender, and Society (1983). Reference works: CA (1975). FC (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: New York (24 May 1971). Art in America (Jan. 1986, Feb. 1993). —SUZANNE GIRONDA, UPDATED BY NELSON RHODES
JOHNSTON, Mary Born 21 November 1870, Buchanan, Virginia; died 9 May 1936, Warm Springs, Virginia Daughter of John W. and Elizabeth Alexander Johnston Mary Johnston was the eldest of six children. Her father was a lawyer, a member of the Virginia Legislature, and a major in the
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Confederate Army. Because her frail health precluded her attending school (except for a few months in Atlanta), she was educated at home, first by her Scots grandmother and later by extensive reading in her father’s large library. Her mother died when Johnston was sixteen, and she took the responsibility of managing the large household. Her family moved to New York City, but in 1902 Johnston returned to Virginia. Although she traveled in Europe and the Middle East, she lived in Virginia the rest of her life. With proceeds from her bestselling novel, To Have and to Hold (1900), she built a large, beautiful country home in Warm Springs, Virginia, where she resided with three of her sisters and brother. All four of these Johnston siblings remained single. Johnston is remembered as an ardent feminist and popular novelist of romantic historical fiction. As one of the founders, in 1909, of the Equal Suffrage League in Richmond, she generously used her talents for the cause. In ‘‘The Woman’s War’’ (Atlantic Monthly, April 1910), she clearly stated her beliefs in the rights of women. She was a serious woman who was a diligent student of the history that formed the background for many of her novels. Johnston published 23 novels, a volume of history, Pioneers of the Old South (1918), and a blank verse drama set during the French Revolution, The Goddess of Reason (1907). The novels are generally divided into five categories: Virginia historical romances, European romances, realistic Civil War novels, sociological novels, and mystical novels. She also contributed poetry and short stories to periodicals. To Have and to Hold is Johnston’s best-known novel. Set in Jamestown in 1621, during the time of Governor Yeardley, it is a swashbuckling romance. Jocelyn Leigh, the ward of King James I, refuses to marry Lord Carnal and escapes from England disguised as Patience Worth. She joins a group of women coming to America to be sold as brides for the settlers. Jocelyn is ‘‘purchased’’ by Captain Ralph Percy for 120 pounds of tobacco. The novel tells the story of Jocelyn’s developing love for Ralph Percy. The language is florid, the dialogue stilted, and the plot melodramatic, but the novel has narrative power. It was the number one bestseller of the year. The Long Roll (1911) and Cease Firing (1912) constitute a two-volume account of the Civil War and of the fortunes of two Virginia families, the Carys and the Cleaves. Stonewall Jackson is the central figure in the first volume. The books are epic in vision and attempt to document in realistic detail the campaigns of the war. One reviewer of the time questioned whether the books were fiction or were indeed ‘‘military history.’’ Lawrence Nelson has called the books ‘‘a massive epical romance in prose, an extended ode or elegy for the dead Confederacy’’ and ‘‘the completest and most authentic embodiment of the Southern Myth.’’ Hagar (1913) is a feminist novel with a contemporary Southern setting. Hagar, aesthetic and intellectual, is frail in health. As a small child she observes the inequities in life and is punished when she is caught reading Darwin. She becomes a successful writer, rejects the proper Virginia suitor, and goes to New York. When she agrees to marry Ralph Cottsworth, she reminds him she will continue to work for the rights of women.
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Some reviewers complained that the book was ‘‘too much of a tract,’’ but others hailed it as the ‘‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the women’s movement.’’ This was the first of Johnston’s ‘‘sociological’’ novels, and it not only argued for the emancipation of women but also pointed out other social problems. A later feminist work by Johnston, The Wanderers (1917), consists of 19 sketches that trace the changing relations between men and women in history from the early days of humanity to the French Revolution. Johnston is almost forgotten today, and she has received little serious critical attention. Critics generally agree that her reputation is based on the historical novels. Beginning with her ‘‘sociological’’ works in 1913, her readership fell off. The later mystical and transcendental works perplexed reviewers and did not sell well. Johnston’s characters are limited and stilted, her plots melodramatic, her themes overused, and her metaphysics and politics often intrusive. Despite valid criticism of her style and plots, she was a good storyteller, and she knew well the history on which her novels were based; her depiction of setting and landscape has been praised. Her most enthusiastic critic, Lawrence Nelson, has called her ‘‘perhaps the most distinctive and valuable American historical novelist after Cooper and Simms.’’ OTHER WORKS: Prisoners of Hope (1898). Audrey (1902). Sir Mortimer (1904). Lewis Rand (1908). The Witch (1914). The Fortunes of Garin (1915). Foes (1918). Michael Forth (1919). Sweet Rocket (1920). 1492 (1922). Silver Cross (1922). Croatan (1923). The Slave Ship (1924). The Great Valley (1926). The Exile (1927). Hunting Shirt (1931). Miss Delicia Allen (1933). Drury Randall (1934). The Collected Short Stories of Mary Johnston (1982). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cella, C. R., Mary Johnston (1981). Goloboy, J. L., ‘‘Marrying the Future: Kate Langley Bosher, Mary Johnston, Ellen Glasgow, and the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia’’ (thesis, 1995). Hubbell, J., The South in American Literature: 1607-1900 (1954). Longest, G., Three Virginia Writers: Mary Johnston, Thomas Nelson Page, and Amélie Rives Troubetskoy: A Reference Guide (1978). Patterson, M. H., ‘‘Survival of the Best Fitted: The Trope of the New Woman in Margaret Murray Washington, Pauline Hopkins, Sui Sin Far, Edith Wharton and Mary Johnston, 1895-1913’’ (thesis, 1996). Quinn, A. H., American Fiction: An Historical and Critical Survey (1937). Rubin, L. Jr., ed., A Bibliographical Guide to the Study of Southern Literature (1969). Simonini, R. C. Jr., ed., Southern Writers: Appraisals in Our Time (1961). Stone, P. S., ‘‘Mary Johnston: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Works’’ (thesis, 1981). Votes for Women! The Woman Suffrage Movement in Tennessee, the South, and the Nation (1995). Reference works: Cavalcade of the American Novel (1952). DAB. LSL. NAW (1971). NCAB. TCA. Other references: Richmond Quarterly (1981). SR (Apr.-June 1937). Virginia Cavalcade (Winter 1956). —DOROTHY M. SCURA
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JONES, Amanda Theodocia Born 19 October 1835, East Bloomfield, New York; died 31 March 1914, Brooklyn, New York Daughter of Henry and Mary Mott Jones
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While working on her inventions, Jones continued to write and publish collections of her poetry. A Prairie Idyl (1882) demonstrated her extensive knowledge of the wildflowers of the Midwest. Rubaiyat of Solomon, and Other Poems (1905) included a popular series of poems, ‘‘Kansas Bird Songs,’’ which revealed her knowledge of Midwestern wildlife.
Amanda Jones’ father was a master weaver; her mother was an avid reader. Both of them considered books to be ‘‘more necessary than daily bread,’’ and introduced Jones, at an early age, to Jane Austen, Bunyan, Dryden, Pope, and Scott. Jones attended the local district school and after the family moved to Black Rock, near Buffalo, New York, the East Aurora Academy. At fifteen she began teaching school.
Jones’ life and poetry reflected the dynamic character of 19th-century America. Her interests ranged from food preservation and woman suffrage to wildlife and psychic phenomena. She traveled extensively around the eastern half of the U.S. and seemed determined never to succumb to poor health. Her poetry not only reflects her strong sense of patriotism, but reveals Jones to be a sensitive woman, aware of and engaged in the society she lived in, and always hopeful of eternal salvation.
Four years later she gave up teaching when the Ladies’ Repository of Cincinnati accepted one of her poems. During the next decade she contributed a series of poems to the Repository. In 1859 Jones developed tuberculosis and spent six months at the Clifton Springs (New York) Water Cure. She never fully regained her health and periodically resorted to similar cures.
OTHER WORKS: Poems and Songs: Written in Spare Moments (1890). Poems, 1854-1906 (1906).
Jones’ first volume of poetry, Ulah, and Other Poems (1861), was dedicated to her father, who had died six years earlier. The title poem, based on an ancient Native American legend, tells the story of the Native American maiden Ulah and her lover. Death and the hope of eternal salvation are popular themes in the other poems. Her second volume, Poems (1867), was dedicated to the ‘‘Nameless Club,’’ a men’s literary society of which Jones was an honorary member. The first poem in this collection, ‘‘Atlantis,’’ describes the disappearance of the kingdom of Atlantis. The next 20 poems are classified as ‘‘patriotic’’ and are concerned with the Civil War. Several of them commemorate important battles; most glorify the Northern cause. One of the poems, ‘‘Forest Lawn,’’ is an especially moving tribute to Jones’ brother Porter, who died in battle at the age of eighteen. In these poems, once again, death is a recurring theme as are love, God, and the triumph of good over evil. The spiritualist movement was gaining popularity at this time; by 1854, Jones believed she was a medium and that her actions were governed by her spiritual guardian. She saw in spiritualism the hope of salvation she sought after the sudden death of her brother. Among her powers as a medium was the ability to heal, and during the 1850s and 1860s this ability secured for her the hospitality of other spiritualists. These long visits allowed her ample time to continue to write poetry. Her spiritual guardian led her to Chicago in 1869, where she found work as a writer with the Western Rural, Interior, and a juvenile periodical, Bright Sides. Years later she collected many of her psychic experiences in her Psychic Autobiography (1910). Just as she had been affected by the spiritualist movement, Jones was affected by the great pace of invention characterizing 19th-century America. Over the years, she developed a vacuum process to preserve food, patented an oil burner, established a working women’s home, and founded the Woman’s Canning and Preserving Company.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Barker, N. G., Kansas Women in Literature (1915). Reference works: AA. AW. DAB. NAW (1971). NCAB. —DOMENICA BARBUTO
JONES, Edith See WHARTON, Edith
JONES, Gayl Born 23 November 1949, Lexington, Kentucky Daughter of Franklin and Lucille Jones Gayl Jones grew up in Lexington, Kentucky, a setting that is clearly influential in her novels. She earned a B.A. in English from Connecticut College in 1971. While there, she received the college’s award for the best original poem in both 1969 and 1970 and the Frances Steloff Fiction award for ‘‘The Roundhouse,’’ a short story that establishes the themes that dominate Jones’ work—the problems and possibilities of relationships between black men and women, the uniqueness of women, and the complexities of communication. Jones received graduate degrees in creative writing from Brown University. Corregidora (1975, reprinted 1988) is a lean book narrated by Ursa, the descendant of slaves and their Portuguese owner, in a dialogue style that Jones describes as ‘‘ritualized.’’ Despite the spareness of its presentation, the story is complex. At one level, it is an account of Ursa’s matrilineal heritage and her relationship to a line of female ancestors who are preoccupied with perpetuating, and perhaps redeeming, their oppressive history in new generations. This background illuminates Ursa’s attempts to create a
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constructive and loving relationship with a man despite centuries of misunderstanding between the sexes accentuated by profound social and economic injustice. Because an accident early renders Ursa incapable of producing her generation of children, the blues she sings and the tale she tells become her testimonial—her ‘‘generation’’—for ultimately the novel itself passes the story on. Jones has said Corregidora is a ‘‘Blues Novel’’ and in doing so compared it to her moving poem ‘‘Deep Song.’’ Stylistically, the book depicts the black female experience in terms of the unique language and oral tradition of the blues. Jones defines ‘‘Blues Art’’ as that which expresses the simultaneity of good and bad feelings; she says that she often creates ‘‘blues relationships’’ between men and women. Critics have praised her for her skill in adapting the linguistic, cultural, and emotional perspective of the black woman to the form of the traditional novel. Eva’s Man (1976, 1987), Jones’s second novel, is the story of Eva Medina Canada, a so-called ‘‘savage woman’’ who murders her lover by dental castration. Eva narrates the story from her cell in a psychiatric prison. Although the novel shares much in theme and setting with Corregidora, the emphasis here is more social than personal, as it points to the terror and squalor of Eva’s past, the destructiveness inherent in male-female relationships, and the violent nature of sexuality. Relationships between men and women in Corregidora mingle tenderness and brutality, but cultural and emotional brutality triumph in Eva’s Man. Jones says, ‘‘In many ways, Eva’s Man is a horror story. It really is. . . . Their ritual isn’t a blues ritual. I don’t know what it is.’’ Jones has published excerpts from another novel and a collection of short stories, White Rat (1977, 1991). Her powerful title story, ‘‘White Rat,’’ is being included in collections of short fiction. Jones, a versatile and prolific writer, has also written several plays and numerous poems, but her major works are the two novels. Although her writing is neither polemical nor explicitly political, it reveals a central concern with the issues of racism and feminism. Admirers of Jones’ novels of the 1970s assert that her construction of black women questions the ‘‘naturalness’’ of racist and sexist attitudes. Others, however, have faulted what they see as her lack of positive images of African American characters, especially of black men. In the 1980s, Jones’ work changed substantially, although it is unclear whether the transformation stemmed from criticism of her novels. Her three collections of poetry have received little attention. Still interested in the slave history of colonial Latin America, Jones continues to use mutilation themes as well as the richness of the oral tradition to create accounts of female subjectivity and the continuity of history. Set in 17th-century Brazil, Song for Anninho (1981, reissued 1999) tells of the atrocities committed by the Portuguese in their attacks on Palmares, an independent settlement of escaped African slaves. The poem is told by a young African woman who also relates others’ stories. Similarly, the title poem in Xarque and Other Poems (1985) weaves the voices of three women into a history told by a single female, the granddaughter of Almeyda from Song for Anninho. Thus tales of survival and oppression become a matrilineal heritage that finds its voice in song.
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The Hermit-Woman: Poems (1983), which also develops voices from colonial Brazil, includes two self-referential pieces. One of these, ‘‘Stranger,’’ closes the book with a couple’s love-making, ‘‘fierce / strong / soaring,’’ so that the joy of sexual union heals an African past of sundered relationships. The theme of tenderness in all three books is a departure from the brutality between black women and black men that critics had objected to in her fiction. While that tenderness exists often only in memory and is experienced through the pain of recollection, it closes the gap between women and men and locates violence in racist atrocities. By exploring memory’s painful burden as a necessity for the survival of the African race, Jones alters the feminist polemic many had noted in her novels to a dialogue of racial unity. Jones has received a number of literary awards, including fellowships from Yaddo (1974) and from the National Endowment for the Arts (1976), and the Henry Russell Award from the University of Michigan (1981), where she was professor of English from 1975 to 1983. In the later 1990s, Jones continued to write and travel. OTHER WORKS: Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature (1991). The Healing (1998). The Healing; Corregidora; Eva’s Man (bound together, 1998). Mosquito (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Allen, D. E., ‘‘The Role of the Blues in Gayl Jones’ Fiction’’ (thesis, 1993). Baker, H. A., and P. Redmonds, eds., Afro-American Literary Study in the 1990s (1989). Bell, R. P., et al., eds., Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature (1979). Bloom, H., Black American Women Fiction Writers (1995). Bloom, H., Contemporary Black American Fiction Writers (1995). Broome, L. J., ‘‘Sex, Violence, and History: Images of Black Men in the Selected Fiction of Gayl Jones, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison‘‘ (thesis, 1990). Burwell, S. L., ‘‘The Soul of Black Women: The Hermeneutical Method of Analysis as Applied to the Novel Corregidora’’ (thesis reissue, 1981). Coser, S., Bridging the Americas: The Literature of Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, and Gayl Jones (1995). Dubey, M., ‘‘Winged, But Grounded: A Contextual Study of the Fiction of Toni Morrison and Gayl Jones’’ (thesis, 1989). Flora, J. M. and R. A. Bain, Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook (1993). Fossett, J. J., and J. A. Tucker, Race Consciousness: African-American Studies for the New Century (1997). Gottfried, A. S., ‘‘Confessions and Accusations: Violence and Redemption in Contemporary U.S. Women’s Fiction’’ (thesis, 1994). Intemann, C., ‘‘The Blues Ache in Corregidora’’ (thesis, 1988). Kerr, L. A., ‘‘You Are My Face; You Are Me: Kristeva’s Semiotic as Site of Self-Erasure in Gayl Jones’ Corregidora and Toni Morrison’s Beloved’’ (thesis, 1995). Kester, G. T., ‘‘Writing the Subject Structure, Tropes, and Doubleness in Five African-American Novels’’ (thesis, 1991). McKoy, S. S., ‘‘Insanity and Creativity: The Psychic Trauma of Women in Texts by Gayl Jones and Gloria Naylor’’ (thesis, 1991). Murphy, C. M., ‘‘Shaping Space: Quilting Aesthetics and Black Feminist Writers’’ (thesis, 1990). Porter, S. D., ‘‘The Search for Wholeness is Completed: Gayl Jones’ Corregidora as a Rewriting of
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Jean Toomer’s Cane’’ (thesis, 1991). Richards, C. S., ‘‘The Empowerment of Orality in the Novels of Gayl Jones’’ (thesis, 1992). Robinson, S., Engendering the Subject: Gender and Self-Representation in Contemporary Women’s Fiction (1991). Stallings, L., ‘‘Creating a Bodily Text: Orality and Sexuality as Means of Empowerment in Gayl Jones’ Corregidora and Eva’s Man (thesis, 1998). Tate, C., ed., Black Women Writers at Work (1983). Walker, S., Stories from the American Mosaic (1990). Wilcox, J., ‘‘Constructed Silences: Voice and Subjectivity in the Resistant Texts of Gayl Jones, Alice Walker, and Toni Cade Bambara’’ (thesis, 1995). Reference works: Black American Writers Past and Present (1975). Black Writers: A Selection of Sketches (1989). DLB (1984). FC (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Who’s Who in Black Americans (1992). Other references: American Poetry Review (Sept.-Oct. 1976). Ariel (1992). Callaloo (Winter 1984). CLAJ (1984, 1986). MELUS (Winter 1980). MR (1977). New Republic (28 June 1975, 19 June 1976). Studia Africana (1977). YR (1976). —JUDITH P. JONES, UPDATED BY JOELLEN MASTERS
JONES, Hettie Born 16 July 1934, Brooklyn, New York Daughter of Oscar and Lottie Lewis Cohen; married LeRoi Jones (now Amiri Baraka, divorced 1966); children: Kellie, Lisa Perhaps Hettie Jones’ chief distinction as a writer is as the author of a superbly written autobiography, How I Became Hettie Jones (1990), which, in chronicling her own story, also gives a discerning and loving portrait of LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka). This book describes the lively bohemian artistic life in Greenwich Village during the 1950s, when writers Allan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Frank O’Hara, Joel Oppenheimer, and artists and musicians were friends and cohorts, and portrays the conflict of Baraka, especially, and for herself as the Black Power movement escalated in the 1960s. In addition, however, Jones is also an acclaimed and prizewinning writer of books for children. She earned a B.A. from the University of Virginia (1955), attended Columbia University (1955-56), and has lived since in New York City. She began her career as a staff writer for the Columbia University Press’ Center for Mass Communication, then became subscription manager for the Record Changer, a jazz magazine. When this journal met financial difficulties, Jones answered a New York Times advertisement from the Partisan Review and eventually became its managing editor. As the ‘‘Beat poets-Beat generation’’ gained status and celebrity, Jones and her husband founded a new journal, partly to showcase the writing and visual art of the Beat circle. Yugen, the magazine, debuted in spring 1958, followed soon by Totem Press,
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with the capability of publishing longer works. Following her divorce, Jones supported herself with freelance work as a clerk, proofreader, and eventually as an organizer for the Mobilization for Youth program, where she founded educational after-school programs, working also in day care and as a substitute teacher. From 1970 on, as a freelance writer she published poems, stories, and several children’s books. Her compilation of American Indian songs, The Trees Stand Shining, was chosen as a notable children’s book by the American Library Association in 1971 and was included in the American Institute of Graphic Arts Children’s Book Show (1971-72). Longhouse Winter: Iroquois Transformation Tales was chosen for the American Institute of Graphic Arts 50 Books of the Year in 1972. Her own acknowledged ‘‘favorite,’’ Big Star Fallin’ Mama (biographies of five women jazz musicians), was featured by the New York Public Library as a young adult best book in 1975 (a revised edition was published in 1997). About her writing, Jones has said: ‘‘Since 1957 I’ve been involved with literature and writers one way or another. . . .When I have time I like to write short stories for slow readers, textbook stories for kids. I write novelizations to support my children and my writing habit. Have been totally selfemployed since 1970, but am POOR.’’ What she likes about writing for children, she said, is that ‘‘it’s a challenge to simplify and clarify.’’ In her autobiography, which was reissued in paperback in 1998, Jones delineates her struggle to get from wanting to write to finished and published writing—a struggle common to women who find marriage and motherhood and their accompanying responsibilities to be insurmountable obstacles to creative fulfillment (as Tillie Olsen so movingly documented in the famous Silences, published in 1965). Jones also, echoing the theme of her title, describes her unremitting journey from a middle-class Jewish childhood in suburban New Jersey through her marriage to the self-realization that finally culminated in the autobiography. Throughout she is nonjudgmental of all the ‘‘others’’ whom she loved-her parents, her husband, her mostly unorthodox friends-all the while she is seeking to define the self she always instinctively recognized but came to terms with only after heartbreak and difficulty. Her writing is beautifully simple, though intense and moving. Assessing what happened with her father and her husband, Jones wrote: ‘‘Both these men, Cohen then Jones, first loved me for myself, and then discarded me when that self no longer fit their daughter/wife image. If I hadn’t been myself all along I might have been left next to nothing. Still, while they loved me they sometimes saw in me more than I did, and for those times I owe them.’’ Later, years after her divorce, she encountered an old acquaintance who obviously recognized her but could not quite place who she was. She wrote: ‘‘He wanted to recognize me. . .though it was hard to get past my intent withdrawal. . . .‘Are you. . .’ he asked, and I waited, caught. ‘Are you still. . .’ he tried again. . . .He was searching out a name for me and rejecting all the choices. Is she Cohen? No, she was Jones. Is she yet that, or is the
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name removed like the man from whom she got it?. . .But then he came out with it, what he’d decided to ask—and it was a smash! ‘Are you still. . .Hettie?’ he said. ‘By all means,’ I said laughing. By all means.’’ OTHER WORKS: Aliens at the Border: The Writing Workshop, Bedford Hills Correctional Facility (edited and with an introduction by Hettie Jones, 1997). Coyote Tales (1974). Drive (1998). Grace the Table: Stories and Recipes from My Southern Revival (by Alexander Smalls with Hettie Jones, 1997). How to Eat Your ABC’s: A Book about Vitamins (1976). I Hate to Talk about Your Mother (1980). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Authors of Books for Young People (1979). Belle Lettres (Summer 1990). Booklist (15 Jan. 1990, 15 Feb. 1995). CA 81-84 (1979). Essence (May 1994). LJ (15 Feb. 1990, Mar. 1995). Native Peoples (Spring 1994). New Directions for Women (Sept. 1990). New York (4 June 1990). NYTBR (11 Mar. 1990, 21 July 1991). Review of Contemporary Fiction (Fall 1990). SATA 27, 42 (1982, 1986). —JOANNE L. SCHWEIK
JONES, Mary Harris Born 1 May circa 1830, Cork, Ireland; died 30 November 1930, Silver Spring, Maryland Wrote under: Mother Jones Daughter of Richard and Helen M. Harris; married George Jones, 1861 (died 1867) A descendant of Irish freedom fighters, Mary Harris Jones attended public schools in Toronto, where her father had found railroad work. Her early career alternated between teaching and dressmaking in the U.S. and Canada. In 1867 her husband (an iron molder and union organizer) and four children perished in a yellow fever epidemic, and Jones began a new life as a Chicago dressmaker. Tragedy again intervened: the Chicago Fire destroyed her business in 1871. Jones’ lifework arose from the ashes when she became involved with the Knights of Labor. Her career as union gadfly, wandering wherever workers needed organizing, renewed commitment, or publicity, began with a Pittsburgh railroad strike in 1877. Jones expended her greatest efforts on behalf of miners, particularly in the bitter struggles in West Virginia and Ludlow, Colorado, where she was jailed for her organizing work. She also exposed abusive child labor, conducting undercover investigations in Southern mills and organizing a march of child strikers. She helped establish the radical labor publication An Appeal to Reason in 1895 and the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905, supported the Mexican Revolution in 1910, and spoke at the
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first Pan American Labor Conference in 1921. Before she died, shortly after claiming her 100th birthday, Jones had attained the status of labor’s guardian angel, able to unify workers with fiery rhetoric emphasizing principles that transcended union politics. Jones was primarily an activist and orator; her recorded speeches and testimony before Congressional committees reveal the power of her unminced words and florid metaphors. Her writings retain an oratorical quality; compelling calls to action, memories of earlier struggles, denunciations of capitalist ogres, and forthright statements of principle are loosely organized and dramatically presented. Jones’ articles in the International Socialist Review paint a horrifying picture of life in Southern mills and coal mines, and denounce church and legislative complicity supporting such conditions. Child labor aroused her maternal wrath; she warns of its dire consequences for the health of the children and the nation. Although she calls for the replacement of oppressive capitalism with socialism, her articles lack any theoretical strategies for social reconstruction. In her Autobiography of Mother Jones (1925, edited by M. F. Parton), Jones elaborates upon these themes, while presenting herself as the tireless, roving champion of the oppressed, conveniently disguised as an old woman more readily suspected of knitting ‘‘mittens for the heathens of Africa’’ than fomenting workers’ revolts. Although disorganized and inaccurate in details and chronology, Jones provides readers with graphic personal reminiscences of most major labor upheavals of her era and reveals her genius for dramatic strategies to publicize her cause. Jones’ class consciousness is paramount in her autobiography and explains her negative evaluations of prohibition and woman suffrage. Although a feminist in her personal assertiveness, her denunciation of the ‘‘lady,’’ and her insistence that the militancy of miners’ wives determines a strike’s success, Jones criticizes the concept of careers for women. She sees factory work, the career open to women of her class, as less satisfying than raising a family and states as her ultimate goal a society that provides amply for family welfare. Espousing no consistent theoretical dogma, she chooses her stands on all issues according to her convictions. Selflessly eschewing financial rewards for her work, Jones, in her autobiography, criticizes those union leaders who enrich themselves in the cause. She does not similarly reject the rewards of notoriety; seeing herself as an agitator in the tradition of Jesus and the American heroes of 1776, she takes pride in her designation by her foes as ‘‘the most dangerous woman in the country.’’ Jones provides us with one of the foremost American examples of the worldwide phenomenon of the power of postmenopausal women, who, exempt from the demands of childbearing, use maternal qualities in a new leadership role. Her importance as a union organizer and reputation as indomitable unionism personified have been undeservedly forgotten. Jones’s autobiography forces us to remember her and her philosophy, women’s activity in the developing labor movement, and the relationship of class to feminism.
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OTHER WORKS: Excerpt from The Autobiography of Mother Jones in Motherland: Writings by Irish American Women About Mothers and Daughters (1999). The papers of Mary Harris Jones are at the Department of Manuscripts and Archives, Catholic University, Washington, D.C. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ashby, R. and D. G. Ohrn, eds., Herstory: Women Who Changed the World (1995). Downing, C. A., An Examination of Rhetorical Strategies Utilized by Mary Harris ‘‘Mother’’ Jones Within the Context of the Agitative Rhetoric Model Developed by John Waite Bowers and Donovan J. Ochs (dissertation, 1987). Felder, D. G., The 100 Most Influential Women of All Time: A Ranking Past and Present (1996). Fetherling, D., Mother Jones, the Miners’ Angel (1974). Goldfarb, R. L., ‘‘A Rhetorical Analysis of Selected Speeches of Mary Harris ‘‘Mother’’ Jones’’ (thesis, 1966). Mikeal, J. E., ‘‘Mother Jones: The Labor Movement’s Impious Joan of Arc’’ (thesis, 1965). Nies, J., Seven Women (1977). Raffaele, Sister J. F., ‘‘Mary Harris Jones and the United Mine Workers’’ (thesis, 1969). Rolka, G. M., 100 Women Who Shaped World History (1994). Scholten, P. C., Militant Women for Economic Justice: The Persuasion of Mary Harris Jones, Ella Reeve Bloor, Rose Pastor Stokes, Rose Schneiderman, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (dissertation, 1986). Thompson, F., Introduction and Bibliography to The Autobiography of Mother Jones (1976). Tonn, M. B., ‘‘Effecting Labor Reform Through Stories: The Narrative Rhetorical Style of Mary Harris (Mother) Jones’’ in Constructing and Reconstructing Gender: The Links Among Communication, Language, and Gender (1992). Tonn, M. B., The Rhetorical Personae of Mary Harris ‘‘Mother’’ Jones, Industrial Labor’s Maternal Prophet (dissertation, 1989). Truman, M., Women of Courage (1977). Reference works: DAB. Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (1937). NCAB. NAW. Other references: Labor Hall of Fame (1996). NR (20 Feb. 1915). NYT Magazine (1 June 1913). —HELEN M. BANNAN
JONG, Erica Born 26 March 1942, New York, New York Daughter of Seymour and Eda Mirsky Mann; married Michael Werthman, 1963; Allen Jong, 1966; Jonathan Fast, 1977; Kenneth David Burrows, 1989; children: Miranda (‘‘Molly’’) The second of three daughters, Erica Jong grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. While an undergraduate English major at Barnard, Jong was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and won Woodrow Wilson and George Weldwood Murray fellowships, as well as the Academy of American Poets prize and other awards at Columbia. She earned an M.A. in 18th-century literature from Columbia in 1965. Jong spent 1966-69 in Heidelberg, Germany. Her first novel, Fear of Flying (1973), made her a celebrity.
Fear of Flying is about a woman’s discovery of her selfhood, through discarding cultural stereotypes and accepting responsibility for defining herself, first as a Jew, then as a woman—with all the vulnerability that this entails—and finally as a writer. Through strategically juxtaposed flashbacks, the first half of the novel provides the psychological motivations behind Isadora’s dilemma as she debates whether to leave her husband and go off with another man. Although she feels restless and frustrated, Isadora depends on her husband, as she always has depended on men for security. But Adrian, her new lover, awakens the part of her that loves to be wanton and carefree and not feel guilty. In the second half of the novel, Isadora and Adrian begin an erratic odyssey across Europe, zigzagging their way from Vienna to Paris. Away from time and social conventions, it becomes a journey of self-discovery for Isadora, as she describes in rambling conversations her past relationships with men. A pattern emerges: she has allowed them to exploit her, and they have never proved satisfying both physically and emotionally. By the end of the novel, abandoned by Adrian and waiting for her husband in his London hotel room, she has come to realize she can’t find fulfillment through another person, but only through achieving her own authenticity as a human being. Most of the controversy this novel stirred up focuses on its explicit sexuality. But such criticism overlooks its solid literary qualities—its use of allusions and symbols, as well as other imagery, to underscore its theme; its robust humor; and most of all its freshness, honesty, and abundant vitality. How to Save Your Own Life (1977) picks up Isadora’s story in New York, after she has written a bestselling novel and become even more estranged from her husband, and takes her through her disenchantment with the Hollywood producer for whom she is writing a film version of her novel to her decision to leave her husband and take up residence with Josh Ace, a struggling young writer in Hollywood. Both the style and themes of How to Save Your Own Life indicate Jong’s strengthening command of the novel form. The second book relies less on wisecracks and has a more lucid structure than the first. Also, in dramatizing her protagonist’s change from dependency to womanhood and her rejection of self-destruction in favor of life, Jong breaks away from traditional literary treatment of female characters by not eroticizing pain or making her ‘‘free woman’’ pay for her sins. Jong has also published several volumes of poetry. Fruits & Vegetables (1971), which treats a variety of experiences, is most notable for its experiments in style, such as its botanical imagery and the intermingling of prose and poetry. Half-Lives (1973) is more consistent in subject matter and tone. The main themes are a woman’s sexual and emotional longings; the tone predominantly wistful or angry. Loveroot (1975) announces a change in the author’s attitude—a joyous embracing of life, with all of its pain and uncertainty. These three volumes were highly praised and won several awards. Here Comes & Other Poems (1975) is a compilation of previously published poems and essays. At the Edge of the Body (1979) has received little critical attention; however, it reflects the author’s deepening maturity. The quality of Jong’s reviews and articles about writing places her in the front ranks of feminist literary critics. Jong’s fiction and poetry, with its
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willingness to take risks and experiment, demonstrates continuing growth and self-confidence.
early unpublished poems, poems included in other prose works, and more recent poems.
Jong’s work since 1979 has been prolific and varied. The travels and travails of Isadora, heroine of Fear of Flying and How to Save Your Own Life, are continued in Parachutes & Kisses (1984) and Any Woman’s Blues (1990). The first takes Isadora through the breakup of her marriage to Josh Ace, her recovery from the divorce, and rediscovery of love—all while raising her toddler daughter. The next begins with the breakup of the love affair begun at the end of the previous novel. Any Woman’s Blues diverges from its predecessors by continuing Isadora’s saga from a one-step removed point of view. The novel’s conceit is that another author has organized and finished the semiautobiographical novel Isadora had been working on shortly before her death. The author’s voice now interacts with the character she bases on herself. This structure reflects Jong’s new interest in experimenting with the borders between fiction and reality. Fanny: Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones (1980) and Serenissima: A Novel of Venice (1987) represent her work in this vein. The genesis of Fanny is Jong’s imagined response to Cleland’s heroine in Fanny Hill; or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. Fanny responds by writing her own version of her life to reclaim it for herself. In this way, Jong confronts the issues not addressed at the time, of incest, prostitution, and woman’s powerless position in society, and does so from within, by giving the very source of Cleland’s novel a voice. In Serenissima (later reissued as Shylock’s Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice in 1995), Jong continues to appropriate and rework older styles and language. The heroine is an actress at a Venice film festival who is about to play Jessica in a new film production of The Merchant of Venice. Becoming feverishly ill, she begins to hallucinate and dreams she is a Jew in Venice around Shakespeare’s time—in fact, the very woman who will inspire Shakespeare to write The Merchant of Venice. Accidents of fate bring her together with Shakespeare and, naturally, adventures ensue. Jong’s attempts to meld and confuse the border of time greatly test her reader’s suspension of disbelief. Serenissima could have used more of the refinement of Fanny in concept as well as structure; and the contrast between the critical and popular receptions of the two novels reflect these discrepancies.
In the early 1990s, Jong added yet another genre to her portfolio with Fear of Fifty: A Midlife Memoir (1994), an autobiographical blend of personal history coupled with biting social criticism. The book sheds additional light on Jong’s earlier works and reveals a broader picture of the author. She offers her insight into the world of women while investigating her own roles as daughter, sister, wife, mother, writer, feminist, and Jew. Jong classifies her generation of women as the ‘‘whiplash generation’’ because of the roller coaster of changing expectations through which they’ve lived, and includes her thoughts on the past, present, and future of feminism. Above all, though, the book is hailed as honest and frank. Jong even addresses the disenchantment liberal feminists have felt with her previous work and argues that women who insist on political correctness only foster separatism and sexism.
Jong has also ventured into two other genres: nonfiction and children’s literature. Witches (with Joseph Smith, 1981), a book about witches and witchcraft, utilizes poetry and illustrations—in addition to the expected prose—to educate its readers. Clearly the result of much research, it even includes a few spells and rites one might practice, if one dared. Megan’s Book of Divorce (1984), a self-proclaimed ‘‘kid’s book for adults,’’ takes on divorce, presumably from Jong’s daughter’s point of view. The view, however, seems a little unrealistically rosy. The book was reissued in a less candid title in 1996 as Megan’s Two Houses: A Story of Adjustment. Jong considers herself primarily a poet. She has published Ordinary Miracles (1983) and Becoming Light: Poems New and Selected (1991). The first covers the themes of motherhood and divorce, while the second is a comprehensive compilation, including poems from each of her previous collections as well as some
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Jong’s following work, Inventing Memory: A Novel of Mothers and Daughters (1997), goes back to novel form with the story of four generations of Jewish women struggling with the challenges of their time. The founding woman, Sarah, escapes Russia as a 15-year-old and makes her way to the U.S. to find a better life. She successfully navigates these trials and later bears a daughter, Salome. Salome becomes a freewheeling writer and moves back to Europe. She has a daughter, Sally, who grows up in the 1960s in the U.S. and becomes a popular singer. Sally delves into the world of drug and alcohol abuse, and when she gives birth to a daughter, Sara, the father is soon granted permanent custody. This woman is the final generation featured, and pulls the story together in search of her heritage. The early characters in the novel, particularly Sarah, are the most popular with critics. The story tends to drag, becoming more bogged down with each generational layer, and most do not consider it one of Jong’s best works. The topics she deals with (Jewish immigration to America, challenges for female artists, and women’s spirituality), says one critic, are better addressed in her autobiography. Jong’s more recent work, What Do Women Want? Bread, Roses, Sex, Power (1998), is a collection of her essays on a variety of topics. She deals with issues ranging from censorship to Bill and Hillary Clinton to her second home in Italy. While the book doesn’t answer the question posed in the title, the compilation is almost like a conversation between Jong and the reader. Criticism of the book varies depending on the essay, but most agree that Jong’s characteristic honesty once again shines through on every topic. OTHER WORKS: The Devil at Large: Erica Jong on Henry Miller (1993). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Packard, W., ed., The Craft of Poetry (1974). Reference works: CA (Online, 1999). Contemporary Poets (1975). Other references: Booklist (19 July 1994). Boston Review (March 1992). Denver Quarterly (Winter 1983). Harper’s Bazaar (May 1977). KR (1 May 1997). LAT (27 May 1979). LATBR (24
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Nov. 1991). Nation (28 June 1971, 12 Jan. 1974). NR (2 Feb. 1974). Newsweek (5 May 1975). NY (17 Dec. 1973). NYTBR (12 Aug. 1973, 5 June 1988). Novel (Winter 1987). ReadersNdex Online (6 Apr. 1999). University of Dayton Review (Winter 1985-86). Web site: www.ericajong.com. —VIRGINIA COX, UPDATED BY GINA BIANCAROSA AND CARRIE SNYDER
JORDAN, Barbara C. Born 21 February 1936, Houston, Texas; died 17 January 1996, Austin, Texas Daughter of Benjamin M. and Arlyne Patten Jordan Congresswoman, orator, educator, and author Barbara Jordan first came to national attention as a member of the House Judiciary Committee charged with determining impeachment proceedings against then President Richard M. Nixon for his connection with the break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at Watergate Apartments. Jordan called for impeachment on 25 July 1974. A fellow committee member, Charles B. Rangel, was quoted as saying in an article by Francis X. Clines in the New York Times, ‘‘Barbara wasn’t really that concerned about the guilt or innocence of Nixon. She was most concerned that the Constitution not be distorted for political reasons.’’ As a defender of the Constitution, Jordan dedicated herself to a career in public service. Jordan was the great-granddaughter of Edward A. Patton of Evergreen, Texas. He was the only black man among the 150 members of the Texas Legislature in 1891. A Republican, he was one of the despised holdovers from what whites called the ‘‘nigger party’’ of the radical reconstruction of the Southern states after the Civil War. Like her great-grandfather, Jordan embodied ‘‘first’’ and ‘‘only’’ when she became the first black female state senator in Texas history. Elected from District 11 in Houston, Jordan was sworn in on 10 January 1967. Jordan was raised in a cocoon of respectability in the heart of Houston’s Good Hope Missionary Baptist Church. She attended Roberson Elementary and Phyllis Wheatley High School, where she was a member of the Honor Society and excelled in debating. She graduated in 1952 in the upper five percent of her class, then attended Texas Southern University, graduating magna cum laude in 1956 with a double major in political science and history. Her law degree came from Boston University in 1959. Houston was booming when Jordan returned in the fall of 1959. It was hard for her to believe, but Houston’s phenomenal population growth in the 1950s made it a larger city than Boston. When Jordan passed the Texas bar exam in the late fall of 1959, she was only the third female African-American attorney licensed to practice law in Texas. Little by little, Jordan began to build a law practice: she used her parents’ dining room table and the family telephone to conduct her law business.
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In the fall of 1960, with the presidential campaign heating up, she went down to the local Kennedy-Johnson campaign headquarters to volunteer her services. She started out licking stamps and stuffing envelopes, and it was almost by accident that her greatest gift was discovered. ‘‘One night there was a speech at a black church in the Fifth Ward. . .and the speaker who usually gave the pitch was sick and couldn’t show up. I was selected to do the pitch, and I was startled with the impact I had on people.’’ Jordan’s days of stuffing envelopes ended and she was assigned to the speaking circuit. Once on the speaking circuit, rallying mostly African-American groups, Jordan came to be noticed by some of Houston’s most prominent black citizens. And by the time the Kennedy-Johnson campaign ended successfully, Jordan was bitten by the political bug. She recalled, ‘‘My interest, which had been latent, was sparked. I think it had always been there, but that I did not focus on it before because there were certain things I had to get out of the way before I could concentrate on any political effort.’’ During the early 1960s Jordan campaigned twice on her own behalf for a seat in the Texas House of Representatives, but lost both times. In 1966, however, she received 80 percent of the votes cast in her successful bid for election to the Texas Senate. She served from 1966 to 1972, initiating and supporting much social reform legislation. During her second term, she was directly responsible for two major changes in Texas law: the state’s first minimum wage law and the first increase in benefits in 12 years for workers injured on the job. The liberal Texas Observer called the passage of the minimum wage by the Texas Legislature a ‘‘near miracle.’’ Social issues remained a focus for Jordan after she was elected to the U.S. Congress. She backed proposals to increase the minimum wage, to extend social security benefits to housewives, to provide free legal services for the indigent, and to expand existing programs to benefit the aged and ill. Jordan’s reputation for inspired oratory was confirmed in 1976 with her keynote address to the Democratic National Convention, when she was the first woman and the first African American to serve as party keynoter. In her oft-quoted remarks, she proclaimed, ‘‘We cannot improve on the system of government handed down to us by the founders of the Republic, but we can find new ways to implement that system and realize our destiny.’’ She went on to issue a call for ‘‘a national community’’ with everyone sharing in ‘‘the American dream.’’ Jordan was reelected to the House and continued to serve her constituents from the 18th District in Texas through 1978, when she retired from Congress after serving three terms as a representative. She explained her decision to leave politics in her autobiography, Barbara Jordan: A Self-Portrait (1979): ‘‘I felt more of a responsibility to the country as a whole, as contrasted with the duty of representing the half-million people in the Eighteenth Congressional District. I felt some necessity to address national issues. I thought my role now was to be one of the voices in the country defining where we were, where we were going, what the policies were that were being pursued, and where the holes in those policies were.’’ She therefore accepted a teaching post at the
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Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. In an interview published in Ms. in 1985, Jordan spoke about her career as an educator: ‘‘Now that I am teaching I think my future is in seeing to it that the next generation is ready to take over.’’ Until her death in 1996, Jordan committed her formidable talents and skills to her students. She wanted her students to be the premier public servants and guided by a core of principles. Jordan taught the way she legislated, with courage, tenacity, vision, and compassion. In 1996, 131 years after the end of slavery, 30 years after she entered the Texas Senate, and 24 years after she became the first African-American woman elected to Congress from the South, Barbara Jordan became the first black person to be buried in the State Cemetery in Austin, Texas. OTHER WORKS: Local Government Election Systems (1984). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bryant, I. B., Barbara Charline Jordan: From the Ghetto to the Capitol (1977). Rogers, M. B., Barbara Jordan: American Hero (1998). Reference works: Black Women in America (1993). CA (1988, 1996). —CELESTE DEROCHE
JORDAN, June (M.) Born 9 July 1936, New York, New York Daughter of Granville Ivanhoe and Mildred Maude Fisher Jordan; married Michael Meyer, 1955 (divorced 1965); children: Christopher Prolific and expansive in her interests and subject matter, June Jordan works in a variety of literary forms including poetry, essays, drama, fiction, and children’s literature. She combines writing with her roles as political activist, teacher, composer, and urban planner. Her parents, Granville and Mildred Jordan, emigrated from Jamaica to New York City, where Jordan, their only child, was born on 9 July 1936 in Harlem. When she was five, the family moved to a brownstone on Hancock Street in the BedfordStuyvesant area of Brooklyn, and it was there she began writing poetry at the age of seven. Her parents were working people who struggled to make ends meet, and both eventually went on the night shift to earn a little more pay, her father as a postal clerk and her mother as a nurse. The many difficulties of trying to survive took a toll on the family, and Jordan has written that her parents’ strictness and her father’s excessive use of physical punishment caused her a great deal of suffering and anger. Nevertheless, she has acknowledged her love for them and her gratitude for a home where poetry and the creative spirit were a part of everyday life. Her father introduced her to the Bible, Shakespeare, Edgar Allen Poe, and the dialect poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Her mother took her at an early age to services at the Universal Truth Center, where Jordan
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was exposed to the scriptural concept of the Word and the congregation’s belief that by declaring the truth, you create the truth. Mildred also confided to her daughter that she had once wanted to be an artist. In the Reid Lecture at Barnard College in 1975, and later in the introduction to Civil Wars (1981), Jordan honored the wish to be an artist as an inheritance from her mother and recognized the extent of her mother’s sacrifice in giving up not only her calling but also her very life when she committed suicide in 1966. After spending her childhood in a black environment, Jordan began her secondary education with a commute of one hour and twenty minutes to Midwood High School, where she was the only African-American in a student body of 3,000. The following year she went to Northfield School for Girls, a prep school in Massachusetts, and found herself once again in a white universe. When she entered Barnard College in 1953, the pattern continued with a program centered around only those thinkers and artists who were white and male. She drew upon her experiences as a student—and also upon her experiences as an educator in such projects as The Voice of the Children workshop in the mid-1960s—to formulate her ideas about the promotion of Black English and AfricanAmerican art, and the inclusion of women along with men as subjects of study in school. During her sophomore year at Barnard, she met Michael Meyer, a white student in his senior year at Columbia University. They married in 1955 and had a son, Christopher David, in 1958. At the time, interracial marriage was a felony in 43 states, and they often found themselves the object of insults and slurs. The situation within the larger society, part of which was the strife during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, put enormous stress on their relationship, and the marriage ended in 1965. As a single parent, Jordan supported herself and her son initially through freelance journalism, a field in which she has continued to be active as a columnist for The Progressive since 1989. Her long and varied career as a teacher began in 1967 with a position at the City College of New York. She subsequently taught at Sarah Lawrence College and Yale University, and from 1978 to 1989 at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where she also directed the Poetry Center and Creative Writing Program. In 1986 she was the Chancellor’s Distinguished Lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley and joined the faculty at Berkeley in 1989 as Professor of Afro-American Studies and Women’s Studies. Her first book, Who Look At Me, appeared in 1969, and since then there has been a steady stream of work that includes theater and performance pieces and books for young people and major collections of poems and essays. Written in Black English, her novel His Own Where (1971) reflects her interest in urban planning and her collaboration with R. Buckminster Fuller in rethinking the design of Harlem to foster black life. It was the basis for her winning the Prix de Rome in environmental design (1970-71), for which Fuller had recommended her. From the beginning, Jordan’s work has fused poetic expression and political statement as she balances her moral outrage with her belief in
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love and the transformative power of language. In recent years her concerns have become increasingly international in scope. She has addressed issues in such countries as Angola, Lebanon, and Nicaragua. She was presented the PEN Freedom-to-Write award in 1991 and the decade has seen a rich output of her political thinking in the collections Technical Difficulties: African-American Notes on the State of the Union (1992) and Affirmative Acts: Political Essays (1998). OTHER WORKS: Some Changes (1971). Dry Victories (1972). Fannie Lou Hamer (1972). New Days: Poems of Exile and Return (1974). New Life: New Room (1975). Things that I Do in the Dark: Selected Poetry (1977). Passion: New Poems, 1977-1980 (1980). Kimako’s Story (1981). Living Room: New Poems (1985). On Call: Political Essays (1985). Lyrical Campaigns: Selected Poems (1989). Moving Towards Home: Political Essays (1989). Naming Our Destiny: New and Selected Poems (1989). Haruko/ Love Poems (1994). I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky: the Libretto and Lyrics (1995). Kissing God Goodbye: poems 1991-97 (1997). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bowles, J., ed., In the Memory and Spirit of Frances, Zora, and Lorraine: Essays and Interviews on Black Women and Writing (1979). Davenport, D., ‘‘Four Contemporary Black Women Poets: Lucille Clifton, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Sherley Ann Williams’’ (dissertation, 1985). Smith, V., ed., African American Writers (1991). Reference works: CANR (1989). Contemporary Poets (1991). CLC (1976, 1979, 1983). DLB (1985). Other references: African American Review (Fall 1998). Callaloo 9 (Winter 1986). DAI (Jan. 1987). Essence (April 1981). Feminist Review 31 (Spring 1989). High Plains Literary Rev. (Fall 1988). —MARLENE M. MILLER
JORDAN, Kate Born 23 December 1862, Dublin, Ireland; died 20 June 1926, Mountain Lakes, New Jersey Daughter of Michael J. and Katherine Jordan; married Frederic M. Vermilye, 1897
producing plays, novels, a long list of stories in popular magazines, and one children’s book, The Happifats and the Grouch (1917). A world traveler, Jordan lived for long periods in England and France, joining writers’ clubs in London and New York. After her husband died, Jordan, failing in health and unable to finish the novel she had been working on, committed suicide by taking poison. In A Circle in the Sand (1898), Anne Garrick is a talented woman determined to succeed as a journalist and novelist. Her romantic life is less smooth than her professional life, but she ultimately turns down the man she once wanted to marry (who had fallen for her scheming cousin) and rushes to Brazil to join his half-brother, redeemed from a dissolute life by her faith in him. A Circle in the Sand comments on current feminism when Anne insists that she is not the ‘‘new woman,’’ whom she hates, but the ‘‘awakened woman,’’ who wants progress but ‘‘believes that marrying the man she loves. . .is the culmination of the purpose for which she was created.’’ Despite melodramatic use of coincidences, Jordan holds her reader with well-drawn scenes, skillfully created characters, and just enough suspense. Much of Jordan’s work involves vast swings of fortune and other fictional staples. In The Next Corner (1921), Jordan develops character more fully than in some of her other work and produces fine local color, but the plot, though engrossing, is full of marvelous coincidence. It includes murder just before an elopement, the devastating effect of war on the wife’s attempt at self-support, and her life of dread while awaiting a mysteriously overdue letter. Jordan’s plays were less successful than her novels. Theatre mgazine considered The Masked Woman (1922) ‘‘well constructed. . .save for long and tedious portions of conversation,’’ but Life felt it ‘‘might just as well never have been brought out.’’ Among her popular plays, apparently unpublished, were A Luncheon at Nick’s (1903), The Pompadour’s Protégé (1903), and The Right Road (1911). The plots of Jordan’s novels and stories are melodramatic and manipulative but enhanced by deft characterization, convincing psychological development, and good dramatic sense. The Boston Transcript gracefully described her in 1921 as a ‘‘born storyteller who can touch the veriest trifle and turn it out, not a joy forever, but a pleasure in the moment.’’ This summary is still valid. OTHER WORKS: The Kiss of Gold (1892). The Other House (1892). Time, the Comedian (1905). The Creeping Tides (1913). Against the Winds (1919). Trouble-the-House (1921).
Kate Jordan came to New York from Dublin at the age of three, when her professor father accepted a position at an American college. Always imaginative, she told classmates she was born on the high seas in a pirate ship, causing her teacher to warn Jordan’s mother that ‘‘either she will one day write fiction or she is one of those natural liars to whom truth is unattractive.’’ Jordan’s father so successfully converted her to fiction that her first story was published when she was twelve.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: DAB. Other references: Bookman (June 1913).
Stories like the popular ‘‘The Kiss of Gold’’ (1892) brought Jordan recognition as a short story writer. After her marriage to a New York broker, she continued writing under her own name,
JORDAN, Laura
—CAROL B. GARTNER
See BROWN, Sandra
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JUDSON, Emily Chubbuck Born 22 August 1817, Eaton, New York; died 1 June 1854, Hamilton, New York Wrote under: Emily Chubbuck, Fanny Forester, Mrs. Emily Judson Daughter of Charles and Lavinia Richards Chubbuck; married Adoniram Judson, 1846; children: three Emily Chubbuck Judson’s self-taught skills enabled her to teach in local schools from 1832 to 1840. Enrolled at the Utica Female Seminary for one year, she remained there as a teacher of English composition from 1841 to 1846. She rose from poverty eventually to find fame and wealth with her early children’s books. With the income from those books, she was able to buy her family a home and to make their lives comfortable. Judson’s short life span of 36 years was a full and varied one. Her writing career divides into three clearly defined phases; in each she wrote under a different name. Publishing under the name Emily Chubbuck, Judson wrote several successful children’s books between 1841 and 1844. Like other mid-19th-century writers, Judson writes consciously as an American and as a ‘‘republican.’’ Her fiction is for young Americans, and all the stories are heavily moralistic and didactic. For example, the stories in Charles Linn; or, How to Observe the Golden Rule (1841) have the theme of self-sacrifice. In ‘‘The Selfish Girl,’’ Julia has to cripple her schoolmate Sally before she realizes how selfish she is. Sally is, however, even improved by her accident; her brother ‘‘thought his sweet sister could scarcely be as lovely if she were not a cripple.’’ ‘‘The Mother’s Story’’ describes a vain little girl who has to contract smallpox to be taught humility. Publishing under the name of Fanny Forester, Judson wrote stories with a completely different tone, changing from the previously moral tone to one of irony and fancy. The sketches gathered into Trippings in Author-Land (1846) reveal a writer enjoying the world she was creating and perhaps enjoying the recreation of herself as Fanny Forester, a character in that world. Two more volumes continued to construct the village of Alderbrook, Lilias Fane, and Other Tales (1846) and Alderbrook (1846), which contained some of the same tales from Lilias Fane. Simplicity and unpretentiousness is praised; village life is uncomplicated and contains a community unknown to the larger, sprawling urban scene. Fanny Forester returned several times to the character Ida Ravelin, a genius, a poet, an angel (all synonyms in these stories), as she created her vision of the poet who is ‘‘not like them’’ but who can live completely in the ideal. By the time a revised edition (1847) of Alderbrook was published, Judson wished to suppress Ida Ravelin and substitute ‘‘Angel’s Pilgrimage,’’ a very different story of human greed, murder, and cruelty, in which the angels try to change the world by continuing the holy mission begun by their prototype, Christ. The work published under Fanny Forester continued to bring Judson money and fame. Alderbrook went through at least 11 editions.
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The third phase of Judson’s career began when she left the imaginary world of Alderbrook and entered into missionary life, marrying the Reverend Adoniram Judson, who was nearly 30 years her senior, and going to Burma with him and three of his children from his second marriage. In this phase, she published a Memoir of Sarah B. Judson (1849, reissued several times, including 1980), her husband’s second wife. This volume by its popularity furthered the cause of the missionaries. Printed in both London and New York, it was reprinted several times for a total of over 30,000 copies. Less popular, The Kathayan Slave (1853) is a defense of missionary activity and maintains that the barbarism of the natives of Burma and India can only be alleviated through Christianity. It is clear from The Kathayan Slave that Adoniram Judson’s pioneering efforts in missionary work were not always supported by his contemporaries; their attacks after his death in 1850 prompted Judson’s defense. Although she never became a legendary heroine on the order of Ann Hasseltine Judson, Adoniram Judson’s first wife, or of Sarah Boardman Judson, his second, she did much to further their fame and to support, by her writing, the work of her husband after his death. Her life and work indicate some of the tensions and contradictions inherent in mid-19th-century America, its commercialism and also its idealism. Perhaps these tensions led her to frame her literary answer to them by assuming three different identities. These three different literary personalities, the didactic Emily Chubbuck, the frivolous and charming Fanny Forester, and the defensive Mrs. Emily Judson, need not coalesce into one personality, although the prevailing opinion is that identity is such a synthesis. In some writers the paradoxes of their cultures cause them to produce ambiguous and morally contradictory works. In others these same paradoxes produce moral absolutism in the writing and ambiguity in the identity of the writer herself. Judson was such a writer.
OTHER WORKS: The Great Secret; or, How to Be Happy (1842). Allen Lucas: The Self-Made Man (1843). John Frink; or, The Third Commandment Illustrated (1844). How to Be Great, Good, and Happy (1848). A Mound is in the Graveyard (ca. 1851). An Olio of Domestic Verses (1852). My Two Sisters (1854).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Douglas, A., The Feminization of American Culture (1977). Hartley, C. B., The Three Mrs. Judsons: The Celebrated Female Missionaries (reissue, 1980). Kendrick, A. C., The Life and Letters of Mrs. E. C. Judson (1860). Pattee, F., The Feminine Fifties (1940). Stuart, A. W., The Lives of Mrs. Ann H. Judson and Mrs. Sarah B. Judson, with a Biographical Sketch of Mrs. E. C. Judson (1851). Wyeth, W. N., Emily C. Judson: A Memorial (1980). Reference works: AA. CAL. DAB. FPA. NAW (1971). NCAB. —JULIANN E. FLEENOR
K KAEL, Pauline Born 19 June 1919, Petaluma, California Daughter of Isaac P. and Judith Friedman Kael; children: Gina Pauline Kael grew up in California and attended the University of California at Berkeley, majoring in philosophy. She began her critical career as a freelance film reviewer for various monthlies, along with experimental filmmaking and playwrighting. Her work appeared in the San Francisco City Lights, Sight and Sound, Partisan Review, Kulchur, Film Culture, and Moviegoer, with a regular series in Film Quarterly. She was manager of the Berkeley Cinema Theatres through the early 1960s, inaugurating one of the first programs of film revivals, which featured W. C. Fields, Mae West, and the Busby Berkeley musicals, supplying her own program notes. Kael was also a frequent lecturer on film at various California universities. She has received a Guggenheim fellowship (1964), and several awards (a National Book Award, the San Francisco International Film Festival’s Mel Novikoff Award, the Newswomen’s Club of New York Front Page Award, and others), as well as eight honorary doctorates from colleges and universities across the nation. With her first collection of reviews, the best-selling I Lost It at the Movies (1965), Kael began her rapid ascendancy to dean of American film critics, her reputation already well on its way in film circles. Film critic for McCall’s (1965-66) and New Republic (1966-67), she soon found a more prominent association with the New Yorker. Kael is indisputably the most influential and innovative film critic of the 1960s and 1970s, one of the new breed of film critics led by a contingent of articulate women writers, which emerged with the coming of age of film as an intellectual as well as popular art form. From the beginning of her writing career, she was hailed as one of the most articulate and sensible in the field, although some fellow critics dissent. Her witty, candid, caustic, and opinionated style and encyclopedic knowledge of film history and of the film industry as a social institution gave her work immediate appeal and authority and served as a dominant model for the succeeding generation of young critics. In her embrace of movies as part of popular culture, rather than as a rarefied cult of fine film, Kael’s opinions are often at odds with those of more conservative reviewers working out of the tradition of drama criticism. Her very personal approach to film—as a dynamic between art and audience—disturbs those who consider the art a more objective matter of aesthetic standards. The Citizen Kane Book (1971) is perhaps her crowning achievement. In this intensive case study, the depths of her historical and analytical powers are shown to greatly exceed the conventional limits of film criticism. Here her style, a compound of what one critic recognized as ‘‘journalism, biography, autobiography, gossip, and criticism,’’ created a new model of film
biography. A storm of controversy followed her attack upon the long-standing legend of Orson Welles as the animating genius behind the film. Concerned that ‘‘movies should be a great popular democratic art form,’’ of social and mythic as well as aesthetic interest, Kael’s authority as the ‘‘Great Pop Critic’’ is the hallmark of her leadership of a field which has rapidly become the newest preserve of hip intellectual snobbery, pretentiousness, and a ‘‘new wave’’ of cultural elitism. In an age of the popular arts of the mass media, it is fitting that, as the leading critic of film, Kael should have command of both the strictly aesthetic vision and a wider, holistic, and interdisciplinary vision of film. She offers a promising model, a synthesis of the elite and the popular, for the study of contemporary life. ‘‘It is unlikely that anyone in the world has reviewed more movies than Pauline Kael,’’ William Shawn noted. ‘‘The quintessential movie lover’’ retired in 1991 at the age of seventy-one after a long and distinguished career. Kael’s announcement she would be leaving the New Yorker after 24 years as its film critic was a shock to the movie industry. Kael raised expectations for criticism as well as moviemaking. She was the primary advocate of the ‘‘cinematic pleasure principle,’’ as she called it, and she truly believed that moviegoers should not settle for mediocrity. Her reviews bashed the Hollywood ‘‘cloning process’’ where filmmakers try to sell the same film over and over again under a different title. In the 1970s, many films had risen to Kael’s heightened expectations of them. She praised bright young innovators such as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola in her book of collected reviews, When the Lights Go Down (1980), as ‘‘directors who weren’t afraid to excite your senses.’’ If the 1970s proved anyone was listening to Kael, the 1980s seemed to prove no one was listening but everyone was making money. Kael’s reviews during the 1980s responded to the film standards of the decade. She criticized Hollywood for trying no bold undertakings, instead producing only cheap imitations of old clichés with overexposed actors regurgitating mass-produced messages. Four books assembling her 1980s reviews reflect her disgust, while noting the occasional successes. Taking It All In (1984) and State of the Art (1985) cover the early 1980s. Hooked (1989) includes reviews from 1985 to 1988, a period occasioning some of her most congratulatory comments. In the author’s note, she comments that the films ‘‘began rather lamely, and then suddenly there’s one marvelous movie after another,’’ citing as examples Blue Velvet and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Movie Love (1991), incorporating her reviews from the late 1980s to her retirement, contains only a few complimentary reviews and many examples of her distaste for the films of the 1980s. Although she was criticized for overbashing the popular film about Native
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Americans, Dances with Wolves, her response to it is a good example of her attractive irreverence and intolerance for films made simply to be ‘‘do-gooders.’’ Although many viewers have disagreed with Kael’s opinions, her reviews have had an important impact on the way movies are viewed. She has forced moviegoers to react instead of merely to watch. Kael’s contributions to the movie industry will continue to affect both moviemakers and moviegoers. For Keeps (1994, 1996) is a monumental anthology including the best of Kael’s 10 volumes of reviews and essays published between 1965 and 1991. A compendium of arguably the best and most thoughtful (if often irreverent and politically incorrect) criticism of a generation of filmmaking, Kael never fails to approach film as an art form to be dealt with on its own terms and within its own framework. She causes readers to consider the manner in which movies interface with life, the culture at the time, and the psyche of the populace. Kael has announced this is her last book because she is in her seventies and in failing health. In a 1998 interview with Newsweek reporter Ray Sawhill, seventy-eight-year-old Kael discussed the changes she has observed in the film industry over the years. When asked what critics are guilty of, she remarked, ‘‘We tend to exalt the works that we’re emotionally and intellectually ready for’’ and noted that what appeals to the critic may not be what appeals to the audience. Regardless of the critic’s feelings, Kael says, ‘‘Only a twerp would castigate an audience for its enjoyment of something. . . . The most a critic can do is to try to understand the audience’s responses—and maybe enlarge them a teeny bit.’’ OTHER WORKS: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (1960). Going Steady (1970). Deeper into Movies (1973). Reeling (1976). 5001 Nights at the Movies (1982, expanded, 1991). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1974). CB (Mar. 1974). Other references: American Scholar (Winter 1989). Book World (23 Feb. 1969). Boston Globe (8 Sept. 1991). Commentary (April 1995). Kaleidoscope (Apr. 1989). Mirabella (Aug. 1992). Newsweek (18 Mar. 1991, Summer 1998). New York (5 Aug. 1974, 14 July 1975). Post (11 May 1966). PW (24 May 1971, 22 Aug. 1994). SR (Apr. 1973). Time (12 July 1968). —MARGARET J. KING, UPDATED BY SARAH E. MASON AND REBECCA C. CONDIT
KAVANAUGH, Cynthia See DANIELS, Dorothy
KEENE, Carolyn See ADAMS, Harriet Stratemeyer
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KEITH, Agnes Newton Born 6 July 1901, Oak Park, Illinois; died March 1982 Daughter of Joseph G. and Grace Goodwillie Newton; married Henry G. Keith, 1934 Reared in California, Agnes Newton Keith graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1924. Her brief career with the San Francisco Examiner ended when she was brutally attacked by a frenzied drug addict. A prolonged incapacitation, including the loss of eyesight, followed. Surgery eventually restored her to health. Married to an English tropical forestry expert, she found the materials for her sensitive and evocative books about Asia and Africa in their subsequent travels. From 1934 to 1952 the Keiths lived in North Borneo and four books are based on this experience. Land Below the Wind (1939), a bride’s sunny report on her Eden, examines the life of westerners in an outpost of Empire, describes her experiences there, and characterizes her native friends. Like most of Keith’s books, it is illustrated by her own sketches. Three Came Home (1947) is the story of imprisonment by the Japanese during World War II. Keith and her young son were interned together, her husband in a neighboring camp. Despite its subject, the book is strangely affirmative: she shows brutality and humanity in both jailers and prisoners, stressing that war, not race, has dehumanized them all. Her depiction of the heroism of many prisoners and their Asian friends outside the camp is moving, and throughout she stresses the courage and endurance enabling them to bring all 34 interned children through alive. White Man Returns (1951) rounds off this series by showing the return to North Borneo after the war; the beginning of the process of rebuilding is central to this book. Similar to Land Below the Wind in approach and structure, it lacks the happy idealism of the first book; the war experience had destroyed Keith’s Eden. Much later came yet another work based on the Borneo years, this time a novel, Beloved Exiles (1972). Only loosely autobiographical, it is less successful than the nonfiction works. Having retired from his government’s service, Keith’s husband was, in 1953, prevailed upon to go to the Philippines for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Bare Feet in the Palace (1955) resulted. Like her first and third Borneo books, it is a mixture of personal experiences, sketches of people, and information about the society and its history. A central theme is the creation of democracy in Asia; the title refers to the coming of poor natives to the 200-year-old former palace of Spanish governors, now the residence of a democratically elected president. Children of Allah (1966), Keith’s only non-Asian book, tells of their following assignment in Libya. Keith used her previously successful formula here, and this work is particularly notable for its studies of Libyan Moslem women in various stages of subservience to and liberation from the veil and all that its wearing implies.
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A more recent book, Before the Blossoms Fall (1975), must be paired with Three Came Home, which had been widely admired in Japan. In 1973 she was sent by the Japan Foundation on a six-week visit to Japan, the goal being to write something to increase understanding between Japan and the U.S. Important themes here are the young, the aged, and women’s changing status and attitudes. Like her other books, it is a perceptive and sympathetic study, though Keith admits she is unable completely to understand or trust these people, whom she nevertheless loves. Throughout her career, and hinging on her imprisonment experience, Keith’s attitude toward her Asian subjects altered subtly. While she was always sympathetic and even admiring, the earliest book also sometimes seems patronizing, and the idea of the white man’s burden is not totally absent. The later books reveal a truer sense of equality and a surer stress on the values of alien cultures, along with a more open admission of inability thoroughly to understand them. All of the works, however, are both informative and absorbing. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1967). TCAS. Other references: Atlantic (March 1966). NYHTB (6 April 1947, 5 Aug. 1951). NYTBR (12 Nov. 1939, 26 March 1972). SR (5 April 1947, 13 Dec. 1955). —MARY JEAN DEMARR
KELLER, Helen (Adams) Born 27 June 1880, Tuscumbia, Alabama; died 1 June 1968, Westport, Connecticut Also wrote under: Helen Adams Keller Daughter of Arthur H. and Katherine Adams Keller Helen Keller was nineteen months old when illness left her deaf and blind. She soon became wild and unmanageable, locked inside a dark, silent world no humanizing influence seemed able to penetrate. In the 1890s almost no hope existed for educating people both deaf and blind, but Keller’s parents turned to the Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston for help. The institution sent Anne Sullivan, a new graduate who had recently had her own sight partially restored, to educate the child to whatever extent proved possible. Undreamed of success followed, and Keller eventually, in 1904, earned a B.A. cum laude from Radcliffe College. Keller became friends with many of the world’s greatest people, including Alexander Graham Bell, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Charlie Chaplin, and Andrew Carnegie. At least nine presidents received her, and a half dozen of the most prestigious universities in the world bestowed honorary degrees upon her. From 1924 until her death in 1968, Keller was associated with the American Foundation for the Blind, traveling to every state in the U.S. and to every continent in the world, working to enlarge the possibilities for disabled people.
Keller’s first book was The Story of My Life (1902, several reissues, including 1988), first published serially by the Ladies’ Home Journal. The book contains, in addition to her early autobiography, her letters from 1887 to 1901, passages from Anne Sullivan’s reports about Keller’s education, and comments by John Albert Macy. Keller describes the terrible isolation of the blind and deaf mute as a ‘‘twofold solitude’’ in which one can ‘‘know little of the. . .affections that grow out of endearing words and actions and companionship.’’ She tells about an incident of unconscious plagiarism, which happened in 1892, and about the fear that grew from this ‘‘disgrace,’’ saying ‘‘even now I cannot be quite sure of the boundary line between my ideas and those I find in books. I suppose that is because so many of my impressions come to me through the medium of others’ eyes and ears.’’ The Story of My Life is lively and interesting to read, and it contributed significantly to the body of knowledge about educating the deaf-blind. Midstream: My Later Life (1929) brings up to date the story of this remarkable woman and her teacher. It also gives the reader a lively picture of life in America during the first three decades of this century. Keller recounts vividly a long visit in the early 1900s with Mark Twain at his home. During the visit, she told Twain about her friend W. S. Booth having ‘‘discovered’’ that the literature usually attributed to Shakespeare was actually written by Francis Bacon. Twain was at first skeptical, she says, but less than a month later he brought out a new book attempting ‘‘to destroy the Shakespeare legend.’’ In Midstream, Keller seems to delight in using images of sight and sound, perhaps because some critics had questioned the honesty of this aspect of her style. Surely she had experienced in some physical way the scene she describes thus: ‘‘Out of the big, red, gaping mouths of the furnaces leaped immense billows of fire.’’ Such vivid sensory images enliven this entire book in a degree that would be noteworthy even in a writer without handicaps. Teacher: Anne Sullivan Macy (1955) is certainly, as the title page proclaims, ‘‘a tribute by the foster-child of her mind.’’ Keller memorably describes the incredible difficulties faced by Sullivan in introducing Keller to language. Once the child discovered things have names, her education proceeded with astonishing rapidity. Sullivan is presented as a human being with more than her share of human problems and foibles, but when compared with Keller’s earlier clean, concrete writing, the book seems somewhat repetitious and sentimental. Her many other books include poetry (Double Blossoms, 1931) and social criticism (Helen Keller, Her Socialist Years: Writings and Speeches, 1967). But her best work is found in her autobiographical books. OTHER WORKS: Optimism, an Essay (1903). The World I Live In (1908). The Song of the Stone Wall (1910). Out of the Dark: Essays, Letters, and Addresses on Physical and Social Vision (1913). My Religion (1927). We Bereaved (1929). Peace at Eventide (1932). Helen Keller in Scotland (edited by J. K. Love, 1933). American Foundation for the Blind, 1923-1938: A Report from Helen Keller to the Blind People of America (1938). Journal,
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1936-1937 (1938). Let Us Have Faith (1940). Open Door (1957). Light in My Darkness (1994). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Barnett, G., Inspiration and Innovation: Helen Keller and the American Foundation for the Blind (1996). Benge, J., Helen Keller: Facing Her Challenges, Challenging the World (2000). Benjamin, A., Young Helen Keller: Woman of Courage (1992). Braddy, N., Anne Sullivan Macy: The Story Behind Helen Keller (1933). Brooks, V. W., Helen Keller: Sketch for a Portrait (1956). Cush, C., Women Who Achieved Greatness (1995). Einhorn, L. J., Helen Keller, Public Speaker: Sightless but Seen, Deaf but Heard (1998). Felder, D. G., The 100 Most Influential Women of All Time: A Ranking Past and Present (1996). Gibson, W., The Miracle Worker: A Play for Television (1957). Graff, S., and P. A. Graff, Helen Keller: Toward the Light (1965). Harrity, R., and J. G. Martin, The Three Lives of Helen Keller (1962). Hedin, L., Voices of Light and Grace: Reflections on the Lifework of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan Macy (1991). Herrmann, D., Helen Keller: A Life (2nd edition, 1999). Hickok, L. A., The Touch of Magic (1961). Hunter, N., Helen Keller (1985). Klages, M. K., ‘‘More Wonderful Than Any Fiction: The Representation of Helen Keller‘‘ (thesis, 1989). Logue, M., Trust: The Story of Helen Keller (1999). Macdonald, F., Helen Keller: The Deaf and Blind Woman Who Conquered Her Disabilities and Devoted Her Life to Campaign for Other People (1992). Markham, L., Helen Keller (1993). Morgan, N., Helen Keller (reissue, 1995). Nicholson, L., Helen Keller: Humanitarian (1998). Peare, C. O., The Helen Keller Story (1959, 1992). Polcovar, J., Helen Keller (1988). Rolka, G. M., 100 Women Who Shaped World History (1994). Sabin, F., The Courage of Helen Keller (1998). Santrey, L., Helen Keller (1985). St. George, J., Dear Dr. Bell—Your Friend, Helen Keller (reissue, 1994). Sullivan, G., Helen Keller (2000). Tames, R., Helen Keller (1991). Waite, H. E., Valiant Companions: Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan Macy (1959). Wepman, D., Helen Keller (1987). Woodhouse, J., Helen Keller (reissue, 1999). Zonderman, J., Helen Keller & Annie Sullivan, Working Miracles Together (1984). Reference works: CB (Dec. 1942, July 1968). LSL. NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —PEGGY SKAGGS
KELLERMAN, Faye Born 1952, St. Louis, Missouri Daughter of Oscar and Anne Steinberg Marder; married Jonathan Seth Kellerman, 1972; children: Jesse, Rachel, Ilana, Aliza Faye Kellerman is best known for her mystery-detective series involving the recurring characters Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus. Decker, a Los Angeles Police Department detective, teams up, first professionally and then romantically, with a most unlikely crime-solving partner, Rina Lazarus, an orthodox Jewish
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woman whose introduction to the very secular world of crime occurs in Kellerman’s first mystery novel in the series, The Ritual Bath (1986), which received a Macavity award for best first novel. Since the publication of The Ritual Bath, in which Rina Lazarus (at this point in the developing saga, a young widow with two children) assists the police in their investigation of a brutal rape that takes place at the mikvah (the women’s ritual bathhouse) in the orthodox community in which she lives, Kellerman has published nine sequential mysteries involving Decker and Lazarus: Sacred and Profane (1987), Milk and Honey (1990), Day of Atonement (1991), False Prophet (1992), Grievous Sin (1993), Sanctuary (1994), Justice (1995), Prayer for the Dead (1996), and Serpent’s Tooth (1997). The narrative conceit and dramatic plots of Kellerman’s detective novels alone are compelling evidence of her mastery of the mystery genre. Most of the action takes place in Los Angeles or the surrounding areas (although she does move out into New York and Israel for an occasional foray), and the situations she describes are timely. In fact, Kellerman captures the drama of American life in the latter part of the 20th century with a recognizable and often chilling intensity and accuracy. The impetus for the central action of each novel always stems from the American scene, from family dramas, to the moral vacuity and despair and desperate acts that both define and reflect American culture: domestic violence, women targeted by uncontrollable rage, children as victims of neglect and abuse, gang affiliation, drugs, gratuitous sex, an ever-growing wayward sense of hopelessness, unanchored lives, the pathologies of our age. The dialogue that unleashes the action in her novels is terse, uncompromised by the jargon that often impairs the movement of such typical crime scenarios that compete on the mystery-detective market. Kellerman’s plots are consistently realistic and at the same time unconventional. The unconventionality is created by a particular aspect of Kellerman’s work that differentiates it from others in the mystery genre and gives her work its idiosyncratic appeal: while the central plot in all her work captures the drama of life on the streets of Los Angeles and the police investigation that brings it to its close, each novel works through a secondary plot, often a series of subplots involving the richly nuanced and complex life of the orthodox Jew attempting to maintain a life of traditional Jewish values and rituals in the midst of an increasingly secular world of contemporary America. Kellerman’s work deftly and engagingly introduces the practices, rituals, the very life of Orthodox Judaism into her fiction. And she does so framed within the evolving attraction, romance, and marriage of her two main characters, Peter and Rina. Peter, raised a Baptist by his adoptive parents, in the first novel of the series is held off initially by Rina, who is forbidden by her religious principles from a romantic involvement with someone outside the faith. The romantic tension is resolved when, in a subsequent novel, Peter discovers that his birth parents were Jewish, and so, by Jewish law, he too is Jewish. By the third novel in the series, Milk and Honey, Peter embraces Orthodox Judaism and officially converts. The two protagonists, in the novels that follow, go on to marry and have a child of their own.
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While such a narrative conceit might otherwise seem contrived, the plot too easily resolved in favor of the religious lessons it purports, Kellerman handles the unfolding romantic ‘‘mystery’’ and her clear interest in maintaining and celebrating Jewish culture and traditional values unobtrusively and smoothly. Kellerman works into her novels a range of issues from interfaith marriages and religious adherence to what it means to keep kosher and study Talmud. Her novels themselves reflect the revisions that Judaism has seen in contemporary America, such as the changing roles of women in Judaism and the ever-increasing necessity for a balance between the constraints of the religious and the freedom of the secular worlds. Kellerman achieves such a mingling of plots and subplots because her protagonists as well as the minor characters who reoccur throughout the series—such as the two Lazarus children, Decker’s daughter from his first marriage, his partner in the LAPD, the rabbi who oversees their congregation, and others— are all so likable, all such complex and realistic characters. Kellerman’s readers end up caring as much if not more about the fate of her characters as they do about the unfolding and resolution of the crime investigation. ‘‘Whodunit’’ competes in Kellerman’s fiction with the developing psychologies and relationships among the characters who scrutinize and often stand at the margins of the typically gruesome crimes she describes—thus Kellerman broadens the genre of the mystery-detective novel. Kellerman has written two other novels that depart from the Peter Decker-Rina Lazarus series: a historical romance, The Quality of Mercy (1988), set in England during the reign of Elizabeth I, and Moon Music (1998), a novel mixing mystery with fantasy. Kellerman is married to the psychologist-writer Jonathan Kellerman, also the author of a popular detective series featuring the psychologist-turned-sleuth, Alex Delaware. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: St. James Guide to Crime and Mystery Writers (1996). Other references: ANR 60. Atlanta Journal-Constitution (7 July 1991, 13 Sept. 1992, 2 Nov. 1995, 29 Aug. 1996). Booklist (15 Apr. 1990, 15 June 1991, 15 June 1992, July 1993, Aug. 1995, July 1996). Judaism 46 (Winter 1997). —VICTORIA AARONS
KELLEY, Edith Summers Born 1884, Ontario, Canada; died 1956, Los Gatos, California Also wrote under: Edith Summers Married Allan Updegraff, 1908 (divorced); Claude F. Kelley, 1915; children: two Like the protagonists of her two novels, Edith Summers Kelley struggled much of her adult life for financial security and for realization of her dream to be a writer. After taking an honors
degree in languages from the University of Toronto, the nineteen-year-old Edith moved to New York and began working on Funk and Wagnall’s Standard Dictionary project. In 1906 Kelley became secretary to Upton Sinclair and part of the staff at Helicon Hall, Sinclair’s socialist commune (inspired by Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s plans for municipal housing, advanced in 1904). At the Hall, she met two other aspiring writerscum-janitors, Sinclair Lewis and Alan Updegraff. Both Sinclair and Updegraff (to whom she was engaged) remained lifelong correspondents. The marriage to Updegraff produced two children; Kelley apparently was primary breadwinner as a teacher in the Hell’s Kitchen area of New York City. After her divorce, she became the common-law wife of Claude Fred Kelley. The Kelleys pursued a series of mostly unprofitable jobs from 1914 to 1945: tenant tobacco farming in Kentucky; boardinghouse management in New Jersey; alfalfa and chicken ranching, and bootlegging in California. Thus unlike Sinclair’s journalistic fiction, Kelley’s novels reflect her own experiences and observations as an economically depressed rancher. In Weeds (1923, reissued 1972 and 1996), Judith Pipinger is different from other members of her tenant tobacco farming community in Kentucky because she is a throwback to purer pioneer stock, an exception to the usual results of inbreeding and poor nutrition. Her early repugnance to traditional female chores and her preference for ‘‘man’s’’ (outdoors) work isolate her from the closely knit female subculture. This isolation is underlined by imagery linking Judith with natural (as opposed to societal) objects, and by a character ‘‘double,’’ Jabez Moorhouse, an iconoclastic fiddler who shares Judith’s intuitive grasp of beauty and meaning in life. With her marriage and subsequent motherhood, Judith is trapped in the very role she has despised; when Moorhouse dies, her death in spirit concludes the novel. Encouraged by a monetary award from a civil liberties group, Kelley began work in 1925 on a second novel, a study of the Imperial Valley in Southern California and ‘‘the life it harbors.’’ From 1925 through 1929, Kelley wrote and revised as her knowledge of California development and the International Workers of the World increased, but The Devil’s Hand was not published until 1974, 18 years after her death (and reissued in 1982). Marriage proves to be a spiritual death for Rhoda Malone, an acknowledgment of defeat closing The Devil’s Hand. Tempted by her friend Kate Baxter to leave her passive and orderly life as an office clerk in Philadelphia, Rhoda takes on a partnership with Kate in a California alfalfa farm. Because Rhoda’s is the central consciousness through which the story is told, focus is equally on what she sees and who she becomes. Her awareness of the exploitation of people like herself, and the Hindu, Mexican, and Oriental laborers, by rapacious realtors and big landowners gradually intensifies; two male friends serve (as did Moorhouse in Weeds) as examples of the individual freedom that Rhoda, as a woman, cannot achieve. Disheartened by the loss of these friends, the drudgery of profitless farming, and her realization that to
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challenge the economic system is to suffer social and material martyrdom, Rhoda marries the very realtor who initially took advantage of her ignorance. In both novels the central character is sensitively drawn, but equally effective are the local-color sketches of California and Kentucky farmers, customs, and community life in general. The function of these characterizations is not, however, strictly for background interest. In Weeds, such material serves to heighten Judith’s alienation. Especially in the depiction of the other passive (and vicious) women, Judith’s behavior and emotions are seen as different and unnatural. It is an ironic contrast since Kelley’s point is that Judith is the sole ‘‘natural’’ person. Kelley is among several American women writers of the 1920s, such as Josephine Herbst, Frances Newman, Evelyn Scott, and Ruth Suckow, who have been ‘‘rediscovered’’ after being long forgotten or ignored. Kelley is also emerging as a master of fiction in the Dreiser, Garland, Howells vein. She does not limit her work to tedious cataloguing of realistic detail, but her work is firmly rooted in everyday experience. Although the imagery of her novels underlines the forgotten connection of men and women to nature, her fiction is oriented more toward sociological (even socialist) study; time and again she emphasizes the effect of social environment on individual fate. Thus, the feminist concerns grow naturally out of her realistic approach to life and fiction.
OTHER WORKS: Selected papers of Edith Summers Kelley are in the Special Collections of the Morris Library at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. Her letters to Sinclair Lewis and to Upton Sinclair are in collections of the Lilly Library at Indiana University.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ammons, E., Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century (1991). Irvin, H., Women in Kentucky (1979). Miller, D., Wingless Flights: Appalachian Women in Fiction (1996). Powderly, C., ‘‘Learning the Land: Survival of the Self in a Hostile World’’ (thesis, 1996). Samuelson, J. W., ‘‘Patterns of Survival: Four American Women Writers and the Proletarian Novel’’ (thesis, 1982). Schorer, M., Sinclair Lewis: An American Life (1961). Toth, E., ed., Regionalism and the Female Imagination (1985). Wanless, T. C., ‘‘Soil and Soul: The Experience of Southern Rural Womanhood in Selected Novels by Edith Summers Kelley, Ellen Glasgow and Elizabeth Madox Roberts’’ (thesis, 1984). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Frontiers (1980). Michigan Papers in Women’s Studies (June 1975). Regionalism and the Female Imagination (Spring 1977). —SALLY BRETT
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KELLOGG, Louise Born 12 May 1862, Milwaukee, Wisconsin; died 11 July 1942, Madison, Wisconsin Daughter of Amherst W. and Mary Phelps Kellogg A historian and editor, Louise Kellogg served for nearly 40 years as a researcher and executive for the Wisconsin State Historical Society. Her focus of concern was the Northwest through the Revolutionary War era. Kellogg’s earliest work was The American Colonial Charter (1903), for which she received the Justin Winsor Prize of the American Historical Association. She served first as editorial assistant to Reuben Gold Thwaites, executive director of the Wisconsin Society; together they edited three volumes from the Lyman Coleman Draper Collection. After Thwaite’s death, Kellogg continued the editing of the Draper Collection and published Frontier Advance on the Upper Ohio, 1778-1779 (1916) and Frontier Retreat on the Upper Ohio, 1779-1781 (1917, reissued 1993). In the introductions to these two volumes she reveals herself to be a historian writing with clarity and force, as well as an editor of high scholarly ability. She shows keen insight into the mixture of motives on both sides and incisively analyzes the factors that brought the British and the revolutionists into conflict. She saw the 15 crucial months from May 1778 to July 1779 as ‘‘the most momentous events of the Revolution in the West.’’ In Frontier Retreat on the Upper Ohio, 1779-1781, she portrays with sympathy ‘‘the most critical years of the Revolution’’ in the West and East alike. A third major editing work by Kellogg was Early Narratives of the Northwest, 1634-1699 (1911, reissued and recorded in 1987), in J. Franklin Jameson’s Original Narratives of Early American History series. Kellogg’s introductions are written in a fluid and dramatic style, and she shows keen appreciation of the role of French explorers, missionaries, and Canadian recruits. In The French Regime in Wisconsin and the Northwest (1925), Kellogg’s major work as a historian, she concentrates on the interaction of the French and Native Americans in the Northwest, arguing that the history of the Native Americans ‘‘forms the warp of the story, of which the coming of the French forms the woof.’’ A major purpose of her work is to reassess the impact of the French missionaries; her rereading of original sources convinced her that they had received an undue share of credit for ‘‘opening the West to civilization.’’ The real impact upon the Native Americans, she argues, came through the traders. As a Native American acquired new needs from the traders, he ‘‘lost the proud independence of a son of the forest.’’ Although she devotes half the book to the 18th-century experience, her real focus is the 17th-century world. She does not portray in depth the fall of New France. In The British Regime in Wisconsin and the Northwest (1935), Kellogg argues that British domination in the area continued from 1761 to 1816. Although there was only one two-year period (1761-63) during which a British army occupied a Wisconsin post, a British regime did in fact exist. Kellogg defines it as a ‘‘social system’’ built around ‘‘the regime of the fur trade.’’ She
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analyzes with skill the ways in which Britain nullified the terms of the Treaty of Ghent and how they later circumvented Jay’s treaty. As a historian, Kellogg had a firm grasp of the long-range issues and was insightful in her judgements. She wrote easily and with a sense of drama. Although at times her phrasing tended toward extravagance, on the whole she was even-handed and balanced in her portrayals. This evenness gave particular strength to her handling of the problems the Native Americans encountered from their exposure to French culture. As an editor and as a historian in her own right, Kellogg provided a masterly treatment of her chosen area of concern: the Northwest, and Wisconsin in particular. OTHER WORKS: The Fox Indians During the French Regime (1908). Organization, Boundaries, and Names of Wisconsin Counties (1910). Remains of a French Post near Trepealeau (1915). The Tercentennial of the Discovery of Wisconsin (1934). Report of the Daniel Boone Bicentennial Commission to the 1936 General Assembly of Kentucky (1936). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cole, H. E., Stagecoach and Tavern Tales of the Old Northwest (reissue, 1997). Nettels, C., Louise P. Kellogg (Ms. in University of Wisconsin Archives). Reference works: NAW (1971). Wisconsin Lives of National Distinction (1937). Wisconsin Writers: Sketches and Studies (1974). Other references: AHR (July 1926, Oct. 1936, Oct. 1942). —INZER BYERS
KELLOR, Frances (Alice) Born 20 October 1873, Columbus, Ohio; died 4 January 1952, New York, New York Daughter of Daniel and Mary Sprau Kellor; partnered Mary Dreier, 1905 Frances Kellor grew up in Coldwater, Michigan, where her mother worked as a laundress and domestic servant. Her father left the family before she turned two and her only sister, 27 years older, married and left town at about the same time. Kellor helped her mother by collecting and delivering laundry, hunting rabbits and other fur animals, and doing laundry herself when she got older. She dropped out of high school for lack of money, but after a gun accident was informally adopted by the town’s librarians, Mary and Frances Eddy. The sisters encouraged Kellor’s love of learning, gave her a home during the two years she worked as a reporter for the local newspaper, then helped her attend Cornell University. At Cornell, Kellor studied sociology and law. Encouraged by her professors to investigate ‘‘practical’’ social problems, she decided to study crime and criminals and received an LL.B. in
1897. The following year, she went to the University of Chicago, where she spent four years but never finished her doctorate. Most people at the time believed criminal behavior was caused by biology and heredity, though some sociologists were beginning to consider psychology and social environments as well. Kellor’s first publications were articles in the American Journal of Sociology (1900) comparing the physical, psychological, and sociological characteristics of female prisoners and female college students. This was the first study ever done to compare female criminals and noncriminals, and Kellor concluded that their similarities made biological explanations of crime implausible. After taking a year to travel around the country and study prisons and prisoners, Kellor published her observations under the uninspiring title, Experimental Sociology: Descriptive and Analytical Delinquents (1901). In this book Kellor decried the unequal treatment of Southern blacks and the dangerous conditions of Southern jails. She reiterated that crime was correlated with poverty, not heredity, and called for nationwide reforms to guarantee prisoners opportunities for exercise, education, and religious observances, eliminate corporal punishment, and scientifically study how to prevent recidivism. For the rest of her life, Kellor’s writings would combine sociological analysis with policy recommendations. Kellor’s next book—Out of Work (1904, expanded 1915)— was her most significant. She and her associates posed as work-seekers and employers to expose the ruthlessness of private employment agencies. Unemployment, Kellor concluded, was not usually a result of personal laziness or character flaws, but of exploitative systems. Women seeking positions as domestic workers, immigrants, and migrants from the South or rural areas were particularly likely to encounter fraud, entrapment into prostitution, or quasi-slavery. Each state, Kellor concluded, should set up ‘‘Bureaus of Information’’ to help reputable employers and employees find each other. She founded the National League for the Protection of Colored Women, an interracial organization to help black women migrating from the South find decent housing, employment, and social services. Shocked by the suffering of poverty-stricken immigrants, especially women, Kellor began to study immigration. New immigrants, she concluded, need information about American laws and customs, instruction in English, and assistance in finding employment. With these resources they can rapidly become valuable members of the American public, but without them they often end up in squalid tenements. Arguing against the rising nativism of her time, Kellor wrote numerous books and articles urging state and federal governments to set up programs to help immigrants adjust to life in America. President Theodore Roosevelt was very impressed with Out of Work and followed Kellor’s later work closely. When Roosevelt broke with the Republican party in 1912 to run for president on the Progressive party ticket, Kellor became an at-large member of the Progressives’ National Committee. She used her position to press for women’s suffrage, federal programs for the poor, and
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government-funded studies of social problems such as unemployment, poverty, exploitation of workers, inadequate housing, and racial injustice. Experts, she hoped, would find solutions to these problems, and politicians would follow the experts’ advice. As director of the Progressive party’s research bureau, the National Progressive Service, Kellor fused research, education, and politics into a comprehensive program for economic, gender, and racial justice. She was dismayed when the Progressive Service, and then the Progressive party, collapsed. World War I focused Kellor’s attention on the international arena. She was a firm supporter of internationalism and the League of Nations and lobbied for American participation in the Court of International Justice. International dispute resolution by impartial experts, she believed, would prevent the world from descending again into war. Kellor also applied these ideas about arbitration to domestic problems. In 1926 she helped found the American Arbitration Association (AAA) to settle commercial and industrial labor disputes through mediation. Jurors, Kellor felt, were often ignorant, and litigation could be both lengthy and expensive. Arbitrators, in contrast, were informed and impartial and enabled businesses to regulate themselves rationally. In 1931 Kellor published the much-used Code of Arbitration, which outlined procedures for dispute resolution. For the rest of her life, Kellor devoted herself to the AAA and promoted arbitration as a solution to commercial, civil, and international conflicts. She greatly enjoyed her home life with Mary Dreier (with whom she became partnered in 1905), and refused to retire even when her health deteriorated. Only her final illness took her away from the AAA offices.
OTHER WORKS: The Immigrants in America Review (1915). Straight America, A Call to National Service (1916). Americanization of Women (1918). Neighborhood Americanization (1918). Immigration and the Future (1920). The Federal Administration and the Alien (1921). The United States of America in Relation to the Permanent Court of International Justice of the League of Nations and in Relation to the Hague Tribunal (1923). Security Against War (1924). The United States Senate and the International Court (1925). Protocol for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes in Relation to the Sanction of War (1925). Arbitration in the New Industrial Society (1934). Arbitration in Action (1941). Arbitration in International Controversy (1944). American Arbitration: Its History, Functions, and Achievements (1948). Arbitration and the Legal Profession (1952).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Fitzpatrick, E., Endless Crusade: Women Social Scientists and Progressive Reform (1990). Reference works: DAB Supplement 5. NAW:MP. Other references: Gustafson, M., ‘‘Partisan Women: Gender, Politics, and the Progressive Party of 1912’’ (Ph.D. dissertation,
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1993). New York State Department of Labor Industrial Bulletin (Mar. 1952). Reviews in American History (1991). —LORI KENSCHAFT
KELLY, Eleanor Mercein Born 30 August 1880, Milwaukee, Wisconsin; died 11 October 1968, Louisville, Kentucky Daughter of Thomas R. and Lucy Schley Mercein; married Robert M. Kelly Jr., 1901 Eleanor Mercein Kelly was born into a prominent and wealthy family of Scottish French ancestry. After a childhood in Milwaukee, she graduated with honors in 1898 from the Georgetown Convent of the Visitation in Washington, D.C. After her marriage, she settled in Louisville, Kentucky. Kelly’s first novel, Toya the Unlike (1913), was not well received by the critics, but she followed this failure with a trilogy of novels depicting life in Kentucky: Kildares of the Storm (1916), Why Joan? (1918), and The Mansion House (1923). After this apprenticeship, Kelly wrote her most successful novels, another trilogy, this time set in the Basque country of Spain. Basquerie (1927), considered by most critics as her best novel, chronicles the romantic adventures of Emily Weldon, a frivolous flapper who meets her true love in Esteban Urruty, a Basque nobleman. Kelly perpetuates those popular romantic stereotypes of the wealthy suitor disguised as a poor man, the strong-willed woman tamed by the dominating man, and the ennobling effect of childbearing on the flighty heroine. Basquerie, like her previous works, also explores the destructive effects of jealousy and suspicion on a marriage. The two other novels in the trilogy, The Book of Bette (1929) and Nacio, His Affairs (1931), concern the adventures of Esteban’s younger sister and brother, both of whom figure in Basquerie. Kelly wrote one biographical study, The Chronicle of a Happy Woman: Emily A. Davison (1928), but the majority of her works are romantic ‘‘women’s fiction,’’ set in such exotic locales as Syria, Ragusa, Corfu, and Moorish Africa. During the 1940s, she continued to travel throughout the world and wrote travel tales for a number of publications, including the Ladies’ Home Journal, Collier’s, and the Saturday Evening Post. Kelly returned to novel writing with Richard Walden’s Wife (1950). Dedicated to her grandparents and based on family diaries, the novel is a family saga of settlers in Wisconsin during the late 1850s. The chief characters are Walden and his spirited wife, Aurora Fairmont, an archetypal Southern belle; the couple’s estrangement is brought about by divided loyalties during the Civil War and by jealousy and suspicion. Overly sentimental, the
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novel nonetheless presents a vivid portrait of the ambivalence inherent in the woman who would play the Southern belle role. As a popular woman writer, writing primarily for women, Kelly’s strength lies in depicting a wide variety of strong women who engage her readers’ interest and concern.
OTHER WORKS: Arabesque (1930). Spanish Holiday (1930). Sea Change (1931). Sounding Harbors (1935). Mixed Company (1936). Proud Castle (1951).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: TCA, TCAS. —DIANE LONG HOEVELER
KELLY, Myra Born 26 August 1875, Dublin, Ireland; died 30 March 1910, Torquay, England Daughter of James and Annie Morrogh Kelly; married Allan MacNaughton, 1905 Myra Kelly came to New York City with her family when she was a child; they lived on the East Side, where her physician father developed a large practice. Educated first at convent schools, she attended Horace Mann High School and then Teachers College of Columbia University, receiving a diploma in 1899 as a teacher of manual training. Her experience at East-Side Public School 147, where she taught from 1899 to 1901, provided material for her popular stories about ‘‘Bailey’s Babies.’’ Kelly’s long stream of published stories began with the sentimental ‘‘A Christmas Present for a Lady,’’ which she had sent to two magazines, thinking both would reject it. When both accepted it, Kelly had complicated adjustments to make. She told friends later that no manuscript of hers was ever rejected. The story was included in her first book, Little Citizens: The Humours of School Life (1904). Little Citizens caught the attention of Allan MacNaughton, president of Standard Coach Horse Company, who arranged to meet her. They were married in 1905; their one child, a boy, died in infancy. The MacNaughtons lived briefly at Oldchester Village, Orange Mountain, New Jersey, while working to establish a literary colony there. In her scant 35 years, the prolific Kelly produced not only three books of East Side stories but popular romantic tales as well. She also wrote essays about educational methods and effects, some of which appeared in collections with her stories. Kelly died from tuberculosis in England, where she had gone in hope of a cure. Her last books were published posthumously.
Little Citizens is a collection of Kelly’s earliest stories about the children in Constance Bailey’s first-reader class, boys and girls primarily from poor Jewish immigrant families but including the son of the local Irish policeman for contrast and occasional conflict. Kelly wrote that she was not the model for Constance Bailey. ‘‘‘What I aspired to be and was not’ Constance Bailey was. Only her mistakes are mine and her very earnest effort.’’ The stories were intended as educational, but have the charms of novelty and originality, although verisimilitude suffers in both incidents and dialogue. The humor that tempers the message is usually at the immigrant’s expense and is often condescending, but it sometimes touches on the teacher’s embarrassment as she realizes the limitations of her knowledge or experience. Wards of Liberty (1907) contains more stories of Miss Bailey’s 58 students. There are disruptive influences like the nine-year-old ‘‘Boss’’ who is running his late father’s cellar garment shop. Kelly believed the schools played a crucial role in helping immigrants get along in America, but the Boss’ story shows that she recognized the system’s limitations. The Boss has previously avoided all schooling and other Americanizing influences, but comes to school when he decides learning to read will bring better-paid work for his shop. Discouraged by the slow pace and unessential busy work, he disappears. His life has no room for childhood activities. He lives in a world the schools could not reach. Although Kelly continues to emphasize the fun, under it rages revolt against conditions among the poor. After several less critically successful novels, Kelly returned, as her critics hoped she would, to the world of her schoolchildren in Little Aliens (1910). There is still humor and pathos but with a deeper understanding of children and the nature of alienation. ‘‘Games in Gardens’’ shows how immigrants can misinterpret the bits of America that filter into their ghetto world, as the children try to don proper costume for track and field events. Miss Bailey takes her share of the satire for her inadequate communication. Whereas earlier Kelly had saved discussion for her essays, here she explains how natural these misunderstandings are with children ‘‘alien to every American custom, and prejudiced by religion and precept against most of them.’’ Although generally unknown now, Kelly achieved tremendous popular success, publishing frequently in mass-circulation magazines like McClure’s. Even President Theodore Roosevelt sent her a letter of appreciation. She exaggerated both characters and incidents, looked for sentiment, and created wry humor always on the verge of pathos, but she was honest in her approach, often touching on serious issues such as the values of Americanization and the clash between immigrant and American traditions. Writing with warmth, sympathy, and as much understanding as she could muster, Kelly did much to acquaint the reading public with the harsh conditions of ghetto life and to suggest that Americans learn to know their immigrants before thoughtlessly attempting to Americanize them. When she left the narrow area of the East Side schools, her stories were less well received and less significant.
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OTHER WORKS: The Isle of Dreams (1907). Rosnah (1908). The Golden Season (1909). New Faces (1910). Her Little Young Ladyship (1911). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Fine, D. M., The City, the Immigrant, and American Fiction (1977). Friedman, L. M., Pilgrims in a New Land (1948). Lieberman, E., The American Short Story: A Study of the Influence of Locality in Its Development (1912). Reference works: DAB. NCAB. Other references: American Mercury (Feb. 1926). American Studies (Spring 1978). —CAROL B. GARTNER
KEMBLE, Fanny Born Frances Anne Kemble, 27 November 1809, London, England; died 15 January 1893, London, England Also wrote under: Frances Anne Butler, Mrs. Butler, Frances Anne Kemble Daughter of Charles and Maria Kemble; married Pierce Butler, 1834 (divorced); children: two daughters Born into London’s leading theatrical family, Frances Anne ‘‘Fanny’’ Kemble was an actress who became one of the most articulate Victorian women of letters in both America and England. Daughter of an actor who was also manager of Covent Garden Theatre, Kemble received all her formal education at boarding schools in France. Kemble’s first stage performance, as Shakespeare’s Juliet at Covent Garden in 1829, was a phenomenal success that transformed her life. She became the pinup girl of the London stage, enjoying admiration from people in England and the provinces. In 1832 she toured America. Her marriage to a wealthy Philadelphian initiated a period of emotional upheaval. Kemble gave up her acting career for marriage, but she never became the model 19th-century woman. Instead of accepting the role of subservient wife, she demanded equality. Furthermore, instead of accepting and approving of her husband’s homeland, she was quite critical of it. The record of her experiences, Journal of a Residence in America (1835), publicly announced her negative attitudes, much to the chagrin of her husband. A particularly crucial issue for him, as the owner of large Georgian plantations and hundreds of slaves, was Kemble’s passionate and outspoken opposition to the ‘‘peculiar institution.’’ After the birth of her two daughters, two return visits to England, and numerous attempts to sever her relationship with Butler, Kemble left her husband and daughters in 1844. Kemble returned to England, published a volume of poetry, and resumed her acting career. When Butler filed for divorce in 1848, she came back to America and spent her final years in public readings of Shakespeare, frequent visits to Europe, and, finally, in devoting herself to her lifelong ambition: writing. She wrote more memoirs, a critical work on Shakespeare, poetry, a comedy, and a novel (Henry James noted that not many people published a first
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novel at the age of 80). She developed friendships with a number of literary figures and died where she was born—in England. Written 22 years before the outbreak of the Civil War and published in the same year the slaves were emancipated, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, 1838-1839 (1863) describes the condition of the slaves in brutally realistic terms. Among many of the inhuman aspects that Kemble denounces, the painful life of women slaves is carefully detailed. Decrying their oppressed state of manual labor and continual childbearing, Kemble speaks of the females’ ‘‘sorrow-laden existence’’ and their endurance of sufferings that appeared to be ‘‘all in the day’s work.’’ The book was well read during Kemble’s day, although its stark realism was disconcerting to the Victorian readership. While posterity tends to remember Kemble as an actress, perhaps her place as a chronicler of the American experience should be reevaluated. Her autobiographical works, especially Journal of a Residence in America and Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, have a particular psychological and historical significance as documents that reveal the struggles and challenges facing a 19th-century woman critical of national and regional narrowness. The memoirs, bestsellers of their day, also contain keen insights into the enormous changes transforming the nation; Kemble recognized and evaluated the movement away from Victorian America toward the modern age. Criticized by some reviewers for her ‘‘racy’’ language and for her subjective judgments of particular individuals, Kemble nonetheless had the rare ability to write vivid and insightful observations of places, people, and historical changes she witnessed. Her journals are neither carefully crafted nor totally consistent pictures of life in early America, but they are rich psychological and cultural documents because of their author’s complex personality, interests, and skills of observation. Perhaps Henry James’ evaluation is the best assessment of Kemble: ‘‘There was no convenient or handy formula for Mrs. Kemble’s genius, and one had to take her career, the juxtaposition of her interests, exactly as one took her disposition, for a remarkably fine cluster of inconsistencies.’’ OTHER WORKS: Francis the First: A Tragedy in Five Acts (1832). The Star of Seville: A Drama in Five Acts (1837). A Year of Consolation (1837). Poems (1844). Poems (1859). On the Stage (1863). Records of a Girlhood (1878). Notes upon Some of Shakespeare’s Plays (1882). Records of a Later Life (1882). Poems (1883). Adventures of John Timothy Homespun in Switzerland (1889). Far Away and Long Ago (1889). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Armstrong, M., Frances Kemble: A Passionate Victorian (1938). Bobbe, D., Frances Kemble (1931). Driver, L., Frances Kemble (1933). Furnas, J. C., Fanny Kemble (1982). Gibbs, H., Yours Affectionately, Fanny (1947). James, H., Essays in London and Elsewhere (1992). Marshall, D., Frances Kemble (1977). O’Grady, D. L., ‘‘Frances Anne Kemble: Actress to Abolitionist’’ (thesis, 1995). Ransome, E., ed., The Terrific Kemble: A Victorian Self-Portrait from the Writings of Fanny Kemble (1978). Scott, J. A., Fanny Kemble’s America (1973). Thompson,
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J. C., Everything in ‘‘The Garden’’ and Other Plays (1996). Wister, F. K., Fanny, The American Kemble: Her Journals and Unpublished Letters (1972). Wright, C. C., Frances Kemble and the Lovely Land (1972). Reference works: AA. British Authors of the Nineteenth Century (1936). DAB. LSL. NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). She Wields a Pen: American Women Poets of the 19th Century (1997). —MARJORIE SMELSTOR
KENNEDY, Adrienne Born 13 September 1931, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Daughter of Cornell W. and Etta Haugabook Hawking; married Joseph C. Kennedy, 1953 (divorced 1966); children: Joseph, Adam Adrienne Kennedy had a middle class upbringing in Cleveland, Ohio, and what she has described as an excellent public school education. After high school (Glenville, 1949) she went to Ohio State University, where she briefly studied social work (her father’s profession) before majoring in elementary education (her mother’s). A few weeks before graduation (1953) she married, eventually moving with her husband and first child to New York City. There she studied writing at Columbia University (1954-56), the New School for Social Research, the American Theatre Wing, and Circle in the Square (1962), where she was a member of playwright Edward Albee’s workshop and saw her first play performed, Funnyhouse of a Negro. This play won an OffBroadway Obie Award in 1964; she followed it with The Owl Answers (1965), her favorite among her works. By this time she had developed her own intense one-act style, among whose literary influences she credits, besides Albee, Tennessee Williams and Federico García Lorca. Since the 1970s Kennedy has taught at universities around the country, among them Yale, Princeton, Brown, Berkeley, Rutgers, and Harvard. She has been on the PEN board of directors, and was a founding member of the Women’s Theatre Council (established 1972). Kennedy has been commissioned to write for, among others, the Juilliard School of Music, the Royal Court Theatre in London, the New York Shakespeare Festival, the Alvin Ailey Dance Company, and the Empire State Youth Theatre Institute. Her many awards include Rockefeller and National Endowment for the Arts grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Yale Fellowship. In March 1992 Kennedy’s work was celebrated in a month-long Adrienne Kennedy Festival organized by the Great Lakes Theatre Festival in her hometown of Cleveland. Her work has been described as gothic, expressionist, and surrealist, but Kennedy’s writings are also, as her interviews and autobiographical writings demonstrate, personal and introspective. It is difficult to keep the writer and her writing separate; and the absence of boundaries for establishing separate identities is a common theme and tactic in her work. Movie stars, dreams, her mother’s scrapbooks, political figures, paintings, music, and
statues are as alive in her writing as her own memories of childhood, her own rooms, her neighborhood. Commenting on the Wolf Man in her People Who Led to My Plays (1987), she writes, ‘‘Soon the characters in my plays and stories would be changing personae at an alarming rate.’’ The strange, blinding vividness of her stage images—animals, people who turn into animals, people with smashed heads, people with worms in their hair, exploding body parts, blood pouring out of a fractured moon—images of violent brilliance unleash the possibilities of imaginative juxtapositions on the stage, the complex beauty and horror of dreams, the power of memory, and the transforming magic of the movies, theater, art, beauty, and fame. Kennedy’s later plays seem more directly concerned with the filmic properties of her work. In A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White (1976) a black woman named Clara is partly spoken for by the female stars of classic Hollywood movies. In An Evening with Dead Essex (1973) a group of performers rehearses a production based on Mark Essex’s life and death, using music and photographs exhibited by a projectionist—the only white character in the play, and the only one dressed in black. Kennedy’s insistence on images of black on white, and her blazing use of color, are ‘‘typical’’ in more ways than one: race is both visual and felt in her work as the image and the tone of identity and conflict, which she suggests are complementary impulses. Her adaptations from Euripides, Electra and Orestes (1980), like her ‘‘Theatre Mystery’’ Deadly Triplets (1990), dramatize these tensions in somewhat more linear works about family loyalty and sibling rivalry. In The Alexander Plays (1992), Kennedy’s alter ego from Deadly Triplets, ‘‘Suzanne Sand. . . playwright,’’ seems to reappear as ‘‘Suzanne Alexander, a Writer.’’ These plays continue her exploration of narrative, while also experimenting with sound in their use of radio, offstage noise, and music. The Film Club is a monologue by Suzanne, and The Dramatic Circle is a radio play. Meanwhile, the mise-en-scène in She Talks to Beethoven and The Ohio State Murders is less violent than in Kennedy’s early work, and the narrator, Suzanne, seems more in control of the events she remembered. Kennedy’s American Eurocentric influences—from Charlotte Brontë to Bette Davis—were released into her plays, interestingly, after she visited Africa in 1960. There she ‘‘discovered the place of my ancestors,’’ bought an African mask, ‘‘a woman with a bird flying through her forehead,’’ listened to the owls at night and was afraid, and thought about herself as a separate person: ‘‘The solitude under the African sun had brought out a darkness in me. I wanted to be more separate.’’ This journey was a turning point in her writing and its influences are clear in the works that followed. OTHER WORKS: Cities in Bezique (1969). The Lennon Play: In His Own Write (with John Lennon and Victor Spinetti,1969). Adrienne Kennedy in One Act (1988). Sleep Deprivation Chamber: A Theatre Piece (1996). Plays included in: Poet Lore (1965), Collision Course (1968), New American Plays (1968), New Black Playwrights: An Anthology (1968, 1996), Best Short Plays of 1970, Black Drama: An Anthology (1970), Black Theater (1971), Scripts One (1971), More Plays from Off-Off-Broadway (1972), Broadway Book
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(1972), Spontaneous Combustion (1972), Kintu Drama (1974), Woman as Writer (1978), Wordplay Three (1984), Moon Marked and Touched by Sun: Plays by African-American Women (1994), Black Theatre USA: Plays by African Americans 1847 to Today (1996), Plays for the End of the Century (1996), and others. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brown, E. B., Shackles on a Writer’s Pen: Dialogism in Plays by Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, Adrienne Kennedy, and Ntozake Shange (1997). Martin, H. H., ‘‘Adrienne Kennedy: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography and Essay’’ (thesis, 1993). Page, J. A. Selected Black American Authors: An Illustrated Bio-Bibliography (1977). Peterson, B. L., Contemporary Black American Playwrights and Their Plays: A Biographical Directory and Dramatic Index (1988). Robinson, M., The Other American Drama (1994). Singh, Y. Stages in the Funnyhouse: The Dramaturgy of Adrienne Kennedy (dissertation, 1998). Thomas, C. ‘‘The Daughter and Her Journey of Self-Definition in the Familial Plays of Adrienne Kennedy’’ (thesis, 1985). Reference works: Black Writers (1989). CA (1982, Online 1999). CANR (1989). Contemporary Dramatists (1988). Dictionary of the Black Theatre (1983). DLB (1985). Notable Women in the American Theatre (1989). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Women in American Theatre (1981). Other references: American Literature (Sept. 1991). American Theatre (1988). College Language Association Journal (1976). Drama Review (1977). MELUS (Fall 1985). Modern Drama (Dec. 1985, March 1986, March 1989). Negro American Literature Forum (1975). NYT (reviews of first productions: 14 Jan., 20 June, 9 July, 14 July 1964; 13 Jan., 19 Jan., 1 Nov. 1969; 11 March 1976; 21 May 1980; 20 Sept. 1985). Studies in American Drama, 1945-Present (1989). Studies in Black Literature (1975). Theatre Journal (March 1992, 1996) Theatre Southwest (April 1989). —ANNE FLECHE
KENYON, Jane Born 23 May 1947, Ann Arbor Michigan; died 23 April 1995, Wilmot, New Hampshire Married Donald Hall, 1972; children: Philippa, Andrew Jane Kenyon was born and raised in the rural Midwest, outside Ann Arbor. She attended a one-room school until she was in the fifth grade, when she went into the Ann Arbor school system. Though Kenyon grew up in the country, her father was a musician, not a farmer, and as Donald Hall, her husband, said in an interview with Marian Blue (1993), ‘‘Her father and mother made a union of opposites: a sophisticated house and life in a country setting.’’ As there were few neighbors and children, this country setting provided Kenyon with the chance to create a rich interior life in conjunction with the natural world. She has said her childhood solitude may have contributed to her becoming a poet—that and, as she told David Bradt in a 1993 interview, ‘‘the
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fact that when I was introduced to poetry, which was not till junior high school, I was terribly drawn by strong emotions that I could see were the stuff of poetry.’’ Kenyon attended the University of Michigan, where she obtained her B.A. and then M.A. It was during her time there that she met Hall, a poet and teacher at the university. She and Hall married in the spring of her graduation in 1972. In 1975 Donald took a year leave from teaching, and the couple moved to New Hampshire to live in his family house. At the end of their year there, they decided to stay on in rural New Hampshire to write full time. Kenyon felt in moving to New Hampshire, she was regaining some sense of the life of her childhood. And it was here that Kenyon began, as she told Bill Moyers (interview 1993), ‘‘to work seriously as a poet.’’ Also in her interview with Bradt she said, ‘‘Moving here has been critical for both of us in our development as artists. This is ‘the vale of soul-making,’ as Keats says. This place has made us both considerably different people.’’ Kenyon published her first book, Room to Room, in 1978, only three years after their move. This first book is a poetic record of her transition from life in Ann Arbor and the Midwest to life in rural New England and of the difficulties of making a place for herself as a woman and wife in a house with many ghosts: ‘‘Here in this house, among photographs / of your ancestors, their hymnbooks and old / shoes. . . / I move from room to room, / a little dazed, like the fly. I watch it / bump against each window (‘‘From Room to Room’’). Kenyon published in journals and small magazines, but the next book of her own poems, The Boat of Quiet Hours, didn’t come out for another eight years. In the late 1970s, at Robert Bly’s urging, she began reading Anna Akhmatova’s poetry, and for pleasure and also because she was frustrated with the translations she was able to find, she began translating the Russian poet’s poems. When Bly read some of these translations, he asked her to do a book for his Eighties Press. These excellent translations came out in 1985 as Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova and are reprinted in the posthumously published A Hundred White Daffodils (1999). Kenyon felt working on the translations greatly impacted her own work; in the Bradt interview she said she ‘‘struggled not to change [Akhmatova’s] images. . . . Then I would turn to my own poems with this tremendous sense of freedom, and I would begin to feel some power in my own work for the first time. . . . I saw that there was nothing to limit me but my own imagination.’’ The Boat of Quiet Hours, like all her volumes, draws from life in rural New Hampshire. She looks outward at the seasons and cycles of nature in order to evoke and name what is inward. Her inward life lived in close proximity to the natural world is the ground of much of Kenyon’s work. Her lyric poems have a quiet force and are what she hoped would be ‘‘short, intense, musical cries of the spirit.’’ Kenyon suffered from depression throughout her life but was not properly diagnosed until she was in her late thirties. She struggled to keep her depression in check, but was not always able to and many of her poems come out of her experiences of deep melancholy. Poetry was a refuge for her, a ‘‘safe place,’’ and also
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a way of making something constructive and hopeful out of painful and enervating experiences: ‘‘Nothing but white—the air, the light: / only one brown milkweed pod / bobbling in the gully, smallest / brown boat on the immense tide. / A single green sprouting thing / would restore me.’’ (’’February: Thinking of Flowers’’). In addition to her gardens giving her hope in winter, they were a much tapped resource for her poetry and for a column she wrote for the local paper, the Concord Monitor. Kenyon was a great gardener, and during gardening season she spent mornings writing and afternoons in the garden—a balance of time and activities she loved. Writing poetry was also a place to work through the spiritual, to exclaim and wonder about the world and all it can throw at one. In 1986 Kenyon had her first struggle with cancer, and then her husband was diagnosed with cancer of the liver. Kenyon drew strength from her faith, as well as from the act of writing. She told Bill Moyers, ‘‘It’s odd but true that there really is consolation from sad poems, and it’s hard to know how that happens. There is the pleasure of the thing itself, the pleasure of the poem, and somehow it works against sadness.’’ The title poem of her next volume, Let Evening Come (1990), evokes this spiritual strength: ‘‘To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop / in the oats, to the air in the lung / let evening come / Let it come, as it will, and don’t / be afraid. God does not leave us / comfortless, so let evening come.’’ Kenyon’s work has received critical recognition over the years: she won the Avery and Julia Hopwood Award for poetry at the University of Michigan, was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1981) and from the New Hampshire Commission on the Arts (1984), and received a Guggenheim fellowship for 1992-93. She was New Hampshire’s poet laureate when she died of leukemia at the age of forty-six in the prime of her writing life. Two books have come out since her death: Otherwise: New and Selected Poems (1996), which has been a bestseller (unusual for any book of poetry), and One Hundred White Daffodils (1999), a collection of her prose as well as some poetry. Unfortunately, we won’t know what more Kenyon would have produced as a poet in her prime; what we do have are six volumes of exquisitely crafted lyric and prose that tug at our souls and hearts with the weight of her lived life. OTHER WORKS: Constance: Poems (1993). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hall, D., Without: Poems (1999). Kinnell, G., How Could She Not: For Jane Kenyon (1947-1995) (1998). Moyers, B. D., The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets (1995). Reference works: CA. Contemporary Women Poets. DLB. Other references: Bright Unequivocal Eye: Poems, Papers, and Remembrances from the First Jane Kenyon Conference, 1998 (forthcoming, 2000). Hall, D., Poets Read Their Work: Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon (video, 1977). Jane Kenyon (audiocassette, 1987). Jane Kenyon (video, 1989). Jane Kenyon: A Memorial Tribute (video, 1996). A Life Together (video, 1993, 1994). Nation (Apr. 1996). NYTBR (June 1987, Mar. 1991, Jan. 1997).
KERBER
Poetry (July 1997). The Poetry of Jane Kenyon, Ai, Lawrence Kearney and Kathleen Spivak (video, 1978). Virginia Quarterly (Winter 1979). WP (25 Apr. 1995). —GLYNIS BENBOW-NIEMIER
KERBER, Linda Kaufman Born 23 January 1940, New York, New York Daughter of Harry H. and Dorothy Haber Kaufman; married Richard Kerber, 1960; children: Ross, Justin In April 1997, Linda Kerber’s dazzling career was recognized by her election to the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences for her seminal historical research on the place of women in American history. Then, in April 1999, Kerber became the first recipient of a new Radcliffe Award for Distinguished Academic Scholarship given by the Radcliffe College Board of Trustees. Radcliffe’s award honored Kerber for her research in areas of women, gender, and society. For nearly three decades, historian Kerber has been teaching, by example, precisely the history she writes about. In her professional life as author of a number of important books on American history (an area of scholarship defined by men in every sense of the word until Kerber came along) and professor at a major research university, and in her personal life as wife to cardiologist Richard Kerber and mother to Ross and Justin, she has lived and competed in public and private worlds dominated by males. Kerber has experienced firsthand the conflicts dominating the personal lives of every woman who wishes to have a productive and meaningful career as well as children to nurture. She has written with considerable skill about the dilemma of the Revolutionary woman juggling the world of intellect and the world of domesticity. She refers often to the language of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, which describes as ‘‘separate spheres’’ the areas of interest and responsibilities belonging to men and women. She employs eloquent and complex strategies to untangle this simple linguistic device that has served to subjugate women for centuries. In all her books and essays, she makes one point repeatedly and definitely: ‘‘One day we will understand the idea of separate spheres as primarily a trope, employed by people in the past to characterize power relations for which they had no other words and that they could not acknowledge because they could not name, and by historians in our own times as they groped for a device that might dispel the confusion of anecdote and impose narrative and analytical order on the anarchy of inherited evidence, the better to comprehend the world in which we live.’’ In 1985 Kerber was named May Brodbeck Professor in Liberal Arts at the University of Iowa. She has been on the faculty of the history department at Iowa since 1971. Her academic background includes Barnard College, where she earned a B.A. (1960), New York University, where she took an M.A. (1961), and Columbia University, where she earned a Ph.D. (1968). Her teaching posts before Iowa were at Stern College for Women, San
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Jose State College, and Stanford University. She has successfully integrated a teaching and scholarly career of great distinction with a long, happy marriage and two wonderful sons. In Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (now in its third edition since 1980), Kerber has presided over a reassessment of American history that has been described as ‘‘radical re-thinking.’’ Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, this book looks at the American Revolution through the eyes of women. Kerber describes women’s history in America as the effort to gain for themselves what the Revolution did not accomplish. If most people would agree history describes human nature and events, it seems abundantly clear that history should include the experience of women along with that of men. Yet, for a very long time, it didn’t. Kerber argues that women’s history is American history. She has been a central figure in establishing the disciplines we understand today as feminism and women’s studies. What seems obvious to us now at the end of the 20th century—that the language spoken by women reflects the economic and social realities experienced by women—is comparatively recent as an understood phenomenon. Kerber’s essays in Toward an Intellectual History of Women (1997) were published together as one volume but written over more than two decades. These essays have not simply redirected the history of women in America but revised it. Gender is no longer a term of exclusion. She has addressed this issue directly in U.S. History AS Women’s History: New Feminist Essays (1995, a collection edited with Alice Kessler-Harris and Kathryn Sklar), which examines specific historical events from a feminist perspective. In an essay ‘‘The Obligations of Citizenship,’’ Kerber writes, ‘‘Skepticism of the state, however, has never been and should not be limited by gender; if public life is to be an arena of human freedom, men and women will have to find ways to make it so.’’ She maintains that obligation is not duty, not a social contract, more than a political order or law: it is a fundamental right; it is a fundamental right of women. Her arguments about obligation have evolved recently into a much longer work, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (1998). The central drama of women’s rights becomes their absolution from public service and corresponding obligation to family life. Democracy, equality, citizenship, responsibility, loyalty coalesce into a historiography out of which women’s history, in particular, can be understood and explained. OTHER WORKS: Federalists in Dissent: Imagery and Ideology in Jeffersonian America (1970). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Rethinking Political History (1996). Other references: Iowa City Press-Citizen (8 Apr. 1999). Journal of American History (June 1988). University of Iowa Literature, Science and the Arts Culture Diversity and Identity Seminar (1997). —KATHLEEN BONANN MARSHALL
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KERR, Jean (Collins) Born 10 July 1923, Scranton, Pennsylvania Daughter of Thomas J. and Kitty O’Neill Collins; married Walter Kerr, 1943 Jean Kerr earned an M.A. in theater from the Catholic University, where she met her husband, a dramatics professor who later became the New York Times theater critic. Kerr regards herself principally as a playwright and her essays as a diversion, but it is the latter that have gained vast popularity. The typical style of her plays and essays is the carefully polished imitation of easy conversation. Kerr wrote three plays for her husband’s direction at the Catholic University. The third, Jenny Kissed Me (1948), opened on Broadway, starring the famous comic actor Leo G. Carroll. Collaborating with her husband and the musician Jay Gorney, Kerr won praise for energy and intelligence in the revue, Touch and Go (1949). In the successful Broadway production John Murray Anderson’s Almanac (1953), Kerr’s sketch ‘‘Don Brown’s Body’’ uses the violent, sexually suggestive style of Mickey Spillane’s detective stories to lampoon orchestrated readings of Stephen Vincent Benet’s Civil War poem. In her most successful play, Mary, Mary (1961), the title character discovers her true, timid nature through a new admirer’s eyes but returns to her first love just before he can divorce her for a less disarming wife. Kerr’s urbane wit is not only richly decorative but integral to character: Mary antagonizes her husband not with her superior insight into his publishing business but with the hilarious sarcasm that masks her personal insecurity. Mary draws audience sympathy for her clever vulnerability, but she wins her man because she learns to demonstrate sophistication. Kerr again reveals troubled characters through witty repartee in Poor Richard (1964), an intense romantic comedy featuring a self-doubting, wisecracking widowed poet, whose internal conflict with grief overwhelms the ubiquitous love-triangle plot. As a thin disguise for the sensitive poet’s anguish, Kerr’s bright clowning is less satisfying than the feeling poetry evident in Richard’s best monologues. A self-denigrating woman is the protagonist in Finishing Touches (1973), a predictable drawing-room comedy that briefly challenges middle-aged self-righteousness with modern sexual freedom. Central characters face their own smugness but end up celebrating it. Kerr’s humorous, perfectly paced, comic dialogue suggests an unspoken and unresolved uneasiness over contemporary social change. Her most successful book, Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (1957), collects 15 humorous sketches written for popular magazines. Intelligent literary allusion and stylish satire enliven the familiar essay form, making spirited fun of an alert woman’s irritations with rambunctious sons, slick-magazine advice, and a celebrated husband. Phrasing motherly boasting as complaints, Kerr idealizes family affections. She burlesques the distressingly clichéd 1950s prescriptions for glamorous or maternal feminine
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behavior by opposing them with precise details. In 1965 Kerr adapted her sketches for a two-season NBC situation comedy about a suburban freelance writer, a college dramatics professor, and their four sons. The best pieces in The Snake Has All the Lines (1960) portray Kerr less as a homemaker than as an author revising a play in a rehearsal or growing cynical over mixed critical reviews. Tributes to her determined Irish mother and her awkward Catholic school days show Kerr learning the value of her generous verbal wit. In the best essay of her collection Penny Candy (1970), Kerr combines her two personae of a mother and a student of literature to recall her success in bringing her sons to share her love of poetry. Unfortunately, the made-to-order sketches for Family Circle and the Ladies’ Home Journal, which outnumber the more original work, force Kerr to act the housewife flustered by babytalk, wilting houseplants, cocktail parties, and her weight. In her introduction to How I Got to Be Perfect (1978), a new edition of her essays published over 20 years, Kerr confides a humorous disorientation with her problems of lengthened memories, self-acceptance, and occasional isolation of middle age. Alert to nuances in popular taste, she deftly updates her punch lines and topical references, but contemporary reviews praised the collection less for its craft in portraying common absurdities than for its momentary glimpses of poetic perceptiveness. Humorously alert to absurd trivialities, the strong female character who dominates Kerr’s essays and plays saves herself from selfish insignificance by her own generous instinct. During the 30 years of her writing career, Kerr’s essays have grown loose and self-revealing while her stage comedies have faced increasingly difficult social issues within constricting dramatic unities. Wary of intimidating her readers, Kerr rarely mentions the strains her writing and successful marriage place on each other. With merry charm, in the early 1960s, she seemed to synthesize the careers of Larchmont homemaker and Broadway playwright and thus unexpectedly became an American ideal, without being forced to scrutinize the difference between the values she held and those she represented. OTHER WORKS: The Big Help (1947). King of Hearts (with E. Brooke, 1954; film version, That Certain Feeling, 1956). Goldilocks (with W. Kerr and L. Anderson, 1958). Lunch Hour (1982). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Kearns, C., Motherland: Writings by Irish American Women About Mothers and Daughters (1999). Owens, E. S. B., ‘‘The Changing Image of Women as Seen in Plays of Jean Kerr’’ (thesis, 1983). Reference works: Best Plays of 1980-1981: The Burns Mantle Yearbook (1981). CA (1969). CB (July 1958). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). WA. Other references: New York Theatre Critics Reviews (194673). NYT (18 Feb. 1973). Saturday Review (30 Nov. 1957). Theatre Arts (Mar. 1961). Time (14 Apr. 1961). —GAYLE GASKILL
KEYES, Frances Parkinson (Wheeler) Born 21 July 1885, Charlottesville, Virginia; died 3 July 1970, New Orleans, Louisiana Daughter of John H. and Louise Johnson Wheeler; married Henry W. Keyes, 1904; children: three sons An only daughter, Frances Parkinson Keyes received but seven years of formal schooling—in Boston, Switzerland, Berlin—as was appropriate for a ‘‘gently born girl.’’ Her husband, more than 20 years her senior, with whom she had three sons, was governor of New Hampshire and served three terms in the U.S. Senate. She describes her role as hostess in Capital Kaleidoscope (1937). Always a rapid and omnivorous reader, Keyes wrote as a child but was not encouraged. She began publishing after her marriage because of desperate financial need. Soon a regular contributor to Good Housekeeping, she was widely known for monthly ‘‘Letters from a Senator’s Wife,’’ which ran for 14 years, and for other political analyses. A contributing editor from 1923 to 1936, Keyes wrote about her world trip in 1925-26 and another to South America in 1929-30. These formative years are described in All Flags Flying (1972), an incomplete autobiography published posthumously. Keyes contributed to other magazines, was editor of the Daughters of the American Revolution’s National Historical Magazine from 1937 to 1939, and was a frequent lecturer. Keyes’ fame rests upon her extraordinary career as a bestselling novelist. Her first novel, The Old Gray Homestead, was published in 1919. Not until Honor Bright (1936) did she have a bestseller, but she was seldom without one throughout the next decades. In spite of frequent and severe illness and a crippling back injury, Keyes was a person of great vitality and enthusiasm, many interests, extraordinary dedication to work, and an urgent need for fulfillment. She produced very long and fluent novels that reflected careful and diligent research to ensure correctness of setting and circumstance. She reveled in descriptions of rich foods, elegant clothes, gay parties, and exotic locales. Older civilizations fascinate, but also evidence decay; in her novels promise in the modern world lies in simplicity and hard work. Keyes favored accounts of a family’s fortunes through several generations. The first novels are set in New England, Washington, and Europe. Perhaps the most lavish is Crescent Carnival (1942), sumptuously detailing complex New Orleans traditions through three generations. After its enormous success, she spent her winters in Louisiana and developed a pattern in which she wrote Louisiana books alternatively with other novels. The highly successful Dinner at Antoine’s (1948) added mystery to her customary romance. The typical Keyes heroine is young, beautiful, naive, and in love with an older experienced man who is ennobled by passion
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for her. Temptations abound, but high principle triumphs, though the rule that a Keyes heroine is never seduced altered in the later novels. Her women are competent, loyal, and stoic in their acceptance of hardships. Some have personal careers, but usually their lives are shaped by marriage, and fulfillment comes in motherhood, woman’s triumph for Keyes. Religion was important to Keyes. Though her family was Congregational, she was attracted to formal ritual and was confirmed at fourteen in the Episcopal church. In Along a Little Way (1940), she describes her gradual growth to Catholicism and recent conversion. She wrote about a number of saints’ lives and often described religious practice in her novels. Her novels had a large audience in England and were also translated into several languages. Keyes received many awards and honorary degrees. Although resigned to not receiving critical acclaim, she made a strong case for her craft in The Cost of a Best-Seller (1950). Admittedly sentimental and often rhetorical, her high romance is strengthened by common sense and diversified incidents. Keyes’ exposition of political and social circumstances and concern with international relations challenged American provincialism.
OTHER WORKS: The Career of David Noble (1921). Queen Anne’s Lace (1930). Silver Seas and Golden Cities (1931). Lady Blanche Farm: Senator Marlowe’s Daughter (1933). The Safe Bridge (1934). The Happy Wanderer (1935). Written in Heaven (1937). Parts Unknown (1938). The Great Tradition (1939). Fielding’s Folly (1940). The Sublime Shepherdess (1940). All That Glitters (1941). The Grace of Guadalupe (1941). Also the Hills (1943). The River Road (1945). Came a Cavalier (1947). Once on Esplanade (1947). All This is Louisiana (1950). Joy Street (1950). Therese: Saint of a Little Way (1950). Steamboat Gothic (1952). Bernadette of Lourdes (1953). The Royal Box (1954). Frances Parkinson Keyes Cook-book (1955). Mother of Our Saviour (1955). The Blue Camellia (1957). Land of Stones and Saints (1957). Victorine (1958). Frances Parkinson Keyes Christmas Gift (1959). Mother Cabrini: Missionary to the World (1959). Station Wagon in Spain (1959). The Chess Players (1960). Roses in December (1960). The Third Mystic of Avila (1960). The Rose and the Lily (1961). Madame Castel’s Lodger (1962). The Restless Lady, and Other Stories (1963). Three Ways of Love (1963). A Treasury of Favorite Poems (1963). The Explorer (1964). I, the King (1966). Tongues of Fire (1966). The Heritage (1968).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1969, 1971). Catholic Authors: Contemporary Biographical Sketches (1948). TCA, TCAS. Other references: Catholic World (Jan. 1943). CSM (28 Nov. 1950). NYHTB (19 Nov. 1939). NYTBR (8 Nov. 1936, 8 Nov. 1942, 9 Dec. 1945). Time (26 Dec. 1960). —VELMA BOURGEOIS RICHMOND
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KILMER, Aline Murray Born 1 August 1888, Norfolk, Virginia; died 1 October 1941, Stillwater, New Jersey Wrote under: Aline Kilmer, Aline Murray Daughter of Kenton and Ada Foster Murray; married Joyce Kilmer, 1908 (died); children: five Among the literary members of Aline Murray Kilmer’s family were her father, an editor; her stepfather, Henry Mills Alden, the editor of Harper’s magazine; and her husband, one of the more famous poets of the day and the poetry editor of the Literary Digest. Two of her sons were published poets. Kilmer was educated at Rutgers Prep and at the Vail-Deane School in Elizabeth, New Jersey. In 1913 both she and her husband entered the Roman Catholic church. They were the parents of five children. In 1918 Sgt. Joyce Kilmer of the ‘‘Fighting 69th’’ was killed in action in France. Although she had published a few poems before her marriage, selling her first poem to St. Nicholas magazine at age eleven, Kilmer was always overshadowed by her husband, both professionally and socially. Most critics concede, however, that she was the better poet. After his death, her reserve lessened, and she occasionally made lecture tours to help with expenses. She served as vice president of the Catholic Poetry Society of America. The death of her husband had been preceded by the death of one child from polio and was followed in a few years by the death of another. Both the subject matter and the tone of her work were largely determined by these events and her task of bringing up a family alone. In Candles that Burn (1919), Kilmer presents intensely personal poems, most of them about children, and many of these dealing with the still-raw pain of personal bereavement or the fear of loss. In some of these she is unable to transcend the experience, yet already in this first volume one can occasionally see the note of gentle irony that pervades her best mature poetry. Vigils (1921) continues Kilmer’s emphasis on personal preoccupations. A mere two strings of her instrument suffice, she writes in ‘‘The Harp’’: ‘‘One is for love and one for death. . . . I play on the strings I know.’’ Although the cry of pain reappears in many of these poems, the poet has learned to transmute her material and to choose more evocative imagery. The rhythms have become her own. Literary subjects—the Lady of Shalott and Sappho—appear. In The Poor King’s Daughter (1925), Kilmer has perfected her distinctive tone of gentle but unrelieved disillusionment, of irony delicate but never bitter. The intimacy remains, but a reticence disciplines it. The poet has now learned to maintain distance and to detach the poetic process from the experience. In ‘‘Favete Linguis,’’ the poet admires the plum tree heavy with blossom but warns: ‘‘You lift your lute to celebrate its beauty / And all its petals flutter to the ground.’’ The theme of enforced silence emerges again in the fine poem ‘‘Against the Wall.’’ Here the irony of the parent calmly mending armor for the sons’ fights, while silently lamenting the emptiness of victory and glory,
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achieves tragic overtones by Kilmer’s use of conversational language and rhythms. Kilmer’s prose works include two children’s books and Hunting a Hair Shirt (1923), a collection of brief personal essays similar in theme and tone to her verse.
OTHER WORKS: Emmy, Nicky, and Greg (1927). A Buttonwood Summer (1929). Selected Poems (1929).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Catholic Authors: Contemporary Biographical Sketches, 1930-1947 (1948). CB (Dec. 1941). Other references: America (18 Oct. 1941). Bookman (Dec. 1921, May 1925). Catholic World (June 1929). Commonweal (17 July 1929, 14 Aug. 1929). —ARLENE ANDERSON SWIDLER
KIMBROUGH, Emily Born 23 October 1899, Muncie, Indiana Daughter of Hal C. and Charlotte Wiles Kimbrough; married John Wrench, 1926 (divorced); children: two daughters Emily Kimbrough graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1921, studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, and in 1923 began a career in advertising copywriting for Marshall Field & Co. that was to lead, four years later, to the managing editorship of the Ladies’ Home Journal, a position she held until 1929. In 1929 she gave birth to twin daughters; she was divorced after only several years of marriage. By 1934 Kimbrough’s articles had begun to appear in various national magazines, including Country Life, House and Garden, Travel, Readers’ Digest, and Saturday Review of Literature. Even a reader of Parents’ magazine would have come across her down-to-earth advice about raising twins. By 1968 she had devoted herself to accounts of her frequent travels to Europe and around America. Emily Kimbrough used to be a household name. ‘‘Oh, I LOVED Our Hearts Were Young and Gay’’ is the inevitable cry of almost anyone old enough to read in 1942. Kimbrough’s first and most famous work, written jointly with Cornelia Otis Skinner, was a chronicle of their 19th summer, spent in Europe contracting measles on an ocean liner, overnighting in an unsuspected brothel, lunching at the Ritz in Paris, and generally charming one continent with their exploits and another with the reminiscences of them. Kimbrough’s next volume, We Followed Our Hearts to Hollywood (1943), describes the summer she and Skinner spent writing a film script for Our Hearts. Amusement and satisfaction remain with the reader of any of Kimbrough’s subsequent books, which followed Our Hearts
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Were Young and Gay in rapid succession. At one time, Kimbrough’s travel books were standard guides to England, Italy, Portugal, Greece, France, and Ireland; that they have fallen out of currency is our loss. Full of Michelin-type restaurant and hotel lore, news of vistas and sights far beyond the guidebooks, and chatty stories of the people behind the walls and doors forming the boundaries of most tourists’ experiences, they were the guiding tour lights of an entire generation. Kimbrough does more than recount the sights seen or merely detail the humorous adventures of four middleaged women who ‘‘no speaka da language’’—she takes the reader into the atmosphere of the places she visits, and throughout she provides the reader with the most intimate historical details. But it is not only for her travel books that Kimbrough deserves to be remembered. Through Charley’s Door (1952) is an intimate biography of Marshall Field & Co. and takes the reader to the heart of Chicago’s venerable department store. Equally good are her stories of her childhood. How Dear to My Heart (1944, reissued most recently in 1991) introduces six-year-old Emily about to begin school. The innocence and imagination of childhood are recreated in this story of her extended family (including Indiana Senator Charles M. Kimbrough), of the birth of her baby brother, and of her growing understanding of the world. In The Innocents from Indiana (1950), 11-year-old Emily moves from Muncie to Chicago and learns to love the big city in a series of adventures that includes playing catch unawares with Douglas Fairbanks and driving around and around the block in an electric car that cannot be stopped because its clutch is stuck. In Now and Then (1972), Kimbrough goes back, through her twins’ childhood experiences, to more of her own. These delightful, low-key books, reminiscent of James Thurber, should be included among adolescent reading selections, for they reproduce the puzzlement and triumph of a child growing into herself. Kimbrough’s writing has a simplicity and directness that immediately attracts. Her own naive pleasure at what she has seen, heard, and experienced is communicated directly to the reader. Of course, such simplicity dates the travel books; they could hardly be written in these days of jet travel, inflation, and mass education. It is for this reason that Kimbrough is an important mid-20thcentury writer, for she manages to reproduce the wonderment of which the American, particularly the sophisticated American matron, is no longer capable. In addition to a sharp sense of the times, Kimbrough’s books present a great deal of information, even if much of it is dated, that provides the sort of rich historical background lately recognized in the writings of such regionalists as Jewett and Chopin. Kimbrough’s readers can hardly help but experience an otherwise unrecapturable past. Each book ends before we want it to and dances around the edges of our memories. It is little wonder Our Hearts Were Young and Gay (most recently reprinted in 1983), remains beloved to this day. OTHER WORKS: Forty Plus and Fancy Free (1954). So Near and Yet So Far (1955). Water, Water Everywhere (1956). And a Right Good Crew (1958). Pleasure by the Busload (1961). Forever Old,
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Forever New (1964). Floating Island (1968, reissued 1984). Time Enough (1974). Better Than Oceans (1976). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ball, E., A Suite of Poems (1984). Cavanaugh, K., Design Review Guidelines for the Emily Kimbrough Historic District (1990). Reference works: CA (1976). CB (Mar. 1944). Indiana Authors and Their Books, 1917-1966 (1974). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Atlantic (Dec. 1942). NYTBR (22 Nov. 1942). Saturday Review (11 Dec. 1943). —LORALEE MACPIKE
KINCAID, Jamaica Born Elaine Potter Richardson, 25 May 1949, St. John’s, Antigua Daughter of Annie Richardson; married Allen Shawn, 1979; children: Annie, Harold Until she was sixteen, Jamaica Kincaid spent her life on the nine-by-twelve-mile island of Antigua. Her father was a carpenter; her mother ran the household and became the dominant figure in Kincaid’s childhood. Kincaid excelled in her government schools and was an avid reader and library user. However, she felt stifled and isolated on her small island, and at sixteen she left for New York City as an au pair. Realizing she would need a high school diploma, she obtained one in New York and subsequently attended Franconia College for one year. She then moved back to New York City and began writing. With the publication of her first story in 1973, she changed her name from Elaine Potter Richardson to Jamaica Kincaid. In the mid-1970s Kincaid became a staff writer for the New Yorker, where editor William Shawn provided immense help and support. Ten of the stories she wrote for the magazine became her first book, At the Bottom of the River (1983). Kincaid married Shawn’s son Allen and in 1985 the couple moved to North Bennington, Vermont. They have two children, and Kincaid divides her life between her family, writing at home, and giving lectures and readings. Kincaid’s books closely reflect her island culture and experience, and are a blend of fiction and autobiography. Her fictional style has progressed from the dreamlike images in her early stories to a more linear narrative form in the novels Annie John (1985) and Lucy (1990). Her voice, however, remains uniquely lyrical and exotic. Often her sentences repeat phrases in musiclike cadences, lulling the reader into Kincaid’s very special poetic rhythms. Critics have heard in her work the voices of Caribbean folktales. At the Bottom of the River begins with her most frequently anthologized story, ‘‘The Girl,’’ a one-page sentence of combative dialogue between mother and daughter. This love-hate relationship continues in others of these stories and throughout Kincaid’s work. Fantastic folklike images appear and disappear: a
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mother becomes a lizard, yet she also makes her daughter a mat from her own hair. The book is both a child’s nightmare and a vision of bliss and innocence. As in all of Kincaid’s writing the sense of place and the rhythms and colors of the Caribbean are powerful. Annie John, a penetrating look at a perceptive and vulnerable adolescent’s world, recollects similar childhood images and themes, but is written in a simpler, more narrative style. The intimacy tenyear-old Annie feels with her mother evolves into anger and fear as Annie is told by her mother that she can no longer be ‘‘a little me.’’ She rebels, trying on new ‘‘forbidden’’ relationships, deciding finally to depart from her island home. The end of the novel finds her on a boat headed north. Antigua is seen from a different, and far more bitter perspective in A Small Place (1988), a work of nonfiction. The reader is a tourist, the ‘‘you’’ of the essay who plucks the beauty of the island, yet remains blind to the reality of its poverty and foreign domination. Kincaid describes Antigua as a ‘‘prison of beauty’’ where, despite the end of slavery and the departure of the English ‘‘criminals,’’ political corruption persists. She sees little hope for positive change. Kincaid’s anger continues to ferment in her second novel, Lucy (1990), told through the eyes of a young woman newly arrived from ‘‘an island’’ and now an au pair to four blond sisters. Lucy’s penetrating observations of the family’s white world relentlessly uncover their mirages and self-deception. She sees the family’s white culture as domineering, both within their home and as far-reaching as the domination of her own island, and suffers as she discovers she is just as detached from this family as she was from her own. Lucy remains critical and separate. Her mother’s letters are unopened, and even after her father’s death, she chooses to stay away from her mother. At novel’s end, she begins to write. Kincaid’s career has developed and expanded into new forms in the early 1990s, including an adaptation of a Chekhov short story for public television. She has also written for the newly revamped journal Transitions and continues to publish frequently in the New Yorker. Whereas her previous novels portrayed a mother who was cruel, selfish, willful, and only sporadically capable of maternal love from the daughter’s point of view, in Autobiography of My Mother (1996), the mother tells her own story. The title, however, is somewhat misleading; the narrator’s mother died in childbirth, and though that mother is endlessly grieved, it is not her story. Rather it is Xuela Claudette Richardson’s story, the story of a fertile woman who chooses not to bear children. Kincaid has explained that although she is glad to have been born, she believes her own mother should never have had children, and with this book Kincaid created an alternate life story for her mother. As she recounts her anguish and loss-filled childhood in Dominica, her colonial schooling, and her first sexual experiences, the only emotion Xuela allows herself is contempt. Exercising her incredible will, Xuela creates herself, but the act of creation is one of negation as she defines what she won’t do or be. Her pivotal act of self-definition is a messy, painful, self-inflicted
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abortion. Autobiography ends with Xuela in her 70s; she has surmounted all obstacles, submitted to no one, and her hatred is unabated. In My Brother, her 1997 memoir tracing the life and death of her brother in Antigua, Kincaid embraces a much wider range of emotions. This is another story of family and its inescapable pull, and at the center, once again, is a formidable mother figure. Again Kincaid expresses her ambivalence toward the Caribbean, its beauty, poverty, and distorted sexuality. And of course the story’s familiar heroine, the daughter who flees, is Kincaid herself. Critics welcomed the emotional breadth of My Brother and praised Kincaid’s unsparing honesty. As Kincaid follows the arc of her brother’s life, she examines her emotions with scientific precision, seeking to identify and name each one. ‘‘Love always feels better than not-love,’’ she says, but she decides her own intense feelings for her brother, disguised by anger, are finally less than love. Kincaid’s language continues to dazzle. Corresponding to the nonlinear nature of memory, she writes long, lyrical, looping sentences whose rhythm and tone are most often described as ‘‘incantatory.’’ My Brother is ultimately Kincaid’s own story of what might have been. As she compares her life to her brother’s, she recognizes how her own ruthlessness in cutting herself off from the life of her childhood was what saved her. In recent years Kincaid has turned her obsessive attention to gardening. In 1998 she edited the anthology My Favorite Plant: Writers and Gardeners on the Plants They Love. She is also working on a book about her own garden.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Perry, Donna, ‘‘An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid,’’ in Reading Black, Reading Feminist, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed. (1990). Reference works: CA 125 (1989). CLC (1987, 1991). Contemporary Novelists (1986). CB (March 1991). FC (1990). Other references: Bennington Banner (27 April 1991). Commonweal (4 Nov. 1988). Missouri Review (1992). Nation (18 Feb. 1991). NYT (7 Oct. 1990, 16 Jan.1996). NYTBR (4 Feb. 1996, 19 Oct. 1997). Salon (13 Jan. 1996). Slate (21 Oct. 1997). WRB (Nov. 1985). —SUSAN SWAN, UPDATED BY VALERIE VOGRIN
KING, Grace Elizabeth Born 29 November 1851, New Orleans, Louisiana; died 14 January 1932, New Orleans, Louisiana Daughter of William W. and Sarah Miller King The eldest of four girls in a family of eight children, Grace Elizabeth King was raised in the French-speaking Creole society
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of New Orleans by her Protestant mother and staunchly Confederate lawyer father. A member of the state legislature prior to the Civil War, he was barred for a time from practicing law for refusing to take the oath of allegiance to the Union. King’s memories of antebellum life and view of Southern defeat and Reconstruction were shaped by her youthful experiences of flight from New Orleans, loss of the family home, and years of relative privation. Only gradually did her father reestablish a thriving law practice. Like other cultivated upper-class whites who had lost most in the war, King became a conservative. Upon the family’s return to the city at the end of Union occupation, King attended the Institut St. Louis and graduated with a prize in French at age sixteen, after which she continued her studies at the school of Heloise Cenas, where she developed an interest in writing. Her skill in French led her to Maupassant and other French authors from whom she learned techniques of realism influential in her treatment of regional subjects. In 1904, with a brother and two unmarried sisters, King purchased a permanent home in New Orleans, their residence for the remainder of their lives. She made three trips to Europe, finding Paris most congenial to her writing, interest in theater, and friendships with women. Her criticism of what she considered George Washington Cable’s negative portrayals of Creole society in a conversation with the Century magazine editor in 1885 led to his challenge that some local author might try producing better work. From this stimulus grew her first story, ‘‘Monsieur Motte,’’ published in 1886 through the efforts of a family friend and respected advisor, Charles Dudley Warner, editor of Harper’s. At Warner’s invitation she visited Connecticut in 1887 and met, among others of the Nook Farm group, Samuel Clemens and his wife Olivia, who became her longtime confidant. On the whole she detested the North, finding affection for only a few admirable ‘‘exceptions.’’ Minor praise in the northern press led to the acceptance of other stories in monthlies such as Century. To ‘‘Monsieur Motte’’ she added three stories and published them as a first collection in 1888. Her stories centered on women’s experiences. Later, she wrote articles for Harper’s Bazaar, introducing the French intellectuals she met in Paris to American readers, and contributed a number of short pieces about such figures as Baudelaire, Mérimée, and Paul Desjardins to Warner’s Library of the World’s Best Literature (1896-97). From 1893 to 1898, King turned her attention to writing historical works about the territory and state of Louisiana, following the example of Charles Gayarré, a distinguished conservative Southern historian and beloved family friend. Jean Baptiste le Moyne (1892) is a biography of the Canadian founder of Mobile and New Orleans. With H. R. Ficklen, a Tulane University professor, she wrote A History of Louisiana (1893), primarily a school text. New Orleans: The Place and the People (1895), a model municipal history, is her best historical work. King wrote few stories and articles and only two novels in the last 20 years of her life. The Pleasant Ways of St. Médard (1916) is
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an autobiographical work dealing with the economic struggle and humiliation of the Reconstruction period; and La Dame de Sainte Hermine (1924), a historical romance set in 18th-century New Orleans. Creole Families of New Orleans (1921), an interesting interpretive history, is based on the lives of French and Spanish families who contributed to the development of the city’s culture in the 18th and 19th centuries. ‘‘The past is our only real possession in life’’ begins King’s Memories of a Southern Woman of Letters, published posthumously in 1932. More a study of King’s friendships than a detailed picture of her life, it recalls in an overly refined manner the genteel society King sought to reestablish after her family’s misfortunes. King was a competent realist at her best. Her fiction offers instructive contrast with that of Cable and Kate Chopin; her most notable efforts can be found in Balcony Stories (1893), several uncollected stories, New Orleans, and in sections of her Memories.
OTHER WORKS: Tales of a Time and Place (1892). DeSoto and His Men in the Land of Florida (1898). Stories from Louisiana History (with J. R. Ficklen, 1905). A Splendid Offer: A Comedy for Women (1926). Mount Vernon on the Potomac (1929).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bush, R., Grace King: A Southern Destiny (1983). Bush, R., Grace King of New Orleans: A Selection of Her Writings (1973). Civil War Women: The Civil War Seen Through Women’s Eyes in Stories by Louisa May Alcott, Kate Chopin, Eudora Welty, and Other Great Women Writers (1990). Elfenbein, A. S., Women on the Color Line: Evolving Stereotypes and the Writings of George Washington Cable, Grace King, Kate Chopin (1989). Gehman, M. E., ‘‘The Creole Controversy Between George Washington Cable and Grace King: A Thesis’’ (thesis, 1987). Heidari, M. W., ‘‘Grace King in Her Journals, 1886-1910’’ (thesis, 1991). Kirby, D. K., Grace King (1980). Lyles, E. R., ‘‘A Transitional Generation: Grace King’s World, 1852-1932’’ (thesis, 1991). Ripples of Dissent: Women’s Stories of Marriage in the 1890s (1996). Shannon, A. W., ‘‘Women on the Color Line: Subversion of Female Stereotypes in the Fiction of Cable, King, and Chopin’’ (thesis, 1984). Signet Classic Book of American Short Stories (1985). Slayton, G. C., ‘‘Grace E. King: Her Life and Works’’ (dissertation, 1974). Sneller, J. E., ‘‘Man-Figs and Magnolias, Ladies and Lariats Humor and Irony in the Writings of Three New Orleans Women, 1865-1916’’ (thesis, 1993). Williams, C. A., ‘‘A Southern Writer’s Retrospective: Betrayal, Rage and Survival in the Reconstruction Fiction of Grace King’’ (thesis, 1986). Reference works: DAB. NAW (1971). NCAB, 2. Other references: AL (March 1972). Louisiana Historical Quarterly (Oct. 1934). SLJ (Fall 1974). Southern Review (April 1977). —THEODORA R. GRAHAM
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KING, Laurie R. Born 19 September 1952, Oakland, California Daughter of Roger R. and Mary Dickson Richardson; married Noel A. King, 1977; children: Nathanael, Zoe Laurie R. King is an acclaimed mystery writer who won both the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe award and the British John Creasey award for her debut book, A Grave Talent (1993). Her two primary series—one consisting of three psychological thrillers starring K.C. (Kate) Martinelli, a present-day lesbian detective, and the other of four historical mysteries centering on Mary Russell, who matches wits with and ultimately marries a retired Sherlock Holmes—are very different in setting and tone. Despite their dissimilarities, the two series have many attributes in common. These include their focus on strong, multifaceted female protagonists, their attention to detail, and their realistic treatment of complex relationships. Both are also distinguished by the author’s compassion for characters that would often be written as two-dimensional villains. King’s father was a furniture restorer and her mother a librarian and curator. In addition to receiving a B.A. from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1977 and a 1984 postgraduate degree from the same institution’s Graduate Theological Union, King raised two children, worked as a coffee roaster, and held several volunteer positions. She launched her writing career in 1987, at age thirty-five, as her second child entered preschool. A Grave Talent introduced Martinelli, a San Francisco police inspector who grows professionally and emotionally from book to book. It’s not until page 180 of this work that readers discover Kate is a lesbian (whose lover is a paraplegic psychotherapist). In addition to a page-turning mystery, the book focuses on Kate’s relationship with her older, male partner and the trust that gradually grows between them. Although a Publisher’s Weekly reviewer pointed out cracks in the plot and felt the two main characters were less developed than they should be, the book garnered primarily positive reviews (as did future King works). For example, Library Journal wrote of A Grave Talent, ‘‘King’s intricate plotting, intriguing characters, and eye for detail make this an outstanding mystery and a great start to the series.’’ The second title in the Martinelli series is To Play the Fool (1995), in which the detective enlists the help of the dean of King’s real-life alma mater, the Graduate Theological Union. Critics applauded the book’s sharply drawn characters, particularly the homeless Brother Erasmus, who speaks only in scripture and literary allusions. Publishers Weekly’s stated, ‘‘Like the holy fools whose purposes frame her latest modern mystery, King practices her own magic here, conjuring up, after a slowish start, an indelibly affecting narrative from unexpected material.’’ The third Martinelli book, With Child (1996), again highlights the protagonist’s compassion, as well as her intelligence.
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Mary Russell, a scholarly, young, would-be detective growing up in World War I England, is introduced as a 15-year-old in The Beekeeper’s Apprentice; or On the Segregation of the Queen (1994). Although written before A Grave Talent, its publication was delayed, in part due to copyright issues involving Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation. Russell meets the retired detective, who is busy keeping bees, and becomes his apprentice, matching him in intelligence and temperament as they solve the case of a U.S. senator’s kidnapped daughter. According to Booklist, ‘‘Everything about this book rings true, from the ambience of World War I England to the intriguing relationship between Holmes and Mary to the surprising final confrontation between Holmes and Moriarty’s daughter.’’ In the second Mary Russell mystery, A Monstrous Regiment of Women (1995), Russell and Holmes fall in love, and in A Letter of Mary (1996) they become husband and wife. While the New York Times Book Review called the latter a ‘‘smartly researched and thoroughly enjoyable historical mystery,’’ many reviewers were most taken with the relationship between the two characters. As Publisher’s Weekly noted, ‘‘King’s achievement is her depiction of the complex relationship between two individualists.’’ In 1997 came The Moor, a retelling of the classic Holmes story The Hound of the Baskervilles, in which Holmes and Russell revisit the case 20 years after Holmes’ first encounter. The work expertly combines the evolving relationship between the two characters and key elements of the original story, while adding historical figures such as the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould into the mix. Publishers Weekly called it a ‘‘captivating story’’ and King ‘‘a fluent writer,’’ although the publication also noted that ‘‘this effort is slightly hobbled by the slow coalescence of its subplots.’’ The fifth Russell and Holmes adventure, O Jerusalem (1999) takes the couple back to 1919, revisiting occupied Palestine where they had visited in The Beekeeper’s Apprentice. King introduced a new protagonist, Anne Waverly, in A Darker Place (1998). A university professor and FBI operative, her involvement with a cult nearly two decades ago cost her her husband and young daughter. In this psychological suspense novel, her experiences give her unique insight as she infiltrates a religious cult called Change, but also cause personal complications. The story is typical of King in that it deals with difficult emotional issues and intricate characters evenhandedly and compassionately. ‘‘King presents Change’s leaders as neither simplistic opportunists nor frenzied maniacs, but rather as methodical true believers who inhabit an ambiguous and dangerous middle ground,’’ wrote Publishers Weekly. ‘‘Anne is equally hard to pigeonhole, a feisty, independent woman whose guilt about her family tragedy leads to a misplaced sense of responsibility toward two of the commune’s young wards.’’ From this description, it can be seen that Anne shares many of the attributes of King’s previous heroines. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference Works:CA 140 (1993). CANR 63 (1998). SATA 88 (1997). Other references: Booklist (1 Feb. 1993, 1 Feb. 1994). LJ (Jan. 1993, 15 May 1994, Jan. 1997). NYTBR (19 Feb. 1995, 17
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Sept. 1995, 5 Jan. 1997, 23 Nov. 1997). PW (28 Dec. 1992, 2 May 1994, 12 Dec. 1994, 18 Nov. 1996, 17 Nov. 1997, 21 Dec. 1998). School Library Journal (June 1997). —KAREN RAUGUST
KING, Louisa Yeomans Born 1863, Washington, New Jersey; died 16 January 1948, Milton, Massachusetts Wrote under: Mrs. Francis King Daughter of Alfred and Elizabeth Ramsay Yeomans; married Francis King, 1890; children: three A well-known garden writer in her time, Louisa Yeomans King was an influential and active supporter of the Garden Club movement and many horticultural societies. The daughter of a Presbyterian clergyman, she was educated at private schools. She was the mother of three children and lived for many years in Alma, Michigan, but moved to South Hartford, New York, in 1928. She was a founder of the Women’s National Farm and Garden Association, belonged to various horticultural societies, and served as a vice president of the Garden Club of America. In 1921 she was awarded the George Robert White medal by the Massachusetts Horticultural Society and in 1923 the Garden Club of America Medal of Honor. All of her garden books are concerned with the practical aspects of gardening and garden planning. While she often referred to her own gardens, she did not write the sort of personal garden books associated with writers like Gertrude Jekyll and Elizabeth Lawrence. Her work belongs to the large group of books by American women for American women encouraging their active participation in the art of gardening. Illustrated with photographs of elaborate garden schemes, most of King’s works chronicle the gardening possibilities of the prosperous middleclass American. While her advice is sound and her writing style admirable, much of her work is dated because she devotes much space to discussing particular named varieties available at that time. Her first book, The Well-Considered Garden (1915), went through many editions. Basically, it is an introduction to gardening on a somewhat rich scale, with chapters on ‘‘Color Harmony’’ and ‘‘A Small Spring Flower Border.’’ In ‘‘The Question of the Gardener’’ she writes, ‘‘A book on gardening in its varying aspects could hardly omit mention of that man who must be constantly in sight of those who garden, the gardener, the paid, the earnest, and almost always the friendly, assistant in our labors with flowers.’’ Among other advice she gives in this chapter on the gardener is to pay him well, at least $100 a month. Two of her very popular books, The Little Garden (1921) and Variety in the Little Garden (1923), were, however, less remote from the average American gardener. The premise behind these two books is that the usual in gardening with taste is a large garden, so the small garden requires special attention. In The Little Garden , she mourns the rise of the automobile, partly because a
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garage is now needed with most homes, taking up valuable garden space, and partly for social reasons: ‘‘I see sometimes the deterioration of the family, physical and mental, brought about by the Ford and its kind.’’
biology at the University of Arizona. Her work as a journalist and political rights activist has been the source of many of the themes of her poetry and fiction, but her central concern in all of her writing is the way women relate to the world.
King wrote extensively for garden magazines and for newspapers like the New York Times, and often her chapters first appeared elsewhere. One of her most interesting pieces is a chapter in Pages from a Garden Note-Book (1921), originally read at the opening of a dormitory for women agriculture students at Massachusetts Agricultural College (now the University of Massachusetts). In ‘‘Vocations for Women in Agriculture,’’ she tells of the founding of the Women’s National Farm and Garden Association in 1913. The goal of the organization was to encourage women to seek jobs on the land and to serve as a sort of information bureau about such work. Centered in Chicago, the association had members who raised such things as poultry, bees, petunia seed, and Poland China hogs. This association was part of the growing consciousness of women’s ability to do physical work outside the home. King looked forward to an extension of such opportunities for women.
The 12 stories of Homeland and Other Stories (1989) depict enduring women who seek to reconcile their quest for individual fulfillment with their sense of responsibility to the community. Their progress is often thwarted by political, social, or economic circumstances. Magda of ‘‘Island on the Moon’’ is a woman who would have been an artist ‘‘if her life had been better.’’ Instead, she ‘‘just has to ooze out a little bit of art in everything she does.’’
King’s nine books, published over a short period of 15 years, were among the most widely read garden books of her day. While lacking the scope and influence of Louise Beebe Wilder and the scholarship of Helen M. Fox and Elizabeth Lawrence, King was probably closer than any of these women to the average middle class reader. OTHER WORKS: Chronicles of the Garden (1925). The Beginner’s Garden (1927). The Flower Garden Day by Day (1927). The Gardener’s Colour Book (1929). From a New Garden (1930). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: NAW (1971). Other references: NYT (18 Jan. 1948). —BEVERLY SEATON
KINGSOLVER, Barbara Born 8 April 1955, Annapolis, Maryland Daughter of Wendell R. and Virginia Henry Kingsolver; married Joseph Hoffman, 1985 (divorced 1993); Steven Hopp; children Camille, Lily Barbara Kingsolver, working as a journalist in 1983, drove into the mining town of Clifton, Arizona, to cover the strike against the Phelps Dodge Copper Corporation. Her book, Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983 (1989), was Kingsolver’s tribute to the women who kept the strike alive. It was also her introduction to the way politics work for women— down and dirty. Born in Maryland, Kingsolver grew up in eastern Kentucky and subsequently moved to Arizona. She graduated from DePauw University (B.A., 1977) and later completed a master’s degree in
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Kingsolver’s novels focus on women seeking their place in community while developing a sense of self. In her first, The Bean Trees (1988), protagonist Taylor Greer flees rural Kentucky and entrapment in what happens to all her friends—pregnancy. Her odyssey includes finding a Cherokee baby, whom she names Turtle, in her car. They settle in Tucson, finding a place in the Jesus Is Lord Used Tire Shop, whose proprietor offers sanctuary to Central American refugees. In that world, Taylor and Turtle find their own sanctuary and become a family. In Pigs in Heaven (1993), the sequel to Bean Trees, the community Taylor and Turtle have forged is under threat. Annawake Fourkiller, a Cherokee lawyer dedicated to returning Native American children to the custody of the tribe, starts proceedings to gain custody of Turtle. The struggle for the child sends Taylor on another odyssey to escape her responsibility to Turtle’s people. Finally, she returns to the reservation and finds that, because of a Cherokee great-grandmother, it is also her tribe. Animal Dreams (1990) combines the personal quest for identity with the larger quest for human rights. Codi Noline, a medical doctor turned high school teacher, returns to Grace, Arizona, to understand her family’s past. Her sister, Hallie, chooses commitment to the politics of the future and goes to Nicaragua while Codi retreats into herself to try to understand her place in the cosmos of Grace. The balance of the personal and the political is a hallmark of Kingsolver’s fiction and has parallels in her poetry. Another America (1992), a dual-language text with Spanish translations by Rebeca Cartes, captures women’s entry into the arena of politics, violence, and survival. Kingsolver’s poems chronicle the struggle for community that keeps women strong. Throughout her work, Kingsolver seeks a dialogue among women of the many cultures of the U.S.—Native American, Latino, Anglo—as they encounter each other and find ways to establish community in difference. Among these women is the Cherokee great-grandmother who appears again and again in Kingsolver’s work and who, like the Great Mother, watches the unfolding history of all her children. Kingsolver writes about family, community, and the natural world. Her exploration of these themes continue in both the fiction and nonfiction of two recent works. High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never (1995) is a collection of 25 essays the author said gave her the opportunity to step from behind her mask of fiction and to say, ‘‘I, Barbara Kingsolver, believe this.’’ The
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essays include her comments on motherhood, property, the place of humans in the animal kingdom, the effects of the Gulf War, her attitude toward housework, the art of fiction writing, as well as her stint as a keyboard player in a band of bestselling authors that included Stephen King and Amy Tan. Her honest and witty personal and political observations cover the defiance of her two-year-old daughter, the ethics of a wild pig who eats up her garden, and the experience of buying a love fetish in a West African market. In the early 1960s Kingsolver lived in the Congo when her parents were health care workers. Out of this experience came The Poisonwood Bible (1998), a symbolic parallel to the Congo’s struggle for independence, this novel is the story of a minister who comes to a small African village in 1959 to convert the natives. There he not only fails to deliver his message of Christianity because he mispronounces basic words in the tribal language, but he also refuses to seek help from the village community in times of flood, drought, malaria, and ant attacks. Ultimately, he and his family are ejected from the village when the villagers decide their traditional gods are better than Jesus. As always in Kingsolver’s books, the story unfolds from the perspective of the female characters—the preacher’s wife and four daughters. Kingsolver’s powerful and simple writing style addresses the problem of getting on with the business of living. While political issues such as race, sex, wealth, poverty, greed, and justice appear as driving forces, her emphasis is on probing into how personal relationships fit into the overarching picture. She continues to enlighten her readers as she delves into this question by expressing her views in her own words and in the words of her women characters. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: ANR 60 (1998). CA 129 (1989). CLC 55 (1992). Other works: Ms. (April 1988). NYTBR (10 April 1988, 5 June 1988, 11 June 1989, 7 Jan. 1990, 2 Sept. 1990, 28 July 1991). The Progressive (Dec. 1998, Feb. 1996). Time (24 Sept. 1990, 9 Nov. 1998). Trachtman, P., ‘‘High Tide in Tucson,’’ in Smithsonian (June 1996). WRB 5:8 (May 1988). Wootten, S., ‘‘In a State of Hopefulness: Barbara Kingsolver Swims At High Tide,’’ in Sojourners (May/June 1996). —MARY A. MCCAY, UPDATED BY PAULA C. MURPHY
KINGSTON, Maxine Hong Born 27 October 1940, Stockton, California Daughter of Tom and Ying Lan Chew Hong; married Earll Kingston, 1962 Maxine Hong Kingston’s parents immigrated from China in the 1930s, eventually setting up a laundry in Stockton, where Kingston worked as a child. She received a degree in English from the University of California at Berkeley and studied toward an
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advanced degree in education. In 1967 she moved to Honolulu and from then until 1977 taught English at the Mid-Pacific Institute, a private coeducational high school. In 1977 Kingston was a visiting assistant professor at the University of Hawaii, where she taught creative writing. She has contributed many articles and reviews to popular and literary magazines. Winner of the 1976 National Book Critics’ Circle Award for nonfiction, her first book, The Woman Warrior, has been variously viewed as a novel, a memoir, and an autobiography. In it Kingston recreates in five sketches the imagined life of a Chinese aunt who committed suicide after bearing a child out of wedlock; the training and exploits of a legendary Chinese woman warrior; the disjunctively similar training and exploits of Kingston’s own mother, first as a doctor in China and then as the mother of six children born after she arrived in America at the age of forty-five to run a Chinese laundry; the failure of another of Kingston’s aunts to adapt to modern life after the husband she came from China to reclaim after 30 years rejected her in favor of his modern American wife; and, finally, the author’s own struggles with all the ghosts of her past as she balances the Chinese heritage, largely unarticulated, and the American life which impinges so painfully and immediately upon her childhood. Throughout the book move ghosts. There are the shrouded villagers who terrorize the ‘‘no-name’’ aunt; the old-young couple who trains the woman warrior in their fantasy mountain fastness. We confront our everyday selves in the multitude of ghosts who populate the world of the young Kingston: garbage ghosts, meter-reader ghosts, newsboy ghosts, half-ghosts of Chinese immigrant children raised in America, and finally the unnamed but insistent ghost of Kingston’s own Americanized self as she torments a remnant of her past who, like her, refuses to speak in public. It is these ghosts that unite the five sketches— ghosts of the past, of otherness, of a larger, corporeal world which only gradually merges with emotional reality. It is only by attempting to retrace the legends told by her family and to remake them into her own life that Kingston comes to uneasy terms with them. And yet she is beset by difficulties: her mother will not tell what is truth and what desire, and the child cannot often distinguish. ‘‘I don’t see how [the Chinese] kept up a continuous culture for five thousand years,’’ she remarks. ‘‘Maybe they didn’t; maybe everyone makes it up as they go along.’’ But her attempt to shape the world through her own legends proves insufficient too, and she flees from the spectre of forcing another shy Chinese girl into the legend Kingston would, but cannot quite, create. With maturity comes the inevitable questioning: Perhaps the ghosts have nothing to do with the struggle; perhaps ‘‘what I once had was not Chinese-sight at all but childsight that would have disappeared eventually without such struggle.’’ Oneself becomes the ultimate elusive ghost. Kingston crosses the ultimate cultural barrier into the mind, where cultural patterns are but archetypes. The unheroic, vulnerable American-born child both embodies and is descended from the woman warrior, invulnerable symbol of heroism from whom all of us are descended and whose blood, both heroic and ghostly,
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runs in all veins. The Woman Warrior is short and elliptical. It sounds like a Chinese translation, with simple sentences and flat direct statements. As in poetry, much is left to the reader. The book achieves through style and tone a force of pure incontrovertibility which in large part creates its aura of universality.
and stereotypes that can sometimes seem completely different and at other times strangely conflated. He frequently invokes and identifies with the trickster King of the Monkeys of Chinese folklore, which becomes an ‘‘American Monkey’’ by the end of the book.
Since the publication of The Woman Warrior (1976), Kingston has become one of the most critically praised and best known contemporary writers in the U.S. and by far the most studied Asian-American writer. Devoting herself wholly to her writing since the late 1970s, she won the 1981 nonfiction American Book Award for her narrative China Men and the American Academy and Institute of Art and Letters Award for literature in 1990.
Kingston has been criticized by some for promoting a fake exotic Asian-American image or for catering to ‘‘mainstream’’ tastes at the expense of ethnic authenticity. It is precisely the notion of ‘‘authenticity’’ that Kingston questions while she affirms the existence and significance of tradition and history. She is one of the premiere interpreters of the fluctuating and persistent nature of those racial and ethnic categories in the U.S. that are impossible both to escape and to fix with any certainty.
A series of biographical/autobiographical narrations, China Men recounts the encounters of several generations of Kingston’s male ancestors with the U.S. and graphically examines the difficult questions of race, ethnicity, and nationality in America. These men often work in menial or marginal jobs—as a farmworker clearing land in Hawaii, as a laborer building the transcontinental railroad, as the owner of a small laundry. Yet these jobs are often at the foundation of the communities in which these men and their families live. The men whose stories are told remain outside ‘‘mainstream’’ U.S. society in many respects, victims of virulent racist discrimination, culturally enforced silence, and violence. Their identification as ‘‘Chinese’’ is also called into question, however: one uncle, deranged by dreams of the U.S. and the Communist Revolution in China, goes there, to a ‘‘home’’ he may never have previously seen, and disappears; the narrator’s father is cheated by his Chinese partners in a laundry. As in Kingston’s earlier work, dreams of China and American dreams collide with American racial constructions and the actual conditions of immigrant life in the U.S., producing an unstable story of hope, disappointment, and disquiet in which neither side of the hyphen in ‘‘Chinese-American’’ can be either erased or made to remain fixed. Kingston’s first novel, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989), also deals with the unstable and inescapable categories of race and nationality in the United States. The protagonist of the novel, Wittman Ah Sing, is a fifth-generation Chinese-American living in San Francisco’s Chinatown during the 1960s. He can speak, though not read much Chinese, as well as recognize and speak a number of Chinese-American vernaculars produced by various Chinese encounters with American English in U.S. ‘‘Chinatowns.’’ He is also familiar with Chinese folklore and traditional culture. At the same time Wittman (named for Walt Whitman) is a poet, storyteller, and graduate in English at the University of California at Berkeley, familiar with both the ‘‘high’’ literary culture of Rilke and Joyce and the counterculture that seems on the cusp of the transformation from the period of the Beats, especially Jack Kerouac, to the hippies. He is also saturated and obsessed with American popular culture, particularly the images of Asians and Asian-Americans promoted in such movies as Flower Drum Song and The World of Suzie Wong. The son of Chinese-American vaudevilleans who traveled the country performing largely African American music, Wittman is at home, if not exactly comfortable, with theatrics, illusion, and ethnic types
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Kingston was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 1997. Since the publication of Tripmaster Monkey, she has been at work on a number of projects. She has also remained active in the literary community, participating on various panels throughout the country. Kingston’s method of writing has changed in recent years. Following the fire that destroyed her home (and her manuscript in progress), Kingston decided she no longer wanted to work alone. Thus her stage adaptation of The Woman Warrior and China Men (combined into one work) was the result of a decade-long collaboration with a number of producers, screenwriters, playwrights, actors, editors, and musicians. The play opened at the Berkeley Repertory Theater in 1994. Kingston has also been working on a new full-length piece, The Fifth Book of Peace. Like much of her work, it will be difficult to categorize as fiction or nonfiction, combining stories of her own experiences with those of invented characters. The Fifth Book of Peace is being created in her new collaborative mode; Kingston has been working extensively with a group of war veterans discussing and writing about their ideas of war and peace. OTHER WORKS: Hawaii One Summer (1987, originally published 1978). Through the Black Curtain (1987). ‘‘Cultural Misreadings by American Reviewers,’’ in Asian and Western Writers in Dialogue (edited by Guy Amirthanayagam, 1982). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brown Ruoff, A. L. and J. Ward, eds., Redefining American Literary History (1990). Duke, M. S., ed., Modern Chinese Women Writers: Critical Appraisals (1989). Eakin, P. J., Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in Self-Invention (1985). Kessler-Harris, A. and W. McBrian, eds., Faith of a (Woman) Writer (1988). Yang, M. C. ‘‘From Ethnicity to a Wider World: The Education of Kate Simon and Maxine Hong Kingston’’ (thesis, 1992). Reference works: CANR (1987). FC (1990). Modern American Women Writers (1991). Other references: American Literary History (1990). Asian Week (17 June 1994, 31 Mar. 1995). Biography (Winter 1983, Spring 1986, Spring 1989). Humanities (1 Nov. 1997). MELUS (Winter 1982, Winter 1983, Fall 1985, Spring 1987, Spring 1988). Ms. (June 1989). Michigan Quarterly Review (1987). NYRB (3
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Feb. 1977). NYTBR (7 Nov. 1976, 23 April 1989). PMLA (1988). Seven Days (28 Feb. 1977).VVLS (May 1989). —LORALEE MACPIKE, UPDATED BY JAMES SMETHURST AND VALERIE VOGRIN
KINNEY, Elizabeth (Clementine) Dodge Born 18 December 1810, New York, New York; died 19 November 1889, Summit, New Jersey Wrote under: Mrs. E. C. Kinney, Mrs. E. Clementine Kinney, Mrs. E. C. Stedman Daughter of David and Sarah Cleveland Dodge; married Edmund B. Stedman, 1830 (died); William B. Kinney, 1841 Elizabeth Dodge Kinney’s father was a prosperous New York merchant. Her first son was Edmund C. Stedman, American anthologist, literary critic, and poet. After her first husband’s death at sea in 1835, she became a regular contributor of poems and articles to popular magazines such as Graham’s, Sartain’s and the Knickerbocker. In 1841 she married William B. Kinney, ‘‘the leading political writer in the state of New Jersey’’ and owner and editor of the Newark Daily Advertiser, and combined work on essays and criticism for his paper with her duties as mother of a growing family. Her husband was appointed chargé d’affaires at Sardinia in 1850. For three years, the Kinneys lived in Turin, and then, for more than 10 years, they lived in Florence, before returning to New Jersey in 1865. Felicità: A Metrical Romance (1855), Kinney’s first work, is the supposedly true story of an unfortunate young French girl who is sold as a slave by her miserly father. It is long on bad rhymes and strained meters but short on credible characters or motives. Bianca Cappello: A Tragedy (1873), set in Venice and Florence in the latter part of the 16th century, is based on historical sources and told in blank verse, complete with comic scenes. The leading character, Bianca, is both desirous of power (she is involved in the murders of three people) and very much in love, and therefore her motives are often unclear. So prolific was Kinney that even her collection of Poems (1867) omits many of her contributions to magazines and newspapers from the 1830s through the 1850s. In 1854 critic Caroline May wrote of Kinney’s poems, ‘‘There is much genuine feeling, a delicate perception of the beautiful, and an honest love for the simple and true, in her effusions, which cannot fail to please.’’ To modern tastes, her verses mix bromide and saccharin, and only a few rise above the general mediocrity. ‘‘The Infant’s Miniature’’ (Knickerbocker, July 1842) manages to suggest some particularity and freshness, as does the topographical poem ‘‘Mount Hope Cemetery, Rochester’’ (Knickerbocker, Sept. 1840). Her tales, like her poems, suffer today because they suited all too well the popular taste of her era. Kinney’s journalism and travel pieces such as ‘‘A Sabbath Among the Mountains of Pennsylvania’’ (Graham’s, July 1845) retain far more interest.
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Kinney’s best writings now seem to be her accounts, in letters and journals, of Italy and of the people she knew there. Her journal records a revelatory dispute between the Brownings, whom the Kinneys knew in Florence, and Kinney over George Sand’s morality or immorality, and many comments on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dabblings in spiritualism. Most of Kinney’s works published during her lifetime are now of interest chiefly as indices of mid-19th-century American popular taste; her letters, ‘‘Journal,’’ and ‘‘Personal Reminiscences’’ retain more lasting charm and power to please. OTHER WORKS: Elizabeth Dodge Kinney’s ‘‘Journal’’ and ‘‘Personal Reminiscences’’ are in the Columbia University Library in New York City. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Woodress, J., ed., Essays Mostly on Periodical Publishing in America: A Collection in Honor of Clarence Gohdes (1973). Reference works: AA. The American Female Poets (1854). CAL. DAB. The Female Poets of America, (1850). The Female Prose Writers of America (1857). NCAB. Other references: BIS (1976). —SUSAN SUTTON SMITH
KINZIE, Juliette (Augusta) Magill Born 11 September 1806, Middletown, Connecticut; died 15 September 1870, Amagansett, New York Daughter of Arthur and Frances Wolcott Magill; married John H. Kinzie, 1830; children: seven Born to a wealthy and established Connecticut family, Juliette Magill Kinzie was the eldest child and an only daughter. She was educated at home by her mother and an uncle, and then, in 1821, attended the Emma Willard Female Seminary in New Haven. Married to an Indian agent at Fort Winnebago, Wisconsin, Kinzie later used Winnebago as the scene for her novels. She and her husband settled in Chicago in 1834, where she quickly became the early settlement’s social force. She assisted in founding St. Luke’s Hospital and St. James Church, the first Episcopalian church in the settlement. The Kinzies were parents of seven children, only three of whom survived their parents. Narrative of the Massacre at Chicago, August 15, 1812, and of Some Preceding Events (1844) records the memories of ‘‘eyewitnesses of the events.’’ It contains a detailed description of the raid of Chicago conducted by the Pottowattamie Nation, the Ottawas, Shawnees, Winnebagoes, and Calumets. Kinzie claims her Narrative was ‘‘made simply for the purpose of preserving to the children of the writer a faithful picture of the perilous scenes through which those near and dear to them had been called to pass.’’ Focusing on personal incidents as remembered by members of the Kinzie family, the Narrative utilizes conversation and
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an anecdotal style. It was considered factual enough, however, to be used two years later by Henry Brown in his History of Illinois.
she returned to London, where she obtained employment with the family of the Reverend E. S. Gannet, who brought her to Boston.
Kinzie’s second work, Wau-Bun: The ‘Early Day’ in the Northwest (1856), is generally considered her best novel. A long work about the activities and experiences of settlers in the Midwest, it describes Kinzie’s journeys through Wisconsin and Illinois and includes ‘‘pictures of domestic life and experience.’’ As described in her introduction, her technique depends on the use of journals and letters written during the period, for her goal was to write with an ‘‘air of truth and reality.’’ Wau-Bun is also very much concerned with the Native Americans, and Kinzie alternately portrays their ‘‘Acuteness and Simplicity.’’ She reprints her vivid description of the massacre of the Chicago settlement, and the Battle of Lake Erie and the rebuilding of Fort Dearborn are prominently featured.
In 1841 Kirby joined the Brook Farm community at West Roxbury, Massachusetts, as pupil and teacher, initially to develop sufficient mathematical skills to obtain a teaching certificate. Eventually she took over the direction of the Infant School. Kirby readily embraced the liberal religious views of Brook Farm, where no formal religion was imposed. A rebel from early childhood, she found it difficult to respect ‘‘a Diety who had made such a botch of his universe.’’ in her autobiography, Years of Experience (1887), she wrote: ‘‘How much I wished that the Almighty had been a mother, an infinite mother! She would never have planned an endless hell.’’
Walter Ogilby (1869) is a departure from the scene and style of Kinzie’s earlier works. Set in New England during the 1820s, the novel is a sort of imitation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. It concerns the romantic adventures of Alice Morton, who finally marries the Byronic Ogilby. Kinzie’s final novel, Mark Logan, published posthumously in 1871, returns to the subject matter of Wau-Bun. Set in Detroit at the turn of the 19th century, the novel depicts the experiences of English and French settlers, military families, and Native Americans as they interact on the frontier. The plot revolves around the hero’s disguise as an Native American, the surrender of Red Bird, and the Winnebago War. Though her writing is filled with the flaws of popular writing—stereotyped heroes and heroines, contrived plots, and stilted dialogue— her best work captures the everyday experiences of men and women struggling to survive on an alien frontier. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: NAW (1971). —DIANE LONG HOEVELER
KIRBY, Georgiana Bruce Born December 1818, Bristol, England; died 27 February 1887, Santa Cruz, California Daughter of Francis and Mrs. Stradwick Bruce; married R. C. Kirby, 1850 The second daughter of her mother’s first marriage, Georgiana Bruce Kirby was born three months after the death of her seaman father. Her childhood was a mixture of one happy year in the country, two years of formal education, and a number of years of deprivation in a small English seaport town. At fourteen Kirby became a governess for an English family who took her to France and later to Melbourne, Canada, where she taught school and learned the skills necessary for survival on the frontier. In 1837
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The radical social views of Brook Farm also appealed to Kirby. She enjoyed the intimate friendships, aesthetic pleasures, and intellectual contacts with people like Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, W. H. Channing, and Theodore Parker. She developed an interest in mesmerism, hydropathy, and phrenology and espoused abolition, women’s rights, and Fourierist reforms. Ultimately, she became so radicalized she believed revolution alone could effect social change. When Kirby decided to leave Brook Farm, Margaret Fuller, who had become her closest friend, arranged for her to meet Eliza W. Farnham, the matron of the women’s prison at Sing Sing. Farnham welcomed Kirby as her assistant, but, unable to endure the tensions of the work, Kirby left after a year. She endeavored to obtain a teaching assignment in the Midwest in order to help young blacks, but her strong abolitionist views made it impossible for her to keep a position. In 1850 Kirby moved to Santa Cruz, California, where, after living with Farnham for some time, she married R. C. Kirby. A decade after her marriage Kirby began to write for publication. Her initial piece, ‘‘My First Visit to Brook Farm,’’ appeared in the Overland Monthly in 1870. The narrative recreates the idyllic atmosphere of the early days at the farm. Kirby’s use of fictional names and her alteration of some events lessens the historical value of the work. Later publications concerning Brook Farm also fictionalize the life to some extent. Kirby also wrote at least one short story, ‘‘A Tale of the Redwoods’’ (1874). Transmission; or, Variation of Character Through the Mother (1879), Kirby’s most unusual work, consists of what Kirby calls ‘‘self-evident propositions’’ concerning the power which the pregnant woman exercises over the fetus. Drawing on observations made during nearly 40 years, Kirby refutes the notion that the woman ‘‘merely nourishes the germ given by the father.’’ She demonstrates, with many examples, that the mother’s occupations and attitudes during gestation strongly benefit or impair the child’s temperament and later actions. Kirby’s most extensive work is her autobiographical narrative Years of Experience, which recounts her life from her youth up to the point of her departure for the West. Although partially fictionalized, the work as a whole gives a good account of her life and thought. The book provides ample evidence for the remark of one Brook Farmer that Kirby was the most radical of them all.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY: Codman, J. T., Brook Farm: Historical and Personal Memoirs (1894). Curtis, E. R., A Season in Utopia: The Story of Brook Farm (1961). Farnham, E. W., California InDoors and Out (1856). Stern, M. B., ‘‘Two Letters from the Sophisticates of Santa Cruz,’’ in Book Club of California Quarterly News-Letter (Summer 1968). Swift, L., Brook Farm: Its Members, Scholars, and Visitors (1961). —LUCY FREIBERT
KIRK, Ellen Warner (Olney) Born 6 November 1842, Southington, Connecticut; died 1928, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Wrote under: Henry Hayes, Ellen Olney Kirk, Ellen W. Olney Daughter of Jesse and Elizabeth Barnes Olney; married John F. Kirk, 1879 Even in her childhood, Ellen Warner Kirk enjoyed a familiarity with the publishing world. Her mother was the sister of the New York publisher A. S. Barnes, and her father, in his time a well-known geographer and educator, was the author of numerous textbooks including Geography and Atlas (1828), a standard work widely used in American schools that went through nearly 100 printings. Although Kirk evidenced a love of literature and a penchant for creative writing throughout her extensive private education at schools in Connecticut and Boston, she did not actively try to get her work published until after the death of her father in 1872. The serialized publication of her first novel, Love in Idleness, in Lippincott’s (1876-77), brought her an immediate fame, which she enjoyed throughout her prolific career. She published 29 book-length works of fiction as well as numerous essays and short stories for various periodicals, primarily Atlantic Monthly. Following her marriage to an author of historical studies and editor of Lippincott’s, she lived in the Germantown area of Philadelphia. In Love in Idleness (1877), Kirk traces the adventures and misadventures of several characters spending a vacation together at the Connecticut country home of a wealthy bachelor. Nearly everyone falls in love, but almost never with each other. There is no actual plot other than that provided by the conversations that reveal the inevitable unraveling and recoupling. The novel ends happily, if predictably, with at least half a dozen marriages. Kirk repeated these basic elements in her second novel, His Heart’s Desire (1878). Here the setting is a stately ‘‘old Knickerbocker’’ family mansion, comfortably overlooking the Hudson River. The various complications originating from the tangled lives of the many characters are resolved only through an equally complicated series of misunderstandings, trysts, deaths, suicides, and blackmail schemes. This interest in combining a variety of characters in revealing social situations was to prove the mainstay of Kirk’s popularly received fiction throughout her prolific career. Kirk’s most favorably reviewed and financially successful novel was The Story of Margaret Kent (1886). Rumored to be a
fictionalized, and overly flattering, account of the life of the writer Katharine Sherwood McDowell (1849-1883), it relates the travails of a young author trying to support herself and her daughter after having been deserted by her weak, spendthrift husband. Many of the complications in the novel arise when Margaret is courted by several suitors who presume that she is a widow. Margaret is the most complicated, realistically portrayed, and continually intriguing of Kirk’s many heroines. Her struggles to earn an independent income and wrestle with the conflicting demands of passion and propriety are of lasting interest. Even the contrived death of her husband, which frees her to marry the worthy Dr. Walton and conveniently resolves the moral ambiguities surrounding divorce and fidelity, does not seriously undercut the novel’s worth. Kirk was less successful when she repeated the plot of a noble heroine married to the wrong man in a later novel, Walford (1890). Another of her better novels is Queen Money (1888). The focus is on the misadventures that befall Otto March, a naive young college graduate apprenticed to a prominent Wall Street financier and living with relatives involved in the publishing industry. The setting provides Kirk with a wide range of possible intrigues, humorous anecdotes, and social commentary upon which to capitalize. Although many of these complications arise as a result of the numerous characters’ attempts to heed the dictates of materialistic and overly fashionable society, Kirk’s motive seems less social criticism than entertainment. The menu at a dinner party and the program at an opera receive as much narrative attention as the vagaries of the stock market; events provide the background for the revelation of and interplay between characters. A calamitous stock market crash does solve most of the romantic complications, and the essentially unscathed Otto escapes with the idealized heroine, Lucy Florian. Kirk repeated this examination of the follies that befall the ‘‘Mammon worshippers of New York’’ in two subsequent novels, A Daughter of Eve (1889) and Ciphers (1891). Of the two, A Daughter of Eve is the more interesting. The novels Kirk wrote during the second half of her career are strikingly less memorable than her earlier novels. Her critics often bemoaned that she did not live up to the promise she initially demonstrated. The clever style and definitive ability to capture characters through their conversations becomes less controlled, the repetition of plots more tedious, and the powers of observation less acute. Although widely read in her own time, most of Kirk’s works will probably strike the modern reader as ephemeral. Only The Story of Margaret Kent and Queen Money seem to deserve any genuine resurrection. OTHER WORKS: Clare and Bebe (1879). Through Winding Ways (1879). A Lesson in Love (1881). Fairy Gold (1883). A Midsummer Madness (1884). In City and Camp (1886). All in the Wild March Morning (1887). Sons and Daughters (1887). Better Times Stories (1889). Maiden’s Choosing (1890). A Superfluous Woman (1892). Wooing of the Two Mr. Benedicts (1892). The Story of Lawrence Garthe (1894). The Revolt of the Daughter (1897). Dorothy Deane: A Children’s Story (1898). A Revolutionary Love Story, and the High Steeple of St. Chrysostom’s (1898). Dorothy
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and Her Friends (1899). Our Lady Vanity (1901). A Remedy for Love (1902). Goodbye Proud World (1903). The Apology of Ayliffe (1904). Marcia (1907).
the process of the transformation of the diverse aspects of pioneer life into a less precarious existence. Integrating her impressions, Kirkland comments on the scene in retrospect and with accumulated insight.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hill, V., Strategy and Breadth: The Socialist-Feminist in American Fiction (dissertation, 1979). Logan, J., The Part Taken by Women in American History (1912). Taylor, W., The Economic Novel in America (1942). Reference works: Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography (1900). A Critical Dictionary of English Literature (1863). A Dictionary of American Authors (1904). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Atlantic (June 1888). Epoch (Feb. 1888). Galaxy (May 1877). Harper’s (Apr. 1886). Independent (30 May 1889). Literary World (6 Feb. 1886, 5 Jan. 1889). Nation (13 Mar. 1879, 19 Mar. 1891, 11 Feb. 1892). Overland Monthly (Aug. 1887).
Kirkland returned to the East in 1843, where her husband would have better professional opportunities and their four children (Joseph Kirkland, the eldest son, later became a well-known novelist) could get proper schooling. After her husband’s death in 1846, Kirkland immediately took up his responsibilities at the Christian Inquirer, operated her school for girls, reviewed for Duyckinck’s Literary World, and shortly thereafter undertook the editorship of the Union Magazine of Literature and Art. In its earliest days under Kirkland’s leadership the Union was considered one of the best family magazines of its kind.
—VICKI LYNN HILL
KIRKLAND, Caroline M(atilda) Stansbury Born 11 January 1801, New York, New York; died 6 April 1864, New York, New York Also wrote under: Mrs. Mary Clavers, Aminadab Peering Daughter of Samuel and Eliza Alexander Stansbury; married William Kirkland, 1828 (died 1846); children: four Caroline Kirkland, an eldest child, came from a literary family (her mother was a writer and her great-grandfather was a Tory poet during the American Revolution). In the Quaker school of her aunt Lydia Mott she received an unusually good education for a girl born at the beginning of the 19th century. After her marriage to Kirkland the couple settled in Geneva, New York, where they established a school. In 1835, they crossed overland to Detroit, an already thriving ‘‘metropolis’’ on the edge of the frontier to direct the newly established Detroit female seminary. The land fever and get-rich schemes circulating through Detroit engaged their imagination, and two years later they located 60 miles west, in the tiny hamlet of Pinckney. The pioneering experience was the impetus for Kirkland’s writing career. A New Home—Who’ll Follow? (1839), written by Kirkland under the pseudonym ‘‘Mrs. Mary Clavers, an Actual Settler,’’ gives her slightly fictionalized account of the early years of a new community on the frontier. Loosely constructed of character sketches, brief essays on events unique to frontier life, tales, and a few mild adventures, the book covers the development of the town from the log cabin to the community. Though Kirkland claims that nothing very adventurous happens, the life she describes is, in fact, eventful and arduous. In her second book, Forest Life (1842), the device of a tour of Michigan allows Kirkland to comment on the developing institutions of the frontier, to generalize on events, and to describe the natural terrain and
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A New Home—Who’ll Follow? brought immediate popularity; Forest Life followed to enthusiastic reviews. Poe thought Western Clearings (1845), a collection of sketches leaning toward the short story form, the best of all. Though best known for this Western writing, Kirkland also completed a travel book, a biography of Washington, a novel, and three collections of essays. But the work of the last 20 years of her life remains unexplored and unevaluated. Though never identified with the women’s rights movement, Kirkland’s introduction to Reid’s A Plea for Women (1845) appeared three years before the first women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls. Kirkland advocated equal legal and political rights, and was especially bitter on the problem of women’s financial dependence. She was also deeply concerned about the slavery issue and by 1856, after completing her Washington biography, wrote a friend, ‘‘I am terribly low-spirited about public affairs. I see nothing but civil war and disunion before us.’’ Though a pacifist, she supported and worked for the Union. In the early 1850s, her short stories and essays were brought out as gift-book collections: The Evening Book (1852); A Book for the Home Circle (1853); and Autumn Hours (1854). The major topic in each was the correction and improvement of American manners and morals, which she managed to urge with sophisticated, disarming simplicity quite different from the saccharine and somber utilitarianism that characterized most literature on the same topics. In one essay, ‘‘Literary Women,’’ a spirited defense of women authors, Kirkland with tongue in cheek suggests shopkeepers not sell pens to women who write, and that women should be excluded from school—at least till they are over forty. At a time when popular literature consisted of moralizing essays on self-improvement and sentimental tales, Kirkland, in contrast, expressed herself clearly, concisely, and humorously. Her themes, settings, characters, and moral vision were a realist’s. Her range of female characters gives a more complete picture of the nature and condition of women than can be derived from the work of the first-ranking American authors of the period. Kirkland wrote, ‘‘It has been thought necessary to dress up and render conspicuous a certain class of events, while another class, perhaps far more efficient in producing the real features of the age, are unnoticed and forgotten.’’ Kirkland, with her realist’s perspectives, makes a significant contribution to our own times.
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OTHER WORKS: Principles of Morality by J. Dymond (edited by Kirkland, 1847). Spenser and the Faery Queen (edited by Kirkland, 1847). Holidays Abroad (1849). The Book of Home Beauty (1852). Garden Walks with the Poets (1852). The Helping Hand (1853). Memoirs of Washington (1857). The School-Girl’s Garland (1864). Patriotic Eloquence (1866). Some of Caroline Kirkland’s papers are housed within the Chicago Historical Society. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Dondore, D. A., The Prairie and the Making of Middle America: Four Centuries of Description (1926). Keyes, L. C., ‘‘Caroline M. Kirkland: A Pioneer in American Realism’’ (dissertation, 1935). Kolodny, A., The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 16301860 (1984). Leverentz, D., Manhood and the American Renaissance (1989). Osborne, W. S., Caroline M. Kirkland (1972). Parra, J. M., ‘‘Altered Vision: Three Nineteenth-Century Western Authors: Caroline Kirkland, Mary Hallock Foote and Mary Austin’’ (thesis, 1995). Riordan, D. G., ‘‘The Concept of Simplicity in the Works of Mrs. Caroline M. Kirkland’’ (dissertation, 1973). Roberts, A. J., ‘‘The Letters of Caroline M. Kirkland’’ (dissertation, 1976). Stickney, G., ‘‘Oh, the Troubles We’ve Seen: Women’s Pioneering Portrayals of Hardship in the Development of American Literature’’ (thesis, 1993). Reference works: AA. CAL. DAB. NAW (1971). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United Stated (1995). Other references: Godey’s Lady’s Book (August 1846). Legacy (Fall 1991). MichH (Sept. 1956, March 1958, Dec. 1961). —AUDREY ROBERTS
much praise for her ‘‘interpretations’’ of Chinese poetry, she remarked that her mother (credited in YIN: New Poems, 1984, as her muse) had read Arthur Waley’s translations to her when she was as young as eight. High-minded and intense, Kizer missed other children, but her childhood and her remarkably individual education suggest the freedom available to many important creative personalities. Living in the western U.S. may also have contributed to the sense of possibility essential to becoming a writer. In a valuable brief autobiography, Kizer captures the bravery and the variety of her ancestors’ achievements as they struggled toward the far edge of the continent. Similar pride might have also inspired her first public success: a patriotic poem published in the Ladies’ Home Journal and set to music for radio when she was just fifteen. Looking for a college far from home to match the seriousness and eccentricity of her upbringing, Kizer settled on Sarah Lawrence, a school that challenged her self-image but also provided encouragement for her writing. When the New Yorker published one of her poems, the seventeen-year-old author received over 500 letters—public endorsement for an unsure commitment. Going on to Columbia University after graduation to study comparative literature on a Chinese Cultural Fellowship, Kizer subsequently continued her studies in China. But her poetic inspiration remained more imaginative than linguistic. Waley’s translations suggested the imitations included in her second collection of poems, Knock Upon Silence (1965). Praising her sensitivity to the spirit of the Chinese poems, critics admired her ability to include many perspectives in her work. Comparisons with Waley suggest entirely new dimensions of psychological insight.
In the second half of the 20th century, Carolyn Kizer emerges as one of a powerful group of women poets for whom motherhood is a crucial aspect of identity. These women, Adrienne Rich, Denise Levertov, Audre Lorde, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath, among others, helped expand the range of metaphor and the depth of meaning for all poets and for all women. Not simply a feminist poet, a gifted translator, a committed internationalist, Kizer has an inclusive generous intellect that offers a strong stand against the petty visions attributed to ‘‘women’’ poets of the past.
It was, Kizer said, her study of the craft with Theodore Roethke at the University of Washington in the early 1950s that finally turned her into a self-assured poet. The Ungrateful Garden (1961, reissued 1999), her first volume, was a polished offering reflective of the highly valued stress on workmanship characterizing the earlier decade. Poems like ‘‘The Great Blue Heron’’ and ‘‘The Death of a Public Servant’’ hold up as elegantly crafted artifacts. Perhaps reacting to Roethke’s mocking hostility to women poets as much as she admired his teaching techniques, Kizer also began to record the range of women’s sensibilities finally included in her assembled poems for women, Mermaids in the Basement: Poems for Women (1984). But the idea that women writers were the custodians of the world’s best-kept secret, ‘‘merely the private lives of one-half of humanity,’’ has always been with her. A protofeminist, as were many of her gifted contemporaries (women poets trained by men), she early saw beyond the college English Department into life. With the ‘‘Pro Femina’’ sequence in Mermaids, she distinguished herself as a pioneer in forging new traditions in American women’s writing.
Born when her politically active biologist mother was in her forties and her distinguished planner-lawyer father fifty, Kizer flourished on the attentions afforded an only child with extraordinary parents. Her father introduced her to a parade of accomplished friends such as Lewis Mumford, Percy Grainger, and Vachel Lindsay, and her mother gave up her own work to encourage her daughter’s talents. When Kizer later garnered
The roles Kizer has played as poet are various and international. In 1959 she became an editor and founder of Poetry Northwest, which she served until 1965. She acted as cultural ambassador to Pakistan in 1964-65 and continued a life of public service as the first director of Literary Programs for the National Endowment of the Arts, where good sense distinguished her choices. During these years, she managed to raise three children
KIZER, Carolyn Born 10 December 1925, Spokane, Washington Daughter of Benjamin H. and Mabel Ashley Kizer; married Charles S. Bullitt, 1948 (divorced); John M. Woodbridge, 1975; children: Ashley, Scot, Jill
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who make their presence felt in a number of moving poems. And she has continued to share her knowledge of poetry as a teacher: from North Carolina to Ohio to Iowa to Stanford to Arizona and Princeton, young writers have profited from her critical advice. Fellow professionals have appreciated her talents enough to award her a Pulitzer Prize in 1985 and a Robert Frost medal in 1988. What we continue to value most highly in Kizer’s work is her deep sense of engagement with life on every level, personal, political, and aesthetic, an involvement that makes all readers more human by sharpening our awareness of the possibilities in every kind of experience. OTHER WORKS: Midnight Was My Cry: New and Selected Poems (1971). The Nearness of You (1986). Carrying Over: Translations from the Chinese, Urdu, Macedonian, Yiddish, and French African (1988). The Shattered Mirror: Poems from the Chinese Democracy Movement (with D. Finkel, 1991). Proses: Essays on Poets and Poetry (1993). The Essential Clare (edited by Kizer, 1993). Picking and Choosing: Essays on Prose (1995). Election Day, 1984 (1996). Harping On: Poems 1985-1995 (1996). On a Line from Valery (1996). 100 Great Poems by Women: A Golden Ecco Anthology (1998). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Howe, F., ed., No More Masks! An Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Women Poets, Newly Revised and Expanded (1993). North, A. F., ‘‘Carolyn Kizer: Contemporary Feminism’’ (thesis 1988). O’Connell, N., At the Field’s End: Interviews With 22 Pacific Northwest Writers (1998). Rigsbee, D., ed., An Answering Music: On the Poetry of Carolyn Kizer (1990). Schumock, J., Story, Story, Story: Conversations with American Authors (1999). Simic, C. and D. Lehman, eds., The Best American Poetry, 1992 (1992). Reference works: CAAS (1987). CA (1977, 1999). CANR (1988). CLC (1980, 1986). DLB (1980). FC (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Carolyn Kizer, 17 November 1987 (video, 1987). The Writing Life. A Conversation About the Writing Life Between Lucille Clifton . . . and Carolyn Kizer (video, 1985). —EUGENIA KALEDIN
special interest in archetypal criticism, but she has written in several genres on a wide range of literary, theatrical, and religious figures. She has stated that, through her study of an individual writer, she attempts to explore the deeper levels of the mind and psyche in an effort to approach the collective unconscious. Indeed, her books are an engaging combination of biography and literary criticism viewed from Jungian, mythic, or mystical perspectives. Knapp’s most courageous and, she says, most painful work is Céline: Man of Hate (1974), in which Knapp, a Jew, frankly and intelligently studies Céline’s anti-Semitism. Characteristically, Knapp approaches her subject armored with historical and biographical facts, makes sense of Céline’s art with psychoanalytic insights, forces our attention on the universality of his malady with a passionate rhetoric, and pushes the reader toward healing perspectives with the sheer weight of her conviction. For Knapp, Céline is an example of a man who was unable to confront his ‘‘shadow,’’ unable to establish a rapport between his conscious and his unconscious selves. This failure resulted in ‘‘eruptions,’’ Knapp’s term for Céline’s novels. Céline, she argues, is a symbol of a similar failure in the larger world, as evidenced by the cataclysms that have rocked the century. His usefulness is as a ‘‘guide’’ to help us ‘‘peer. . .into our own. . .depths,’’ so that we can develop the means for our own self-transformation. Perhaps Knapp’s most ambitious work is Dream and Image (1977). Highly praised by reviewers, it analyzes from the point of view of psychoanalysis and myth various aspects of the relationship between dreams, as expressions of the unconscious, and creativity in 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century French figures from Descartes to Mallarmé. She coins the term oneirosphere to describe that region of the mind in which the personal and collective unconscious converge and ‘‘in which dreams and images become discernible to the individual.’’ Her method is to allow the writer or work being analyzed to suggest the pattern she describes: the Great Female Archetype in Racine, the battle with Thanatos in Mallarmé, the conflict between Christian and pagan values in Gautier. Yet the unifying emphases are on the way dreams influence, inspire, and enrich the creative process, and on the way creative works express or resolve the eternal struggles of the psyche.
Born 9 May 1926, New York, New York Daughter of David and Emily Gresser Liebovitz; married Russell S. Knapp, 1949; children: two sons
The Prometheus Syndrome (1979) is a provocative work studying the Promethean impulse: that force, endemic to Occidental man, compelling him to create, to surpass limits, and to outdo the achievements of former centuries. Knapp divides the Prometheus myth into several stages: Prometheus’ ‘‘fashioning of the human race, stealing of fire, being punished for his crime, and reintegration with dignity into the society he rejected.’’
Bettina Liebowitz Knapp, the mother of two sons, is a prolific writer and has taught Romance languages and comparative literature at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the author of a score of books and the recipient of a number of coveted awards. Knapp has a
Each stage in the myth corresponds to the efforts of fictional and real figures representative of a certain age. The first section, ‘‘Man as Creator,’’ studies figures who strained against the ordinary limits of their time but who were nevertheless in harmony with their world. In the second section, ‘‘The Ordeal of
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Reason,’’ Knapp deals with the Promethean hubris—the increasing overvaluation of human powers to understand and control the universe—in Voltaire, Balzac, Hesse, and others. This hubris results in a feeling of alienation that has pervaded the modern sensibility. It is perhaps the last section, ‘‘Toward Integration’’—in which Promethean man, still determined and searching, is reconciled to but not subdued by his place in the world—that expresses the essence of Knapp’s stand on life and literature. She is a critic with a clear vision, who writes lucidly, feels comfortable in any century, in the Occident as well as the Orient, and among a variety of psychological and religious systems. By the end of the 20th century, Knapp was still going strong, publishing at least one of her now nearly trademarked style of historical or psychological insighted studies per year, while also contributing to other works with a similar bent.
OTHER WORKS: Selected: Louis Jouvet: Man of the Theatre (1957). Louise Labé (1964). That Was Yvette: A Biography of Yvette Guilbert (1964). Cymbalum Mundi (1965). Aristide Bruant: A Biography (1968). Jean Genet: A Critical Study of His Writings (1968). Antonin Artaud: Man of Vision (1969, 1993). Jean Cocteau: A Critical Study of His Writings (1970). Jean Racine: Mythos and Renewal in Modern Theatre (1971). Georges Duhamel: A Critical Study of His Writings (1972). Anthology of Modern French Theatre (1974). Maurice Maeterlinck (1975). Off-Stage Voices (1975). French Novelists Speak Out (1976). Anaïs Nin (1978). Fernand Crommelynck (1978). Gérard de Nerval: The Mystic’s Dilemma (1978, 1980). Emile Zola (1980). Theater and Alchemy (1980). Sacha Guitry (1981). Paul Claudel (1982). Andrée Chedid (1984). French Theatre: 1918-1939 (1985). Alfred Stieglitz’s Letters to David Liebowitz, 1923-1930 (1985). Word, Image, Psyche (1985). Women in 20th Century Literature: A Jungian View (1987). Liliane Atlan (1988). The Reign of the Theatrical Director: French Theatre 1887-1924 (1988). Music, Archetype, and the Writer: A Jungian View (1988). Machine, Metaphor, and the Writer: A Jungian View (1989). Emily Dickinson (1989). Gertrude Stein (1990). Exile and the Writer: Exoteric and Esoteric Experiences—A Jungian Approach (1991). Images of Chinese Women: A Westerner’s View (1992). Images of Japanese Women: A Westerner’s View (1992). Walt Whitman (1993). Nathalie Sarraute (1994). French Theatre Since 1968 (1995). Manna & Mystery: A Jungian Approach to Hebrew Myth and Legend (1995). Women in Myth (1997). Women, Myth, and the Female Principle (1998). Gambling, Game, Psyche (1999).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1975). Other references: AR (Winter 1979). Choice (Mar. 1976). FR (May 1978). MLJ (Feb. 1970, Nov. 1975). NYTBR (5 Aug. 1969). Saturday Review (24 May 1969). —ELLEN FRIEDMAN
KNIGHT, Sarah Kemble Born 19 April 1666, Boston, Massachusetts; died 25 September 1727, New London, Connecticut Daughter of Thomas and Elizabeth Trerice Kemble; married Richard Knight, 1689; children: one daughter When Sarah Kemble Knight was born, her family had already been in New England for a generation. Her husband was by some accounts a shipmaster, though a more recent study suggests he may have been the Richard Knight listed in two records as a publican. Upon her father’s death, Knight inherited a house on Moon Street in Boston, where she maintained a large household including her mother, her daughter, and several lodgers, some of whom may have been relatives. Knight herself was active in the copying and witnessing of legal documents and in the settling of estates. She kept a shop in the Moon Street house and is said to have run a writing school, though this has not been verified. In the fall and winter of 1704-05, in order to settle an estate for one of the relatives in her household, Knight traveled on horseback from Boston to New York and back. She was the first woman to accomplish such a feat, securing guides and stopping at various post-houses, inns, and occasionally homes in the towns she passed through. There remains no further record of Richard Knight after 1706. In 1713, when Richard and Sarah’s daughter married, Knight sold the Boston house and moved to Norwich and New London, Connecticut. There she speculated in Native American lands, ran several farms, and kept a house of entertainment. During the journey from Boston to New York, Knight kept notes, which upon her return she fashioned into a journal. At this time, overland travel between the colonies was difficult; there were no main roads, and a traveler had to secure local guides to get from one town or posting place to another. The colonies were separate in government and customs; there were as yet no newspapers; it was only through letters or travelers’ tales that colonists learned about events and customs elsewhere. Knight’s racy narrative describes the difficulties of travel, the inconveniences of inns, and the people she met, ranging from the governor of Connecticut, with whom she supped, to the poor family who allowed her refuge in their drafty hut. Her perceptive, sharp wit spares no one, not even herself. The narrative is a series of episodes pulled together by the vitality and strength of character of its author. Brief as it is, and though it remained in manuscript until 1825, the journal is a landmark in our literature for several reasons. Along with the journal of Samuel Sewall, it represents the lay view as opposed to that of the ministers, who until this time dominated American letters. As Knight’s account rushes along, she displays several of the types of humor and characters that were to develop as typically American: the pompous judge making a fool of himself, the laconic master of understatement, the country ‘‘bumpkin’’ who later may be seen as Yankee Doodle, and a succession of other tobacco-chewing yokels. Her use of generic names for characters, such as ‘‘Bumpkin Simpers,’’ ‘‘Joan Tawdry,’’ and ‘‘Gaffer,’’ perhaps based on a reading of Pilgrim’s
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Progress, presages the use of stereotyped characters in the newspapers soon to be started in England and America. In one passage where Knight is riding at night, she imagines the towers of towns and palaces, displaying a longing for Europe that recurs in much of American literature through Henry James and later expatriates, and her descriptions of the terrors of night resemble the Gothic effects later used by Irving. Her journal indicates throughout that its author was well versed in the popular literature of the day. Its prose is interlaced with poems in a variety of current styles; in one poem she uses the kind of couplets in vogue in England but not in America at the time. Her journal represents an early movement toward the satire and other forms that were used throughout the 18th century and presents an unusual and vivid series of pictures of the ordinary and extraordinary people of New England.
OTHER WORKS: The Journal of Madam Knight, and Rev. Mr. Buckingham (1825, reprinted with an Introduction by M. Freiberg, 1971). The Private Journal of a Journey from Boston to New York in the Year 1704 Kept by Madam Knight (1865).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Andrews, W., ed., Journeys in New Worlds: Early American Narratives (1990). Levernier, J. A., and D. R. Wilmes, eds., American Literature Before 1800 (1983). Spengemann, W. C., The Adventurous Muse: The Poetics of American Fiction, 17891900 (1977). Springer, M., ed., What Manner of Woman (1977). Reference works: AA. DAB. NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Bostonian Society Publications (1912). CLAJ (Mar. 1964, Dec. 1966). Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America (1964). —ANN STANFORD
KNOX, Adeline Trafton Born 8 February 1845, Saccarappa, Maine; died date unknown Wrote under: Adeline Trafton Daughter of Mark and Eliza Young Trafton; married Samuel Knox Jr., 1889 (died 1897) Adeline Trafton Knox was educated in private and public schools in Massachusetts. She married a lawyer from St. Louis, where they apparently resided until her husband’s death in 1897. Knox’s last-known residence was Springfield, Massachusetts. Although biographical information on Knox is sketchy, material on the life of her father, a Methodist clergyman, is not. He was a one-term congressman, an author, and a temperance and antislavery advocate. These are themes that his daughter uses in her fiction.
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Knox wrote four novels, all of which appeared first as serials in magazines. She contributed numerous stories to Scribner’s magazine. Her works, originally written for adults, continued to have popular appeal with adolescent readers into the 20th century. Three of her works were reprinted in the American Girl series. Knox’s first book, An American Girl Abroad (1872), is apparently an account of a European trip that the author took as a young woman. In a chatty first-person narrative, this guidebook presents the travels of a young woman (unnamed) and her chaperone. The narrator describes the various countries of Europe, most often observing scenic landscapes and comic or quaint local customs. This work ends with a list of recommendations to would-be women travelers: that women can travel alone safely through Europe, that they should bring little baggage, dress warmly, and be equipped with ‘‘an abundant supply of patience and good nature.’’ The heroine in Katherine Earle (1874) is an upright, independent young girl who at one point even harbors a fugitive slave in her home. As she matures, she fancies herself in love with Dacre Home, a man she had hated as a child. He returns her affections initially; nevertheless, after she accepts a teaching job away from home, he becomes a negligent suitor. Dacre’s possible role in a bank robbery and the discovery of his unfaithfulness cause Katherine much unhappiness, with the impending Civil War, a nasty colleague, and her stern supervisor, Professor Dyce, aggravating the situation. Through the treachery of another, Katherine and Dyce lose their way in the woods overnight and, to save their reputations, get married. After a shaky beginning, the marriage proves to be a happy one. Dorothy’s Experience (1890) is Knox’s most moralistic tale. It uses a familiar theme of 19th-century popular fiction: the affluent, well-educated woman who finds herself and religion in unselfish work for others. Dorothy’s work involves the establishment of a mission home for women who work in a shoe factory by day and have too much free time at night. The idea is a noble one, although to the modern reader Knox’s description of the working-class people will seem both condescending and naive. Adeline Trafton is a name few now recognize. It is doubtful her works made an impression on (or were even read by) the better writers of her time. Her plots, by modern standards, seem contrived and sentimental, yet she wrote lively, interesting stories. Since she was more intent on providing entertainment than a moral message, Knox remained popular with young readers for at least a few decades.
OTHER WORKS: His Inheritance (1878).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography (1900). AW. A Dictionary of American Authors (1904). —AMY DYKEMAN
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KOHUT
KOCH, Adrienne
engaged in a study of the Grimké family and its place in American life.
Born 10 September 1912, New York, New York; died 21 August 1971, New York, New York Daughter of John D. and Helen Koch; married Lawrence R. Kegan, 1947
As a historian of ideas, Koch brought to bear on her work a disciplined mind and finely sharpened powers of critical analysis and judgement. Though sympathetic to the liberal democratic philosophy, she explored cogently and persuasively the diverse strands woven into the American political tradition. She sought to convey with objectivity and fair-mindedness the differences in ‘‘angles of vision’’ of the philosopher-statesmen. In her writing Koch displayed clarity and wit and an elegance of style reflective of the Enlightenment. She saw the American Enlightenment as ‘‘a glorious time of thought and human constructive activity’’ and wrote of it, as she said, ‘‘con amore.’’ With acuteness of vision and lucidity of expression, she sought to lay open the values and achievements of that age and their continuing relevance to the darker contemporary age.
Adrienne Koch began her career in philosophy, but became in time one of America’s leading historians. She took as her particular province the era of American Enlightenment, defined as the period from 1765 to 1815, concentrating on political philosophy. Her first work was her doctoral dissertation, The Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson (1943), for which she won the Woodbridge prize at Columbia University. In it she explores the major influences on Jefferson’s thought and tries to establish his originality and significance as a philosopher. Koch’s next two works were The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson (1944) and The Selected Writings of John Adams and John Quincy Adams (1946). Although she is basically more sympathetic to Jefferson’s position, both works reveal her keen appreciation of these shapers of early American political thought, to her the heart of American Enlightenment.
OTHER WORKS: Power, Morals, and the Founding Fathers: Essays in the Interpretation of the American Enlightenment (1961, reissued 1984). Adams and Jefferson: Posterity Must Judge (1963).
In Jefferson and Madison: The Great Collaboration (1950, reissued 1987), Koch explores their personal friendship, intellectual changes, and political cooperation over a 50-year span. Drawing heavily on unpublished primary sources, she underscores the impact of Madison’s strongly, logical mind on Jefferson. The collaboration, she concludes, was of mutual weight, and they shared equally in formulating early American democratic philosophy.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Jefferson, T., The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson (reissue, 1998). Other references: AHR (Feb. 1972). Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (Jan. 1944). Journal of American History (June 1965). Maryland Historian (Spring 1972). NR (4 Sept. 1950). SR (20 Feb. 1960). Virginia Quarterly Review (Summer 1966).
In 1959, Koch published Philosophy for a Time of Crisis, a work reflecting her deep concern over the postwar threat to Western civilization and its crisis in values. In response to ‘‘the felt universal need. . .for an answer to nihilism,’’ she drew on the writings of 15 modern thinkers, among them Einstein, Buber, and Sartre, men concerned with ‘‘the root values of man and society.’’ Koch edited The American Enlightenment (1965), in which she focuses on the work of five major philosopher-statesmen: Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, Madison, and Hamilton. Brilliant individually, they shone with increased splendor as a constellation, she concludes. She stresses the importance of their intertwining roles as theorists and activists, meeting ‘‘the historical imperative of their time. . .the advancement of human freedom.’’ The Whig-Clio lectures Koch gave at Princeton were published as Madison’s ‘‘Advice to My Country’’ (1966). In this short, cogent analysis, she sums up a lifetime of thought on Madison, tracing the threads of three major concerns: liberty, justice, and union. With thoughtful intensity she traces the evolution of his thought and the relevance of his stance to contemporary society. Her last work was Jefferson (1971), edited for the series Great Lives Observed. She draws on autobiographical material, observations of contemporaries, and the views of historians to provide perspective on his life. At the time of her death, Koch was
—INZER BYERS
KOHUT, Rebekah Bettelheim Born 9 September 1864, Kaschau, Hungary; died 11 August 1951, New York, New York Daughter of Siegfried and Henrietta Weintraub Bettelheim; married Alexander Kohut, 1887 Rebekah Bettelheim Kohut was the second daughter of a rabbi and physician father, and her mother was the first female Jewish schoolteacher in Hungary. In 1874, the family emigrated to America, finally settling in San Francisco, where Kohut attended the University of California. After the death, in 1895, of her husband, a renowned Hebrew scholar and rabbi, she founded a school for girls that she headed for five years. Her major interest revolved around the newly developing Jewish women’s organizations; she served as first president of the National Council of Jewish Women and of the World Congress of Jewish Women. Concern for the problems of working women led her to investigate the opportunities available to them, and to create and to serve on numerous local and national employment commissions. During World War I, she was active in mobilizing women’s participation,
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and after the war she surveyed the refugee problems for the overseas relief organizations. Kohut’s first book, My Portion (1925), written when a long illness limited her community activities, is a description of her early years in Hungary, her first experiences in America in wardevastated Richmond, and her coming to maturity in the exciting atmosphere of post-Gold Rush San Francisco. Despite considerable restraint in discussing personal affairs, she nonetheless chronicles her spiritual crisis as an adolescent, the trials of being a rabbi’s wife and stepmother to eight children, and her sorrowful adjustment to widowhood. The bulk of the story, however, is bound up with her activities in Jewish organizations and the difficulties of transforming women’s groups from sewing circles and ladies’ auxiliaries into significant philanthropic organizations. As I Know Them: Some Jews and a Few Gentiles (1929) provides an informal history of Jews in the U.S. Kohut’s main concern in this work, which is essentially anecdotal, is to explain the aims and attitudes of American Jews, the differences between the early Spanish, mid-19th-century German, and late-19thcentury East European immigrants, and their common anxiety over the rising anti-Semitism. She is particularly concerned with detailing the tensions within the Jewish community between the Reform and Orthodox sectors, and the conflicting needs of Jews to retain traditional values while adapting to American customs. She reveals an acute awareness of women’s peculiar position both in America and within Judaism, and though she eschews radical changes, she strongly supports suffrage and career training for women. In His Father’s House (1938) is Kohut’s moving tribute to her stepson George Alexander Kohut, who died after becoming a leader in American education, a prolific writer, and a philanthropist. A warm relationship between stepmother and stepson underlies the story. Kohut’s last book, More Yesterdays (1949), written when she was an invalid, was intended as a supplement to her earlier autobiography but covers much of the same material. Kohut describes the pleasures of cosmopolitan life, the horrors of the severe economic depression of the 1920s and 1930s, the rising fascism and its companion, anti-Semitism, and her conversion to Zionism by Theodore Herzl. Despite her four essentially autobiographical books, the dynamic quality of Kohut’s life remains untold. The formal, somewhat pedantic tone of her writing is partially responsible for this, but more significant is her attitude towards herself emphasizing her role as a member of a group rather than as an achieving individual. Her extraordinary accomplishments in social work, in education, and in the development of public unemployment agencies are presented primarily as external events rather than the struggles of a particular person. Her contributions to women’s rights lie more in her assumption of responsibilities than in advocacy, yet she never lost the focus of an earlier tradition. For her the family was ‘‘a sacred and hallowed responsibility,’’ and
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throughout her life she followed the injunction that ‘‘while woman’s interests ought to begin at home and ought to end there, they need not necessarily confine themselves to it alone.’’
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Askowith, D., Three Outstanding Women (1941). Baum, C. et al., The Jewish Woman in America (1976). Reference works: NCAB, E. Other references: American Jewish Yearbook, Vol. 46 (1944-45). —CAROL B. SCHOEN
KONIGSBURG, E. L. Born 10 February 1930, New York, New York Daughter of Adolph and Beuhlah Lobl; married David Konigsburg, 1952; children: three E. L. Konigsburg grew up in a small town near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She received a B.S. from Carnegie Institute of Technology, and did graduate work in chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh. Before starting to write, she taught science at a private girls’ school, married, and had three children. Konigsburg, feeling that there were few books geared to suburban children, started writing to fill this gap, and culled ideas from her own children’s experiences and imagination. Konigsburg writes for children between the ages of eight and 12, and believes that by the time children reach this stage in their development, they should be able to recognize their inner selves—or consciences—and be answerable to them. Konigsburg’s books, however, are not of the sort that hold together thinly developed plots only to proclaim morality; her plots are intricate and her characters disarmingly real. She is principally concerned with telling a good story and says, ‘‘When you write for children, they do not have any self-consciousness about putting down a book that is boring.’’ From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (1967, reprinted more than 50 times), a Newbery winner, is probably Konigsburg’s best-known work. It is the story of two upper middle-class children who run away from their suburban Connecticut home to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They become involved in solving a mystery and return home, having grown in the sense that they have gained an inner secret to cherish and have taken an admirable first step toward adulthood. Konigsburg considers Father’s Arcane Daughter (1976), which deals with the problems of handicapped children, her best book. By comparison with many others of this genre, it is distinctive in that the reader does not find out until the middle of
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KROEBER
the book that Heidi, the protagonist’s little sister, is not clumsy and awkward simply because she is the pesky little sister but because she has a physical disability. The child’s mother had been disguising all of the child’s problems under a veil of cuteness. Unable to admit that a problem existed, the mother had virtually forced it to disappear. It is only after Heidi admitted that she needed help and underwent physical therapy that she was able to lead a satisfactory life—although not one without bitterness toward the overprotective mother. Konigsburg has also written two historical novels for children, one delving into the mystery of the Mona Lisa, and the other bringing to life Eleanor of Aquitaine, whom Konigsburg depicts as a strong-willed, highly intelligent woman who, Konigsburg claims, is ‘‘everything the woman’s movement is.’’ Here Konigsburg has one of her characters state: ‘‘True simplicity is elegance.’’ This philosophy permeates Konigsburg’s writing, which is candidly simple and unpretentious, yet not without depth and elegance. Konigsburg treats her material with sophistication, trusting that her readers have the capacity to consider complex ideas. Like the characters in her books, Konigsburg’s readers grow after having been exposed to the intellectual stimulation of her books. OTHER WORKS: Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth (1967, recorded 1992). About the B’Nai Bagels (1969). George (1970). Altogether, One at a Time (1971). A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver (1973). The Dragon in the Ghetto Caper (1974). The Second Mrs. Giaconda (1975). Talk, Talk: A Children’s Book Author Speaks to Grown-Ups (1995). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Barrett, P. A., To Break the Silence: Thirteen Short Stories for Young Readers (1986). Greenberg, M. H. and Waugh, C., eds., A Newbery Christmas: Fourteen Stories of Christmas by Newbery Award-Winning Authors (1998). Greenberg, M. H., Waugh, C. and Alexander, L., eds., A Newbery Halloween: A Dozen Scary Stories by Newbery Award-Winning Authors (1998). Hanks, D. T., E. L. Konigsburg (1992). Smith, S. N., ‘‘Father Doesn’t Know Best Anymore: Realism and the Parent in the Junior Works of Judy Blume, E. L. Konigsburg, and Richard Peck’’ (thesis, 1981). Reference works: CA (1969). Children’s Literature Review (1976). Other references: Book List (June 1995). Commonweal (23 May 1969, 20 Nov. 1970). CSM (2 Nov. 1967, 1 May 1974). E. L. Konigsburg (audiovisual, 1983). E. L. Konigsburg Interview (audio, 1980). Good Conversation! A Talk with E. L. Konigsburg (audiovisual, 1995). Horn Book (Apr. 1967, Aug. 1968, Dec. 1970, Aug. 1971, Oct. 1973, Oct. 1975). New Statesman (4 June 1971). Newbery/Caldecott Medal Acceptance Speeches (recording, 1997). NYTBR (5 Nov. 1967, 30 Mar. 1969, 8 Nov. 1970, 30 May 1971, 14 Oct. 1973, 5 Oct. 1975, 7 Nov. 1976). Profiles in Literature [E. L. Konigsburg] (audiovisual, 1983). SR (22 Apr. 1967, 21 Oct. 1967, 9 Nov. 1968, 22 Mar. 1969, 4 Nov. 1970). —RISA GERSON
KROEBER, Theodora Born 24 March 1897, Denver, Colorado; died 1960 Daughter of Charles E. and Phebe Johnston Kracaw; married Clifton S. Brown, 1920 (died 1923); Alfred L. Kroeber, 1926; children: three sons, one daughter Theodora Kroeber grew up in the mountains of Colorado, an environment permeated by Native American cultures. She attended the University of California at Berkeley, receiving an M.A. in psychology in 1920. Kroeber’s husband, with whom she had two sons, died three years after their marriage. She later married the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and had two more children, a son and a daughter, Ursula K(roeber) LeGuin, the science fiction writer. Kroeber died in 1960. From her early interests in ethnology and art and from her access through Alfred Kroeber and his associates to Native American informants, Kroeber drew the inspiration for her first book, The Inland Whale (1959), a retelling of nine California Native American legends with notes on the literary, cultural, and psychological implications of each tale. In this book, Kroeber balances commitments to ethnological authenticity and to the demands of literary form. In its simplicity and directness, the style of The Inland Whale is remarkable for its evocation of the oral style of its sources: ‘‘The first people were the Wogè. The world was the same in Wogè time as it is today; it has always been the same.’’ The nine tales are of many literary types—morality tale, masque fantasy, lyric, idyll, epic—but they are unified by origin and by the recurrent figure of an enigmatic woman. Kroeber’s next two books drew heavily on the life of one particular Californian, Native American Ishi, who walked out of the Mount Lassen foothills in 1911. Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America (1963) provides an ethnologist’s careful account of the life of the Yahi people from the Stone Age through the days of the gold rush and an account of Ishi’s life among his 20th-century scholar friends, including Kroeber’s husband Alfred. At the time of its appearance, the book was hailed as a contribution ‘‘not only to our history but to our literature.’’ A year later, Kroeber produced a children’s book, Ishi, Last of His Tribe (1964), in which Ishi’s story is seen through his own eyes. The alternation of a limited third-person as well as a first-person point of view is handled without confusion, and Kroeber’s characteristic cadenced prose, coupled with the impressive command of material, justifies the book’s immediate acceptance as a classic. In both Ishi books, Kroeber’s greatest achievement is the creation of the character of her hero. The portraits of Ishi, both as boy and as man, catch his humanity, his dignity, and his essential kindness, gentleness, and competence. Some contemporary reviewers objected to the violence in the description of the massacre of the Yahi, but Kroeber’s history is accurate on this point. And though the level of violence in Ishi, Last of His Tribe may have seemed high at the time of its publication, we can now appreciate by comparison Kroeber’s refusal to sensationalize.
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A Green Christmas (1967), also a children’s book, is a prose poem about two children celebrating their first California Christmas, fearing that Santa Claus will not be able to find them because there is no snow for his sleigh. Again, the cadenced language is present, as is the psychological/ethnological motive. The book has an attractive gentleness about it, but the slight plot and the book’s awkward stance between fantasy and realism undercut its effectiveness. Carrousel (1977), also a children’s book, is a more fully realized depiction of the elements of classical mythology in collision with the prosaic realism of the modern world, represented by the Inspector of Strange and Foreign Objects’ desire to cement the winged horse, Pegason, to the ground. Kroeber draws on mythological motifs and details, but reforms them to create a new story of her own making. Kroeber’s three books on Native American themes establish her literary reputation. She has said, ‘‘When I write, I turn most often to something Indian. This is not because I am an Indian ‘specialist,’ or feel that I have anything novel to say about Indians, but because I find their stories beautiful and true and their way of telling a story to be also my way.’’ That way includes a celebration of each person’s individual humanity, a love of naming and detailing features of the environment (‘‘Manzanita berries and acorns, and hazel nuts and pine nuts were ripe. The brown-red of ripe buckeye nuts shown through their husks’’), and an overriding commitment to pattern, expressed in the cadences of her prose and in the structures of her stories. OTHER WORKS: Almost Ancestors (with R. Heizer, 1968). Alfred Kroeber: A Personal Configuration (1970). Drawn from Life (1978). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1969). Other references: AA (Aug. 1969). American Scholar (Summer 1968). Horn Book (Dec. 1964). NYHTB (3 May 1959, 29 Oct. 1961). Saturday Review (20 June 1959). Spectator (1 June 1962). —KATHARYN F. CRABBE
KÜBLER-ROSS, Elisabeth Born 8 July 1926, Zurich, Switzerland Also writes under: E. Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth K. Ross Daughter of Ernst and Emma Williger Kübler; married Emanual R. Ross, 1958 (divorced); children: two Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, one of a set of tiny triplets, lived in Europe until after receiving her M.D. from the University of Zurich in 1957. She came to the U.S. in 1958 as an intern at Community Hospital in Glen Cove, Long Island, New York. She spent the next three years in residency in psychiatry at Manhattan State Hospital, Montefiore Hospital, and Colorado General Hospital. She has taught at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and at the University of Chicago.
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Kübler-Ross travels throughout the world, giving hundreds of lectures, seminars, and workshops on death and dying. She has served on the advisory boards of more than 20 hospices and institutes on grief and dying and has received honorary degrees from 17 colleges and universities as well as numerous other awards. In 1976 Kübler-Ross founded Shanti Nilaya, a nonprofit organization ‘‘dedicated to the promotion of physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual health.’’ She served as president of the board of directors. She married another physician and they had two children before divorcing. Kübler-Ross holds both U.S. and Swiss citizenship. Although she does not administer medication or perform surgery, few people have Kübler-Ross’ power to heal. On Death and Dying (1969, reprinted numerous times, including 1991, 1997), her groundbreaking book, and her subsequent lectures, writings, and workshops, have helped, as Anne Hudson Jones noted, to revolutionize ‘‘the way Americans think about death and dying, and consequently, about living as well.’’ In On Death and Dying, Kübler-Ross reports on her work with terminally ill patients at the University of Chicago, where for several years she taught an interdisciplinary seminar on death and dying. She begins by outlining the changes occurring in the last few decades in the treatment of the dying. Instead of dying among family and friends, most people now die in impersonal institutional settings surrounded by medical personnel who are trained to prolong life but who do not know how to manage dying patients humanely. Kübler-Ross has identified five stages dying patients go through: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Not all patients go through all stages, but those who reach acceptance die more peacefully, according to Kübler-Ross. The book includes some interviews with patients as well as a chapter assessing the reactions of the medical staff and students to her seminar. In Questions and Answers on Death and Dying (1974, reprinted with two other titles, 1992), Kübler-Ross attempts to answer the questions most frequently asked of her by audiences. Although she reviews the material in her earlier work, there is useful new information about suicide and terminal illness, euthanasia, caring for the dying at home, the family’s problems, funerals, problems of the medical staff, and beliefs in life after death. Death: The Final Stage of Growth (1975), an anthology edited by Kübler-Ross, includes essays, poems, and letters, many of them written especially for this collection by former patients, colleagues, and her students. Selections address the psychological difficulties of patients dying in institutions, tell how other cultures handle death, and insist that death can be the final stage of personal growth. Of special interest is an autobiographical essay by Kübler-Ross, relating her early experiences with death, both in her community and in Europe during World War II, which she believes led her to her work with death and dying. To Live Until We Say Goodbye (1978) is a volume of photographs by Mal Warshaw with text by Kübler-Ross. The first part of the book has photographs and interviews with three dying patients. The second part presents alternative settings for care of the dying—hospices, homes for the dying, and personal homes of
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the dying. The photographs are haunting; the text is informative. In this volume, Kübler-Ross says more about the death of children than she does in any of her other works. The final chapter tells of her teachings about life, death, and transition at Shanti Nilaya (Sanskrit for ‘‘home of peace’’). In Working It Through: An Elizabeth Kubler-Ross Workshop on Life, Death and Transition (1981, 1987, 1997), her second collaboration with photographer Mal Warshaw, she briefly recounts the history behind Shanti Nilaya, and then describes the workshops, integrating photographs and letters from former participants. In AIDS: The Ultimate Challenge (1987, 1997) Kübler-Ross recounts her ongoing efforts to help AIDS patients accept their condition with strength and serenity. She believes AIDS presents ‘‘the ultimate challenge’’ because the stigma attached to the disease has been as devastating as the disease itself. In one fascinating section, Kübler-Ross reprints a transcript of a town meeting held to discuss the founding of a hospice for babies with AIDS; she encounters hostile resistance from town members, whose concerns and prejudices reflect the fear and uncertainty shared by many across the country. Contrasting society’s support for victims of ‘‘acceptable’’ illnesses such as cancer to the isolation and condemnation faced by AIDS sufferers, KüblerRoss addresses her book to those who would still deny or ignore the tragedy of AIDS and withhold compassion from its sufferers. Kübler-Ross’ work has helped effect a much needed revolution in the way Americans think about death and dying and, consequently, about living as well. She has helped change medical education to include teaching about death and dying, and she is cited as an authority by almost everyone doing work in the field. She has received many honorary degrees, from Albany Medical College, Smith College, the University of Notre Dame, Hamline University, and the Medical College of Pennsylvania. At the turn of the century, Kübler-Ross faced her own declining health, and the need to practice what she had so long, and so eloquently preached. In 1999, after six strokes, she spoke candidly to the media about her own imminent demise. She said she was already in the fifth stage (acceptance), and has been for nearly five years. Talking to ABC News in August, Kübler-Ross said, ‘‘That I could die tonight would be a good death. Not 10 years or even two years from now—that would be lousy. The sooner the better.’’ Yet some wonder if Kübler-Ross is simply giving up, or depressed. For an independent woman, with an overactive, workaholic life, to be confined to a chair for better part of every day, has indeed been difficult. Her friend and holistic doctor, Gladys McGarey, told ABC News, ‘‘The strokes have been really devastating for her. . .another person, who was less in charge, might not be as deeply affected.’’ For her part, KüblerRoss states she is not truly living, just ‘‘existing.’’ One hopes Kübler-Ross will achieve the peaceful passing she has advocated, the kind of death she helped many accept through her writings and seminars. OTHER WORKS: Living with Death and Dying: How to Communicate with the Terminally Ill (1981, 1997). Remember the Secret (1982, 1998). On Children and Death: How Children and
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Their Parents Can and Do Cope with Death (1983, 1997). Psychoimmunity and the Healing Process: A Holistic Approach to Immunity and AIDS (1987). On Life After Death (1991). On Death and Dying; Questions and Answers on Death and Dying; On Life After Death (bound in one volume, 1992). Death is of Vital Importance: On Life, Death and Life After Death (1995). Healing in Our Time (1997). The Meaning of Suffering (1997). Say Yes to It (1997). The Wheel of Life: A Memoir of Lving and Dying (1998). The Tunnel and the Light: Essential Insights on Living and Dying (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Chaban, M., The Life Work of Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and Its Impact on the Death Awareness Movement (1998). Elliott, W., Tying Rocks to Clouds: Meetings and Conversations with Wise and Spiritual People (1995). Felder, D. G., The 100 Most Influential Women of All Time: A Ranking Past and Present (1996). Groen-Colyn, S. M., ‘‘The Influence of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross on the Field of Thanatology: A Historical Analysis’’ (1998). Haney, D. M., Healing Waters Farm Cookbook: Favorite Recipes of Elisabeth and Friends of the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Center, Head Waters, Virginia 24442 (1997). Molnar, L. A., ‘‘The Attitudes and Knowledge of Kübler-Ross’ Stages and the Fears of Death and Dying in Junior and Senior Nursing Students an Exploratory Study’’ (thesis, 1981). Skog, S., Embracing Our Essence: Spiritual Conversations with Prominent Women (1995). Stille, D. R., Extraordinary Women of Medicine (1997). Reference works: Biographical Directory of the American Psychiatric Association (1977, 1991). CA (1999). Other references: Book World (17 Oct. 1982). Christian Century (14 Apr. 1976). Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (transcript, 1997). Family Circle (Sept. 1975). Life (21 Nov. 1969). McCall’s (Aug. 1976). New Statesman (9 July 1982). NYTBR (10 Apr. 1988). People (Nov. 1975). Psychology Today (Oct. 1982). Readers’ Digest (Aug. 1976). Register (Dec. 1966). Time (10 Oct. 1969). Web site: ABCNews.com, 1999. —ANNE HUDSON JONES, UPDATED BY JEROME CHOU AND NELSON RHODES
KUMIN, Maxine W. Born 6 June 1925, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Daughter of Peter and Doll Simon Winokur; married Victor M. Kumin, 1946; children: Jane, Judith, Daniel Maxine W. Kumin received her B.A. and M.A. degrees from Radcliffe College. She married an engineering consultant; they have three children. A nature lover and an equestrian, Kumin lives with her husband on a farm in Warner, New Hampshire, where her avocations include raising most of her own fruits and vegetables, and riding and breeding Arabian and quarter horses. Although Kumin remembers writing from a very early age, during her late teens and early twenties she stopped altogether. She began writing and publishing children’s stories and light verse while she was pregnant with her third child in 1953, when
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she felt a rising discontentment with her life. Her first book of poetry, Halfway, appeared in 1961. Since then, Kumin has published nearly a dozen other books of poetry, several novels, and many children’s books. Kumin has also spent two years as a scholar of the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, has conducted workshops at Columbia, Brandeis, and Princeton universities, and has served on the staff at Washington University, the University of Massachusetts, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her literary prizes and awards include the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1973 for Up Country: Poems of New England (1972); both the Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize (1972) and the Levinson Prize (1986) from Poetry magazine; an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award (1980); fellowships from the National Council on the Arts (1967) and the Academy of American Poets (1985); the Poet’s Prize (1994) and the Aiken Taylor Poetry Prize (1995) for Looking for Luck (1992); the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences’s Centennial Award (1996), the New Hampshire Writers Project Lifetime Achievement award (1998); and most recently, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 1999. Kumin has also been awarded two honorary doctorates of humanities.
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they do not work (organically) in the poem. Even though she is fascinated by and preoccupied with the irrational unconscious, sanity and a conscious choice within and for life are essential keys to Kumin’s voice. Clear, practiced talent for the close image and the penetration of patterned sounds, as well as successful transformation of traditional forms such as the sonnet into contemporary usage, enable her to render honestly and artistically her life experiences in her preferred medium, the poem. Kumin often writes pastoral poetry about New England; yet she is more than either a mere nature poet or a regional writer. She is, without doubt, what she has and continued to strive for, to be ‘‘a good poet.’’ Kumin’s considerable output attests to the power of nature and mortality as literary subjects. In the 1970s and 1980s, Kumin published more poetry, novels, and children’s books, as well as making regular contributions—essays, poetry, and fiction—to a number of journals, while making appearances and teaching at Washington University, the University of Massachusetts, Columbia, Princeton, Brandeis, and the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference.
As a poet, Kumin has been influenced most by W. B. Yeats, W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, Karl Shapiro, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop—either by their careful craft, by their intensity of observation, or sometimes by their stanza pattern. She has been placed by one critic as existing within the ‘‘Bishop-Lowell-Sexton’’ school of contemporary American poetry, which is an indication that Kumin’s work, like much of theirs, reveals a close attention to objective details yet an astute ability to metamorphose her observations into descriptions that resonate with more than mere imagery.
Kumin’s work remains impressive. The well-received Retrieval System (1978) was followed by To Make a Prairie: Essays on Poets, Poetry, and Country Living (1979), and her first collection of stories, Why Can’t We Live Together like Civilized Human Beings? (1982). Although Kumin’s work makes much of the positive coexistence with nature, these works pursue another common theme: ‘‘loss’’ and ‘‘relinquishment,’’ especially as experienced in intimate relationships such as family. Kumin communicates these themes by juxtaposing scrupulous attention to the detail of everyday life with transcendent communion with the natural world.
The tenor of Kumin’s poems ranges from horror to love. Even when descending into the theme of the grotesque, particularly in the poems from The Nightmare Factory (1970), her sensibility is one that funds the ordinary events of life more wonderful than desperate. One reviewer has rightly contrasted Kumin’s Up Country with Sylvia Plath’s Winter Trees. While both Plath and Kumin take the pose of a transcendentalist nature poet in these volumes, Plath’s transcendence pushes her toward cessation in death while Kumin’s leads her more intensely into the progression of life.
While Kumin amuses readers with characterizations of her neighbors in New Hampshire in Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief: New and Selected Poems (1982), the willfulness, almost maliciousness of nature that seems not to care for connections, familial or neighborly, is a powerful presence. Henry Manley, a recurring character in Kumin’s poems, provides a way of exploring both sides: the little foibles of day-to-day existence and the large specter of mortality looming over everyone. Paradoxically, nature allows for continuation and extinction at the same time, and Kumin is determined readers will understand both.
Kumin’s The Retrieval System (1978) includes all the predominant themes of her ouevre: transcendence via absorption in nature, the love of animals, the importance of personal relationships, and the horrors of separation and death. This book deals specifically with the attempts at integration of the self at midlife, and with loss. The poet writes especially of her separation from her adult children because of geographical distance, and of the separation of herself from her best friend, Anne Sexton, because of the latter’s suicide.
In her eighth book of poems, The Long Approach (1985), Kumin not only continues with the subject of farm living, but also takes on social issues such as pollution, religious persecution, nuclear holocaust, and famine. These poems mark somewhat of a turning point in Kumin’s career in that her essentially personal, intimate voice transforms into one that is more public and critical. The critics were quick to notice this alteration, and not all of them were pleased. Although her appraisal of these issues was sometimes perceived as underdeveloped, the growth into new areas of expression was welcome from a poet who had brought such understanding to the paradoxes of nature.
Kumin has most often been praised for her original description of detail, particularly in the natural world. She has been criticized, though much less frequently, for the creation of similes that attempt to be perceptive but are artificial or forced because
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Kumin continued to mix the personal with the globally relevant in Nurture (1989). The intimate voice recurs in such
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autobiographical poems as ‘‘Marianne, My Mother, and Me.’’ But she further develops the socioecological voice that expresses concern over pollution and consequent extinction. Kumin understands animals’ perceived cruelty to each other; conflict inherent in survival is one of the foundations of nature. But the argument for survival does not extend to humanity’s abuse and neglect of animals. This concern for animals and their relationship with human beings is also important in Looking for Luck: Poems (1992). But animals do not take center stage in this collection; Kumin is equally interested in the universalities of her own personal relationships, with her daughter who has departed to another country and with fellow writers Flannery O’Connor and Sexton. Kumin’s relationships with family, friends, and nature are the settings for a deeper consideration of nature and mortality. Connecting the Dots (1998) reinforces her disillusionment with society. Ben Howard noted in Poetry, ‘‘From her earliest poems to her most recent, she has held fast to her dominant themes, her inductive methods, and her darkly ironic outlook, which has altered only in the respect that it has become more recognizably itself. At once ardent and skeptical, her vision has grown more stringent over the years, and the strain of social criticism has become more insistent. What has not changed is Kumin’s earthy realism, her generous receptivity.’’ Kumin’s productivity has not been confined to poetry. She continues to write essays, specifically In Deep: Country Essays (1987), and children’s books, such as The Microscope (1984). An accomplished horsewoman, she makes regular contributions to equestrian journals. Her essays and columns also encompass such topics as organic gardening. She has continued to teach, with visiting stints at MIT (Boston, 1984), University of Miami (spring 1995), Pitzer College (California, 1996), Davidson College (North Carolina, spring 1997), Florida International University (spring 1999). As the turn of the century approaches, Kumin is still writing: Quit Monks or Die, her first mystery, was published in 1999, and two new books of essays are forthcoming in 2000 (Always Beginning: Prose Essays and Inside the Halo and the Journey Beyond). OTHER WORKS: Sebastian and the Dragon (1960). Follow the Fall (1961). Spring Things (1961). A Summer Story (1961). A
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Winter Friend (1961). Mittens in May (1962). No One Writes a Letter to the Snail (1962). Archibald and the Traveling Poodle (1963). Eggs of Things (with A. Sexton, 1963). The Beach before Breakfast (1964). More Eggs of Things (with A. Sexton, 1964). Speedy Digs Downside Up (1964). The Privilege (1965). Through Dooms of Love (1965). Paul Bunyan (1966). Faraway Farm (1967). The Passions of Uxport (1968). The Wonderful Babies of 1809 (1968). When Grandmother Was Young (1969). When Mother Was Young (1970). The Abduction (1971). Joey and the Birthday Present (with A. Sexton, 1971). When Great Grandmother Was Young (1971). The Designated Heir (1974). House, Bridge, Fountain, Gate (1975). The Wizard’s Tears (with A. Sexton, 1975). What Color Is Caesar (1978). Women, Animals, and Vegetables: Essays and Stories (1994). Connecting the Dots (1996). Selected Poems 1960-1990 (1997).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: A Separate Vision: Isolation in Contemporary Women’s Poetry (1984). Grosholz, E., ed., Telling the Barn Swallow: Poets on the Poetry of Maxine Kumin (1997). Reference works: CA (1967, 1999). CANR (1981, 1987). CAAS (1989). CLC (1976, 1980, 1984). CP (ca. 1975). DLB (1980). MTCW (1991). Modern American Women Poets (1984). Modern American Women Writers (1991). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: America (18 Nov. 1989). Belles Lettres (Fall 1992). Commonweal (29 Nov. 1985). CSM (9 Aug. 1961, 10 July 1975). Hudson Review (Winter 1982-83). LJ (1 Mar. 1989). MR (Spring 1975). Nation (24 July 1982). NYHTB (27 Aug. 1961). NYTBR (19 Nov. 1972, 7 Sept. 1975, 8 Aug. 1982, 5 Nov. 1989, 21 Mar. 1993). Poetry (May 1966, June 1998). SR (6 May 1961, 25 Dec. 1965, 26 Dec. 1970, 25 Mar. 1972). Virginia Quarterly Review (Summer 1991). WRB (May 1992). Yankee (Dec. 1987). YR (Mar. 1962). —SYBIL ESTESS, UPDATED BY LINDA BERUBE AND ALLISON A. JONES
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Second Edition
VOLUME 3 L-R Editor Ta r y n B e n b o w - P f a l z g r a f
Taryn Benbow-Pfalzgraf, Editor Glynis Benbow-Niemier, Associate Editor Kristin G. Hart, Project Coordinator Laura Standley Berger, Joann Cerrito, Dave Collins, Steve Cusack, Nicolet V. Elert, Miranda Ferrara, Jamie FitzGerald, Laura S. Kryhoski, Margaret Mazurkiewicz, Michael J. Tyrkus St. James Press Staff Peter M. Gareffa, Managing Editor, St. James Press Mary Beth Trimper, Composition Manager Dorothy Maki, Manufacturing Manager Wendy Blurton, Senior Buyer Cynthia Baldwin, Product Design Manager Martha Schiebold, Art Director Ronald D. Montgomery, Data Entry Manager Gwendolyn S. Tucker, Project Administrator
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data American women writers : from colonial times to the present : a critical reference guide / editor: Taryn Benbow-Pfalzgraf. -- 2nd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-55862-429-5 (set) — ISBN 1-55862-430-9 (vol.1) — ISBN 1-55862-431-7 (vol.2) — ISBN 1-55862-432-5 (vol.3) — ISBN 1-55862-433-3 (vol.4) 1. American literature-Women authors-Bio-bibliography Dictionaries. 2. Women authors, American-Biography Dictionaries. 3. American literature-Women authors Dictionaries. I. Benbow-Pfalzgraf, Taryn PS147.A42 1999 810.9’9287’03—dc21 [B]
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EDITOR’S NOTE American Women Writers, Second Edition is an important resource for many reasons, the least of which is to disseminate information about hundreds of women writers who have been routinely overlooked. A veritable treasure trove of knowledge, the women profiled in this series have literally changed the world, from Margaret Sanger’s quest for reproductive freedom to Jane Addams and Hull House, from Sylvia Earle and Rachel Carson’s environmental concerns, to the aching beauty of poems by Olga Broumas, Emily Dickinson, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath, Sara Teasdale, Lorrie Moore, and many others. There are writers who are immensely entertaining (M.F.K. Fisher, Jean Craighead George, Sue Grafton, Helen MacInnes, Terry McMillan, C. L. Moore, Barbara Neely, Danielle Steel), some who wish to instruct on faith (Dorothy Day, Mary Baker Eddy, Catherine Marshall, Anne Morrow Lindbergh), others who revisit the past to educate us (Gwendolyn Brooks, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Paula Allen Gunn, Carolyn Heilbrun, Mary Johnston, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Mary White Ovington, Sherley Ann Williams, Mourning Dove), and still more who wish to shock us from complacency of one kind or another (Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Lillian Hellman, Shirley Jackson, Harriet Jacobs, Shirley Jackson, Carson McCullers, A.G. Mojtabai, Bharati Mukherjee, Carry A. Nation, Flannery O’Connor, Anne Sexton, Phillis Wheatley, and more). The women filling these pages have nothing and everything in common; they are female, yes, but view their lives and worth in vastly different manners. There is no census of ethnicity, class, age, or sexuality—the prerequisites for inclusion had only to do with a body of work, the written word in all its forms, and the unfortunate limits of time and space. Yes, there are omissions, none by choice: some were overlooked in favor of others (by a voting selection process), others were assigned and the material never received. In the end, it is the ongoing bane of publishing: there will never be enough time nor space to capture all—for there will (hopefully) always be new women writers coming to the fore, and newly discovered manuscripts to test our conceptions of life from a woman’s eye. Yet American Women Writers is just what it’s title implies, a series of books recounting the life and works of American women from Colonial days to the present. Some writers produced far more than others, yet each woman contributed writing worthy of historical note, to be brought to the forefront of scholarship for new generations to read. Last but never least, thanks to Peter Gareffa for this opportunity; to Kristin Hart for her continual support and great attitude; to my associate editor Glynis Benbow-Niemier; to my editorial and research staff (Jocelyn Prucha, Diane Murphy, and Lori Prucha), and to the beloveds: Jordyn, Wylie, Foley, Hadley, and John.
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FOREWORD In a memorandum to contributors, Lina Mainiero, the founding editor of American Women Writers described the project she envisioned in 1978: Written wholly by women critics, this reference work is designed as a four-volume survey of American women writers from colonial days to the present. . . Most entries will be on women who have written what is traditionally defined as literature. But AWW will also include entries on writers in other fields. . . I see AWW as a precious opportunity for women—those who write it and those who read it— to integrate at a more self- conscious level a variety of reading experience. The result was a document of its time, a period when feminism was associated with building sisterhood and raising consciousness. Even a commercial publishing venture might take on the trappings of a consciousness raising session in which readers and writers met. The idea now seems naive, but the ideal is worth remembering. In 1978 Mainiero was neither young nor revolutionary. She was hesitant about pushing too far; she was content to let traditional definitions stand. But the very inclusion of Rachel Carson and Margaret Mead, Betty Smith and Ursula LeGuin, Rebecca Harding Davis and Phillis Wheatley, Gertrude Stein and Dorothy Parker in a reference work entitled simply and profoundly American Women Writers spoke eloquently. Without ever referring explicitly to ‘‘canon revision,’’ these four volumes contributed to the process. Having the books on the shelves testified to the existence of hundreds of women who had written across the centuries. Including those whose work was perceived to be ‘‘literary’’ alongside those whose work was not, prefigured debates that continue today both inside and outside of the academy. Mainiero was especially concerned that contributors not aim their entries at the academic specialist. The ‘‘putative reader’’ was a college senior, who was conversant with literary history and criticism, feminism, and the humanities. This emphasis provoked criticism, because it was expressed during the heyday of academic feminism. American Women Writers appeared the same year as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar published The Madwoman in the Attic, their influential study of 19th-century English women writers. Nina Baym’s American Women Writers and Women’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and About Women in America had appeared the year before. In retrospect, however, the reader Mainiero targeted is precisely the young woman she hoped would join the consciousness session organized by her elders, a woman who would not become an academic, but who would find in women’s writing the ‘‘necessary bread’’ to sustain her in living her life. Ideals and realities clashed in a project that was clearly intended to make money, but declined to pay honoraria to individual contributors. Instead, the publisher promised to contribute a percentage of any profits to ‘‘women’s causes.’’ The desire to reach the common reader was one reason the volumes were published without a scholarly overview. The decision not to address an academic audience meant the entries contained no critical jargon, but it also meant no authorities checked facts. In fairness, few facts were known about many of the women in the book. Numerous articles profiled women about whom no one had written. One way to gauge the success of feminist scholarship over the past two decades would be to compare the bibliographies of women in this edition with those in the original edition. What we know now about women’s writing in the United States is more than we realized there was to know two decades ago. Let me use my contributions as examples. I wrote entries on Gwendolyn Brooks, Frances Watkins Harper, Nella Larsen, and Anne Spencer. These black women lived and worked across almost two centuries. Harper, an abolitionist and women’s rights advocate, had been the most popular African American poet of the mid-19th century. Larsen and Spencer published fiction and poetry, respectively, during the Harlem Renaissance. Of Brooks, I concluded, ‘‘by any reckoning, hers is one of the major voices of 20th-century American poetry.’’ Yet no biographies existed for any of them. All of the information in print on Harper referred to a single source. Twenty years later, scholars have explored Harper’s life in depth; digging through the archives, Frances Smith Foster discovered three lost novels and a treasure trove of poems. In search of the women of the Harlem Renaissance, scholars have unearthed much more information concerning Larsen and Spencer. Now the subject of a biography by Thadious Davis, Larsen and her novels—Passing in particular—have become key texts in the formulation of feminist theory and queer theory. Ironically, though Spencer’s oeuvre was the most slender, she was the only one of these writers to have been the subject of a book: J. Lee Greene’s Time’s Unfading Garden, a biographical and critical treatment of the poet along with a selection of her poems. Brooks has begun to receive her due in five biographical and critical studies. As scholars have continued their work, readers have found a valuable reference tool in American Women Writers. The fourth and final volume of the original edition appeared in 1982. Soon afterward, Langdon Lynne Faust edited an abridged version, including a two-volume edition in paperback. In part because the original edition concentrated on writers before 1960, a supplement, edited by Carol Hurd Green and Mary G. Mason, was published in 1993. The writers included were more diverse than ever, as a more inclusive understanding of ‘‘American’’ grew. Fostering that understanding has been a priority of this project since the beginning. That new editions continue to be published confirms the existence of a need that these volumes fill. The explosion of feminist scholarship has enriched each subsequent edition of American Women Writers. In this venue at least, the gap between academic specialist and common reader has narrowed. One development that no one would have predicted is the re-emergence of the literary society, a common feature in 19th-century American life. The name has changed; it is now more often called the reading group. But the membership remains mostly female. Such groups have grown up in every segment of American society. Indeed, ‘‘Oprah’s Book Club’’ is a macrocosm of a widespread local phenomenon. I hope and suspect members of reading groups, as well as the undergraduates who remain its putative readers, will find this new edition of American Women Writers a resource that can be put to everyday use. CHERYL A. WALL Professor of English Rutgers University
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BOARD OF ADVISORS Roger Blackwell Bailey, Ph.D. Professor of English San Antonio College Alanna K. Brown, Ph.D. Professor of English Montana State University Pattie Cowell Professor of English Colorado State University Barbara Grier President and CEO Naiad Press, Inc. Jessica Grim Reference Librarian Oberlin College Library
Kathleen Bonann Marshall Assistant Director, Center for the Writing Arts Northwestern University Margaret (Maggie) McFadden Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies Editor, National Women’s Studies Association Journal Appalachian State University Kit Reed Novelist, Teaching at Wesleyan University
Carolyn G. Heilbrun Avalon Professor in the Humanities, Emerita Columbia University
Cheryl A. Wall Professor of English Rutgers University
Marlene Manoff Associate Head/Collection Manager Humanities Library Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Barbara A. White Professor Emeritus of Women’s Studies University of New Hampshire
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BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS Aarons, Victoria Allegra Goodman Alice Hoffman Faye Kellerman Lesléa Newman Tillie Olsen Francine Prose Adams, Barbara Aimee Semple McPherson Adams, Pauline Marion Marsh Todd Alldredge, Betty J. Katherine Mayo Katharine Pearson Woods Allen, Carol Alice Childress Allen, Suzanne Martha Moore Avery Madeleine Vinton Dahlgren Anna McKenney Dorsey Ella Loraine Dorsey Susan Blanchard Elder Caroline Gordon Laura Z. Hobson Lillian Smith Alonso, Helena Julia Álvarez Sandra Cisneros Achy Obejas Anderson, Celia Catlett Beverly Cleary Marguerite Henry Florence Crannell Means Cornelia Meigs Anderson, Eileen M. Phyllis Chesler Anderson, Kathryn Murphy Beth Henley Marsha Norman Anderson, Maggie Jane Cooper Anderson, Nancy G. Dorothy Scarborough Lella Warren
Antler, Joyce Lynne Sharon Schwartz Armeny, Susan Mary Sewall Gardner Lillian D. Wald Armitage, Shelley Ina Donna Coolbrith Anne Ellis Assendelft, Nick Lisa Alther Anne Bernays E. M. Broner Marilyn Hacker Joy Harjo Maureen Howard Florence Howe Susanne K. Langer Meridel Le Sueur Bach, Peggy Evelyn Scott Bakerman, Jane S. Vera Caspary Ursula Reilly Curtiss Dorothea Canfield Fisher Lois Gould Elisabeth Sanxay Holding Emma Lathen Ruth Doan MacDougall Margaret Millar Toni Morrison May Sarton Elizabeth Savage Susan Fromberg Schaeffer Gene Stratton-Porter Mary Sture-Vasa Dorothy Uhnak Jessamyn West Bannan, Helen M. Fabiola Cabeza de Baca Elizabeth Bacon Custer Elaine Goodale Eastman Helen Hunt Jackson Mary Harris Jones Kathryn Anderson McLean Franc Johnson Newcomb Anna Moore Shaw Elizabeth G. Stern xi
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Banner, Lois W. Harriet Hubbard Ayer
Barr, Marleen S. Deborah Norris Logan
Benet, Sydonie Janet Flanner Mary McCarthy Josephine Miles Edna St. Vincent Millay Virginia Ramey Mollenkott Linda Pastan Katherine Paterson Marilyn Sachs Elizabeth Spencer Ruth Stone Michele Wallace Mae West Sherley Anne Williams
Baruch, Elaine Hoffman Susan Sontag Diana Trilling
Berke, Jacqueline Harriet Stratemeyer Adams Eleanor Hodgman Porter
Bauer, Denise Lucille Clifton Alicia Ostriker Alix Kates Shulman
Berry, Linda S. Georgia Douglas Johnson
Barbour, Paula L. Jane Auer Bowles Barbuto, Domenica Anne Warner French Amanda Theodocia Jones Barnhart, Jacqueline Baker Sarah Bayliss Royce Elinore Pruitt Stewart
Baytop, Adrianne Margaret Walker Phillis Wheatley Beasley, Maurine Mary E. Clemmer Ames Emily Edson Briggs Kate Field Beecher, Maureen Ursenbach Susa Young Gates Bell, Alice Paula Fox Belli, Angela Frances Winwar Ben-Merre, Diana Helen McCloy Benardete, Jane Harriot Stanton Blatch Abby Morton Diaz Mary Abigail Dodge Amanda Minnie Douglas Malvina Hoffman Elizabeth Palmer Peabody Lydia Huntley Sigourney Sophie Swett Benbow-Niemier, Glynis Jane Kenyon Lorine Niedecker Jean Valentine xii
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Berube, Linda Susan Griffin Alice Hoffman Maxine W. Kumin Valerie Miner Grace Paley May Swenson Beyer, Janet M. Erma Bombeck Ellen Goodman Lois Gould Doris Grumbach Nicole Hollander Biancarosa, Gina Erica Jong Bienstock, Beverly Gray Anita Loos Shirley MacLaine Cornelia Otis Skinner Thyra Samter Winslow Biguenet, John Valerie Martin Bird, Christiane Rosamond Neal DuJardin Josephine Lawrence Harper Lee Harriet Stone Lothrop Alice Duer Miller Bittker, Anne S. Mary Margaret McBride
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Blair, Karen J. Jane Cunningham Croly Ella Giles Ruddy Blicksilver, Edith Leslie Marmon Silko Bloom, Lynn Z. Natalie Stark Crouter Bloom, Steven F. Wendy Wasserstein Bloom, Susan P. Natalie Babbitt Eloise Greenfield Boisvert, Nancy L. Judith Rossner Bonazoli, Robert Kit Reed Bordin, Ruth Elizabeth Margaret Chandler Mary Rice Livermore Anna H. Shaw Boyd, Karen Leslie Patricia Highsmith Nora Roberts Boyd, Lois A. Paula Marie Cooey Boyd, Zohara Sophia Robbins Little Josephine Pollard Martha Remick Mary Jane Windle Brahm, Laura Judy Grahn Mary Oliver Breitsprecher, Nancy Zona Gale Bremer, Sidney H. Lucy Monroe Elia Wilkinson Peattie Eunice Tietjens Edith Franklin Wyatt Brett, Sally Inglis Clark Fletcher Bernice Kelly Harris Edith Summers Kelley Ida Tarbell Broner, E. M. Anne Bernays
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Brooker-Gross, Susan R. Ellen Churchill Semple Brookes, Kimberly Hayden Barbara Deming Brostoff, Anita Gladys Schmitt Brown, Alanna Kathleen Mourning Dove Brown, Dorothy H. Rose Falls Bres Elma Godchaux Margaret Landon Mary Lasswell Mary Ashley Townsend Jeannette Hadermann Walworth Brown, Fahamisha Patricia Jayne Cortez Carolyn M. Rodgers Ntozake Shange Brown, Lois Octavia E. Butler Terry McMillan Brown, Lynda W. Caroline Whiting Hentz Octavia Walton Le Vert Anne Newport Royall Jennette Reid Tandy Bryer, Marjorie Michele Wallace Buchanan, Harriette Cuttino Corra May Harris Helen Kendrick Johnson Agnes C. Laut Blair Rice Niles Marie Conway Oemler Josephine Pinckney Lizette Woodworth Reese Mary Howard Schoolcraft Bucknall, Barbara J. Pearl S. Buck Ursula K. Le Guin Phyllis McGinley Hannah Whittal Smith Evangeline Walton Burger, Mary Diane DiPrima Burns, Lois Mary Hunter Austin xiii
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Burns, Melissa Anne Bernays E. M. Broner Mary McCarthy Helen Hennessy Vendler
Challinor, Joan R. Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams
Butery, Karen Ann Karen Horney
Chew, Martha Mary Henderson Eastman Sallie Rochester Ford Maria Jane McIntosh
Butler, Francelia Harriet Taylor Upton Byers, Inzer Annie Heloise Abel Mary Sheldon Barnes Mary Louise Booth Catherine Drinker Bowen Carrie Chapman Catt Frances Manwaring Caulkins Margaret Antoinette Clapp Margaret L. Coit Angelina Grimké Sarah Moore Grimké Louise Kellogg Adrienne Koch Martha Nash Lamb Alma Lutz Nellie Neilson Martha Laurens Ramsay Constance Lindsay Skinner Margaret Bayard Smith Byington, Juliet Susan Brownmiller Lorna Dee Cervantes Alice Childress Rosalyn Drexler Eloise Greenfield Catharine A. MacKinnon Kate Millett Andrea Nye Susan Sontag Campbell, Mary B. Carolyn Forché Carl, Lisa Nikki Giovanni Mary Lee Settle Carlin, Sandra Louella Oettinger Parsons Carnes, Valerie Janet Flanner Carroll, Linda A. Jean Craighead George xiv
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Chase, Evelyn Hyman Mary Ellen Chase
Chou, Jerome Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Cathy Song Eudora Welty Kate Wilhelm Christensen, Lois E. Louise Smith Clappe Clark, Susan L. Mignon G. Eberhart Doris Grumbach Mary R. Higham Mabel Seeley Cleveland, Carol Patricia Highsmith Cohn, Amy L. Lois Lowry Cohn, Jan Mary Roberts Rinehart Coleman, Linda S. Mollie Dorsey Sanford Condit, Rebecca C. Ai Jayne Cortez Joan Didion Frances FitzGerald Paula Fox Sandra M. Gilbert Ellen Gilchrist Marita Golden Mary Catherine Gordon Lois Gould Joanne Greenberg Beth Henley Pauline Kael Alison Lurie Marge Piercy Rosemary Radford Ruether Linda Ty-Casper Dorothy Uhnak Ann Belford Ulanov
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Cook, Martha E. Virginia Hamilton Annie Fellows Johnston George Madden Martin Katherine Bonner McDowell Mary Murfree Cook, Sylvia Olive Tilford Dargan Grace Lumpkin Coultrap-McQuin, Susan Eliza Leslie Catharine Arnold Williams Cowell, Pattie Bathsheba Bowers Martha Wadsworth Brewster Elizabeth Sandwith Drinker Anna Young Smith Annis Boudinot Stockton Lydia Fish Willis Anna Green Winslow Cox, Virginia Erica Jong Crabbe, Katharyn F. Jane Andrews Carolyn Sherwin Bailey Katherine Lee Bates Margery Williams Bianco Claire Huchet Bishop Rebecca Sophia Clarke Clara F. Guernsey Lucy Ellen Guernsey Theodora Kroeber Elizabeth Foreman Lewis Ella Farman Pratt Susan Ridley Sedgwick Monica Shannon Eva March Tappan Louisa Huggins Tuthill Elizabeth Gray Vining Eliza Orne White Crumpacker, Laurie Sarah Prince Gill Cutler, Evelyn S. Rose O’Neill Dame, Enid Edna St. Vincent Millay Darney, Virginia Maude Howe Elliott Laura Howe Richards
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Dash, Irene Carolyn G. Heilbrun Davidson, Cathy N. E. M. Broner Laura Jean Libbey Tabitha Tenney Davis, Barbara Kerr Ellen Moers Davis, Thadious M. Anna Julia Cooper Mollie Moore Davis Shirley Graham Mary Spring Walker Rhoda E. White Deegan, Mary Jo Edith Abbott Emily Greene Balch Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge Helen Merrell Lynd Marion Talbott DeMarr, Mary Jean Charlotte Armstrong Sarah T. Bolton Gwen Bristow Doris Miles Disney Janet Ayer Fairbank Rachel Lyman Field Alice Tisdale Hobart Agnes Newton Keith Alice Hegan Rice Mari Sandoz Anya Seton Ruth Suckow Elswyth Thane Agnes Sligh Turnbull Carolyn Wells Demetrakopoulos, Stephanie Mary Daly Mary Esther Harding June K. Singer Ann Belford Ulanov Deming, Caren J. Gertrude Berg Elaine Sterne Carrington Agnes E. Nixon Irna Phillips xv
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Denler, Heidi Hartwig Alice French Tina Howe Kristin Hunter-Lattany Alice McDermott Anne Tyler Denniston, Dorothy L. Paule Marshall DeRoche, Celeste Beverly Cleary Natalie Zemon Davis Rachel Blau DuPlessis Sylvia A. Earle Louise Erdrich Gail Godwin Katharine Graham Carolyn G. Heilbrun Linda Hogan Nicole Hollander Barbara C. Jordan Nancy Mairs Maria Mitchell Robin Morgan Gloria Naylor Anne Firor Scott Joan Wallach Scott Vida Dutton Scudder Jane P. Tompkins Dorothy West Dixon, Janette Goff Judy Blume Erma Bombeck Betty Friedan Barbara Tuchman Helen Hennessy Vendler Dobbs, Jeannine Hildegarde Flanner Hazel Hall Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck Leonora von Stosch Speyer Jean Starr Untermeyer Marya Zaturenska Domina, Lynn Dorothy Allison Susan B. Anthony Rita Dove Anne Lamott Denise Levertov Sojourner Truth xvi
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Donnelly, Daria Sarah Appleton-Weber Joy Harjo Naomi Shihab Nye Linda Pastan Donovan, Josephine Annie Adams Fields Louise Imogen Guiney Sarah Orne Jewett Lucy Larcom Celia Laighton Thaxter Dooley, Dale A. Ai Alexis DeVeaux Dorenkamp, Angela Mary Catherine Gordon Dorenkamp, Monica Kathy Acker Alicia Ostriker Dykeman, Amy Kate W. Hamilton Cecilia Viets Jamison Adeline Trafton Knox Eliasberg, Ann Pringle Annie Brown Leslie Josephine Preston Peabody Dorothy Thompson Victoria Woodhull Estess, Sybil Maxine W. Kumin Etheridge, Billie W. Abigail Smith Adams Mercy Otis Warren Evans, Elizabeth Josephine Jacobsen Helen MacInnes Frances Newman Margaret Junkin Preston Anne Tyler Eudora Welty Ewell, Barbara C. Sarah McLean Greene Fannie Heaslip Lea Eliza Jane Poitevent Nicholson Eliza Phillips Pugh Faust, Langdon Frances Willard
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Ferguson, Mary Anne Lisa Alther Sally Benson Doris Betts Tess Slesinger Finger, Mary E. Josephine Herbst Madeleine L’Engle Fiore, Jullie Ann Annie Dillard Fish, Virginia K. Frances R. Donovan Annie Marion MacLean Fitch, Noel R. Sylvia Beach Fleche, Anne Adrienne Kennedy Fleenor, Juliann E. Catharine Esther Beecher Caroline Chesebrough Susan Hale Emily Chubbuck Judson Margaret Sanger Ann Winterbotham Stephens Flint, Joyce Margaret Craven Florence, Barbara Moench Lella Secor Fowler, Lois Eleanor Flexner Frances Dana Gage Ida Husted Harper Julia McNair Wright Franklin, Phyllis Judith Sargent Murray Elsie Clews Parsons Jean Stafford Frazer, Winifred Dorothy Day Voltairine de Cleyre Emma Goldman Freiberg, Karen Kate Wilhelm Freibert, Lucy Georgiana Bruce Kirby Jessica N. MacDonald Marianne Dwight Orvis
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Friedman, Ellen Anna Hempstead Branch Bettina Liebowitz Knapp Dilys Bennett Laing Fuchs, Miriam Beulah Marie Dix Maude McVeigh Hutchins Gabbard, Lucina P. Mary Coyle Chase Clare Boothe Luce Galanter, Margit Barbara Tuchman Gallo, Rose Adrienne Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald Garson, Helen S. Jacqueline Susann Sophie Kerr Underwood Gartner, Carol B. Carman Dee Barnes Laura Benét Mary Putnam Jacobi Kate Jordan Myra Kelly Gaskill, Gayle Isabella MacDonald Alden Beatrice J. Chute Marchette Chute Mathilde Eiker Sarah Barnwell Elliott Jean Kerr Gensler, Kinereth Sandra M. Gilbert Gentilella, Dacia Paula Gunn Allen Gerson, Risa Susanna Anthony E. L. Konigsburg Eliza Buckminster Lee Gibbons, Christina Tischler Mary Palmer Tyler Gibbons, Sheila J. Mary McGrory Gilbert, Melissa Kesler Gloria Steinem Giles, Jane Elizabeth Elkins Sanders Catharine Maria Sedgwick xvii
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Ginsberg, Elaine K. Amelia Jenks Bloomer Maria Susanna Cummins Hannah Webster Foster Mary Jane Hawes Holmes Betty Smith E. D. E. N. Southworth Gironda, Suzanne Michelle Cliff Jill Johnston Meridel Le Sueur Gladstein, Mimi R. Ayn Rand Gleason, Phyllis S. Alice Adams Alison Lurie Goldman, Maureen Esther Edwards Burr Hannah Flagg Gould Hannah Sawyer Lee
Griffith, Susan Nicholasa Mohr Grim, Jessica Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Lucy R. Lippard Eileen Myles Rosmarie Waldrop Groben, Anne R. Ella Wheeler Wilcox Grove, Shari Linda Hogan Hall, Joan Wylie Ruth McEnery Stuart Eudora Welty Halpern, Faye Joanne Greenberg Maureen Howard
Grant, Mary H. Florence Howe Hall Julia Ward Howe
Hamblen, Abigail Ann Eleanor Hallowell Abbott Temple Bailey Amelia E. Barr Clara L. Root Burnham Elizabeth Jane Coatsworth Margaret Campbell Deland Mary E. Wilkins Freeman Honoré McCue Morrow Louise Redfield Peattie Lucy Fitch Perkins Margaret E. Sangster Elsie Singmaster Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard Nelia Gardner White Ola Elizabeth Winslow
Green, Carol Hurd Eve Merriam
Hamblen, Vicki Lynn Helen M. Winslow
Greene, Dana Sophia Hume Martha Shepard Lippincott Lucretia Mott Sara Vickers Oberholtzer
Hannay, Margaret P. Marabel Morgan
Gottfried, Erika Rose Pesotta Gottlieb, Phyllis Lucy Hooper Lucy Jones Hooper Graham, Theodora R. Louise Bogan Grace Elizabeth King Josephine Miles Harriet Monroe
Greyson, Laura Hannah Arendt Grider, Sylvia Ann Linda Dégh Grierson, Beth Rita Mae Brown Alma Routsong xviii
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Hardesty, Nancy Antoinette Brown Blackwell Hannah Chaplin Conant Sarah Ewing Hall Phoebe Worrall Palmer Elizabeth Payson Prentiss Elizabeth Cady Stanton Emma Willard Hardy, Willene S. Katharine Fullerton Gerould
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Harlan, Judith Sue Grafton Shere Hite Diane Johnson Sarah Winnemucca Naomi Wolf Harris, Miriam Kalman, Ph.D Jean Houston Claire Myers Owens Florida Scott-Maxwell Harvey, Mary E. Mari Evans Sally Miller Gearhart Marita Golden Kristin Hunter-Lattany Healey, Claire H. D. Amy Lowell Heilbrun, Carolyn G. A. G. Mojtabai Helbig, Alethea K. Carol Ryrie Brink Eleanor Estes Lucretia Peabody Hale Irene Hunt Madeleine L’Engle Myra Cohn Livingston Emily Cheney Neville Ruth Sawyer Kate Seredy Caroline Dale Snedeker Zilpha Keatley Snyder Elizabeth George Speare Anne Terry White Ella Young Henderson, Kathy Linda J. Barnes Joan Didion Martha Grimes Susan Minot
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Hill, Vicki Lynn Bessie Breuer Mary Cruger Helen Hamilton Gardener Ursula N. Gestefeld Marie Howland Ellen Warner Kirk Theresa S. Malkiel Myra Page Martha W. Tyler Marie Van Vorst Mary Heaton Vorse Bessie McGinnis Van Vorst Hobbs, Glenda Harriette Simpson Arnow Hoeveler, Diane Long Mathilde Franziska Giesler Anneke Phoebe Cary Mary Andrews Denison Alice Bradley Haven Eleanor Mercein Kelly Juliette Magill Kinzie Marya Mannes Jessica Mitford Frances Crosby Van Alstyne Babette Deutsch Holbrook, Amy Alice McDermott Holdstein, Deborah H. Harriet Livermore Vienna G. Morrell Ramsay Dora Knowlton Ranous Itti Kinney Reno Mae West Holly, Marcia Margaret Culkin Banning
Hepps, Marcia María Irene Fornés Tina Howe Megan Terry
Hornstein, Jacqueline Jenny Fenno Sarah Symmes Fiske Susannah Johnson Hastings Elizabeth Mixer Sarah Parsons Moorhead Sarah Wentworth Morton Sarah Osborn Sarah Porter Eunice Smith Jane Turell Elizabeth White
Hill, Holly Mina Kirstein Curtiss
Horton, Beverly Harriet Jacobs
Henning, Wendy J. Marie Manning
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BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Howard, Lillie Fannie Cook Alice Walker Howze, Jo Mary McLeod Bethune Hoyle, Karen Nelson Virginia Lee Burton Natalie Savage Carlson Marguerite Lofft de Angeli Jean Lee Latham
Jones, Judith P. Phyllis Chesler Eleanor Clark Elizabeth Gould Davis Gayl Jones Kafatou, Sarah Ellen Bryant Voigt Kahn, Mariam Ruth Benedict Margaret Mead
Hudspeth, Cheryl K. Rodello Hunter
Kaledin, Eugenia Carolyn Kizer Elizabeth Spencer
Hughson, Lois Mary Ritter Beard Barbara Tuchman
Karp, Sheema Hamdani Adrienne Rich
Humez, Jean McMahon Rebecca Cox Jackson Hunter, Edith F. Sophia Lyon Fahs Irvin, Helen Deiss Antoinette Doolittle Anna White Johnson, Claudia D. Olive Logan Clara Morris Johnson, Lee Ann Mary Hallock Foote Johnson, Robin Marianne Moore Jones, Allison A. Maxine W. Kumin Rhoda Lerman Lois Lowry Paule Marshall Terry McMillan A. G. Mojtabai Katherine M. Rogers Susan Fromberg Schaeffer Ntozake Shange Jones, Anne Hudson Kate C. Hurd-Mead Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Esther Pohl Lovejoy Gail Sheehy xx
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Kaufman, Janet E. Eliza Frances Andrews Mary Miller Chesnut Kate Cumming Sarah Ellis Dorsey Rebecca Latimer Felton Constance Cary Harrison Sarah Stone Holmes Mary Ann Webster Loughborough Judith Brockenbrough McGuire Elizabeth Avery Meriwether Phoebe Yates Pember Sara Rice Pryor Sallie A. Brock Putnam Eliza M. Ripley Cornelia Phillips Spencer Susie King Taylor Katharine Prescott Wormeley Kavo, Rose F. Sue Petigru Bowen Jane C. Campbell Juliet Lewis Campbell Jane McManus Cazneau Jane Dunbar Chaplin Ella Rodman Church Jane Hardin Cross Keeney, William María Irene Fornés Tina Howe Keeshen, Kathleen Kearney Marguerite Higgins Ada Louise Huxtable Miriam Ottenberg
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Kelleghan, Fiona Marion Zimmer Bradley Suzy McKee Charnas Anne McCaffrey Vonda N. McIntyre Andre Norton Kit Reed Elizabeth Ann Scarborough Sheri S. Tepper Connie Willis
Koengeter, L. W. Ann Eliza Schuyler Bleecker Maria Gowen Brooks Hannah Mather Crocker Margaretta V. Faugeres Rose Wilder Lane Adah Isaacs Menken
Kenschaft, Lori Martha Ballard Barbara Ehrenreich Charlotte Perkins Gilman Frances Kellor Carson McCullers Ann Lane Petry Ida B. Wells-Barnett
Kolmerten, Carol A. Frances Wright
Kern, Donna Casella Frances Fuller Victor Kern, Edith Ann Landers Kessler, Carol Farley Elizabeth Stuart Phelps King, Margaret J. Clara Jessup Bloomfield-Moore Peg Bracken Judith Crist Maureen Daly Pauline Kael Elizabeth Linington Madalyn Murray O’Hair Emily Post Mary Wilson Sherwood Amy Vanderbilt Kish, Dorothy Rebecca Harding Davis Klein, Kathleen Gregory Susan Griffin Ruth McKenney Anne Nichols Bella Cohen Spewak Megan Terry Klein, Michael Jean Valentine Knapp, Bettina L. Anaïs Nin
Kohlstedt, Sally Gregory Anna Botsford Comstock Almira Lincoln Phelps
Kondelik, Marlene Mary Shipman Andrews Koon, Helene Marian Anderson Ruth Gordon Anna Mowatt Ritchie Elizabeth Robins Catherine Turney S. S. B. K. Wood Koppes, Phyllis Bixlir Frances Hodgson Burnett Kouidis, Virginia M. Mina Loy Krieg, Joann Peck Charlotte Mary Sanford Barnes Susan Fenimore Cooper Mary Baker Eddy Kroll, Diane E. Jean Fritz Katherine Paterson Krouse, Agate Nesaule Rhoda Lerman Kuenhold, Sandra Leta Stetter Hollingworth Kuznets, Lois R. Esther Forbes Lois Lenski Lamping, Marilyn Hallie Quinn Brown Pauline Hopkins Maria W. Stewart Fannie Barrier Williams Langhals, Patricia Florence Wheelock Ayscough Alice Bacon Dorothy Borg xxi
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Langsam, Miriam Z. Margaret Bourke-White Laska, Vera Marcia Gluck Davenport Elisabeth Elliot
Ludwig, Linda Kathryn Cavarly Hulme Margaret Mitchell MacDonald, Maureen Katherine Bolton Black
Lauter, Estella Diane Wakoski
MacKay, Kathryn L. Maurine Whipple
Levy, Ilise Alice Hamilton Jane Jacobs
MacPike, Loralee Emily Kimbrough Maxine Hong Kingston Mary Jane Ward
Lewandowska, M. L. Marilyn Hacker Lewis, Janette Seaton Carrie Jacobs Bond Joanne Greenberg Lewis, Sharon A. Marita Bonner Lezburg, Amy K. Ilka Chase Linden-Ward, Blanche Andrea Dworkin Marilyn French Robin Morgan Loeb, Helen Inez Haynes Irwin Lohman, Judith S. Crystal Eastman Londré, Felicia Hardison Agnes de Mille Edith Ellis Anne Crawford Flexner Harriet Ford Rose Franken Ketti Frings Dorothy Kuhns Heyward Jeannette Augustus Marks Frances Aymar Mathews Adelaide Matthews Marguerite Merington Lillian Mortimer Martha Morton Josefina Niggli Charlotte Blair Parker Lillian Ross Lillie West Rida Johnson Young Lord, Charlotte V. Sidney Cowell Bateman xxii
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Madsen, Carol Cornwall Louisa Greene Richards Emmeline Woodward Wells Maida, Patricia D. Lillian O’Donnell Mainiero, Lina Willa Sibert Cather Maio, Kathleen L. Anna Katharine Green Mary R. Platt Hatch Lenore Glen Offord Metta Fuller Victor Mallett, Daryl F. Leigh Brackett Jane E. Brody Carolyn Chute Emma Lathen Ursula K. Le Guin Reeve Lindbergh Bobbie Ann Mason Rachel Pollack Anne Rice Kristine Kathryn Rusch Joanna Russ Jessica Amanda Salmonson Lee Smith Margaret Truman Marchino, Lois Rita Mae Brown Marcus, Lisa bell hooks Sherley Anne Williams Margolis, Tina Eva LeGallienne Marie, Jacquelyn Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Marks, Elaine Germaine Brée Marshall, Kathleen Bonann Susan H. Bergman Elizabeth Hardwick Linda Kaufman Kerber Bette Bao Lord Lorrie Moore Sara Paretsky Elaine Showalter Mona Van Duyn Edith Wharton Martinez, Elizabeth Coonrod Sandra Benítez Rosa Guy Demetria Martínez Cherríe Moraga Judith Ortiz Cofer Esmeralda Santiago Helena María Viramontes Masel-Walters, Lynne Alice Stone Blackwell Mary Ware Dennett Miriam Follin Leslie Inez Haynes Irwin Mason, Mary Grimley Betty Friedan Carolyn G. Heilbrun Nancy Gardner Prince Mason, Sarah E. Pauline Kael Masteller, Jean Carwile Annie Nathan Meyer Elizabeth Seifert Masters, Joellen Gayl Jones Masters, Jollen Susan Fromberg Schaeffer Matherne, Beverly M. Alice Gerstenberg
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
McCarthy, Joanne Kay Boyle Maeve Brennan Mary Maguire Colum Hedda Hopper Betty MacDonald Kathleen Thompson Norris McCay, Mary A. Rosellen Brown Louise Erdrich Kaye Gibbons Ellen Gilchrist Patricia Highsmith Barbara Kingsolver Bobbie Ann Mason Brenda Marie Osbey Anne Rice Helen Yglesias McClure, Charlotte S. Gertrude Atherton McColgan, Kristin Dorothea Lynde Dix McCrea, Joan M. Katharine Coman McDannell, M. Colleen Katherine Eleanor Conway Pearl Richards Craigie Amanda Smith Frances Fisher Tiernan Ellen Gould White McFadden-Gerber, Margaret Sally Carrighar Annie Dillard Wilma Dykeman Fannie Hardy Eckstorm Josephine Winslow Johnson Harriet M. Miller Louise Dickinson Rich
May, Jill P. Ann Nolan Clark Ingri Mortenson d’Aulaire Maud Fuller Petersham Marilyn Sachs
McGovern, Edythe M. Margaret Wise Brown Rachel Crothers Susan Glaspell Lorraine Hansberry Sophie Treadwell Charlotte Zolotow
Mayer, Elsie F. Anne Morrow Lindbergh
McKay, Mary A. Lee Smith xxiii
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
McLennan, Karen Harriette Simpson Arnow Toni Cade Bambara Mary Daly Louise Glück Virginia Johnson-Masters Audre Lorde Patricia Meyer Spacks McQuin, Susan Coultrap Sarah Ann Evans Medeiros, Kimbally A. Sandra Harding Eleanor Munro Anne Truitt Anne Waldman Menger, Lucy Ruth Shick Montgomery Jane Roberts Susy Smith Mercier, Cathryn M. Yoshiko Uchida Cynthia Voigt Miller, James A. Margaret Randall Miller, Marlene M. Elizabeth Bishop Kelly Cherry Elizabeth Cook-Lynn M. F. K. Fisher June Jordan Mitchell, Nora Olga Broumas Louise Glück Sharon Olds Mitchell, Sally Francesca Alexander Helen Dore Boylston Margaret Mayo Cora Baggerly Older Mary Green Pike Rose Porter Molly Elliot Seawell Mary Ella Waller Moe, Phyllis Abbie Farwell Brown Helen Stuart Campbell Eliza Cabot Follen Emily Huntington Miller Sarah Chauncey Woolsey xxiv
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Mollenkott, Virginia Ramey Grace Livingston Hill-Lutz Sarah Smith Martyn Marjorie Hope Nicolson Rosemond Tuve Montenegro, David Linda Ty-Casper Morris, Linda A. Marietta Holley Frances Berry Whitcher Mortimer, Gail Katherine Anne Porter Mossberg, Barbara A. Clarke Sylvia Plath Genevieve Taggard Moynihan, Ruth Barnes Abigail Scott Duniway Murphy, Maureen Mary E. McGrath Blake Helena Lefroy Caperton Kathleen Coyle Blanche McManus Mansfield Mary L. Meaney Asenath Hatch Nicholson Florence J. O’Connor Jessie Fremont O’Donnell Katharine A. O’Keeffe Clara M. Thompson Murphy, Miriam B. Sarah E. Carmichael Martha Spence Heywood Murphy, Paula C. Maya Angelou Eleanor Taylor Bland Nora Ephron Barbara Kingsolver Barbara Neely Mussell, Kay Phyllis A. Whitney Nance, Guin A. Gail Godwin Nancy Hale Virginia M. Satir Elizabeth Spencer Clara M. Thompson Neils, Patricia Langhals Emily Hahn Charlotte Y. Salisbury Mary Clabaugh Wright
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Neville, Tam Lin Ruth Stone Newman, Anne Julia Mood Peterkin Elizabeth Sewell Amélie Rives Troubetzkoy Nichols, Kathleen L. Miriam Coles Harris Ellen Peck Harriet Waters Preston Anne Sexton Nix, E. M. Gail Godwin Nochimson, Martha Carry A. Nation Martha Harrison Robinson Norman, Marion Lucretia Maria Davidson Margaret Miller Davidson O’Connor, Christine Martha Ostenso O’Loughlin, James Tillie Olsen Ockerstrom, Lolly Mona Van Duyn Pannill, Linda Isadora Duncan Parker, Alice Ada Jack Carver Edith Hamilton Passty, Jeanette Nyda Isabella Oliver Sharp Sarah Pogson Smith Sukey Vickery Watson Payne, Alma J. Louisa May Alcott Pelzer, Linda C. Patricia Cornwell Martha Gellhorn Anita Shreve Penn, Patricia E. Del Martin Annie Smith Peck Penn, Shana Lucy S. Dawidowicz Perez-Guntin, Amiris Julia de Burgos
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Peterson, Margaret Emily Dickinson Janet Lewis Pettis, Joyce Zora Neale Hurston Philips, Elizabeth Sarah Helen Whitman Phillips, Elizabeth Elizabeth Ellet Annie Somers Gilchrist Estelle Robinson Lewis Frances Sargent Osgood Caroline Ticknor Mabel Loomis Todd Piercy, Josephine K. Anne Dudley Bradstreet Pogel, Nancy Constance Mayfield Rourke Poland, Helene Dwyer Julia Henrietta Gulliver Susanne K. Langer Pool, Gail Cynthia Ozick Dawn Powell Pouncey, Lorene Vassar Miller Marguerite Young Preston, Caroline Annie Trumbull Slosson Pringle, Mary Beth Léonie Fuller Adams Charlotte Perkins Gilman Puk, Francine Shapiro Elizabeth Akers Allen Victoria Lincoln Dorothy Parker Frances Gray Patton xxv
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Radtke, Barbara Anne Mary Daly Rosemary Radford Ruether Ratigan, Virginia Kaib Isabella Marshall Graham Mary Agnes Tincker Raugust, Karen Kathy Acker Natalie Angier Nevada Barr Ann Beattie Blanche McCrary Boyd Sandra Brown Edna Buchanan Amy Clampitt Nancy F. Cott Elizabeth Daly Dorothy Salisbury Davis Elizabeth Drew Carolyn Forché Jean Garrigue Kaye Gibbons Doris Kearns Goodwin Jorie Graham Jane Hamilton Lyn Hejinian Laurie R. King Ray, Sandra Rosa Guy Mildred Pitts Walter Nancy Willard Rayson, Ann Adelle Davis Ann Lane Petry
xxvi
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Rhodes, Nelson Margaret Wise Brown Alexis DeVeaux Ann Douglas Susan Griffin Lillian Hellman Zenna Henderson Jill Johnston Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Madeleine L’Engle Harper Lee Anne Morrow Lindbergh Shirley MacLaine Nancy Mairs Del Martin Marsha Norman Rochelle Owens Sylvia Plath Ayn Rand Hannah Whittal Smith Gertrude Stein Megan Terry Phyllis A. Whitney Richardson, Susan B. Mitsuye Yamada Hisaye Yamamoto Richmond, Velma Bourgeois Anne Fremantle Frances Parkinson Keyes Ruth Painter Randall Agnes Repplier Richter, Heddy A. Elizabeth Frances Corbett Olive Higgins Prouty Roberts, Audrey Caroline M. Stansbury Kirkland
Reardon, Joan Julia Child
Roberts, Bette B. Lydia Maria Child
Reisman, Jessica Hortense Calisher Angela Yvonne Davis Rachel Hadas Anne Moody Ann Rule Cynthia Voigt Alice Walker Kate Wilhelm
Roberts, Elizabeth Fannie W. Rankin Maggie Roberts Harriet Winslow Sewall Eliza Ann Youmans
Reuman, Ann E. Janice Mirikitani
Rogers, Katharine M. Lillian Hellman
Roca, Ana Julia Álvarez Gloria Anzaldúa Achy Obejas
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Rosenberg, Julia Emma Manley Embury Mary E. Moore Hewitt Rebecca Rush Caroline Warren Thayer Rosinsky, Natalie McCaffrey Anne McCaffrey Judith Merril C. L. Moore Rowe, Anne Maya Angelou Elizabeth Madox Roberts Constance Fenimore Woolson Rudnick, Lois P. Mabel Dodge Luhan Rushin, Kate Audre Lorde Ryan, Rosalie Tutela Jane Starkweather Locke Salo, Alice Bell Marjorie Hill Allee Mabel Leigh Hunt Elizabeth Yates Sandberg, Elisabeth Carolyn Chute Ruth Seid Scanzoni, Letha Anita Bryant Virginia Ramey Mollenkott Schiavoni, Andrew Rochelle Owens Susan Sontag Schleuning, Neala Yount Meridel Le Sueur Schoen, Carol B. Hannah Adams Rebekah Bettelheim Kohut Emma Lazarus Penina Moise Ruth Seid
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Schoenbach, Lisi Germaine Brée Schofield, Ann Helen Marot Schull, Elinor Adela Rogers St. Johns Schwartz, Helen J. Mary Antin Hortense Calisher Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer Margaret Thompson Janvier Margaret Woods Lawrence Tillie Olsen Grace Paley Schweik, Joanne L. Marilyn French Isabella Gardner Vivian Gornick Hettie Jones Gloria Steinem Scura, Dorothy M. Mary Johnston Seaton, Beverly Florence Merriam Bailey Gladys Hasty Carroll Mary Hartwell Catherwood Nellie Blanchan Doubleday Mateel Howe Farnham Margaret Flint Helen Morgenthau Fox Mary Griffith Susan Huntington Louisa Yeomans King Elizabeth L. Lawrence Alice Lounsberry Helen Reimensnyder Martin Sarah Edgarton Mayo Josephine Clifford McCrackin Helen Matthews Nitsch Frances Dana Parsons Grace Richmond Gladys Bagg Taber Anna Bartlett Warner Susan Bogert Warner Mary Stanbery Watts Adeline D. T. Whitney Kate Douglass Wiggin Laura Ingalls Wilder Louise Beebe Wilder Mabel Osgood Wright xxvii
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Secrest, Rose V. C. Andrews Mary Higgins Clark June Doman Katherine V. Forrest Nancy Freedman Carolyn G. Hart Joyce Maynard Sharon McCrumb Bharati Mukherjee Frances Perkins Belva Plain Patricia Polacco Sylvia F. Porter Pamela Sargent Shaffer-Koros, Carole M. Willystine Goodsell Helen Hazlett Ruth Putnam Shakir, Evelyn Ednah Littlehale Cheney Abigail May Alcott Nieriker Sharistanian, Janet Florence Howe Elizabeth Janeway Helen Waite Papashvily Katherine M. Rogers Shelton, Pamela Rita Mae Brown Nikki Giovanni Harriet Jacobs Sherman, Sarah Way Sarah Knowles Bolton Alice Brown Rose Terry Cooke Gertrude Battles Lane Louise Chandler Moulton Mary Alicia Owen
xxviii
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Shostak, Elizabeth Bette Bao Lord Jayne Anne Phillips Kate Simon Shur, Cherri L. Marianne Wiggins Shute, Carolyn Judy Blume Mildred Delois Taylor Siefert, Susan E. Ariel Durant Fannie Merritt Farmer Skaggs, Peggy Helen Keller Catherine Marshall Sladics, Devra M. Lilian Jackson Braun Gwendolyn Brooks Tess Gallagher Doris Grumbach Sonia Sanchez Dana Stabenow Wendy Wasserstein Sylvia Watanabe Jade Snow Wong Charlotte Zolotow Slaughter, Jane Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Smelstor, Marjorie Fanny Kemble
Shinn, Thelma J. Margaret Ayer Barnes Frances Courtenay Baylor Barnum Kate Chopin Martha Finley Lucy Smith French Shirley Ann Grau Mary Dana Shindler Harriet Prescott Spofford
Smethurst, James Maya Angelou Marilyn Hacker Maxine Hong Kingston Sonia Sanchez Alice Walker Margaret Walker
Shortreed, Vivian H. Elizabeth Oakes Smith Jane Grey Swisshelm
Smith, Martha Nell Toi Derricotte
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Smith, Susan Sutton Elizabeth Cabot Cary Agassiz Jane Goodwin Austin Delia Salter Bacon Sarah G. Bagley Mary Edwards Bryan Maria Weston Chapman Adelaide Crapsey Caroline Healey Dall Eliza Ann Dupuy Harriet Farley Eliza Rotch Farrar Margaret Fuller Caroline Howard Gilman Caroline Gilman Jervey Elizabeth Dodge Kinney Sara Jane Lippincott Harriet Hanson Robinson Phoebe Atwood Taylor Mary Hawes Terhune Jean Webster Sneller, Jo Leslie Rosemary Sprague Snipes, Katherine Clara Barton Laura Jackson Carson McCullers Snyder, Carrie Ana Castillo Julia Child Jane Cooper Mari Evans María Irene Fornés Shirley Ann Grau Bertha Harris Erica Jong Sandra McPherson Valerie Miner Alma Routsong Anya Seton Gail Sheehy Leslie Marmon Silko Zilpha Keatley Snyder Cathy Song Danielle Steel Mildred Pitts Walter Sonnenschein, Dana Rosalyn Drexler Jorie Graham Sandra McPherson
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Sparks, Leah J. Sanora Babb Carman Dee Barnes Doris Betts Germaine Brée Olga Broumas Octavia E. Butler Rachel Carson Kim Chernin Phyllis Chesler Marilyn Chin Michelle Cliff Judith Crist Toi Derricotte Diane DiPrima Andrea Dworkin Suzette Haden Elgin Carol Emshwiller Marjorie Garber Sally Miller Gearhart Donna Haraway Lillian Hellman Susan Isaacs Molly Ivins Shirley Jackson Gerda Lerner Del Martin Alice Notley Martha Craven Nussbaum Flannery O’Connor Joyce Carol Oates Camille Paglia Margaret Randall Harriet Beecher Stowe Lois-Ann Yamanaka Spencer, Linda Jayne Anne Phillips Eleanor Roosevelt Judith Rossner Sprague, Rosemary Sara Teasdale Sproat, Elaine Lola Ridge Stackhouse, Amy D. Edith Maud Eaton Lorine Niedecker Staley, Ann Jane Hirshfield Stanbrough, Jane Elizabeth Manning Hawthorne Hildegarde Hawthorne Rose Hawthorne Lathrop xxix
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Stanford, Ann Sanora Babb Sarah Kemble Knight May Swenson Staples, Katherine G. M. Flanders Louisa Park Hall Caroline E. Rush Alma Sioux Scarberry Stauffer, Helen Bess Streeter Aldrich Bertha Muzzy Sinclair Dorothy Swain Thomas Steele, Karen B. Elizabeth W. Latimer Mary Lowell Putnam Stein, Karen F. Paulina Wright Davis Alice Dunbar-Nelson Abbie Huston Evans Phebe Coffin Hanaford Elinor Hoyt Wylie Stein, Rachel Toni Cade Bambara Stepanski, Lisa Ann Beattie Stetson, Erlene Gwendolyn B. Bennett Stevenson, Deanna Olga Broumas Stiller, Nikki Helaine Newstead Stinson, Peggy Jane Addams Agnes Smedley Ella Winter Anzia Yezierska Stoddard, Karen M. Dorothy Daniels Summers, Shauna Joan Didion Anne Tyler Swan, Susan Jamaica Kincaid xxx
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Swartz, Mark Djuna Barnes bell hooks Susan Howe Ann Lauterbach Cynthia Ozick Swidler, Arlene Anderson Sarah N. Brownson Katherine Kurz Burton Aline Murray Kilmer Sister Mary Madeleva Helen Constance White Sylvander, Carolyn Wedin Martha Griffith Browne Jessie Redmon Fauset Frances Noyes Hart Helen Hull Mary Britton Miller Mary White Ovington Laura M. Towne Szymanski, Karen Anne C. Lynch Botta Eliza Woodson Farnham Talamantez, Inés Ella Cara Deloria Tebbe, Jennifer L. Georgette Meyer Chapelle Elisabeth May Craig Rheta Childe Dorr Elizabeth Drew Barbara Ehrenreich Frances FitzGerald Anne O’Hare McCormick Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman Anna Louise Strong Terris, Virginia R. Alice Henry Sarah Bryan Piatt Jessie B. Rittenhouse Lillian Whiting Thiébaux, Marcelle Faith Baldwin Cuthrell Julia Ripley Dorr Ellen Glasgow Anne Green Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Thomas, Gwendolyn A. Henrietta Buckmaster Charlotte L. Forten Pauli Murray
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Thompson, Ann Rosemary Radford Ruether Thompson, Dorothea Mosley Mary Cunningham Logan Ruth Bryan Owen Irma von Starkloff Rombauer Caroline White Soule Thornton, Emma S. Marion Marsh Todd Tipps, Lisa Bertha Harris Tobin, Jean Hilda Morley Adrienne Rich Ruth Whitman Townsend, Janis Mildred Aldrich Gertrude Stein Alice B. Toklas Treckel, Paula A. Alice Morse Earle Gerda Lerner Emily Smith Putnam Lucy Maynard Salmon Eliza Snow Smith Fanny Stenhouse Narcissa Prestiss Whitman Ann Eliza Young Turner, Alberta Katherine Garrison Chapin Ruth Herschberger Barbara Howes Muriel Rukeyser Uffen, Ellen Serlen Fannie Hurst Uphaus, Suzanne Henning Ann Chidester Eleanor Carroll Chilton Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn Pamela Frankau Maureen Howard Marge Piercy Vasquez, Pamela Judith Ortiz Cofer
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Vogrin, Valerie Alice Adams Annie Dillard Jamaica Kincaid Maxine Hong Kingston Carole Maso Toni Morrison Sharon Olds Grace Paley Ann Patchett Amy Tan Wahlstrom, Billie J. Alice Cary Anna Peyre Dinnies Betty Friedan Zenna Henderson Andre Norton Joanna Russ Waldron, Karen E. Kim Chernin Walker, Cynthia L. Shirley Barker Taylor Caldwell Edna Ferber Eleanor Gates Caroline Pafford Miller Myrtle Reed Florence Barrett Willoughby Wall, Cheryl A. Gwendolyn Brooks Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Nella Larsen Gloria Naylor Anne Spencer Ward, Jean M. Elizabeth Blackwell Ella Rhoads Higginson Bethenia Owens-Adair Welch, Barbara A. Alice James Werden, Frieda L. Dorothy Dodds Baker Kate Millett Bernice Love Wiggins West, Martha Ullman Rosellen Brown Lynne Sharon Schwartz xxxi
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
White, Barbara A. Lillie Devereux Blake Sarah Josepha Hale Sara Willis Parton Marilla M. Ricker Caroline Slade
Yee, Carole Zonis Leane Zugsmith
White, Evelyn C. Angela Yvonne Davis
Yongue, Patricia Lee Zoë Akins Anne Douglas Sedgwick Helen Hennessy Vendler
Williams, Donna Glee Diane Wakoski Williams, Lynn F. Marion Zimmer Bradley Joanna Russ Wolff, Ellen Harriet E. Adams Wilson Jade Snow Wong Wolfson, Rose Klara Goldzieher Roman Wollons, Roberta Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg Woodward, Angela Natalie Babbitt Ellen Goodman Elizabeth Gray Vining Diane Wakoski Wright, Catherine Morris Mary Mapes Dodge Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne Gloria Anzaldúa Ana Castillo Lorna Dee Cervantes Sandra Cisneros Cherríe Moraga Helena María Viramontes
xxxii
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Yglesias, Helen Amy Tan
Young, Melanie Harriette Fanning Read Caroline H. Woods Zajdel, Melody M. Caresse Crosby Zilboorg, Caroline Elise Justine Bayard Ann Douglas Maud Wilder Goodwin Sarah Sprague Jacobs Charlotte A. Jerauld Mary Elizabeth Lee Dolley Madison Louisa Cheves McCord Maria G. Milward Agnes Woods Mitchell Mrs. H. J. Moore Martha Read Catherine Ware Warfield Amelia Coppuck Welby Zimmerman, Karen Marcia Muller
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS Abbott, Edith Abbott, Eleanor Hallowell Abel, Annie Heloise Acker, Kathy Adams, Abigail Smith Adams, Alice Adams, Hannah Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, Léonie Fuller Adams, Louisa Catherine Johnson Addams, Jane Adisa, Giamba See Lorde, Audre Agassiz, Elizabeth Cabot Cary Ai Akins, Zoë Alcott, Louisa May Alden, Isabella MacDonald Aldon, Adair See Meigs, Cornelia Aldrich, Bess Streeter Aldrich, Mildred Alexander, Francesca Allee, Marjorie Hill Allen, Elizabeth Akers Allen, Paula Gunn Allison, Dorothy Alther, Lisa Álvarez, Julia Ames, Mary E. Clemmer Anderson, Marian Andrew, Joseph Maree See Bonner, Marita Andrews, Eliza Frances Andrews, Jane Andrews, Mary Shipman Andrews, V. C. Angelou, Maya Angier, Natalie Anneke, Mathilde Franziska Giesler Anpetu Waśte See Deloria, Ella Cara Anthony, Susan B. Anthony, Susanna Antin, Mary Anzaldúa, Gloria Appleton-Weber, Sarah Appleton, Sarah See Appleton-Weber, Sarah Appleton, Victor, II See Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Arendt, Hannah Armstrong, Charlotte Arnow, Harriette Simpson Ashley, Ellen See Seifert, Elizabeth Atherton, Gertrude Atom, Ann See Walworth, Jeannette Hadermann
Auerbach, Hilda See Morley, Hilda Austin, Jane Goodwin Austin, Mary Hunter Avery, Martha Moore Ayer, Harriet Hubbard Ayscough, Florence Wheelock Babb, Sanora Babbitt, Natalie Bacon, Alice Bacon, Delia Salter Bagley, Sarah G. Bailey, Temple Bailey, Carolyn Sherwin Bailey, Florence Merriam Baker, Dorothy Dodds Balch, Emily Greene Ballard, Martha Bambara, Toni Cade Banning, Margaret Culkin Barker, Shirley Barnard, A. M. See Alcott, Louisa May Barnes, Carman Dee Barnes, Charlotte Mary Sanford Barnes, Djuna Barnes, Linda J. Barnes, Margaret Ayer Barnes, Mary Sheldon Barnum, Frances Courtenay Baylor Barr, Amelia E. Barr, Nevada Barton, Clara Barton, May Hollis See Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Bateman, Sidney Cowell Bates, Katherine Lee Bayard, Elise Justine Beach, Sylvia Beard, Mary Ritter Beattie, Ann Beebe, Mary Blair See Niles, Blair Rice Beecher, Catharine Esther Benedict, Ruth Benét, Laura Benítez, Sandra Bennett, Gwendolyn B. Benson, Sally Berg, Gertrude Bergman, Susan H. Bernays, Anne Berne, Victoria See Fisher, M. F. K. Bethune, Mary McLeod xxxiii
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Betts, Doris Bianco, Margery Williams Bishop, Claire Huchet Bishop, Elizabeth Black, Katherine Bolton Blackwell, Alice Stone Blackwell, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Elizabeth Blaisdell, Anne See Linington, Elizabeth Blake, Lillie Devereux Blake, Mary E. McGrath Bland, Eleanor Taylor Blatch, Harriot Stanton Bleecker, Ann Eliza Schuyler Bloomer, Amelia Jenks Bloomfield-Moore, Clara Jessup Blume, Judy Bly, Nellie See Seaman, Elizabeth Cochrane Bogan, Louise Bolton, Isabel See Miller, Mary Britton Bolton, Sarah T. Bolton, Sarah Knowles Bombeck, Erma Bond, Carrie Jacobs Bonner, Marita Booth, Mary Louise Borg, Dorothy Botta, Anne C. Lynch Bourke-White, Margaret Bowen, Catherine Drinker Bowen, Sue Petigru Bower, B. M. See Sinclair, Bertha Muzzy Bowers, Bathsheba Bowles, Jane Auer Boyd, Blanche McCrary Boyd, Nancy See Millay, Edna St. Vincent Boyle, Kay Boylston, Helen Dore Bracken, Peg Brackett, Leigh Bradley, Marion Zimmer Bradstreet, Anne Dudley Branch, Anna Hempstead Braun, Lilian Jackson Breckinridge, Sophonisba Preston Brée, Germaine Brennan, Maeve Brent, Linda See Jacobs, Harriet Bres, Rose Falls Breuer, Bessie Brewster, Martha Wadsworth Briggs, Emily Edson Brink, Carol Ryrie Bristow, Gwen Brody, Jane E. xxxiv
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Broner, E. M. Brooks, Gwendolyn Brooks, Maria Gowen Broumas, Olga Brown, Abbie Farwell Brown, Alice Brown, Hallie Quinn Brown, Margaret Wise Brown, Nancy See Leslie, Annie Brown Brown, Rita Mae Brown, Rosellen Brown, Sandra Browne, Martha Griffith Brownmiller, Susan Brownson, Sarah N. Bryan, Mary Edwards Bryant, Anita Buchanan, Edna Buck, Pearl S. Buckmaster, Henrietta Burke, Fielding See Dargan, Olive Tilford Burnett, Frances Hodgson Burnham, Clara L. Root Burr, Esther Edwards Burton, Katherine Kurz Burton, Virginia Lee Butler, Octavia E. Cabeza de Baca, Fabiola Cade, Toni See Bambara, Toni Cade Caldwell, Taylor Calhoun, Lucy See Monroe, Lucy Calisher, Hortense Campbell, Helen Stuart Campbell, Jane C. Campbell, Juliet Lewis Caperton, Helena Lefroy Carlson, Natalie Savage Carmichael, Sarah E. Carrighar, Sally Carrington, Elaine Sterne Carroll, Gladys Hasty Carson, Rachel Carver, Ada Jack Cary, Alice Cary, Phoebe Caspary, Vera Castillo, Ana Cather, Willa Sibert Catherwood, Mary Hartwell Catt, Carrie Chapman Caulkins, Frances Manwaring Cazneau, Jane McManus Cervantes, Lorna Dee Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Chandler, Elizabeth Margaret Chapelle, Georgette Meyer Chapin, Katherine Garrison Chaplin, Jane Dunbar Chapman, Lee See Bradley, Marion Zimmer Chapman, Maria Weston Charnas, Suzy McKee Chase, Ilka Chase, Mary Coyle Chase, Mary Ellen Chehia See Shaw, Anna Moore Cheney, Ednah Littlehale Chernin, Kim Cherry, Kelly Chesebrough, Caroline Chesler, Phyllis Chesnut, Mary Miller Chidester, Ann Child, Julia Child, Lydia Maria Childress, Alice Chilton, Eleanor Carroll Chin, Marilyn Chopin, Kate Church, Ella Rodman Chute, Beatrice J. Chute, Carolyn Chute, Marchette Cisneros, Sandra Clampitt, Amy Clapp, Margaret Antoinette Clappe, Louise Smith Clark, Ann Nolan Clark, Eleanor Clark, Mary Higgins Clarke, Rebecca Sophia Cleary, Beverly Cleghorn, Sarah Norcliffe Cliff, Michelle Clifton, Lucille Coatsworth, Elizabeth Jane Coit, Margaret L. Colum, Mary Maguire Coman, Katharine Comstock, Anna Botsford Conant, Hannah Chaplin Conway, Katherine Eleanor Cooey, Paula Marie Cook, Fannie Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth Cooke, Rose Terry Coolbrith, Ina Donna Coolidge, Susan See Woolsey, Sarah Chauncey Cooper, Anna Julia Cooper, Jane
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Cooper, Susan Fenimore Corbett, Elizabeth Frances Cornwell, Patricia Cortez, Jayne Cott, Nancy F. Coyle, Kathleen Craig, Elisabeth May Craig, Kit See Reed, Kit Craigie, Pearl Richards Crapsey, Adelaide Craven, Margaret Crist, Judith Crocker, Hannah Mather Croly, Jane Cunningham Crosby, Caresse Cross, Amanda See Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Cross, Jane Hardin Crothers, Rachel Crouter, Natalie Stark Crowe, F. J. See Johnston, Jill Cruger, Mary Cumming, Kate Cummins, Maria Susanna Curtiss, Mina Kirstein Curtiss, Ursula Reilly Custer, Elizabeth Bacon Cuthrell, Faith Baldwin Dahlgren, Madeleine Vinton Dall, Caroline Healey Daly, Elizabeth Daly, Mary Daly, Maureen Daniels, Dorothy Dargan, Olive Tilford d’Aulaire, Ingri Mortenson Davenport, Marcia Gluck Davidson, Lucretia Maria Davidson, Margaret Miller Davis, Adelle Davis, Angela Yvonne Davis, Dorothy Salisbury Davis, Elizabeth Gould Davis, Mollie Moore Davis, Natalie Zemon Davis, Paulina Wright Davis, Rebecca Harding Dawidowicz, Lucy S. Day, Dorothy de Angeli, Marguerite Lofft de Mille, Agnes de Burgos, Julia de Mondragon, Margaret Randall See Randall, Margaret de Cleyre, Voltairine Dégh, Linda xxxv
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Deland, Margaret Campbell del Occidente, Maria See Brooks, Maria Gowen Deloria, Ella Cara Deming, Barbara Denison, Mary Andrews Dennett, Mary Ware Derricotte, Toi Deutsch, Babette DeVeaux, Alexis Dexter, John See Bradley, Marion Zimmer Diaz, Abby Morton Dickinson, Emily Didion, Joan Dillard, Annie Dinnies, Anna Peyre DiPrima, Diane Disney, Doris Miles Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee Dix, Beulah Marie Dix, Dorothea Lynde Dix, Dorothy See Gilmer, Elizabeth Meriwether Dixon, Franklin W. See Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Dodge, Mary Abigail Dodge, Mary Mapes Doman, June Domini, Rey See Lorde, Audre Dominic, R. B. See Lathen, Emma Donovan, Frances R. Doolittle, Antoinette D(oolittle), H(ilda) Dorr, Julia Ripley Dorr, Rheta Childe Dorsett, Danielle See Daniels, Dorothy Dorsey, Anna McKenney Dorsey, Ella Loraine Dorsey, Sarah Ellis Doubleday, Nellie Blanchan Douglas, Amanda Minnie Douglas, Ann Dove, Rita Drew, Elizabeth Drexler, Rosalyn Drinker, Elizabeth Sandwith DuBois, Shirley Graham See Graham, Shirley DuJardin, Rosamond Neal Dunbar-Nelson, Alice Duncan, Isadora Duniway, Abigail Scott Dunlap, Jane See Davis, Adelle DuPlessis, Rachel Blau Dupuy, Eliza Ann Durant, Ariel Dworkin, Andrea Dykeman, Wilma xxxvi
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Earle, Alice Morse Earle, Sylvia A. Eastman, Crystal Eastman, Elaine Goodale Eastman, Mary Henderson Eaton, Edith Maud Eberhart, Mignon G. Eberhart, Sheri S. See Tepper, Sheri S. Eckstorm, Fannie Hardy Eddy, Mary Baker Egan, Lesley See Linington, Elizabeth Ehrenreich, Barbara Eiker, Mathilde Elder, Susan Blanchard Elgin, Suzette Haden Ellet, Elizabeth Elliot, Elisabeth Elliott, Maude Howe Elliott, Sarah Barnwell Ellis, Anne Ellis, Edith Embury, Emma Manley Emshwiller, Carol Ephron, Nora Erdrich, Louise Estes, Eleanor Evans, Abbie Huston Evans, Mari Evans, Sarah Ann Evermay, March See Eiker, Mathilde Fahs, Sophia Lyon Fairbank, Janet Ayer Fairfield, A. M. See Alcott, Louisa May Farley, Harriet Farmer, Fannie Merritt Farnham, Eliza Woodson Farnham, Mateel Howe Farquharson, Martha See Finley, Martha Farrar, Eliza Rotch Faugeres, Margaretta V. Fauset, Jessie Redmon Felton, Rebecca Latimer Fenno, Jenny Ferber, Edna Field, Kate Field, Rachel Lyman Fields, Annie Adams Finley, Martha Fisher, Dorothea Canfield Fisher, M. F. K. Fiske, Sarah Symmes Fitzgerald, Zelda Sayre FitzGerald, Frances Flanders, G. M.
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Flanner, Hildegarde Flanner, Janet Fletcher, Inglis Clark Flexner, Anne Crawford Flexner, Eleanor Flint, Margaret Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley Follen, Eliza Cabot Foote, Mary Hallock Forbes, Esther Forché, Carolyn Ford, Harriet Ford, Sallie Rochester Forester, Fanny See Judson, Emily Chubbuck Fornés, María Irene Forrest, Katherine V. Forten, Charlotte L. Foster, Hannah Webster Fox, Helen Morgenthau Fox, Paula Frankau, Pamela Franken, Rose Freedman, Nancy Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins Fremantle, Anne French, Alice French, Anne Warner French, Lucy Smith French, Marilyn Friedan, Betty Frings, Ketti Fritz, Jean Fuller, Margaret Gage, Frances Dana Gale, Zona Gallagher, Tess Garber, Marjorie Gardener, Helen Hamilton Gardner, Isabella Gardner, Mariam See Bradley, Marion Zimmer Gardner, Mary Sewall Garrigue, Jean Gates, Eleanor Gates, Susa Young Gearhart, Sally Miller Gellhorn, Martha Genêt See Flanner, Janet George, Jean Craighead Gerould, Katharine Fullerton Gerstenberg, Alice Gestefeld, Ursula N. Gibbons, Kaye Gilbert, Fabiola Cabeza de Baca See Cabeza de Baca, Fabiola
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Gilbert, Sandra M. Gilchrist, Annie Somers Gilchrist, Ellen Gill, Sarah Prince Gilman, Caroline Howard Gilman, Charlotte Perkins Gilmer, Elizabeth Meriwether Giovanni, Nikki Glasgow, Ellen Glaspell, Susan Glück, Louise Godchaux, Elma Godwin, Gail Golden, Marita Goldman, Emma Goodman, Allegra Goodman, Ellen Goodsell, Willystine Goodwin, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Maud Wilder Gordon, Caroline Gordon, Mary Catherine Gordon, Ruth Gornick, Vivian Gottschalk, Laura Riding See Jackson, Laura Gould, Hannah Flagg Gould, Lois Grafton, Sue Graham, Isabella Marshall Graham, Jorie Graham, Katharine Graham, Shirley Grahn, Judy Grant, Margaret See Franken, Rose Grau, Shirley Ann Graves, Valerie See Bradley, Marion Zimmer Gray, Angela See Daniels, Dorothy Green, Anna Katharine Green, Anne Green, Olive See Reed, Myrtle Greenberg, Joanne Greene, Sarah McLean Greenfield, Eloise Greenwood, Grace See Lippincott, Sara Jane Griffin, Susan Griffith, Mary Grimes, Martha Grimké, Angelina Grimké, Sarah Moore Gruenberg, Sidonie Matzner Grumbach, Doris Guernsey, Clara F. Guernsey, Lucy Ellen Guiney, Louise Imogen xxxvii
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Gulliver, Julia Henrietta Guy, Rosa H. D. See D(oolittle), H(ilda) Hacker, Marilyn Hadas, Rachel Hahn, Emily Hale, Lucretia Peabody Hale, Nancy Hale, Sarah Josepha Hale, Susan Hall, Florence Howe Hall, Hazel Hall, Louisa Park Hall, Sarah Ewing Hamilton, Alice Hamilton, Edith Hamilton, Gail See Dodge, Mary Abigail Hamilton, Jane Hamilton, Kate W. Hamilton, Virginia Hanaford, Phebe Coffin Hansberry, Lorraine Haraway, Donna Harding, Mary Esther Harding, Sandra Hardwick, Elizabeth Harjo, Joy Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Ida Husted Harris, Bernice Kelly Harris, Bertha Harris, Corra May Harris, Miriam Coles Harrison, Constance Cary Hart, Carolyn G. Hart, Frances Noyes Hasbrouck, Lydia Sayer Hastings, Susannah Johnson Hatch, Mary R. Platt Haven, Alice Bradley Hawthorne, Elizabeth Manning Hawthorne, Hildegarde Hazlett, Helen Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Hejinian, Lyn Hellman, Lillian Henderson, Zenna Henissart, Martha See Lathen, Emma Henley, Beth Henry, Alice Henry, Marguerite Hentz, Caroline Whiting Herbst, Josephine Herschberger, Ruth xxxviii
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Hewitt, Mary E. Moore Heyward, Dorothy Kuhns Heywood, Martha Spence Higgins, Marguerite Higginson, Ella Rhoads Higham, Mary R. Highet, Helen MacInnes See MacInnes, Helen Highsmith, Patricia Hill-Lutz, Grace Livingston Hirshfield, Jane Hite, Shere Hobart, Alice Tisdale Hobson, Laura Z. Hoffman, Alice Hoffman, Malvina Hogan, Linda Holding, Elisabeth Sanxay Hollander, Nicole Holley, Marietta Hollingworth, Leta Stetter Holm, Saxe See Jackson, Helen Hunt Holmes, Mary Jane Hawes Holmes, Sarah Stone hooks, bell Hooper, Lucy Jones Hooper, Lucy Hope, Laura Lee See Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Hopkins, Pauline Hopper, Hedda Horlak, E. E. See Tepper, Sheri S. Horney, Karen Houston, Jean Howard, Maureen Howe, Florence Howe, Julia Ward Howe, Susan Howe, Tina Howes, Barbara Howland, Marie Hull, Helen Hulme, Kathryn Cavarly Hume, Sophia Humishuma See Mourning Dove Hunt, Irene Hunt, Mabel Leigh Hunter, Rodello Hunter-Lattany, Kristin Huntington, Susan Hurd-Mead, Kate C. Hurst, Fannie Hurston, Zora Neale Hutchins, Maude McVeigh Huxtable, Ada Louise Hyde, Shelley See Reed, Kit
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Ireland, Jane See Norris, Kathleen Thompson Irwin, Inez Haynes Isaacs, Susan Ives, Morgan See Bradley, Marion Zimmer Ivins, Molly Jackson, Helen Hunt Jackson, Laura Jackson, Rebecca Cox Jackson, Shirley Jackson, Ward See Braun, Lilian Jackson Jacobi, Mary Putnam Jacobs, Harriet Jacobs, Jane Jacobs, Sarah Sprague Jacobsen, Josephine James, Alice Jamison, Cecilia Viets Janeway, Elizabeth Janvier, Margaret Thompson Jerauld, Charlotte A. Jervey, Caroline Gilman Jewett, Sarah Orne Johnson, Diane Johnson, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Helen Kendrick Johnson, Josephine Winslow Johnson-Masters, Virginia Johnston, Annie Fellows Johnston, Jill Johnston, Mary Jones, Amanda Theodocia Jones, Edith See Wharton, Edith Jones, Gayl Jones, Hettie Jones, Mary Harris Jong, Erica Jordan, Barbara C. Jordan, June Jordan, Kate Jordan, Laura See Brown, Sandra Judson, Emily Chubbuck Kael, Pauline Kavanaugh, Cynthia See Daniels, Dorothy Keene, Carolyn See Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Keith, Agnes Newton Keller, Helen Kellerman, Faye Kelley, Edith Summers Kellogg, Louise Kellor, Frances Kelly, Eleanor Mercein Kelly, Myra Kemble, Fanny
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Kennedy, Adrienne Kenyon, Jane Kerber, Linda Kaufman Kerr, Jean Keyes, Frances Parkinson Kilmer, Aline Murray Kimbrough, Emily Kincaid, Jamaica King, Grace Elizabeth King, Laurie R. King, Louisa Yeomans Kingsolver, Barbara Kingston, Maxine Hong Kinney, Elizabeth Dodge Kinzie, Juliette Magill Kirby, Georgiana Bruce Kirk, Ellen Warner Kirkland, Caroline M. Stansbury Kizer, Carolyn Knapp, Bettina Liebowitz Knight, Sarah Kemble Knox, Adeline Trafton Koch, Adrienne Kohut, Rebekah Bettelheim Konigsburg, E. L. Kroeber, Theodora Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth Kumin, Maxine W. Laing, Dilys Bennett Lamb, Martha Nash Lamott, Anne Landers, Ann Landon, Margaret Lane, Gertrude Battles Lane, Rose Wilder Langdon, Mary See Pike, Mary Green Langer, Susanne K. Larcom, Lucy Larsen, Nella Lasswell, Mary Latham, Jean Lee Lathen, Emma Lathrop, Rose Hawthorne Latimer, Elizabeth W. Latsis, Mary Jane See Lathen, Emma Laut, Agnes C. Lauterbach, Ann Lawrence, Elizabeth L. Lawrence, Josephine Lawrence, Margaret Woods Lazarus, Emma Le Guin, Ursula K. Le Sueur, Meridel Le Vert, Octavia Walton xxxix
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Lea, Fannie Heaslip Lee, Eliza Buckminster Lee, Hannah Sawyer Lee, Harper Lee, Marion See Comstock, Anna Botsford Lee, Mary Elizabeth LeGallienne, Eva L’Engle, Madeleine Lenski, Lois Lerman, Rhoda Lerner, Gerda Leslie, Annie Brown Leslie, Eliza Leslie, Miriam Follin Levertov, Denise Lewis, Elizabeth Foreman Lewis, Estelle Robinson Lewis, Janet Libbey, Laura Jean Lincoln, Victoria Lindbergh, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Reeve Linington, Elizabeth Lippard, Lucy R. Lippincott, Martha Shepard Lippincott, Sara Jane Little, Sophia Robbins Livermore, Harriet Livermore, Mary Rice Livingston, Myra Cohn Locke, Jane Starkweather Logan, Deborah Norris Logan, Mary Cunningham Logan, Olive Loos, Anita Lord, Bette Bao Lorde, Audre Lothrop, Amy See Warner, Anna Bartlett Lothrop, Harriet Stone Loughborough, Mary Ann Webster Lounsberry, Alice Lovejoy, Esther Pohl Lowell, Amy Lowry, Lois Loy, Mina Lucas, Victoria See Plath, Sylvia Luce, Clare Boothe Luhan, Mabel Dodge Lumpkin, Grace Lurie, Alison Lutz, Alma Lynd, Helen Merrell MacDonald, Betty MacDonald, Jessica N. xl
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Macdonald, Marcia See Hill-Lutz, Grace Livingston MacDougall, Ruth Doan MacInnes, Helen MacKinnon, Catharine A. MacLaine, Shirley MacLean, Annie Marion Macumber, Marie S. See Sandoz, Mari Madeleva, Sister Mary Madison, Dolley Mairs, Nancy Malkiel, Theresa S. Mannes, Marya Manning, Marie Mansfield, Blanche McManus March, Anne See Woolson, Constance Fenimore Marks, Jeannette Augustus Marot, Helen Marshall, Catherine Marshall, Gertrude Helen See Fahs, Sophia Lyon Marshall, Paule Martin, Del Martin, George Madden Martin, Helen Reimensnyder Martin, Valerie Martínez, Demetria Martyn, Sarah Smith Maso, Carole Mason, Bobbie Ann Mathews, Frances Aymar Matthews, Adelaide May, Sophie See Clarke, Rebecca Sophia Maynard, Joyce Mayo, Katherine Mayo, Margaret Mayo, Sarah Edgarton McBride, Mary Margaret McCaffrey, Anne McCarthy, Mary McCloy, Helen McCord, Louisa Cheves McCormick, Anne O’Hare McCrackin, Josephine Clifford McCrumb, Sharon McCullers, Carson McDermott, Alice McDowell, Katherine Bonner McGinley, Phyllis McGrory, Mary McGuire, Judith Brockenbrough McIntosh, Maria Jane McIntyre, Vonda N. McKenney, Ruth McLean, Kathryn Anderson McMillan, Terry McPherson, Aimee Semple
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
McPherson, Sandra Mead, Kate C. See Hurd-Mead, Kate C. Mead, Margaret Meaney, Mary L. Means, Florence Crannell Meigs, Cornelia Meloney, Franken See Franken, Rose Menken, Adah Isaacs Merington, Marguerite Meriwether, Elizabeth Avery Merriam, Eve Merril, Judith Meyer, Annie Nathan Meyer, June See Jordan, June M. Miles, Josephine Millar, Margaret Millay, Edna St. Vincent Miller, Alice Duer Miller, Caroline Pafford Miller, Emily Huntington Miller, Harriet M. Miller, Isabel See Routsong, Alma Miller, Mary Britton Miller, Vassar Millett, Kate Milward, Maria G. Miner, Valerie Minot, Susan Mirikitani, Janice Mitchell, Agnes Woods Mitchell, Margaret Mitchell, Maria Mitford, Jessica Mixer, Elizabeth Moers, Ellen Mohr, Nicholasa Moise, Penina Mojtabai, A. G. Mollenkott, Virginia Ramey Monroe, Harriet Monroe, Lucy Montgomery, Ruth Shick Moody, Anne Moore, C. L. Moore, Lorrie Moore, Marianne Moore, Mary Evelyn See Davis, Mollie Moore Moore, Mollie E. See Davis, Mollie Moore Moore, Mrs. H. J. Moorhead, Sarah Parsons Moraga, Cherríe Morgan, Claire See Highsmith, Patricia Morgan, Marabel Morgan, Robin Morley, Hilda
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Morris, Clara Morrison, Toni Morrow, Honoré McCue Mortimer, Lillian Morton, Martha Morton, Sarah Wentworth Mother Goose See Walworth, Jeannette Hadermann Mott, Lucretia Moulton, Louise Chandler Mourning Dove Mukherjee, Bharati Muller, Marcia Munro, Eleanor Murfree, Mary Murray, Judith Sargent Murray, Pauli Myles, Eileen Nation, Carry A. Naylor, Gloria Neely, Barbara Neilson, Nellie Neville, Emily Cheney Newcomb, Franc Johnson Newman, Frances Newman, Lesléa Newstead, Helaine Nichols, Anne Nicholson, Asenath Hatch Nicholson, Eliza Jane Poitevent Nicolson, Marjorie Hope Niedecker, Lorine Nieriker, Abigail May Alcott Niggli, Josefina Niles, Blair Rice Nin, Anaïs Nitsch, Helen Matthews Nixon, Agnes E. Norman, Marsha Norris, Kathleen Thompson Norton, Alice See Norton, Andre Norton, Andre Norton, Katherine LaForge See Reed, Myrtle Notley, Alice Nussbaum, Martha Craven Nye, Andrea Nye, Naomi Shihab Oates, Joyce Carol Obejas, Achy Oberholtzer, Sara Vickers O’Connor, Flannery O’Connor, Florence J. O’Donnell, Jessie Fremont O’Donnell, Lillian Oemler, Marie Conway xli
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Offord, Lenore Glen O’Hair, Madalyn Murray O’Hara, Mary See Sture-Vasa, Mary O’Keeffe, Katharine A. O’Neill, Egan See Linington, Elizabeth Older, Cora Baggerly Olds, Sharon Oliphant, B. J. See Tepper, Sheri S. Oliver, Mary Olsen, Tillie O’Neill, Rose Orde, A. J. See Tepper, Sheri S. Ortiz Cofer, Judith Orvis, Marianne Dwight Osbey, Brenda Marie Osborn, Sarah Osgood, Frances Sargent Ostenso, Martha Ostriker, Alicia Ottenberg, Miriam Ovington, Mary White Owen, Catherine See Nitsch, Helen Matthews Owen, Mary Alicia Owen, Ruth Bryan Owens, Claire Myers Owens-Adair, Bethenia Owens, Rochelle Ozick, Cynthia Page, Myra Paglia, Camille Paley, Grace Palmer, Phoebe Worrall Papashvily, Helen Waite Paretsky, Sara Parker, Charlotte Blair Parker, Dorothy Parrish, Mary Frances See Fisher, M. F. K. Parsons, Elsie Clews Parsons, Frances Dana Parsons, Louella Oettinger Parton, Sara Willis Pastan, Linda Patchett, Ann Paterson, Katherine Patton, Frances Gray Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Josephine Preston Peattie, Elia Wilkinson Peattie, Louise Redfield Peck, Annie Smith Peck, Ellen Pember, Phoebe Yates Penfeather, Anabel See Cooper, Susan Fenimore Percy, Florence See Allen, Elizabeth Akers xlii
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Perkins, Frances Perkins, Lucy Fitch Pesotta, Rose Peterkin, Julia Mood Peters, Sandra See Plath, Sylvia Petersham, Maud Fuller Petry, Ann Lane Phelps, Almira Lincoln Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart Phillips, Irna Phillips, Jayne Anne Piatt, Sarah Bryan Piercy, Marge Pike, Mary Green Pinckney, Josephine Pine, Cuyler See Peck, Ellen Plain, Belva Plath, Sylvia Polacco, Patricia Pollack, Rachel Pollard, Josephine Porter, Eleanor Hodgman Porter, Katherine Anne Porter, Rose Porter, Sarah Porter, Sylvia F. Post, Emily Powell, Dawn Pratt, Ella Farman Prentiss, Elizabeth Payson Preston, Harriet Waters Preston, Margaret Junkin Prince, Nancy Gardner Prose, Francine Prouty, Olive Higgins Pryor, Sara Rice Pugh, Eliza Phillips Putnam, Emily Smith Putnam, Mary Lowell Putnam, Ruth Putnam, Sallie A. Brock Raimond, C. E. See Robins, Elizabeth Rampling, Anne See Rice, Anne Ramsay, Martha Laurens Ramsay, Vienna G. Morrell Rand, Ayn Randall, Margaret Randall, Ruth Painter Rankin, Fannie W. Ranous, Dora Knowlton Rawlings, Marjorie Kinnan Read, Harriette Fanning Read, Martha Reed, Kit
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Reed, Myrtle Reese, Lizette Woodworth Remick, Martha Reno, Itti Kinney Repplier, Agnes Rice, Alice Hegan Rice, Anne Rich, Adrienne Rich, Barbara See Jackson, Laura Rich, Louise Dickinson Richards, Laura Howe Richards, Louisa Greene Richmond, Grace Ricker, Marilla M. Ridge, Lola Riding, Laura See Jackson, Laura Rinehart, Mary Roberts Ripley, Eliza M. Ritchie, Anna Mowatt Rittenhouse, Jessie B. Rivers, Alfrida See Bradley, Marion Zimmer Rivers, Pearl See Nicholson, Eliza Jane Poitevent Robb, J. D. See Roberts, Nora Roberts, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Jane Roberts, Maggie Roberts, Nora Robins, Elizabeth Robinson, Harriet Hanson Robinson, Martha Harrison Rodgers, Carolyn M. Rogers, Katherine M. Roman, Klara Goldzieher Rombauer, Irma von Starkloff Roosevelt, Eleanor Roquelaure, A. N. See Rice, Anne Ross, Helaine See Daniels, Dorothy Ross, Lillian Rossner, Judith Rourke, Constance Mayfield Routsong, Alma Royall, Anne Newport Royce, Sarah Bayliss Ruddy, Ella Giles Ruether, Rosemary Radford Rukeyser, Muriel Rule, Ann Rusch, Kristine Kathryn Rush, Caroline E. Rush, Rebecca Russ, Joanna Ryan, Rachel See Brown, Sandra Sachs, Marilyn St. Johns, Adela Rogers
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
St. Claire, Erin See Brown, Sandra Salisbury, Charlotte Y. Salmon, Lucy Maynard Salmonson, Jessica Amanda Sanchez, Sonia Sanders, Elizabeth Elkins Sandoz, Mari Sanford, Mollie Dorsey Sanger, Margaret Sangster, Margaret E. Santiago, Esmeralda Sargent, Pamela Sarton, May Satir, Virginia M. Savage, Elizabeth Sawyer, Ruth Scarberry, Alma Sioux Scarborough, Dorothy Scarborough, Elizabeth Ann Schaeffer, Susan Fromberg Schmitt, Gladys Schofield, Sandy See Rusch, Kristine Kathryn Schoolcraft, Mary Howard Schwartz, Lynne Sharon Scott, Anne Firor Scott, Evelyn Scott, Joan Wallach Scott, Julia See Owen, Mary Alicia Scott-Maxwell, Florida Scudder, Vida Dutton Seaman, Elizabeth Cochrane Seawell, Molly Elliot Secor, Lella Sedges, John See Buck, Pearl S. Sedgwick, Anne Douglas Sedgwick, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Susan Ridley Seeley, Mabel Seid, Ruth Seifert, Elizabeth Semple, Ellen Churchill Seredy, Kate Seton, Anya Settle, Mary Lee Sewall, Harriet Winslow Sewell, Elizabeth Sexton, Anne Shange, Ntozake Shannon, Dell See Linington, Elizabeth Shannon, Monica Sharon, Rose See Merril, Judith Sharp, Isabella Oliver Shaw, Anna Moore Shaw, Anna H. Sheehy, Gail xliii
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Sheldon, Ann See Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Sherwood, Mary Wilson Shindler, Mary Dana Showalter, Elaine Shreve, Anita Shulman, Alix Kates Sidlosky, Carolyn See Forché, Carolyn Sigourney, Lydia Huntley Silko, Leslie Marmon Simon, Kate Sinclair, Bertha Muzzy Sinclair, Jo See Seid, Ruth Singer, June K. Singleton, Anne See Benedict, Ruth Singmaster, Elsie Skinner, Constance Lindsay Skinner, Cornelia Otis Slade, Caroline Slesinger, Tess Slosson, Annie Trumbull Smedley, Agnes Smith, Amanda Smith, Anna Young Smith, Betty Smith, Eliza Snow Smith, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Eunice Smith, Hannah Whittal Smith, Lee Smith, Lillian Smith, Lula Carson See McCullers, Carson Smith, Margaret Bayard Smith, Rosamond See Oates, Joyce Carol Smith, Sarah Pogson Smith, Susy Snedeker, Caroline Dale Snyder, Zilpha Keatley Solwoska, Mara See French, Marilyn Somers, Suzanne See Daniels, Dorothy Song, Cathy Sontag, Susan Sorel, Julia See Drexler, Rosalyn Soule, Caroline White Southworth, E. D. E. N. Souza, E. See Scott, Evelyn Spacks, Patricia Meyer Speare, Elizabeth George Spencer, Anne Spencer, Cornelia Phillips Spencer, Elizabeth Spewak, Bella Cohen Speyer, Leonora von Stosch Spofford, Harriet Prescott Sprague, Rosemary Stabenow, Dana xliv
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Stack, Andy See Rule, Ann Stafford, Jean Stanton, Elizabeth Cady Steel, Danielle Stein, Gertrude Steinem, Gloria Stenhouse, Fanny Stephens, Ann Winterbotham Stephens, Margaret Dean See Aldrich, Bess Streeter Steptoe, Lydia See Barnes, Djuna Stern, Elizabeth G. Stewart, Elinore Pruitt Stewart, Maria W. Stockton, Annis Boudinot Stoddard, Elizabeth Barstow Stone, Ruth Story, Sydney A. See Pike, Mary Green Stowe, Harriet Beecher Stratton-Porter, Gene Strong, Anna Louise Stuart, Ruth McEnery Sture-Vasa, Mary Suckow, Ruth Sui Sin Far See Eaton, Edith Maud Susann, Jacqueline Swenson, May Swett, Sophie Swisshelm, Jane Grey Taber, Gladys Bagg Taggard, Genevieve Talbott, Marion Tan, Amy Tandy, Jennette Reid Tappan, Eva March Tarbell, Ida Taylor, Mildred Delois Taylor, Phoebe Atwood Taylor, Susie King Teasdale, Sara Tenney, Tabitha Tepper, Sheri S. Terhune, Mary Hawes Terry, Megan Thane, Elswyth Thanet, Octave See French, Alice Thaxter, Celia Laighton Thayer, Caroline Warren Thayer, Geraldine See Daniels, Dorothy Thomas, Dorothy Swain Thompson, Clara M. (b. c. 1830s) Thompson, Clara M. (1893-1958) Thompson, Dorothy Thorndyke, Helen Louise See Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Ticknor, Caroline
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Tiernan, Frances Fisher Tietjens, Eunice Tilton, Alice See Taylor, Phoebe Atwood Tincker, Mary Agnes Todd, Mabel Loomis Todd, Marion Marsh Toklas, Alice B. Tompkins, Jane P. Towne, Laura M. Townsend, Mary Ashley Treadwell, Sophie Trilling, Diana Troubetzkoy, Amélie Rives Truitt, Anne Truman, Margaret Truth, Sojourner Tuchman, Barbara Turell, Jane Turnbull, Agnes Sligh Turney, Catherine Tuthill, Louisa Huggins Tuve, Rosemond Ty-Casper, Linda Tyler, Anne Tyler, Martha W. Tyler, Mary Palmer Uchida, Yoshiko Uhnak, Dorothy Ulanov, Ann Belford Underwood, Sophie Kerr Untermeyer, Jean Starr Upton, Harriet Taylor Valentine, Jean Valentine, Jo See Armstrong, Charlotte Van Alstyne, Frances Crosby Vandegrift, Margaret See Janvier, Margaret Thompson Vanderbilt, Amy Van Duyn, Mona Van Vorst, Bessie McGinnis Van Vorst, Marie Vendler, Helen Hennessy Victor, Frances Fuller Victor, Metta Fuller Vining, Elizabeth Gray Viramontes, Helena María Voigt, Cynthia Voigt, Ellen Bryant Vorse, Mary Heaton Wakoski, Diane Wald, Lillian D. Waldman, Anne Waldrop, Rosmarie Walker, Alice
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Walker, Margaret Walker, Mary Spring Wallace, Michele Waller, Mary Ella Walter, Mildred Pitts Walton, Evangeline Walworth, Jeannette Hadermann Ward, Mary Jane Warfield, Catherine Ware Warner, Anna Bartlett Warner, Susan Bogert Warren, Lella Warren, Mercy Otis Wasserstein, Wendy Watanabe, Sylvia Watson, Sukey Vickery Watts, Mary Stanbery Weber, Sarah Appleton See Appleton-Weber, Sarah Webster, Jean Weeks, Helen C. See Campbell, Helen Stuart Welby, Amelia Coppuck Wells, Carolyn Wells, Emmeline Woodward Wells, John J. See Bradley, Marion Zimmer Wells-Barnett, Ida B. Welty, Eudora West, Dorothy West, Jessamyn West, Lillie West, Mae Wetherall, Elizabeth See Warner, Susan Bogert Wharton, Edith Wheatley, Phillis Wheaton, Campbell See Campbell, Helen Stuart Whipple, Maurine Whitcher, Frances Berry White, Anna White, Anne Terry White, Eliza Orne White, Elizabeth White, Ellen Gould White, Helen Constance White, Nelia Gardner White, Rhoda E. Whiting, Lillian Whitman, Narcissa Prentiss Whitman, Ruth Whitman, Sarah Helen Whitney, Adeline D. T. Whitney, Phyllis A. Wiggin, Kate Douglass Wiggins, Bernice Love Wiggins, Marianne Wilcox, Ella Wheeler Wilder, Laura Ingalls xlv
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Wilder, Louise Beebe Wilhelm, Kate Willard, Emma Willard, Frances Willard, Nancy Williams, Catharine Arnold Williams, Fannie Barrier Williams, Sherley Anne Willis, Connie Willis, Lydia Fish Willoughby, Florence Barrett Wilson, Harriet E. Adams Windle, Mary Jane Winnemucca, Sarah Winslow, Anna Green Winslow, Helen M. Winslow, Ola Elizabeth Winslow, Thyra Samter Winter, Ella Winwar, Frances Wolf, Naomi Wong, Jade Snow Wood, Ann See Douglas, Ann Wood, S. S. B. K. Woodhull, Victoria Woods, Caroline H.
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Woods, Katharine Pearson Woolsey, Sarah Chauncey Woolson, Constance Fenimore Wormeley, Katharine Prescott Wright, Frances Wright, Julia McNair Wright, Mabel Osgood Wright, Mary Clabaugh Wyatt, Edith Franklin Wylie, Elinor Hoyt Yamada, Mitsuye Yamamoto, Hisaye Yamanaka, Lois-Ann Yates, Elizabeth Yezierska, Anzia Yglesias, Helen Youmans, Eliza Ann Young, Ann Eliza Young, Ella Young, Marguerite Young, Rida Johnson Zaturenska, Marya Zolotow, Charlotte Zugsmith, Leane
ABBREVIATIONS A style of all or nothing (initials or complete title) has been employed in this new edition; partial abbreviations have been purged, to limit confusion. In cases where two well-known periodicals have the same initials, only one has the initials and the other is always spelled out in its entirety (i.e. NR is New Republic, and National Review is spelled out).
KR
Kirkus Reviews
LATBR
Los Angeles Times Book Review
LJ
Library Journal
APR
American Poetry Review
MTCW
Major Twentieth–Century Writers
CA
Contemporary Authors
NAW
Notable American Women
CAAS
Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series
NAW:MP
Notable American Women: The Modern Period
CANR
Contemporary Authors New Revision Series
NBAW
Notable Black American Women
CB
Current Biography
NR
New Republic
CBY
Current Biography Yearbook NYRB
New York Review of Books
NYT
New York Times
NYTM
New York Times Magazine
NYTBR
New York Times Book Review
CLAJ
College Literary Association Journal
CLC
Contemporary Literary Criticism
CLHUS
Cambridge Literary History of the United States
CLR
Children’s Literature Review
CN
Contemporary Novelists
PMLA
Publication of the Modern Language Association
CP
Contemporary Poets
PW
Publishers Weekly
CPW
Contemporary Popular Writers
SATA
Something About the Author
CWD
Contemporary Women Dramatists
SL
School Librarian
CWP
Contemporary Women Poets
TLS
[London] Times Literary Supplement
DAB
Dictionary of American Biography TCCW
Twentieth–Century Children’s Writers
WP
Washington Post
WPBW
Washington Post Book World
VV
Village Voice
DLB
Dictionary of Literary Biography
DLBY
Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook
DAI
Dissertation Abstracts International
FC
Feminist Companion
FW
Feminist Writers
WRB
Women’s Review of Books
GLB
Gay & Lesbian Biography
WWAW
Who’s Who of American Women xlvii
L LAING, Dilys Bennett Born October 1906, Pwllheli, North Wales; died 14 February 1960, Norwich, Vermont Wrote under: Dilys Bennett, Dilys Laing Daughter of Alfred James and Eve Bennett; married Alexander Laing, 1936 Dilys Bennett Laing, who became a U.S. citizen in 1941, and her husband are associated with the Dartmouth group of poets, which includes Philip Booth, Ramon Guthrie, and Richard Eberhart. Laing’s poems frequently appeared in Poetry, the Nation, The New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Saturday Review. Although Laing’s poetic vision is authenticated in personal experience, her eye, especially in her early volumes, is turned outward, surveying politics, history, culture, and nature. Her strong antiwar stance is expressed in many poems and in the Responsibles, a group Laing and her husband formed in the 1950s in protest against the Cold War. Some of Laing’s later poems reflect the profound influence of her visit to Mexico in 1950. In her last years, she was preoccupied with Aztec studies and with the manuscript of Corazon, a tale that, according to her son, reflects the schizophrenia Laing saw as the era’s disease. Laing’s first volume, Another England (1941), opens with poems of bitter protest against war, which Laing cautions submerges the individual in ‘‘the mass impulse’’ and ‘‘mass objective’’ and pulls us down from our position of superiority on the evolutionary ladder to become ‘‘hawks’’ in our airplanes and ‘‘crabs’’ in our tanks and submarines. The anger with which the volume opens gives way in Part II to gentler reflections of the redeeming power of poetry and art. In ‘‘The Maker,’’ Laing objects to the ‘‘falling cadence of disillusion’’ of fashionable poetry, asserting that ‘‘It is the gift of the poet / to contradict chaos, to hear the YES! of the womb . . . / making another space, and a new time.’’ In Birth Is Farewell (1944), Laing offers appraisals—sardonic, wry, humorous, laudatory, and poignant—of human achievements and of the evolutionary achievement that humankind itself represents. In the couplet that comprises ‘‘Note to Charles Darwin,’’ Laing writes: ‘‘Sorrow took the swinging ape / and twisted it to human shape.’’ Laing devotes particular attention to juxtaposing man’s scientific and technical achievements with the moving fullness, the unpredictability, the majesty, and the eternalness of nature. The verses in Poems from a Cage (1961) celebrate, in Laing’s words, ‘‘two conditions basic to poetry as to life’’: ‘‘captivity’’ and ‘‘release.’’ Within the thematic framework, there are some deliciously feminist poems. ‘‘Let Them Ask Their Husbands’’—the title comes from Corinthians—declares, ‘‘In
human need / of the familiar / I see God / woman-shaped / and I have my Pauline pride.’’ Laing, in this volume as in her others, often employs metaphors of pregnancy, motherhood, and wifehood, metaphors so naturally woven into the fabric of her poetry that they reveal a poet neither self-conscious nor ashamed nor unduly prideful of her sex. Laing neither followed in the poetic fashions of her time nor blazed new trails and thus did not achieve fame. However, she always enjoyed and still enjoys the high regard of fellow poets, including Marianne Moore. Her poems are gracefully and economically shaped and are often aphoristically brilliant. They have solidarity, maturity, and wit. Readers will recognize in Laing an accomplished craftswoman. They will be rewarded by the fullness of her vision and will enjoy a poetry rife with a sympathetic humanity. OTHER WORKS: The Great Year (1948). Walk through Two Landscapes (1949). The Collected Poems of Dilys Laing (1967). BIBLIOGRAPHY: NYHTB (10 Oct. 1948; 20 Aug. 1950). NYT (7 Dec. 1941; 10 Dec. 1944). NYTBR (21 Jan. 1978). SatR (29 Nov. 1941; 25 Nov. 1944; 15 April 1950). —ELLEN FRIEDMAN
LAMB, Martha (Joanna Reade) Nash Born 12 August 1826, Plainfield, Massachusetts; died 2 January 1893, New York, New York Wrote under: Aunt Mattie, Mrs. Martha J. Lamb Daughter of Arvin and Lucinda Vinton Nash; married Charles A. Lamb, 1852 Martha Nash Lamb began her career as a writer of children’s stories and a romantic novel. It was, however, as a historian of the city of New York and as an editor (1883-93) of the Magazine of American History that she did her most significant work. Lamb’s major publication is her History of the City of New York, the first volume appearing in 1877, the second in 1880. The two comprise the history of New York from the era of Hudson’s discovery to the inauguration of Washington. After Lamb’s death, Constance Cary Harrison contributed a brief supplementary volume to the history, Externals of Modern New York (1896). Lamb’s perspective in the History of the City of New York is that of the narrative historian, and she concentrates particularly on political developments. In the Dutch era, she traces with acuity the
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internal conflicts, giving special stress to the role of Peter Stuyvesant. She discusses with sympathetic insight the efforts of the British to peacefully amalgamate the two communities in the colony of New York. In the 18th-century history, Lamb particularly stresses the growing conflict with the British and the city’s role in the Revolution and the new nation. She also gives some attention to the social history of New York, noting particularly the roles of the emerging major families and their interlocking interests. On the other hand, she does not attempt to deal in any depth with the city’s economic development. Lamb’s The Homes of America (1879) is an account of historic homes, primarily of political leaders, from the early 17th to the mid-19th centuries. For the 19th century, she included residences of artists and writers. The work was not a history of American architecture but rather a descriptive account, including biographical sketches and a number of brief family histories. As editor of the Magazine of American History, Lamb contributed some 50 signed and many unsigned articles. Her Wall Street in History (1883) consists of material that first appeared in three issues (May-July 1883). The book is a lively, well-researched account of three stages of the history of the street: the early Dutch and English developments; its 18th-century role as ‘‘seat of fashion, aristocracy and state government’’; and its 19th-century role as financial center. Lamb’s account is descriptive rather than analytical, and she deals in very general and positive terms with Wall Street’s financial role. Lamb also wrote fiction. Her novel Spicy (1873) is a romantic mystery, with the recent Chicago fire giving dramatic climax to the work. She also wrote several children’s stories, generally moralistic, and edited such publications as The Christmas Basket (1882), a collection of poetry. It was as a narrative historian that Lamb was most successful. She handled with clarity and balance the broad developments of public life; she had a keen eye for character, and wrote with a dramatic flair of such events as the Zenger trial. Her style is somewhat stilted at times, but she wrote with ease. Though somewhat discursive and occasionally preoccupied with minute detail, on the whole she developed forcefully and with balanced judgment the major political themes. Lamb was a thorough if untrained researcher with a great interest in primary sources. She utilized manuscript collections, public records, private letters, and personal interviews. Accordingly, her historical work has depth and solidity. She wrote primarily for an educated general public. In her History of New York, she best achieved her goal of combining sound historical scholarship with popular appeal. OTHER WORKS: Laughing Kittie and Purring Kittie, with Other Little Folks at Robinwood (1868). The Playschool Stories for Little Folks (1869). Aunt Mattie’s Library (1870). Drifting Goodward (1870). Fun and Profit (1870). Snow and Sunshine: A Story for Boys and Girls (1882). A Guide for Strangers to General Grant’s Tomb in Riverside Park (1886). Our Country Fifty Years
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Ago: Some Incidents in Connection with Lafayette’s Visit (1887). The Washington Inauguration (1889).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Lyman, S. E., Lady Historian: Martha J. Lamb (1969). Reference works: AA. AW. DAB. NAW (1971). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Godey’s Lady’s Book (Nov. 1887). NYT (3 Jan. 1893). —INZER BYERS
LAMOTT, Anne Born 10 April 1954, San Francisco, California Daughter of Dorothy and Kenneth Lamott; children: Samuel Anne Lamott grew up and has spent most of her life in San Francisco and surrounding Marin County. She has supported herself primarily as a writer for much of her adult life. The most significant events in her life, as they have affected her writing, are her father’s illness and death from brain cancer during the late 1970s; the death of her friend Pammy, also from cancer; her decision to quit drinking in 1986; the birth of her son in 1989; and her subsequent decision to embrace Christianity. Much of her fiction is at least semiautobiographical. All of her writing is marked by an edgy wit. Her personas in her nonfiction and the narrators of her novels are likeably quirky. Lamott is that rare type of writer whose tone can be sarcastic and ironic without becoming bitter or jaded. Much of the time, she is herself the target of her own sarcasm. The many paradoxes of modern life inform her plots and the development of her characters. Over time, her novels have grown increasingly complex and more successfully structured, and her popularity has steadily increased until Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith (1999), a memoir of her journey toward and into Christianity, reached the New York Times bestseller list. Her most prestigious award is a Guggenheim fellowship, which she received in 1985. Lamott attended Goucher College in Baltimore for two years but didn’t begin writing until after she had left the school. Relying on her father’s connections to a literary agency in NewYork, she started submitting short fiction but had difficulty publishing until she began the novel that was to become Hard Laughter (1980). Begun soon after her father was diagnosed with cancer and nearly finished when he died, Hard Laughter is the story of a family just after the adult children have received the news that their father has brain cancer. The narrator is one of the daughters, Jennifer. Despite its subject matter, the novel is amusing and joyful; the characters often rely on humor as a strategy for reconciling
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themselves to their situation. Though none of the members of this family is perfect, the novel conveys the strengths of a family that functions well together under stress. Family life in imperfect families is a consistent theme in Lamott’s work. Her second novel, Rosie (1983), features a child whose father has been killed in an automobile accident and whose mother, despite her ability to maintain a positive public image, descends into alcoholism and neurosis. Rosie, the protagonist, is sexually abused by the father of a friend, but her mother, Elizabeth, is too consumed by her addiction to help her daughter. The novel ends happily, however, as Elizabeth recognizes her alcoholism and other minor characters also tame their neuroses. Crooked Little Heart (1997) is a sequel to Rosie. In this novel, Rosie is an adolescent who has achieved success as a competitive tennis player. Because she fears failure more than she assumes success, however, Rosie enjoys the sport less and less, especially after she begins to cheat. She becomes consumed by the weight of this secret, as well as by the secret that her friend and doubles partner, Simone, is pregnant. This novel, with its shifting points of view, successfully conveys the confusion inherent to adolescence as well as the frustration and anguish involved in parenting an adolescent. Lamott’s nonfiction has been even more commercially and critically successful than her fiction. Her first memoir, Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year (1993), delineates Lamott’s experience as a single parent. Sam’s father did not support Lamott’s decision to have the baby, and he is most noticeable by his absence from the book. The book is primarily a chronicle of Lamott’s shifting identity as she accepts and understands the appellation ‘‘mother.’’ In a similar vein, Bird by Bird (1994) is less an instruction manual than a revelation of Lamott’s identity as writer. Her suggestions to aspiring writers are less stylistic or pragmatic than philosophical; it’s a how-to text only in the broadest sense, and some sections are among Lamott’s most wickedly witty.
LANDERS, Ann Born Esther Pauline Lederer, 4 July 1918, Sioux City, Iowa Daughter of Abraham and Rebecca Friedman; married Jules W. Lederer, 1939 (divorced); children: one daughter Having graduated with honors from Central High School in 1936, Ann Landers majored in psychology and journalism at Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa. Though married in 1939 before graduating from college and devoting herself to being a wife and then a mother to her only daughter, Landers engaged in many charitable and political activities. In 1955 her life changed dramatically when she won a Chicago Sun-Times competition to become the writer-editorship of the ‘‘Ann Landers’’ column—a job previously held for five years by Ruth Crowley until her death. As Ann Landers, Landers gained instantaneous fame, doubling, tripling, and quadrupling subscriptions to the syndicated column within the first two years. Landers is often cited as one of the most admired or most influential women in the United States. Since 1965 she has been showered with awards and citations from Jewish associations and from foundations as varied as those for mental health and psychiatry. Whatever problems Landers may have had to face in her own life, including a divorce after 36 years of marriage, she proved able to answer—with pungent wit or a sympathetic understanding that is not only intuitive but also well informed and based on expert advice, and with brisk as well as open-minded intelligence—questions as naive as ‘‘Is incest hereditary?’’ and as anguished as ‘‘Should I leave him?’’ or ‘‘What are we to do about these kids?’’ While her answers as well as the inquiries prompting them seem as American as apple pie, it is reassuring to remember that the need for such advice has been timeless and universal and only the answers have had to change in conformity with changing mores.
Traveling Mercies is a discussion of Lamott’s circuitous and wayward route to faith; such a choice was neither natural to nor expected of her. She delineates her childhood experiences with religion, generally among families other than her own. The fact that she has become an active member of a Christian church is as bizarre and puzzling to her as it is to many of her friends, and Lamott approaches religion with the same zealous irony that characterizes her interpretation of other more secular contemporary topics. But her irony remains affectionate, and she treats spirituality as one more quirky yet significant human need. Throughout her writing, Lamott is forthright about her weaknesses and failings, public and private, as well as her desires and beliefs.
Perhaps unwittingly, Landers is continuing a tradition with antecedents—naturally without the benefits of modern communication media—in medieval Love Courts, Italian Renaissance novels, and romances of 17th-century France, wherein questions concerning love were urgently posed, discussed, and answers provided. In essence, Landers’s advice to teenagers to keep ‘‘all hands on deck and four feet on the floor’’ and her ecstatic hope that ‘‘all of you someday will know this most exquisite of all experiences, the moment when you give your most precious gift—yourself—to your beloved in marriage,’’ is not so different from that of France’s Mlle. de Scudéry, who in 1656 mapped out a chart for lovers to show them the way and the obstacles they might encounter on departing from ‘‘New Friendship’’ toward ‘‘Tenderness.’’
OTHER WORKS: Joe Jones (1985). All New People (1989). Home and Other Stories: Catherine Wagner (1993).
If it is reassuring to find, in perusing such past discussions, that certain human problems are universal and answers to them were welcomed by as many national and international readers then as today, it is also interesting to realize these answers are of immense importance to our understanding of how people lived— even if only as portrayed in fiction. In return, though in a more
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1994). —LYNN DOMINA
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documentary sense, Landers’s columns will provide present and future historians increasingly interested in exploring the lives of ordinary people rather than those of a country’s rulers and their wars with invaluable material concerning the ever-changing mores of mankind. OTHER WORKS: Since You Asked Me (1962, 1983). Teenagers and Sex (1964, 1987). Truth Is Stranger (1968). The Ann Landers Encyclopedia, A to Z: Improve Your Life Emotionally, Medically, Sexually, Socially, Spiritually (1978, 1979). Ann Landers’ New Bride Guide (1983). Gems (1988). Nuggets and Doozies (1991). A Collection of My Favorite Gems (1994). Wake Up and Smell the Coffee! Advice, Wisdom, and Uncommon Good Sense (1996). The Best of Ann Landers: Her Favorite Letters of All Time (1997). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Grossvogel, D. I., Dear Ann Landers: Our Intimate and Changing Dialogue with America’s Best-Loved Confidante (1989). Howard, M., Eppie: The Story of Ann Landers (1982). Pottker, J., Dear Ann, Dear Abby: The Unauthorized Biography of Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren (1987). Whitelaw, N., They Wrote Their Own Headlines: American Women Journalists (1994). Other references: Bon Appetit (November 1995). Canadian Business (October 1994). CQ Researcher (March 1993). JAMA (Oct. 1992). Ladies’ Home Journal (June 1996). Psychology Today (May 1993). Quill (March 1993). Skeptical Inquirer (1995). Virginia Journal of Education (March 1993). U.S. News & World Report (Nov. 1993). —EDITH KERN
LANDON, Margaret (Dorothea Mortenson) Born 3 September 1903, Somers, Wisconsin; died 4 December 1993 Daughter of Annenus D. and Adelle Estbourg Mortenson; married Kenneth P. Landon, 1926 Margaret Landon received her B.A. degree from Wheaton College, Illinois, in 1925. While teaching Latin and English in Bear Lake, Wisconsin, Landon felt that perhaps she had chosen the wrong career. She did, however, continue her interest in education after her marriage to a Presbyterian missionary (who later was associate dean of area and language studies at the U.S. Department of State Foreign Service Institute). After a one-year stay in Bangkok, largely spent in learning the language, the Landons were stationed in Siam (now Thailand) from 1927 to 1937. Landon was principal of the Trang Girls’ School there for five years. The Asian experience led to writings by her husband such as Southeast Asia (1949) and to her own novels, Anna and the King of Siam (1944) and Never Dies the Dream (1949).
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Anna and the King of Siam is the story of Anna Leonowens, a spirited Welsh woman who, in the 1860s, became secretary to Siam’s King Mongkut and governess to his 60-plus children and his favorite concubines. Landon based the story on two books of memoirs by Mrs. Leonowens, The English Governess at the Siamese Court (1870) and The Romance of the Harem (1872), but she supplemented this information with her own research in Siamese books and documents in the Library of Congress and in consular records in the National Archives. In addition, Landon was able to meet Mrs. Leonowens’s granddaughter, who gave her diaries, letters, and other family materials. This novel, Landon’s best-known work, appeals to the reader through its descriptions of the unusual nature of the household, the exotic setting of the palace of Siam, and the spunky character of the heroine, who bravely speaks out on freedom and individual rights to her employer. Anna and the King of Siam was a bestseller and has been translated into many languages. The hit musical comedy The King and I was first produced in 1951 but has been an international success on stage with many revivals in the 1970s and ’80s, as well the most recent in the late 1990s. The original movie version of the novel also had much success, and it, too, was remade in the late 1990s, along with an animated version on video. Rheumatic fever in 1946 interfered with Landon’s writing for an extended period of time, but in 1949 she published Never Dies the Dream, a novel which seems to be drawn largely from her own mission-teaching experience in Bangkok. The heroine is India Severn, a native of Chicago and missionary for 25 years. She is head of Jasmine Hall, a mission school for girls that she established 11 years before the story begins in 1930. Attitudes toward education for women provide interest in this tale of a land where, in the 19th century, the proverb ‘‘Teach a buffalo before a woman’’ was commonly accepted. The most successful aspect of Never Dies the Dream is the delineation of setting. It provides the reader with a strong sense of having been in Bangkok along with the characters. Landon uses intimate details drawn from her own stay there to give a realistic dimension to the fictional scene. The great success of Anna and the King of Siam was not duplicated by Landon’s second novel. For a number of years, she worked on a history of Southeast Asia in the colonial period, which remains unpublished. Had ill health not interfered, Landon might well have published much more. Her two novels, however, stand as worthwhile literary contributions in their examination of cultural differences and as adventure tales. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Lehmann, J. D., Landon Family History: Descendants of Samuel and Margaret Landon of Tioga County, Pennsylvania, and Descendants of Daniel and Ann Landon of Greenwood, Nebraska, 1727-1987 (1988). Reference works: CA (1975). CB (Feb. 1945). TCAS. Other: Anna and the King of Siam (recording, 1980). Anna and the King of Siam (video, 1994). The King and I (audiovisual, 1982). —DOROTHY H. BROWN
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LANE, Gertrude Battles Born 21 December 1874, Saco, Maine; died 25 September 1941, New York, New York Daughter of Eustace and Ella Battles Lane Gertrude Battles Lane was educated at Thornton Academy in Maine. She first worked in Boston as an assistant editor and, in her spare time, edited the Boston Beacon, a small society weekly. In 1903, Arthur T. Vance of Woman’s Home Companion, newly published by the Crowell Publishing Company, offered her a job as household editor. She rose rapidly, becoming managing editor in 1909 and editor-in-chief in 1912, a position she held until her death. Already a director of the Crowell Publishing Company, she became a vice president in 1929, the same year Colby College of Maine awarded her an honorary LL.D. When Lane entered the publishing world, many high-quality, low-circulation periodicals were disappearing. Competing for a new mass market, the Companion supplemented the entertainment sections—fiction and features—with ‘‘a great deal of material to whet the reader’s appetite for advertized products’’ (Fortune, Aug. 1937). ‘‘In editing the Woman’s Home Companion, ’’ Lane wrote, ‘‘I keep constantly in mind . . . the housewife of today as I see her . . . the woman who wants to do less housework, so she will have more time for other things.’’ To attract her, Lane developed an enormously successful editorial formula: ‘‘two serials, four or five short stories, six special articles, and a full complement of service departments for each number.’’ The Companion took a moderate pro-woman-suffrage stance and, later, was the first of its kind to oppose prohibition. Frequent special articles were aimed at working women. Lane enhanced the Companion’s long-established reputation for fiction. In the 1910s she bought stories by Mary Wilkins Freeman, Mary Dawson, and William Chester Estabrook. During the 1920s and 1930s she garnered work by Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pearl Buck, and Sinclair Lewis, along with Booth Tarkington, Sherwood Anderson, John Galsworthy, and Ellen Glasgow. In 1916, the Companion’s 1,000,000 circulation still trailed Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, and Pictorial Review. By 1934, the Companion led the circulation race, with five women’s magazines close behind. Against this fierce competition, Lane successfully exploited new techniques in merchandising and market research. In 1935, she supplemented her highly trained corps of subeditors with 1,500 reader-editors, who were regularly surveyed on everything from manners and morals to cosmetics and salad recipes. Under Lane’s astute leadership, the Companion became a top national magazine, its circulation growing from approximately 738,000 to 3,608,000. According to Fortune this profitable magazine was successful due to Lane’s ‘‘intelligent, purposeful editing.’’ Her Times obituary described her as ‘‘the dean of magazine editors in this country.’’ Through three decades of tremendous
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change, she kept her rapport with her audience. Although she encouraged a pervasive consumerism, Lane also provided her readers with solid, factual advice and introduced them to America’s finest writers. As a businessperson, Lane proved an innovative leader. Her lasting reputation doubtless will depend upon that of the general woman’s magazine, a type of periodical which she helped create and which flourishes still. OTHER WORKS: American Naval Heroes, 1775-1812, 1861-1898 by J. H. Brown (edited by Lane, 1899). Gertrude Battles Lane’s letters are at the Library of Congress. Her papers are owned by Mrs. Edward E. Lane, of Wayne, Pennsylvania. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ferber, E., A Peculiar Treasure (1939). McBride, S. E., ‘‘Woman in the Popular Magazines for Women in America: 1830-1956’’ (Dissertation., 1966). Mott, F. L., A History of American Magazines, Vol. 4: 1885-1905 (1957). Peterson, T, Magazines in the Twentieth Century (1956). Seaton, E. K., ‘‘The Changing Image of the American Woman in a Mass-Circulation Periodical: The Ladies’ Home Journal, 1890-1919’’ (Dissertation, 1967). Woodward, H., The Lady Persuaders (1960). Reference works: CB DAB. NAW. Other references: Fortune (Aug. 1937). NYT (26 Sept. 1941). Time (27 July 1936). Woman’s Home Companion (Nov. 1941). —SARAH W. SHERMAN
LANE, Rose Wilder Born 5 December 1886, De Smet, South Dakota; died 30 October 1968, Danbury, Connecticut Daughter of Almanzo and Laura Ingalls Wilder; married Gillette Lane, 1909 Unconventional from the first, Rose Wilder Lane left her parents’ Mansfield, Missouri, home to work as a telegraph operator for Western Union. She married a land speculator whose ne’erdo-well behavior soon forced Lane to fend for herself as the first woman real estate agent in California. She was a reporter for the San Francisco Bulletin from 1914 to 1918. Written during this period, and indicative of her admiration for American heroes, are Henry Ford’s Own Story (1917) and The Making of Herbert Hoover (1920), both panegyrics to men she considered archetypally American in their resourcefulness and individualism. After formally divorcing her husband, Lane worked for the American Red Cross during World War I, primarily in Russia, Turkey, and Albania. The Peaks of Shala (1923) is a travelogue of her adventures in Albania. In the 1920s, her articles and short stories filled the most popular magazines and journals. In 1922, she received the secondplace O. Henry best short story of the year award for ‘‘Innocence.’’ ‘‘Yarbwoman’’ was included in O’Brien’s The Best Short Stories of 1927, and her ‘‘Old Maid’’ was singled out for O.
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Henry honors again in 1933. Lane became one of the highest-paid writers in the U.S. ‘‘Innocence’’ and ‘‘Yarbwoman’’ are both set among poor whites of the South. Ironically, Lane’s two prizewinning stories have an atypically eerie air. The dark forces are eventually shown to be those cruel and ignorant aspects of human nature coming from within man himself, especially as he is limited by moribund social structures. Her Ozark novels, Hill Billy (1925) and Cindy (1928), were followed by her pioneer novels, Let the Hurricane Roar (1933, reprinted 1985) and Free Land (1938). In Let the Hurricane Roar two young pioneers struggle with the most intolerable conditions of the Dakota frontier, finding at last a sort of sad strength in themselves, even after their most cherished illusions are gone. The novel celebrates the capacity of the individual pioneer. Free Land takes a sardonic view of the governmental scheme to settle the frontier by the free grant of land. Lane’s portrait of foolish expectations is satirical, but tempered by sympathy for the real sufferings of the naive settlers. In Old Home Town (1935, reissued 1988), a collection of stories about women in a Midwestern town, Lane dissects smalltown life. Convention, intolerance, and gossip force the various women characters into unhappy marriages, into shame at being old maids of twenty-six, and even into suicide and murder. In the most overtly feminist story, ‘‘Immoral Woman,’’ the lovely and talented Mrs. Sims is unjustly driven from the town by her clod of a husband and by the townspeople, who are held in thrall by the meanness of their accepted mores. She becomes a liberated woman and an internationally famous designer. Give Me Liberty (1936) began Lane’s overtly political career, and her belletristic efforts correspondingly diminished. In The Discovery of Freedom (1943), she maintains the progress of human civilization is towards ‘‘individualistic libertarianism’’ (with emphasis on private ownership) and individual freedom from coercion by collective society. Her adamant refusal to support New Deal programs such as social security and her opposition to taxation led her into increasingly conservative political company. Lane was editor of the National Economic Council’s Review of Books from 1945 to 1950, but after some of her more bitter political disputes, she retreated from the public arena, concerning herself with domestic arts, local politics, and behind-the-scenes encouragement of individualistic libertarianism. In 1965 Woman’s Day magazine called Lane out of retirement to serve as their war correspondent in Vietnam. She died suddenly of a heart attack just before a projected trip abroad in 1968. Lane was a woman of varied adventures and several careers, but the greatest proportion of her prolific literary production centered around intensely American life. She wrote in praise of the American capitalist and of the pioneer woman of the American West. In many ways her style is simple, but delightful in its factual detail and portraiture of life from a primarily feminine point of view. Lane’s thought and work resist traditional labels. Brilliant, adventurous, and self-sufficient, she was very opposed to the socialistic idealism historically connected with revolutionaries of
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her type in America. She saw governmental authority and smalltown propriety as abstractions that had no right to control the actual pragmatic course of real people’s lives. This fierce elevation of the actual is the bedrock theme of her literary celebration of the quintessential American spirit. OTHER WORKS: Art Smith’s Story (1915). Diverging Roads (1919). White Shadows in the South Seas (1919). The Dancers of Shamahka (1923). He Was a Man (1925). Woman’s Day Book of American Needlework (1963). The Lady and the Tycoon (1973). Rose Wilder Lane: Her Story (1980). Travels with Zenobia: Paris to Albania by Model T Ford: A Journal (1983). Islam and the Discovery of Freedom (special reprint, 1997). Young Pioneers (1998). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Anderson, W., Laura’s Rose: The Story of Rose Wilder Lane (1986). Doughty, J. A., ‘‘Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane: The Cooperative Duo’’ (thesis,1994). Holtz, W. V., The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane (1995). Laura Ingalls Wilder & Rose Wilder Lane, 1937-1939 (1992). MacBride, R, ed., The Lady and the Tycoon: Letters of Rose Wilder Lane and Jasper Crane (1973). MacBride, R., Rose Wilder Lane: Her Story (1977). MacBride, R. L., Rose & Alva: Adapted from the Rose Years Books (2000). MacBride, R. L., Rose at Rocky Ridge: Adapted from The Rose Years Books (2000). Thompson, D., Dorothy Thompson and Rose Wilder Lane: Forty Years of Friendship: Letters, 1921-1960 (1991). Weaver, H., Mainspring; Based on the Discovery of Freedom (1947). Wilder, L. I., On the Way Home; The Diary of a Trip from South Dakota to Mansfield, Missouri, in 1894 (1990). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCA, TCAS. Other references: NR (24 April 1944). Signs (Spring 1990). —L. W. KOENGETER
LANGDON, Mary See PIKE, Mary Green
LANGER, Susanne (Katherina) K(nauth) Born 20 December 1895, New York, New York; died 17 July 1985 Daughter of Antonio and Else Uhlich Knauth; married William L. Langer, 1921 (divorced); children: two sons Susanne K. Langer received her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees all from Radcliffe College; she also studied for a year (1921-22) at the University of Vienna. Langer served as a tutor in philosophy at her alma mater from 1927 to 1942 and taught at the
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University of Delaware in 1943 and at Columbia University from 1945 to 1950. She was professor of philosophy at Connecticut College for Women from 1954 to 1962. She has been the recipient of numerous research grants and honorary degrees. Langer had two sons, was divorced in 1942, and lived in Olde Lyme, Connecticut. While Langer is best known for her philosophy of art, her extensive writings in aesthetics are part of an exploration of a larger question about the workings of the human mind. It is her interest in the human ability to symbolize that unifies works as seemingly dissimilar as her study of symbolic logic, her works on the creation and appreciation of art, and her Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (1967, 1972, 1982), which comprised three volumes. In her first major work, The Practice of Philosophy (1930), Langer introduces many of the themes that engage her later thinking. Intended as an introduction to philosophy, the book defines philosophy as the search for the logical connections between meanings and contrasts it with science, which seeks the empirical connections between facts. The study of symbolic logic, the logic of relations, is therefore an indispensable preliminary to the study of the more engrossing problems of metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics. Langer outlines a theory of meaning intended to present a general pattern common to all the various ‘‘meaning situations,’’ including dictionary definition and emotional import. This common pattern is the triadic relationship between object, symbol, and interpreter, when the symbol and the object have some similar internal structure. The notion of similarity of structure in symbol and object symbolized leads to the suggestion that emotional and aesthetic experiences, which have structures so unlike that of our ‘‘discursive’’ syntactical languages, are best symbolized by the structures of myth, ritual, and art. In this early work, Langer presents the outlines of a theory of a form of understanding that, even though nondiscursive, is reasoning; that, like all understanding, ‘‘involves the appreciation of symbolic structures qua symbolic’’—and that, as the ‘‘personal discovery of meanings through myth, ritual, and art, highly individual, and awe-inspiring by its subtlety, is the very acme of logical procedure, and the refinement of intelligence.’’ In An Introduction to Symbolic Logic (1937), Langer sets out at length the system whose value she had proposed in The Practice of Philosophy. Yet Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbols of Reason, Rite, and Art (1942) is the explicit exposition of the theory of symbolism which had only been indicated in her two earlier works. The ‘‘new key’’ is the focus upon symbol-using as the essence of such diverse enterprises as mathematics, science, psychology, and art. Langer does not claim to have been the first to strike this new key, but only to have recognized it and to have shown how some of the chief questions of philosophy have been transposed into it. In Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key (1953), Langer applies the theory of art proposed in the earlier book to the various major art forms. The
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arts are alike in that they all create forms symbolic of human feeling; they differ in that each creates a different ‘‘primary illusion.’’ The function of artistic illusion is not ‘‘make-believe,’’ but rather, ‘‘disengagement from belief’’—the contemplation of sensory qualities without any practical overtones. In art, forms are freed from their common uses; this is in order that they may act as symbols, may become expressive of human feeling. All the essays in Philosophical Sketches (1962) are preliminary studies for a complete philosophy of mind, which is attempted in Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling. Langer’s stated purpose in this work is to understand ‘‘the nature and origin of the veritable gulf that divides human from animal mentality, in a perfectly continuous course of development of life on earth that has no breaks.’’ She develops the thesis that the departure of human from animal mentality ‘‘is a vast and special evolution of feeling in the hominid stock,’’ a development so great it adds up to a qualitative difference that sets human nature apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. The fault she finds in most previous theories of mind is that they borrow their images from physics, and such images are inadequate to the richness of mental phenomena. Langer, in contrast, turns to works of art, which, as ‘‘images of the forms of feeling,’’ can more adequately reveal the psychic life. Langer’s own works exhibit what she finds in the course of evolution: a process of growth in which there is no break in continuity from the beginning to the present and yet in which there is considerable development and enrichment. Her writings are from the earliest characterized by an exceptional sensitivity to both art and the dynamisms of the subjective life; she has combined with this sensitivity a familiarity with a broad range of scientific research. Langer has acknowledged the influence of such diverse thinkers as Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Sigmund Freud, and Ernst Cassirer; however, she is an original thinker whose insights have transformed what she received from others. She presented her insights within the framework of an overall empiricist philosophy, but even those who question this framework find much to value in her work. Langer’s sensitivity to the life of feeling and her refusal to consign art (and myth, and ritual) to a place of less importance than that held by the discursive enterprises assure her a place of lasting influence among philosophers, art theorists, and the lay public. OTHER WORKS: The Cruise of the Little Dipper, and Other Fairy Tales (1923; revised 1963). Problems of Art: Ten Philosophical Lectures (1957). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Abel, S., ‘‘Susanne Langer and the Rhythm of Dramatic Action’’ (thesis, 1984). Barth, E. M., Women Philosophers: A Bibliography of Books Through 1990 (1992). Blair, R. L., ‘‘A Langerian Analysis of Chekhov’s Major’’ (thesis, 1986). Cochrane, J. S., ‘‘Toward a Satisfactory Approach to Religion and the Arts Based Upon Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism and Susanne K. Langer’s Philosophy of Art’’ (thesis, 1986). Curran, T.,
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‘‘A New Note on the Film: A Theory of Film Criticism Derived from Susanne K. Langer’s Philosophy of Art’’ (dissertation on film, 1980). Feder, M., ‘‘The Semblance of Self: A Critique of Susanne Langer’s Expressionist Aesthetics’’ (thesis, 1980). Greenfield, G., Literary Cognition (dissertation, 1986). Harding, S. and M B. Hintikka, Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and the Philosophy of Science (1983). Johnson, J. R., ‘‘The Primacy of Form: A Study of the Philosophical Development of Susanne K. Langer with Implications for Choral Music’’ (thesis, 1990). Kidneigh, B. J., ‘‘The Potential Rhetorical Power of Myth: An Account Based on the Writings of Cassirer, Langer, and Burke’’ (thesis, 1990). Lathy, E. D., ‘‘Metaphor, Symbol, and Utterance the Reality of Relation in Susanne Langer and Mikhail Bakhtin’’ (thesis, 1985). Liddy, R. M., Art and Feeling: An Analysis and Critique of the Philosophy of Art of Susanne K. Langer (1970). Light, L. W., ‘‘Formalism, Expression Theory, and the Aesthetics of Susanne Langer’’ (thesis, 1980). Malhotra-Hammond, V., ‘‘Toward a Sociology in a New Key: An Inquiry into Dramatistic Social Theory’’ (thesis, 1980). McCall, M., ‘‘Symbol, Art, and Human Feeling in Susanne Langer’s Philosophy of Art’’ (thesis, 1983). Morosoff, D. A., ‘‘Humans as Symbol Makers and Symbol Users: The Development of Susanne Langer’s Philosophical Anthropology’’ (thesis, 1997). Nolan, F. J., ‘‘The Aesthetic Theory of Susanne Langer’’ (thesis, 1984). Phelan, C. M., The Influence of Susanne K. Langer’s Symbolic Theory of Aesthetic Education (1981). Smith, N. R., ‘‘The Usefulness of Susanne K. Langer’s Structural Analysis for Philosophy of Religion’’ (thesis, 1984). Waithe, M. E., A History of Women Philosophers (4 vols., beginning 1987). Watkins, G. K., ‘‘A Dramatic Application of Susanne Langer’s Aesthetic Symbolism’’ (thesis, 1989). Young, C. M., ‘‘Similarities in the Symbolic Theories of George Herbert Mead and Susanne K. Langer’’ (thesis, 1986). Reference works: CA (1974, 1986). CB (Nov. 1963). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCAS. Other references: BJA (Oct. 1968). Gregorianum (1972). JAAC (1955-56, 1968, 1970, 1972). Personalist (1965). Process Studies (Fall 1974). Review of Metaphysics (1954, 1961-63, 1970). —HELENE DWYER POLAND, UPDATED BY NICK ASSENDELFT
LARCOM, Lucy Born 5 March 1824, Beverly, Massachusetts; died 17 April 1893, Boston, Massachusetts Daughter of Benjamin and Lois Barrett Larcom Lucy Larcom grew up in the seaport town of Beverly. Her father was a retired shipmaster; her mother raised a family of 10 children, of which Larcom was next to the youngest. The events and experiences of her early childhood are vividly described in her autobiography, A New England Girlhood, Outlined from Memory (1892, latest reissue 1986). This work remains one of our
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most important authentic descriptions of the daily experience of a young working woman in the 19th century. Remarkably unsentimental, Larcom captures the sights and sounds of a bustling port town and relates the reactions of a growing girl to her social environment. When Larcom was nine years old, her father died; having no other means of support, her mother moved the family to the mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, where even the children could earn enough to contribute to the family income. Her mother ran a boarding house for the factory girls, and Larcom herself went to work in the mills at the age of eleven, as a ‘‘bobbin girl,’’ changing the bobbins on the spinning frames. The hours of work were from 5:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. daily. Despite this use of child labor, the Lowell mills were considered an enlightened advance over the sweatshop conditions of European industry. Young women workers were encouraged to seek ‘‘self improvement’’ through various educational opportunities provided for them, such as the night schools and a special lecture series, the Lowell Lyceum. Larcom and her sister Emeline initiated a series of biweekly journals to which they and other women in their boarding house contributed creative pieces. Larcom’s own contributions were mainly poetical, following a bent she had developed in early childhood. By 1840 creative works of the mill women were being published in two literary magazines, the Lowell Offering and the Operatives’ Magazine. In 1842 these merged as the Lowell Offering, edited by Harriet Farley and Harriot Curtiss. It continued until 1847 and at its height had a subscription list of 4,000. Larcom contributed regularly to this journal, which is now recognized as a unique literary expression of working-class women. In A New England Girlhood, Larcom reveals some of the attitudes these women shared. She resists class prejudices, urging we not consider a woman’s station or occupation but rather her character: ‘‘It is the first duty of every woman to recognize the mutual bond of universal womanhood.’’ Larcom observes that many of the mill women were there so a less talented brother could be sent to school. Larcom also notes the concern of the mill women for the problem of slavery; petitions for its abolition were circulated each year among the workers and received thousands of signatures. Larcom herself was a strong abolitionist and wrote many antislavery verses. Her experiences in Lowell are further described in ‘‘Among Lowell Mill-Girls: A Reminiscence’’ (Atlantic Monthly, Nov. 1881). At age sixteen Larcom was transferred to the position of bookkeeper in the Lawrence Mills. There she had more time to study and to write. In 1846 she moved with her sister Emeline’s family to Illinois, where she graduated in 1852 from the Monticello Female Seminary in Alton. She then returned to the East and in 1854 began teaching at the Wheaton Seminary in Norton, Massachusetts. That year she published her first book, Similitudes from the Ocean and the Prairie , a series of prose parables, which she later dismissed as an immature work. During this period she published poetry in newspapers and in the Atlantic Monthly. In 1862 she resigned her teaching position
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and in 1865 became, along with Gail Hamilton (Mary Abigail Dodge) and J. T. Trowbridge, an editor of Our Young Folks, a leading juvenile magazine. In 1868 she was named sole editor. Larcom never married, mainly because she wished to remain independent enough to pursue her career as a writer. Her first collection of verse, Poems (1868), was reissued in 1885 in the popular ‘‘household edition.’’ Larcom’s most important poetical work was An Idyl of Work (1875), a long poem in blank verse, which dealt with the Lowell factory women she had known in the 1840s. Larcom edited several anthologies with her friend John Greenleaf Whittier. These included Child Life (1871), Child Life in Prose (1873), and Songs of Three Centuries (1875). These collections were all published under Whittier’s name, but it is clear she had the major hand in their creation from the fact that he split the royalties with her. In the preface to Child Life in Prose, Whittier acknowledges that Larcom did most of the work. Works by both Larcom and Whittier were included in these collections. She also herself compiled several popular books of collected poems. Larcom’s reputation today rests not so much on the popular verse which brought her fame in her own day, but rather on the straightforward, unsentimental picture of her life and times she has given us in her prose works. OTHER WORKS: Lottie’s Thought-Book (1858). Ships in the Mist, and Other Stories (1860). Leila Among the Mountains (attributed to Larcom, 1861). Breathings of a Better Life (1866). Childhood Songs (1875). Roadside Poems for Summer Travellers (compiled by Larcom, 1876). Hillside and Seaside in Poetry: A Companion to ‘Roadside Poems’ (compiled by Larcom, 1877). Snow Bloom, and Other Poems ( circa 1880). Wild Roses of Cape Ann, and Other Poems (1881). Wheaton Seminary: A Centennial Sketch (1885). The Cross and the Grail (1887). Easter Gleams: Poems (1890). As It Is in Heaven (1891). At the Beautiful Gate, and Other Songs of Faith (1892). The Unseen Friend (1892). Beckonings from Every Day: A Calendar of Thought (1895). Lucy Larcom: Life, Letters, and Diary (edited by D. D. Addison, 1895). Letters of Lucy Larcom to the Whittiers (edited by G. F. Shepard, 1930). The papers of Lucy Larcom are at the Essex Institute, James Duncan Phillips Library in Salem, Massachusetts. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Conway, J. K., Written by Herself: Autobiographies of American Women: An Anthology (1992). Eisler, B., The Lowell Offering (1971). Gray, J. and Bigsby, C. W. E., She Wields a Pen: American Women Poets of the 19th Century (1997). Marchalonis, S., The Worlds of Lucy Larcom, 1824-1893 (1989). Myers, B. J., ‘‘Moving About in Worlds Unrealized’’—A Look at the Life of Lucy Larcom’’ (thesis, 1986). Robinson, H. H., Loom and Spindle; or, Life Among the Mill Girls (1898). Selden, B., The Mill Girls: Lucy Larcom, Harriet Hanson Robinson, Sarah G. Bagley (1983). Shapazian, K., ‘‘The Poetry of Lucy Larcom: Nineteenth Century Woman of Letters’’ (thesis, 1984). Walker, C., American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century: An
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Anthology (1992). Ward, S. H., ed., The Rushlight, Special Number in Memory of L. L. (1894). Westbrook, P. D., Acres of Flint, Writers of Rural New England 1870-1900 (1951). Reference works: AA. AW. DAB. FPA. NCAB. Norton Book of American Autobiography (1999). NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Women’s Studies (1973). —JOSEPHINE DONOVAN
LARSEN, Nella Born 13 April 1893, Chicago, Illinois; died 30 March 1964, New York, New York Also wrote under: Nella Larsen Imes Daughter of Mary Hansen; married Elmer Imes, 1919 (divorced) Although Nella Larsen’s name is associated with the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, she was somewhat estranged from the coterie of Harlem writers. Her background and the peculiarities of her personal experience helped set her apart from her fellows. The daughter of a Danish immigrant mother and a West Indian father, she was educated both at Fisk University and the University of Copenhagen. Later she attended nursing school in New York, and in 1915 accepted a position at the hospital at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. On her return to New York, she decided to change her profession from nurse to librarian and was subsequently employed at the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library. Larsen’s two novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), enjoyed considerable critical success. In recognition of her accomplishment, Larsen was awarded a Bronze Medal from the Harmon Foundation in 1928, and in 1930 became the first black woman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1933 Larsen was divorced from her husband, a professor of physics at Fisk. Soon afterward she moved to Brooklyn and resumed her work as a nurse. Little is known about her life after 1934, because she achieved the anonymity which by that time she preferred. Quicksand, a largely autobiographical novel, depicts the long and ultimately unfulfilling journey toward self-realization of Helga Crane, a young woman of mixed black and Danish ancestry. As the novel opens, Helga is teaching at Naxos, a small Southern black college; she feels out of place in the closed, fearful, unintellectual environment of the school. She escapes to New York City and is drawn into the sophisticated circles of New York’s black elite. Despite her initial enjoyment of Harlem’s nightlife and its cosmopolitan veneer, Helga concludes that Harlem is too restricting. She escapes again, this time to Denmark. In the home of her affluent relatives, Helga is free to indulge her taste for expensive things. The constant attention she attracts in the drawing rooms, shops, and streets of Copenhagen also serves at first to reenforce her battered ego. Eventually though, she begins to feel objectified by the curiosity of her relatives and friends. She returns to Harlem, but finds it even less congenial than before.
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Acting out of passion and desperation, she marries the Reverend Pleasant Green, an illiterate backwoods preacher. She goes with him to Alabama, where she soon finds herself mired in a life of rural poverty and continual pregnancies. Like many novels of the Harlem Renaissance, Quicksand explores the theme of cultural dualism. Unlike many of her fellow writers though, Larsen analyzes the theme from a psychological, rather than a sociological, perspective. To a great extent, the division in Helga’s psyche is manifested in her often conflicting desires for material possessions and spiritual fulfillment. The fact that she is a mulatto is used to symbolize her inner turmoil. Her dilemma lies in her inability to accept the white world’s definition of black people; she knows she is neither exotic nor primitive, neither ‘‘savage’’ nor sharecropper. Blacks’ definitions of themselves are equally unsatisfactory, for they too are dependent on the white world’s images. Helga struggles to claim both her European and African cultural heritages. Helga also aspires to a complete womanhood that is denied to black women in her society and to white women as well, as Larsen’s novel explores the twin evils of racism and sexism. Larsen’s literary skill is most apparent in her use of metaphor. The novel is tightly unified by the central metaphor of quicksand, supported throughout by concrete images of suffocation, asphyxiation, claustrophobia, and confinement. The images are introduced at every critical point in the narrative, and they are presented with great care and subtlety. Less successful is Larsen’s handling of language; the dialogue is often stilted and unconvincing. Certain portions of the novel seem rushed, and the ending, though compelling, seems contrived. Nevertheless, the novel succeeds admirably in its main objective, the presentation of a detailed psychological portrait of an educated black woman set against a backdrop of American and European life. In Passing, Larsen presents a less complex, less engaging situation. Two characters, Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry, dominate the novel; both are attractive, well-to-do, and able to ‘‘pass.’’ Irene identifies with blacks, choosing to ‘‘pass’’ only for occasional social convenience, while Clare has moved completely into the white world. Theirs are two possible responses to the racial dilemma, but neither is very inspiring. Although this novel is probably the best treatment of a very popular theme in early African American literature, it serves primarily to demonstrate how inconsequential the ‘‘passing’’ theme was. OTHER WORKS: An Intimation of Things Distant: The Collected Fiction of Nella Larsen (1992). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Barker, A., ‘‘Either/Or: The Resolution of Racial Ambiguity in the Works of Nella Larsen’’ (thesis, 1996). Bone, R., The Negro Novel in America (1965). Bontemps, A., ed., The Harlem Renaissance Remembered (1972). Branzburg, J. V., ‘‘Women Novelists of the Harlem Renaissance: A Study in Marginality’’ (thesis, 1983). Brauer, S. F., ‘‘Strategies for Survival in AfricanAmerican Women’s Literature’’ (thesis, 1996). Centers of the
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Self: Stories by Black American Women from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (1994). Chu, P. E., ‘‘Modernist Itineraries: Gender, Geography, Genre’’ (thesis, 1997). Coleman, A. R., ‘‘The Mulatto Syndrome and the Novels of Nella Larsen’’ (thesis, 1991). Cooke, M. G., Afro-American Literature in the Twentieth Century: The Achievement of Intimacy (1984). Davis, A. P., From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers 1900 to 1960 (1981). Davis, T. M., Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman’s Life Unveiled (1996). Edwards, J. A. C., ‘‘Creative Reverence: Self-Defining Revisionary Discourse in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston’’ (thesis, 1998). Hollins, T. Z., ‘‘The Production of Identity in Three Harlem Renaissance Movements’’ (thesis, 1997). Johnson, B., ‘‘The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race, and Gender’’ (thesis, 1998). Larson, C. R., Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer & Nella Larsen (1993). Major, C., Calling the Wind: Twentieth Century African-American Short Stories (1993). Marren, S. M., ‘‘Passing for American: Establishing American Identity in the Work of James Weldon Johnson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nella Larsen and Gertrude Stein’’ (thesis, 1995). McLendon, J. Y., The Politics of Color in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen (1995). McManus, M. H., ‘‘African- American Modernism in the Novels of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen’’ (thesis, 1992). Miller, E. M., The Other Construction: Where Violence and Womanhood Meet in the Writings of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Angelina Weld Grimke, and Nella Larsen (1999). Motley, A. E., ‘‘Gender and Culture: The New Woman in the Fiction of Nella Larsen and John Galsworthy’’ (thesis, 1996). Newman, R., Words Like Freedom: Essays on African-American Culture and History (1996). O’Banner, B. M., ‘‘A Study of Black Heroines in Four Selected Novels (1929-1959) by Four Black American Women Novelists: Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Paule Marshall, Ann Lane Petry’’ (thesis, 1985). Roberts, M. O., ‘‘Writing to Liberate: Selected Black Women Novelists from 1859 to 1982’’ (thesis, 1987). Royster, B. H., The Ironic Vision of Four Black Women Novelists: A Study of the Novels of Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston and Ann Petry (1980). Singh, M., The Novels of the Harlem Renaissance (1976). Tate, C., Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race (1998). Whitehead, B. M., ‘‘The Treatment of Women in the Novels of Nella Larsen’’ (thesis, 1981). Wilkerson, A. M., ‘‘Sanctuary: The Critical Protection Which Silenced Nella Larsen’’ (thesis, 1997). Williams, B. J., ‘‘Nella Larsen: Shaping African-American Female Representation in Quicksand and Passing’’ (thesis, 1993). WitherspoonWalthall, M. L., The Evolution of the Black Heroine in the Novels of Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker (1988). Reference works: African American Writers (1991). Black American Writers Past and Present (1975). Classic Fiction of the Harlem Renaissance (1994). Great Short Stories by American Women (1996). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Austin, S. M. C., A Conversation about Nella: A Story of Nella Larsen (audiovisual, 1998). CLAJ (1973, 1974). Ms. (Dec. 1980). —CHERYL A. WALL
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LASSWELL, Mary Born 8 February 1905, Glasgow, Scotland; died 19 July 1994 Daughter of William R. and Mary Caskey Lubbock; married Clyde Lasswell, 1938; Dudley W. Smith, 1964 Mary Lasswell, born to a prominent Texan family, spent her childhood in Brownsville, Texas, where she learned to speak Spanish before she learned English. She taught for a few years after receiving her B.S. degree in 1930 from the University of Texas. In 1938 she married, and her husband’s career in the U.S. Navy took them away from Texas for a time. Upon returning to the state in the late 1950s, Lasswell, who by this time had achieved considerable success as a humorous writer, became active in many professional and civic organizations. These affiliations included the Texas Civil War Centennial Commission, Authors League, Dramatists Guild, Texas Institute of Letters, Daughters of the Republic of Texas, and Theta Sigma Phi (Women in Communications). She remarried in 1964, and after many years of residence in Texas, moved to Los Alamos, California. Lasswell’s first novel, Suds in Your Eye (1942), portrays three elderly ladies living in a junkyard in Southern California. The New York Times called it ‘‘one of the funniest, jolliest books of the season’’ when it appeared. Mrs. Feeley, Mrs. Rasmussen, and Miss Tinkham are also central characters in High Time (1944), One on the House (1949), Wait for the Wagon (1951), and Tooner Schooner (1953). These warm-hearted, down-to-earth women refuse to let old age, physical infirmity, or lack of funds keep them from enjoying life. They look at the rules of society as something they can leave or take as they wish, and they have grown old and wise enough not to be concerned with the superficialities of life. The rowdy women make their way from the junkyard to running a bar to operating an outlandish motel, and they exert prodigious efforts to achieve their goals. Although these characters were considered vulgar by some reviewers, many readers have found them enjoyable; Suds in Your Eye has sold over 300,000 copies. Two books of recipes, Mrs. Rasmussen’s Book of One-Arm Cookery (1946) and Mrs. Rasmussen’s Book of One-Arm Cookery with Second Helpings (1970), were a by-product of these comic novels, when readers wrote to request instructions for the dishes prepared by the three old women. A serious novel, Bread for the Living (1948), set in Brownsville in the early 20th century, was not very favorably received. Several other publications were more successful. I’ll Take Texas (1959), a descriptive, anecdotal guide to the state, was described as ‘‘affectionate and enthusiastic’’ and ‘‘told with charm.’’ In 1962 Lasswell compiled and edited the 1861-65 memoirs of Valerius C. Giles, who had been a nineteen-year-old recruit with Hood’s Brigade. The resulting volume, Rags and Hope, received favorable notice. Lasswell wrote a comic novel, Tio Pepe (1963), which she developed into a musical comedy in 1968. It is named for its protagonist, the elderly Mexican owner of a bar, Cada Noche un Amor (A Love Every Night), whose wife is a religious fanatic. Professor Elijah Potts, bachelor, folklorist, and professional Kinsey
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researcher, provides an unbiased view of this amusing household. Lasswell’s intimate knowledge of Mexico and its people is evidenced in both the novel and the play. It is a somewhat bawdy story, but, as Dr. William Madsen, professor of anthropology at the University of Texas, noted, ‘‘The book is full of respect for life. In it there is compassion and tenderness for all human things.’’ Lasswell’s works include a variety of literary types, all of which are competently written. She is at her best, however, in her amusing tales of the rowdy trio of old ladies, where she manages to tell funny stories without losing the sense of human dignity underneath the foolishness. OTHER WORKS: Lonely Star (1951). Let’s Go for Broke (1962). John Henry Kirby, Prince of the Pines (1966). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: American Novelists of Today (1951). CA (1965). TCAS. Other references: Boston Globe (11 Oct. 1944). LJ (15 Oct. 1951). NY (19 Nov. 1949). NYT (13 Dec. 1942). NYTBR (18 Dec. 1949). Saturday Review (17 Mar. 1951, 2 Sept. 1961). Springfield Republican (8 Oct. 1961). —DOROTHY H. BROWN
LATHAM, Jean Lee Born 19 April 1902, Buckhannon, West Virginia; died 13 June 1995 Daughter of George R. II and Winifred Brown Latham Jean Lee Latham received a B.A. from West Virginia Wesleyan College, Buckhannon, and a Bachelor of Oral English and M.A. from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. While at Cornell, she studied drama at the Ithaca Conservatory. After six years as editor-in-chief of Dramatic Publishing Company in Chicago, she resigned to write her own stage and radio plays. Teaching and writing have been integrated throughout her career. Latham’s key to success in the genre of drama and fictionalized biography is careful planning. Her first published play, Thanks Awfully! (1928), a one-act farce, was followed by the 1940s by more than 40 plays. They ranged from a psychological suspense drama, The Nightmare (1943), to a Christmas play, People Don’t Change (1941). Old Doc (1940), a three-act comedy, was adapted for Kraft TV Theater in 1951. She also wrote 140 episodes about the Lewis and Clark expeditions for a children’s radio serial and radio plays for various network programs, including First Nighter, Grand Central Station, and Skippy Hollywood Theater. Her Do’s and Don’ts of Drama: 555 Pointers for Beginning Actors and Directors (1935) was required reading in some college and university courses. Latham debuted in the field of children’s books with The Story of Eli Whitney: Invention and Progress in the Young Nation (1953). She selected the subjects from among those men who
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overcame unusual hardships, such as James Cook, Sam Houston, and David Glasgow Farragut. Reading just one paragraph of Nathaniel Bowditch’s The American Practical Navigator prompted her to pursue facts that resulted in the writing of her most popular book, Carry On, Mr. Bowditch (1955, reissued 1991), which won the Newbery Medal. Her goal in research was to become ‘‘backyard familiar’’ with the subject, and reviewers never challenged her facts. When asked how long it took her to write This Dear-Bought Land (1957), she responded: ‘‘Twenty years to gather information and ten months to write and rewrite.’’ Latham often wrote two books about the same subject with two audiences in mind. For example, the substantial fictionalized biography, Medals for Morse: Artist and Inventor (1954), was intended for adolescents, while the shorter Samuel F. B. Morse: Artist Inventor (1961, reissued 1991) was written for grades two to four. The Chagres: Power of the Panama Canal (1964), in the Great River Series, relates closely to an easy-to-read biography, George W. Goethals: Panama Canal Engineer (1965). Latham has covered a span of more than 350 years in her historical writing, from This Dear-Bought Land about Jamestown to Rachel Carson, Who Loved the Sea (1973, 1991). For 22 years the annual book list for children included a new fictionalized biography by Latham, mostly about inventors and adventurers. A contributor in an area where few others competed—fictionalized biography about leaders in the industrial revolution—she contributed some lasting titles. With school curricula changing, a number of Latham’s notable books are now out of print, while others, such as Carry On, Mr. Bowditch, have been translated into Arabic, Japanese, and Slovenian, and were reprinted again in the 1990s. With her sense for the dramatic, her strength in the children’s books is dialogue. A teacher both in the formal sense and through her books, Latham has offered substance graced with humor in her fictionalized biographies.
OTHER WORKS: The Alien Note (1930). The Christmas Party (1930). Christopher’s Orphans (1931). Crinoline and Candlelight (1931). Lady to See You (1931). Sign Unto You (1931). The Blue Teapot (1932). Broadway Bound (1933). The Giant and the Biscuits (1934). The Prince and the Patters (1934). Master of Solitaire (1935). Tommy Tomorrow (1935). All on Account of Kelly (1937). And Then What Happened? (1937). Bed of Petunias (1937). Have a Heart! (1937). Here She Comes! (1937). Just the Girl for Jimmy (1937). Mickey the Mighty (1937). Smile for the Lady! (1937). Talk Is Cheap! (1937). Well Met by Moonlight (1937). What Are You Going to Wear? (1937). The Ghost of Rhodes Manor (1939). They’ll Never Look There (1939). The Arms of the Law (1940). Nine Radio Plays (1940). Gray Bread (1941). Minus a Million (1941). Senior Freedom (1941). The House without a Key (1942). The Nightmare (1943). Trail Blazer of the Seas (1956). On Stage, Mr. Jefferson (1958). Young Man in a Hurry: The Story of Cyrus W. Field (1958). Drake: The Man They Called Pirate (1960). Aladdin (1961). Ali Baba (1961). The Cuckoo That Couldn’t Count (1961). The Dog That Lost His
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Family (1961). Hop O’ My Thumb (1961). The Magic Fishbone by Charles Dickens (retold by Latham, 1961). The Man Who Never Snoozed (1961). Nutcracker (1961). Puss in Boots, Le Chat Botté (1961). Wa O’Ka by P. Ramirez (retold from the Spanish by Latham, 1961). When Homer Honked (1961). The Brave Little Tailor, Hansel and Gretel, and Jack and the Beanstalk (1962). Man of the Monitor: The Story of John Ericsson (1962). The Ugly Duckling, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, and the Little Red Hen (1962). Eli Whitney: Great Inventor (1963, 1991). The Frightened Hero: A Story of the Siege of Latham House (1965). Retreat to Glory: The Story of Sam Houston (1965). Sam Houston: Hero of Texas (1965, 1991). Columbia: Powerhouse of North America (1967). David Glasgow Farragut (1967). Anchor’s Aweigh: The Story of D. G. Farragut (1968). Far Voyager: The Story of James Cook (1970). What Tabbit the Rabbit Found (1974). Who Lives Here? (1974). Elizabeth Blackwell: Pioneer Woman Doctor (1975, 1991). The papers of Jean Lee Latham are in the Kerlan Collection of the University of Minnesota Libraries.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Livingston, W., ‘‘A Bio-Bibliography of Jean Lee Latham’’ (thesis, 1960). Reference works: CA (1963). More Books by More People (1974). Newbery and Caldecott Medal Books, 1956-65 (1965). SATA (1971). —KAREN NELSON HOYLE
LATHEN, Emma Pseudonym of Martha Henissart and Mary Jane Latsis; Henissart: Born 4 June 1929, New York, New York; Latsis: Born 12 July 1927, Oak Park, Illinois, died 1997 Also wrote as: R. B. Dominic Writing jointly under two different pseudonyms, Emma Lathen and R. B. Dominic, Martha Henissart and Mary Jane Latsis created murder mysteries that rank among the best. For their day jobs, Henissart also worked as a corporation lawyer and corporate banker, Latsis as an administrator for the federal government and an economist at the United Nations. Both held graduate degrees from Harvard University. The Dominic novels focus upon a continuing character, Senator Ben Safford of Ohio, an amateur detective. Safford’s legislative duties draw him into murder cases, all of which are briskly plotted. Murder in High Places (1970) features Karen Jenks, ousted from her studies in South America by political pressure. The portrait is candid and refreshing, an interesting example of this series’ realism. Here Henissart and Latsis combine humor and social comment, a pattern apparent in all their
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books. There is No Justice (1971) deals with a Supreme Court appointment, and Epitaph for a Lobbyist (1974) treats political corruption. John Putnam Thatcher, described by the Los Angeles Daily News as ‘‘the Agatha Christie of Wall Street,’’ is the continuing character, whose adventures, stemming from his work as senior officer at the Sloan Guaranty Trust of Wall Street, often include murder investigation in the Lathen books. All the plots arise from some facet of business practice: tax-loss farming in A Place for Murder (1963), fast food chains in Murder to Go (1969), and real estate development in Ashes to Ashes (1971). The titles are often sources for sly humor, as in A Stitch in Time (1968), which deals with medical fraud. Thatcher, representing the Sloan Guaranty Trust, goes wherever money and mayhem are being made. An urbane, deliberate, clever widower, the banker is comfortable in all settings, from the hockey rink in Murder Without Icing (1972) to Detroit’s auto empires in Murder Makes the Wheels Go ’Round (1966). Thatcher knows that sport can involve high finance; his creators know that high finance can provide recreation through mystery fiction. The portraits of female characters are particularly interesting, for they illustrate careful attention to detail and realism. Thatcher’s secretary, Rose Teresa Corsa, is no office wife; instead, she values herself and her work, wisely exercising the power she has accrued and acknowledging that she is indispensable. Through her, sharp comments about women’s traditional business roles are often made, as in When in Greece (1969). The Corsa characterization is nicely rounded, for readers are allowed some knowledge of her extended family and are aware she has a life of her own. A contrasting example of fully realized characterization is lonely, undervalued Tessie Marcus in Murder Against the Grain (1967). At first Marcus appears to be merely the stereotyped girl Friday who has invested her energy and affection in the firm for which she works. But actually a multidimensional portrait is drawn, for Marcus proves capable of decisiveness and vigorous self-interest. The portrayal of labor leader Annie Galiano in The Longer the Thread (1971) saves this novel, for the business manipulations central to the main plot are a bit more cumbersome than usual. Galiano is a major character, a powerful, astute, and effective woman marked by years of strenuous work. She is a tough, victorious bargainer in the strike that provides the subplot, and her presence also serves to augment unity in the novel. Much of the success of this series stems from detailed portraits such as hers, which never deter the swift pace but do flesh out the stories. Full of comments about American culture, the Thatcher books are novels of manners. Few facets of modern living escape observation, and they range from Americans’ adoration of automobiles in Sweet and Low (1974) to campus radicals in Pick Up Sticks (1970) and civil rights in Death Shall Overcome (1966). Unfortunately, the social commentary in the latter is flawed. Both Edward Parry (the first black to sit on the stock exchange) and a
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racist Southerner are too stereotyped to be fully effective; here characterization is not saved by caricature. Yet the book is redeemed by marvelously humorous moments, a device that never fails in this series. In Brewing up a Storm (1996), regular characters Tom Robichaux, Everett Gabler, and Walter Bowman are left out of the story, not as much emphasis is placed on the world of high finance as on the whodunit itself, and the critics were less than kind in their reviews of this book, saying it is not ‘‘her’’ (Lathen’s) best book. The pair redeems Lathen’s good name in A Shark Out of Water (1997), which marked the 23rd novel in the Thatcher series. The book, which won an Edgar award from the Mystery Writers Association, keeps the character fresh, despite his longevity. Thatcher remains a great character, and in Shark the storyline is filled with irony targeted at the slapstick efforts of governments and international corporations and the capitalization of the remnants of the former Soviet Union. Lathen also took a look outside the U.S. in East is East (1991), in which Thatcher travels to Japan and becomes involved in a murder there. The plot line was similar to the film Rising Sun (1993) starring Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes caught up in a shadowy world of Japanese business and terrorism. The Henissart and Latsis team produced consistently strong, thoughtful books, and they avoided the formulaic limitations of many mystery novels through skillful use of characterization, social criticism, and splendid humor, which is often based on irony. The authors’ special professional knowledge informed the novels, which hold a secure place among well-written mysteries capitalizing on the popularization of unusual expertise. In 1983 Henissart and Latsis shared an Ellery Queen award, given by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, along with their 1967 Crime Writers Association Silver Dagger. In 1997 the pair shared an Agatha award for Lifetime Achievement. Latsis passed away in 1997, leaving the fate of the two pseudonymous authors undecided in the hands of her longtime collaborator and friend, Henissart. Lathen’s fans have included such stalwarts in the legal profession as the late Professor James Willard Hurst (1910-1997) of the Wisconsin Law School (who, coincidentally, has a prize for the best book in American legal history named after him) and Stewart Macaulay, Malcolm Pitman Sharp Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
OTHER WORKS: Banking on Death (1961). Accounting for Murder (1964). Come to Dust (1968). Murder, Sunny Side Up (1968). Murder Out of Court (1971). By Hook or By Crook (1975). Murder out of Commission (1976). Double, Double, Oil and Trouble (1978). The Attending Physician (1980). Going for the Gold (1981). Green Grow the Dollars (1982). Banking on Murder: Three by Emma Lathen (1984). Unexpected Developments
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(1984). Something In the Air (1988). Right on the Money: A John Thatcher Mystery (1996). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bargainnier, E. F., Ten Women of Mystery (1981). Klein, K. G., Great Women Mystery Writers: Classic to Contemporary (1994). Reference works: Detecting Women (1994). Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection (1976). St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers 1996. Other references: Armchair Detective (Nov. 1974, June 1976). Forbes (1 Dec. 1977). Harvard (July/Aug. 1975). Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly (Winter 1977). Tablet (22 Aug. 1970). —JANE S. BAKERMAN, UPDATED BY DARYL F. MALLETT
LATHROP, Rose Hawthorne Born 20 May 1851, Lenox, Massachusetts; died 9 July 1926, Hawthorne, New York Wrote under: M. M. Alphonsa Lathrop, O.S.D., Mother Alphonsa, O.S.D. Daughter of Nathaniel and Sophia Peabody Hawthorne; married George P. Lathrop, 1871 (died 1898); children: Francis (died 1881) Rose Hawthorne Lathrop spent seven of the first nine years of her life in England, Portugal, and Italy. Although culturally enhanced by the European travels, her formal education was random and erratic, provided mainly by her parents and by instructors at home. Like both her brother, Julian, and her sister, Una, Lathrop felt compelled to further the Hawthorne literary fame. She began writing stories when she was eleven, married a writer when she was twenty, and spent the next 25 years of an unfulfilled, stormy marriage writing and publishing poetry, short stories, and sketches. Her only child, Francis, died in 1881 at the age of four. Restless and rootless, Lathrop renounced her Unitarian faith in 1891, and she and her husband were received into the Catholic church. In 1895 with church permission, she formally separated from her husband to devote her life to the care of impoverished, dying victims of cancer, and she organized a group who called themselves Servants of Relief for Incurable Cancer. In 1900, two years after the death of her husband, Lathrop was named Sister Mary Alphonsa in the Dominican Order. A year later, as head of two resident homes she had established for the incurably ill, she became Mother Alphonsa. She directed one of these homes, Rosary Hill, in Hawthorne, New York, until her death. Lathrop’s single volume of poetry, Along the Shore (1888), is a collection of generally traditional lyrics and ballads, many of which had been previously published in Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Monthly, and Scribner’s. The poems reflect Lathrop’s deep
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grief over the deaths of her father, her mother, her son, and the loss of a friend; they show her despair over the world’s deceits—the unrealities of faith, love, and hope. She struggles to resist depression, to find something besides illusion in her life. Her frustrations and disappointments emerge in this poetry in images of death, graves, burials, gloom, and darkness. In Lathrop’s most significant piece of writing, Memories of Hawthorne (1897), her tone has noticeably altered. She examines her parents’ lives and her own childhood from a position of comfort and security in the Catholic faith, editing the family letters and diaries carefully and writing lovingly and admiringly. She works from a spiritual serenity and a moral consciousness that she confidently believes are inherited from her father. Drawing extensively from her mother’s letters and diaries, Lathrop narrates the lives of her parents from the period of their courtship in 1838 until the death of her father in 1864. Her mother, Sophia, tends to romanticize any account of Nathaniel and the children, but she has a talent for selecting the significant and interesting detail. Thus, Sophia’s letters and diaries, given interpretation and continuity by Lathrop’s commentary, provide intimate and fascinating records of the family’s Concord years and their European experiences. Lathrop’s best writing in the volume is inspired by her own personal recollections of her father, which vividly portray the private Hawthorne—his attentiveness to his wife and children, his sense of fun, his generosity, his compassion, and his moral stature. For a full and rich chronicle of the Hawthorne years in Liverpool, Memories of Hawthorne is an excellent companion piece to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s English Notebooks. Except for this biographical work, Lathrop’s later writing derived from her interests and experiences in the Catholic church. She wrote and published informative and imaginative accounts of her work with cancer patients in a little magazine that she created, Christ’s Poor (1901-04). The series of Reports of the Servants of Relief for Incurable Cancer (1908-22) excited enough interest to be reviewed in the New York Times: ‘‘Reports, even of the best charitable institutions, are generally dull reading; but these reports are a flaming exception.’’ None of Lathrop’s early work—the poetry and fiction written before she joined the Catholic church—is remarkable; it lacks both originality and artistic control. However, her later work—the study of Hawthorne and the records of her work with the poor—is well written and valuable. For Lathrop, the work in Rosary Hill Home ended her long search for personal fulfillment and provided a true stimulus for her creative imagination. OTHER WORKS: A Story of Courage: Annals of the Georgetown Convent of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary (with G. P. Lathrop, 1894). The papers of Rose Hawthorne Lathrop are in collections at the Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley; the Beinecke Library, Yale University; the Essex Institute, Salem, Massachusetts; the New York Public Library; the Rosary Hill
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Home, Hawthorne, New York; and the Cambridge University Library, Cambridge, England. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Burton, K., Sorrow Built a Bridge: A Daughter of Hawthorne (1938). Hawthorne, J., Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife (1888). Joseph, Sister M., Out of Many Hearts (1964). Loggins, V., The Hawthornes: The Story of Seven Generations of an American Family (1951). Maynard, T., A Fire Was Lighted: The Life of Rose Hawthorne Lathrop (1948). Walsh, J. J., Mother Alphonsa: Rose Hawthorne Lathrop (1930). Reference works: Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography (1887). DAB. Dictionary of Catholic Biography (1961). NCAB. Other references: Atlantic (Sept. 1928). Ladies’ Home Journal (Feb. 1893). NYT (16 Apr. 1922). —JANE STANBROUGH
LATIMER, Elizabeth W(ormeley) Born 26 July 1822, London, England; died 4 January 1904, Baltimore, Maryland Also wrote under: Elizabeth Wormeley Daughter of Ralph R. and Caroline Preble Wormeley; married Randolph B. Latimer, 1856 Elizabeth W. Latimer’s family roots were planted in three soils: her father, although raised in England and a rear admiral in the British Navy, was of old landed Virginia stock; her mother was the daughter of an East India merchant of Boston. In her youth, Latimer lived in London, Paris, Boston, Newport, and Virginia. In London and Paris, she attended the funeral of William IV and the reburial of Napoleon, saw Queen Victoria in coronation regalia, met William M. Thackeray, and attended Louis Philippe’s balls. In Boston, in 1842, she met George Ticknor, William H. Prescott, and Julia Ward Howe, who encouraged her to write. Her first publication was a translation of a Mexican poem for the appendix of Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico. In 1848, after witnessing the revolution in Paris and Chartist demonstrations in London, the Wormeley family moved back to New England. Latimer published several novels before marrying and moving to Maryland. She then spent 20 years rearing children and, during the Civil War, caring for wounded soldiers. Although her eyes were weak, she read assiduously, and during the last 30 years of her life, she published prolifically: novels, magazine articles, translations from French and Italian, and popular European histories that went through many editions. Latimer’s best works are her histories, anecdotal in style. As a compiler and editor, she read copiously from magazines, newspapers, books, and private papers, then presented her information in lively, compact, confident prose. She did not claim to be a historian, but stated in her prefaces that she concentrated on the
historical figures who interested her. She was fascinated by the adventures of royalty, explorers, and military people. Occasionally she inserted information from her family’s experiences. In France in the Nineteenth Century (1892), for example, she wrote from personal observation, and in Europe in Africa in the Nineteenth Century (1898), she mentioned some personal letters she had received from Liberians in 1854. In all the histories, one senses her desire to keep abreast of events in the world and, at the century’s end, to sum up historic achievements. Some of her novels are quite bad. Salvage (1880), for example, is largely a diatribe against easy divorce and in favor of long-suffering, dutiful love, especially of a wife toward her husband. The plot is wholly predictable and the characters are flat. Latimer’s characters lack the roundness of good fiction. They are like figures frequently described by historians and news reporters—despite imputed motives and feelings, the characters sound made up, for the writers do not know them from the inside. Amabel: A Family History (1853), however, blends history and fiction interestingly. The flat narrator, ostensibly Amabel’s granddaughter, is primarily a compiler of other people’s narratives about her grandmother’s history. The history is lively, but when the narrator becomes a character, the sentimentality is overwhelming. The novel is further burdened by the moral announced in the preface (‘‘that love, the principle, infused into our duties works its own reward’’), which is representative of all Latimer’s novels. Our Cousin Veronica (1855) is probably Latimer’s best novel. Its vividness of action and description derives from her own experiences in England and Virginia. At the novel’s end, the female narrator marries a slave owner only after a serious discussion of abolition. He opposes freeing his slaves outright, for they would be harassed in their own state and unprotected if they moved north. Quoting Wilberforce, she impresses her husband with the responsibility they have as masters, not just for their slaves’ physical needs, but for their souls. Husband and wife both hope for a general emancipation and in the meantime free and aid those of their slaves who are willing to emigrate to Liberia. In her novels, Latimer is strongest when she is closest to historical anecdote. Her histories are valuable for the interest she generates in people and for her amassing of historic information often inaccessible to others. OTHER WORKS: Forest Hill: A Tale of Social Life in 1830-31 (1846). Recollections of Ralph Randolph Wormeley, Rear Admiral, R.N.; Written Down by His Three Daughters (with A. R. W. Curtis, 1879). My Wife and My Wife’s Sister (1881). Princess Amelie: A Fragment of Autobiography (1883). Familiar Talks on Some of Shakespeare’s Comedies (1886). A Chain of Errors (1890). Russia and Turkey in the Nineteenth Century (1893). England in the Nineteenth Century (1894). Italy in the Nineteenth Century and the Making of Austro-Hungary and Germany (1896). Spain in the Nineteenth Century (1897). Judea from Cyrus to Titus, 537 B.C.-70 A.D. (1899). The Last Years of the Nineteenth
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Century (1900). Men and Cities of Italy (1901). The Prince Incognito (1902). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hayden, H. E., Virginia Genealogies (1891). Logan, M. S., The Part Taken by Women in American History (1912). Preble, G. H., Genealogical Sketch of the First Three Generations of Prebles in America (1868). Reference works: AA. AW. A Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors (1872). A Dictionary of American Authors (1897). DAB. Index to Women of the World, from Ancient to Modern Times: Biographies and Portraits (1970). NCAB. Other references: Baltimore American (3 Jan. 1904, 4 Jan. 1904, 7 Jan. 1904). Baltimore Sun (4 Jan. 1904, 5 Jan. 1904). Dial (1 Feb. 1904). Harper ’s (Feb. 1856). London Athenaeum (1853). London Literary Gazette (1846). New England Historical and Genealogical Register (Oct. 1868). NYT (5 Jan. 1904). Putnam’s (Feb. 1856). —KAREN B. STEELE
LATSIS, Mary Jane See LATHEN, Emma
LAUT, Agnes C(hristina) Born 11 February 1871, Ontario, Canada; died 15 November 1936, Wassaic, New York Also wrote under: A. C. Laut When Agnes C. Laut was a child in Winnipeg, Canada, it was still a frontier town where the Hudson’s Bay Store traded for furs with trappers who came down from the mountains. Their stories provided the stimulus for her interest in the exploration and settlement of the North American continent. As a journalist, Laut wrote numerous historical articles for newspapers and magazines before publishing her first book. She then worked primarily on books and later moved to upstate New York to be nearer the major publishing centers. Laut’s first two books are novels set at the time of the opening of the Canadian fur trade. Lords of the North (1900) is a romance set against the intrigues between the North-West [fur] Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company over the establishment of territories. Heralds of Empire (1902) tells the story, set against a similar background, of Pierre Radisson’s adventures as one of the first explorers of the Canadian wilderness. The Story of the Trapper (1902) established the genre in which Laut excelled—a combination of history, biography, and folklore. It opens with a history of the conflicts among the great fur companies, then moves backward in time to tales of the French trappers and of the Native Americans, and finally to animal lore.
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The book displays Laut’s typical strengths and weaknesses as a writer. Much of the history of the fur trade is confused, and the point is lost in her attempts to glorify the personalities involved. However, when she is repeating the tales she must have heard from the trappers of her childhood and recreating the adventures of anonymous Native Americans, the narrative achieves the compelling force of fine fiction that is better, in fact, than her own fiction ever is. Laut’s next books followed in a similar vein by chronicling adventures of the men who opened North America to the fur trade. The material in some of her books was reworked for Laut’s contribution (volumes 18, 22, and 23) to the series of popular histories known as The Chronicles of Canada; however, volume 23, The Cariboo Trail (1916), is her first treatment of the Canadian gold rush that began in 1858. In many ways, these short books are superior to Laut’s longer works because she achieves here a clarity and succinctness missing in the books that were intended to be more serious. Also, she uses a more temperate stylistic tone in describing her heroes. In the earlier works, the biographical sections suffer from the excesses of hagiography. The Canadian Commonwealth (1915) is a combination of social history and commercial promotion in which Laut foresees the emergence of Canada as a world power in the 20th century. This promotional chauvinism is repeated in Canada at the Cross Roads (1921), and promotion of a slightly different sort dominates The Fur Trade of America (1921), which Laut wrote in response to an outcry against fur trapping. Her thesis is that the trapper is more humane than nature because he kills the animal quickly, a sentiment expressed in many of her earlier books about the fur trade. In some of her later books, Laut treated the establishment of various overland trails by which settlers came west; there were also travel books about Glacier Park and the American Southwest. Laut was a prolific writer of popular histories. Her work is at its best when she draws on oral and folk traditions and writes narratives of the life of the early adventurers and settlers on the North American continent. She follows Frederick Jackson Turner’s conviction that settlement comes in waves: the explorers, the traders, the settlers. Her special sympathy and interest was with the explorers and traders, but she also studied and wrote about the settlers. OTHER WORKS: Pathfinders of the West (1904). Vikings of the Pacific (1905). The Conquest of the Great Northwest (1908). Canada, the Empire of the North (1909). The Freebooters of the Wilderness (1910). The New Dawn (1913). Through Our Unknown Southwest (1913). The ‘‘Adventures of England’’ on Hudson Bay (1914). Pioneers of the Pacific Coast (1915). The Quenchless Light (1924). The Blazed Trail of the Old Frontier (1926). Enchanted Trails of Glacier Park (1926). The Conquest of Our Western Empire (1927). The Overland Trail: The Epic Path of the Pioneers to Oregon (1929). The Romance of the Rails (1929). Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, 1657-1730 (1930). John Tanner, Captive Boy Wanderer of the Border Lands (1930). Marquette (1930). Cadillac, Knight Errant of the Wilderness,
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Founder of Detroit, Governor of Louisiana from the Great Lakes to the Gulf (1931). Pilgrims of the Santa Fe (1931).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Canadian Writers; a Biographical Dictionary (1966). Junior Book of Authors (1951). Other references: Canadian Magazine of Politics, Science, Arts, and Literature (Apr. 1909). NYTBR (17 May 1902, 13 Jan. 1906, 28 Nov. 1908, 1 Aug. 1926, 29 Sept. 1929). —HARRIETTE CUTTINO BUCHANAN
LAUTERBACH, Ann Born 1942 Daughter of Elisabeth Stuart Wardwell and Richard E. Lauterbach When Ann Lauterbach writes, ‘‘The dictionary / is part of the clutter,’’ in the poem ‘‘For Example (1) Stepping Out,’’ she voices an ambivalence toward language that her poetry both resolves and redoubles. The lexicon extends the promise of expression, of catharsis, but the words required to bring about this state are mired in usages too numerous to count. To borrow a title from John Ashbery, a poet with whom she is often grouped, Lauterbach’s work is a self-portrait in a convex mirror, though the breadth of her vision exceeds the limits of the subjective self. Critic Charles Altieri has written that ‘‘Lauterbach invites us to dwell in the moment when everything is in an unstable transition.’’ Nothing remains still in Lauterbach’s poems, and the language mirrors this state of ever-shifting uncertainties. Titles of her collections sound like phrases snatched from the mouths of passersby—Many Times, But Then, Later That Evening, And For Example—and yet even these apparently random phrases reveal the poet’s fixed focus on the transitional nature of everyday life. Lauterbach has written about an early impression of the writing life. Because her father was a foreign correspondent, he often had to leave for Moscow and other destinations for long periods, taking his manual typewriter with him, and these absences left Lauterbach feeling vulnerable and uncertain. Perhaps, then, her initial decision to become a painter was a rebellion against the written word. She was drawn to abstract expressionism, with its intimations of freedom and possibility. Lauterbach has been associated with the New York school of poetry, a loose alliance that includes Ashbery, who also writes art criticism, and Frank O’Hara, who was curator at the Museum of Modern Art. Other figures include James Schuyler and Barbara Guest. Owing to its difficulty and occasional tendency for inside jokes, the New York School never had the great cultural impact of abstract expressionism, but it has endured as a culturally significant movement long after the decline of the artistic movement that helped spawn it.
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Lauterbach made a gradual transition from art to poetry, working in galleries in London and New York City and working on the pieces that would go into her first collection, Many Times, But Then (1979). True to her artistic roots, the poems are closely observed, replete with cultural references, and light-sensitive: ‘‘even as the sun flares descending, an image / for which cathedrals have been made, glass cut / to let it in,’’ she writes in the title poem. At the same time, Lauterbach includes autobiographical elements in her work, writing movingly of her mother and grandparents in ‘‘The Yellow Linen Dress.’’ These two strains, the personal and the cultural, continue to exist side by side in Before Recollection, a collection from 1987 where the section called ‘‘Naming the House’’ addresses the former, while ‘‘Still Life with Apricots,’’ among other works, is a meditation on art. Lauterbach asserts, ‘‘Beauty is a way of meriting surprise.’’ Clamor, published in 1991 by Viking/Penguin, was her first collection to reach a wider audience and set Lauterbach on the path toward recognition as one of America’s premier poets. Her feel for painting takes the form of a long poem about a scene of Annunciation in ‘‘Tuscan Visit (Simone Martini),’’ which makes a surprising U-turn back to literature by noticing the Virgin, ‘‘her thumb holding a book open, / Her body recoiled from the offered lilies.’’ And for Example continues to win plaudits for the author. Naming it one of the 25 Favorite Books of 1994, the [Village] Voice Literary Supplement extolled Lauterbach’s work as ‘‘the song of a brilliant whirligig mind.’’ A MacArthur ‘‘genius’’ grant followed in 1995. ‘‘Poems that interest me,’’ wrote Lauterbach in an essay titled ‘‘Misquotations from Reality’’ (1996), ‘‘are poems that show me how to proceed, not where to go or what to look at.’’ OTHER WORKS: A Clown, Some Colors, a Doll, Her Stories, a Song, a Moonlit Cove (1996). On a Stair (1997). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Altieri, C., ‘‘Ann Lauterbach’s ‘Still’ and Why Stevens Still Matters,’’ in Wallace Stevens Review (Fall 1995). Jarman, M., ‘‘The Curse of Discursiveness,’’ in Hudson Review (Spring 1992). Schultz, S., ‘‘Houses of Poetry After Ashbery: The Poetry of Ann Lauterbach and Donald Revell,’’ in Virginia Quarterly Review (Spring 1991). —MARK SWARTZ
LAWRENCE, Elizabeth L. Born 27 May 1904, Marietta, Georgia; died June 1985 Daughter of Samuel and Elizabeth Bradenbaugh Lawrence One of America’s foremost authorities on Southern gardening, Elizabeth L. Lawrence is a graduate of St. Mary’s School in Raleigh, North Carolina, and of Barnard College in New York
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City. She was the only woman in the first landscape architecture class at North Carolina State College, where she earned a B.S. in 1930. Although she is a noted gardener herself, having created gardens in both Raleigh and Charlotte, North Carolina, her major contributions to horticulture are in the area of writing. Most early American horitcultural writing was concerned with the Northeast. The South had to develop its own garden experts and authorities. In many ways, the South has led the country in historical appreciation of the art of gardening, and Lawrence, its most distinguished writer on modern Southern gardening, is a person of literary ability and cultured background. All of her works are written in a prose style reminiscent of the age of ‘‘polite letters.’’ The ease with which she mixes horticultural description and literary or historical associations reveals a depth to her learning comparable to that of the best English garden writers. Lawrence has often given lectures and written articles for magazines and journals. Throughout her life, she has carried on widespread correspondence with gardeners across the United States, particularly in the South. She is the recipient of many awards from horticultural societies. Probably her most important book for gardeners in the South is A Southern Garden (1942). Reissued with new material in 1967, this book has been widely acclaimed. As its subtitle, A Handbook for the Middle South, suggests, it is about plants that can be grown in what is basically zone eight on the hardiness map. Beginning in winter, it is organized seasonally, and throughout she refers to other gardens as well as her own. There is an appendix of plants listing blooming dates for the South. Gardens of the South (1945) presents the subject of gardening in the South in a 12-lesson guide for women’s clubs. Perhaps her most beloved book, The Little Bulbs: A Tale of Two Gardens (1957), describes the various families of little bulbs (squills, miniature daffodils, crocuses, and such) in the context of the story of bloom in her own North Carolina garden and in that of Carl Krippendorf in Ohio. Many other garden records are cited as well, including an English garden of the years before 1914. Lawrence later wrote Lob’s Wood (1971), a short book about Krippendorf and his garden, which after his death was taken over by the Cincinnati Nature Center. While The Little Bulbs is the major handbook on its subject, the fortunate combination of Krippendorf’s story and the charm of the little flowers make this much more to readers than a list of species and bloom dates. The Middle South shares with England the distinction of having the proper climate for the winter garden: just cold enough to make it adventuresome, warm enough to have a variety of broad-leaved evergreens and early-flowering plants tucked away in snug corners. Lawrence’s book on this topic, Gardens in Winter (1961), makes the most of this glamorous subject, giving the horticultural details of plant names, bloom times, and landscape uses, along with references to winter gardens in literature and in her correspondence. The book is beautifully illustrated by Caroline Dorman, and Lawrence’s training in landscape architecture is particularly evident. In her introduction to A Southern Garden, Lawrence writes, ‘‘One hears a great deal about ‘dirt’ gardeners. When a gardener
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has identified himself as the dirt variety he feels a marked superiority. But dirty fingernails are not the only requirement for growing plants. One must be as willing to study as to dig, for a knowledge of plants is acquired as much from books as from experience.’’ In her books, Lawrence has shared the wealth of her knowledge with her readers, not only her ‘‘dirt gardening’’ experience but the results of her study as well. Throughout her books, she cites gardeners and garden writers such as Addison, Bacon, Mrs. Loudon, and Thoreau, giving her reader the sense of belonging to an ancient and distinguished Order of Gardeners.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Herbertia (Yearbook of the American Plant Life Society, 1942, 1943). —BEVERLY SEATON
LAWRENCE, Josephine Born 1897, Newark, New Jersey; died 22 February 1978, New York, New York Daughter of Elijah W. and Mary Barker Lawrence; married Arthur Platz, 1940 Josephine Lawrence spent her entire life in Newark, New Jersey. The daughter of a physician, she attended the Newark public schools and later took courses at New York University. In 1915 she joined the staff of the Newark Sunday Call as editor of the household section and children’s page. In 1946 she became the women’s page editor of the Newark Sunday News, where she also contributed a weekly book review column entitled ‘‘Bookmarks.’’ Lawrence began her writing career as a children’s author. From 1921 to 1931, she wrote over 30 juveniles, publishing many of them anonymously. The Brother and Sister series (1921-27), the Elizabeth Ann series (1923-29), and the Two Little Fellows series (1927-29) are among her best known. Lawrence also wrote Man in the Moon, a radio series for children, broadcast in 1921. Head of the Family (1932), Lawrence’s first attempt at an adult novel, drew little attention, but her second novel, Years Are So Long (1934), became a bestseller and a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. It deals with the relationship between grown children and their aging parents, and it is regarded by many to be Lawrence’s best work. When the novel opens, Barkley Cooper, age 73, has recently retired from his lifelong job as a bookkeeper. He has saved little money during this period because he always expected his five children to support him and his wife in their old age. It comes as a cruel shock when his offspring show no inclination to do so. After heated family debate, the children decide that the cheapest solution is to separate their parents and move them around among themselves on extended visits.
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No one in Years Are So Long notices or cares about the needs of others. The gap between the generations is immense—the parents cannot understand their children’s lack of compassion, and the children cannot understand their parents’ self-centered expectations. Yet the gap between members of the same generation is also immense—the children can barely exchange civil greetings, let alone communicate. Occasionally, there are unexpected bursts of sympathy felt by one family member toward another, but this feeling is rarely acted upon. The grim realism of this novel is often unbearable and sometimes unbelievable. Lawrence presents a stark world, and she offers no solutions. Money, or the lack of it, is often a major theme in Lawrence’s work. In If I Have Four Apples (1935), a family refuses to face the fact that they are living beyond their means. When reality forces itself upon them, their lives are shaken. In The Sound of Running Feet (1937), young toes press upon old heels in a business world that cannot provide enough money for all. Lawrence is describing a shoddy America in these novels—ideas and ideals are obliterated in the frantic struggle to obtain sufficient hard cash. Lawrence uses the knowledge she gained as editor of a newspaper question-and-answer column to portray the ordinary lives of ordinary people. Her novels always take place in a working community (such as Newark), and they always deal with the problems of the lower middle class. Sinclair Lewis remarked on Lawrence’s ‘‘unusual power of seeing and remembering the details of daily living, each petty, yet all of them together making up the picture of an immortal human being.’’ Lawrence continued working up until the last years of her life, retiring from the newspaper business at the age of seventy-three and publishing her last novel, Under One Roof (1975), at the age of seventy-eight.
OTHER WORKS: Brother and Sister Books (1921). Rosemary (1922). Elizabeth Ann Books (1923). Rainbow Hill (1924). The Berry Patch (1925). Linda Lane Books (1925). Next Door Neighbors (1926). Rosemary and the Princess (1927). Two Little Fellow Books (1927). Glenna (1929). Christine (1930). Bow Down to Wood and Stone (1938). A Good Home with Nice People (1939). But You Are So Young (1940). No Stone Unturned (1941). There Is Today (1942). A Tower of Steel (1943). Let Us Consider One Another (1945). Double Wedding Ring (1946). The Pleasant Morning Light (1948). My Heart Shall Not Fear (1949). The Way Things Are (1950). The Picture Window (1951). Song in the Night (1952). The Gates of Living (1955). The Empty Nest (1956). The Amiable Meddlers (1961). In the Name of Love (1963). Not a Cloud in the Sky (1964). In All Walks of Life (1968).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: American Novelists of Today (1951). TCA. TCAS. Other references: Newsweek (7 Mar. 1938). NYTBR (12 Jan. 1911). Time (30Dec. 1935). WLB (Mar. 1930). —CHRISTIANE BIRD
LAWRENCE, Margaret (Oliver) Woods Born 1813; died 1901 Wrote under: Meta Lander Daughter of Leonard Woods; married Edward A. Lawrence Biographical information on Margaret Woods Lawrence is slight. She wrote about children (mostly about aspects of their deaths) and Christian activists; she also wrote fiction in a romantic but moral vein. The daughter of a minister, Lawrence began writing out of her concern for children. Blossoms of Childhood by a Mother (1840), originally published by an Episcopal Sundayschool association, was reprinted at least four times over an 11year period. The death of one of her children apparently prompted Lawrence to write The Broken Bud; or, Reminiscences of a Bereaved Mother (1851) and Fading Flowers (1860), an anthology of poetry about dying children. After the death of her son, a Christian missionary, she wrote Reminiscences of the Life and Work of Edward A. Lawrence, Jr. (1900). The melodramatic plot of Marion Graham; or, ‘‘Higher Than Happiness’’ (1861) unconvincingly illustrates Carlyle’s statement, ‘‘There is in man a Higher than love of happiness; . . .blessedness.’’ Marion Graham loves Maurice Vinton, an atheistic doctor who lacks purpose or commitment in his life, but she sacrifices happiness to her Christian duty and belief when she refuses his proposal. Vinton travels the world, opens his heart to the plight of the wretched, and is finally converted in Jerusalem, while Marion fights off the incredibly demonic advances of the villainous Mr. Perley and finally marries her rescuer, the Reverend Henry Sunderland, when she hears of Vinton’s alleged engagement. The lovers have been star-crossed by gossip and by undelivered mail, but Marion finally devotes herself to her understanding husband, who names their son after his wife’s lover. Byronic pessimism is converted to Christian zeal and passion is sublimated to duty in the novel’s sentimental ending: as Vinton sets off on missionary work, he takes leave of Marion, saying, ‘‘An eternity together in heaven.’’ Her husband smiles on the separating lovers. In Esperance (1865), the life of Hope Frazer predictably proves the soundness of her dying mother’s advice: to care for her brother and sisters, to respect and please her cold and strict father, to trust in God, and to moderate her impulses and the intensity of her feelings. The first half of the novel shows how Hope’s rebellion against her mother’s advice further alienates her unsympathetic father, contributes to the moral neglect of her siblings, exposes Hope to decadently sensual and impulsive role models, and embitters her life. The death of her angelic little sister and the inspiring and subduing influence of several sisterly Christian women help Hope reverse herself and begin fulfilling her mother’s deathbed requests. Now dispersing sweetness and light, the plain Hope survives when her handsome but weak fiance transfers his affections to her sister, Joy; she raises up fallen women (including her
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stepmother) and assists their conversions to righteousness; she comforts and ministers to her broken father. At the end, Lawrence strongly hints that the deep and sudden attraction between Hope and Horatio Ferguson, a wildly romantic figure, will flourish despite geographic separation. Both novels are devoid of any reference to slavery or the Civil War, yet the melodramatic and woodenly plotted stories affirm the importance of commitment and the validity of passion when subdued to Christian morality. Lawrence shows not only the attraction to Byronic romanticism characteristic of American audiences, but also their moral condemnation and their sublimation of this romanticism.
OTHER WORKS: Light on the Dark River; or, Memorials of Mrs. Henrietta A. L. Hamlin, Missionary in Turkey (1853). The Tobacco Problem (1885). The Home Garden (n.d.).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: A Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors (1858). Dictionary of American Authors (1897). —HELEN J. SCHWARTZ
LAZARUS, Emma Born 22 July 1849, New York, New York; died 19 November 1887, New York, New York Daughter of Moses and Esther Nathan Lazarus Emma Lazarus was privately educated and revealed an early gift for poetry and languages. Although the family was part of the cultivated and fashionable New York society—her father was a wealthy industrialist—Lazarus had little contact with literary groups until her twenties, when she met Ralph Waldo Emerson, who served as a sometime literary mentor. Trips to Europe brought her into contact with English writers and thinkers. Lazarus’ Poems and Translations (1867), published when she was just eighteen, contains translations of Hugo, Dumas, Schiller, and Heine, as well as original poems dealing with conventionally romantic subjects. The title poem in Admetus, and Other Poems (1871), dedicated to Emerson, retells in blank verse the myth of Alcestis, whose strength and courage saved her husband from death. In Lazarus’ version, the heroic willingness of Alcestis to sacrifice herself as the substitute the Fates had demanded becomes the crucial incident, and the portrait is a significant advance in the depiction of women in romantic poetry. In another poem, ‘‘Epochs,’’ Lazarus personifies work as a woman. The maturity of Lazarus’ thinking is reflected in ‘‘Heroes,’’
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which stresses the problems of the aftermath of war, rather than the presumed glory of the battlefield. Lazarus’ studies led her to an interest in Goethe; the novel Alide (1874) is based on an incident in his life. Turgenev praised the work, which considers the artist’s quandary in choosing between ordinary life and the demands of his art. Poems and Translations of Heinrich Heine (1881) is Lazarus’ major achievement as a translator; in many instances her rendition is the definitive English version still in use today. Although translations of Heine’s poems were among her earliest works, this volume contains for the first time Heine’s poems on specifically Jewish subjects, on which Lazarus worked in the 1870s. Particularly effective is her translation of the ironic ‘‘Donna Clara,’’ in which the insouciant charm of the ballad form clashes with the mock revenge against the rabid anti-Semite. The pogroms in Russia and the mass immigration of refugees to the U.S. mobilized Lazarus’ energetic support of her people. Songs of a Semite (1882) was issued in an inexpensive edition so that it might reach as wide an audience as possible. Along with ballads, sonnets, and translations of Hebrew poets, it contains one of her finest works, The Dance to Death. In this verse drama, Lazarus tells the tragic events of a pogrom in the 14th century and portrays a stirring affirmation of the life and spirit of the persecuted people: ‘‘Even as we die in honor, from our death / Shall bloom a myriad of heroic lives, / Brave through our bright example, virtuous / Lest our great memory fall in disrepute.’’ Lazarus also relied on prose to explain the position of the Jewish people. While only a few selections are available in book form, these essays represent one of Lazarus’ greatest accomplishments, explaining in sharp, incisive fashion the attainments of the Jewish people, their heroics and their contributions to the contemporary world, and—even at this early date—calling for the formation of a Jewish state. Lazarus’ essays on other topics are equally valuable, although they, too, are buried in the periodicals of the day. Her strong humanitarian spirit led her to readings in socialism, and a visit to William Morris’ workshops in England is described in warm, affectionate terms. An essay on Longfellow, while pointing out the flaws in his work, calls for a specifically American literature, rather than one dependent on the English tradition. The last few years of Lazarus’ short life were wracked by cancer; she nonetheless produced By the Waters of Babylon (1887), a series of prose poems using the long, sweeping line reminiscent of Walt Whitman and full of prophetic fire. Lazarus’ fame today rests largely on the sonnet ‘‘The New Colossus,’’ which was written to raise money for a base for the Statue of Liberty, and which, as James Russell Lowell said, gave it its spiritual basis. But consideration of her entire literary output leads to a more far-reaching appreciation. From a shy, sensitive girl writing on romantic topics in a stilted diction, she became a mature artist, an impassioned supporter of her people, of the downtrodden of all nations, and of her own country and its literary accomplishments.
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OTHER WORKS: The Spagnoletto: a Drama in Verse (1876). The Poems of Emma Lazarus (1889). The Letters of Emma Lazarus, 1868-1885 (edited by M. U. Schappes, 1949). Emma Lazarus: Selections from Her Poetry and Prose (edited by M. U. Schappes, 1967).
Revelle College of the University of California at San Diego, Portland State, Tulane, Beloit, and Stanford, as well as furthering the craft of writing by teaching at Clarion Science Fiction workshops, the First Australian Workshop in Speculative Fiction, the Indiana University Writers Conference, and the Bennington Writing Program.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Baym, M. I., A Neglected Translator of Italian Poetry: Emma Lazarus (1956). Fried, L., ed., Handbook of Jewish-American Literature (1988). Harap, L., The Image of the Jew in American Literature (1974). Kaye-Kantrowitz, M. and I. Klepfisc, eds., The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women’s Anthology (1989). Merriam, E., Emma Lazarus, Woman with a Torch (1956). Merriam, E., The Voice of Liberty: The Story of Emma Lazarus (1956). Rothenberg, J., ed., The Big Jewish Book (1978). Rusk, R., Letters of Emma Lazarus in the Columbia University Library (1939). Schappes, M. U., Emma Lazarus: Selections from Her Poetry and Prose (1967). Scharf, L., and J. M. Jenson, eds., Decades of Discontent: The Women’s Movement, 1920-1940 (1983). Schwartz, H. and A. Rudolf, eds., Voices Within the Ark: The Modern Jewish Poets (1980). Reference works: AA. AW. DAB. NAW. NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Poet Lore (1893). Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society (Sept. 1952, June 1956).
Le Guin has been a writer since 1962, when she made her first professional sale, ‘‘April in Paris,’’ to Fantastic Stories in September. Since then, her stories have been collected in numerous publications. Le Guin calls the stories in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975) ‘‘psychomyths,’’ the stories in The Compass Rose (1982) are similar in tone. Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences (1987) is another collection, containing the title story, which won the Hugo award for best novelette.
—CAROL B. SCHOEN
LE GUIN, Ursula K. Born 21 October 1929, Berkeley, California Daughter of Theodora Covel Brown Kracaw and Alfred L. Kroeber; married Charles A. Le Guin (1953); children: Elisabeth, Caroline, Theodore A prominent writer of fantasy and science fiction, publishing novels, novellas, novelettes, and short stories in these genres, Ursula K. Le Guin grew up in a stimulating environment. Her father was a famous anthropologist, teacher, and writer who discovered the last Yahi Indian, Ishi, and her mother was also a writer (Ishi in Two Worlds, 1961), with whom she wrote Tillai and Tylissos (1979). Le Guin received her A.B. at Radcliffe College in 1951 and her A.M. at Columbia University in 1952, studying romance literatures of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, especially French. During a Fulbright year in France (1953), she married historian Charles A. Le Guin, with whom she has three children. She went on to receive honorary degrees from Bucknell, Lawrence, the University of Oregon, Western Oregon State, Lewis & Clark, Occidental, Emory, Kenyon, and Portland State. She has taught classes at Mercer, Idaho, Pacific, Reading (England), Kenyon,
Her first science fiction novels were Rocannon’s World (1966), Planet of Exile (1966), and City of Illusions (1967). The books show Le Guin’s interest in anthropology and ESP, rather than in technology, placing them in the New Wave movement of science fiction that swept the time and included writers such as Michael Moorcock, Brian W. Aldiss, J. G. Ballard, John Brunner, and others. At the same time, the magical and romantic tone of these books suggests a hint of ‘‘Sword and Sorcery,’’ characterized more in fantasy than in science fiction. Le Guin describes herself at times as a Taoist, as she feels that wholeness is reached through a dynamic balance of opposites. This philosophy is expressed most directly in The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), which won both the Hugo and Nebula awards. In this novel, the planet Gethen is peopled by ‘‘androgynes’’ who have biologically regulated, almost guilt-free sex lives and do not, as yet, wage war. Le Guin’s aim was to show what it meant to be simply human, working one’s way through conflicts that are not based on sex roles—we are still left with love and faith, disappointment and betrayal, face-saving, incest, religion, politics, and the weather—but many feminists of the time felt she had sold out to the establishment. Sensitive to her critics, many of Le Guin’s later works are rigid and more militant in their feminism. Le Guin’s most unified work, the Earthsea Trilogy, followed, in which basic human problems are discussed in fairy tale terms, complete with wizards and dragons. In A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), which won the Boston Globe Horn Book award for excellence, she stresses the importance of coming to grips with the evil in one’s own personality. In The Tombs of Atuan (1971), she portrays a girl coming to trust a man whom she had seen as an intruder in her feminine world. And in The Farthest Shore (1972), which won the National Book award for Children’s Literature, she presents the fact that life is meaningless if one refuses to face the reality of death. In 1990, Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea appeared. A strongly feminist novel, Le Guin depicts women as having a strength of their own, different from that of men, on which men have to rely when their own strength fails them. It is a theme Robert Jordan also explores in his Wheel of Time series, in which women can channel one half of ‘‘the Power’’ and men another, only the women have been doing so for millennia with no
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ill effects (actually, they live for hundreds of years longer for doing so), while men usually go mad when they do so. Many of Le Guin’s novels and short stories have won awards, and she is second in the genres only to Harlan Ellison in accolades received. ‘‘The Word for World is Forest’’ (1972) combines insight into dream states with a scathing satire on American involvement in Vietnam. The Dispossessed (1974) shows a physicist from an anarchist moon colony who is obliged to go to the capitalistic mother planet in order to be able to continue his research. Finally he returns to his own society in the hopes of leading it back to its original free principles (much as the U.S. and United Kingdom educate people of other countries, who return to their own native lands to become tyrants and terrorists). The New Atlantis (1975), in contrast, depicts a repressive, bureaucratic U.S. destroyed by a visionary cataclysm out of Edgar Cayce. In Always Coming Home (1985), Le Guin tells an account of a matrilineal society that may exist in the Napa Valley region of California some time in the future, bears the imprint of her anthropological upbringing, and combines poetry and a musical compilation with narrative and illustrations, as Le Guin pushes her artist’s nature into new realms. Le Guin is also the editor or coeditor of numerous publications, including Edges: Thirteen New Tales from the Borderlands of the Imagination (1980) and Interfaces (1980), both with her longtime agent, Virginia Kidd, and The Norton Book of Science Fiction, with Brian Attebery and Karen Joy Fowler (1993). Her children’s books are well received and include Catwings (1988), Catwings Return (1989), and Wonderful Alexander and the Catwings (1994). Le Guin has also won the Science Fiction Research Association’s Pilgrim award for her lifetime contributions to the study of science fiction with nonfiction works such as Dreams Must Explain Themselves (1975), The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction (1979), Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (1989), The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction (revised edition) (1989), Myth and Archetype in Science Fiction (1991), and Talk about Writing (1991). Le Guin has been heralded as a feminist science fiction writer, but some of her publications have been much closer to mainstream literature. Orsinian Tales (1976), a collection of stories about an imaginary East European country, is quite realistic. Very Far Away from Anywhere Else (1976), a novella for young adults, describes without any fantasy the pressures brought to bear on sensitive young Americans to force them into conformity. The Beginning Place (1980) is a mixture of realism and fantasy that made some critics feel that Le Guin was joining the mainstream full time, since the fantasy element consists of psychological fantasy rather than the construction of an alternate reality. On the whole, Le Guin has shown a preference for science fiction and fantasy over the techniques of the mainstream novel. She has great faith in the creative imagination and wants it to be free; science fiction and fantasy give her this scope. It’s probably because she allows so much free play to the imagination that she is
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able to be concerned with moral issues without appearing moralistic and to discuss politics without being forced into other people’s molds. Le Guin continues to be a rallying point for female writers and feminist scholars and a strong voice overall in the genres of fantasy and science fiction, and in literature in general.
OTHER WORKS: The Lathe of Heaven (1971). From Elfland to Poughkeepsie (1973). Wild Angels (1974). Walking in Cornwall (1976). The Water Is Wide (1976). The Word for World is Forest (1976). Earthsea: An Omnibus Comprising A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore (1977). Three Hainish Novels: Rocannon’s World; Planet of Exile; City of Illusions (1978). The Earthsea Trilogy (1979). Leese Webster (1979). Malafrena (1979). Threshold (1980). Gwilan’s Harp (1981). Hard Words (1981). The Adventure of Cobbler’s Rune (1982). The Eye of the Heron (1982). Cobbler’s Rune (1983). In the Red Zone (1983). Solomon Leviathan’s Nine Hundred and Thirty-First Trip around the World (1983). The Visionary: The Life Story of Flicker of the Serpentine of Telina-Na (1984). Five Complete Novels (1985). King Dog (1985). Solomon Leviathan (1988). A Visit from Dr. Katz (1988). Wild Oats and Fireweed (1988). Way of the Water’s Going: Texts from Always Coming Home (1989). Fire and Stone (with Laura Marshall, 1989). The New Atlantis (1989). The Eye of the Heron; and, The Word for World is Forest (1991). Searoad (1991). A Winter Solstice Ritual (with Vonda N. McIntyre, 1991). Fish Soup (1992). Fixings (1992). Nine Lives (1992). No Boats (1992). A Ride on the Red Mare’s Back (1992). The Art of Bunditsu (1993). Blue Moon over Thurman Street (1993). Earthsea Revisioned (1993). Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight? (1994). A Fisherman of the Inland Sea (1994). Going out with Peacocks (1994). Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995). The Shobies’ Story (sound cassette, with Amy Bruce, 1996). The Twins, The Dream—Two Voices = Las Gamelas, El Sueño—Dos Voces (with Diana Bellessi, 1996). Unlocking the Air, and Other Stories (1996). Worlds of Exile and Illusion (1996). Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew (1998).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Barr, M. S., Lost in Space: Probing Feminist Science Fiction and Beyond (1993). CA Online (1996).Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1995). Hall, H. W., and D. F. Mallett, Pilgrims and Pioneers: The History and Speeches of the Science Fiction Research Association Award Winners (1999). Mallett, D. F., and R. Reginald, Reginald’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards: A Comprehensive Guide to the Awards and Their Winners, 2nd ed. (1991), 3rd ed. (1993). McCaffery, L., Across the Wounded Galaxies: Interviews with Contemporary Science Fiction Writers (1990). Reginald, R., Science Fiction & Fantasy Literature, 1975-1991: A Bibliography of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Fiction Books and Nonfiction Monographs (1992). Reid, S. E., Presenting Ursula K. Le Guin (1997). Slusser, G. E., The Farthest Shores of Ursula K.
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Le Guin (1976). Wildberger, M. E., Approaches to Literature Through Authors (1993). Yalom, M., and M. B. Davis, Women Writers of the West Coast: Speaking of Their Lives and Careers (1983). —BARBARA J. BUCKNALL, UPDATED BY DARYL F. MALLETT
LE SUEUR, Meridel Born 22 February 1900, Murray, Iowa; died 14 November 1996, Hudson, Wisconsin Daughter of William W. and Marian Le Sueur Wharton; married M. Yasha Rabanoff, 1927 (died) Meridel Le Sueur’s life and work are rooted in Midwestern culture; she has often been referred to as the ‘‘Voice of the Prairie.’’ Her mother was a militant feminist; her stepfather, Arthur Le Sueur, was a socialist lawyer. Le Sueur’s lifelong association with artists of the radical left, Wobblies, Marxists, and prairie populists provides the rich backdrop for over 50 prolific years of prose, poetry, journalism, history, and philosophical writing. Le Sueur’s social writing began during her teenage years. In 1927 her short story ‘‘Afternoon’’ was published in the Dial literary journal. During the 1930s, Le Sueur was a prominent figure on the ‘‘literary left’’—writing and advocating a revolutionary aesthetic based on change in form, style, and content. Le Sueur’s work appeared in such varied journals and publications as the Daily Worker, Partisan Review, New Masses, American Mercury, Pagany, Scribner’s, and the Anvil. Salute to Spring and Other Stories (1940, reprinted 1989), a collection of Le Sueur’s short stories, reflects her deep commitment to the political struggles of the Depression and the effects of the period’s social trauma, especially on women, poor workers, and farmers in the Midwest. Included in the collection is perhaps her finest short story, ‘‘Annunciation.’’ Celebrating the creative force, Le Sueur shares the intense feelings of an expectant mother as she meditates on her pregnancy and the impending birth. Speaking to the unknown child within her, the woman seeks to explain the world into which the child will be born. Rich in organic and transcendental imagery, ‘‘Annunciation’’ is representative of both the subject matter and style for which Le Sueur would become known. Le Sueur always sought to create outside the narrative form. ‘‘Annunciation’’ demonstrates her early success in creating a literary ‘‘moment’’ or reflection that stylistically integrates prose and poetry. North Star Country (1945, reprinted 1984) is a lyrical history of the northern Midwest. Rich in the language of the common man
and woman, the book is a unique document for the folklorist. Early criticism rejected the book’s rich oral database, but contemporary historians have looked more appreciatively on the original oral and written material. The McCarthy era was particularly harsh on Le Sueur. Her literary outlet continued through such radical journals as Masses and Mainstream, but she was excluded from a wider audience through an informal blacklist. She turned to writing children’s stories, primarily historical treatments of American cultural myths and heroes: Johnny Appleseed, Davey Crockett, Abraham Lincoln, and Nancy Hanks Lincoln. She also wrote a delightful cross-cultural book for children about an Indian and a white boy, Sparrow Hawk (1950, reprinted 1989). In addition to the reissuing of many of her works, Le Sueur published two new collections in the 1970s. One, Rites of Ancient Ripening: Poems (1975), is a collection of poetry that reflects her militant feminism, and in which she articulates her Indian philosophy. In Rites, the mature writer emerges, integrating rhythms and imagery of the rich plurality of American culture. The Girl, a novel written in 1939, was not published until 1978 and reprinted in 1990. Here Le Sueur sensitively and brilliantly portrays the ‘‘girl’’ in all of us. The Girl has a unique and powerful style; the rhythm of a woman’s culture is shown in patterns rather than through narrative development. The girl is not a heroine so much as a counterpoint to the world through which she moves. Le Sueur’s journals (over 125 volumes) are yet to be published. They contain her original contribution to American political philosophy. Students of indigenous American Marxist-Anarchism, Native American philosophies, radical feminism, and the aesthetics of the left will find the journals a rich mine for future inquiry. Le Sueur was still writing up until her death, about the America often ignored or overlooked, and her message is as timely as when she started to write at age thirteen. Though she will no longer be traveling the country in her Volkswagen van or by Greyhound bus, she remains a significant interpreter of the heart of American life and a model for younger feminists. Ripening: Selected Works (1990) is a collection of journalism, poetry, fiction, history, and autobiography spanning the years from 1927 to 1980. Represented is what Elaine Hedges describes as ‘‘fifty years of faithful and passionate witness to many of the central economic, political, and social realities of twentieth century American life.’’ Le Sueur’s title is a metaphor for her belief in the continuum of her work and her sense of literary fulfillment. The volume contains such important earlier pieces as ‘‘Women on the Breadlines’’ and ‘‘The Girl,’’and excerpts from North Star Country and from her personal journal. Class-conscious writing blends together art and ideology in I Hear Men Talking and Other Stories (1984), three stories published originally in the 1930s. Striking workers, natural disasters,
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and human nature are the themes of the stories, which have contemporary relevance as well as historical interest. Le Sueur’s short story ‘‘Jelly Roll’’ appeared in the anthology Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song (1982). Whitman’s poetry encouraged a young Le Sueur to write in spite of the fact that she would be blacklisted for her ideas. She also recalls Whitman’s impact on Midwestern farmers and workers of the Great Depression. Winter Prairie Woman (1990), written when Le Sueur turned ninety, is a six-part story of the end of a very old woman’s life. She must leave the farm where she has lived all her life as it is falling apart around her. Instead of fearing or rejecting death, Le Sueur’s character, with a powerful resemblance to the author, goes toward it, welcoming it as a new start. Le Sueur challenges and informs the reader about the atrocities of American history in The Dread Road (1991). A woman, a semiautobiographical figure, makes a trip every year from El Paso to Denver on a Greyhound bus to visit the institution that holds her son. He is ‘‘dead but not buried,’’ a victim of earlier nuclear weapons testing in the West. Intricately written, three narratives share each page: quotations from Edgar Allan Poe, the main story, and excerpts from Le Sueur’s journal. Le Sueur’s literary voice speaks for the common person in America. Many of her earlier writings, including novels, a number of children’s books, and a family memoir, have been reissued and gained a new popularity. She was inducted into the Women’s Hall of Fame in 1996 and won a Creative Writing Award from the National Endowment of the Arts. OTHER WORKS: Annunciation (1935). Little Brother of the Wilderness: The Story of Johnny Appleseed (1947, 1987). Nancy Hanks of Wilderness Road: A Story of Abraham Lincoln’s Mother (1949, 1990). Chanticleer of Wilderness Road: A Story of Davey Crockett (1951, 1990). The River Road: A Story of Abraham Lincoln (1954). Crusaders (1955). Corn Village: A Selection (1970). Conquistadors (1973). The Mound Builders (1974). Harvest: Collected Stories (1977). Song for My Time: Stories of the Period of Repression (1977). Women on the Bread Lines (1978). Worker Writers (1978). Crusaders: The Radical Legacy of Marian and Arthur Le Sueur (1984). Word is Movement: Journal Notes from Altanta to Tulsa to Wounded Knee (1984). Better Red by Constance Coiner (1995). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Davis, L. J., and M. B. Mirabella, eds., Left Politics and the Literary Profession (1990). Duncan, E., Unless Soul Clap Its Hands: Portraits and Passages (1984). Gelfant, B., Women Writing in America (1984). Halpert, S., and R. Johns, eds., A Return to Pagany 1929-32 (1969). Harris, M., and K. Aguero, eds., A Gift of Tongues: Critical Challenges in Contemporary American Poetry (1987). Hart, H., ed., American Writers’ Congress (1935). Sterusher, B., and J. Sealander, eds., Women of Valor: The Struggle against the Great Depression as Told in Their Own Life Stories (1990). Wagner-Martin, L., The Modern American Novel, 1914-1945 (1990). Yount, N. J., ‘America: Song We
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Sang Without Knowing—’ Meridel Le Sueur’s America (dissertation, 1978). Reference works: Book Forum (1982). CA (1975 , 1997). CANR (1990). Encyclopedia of the American Left (1990). FC (1990). Minnesota Writers (ca. 1961). More Junior Authors (1963). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCWW (1991). Other references: Book Forum (1982). Contemporary Literature (Winter 1988). Minnesota Daily (19 Nov. 1973). Minnesota Leader (10 Feb. 1975). Moons and Lion Tailes (1976). Ms. (Aug. 1975). North Country Anvil (Feb.-Mar. 1974, June-July 1977). Sentinel (28 Nov. 1954). Women’s Studies (1988). WRB (Apr. 1992). —NEALA YOUNT SCHLEUNING, UPDATED BY SUZANNE GIRONDA AND NICK ASSENDELFT
LE VERT, Octavia Walton Born 18 August 1810, near Augusta, Georgia; died 12 March 1877, near Augusta, Georgia Daughter of George Jr. and Sally Walker Walton; married Henry Strachey Le Vert, 1836 Octavia Walton Le Vert seemed destined by parentage and by place and year of birth to become a Southern belle. Her intelligence, education, vivacity, and wealth suited her to be also a cosmopolitan hostess and traveler. She played both roles flawlessly. Her life began and ended at Belle Vue, the estate of her grandfather George Walker. Her paternal grandfather, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, was George Walton, and her father was acting governor and territorial secretary of Florida at Pensacola. Le Vert’s mother and her grandmother carefully groomed and tutored the child for an aristocratic life. She learned to sing, dance, paint, and play the piano and guitar. As child and as adult, she read widely. Her facility for language allowed her Scotch tutor to teach her Greek, Latin, German, French, Italian, and Spanish. By the time she was twelve years old, she was so adept at language she could translate foreign dispatches for her father. When Lafayette visited the Waltons in 1825, Le Vert delighted him with her conversation in French. In Pensacola, Le Vert knew the Seminoles who negotiated with her father. From them she learned the Native American language and legends. Le Vert was well traveled in the U.S. and Europe. She met and charmed people with power and position. In Washington, D.C., she visited President Jackson at the White House and was the friend of Senator Henry Clay. In 1835, the Walton family moved to Mobile, Alabama, where George Walton later served as mayor. There, as a volunteer nurse, Le Vert met a French physician whom she married in 1836. They had five children, several of whom died as children. In Mobile, Le Vert established what was perhaps the only French-styled salon in America. On her ‘‘Mondays,’’ she received the social elite and persons distinguished in the arts and politics.
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When war came, Le Vert, who had opposed secession, remained in Mobile and welcomed both Yankees and Confederates to her home. Public opinion turned against her, and she was denounced as a ‘‘Yankee spy.’’ By the end of the Civil War, her husband was dead and their money gone. For a time, she traveled and gave public readings, but soon returned to Belle Vue where she died. Souvenirs of Travel (1857), compiled from her journals and letters, is Le Vert’s account of two trips to Europe in 1853 and 1855, during which she was received by Queen Victoria and Pope Pius IX, presented to Napoleon III and the Empress Eugenie, escorted in Paris by ex-President Millard Fillmore, and introduced to Robert and Elizabeth Browning. The book glorifies the Old World with sentimental descriptions of notable people and famous places. Le Vert followed a popular format for 19th-century travel accounts, a genre which does not adequately reflect her intelligence and scholarly ability. The narrator of Souvenirs often sounds like just another matron on a tour, but Le Vert was an accomplished linguist. For instance, in her diary she wrote about translating Dante’s descent into hell into three languages one afternoon for her own enjoyment. Despite its literary deficiencies, Souvenirs was read by some important people who wrote to Le Vert thanking her for a copy of the book or complimenting her on it. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edwin Booth, Washington Irving, and President James Buchanan were among her admirers. OTHER WORKS: BIBLIOGRAPHY: Delaney, C., ‘‘Madame Octavia Walton Le Vert, 1810-1877’’ (thesis, 1952). Williams, B. B., A Literary History of Alabama: The Nineteenth Century (1979). Reference works: LSL. NCAB. Other references: Alabama Historical Quarterly (1941). Uncle Remus Magazine (June 1907; Aug. 1907). —LYNDA W. BROWN
LEA, Fannie Heaslip Born 30 October 1884, New Orleans, Louisiana; died 13 January 1955, New York, New York Daughter of James J. and Margaret Heaslip Lea; married Hamilton P. Agee, 1911 (divorced 1926); children: one daughter Fannie Heaslip Lea, the daughter of a newspaperman, quickly took up the journalist’s trade. She wrote class poems and plays and edited the Newcomb College (New Orleans) yearbook. After receiving a B.A. from Newcomb in 1904, Lea did graduate work in English at Tulane University in Louisiana for two years. From 1906 to 1911, she wrote feature articles for the New Orleans daily
newspapers and short stories for national magazines such as Harper’s and Woman’s Home Companion. After her marriage, she moved with her husband to Honolulu, where he had accepted a position. She continued to write prolifically, undeterred by the birth of a daughter. After her divorce from Agee in 1926, she took up residence in New York, where she published 19 novels and more than 100 stories, poems, and essays in newspapers and journals like Good Housekeeping, Collier’s, and the Saturday Evening Post. An Episcopalian, Lea was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and the Authors’ League of America and a regular contributor to philanthropies. Lea’s first novel, Quicksands (1911), embodies many of the qualities that mark her best work. As in most of her tales, the heroine is an intelligent, spirited woman; but Rosemary chooses to live her life, ‘‘not think it,’’ when she marries an unsophisticated but devoted Virginian. Her superficial serenity is disturbed by the return from New York of her husband’s best friend, a thoughtful writer, whose presence emphasizes the intellectual stimulation missing in her marriage. The triangle is formed, but Lea renders Rosemary’s conflict fairly and creates sympathy for each of the characters, although she resolves their dilemma with an unexpected twist in the plot. The rather conventional romance that is the basis of this and most of Lea’s stories is considerably enlivened by her sparkling and realistic dialogue. Lea had a good ear for clever conversations and the ability to create well-rounded characters, such as Rosemary and the writer, from whom such talk seems natural. Romance and marriage were the staples of Lea’s plots, especially in her short stories, but she was also inventive in exploring that theme from varied perspectives. Many of her independent heroines struggle with the conflicting lures of career and marriage, as in With or Without (1926), Happy Landings (1930), and Dorée (1934). Others must face the difficulties of marriage and divorce as in Not for Just an Hour (1939) and Half-Angel (1932), which is a particularly honest portrayal of a young couple coping with their first year of marriage. In Goodbye, Summer (1931) and later works like The Four Marys (1937) and The Devil Within (1948), Lea centers on the dilemmas of mature women. Though none of these are very satisfactorily plotted or focused, they do reveal Lea’s efforts to explore the complicated psychologies of selfishness and jealousy and their effects on love. Lea even approached her subject from a male point of view in novels like Anchor Man (1935) (which features a wily grandmother to rescue the hero) and Once to Every Man (1938), whose middle-aged hero falls in love again after years in an empty marriage. Lea also wrote several plays. Her first, Round-About, was produced in 1929 by the New York Theater Assembly. Her two collections of verse are light and entertaining, but generally undistinguished. Lea was one of the league of popular romancers whose novels and short stories never failed to delight her readers. Always intent on entertaining, she had a gift for believable characterization, pointed dialogue, and romantic comedy. Her medium was essentially slight, and she rarely transcended it, but her graceful style and wit distinguish her among popular writers.
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OTHER WORKS: Jaconetta Stories (1912). Sicily Ann (1914). Chloe Malone (1916). The Dream-Maker Man (1925). With This Ring (1925). Wild Goose Chase (1929). Take Back the Heart (1931). Summer People (1933). Crede Byron (1936). Nobody’s Girl (1940). There Are Brothers (1940). Sailor’s Star (1944). Verses for Lovers (and Some Others) (1955). The papers of Fannie Heaslip Lea are housed in the University of Oregon Library in Eugene, Oregon. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: NCAB. TCA. TCAS. Other references: Dial (16 Sept. 1911). Good Housekeeping (Aug. 1923). Literary Review (10 Apr. 1926). Newsweek (24 Jan. 1955). NYT (18 Oct. 1931, 26 Oct. 1932, 14 Jan. 1955). New Orleans Daily Picayune (23 Apr. 1911). New Orleans Times-Picayune (14 Jan. 1955). Saturday Evening Post (29 May 1926). —BARBARA C. EWELL
LEE, Eliza Buckminster Born ca. 1788, Portsmouth, New Hampshire; died 22 June 1864, Boston, Massachusetts Daughter of Joseph and Sarah Stevens Buckminster; married Thomas Lee, 1827 Left motherless as a small child, Eliza Buckminster Lee was raised by her father, a Calvinist minister. Insight can be gained into Lee’s childhood through Memoirs of Rev. Joseph Buckminster, D.D., and of His Son, Rev. Joseph Stevens Buchminster (1849), which Lee wrote as a tribute to her father and brother. Lee explores the relationship between father and son and attempts to analyze and explain much of her father’s behavior. Although Dr. Buckminster was instrumental in establishing better schools for girls in Portsmouth, he would not allow his daughters to attend them. Lee explains that her father ‘‘certainly cherished the Old Testament or Hebrew ideas of the greater importance of the culture of the male than the female intellect, which was the prevailing sentiment of Puritan New England.’’ Far from subscribing to her father’s old-fashioned ideas, in Naomi; or, Boston Two Hundred Years Ago (1848), Lee argues that the strictness and unwavering bigotry of New England puritanism was responsible for ruining the lives of innocent people. The protagonist, Naomi, is an orphan (as are most of Lee’s heroines) who displays Christ-like compassion. Through Naomi’s story, Lee describes the town of Boston in the 1660s, emphasizing the closed-minded beliefs of the Puritans and their persecution of the Quakers. Lee warns of the dangers of amplified fear and suspicion, implying that they lead to senseless acts of persecution. In Delusion; or, The Witch of New England (1840), as in Naomi, Lee lashes out at the hypocritical masses who blindly follow prevailing dogmas. Here Lee recounts the tale of a woman unjustly accused of witchcraft in Salem in 1692.
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Parthenia; or, The Last Days of Paganism (1858), a fictional foray into fourth-century Greece and Rome, contrasts the attributes of Christianity with the superstitious beliefs of paganism. One of Lee’s main arguments for the institution of Christianity is its respect and reverence for women. In contrast to her father’s views, she believed that Christianity in its pure form teaches the extinction of the unnatural differences between the sexes. In all of her writings Lee is concerned with promoting the benefits of an open mind combined with the ideals of Christianity. In Lee’s romantic novels the heroines, who are gifted both morally and intellectually, show courage in both conviction and action, often sacrificing personal safety for the sake of pursuing a morally pure life. Lee said of women that ‘‘their natural timidity forbidding them to publish their thoughts to the world, prevents their conquests from being known.’’ It seems that Lee undertook the task of redeeming these women by perpetuating and disseminating their struggles through literature. Lee’s simple but engaging prose style is only slightly marred by her overuse of similes and metaphors. Her family goes back to the seventeenth century, and her novels are replete with anecdotes culled from her family folklore. Although simplistic in her plots and in her conception of good and evil, Lee captures the spirit of early America in her novels. OTHER WORKS: Sketches of a New England Village (1838). Life of Jean Paul Friedrich Richter (1842). Coreggio: A Tragedy by Œhlenschlager (translated by Lee, 1846). Sappho: A Tragedy by Grillparzer (translated by Lee, 1846). Walt and Vult; or, The Twins by J. P. Richter (translated by Lee, 1846). Florence, the Parish Orphan, and a Sketch of the Village in the Last Century (1852). The Little Barefoot by B. Auerbach (translated by Lee, 1867). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: AA. DAB. NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States. Other references: Brownson’s Quarterly Review (Oct. 1849). North American Review (Oct. 1849). —RISA GERSON
LEE, Hannah (Farnham) Sawyer Born 1780, Newburyport, Massachusetts; died 17 December 1865, Boston, Massachusetts Daughter of Micajah Sawyer; married George Gardner Lee, 1807 (died 1816); children: three daughters The daughter of a physician, Hannah Sawyer Lee was widowed after nine years of marriage and left with three daughters to raise. Financial pressures may have caused her to begin writing for publication at the age of fifty, because her early works focus on
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the problems confronting women who need to earn their own livings and who have to manage with limited means. Although it is difficult to identify all that she wrote because she did not sign her name to any of her work, it is clear that from 1837 to 1854 Lee published over 20 novels, collections of tales and sketches, and educational works. These evidently brought her financial security and reputation, but she was not considered a major writer even at the height of her popularity. Her achievements were soon forgotten, and she died in obscurity. In Grace Seymour (1830) Lee created the first of the strong woman figures for which she deserves to be remembered. Growing up in the period of the American Revolution, the heroine is simple, modest, and neat, her character strengthened by the ‘‘vicissitudes of life.’’ Grace stoically endures poverty and isolation with her Tory father, and helps him redeem his reputation, before marrying an officer of the American army who values her ‘‘good sense and good feelings.’’ In her next work, a ‘‘continuation’’ to Joseph Tuckerman’s Memoir of Hannah Adams (1832), Lee found a living model for the heroines of her fiction. A solid Christian and virtuous single woman, Adams (as Lee described her) used ‘‘careful observation, steady government, and systematical arrangement,’’ to overcome poverty and to become a respected writer of history. In the novels which followed, Lee used the formula developed in Grace Seymour and Hannah Adams. While not ‘‘feminists’’ (whose aggressiveness earned Lee’s disapproval), the heroines in these works are sensible and practical and support themselves and others if need be. Deliberately unromantic, they keep their eyes steadfastly on virtue and accept husbands only if they are worthwhile. Lee is notable for endowing her heroines with the ability to manage money—both to earn it and to live well with it. She argues any able-bodied woman can support herself and that once money is earned, it must be used for ‘‘home pleasures,’’ which are ‘‘the purest and most satisfying this world affords.’’
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the modern reader, these heroines show that the strong, independent woman had a place as a figure of admiration and imitation in the pre-Civil War years. OTHER WORKS: The Backslider (1835). The Contrast; or, Modes of Education (1837). Fourth Experiment of Living: Living Without Means (1837). The Harcourts (1837). Living on Other People’s Means; or, The History of Simon Silver (1837). New Experiments: Means Without Living (1837). Three Experiments of Living (1837). Historical Sketches of Old Painters (1838). The Life and Times of Martin Luther (1839). Rosanna; or, Scenes in Boston (1839). The Life and Times of Thomas Cranmer (1841). Tales (1842). The Huguenots in France and America (1843). The Log Cabin; or, The World before You (1844). Sketches and Stories from Life: For the Young (1850). Familiar Sketches of Sculpture and Sculptors (1854). Memoir of Pierre Toussaint (1854). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Baym, N., Woman’s Fiction, A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870 (1978). Papashvily, H. W., All the Happy Endings (1956). Reference works: DAB. Daughters of America (1883). NCAB. Woman’s Record (1853). Other references: New England Historical and Genealogical Register (Jan. 1851, April 1866). —MAUREEN GOLDMAN
LEE, Harper Born Nelle Harper Lee, 28 April 1926, Monroeville, Alabama Daughter of Amasa C. and Frances Finch Lee
Lee makes this argument forcefully in Three Experiments of Living (1837), the novel with which she achieved success, and in its sequel, Elinor Fulton (1837). The first novel shows the Fulton family as victims of a materialistic value system; success has made them luxury-loving and selfish. Their home life is unhappy, and, when the family loses its money, there are few inner resources to keep it together. Fortunately the daughter Elinor has developed Christian fortitude; in the second novel she is the main character, supporting her mother and three brothers and sisters while her father tries to reestablish his reputation by building up a medical practice in the West.
Harper Lee’s hometown, Monroeville, provided her with the setting for her only novel, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). Like the novel’s heroine, Scout Finch, Lee attended an eight-grade grammar school that served three counties and watched from the balcony of a local courthouse while her lawyer father defended cases. Lee herself later studied law (as did an older sister who practiced in town), and when she began writing the novel, she was working in an office for an overseas airline. Lee quit this job, however, when she had to concentrate full time on the extensive rewriting her editors at J. B. Lippincott required. Lee later stated the novel emerged from ‘‘a long and hopeless period of writing the book over and over again.’’
Lee is clearly not a major writer. Her nonfiction work is unoriginal and excessively didactic. In her novels the characters are mostly flat, the plots contrived, and the moralism pervasive. Yet the fiction is memorable for its heroines: independent, unsentimental, hard-working, intelligent, self-supporting, selfrespecting, contented, and moral, these women were realistic models for the many women of the 19th century who wanted to be useful rather than merely decorative members of their society. To
The events in To Kill a Mockingbird are seen through the eyes of six-year-old Scout Finch, but the voice is that of a mature narrator, reflecting in maturity upon events that occurred in childhood. Lee uses the purity of Scout’s vision to pierce the complexity and the mystery of the South. The story tells of the gradual moral awakening of Scout and her brother Jem. From two uncomprehending and confused observers, they slowly become aware of the difference between truth and gossip, and learn that
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things are not always what they seem: the rumored violence of town recluse Boo Radley is only a gentle befuddlement. Puzzled by the adult world around them, they question the hypocrisies and paradoxes surrounding words such as ‘‘class’’ and ‘‘race,’’ and their most disturbing discovery is that kind, easygoing neighbors can let their prejudices twist them into ruthless, glassy-eyed strangers. The lesson is brought home to them by the trial of a black man, Tom Robinson. Atticus Finch, the children’s father, defends Tom against a white woman’s accusation of rape. Although the facts clearly point to Tom’s innocence, his color just as clearly points to his conviction. Lee gives Atticus a godlike stature that is overbearing at times: he is the superior man of conscience, brave enough to voice his convictions in the face of hostile opposition. Yet Atticus defends Tom with a minimum of melodrama—the world that Lee portrays is tranquil and soft-spoken. When the trial ends, there are no visible ripples, and life settles back into its timeless patterns. Only the children have changed. The novel climaxes in a Halloween attempt on their lives, when they are saved by Boo Radley. Scout and Jem realize that to kill Tom or to hurt Boo Radley is as senseless as to kill a mockingbird who ‘‘don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy.’’ To Kill a Mockingbird was a bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961, as well as the Brotherhood Award from the National Conference of Christians and Jews. It was made into a popular movie starring Gregory Peck in 1962, and both the book and film became staples in junior high school educational programs. To Kill a Mockingbird has remained in print for decades, and has sold around 12 million copies since its publication. It stands solid as a poignant and unforgettable tale. OTHER WORKS: Romance and High Adventure (1993). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Boye, A. P., ‘‘Harper Lee, I Suppose, Was a Child Once: A Monodrama; and Harper Lee and Me: Expectations, Realities, and Discoverings While Writing and Performing a OneWoman Show’’ (thesis, 1997). Going, W. T., Essays on Alabama Literature (1975). Handley, G., Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (1985). Hardacre, K., Brodie’s Notes on Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1992). Power, C. K., Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Mockingbird: A Collection of Critical Essays (dissertation, 1996). Whitlock, L. A., ‘‘Sense and Sensibilities: Southern Discourse and the Popularity of To Kill a Mockingbird’’ (thesis, 1998). Reference works: CA (1975). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). WA. Other references: Alabama Law Review (Winter 1994). Alabama Review (1973). Atlantic (Aug. 1960). Life (26 May 1961). Newsweek (9 Jan. 1961). NY (10 Sept. 1960). NYTBR (10 July 1960). Southern Living (May 1997). Studies in American Fiction (1991). Time (1 Aug. 1960). —CHRISTIANE BIRD, UPDATED BY NELSON RHODES
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LEE, Mary Elizabeth Born 23 March 1813, Charleston, South Carolina; died 23 September 1849, Charleston, South Carolina Daughter of William and Elizabeth Lee A tireless perfectionist striving constantly against illness, Mary Elizabeth Lee reveals in her life and writing a reflective solitude within the family circle. Her father practiced law and served briefly in the state legislature while her mother cared for Lee and her several brothers and sisters. Lee developed very early a dedication to books and educated herself at home, except for a short period at school from 1823 to 1825. An extremely sensitive child, Lee preferred home to society, leaving school because of emotional depression and later secluding herself because of a lengthy, debilitating illness of an undetermined nature. Lee independently learned French, Italian, and German, beginning to translate and to write for publication in 1833. Sarah Josepha Hale comments on her ‘‘sleepless’’ application, and Mary Forrest notes her determination ‘‘to maintain herself in strict independence’’; certainly Lee’s diligence is impressive. Like many women authors of her time, Lee began to write in verse, not turning to prose until the 1840s. Her early poems first appeared in Caroline Gilman’s The Rose Bud (later The Southern Rose) as did brief essays primarily on moral or scriptural topics. However, Lee soon began to write for a wide range of journals and annuals, adding translations of both poetry and fiction, particularly from the French and German, to her productions. In 1845 alone, her work appeared in Graham’s Magazine, Godey’s Lady’s Book, New Orleans Miscellany, Philadelphia Courier, Token, Gem, Gift, Mr. Whitaker’s Journal, Southern Literary Messenger, and Orion Magazine. Lee’s verse, both original and translated, is conventionally sentimental and generally focuses on traditional subjects: death, religion, motherhood, nature, love, history, and chivalry. Her poems are unusual, however, in their emphasis on other-thanromantic love. Thus, in ‘‘Smiles,’’ Lee writes about the joy of an infant, a mother, a man, a warrior, and a dead youth, but omits the lovers’ smiles. Similarly, in the dramatic ‘‘Choice of Flowers,’’ three children and their mother defend their preferences, but even Julia, in her choice of the rose, says nothing of romantic love. Rather, Lee prefers filial devotion and stresses through her speakers and characters the role of the woman as a mother and a teacher. Also unlike her contemporaries, Lee gradually moved from lyric towards narrative poems and grew increasingly comfortable with dramatic poetry, run-on lines, slant rhyme, and blank verse. ‘‘The Winter’s Evening Fire Side’’ suggests her developing skill as does ‘‘The Church by Moon-Light,’’ in which she rhymes ‘‘stood’’ and ‘‘flood’’ and uses a natural enjambment effectively to sketch her subject with detailed objectivity. Her late poems occasionally reveal a controlled emotionalism. Still capable of writing ‘‘Sonnet.—To My Pen,’’ in which she apostrophizes ‘‘Thou delicate and pearly wand of thought!’’ Lee is also capable
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of ‘‘Summer’s Eve.—A Fragment,’’ in which she emphasizes the philosophic implications of nature’s imperfections in strong blank verse. Social Evenings; or, Historical Tales for Youth (1840) seems a natural development from Lee’s growing interest in narrative and in women’s maternal and educational roles. Written for a prize offered by the Massachusetts Board of Education, the children’s work offers eight ‘‘evenings,’’ each consisting of a moral introduction and a national tale. ‘‘The Stolen Boy’’ is subtitled ‘‘An Austrian Tale,’’ while ‘‘The Good Protestants’’ is ‘‘An English Tale.’’ The stories are rather sentimental and moralistic but reveal Lee’s continuing literary development in their sharp detail and occasional humor. The editor of The Poetical Remains (1851) notes Lee’s levity and includes in his biographical sketch excerpts from letters that the modern reader may find more satisfying than her published work. He writes that ‘‘she seemed, in her correspondence, to fly to the personal details and affectionate intimacies of domestic life, as a relief from the more constraining formalities of publication.’’ Had Lee lived longer, she might have revealed in both poetry and prose the imaginative sprightliness and acute observation her letters and late work sometimes promise. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Daughters of America. FPA. LSL. NCAB. Woman’s Record. Women of the South. Other references: SoQ (Oct. 1842). —CAROLINE ZILBOORG
LEE, Marion See COMSTOCK, Anna Botsford
LeGALLIENNE, Eva Born 11 January 1899, London, England; died 1991 Daughter of Richard and Julie Norregaard LeGallienne Eva LeGallienne’s father was a poet and her mother a translator and journalist. LeGallienne studied acting at Tree’s Academy (later the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) in London; she made her stage debut in London in 1914 and her American debut on Broadway in 1915. She established herself as a star in the role of Julie in Liliom in 1921 and five years later founded the Civic Repertory Theatre, a company devoted to offering the highest quality dramas at low cost to the public. She both acted in and directed works of Ibsen, Chekhov, and Shakespeare, as well as plays such as Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland, touring extensively with these works. LeGallienne received many honorary degrees and awards, among them the Woman of the Year Award (1947) and a special Tony award (1964).
Eva LeGallienne’s Civic Repertory Plays (1928) includes four texts plus her character analyses, stage directions, and set diagrams. Her detailed annotations capture her commitment to stage realism in terms of acting, directing, costumes, and scene design. LeGallienne focuses on the characters and derives her thematic conceptions from their actions and attitudes. Her notes are invaluable: They preserve, over time, a sense of her productions. In At 33 (1934), her first autobiography, LeGallienne relates significant events from her childhood and education in Europe up to the founding of the Civic Repertory Theatre. She does not dwell on any particular period, but devotes as much space to her early auditions and roles as to her direction of such classics as Hedda Gabler and The Three Sisters. LeGallienne had stated, ‘‘I have always felt so impersonally about my work,’’ and nowhere in her writing is this better exemplified. She writes clearly and dispassionately about herself, using short, quick verbs which impel the narrative forward and revealing a wry wit. Thus LeGallienne’s character emerges from both the form and content of her writing. Her vision of life as action is reflected by the range of her theatrical endeavors as well as by her linear, short, and succinct style; she plunges from story to story in her narrative as fearlessly as she has plunged into work. At 33 is an exuberant account, dealing almost exclusively with her professional life and activities, but upon completion, this record leaves one strangely cold. With a Quiet Heart (1953), which deals with LeGallienne’s life from the age of thirty-three to fifty-three, is more contemplative. She commits more space to each episode and discusses a wider range of experience. Her feelings about her father and her friends are more openly revealed, lending depth to the work. For the most part, however, this book is again dedicated to her professional achievements. Its tone is tempered, yet it objectively reveals LeGallienne as a resourceful and tenacious artist. The critical preface to Ibsen’s The Master Builder (1955) is one of LeGallienne’s best works, in which she gives free rein to her emotional and intellectual imagination. Here she discusses the drama in terms of character and action, dividing the essay into three sections which correspond to the acts and scenes in the play. She relates to The Master Builder tonally and calls the composition ‘‘great music.’’ She focuses on major events in the play, ignoring other parts that are only passing or connecting notes. Delving into the psychological drives of the major characters, LeGallienne examines their conflicts and goals and charts the changes in their moods and attitudes. Still, she raises as many questions as she answers; well aware that the symbolism in the play is complex, LeGallienne warns against forming absolute or oversimplified interpretations. The discussion reads like a director’s promptbook notes. She uses many of Ibsen’s stage directions to formulate or support her ideas. Her concern for the theater as a physical space is central to her critiques, and she believes that through external settings, a figure’s inner self may be illuminated. Through her scene studies, LeGallienne evokes an intense visual and poetic experience. LeGallienne’s greatest contributions are her play and character analyses and her notes. She combines a literary sensibility with
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a technical knowledge of the theater. Thus, her essays reveal an understanding of drama at its deepest levels. Her notes on directing and design are valuable documents in the study of theater history. OTHER WORKS: Flossie and Bossie (1949). Six Plays by Henrik Ibsen (translated by LeGallienne, 1951). The Strong Are Lonely by F. Hochwalder (adapted by LeGallienne, 1955). Seven Tales of Hans Christian Andersen (translated by LeGallienne, 1959). The Wild Duck, and Other Plays by A. Chekhov (translated by LeGallienne, 1961). The Mystic in the Theatre: Eleanora Duse (1965). The Nightingale by H. C. Andersen (translated by LeGallienne, 1965). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cooper, P. R., Eva LeGallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre (dissertation, 1967). Copeland, P. A., ‘‘Contribution to the American Theatre of Eva LeGallienne’s Leadership in the Civic Reperatory Theatre’’ (thesis, 1959). Davis, W., The Importance of Being Eva LeGallienne (1977). Hewitt, B., Theatre U.S.A. (1959). Hughes, G., A History of the American Theatre: 1700-1950 (1950). Little, S. W., Off-Broadway (1972). Macgowan, K., Footlights across America (1929). Rudisill, A. S., The Contributions of Eva LeGallienne, Margaret Webster, Margo Jones, and Joan Littlewood to the Establishment of Repertory Theatre in the United States (dissertation, 1979). Schanke, R. A., Eva LeGallienne: A Bio-bibliography (1989). Schanke, R. A., Eva LeGallienne: First Lady of Repertory (dissertation, 1975). Schanke, R. A., Shattered Applause: The Eva LeGallienne Story (1995). Tumbleson, T. R., Three Female Hamlets: Charlotte Cushman, Sarah Bernhardt and Eva LeGallienne (dissertation, 1981). Wilson, G., Three Hundred Years of American Drama and Theatre (1973). Young, W. C., Famous Actors and Actresses of the American Stage, Vol. II (1975). Reference works: NCAB. Other references: [Interview by Darryl Croxton] (cassette, 1973). ‘‘Eva LeGallienne: Dick Cavett Talks with the Legendary Actress’’ (cassette, 1979). —TINA MARGOLIS
L’ENGLE, Madeleine Born 29 November 1918, New York, New York Daughter of Charles W. and Madeleine Barnett Camp; married Hugh Franklin, 1946 (died); children: three The only child of a foreign correspondent, playwright, and critic (her father) and a pianist (her mother), Madeleine L’Engle led a lonely, isolated city life until she was twelve, occupying her time with writing, drawing, and playing the piano. When her family moved to Europe, L’Engle was put in an austere and strict English boarding school in Switzerland, where she learned to
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withdraw into the world of the imagination for solitude. After graduating from Smith College with honors, she published some magazine articles and then returned to New York City to work in the theater, taking the family name of L’Engle. After her marriage to an actor, L’Engle gave up her stage career permanently for writing. L’Engle’s earlier works, intended for adults, feature adolescent girls and grew out of her life as a child in New York City, in boarding schools, and later in the theater. Some of these early novels were rewritten for young people in the 1960s. Sensitive and perceptive, these books are important in showing the development of the author’s style and philosophy. More highly regarded are L’Engle’s stories for children and young people of family life and adventure about the O’Keefes, the Murrys, and the Austins. The episodic Meet the Austins (1960), which reflects L’Engle’s Connecticut period, has 12-year-old Vicky telling of the family’s problems when the spoiled orphan, Maggie, comes to live with them. Somewhat didactic, in incident and discussion it explores such matters as the nature of God and the meaning of death. Less convincing, but still distinctly above average for its type, is The Moon by Night (1963), in which the Austins camp in the West. The Twenty-Four Days Before Christmas (1964, reprinted 1993), a picture-story book, introduces younger children to the Austins through the events of the Advent season. While characters are well differentiated and dialogue and details of family life ring true, the Austins solve their problems a bit too easily and seem a little too agreeable to be completely convincing. The highly praised, family-centered fantasy A Wrinkle in Time (1962, reprinted many times, the latest in 1998) was rejected by several publishers because it was so unusual for a children’s book. It combines comedy and deep seriousness for exciting reading even though it suffers from a lack of unity and an overload of ideas. Adolescent Meg Murry ‘‘tesseracts’’—takes a wrinkle in time—to go into space to rescue her scientist father from It, a disembodied brain. A Wrinkle in Time won the Newbery Medal. The complex and highly philosophical A Wind in the Door (1973, reprinted 1997) repeats the theme of the power of love with Meg rescuing her brother, Charles Wallace. Although the highly imaginative and innovative Wrinkle has received the most critical acclaim, three later books about the conflict of good and bad (The Arm of the Starfish, 1965; The Young Unicorns, 1968; and Dragons in the Waters, 1976) are less didactic and contrived. The witty verse-drama, The Journey with Jonah (1967), a retelling of the biblical story, stands out among the versatile L’Engle’s other writings, as does her 1969 collection of intense, personal lyrics reflecting her experience and observation of life. Her autobiographical works for adults, A Circle of Quiet (1972), The Summer of the Great-Grandmother (1974), and The Irrational Season (1977), are not only thought-provoking and compelling as literature, they are essential for an understanding of her motivations and objectives as a writer. Recurring themes in L’Engle’s work are the conflict between good and evil and the problem of distinguishing one from the other, the nature of God, the dangers of conformity, and the
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necessity for giving love. A bold writer who dares to strike out in new directions and to challenge her readers, she obviously takes young people very seriously and regards them as being as worthy of intellectual stimulation as adults. In spite of her overconcern with ideas and her, at times, uncontrolled virtuosity, L’Engle’s ability to tell a good story has earned her a number of awards. She is regarded as one of today’s outstanding writers for children and young people. Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, L’Engle continues to garner attention for her innovative fantasy A Wrinkle in Time. She has written several more novels for children, including new adventures for the Austin, O’Keefe, and Murry families. In A Ring of Endless Light (1980, reprinted 1995), the Austin family gathers to be with the dying grandfather on an island in Maine, and Vicky, the young protagonist, learns to come to terms with death. Polly O’Keefe, in A House like a Lotus (1984), experiences an almost devastating homosexual advance but eventually is able to put it in perspective. The Murry twins return to the days of Noah in Many Waters (1986) and the O’Keefes to prehistoric times in An Acceptable Time (1988, reprinted 1997). Two Part Invention (1988), the story of L’Engle’s almost 45-year marriage to the actor Hugh Franklin, written after his death from cancer, chronicles the shared joys and difficulties of their marriage, as well as the silent communion developing between two people who live together for many years. The book is a tribute both to the memory of her husband and to L’Engle’s faith as a Christian. In keeping with her passionate belief in the strength of the human spirit, L’Engle has written the introductions to over two dozen volumes in a series called Triumphs of the Spirit in Children’s Literature. Critics are sometimes bothered by weakly drawn characters in L’Engle’s works, overcrowded plots, and stories burdened by an excess of theological, scientific, and philosophical ideas. She is generally regarded, however, as an accomplished writer, admired for her virtuosity, her respect for the intelligence of young readers, her portrayal of caring families, her concern for individual dignity, and her insistence upon the redemptive power of love. OTHER WORKS: 18 Washington Square (1945). The Small Rain (1945, reissued as Prelude 1969). Ilsa (1946). And Both Were Young (1949). Camilla Dickinson (1951, as Camilla 1964). A Winter’s Love (1957). The Love Letters (1966, 1996). Dance in the Desert (1969). Lines Scribbled on an Envelope, and Other Poems (1969). The Other Side of the Sun (1971, 1993). Everyday Prayers (1974). Prayers for Sunday (1974). A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978). The Weather of the Heart (1978). Ladder of Angels (1979). The Anti-Muffins (1980). Walking on Water (1981, 1998). The Sphinx at Dawn (1982). A Severed Wasp (1983). And It Was Good (1984). Dare to Be Creative (1984). Trailing Clouds of Glory (with A. Brook, 1985). A Stone for a Pillow (1986). Cry Like a Bell (1987). Sold into Egypt (1988). This Day Forward (1988). The Glorious Impossible (1990). Certain Women (1992, 1993). The Rock That Is Higher: Story as Truth (1993). Anytime Prayers (1994). Troubling a Star (1994). Wintersong: Christmas
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Recordings (1996). Penguins and Golden Calves: Icons and Idols (1996). Glimpses of Grace: Daily Thoughts and Reflections (1996). Genesis Trilogy: Comprising And it was Good, A Stone for a Pillow, Sold into Egypt (1997). A Live Coal in the Sea (1997). Mothers and Daughters (1997). Miracle on 10th Street & Other Christmas Writings (1998). Bright Evening Star: Mystery of the Incarnation (1999). Friends for the Journey (1999). Full House: An Austin Family Christmas (1999). Mothers and Sons (1999). My Own Small Place: Madeleine L’Engle’s Thoughts on Developing the Writing Life (1999). A Prayerbook for Spiritual Friends: Partners in Prayer (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Amison, M. V., A Study of Madeleine L’Engle’s Early Life and Its Effect on Some Themes in Her Children’s and Young Adult Fiction (Thesis, 1987). Chase, C. F., Madeleine L’Engle, Suncatcher: Spiritual Vision of a Storyteller (1995). Chase, C. F., Suncatcher: A Study of Madeleine L’Engle and Her Writing (1998). Datnow, C. L., American Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers (1999). Gonzales, D., A Biography of Madeleine L’Engle: Author of A Wrinkle in Time (1991). Hettinga, D. R., Presenting Madeleine L’Engle (1993). Hettinga, D. R., Madeleine L’Engle (1995). King, E. K., L’Engle’s World of Ideas: A Study of Sources (thesis, 1989). Rountree, C., On Women Turning 70: Honoring the Voices of Wisdom (1999). Skog, S., Embracing Our Essence: Spiritual Conversations with Prominent Women (1995). Steele, C. E., Circles of Quiet: The Journals of Madeleine L’Engle (1997). Townsend, J. R., A Sense of Story (1971). Wytenbroek, J. R., Nothing Is Ordinary: The Extraordinary Vision of Madeleine L’Engle (1996). Reference works: CA (1967). CANR (1987). CLC (1980). CLR (1988). DLB (1986). More Books by More People (1974). More Junior Authors (1963). MTCW (1991). Newbery and Caldecott Medal Books, 1956-1965 (1965).SATA (1971, 1982). Women Writers of Children’s Literature (1998). Writing Women’s Lives: An Anthology of Autobiographical Narratives by 20th Century American Women Writers (1994). Other references: First Words: Earliest Writing from Favorite Contemporary Authors (recording, 1995). Language Arts (1977). Newbery Award-Winning Author Madeleine L’Engle (audiovisual, 1990). The Swiftly Tilting Worlds of Madeleine L’Engle (1998). A Talk with Madeleine L’Engle (audiovisual, 1993). —ALETHEA K. HELBIG, UPDATED BY MARY E. FINGER AND NELSON RHODES
LENSKI, Lois Born 14 October 1893, Springfield, Ohio; died 11 September 1974, Florida Daughter of Richard and Marietta Young Lenski; married Arthur S. Covey, 1921; children: three Fourth of the five children of a Lutheran minister, Lois Lenski received a B.S. in education from Ohio State University in 1915, although she never taught. She enrolled in the Art Students
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League in New York City, and in 1920 went to the Westminster School of Art in London. With her husband, a muralist and former teacher, Lenski brought up two stepchildren and their own son, Stephen, in a small Connecticut town. After her health broke down, they lived at least part of the year in Florida. Lenski entered the world of children’s books as an illustrator. She illustrated 57 books for others. Not until 1927, with Skipping Village, a novel about her childhood, did Lenski begin her extraordinarily prolific career as both writer and illustrator of historical and regional books for children. She won the Newbery Medal for Strawberry Girl (1945) in 1946 and the Child Study Association Book Award for Judy’s Journey (1947). Lenski’s many children’s books can be grouped into age categories as well as types. The picture books for preschoolers fall into two series, the Small Family books, beginning with The Little Auto (1934), in which Mr. Small masters various forms of locomotion and several professions, and the Davy books, beginning with Davy’s Day (1943), which depict the mundane experiences of a small boy. Lenski’s seven novels dealing with ‘‘childlife of the past’’ begin with Phebe Fairchild, Her Book (1936). They are written for the same nine- to twelve-year-old group for which she writes her regional novels. For the regional series, of which Bayou Suzette (1943) is the first, Lenski adopted the methods of the anthropologist: she traveled extensively and made on-site verbal and graphic documentation of the lives of particular children in out-of-the-way corners of the U.S. A later series, Roundabout America, is aimed at seven- to nine-year-olds. These books are short novels or collections of short stories such as We Live in the South (1952) or We Live in the City (1954). While the regional books deal mainly with white, rural children, including migrant workers, the later series moves into both urban slums and Native American reservations. Lenski’s strength as a children’s writer, her true originality and influence, lies in her dedication to ‘‘documentary realism’’: she sought out and recorded both the hardships and joys of ways of life outside the mainstream of middle-class American existence. Lenski often responded to direct appeals from children to ‘‘come write about us’’; she thus satisfied needs for attention and recognition not previously filled by children’s literature. Lenski’s books signal the beginning of a trend toward the realistic problem novel in children’s literature, a trend which has probably since been abused. Lenski, however, was a true innovator and a careful craftswoman. She wrote in clear and simple language and was interested in dialects, trying to make speech patterns as authentic as possible in her dialogue. She also recognized the fascination of children with the world of work and economic survival. In language and character development, Lenski’s books appear somewhat one-dimensional and, read as a corpus, they are surprisingly formulaic. Solutions to serious struggles and conflicts that Lenski depicts are circumstantial rather than the result
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of realistic development and change in the child characters themselves. These solutions sometimes seem childishly simplistic, not unlike her deliberately simple line illustrations. Such, for instance, is the sudden revivalist conversion of a drunken and belligerent father in Strawberry Girl. Her interest in recording often brings out vividly the special suffering of women and children in harsh environments, but does not suggest rebelling against very traditional roles. Lenski’s books remain immensely popular with children and in many ways justifiably so. But their enduring value seems finally somewhat extraliterary: her works are sympathetic and, at their best, vivid portrayals of hard, obscure, yet intrinsically interesting ways of life, emphasizing, within socioeconomic and cultural differences, similarities in the needs and wishes of children to be recognized and cherished—and to wring some pleasure out of life. OTHER WORKS: Jack Horner’s Pie (1927). Alphabet People (1928). A Little Girl of Nineteen Hundred (1928). Two Brothers and Their Animal Friends (1929). The Wonder City, Picture Book of New York (1929). Spinach Boy (1930). Two Brothers and Their Baby Sister (1930). The Washington Picture Book (1930). Benny and His Penny (1931). Grandmother Tippytoe (1931). Arabella and Her Aunts (1932). Johnny Goes to the Fair, a Picture Book (1932). The Little Family (1932). Gooseberry Garden (1934). Surprise for Mother (1934). Little Baby Ann (1935). Sugarplum House (1935). The Easter Rabbit’s Parade (1936). A-Going Westward (1937). Baby Car (1937). The Little Sailboat (1937). Bound Girl of Cobble Hill (1938). The Little Airplane (1938). Oceanborn Mary (1939). Susie Maria (1939). Blueberry Corners (1940). The Little Train (1940). Animals for Me (1941). Indian Captive: The Story of Mary Jemison (1941). The Little Farm (1942). Let’s Play House (1944). Puritan Adventure (1944). Spring Is Here (1945). Blue Ridge Billy (1946). The Little Fire Engine (1946). Surprise for Davy (1947). Boom Town Boy (1948). Mr. and Mrs. Noah (1948). Now It’s Fall (1948). Cotton in My Sack (1949). Cowboy Small (1949). Texas Tomboy (1950). I Like Winter (1950). Papa Small (1951). Prairie School (1951). Peanuts for Billy Ben (1952). We Are Thy Children (with C. R. Bulla, 1952). Mama Hattie’s Girl (1953). On a Summer Day (1953). Corn-Farm Boy (1954). Project Boy (1954). Songs of Mr. Small (with C. R. Bulla, 1954). A Dog Came to School (with C. R. Bulla, 1955). San Francisco Boy (1955). Berries in the Scoop (1956). Big Little Davy (1956). Flood Friday (1956). Songs of the City (with C. R. Bulla, 1956). We Live by the River (1956). Davy and His Dog (1957). Houseboat Girl (1957). I Went for a Walk (with C. R. Bulla, 1958). Little Sioux Girl (with C. R. Bulla, 1958). At Our House (with C. R. Bulla, 1959). Coal Camp Girl (1959). We Live in the Country (1960). When I Grow Up (with C. R. Bulla, 1960). Davy Goes Places (1961). Policeman Small (1962). We Live in the Southwest (1962) Shoo-Fly Girl (1963). The Life I Live (1965). We Live in the North (1965). High-Rise Secret (1966). Debbie and Grandmother (1967). To Be a Logger (1967). Adventure in Understanding (1968). Deer Valley Girl (1968). Lois Lenski’s Christmas Stories (1968). Debbie and Her Family (1969).
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Debbie Herself (1969). Journey into Childhood: The Autobiography of Lois Lenski (1972). There are two Lois Lenski Collections, one at the Florida State University Library in Tallahassee, Florida, and the other within the University of Oklahoma Library. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bird, N., ed., Lois Lenski Collection in the Florida State University Library (1966). Giambra, C., The Lois Lenski Children’s Collection in the Edward H. Butler Library (1977). Greenberg, M. H. and C. Waugh, eds., Newbery Christmas: Fourteen Stories of Christmas by Newbery Award-Winning Authors (1998). Hawk, R. E., ‘‘Lois Lenski and Her Influence on American Children’s Literature’’ (thesis, 1961). Isa, J. W., Lois Lenski: Her Contribution to Children’s Literature (thesis, 1957). Portwood, D., ‘‘The Geographical, Socio-Economical and Psychological Values in Lois Lenski’s Regional Books’’ (thesis, 1954). Ram, M. L., ‘‘The Regional Stories of Lois Lenski’’ (thesis, 1952). Ram, M. L. An Analysis of the Lois Lenski Literature from a Sociological Point of View (1980). Reference works: Newbery Medal Books, 1922-1955 (1955). SAA (1971). Other references: Lois Lenski Interviewed by Her Stepson, Laird Covey in 1968 (audio recording, 1968). Lois Lenski Interviewed by Ralph Jennings in 1957 (audio recording, 1957). Lutheran Libraries (Winter 1969). North Carolina Folklore (December 1961). Ohiana Quarterly (Spring 1970). This Day (January 1970). —LOIS R. KUZNETS
LERMAN, Rhoda Born 18 January 1936, Far Rockaway, New York Daughter of Jacob and Gertrude Sniderman; married Robert Lerman, 1956; children: Jill, Julie, Matthew One of twin sisters, Rhoda Lerman spent her childhood in the midst of a large, extended family, all of whom shared the family mansion. She received a B.A. in English from the University of Miami at Coral Gables, and has both studied and taught at Syracuse University. She is married and the mother of three. Lerman’s first novel, Call Me Ishtar (1973), is erudite, complex, and comic. The great mother goddess, Ishtar, once worshipped for her immense powers of creation and feared for her volatile moods, has been neglected because of the newer religions of Moses and Jesus. Ishtar is tired of males (destructive mutants of females, results of a minor chemical error) enviously claiming they created the world, eliminating evidence of matriarchy, and usurping the rightful functions of women. Disillusioned with patriarchal 20th-century America, which separates love from religion, and herself capable of various manifestations, Ishtar directs her energies into a Syracuse, New York, housewife of the same name. The new Ishtar is thus not only a mother, wife, and part-time manager of a rock band called the Demons, but also a
powerful goddess capable of animating banal products (Hostess cupcakes) and transforming communal events (a rock concert, a bar mitzvah) into occasions for experiencing female divinity. Two major narrative strains enrich each other. In one, details and dialogue of suburban housewifery are both symbolic and ludicrously mundane. (‘‘Scram, I’m dead,’’ Ishtar whispers from her coffin to her son who keeps bothering her about a lost toothbrush.) The second major narrative thread emerges in brief set pieces. These ingeniously rewritten fairy tales, classical and Middle Eastern myths, biblical stories, etymologies, and interviews with pop stars develop the cosmically significant actions of the ancient goddess Ishtar in several of her many incarnations. The theme of past and present female power—divine, creative, sexual, passionate, and intelligent—is developed throughout. Call Me Ishtar is notable for the verbal energy of its allusions, alliterations, metaphors, puns, daring juxtapositions, and unexpected continuities. The varied rhythms reveal Lerman’s sensitivity to the cadences of various literary materials and of everyday speech. The skillful blend of realistic and mythical materials places Call Me Ishtar in one of the major contemporary novelistic traditions—fabulation. The Girl That He Marries (1976) is the first-person narrative of Stephanie, a sophisticated New Yorker, who is also almost 30 and unmarried. In spite of knowing about the darker side of marriage and not being ‘‘in love,’’ Stephanie sets out to trap eligible, politically ambitious, Jewish Richard Slenz with such obvious manipulative ploys as making him feel insecure by insulting his tie or enlisting his family on the side of purity outraged and WASP connections spurned. She has to suppress her sympathy, sexuality, and integrity to take him from Innocent Marie, who, unlike her, does love him. When Stephanie wins him, she no longer even likes him. The Girl That He Marries is verbally less dazzling, but more unified than Call Me Ishtar. Mythic dimensions are integrated naturally. As an employee of the Cloisters, Stephanie can see ironic parallels to her own situation in the legends of the unicorn or the Cornish men with heart-shaped tails. She knows the Broadway show tunes that have perpetuated silly concepts of romantic love. The dialogue and details are exceptionally vivid; the comic scenes sustained; the plot suspenseful. God’s Ear (1989) is a story in which a rich, successful Jewish insurance salesman is influenced by the will of God to become rabbi to his father’s congregation deep in the American West. Kirkus Reviews reported, ‘‘Lerman effortlessly works an immense amount of Jewish learning and Hasidic lore into a novel that’s moving, wise, and very, very funny.’’ Lerman’s novel Animal Acts (1994) follows another theme, exploring the relationship between a woman who has left both her husband and lover and a trained gorilla. Revealing the differences between men and women in their mental and cognitive processes, Lerman uses satire and suspense to contrast the sexes’ distinctions. Publishers Weekly noted her strategy: ‘‘Lerman’s writing has a sweetness and a desperation that sharpen her piquant questions about human existence, the ways she delineates the
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stresses of contemporary marriage and the workings of a woman’s heart.’’ Having shared her estate with as many as eight large Newfoundland dogs, Lerman was driven to write her first nonfiction book, In the Company of Newfies: A Shared Life (1996). The story is about a year of living with a new litter and six adult Newfoundland dogs. She reveals her connection with the animals and tells of their strong regard to themselves as human, offering instances in which her communication with them seems remarkable. Lerman’s major strengths include an exuberant, playful praise of sexuality; a vivid female view of suburban Jewish life; a talent for parody and satire; a richly poetic use of language; and a daring mixture of realism and myth. As a funny feminist and a female fabulator, Lerman deserves continued attention. OTHER WORKS: Eleanor, A Novel (1979). Book of the Night (1984). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1975, 1999). Other references:KR (15 Feb. 1989). PW (2 May 1994, 8 Apr. 1996). Ms. (Jan. 1974). Newsweek (5 May 1975). NYTBR (25 Nov. 1973, 8 Aug. 1976). PR (1974). —AGATE NESAULE KROUSE, UPDATED BY ALLISON A. JONES
LERNER, Gerda Born 30 April 1920, Vienna, Austria Daughter of Robert and Ilona Neumann Kronstein; married Carl Lerner, 1941 (died); children: Stephanie, Daniel Gerda Lerner, an only child, came of age in Nazi-dominated prewar Europe. She became involved in her teens with the Austrian underground, and was captured and imprisoned by German officials before fleeing to the U.S. in 1939. Lerner was the only member of her family to escape the ravages of Nazism during World War II. She married a Philadelphia-born filmmaker and editor in 1941 and became a U.S. citizen two years later. Lerner did not undertake higher education until she was in her forties. She received a B.A. from the New School for Social Research in New York in 1963, an M.A. in 1965 from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. from Columbia in 1966. Lerner taught at the New School for Social Research, Long Island University, and Sarah Lawrence College before becoming a professor of American history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1980. Lerner’s first important historical work was based upon her doctoral dissertation. The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels Against Slavery (1967) is a biography investigating the origins of the sisters’ abolitionist sentiments in their youth on a South Carolina plantation. It chronicles their movement northward to escape from the influence of slavery and the problems they faced as female activists in the abolitionist movement. More than a biography of two women reformers, The Grimké Sisters
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investigates the development of both the abolitionist movement and the women’s rights movement that grew out of it. Lerner picked up the Grimké sisters’ story 20 years later with The Feminist Thought of Sarah Grimké (1998). Lerner’s study of the activities of women in the abolitionist movement naturally led her to investigate the history of American women. The Woman in American History (1971) is a textbook outlining the history of women in American life over the past three centuries. Organized into four major chronological periods, the text discusses women as homemakers, workers, and citizens in each of these periods. Throughout this work, Lerner demonstrates Mary Ritter Beard’s thesis that women have always been a force in history, but their involvement has always been overshadowed by that of men. Yet Lerner is careful to point out that the history of American women has been one of accomplishments followed by setbacks. In Lerner’s belief, by understanding how this progress of history is so uneven, the challenges and problems faced by women today can be better met. To make black women, a group particularly neglected by most historians, more visible in American history, Lerner published Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (1972). Consisting of unmined primary documents, most of which had never been published before, the book tells the story of America’s black women, from the early years of the American republic to the 1960s. This history of black women provided the groundwork for many excellent works on the subject written during the past three decades. The Female Experience: An American Documentary (1977) represents Lerner’s attempt to create a new philosophy of history more sympathetic to the values of women. She points out in the foreword that, in order for a universal, undistorted history of America to be written, the patriarchal value system from which American history has been written by men and for men must be countered with a female value system of history. Only by studying women in history according to their own value systems and on their own terms will we arrive at an accurate history of the American woman. Lerner’s two-volume Women and History charts the evolution of women’s roles in society from prehistory to 1870. In volume one, The Creation of Patriarchy (1986), Lerner attempts to track the beginnings of male dominance in the ancient civilizations of Sumer, Egypt, and Greece. She cites evidence from such diverse sources as literature, art, and archaeology to support her claims that patriarchy is a cultural invention and male dominance is the first instance of—and thus the model for—oppression. Lerner has been criticized by reviewers and colleagues for using such fragmentary evidence, although she herself notes her supporting documentation is ‘‘fragile.’’ Other scholars praise Lerner for providing new information about women’s roles throughout history. In The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to 1870 (1993), volume two of Women and History, Lerner examines European history from the 7th through the 19th centuries and shows the constraints imposed upon women by the patriarchal society. Among the areas she explores in detail are the
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lack of education available to women and their inability to participate in important traditions reserved exclusively for men. Lerner also looks at the scattered resistance to male domination as expressed by women, particularly through their writings and their roles as mothers, and theorizes on the failure of these early seeds of feminism to take root.
has also won several awards for individual works, including a Special Book award from the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians in 1980 for The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History (1979), and a Joan Kelly Award from the American Historical Association in 1986 for volume one of Women and History.
Why History Matters: Life and Thought (1997) is a collection of essays and speeches, partly autobiographical and partly scholarship. Lerner begins with her memories of life in post-World War I Austria and continues with her family’s escape from the Nazis and subsequent relocation to the U.S. She recalls her inability to reconcile her Judaism with women’s exclusion from full participation in temple services and her abandonment of her faith for over five decades. She also traces her path to academic success and her views on broader topics like class, race, and feminism.
As a historian and a writer, as a teacher and a scholar, Lerner has had a profound influence on a generation of students, both male and female. Lerner, determined to ‘‘make women’s history respectable,’’ founded several graduate programs in the field and helped train many women’s studies scholars. Her work, both historical and literary, has had one major goal: to humanize and universalize the American experience.
Lerner writes that ‘‘all human beings are practicing historians,’’ and we need not only remember history but remember it accurately, since she notes that what is left out of history may be as telling as what is recorded. She underscores the power of those who are charged with writing the history—how they are usually the victors and how their versions of history affect individuals and nations. In this collection of essays, Lerner teaches the reader how our own personal history also matters, because it tells us who we are, where we have been, where we are going, and what we have won or lost along the way. Knowing our own histories is the only way to achieve our goals, right wrongs, and remember the suffering that we or others have caused. In addition to these notable contributions in the fields of American, social, and women’s history, Lerner has also written short stories and screenplays. Lerner’s literary abilities, however, have found their most praiseworthy outlet in A Death of One’s Own (1978), a beautifully sensitive account of the death of her husband. A combination of narrative, journal entries, and poetry, the book is best summarized in a poem by Howard Nemerov, which Lerner herself quotes: ‘‘Their marriage is a good one. In our eyes / What makes a marriage good? Well, that the tether / Fray but not break, and that they stay together. / One should be watching while the other dies.’’ A Death of One’s Own illustrates Lerner’s attempts to come to terms not only with her marriage and the death of her husband, but with her own past. She is true to her historical training when she recounts memories of her childhood and family to give insight and meaning to her relationship with her husband and his death. In this work, as demonstrated by the personal tragedy and experience of Lerner, we truly see the value of history in our lives. In 1981 Lerner, a founding member of the National Organization of Women, became the first woman president of the Organization of American Historians in 50 years. Among her awards are a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship in 1976, a Ford Foundation fellowship in 1978, a Guggenheim fellowship in 1980, Sarah Lawrence College established the Gerda Lerner Scholarship Fund in her honor in 1983, an Educational Foundation Achievement award from the American Association of University Women in 1986, the Lucretia Mott Award in 1988, and the Austrian Cross for Science and Art in 1996. Lerner
OTHER WORKS: No Farewell (1955). Singing of Women (musical, with Eve Merriam, 1956). Black Like Me (screenplay, with Carl Lerner, 1964). Women Are History: A Bibliography in the History of American Women (1975). Teaching Women’s History (1981). A History of the Coordinating Committee on Women in the Historical Profession—Conference Group on Women’s History (with Hilda Smith and Nupur Chaudhuri, 1989. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1971). CANR (1989, 1999). CBY (1998). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: America (4 Dec. 1993). Journal of American History (June 1983, Sept. 1990). Ms. (May 1986). Nation (12 May 1997). NYTBR (17 Nov. 1985, 20 Apr. 1986, 2 May 1993). Progressive (May 1997). PW (3 Feb. 1997). Signs (Summer 1988). WRB (Jan. 1987). —PAULA A. TRECKEL, UPDATED BY LEAH J. SPARKS
LESLIE, Annie (Louise) Brown Born 11 December 1869, Perry, Maine; died 7 October 1948, Detroit, Michigan Wrote under: Nancy Brown Daughter of Levi Prescott and Ann Robinson Brown; married James Edward Leslie, 1904 Born in rural Maine, Annie Brown Leslie attended high school in Middleborough, Massachusetts, and graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1892. She taught school for about ten years, in Vermont, in Connecticut, and finally in Michigan, where she married a journalist and editor. At his death in 1917, her husband was drama editor of the Pittsburgh Dispatch, and for a time Leslie took on this job. In 1918, however, she joined the women’s department of the Detroit News. It was part of her responsibility to answer letters from women readers. From this task grew her column, ‘‘Experience,’’ one of the earliest and most influential of the letters columns that became a standard feature in newspapers all over the
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country. Leslie adopted the editorial name ‘‘Nancy Brown,’’ and as such she became a public figure throughout Michigan, lending the influence of her column to charities, cultural events, and such special projects as the reforestation of burned-out areas of northern Michigan. She retired in 1942 and died in 1948, leaving no children.
home, attending school only to learn needlework. When her father died, Leslie and her mother opened a boardinghouse in Philadelphia to support the family. Leslie also taught drawing, building up a fair reputation; her brother Charles Robert became a well-known painter.
Although ‘‘Experience’’ started as a column of domestic advice, it broadened its scope as Leslie tackled moral and social questions: the propriety of couples living together before marriage, the place of religion in daily life, the proper education of children, the consolations of music and art to the disheartened, and a variety of timely topics that would fit into the medical and psychology columns of newspapers today. The column had professional consultants, and in more than one instance Nancy Brown seems to have intervened to put a correspondent in touch with a hospital or other facility for needed care.
Leslie’s literary career began in middle age when she published Seventy-five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes, and Sweetmeats (1827), a collection of recipes she had gathered years before as a student at Mrs. Goodfellow’s cooking school in Philadelphia. This early American cookbook was such a success that Leslie was encouraged to undertake other literary ventures. During the next 30 years she published cookbooks, domestic economy treatises, children’s books, magazine fiction, and some poetry. Satiric wit and lively anecdotes were the characteristics of her conversation and prose. In her last years she enjoyed the acclaim of a celebrity.
Although the Detroit News had for the most part an urban readership, Leslie enlivened her column with letters from lonesome cowboys and other figures out of the romantic tradition of the American West. Readers sometimes exchanged views through the medium of her column. One letter, for example, tells an Enoch Arden story: a man presumed dead arrives home to find his bride happily married to another man. Should he reveal his identity? The letters that follow take on the tone of dramatic narrative.
Of all Leslie’s work, the books on cooking and housekeeping—many going through multiple editions—were most popular. She reported the greatest financial success for Directions for Cookery (1837), The House Book (1840), and The Lady’s ReceiptBook (1846). Her domestic economy books dealt with a wide range of housekeeping activities; similarly, her cookbooks included suggestions on other domestic tasks.
Leslie’s views were generally conservative, although her advice was crisp and forthright. When one reads the letters sequentially, as in the volumes of column contributions published by the Detroit News, one is struck by certain resemblances between the editor’s style and the prose of the letters themselves. These pseudonymous contributors seem not to suffer from the awkwardness that mars the writing of many nonprofessionals. One feels that Leslie selected letters carefully and put them through extensive and thorough editorial processing.
Leslie was also successful and creative in her works for children. Her earliest effort, The Mirror (1828), was followed by many stories, some of the best republished in Atlantic Tales (1833). Leslie contributed to children’s annuals and edited one, The Violet (1837-1842). Her stories were designed to amuse, instruct, and inspire further reading. Some were syllabicated for beginning readers. Many incorporated American themes and subjects. In addition to her juvenile literature, she developed a game about Boston and published three books of playtime activities for girls.
OTHER WORKS: Experience (1932). Dear Nancy (1933). Column Folks (1934). Nancy’s Family (1935). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Boughner, G., Women in Journalism (1926). Reference works: NAW. —ANN PRINGLE ELIASBERG
LESLIE, Eliza Born 15 November 1787, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; died 1 January 1858, Gloucester, New Jersey Also wrote under: A Lady of Philadelphia, Eliza Lord Daughter of Robert and Lydia Baker Leslie Eliza Leslie, the eldest of five children, resided in London with her family from 1793 to 1799. There Leslie was educated at
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Soon after her early successes, she began writing short stories for ladies’ magazines. In 1832 she won a literary prize from Godey’s Lady’s Book for ‘‘Mrs. Washington Potts.’’ Subsequently, she won three other prizes from different periodicals. Her numerous stories appeared in Godey’s, Parley’s, Graham’s, the Saturday Gazette, and the Saturday Evening Post. Many were reprinted in collections, the most well known being the threevolume Pencil Sketches (1833-1837). For several years she edited the annual The Gift (1836-1845), which included her contributions along with those of such authors as Lydia Howard Sigourney, Edgar Allan Poe, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. In 1843 she started Miss Leslie’s Magazine, but it survived just one year. Leslie wrote only one novel, Amelia (1848). Leslie’s stories for adults, like those for children, were written to be entertaining and instructive. Upper-class snobbery and bad manners are most frequently satirized. Several stories contrast modest, intelligent country girls with extravagant, inane city flirts, illustrating the foolishness of class distinctions based on money, family background, or the whims of social matrons.
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Female vanity, especially lavishness in dress, is repeatedly shown to lead to marital and financial unhappiness. Integrity, selfrespect, and honesty are reflected in a character’s demeanor and dress. The well-mannered woman always knows how to be useful in her place; she is adept in domestic skills and, if necessary, can earn a living utilizing them. Miss Leslie’s Behaviour Book (1859) straightforwardly reiterates such definitions of appropriate female behavior. In addition, it includes chapters on ‘‘Conduct to Literary Women’’ and ‘‘Suggestions to Inexperienced Authors.’’ Not only does Leslie give advice on respecting literary women’s time and talents, but also she cautions against thinking female authors are deficient in domestic skills. Leslie’s contemporaries disagreed about the value of her work: some felt it represented life perfectly, others that her satirical approach was overused. The reader today will find Leslie’s work generally well-written, fast-moving, and amusing, but its messages become repetitious. Though her attention was focused primarily on women, she showed no particular sympathy with her sex as a whole. She revealed the foibles of high society and encouraged propriety in ‘‘woman’s sphere.’’ Leslie did not address current social issues; nevertheless, her work, because of its popularity, merits reexamination as an indicator of beliefs about women and the woman writer in antebellum America.
OTHER WORKS: The Young Ladies’ Mentor; or, Extracts in Prose and Verse for the Promotion of Virtue and Morality (1803). Stories for Adelaide: Being a Second Series of Easy Reading Lessons, with Divided Syllables (1829). The Young Americans; or, Sketches of a Sea Voyage, and a Short Visit to Europe (1829). American Girl’s Book; or, Occupation for Play Hours (1831). Cards of Boston (1832). 200 Receipts for French Cookery (1832). Laura Lovel: A Sketch (1834). Althea Vernon; or, the Embroidered Handkerchief, to Which is Added, Henrietta Harrison; or, the Blue Cotton Umbrella (1838). Mr. and Mrs. Woodbridge, with Other Tales (1841). Mrs. Washington Potts, and Mr. Smith: Tales (1843). The Indian Meal Book (1846). Leonilia Lynmore, and Mr. and Mrs. Woodbridge; or, A Lesson for Young Wives (1847). The Dennings and Their Beaux (1851). The Maid of Canal Street, and The Bloxhams (1851). The Behaviour Book: A Manual for Ladies (1853).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Haven, A. B., ‘‘Personal Reminiscences of Miss E. Leslie,’’ in Godey’s Lady’s Book (April 1958). Mott, F. L., A History of American Magazines, 1741-1850 (1938). Reference works: AA, DAB. Female Prose Writers of America (1855). NAW (1971). NCAB. Prose Writers of America (1849). Woman’s Record (1873). Other references: North American Review (October 1833). —SUSAN COULTRAP-MCQUIN
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LESLIE, Miriam (Florence) Follin Born 5 June 1836, New Orleans, Louisiana; died 18 September 1914 Wrote under: Frank Leslie, Miriam Florence Folline Leslie, Miriam F. Squier Daughter of Charles Follin and Susan Danforth; married David C. Peacock, 1854; Ephraim G. Squier, 1856; Frank Leslie, 1873; William K. Wilde, 1891 Miriam Follin Leslie changed her name, birth date, and the details of her parentage to suit her altered mood or circumstance. Although they probably never married, Leslie’s parents lived together as man and wife, and her mother used the Follin name. Leslie was educated at home by her father. The intellectual skills she honed at this time were matched by her seductive skills. Her first marriage, a shotgun marriage to a jeweler’s assistant, was annulled after two years. Leslie then began a stage career, traveling with actress Lola Montez as her sister Minnie. Leslie gave up acting in 1857 to marry Squier, an amateur archeologist. With him, she published a Spanish newspaper, Noticias de Neuva York. Through him, she met Frank Leslie, whom she married after divorcing Squier. Head of a successful publishing house, Leslie made her the editor of his Lady’s Magazine. Miriam also worked on Frank Leslie’s Chimney Corner and Frank Leslie’s Lady’s Journal, and some said she was the power behind the Leslie throne. Financial mismanagement and the publisher’s 1880 death nearly destroyed the business, but Miriam was a good manager and editor with sound news judgment and the ability to gauge the public’s interests. Her decision to reduce the number of Leslie magazines and to concentrate on Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly displayed sound business sense. Miriam Leslie also had a flair for personal publicity. She changed her name to Frank Leslie and lived extravagantly. Her every move made news. Her marriage to the brother of Oscar Wilde, sixteen years her junior, ended when she divorced him in 1893. Tired of romance and work, Leslie sailed for Europe, leaving her publishing house in control of a syndicate. The group mismanaged the business, and Leslie was called home in 1898. Again she changed the Leslie fortunes; and again she changed her name, to the Baroness de Bazus, after doubtful Huguenot ancestors. Leslie sold her business in 1903 for a half-million dollars. When she died, she left nearly one million dollars to Carrie Chapman Catt, the suffrage leader, to mount the successful campaign for women’s suffrage. During the course of her colorful career, Leslie produced not only newspapers, but also newpaper columns and several books. She even wrote a play. The Froth of Society, Leslie’s translation of Dumas’s Demi-Monde, opened in 1893 to terrible reviews. Leslie’s was the third adaptation of the work to be presented on the New York stage, and she had taken considerable liberties with the original play.
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Leslie’s books of opinion and advice—Rents in Our Robes (1888), Are Men Gay Deceivers? (1893), and A Social Mirage (1899)—deal with essentially female interests: love, beauty, marriage, and sex. Dress is discussed extensively, Leslie believing that ‘‘fashion is not society—it is its genius.’’ The triumvirate of beauty, love, and fashion that Leslie said should motivate other women as it had motivated her is most evident in Beautiful Woman of Twelve Epochs (1890). This lavishly illustrated book begins with a picture of Leslie. It describes, in flowery language, such generic females as the druidess, the Puritan maiden, and the Saxon maid, admiring them more for how they looked and who they loved than for what they did. Written from the point of view of a grande dame, California: A Pleasure Trip from Gotham to the Golden Gate (1877) betrays intellectual snobbery and racial and regional elitism. The book, however, does present some graphic sketches of the West in 1877, and it excels in its portraiture, providing the reader with insights about Mormon women, Native Americans, frontiersmen, Chinese immigrants, and especially about Leslie herself. Rents in Our Robes warns women not to compete overzealously with men, not to become masculine, and California constantly alludes to the ‘‘feeble female mind.’’ This attitude seems like a contradiction from the one woman of her time to run, and to run successfully, a major publishing house. OTHER WORKS: Travels in Central America by A. Morelet (translated by Leslie, 1871). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bird, C., Enterprising Women (1976). Ross, I., Charmers and Cranks (1965). Stern, M., Purple Passage: The Life of Mrs. Frank Leslie (1971). Reference works: AA. DAB. NAW. NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States. Other references: Nevada Daily Territorial Enterprise (14 July 1878). —LYNNE MASEL-WALTERS
LEVERTOV, Denise Born 24 October 1923, Ilford, Essex, England; died 20 December 1997, Seattle, Washington Daughter of Paul P. and Beatrice Spooner-Jones Levertoff; married Mitchell Goodman, 1947 (divorced); children: Nikolai As the author of over two dozen collections of poetry as well as collections of essays and translations of European poetry, Denise Levertov is among the most prolific writers of the 20th century. She was born in Essex, England. Her father was a
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Russian Jew who converted to Christianity and was ordained an Anglican priest. Her mother, who was Welsh, educated Levertov and her sister primarily at home with assistance from private tutors. Shortly after her marriage, which eventually ended in divorce, Levertov emigrated to the U.S. in 1948 and was naturalized as an American citizen in 1955. Levertov taught at a number of American universities, including the City University of New York, the University of California at Berkeley, Tufts, Brandeis, and Stanford. At various times, she also worked as poetry editor of such publications as the Nation and the Village Voice. During the Vietnam era, she cofounded the Writers and Artists Protest against the War in Vietnam with poet Muriel Rukeyser and others. Levertov was the winner of numerous prestigious awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. Although she does not fully embrace the philosophy of any particular poetic school, Levertov is most often associated with the Black Mountain Poets, including Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, who flourished during the 1950s. She was also clearly influenced by William Carlos Williams. Her work is most often characterized by a spare lyricism rather than any extended narrative. Her moods range from celebration to outrage, and her themes include a religious or spiritual impulse, humanitarian politics, and issues of social justice including the Vietnam war, nuclear war, environmentalism, racism, and gender relations. Although several of her poems allude to stories from classic mythology, more often her references are overtly biblical. When her poetry is ideologically informed, she receives both the highly positive and highly negative reviews typical of ideological writing. Her concerns, in other words, are both individual and communal, but as in much political poetry, her themes can sometimes be so directly stated that critics have occasionally classified some of her work as not truly poetry. On the other hand, her ability to address political concerns in a lyrical mode can also lead one to describe her as visionary or prophetic. Levertov’s first book, The Double Image, was published in England in 1946. This collection is often regarded as too romantic or sentimental or too derivative, but by the time With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads was published in 1959, critics agreed her work had become more substantial and individual; most critics also trace a progression toward a more American sensibility during this decade. Her interest in the work of William Carlos Williams is an obvious influence in terms of the Americanization of her voice. She continued to publish several books per decade until her death. Levertov’s most widely read collections of poetry include The Jacob’s Ladder (1961), O Taste and See: New Poems (1964), Life in the Forest (1978), and Candles in Babylon (1982). Levertov’s reflections on poetry and other topics are included her collections of essays, The Poet in the World (1973) and Light Up the Cave (1981). When discussing poetic craft, in her own work or in the work of other poets, she is highly articulate. Simultaneously, she is also able to analyze her poetic calling in a more transcendent sense. Her essays indicate that she consistently thinks about the nature of poetry and the role of the poet in both local and global
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terms. Individual well-wrought poems are necessary but not sufficient if poets are to fulfill their call as philosophers and prophets. When Levertov died in 1997, she was at work on a new collection, published posthumously as This Great Unknowing: Last Poems (1999). Although Paul A. Lacey indicates in an afterword that the book would surely have been longer had Levertov lived, this book is nearly as full as any of her others. Her concerns with beauty, spirituality, and justice remain, as does her occasional tendency toward the didactic. Over the five decades of her publishing life, her voice matured and became more refined; yet, her poems remain identifiably hers. OTHER WORKS: Here and Now (1957). Overland to the Islands (1958). Five Poems (1958). City Psalm (1964). Psalm Concerning the Castle (1966). The Sorrow Dance (1967). A Tree Telling of Orpheus (1968). A Marigold from North Vietnam (1968). Three Poems (1968). The Cold Spring and Other Poems (1969). Embroideries (1969). Relearning the Alphabet (1970). Summer Poems 1969 (1970). A New Year’s Garland for My Students (1970). To Stay Alive (1971). Footprints (1972). The Freeing of the Dust (1975). Chekhov on the West Heath (1977). Modulations for Solo Voice (1977). Collected Earlier Poems, 1940-1960 (1979). Pig Dreams: Scenes from the Life of Sylvia (1981). Wanderer’s Daysong (1981). Poems, 1960-1967 (1983). El Salvador: Requiem and Invocation (1984). The Menaced World (1984). Selected Poems (1986). Breathing the Water (1987). Poems, 1968-1972 (1987). A Door in the Hive (1989). Evening Train (1992). New and Selected Essays (1992). Tesserae: Memories and Suppositions (1995). Sands of the Well (1996). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Breslin, J. E. B., From Modern to Contemporary American Poetry, 1945-1965 (1984). Middlebrook, D., and M. Yalom, eds., Coming to Light: American Women Poets in the Twentieth Century (1985). Marten, H., Understanding Denise Levertov (1988). Ostriker, A., Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America (1986). Sakelliou-Schultz, L., Denise Levertov: An Annoted Primary and Secondary Bibliography (1988). Wagner-Martin, L., ed., Critical Essays on Denise Levertov (1990). Wagner, L. W., Denise Levertov (1967). Wilson, R. A., A Bibliography of Denise Levertov (1967). Reference works: Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia (1991). CA (1967). CANR (1990, 1996). CLC (1980, 1984, 1991). CP (1970, 1975, 1991). DLB (1980). FC (1990). MTCW (1991). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). WW of Writers, Editors, and Poets (1991). Other references: American Poetry (Spring 1990). APR (Nov.-Dec. 1991, Sept.-Oct. 1992). Contemporary Literature (Summer 1986). Descant: Texas Christian University Literary Journal (1974). Hudson Review (1974). MELUS (Winter 1982). Michigan Quarterly Review (interview, Fall 1985). Parnassus (Spring-Winter 1985). Sagetrieb (Spring-Fall 1989, Winter 1989). Studies in American Jewish Literature (1990). —LYNN DOMINA
LEWIS, Elizabeth Foreman Born 24 May 1892, Baltimore, Maryland; died 7 August 1958 Daughter of Joseph F. and Virginia Bayly Foreman; married John A. Lewis, 1921 Elizabeth Foreman Lewis was born and raised in Baltimore and educated in the public schools there. She also attended the Tome School and studied art at the Maryland Institute. In 1916, having moved to New York, she studied religion and literature for a year at the Biblical Seminary of New York. Then, under the auspices of the Methodist Women’s Mission Board, she went to China. For a year she worked in the offices of the Mission Board and taught evening classes in religious education in Shanghai. She was transferred to Chungking, where she taught in the district school in 1918 and 1919, and then to Nanking, where she taught in the Huei Wen School for Girls and in the Boys Academy. In 1921, Lewis married the principal of the Boys Academy, the son of the former Methodist Bishop of China. They had one son; her husband died in 1934. The years in China left Lewis with a knowledge and a love of the culture and the people that became the major force in her life. Forced by illness to return to the U.S., she began writing fictionalized sketches of life in China, with an eye to publishing them in magazines such as St. Nicholas. One such story, concerning the arrival of a young boy and his mother in the city of Chungking, became the nucleus of Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze (1932), her first novel and winner of the Newbery Award for 1933. This first novel contains all the major elements of Lewis’ vision: a disrupted and disintegrating Chinese culture, a representative of Western influence (here a foreign doctor), and a young Chinese who seeks to understand the collision of old and new, and who finally becomes a symbol of their successful union. When the fatherless Young Fu demonstrates that he has learned piety, prowess, and perspicacity, he is rewarded with a father—his master Tang, the coppersmith, who offers to adopt him. This essentially romantic vision of life is as much a part of Lewis’ art as her Chinese settings. Though Lewis’ accuracy as an observer of Chinese ways is beyond suspicion, her greatest strength as a children’s author is in her real and sympathetic characters whose universal needs, desires, and motives transcend national boundaries. Her young heroes want to be a part of a family, to feel that they are contributing members of the family and the wider society, and to feel that they are competent. The universality of their aspirations was important to Lewis, whose hope for Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze was that, reading it, ‘‘the youth of America might recognize in the youth of China a kinship to themselves.’’ Lewis’ books take place in the cities she knew along the Yangtze—Chungking, Shanghai, and Nanking. The time period is that of the Open Door Policy, the civil war between the republican forces of Sun Yat-sen and the war lords of the north, and the beginnings of the second Sino-Japanese conflict. In the early books, Young Fu and Ho-Ming, Girl of New China (1935), the
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cultural ferment that accompanied Westerners into China is central. Labor agitation, especially against foreign concerns, is important, as is the Chinese resentment of Western science and Western religious thought. The literary renaissance, during which the written language was simplified to make it more easily learned by the lower classes, figures in the burning desires of Young Fu and Ho-Ming to ‘‘do books’’ and the importance of literacy as a symbol to the young delinquents of To Beat a Tiger (1956). Being essentially stories of character, Lewis’ books bear the passing of time gracefully. In addition, the stories, the notes, and the glossaries are excellent sources of information about life in precommunist China. Although the Western bias is evident throughout, Lewis’ books communicate a real love for the country and culture of China and a real sympathy for the Chinese people. OTHER WORKS: China Quest (1937). Portraits from a Chinese Scroll (1938). Test Tubes and Dragon Scales (with G. C. Basil, 1940). When the Typhoon Blows (1942). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: The Junior Book of Authors. —KATHARYN F. CRABBE
LEWIS, Estelle (Anna) Robinson Born April 1824, Baltimore, Maryland; died 24 November 1880, London, England Wrote under: Estelle Anna Lewis, Estelle Anna Blanche Lewis, Estelle Anna Robinson Lewis, Stella Daughter of John N. Robinson; married Sylvanus D. Lewis, 1841 Estelle Robinson Lewis was the daughter of a wealthy, cultivated, and influential Cuban of English and Spanish parentage, who died in her childhood. She attended Emma Hart Willard’s Female Seminary, where she studied ‘‘masculine’’ subjects including law. After leaving school in 1841, she continued a regimen of independent study in classical and modern languages, comparative literature, and history. She published her first poem at fourteen; married a Brookyn lawyer at seventeen; and published a first book of poems at twenty. Sharing an enthusiasm for the work of Edgar Allan Poe with whom her husband began a friendship in 1845, Lewis and her husband are remembered in accounts of the Poe circle. As Poe pointed out—however ironically in view of his own goaded imagination—the predominant trait of Lewis’ disposition was ‘‘a certain romantic sensibility, bordering upon melancholy, or even gloom.’’ Divorced in 1858, Lewis traveled in Europe, read at the Vatican Library and the Bibliothèque Imperiale, and lived for the last decades of her life in London, where she took a house in Bedford Square and studied frequently at the British Museum. Having published occasional translations of Virgil, articles on travel and American art, stories and a play, as well as additional
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poetry, she then wrote her most ambitious work, a dramatization in verse of Sappho’s life. Appearing in 1868, it was widely reviewed in England, the U.S., and France, translated into modern Greek, and staged in Athens. In the complexity of characterization, Lewis anticipates the Sappho later revealed by scholarly research as a woman with primitive passions, unappeasable longing, frailties of ego, and an imperious will, but Lewis’ awareness of the poet’s keen intelligence, charms, and genius is not matched by the pedestrian verse. Lewis is usually mentioned in Poe biographies as a scribbling woman given to immense sentimentality, but she is rather an expert in the histrionics of passion. The title of the first poems, Records of the Heart (1844), could serve for all of Lewis’ major work; the convulsive emotions and fickle vows of love resulting in ‘‘frightful wrecks of mutual ill’’ for both men and women are her most persistent themes. Although she relies on the exhausted conventions, language and meters of romantic poetry in her period, she has nevertheless a disciplined energy for her criticisms of life from a woman’s point of view. She is a formidable scribbler. Lewis’ imagination is perhaps at its best in ‘‘Laone,’’ a history of adolescent conflict. The poem depicts the harsh consequences of a relationship between two young people who have been inseparable for five years. The boy develops sexually and emotionally much earlier than the shy girl he has protected since their childhood as a promise to her dying father. Neither youth is censured for the disparity in needs or the failure to perceive them until it is too late. A century before Robert Frost’s comparable poem, ‘‘The Subverted Flower,’’ for instance, Lewis confronts the subject with more equanimity than either Frost or a mere sentimentalist, in spite of the fact that she writes in the cadences, images, and metaphors of an age when natural expression was inhibited by scrupulous nicety or plain prudery. The ambitions of Lewis, it has been said, ‘‘were underwritten by her husband and Poe.’’ While she benefited from their aid, she also received early commendation by poets as different as William Cullen Bryant and Lamartine. Records of the Heart was, moreover, in an eleventh edition, and Sappho, in a sixth edition at the time of her death. The rapid decline in Lewis’ reputation can be accounted for not only by the derivative manner of the verse but also by radical changes in taste. OTHER WORKS: Child of the Sea, and Other Poems (1848). Myths of the Minstrel (1852). Poems by Estelle Anna Lewis (1857). Sappho: A Tragedy in Five Acts (1868). The King’s Stratagem; or, The Pearl of Poland (1869). Minna Monte (1872). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Poe, E. A., Complete Works of Poe XIII (Ed. J. A. Harrison, 1902). Poe, E. A., The Literati (1850). Reference works: AA. CAL. FPA. LSL. NCAB. Other references: The Athenaeum (4 Dec. 1880). SLM (Sept. 1848). —ELIZABETH PHILLIPS
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evil motives and passions may also elude human justice and destroy the innocent as well as the guilty.
Born 17 August 1899, Chicago, Illinois; died 1 December 1998 Daughter of Edwin H. and Elizabeth Taylor Lewis; married Yvor Winters, 1926 (died)
Lewis’ poetry is composed of short lyrics, usually in traditional forms, meticulously executed. In contrast to the darker themes of her fiction, her poetry is strongly affirmative. Her subjects—unfashionable in contemporary poetry—center in the contentments of domestic life. Although limited in range, these are not poems of complacency. Many are shaded by the one inevitable grief, the death of loved ones. A more inclusive theme is the spiritual discipline necessary to ‘‘combine despair and joy/ Into a stable whole,’’ as she writes in ‘‘Morning Devotion.’’ For Lewis this means a moral commitment to constancy, an adherence to rationally chosen, enduring values. The failure of such commitment, and its consequences, is the subject of one of her most moving poems, ‘‘Helen Grown Old,’’ in which Helen of Troy epitomizes a life ‘‘ruled by passion,’’ the threat of which, in assessing her own experience, Lewis is aware. In ‘‘The Candle Flame,’’ she acknowledges in her nature the variability that might turn loyalty into ‘‘a flickering vagrancy’’ leaving ‘‘nothing certain.’’ One of her finest love poems, ‘‘Old Love, ’’ is a tribute to an enduring marriage in which love eventually becomes ‘‘Love that is rooted deep,/ Quiet as friendship seeming,/ Secure as quiet sleep.’’ The ultimate wisdom, Lewis implies in ‘‘White Oak,’’ is to achieve a stability subject only to death. The human analogy for the metaphoric white oak, ‘‘Forever stirring in the air yet not/ Forsaking this one spot,’’ is that of living experience rooted in permanent values.
Lewis received a Bachelor of Philosophy degree from the University of Chicago. She then worked for a time at the American Consulate in Paris, in Chicago as a proofreader for Redbook and as a teacher. She married the poet and critic Yvor Winters and they settled in Los Altos, California, and had two children. Winters died in 1968. Lewis taught at Stanford and at other universities and received several awards. Lewis’ first novel, The Invasion (1932), established her talent for historical fiction. It is an account of the Johnston family, whose American ancestry began shortly after the Revolution, when John Johnston, an Irishman, settled with an Ojibway wife in northern Michigan. The effects of the gradual invasion by white settlers of Native American lands are background to the family history. Two subsequent novels take their sources from historical accounts of trials Lewis first encountered in the 19th century Famous Cases of Circumstantial Evidence. In The Trial of Sören Qvist (1947), set in 17th-century Denmark, Qvist is framed for murder, convicted, and executed. In The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941, 1985), the setting is 16th-century France. This is a classic novella telling the story of Bertrande de Rols, the child bride of Martin Guerre. When Bertrande’s husband presumably returns from war after long absence, her growing conviction the returning soldier is an impostor leads to a climactic trial that became a famous case in French jurisprudence. By focusing upon Bertrande, a devout young woman tormented by her love for two men, Lewis transforms a legal record into a moving domestic tragedy. In 1958, Lewis wrote a libretto based on her novel. In her most ambitious novel, The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron (1959, 1981), Lewis again deals with French history, during the reign of Louis XIV. Here two plots and two worlds interweave: the first plot concerns the discovery at the Court of Versailles of a libelous pamphlet against the King and the effort of the King’s authorities to find the man responsible; the second plot deals with the life of a devout and simple Parisian bookbinder, Jean Larcher. When Larcher is convicted upon circumstantial evidence of the crime against the King, the two plots merge, and the story becomes one of a wife’s infidelity and an ensuing tragedy of betrayal and revenge. The mark of Lewis’ fiction is craftsmanship, evident in the precision of her style, her command of historical detail, and her rigorous control of her narratives. Her approach to history is essentially dramatic; history provides her with the plots and settings of tragedy. Her interest is not in great historical personages, but in forgotten everyday lives where as with high tragedy,
Although Lewis has an excellent reputation among a select audience—mainly writers and poets themselves—she has not had the critical recognition merited by the quality of her work. Perhaps this is because she has never been a follower of fashion, and, in poetry, her production has been relatively small.
OTHER WORKS: Indians in the Woods (1922). The Friendly Adventures of Ollie Ostrich (1923). The Wheel in Midsummer (1927). Against a Darkening Sky (1943, 1985). Goodbye Son, and Other Stories (1946, 1986). The Earth-Bound (1946). Poems, 1924-1944 (1950). Keiko’s Bubble (1961). The Last of the Mohicans (libretto by Lewis, 1977). The Birthday of the Infanta (libretto by Lewis, 1977). Poems, Old and New: 1918-1978 (1981, 1982). The Swans (libretto by Lewis, 1986). The Legend (libretto by Lewis, 1987). Late Offerings (libretto by Lewis, 1988). Early Morning (1990). The Dear Past and Other Poems (1994). Janet and DeLoss: Poems and Pictures (1995). Morning Devotion: A Poem (1995). Garden Note: Los Altos, November (1997). The Invention of the Flute (1998). A Cautionary Note (1998).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Akard, J., Seen and Unseen: For Janet Lewis at 90 (1989). Carnochan, B. H., The Strength of Art: Poets and Poetry in the Lives of Yvor Winters and Janet Lewis (1984). Carnochan, B. H., Landscape, Memory & the Poetry of Janet Lewis (1995). Pearlman, M., Inter/view: Talks with America’s Writing Women (1990). Yalom, M. and Davis, M. B., eds.,
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Women Writers of the West Coast: Speaking of Their Lives and Careers (1983). Yvor Winters, Janet Lewis & Their Friends (1983). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCAS. Other references: NYRB (1998). Virginia Quarterly Review (Summer, 1993). —MARGARET PETERSON
LIBBEY, Laura Jean Born 22 March 1862, Brooklyn, New York; died 25 October 1925, New York, New York Daughter of Thomas H. and Elizabeth Nelson Libbey; married Van M. Stilwell, 1898 Laura Jean Libbey was one of this country’s most prolific writers of fiction, publishing some 80 volumes in her 30-year career as a popular novelist. Her fiction provided a formula for female escape literature which persists even into the present. Yet despite her productivity and popularity, Libbey’s current reputation is negligible and her biography obscure. Most of her novels were printed serially in newspapers, magazines, and the weekly ‘‘story papers,’’ and then reprinted in cheap paperbound editions. Few libraries kept these inexpensive copies of her once bestselling books. The obscurity of her biography is partly owing to Libbey’s own sense that her private life was not the public’s business. We do know she lived most of her life in Brooklyn, although as an adult she traveled continually in order to promote her books. On most of these journeys, the author was accompanied by her mother, a strict, domineering woman who governed Libbey’s life and forbade her daughter to marry. Libbey disobeyed this command only after her mother’s death in 1898. True to the heroines in her fiction, the popular novelist gave up her career upon marriage to a respectable husband. Only after nearly a decade of retirement could she be coaxed to work again. Libbey was a leading practitioner of the so-called working girl novel. These books about young, female proletarian protagonists netted the author over $50,000 a year, hardly a working-class income by any standard. All of the novels preached the same simple and not very original message: A young girl who remains virtuous (i.e., virginal) can ultimately expect to secure not only a husband and happiness, but a fortune too. Not one of the novels can be singled out from the Libbey canon since each, invariably, tells the same story, shares the same plot, preaches the same moral, and portrays the same heroes, heroines, villains, and villainesses. The books all include compulsory scenes depicting the harshness of city life, thus echoing a
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standard theme in much popular fiction of the last decade of the 19th century. Named little Leafy, pretty Guelda, or poor Faynie, the heroine attempts to make her way alone in the cruel city. After having been cast out of her idyllic rural home, often by a wicked stepmother or selfish foster parent, she finds she now must support herself and frequently must support indigent siblings as well. In a backhanded and almost ludicrously sentimentalized fashion, this formulaic plot attests to a changing pattern in the American labor force after the Civil War, when women were finding employment in increasing numbers, frequently in lowpaying factory jobs. But Libbey’s novels do not focus much on the actual working conditions endured by the female protagonists. Instead, the heroine’s energies are devoted to fending off often hostile masculine attentions. Only after a series of victimizations is the heroine finally rescued by the hero, a character both virtuous and prosperous. Their marriage presages happiness ever after and an end to both the threat of assault and the daily grind of a factory job. Although men are always the aggressors in these novels and the heroine’s moral character is never even questioned, it is interesting to note that the heroine alone is responsible for maintaining her virtue. The message of Libbey’s novels is a conservative one, and certainly one running counter to ideas endorsed by a growing number of feminists in late-19th-century America; but the credo she preached is of interest to the social historian. What Horatio Alger did for American working-class men, Libbey did for female readers: Alger’s heroes worked hard, took advantage of every opportunity, and against all odds realized the American dream. Libbey’s heroines worked hard too. But the 19th-century business world held few opportunities for women. So real success for Libbey’s heroines came through successful marriage. Her socially conservative fables, however we might object to them, spoke to millions of working-class women who needed a fantasy of their own to take them away from the real grime of the sweatshops, the bookbinderies, and the cotton mills.
OTHER WORKS: This is a representative list of Libbey’s novels, many of which are not even listed in the Library of Congress catalogues: A Fatal Wooing (1883). All for Love of a Fair Face; or, A Broken Betrothal (1885). Madolin Rivers; or, The Little Beauty of Red Oak Seminary: A Love Story (1885). A Forbidden Marriage; or, In Love with a Handsome Spendthrift (1888). Miss Middleton’s Lover; or, Parted on Their Bridal Tour (1888). Leonie Locke: The Romance of a Beautiful New York Working Girl (1889). Willful Gaynell; or, The Little Beauty of the Passaic Cotton Mills (1890). Little Leafy, the Cloak-maker’s Beautiful Daughter: A Romantic Story of a Lovely Working Girl in the City of New York (1891). A Master Workman’s Oath; or, Coralie the Unfortunate: A Love Story Portraying the Life, Romance, and Strange Fate of a Beautiful New York Working Girl (1892). Only a Mechanic’s Daughter: A Charming Story of Love and Passion (1892). Parted at the Altar (1893). A Handsome Engineer’s Flirtation; or, How He Won the Hearts of Girls (circa 1900). Was
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She Sweetheart or Wife (circa 1900). Wooden Wives: Is It a Story for Philandering Husbands? (1923). Several of Laura Jean Libbey’s letters and travel journals are in the Bonner Collection of the New York Public Library. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Denning, M., Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (1987). Noel, M., Villains Galore: The Heyday of the Popular Story Weekly (1954). Papashvily, H. W., All the Happy Endings (1956). Stein, L., Lives to Remember (1974). Reference works: NAW (1971). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: American Mercury (Sept. 1931). American Studies (Spring 1983). Historical Society of Michigan Chronicle (4th quarter 1975). MFS (Autumn 1977). —CATHY N. DAVIDSON
LINCOLN, Victoria Born 23 October 1904, Fall River, Massachusetts; died June 1981 Daughter of Jonathan T. and Louise Cobb Lincoln; married Isaac Watkins, 1927 (divorced 1933); Victor Lowe, 1934 Victoria Lincoln’s father was a well-to-do manufacturer of textile machinery. She grew up in a small mill town where she was educated in the public schools before attending Radcliffe. She wrote poetry from a rather early age. Lincoln married Isaac Watkins the year she graduated from Radcliffe, but was divorced in 1933. She married Lowe, a philosophy student, the following year and resided in Baltimore, where he taught at Johns Hopkins. Since her marriage, she dedicated herself to her art, producing an impressive number of novels and novellas, as well as volumes of short stories and poems originally published in such magazines as the New Yorker, Harper’s, and Cosmopolitan. Her most recent project was researching St. Teresa of Avila, which was published posthumously as Teresa, a Woman: A Biography of Teresa of Avila (1984). Lincoln’s most popular novel, February Hill (1934), appeared as a motion picture and play, The Primrose Path. The dry humor which characterizes the narrative tone counterpoints the outlandish vagaries of the characters. For instance, the Harrises’ shanty is described as a ‘‘brazen slattern of a place’’ and ‘‘a sort of architectural portrait of Grandma.’’ The bewigged, rouged matriarch lives with her golden-hearted prostitute daughter Minna; her three granddaughters (a virginal, innocent petty thief; a homely, soured mill worker; and a precocious youngster fast following in Minna’s footsteps); the moody philosopher brother; and their Harvard-educated, alcoholic father. Despite the burlesque qualities of the narrative, Lincoln prevents the novel from disintegrating into caricature by incorporating her firsthand knowledge of smalltown life through an excellent use of local color and dialect. The story has a sparkling vitality, and the simple philosophy of ‘‘People must be who they are’’ is amply suited to the youthful quality of the work.
The biographical novel Charles (1962) deals with ‘‘how Charles got to be the Dickens of the great middle-period’’ and is faithful to the facts. Despite her great love and admiration for Dickens, Lincoln describes him as ‘‘the near-miss great writer who would have been so much better if he had been capable of understanding what Mary Hogarth tried to tell him about his crippling sentimentality and arrivisme.’’ The characters appear more stylized and distanced than in her other works, but Lincoln’s wry humor is again pervasive. Lincoln seems most attuned to writing about minority groups and the poor. Although many of her characters border on caricature, she is at her best when writing about children and ‘‘innocents.’’ Their simplicity allows the presentation of a moral battlefield upon which to confront various complex issues. The Apache boy in ‘‘A Necklace for a Saint,’’ whose ‘‘body stiffened at the touch that sought to diminish his one possession, his precious grief,’’ eventually finds his place through a new flexibility born of compassion and humility combined with his innate moral sense. It is this vision of people’s suffering combined with their ‘‘capacity to ask questions, to find that singular occasional yes’’ that continually finds voice in Lincoln’s writing. As a writer, Lincoln has been unjustly neglected in recent years, just as her poetry was ignored during her writing career. Her use of metaphoric language combined with her often humorous and insightful elucidation of the human predicament, however, is not only entertaining, but richly rewarding. OTHER WORKS: The Swan Island Murders (1930). Grandmother and the Comet (1944). The Wind at My Back (1946). Celia Amberley (1949). Out from Eden (1951). The Wild Honey (1953). A Dangerous Innocence (1958). Desert Water (1963). Everyhow Remarkable (1967). A Private Disgrace: Lizzie Borden by Daylight (1967). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1975). Ohio Authors and Their Books (1962). TCAS. Other references: Booklist (1 June 1958). KR (July 1951). Nation (23 Nov. 1946). NY (26 April 1958). NYHTB (20 April 1958). NYT (28 Oct. 1934). WLB (March 1945). —FRANCINE SHAPIRO PUK
LINDBERGH, Anne Morrow Born 22 June 1906, Englewood, New Jersey Daughter of Dwight and Elizabeth Cutter Morrow; married Charles A. Lindbergh, 1929 (died); children: six. Born into a family devoted to books and scholarship, Anne Morrow Lindbergh learned to value education, self-discipline, and personal ambition from an early age. She acquired a sense of history firsthand from traveling with her parents throughout Europe. Lindbergh received a B.A. (1928) from Smith College, where she also earned recognition as a writer. With her marriage,
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the publicity engulfing her husband Charles extended to Lindbergh, shattering the privacy she had treasured. After her marriage she learned to fly, studied dead reckoning and celestial navigation, and became the first woman in America to obtain a glider-pilot’s license. Between 1931 and 1933 Lindbergh assisted her husband in charting the international air routes later used for commercial air travel. For her work as copilot and radio operator in flights exceeding 40,000 miles over five continents, the National Geographic Society awarded her the Hubbard Gold Medal in 1934. In the midst of these achievements the public curiosity haunting the Lindberghs reached frenzied levels with the kidnapping and murder of their twenty-month-old son in 1932. The tragedy and the prolonged investigation terminated with the conviction of Bruno Richard Hauptman. In December 1935, for protection and privacy, the Lindberghs left the U.S. for England, and later France; when World War II descended on Europe in 1939, the Lindberghs returned to the U.S. Since her husband’s death in 1974, Lindbergh has continued to occupy the family home in Darien, Connecticut, and maintained a residence on the Hawaiian island of Maui. Although her duties as celebrity and mother of a large family have drawn heavily on her energy, Lindbergh has never abandoned her writing career, producing both fiction and nonfiction throughout her life. In Gift from the Sea (1955), originally conceived as a series of autobiographical essays, Lindbergh presents a microcosm of modern American womanhood as contemplated by a solitary figure in retreat at a seashore. With attention to the effects of marriage on woman’s struggle for self-identity, Lindbergh traces the stages of marriage from the early self-contained relationship between man and woman, through the middle years weighed down with responsibilities, and finally to the mature marriage characterized by a newly acquired sense of freedom. With the abandoned argonauta, one of several seashells used to symbolize the different stages of marriage, Lindbergh offers her view of the ideal relationship: ‘‘the meeting of two whole fully developed people as persons.’’ Recognizing that the many demands of marriage hinder woman’s growth, Lindbergh advocates as a counterbalance to these demands periods of solitude devoted to creativity. If practiced, such creativity would yield self-knowledge. Having reaffirmed her faith in the power of solitude, Lindbergh leaves the seashore, strengthened by her reflections, especially by her awareness of the dynamic nature of life. With her customary modesty, she acknowledges that her answer to woman’s predicament is not definitive, except in her assertion that the desire for self-identity will persist. Moreover, she admits new problems will appear just as certainly as the ebb and flow of the sea continues. With this, her most significant work, Lindbergh reveals not only her poetic sensitivity but her insight into the nature of womanhood as well. A collection of her poetry, The Unicorn, and Other Poems (1956), presents the spiritual odyssey of an individual pursuing personal freedom. Throughout the poems, Lindbergh identifies the demons obstructing this pursuit, all the while attempting to destroy them. Irregular lyric forms appropriately capture her
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meandering reflections, just as images drawn from winter effectively support passages dealing with spiritual isolation in contrast to the aerial images signaling hope and joy. Lindbergh returned to the theme of marriage in her novel Dearly Beloved (1962). Writing in the tradition of the experimental novel, Lindbergh eschews simple narration in favor of the stream-of-consciousness technique as a means of revealing certain basic truths about marriage. Organized around the single event of a family wedding in a structure reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, the novel examines the different attitudes towards marriage held by the wedding guests. As the minister recites the traditional marriage formula and the guests reveal their innermost thoughts, the contradiction between religious precepts and experienced reality gradually emerges. With remarkable restraint but unabashed candor Lindbergh crushes the romantic myth surrounding marriage. In the final pages of the novel marriage is redefined simply as a state offering two people a unique opportunity for human growth; hence, a wedding should be a joyous occasion because it crystallizes this awareness. Although Lindbergh’s characters remain wooden with little interaction among them, they function effectively insofar as they represent different points of view in this ideational novel. Lindbergh’s literary themes have their genesis in several volumes of her letters and diaries. From these pages there emerges the figure of a sensitive individual with a penchant for writing, whose circumstances in life have plunged her into the maelstrom of public activity. The anxiety resulting from these conflicting forces and her determination to assert spiritual independence spill over into her writing, making it all of one piece. Lindbergh’s artistic forte lies in her ability to shape her themes into impressive forms. Since her themes are open-ended, her forms are appropriately organic: the lyric, the stream-ofconsciousness novel, the familiar essay. She manages aesthetic distance by objectifying nature. Seashells, barren trees, the sky, birds, and mountains are favorite images conveying her vision. Lindbergh’s astute handling of diverse forms and her instinct for selecting the near-perfect image have contributed to her reputation as a significant modern writer. Throughout the 1980s Lindbergh continued to write, living quietly and modestly. Yet in the next decade her family name was once again in the media, both print and television. As the century came to a close, a number of documentaries and books recounted the significant events of the last 100 years, and the Lindberghs were in the center of two: Lucky Lindy’s historical flight, and the tragic death of Charles, Jr., culminating in one of the ‘‘trials of the century.’’ Additionally, there were two exceptional biographies, one by renowned biographer Scott A. Berg, and the other by Lindbergh’s daughter Reeve. The latter, Under a Wing: A Memoir (1998), details the Lindberghs’ lives after Reeve and her siblings are born, none of them knowing about their slain older brother, yet sensing something dark and terrible had once occurred in their parents’s lives. The book’s title reflects Reeve’s impression of the Lindbergh children’s upbringing—sheltered, private, protected— as well as a reference to her father’s historic deed and its aftermath. Under a Wing: A Memoir also recounts Anne Morrow
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Lindbergh’s other losses—after her husband and firstborn—of daughter Anne to cancer and a young grandson (Reeve’s son) to encephalitis. These later losses brought mother and daughter together, united in their grief and determined to move through it with grace and dignity. OTHER WORKS: North to the Orient (1935). Listen! The Wind (1938). The Wave of the Future (1940). The Steep Ascent (1944). Earth Shine (1966). Bring Me a Unicorn: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1922-1928 (1971). Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead (1973, reissued as Hour of Lead: Sharing Sorrow 1986). Locked Rooms and Open Doors: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1933-1935 (1974). The Flower and the Nettle: Diaries and Letters, 1936-1939 (1976). War Within and Without: Diaries and Letters, 1939-1944 (1980). The People in Pineapple Place (1982). Bailey’s Window (1984). Hunky-Dory Diary (1986). Shadow on the Dial (1987). Nobody’s Orphan (1987). Next Time, Take Care (with S. Hoguet, 1988). Tidy Lady (1989). Prisoner of Pineapple Place (1990). Travel Far, Pay No Fee (1992). Three Lives to Live (1992). Nick of Time (1994). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Chadwick, R., Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Pilot and Poet (1987). Herrmann, D., Anne Morrow Lindbergh: A Gift for Life (1993). Latham-Jones, A., ‘‘Frames: A Script and Solo Performance of Selected Writings of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’’ (thesis, 1986). Mayer, E. F., My Window on the World: The Works of Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1988). Owens, E. S., The Phoenix and the Unicorn: A Study of the Published Private Writing of May Sarton and Anne Morrow Lindbergh (dissertation, 1982). Vaughan, D. K., Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1988). Woggon-Wheeler, K. M., ‘‘Embracing the feminine: The Thought of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’’ (thesis, 1991). Wurz, T., Anne Morrow Lindbergh— The Literary Reputation: A Primary and Annotated Secondary Bibliography (1988). Reference works: CA (1976). CB (Nov. 1940; June 1976). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCA, TCAS. Other references: Anne Morrow Lindbergh (audiocassette, 1981). America (28 Feb. 1968). NYT (10 June 1962). NYTBR (20 March 1955, 27 Feb. 1972). SR (2 April 1955, 12 Jan. 1957). —ELSIE F. MAYER, UPDATED BY NELSON RHODES
LINDBERGH, Reeve Born 20 October 1946, Darien, Connecticut Wrote under Reeve Lindbergh Brown Daughter of Charles Augustus and Anne Morrow Lindbergh; married Richard Brown; children: four Like Margaret Truman, another famous daughter-turned-writer, Reeve Lindbergh is the youngest child (of five) of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh (1902-1974) and Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Most of Lindbergh’s works are children’s books.
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Working with such illustrators as Tracey Campbell Pearson, Susan Jeffers, Steven Kellogg, Rachel Isadora, Kimberly Bulcken Root, and many more, Lindbergh’s words come to life for youngsters ranging in age from preschoolers to preteens. In The Midnight Farm (1987), probably Reeve’s most popular picture book, the secrets of the dark are revealed in beautiful scenes as a mother takes her child on a midnight tour of a farm, in order to help him overcome his fear of the dark. Next came Benjamin’s Barn (1989), another verse book, describing a magnificent barn, while the legendary apple tree planter, John Chapman, comes to life in Johnny Appleseed: A Poem (1990). In The Day the Goose Got Loose (1990), Lindbergh follows the reigning havoc at a farm as all the animals react to the goose’s escape by escaping themselves. With Philip S. Hart, Lindbergh also published Flying Free: America’s First Black Aviators (1992) for Lerner’s Space and Aviation Series for children, chronicling the achievements of pioneer African-American aviators. Lindbergh departed temporarily from children’s fiction with the release of The Names of the Mountains: A Novel (1992), the story of the family of a famous American aviator and hero, Cal Linley, as they band together to deal with the death of their father and the deteriorating mental capacity of their mother. Although the book has the standard declamation that all events are ‘‘fictitious’’ and any resemblance to persons living or dead is ‘‘purely coincidental,’’ the book very deeply mirrors Lindbergh’s own life and that of her famous family, including the death of Lindbergh’s two-year-old son in 1985 from encephalitis. View from the Air (1992) provides an enlightening view of humanity’s impact on the Earth from a pilot’s perspective as Lindbergh and photographer Richard Brown present a plea for conservation by the author’s father, Charles Lindbergh, combined with color photographs taken in the early 1970s, when Brown flew with Lindbergh during his last flights over rural New England. Returning to children’s fiction with Grandfather’s Lovesong (1993), Lindbergh gives a poetic description of the love between a boy and his grandfather using metaphors of nature throughout the seasons. There’s a Cow in the Road (1993) tells the story of a young girl, preparing for school, who is surprised by the number of barnyard animals gathering in the road outside her house. More Lindbergh verse finds voice in If I’d Known Then What I Know Now (1994), as the narrator’s father, who is still learning how, takes on another do-it-yourself project, from building their house to raising chickens and sheep, with disastrous yet comical results. What is the Sun? (1994) tells of a grandmother tucking her grandson into bed and answering his wondering questions with replies about the sun, moon, wind, and rain. In Nobody Owns the Sky: The Story of ‘‘Brave Bessie’’ Coleman (1996), Lindbergh again returns to famous aviators, this time celebrating the life of Bessie Coleman (1892-1926), the first licensed African-American aviator in the world, following her from picking cotton in Texas in the late 1800s to her trip to France and her barnstorming days in the United States. In 1997 Lindbergh returned to story books with North Country Spring, which contains rhyming verse and illustrations to
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describe the arrival of spring in the North and the emergence of the forest animals, as well as The Awful Aardvarks Go to School (1997), which tells an alphabetical story of the acts of destruction a group of mischievous aardvarks commit during their visit to a school. The Circle of Days (1998) contains Lindbergh’s rhymed retelling of St. Francis of Assisi’s The Canticle of the Sun (1225), an incantatory hymn of praise for all creation. In Under a Wing: A Memoir (1998), the first memoir written by a Lindbergh child about the family, Reeve reflects on both the fame and secrecy of her parents’ lives, their strengths and weaknesses, how the children were raised under a wing of protectiveness they never understood. It wasn’t until they were older and learned about their brother’s kidnapping, that the Lindbergh children began to understand. The book also delves into Lindbergh’s sister Anne’s death from cancer, as well as how she and her mother grew close when Lindbergh’s young son died. Lindbergh also wrote the introduction to the 1996 edition of her father’s book, The Spirit of St. Louis, a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1954, and is mentioned in many books about her family by others. Lindbergh has also been active in Vermont, with speaking engagements and serving on the state board of libraries. OTHER WORKS: Moving to the Country (1983). The View from the Kingdom: A New England Album (with Richard Brown, 1981). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Herrmann, D., Anne Morrow Lindbergh: A Gift for Life (1992). Lindbergh, C. A., The Spirit of St. Louis (1996). Berg, A. S., Lindbergh (1998). —DARYL F. MALLETT
LININGTON, Elizabeth Born Barbara Elizabeth Linington, 11 March 1921, Aurora, Illinois; died 5 April 1988 Also wrote under: Anne Blaisdell, Lesley Egan, Egan O’Neill, Dell Shannon Daughter of Byron and Ruth Biggam Linington Elizabeth Linington lived in California since 1928, graduating from Glendale College (B.A. 1942), where she began her writing career with radio and stage dramas. Her first novel, The Proud Man (1955), drew upon her family’s 19th-century Irish immigrant background and was followed by other historical novels, including The Long Watch (1956), California Commonwealth Club Gold Medal winner for best historical novel by a California author. She turned to the mystery novel in 1960. Under two pseudonyms and her own name, Linington has created four separate police routine series, each featuring a singular detective protagonist. Lt. Luis Mendoza, dapper, mannered Mexican-American sleuth, first appearing in Case Pending (1960) by Dell Shannon, lends class, Hispanic pride, and a sharp
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intelligence to the Los Angeles police department. Two series are by Lesley Egan: one with Detective Vic Varallo, an Italian rosefancier of the Glendale police (A Case for Appeal, 1961) and a second with a tandem: New England Sergeant Andrew Clock of the Los Angeles police and his confrere, lawyer and amateur detective Jesse Falkenstein, a subtly Jewish character who quotes the Talmud (Some Avenger, Rise!, 1966). As Elizabeth Linington, she created Sergeant Ivor Maddox, a dedicated Welsh bachelor of Hollywood’s Wilcox Avenue station (Greenmask!, 1965). A strong point of interest in Linington’s writing is her innovation of ethnic types endowed—most notably in the case of the Hispanic Mendoza—with a practical awareness of the pluralistic ethnic sociology of Los Angeles and its intercultural conflicts of race, class, politics, money, mores, and opportunity. The ethnicity of these characters, while not fully developed, actually predates the ethnic revolution of the 1960s. In their scrutiny and judgements of the problems of the ‘‘One Big City,’’ these books can also be considered in a more serious vein as novels of social problems or even modern novels of manners. Linington’s detailed documentation of everyday life gives a new twist to more conventional formula approaches to the police procedural detective story format. In Linington’s view, the detective novel is politically and ethically significant as the ‘‘morality play of the 20th century’’ and as a literary form whose influence and brilliance have both been overlooked and underestimated by critics and writers alike. Linington has been cited as ‘‘Queen of the Proceedurals’’ and has been compared to masters of the genre such as Ed McBain, John Creasey, and Dorothy Uhnak. She admittedly bases her knowledge of police routine and law not on direct experience but on the basic texts used by police departments themselves and, for specific plots, on detective magazines. Philosophically, she focuses on the theme of the irrationality of violence. Her concern is with the balance of good and evil within the delicate relationship between individual psychology and the social and political order. A Linington novel characteristically interweaves three or four distinct plot lines in a pattern that follows the natural outlines of actual police work rather than focusing on the ideal ‘‘single case’’ of crime fiction and drama. She also omits the customary summing-up scenario, forcing readers to trace the solution of the mystery backwards from the denouement themselves. Linington thus combines the conservatism of the law-and-order school of detective mystery with the style and art of the cerebral school to give her works an unusually broad appeal. OTHER WORKS: The Anglophile (1957). Monsieur Janvier (1957). The Kingbreaker (1958). The Ace of Spades (1961). Forging an Empire: Elizabeth I (for children, 1961). Nightmare (1961). The Borrowed Alibi (1962). Extra Kill (1962). The Knave of Hearts (1962). Against the Evidence (1963). Death of a Busybody (1963). Double Bluff (1963). Mark of Murder (1964). My Name is Death (1964). Root of All Evil (1964). Run to Evil (1964). The DeathBringers (1965). Death by Inches (1965). Come to Think of It
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(1965). Detective’s Due (1965). Coffin Corner (1966). Date with Death (1966). With a Vengeance (1966). Chance to Kill (1967). Nameless Ones (1967). Something Wrong (1967). Rain with Violence (1968). Kill with Kindness (1968). Policeman’s Lot (1968). A Serious Investigation (1968). Practice to Deceive (1969). Crime on Their Hands (1969). Schooled to Kill (1969). Wine of Violence (1969). In the Death of a Man (1970). Unexpected Death (1970). Whim to Kill (1970). The Ringer (1970). Malicious Mischief (1971). Murder, with Love (1972). Paper Chase (1972). With Intent to Kill (1972). Crime by Chance (1973). No Holiday for Crime (1973). Spring of Violence (1973). Crime File (1974). Deuces Wild (1975). Scenes of Crime (1976). Streets of Death (1976). Appearances of Death (1977). Blind Search (1977). Perchance of Death (1977). Cold Trail (1978). A Dream Apart (1978). Look Back on Death (1979). The Hunter and the Hunted (1979). Felony at Random (1979). Motive in Shadow (1980). Felony File (1980). A Choice of Crimes (1980). The Miser (1981). Murder Most Strange (1981). Random Death (1982). The Motive on Record (1982). Exploits of Death (1983). Little Boy Lost (1983). Crime for Christmas (1983). Destiny of Death (1984). Chain of Violence (1985). The Wine of Life (1985). Chaos of Crime (1985). Blood Count (1986). Murder By Tale (short stories, 1987). The Scalpel and the Sword (1987). The Dispossessed (1988). Alter Ego (1988). Sorrow to the Grave (1992). The papers of Elizabeth Linington are housed in the Mugar Memorial Library of Boston University. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Detecting Women (1994). Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (1994). St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (1996). Other references: Armchair Detective (1982). Writer (March 1967). —MARGARET J. KING
LIPPARD, Lucy R. Born 14 April 1937, New York, New York Daughter of Vernon W. and Margaret Cross Lippard; married Robert T. Ryman, 1961 (divorced); children: Ethan Lucy R. Lippard’s voice as an art critic and social activist has been making itself known in no uncertain terms for nearly 40 years. In addition to the important books of art criticism and art biography she’s authored, she has contributed essays, comments, and introductions to countless anthologies, exhibition catalogs, and other critical works, as well as editing a number of them. She has also curated numerous art exhibitions, including a show of conceptual art (‘‘955,000: An Exhibition,’’ Vancouver Art Gallery, 1970); a show centered around activism by women artists (‘‘Issue: Social Strategies by Women Artists: An Exhibition,’’ London, Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1980); and the art of the Vietnam War (‘‘A Different War: Vietnam in Art,’’ Whatcom Museum of History and Art, Bellingham, Washington, 1990).
Lippard was born in 1937 into a family of ‘‘good liberals,’’ and a family familiar with the academic life (her father was dean of Yale University Medical School). She grew up in New York, Louisiana, and Virginia. She attended Smith College, where she received her B.A. in 1958, and then went to New York University, where in 1962 she received an M.A. from the Institute of Fine Arts. She has been based in New York City for many years. Lippard started writing about art in the 1960s, initially writing from a position that supported the aesthetics of minimalism. Lippard also wrote extensively on conceptualism. It was following a trip to Buenos Aires (during which she met Argentine artists who, in response to corruption in the art world, simply stated that they wouldn’t make art until the world changed) that Lippard turned her primary interest and attention to activism and social responsibility in art. Upon returning to New York, she joined the Art Workers Coalition, an active group of antiwar artists. She also began identifying herself as a feminist and started writing extensively about women artists and feminist issues relating to art. A number of Lippard’s books have become standards of art historical criticism, including Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966-1972 (1973) and Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory (1983). Her biographies of Eva Hesse (Eva Hesse, 1976) and Ad Reinhardt (Ad Reinhardt, 1981) are likewise recognized as the standards in the field. Lippard is most decidedly a living example of a socially committed artist. Her involvement as a writer with a range of socially aware and active art production is extensive, and her support of the artists involved is significant not only to the artists themselves, but more importantly in its potential to impact and help shape the larger art world. She has been involved with art projects as various as Partial Recall (1992), a book on Native American portrait photography, to an interview with the Guerrilla Girls (a group of anonymous women artists who have dedicated themselves to informing the public of the inequality that persists in the art world with respect to women artists and their work). Lippard has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship (1968), National Endowment for the Arts grants in 1972-73 and 1976-77, and the Frank Jewett Mather award for criticism in 1976. In the 1990s, Lippard turned her attention to art production centered on such important issues as multiculturalism and environmentalism. Her book Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America (1990) has ‘‘quickly become a fixture in college art history courses and required reading for anyone interested in the subject,’’ according to an article in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution. ‘‘It’s a major, pioneering book, enormously important,’’ said Judith Bettelheim, an art history professor at San Francisco State University specializing in African and Caribbean art. ‘‘Nobody’s ever tried to tell the other side of the diamond—the nonwhite male version of art history.’’ Ms. Lippard considers her seven-year effort ‘‘just the beginning’’ of a substantive look at artists of color. ‘‘This isn’t the be-all and end-all, and these aren’t the only artists. I kept finding artists up until the end. The art was there. You just had to look for it.’’ Lippard’s most recent book, On the Beaten Track: Tourism, Art and Place (1999),
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is about the way in which tourism affects, and in some way shapes, the perception of art and art history. OTHER WORKS: Graphic Work of Philip Evergood (1966). Pop Art (1966). Changing: Essays in Art Criticism (1971). From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art (1976). I See/You Mean: A Novel (1979). Get the Message? A Decade of Art for Social Change (1984). A Different War: Vietnam in Art (1990). The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Essays on Feminist Art (1995). The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society (1997). BIBLIOGRAPHY: ANR 20. Atlanta Journal and Constitution (20 Oct. 1992). LAT (31 Mar. 1991). —JESSICA GRIM
LIPPINCOTT, Martha Shepard Born Moorestown, New Jersey; died 10 August 1949, West Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Daughter of Jesse and Elizabeth Homes Lippincott Although born in New Jersey, Martha Shepard Lippincott lived most of her life in Pennsylvania. The Quaker experience was an important part of her life, and she was commonly known as the Quaker Poetess. She attended Friends’s High School and later Swarthmore College. In 1886 she began writing poetry, and after 1895 she made writing her life’s work. In all she wrote 4,444 poems and sacred songs and 836 book reviews, articles, and stories which appeared in religious and secular publications in the U.S., Canada, England, Ireland, and Scotland. Many of her songs appeared in hymnbooks. Lippincott published only one book of verse, Visions of Life (1901). This anthology opens with a series of poems on the stages of female life and the distinct vision of reality which emerges in each stage. Infancy, childhood, maidenhood, womanhood, motherhood, widowhood, and death are examined. Basically, Lippincott’s world view is optimistic; however, she sees that joy and sorrow become more firmly intertwined as one ages. The delights of childhood and the dreams of maidenhood are replaced by the sorrow and the possibly deeper joys that come with marriage and motherhood. Although Lippincott never married, the suffering of married women is a central theme of a number of her poems. Her view is that married life is difficult and that women suffer most in the marital relationship. She admonishes the young to marry only for love, for it is only true love which can sustain husband and wife and draw them closer together. In a number of long poems, Lippincott explores the horrors of liquor and the suffering it causes both wives and children. She describes the drunken husband who, seeking his own pleasure, squanders his money and, enslaved to liquor, destroys both his marriage and his family. Lippincott hails prohibition as a holy crusade blessed by God to rid the world of alcohol and its
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pernicious consequences. She urges men to use the vote to support this holy work. Although the dominant theme of this anthology is the problems and visions of female life, Lippincott also includes a substantial number of nature poems. Lippincott’s other interests are manifest in diverse inclusions such as the autobiographical poem, ‘‘The Poet’s Faith,’’ and ‘‘Frances Willard,’’ a poem dedicated to the female educator. Her concern for her own religious tradition is obvious in the poems ‘‘Friends’ Ministry’’ and ‘‘Quaker Bonnet.’’ Although Lippincott’s style is often didactic and saccharine, her poetry is distinctive on a number of counts. She reflects with great sympathy the full range of emotions and hopes experienced by women throughout their life cycle and points out the intimate connections between social problems and female suffering. Finally, as a member of the Society of Friends, a religious group which historically eschewed artistic expression, Lippincott offers prolific examples of poetry marked by a deep religious faith. —DANA GREENE
LIPPINCOTT, Sara Jane (Clark) Born 23 September 1823, Pompey, New York; died 20 April 1904, New Rochelle, New York Also wrote under: Sara J. Clarke, Grace Greenwood, Mrs. L. K. Lippincott Daughter of Thaddeus and Deborah Baker Clarke; married Leander K. Lippincott, 1853 The youngest daughter among 11 children of a physician and a great-granddaughter of Jonathan Edwards, Sara Jane Lippincott spent her childhood near Syracuse, New York, and attended school for eight years in Rochester, New York. When she was nineteen, she moved with her family to New Brighton, Pennsylvania. Lippincott’s first poems appeared in Rochester papers, and in 1844 her verse was published in N. P. Willis’s New Mirror. Soon she wrote prose and informal letters for the Mirror and Home Journal under the pseudonym ‘‘Grace Greenwood.’’ Later she worked as a journalist and correspondent for Godey’s Lady’s Book, Graham’s, Sartain’s, the Saturday Evening Post, the abolitionist National Era, the New York Times, and the New York Tribune. Throughout her career, because of her Puritan heritage or her own staunch sense of right, Lippincott spoke out strongly for such causes as abolition, woman suffrage, prison reform, and Colorado’s right to statehood and against capital punishment. Her marriage was unhappy. Lippincott and her husband Leander were coeditors of the early and highly popular juvenile magazine the Little Pilgrim (1853-75), but in 1876 Leander fled the country and disappeared after being indicted for embezzlement connected with his job at the Department of the Interior. Greenwood Leaves (1850), Lippincott’s first bestseller, epitomizes mid-19th century taste. It combines saccharine and sentimental tales and sketches (‘‘Sly Peeps into the Heart Feminine,’’
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
‘‘A Spring Flower Faded’’) with a series of lively informal letters and parodies of Poe, Melville, Longfellow, and other authors. The letters, though often prolix and gushing, give promise of the journalism that would later be Lippincott’s forte. Haps and Mishaps of a Tour in Europe (1854) was another Greenwood bestseller and was still being reprinted in the 1890s. A lively and often humorous account of her journey alone to England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Germany, and Italy, it records visits to literary and historical sites, prisons, almshouses, and lunatic asylums and meetings with literary, artistic, and political lions. Haps and Mishaps mixes sentiment and gush, American chauvinism, and some of the dry Yankee wit later to be fully developed in Twain’s The Innocents Abroad. As in the first and second series of Greenwood Leaves, the most interesting parts are the segments of straight reporting, especially Lippincott’s impressions of people. Merrie England (1855), like Bonnie Scotland (1861) and other juvenile works, first appeared in the Little Pilgrim. Linked with sites she visited on her first trip to Europe are ‘‘tales’’ or ‘‘historical sketches.’’ Most of the history presented is highly suspect by modern standards and often seems comic in its invention and moralizing: ‘‘But the neighbors all shook their heads wisely, and said, ‘Mrs. Shakespeare is spoiling that boy; he’ll never make the man his father is.’ I am sorry to say that, as he grew out of boyhood, the young poet fell into rather wild ways.’’ Heavy morality, sentimentality, and emphasis on sickbed and deathbed scenes typify many of Lippincott’s tales for children. In Nelly, the Gypsy Girl (1863), written for the General Protestant Episcopal Sunday School Union and Church Book Society, the eponymous heroine is no Romany, but a motherless girl who reforms her dissipated father by reading him the parable of the prodigal son. Her father then effects a reconciliation with his father, who, ‘‘the gout having reached his stomach,’’ dies and leaves him £10,000. Nelly and her father devote their lives to good works (improving the vicarage school and playground, founding a training school for servants) until her father dies. Much of Lippincott’s best writing is in accounts of her travels in Europe during the 1870s and 1880s written for the Independent, after she stopped gushing. Her power and charm continued in letters from Washington, D.C., written through the 1890s and even into the 20th century. Once-popular books by ‘‘Grace Greenwood’’ have now been largely forgotten, while the works of contemporaries she far outsold in her lifetime (e.g., Thoreau and Melville) have become American classics. Her poetry, sentimental tales and sketches, and children’s books merit obscurity, but her strong-minded, firsthand reporting still deserves and rewards attention. OTHER WORKS: History of My Pets (1851). Poems (1851). Greenwood Leaves, Second Series (1852). Recollections of My Childhood, and Other Stories (1852). A Forest Tragedy (1856). Old Wonder-Eyes (1857). Stories and Legends of Travel and History (1857). Stories from Famous Ballads (1859). Records of Five Years (1867). Stories and Sights of France and Italy (1867).
LITTLE
Stories of Many Lands (1867). New Life in New Lands (1873). Heads and Tails: Studies and Stories of My Pets (1874). Emma Abbott, Prima Donna (1878). Treasures from Fairy Land (with R. W. Raymond, 1879). Queen Victoria: Her Girlhood and Womanhood (1883). Some of My Pets (1884). Stories for HomeFolks, Young and Old (1884). Stories and Sketches (1892). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hart, J. S., Female Prose Writers of America (1852). Pattee, F. L., The Feminine Fifties (1940). Marzolf, M., Up From the Footnote: A History of Women Journalists (1977). Rosh, I., Ladies of the Press: The Story of Women in Journalism by an Insider (1936). Thorp, M. F., Female Persuasion (1949). Reference works: AA. American Female Poets (1854). American Literary Manuscripts. AW (1897). CAL. DAB. Eminent Women of the Age (1869). FPA (1857). NAW (1971). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Woman’s Record (1853). Other references: AL (Jan. 1938). Atlantic (June 1859, Sept. 1859). New England Quarterly (Dec. 1985). NYT (21 April 1904). —SUSAN SUTTON SMITH
LITTLE, Sophia (Louisa) Robbins Born 1799, Newport, Rhode Island; died circa 1870s, Boston, Massachusetts Wrote under: Sophia Louisa Little Daughter of Asher Robbins; married William Little, Jr., 1824 Biographical information about Sophia Little is sparse. Her mother’s name and the date of Little’s death are not listed in any of the standard biographical sources. Allibone’s Critical Dictionary of English Literature and American Authors (1891) cites two works by Little, Pilgrim’s Progress in the Last Days (1843) and The Betrothed (1844), which are not listed in the National Union Catalog. It may be that these works are no longer extant, as most of her work was privately printed in limited quantity. Little’s books are therefore extremely rare, and most are not circulated by the libraries holding them. She was both an abolitionist and a temperance advocate, and her prose works are primarily vehicles for spreading these gospels. The Branded Hand: A Dramatic Sketch, Commemorative of the Tragedies at the South in the Winter of 1844-5 (1845) is Little’s tribute to Jonathan Walker, an abolitionist who was branded with the letters ‘‘SS’’ (slave stealer) for aiding slaves to escape from Florida to the West Indies. Thrice Through the Furnace: A Tale of the Times of the Iron Hoof (1852), another book on abolition, deals with the trials of Gilbert and Marian, Sedley Livingston’s mulatto children, who are sold when his wife can no longer stand their resemblance to the Livingston family. They are purchased by Arthur St. Vallery, a cousin who wants Marian for a concubine. Aided by the Freemans, a Quaker family
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that defies the newly legislated Fugitive Slave Act, Marian and Gilbert escape. Arthur pursues them until he meets Aimee Freeman, who converts him and wins his heart. Marian and Gilbert are reunited with their slave sweethearts, Jasmyn and Cornelia, whom Arthur frees. All three couples marry and live together harmoniously on Arthur’s land. The Reveille; or, Our Music at Dawn (1854) is the story of Jerry Woodliffe, a reformed alcoholic who tries to remain sober despite the evil machinations of the Rum Club, a cabal of saloon keepers who strive to get Jerry publicly drunk to discredit the temperance movement. Some of Jerry’s friends, all ex-alcoholics, succumb to rum cake served to them on Election Day by one of the plotters. Others are trapped by spiked ‘‘temperance punch.’’ Jerry is lured by a rum-tainted glass of soda, but Mary, his vigilant wife, saves him by demolishing the grog shop. As she smashes the bottles, the other wives cheer her on. The temperance movement is victorious. Little’s religious poetry is a cycle depicting the life of Jesus. The first part, The Last Days of Jesus (1839), was first published by itself. Little then added sections on the Annunciation, Birth, and Resurrection. This work was printed several times, in various stages of completion. Little’s novels are very thin in both plot and characterization. The sufferings, romances, and narrow escapes are all very trite and predictable. Gilbert and Marian, the uneducated slaves, posture and soliloquize like Hamlet. The Rum Club plotters, who rejoice in names such as Stillworm and Rockheart, are clearly cartoons, not people. These books are interesting period pieces, but they were never literature. Little’s poetry, however, has considerable merit. It is lyrical and emotional, but not effusive. Her verses have rhyme, meter, dignity, and restraint. Little’s intellect and artistic sense are very much in control here. Although the religious subject matter, epic length, and poetic diction of these pieces are not in keeping with modern tastes, these works are a fine example of 19th century popular art. OTHER WORKS: The Birth, Last Days, and Resurrection of Jesus: Three Poems (1841). Poems (1841). Pentecost (1869). Massacre at Fort Griswold and Burning of New London, September 6, 1781: A Poem (n.d.). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CAL. FPA. —ZOHARA BOYD
LIVERMORE, Harriet Born 14 April 1788, Concord, New Hampshire; died 30 March 1868, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Daughter of Edward St. Loe and Mehitable Harris Livermore Evangelist and religious author, Harriet Livermore was the third of five children and a descendant of Samuel Livermore, U.S.
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Senator from New Hampshire. Her father, an attorney, was a justice of the New Hampshire supreme court. Her mother died when she was five. Livermore is noted for the zeal and fervor which marked her personality. Even as a child, she demonstrated fits of temper severe enough to concern her family. At eight, Livermore was sent to a girl’s boarding school in Haverhill, Massachusetts, and later attended the Byfield Seminary and the Atkinson (New Hampshire) Academy. Her beauty and conversational abilities were highlighted during a visit to Washington, D.C., when she was twenty; socialites of the city were taken with her intelligence, vivacity, and wit. In 1811, she was engaged to Moses Elliott; his parents, however, forbade the liaison, feeling that a woman of such ‘‘excitable and stormy temperament’’ could not insure his happiness. Livermore herself noted this turning point: she ‘‘fled to the name and form of religion, as a present sanctuary from the sorrows of life.’’ In her view, it would be chastisement for her ‘‘wild and irregular’’ disposition. Livermore’s works are entirely religious in nature, and most have seen little public success. They parallel her life in that each grew from her evangelical travels and her personal search for religious creed. Raised in the Episcopal church, she turned to Quakerism, then Congregationalism; later, she became a Baptist, but left formal religion to become the self-named ‘‘Pilgrim Stranger.’’ But while her writings are impassioned, effusive, and sincere, they most often are directionless, marred by organizational deficiencies and Livermore’s increasing personal eccentricity. One of her more lucid efforts, A Narration of Religious Experience (1826), documents her turn to spirituality and evangelism with Livermore’s own testimony that her escape was prompted by the ‘‘sorrows of life’’ and her unfortunate love affair. The Narration is essentially her autobiography to 1826; she realized that people thought her crazy but insisted on seeking religious truth by her own means. In 1824, she suffered a breakdown, and afterwards reevaluated for a final time her myriad denominational inclinations. The Narration epitomizes the religious attitudes guiding Livermore’s writing. When she fell ill in 1824, a voice told her: ‘‘This is to punish you for your infidelity to your master.’’ Out of Livermore’s conviction that Christ’s return was imminent came her book, The Harp of Israel, to Meet the Loud Echo in the Wilds of America (1835). For this, she journeyed through hazardous territory to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to seek out the Native Americans, although local officials prevented her from spreading the gospel. The Harp is a work of subjective evangelism. It depicts Livermore’s fervor in converting the Native Americans, identified in her text as the lost tribes of Israel, through inspirational prose and poetry. A Testimony for the Times (1843) focuses on the conversion and ‘‘condition’’ of the Jewish people and state. While her tract is not wholly anti-Semitic, she indicates that Christ would rule on David’s throne over the Israelite tribes, the Jews first having to suffer for their rejection of the gospel. Her Christ was due in 1847. By this time, the marked eccentricities of both woman and writer forced even formerly steadfast supporters to abandon her.
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
LIVERMORE
In ‘‘Snowbound’’ (1866), John Greenleaf Whittier described Livermore as ‘‘A woman tropical, intense / In thought and act, in soul and sense / She blended in a like degree / The vixen and the devotee.’’ Although she eloquently spoke and ministered before Congress and her speaking abilities were said to be ‘‘glorious,’’ Livermore’s prose writings, adhering to the idiom of early-19thcentury evangelical writing, are obscure and stylistically inaccessible to the general public. Livermore had hoped that she would be a role model, inspiring other women to greater participation in the church. But her ever-increasing solitude ironically removed her from those she would have reached; this and the impenetrability and extremism of her writings made her even more the ‘‘solitary traveler.’’ Despite an inner strength and conviction, her work is, sadly, a curiosity and not of literary merit. OTHER WORKS: Scriptural Evidence in Favour of Female Testimony in Meetings for Christian Worship in Letters to a Friend (1824). An Epistle of Love, Addressed to the Youth and Children of Germantown, Pennsylvania, County of Philadelphia (1826). A Wreath from Jessamine Lawn; or, Free Grace, the Flower That Never Fades (1831). A Letter to John Ross, the Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation (1838). Millenial Tidings (1839). The Counsel of God, Immutable and Everlasting (1841). Glory of the Lord in the Land of the Living by Redemption of the Purchased Possession (1842). Addresses to the Dispersed of Judah (1849). Thoughts on Important Subjects (1864). The Sparrow (n.d.). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Adams, M. Q., Memoirs, Vols. 10 and 12 (1876, 1877). Livermore, S. T., Harriet Livermore, the ‘‘Pilgrim Stranger’’ (1884). Thwing, W. E., The Livermore Family of America (1902). Reference works: Career Women of America (1776-1840), E. A. Dexter, ed. (1950). NAW (1971). Other references: NEQ (March 1945). —DEBORAH H. HOLDSTEIN
LIVERMORE, Mary (Ashton) Rice Born 19 December 1821, Boston, Massachusetts; died 23 May 1905, Melrose, Massachusetts Daughter of Timothy and Zebiah Ashton Rice; married Daniel P. Livermore, 1845; children: three daughters, one of whom died in infancy The fourth but first surviving child of an English sea captain’s daughter and a workingman of Welsh background, Mary Rice Livermore was educated in the public and private schools of Boston and at Martha Whiting’s Female Seminary of Charlestown, Massachusetts. She taught Latin and French at the seminary, made an unsuccessful attempt to matriculate at Harvard, and spent three years as a tutor on a large Virginia plantation with 500 slaves, an
experience which converted her to strong antislavery views. She returned to Massachusetts as head of a private coeducational school in Doxbury, where she met and married a Universalist minister. They were parents of three daughters, two of whom survived to adulthood. Livermore began writing for juveniles in 1844, publishing stories, sketches, and poems in religious periodicals and newspapers. The Children’s Army (1844) is a collection of such stories— simple fiction with obvious plots detailing the evils of drink. A Mental Transformation (1848) is probably autobiographical, describing her own rejection of Baptism for Universalism. In 1857 she moved to Chicago with her husband. He became editor of the New Covenant, a Universalist newspaper, for which she acted as associate editor, writing for every section of the paper. Livermore was the only woman reporter at the 1860 national Republican convention. During the Civil War, Livermore volunteered her services to the Sanitary Commission. She headed the Chicago office (with Jane Hoge), made frequent speaking tours, organized the Sanitary Fair of 1863, and collected money and large quantities of supplies for the Union armies, meanwhile writing graphic accounts of her activities for the New Covenant and other papers. After the war she joined the woman suffrage and temperance movements and was president of several associations in both movements. In 1869 she established The Agitator, a suffrage paper which merged with the Woman’s Journal in 1870. She edited the Journal for two years, resigning in 1872 to devote herself to lecturing, a career she pursued until 1895. She continued her support of suffrage and temperance causes, using the lecture platform as a forum. Livermore’s fame in the 19th century was based largely on her popularity as a lecturer, and her published lectures constitute an important segment of her work. Her style is conversational, interspersed with humor and homely examples. The ‘‘woman question’’ and her commitment to feminism are central themes, although she also lectured on temperance and historical figures, usually women. Aside from her lectures, Livermore’s major works are her autobiographies, which sold very well. She wrote the first of these, My Story of the War: A Woman’s Narrative (1888), because she felt the postwar literature had neglected the common soldier. Her purpose may have been to give the common soldier his due, but much of the volume’s emphasis is on the role played by women in the hospitals, on the field of battle, and at home running the farms and staffing the factories. The Story of My Life (1897) fills out her reminiscences with material on her early and later life and adds further material on the Civil War. The memoirs are composed in straightforward narrative style, interspersed with skillful dialogue. In her accounts of her plantation experiences, she reproduces with a good ear the dialect of both blacks and whites in the antebellum South. Her descriptions of plantation life are vivid and surprisingly objective. Livermore’s literary contribution was as an editor and journalist; she did not see herself as a major literary figure. She
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launched the Woman’s Journal, a major publication of the women’s movement, and shepherded it through the crucial first two years. Her emphasis on women’s rights brought unfavorable criticism early in her career, but this did not deter her from continuing to say what she felt needed to be said or seemingly interfere with her popularity. With Frances Willard, she edited that formidable biographical compilation, A Woman of the Century (1893), which Leslie Shepard has called more than a reference book, rather a major record of the emancipation of American women. OTHER WORKS: Thirty Years Too Late: A Temperance Story (1845). Nineteen Pen Pictures (1863). What Shall We Do with Our Daughters? and Other Lectures (1883). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brockell, L. P., and M. C. Vaughan, Woman’s Work in the Civil War (1867). Hanson, E. R., Our Women Workers (1882). Newberry, J. S., The U.S. Sanitary Commission in the Valley of the Miss. (1871). Thwing, W. E., The Livermore Family of America (1902). Whiting, L., Women Who Have Ennobled Life (1915). Wittenmyer, A., History of the Woman’s Crusade (1882). Reference works: AA. AW. NAW. NCAB 3. —RUTH BORDIN
LIVINGSTON, Myra Cohn Born 17 August 1926, Omaha, Nebraska; died 23 August 1996 Daughter of Mayer Louis and Gertrude Marks Cohn; married Richard R. Livingston, 1952; children: three As a child, Livingston wrote poetry and plays (which were produced at school) and showed a talent for music, winning a national competition on the French horn. ‘‘Whispers’’ (1946), written while Livingston was a freshman at Sarah Lawrence College, was her first published poem. After graduation, Livingston wrote book reviews and did public relations work. She continued to write poetry while her three children were growing up. Very interested in education, she was poet-in-residence for the Beverly Hills School District. The collections of Livingston’s poetry can be divided into two groups: those for the very young and those for children in the middle and late elementary school grades. Some of the former contain short unrhymed prose poems built around a particular topic; the most highly regarded volumes are I’m Hiding (1961), See What I Found (1962), and I’m Waiting (1966). Others of Livingston’s books for young children are random collections in varying moods and meters about the oddities and joys of daily life. Livingston writes simply and directly from the child’s point of view about things that please and puzzle the preschooler. The poems are very short, seldom more than 8 or 10 lines, and are
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intended to be shared with children in those brief moments when their attention can be caught. On the whole, the poems project a certain charm as they show how children can find magic in simple, everyday things, but they are repetitive, uneven, and sometimes strained. The expression lacks the melody and fun with words that small children most enjoy in their poetry. Livingston’s poems for the very young mirror the child’s world rather than extend it imaginatively. Later poems, in collections such as Old Mrs. Twindlytart, and Other Rhymes (1967) and A Crazy Flight, and Other Poems (1969), continue the refreshing unpretentiousness and honesty of her earlier ones, but they show a changing perspective and increasing attention to broader matters that direct them toward a somewhat older audience. In general, these later poems are longer; forms, subjects, and moods are more varied; and there is less repetition. While these are also inconsistent in quality, they are more melodious, less prosy, and reveal a deftness and adventurousness of expression that the earlier poems lack. In When You Are Alone / It Keeps You Capone: An Approach to Creative Writing with Children (1973), Livingston presents the philosophy behind her own writing and teaching, along with practical suggestions for helping children express themselves poetically. She maintains that exposing children from their earliest years to good poetry is essential for stimulating them to write well: ‘‘The sharing of poetry, wherever one is, in the classroom or library or at home, is intrinsic to the development of the imagination and the humanization of child and adult alike.’’ Her articles (Horn Book, Dec. 1975 and Feb. 1976) deploring current methods of teaching children to write and the tendency of adults to rate poetry done by children higher than it should be have resulted in a reexamination of attitudes toward children’s writing. A capable poet, an anthologist noted for several collections of poetry by other writers, and a respected critic, Livingston became a leading influence in the world of literature for children. OTHER WORKS: Whispers, and Other Poems (1958). Wide Awake, and Other Poems (1959). I Talk to Elephants! (1962). I’m Not Me (1963). Happy Birthday! (1964). The Moon and a Star, and Other Poems (1965). The Malibu, and Other Poems (1972). Come Away (1974). The Way Things Are, and Other Poems (1974). Four-Way Stop, and Other Poems (1976). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Allman, B., et al eds., Children’s Authors and Illustrators (1991). Copeland, J. S., Speaking of Poets: Interviews with Poets Who Write for Children and Young Adults (1993). Larrick, N., Somebody Turned on a Tap in These Kids (1971). Mahmoud, L. V., ed., Books Remembered: Nurturing the Budding Writer (1997). Sutherland, A., and M. H. Arbuthnot, Children and Books (1977). Reference works: Anthology of Children’s Literature (1970). Books Are by People (1969). CA (1967). SATA (1973). Other references: Booklist (June 1995). Instructor (Oct. 1992). —ALETHEA K. HELBIG
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
LOCKE, Jane (Erminia) Starkweather Born 25 April 1805, Worthington, Massachusetts; died 8 March 1859, Ashburnham, Massachusetts Wrote under: Jane E. Locke Daughter of Charles and Deborah Brown Starkweather; married John G. Locke, 1829; children: seven A deacon’s daughter, Jane Starkweather Locke reflects in her work the religious and patriotic idealism nurtured in her childhood home. Her uncle Ezra was a Massachusetts state senator and a member of the Constitutional Convention of 1820, as was Locke’s father-in-law, John Locke. She was the youngest of 10 children. Locke followed her husband to New York shortly after their marriage. The first of their seven children was born there; three of the children were to die in early childhood, and only one, Grace LeBaron Upham, was to survive to adulthood. The family settled in Lowell (1833) and in Boston (1849). While John pursued a career in business and government service, Jane cared for the children and pursued her own literary interests. Locke’s first collection of poetry is Miscellaneous Poems (1842). In the preface, the author tells us that the poems were written ‘‘for the most part. . .to relieve the soul of what would cumber it unuttered.’’ The poems range in subject from reminiscences of her childhood home to expressions of love and concern for husband and children, and beyond this family circle to acknowledgements of the genial accomplishments of others— mostly contemporaries. One important aspect of Locke’s poetry is the evidence of sincere personal concerns and beliefs pertaining to women. A poem entitled ‘‘To an Infant,’’ dated 11 August 1837, commemorates the birth of her first daughter. However, rather than greet the child in cheerful language, Locke bemoans the estate the child inherits: the wearisome toil of woman’s daily existence. Despite this pessimistic, recurrent theme, in other poems Locke stresses in stronger, more positive language another aspect of woman’s existence: motherhood. Two of the most notable examples of this latter theme can be found in the poems ‘‘Mount Holyoke Seminary’’ and ‘‘A Poem Adapted to the Times.’’ In the former, Locke compares the glories of the school in Northampton to those of the Propylaea at Athens and says, ‘‘To learning’s inner temple here / Pass mothers of the race.’’ That Locke believes generations of educated women will produce generations of enlightened men, implicit here, is explicit in the latter poem, which also reflects her sympathy with the abolitionist movement: ‘‘An influence benign she will exert. . . In childhood hearts, that, hence, man’s common acts / Will be but deeds of charity and love, / And the forged bands of the dark slave fall off, Spontaneous and uninvoked.’’ Locke’s firm, patriotic vision is set forth in a 46-page poem entitled Boston: A Poem (1846), dedicated ‘‘to the names of Appleton and Lawrence.’’ In it, Locke honors scientists, educators, and working men and women, as well as industrialists, all of whom, she believes, contributed to the economic and academic well-being of the ‘‘Athens of America.’’
LOGAN
In Rachel; or, The Little Mourner (1844), Locke touches with astute sensitivity the problematic situation of the Christian who must try to reconcile joyful belief in eternal life with very real sorrow and pain at the earthly parting. The Recalled, in Voices of the Past, and Poems of the Ideal (1854) is a collection of poetry that reflects the more mature mind at work. Rather than a random selection of poetry gathered almost at whim, Locke arranges this volume in four sections. ‘‘Voices of the Past’’ commemorates public occasions, historic events, and the achievements of prominent personages and includes ‘‘Requiem for Edgar A. Poe,’’ whom Locke knew. The poems in ‘‘Passages from Life’’ are autobiographical, but Locke is more selective than in Miscellaneous Poems. Love filtered through Christian belief is reflected in personal poems such as ‘‘One Thousandth Imitation of an Old Song,’’ written for her husband, and ‘‘Proverbs,’’ written to her son. Throughout all of her work, Locke alludes to the ‘‘ideal,’’ which is also the subject of the third section in ‘‘Poems of the Ideal.’’ Her most philosophical offering, ‘‘The Sisters of Avon,’’ suggests at least an acquaintance with Hermetic philosophy. The final section, a tribute to Daniel Webster consistent with Locke’s political sympathies, was first published separately as Daniel Webster: A Rhymed Eulogy (1854). Between 1850 and 1854, Locke worked as a newspaper correspondent for the Boston Journal and the Daily Atlas . In the same period, she also worked for the James Monroe Publishing Company, writing prefaces for the English publications that they reproduced in this country. Locke’s writing, prose and poetry, is lucid and straightforward. Her poetry is representative of the popular poetry of the 19th century in general, and of the varied interests of its women in particular. OTHER WORKS: Nothing Ever Happens (1938). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Baldwin, J. S., Memories and Traditions (1909). Locke, J. G., Book of the Lockes (1853). Starkweather, C. L., A Brief Genealogical History of Robert Starkweather of Roxbury and Ipswich (1904). Upham, G. L., Contributions of the Old Residents’ Historical Association, Lowell, Mass. (1891). Reference works: CAL. Other references: Lowell Historical Society (1940). —ROSALIE TUTELA RYAN
LOGAN, Deborah Norris Born 19 October 1761, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; died 2 February 1839, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Daughter of Charles and Mary Parker Norris; married George Logan, 1781 Many of the figures who influenced Pennsylvania’s early history were members of Deborah Norris Logan’s family. Distinguished guests were frequently entertained in the Norrises’ Quaker household. At the age of fourteen, Logan heard the first reading
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of the Declaration of Independence while standing behind a fence in her own yard. Years later she recalled the scene: ‘‘The crowd that assembled at the State House was not great and those among them who joined in the acclamation were not the most sober or reflecting.’’
Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Charles Thomson, and George Washington. Happily, the descriptions of these predictably male luminaries do not overshadow the diarist’s feminine perspectives. It is the ‘‘irrelevant’’ material which dominates the diary, showing glimpses of Logan’s daily thoughts and actions.
Logan did not take full advantage of her days at Anthony Benezet’s Friends Girls’ School; however, she soon developed an extensive self-imposed reading course which formed the foundation of her literary pursuits. She did not abandon her interest after 1781, the year she married an active Republican politician and, later, U.S. senator.
Logan expresses her awareness of ‘‘the prayers and wishes of thousands of the amiable and excellent women of these states whose voices are never heard but in the domestic privacy of their happy homes.’’ She successfully excluded herself from this group since her voice has survived for over a century in the dual guise of professional chronicler and private individual.
At Stenton, her husband’s ancestral home, Logan enjoyed an exceedingly happy marriage and a lifestyle resembling that of an early American Gertrude Stein. Politicians, artists, and historians who were attracted by Philadelphia’s position as a chief American city also habitually sought the company of Stenton’s charming hostess. Robert Walsh, the accomplished editor of The National Gazette and a member of Logan’s circle, described her character: ‘‘To the expression of our satisfaction with her muse we add the tribute of admiration due to a strength of intellect, a copiousness of knowledge, an habitual dignity of thought and manner, and a natural justness and refinement of sentiment.’’
Contemporary readers who consult the information she saved must hold her in esteem; those who read the diary will find it difficult to avoid becoming closely attached to her. In these days when we confront new feminine roles, we can derive much from looking back at a woman who adroitly juxtaposed intellect and emotion—a woman who can touch our hearts and heads.
In addition to her own work, Logan provided John T. Watson with invaluable information while he was writing his Annals of Philadelphia (1830). Logan was also the first female member of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Stenton literally supplied Logan with the material which formed her great service to history. In the attic, she found the correspondence, in worn and delicate condition, of two of Pennsylvania’s greatest early leaders, William Penn and her husband’s grandfather James Logan. Like the efficient management of her household, she saw the preservation of these letters as her duty. With her usual humbleness she said, ‘‘Not that I consider myself as qualified for such work, but that it has small chance of being performed unless I undertake it.’’ A reluctance to neglect her family responsibilities motivated Logan to rise before dawn to accomplish the time-consuming task of deciphering, copying, and editing. The eleven quarto manuscripts which resulted from her meticulous labor were eventually published in two volumes by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (1870-72). In addition to a zeal for historical preservation, Logan also possessed poetic talent. Although Logan’s poetry was comparable to some of the verse admired in her time, it would not excite a modern reader. Rather, we must look toward her diary as the generator of present-day interest. She described this 4000-page, 17-volume work, started in 1815 and concluded shortly before her death, as a record of ‘‘whatever I shall hear of fact or anecdote that shall appear worthy of preservation. And many things for my own satisfaction likewise that may be irrelevant to others.’’ The text’s ‘‘worthy’’ portions include lively anecdotes about such figures as John Adams, Joseph Bonaparte, John C. Calhoun, Benjamin
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OTHER WORKS: The Norris House (1867). Correspondence of William Penn and James Logan (2 vols., 1870-1872). Memoir of Dr. George Logan of Stenton (1899). Diary 1815-1839 (edited by M. S. Barr, forthcoming). Many of Deborah Norris Logan’s published and unpublished works are located in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Myers, A. C., Sally Wister’s Journal (1902). Norris, I., Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Vol. 9 (1870). Tolles, F. B., George Logan of Philadelphia (1953). Wister, S. B., and A. Irwin, Worthy Women of Our First Century (1877). Reference works: DAB. NAW (1971). NCAB. Other references: Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society (Jan. 1905). Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser (4 Feb. 1839). —MARLEEN S. BARR
LOGAN, Mary (Simmerson) Cunningham Born 15 August 1838, Petersburgh, Boone County, Missouri; died 22 February 1923, Washington, D.C. Wrote under: Mrs. J. A. Logan Daughter of Captain John M. and Elizabeth La Fontaine Cunningham; married John A. Logan, 1855 (died 1886) Mary Cunningham Logan was born to parents of IrishFrench ancestry. Logan’s maternal grandfather, La Fontaine, owned many slaves and large tracts of land in Missouri, and her paternal grandfather was a slave owner in Tennessee. Shortly after her birth, Logan’s parents moved to southern Illinois, where her
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father became registrar of the land office as well as an army officer. Logan, the oldest of thirteen children, had little formal education except that provided by itinerant teachers. When Logan was fifteen, she studied for a year at St. Vincent’s Academy near Morganfield, Kentucky. After graduation, she returned home to marry a friend of her father’s. Logan wrote in the preface of her autobiography, ‘‘To tell my own story is to tell that of my own famous husband, General John A. Logan. Our marriage was a real partnership for thirty-one happy years.’’ Logan traveled with her husband and assisted him by drawing up the forms for indictments and helping draft briefs. When Logan ran for Congress, Mary was by his side throughout the political campaign. After the Civil War, both General Logan and his wife were concerned about the welfare of returning veterans. They were enthusiastic participants in the development of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR). Mary Logan was also closely associated with the women’s auxiliary of the GAR: the Women’s Relief Corps. The Logans were responsible for the establishment of Memorial Day as a national holiday. In 1868, Mary noted that the graves of Confederate soldiers in a cemetery in Richmond, Virginia, were marked by small Confederate flags and flowers. As a Senator, Logan effected passage of legislation to perpetuate Memorial Day as a national holiday. After the death of General Logan, Mary was forced to earn a living for herself and her two children. The Home Magazine was started especially for her to edit and was successful for seven years. However, her political influence and good works continued. President Harrison appointed her to the board of the Lady Managers of the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition. In 1919, four years before her death, Logan received the Belgian medal of Queen Elizabeth for work during World War II. Logan’s first book was The Home Manual (1889), which bore a direct relationship to her magazine. A compendium of etiquette, nostrums, recipes, stories, and games, its focus was selfimprovement and self-help. In one chapter, ‘‘Society Small Talk,’’ Logan writes, ‘‘It is true that the newcomer into society often discovers that his or her greatest difficulty lies in finding just the right thing to say at the right time.’’ Thirty Years in Washington (1901) and Reminiscences of a Soldier’s Wife (1913) manifest Logan’s pride in the city of Washington and in being the wife of a famous general and statesman. Thirty Years is composed of a series of vignettes that describe the many agencies and offices of the national government. Logan’s descriptions of her privileged access to behind-thescenes workings of the government make this work an interesting source of information. That there are inaccuracies in the work does not detract from the general interest provided by rich details and Logan’s general enthusiasm. This same enthusiasm is apparent throughout Logan’s best work, the autobiographical Reminiscences. Logan’s eyewitness
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narration of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, her husband’s political campaigns, and battle scenes of the Civil War provide a moving, personal view of those well-known events. Using the resources of the Library of Congress from 1902 to 1909, Logan and her daughter, Mary Logan Tucker, prepared a compendium of biographies of American women. The Part Taken by Women in American History (1912) contains two thousand biographical sketches varying in length and organized under rubrics such as Aboriginal Women, Pioneers, Women of the Revolution, Suffragists, etc. Like many other compendiums of the time, effusive encomiums based on scant factual material abound. However, this work is valuable for its great number of biographies of worthy women. Throughout her life, Logan was accorded equal praise with her husband. However, she lived 37 years longer than he, and forged a career of her own as an editor and writer. Logan’s works, especially the autobiography, exhibit her enthusiastic appreciation of the historic times through which she lived.
OTHER WORKS: The Logan family papers are in The Library of Congress.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Busbey, K. G., ‘‘Concerning the Author, Mrs. John. A. Logan,’’ in The Part Taken by Women in American History (1912). Reference works: AW. NCAB, 4. NAW (1971). Other references: American Historical Review (Oct. 1902). Independent (14 June 1919). NYT (23 Feb. 1923). —DOROTHEA MOSLEY THOMPSON
LOGAN, Olive Born 22 April 1839, Elmira, New York; died 27 April 1909, Banstead, England Also wrote under: Chroniqueuse, Mrs. Wirt Sikes Daughter of Cornelius Logan and Eliza Akeley; married Henry A. DeLille, 1857 (divorced); William Wirt Sikes, 1871 (died 1883); James O’Neill, 1892 Olive Logan, the daughter of a theatrical couple, made her stage debut as a child and continued acting in New York City and on tour throughout the U.S. until about 1868. Her career was interrupted in the mid-1850s for eight years during her first marriage. It was not for love of the theater that Logan returned briefly to the stage in her own play, Eveleen, in 1864. The
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economic necessity brought on by her divorce from DeLille forced her resumption of one career, acting, that she always despised and one, writing, that she enjoyed. She had also by this time begun to make a name for herself as a feminist lecturer. The exact date of her retirement is uncertain, but she seems to have entirely abandoned acting by 1868, continuing her connection with the theater as playwright only. Three plays, Surf (1870), Newport (1879)—both mild satires of high society—and Armadale (1866), a dramatization of Wilkie Collins’ novel, were produced for the stage but not published. Her second marriage in 1872 to Willaim Wirt Sikes lasted until his death in 1883. Her third husband, O’Neill, was twenty years her junior. Logan’s literary productivity was particularly intense during those years when she was not being supported by a husband. The poverty and insanity which haunted her for most of her adult life became acute in old age and she died at the age of seventy in an English home for the insane. Logan’s literary career began with lectures, articles, and a lengthy record of ‘‘politics, art, fashion, and anecdote’’ in the Paris of 1862. Photographs of Paris Life (1862) was first published under the pseudonym Chroniqueuse. Chateau Frissac: Home Scenes in France (1865), Logan’s first novel, attacked the evils in the French marriage of convenience. In the melodramatic style, love is temporarily thwarted by inadequate dowries, family disapproval, and arranged alliances. Another short novel followed in 1867: John Morris’ Money is the story of a family of modest means who take in a widowed aunt, entertain her with four tales of the triumph of romantic love over greed, and finally, at the old woman’s death, unexpectedly inherit her secret fortune. In Apropos of Women and the Theater (1869), Logan expounded upon a theme which often occupied her: the immorality of Lydia Thompson’s ‘‘British Blondes,’’ the lavish 1866 production of The Black Crook, both of which featured dancers in fleshcolored tights, and the subsequent seminudity which gave respectable actresses bad names. Logan’s most impressive and longest work appeared in 1870 under the title Before the Footlights and Behind the Scenes and in 1871 The Mimic World. This is one of the most informative but disorganized and often biased accounts of backstage life from the legitimate stage to the circus. It includes biographical sketches and anecdotes, arguments for treating actors with respect, and attacks on stage nudity and the third tier. Also published in 1870, ‘‘The Good Mr. Bagglethorpe,’’ is a cinderella story about a poor, orphaned young actress appearing in ‘‘moral dramas’’ who is seen and loved by the well-heeled Willie Gentry. To make the union between the two possible, she must be taken from the stage and educated for two years. Logan continued her interest in writing nonfiction with Get Thee Behind Me, Satan: A Home-born Book of Home-Truths (1872), a celebration of marriage and the home under attack by free love and loveless ‘‘mercantile’’ marriages. Logan also warns women of the dangers in believing that marriage is the only existence that awaits them and in allowing themselves to be
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treated as commodities. Portraits of several types of unhappy women underscore her thesis: one woman whose family is excessively eager to see her married, one considered only as a beautiful object, and one who is neglected by her husband. They Met By Chance: A Society Novel (1873), Logan’s last major work of published fiction, describes the life of the wealthy aristocrat in 19th-century New York: the vacation spots, the entertainments, the matchmaking, and the petty games. As in her other novels of high society, much hangs on disguise, mistaken reports of a character’s death, coincidence, and intrigue. The American Abroad (1882) is a derisive comment on the contempt with which Americans are treated in England, necessitating the formation of a special organization to act in behalf of Americans abroad and to help Britishers attempting to immigrate to the U.S. Logan’s strengths lie not in her imagination and creativity, but in her observations of attitudes and details which help to characterize the 19th-century life and mind.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brown, T. A., History of the American Stage (1903). Ireland, J. N., Records of the New York Stage (1866-67). Ludlow, N., Dramatic Life as I Found It (1913). Winter, W., The Wallet of Time (1913). Reference works: AA. DAB. NAW. NCAB 6. —CLAUDIA D. JOHNSON
LOOS, Anita Born 26 April 1893, Sissons (now Mt. Shasta), California; died 1981 Daughter of Richard B. and Minnie Ellen Loos; married Frank Pallma, Jr., 1915 (annulled); John Emerson, 1919 When Anita Loos was four, her family moved from Sissons (now Mt. Shasta), California, to San Francisco’s Barbary Coast, where her ne’er-do-well father engaged in a series of journalistic and theatrical schemes. Loos became a child actress and the family’s chief mainstay for many years. After a period in Los Angeles, where her father managed an early movie house, the family settled in San Diego. By this time a youthful correspondent for the New York Morning Telegraph, Loos hit upon the idea of writing movie scenarios for the Biograph Company. The New York Hat (1912) was her first filmed scenario, and by 1915 she had sold D. W. Griffith over 100 scripts. Eager to leave her family behind, Loos married in 1915. After one night she deserted her young husband and set out for
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Hollywood where Biograph quickly offered her a contract. (The marriage was later annulled.) It was Loos who wrote the title cards for Griffith’s epic, Intolerance (1916). Her wisecracking verbal humor seemed ill-suited to the silent screen, however, until the chance success of an early Douglas Fairbanks film proved audiences were willing to read comic subtitles. For the next few years, Loos worked closely with Fairbanks, with Constance Talmadge, and with the suave director John Emerson, whom she married in 1919. In collaboration with Emerson she wrote two books about the motion picture industry, How to Write Photoplays (1920) and Breaking into the Movies (1921), along with several Broadway plays. Living in New York, Loos became a friend of H. L. Mencken. As a spoof of his taste for dimwitted blondes, she wrote a comic diary which first appeared in Harper’s Bazaar in 1925. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925), featuring the irrepressible Lorelei Lee, was a runaway international success, gaining Loos such celebrated admirers as Winston Churchill, George Santayana, Mussolini, and James Joyce. As one of the first women who dared hike her hemlines and bob her hair, Loos came to epitomize the flappers of the 1920s. But despite her earning power, she was not in all respects an independent modern woman. As a self-described pushover for rogues, she remained loyal to her husband even while he dated other women and tried to take credit for Loos’ achievements. When she returned to Hollywood as a highly paid screenwriter under Irving Thalberg at MGM, she protected Emerson’s fragile ego by finding him a sinecure at the studio. Seemingly proud of her financial ineptitude, she turned her entire income over to ‘‘Mr. E,’’ who put everything into his own name in a move that could have left her penniless upon his death. Emerson was ultimately diagnosed as a manic-depressive, and spent the last 18 years of his life in a sanitarium. In her autobiographical Kiss Hollywood Good-By (1974), Loos chronicles her strictly platonic relationships with several attractive men, among them ‘‘the love of her life,’’ the gambler and con-man Wilson Mizner. Loos’ Broadway successes include several musical versions of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, two romantic comedies adapted from the works of Colette, and Happy Birthday (1947), written for her good friend Helen Hayes. Hayes, who had recently starred as Queen Victoria and Harriet Beecher Stowe, was ‘‘fed up with being noble,’’ and Loos obliged with a comic portrait of a drab librarian who blossoms in a barroom. With Hayes she has published Twice Over Lightly (1972), an exuberant tour of New York City, her adopted home. In three play versions, a sequel, and such later works as A Mouse Is Born (1951), Loos tried to repeat her triumph with Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, but she never again so artfully captured Lorelei’s blend of innocence and avarice, nor her highly original gift of gab. Though Loos’ later novels seem sadly dated, her gossipy Hollywood memoirs, A Girl Like I (1972) and Kiss Hollywood Good-By, are delightful souvenirs of a bygone age.
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OTHER WORKS: The Whole Town’s Talking (with J. Emerson, 1925). But—Gentlemen Marry Brunettes (1928). Gigi (dramatization of the story by Colette, 1951; revised, 1956). Chéri (dramatization of the novel by Colette, 1959). No Mother to Guide Her (1961). The King’s Mare (1967). Cast of Thousands (1977).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1969). CB (Feb. 1974). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCA, TCAS. Other references: Atlantic (Oct. 1966). Film Comment (Winter 1970-71). NR (10 Aug. 1974). NY (28 Dec. 1946). NYT (27 Dec. 1925). NYTBR (18 Aug. 1974). SR (24 Sept. 1966). —BEVERLY GRAY BIENSTOCK
LORD, Bette Bao Born 3 November 1938, Shanghai, China Daughter of Sandy and Dora Fang Bao; married Winston Lord, 1963; children: Elizabeth, Winston Born in China and raised in the U.S., Betty Bao Lord explores her dual identity through novels and nonfiction acknowledging both her Asian and her American sides as integral parts of one self. In this respect, perhaps, she differs from slightly younger contemporaries who have sought to give voice more directly to ethnic and gender concerns. Eldest child of a middle-class family (her father was a Nationalist Chinese government official while her mother descended from an illustrious clan of scholars), Lord accompanied her parents to America in 1946. They left behind Lord’s youngest sister, Sansan, who was forced to remain in China after the Communist victory. Lord spent a happy childhood in Brooklyn, where she eagerly (and apparently easily) adapted to American ways. She later attended Tufts University (B.A. 1959; Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, M.A. 1960). Lord inadvertently began her writing career with Eighth Moon (1964), the straightforward account of how Sansan, who was reunited with the family in 1962, grew up amid the extreme hardships of the People’s Republic. Despite the book’s favorable reception, it did not prompt Lord to define herself as a writer; for several years she occupied herself with family and modern dance. Inspired by a 1973 trip to China, however, Lord produced two extraordinarily successful novels in middle age. Centered on strong female characters, both books examine different aspects of Lord’s heritage. Spring Moon (1981), which began as a journal based on family history, is set during the years between the Boxer Rebellion and the Communist Revolution, and evokes traditional China with a mixture of sympathy and distance characteristic of
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all of Lord’s work. Her decision to reshape the material as fiction allows her to displace onto her characters emotions that might be too intimately exposed in a memoir. Similarly, Lord’s own childhood is described from a mature and balanced perspective in the autobiographical In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson (1984), a novel for young readers. The America young Shirley Temple Wong encounters is basically a welcoming one; the book’s focus is on the positive experience of achieving an identity, not on the adverse effects of racism. From 1987 to 1989 Lord and her husband lived in Beijing, where he served as U.S. Ambassador. Here Lord presided over a sort of salon at the embassy, attracting large numbers of artists and intellectuals eager to share their stories of life during the Cultural Revolution. These accounts became the foundation of Legacies: A Chinese Mosaic (1990). Published soon after the 1989 student uprising in Tiananmen Square, the book weaves together these histories with stories of Lord’s own extended family. Again, her choice of genre is apt: the fragmented material allows her both intimacy and distance, enabling her to write engagingly from both a Chinese and an American perspective. It has been clear since the publication of Eighth Moon in1964, when she was only twenty-six, that Lord felt deeply about the American and Chinese cultures that nurture her writing and her life. She confesses much of the tape recording of her early conversations with Sansan—the tiny sister left behind when their family was stranded in the U.S. in 1947—was spoiled because both sisters were crying. For a lifetime Lord has constantly juggled the worlds of politics and of feeling as well as the two very different political realities of Chinese communism and American democracy. Throughout In The Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson Lord uses the American passion for baseball and its heroes as a poignant metaphor for the shared experiences of children in every race and culture. Her ability to see differences clearly and yet write without rancor characterizes her books of fiction and memoir. In a recent novel, The Middle Heart (1996), Lord describes the 70 years of Chinese history which led to the student demonstrations at Tiananmen Square (which she witnessed as a resident in Bejing during that ‘‘China Spring’’) with the rare perspective of someone who is both Chinese and American. In addition to her writing career, Lord has been assistant director of the University of Hawaii East-West Cultural Center (1960-61); program officer, Fulbright Exchange Program (1961-63); conference director for the National Conference for the Associated Councils of the Arts (1970-71); lecturer with the Leigh Bureau; member of the selection committee, White House Fellows; and member of the board of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, Inc. She received an honorary LL.D. from Tufts University in 1982. In 1998, at the annual Achievement Awards of the American Immigration Law Foundation, Lord was honored as a model of achievement for her contributions to human rights activism, education, and service. She is chair of the Board of Trustees of
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Freedom House, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization devoted to the causes of democracy around the world. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Chang, Henry L. ‘‘Immigrants Who Have Benefitted America,’’ Introduction at the American Immigration Law Foundation dinner, 20 March 1998. Fox, Mary Virginia, with Paris H. Chang, Bette Bao Lord: Novelist and Voice for Change (1993). Wu, W. K., ‘‘Cultural Ideology and Aesthetic Choices: A Study of Three Works by Chinese-American Women—Diana Chang, Bette Bao Lord, and Maxine H. Kingston.’’ (dissertation, 1989). Reference works: CA (1983, 1994). CLC (1983). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Minneapolis Star (16 Nov. 1981). NYTBR (15 Oct. 1990). PW (30 Oct. 1981). Time (12 March 1990). Saturday Review (1981). WP (28 Oct. 1981). —ELIZABETH SHOSTAK, UPDATED BY KATHLEEN BONANN MARSHALL
LORDE, Audre (Geraldine) Born 18 February 1934, New York, New York; died 17 November 1992, Christiansted, St. Croix, Virgin Islands Wrote under: Giamba Adisa, Rey Domini Daughter of Frederick Byron and Linda Gertrude Belmar Lord; married Edward Rollins, 1962 (divorced 1970); children: Elizabeth, Jonathan Born in Harlem of Barbadian and Grenadian parents (her father was a real estate broker), Audre Lorde, one of three sisters, overcame muteness and sight problems to become one of the most eloquent, outspoken, and visionary poets, teachers, and orators of her times. Her writing was inseparable from her life as a ‘‘Black Lesbian, Feminist, mother, lover, warrior poet doing her work.’’ While a student at Hunter College High School Lorde joined the Harlem Writers’ Guild founded by John Henrick Clarke, where she met Langston Hughes, Rosa Guy, and others. Her poems were published in the Harlem Writers’ Quarterly and Seventeen magazine. After studying at the National University of Mexico in 1954, Lorde received her B.A. in American literature from Hunter College in 1959 and her M.L.S. from Columbia University in 1960. She married Edward Rollins in 1962; they divorced eight years later. Lorde worked as a librarian for eight years before beginning her teaching career at Tougaloo College. Subsequently she taught at Herbert Lehman College and at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, and at Atlanta University. In 1987 Lorde became Thomas Hunter Professor of English at Hunter College. Lorde’s poetry expresses her profound interest in the power of difference, the responsibility of the individual in the community, women loving women, connections among people of African
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descent, and the bond between parents and children. A recurring theme in all of Lorde’s writing is breaking silence and speaking out. In ‘‘A Litany for Survival’’ (from The Black Unicorn, 1978), a rich and lyrical work considered to be a high point of her poetic achievement, she writes, ‘‘And when we speak we are afraid / our words will not be heard, / nor welcomed / but when we are silent / we are still afraid. / So it is better to speak / remembering / we were never meant to survive.’’ Lorde developed a new fictional form, the biomythography, an amalgam of fiction, biography, and myth in her 1982 work Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. The book remains one of the most powerful and provocative evocations of black lesbian life. Lorde battled serious health problems beginning in the late 1970s and incorporated those struggles into her work, challenging traditional Western notions about illness and women’s ability, responsibility, and right to make decisions regarding their health. The Cancer Journals (1980), named the 1981 Gay Book of the Year by the American Library Association, was Lorde’s first book-length prose work and greatly expanded her readership. Lorde never shied away from facing difficult and painful subjects. Sister/Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984) includes both the essay ‘‘Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger’’ and ‘‘Manchild,’’ in the same volume, the latter discussing her long interracial relationship with Frances Clayton, with whom Lorde raised her two children. In the poem ‘‘Sisters in Arms’’ from Our Dead Behind Us (1986) she explores what it means for black women to live and love within the horror and obscenity of the South African apartheid regime. The title essay in A Burst of Light (1988) is subtitled ‘‘Living with Cancer.’’ Despite, or perhaps because of all that she experienced, Lorde had a remarkable ability to communicate her great compassion and generosity of spirit through her writing. Lorde’s work has had wide impact as evidenced by the many awards and honors she received during her energetic and prolific career. Her third book of poetry, From a Land Where Other People Live (1973), received a nomination for the National Book Award; A Burst of Light won the 1989 Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award. Lorde was named state poet of New York (1991-93) by Governor Mario Cuomo and the New York State Writers Institute, and received the Astrea Foundation’s Sappho Award and the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement in Gay and Lesbian Literature, presented by the Publishing Triangle. (She accepted the award and declined the money.) In addition, she received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1968, 1990), and was the inspiration for the Audre Lorde Women’s Poetry Center at Medgar Evers College, as well an international feminist ‘‘celeconference,’’ called ‘‘I Am Your Sister,’’ based on the principles of her work, held in Boston in October 1990. Lorde has also received honorary degrees from Oberlin College (1989) and Haverford College (1990). Lorde’s commitment to justice and empowerment for all was expressed through her involvement in the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the lesbian and gay rights movement, and the international antiapartheid movement. She served on the editorial boards of the Black Scholar, Amazon Quarterly, and was
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a founding member of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press; SISA (Sisters in Support of Sisters in South Africa); and the St. Croix Women’s Coalition. Lorde played a key role in the development of the Afro-German Movement and in the publication of Farbe Bekennen (Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out, 1992) for which she provided the introduction. Her work has been translated into many languages and she lectured, read, and taught throughout the U.S. and around the world. Lorde died in St. Croix, in the home she had shared for many years with her companion, Dr. Gloria I. Joseph. The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (1997) brings together her poems just as they appeared in the original volumes of which all but one, Undersong: Chosen Poems Old and New, Revised (1992), is out of print. In instances where poems were revised or retitled and published in later volumes, the original version and the revision are both printed. These 12 volumes indicate her significant contribution to literature. The themes of silence and the power of words in her early poem, ‘‘Cole,’’ recur and evolve so that stronger, bolder themes emerge: eroticism, lesbianism, racism, injustice, feminism, social change, cancer, and death. They show, according to Anna Louise Keating in Women Reading Women Writing: Self Invention in Paula Gunn Allen, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Audre Lorde (1996) as in all her work, ‘‘the transformational possibilities achieved through writing.’’ Her language—its images, music, and complexity—reveals a beauty and ache achieved only by major poets. Since Lorde’s death in 1992, criticism of her work has centered on her autobiographical prose including Zami: A New Spelling of My Name and The Cancer Journals. This focus reveals the concerns about identity, technology, society, and spirituality at the end of the 20th century. As a poet who also writes prose, her writing, says Jeanne Braham in ‘‘A Lens of Empathy,’’ has ‘‘the power to speak to a wide readership [who] may be effected through metaphor’s power to universalize and particularize simultaneously.’’ OTHER WORKS: The First Cities (1968). Cables to Rage (1970, reprinted 1972). New York Headshop and Museum (1974, 1977, 1981). Between Ourselves (1976). Coal (1976). The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power (pamphlet, 1978). Chosen Poems Old and New (1982). Undersongs: Chosen Poems Old and New Revised (1992). The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance (1993). Contributed to APARTHEID USA (1985). Lesbian Travels: A Literary Companion (1998). Movement in Black: The Collected Poetry of Pat Barker 1961-1978 (1978). Need: A Chorale for Black Woman Voices (1991). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bunkers, S. L. and C. A. Huff, eds., Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries (1996). Davenport, D., Four Contemporary Black Women Poets: Lucille Clifton, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Sherley Anne Williams (dissertation, 1985). Evans, M., ed., Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation (1984). Keating, A. L., Women Reading Women Writing: Self-Invention in Paula Gunn Allen, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Audre Lorde (1996). Tate, C., ed., Black Women
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Writers at Work (1983). Zimmerman, B., Safe Sea of Women: Lesbian Fiction, 1969-1989 (1990). Reference works: Black American Writers Past and Present (1975). Black American Women in Literature: A Bibliography, 1976-1987 (1989). Black Women in America (1993). CANR (1989). CLC (1981). DLB (1985). FC (1990). Facts on File, Encyclopedia of Black Women in America (1996). MTCW (1991). NBAW (1992). Other references: Advocate (29 Dec. 1992, obituary). American Literary History (Winter, 1994). Booklist (19 Aug. 1997). Callaloo (special section, 1991). Colby Library Quarterly (March 1982). DAI (Jan. 1987). Essence (December 1984). NYT (20 Nov. 1992, obituary). A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde (film, 1994). Before Stonewall: The Making of the Gay and Lesbian Community (video, 1986). —KATE RUSHIN, UPDATED BY KAREN MCLENNAN
LOTHROP, Amy See WARNER, Anna Bartlett
LOTHROP, Harriet (Mulford) Stone Born 22 June 1844, New Haven, Connecticut; died 2 August 1924, Concord, Massachusetts Wrote under: Margaret Sidney Daughter of Sidney Mason and Harriet Mulford Stone; married David Lothrop, 1881; children: Margaret Harriet Stone Lothrop grew up in a religious New England family whose ancestors included the Reverend Thomas Hooker and several distinguished colonial governors. Lothrop’s father was a respected architect, and it was in deference to his disapproval of women writers that Lothrop adopted the pen name of ‘‘Margaret Sidney.’’ The disciplined atmosphere of learning and religion that pervaded Lothrop’s childhood days is reflected in the tight moral tone dominating her many works. In 1878, Lothrop contributed a short story entitled ‘‘Polly Pepper’s Chicken Pie’’ to Wide Awake, a children’s magazine. Reader response was enthusiastic, and the editor requested that Lothrop provide the magazine with twelve more installments. Lothrop hesitated, unsure of her ability; but she succeeded in completing the requested chapters. They were later compiled into the best-selling children’s book, Five Little Peppers and How They Grew (1881). Lothrop followed this first success with Five Little Peppers Midway (1890) and then proceeded to write ten more Pepper volumes, ending with Our Davie Pepper in 1916. The Pepper series traces the development of five energetic children from their early childhood days in the country, through their adolescent education in the big city, and on to the decisions of their adult
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lives. Although all the Pepper volumes were greeted with enthusiastic reviews, Lothrop’s first volume remained the most popular, selling over two million copies by the time of her death. Five Little Peppers and How They Grew opens in a little brown house in the country where five children and their recently widowed mother are struggling to survive through a bitter winter. Lothrop, herself from a well-to-do family, always wanted to live in a little brown house, and the picture she presents of impoverished country life is extremely romanticized. Despite their many misfortunes, the Peppers are never downcast and they meet all adversity with an amazing fortitude. They are intent on being good Christians, never giving in to petty emotions such as jealousy or conceit. This moral tone does not get in the way of the narrative, however. The Pepper adventure is energetic and amusing, filled with mischief and practical joking. Lothrop has a deep-rooted understanding of children and she provides the action as well as the repetition that her audience demands. Her language, although overworked, is effective and sincere. Lothrop claimed that the Peppers lived independently in her imagination for years before she ever wrote about them, and this philosophy gives her narratives a natural fluidity. In 1881, at the age of thirty-seven, Lothrop married a Boston publisher of children’s books, and they moved to Concord, Massachusetts. Here, Lothrop gave birth to her only child, Margaret, and her husband bought the historic Wayside house as a surprise for her. The Wayside had been the childhood residence of Louisa May Alcott, whose work Lothrop’s so closely resembles. In Massachusetts, Lothrop continued working on the Pepper narratives, as well as writing historical novels such as A Little Maid of Concord Town (1898) and The Judges’ Cave (1900). Lothrop had a strong interest in history and was a careful researcher, but she never succeeded in bringing life to these historical novels. Primarily written for an adult audience, they lack the spark and energy of the Pepper novels, while retaining their didactic overtones. Lothrop was always active in community life. She combined her interest in history with her interest in children by founding the national society of Children of the American Revolution. She belonged to innumerable clubs—women’s, writers’, and historical—but showed little interest in the woman suffrage movement. Shortly before her death at the age of eighty, she was still going strong, working on an article about Edgar Allan Poe. OTHER WORKS: So As By Fire (1881). The Pettibone Name (1882). Hester, and Other New England Stories (1886). The Minute Man (1886). A New Departure for Girls (1886). Dilly and the Captain (1887). How Tom and Dorothy Made and Kept a Christian House (1888). Rob: A Story for Boys (1891). Five Little Peppers Grown Up (1892). Old Concord, Her Highways and Byways (1893). Whittier with the Children (1893). The Old Town Pump (1895). The Gingham Bag (1896). Phronsie Pepper (1897). The Stories Polly Pepper Told (1899). An Adirondack Cabin (1900). The Adventures of Joel Pepper (1900). Five Little Peppers Abroad (1902). Ben Pepper (1903). Sally, Mrs. Tubbs (1903).
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LOUNSBERRY
Five Little Peppers and Their Friends (1904). The Five Little Peppers at School (1907). Five Little Peppers in the Little Brown House (1907). A Little Maid from Boston Town (1910). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Lothrop, M., The Wayside: Home of Authors (1940). Swayne, J. L., The Story of Concord (1906). Reference works: AA. AW. DAB, VI, 1. NAW NCAB, 8. Other References: Book News Monthly (Feb. 1910). Boston Transcript (4 Aug. 1924). PW (9 Aug. 1924). —CHRISTIANE BIRD
LOUGHBOROUGH, Mary Ann Webster Born 27 August 1836, New York, New York; died 27 August 1887, Little Rock, Arkansas Married James M. Loughborough, 1850s Little is known about Mary Ann Webster Loughborough’s early life or education, but it is obvious that she was a well-read and intelligent woman. Her marriage in the 1850s brought her to the South, where she spent the rest of her life. When the Civil War began, Loughborough apparently followed her soldier husband from place to place, living for a while in Tennessee and Mississippi. Loughborough is best known for her only book, My Cave Life in Vicksburg (1864), a graphic description of the siege of that city by the Union army in 1863. Loughborough arrived in Vicksburg a few weeks before the assault began. She had been living in Jackson, Mississippi, but moved to Vicksburg in the mistaken belief that it would be safer. ‘‘Ah! Vicksburg,’’ she recalls, ‘‘our city of refuge, the last to yield thou wilt be; and within thy homes we will not fear the footsteps of the victorious army but rest in safety amid thy hills.’’ General John C. Pemberton, commander of the Confederate defenders, had already ordered women and children out of the city. Loughborough, however, chose to remain close to her husband and feared she would not be able to get to Mobile, the closest city of refuge. The bombardment and siege of Vicksburg began on 17 May 1863. Shells from stationary cannons and gunboats on the river rained on the city, forcing the inhabitants to seek shelter in caves dug into the surrounding hillsides. According to the author, many of these caves were large enough to be divided into several rooms, and when furnished with beds and tables were comfortable, if not exactly fashionable. However, a heavy rain or mortar shell reminded the occupants that they lived under fragile earth. Remarkably, life inside the caves soon became routine. Cave dwellers learned to distinguish the sounds made by the various types of shells as they exploded and could calmly predict their point of impact, although Loughborough records several nearfatal miscalculations. One night a visiting soldier picked up a guitar and all joined the impromptu party. ‘‘How could we sing and laugh amid our suffering fellow beings—amid the shriek of
death itself?’’ she asks. They learned to take amusement when and where it came. Shells and mortars were not the only problems faced by the cave dwellers of Vicksburg. Food became scarce as the Union army closed trade routes into the city. Fresh meat and vegetables were almost impossible to obtain, so with true ingenuity the cave dwellers found substitutes. Mule, squirrel, and rat replaced beef and pork; and peas, dried, mashed, and baked into bread became the staple diet. Finally, the city could hold out no longer. With the army on one-quarter rations and no reinforcements in sight, General Pemberton surrendered the city on 4 July 1863. Cautiously, Loughborough and others moved out of their caves. For the first time in forty-seven days, there was no gunfire. As soon as it was safe, Loughborough moved to St. Louis. Friends there were interested in her description of the siege and urged her to record her experiences for publication. The first edition of My Cave Life was published by Appleton and Company in 1864. After the war, Loughborough settled in Little Rock, Arkansas. There in 1883, she founded the Southern Ladies Journal, one of the first modern women’s magazines. She served as its editor until her death. My Cave Life in Vicksburg is one of the few complete, firsthand accounts of the siege and life inside the city. Although written shortly after the event, it has the immediacy of a newspaper account and the detail of a daily diary. One of the problems of Civil War historiography is that scholars have tended to focus on the political and military aspects of the conflict while ignoring the effects of the war on the noncombatants. However, recent scholarship is beginning to reverse this trend, and memoirs like My Cave Life will be invaluable in this effort. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hoehling, A. A., Vicksburg: 47 Days of Siege (1969). Walker, P. F., Vicksburg: A People at War (1960). —JANET E. KAUFMAN
LOUNSBERRY, Alice Born circa 1860s or 1870s; Died 22 November 1949, New York, New York Daughter of James S. and Sarah W. Lounsberry While information on the life of Alice Lounsberry has proven scarce, many of the references in her works suggest she was a New Yorker with ties in New England, or at least extensive knowledge of those parts of New England near New York. And since she was a former treasurer of the National Society of Colonial Dames, we can place her in the upper-middle class. While most of her publications are about trees and flowers, we do not know her background for her work as a botanical and
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horticultural writer. Turn-of-the-century readers called for nature guides in large numbers, and most of the popular flower, tree, and bird guidebooks were written by women. Lounsberry and her illustrator, Australian artist Mrs. Ellis Rowan, worked on the books as a team, traveling all over the country together. Her first book, A Guide to the Wild Flowers (1899), was the most popular of her guidebooks. Organized by habitat, this work is very similar to other such works of the period, describing the plants and telling a bit about them, particularly where they might be seen. This book is illustrated with 64 beautiful colored plates as well as many black-and-white illustrations. A companion volume, A Guide to the Trees, was published the next year and was also illustrated by Mrs. Rowan. The two works were issued in uniform format. Then the next year the two women collaborated on Southern Wild Flowers and Trees, in which Lounsberry describes their journey, including railway incidents, through the South. In addition to her guidebooks for adults, Lounsberry wrote three books for children, one of them a wild flower guide. Her Garden Book for Young People (1908), illustrated with photographs, is not a book on how to garden but rather a fictionalized account of two orphaned young people who make their home in a suburban town called Nestly. On their own in an old brick house, they strive to improve their property and do so, with the help of many friends and neighbors. The book has little plot, apparently being intended to inspire young readers to garden. Probably her most important garden book, Gardens near the Sea (1910), is a large, handsome work illustrated with photographs and color plates by H. W. Faulkner. It includes practical directions for various seaside locations and descriptions of gardens she had seen. The book includes gardens in New England and on Long Island and shows that she had extensive acquaintance with plant material and a lesser interest in garden design. Lounsberry’s last book (Sir William Phips, 1941), published many years after her garden writings, was a biography of Sir William Phips, a 17th-century governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony who had an interesting and eventful life. This work is intended for the average reader, and there is no indication why she chose to write a book about this man, who has not been ignored by other writers. Lounsberry’s works are not much different from those of other such writers, but she is an example of the many upper middle-class women, mostly New Yorkers, who put their knowledge of plants to profit when nature study became a popular pastime. OTHER WORKS: The Wild Flower Book for Young People (1906). Frank and Bessie’s Forester (1912). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Samuel, H. J., Wild Flower Hunter: The Story of Ellis (1961). Other references: NYT (22 Nov. 1949). —BEVERLY SEATON
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LOVEJOY, Esther (Clayson) Pohl Born November 1869, near Seabeck, Washington; died17 August 1967, New York, New York Daughter of Edward and Annie Quinton Clayson; married Emil Pohl, 1894 (died 1911); George A. Lovejoy, 1913 (divorced 1920); children: one son, who died in 1908 Esther Pohl Lovejoy was born in a logging camp. She worked her way through the University of Oregon Medical School, graduating in 1894, the second woman to receive an M.D. from the institution. Lovejoy and her first husband, also a physician, practiced together in Portland for several years. In 1898 they joined the gold rush to Alaska and set up practice and a hospital in Skagway, returning in 1900 to Portland. Following the birth of her son the next year, Lovejoy continued her practice in Portland and was director of Portland’s Health Department from 1907 to 1909. Her son died in 1908; Pohl died in 1911. She divorced her second husband, a Portland businessman, in 1920. From 1919 until the year of her death, Lovejoy served as chairman of the American Women’s Hospitals (AWH) executive board, organizing relief efforts in 30 different countries. She helped found the Medical Women’s International Association (MWIA) in 1919 and served as its president until 1924. She also served as president of the American Medical Women’s Association from 1932 to 1933. In acknowledgment of her outstanding service on behalf of their people, many foreign countries bestowed upon Lovejoy their highest honors. Lovejoy’s first book, The House of the Good Neighbor (1919), tells of her experiences during World War I at a French résidence sociale in Levallois, a suburb of Paris. As a representative of the MWIA, Lovejoy went to France to find ways American women physicians might aid relief efforts there. Her stay with Marie-Jeanne Bassot, who conducted the social center known affectionately as the ‘‘House of the Good Neighbor,’’ allowed Lovejoy to observe directly the effects of the war on French women and children. Lovejoy tells of the French government’s campaign encouraging women to have children as a patriotic duty at a time when 80,000 French babies were dying each year of starvation or disease, and concludes that for women war is worse than death. Certain Samaritans (1927) tells of the AWH’s relief efforts in Europe. Because American women physicians wanted to serve their country and were not accepted for military service by the war department, in 1917 the MWNA established the AWH, directed and staffed entirely by women, to bring relief and medical aid to noncombatant populations in war-stricken countries. AWH relief work did not end with the war, however. The book focuses on the Christian exodus from Turkey in 1922 and AWH efforts to help the hundreds of thousands of refugees suffering everything from smallpox to starvation. The story is remarkable and is well told. Women Physicians and Surgeons (1939) tells the same story but offers more specific supporting details, including actual letters, reports, records, and minutes of AWH executive meetings. It is of more interest to historians and scholars than to the general reader.
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LOWELL
In Women Doctors of the World (1957), her last book, Lovejoy records the history of women physicians throughout the world. She summarizes the early historical background in her first chapter, relying heavily on the work of Kate Campbell Hurd Mead, and concentrates on the 19th and 20th centuries, thus supplementing Mead’s work, A History of Women in Medicine (1938). Lovejoy traces the careers of the first women physicians in countries around the world; includes the history of the AWH; and concludes with a chapter, ‘‘Women Doctors in the Golden Age of Medicine,’’ asserting that women physicians may be responsible for the present golden age of medicine. Lovejoy wrote to provide young women interested in medicine with role models of successful women physicians. She succeeded and made a great contribution to women’s history. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Burt, O. W., Physician to the World: Esther Pohl Lovejoy (1973). Medical Women’s International Association Golden Jubilee Souvenir, Esther Pohl Lovejoy, M.D. (1970). Other references: Journal of the American Medical Women’s Association (Aug. 1967, Sept. 1967). NYT (18 Aug. 1967). Time (25 Aug. 1967). Today’s Health (Aug. 1970). —ANNE HUDSON JONES
LOWELL, Amy Born 9 February 1874, Brookline, Massachusetts; died 12 May 1925, Brookline, Massachusetts Daughter of Augustus and Katherine Lawrence Lowell Amy Lowell, a descendant of a clan of cultivated New England intellectuals, was raised in a family of devout Episcopalians on a 10-acre estate (Sevenels); the stately brownstone mansion, with its high mansard roof and extravagant gardens, became her home on the death of her parents. Her life of opulence was reinforced by a full staff of servants and her secretary-companion, Ada Russell. Lowell disapproved of wasting time and money on frivolities, however, claiming she was ‘‘an old-fashioned Puritan,’’ who ‘‘let each day pass, well ordered in its usefulness.’’ Following several years of solitary apprenticeship in the atmosphere of the 7,000-book-lined library at Sevenels, she became a student of verse, and finally, in 1902, settled into the serious business of being a poet. The image of the social grand dame was not easily overcome; however, Lowell was determined to be be recognized as a hardworking, serious poet. At the time her first serious poem, ‘‘Fixed Idea,’’ appeared in Atlantic Monthly (Aug. 1910), her recognition consisted of the admiration accorded the sister of an eminent astronomer and the president of Harvard. Despite the uncharitable opinions of some of her relatives, the portly, liberated woman, who resembled the director of a girls’ school in her mannish coat, stiff collar, and pince-nez, knew what she was about. For more than 13 years, Lowell was an ardent and indefatigable campaigner for poetry, and her prominence in both social and literary circles, coupled with her histrionic presence,
gave her easy access to poetry societies, publishing offices, and public platforms. As a self-appointed prophet, she felt her mission was to reconstruct the taste of the American public, whom she felt had little comprehension of contemporary poetry. It was not until her meeting with the Imagists in London in 1913 that Lowell began to gain some recognition. Despite controversy with writers such as Ford Maddox Ford and Ezra Pound over the reconstructed version of Imagism she imported to America, Lowell successfully published three Imagist anthologies and continued unwavering in her determination to create a climate conducive to the creation of American poetry. Together with her poetry, Lowell published two volumes of critical essays, Six French Poets (1915) and Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (1917), and numerous reviews, some of which reflected critical misjudgements, particularly in the case of Pound, Eliot, and Marianne Moore. Following the publication of her first volume of poems, A Dome of Many-Colored Glass (1912), highly conventional in subject and style, Lowell was more experimental, studiously noting in each of her prefaces the development of her own poetics, her experimentation with unrhymed cadence, fluctuating rhythm, and most notably ‘‘polyphonic verse,’’ a flexible verse form that she first used in Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds (1914) and later in Can Grande’s Castle (1918). Generally, Lowell was successful when she was on native ground; her lack of success is reflected in departures, such as her ‘‘oriental poems.’’ Occasionally a memorable poem (‘‘Meeting-House Hill,’’ ‘‘Patterns,’’ ‘‘Lilacs’’) appears among the 650 preserved in published volumes, but Lowell will not be memorialized for her poetry. She had unlimited faith in her own capacity and a shared concern with other poets for the enterprise of poetry, and until her death she was a tireless and dedicated impresario of modern poetry.
OTHER WORKS: Some Imagist Poets: An Annual Anthology (1915-1917). Men, Women, and Ghosts (1916). Pictures of the Floating World (1919). Legends (1921). A Critical Fable (1922). John Keats (1925). What’s O’Clock (1925). Eastwind (1926). Ballads for Sale (1927). Selected Poems (1928). Poetry and Poets (1930). Correspondence of a Friendship (with F. Ayscough, 1946). Complete Poetical Works of Amy Lowell (edited by L. Untemeyer, 1955). The majority of Amy Lowell’s manuscripts are housed in the Houghton Library of Harvard University, others are at the University of Virginia.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Benvenuto, R., Amy Lowell (1985). Damon, S. F., Amy Lowell: A Chronicle, with Extracts from Her Correspondence (1935, 1969). Gould, J., Amy: The World of Amy Lowell and the Imagist Movement (1963). Heymann, C. D., American Aristocracy: The Lives and Times of James Russell, Amy, and Robert
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Lowell (1980). Ruihley, G. R., The Thorn of a Rose: Amy Lowell Reconsidered (1963). Scott, W. T., Exiles and Fabrications (1961). Reference works: DAB. NAW (1971). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the Untied States (1995). TCA. TCAS. Other references: JML (1963). NEQ (Mar. 1970, Sept. 1970). TQ (1964). —CLAIRE HEALEY
LOWRY, Lois Born 20 March 1937, Honolulu, Hawaii Daughter of Robert E. and Katharine Landis Hammbersberg; married Donald G. Lowry, 1956 (divorced); children: Alix, Grey, Kristen, Benjamin One of the most popular children’s novelists, Lois Lowry combines a perceptive sense of humor with a sure understanding of children and childhood. Although best known for her comic novels about a girl named Anastasia growing up in the Boston area, Lowry has also received widespread critical acclaim for her more serious novels, including the 1990 Newbery award-winner, Number the Stars (1989), and the 1994 Newbery award-winner, The Giver (1993). Lowry lived in Pennsylvania during World War II, while her father was on active duty. After the war, she moved with her family to Japan, where she finished junior high. When they returned to the U.S., Lowry graduated from high school in New York City. She taught herself to read at an early age and always loved books. ‘‘I remember the feeling of excitement that I had the first time that I realized each letter had a sound, and the sounds went together to make words, and the words became sentences, and the sentences became stories. I was very young—not yet four years old. It was then that I decided that one day I would write books.’’ Determined to fulfill her dream, Lowry entered Brown University at seventeen. She left after two years to marry and had four children by the time she was twenty-five. Returning later to college, she received her B.A. from the University of Maine in 1973 at the age of thirty-six. After a successful career as a freelance writer and photographer, Lowry published her first novel, A Summer to Die, in 1977. Written in memory of her sister Helen, who died young, the book received the International Reading Association’s Children’s Book Award for the best book of the year by an author ‘‘who shows unusual promise in the children’s book field.’’ Lowry’s other novels also draw on personal and family experience. Her years in Pennsylvania, where she lived in her grandparents’ home, inspired Autumn Street (1980), the moving story of a child’s response to a war being waged far away and her growing understanding of the curious inequities that existed in her own home and town. The Appalachian community in which her
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brother works as a physician is the setting of the 1987 Boston Globe-Horn Book award-winner for fiction, Rabble Starkey, while a friend’s experiences in Copenhagen during World War II led directly to Lowry’s Newbery award-winning novel Number the Stars. This is a vivid portrayal of friendship and courage in which a gentile family helps its Jewish neighbors escape when their safety is threatened by Hitler’s planned roundup of Denmark’s Jews. Humor forms the backbone of Lowry’s novels about the precocious Anastasia Krupnik, whom critic Eric A. Kimmel calls Lowry’s ‘‘supreme creation, the most formidable child since Ramona Quimby.’’ Beginning with Anastasia Krupnik (1979) and continuing through Anastasia at This Address (1991), the series details the myriad changes and comic moments that mark the life of a girl between the ages of ten and thirteen. All About Sam (1988), focusing on Anastasia’s younger brother, describes with broad humor and flashes of genuine insight about the world as seen through the eyes of an extremely curious, extremely verbal little boy. Underneath the humor, however, lies a serious theme, one Lowry herself identifies as pivotal to her work: ‘‘If I go on writing books as I hope to for years and years, . . .probably every one of those books will have the same basic theme. . .the importance of human beings to one another.’’ A sequel, Attaboy Sam!, was published in 1992. Lowry’s autobiographical Looking Back: A Book of Memories (1998) includes family snapshots, short excerpts from her novels, and character sketches of her friends and relatives. Lowry explained to Publishers Weekly her childlike narrative, which allows her to share experiences through a different perspective: ‘‘That is how I write—I go back to the child I was and see things through those eyes. It’s a very subjective way of writing, but it seems to work.’’ Triggered by her son Grey’s tragic death in an Air Force fighter plane, this project became Lowry’s solution to offering her young granddaughter a story about her father. ‘‘Once Grey became the focus of an article in Time and of segments on Inside Edition and 60 Minutes,’’ she noted, ‘‘there was no longer any privacy to the sorrow. Because of this publicity, I began to get many letters from strangers who poured out their own life stories, and this made me aware of how important it is for people to tell their stories to each other.’’ Lowry discussed her concern with people’s misconception of writing books for children in Contemporary Authors: ‘‘An awful lot of people believe the myth that it’s easy to write for kids, so they think they can sit down and do it on Sunday afternoon after the dishes are done. People who think that are wrong. They should spend their time reading books for young people. A lot of them think they can write for young people but they haven’t read what’s being written, so they aren’t familiar with it. I think, in general, anybody who wants to write anything should a, read a lot and b, write a lot, and quit worrying about who’s going to buy it. It seems to be a part of the current generation, which is very impatient, to want to sit down and write something and sell it. If they’d concentrate on the writing instead of the selling, they’d probably end up a lot better off. But it’s tough to convince them of that. Instant gratification seems to be very important these days.’’
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Original characters, brilliant plotting, and a finely tuned ear for the comic touch combine to give Lowry’s novels for children a permanent place in the history of children’s literature. OTHER WORKS: Black American Literature (1973). Literature of the American Revolution (1974). Values and the Family (1977). Find a Stranger, Say Goodbye (1978). Here in Kennebunkport (1978). Anastasia Again! (1981). Anastasia at Your Service (1982). Taking Care of Terrific (1983). The 100th Thing About Caroline (1983). Anastasia, Ask Your Analyst (1984). Us and Uncle Fraud (1984). Anastasia on Her Own (1985). Switcharound (1985). Anastasia Has the Answers (1986). Anastasia’s Chosen Career (1987). Your Move, J.P. (1990). Stay! Keeper’s Story (1997). Zooman Sam (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1976, 1999). CANR (1984). CLR (1984). DLB (1986). SATA (1978, 1981). Other references: Horn Book (Mar./Apr. 1987, July/Aug. 1990). PW (2 Feb. 1994, 7 Sept. 1998). —AMY L. COHN, UPDATED BY ALLISON A. JONES
LOY, Mina Born 27 December 1882, London, England; died 25 September 1966, Aspen, Colorado Daughter Sidmund and Julia Brian Lowy; married Stephen Haweis, 1903; Arthur Cravan (Fabian Avenarius Lloyd), 1918; children: four, two of whom died young Mina Loy has always been considered an American modernist poet. Her modernist education began at seventeen with the study of painting in Munich, London, and Paris. She was elected to the Autumn Salon in 1906 and then left Paris for Florence. There she met the Futurists and incorporated their revolutionary theories of painting and literature into her early poetry. Her poems began appearing in the American little magazines in 1914, and she joined the New York avant-garde in 1916. Loy shared the Americans’ commitment to the rejuvenation of word and image and their search for new poetic forms, derived from modern painting, to depict the movement of consciousness. At the forefront of poetic experiment, Loy earned notoriety for her structural innovations and her sexual subject matter. After 1925 she was largely forgotten, partly because she lacked the discipline to develop her early breakthroughs, and also because she gave much of her creative energy to painting. Loy was married twice: in 1903 to Stephen Haweis, an English painter; in 1918 to Dadaist Arthur Cravan. Of her four children, one died in infancy, one in adolescence. She lived in Paris from 1923 to 1936 and in New York from 1936 to 1954; she spent the remainder of her life with her daughters in Aspen, Colorado.
LOY
In her poetry, Loy explores the self, ‘‘a covered entrance to infinity.’’ Her main symbol is the eye; her enduring theme the necessity of persistent, self- and world-defining vision in a chaotic and indifferent universe. In poems written from 1914 to 1917, she analyzes a female self deformed by social mores that limit women to the roles of wife and mistress and make her success in the marriage market dependent on virginity and sexual ignorance. Educated on romantic love stories, the Italian matrons of ‘‘At the Door of the House’’ (1917) and ‘‘The Effectual Marriage’’ (1917) are soon disillusioned with marriage. The semiautobiographical Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose (first half, Little Review, 1923-24; second half, Contact Collection of Contemporary Writers, 1925) details the English version of the domestic drama. ‘‘Parturition’’ (1914) uses irregular typography to convey woman’s physical pain and spiritual quest during childbirth. Her central work is Love Songs (Poems I-IV, Others, 1915), or Songs to Joannes (Poems I-XXXIV, Others, 1917), 34 poems on the failure of romantic love, using irregular typography and a collage structure. Proto-surrealist images link sexuality and the psyche, and narrative blurs as the speaker is accosted by fragments of love that introduce her to a meaningless universe. Loy retreats from nihilism in ‘‘Human Cylinders’’ (1917), ‘‘The Black Virginity’’ (1918), and ‘‘The Dead’’ (1920), where, recognizing the impossibility of attaining absolute answers to the cosmic mystery, she shifts her emphasis to the act of vision. Lunar Baedeker (1923) contains early poems (13 Love Songs from 1914 and 1915) and new poems. The theme of the unique vision of the artist, who alone shapes chaos into divine Form, dominates the newer poems. Loy’s heritage here is art for art’s sake as it developed through Baudelaire, Parnassianism, Laforgue, and the English 1890s. ‘‘Apology of Genius’’ (1922) stresses the artist’s alienation from philistine society, the supremacy of art, and the importance of artistic craftsmanship. Other poems draw upon this heritage to defend abstract art. The title poem and ‘‘Crab-Angel’’ satirize the dishonest artist who abandons vision and treats art as a circus for self-display. Lunar Baedeker reflects the development of Loy’s imagery. Early poems alternate abstraction and image to depict the movement of consciousness between intellect and intuition. Later poems are series of vivid images, unified by the interplay of sounds (Loy’s trademark) that unite abstraction and image in flashes of vision. Lunar Baedeker & Time-Tables (1958) retraces former ground and includes a few later poems. In poems written during the 1940s and 1950s, Loy elaborates a minor early subject, the clownish bum who, as in ‘‘Hot Cross Bum,’’ sidesteps vision to pursue false Nirvanas. His companions are other denizens of the metropolis who fabricate illusions in order to escape reality. Since 1944 Loy has been rediscovered by poets and critics who find in her, as in Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams, elements of modernist poetry that feed the present. An innovative structuring of consciousness, honesty of subject, and deployment of radiant words and images are qualities that made Loy a seminal modernist and connect her to the present.
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OTHER WORKS: Auto-Facial Constructions (1919). Psycho-Democracy (1920).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Fields, K., The Rhetoric of Artifice—Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Walter Conrad Arensberg, Donald Evans, Mina Loy, and Yvor Winters (Ph.D. dissertation, 1967). Kouidis, V. M., Mina Loy: American Modernist Poet (1980). Reference works: CB (Oct. 1950). DLB (1980). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Women’s Studies (1980). Other references: Boundary 2 (Spring 1980). Circle (1944). Dial (June 1926). Little Review (Mar. 1918). Nation (May 1961). New York Evening Sun (13 Feb. 1917). Southern Review (July 1967). —VIRGINIA M. KOUIDIS
LUCAS, Victoria See PLATH, Sylvia
LUCE, Clare Boothe Born 10 April 1903, New York, New York; died 9 October 1987 Also wrote under: Clare Boothe, Clare Boothe Brokaw Daughter of William F. and Ann Snyder Boothe; married George T. Brokaw, 1923 (divorced 1929); Henry R. Luce, 1935 Clare Booth Luce was a playwright, journalist, politician, diplomat, and feminist. She planned a theatrical career, attending Clare Tree Major’s School of the Theater, but her direction was changed by a brief stint for the woman suffrage movement and her marriage to George Brokaw in 1923. Six years later when her marriage ended, she turned to journalism, serving in editorial posts for Vogue and then Vanity Fair. In 1931 she resigned, determined to write plays, and shortly thereafter married Henry Luce, then president of Time Inc. This second marriage did not interrupt her career. She wrote four plays for Broadway, then devoted herself to journalism and politics. She traveled and wrote for Life, campaigned for Wendell Willkie and later for Eisenhower, served two terms as U.S. Congresswoman from Connecticut in the 1940s, and competed for a Republican senatorial nomination in the early 1950s. She lost the last race, but Eisenhower appointed her Ambassador to Italy. During these years, Luce wrote and lectured, not only on politics but also on Catholicism, to which she was converted in midlife. After the death of Henry Luce, she retired to Hawaii, where she wrote and lectured on such diverse subjects as the
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women’s movement, the Catholic stance on abortion, and conservative Republicanism. As a writer, Luce’s most significant body of work is her plays. The first, Abide with Me (1935), is a somber melodrama about a sadistic husband who is finally shot by the faithful family servant. It ran for only 36 performances. Fame came with The Women (1936), a vitriolic comedy about wealthy ladies of leisure. The play centers on the struggles of a devoted wife to regain her husband while living amidst a jungle of catty women nourished on gossip and the misfortunes of their acquaintances. The play was filmed twice, in 1939 and 1956, and was revived on Broadway in 1973. In the light of the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s, however, the play comes across as false and unworthy. Luce made Broadway again with Kiss the Boys Good-Bye (1938), a frivolous comedy about the much-ballyhooed Hollywood search for an unknown actress to play Scarlet O’Hara, which ran for 286 performances. Luce’s last play, Margin for Error, a satiric melodrama with an anti-Nazi plot, was produced in 1939. All of her plays, except the first, were later filmed. A review of Luce’s journalistic writings reveals her personal development. Her first piece, Stuffed Shirts (1931), is a brittle series of sketches lampooning various New York characters, such as the newly rich dowager, the divorcee, and the Wall Street ladies’ man. Later Luce’s interests became more international. Europe in the Spring (1940) is a lively account of her European travels at the time of the great German offensive. After her seven years in politics, she wrote a series of articles for McCall’s magazine (1947) describing her religious conversion to Roman Catholicism after the death of her daughter Ann. In 1952 she edited a volume of essays by American and British authors called Saints for Now. Ladies’ Home Journal printed the essay ‘‘Growing Old Beautifully’’ in 1973. Despite the more mellow works of her later years, Luce is remembered best as a playwright with a heavy hand for sensationalism and sentimentality—two qualities with great appeal for audiences of the 1930s. Her plays are infused with social snobbery and a brisk but vituperative wit with which she characterized the wealthy, sophisticated class. It is a great irony that the hostile, unflattering portraits of her own sex, in plays such as The Women and Kiss the Boys Good-Bye, should overshadow the more constructive efforts of this feminist. OTHER WORKS: Come to the Stable (nominated for an Academy Award, 1949). Child of the Morning (performed 1951, 1958). Slam the Door Softly (published in Life as A Doll’s House, 1970). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Betts, A. P., Women in Congress (1945). Gray, J., ‘‘Dream of Unfair Women,’’ in On Second Thought (1946). Martin, H. Henry and Clare: An Intimate Portrait (1991). Mersand, J., American Drama 1930-1940 (1941). Shadegg, S.,Clare Booth Luce: A Bibliography (1970). Sheed, W., Clare Booth Luce (1982). Reference works: Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress, 1774-1984, Bicentennial Edition (1989). CA (1974). Catholic Authors: Contemporary Biographical Sketches, 1930-1947 (1952).
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NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCA, TCAS. Other references: NR (11 May 1953). Newsweek (26 Nov. 1973). Woman’s Home Companion (Nov. 1955, Dec. 1955, Jan. 1956). —LUCINA P. GABBARD
LUHAN, Mabel (Ganson) Dodge Born 26 February 1879, Buffalo, New York; died 13 August 1962, Taos, New Mexico Also wrote under: Mabel Dodge Daughter of Charles and Sarah Ganson; married Karl Evans, 1900; Edwin Dodge, circa 1905; Maurice Sterne, 1917; Antonio Luhan, 1923 The only child of upper-class parents, Mabel Dodge Luhan had an economically and socially secure, but emotionally starved, childhood. Tended by nursemaids and kept at a distance by an ineffectual father and a strong-willed, socialite mother, Luhan felt like an orphan who spent her life in search of a community in which she could be ‘‘at home.’’ Luhan devoted her life to overcoming her anomie by directing her energies to the discovery and creation of her identity. She identified herself with an enormous variety of aesthetic and political causes; constructed model communities she hoped would define her role and purpose in modern society; collected famous artists and activists whose careers she tried to shape and who, in turn, she hoped would give shape and meaning to her life; spent 20 years in psychoanalysis while dabbling in a number of mind-cure philosophies; and left 24 volumes of autobiographical materials bearing witness to the multiple ways in which she sought self-definition. Although financially independent and sexually liberated, Luhan was crippled by her belief in woman’s cultural subservience. Believing women capable of only ‘‘secondary’’ forms of creativity, she played the role of muse to men of genius, attempting to achieve an identity by inspiring their creativity. At the same time, she wished to create in her own right, so her relationships with men often turned destructive and self-destructive. She was married four times; only in her last marriage to a full-blooded Pueblo did she achieve any sense of fulfillment. Among the Pueblos, she found a culture in which individual, social, and religious values were integrated by a unifying mythos that was organically related to a land in which she finally felt at home. Luhan became a leading symbol of modernism, in fact and fiction. As a spokeswoman for the avant-garde, Luhan was a published poet, book reviewer, essayist, biographer, and social critic. Her prose styles and subject matter were a melting pot of Americana, ranging from the banality of the Dorothea Dix-type columns she wrote for the Hearst papers to superbly evocative descriptive prose on life in the Southwest.
Luhan’s major contribution to American literature is her book Winter in Taos (1935). While she sought for years to find writers (D. H. Lawrence and Robinson Jeffers were the two most famous) to publicize her Southwestern paradise, she wrote its finest testament herself. Winter in Taos is a first-rank contribution to American regional literature, a work of intense lyrical beauty and metaphoric power that achieves a richly sustained integration of her emotional life with the landscape surrounding her. Luhan’s discovery of the Native Americans as potential saviors for a declining white civilization led to the writing of her best-known work, Intimate Memories (4 vols., 1933-37). Begun in 1924 as part of an ongoing process of psychotherapy, Luhan presented her fragmented personality as a metaphor for a world she wished would die and be reborn, as she felt she had, through the grace offered by a pre-Western tribal culture. Although she was not a feminist, her self-portrait reveals the destructiveness of the feminine mystique of which she was both perpetrator and victim. Luhan’s memoirs are a significant contribution to social, intellectual, and feminist history. In spite of her sometimes unreliable and self-serving observations, she is an insightful eyewitness to childrearing in Victorian America, the fin de siècle world of American expatriates in Europe, the major revolutionary movements of pre-World War I America, and the fascination of postwar intellectuals with ‘‘primitives.’’ OTHER WORKS: Lorenzo in Taos (1932). Taos and Its Artists (1947). The papers of Mabel Dodge Luhan are housed in the Beinecke Library of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Crunden, R., From Self to Society, 1919-1941 (1972). Hahn, E., Mabel (1978). Heller, A., and L. P. Rudnick, eds., 1915, The Cultural Moment: The New Politics, the New Woman, the New Psychology, the New Art, and the New Theatre in America (1991). Lasch, C., The New Radicalism in America (1889-1963) (1965). Norwood, V. and J. Monk, eds., The Desert is No Lady: Southwestern Landscapes in Women’s Writing and Art (1987). Rudnick, L. P., Mabel Dodge Luhan: New Woman, New Worlds (1984). Reference works: TCA, TCAS. —LOIS P. RUDNICK
LUMPKIN, Grace Born 20 May 1905, Milledgeville, Georgia; died 27 February 1996 Raised and educated largely in South Carolina, Grace Lumpkin later taught school in Georgia and worked as a home demonstration agent for the government, thereby coming into contact with the poverty of many Southern farm families. Her sympathy for the poor was expanded by living and working among North Carolina
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mountain people and watching their migration to the cotton mills. She became a staunch anticapitalist and ardent supporter of industrial unionism. Lumpkin went to New York when she was twenty-five and began to write short stories, becoming involved in liberal and radical politics. Her first story was published in the New Masses, and during the 1930s, like many young writers, she became a fellow traveler. During this period, she wrote two proletarian novels, both about the Southern poor. A Sign for Cain (1935) was the subject of a 1953 inquiry by the Senate Permanent Investigating Sub-Committee, at which Lumpkin testified she had been forced to write communist propaganda into the novel, under threat of having her career ‘‘broken’’ by communist book reviewers. Lumpkin, who lived for years in Columbia, South Carolina, was said to be working on a new novel, God and a Garden, but she died in 1996 and the work remains unpublished. Lumpkin’s first and best novel, To Make My Bread (1932), traces the movement of poor Southern tenant farmers and sharecroppers from their rural homes to newly industrialized mill towns. It is a compassionate novel that uses the author’s intimate knowledge of these people to explore the cultural shock and the disillusion they encountered in the transition. While in the Southern mountains, these people had endured a stable kind of poverty, ameliorated by the natural beauty of their surroundings, the intoxicating rituals of their fundamentalist religion, and the closeness of family and community ties. In the cotton mills, their large families became a burden, especially for the women who were needed as wage earners; their religion became a tool of the bosses who exploited and distorted its ideals of submissiveness; and the natural beauty was replaced by dreary industrial ugliness. Lumpkin’s heroine, Bonnie McClure, like many of the other women, is pushed, almost reluctantly, out of her traditional feminine role as childbearer by the economic exigencies of her life: sooner than watch children starve to death she will become a union organizer and strike leader. Lumpkin’s sympathies for factory women are strong, but she tends ultimately to see the resolution of their problems in a socialist transformation of society, despite the fact that their sufferings are markedly different in nature from those of their husbands and brothers. In her second novel, A Sign for Cain, Lumpkin again attempts to demonstrate that the interests of all the poor are best served by communism, this time by exploring the potential power of a political alliance between black and white sharecroppers in the South. This novel has, as a kind of antiheroine, a rebellious bourgeois woman, Caroline Gault, who, modern and assertive in her sexual morality, is nevertheless condemned for trying to substitute a reactionary code of individualism for collective action. This novel proposes even more directly than the first that women should not seek sexual justice outside the framework of a socialist redistribution of society’s resources. Lumpkin’s third novel, The Wedding (1939, reprinted 1977), makes a movement away from political tendentiousness in favor of a rather sympathetic examination of a Southern middle-class family in a state of personal crisis. Her last published work, Full Circle (1962), is a novel embracing neither her political nor her
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literary reputation, dealing as it does with what one critic has called the overcultivated soil of international communist conspiracy. It is in the first two novels Lumpkin makes her most significant contribution to the literature of feminism. Both provide early examples of the continuing dialectical debate between the adherents of solidarity with other movements of oppressed groups and those who believe that no economic or social equality can ever exist without a prior radical revision of the relationships between men and women. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Chestnut, S., The Difference Within: Southern Proletarian Writers Olive Dargan, Grace Lumpkin, and Myra Page (dissertation, 1994). Rideout, W. B., The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900-1954 (1956). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the Untied States (1995). TCA, TCAS. Other references: Books (27 Oct. 1935). Nation (19 Oct. 1932). New Republic (7 Dec. 1932, 23 Oct. 1935). NYT (26 Feb. 1939). Saturday Review (9 Nov. 1935). —SYLVIA COOK
LURIE, Alison Born 3 September 1926, Chicago, Illinois Daughter of Harry and Bernice Stewart Lurie; married Jonathan P. Bishop Jr., 1948 (divorced); Edward Hower, 1995; children: John, Jeremy, Joshua The daughter of a sociology professor father turned Jewish-welfare administrator, and a mother who had been a journalist, Alison Lurie was encouraged to explore her creativity at an early age. An ‘‘odd-looking,’’ partially deaf child, Lurie predicted she would become one of the ‘‘old maids’’ she voraciously read about in Victorian and Edwardian children’s books. After graduating from Radcliffe (B.A., 1947), Lurie worked as a manuscript reader for Oxford University before marrying in 1948. Although she had sold three poems and a short story while in college, she published nothing until her privately printed memoir of her friend Violet Ranney (Bunny) Lang appeared in 1959. The memoir, reprinted commercially in 1975, focuses on Lang’s career and the beginnings of the Poets’ Theater of Cambridge. Lurie’s first novel, Love and Friendship (1962), explores the academic milieu figuring prominently in her life and her novels. A member of the English faculty at Cornell University beginning in 1969, Lurie sets several of her multilayered satirical novels at universities. In Love and Friendship, Emily Turner suddenly realizes she no longer loves her adoring professor-husband. Lurie’s characters are well-educated middle class or uppermiddle class people who have, for a brief time, taken themselves or what they do too seriously. The Nowhere City (1966) explores several dichotomies: East-West, male-female, and past-present.
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In Imaginary Friends (1967), Lurie satirizes both religious cults and academia, exploring the pressure on professors to publish as well as the apathy some exhibit regarding their power over students. Real People (1969) draws on Lurie’s experiences at Yaddo, an upstate New York artists’ retreat, to describe Illyria, where ‘‘one becomes one’s real self.’’
pestered and attacked by a piece of antique furniture that refuses to be placed in a museum. In perhaps the best of these tales, Dinah is confronted by the ghost of her fiancé’s first wife, Ilse, who is passed out in a drunken stupor at her kitchen table. Dinah begins to investigate Ilse’s fate and finds out enough about her beloved Gregor to make her run for her own safety.
The title of Lurie’s fourth novel, The War Between the Tates (1974), works on various levels: it refers to Erica and Brian Tate’s marital problems, to the difficulty of their children’s budding adolescence, and to the parallel between the war in Vietnam and the battle between the sexes and the generations. In Only Children (1979), Lurie’s narrative point of view alternates between eight-year-old Mary Ann and an objective third person. The novel satirizes adult responsibility, love, beauty, and moral values.
The Last Resort (1998) is a novel set in Key West and populated by a wide range of characters befitting the schizophrenic nature of the area itself. Jenny Walker pushes her husband, Wilkie, to spend the winter in Key West, which she believes will help his depression. Wilkie, however, believes he is dying of cancer and is planning to commit suicide. Jenny, 25 years his junior, has her own issues and falls in love with a gay member of the Key West community. Essentially a comedy of characters and events, The Last Resorthas underlying agendas of antienvironmentalism and gay activism.
Lurie masters the use of metaphor in Foreign Affairs (1984), in which a little dog represents self-pity. Vinnie Miner, an Anglophile professor of children’s literature on sabbatical in England, resembles her creator. An affair between Vinnie and Chuck Mumpson, a stereotypical Oklahoman tourist, forces her to reconsider her concept of reality. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize (1985). Lurie’s other awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim (1965) and Rockefeller (1967) foundations. In The Truth about Lorin Jones (1988), museum curator Polly Alter undergoes a journey toward self-discovery while trying to learn about Lorin Jones, a painter who had died many years before. Although some critics dismissed the novel as frivolous, it explores difficult choices, and has many satirical moments. By ostensibly stereotyping both gender roles and sexual preference, Lurie speaks profoundly about the backlash against feminism. The novel also reflects on the futility of seeking the truth: as Polly struggles to sort out the myriad perceptions she has gathered about Lorin, she realizes no one she interviewed was ‘‘lying. . .everyone had told her the truth as he or she knew or imagined it.’’ Lurie’s long-term interest in children’s literature is illustrated in such gatherings and translations of children’s tales from around the world as The Heavenly Zoo (1970), Clever Gretchen and Other Forgotten Folktales (1980), and Fabulous Beasts (1981). In Don’t Tell the Grown-Ups: Subversive Children’s Literature (1990), she examines underlying texts in children’s stories, ranging from folk- and fairy tales and gothic novels through such modern writers as J. R. R. Tolkien and Richard Adams. According to Lurie, most children’s literature maintains the status quo, but the books in which she takes pleasure undermine current assumptions and express alternate views of the world. Lurie’s diversity of interests takes yet another form in The Language of Clothes (1981). Explaining fashion as a nonverbal language of signs, she shows the influence political climates have historically had on dress and costume. Lurie’s Women and Ghosts (1994) is a collection of nine short stories about women who are plagued by a selection of thoroughly modern and entertaining ghosts—not all of which are human. A dieting woman is pursued by fat ghosts; another woman is chaperoned on dates by her whining, deceased fiancé; another is
In a return to juvenile literature, The Black Geese: A Baba Yaga Story from Russia, Lurie reprises the powerful witch from Russian folklore, Baba Yaga, first encountered in The Heavenly Zoo. Elena is charged with watching her little brother. The boy is taken away by the black geese who belong to Baba Yaga, and Elena must find a way to get him back. A well-illustrated book, this may be a classic in the making. OTHER WORKS: V. R. Lang: A Memoir (1959, reprinted as Poems and Plays/V. R. Lang with a Memoir by Alison Lurie, 1975). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CANR (1981, 1986). CBY (1986). CLC (1975, 1976, 1986). DLB 2 (1978). FC (1990). MTCW (1990). Other references: Antioch Review (Winter 1999). BL (1 Sept. 1994, 1 June 1998). Commonweal (16 Dec. 1988). Human Ecology (Spring 1991). Ms. (Oct. 1988). Nation (21 Nov. 1988). New Leader (16 Apr. 1990). New Stateman and Society (8 July 1988, 25 May 1990, 17 June 1994). NYRB (24 Nov. 1988, 23 Nov. 1989, 26 Apr. 1990, 20 Dec. 1990, 25 Apr. 1991). NYTBR (4 Sept. 1988, 25 Feb. 1990, 11 Mar. 1990). PW (9 Feb. 1990, 1 Aug. 1994). Redbook (Oct. 1990). Vogue (Oct. 1989, Aug. 1991). World and I (Feb. 1999). —PHYLLIS S. GLEASON, UPDATED BY REBECCA C. CONDIT
LUTZ, Alma Born 2 March 1890, Jamestown, North Dakota; died 31 August 1973, Berlin, New York Daughter of George and Matilda Bauer Lutz Alma Lutz was a freelance writer, journalist, and contributing editor of Equal Rights, the official journal of the National Women’s Party. She achieved her literary prominence primarily as the biographer of 19th-century women leaders. Lutz’s first work was Emma Willard: Daughter of Democracy (1929). For this narrative biography of the early 19th-century educator, Lutz
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focuses particularly on Willard’s early pioneering investigatory work to prove women’s intellectual capacity and on Willard’s achievements through her Troy, New York, school. Lutz later published a revised edition of this book entitled Emma Willard, Pioneer Educator of American Women (1964). This second version gives a tightened, more sharply honed study of Willard’s mature thought and practice. Lutz portrays with sympathetic insight the consistency of Willard’s views in the midst of changing circumstance. In 1940 Lutz turned to the women’s rights movement, publishing Created Equal: A Biography of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Lutz gives relatively little attention to the formative experiences of Stanton’s early life or even to her early career. She centers instead on the post-1860 years of Stanton’s life, when she could devote nearly full-time attention to the women’s rights cause as publicist, lecturer, and brilliant formulator of policy statements. Lutz places particular stress on Stanton as a ‘‘torchbearer for women,’’ underscoring Stanton’s broad-ranging concerns, the clarity of her perspective, and her role as pioneer anticipator of issues.
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Lutz’s studies of Willard and of Stanton in particular were pioneering works. The Stanton work was the first significant appraisal of that leader since the general History of Woman Suffrage. The Anthony biography and the study of antislavery women presented more familiar material and drew more on well-known sources. The works provided dramatic restatements of these women’s roles. Lutz wrote perceptively, lucidly, and with fervor about the 19th-century struggles for women’s rights. She had a strong, appreciative sense of what had been achieved, but also a personal concern for the unfinished tasks. In the years between the first and second women’s movements, Lutz kept before the general public the sharply lit images of forceful women leaders of the past. OTHER WORKS: Mary Baker Eddy Historical House, Swampscott, Massachusetts: The Birthplace of Christian Science (1935). Mary Baker Eddy Historical House, Rumney Village, New Hampshire: The Rumney Years (1940). With Love, Jane: Letters of American Women on the War Fronts (1945).
Lutz further extended the Stanton story by collaborating with Elizabeth’s daughter, Harriot Stanton Blatch, in Blatch’s memoirs, Challenging Years (1940). The memoirs themselves deal largely with the women’s-rights efforts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the work about Stanton, Lutz reveals a keen appreciation of the importance of the Stanton-Anthony collaboration. In 1959 Lutz published a significant biographical study of that second figure, Susan B. Anthony: Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian. Lutz thoughtfully appraises the complementary nature of the two women’s work and also traces with careful precision the separate line of Anthony’s thought and action. She underscores the crucial importance of Anthony’s organizing ability and the unflagging involvement that made her eventually the symbol of the woman suffrage movement.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1974). Permanent Series (1975). Other references: AHR (July 1959, Dec. 1968). New Enlgand Quarterly (Dec. 1959). NR (29 July 1940). NYT (9 June 1919, 1 Sept. 1973). Saturday Review (7 Mar. 1959).
Lutz’s final work on 19th-century women leaders was Crusade for Freedom (1968), a study of women’s roles in the antislavery campaigns. In this collective biography, Lutz evaluates the work of such varied personalities as the early antislavery writer Elizabeth Chandler; the educator Prudence Crandle; and the lecturers-writers the Grimké sisters. She underscores the significance of the interwoven strands of antislavery efforts and the emerging women’s rights movement. Lutz sees this same interweaving of concerns reemerging as an important theme of the 1960s.
Raised as a Congregationalist, Helen Merrell Lynd shifted her religious orientation while at Wellesley College (B.A., 1919) to an explanation of the world based on Hegelian dialectics. She earned an M.A. (1922) and a Ph.D. (1944) in history from Columbia University; her teaching career centered around Sarah Lawrence College, where she taught from 1929 to 1964. Lynd has shared with her husband a rich, full life as wife, mother of their two children, and professional colleague.
Lutz was essentially a narrative biographer, concerned primarily with the broad public record of 19th-century women leaders. She developed a strong, dramatic style of writing and became a vivid portrayer of reform personalities. Though concerned with the ideas of the women’s movement, Lutz focused primarily on the efforts to translate ideas into reality. She gave relatively little attention to intellectual history itself or to critical appraisal of the broad social context within which the women functioned. She excelled in the presentation of the individual personality and the detailed accounts of women’s campaigns, rather than in analytical background studies.
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LYND, Helen Merrell Born 17 March 1896, La Grange, Illinois; died January 1982 Daughter of Edward T. and Mabel Waite Merrell; married Robert S. Lynd, 1921; children: two
Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture (1929) and the companion volume, Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts (1935), written by Lynd and her husband, are well-documented studies outstanding in their comprehensiveness, accuracy, and interpretation of community life in the United States. In 1924 and 1925, the Lynds and their research staff lived in the Middletown community and collected information from a variety of sources, as anthropologists study primitive tribes. The study is organized by an analysis of the major activities for community survival: getting a living, making a home, training the young, and engaging in religious practices and community activities. Although ending their first study on a cautious note, recognizing the problems resulting from rapid
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social change, the prosperity and optimism of the community is evident. The Lynds returned to Middletown during the Depression. Earning a living, staying healthy, and in general surviving the effects of financial collapse made life in 1935 starkly different from what it was in 1925. The ability of the city to recover and retain optimism is still striking, though. Class privileges and strain are more apparent in the later study, yet a sense of worker solidarity is lacking. Radical social change did not occur as a result of radical changes in economics. Rather, the community adhered to ‘‘the American way,’’ hoping for a better future. These remarkable community studies provide a systematic view of an American city in times of stability and change. They also set a high standard of sociological expertise making them landmark studies of community development. In Field Work in College Education (1945), Lynd studies student-teacher interaction and the application of social science
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principles in everyday life. England in the Eighteen-Eighties: Toward a Social Basis for Freedom (1945) is a sweeping and powerful study, beautifully written, of the interaction between ideas, material changes, and social movements during a period of social ferment. In On Shame and the Search for Identity (1958), Lynd analyzed more contemporary problems arising from the relationship between the individual and society. The 1965 collection, Toward Discovery, serves as a brief overview of Lynd’s writings. Lynd’s interests and skills cover a wide range of topics and disciplines. Always dedicated to the holistic approach to human behavior, her work reflects her standards of excellence and consistent probing for new insights into the human experience. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: TCA, TCAS. —MARY JO DEEGAN
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M MacDONALD, Betty (Bard) Born 26 March 1908, Boulder, Colorado; died 7 February 1958, Seattle, Washington Daughter of Darsie and Elsie Sanderson Bard; married Robert E. Heskett, 1927 (divorced 1935); Donald C. MacDonald, 1942 (died 1957); children: two daughters The second of five children, Betty MacDonald lived in Mexico, Idaho, and Montana before her mining-engineer father transferred the family to Seattle. After his death, the children were raised by MacDonald’s mother and paternal grandmother. In 1927 MacDonald abandoned art studies at the University of Washington to marry an insurance salesman, who brought her to a chicken ranch on the Olympic Peninsula. They separated in 1931, eventually divorcing in 1935. She remained with her two daughters in her mother’s home, holding a variety of jobs until her second marriage, when she moved with her husband to Vashon Island, Puget Sound. They purchased a California ranch in 1955, and stricken with cancer in 1957, MacDonald returned to Seattle for treatment and died at the age of forty-nine. Yet back in 1943, at her sister Mary’s urging, MacDonald took a day from work to prepare a book outline for a visiting publisher’s representative. This outline became The Egg and I (1945), and her writing career was launched. MacDonald’s major books are autobiographical and are written in high humor. The Egg and I, her witty account of life on a primitive chicken ranch, achieved immediate popularity; one million copies were sold in the first year of publication. In 1947 Universal International released the movie, starring Fred MacMurray and Claudette Colbert and featuring Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride as Ma and Pa Kettle. Much of MacDonald’s charm as author-character lies in her zealous determination to do the right thing. Nevertheless, her homemade bread is a disaster and her autopsies of spraddled chick carcasses futile (‘‘Cause of death: Eggzema’’). Amid the humor, MacDonald probes the loneliness of the farm wife, discovering in a fair exhibit of knotted gunnysacks a pathetic symbol of what isolation can do to a woman. Behind her parade of outlandish characters, she offers carefully muted evidence of her crumbling marriage. The Plague and I (1948) details MacDonald’s battle against tuberculosis at age thirty. Confined in a sanatorium, she sketches other inmates with an artist’s precision, barely roaching on her own fears. Anybody Can Do Anything (1950) encompasses her years as a career woman during the Depression, and Onions in the Stew (1955) depicts family life on Vashon Island. A born humorist with a fine sense of timing, MacDonald knows how to tell a story. Her observations are succinct (‘‘piddocks are clams with some sort of neurosis that makes them afraid to face life’’), her caricatures barbed (‘‘a small sharp-cornered
woman with a puff of short gray hair like a gone-to-seed dandelion’’), and her language friendly and pleasantly earthy. Less generally recognized is her affinity to nature. In MacDonald’s almost lyric descriptions of mountains in the mist, damp green rain forests, and the earth itself, the eye of the art student never deserts her. MacDonald’s humor is frequently self-deprecatory. Actually quite competent, she creates an impression of hopeless ineptness, at the same time praising courageous women like her mother and sister. Her ambivalence toward housework and domesticity is striking. She genuinely loves children and displays a gregarious nature, yet one senses in her writing a barely repressed undercurrent of frustration, almost anger, at the subordinate role wife and mother must play in society. Critically dismissed as a ‘‘regional’’ and ‘‘popular’’ writer, MacDonald still projects an easy warmth and familiarity that draw her reader close. Though her popularity has waned since the 1950s, MacDonald’s work is worthy of rediscovery; her comments are as pungent, her characters as delightful as ever. OTHER WORKS: Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle (1947). Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s Magic (1949). Nancy and Plum (1952). Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s Farm (1954). Hello, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle (1957). Who, Me? The Autobiography of Betty MacDonald (1959). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Spacks, P. M., The Female Imagination (1975). Reference works: CA (1987). CB (1947). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCA (1955). Other references: NYT (8 Feb. 1958). Saturday Review (14 May 1955). Tacoma News Tribune (28 Aug. 1977). —JOANNE McCARTHY
MacDONALD, Jessica N. Born 7 September 1891, Madison, Wisconsin; died 3 June 1988 Wrote under: Jessica Nelson North Daughter of David Willard and Elizabeth Nelson North; married R. I. MacDonald, 1921 Early in life, Jessica N. MacDonald showed signs of the literary potential that would bring her recognition as poet, novelist, critic, and editor. A precocious child, she memorized and recited poetry from the time she could speak. By the age of five, she read the newspaper and composed rhymes. In her youth MacDonald competed successfully with other young poets, including Edna St. Vincent Millay, in the contests conducted by Mary Mapes Dodge, editor of St. Nicholas Magazine.
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MacDonald discovered Poetry Magazine while a student at Lawrence College, from which she was graduated in 1917. When MacDonald moved to Chicago in 1920, she began to contribute poems to Poetry; through the next few decades, she placed poems in such magazines as the Dial, the Forge, Atlantic Monthly, the London Mercury, Double-Dealer, Nation, New Yorker, Voices, Lyric, and the Saturday Evening Post. In 1927 she was awarded the Reed Poetry prize. MacDonald’s best poetry is finely crafted, and even the weakest shows inventiveness. Her first volume, A Prayer Rug (1923), while evincing control of traditional techniques and forms, reveals modernist influences. As Elizabeth Tietjens pointed out, MacDonald creates images with the best of her peers, but knows that ‘‘a single image is not enough to make a poem.’’ MacDonald treats a wide range of everyday topics, and a number of the poems shed light on the complexity of woman’s role in society. Her calm ironic voice registers clearly in such poems as ‘‘Hunger Inn,’’ ‘‘The Marionette,’’ and ‘‘The Sleeper.’’ The poems in The Long Leash (1928) demonstrate MacDonald’s growth as a poet. The volume exhibits what Horace Gregory calls her ‘‘technique of restraint.’’ The selections focus on the power of the creative woman to capture and examine intensely dramatic male-female relationships. The title poem, considered one of her best, treats the confidence with which reciprocated love enables the creative woman to face life’s realities and fulfill her artistic potential. ‘‘A Sumerian Cycle’’ and ‘‘Hibernalia’’ illustrate the breathless emotion MacDonald is capable of producing through understatement. MacDonald succeeds best in the longer poems, where she develops and multiplies dramatic scenes. MacDonald’s artistic control and keen sensibility appear again in Dinner Party (1942), although this volume seems to lack the modernity of her other poetry of that period. Although MacDonald is primarily a poet, she has also produced two successful novels: Arden Acres (1935) and Morning in the Land (1941). Arden Acres draws upon her observations of life in a suburban area outside Chicago during the Depression years. The narrator depicts the lives of the Chapin family, plagued by poverty and shocked by the father’s murder. Although the emotional impact of the novel is effective, its real strength lies in the characterization of women from three generations—Gram, Loretta, and Joan—each of whom demonstrates unusual resilience and aptitude for survival. Morning in the Land, based on the recollections of MacDonald’s father, is a fictional account of an English immigrant family in Wisconsin between 1840 and 1861, when the son is about to leave for service in the Civil War. The novel centers on the frontier achievements of the protagonist, Dick Wentworth, but it also calls attention to the difficulties both Native American and white women endured within the male-oriented social structure. Throughout the period in which her prose and poetry were being published, MacDonald also gained a reputation as editor and critic. She began by editing the Chicago Art Institute Bulletin
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under the direction of Robert Harshe. Learning on the job, MacDonald prepared catalogues for exhibits and published many articles describing various holdings of the institute. In 1927, she moved to Poetry, where over the next twenty years, under the leadership of Harriet Monroe, she helped make Poetry the showcase for the best young American and British authors. MacDonald filled various editorial posts and, in later years, served as a member of the advisory committee. During this period she wrote 21 articles and fifty book reviews. Her contributions ranged from caustically critical pieces such as ‘‘The Wrong-Headed Poets,’’ ‘‘The Hungry Generations,’’ and ‘‘Quality in Madness,’’ to the gently appreciative tribute commemorating the death of Harriet Monroe. In her criticism, as in her poetry, MacDonald displays a sharp eye for honesty of emotion and perfection of form. —LUCY FREIBERT
MacDONALD, Marcia See HILL-LUTZ, Grace Livingston
MacDOUGALL, Ruth Doan Born 19 March 1939, Laconia, New Hampshire Daughter of Daniel and Ernestine Crone Doan; married Donald K. MacDougall, 1957 Ruth Doan MacDougall’s novels reflect her affection for the New England scenes of her youth; a constant theme is regret and anger over the encroachments of ‘‘civilization’’ on the natural beauties of the countryside. A frequent motif is female friendships between contemporaries or between a girl and an older woman who serves as mentor and confidant. MacDougall’s male characters are drawn in brief, telling strokes; they are vivid but secondary to the women. The Lilting House (1965) progresses from the point of view of the ‘‘wise innocent’’ to the informed commentary of Celia, the narrator, as a young woman taking charge of her life; Celia’s development is the novel’s frame. The inner story traces the late maturation of Felicia Polichnowski, an intellectual, imaginative woman married to a laborer. The Lilting House contrasts several mother-daughter relationships, Felicia’s and Celia’s families, and the characters’ various abilities to reconcile dream and reality. One of the decade’s most powerful novels, The Cost of Living (1971), opens with a massacre in a New England supermarket; the motivation is then provided in a long flashback. As narrated sympathetically but unsentimentally by her lifelong friend, Jane, Polly Hall’s attempt to be an ideal daughter, wife, and mother is symbolized by her efforts to restore her old home to perfection. The realism of Polly’s struggle with an inadequate budget and other details of daily life is contrasted brilliantly with the almost mythic sense of fate that controls the novel’s tone.
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One Minus One (1971) is a character study of newly divorced Emily Bean, who fears being a single woman. Her relationships with two roommates—one soon to be married, one desperately wishing to be—and her affairs with two men form the plot, which compares her life with those of her mother and grandmother, employing passages from the grandmother’s diary. The novel ends on a note of restrained hope; Emily is simply drifting professionally, but she has confronted her former husband’s happy second marriage and has faced the impossibility of averting change. Both these novels also present fascinating studies of one kind of modern American nomad—high school teachers who move from job to job, seeking the good life. All yearn to put down roots, but most move on, searching for a natural environment that no longer exists and an ideal town that perhaps exists only in imagination. MacDougall’s stark contrasting of their realistic need for decent pay and good working conditions with their more dreamlike goals contributes greatly to the tension of these novels. The Cheerleader (1973, reprinted 1998) is a bildungsroman that clearly depicts high school life and mores in the 1950s, often employing references to music and films to enhance the realism of the setting. The characterization of the protagonist, Henrietta Snow, is remarkably lifelike because of MacDougall’s treatment of teenage friendships, sexuality, bondage to dress and behavior codes, and desire for both popularity and recognition. Snowy’s maturation, though at times painful, is successful, as symbolized by her rejection of childish alliances in favor of the intellectual stimulation of a good college. The central characters in Wife and Mother (1976) are clearly designed to symbolize two forces in American society, with Carolyn representing intellectual values and conservationist attitudes and John representing single-minded business sense and exploitation of the land. Yet the portrait of Carolyn Ash, who marries only because she is pregnant and who achieves a sense of herself largely because of her friendship with Dee Winkler, one of MacDougall’s best realized characters, is sharply drawn. The novel is a strong, useful metaphor for modern life; its celebration of the simple joys of gardening and of animal and bird watching is all the more effective because of the pervading consciousness that John’s ambition dooms the environment Carolyn has learned to love. MacDougall is an accurate, careful reporter of contemporary middle-class life; her novels are well crafted, serious, and worthy of attention. OTHER WORKS: Aunt Pleasantine (1979). The Flowers of the Forest (1982). A Lovely Time Was Had By All (1982). My Old Man of the Mountain: A Profile of Daniel Doan (1994). Snowy (1993). BIBLIOGRAPHY: NYT (13 Jan. 1971, 1 Feb. 1973). NYTBR (12 Sept. 1971, 4 Feb. 1973). —JANE S. BAKERMAN
MacINNES, Helen Born 7 October 1907, Glasgow, Scotland; died 30 September 1985 Also wrote under: Helen MacInnes Highet Daughter of Donald and Jessica Sutherland McInnes; married Gilbert Highet, 1932; children: one son Helen MacInnes earned an M.A. degree at Glasgow University in 1928 and received her diploma in librarianship from University College, London, in 1931. In 1939 she and her husband, Gilbert Highet, a classics professor, left Oxford and settled in New York City. MacInnes adopted a variant spelling of her family surname under which she published, instead of her married surname. In addition to her 18 novels, MacInnes also published a clever comic play on Ulysses’ return, Home is the Hunter (1964). Ralph Harper in The World of the Thriller suggests that crime in detective stories threatens to destroy a portion of society and in spy stories the threat is that civilization will be undermined. The spy genre in America fully emerged with World War II, and MacInnes’ Above Suspicion (1941, reprinted 1985) and Assignment in Brittany (1942, reprinted 1983)—still two of her best books—used contemporary events of the war and successfully established her reputation as a master of the thriller, as the queen of suspense, and as a popular writer of spy novels. Several of her novels have been made into films, and most MacInnes titles were bestsellers. Her audience extends into numerous countries where translations of her work have appeared. In a MacInnes spy novel, professional agents abound, but interest usually centers on the amateur—an Oxford don, an architect, artist, lawyer, playwright, music critic—thrust into international intrigue to confront real dangers which are often serious enough to undermine the social structure. David Mennery in Snare of the Hunter (1974), Tom Kelso in Agent in Place (1976, 1983), and Colin Grant in Prelude to Terror (1978) illustrate her continued success in portraying the amateur agent effectively. After World War II, MacInnes’ subject matter involved data still vital and dangerous after the war; later she moved to complex political plots in which communist forces pose threats to individuals’ safety and to the security of nations. Although MacInnes never moved into the elaborate gimmicks of the James Bond novels, readers nevertheless find sinister enemy agents, coded messages, kidnappings, elaborately planned secret meetings, narrow escapes, chases, betrayals, brutal murders, and love affairs— devices that have made MacInnes’ novels extremely popular over her writing career of nearly 50 years. If the situations in her novels do not lead readers to serious self-examination and profound selfjudgment, she does often present a character who is apolitical; who staunchly insists good be recognized as good, evil as evil; and who acts relentlessly from strong beliefs. Set throughout the world, MacInnes’ novels reflect her extensive travel and careful research. Most reviewers have noted the convincing locales; others have complained characters frequently are too good, too bad, or too idealistic. At times, multiple subplots and excessive literary and musical allusions weigh down
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the main story line. A more serious defect is occasional propaganda, which one reviewer of Message from Málaga (1971, 1987) saw as so marring her work that it is unreadable because ‘‘she seems now less concerned to tell a good story than to make an apologia for the U.S., assailed by external enemies, riddled from within.’’ Nevertheless, MacInnes combines adventure, a patriotic struggle against evil forces, individual heroism, and rewards by love in novels read by millions. Friends and Lovers (1947, 1987) and Rest and Be Thankful (1949, 1983), her two novels outside the spy genre, were not particularly successful. Her continued popularity came from her spy novels (many still in print) in which genre she is, as one reviewer has noted, ‘‘such a pro.’’ OTHER WORKS: Sexual Life in Ancient Rome by O. Kiefer (translated by MacInnes, with G. Highet, 1934). Friederich Engels: A Biography by G. Mayer (translated by MacInnes, with G. Highet, 1936). While Still We Live (1944, 1989). Horizon (1946, 1985). Neither Five Nor Three (1951, 1983). I and My True Love (1953, 1983). Pray for a Brave Heart (1955, 1985). North from Rome (1958, 1982). Assignment: Suspense (1961). Decision at Delphi (1961, 1983). The Venetian Affair (1963, 1985). The Double Image (1966, 1985). The Salzburg Connection (1968, 1983). The Hidden Target (1980, 1982). Cloak of Darkness (1982). The Unconquerable (1990). Ride A Pale Horse (1985, 1986). Mystery (1996). A manuscript collection of Helen MacInnes’ works is in the Princeton University Library in New Jersey. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Breit, H., The Writer Observed (1956). Fadiman, C., The Art of Helen MacInnes (1971). MacInnes, H., Introduction to Assignment: Suspense (1961). Reference works: CB (Nov. 1967). Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (1994). St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (1996). TCAS. Other references: Counterpoint (1965). Film Literature Quarterly (1977). —ELIZABETH EVANS
MacKINNON, Catharine A. Born 1946 Daughter of George E. and Elizabeth V. Davis MacKinnon Catharine A. MacKinnon, a controversial figure on the contemporary legal and feminist scene, has spent her career fighting sexual and political injustice against women. While no stranger to the machinations of public service with a judge, congressman, and presidential campaign advisor for a father, MacKinnon has stepped outside what many consider the boundaries of legal jurisdiction by addressing ‘‘moral’’ issues such as sexual harassment and pornography. Following in the footsteps of
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her mother and grandmother, MacKinnon attended Smith College, from which she graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. in government in 1969. She went on to Yale University, where she received her J.D. and a Ph.D. in political science in 1977 and 1987, respectively. Deeply involved in the social consciousness and activism of the 1970s, she was particularly drawn to the feminist movement. From here she became the leading figure in identifying, defining, and working to eliminate sanctioned sexual harassment in the work place. With the 1980s came a new focus for MacKinnon, and she centered her energy on drafting and supporting anti-pornography legislation. She has held visiting professorships at numerous prestigious schools, written several books, and currently holds a professorship at the University of Michigan Law School, where she has taught since 1989. Called by one critic ‘‘the law’s most prominent legal theorist,’’ MacKinnon became involved with sexual harassment in 1974 after hearing of one woman’s fruitless battle against the heretofore unquestioned and legally unchallenged sexual harassment she faced in the workplace. MacKinnon began a crusade to have sexual harassment redefined as a breed of sexual discrimination. From here she wrote her first book, Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case in Sexual Discrimination (1979). It was not until MacKinnon helped open the eyes of both the American legal system and the American public to the true nature of this injustice that sexual harassment was recognized as discrimination against the female body. When in 1986 the U.S. Supreme Court heard its first sexual harassment case, MacKinnon was present to help represent the prosecution. The two most important changes brought about by MacKinnon’s efforts were the inclusion of a ‘‘hostile environment’’ to the legal definition of sexual harassment, and as a corollary, that the victim was not responsible for demonstrating severe psychological damage as a result of the discrimination. Thus no longer was sex in return for a job the sole definition, but any environment that subjected a woman to sexual advances, overtones, or otherwise inappropriate behavior of a sexual nature fell under the sexual harassment law. In the early 1980s, MacKinnon joined the feminist antipornography movement. Once again she identified a social phenomenon, the selling and buying of misogynist pornography, as sexually discriminating against women. This battle has thus far proved to be a much more difficult one for MacKinnon, both legally and critically. Legislation she codrafted which sought to provide women with the legal right to sue members of the pornography industry has met with resistance and hesitation. Where the sexual advances of a male employee towards a female employee were more tangibly identifiable as discriminatory, the fight against pornography touches on issues of free speech and the First Amendment. Few legal or political activists have been willing to forgo these rights in favor of what many consider a moral stance. MacKinnon has countered these claims by stating ‘‘Pornography isn’t protected by the First Amendment any more than sexual harassment is. It’s not a question of free speech or ideas. Pornography is a form of action, requiring the submission of women. . .the more pornography men see, the more they enjoy it and the less sensitive they become to violence against women. A rape stops being a rape, the woman stops being a person.’’
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Regardless of her adamant arguments, MacKinnon has not enjoyed the same level of support from feminist groups as with her antisexual harassment campaign. Nor has she received critical endorsement from reviewers and other scholars. Nevertheless, MacKinnon has made her revolutionary voice heard in late 20th-century America. She has helped create laws that aim at freeing the workplace of sexual discrimination in the form of harassment, and continues to fight to free culture from images of objectified and violated female bodies. As a lawyer, teacher, and feminist she brings an important perspective to contemporary women’s studies, as well as legal studies. Her publications and public speaking challenge complacency as she fights against the historical and cultural oppressors of women. OTHER WORKS: Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (1987). Pornography and Civil Rights: A New Day for Women’s Equality (coauthored by A. Dworkin, 1988). Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989). Only Words (1993). BIBLIOGRAPHY: CA (1991). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). WWAW (1993-94). CBY (1994). Other references: New York (22 March 1993). NYT (28 Feb. 1992). Nation (30 May 1987). —JULIET BYINGTON
MacLAINE, Shirley Born Shirley MacLean Beaty, 24 April 1934, Richmond, Virginia Daughter of Ira O. and Kathlyn MacLean Beaty; married Steve Parker, 1954; children: Suki Born Shirley MacLean Beaty (brother Warren added the second ‘‘t’’) into what she describes as ‘‘a cliché-loving, middle class Virginia family,’’ MacLaine was raised to be respectable and conventional. She found an early outlet for her energies in ballet lessons, which she began at age three. By the time she graduated from high school, she had abundant professional credits as a dancer. Heading for New York City, she made her way into the chorus of some hit musicals, among them Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Me and Juliet (1953). In 1954 Carol Haney broke an ankle three nights after the Broadway opening of Pajama Game, and MacLaine was called upon to replace her. Performing without rehearsal, she emerged a star. Hollywood producer Hal Wallis instantly signed her to a long-term contract, and she played the first of many madcap roles in Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry (1955). In the next decade, MacLaine played a number of major movie roles, specializing in kooks and good-hearted prostitutes. She received Academy Award nominations for Some Came Running (1959), The Apartment (1960), and Irma La Douce (1963). Her offbeat marital life also generated much comment.
When not before the cameras, MacLaine devoted a great deal of time to travel, exploring lifestyles radically different from her own. She toured the deep South with black leaders in the early days of the Civil Rights movement, and researched her role in Irma La Douce by witnessing at close range the working life of a Paris streetwalker. MacLaine’s travels are described in her bestselling book Don’t Fall Off the Mountain (1970, reissued 1983). In 1971 a television series for which MacLaine had great hopes turned out to be a commercial and artistic disaster. Alienated from the Hollywood establishment, she turned from show business to politics, playing an active role in the presidential campaign of Senator McGovern. Her second publication was McGovern: The Man and His Beliefs (1972), a collection of writings she selected and edited. Although the McGovern campaign was unsuccessful, MacLaine retained an interest in public affairs and social action. In the spring of 1973, she was asked to lead the first women’s delegation to the People’s Republic of China. This six-week trip became the central episode of her second bestseller, You Can Get There from Here (1975). Another outgrowth of the trip was a documentary film, The Other Half of the Sky: A China Memoir (1974), which MacLaine produced and which received an Academy Award nomination. After the trip to China, MacLaine returned to her theatrical career with renewed vigor. In 1974 she made her hugely successful Las Vegas debut, and has since had triumphs on stage, screen, and television. For her ballet film The Turning Point, MacLaine was once again honored with an Oscar nomination. MacLaine’s books are marked far less by her stylistic skills than by a keen eye for detail and a refreshing candor. Genuinely interested in all she surveys, MacLaine is not ashamed to reveal the ambivalence of her personal reactions. This is especially true of her account of the China trip: Her focus is not so much on the fact of China as on the way the impact of the Chinese experience threw a group of American women into total mental confusion. In her unflagging eagerness to probe and evaluate the world around her, MacLaine shows herself to be very different from other writers of show business memoirs. In the public mind, MacLaine is first and foremost a Hollywood star. Prior to 1983, her reputation as a writer was based on two candid, colorful travel memoirs. But the publication in 1983 of Out on a Limb (reprinted 1986) brought MacLaine into a new arena. In this book, which was to become a bestseller, she recounts her search for her own spiritual identity, ending in her embracing such New Age concepts as reincarnation, trance channeling, and astral projection. For the spiritually unconvinced, her best writing here details her trip to the remarkable Mantaro River Valley, high in the Peruvian Andes. But the bulk of the book is divided between MacLaine’s tortuous love affair with a married British politician and her ongoing movement from skepticism to spiritual certainty. Dancing in the Light (1985, reissued 1996) opens in 1984, with MacLaine, at the top of her profession, looking back on a year that included the Academy Award for best actress for Terms of Endearment, the overwhelming success of Out on a Limb, and the record-breaking run of her one-woman musical show on Broadway. Amid all this joy, she must contend with the health
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problems of her aging parents. She speculates on their complex interrelationship and why they chose to spend this lifetime as a couple. To probe the mystery of the entangled lives of her parents and other family members, she journeys to Santa Fe for a session with a spiritual acupuncturist. The book climaxes with her multiple visions of herself in previous incarnations—as an elephant princess in Africa, a desert nomad swept away by a marauding chieftain, a helpless liberal in czarist Russia. Ultimately, she meets her own androgynous Higher Self, who will serve as her personal inspiration and spiritual guide.
Shirley MacLaine & the New Age Movement (1988). Spada, J., Shirley & Warren (1985). Reference works: CA (1982, 1999). CANR (1991). Other references: LJ (1 July 1983, 1 Nov. 1985). New Statesman (14 Oct. 1983). Newsweek (11 Jan. 1971). NYRB (1 May 1975). NYT (23 Mar. 1975). NYTBR (16 Mar. 1975, 18 Sept. 1983, 3 Oct. 1985). Time (28 Dec. 1970, 3 Mar. 1975, 14 Oct. 1985). TLS (16 Apr. 1971). VV (10 Mar. 1975).
Some of the most convincing passages of Dancing in the Light deal with the life of a working dancer. Similarly, It’s All in the Playing (1987, 1988) effectively brings the reader behind the scenes into the filmmaker’s self-absorbed world. The book also probes MacLaine’s further spiritual development during the filming of a television miniseries based on Out on a Limb.
UPDATED BY NELSON RHODES
Going Within: A Guide for Inner Transformation (1989, 1990), inspired by seminars MacLaine has given from coast to coast, introduces the reader to additional spiritual possibilities. They include forms of meditation, the seven chakras, and something called psychic surgery. The book extends the optimistic vision of each individual’s godlike potential that has marked MacLaine’s earlier works. MacLaine is always a refreshingly honest writer, but the intensity of her spiritual beliefs may try the patience of many readers. On the acting front, MacLaine was lauded for performance in Steel Magnolias. In Dance While You Can (1992, 1993), MacLaine returns to explorations of her relationships with her parents, her mother’s ambitions for her children and her father’s anxieties, and to the struggle to resolve the tensions she has faced with her own daughter. Beginning with memories of Hollywood, the book details MacLaine’s experience of aging, as an actress in Postcards from the Edge, coping with injury and pain, more often alone. Less insistent on detailing her spiritual development, the book continues MacLaine’s account of her search ‘‘to become harmonious with the music of the universe.’’ She also released her first video, Shirley MacLaine’s Inner Workout to considerable success.
—BEVERLY GRAY BIENSTOCK,
MacLEAN, Annie Marion Born Nova Scotia, Canada; died May 1934, Pasadena, California Daughter of Reverend John and Christina MacLean Annie Marion MacLean studied sociology at Acadia College, Nova Scotia, before immigrating to the University of Chicago, where she earned a Ph.D. MacLean’s dissertation, ‘‘The Acadian Element in the Population of Nova Scotia,’’ was completed in 1900. MacLean taught at Adelphi College from 1906 to 1916 and at the National Training School of the YWCA from 1903 to 1916. She was associated with the University of Chicago from 1903 to 1934 as an extension assistant professor of sociology in what was then termed the Home Study Department. MacLean’s interests are reflected in the titles of the courses she taught: Rural Life, Introduction to Social Problems of Industry, Social Technology, Modern Immigration, and History of the Social Reform Movement.
In the later 1990s, MacLaine continued to write, act, and perform on stage. Her recent book, My Lucky Stars: A Hollywood Memoir (1995), about some of the Hollywood movers and shakers she’s known, was another bestseller. In addition, she appeared in several films, including with Wrestling with Ernest Hemingway, Guarding Tess, Mrs. Winterbourne, and Evening Star, the longawaited sequel to Terms of Endearment. She then turned her attention to directing: her directorial debut was a film entitled Bruno, in which she also acted, along with Kathy Bates.
As a sociologist, MacLean was keenly interested in social reforms aimed at improving the condition of women in industry and furthering their organizational efforts. Trade unions represented to her ‘‘a rational theory of industrial betterment.’’ Her immersion into the ‘‘social world’’ of others was of short term and great variety: hop picker; department store clerk (reflecting her interest in the newly formed Consumers’ League of Illinois, an organization designed to use the power of consumers to remedy industrial ills); striker; model factory worker; and finally, sweatshop worker. Her interest in the latter was aroused while serving as a member of New York Governor Roosevelt’s Tenement House Commission.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Denis, C., The Films of Shirley MacLaine (1980). Freedland, M., Shirley MacLaine (1986). Gordon, H., Channeling Into the New Age: The ‘‘Teachings’’ of Shirley MacLaine and Other Such Gurus, An Unauthorized Account (1988). Gordon, H., Extrasensory Deception: ESP, Psychics, Shirley MacLaine, Ghosts, UFOs (1988). Kaminer, W., True Love Waits: Essays and Criticism (1996). Pickard, R., Shirley MacLaine (1985). Sire, J. W.,
MacLean’s writing style is straightforward, both descriptive and analytical, and eminently readable. A sense of humor keeps her works from taking on a preaching tone. Her primary interests are reflected in two books: Wage Earning Women (1910) and Women Workers and Society (1916). The former involved MacLean as a director of a massive effort sponsored by the national board of the YWCA to study typical conditions of representative industries employing women. About 400 establishments in more than a
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score of cities were studied. These included textile, clothing, and printing work in New York and New England; meat packing in Nebraska; hop picking in Oregon; and fruit picking and drying in California. Wage Earning Women advocated regular investigations by both public and private agencies. MacLean alludes to the work of private agencies such as the Consumers’ League; additionally, she points to the role of social settlement leaders Jane Addams and Mary McDowell in Chicago and Lillian Wald and Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch in New York, urging a careful study of working conditions. Among the other concerns of the book were improved and uniform legislation among the states, including ‘‘protective’’ legislation for women and children; employer’s welfare work; trade unions; and a variety of residential clubs and hotels for working women, in which the YWCA was a pioneer. MacLean applauds the Eleanor Clubs of Chicago, which served as neighborhood centers as well as providing living facilities. MacLean’s interest in immigration culminated in the publication of Modern Immigration (1925), which reflects the concerns of that era over the desirability of assimilation and Americanization. The implicit message is almost one of noblesse oblige: helping those less fortunate ‘‘lose’’ their own culture and adopt the ‘‘superior’’ American culture. The book also shows a concern with selecting immigrants so that a polyglot race (with structural weaknesses) would not emerge. MacLean tempers her stance somewhat by noting that this does not mean ‘‘an arrogant trampling under the feet of other strains.’’ As can be inferred, MacLean was part of the Chicago Hull House network. Like the other women sociology faculty members (Edith Abbott and McDowell), she occupied a marginal, peripheral role within the university. In spite of her reputation as a sociologist, MacLean was relegated to the Home Study Department instead of being part of the regular faculty. Her contributions to the sociology of women and work are major; her forthright and militant efforts to improve the conditions of working women are commendable.
OTHER WORKS: Mary Ann’s Malady (1913). Cheero (1918). Some Problems of Reconstruction (1921). Our Neighbors (1922). This Way Lies Happiness (1923).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: American Journal of Sociology (1921, 1934). Journal of the History of Sociology (1978). —VIRGINIA KEMP FISH
MACUMBER, Marie S. See SANDOZ, Mari
MADELEVA, Sister Mary Born Mary Evaline Wolff, 24 May 1877, Cumberland, Wisconsin; died 25 July 1964, Boston, Massachusetts Daughter of August and Lucy Arntz Wolff The daughter of a German-born harness maker and a former teacher, Sister Mary Madeleva grew up in a mill town in rural Wisconsin. After a year at the University of Wisconsin, Madeleva transferred to St. Mary’s College at Notre Dame, Indiana, from which she graduated in 1909. She received an M.A. from the University of Notre Dame and a Ph.D. in English from the University of California. By 1908 she had joined the Congregation of the Holy Cross, which conducts St. Mary’s, taking the name Sister Mary Madeleva, and her entire life was devoted to educating women. From 1934 to 1961, Madeleva served as president of St. Mary’s; during this time she was responsible for the founding of the first American Catholic graduate school of theology for the laity. From 1942 to 1948, she was president of the Catholic Poetry Society of America. Her prose works include essays and addresses on education as well as literary criticism. Madeleva’s best-known study is ‘‘Chaucer’s Nuns’’ (1925), in which she interprets details of the portrait of the prioress in the prologue to the Canterbury Tales by observing her in the context of religious life. With the publication of Knights Errant, and Other Poems (1923), Madeleva became the first of the modern ‘‘nun-poets’’— a peculiarly American phenomenon. Most of Madeleva’s poems are short lyrics, usually under 20 lines. Madeleva’s only leisure, she explained, came in recuperating from illnesses; other moments were snatched between tasks, in walking from building to building, or during nights of insomnia. Only occasionally do her poems focus on secular themes: her visits to Oxford and the Holy Land, glimpses of nature, or literary interests. ‘‘Marginalium,’’ for example, protests the death of the Lady of Shalott. The great bulk of Madeleva’s work deals with religious experience. Madeleva’s religious poetry is always personal and devotional, never didactic or public. By dealing with her own experience, Madeleva avoids the pious and the platitudinous. Her verse abounds in nature imagery of an amiable sort. ‘‘My Windows,’’ from Penelope, and Other Poems (1927), describes two ‘‘wonder-windows’’: One lets in ‘‘tranquillity and noon. . .magic and the moon’’; the other looks on a garden with ‘‘a sudden rose, / A poppy’s flame.’’ It is through these windows that the poet sees God. Here as always Madeleva’s theme is constant love and serene beauty; images of horror or despair are absent. Even the tone of religious longing is usually carefully modulated. In ‘‘Petals and Wings,’’ from Four Girls, and Other Poems (1941), field flowers—‘‘Silent, at peace, and beautiful’’—are contrasted with ‘‘wild, unlettered birds, / Song-silver things.’’ The poet’s question as to whether ‘‘petalled peace’’ or ‘‘wilding flight / Into the sun’’ is ultimately preferable remains unanswered, except in the hidden mind of God.
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The mystical ‘‘The King’s Secret’’ (in Penelope), generally recognized as Madeleva’s best poem, is unlike almost all her other work. In this poem, her longest, Madeleva abandons her usual reticence and in explicitly erotic language, inspired by and even echoing the Song of Songs, speaks ecstatically of union with ‘‘this King Who is God and your Lover.’’ Some critics, presumably not recognizing the biblical precedent, were critical of this breach of nunly decorum, and the poem was not included in Selected Poems (1939). In her later published work, Madeleva returned to the ascetic restraint of her first volume. OTHER WORKS: Chaucer’s Nuns, and Other Essays (1925). Pearl—A Study in Spiritual Dryness (1925). A Question of Lovers, and Other Poems (1935). The Happy Christmas Wind, and Other Poems (1936). Christmas Eve, and Other Poems (1938). Gates, and Other Poems (1938). Addressed to Youth (1944). A Song of Bedlam Inn, and Other Poems (1946). Collected Poems (1947). A Lost Language, and Other Essays on Chaucer (1951). American Twelfth Night, and Other Poems (1955). The Four Last Things (1959). My First Seventy Years (1959). Conversations with Cassandra (1961). A Child Asks for a Star (1964). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CB (1942, 1964). NCAB. TCA, TCAS. Other references: America (1937, 1938). Catholic Library World (1940). Commonweal (1956). Spirit (1939, 1948). Thought (1948). —ARLENE ANDERSON SWIDLER
MADISON, Dolley (Payne Todd) Born 20 May 1768, New Garden, North Carolina; died 12 July 1849, Washington, D.C. Daughter of John and Mary Coles Payne; married John Todd, 1790 (died 1793); James Madison, 1794 (died 1836) Dolley Madison grew up on a plantation in a Quaker community in Hanover County, Virginia. She went to the local school with her brothers until the family moved to Philadelphia in 1783. Having freed his slaves in 1779, her father suffered financially, and Madison did well to marry a Quaker lawyer, John Todd. John and their youngest child died of yellow fever in 1793; although taken ill, Madison survived. Madison settled with her second husband, James Madison, on his family estate in Montpelier, Virginia, where she lived until he became Secretary of State under Jefferson in 1801. Since the President Jefferson was a widower whose own daughters were seldom available, Madison served as hostess at the White House (a name she coined) during the eight years of Jefferson’s administration. Madison formally assumed the title ‘‘First Lady’’ when her husband succeeded his friend in 1809. Renowned as a hostess, Madison combined social power with impeccable gentility. She well deserves her reputation as a
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courageous, independent woman; during the War of 1812, she remained a force of diplomatic calm, even saving Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington during the burning of the Capitol in 1814. She again settled at Montpelier when her husband left public life in early 1817; in 1837, a year after James’ death, she returned to Washington, where she reassumed her position of social influence with grace and good sense. She personally knew all 12 presidents from Washington through Taylor. Madison’s letters are firmly within the American tradition of ‘‘private’’ writings not intended for publication. Focusing on household matters, fashion, social commitments, and the health of her immediate relations, her letters reveal neither the personal self nor accounts of matters of public moment. The letters do, however, suggest Madison’s characteristic prudence, modesty, and loyalty—her 18th-century sense of decorum. Thus, she writes, in 1809, ‘‘It is one of my sources of happiness, never to desire a knowledge of other people’s business,’’ and in 1834, ‘‘Our sex are ever losers when they stem the torrent of public opinion.’’ In the same vein, Madison criticizes Cooper as ‘‘too melodramatic’’ and ‘‘too emphatic about the horrible.’’ Madison’s passing remark to her sister, ‘‘You have heard no doubt, of the terrible duel and death of poor Hamilton,’’ seems particularly remarkable when one realizes Aaron Burr was not only vice president under Jefferson but was once Madison’s suitor. Madison was a significant figure to the men and women of her own time. She was also a woman privileged in her position, influence, and personal advantages—even in her long, happy marriage to a man who realized that ‘‘the saddest slavery of all was that of conscientious Southern women.’’ Although her letters seldom reveal her influence and prominence, they deserve more attention than they have received. It is unfortunate A. C. Clark’s edition of the Life and Letters of Dolley Madison (1914) is incomplete and his commentary cryptic and confusing. OTHER WORKS: The papers of Dolley Madison are housed in the Library of Congress, at the University of Virginia Library, and in the Miscellaneous Collection of the District of Columbia Library. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Anthony, K., Dolley Madison: Her Life and Times (1949). Barnard, E. K., Dorothy Payne, Quakeress: A Sidelight upon the Career of Dolley Madison (1909). Bivins, C. P. H., A Study of Dolley Payne Todd Madison (1768-1849) through Bibliographical Sources (1983). Brant, I., James Madison (1941-1961). Briscoe, C., A Long Way from Home (1999). Brown, R. M., Dolley: A Novel of Dolley Madison in Love and War (1995). Cutts, L. B., Dolley Madison: Memoirs and Letters of Dolley Madison (1886). Dean, E. L., Dolley Madison: The Nation’s Hostess (1928). Doyle, R. S., ‘‘Dolley Madison: An American Queen’’ (thesis, 1997). Flanagan, A. K., Dolley Payne Todd Madison, 1768-1849 (1997). Gerson, N. B., The Velvet Glove: A Life of Dolley Madison (1975). Goodwin, W., Dolley Madison (1896). Gormley, B., First Ladies: Women Who Called the White House Home (1997). Gould, L. L., ed., American First Ladies: Their Lives and Their Legacy (1996). Klingel, C. F., Dolley Madison: Beloved First Lady (1768-1849) (1987). McCaslin, N.,
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Daring, Darling Dolly (1993). Pflueger, L., Dolley Madison: Courageous First Lady (1999). Poor, S. R., Herstory (1990). Quackenbush, R. M., James Madison and Dolley Madison and Their Times (1992). Quiri, P. R., Dolley Madison (1993). Sandak, C. R., The Madisons (1992). Waldrop, R. W., Dolley Madison (1989). Wilson, D. C., Queen Dolley: The Life and Times of Dolley Madison (1987). Reference works: AW. NAW (1971). NCAB. Other reference: Cobblestone (March 1996). —CAROLINE ZILBOORG
who will follow her a rich, startling, and absorbing view of her world. Other than her writing, Mairs has had a varied career, working as a junior editor at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory from 1966-69, as an editorial assistant at Harvard Law School (1970-72), a teaching assistant at the University of Tucson in Arizona on and off from 1972 through 1986, as well as teaching at Salpointe Catholic High School in Tucson (1975-77). In 1983 Mairs became the Project Director for the Southwest Institute for Research on Women, a position she held until 1985. The next year, she ventured to Los Angeles, where she lectured at the University of California (UCLA) until 1987. She currently resides in Tucson.
MAIRS, Nancy OTHER WORKS: Instead It is Winter (1977). Voice Lessons (1994). Born 23 July 1943, Long Beach, California Daughter of John Eldredge, Jr. and Anne Cutler Smith; married George A. Mairs, 1963; children: Anne, Matthew Nancy Mairs is a leading feminist writer who has won acclaim for her poetry, memoirs, and essays. Among her early works is In All the Rooms of the Yellow House (1984), her second poetry collection for which she received a Western States Arts Foundation Book Award. Her other early works include Plaintext: Deciphering a Woman’s Life (essays, 1986), Remembering the Bone-House: An Erotics of Place and Space (a memoir, 1989), Carnal Acts (essays, 1990), and Ordinary Time (essays, 1990). Mairs’ writing, which is fierce and funny by turn, most often examines her own condition and experience. Living in a body undermined by degenerative multiple sclerosis (MS), she bends her agile mind and sharp tongue around the daily tasks that confront her. In Waist-High in the World: A Life Among the Nondisabled (1998), Mairs describes in candid and sometimes pained ways the problems and rewards of life as a (as she describes herself) cripple. With lucidity, humor, and freedom from sentimentality, Mairs provides an upbeat account of life in a wheelchair. She has coped with multiple sclerosis for more than two decades, and there isn’t any aspect of her illness and its impact both on daily life and on the soul that she hasn’t pondered and learned from. She declares that a life like hers, ‘‘commonly held to be insufferable, can be full and funny.’’ Among the concerns Mairs addresses are sex, language, mobility, the rights of the disabled, caregiving and caretaking, euthanasia, and abortion, especially the implications for the disabled of the right to abort a fetus known to be defective. Mairs also describes her adventure as an undercover agent gathering information and evidence in a scam to bilk thousands of dollars from MS victims. Mairs asks her readers to read her book ‘‘not to be uplifted, but to be lowered and steadied into what may be unfamiliar, but is not inhospitable, space.’’ With wit, wisdom, and compelling insight, Mairs describes a full life that, as she asserts, ‘‘is no piteously deprived state I’m in down here but a rich, complicated, and utterly absorbing process of immersion in whatever the world has to offer.’’ She offers her readers and any
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1992). Other references: Booklist (1 Jan. 1997).KR (1 Nov. 1996). —CELESTE DEROCHE, WITH NELSON RHODES
MALKIEL, Theresa S(erber) Born 1 May 1874, Bar, Russia; died 17 November 1949, New York, New York Married Leon A. Malkiel, 1900 Teresa S. Malkiel emigrated to the U.S. with her family in 1891. Her political activity began when she became a member of the Russian Workingmen’s Club. In 1892 she helped organize the Woman’s Infant Cloak Maker’s Union, was elected its first president, and served as its delegate to the Knights of Labor. In 1893 she joined the Socialist Labor Party and was a delegate to the first convention of the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance in New York City. Malkiel split from the Socialist Labor Party in 1899 and joined the Socialist Party, in which she continued to be active for many years. Her interest in the relationship between feminism and socialism became central to her political work in 1907 when she helped organize the Women’s Progressive Society of Yonkers, New York. When a vacancy occurred in the National Woman’s Committee, she was elected a member by the national committee of the Socialist Party. In addition to extensive labor union organizing throughout the northeast and Midwest, Malkiel was an ardent champion of ‘‘women’s issues.’’ She wrote of the coming ‘‘free woman,’’ whose goals could be realized only within the framework of a socialist future. Similarly, she disagreed with party members who claimed that feminism detracted from the class struggle; to Malkiel, the woman question was an important key to the emancipation of all humanity. Throughout her career, Malkiel wrote extensively in such party-affiliated journals as Socialist Woman, Progressive Woman, and Coming Nation and such periodicals as
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New York Call, the Chicago Daily Socialist, and Daily Forward (New York). She also edited a woman’s column in the Jewish Daily News (New York). Both Woman of Yesterday and Today (1915) and Woman and Freedom (1915) vigorously argue the implicit relationship and politically necessary connection between feminist and socialist goals. Both works establish the historical connections between the women’s rights movement and the entrance of women into the wage-earning labor force. In Woman of Yesterday and Today, Malkiel writes a brief history of the changing economic status of American women since the revolutionary war, focusing on how working conditions and experiences create a new self-definition for women and a concomitant desire for expanded rights. In Woman and Freedom, Malkiel links this new consciousness with the history of political advancement of all working people. She also underscores the double oppression of the working woman: ‘‘Under the present system the working man has only one master—his employer, the working woman must bow to the will of husband as well.’’ Both pamphlets stress the importance of a direct and personal involvement in political activity on the part of American women: ‘‘She who would be free must herself strike the blow.’’ In Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker (1910), a fictionalized account of the New York shirtwaist maker’s strike, Malkiel dramatizes both the obstacles faced and the triumphs attained through direct and personal political activism. Written from the point of view of a native-born American woman who works not for survival but for extra money, the novel depicts the heroine’s conversion, first to the immediate goals of the strike and eventually to the wider goals of the Socialist Party. It provides an excellent introduction to many of the problems that were central to the unionization of women during the early years of the 20th century: the tensions between native and immigrant workers, the hostility of male trade unions, the class bias of the Women’s Trade Union League, and the questions about ‘‘woman’s place’’ raised by parents and lovers when their daughters and fiancées were on picket lines. Malkiel’s main focus is on the self-respect, comradeship, and capabilities that develop among young women as a result of their strike experiences. Her heroine becomes a vividly portrayed mouthpiece for Malkiel’s vision of the woman of the future, a woman for whom the goals of feminism and socialism have become inseparable. The resurgence of attention paid to the connection between issues of sex and class has generated a new interest in Malkiel’s writings. Her tireless investigation of the relationship between a woman’s personal and political self-definition will strike many readers as surprisingly modern. Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker should prove of invaluable interest to any reader interested in questions about the relationship between social movements and literary representation. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Blake, F., The Strike in the American Novel (1972). Buhle, M. J., ‘‘Feminism and Socialism in the United States, 1820-1920’’ (dissertation, 1974). Dancis, B., ‘‘Socialism
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and Women in the United States, 1900-1917,’’ in Socialist Revolution (1976). Hill, V., ‘‘Strategy and Breadth: The SocialistFeminist in American Fiction’’ (dissertation, 1979). Maglin, N., ‘‘Rebel Women Writers, 1894-1925’’ (dissertation, 1975). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Progressive Woman (May 1909). —VICKI LYNN HILL
MANNES, Marya Born 14 November 1904, New York, New York, died 13 September 1990 Wrote under: Marya Mannes, Sec. Daughter of David and Clara Damrosch Mannes; married Jo Mielziner, 1926 (divorced); Richard Blow, 1936 (divorced); Christopher Clarkson, 1948 (divorced); children: one son Marya Mannes spent her childhood in New York City, where she was privately educated. Along with her parents, a violinist and a pianist, the founders of the Mannes College of Music, and her brother Leopold, co-inventor of the Kodachrome process, Mannes spent many vacations in Europe; upon her graduation in 1923, she spent a year in England independently studying sculpture and writing. After returning to the U.S., Mannes worked as a playwright, editor for Vogue and Mademoiselle, and cultural commentator for the Reporter, McCall’s, the New York Times, Harper’s, and The New Republic. During World War II, she worked for the OSS and was based briefly in Portugal and Spain. Mannes was married and divorced three times. She had one son during her second marriage. In her first published novel, Message from a Stranger (1948), Mannes explored the notion that the dead resume their conscious identities when the living remember and think about them. The story is narrated by poetess Olivia Baird, the leading character, who dies on the second page of the novel and yet continues to ‘‘live’’ in the minds of her lover, husband, and children, so that she eventually achieves self-understanding. Mannes’s first book of essays, More in Anger (1958), collected her social criticism previously published in the Reporter. Mannes observes that she is ‘‘angry with the progressive blurring of American values, the sapping of American strength, the withering of American courage.’’ Specifically, she attacks the mass media, the advertising establishment, and the ‘‘Never-Never Land of the 1950s.’’ Mannes’ next published work was, according to her, a ‘‘long deep look at the city I loved and hated,’’ The New York I Know (1959). But Will It Sell? (1964) was another collection of social criticism, exploring the invasion of ‘‘the government of money’’ in every sector of our lives. It contains four essays that outline Mannes’ opinions on the proper egalitarian relationship between
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men and women. She also attacks contemporary violence, pop art, and commercial television. Mannes’ second novel, They (1968), depicts the final days of a group of elderly people ostracized by the new youth-dominated culture. Less a futuristic novel than an opportunity for social criticism, They condemns modern music, art, and literature while celebrating the ‘‘lost world—the long-discredited ‘values’ of humanism.’’ These values, according to the main characters, are ‘‘Discipline, Grace, and Responsibility’’—all qualities that Mannes felt were missing from modern society. Mannes’s autobiography, Out of My Time (1971), charts the major events in her life as well as her thoughts on woman’s role and quest for identity in a male-dominated society. The major theme is the belief in ‘‘spiritual hermaphroditism’’—the notion that human beings contain both masculine and feminine qualities that must be accepted and balanced in their personalities. Mannes’s last work, Last Rights (1974), expresses her support for euthanasia and her plea for laws to ensure a dignified death for all. In 1959, Mannes published a collection of politically satirical poems, Subverse: Rhymes for Our Times, originally published in the Reporter under the pseudonym of ‘‘Sec.’’ The poems attack the materialism of American society, environmental pollution, television inanities, the medical establishment, politicians, and militaristic imperialism. Mannes’ writings received mixed reviews, and she assessed herself as somewhat of a misfit: ‘‘Professionally I appear to fall uneasily between the writers who succeed because they appeal to the mass audience and those who succeed because they appeal to a superior intellectual elite. The big magazines find me too special and controversial to handle, and the critical literary fraternity find me too explicit to be important.’’ This perceptive self-assessment helps explain Mannes’ minor stature among 20th-century essayists and novelists. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA. CB. WA. —DIANE LONG HOEVELER
MANNING, Marie Born 22 January 1873, Washington, D.C.; died 28 November 1945, Washington, D.C. Also wrote under: Beatrice Fairfax Daughter of Michael Charles and Elizabeth Barrett Manning; married Herman Edward Gasch, 1905 The daughter of distinguished English parents, Marie Manning was educated in private schools in New York City and London but grew so alarmingly tall and gangling in her teens that
her father sent her to a western ranch to build strength and poise. This ranch was later to provide the setting for her most successful novel. Manning started in 1893 as a cub reporter for the New York World and by 1897 was working for the more prestigious New York Evening Journal, where her famous advice column, ‘‘Beatrice Fairfax,’’ first appeared in 1898. The column gained immediate success throughout New York State and soon became a national catchword. In 1905, Manning left a thriving career to marry a real estate dealer and raise their two sons. For nearly twenty-five years Manning devoted herself to her family, although she remained active in fighting for women’s rights. For financial reasons Manning resumed her still-popular column in 1929, and later also worked for International News Service. Manning’s first literary work, a romantic adventure novel, Lord Alingham, Bankrupt (1902), was a commercial and critical failure, but her second novel, Judith of the Plains (1903), fared better, going into two printings and receiving serious praise from reviewers. Here Manning creates a strong heroine, Judith Rodney. The story, set in a Wyoming desert that ‘‘lies white and palpitating beneath the noonday glare,’’ follows Judith’s battle to save her brother from an unjust death sentence, as well as her courage and fire. At one point, Judith wonders whether in marriage ‘‘women were dogs, that men should play with them in idle moods, caress them, and then fling them out for other toys.’’ Only when she knows she is in control of her own life does Judith accept an offer of marriage from the man she loves. The book presents a strong, clear picture of an idealized woman and perceptive descriptions of both characters and setting. Problems of Love and Marriage (1931) and Personal Reply (1943) are collections of letters and answers compiled from Manning’s ‘‘Beatrice Fairfax’’ column. The pre-Depression letters deal largely with the love dilemmas of young girls, whereas the post-Depression correspondence comes from men and women who are either contemplating divorce or having affairs. Manning’s advice was generally to dry your eyes, roll up your sleeves, believe in yourself, and ‘‘dig for a practical solution.’’ Ladies Now and Then (1944), Manning’s autobiography, concentrates on her early days as reporter and columnist for the Evening Journal and tells little of her personal life. It provides insight into the struggles and sacrifices of all women journalists who were at that time trying to break out of the ‘‘latest society divorce scandal’’ and into the real world of serious reporting. There are many tongue-in-cheek accounts of Manning’s interviews with celebrities from William Jennings Bryan to Eleanor Roosevelt. Manning ends her life study reflectively, saying that ‘‘as an inconspicuous private who helped to fight the good fight for women’’ she feels a glow of pride whenever she reads of any woman’s accomplishment. Although most of Manning’s work is mediocre as literature, she tried, within the limits of popular fiction, to create women who were strong, sometimes unconventional, and yet beloved.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ross, I., Ladies of the Press: The Story of Women in Journalism by an Insider (1974). Reference works: CB. NAW. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States. Other references: NYT (30 Nov. 1945). —WENDY J. HENNING
MANSFIELD, Blanche McManus Born circa 1870, East Feliciana, Louisiana; death date unknown Also wrote under: Blanche McManus Married Milburg Francisco Mansfield, 1898 Blanche McManus Mansfield was educated in New Orleans and studied art in Paris. An illustrator of books and periodicals as well as a writer, Mansfield was published in The Boys’ and Girls’ Journal and St. Nicholas Magazine; a dozen color illustrations were commissioned for Rudyard Kipling’s Ballad of East and West (1899). Mansfield married an author in 1898, moved to New York City, and later lived abroad. Her last address was listed as 9 Rue Falguiere, Paris (1945). Mansfield specialized in travel books for children and for adults, particularly women. She wrote and illustrated eight of the fifty titles in the ‘‘Little Cousin’’ series published between 1905 and 1911. One of the first examples of informational literature for children, the series was designed to introduce American middleclass children to geography and history by identifying with children in other parts of the world. Well-written and illustrated with drawings and photographs, Mansfield’s ‘‘Little Cousin’’ books emphasized food, dress, and customs as well as manners. They were also a child’s travelogues that described selected tourist attractions of each country. Mansfield’s adult travel books include Romantic Ireland written with M. F. Mansfield (1904) and The American Woman Abroad (1911). Romantic Ireland is more ambitious than a travel book: It discusses 19th- and 20th-century Irish literature and the accomplishments of the Gaelic League, considers social problems like emigration and the want of industry, and suggests a policy of reconciliation with England. The American Woman Abroad offers advice on a range of topics involving life abroad: cost, servants, foreign marketing and shopping, women traveling alone, and social conventions. It is of interest to the social historian studying Americans abroad or middle-class European social life before World War I. The advice is practical and realistic. The book concludes with Mansfeild’s description of three housekeeping experiences: in a cottage in Kent, in a country house in Normandy, and in a villa on the Mediterranean. Mansfield’s work as an illustrator influenced her work as a writer; her prose, like her excellent draftsmanship, is clear, economical, and attentive to detail. Although her travel books are not limited to landscape, Mansfield’s painter’s eye is responsible for their pictorial quality. Her insights into other cultures reflect a
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thorough familiarity with the people among whom she lived and wrote. OTHER WORKS: The Voyages of the Mayflower (1897). Bachelor Ballads (1898). Our Little English Cousin (1905). Our Little French Cousin (1905). Our Little Dutch Cousin (1906). Our Little Scotch Cousin (1906). Our Little Arabian Cousin (1907). Our Little Hindu Cousin (1907). Our Little Egyptian Cousin (1908). Our Little Belgian Cousin (1911). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Biographical Dictionary of Southern Authors (1978). Childhood in Poetry (1967). Dictionary of American Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers from Colonial Times Through 1926 (1960). —MAUREEN MURPHY
MARCH, Anne See WOOLSON, Constance Fenimore
MARKS, Jeannette Augustus Born 16 August 1875, Chattanooga, Tennessee; died 15 March 1964, Westport, New York Wrote under: Jeannette Marks Daughter of William Dennis and Jeannette Colwell Marks Jeannette Augustus Marks’s father was president of the Edison Electric Light Company and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Marks studied in Dresden, Germany, and spent several summers in Wales before entering Wellesley College, Massachusetts, where she earned a B.A. in 1900 and an M.A. in 1903. Marks did postgraduate research in English literature at the Bodleian Library and the British Museum. For 38 years Marks taught poetry and drama courses at Mt. Holyoke College, Massachusetts, and she was chairwoman of its English department from 1921 to 1939. Marks’s love of nature and outdoor activity provided the impetus for several early books, such as Little Busybodies (1910) and Holiday with the Birds (1911), both of which offered children ‘‘a wholesome sugarcoating to a goodly array of scientific facts.’’ The love of nature that inspired Vacation Camping for Girls (1913) also pervaded the poetry she published in numerous national magazines and in the collection Widow Pollen (1921). The romantic sincerity of these saccharine and technically clumsy poems is exemplified by the concluding lines of her long poem ‘‘Calendar’’: ‘‘I say the sun is a bee, a big bee, a burning bee, / I know!’’ Other poems, like the four-line ‘‘Work,’’ are still more personal: ‘‘I told my heart that work must be / The only aim of life for me. / But oh! my heart cried, ‘‘Love, love, love!’’ / And wept bitterly.’’
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Drawing upon the knowledge of Welsh peasant life she had gained while hiking in northern Wales, Marks published a collection of stories, Through Welsh Doorways, in 1909. Encouraged by playwright Edward Knoblock to try her hand at dramatizing them, Marks wrote her first three one-act plays. The Merry Merry Cuckoo is a simple dramatic statement about married love that has endured into old age. The husband, David, is dying, but he longs to hear once more the song of the cuckoo. Since it is too early for the cuckoo, his wife, Annie, practices its song and, despite the pastor’s and the neighbors’ admonitions against deceit, gives him his last happiness. The Deacon’s Hat is a comedy in which a young woman, suspecting that the deacon has been helping himself to the groceries in her shop, forces him to sit by her fire until the butter he has hidden under his tall Welsh beaver hat begins to melt down onto his face. In Welsh Honeymoon, local folklore and superstition play a part in the reconciliation of a quarrelsome middle-aged married couple. Without Marks’s knowledge an acquaintance submitted two of the plays to the 1911 Welsh National Theatre competition. Although the prize had been planned for a full-length play, Marks’s one-act plays were awarded first place. They were published in Three Welsh Plays (1917) and were also included in a later collection, The Merry Merry Cuckoo, and Other Welsh Plays (1927), along with four new one-act sketches: A Tress of Hair, Love Letters, Steppin’ Westward, and Look to the End. Marks’s plays were frequently produced by little theater groups and colleges in the U.S. and Great Britain. Marks also gave readings of them for literary and social clubs. The Sun Chaser (1922), a full-length play, is set in an American frontier village near the Canadian border. The title character had once been a fine young man, a good husband and father. But the grasping village storekeeper has encouraged his weakness for drink to the point where he has lost all sense of responsibility and is obsessed with running after the setting sun each evening. The play builds in bathos until his devoted little daughter, attempting to bring him food, freezes to death in a Christmas-eve blizzard. Marks’s motive in writing The Sun Chaser may be inferred from her next work, Genius and Disaster (1926), a critical examination of the effects of alcohol, opium, and laudanum on the writing of Poe, Coleridge, Swinburne, De Quincey, James Thomson, and Francis Thompson. The work contains some interesting passages of literary analysis, but it is largely unfocused and marred by florid rhetoric and sweeping generalizations. Thirteen Days (1929) is about the Sacco-Vanzetti trial. The Family of the Barrett (1938) is a genealogical study of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In 1928, Marks founded the Laboratory Theatre in Connecticut, and she was its director until 1941. From 1942 to 1947 she was chairwoman of the New York State branch of the National Women’s Party. Marks was an outstanding educator and a prolific writer of scholarly criticism, plays, short fiction, poetry, and books for children. Her best works are her one-act plays, which capture the quaint charm of Welsh character and customs.
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OTHER WORKS: The Cheerful Cricket (1907). The English Pastoral Drama (1908). The End of a Song (1911). Girl’s Student Days and After (1911). Gallant Little Wales (1912). Leviathan (1913). Yellow Curtains (1913). Pandy Post (1914). The Doctor (1915). Early English Hero Tales (1915). Baronet and the Baby (1916). Glow Man (1916). Children in the Wood Stories (1919). Courage (1919). Madame France (1919). Goeffrey’s Window (1921). The Life and Letters of Mary Emma Woolley (1955). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Mayorga, M., Representative Plays by American Authors (1920). Reference works: NCAB. TCA. TCAS. —FELICIA HARDISON LONDRÉ
MAROT, Helen Born 9 June 1865, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; died 3 June 1940, New York City Daughter of Charles Henry and Hannah Griscom Marot Helen Marot was raised in an old, established Quaker family and educated in Friend’s schools in Philadelphia. She worked as a librarian from 1893 to 1899. In 1899, she served as an investigator for the U.S. Industrial Commission and was profoundly moved by the conditions of child and female labor, a concern that made her an activist. She became an investigator for various social-reform groups and also served as executive secretary of the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) from 1906 to 1913. Marot organized working women into trade unions and was herself a member of the Bookkeepers, Stenographers, and Accountants Union of New York. Marot resigned from the WTUL in 1913, partly because she felt that working women were not adequately represented in the League’s administration. For the next six years, she wrote and edited two books and several journals. She served on the editorial boards of the Masses (1916-17) and the Dial (1918-19). Marot retired in 1920 and spent the next years in either Greenwich Village or West Becket, Massachusetts, where she summered with her close friend and sister reformer Caroline Pratt. Marot’s first book, A Handbook of Labor Literature (1899), is an annotated bibliography. The 32 topics that Marot selected, dealing with cultural, political, and philosophical questions, provide a clue to her broadly based conceptualization of the labor movement. The themes of feminism, socialism, and liberal reform that were foreshadowed in schematic form in Marot’s first book are expounded fully in American Labor Unions (1914). Marot viewed the trade union as an expression of worker autonomy and independence even from well-intentioned reformers. ‘‘The reform movement,’’ Marot asserted, ‘‘is not coextensive with democracy but with bureaucracy. The labor unions are group efforts in the direction of democracy.’’ She dismissed the charge of discrimination against women by unions as ‘‘hypothetical.’’ Women’s problems in industry were rooted in society’s casting of women in
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a primarily domestic role. Yet, Marot did admit that women were discouraged from seeking leadership positions within unions. The Creative Impulse in Industry: A Proposition for Educators (1918) is dedicated to Marot’s friend Caroline Pratt. It reflects Pratt’s and John Dewey’s views on educational reform as well as Marot’s own program for industrial reform. She insisted that industry must be an extension of education. Thus, creative people will be attracted to it, and the motive for working will be this creative impulse rather than the possessive instinct. Marot condemned both state socialism and scientific management. Marot’s concerns in the articles she wrote for the Masses, the Dial, and other periodicals echoed the themes articulated in her books. Although expository in form and didactic in style, Marot’s writings provide us with an excellent example of the crosscurrents of feminism, socialism, and liberal reform which enlivened the progressive era. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Boone, G., The Women’s Trade Union League in Great Britain and the U.S.A. (1942). Hall, F. S., Forty Years, 1902-42: The Work of the New York Child Labor Commission (1943). Pratt, C., I Learn from Children (1948). Reference works: NAW. Other references: Dial (19 Sept. 1918). —ANN SCHOFIELD
MARSHALL, Catherine Born 27 September 1914, Johnson City, Tennessee; died March 1983 Daughter of John A. and Leonora Whitaker Wood; married Peter Marshall, 1936 (died 1949); Leonard E. LeSourd, 1959; children: one son Catherine Marshall’s father was a pastor of a Presbyterian church in Canton, Mississippi, and later in Keyser, West Virginia. Marshall earned a B.A. in history from Agnes Scott College. Her first husband Peter was already a well-known pastor in Atlanta when they were married. In 1937 they moved to the New York Avenue Church in Washington, D.C., and in 1946 Peter became chaplain of the U.S. Senate. After her husband’s death in 1949, Marshall became an editor and writer in order to support herself and her son. Her second husband was the editor of Guideposts, an inspirational magazine which published many of Marshall’s shorter articles. She was the woman’s editor of the Christian Herald from 1958 to 1960, when she became a roving editor for Guideposts. In 1953 Marshall was named ‘‘Woman of the Year’’ in the field of literature by the Women’s National Press Club. She was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, served Agnes Scott College as a trustee, and received honorary doctorates from Cedar Crest College and Taylor University. Marshall’s first independent work was editing a few of Peter’s sermons and prayers, which were published as Mr. Jones,
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Meet the Master (1949, revised 1950). Mr. Jones stayed on the nonfiction bestseller list for almost a year and led to the contract for her most important work, A Man Called Peter: The Story of Peter Marshall (1951, most recent reprint 1998), another bestseller for many years. A Man Called Peter has been categorized as ‘‘a biography, an autobiography-biography, a fairy story with a sad ending, a Horatio Alger novel, a how-to book on successful marriage, and a straight-from-the-shoulder devotional on God.’’ Whatever its genre, this book sold over four million copies during its first 20 years and is still sells today. With Marshall assisting in production, it was made into a successful film (1955), and translated into Dutch, printed in a large-print edition, and recorded for the blind. This ‘‘autobiography-biography’’ is, of course, the story of Peter Marshall, the Scotsman who grew up in poverty, emigrated to America, and became one of the most widely admired preachers of the 20th century. The prose is clear, concise, concrete; and the book is saved from excessive sentiment by its simple sincerity, honesty, and forthrightness. Marshall’s novel, Christy (1967, 1994), features a protagonist whose fortitude grows from her faith, much as Peter Marshall’s does in A Man Called Peter. Based on the experiences of the author’s mother, Christy is the story of a nineteen-year-old woman who, in 1912, leaves her comfortable home to spend a year teaching in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. The clear style and obvious sincerity that mark all of Marshall’s works enable this long novel to maintain its charm, even though it sometimes moves very slowly. The book was later made into a successful television drama in the mid-1990s, and spawned a paperback tie-in. Marshall has also written or edited over a dozen other booklength works, including several children’s books, and many articles for popular and religious magazines. Marshall’s The Helper (1978), is a series of 40 devotionals about the Holy Spirit, which Marshall says ‘‘has been written out of my own spiritual need to speak to those who share my longing for thirst-quenching quaffs of the Living Water.’’ Probably everything Marshall has ever published could be prefaced by those words. OTHER WORKS: The Mystery of the Ages (with P. Marshall, 1944). Let’s Keep Christmas by P. Marshall (introduction by Marshall, 1953). God Loves You: Our Family’s Favorite Stories and Prayers (with P. Marshall, 1953; revised 1967). The Prayers of Peter Marshall (edited by Marshall, 1954, later reprinted as a combined book of A Man Called Peter and The Prayers of Peter Marshall: A Spiritual Life, 1996). Friends with God: Stories and Prayers of the Marshall Family (1956). The Heart of Peter Marshall’s Faith: Two Inspirational Messages from ‘‘Mr. Jones, Meet the Master’’ (introduction by Marshall, 1956). To Live Again (1957). The First Easter (by P. Marshall, edited and introduction by Marshall, 1959). John Doe, Disciple: Sermons for the Young in Spirit (by P. Marshall, edited and introduction by Marshall, 1963). Beyond Ourselves (1966, 1994). Claiming God’s Promises: Selections from Guideposts by Catherine Marshall and Others (1973).
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Something More: In Search of a Deeper Faith (1974, 1994). Adventures in Prayer (1975, 1996). To Live Again (1984). Julie (1984). Guide to Abundant Living (1985). Catherine Marshall’s Storybook for Children (1987). Together with God: Family Stories, Poems and Prayers of the Marshall Family (1987). Day by Day: With Catherine Walker (1990, 1995). The Inspirational Writings of Catherine Marshall: Something More; A Closer Walk (1990). The Inspirational Writings of Catherine Marshall (1991). A Closer Walk: A Spiritual Lifeline to God (1994). Light in My Darkest Night (1994). The Best of Catherine Marshall: Her Intimate Life (1995). Unlocked Dreams: A Collection of Poems (1995). Quiet Times with Catherine Marshall (1996). The Collected Works of Catherine Marshall: Two Bestselling Works Complete in One Volume (1997). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Davis, E. L., Fathers of America: Our Heritage of Faith (1958). Haslam, B., From Suffrage to Internationalism: The Political Evolution of Three British Feminists, 1908-1939 (1999). Hosier, H. K., Profiles: People Who Are Helping to Change the World (1977). LeSourd, L., ed., The Best of Catherine Marshall (1994). McReynolds, K. M., Catherine Marshall (1999). Petersen, W. J., C. S. Lewis Had a Wife; Catherine Marshall Had a Husband (1986). Vellacott, J., From Liberal to Labour With Women’s Suffrage: The Story of Catherine Marshall (1993). Reference works: CA (1976). SATA (1971). Other references: Albion (Winter 1995). American Historical Review (February 1995). History (Summer 1994). Journal of Women’s History (Summer, 1996). Newsweek (4 April 1956). PW (18 Oct. 1971). SR (10 April 1954). —PEGGY SKAGGS
MARSHALL, Gertrude Helen See FAHS, Sophia Lyon
MARSHALL, Paule Born 9 April 1929, Brooklyn, New York Daughter of Samuel and Ada Burke; married Kenneth E. Marshall, 1957 (divorced); Nourry Menard, 1970; children: Evan A first-generation American born of Barbadian parents, Paule Marshall spent her childhood in Brooklyn. At the age of nine, she visited the native land of her parents and discovered for herself the quality of life peculiar to this tropical island. After writing a series of poems reflecting her impressions, Marshall began a long period of reading. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Brooklyn College (1953) and attended Hunter College (1955) for postgraduate study. Marshall has worked in libraries, as a staff writer for Our World magazine, and has traveled on assignment to Brazil and the
West Indies. She has lectured at several colleges and universities within the U.S. and abroad and has contributed short stories and articles to various magazines and anthologies. She has been the recipient of several awards and grants, including a Guggenheim fellowship (1960), the Rosenthal Award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters for Soul Clap Hands and Sing (1961), a Ford Foundation grant (1964-65), a National Endowment for the Arts grant (1967-68), and the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award for Praisesong for the Widow (1984). In 1990 Marshall was an honoree of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, and in 1992 she was the recipient of a MacArthur fellowship. In her first novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959, dramatized by CBS Television Workshop 1960), Marshall explores the coming of age of Selina Boyce and the struggle for survival of a black immigrant family and community. Divided into four sections, the novel functions on several imaginative levels and devotes some attention to the ramifications of power as experienced by the dawning political consciousness of a small black community. The plot revolves around Selina’s growth and awareness as she watches her parents and others devise plans to acquire property. Conflicting attitudes and personalities change the central question of where to live to the more penetrating question of how to live. We are hurled into a world of violence, turmoil, mechanization, and sameness. As the tensions are resolved, the young heroine travels to the homeland of her parents, searching for a more humanistically oriented way of life. Her ‘‘return’’ symbolizes a rehabilitation of her spirit and psyche, and represents the acknowledgment of historical roots essential to her identity. Marshall’s consistent use of imagery and symbolism, and her concise, rhythmic, and passionate style dramatically define and technically underscore themes of rebirth and self-definition. The end result is a picture of a world not blurred by racial bitterness, but sharply focused in its unabashed honesty and deliberate confrontation of Western cultural values. Her language is strikingly beautiful and powerfully effective, capturing the essence of black language as a weapon of survival and revealing how spoken communication can itself be a form of art. Marshall adopts and adapts the West Indian dialect, fusing it with biblical and literary allusions to create a language that compels imaginative associations and entertains with the sheer delight of sound. Soul Clap Hands and Sing, a collection of short stories, borrows its title from Yeats’s ‘‘Sailing to Byzantium.’’ Thematic connections are obvious as we read the accounts of four men of different national origins experiencing the inevitable decline of age. Caught up in the Western credo of amassing wealth and prestige, the characters have developed a hardened exterior impervious to meaningful human relationships. When the submerged need for love and acceptance emerges, they can only respond by reaching out to the young. That itself remains a selfish motivation, and the implications of their wasted lives are recognized too late. Unable to translate harsh reality into lyrical song,
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their dying moments sound the notes of lamentation and doom, as Marcia Keiz observes in Negro American Literature Forum. The Chosen Place, the Timeless People (1969) is a massive epic novel recapitulating and expanding upon themes developed in earlier works. The primary storyline concerns a small group of Americans who travel to the Caribbean island of Bournehills. Sponsored by a philanthropic foundation, they intend to design a project to assist an ‘‘underdeveloped’’ but curiously unified people. Juxtapositions and correspondences give the novel its texture, but the cohesive element is achieved through the paradoxical characterization of the native woman Merle Kinbona. With her, we explore the political, sociological, and psychological dimensions of power not only as it influences racial and sexual roles, but also as it shapes cultural patterns and assumptions. Never sacrificing art to propaganda, Marshall sustains full human portraiture within a racially turgid atmosphere and concludes with the vision of a world not solely defined by territorial boundaries or even by cultural distinctions. Marshall’s exceptional talent is born of solid scholarship and careful craftsmanship. By choosing to depict West Indian-American culture, she makes a valuable contribution toward helping contemporary society understand the multidimensional aspects of the black experience. All of Marshall’s major fiction reveals the author’s preoccupation with the history of blacks dispersed throughout the Western hemisphere, a history of struggle and resistance to oppression but also a history of independence and self-determination. Marshall firmly believes her task as a writer is to ‘‘reinvent’’ the images that define African peoples. To this end, she builds upon African myth in her fiction to illustrate the relevance of history to the modern world. In The Chosen Place, the Timeless People she centers the theme of the novel around the legend of Cuffee Ned. In Praisesong for the Widow (1983) she includes the ‘‘unwritten’’ history of the Ibo people. Praisesong takes on surreal, ethereal qualities emanating from dreams and memories. Those dramatically overlap opposing time frames and conflicting modes of thought. Having forgotten the ‘‘nurturing ground from which she sprang,’’ the widow embarks on a journey. Her destination is not as intended, however; she arrives instead at her symbolic cultural home. Marshall describes in this novel a common history of separation and loss among peoples of African descent. Despite this physical separation, the heroine learns it is possible to sustain spiritual (mental) ties. This, in part, is the message of the Ibos. Reena and Other Short Stories, also published in 1983, is a collection of some of Marshall’s early short fiction. It includes commentary by the author and her seminal essay, ‘‘The Making of a Writer: From the Poets in the Kitchen.’’ This important essay describes Marshall’s indebtedness to her mother and other Barbadian women who taught her the power of the spoken word as both a tool of communication and as a weapon of survival. Two selections from Soul Clap Hands and Sing make up a part of the volume as well as a new novella, entitled ‘‘Merle.’’ Many will recognize that story as an adaptation and condensation of the story of the pivotal character in The Chosen Place, the Timeless People. In some respects, the short selections in Reena introduce the
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reader to themes Marshall develops more fully in her novels. They certainly indicate her early exploration of the ways in which women, especially, define themselves and actively engage in battling the double forces of racism and sexism. In Daughters (1991) Marshall returns to the complex, changing parameters of a female persona living and growing in the two worlds that have formed her: the Caribbean and the United States. The novel, while contemporary in focus, also moves backward and forward in time to underscore enduring relationships between women. The novel is about black female-male relationships as well—particularly a young woman’s struggle to sever emotional ties with her overpowering father. Once again Marshall turns to myth to insinuate the dominant motif. The story of Congo Jane and Will Cudjoe teaches that despite overwhelming odds, men and women can work together in mutual support. Through a series of subplots that involve intimate human relationships and corrupt political practices, Marshall shows how exacting this ideal may be. Yet for the common good, the ideal must become the standard. Marshall offers no easy solutions in her fiction, but she does suggest models for change and possibility. Because she develops those possibilities through the characterization of black women, she celebrates female agency and empowerment. Indeed, black women become representative of the larger black struggle for individual autonomy and communal wholeness. Marshall discussed her writing in the Los Angeles Times, ‘‘My work asks that you become involved, that you think. On the other hand. . .I’m first trying to tell a story, because I’m always about telling a good story.’’ Continuing, she notes, ‘‘One of the reasons it takes me such a long time to get a book done, is that I’m not only struggling with my sense of reality, but I’m also struggling to find the style, the language, the tone that is in keeping with the material. It’s in the process of writing that things get illuminated.’ Critic Barbara T. Christian explained the author’s niche in literature in Black Women Novelists, ‘‘[Marshall’s works] form a unique contribution to Afro-American literature because they capture a lyrical, powerful language in a culturally distinct and expansive world.’’ Marshall has lectured on black literature at colleges and universities including Oxford University, Columbia University, Michigan State University, Lake Forrest College, and Cornell University. She holds a distinguished chair in Creative Writing at New York University and regularly contributes articles and short stories to periodicals. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Braxton, J., and A. McLaughlin, Wild Women in the Whirlwind: Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance (1990). Evans, M. ed., Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation (1984). O’Banner, B. M., ‘‘A Study of Black Heroines in Four Selected Novels (1929-1959) by Four Black American Women Novelists: Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Paule Marshall, Ann Lane Petry’’ (thesis, 1985). Pryse, M., and H. Spillers, Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition (1985). Shaw, H., ed., Perspectives of Black
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Popular Culture (1990). Willis, S., Specifying: Black Women Writing the American Experience (1987). Reference works: African-American Writers (1991). Black American Writers Past and Present (1975). Black Women Novelists (1980). CA (1999). CANR (1989). CLC (1984). CN (1976). DLB (1984). FC (1990). Other references: Black American Literature Forum (Winter 1986). Callaloo (Winter 1987, Spring/Summer 1983, SpringSummer 1986). CLAJ (1972). Encore American and Worldwide News (23 June 1975). Essence (May 1980). Freedomways (first quarter, 1970). Journal of Black Studies (1970). LAT (18 May 1983). Negro American Literature Forum (1975). SAGE: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women (Fall 1984). Trinidad Guardian (12 Sept. 1962). World Literature Written in English (Autumn 1985). —DOROTHY L. DENNISTON, UPDATED BY ALLISON A. JONES
MARTIN, Del Born Dorothy L. Martin, 5 May 1921, San Francisco, California Daughter of Richard R. and Mary Corn Martin; married James F. Martin (divorced); children: Kendra A feminist and lesbian activist since the 1950s, Del Martin studied journalism at the University of California at Berkeley from 1938 to 1939 and San Francisco State College (now University) from 1939 to 1941. She credits her interest in journalism to a 1934 junior high class and her interest in politics to President Franklin Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats. She was awarded a doctor of arts from the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco in 1987. Martin served as a reporter for Pacific Builder from 1948 to 1949 and editor of Daily Construction Reports from 1949 to 1951. She married, had one daughter, and divorced before meeting Phyllis Lyon, her partner since 1953. Martin’s pioneering activities in the gay and feminist movements are numerous. In 1955, with Lyon and a few friends, Martin founded the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), one of the first international lesbian organizations, and its publication, The Ladder. Martin became associated with various church groups in an educational capacity. She cofounded the Council on Religion and the Homosexual in 1964 and served Bishop James A. Pike’s Diocesan Commission on Homosexuality from 1965 to 1966. She served on a similar committee for Bishop C. Kilmer Myer from 1972 to 1973. Martin is also a cofounder of numerous other social action organizations, including Citizens Alert (1964), San Francisco Women’s Centers (1970), Lesbian Mothers and Friends (1971), Bay Area Women’s Coalition (1974), and the California Coalition Against Domestic Violence (1978). She was secretary of one of the first chapters of the National Organization for Women (NOW), served on the national board of directors, and was coordinator of NOW’s National Task Force on Battered Women/Household Violence from 1975 to 1977. Martin’s first two books, Lesbian/Woman (1972) and Lesbian Love and Liberation (1973), were both written with Phyllis
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Lyon. They were among the first nonfiction books about lesbianism written by lesbians. Lesbian/Woman demonstrates the special problems, myths, and realities of lesbians by presenting cases and lifestyles. The topics include lesbian mothers, growing up gay, lesbian sexuality, the interrelationship between lesbianism and feminism, and the negative effect of religion and mental health establishments upon lesbian self-images. The book is unself-conscious, straightforward, and sensitive in style. It is not well documented, but the authors clearly intended it to be a subjective work and to encourage consciousness-raising. It was written mainly for educators and to help professionals and parents of gays, and an updated version was released in 1991. Martin’s Battered Wives (1977, revised edition in 1981) was the first book published on this subject in the U.S. and was very influential in initiating what became the battered women movement. It is a source book, presenting a historical discussion of societal attitudes promoting domestic violence, which Martin believes are exaggerations of traditional sex roles. Several shocking case histories are presented, demonstrating the failure of ‘‘helping’’ and legal institutions to cope with the problem. Martin presents practical suggestions for reform in this area, including institutional changes, a guide to the establishment of community refuges, and suggestions for individual action. The interrelation of domestic violence with other feminist issues is discussed. The book, however, was criticized for giving only a sociological viewpoint and avoiding the idea that intrapersonal interactions may be influencing factors. Martin’s next book was also on the topic of domestic violence. The Male Batterer: A Treatment Approach (1985), with Daniel Jay Sonkin and Lenore E. A. Walker, was volume 4 of the Springer Series’ Focus on Men. She has published articles in numerous periodicals, including Journal of Homosexuality, Vector, Trends, Ms., Open Hands, and the Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review. Many of these were cowritten by Lyon. The two have also contributed chapters to many books on lesbian issues and domestic violence (see Other Works section). Martin has spoken on lesbian and feminist topics at universities, medical and law schools, mental health organizations, community workshops, and local women’s groups. Her writings and lectures are a direct extension of her social activism; one of her primary objectives is to expose problems and educate about women’s issues. She hopes that, through consciousness-raising, research will be stimulated and redirected along lines more in accordance with real life. OTHER WORKS: Contributor to: Is Gay Good? A Symposium on Homosexuality, Theology and Ethics (with P. Lyon, 1971); Sexual Latitude: For and Against (with P. Lyon, 1971); Love Today: A New Exploration (with P. Mariah, 1972); We’ll Do It Ourselves: Combating Sexism in Education (with S. M. Gearhart, 1974); The Victimization of Women (1978); Positively Gay (with P. Lyon, 1979, updated 1992); Stopping Wife Abuse (foreword, 1979); The Lesbian Path (with P. Lyon, 1980, revised 1985); Women’s Sexual Experience: Exploration of the Dark Continent (1981); Women and Mental Health Policy (with P. Lyon, 1984); On Our
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Backs (1990); Dyke Life (with P. Lyon, 1995); The New Our Right to Love, a Lesbian Resource Book (with P. Lyon, 1996); Caring for Ourselves: The Lesbian Health Book (with P. Lyon, 1997); Violence Begins at Home: A Comprehensive Guide to Understanding and Ending Domestic Abuse (foreword, 1997).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CANR (1993). Other references: Association of Humanistic Psychology Newsletter (Jan. 1973). LJ (Aug. 1972). Off Our Backs (Sept. 1972). Psychiatric News (4 Mar. 1977). Psychology of Women Quarterly (Spring 1978). San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle (10 Sept. 1972). SIECUS Report (May 1973). Social Casework (Mar. 1977). Society (Sept. 1977). —PATRICIA E. PENN, UPDATED BY LEAH J. SPARKS AND NELSON RHODES
MARTIN, George Madden Born Georgia May Madden, 3 May 1866, Louisville, Kentucky; died 30 November 1946, Louisville, Kentucky Daughter of Frank and Anne Mckenzie Madden; married Attwood Reading Martin, 1892 George Madden Martin received most of her education from private tutors. She taught at Wellseley School for two years before her marriage to Attwood Martin, who subsequently became a prominent businessman. Martin spent her life in Louisville, though she traveled widely. In the 1890s, Martin became an active member of the women’s ‘‘Author’s Club’’ of Louisville, along with writers such as Annie Fellows Johnston, Alice Hegan Rice, and her own sister Eva. Martin’s career began in 1895 with the publication of the story ‘‘Teckla’s Lilies’’ in Harper’s Weekly. She remained active as a writer well into the 1930s, publishing nine novels, a children’s biography of Shakespeare’s early years (A Warwickshire Lad, 1916), a collection of short stories (Children in the Mist, 1920), and a number of short stories. Like many novels of the period, The House of Fulfilment (1904), Abbie Ann (1907), and Letitia: Nursery Corps, U.S. Army (1907) were first published serially. Martin’s career in fiction virtually ended with the publication of the novel March On (1921), which reflected her involvement in political and social issues of World War I. Here she specifically focuses on the character of the ‘‘new woman’’ and the role she should play in preventing war. Martin’s only subsequent novel, Made in America (1935), demonstrates her knowledge of politics and history. Martin served in a number of elected and appointed offices during the 1920s and 1930s. In 1920, she began a 14-year term on
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the board of the Committee on Interracial Cooperation, of which she was a charter member. That same year, Martin published Children in the Mist, a collection of stories of black life in the South; here she clearly sympathizes with blacks and implicitly castigates whites for keeping them in a subordinate position. In the 1930s, Martin was chairwoman of the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, which objected to mob violence, advocating the solution of the problem of lynching through the abolishment of segregation and economic repression of blacks. However, the position taken by this organization was consistent with Martin’s support of states’ rights; it advocated an antilynching law that was designed to punish state officers and county governments that failed to prevent lynchings. In a series of articles for the Atlantic Monthly (1924 -25) Martin explored her view of the role of the American woman in politics. Martin speaks of her personal experience as a woman, yet ironically she continues to use the masculine pseudonym under which she had always published. These articles demonstrate the paradoxes in Martin’s political thinking. She was a strong supporter of the rights of blacks, yet consistently advocated strong states’ rights. She was not active in the woman-suffrage movement, but urged greater involvement of women in government, chastising them for seeing the centralized federal government as the traditional southern father figure. Although Martin was well known in her day and her books were usually reviewed favorably, her reputation must derive from her limited skill as a novelist. Her fiction is essentially realistic, with accurate details of daily life. Her simple plots are often too easily resolved; she is better with the episodic novel or short story. However, Martin confronts realistic social problems ranging from racial prejudice to the failure of the school system to reach the average child. Unlike her friend Annie Fellows Johnston, Martin wrote primarily for adults; yet her greatest achievement is the creation of a child’s perspective on life through an adult narrator who supplies the proper distance. Thus, her best-known work is Emmy Lou: Her Book and Heart (1902). Emmy Lou’s misconceptions and confusions are both delightful and touching; no reader can forget her failure to understand the purpose of learning letters and numbers, or the well-meaning adults who surround her. Although Martin’s subjects have limited appeal, her exploration of the emerging role of the ‘‘new woman’’ in realistic novels such as Selina (1914), and March On is historically significant.
OTHER WORKS: The Angel of the Tenement (1897). Emmy Lou’s Road to Grace (1916).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: LSL. NAW NCAB. Other references: Nation (31 Dec. 1914). NYT (3 Oct. 1920). Outlook (1 Oct. 1904). —MARTHA E. COOK
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MARTIN, Helen Reimensnyder Born 18 October 1868, Lancaster, Pennsylvania; died 29 June 1939, New Canaan, Connecticut Wrote under: Helen R. Martin, the author of Unchaperoned Daughter of Cornelius and Henrietta Thurman Reimensnyder; married Frederic C. Martin, 1899; children: son and a daughter Socialist, feminist, and champion of the oppressed, Helen Reimensnyder Martin was born to an immigrant German clergyman. She attended Swarthmore and Radcliffe Colleges and taught school in New York City. After her marriage, she lived with her husband in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and had two children, a son and a daughter. In her first published works, Martin wrote about society girls trying to make something of themselves, a theme she later returned to. She first met real success with the publication of Tillie: A Mennonite Maid (1904); thereafter, most of her books were set in Pennsylvania Dutch communities and depicted the self-improvement campaigns of Pennsylvania Dutch young women. Tillie went into many editions and made Martin a writer in demand, especially for the women’s magazines, where many of her novels were serialized. As a picture of the Pennsylvania Dutch, Martin’s novels are informed but very biased, at times melodramatically so. Martin was familiar with the colorful manners of her Mennonite, Amish, and other Pennsylvania Dutch neighbors. She created many positive Pennsylvania Dutch characters, especially her heroines, but her most memorable ones are the men: arrogant, mean, illiterate, miserly, and superstitious. Her fathers are usually brutes, while the bumptious youths, brothers or suitors of the heroine, are self-important boors who get what they deserve. Martin was criticized for her description of the Pennsylvania Dutch, but she claimed that she got many letters from them which testified to the truth of her portrayals. Martin, a feminist, was active as a campaigner for suffrage. All her novels concern the drive for self-improvement, independence, and success of the heroine. She champions votes for women in her pre-1919 novels, but a more prevalent theme is the financial bondage of women. Martin was also a socialist, and her works abound in criticism of capitalism, industrialism, and the way in which established churches uphold the status quo. Many of her clergymen are prissy, self-interested hypocrites. Many of the young, reform-minded clergymen have to leave the church over some social issue. Martin’s anger often shows in overdramatization bordering on caricature when she portrays those who enslave the female characters. There is a good deal of repetition in Martin’s books. The typical Martin heroine is a sensitive, intelligent girl, with a mild manner masking a strong will, who has to make her own way in the world, and the typical plot centers on the girl’s fight for survival. Either the girl is an abused Pennsylvania Dutch daughter/sister/stepdaughter/wife who has to fight the Pennsylvania Dutch establishment, or she is a society girl who has to combat her
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mother or her husband. In the stories of married women, most often the husband wants to keep the wife silly and self-sacrificing while he torments her with money problems. In most of the novels, the woman eventually strikes out against the oppressor and wins; and those who don’t win vow that their children will have it better. Martin was not a very good writer, but the force of her feelings about the place of women makes the reading of her work rewarding. The very popularity of such books in the first 30 years of this century tells us something about American women of the time. OTHER WORKS: Unchaperoned (1896). Warren Hyde (1897). The Elusive Hildegard (1900). Sabina, a Story of the Amish (1905). The Betrothal of Elypholate, & Other Tales (1907). His Courtship (1907). The Revolt of Anne Royle (1908). The Crossways (1910). When Half-Gods Go (1911). The Fighting Doctor (1912). The Parasite (1913; film version, 1925). Barnabetta (1914; dramatization by M. de Forest and M. M. Fiske, Erstwhile Susan, 1916; film version, 1919). Martha of the Mennonite Country (1915). Her Husband’s Purse (1916). Those Fitzenbergers (1917). Fanatic or Christian (1918). Maggie of Virginsburg (1918). The Schoolmaster of Hessville (1920). The Marriage of Susan (1921). The Church on the Avenue (1923). The Snob (1924; film version, 1924). Challenged (1925). Ye That Judge (1926). Sylvia of the Minute (1927). The Lie (1928). Wings of Healing (1929). Tender Talons (1930). Yoked with a Lamb, & Other Stories (1930). Porcelain and Clay (1931). Lucy Anderson (1932). From Pillar to Post (1933). The Whip Hand (1934). Deliverance (1935). The House on the Marsh (1936). Emy Untamed (1937). Son and Daughter (1938). The Ordeal of Minnie Schultz (1939). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Overton, G., The Women Who Make Our Novels (1922). Seaton, B., in Pennsylvania Magazine of History & Biography (Jan. 1980). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: NYT (30 June 1939). —BEVERLY SEATON
MARTIN, Valerie Born 14 March 1948, Sedalia, Missouri Daughter of John R. and Valerie Fleischer Metcalf; married Robert M. Martin, 1970 (divorced); James Watson, 1986 (divorced); children: Adrienne Though born in Missouri, Valerie Martin was raised and educated in New Orleans. Having earned a B.A. from the University of New Orleans in 1970, she enrolled in the graduate writing program at the University of Massachusetts (M.F.A., 1974).
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Subsequently, she held a series of teaching posts at New Mexico State University, the University of New Orleans, the University of Alabama, Mount Holyoke College, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The title of her first book, a little-known but powerful collection of stories called Love (1977, reissued 1999), announced Martin’s one consuming subject. Over the course of her career, she has examined its complexities in intense and widely admired novels and short stories. Her first novel, Set in Motion (1978), recounts the uneasy progress of Helene Thatcher’s passionate relationships with the husbands of her two best friends and the gentle but passionless friendship with a drug addict to whom she always returns. Winning praise from Walker Percy and others, Set in Motion was quickly followed by Alexandra (1979). Less well received, Alexandra relates the melancholy tale of Claude Ledet’s abandonment of his life in New Orleans to follow a beautiful woman into the bayou country, where they attend to the needs of her wealthy and pregnant friend. Martin takes the bold step of narrating this novel about memory and mystery from the man’s point of view. Such experimentation with narrative perspective culminates in A Recent Martyr (1987), an intense meditation on the relationship of the profane to the sacred. Widely praised, the novel tells the story of a highly charged erotic affair in a New Orleans beset by plague. The two lovers, yielding to more and more dangerous sexual play, engage in a struggle over a saintly young novice on leave from her convent. In a display of technical virtuosity, the point of view in A Recent Martyr shifts throughout the novel from first to third person as the scene shifts from the woman to the man. Similarly concerned with structural experimentation and love on the edge of doom, Martin’s second collection of short fiction, The Consolation of Nature and Other Stories (1988), juxtaposes lovers in crisis with animals of both domestic and fantastic species. The obviously gothic character of this volume finds even clearer expression in Mary Reilly (1990, 1991, 1995). Widely hailed as a major achievement, Martin’s fourth novel retells Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from the point of view of Dr. Jekyll’s devoted maid. Though certainly related to Martin’s earlier work, the book strikes out in many new directions. A historical novel set in London, Mary Reilly abandons the triangle of two women and one man that forms a basic unit of conflict in some of the earlier novels. Additionally, the explicit sexuality of her other fiction yields to an implied (though menacing) eroticism here. Even the narrative voice is unlike any other in Martin’s work. Reviewing The Consolation of Nature and Other Stories, Michiko Kakutani summarized the characteristics of Martin’s work: ‘‘A preoccupation with the dark underside of life, a taste for disturbing, even macabre imagery, and a tendency to use that imagery to delineate turning points in people’s lives—the moment when innocence is replaced by an acute awareness of death and pain.’’ Though all this continues to be true of Mary Reilly, the novel also promises increasingly complex and subtle strategies for the expression of these qualities.
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OTHER WORKS: The Great Divorce (1996). Italian Fever: A Novel (1999).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: McNally, J., ed., High Infidelity: 25 Great Short Stories About Adultery by Some of Our Best Contemporary Authors (1997). Meyer, K. Z., ‘‘Feminist Doubles of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: Rewriting a Classic’’ (thesis 1994). Plate, L., ‘‘Visions and Re-Visions: Female Authorship and the Act of Rewriting’’ (dissertation 1995). Southern Review (Spring 1988). Other references: Book World (March 1994). Boston (July 1990). Contemporary Literature (Spring 1993, 1996). New Orleans Review (Spring 1995). NYT (23 June 1978, 21 July 1979, 5 Aug. 1979, 7 June 1987, 13 Jan. 1988, 31 Jan. 1988, 26 Jan. 1990, 4 Feb. 1990). —JOHN BIGUENET
MARTÍNEZ, Demetria Born 10 July 1960, Albuquerque, New Mexico Daughter of Theodore and Dolores Jaramillo Martínez; married Jeff Scott First a journalist, Demetria Martínez’s writing career has evolved very naturally into poetry and novel. While her first novel, Mother Tongue (1994), published when she was only thirty-three years old, won the 1994 Western States Book award for fiction, Martínez came to fame several years earlier as a reporter put on trial by federal prosecutors for her participation in the Sanctuary movement (consisting mainly of church-related groups that provided haven for refugees from Central American conflicts). She was accused of helping illegally transport and harbor two pregnant Salvadoran women who had crossed the border at El Paso, Texas. Martínez was working as a religion reporter for the Albuquerque Journal in August 1986 when a minister from the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America contacted her and suggested she cover the story of the two Salvadoran women, who wanted to give birth in the United States and give their babies up for adoption. Martínez drove to El Paso, met the women, and interviewed them as they traveled with the minister back to Albuquerque. She eventually decided not to write the newspaper story, fearing she would endanger the women’s anonymity and they would be deported. Instead, she wrote a long poem about their lives. Later, when the U.S. government found out about her interview, Martínez was indicted on five counts of violating federal immigration laws. It should be noted that during the 1980s the U.S. government was passionate about breaking any insurgency in Central America, and supported the Salvadoran rightist government. The archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero, was assassinated in 1980,
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while neither the Salvadoran nor the U.S. government sought to identify his killers. As Martínez notes in a foreword to her novel, more than 75,000 people died or disappeared in El Salvador during a 12-year civil war, which officially ended in 1991. Most died ‘‘at the hands of their own government.’’ In 1987 in Arizona, a trial ensued against Sanctuary movement participants, and Martínez became the subject of newspaper stories across the country as she pled the confidentiality of her reporter’s notes. The federal prosecutor obtained a copy of her poem, which gave geographical details of the trip from El Paso to Albuquerque, and it looked like she would go to jail. Church-related groups who sought to provide haven for refugees from Central American conflicts viewed the case as a needed breakthrough for their cause. But the U.S. government sought to prosecute Martínez as a criminal who had willingly broken immigration laws. Literary experts testified of many examples of journalists later writing books or poems from previous reportorial notes. The defense succeeded. They demonstrated that the Salvadoran women had been persuaded to become prosecution witnesses because their fate lay in the hands of the immigration service, and the jury ended up discounting most of their testimony. The 1988 acquittal came after a very short deliberation. As frightening as the indictment and trial must have been for her, Martínez considers the incident only a footnote to a much larger drama: the plight of the Salvadoran people. She considers that people lived in even greater fear of death and disappearance in El Salvador than she ever had to endure herself. It is no surprise this the theme of her award-winning literature is of El Salvador. Her long poem on the two Salvadoran women, titled ‘‘Turning,’’ was published by Bilingual Press Review in Arizona as one of three poems included in the volume Three Times a Woman (1989). Martínez’s poem won first place in the 13th Annual Chicano Literary Arts Contest in 1989. She then received the opportunity to give readings and do a lecture circuit at various universities, including Stanford, the University of California, the University of Utah, MIT, and Long Island University, as well as several campuses in Arizona and Texas. She taught a summer writing seminar at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and in 1990 she spent a month as writer-in-residence at Hedgebrook Cottages on Whidby Island, Washington, where she began a novel. That year she also became national news editor for the weekly National Catholic Reporter in Kansas City. In 1993 she moved to Tucson, Arizona, and in 1994 published her first novel, a short book that packs a punch at the end. In Mother Tongue, there are two principal characters. The man is a Salvadoran refugee and poet who arrives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where ‘‘movement’’ people are trying to help him acclimate and assimilate. The young woman who is the other principal character, Mary, is living emotionally at the edge of life. She is asked to help the refugee, pick him up at the airport, settle him into her friend’s house, help direct him to his new job as a dishwasher, and help him get to meetings where he will share his story with church and community members. She does these things while musing about
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what her role will ever be in life and if she will ever work more than part-time. She falls in love with him, but her own life is as precarious as his, which he does not realize. As they come to know each other better and as lovers, he at one point explodes from his anger and pain and the terrible Salvadoran violence. He confuses Mary with the Salvadoran army members who have brutally murdered his fiancé and begins yelling and hitting her. Then Mary lets out a cry that has been deep inside her since her childhood, and we learn more of what has happened to a young woman who is ignored by U.S. society—the child of a single mother, who suffers a terrible incident in her childhood, and whose mother dies of cancer when she is barely an adult. Martínez seems to be bringing each society to a deeper understanding of each other: the Salvadoran refugee has no idea how life was for the young Chicana woman in near poverty, and the U.S. mainstream society has no idea of Salvadoran reality for the common people. Martínez is a strong, creative writer who will surely produce more insightful fiction and poetry. After completing a bachelor’s degree at Princeton University, she seems to have stumbled accidentally into political involvement at an early stage. Her family history may have provided a strong political foundation. Her father was a Peace Corps volunteer in Belize for two years. He became the first Latino or Hispanic president of the Technical Vocational Institute, a large community college in Albuquerque. He is also the first Hispanic to sit on the Albuquerque School Board, winning two terms during the 1960s. The governor then appointed him to the State Board of Educational Finance. Martínez’s mother is a kindergarten teacher, but her maternal grandmother, Lucy Jaramillo, was also recognized as a pioneer in the Latino community. In the 1940s she was elected county clerk in Albuquerque and remained politically active, holding various elective posts, through the 1980s. With her creative writing, Martínez works at bringing people together to examine each other, to see how politics and society affect the human being. Alice Walker called Mother Tongue ‘‘a great beauty of a book. I am so proud of Demetria Martínez for standing with and for the disappeared.’’ And Luis Rodríguez, Chicago author of the banned book on gang life, Always Running, says, ‘‘Demetria Martínez has pulled out all the stops: here is truth to arouse any hardened heart; here is the ‘insanity’ of a woman in love calling forth a revolutionary lucidity. Read it. Get angry. And act.’’
OTHER WORKS: Women’s Voices From the Borderlands (edited by Lillian Castillo-Speed, 1995). The Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education (1997). Breathing Between the Lines: Poems (1997). Martínez has published more than 100 news stories and columns for the National Catholic Reporter (a nationwide newspaper independent from the Catholic church), numerous articles for the Albuquerque Journal, and poems in various anthologies.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Escritura 18 (Caracas, Venezuela, Jan.-Dec. 1993). LAT (11 Sept. 1994). Notable Hispanic American Women. —ELIZABETH COONROD MARTÍNEZ
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MARTYN, Sarah (Towne) Smith Born 15 August 1805, Hopkinton, New Hampshire; died 22 November 1879, New York City Wrote under: Sarah Towne Martyn, Mrs. S. T. Martyn Daughter of Ethan and Bathsheba Sanford Smith; married Job H. Martyn, 1841 Both of Sarah Smith Martyn’s parents could trace their ancestry to 17th-century New England settlers. Martyn’s father, a scholarly clergyman who had fought in the American Revolution, directed her education in channels that were considered ‘‘masculine,’’ including not only various modern languages but also Greek and Hebrew. Although Martyn had considerable musical talent, she soon became far more interested in some of the causes that consumed her father’s attention, especially the temperance and antislavery movements. From 1836 to 1845 she was active in the Female Moral Reform Society of New York, assisting the editor of the organization’s journal, the Advocate of Moral Reform, until she left the society because of internal dissension. After her marriage to a clergyman, Martyn became known to New York literati as a gracious hostess at whose home famous reformers and writers frequently gathered. In addition to her editorial labors for the Advocate of Moral Reform, Martyn edited the Olive Plant and Ladies’ Temperance Advocate (1842), the True Advocate (1845), the White Banner (1846), and the Ladies’ Wreath (1846-50). Martyn edited excerpts from the latter for The Golden Keepsake; or, Ladies’ Wreath: A Gift for All Seasons (1851), a collection that reflects the journal’s focus on ‘‘literature, industry, and religion.’’ Stories and essays by Martyn are included. In ‘‘The Social Position of Woman,’’ Martyn describes the female role as giving ‘‘tone to the manners and morals of the community’’ and deplores the idea that woman’s contracted sphere of action implies any inferiority. Elsewhere she asserts that the true mission of woman is simply to be a good wife and mother. Despite Martyn’s rigidly traditional views of woman’s status in society, she demonstrated by her own example that a woman’s impact could extend far beyond the domestic sphere. She also depicted strong female characters in her fiction. For instance, in Allan Cameron; or, The Three Birthdays (1864), one of the many pious books Martyn wrote during the 1860s for the American Tract Society, she depicts a young woman who puts abolitionism into action as soon as she becomes the mistress of her guardian’s estates. Not only does Cora free her slaves, but she demonstrates sound economic awareness by presenting each of the males with a plot of land to cultivate so that he can support himself and his family. And in The English Exile; or, William Tyndale at Home and Abroad (1867), Martyn describes the words and actions of the great English reformer and translator through a journal kept from 1521 until Tyndale’s martyrdom in 1536 by a female theology student who likes being right where the action is. That Martyn’s best-known work, Women of the Bible (1868), was preceded by an article of the same title in the Ladies’ Wreath (1850), indicates a prolonged interest in the topic. Martyn’s
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approach to biblical women is highly romanticized; for instance, she asserts that the Book of Ruth is ‘‘full of thrilling interest and pathos’’ and indicates that Ruth herself is a ‘‘young and beautiful woman,’’ even though there is not a word in the Old Testament narrative to imply that Ruth is either particularly young or physically beautiful. Martyn’s warmly appreciative nature is the greatest strength of her work; for example, she evaluates the ode sung by Samuel’s mother, Hannah, as ‘‘one of the finest specimens of Hebrew poetry extant.’’ Throughout, Martyn stresses the marriage and motherhood of biblical women; but 19th-century women might have been stimulated to additional ambitions by her emphasis on their ‘‘rare endowments of mind as well as heart.’’
OTHER WORKS: The Huguenots of France; or, The Times of Henry IV (1864). The Hopes of Hope Castle; or, The Times of Knox and Queen Mary Stuart (1867). Margaret, the Pearl of Navarre (1867). Netty and Her Sister; or, The Two Paths (1867). Daughters of the Cross (1868).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bittinger, J. Q., History of Haverhill, N. H. (1888). Hart, John S., A Manual of American Literature (1874). Reference works: AA. DAB. Other references: New England Historical and Genealogical Register (April 1847). —VIRGINIA RAMEY MOLLENKOTT
MASO, Carole Born circa 1955 Carole Maso’s writing career has followed an unusual arc: she has never written a short story, and though her work has been labeled experimental and she often struggled to find a publisher, her six novels remain in print and her work has been much honored. She didn’t begin writing until her senior year at Vassar College, and though she was offered several generous graduate fellowships, she declined. Instead, she began a nine-year selfdescribed apprenticeship in which to learn her craft. Out of this time came her first novel, Ghost Dance (1986), in which she announced ‘‘Maso themes’’ and her determination to write in a new way. She found that conventional structures would not contain her vision. She stated that she wants nothing less than to ‘‘restore to fiction, to our world, what it is to be human, the motions of human thought—and all that is mysterious, impossible to grasp, outside the ordinary reach or grasp.’’ Maso’s work shares with poetry lyrical, metaphorical language, concentrated image, rhythm, use of white space, an
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open-endedness, and attention paid to every word, as well as line and paragraph breaks. (Her paragraphs are often only a sentence or two long.) Her novels may best be compared to symphonies— they are both musical and formal, structured, layered, spacious, and full of resonances. Though she cites Woolf, Stein, Becket, and Celan as influential, many of her influences come from outside literature, and she draws freely from dance and film, especially Antonioni, Godard, and Tarkovsky. Maso frequently employs unusual textual strategies. While she was writing her second novel, The Art Lover (1990), a close friend of hers died of AIDS. The story of his death is contained in an autobiographical section of the novel. The Art Lover also contains the main character’s novel-in-progress, news clippings, and fliers torn from telephone poles. In one section of Aureole (1996), an exploration of language and sexuality, Maso intermixes her own writing with lines from Sappho, text from Gertrude Stein, and the list of camera shots from a film by Maya Deren. An ongoing theme in Maso’s novels is the struggle to find meaning. In Ghost Dance a young woman struggles to comprehend her mother’s madness, which the mother has mythologized as the Topaz Bird, a figure that is always there but means no harm, a source of power (creativity) and pain. The American Woman in the Chinese Hat (1994) is Maso’s attempt to capture the slow but complete breakdown of Catherine, a writer on the Côte d’Azur. As Catherine attempts to make sense of her experience, images such as roses, horses, swans, figs, and boats are repeated, reconfigured, and distorted, and a vivid Mediterranean palette of colors is created, then erased, until nothing remains but red. Maso’s Defiance (1998), is the fictional diary of Bernadette O’Brien, a Harvard mathematics professor who has molested and murdered two of her male students. The unremorseful murderer/ narrator’s prison diary alludes to an awful past but does not seek to explain or justify her actions. The notebooks include mathematical equations, lyrics, liturgy, excerpts from a self-help manual, charts of the stars, dreams—all part of Bernadette’s efforts to order her world through her intellect. Here, as in The Woman in the Chinese Hat, the accrual of images leads nowhere; language fails where madness presides. These pessimistic depictions are balanced by the celebratory nature of Ava (1993). In this verbal collage portraying the last day of Ava Klein’s life, the accrual of images is euphoric. Ava finds peace as she is freed from the tyranny (Maso’s word) of linear narrative. The novels demonstrate Maso’s stance on fiction: ‘‘The inability to believe in points on the ordinary trajectory anymore—the unstable, beautiful, flawed, gorgeous happenstances—seems now to me to be more the ‘story.’’’
BIBLIOGRAPHY: APR (Mar.-Apr. 1995). KR (15 Aug. 1996, 15 Apr. 1998). Lambda Book Report (Aug. 1998). Nation (12 Oct. 1998). NYTBR (12 Dec. 1993, 15 May 1994, 24 June 1990). Review of Contemporary Fiction (Fall 1997). —VALERIE VOGRIN
MASON, Bobbie Ann Born 1 May 1940, Mayfield, Kentucky Daughter of Wilber A. and Christi Anna Lee Mason; married Roger B. Rawlings, 1969 Bobbie Ann Mason writes of the world of the changing South that she inhabited during her childhood. It is a world of people who shop at Kmart, listen to rock and roll, and go to shopping malls for entertainment. She grew up on her parents’ dairy farm near Mayfield, Kentucky, reading Nancy Drew and the Bobbsey Twins. When she was ten, she began to write her own mysteries. Her writing career took off briefly when she was a teenager and became the national president of the Hilltoppers Fan Club. She wrote their monthly newsletter and corresponded with the presidents of other fan clubs. When she entered the University of Kentucky in Lexington in 1958, Mason began to read more classical literature, but, she claims, she related to none of it. She knew she wanted to be a writer, but received no encouragement. Upon graduation in 1962, she went to New York and wrote for fan magazines such as Movie Stars, Movie Life, and T.V. Star Parade. She returned to graduate school and received her M.A. from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1966 and her Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut in 1972. Her dissertation on Nabokov’s Ada became her first published book, Nabokov’s Garden: A Guide to Ada (1974). Returning to her childhood reading, Mason’s second book was The Girl Sleuth: A Feminist Guide to the Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, and Their Sisters (1975). She taught English for several years at Mansfield College in Pennsylvania and started to write literary criticism and short fiction. Mason was in her mid-thirties before she began to write serious fiction. In 1980 the New Yorker accepted her story ‘‘Offerings,’’ which later became a part of Shiloh and Other Stories (1982). This first book of fiction was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle award, the American Book award, and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and received the Ernest Hemingway Foundation award in 1983. The title story, ‘‘Shiloh,’’ was anthologized in Best American Short Stories for 1981, and ‘‘Graveyard Day’’ was reprinted in the 1983 edition of The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. A sale to Redbook followed shortly thereafter. Mason received fellowships from both the National Endowment of the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She also joins other Southern writers (authors who live or grew up south of the Mason-Dixon line and who write about life in the South) such as Truman Capote, Pat Conroy, James Dickey, Shirley Ann Grau, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, William Styron, John Kennedy Toole, Eudora Welty, and Anne Rivers Siddons as a past Steinberg Symposium Fellow. As an interesting side note, the Prize of the United States of America was conferred
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on Barbara Vieser for her essay ‘‘Modernity and Regional Consciousness in Short Prose Works by Bobbie Ann Mason and Lee Smith.’’ While ‘‘Shiloh’’ is the most anthologized, Mason feels that the central story of the book Shiloh and Other Stories is ‘‘Residents and Transients,’’ which focuses on her fascination with the conflict between those who stay home and those who run away. The story highlights the tensions between the old and the new South and between the world of mass, popular culture, and the world of academic, elite culture. Mason has her most scathing words for the elite who disdain those who shop at Kmart and spend their leisure time at shopping malls, and she treats her drugstore workers and truck drivers with love and respect. While they pay their bills and eat at McDonald’s, they often dream of something more in their lives, and these dreams lead them to paint watermelons, build log cabins out of popsicle sticks, use fennel toothpaste, and, like Mason herself, dream of returning home to Kentucky. Sometimes, though, her characters are only dimly aware of living lives of quiet desperation. Mason’s regional sense and her eye for the details and detritus of everyday life enrich Shiloh and Other Stories, while her love for her characters lends them dignity. Mason’s first novel, In Country (1985), began with a set of characters much like those in her short stories. They live marginal lives on the fringe of the middle class and spend time listening to rock and roll and driving secondhand cars and trucks to the mall. As Mason wrote, the story of Samantha (Sam) Hughes’ loss emerged. Sam’s father was killed in Vietnam before she knew him. Her mother has remarried and just had a new baby, and Sam is living with her uncle, Emmett Smith, a Vietnam veteran. The Vietnam War is the biggest thing that has happened in the lives of all the characters, and in America’s life as well. While rejecting didacticism, Mason creates the texture of the Vietnam experience. After spending the night in a swamp with her father’s diary, Sam emerges knowing she will never really experience being ‘‘in country,’’ but her search for her father leads her to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., where she sees not only her father’s name, Dwayne E. Hughes, but also her own—Sam A. Hughes. The memorial represents America for Sam, just as it did for Mason when she first saw it. In Country records America’s tragedy in Vietnam and reminds readers of the continuing loss from dangers experienced there, such as Agent Orange. Mason’s second novel, Spence and Lila (1988), follows the personal tragedy of Lila Culpepper’s cancer. Married for over 40 years, Spence and Lila have reared their children and farmed their rural Kentucky farm. Now their future is threatened by a lump in Lila’s breast. With the same unerring ear for dialogue that characterized her earlier work, Mason reveals the impatience, fear, loneliness, and love that wash over ordinary human beings as they try to deal with family and with old age, disease, and death. Lila’s encounter with mortality helps her see how many people ‘‘won’t or can’t come out with their feelings,’’ but despite their
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inability, Mason is able to reveal her inarticulate characters’ emotions. Nancy, Spence and Lila’s daughter, who also appears in ‘‘Nancy Culpepper’’ and ‘‘Lying Doggo’’ in Shiloh and Other Stories, is one of Mason’s transients, while her sister, Cat, and her brother, Lee, are residents who stay close to their parents’ farm. With Love Life (1989), Mason returned to the short story form. The collection, which focuses on varying responses to love, has, like Shiloh and Other Stories, thematic interconnections that make it almost novelistic. Like those in her earlier work, the characters listen to rock and roll and watch MTV and live on the margins of the middle class in small-town Kentucky. Here, as in all of her work, Mason takes lives that seem on the surface to be barren and devoid of interest and invests them with will, dignity, and grace. Mason’s third novel, Feather Crown (1993), is a tribute to Kentucky and to Christine Wheeler, mother of the first recorded quintuplets born in North America. Already the mother of three, Christine struggles with moral issues as she also battles to keep her tiny children alive. A black woman is brought in as a nursemaid to help, since Christine cannot produce enough milk herself, and then the predators come, seeking to exploit the family. Like In Country, the novel records America’s choices and the conflicts they create, as Mason chronicles day-to-day life for the struggling family. The book was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle award and was listed by the New York Times as a 1993 Notable Book and by Publishers Weekly as one of the 20 best novels of the year. In 1996 Mason joined Garrison Keillor, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, and Annie Dillard in David Pichaske’s Late Harvest: Rural American Writing, which contains the short story contributions of 35 contemporary authors in an anthology following America’s firm ties to its rural roots. In 1998 Midnight Magic: Selected Stories of Bobbie Ann Mason was released, collecting 17 of Mason’s stories already seen in Shiloh and Other Stories and Love Life. She also became the subject of a book-length work, Bobbie Ann Mason: A Study of the Short Fiction, by Albert Wilhelm, as part of Twayne’s Studies in Short Fiction series. The book covers Mason’s career from the first story up to early 1998. OTHER WORKS: Clear Springs: A Memoir (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA 53-56 (1975). CANR 11 (1984), 31 (1990). CBY (1989). CLC 28 (1984), 43 (1987). DLBY (1987). Major Twentieth CenturyWriters (1991). Other references: The American Claimant (1997). NYT Magazine (15 May 1988). Southern Literary Journal 19 (Spring 1987). Passion and Craft: Conversations with Notable Writers (1998). Southern Writers (1997). Wilhelm, A., Bobbie Ann Mason: A Study of the Short Fiction (1998). Women Writers of the Contemporary South (1984). A World Unsuspected, Portraits of Southern Childhood (1990). —MARY A. McCAY, UPDATED BY DARYL F. MALLETT
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MATHEWS, Frances Aymar Born circa 1855, New York, New York; died 13 January 1923, New York, New York Daughter of Daniel A. and Sara Eayres Webb Mathews Frances Aymar Mathews, the daughter of a New York City art dealer, was privately educated. In the 1880s, she began publishing feature articles, playlets, and short stories in periodicals. Mathews’s first professionally staged work was Bigamy (1881), ‘‘a society play in five acts.’’ Her next full-length play, Joan (1898), was written as a result of a letter from actress Fanny Davenport: ‘‘I have seen some of your short stories and believe you are the person to write a play for me. . . . I want a play on Joan of Arc.’’ Mathews spent two years doing research in the Astor Library, but took dramatic license in giving ‘‘Joan Darc’’ some love interest. Mathews’s most successful play was Pretty Peggy (1902), in which Grace George starred. This comedy was based upon 18thcentury actress Peg Woffington’s early career and romance with David Garrick. Audiences were most delighted by the novelty of a scene in Act 4 in which costumed actors suddenly appeared among the audience in every part of the theater, voicing their opinions of Peg’s on-stage performance as Rosalind in As You Like It. My Lady Peggy Goes to Town (1901) is a rambling pseudo18th-century novel about a well-born country lass who travels to London to visit her twin brother and, she hopes, to be reconciled with Sir Percy, with whom she has had a lover’s quarrel. Forced by circumstances to dress as a young man and to pass for a rival suitor for her own hand, Peggy careers from one adventure to another. After improbably becoming a protégé of Beau Brummell, she is frequently thrust into company with the unsuspecting Sir Percy, whose jealous dislike of his rival prevents her from unmasking. The dialogue prickles with period interjections, while the narrative bristles with typical turn-of-the-century rhetorical devices. One of Mathews’ last published works was a sequel, My Lady Peggy Leaves Town (1913). For a time, Mathews published and edited The Havana (New York) Journal. In January 1923, Mathews’ scantily clad body was found frozen in a snowdrift not far from her home. It was reported in the New York Times that she, a pharmacist’s assistant, may have been ‘‘stricken with a fit of insanity. ’’
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The New Yorkers and Other People (1900). The New Professor (1903). Little Tragedy of Tien-Tsin (1904). Pamela Congreve (1904). Billy Duane (1905). Finding a Father for Flossie (1905). The Marquise’s Millions (1905). The Staircase of Surprise (1905). Up Yonder (1905). Undefiled (1906). All for Sweet Charity (1907). Allee Same (1907). American Hearts (1907). The Apartment (1907). At the Grand Central (1907). Both Sides of the Counter (1907). A Charming Conversationalist (1907). The Courier (1907). En Voyage (1907). The Honeymoon (1907). A Knight of the Quill (1907). On the Staircase (1907). Paying the Piper (1907). War to the Knife (1907). A Woman’s Forever (1907). Flame Dancer (1908). If David Knew (1910). A Finished Coquette (1911). Christmas Honeymoon (1912). Fanny of the Forty Frocks (1916). BIBLIOGRAPHY: NYT (23 Jan. 1920, 14 Jan. 1923). Theatre Magazine (Oct. 1906). —FELICIA HARDISON LONDRÉ
MATTHEWS, Adelaide Born 1886, Kenduskeag, Maine; died death date unknown All except one of Adelaide Matthews’ plays were written with collaborators. Her most famous coauthor was Anne Nichols, whose reputation rests mainly upon her own play Abie’s Irish Rose. Matthews’ most frequent collaborator was Martha Stanley, with whom she wrote eight plays between 1919 and 1930. W. C. Duncan and Lucille Sawyer each collaborated once with Matthews. It is difficult to distinguish what Matthews’ contribution may have been to these joint efforts. All the plays were written for undiscriminating popular theater audiences. The plays abound with contrived comic business that audiences found hilarious, but is trite and silly in print. Characters are not individuated; each is simply assigned an age, a degree of physical attractiveness, and enough stupidity to keep the situation unresolved until the last act. The most distinctive character type that emerges in a number of the plays is the flighty, middle-aged woman who becomes hysterical at the slightest provocation.
Mathews’ favorite subjects for narrative fiction as well as for her plays were courtship and marriage in an elegant social milieu. Her usual working procedure was to write her plots out first in the form of novels and then to dramatize them. Mathews’ strength as a dramatist lay in her ability to write graceful, witty dialogue. However, her plots are contrived, and she provided little depth of characterization.
If Matthews’ plays have any redeeming value for the modern render, it is their depiction of social mores of the 1920s. In Puppy Love (1925), for example, much of the intrigue depends upon a quantity of bootleg gin temporarily stored in a convenient teapot that is unsuspectingly pressed into service. The ensuing merriment causes the ladies to abandon their stand against marriage, and a double ceremony is performed on the spot. There are references to a ukulele used by one of the young suitors, to flappers and petting parties, and to the moving pictures.
OTHER WORKS: To-night at Eight; Comedies and Comediettas (1889). The Scapegrace (1890). Six to One (1890). The Bracelet (1895). Wooing a Widow (1895). His Way and Her Will (1900).
Anne Nichols was the producer of Puppy Love, which Matthews wrote with Martha Stanley. Matthews had collaborated with Nichols as early as 1917 on a farcical comedy entitled What’s
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Your Number? It was produced in New York and London in the early 1920s as Just Married, and in Berlin in 1929 as Nearly Married. This comedy is set on a transatlantic steamer. Robert Adams and Roberta Adams are strangers who are mistakenly assigned to the same stateroom. The error goes undetected until morning, since he entered in the dark after she was asleep. Misunderstandings involving a number of other characters grow out of Roberta’s attempts to save her reputation, but all is set right when Robert and Roberta, predictably, fall in love and decide to marry. Matthews’ work might best be summed up in the words of the New York Times reviewer for her Nightie Night (1919), which occasioned ‘‘several hours of continuous and unforced laughter. . . . It is made of materials that have been used so often in the last twenty-five years that they are worn through in spots. And yet it is funny.’’ OTHER WORKS: The Teaser (with M. Stanley, 1921). Where Innocence Is Bliss (with M. Stanley, 1921). An Errand for Polly (with W. C. Duncan, 1926). The Wasp’s Nest (with M. Stanley, 1927). Sunset Glow (with L. Sawyer, 1929). The First Mrs. Chiverick (with M. Stanley, 1930; produced, as Scrambled Wives, 1920). Innocent Anne (with M. Stanley, 1930). It Never Happens Twice (1938). BIBLIOGRAPHY: NYT (10 Sept. 1919, 6 Aug. 1920, 28 July 1921, 28 Jan. 1926, 26 Oct. 1927). —FELICIA HARDISON LONDRÉ
MAY, Sophie See CLARKE, Rebecca Sophia
MAYNARD, Joyce Born 1953, New Hampshire Daughter of Fredelle and Max Maynard; married Steve Bethel (divorced); children: Audrey, Charlie, Willy Joyce Maynard became famous for an essay describing herself and her generation, published when she was only eighteen years old. She went on to write novels, children’s books, memoirs, newspaper columns, and magazine articles. Much of her written work has been controversial, winning both praise and condemnation from literary critics. She may be best known for a brief relationship she had with an older man who happened to be a famous, reclusive writer. Maynard began writing at a very early age. Her mother wrote notes on her handwritten pages, much like an editor making comments on an author’s manuscripts. By the age of eight,
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Maynard was writing for a neighborhood newspaper. She was published in school magazines by the age of twelve. As a teenager, she had her first professional writing published in Seventeen magazine. Maynard attended a series of prestigious schools in her native New England. In her senior year of high school, she was one of ten young women to be admitted as part of the first coeducational class at Phillips Exeter Academy, a famous prep school in Exeter, New Hampshire. She went on to attend Dartmouth College and Yale University. While still in college, Maynard had an autobiographical essay, ‘‘An Eighteen-Year-Old Looks Back on Life,’’ published in the 23 April 1972 issue of the New York Times Magazine. The magazine also featured a photograph of Maynard on the front cover. The essay, which described members of her generation as world weary, uninvolved, and unambitious, made Maynard famous almost literally overnight. The magazine received three large mailbags full of letters commenting on the essay within a week. Maynard’s career as a writer was launched by the response to the essay. She soon began writing articles for Vogue, Mademoiselle, and other magazines. CBS Radio hired her as one of two female commentators on its opinion program, Spectrum. She also spent a summer writing editorials for the New York Times. At this time, Maynard spent ten months in a relationship with J. D. Salinger, the acclaimed author of Catcher in the Rye, known for his reclusiveness. Maynard did not publicly discuss this relationship for many years. When she did, some critics suggested she was violating Salinger’s privacy for the sake of her own publicity, an accusation she strongly denied. However, in 1999 she auctioned off 14 letters he had written her during their relationship. Maynard expanded her famous essay into her first book, Looking Back: A Chronicle of Growing Up Old in the Sixties (1973). Although critics praised her ability to describe her personal experiences, many found her too eager to expand these experiences into vague generalizations about her generation. Maynard returned to work for the New York Times, this time in the Metro department. She soon married Steve Bethel, a painter she had known at Yale, and left her job to raise their children. She also continued to write, mostly for magazines aimed at women and parents. In 1981 Maynard published her first novel, Baby Love. The book deals with a large number of characters, primarily four young working-class women who have had babies or who are about to have babies. Critics generally praised Maynard’s ability to describe the ordinary lives of these women. Most agreed, however, that the novel was less effective when she turned her attention away from these women to focus on more melodramatic characters, including a psychopathic murderer. In 1984 Maynard began publishing a popular column that was syndicated in 40 newspapers. The column, describing Maynard’s daily life as a wife and mother, was collected into a book entitled Domestic Affairs: Enduring the Pleasures of Motherhood and Family Life (1987). During this time, Maynard published two children’s books, with paintings by her husband. She also published an article, ‘‘A Story of a Town,’’ protesting the possibility
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of placing a nuclear waste disposal site near her home in Hillsboro, New Hampshire. Her newspaper column ended in 1991, after loyal readers were dismayed to discover she had separated from her husband. Maynard continued to write in the 1990s while raising three children as a divorced mother. She started a monthly column for Parenting magazine in 1991. She also wrote episodes of the nostalgic television series, Brooklyn Bridge. In 1992 Maynard published her second novel, To Die For. The book was loosely based on a true story, in which a high school advisor seduced a student and convinced him and two of his friends to murder her husband. Maynard changed the character to a woman obsessed with fame who will stop at nothing to succeed in the world of television news broadcasting. Many critics found the story compelling but the character unconvincing. To Die For was adapted into a popular film in 1995 starring Nicole Kidman. Maynard returned to a more domestic theme, involving motherhood and divorce, in Where Love Goes (1995). She returned to autobiography in At Home in the World: A Memoir (1998), in which she detailed her relationship with Salinger. OTHER WORKS: Camp-Out (1985). New House (1987). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CANR (1998). CLC (1983). —ROSE SECREST
MAYO, Katherine Born 24 January 1867, Ridgeway, Pennsylvania; died 9 October 1940, Bedford Hills, New York Also wrote under: S. Deane, Katherine Prence Daughter of James and Harriet Ingraham Mayo One of three daughters of a mining engineer, Katherine Mayo spent part of her youth in Pennsylvania and part in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1899, Mayo accompanied her father in his search for gold in Dutch Guiana, where she spent much of the next eight years. Mayo began her writing career by publishing pop articles and, through the guidance and help of Oswald Garrison Villard, began work at the Saturday Evening Post as a research assistant. In 1910, she began a long friendship with M. Moyca Newell, an orphaned heiress in her early twenties. This friendship provided financial security for Mayo, freeing her to write and to pursue her own research interests. The two women traveled together extensively to gather material for books, and built an estate in Bedford Hills, New York, where Mayo lived until her death from cancer. In her writing Mayo became a crusader and spokeswoman for what she termed ‘‘voiceless underdogs.’’ In 1917, she lobbied successfully for a state police force in New York, writing about
the problem in her first book, Justice to All (1917). In 1920, Mayo defended the overseas activities of the YMCA during World War I in ‘‘That Damn Y.’’ Soldiers What Next! exposed the American Legion lobby in 1934. Mayo did not seem concerned with the usual interests of feminists of her generation such as woman suffrage, slum conditions, or settlement houses, but preferred to write about the sexual exploitation of women. Interestingly, she did not deal with the problem in her own country or from her own experience, but rather in her writings about distant places and cultures—especially the Philippines and India. In The Isles of Fear (1925), Mayo rejects the idea of independence for the Philippines. Although Mayo’s avowed purpose is to ‘‘present accurate information, not to influence judgment,’’ her selection of material reflects her bias. Mayo presents information about local corruption and usury laws, which reflect the Filipinos’ inability to govern themselves, but she focuses much of the work on the sexual exploitation of girls by landowners in the tenant relationship and by male Filipino schoolteachers. Mayo’s concern with sexual exploitation becomes most vocal in her sensational novel of child marriage, Mother India (1927). The book is journalistic in style; the text is documented by photographs, statistics, and other supplementary material. Mayo’s generalizations about India are much the same as those about the Philippines—India is not ready for self-rule—but Mayo ascribes the reason to India’s preoccupation with sex. Mayo does deal to some extent with other political and religious concerns, but the sensational elements are clear in her graphic medical descriptions of the forced marriages of very young girls (ages five to ten) to mature males. Mayo concluded that such marriages kept women in the lowest possible status. The book was widely read and highly controversial; many rebuttals were written. Mayo continued this theme in Slaves of the Gods (1929), Volume Two (1931), and The Face of Mother India (1935). Mother India, Mayo’s most widely read book, is stylistically better than some of the others. Descriptive sections achieve an immediacy through specific detail and fragmented structure. On the whole, however, the work is principally muckraking typical of its era. The preoccupation with sexual exploitation limits its effectiveness. OTHER WORKS: The Standard Bearers (1918). Mounted Justice: True Stories of the Pennsylvania State Police (1922). General Washington’s Dilemma (1938). The papers of Katherine Mayo are at the Yale University Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Oswald Garrison Villard papers at Harvard University contain several of her letters. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: NAW. NCAB. TCA. Other references: Atlantic (Summer 1930). Current History (Aug. 1930). Fortune (March 1929). Forum (Fall 1928). Nation (12 June 1929). North American Review (June 1928). —BETTY J. ALLDREDGE
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MAYO, Margaret Born Lillian Clatten (Slatten?), 19 November 1882, near Brownsville, Illinois; died 25 February 1951, Ossining, New York Married Edgar Selwyn (divorced) A midwest farm girl, Lillian Clatten (sometimes given as Slatten) adopted the stage name Margaret Mayo when she went to New York City in search of a career. While still in her teens, Mayo toured in Charley’s Aunt and Secret Service and, between 1899 and 1903, had a few minor roles on Broadway. Dissatisfied with women’s character parts, she adapted Ouida’s novel Under Two Flags so that she could play Cigarette, but Belasco’s competing version opened first. Mayo spent one season in London and then appeared in a New York company with the popular idol Grace George, who asked Mayo to dramatize The Marriage of William Ashe (produced 1905) for her. The play’s success prompted producers to commission vehicles for other stars. Mayo collaborated with her playwright husband (from whom she was later divorced) on the book to a musical, Wall Street Girl (1908; produced 1912). Her own farce Baby Mine (1911; produced 1910) was one of the decade’s most successful plays. In 1917 Mayo and her husband joined Sam Goldfish in a film company; amalgamation produced the corporate name Goldwyn, which Sam took for his own when the partnership dissolved. In 1918, Mayo headed a unit of the Red Cross ‘‘Over There’’ theater; her own act included a solo dance. Mayo’s first original play, Polly of the Circus (1908; produced 1907), was a sentimental comedy. Bareback rider Polly is taken to the local minister’s house after a fall. Under his influence, she loses her fiery temper and slangy speech, and becomes gentle, literate, good at amusing children, and beloved. She runs back to the circus to protect him from gossip—but, of course, he follows her and love conquers all. In 1917 the play became the Goldwyn Company’s first film; reviewers agreed that it fulfilled Goldwyn’s promise to elevate the state of the art. A second movie version in 1932 starred Clark Gable as the minister. Farce, however, and not sentimental romance, was Mayo’s real talent. Baby Mine is typical. Alfred Hardy is absurdly jealous, and his wife Zoie is a chronic (though innocent and featherbrained) liar. Alfred leaves; she decides to get him back by giving birth to a son. She lines up a baby from a foundling home and sends Alfred the telegram—and then the baby’s mother changes her mind, so that Zoie and her husband’s friend Jimmy Jinks (the role Fatty Arbuckle chose for his return to Broadway in 1927) spend the second act scrambling to beg, steal, borrow, or buy a baby. No mother will make a permanent arrangement, babies appear and disappear, the police press in with kidnapping charges, Alfred clasps his ‘‘son’’ to his bosom and hears a spare baby crying elsewhere, Jinks climbs in the window with yet another—and somehow everything is straightened out two minutes before the final curtain. Baby Mine played London, Paris, and cities from Singapore to Cape Town; it was filmed in 1928 and made into a musical by
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Herbert Reynolds and Jerome Kern (Rock-A-Bye-Baby, produced 1918). Commencement Days (1908), Twin Beds (1931; produced 1914), and Seeing Things (1920) also display Mayo’s mastery of traditional farce. The characters are simple and rigid, the situations flirt innocently around the edges of the risqué, and in the climactic scene most of the characters are stowed away in closets, under the bed, behind curtains, and in the laundry basket, so that when the spring is wound up tight they can begin to pop out again. Mayo cared little for literature; she said that she had never read a play before she began writing them. Her only nondramatic work, Trouping for the Troops (1919), is a slender, sentimental account of her wartime tour. She used an entertainer’s skills to put together scripts that would play. Polly of the Circus let the producer add as many circus acts as the proscenium and the budget would accommodate; Wall Street Girl featured Will Rogers and his vaudeville routine. One reason Mayo’s plays have not survived is that she tailored them so individually to the performer’s talents; she did, for example, three different versions of Sardou’s Cyprienne for three different actresses. She was often called in to doctor other writers’ scripts. Her fast-paced, superficial, mechanical, and highly visual farces were a natural for silent films, but by the 1930s and 1940s the sound remakes already looked creaky and out-of-date.
OTHER WORKS: The Love Thief (1926; film version, 1926). The Poor Simp (revised by Mayo from the version by Zellah Covington, 1935).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Zierold, N., The Moguls (1969). Other references: Green Book (Oct. 1913). McClure’s (Sept. 1912). NYT (24 Dec. 1907, 10 Sept. 1913, 15 Aug. 1914, 26 Feb. 1951). —SALLY MITCHELL
MAYO, Sarah (Carter) Edgarton Born 17 March 1819, Shirley, Massachusetts; died 9 July 1848, Gloucester, Massachusetts Wrote under: Miss Sarah C. Edgarton, Mrs. Sarah C. Edgarton Mayo Daughter of Joseph and Mehitable Whitcomb Edgarton; married Amory Dwight Mayo, 1846; children: one daughter Fortunate in her family, friends, and husband, Sarah Edgarton Mayo lived a brief but active life, tempering her serious, intellectual nature with a cheerful and loving outlook. Mayo was educated at her parents’ home, a large mansion where, as the tenth of fifteen children, she was surrounded by a happy, busy, intelligent
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family who encouraged her interest in literature. At age sixteen Mayo began to write for publication, thereafter leading the life of the professional woman editor/writer. The only formal education Mayo had was 14 weeks at Westford Academy, but she could read several languages and wrote with ease. Her family belonged to the Universalist church, which Mayo joined at age seventeen, for that liberal, intellectually minded denomination was best suited to her. In 1846 she married a young man who was later to become a successful minister and a prolific author. They had one child, a daughter, during their short married life. Mayo’s Selections from the Writings of Mrs. Sarah C. Edgarton Mayo; with a Memoir (1849) is the chief source of information about Mayo’s life and work. During Mayo’s early years as a professional writer, when apparently she needed to earn money, she wrote quantities of stories and poems, finding a ready market. Many of Mayo’s short pieces appeared in the Universalist and Ladies’ Repository, a Boston publication where she served as associate editor from 1839 to 1842, and The Rose of Sharon, the Universalist gift annual which she edited from 1840 to 1848. Two children’s books, The Palfreys (1838) and Ellen Clifford (1838), appeared during this time, and Mayo also published two collections of her short pieces, Spring Flowers (1840?) and The Poetry of Woman (1841). Her husband later said about this period of her life that ‘‘she wrote much more than her own judgment would dictate, and necessarily with great rapidity.’’ One of Mayo’s personal interests was botany, and combining her love of flowers with poetry, she published three sentimental flower books. The Flower Vase (1843) is a traditional flowerlanguage book, in which Mayo presents the symbolic meanings of flowers and some passages of poetry illustrating the sentiments. Books like this on flower language were published by most women editors of the day, including Sarah Josepha Hale. Usually presented as gift books, these volumes were displayed on ‘‘centre tables’’ in many homes where they functioned along with other symbolic possessions to provide that gloss of refinement so desired at that time. Mayo also published The Floral Fortune Teller (1846), an involved game using flower meanings and passages of poetry, and The Fables of Flora (1844), a collection of flower fables, some her own, some by Dr. Langhorne. A good selection of Mayo’s prose and poetry can be found in the book edited by her husband. A study of her poems shows that her admiration for Wordsworth and Burns did not stop short this side of imitation. Most of her poems, populated by figures such as ‘‘Young Rosabelle’’ and ‘‘Leila Gray,’’ concern standard subjects such as nature, religion, family feelings, and death. Although Mayo occasionally gives an interesting background detail or an insightful character analysis, her short stories are mostly, sentimental, mawkish romances with happy, moral endings. Certainly, Mayo had no illusions about the quality of her work. In the two years after her marriage, she wrote little and seemed dissatisfied with what she did write. Her husband tells us that she was trying to write ‘‘a work in the form of a novel, the
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spiritual autobiography of a woman from childhood to middle age,’’ but Mayo left only a few fragments. Such a novel would have been worth reading. However, it is debatable whether Mayo, with her ready gifts but essentially imitative attitude, could ever have written it. One of her prides, said her husband, was the acceptability of her work to everyone. ‘‘If she ever wrote a controversial line she sincerely regretted it,’’ he boasted.
OTHER WORKS: Poems by Mrs. Julia H. Scott, Together with a Brief Memoir (1843).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Douglas, A., The Feminization of American Culture (1977). Mayo, A. D., Selections from the Writings of Mrs. Sarah C. Edgarton Mayo; with a Memoir, by Her Husband (1849). Reference works: AA. FPA. NCAB —BEVERLY SEATON
McBRIDE, Mary Margaret Born 16 November 1899, Paris, Missouri; died 7 April 1976, West Shokan, New York Daughter of Thomas Walker and Elizabeth Craig McBride Mary Margaret McBride, the daughter of a modestly successful farming couple, always knew she would be a journalist. Two relatives whose interest had permanent influence on McBride were her maternal grandfather, a Baptist minister, who schooled her in bible readings, and her paternal grandfather, a scholar, who gave her an appreciation of Greek and Latin poetry. The first woman in her family to aspire to a career, she attended the University of Missouri, graduating in two and a half years, and financing her education by working on the Columbus Times. Successive feature-writing positions on the Cleveland Press and the New York Mail catapulted her to a syndicated column, a woman’s-page editorship, and extensive magazine freelance work. A second and third career for McBride emerged from the Depression years when periodicals ceased publication or could no longer pay her prices. She turned to producing books and to conducting a daily program on radio (and ultimately on television), earmarking each media venture with her special vitality, her wide-ranging interests, her candor, and her respect for facts. Though, on the one hand, McBride’s work was characterized by deep-seated religious and moral convictions, plus sincere and unselfconscious sentimentality, she was at the same time a tough and searching reporter. And though she struggled against and never conquered deep feelings of guilt and insecurity, she numbered among her close friends heads of state and celebrities in diverse fields in the U.S. and abroad. Testaments to her personal
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popularity and magnetism were the quarter of a million letters she received annually from listeners and a party on her tenth anniversary in radio, held at Madison Square Garden and attended by 125,000 ‘‘Mary Margaret’’ fans. McBride’s newspaper assignments were, for the most part, self-selected. She managed, whether the story involved a parade, a political convention, or a luncheon, to make the reader feel like a ringside spectator by introducing particulars of texture, smell, and other detail. Her acute sensory awareness coupled with searching curiosity and a zealot’s concern for the truth contributed to McBride’s being one of the most sought-after and highest-paid journalists in the country. When the magazine market suffered reverses in the late 1920s, McBride completed four travel books with coauthor and journalist, Helen Josephy. Though the books sold well because European travel was becoming popular, they have little value today except as social documents. Their preoccupation with where celebrities dined, resided, and shopped, made these books highly palatable to middle America and were a harbinger of McBride’s modus operandi and subsequent success in radio and television, but the net result is a sensual, somewhat naive recitation of a time long past.
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taken altogether it is faintly, sometimes even blatantly ridiculous. I wanted to be a great writer, and now I never shall be.’’
OTHER WORKS: Jazz: A Story of Paul Whiteman (with P. Whiteman, 1926). Charm (with A. Williams, 1927). Paris Is a Woman’s Town (with H. Josephy, 1929). The Story of Dwight Morrow (1930). London Is a Man’s Town (with H. Josephy, 1931). New York Is Everybody’s Town (with H. Josephy, 1931). Beer and Skittles: A Friendly Modern Guide to Germany (1932). Here’s Martha Deane (1936). How Dear to My Heart (1940). America for Me (1941). Tune in for Elizabeth (1945). How to be a Successful Advertising Woman (edited by McBride, 1948). Harvest of American Cooking (1957). Encyclopedia of Cooking (1959). The Giving Up of Mary Elizabeth (1968).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CB. Ladies of the Press. Successful Women. Whatever Became of . . .? Other references: American Mercury (Jan. 1949). Life (4 Dec. 1944). NY (19 Dec. 1942). NYT (8 April 1976). SatR (1 March 1947). Scribner’s (March 1931). —ANNE S. BITTKER
Several other volumes are autobiographical, nonintellectual, nonliterary, but highly readable. A Long Way from Missouri (1959) and its sequel, Out of the Air (1960), recount with modesty and pride the events of McBride’s life. Both books are replete with names and anecdotes, her successes and her setbacks, all treated honestly and with the utmost simplicity. At a moment of success on a New York paper she was to confess, ‘‘but I never felt really secure in my love life or in my job, not for long, even when I had two beaux at once and a byline on front page center.’’ Her shift in media to radio, and later to television, made no difference in the persona of McBride, though, for contractual reasons, she assumed initially the ‘‘radio name’’ of Martha Deane. The same buoyancy, frankness, and cozy confidentiality prevailed. Her selection of guests, books, professions, and hobbies were examined like feature stories, utilizing, for the first time, newspaper techniques in radio presentation. To the extent that material was written, she prepared it herself, including the commercials. Products were always personally pretested for acceptability before she agreed to their sponsorship. Printer’s Ink, authoritative bible of the marketing world, commenting on the slavish acceptance of her listeners, described the response to her program and her merchandising prowess as ‘‘the most outstanding example of reliance upon the word of a human being in the commercial field.’’ With the death in 1954 of her friend and manager, Stella Karn, McBride gave up her own program and restricted herself to guest appearances. Six years later she moved permanently to a refurbished barn in West Shokan, New York. Her own assessment of her career was characteristically candid and self-effacing: ‘‘I’ve enjoyed my life and don’t regret any of it. But I can see that,
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McCAFFREY, Anne Born 1 April 1926, Cambridge, Massachusetts Daughter of George Herbert and Anne McElroy McCaffrey; married Wright Johnson (divorced 1970); children: Alec Anthony, Todd, Georgeanne Anne McCaffrey earned a B.A. from Radcliffe College in 1947 and studied voice and drama; she also took some graduate courses in meteorology at the University of the City of Dublin. She directed opera before abandoning professional ambitions in theater arts and worked as a copywriter from 1948 until 1952, but began writing full-time in the late 1950s. Prominent as a popular author of science fiction and fantasy, McCaffrey has also written gothic mysteries: Ring of Fear (1971), The Mark of Merlin (1971), The Kilternan Legacy (1975), Stitch in Snow (1984), The Year of the Lucy (1986), and The Lady (1987). She edited Cooking Out of This World (1973), a collection of recipes by various science fiction writers, and a sequel, Serve It Forth (1996), edited with John Gregory Betancourt. McCaffrey now resides at Dragonhold, County Wicklow, Ireland. Revealing her love for her adopted home, McCaffrey often employs Irish characters and motifs, sometimes thinly disguised, in her fiction. Her work usually features young, mostly adolescent protagonists who are misunderstood by society and authority
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figures, but who eventually prove to possess wonderful talents that will expose and rectify the evil of their conservative cultures. McCaffrey won a devoted female readership by featuring female protagonists, telling critic Robin Roberts that her heroines are ‘‘victims who became survivors. That’s important for women today.’’ She was the first science fiction writer to make the New York Times bestseller list, and the first woman to win the Hugo and Nebula Awards, the most prestigious awards granted in the fields of science fiction and fantasy. ‘‘The Ship Who Sang’’ (1964) is one of the earliest works in which McCaffrey broaches the issue of sexual stereotypes. This story of Helva, one of many severely physically deformed infants whose healthy brains are encapsulated in spaceships to enable them to lead productive lives, emphasizes the humanity of such cyborgs and their ‘‘normal’’ partners rather than their original genders. Thus the caring relationship which develops between Helva, the ‘‘brain’’ of a spaceship, and her first partner, its ‘‘brawn,’’ is predicated upon their mutual love of music rather than their sexual identities. In 1969 this story was anthologized with five others about Helva as The Ship Who Sang. A subsequent anthology, Get Off the Unicorn (1977), contains a further story about Helva, ‘‘Honeymoon.’’ Other novels about similar brain/ brawn relationships include The Ship Who Searched (1992), PartnerShip (1992) with Margaret Ball, The City Who Fought (1993) with S. McCaffrey Stirling, and The Ship Who Won (1994), with Jody Lynn Nye. In 1968 ‘‘Weyr Search’’ won the Hugo award, presented by the members of the World Science Fiction Association, for best short story of the year, while ‘‘Dragonrider’’ won the Nebula, presented by the Science Fiction Writers of America. Both of these works were later incorporated into Dragonflight (1968), the first volume in the Dragonriders of Pern series for which McCaffrey is best known. This series earned a loyal audience for its depiction of the telepathic bonding between humans and a dragon-like alien species native to the planet of Pern. McCaffrey describes not only the rapport between individual humans and dragons as they fight the life-threatening spores that periodically attack Pern, but also the ways in which this rapport permeates the intricate, almost feudal social structure of Pern. Dragonflight focuses upon an independent, courageous female protagonist, Lessa, who reappears as a minor character in the later novels. McCaffrey’s concern with women’s roles and struggles in Pern’s society is most vividly realized in Dragonsong (1976) and Dragonsinger (1977), both of which center upon Mennolly, a young woman whose ambition to be a harper runs counter to Pern’s social norms for women. Like Lessa, Mennolly achieves her goals through perseverance, courage, and quick wit. Because Dragonsong, Dragonsinger, and Dragondrums (1979) are designed for a juvenile audience, they lack the scope of characterization and development of other novels in the series. The later Pern novels include the highly acclaimed All the Weyrs of Pern (1991); Nerilka’s Story (1986), The Dolphins of Pern (1994), Moreta, Dragonlady of Pern (1997), Dragonseye (1997), and The Masterharper of Pern (1998).
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Decision at Doona (1969) is akin to the Dragonriders series in its presentation of the evolving, intricate relationship between humans and another sentient alien species. The Hrrubans, lionlike beings, are as reluctant as Terrans to coexist on the colony planet of Doona. The lifesaving friendship of two of their offspring brings the two species together. Later novels, Crisis on Doona (1992) and Treaty at Doona (1994), were written with Jody Lynn Nye. Dinosaur Planet (1978) and its sequel The Survivors (1984), collected together as The Ireta Adventure (1984), also feature a woman protagonist whose professional competence and personal integrity are essential plot elements. They touch again upon the relationships between humans and aliens. Freedom’s Landing (1995), Freedom’s Choice (1997), and Freedom’s Challenge (1998) are a trilogy about slave labor and rebellion in a space colony, featuring a pleasing alliance-turnsromance between the human protagonist, Kris, and a renegade member of the slaver race. Other characteristic novels include Acorna, the Unicorn Girl (1997) and Acorna’s Quest (1998), both written with Margaret Ball and dealing with a magically talented unicorn-like girl who winds up on a child slave-labor planet and fights to improve the children’s lot. A quasiseries beginning with To Ride Pegasus (1974), developing with Pegasus in Flight (1990), and expanding into the Rowan series concern a group of ‘‘psionically talented’’ people who search for acceptance, and the chance to help humanity at war with hive-mind aliens. The Rowan herself is a tremendously gifted orphan girl whose story, like so many of McCaffrey’s, is a Bildungsroman, which evolves into a generational epic with the following novels Damia (1992), Damia’s Children (1993), and Lyon’s Pride (1994). Other popular series include the trilogy Crystal Singer (1982; revised and expanded in 1983), Killashandra (1985), and Crystal Line (1992), featuring the musician Killashandra Ree; the Planet Pirates series, a collaboration with Elizabeth N. Moon and Jody Lynn Nye, composed of Sassinak (1990), The Death of Sleep (1990), and Generation Warriors (1991); and a trilogy coauthored with Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, Powers That Be (1993), Power Lines (1994), and Power Play (1995), which examine the struggle between forcibly implanted colonists on the wintry planet Petaybee and a heartless mining corporation. McCaffrey’s work has been criticized for occasionally being overly romantic and sentimental. Certainly some of her earlier fiction, such as Restoree (1967) and ‘‘A Wonderful Talent’’ (1969), is susceptible to this charge and to that of sexual stereotyping. In her other works, however, such flaws are counterbalanced by believable, intriguing portraits of human and alien interaction and by the creation of female protagonists who successfully struggle against discrimination in their societies.
OTHER WORKS: Alchemy and Academe: A Collection of Original Stories Concerning Themselves with Transmutations, Mental and Elemental, Alchemical and Academic (edited by McCaffrey,
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1970). Dragonquest (1971). The White Dragon (1978). The Coelura (1983). The Renegades of Pern (1989). The Rowan (1990). Rescue Run (1991). The Chronicles of Pern: First Fall (1993). The Dolphins’ Bell (1993). The Girl Who Heard Dragons (1994). An Exchange of Gifts (1995). Black Horses for the King (1996). No One Noticed the Cat (1996). Space Opera (anthology edited with Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, 1996). A Diversity of Dragons (with Richard Woods, 1997). If Wishes Were Horses (1998). Nimisha’s Ship (1999). The Tower and the Hive (1999).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Allen, B., ‘‘Toward a Feminine Style of Psyche: Women Creating Myth’’ (thesis, 1985). Barr, M. S., Lost in Space: Probing Feminist Science Fiction and Beyond (1993). Berger, L., ‘‘Variations on the Traditional Hero/Dragon Conflict in the Realms of the Beowulf Poet, Tolkien and McCaffrey’’ (thesis, 1989). Brizzi, M., Anne McCaffrey (1986). Harkins, P., ‘‘Myth in Action: The Trials and Transformation of Menolly,’’ in Science Fiction for Young Readers (1993). Nye, J. L., The Dragonlover’s Guide to Pern (2nd edition, 1997). StephensenPayne, P., Anne McCaffrey, Dragonlady and More: A Working Bibliography (4th edition, 1996). Wood, R., The People of Pern (1988). Friend, B., ‘‘Virgin Territory: The Bonds and Boundaries of Women in Science Fiction,’’ in Many Futures, Many Worlds: Theme and Form in Science Fiction (1977). Sargent, P., ed., Women of Wonder (1974). Sargent, P., introduction to The New Women of Wonder (1977). Reference works: DLB 8 (1981). Index to Science Fiction Anthologies and Collections (1978). Other references: Algol/Starship (Winter 1978-79). Facts on File Bibliography of American Fiction 1919-1988 (1991). Locus (March 1993). New York Review of Science Fiction 10 (June 1989).
theories of the novel to travel observations to art history. Many of her essays are on political subjects. ‘‘My Confession’’ (On the Contrary, 1962) tells of her leftwing associations during the 1930s, and other essays discuss the national anticommunist hysteria of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Although liberal herself, McCarthy is unsympathetic toward ‘‘liberals’’ who are ill-informed, careless, or dishonest. Sharply critical of the Vietnamese war protesters who rested their case in a ‘‘sterile’’ and vague ‘‘indictment’’ of American culture, she went to Vietnam in order to oppose America’s involvement in the war from an informed point of view. McCarthy’s prose style is graceful and precise, showing the influence of her classical education. She dislikes slang and often uses Latinate diction as well as long, balanced structures, but her writing is generally informal. McCarthy’s sentences are often barbed, sometimes given to startling generalizations; but she is usually concrete, meticulous, and reasonable. McCarthy began writing fiction at the suggestion of her second husband, critic Edmund Wilson, and published her first story in 1939. She was long admired by a small readership, but The Group (1963) was an enormous bestseller and vastly enlarged her public. The novel recreates an era as it follows the lives of eight Vassar girls of the class of 1933 during the seven years after their graduation. It details their experiences with sex, psychiatry, domesticity, and politics; a description of one character’s defloration is both funny and shockingly graphic. The book has a unique third person point of view: the narrative ‘‘voice’’ is that of the Group, sometimes in chorus, sometimes individually. The girls are comic characters by McCarthy’s definition—ineducable, unchanging, and therefore immortal.
Mary McCarthy graduated from Vassar in 1933 and then settled in New York City, where she began her writing career. McCarthy’s early book reviews appeared in the New Republic and the Nation, and in 1937 she became drama editor of the Partisan Review. She quickly attracted the attention of the literary establishment, which she often sharply attacked.
McCarthy is an extremely personal writer whose uses of her acquaintances in fiction are often unflattering. The Oasis (1949), a prizewinning conte philosophique about a utopian experiment, is a case in point; Philip Rahv and Dwight Macdonald were the ‘‘originals’’ of two satiric portraits which expose the dishonesty and pretentiousness of liberals whose high ideals and rhetoric offer no immunity against human frailty. McCarthy is no gentler with herself than with her friends. Some readers have mistaken ‘‘Artists in Uniform’’ for fiction, probably because of the uncomplimentary light it casts upon the author, but it is fact. So, McCarthy says, are two of the short stories about Margaret Sargent, heroine of McCarthy’s first novel, The Company She Keeps (1942), which is actually a collection of stories unified by Margaret’s quest for self. Other characters based to some extent on McCarthy include Kay (The Group), Martha Sinnott (A Charmed Life, 1955), and Rosamund Brown (Birds of America, 1971). These characters are self-consciously ‘‘superior’’ but at times self-doubting, and relentlessly honest with themselves, believing that if action is sometimes compromised, thought should never be. Although liberal intellectuals, they believe in ritual and ceremony and abhor the common, the cheap, and the ugly.
Known primarily as a novelist, McCarthy was a very fine expository writer, who covered a wide range of subjects, from
These characteristics are discernible in the child described in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957, 1990) McCarthy’s
—NATALIE McCAFFREY ROSINSKY, UPDATED BY FIONA KELLEGHAN
McCARTHY, Mary (Therese) Born 21 June 1912, Seattle, Washington; died 25 October 1989, New York, New York Daughter of Roy W. and Theresa Preston McCarthy; married Harold Johnsrud, 1933; Edmund Wilson, 1938; Bowden Broadwater, 1946; James Raymond West, 1961
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autobiography. A collection of memoirs brought together with an introduction and epilogues, the book derives its unity chiefly from the character of the young Mary and from its themes of education, Catholicism, Jewishness, the quest for superiority, and the difficulty of doing the right thing for the right reason. McCarthy, orphaned at six, had a bizarre childhood, and the most striking passages of the book are the ones about the Minneapolis years. The material is Dickensian, but McCarthy treats it with remarkable coolness. There is more bewilderment than anger, and very little that can be called pathos. Indignant, independent of mind, striving to be a ‘‘superior girl,’’ the young Mary suffered outrageous abuses until she was taken to live with her maternal grandparents in Seattle in 1923. Both the child of personal history and the heroines of fiction cultivate the appearance of superiority, but they also hold themselves answerable to rigid moral standards. Margaret Sargent is less anxious about looking ridiculous than about being ‘‘hard as nails.’’ When she wakes up in bed with the Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt, she must carry on from this undignified moment and see the vulgar ‘‘love story’’ to its conclusion. The need for private truth rather than public superiority requires Martha Sinnott to have an abortion rather than bear a child of doubtful paternity. In The Company She Keeps, McCarthy experiments with points of view. Margaret is seen both publicly and privately; she is seen from a distance through the eyes of the Yale man and from close through her own eyes as she undergoes analysis. In The Groves of Academe (1952), McCarthy’s academic novel, she uses the point of view of a character quite the opposite of herself. Henry Mulcahy is a physically and morally repulsive man, and his voice—whining, raging, pleading, gloating—carries much of the narrative. Fired from his previous position amid suspicions of communism, Mulcahy is hired by the liberal President Hoar to teach, temporarily, at Jocelyn College, a ‘‘progressive’’ school. When his term of appointment is up, Mulcahy fights dismissal by the startling device of falsely confessing to membership in the Communist Party, thereby cynically enlisting the support of faculty liberals. The novel moves with relentless logic from Mulcahy’s letter of dismissal to the resignation of Hoar, blackmailed by the triumphant Mulcahy. In conforming to liberal conventions, Hoar and the faculty override their own good sense and powers of observation. Yet even when not self-deceived, the liberal in McCarthy’s fiction finds moral integrity difficult to achieve. In Birds of America, Peter Levi, a nineteen-year-old egalitarian and literary kinsman of Candide, sees that the things he most loves—nature, tradition, art—are threatened by the advance of the thing he believes in most—equality; yet the evils of injustice and poverty persist undiminished. In Cannibals and Missionaries (1979) a committee of liberals en route to Iran to investigate the Shah’s regime and a tour group of American art collectors are hijacked by an international terrorist group and held in Holland while the collectors are exchanged for their priceless paintings and a farmhouse is turned into an unlikely gallery. Liberals and paintings are
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then offered in exchange for Holland’s withdrawal from NATO and severing of relations with Israel. The novel’s moral center is a senator who comes to the recognition that terrorism is a ‘‘kid brother’’ of minority electoral politics; both are equally ineffectual against the inertia of facts. The outcome is grim, but the mode is comic; people and their institutions are impervious to these events, and at the end, the Reverend Mr. Frank Barber, among others, has survived to go on counting his blessings. McCarthy’s ear is true, and her fiction is rich with the sounds of authentic voices, heightened but not distorted. If her characters are often ridiculous, she tolerates their absurdities even as she exposes them, although she is merciless with self-professed intellectuals who exempt themselves from responsibility to facts. Her most malevolent characters—Henry Mulcahy and Norine Schmittlapp (The Group)—thrive in personal and moral squalor with no foothold in truth. In 1980 McCarthy’s zeal for truth telling landed her in the midst of a legal battle. On the Dick Cavett television show that year she accused Lillian Hellman of being a ‘‘dishonest writer.’’ Hellman responded with a $2.25-million libel suit. When Hellman died in 1984, the case was dropped, much to McCarthy’s disappointment; she had been looking forward to the public trial. The same year, McCarthy was awarded both the Edward MacDowell Medal for outstanding contributions to literature and the National Medal for literature, only the third woman to have been so honored. She sold her papers—more than 6,500 pages of manuscripts, legal documents, notes, and letters—to Vassar College in 1985. Occasional Prose (1985) is a diverse collection of McCarthy’s essays written since 1970. It includes a discussion of a 1968 demonstration in London against the war in Vietnam, a ‘‘postface’’ to her friend Nicola Chiaromonte’s Paradox of History, as well as a tribute to her late friend Hannah Arend. In addition there are critical essays, lectures, book reviews, obituaries, and a retelling of La Traviata. In 1987 McCarthy published the first of what she had hoped would be a three-volume autobiographical work. Like her earlier Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew (1987, reissued 1989) covers the years from her childhood through her graduation from Vassar College and her marriage to Harold Johnsrud, both in 1933. Unlike the earlier work, however, How I Grew chronicles the intellectual development of its subject, beginning, ‘‘I was born as a mind during 1925, my bodily birth having taken place in 1912.’’ The book was widely criticized for returning to the material of her earlier memoir and generally compared unfavorably with it. Written as a narrative monologue, the style of How I Grew is discursive, at times even deliberately antiquated. The tone is one of comic detachment. Even while relating the abuse she suffered during her orphan years, or her teenage attempts at suicide, McCarthy remains emotionally distanced from her material. ‘‘Laughter is the great antidote for self pity,’’ she explains. As a result the emotional force of the work is somewhat diminished. McCarthy died of cancer in New York City at the age of seventy-seven. At the time of her death, she had published 19
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books, including fiction, criticism, journalism, and autobiography. Having declared back in 1985 that it wasn’t possible to write a successful novel ‘‘after a certain age,’’ she devoted the last decade of her life to writing literary and cultural criticism and autobiography. Her last works were a study of Gothic architecture and another volume of her autobiography, Intellectual Memoirs: New York, 1936-1938 (1992), which was published posthumously by the Mary McCarthy Literary Trust. In addition to writing, McCarthy had also been teaching at Bard College, the same institution that first invited her to teach in the 1940s. As social critic and moralist, McCarthy consistently and scrupulously sought truth. Neither hopeful nor sentimental, McCarthy’s messages often fall on unwelcoming ears. Like most satiric writers, she sometimes wrote about the topical. But her range is wide, her eye and ear are keen, and her literary commitment is to the durable and universal facts of human life candidly and often caustically recorded.
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O’Connor. . .’’ (thesis, 1997). Stock, I., Mary McCarthy (University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers, No. 72, 1968). Stwertka, E. and M. Viscusi, eds., Twenty-Four Ways of Looking at Mary McCarthy: The Writer and Her Work (1996). Reference works: CA (1969, 1990). FC (1990). Modern American Women Writers (1991). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Short Story Criticism: Excerpts from Criticism of the Works of Short Fiction Writers (1997). TCAS. Other references: Columbia University Forum (1973). Esquire (July 1962). Hudson Review (Spring 1981, Spring 1989). Journal of American Studies (1975). NYRB (4 Dec. 1980, 11 June 1987). NYT (1 May 1985, 5 May 1985, 26 Oct. 1989 [obituary], 18 Nov. 1989). NYTM (29 Mar. 1987). NYTBR (18 Jan. 1981, 19 April 1987, 24 May 1992). Paris Review (Winter-Spring 1962). Partisan Review 57 (Winter 1990). TLS (6 March 1981, 31 Jan. 1986, 18-24 Sept. 1987). —MELISSA BURNS,
OTHER WORKS: Cast a Cold Eye (1950). Sights and Spectacles: 1937-1956 (1956). Venice Observed (1956). The Stones of Florence (1959). Mary McCarthy’s Theatre Chronicles, 1937-1962 (1963). Vietnam (1967). Hanoi (1968). The Writing on the Wall, and Other Literary Essays (1970). Medina (1972). The Mask of State: Watergate Portraits (1974). The Seventeenth Degree: How It Went, Vietnam, Hanoi, Medina, Sons of the Morning (1974). Ideas and the Novel (1980). Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949-1975 (with H. Arendt, 1995, reissued 1996). Papers and manuscripts of Mary McCarthy are housed in the Special Collections area of the Vassar College Library in Poughkeepsie, New York.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Auchincloss, L., Pioneers and Caretakers: A Study of Nine American Women Writers (1965). Bennett, J. Mary McCarthy: An Annotated Bibliography (1992). Brightman, C., Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World (1992, 1994). Bullis, J. A., Wisely Armed: The Psychology of Self and Satire in the Novels of Dawn Powell, Mary McCarthy, and Muriel Spark (dissertation, 1995). Butler, S. M., Portrait of an Intellectual as a Young Woman: Mary McCarthy, the Early Years (dissertation, 1995). Cahill, S. N., ed., Writing Women’s Lives: An Anthology of Autobiographical Narratives by Twentieth Century American Women Writers (1994). Gelderman, C., Mary McCarthy: A Life (1989). Gelderman, C., ed., Conversations with Mary McCarthy (1991). Goldman, S., Mary McCarthy: A Bibliography (1968). Greve, J. J., Inhabiting the Flesh: Trauma and the Body in Twentieth-Century Women’s Autobiography (dissertation, 1998). Grumbach, D., The Company She Kept (1967). Hardwick, E., A View of My Own: Essays in Literature and Society (1963). Hardwick, E., Sight-Readings: American Fictions (1998). McKenzie, B., Mary McCarthy (1966). Mailer, N., Cannibals and Christians (1966). Plimpton, G., ed., Women Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews (1998). Rutledge, C., ‘‘Falling into the Self: A Review of Mary McCarthy and Flannery
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McCLOY, Helen Born 6 June 1904, New York, New York; died December 1992 Also wrote under: Helen Clarkson, H. C. McCloy Daughter of William C. and Helen Clarkson McCloy; married David Dresser, 1946 (divorced 1961); children: one daughter Helen McCloy’s father was managing editor of the New York Evening Sun; her mother wrote short stories under her maiden name. A Quaker, McCloy studied at the Brooklyn Friends School in New York. At fourteen, she published a literary essay in the Boston Transcript; at fifteen, she published verse in the New York Times. McCloy lived in France for eight years, studying at the Sorbonne in 1923 and 1924. McCloy was Paris correspondent for the Universal News Service (1927-31) and the monthly art magazine International Studio (1930-31). She also was London correspondent for the Sunday New York Times art section and wrote political sketches for the London Morning Post and the Daily Mail. McCloy returned to the U.S. in 1931 and spent several years writing magazine articles and short stories. In 1938 she published her first mystery novel, Dance of Death. She has one daughter and was divorced in 1961 from her husband, who wrote mysteries under the name Brett Halliday. McCloy was rather prolific, writing dozens of detection and suspense novels, short stories, and newspaper and magazine articles. She won Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine awards for the short stories ‘‘Through a Glass, Darkly’’ (reprinted in The Singing Diamonds, 1965) and ‘‘Chinoiserie’’ (reprinted in 20 Great Tales
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of Murder, 1951), and the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America (MWA) for the best mystery criticism. In addition, she was the first woman president of MWA and was given the organization’s highest honor, being named the Grand Master in 1989, one of only eight women at the time so honored. Dance of Death features her detective, Dr. Basil Willing, a psychiatrist and an expert in forensic medicine; he appears in many of what are considered her strongest novels. The social satire in such novels as Cue for Murder (1942) and Two-Thirds of a Ghost (1956), as well as the fine presentation of New York society in Alias Basil Willing (1951) and Unfinished Crime (1954), suggests, as Erik Routley has indicated, that McCloy is one of those mystery writers in whom ‘‘there is a good deal of straight novel-writing.’’ Anthony Boucher believed McCloy ‘‘has always resembled the best British writers of the Sayers-BlakeAllingham school in her ability to combine a warm novel of likeable people with a flawless deductive plot.’’ McCloy’s choice of a psychiatrist-detective as hero reveals her interest in psychology, especially in its more paranormal manifestations, as is evident in Through a Glass, Darkly (1949), Who’s Calling? (1942), and The Slayer and the Slain (1957). Her interest in the fragile structure upon which an individual’s personality is based is shown in The Changeling Conspiracy (1976), which deals with political kidnapping and brainwashing. This and recent novels reflect McCloy’s interest in contemporary affairs; The Goblin Market (1943) and Panic (1944), which were written during World War II and deal with problems created by the war, suggest this interest is not new. In general, critics have preferred McCloy’s novels of detection to the novels of suspense or terror. McCloy herself believed the current popularity of detective stories is related to ‘‘some lack in the accepted literary diet.’’ The ‘‘moral understanding of common minds which results in sympathy for common lives’’ and the themes ‘‘that mean so much to the common man—love and death’’—are missing from modern novels. In her best works, McCloy’s success in providing interesting characters and themes is matched with her ability in plotting.
OTHER WORKS: The Man in the Moonlight (1940). The Deadly Truth (1941). Do Not Disturb (1943). The One That Got Away (1945). She Walks Alone (1948). The Long Body (1955). The Last Day (1959). Before I Die (1963). The Further Side of Fear (1967). Mister Splitfoot (1968). A Question of Time (1971). A Change of Heart (1973). The Sleepwalker (1974). Minotaur Country (1975). The Imposter (1977). The Smoking Mirror (1979). Burn This (1980). The papers of Helen McCloy are housed in the Mugar memorial Library of Boston University.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Routley, E., The Puritan Pleasures of the Detective Story (1972). Reference works: CA (1971). A Catalogue of Crime (1971). Detecting Women (1994, 1995). Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (1994).
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Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection (1976). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (1996). WA. Other references: NYHTB (28 Nov. 1943, 7 Oct. 1956). NYT (27 Feb. 1938, 11 Oct. 1942, 18 June 1950). —DIANA BEN-MERRE
McCORD, Louisa (Susannah) Cheves Born 3 December 1810, Charleston, South Carolina; died 23 November 1879, Charleston, South Carolina Wrote under: L. S. M. Daughter of Langdon and Mary Elizabeth Dulles Cheves; married David James McCord, 1840 (died 1855); children: three, plus 10 stepchildren Although born in South Carolina, Louisa Cheves McCord spent formative years (1819-29) with her family in Philadelphia, where her father served under Monroe as president of the Bank of the United States. Langdon Cheves early recognized his daughter’s intellect and motivation and, despite his strict conception of a woman’s role, encouraged her education with her brothers in math and Latin. Inheriting ‘‘Lang Syne’’ from an aunt in 1830, McCord skillfully managed the large cotton plantation with its 200 slaves near Columbia, South Carolina. Her husband, a widower with 10 children, was a minor but vigorous political figure, with high if traditional expectations of his wife: beyond her responsibilities for her stepchildren and her own three children, McCord became a perceptive participant in her husband’s social and political world. Encouraged by her husband to support the Southern cause while maintaining the conventionally female role in which she ardently believed, McCord translated Frederic Basiat’s Sophisms of Protection (1847) in 1848. Vehemently against protective tariffs and for free trade, the document has sharpness, passion, and wit; McCord’s translation is precise yet literal and dull. The work was well received in the South, and McCord soon began to publish her own writings. Later in the same year, My Dreams, a collection of abstract and formal poems, appeared. This work suggests the girlhood tensions that probably underlie her staunch support of an essentially conservative and traditional position for women. She quickly followed these pieces with other occasional poems and with frequent articles on economics, finance, slavery, and women’s rights. Both her husband’s and Basiat’s influence is clear in these writings, but their emotional vigor, acute wit, and satire make them compelling reading. McCord was startlingly versatile in her writing. In 1851, when her own son was ten, McCord published Caius Gracchus, a
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blank-verse tragedy in five acts, with strong autobiographical elements: The protagonist, Cornelia, strongly influences the development of her able son, Caius. Veiled but clear parallels between the exploitive Senate and the North and between the plebeians, inspired by the orator Caius, and the oppressed South pervade the work. The drama’s interest for today’s readers lies primarily in the implied identification of McCord with her son and the revelation of her sublimated political desires. After her husband’s death in 1855, McCord settled in Columbia, South Carolina, and devoted herself to her children and to civic pursuits. She took a brief European tour after her father’s death in 1857. During the Civil War she spent much of her time nursing the wounded and encouraging the Confederate troops; in 1861, she was elected president of the Soldier’s Relief Association and of the Lady’s Clothing Association. During this period, her friend Mary Boykin Chesnut noted in her diary that McCord had ‘‘the intellect of a man and the perseverance and endurance of a woman.’’ At the end of the war, McCord lived in Canada for two years before agreeing to take the oath of allegiance to the federal government. McCord strove ardently with both unusual strength and style to preserve a passing way of life. This position places her firmly within a strict southern tradition, while her energy, sharp perception, and firm character give her a deserved prominence in southern letters. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Chesnut, M. B., A Diary from Dixie (1905). Fraser, J. M., Louisa C. McCord (1920). Smythe, Louisa McCord, For Old Lang Syne (1900). Thorp, M. F., Female Persuasion (1949). Reference works: CAL. The Living Female Writers of the South. The Living Writers of the South. LSL. NAW. NCAB. The Writers of South Carolina. Other references: South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine (Oct. 1933, July 1934). —CAROLINE ZILBOORG
McCORMICK, Anne O’Hare Born 16 May 1880, Wakefield, England; died 29 May 1954, New York, New York Also wrote under: Anne O’Hare Daughter of Thomas and Teresa Beatrice O’Hare; married Francis J. McCormick, 1910 As an infant Anne O’Hare McCormick was brought from England to Columbus, Ohio, by her American-born parents. Intellectually influenced by her Catholic mother, a poet and woman’s-page editor, McCormick was educated in private schools in Ohio, graduating from the College of St. Mary of the Springs. Following in her mother’s footsteps, she published children’s feature articles and soon became an associate editor for her mother’s employer, Cleveland’s weekly Catholic Universe Bulletin.
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After her marriage to an engineer and importer, McCormick resigned her editorship and traveled with her husband on his European business trips. She wrote several impressionistic articles about European countries in the aftermath of World War I for the New York Times Magazine. In 1921, her dispatches from Europe, serious assessments of the rise of fascism in Italy, and of the role of Benito Mussolini (a figure then dismissed as a ‘‘posturing lout’’ by most journalists) impressed Times managing editor Carr V. Van Anda. He hired her as a foreign correspondent in 1922. She was the first woman hired as a regular contributor to the Times editorial page (1936) and the second woman to receive a Pulitzer Prize for journalism (in 1937, for her European correspondence). Through the early 1950s she lectured in major U.S. cities, made radio broadcasts, and wrote ‘‘Abroad,’’ a column based on reportage in Europe, Asia, and Africa. She also published editorials commenting on the American political scene. The Hammer and the Scythe: Communist Russia Enters the Second Decade (1928) is based on articles McCormick originally wrote for the Times while traveling in Russia in the 1920s. McCormick reports her impressions of the Russian people, their conditions, and the clash of new and old. The Hammer and the Scythe is among the best of the books written by American journalists visiting Russia in the 1920s, but The World at Home: Selections from the Writings of Anne O’Hare McCormick (1956, edited by M. T. Sheehan), one of two collections of McCormick’s Times columns posthumously edited by her personal friend, Marion Sheehan, better withstands the passage of time. Like other writers in the 1930s, McCormick ‘‘rediscovered America’’ in the pieces included in The World at Home. Her generalizations about the nation are convincing, particularly when examined together with the essays on Franklin Roosevelt. She connects small details that blend into larger patterns of the nation’s character and dramatizes ‘‘that curious community. . .between the mind of the President and the mind of the people.’’ For Vatican Journal: 1921-1954 (1957, edited by M. T. Sheehan), Sheehan included Times pieces on the struggle between Mussolini’s government and Pius XI, America’s relations with the Vatican, the Church’s persecuted position in Europe through the World War II era, and finally Roman Catholics’ Cold War engagement in a fundamentally ‘‘spiritual’’ battle against communism for ‘‘domination over the soul.’’ In the articles, McCormick often uses the first person, details specifics of the surroundings in which events occur, and recounts dramatically the scenes observed. Her own point of view is usually made clear, balanced against a ‘‘fair’’ presentation of the opposition’s perspectives. McCormick considered herself above all else a newspaperwoman. Aside from her book on Russia, she preferred to write ‘‘on top of the news while people were listening.’’ Her reporting of foreign and domestic events was clear, incisive, and authoritative. It embodied her commitment to moral absolutes and professional standards of reporting. The body of correspondence (especially, warnings about fascism’s rise in Europe), achievements as an influential political columnist, and eighteen years of service on the editorial board of America’s most prestigious
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newspaper, secure McCormick an important place in the ranks of American journalists. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Filene, P. G., Americans and the Soviet Experiment: 1917-1933 (1967). Hohenberg, J., Foreign Correspondence: The Great Reporters and Their Times (1964). Marzolf, M., Up from the Footnote: A History of Women Journalists (1977). Talese, G., The Kingdom and the Power (1966). Reference works: Catholic Authors: Contemporary Biographical Sketches, 1930-1947. Ohio Authors and Their Books (1962). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States. TCA, TCAS. Other references: Catholic World (Oct. 1954). NYT (30 May 1954). SR (19 June 1954). —JENNIFER L. TEBBE
McCRACKIN, Josephine (Woempner) Clifford Born 25 November 1838, Petershagen, Germany; died 21 December 1920, Santa Cruz, California Also wrote under: Josephine Clifford Daughter of Georg and Charlotte Hartman Woempner; married James Clifford, 1864; Jackson McCrackin, 1882 (died 1904) A journalist and short-story writer associated with western literary figures such as Bret Harte and Ambrose Bierce, Josephine Clifford McCrackin lived a courageous and romantic life. Born in Germany and brought to St. Louis as a child, she married a cavalry officer who became insane shortly after their marriage. Although she stayed with him longer than seems reasonable, she finally escaped him and left the desert outpost where they were stationed to make her home in California. There she wrote for Overland, Harper’s Magazine, and other publications that were eager to print firsthand accounts of western life. A happy second marriage introduced her to ranch life. After the destruction of the McCrackins’ ranch by fire in 1899 and her husband’s death in 1904, McCrackin became involved in the conservation movement. During her last years she worked as a newspaperwoman in the Santa Cruz area. Perhaps McCrackin’s most famous piece of nonfiction was her letter to the Santa Cruz Sentinel (7 March 1900) attacking the depredations of the lumber business on the redwoods, for it served to mobilize public interest in preserving the trees, leading to the creation of what was then called California Redwood Park. Much of the background and some of the actual experiences in McCrackin’s short stories come from her own adventures in Arizona and Southern California. California is described as a flowery paradise with clean air, sea breezes, and distant mountain scenery to gaze at. Since McCrackin was born into a military family and married into the army as well, she praised the army men and glamorized the army life. While she often sympathized
with the Spaniards and Mexicans, who were being bested by the Americans in the battle for land in California, she showed little concern for the Native Americans, portraying them as ‘‘red devils.’’ The plots and characterizations are melodramatic and repetitious. Many of the stories end with a murder or suicide, the motive for the tragedy usually being thwarted love. Her fictional old Southwest was thickly peopled with brokenhearted heroes and heroines, lovers who had betrayed trusts, daughters who had been maneuvered by their parents into marriage to rich men they did not love, and strong-minded women pursued by evil husbands. Whether they are good or bad, most of McCrackin’s heroines are strong women. The bad ones are very bad; the cruel Mrs. Arnold of ‘‘A Woman’s Treachery’’ tortures animals and cheats on her husband, eventually causing his death. Often the women are high-tempered and nervous, flushing easily and flashing their eyes a lot. They work hard and love horses; they suffer nobly under persecution and remain faultlessly faithful to their first loves. Her men are not very individualized. Most of them are either villains, in the form of dissipated, irresponsible husbands, or heroes, in the person of handsome young lieutenants. Physical and moral courage are both needed for one to remain alive (much more so to be successful in any way) in the landscapes of her tales. While McCrackin’s short stories are not valuable works of literature, they are an interesting source for details of life on the western frontier. Her career in the conservation movement, typical of those who turned so enthusiastically to that movement in the early 20th century, is also of interest. She was active in several conservation groups, seeking to preserve (in fact) the unspoiled natural reserves of her beloved California which she has helped to preserve (in print) through her descriptions of life there in the last 30 years of the 19th century. OTHER WORKS: Overland Tales (1877). Pen Pictures of Ventura County, California (1880). Another Juanita, and Other Stories (1893). The Woman Who Lost Him, and Tales of the Army Frontier (1913). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bierce, A., Introduction to The Woman Who Lost Him, and Tales of the Army Frontier by J. C. McCrackin (1913). James, G. W., in The Woman Who Lost Him, and Tales of the Army Frontier by J. C. McCrackin (1913). Reference works: AW. CAL. NAW. Other references: Overland Monthly (Sept. 1902). —BEVERLY SEATON
McCRUMB, Sharon Born 26 February 1948, Wilmington, North Carolina. married; children: Spencer, Laura Sharon McCrumb’s fiction falls into three categories. As a Southerner descended from ancestors who once lived in the Great
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Smoky Mountains, she writes novels and short stories to dissolve stereotypes of those who live in the Appalachian Mountains. Called the ‘‘Ballad’’ series, many of these novels are taught in college courses. As a descendent of Scots, McCrumb also writes several novels in the Elizabeth MacPherson mystery series dealing with trips to Scotland, clan games in America, and other adventures tied to Scotland or Scottish Americans. Finally, there is the Jay Omega series, also whodunits, which consist of a satiric look at the world of science fiction and fantasy fandom. McCrumb’s childhood was spent reading and listening to family tales. At seven she knew she wanted to be a writer, so after graduating from high school she intended on going to nearby Chapel Hill to major in English. Her father talked her out of it, advising her to choose a major with good job prospects. McCrumb ended up with a degree in communications and Spanish from the University of North Carolina in 1970, then sought out journalism jobs in her area. At one point, she worked at the local newspaper in Bryson City, North Carolina, a sleepy little tourist town adjacent to the defunct eastern gateway to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. McCrumb also taught journalism and Appalachian studies in Virginia. After 10 years, however, she went back to college and secured a master’s degree in English from Virginia Tech in 1985. Only then did she begin to write novels, becoming a full-time writer in 1988. McCrumb began with a murder mystery featuring a female forensic anthropologist turned detective. The first novel, Sick of Shadows (1984), about a murder occurring at the wedding of Elizabeth MacPherson’s cousin, an heiress, was followed by Lovely in Her Bones (1990), which won the Best Appalachian Novel award for that year. By 1995 McCrumb had written five more books in the series, each noteworthy for its wit. If I’d Killed Him When I Met Him. . . (1995) depicts the murder of a divorced man and his new bride by his ex-wife, a ménage à trois consisting of a middle-aged woman, her husband, and the sixteen-year-old he has brought home to be his second wife, as well as a woman who wants to marry a dolphin. An experience at a small local science fiction convention at which she was the featured guest author led McCrumb to write a satire of such gatherings. A murder mystery featuring the detective work of science fiction writer Jay Omega (alias Dr. James Owen Mega, professor) and his colleague, Marion Farley, Bimbos of the Death Sun (1987) won an Edgar award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1988. At the annual science fiction convention Rubicon, bestselling fantasy author Appin Dungannon arrives as the guest of honor. It turns out he loathes his adoring fans, insulting and injuring them whenever possible. Between the costume ball and the Dungeons and Dragons game, he is murdered. While Jay Omega searches for the culprit, Dungannon’s fans are traumatized, and the hucksters increase the price of his autographed books. McCrumb followed with a second spoof, Zombies of the Gene Pool, in 1992. McCrumb’s third series of books eschews humor while focusing on the lives of latter-day Appalachians. If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O (1990) presents the 20th reunion of the class of 1966 at Hamelin (Tennessee) High School. The fellow classmates
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are shown dealing with relationships, Vietnam, and problems facing today’s working women. The novel won a New York Times Notable Book citation and the Macavity award. The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter (1992) centers on a mass murderer as well as the effects of water pollution. The novel won the Best Appalachian Novel award, a New York Times Notable Book citation, and a Los Angeles Times Notable Book citation. In She Walks These Hills (1994), McCrumb brings in the past in the form of a ghost from the 18th century. This novel also won multiple awards, including a Los Angeles Times Notable Book citation, and the Nero, Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity awards. McCrumb’s ambitious attempt to bring the Appalachians up to date also garnered her the Outstanding Contribution to Appalachian Literature award in 1997 and the Thomas and Lillie D. Chaffin Celebration of Appalachian Writings Award in 1998. OTHER WORKS: Paying the Piper (1988). Our Separate Days (with Mona Walton Helper, 1989). The Windsor Knot (1990). Highland Laddie Gone (1991). Missing Susan (1991). MacPherson’s Lament (1992). The Rosewood Casket (1996). Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories (1997). The Ballad of Frankie Silver (1998). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1999). Detecting Women (1994). Great Women Mystery Writers (1994). St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers 1996. —ROSE SECREST
McCULLERS, Carson (Smith) Born 19 February 1917, Columbus, Georgia; died 29 September 1967, Nyack, New York Also wrote under: Lula Carson Smith Daughter of Lamar and Marguerite Waters Smith; married Reeves McCullers, 1937 (divorced 1940, remarried 1945) Carson McCullers’ childhood was remarkable more for imaginative activity than for external events. She knew firsthand the monotony and dreary heat of a small Southern town, which later provided settings for her novels. Her family was very supportive of her artistic talents, which gave early promise in both writing and music. In 1935 McCullers went to New York City to study music. She lost her tuition money to the Julliard School of Music, however, and took part-time jobs while studying writing at Columbia University. She married a young army corporal, whom she divorced in 1940 but remarried five years later. Her health, always delicate, deteriorated steadily from a tragic series of paralyzing strokes, breast cancer, and pneumonia. Yet she received visitors, traveled, and worked at her writing
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while half-paralyzed until a final stroke killed her when she was fifty. McCullers received immediate acclaim with her remarkable first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940, film version, 1968), written when she was twenty-two. She became one of the most controversial writers in America and had many prominent friends, including Tennessee Williams, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNiece, and Richard Wright. With The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, McCullers established the themes that concerned her in all subsequent writings: the spiritual isolation of the individual and the individual’s attempt to transcend that loneliness through love. The action centers on a deaf-mute, John Singer, to whom an odd assortment of characters turn as to a being especially wise and benevolent. The adolescent Mick speaks to him passionately of music, although Singer has never heard music. Dr. Copeland, a black physician, confides desperately his dreams for educating his race. Jake Blount, an ineffectual agitator, rants about the workers’ revolution. Biff Brannon, quiet observer of men, is fascinated by Singer because of his effect on all the others. But Singer loves another mute: an indolent, developmentally challenged Greek named Antonapoulos, who can never respond in kind to the outpourings of communication from Singer’s expressive hands. Thus each man creates a god fashioned after his own need—but such gods fail. When Antonapoulos dies in a mental hospital, Singer commits suicide. His death signals the fading of a dream for each of those who revered him. This novel, like many of McCullers’ works, is highly symbolic yet rich in concrete detail. A number of allegorical meanings have been suggested for the story, of which McCullers’ own, concerning fascism, seems least appropriate. Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941, film version 1967) is technically more polished and controlled than the first novel but more grotesque in character and event. In the static, ingrown environment of a Southern army post, Captain Penderton, a latent homosexual, is impotent with his beautiful wife, Leonora, but infatuated with their neighbor, Major Langdon, who is her lover. The catalyst is Private Williams, an inarticulate young man with an affinity for nature and horses, especially Leonora’s highspirited stallion, Firebird. Captain Penderton both loves and hates Private Williams with a repressed sadomasochism reminiscent of D. H. Lawrence’s ‘‘The Prussian Officer.’’ Williams glimpses the naked Leonora through an open door, and thereafter he creeps into the Penderton house at night and crouches reverently beside Leonora’s bed simply to watch her sleep. Captain Penderton discovers him there and shoots him. The influence of Freud is unmistakable in this novel; McCullers was one of the first American writers to deal openly with homosexual impulses. The approach is consistently objective and nonjudgemental, as though reflected in the disinterested eye of nature. McCullers’ novella The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951, dramatized by Edward Albee in 1963) achieves more successfully the mode of archetypal myth she approached in Reflections in a Golden Eye. It combines realistic detail with the legendary quality of folk ballad, in a tale of love at once melancholy and sardonically humorous. Surely no more incongruous pair exists in literature
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than the manlike, independent, crosseyed Miss Amelia and her self-centered little hunchback, Cousin Lyman. Singlehandedly running an excellent distillery and the only general store, Miss Amelia is the leading citizen of a tiny backwoods community. The townsfolk, like a stupid and malicious Greek chorus, have no recreation but observing her colorful career. Miss Amelia once married a local bad boy but quickly threw him out when he tried to augment their partnership with sexual attentions. The humiliated lover made threats, turned to crime, and landed in the penitentiary. Now, a pathetic, homeless dwarf who claims kinship to Miss Amelia straggles into town. Contrary to all expectations, she takes in the stranger and builds her life around him. She opens a café, which becomes the social hub of the community, and the misshapen Cousin Lyman becomes a strutting little prince in her modest castle. Eventually, however, her despised husband returns from prison. Ironically, the dwarf becomes enamored with Macy, who uses him to harass Miss Amelia. The competition culminates in a public fistfight between Miss Amelia and Macy. Miss Amelia is actually winning when the dwarf leaps savagely upon her back and turns her victory into physical and emotional defeat. The two men vandalize her café and distillery and then get out of town. Miss Amelia becomes a recluse, and the town seems to share in her emotional death. There is nothing to do there now but listen to the melancholy singing of the chain gang. McCullers hardly surpassed the skill and originality of The Ballad of the Sad Café, but many people prefer her mood piece, The Member of the Wedding (1946, film version 1952). It is certainly the most autobiographical of McCullers’ novels, and may seem closer to everyday experience, although the view of life as painful and frustrating is consistent with her more bizarre creations. The story concerns a motherless adolescent girl’s abortive attempt to outgrow her childhood and create a platonic bond of love with a dimly understood adult world. Frankie Addams wants to find the ‘‘we’’ of ‘‘me’’ and thus escape the prison of selfhood; she decides to go away with her brother and his bride at their forthcoming marriage. This preposterous dream is born of endless conversations in the kitchen with Berenice, the black maid who is her only adult companion, and her seven-yearold cousin, John Henry, who represents the relatively untroubled childhood she wishes to discard. The little boy dies unexpectedly at the end of the novel, suggesting not only that childhood passes but even children are not exempt from tragedy. Frankie, of course, is denied her dream of the perfect threesome on the honeymoon. She does not die of this traumatic rejection, but something rare and fragile is broken. McCullers converted this novel into an award-winning play, which ran for 501 performances in New York. McCullers’ other works include a number of significant short stories (‘‘A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud,’’ sometimes compared in theme to ‘‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’’ was chosen for O. Henry Memorial Prize Stories of 1942); some poetry for children; another, less successful play (The Square Root of Wonderful, 1958, with 55 performances on Broadway); and one other novel, written in the veritable shadow of death. Clock Without Hands (1961) concerns a man who faces death from leukemia. The theme is still loneliness and isolation, but it
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has taken on existential overtones. Though the world is without intrinsic meaning, human life acquires significance through an individual’s commitment to action. The protagonist, J. T. Malone, is Everyman, unrelievedly ordinary, who suspects he has never lived on his own terms. In his new and painful awareness, there are few decisions left to make, but he makes one small gesture: he refuses to accept the community’s order to bomb the home of a black man who had made a commitment by moving into a white neighborhood. In Malone’s aging friend, Judge Clane, McCullers has revealed with admirable precision that peculiar combination of sentimentality and cruelty which characterizes the old Southern variety of white racism. Gore Vidal once predicted that ‘‘of all our Southern writers Carson McCullers is the one most likely to endure’’ (cited by Oliver Evans). ‘‘Her quality of despair is unique and individual,’’ wrote Richard Wright (New Republic, 5 Aug. 1940), ‘‘and it seems to me more natural and authentic than that of Faulkner.’’ Some have called her a writer’s writer, which presumably implies she is more appreciated by professionals than by general readers. If this is true, it may merely indicate that people are uncomfortable with her bleak view of the world. She is, at times, perhaps morbidly engrossed in the grotesque and horrible; yet, the emphasis is never on brutality and gore, but rather on symbolic action equal to psychic pain. In the foreword to The Square Root of Wonderful, McCullers wrote: ‘‘I suppose a writer writes out of some inward compulsion to transform his own experiences (much of it unconscious) into the universal and symbolical. . . . Certainly I have always felt alone.’’ She admired, and to some extent emulated, some of the very greatest writers: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Flaubert. McCullers’ works do not have the psychological insight or concentrated impact of the European masters, but they still cherished Christian redemption as the answer to human failure, which McCullers cannot do. For her, there is only human love to pit against the indifferent universe—and that love is tragically flawed. One of the gentle ironies of the relationship between the author and her work is that McCullers herself, for all her loneliness, had a remarkable capacity for affection and loyalty to her friends. Her fortitude in the face of terrifying physical infirmity is the best symbol for the supremacy, at least briefly, of spirit over mortal matter. Surprisingly, about half of the books about McCullers written in the 1980s and 1990s were published outside the U.S.—in India, Spain, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. On a global scale, it seems, she is recognized as one of the more interesting writers the U.S. has produced. Among English-speakers, McCullers has provoked a small but steady stream of critical interest. The publication of her Collected Stories (1987), the film adaptation of her Ballad of the Sad Café (1992), and the release of her unfinished autobiography Illumination and Night Glare (1999) have helped keep her in the public eye. As Judith Giblin James points out in Wunderkind: The Reputation of Carson McCullers, 1940-1990 (1995), many recent critics have turned away from the formal and stylistic interests of
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the ‘‘New Criticism’’ to examine McCullers’ treatment of race, gender, social class, and sexuality. These new questions have led to markedly different understandings of her works and the isolated, freakish characters for which she was long known. James reviews the critical reception of each of McCullers’ books, plays, stories, essays, and poems, showing how critics’ concerns reflect broader social and academic trends. Her bibliography of Englishlanguage writings on McCullers is extensive and chronologically arranged from 1940 to 1993. Critical Essays on Carson McCullers (1996), edited by Beverly Lyon Clark and Melvin J. Friedman, reprints contemporary reviews of McCullers’ works, tributes to her career, and selected critical essays. It includes Richard Wright’s 1940 review of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, in which he praised McCullers as the first Southern white writer to ‘‘handle Negro characters with as much ease and justice as those of her own race.’’ It also offers three new critical studies examining ethnicity in The Member of the Wedding, the chain gang in The Ballad of the Sad Café, and homoerotics in McCullers’ fiction. Much of this recent criticism illuminates McCullers’ interest in communities, social structures, and social criticism. She was a subtle artist, and her ‘‘messages’’ were never blunt. Nevertheless, this recent work has revised the earlier perception McCullers was preeminently concerned with personal psychology and the isolated plight of the individual. OTHER WORKS: Sweet As a Pickle and Clean As a Pig: Poems (1964). The Mortgaged Heart (edited by M. G. Smith, 1971). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Balakian, N., and C. Simmons, eds., The Creative Present (1963). Bloom, H. ed., Carson McCullers (1986). Carr, V. S., The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers (1975). Carr, V. S., Understanding Carson McCullers (1989). Eisinger, C. E., Fiction of the Forties (1963). Evans, O., The Ballad of Carson McCullers (1966). Jenkins, M., The South in Black and White: Race, Sex, and Literature in the 1940s (1999). McDowell, M. B., Carson McCullers (1980). Shapiro, A. M. et al, Carson McCullers: A Descriptive Listing and Annotated Bibliography of Criticism (1980). Westling, L., Sacred Groves and Ravaged Gardens: The Fiction of Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O’Connor (1985). Reference works: American Writers (1972). CA. CANR (1964). CLC. DAB. DLB. NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). SATA. TCA, TCAS. Other references: CE (Oct. 1951). Explicator (1988). Georgia Review (Dec. 1958, Summer 1963). Jahrbuch fur Amerikastudien (1963). Kenyon Review (Winter 1947). Mississippi Quarterly (Winter 1987-88). Pembroke Magazine (1988). SAQ (1957). Studies in American Fiction (Autumn 1990). Southern Literary Journal (Fall 1991, Spring 1992). Southern Studies (1993). WSCL (Jan. 1960, Feb. 1962). —KATHERINE SNIPES, UPDATED BY LORI J. KENSCHAFT
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McDERMOTT, Alice
dreams within this limited space. Nominated for a National Book award, the novel was later made into a film.
Born 27 June 1953, Brooklyn, New York Daughterof William J. and Mildred Lynch McDermott; married David M. Armstrong, 1979; children: Willie, Eames
At Weddings and Wakes (1992) transports the reader into the heart of Irish Catholic family life on Long Island, through the eyes of children. From the female vantage point of four middle-aged sisters and their stepmother, McDermott interrogates the common aspects of life that hold extraordinary significance for her characters—joy and grief, mortality and faith, illusion and reality. According to reviewer Jill Smolowe, the novel secures McDermott’s ‘‘reputation as a mesmerizing and innovative storyteller.’’ In addition to her novels, McDermott has published dozens of short stories as well as articles and reviews.
Credited in a review of At Weddings and Wakes (1992) with ‘‘transfiguring everyday life,’’ Alice McDermott draws deeply from her childhood memories of suburbia to detail those ‘‘deceptively ordinary elements’’ integral to formulating an adult moral vision. Writing from the perspective of an Irish American, Roman Catholic woman and mother, McDermott masterfully integrates into her harmonious prose the tragedies and complexities arising from the ambiguous nature of morality, the delicacies of the extended family relationship, the malleability of children’s memories, and the constancy of women’s pain. Along the continuum of feminist writings, McDermott identifies with the cadre of female authors who balance the demands of motherhood and of writing. Devoted to her own family, McDermott writes her critically acclaimed novels about women and families downstairs, adjacent to the laundry room, while her children are at school. Fascinated by the suburban subject, she sees the church as the spiritual center of family life and the impetus for improving the lives of one’s children. McDermott’s parents had excluded stories of Ireland from her rearing, yet she attributes to genetics her elegiac writing within the Catholic context, which, a reviewer comments, ‘‘neither attacks the church or proselytizes.’’ McDermott spent her childhood on Long Island, where she attended parochial grammar and high school and claims never to have missed the ten o’clock Sunday Mass. In 1975 she received her B.A. from the State University of New York. After a year of working in publishing, an experience that forms the backdrop to one of her novels, McDermott enrolled at the University of New Hampshire (M.A., 1978), where her goals as a writer were encouraged by teacher Mark Smith and by the tangible affirmation of her talent—publication of short stories in Ms., Redbook, Seventeen, and Mademoiselle magazines. Her first novel, A Bigamist’s Daughter (1982), was accepted, unfinished, for publication six months after its initial submission; assured of her career as a writer, McDermott relinquished her original desire to attend law school and committed her time to writing, editing, lecturing, and, later, teaching writing workshops at American University. McDermott honestly chronicles the pain, confusion, and yearning of childhood from the later, infringing perspective of adulthood. A Bigamist’s Daughter examines these memories and stories of youth and the essential part that fiction plays in life. In a review, Jean Strouse praised the human depth of McDermott’s ‘‘wise, sad, witty novel about men and women, God, hope, love, illusion and fiction itself.’’ The characters in McDermott’s novels struggle with the choices that either define and determine happiness or impose the realities of sorrow. In That Night (1987) the characters are caught in the seamless intractability of suburbia, unable to achieve their
McDermott continues to follow the advice she gives her students at Johns Hopkins University and writes about what she knows—the Irish American and Irish Catholic—and the setting remains in Long Island. Her fourth novel, Charming Billy (1998), is once again the close-knit Irish American/Irish Catholic community. Charming Billy tells the tale of Billy Lynch through the eyes of his friends and family as they recall his life at his wake. As Billy’s friends remember him, the twists and turns of family relationships, friendships, and human frailty are studied. The novel is a study of the lies created by family desires and the need to keep up appearances; characters learn that even well-intended lies can be as harmful to relationships and lives as the truth those lies are concocted to hide. In an interview with the Sacramento Bee, McDermott noted that her challenge in writing Charming Billy was to not make Billy the stereotypical drunk Irishman of jokes: ‘‘I didn’t want to write a book about an Irish drunk. . . I wanted to individualize this character.’’ Individualize she did: the real Billy who is uncovered as the storyline unfolds was not the poetry-loving Irishman ruined by drink everyone thought he was. The novel uncovers what lay beneath the surface in Billy’s complex character. Charming Billy was the winner of the 1998 National Book Award for fiction, a kudo that came as a surprise to McDermott, since A Man in Full, the heavyweight novel by Tom Wolfe, was expected to win the honor the year. Movie rights to Charming Billy have been optioned. McDermott likes to work on two books at once and at the time of Charming Billy’s publication, she was about halfway through her upcoming novel.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1983). Other references: LATBR (26 Apr. 1987). Ms. (May 1987). Newsweek (22 Mar. 1982). New Yorker (17 Aug. 1987). NYTBR (21 Feb. 1982, 19 Apr. 1987, 12 Apr, 1992). PW (30 Mar. 1992). Time (20 Apr. 1992). Washington Post (21 Apr. 1992). Reviews and profiles available online at http://www.amazon.com, http:// www.bhny/com/nba98f.htm; http://www.sacbee.com/sacbeat/ bookclub/mcdermott/mcdermott.html; and http://www.sacbee/com/ sacbeat/bookclub/mcdermott/profile.html. —AMY HOLBROOK, UPDATED BY HEIDI HARTWIG DENLER
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McDOWELL, Katherine (Sherwood) Bonner Born Catherine Sherwood Bonner, 26 February 1849, Holly Springs, Mississippi; died 22 July 1883, Holly Springs, Mississippi Wrote under: Sherwood Bonner Daughter of Charles and Mary Wilson Bonner; married Edward McDowell, 1871 (separated 1873, divorced 1881); children: one As a young teenager, Katherine Bonner McDowell experienced the harsh realities of the Civil War, when Union troops occupied Holly Springs and even her family home. McDowell also suffered personal losses during the war years, with the deaths of her youngest sister in 1863 and her mother in 1865. In 1871, McDowell married another native of Holly Springs; their only child was born in 1872. The McDowells separated in 1873; finally, McDowell established residence in Illinois and obtained a divorce in 1881. In 1873, McDowell moved to Boston to pursue a career in writing; there Nahum Capen, who had published her first story in 1864, recommended her to Henry W. Longfellow, with whom she worked and established a close friendship. During 1876, McDowell sent from Europe a number of travel articles for the Memphis Avalanche and the Boston Times. Her only novel, Like Unto Like, was published in 1878. McDowell returned to Holly Springs in the fall of 1878 and nursed her father and brother through fatal illnesses with yellow fever. In 1881, as her writing career was gaining momentum, McDowell learned that she had breast cancer. Until her death, she continued to write and to prepare her short stories, which had appeared in such magazines as Lippincott’s, Harper’s Weekly, and Youth’s Companion, for publication in two volumes, Dialect Tales (1883) and Suwanee River Tales (1884). McDowell’s Gran’Mammy tales present a distinctive element of southern life; McDowell creates one of the finest literary portraits of the black mammy, who sustained and taught the members of her white family. ‘‘Gran’Mammy’s Last Gifts’’ (1875) may well be the first example of black dialect published in a northern magazine. The most successful story of the group is ‘‘Coming Home to Roost’’ (1884), in which McDowell perceptively treats slave superstition. The child narrator has a significant role in the story’s action, for her chance remark causes Aunt Beckey to believe she has been bewitched. The story is humorous, yet suspense builds as Beckey weakens spiritually and physically. She is cured by the brash young medical student, Henry, who is able to deal with the ‘‘trickery’’ on Beckey’s level. McDowell’s detailed and accurate descriptions are effective, as is the realistic attitude of the rest of the white family, who can view Henry’s actions only as a ‘‘fraud.’’ McDowell’s months in Illinois resulted in other examples of regional fiction, such as ‘‘On the Nine-Mile’’ (1882), which tells in lower-class dialect the story of Janey Burridge, a farm girl who is severely crippled shortly before her wedding. Her fiancé rejects her because she cannot carry her share
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of the workload on his farm. Up to this point, the story is realistic and somber. However, McDowell succumbs to sentimentality; in the last two paragraphs, Janey reforms the alcoholic father of the child responsible for her injury, marries him, regains her ability to walk, and has a child with him. McDowell’s longer works, Like Unto Like and ‘‘The Valcours,’’ a novella published serially (1881), are set during the Reconstruction period. Like Unto Like focuses on the continuing conflict of regional ways of life after the war, primarily in the romance of southerner Blythe Herndon and Roger Ellis, a northern radical. There are weaknesses in Like Unto Like, but McDowell avoids sentimentality, especially when Blythe renounces Roger’s love and remains alone at the end of the novel. McDowell has been praised for her characterization, particularly of women such as Blythe Herndon and the lively Buena Vista Church of ‘‘The Valcours.’’ A study of McDowell’s fiction does not reveal any sustained development from purely regional to more sophisticated realistic works. Even though she began writing as a teenager, McDowell wrote for too short a period of time to develop her talents fully. Like Unto Like was reviewed favorably, but McDowell is appreciated today chiefly for her short stories, especially for her realistic use of dialects—lower-class midwestern, southern mountain, and black—and her humor. Many readers also enjoy her characterizations and plots. She is important as a forerunner of later southern women writers like Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Frank, W. L., Sherwood Bonner (1976). Reference works: AA. DAB. NAW. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States. Other references: ALR (Winter 1972). MissQ (Winter 1963-64). NMW (Spring 1968, Spring 1969). —MARTHA E. COOK
McGINLEY, Phyllis Born 21 March 1905, Ontario, Oregon; died 22 February 1978, New York, New York Daughter of Daniel and Julia McGinley; married Charles L. Hayden, 1937 Beginning her career as a teacher in New Rochelle, New York, Phyllis McGinley wrote poetry in her spare time. Her success in publishing it in magazines enabled her to give up teaching. To keep going, she held various other positions, including poetry editor for Town and Country and copywriter for an advertising agency. According to an interview in Newsweek, she started writing in the style of Swinburne, but switched to light verse when she found out this was what the New Yorker wanted from her. Faithful to the Eastern seaboard, although brought up in Colorado and Utah, she hymned New York to begin with and then,
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when she moved to Westchester County, the suburbs. In a volume of essays, The Province of the Heart (1959), she speaks out in favor of the Easterner and praises the village in which she lives for the way the neighbors love one another. A suburban housewife and mother was what she was and what she was happy to be. Her first volume of verse, On the Contrary, was published in 1934. It contains mainly occasional verse—light comments on contemporary events. It was followed by One More Manhattan (1937), in which McGinley developed more of the tone we associate with her—light, astringent, and witty. There are times when McGinley comes close to Emily Dickinson, but she deliberately avoids total seriousness. A Pocketful of Wry (1940) contains a fair amount of political comment. In Husbands Are Difficult; or, The Book of Oliver Ames (1941), McGinley pokes fun at her husband, but her mockery is very mild and loving. In Stones from a Glass House (1946), she comments on the war but refuses to hate. The Love Letters of Phyllis McGinley (1954) shows her improving and maturing, and won several awards. McGinley won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 for her volume of collected poetry, Times Three (1960), which was prefaced by W. H. Auden. The collection starts with the poems of the 1950s and works backward through the 1940s and 1930s. Some of the most charming poems are about saints and reformers, bearing testimony to her religious convictions as a Catholic but also to her moderation and warmhearted reasonableness. In a second volume of essays, Sixpence in Her Shoe (1964), McGinley writes of the trials and rewards of a wife and mother, a state which she accounted woman’s most honorable profession. A Wreath of Christmas Legends (1967) and Saint-Watching (1969) show her more deeply entrenched in the Catholic faith. In Saint-Watching, she deliberately brings out the human side of the saints, whom she treats as people endowed with a special form of genius; it is a delight to read and can be described without irony as heartwarming. McGinley also wrote a number of children’s books, but these do not have the distinction of her writing for adults. Staunchly traditional, McGinley believed in lifelong vows and in the special vocation of women to motherhood. She also believed in the reality of sin, but was sure it could be forgiven. For her, manners were morals. Her lightness of touch was always backed by an acute intelligence and the feeling that she had found her proper place. She was probably a happy woman. OTHER WORKS: Mary’s Garden (1927). The Horse Who Lived Upstairs (1944). The Plain Princess (1945). All Around the Town (1948). A Name for Kitty (1948). The Most Wonderful Doll in the World (1950). Blunderbus (1951). The Horse Who Had His Picture in the Paper (1951). A Short Walk from the Station (1951). The Make-Believe Twins (1953). The Year Without a Santa Claus (1957). Merry Christmas, Happy New Year (1958). Lucy McLockett (1959). Sugar and Spice: The ABC of Being a Girl (1960). Mince Pie and Mistletoe (1961). The B Book (1962). Boys Are Awful (1962). A Girl and Her Room (1963). How Mrs. Santa Claus
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Saved Christmas (1963). Wonderful Time (1966). Wonders and Surprises (1968). Confessions of a Reluctant Optimist (1973). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CB (Nov. 1961). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCAS. Other references: Commonweal (Dec. 1960). Newsweek (26 Sept. 1960). Saturday Review (10 Dec. 1960). —BARBARA J. BUCKNALL
McGRORY, Mary Born 22 August 1918, Boston, Massachusetts Daughter of Edward and Mary Jacob McGrory Mary McGrory inherited a love for books, poetry, and reading from her father, a deputy superintendent at the South Boston Post Office. His death when she was twenty-one was a deep loss. She attended Boston’s Girls Latin School. As a senior she had her heart set on going to Radcliffe, but the scholarship she needed did not come through. Instead, she enrolled at Emmanuel College, a Catholic women’s school in Boston. She continued to live at home with her mother after graduation, grading papers at night to earn money for her tuition at secretarial school. Compared to most eminent journalists, McGrory’s career got off to a slow start. She began at the Boston Herald as a secretary to the book review editor. McGrory hoped she would get a chance to write and report, but the opportunities were few. She ‘‘was allowed to write about dogs,’’ but not encouraged to contribute anything more ambitious. In six years there, however, she did manage to get some book reviews published. She was twenty-nine when a friendly editor at the Boston Herald recommended her to the Washington Star as a book reviewer. For seven years, McGrory wrote three or four book reviews a week, ‘‘color commentary’’ about books in a column called ‘‘Reading and Writing,’’ and an occasional ‘odd feature’ and profiles for the Star’s Sunday section. Her chance to write for the news side of the paper came in 1954 when Newbold Noyes, editor of the Star, sent her to the Army-McCarthy hearings, telling her he wanted her to ‘‘give color, humor, and charm to the news columns.’’ His guidance launched McGrory’s interpretive writing, in which people—their conversations and comments, their posture and facial expressions—personify the issues of the day. The Army-McCarthy hearings stories established McGrory as an imaginative, observant reporter, and she continued to get plum assignments. Whereas most news reporters record words and statements, McGrory records faces. A colleague of hers says she has the ability ‘‘to write pictures.’’ Her style is much more personal than that of many writers, but it is every bit as factual. Her facility for shorthand enables her to capture quotes and convey exact moods. In 1955 the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild honored McGrory for her ‘‘unusually penetrating’’ coverage of the
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Army-McCarthy hearings, quite an achievement for the ‘‘ancient cub’’ [reporter], as McGrory described herself at that time. This organization and others have continued to cite the quality of her work. In 1974 she became the 14th woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for journalism for her commentary on the Watergate scandal. In 1960 McGrory’s column was syndicated by United Features Syndicate. It appeared four times a week in more than 130 newspapers, and is also carried by the wire services of United Press International and the New York Times. McGrory belies many stereotypes of newspaper reporters. By her own admission she is not a relentless cross-examiner of public figures, nor is she a cozy compatriot of the powerful. She is not a news ‘‘personality.’’ She is a syndicated columnist whose quiet, consistent methods of gathering news yield accurate, illuminating commentary. McGrory rarely refers to herself in her columns, as many columnists do. She does not use the first person; she does not reminisce about her own contact with those she covers. She writes about encounters and events as if she were invisible at the time they happened. Only the keen observations and often devastating barbs in her columns indicated McGrory was very much present. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Marzolf, M., Up from the Footnote: A History of Women Journalists (1977). McLendon, W., and S. Smith, Don’t Quote Me! Washington Newswomen and the Power Society (1970). Other references: Ms. (May 1975).Washington Star (6 May 1975). —SHEILA J. GIBBONS
McGUIRE, Judith (White) Brockenbrough Born 1813, Richmond, Virginia; died death date unknown Daughter of William Brockenbrough; married John P. McGuire; children: two sons and several daughters Judith Brockenbrough McGuire was the daughter of a member of the Virginia state Supreme Court. Her early life is obscure. We do know that she married the principal of the Episcopal High School of Alexandria, Virginia. At the beginning of the Civil War, the McGuires lived there with their two sons and several daughters. McGuire began her diary, published in 1867 as The Diary of a Southern Refugee, in May 1861 with the breakup of her family. Rev. McGuire and the boys had enlisted while McGuire and her daughters were forced to leave Alexandria when federal troops occupied the town. ‘‘I am keeping this [diary],’’ she wrote, ‘‘for the members of the family who are too young to remember these days.’’ The days to which she refers seem filled with movement and insecurity. The family traveled south through the Virginia countryside to Richmond. Along the way they stayed with friends and relatives, but, McGuire recalled, ‘‘while [their hospitality] is very gratifying, and delightful, yet we must find some place,
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however small and humble, to call home.’’ By February 1862 they were in Richmond, trying desperately to find a home. Since Richmond had become the seat of the Confederate government, the city’s population had doubled and lodgings were at a premium. After being refused board at several homes, McGuire was finally offered rooms at $3 less than her husband’s monthly salary. Finding the Confederate capital too expensive, McGuire and her daughters were on the move again, settling first in Lynchburg and then in Charlottesville, Virginia. There she hoped to get work in the Treasury Department, signing government notes. But widows and orphans were given preference for government jobs, so the family supported itself by making and selling soap. In November 1863 McGuire obtained a clerkship in the Army’s Commissary Department. Like the other 35 refugee women, she worked from 7:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. daily and received $125 per month in depreciated Confederate paper money. In addition, she worked evenings as a volunteer nurse in local hospitals. The diary ends abruptly in May 1865 with the notation that General Joseph E. Johnston had surrendered his army on April 26: ‘‘My native land, good night!’’ We do not know what happened to McGuire after the war, or whether the family was able to return to Alexandria. The end of her life, like the beginning, is a mystery. Unlike many of the other Confederate women whose diaries have been published, McGuire did not move in high social circles. Her diary does not record the comings and goings of the Confederacy’s military and social elite. However, The Diary of A Southern Refugee is perhaps more valuable than other more widely known diaries because McGuire’s experiences are more representative of the war’s effect on Southern society. It is difficult for modern readers to imagine the constant fear and uncertainty under which most Confederates lived. They not only feared for their own safety at the hands of an enemy they believed was inhuman and for the safety of loved ones in the army, but they wondered where their next meal might come from, or whether they would have homes when the war ended. The refugee experience was far more common than most historians have realized, and McGuire’s diary allows us to relive part of it. The tone of the diary varies. At times McGuire is a dispassionate observer, merely chronicling the events of the war. At other times, she allows the reader to share her emotions. These latter passages are infrequent, as though McGuire feared to let herself feel too deeply, but when they occur, they are moving and effective. It is unfortunate The Diary of a Southern Refugee has been overlooked for so long. OTHER WORKS: General Robert E. Lee, the Christian Soldier, Published for the City Missionary Association of the Protestant Episcopal Church of Richmond (1873). BIBLIOGRAPHY: K. M. Jones, ed., Heroines of Dixie (2 vols., 1955). M. E. Massey, Refugee Life in the Confederacy (1964). —JANET E. KAUFMAN
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McINTOSH, Maria Jane Born 1803, Sunbury, Georgia; died 25 February 1878, Morristown, New Jersey Also wrote under: Aunt Kitty, Cousin Kate, M. J. McIntosh, Maria J. McIntosh Daughter of Lachlan McIntosh and Mary Moore Maxwell McIntosh Maria Jane McIntosh was educated at home, at a coeducational academy in Sunbury, and at Baisden’s Bluff Academy in McIntosh County. A descendant of the powerful McIntosh clan in Scotland, McIntosh exhibited in her life a self-reliance akin to the moral independence she sets as a standard for the heroines of her novels. Her father, a lawyer, died when McIntosh was only a few years old, and on the death of her invalid mother in 1823, the young McIntosh took over the management of the family estate. Moving to New York in 1835, McIntosh sold her property and invested in New York securities, only to lose her substantial fortune in the 1837 business crisis. Setting out to make her living by writing, McIntosh published the first of her series of moralistic children’s stories in 1841 and the first of her eight novels in 1843. During her prolific writing career she published 24 books, which, popular in England and France as well as in America, eventually made her selfsupporting. Conquest and Self-Conquest (1843), McIntosh’s first novel, traces the lives of Frederic Stanley and his friend from the time they are schoolboys through their early adventures as midshipmen in the navy. Conceived by McIntosh as ‘‘a history of the mind,’’ the novel presents parallel incidents contrasting Frederic’s control and his friend’s lack of control of the ‘‘rash passions’’ that lead to ‘‘wrong-doing’’—in this case fighting, gambling, and drinking. The abstemious Frederic rescues his lady love from pirates and is rewarded by her hand and a state ceremony in his honor, while his friend, lacking Frederic’s self-control, is invalided home. Frederic sums up the novel’s moral when he explains to his disappointed friend that what makes the true hero is ‘‘not conquest over others. . .but self-conquest.’’ For the most part McIntosh’s subordination of character and plot to her didactic purpose results in a tract-like work that is predictably boring. Woman, an Enigma (1843) again focuses on development of self-control in a young person, but here McIntosh is concerned with a young woman’s purposeful direction of her life. Set in 18th-century France and England, the novel traces the life of Louise de La Valliere, a convent-bred seventeen-year-old who suddenly becomes an heiress and the betrothed of a jaded marquis. She adopts the philosophy that ‘‘a wife’s best talisman for the preservation of peace and purity lay in her devotion to her husband.’’ The result is disastrous: the pair are embroiled in five years of misunderstandings, intrigues, and separations. Suffering forces Louise into action, led by duty and a sense of right, not by a desire to please her husband. McIntosh’s thesis is that the inconsistencies criticized in women stem from their failure to have a purpose in life other than to please men. This work is as didactic as
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McIntosh’s first novel, but Louise’s development of a purpose in life makes for more interesting reading than does Frederic’s abstinence. Two Lives (1846), the first work McIntosh published under her real name, combines the parallel structure of her first novel with the theme of her second novel: the need for women to be independent of men in the spiritual purpose that guides their everyday life. The lovely Grace Elliot ‘‘has no fixed principle but the desire to please,’’ whereas her equally lovely but solemn cousin Isabel adheres to ‘‘the unchanging and eternal principles of right.’’ Grace’s fiancé leaves her when he realizes that ‘‘To seem what I wished has been her effort, and how shall I know that her whole life is not seeming.’’ Straitlaced Isabel is an unappealing character, but McIntosh’s insight into her coldness and into Grace’s desire to please occasionally cuts through the novel’s sentimentality and sermonizing. Charms and Counter-Charms (1848), the most popular of McIntosh’s novels, traces the development of Evelyn Beresford, a young woman very like Grace Elliot and Louise de La Valliere in that ‘‘she is as wax in the hands of those she loves.’’ McIntosh structures the novel on parallels, setting Evelyn’s trials with her dashing husband, Euston, an ‘‘unbeliever’’ and a ‘‘libertine,’’ against her friend Mary’s relationship with the exemplary Everard. The novel focuses on what undoubtedly made it a bestseller: the sado-masochistic relationship between Evelyn and Euston. He repeatedly rejects her for another woman so that, at any sign of unhappiness, he can punish her with coldness. When they are eventually reconciled, Evelyn has become less dependent on his love, but the real change is in Euston. Euston represents an excess of the self-control McIntosh praises in her other novels, and her sympathetic insight into his distaste for emotional intimacy adds psychological realism to her portrayal of his and Evelyn’s relationship. McIntosh’s insight into the emotions of her characters only occasionally transcends her rigid parallelism of plot and characters, her sentimentality, and her didacticism. McIntosh’s thematic variations on self-control in her novels are interesting in the context of her life. What is most interesting about her works, however, is that, although her treatise Woman in America: Her Work and Her Reward (1850) asserts that woman’s role is to be a mother, her novels preach a different message: the need for women to be guided not by a desire to please men, but by their own sense of right.
OTHER WORKS: Blind Alice; or, Do Right If You Wish to Be Happy (1841). Florence Arnott; or, Is She Generous? (1841). Jessie Graham; or, Friends Dear, but Truth Dearer (1841). Ellen Leslie; or, The Reward of Self-Control (1842). Grace and Clara; or, Be Just as Well as Generous (1842). The Cousins: A Tale of Early Life (1845). Praise and Principle; or, For What Shall I Live? (1845). Aunt Kitty’s Tales (1847). The Christmas Guest; or, Evenings at Donaldson Manor (1853). Meta Gray; or, What
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Makes Home Happy (1853). Letter on the Address of the Women of England to Their Sisters of America, in Relation to Slavery (1853). The Lofty and the Lowly; or, Good in All and None AllGood (1853). Alice Montrose: A Tale (1855). Rose and Lillie Stanhope; or, The Power of Conscience (1855). Violet; or, The Cross and the Crown (1856). Maggie and Emma: A True Story (1861). Two Pictures; or, What We Think of Ourselves and What the World Thinks of Us (1863). Violetta and I (1870). The Children’s Mirror: A Treasury of Stories (1887). Emily Herbert; or, The Happy Home (n.d.).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Baym, N., Women’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870 (1978). Forrest, M., Women of the South Distinguished in Literature (1861). Reference works: A Critical Dictionary of English Literature. The Female Prose Writers of English Literature. The Living Female Writers of the South. NAW. The Twentieth Century Biographical Dictionary of Notable Americans. Woman’s Record. —MARTHA CHEW
McINTYRE, Vonda N. Born 28 August 1948, Louisville, Kentucky Daughter of H. Neel and Vonda B. Keith McIntyre Vonda N. McIntyre is a respected science fiction author. At the University of Washington, she earned a degree in biology in 1970, followed by graduate work in genetics. Besides writing, she is a conference organizer and a riding and writing instructor. Her scientific interests influence her fiction, which showcases genetic manipulation or bodily transformations of various kinds. She is renowned for the ingenious plausibility of her fictional aliens and mutants. These characters embody the theme of the Outsider in society to great emotional effect. McIntyre emphasizes the related theme of building the bridge to friendship and the many faltering steps and missteps across that bridge. Relationships between ‘‘normal’’ people and Others in her works are profoundly felt and portrayed. Her fiction features strong female characters, who nearly always live in an egalitarian future society. Her first story, ‘‘Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand’’ (1973), won the Nebula award, bestowed by the Science Fiction Writers of America. She expanded the tale into Dreamsnake (1978), which won the World Science Fiction Association’s Hugo award. The story concerns the travels of a healer who breeds genetically altered snakes for medicinal purposes. McIntyre’s novel The Exile Waiting (1975), a Nebula nominee, chronicles a mutant orphan teenager’s survival on
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postapocalyptic Earth and her gradual alliance with other underground mutants and the interplanetary raiders who invade to take over the last remaining terrestrial city. The protagonists eventually escape the wreckage of Earth, but first they must each confront and resolve their inner problems, which are less easy to escape. Fireflood and Other Stories (1979) depicts a future in which humanity has departed a similarly ruined Earth, leaving behind a few ‘‘worthless’’ unfortunates. These wretches have been altered into inhuman shapes—cyborgized or transformed into winged creatures—and are imprisoned on reservations or perform meaningless work: drilling pits, digging tunnels. In ‘‘The End’s Beginning,’’ a dolphin describes a forced undeviating swim across the ocean to deliver an implanted bomb. In ‘‘Spectra,’’ slaves’ eyes have been replaced with plug-in sockets to manipulate electronic data. These lonely characters wish only for a chance at the pursuit of happiness and a life of dignity. The stories are linked by the thematic importance of friendship and trust in an intolerable world. The most famous tale in the collection, Hugo-nominated ‘‘Aztecs,’’ was expanded into the 1984 novel Superluminal. It tells the tragic love story of Laenea, a pilot, and Radu, the crewman who has loved her since she saved him from a plague on another planet. As though McIntyre felt dissatisfied with the bitter ending, she continues their adventures so they may escape the separation forced upon pilots and crew. New to the galaxy-spanning tale is Orca, a ‘‘diver,’’ who has voluntarily undergone anatomical alteration in order to live underwater and befriend cetaceans. Radu turns out to be a mutant, too: the only spaceman who has ever dreamed during the drugged sleep of transit, on a critical voyage he actually wakes up during the flight. The scientists want to study this unique ability, but he escapes medical imprisonment to follow and rescue Laenea, who is also unique in that she has found how to pilot her spaceship into the seventh dimension—and return. The three young protagonists, all moody and headstrong, forge a strange but intense friendship. In Barbary (1986), twelve-year-old Barbary goes to live on a space station with a foster family, but illegally smuggles onboard her beloved cat, Mickey. Raised in the school of hard knocks, Barbary initially distrusts her kind new father and sister. Heather, who teaches Barbary to live in zero gravity, learns in return the importance of responsibility when she finds the cat and promises to help care for him. Unfortunately, the authorities also discover Mickey, but when an alien spaceship appears, Barbary and Mickey save the day in a surprise ending. A ‘‘space opera’’ series begins with Starfarers (1989). Scientists Victoria, Stephen Thomas, Satoshi, and J. D. work on the spaceship Starfarer, whose peaceful mission is to seek alien intelligence. However, the despotic president of the United States will do anything to prevent its launch—even deploying saboteurs onboard—in order to seize the ship for military purposes. In Transition (1990), the scientists orbit Tau Ceti II, where they meet an alien civilization awaiting them. Metaphase (1992) describes the relationship between the crew and a bizarre alien called a squidmoth. And in Nautilus (1994), four alien races require the
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humans to prove themselves peaceful enough to join their interstellar civilization. The novels’ comic moments and chaotic mayhem arise from the cultural clashes between people of different ages and nations as they form a cohesive team determined to carry out their mission at all costs. McIntyre was the first commercially successful writer of Star Trek novelizations, which include The Wrath of Khan (1982), The Search for Spock (1984), Enterprise: The First Adventure (1986), and The Voyage Home (1986). These books are perspicuously told by an omniscient narrator. McIntyre is faithful to the film scripts, with occasional flights of originality that breathe life into screenplays made prose—and written at high speed to meet marketing deadlines. She has also written other novelizations and coedited an early feminist science fiction anthology. In the Nebula-winning The Moon and the Sun (1997), McIntyre blends historical fiction, fantasy, and science fiction in her most acclaimed novel. The point-of-view character is teenager Marie-Josèphe de la Croix, a lady-in-waiting to a niece of King Louis XIV at Versailles. As fascinated in ‘‘natural philosophy’’ as her brother, Yves, who has captured two sea monsters for the King’s menagerie, Marie-Josèphe helps him dissect the male creature in search of an ‘‘organ of immortality.’’ However, she establishes a rapport with the female, who is both sentient and telepathic. The plot involves Marie-Josèphe’s frantic and disloyal attempts to save the Sea-Woman from being served as a dainty dish for the King, but the novel surpasses mere adventure. McIntyre enriches her simple style with luxurious, beautiful prose, and the story dramatizes the transition from credulous superstition to rational inquiry that became the European Enlightenment. McIntyre’s skillful characterization and fascinating scientific extrapolation combine to form pleasing, poignant, and passionate story-telling.
OTHER WORKS: The Bride (1985). Screwtop, bound with The Girl Who Was Plugged In by James Tiptree, Jr. (1989). Star Wars: The Crystal Star (1994).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Garnett, R., ed., Science Fiction Roots and Branches (1990). Staicar, T., ed., Critical Encounters II (1982). Wolmark, J., Aliens and Others: Science Fiction, Feminism, and Postmodernism (1994). Reference works: CANR (1991). Magill’s Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature (1996). Reader’s Guide to Twentieth-Century Science Fiction (1989). St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers (1996). Survey of Science Fiction Literature (1979). Other references: ELF: Eclectic Literary Forum (1997). Extrapolation (Summer 1988, Spring 1990). Fantasy Newsletter (Dec. 1982). Future Life (Sept. 1979). Galileo (Nov. 1979). IAFA Newsletter (Spring 1989). P*S*F*Q (Fall 1981). Science Fiction Chronicle (May 1993). Science-Fiction Studies (Mar. 1987). Seattle Times (3 Aug. 1984). Starship (Spring 1979, Winter 1983/ 84). Women’s Studies International Forum (1984). —FIONA KELLEGHAN
McKENNEY, Ruth Born 18 November 1911, Mishawaka, Indiana; died 25 July 1972, New York, New York Daughter of John S. and Marguerite Flynn McKenney; married Richard Bransten, 1937; children: three Ruth McKenney was raised in Indiana and Ohio, where she began working in a print shop at age fourteen. After attending Ohio State University, she wrote for the Akron Beacon Journal and the New York Post. She married and raised three children (she adopted the son of her sister Eileen and the novelist Nathanael West after their deaths in an automobile accident). McKenney wrote short semiautobiographical stories for the New Yorker, Publishers Weekly, and other popular magazines, and worked as an editor of New Masses. She and her husband, Richard Bransten, were ousted from the Communist Party in 1946 for deviating from party doctrine. Exaggerated and amusing, McKenney’s best-known work, My Sister Eileen (1938), was compiled from short stories originally appearing in the New Yorker; it was followed by stage, movie, and musical versions. McKenney published other accounts of her unusual family in All about Eileen (1937), The McKenneys Carry On (1937), The Loud Red Patrick (1947), Love Story (1950), and Far, Far from Home (1954), sometimes overlapping stories from one volume to the next. These accounts of her youth have lost much of the charm that was their primary attraction; the sisters’ adventures (far more concerned with Ruth than with Eileen) are described from childhood to adulthood in humorous but extravagant, unconnected anecdotes. The nonfictional Industrial Valley (1939) is the cornerstone of McKenney’s socialist writings, which also include Browder and Ford: For Peace, Jobs, Socialism (1940), the unsuccessful novel Jake Home (1943), and her articles and column, ‘‘Strictly Personal,’’ for New Masses. Written in journal form, Industrial Valley details the struggle between 1932 and 1936 of the Akron rubber workers to unionize. The details of the Depression, both personal and industrial, are related as though by an omniscient observer, revealing the manipulations and deceptions of the powerful. The stark facts recorded in Industrial Valley are more arresting than the fictional portrait of a developing union leader in Jake Home. Neither his personality nor his motivations are sufficiently engaging to make the novel convincing. McKenney’s final two works move away from previously developed patterns. Here’s England: A Highly Informal Guide (1950), coauthored with Bransten, is a pleasant, well-informed guide to Britain’s historical and tourist attractions. Mirage (1956) chronicles the adventures of Remi Sainte-Victor, a Lyon chemist, through his imprisonment in the French Revolution, his release through the intercession of Josephine Bonaparte, and the campaign in Egypt with Napoleon. The novel fails to draw the social, personal, and military elements together to focus on either the bourgeois hero or his Corsican emperor. Although My Sister Eileen is still remembered (chiefly for its filmed version), Industrial Valley, McKenney ’s most significant
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work, better displays her ability to humanize a great drama by the presentations of precise and realistic details. The perspective she achieves in the nonautobiographical view of the Midwest is valuable for its clarity and compassion. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1973). TCA, TCAS. —KATHLEEN G. KLEIN
McLEAN, Kathryn Anderson Born 10 March 1909, San Francisco, California; died 15 May 1966, San Francisco, California Wrote under: Kathryn Forbes Daughter of Leon Ellis and Della Jesser Anderson; married Robert Edward McLean, 1926 (divorced 1946) Kathryn Anderson McLean was the scion of 19th-century California pioneers. Her voluntary publicity work for clubs grew into a professional writing career; she published her first story in 1938. McLean stopped publishing in the late 1940s, perhaps weakened by the chronic emphysema that caused her death. In 1946, she divorced her husband, on grounds of extreme mental cruelty. The American public first met Mama, McLean’s most famous character (based on her grandmother), in Readers’ Digest in 1941. In ‘‘Mama and Her Bank Account,’’ Mama supervises the careful division of Papa’s paycheck, and she and the children work part-time to prevent any withdrawal from the mythical savings account Mama invented to give the children a sense of security. Mama’s Bank Account (1943) is a collection of sketches depicting Mama raising her family in early-20th-century San Francisco, told from the point of view of Katrin, the eldest daughter, who aspires to a writing career. The book centers on Mama’s relationships with her carpenter husband and five children, her patriarchal Uncle Chris, maiden Aunt Elna, and four sisters. This is an extended family that works, chiefly because of Mama’s talents for understanding and mediation. McLean etches the character of each family member clearly and well; they perform consistently in the stories, which are pervaded by an atmosphere of optimism and humor. In traumatic times of strikes and illness, Mama’s common sense and ability to make things right prevail. Several stories highlight the difficulties of Americanization, but Mama’s wisdom transcends cultural and class boundaries, as she helps overcome the anti-immigrant prejudice her daughters face at school. Her warmth and wisdom loom large, approximating closely the traditional American maternal ideal. Critics and public alike applauded Mama’s Bank Account, and it became a bestseller. Its emphasis on togetherness held special appeal during World War II, and it was reinterpreted in
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several media. Playwright John Van Druten noted the dramatic possibilities of Mama’s Bank Account, and wrote and directed a two-act play based upon it. I Remember Mama opened on Broadway in 1944 and ran for 714 performances until 1946. Despite its sentimentality, the play won both general critical approval and the hearts of audiences. Critical charges of sentimentality increased after the film version (produced and directed by George Stevens, with an all-star cast headed by Irene Dunne) opened in 1948, but audiences continued to appreciate I Remember Mama and its celebration of old-fashioned domesticity. Mama’s proven popularity and the episodic, open-ended nature of her story seemed ideal material for television; the series was an instant success and ran from July 1949 through March 1957. Unfortunately, Mama’s creator did not share her character’s long popularity. McLean largely left the work of developing Mama to other writers, publishing only two additional stories about her: ‘‘Mama and Dagmar’’ (1944) and ‘‘Mama and the Christmas Tradition’’ (1945). McLean continued to write short stories in a variety of settings but with a consistent emphasis on family values and concern for others. McLean’s second book, Transfer Point (1947), returns to Mama’s San Francisco, but the family in focus is far from idyllic. Ten-year-old Allie Barton, the protagonist, is a daughter of divorce, her parents torn apart by guilt over the tragic deaths of two older sons. Allie, a bright, independent child, loves both her parents, and tries desperately to find continuity, friendship, and a sense of her own identity that will include the different self she is with each parent. The roomers in Allie’s mother’s boardinghouse provoke more serious problems than Mama ever faced: suspected child molesting, fraud, and murder. McLean presents Allie’s situation and point of view with great understanding, but the episodic structure of the novel weakens its force. The novel received mixed reviews; hostile critics and readers perhaps expected only domestic bliss from McLean’s pen. The serialized version in Good Housekeeping was the last of McLean’s published fiction. McLean will be remembered for Mama, which showed her apt characterization and her ability to tap the lode of a memory broader than her own. McLean’s embodiment of the maternal ideal hovered on the edge of sentimentality, but she never totally lost her balance. Although the televised version of Mama may have provided historical background for the feminine mystique of the 1950s, McLean’s novel Transfer Point presented a child growing to a well-adjusted maturity under far different domestic arrangements. McLean was rejected by the reading public when she removed the rose-colored lens she had earlier used in viewing the past, but she deserves to be remembered for capturing the drama and humor inherent in various forms of family life. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: American Novelists of Today. CB. Other references: Commonweal (16 April 1943). NYT (12 March 1948). NYTBR (28 March 1943, 9 Nov. 1947). NYTMag
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(14 Oct. 1945). SatR (16 Dec. 1944, 24 Jan. 1948, 13 Oct. 1951). Theatre Arts (Dec. 1944). —HELEN M. BANNAN
McMILLAN, Terry Born 18 October 1951, Port Huron, Michigan Daughter of Edward and Madeline Washington McMillan; married Jonathan Plummer, 1998; children: Solomon The oldest daughter of five children born into a middle class working family, McMillan spent her childhood in Port Huron. Her father was often forced to be away from the family because he suffered from tuberculosis and needed sanitorium care. When McMillan was thirteen, her parents divorced, and three years later her father died. During McMillan’s childhood, her mother, who never finished high school, provided for her family by working in jobs as diverse as auto worker, domestic, and pickle factory employee. In a 1992 interview, McMillan said her mother was ‘‘one of the strongest women I’ve ever met in my life’’ who ‘‘taught us to test ourselves in every way.’’ McMillan left Michigan at seventeen to attend Los Angeles City College, but soon transferred to the University of California at Berkeley (B.S. 1979), attending classes at night while working as a typist. It was during this time that she began to write, initially for Black Thoughts, an African American campus newspaper. Her foray into creative writing was inadvertent: a roommate’s friend discovered a poem McMillan had written about a heartbreaking romance and published it in the literary magazine of which he was editor. McMillan’s intrigue with the idea of being a published writer was fueled by a workshop with Ishmael Reed, ‘‘a very encouraging and nurturing teacher’’ who she says gave her ‘‘the courage to write.’’ Following his injunction not to distract herself by pursuing an advanced degree in writing, McMillan left for New York City after graduation to enter a master’s degree program in film at Columbia University. In New York she joined the Harlem Writers’ Guild where members encouraged her to extend the short story she read them into what became her first novel, Mama (1987, reissued 1994). McMillan undertook her own publicity tour, sending out over 3,000 letters to independent bookstores, bookstore chains, and universities, inviting them to purchase her book and offering to give readings. Much to the surprise of her publishers, her strategy worked—her novel sold out its first hardcover printing of 5,000 copies. Of her own writing, McMillan has said, ‘‘All I’ve ever wanted was to tell a story in the best way I possibly could, with the hopes that other people would share and identify with my characters and find the same kind of gratification or redemption from the reading that I found in the writing.’’ Her central figures are all African American; they are poor single mothers, enterprising and
gifted young girls passing into womanhood, or middle class single women coming to terms with themselves as adults, as well as with relationships with parents, lovers, and husbands who are sometimes extremely trying, humiliating, and unempowering. In addition, McMillan’s narratives are often peopled with young children who are being influenced, alienated, and decidedly shaped by their home life, and their family’s encounter with American culture. Portraying strong African American characters with honesty, insight, and love, McMillan details the intense emotional and psychological bonds her characters are trying to unearth or flee, as well as the vital bonds of friendship and love they are trying to sustain. In Mama, a semiautobiographical novel, McMillan explores the tensions and frustrations experienced by a poor African American family in the 1960s and 1970s. The protagonist, Mildred Peacock, is an indefatigable, imaginative woman and mother of five who reacts with untempered rage and ingenuity to the variety of demands made of her whether from bill collectors, the U-Haul company from whom she has stolen a truck to move her family cross-country, or her alcoholic husband. Disappearing Acts (1989, reprinted 1993) is a tense, explosive love story set in Brooklyn in the early 1980s. McMillan’s real-life lover sued her, claiming the male character was a libelous version of him and the story about their relationship (he didn’t win the case). The book proceeds as two first-person narratives, those of Zora and Franklin. Zora is McMillan’s deliberate attempt to honor the voice and spirited writing of Zora Neale Hurston. In creating the voice of Franklin, McMillan wanted to portray a good man, yet one filled with ‘‘a lot of anger.’’ The novel received favorable reviews and sold more than 100,000 copies in paperback. Waiting to Exhale (1992, reprinted 1995) charts the friendships between four women in Arizona, it offers their explicit, funny, indulgent analyses of social politics, and their frustration with aspects of their personal lives and choices. As with her earlier novels, Waiting to Exhale has been criticized for coarse language—something McMillan describes as simply realistic rendering. Defending the placement of men at the novel’s periphery, she has explained that this was a book about women, to be told from women’s points of view, with women at its center. Additionally, McMillan wrote the screenplay of Waiting to Exhale in 1994, which became a successful film starring some of Hollywood’s most prominent actors, and this movie, along with the book and music CD, triumphed as a demographic-defining social phenomenon. McMillan’s next fictional foray, How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1997, reissued 1999), was another bestseller. The novel was again semiautobiographical, mirroring her own experiences in meeting and falling in love with a much younger man. In the book and real life, both Stella and McMillan got their men, with McMillan marrying her prince charming in 1998. Stella, like Waiting to Exhale, was made into a popular motion picture, proving another box office success for McMillan. In addition to her fictional works, McMillan has published a critical analysis of the films of Spike Lee, edited a collection of
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contemporary African American fiction, and written about her own experiences in promoting her first novel. A visiting writer at the University of Wyoming in 1987-88, she received a literary fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1988, and then went on to a tenured position at the University of Arizona-Tucson. She is also a vocal member of PEN and member of the Author’s League. Despite having achieved a dynamic literary profile, this feisty and unapologetic writer remains frustrated by what she calls the lack of respect from other prominent African American women writers. Some critics have labeled McMillan a pulp writer; others celebrate the ways in which her works attend to and affirm contemporary African American women and the worlds in which they live. Liesl Schillinger discussed McMillan’s ability to portray inspiring, empowered, successful female characters in the Washington Post Book World: ‘‘Terry McMillan is the only novelist I have ever read, apart from writers of children’s books, who makes me glad to be a woman. . . . [Maybe] fiction at last is about to understand that women are ready to read about themselves not only as schemers or sufferers, but as the adventurous heroes of their own lives.’’
OTHER WORKS: Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary Black American Fiction (1990). Five for Five: The Films of Spike Lee (1991). The Writer as Publicist (1993).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Austin, D. J., and Simmons, M., eds., Streetlights: Illuminating Tales of the Urban Black Experience (1996). Doyle, T., Touching the Sun: Contemporary Afro-American Women Writers in the Ward M. Canaday Center, 26 February-29 May 1998 (1998). Kesner, L. B., ‘‘Women Friends Enabling Relationships in Emancipatory Novels by Contemporary Women Writers’’ (thesis, 1992). Kothari, G., ed., Did My Mama Like to Dance? and Other Stories About Mothers and Daughters (1994). Major, C., ed., Calling the Wind: Twentieth Century African-American Short Stories (1992). Norris, G., ed., The Seasons of Women: An Anthology (1996). Patrick, D., Terry McMillan: The Unauthorized Biography (1999). Pollard, D. P., ‘‘Terry McMillan: Literary Giant or Pop Icon? A Question of Literary Value’’ (thesis, 1995). Richards, P., Terry McMillan: A Critical Companion (1999). Smith, J. D., ‘‘The Rhetoric of Terry McMillan: African American Women’s Literature, Black Feminism, and Intercultural Communication’’ (thesis, 1997). Ward, K. L., From a Position of Strength: Black Women Writing in the Eighties (dissertation, 1993). Reference works: Black American Women Fiction Writers (1995). CA (1999). Contemporary Black American Fiction Writers (1995). CLC (1986, 1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). WW of Black Writers (1992). Other references: Callaloo (Summer 1988). Ebony (May 1993, Dec. 1996). Elle (October 1996). Esquire (August, 1995). Essence (Oct. 1992, June 1996). Newsmakers (1993). NYT (1 May 1992, 1 July 1992). New Yorker (April 1996). NYTBR (22 Feb. 1987, 6 Aug. 1989, 31 May 1992, Nov. 1993). NYTM (9 Aug. 1992). People (5 July 1999). Poets and Writers (Nov./Dec. 1992,
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interview). PW (23 Mar. 1992, 11 May 1992, 16 June 1992, 1 April 1996, 1997). Time (1996). TLS (6 Sept. 1991). WP (11 April 1991, 2-3 July 1992). WPBW (5 May 1996). —LOIS M. BROWN, UPDATED BY ALLISON A. JONES
McPHERSON, Aimee Semple Born 9 October 1890, Ingersoll, Ontario, Canada; died 27 September 1944, Oakland, California Daughter of James M. and Mildred Pearce Kennedy; married Robert Semple, 1908; Harold S. McPherson, 1912; David L. Hutton, 1931; children: one son, one daughter The only child of a Methodist farmer and a Salvation Army mother, Aimee Semple McPherson was dedicated to God’s work in the Salvation Army at age six weeks. At seventeen, she was converted to the Pentecostal mission by Robert Semple, whom she then married. Ordained as a preacher of the Full Gospel Assembly in 1909, McPherson conducted revivals in small towns in the U.S., and then went to China in 1910, where her husband Robert died. A daughter, Roberta, was born a month later. Returning to the U.S., McPherson worked in missions with her mother in New York City. A second marriage to Harold Stewart McPherson, a bookkeeper, produced a son. Wishing to resume her revival work full time, McPherson left McPherson, and with her mother and two children began her career as evangelist in 1915. In a Pentecostal mission in Ontario, McPherson conducted tent meetings characterized by faith healing, crisis conversions, speaking in tongues, premillennialism, and literal interpretation of the Bible. In 1916 McPherson began her itinerant career, holding tent revivals from Maine to Florida, accompanied by her astute, business-minded widowed mother. They drove to Los Angeles in their ‘‘Gospel Car’’ in 1918, and founded the Angelus Temple in 1923. The funds were raised by her devout lower-middle-class followers, for whom McPherson formed a new sect, the Church of the Foursquare Gospel. From her temple, McPherson launched a wide variety of highly successful religious and social welfare programs. These included a monthly newsletter, Bridal Call, and a weekly, Bridal Call Four-Square; a church radio station; a commissary to distribute food and clothing to the poor; a telephone counseling service; prayer vigils; and a Bible College. By 1944, when McPherson died of an accidental overdose of barbiturates, membership in the 400 branches of her church was over 22,000, and her Bible College had graduated 3,000. Since then, the sect has continued to thrive, with 2,700 churches all over the world. McPherson wrote all her own sermons, many songs, most of Bridal Call, and two autobiographies besides preaching the scheduled 10 sermons a week and going on a number of cross-country tours. McPherson’s writings, though not deep, were based on a
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solid knowledge of the Bible and a sure understanding of her uneducated audience. The most famous of her cliché-ridden but inspired sermons is ‘‘The Rose of Sharon,’’ delivered in 1931. Dressed in her trademark clerical garb of white dress and blue satin cape, and cradling a bunch of red roses, McPherson compared the short life of the rose to that of humans. Then, tearing off a rose petal, she made her point: while the petal dies, the attar, if extracted, is a fragrance everlasting. Rose attar, like the blood of Jesus, is a symbol of eternal hope, preserving the soul when the body is sacrificed. McPherson’s autobiographies are more imaginative than factual, intended to glorify her early life and omitting baser details. Her first book, This Is That (1919), describes her conversion and mission in a sentimental but vivid style. The second, In the Service of the King (1927), probably ghostwritten, attempts to explain her version of her presumed kidnapping and disappearance in 1926. A few of her sermons were recorded, preserving her compelling voice and simplistic metaphors in such messages as ‘‘Three Little Pigs,’’ ‘‘From Milkpail to Pulpit,’’ and ‘‘The Scarlet Thread.’’ A genius at managing publicity, McPherson received almost daily press coverage throughout her career. A charismatic evangelist and a beautiful, youthful-looking woman to the end of her life, McPherson offered solace and material comfort to all. During the Depression, her commissary predated even President Roosevelt’s welfare programs. Her always optimistic sermons gave hope to the neglected working-class poor, people who craved some color and symbol of affection. As a symbol of fundamentalism in America, McPherson is said to have inspired Sinclair Lewis’s antievangelist novel, Elmer Gantry.
OTHER WORKS: The Holy Spirit (1931). Give Me My Own God (1936). The Story of My Life (1936, 1973). Fire from on High (1969). The Foursquare Gospel (1969). Lost and Restored: The Dispensation of the Holy Spirit from the Ascension of the Lord Jesus Christ to His Coming Dispensation (1976). Life Story of Aimee Semple McPherson (1979). The Personal Testimony of Aimee Semple McPherson (1984). Centennial Edition of Aimee Semple McPherson’s Original Writings: Lost and Restored Sermons and Her Personal Testimony (1990).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Aimee Semple McPherson’s Kidnapping (1965). Austin, A., Aimee Semple McPherson (1980). Blumhofer, E. W., Aimee Semple McPherson: Everybody’s Sister (1993). Cox, R. L., The Verdict Is In (1983). Dalton-Rheaume, F., Aimee Semple McPherson: The Forgotten Evangelist (thesis 1996). Epstein, D. M., Sister Aimee: The Life of Aimee Semple McPherson (1993). Goben, J. D., ‘‘Aimee’’—the Gospel Gold-Digger (1932). Grindstaff, R. A., The Institutionalization of Aimee Semple McPherson: A Study in the Rhetoric of Social Intervention (dissertation 1990). Hood, J. L., The New Old-Time Religion: Aimee Semple McPherson and the Original Electric Church (1981). Leighton, I., ed., The Aspirin Age (1949). Mavity, N. B., Sister
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Aimee (1931). McBride, S., ‘‘Inspirational Creativity in the Foursquare Church’’ (thesis 1996). Thomas, L., Storming Heaven: The Lives and Turmoils of Minnie Kennedy and Aimee Semple McPherson (1970). Thomas, L., The Vanishing Evangelist: The Aimee Semple McPherson Kidnapping Affair (1959). Reference works: Dictionary of Religious Biography (1977). NAW (1971). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Book World (March 1993). Christian History (1998). Journal of American History (1995). Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (June 1994). —BARBARA ADAMS
McPHERSON, Sandra Born 2 August 1943, San Jose, California Daughter of William J. and Frances G. McPherson; married Henry D. Carlile, 1966 (divorced 1985); Walter Pavlich, 1995; children: Phoebe Raised in California, Sandra McPherson attended Westmont College and San Jose State (B.A. 1965) and went on to graduate study under David Wagoner and Elizabeth Bishop at the University of Washington. McPherson shares Bishop’s unsentimental love of nature and precision in observing it, though what Bishop complimented in her former student’s work was its voice— ‘‘original, surprising, and clean.’’ McPherson’s evolving combination of colloquialism and what poet Gary Snyder terms ‘‘linguistic accuracy’’ of natural speech rhythms and poetic forms, as well as her gift for the unexpected and tonally complex metaphor, have continued to win praise for her poetic voice. McPherson has received numerous grants, including three from the National Endowment for the Arts (1974, 1980, 1985) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1976); her poems have received prizes from Poetry, Poetry Northwest, and the Poetry Society of America. The Year of Our Birth (1978) was nominated for a National Book Award, and Streamers (1988) was nominated for two major regional awards, while Radiation (1973) won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Prize. In 1987, McPherson received the Award in Literature of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In addition to her several chapbooks and volumes of poetry, McPherson’s work is widely anthologized. McPherson has taught at the University of California at Davis since 1985, where she also served as the director of creative writing (1987-90). Previously, she taught at the University of California at Berkeley, the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa, and the Oregon Writers Workshop at Pacific Northwest College of Art. Her teaching has influenced both her writing process and subject, as ‘‘Sonnet for Joe’’ suggests: ‘‘I would
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rather you describe a clock than time.’’ But McPherson does not generally write dicta; more typical is her feminist reenvisioning of a student’s essay, ‘‘Sentience,’’ and her dreamlike meditation on a fellow teacher’s miscarriage, ‘‘A Coconut for Katerina.’’ Though she continues ‘‘to learn from’’ her ‘‘students’ work,’’ in her later books her interest shifts to her own teachers and role models. Relationship, the flux of intimacy and isolation, is a central theme of McPherson’s work, though the poems always locate their lovers, mothers and daughters, and women friends in a figurative and literal natural world. Her poems are also concerned with the art of writing and vision itself; she describes writing as a way to ‘‘think, learn, make discoveries.’’ McPherson’s early work has been compared to Sylvia Plath’s and her later work to Marianne Moore’s, but her vision and voice have always embodied aspects of both, in the use of slant rhyme, in rhythm, image, and tone, and in the impulse to revise myths of female identity. Though her later poems are less private and slightly more abstract, all her work exhibits a tension between objective and subjective views, between description and symbol, between seeing wildflowers, seaweed, or jellyfish as uniquely themselves, or as other, and finding in them objective correlatives for the poet’s emotions. Edge Effect: Trails and Portrayals (1996) is a prime example of this tension. The collection has been called McPherson’s most original work yet. It examines the place where two entities—such as land and sea—meet, and describes the uniqueness of this ‘‘edge effect.’’ Another portion of the work addresses folk art forms such as quilt making, similar to her 1993 publication The God of Indeterminacy. The year 1996 also brought the McPherson’s well-received The Spaces Between Birds: Mother/Daughter Poems, 1967-1995. The poems chronicle and describe the relationship between McPherson and her daughter Phoebe, born with Asperger’s Syndrome (a form of autism). Phoebe’s unique poetry is woven through the work, offering an insightful perspective on her mother’s poetry.
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1985). Floralia (chapbook, 1985). At the Grave of Hazel Hall (1988). Designating Duet (1989). Beauty in Use (1997).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Turner, Alberta T., ‘‘A Coconut for Katerina,’’ in Fifty Contemporary Poets: The Creative Process (1977). Reference Works: CA (1978, Online 1999). CANR (1984). CP (1985, 1991). DLBY (1986). Other references; APR (May/June 1978, July/Aug. 1978, Sept./Oct. 1981, May/June 1989, May/June 1991, July/Aug. 1991). College English (Oct. 1980). LJ (15 Feb. 1978). NR (9 Dec. 1978). NYTBR (17 Nov. 1974). Northwest Review (1982). Poetry (Aug. 1971, May 1975, April 1989). Web sites: ‘‘Sandra McPherson,’’ available online at: dartmouth.edu/acad-inst/upne/mcpherson, Wesleyan University Press (2 July 1999). Sherwin, E., ‘‘McPherson Kicks Off Writing Series with Poetry Reading,’’ available online at: dcn.davis.ca.us (30 June 1996). —DANA SONNENSCHEIN, UPDATED BY CARRIE SNYDER
MEAD, Kate C. See HURD-MEAD, Kate C.
MEAD, Margaret Born 16 December 1901, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; died 15 November 1978, New York, New York Daughter of Edward S. and Emily Fogg Mead; married Luther Cressman, 1923; Reo Fortune, 1928; Gregory Bateson, 1935; children: one daughter
Of late, McPherson has been featured in the Bill Moyers’ PBS special The Language of Life (1995). She continues to teach both in an academic setting at UC Davis and by lecturing at special student events. In addition, she has contributed to A Field Guide to Contemporary Poetry and Poetics (1997), hailed as an exceedingly helpful resource for aspiring poets. McPherson’s careful eye, her quirky sense of humor, her hope, and her delicate modulations of idea through image make reading her poems a way for the reader, too, to think, learn, and make discoveries—about the natural world and human nature.
Margaret Mead, the eldest of five children, was born in Philadelphia. Her father, Edward Sherwood Mead, was a professor at the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce. Mead respected his loyalty to his work, capacity to listen, and powers of concentration, and from him learned that the most valuable thing one could do was to add to the store of known facts. Mead’s mother, Emily Fogg Mead, was a gentle and delicate woman with a determined nature and a professional concern for other people and the state of the world. The most decisive influence in Mead’s life was her parental grandmother, a strong and determined woman who lived with the family.
OTHER WORKS: Elegies for the Hot Season (1970, reprinted 1982). Sensing (chapbook, 1979). Journey from Essex: Poems for John Clare (editor, 1981). Patron Happiness (1983). Pheasant Flower (chapbook, 1985). Responsibility for Blue (chapbook,
Mead’s grandmother informally educated her at home until Mead went to Doylestown High School and New Hope School for Girls in Pennsylvania. After a disappointing year at DePauw University, Mead transferred to Barnard College, where she
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studied anthropology under Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict and received her B.A. in 1923. Upon graduation from Barnard, she married Luther Cressman. As a graduate student at Columbia, where she earned her Ph.D. in 1929, Mead began her first fieldwork in Samoa in 1925. While traveling home from Samoa, Mead met her second husband, Reo Fortune, a New Zealand psychologist and anthropologist. Upon returning to New York, Mead was appointed curator of ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History, an appointment which grew into a lifelong position. Later, while doing fieldwork in New Guinea, she met her third husband, Gregory Bateson, a British anthropologist by whom she had one daughter. Mead held almost 40 positions, including professor of anthropology at Columbia University. She was the recipient of many honorary degrees and some 35 awards. Mead was president of the World Federation for Mental Health (1956-57) and the American Anthropological Association (1960). Mead’s long and productive career as an author-anthropologist blossomed with the publication of her first and most popular book, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928). It has since been translated into several languages and has reappeared in many editions. The book is based on Mead’s first fieldwork, undertaken at the age of twenty-three, in which she set out to discover whether the problems troubling American adolescents are due to the biological nature of adolescence or to culturally learned attitudes. Her study of the individual within a culture was unique. Mead vividly describes the basic character of Samoan life and how attitudes and behavior are shaped from birth to maturity. The results of her nine months of work showed how much of individual behavior is culturally learned. Stripped of the technical jargon of anthropology, Mead’s clear presentations of life in Samoa and her answers to a fascinating anthropological question have reached a wide and enthusiastic audience. Growing Up in New Guinea (1930), based on Mead’s second field trip, is about the Manus people of Peri village in the Admiralty Islands. Mead’s focus is on family life and the education of young children. Important themes in the education of Manus children are the teaching of physical adaptation to a precarious environment, the instilling of a respect for property, and a combination of firm discipline and gentle solicitude. Children grow up without any feelings of inferiority or insecurity. Throughout the book, Mead draws interesting parallels with modern life. Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), which has been translated into more than a dozen languages, was the outcome of fieldwork in three villages in New Guinea. When going into the field in 1931, Mead’s original intentions were to study the cultural conditioning of the personalities of the two sexes. After working for two years in three different villages, she discovered her findings revealed more about differences in human temperament than about gender. Among the Mountain Arapesh, both men and women are gentle and maternal; among the Mundugumor, both sexes are fierce and virile; and among the Tchambuli, the roles of men and women are reversed from our
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traditional roles. Thus gender is only one of the ways in which a society can group its social attitude toward temperament. Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis (1942), written with Bateson, was the outcome of rich and extensive fieldwork done from1936 to 1938. It represents a major leap in the use of photography as a method of ethnographic presentation, stemming from the authors’ sensitivity to the inadequacy of verbal presentation in portraying the finer shades of cultural meaning. From a total of 25,000 photographs, over 700 were selected and grouped so that details from different scenes are thematically related and explained by captions. This type of presentation was followed nine years later by Growth and Culture: A Photographic Study of Balinese Childhood (1951), written with Frances Cooke MacGregor. In 1949 Mead wrote Male and Female: A Study of the Sexes in a Changing World. It is based on 14 years of fieldwork in seven different societies, and was written at a time when traditional roles of male and female were undergoing scrutiny in our society. Mead discusses ways in which physical similarities and differences are the basis on which we learn about our own sex and our relationship to the other sex. Mead includes a discussion of how societies develop myths to answer the questions about differences between men and women, and about how children grow up to be a member of one or the other group. In the final section, Mead brings her knowledge back to America and discusses ways in which we can make improvements in our society. Mead returned to the Manus 25 years after her original journey. The cultural changes that occurred during World War II when the Manus was overrun by Americans are recorded in New Lives for Old: Cultural Transformation—Manus, 1928-1953 (1956). This study of culture contact is based on Mead’s belief that Americans have something to contribute to a changing world. Since Mead investigates mainly the more superficial changes in Manus, the book is anthropologically less satisfying than her others but is otherwise a remarkable account of the rapid leaps one society made from ‘‘stone age’’ to ‘‘civilization.’’ Mead’s restudy of the Manus is also the subject of two of her films, New Lives for Old (1960) and Margaret Mead’s New Guinea Journal (1968). An Anthropologist at Work: Writings of Ruth Benedict (1959) is a biography of Mead’s teacher, colleague, and lifelong friend. Mead interweaves her own introductory chapters on various stages of Benedict’s life and career with selections from Benedict’s work, diaries, unpublished poems, and personal letters to Edward Sapir, Franz Boas, and Mead. The reader gains a deep appreciation of Benedict, a sensitive and emotionally complex woman whose great contribution to anthropology was her theory of culture as a ‘‘personality writ large.’’ Mead wrote a second book entitled Ruth Benedict: A Biography (1974), which is less massive than the first and written mainly for students. Culture and Commitment: A Study of the Generation Gap, written in 1970 and revised extensively in 1978, is written in the belief that if we know and understand enough, our knowledge will
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breed optimistic and constructive thinking. Mead feels we are experiencing an irreversible evolutionary change brought about by modern technology, population explosion, and destruction of the natural environment, and that it is a change of which, for the first time in human history, we have a full awareness. Mead proposes three categories of generational interaction based on past, present, and future orientations. Our culture is a future-oriented one, in which there has been a reverse in the relationship between the generations. Now the young members set the goals for the older to follow. Mead’s autobiography, Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years (1972), is perhaps her most interesting book, providing the reader with some insight into the person behind the prolific and influential personality. In the first and third sections, Mead writes about her family life, first from her early point of view as a granddaughter and then from her later view as a grandmother. The middle section is devoted to her field experiences. Letters from the Field, 1925-1975 (1977), a collection of letters to family and friends from Mead’s various expeditions, is another work that provides insight into the determined, fearless, and energetic person who became the world’s most popular anthropologist. Mead’s contributions as an anthropologist have been unparalleled. She taught us about the behavior of other human beings— human beings like ourselves in everything but their culture—and in so doing gave us a better understanding of ourselves within a broad perspective. Mead applied the results of her studies in primitive cultures to the questions of the day in our rapidly changing world. With the insight and knowledge she gained as a granddaughter and a grandmother, she was able to span the gaps between the generations to which she spoke. As a person who watched children from isolated primitive societies grow up into a modern world, Mead gained and shared a knowledge of cultural change and continuity. She was a person who made her home the entire world and communicated what she learned in such a felicitous, direct, and vivid style that people everywhere have benefitted from her insights.
OTHER WORKS: An Inquiry into the Question of Cultural Stability in Polynesia (1928). Social Organization of Manu’a (1930). The Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe (1932). Kinship in the Admiralty Islands (1934). The Mountain Arapesh (Vol. 1, An Importing Culture, 1938; Vol. 2, Supernaturalism, 1940; Vol. 3, Socio-Economic Life, 1947; Vol. 4, Diary of Events in Alitoa, 1947; Vol. 5, The Record of Unabelin with Rorschach Analysis, 1949). From the South Seas: Studies in Adolescence and Sex in Primitive Societies (1939). And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America (1942). The School in American Culture (1951). Soviet Attitudes Toward Authority (1951). Cultural Patterns and Technical Change: A Manual Prepared by the World Federation for Mental Health (edited by Mead, 1953). Themes in French Culture: A Preface to a Study of French Community (with R. Metraux, 1954). People and Places (1959). Anthropology, a Human Science: Selected Papers 1939-1960
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(1964). Continuities in Cultural Evolution (1964). Anthropologists and What They Do (1965). Family (with K. Heyman, 1965). The Wagon and the Star: A Study of American Community Initiative (with M. Brown, 1966). The Small Conference: An Innovation in Communication (with P. Byers, 1968). A Rap on Race (with J. Baldwin, 1971). Twentieth Century Faith: Hope and Survival (1972). World Enough: Rethinking the Future (with K. Heyman, 1975). Aspects of the Present (with R. Metraux, 1980).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bateson, M. C., With a Daughter’s Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson (1984). Gordan, J., ed., Margaret Mead: The Complete Bibliography 1925-1975 (1976). Holmes, L. D., Quest for the Real Samoa: The Mead/ Freeman Controversy and Beyond (1987). Howard, J., Maragert Mead: A Life (1984). Moss, A., Shaping a New World: Margaret Mead (1963). Rossi, A. S., The Feminist Papers from Adams to de Beauvoir (1973). Reference works: American Women of Science (1955). Britannica Yearbook of Science and the Future (1971). Famous American Women (1970). More Heroes of Civilization (1969). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCA, TCAS. Other references: Louisiana Academy of Sciences Proceedings (1968). New York magazine (13 Aug. 1973). NY (1961). NYTM (26 Apr. 1970). SR (1977). Science (1974). Science Year: The World Book Science Annual (1968). —MIRIAM KAHN
MEANEY, Mary L. Born circa 1840; death date unknown Most of Mary L. Meaney’s works are thinly disguised religious tracts written to inspire loyalty to the faith among young Catholic readers. Grace Morton; or, The Inheritance (1864) is one of Meaney’s more successful treatments of the conflict between apostasy and constancy. Grace Morton and her brother are adopted by Gerald Althorpe after he disowns his son for marrying a Catholic. Grace befriends the disinherited family and converts to Catholicism, although it means breaking her engagement with Powhattan Clifton and being disowned by Althorpe. When Althorpe dies intestate, his son’s family gets their fortune and Grace’s loyalty is rewarded by a reunion with Powhattan, who accepts her religion. In its attempt to demonstrate that virtue is rewarded, the novel is flawed by a melodramatic plot and weak character development. Meaney’s best work, The Confessors of Connaught; or, The Tenants of a Lord Bishop (1865), is based on the Partry evictions that took place in Ireland from November 21st to the 23rd, 1860,
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on the estate of Lord Plunket, a Protestant Bishop. Catholic tenants were evicted for not sending their children to Bishop Plunket’s school. In The Confessors, the Protestant curate Reverend Gillman refuses to proselytize and instead works cooperatively with Father Dillon, the parish priest. His wife is Meaney’s best character. A foil for the Bishop’s daughter, Mrs. Gillman is shrewder and stronger than her husband, and unafraid to confront the Bishop over his eviction plan. Gillman proves too charitable for the Bishop’s plan and is replaced by Reverend Robinson and new teachers who contrive to make themselves popular with their pupils; however, the school fails. When the tenants remain steadfast, the Bishop calls in the military to evict them. Word of the eviction spreads and becomes the subject of a debate in Parliament. Even the London Times is moved to protest. Contributions, including money raised by Reverend Gillman, help Father Dillon resettle his parishioners. The Confessors succeeds for several reasons. The historical facts of the Partry evictions help structure the plot; Meaney’s theme, the triumph of real Christianity over sectarian bigotry, is broader than her narrower Catholicism; Mrs. Gillman is a more developed character than sentimental protagonists like Grace Morton and Elinor Johnston; and finally, the tone of this book is less moralistic and more humane than the tone of Meaney’s other works. Unfortunately, Meaney’s later books did not reach the standard of The Confessors, and her books are of interest only as examples of pious Catholic literature of the late 19th century. —MAUREEN MURPHY
MEANS, Florence Crannell Born 15 May 1891, Baldwinsville, New York; died 19 November 1980, Boulder, Colorado Daughter of Phillip Wendell and Fannie Grout Crannell; married Carleton Bell Means, 1912; children Eleanor Hull Florence Crannell Means’ upbringing in the household of her Baptist theologian father, a man with ‘‘no racial consciousness,’’ contributed to her ambition to sway young people to her own conviction that ‘‘folks are folks.’’ From her mother’s side of the family Means had heard the tales of the pioneering Grout grandparents, and this provided another subject for her pen. Means’ first books recount the adventures of a Mexican-American teenager in Wisconsin and Minnesota during the 1870s. The second, A Candle in the Mist (1931), established Means as a writer of considerable talent. Although Means’ work focused often on the problems of racial prejudice, she wrote books on religious tolerance, family relations, the handicapped, and migrant workers. Means’ writing was encouraged by her husband, an attorney and businessman with whom she wrote The Silver Fleece (1950), one of many books dealing with Mexico. Their only child, Eleanor Hull, also writes.
Means lived for many years, in Boulder, Colorado. Failing eyesight curtailed both her traveling and writing after her last book, Smith Valley, was published in 1973. A book that focused much attention on Means and won the Childhood Education Association award in 1945 is The MovedOuters, her tale of a Japanese-American family evacuated from California during World War II. Earlier, Means had dealt sensitively with the problems of assimilation for Japanese in America in Rainbow Bridge (1934), and she brought the same understanding to the patient suffering of the fictional Ohara family. Teresita of the Valley (1943) and The House under the Hill (1949) have Mexican-American heroines who in maturing come to value their culture and people, a frequent development with Means’ characters. In her books with black heroines, Means stressed their successes. Although struggles and heartbreaking insults are there, her characters overcome them. Beginning with Shuttered Windows (1938), Means gave her readers a number of ambitious, intelligent black girls whose ‘‘similarity to any witty white girl should do more to promote understanding between the two races than any amount of sermonizing,’’ as Jane Cobb put it in her Atlantic review of Great Day in the Morning (1946). Among Means’ best books are those which deal with Native Americans. For years, Means ‘‘spent as much time as possible among the Hopi and Navajo’’ and her stories differentiate tribal customs in accurate detail. They are beautifully written, though they have been criticized as perhaps ‘‘too unhappy to sustain the interest of the young.’’ In Tangled Waters (1936), a Navajo girl fights her family’s prejudice against education. Our Cup Is Broken (1969), one of Means’ last major books, is less upbeat than many of her stories. A young Hopi woman, hurt by society’s taboo against interracial marriage, rejects the white world and returns to an unhappy life in her native village. Means’ books have been called alternately ‘‘too tragic’’ and ‘‘too pat.’’ Her novels occasionally seem contrived in their solutions, but more often conflicts between character and situation are resolved realistically. Long before racial tolerance was a popular or even generally accepted subject for juvenile literature, Means was writing straightforward books about minority groups. Means’ approach, however, is far from radical. Her minority characters are dedicated to American ideals.
OTHER WORKS: Rafael and Consuelo (with H. Fullen, 1929). Children of the Great Spirit (with F. Riggs, 1932). Ranch and Ring, a Story of the Pioneer West (1932). Dusky Day (1933). A Bowlful of Stars (1934). Penny for Luck (1935). The Singing Wood (1937). Adella Mary in Old New Mexico (1939). Across the Fruited Plain (1940). At the End of Nowhere (1940). Children of the Promise (1941). Whispering Girl (1941). Shadow over Wide Ruin (1942). Peter of the Mesa (1944). Assorted Sisters (1947). Hetty of the Grande Deluxe (1951). Carvers’ George (1952).
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Alicia (1953). The Rains Will Come (1954). Knock at the Door, Emmy (1956). Sagebrush Surgeon (1956). Reach for a Star (1957). Borrowed Brother (1958). Emmy and the Blue Door (1959). Sunlight on the Hopi Mesa: The Story of Abigail E. Johnson (1960). But I Am Sara (1961). That Girl Andy (1962). Tolliver (1963). It Takes All Kinds (1964). Us Maltbys (1966). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA. Junior Book of Authors. Other references: Atlantic (Dec. 1946). Best Sellers (15 Dec. 1963). Boston Transcript (28 Nov. 1931). Horn Book (March 1945, June 1946, June 1969). LJ (15 Nov. 1954). NY (8 Dec. 1945). NYT (9 Aug. 1953). NYTBR (2 Feb. 1964). SatR (13 Nov. 1954, 13 Sept. 1969). —CELIA CATLETT ANDERSON
MEIGS, Cornelia (Lynde) Born 6 December 1884, Rock Island, Illinois; died 10 September 1973, Hartford County, Maryland Also wrote under: Adair Aldon Daughter of Montgomery and Grace Lynde Meigs The strong sense of family tradition that pervades much of Cornelia Lynde Meigs’ writing for young people comes naturally from her own appreciation of kinship and its values. A descendant of Commodore John Rogers of Revolutionary fame, Meigs grew up in a close-knit family on the Mississippi, where her father was a government engineer. Graduating from Bryn Mawr College in 1907, Meigs taught in Davenport, Iowa (1912-13), where she began ‘‘to tell stories to the younger children. . .finding quickly just what sort they liked and what they would have none of.’’ Meigs’ first book of short stories, The Kingdom of the Winding Road (1915), resulted from this experience. Novels, two plays (The Steadfast Princess won the Drama League prize in 1915), and four pseudonymous adventure stories followed during the next two decades. From 1932 to 1950 Meigs taught English at Bryn Mawr. Meigs’ work as a literary scholar culminated in her editing and contributing to the landmark book A Critical History of Children’s Literature (1953; revised edition, 1969). Ann Pellowski refers to it as ‘‘a definitive survey of the literature,’’ and Frances Sayers says that Meigs’ section ‘‘The Roots of the Past’’ has the ‘‘storyteller’s narrative pace, the novelist’s eye for endearing detail, and the scholar’s control of historic perspective.’’ These talents are evident in most of the fiction, history, and biography that Meigs wrote. Her historical romances, beginning with Master Simon’ Garden (1916), are compelling narratives. This first novel is suitable for an adolescent audience and traces the vicissitudes and final triumph of puritan Master Simon’s family and garden (‘‘a symbol of tolerance and understanding’’
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according to Constantine Georgiou) through several generations. The sense of continuity of family ideals is strong, and the many characters are clearly individualized. Three successful shorter fictions followed the ‘‘olden days’’ adventures of eight-year-old heroines. The Willow Whistle (1931) has an exciting plot and convincing descriptions of daily living on the prairie. Wind in the Chimney (1934) recounts a young girl’s growing love for the Pennsylvania farmhouse where her widowed mother has brought the family from England. The Covered Bridge (1936) tells of young Constance’s stay on a Vermont farm in the winter of 1788. Vermont, where Meigs had a summer home for many years, is the setting for other books, notably Call of the Mountain (1940). This story of a young man’s determination to make a mountainside farm his true inheritance contains Meigs’ usual mixture of adventure, courage, and generous actions. Another book that deserves mention, although its story line is not so clear as that of Meigs’ best work, is Vanished Island (1941). Here, Meigs writes some marvelous chapters about steamboating on the Mississippi of her childhood. Two of her books on American history, The Violent Men: A Study of Human Relations in the First American Congress (1949) and The Great Design: Men and Events in the United States from 1945 to 1963 (1964), show comprehensive research though perhaps not enough winnowing of significant detail to make them as readable as her biographies. Invincible Louisa: The Story of the Author of Little Women (1933) won the Newbery Medal in 1934. ‘‘A thoroughly readable and satisfactory life,’’ Bertha Miller called this labor of scholarship and love. In her acceptance paper for the prize, Meigs stated that she read Alcott’s letters and journals ‘‘over and over again through my growing years’’ and in times of difficulty for ‘‘the stimulation of courage’’ they brought. Her biography carries this same ‘‘stimulation of courage,’’ as does her last major work, Jane Addams: Pioneer for Social Justice (1970), another excellent biography of a strong woman. Meigs’ young heroines, although brave and sensible, often play a comparatively passive role, but of the two real-life models that Meigs chose for her biographies, each, like Alcott, ‘‘gallantly went her own way and won her own triumph.’’ Meigs’ talents seem fully realized only in her biographies. However, her books, of whatever type, have, as Bertha Miller notes, ‘‘given expression to America’s best in thought, feeling and action.’’
OTHER WORKS: The Island of Appledore (1917). The Pirate of Jasper Peak (1918). The Pool of Stars (1919). At the Sign of the Heroes (1920). The Windy Hill (1921). Helga and the White Peacock (1922). The Hill of Adventure (1922). The New Moon: The Story of Dick Martin’s Courage, His Silver Sixpence, and His Friends in the New World (1924). Rain on the Roof (1925). As the Crow Flies (1927). The Trade Wind (1927). Clearing Weather
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(1928). The Wonderful Locomotive (1928). The Crooked Apple Tree (1929). Swift Rivers (1932). Young Americans: How History Looked to Them While It Was in the Making (1936). Railroad West (1937). The Scarlet Oak (1938). Mother Makes Christmas (1940). Mounted Messenger (1943). The Two Arrows (1949). The Dutch Colt (1952). Fair Wind to Virginia (1955). What Makes a College? A History of Bryn Mawr (1956). Wild Geese Flying (1957). Saint John’s Church, Havre de Grace, Md. 1809-1959 (1959). Mystery at the Red House (1961). Glimpses of Louisa: A Centennial Sampling of the Best Short Stories (edited by Meigs, 1968). Louisa M. Alcott and the American Family Story (1971).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Georgiou, C., Children and Their Literature (1969). Pellowski, A., The World of Children’s Literature (1968). Reference works: CA. Junior Book of Authors. Newbery Medal Books. Other references: Horn Book (Sept. 1944). LJ (July 1934). PW (30 June 1934, 25 April 1936).
MENKEN
Moving to New York, she associated with Walt Whitman and other Bohemians in Pfaff’s famous beerskellar. Menken contributed poems and letters to the New York Clipper, and in a series of short articles for the Sunday Mercury, defended Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe, perceptively prophesying their recognition ‘‘in the next century.’’ Menken wrote on the affinity of poetry and religion, on politics, and on women. In ‘‘Women of the World,’’ she spoke of the need to train women for ‘‘other missions than wife and mother.’’ During a California tour, Menken met Bret Harte, Joaquin Miller, Artemus Ward, Charles Warren Stoddard, and possibly Mark Twain. On her European tours she became the associate of Rossetti and other Pre-Raphaelites, had a rather strange affair with Swinburne (he wrote ‘‘Laus Veneris’’ for her), and courted Dickens assiduously. Dickens was kind, but kept Menken at a respectable distance. Menken’s greatest theatrical success was at Paris; there George Sand befriended her and she indulged in a scandalous affair with the aging Alexander Dumas. Menken died suddenly in Paris from complications of a chest ‘‘abscess.’’
—CELIA CATLETT ANDERSON
MELONEY, Franken See FRANKEN, Rose
MENKEN, Adah Isaacs Born Adah Bertha Theodore, 11 April 1835, Milneburg, Louisiana; died 10 August 1868, Paris, France Daughter of Auguste and Marie Theodore; married Alexander Isaac Menken, 1856; John Carmel Heenan, 1859; Robert Henry Newell, 1862; James Paul Barkley, 1866 Adah Isaacs Menken, feminist actress, poet, and essayist, astounded audiences of the 1860s with her near nudity and daring equestrian feats in a theatrical version of Byron’s Mazeppa. Although Menken’s perfect figure and unashamed sexuality were of primary appeal to audiences, the multiple talents of this creative and energetic woman should not be dismissed. She knew French, Spanish, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and was a competent sculptor and an expert horsewoman and marksman. A pioneer in vaudeville and burlesque, Menken made as much as $5,000 a week, much of it lavished on the poets, authors, and journalists who were her favorite companions. Four marriages and multiple dalliances made her notorious. A Hollywood star ahead of her time, she was among the first to employ modern publicity techniques, using photographs, fake biographies, and scandals to fill theater seats. ‘‘Notes of My Life’’ (New York Times, 6 Sept. 1868), for example, is pure fiction. From 1857 to 1859, Menken converted to Judaism, published poetry in the Cincinnati Israelite, and began her theatrical career.
Before she died, Menken gathered a number of poems into Infelicia (1868), dedicated to Dickens. His dictum, that ‘‘she is a sensitive poet who, unfortunately, cannot write,’’ is reductionist, but her mind was better than her poetry, which lacks consistent discipline. Whitman gave her courage to adopt the free verse form that suited her passionate and extravagant nature, and his chant and litany techniques are much in evidence. Swinburne’s often indecipherable sensuality was also congenial. Her talent for the occasional haunting image, often imbedded in a matrix of forgettable incoherence and private allusion, seems indisputable. Menken’s constant theme was ‘‘infelix.’’ She contrasted the gaudy trappings of her external life to her sensitive and intellectual inner nature, and posed as the suffering victim of man and fate in ‘‘My Heritage’’ and elsewhere. Death and sobs figure prominently but always voluptuously intertwined with sensual and throbbingly sexual images. If she took her form from Whitman, certainly her idol Poe gave the pattern for her content. Her affinity to the ‘‘fleshly school’’ of the Pre-Raphaelites and Swinburne is also apparent. Menken’s passion seems undifferentiated—religion, poetry, sex—all seem part of the same intense impulse. Betrayed in love, the persona in ‘‘Resurgam’’ ‘‘died with my fingers grasping the white throat of many a prayer.’’ But no one is aware of this death because ‘‘who can hear the slow drip of blood from a dead soul?’’ The feminist ‘‘Judith’’ is a militant prophet of the ‘‘advent of power’’ for women. She rejects utterly the hypocritical and ‘‘slimy’’ ways of the ‘‘enemy Philistines’’: ‘‘Stand back! I am no Magdalene waiting to kiss the hem of your garment.’’ She beheads Holofernes with gusto and obvious sensual enjoyment: ‘‘. . .the strong throat all hot and reeking with blood, that will thrill me with wild unspeakable joy as it courses down my bare body and dabbles my cold feet.’’ Despite the racy metaphor, the power desire of ‘‘Judith’’ seems primarily the drive toward intellectual
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and moral control. For Menken, ‘‘Genius is power,’’ and Infelicia is full of poems on intellectual and artistic ‘‘aspiration.’’ Menken was perceptive enough to be dissatisfied with the quality of her life and work. The last poem in Infelicia moans, ‘‘Where is the promise of my years; / Once written on my brow? / Ere errors, agonies and fears, / . . .Where sleeps that promise now?’’ Menken was bright and energetic, but with a streak of bad judgment and superficiality that cheapened the final results of her talent. In the ten brief years of her career, she managed to live ten lifetimes. Glamorous and intelligent, willful and kind, she did almost everything, but nothing supremely well.
OTHER WORKS: Adah Isaacs Menken’s diary is in Harvard College Library Theatre Collection.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Edwin, J., The Life and Times of Adah Isaacs Menken (1881?). Falk, B., The Naked Lady (1934; rev. ed., 1952). Lesser, A., Enchanting Rebel (1947). Lewis, P., Queen of the Plaza (1964). Newell, R. H., My Life with Adah Isaacs Menken (n.d.). Reference works: NAW. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States. —L. W. KOENGETER
MERINGTON, Marguerite Born circa 1860, Stoke Newington, England; died 19 May 1951, New York, New York Daughter of Richard Whiskin Crawford Merington Although born in England, Marguerite Merington spent most of her life in America after her father emigrated because of business interests. Merington was teaching Greek at the Normal College in New York City when she wrote her most famous work, Captain Lettarblair, for the prominent actor E. H. Sothern. The play was produced by Daniel Frohman at the Lyceum Theatre in 1891 and revived during the next two seasons. Captain Lettarblair Litton of the Irish Fusilliers has been scrimping to pay off a debt to clear the name of his wronged, deceased father. He hopes to marry Fanny Hadden. So strongly does she desire a proposal from him that she contrives to send him a large sum of money as though it came from his estate. However, in order to do so, she must press for payment of an old debt owed to her estate, not realizing that the debtor is Lettarblair himself. The captain is forced to sell all his possessions, including his mare, and to renounce hope of marrying Fanny. The check that
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Fanny sends him is stolen from the mail pouch by the villainous Merivale, a rival for Fanny’s hand, who leads her to believe that Lettarblair has squandered the money. By such complications is the flimsy plot sustained until the lovers are united in act 3. It is further buoyed up by moments of farcical business, such as the scene in which Lettarblair negotiates a sale through the window of his quarters while his valet tries to hold the door against the collection agent, or the scene in which Fanny is stranded in Lettarblair’s room with her skirt caught in the door and the knob fallen off out of reach. The popularity of Captain Lettarblair may be attributed to the performance of Sothern. To the modern reader, the play is belabored and contrived, but it won critical acclaim from the New York Times: ‘‘Miss Merington has a knack of devising pictures which is a valuable theatrical gift, and she writes dialogue with great facility. Some of the Hibernicisms of the hero are delightful.’’ In 1906, it was published in an elaborate book edition with numerous photographs from the production. Love Finds the Way (1898) was Merington’s last professionally produced play and the one Merington considered her best. Thereafter, Merington turned to writing mostly fairy-tale plays for young children and literary adaptations and historical dramas for high-school students. Merington’s sincere dedication to these audiences is evident in her article ‘‘The Theatre for Everybody’’ in The World’s Work (December 1910): ‘‘I regard the stage, rightly employed, as part of a broad general training. To language it is invaluable—and what trade is there, what calling, in which language is not a tool?. . . The theatre was part of the national life of the Greeks in their civilization’s heyday—and there are matters in which we have yet to outstrip the wisdom of the Greeks.’’ Although Merington’s children’s plays now seem dated, they were popular in their time. Snow White (1905), written for the dramatic department of the Hebrew Educational Alliance, drew hundreds of children to each Sunday matinee. In addition to Merington’s several collections of fairy-tale plays and plays for holidays, one collection of particular interest is her Picture Plays (1911). These are very short one-act plays based upon famous paintings: The Last Sitting (da Vinci’s ‘‘Mona Lisa’’), A Salon Carré Fantasy (Titian’s ‘‘Man with the Glove’’), His Mother’s Face (Watteau’s ‘‘Une Fête champêtre’’), and so forth. Scribner’s magazine published many of Merington’s sonnets, which, she later told an interviewer, one editor liked to call ‘‘Merington’s 57 Varieties of Love, Life, and Death.’’ Merington had met Elizabeth Bacon Custer, the widow of General George A. Custer, in 1894. They became close friends, and when Mrs. Custer died, Merington was her literary executor. Merington’s only major nondramatic work was an edition of the letters of General Custer and his wife, published in 1950. At the time of Merington’s death, she was working on a book of recollections of the pianist Paderewski. The success of Merington’s fifty-nine-year career as a writer may be attributed to the dedication and sincerity of purpose by which she labored at her craft.
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OTHER WORKS: Oh, Belinda (1892). Goodbye (1893). An Everyday Man (1895). Daphne; or, The Pipes of Arcadia (1896). Bonnie Prince Charlie (1897). Old Orchard (1900). The Gibson Play (1901). Cranford (1905). The Lady in the Adjoining Room (1905). Snow White (1905). The Turn of the Tide (1905). Scarlet of the Mounted (1906). The Vicar of Wakefield (1909). Holiday Plays (1910). The Elopers (1913). Festival Plays (1913). More Fairy-Tale Plays (1917). A Dish o’ Tea Delayed (1937). Booth Episodes (1944). The Custer Story: The Life and Intimate Letters of General George A. Custer and His Wife Elizabeth (1950). Ten undated plays in typewritten manuscripts are at the New York Public Library.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: NYT (23 Oct. 1891, 21 May 1951). NYTBR (12 Feb. 1950). Theatre Magazine 6 (Oct. 1906).
MERIWETHER
Susan B. Anthony on a speaking tour of New England. There she met Henry George and became a supporter of his ‘‘single tax’’ theory of economics. Meriwether’s first novel, The Master of Red Leaf, was published in 1872. It is basically a description of life on a southern plantation before the Civil War and a justification of secession. Her other works include novels, a play, and several works of popular history. Meriwether’s autobiography, Recollections of 92 Years, was published the year before her death. In many ways, Meriwether can be considered a ‘‘professional Confederate.’’ Not only do most of her works deal with the antebellum South, but unlike other postwar southern authors, Meriwether refused to acknowledge that slavery had been a moral or social evil. Meriwether’s fiction is replete with stereotyped black characters—happy, carefree, childlike, and unable to govern themselves without the discipline of slavery.
—FELICIA HARDISON LONDRÉ
MERIWETHER, Elizabeth Avery Born 19 January 1824, Bolivar, Tennessee; died 1917(?), Memphis, Tennessee Also wrote under: George Edmunds Daughter of Nathan and Rebecca Avery; married Minor Meriwether, 1850 In her autobiography, Elizabeth Avery Meriwether reveals little about her childhood other than to note that her family moved from Bolivar to Memphis when she was eleven. It is obvious, however, that Meriwether was well educated, for after the death of her parents, she became a teacher. When the Civil War began, her husband, a civil engineer, joined the army, leaving Meriwether in Memphis. The city was occupied by the Union army in 1862, and after several unpleasant encounters with Northern generals, Meriwether decided to seek refuge in Alabama. While in Tuscaloosa, Meriwether resumed her childhood pastime of writing. She won a competition sponsored by the Selma Daily Mississippian offering $500 for the best story dealing with the war. ‘‘The Refugee’’ is based partly on her own experiences traveling through Alabama and Tennessee. Encouraged by this success, Meriwether wrote ‘‘The Yankee Spy,’’ which the newspaper planned to publish as a book. However, when the Confederacy fell, these plans were abandoned. After the war, Meriwether combined writing with an interest in social reform. In 1872, she edited and published a weekly newspaper, The Tablet, which lasted for a year. A strong believer in woman suffrage, Meriwether ‘‘cast a vote’’ in the Memphis elections of 1872 and began a correspondence with leading feminists. In 1881, Meriwether joined Elizabeth Cady Stanton and
However, with the end of slavery, Meriwether saw her ordered world turned upside down. ‘‘Life in the South,’’ she wrote, ‘‘became one long nightmare; then a miracle happened— for surely the way the South escaped from that frightful nightmare was little short of miraculous.’’ The ‘‘miracle’’ was the Ku Klux Klan. Meriwether writes about the Klan with an insider ’s knowledge and sympathy, for her husband was a member. She witnessed its night raids, terrorism, and destruction of black property, claiming that the corruption of the carpetbaggers and the insolence of ‘‘uppity’’ blacks justified any actions by disfranchised whites. Meriwether concludes: ‘‘No doubt many abuses were committed by the Ku Klux. In large bodies of men some unwise ones, some mean ones will inevitably be found. But considered as a whole the work of the Ku Klux was done in a patriotic spirit for patriotic purposes, and I rejoice to see . . . that History is beginning to do justice to that wonderful secret movement. At the time it was misunderstood; in the North it was reviled. But in truth it accomplished a noble and necessary work in the only way in which that work was then possible.’’ Despite Meriwether’s obvious prejudices, her works are enjoyable. She had a knack for telling a good story and making her characters real. Meriwether’s descriptions of poor white hill people are charming and convey the spirit of these people.
OTHER WORKS: The Ku Klux Klan; or, The Carpet-bagger in New Orleans (1877). English Tyranny and Irish Suffering (1881). Black and White: A Novel (1883). The Devil’s Dances: A Play (1886). The Sowing of Swords (1910).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Horn, S. F., Invisible Empire: The Story of the Ku Klux Klan (1939). Patton, J. W., Unionism and Reconstruction in Tennessee, 1860-1869 (1934). —JANET E. KAUFMAN
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MERRIAM, Eve Born Eva Moskovitz, 19 July 1916, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; died 11 August 1992, New York, New York Daughter of Max M. and Jennie Siegel Moskovitz; married Erwin Spitzer, 1939 (divorced); Martin Michel, 1947 (divorced); Leonard Lewin, 1963 (divorced); Waldo Salt, 1983; children: Guy, Dee Best known for her many exuberant and language-loving books for children, Eve Merriam was primarily a poet. She was also a successful playwright, and well before the emergence of the contemporary women’s movement, a feminist who wrote, often bitingly, about the relations between women and men. Merriam grew up in Pennsylvania where her parents, who had emigrated from Russia as children, owned a chain of women’s clothing stores. She attended Cornell for two years, graduated from the University of Pennsylvania (B.A., 1937), and moved to New York to attend Columbia University. Unsuccessful in her attempts to publish her poems, she reluctantly agreed with one of her professors that anti-Semitism might be the cause and changed her name: ‘‘Merriam’’ was borrowed from the Merriam Webster dictionary. During the early 1940s, Merriam worked in New York City as a copywriter and feature editor on fashion magazines; she later published a wittily critical book on the fashion industry (Figleaf: The Business of Being in Fashion, 1960). She was also a writer for radio and from 1942 to 1946 moderator of a weekly radio program on poetry. A long-sought goal was reached in 1946 when her first book, Family Circle, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets award. In his introduction to the collection, poet Archibald MacLeish praised the distinctiveness of Merriam’s voice and diction: ‘‘If Miss Merriam can continue in her own person, speaking her own tongue, with the courage of her own carelessness, she may well survive.’’ Merriam continued speaking her own tongue in more than 60 books and plays for children and adults. Her work was consistently motivated by two passions: a love of language and wordplay and an abiding concern for social justice. In ‘‘How to Eat a Poem’’ (It Doesn’t Always Have to Rhyme, 1964), she urged children to understand poems as nourishment: ‘‘Bite in. / Pick it up with your fingers and lick the / juice that may run down your chin. / It is ready and ripe now, whenever you are.’’ Finding a Poem (1970) includes a series of poems on punctuation marks: ‘‘Semi-colon’’ pictures the diver who ‘‘lunges toward the edge; / hedges; / . . .hesitates; / plunges.’’ Describing herself in ‘‘Writing a Poem’’ as ‘‘fooling around with images and rhymes simultaneously,’’ Merriam unlocks the process, leading her readers through the evolution of ‘‘Landscape’’ from the original image, a rusting car, to its final musing on ‘‘what you will find at the edge of the world.’’ Merriam’s delight in the potential and joy of language made her unusually successful as both poet and educator; in her work,
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pleasure and learning are simultaneous. Her poems never speak down to children but offer them ideas to imagine and consider: ‘‘Fantasia’’ (Finding a Poem) invites them into her ‘‘dream’’ of giving birth to a child who will have to ask, ‘‘Mother / what was war?’’ In addition to poems, Merriam also wrote biographies for young readers, including The Voice of Liberty: The Story of Emma Lazarus (1959), and books that raised issues of gender equality. The groundbreaking Mommies at Work appeared in 1961 (reprinted 1995); it celebrates all the kinds of work that women do. Boys and Girls, Girls and Boys (1972) inventively calls gender roles into question. Merriam received the 1981 Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children from the National Council of Teachers of English, and continued throughout her life to travel to talk with children and teachers. She also taught writing at City College of New York in the 1960s and at New York University in the 1980s. Long committed to a progressive political outlook, Merriam’s concern for social justice and her anger at society’s failure to overcome the prejudices of race and gender permeate her writing. In the 1950s, she wrote about the civil rights struggle and its leaders: Montgomery, Alabama, Money, Mississippi, and Other Places (1956) contains poems praising Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. The Inner City Mother Goose (1969, reprinted 1996) draws powerfully on the rhythms and language of nursery rhymes to indict a society that destroys its youth by racism and violence. The controversial book provided the basis for two theatrical productions: Inner City: A Street Cantata, with lyrics by Merriam (produced on Broadway in 1971), and Sweet Dreams, which premiered at La Mama Experimental Theatre Company in February 1984. Satire and anguish predominate in The Nixon Poems (1970), a response to the implications of Nixon’s election for the continuation of both the war in Vietnam and injustice at home. No subject more consistently drew Merriam’s attention than relationships between women and men and their inequities. As early as the 1940s, she collaborated with historian Gerda Lerner on ‘‘Singing of Women: A Dramatic Review,’’ which offers a panoramic view of women’s history and women’s struggle for justice. The Double Bed from the Feminine Side, published in 1958, is a series of poetic sequences tracing the story of a marriage from passion to alienation. The bride dreams ‘‘He’ll make me free / And we’ll hold our marriage forever’’; the wife finally breaks free of the ‘‘monotonous round,’’ and dreams of ‘‘becoming her own horizon.’’ When it was published in a new edition in 1972, Merriam noted her hope that The Double Bed might become ‘‘a consciousness-raising book.’’ A later book of poems, A Husband’s Notes about Her (1976), is wryly subtitled Fictions. After Nora Slammed the Door: American Women in the 1960s-The Unfinished Revolution appeared to almost no notice in 1964, perhaps overshadowed by the popular success of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963). Combining social and economic analysis of ‘‘relations between the middle-class sexes’’ with poetry and the deconstruction of myths about women, Merriam offers no simple solutions for the modern Nora (the
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reference is to the heroine of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House). She argues for the need to alter the gender-bound nature of language, education, and social relations so women might imagine themselves, and so that both sexes might break free of the roles that keep them ‘‘bent over, stooped.’’ Merriam’s several contributions to the effort of reeducation include Growing up Female in America: Ten Lives (1971, reprinted 1987), a selection of autobiographical writings edited with a historical introduction by Merriam. The subjects range from Eliza Southgate, a 19th-century schoolgirl, to Susie King Taylor and Mountain Wolf Woman. The stories were later made into a play, Out of Our Father’s House (1975; first New York production 1977), which had a White House performance in 1978 and was adapted for public television. From the early 1970s on, Merriam was deeply involved with theater projects. Probably best known of Merriam’s dramatic work is the OBIE award-winning The Club (1976). In this satirical feminist commentary set in an ‘‘exclusive men’s club in 1903. . .when male chauvinist behavior and banter were in full flower,’’ Merriam made her devastating point by casting women, dressed in formal male attire, in all the roles. Other theatrical productions include At Her Age (1979; published 1983), first staged at the Theatre for Older People in New York, and Plagues for Our Time, produced by Tom O’Horgan (who also staged ‘‘Inner City’’) at La Mama in 1983. Plagues, one critic noted, is ‘‘a pointed critique of a society that offers its pets hundreds of varieties of food, yet won’t adequately feed all its elderly.’’ In the last year of her life, Merriam focused her writing on a remarkable series of poems that confront death. ‘‘Poems Purgatorio’’ appear with the Plague poems and the ‘‘Jack Dark’’ sequence in Embracing the Dark (1995). The ‘‘Jack Dark’’ poems are the saga of a fierce and painful struggle: Jack, rapist, murderer, cruel jokester, holds all the cards, except for that of the poet’s language, which, still inventive, outwits and outlasts him.
OTHER WORKS: The Real Book about Franklin D. Roosevelt (1952). Tomorrow Morning (1953). The Real Book about Amazing Birds (1955). Emma Lazarus: Woman with a Torch (1956). A Gaggle of Geese (1960). The Trouble with Love (1960). There Is No Rhyme for Silver (1962). Basics: An I-Can-Read Book for Grownups (1962). Funny Town (1963). What’s in the Middle of a Riddle? (1963). Inside a Poem (1964). What Can You Do with a Pocket? (1964, reprinted 1990). Do You Want to See Something? (1965). Don’t Think about a White Bear (1965). Small Fry (1965). The Story of Ben Franklin (1965). Catch a Little Rhyme (1966). Andy All Year Round (1967). Miss Tibbett’s Typewriter (1967). Independent Voices (1968). Epaminondas (reteller, 1968; republished 1972 as That Noodle-Headed Epaminondas). Man and Woman: the Human Condition (1968). I Am a Man: Ode to Martin Luther King, Jr. (1971). Project 1-2-3 (1971). Bam! Zam! Boom!; a Building Book (1972). Rainbow Writing (1976). Ab to Zogg: A Lexicon for Science-Fiction and Fantasy Readers (1977). The Birthday Cow (1978). Unhurry Harry (1978). Good Night to Annie (1980, reprinted 1994). A Word or Two with You (1981).
MERRIL
And I Ain’t Finished Yet (1981). If Only I Could Tell You: Poems for Young Lovers and Dreamers (1983). Jamboree: Rhymes for All Times (1984). Blueberry Ink (1985). A Book of Wishes for You (1985). The Birthday Door (1986). Fresh Paint: New Poems (1986). A Sky Full of Poems (1986). The Christmas Box (1986). Alligator in the Attic (1987). Halloween ABC (1987, reprinted 1995). You Be Good and I’ll Be Night: Jump on the Bed Poems (1988). Chortles: New and Selected Wordplay Poems (1989). Daddies at Work (1989). Poem for a Pickle: Funnybone Verses (1989). Where Is Everybody? (1989, reprinted 1993). The Wise Woman and Her Secret (1991). Fighting Words (1992). Singing Green: New and Selected Poems (1992). Train Leaves the Station (1992, reprinted 1994). Shhh! (1993). Quiet, Please (1993). 12 Ways to Get to 11 (1994, reprinted 1996). Higgle Wiggle (1994, reprinted 1995). Blackberry Ink: Poems (1994). The Hole Story (1995). What in the World? (1997). Bam, Bam, Bam (1998). Ten Rosy Roses (1999). The manuscripts and correspondence of Eve Merriam are housed in the Schlesinger Library of Radcliffe College and at the Kerlan Collection at the University of Minnesota (materials relating to juvenile works).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Copeland, J. S., Speaking of Poets: Interviews with Poets Who Write for Children and Young Adults (1993). Heffer, H., A Checklist of Works by and about Eve Merriam (thesis, 1980). Reference works: CA (1992). CANR (1990). CLR (1988). DLB (1987). SATA (1972, 1985). TCCW (1989). Who’s Who of Writers, Editors, Poets (1989). Other references: Language Arts (Nov./Dec. 1981). Learning (Sept. 1985). Nation (31 Jan. 1959, 21 Mar. 1959, 23 June 1962, 14 Dec. 1964, 7 June 1965, 7 Oct. 1968, 7 Feb. 1972). NYT (22 Dec. 1963, 23 July 1976, 30 May 1980, 17 Apr. 1983, 9 Dec. 1987, 13 Aug. 1992). NYTBR (16 Aug. 1964, 2 Mar. 1969, 1 Nov. 1970, 25 June 1972, 13 Mar. 1977, 15 Nov. 1981, 25 Nov. 1984, 8 Dec. 1985, 25 Oct. 1987, 26 Mar. 1989). Working Woman (Mar. 1982). —CAROL HURD GREEN
MERRIL, Judith Born Josephine Judith Grossman, 21 January 1923, New York, New York; died 12 September 1997 Also wrote under: Ernest Hamilton, Cyril Judd, Rose Sharon, Eric Thorstein Daughter of Samuel S. and Ethel Hurwitch Grossman; married Mr. Zissman, 1940; Frederick Pohl, 1950; Daniel Sugrue, late 1950s; children: two daughters The daughter of Zionist activists, Judith Merril was involved in the socialist and Zionist movements as a young woman and was
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MEYER
only introduced to science fiction in 1940. During World War II, she joined the New York-based Futurian Society, a group of science fiction enthusiasts that included such nascent luminaries as Isaac Asimov, Cyril Kornbluth, Frederick Pohl, James Blish, Damon Knight, and Virginia Kidd; Merril and her daughter Merril, whose first name the author adopted as her pseudonym, shared a communal household with Kidd, whose husband was also overseas. Encouraged by the Futurians, Merril began to write. After the termination of her marriage to Frederick Pohl, Merril continued her own writing as she raised her daughters, Merril Zissman and Ann Pohl, and with Damon Knight organized the first of the annual Milford Science Fiction Writers’ Conferences in 1956. During the 1950s and 1960s, Merril became an influential editor and critic of science fiction. Since the late 1960s, in response to U.S. involvement in Vietnam and the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, Merril lived in Canada as a landed immigrant. She worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, choosing topics, selecting discussants, and making and editing tapes for radio broadcast. She also edited an anthology of contemporary Japanese science fiction. With ‘‘That Only a Mother’’ (1943), Merril began a writing career characterized by attention to the lives of women in possible future societies. It describes, through letters and third-person narration, the ability of one woman to love her daughter, who is physically deformed as a result of atomic radiation, despite widespread social condemnation and infanticide of such mutations. It was later included in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Merril’s first published novel, Shadow on the Hearth (1950), explores a related situation, an atomic bomb attack on North America. It is set entirely within one woman’s household and told from her point of view. The novel was subsequently dramatized for television as ‘‘Atomic Attack.’’ ‘‘Survival Ship’’ (1951), an experiment in the elimination of gender pronouns, depicts a future society in which women dominate in a spaceship hierarchy. Merril returned to this exploration of sex-role behavior and reversal in ‘‘Wish Upon a Star’’ (1958), in which the narrator, a male adolescent aboard the Survival Ship, is socially and vocationally constrained because of his gender. His wish is to be female.
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Ellison and by Merril’s conviction that science fiction is gradually merging with mainstream literature. Some historians of science fiction maintain Merril’s most important contributions to the field are as editor and critic (she is the author of such essays as ‘‘What Do You Mean: Science? Fiction?’’ 1971), but this claim must be weighed against the contributions she made to the ‘‘humanization’’ of science fiction. Emphasizing human interaction and potential rather than technological or scientific innovation, Merril’s fiction differs significantly from that of many of her contemporaries, whose works often propagate sexual and racial stereotypes. While the clarity of her insight within individual works into present and possible future societies may be debated—the sex-role reversal in ‘‘Survival Ship’’ is, for example, a simplistic and disheartening depiction of future options—and although some of her fiction sentimentalizes human relationships, as a whole Merril’s oeuvre remains impressive in its historical context.
OTHER WORKS: Shot in the Dark (edited by Merril, 1950). Beyond Human Ken: Twenty-One Startling Stories of Science Fiction and Fantasy (edited by Merril, 1952). Gunner Cade, with C. M. Kornbluth (1952). Outpost Mars, with C. M. Kornbluth (1952). Beyond the Barriers of Space and Time (edited by Merril, 1954). Human?????? (edited by Merril, 1954). Galaxy of Ghouls (edited by Merril, 1955). Out of Bounds: Seven Stories (1960). The Tomorrow People: A Science-Fiction Novel (1961). Survival Ship, and Other Stories (1964). The Best of the Best (edited by Merril, 1967). England Swings SF: Stories of Speculative Fiction (edited by Merril, 1968). The Best of Judith Merril, edited by V. Kidd (1976). Gunner Cade; Plus, Takeoff (with C. M. Kornbluth, 1983). Tesseracts (edited by Merril, 1985).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Knight, D., The Futurians (1977). Riley, D., ed., Critical Encounters: Writers and Themes in Science Fiction (1978). Reference works: CA (1975). Index to Science Fiction Anthologies and Collections (1978). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). St. James Guide to Science Fiction (1996). WA. Women of Wonder (1974). Other references: Algol/Starship (Winter 1978-1979). —NATALIE M. ROSINSKY
The novella Daughters of Earth (1968) is noteworthy for its depiction of mother-daughter relationships in a six-generation dynasty of female space pioneers. Employing letters, diary entries, and third-person narration, it realistically presents women who, as equal, contributing members of societies that value their professional abilities, nonetheless experience, but usually surmount, personal and professional problems. In 1956 Merril began editing an annual series, SF: The Year’s Greatest Science Fiction and Fantasy, which in 1960 was renamed The Year’s Best Science Fiction and in 1968 became SF 12. These and other anthologies are characterized by the introduction of such (then) avant-garde writers as Brian Aldiss and Harlan
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MEYER, Annie Nathan Born 19 February 1867, New York, New York; died 23 September 1951, New York, New York Daughter of Robert Weeks and Annie Florance Nathan; married Alfred Meyer, 1887 Born in New York City, the youngest of four children, Annie Nathan Meyer proudly claimed her heritage in a prominent Jewish
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MEYER
family that dated to the revolutionary era. After the 1875 stockmarket crash, her family moved to the Midwest, where Meyer lived until just before her mother’s death in 1878, when the three youngest children were sent to New York to live with Meyer’s grandfather. Later Meyer lived with her father until her marriage; she spent the rest of her life in New York City.
she satirizes the club woman who ignores her own child while she campaigns for child-protection legislation. This play also satirizes the tendency of some women to assume that they are the superior sex. Eventually chastened by the knowledge that her husband represents the dominant sex, the club woman gives up her club work and returns to her proper role at home.
In 1885 she secretly studied for and passed the entrance examinations for Columbia University’s collegiate course for women. At that time women were not allowed to attend Columbia’s classes but could be admitted to the collegiate course for women and allowed to study independently for the same examinations taken by men. When her father learned of her activities, he warned, ‘‘You’ll never marry’’ because ‘‘men hate intelligent wives.’’ Undaunted by his criticism, she decided ‘‘to forego all chances of winning a husband.’’ This potential sacrifice, described in her autobiography, It’s Been Fun (1951), and in her account of the founding of Barnard College, Barnard Beginnings (1935), proved unnecessary. She described her husband, Dr. Meyer, as sympathetic to her literary ambitions.
The Dominant Sex dramatizes the strong antisuffrage views Meyer presented in ‘‘Woman’s Assumption of Sex Superiority’’ (North American Review, Jan. 1904), which rejects both the ideas that women could combine marriage and career and that women represent a morally superior group. Although Meyer claimed in her autobiography that Helen Brent, M.D. and The Advertising of Kate—a play about the ‘‘delicate adjustment of the claims of sex to the work of the business woman,’’ written in 1914 and produced on Broadway in 1922—were ahead of their times, other works seem very dated in their opposition to the new woman.
Although Meyer felt continuation of the Columbia course no longer necessary for her literary ambitions, she did begin campaigning for a women’s college affiliate of Columbia that would allow women the full advantages of a collegiate education comparable to that available to Columbia’s male students. As an incorporator and trustee of Barnard College, Meyer continued throughout her life to support the college she had helped found in 1889. Meyer also pursued her own literary career, writing novels, plays, and short stories; articles on education, art, and feminism; and frequent letters to the editors of various publications. Her stories and articles appeared in such periodicals as Bookman, Critic, Harper’s Bazaar, North American Review, Putnam’s, and Century. Many of Meyer’s works deal with the special problems resulting from women’s search for new roles in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After expressing her concern for the improvement of education for women in the late 1880s, she turned to the special problems of the women who entered the professions in Woman’s Work in America (1891), a collection of essays by prominent women, such as Mary Putnam Jacobi, Frances Willard, and Clara Barton. In 1892 Meyer anonymously published Helen Brent, M.D., a novel about the special problems of a woman doctor. The heroine refuses to surrender her career to marriage and insists that she has as much right to ask a man to give up his ambition as he does to demand such a sacrifice from her. Until she can find a man willing to accept a wife who will continue her career, she will forgo marriage. Of all of Meyer’s works, this one stirred the most controversy among reviewers. Several of Meyer’s plays also addressed complexities faced by the new woman. Meyer did not, however, maintain any consistent prowoman philosophy. In The Dominant Sex (1911),
Among her approximately twenty-six plays, several addressed other social issues. In The New Way, a comedy directed by Jessie Bonstelle at the Longacre Theatre in New York in 1923, Meyer treated humorously the complexities of marriage and divorce. Her more serious Black Souls (1932), directed by James Light in 1932 at the Provincetown Playhouse in New York and including members of Zora Neale Hurston’s choral group, dealt with the horrors of the lynching of blacks and the hypocrisy of white attitudes toward blacks. In addition to numerous published works, Meyer’s unpublished manuscripts and correspondence reveal both her wideranging social interests and her occasionally contradictory convictions about the issues of her day.
OTHER WORKS: My Park Book (1898). Robert Annys, Poor Priest (1901). The Dreamer: A Play in Three Acts (1912). P’s and Q’s: A Play in One Act (1921). The New Way: A Comedy in Three Acts (1925). The papers of Annie Nathan Meyer are at the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Askowith, D., Three Outstanding Women: Mary Fels, Rebekah Kohut, and Annie Nathan Meyer (1941). Reference works: AW. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States. Other references: Harper’s Bazaar (4 June 1892). NY (23 Oct. 1943, 30 Oct. 1943). NYT (2 April 1911, 9 May 1922, 31 March 1932, 24 Sept. 1951, 25 Sept. 1951). —JEAN CARWILE MASTELLER
MEYER, June See JORDAN, June M.
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MILES, Josephine Born 11 June 1911, Chicago, Illinois; died 12 May 1985, Berkeley, California Daughter of Reginald O. and Josephine Lackner Miles Josephine Miles was descended from an English business family that came to America on the Mayflower. Her mother studied history and education with John Dewey at the University of Chicago. Miles attended public schools in Los Angeles and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1932. She received an M.A. (1934) and Ph.D. (1938) from the University of California at Berkeley and joined the Berkeley faculty in 1940. She retired, university professor emerita, in 1978. Miles began writing poems at age eight. In high school, she gained a strong foundation in Latin and Greek poetry, followed in college by rigorous training in literary history. During early graduate study, Miles developed her compelling interests in poetic language and form. The metaphysical poets and Yeats led her own early verse in a direction counter to that of a number of her contemporaries. Later, the writing of Neruda and Rilke offered in subject and approach modern alternatives to the more oblique expression of the metaphysical poets. The contemporary poets she has regarded most highly include Eberhart, Rukeyser, Levertov, Dickey, Stafford, Nathan, and Ammons. Those characteristics Miles identified as important in their verse—incisiveness, factualness, simplicity, power, and lyricism—are evident in her own finest poems. Miles has received distinguished awards for her poetry and for her literary scholarship, among them a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award for poetry (1956), the Fellowship of the American Academy of Poets (1978), and election to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1980). Miles’ doctoral dissertation, ‘‘Wordsworth and the Vocabulary of Emotion,’’ was published in 1942. In this systematic study, Miles establishes a historical and quantitative approach to criticism based on a method she later refined and applied to other poets and eras and to prose style as well. By ‘‘counting the number of previously established names of emotion and standard signs of emotion in every poem, group, and in the complete poetical works’’ of a poet, the literary scholar could, Miles demonstrates, formulate a more scientific, evidential basis for analyzing the relationship of thought and feeling in an era and the specific vocabulary a poet considered ‘‘poetic.’’ In Style and Proportion (1966), by tabulating numerous British and American writers’ use of adjectives, nouns, verbs, and connectives, Miles recognizes ‘‘three styles distinguishable on the basis of structural choice: the predicative, the connective-subordinate, and the adjectival.’’ At times reluctant to acknowledge the prior necessity of such tabulation, some scholars have praised Miles’ aesthetic criticism and insight into the social nature of language at the expense of appreciation of the scientific method she employed in describing English poetry from the 16th century to the present.
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Miles’ approach to what she calls ‘‘verse composition’’ is often determined by ‘‘the idea of speech. . .people talking. . .as the material from which poetry is made.’’ In an early poem, ‘‘Speaker,’’ the voice admits: ‘‘My talking heart talked less of what it knew / Than what it saw.’’ What is known in many of Miles’ poems is conveyed obliquely by what is observed in commonplace landscapes. Long a city resident, Miles includes in these landscapes the repeated sights of urban life. In ‘‘Entry,’’ the quantifiable city where ‘‘the small matter is put down already / To depreciation’’ is contrasted with the country, a place of hints and expectation. Noting in her work a subtle satiric gift, Louise Bogan pointed to the indirect way Miles drew meaning from ‘‘the parking lot, the motel. . .the supermarket, and the service station.’’ Miles’ poetry has not received the critical attention it deserves, although reviews of Coming to Terms (1979) and Collected Poems, 1930-1983 (1983), were uniformly laudatory. It is difficult to generalize about Miles’s writing except to note its condensation, craft, unexpected juxtaposition of images, pleasure in ‘‘the space and active interplay of talk,’’ and—in recent volumes—willingness to employ more irregular form and an increasingly more direct political and ethical stance. Negative criticism of her work has centered on a miscellaneous quality of a number of the poems, as well as a control which has seemed to some to force a too moderate, reasonable, and civil response. However, longer poems, such as ‘‘Two Kinds of Trouble (for Michelangelo),’’ ‘‘Ten Dreamers in a Motel,’’ and ‘‘Views from Gettysburg,’’ show Miles capable of sustaining and varying form.
OTHER WORKS: Lines at Intersection (1939). Poems on Several Occasions (1941). Pathetic Fallacy in the Nineteenth Century (1942). Wordsworth and the Vocabulary of Emotion (1942, 1976). Local Measures (1946). The Vocabulary of Poetry: Three Studies (1946). Criticism: The Foundations of Modern Literary Judgment (edited by Miles, with M. Schorer and G. McKenzie, 1948, revised, 1958). The Primary Language of Poetry in the 1640s (1948). The Continuity of English Poetry from the 1540s to the 1940s (1951). Prefabrications (1955). Eras and Modes in English Poetry (1957, revised, 1964). The Poem: A Critical Anthology (edited by Miles, 1959; revised and abridged edition, The Ways of the Poem, 1969, revised, 1973). Poems, 1930-1960 (1960, 1979). Renaissance, Eighteenth-Century, and Modern Language in English Poetry: A Tabular View (1960). Classic Essays in English (edited by Miles, 1961, revised, 1965). Ralph Waldo Emerson (1964). Civil Poems (1966). Kinds of Affection (1967). Fields of Learning (1968). Poetry and Change: Donne, Milton, Wordsworth, and the Equilibrium of the Present (1974). To All Appearances: New and Selected Poems (1974). Poetry, Teaching, and Scholarship (1980).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bogan, L., in A Poet’s Alphabet (1970). Dickey, J., in Babel to Byzantium (1968). Kuzma, G., ed., Rereadings (1978). Reference works: CA (1967, 1986). CANR (1981). CLC (1985, 1986). Contemporary Poets (1970, 1975). DLB (1986). FC
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(1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCAS. Other references: Hudson Review (Autumn 1984). LJ (Aug. 1983). Southern Review (July 1983). TLS (25 April 1975). Josephine Miles Reading Her Poems with Comment (audio tape, 1981). Josephine Miles Reading Her Poetry at the Library of Congress (audio tape, 1981). Josephine Miles Reading Her Own Poetry Morrison Library, University of California, Berkeley (audio tape, 1977). Josephine Miles Reading in the UCSD New Poetry Series (audio tape, 1980). Oral History Interview of Josephine B. Miles (audio tape, 1984). —THEODORA R. GRAHAM, UPDATED BY SYDONIE BENET
MILLAR, Margaret Born 5 February 1915, Kitchener, Ontario, Canada; died 26 March 1994 Daughter of William and Lavinia Ferrier Sturm; married Kenneth Millar, 1938 Margaret Millar studied at the University of Toronto; her early interests were classics, archaeology, music, and psychiatry. Millar’s husband wrote mysteries under the name Ross Macdonald. Millar is a former president of the Mystery Writers of America and widely known as an environmentalist. The Birds and the Beasts Were There (1967) recounts the difficulties and the pleasures of a major current interest, bird watching. Primarily known as a mystery writer, Millar created two series detectives. Dr. Paul Prye, psychiatrist and witty amateur sleuth, appears in The Invisible Worm (1941) and The Weak-Eyed Bat (1942), which details Prye’s search for a killer and his courtship of clever, brash Nora Shane. Their wedding, in The Devil Loves Me (1942), is complicated by a murder and allows for the introduction of the second continuing character, Detective-Inspector Sands. Sands, unprepossessing but perceptive and humane, is more typical of Millar’s characters and appears in two other novels. Wall of Eyes (1943) uses an important Millar device—characters who are not what or who they seem. The relationship between the Heath sisters, pliant Alice and blind, shrill Kelsey, asks who is prey and who is predator. The Iron Gates (1945) finds Sands investigating the disappearance of Lucille Morrow, one of Millar’s most successfully complex characters. The novel also features another important Millar motif, dream imagery, and a key theme, the evil power of love. Fire Will Freeze (1944) and Rose’s Last Summer (1952) are comedy-mysteries. Fire provides amusing characters, a measure
of terror, and a clever surprise ending. All the early novels employ the ‘‘closed circle of suspects’’ technique. Psychotic personalities are the focus of The Cannibal Heart (1949) and Beast in View (1955, cited as best mystery, winning the Edgar Allen Poe award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1956). In The Cannibal Heart, the relative innocence of young Jessie Banner and adolescent Luisa Roma contrasts with the corruption of Janet Wakefield as she attempts to compensate for disappointment in marriage and motherhood. Beast in View is the study of Helen Clarvoe, rejected and repressed as a child and dangerous as a woman. Hurtful family impact is a central theme, and the novel employs yet another pattern, the outsider drawn into a turmoil of family entanglements. Perhaps Millar’s best novels are Vanish in an Instant (1952) and The Fiend (1964). The former compares the relationship between Virginia Barkley, accused of a murder, and her overprotective mother with that between Earl Loftus, who confesses to the killing, and his alcoholic mother. The Fiend, compassionate and unsentimental, probes the interactions within and between five families as Charlie Gowen, former child molester, struggles against his interest in little Jessie Brant. The characterizations are vivid, and Millar uses a variation of the mother-child theme here, as a childless woman interferes with another’s daughter. The Listening Walls (1959) compares the self-protective instincts of a Mexican hotel maid with those of a pampered California matron. Beyond This Point Are Monsters (1970) and Ask for Me Tomorrow (1976) have fine Southern California settings, and in each Millar provides sensitive examinations of the position of Mexican Americans within this culture. How Like an Angel (1962) interweaves two plots—a disappearing husband and the fate of the True Believers, a strange religious cult. The Believers’ impact on the elderly Sister Blessing and teenaged Sister Karma are of especial interest, as is the portrait of Charlotte Keating, the seemingly controlled, competent, independent physician of Do Evil in Return (1950). The detectives in these novels, Quinn and Easter, are imperfect but decent men doing their best to cope with murder and with love. Experiment in Springtime (1947), Wives and Lovers (1954), and A Stranger in My Grave (1960) treat failed marriages. In each, recognition of failure and termination of the marriage symbolize growth toward maturity for at least one partner. Experiment in Springtime contrasts the ‘‘second youth’’ of Martha Pearson and Steve Ferris, reunited lovers, with the realistic adolescence of Laura Shaw, who also loves Steve. A Stranger in My Grave effectively combines gothic overtones with a search for self-definition as Stevens Pinata discovers factual reasons for Daisy Harker’s nightmares. Millar is considered a novelist of skill and power, especially noted for her effective imagery and excellent characterizations. For her lifetime achievement, she was named the Los Angeles Times Woman of the Year in 1965, and given the Mystery Writers
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of America’s Grand Master award in 1982 (she also served as president of the MWA from 1957-58).
OTHER WORKS: It’s All in the Family (1948). An Air That Kills (1957). The Murder of Miranda (1979). Mermaid (1982). Banshee (1983). Spider Webs (1986).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1975). Detecting Women (1994). Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (1994). Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection (1976). St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (1996). WA. Other references: The Armchair Detective (Jan. 1970). NYT (13 Oct. 1976). NYTBR (30 May 1954, 21 June 1964). —JANE S. BAKERMAN
MILLAY, Edna St. Vincent Born 22 February 1892, Rockland, Maine; died 19 October 1950, Steepletop, New York Also wrote under: Nancy Boyd Daughter of Henry and Cora Buzzelle Millay; married Eugen Boissevain, 1923 Edna St. Vincent Millay was the oldest of three daughters. Her father, a schoolteacher and school superintendent, left the household when Millay was seven. Her mother supported the family by working as a practical nurse and did her utmost to encourage all three girls to develop their creative talents. Millay first received recognition as a poet when her long poem ‘‘Renascence’’ was selected in 1912 for inclusion in The Lyric Year. However, ‘‘Renascence’’ narrowly missed receiving one of the three prizes awarded for the best poems in the volume. Publication of the anthology brought forth a storm of protest. Readers maintained that Millay’s youthful statement of despair, rebirth, and affirmation was the strongest in the book. Her success brought her to the attention of Caroline Dow, who made it possible for the poet to attend Vassar College. In 1917, soon after graduation, Millay moved to Greenwich Village, where she quickly became a legend. Several images of Millay during this period emerge: the serious artist living on limited funds; the bohemian, careless of health and propriety; the passionate woman involved in brief, intoxicating love affairs. During her Village years, Millay published Renascence, and Other Poems (1917, reprinted several times, most recently in 1994) and A Few Figs from Thistles (1920). The latter, with its famous ‘‘candle’’ quatrain (beginning ‘‘My candle burns at both ends; / It shall not last the night’’) and flippant love poems, captured the imaginations of the ‘‘emancipated’’ youth of the early 1920s. At the same time, Millay finished
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the poems that would appear in Second April (1921), and wrote and directed a pacifist verse play, Aria da Capo (1920). In 1922 Millay received the Pulitzer Prize for The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver (reprinted 1983), an expanded edition of Figs with eight new sonnets. The following year, she married a Dutch businessman, Eugen Boissevain, whose first wife had been Inez Milholland, the famous suffragist, who died in 1916. Millay, who had admired Milholland at college, dedicated to her a sonnet honoring the women’s rights movement. Eventually, Boissevain gave up his coffee business to manage Millay’s highly successful poetry-reading tours and to superintend Steepletop, their farm in upstate New York. Their marriage lasted 27 years, until Boissevain’s death in 1949. During these years, Millay produced several books of poems—The Buck in the Snow (1918), Fatal Interview (1931), Wine from These Grapes (1934)—that are more subdued and more contemplative in tone than her earlier work. In 1927 Millay became active in the movement to save Sacco and Vanzetti. She signed petitions, demonstrated, and, in a futile interview, tried to persuade the governor of Massachusetts to grant clemency. Her involvement in this case is reflected in several poems, most notably ‘‘Justice Denied in Massachusetts.’’ Growing increasingly concerned about the spread of fascism throughout Europe and the start of World War II, Millay renounced her former pacifism in the late 1930s. In a series of political poems, she argued for American military preparedness and aid to France and England. Unfortunately, these poems are quite poor, relying on jangling rhythms and trite language. Collected in Make Bright the Arrows (1940), they drew a barrage of adverse criticism. Millay is particularly interesting because, at a time when modern poetry was abandoning traditional forms, she chose to write ballads, lyrics, and sonnets. Though Millay’s later work is somewhat more experimental, she usually stayed within familiar structures, adapting them to her own use. Millay’s strongest poems work precisely because of the balance maintained between the emotional intensity of her subjects and the disciplined craftsmanship of her forms. As Floyd Dell said, ‘‘She learned the molds first, into which she poured her emotions while hot.’’ Many of her first poems (‘‘Renascence,’’ ‘‘God’s World’’) reveal innocence and youthful exuberance. In ‘‘Recuerdo,’’ the young lovers, after riding ‘‘back and forth all night on the ferry,’’ impulsively give bags of fruit and ‘‘all our money but our subway fares’’ to an old woman newspaper seller. Other early verses, however, exhibit a mocking, skeptical attitude toward life and love. In many of the poems from A Few Figs from Thistles, Millay creates a bold, unconventional woman persona who is frankly attracted to men and who initiates and terminates love affairs at will. In Sonnet XI, for instance, she tells her lover, ‘‘I shall forget you presently, my dear,/ So make the most of this, your little day.’’ The poem ends with the forthright statement ‘‘Whether or not we find what we are seeking/ Is idle, biologically speaking.’’ In
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another poem, the persona glories in being a ‘‘wicked girl’’ and declares, ‘‘If I can’t be sorry, why,/ I might as well be glad.’’ A more serious note appears in Second April (1921). The skepticism remains, but the lightness is gone. In ‘‘Spring,’’ Millay states that ‘‘Life in itself/Is nothing’’ and compares the month of April to ‘‘an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.’’ The love poems in this book are somber. ‘‘Sonnet XIX,’’ for example, begins, ‘‘And you as well must die, beloved dust/ And all your beauty stand you in no stead.’’ Throughout all of Millay’s poetry runs the message that life is short and love ephemeral. Human relationships, however sweet, cannot last; the theme of death constantly recurs. The early ‘‘Passer Mortuus Est’’ begins, ‘‘Death devours all lovely things,’’ and the late ‘‘Epitaph for the Race of Man’’ mourns, ‘‘Earth, unhappy planet, born to die.’’ Millay has been criticized for writing only of herself and her love affairs, but many of her poems reflect wider concerns. Her love poems, however, far from being sentimental effusions, are central to her vision of life’s brevity and impermanence. The recipient of much acclaim in the 1920s, Millay is less popular today. Feminist readers tend to dismiss her work as old fashioned and conventional. This is unfortunate because she, though no structural innovator, is in many ways close to the feminist-oriented poets of the 1970s. Certainly Millay’s use of highly personal material, her fresh, forthright language, and her creation of strong female personae anticipate modern women’s poetry. Millay’s finest poems, moreover, ensure her position as an important American woman poet.
OTHER WORKS: The Lamp and the Bell (1921). Two Slatterns and a King (1921). Distressing Dialogues (1924). The King’s Henchman (1927, 1965). Poems Selected for Young People (1929, 1979). The Princess Marries the Page (1932). Conversation at Midnight (1937). Huntsman, What Quarry? (1939). Collected Sonnets (1941, 1988). Invocation to the Muses (1941). The Murder of Lidice (1942, 1978). Collected Lyrics (1943, 1981). Poem and Prayer for an Invading Army (1944). Mine the Harvest (1954). Collected Poems (1956, 1999). Thanksgiving 1950 (1966). Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay (1972). On Thought in Harness (1981). Sonnets & a Few Poems (1982). Take Up the Song: Poems (1986). What Lips My Lips Have Kissed (1989). The Rebirth (1892-1950: An Appreciation (1992). Selected Poems: The Centenary Edition (1992). Forceless Upon Our Backs There Fall (1992). Grace from Simple Stone (1992). Early Poems (1999).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Andrews, B., No Wider Than the Heart: A Play in Two Acts, Based on the Life and Work of the Poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay (1994). Atkins, E., Edna St. Vincent Millay and Her Times (1936). August, B. T., The Poetic Use of Womanhood in Five Modern American Poets: Moore, Millay, Rukeyser, Levertov, and Plath (dissertation 1995). Beisch, J. S., ‘‘Edna Who? The
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Critical (Mis)fortunes of a Woman Poet in Decline’’ (thesis 1991). Bogan, L., Achievements in American Poetry (1951). Britten, N. A., Edna St. Vincent Millay (1982). Bukovinsky, J., ed., Women of Words: A Personal Introduction to Thirty-Five Important Writers (1994). Cheney, A., Millay in the Village (1975). Daffron, C., Edna St. Vincent Millay (1989). Dash, J., A Life of One’s Own (1973). Dell, F., Homecoming: An Autobiography (1933). Dinkins, E. V., ‘‘Night’s Sister: Voices of Desire in the Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay’’ (dissertation 1995). Fleeger, C., ‘‘Edna St. Vincent Millay: A Study in Her Centennial Year’’ (thesis 1993). Freedman, D. P., ed., Millay at 100: A Critical Reappraisal (1995). Gilbert, S. and S. Gubar, Shakespeare’s Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets (1978). Gould, J., The Poet and Her Book (1969). Gray, J., Edna St. Vincent Millay (1967). Gurko, M., Restless Spirit (1962). Mattson, F. J., Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1892-1950 (1991). Minot, W. S., Edna St. Vincent Millay: A Critical Revaluation (dissertation 1995). Moore, J. V., ‘‘Selving, Sexuality, and Sestinas: The Poetics of Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Marilyn Hacker’’ (thesis 1996). Nierman, J., Edna St. Vincent Millay: A Reference Guide (1977). Patton, J. J., Edna St. Vincent Millay as a Verse Dramatist (dissertation 1995). Perkins, C. N., 100 Authors Who Shaped World History (1996). Rosta, P., The Magazine that Taught Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Millay How to Write (1985). Sheean, V., The Indigo Bunting (1951). The Shores of Light (1952). Wilson, E., I Thought of Daisy (1929). Reference works: CP. NAW (1971). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Commentary (June 1992). Criticism (1995). Genre (1998). Iowa Review (Fall 1992). Style (1995). Twentieth Century Literature (Spring 1986). —ENID DAME, UPDATED BY SYDONIE BENET
MILLER, Alice Duer Born 28 July 1874, Staten Island, New York; died 22 August 1942, New York, New York Daughter of James Gore King and Elizabeth Wilson Meads Duer; married Henry Wise Miller, 1899 Alice Duer Miller was born into a prominent New York family and spent a long, happy girlhood growing up with her two sisters on the family estate in Weehawken, New Jersey. The idyll ended abruptly, however, when Miller’s father lost the family fortune in the Baring Bank failure. Undaunted by the crisis, Miller worked her way through a mathematics program at Barnard College by selling stories to Harper’s and Scribner’s magazines. Upon her graduation in 1899, Miller married a Harvard graduate, and they set sail for Costa Rica. Here, Miller was frequently left alone while her husband traveled on business, and the stories
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Miller wrote during the companionless hours supported the Millers throughout their Central American stay. Her efforts continued to be the family’s main source of income long after their return to New York in 1903. In 1915, after fifteen years of serious writing, Miller published a serial in Harper’s Bazar entitled Come Out of the Kitchen that made her famous overnight. In 1916 it was published in book form and became a best-seller; a dramatized version ran a long season on Broadway; and Famous Players bought the motion picture rights. Come Out of the Kitchen centers on four children of an aristocratic family who cannot make ends meet, and therefore rent out the family mansion while their parents are away. The dashing young bachelor who leases the house falls in love with the daughter who is masquerading as a cook. The novel is light, amusing, and fast-moving; primarily concerned with narrative and dialogue, Miller makes little use of description or reflection. She creates a safe and sane world where nothing can go seriously wrong, yet this artificial world is deceptively simple. Along with the goodness and light, Miller employs a great deal of masterful irony. She puts the rich and proud in their place by highlighting their ridiculous manners and pompous stupidity. As Harvey Higgins writes in a 1927 New Yorker profile, Miller’s stories ‘‘are written as precisely as if they were engraved by a fashionable stationer, but they are full of the devil.’’ Many of Miller’s later novels follow this same pattern. In the best-selling The Charm School (1919) and Gowns by Roberta (1933), the simple and sincere are again rewarded, whereas the self-seeking and affected are again chastised. Limited in scope, Miller’s stories are written to entertain. Only one of Miller’s works, Manslaughter (1921), breaks through the insulation of upper-class reality. In this ambitious novel, a heroine who has taken unfair advantage of her wealth, beauty, and social position is convicted in a hit-and-run case like any other common criminal. For once Miller does not skirt around the ugly, and the result is surprisingly successful. Manslaughter is a complex novel inhabited by characters capable of depth. Like The Charm School and Gowns by Roberta, Manslaughter became a popular motion picture. Miller is best remembered for her poetry, although it is inferior in quality to her prose. From 1914 to 1917, she wrote a poetry column for the New York Tribune entitled ‘‘Are Women People?’’ which she compiled into a book (1915) and then followed with the sequel Women Are People (1917). These heavily ironic poems point out the hypocritical nature of men’s arguments against suffrage, and they are often hilarious. Miller is most famous, however, for The White Cliffs (1940), a serious narrative poem about an American girl and an English soldier during World War II. Written in sentimental verse, The White Cliffs is utterly devoid of the social satire that makes Miller’s prose come alive. Throughout its dreary fifty-two sections, the poem remains childishly singsong and superficial. Nevertheless, it became an extraordinary bestseller both in the U.S. and abroad, and was read by Lynn Fontanne on NBC radio for the British War
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Relief. Miller agreed with the critics when they attributed the success of The White Cliffs to the emotional climate of the 1940s. Miller never let her writing interfere with her personal life. She traveled extensively, was frequently called to Hollywood on assignment for Goldwyn or Paramount, and socialized regularly with prominent figures. Miller was happiest when among others, and she often admitted that she had no style and wrote only for money. Yet Miller’s stories, although sentimental and simplistic, are solid and clever narratives. Like the charming, artistocratic woman who once worked her way through Barnard and supported her family in Central America, Miller’s works are easy to underestimate.
OTHER WORKS: Poems (with C. Duer, 1896). The Modern Obstacle (1903). Calderon’s Prisoner (1904). Less Than Kin (1909). The Blue Arch (1910). The Burglar and the Blizzard (1914). Things (1914). The Rehearsal (1915). Come Out of the Kitchen (film version, 1916). Ladies Must Live (1917). The Happiest Times of Their Lives (1918). Wings in the Night (1918). The Beauty and the Bolshevist (1920). Are Parents People? (1924). Priceless Pearl (1924). The Reluctant Princess (1925). Instruments of Darkness, and Other Stories (1926). The Springboard (1927). Welcome Home (1928). The Prince Serves His Purpose (1929). Forsaking All Others (1930). Come Out of the Pantry (1933). Death Sentence (1934). Four Little Heiresses (1935). The Rising Star (1935). And One Was Beautiful (1937). Not for Love (1937). Barnard College: The First Fifty Years (with S. Myers, 1939). I Have Loved England (1941). Summer Holiday (1941). Cinderella (1943). Selected Poems (1949).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Miller, H. W., All Our Lives (1945). Overton, G. M., The Women Who Make Our Novels (1928). Reference works: NAW. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States. TCA, TCAS. Other references: NY (19 Feb. 1927, 9 Aug. 1941). NYTBR (29 June 1941). —CHRISTIANE BIRD
MILLER, Caroline Pafford Born 26 August 1903, Waycross, Georgia Wrote under: Caroline Miller Daughter of Elias and Levy Zan Pafford; married William D. Miller, circa 1921; Clyde H. Ray; children: three Caroline Pafford Miller was raised near the Georgia backwoods and spent most of her adult life there. Her knowledge of the area and its people inspired Miller to write Lamb in His Bosom
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(1933, reprinted 1993), which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and the first part of Lebanon (1944), her only other novel. Miller and her first husband, her high school English teacher, had three children. Lamb in His Bosom chronicles the life of Cean Carver Smith from her marriage in the mid-19th century to the Reconstruction era. Cean is a typical Georgia backwoods woman; she endures hard work, infant deaths, fire, snakebite, lonely childbirth, attacking panthers, and the death of a son in the Civil War. An important secondary character is her brother Lias, whose philandering and thirst for adventure are unexampled in the community. Lebanon is certainly not the equal of Lamb in His Bosom. Although the locale is the Georgia backwoods and the interest in the wilderness life remains, the protagonist, Lebanon Fairgale, is a bit too much the complete frontierswoman. She can kill any critter and cure any disease from colic to the Pest, although surgery doesn’t seem to be her line. When her rifle accidentally shoots off her lover’s hand and when her face is clawed by a ‘‘pet’’ bear, someone else has to do the stitching. These catastrophes would be enough, but in addition Lebanon suffers desertion by her lover, infidelity by her husband, the deaths of her husband, humpback child, and adopted child, and false accusations of sodomy, harlotry, and murder. In the end she marries a preacher. Miller is at her best in the evocation of routine frontier life and in the lyrical, loving depiction of Georgia; indeed, her attempt to move Lebanon out of Georgia into an unidentified wilderness is one of the second novel’s major flaws. Miller is at her worst in constructing melodramatic, action-packed plots, which she evidently feels her books need. Yet, despite the plot and Miller’s prose, which may be too lyrical for the brutal, uneducated lives she describes, Lamb in His Bosom is beautiful, peaceful, and satisfying—a poem to the past, particularly to the past of the ‘‘frontier’’ woman. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Spell, V. E., ‘‘Caroline Miller, Laureate of the Wiregrass’’ (thesis 1984). Reference works: TCA, TCAS. Other references: Boston Transcript (20 Sept. 1933). Literary Digest (12 May 1934). NR (20 Sept. 1933). Newsweek (12 May 1934). NYT (8 May 1933, 17 Sept. 1933, 15 Nov. 1933). PW (12 May 1934). —CYNTHIA L. WALKER
MILLER, Emily (Clark) Huntington Born 22 October 1833, Brooklyn, Connecticut; died 2 November 1913, Northfield, Minnesota Daughter of Thomas and Paulina Clark Huntington; married John Edwin Miller, 1860; children: three sons One of five children, Emily Huntington Miller attended local schools in Connecticut and completed her education at Oberlin College. Miller had three sons who survived to adulthood.
From 1867 to 1871 Miller was associate editor of Little Corporal, a Chicago juvenile periodical. After her husband acquired control of the magazine in 1871, Miller became editor-inchief, retaining the position until the magazine was absorbed by St. Nicholas in 1875. During these years, Miller was also active in the Chautauqua movement, serving as president of the Chautauqua Woman’s Club and writing for the Chautauquan. In 1874, Miller helped found the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. From 1878 to 1891 Miller lived in St. Paul, Minnesota. For six years she was president of the Methodist Women’s Foreign Missionary Society of Minneapolis. Miller was dean of women at Northwestern University (1891-98) and taught English literature there until 1900. Throughout her career as editor, administrator, and teacher, Miller wrote poetry, children’s stories, and adult fiction as well as producing numerous articles for leading American magazines. Many of Miller’s children’s books first appeared as serials in Little Corporal. These stories combine adventure, often in the form of travel, with sufficient piety to make them attractive to the Sunday-school movement. The Royal Road to Fortune (1869) illustrates this formula. Jimmy Marvin, a homeless ten-year-old orphan, finds a card bearing the inscription, ‘‘The hand of the diligent maketh rich.’’ From then on diligence—not, however, unaided by good fortune—allows him to progress from sweeping crossings to selling newspapers to bootblacking and ultimately to owning his own farm. It is significant that his social advancement occurs as he moves west, journeying from New York to Ohio to Idaho. Three volumes of the ‘‘Kirkwood Library’’ use variants of the same formula. Summer Days at Kirkwood (1877) is a tale of family fun in a country house near a large lake. The story is episodic in structure, and the tone is free of fervent piety. A Year at Riverside Farm (1877) attractively describes the sobering of exuberant Barbie Williams, who has grown to dislike the dull routine of farm life. The realistic portrait of the adolescent girl and Miller.’s familiarity with rural life compensate somewhat for the fact that the girl’s adventures are not really very exciting. Uncle Dick’s Legacy (1877), by contrast, is an adventure tale of two boys traveling in the wilds of Michigan to find the homestead their uncle has left them. Despite the interesting journey, the tale is unsuccessful because the picturesque characters are overdrawn and the boys themselves are colorless creatures. In Captain Fritz, His Friends and Adventures (1877) Miller abandoned the child protagonist and scriptural quotations. Captain Fritz, a performing French poodle, narrates his turbulent life from the vantage point of serene old age, describing with some puzzlement the neglect and cruelty he has suffered. The story is clever and warmhearted, teaching kindness without resort to moral asides. Miller’s ventures into adult fiction and drama also put her pen at the service of religion. The Parish of Fair Haven (1876) is a
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faintly disguised tract supporting missionary work. The Little Lad of Bethlehem Town (1911), a nativity play in blank verse, attempts to deal with traditional material in a fresh way, but slips into pathos and sentimentality. Miller’s best-known volume of poetry, From Avalon, and Other Poems (1896), contains forty lyrics on such conventional subjects as death, religion, love, motherhood, and nature. Miller’s tone is often moralistic and her mood melancholy; in her response to nature, however, she occasionally achieves a genuine lyric quality. Miller was a minor writer whose copious output was often merely a vehicle to express religious and social interests. But in a few of Miller’s children’s books, she successfully combined entertainment with moral instruction.
OTHER WORKS: What Tommy Did (1876). Little Neighbors (1878). Debt and Credit (1886). Kathie’s Experience (1886). What Happened on a Christmas Eve (1888). The King’s Messengers (1891). Helps and Hinderances (1892). Girls’ Book of Treasures (1894). Home Talks about the Word (1894). Songs from the Nest: From Avalon, and Other Poems (1896). For the Beloved (n.d.).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Darling, F. L., The Rise of Children’s Book Reviewing in America, 1865-1881 (1968). Literary Writings in America: A Bibliography (1977). Reference works: AA. AW.NAW. NCAB. Other references: PW (15 Dec. 1877).
for writing. An urbanite herself, Miller contributed to the growing tendency in American popular literature to see nature as a healing retreat. Like other nature writers of the period, Miller indulged in extreme feats of anthropomorphism, her birds being regularly described as brides and grooms, proud parents, dutiful husbands, rebellious children, etc. Her blatant racism (a chimpanzee in Four-Handed Folk, 1897, ‘‘does the work of four negro waiters’’) is painful to encounter. Miller’s children’s stories are not particularly noteworthy, although many (such as Nimpo’s Troubles, 1880, or the Kristy books) show Miller’s special concern for children in difficulty. The nature sketches for children, however, showcase Miller’s teaching talent. In The First Book of Birds (1899) Miller uses the juvenile form to further her own purpose—conservation of birds and their environment. She interests youngsters in unusual bird habits, tries to stimulate further study by means of careful lessons in techniques of observation, and thereby hopes to make the killing of birds seem ‘‘almost like murder.’’ This book, like Little Folks in Feathers and Fur, and Others in Neither (1875), describes the habits of various species in humanly significant details bound to hold a child’s interest. Some of Miller’s children’s books are beautifully illustrated. Miller’s bird studies for adults, beginning with Bird-Ways (1885), were mostly researched and written in her later years. Not content with observation of birds in captivity, Miller traveled to Colorado, the Carolina coast, the summit of the White Mountains, and outposts in northern Maine—all this in the late decades of the nineteenth century when Miller was in her sixties and seventies. Miller’s accounts of these travels and the difficulties she encountered—from barbed wire (how to get over in Victorian skirts!) to human nest robbers to litterbugs—provide absorbing reading.
—PHYLLIS MOE
MILLER, Harriet M(ann) Born 25 June 1831, Auburn, New York; died 25 December 1918, Los Angeles, California Also wrote under: Olive Thorne Miller, Olive Thorne Daughter of Seth and Mary Holbrook Mann; married Watts Todd Miller, 1854; children: four Married at twenty-three, after a finishing-school education, Harriet M. Miller waited until after her four children were born to publish her first work, a children’s essay on china-making, and she was forty-nine when she began the close observation of birds that led to her best work. Miller continued writing children’s stories and essays to the end of her life. One of the most popular and influential nature writers of the last century, Miller combined an early conservationist sensibility with the careful naturalist’s eye for detailed observation and talent
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The usual format for Miller’s books is anecdotal; chapters describe separate adventures with various species, usually introduced by appropriate poetry and interspersed with allusions and quotations from other writers. Miller’s style is urbane, informal, observant, and witty. Miller contributed to the early conservation movement chiefly by observing how birds, in their natural ecosystems, help humans. Miller also tried to ascertain the truth in various bird myths—that doves are mournful, that cuckoos rob nests—through careful observation. Hers was a strong voice for wilderness preservation; she frequently notes in detail how human waste and destruction is left from the Maine coast to Pike’s Peak. Miller believed that naturalists tend to study specimens with an eye only to classification, while ‘‘the soul of the robin has escaped them.’’ Instead, naturalists must observe ‘‘the free, unstudied ways of birds who do not notice or are not disturbed by spectators.’’ Such a study, Miller maintains, should be taken up especially by women, with their ‘‘great patience and quiet manners.’’ The concern that women should expand their horizons beyond their traditional occupations was carried over into Miller’s
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public lecturing and publication of The Woman’s Club (1891), a guide and handbook. Such clubs, Miller believed, could ‘‘broaden and elevate’’ women. For these forays into territory unfamiliar to women, for her sound nature observations, and most especially for her adventuring—with mosquito netting, notebook and ‘‘good ink’’—Miller deserves reading today.
OTHER WORKS: Queer Pets at Marcy’s (1880). Little People of Asia (1882). In Nesting Time (1888). Old Grip, the Crow (1891). Little Brothers of the Air (1892). A Bird-Lover in the West (1894). Our Home Pets: How to Keep Them Well and Happy (1894). Upon the Tree Tops (1899). The Children’s Book of Birds (1901). The Second Book of Birds (1901). True Bird Stories from My Notebooks (1903). Kristy’s Queer Christmas (1904). With the Birds in Maine (1904). Kristy’s Surprise Party (1905). Kristy’s Rainy Day Picnic (1906). Harry’s Runaway, and What Came of It (1907). What Happened to Barbara (1907). The Bird Our Brother (1908). A Vision of Moses (1924).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: AA. NAW. NCAB. Ohio Authors and Their Books. —MARGARET McFADDEN-GERBER
MILLER, Isabel See ROUTSONG, Alma
MILLER, Mary Britton Born August 1883, New London, Connecticut; died 3 April 1975, New York, New York Also wrote under: Isabel Bolton Daughter of Charles Phillip and Grace Rumrill Miller The tragic events of Mary Britton Miller’s childhood, which haunted her throughout her long life, are depicted in two books. In the Days of Thy Youth (1943), a fictionalized autobiography, and Under Gemini (1966), a memoir, describe the sudden deaths of Miller’s parents, within an hour of each other, when Miller and her twin sister, Grace, were four. Moved with two brothers and a sister to their grandmother’s Springfield, Massachusetts house, and from thence to other relatives, the twins thought, acted, and reacted as one person. The two books end with another tragedy—the death, by drowning, of twin sister Grace at age fourteen. Of the aborted twinship experience, Miller said ‘‘Those early years with her are
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my treasury . . . of swift and accurate response to human behavior, of a queer sense of seeing into and through human beings who accompany me through life.’’ Miller attended boarding school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and subsequently traveled and did volunteer social work in Greenwich Village. The poetry Miller wrote in her free time resulted in her first publications. It was only after her sixtieth birthday that Miller turned to the novel form, dictating (because of eye pain from low-grade arthritis) five books between ages sixtythree and eighty-seven. Some of Miller’s poetry is written for a young audience, and is sensitive, quiet, and nature-loving. Sensitive in a different way is The Crucifixions (1944), which includes three Easter poems full of the imagery of guns, armaments, and tanks—the new Golgotha— and a resultant prayer for peace. Adopting the name Isabel Bolton for her change from poetry to fiction, Miller followed her autobiographical In the Days of Thy Youth with the novel Do I Wake or Sleep (1946). Set in springsaturated New York City in 1939, and told through the intense consciousness of a young Millicent Munroe, the book skillfully compares midwest, New York City, and European sensitivities, moving around the character of a woman whose retarded child is trapped in Nazi Austria. The Christmas Tree (1949), published first in part in The New Yorker, compares the inescapably selfdestructive lives of New Yorkers of three generations with the world going to smash in 1945. The special insight into aging and age that Miller was able to incorporate into her novels is strongly moving in Many Mansions (1952), whose protagonist is the eighty-four-year-old New Yorker, Miss Sylvester. On the day that Truman gave approval for development of the H-bomb, she is reviewing a manuscript she has written revealing a long-held secret love affair and child given up for adoption in her youth. The book gives what must be an intensely realistic picture of a day in the life of an elderly, creative, dying person. Memories of the 19th century and the two world wars of the 20th century merge and conflict, while physical difficulties and the present day interrupt the mind’s sorting. The Whirligig of Time (1971), Miller’s last novel, depicts even more skillfully that combination of memory and desire that her elderly characters exude. Before the scheduled reunion of ‘‘Old David Hare’’ and ‘‘Old Blanche Willoughby’’ after over fifty years of separation, each thinks backward in time to childhood. Histories of mistaken marriages, desertion, deception, affairs, and passions come filtered through the years of their aging. Miller’s slim volumes of fiction deserve appreciative readers and scholars. In a 1971 interview, at age eighty-eight, Miller described her admiration for Virginia Woolf, Flannery O’Connor, and Joyce Carol Oates. ‘‘I care a good deal for style.’’ ‘‘When in doubt, delete.’’ I ‘‘fear that too many books try to say too much’’—these statements by Miller could be her literary epitaph. Diana Trilling in 1966 described Miller’s talent as ‘‘modest’’ and
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‘‘deferential,’’ hard to place in U.S. literary history. Perhaps that means, simply, that the literary history needs rewriting to encompass Miller.
OTHER WORKS: Menagerie (1928). Songs of Infancy, and Other Poems (1928). Without Sanctuary (1932). Intrepid Bird (1934). Give a Guess (1957). All Aboard (1958). A Handful of Flowers (1959). Jungle Journey (1959). Listen—the Birds (1961).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: American Novelists of Today. CA. TCAS. Other references: NYHTB (27 March 1949). NYT (4 April 1975). NYTBR (20 Oct. 1966). PW (5 July 1971). —CAROLYN WEDIN SYLVANDER
MILLER, Vassar Born 19 July 1924, Houston, Texas; died 31 October 1998 Daughter of Jesse G. and Vassar Morrison Miller Vassar Miller kept house for herself and her dog in Houston, Texas. For Miller, born with cerebral palsy, this testifies to an unusual courage and fiercely independent spirit. Miller’s stepmother was the most important person in her childhood and early life. She taught Miller to read, and enabled her to attend junior and senior high school and to earn B.S. and M.A. degrees from the University of Houston. The Wings Press, in Houston, was founded as a vehicle to publish and distribute Miller’s new work. Adam’s Footprint (1956), Miller’s first collection of poems, marked the appearance of an accomplished lyric poet. Miller’s peculiar voice is heard in the title poem: ‘‘My bantam brawn could turn them back / My crooked step wrenched straight to kill / Live pods that then screwed tight and still.’’ Howard Nemerov wrote that Miller’s poems were ‘‘at their best brilliant works of language.’’ Miller is a maker of the short lyric, songs singing in words that are worked to the utmost, with rich combinations of meanings. In ‘‘Love Song out of Nothing,’’ Miller speaks of the ‘‘Mirage. . .formed from the crooked hear waves of my thought,’’ minus which the poet is ‘‘nothing but a nought.’’ Without her poems, the poet is nothing; and yet even from this nought she sang a strange convoluted love song to her muse. In the poem ‘‘Waste of Breath,’’ Miller writes of ‘‘waging war with paper pistols.’’ In ‘‘Spastic Child,’’ she writes of a boy whose ‘‘tongue. . . / Is locked so minnows of his wit may never / Leap playing in our waterspouts of words, / . . .his mind, bright bird, forever trapped in silence.’’ The confessional aspects of Miller’s poetry become more pronounced with each new volume. Meditative, religious, rebellious, anguished, angry, subdued, and quiet, Miller’s poems are
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suffused with learned acceptance. With Miller’s ‘‘small emphasis’’ and her ‘‘weapons of words,’’ but most especially with her ‘‘one two three four / clink clank this small change of being,’’ Miller sings something rare—songs that bear hearing over and over.
OTHER WORKS: Wage War On Silence (1960). My Bones Being Wiser (1963). Onions and Roses (1968). If I Could Sleep Deeply Enough (1974). Small Change (1976). Approaching Nada (1977). Selected and New Poems: 1950-1980 (1981). Open Question (1982). Struggling to Swim on Concrete: Poems (1984). Despite This Flesh: The Disabled in Stories and Poems (edited by Miller, 1985). If I Had Wheels or Love: Collected Poems of Vassar Miller (1991).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brown, S. F., ed., Heart’s Invention: On the Poetry of Vassar Miller (1988). Davy, T. C., ‘‘Benediction of Bone: The Poetry of Vassar Miller, a Psychological Study of the Evolution of Poetic Voice and Self’’ (thesis 1990). Howe, F., ed., No More Masks! An Anthology of 20th-Century American Women Poets, Newly Revised and Expanded (1993). Jones, W. H., ‘‘Mystic of the Bruising Thing,’’ A Study of the Mystical in the Poetry of Vassar Miller (thesis 1996). Miller, N. J., ‘‘Aloneness, Suffering, and Faith: A Study of Themes in the Poetry of Vassar Miller’’ (thesis 1989). Saylors, R., ed., Liquid City (1987). Tyler, B., Life of a Poet (1994). Wade, S., Her Own Dilemma: Vassar Miller (1984). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the Untied States (1995). WA. Other references: American Book Review (Oct. 1991). Christian Century (1997). Houston Chronicle (2 Feb. 1975). Sam Houston Literary Review (Nov. 1977). Houston Post (26 Jan. 1969). Kenyon Review (1958). NYTBR (22 Dec. 1968). —LORENE POUNCEY
MILLETT, Kate Born 14 September 1934, St. Paul, Minnesota Daughter of James and Helen Feely Millett; married Fumio Yoshimura, 1965 (divorced 1975) The second of three daughters, Kate Millett attended parochial schools in St. Paul. Her father, a contractor, abandoned the family when Millett was fourteen. Her mother took a job selling insurance, and the girls helped support the family. Millett graduated from the University of Minnesota, magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, in 1956. She studied literature for two years at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, and earned first honors. She began her teaching career at the Women’s College of the University of North Carolina. In 1961 she moved to Japan where she continued
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teaching English and sculpted. In 1968 Millett was hired to teach at Barnard College, and began work on a Ph.D. in English and comparative literature at Columbia, where she received a doctoral degree with distinction in 1970. Since receiving her degree, she has taught as an instructor and visiting professor at several schools, including Bryn Mawr (1970), Sacramento State University (1973), University of California at Berkeley, Extension College (1974), SUNY Stonybrook (1997), and New York University (1998). Millett’s activism in the causes of women’s liberation and student rights led to the loss of her teaching post at Barnard College in December of her first year. However, a speech delivered to a women’s group at Cornell became the germ of her doctoral thesis. This thesis may be considered the first major literary criticism of the new, or second wave of feminism. She sets forth the postulate that the oppression of women is essentially political, and then discredits religious, literary, philosophical, and ‘‘scientific’’ constructs erected by male supremacists to justify their advantage. A second section documents the feminist revolution and male chauvinist counterrevolution in the history of ideas, and the third section exposes the phallic supremacism of three modern male literary idols: D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer. Finally Millett sets up Jean Genet, the French homosexual writer, as master social critic who reverses every status hierarchy in Western culture, including that of masculine and feminine. After receiving her Ph.D. in August, 1970, Millett’s thesis was published by Doubleday. It sold 80,000 copies in the first six months of publication. Titled Sexual Politics, her work brought feminism to the forefront of cultural discussion. With the media both praising and lambasting the book and its author, Millett and her work became a reification of ‘‘women’s lib.’’ The Prostitution Papers (1971, revised 1976) began as a chapter for Vivian Gornick’s Woman in a Sexist Society (1971). Millett edited oral narratives from two prostitutes and a feminist lawyer, and added an essay of her own arguing how prostitution is only one salient example of the ways in which femaleness has been reduced to a commodity. Millett called the chapter ‘‘a quartet in four voices,’’ and had four statements printed side by side in columns; but when the chapter was published separately as a book, the experimental layout was abandoned. The 1976 edition includes Millett’s firsthand account of the 1975 French prostitutes’ revolt. Millett’s experience with spoken language led her to produce and direct the film Three Lives, the biographical accounts of three women’s lives, and inspired her fourth book. Frankly confessional, Flying (1974) was Millett’s response to the enforced twodimensionality of being created as a media feminist and showed her need to bring together disparate private and public selves. Originally planned as a scholarly treatise in defense of homosexuality, this book became instead a supremely vulnerable book about Millett’s own sexuality, her work, her feelings, her friends, and the feminist movement. Using the writing of the book itself as a framework, Millett intercuts scenes from other periods of her life, giving the effect of a sculptural assemblage.
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Another largely autobiographical account is Going to Iran (1982), a little-noted account of Millett’s experiences in this country during some of the most turbulent months of the Iranian Revolution. Her primary interest throughout is the evolving status of women, which she observes as having deteriorated markedly from what began as a popular revolution dissolved into fundamentalist reaction. Imbued with the penetrating insight and critical awareness emblematic of Millett’s work, Going to Iran offers a poignant and disturbing perspective on the myriad issues confronting contemporary Iranian women. Predictably, Millett was viewed with considerable suspicion and animosity by Iranian authorities, and thus, for political reasons, was officially detained and ultimately deported. Her seventh publication, The Loony-Bin Trip (1990) concerns her ordeals as a psychiatric patient forced, on multiple occasions, to suffer the trauma and indignities of involuntary hospitalization. Because of the nature of the work, Millett had trouble finding a publisher and waited five years to publish the charged personal account. One of its greatest strengths lies in the unflinching honesty with which Millett portrays the inner workings of her mind as she endured not only her manic-depressive disorder, but also the well-intended though nonetheless devastating treatment she received at the hands of family, friends, and physicians. Turning her attentions once again to social injustice in much the same way she did with Sexual Politics, The Politics of Cruelty: An Essay on the Literature of Political Imprisonment (1994) seeks to expose and understand torture of political prisoners. Millett examines political hierarchy and state power in torture literature, both to bring the individual stories of pain and humiliation into the common consciousness, and to demonstrate how powerless the individual has become against the absolute power of the state. Millett explains ‘‘We’re not even awake to the fact that hundreds of years of tedious, hard won guarantees and protections are being lost in this century at the very time when we also have more human rights groups.’’ Analyzing torture as a wielding of patriarchal force and oppression through state terrorism, particularly in South America, Millett ‘‘would love this book to be the beginning of not just a study of this form of literature but a study of the real growing dangers of state control, of the danger involved when churches and religions formulate political policy.’’ In addition to her writing, Millett is an accomplished visual artist whose sculpture and painting have frequently been exhibited in cities throughout the United States. Her capacity for obsession drives her visual art. For 10 years, Millett sculpted almost nothing but cages, her response to a newsmagazine article about the murder of a sixteen-year-old girl by her female guardian and a group of kids. In 1978 Millett formed a cooperative artists’ colony at her farm in Poughkeepsie, New York, which she continues to operate. Women artists, including writers, sculptors, photographers, and painters, all receive studio space in exchange for their contributions to the maintenance of the colony. Millett lectures on feminism and human issues, and through these diverse means, continues her efforts to raise public consciousness of persisting social injustices and contribute to the continued elevation in the quality of women’s lives. A pacifist and international feminist
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activist, her politics are frequently denigrated and her works sometimes harshly reviewed in the major press. Nonetheless, her influence is pervasive, and a generation of feminist writers has taken her for its model. She has set a standard for powerful feminist criticism, social activism, and provoked reevaluation of confessional and journal writing as artistic literary forms. OTHER WORKS: Token Learning (1967). Sita (1977). The Basement: Meditations on a Human Sacrifice (1979). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cohen, M., The Sisterhood (1988). Jelinek, E., ed., The Traditions of Women’s Autobiography: From Antiquity to the Present (1986). Mills, S., et al, Feminist Readings/Feminists Reading (1989). Moi, T., Sexual/Textual Politics (1985). Reference works: CA (1978, 1991). CLC (1992). FC (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Belles Lettres (interview, Spring 1995). Chrysalis (1977, 1978). Harper’s (1970). Ms. (1974, March 1988, May 1988). NYTBR (3 June 1990). WRB (Oct. 1990). —FRIEDA L. WERDEN, UPDATED BY JULIET BYINGTON
MILWARD, Maria G. Born circa 1810s; death date unknown Although there is no available biographical information about Maria G. Milward, the fact that she twice signed her stories ‘‘Mrs.’’ suggests she was married. Her stories occur in contemporary rural and urban settings and reveal the author’s familiarity with the details of both worlds. Accompanying each of Milward’s stories is a note of her current residence: Macon, Georgia, in 1839; Savannah, in 1840; other places in Georgia and Alabama later. Milward’s stories suggest that she had a broad education in literature and at least a familiarity with science, geography, and history. She seems to have read widely, and her comparisons reveal a knowledge of classical mythology and of the world beyond Georgia and the south. Milward’s work is consistently well-observed and elegantly composed, showing little change between 1839 and 1846. The intelligence behind the tales is quick-witted, humorous, and lively, ranging from satire to sympathy while consistently avoiding the flaws of her sentimental female contemporaries. Milward has a fine eye for detail and characterization. ‘‘The Bachelor Beset; or, The Rival Candidates’’ (Southern Literary Messenger, Nov. 1839), a study of a spinster’s sudden interest in a confirmed bachelor who finally eludes her by running ‘‘off to Texas,’’ is a moving and humorous exploration of Miss Betsey Bud, of whom Milward writes: ‘‘. . . age seemed to have dried up every avenue to the tender passion in the heart of Miss Betsey; it was believed that the fire of her juvenile days had burnt out, and though its violence had been extreme, all now regarded her as an extinct volcano.’’ Milward notes with similar imaginative humor
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the plants in Mr. Singlesides’ garden—stiff boxwood, bachelor’s hat, southernwood (or old man) abound, while he allots a separate area for lady slippers, maiden’s blush, and heart’s ease. Forced to acknowledge Miss Bud, the bachelor ‘‘waved his hand with an action somewhat resembling the motions of a dead body under the effects of a galvanic battery.’’ Milward also has an ear for witty and natural conversation. She even reproduces dialect convincingly in ‘‘The Yellow Blossom of Glynn’’ (Southern Literary Messenger, July 1840), a tale of rough rural folk and the misunderstandings that are finally resolved in several marriages. Milward explores a young man’s perspective in ‘‘The Winter Nights’ Club ’’ (Southern Literary Messenger, Jan. 1843), in which Reginald Braithwaite finally decides to tolerate no longer the offhand manner of the coquette for whom he thinks he cares. Reevaluating his view of her rival, Hortensia Hurst, he marries her with real love. Milward’s understanding of young men also informs ‘‘Mrs. Sad’s Private Boarding House,’’ in which the pathetic country bumpkin, Edgar Fairchild, comes to the city to seek his fortune and fails. Milward is at her best when writing in the first person from the point of view of a young woman with whose sensibility we sympathize but who, like Jane Austen’s heroines, does not see so clearly as the reader until the end of the tale. The narrator of ‘‘Country Annals’’ is a realistic and compelling character whose humor and clear-sightedness obscure the story’s simple plot and emphasize the vividness of the local scenes. ‘‘Country Annals’’— a sustained two-part tale of sixteen chapters and Milward’s finest work—may be autobiographical; its young female narrator of modest means lived with a benevolent uncle in rural comfort, observing the surrounding countryfolk and landowners, and finally marrying a wealthy gentleman from the city. Still, Milward’s literary skills are such that she is able to explore various characters with affection and penetration and she need not have written directly from her own experience. Milward finally charms the modern reader, who might, however, have difficulty locating her work, for her six stories appear only in the Southern Literary Messenger. —CAROLINE ZILBOORG
MINER, Valerie Born 28 August 1947, New York, New York Daughter of John D. and Mary McKenzie Miner Journalist, novelist, essayist, editor, and critic—Valerie Miner could be any one of her main characters. They are all a type of everywoman—Liz, Susan, Beth, Polly, Teddy, Anne, Gerry— who mirror not only Miner’s life, but the life and struggle of many women. Educated at the University of California at Berkeley (B.A. 1969) where she also earned a graduate degree in journalism
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(M.A. 1970), Miner’s accomplishments include a founding membership in the National Feminist Writers Guild, a position on the board of directors of Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media, a lengthy teaching career including many at UCBerkeley, and a score of awards including the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. Miner’s dedication to political causes, especially feminism, is reflected in her fiction as well as her career. Her characters are fiercely independent, fiercely political and, for the most part, fiercely alone. And these women need to be ferocious, for they must weather wars, terrorism, exile, imprisonment, marriage, divorce, and complex relationships, both heterosexual and lesbian. Each situation, each relationship is approached with hope and trepidation. Sometimes, all the women are left with is their hope and fear; but the perseverance to change their world survives. Perseverance is indeed the legacy left to Liz and Beth, daughters of the Irish-born twin sisters, Polly and Gerry, in Blood Sisters: An Examination of Conscience (1981). Liz and Beth, although only cousins, are mirror images of each other; their twinning going beyond biological ties is established in blood, the bloodshed from IRA bombings in England. War of a different kind challenges the perseverance of the bonds of women in All Good Women (1987). A desire for careers and independence is what brings Teddy, Ann, Moira, and Wanda together in the first place. But the endurance not only of their friendship but also of their dreams is tested by U.S. involvement in World War II and the internment of Wanda, a Japanese-American. Ann cannot sit still with the knowledge that some of her family in Europe may be the victims of concentration camps and sets off to work with war orphans in London. Teddy and Moira are left to handle their own personal struggles with the war effort at home, in addition to the realization and consummation of their feelings for each other. Miner takes on a whole host of social issues aside from those related to war: the lesbian lifestyle, pregnancy and birth outside of marriage, women living on their own and working in maledominated jobs, sexual harassment. The bond of the four women is what sustains them all, much as the bond of blood and kin sustains Liz, Polly, and Beth, despite the death of Gerry and the imprisonment of Beth. Winter’s Edge (1984) is somewhat of a departure from the above novels in that the focus is on a couple—two elderly women, Chrissie and Margaret—whose bond survives Margaret’s flirtations with men, Chrissie’s jealousy, Margaret’s passiveness, and Chrissie’s activism. The reader sees the world of San Francisco, replete with dirty politics, greedy developers, and bombings, through the eyes of each woman. If the novel reads like a mystery for senior citizens, perhaps Miner’s previously published novel, Murder in the English Department (1982), is responsible for her further experimentation with the genre. The title conjures up an old-fashioned scholarly atmosphere, but the reality of the setting and plot focuses on violence, not only physical, but the emotional kind that can undermine reputation and self-confidence. The reader follows Nan Weaver as she is implicated in the murder of a university colleague, and is treated to a good dose of examples of sexual harassment and tenure woes.
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In another kind of examination of the academic world, Competition: A Feminist Taboo (1987), coedited with Helen Longino, Miner explores the one area of female experience that is steeped in denial. Aimed specifically at academia, the collection of essays examines what happens to sisterhood in atmospheres dictating rivalry. Rumors from the Cauldron: Selected Essays, Reviews, and Reportage (1992) looks back on Miner’s career, pulling together various writings in order to report on her own development as a writer and a woman. As in Competition, she examines sisterhood and its endurance in the face of career and art, but in Tales rivalry cedes to sisterhood in the last section of the book where Miner reviews the work of other women writers, taking care to spotlight those who are lesser known. It is clear from this book that, indeed, Miner has been on an odyssey of her own and has more than merely survived. Miner’s seventh work of fiction, A Walking Fire: A Novel (1994), is based on Shakespeare’s King Lear, told from Cordelia’s perspective. The novel follows the life of Cora with short clips jumping between her college days in the late 1960s, when she was involved with protesting the Vietnam Conflict, and 1988 when she returns from Canada to care for her ailing father. Miner focuses on family relationships through a lens of liberal political commentary. Range of Light (1998) is Miner’s latest novel, again with a strong undercurrent of liberal feminist agenda. The book is set in the High Sierras, where two women meet to hike for a 25year reunion from their elementary school friendship. One woman is a lesbian; the other heterosexual. The book is less successful, as the Kirkus Review commented that ‘‘Miner’s obvious feminist agenda adds unwelcome weight to an already overly portentous tale.’’ Miner continues to teach at the University of Minnesota in the Department of English, and frequently travels for speaking engagements. She was awarded the Fulbright Senior Scholar Award to India for 2000. OTHER WORKS: Her Own Woman (with M. Kostash et al., 1975). Tales I Tell My Mother (with Z. Fairbairns et al., 1978). More Tales I Tell My Mother (1987). Trespassing and Other Stories (1989). Movement, A Novel in Stories (1982). Songs My Mother Taught Me: Stories, Plays, and Memoir (editor, 1994). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1981, 1999). CLC (1986). FC (1990). Other references: KR (15 May 1994, 1 March 1988). New Statesman (24 July 1981). NYTBR (19 Jan. 1986, 22 Aug. 1987). PW (9 July 1982, 27 Sept. 1985, 11 Sept. 1987, 7 Aug. 1987, 8 Aug. 1986). TLS (17 July 1981, 5 Nov. 1982, 27 July 1984, 12 July 1989). WRB (April 1986, Dec. 1986, Nov. 1987, March 1988). Web site: ‘‘Valerie Miner,’’ available online at: http://english.cla.umn.edu/Faculty/Miner/Miner.htm, University of Minnesota (9 June 1999). —LINDA BERUBE, UPDATED BY CARRIE SNYDER
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MINOT, Susan Born 7 December 1956, Manchester, Massachusetts Daughter of Carrie and George R. Minot; married Davis McHenry, 1988 A short story writer and novelist, Susan Minot earned critical acclaim and success with her first novel, Monkeys (1986). The semiautobiographical work drew on Minot’s own experience growing up in a large, middle-class American family. But she has made it clear that Monkeys is fiction, not a memoir. Monkeys chronicles various moments in the lives of the Vincent family: the father, Gus, the mother, Rosie, and their seven children (lovingly called ‘‘monkeys’’ by their mother). The story is told over a span of 13 years (1966-79) primarily by Sophie, the second-oldest child. The novel follows the family as the children grow up, their father slips deeper into his alcoholism, and their mother dies. The book is a series of interconnected stories, seven of which were previously published as short stories. Each chapter revolves around one incident that either endangers the family union or reaffirms it. While each chapter is complete in itself, they are tied together as a whole by frequent allusions. Monkeys has been both praised and criticized. Those who sing its praises compare Minot’s economical yet detailed writing style in the novel to Hemingway, Woolfe, Faulkner, and Salinger. They point to her ability to so wonderfully capture those moments, both mundane and miraculous, that make up family life. And they extol her conveyance of life in a large family through such details as mitten baskets hanging by the back door and wobbly children’s tables at Thanksgiving. Those who are more critical of Monkeys focus on its makeup (nine short stories assembled into a novel) and its brevity (176 pages). After the success of Monkeys, Minot told New Yorker magazine that her life ‘‘had sort of gotten complicated. . . . I had lost my connection to writing.’’ So she left her New York City home and spent the next three months secluded in Tuscany, Italy, working on her second book. Lust and Other Stories (1988), a collection of 12 short stories, focuses on the relationships of a number of young New York City professionals. The book received mixed reviews. Born and raised in a suburb north of Boston, Minot, like the Vincent children, grew up with six brothers and sisters. She was the second oldest. She began writing at thirteen when she went away to Concord Academy, a boarding school, and joined the staff of the literary magazine. She attended Boston University from 1974-75 and graduated from Brown University with a B.A. in English in 1978. During her senior year at Brown, Minot’s mother was killed in a car accident. After graduating, Minot returned home to take care of her father and younger sister. She continued to write, and at twenty-two she enrolled in the M.F.A. graduate writing program at Columbia University. The first short stories she sold (to Grand Street and the New Yorker) later became part of Monkeys. During her career, Minot has an editorial assistant at the New York Review of Books, an assistant editor at Grand Street, taught
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writing workshops at Columbia, and became an adjunct professor at New York University. She has also earned a living as a waitress and a bookstore clerk. Her awards and honors include the Prix Femina in 1988 for Monkeys, the O. Henry award from the Texas Institute of Letters in 1985 and 1988, and the Pushcart Prize for the Best of the Small Presses. Minot’s newest work again revolves around family relationships. In Evening (1998), Ann Lord, a sixty-five-year-old woman dying of cancer, vividly relives a weekend affair with the greatest love of her life, all the while her grown children gather around her deathbed thinking their mother’s mind is blank. Minot once told a reporter ‘‘I haven’t figured out how to write about things I don’t have some contact with.’’ Evening, which she worked on for more than a year before even deciding on a story, point of view, or length, started out as a novella titled ‘‘Report from Nurse Brown.’’ This shorter story survives as a chapter in the novel. Minot says the book became a ‘‘meditation’’ of what it must feel like to gradually die. She says part of the reason for writing Evening was watching her grandmother slowly die. She wanted to ‘‘put myself in the mind of someone who was lying there knowing that she was going to die.’’ The reviews of the book have been overwhelmingly positive. Minot was also working on a screen adaptation of Evening for Disney. This is not her first foray into scriptwriting: she also wrote the screenplay for Bernardo Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty. She has a collection of short stories almost complete and has started another book, tentatively titled My Life with No One, about a young man in search of his soul. OTHER WORKS: Folly (1994). BIBLIOGRAPHY: CA (1992). CLC 44 (1987). Lewis, J., ‘‘Imagining the End,’’ in Los Angeles Weekly (26 Nov. 1998). —KATHY HENDERSON
MIRIKITANI, Janice Born 5 February 1942, Stockton, California Daughter of Ted and BelleAnne Matsuda Mirikitani; married Cecil Williams, 1982; children: Tianne Poet, editor, anthologist, teacher, choreographer, and political activist, Janice Mirikitani is an important figure in the Asian American community and in the literary world. A third-generation Japanese American whose grandparents emigrated from Hiroshima, incarcerated at birth with her family in the Rohwer, Arkansas, concentration camp during World War II, Mirikitani has spoken out with persuasive and lyrical militancy against racism, violence, and containment. She has urged others, particularly women of color, to shed their silences and find the power of collective voice.
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Mirikitani received her B.A. cum laude from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1962 and her teaching credentials from the University of California at Berkeley in 1963. She taught English, speech, and dance at the Contra Costa Unified School District (1964-65) and enrolled in graduate studies in creative writing at San Francisco State University, where she was later (1972) a lecturer in Japanese American literature and creative writing. In 1966 Mirikitani began work at the Glide Church/Urban Center in San Francisco. Since becoming program director there in 1969, she has overseen meal and housing projects, rape and abuse recovery programs for women, and a volunteer program offering computer services to the poor and homeless. She was elected president of the Glide Foundation in 1983. Mirikitani has been involved in efforts for reparations for Japanese Americans who were interned during World War II and she has served on many Bay Area boards, including the Zellerbach Community Arts Distribution Committee and the United Tenderloin Community Fund. With her husband, Rev. Cecil Williams, she compiled a book of children’s writings on the crack cocaine crisis, I Have Something to Say about This Big Trouble: Children of the Tenderloin Speak Out (1989). She has also choreographed and produced more than 35 dance productions with social themes. These include ‘‘A Tribute to King’’; ‘‘Who Among the Missing’’ (in honor of Central Americans missing, tortured, and imprisoned); ‘‘Hiroshima, California,’’ an antiwar statement with had a national tour; ‘‘Lonnie’s Song,’’ which focuses on a community of people affected by the AIDS crisis; and ‘‘Revealing Secrets, Releasing Fear,’’ dances and poetry about addiction, incest, and recovery. Mirikitani’s writing, like her community work, is largely informed by her history and her politics. Committed to helping Third World and women artists and writers to publish, Mirikitani has served as an editor for several magazines and anthologies, including Aion Magazine (which she founded in 1970); Time to Greeze!: Incantations from the Third World (1975); Ayumi: A Japanese American Anthology (1980); and Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings by and about Asian American Women (1989). She also published two collections of her own poetry and prose, Awake in the River (1978, reissued 1982) and Shedding Silence (1987, recorded 1988), and her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, textbooks, magazines, and journals in the U.S. and Japan. In pieces dedicated to war veterans and to comrade sisters, in poems written in response to the assassinations of Steve Biko and of Orlando Letelier, and in remembrance of relatives, Mirikitani speaks out against legally sanctioned racism and brutality. She links the devastation of Hiroshima with Vietnam and the internment camp at Tule Lake, and further connects war atrocities with such assaults and invasions as sexual harassment, child molestation, incest, rape, and battering (see ‘‘Zipper,’’ ‘‘Tomatoes,’’ ‘‘The Winner,’’ ‘‘Crazy Alice,’’ and ‘‘Spoils of War’’). She also writes of racial exoticization, cultural misogyny, and self-erasure (‘‘Doreen,’’ ‘‘Recipes,’’ ‘‘Suicide Note’’). Other poems note the injunction to women of color to bleach their stories, starch their thoughts, and curb desire (‘‘Healthy Choices’’), and the cost of
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political passivity and silence. In a second version of ‘‘Spoils of War,’’ included in Shedding Silence, Mirikitani powerfully links racism, colonialism, and the militarization of people’s consciousness with misogyny and violent sexuality in the story of the rape and mutilation of a young woman by a Vietnam veteran. Mirikitani’s writings, however, are not about victimization as much as they are about survival, rebirth, and affirmation of self. While many remain silent about their violent pasts, Mirikitani refuses to bow to a history of violation; instead, she voices her anger and acts for change. In ‘‘Shedding Silence,’’ a dramatic presentation that developed out of the agitation propaganda theater of the 1960s, Mirikitani uses the image of a discarded obi to symbolize rejection of the containment of women and of prescriptions for ‘‘proper’’ (traditional Japanese, feminine) behavior and writing. Not fearful or powerless, not quiet or demure, she takes memory and creativity as her weapons and becomes a word warrior, deftly wielding her pen to rewrite Japanese American women’s roles (see especially ‘‘Without Tongue’’ and ‘‘Slaying Dragon Ladies’’). She is, she affirms, a ‘‘saboteur of stereotypes’’ (‘‘Who Is Singing this Song?’’). Recognizing that real power lies not in oppression but in sharing, Mirikitani celebrates legacies of strength and claims her place among generations of Asian American women and their ‘‘loud, yellow’’ and ‘‘dangerous’’ protest against injustices and violence (‘‘Generations of Women,’’ ‘‘Prisons of Silence’’). As she writes in ‘‘Breaking Silence’’: ‘‘We must recognize ourselves at last. / We are a rainforest of color and noise.’’ Difficult though it may be for women of color to break free of ‘‘prisons of silence,’’ it is important, Mirikitani insists, to ‘‘give testimony,’’ for, as she says repeatedly, ‘‘We survive by hearing.’’ Direct, vitally angry, and politically impassioned, Mirikitani breaks taboos, writing against expectations of her as a woman and as an Asian American to speak decorously. Without apology, diminution, self-deprecation, or conciliation, she validates her voice and places its power, its passion, and its rage in the context of large and violent truths. While some have found her writings too angry and blunt, many have felt empowered by her explosive poetry and prose and her clear political commitment. In all that she does, Mirikitani insists on the collective power of voice and vows to do her part to stop violence: ‘‘Count our numbers, / harvest our strength, / breathe between the rain. / We shall not go into their camps again.’’ In recognition of the exceptional commitment and impact of her writings and her life work, Mirikitani received the Woman Warrior in Arts and Culture award from the Pacific Asian American Women Bay Area Coalition (1983). She was also honored, along with Alice Walker, Alice Adams, Judy Grahn, Josephine Miles, and Tillie Olsen, with the Woman of Words Award (1985). In 1988 she and her husband received the University of California at San Francisco Chancellor’s Medal of Honor. The California State Assembly named her Woman of the Year in the 17th Assembly District (1988), and she was the recipient in 1990 of the Outstanding Leadership award of the Japanese Community Youth Council.
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OTHER WORKS: Breaking Free: A Glide Songbook (1989). We, the Dangerous: New Selected Poems (1995). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Benatovich, B., ed., What We Know So Far: Wisdom Among Women (1996). Harris, M., and K. Aguero, eds., A Gift of Tongues (1987). Howe, F., ed., No More Masks! An Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Women Poets, Newly Revised and Expanded (1993). Kim, E. H., Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context (1982). Leong, R., Why is Preparing a Fish a Political Act: Poetry of Janice Mirikitani (video, 1990). Mullaney, J. P., ed., Truthtellers of the Times: Interviews with Contemporary Women Poets (1998). Salvin, C. K., ‘‘Exploring Asian American Literary Style: Janice Mirikitani and Ronyoung Kim’’ (thesis 1994). Trudeau, L. J., ed., Asian American Literature: Reviews and Criticism of Works by American Writers of Asian Descent (1999). Yamamoto, T., Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American Women, Identity, and the Body (1999). Yep, L., ed., American Dragons: Twenty-Five Asian American Voices (1995). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Ayumi, Making Waves. Feminist Studies (Fall 1988). Heath Anthology of American Literature (1990). Janice Mirikitani (video, 1989).
Hawthorne Glen,’’ motherless Mary Warner, spoiled by her goodhearted governess who neglects her religious training, reads light fiction and finally visits a gypsy caravan, losing there her diamond engagement ring. ‘‘Ever the child of impulse,’’ Mary does at last reform and is forgiven at the story’s conclusion. Mitchell is also fond of irreligious young men; in ‘‘Carra’s Rest,’’ William Murray unwisely reads Cartesian philosophy; his sister strives to recover him from ‘‘delusion’’ but fails. She dies of grief, but William vows reform at her funeral. In ‘‘Frederick Gordon,’’ the central character, a passionate, frivolous young man, fails the woman who loves him, marrying instead Corinna, who turns out to be poor and then dies. Devastated, Gordon shoots himself, and Mitchell spares us no details in her vivid description of his body ‘‘all mangled and bloody.’’ Although Mitchell’s work lacks technical elegance, she seems to be aware of literary art and sensitive to language. Her tales are clearly structured; Mitchell repeatedly begins with a scene, then introduces a substantial flashback, only returning to the present at the story’s end. Her originality stems from her impressive capturing of Scottish dialects, for her characters speak with charming local syntax and vocabulary. Certainly Mitchell’s frequently simple tales and predominately narrative poems are didactic and even moralistic, but their interest for the modern reader lies essentially in their elements of local color. —CAROLINE ZILBOORG
—ANN E. REUMAN
MITCHELL, Margaret MITCHELL, Agnes Woods Born circa 1810s, Scotland; death date unknown In the preface to her only book, The Smuggler ’s Son, and Other Tales and Sketches (1842), Agnes Woods Mitchell suggests the only details of her life available today. She defends the settings of her stories and poems as the realistic result of her ‘‘Celtic’’ childhood. Evidently born in Scotland, Mitchell seems to have been conventionally Presbyterian and relatively comfortable. The preface is dated 1842, Jonesboro, Tennessee, and while Mitchell maintains fierce Scottish loyalties, she apparently thinks of herself as an American author writing for an American public, even comparing a beautiful Highland landscape with ‘‘Florida’s gardens’’ in ‘‘The Bride of Hawthorne Glen.’’ Mitchell refers to the works in The Smuggler’s Son as her ‘‘first fruits,’’ and the sometimes vivid stories alternating with unremarkable verse substantiate her implied roughness. However, Mitchell takes responsibility for her writing and emphasizes that the book ‘‘was written chiefly with a view to the improvement of the young’’ and that, despite aesthetic defects, it contains ‘‘instruction with amusement.’’ Mitchell offers spoiled, misguided, but likeable heroines who reform and generally marry well. In the title tale, Roderick M’Alpine, the son of Caledonian rustics, finally marries the wealthy orphan, Jane Rutherford, after he has shown her the discipline of education. Similarly, in ‘‘The Bride of
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Born 11 November 1900, Atlanta, Georgia; died 11 August 1949, Atlanta, Georgia Daughter of Eugene M. and Maybelle Stephens Mitchell; married John R. Marsh, 1925 Margaret Mitchell lived in Atlanta all her life, as had her parents and grandparents. Both parents were authorities on Georgian and Southern history, especially the Civil War. Her brother edited the Atlantic Historical Bulletin. In 1922 Mitchell began working as a professional writer for the Atlanta Journal, where she quickly gained a reputation as a talented and disciplined writer with an imaginative and witty style. Mitchell never completely comprehended the phenomenal success of Gone with the Wind (1936), feeling it had no philosophic merit or moral value. Nor did she ever completely recover from its success; unlike many novelists who achieve recognition with their first attempt, Mitchell declared she would never write again—and she didn’t. Gone with the Wind is a highly authentic historical novel. It has been praised for its accurate portrayal of black vernacular and of the period in general. Its four main characters have obtained archetypal stature; like mythic gods and goddesses, they show us how we live and teach us how to survive. Scarlett O’Hara is the protagonist, regardless of what the author has said elsewhere. For it is Scarlett whom we see in the opening pages as a vibrant, young
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creature with great strength of character. It is Scarlett, after three husbands, three children, and many trials, who has survived at the novel’s end. However, this survival has cost Scarlett her dream. Legend has it Mitchell wrote the last chapter first, then the first chapter, and thereafter wrote in no particular chronological order. This is particularly significant from a psychological viewpoint. Mitchell is saying—either consciously or unconsciously— that we remain essentially unchanged by the events that touch our external lives—we are slaves to our earliest childhood experiences. In the last pages, Scarlett achieves a single moment of heightened awareness with enough insight to reflect on how little we really know those who are closest to us: ‘‘Had she ever understood Ashley, she would never have loved him; had she ever understood Rhett, she would never have lost him.’’ But with that, she reverts even further back into her memories where life was once safe and secure. Scarlett refuses to be controlled either by men or by circumstance. Her ability to assert herself in the face of social adversity wins our hearts and we root for her as she strikes a blow for the liberation of women. Yet the nature of survival is twofold: whereas one may survive in the physical world, there is still the problem of the psyche to contend with. And in this sense Scarlett fails to survive; she never succeeds in transcending adolescent experience. Given Mitchell’s ambiguity toward her characters and the success of her novel, it is not surprising that Gone with the Wind has been relegated to the category of juvenile literature. OTHER WORKS: Gone with the Wind Letters, 1936-1949 (edited by R.B. Harwell, 1976). The Margaret Mitchell Collection is housed at the University of Georgia. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Edwards, A., The Road to Tara (1983). Pyron, D. A., Southern Daughter (1991). Farr, F., Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta (1965). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine (18 Dec. 1949). Collier’s (Mar. 1937). New Republic (16 Sept. 1936). NYHTB (5 July 1936). NYTBR (5 July 1936). Pictorial Review (Mar. 1937). Red Barrel (Sept. 1936). Saturday Review (4 July 1936). —LINDA LUDWIG
MITCHELL, Maria Born 1 August 1818, Nantucket Island, Massachusetts; died 28 June 1889, Lynn, Massachusetts Daughter of William and Lydia Coleman Mitchell Maria Mitchell was born in Massachusetts on the island of Nantucket, the second daughter and third of 10 children of Lydia
and William Mitchell. Her ancestors were members of the Society of Friends who had migrated from England to America. Encouraged by several factors, astronomer Mitchell pursued an unconventional life pattern for a 19th-century woman. Her Quaker background, a mother who had worked in two libraries in order to read all the books they contained, a father with a passion for astronomy and an unswerving belief that a girl’s education should be comparable to those given to boys, and a geographical location that stimulated the study of natural phenomena all combined to encourage Mitchell to follow her passion for mathematics and astronomy. As the first woman astronomer, Mitchell was also the first woman scientist to gain international recognition, and she was one of very few scientists to be known by people outside her field. As a child, Mitchell was insatiably curious. After attending local private elementary schools from the age of four, she enrolled in a school run by her father. His was a remarkable institution where observation of nature predominated, a pedagogy that Mitchell would later put to good use during her illustrious career at Vassar College. Established in 1827, William Mitchell’s method stressed fieldwork—the collecting of stones, shells, seaweed, and flowers. After William Mitchell gave up his school, Maria was sent to Cyrus Peirce’s school for ‘‘young ladies.’’ Peirce, who later became principal of the first Normal School in the United States, was intrigued by Maria’s mathematical abilities and encouraged her in this area. Although she later insisted that she ‘‘was born of only ordinary capacity, but of extraordinary persistency,’’ Peirce ‘‘saw in her the quality of self-discipline together with the rare insight which makes the difference between a creative life and the prosaic existence of a mere fact collector.’’ At age sixteen the formal education of Maria Mitchell—later the recipient of two honorary LL. D.s and an honorary Ph.D.—ended. On her own, she labored over Bridge’s Conic Sections, Hutton’s Mathematics, and Bowditch’s Practical Navigator. She studied the works of Lagrange, Laplace, and Legendre in French, and she carefully considered Gauss’ Theoria motus corporeum coelestium. In 1835 Maria Mitchell opened her own school. Her pupils were greeted with an unconventional approach to education. School might begin before dawn in order that the students could watch birds. The school day might extend late into the night so they could observe the planets and stars. In 1836 Mitchell was offered the post of librarian at the new Nantucket Athenaeum. This position allowed her time to continue her own studies. On 1 October 1847 Mitchell observed a new comet. When it was established she was, indeed, the first discoverer, the comet was named for her, and she gained worldwide fame when the king of Denmark awarded her a gold medal. With this discovery, Mitchell gained more attention as a leading astronomer in both the U.S. and Europe. As a result of her discovery of the comet, in 1848 Mitchell became the first woman ever elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her name was proposed by Louis Agassiz, the well-known American naturalist and geologist. She also became a member of the newly formed American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1850 and formed a lifelong friendship with Joseph Henry, director of the Smithsonian Institution.
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William Mitchell spent most of his evenings observing the heavens. As his children grew old enough, they became his assistants. Maria learned to operate a sextant at an early age. When she was eighteen, her father began making astronomical observations for the U.S. Coast Survey. Mitchell helped her father with his work and together they made thousands of observations of meridian altitudes of stars for the determination of time and latitude and of moon culminations and occultations for longitude. Mitchell became a computer for the American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac, a post she held for 19 years. In this capacity she made measurements that helped in the accurate determination of time, latitude, and longitude. Nantucket was often visited by famous people, many of whom, like the writer Herman Melville, ‘‘passed the evening with Mr. Mitchell, the astronomer, and his celebrated daughter, the discoverer of comets.’’ An opportunity to travel abroad occurred in 1857 when Mitchell was asked to chaperone the daughter of a wealthy Chicago banker on a trip through Europe. Equipped with letters of introduction, Mitchell seized the opportunity to visit observatories in England and on the Continent. One of the high points of her trip was a meeting with the seventy-seven-old physicist and astronomer, Mary Somerville: ‘‘I could not but admire Mrs. Somerville as a woman. The ascent of the steep and rugged path of science had not unfitted her for the drawing room circle; the hours of devotion to close study have not been incompatible with the duties of wife and mother; the mind that has turned to rigid demonstration has not thereby lost its faith in those truths which figures will not prove.’’ Mitchell’s career turned from a focus on research to teaching when she accepted an offer from Matthew Vassar to become professor of astronomy and director of the observatory at the newly founded Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. Mitchell became an ardent and impassioned proponent of higher education for woman. She considered ridiculous the prevalent view that women were innately unsuited to mathematics and other sciences. Once again her teaching methods were unorthodox. Instead of lectures, of which she heartily disapproved, she stressed small classes and individual attention. Keenly aware of what defined scientific excellence, Mitchell made a deliberate choice to commit herself to teaching rather than to theoretical astronomy. At a time when higher education for women was in its infancy, she decided that her talents would be of most use in this area. Because she was a devoted teacher, her research time was sharply limited. Mitchell, reared on the model of Nantucket women and forced to be independent by her husband’s, son’s, and father’s long absences at sea, taught her students to ‘‘question everything else.’’ She insisted on their learning not by rote but from observation. Her commitment to the higher education of women only increased over time. In 1873 she was a founder of the Association for the Advancement of Women and for two years served as its president; until her death she was chair of its science committee. Year after year, at scientific meetings and A.A.W. congresses and in lectures, she pleaded for a recognition of women’s scientific abilities. In recognition of this breadth of outlook, she was in 1869 elected to the American Philosophical Society—again the first
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woman so honored—and in 1873 was made a vice-president of the American Social Science Association. With her health failing, Mitchell retired from Vassar College on Christmas Day, 1888. She returned to Lynn, Massachusetts, where she died in 1889. Mitchell did not feel she was a theoretician, but rather a teacher and observer. She saw a conflict in trying to do both, remarking that ‘‘the scientist should be free to pursue his investigations. He cannot be a scientist and a schoolmaster.’’ She believed strongly in the value of imagination in science, saying, ‘‘It is not all mathematics, nor all logic but is somewhat beauty and poetry.’’ A crater on the moon was named after her and a society established in her honor—the Maria Mitchell Association of Nantucket, which maintains the Maria Mitchell Observatory. OTHER WORKS: Articles: ‘‘Mary Somerville,’’ Atlantic Monthly 5 (May 1860). ‘‘On Jupiter and its Satellites,’’ American Journal of Science and Arts (1871). ‘‘Astronomical Notes,’’ Scientific American (1876). ‘‘The Need of Women in Science,’’ Association for the Advancement of Women: Papers Read at the Fourth Congress of Women (1876). ‘‘Notes on the Satellites of Saturn,’’ American Journal of Science Arts (1879). ‘‘The Astronomical Science of Milton as Shown in Paradise Lost,’’ Poet-Lore (June 1894). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Kendall, P. M., Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters and Journals (1896). Wright, H., Sweeper in the Sky: The Life of Maria Mitchell (1949). Reference works: American Women in Science (1994). Biographical Encyclopedia of Scientists (1998). Dictionary of Scientific Biography (1974). NAW (1971). Notable Women in the Physical Sciences (1997). Women in Science: Antiquity Through the Nineteenth Century (1986). —CELESTE DEROCHE
MITFORD, Jessica Born 11 September 1917, Batsford Mansion, Gloucestershire, England; died 23 July 1996 Daughter of David and Sydney Bowles Mitford; married Esmond Romilly, 1936; Robert E. Truehaft, 1943 Jessica Mitford was the daughter of the second baron of Redesdale. Her eccentric siblings include Nancy, the biographer; Diana, the wife of fascist Oswald Mosley; and Unity, disciple of Hitler. After receiving a private education at home, Mitford ran away with and married her second cousin, Esmond Romilly, in 1936 to assist the Loyalist cause in Spain. They worked briefly as journalists before returning to England, where Mitford was a market researcher for an advertising agency. Mitford and her husband emigrated to the U.S. in 1939, where each took odd jobs while traveling along the Eastern seaboard. Mitford worked in Washington, D.C., for two years in the Office of Price Administration after Romilly was killed in action
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during World War II. She married a lawyer in 1943, and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1944. After moving to Oakland, California, she worked as executive secretary for the Civil Rights Congress, where she pressed for the investigation into charges of police brutality. In 1973 Mitford was appointed distinguished visiting professor in sociology at San Jose State College, where she taught a class on ‘‘The American Way’’ and a seminar on muckraking.
In addition to her book-length studies, Mitford published extensively in Life, Esquire, Nation, and the San Francisco Chronicle. A staunch supporter of civil liberties, Mitford was often accused of communist sympathies and ‘‘un-American’’ activities. All Mitford’s writings, however, reveal a satirical perspective on the fraud and corruption of organizations that victimize and exploit human beings.
Mitford’s first book, Lifeitselfmanship, was privately published in 1956. Her autobiography, Daughters and Rebels (1960, reprinted 1981), hilariously recounts her childhood and marriage to Romilly. Mitford’s first investigative study, The American Way of Death (1963), exposed the greed and commercialism of the funeral industry. Relying on extensive research and quotations from the industry’s own publications, Mitford satirically deflated the pretentious hypocrisy of such establishments as Forest Lawn Memorial Park. Although the book was viciously denounced by the industry, it was used as the basis for a television documentary.
OTHER WORKS: Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking (1979). Faces of Philip: A Memoir of Philip Toynbee (1984). Grace Had an English Heart (1988). The American Way of Birth (1992). The American Way of Death Revisited (1998).
Mitford’s second investigative study, The Trial of Dr. Spock, William Sloane Coffin Jr., Michael Ferber, Mitchell Goodman, and Marcus Raskin (1969), concluded with the observation that conspiracy laws threatened personal and civil rights: ‘‘Does not the cherished concept of due process of law, the foundation of our system of jurisprudence, become merely an elaborate sham to mask what is in reality a convenient device to silence opponents of governmental policies?’’ Mitford next attacked the Famous Writers School in a lengthy article entitled ‘‘Let Us Now Appraise Famous Writers’’ (Atlantic, July 1970). Mitford charged the Westport, Connecticut, school with deception in advertising and criticized writers who allowed the school to use their names. Kind and Usual Punishment: The Prison Business (1973) exposes the atrocities of the penal system. In a chapter entitled ‘‘Clockwork Orange,’’ Mitford listed the techniques used in prisons to modify behavior and reform ‘‘antisocial personalities,’’ including chemotherapy, aversion therapy, neurosurgery, and drugs. She refers to prisons as the ‘‘happy hunting ground for the researcher.’’ Mitford condemns lengthy and indeterminate sentences, the parole system, and the use of prisoners in psychological and physiological research, while supporting the idea of a prisoners’ union. She concludes prisons are ‘‘inherently unjust and inhumane’’ institutions that demean all people in society. Mitford published the sequel to her autobiography Daughters and Rebels in 1977. A Fine Old Conflict traces her involvement with the Communist party in America. As Mitford puts it, being fiercely anti-Fascist and antiracist, the Communist party seemed to her the only practical outlet for her political and social beliefs. Recreating the ambience of the ‘‘witch-hunting’’ 1950s, Mitford recalls such activities as her trip to Mississippi in 1951 to appeal the conviction of a black rapist and her efforts to raise money for the party by organizing chicken dinners. After defecting from the party after 20 years, Mitford describes it as ‘‘an embattled, proscribed (and, to me, occasionally comical) organization.’’ The appendix reprints her previously unavailable spoof of party jargon, Lifeitselfmanship.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Benedict, H., Portraits in Print: A Collection of Profiles and the Stories Behind Them (1991). Canine, J., What Am I Going to Do with Myself When I Die? (1999). McCreery, L., ‘‘Queen of Muckrakers: Jessica Mitford’s Contributions to American Journalism’’ (thesis, 1995). Reference works: CA (1967). CB (1974). Norton Book of Women’s Lives (1993). Other references: American Book Review (Nov. 1990). Book World (Nov. 1992). California Lawyer (Nov. 1992). City Arts of San Francisco Presents Jessica Mitford (audiocassette, 1990, 1995). Critical Quarterly (1996). Harper’s (Nov. 1992). Medical Anthropology Quarterly (1995). NR (Dec. 1992). Portrait of a Muckraker (videocassette, 1986). Theology Today (1999). —DIANE LONG HOEVELER
MIXER, Elizabeth Born circa 1710s; death date unknown Elizabeth Mixer, a native of Ashford, Massachusetts, lived and wrote during the second quarter of the 18th century. She was the daughter of a deacon of the Ashford congregation. Little is known about her life, besides the scant materials presented in her spiritual autobiography. She states that she had a thorough religious education provided by her parents, and indeed she was literate enough to write a clearly stated account of her regeneration. An Account of Some Spiritual Experiences and Raptures (1736) was prepared for Mixer’s admittance into the Ashford church. Her confession is characterized by a stylized, hyperbolic recounting of the three visions sent to her by the Lord. In dramatic, elaborate language, Mixer pictures Christ in the Heavenly City, Christ appearing in glory to her at night in her bedroom, and the glory and horror of the Last Judgment. Her visionary moments replace the more typically Puritan extended struggle for salvation. This change reflects the climate in which Mixer wrote, the early years of the Great Awakening, the religious movement of the second quarter of the eighteenth century that profoundly affected New England religious life. Mixer’s spiritual autobiography, devoid of personal references or theological discourse, remains an illuminating document
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by a woman of an important religious movement in American history. —JACQUELINE HORNSTEIN
MOERS, Ellen Born 9 December 1928, New York, New York Daughter of Robert and Celia Lewis; married Martin Mayer, 1949; children: two sons Ellen Moers received a B.A. at Vassar College in 1948, an M.A. at Radcliffe in 1949, and a Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1957. She has taught at Columbia, Barnard College, Brooklyn College, and the Graduate School of the City University of New York. Moers has two sons and lives in New York City. Moers, who has published a critical book on a certain classification of men, The Dandy: Brummel to Beerbohm (1960, reprinted 1978), and one on an individual man, Two Dreisers (1969, 1970), is best known for Literary Women: The Great Writers (1976, 1986). Moers assumes the quality of greatness in her subjects and asks intriguingly, ‘‘What did it matter that so many of the great writers of modern times have been women? What did it matter to literature?’’
devoted to them and their works? In Literary Women, Moers answers this question affirmatively, for her approach to these great writers has resulted in a rich addition to the body of literary criticism and, more significantly, to our appreciation of the works of these women. In its combination of so many elements—the writers’ works; their social, political and economic milieu; their themes; and their biographies and literary traditions—this book is a model for further feminist criticism. OTHER WORKS: A Century of Dreiser (1974). Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1976). Harriet Beecher Stowe and American Literaure (1978). Josei to Bungaku (1978). Contributor to: LaValley, A. J., Twentieth Century Interpretations of Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Collection of Critical Essays (1969). Buckley, J. H., ed., The Worlds of Victorian Fiction (1975). Levine, G. L. and U. C. Knoepflmacher, eds., The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel (1982). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). American Scholar (Autumn 1976). Book World (11 Apr. 1976). Ms. (July 1976). NYRB (1 Apr. 1976). NYT (12 Mar. 1976). NYTBR (7 Mar. 1976). SR (Mar. 1976). VQR (Winter 1977). —BARBARA KERR DAVIS
While clearly stating there is no single female tradition, no single literary form to which women are restricted, no such thing as the female genius or the female sensibility, and no female style in literature, Moers presents a fair amount of evidence to support her contention that women writers have drawn confidence (even if not loyalty) from belonging to a literary movement, an ‘‘undercurrent, rapid and powerful,’’ apart from the mainstream. Within this undercurrent, the great writers have seemed to emphasize or to be drawn toward some specific themes and literary forms. Focusing on ‘‘heroinism’’ in the second half of Literary Women, Moers integrates biographical, social, and historical factors, as well as literary tradition, into the critical discussion of various works. The ‘‘traveling heroinism’’ of Mrs. Radcliffe’s gothic novels, for example, is noteworthy because the traveling is done entirely indoors—the only way, in that writer’s time, that the heroine could be brave and free and still maintain her respectability. Moers’s presentation of the tradition of ‘‘loving heroinism’’ in women’s literature demonstrates ‘‘the woman writer’s heroic resolve to write herself, as men for centuries had tried to do, the love story from the woman’s point of view.’’ The final chapter of Literary Women concerns metaphors in literature by women. The interpretations are, admittedly, generally made from a Freudian viewpoint, but Moers’s brief analysis of landscapes, including the Brontë moors and Cather prairies, may have wider implications and applications; her suggestions invite the reader to examine this subject further. The question that must be raised about a work like Literary Women is: do women writers really need a criticism especially
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MOHR, Nicholasa Born 1 November 1935, New York, New York Daughter of Pedro and Nicholasa Rivera Golpe; married Irwin Mohr, 1958 (died); children: David, Jason The youngest child in a family with six brothers, Nicholasa Mohr was born in El Barrio, Spanish Harlem, where her parents had moved from Puerto Rico at the height of the Depression of the 1930s. Like several of her young characters, Mohr’s artistic abilities were recognized at an early age. In spite of her talent, she attended a trade high school, a decision made by a grade school counselor who felt that ‘‘because I was a child from a poor Puerto Rican family, I most likely could not go on to higher education.’’ Subsequently, she studied at the Art Students League of New York (1957), Brooklyn Museum Art School (1961-63), and Pratt Center for Contemporary Printmaking (1966-70), and established an active career as a graphic artist. Mohr began writing when the words, phrases, and bold figures of her prints caught the eye of one of her collectors, the head of a publishing house. Through her agent, he suggested that Mohr try writing stories about her experiences. After some encouragement, she took the suggestion seriously and in 1973 published her first novel, Nilda (reprinted 1986). Since then she has written fiction, short stories, screenplays, and articles for both children and adults.
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Mohr is the first Puerto Rican woman on the mainland to write in English about the experiences of first-generation Puerto Rican—Americans. Her writing is characterized by simplicity in its structure and in its choice of words. Short sentences and a matter-of-fact, episodic style paradoxically create vivid, detailed scenes of streets and neighborhoods, and introduce complex, sometimes controversial, characters and themes. The individual experiences and feelings of her characters demonstrate the clash between white and Puerto Rican cultures as well as the tensions between Puerto Ricans from the mainland and those from the island. Other themes explored in her work include the resilience of the human spirit, the role of ritual and celebration in family life, the difficulty of moving from the country to the city, and the effects of institutionalized racism. Together, Nilda and Mohr’s short story collections, El Bronx Remembered (1975, 1986, 1993) and In Nueva York (1977, 1993), comprise a history of the everyday struggles of Puerto Ricans in New York City over a 30-year period (1941-70). Written for the general public, the books were published as juvenile trade books and marketed as young adult literature. They continue to spark controversy over their appropriateness for young people because Mohr incorporates homosexuality, teenage pregnancy, graphic language, racist violence, and shocking effects of poverty in these stories of urban life. Nilda, a coming-of-age story, is set in El Barrio during World War II. Told from the point of view of Nilda Ramirez who is nine at the outset of the novel, the story’s parameters expand as Nilda’s understanding of life expands. Her struggle to become herself is the foreground as her mother’s struggles to nurture and maintain a family of six is the background. The two stories come together when Nilda is left confused and overwhelmed after her mother’s death. With only the legacy of her mother’s final words, ‘‘I have never had a life of my own. . .hold onto yourself. . . . A little piece inside has to remain yours always,’’ Nilda turns to her art for solace. Many of the women in Mohr’s short stories struggle to keep this ‘‘little piece inside’’ intact. The importance of self-determination and self-expression for women is most explicitly explored in Rituals of Survival: A Woman’s Portfolio (1985), a short story collection for adults. Zoraida, Carmela, Virginia, Amy, Lucia, and Inez contend with poverty, rigid role expectations, racism, and internal confusion as they fight to maintain their inner lives. Whether triumphant or defeated, each is transformed as she steps toward self-identity. With Felita (1979, 1990) and its sequel, Going Home (1986, 1989), Mohr began writing specifically for children. The fresh outlook and lively, independent spirit of each of these books rests in the characterization of Felita. In both, the harsher realities of the world are balanced by the ordinary events and crises of growing up. In the former, her family is driven from a white neighborhood by violent racist harassment and Felita and her best friend experience jealousy and misunderstanding over the lead in the class play. In the latter, Felita’s summer in Puerto Rico is marred by being an outsider on her ‘‘own’’ island while she works on sets for a local youth group’s play.
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Providing an animated and loving, yet uncompromising portrayal of the Puerto Rican-American community, Mohr’s writing focuses on details, in both setting and experience, to capture the spirit and resilience of individuals and their community. This illumination of details and incidents effectively shapes itself into compelling portraits of individuals as well as of the whole in many stories, although it sometimes creates narratives lacking in drama or depth. Overall, Mohr’s literature for both children and adults is valuable as a unique and significant artistic rendering of the experiences of Puerto Rican-Americans. OTHER WORKS: All for the Better: A Story of El Barrio (1993). Old Letivia and the Mountain of Sorrows (1994, 1996). Growing Up Inside the Sanctuary of My Imagination (1994). The Song of El Coqui and Other Tales (1995). The Magic Shell (1995). A Matter of Pride and Other Stories (1997). Contributor to: Revista Chicano-Riqueña (Spring, 1980; Spring, 1981; 1983), Ethnic Lifestyles and Mental Health (1980), Perspectives: The Civil Rights Quarterly (Summer, 1982), The Americas Review (Fall 1986-Winter 1986, Summer, 1987), Images and Identities: The Puerto Rican in Literature (1987), and others. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ferguson, M. A., ed., Images of Women in Literature (1991). Hunter, S., Writers (1998). Hernandez, C. D., Puerto Rican Voices in English: Interviews with Writers (1997). May, L. A., ‘‘Nicholasa Mohr: A Woman’s Perspective in Nuyorican Literature’’ (thesis 1993). Morales, M. E., ‘‘An Introduction to the NeoRican Experience in the Works of Nicholasa Mohr: A SocioHistoric Literary Analysis’’ (thesis 1992). Rodríguez del Laguna, A., ed., Images and Identities: The Puerto Rican World in Two World Contexts (1987). Telgen, D. and Kamp, J., eds., Latinas! Women of Achievement (1996). Reference works: Biographical Dictionary of Hispanic Writers in the U.S. (1989). CANR (1991). CLR (1991). Fifth Junior Book of Authors (1983). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Americas Review (Summer 1987). Latino Biographies (1995). MELUS (1978). Reading Teacher (Oct. 1991). Revista/Review Interamericana (1979-1980). Revista Chicano-Riqueña (Spring 1980). English Journal (1978). Turner, F., ‘‘The Myth of the American Dream in the Works of Nicholasa Mohr,’’ (unpublished paper, Amherst College). —SUSAN GRIFFITH
MOISE, Penina Born 23 April 1797, Charleston, South Carolina; died 13 September 1880, Charleston, South Carolina Daughter of Abraham and Sarah Moise Penina Moise was the sixth of nine children of parents who had fled to Charleston during the slave insurrections in Santo
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Domingo. The death of Moise’s father forced her to abandon formal education and help support the family by needlework, but she nevertheless continued to study and write, publishing poems and stories in newspapers and periodicals. Devoutly religious, Moise served as superintendent of the religious school of Beth Elohim beginning in 1842. After the Civil War, although ill and nearly blind, Moise founded a school for girls and conducted literary salons. Fancy’s Sketch Book (1833) was probably the first published book to which a Jewish woman appended her full name. Primarily a volume of verse, it includes light satires, epigrams, lyrics, and occasional poems commemorating prominent events. Conventional themes of love, death, and nature predominate, but in many instances they are distinguished by charming poignancy, delicate wit, and clever word play. For example, in ‘‘The Disconcerted Concert’’ Moise uses the double meaning of musical terms to describe a quarrel among the instruments. Serious themes are not neglected, and the book reveals a wide range of interests and knowledge, including Greek mythology, the Bible, Shakespeare, music, art, and history. Women are generally presented in terms of love or motherhood, but in one instance Moise writes movingly of the women who donated their wedding rings to support Kosciuszko’s efforts to liberate Poland. Hymns Written for the Use of Congregation Beth Elohim, first published in 1842 and enlarged in three subsequent editions, is primarily the work of Moise. The art of hymn writing, which requires decided meter with little variation, simple language that conveys an immediate sense of emotion, and above all sincere devoutness, brought out Moise’s talents to the fullest—her hymns are still included in modern hymnals. In writing the lyrics, Moise often added images that echoed many parts of the service, and her dramatic images greatly enhance the effectiveness of the prayer. Although the bulk of Moise’s writings still lies buried in the numerous newspapers and periodicals to which she contributed, a selection of her poems and hymns was collected in Secular and Religious Works of Penina Moise (1911). Some of the verses from the earlier volumes were included, but the collection is notable for works on specifically Jewish subjects and a number of previously uncollected poems dealing with political and social issues. The refusal by the British House of Lords to grant constitutional rights to Jews became for Moise ‘‘that dark deformity from Freedom’s code,’’ and when the Jews of Damascus were being persecuted, she reproached the rest of the world that could ‘‘the suppliants scorn / From whose inspired relics revelation was born.’’ Limited by poverty, by social tradition, by illness, and by blindness, Moise nevertheless produced a substantial body of poems and hymns. Much of Moise’s work reveals an excessive concern for the poetic diction and conventions of her time, but several of her satiric pieces can still delight readers. Moise’s poems on serious subjects reveal an unusual awareness of social and moral problems. Her hymns, expressing a deep, sincere faith in God’s mercy, continue to evoke a solemn piety. All contemporary accounts of Moise emphasize her cheerfulness, good humor, and wit, despite the hardships under which she lived. The mark of
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suffering which found no voice in her poetry was expressed only in the lines Moise wrote for her epitaph: ‘‘Lay no flowers on my grave. They are for those who live in the sun, and I have always lived in the shadow.’’ BIBLIOGRAPHY: Elzas, B. A., The Jews of South Carolina (1905). Moise, H., The Moise Family of South Carolina (1961). Reznikoff, C., and U. Z. Engleman, The Jews of Charleston (1950). Reference works: AA. DAB. NAW. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States. Other references: American Jew’s Annual (1885-86). American Jewish Yearbook (1905-06). Critic (28 Dec. 1889). Southern Jewish Historical Society (1978). —CAROL B. SCHOEN
MOJTABAI, A. G. Born 8 June 1937, Brooklyn, New York Daughter of Robert and Naomi Alpher; married Fathollah Mojtabai, 1960 (divorced); children: two A. G. Mojtabai had no formal literary training. When very young, Mojtabai began dissecting on her own, developing an intense interest in biology. Early in her schooling, she was tracked for science; while in high school, she interned for two summers at the Jackson Memorial Laboratory. She received a B.A. from Antioch College in 1958, concentrating on philosophy and mathematics. She married later, and lived in Iran, where her two children were born. The marriage ended in divorce. Returning to the U.S., Mojtabai lectured in philosophy at Hunter College, receiving an M.A. in philosophy from Columbia University in 1968. She worked as a librarian at the Graduate School of Business at Columbia from 1968 to 1970 and received an M.S. in library service in 1970. Thereafter, Mojtabai worked for six years as a librarian at the City College of New York. From 1976 to 1978, Mojtabai was a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, and was Briggs-Copeland lecturer in English at Harvard from 1978-1983. Mundome (1974), Mojtabai’s first novel, is a series of reflections or reveries on a few recurring themes. Richard Henken, the narrator, is an archivist, a specialist in ‘‘fugitive and ephemeral materials’’ in a mouldering public library. He spends his time outside of work caring for Meg, his mentally disturbed sister, who deteriorates as the book progresses. Richard is sane, sober, and responsible; Meg is everything Richard is not. The novel has two settings—inner and outer—which fuse at the end, and only one main character, or perhaps two main characters who fuse at the end. There are two equally cogent ways of reading the book; Mojtabai claims to have written it both ways, and has preserved all the ambiguities. Her aim is to produce vertigo in the reader—‘‘a sense of radical dislocation.’’ The book was praised for its poetic
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imagery and lapidary precision, and faulted for its lack of sensuality and lyricism. The 400 Eels of Sigmund Freud (1976) is a complementary exploration. As Robert Morris noted in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, ‘‘If Mundome plumbs the elusive recesses of dark psyches to show how two people lose themselves in the labyrinths of madness, Eels unfolds with the same sort of quiet horror to reveal how an entire enlightened community crumbles despite its principles of logic and reason.’’ The book describes a summer educational experiment with high school students who live in a mansion called the Four Winds at the edge of the sea. They are told the story of the 400 eels that the young Freud dissected; this monumental dissection is the measure of what the man lost to science when he turned to ‘‘other’’ things. Yet for lack of attention to these ‘‘other’’ things, the community at the Four Winds is lost. The book was praised for the high luster of its writing, and both praised and faulted for its meticulous clarity. Mojtabai’s vision of the world is rather bleak. Her refusal to flesh out her books with details of dress, food, and conversation and her lack of narrative breadth have led some reviewers to claim she is not really a novelist. Mojtabai’s literary method is dissection—presenting a character, then trimming away layer after layer of deceptive appearance. She rarely amplifies a social context; instead, she cuts the individual away from the traditional social underpinnings. Characteristically, there are no seduction scenes; instead we are offered gropings, failures, fantasies, people in juxtaposition rather than in connection. Called Out (1994) is a short novel in which Mojtabai tells how a tragedy involving strangers disturbs the lives of people who live in or near the site where the catastrophe occurs. The story of an airplane crash in a small town in Texas is related through monologues by witnesses of the crash and those affected by it. Felice Aull wrote, ‘‘This well-written, reflective novel considers the paradoxes of contemporary life and death. Disparate lives, social isolation, moral confusion are played off against the theme that ‘no man is an island.’ The crash, with its plane cargo of multinational travelers, explodes the insular (symbolized by the town’s name, Bounds) existence of the observers. The web of connected humanity extends to the dead as well as to the living.’’ Mojtabai explores terminal illness and death in the collection of stories called Soon: Tales from a Hospice (1998). Seventeen tales make up the anthology, all about the dying patients, family and friends, and hospice staff at St. Anthony’s Hospital in Amarillo, Texas, where Mojtabai volunteered as a hospice worker for several years. Mojtabai discusses the miracle of willingness to accept the unknown in dying, as she explains in her preface: ‘‘[Hospice] is as much a mode of practice as a place. . . . Help comes through a mutual unfolding. And, happening to be present at a graced moment, sometimes I am startled to find—this side of death—the old barriers rolled away, stranger turning towards stranger with no other strangeness than the ease of turning.’’ Richard Dyer wrote of Soon in the Boston Globe, ‘‘Mojtabai has all the gifts of a great writer—the observant eye that misses no nuance of expressions; the ear that hears the music and the poetry
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behind the plain cadences of common speech; the willingness to confront her own primal fears.’’
OTHER WORKS: A Stopping Place (1979). Autumn (1982). Blessed Assurance: At Home with the Bomb in Amarillo, Texas (1986, 1997). Ordinary Time: A Novel (1989).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Desmond, N. S., ‘‘Individuality Versus Conformity: A Comparative Analysis of This Theme in The Catcher in the Rye and The 400 Eels of Sigmund Freud’’ (thesis, 1979). Reference works: CA (1999). Other references: Boston Globe (27 Nov. 1998). Critique (Dec. 1978). —CAROLYN G. HEILBRUN, UPDATED BY ALLISON A. JONES
MOLLENKOTT, Virginia Ramey Born 28 January 1932, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Daughter of Robert F. and May Lotz Ramey; married Friedrich Mollenkott, 1954 (divorced 1973); children: Paul Virginia Ramey Mollenkott had a Christian upbringing and education, receiving a B.A. from Bob Jones University in 1953. A year later, she married a schoolteacher, and a son was born in 1958. The marriage ended in divorce in 1973. Mollenkott earned an M.A. from Temple University (1955) and a Ph.D. from New York University (1964). She has chaired English departments at Nyack College and Shelton College, and is Professor Emeritus at Paterson College of New Jersey. Mollenkott is known for writings on English literature (especially the 17th century), religion, education, feminism, and social justice. All of her writings may be subsumed under the theme of oneness, which Mollenkott variously describes as an ‘‘organic wholeness’’ and a ‘‘transcendental integrative vision.’’ The emphasis is on seeing God in all things and serving God in all activities, integration of the human personality around a unifying center, and awareness of humanity’s interdependence. In her first book, Adamant and Stone Chips (1967), Mollenkott strives to awaken other Christians to the exhilaration and joy of her ‘‘Christian humanist’’ approach. Rather than being fearful and suspicious of human culture, ‘‘the Christian humanist takes. . .a positive approach to academics, aesthetics, and human relationships.’’ Using examples from literature, Mollenkott illustrates what such a view has meant in earlier times and can mean for today. In Adam Among the Television Trees: An Anthology of Verse by Contemporary Christian Poets (1971), Mollenkott continues her examination of this field.
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In Search of Balance (1969) is a personal account of Mollenkott’s attempts to deal with questionings, doubts, paradox, freedom, and responsibility. The book amplifies ‘‘balance’’ themes found throughout Mollenkott’s writings: the counterpoint of now and then, the ‘‘dialectic of faith,’’ the distinction between ultimate categories and human categories, and the need for self-awareness. In Women, Men, and the Bible (1977, revised 1988, translated into Korean in 1981), Mollenkott calls for male-female equality through mutual submission and mutual service, stressing that ‘‘Christian equality is never a matter of jockeying for the dominant position.’’ The theme of neighbor love and social justice is examined further in Is the Homosexual My Neighbor? (1978, revised and expanded 1994), where the emphasis is on respecting the dignity and worth of one of society’s most oppressed groups. Equality, compassion, social justice, oneness—all are viewed by Mollenkott as grounded in redemptive grace, as ‘‘Christ impaled but with forgiving love / impaling his impalers.’’ Speech, Silence, Action! The Cycle of Faith (1977), a spiritual autobiography, features Mollenkott’s analysis of inclusive God-language and other issues with which she has come to be identified in recent years. Critics have acknowledged Mollenkott as an important literary scholar, noted especially for her work on Milton and also as an articulate Christian humanist and an influential evangelical feminist. Continuing her efforts to promote Christian feminism, Mollenkott published two interesting tomes, the first being The Divine Feminine: Biblical Imagery of God as Female (1983). The work’s widespread appeal led to several printings and translations, including German (1985), French (1990), and Italian (1993). The other, Women of Faith in Dialogue, gives readers differing perspectives of women, faith, and feminism. Mollenkott is also a frequent contributor to a myriad of publications, including Cross Currents, Christianity Today, Commonweal, Daughters of Sarah, English Language Notes, Higher Education, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Journal of Psychology and Theology, Modern Language Quarterly, Milton Studies, Religion in Public Education, Seventeenth-Century News, Studies in Formative Spirituality, Texas Quarterly and others.
OTHER WORKS: Views from the Intersection (with C. Barry, 1984). Godding: Human Responsibility and the Bible (1987). Sensuous Spirituality: Out from Fundamentalism (1992).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Apel, W. D., Witnesses Before Dawn: Exploring the Meaning of Christian Life (1984). DeSocio, M. L., ‘‘Feminist Theology: A Study of Biblical Hermeneutics’’ (thesis 1987). Hamaan, G. J., ‘‘Homosexuality as an Etiological, Theological and Sociological Issue: A Critique of and Response to the Book Is the Homosexual My Neighbor? by Letha Scanzoni and Virginia Ramey Mollenkott’’ (thesis 1980). Hearn, V., ed., Our Struggle to Serve: The Stories of Fifteen Evangelical Women (1979). Hunter,
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W. B., et al., eds., A Milton Encyclopedia (1978). Siker, J. S., ed., Homosexuality in the Church: Both Sides of the Debate (1994). Smith, A., ‘‘Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, An Evangelical Feminist Vision’’ (thesis 1988). Reference works: CA (1973, 1999). Directory of American Scholars. Dictionary of International Biography WW in the East. WW of American Women. Other references: Faces on Faith: An Interview With Virginia Mollenkott (video, 1989). The Other Side (May-June 1976). Union Seminary Quarterly Review (Winter 1977). Christianity and Literature (Winter 1979). —LETHA SCANZONI, UPDATED BY SYDONIE BENET
MONROE, Harriet Born 23 December 1860, Chicago, Illinois; died 26 September 1936, Arequipa, Peru Daughter of Henry S. and Martha Mitchell Monroe Poet, editor, and journalist, Harriet Monroe was an influential force in the publication of modern poetry in the U.S. and an important figure in the Chicago Renaissance. Both her parents had moved to the growing city shortly before their marriage in 1855: her father, who became a prominent lawyer, from western New York and her mother from Ohio. Decidedly more erudite and socially ambitious than his beautiful but uneducated wife, Henry Monroe inspired in his daughter a keen interest in literature, painting, music, and the theater; and much of her early education was acquired from reading in his substantial library. The tensions in her parents’ marriage, which increased after 1871 because of her father’s business reverses, contributed along with frail health to Monroe’s reserved, nervous character as a girl. At the Georgetown Visitation Convent in Washington, D.C. (1877-79), she outgrew her former reticence, forming lifelong friendships with several affluent classmates and discovering the satisfactions of an independent, critical mind. She also blossomed into an aspiring poet. During the 1880s, involvement in the Fortnightly, a literary women’s club, and publication of occasional art and drama reviews provided Monroe entrée into the world of Chicago’s writers and journalists, among them Margaret Sullivan and Eugene Field, who became her friends and sponsors. While she had several opportunities to marry, she chose not to. Monroe spent the winter of 1888-89 with her sister, Lucy, in New York as an art, drama, and music correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. At E. C. Stedman’s Sunday evenings, she tasted the culture of the New York art and literary scene, meeting such luminaries as W. D. Howells and Joseph Pulitzer. Yet despite her growing knowledge
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of contemporary art and theater, she considered journalism always second to her poetry and worked during her free time that winter on the verse play Valeria. On her return to Chicago, she was commissioned by a group of businessmen to write a cantata for the dedication ceremony of Louis Sullivan’s new Auditorium in 1889. After a visit to London and northern France in 1890, she established herself as a freelance art and music reviewer and, from 1909 to 1914, worked as art critic for the Tribune. Her most public success as a poet came in 1892: the performance of her ‘‘Columbian Ode,’’ a long poem composed (with music for lyric passages by G. W. Chadwick) for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Valeria, and Other Poems appeared in a private edition in 1891 and a memoir of her brother-in-law, the Chicago architect John Wellborn Root, in 1896. Monroe traveled extensively in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. On her return from a PEN congress in Buenos Aires in 1936, she traveled to Peru intending to view the Inca ruins at Machu Picchu. During a stop at Arequipa, however, she died and was buried in the Andean village. Although Monroe’s poetry never gained the wide audience and critical notice she hoped for, she continued throughout her life to write occasional verse, competent but largely conventional in sentiment and language. Among her more interesting poems are short lyrics about the deserts and mountains of the American Southwest; longer descriptions of foreign locations she visited— among them Constantinople, Peking, the Parthenon; and a few ironic observations of modern society like ‘‘The Hotel.’’ Monroe’s most distinguished and lasting achievement was the founding of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse in October 1912 and editing the monthly for 24 years. In June 1911, at the suggestion of her friend H. C. Chatfield-Taylor, Monroe, then fifty-one, began the arduous task of soliciting subscriptions of $50 a year for five years from 100 Chicago business leaders and professionals to establish a magazine ‘‘which shall give the poets a chance to be heard.’’ To develop a public ‘‘interested in poetry as art’’ became her persistent aim. The circular and personal letter she sent to many poets, established and unknown, discovered through ardent research— and through Elkin Mathews’ fortuitous presentation to her in London in 1910 of two of Ezra Pound’s early books—drew favorable response to her ambitious venture. It also stimulated a flow of letters from Pound, who became the magazine’s unpaid foreign correspondent with the second issue. Along with Alice Corbin Henderson, her associate editor, Pound influenced Monroe to include in Poetry’s early years the writing of Yeats, Lawrence, Frost, William Carlos Williams, his own work, and in 1915, Eliot’s ‘‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’’ Ellen Williams locates the great years of Poetry in 1914 and 1915, when Monroe opened the publication to controversy over Imagism, experimental verse, and the poet’s relation to his
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audience. In general, Monroe’s preference for democratic and more accessible American poetry led her to espouse Lindsay, Masters, and many lesser poets. But the contribution she made, despite criticism and financial difficulties, in gaining recognition for poets in the U.S., in articulating modern standards in opposition to those of the powerful established outlets, and in calling attention to new writing and ideas in editorials and reviews was invaluable.
OTHER WORKS: The Columbian Ode (1893). John Wellborn Root: A Study of His Life and Work (1896). The Dance of the Seasons (1911). You and I (1914). The Difference, and Other Poems (1924). Poets and Their Art (1926). Chosen Poems: A Selection from My Books of Verse (1935). A Poet’s Life: Seventy Years in a Changing World (1938). Manuscripts, diaries, letters, and personal papers of Harriet Monroe are housed in the Harriet Monroe Collection at the University of Chicago Library.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cahill, D. J., Harriet Monroe (1973). Duffey, B., The Chicago Renaissance in American Letters (1956). Hoffman, F. J., et al., The Little Magazine (1947). Redle, K. G., Amy Lowell and Harriet Monroe: Their Correspondence (dissertation, 1968). Williams, E., Harriet Monroe and the Poetry Renaissance: The First Ten Years of Poetry, 1912-22 (1977). Reference works: DAB. NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCA. Other references: Illinois Quarterly (1975). Journal of American Studies (April 1986). JML (1976). Poetry (Jan. 1961). —THEODORA R. GRAHAM
MONROE, Lucy Born March 1865, Chicago, Illinois; died 5 September 1950, Chicago, Illinois Also wrote under: Lucy Calhoun Daughter of Henry Stanton and Martha Mitchell Monroe; married William James Calhoun, 1904 Lucy Monroe was the third of four children. Her uppermiddle-class parents—a fashion-conscious, self-educated woman and a lawyer fond of horses and books—saw that she was well educated, despite their dwindling family income. Monroe and her sister Harriet (later founding editor of Poetry) became close, traveling together, sharing interests in the arts, competing as journalists, and joining forces in Chicago’s emerging artistic community. Monroe wrote newspaper and magazine columns from 1890 to 1896. From 1898 to 1905 she was an editorial reader for
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Herbert S. Stone, who published The Awakening on Monroe’s recommendation. She also participated actively in the professional Contributors’ Club, named and helped found The Little Room, Chicago’s preeminent artistic salon, and played in Anna Morgan’s little-theater productions. Monroe married a Chicago lawyer who became Taft’s minister to China in 1909-13. In 1916, widowed and childless, Monroe went to France as a wartime nurse, then returned to China as unofficial ‘‘first lady’’ of the Peking diplomatic corps. Forced home by political unrest in 1941, she lived quietly with her younger brother. Monroe’s first journalistic endeavors, as art critic for the Chicago Herald in 1890-91, did not gain much local attention; but her informed and clear prose earned Monroe a commission as the first Chicago correspondent for New York’s journal of literature and art, The Critic. Monroe was hailed as ‘‘an accomplished littérateuse’’ whose ‘‘Chicago Letter’’ signaled eastern recognition of her native city as a literary center. From March 1893, one hundred twenty-five weekly installments of Monroe’s ‘‘Chicago Letter’’ appeared, then nine more after September 1895. The first seventy ‘‘Chicago Letter’’ installments were Monroe’s best. They were unified by an implicit theme—the coherence of Chicago’s cultural development. As a set, they achieved a rhythmic, narrative structure by tracing the gradual preparation, full-blown celebration, diminishing echoes, and final fiery destruction of the World’s Fair Columbian Exposition. Within that framework, Monroe embedded commentaries on World’s Fair buildings, novels about Chicago, lectures and academic congresses, art exhibits, libraries and museums, little theater, and World’s Fair memoirs —all as unfolding events in Chicago’s cultural history. After a five-week break in August 1894, Monroe began to emphasize her personal interests—especially in paintings, drama, and publishing houses—instead of trying to embody a common cultural motif. Many letters lacked any primary subject, and the separate installments became fragmented by brief notations. Particularly in her later letters, however, Monroe frequently took an argumentative stance, berating the Chicago Woman’s Club for its near exclusion of a black woman, promoting efforts by Hull House and other civic groups to make art accessible to the poor, and criticizing the Woman’s Bible for feminist excess and tastelessness. Generally, Monroe’s work is more important as historical document than as aesthetic creation. The ‘‘Chicago Letter’’ attests to—and discusses significant facets of—Chicago’s selfconscious rise as a cultural center in the 1890s. It also contains frequent commentaries on women’s increasing leadership, written from the occasionally feminist perspective of a cultivated society woman.
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OTHER WORKS: ‘‘My Chinese House,’’ House Beautiful, 57 (February 1925), 133-35. Correspondence by and memorabilia concerning Lucy Monroe (Calhoun) are included in the personal papers of Harriet Monroe, Regenstein Library, University of Chicago.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: MidAmerica, 5 (1978). —SIDNEY H. BREMER
MONTGOMERY, Ruth Shick Born 1912, Sumner, Illinois Daughter of Ira W. and Bertha Judy Shick; married Robert H. Montgomery, 1935 Little in Ruth Shick Montgomery’s Methodist upbringing, marriage, or career as a reporter presaged her later development of psychic abilities or the psychic messages she would disseminate to millions. Montgomery studied journalism at Baylor and Purdue Universities, subsequently working for the Waco News-Tribune, the Louisville Herald-Post, the Detroit News, the Chicago Tribune, and the New York Daily News. In 1956 Montgomery became special Washington, D.C., correspondent for International News Service, and later syndicated columnist for Capital Letter King Features, Hearst Headline Service (1958-1968). Montgomery has received many awards for her newspaper work. Montgomery’s first literary brush with psychic affairs occurred in the mid-1950s when she researched and wrote a series of newspaper articles debunking fraudulent mediums. Her next foray into the field was as a believer with the bestselling A Gift of Prophecy: The Phenomenal Jeanne Dixon (1965). Montgomery herself developed psychic abilities at about this time. First via automatic handwriting and then automatic typewriting, Montgomery began to communicate with ‘‘Lily and the group’’—beings who claimed to be spirits of the dead and Montgomery’s guides. To prove their veracity, the guides dictated much information previously unknown to Montgomery, which she was later able to verify. From 1960 to 1969, Montgomery worked with her guides to produce A Search for the Truth (1967, reprinted 1982) and Here and Hereafter (1968, 1983). The first treats Montgomery’s own spiritual progress, and the second karma and reincarnation. In 1969, satisfied that death is not the end of individuality and busy with other projects, Montgomery abandoned automatic typewriting. Early in 1971, however, on discovering that Arthur Ford, her recently deceased friend and a world-famous medium, had become one of her guides, Montgomery recommenced taking spirit
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dictation. The new communications, now from ‘‘Lily, Art and the group,’’ provided the basis for A World Beyond: A Startling Message from the Eminent Psychic Arthur Ford From Beyond the Grave (1970, 1988), Companions Along the Way (1974, 1985), A World Before (1976, 1982), and Strangers Among Us: Enlightened Beings from a World to Come (1979, 1982). These books discuss, respectively, the circumstances of life after death, Montgomery’s previous incarnations, the past history of the world, and the near future prospects of humanity. The cosmology presented by Montgomery posits God as creating the universe and, to help Him enjoy His universe, also creating trillions of souls, all with free will and creative abilities. Some of these souls chose to remain God’s worshipful companions while others entered the bodies of terrestrial animals and became trapped and debased. God then formed the human body as a vehicle more suitable to housing incarnate souls. Souls reincarnate repeatedly for the purpose of expiating past sins, learning, and progressing toward reunion with God. Strangers Among Us warns of an approaching cataclysm. The guides have informed Montgomery that at the close of this century, the earth’s axis and its magnetic poles will shift, killing most of the human race. A period of chaos will ensue, to be followed by an era of unprecedented peace and brotherhood. Scientists from other planets are now assembling to observe the axis shift, but will keep themselves hidden. Advanced souls are also assembling to assist those living at the time of the axis shift. Many of these advanced souls have returned or will return to life as ‘‘walk-ins’’ who take over living bodies when the souls born into those bodies wish to leave and agree to such a transfer. The guides say the walk-ins will reveal themselves as the cataclysm nears. Few people have done as much as Montgomery to bring widespread recognition of the genuineness of psychic occurrences and to reestablish belief in life after death. The volume and consistency of her writings are convincing. On leaving Schoolhouse Earth through the doorway of death, we continue to learn and grow in the company of those we love. Montgomery’s is no small accomplishment; she has brought comfort and hope to millions.
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History—Correlated Data from Works by Ruth Montgomery, Erich Von Daniken, Zecharia Sitchin & Edgar Cayce (1997). Rackley, M. J., ‘‘The Theological Implications of Psychic Research into Life After Death in the Writings of Arthur Ford, Hans Holzer and Ruth Montgomery’’ (thesis, 1972). Schielke, C. A., ‘‘Silent Struggle: A Newspaperwoman’s Success Despite Sexism’’ (thesis, 1996). Smith, S., Confessions of a Psychic (1971). Smith, S., The Conversion of a Psychic (1978). Reference works: CA (1967). —LUCY MENGER
MOODY, Anne Born 15 September 1940, near Centreville, Mississippi Daughter of Fred and Elmira Williams Moody; married Austin Straus, 1967 (divorced); children: Sascha Anne Moody grew up on a plantation in rural Mississippi, one of nine children of sharecropper parents in the violent and racist Deep South of the 1940s and 1950s. When her father, tired of the sharecropping life, left the family, her mother remarried. Moody, deeply distressed by the violence surrounding their lives and her mother’s unwillingness to confront its existence, left Centreville at her earliest opportunity. She went to live with her father during her last year of high school, then with relatives in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. She worked from age nine, first at an after-school job for a white family, cleaning house and watching their children, to help feed her own family, then supporting herself through college with a summer job waiting tables at a restaurant in New Orleans.
OTHER WORKS: Once There Was a Nun: Mary McCarran’s Years as Sister Mary Mercy (1962). Mrs. LBJ (1964). Flowers at the White House (1967). Hail to the Chiefs (1970). Born to Heal (1973). Threshold to Tomorrow (1984). Born to Heal: The Astonishing Story of Mr. A and the Ancient Art of Healing with Life Energies (1985). Aliens among Us (1986). Ruth Montgomery, Herald of the New Age (1987). The World to Come: Guidance for a Coming Age (1999).
She excelled in school, was homecoming queen and a mostly A student in high school, going on to Natchez College on a basketball scholarship and then to Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi, on an academic scholarship. While at Tougaloo, she helped to organize the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), worked with Martin Luther King Jr. and the NAACP, was a member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and was one of the original protesters at the segregated Woolworth’s counter in Jackson. She earned her B.S. from Tougaloo in 1964 and left the South, going to New York and serving as civil rights project coordinator at Cornell University for a year. Becoming frustrated with the splintering factions of the civil rights movement, what she saw as the lack of progress and the ineffectuality of the non-violent stance against violent racism, she then moved to New York City and began to write the work she is known for, Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Karling, C., ed., UFOs & Extraterrestrials: Why They are Here, the Darkest, Longest Kept Secret in Human
The autobiography of her life from the age of four to twenty-four, Coming of Age in Mississippi is a singular and powerful document. Personal and political before the term came
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into vogue, the book depicts Moody’s impoverished childhood, her inner conflict and turmoil with regard to the brutal racism that shadowed and defined her days and nights, and her eventual exteriorization and transformation of that turmoil into her work as an activist. Her activism then led to estrangement from her family, who did not share her commitment to the movement, to her being listed on a Klan wanted list, and to her being unable to return to her hometown. Written in a forthright, unapologetic, and cleanly intimate prose, Coming of Age in Mississippi is a work with a continuing impact on readers of all ages. Highly praised and now considered a classic of the autobiography genre, much anthologized and studied in classes on American history, the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, and African-American women as a source document, Coming of Age in Mississippi is a work of lasting and invaluable worth. The book received a Best Book of the Year award from the National Library Association and Moody received a Brotherhood award from the National Council of Christians and Jews, both in 1969. She received a silver medal from Mademoiselle in 1970 as part of their ‘‘New Hopes for the Seventies: 25 to Watch’’ feature. She became a counselor for New York City’s poverty program in 1967, is a member of International PEN, and spent time in Berlin in 1972 as artist-in-residence on a German Academic Exchange Service grant. Her other published works include a book of four young adult short stories entitled Mr. Death(1975), opinion pieces and stories in Ms. and Mademoiselle, and stories in several elementary school readers. It becomes clear from the tone of an opinion column in Mademoiselle in January of 1969, not too long after the publication of Coming of Age, that Moody felt frustrated with the movement and the Northern white establishment’s response—or lack thereof. Angry and militant, her words there are a presage of her eventual withdrawal from the public light. She has been living in New York City, reticent of publicity, continuing her work as an activist for human rights. As she wrote in her autobiography, ‘‘I realized that the universal fight for human rights, dignity, justice, equality and freedom is not and should not be just the fight of the American Negro or the Indians or the Chicanos, it’s the fight of every ethnic and racial minority, every suppressed and exploited person, every one of the millions who daily suffer one or another of the indignities of the powerless and voiceless masses.’’ BIBLIOGRAPHY: Heller, D. A., ‘‘Radical Departures: The Feminization of Quest-Romance’’ (thesis, 1989). Holland, E. I. M., ‘‘The Autobiography of a Parader Without a Permit’’ (thesis, 1986). Reference works: Black Writers (1989). CA (1977). The Norton Book of Women’s Lives (1993). Who’s Who Among African Americans (1998). Other references: CLAJ (Sept. 1990). Feminist Teacher (1994). Harvard Educational Review (1970). Journal of Women’s History (1996). Ms. (Sept./Oct. 1993). NWSA Journal (1996). Seventeen (June 1985). —JESSICA REISMAN
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MOORE, C(atherine) L(ucille) Born 24 January 1911, Indianapolis, Indiana; died April 1987 Also wrote under: Paul Edmonds, Keith Hammond, Hudson Hastings, Kalvin Kent, Henry Kuttner, C. H. Liddell, Lawrence O’Donnell, Lewis Padgett, Woodrow Wilson Smith, and others Daughter of Otto N. and Maude Ones Moore; married Henry Kuttner, 1940 (died 1958); Thomas Reggie, 1963 C. L. Moore attended Indiana University for a year and a half but was forced by the Depression to take a job in an Indianapolis bank. She produced her first published works in her spare time. In 1938, Moore met science fiction and fantasy writer Henry Kuttner; from 1940, when she and Kuttner married, until his death in 1958, they collaborated, in varying degrees, on almost everything they wrote. Moore earned B.A. (1956) and M.A. (1963) degrees in English from the University of Southern California; after Kuttner’s death, for four years she taught his writing course at USC. She completed a screenplay for Rappacini’s Daughter which they had been writing and later wrote scripts for television. Moore lived in Los Angeles with her second husband. Although Moore had published no new science fiction or fantasy in some 20 years, at a 1976 convention she did announce her intentions to return to this field. She was true to her word and released varied titles, including The Startling Worlds of Henry Knutter (1987), which she edited in memory of her first husband. ‘‘Shambleau’’ (1933), Moore’s first published short story, innovatively emphasizes characterization, imagery, and human sexuality in its depiction of an Earth adventurer, Northwest Smith, and his encounter with a Medusa-like alien. Smith, a conventional hero whose illegal exploits are never immoral, figures in a series of stories which subsequently appeared in Weird Tales: these include ‘‘Black Thirst’’ (1934), ‘‘Scarlet Dream’’ (1934), and ‘‘Dust of Gods’’ (1934). In 1934, Moore began a parallel series of stories, featuring Jirel of Joiry, an independent warrior queen of the 15th century. In ‘‘Black God’s Kiss’’ (1934), Jirel braves the horrors of a supernatural, evil-ridden dimension to find a weapon to overthrow her castle’s conquerer. In subsequent stories (‘‘Black God’s Shadow,’’ 1934; ‘‘Julhi,’’ 1935; ‘‘ Jirel Meets Magic,’’ 1935; ‘‘The Cold Gray God,’’ 1935; and ‘‘The Dark Land,’’ 1936) Jirel continues to triumphantly battle the supernatural. ‘‘Quest of the Star Stone’’ (1937), on which Moore and Kuttner collaborated through correspondence, was of special interest to fans of both series; in it, Northwest Smith is magically transported back to the 15th century to confront Jirel. It is difficult to determine which stories written after Moore’s marriage are exclusively or predominantly hers and which Kuttner’s because both writers, singly and in collaboration, used a total of seventeen pseudonyms. One story, however, written under her own name, is clearly Moore’s work. ‘‘No Woman Born’’ (1944),
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the tale of a dancer caught in a theater fire whose severe burns force her rescuers to transfer her brain into a metal body, highlights Moore’s glowing imagery and subtle questions about the nature of humanity. It is one of the first science fiction treatments of cyborgs (creatures part human and part machine) to emphasize characterization rather than technology. Two of Moore and Kuttner’s collaborations have been included in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. ‘‘Mimsy Were the Borogroves’’ (1943), written under the pseudonym Lewis Padgett, plays with conventional notions of childhood and maturity. Two Earth children transport themselves into a future dimension by deciphering the puzzles and games lost by a time traveling future scientist. ‘‘Vintage Season’’ (1946), published under the name of Lawrence O’Donnell, is a novella about time travelers from the future whose vacations are spent witnessing crucial events in Earth’s history. Its action centers upon the characters and personalities of these voyeurs and the reactions of their landlord, a contemporary young man who gradually realizes their origin and motivations. Although these dilettantes might avert disaster in his time, they choose not to. In addition to their numerous short stories, Moore and Kuttner collaborated on a notable novel, Fury (1947), set on Venus and describing the aftermath of a failed utopia. The science fiction and the four mystery novels they wrote between 1948 and 1958 are not of the same caliber as their earlier creations. Moore’s lasting contributions to the fields of science fiction and fantasy include not only her own works but also the models she and Kuttner set for contemporary and future writers. Depth of characterization and setting, attention to the nuances of human motivation and interaction, recognition of the myths shaping human experience, and incorporation of sophisticated mainstream literary techniques (such as the use of a central intelligence in ‘‘No Woman Born’’) are the innovations one may credit to Moore Feminist critics have recently begun to praise Moore for her strong heroine, Jirel of Joiry, at the same time they ‘‘excuse’’ or ignore her other works, but such criticism does not recognize the full significance of her oeuvre. OTHER WORKS: The Day He Died (1947). The Brass Ring (with H. Knutter, 1947, reissued in 1964, and as Murder in Brass, 1947). A Knome There Was, and Other Tales of Science Fiction and Fantasy (1950). Tomorrow and Tomorrow; and The Fairy Chessman (with Knutter, 1951, later versions, 1956, 1963). Judgment Night (1952). Robots Have No Tails (1952, as The Proud Robot: The Complete Galloway Gallegher Stories 1983). Shambleau, and Others (1953). Mutant (1953). Northwest of Earth (1954). Line to Tomorrow (1954). There Shall Be Darkness (1954). Beyond Earth’s Gates (1954). No Boundaries (with Knutter, 1955). Doomsday Morning (1957). Earth’s Last Citadel (with Knutter, 1964). Valley of the Flame (with Knutter, 1964). The Time Axis (with Knutter, 1965). The Dark World (with Knutter, 1965). Well of the Worlds (with Knutter, 1965). Jirel of Joiry (1969, as Black God’s Shadow 1977). The Mask of Circe (with Knutter, 1971). The Best of C. L. Moore (edited by L. del Ray, 1975). Clash By Night and Other Stories (with Knutter, 1980).
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Scarlet Dream (1981, as Northwest Smith 1982). Vintage Season (bound with In Another Country by R. Silverberg, 1990). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Clareson, T., ed., Voices for the Future: Essays on Major Science Fiction Writers (1976). del Ray, L., in The Best of C. L. Moore (1975). Knight, D., In Search of Wonder: Essays on Modern Science Fiction (1956). Moskowitz, S., Seekers of Tomorrow (1966). Rosinsky, N. Moore, in Selected Proceedings of the 1978 Science Fiction Research Association National Conference (1979). Sargent, P., ‘‘Women and Science Fiction,’’ in Women of Wonder (1974). Reference works: Index to Science Fiction Anthologies and Collections (1978). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers (1996). —NATALIE M. ROSINSKY
MOORE, Mrs. H. J. Born circa 1820s; death date unknown The settings of Mrs. H. J. Moore’s works suggest a protestant New England or Middle Atlantic background. Moore’s three substantial novels, published within five years, hint at a short but productive period of creativity. In her first book, Anna Clayton (1855), Moore has a clear thesis to prove, but she grows more subtle and skillful in her later novels. One imagines that the Protestant cause rather than a dedication to art was the goad for Moore’s first work, but even by the end of Anna Clayton Moore’s aesthetic sensitivity increases. Although her work is always rough, Moore reveals a developing artistry that rewards the modern reader in brief passages of acute observation, in a few vivid if sentimental characters (especially servants and children), and in carefully transcribed conversation and snips of amusing dialect. In Anna Clayton, Moore focuses on Anna’s unfortunate marriage to an English Catholic, Sir Charles Duncan. In rural America, the couple have two children, whom the materialistic Father Bernaldi arranges to kidnap. The plot revolves around the rather naively conceived ‘‘lucre-loving priests,’’ who incarcerate the children in order to gain Sir Charles’s inheritance, and Anna’s first and persevering lover, Robert Graham, who was prevented from marrying her because of Squire Clayton’s initial greed and who returns to rescue the children. Both children finally return to their mother, whom Graham marries, and learn true worship from the long-suffering Anna. Throughout this overplotted, sentimental novel, Moore uses her characters to glorify motherhood, vilify aristocratic Europe, and attack the Roman church. The novel’s strengths are its passion, the suspense that derives from the earnestness of Moore’s complex story, and the charmingly ignorant servant Ralph, whose devotion to Myrtie, his ‘‘birdie,’’ engages even the sophisticated reader.
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The plot of The Golden Legacy (1857) is simpler, and Moore reveals here a greater sensitivity to character. An orphan, Lonny Brown, is adopted by the farmers Joseph and Henny Atherton because of the concern of their young niece, Nettie. Nettie’s aunt Lottie, a model of charity, owes her character to her mother’s ‘‘legacy,’’ a famed inscription: ‘‘Whatsoever ye would that others should do unto you, do ye even so to them.’’ Lottie marries Melville Thornton, who finally discovers that he is Lonny’s longlost father. The novel lacks the suspense of Anna Clayton, but it is both less naive and less sentimental. The townspeople, such as the petty minister, Mr. Flint, and the greedy Mrs. Wormwood, provide amusing comic relief, testifying to Moore’s increasing versatility. Wild Nell (1860) has a yet simpler plot, as Moore insists that religion and education conquer wildness and stresses the moral for mothers. The crazy fortune-teller, Esther Cram, after nursing the injured son, Walter Everson, of her former lover, gives her child, Nell, to be educated by Dr. and Mrs. Jepson. Nell becomes a beautiful, cultivated young woman while her mother reforms. Nell and Walter fall in love, but when the heroine confesses ‘‘I AM WILD NELL,’’ Everson and his mother reject her because of her poverty and lack of social breeding. Augustus Murray, Everson’s friend, falls in love with Nell who soon returns his affection. The novel’s strengths lie in its local scenery and dialect (Dr. Jepson’s constant ‘‘Gim-i-ni’’ and the child Nell’s ‘‘les run’’ are well observed) and in Nell’s rejection of Everson when he wants her back, an unusual turn in sentimental fiction. —CAROLINE ZILBOORG
MOORE, Lorrie Born Marie Lorena Moore, 13 January 1957, Glen Falls, New York Daughter of Henry T., Jr. and Jeanne Day Moore; married; children: Benjamin Lorrie Moore is the author of two novels and three collections of short stories. She lives with her husband, Mark, and small son in Madison, where she is professor of English at the University of Wisconsin. She is quite young, but has already been honored with a number of awards including a National Endowment for the Arts grant (1989), a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship (1989), and a Guggenheim fellowship (1991). Her work has been chosen for Best American Short Stories (1997) and for Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards (1998). She displays a formidable range of feeling, a superb sense of humor and of timing, a sharp ear for human conversation, and a self-deprecatory style that favors irony. Moore is widely read and admired not only by general readers but by other well-known writers of stories and novels who exclaim at her skill. Moore was born into a house ‘‘full of books and music’’ in Glen Falls, New York, where her parents cultivated a careful middle ground with their talented daughter. She was an intellectually gifted young student who won Seventeen magazine’s fiction
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contest in 1976 for ‘‘Raspberries.’’ But an English major at St. Lawrence University seems to have been an easy choice rather than a conscious one. She admits openly she saw college as a way to ‘‘fall in love.’’ Still, she won the Paul L. Wolfe Memorial Prize for Literature when she graduated summa cum laude in 1978. But after college (and years with the same boyfriend), she enrolled at Cornell in the M.F.A. program. There she found it impossible to integrate her passion for piano playing with story writing. In her own words, ‘‘I was having ecstatic experiences in the practice room at Cornell and wasn’t getting any writing done. So I had to choose.’’ This willingness to choose and to focus defines her work as well as her life. When her first book, Self-Help (1985), a collection of nine stories chiefly from her master’s thesis, was published by Knopf, she was only twenty-six. Six of these stories were written as an experiment; they employ the second person, mock imperative form of a how-to: ‘‘Understand that your cat is a whore and cannot help you.’’ Already Moore demonstrates the uncanny ability to be fierce and funny at the same time—a juggling act of emotion and ironic tone made all the more impressive because she shows her reader how it’s done (like a wily magician who snares his victim into wanting to see the same trick over and over again). In ‘‘What Is Seized’’—which won the A.L. Andrews Prize from Cornell even before it was published in Self-Help—she concludes that ‘‘forgiveness lives alone and far off down the road, but bitterness and art are close, gossipy neighbors, sharing the same clothesline, hanging out their things, getting their laundry confused.’’ In this first collection of stories, Moore looks not for harmony but for ‘‘what happens when one appropriates the how-to form for a fiction, for an irony, for a how-not-to.’’ If all writers were blessed with the gift of personal suffering, then perhaps more of them would write as well and as honestly as Lorrie Moore. She has had the painful experience of a very sick baby to complement (and undermine) her deftness at realistic internal diatribe and interpersonal chat. In ‘‘People like that Are the Only People Here,’’ the most affecting (because deeply felt by author and reader alike) story in her most recent collection, Birds of America (1998), the mother/narrator describes herself a few hours after hearing ‘‘baby’’ and ‘‘chemo’’ together in a sentence: ‘‘She has already started to wear sunglasses indoors, like a celebrity widow.’’ If these stories produce immense satisfaction, the reader also struggles with rising horror at what it must have cost Moore emotionally to understand feelings so clearly. It is evident in every story that Moore feels with her head as well as her heart. There is an organic unity about her work that both fascinates and appalls: how can she make so effortless the move from daily frustration to intense dread that goes with the life-threatening illness of a beloved child? So, though Moore did not invent black humor in Birds of America, she certainly refined it. The alternately sad and outrageous story ‘‘Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens’’ transforms the stages of grief described by a young woman mourning the death of her cat—‘‘Anger, Denial, Bargaining, Häagen-Dazs, Rage’’—into laughter as inevitable as tears. Moore’s imaginative range is vast: her stories begin in Iowa, Ireland, Italy, New York; descriptive passages about aging are as effective and affecting as those about adolescence; some stories
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experiment with second person, others have an omniscient narrator whose judgement seems as reliable as her information. Moore is both graceful and reckless, an oxymoron on the page, wringing out misery like a wet towel in the spin cycle—one has to stop occasionally to settle the soggy object into a proper spot—and then goes on. Her touch is light when one most expects the weight of drama, but her estimation of just how much the reader can take is sure and keen. OTHER WORKS: Anagrams (1986). The Forgotten Helper (1987). Like Life (1990). Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (1994). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1986). CANR (1992). CLC (1967, 1987, 1989). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Chicago Tribune Book World (24 Mar. 1985). LAT (3 June 1985). LATBR (3 June 1990). NYT (6 Mar. 1985). NYTBR (24 Mar. 1985, 20 May 1990). TLS (31 Aug. 1990). Vanity Fair (Sept. 1985). —KATHLEEN BONANN MARSHALL
MOORE, Marianne (Craig) Born 15 November 1887, Kirkwood, Missouri; died 5 February 1972, New York, New York Daughter of John Milton and Mary Warner Moore Marianne Moore was raised by her mother and grandfather, a Presbyterian minister. She was seven when her grandfather died, and her mother moved the two children to Carlisle, Pennsylvania. She became an English teacher in the Metzger Institute, where she was educated before entering Bryn Mawr College (B.A., 1909). In college, Moore specialized in biology and histology, but also submitted poetry to the campus literary magazine. For four years after graduating from the Carlisle Commercial College in 1910, Moore taught stenography, typing, and bookkeeping at the U.S. Indian School in Carlisle. Moore’s publishing career began in 1915 when the Egoist, a London journal dedicated to the new Imagist movement in poetry, accepted ‘‘To the Soul of Progress,’’ a short satire on war. The same year, Poetry published Moore for the first time in a U.S. magazine of general circulation. In Greenwich Village, where Moore lived with her mother, she became part of a literary group that included poets William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and Alfred Krembourg. Poems (1921) was published without Moore’s knowledge by her admirers in England. She added several poems, including the long Marriage (issued first as a pamphlet in 1923), before the collection was published in the U.S. as Observations (1924). It won the $2,000 Dial Award for ‘‘distinguished service to American letters,’’ and Moore was asked to become acting editor of the Dial, where she worked from
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1926 until the magazine ceased publication in 1929. Thereafter her vocation was solely poetry and writing. Moore was the recipient of many honorary degrees and awards, including the Bollingen and Pulitzer prizes for her Collected Poems (1951). In 1955 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Observations shows clearly Moore’s celebrated innovations in prosody, formal structuring of verse, and poetic vision of animals and of man. In ‘‘The Fish,’’ Moore’s sharp powers of close observation enable her to render vividly the world of the ocean. That poem also reveals Moore’s intense interest in design and pattern, indicated by the distinctive forms of typography, and her new emphasis on the whole stanza as a formal unit, rather than on the line. In the first few lines of ‘‘Poetry,’’ Moore tells us she, too, dislikes poetry, but that by reading it, one may discover ‘‘the genuine.’’ This poem includes Moore’s famous description of poetry as seeing real toads in imaginary gardens. In his introduction to Moore’s Selected Poems (1935), T. S. Eliot linked her with the Imagist poets, yet pointed out unique characteristics of her work. He acknowledged her as the greatest master of light rhyme, admiring her intricate forms and patterns. Eliot recognized Moore’s work as being part of a small number of durable poems from our time. In ‘‘The Mind Is an Enchanted Thing’’ (from Nevertheless, 1944, reissued 1983), Moore argues, through her own intricate form of syllabics, that contemplation of art has the power to transform spiritual dejection into spiritual joy. The most emotional of all Moore’s poems is ‘‘In Distrust of Merits.’’ It has been called the best poem to come out of World War II; the theme is the tragedy of war, and the poem reflects Moore’s profound hope that contagion, so effective in sickness, may also become effective in creating trust. Moore’s major scholarly work, on which she spent nine years, is a translation of the fables of La Fontaine (1954). The fables are all slyly satirical and entertaining in their striking wisdom and new typographical forms. Moore’s criticism, collected in Predilections (1955), is eclectic; her topics include Louise Bogan, D. H. Lawrence, Sir Francis Bacon, Ezra Pound, Henry James, and Anna Pavlova. She also wrote a play, The Absentee: A Comedy in Four Acts (1962), based on the 1812 Irish novel by Maria Edgeworth. Moore’s most popular book, A Marianne Moore Reader (1961), includes selections from her best prose and poems. Moore’s primary literary contribution is the development of the artful flexibility of direct language in poems. She is remembered as a genius of invention in poetry, for humane wit and intellectual energy, and as a loved and gracious literary artist. OTHER WORKS: The Pangolin, and Other Verse (1936). What Are Years (1941). A Face (1949). The Fables of La Fontaine (translated by Moore, 1954). Gedichte (1954). Like a Bulwark (1956). Idiosyncrasy & Technique: Two Lectures (1958). Letters from and to the Ford Motor Company (1958). O to Be a Dragon (1959).
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The Arctic Ox (1964). Poetry and Criticism (1965). Tell Me, Tell Me; Granite, Steel, and Other Topics (1966). The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (1967, 1972). The Accented Syllable (1969). Marianne Moore’s First Poem (1972). Unfinished Poems (1972). Marianne Moore: Letters to Hildegarde Watson, 19331964 (1976). Alyse Gregory Remembered (1981). Answers to Some Questions Posed by Howard Nemerov (1982). Nevertheless (1983). The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore (edited by P. C. Willis, 1987). Complete Poems (1994). Selected Letters of Marianne Moore (1998). BIBLIOGRAPHY: August, B. T., The Poetic Use of Womanhood in Five Modern American Poets: Moore, Millay, Rukeyser, Levertov, and Plath (1995). Ciugureanu, A., High Modernist Poetic Discourse: T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens (1997). Engle, B. F., Marianne Moore (1964, 1989). Garrigue, J., Marianne Moore (1965). Goodridge, C., Hints and Disguises: Marianne Moore and Her Contemporaries (1989). Hall, D., Marianne Moore: The Cage and the Animal (1970). Holley, M., The Poetry of Marianne Moore: A Study in Voice and Value (1987). Joyce, E. W., Cultural Critique and Abstraction: Marianne Moore and the Avant-Garde (1998). Kineke, S. A., Prefacing Modernism: The Marketing and Mentoring of Women Writers in the Early 20th Century (dissertation, 1996). Leavell, L., Marianne Moore and the Visual Arts: Prismatic Color (1995). Magill, F. N., Great Women Writers: The Lives and Works of 135 of the World’s Most Important Women Writers, From Antiquity to the Present (1994). Martin, T., Marianne Moore: Subversive Modernist (1986). Nitchie, G. W., Marianne Moore: An Introduction to the Poetry (1969). Miller, C., Marianne Moore: Questions of Authority (1995). Molesworth, C., Marianne Moore: A Literary Life (1990). Page, D., Marianne Moore (1994). Parisi, J., ed., Marianne Moore: The Art of a Modernist (1990). Plimpton, G., ed., Women Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews (1998). Schulze, R. G., The Web of Friendship: Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens (1995). Schulman, G., Marianne Moore: The Poetry of Engagement (1986). Sheehy, E. P., and K. A. Lohf, The Achievement of Marianne Moore: A Bibliography, 1907-1957 (1958). Slatin, J., The Savage’s Romance: The Poetry of Marianne Moore (1986). Stamy, C., Marianne Moore and China: Orientalism and a Writing of America (1999). Teter, S. W., ‘‘Collaboration and Commitment: A Study of Marianne Moore’s Career as Poet and Daughter’’ (thesis, 1998). Tomlinson, C., ed., Marianne Moore: A Collection of Critical Essays (1969). Watts, E. S., The Poetry of American Women from 1632 to 1945 (1977). Willis, P. C., Marianne Moore: Woman and Poet (1990). Reference works: CA (1973) CB (Dec. 1952, April 1968). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCA, TCAS. Other references: American Book Review (Oct. 1992). Harper’s (May 1977). Journal of Modern Literature (1997). London Review of Books (1998). Modern Philology (1997). New England Quarterly (June 1993). NYRB (Nov. 1997). NYTBR (Nov. 1997). Parnassus (1991). Quarterly Review of Literature (1948, 1969). —ROBIN JOHNSON
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MOORE, Mary Evelyn See DAVIS, Mollie Moore
MOORE, Mollie E. See DAVIS, Mollie Moore
MOORHEAD, Sarah Parsons Born circa 1710s; death date unknown Sarah Parsons Moorhead lived during the tumultuous Great Awakening, the religious revival of the 1740s which shook New England. Moorhead’s one slender published work, To the Reverend James Davenport on His Departure from Boston by Way of a Dream (1742), is an extended poetic comment on the controversy that occurred in Boston over Davenport’s theological opinions and religious practices. Davenport, deeply affected by the religious zeal of the 1740s, deserted his congregation of Southold, Long Island, and began itinerant preaching. He attacked the piety and sincerity of local ministers, creating internal dissension in many congregations. Moorhead comments sharply on his behavior and admonishes backsliding and bickering Bostonians. Her public criticism of the clergy is significant because it was published contemporaneously with the events discussed in the poem. That is, a woman writer had been accepted as a critic of current events as early as 1742. Stylistically, Moorhead mimics the poetical taste of the day. Paradoxically, although her subject is religious, Moorhead speaks with the voice of a distressed sentimental lover. Moorhead also employs the technique of a dream vision. She interjects a feminine feeling through florid description, creating an elaborate tapestry quality. Perhaps Moorhead recognized that using such sugared language would make her severe criticism acceptable to the public. Her style and subject matter thus appear as a strange but well-presented mixture of the religious and the secular, the pious and the sentimental. Moorhead’s criticism, perhaps influenced by Charles Chauncy, the conservative minister of the First Church of Boston, focuses on the extremist elements of the Great Awakening and on a prevalent religious hypocrisy. She also discusses free grace. Dealing with a major problem among the Puritans—the difficulty of differentiating between moral action and faith—Moorhead depicts the good-deeds churchgoers, who salve their conscience while actually remaining ‘‘immers’d in the black Gulph of sin, / . . .Pleas’d with the fancy’d Freedom of their Will.’’ She believed that salvation can be secured only through the gift of free grace. The poem also emphasizes the breakdown of morale in the Congregationalist churches—a result of continued quarreling over theological differences, notably among the ministers. Moorhead admonishes the New England churches to remain united against external opposition if they are to survive. She
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restates this notion in a short poetic postscript published with the longer Davenport verse. Moorhead’s two poems have historical importance as well as poetic merit. They indicate a general easing of social and religious restraints among New England’s Puritans, which allowed women a wider range of subjects and an emergent, if limited, public voice in the New England colonies. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Benedict, A., A History and Genealogy of the Davenport Family (1851). —JACQUELINE HORNSTEIN
MORAGA, Cherríe Born 25 September 1952, Whittier, California Daughter of Joseph L. and Elvira Moraga Cherríe Moraga is a celebrated poet, playwright, and essayist. Her mother is Chicana and her father European American, and she grew up in the Los Angeles area, but as a young adult moved to Northern California. A poor reader as a child, she affirms that listening to the women of her mother’s family instilled in her the art of telling a story and the blend of Spanish and English that characterizes her writing. She received a B.A. in English (1974) and an M.A. in feminist writings (1981) from San Francisco State University. From 1986 to 1991 Moraga taught in the Chicano Studies Department at the University of California at Berkeley. Moraga’s work is courageous and polemical in both Chicano and feminist communities. Speaking as a Chicana feminist lesbian, she has broken the silence surrounding taboo topics such as sexuality and lesbianism, sexism and homophobia in Chicano culture, racism and classism in the white women’s movement, and the urgent need for a feminism defined by women of color. Moraga’s effort to think through what it means to be Chicana and lesbian in essays that are collages of dreams, journal entries, and autobiographical reflection is an important foundation on which to build further Latina feminist theory. Moraga is well known as coeditor and contributor to the award-winning book This Bridge Called My Back (1981), an anthology of poetry and essays by radical women of color. Coedited with Gloria Anzaldúa, the book provides an analysis of interlocking systems of oppression. Besides the important prefatory material, including the introduction defining the concept of ‘‘theory in the flesh,’’ Moraga’s work is represented by two poems and an essay. ‘‘La Güera’’ explains how her light skin allowed her to ‘‘pass’’ until she came out as a lesbian. Only then did she understand oppression. The essay documents her painful journey to ‘‘my brown mother—the brown in me,’’ and calls for an awareness of the ways in which all women internalize the values of the oppressor. She sees her lesbian identity as another border to be crossed in her critical subjectivity.
Moraga is also acclaimed for her early book Cuentos: Stories by Latinas (1983), coedited with Alma Gomez and Mariana Romo-Carmona. This book is the first anthology of fiction by Latina feminist writers. ‘‘Sin luz,’’ one of Moraga’s two stories, is a frank depiction of a young girl’s attitudes about sexuality. In another book published in 1983, Loving in the War Years, Moraga gathered together seven years of poetry and continued to work out in essays the contradictory aspects of her identity. She analyzes the pervasive influence on gender roles of the myth of ‘‘La Malinche,’’ Hernán Cortés’ mistress and tactical adviser who represented the equation of female sexuality and betrayal and contributed to the cultural construction of woman as passive object. And she forges new meaning for the lesbian body, which has been considered culturally meaningless. Part of her challenge in the construction of lesbian consciousness is to discover or create a female-centered image and to resist heterosexual meanings and images. Moraga’s first work for the theater, the two-act verse play Giving Up the Ghost (1986), which premiered in San Francisco in 1987, juxtaposes the poetic monologues of three characters: Marisa, a Chicana lesbian; Corky, Marisa’s younger self; and Amalia, a heterosexual Chicana. Corky’s fierce attempts to escape the definition of her female self as passive object are defeated when she is raped at the age of eleven. The adult Marisa is left with her rage, unable to open herself in her love for women and crippled by the betrayal of women who always put men first. Through Amalia’s love for her, Marisa experiences what it is like to surrender to the woman she desires. But this sexual love does not bring salvation, and at the end of the play, both women are still struggling with the private ghosts that torment them, although Marisa dreams of a community based on the love and loyalty of women for women. Moraga has received several fellowships and awards for her work in playwrighting. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Theatre Playwrights Fellowship, the Dramalogue Award for Playwrighting, the PEN West Literary Award for Drama, the Will Glickman Playwrighting award, and the Critics’ Circle award for best original script. Since 1991 she has been an artist-in-residence and instructor in creative and performance writing at the Brava! For Women in the Arts organization in San Francisco. Moraga’s second play, Shadow of a Man, performed in 1990 at San Francisco’s Eureka Theatre, explores the harmful impact of machismo on Chicano men. Set in the late 1960s in Los Angeles, the play tells the story of the Rodríguez family, torn apart by the dark ‘‘secret’’ of the father Manuel’s obsession with his compadre Conrado, who represents the masculine ideal Manuel both desires and fails to embody. The play asks the Latino community to think about sexuality and desire beyond rigid heterosexual roles and to explore the intersections and contradictions of homosociality and homosexuality. In 1992 the play opened at The Latino Chicago Theatre. Moraga’s third play, Heroes and Saints, premiered at the Mission Theatre in San Francisco in May 1992 and later that year at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio, Texas. This play combines consideration of the pesticide poisoning of farm workers, sexuality, and female subjectivity. With it, Moraga
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continues the project of creating a ‘‘healing’’ theater that offers the possibility of transformation by addressing Chicano reality in all its complexity. Heroes & Saints and Other Plays was published in 1993 by West End Press. Moraga continues to write essays and poetry, publishing a new collection in 1993 titled The Last Generation, and also to collaborate with other Latinas. In 1989 she published The Sexuality of Latinas, coedited with Norma Alarcón and Ana Castillo, a collection of essays and poems by several Latinas dealing in fun with the taboo subject of sex. She frequently provides talks and performances for university and other academic functions, such as a performance and keynote talk for the March 1999 opening of the Southwest Texas State University’s new L.B.J. Student Center and a performance with Sandra Cisneros for the 1999 National Association of Chicana/Chicano Studies annual conference. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Corpi, L., ed., M scaras (1997). Hart, L., and P. Phelan, eds., Acting Out: Feminist Performances (1993). Horno-Delgado, A. et al., eds., Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writing and Critical Readings (1989). McCracken, E., New Latina Narrative: The Feminine Space of Postmodern Ethnicity (1999). McKenna, T., Migrant Song: Politics and Process in Contemporary Chicano Literature (1997). Rebolledo, T. D., Women Singing in the Snow (1995). Saldívar, R., Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference (1990). Third Woman (1986). Trujillo, C., ed., Chicana Lesbians. The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About (1991). Reference works: CA (1991). DLB (1989). Hispanic Writers (1987). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Americas Review (Summer 1986, Fall 1987). Monographic Review (1990). Off Our Backs (Jan. 1985). —YVONNE YARBRO-BEJARANO AND ELIZABETH COONROD MARTINEZ
MORGAN, Claire See HIGHSMITH, Patricia
MORGAN, Marabel Born 25 June 1937, Crestline, Ohio Married Charles Morgan, 1964 Marabel Morgan recalls that ‘‘I never saw a happy marriage when I was young. I grew up amid a lot of fighting. My father left when I was three, and then my mother married a policeman who adopted me. I adored him.’’ The family was poor, despite the long hours Morgan’s father worked. Until her father’s death, Morgan’s parents were ‘‘in the throes of divorce. . . . I was being wrenched between one parent and the other. . . . I had packed and unpacked my few belongings at least a dozen times.’’
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As a beautician, Morgan earned enough money to study home economics for one year at Ohio State University. After a conversion experience, Morgan worked with Campus Crusade for one year at the University of Miami, where she met and married a law student. Entering marriage with high expectations, Morgan was quickly disappointed. She found herself tense, nagging, and resentful, repeating the unhappiness of her childhood home. Her four principles for pleasing husbands were developed in an attempt to save her own marriage—accept him, admire him, adapt to him, appreciate him. Morgan first shared her principles with friends, and then began teaching ‘‘Total Woman’’ classes and hiring other women to help her teach. When Morgan was urged to write up her classes, her editors warned her to keep the writing at a fifth-grade level, which was no problem, she says, since ‘‘I’m a two-syllable person.’’ Morgan’s writing in Total Woman (1973, reprinted and translated into several languages) and its sequel Total Joy (1976) is breezy, simple, and directed at women like herself—full-time homemakers whose husbands are quite affluent. The principle of adapting is the most controversial part of Morgan’s books. She concludes: ‘‘God planned for the woman to be under her husband’s rule.’’ In an interview, Morgan admitted the ideal is for the husband and wife to discuss decisions and make them together. But if the attempt at compromise fails, the only two alternatives she sees are for the wife to go the husband’s way, or for them to split up. The wife usually gets her own way, however, by submitting and using ancient ‘‘feminine wiles’’—and the rewards for adapting are usually material. Total Joy reflects the criticism of the materialism of Total Woman, concentrating more on affection and less on presents. Morgan was among the first to tell Evangelicals that sexuality and godliness are not incompatible, which may explain why her book was the number-one bestseller of 1947. Morgan presents two principles: sex is necessary for a man, and he will get it elsewhere if he doesn’t get it at home; and sex is as ‘‘clean and pure as eating cottage cheese.’’ Morgan’s advice (to meet the husband at the door dressed in a ‘‘costume’’ or to put suggestive notes in his lunch box, for example) may seem silly and immature, but by playing these games, with the encouragements of other ‘‘gals’’ in the class, some women are apparently able to develop a more positive attitude toward their own sexuality. The primary weaknesses of Morgan’s books are her logical fallacies and her encouragement of materialism and manipulation. Her strengths lie in her stress on self-acceptance, hints for efficient home management, positive attitude toward sexuality, and apparently genuine love for her family and faith in God. OTHER WORKS: The Electric Woman: Hope for Tired Mothers, Lovers, and Others (1985). Marabel Morgan’s Total Woman Cookbook: A Handbook for Kitchen Survival (1980). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Fallon, J. L., A Rhetorical Analysis of The Total Woman Movement (thesis 1979). Howard, A., and S. R. Tarrant, eds., Reaction to the Modern Women’s Movement: 1963 to the
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Present (1997). Meier, M. M., The Husband-Wife Relationship: A Critique of Three Popular Female Christian Philosophies (thesis, 1978). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Christian Century (8 Dec. 1976). National Review (25 Apr. 1975). NYT (28 Sept. 1975). Time (14 Mar. 1977). Wittenburg Door (Aug.-Sept. 1975). —MARGARET P. HANNAY
MORGAN, Robin Born 29 January 1941, Lake Worth, Florida Daughter of Faith Berkeley Morgan; married Kenneth Pitchford, 1962; children: Blake As a child, Robin Morgan played Dagmar on the popular television series I Remember Mama but quit acting at age sixteen. She left Columbia University in 1962 to marry a fellow poet and work as a literary agent and freelance editor. Becoming an antiwar ‘‘politico’’ activist in the New Left, Morgan met Ellen Willis and Jane Alpert and, like many female colleagues, made a quick transition to radical feminism. She was a founding member of New York Radical Feminists (NYRF, 1967) and the Women’s International Conspiracy from Hell (WITCH, 1968). Morgan helped organize and publicize the 1968 WITCH demonstration at the Miss America Pageant and was an early participant in NYRF consciousness-raising sessions. Morgan and Alpert engineered the January 1970 women’s takeover of the New Left magazine Rat, publishing a women’s issue in retaliation for the male staff’s ‘‘sex-and-porn special.’’ Morgan’s essay, ‘‘Good-Bye to All That,’’ a bitter indictment of male chauvinism among leftist activists and a call for a women’s revolution, was ‘‘the shot heard round the Left,’’ and became a feminist classic signaling gender fragmentation, the rise of the Women’s Liberation Front, and the demise of the New Left. Morgan’s rage, with characteristically emotional leftist rhetoric punctuated by obscenities, proclaimed the beginning of a new era critical of patriarchal, sexist, racist, imperialist, and capitalist ‘‘Amerika.’’ Morgan and other radical women published Rat for two years as a feminist periodical before Alpert fled ‘‘underground’’ to avoid prosecution for Weatherman activities. Morgan’s ‘‘Letter to a Sister Underground’’ revealed that she remained Alpert’s mentor despite intense controversy over Alpert among feminists. Morgan became a major theorist for cultural feminism, urging creation of alternative women’s institutions as ‘‘concrete moves towards self-determination and power’’ and ‘‘an absolute necessity.’’ She emphasized women’s essential sameness and connections, their difference from men. Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement (1970), edited by Morgan and proclaimed as the radical
feminist ‘‘bible,’’ compiled documents on race, class, sexuality, and cultural representation from over 70 women and organizations. Morgan believed the process of creating the book through ‘‘collectivity, cooperation, and lack of competition’’ to be ‘‘proof of how radically different the women’s movement is from male-dominated movements.’’ Morgan’s essays in Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicles of a Feminist (1977) exemplify a personal struggle to compromise tensions between heterosexuality and radical feminism. Recounting the early years of her marriage to a bisexual, marital tensions, motherhood, and the beginnings of the women’s liberation movement, the book is an account of personal growth spanning the transition from prefeminism in 1962 to ‘‘transformative’’ feminism by 1977, a process of discovering that personal problems are intrinsic in gender relationships related to larger cultural issues. Morgan declared herself a lesbian in the mid-1970s, yet vilified male values in lesbianism in her attempt to end the gay-straight split in the women’s movement. ‘‘The Rights of Passage’’ in Ms. (September 1975) epitomized her unsuccessful crusade to reconcile fragmentation in the movement through ‘‘pluralistic tolerance.’’ In her poetry, Morgan often uses a feminist, polemical voice more celebratory of Jungian matriarchal archetypes than simply countering patriarchy, ranging in form from sonnets and villanelles to forms of her own invention. In Monsters (1972) and Lady of the Beasts (1976), she finds female identity in a universal self, mundane aspects of the eternal Creatrix, and ends with hope for cultural transformation. Her third volume, Depth Perception: New Poems and a Masque (1982), is an almost novelistic progression from self-affirmation to a call for transcendent unification. The one-act verse play with which it ends, featuring archetypal woman and man speaking truths spanning the comic and the tragic, was first performed in New York in 1979 with her husband’s complementary one-act play, The Dialectic, under the joint title Love’s Duel. Rejecting ‘‘this century’s divisions between thought and action, art and politics, thinking and feeling,’’ Morgan means her poems to ‘‘shock, infuriate, terrify, move, heal, release.’’ Upstairs in the Garden: Poems, Selected and New, 1968-1988 (1990) contains works that have appeared in many literary magazines, anthologies, and feminist journals. ‘‘The Two Gretels’’ provided feminists with slogans for banners, posters, buttons, and t-shirts. The Anatomy of Freedom: Feminism, Physics, and Global Politics (1982) argues for human freedom based on erratic motion in quantum physics and a historic perspective. Here Morgan describes creating a logo for the women’s movement, a clenched fist inside the universal sign for the female as inclusive of ‘‘women and men together’’ and a ‘‘sign of hope.’’ Morgan also edited Sisterhood Is Global: The International Women’s Movement Anthology (1985), full of demographic, economic, and political facts from 70 countries and including an extensive bibliography. Critical of patriarchy, the volume argues that ‘‘the world’s problems are women,’’ rarely consulted for solutions or considered by those in power. Critics lambasted it as left leaning. Contributors met in 1984 in the Sisterhood Is Global Institute to ‘‘address the problems of women everywhere,’’ including care
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for the elderly, poverty, population, education, religion, and women’s rights, status, and problems. Morgan’s first novel, Dry Your Smile (1987), is the self-conscious account of a woman writer expressing many of the concerns seen in Going Too Far. For The Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism (1989), describing herself as a feminist ‘‘apostate Jew’’ trying to understand the Middle East conflict, Morgan interviewed women in the Gaza Strip and on the West Bank. The book continues earlier themes of ‘‘metaphysical feminism’’ in theoretical essays. A longtime contributing editor to Ms. magazine, Morgan became its editor in 1990. She received the Front Page Award for distinguished journalism in 1982 and is an active lecturer. Morgan has continued to be an influential and prominent feminist activist, theorist, and author. For the last 25 years, she has offered an incisive global commentary on the conditions of women’s lives. Her poetry, essays, and fiction reflect her commitment to forging her artistic self and political interests into an ‘‘integrity which affirms language, art, craft, form, beauty, tragedy, and audacity.’’ She writes poetry that often plumbs the depths of forbidden inexpressible rage. Alicia Ostriker in the Partisan Review called Morgan ‘‘one of the most honestly angry women since Antigone.’’ In the early 1990s, Morgan produced several retrospective collections of her poetry and feminist writings. Upstairs in the Garden: Poems Selected and New, 1968-1988 (1990) brings together her classic early poems, including ‘‘Monster’’ and ‘‘The Network of Imaginary Mothers,’’ along with new pieces. Morgan’s poetry demonstrates her continuing fierce dedication to women’s lives and passions. Her work is deeply feminist. The Word of a Woman: Feminist Dispatches, 1968-1992 (1992) brings together 18 previously published essays produced by Morgan over a quarter of a century. In a review for Belles Lettres, Renee Hausmann Shea wrote that the essays, each accompanied by new prefaces and footnotes, ‘‘are shot through with optimism and pain. They are written with passion and humility and wit.’’ This volume is especially recommended for today’s third-wave feminists, since it provides a comprehensive overview of feminist issues and slogans since 1968. Morgan’s devotion to causes that transcend racism, sexism, and all other forms of oppression and injustice has led her to found or cofound several organizations that promote feminist change. These include the Sisterhood Is Global Institute, the National Network of Rape Crisis Centers, the New York Women’s Center, the Feminist Women’s Health Network, and the Battered Women’s Refuge Network. In 1990 she returned to the position of editor of the new, no-advertising Ms. magazine and became its international consulting editor in 1993. Her recent book of poetry, Hot January: Poems 1996-1999, was published in fall of 1999. Her life and work affirm her insistence on personal liberation and revolutionary feminist politics. OTHER WORKS: Poems by Seven: Robin Morgan and Others 1959. Women’s Liberation (1969). Death Benefits (1981). Manpower: Photographs by Sally Soamer (1987). The Mer-Child: A
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Legend for Children and Other Adults (1991). The Anatomy of Freedom: Feminism, Physics, and Global Politics (1994). Robin Morgan’s papers are housed in the Schlesinger Library of Radcliffe College.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Alperr, J., Growing Up Underground (1981). Cohen, M., The Sisterhood: The Inside Story of the Women’s Movement and the Leaders Who Made It Happen (1988). Echols, A., Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975 (1989). Payne, K., ed., Between Ourselves: Letters Between Mothers and Daughters, 1750-1982 (1984). Reference works: CA (1978). CANR (1998). CLC (1974, 1990). FC (1990). MTCW (1991). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Choice (May 1985). Commonweal (2 Apr. 1971, 15 Jan. 1973). Feminist Writers (1996). Ms. (Sept. 1975, Mar. 1977, Jan. 1991). Nation (14 Dec. 1970, 2 Mar. 1985). NYT (29 Oct. 1970). NYTBR (22 Nov. 1970, 21 Feb. 1971, 19 Nov. 1972, 27 Jan. 1985, 27 Sept. 1987). off our backs (Apr. 1989). Partisan Review (10 Jan. 1980). Poetry (Dec. 1973, Aug. 1975, Aug. 1977). Progressive (Jan. 1977, Aug. 1977). TLS (12 Nov. 1982). WRB (8 July 1987). —BLANCHE LINDEN-WARD, UPDATED BY CELESTE DEROCHE
MORLEY, Hilda Born 19 September 1916, New York, New York; died 23 March 1998 Wrote under: Hilda Auerbach Daughter of Rachmiel and Sonia Kamenetsky Auerbach; married Eugene Morley, 1945 (divorced 1949); Stefan Wolpe, 1952 (died 1972) Hilda Morley, who began writing poems at nine and who as a young woman living in London both corresponded with W. B. Yeats and became friends with H[ilda]. D[oolittle], is frequently associated with the Black Mountain poets. With her husband, Stefan Wolpe, she taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina from 1952 to 1956, and published in the Black Mountain Review. She was a friend of Charles Olson, as poems such as ‘‘For Constance Olson (January 1975)’’ and ‘‘Charles Olson (1910-1970)’’ recall. Influenced by Olson’s ideas on Projective Verse, she mastered and went beyond his theories of ‘‘composition by field’’ for, as Denise Levertov stated, Morley ‘‘is one of the few who know exactly how to notate, or score, the words on the page so that emphasis, nuance, pace, all get into the reader’s ear.’’ Black Mountain poet Robert Creeley wrote the introduction to her first collection of poems, A Blessing Outside Us (1976). Levertov wrote the preface for What Are Winds and What Are Waters (1983); Morley opens the first section, ‘‘Makers,’’ of To
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Hold in My Hand: Selected Poems, 1955-1983 (1983) with a poem ‘‘for Denise’’ called ‘‘Psalm,’’ and she has written long essays for Ironwood about Levertov (Spring 1985) and George Oppen (Fall 1985). A highly visual person, whose poems are filled with a sense of place and landscape, Morley has also been influenced by painters. Cloudless at First (1988) contains ‘‘Eye of Pissarro’’ and ‘‘Matisse: Large Red Interior’’ as well as ‘‘Yeats at Seventy’’ and ‘‘A Voice Suspended,’’on H. D.: ‘‘Hilda Doolittle / like myself American / in London.’’ Born of parents who had emigrated from Russia, Morley received a rich and varied education. As a youngster, she attended the experimental Walden School in New York City. In 1934 she moved with her parents to Palestine, where she completed high school at the Haifa Realschule. In autumn 1936 she moved to London, where in 1939 she took an Honors B.A. in English language and literature at University College. Subsequently, Morley earned graduate degrees and taught at New York University, and was a faculty member at Queens College (New York) and Rutgers University. At Black Mountain College, known for its experimentation in the arts, Morley taught 17th-century English literature, late 19th- and early 20th-century literature, and Hebrew. Morley’s experiences in Palestine and her Jewish heritage have been important to her life and writing. During World War II, she worked with the Office of War Information and later with the American Jewish Congress. She also translated modern Hebrew poetry which appeared in The Jewish Frontier and Israel Life and Letters. Her translation of Morley Mosenson’s Letters from the Desert won the Lamed Award for best translation. ‘‘I am a daughter of the daughters of Jerusalem,’’ she writes in ‘‘Untitled.’’ Central to Morley’s life and poetry has been her 24-year relationship with avant-garde composer Stefan Wolpe, whom she met in the U.S. in September 1948. During her early years of marriage, Morley subordinated her own artistic career to her husband’s, and in ‘‘La Belle Otero’’ speaks of herself as ‘‘Being one of those who postponed / her real self so much, / letting others lead me (or not) / being loved / & loving so much.’’ In 1962 Wolpe was diagnosed as terminally ill with Parkinson’s disease; he died in 1972. Morley describes Wolpe in ‘‘Letter for Stefan, Fifteen Years Later’’ as ‘‘most gifted / of all the men I’ve known in making / life more alive, more charged with / pride.’’ She hoped to complete a prose biography of her husband; many, even most of her poems are about Wolpe—their love, her loss. In 1983 Morley received a Guggenheim Fellowship and also became the first recipient of the Capricorn Award, sponsored by the Writer’s Voice of the West Side YMCA in New York City and ‘‘given to a poet over forty in belated recognition of excellence.’’ In 1989 she won awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts and from the Fund for Poetry; she was a nominee for the Poets Prize in 1990. Critics speak admiringly of Morley’s courage and self-effacing modesty, of her unflinching determination to experience all of life fully, of her ‘‘combined lyricism and intelligence.’’ Her poems are permeated with the sense of loss, yet filled with a sensuous joy.
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OTHER WORKS: Not Tristan & Isolde (1986). Between the Rocks: Poems (1992). What Are Winds & What Are Waters: Poems (1993). The Turning (1998).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hilda Morley (audio tape, 1981). Other references: American Book Review (Feb. 1980, Jan. 1986). Booklist (15 Sept. 1984). Boston Review (Aug. 1989). Georgia Review (Spring 1985). Hilda Morley (audio tape, 1981). Ironwood (featured: Nov. 1982). LJ (1 June 1984). Parnassus (1988). Poetry (Aug. 1985). PW (27 April 1984). Small Press Review 7 (Aug. 1989). TLS (18 April 1986). VV (16 Oct. 1984). —JEAN TOBIN
MORRIS, Clara Born 17 March 1847, Toronto, Canada; died 20 November 1925, New Canaan, Connecticut Also wrote under: Mrs. Clara Morris Harriott Daughter of Charles La Montagne and Sarah Jane Proctor; married Frederic C. Harriott, 1874 Clara Morris lived with her seamstress mother in boardinghouses. At thirteen, she became a dancer’s apprentice in a Cleveland musical company, and advanced after seven years to Augustin Daly’s Fifth Avenue Theater in New York. Morris then moved to A. N. Palmer’s Union Square Company, where she remained for most of her 30 years in the theater as the unchallenged queen of the emotional school of acting. In 1890, chronic poor health forced Moore to relinquish regular acting jobs for occasional appearances, lectures, and writing. Moore’s marriage was an unhappy one. In her last years, her considerable fortune exhausted, Moore battled poverty and arthritis. Several benefits staged for Moore by her fellow actors failed to save her house from creditors. In a desperate effort to keep herself alive, Moore wrote eight books in eight years. Little Jim Crow (1899) is a children’s book of sketches of real-life waifs. Life on the Stage (1901) is both an account of Moore’s early childhood and rise to stardom and a defense of the profession. Three volumes appeared in 1902: A Pasteboard Crown, a novel about a star’s hopeless love for a married man; A Silent Singer, another collection of real-life sketches, primarily about old age and death; and Stage Confidences, containing advice for the aspiring actress. In 1904, M. published Left in Charge, a novel of the Ohio frontier of her youth. Many details are autobiographical: A woman alone with her daughter tries to scrape together a living and escape discovery by her bigamist husband. Another short
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sketch of frontier life, The Trouble Woman appeared the same year. It is about a woman who loses husband, children, and farm to the harshness of 19th-century rural life. The Life of a Star (1906) is a series of character sketches of people Morris knew: a Mormon leader, the pacifist L. Q. C. Lanar, Dion Boucicault, and others. No element of melodrama is missing from The New East Lynne (1908). A wronged wife, disfigured by an accident, returns incognito to be her own children’s governess. The literary strengths and weaknesses of Morris’ work derive from the domestic tragedies in which she appeared as an actress— stock melodramatic characters and stories and rapidly moving plots. Despite the superficiality of much of her work, Morris learned to tell a story and to reveal the problems of women in her time: the constant ‘‘neurasthenia,’’ the double sexual standard, the plight of the woman alone, and the burden of urban and rural poverty.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ayres, A., Acting and Actors (1894). Holcomb, W., Famous American Actors of To-Day (1896). Strang, L. C., Players and Plays of the Last Quarter Century (1902). Towse, J. R., Sixty Years of the Theatre: An Old Critic’s Memories (1916). Wilson, G. B., A History of American Acting (1966). Winter, W., The Wallet of Time (1913). —CLAUDIA D. JOHNSON
MORRISON, Toni Born 18 February 1931, Loraine, Ohio Daughter of George and Ramah Willis Wofford; married (divorced); children: two sons The daughter of working-class parents, Toni Morrison reflects her Midwestern background in her novels. Educated at Howard and Cornell Universities, Morrison has taught at several universities including Harvard and Princeton, while pursuing both writing and editing. Morrison has been married and divorced and is the mother of two sons. In the 1980s, Morrison had been identified by some as the only contemporary black feminist American novelist. Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), depicts the failed maturation of Pecola Breedlove, a black child of the 1940s who believes herself ugly as measured against white American standards of beauty. Pecola’s symbol of beauty and acceptance is her intense desire for blue eyes; her search for them leads her into the hands of a charlatan sorcerer. The novel is set into two frames—the school primer, which provides misleading standards
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of family life, and the perceptions of Claudia MacTeer, Pecola’s friend, who narrates the story. Morrison contrasts the two girls’ families, providing detailed and powerful flashbacks into the histories of both Breedlove parents. The reader clearly understands that unloved, unvalued human beings cannot love wisely, for Pecola is raped by her father and hence driven into madness and total social isolation. Another important theme is the difficulty of life for Southern blacks who move north. Generally well received by critics, the novel was taken as indication of Morrison’s power and potential as a writer. In Sula (1973), Morrison explores the maturation and long friendship of Sula Peace and Nel Wright Greene, as well as the history and values of the Bottom, the black settlement in imaginary Medallion, Ohio. Sula and Nel are revealed as the products of their family backgrounds, and the book stresses the various mother-daughter relationships. Highly episodic and violent, Sula depicts a wide range of the girls’ experiences—sexual awakening, black and female social roles, shared responsibility for a playmate’s death, an affair between Sub and Nel’s husband—and reveals that, could their separate damaged personalities be merged, the result would be a balanced, effective woman. Thus, the real tragedy is identified when Nel realizes her greatest loss is the failure of her friendship with Sula. Morrison’s early novels are spare; two of her greatest stylistic successes are her use of foreshadowing (often connected with extensive nature symbolism) and her realistic dialogue. With Song of Solomon (1977), however, Morrison has made a conscious effort to ‘‘write it all out,’’ and the result is a longer, more flowing novel. Song of Solomon retains some themes of Morrison’s earlier works. The development and destruction of a friendship is again depicted, and again, the friends would be more nearly whole were they to share one another’s traits. This is another maturation novel, and the central character—Macon ‘‘Milkman’’ Dead, Jr.— slowly learns to see himself not only as an individual but also as the product of his family history. The central image is Milkman’s desire to fly, cleverly associated with both the maturation and family motifs. Flashbacks are used very successfully, allowing the reader to share the mystery and excitement of Macon’s search for identity. The novel is panoramic, telling the stories of four generations through stunning characterization and the vivid portraits of two black communities. In Song, as in all her work, Morrison’s key theme is the effect of the presence or the absence of love, an examination of love as a liberating and nurturing (or destructive) force. In exploring various kinds of love, Morrison makes clear that the capacity for genuine love must be achieved through personal growth that includes evaluation, acceptance, or even rejection of learned patterns for loving. As an editor, Morrison stresses high-quality writing and urges women to value their experiences enough to write effectively about them. In conceiving and editing The Black Book (by Middleton Harris, et al., 1974), Morrison has helped provide a journalistic, pictorial, personal ‘‘scrapbook’’ of black American
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life from its beginnings. Her dedication to this project is in keeping with her desire to produce—and help others produce— true, valid portraits of black Americans and their lives. Widely considered the leading American novelist of the late 20th century, Morrison received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, the first African-American woman to be thus honored. Her later novels extend Morrison’s conscious effort, begun in Song of Solomon (1977), and expanded into a more discursive style. The resulting lyricism of Tar Baby (1981), Beloved (1987), and Jazz (1992) has been widely praised. Though each of her novels has accumulated some mixed reviews, by far the majority have been very positive. Appearances of her recent titles on bestseller lists demonstrate public as well as critical admiration for her work. Song of Solomon received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1978 and Beloved received the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. Beloved failed to win the National Book Award for that year although it was on the short list, prompting concern that Morrison was not receiving adequate recognition. In the 24 January 1988 issue of the New York Times Book Review, a group of black writers and critics published a ‘‘testament of thanks’’ to Morrison, believing her works have ‘‘advanced the moral and artistic standards by which we must measure the daring and the love of our national imagination and our collective intelligence as people.’’ An accompanying piece by June Jordan and Houston A. Baker, Jr. suggested a parallel between Morrison’s situation and that of James Baldwin, who was never nominated for the ‘‘keystones to the canon of American literature: the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.’’ Subsequently, when Beloved did win the Pulitzer Prize, the prize committee stressed that merit was the only standard upon which the award was granted. The controversy raised questions about the effect of racism on American life similar to the questions Morrison consistently addresses in her work. Morrison’s more recent novels extend the exploration of a key theme of her first works—the effect on the individual of the presence or the absence of love—just as they continue to examine relationships between parents and their children. From these perspectives, Morrison considers the impact of others’ responses upon her characters’ attitudes, emotions, and behavior. The sources of those responses are themselves crucially powerful subjects in her work, for almost all the problems that her protagonists confront stem from the racism so pervasive in American history and culture. As Morrison brilliantly and painfully depicts it, racial injustice has not only poisoned relationships within the community but has also damaged individuals to the point that they may contribute to their own destruction. Only by confronting personal and social history and by considering—sometimes embracing—the magic, folklore, and myths that illuminate it can an individual empower themselves to face the future with more confidence than fear. Understanding eases the crippling pressure of self-blame, though sadly, not all of her characters have strength enough to achieve it. Tar Baby, which reinvents the old tale of the fox and the rabbit, depicts intraracial as well as interracial conflict, here
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dramatized in the story of Jadine and Son—she beautiful, educated, nearly assimilated into the white culture, he angry, violent, at odds with her world. Passionate lovers, each is also a threat to and trap for the other. Morrison contrasts these lovers with a white couple, wealthy, ‘‘cultured’’ Valerian and Margaret Street, and with the Streets’ butler, Sydney, and his wife. Beloved, like Song of Solomon, is an especially powerful rendering of the control the past can exert over the present until an emotional exile achieves community with his or her own people. Based on a true story, Beloved depicts the life of Sethe, a slave who escaped to Cincinnati to find freedom for her children. When slave catchers close in, she succeeds in murdering one daughter, though three other children survive. Much later, in the guise of a grown woman, the dead daughter’s ghost takes over Sethe’s household, symbolizing the guilt and grief that have crippled her spirit. To survive, Sethe must come to believe what Paul D. tells her, that she is ‘‘her own best thing,’’ as she finds her way through her surviving daughter, Denver, into the life of the community. In Jazz, an unidentified first-person narrator recounts the story of Joe Trace, a middle-aged cosmetics peddler who murders his teenaged mistress, and of his wife, Violet, who attempts to deface the corpse in its coffin. The narrative style echoes a jazz performance, and the scene riffs fluidly from one time period to another. Though the community knows all about the murder and the attack upon the corpse, no one informs the authorities, and the Traces are left to confront one another, to acknowledge their deeds and misdeeds, and to attempt to repair their lives. More successful than Tar Baby, not so powerful as Beloved, Jazz is most effective in its bluesy evocation of New York in 1926. By her vivid, telling depictions of African-American experience in various periods and settings, Morrison has cast new perspectives on the nation’s past and even suggests—though she makes no promise—that people of strength and courage may be able to achieve a somewhat less destructive future. In a theoretical work, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) she examines the impact of race, racism, and the Africanist presence on several works by prominent American writers. The book is a stimulating companion to Morrison’s fiction. Like all of Morrison’s previous work, Paradise, her first post-Nobel novel, is an inquiry, and its title should be read with a question mark behind it. The familiar Morrison theme of human history—the relationship between past and present, the way history haunts—is revisited here as well, and ghosts are a given. Ruby, Oklahoma (established 1947, population 360), is based in history, literally and emotionally. The town is a transplanted rendition of another all-black community, Haven, established after the Civil War by Ruby’s ancestors, former slaves. Morrison illustrates how history is both Ruby’s source of strength and its fatal flaw. The history is permeated with anger and resentment springing from injustices, large and small, suffered by the ancestors at the hands of whites and light-skinned blacks. The townspeople are full of stories about these ancestors, ‘‘Testimonies to
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endurance, wit, skill and strength. Tales of luck and outrage,’’ but there are no stories of themselves. In failing to move past the town’s history, its leaders are paralyzed and unable to adapt to the turbulent societal changes of the 1960s and 1970s. Critics strongly disagree on whether the novel’s symbolism and sharply delineated dichotomies strengthen or weaken the book. Chief among the dichotomies is that of the town vs. the neighboring Convent. Built to be a crook’s mansion and converted to a convent and boarding school for Arapaho girls, in its decrepitude it is a home for outcasts, injured women who stumble upon it, just as the Convent stumbles along the path of its own chaotic history; conversely, a history of instability requires that Ruby (that paradise) be orderly. Where there is discipline in Ruby, the Convent has strange new rituals. Ruby is engaged in denial; the Convent is a place of acceptance and healing. Where there is spiritual, carnal, and mystical love at the Convent, in Ruby the relationships between human beings and God, men and women, the elders and the youth, are curiously, tragically absent of love. And it is this lack of love—another career-long concern of Morrison’s—that tears the town apart.
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Modern Fiction Studies (1988). Nation (6 July 1974, 16 Jan. 1998). NY (23 Jan. 1971). NYT (11 Sept. 1994, 6 Jan. 1998). NYTBR (11 Jan. 1998). Salon (2 Feb. 1998). Southern Review (Winter 1999). Village Voice (27 Jan. 1998).WRB (Apr. 1998). WBPW (3 Feb. 1974). Marcus, J., ‘‘This Side of Paradise,’’ www.amazon.com interview. —JANE S. BAKERMAN, UPDATED BY VALERIE VOGRIN
MORROW, Honoré McCue (Willsie) Born 1880, Ottumwa, Iowa; died 12 April 1940, New Haven, Connecticut Wrote under: Honoré Willsie Morrow Daughter of William D. and Lilly Head McCue; married Henry E. Willsie, 1901 (divorced 1922); William Morrow, 1923 (died 1931); children three
The town fathers don’t recognize the source, but they see evidence everywhere of disintegration, and when a paradise based on isolation decays, blame must be cast outside the community. The women of the Convent are enemies because they are viewed as anarchists, the source of hellish disorder. The awful violence the men enact on these women ultimately indicts the idea of paradise, of the sort pictured here at least, a paradise whose inhabitants are the chosen people, a paranoid paradise of exclusion. Instead, Morrison suggests that the other half of the dichotomy, the inclusive, loving, history-healed Convent, has the potential to be a true earthly paradise.
Honoré McCue Morrow grew up in the Midwest, although her family had ties in the East. Her parental grandfather was a Methodist circuit rider who served for 53 years in the West Virginia coal mining regions. Her mother’s father was a friend of Daniel Webster. After her graduation from the University of Wisconsin, Morrow married a construction engineer; they were divorced in 1922. By that time, Morrow’s writing career was launched. Stories and articles growing out of a visit to an Arizona mining camp had appeared in Colliers and Harper’s Weekly. Morrow had also written on such subjects as immigration, divorce, and the U.S. Reclamation Service, and had produced six novels. From 1914 to 1919, Morrow was editor of the Delineator, a woman’s magazine.
In addition to her teaching duties at Princeton University, Morrison has continued to be active as an editor. She edited two volumes of James Baldwin’s work as well as a collection of works by Toni Cade Bambara. In 1999 she published a children’s book, Big Box, written with her son, Slade Morrison, and illustrated by Giselle Potter.
Morrow’s second husband, a publisher, died in 1931. The next year, she moved to England, where she lived in a 16th-century cottage on the Devon coast. She died of influenza while on a visit to her sister in Connecticut; she was survived by three children.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Lee, D. H., ‘‘‘The Quest for Self’: Triumph and Failure in the Works of Toni Morrison’’ in Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation (1984). Witherspoon-Walthall, M. L., The Evolution of the Black Heroine in the Novels of Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker (1988). Reference works: Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia (1991). Black Writers (1989). CANR (1989). CLC (1982, 1989). DLB (1984). FC (1990). Handbook of American Women’s History (1990). MTCW (1991). NBAW (1992). Negro Almanac (1989). SATA (1989). Who’s Who of Writers, Editors and Poets (1989). Other references: American Literature (1981). Black American Literature Forum (1988). Christian Science Monitor (2 Jan. 1998). Critique (1977). Essence (Dec. 1976). MELUS (1991-92).
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Morrow’s early fiction shows her pleasure in and knowledge of the Southwest; her desert settings have been praised for their authenticity. Later, Morrow was to write of historical events with similar vividness and enthusiasm. An excellent example of her historical fiction is We Must March (1925), a dramatized account of the lives and labor of Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, missionaries to the Native Americans of the Far West, and their part in securing Oregon Territory. Several of Morrow’s best-known novels deal with Lincoln and the Civil War. Forever Free (1927), With Malice Toward None (1928), and The Last Full Measure (1930) were published as a trilogy under the title Great Captain, with a preface by William Lyon Phelps. ‘‘Honoré Morrow,’’ Phelps wrote, ‘‘is at once an eminent research scholar and an eminent literary artist. She loves the truth and knows how to tell it.’’ Sherwin Lawrence Cook of the Boston Transcript asserted that ‘‘she has made a more serious
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and enlightened study of [Lincoln] than any previous writer of fiction,’’ and went on to say her portrayal of Lincoln was ‘‘without question the best.’’ Morrow wrote two notable nonfiction books about generally unpopular figures. The Father of Little Women (1927) deals sympathetically with Bronson Alcott, whom Morrow obviously admired as an intellectual and spiritual giant ahead of his time. Genuinely religious herself, she writes of him from an almost mystical point of view, and is in complete accord with his views on education. Mary Todd Lincoln (1928), Morrow’s account of Lincoln’s unhappy, much maligned wife, is sensitive, compassionate, and admiring. Morrow’s style is conversational, lucid, and only occasionally dramatic and ‘‘literary.’’ It gives evidence of a warm sympathy with all kinds of people, plus a real pleasure in living. OTHER WORKS: Heart of the Desert (1913). Still Jim (1915). Lydia of the Pines (1916). Benefits Forgot (1917). The Forbidden Trail (1919). The Enchanted Canyon (1920). Judith of the Godless Valley (1922). The Exile of the Lariat (1923). The Devonshers (1924). On to Oregon! (1926). Splendor of God (1929). Tiger! Tiger! (1930). Black Daniel (1931). Beyond the Blue Sierra (1932). Argonaut (1933). Yonder Sails the Mayflower (1934). Let the King Beware (1935). Demon Daughter (1939). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: TCA. Other references: NYT (13 Apr. 1949). —ABIGAIL ANN HAMBLEN
MORTIMER, Lillian Born circa late 1870s; died 19 December 1946, Petersburg, Michigan Wrote under: Naillil Remitrom Married J. L. Veronee Lillian Mortimer’s date of birth is unknown, but she was acting in her own plays by 1895. Mortimer began producing her plays and achieved her greatest success with No Mother to Guide Her (1905). For a number of years, Mortimer played the comic soubrette Bunco in that melodrama. She evidently had a repertoire of lazzi to use whenever her stage directions indicated ‘‘funny business,’’ and she must have been able to put across lines such as this: ‘‘Christopher Columbus! Burglars! I thought dere was somethin’ crooked about dat guy. De oder one didn’t want to do it. Hully gee—what’ll I do? Guess I’ll have to take my trusty and go after dem. Dey’re comin’ back.’’ No Mother to Guide Her was revived in 1933 for 13 performances with a cast of 15 midgets. The popularity of No Mother to Guide Her can scarcely be comprehended by the reader of the published text. The dialogue is
little more than a framework on which to hang innumerable bits of comic business, scuffles, pratfalls, abductions, faintings, fisticuffs, knife fights, and revolver shots. The stage directions at the ends of the acts illustrate the genre: at the end of act 2, ‘‘they fight. Livingstone gets the better of the knife fight—stabs Jake and throws him off. Livingstone starts for Jake again with knife, to give him another thrust, and as he does so, Bunco enters from R., shoots him; he staggers. During all this action there is a terrible storm raging.’’ In 1915 Mortimer left the popular-priced melodrama theater circuit to become a headliner in vaudeville. In an interview about her plans for the future, she said, ‘‘I shall write again—when I get time. . .I’ve got enough scenarios to keep me busy for the next year if I should make plays of all the plots that I have in mind; but I’m always waiting for a little ‘leisure,’ and then along comes a new contract, and I jump to the road again.’’ Although Mortimer remained on the Keith Circuit for 20 years, she found leisure time during the 1920s to write three to five full-length ‘‘comedy-dramas’’ each year. Most were published for use by amateur theater groups. In these plays, Mortimer frequently used ethnic characters for the secondary roles—Irish, German, and Jewish ‘‘types,’’ country folk, and blacks. In Mammy’s Lil’ Wild Rose (1924), Mortimer specified that Mammy be ‘‘made up with minstrel black (not mulatto) and mammy wig.’’ Headstrong Joan (1927) includes a courtship between the lovable middle-aged Irish maid, Honora, and Abie, a ‘‘typical Jewish peddler,’’ who wears a paper collar and his derby pulled down to make his ears stand out. This subplot spoofs the long-running Broadway hit Abie’s Irish Rose. The various dialects Mortimer used provide a counterpoint to the bright, slangy speech of the lively young couples. The plot formula Mortimer found most useful set up a confrontation between two young couples. The more attractive pair is virtuous and romantically idealized. The other two, motivated by greed or jealousy, create obstacles for the innocent lovers. But the lovers are so young and appealing that the plotters finally repent and accept the ethics and values that will enable them to live happily ever after. The photograph of Mortimer in the New York Dramatic Mirror (12 May 1915) is of a self-assured middle-aged woman, flamboyantly dressed. She stands with hand on hip and chin tilted back, archly gazing from heavy-lidded eyes. It is hardly the image one would expect of the author of more than 40 moral dramas reaffirming the values of girlish innocence and of decency and noble self-abnegation for young men. OTHER WORKS: A Man’s Broken Promise (1906). The City Feller (1922). Little Miss Jack (1922). The Path Across the Hill (1923). The Road to the City (1923). Yimmie Yonson’s Yob (1923). That’s One on Bill (1924). An Adopted Cinderella (1926). The Bride Breezes In (1926). Mary’s Castle in the Air (1926). Nancy Anna Brown’s Folks (1926). Ruling the Roost (1926). He’s My Pal (1927). Nora, Wake Up! (1927). The Winding Road (1927). His Irish Dream Girl (1928). Love’s Magic (1928). Paying the
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Fiddler (1928). Two Brides (1928). The Open Window (1928). Manhattan Honeymoon (1929). The Gate to Happiness (1930). The Wild-Oats Boy (1930). Jimmy, Be Careful! (1931). Mother in the Shadow (1936). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Leverton, G. H., ed., America’s Lost Plays (1940). Mantle, B., ed., The Best Plays of 1933-34 (1934). Other references: New York Dramatic Mirror (12 May 1915). NYT (26 Dec. 1933, 20 Dec. 1946). —FELICIA HARDISON LONDRÉ
MORTON, Martha Born 10 October 1865, New York, New York; died 18 February 1925, New York, New York Married Hermann Conheim Martha Morton’s family included two playwrights and several novelists and journalists. Her mother encouraged Morton to write poems and short stories, some of which were published in magazines. Since the stories were mostly in dialogue, Morton was persuaded to try writing a play. Unable to interest any managers in her first effort, Hélène, she mounted it at her own expense, for one performance, in 1888. The New York Times called it ‘‘a lugubrious and ill-made though not wholly ineffective drama,’’ but actress Clara Morris revived it in 1889 for a two-year run that returned $50,000 to the novice playwright. Morton’s second produced play, The Triumph of Love: The Merchant (1891), won the New York World’s Play Contest. Morton described the prejudice she had to face while directing a rehearsal: ‘‘The men shook their heads. They said the drama was going to the dogs. Then they crept in through the stage door and watched that ‘green girl’ direct the rehearsal and one of them came up to me and said, ‘Are you going to make a business out of this?’. . . I looked him straight in the eyes and answered fervently, ‘God help me, I must!’ Then he put out a friendly hand, crushed my fingers into splinters and gave me the comforting assurance that a woman would have to do twice the work of a man to get one-half the credit.’’ Because women were barred from membership in the American Dramatists’ Club, Morton organized the Society of Dramatic Authors. Thirty women constituted its charter membership, but male playwrights were also invited to join. In 1907 the older group proposed consolidation, and the result was the Society of American Dramatists and Composers. By 1910 Morton was called ‘‘America’s pioneer woman playwright,’’ ‘‘the first successful woman playwright,’’ and ‘‘the dean of women playwrights.’’ She wrote about 35 forgotten plays, 14 of which were professionally produced in New York City between 1888 and 1911.
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Morton’s most successful plays were written for the popular comedian William H. Crane: Brother John (1893), His Wife’s Father (1895), A Fool of Fortune (1896), and The Senator Keeps House (1911). These were considered ‘‘good and clean, not too subtle and not too obvious.’’ Morton’s favorite subjects were marital adjustments, ups and downs in the business world, and the foibles of high society. A Bachelor’s Romance (1896) showed members of the frivolous social élite redeemed by exposure to rural life. Morton’s plays pleased audiences despite the critics’ continual readiness to point out their hackneyed qualities. Morton traveled widely in Europe, and was well read in French and German literature. Her most ambitious work was an adaptation of Leopold Kampf’s On the Eve (1909), about revolutionary unrest in Russia. For the part of the heroine, Morton sent for German actress Hedwig Reicher, who made a personal triumph of her first English-speaking role. Of that character, Morton said: ‘‘Woman is the tragic element in the social body. . . . The chief woman figure in On the Eve symbolizes the woman of today, the universal woman seeking her work and finding it.’’ Critics called this play ‘‘a collection of antiquated theatrical effects,’’ but Morton’s professionalism afforded her a degree of prestige attained by few other women playwrights. OTHER WORKS: Geoffrey Middleton (1892). The Diplomat (1902). Her Lord and Master (1902). A Four Leaf Clover (1905). The Truth Tellers (1905). The Movers (1907). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bookman (Aug. 1909). Green Book Magazine (May 1912). Theatre Magazine (1909, 1913). World To-Day (July 1908). —FELICIA HARDISON LONDRÉ
MORTON, Sarah Wentworth (Apthorp) Born August 1759, Boston, Massachusetts; died 14 May 1846, Quincy, Massachusetts Wrote under: Constantia, Sarah Wentworth Apthorp Morton, Philenia Daughter of James and Sarah Wentworth Apthorp; married Perez Morton, 1781; children: six Sarah Wentworth Morton was the scion of two influential, wealthy early New England families. She had a thorough education, evidenced in the literary quality of her verses. When the Revolution started, Morton’s family was accused of Tory loyalties, but she expressed strong patriot sentiments in her post-Revolutionary verse. In 1781 she married Harvard graduate Perez Morton, a patriot lawyer during the Revolution and a prominent figure in state government in the republic’s early years. During their early married life, Morton and her husband headed Boston’s socialites and remained leading figures in Massachusetts’ social and political life. Five of their six children lived to maturity, but all
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died before Morton. In 1788 Perez had an affair with Morton’s sister, Frances, ending in her sister’s suicide. This affair appeared fictively in the first American novel, The Power of Sympathy; or, The Triumph of Nature (1789), by William Mill Brown. Morton and her husband led the fight for repeal of Massachusetts’ antitheater laws in 1793, subscribing to Boston’s first theater. Morton supported the earliest American abolitionist groups. In later life she was a patron to young writers. Morton’s subject matter is wide-ranging. Her earliest poems are sentimental plaints or elegies filled with neoclassic devices. Her post-1800 works are mainly occasional poems. Themes throughout focus primarily on moral and political issues. In much of her work, Morton speaks through a languishing, affected female persona, whose sentimental sufferings are suffused with the soft glow of flowery diction. Morton’s interest in sentimental neoclassicism also appears in ‘‘Ode to Mrs. Warren,’’ a notable example of one early American female poet praising another. In her concern for female attitudes and behavior, Morton was a ‘‘Sappho,’’ the woman’s poet. However, Morton was also an ‘‘American’’ poet, for she wrote verse about the new nation’s ideological issues. Her best works in this vein demonstrate a well-developed social and moral conscience, independent thought, and notable poetic scope. Morton’s poem ‘‘Beacon Hill’’ (Columbian Centinal, 4 December 1790), written in neat neoclassic couplets, celebrates the sacred, solemn events that transpired on Boston Hill during the Revolution. With revisions and enlargements, this poem reappeared as Beacon Hill: A Local Poem, Historic and Descriptive, Book I (1797). Here Morton tries to revitalize and mythologize the revolutionary era. The poem’s introductory section reviews early events: Warren’s death, Bunker Hill, Washington’s camp at Cambridge. The central section discusses the ‘‘natural, moral, and political history’’ of the colonies. Book One closes with a shepherd-soldier figure defending ‘‘his hereditary farm,’’ while the prophetic Columbian muse bears the message of ‘‘Equal Freedom’’ around the earth. Although thoroughly nationalistic in this work, Morton also presents a critique of Southern slavery. Morton’s ‘‘sister’’ poems, Ouâbi; or, The Virtues of Nature: An Indian Tale in Four Cantos (1790) and The Virtues of Society: A Tale Founded on Fact (1799), show further interest in moral and social issues. They exemplify her mixed vision of the sentimental-domestic and historical-heroic. Ouâbi, perhaps the first American ‘‘Indian’’ poem, discusses a contemporary problem: the survival of simple American virtues beset by luxury and sophistication. The Virtues of Society, a spin-off of the failed epic Beacon Hill, is a romantic tale based on an incident in the American Revolution. My Mind and Its Thoughts, in Sketches, Fragments, and Essays (1823) is Morton’s only work to appear under her real name. It consists of numerous aphorisms, short essays, and poems—some previously published and rewritten, others new to print. Her ‘‘Apology’’ explains that she made the collection to ease her distress (her son had recently died). The book is a curious mixture of the public and private, the patriotic and sentimental, summarizing Morton’s life interests.
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Morton was quite popular in the 1790s, but she outlived the vogue for her neoclassical style and post-Revolution themes. Her last book was praised nostalgically, not for innate achievement. Her reputation as a poet died with her. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Evans, C., American Bibliography (1912). Field, V. B., Constantia: A Study of the Life and Works of Judith Sargent Murray (1931). Otis, W. B., American Verse, 1625-1807: A History (1909). Pearce, R. H., The Savages of America (revised edition, 1953). Pendleton, E., and M. Ellis, Philenia: Life and Works of Sarah Wentworth Morton (1931). Watts, E. S., The Poetry of American Women from 1632 to 1943 (1977). Westbrook, A. G. R., and P D. Westbrook, The Writing Women of New England, 1630- 1900 (1982). Reference works: AA. CAL. DAB. NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —JACQUELINE HORNSTEIN
MOTHER GOOSE See WALWORTH, Jeannette Hadermann
MOTT, Lucretia (Coffin) Born 3 January 1793, Nantucket Island, Massachusetts; died 11 November 1880, Roadside, Pennsylvania Daughter of Thomas and Anna Folger Coffin; married James Mott, 1811; children: six Born to a hearty, seafaring Quaker family, Lucretia Mott was sent to a Friends’ school in New York, where she subsequently served as an assistant teacher. There she met her husband, with whom she had six children. Mott was designated a minister of the Society of Friends in 1821. During the Great Separation of the Society in 1827, she allied herself with the liberal Hicksite faction. During the next decade, she became a vocal abolitionist who helped found the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. Within the abolitionist movement, Mott backed the radical faction of William Lloyd Garrison, which urged immediate emancipation of the slaves. The diary in which Mott recorded her experiences at the 1840 World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in London, where, because of her sex, she was denied recognition as a delegate of the United States, has been edited by Frederick B. Tolles (Slavery and ‘‘The Woman Question,’’ 1952). Mott describes the political wrangling among abolitionists and Quakers, her meeting with English female reformers, her conversations with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and her travels throughout the British Isles. Mott’s friendship with Stanton, begun at the convention, resulted in a decision to call the first women’s rights convention in 1848 at Seneca Falls, New York.
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A preacher and reformer, Mott’s literary corpus consists almost entirely of recorded sermons and discourses. Her appeal to reason and moral principle, powerful delivery, and personal presence gave her words great impact. Her preaching was shot through with the liberal religious belief that practical righteousness was more important than theological speculation. In A Sermon to the Medical Students (1849), Mott laid out her self-proclaimed heretical view that true religion is not mysterious, but is based on the universal and self-evident conviction that the kingdom of God is within. Humanity is not depraved, and does not need to be brought to righteousness by the atonement of Christ. The work of the present age is to reveal the nobility, and hence the divinity, of humanity through works of reform. In response to a lecture by Richard Henry Dana, Mott delivered her logical and powerful Discourse on Woman (1849), in which she shows that the present position of woman is neither her natural nor original one. Her equality with man is established by God, but she is everywhere in subjection to man. Woman’s natural ability is illustrated historically in the lives of great women, but society promotes her inferiority. Woman, like the slave, has no liberty. She is subject to laws she does not make, excluded from a pulpit that disciplines her, and bound by a marriage contract that degrades her. She asks for no favors, but for the right to be acknowledged as a moral, responsible being. Her high destiny, to be helpmeet to man, will be achieved only through the removal of all political, professional, economic, legal, and religious hindrances to her development. As president of the Equal Rights Association in the 1860s, Mott continued to work for the extension of rights to women and freedmen. When the women’s rights movement split in 1869, she joined neither the National nor the American Women’s Suffrage Association. Five sermons and discourses delivered during this period reflect her interest not only in the plight of women and blacks but in the peace, temperance, and antisectarian movements as well. In A Sermon at Yardleyville (1858), Mott affirms the divinity of human instincts and claims that the attempt to create greater equality among people is characteristic of the work of the real Christian. In A Sermon at Bristol (1860), she urges Christians to be nonconformists like Jesus, and women to reject sectarianism, which sets limits on the divinity within them. Mott maintains in Discourse at the Friends’ Meeting, N.Y. (1866) that human progress is really moral progress and that skepticism and critical thinking are religious duties. In Discourse at the Second Unitarian Church (1867), Mott urges that religion be carried into all of life’s transactions. She denounces sectarianism in her ‘‘Remarks’’ to the Free Religious Association (1867), and in her Sermon on the Religious Aspects of the Age (1869), she states that the work of reform in the present age is an indication of the growth of the Christian spirit and a new reverence for humanity. ‘‘Truth for authority, rather than authority for truth’’ was Mott’s central concern. In her preaching and speaking, Mott attempted to uncover truth. Through her personal involvement in a myriad of reform movements, she tried to live truth and help
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realize it in her own time. In her home, where Mott offered hospitality to hundreds of fellow reformers and society’s most oppressed, she helped sustain truth and those who sought it. OTHER WORKS: Life and Letters of James and Lucretia Mott (edited by A. D. Hallowell, 1884). Lucretia Mott: Complete Sermons and Speeches (edited by D. Greene, 1980). The letters of Lucretia Mott are in the Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College and the Sophia Smith Collection of the Smith College Library. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bacon, M., Valiant Friend: The Life of Lucretia Mott (1980). Cromwell, O., Lucretia Mott (1958, 1971). Hallowell, A. D., James and Lucretia Mott, Life and Letters (1884). Hersh, B. G., The Slavery of Sex: Feminist Abolitionists in America (1978). Reference works: AW. DAB. HWS. NAW (1971). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: American Scholar (Spring 1951). Bulletin of the Historical Society of Montgomery County, Pa. (Apr. 1948). —DANA GREENE
MOULTON, Louise Chandler Born 10 April 1835, Pomfret, Connecticut; died 10 August 1908, Boston, Massachusetts Wrote under: Ellen Louise Chandler, Louisa Chandler, A Lady, Ellen Louise Daughter of Lucius L. and Louisa Clark Chandler; married William U. Moulton, 1855 Louise Chandler Moulton was born on a farm outside a town settled by her Puritan ancestors. Her parents were wealthy, conscientious Calvinists. Moulton’s childhood was solitary and circumscribed, but reasonably happy. Precocious, she published her first verses at fifteen. When she entered Emma Willard’s Female Seminary in Troy, New York, fellow students knew her as ‘‘Ellen Louise,’’ editor of The Book of the Boudoir (1853) and author of This, That, and the Other (1854), a collection of sentimental stories and sketches that appeared in 1854 and sold 20,000 copies. Soon after Moulton’s graduation in 1855, she married the editor and publisher of the True Flag, a Boston literary journal. Members of the city’s literary society, the Moultons entertained Whittier, Longfellow, Holmes, and Emerson. In 1870 Moulton became the Boston literary correspondent for the New York Tribune. She began contributing stories to magazines such as Harper’s, Galaxy, and Scribner’s; her poem ‘‘May-Flowers’’ achieved great popularity after appearing in Atlantic. Other works during this period include June Clifford (1855), a novel; Some Women’s Hearts (1874), short stories; and Bed-Time Stories (1873), the first in a series of children’s books.
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After an initial trip to Europe in 1876, Moulton divided her life between the two continents. Her overwhelming success in London literary society began in 1877 with a letter of introduction to Lord Houghton (Richard Monckton Milnes) from ‘‘the Byron of Oregon,’’ Joaquin Miller. From this time, Moulton was firmly established in European artistic circles. Although she had published an earlier volume of poetry in America, Swallow-Flights (1877) brought Moulton her first wave of extravagant praise. Professor William Minto compared her to Sir Philip Sidney; other critics mentioned the lyric poets of the 16th and 17th centuries. In the Garden of Dreams (1890) and At the Wind’s Will (1899) confirmed her reputation. Critics rated her love poetry close to Mrs. Browning’s and considered her sonnets second only to Christina Rossetti’s. During these years, Moulton also brought out two delightful volumes of Irvingesque travel sketches and a book of social advice culled from her newspaper column in Our Continent. Certainly any assessment of Moulton’s achievements must cite her ‘‘genius for friendship.’’ Her correspondence, now in the Library of Congress, fills 52 volumes; its index is a virtual directory of late Victorian authors. Moulton’s library, bequeathed to the Boston Public Library, comprised 900 books, many of them rare editions and autographed presentation copies. However, Moulton’s greatest legacy stemmed from her critical astuteness and sympathy. As a European literary correspondent for the Boston Sunday Herald and the New York Independent during the 1880s and 1890s, Moulton gained recognition in the U.S. for the Pre-Raphaelites, Décadents, and French Symbolist poets. Like many late Victorians, Moulton wrote in traditional forms such as the sonnet, the French ballade, triolet, and rondel. She was known for her polished metrics, sensuous imagery, and meticulous workmanship. While critics appreciated her spontaneity, rarely do her emotions burst their poetic form; poise is all. However, Moulton’s meditations on love and approaching death hint at deep feeling below the restrained surface. One poem concludes with the lines: ‘‘This brief delusion that we call our life / Where all we can accomplish is to die.’’ In another, ‘‘Help Thou My Unbelief,’’ she quietly pleads for protection from the contented but godless life. Doubt, although painful, is less dreadful. Frequently the melancholy, minor note in her poetry is more subtle: ‘‘Roses that briefly live / Joy is your dower; / Blest be the fates that give one perfect hour. / And, though too soon you die, / In your dust glows, / Something the passerby / Knows was a rose.’’ Clichés, along with Moulton’s nostalgia for the lost ‘‘Arcady’’ of childhood and rural life, tend to date her work. Upon her death, Moulton’s reputation reached its crest. According to Whiting, she ‘‘had left a place in American letters unfilled and that no successor is in evidence will hardly be disputed.’’ Moulton lamented half seriously that she seemed to have only two themes: love and death. But as her biographer Lilian Whiting commented, these are surely two of the very greatest. As a poet, her contribution was small, but worth noting. As a critic and literary publicist, she played a valuable role in American letters. As a woman, her social success and ‘‘feminine’’ artistry reveal a great deal about late Victorian expectations.
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OTHER WORKS: My Third Book (1859). Evaline, Madelon, and Other Poems (1861). More Bed-Time Stories (1875). Jessie’s Neighbor, and Other Stories (1877). New Bed-Time Stories (1880). Random Rambles (1881). Poems (1882). Firelight Stories (1883). Ourselves and Our Neighbors (1887). Education for the Girls (1888). Miss Eyre from Boston (1889). A Ghost at His Fireside (1890). Stories Told at Twilight (1890). Arthur O’Shaugnessy, His Life and His Work (1894). In Childhood’s Country (1896). Lazy Tours in Spain and Elsewhere (1896). Against Wind and Tide (1899). Four of Them (1899). The American University Course (State Registered): Second Month Conduct of Life (1900). Jessie’s Neighbor (1900). Her Baby Brother (1901). Introduction to the Value of Love and Its Compiler Frederick Lawrence Knowles (1906). Poems and Sonnets of Louise Chandler Moulton (edited by H. P. Spofford, 1908). The papers of Louise Chandler Moulton are housed in the Library of Congress and the American Antiquarian Society. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Howe, J. W., Representative Women of New England (1904). Spofford, H. P., A Little Book of Friends (1916). Spofford, H. P., Our Famous Women (1884). Whiting, L., Louis Chandler Moulton, Poet and Friend (1910). Winslow, H. M., Literary Boston of Today (1902). Reference works: AW. CAL. DAB. Female Prose Writers of America (1857). NAW (1971). NCAB. Other references: Boston Transcript (12 Aug. 1908). Poet-Lore (Winter 1908). —SARAH WAY SHERMAN
MOURNING DOVE (Humishuma) Born April 1882 (possibly 1888), near Bonner’s Ferry, Idaho; died 8 August 1936, Medical Lake, Washington Daughter of Lucy Stuikin (Colville Tribe) and (father or stepfather) Joseph Quintasket (Okanogan, Nicola, and Arrow Lakes Tribe); married Hector McLeod, 1908; Fred Galler, 1919 Mourning Dove is a grandmother of the Native American Renaissance in literature. Among the first generation to live their entire lives on a reservation, Mourning Dove balanced assimilation pressures with the need to comment on her times through fiction and recollection, as well as to record the Okanogan legends of her people. Her final manuscripts, published as Mourning Dove, a Salishan Autobiography (1990), include stories of her early childhood when the family followed traditional migration routes, to her experiences of being sent off to mission and then Bureau of Indian Affairs (B.I.A.) schools, to the settlement of Indians onto farm plots, and a mineral rights and homesteaders’ run on the Colville Reservation. Her novel, Cogewea, the HalfBlood: A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range (1927, reprinted 1981), one of the first by a Native American woman, explores young adulthood for a mixed-blood on the Montana
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frontier during the first decade of this century, and her collection of tribal legends, Coyote Stories (1933, 1990), is an important act by a Native American storyteller to preserve some of her cultural heritage in the face of what then appeared to be inevitable cultural genocide. It is crucial to know the history of the Northwest and the assimilation period from the background to appreciate Mourning Dove’s achievement. In the decade before her birth, Custer met his death (25 June 1876) and Chief Joseph fled to Canada (1877). The massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota (December 1890), followed her birth. Moreover, in 1883 the federal government established a Court of Indian Offenses which made it a crime for Native Americans to speak their own languages, to practice traditional religious rituals, even to wear traditional dress. By 1887 the General Allotment or Dawes Act opened up reservations to white settlement and initiated an even more intense period of suppression of Native cultures. Children were removed from their homes and sent to mission and government schools to eradicate their Indian ways and to teach them to imitate the dominant culture. Mourning Dove received such an education, attending the Goodwin Mission School from 1895 to 1899; she was transferred to the Fort Spokane School for Indians in 1899. She pursued a white education of her own volition when she became a matron of the Fort Shaw Indian School in exchange for classes (1904-07), and she attended a secretarial school in Calgary, Canada, from 1912 to 1914. Yet she ultimately chose to use this education to preserve the knowledge of her people and her times. She also became a recognized elder of the Colville Reservation. Three events triggered her life’s work: witnessing the last roundups of the buffalo on the Flathead Reservation in 1907; the loss of her unborn baby because of battering (and possibly subsequent sterilization, a common medical practice on Native American women at the time) in 1912; and meeting L. V. McWhorter, a father figure who became her mentor, collaborator, and friend, in 1914. When she met him, Mourning Dove already had the rough drafts for Cogewea and 22 legends. Enthusiastic about her writing, McWhorter worked tirelessly to edit her Indian English and to add the ethnographic and historical information to ‘‘enhance’’ the novel. He went too far, however, and the novel is torn by two voices: Mourning Dove’s story about the dilemma of being a half-breed woman on the Northwest frontier, and McWhorter’s diatribes against the greed and Christian hypocrisy of his own people. Yet the work is important: it conveys both white and Native American concern about the racism and exploitation in the settlement of the West. McWhorter’s editorial work on Okanogan Sweathouse, which came to include 38 stories, is restrained, and thus the work remains Mourning Dove’s. It is a rich collection of Okanogan tales. Dean Guie, who joined the project in 1928, is responsible for reducing the number of stories and editing the selections toward a juvenile audience. The manuscript was retitled Coyote Stories. Unfortunately, as Mary Dearborn explains in Pocahontas’s Daughters (1986), women of color have often come to print
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through white male editors who ‘‘interpret’’ and ‘‘alter’’ the material to make the texts palatable to publishers and the dominant culture. Jay Miller continued this role in his edition of Mourning Dove, a Salishan Autobiography (1990). Nonetheless, Mourning Dove’s storytelling gifts are powerful enough that her core themes survive and direct readers to the devastating impact of Manifest Destiny on Native people’s lives. But her works are not just important for the historical depth they add to our understanding of the impact of conquest and settlement on naive peoples. She is a gifted storyteller, and her writings are imbued with the rhythms, humor, dramatic presentation and world view of her Salish oral tradition. Moreover, to study Mourning Dove’s primary works is to confront the complexities of Red English, the dialect of Native and English language patterns and pronunciation. If her English is ‘‘corrected,’’ the word choices and punctuation changed, then much is lost from her oral tradition and from an understanding of what native students actually learned in the BIA and mission schools, and how they struggled to make sense of a very difficult situation in a new language. Mourning Dove is interesting in and of herself— eclectic, intelligent, playful, and surprisingly insightful about her times. Her reflections on and responses to the pressure of hothouse assimilation are the most thorough accounts we have by a native woman of Mourning Dove’s time. Hers is a precious and rare voice. Late in her life Mourning Dove achieved recognitions that meant much to her: she was the first Native Americanto be made an honorary member of the Eastern Washington Historical Society (1927), and later a life member of the Washington State Historical Society. Moreover, she was the first woman elected to the Tribal Council on the Colville Reservation (1935). OTHER WORKS: Tales of the Okanogans (1976). Most of Mourning Dove’s unpublished letters are included among the Lucullus Virgil McWhorter collection, Holland Library, Washington State University. Her final manuscripts are included in the Erna Gunther materials, Archives Division, of the University of Washington. Information is also available from tribal enrollment records, marriage licenses, allotment records, and from family descendants who live on the Colville Reservation, Washington, and on reserves around Penticton, British Columbia. Mourning Dove appears under the name Christal Quintasket in some references. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ammons, E., and A. White-Parks, eds., Tricksterism in Turn-of-the-Century American Literature: A Multicultural Perspecitve (1994). Clifton, J. A., ed., On Being and Becoming Indian: Biographical Studies of North American Frontiers (1989). Dearborn, M., Pocahontas’s Daughters: Gender and Ethnicity in American Culture (1986). Fisher, A. P., ‘‘The Transformation of Tradition: A Study of Zitkala-Sa (Bonnin) and Mourning Dove, Two Transitional Indian Writers.’’ (dissertation, 1979). Krupat, A., ed., New Voices in Native American Literary Criticism (1993). Muldrum, B. H. ed., Old West-New West: Centennial Essays
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(1993). New, W. H., ed., Native Writers and Canadian Writing (1990). Wiget, A., ed., Critical Essays on native American Literature (1985). Reference works: DLB (1997). Other references: American Indian Culture and Research Journal (1995). American Indian Quarterly (Fall 1995). American Literature (Sept. 1995). Canadian Literature (Spring-Summer 1990, Spring 1995). Plainswoman (Jan. 1988). Legacy (Spring 1989). Studies in American Indian Literatures (Summer/Fall 1992). Wicazo Sa Review (Fall, 1988). WRB (Nov. 1990). Reference works: FC (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —ALANNA KATHLEEN BROWN
MUKHERJEE, Bharati Born 27 July 1940, Calcutta, India Daughter of Sudhir Lal and Bina Barrerjee Mukherjee; married Clark Blaise, 1963; children: Bart, Bernard Bharati Mukherjee, a native of India who was educated largely by the English and who has lived most of her life in North America, writes literary short stories and novels about life as an expatriate. Typically, the story revolves around a fairly naive Indian woman who experiences misery and frustration thanks to her traditional upbringing, although other nationalities and male protagonists are frequent. Violence and angry prejudice are featured in many of the narratives, while a few are surrealistic. Mukherjee was born in Calcutta, the middle of three daughters, and a member of the Brahmins, the highest caste among Bengali Hindus. In her early years, she lived in an extended familial home until around the age of seven, when her father, a chemist, moved his pharmaceuticals business to London. Amongst the English schoolchildren, Mukherjee began a novel about their experiences, which she never completed. For a time she lived in Basel, Switzerland, returning to Calcutta when she was eleven. Residing on company property with no relatives or neighbors nearby, she attended a convent school run by Irish nuns. While there, she wrote short stories for the student magazine. After attending the University of Calcutta and receiving a B.A. in English in 1959, Mukherjee then earned an M.A. in English and ancient Indian culture at the University of Baroda. Her father recommended her to the University of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop, where she earned an M.F.A. in 1963 and Ph.D. in 1969. While in residence, she met Clark Blaise, a fellow student from Canada, and they were married during a lunch break in September of 1963. Together they were hired onto the faculty of McGill University in Montreal. Mukherjee’s first novel The Tiger’s Daughter appeared in 1972. Quite autobiographical, the novel concerns the shock and horror experienced by a young Indian woman on her return to Calcutta from the United States. After her sheltered life, the poverty and class warfare she encounters are overwhelming. Wife
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(1975) portrays a young Indian woman traveling to America, only to become bored, lonely, and, eventually, murderous. A sabbatical taken in 1973 led to the publication of Days and Nights in Calcutta (1977), written with her husband, who accompanied her on a return trip to India. The book is interesting in that it records Mukherjee’s sense of loss over seeing a Calcutta that had changed so much during her lifetime while at the same time showing Blaise’s more positive reaction to an exotic, rich culture. On her return to Montreal after her revelatory trip back home, Mukherjee began to notice blatant discrimination against Indians (derogatorily called ‘‘Pakis’’ in Canada) and began to write both fiction and nonfiction in protest. Her story ‘‘Isolated Incidents’’ won first prize from the Periodical Distribution Association in 1980. Not only does the story deal with white Canadians’ reaction toward Indian immigrants, but it also portrays a white bureaucrat’s lack of power to make a positive change in race relations. In 1981 the essay ‘‘An Invisible Woman’’ won the National Magazine Award’s second prize. Again Mukherjee complained about Canadians’ treatment of Indians, describing her feelings of humiliation and fear in public places. Believing whites saw her as a criminal, she said she became housebound to avoid the problem. In 1980 she chose to abandon her tenured position to reside in the United States. On 23 June 1985, an Air India plane crashed off the coast of Ireland. With her husband, Mukherjee wrote The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy (1987), an account of the event, which had resulted in hundreds of Canadians being killed. Mukherjee vividly portrayed the victims and the reactions of those close to them, while claiming that the disaster was partly the product of extreme prejudice against Indians. In 1988 Mukherjee’s second collection of short stories, The Middleman and Other Stories, won the National Book Critics Circle award for best fiction. While some of the stories portray Indians, Mukherjee was more interested in writing about the experiences of immigrants to the U.S. from many different countries. After many years of visiting professorships, she moved to the University of California at Berkeley in 1989, where she was named distinguished professor. In the late 1990s she began to write a book based on the depiction of an oppressed minority she had explored in ‘‘An Invisible Woman.’’ OTHER WORKS: Kautilya’s Concept of Diplomacy: A New Interpretation (1976). Darkness (1985). Jasmine (1989). Political Culture and Leadership in India (1991). Regionalism in Indian Perspective (1992). The Holder of the World (1993). Leave it to Me (1997). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Alam, F., Bharati Mukherjee (1996). Nelson, E. S., Writers of the Indian Diaspora (1992). Nelson, E. S., ed., Bharati Mukherjee: Critical Perspectives (1993). Reference works: CANR (1999). CLC (1989). DLB (1987). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —ROSE SECREST
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MULLER, Marcia Born 28 September 1944, Detroit, Michigan Daughter of Henry J. and Kathryn Minke Muller; married Frederick T. Guilson, Jr., 1967 (divorced 1981); Bill Pronzini, 1992 Marcia Muller is best known for creating the first hard-boiled female private investigator to be featured in an American crime fiction series. Since she introduced her signature character Sharon McCone in 1977, she has written more than 20 novels and many short mystery stories. She is also a noted anthologist and critic. When McCone first appeared in Edwin of the Iron Shoes (1977), fans of crime fiction seemed to have little interest in female private eyes. Although English writer P. D. James had introduced her young apprentice investigator Cordelia Gray, and Maxine O’Callaghan had featured private eye Delilah West in a 1974 short story, until Muller’s McCone, crime fiction could boast no tough, independent female protagonists. By the time McCone reappeared in the 1982 novel Ask the Cards a Question, the climate had clearly changed. In the same year, Sue Grafton debuted her Southern California detective, Kinsey Millhone, and Sara Paretsky created Chicago investigator V. I. Warshawski. Today it is Muller who is credited with having established the conventions for this type of detective. Muller’s commitment to creating strong female characters is found elsewhere in her work. Before concentrating solely on the McCone series, she produced two trilogies, each featuring a female protagonist in the role of amateur sleuth. The Tree of Death (1983) debuts Hispanic curator Elena Oliverez, who finds herself in the position of having to prove her innocence in the murder of her boss. Maureen Reddy wrote that the series is ‘‘feminist in the deepest sense of the term. Women are at the center of the world [Muller] creates, with relationships between women seen as basic to every woman’s life and women portrayed in all their realistic variety.’’ The novel also explores the clash between Hispanic and white cultures; such treatment of contemporary themes is a hallmark of Muller’s work. Muller’s other trilogy features Joanna Stark, a partner in a San Francisco securities firm. In The Cavalier in White (1986), Stark investigates the theft of a painting from a museum. She later reappears in There Hangs the Knife (1988) and Dark Star (1989). McCone, however, is the enduring character in Muller’s work. At the outset, Muller purposed to create a multidimensional character. She wrote that McCone ‘‘was to be as close to a real person as possible. Like real people she would age, grow, change, experience joy and sorrow, love and hatred—in short, the full range of human emotions. In addition, McCone was to live within the same framework most of us do, complete with family, friends, coworkers, and lovers; each of her cases would constitute one more major event in an ongoing biography.’’ Muller endowed McCone with verbal acuity, a sense of humor, and a strong sense of justice. Close to age 30 at the start of the series, she comes from a large blue-collar family, and her appearance reflects her Shoshone Indian ancestry. She finances
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her education at the University of California at Berkeley by working as a security guard and is later hired by a large investigative firm. Fired from this job, she’s eventually hired at a poverty law firm called All Souls Legal Cooperative. All Souls comes complete with a cast of supporting characters who reappear in subsequent books. Indeed, well-developed and recurring secondary characters are an important feature of Muller’s work. Additonally, McCone’s cases themselves come from people she knows personally, each case thereby showing a different facet of her life. For instance, Till the Butchers Cut Him Down (1994) introduces T. J. ‘‘Suitcase’’ Gordon, who reenters McCone’s life after a long hiatus. His presence in the novel gives the reader a sense of part of McCone’s past. McCone is a dynamic character, and readers watch her change and grow throughout the series. In later novels, she becomes more jaded and is forced to confront the darker side of her nature. In an article for The Writer (1997), Muller writes that ‘‘a confrontation. . .when the lives of people [McCone] cared about were at stake, demonstrated that she could take violent action when the circumstances justified it.’’ McCone’s career also evolves, and in Wolf in the Shadows (1993) she decides to leave All Souls to start her own firm. Muller is frequently praised for her detailed and accurate descriptions of the San Francisco Bay area, the setting for most of McCone’s cases. She has proven equally adept at describing the other locations when McCone’s cases take her far from the Bay area. With her husband, Bill Pronzini, Muller has edited many short story collections, and the two have also collaborated to produce a number of novels. Double (1984) is one of their more interesting endeavors; in it, the point of view alternates between Muller’s McCone and Pronzini’s ‘‘Nameless’’ detective. Muller has been the recipient of several awards, among them the Private Eye Writers of America Shamus award (1991) and the Private Eye Writers of America Life Achievement award (1993). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Authors & Artists for Young Adults, vol. 25 (1998). CA (1998). The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories (1996). Publishers Weekly (8 Aug. 1994). Reddy, M. T., Sisters in Crime: Feminism and the Crime Novel (1988). St. James Guide to Crime and Mystery Writers (1996). Writer (May 1997). —KAREN ZIMMERMAN
MUNRO, Eleanor Born 28 March 1928, Brooklyn, New York Daughter of Thomas and Lucile Nadler Munro; married Alfred Frankfurter, 1965; children: David, Alexander Since 1961, Eleanor Munro has fascinated her followers with words that delve into the depths of artists’ minds and search the
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self through family and childhood recollection and journey. Intriguing the reader into reflection and self-understanding, Munro has twice earned the honor of the New York Times Notable Book of the Year with Originals: American Women Artists (1979) and On Glory Roads: A Pilgrim’s Book about Pilgrimage (1987). Her dedicated work as a writer, editor, and lecturer has also been acknowledged with the Cleveland Arts Prize in 1988 and the Medal of Honor at Smith College in 1990. Raised in Cleveland, Munro ventured away from familiar territory to Smith College and earned her B.A. in 1949. She went on to write for Art News from 1952 to 1959 and became managing editor of Art News Annual. She then earned her M.A. from Columbia University in 1968. Munro writes for the reader to travel with her both spiritually and thoughtfully and to understand how she sees and interprets her inner world as well as the global world. In On Glory Roads: A Pilgrim’s Book about Pilgrimage, which is relatively autobiographical, Munro embarks on a journey beginning in India and ending in Compostela. A pilgrim herself, she travels in search of knowledge of rituals, myths, and sacred art in Asia like an Asian pilgrim would tour a shrine: entering the sanctuary at the east, turning south, and going about the shrine toward the west. She writes, ‘‘The doctrinaire meaning of the route is that it imitates the sun’s daily flight.’’ For Munro, it meant a pilgrimage starting in the east in India (Benares), to the south in Indonesia, toward the center in Jerusalem, and toward the west in Compostela. She calls this type of journey ‘‘secular traveling,’’ but adds anyone who embarks on trips to places that ‘‘move them’’ may call themselves ‘‘secular travelers.’’ With this, Munro articulates the same adventurous feeling all travelers have within themselves when they climb a mountain or visit the country of their families’ heritage. Munro courageously takes on an even more personal venture with Memoir of a Modernist’s Daughter (1988), where she uninhibitedly shares her childhood through adulthood accounts with her family, but most importantly, her modernist father of philosophy and teaching. The autobiography reflects life with father and how it affected her education, profession, and growth into womanhood. She challenges the reader to understand her struggle of growing up with a dominant father, whose ideas of child-rearing and personal development were strong and unconventional. It is apparent that Munro’s father contributed vastly to her ideas, beliefs, and journeys as she began to write of him the year prior to Memoir of a Modernist’s Daughter in On Glory Roads: ‘‘The more I’d pressure myself to accept the finality of life in a Buddhistic sense, the more, the very next day, my thoughts had striven on to discover more life in things—as my father strove through his voluminous readings toward the image in Lucretius of the living gods.’’ It is this question of death that Munro explores in On Glory Roads that further references her father’s impact on her life and, in turn, her writing. Her father, as she describes in Memoir of a Modernist’s Daughter, was an atheist, showing signs of his beliefs in his childhood. At seven years old, he announced he wanted to be ‘‘the founder of a new religion.’’ This was the beginning of an assured and abstract-minded man who eventually would promote thought-provoking writing from his daughter.
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Originals: American Women Artists is Munro’s biographical honor to women artists. She shares the lives of these gifted intellects and how their art is a product and representation of their lives. Interestingly, Munro’s writing about one artist, Michelle Stuart, is a predecessor to her account of India in On Glory Roads. Munro writes of Stuart as an artist who ‘‘collects shovelfuls of earth and rocks.’’ Stuart used the earth to explore art just as the Hindus in India used the earth to explore ritual. Ironically or not, the reader of Munro’s work could cross-reference forward to On Glory Roads, where Munro describes a Hindu woman: ‘‘With her right hand, the woman drew a long, deep-scarlet, moist sweep paste (mud) along the part in her hair.’’ Finally, Munro’s examination of Stuart as an artist of the earth and the Hindu women using the earth for ritual and sacred purposes can be culminated with Wedding Readings: Centuries of Writing and Rituals on Love and Marriage (1989). Although different from all her writings, there’s still a taste of her other works. Seen as a whole, the book is a collection of poems, songs, quotes, and thoughts of wedding rituals, with an introduction written by Munro. Looking further inside, the reader can find the India of On Glory Roads, the self-exploration of Memoir of a Modernist’s Daughter, and the Michelle Stuart of Originals: American Women Artists. In particular, the Hindu love poem that begins ‘‘Let the earth of my body be mixed with the earth my beloved walks on’’ can bring reference to Munro’s thoughts, journeys, and writings. It is clear that Munro comes to understand herself and her family through her writing. In boldly sharing herself, she makes what seems to be the unfamiliar within ourselves actually familiar. She writes of learning, writing, and art. She writes of life.
OTHER WORKS: Encyclopedia of Art (1961). Through the Vermilion Gates: A Journey into China’s Past (1971).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: WWAW (1997-98). —KIMBALLY A. MEDEIROS
MURFREE, Mary (Noailles) Born 24 January 1850, Murfreesboro, Tennessee; died 31 July 1922, Murfreesboro, Tennessee Wrote under: Charles Egbert Craddock, R. Emmet Dembury Daughter of William L. and Fanny Dickinson Murfree Born at the family plantation, Mary Murfree was the daughter of a lawyer and author and a mother whose love of music greatly influenced the family. Illness at the age of four left
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Murfree with permanent lameness. In 1855 Murfree spent the first of 15 summers at Beersheba Springs in the Cumberland Mountains, which she fictionalized as New Helvetia Springs. Soon the family moved to Nashville, where Murfree and her sister Fanny were educated at the Nashville Female Academy. After the Civil War, which the family spent in Nashville, Murfree continued her education at Chegary Institute in Philadelphia, a French finishing school. Murfree’s writing career began in earnest with the publication of ‘‘The Dancin’ Party at Harrison’s Cove’’ in the Atlantic Monthly (May 1878) under the pseudonym Charles Egbert Craddock. Murfree’s mountain fiction was very well received; by 1885, when The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains was being serialized, her popularity had led to increased speculation about the author’s identity, and the sensation following its revelation gained Murfree invaluable publicity. Although the modern reader may find Murfree’s decorous mountain fiction more romantic than realistic, and may be bored by the lack of individualization in her characters, contemporary readers were fascinated by the minute detail, often gleaned through research, with which she portrayed people and their activities. The dominant feature of Murfree’s earlier work is the mountains themselves. The juxtaposition of florid prose with dialect is probably its weakest trait. In spite of Murfree’s desire for realism, her characters tend to be stereotypes. Most of the young ‘‘mountain-flower’’ girls, such as Cynthia Ware in ‘‘Drifting Down Lost Creek’’ and Clarsie Giles in ‘‘The ‘Harnt’ that Walks Chilhowee,’’ are almost indistinguishable. ‘‘Harnt,’’ probably Murfree’s best-known work, is notable for its theme of the superiority of mountain life. Murfree’s greatest achievement is her first volume of stories, In the Tennessee Mountains (1884), with its emphasis on the picturesque details of regional life. Her stories appealed to the awareness of sectional differences that had been heightened by the Civil War, as the popularity of this volume indicates. Except for Murfree’s first novel, Where the Battle Was Fought (1884), based on personal experiences during the Civil War, her work through the late 1890s focuses on mountain places and themes. When the popularity of local-color writing waned, Murfree turned to historical subjects in undistinguished novels such as The Story of Old Fort Loudon (1899) and The Amulet (1906). By 1910 Murfree’s public appeal had diminished to the point that Houghton, Mifflin rejected a proffered novel and collection of stories. Murfree has been favorably compared to local colorists such as Bret Harte, Sarah Orne Jewett, and fellow Southerner George Washington Cable. Her reputation is based on her mountain stories and novels; the body of her work is flawed by her tendency to repeat characters and plots. However, In the Tennessee Mountains remains an important contribution to regional literature in the late 19th century. OTHER WORKS: In the ‘‘Stranger People’s’’ Country (1891). The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain, and Other Stories (1895). The Phantoms of the Foot-Bridge, and Other Stories (1895). A Spectre
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of Power (1903). The Fair Mississippian (1908). The Raid of the Guerilla, and Other Stories (1912). The Story of Duciehurst (1914). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cary, R., Mary Noailles Murfree (1967). Parks, E. W., Charles Egbert Craddock (Mary Noailles Murfree) (1941). Reference works: AW. CAL. DAB. NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the Untied States (1995). Other references: ALR (Autumn 1974). Appalachian Journal (Winter 1976). Mississippi Quarterly (Spring 1978). —MARTHA E. COOK
MURRAY, Judith Sargent Born 1 May 1751, Gloucester, Massachusetts; died 6 July 1820, Natchez, Mississippi Wrote under: Constantan, Honoria, Honoria-Martesia, Judith Sargent, Judith Stevens Daughter of Winthrop and Judith Saunders Sargent; married John Stevens, 1769 (died); John Murray, 1788; children: one daughter, one son Judith Sargent Murray was the oldest child of a well-to-do merchant who was active during the Revolution on the colonists’ side. Murray was better educated than most women of her time, because her father permitted her to study with a brother who was preparing for Harvard. She spent most of her life in Gloucester, where she was married twice: to a sea captain and, two years after his death, to Murray, founder of the American Universalist Church. Two children were born of the second marriage, a son who died shortly after birth and a daughter who survived her mother. Financial difficulties marked the final years of both marriages. In 1798 Murray collected many of her writings into a three-volume work called The Gleaner. These volumes include one series of essays appearing originally from 1792 to 1794 in the Massachusetts Magazine or Monthly Museum, additional essays previously unpublished, and two plays—Virtue Triumphant and The Traveller Returned, produced with little success at the Federal Street Theatre in Boston. There remain uncollected a vast number of essays, letters, and poems published in periodicals and a catechism for children, which was published as a book under the name of Judith Stevens. In addition, Murray edited her own letters and autobiography. Murray is best known for her periodical essay series, ‘‘The Gleaner.’’ These essays purport to be written by Mr. Vergilius, a well-off, philanthropic man of reason and sensibility who has adopted the pen name of the Gleaner to write about moral, religious, political and family matters. Murray reveals her liberal religious views, federalism, cultural nationalism, concern for the special problems of bringing up daughters, and commitment to education, about which she had modern views. Much of the interest, however, centers less on discussions of general issues than on the Gleaner’s accounts of his family. Because the story of
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his daughter is so fully developed, this series has been referred to as a novel of sensibility. In a subplot there is, in contrast with traditions of 18th-century sensibility, an unusually realistic cameo view of women’s experience. Murray is also known for her feminist statement ‘‘On the Equality of the Sexes,’’ which she claimed to have written in 1779, before Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman appeared, although it was not published until 1790 in the Massachusetts magazine. Concerned here with arguing the intellectual equality of women, Murray went on in the later Gleaner essays to elaborate her defense of women’s abilities. Murray’s essay series has attracted some scholarly attention in the past, and her plays, which combine American settings and sentiments with traditions of the Restoration stage, read surprisingly well and are of historic interest. Recently, her essays have attracted attention because of her feminist defense of women’s intellectual potential and insistence on the importance of education and economic independence for women. Murray’s work reflects an acceptance of the literary and intellectual traditions of her time and the strength of mind to reject tradition when she believed it incorrect or unfair. OTHER WORKS: Some Deductions from the System Promulgated (1782). The Life of John Murray, Written by Himself with Continuation by Mrs. Judith Sargent Murray (1816). The papers of Judith Sargent Murray are housed in the Mississippi Department of History and Archives in Jackson. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Benson, M. S., Women in Eighteenth Century America (1935). Field, V. B., Constantan: A Study of the Life and Works of Judith Sargent Murray (1933). Hanson, E. R., Our Women Workers (1882). Jacoba, M., Prose Writings and Dramas of Judith Sargent Murray: Nuturing a New Republic (dissertation, 1987). Reference works: DAB. NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: American Literature (1940). AQ (1976). Early American Literature (1975, 1976-77). Journal of Mississippi History (August 1991). SP (1927). —PHYLLIS FRANKLIN
MURRAY, Pauli Born 20 November 1910, Baltimore, Maryland; died July 1985 Daughter of William H. and Agnes Fitzgerald Murray Orphaned at the age of three, Pauli Murray was raised by her mother’s sister, an elementary school teacher in a small black school. Murray attended her aunt’s classes and learned to read and write at an early age. Murray received a B.A. from Hunter College in New York. In 1938 she applied to the graduate school of the
University of North Carolina but was denied admission to the white institution. During this period, she wrote prose and poetry under the guidance of Stephen Vincent Benét. Murray suspended her literary work to serve as special field secretary for the Workers Defense League. After Benét’s death in 1943, she resumed her efforts to write the epic poem that he had urged her to write about blacks in America. She finished the first version of ‘‘Dark Testament’’ during the Harlem riot of 1943. In 1944 Murray was graduated with honors from Howard University Law School in Washington, D.C. As a woman, she was denied admission to Harvard Law School in 1944 and 1946, but received an M.A. in 1945 from the University of California Law School at Berkeley and a Ph.D. from Yale in 1965. From 1948 to 1960, she was in private practice in New York. In 1960 and 1961, Murray was senior lecturer on constitutional and administrative law at the Ghana School of Law. While in Accra, she joined Leslie Rubin in the writing of The Constitution and Government of Ghana (1961). Murray practiced law, taught law and political science, and served on numerous national committees. Dark Testament, and Other Poems (1970) includes poems originally published in several magazines. The longest and best is ‘‘Dark Testament.’’ Part One of ‘‘Dark Testament’’ questions the possibility of hope but ends on a note of determination, saying, ‘‘Let the dream linger on.’’ Murray contends that universal brotherhood must be the goal of humanity. Part Two contains poems dealing with specific historical events: a Detroit riot, the lynching of Mack Parker, and the death of Franklin Roosevelt. The third part focuses upon the universal human predicament and has no racial emphasis. Neither has the fourth part, which takes images from nature for poems dealing with love, friendship, death, and loneliness. Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family (1956, 1999) is the story of Murray’s ancestors. Asserting that ‘‘true emancipation lies in the acceptance of the whole past, in deriving strength from all my roots, in facing up to the degradation as well as the dignity of my ancestors,’’ Murray traces the family back to great-grandparents who were slaves. But the major portion of Proud Shoes is devoted to her greatest source of pride, her grandfather, who taught Murray that she ought to cherish ‘‘courage, honor, and discipline.’’ Though she knew her parents only briefly during early childhood, Murray found great sources of pride in her mother’s family. Proud Shoes does more than account for the pride that has made Murray such a successful black woman. It analyzes miscegenation as a social phenomenon and examines its bearing on race relations. It attacks stereotypes of the black family as broken and matriarchal. Thus, it is a valuable social document as well as an interesting biography of an American family. Though Murray has chosen to make her social contribution primarily though service rather than literature, her small oeuvre is significant. Her legal writing establishes her as a scholar, Proud Shoes proves her a capable biographer, and Dark Testament
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reveals a talented poet whose lines combine the skills of both biographer and lawyer—precision of language and vision—with the compression of poetic forms to achieve powerful effects.
OTHER WORKS: All for Mr. Davis (with M. Kempton, 1942). States Law on Race and Color (1950). The Fourth Generation of Proud Shoes (1977). Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage (1987). Pauli Murray: The Autobiography of a Black Activist, Feminist, Lawyer, Priest, and Poet (1989).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bryant, F. R., An Examination of the Social Activism of Pauli Murray (dissertation 1991). Collier-Thomas, B., Daughters of Thunder: Black Women Preachers and Their Sermons, 1850-1979 (1998). Diamonstein, B., Open Secrets (1972). Madigan, S., ed., Mystics, Visionaries, and Prophets: A Historical Anthology of Women’s Spiritual Writings (1998). Maschke, K. J., ed., Women and the American Legal Order (1997). Mooney, R. E., Transgression as Transformation: An Investigation into the Relationship Between Mystically Religious Experience and Moral Experience in the Lives of Dorothy Day and Pauli Murray (dissertation 1992). O’Dell, M. D., ‘‘Sites of Southern Memory: The Autobiographies of Katharine DuPre Lumpkin, Lillian Smith, and Pauli Murray’’ (dissertation, 1997). Smith, J. C., ed., Epic Lives: One Hundred Black Women Who Made a Difference (1993). Reference works: Black American Writers Past and Present (1975). Other references: Afro-American (20 Jan. 1968). Black Issues in Higher Education (May 1999). —GWENDOLYN THOMAS
MYLES, Eileen Born 9 December 1949, Cambridge, Massachusetts Daughter of Terrence M. and Genevieve Preston Hannibal Eileen Myles’ writing cuts straight to the heart; her work focuses on friendship, writing, community, lesbianism, politics, the way that all of those things make up daily life. Myles is a poet and prose writer, and has also published a number of plays. Her writing is direct and sometimes sassy, tough yet at times emotionally tender; the context is urban, the community is wide; the net, as it were, is cast broadly. She makes no bones about being a poet, a lesbian, and an activist both through and around her writing. Myles’ writing challenges the reader to go along for a ride that’s often fast and furious, and can also be heartbreakingly funny. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1949, Myles’ upbringing in nearby Arlington was a solidly working-class one. Her father was a mail carrier, and her mother was a secretary. In her
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collection of primarily autobiographical short stories, Chelsea Girls (1994), Myles includes as subject matter her alcoholic father and her own experience of substance abuse. After receiving a B.A. from the University of Massachusetts in 1971, Myles spent time traveling, then made her way to New York, where she briefly attended graduate school at Queens College (‘‘I went to graduate school for about 10 seconds,’’ she notes in a January 1999 interview). It was Myles’ attendance at a writing workshop offered by the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church that was to have a far larger impact on her writing life, however. Myles was to establish a long relationship with, and become an important part of, a community of writers centered around the Poetry Project, a community including, at various times, Ted Berrigan, Alice Notely, John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, James Schuyler, and Frank O’Hara. In 1979 Myles worked as assistant to James Schuyler, and he became a mentor and a friend. From 1984 to 1986, Myles served as the artistic director of the Poetry Project. Myles’ first public reading of her poetry was in 1974 at the New York City punk club CBGB’s; three years later, at a reading at St. Mark’s Church, she ‘‘came out’’ as a poet, reading love poems that where later collected in her book Sappho’s Boat (1982). Myles has published numerous books of poetry and prose in the 1980s and 1990s, and several of her plays have had New York productions. Myles’ commitment to politics and activism is clear in her writing and in her living. She was a write-in candidate in the 1992 presidential election, and actually took her ‘‘one-woman campaign show’’ on the road as ‘‘Eileen Myles for President (and Other Things)’’. She has been arrested at women’s rights protests. In a review of Chelsea Girls in the New York Times Book Review (9 September 1994), Jeannine Delombard wrote, ‘‘Examining how adults, fueled by intoxication and disillusionment, regress to infantile helplessness, and how children, exposed to such scenes of grandiose self-destruction, mature beyond their years, ‘Chelsea Girls’ reads, at its best, like the product of a collaboration between Ernest Hemingway and Lynda Barry.’’ Myles’ poems also tell rich stories. Visually, the poems are aligned in markedly vertical spaces, many of them so thin as to seem spare, stretched, and somehow severe. Yet Myles’ language luxuriates—it opens out in casual, expansive gestures, using ‘‘common’’ vocabulary, the material of everyday life. From the poem ‘‘Everything’s House’’ in the collection Not Me (1991): ‘‘I have / never been / so bothered / by a human / being before. / Let me screw / the cap on / the seltzer. / I could / have gone / out on / you tonight. / I imagined / you furious. / But I / was so / angry / I didn’t / feel a / thing. Just / the breeze / on my / chin. The / bike bouncing / on the / pavement.’’ In a 1999 interview by Daniel Kane about Myles’ poetics and approaches to teaching poetry, Myles said, ‘‘In a way I often write as if you already know what I’m talking about. I don’t spell it out. I jump on that bandwagon with you and keep going.’’ She also notes that ‘‘a poem is a series of conditions, and you’re trying to
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strike some charm that will bring it all together.’’ In addition to Schuyler and O’Hara, Myles notes that other writers whose work has provided her with particular inspiration include Gertrude Stein, Violette Leduc, and Christopher Isherwood. Myles has taught writing at New York University School of Continuing Education, Parsons School of Design, Baruch College, St. Mark’s Poetry Project, and New School for Social Research. Myles is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the New York State Creative Artist’s Public Services grant (1980), Fund for Poetry grant (1988 and 1990), and a National Endowment for the Arts Inter-Arts grant (1989). Her most recent collection of poetry, School of Fish (1997), won a Lambda Book award for poetry. Her work has been anthologized in such collections as Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time (1988) and The Best American Poetry, 1988 (1989).
MYLES
OTHER WORKS: The Irony of the Leash (1978). A Fresh Young Voice from the Plains (1981). Bread and Water (1987). 1969 (1989). Maxfield Parrish: Early & New Poems (1995).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1996). Contemporary Lesbian Writers of the United States: A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook (1993). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: St. Louis Post-Dispatch (1 Nov. 1992). Web site: Poets Chat (Jan. 1999) available online at: http:// www.writentet.org/poetschat/poetschat_em0799.html#interview —JESSICA GRIM
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N NATION, Carry A(melia Moore) Born 25 November 1846, Garrard County, Kentucky; died 2 June 1911, Leavenworth, Kansas Daughter of George and Mary Campbell Moore; married Dr. Charles Gloyd, 1867; David Nation, 1877 Born into the antebellum American ‘‘paradise’’ of faithful slaves and bountiful nature, as Carry A. Nation describes it, this American symbol of rampant morality is perhaps our real Scarlett O’Hara, stripped of all romantic distortion. Complete with a noble, upright father, a mother sporadically deranged by the illusion that she was Queen Victoria, and a faithful mammy with a grip on reality, Nation emerged from the fancies of childhood and the Civil War, like Scarlett O’Hara, with God as her witness—but it was not physical hunger she vowed never to endure again. Instead, Nation was determined never to suffer the deprivation of love, which her first husband’s addiction to drink had brought her. Nation’s autobiography, The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation (1908), her one contribution to American letters, chronicles Nation’s mission to defend love and life in the American family from the demon rum. The book is not a simple autobiography, for Nation’s material is not limited to the exposition of her life. Rather, the autobiography is an encyclopedic work that places itself somewhere beyond confession. Aside from the details of Nation’s life, it contains pictures of social conditions in the South before and after the Civil War and the contemporary medical wisdom on the effects of alcohol and tobacco upon the human constitution. It contains tirades on the abuses of alcohol and tobacco, which outline the philosophical bases of Nation’s crusade. It also contains discourses on Christianity, Judaism, the Masons, upper-class education of the time, and the position of women in society. The book is permeated by a religious hysteria, but the reader will find that Nation’s autobiography bristles with the unexpected. Despite the fundamentalist foundation for her crusade, for example, she reveals a profound reverence for sexual love and a desire for openness about sexuality. Nation is prudishly hostile to the exposure of the undraped female figure in public, but she expresses unexpected disapproval that children are not told the truth about procreation and that men do not pay sexual attention to their wives, perversely giving themselves freely to prostitutes whom, Nation claims with modern insight, they hate and who hate them in return. Despite the fact that Nation is a true believer of the most single-minded sort, she expresses paradoxical respect and affection for both Jews and Catholics as individuals and in groups. She does not appear to have hopes of saving them as reasonably virtuous pagans, but actually grants them another window in her Father’s mansion. Finally, Nation is completely cognizant of the insanity others attribute to her. However, when she finishes
cataloguing the alcohol-induced human misery she has experienced, witnessed, and learned of, her extreme actions to destroy the bane of her existence do not seem insane. They appear, rather, to be lacking in modern insights into the social and chemical roots of alcoholism. The autobiography exhibits two main qualities. It is a portal leading to increased appreciation of the complex social and moral 19th-century American climate. It is also a work that, in recounting Nation’s thoughts about society and her suffering for her cause, has such a contemporary ring that it rescues Nation from the burlesque stereotype that has wrongly portrayed her as an undistilled essence of harridan. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Asbury, H., Carry Nation (1909). Beals, D., Cyclone Carry: The Story of Carry Nation (1962). Reference works: DAB. NAW (1971). Other references: Les Idees (Jan.-June 1939). SHQ (Apr. 1960). —MARTHA NOCHIMSON
NAYLOR, Gloria Born 25 January 1950, New York, New York Daughter of Roosevelt and Alberta McAlpin Naylor In four novels published in only six years, Gloria Naylor demonstrated a talent to match her ambition. Her elaborately detailed, precisely drawn fictional worlds represent the complex social worlds of late twentieth-century African Americans. Always conscious of class and gender distinctions, as well as racial difference and sexual preference, Naylor crafts nuanced and varied representations of black life. All reflect a particular concern with black female character and with the problem of preserving a distinctive cultural heritage during a period of social and cultural assimilation. Larded with literary allusions to both classical Western texts and African-American fiction, Naylor’s novels deliberately call attention to themselves as literary artifacts. They have enjoyed critical and commercial success. Among their most striking elements is the keen evocation of place. Naylor maps a fictional geography that encompasses Brewster Place, an inner-city neighborhood that is home to those with nowhere else to go; Linden Hills, a suburb to which successful blacks aspire; and Willow Springs, a mythical island off the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia that constitutes an ancestral home. Geographically disparate, these sites are connected through the genealogies of the characters who inhabit them. With each novel, the dimension of Naylor’s project becomes clearer. The Women of Brewster Place (1982) was published one year after Naylor graduated from Brooklyn College and embarked on a
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career as a writer. Subsequently, she earned an M.A. in AfroAmerican studies from Yale (1983). Earlier she had been a missionary for Jehovah’s Witnesses (1968-75) and a switchboard operator. The Women of Brewster Place won the 1983 American Book award for best first novel. In 1989, without Naylor’s involvement, it was adapted for television. Walled off from the rest of society, Brewster Place is a literal and figurative dead end; yet its women (each ‘‘an ebony phoenix’’) have the will to make it home. Their poverty imposes a familiarity—the buildings are too cramped for privacy—that they mold into community. Mattie Michael, a Southern-born, hardworking, religious woman, is the book’s moral center. A failed mother, whose spoiled son’s betrayal has compelled her move to Brewster Place, Mattie redeems herself and her maternal power. In a powerful scene, she saves a young woman’s life by ‘‘rocking’’ her through the pain of a lost child. Like racism and poverty, sexism fractures families. Under the weight of these interlocking oppressions, the novel asserts, black women must rely on each other to survive. When they fail, as in the story of the lesbian couple whom the community ostracizes, the consequences are fatal. Kiswana Browne is the character who provides the link to Naylor’s second novel, Linden Hills (1985). This daughter of the bourgeoisie moves to Brewster Place to be with ‘‘the people.’’ Women gently mocks her naive idealism; Linden Hills illuminates its source. Founded by an ex-slave as a challenge to racism, ‘‘a beautiful, black wad of spit right in the white eye of America,’’ Linden Hills has been passed down through five generations of Luther Nedeed’s heirs and namesakes. Despite its subversive intent, it is a monument to patriarchal power and materialism. Kiswana could find no community here. Within a structure borrowed from Dante’s Inferno, Naylor inserts the voices and perspectives of the Nedeed wives, whose legacies are buried in the letters, recipe books, and photograph albums that Willa Nedeed discovers in the family cellar. Their words and images empower Willa. Similarly, through a series of allusions to, and revisions of, texts by Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker, Naylor pays homage to the literary predecessors who enable her work. Mama Day (1988) confirms Naylor’s consciousness of participating in multiple literary traditions. Echoes of Shakespeare’s The Tempest resound against the mythic voice of the slave woman, Sapphira, whose rebellion secured Willow Springs for her descendants. Prominent among these are the title character, Miranda (Mama) Day, a healer, conjure woman, and dispenser of wisdom, and her grandniece Ophelia; Willa Nedeed is their kinswoman. The plot depicts Ophelia’s courtship and marriage to George Andrews, by birth an orphan, by training an engineer, and by inclination a rationalist. The couple’s sojourn on the island builds to a climax in which the forces of faith and reason, history and progress, collide. As Linden Hills draws on Dante and Mama Day on The Tempest, Bailey’s Cafe (1992) reimagines biblical women— Eve, Mary, Jezebel, Mary Magdalene—in a late-20th-century netherworld. A novel ‘‘about sexuality,’’ according to Naylor, it is ‘‘structured. . .like a jazz set.’’ Using a kaleidoscopic point of
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view, Naylor tells stories of sin and redemption, love and hate, damnation and salvation. The cafe, presided over by Maestro Bailey, is both the end of the world and the beginning of new life for those who gather there. Some critics question whether Naylor’s characters are strong enough to carry the historical and philosophical burdens she imposes on them. They point to elements of melodrama and sentimentality as well. But Naylor’s strengths transcend these occasional weaknesses. Through lyrical yet gritty prose and sharply delineated characters, she advances a vision too challenging to ignore. In the late 1990s Naylor continues to create stories that capture the range of the African-American experience. She won the National Book award for The Women of Brewster Place, which she followed with Linden Hills, Mama Day, and Bailey’s Cafe. She also edited Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to the Present (1995), and this anthology provides the companion volume to Langston Hughes’s 1967 classic, The Best Short Stories by Black Writers. Naylor presents the finest African-American short stories of the last three decades. The volume is arranged in four thematic sections: ‘‘Remembering,’’ ‘‘Affirming,’’ ‘‘Revealing the Self Divided,’’ and ‘‘Moving On.’’ Featured in the volume are works by Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Terry McMillan, and Ntozake Shange, among many others. The 37 stories included capture the many facets of the black experience in America. Naylor returned to the site of one of her own most powerful locations in The Men of Brewster Place (1998). A collection of short stories, this book serves as a companion to the earlier work. The book is set in the same physical place, the Brewster Place apartments in an unnamed American city, but with different characters. The men are not so much male versions of the women in the first book but individuals with their own stories. Yet their stories do follow similar themes as the original: personal tales involving relationships, sex, and violence. In rich and expert detail, Naylor examines masculine triumph and failure: the sexually confused husband who visits a dominatrix; the guilt-ridden son who jumps bail and causes his mother to lose her house; the Baptist preacher-hustler who manipulates the fortunes of his poor congregation in order to get his way; the Afrocentric community center counselor who gets his young charges to respond to thugs with Shakespearean poetry. Several critics questioned Naylor’s decision to revisit Brewster Place, finding the connection between the two books tenuous. Since the Brewster Place apartment building does not figure as a main character the way it did in the first novel, there appears to be little reason to have placed them in the same location. These critics would have preferred Naylor to let these men be themselves. Yet none of the critics dispute the continuing power of Naylor’s ability to craft a story. In The Men of Brewster Place she displays the same rich grace, humor, and compassion that is a distinguishing characteristic of her writing. Naylor’s most recent novel, Saphhira Wade, is a sequel to Mama Day. She created her own production company, One Way Productions, which is intended to present positive images of the
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black community to as many people in the U.S. and around the world as possible.
Fiction (1990). Other works appear in collections such as Speaking for Ourselves, Constellations, Street Talk, and World of Fiction.
OTHER WORKS: ‘‘Love and Sex in the Afro-American Novel,’’ Yale Review (Autumn, 1989). ‘‘A Message to Winston,’’ Essence (November, 1982). ‘‘A Conversation,’’ with Toni Morrison, Southern Review, (Summer, 1985).
Neely’s first novel, Blanche on the Lam (1992), won her the Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity awards for best first mystery novel and the best debut novel by the Go-On-Girls. In an article on tools for the part-time novelist in the journal Writer, Neely said the book was produced while she was working ‘‘60 hours a week at a job to which I was dedicated.’’ Despite this arduous schedule, the first Blanche book was heralded for its tribute to the community and the culture of the working-class African-American woman. It also identified Neely’s writing skill as one to be reckoned with.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Awkward, M., Inspiriting Influences (1989). Christian, B., ‘‘Gloria Naylor’s Geography: Community, Class, and Patriarchy in The Women of Brewster Place and Linden Hills,’’ in Reading Black, Reading Feminist, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed. (1990). Felton, S., and M. Loris, eds., The Critical Response to Gloria Naylor (1997). Reference works: African American Writers (1991). Black American Women in Literature (1989). Bloomsbury Guide to Women’s Literature (1992). FW (1996). CA (1983). CANR (1989). CLC (1984, 1989). Other references: African American Review (1994, 1996). Black American Literary Forum 24 (Spring 1990). Boston Globe (interview, 21 Oct. 1992). CLAJ (Sept. 1989, March 1991). Contemporary Literature (1987, 1988). Great Women Writers (1994). Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (26 Apr. 1998). Quarterly Black Review (1995). Seattle Times (2 June 1998). —CHERYL A. WALL, UPDATED BY CELESTE DEROCHE
NEELY, Barbara Born 1941, Lebanon, Pennsylvania Barbara Neely is the author of several short stories and a series of mysteries novels featuring the first amateur AfricanAmerican female domestic sleuth, Blanche White. Neely says her work deals with race and class, and it runs as a common thread throughout her writing. Neely came from a working-class family in a steel town near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Her early years in the 1960s found her attending business school in Jamestown, New York, creating a community-based housing program for female felons in Pittsburgh, and later in the 1970s and 1980s working with homeless women, teenage mothers, women on welfare, and working single mothers. During these years she wrote short stories, and her first, ‘‘Passing the Word,’’ was published in Essence magazine. As the years passed, she worked as a consultant to nonprofit organizations on issues of multiculturalism, project development, program evaluation, and community-based research. She was also the cochair on the Board of Women for Economic Justice. She continued to write short stories part-time, and many of them appear in numerous anthologies such as Test Tube Women (1984), Things That Divide Us (1985), Angels of Power (1986), and Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary African American
This first Blanche novel takes place in a small town in North Carolina where Blanche finds herself sentenced to 30 days in jail for writing a bad check. Out of necessity, she gives the law the slip by becoming a domestic in the home of a wealthy family with deadly secrets. In order to escape being blamed for the death of a racist sheriff who was pursuing her, she begins to investigate the crime and identify suspects. As the plot progresses, she becomes convinced she must fight for her own life to survive. In this work, Blanche is funny and biting in her observation of white people, intelligent and resourceful in her sleuthing, and a marginal outsider by circumstance and therefore easily overlooked at important moments. She was raised to be nobody’s fool. The next Blanche adventure, Blanche Among the Talented Tenth (1994), finds her involved in a series of murders in the African-American community. It deals with the color-based class differences of a posh Maine resort filled with wealthy light-skinned blacks that represent a different kind of bigotry to Blanche. In this book Blanche is living in Boston and travels to the exclusive resort to make sure her niece and nephew, who are spending the summer there, are not getting wrong ideas from these undesirable inhabitants. While there, she not only experiences color and class distinctions, but also becomes involved in investigating the deaths of the local gossip and a man who claims to have killed her. The strength of the Blanche character and the message the book delivered continued to produce positive comments for Neely. Blanche Cleans Up (1998) finds Blanche substituting for the cook in the home of an ambitious politician who aspires to be the governor of Massachusetts. Blanche doesn’t like the way this man appears to support civil rights, but behind closed doors shows disrespect for everyone who isn’t white and rich. When she discovers a connection between deaths in the household and those in her own community, she begins an investigation of murders that turn out to be tied to scandal, sex, and heartbreak. Critics have applauded Neely’s character development and the flowing plotlines in this novel. Neely uses Blanche to present issues of race and class as they exist in our society. Despite Blanche’s seemingly unsophisticated appearance and profession, there is a probing mind, with a sharp wit and an opinionated voice that carries Neely’s message loud and clear. Neely’s mysteries are not mysteries; but rather social statements made to her readers in a sometimes entertaining and
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witty way, sometimes a sharp and biting manner, but always with an honest view.
provides form a basis for classifying and comparing various kinds of rents.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Booklist (15 Mar. 1998). LJ (15 Mar. 1998). Writer (June 1993). PW (20 Jan. 1992, 18 July 1994). Essence (Apr. 1992). WRB (Jan. 1995). Web sites: Barbara Neely at www.smpcollege.com/experience_literature/fiction/neely.htm and Cogdill, O. H., ‘‘A Biography of Barbara Neely,’’ from the Sun-Sentinel South Florida at www.sun-sentinel.com/freetime/mysteries/neely.htm.
In 1920 Neilson edited A Terrier of Fleet, Lincolnshire, and in 1928 she edited A Cartulary and Terrier of the Priory of Bilsington, Kent. The introductory monograph for the latter was a study of customs of the forests and marshes of Kent, based on extensive manuscript research. Of a quite different nature is Medieval Agrarian Economy (1936). This work, part of the Berkshire Studies in European History, was designed for use in college classes in general European history.
—PAULA C. MURPHY
NEILSON, Nellie Born 5 April 1873, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; died 26 May 1947, South Hadley, Massachusetts Daughter of William G. and Mary Cunningham Neilson The first woman to serve as president of the American Historical Association (1943), Nellie Neilson was an outstanding authority on medieval English agrarian economy. Her major concern was the influence of local custom on the development of English common law and on the development of the agrarian economy, especially in Kent. Much of Neilson’s work was in the form of scholarly articles. A charter member of the Medieval Academy of America, she was for years the sole woman fellow and served eventually as president of the society. Economic Conditions on the Manors of Ramsey Abbey (1898) was Neilson’s doctoral dissertation. In this work, Neilson seeks to give a ‘‘full, connected statement’’ of conditions on a set of church manors during the 12th and 13th centuries. She provides a comparative study of conditions in the two centuries, concluding that there was ‘‘an appreciable steady depression in the condition of the villeins’’ over that period. The decline is particularly evident in the rapid evolution of precariae, or boon work. Another major work was Customary Rents (1910), one of two monographs in the second volume of Oxford Studies in Social and Legal History. As Paul Vinogradoff noted in his introduction, Neilson approaches her subject as a student of records. She focuses on three sets of obligations of the typical villein: rents arising from manorial customs, rents originally royal in character, and church rents. Both the latter two had become manorialized in a sense, but they still retained something of their public character. For the study of manorial rents, Neilson contended, the best sources are the custumals of the church manors and the records kept by manorial officers. Neilson traces the complex relationships of five different rents, determined according to origin. As to the royal rents, she notes it is difficult to determine the original principle of assessment, in part because the superimposed manor ‘‘confused the old arrangements of the vill.’’ Furthermore, since manorial, royal, and church rents were all received by the lord in one capacity or another, few distinctions were noted in the records. The guides she
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Neilson notices the greatest difference between medieval life and modern life in the prominence of agriculture in daily medieval affairs and the closeness to nature. She deals with three levels of life: the village settlement itself, the people and their conditions of life and interrelationships, and the relation of the village to two outside agencies: the government and the church. The general focus is on the pattern of life customary in England and France during the 12th and 13th centuries, with much briefer reference to conditions in central Europe. Neilson stresses the role of customary law as the moderating force on arbitrary will. As her focus is on the village, her primary concern is how the outside agencies are encountered there. A thorough and painstaking scholar, Neilson won the respect of medievalists in both Great Britain and the United States. She was an indefatigable researcher, and the variety of approaches she used and the effective comparisons drawn give her work strength and depth. Neilson’s skill in combining the roles of scholar and teacher is part of her hallmark. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ausubel, H., Historians and Their Craft: A Study of the Presidential Addresses of the American Historical Association, 1884-1945 (1950). Reference works: NCAB. Other references: AHR (Jan. 1929, Oct. 1947). Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly (Feb. 1948). —INZER BYERS
NEVILLE, Emily Cheney Born 28 December 1919, Manchester, Connecticut; died 14 December 1997 Daughter of Howell and Anne Bunce Cheney; married Glenn Neville, 1948; children: five Emily Cheney Neville was the youngest child of the large, close-knit family she describes in her autobiographical novel, Traveler from a Small Kingdom (1968). Neville played and went to school only with siblings and cousins until she was ten. She attended Oxford School in Hartford and graduated from Bryn Mawr with a degree in economics. After working briefly for the New York Daily News as an office girl, Neville took a position with the New York Daily Mirror writing a profile column. She married a newspaperman with the Hearst Corporation and retired
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from journalism to raise her family, doing only occasional writing until all five children were in school. Neville’s books have been full-length realistic novels intended for later elementary and teenage readers. Her first book, It’s Like This, Cat (1963), developed out of an imaginary scene in which a boy argues with his father over a cat. Neville expanded a short piece in the Mirror into the novel, which later won the Newbery award and is regarded as Neville’s strongest book. Flimsy in plot, Cat’s strong points are its genuine, contemporary dialogue and warm insights into the inner feelings of young adolescents. For slightly younger children, Berries Goodman (1965) is about the adjustments a New York City family must make when they move to Olcott Corners, a suburban community 50 miles out. Accustomed to a heterogeneous environment, nine-year-old Berries, a Gentile, is perplexed and disturbed by anti-Semitic sentiment directed toward his new friend, Sidney Fine, the only Jewish boy in Berries’s school. Eventually, adults and circumstances come between the two and end their relationship. The story describes with sensitivity and perceptiveness the feelings of children caught up in adult tensions, which they regard as irrational but which they are powerless to combat. Well-drawn children offset the stereotyped adults and thin and contrived plot. The Seventeenth-Street Gang (1966) is an amusing account of the sidewalk adventures of a group of children around Stuyvesant Park, the part of Manhattan in which Neville’s own children grew up. Slower moving, Traveler from a Small Kingdom is a fictionalized autobiography important for evaluating and understanding Neville’s work. It tells of the middle years in the childhood of little Emily Cheney, a scrawny, often sickly, but still active and imaginative child. Her ‘‘small green kingdom’’ is ‘‘The Place,’’ where a dozen Cheney families live in the mill town of South Manchester, Connecticut. Mrs. Goodall, English governess of Emily and her older sister, comes through as a strong, strict, and affectionate personality, while lively details of family gatherings, walks, domestic animals, and games with an assortment of mischievous and inventive cousins recreate the Cheney realm and a way of life that vanished with the Great Depression. Less convincing are Fogarty (1969) and Garden of Broken Glass (1975), written for teenage readers. Both present interesting and sympathetic protagonists but suffer from limp plots, made-toorder incidents, and unbelievable conclusions. While it bravely tackles an important contemporary problem, Garden of Broken Glass lacks conviction as a novel because Neville seems more concerned with the sociology of alcoholism than with telling a good story well. Neville has said about her work: ‘‘My writing is probably an outgrowth of my childhood in a large clannish New England family, mingled with my own quite different experiences raising five children in New York City.’’ Concerned with showing young people the world as it is, she feels ‘‘the job for a writer of junior novels. . .[is] to shine the flashlight on good things, and on bad things. It is not our job to preach that this is right and that is wrong.
NEWCOMB
It is ours to show how and when and why Wrong can be so overwhelmingly attractive at a given moment—and how Right can be found in some very unlikely corners.’’ Neville felt plot in books for young people was less important than character; her strong point is her ability to create lively, sympathetic protagonists whose feelings, speech, and actions reflect well the concerns and behavior of modern youth. Neville’s books are less overtly didactic and sociological than many recent books which deal with contemporary social problems and family relations. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: More Books about More People (1974). Newbery and Caldecott Medal Books (1965). Something about the Author (1971). Third Book of Junior Authors (1972). —ALETHEA K. HELBIG
NEWCOMB, Franc Johnson Born 30 March 1887, Jacksonville, Wisconsin; died 25 July 1970, Albuquerque, New Mexico Daughter of Frank L. and Priscilla Woodward Johnson; married Arthur J. Newcomb, 1914 (divorced); children: two daughters Franc Johnson Newcomb was the daughter of an architect and a teacher who both died before her teens. After graduating from Tomah High School in Jacksonville, Wisconsin, in 1904, Newcomb taught locally for five years, studying summers to complete her education degree in 1913. Joining the Indian Service in 1911, Newcomb taught Menominees until her health demanded a transfer from Wisconsin. In 1912 Newcomb taught Navajos at the Fort Defiance, Arizona, boarding school, where she met her husband, a trader. They established a trading post in a remote Navajo community in northwestern New Mexico. After Newcomb moved to Albuquerque in 1935 to educate her two daughters, she wrote and worked to establish a visiting nurse service and day nursery there and the Museum of Navaho Ceremonial Art in Santa Fe. When fire destroyed their trading post in 1936, her husband’s alcoholism became acute, straining Newcomb to the breaking point. After their divorce in 1946, she resumed writing. Her first book, Sandpaintings of the Navajo Shooting Chant (1937), discusses the origin myth and action; a friendly medicine man, Hosteen Klah, allowed Newcomb to reproduce 44 of the 600 sandpaintings. Newcomb’s section of A Study of Navajo Symbolism (1956) explains the meanings of materials she saw used in Navajo rituals. Respect for Navajo lifeways dominates Newcomb’s descriptions of the hogan in two of many articles published in New Mexico magazine (Nov. 1934 and Jan. 1940). In Navajo Omens and Taboos (1940), Newcomb explains both the ritual reasoning
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and pragmatic logic behind over 200 Navajo customs governing all phases of life, from sex roles to luck signs.
NEWMAN, Frances
Newcomb’s collections of Navajo folklore include histories of Navajo emergence into their ‘‘Fifth World’’ (Navajo Folk Tales, 1967); myths recounting the gods’ gifts of ceremonies (‘‘Origin Legend of the Navajo Eagle Chant,’’ Journal of American Folklore, Jan.- March 1940); and tales explaining animal traits (Navajo Bird Tales , 1970). Her composite versions gathered from several storytellers have limited value for folklorists, but general readers appreciate the graceful language.
Born 13 December 1883, Atlanta, Georgia; died 22 October 1928, New York, New York Daughter of William T. and Frances Alexander Newman
In her poetry based on Navajo materials, Newcomb uses formal meter and rhyme, producing an odd effect of cultural contrast between structure and content. For example, ‘‘Nilth-Chizzie’’ (New Mexico magazine, Oct. 1936) relates Navajo beliefs concerning the ghostliness of the little whirlwind in the form of a sonnet. Newcomb’s best work is her nonfiction prose blending history, autobiography, and folklore. In ‘‘The Price of a Horse’’ (New Mexico Quarterly Review, May 1943), she lets readers connect a diary entry about discovering a mass burial, a government report of a military incident, and Grandma Klah’s story of an Army massacre of 58 Navajos suspected of stealing a horse. In her biography, Hosteen Klah (1964), Newcomb fuses these sources, producing a personalized history of changing Navajo culture through compelling portraits of Klah, his mother, and his great-grandfather, Chief Narbona. Navaho Neighbors (1966) is a collection of reservation memories. The power of Navajo women in their matrilineal society emerges as Newcomb humorously describes a woman divorcing her fat husband by narrowing her hogan door, and poignantly tells of a niece bearing a child to give her aunt, whose children had died. Lack of chronological order reinforces Newcomb’s emphasis upon the continuity of personal ties and tradition in this isolated community. Although some historians and anthropologists resented Newcomb as an amateur, N. Scott Momaday applauded her realistic portrayals of Navajo life. To Newcomb, Navajos were people, not objects for study. This basic assumption permeates Newcomb’s works, enhancing their value as a record of the personal dimension of intercultural communication. The papers of Franc Johnson Newcomb, including an unpublished paper, ‘‘Autobiography of Franc Johnson Newcomb,’’ are at the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. BIBLIOGRAPHY: American Association of University Women, Albuquerque Branch, Women in New Mexico (1976). Other references: American Anthropologist (Dec. 1957, April 1965, Dec. 1967, Feb. 1969). El Palacio (5-12 Jan. 1938). Journal of American History (Dec. 1967). New Mexico Quarterly Review (Aug. 1940). NYTBR (8 Jan. 1967). Sante Fe New Mexican (31 Mar. 1968). —HELEN M. BANNAN
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Except for travel abroad and brief stays in the East, Frances Newman lived in her native Atlanta, Georgia. Her formal schooling included one year in the Carnegie Library School. Newman was a professional librarian at Florida State College for Women, the Atlanta Carnegie Library, and the Georgia School of Technology Library. She began her writing career as a reviewer for the Atlanta newspapers. Newman’s one published short story, ‘‘Rachel and Her Children’’ (American Mercury, 1924), won the O. Henry Memorial award. ‘‘Atlanta Biltmore,’’ her only other story, remains unpublished. The Short Story’s Mutations: From Petronius to Paul Morand (1924) was described in a publicity flyer as ‘‘sixteen illustrative stories. . .woven into ten chapters like episodes in a well-told biography.’’ Beginning with Petronius and ending with Morand, Newman selected stories that were mutations (not evolutions), believing the presence of a genius could produce a new species that would have lasting effect on what came after it. Thus her book is an anthology illustrating Newman’s theory of the short story. Her 60 pages of commentary remain useful and impressive, reflecting her sensitivity to fiction and her irritation toward those who ‘‘would like to confine brief fictions in an inflexible form.’’ Newman’s extensive criticism remains uncollected. By 1915 she was writing brilliant reviews for the Atlanta Constitution and Journal. Book reviews also appeared in the Bookman and the New York Times. Twelve of Newman’s best critical articles and three episodes from what eventually became the novel The Hard-Boiled Virgin (1926, reprinted 1980) were published in the Reviewer, a Richmond journal. Newman’s caustic wit and candor did little to endear her to those she criticized. Repeatedly, she said her own country did not find convictions very important; it was not a century of beliefs and disbeliefs, but of tastes and distastes. Newman was convinced writers of novels must brood over ideas before putting them into words, and ‘‘that American writing will probably not be very much better until American critics are better.’’ The Hard-Boiled Virgin was an instant success, the title alone ensuring its succés de scandale. Newman traced much of her own life in Katharine Faraday, who was also the youngest and least attractive in a handsome family. Trained in Southern mores, Katharine met proper young men but lost them when their courtship (passion) violated her expectations (love). Unable to achieve a proper marriage, she turned writer, traveler, and littérateur. The daring exploits of a properly bred Southern girl made the book appealing to the public. Structured in short chapters (each a paragraph), the novel contains no dialogue. The long, complex sentences reveal Newman’s serious preoccupation with style. Her
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extraordinary gifts of wit, comic irony, and psychological insight delineate the inner self of Katharine Faraday. Newman’s second novel, Dead Lovers Are Faithful Lovers (1928, 1977), has little dialogue. Although slightly flawed by an overabundance of ‘‘yellow crêpe de chine negliges,’’ ‘‘blue-plumed yellow velvet hats,’’ and operatic allusions, the novel nevertheless superbly presents its ménage à trois: Charlton Cunningham, a young lawyer who rose to railroad president; his wife, Evelyn Page, whose mother ‘‘told her that a wife’s love always grows and a husband’s always lessens’’; and Isabel Ramsey, the spinster librarian whom Cunningham began to court after 12 married years. Newman included the daring subjects of sexual sensations, miscegenation, adultery, and divorce. Social nuances were rendered faithfully, but equally significant was the presence of the ‘‘new woman’’ apparent in Isabel’s thoughts. Newman was an interesting woman, slightly out of place in Atlanta in the 1920s, and a distinguished stylist. With the shift in taste that came with the Depression years, her style fell from fashion. Generally, her published work has been little read since the 1920s, though both her novels were reprinted in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Her very first novel, The Goldfish Bowl, remains unpublished, and readers are forever cheated of the stories and books left unwritten save for their tantalizing titles: Eminent Virgins, So-Called, History of Sophistication, ‘‘Mr. Pringle’s Deceased Wife’s Sisters,’’ and There’s a Certain Elegance about Celibacy. Her translation of Six Moral tales from Jules Laforgue, however, was published posthumously in 1928. OTHER WORKS: Frances Newman’s Letters (edited by H. Baugh, 1929). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Baugh, H., ed, Frances Newman’s Letters (1929). Cabell, J., Some of Us: An Essay in Epitaphs (1930). Clark, E., Innocence Abroad (1931). Jones, A. G., Tomorrow is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859-1936 (1981). Ramsey, W., Jules Laforgue and the Ironic Inheritance (1953). Seidel, K. L., The Southern Belle in the American Novel (1985). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Georgia Review (1960). Journal of Library History (Spring 1981). London Magazine (1966). —ELIZABETH EVANS
NEWMAN, Lesléa Born 5 November 1955, Brooklyn, New York Daughter of Edward and Florence Levin Newman In ‘‘Passover Poem’’ (in the collection Love Me Like You Mean It, 1987), Lesléa Newman links the two major literary themes that inform much of her writing: ‘‘Three years ago I came out as a lesbian / and came home / to my Jewishness.’’ Lesbianism and Judaism, irreconcilable by Jewish law, become conjoined in
Newman’s writing, the one a mirror and counterpart of the other. Both lesbianism and Judaism, made reconcilable in her prose and poetry, become vehicles by which Newman defines herself as well as her identity as a writer. And while she does not limit her settings or characters to issues related exclusively to Judaism, the voice in her writing is unmistakably inflected with Yiddish, with the implied mannerisms and gesticulations, with the oral qualities so inherent to Yiddish, to a language of urgency and intimacy. Jewish identity and lesbian sexuality, for Newman, fundamental consequences of circumstance and history, preoccupy her writing, and their intersection provides the lens through which her characters, narrators, and personae navigate the tensions and contradictions of contemporary American life, all within the frame of historical conditions of persecution, specifically homophobia and anti-Semitism. As Newman herself puts it: ‘‘I don’t know what would have happened to my writing if there hadn’t been raging anti-Semitism.’’ A poet, novelist, essayist, and short story writer, Newman’s writing might be said to be largely political, in that issues and concerns—such as homophobia, anti-Semitism, feminism, eating disorders, AIDS, sexual abuse, identity politics, generational conflict, bearing witness to suffering and the transgressions of silence—permeate her work. The political is always linked with the personal in Newman’s writing, an alliance that brings to her work its characteristic depth and ironic and deeply felt sensibilities. In ‘‘A Letter for Harvey Milk’’ (in A Letter to Harvey Milk and Other Stories, 1988), Newman recreates the 1978 murder of Harvey Milk, the gay and much beloved San Francisco city councilman, gunned down by Dan White, prosecuted in the infamous ‘‘twinkie trial.’’ But she does so through personal narrative, through letters written by the story’s first person protagonist, Harry Weinberg, an elderly Jew who, despite his conviction that ‘‘what’s past is past. . .suffering and more suffering. . .I ain’t got no stories,’’ relates a devastating event that took place in a concentration camp, more than 30 years before the immediate time frame of the story, so ‘‘the world shouldn’t forget.’’ In this multilayered and complex narrative, Harry’s story is told to the frame-story’s competing protagonist, a young lesbian teacher who has been rejected by her parents because of her professed sexual identity and whose grandparents refuse to talk to her about their lives as Jews in the shtetlach (remotely located Jewish villages, places of isolation and pogroms) of pre-World War II Europe. The one story of persecution and suffering, the murder of Harvey Milk, gives way to other stories of suffering and oppression, both personal and collective, stories whose personal expression of pain and alienation are part of an ongoing history of communal trauma. ‘‘A Letter to Harvey Milk’’ is a paradigmatic piece in the lengthy and variegated compilation of Newman’s collected works. In a characteristically personal and personalized voice, the political is realized through stories of individual suffering, and the quotidian and seemingly insignificant lives of ordinary people become the motive and catalyst for change. Newman, the recipient of numerous literary awards, including the James Baldwin Award for Cultural Achievement, a Pushcart Prize Nomination, and a Poetry Fellowship from the
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National Endowment for the Arts, is also a playwright, a children’s author, has written a film version of the short story ‘‘A Letter to Harvey Milk’’ (1990), and has written and edited a number of works of nonfiction. She holds a certificate in poetics from the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado (1980). Additionally, her stories and poems have appeared in a number of periodicals and anthologies. OTHER WORKS: Just Looking for My Shoes (1980). Good Enough to Eat (1986). After All We’ve Been Through (1989). Bubbe Meisehs by Shayneh Maidelehs: An Anthology of Poetry by Jewish Granddaughters About Our Grandmothers (1989). Heather Has Two Mommies (1990). Secrets (1990). Belinda’s Bouquet (1991). Gloria Goes to Gay Pride (1991). Rage (1991). Some Body to Love: A Guide to Loving the Body You Have (1991). Sweet Dark Places (1991). In Every Laugh a Tear (1992). Saturday Is Pattyday (1993). Writing from the Heart: Inspirations and Exercises for Women Who Want to Write (1993). My Lover Is a Woman: Contemporary Lesbian Love Poems (1996). Pillow Talk: Lesbian Stories Between the Covers (1998). Too Far Away to Touch (1998). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA 126. Jewish American Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical and Critical Sourcebook (1994). Other references: Bay Area Reporter (11 Oct. 1990, Aug. 1991). Newsweek (7 Jan. 1991). NYTBR (27 Aug. 1995, 28 July 1996). PW (20 May 1988). Sojourner (Aug. 1989, Aug. 1990). Small Press Book Review (July/Aug. 1988). TLS (13-19 Nov. 1987).
Academy (1976), and election to the Presidency of the International Arthurian Society (1972-75). Newstead published several dozen articles and book reviews, many of them in the Journal of Romance Philology and PMLA. Her major work is probably her doctoral thesis, Bran the Blessed in Arthurian Romance (1939). Here, Newstead painstakingly traces many elements of the French grail romances to their Celtic antecedents; thus, she argues for the ‘‘existence of a Welsh stage in the transmission of Celtic material,’’ restores creative credit to medieval Wales, and illuminates the process of myth-making and the accretion of legendary detail. The unobtrusive style of Newstead’s writing is somewhat warmer in the introduction to her anthology, Chaucer and His Contemporaries (1968). This work includes essays on the black death and medieval technology; it is refreshing in its relation of the literature to the life of the period. Newstead’s no-nonsense approach both to scholarship and to human behavior may be seen in her learned articles as well. In a study of Chrétien de Troyes’s Le Comte du Graal, for example, Newstead contends that Perceval does indeed have more than a spiritual relationship with a lady in great distress who comes to his bed. Her subject matter may be obscure and her style flatly academic, but her arguments appeal finally to what we know of real life; Newstead is as a scholar both down-to-earth and erudite. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Voices in Translation: The Authority of ‘‘Olde Bookes’’ in Medieval Literature: Essays in Honor of Helaine Newstead (1992). NY (Mar. 1957). —NIKKI STILLER
—VICTORIA AARONS
NICHOLS, Anne NEWSTEAD, Helaine Born 22 April 1906, New York, New York; died October 1981 Daughter of Nathan and Sarah Newstead An only child of moderately well-off Jewish parents, Helaine Newstead spent her formative years preparing for a career as a pianist. She attended Hunter College, to which she returned as a tutor upon her graduation in 1928, and received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1937. At Columbia, Newstead met her mentor, Roger Sherman Loomis, who inspired her research into Arthurian legend. For years, Newstead taught at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. Her attachment to this institution, and to scholarly organizations and causes, has been great: she was chairman of the Arthurian Romance group of the Modern Language Association (1956-57) and president of the Medieval Club of New York (1950-52) as well as chairman of the English Department both at Hunter College and at CUNY (1962-69). Among Newstead’s more recent honors are an honorary doctorate from the University of Wales (1969), Fellow of the Medieval
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Born 26 November, late 1890s, Dales Mills, Georgia; died 15 September 1966 Daughter of George and Julia Bates Nichols; married Henry Duffy, 1914; children: one son Playwright, producer, director, and actress, Anne Nichols began performing at age fifteen and continued to be active in the performing arts into the 1950s. Married to a theatrical producer, and mother of one son, Nichols toured with vaudeville and traveling acting companies, frequently writing scripts for their use. Her writing versatility extended from vaudeville sketches, full-length plays, and musicals to film scenarios and radio adaptations. She produced both her own works and others’, and she acted on stage and in films. The themes and emphasis of Nichols’ many plays can be identified easily through their titles: Just Married (1921) and Heart’s Desire (1916), written with Adelaide Matthews, Her Weekend (later titled Pre Engagement, 1936), and Marry in Haste (1921). The varieties of farcical complications which either separate lovers and honeymooners or inadvertently join complete strangers are reused from one play to the next. Mistaken identities,
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improbable coincidences, quarreling lovers, ticket mix-ups, and unimportant but closely guarded secrets fill each work. The lighthearted activities invariably end in happy marriage, with particular emphasis on the now-fulfilled proprieties. Social obligations are met, families are united, and proper engagements or marriages are planned. Nichols’ best-known work is Abie’s Irish Rose (1922), which has been periodically revived and was recently (1998) recorded on tape. It was filmed in 1928 and formed the basis for a television situation comedy (Bridget Loves Bernie) in the 1970s. Well received by the general audiences in its New York and international appearances, the play was panned initially by the New York Times. Replete with Jewish dialect and Irish brogue, it calls upon mechanical devices to present every cliché ever offered by disapproving parents about the marriage of their children. In doubling the traditional means of reconciliation (twins instead of just a single child), the play’s final scene is a triumph of sentimentality. In her various theatrical activities, Nichols seldom varied from the trite limits of the well-made farce; nevertheless, her popular success indicates a clear awareness of the public taste and a smooth, competent ability to meet it. Nichols entertains without making demands on her audience’s intelligence or attitudes.
disapproved of her genuine concern for the poor and her outspokenness on matters that outraged her principles. Nicholson narrates her adventures in Ireland’s Welcome to the Stranger (1847), a book valuable for its remarkable picture of 19th-century Irish country life. It is unique among Irish travel books of the time because Nicholson lived among the poor and recorded details of daily life. Although the book is full of her eccentricities, it is marked by vivid writing and by her efforts to help the people she met. Nicholson’s wish to serve the Irish poor was fulfilled by the end of the decade. Even before she left Ireland in August 1845, the first signs of the potato blight had appeared. With aid from American charitable organizations, Nicholson arrived in Dublin again in 1847 to establish her own soup kitchen. She worked with the Dublin Central Relief Committee until July 1847, when she went to Belfast. Nicholson spent the following winter in the west of Ireland in those areas most devastated by famine, organizing relief for the poor. Lights and Shades of Ireland (1847) is the journal of Nicholson’s famine experience. Her portraits of the leaders of the Dublin Quakers in the Central Relief Committee, her description of the rural relief officers who worked courageously among the dying, and her vignettes of individual human suffering make the book an important document.
—KATHLEEN G. KLEIN
NICHOLSON, Asenath Hatch Born 24 February 1792, Chelsea, Vermont; died death date unknown Wrote under: A. Nicholson, Asenath Nicholson Daughter of Michael and Martha Hatch; married Norman Nicholson Asenath Hatch Nicholson’s parents were descendants of New England Puritans. Their example of broad charity and religious tolerance inculcated those virtues in their daughter, who said of her clergyman father: ‘‘He hung no Quakers, nor put any man in a corner of the church because he had a coloured skin. He rebuked sin in high places with fearlessness.’’ Nicholson was trained as a schoolteacher before she married a New York merchant. About 1832 Nicholson opened a Temperance Boardinghouse based on the principles of Sylvester Graham in the old Five Points section of New York, the city’s worst slum. Her rules and their rationale are the subject of Nature’s Own Book (1835). It is a book of crotchets; she was a vegetarian who objected to tobacco, alcohol, coffee, and even tea, which she argued was capable of giving its users the delirium tremens. After Nicholson was widowed, she set off for Ireland in 1844 on a self-appointed mission to bring the Bible to the Irish poor. For 15 months, she walked through Ireland distributing tracts supplied by the Hibernian Bible Society. Everywhere she scolded against dirt, drink, and tobacco, but her compassion and generosity won Nicholson the acceptance of the Irish country people; others
Nicholson left Ireland in 1848 but continued to live in Europe until 1852. In 1850 she was an American delegate to the Peace Conference in Frankfurt. Her last book, Loose Papers (1853), a series of sketches, was published after her return to the United States. She wished to be remembered for her work as an educator, a missionary, a reformer, and a humanitarian. However, Irish social historians value her for Ireland’s Welcome to the Stranger, a book that Sean O’Faolain and Frank O’Connor considered one of the two or three most valuable records of Ireland on the eve of the Great Famine, and for Lights and Shades of Ireland, a documentary of one woman’s efforts to ease human suffering. OTHER WORKS: The Bible in Ireland (edited by A. Sheppard, 1925). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Saints and Scholars (1929). Other references: Dublin magazine (1934). —MAUREEN MURPHY
NICHOLSON, Eliza Jane Poitevent Born 11 March 1848, Pearlington, Mississippi; died 15 February 1896, New Orleans, Louisiana Wrote under: Pearl Rivers Daughter of Captain William J. and Mary Russ Poitevent; married Alva M. Holbrook, 1872; George Nicholson, 1878; children: two sons Eliza Jane Poitevent Nicholson was raised by an aunt near the Louisiana-Mississippi border. She entertained herself by roaming
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the piney woods along the Pearl River, developing in her youth an affectionate regard for nature. In 1867 Nicholson began submitting the poems she had been writing since age fourteen to newspapers and magazines. Her first published poem appeared in the New Orleans literary sheet, the South in 1868. Soon poems by ‘‘Pearl Rivers’’ appeared in the New York Home Journal, the New York Ledger, the New Orleans Times, and the New Orleans Daily Picayune. In 1868 Nicholson met A. M. Holbrook, owner and editor of the Daily Picayune. He offered her a job as literary editor for $25 a week. Over the strenuous objections of her family, Nicholson accepted, becoming New Orleans’ first female journalist. Her lively prose and intelligent selections markedly improved the paper’s literary section. In 1872 she married Holbrook, divorced and 40 years her senior. (His angry ex-wife returned from New York a month after the wedding and proceeded to attack Nicholson with a pistol and a bottle of rum. The subsequent trial was covered in scandalous detail by the Daily Picayune.) When Holbrook died four years later, Nicholson assumed ownership and management of the Daily Picayune, which was $80,000 in debt. At twenty-seven, she thus became the first woman ever to own and operate a metropolitan daily paper. With the assistance of a loyal staff, including the part owner and business manager, George Nicholson, whom she married in 1878, Nicholson transformed the Daily Picayune into a profitable paper and the first general-interest daily in the South. Nicholson’s most significant innovations were directed at women. She introduced a society column, personal notes, fashion news, home and medical advice columns, children’s pages, and plentiful illustrations. Nicholson also employed talented writers, including several women. Nicholson’s own poetry and prose also appeared, including columns of personal and imaginative commentary. In 1884 Nicholson became president of the Women’s National Press Association and was the first honorary member of the New York Women’s Press Club. In addition, Nicholson was largely responsible for the founding of the New Orleans Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1888, and she helped gain public support for the night schools instituted by Sophie B. Wright. Nicholson died of influenza, 11 days after her husband. Their two sons inherited the paper she had shaped, maintaining its ownership and character into the 20th century. In her only volume of poetry, Lyrics (1873), the theme is almost without exception nature and seasonal change. Nicholson’s rhymed quatrains are characterized by personifications of the months and seasons and by fairylike perspectives of plants and animals. Occasionally, she writes of feminine heartbreak. Technically pedestrian, her poems reveal a delight in nature and an eye for authentic detail. To Nicholson, poetry was a ‘‘gift of song,’’ intended to cheer and please her audience. Two later poems, ‘‘Hagar’’ and ‘‘Leah,’’ published first in Cosmopolitan in 1893 and 1894, suggest a richer dimension of Nicholson’s talent. Long dramatic poems in blank verse, they are uneven but vivid and insightful evocations of their heroines’
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bitterness and jealousy as overlooked women. ‘‘Hagar’’ is the stronger of the two poems, with an effective use of meter and imagery. Although her early pastoral poetry is slight, Nicholson’s later poems reflect an ability to dramatize emotion effectively. But it is her journalistic ability that distinguishes her. Her columns are filled with a sure, lively prose, whose mark was entertaining dialogue and reflective commentary. Her paper stands as a model of innovative and responsible publishing. A remarkable and sensitive woman, Nicholson is said to have possessed little confidence in her abilities. Nevertheless, her strong sense of duty and courage often substituted for self-confidence and forged the means by which her creativity and discriminating intelligence were expressed. OTHER WORKS: Four Poems by Pearl Rivers (1900). Two Poems by Pearl Rivers (circa 1900). The papers of Eliza Jane Poitevent Nicholson are in the Howard-Tilton Library of Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Dabney, T. E., One Hundred Great Years (1944). DeMenil, A. N., The Literature of the Louisiana Territory (1904). Farr, E. S., Pearl Rivers (1951). Gill, H. M., The South in Prose and Poetry (1916). Harrison, J. H., Pearl Rivers, Publisher of the Picayune (1932). Mount, M., Some Notables of New Orleans (1896). Ross, I., Ladies of the Press (1936). Rutherford, M. L., The South in History and Literature (1907). Reference works: DAB. Dictionary of American Authors (1904). Living Female Writers of the South (1872). The Living Writers of the South (1869). NAW (1971). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Louisiana Historical Society (Oct. 1923). Poitevent Genealogy (Tulane archives, 1967). New Orleans Daily Picayune (16 Feb. 1896). New Orleans Times-Democrat (16 Feb. 1896). Teachers’ Outlook (Feb. 1901). —BARBARA C. EWELL
NICOLSON, Marjorie Hope Born 18 February 1894, Yonkers, New York; died March 1981 Daughter of Charles B. and Lissie Morris Nicolson The daughter of a newspaper editor, Marjorie Hope Nicolson spent most of her adult life in an academic environment, studying at Michigan, Yale, and Johns Hopkins, and teaching at Minnesota, Goucher, Smith, Columbia, and Claremont. She was a member of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton from 1963 to 1968. Nicolson earned many honors during her long and distinguished career and blazed many new trails for academic women. As the first woman president of the United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa
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(1940), she explained that most academic women had not been able to distinguish themselves because it was hard to be ‘‘both scholars and ladies,’’ in that women scholars ‘‘have no wives to look after social contacts and to perform the drudgery for them.’’ She was the first woman to be elected president of the Modern Language Association, the first woman to receive Yale’s John Addison Porter Prize for original work, and the first woman to hold a full professorship on Columbia University’s graduate faculty. Nicolson was fascinated with the impact on the literary imagination made by science and philosophy, especially in the 17th and 18th centuries. As early as 1935, Nicolson’s lifelong interest surfaced in a study of The Microscope and English Imagination, in which she describes how the invention of the microscope had stimulated both serious and satiric themes in literature, even influencing the remarkable technique of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Several of her best volumes focus on the way scientific advances alter aesthetic judgments and hence modify literary treatments. For instance, A World in the Moon (1937) describes the changing attitudes toward the moon brought about by the telescope; Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory (1959) describes humanity’s shift from abhorrence of mountains as reflecting sin’s disruption to attraction to mountains as symbols of the infinite; and Breaking of the Circle (1950) describes the dislocating insecurity caused by the Copernican Revolution as reflected in the works of John Donne and his contemporaries. Although this latter was her most influential book, it also caused considerable scholarly controversy because many argued that Nicolson had overestimated the importance of scientific theory to people who were accustomed to finding their security not in science but in religion. Newton Demands the Muse (1946), a study of how Newtonian optics affected 18th-century poets, merited the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize of the British Academy. It is not surprising that a woman so interested in science and literature should turn her attention to John Milton, who was similarly attracted to the advanced scientific thought of his day. Accordingly, Nicolson edited a volume of Milton’s major poems and published A Reader’s Guide to Milton (1963), which has proved popular on many campuses. This Long Disease, My Life: Alexander Pope and the Sciences (1968), written with G. S. Rousseau, after Nicolson’s retirement, includes a detailed medical history of the poet, a study of five medical themes or episodes in his work, an extensive section on Pope and astronomy, and a concluding section on Pope’s interest in the other sciences of his day, especially geology. In addition to her books, Nicolson was a frequent contributor to periodicals. She edited American Scholar from 1940 to 1944 and served on the editorial board of the Journal of the History of Ideas for many years. Her work is never academic in the ‘‘dry-as-dust’’ sense; it pulsates with the fascination, wry wit, and human involvement she feels toward her subject. It is Nicolson’s flair for making her point memorably that ensures her a continuing influence among lovers of literature.
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OTHER WORKS: The Art of Deception (1926). Conway Letters (1930). Voyages to the Moon (1948). Science and Imagination (1956). Pepys’ Diary and the New Science (1965). BIBLIOGRAPHY: CA (1964). CB (1940). —VIRGINIA RAMEY MOLLENKOTT
NIEDECKER, Lorine Born 12 May 1903, Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin; died 31 December 1970, Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin Daughter of Henry E. and Theresa Kunz Niedecker; married Frank Hartwig, 1928 (divorced); Albert Millen, 1963 Although a relatively unknown and secluded poet, Lorine Niedecker was early recognized across the Atlantic and her list of admirers is long. Niedecker lived and worked in the upper Midwest all her life, and her poetry arises out of her observations and intimate contact with the people of the region—her ‘‘folk.’’ Niedecker lived on Black Hawk Island, a small island near the town of Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. Her father, who worked as a carp skeiner, was an alcoholic with a boisterous personality and a cruel streak. Her mother was deaf and going blind, a silent sufferer of her husband’s philandering and alcoholism. As a result of her parents’ chaotic relationship and very different personalities, Niedecker learned the importance of balance or ‘‘floating’’ between them. As Lisa Pater Faranda observed, ‘‘Floating and flying became metaphors she used for managing the balance needed to survive’’ and ‘‘achieved in the act of writing.’’ Before graduating from high school in 1922, Niedecker bought a Wordsworth, and as she told Cid Corman many years later, she ‘‘was vaguely aware that the poetry current was beginning to change’’ (Between Your House and Mine: The Letters of Lorine Niedecker to Cid Corman, 1960-1970, 1986). She was already writing some poetry, and after graduation from Fort Atkinson High School, she left home for Beloit College to study literature. After only two years in college, she left Beloit to care for her ailing mother. In 1928 Niedecker married Frank Hartwig, but it was a short-lived marriage and they were permanently separated two years later. During this period, she wrote relatively little, but began her long years in various occupations (librarian, proofreader, radio scriptwriter, cleaning woman) that would become the ground for many later poems. She also moved back to Black Hawk Island, first with her parents, then, after a few years working in Madison for the WPA, in a cabin she built on her father’s property on the river. In 1931 Niedecker read the work of Louis Zukofsky and other poets who appeared in what has been called the ‘‘Objectivist’’ issue of Poetry (February 1931). Impressed by a poetry that condensed details to create a sense of completeness, a poetry that
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touched something in her own poetic sensibility, she began a correspondence and friendship with Zukofsky lasting until her death. Through Zukofsky, Niedecker was introduced to literary journals sympathetic to this new way of looking at poetry, and his critical suggestions helped her develop into a mature poet. The farthest she traveled from Black Hawk Island were the three trips she made to New York City to visit Zukofsky in the 1930s and 1940s. Niedecker published her work in small avant-garde journals and had a small selection of poems published in the groundbreaking first issue of the New Directions Anthology in 1936. Niedecker wrote seriously and steadily, though not quickly—and she kept her poetic occupation much to herself. In her poem ‘‘In the great snowfall before the bomb,’’ she writes, ‘‘What would they say if they knew / I sit for two months on six lines / of poetry.’’ Her first book, New Goose, wasn’t published until 1946. Niedecker, though wanting to be published, was also careful about where and to whom she sent her poems. Although Niedecker felt people were her poetic muse (‘‘folk from whom all poetry flows’’), she also told Cid Corman she had more trees for friends than people. She was a keen observer of people and their everyday lives, of her own everyday life, but she also kept the distance necessary to be an observer. In Niedecker’s second book, My Friend Tree (1961), the poet’s place in the natural world comes more into focus. As with her observations of people, Niedecker does not glorify or sentimentalize nature. Rather, she observes the bleak as well as the bright in the relationship between human beings and nature. In 1963, when Niedecker was sixty years old, she married again, much to everyone’s surprise. Albert Millen was a painter who, though very different temperamentally from Niedecker, offered her companionship and also the opportunity to widen her life. They moved to Milwaukee, working during the week and spending the weekends on Black Hawk Island until they retired back to the island six years later. They took a few driving tours around the north country—one in particular around Lake Superior became the gravitational center of her poems in North Central (1968). Those poems represent the beginning of a change in Niedecker’s finely honed poetics. In a 1967 letter to Gail Roub (published in Origin in 1981), Niedecker broaches the subject of her evolving poetics: ‘‘Much taken up with how to define a way of writing poetry, . . .I loosely called it ‘reflections’ or as I think it over, reflective maybe. . . .The visual form is there in the background and the words convey what the visual form gives off after it’s felt in the mind. A heat that is generated. . . .A light, a motion, inherent in the whole. . . . I used to feel that I was goofing off unless I held only to the hard, clear image, the thing you could put your hand on but now I dare do this reflection.’’ Niedecker began to link shorter poems together to form longer series that resonated with her experiences of the world. Hard on the heels of North Central, which was only published in London, came T&G: The Collected Poems 1936-1969 (1969). Niedecker had waited long for a collection of her poetry to come out in the U.S., and T&G revealed the breadth and depth of
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her poetry. When she remarried, Niedecker had already begun a correspondence with Corman that would continue over the last decade of her life. Along with the publication of T&G and Corman’s journal Origin, Niedecker was introduced to a younger generation of poets and readers, and reintroduced to readers who may not have seen her since the publication of New Goose many years before. But it wasn’t until the posthumous publication of The Granite Pail (1985, reprinted 1996) and then From this Condensary: The Complete Writing of Lorine Niedecker (1985) that Niedecker’s poetic vision and achievement became fully apparent. She died in 1970, just a few months after having met Corman in person and recording her first reading of her poetry for him. She was awarded the Notable Wisconsin Writers Award in 1978, an overdue recognition of her work. Interest in her work waxes and wanes with poetic tastes, but recently there have been more students studying her poetry and writing her place in the American poetic tradition. OTHER WORKS: Blue Chicory (1976). Origin 16: Fourth Series (1981). Harpsichord and Salt Fish (1991). Lorine Niedecker (1995). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Beard, C., ‘‘Lorine Niedecker: The Pulse of Her Poems’’ (thesis, 1996). Dent, P., ed., The Full Note: Lorine Niedecker (1983). Edminster, S., ‘‘The Daisy and the Aster: Two Essays on Lorine Niedecker’’ (thesis, 1991). Gibson, M., ‘‘Stuff That Once Was Rock: Critical Treatments of the Work of Lorine Niedecker’’ (thesis, 1993, 1995). Johnson, J., The Perfect Order: Lorine Niedecker’s Poetry (1994). Knox, J. S., Lorine Niedecker: An Original Biography (1987). Mills, B., On First Looking into Lorine Niedecker (1986). O’Brien, G., Bardic Deadlines: Reviewing Poetry, 1984-95 (1998). Penberthy, J. L., Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky, 1931-1970 (1993). Penberthy, J. L., Lorine Niedecker: Woman and Poet (1996). Prebel, J. E., ‘‘Lorine Niedecker’s Feminist Poetics’’ (thesis, 1994). Radford, M. A., ‘‘The Human Bond: The Mother/Daughter Archetype in the Poetics of Lorine Niedecker & Anne Sexton’’ (thesis, 1993). Sorrentino, G., Something Said: Essays (1984). Sturgeon, T. J., ‘‘A Critical Edition of the Collected Poems of Lorine Niedecker’’ (thesis, 1990). Walsh, P., Lorine Niedecker: Solitary Plover (1992). Whitehead, M. D., ‘‘Saving Graces: The Economies of Water, Rock, and Poetry in the Work of Lorine Faith Niedecker’’ (thesis, 1989). Williams, J., ed., Epitaphs for Lorine (1973). Williams, J., Noah Webster to Wee Lorine Niedecker (1986). Willis, E., The Human Abstract IV, A Few Stones for Lorine Niedecker (1995). Reference works: Benet’s (1991). CA (1977, 1978, 1999). CLC (1979, 1987). Critical Survey of Poetry (1992). DLB (1986). Other references: Arts in Society (Summer 1966). Belles Lettres (May-June 1987). Cambridge Quarterly (Spring 1969). Line (Fall 1985). New Directions in Prose and Poetry (1936, 1937, 1950, 1951). The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics (1999). Origin (July 1966, July 1981). Parnassus (Spring/ Summer 1977, Spring/Winter 1985, 1987). Quarterly Review of Literature (Spring 1956). Truck (Summer 1975). —GLYNIS BENBOW-NIEMIER AND AMY STACKHOUSE
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NIERIKER, Abigail May Alcott Born 26 July 1840, Concord, Massachusetts; died 29 December 1879, outside Paris, France Daughter of Amos B. and Abigail May Alcott; married Ernst Nieriker; children: one daughter Fiercely independent and determined to make her own mark in life, Abigail May Alcott Nieriker would be put out to discover she is remembered today not as an accomplished artist but as the blonde and graceful ‘‘Amy’’ of her sister Louisa’s Little Women. By the time Nieriker, ‘‘the lucky child,’’ was growing up, Alcott family fortunes were brightening. Louisa could afford to provide her with the best art training Boston had to offer and later to help subsidize her studies in London, Paris, and Rome. In the spring of 1877, Nieriker achieved her first major success as an artist when a small still-life was accepted by the same Paris salon that rejected two paintings by her friend Mary Cassatt. It was strong proof, crowed Nieriker, ‘‘that Lu does not monopolize all the Alcott talent.’’ She would exhibit again at the 1879 salon. At thirty-eight, Nieriker married a Swiss businessman and amateur musician 16 years her junior. Less than two years later, she died at her home near Paris shortly after giving birth to a daughter, Louisa, whom she bequeathed to the care of her sister. Back in Massachusetts, the Concord Art Center, established at Nieriker’s instigation, remained as a memorial to the young woman her neighbor Daniel Chester French recalled was ‘‘full of the joy of living.’’ Though not primarily a writer, Nieriker wrote occasional personal essays and one delightful book, Studying Art Abroad, and How To Do It Cheaply (1879). This high-spirited guide, intended for American women artists of limited means, is a charming mixture of pragmatism and romanticism. Pack cheap underclothes, later ‘‘invaluable as paint rags,’’ Nieriker recommends, and in Warwick, ‘‘board at the baker’s for an absurdly low price instead of following all the world to the Warwick Arms.’’ The ruined castle of Kenilworth, on the other hand, with its ‘‘crumbling walls and winding stairs,’’ inspires Nieriker to soaring flights of historical fancy. Studying Art Abroad is sprightly social history, imbued throughout with the author’s strong, essentially feminist sense of self. In some ways it corrects, in others confirms, the picture of the American girl abroad as given in Daisy Miller, published the same year. This work by Bronson Alcott’s youngest child adds a new dimension to our understanding of Concord’s transcendental community; and for those interested in Louisa Alcott, it is of special value. In its expansiveness and sense of adventure, as well as in the rich experience it draws on, Studying Art Abroad demonstrates Nieriker’s escape from the code of selflessness governing Louisa’s life, and documents the fantasies Louisa had to put aside.
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Finally, however, Nieriker’s deepest appeal is not so much to scholars as to the generations of women who have shared her childhood. As Amy March, Nieriker has become a part of American folklore. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ticknor, C., May Alcott: A Memoir (1928). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —EVELYN SHAKIR
NIGGLI, Josefina Born 13 July 1910, Monterrey, Mexico; died December 1983 Daughter of Frederick F. and Goldie Morgan Niggli Josefina Niggli’s father, of Swiss and Alsatian ancestry, left Texas in 1893 to manage a cement plant in the village of Hidalgo, Mexico; her mother was a concert violinist from Virginia. In 1913 and in 1925, when revolutions broke out in Mexico, the family fled to San Antonio, Texas, where Niggli had her only formal schooling. She graduated from Main Avenue High School in 1925 and from Incarnate Word College in 1931. Niggli studied playwrighting at the University of North Carolina, a center for the development of regional and folk drama. She wrote a three-act play, Singing Valley, for her thesis, and received her M.A. degree in drama in 1937. Niggli’s work with Prof. Frederick H. Koch’s Carolina Playmakers was a major influence on her writing. Koch himself edited an anthology of her work, Mexican Folk Plays, in 1938 (reprinted in 1976). Since then, Niggli lived in North Carolina, except for sojourns with Bristol University and the Bristol Old Vic in England and with the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. She taught English and radio scriptwriting at the University of North Carolina, and established a drama department at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee. Niggli’s one-act plays of Mexican folk life have long been favorites of discerning high school drama groups. These plays enliven a small cast and simple scenic requirements with abundant stage action, sound effects, and opportunities for characterization. Niggli’s special skill is her ability to blend closely observed local color and customs with universally understood emotions and humor. Although written in the 1930s, her plays have not become dated. In This Bull Ate Nutmeg (1937), Niggli drew upon her childhood memories of a one-man sideshow attraction and of mock bullfights. The play includes folk music, a romantic rivalry, and a climactic backyard bullfight, underscored by the cheers and laughter of village spectators. This is Villa! (1939) is a portrait of the murderous Pancho Villa. Niggli created an incident that reveals his sentimental and childlike side as well as his cruelty. Despite momentary lapses into swashbuckling melodrama, the play, like all Niggli’s dramatic and narrative fiction, has a convincing documentary quality. Niggli’s most frequently performed play is Sunday Costs Five Pesos: A One-Act Comedy of Mexican
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Village Life (1939, reissued 1964). In her book New Pointers on Playwriting (1945, 1967), Niggli commented: ‘‘My Sunday Costs Five Pesos has made me more money than a bestselling novel, primarily because it is presented again and again in contests.’’ Niggli’s first narrative fiction work, Mexican Village (1945, 1994), a collection of 10 stories of daily life in the village of Hidalgo, using recurrent characters, was uniformly praised by critics. Step Down, Elder Brother (1947) is set among the aristocracy in Monterrey. Niggli again studied the impact of social and historical change in Mexico in Farewell, Mama Carlotta (1950) and Miracle for Mexico (1964). If her writing is occasionally criticized as ‘‘excessively romantic,’’ that is also its strength, for it ensnares the reader with the devices of good storytelling and vividly conveys Niggli’s warm affection for the people of northern Mexico. OTHER WORKS: Mexican Silhouettes (1931). Tooth or Shave (1936). Miracle at Blaise (1944). Pointers on Radio Writing (1946). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Igo, J., ed., Confluence: A Texas Anthology (1985). Martinez, J. Chicano Scholars and Writers: A Bibliographical Dictionary (1979). Spearman, W., The Carolina Playmakers: The First Fifty Years (1970). Velasquez Trevino, G. L., Cultural Ambivalence in Early Chicana Prose Fiction (dissertation, 1985). Reference works: American Novelists of Today (1951). CB (1949). National Playwrights Directory (1977). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: MELUS (Summer 1978). NYT (21 Jan. 1939). —FELICIA HARDISON LONDRÉ
NILES, Blair Rice Born 15 June 1880, Coles Ferry, Virginia; died 13 April 1959, New York, New York Also wrote under: Mary Blair Beebe Daughter of Henry C. and Marie Pryor Rice; married C. William Beebe, 1902 (divorced); Robert L. Niles Jr., 1913 Exposure to the black tenants of her father’s plantation gave Blair Rice Niles a sensitivity to alien cultures, and her marriage to a naturalist opened the world of exploration and scientific observation for her. Her first publications were articles and a book, Our Search for a Wilderness (1910), drawn from their travels in the South Pacific and South America. Niles’ second husband, whom she married after her divorce from Beebe, accompanied her on subsequent explorations and provided the photographs that enhance many of her books. Niles’ next books, Casual Wanderings in Ecuador (1923), Colombia, Land of Miracles (1924), and Black Haiti (1926), are travel books that do more than merely chronicle explorations. Before making her trips, Niles always carefully researched the
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history of her destination. Therefore, each journey becomes for her not only the immediate physical reality, but also the visualization of events both momentous and ordinary in the lives of people of many generations, nationalities, and races. In her research, she always preferred to work from the diaries and journals of lesser figures, because she felt the major historical personages did not give as true a picture of the impact of historical events on the human mind and heart. Her detailing of history is always interesting, but her real power is in her description of the activities of living people. Niles’ most significant work grew out of her trip in 1927 to the penal colony in French Guiana. She was the first woman ever allowed to make a study of the prison, and her husband took the first photographs made there. Condemned to Devil’s Island (1928) is the fictional biography of a prisoner. She gives the reader not only a complete account of life in the penal colony, but also sympathetically treats the effects of such punishment on the spirit as well as the body. The success of this book prompted Niles to write the sequel Free (1930). Her position in both books is that the inhumanity of the prison system either destroys or warps the inmates, and fails to rehabilitate them to a society that has arbitrarily classified them as criminals. Niles’ observations of sexual mores in the prison prompted her to write Strange Brother (1931), a novel treating the homosexual subculture of New York with unusual sympathy and perception. This was followed by Light Again (1933), a fictionalized study of an insane asylum. In 1934 Niles returned to the history of Central and South America for the material of her novel Maria Paluna. This is the moving story of an Indian woman whose life spanned the century of the Spanish conquest of Guatemala. In her life with the Spanish, her love for one of the conquistadores, and her growth as a defender and promulgator of the Indian culture, Paluna convincingly portrays what happened in Guatemala during the 16th century. Niles wrote other novels that are fictional accounts of historical events; while good, they do not have the power of Maria Paluna. In 1939 Niles published The James as one of the ‘‘Growing Rivers of America’’ series. She gives personal and historical accounts of life along the banks of the Virginia river. Niles’ research into the life of George Washington for this work resulted in her biography, Martha’s Husband (1951), which treated Washington from a personal rather than a political or military perspective. Niles’ interest was always in human personality. For their time, her works are exceptionally daring and enlightened. Her genuine sympathy for the people and cultures she studied provides unusual perceptions about the truths of life in those times and places. Niles journeys in space and time, and makes both come alive for the reader. OTHER WORKS: Day of Immense Sun (1936). A Journey in Time: Peruvian Pageant (1937). East by Day (1941). Passengers to Mexico: The Last Invasion of the Americas (1943). Journeys in Time: From the Halls of Montezuma to Patagonia’s
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Plains: A Treasury, Garnered from Four Centuries of Writers (1519-1942) (1946). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: American Novelists of Today (1951). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: NYHTB (29 Dec. 1946). NYTBR (6 May 1934, 14 June 1936, 4 Apr. 1943). —HARRIETTE CUTTINO BUCHANAN
NIN, Anaïs Born 21 February 1903, Paris, France; died 14 January 1977, Los Angeles, California Daughter of Joaquin and Rosa Culmell Nin; married Hugh P. Guiler, 1923 Anaïs Nin was the eldest of three children of a Spanish composer and concert pianist and a French Danish mother. Nin began keeping a diary after her father’s desertion. Her departure with her mother and brothers for New York, her return to Paris, and her home in Louveciennes in the outskirts of Paris were all delineated. Purposely omitted was her marriage to Guiler, a bank and financial consultant who was also known as the engraver and filmmaker Ian Hugo. D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study (1932, 1964, 1994) marked Nin’s entrée into ‘‘creative criticism.’’ Nin was an enemy of naturalism, realism, positivism, and rationalism, which she felt distorted reality; what was of import for her was the catalytic effect of Lawrence’s work on the reader’s senses and imagination. To know Lawrence, she maintained, was to take a fantastic voyage: to ‘‘flow’’ forward with his characters and situations, to follow their feelings as manifested in impulses and gestures. Nin’s feelings of timidity and inadequacy became so disruptive that in 1932 she consulted the psychiatrist René Allendy, who encouraged her to begin The House of Incest (1936, 1958, 1994). ‘‘It is the seed of all my work,’’ Nin wrote, ‘‘the poem from which the novels were born.’’ Affinities with Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, and the surrealists were evident in her reliance upon dream sequences and in her use of stream-of-consciousness style. Dr. Otto Rank’s attitude to the problem of creativity was more to Nin’s liking, and she became his patient in 1933. When he moved his offices to New York in 1934, he invited Nin to practice as a lay analyst. Although successful, Nin understood her mission in life was artistic and not therapeutic. She returned to France, where she lived until the outbreak of World War II. Her friends included Miller, Artaud, Brancusi, Supervielle, Orloff, Durrell, Breton, Dali, Barnes, Young, Varèse, Varda, and many more. In New York, artistic and financial setbacks had encouraged Nin to print her own works: Winter of Artifice: Three Novelettes (1939, 1991) and Under a Glass Bell (1947, 1995). To probe her
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heroine’s dream world in Winter of Artifice, Nin chose the antinovel technique, with its pastiches, repetitions, omissions, and ellipses, instead of the structured characters and plot of the psychological novel. After 20 years of separation, Djuna is reunited with her father, whom she idolized. Valescure, in the south of France, is the idyllic setting for their meeting. Moments of ecstasy, when Djuna perceives herself as her father’s ‘‘mystical bride,’’ give way to periods of depression, when she realizes her Prince Charming is an illusion, that in reality he is superficial, luxury-loving, and lives for externals only. Under a Glass Bell, a collection of 13 short stories, is considered among the best of Nin’s fictional works. Cities of the Interior (1959), a ‘‘continuous novel,’’ includes six short works: Ladders to Fire (1946, 1991), Children of the Albatross (1947), The Four-Chambered Heart (1950), A Spy in the House of Love (1954, 1982, 1995), Solar Barque (1958), and Seduction of the Minotaur (1961, 1993). Labeled ‘‘space fiction,’’ Cities of the Interior is centered in the unconscious, upon clusters of visual configurations. In this inner space, characters confront, respond, act, and react to each other like multiple satellites. Nin’s deepening psychological acumen and intuitive faculties, her heightened powers of observation are brought into play in the recording of minute vibrations in nuanced and contrapuntal relationships. Ladders to Fire focuses on Lilian, a jazz pianist, a ‘‘woman at war with herself.’’ Her hypertense, excitable nature is associated with the instrument she plays. Children of the Albatross deals with the private world of children, its arcane rituals and innocent cruelties. The Four-Chambered Heart focuses on Djuna and a handsome Peruvian guitar player named Rango, who live out their passionate encounter on a houseboat on the Seine. A Spy in the House of Love is set in New York, not Paris. For the first time, the protagonists deal with questions of freedom and guilt, as they develop a new set of values. Solar Barque and Seduction of the Minotaur take place where the sun ‘‘painted everything with gold.’’ In a hedonistic realm, Lilian learns that escape is no longer possible, that she must seek out the minotaur within her own labyrinth (psyche) and face these sides of her personality with strength and vigor. Collages (1964), a combination of portraits, short stories, and a novella, abounds in alchemical symbolism that adds dimension, beauty, and a mystical quality to the narratives. The Diary of Anaïs Nin (7 vols., 1966-78) is a ‘‘woman’s journey of self-discovery,’’ which Henry Miller placed ‘‘beside the revelations of St. Augustine, Petronius, Abélard, Rousseau, Proust.’’ The Diary is a historical document in that it reports and deals with events chronologically. It is of psychological import because it analyzes inner scapes (dreams, reveries, motivations) and a variety of approaches to the unconscious; it is of aesthetic significance because it introduces readers to the world of the novelist, poet, musician, painter, and the artistic trends of the day: cubism, realism, surrealism, op, pop, and minimal art. The Diary is a quest: that of the artist attempting to understand the creative factor within herself; of the woman experiencing her multidimensional selves as she works toward inner growth and fulfillment.
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The sixth volume (1955-1966) focuses on Nin’s decision to publish her Diary, to reveal her innermost thoughts and to remain strong enough to stand the ridicule and the hurt of an unfeeling public. Nin, who leans heavily on her unconscious to lead the way in the workaday world, made her decision following a dream. It begins: ‘‘I opened my front door and was struck by mortal radiation.’’ It was with her Diary that Nin won an international reputation. She was called upon to lecture throughout North America at universities, poetry centers, and clubs. Nin synthesized and elaborated her earlier statements of her artistic credo—Realism and Reality (1946)—in The Novel of the Future (1968), in which she endorses the dictum of C. G. Jung: ‘‘Proceed from the Dream Outward.’’ Nin’s writings express an inner need; truth shaped and fashioned into an art form. Thought, feeling, and dream are captured in metaphors, images, and alliterations, which are interwoven in complex designs. The techniques of free association and reverie enable her to penetrate the inner being, evoke a mood, and arouse sensations in an impressionistic and pointilliste manner. Nin’s work offers readers perpetual transmutations of matter and spirit. Hers is a very personal, authentic, and innovative talent, unique in her time.
OTHER WORKS: On Writing (1947). A Woman Speaks: The Lectures, Seminars, and Interviews of Anaïs Nin (1975, 1992). In Favor of the Sensitive Man, and Other Essays (1976, 1994). Delta of Venus: Erotica (1977, 1996). Waste of Timelessness, and other Early Stories (1977, 1993). Linotte: The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin (1978, 1994). Journal of a Wife (1983). Letters to a Friend in Australia (1992). Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, 1932-1953 (1992). The Mystic of Sex and Other Writings (1995). Stories of Love (1996). White Stains (1998).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bair, D., Anaïs Nin: A Biography (1995). Barille, E., Anaïs Nin: Naked under the Mask (1992). Chadwick, W. and I. De Courtivron, eds., Significant Others: Creativity & Intimate Partnership (1996). Cutting, R. M., Anaïs Nin: A Reference Guide (1978). Evans, O., Anaïs Nin (1968). Fitch, N. R., Anaïs: The Erotic Life of Anaïs Nin (1993). Franklin, B., ed., Recollections of Anaïs Nin (1996). Franklin, V. B., and D. Schneider, Anaïs Nin: An Introduction (1979). Harms, V., ed., Celebration with Anaïs Nin (1973). Hinz, J. E., The Mirror and the Garden (1971). Hinz, J. E., A Woman Speaks: The Lectures, Seminars, and Interviews of Anaïs Nin (1975). Hinz, J. E., The World of Anaïs Nin (1978). Holt, R. L., Anaïs Nin: An Understanding of Her Art (1997). Jason, P. K., ed., The Critical Response to Anaïs Nin (1996). Knapp, B. L., Anaïs Nin (1979). Nalbantian, S., ed., Anaïs Nin: Literary Perspectives (1997). Porter, B., ‘‘I Pursue Her Still’’: Bern Porter on Anaïs Nin (1997). Porter, B., My Affair with Anaïs Nin: A Candid Interview (1996). Richard-Allerdyce, D., Anaïs Nin and the Remaking of Self: Gender, Modernism, and Narrative
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Identity (1998). Scholar, N., Anaïs Nin (1984). Spencer, S., Collage of Dreams (1977). Zaller, R., ed., A Casebook on Anaïs Nin (1974). Reference works: American Novelists Since World War II: Fourth Series (1995). FC (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Short Story Criticism (1992). —BETTINA L. KNAPP
NITSCH, Helen (Alice) Matthews Born circa 1850s; died 28 October 1889, Plainfield, New Jersey Wrote under: Catherine Owen Helen Matthews Nitsch was a late-19th-century authority on homemaking. From internal evidence in Nitsch’s works, we can deduce that she was a well-educated woman of the upper-middle class, who had probably attended one of the popular cooking schools of the time. Nitsch published articles in Good Housekeeping, Harper’s Bazaar, and other magazines and wrote specialized cookbooks, but she was best known for her general cookbook Culture and Cooking; or, Art in the Kitchen (1881), which was reissued in 1885 in an expanded version as Catherine Owen’s New Cook Book. Nitsch makes the point that cooking is an art, and as such is not to be despised by refined women. These books make interesting reading, providing as much entertainment as sociological enlightenment. We can get an interesting glimpse of the eating habits of the genteel American family from Nitsch’s fiction; whether or not it is her subject, food and cooking always take first place in Nitsch’s books. Ten Dollars Enough: Keeping House Well on Ten Dollars a Week; How It Has Been Done; How It May Be Done Again (1887) was serialized in Good Housekeeping and went through many editions. Its name alludes to another American bestseller of the period, the fictional account of a successful back-to-the-land experience by Edmund Morris, Ten Acres Enough (1863). Nitsch’s purpose is to show that a sensible woman can manage a home of her own on a moderate income. Newlyweds Harry and Molly Bishop live in a boardinghouse, the common refuge of many American young couples who were not well-to-do. Molly convinces her husband to rent a small house for the winter and, putting to good use what she has learned in cooking school, proves she can keep house on ten dollars a week. At the end of the story, Molly is pregnant and gets her own home. Harry, a spoiled son of snobbish parents who disdain Molly because of her plebeian origins, hardly appears in the story except to represent the man who must not be disturbed by housekeeping problems. The financial independence of women is the subject of the sequel, Molly Bishop’s Family (1888). The family business fails, Harry dies, and Molly must become the sole support of her three children. Molly shows herself to be a clever businesswoman, able to provide well for her family. The same theme—financial independence for women—is found in Gentle Breadwinners (1888). Dorothy and May Fortesque
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are left penniless on the death of their father, after having been brought up to a life of useless accomplishment. ‘‘Oh, what a humiliation it is to think. . .that we two girls, brought up with all the advantages, are not fit to earn a dollar! Oh, if I ever have daughters they shall learn to do one thing well,’’ exclaims Dorothy, the older and more sensible sister. After an unprofitable dressmaking venture, Dorothy builds a successful business baking cakes and sending them to the women’s exchange in New York. (In all her books, Nitsch emphasizes the importance of cooking and plays down sewing, the normal mainstay of many ‘‘distressed gentlewomen.’’) In the course of the story, we meet a brilliant, needy widow who fails where Dorothy succeeds because she is not careful. The difference between them is put this way: ‘‘Dorothy thought women’s work should be just as much a matter of business as a man’s, and look for no more favor.’’ Finally, the heroine is rewarded by marriage to an artist. Nitsch’s cookbooks are probably of interest only to historians of the domestic arts, but her three novels, intended to help young women in their everyday lives, as homemakers or wage earners, are interesting social statements. It is hard today to identify with a society in which a woman can bake a fancy cake, crate it, put it on the train, see it safely delivered the same day to the market, and make a profit on the business, but the basic impulse behind Nitsch’s work is timeless: Women are only well provided for if they can provide for themselves. OTHER WORKS: A Key to Cooking (1886). Perfect Bread (1886). Six Cups of Coffee (1886). Lessons in Candy Making (1887). Choice Cookery (1889). Progressive Housekeeping (1889). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Plainfield Constitution (7 Nov. 1889). —BEVERLY SEATON
NIXON, Agnes E(ckhardt) Born 10 December 1927, Chicago, Illinois Daughter of Harry J. and Agnes Dalton Eckhardt; married Robert Nixon, 1951; children: four Agnes E. Nixon was raised in a devout Catholic household. As a child, she was an avid reader of comic strips, and she created stories about the characters whose pictures she cut from the funny papers. Nixon attended St. Mary’s College in South Bend, Indiana, and Northwestern University, where she earned a B.A. in drama. She has four children. Nixon entered radio to avoid a career in her father’s funeral-garment business. She began writing dialogue for Women in White (1938-1942), Irna Phillips’ popular daytime serial. Also under Phillips, Nixon began writing for the television serial Guiding Light (1952-). As a freelance teleplay writer, Nixon has
written scripts for Studio One, Robert Montgomery Presents, Somerset Maugham Theater, Philco Theater, and Hallmark Hall of Fame. She later rescued the soap oprea Another World (1964-99) from flagging audience ratings by updating its characters and themes, until its demise in the late 1990s. As a result of her success with Another World, ABC asked Nixon to create her own daytime serial. One Life to Live (1968-) was the first truly interracial television serial, using black characters in more than token roles. Miscegenation was a central theme until the supposedly white Carla Benari proved to be of the same race as black physician Price Trainor. In 1970 Nixon introduced the ‘‘fact-in-fiction’’ format as a way of dealing convincingly with drug abuse. A fictional character, Cathy Craig, aged 17, was introduced to a drug therapy session involving actual residents of New York’s Odyssey House. The residents were taped on location while they tried to persuade Cathy to give up drugs. This realistic, responsible approach to social issues became Nixon’s hallmark. Current social problems, particularly those confronting the generations, also have been central to Nixon’s most successful creation, All My Children (1970-). The program stresses the need for a sense of family and home in the face of such contemporary trials as abortion, male sterility, child abuse, uterine cancer, and STDs. Other contemporary themes include ecology, mental health, the danger of carbon monoxide poisoning in the home, readjustment problems, and drug abuse. All My Children’s stock soap opera characters are interesting because they are modern, likeable, and often funny. Female characters provide most of the dramatic interest. One villain especially, the irrepressible Erica Kane, is often humorously overdrawn yet beloved by fans. Nixon consciously exploits the opportunity provided by the serial format to create sympathetic heavies by allowing viewers to see them in their complexity. In addition to realism and humor, All My Children is distinguished by a fast-moving plot, an optimistic outlook, and a contemporary appearance. With characteristic originality, excellence, and willingness to experiment, Nixon has been writing one or more daily serials (even ABC’s venerable General Hospital) without interruption for some 40 years. As ‘‘Queen of the Soapers’’ Irna Phillips’ successor, Nixon has been called the ‘‘Crown Princess of the Soaps’’ and ‘‘First Lady of Soap Opera.’’ BIBLIOGRAPHY: Edmondson, M., and D. Rounds, From Mary Noble to Mary Hartman: The Complete Soap Opera Book (1976). Soares, M., The Soap Opera Book (1978). Stedman, R., The Serials: Suspense and Drama by Installment (1977). Wakefield, D., All Her Children (1976). Other references: Journal of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (Winter 1972). Los Angeles Times (7 May 1978). McCall’s (May 1970). NYT (7 July 1968, 11 Dec. 1969, 20 Oct. 1975). Television Quarterly (Fall 1970). TV Guide (3 May 1975). —CAREN J. DEMING
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NORMAN, Marsha
reading fairytales and by the influence of Sam’s father, an evangelical preacher.
Born 21 September 1947, Louisville, Kentucky Daughter of Billie L. and Bertha Conley Williams; married Michael Norman, 1969 (divorced); Dann C. Byck, Jr., 1978 (divorced)
Frequently in Norman’s plays women and men have conflicting expectations and understandings; their conversations are characterized by misunderstanding, manipulation, or hostility. In Traveler Sam and his wife, Glory, never connect. Even in ’Night, Mother, where there are no male characters onstage, the men in Thelma and Jessie’s lives are remembered and discussed with a mixture of hurt, confusion, and contempt.
Marsha Norman is one of the first women to receive national acknowledgment as a playwright since Lillian Hellman and Lorraine Hansberry. With Beth Henley and Wendy Wasserstein, she has won the Pulitzer Prize and has ‘‘made successful inroads on a still very much male-dominated reserve.’’ The first of four children of an insurance salesman and a homemaker, Norman was raised in a fundamentalist home in Louisville. She received a B.A. in philosophy at Agnes Scott College (1969) and an M.A.T. at the University of Louisville (1971). Norman taught school in Kentucky and also worked with disturbed children in a state hospital. Her award-winning first play, Getting Out (1977), received national attention. It portrays the first days of freedom of a young woman, Arlene, in jail for murder; Norman has said the character of Arlie (Arlene’s younger, unrehabilitated self) is based on a young woman she encountered while working in the hospital. The play explores Arlene/Arlie’s relationship with her mother, a precursor relationship for those in Norman’s later works. Several subsequent plays failed to receive critical acclaim, although they ring changes on many themes important to Norman’s work. Third and Oak (1978), consisting of one-acts, The Laundromat and The Pool Hall, involve characters coming to terms with various types of bereavement and loss, and with their debts to the people in their past and present. Richard Wattenburg describes The Holdup (produced 1980, published 1987) as a ‘‘feminist perspective on the frontier experience.’’ Although some critics describe The Holdup as a comedy, most of Norman’s work is tragic or serious, punctuated by comic moments. Several critics have called ’Night, Mother (1982, published 1983), which won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a film, an excellent example of Aristotelian tragedy. Norman told Irmgard Wolfe that she looks to classic Greek tragedies as playwriting models. ’Night, Mother, which portrays daughter Jessie’s preparations and conversations with her mother, Thelma, on the night Jessie plans to commit suicide, is Norman’s most complete exploration of mother-daughter relations. Norman is one of the first female dramatists to make relationships in women’s lives and the social and economic constraints on middle- and lower-class women into appropriate matter for powerful plays. Characters in several of Norman’s plays wrestle with issues of religious faith and redemption. In Getting Out Arlene remembers the prison chaplain who told her that Arlie was the evil inside her, which could be banished for Arlene’s salvation. In Traveler in the Dark (produced 1984, published 1988) Sam, a surgeon, struggles to come to terms with the death of a family friend his surgical talent could not save and with his fears that his son is being wooed away from the logical thinking Sam so values, by
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Although Norman is primarily known as a playwright, she has published a novel, The Fortune Teller (1987), and wrote the book and lyrics for a musical adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1991). The Fortune Teller further explores mother-daughter relationships and the inescapability of human fate. Fay, the title character, has roots and a past similar to that of Thelma in ’Night, Mother. She undergoes a symbolically similar process of separation and loss, described by Fay as inescapable events on the turning wheel of fortune, while she reconciles herself to her daughter’s adulthood and maturing sexuality. The novel deals more overtly with contemporary political themes, particularly abortion, than any of Norman’s previous work; it also shows a more developed and intimate relationship between a female and a male character (Fay and her lover Arnie) than in any other of Norman’s works. OTHER WORKS: Circus Valentine (1978). Merry Christmas (unpublished). ‘‘Ten Golden Rules for Playwrights,’’ Writer (Sept. 1985). Sarah and Abraham (1991). Trudy Blue (1995). Collected Poems (1998). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Betsko, K., and R. Koenig, Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights (1987). Brater, E., ed., Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights (1989). Brown, L. G., ed., Marsha Norman: A Casebook (1996). Chen, L., ‘‘Violence in the Spotlight: Exploring the Violent and Violated Female Characters in Selected Plays of Marsha Norman and Maria Irene Fornés’’ (thesis, 1993). Crane, G. M., ‘‘Feminist Theatre and Feminist Theology’’ (thesis, 1995). Dolan, J., The Feminist Spectator as Critic (1988). Foster, K., ‘‘Detangling the Web: Mother-Daughter Relationships in the Plays of Marsha Norman, Lillian Hellman, Tina Howe, and Ntozake Shange’’ (thesis, 1994). Friess, D. K., ‘‘The Shattering of Literary Families: A Lacanian Psychoanalysis of the Absent Male—Tennessee Williams, Marsha Norman, and Selected Poetry of Sylvia Plath’’ (thesis, 1998). Harriott, E., American Voices: Five Contemporary Playwrights in Essays and Interviews (1988). Geraghty, D. M., ‘‘Gods and Strangers: Family Isolation in the Works of Marsha Norman’’ (thesis, 1999). Kilgore, E. S., ed., Landmarks of Contemporary Women’s Drama (1992). Kintz, L., The Subject’s Tragedy: Political Poetics, Feminist Theory, and Drama (1992). Magill, F. N., ed., Great Women Writers: The Lives and Works of 135 of the World’s Most Important Women Writers, From Antiquity to the Present (1994). Raymond, M. G., ‘‘Chronicling Our Selves: Hermeneutical Consciousness in Four Plays by Marsha Norman, Caryl Churchill, and Wendy Wasserstein’’ (thesis, 1998). Redmond, J. ed., Drama,
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Sex, and Politics (1985). Redmond, J., Violence in Drama (1991). Schlueter, J., ed., Modern American Drama: The Female Canon (1990). Shannon, D. D., ‘‘Mothers and Daughters: The Quest for Psychological Wholeness in the Plays of Lillian Hellman and Marsha Norman’’ (thesis, 1994). Shillington, J., ‘‘The Image of the ‘Outsider’ in Works by Marsha Norman’’ (thesis, 1992). Workman, J. A., ‘‘Marsha Norman’s Ghosts: The Embodiment of the Past on Stage’’ (thesis, 1993). Reference works: American Playwrights Since 1945 (1980). American Women Dramatists of the Twentieth Century (1982). Contemporary Southern Writers: Series I (video, 1997). CA (1982). CD (1988). CLC (1984). CB (1984). DLBY (1984). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Writers Directory (1992-94). Other references: Conf. of College Teachers of English Studies (Sept. 1989). Marsha Norman (video, 1995). Modern Drama (Sept. 1987, March 1989, Dec. 1990). Southern Quarterly (Spring 1987). Studies in American Drama (1988). Text and Performance Quarterly (July 1989). Theatre Journal (Oct. 1983). Western American Literature (Feb. 1989). —KATHRYN MURPHY ANDERSON, UPDATED BY NELSON RHODES
NORRIS, Kathleen Thompson Born16 July 1880, San Francisco, California; died 18 January 1966, San Francisco, California Wrote under: Jane Ireland, Kathleen Norris Daughter of James A. and Josephine E. Moroney Thompson; married Charles G. Norris, 1909 The second of six children, Kathleen Thompson Norris grew up in rural Mill Valley, where her father, a San Francisco bank manager, commuted daily by ferry. In 1899 both parents died within a month, leaving the children to fend for themselves. Norris worked as clerk, bookkeeper, librarian, and newspaper reporter to help support the family. While covering a skating party, she met her future husband, a writer. She followed him to New York City when he became arts editor for American magazine. Norris published fiction in the New York Telegram, winning $50 for the best story of the week. Her husband encouraged her to send out others, and Atlantic accepted ‘‘The Tide-Marsh’’ and ‘‘What Happened to Alanna’’ in 1910. Norris began Mother (1911) for another story contest, but it grew too long; it was enlarged to become a popular novel. For the next half century, despite crippling arthritis, Norris wrote 90 books, numerous stories and magazine serials, a newspaper column, and a radio soap opera. A pacifist, she campaigned vigorously against capital punishment and foreign involvement. Much of Norris’ writing is rooted in her own life and California background. Typical is Little Ships (1921), centering on a large nouveau riche Irish Catholic family and its less fortunate relatives, including a fine old peasant grandmother. Although the book is marred by sentimentality and prejudice,
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Norris creates deft characterization and effective dramatic tension in her family scenes. Certain People of Importance (1922) is considered Norris’ most ambitious work. In this impressive family chronicle spanning more than a century, descendants of Forty-niner Reuben Crabtree invent a ‘‘first family’’ history not in the least based on fact. Scandals and intrigues worthy of any soap opera are plentiful, yet no one lifts an eyebrow. Although Norris denies a ‘‘knowledge of those dark forces which fascinate modern writers,’’ the novel’s true subject seems to be human greed, hypocrisy, and deceit. One of the book’s strengths is its precise attention to forgotten detail—fashions, furnishings, eating habits, and amusements. Norris writes sympathetically of independent young women who chafe under the restrictions of parents or brother. She also offers a grim reminder of the risks of pregnancy, childbirth, and poverty. This, Norris’ most realistic book, was not well received. Through a Glass Darkly (1957) is noteworthy only because its first half depicts a utopia where war does not exist, the government feeds anyone who needs it, and people take care of each other. Those who die on earth ‘‘arrive’’ in Foxcrossing to live happily. But the protagonist, who longs to ‘‘go back’’ to our world to help suffering children, loses her life trying to rescue hurricane victims and is reincarnated in the book’s second half. The story moves disappointingly into Norris’ familiar formula of a working girl’s struggle to survive. The utopian world is forgotten. Norris also published two sometimes conflicting autobiographies, Noon (1925) and Family Gathering (1959). Many of her books remain in print, but most of these are frothy romances with pink-and-gold heroines and contrived endings. These characters seem suspended in an eternal 1910, regardless of the real year. Her best writing shows more depth: family warmth, sincerity, and pettiness; condemnation of the self-centered rich; and vivid accounts of early California. She portrays men and women of another generation, almost another world, meeting life however they can—with love, with humor, with desperation. OTHER WORKS: The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne (1912). Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby (1913). Saturday’s Child (1914). The Treasure (1914). The Story of Julia Page (1915). The Heart of Rachael (1916). Martie, the Unconquered (1917). Undertow (1917). Josselyn’s Wife (1918). Sisters (1919). Harriet and the Piper (1920). The Beloved Woman (1921). Lucretia Lombard (1922). Butterfly (1923). Uneducating Mary (1923). The Callahans and the Murphys (1924). Rose of the World (1924). The Black Flemings (also published as Gabrielle, 1926). Hildegarde (1926). The Kelly Kid (1926). Barberry Bush (1927). The Fun of Being a Mother (1927). My Best Girl (1927). The Sea Gull (1927). Beauty and the Beast (1928). The Foolish Virgin (1928). Home (1928). What Price Peace? (1928). Mother and Son (1929). Red Silence (1929). Storm House (1929). Beauty in Letters (1930). The Lucky Lawrences (1930). Margaret Yorke (1930). Passion Flower (1930). Belle-Mère (1931). Hands Full of Living: Talks with American Women (1931). The Love of Julie Borel (1931). My San Francisco (1932). Second-Hand Wife (1932). Treehaven (1932). Younger
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Sister (1932). The Angel in the House (1933). My California (1933). Walls of Gold (1933). Wife for Sale (1933). Maiden Voyage (1934). Manhattan Love Song (1934). Three Men and Diana (1934). Victoria: A Play (1934). Beauty’s Daughter (1935). Shining Windows (1935). Woman in Love (1935). The American Flaggs (1936). Secret Marriage (1936). Bread into Roses (1937). You Can’t Have Everything (1937). Baker’s Dozen (1938). Heartbroken Melody (1938). Lost Sunrise (1939). Mystery House (1939). The Runaway (1939). The Secret of the Marshbanks (1940). The World Is Like That (1940). These I Like Best (1941). The Venables (1941). An Apple for Eve (1942). Come Back to Me, Beloved (1942). Dina Cashman (1942). One Nation Indivisible (1942). Star-Spangled Christmas (1942). Corner of Heaven (1943). Love Calls the Tune (1944). Burned Fingers (1945). Motionless Shadows (1945). Mink Coat (1946) Over at the Crowleys’ (1946). The Secrets of Hillyard House (1947). High Holiday (1949). Morning Light (1950). Shadow Marriage (1952). The Best of Kathleen Norris (1955). Miss Harriet Townshend (1955). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Kilmer, J., Literature in the Making: By Some of Its Makers (1917). Woollcott, A., While Rome Burns (1934). Reference works: Catholic Authors: Contemporary Biographical Sketches 1930-1947 (1948). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCA, TCAS. Other references: Bookman (Sept. 1922). NR (11 Oct. 1922). NYT (19 Jan. 1966). NYTBR (6 Feb. 1955). —JOANNE MCCARTHY
NORTON, Andre Born Alice Norton, 17 February 1912, Cleveland, Ohio Also writes under: Andrew North Daughter of Adalbert F. and Daisy Stemm Norton Although famous as a fantasy and science fiction author for juvenile readers, Andre Norton has written in various genres. Her choice of profession was influenced by her high school teacher of creative writing, under whose encouragement Norton wrote her first book, Ralestone Luck (1938). She originally planned to become a history teacher, but during the Depression took a job at the Cleveland Public Library, and for some years worked at various libraries, including the Library of Congress, until ill health forced her to become a full-time writer. Her love for history reveals itself in many of her novels, particularly the early titles. Typical of these are Huon of the Horn (1951), set in the time of Charlemagne; Scarface (1948), about the exploits of a pirate; Follow the Drum (1942), about colonial Maryland; and Yankee Privateer (1955), a historical adventure about privateering. In 1934 Norton legally changed her name from Alice to Andre, intuiting that a masculine pseudonym would sell more books. She published her first science fiction novel in 1952, Star Man’s Son, 2250 A.D. (reissued as Daybreak, 2250 A.D., 1954), which was warmly received. Many of Norton’s science fiction novels feature an adolescent male and are strictly adventure
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stories. Night of Masks (1964) is typical; it is an adventure story that takes place on the planet Dis, which is lit by a red sun. Only with special goggles can one see in its infrared light. Here Nik Kolherne, an orphan outcast with a severely disfigured face, is sent on an adventure with Vannie, a younger boy wanted by several warring interests. Kolherne agrees to kidnap the boy and takes him to Dis in exchange for plastic surgery on his face and a chance at a normal life. While on Dis, however, he rescues the boy, and in the end Kolherne has a new face as well as an understanding of the responsibilities accompanying manhood. To even the most familiar and routine fast-moving adventures, Norton brings added dimensions by varying the ethnicities of her characters in a genre in which white male heroes are the norm. American Indian heroes are featured in several of Norton’s novels: The Beast Master (1959), The Sioux Spaceman (1960), and The Defiant Agents (1962). These heroes are often exiled from Earth and thrust out to survive on an alien planet. Ordeal in Otherwhere (1964) is the first science fiction story to feature a female heroine, and Storm over Warlock (1960) features the first black protagonist in this genre. Other novels such as Star Man’s Son have mutant heroes in ethnically varied worlds. In later years, Norton increasingly featured female protagonists. Her Witch World series, with its strong, talented women and mysterious matriarchal society, has been extremely successful. Her protagonists as a rule are impetuous, adaptable loners who feel a kindred to animals. Many are shapeshifters or share their adventures with bestial allies, notably with cats or catlike beings. Her tormented adolescent, sometimes orphaned heroes struggle to survive and find a place to belong. Supporting Norton’s themes of conflict and communication between the individual and society, magical powers and talismans are often central to her fiction. She often gifts her characters with the abilities for telepathy and teleportation and with props such as magical gems and amulets. Her particular interest in stones as the source of, or aid to, magical talents has been widely remarked. Her heroes feel a strong attachment to nature and her plots dramatize her distrust of technology run amok. Even her futuristic tales are flavored with Earth’s past: Norton often draws on folklore, myth, and feudal societies in her world-building. Norton draws clear, striking portraits of alien ways and settings. This attention to detail, to the establishing of the human in the nonhuman, makes Norton’s writing popular. She is one of the most prolific and bestselling of all fantasy and science fiction writers. She has also been a respected editor, both at Gnome Press from 1950 to 1958 and as an anthologist. She has written many series, and allows other writers to write in her invented universes. Norton earned the Grand Master or ‘‘Gandalf’’ award for lifetime achievement from the World Science Fiction Association in 1977. She lives in Florida, where she continues to write and collaborate. OTHER WORKS: The Prince Commands (1934). The Sword is Drawn (1944). Rogue Reynard (1947). Sword in Sheath (1949, reissued as Island of the Lost, 1952). Star Rangers (1953, reissued
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as The Last Planet 1955). At Swords’ Points (1954). Murders for Sale (as Allen Weston, pseudonym for Grace Hogarth 1954, reissued as Sneeze on Sunday 1992). The Stars are Ours! (1954). Sargasso of Space (as A. North, 1955). Star Guard (1955). The Crossroads of Time (1956). Plague Ship (as North, 1956). Stand to Horse (1956). Sea Siege (1957). Star Born (1957). Star Gate (1958). The Time Traders (1958). Galactic Derelict (1959). Secret of the Lost Race (1959), reissued as Wolfshead (1977). Voodoo Planet (as North, 1959). Shadow Hawk (1960). Catseye (1961). Ride Proud, Rebel! (1961). Star Hunter (1961). Eye of the Monster (1962). Lord of Thunder (1962). Rebel Spurs (1962). Judgment on Janus (1963). Key out of Time (1963). Witch World (1963). Web of the WitchWorld (1964). Quest Crosstime (1965, reissued as Crosstime Agent 1974). Steel Magic (1965, reissued as Gray Magic 1967). Three Against the Witch World (1965). The X Factor (1965). Year of the Unicorn (1965). Moon of Three Rings (1966). Victory on Janus (1966). Octagon Magic (1967). Operation Time Search (1967). Warlock of the Witch World (1967). Dark Piper (1968). Fur Magic (1968). Sorceress of the Witch World (1968). The Zero Stone (1968). Bertie and May (with B. S. Norton, 1969). Postmarked the Stars (1969). Uncharted Stars (1969). Dread Companion (1970). Ice Crown (1970). High Sorcery (1971). Android at Arms (1971). Exiles of the Stars (1971). Breed to Come (1972). The Crystal Gryphon (1972). Dragon Magic (1972). Garan the Eternal (1972). Spell of the Witch World (1972). Forerunner Foray (1973). Here Abide Monsters (1973). Iron Cage (1974). The Jargoon Pard (1974). Lavender-Green Magic (1974). The Many Worlds of Andre Norton (1974). Outside (1974). The Book of Andre Norton (1975). The Day of the Ness (with M. Gilbert, 1975). Knave of Dreams (1975). Merlin’s Mirror (1975). No Night Without Stars (1975). Star Ka’at (with D. Madlee, 1976). The White Jade Fox (1975). Perilous Dreams (1976). Red Hart Magic (1976). Wraiths of Time (1976). The Opal-Eyed Fan (1977). Trey of Swords (1977). Velvet Shadows (1977). Quag Keep (1978). Star Ka’at World (with D. Madlee, 1978). Yurth Burden (1978). Zarsthor’s Bane (1978). Seven Spells to Sunday (with P. Miller, 1979). Snow Shadow (1979). Star Ka’ats and the Plant People (with D. Madlee, 1979). Iron Butterflies (1980). Lore of the Witch World (1980). Forerunner (1981). Gryphon in Glory (1981). Horn Crown (1981). Star Ka’ats and the Winged Warriors (with D. Madlee, 1981). Ten Mile Treasure (1981). Moon Called (1982). Caroline (with E. Cushing, 1983). ’Ware Hawk (1983). Wheel of Stars (1983). Gryphon’s Eyrie (with A. C. Crispin, 1984). House of Shadows (with P. Miller, 1984). Stand & Deliver (1984). Were-Wrath (1984). Magic in Ithkar (1985). Magic in Ithkar 2 (1985). Ride the Green Dragon (with P. Miller, 1985). Forerunner: The Second Venture (1985). Flight in Yiktor (1986). Magic in Ithkar 3 (1986). The Gate of the Cat (1987). Magic in Ithkar 4 (1987). Serpent’s Tooth (1987). The Magic Books (1988). Moon Mirror (1988). Wizards’ Worlds (1989). Imperial Lady: A Fantasy of Han China (with S. Schwartz, 1989). The Jekyll Legacy (with R. Bloch, 1990). Black Trillium (with M. Z. Bradley and J. May, 1990). Dare to Go A-Hunting (1990). Tales of the Witch World 3 (1990). The Elvenbane (with M. Lackey, 1991). Storms of Victory (1991). Catfantastic II (1991). Flight of Vengeance (1992). The Mark of the Cat (1992). Songsmith (with A. C. Crispin, 1992). Brother to
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Shadows (1993). Redline the Stars (with P. M. Griffin, 1993). Golden Trillium (1993). Empire of the Eagle (with S. Schwartz, 1993). Annals of the Witch World (1994). Catfantastic III (1994). Firehand (with P. M. Griffin, 1994). The Hands of Lyr (1994). On Wings of Magic (with P. Mathews and S. Miller, 1994). Elvenblood (with M. Lackey, 1995). Empire of the Eagle (1995). The Key of the Keplian (with L. McConchie, 1995). Mirror of Destiny (1995). Tiger Burning Bright (with M. Z. Bradley and M. Lackey, 1995). Catfantastic IV (1996). The Magestone (with M. H. Schaub, 1996). The Monster’s Legacy (1996). The Warding of Witch World (1996). Derelict for Trade (with S. Smith, 1997). A Mind for Trade (with S. Smith, 1997). Ciara’s Song (with L. McConchie, 1998). Scent of Magic (1998). The Shadow of Albion (with R. Edghill, 1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Beebe, D. M., The Quest for Harmony with the Other in Andre Norton’s Young Adult Literature (1995). Bleiler, E. F., ed., Supernatural Fiction Writers (1985). Broughton, I., ed., The Writer’s Mind: Interviews with American Authors (1989). Braude, A., ed., Andre Norton: Fables & Futures (1989). Deusterman, J. M., Andre Norton’s Witch World Series (1976). Elwood, R., ed., The Many Worlds of Andre Norton (1974). Fletcher, M. P., ed., Reader’s Guide to Twentieth-Century Science Fiction (1989). Hensley, C. Andre Norton’s Science Fiction and Fantasy, 1950-1979 (1980). Lacy, N. J., ed., The Arthurian Encyclopedia (1986). Lofland, R. D., Andre Norton (1960). MacNee, M. J., Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Writers (1995). Magill, F. N., ed., Survey of Science Fiction Literature (1979). Schlobin, Roger C., Andre Norton, a Primary and Secondary Bibliography (1980, revised edition with I. Harrison, 1994). Schwartz, S., ed., Moonsinger’s Friends. An Anthology in Honor of Andre Norton (1985). Staicar, T., ed., The Feminine Eye (1982). Stephensen-Payne, P., Andre Norton, Grand Master of the Witch World, a Working Bibliography (1993). Sullivan, C. W., ed., Science Fiction for Young Readers (1993). Turner, D. G., The First Editions of Andre Norton (1974). Wilbur, S., Andre Norton (1966). Yoke, C. B., Roger Zelazny and Andre Norton, Proponents of Individualism (1979). Reference works: Facts on File Bibliography of American Fiction 1919-1988 (1991). The 100 Most Popular Young Adult Authors (1996). St. James Guide to Fantasy Writers (1996). St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers (1996). Contemporary Science Fiction Authors (1975). SATA (1971, 1997). Twentieth-Century American Science Fiction Writers (1981). TCCW (1978). Other references: Algol (Summer/Fall 1977). Children’s Literature Association Quarterly (Summer 1985). Extrapolation (Fall 1985). Fantastic (Oct. 1980). Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts (1991). Locus (June 1991, Apr. 1992, July 1993, Jan. 1995). Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine (Spring 1991). Riverside Quarterly (Jan. 1970). School Librarian (July 1967). Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Review Annual 1991 (1994). Science Fiction Chronicle (Oct. 1988, Aug. 1994). Starlog (Nov. 1985). —BILLIE J. WAHLSTROM, UPDATED BY FIONA KELLEGHAN
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NOTLEY
NORTON, Alice See NORTON, Andre
NORTON, Katherine LaForge See REED, Myrtle
NOTLEY, Alice Born 8 November 1945, Bisbee, Arizona Married Ted Berrigan, 1972 (died); Douglas Oliver, 1988; children: Edmund, Anselm Poet Alice Notley was born in Bisbee, Arizona, but lived in the Mojave Desert town of Needles, California, until she left for college. She received a B.A. in English from Barnard College in 1967 and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa’s famed Writers’ Workshop in 1969. Following graduation, Notley lived on New York’s Lower East Side for almost 20 years and was a central figure in the second generation of what is called the New York School of poetry. Notley’s poetry addresses many aspects of American culture and everyday events. Her use of free verse and experimentation with poetic forms draws from the works of Gertrude Stein, Frank O’Hara, William Carlos Williams, and her first husband, poet Ted Berrigan. Like these poets, Notley writes to express her own voice and views social commentary as a secondary function of her poetry. As she expressed it to interviewer Edward Foster, ‘‘Poetry is about personality. It’s the writer or the poet giving her whole self, and a self is personality.’’ Notley credits both her childhood in the Southwest and her lifelong love of films with influencing the images in her poetry. As she told Foster, ‘‘What you take in when you’re very young is what’s most important throughout your life. It’s always what you read or what you see or what you do in childhood that stays fresh for you forever as an artist.’’ Many of Notley’s published works are collections of poems, but The Descent of Alette (1996) is a single book-length poem with sensual language and raw imagery. Alette, the female narrator, undertakes a strange, mythical journey into a surreal world of subways, caves, and forests inhabited by a snake representing Mother Earth and female energy. The rhythm of Alette’s narration has a hypnotic quality as Alette discovers her purpose is to battle ‘‘the tyrant,’’ a charming, evil male figure who tried and failed to kill the snake. The landscape Alette travels is peopled with war veterans and the homeless, with whom the central figures interact for good or ill. The Mysteries of Small Houses (1998) is a partly autobiographical, partly historical look at poetry in America. Many of the poems in this collection pay tribute to the writing of her late husband, Ted Berrigan, and try to sum up his place in American poetry (‘‘Grief’s not a social invention. / Grief is visible, substantial, I’ve literally seen it’’). Notley has used poetry to explore her past in other collections as well. In Alice Ordered Me to Be Made
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(1975), the title poem is about her father’s slow death in a hospital (‘‘tears like a dark running / sheer is the heart / my love loves me’’). In addition to her poetry, Notley has experimented with several other forms in both the written and visual arts. She wrote a play, Anne’s White Glove, produced in New York in 1985 and published in New American Writing (1987). She has also written an autobiography, Tell Me Again (1981), and collaborated with her second husband, poet Doug Oliver, on The Scarlet Cabinet: A Compendium of Books (1992). She also teaches poetry workshops and creates collages, watercolors, and sketches composed of everyday objects and images. Many of her collages are designed to de-eroticize photographs found in pornographic magazines. Among her honors are a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1980, a Poetry Center award in 1982, a G.E. Foundation award in 1983, and Fund for Poetry grants in 1987 and 1989. Notley and her husband live in Paris and edit the French poetry journal Gare du Nord. OTHER WORKS: 165 Meeting House Lane (1971). Phoebe Light (1973). Incidentals in the Day World (1973). For Frank O’Hara’s Birthday (1976). A Diamond Necklace (1979). Songs for the Unborn Second Baby (1979). Doctor Williams’ Heiresses: A Lecture (1980). When I Was Alive (1980). Waltzing Matilda (1981). How Spring Comes (1981). Sorrento (1984). Margaret and Dusty (1985). Parts of a Wedding (1986). At Night the States (1988). Homer’s ‘‘Art’’ (1990). Selected Poems of Alice Notley (1993). Close to Me & Closer. . . (The Language of Heaven) and Desamere (1995). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Foster, E., Postmodern Poetry: The Talisman Interviews (1993). Messerli, D., ed., From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry 1960-1990 (1994). Reference works: CA (1997). Other references: Alice Notley Biography, available online at http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/notley/alicebio.html and http:// www2.bath.ac.uk/~exxdgdc/lynx/cont25.html. Booklist (1 Mar. 1996). NYTBR (17 Jan. 1982). PW (18 Mar. 1996, 25 May 1998). —LEAH J. SPARKS
NUSSBAUM, Martha Craven Born 6 May 1947, New York, New York Daughter of George and Betty Warren Craven; married Alan J. Nussbaum, 1969 (divorced); children: Rachel Philosophy and Classics Professor Martha Craven Nussbaum attended Wellesley College from 1964 to 1966 and received a B.A. from New York University in 1969. She earned an M.A. from Harvard University in 1971 and a Ph.D. in classical philology from Harvard in 1975. Nussbaum was an assistant and later associate professor of philosophy and classics at Harvard from 1975 to 1983. She then returned to Wellesley as a visiting
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associate professor of philosophy and classics from 1983 to 1984 before accepting a faculty position at Brown University, where she taught from 1985 to 1995. Nussbaum left Brown in 1995 and served as Weidenfeld Visiting Professor at Oxford University in the spring of 1996. She then moved to Chicago and is currently the Ernst Freund Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago Law and Divinity Schools. In Poetic Justice: Literary Imagination and Public Life (1996), Nussbaum surveys classic works of literature like Charles Dickens’ Hard Times and Richard Wright’s Native Son to explain how literature can make readers better people. She reveals the ways in which literature provides a view of the thoughts and emotions of others and shows the worth of people that are often marginalized by society. Learning from literature requires what Nussbaum calls ‘‘literary imagination,’’ which she describes by saying ‘‘I defend literary imagination precisely because it seems to me an essential ingredient of an ethical stance that asks us to concern ourselves with the good of other people whose lives are distant from our own.’’ In Cultivating Humanity: A Classic Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (1997), Nussbaum addresses contemporary curricular reform in American higher education. She argues today’s ‘‘new education’’ is producing ‘‘citizens of the world’’ whose critical thinking skills allow them to transcend issues such as race, gender, and ethnicity in their ‘‘quest for truth.’’ Nussbaum’s theories are based on the ancient philosopher Seneca’s idea that a worthy person seeks and respects the ability to reason in whomever it is found, regardless of class or citizenship. Nussbaum’s three core values of liberal education are critical self-examination, the ideal of the world citizen, and the development of the narrative imagination. After developing her theories in the early chapters, Nussbaum takes the reader into a wide array of college classrooms across the U.S. to see how well particular programs are adhering to her philosophy. Along the way, she defends women’s studies, gay studies, and African American studies programs and insists upon their contribution to both critical reasoning and world citizenship. Cultivating Humanity was nominated for a Rea Book award from the Boston Review of Books. In Sex and Social Justice (1998), Nussbaum articulates a new and distinct conception of feminism based on traditional liberal political thought, but also appreciative of radical feminists who are opposed to such traditional views. Nussbaum seeks to bring both traditional and radical thought together as a solution to the global problems of poverty, illiteracy, and male-dominated legal systems. Several of the essays in this collection also address the importance of equal rights for gay men and lesbians. Although some of these essays were previously published, they have been extensively revised and updated. Nussbaum has served on the editorial boards and published dozens of articles in many prestigious scholarly journals, including Philosophy and Literature, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, Yale Classical Studies, Ethics, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, and New Literary History. She has also written book reviews for leading newspapers and book review journals in the U.S. and abroad, including the Times (London)
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Literary Supplement, New York Review of Books, Boston Globe, New Republic, London Review of Books, and the New York Times Book Review. She has lectured and participated in conferences throughout the U.S. and Europe and served in elected positions in several leading academic associations, including the American Council of Learned Societies and the American Philosophical Society. Among her awards are a Literary Lion Award from the New York Public Library in 1993 and a Spielvogel-Diamondstein Prize for best collection of essays for Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (1990). OTHER WORKS: Aristotle’s De Motu Animalium (1978). The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (1986). The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (1994). For Love of Country: A Debate on Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism (1996). Upheavals of Thought: A Theory of the Emotions, forthcoming. Feminist Internationalism, forthcoming. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1992); WW in America 1999 (1998). Other references: University of Chicago Law School Faculty Directory. Web site: Martha Nussbaum’s Curriculum Vitae, available online at http://www.law.uchicago.edu/Faculty/Directory/ nussbaum.html. —LEAH J. SPARKS
NYE, Andrea Born 1939 Children: three A scholar, writer, and teacher, Andrea Nye’s work attempts to reconcile the largely male-dominated realm of philosophy and thought with the many strains of feminist theory. While aware of the lack of women in the field of philosophy, and their absence in the philosophical cannon, when the Harvard undergraduate was asked in the early 1960s why she chose philosophy for her major, she replied that philosophy ‘‘was a puzzle of a kind that I seemed to have a talent for unraveling.’’ Returning to graduate school in 1972 after having three children, and struggling to make ends meet on a teaching assistant’s paycheck, Nye found herself increasingly drawn to the intensifying feminist movement. Her experiences in an almost entirely male discipline led her to live what she considered an academic duality by demonstrating expertise in recognized male-centered, male-created philosophies while trying to hold on to her feminist and feminine voice. This duality grew into a rich understanding of the forces behind traditional thought and the movement of feminist theory both within and around these forces. Her graduate work led to a professional academic career, and Nye is currently a professor of
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philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Deeply involved in the philosophy of language and mind, feminist theory, and the history of philosophy, Nye has contributed a number of important works on these issues. Nye’s 1988 (reprinted 1990) Feminist Theory and the Philosophies of Man for which she received a 1982-83 U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, extensively explores the important feminist and philosophical works and their complex relationships to one another. In her introduction she explains that the study has very personal roots and it seeks to explore women’s understanding of themselves now that feminist theory has taken firm hold of academic disciplines and common consciousness. Nye then presents a comprehensive survey of philosophical movements, beginning with 19th-century Western liberalism and working forward through socialism, Marxism, and contemporary theory. Each doctrine is juxtaposed against this feminist consciousness but conclusions about one’s own place in these discussions are left largely to the reader. Along similar lines is Nye’s Philosophy and Feminism: At the Border (1995), which again discusses the natural/historical male centered language of philosophy and describes women philosophers’ attempts at figuring themselves into this language which in many ways ignores their voices and experiences. Through rhetorical deconstruction, Nye breaks these traditional doctrines down and inserts feminist theory. She explains how ‘‘in each feminist reworking of theory, the conflictual nature of men’s practices was exposed.’’ This work demonstrates the maturation of Nye’s initially frustrated duality by offering clear rhetoric and important conclusions. Nye’s work serves as an important comprehensive survey of feminist theory for any student coming to the discipline of philosophy, or any individual seeking understanding of the historical progression of feminism. Extremely learned and refreshingly personal, Nye’s writing seeks to both validate her readers’ individual experiences and challenge their intellectual boundaries. OTHER WORKS: Private Language (1977). Words of Power: a Feminist Reading in the History of Logic (1990). Philosophia: the Thought of Rosa Luxemburg, Simone Weil, and Hannah Arendt (1994). Philosophy: Discipline Analysis (1997). Philosophy of Language: The Big Questions (edited by Nye, 1998). The Princess and the Philosopher: Letters of Elisabeth of the Palatine to Rene Descartes (1999). Journal articles in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (1987). Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy (1992, 1996). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Fraser, N. and S. L. Bartky, eds., Revaluing French Feminism: Critical Essays on Difference, Agency, and Culture (1992). Kourany, J. A., ed., Philosophy in a Feminist Voice: Critiques and Reconstructions (1998). Lamphere, L., ed., Women in the Curriculum: Discipline Analysis (1997). Tuana, N., ed., Feminist Interpretations of Plato (1994). Other references: European Journal of Philosophy (Dec. 1994). Gender & Society: Official Publication of Sociologists for
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Women in Society (June 1991). Hypatia (Spring 1990). Journal of Gender Studies (July 1995). —JULIET BYINGTON
NYE, Naomi Shihab Born 12 March 1952, St. Louis, Missouri Daughter of Aziz and Miriam Allwardt Shihab; married Michael Nye, 1978; children Madison Naomi Nye’s poetry celebrates moments of grace when, through ordinary acts, people confirm one another. She asserts that poetry itself and poetic voice depend upon these ordinary acts of recognition. In ‘‘Coming into Cuzco,’’ the closing poem of Nye’s first collection, Different Ways to Pray (1980), the poet describes herself as a newly arrived and disoriented traveler, unable to speak—‘‘That morning my mouth was a buried spoon’’— until she is noticed on the bus by the young girl she has noticed: ‘‘And she handed me one perfect pink rose, / because we had noticed each other, and that was all.’’ Nye’s attention to the simple acts of human communion wherever and however they occur springs from a generosity and acuity forged by a sense of her own multifaceted identity. Born in 1952 of a Palestinian father and an American mother, Nye began to write when she was very young, publishing her first poem when she was seven. In 1966, with her brother and parents, she left Missouri and moved to Jerusalem. They left Jerusalem the next year, eventually settling in San Antonio, Texas, where Nye received her B.A. from Trinity University in 1974. After graduation, Nye became a poet-in-the-schools in 1975 for the Texas Arts Commission. She has been Holloway Lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley, lecturer in poetry at the University of Texas at Austin, and visiting writer at the University of Hawaii. She has traveled widely as a visiting writer for more than 20 years, conducting workshops with teachers and students of all ages, and has traveled to the Middle East and Asia for the U.S. Information Agency’s ‘‘Arts America Program.’’ Nye’s desire to be at home in multiple human communities, her experience of her father’s exile and restless wandering, and her acute sense of place is reflected in all of her poetry. Different Ways to Pray attends to human landscapes, from a local Texas street to the Guatemalan jungle and to the human need for a sense of connection. Hugging the Jukebox (1982) continues her argument that the human voice finds its proper song by acts of orientation in a world both familiar and strange. A young boy in Honduras, separated from his land and his mother, clings to his grandparents’ jukebox and sings love songs; trash pickers on Madison Street ‘‘murmur in language soft as rags.’’ Nye has a deep respect for human utterance and for each person’s attempt to find a place in a world that is generous but cool, that does not grant identity until the attempt is made for it. In Yellow Glove (1986) Nye’s vision is darker and she records the enormous cost of not finding the objects or persons
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that ground you in the world: ‘‘Part of the difference between floating and going down.’’ The book is filled with vulnerable people holding resolutely to objects so as not to fall apart, with broken and fallen objects, and with cries to earth about human cruelty: ‘‘Who calls anyone civilized?’’ Yet, Nye’s vision of the world as filled with tenderness and wry comedy endures.
In 1999 Nye, joined by husband Michael Nye, made a striking presentation, a collaborative illustrated lecture in Trinity University’s Stieren Arts Enrichment Series. The couple asked, ‘‘What Are You Looking For?’’ exploring through words and photographs the themes of language, reading, seeing, observing, and listening.
Both Different Ways to Pray and Hugging the Jukebox received the Voertman Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. Hugging was chosen by Josephine Miles as National Poetry Series Winner in 1982, and as one of the Most Notable Books by the American Library Association. Her honors also include a 1997-98 Guggenheim Fellowship, the I. B. Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, four Pushcart Prizes, the Charity Randall Prize for Spoken Poetry from the International Poetry Forum, a Ford Salute to Education award, and the 1997 Distinguished Alumna Award from Trinity University. She serves as poetry editor for the Texas Observer.
Nye’s life is full with her writing, poetry readings, speaking, and teaching, but she observed in a Texas Monthly article in 1998, ‘‘Poetry requires us to slow down, to take time to pause.’’ A collection of essays, aptly titled Never in a Hurry(1996), similarly evokes her commitment to a thoughtful pace. Her poetry and her essays have an intelligence and a gentleness reflecting her knowledge of language, her passion for the craft of writing, her love of reading, and her powers of observation. The words that so moved Bill Moyers in 1995, ‘‘Walk around feeling like a leaf. / Know you could tumble any second. / Then decide what to do with your time,’’ exemplify her acute sense of experiencing and appreciating life.
In addition to her work as a poet, Nye is a songwriter and singer who has recorded two albums, Rutabaga Roo (1979) and Lullaby Raft (1981). Nye is a translator for PROTA (Project of Translation from Arabic Literature) and her work appears in Modern Arabic Poetry (1987); she has also rendered into English the poems of Muhammad al-Maghut, The Fan of Swords (1991), and poems found in Fadwa Tuquan’s autobiography, A Mountainous Journey. She published an international anthology of poems for young readers, This Same Sky in 1992, and recent publications include Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (a compilation of earlier poems, 1995), Fuel (1998), and What Have You Lost? (1999, with photographs by Michael Nye). In addition, there are Sitti’s Secret (1994), Benito’s Dream Bottle (1995), Lullaby Raft (1996), Never in a Hurry: Essays on People and Places (1996), and Habibi (1997). As a poet, essayist, novelist, anthologist, and singer, Nye’s rich and diverse works reach out to young and old in all parts of the world. Her poem, ‘‘The Art of Disappearing,’’ encouraged Bill Moyers, who was recovering from bypass surgery, to go forward with plans for The Language of Life with Bill Moyers, an eightpart series on the Public Broadcasting Station (PBS) in 1995 on which she appeared. Nye has also been featured on another PBS series, The United States of Poetry and on National Public Radio.
OTHER WORKS: Tattooed Feet (chapbook, 1976). Eye to Eye (chapbook, 1977). On the Edge of the Sky (chapbook, 1982). Invisible (chapbook, 1986). Fifty Poems: A Personal Selection (book and tapes, 1988). Tomorrow We Smile (chapbook, 1991). The Miracle of Typing (chapbook, 1991). Mint (chapbook, 1991). Red Suitcase (1994). In the following anthologies: A Quartet: Texas Poets in Concert (1990); The Tree Is Older Than You Are (1995); I Feel a Little Jumpy Around You (1996); The Space Between Our Footsteps: Poems and Paintings from the Middle East (1998). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Gregory, O. and S. Elmusa, eds., Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab-American Poetry (1988). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Booklist (15 March 1982). Georgia Review (Spring 1989). Kenyon Review (Fall 1987). LJ (Aug. 1982, April 1989). New Letters (Winter 1981/82). NYT (18 June 1995). Texas Monthly (Sept. 1998). VV (18 Jan. 1983). —DARIA DONNELLY
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O O’CONNOR, Flannery Born Mary Flannery O’Connor, 25 March 1925, Savannah, Georgia; died 3 August 1964, Milledgeville, Georgia Daughter of Edward F. and Regina Cline O’Connor Flannery O’Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1925 and lived there with her parents until the age of thirteen. In 1938 the O’Connors moved to the small farming town of Milledgeville, Georgia. Her father died several years later of lupus erythematosus, an immune system disease that would lead to Flannery’s own death in 1964. An only child, O’Connor attended Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia College & State University) in Milledgeville after graduating from high school in 1942. While at Georgia State, she edited the campus literary magazine, the Corinthian, and provided illustrations for the school yearbook and newspaper. O’Connor graduated from Georgia State in 1946, the same year her first short story, ‘‘The Geranium,’’ was published in Accent. She received a fellowship to the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and graduated with a master’s degree the following year. O’Connor then moved to upstate New York, where she was a resident at the Yaddo writers’ colony in Saratoga Springs from 1948 to 1949. After leaving New York, she moved to Connecticut to live with friends and work on the novel that would become Wise Blood (1952). While in Connecticut, she was diagnosed with lupus and went home to Georgia to live with her mother. Weak and exhausted, O’Connor could only write for three hours a day and ‘‘spend the rest of the day recuperating from it,’’ she told a Saturday Review interviewer. The publication of Wise Blood brought O’Connor instant recognition as a powerful new literary talent, but she remained shy and modest about her success. The novel’s protagonist is Haze Motes, a war veteran and shady faith healer who founds the Church Without Christ. Motes travels around the South preaching and seeking salvation but finds it only after blinding himself with quicklime. Many of O’Connor’s protagonists also search for salvation, only to find it after moments of great despair or destruction when their emotions have been stripped to the bone and only their essential selves remain. O’Connor herself explained the purpose of violence in her fiction: ‘‘The man in the violent situation reveals those qualities least dispensable in his personality, those qualities which are all he will have to take into eternity with him. . . . There is a moment in every great story in which the presence of grace can be felt as it waits to be accepted or rejected. . . .’’ Like Motes, many of O’Connor’s characters are either literally or emotionally disabled, and their stories revolve around their struggle to find acceptance in others or in themselves. In her second and final novel, The Violent Bear It Away (1960), O’Connor tells the story of Tarwater, a 14-year-old
orphan raised as a Christian prophet by his great-uncle, Old Tarwater. The boy must choose between this life and that offered to him by Rayber, his modern, rational uncle. Tarwater hopes to rid himself of any gifts for prophecy or healing by baptizing his cousin Bishop, but accidentally drowns him instead. In the end, Tarwater chooses his destiny as a prophet, but only after being molested by a stranger and succumbing to madness. Although her physical condition improved enough to allow her to lecture at various colleges and universities, O’Connor was still unable to write as much as she would have liked. It was three years after Wise Blood that she published her first collection of short stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955). The title story is one of O’Connor’s best known and follows a family en route to Florida for a vacation. The grandmother persuades her son to take a detour to search for a plantation she visited in her youth. Embarrassed that she has led the family to the wrong place, she inadvertently causes an accident that forces the family’s car off the road. A murderous stranger whom O’Connor dubs the Misfit comes along and murders the stranded family one by one. Before being shot three times, the grandmother acknowledges that the deaths are her fault and the story closes with the Misfit’s statement that ‘‘She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.’’ O’Connor later wrote to a fellow novelist that ‘‘grace, to the Catholic way of thinking, can and does use as its medium the imperfect, purely human, and even hypocritical.’’ This story reveals not only the redemption possible in times of great distress but O’Connor’s ear for Southern dialect and manners. Other well-known stories from this collection are ‘‘The Life You Save May Be Your Own,’’ ‘‘The Displaced Person,’’ and ‘‘The Artificial Nigger.’’ The latter is about a country grandfather’s decision to take his grandson to Atlanta so he will finally be content to stay on the farm. The boy, Nelson, considers this to be his second trip to town because he was born in a hospital in Atlanta. Angry at this, his grandfather points out that Nelson does not even know what a black person looks like and therefore knows nothing about the town. The two argue violently after the grandfather becomes lost and are reunited only when they sight a statue of a black man—an ‘‘artificial nigger.’’ O’Connor stubbornly refused to change the story’s title despite her publisher’s urging. She could not be accused of racism, however, for many of her stories, including most of those in the posthumously published collection Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965), show the cruelty and ignorance at the root of racial discrimination. O’Connor is credited with using her writings to give a new image to black Americans. In the title story of Everything That Rises, a racist white woman’s confrontation with a black woman forces her to acknowledge the importance of black people in her life. Several of O’Connor’s most lauded works have been published posthumously. The Complete Stories (1972) received the
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National Book award and contains several stories from her university days that had never before been published. The Habit of Being (1979), a collection of her correspondence, shows her dedication to writing and reveals her own views on some of her best-known pieces. This work won several awards as did Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (1969), a collection of her lectures on both her own works and those of other authors. Several of O’Connor’s writings have been adapted for the stage and screen, including ‘‘The Displaced Person,’’ produced as a play in 1966, and Wise Blood, released as a feature film in 1980.
CANR (1992). CBY (1958). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Bulletin of Bibliography (1967). Critique (Fall 1958). Esprit (Winter 1964). Flannery O’Connor Bulletin.
O’Connor is widely regarded as one of the most important American fiction writers of the 20th century. Her Southern Catholicism permeated her writings, which focus almost exclusively on ‘‘both the reality of human weakness and the redemptive power of God’s grace’’ (Authors & Artists for Young People). Many of her works have strange, often deformed characters, and virtually all are set in the predominantly Protestant South of O’Connor’s birth and upbringing. O’Connor continues to attract critical acclaim despite the fact that she wrote only two novels and about 30 short stories during her lifetime.
Born circa 1830s; died death date unknown
OTHER WORKS: A Memoir of Mary Ann (editor, 1961). Three by Flannery O’Connor (1964). The Presence of Grace and Other Book Reviews (1983). Collected Works (1988). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brinkmeyer, R. H., The Art and Vision of Flannery O’Connor (1989). Drake, R., Flannery O’Connor (1966). Driggers, S. G., et al, The Manuscripts of Flannery O’Connor at Georgia College (1989). Driskell, L. V., and J. Brittain, The Eternal Crossroads (1971). Eggenschwiter, D., The Christian Humanism of Flannery O’Connor (1972). Feeley, K., Flannery O’Connor: Voice of the Peacock (1972). Friedman, M. J., and L. A. Lawson, The Added Dimension: The Art and Mind of Flannery O’Connor (1966). Friedman, M. J., and B. L. Clark, Critical Essays on Flannery O’Connor (1985). Giannoue, R., Flannery O’Connor and the Mystery of Love (1989). Golden, R. E. and M. C. Sullivan, Flannery O’Connor and Caroline Gordon: A Reference Guide (1977). Hendin, J., The World of Flannery O’Connor (1970). Hyman, S. E., Flannery O’Connor (1966). Horn, T., To Grandmother’s House We Go: Modern Grandmother Archetypes in Works by Porter, Hurston, McCarthy, O’Connor, and Olsen (dissertation, 1997). Kinney, A., Flannery O’Connor’s Library: Resources of Being (1985). Magee, R. M., ed., Conversations with Flannery O’Connor (1987). Magill, F. N., ed., Great Women Writers: The Lives and Works of 135 of the World’s Most Important Women Writers, From Antiquity to the Present (1994). McFarland, D. T., Flannery O’Connor (1976). Muller, G. H., Nightmares and Visions (1972). Nesbitt, A. S., ed., Short Story Criticism: Excerpts From Criticism of the Works of Short Fiction Writers (1999). Orvell, M., Invisible Parade: An Introduction (1991). Reiter, R. E., ed., Flannery O’Connor (1968). Walters, D., Flannery O’Connor (1973). Westling, L., Sacred Groves and Ravaged Gardens (1985). Reference works: Authors & Artists for Young Adults (1998). Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature (1991).
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O’CONNOR, Florence J.
The frontispiece of The Heroine of the Confederacy (1864) is a portrait of Florence O’Connor: a profile of a young woman with dark hair, an aquiline nose, and a broad forehead. O’Connor, who identified with Louisiana’s Creole Catholics, viewed the Civil War as based on matters other than differences over slavery or the sovereignty of the Union; rather, it was a conflict between AngloSaxon Protestant and Catholic sensibilities. O’Connor’s strongly partisan novel romanticizing the Confederate cause was published in London during the Civil War and reprinted in New Orleans in 1869. O’Connor attempted to provide a Southern answer to Harriet Beecher Stowe, who served as the model for Madame N. ‘‘She was one of that style of wealthy, illdressed, ill-bred Northern aristocrat who fills our hotels during the winter, and who, through courtesy, are invited to the homes of our planters, and then returns to the North to write of Legrees and Uncle Toms.’’ The novel opens in Rosale, a sugar plantation south of New Orleans, when secession has started but before Louisiana secedes. Natalie de Villerie, ward of Judge de Brevil, is about to be engaged to Lieutenant Clarence Belden, but she is loyal to the South: ‘‘I would sever my very heart strings if I thought they bound me to an individual of Northern principles.’’ Belden pleads with Natalie to leave the South, but she breaks with him, joins other Southern women in war efforts, and becomes the first woman in New Orleans to give her jewels to the Confederate cause. A mark of character in O’Connor’s women is their capacity for self-denial and restraint; however, as the novel progresses Natalie becomes more spirited. The tide of battle turns after Shiloh, and the Union army marches south to take New Orleans. Natalie refuses to lower the rebel flag, wraps it around her, and is shot but not seriously injured. Natalie leaves New Orleans for Mississippi and then Virginia, where as Soeur Secessia, a nursing sister in Richmond Hospital, she discovers Belden among the wounded. They are briefly reunited before he dies. Under various disguises, Natalie performs a number of heroic acts for her cause. Count Bernharnais, fighting for the South, loves Natalie, who is unable to return his love because her heart, like her beloved Rosale, is ‘‘in ruins.’’ Perhaps, when the war is over, she can return his love. The novel is flawed by O’Connor’s intention to publicize the Southern cause to an English audience; however, O’Connor’s portrait of Natalie as a young woman whose character is strengthened by the war and her picture of the response of Southern
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women to the Confederate cause is a corrective to the stereotype of the Southern belle.
O’DONNELL, Lillian
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Knight, L., ed., Biographical Dictionary of Southern Authors (1978).
Born 15 March 1926, Trieste, Italy Daughter of Zoltan D. and Maria Busutti Udvardy; married J. Leonard O’Donnell, 1954
—MAUREEN MURPHY
O’DONNELL, Jessie Fremont Born 1860, Lowville, New York; died 1897 Daughter of John O’Donnell Jessie Fremont O’Donnell was educated at the Lowville Academy and at Temple Grove Seminary in Saratoga Springs, where she graduated with highest honors and with the designation of class poet and orator. Her first poems were published in the Boston Transcript; her first volume of poetry, Heart Lyrics, was published in New York in 1887. She edited Love Poems of Three Centuries in 1890; and was also a prose writer. ‘‘A Soul from Pudge’s Corners’’ was issued serially in the Ladies’ Home Journal, and ‘‘Horseback Sketches’’ appeared in Outing in 1891-92 and enjoyed an enthusiastic reception. The nature poems in Heart Lyrics reveal a gift for imagery. ‘‘A White Easter’’ uses the metaphor of an ice storm on Easter morning to represent the purity of the Resurrection. The theme of the romantic ‘‘Night Blooming Cereus’’ is the manifestation of God in nature. O’Donnell uses conventional nature symbolism: hills press in on the poet in ‘‘Shut In,’’ spring is renewal in ‘‘An Easter Hymn,’’ and autumn is death in ‘‘When His Heart Died.’’ The poems in Heart Lyrics frequently have death as their theme. The pantheistic ‘‘A Sister’s Thought in March’’ pictures O’Donnell’s dead younger sister in the flowers of the following spring. Death appears suddenly in ‘‘The Smitten Riviera’’ to break the idyllic tranquility with an earthquake; ‘‘The New Year’s Gift’’ is, ironically, death. O’Donnell offers two consolations to death: In ‘‘The Sweetest Joy of Heaven’’ the poet imagines that in death she can help those she loved on earth, and art transcends death in ‘‘Immortality.’’ O’Donnell’s religious poems suggest a traditional Catholic sensibility. ‘‘Two Women’’ deals with the important theme of a woman’s choice between domestic life and intellectual life; the woman who ‘‘chose valley’s shelter, safe retreat / life centered in home’’ is contrasted with the woman who ‘‘chose the weary heights, her soul too true /to yield her life into a lesser one.’’ The poem may be autobiographical. O’Donnell wrote best of the world around her; her nature lyrics and ‘‘Horseback Sketches’’ are the work of a modest talent, but reveal a sense of craft and a skill with figurative language. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: AW. —MAUREEN MURPHY
Lillian O’Donnell is a New Yorker; she grew up in the city, where she attended parochial and public schools, pursued a career in the theater, married, and continues to live in the city. With a minor role in Pal Joey, O’Donnell became involved in Broadway productions as an actress and dancer. Later she appeared in television productions, and then moved on to direct summer stock, becoming one of the first women managers. After her marriage, she left the theater and decided to try writing novels. O’Donnell’s early mystery stories reflect a gothic dimension in exotic settings, country estate motifs, and genteel characters. Death Schuss (1963), for example, takes place in Canada at the height of the ski season amid the luxurious environs of an heiress’s home. This unlucky young lady becomes the victim in this murder puzzle which is fraught with romantic entanglements and glamour. These early works are too filled with cliches to be unique. The turning point in O’Donnell’s literary career occurred when she cast off the trappings of the mystery-cum-gothic style and moved into the real world of the police thriller to create Norah Mulcahaney of the New York City Police Department as her serial heroine. Mulcahaney is a credible character; O’Donnell gives her heroine ethnic roots and a strong moral fiber. Norah is also appropriately attractive: tall and slim, with long dark tresses. Norah makes her first appearance in The Phone Calls (1972); she is just learning the ropes in the department when she is assigned to the case of a psychopathic killer who preys on women. In Don’t Wear Your Wedding Ring (1973), Detective Mulcahaney becomes more self-assured; this time she is in pursuit of a female prostitution ring. ‘‘The chase’’ as well as the nature of the crime lives up to the tradition of the thriller as Norah eludes a murderous gang. Her relationship with Sgt. Joe Capretto develops in this case; the reader perceives a match is in the making. (Ultimately Norah marries Joe, but she neither retires nor loses her individuality; they do not become a ‘‘crime team.’’) The crimes which O’Donnell chooses for her heroine are usually crimes against women, such as rape (Dial 577 R-A-P-E, 1974). Mulcahaney meets all challenges with conviction—she is a feminist who is concerned with the plight of other women (other policewomen in No Business Being a Cop, 1978). O’Donnell learned about the inner workings of the police world through observation and careful research. Amid growing concern for the victims of crime, O’Donnell chose another dimension to investigate and a different kind of heroine. Mici Anhalt, an investigator for the New York City Victim/Witness Project, makes her debut in Aftershock (1977). A combination social worker and detective, she often experiences personal danger. She too is attractive; though a liberated thirtyish female, she has the youthfulness and enthusiasm of a teenager.
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In both Aftershock and Falling Star (1979), Mici does her sleuthing by assignment and under less than optimum conditions. She experiences on-the-job harassment and departmental jealousies, not to mention the perils of attack from malevolent assailants. But, like Norah Mulcahaney, she endures, proving that a resilient female can make her own way in a tough world. O’Donnell’s novels have achieved success not because her characters are profound or unusual, or because her plots are mindboggling or aesthetically interesting. Hardcore realism, neither sweetened by gingery femininity nor leavened by blood or brutality, is O’Donnell’s metier. Her unadorned literary style is honest and appropriate to the street crimes she depicts.
OTHER WORKS: Death on the Grass (1959). Death Blanks the Screen (1960). Murder Under the Sun (1964). Death of a Player (1964). The Babes in the Woods (1965). The Sleeping Beauty Murders (1967). The Tachi Tree (1968). The Face of the Crime (1968). Dive into Darkness (1971). The Baby Merchants (1975). Leisure Dying (1976). Wicked Designs (1980). The Children’s Zoo (1981). Cop Without a Shield (1983). Lady Killer (1984). Casual Affairs (1985). The Other Side of the Door (1987). A Good Night to Kill (1989). A Wreath for the Bride (1990). A Private Crime (1991). Pushover (1992). Used to Kill (1993). Lockout (1994). The Raggedy Man (1995, 1997). Blue Death (1998). The Goddess Affair (1998). The papers of Lillian O’Donnell are housed in the Mugar Memorial Library of Boston University.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bakerman, J. S., ed., And Then There Were Nine—More Women of Mystery (1985). Klein, K. G., ed., Great Women Mystery Writers: Classic to Contemporary (1994). Reference works: Detecting Women (1994). Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (1995). St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (1996). Other references: Booklist (15 July 1977). KR (1 July 1979). LJ (Aug 1973). Ms. (Oct. 1974). NYTBR (8 Aug. 1976). SR (29 Jan. 1972). —PATRICIA D. MAIDA
O’HAIR, Madalyn (Mays) Murray
(Murray v. Curlett) in the U.S. Supreme Court. O’Hair brought and won suit against the Baltimore public schools on behalf of her eldest son, charging that the required prayer in the classroom— ‘‘sectarian opening exercises’’—violated the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom. Since the early 1960s, O’Hair has become one of the most controversial figures in American public life. Calling herself an ‘‘individual anarchist,’’ she devoted her career to a public campaign of exposing the ‘‘unconstitutional partnership’’ between church and state, showing how these two establishments are not separate as the law requires but hopelessly intermingled. The symbiosis of religious and political life has, from her viewpoint as an atheist spokeswoman, disastrous consequences for the solution of secular social problems and for the ability of the individual to operate in a ‘‘free’’ society without pressures from dominant religious groups. Her life’s work is a critical exploration and exposé of religion—‘‘its origins, its evolution, its political interventions in diverse nations, its wealth, its insanity’’—and the effects of ‘‘irrational and superstitious’’ religious beliefs on individuals and society. Drawing upon a wide and varied background, including academic degrees in philosophy, law, and social work in addition to military service with the Women’s Army Corps in World War II (1943-46), O’Hair’s infamy as social activist and writer is the result of her work in founding American Atheists, Inc., the American Atheist Center, the Freethought Society of America, the Society of Separationists, and Other Americans. O’Hair is the author of an entire canon of volumes dealing with the history, philosophy, and practice of atheism published by the American Atheist Press. These works deal with the past and present impact of organized religion on national economic and political issues. A longrunning radio broadcast, the American Atheist, was a series of essays on this subject. In addition, O’Hair edited the monthly news magazine bearing the same name. The Atheist Center and Press were established because their goals and values were at such marked variance with those of other organizations, both secular and religious, that O’Hair felt the need for a separate forum in which atheist ideas could be voiced. O’Hair’s self-made career as an atheist separationist, like the careers of the more radical feminist writers, is an interesting case because she goes so far beyond the conventionally accepted position for women writers, the guardianship of agreed-upon standards of public morality. In speaking out against religion and God, O’Hair openly challenges the historical model of female activism.
Born 13 April 1919, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; died circa 1995; presumed murdered, no body found Daughter of Irwin and Lena Scholle Mays; married William J. Murray, mid-1940s; Richard Franklin O’Hair, 1965
O’Hair’s standing as an author is based on the polemic, with its mixed reputation in literary circles as an ‘‘applied’’ form in the tradition of social action, persuasion, high emotion, and the definition and pursuit of the public good. In her works, all of these traits are well developed.
Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s unorthodox ideology first came to public attention in 1963 with the renowned ‘‘Murray Case’’
What more she may accomplished is unknown, for O’Hair, one son, and her granddaughter (adopted and raised as a daughter)
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disappeared with little trace, though with well over half a million dollars. They are believed the victims of foul play by a former employee convicted of embezzling funds; while another man involved in the speculated kidnapping and killing was himself murdered and found, the O’Hairs have never been found. OTHER WORKS: Why I Am an Atheist (1965, 1991). What on Earth Is an Atheist? (1966). The American Atheist (1967). An Atheist Epic: Bill Murray, the Bible, and the Baltimore Board of Education (1968; revised, 1970, in 1989 as An Atheist Epic: The Complete Unexpurgated Story of How Bible and Prayers Were Removed From the Public Schools of the United States). The Atheist World (1969). An Atheist Speaks (1970, 1986). Let Us Prey: An Atheist Looks at Church Wealth (1970). An Atheist Believes (1971). Understanding Atheism (1971). Atheism: Its Viewpoint (1972). Atheist Magazines: A Sampling, 1927-70 (introduction by O’Hair, 1972). The Atheist Viewpoint (29 vols., edited by O’Hair, 1972). Letters from Atheists (1972). Letters from Christians (1973). Freedom Under Seige: The Impact of Organized Religion on Your Liberty and Your Pocketbook (1974). Religious Factors in the War in Vietnam (1975, in 1982 as War in Vietnam: The Religious Connection. An Atheist Looks at Gods (1979). Women & Athiesm (1979). Nobody Has a Prayer (1982). An Atheist Speaks (1986). All About Atheists (1988). Our Constitution: The Way it Was (1988). Atheists: The Last Minority (1990). Atheist Heroes and Heroines (1991). The Atheist World (1991). Atheists: Their Dilemma: An Address Given to the 23rd Annual National Convention of American Atheists on 10 April 1993 (1993). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bozarth, G. R., A Case Against Madalyn Murray O’Hair: Interrelated Essays on an Experience (1989). Conrad, J. K., Mad Madalyn (1983). In 1962 Madalyn Murray O’Hair Kicked God, the Bible and Prayer Out of School: And Ten Other Myths About Church and State (1992). Murray, W. J., My Life Without God (1992). Rappoport, J., Madalyn Murray O’Hair: ‘‘Most Hated Woman in America’’ (1998). Stein, G., Nineteen Editorials: 1989 (1990). Stein, G., A Truthful Portrayal From a Firsthand Witness: An Expensive, Unnecessary Luxury for the Atheists by One Who Was There and Experienced It (1990). Woodworth, F., The Atheist Cult (1991). Wright, L., Saints & Sinners: Walker Railey, Jimmy Swaggart, Madalyn Murray O’Hair, Anton LaVey, Will Campbell, Matthew Fox (1995). Reference works: CA (1974). CB (1977). Other references: Insight (Nov. 1996). Moody’s (Jan. 1995). Newsweek (1 Dec. 1975, 19 Sept. 1977). NYTM (16 May 1976, 13 June 1976). Progressive (Feb. 1999). Time (Feb. 1997). WP (18 Feb. 1970). —MARGARET J. KING
O’HARA, Mary See STURE-VASA, Mary
O’KEEFFE, Katharine A. Born 1855, Kilkenny, Ireland; died 2 January 1918, Lawrence, Massachusetts Daughter of Patrick and Rose O’Keeffe; married Daniel J. O’Mahoney, 1895 Katharine A. O’Keeffe could qualify as one of the famous Irish women about whom she lectured and wrote. Her parents emigrated to Lawrence, Massachusetts, when O’Keeffe was a child. After a parochial education, she graduated at the top of her class from Lawrence High School in 1873 and two years later was the first Irish Catholic to be appointed to the Lawrence faculty; she taught history and speech. O’Keeffe first became prominent as a lecturer during Fanny Parnell’s visit to Boston at the time of the Irish Land League. She continued to lecture on a variety of topics—historical, literary, and Irish—throughout New England. In 1892 O’Keeffe delivered the Memorial Day oration in Newburyport, Massachusetts; that summer she lectured at the Catholic Summer School in New London, Connecticut. When the Catholics of Lawrence moved to establish a Catholic paper in New England, the New England Catholic Herald (1880), O’Keeffe was elected to its board. A correspondent for the Boston-based Sacred Heart Review and an associate member of the New England Woman’s Press Association, O’Keeffe also owned and published a Catholic Sunday paper, the Catholic Register. Later, O’Keeffe was active in the Ladies Auxiliary of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, serving as its first president in 1904. Her early writing includes a local history, Sketches of Catholicity in Lawrence and Vicinity (1882), and two dramatic entertainments: Moore’s Anniversary: A Musical Allegory (1887), a frame for a program of Thomas Moore’s songs presented at the Moore Centennial Celebration in Lawrence in 1879, and a similar program for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, A Longfellow Night: A Short Sketch of the Poet’s Life with Songs and Recitations from His Works for the Use of Catholic Schools and Catholic Literary Societies (1898). Famous Irishwomen (1907), a collection of O’Keeffe’s lectures, begins with the disclaimer that the chapters are not original research but retellings. This is true of most of O’Keeffe’s Irish entries; however, when she turns to contemporary Irish-American women like Eleanor Donnelly, Louise Imogen Guiney, and Katherine Conway, O’Keeffe’s account becomes an invaluable description of prominent Irish-American women from the point of view of a sympathetic contemporary. She also provides important information about Irish women in earlier American history: women who fought in the American Revolution and in the Civil War, founders of Irish or Irish-American religious orders, and writers, educators, and philanthropists. Like most Irish-Americans, O’Keeffe identified Catholic with Irish: ‘‘We Americans of Irish-blood—millions of us—have kept that sublime Faith of our Fathers.’’ She exhorted her IrishAmerican listeners and readers to be conscious of their Irish past,
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to be steadfast in their faith, and to be anti-English. Her sentimental and filiopiestic style lends itself better to the lecture hall than to the printed page; however, by her own example and by illustration, O’Keeffe provided a range of role models of active Irish women for young Irish-Americans. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: AW. The Poets of Ireland (1912). —MAUREEN MURPHY
The Master-Mistress (1922) is a collection of poems, varying in quality from excellent to trivial, on many moods and aspects of natural and supernatural love. Like all O’Neill’s works, it is illustrated by the author. In spite of substantial critical appreciation, none of the works for adults had a second edition. Their conspicuous merits were overwhelmed by excesses of whimsy and sentimentality. O’Neill’s Irish forebearers were given both credit and blame for qualities in her writing described as ‘‘Celtic.’’ A modern reader will find much wit, originality, and beauty of language and atmosphere in her works.
O’Neill, Egan See LININGTON, Elizabeth
OTHER WORKS: The Kewpies and Dotty Darling (1912). The Kewpies: Their Book: Verse and Pictures (1913). Kewpie Kutouts (1914). The Kewpies and the Runaway Baby (1928).
O’NEILL, Rose (Cecil) Born 25 June 1874, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania; died 6 April 1944, Springfield, Missouri Also wrote under: Rose Cecil O’Neill, Mrs. H. L. Wilson Daughter of William P. and Alice Smith O’Neill; married Gray Latham, 1896 (divorced 1901); Harry L. Wilson, 1902 (divorced 1907) Rose O’Neill was educated in parochial schools in Omaha, Nebraska. Her professional career began at thirteen, when she won a children’s drawing contest sponsored by the Omaha WorldHerald, which then engaged her to do a weekly cartoon series. O’Neill later moved to New York City, where her work found a ready market. At nineteen, she was a nationally known illustrator and later was also a regular contributor of stories and poems to women’s magazines. In 1896, she married Gray Latham, whom she divorced in 1901. The next year she married Wilson, the novelist and playwright; that marriage ended in 1907. O’Neill is best remembered for the Kewpies, sentimentalized ‘‘little cupids’’ whose illustrated adventures in verse appeared first in the 1909 Christmas issue of the Ladies’ Home Journal and later in other magazines and in several books. In 1913, O’Neill patented the design, and Kewpie dolls and other Kewpie-decorated articles earned a fortune in royalties. The first of four novels, The Loves of Edwy (1904), shows O’Neill’s characteristic charm, humor, and tenderness; it reveals much about her own childhood and youth in a large, needy family. The Lady in the White Veil (1909) is a farcical mystery story in which a stolen Titian portrait is repeatedly recovered and lost anew. In spite of prodigious energy and O’Neill’s unremitting mirth, it soon becomes tedious. Garda (1929) presents a fantasy world both beautiful and bizarre. Garda and her twin brother, Narcissus, symbolize a single mystical being represented as body and soul, the one joyously sensual, the other sensitive and suffering. They are in conflict over and ultimately reconciled by a common passion. The Goblin Woman (1930) is unsuccessful in attempting to combine a theme of sin and redemption with a milieu of contemporary sophistication.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brooks, V. W., Days of the Phoenix (1957). Kummer, G., Harry Leon Wilson (1963). McCanse, R. A., Titans and Kewpies: The Life and Art of Rose O’Neill (1968). Wood, C., Poets of America (1925). Other references: Independent (15 Sept. 1904). International Studio (March 1922). NY (24 Nov. 1934). —EVELYN S. CUTLER
OATES, Joyce Carol Born 16 June 1938, Millersport, New York Also writes under: Rosamond Smith Daughter of Frederic James and Carolina Bush Oates; married Raymond Joseph Smith, 1961 Joyce Carol Oates was raised on her grandparents’ farm in rural upstate New York. She later wrote that her parents’ working-class backgrounds contributed to the ‘‘harsh and unsentimental world’’ of her childhood, where life was a ‘‘continual daily scramble for existence.’’ Oates’ childhood community was the basis for Eden County, the setting of many of her works. Despite their tenuous existence, Oates’ parents encouraged their eldest daughter’s creative development and she began to form narratives even before she could write. After completing her elementary education in a one-room schoolhouse, Oates attended large junior and senior high schools. Upon graduation from Williamsville Central High School in 1956, she entered Syracuse University on a scholarship. She majored in English and minored in philosophy while continuing to write, and published several pieces in the campus literary magazine during her years at Syracuse. In 1959 Oates was named cowinner of a college fiction award sponsored by Mademoiselle magazine for her short story ‘‘In the Old World.’’ She graduated first in her class the following year after having been elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
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Oates entered the University of Wisconsin in Madison in September 1960 and graduated in June of the following year with an M.A. in English. While there she met and married Raymond Joseph Smith, a fellow graduate student. The couple moved to Beaumont, Texas, where Smith taught while Oates entered the doctoral program in English at Rice University in nearby Houston. She withdrew from Rice to devote herself to her writing, however, after one of her short stories was included in the annual Best American Short Stories. Oates’ short stories, which have won four O. Henry awards and numerous other prizes, have always been very well received and are believed by many critics to be her finest works. Oates’ first book, a collection of short stories titled By the North Gate, was published in 1963 to highly favorable reviews. Like her subsequent short story collections, the stories in By the North Gate were carefully selected for their unifying theme. The title story, for example, concerns the devastating effect that the murder of his dog has on an old man. The remaining stories also deal with the line between civilization and brutality. Her first novel, With Shuddering Fall, was published in 1964 and deals with a naive young woman’s stormy relationship with a race car driver. Although the novel received mixed reviews, Oates’ second collection of short stories, Upon the Sweeping Flood (1966) was published to wide acclaim. Oates’ skill as a writer continued to evolve with her next three novels, a trilogy exploring humanity’s desire to live free of economic and social constraints. The third book in the trilogy, Them (1969), follows a fictional working-class family in Detroit over four decades and won Oates the National Book Award, thereby establishing her reputation as an important writer. Many of Oates’ works, including Them, center on her characters’ use of violence as a tool in their quest for physical or emotional freedom. Them was only one of Oates’ novels set in Detroit, where she and her husband lived from 1962 to 1967 while she taught English at the University of Detroit. Oates’ first play, The Sweet Enemy (1965), was produced off Broadway while the couple lived in Detroit. Later plays were either published in book form or produced in a variety of cities, including Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and New Haven, Connecticut. After leaving Detroit, Oates and her husband moved to Ontario, Canada, where she became a professor of English at the University of Windsor. While there, Oates and her husband founded the Ontario Review, a book review journal of which the couple are still editors. Oates remained at the University of Windsor for over a decade before accepting a position as professor and writer-in-residence at Princeton University in 1978. She was still at Princeton in the late 1990s as the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of English. In addition to novels and short stories, Oates has also published quite a few volumes of verse. Her first book of poetry, Anonymous Sins, was published in 1969 and comprised both new poems and those already published in journals like Atlantic Monthly. This and subsequent volumes of poetry received mixed reviews, and it is generally thought that Oates’ gifts lie more in
OATES
drama than in verse. Her novels of the 1970s explore the struggles and triumphs of practitioners of professions as diverse as law, medicine, politics, and academia. Her short stories of this period, collections of which were published approximately every 18 months, contain equally vivid psychological portrayals. One of her most famous and frequently anthologized, ‘‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?,’’ was first published in 1966 and is considered a masterpiece of the short story form. The protagonist is Connie, a fifteen-year-old whose involvement with a mysterious older man reveals the dangers hiding just beneath the surface of ordinary life. Many of Oates’ short stories and novels have similar characters who unwittingly slip from the mundane into a nightmarish reality lurking just out of sight. Oates herself pays homage to oldfashioned gothics, in which the terror is always hiding on the next page or in the next chapter, with several blatantly gothic novels like Bellefleur (1980), A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982), and Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984). Oates switched gears in the late 1980s with Marya: A Life (1986) and You Must Remember This (1987). These books are both autobiographical coming-of-age novels set in upstate New York and representing, according to Oates, her rural and urban experiences. One of Oates’ most famous works, Because It is Bitter, and Because It is My Heart (1990), is also set in small-town New York and tells of the friendship between Jinx, a black teenager, and Iris, a younger white girl, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Jinx accidentally kills a boy who was harassing Iris and the two characters find that it is not as easy to escape their shared guilt and fear as it is to escape their hometown. Oates wrote several novels in the late 1980s and early 1990s utilizing the pseudonym Rosamond Smith, a feminization of her husband’s name, including: Lives of the Twins (1988), Soul/Mate (1989), Nemesis (1990), Snake Eyes (1992), and You Can’t Catch Me (1995). Although Oates reportedly claimed to be finished with her pseudonym after completing You Can’t Catch Me, she returned to it for Double Delight (1997) and Starr Bright Will Be With You Soon (1999). In Black Water (1993), which she wrote under her own name, Oates borrows a page from history to tell a Chappaquiddickesque tale of a young woman left to drown by a senator more frightened for his career than of his conscience. Oates was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for this haunting book, which is regarded as one of her finest. In 1994 Oates earned a very different honor when she received the Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement award for horror fiction. Oates revisited several formats for the first time in almost a decade in the late 1990s. George Bellows: American Artist (1995) was her first new nonfiction title in several years, while Tenderness (1996) was a new collection of poetry, and Come Meet the Muffin! (1998) was a new children’s book. She also continued in her role as editor and compiler of other writers’ works with titles like The Essential Dickinson (1996), Telling Stories: An Anthology for Writers (1998), and The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction, 2nd edition (1998).
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An award-winning and highly distinguished writer, Oates has published short story collections, novels, volumes of verse, nonfiction on a variety of topics, plays, and innumerable pieces in popular magazines and literary journals. The diversity displayed by her choice of format is matched only by the topics and characters in her considerable body of work. Her nonfiction works, for example, are on subjects as diverse as boxing, cats, and the poetry of D. H. Lawrence, while her fiction ranges from realistic, autobiographical portraits of everyday life to tales of gothic romance to stories of shocking physical and emotional violence. As Oates herself has said, ‘‘I have a laughably Balzacian ambition to get the whole world into a book.’’ OTHER WORKS: The Wheel of Love and Other Stories (1966). A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967). Expensive People (1967). Love and Its Derangements (1970). Wonderland (1971). Marriages and Infidelities (1972). The Edge of Impossibility: Tragic Forms in Literature (1972). The Hostile Sun: The Poetry of D. H. Lawrence (1973). Do With Me What You Will (1973). Angel Fire (1973). Dreaming America (1973). Scenes from American Life: Contemporary Short Fiction (editor, 1973). The Goddess and Other Women (1974). Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: Stories of Young America (1974). The Hungry Ghosts: Seven Allusive Comedies (1974). Love and Its Derangements and Other Poems (1974). New Heaven, New Earth: The Visionary Experience in Literature (1974). Miracle Play (1974). The Assassins: A Book of Hours (1975). The Poisoned Kiss and Other Stories from the Portuguese (1975). The Seduction and Other Stories (1975). The Fabulous Beasts (1975). Triumph of the Spider Monkey (1976). Childwold (1976). Crossing the Border: Fifteen Tales (1976). Night Side: Eighteen Tales (1977). Season of Peril (1977). Son of the Morning (1978). All the Good People I’ve Left Behind (1978). Women Whose Lives Are Food, Men Whose Lives Are Money (1978). The Stepfather (1978). Unholy Loves (1979). Cybele (1979). Best American Short Stories of 1979 (editor, 1979). The Lamb of Abyssalia (1980). Three Plays (1980). Angel of Light (1981). A Sentimental Education (1981). Celestial Timepiece (1981). Contraries: Essays (1981). Night Walks (editor, 1982). Invisible Woman: New and Selected Poems, 1970-1972 (1982). First Person Singular: Writers on Their Craft (editor, 1983). The Luxury of Sin (1983). The Profane Art: Essays and Reviews (1983). Last Days (1984). Wild Nights (1985). Solstice (1985). Story: Fictions Past and Present (editor, 1985). Raven’s Wing (1986). On Boxing (1987). Artist in Residence (1987). The Assignation (1988). (Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities (1988). Reading the Fights: The Best Writing About the Most Controversial of Sports (editor, 1988). Conversations with Joyce Carol Oates (1989). American Appetites (1989). Time Traveler (1989). Lock the Door Upon Myself (1990). The Rise of Life on Earth (1991). In Darkest America: Two Plays (1991). I Stand Before You Naked (1991). Twelve Plays (1991). The Best American Essays (editor, 1991). Where Is Here? (1992). Heat (1992). The Sophisticated Cat: A Gathering of Stories, Poems, and Miscellaneous Writings about Cats (editor, 1992). The Oxford Book of American Short Stories (editor, 1992). Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (1993). Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: Selected Early Stories (1993). What I Lived For
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(1994). Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque (1994). Zombie (1995). Will You Always Love Me? (1995). The Perfectionist and Other Plays (1995). Demon and Other Tales (1996). First Love (1996). We Were the Mulvaneys (1996). American Gothic Tales (editor, 1996). Man Crazy (1997). My Heart Laid Bare (1998). Collector of Hearts (1998). Tales of H. P. Lovecraft (editor, 1998). Broke Heart Blues (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Conversations with Joyce Carol Oates (1989). Joyce Carol Oates: An Annotated Bibliography (1986). Bellamy, J. D., ed., The New Fiction: Interviews with Innovative American Writers (1974). Creighton, J. V., Joyce Carol Oates (1979). Friedman, E. G., Joyce Carol Oates (1980). Grant, M. K., The Tragic Vision of Joyce Carol Oates (1978). Johnson, G., Invisible Writer: A Biography of Joyce Carol Oates (1999). Wagner, L. W., ed., Critical Essays on Joyce Carol Oates (1979). Waller, G. F., Dreaming America: Obsession and Transcendence in the Fiction of Joyce Carol Oates (1978). Reference works: Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature (1991). CANR (1989, 1995). CBY (1970, 1994). CLC 19 (1981), 33 (1985), 52 (1989). DLB 2 (1978), 5 (1980). DLBY (1981). Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd edition (1998). FC (1990). MTCW (1991). Other references: AL (1971, 1977). Boston Phoenix (June 1992). Commonweal (5 Dec. 1969). Critique 15 (1973). Georgia Review (Winter 1988). Michigan Quarterly Review (Fall 1983). New Statesman and Society (1 Sept. 1989). NYTBR (28 Sept. 1969). Paris Review 74 (1978). —LEAH J. SPARKS
OBEJAS, Achy Born 28 June 1956, Havana, Cuba Daughter of José and Alicia Fleites Obejas Cuban-born Achy Obejas came to the U.S. by boat with her family at the age of six. Upon their arrival, the family was sent to Indiana, where Obejas grew up in Michigan City. In 1993 she received a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina. A poet, fiction writer, and journalist, she has worked as a reporter in Chicago since the early 1980s. In addition to her weekly column for the Chicago Tribune, her articles also regularly appear in national publications like the Advocate, Ms., Latina, Out and Nation. She received the Studs Terkel Award for journalism in 1996. Obejas’ short stories and poetry have been widely anthologized in collections such as Cubana (1998), Little Havana Blues (1996), The Way We Write Now (1995), and Latina (1995). She was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing fellowship for poetry in 1986. Obejas’ characters are often the disenfranchised. Gay men and lesbians, junkies, abused wives, and people with AIDS speak
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from the margins of urban life in America. While her work gives voice to the outsider, it is a voice as often humorous as it is tragic. In her collection of short stories, We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This?, María de los Ángeles, the Puerto Rican narrator of ‘‘Forever,’’ states, ‘‘I’m a lesbian activist. Part of my job is to fall in love, over and over and over.’’ As she describes the decline of a relationship and subsequent therapy sessions, María says, ‘‘We’re good lesbians: we’ve been painfully breaking up for two years.’’ By story’s end, the comedy of the first line is echoed to reveal deeper, sadder truths: ‘‘We will all love the wrong people, over and over and over.’’ This mapping of the trajectory of relationships, whether between two women, two men, or a man and a woman, is a central theme in Obejas’ work. Eroticism is also boldly depicted in Obejas’ fiction, and issues of ethnic identity are at the forefront of the search for sexual fulfillment. In the title story of We Came All the Way from Cuba, the narrator, a Cuban American lesbian, alternates between scenes of her arrival at ten in the U.S., her parents’ inability to adapt to their daughter’s politics and lesbianism, and her own quest to find a lover who is like her. She describes her two blond lovers, then continues, ‘‘But the first time I make love with a Cuban, . . .she will say, Aaaaaayyyyyyaaaaaayyyyaaaaay, and lift me by my hair from between her legs, strings of saliva like sea foam between my mouth and her shiny curls. . . . And when she rests her head on my belly, her ear listening not to my heartbeat but to the fluttering of palm trees, she’ll sit up, place one hand on my throat, the other on my sex, and kiss me there, under my rib cage, around my navel, where I am softest and palest.’’ For the exile, the question of ‘‘What if?’’ looms large, and it is as haunting for the narrator as it has been for her parents: ‘‘The next morning, listening to her breathing in my arms, I will wonder how this could have happened, and if it would have happened at all if we’d stayed in Cuba.’’ Obejas’ first novel, Memory Mambo (1996), received the Lambda Literary Foundation award for fiction in 1997. Set in Chicago’s West Town, it deals with the unreliability of memory and the fictions people weave to make their own pasts more bearable. The main character, Juani Casas, may have been named after her island birthplace, which was originally called Juana by the Spaniards, or, as she suspects, for an old flame of her father’s. It all depends on whose story she chooses to believe. Her mother, who proudly professes the whiteness of her ancestry, urges her children always to walk on the shady side of the street to protect them from the sun that she knows will bring out their darkness and their true racial heritage. Juani’s father may indeed be the inventor of duct tape, his recipe stolen from him by a CIA plot, or he may simply be a delusional old man. Those who really know the truth, like her Uncle Raúl, who accidentally helped set the Cuban Revolution into motion because of his poor driving on the night of Fidel Casto’s raid on the Moncada barracks, are not talking. In the course of the novel, Juani, the truth-seeker, finds out that she, too, is capable of the worst kind of deception. And, ‘‘Lies,’’ says Juani, ‘‘destroy everything, but especially love.’’ Memory Mambo has been hailed as the first Latina lesbian novel and has opened the doors for many other ‘‘out’’ Latina writers to begin publishing their work.
OBERHOLTZER
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Smorkaloff, P. M., Contemporary Cuban Writers on and off the Island (1998). Zubiaurre, M., Chasqui: Revista de literatura latinoamericana (1999). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Lambda Book Report (1996). ‘‘Talk of the Nation,’’ National Public Radio (24 July 1997). —ANA ROCA AND HELENA ALONSO
OBERHOLTZER, Sara (Louisa) Vickers Born 20 May 1841, Uwchlan, Pennsylvania; died 2 February 1930, Germantown, Pennsylvania Daughter of Paxson and Ann Lewis Vickers; married John Oberholtzer, 1862; children: two sons The oldest of nine children, Sara Vickers Oberholtzer was raised in a Quaker family and attended Friends’ Boarding School and later Millersville State Normal School. In 1862 she married a Philadelphia merchant; they had two sons. Oberholtzer was a poet, novelist, and advocate of school savings banks. She supported numerous social and philanthropic activities and participated in the temperance movement. Violet Lee, and Other Poems (1873) is a collection of simple, unpretentious poems which treat themes of nature and ordinary life. Come for Arbutus, and Other Wild Bloom (1882) contains poems on the sentiments of joy and sorrow as well as commemorative poems on Lucretia Mott and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The volume is dedicated to John Greenleaf Whittier. The hymns, memorial poems, and seasonal poetry in Daisies of Verse (1886) are more somber than those in Souveniers of Occasions (1892), which are dedicated to her sons as the ‘‘joy-giving, living poems of my heart and life.’’ In Here and There: Songs of Land and Sea That Come to Me (1927), human sentiment is explored in its relation to land and sea. In this last, more highly focused collection of poems, Oberholtzer includes hymns and songs, poems translated from German, and a commemorative tribute to Frances Willard. Oberholtzer’s only novel, Hope’s Heart Bells (1884), is a story of 19th-century Quaker life in Chester County, Pennsylvania. The lives and loves of two young women provide the forum for a discussion of ideal love and marriage. Both Hope Willis, a trusting, patient, pure Quaker, and her cousin Nellie, a noble, energetic, and intellectual woman, reject the convention and sham of contemporary married life and the materialism which pervades society. Hope ultimately marries Gus Osborn, a childhood friend and son of her mother’s former sweetheart. Nellie, a doctor, marries a man who will allow her to work and will regard her as an equal. These are marriages of strength and purity that God, not man, has sealed. In 1888, Oberholtzer began to promote the establishment of school savings banks, a program to inculcate thrift in public
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school children. Under this program, involved teachers collected money weekly from students for deposit in local savings banks. Oberholtzer was both National and World Women’s Christian Temperance Union Superintendent of School Savings Banks, and for 16 years she edited and personally published Thrift Tidings (1907-23), a magazine for school savings bank advocates. In this publication and several pamphlets, the most famous of which was School Savings Banks (1914), Oberholtzer explained the history and value of the banks, published testimonials to their success, provided statistics on their development in the U.S. and abroad, and delineated various methods of collecting monies, tabulating deposits, and banking savings. Oberholtzer’s advocacy of school savings banks as well as her prolific output of sentimental poetry ensure her a place as a diverse, miscellaneous writer. Her most important artistic achievement was her novel, Hope’s Heart Bells, in which she not only portrays the uniqueness of 19th-century Quaker life but creates two strong female characters who by their rejection of contemporary mores exemplify the highest values of the Quaker tradition.
OTHER WORKS: Letters From Europe (1895).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Albig, W. E., A History of School Savings Banking (1928). Other references: NYT (4 Feb. 1930). —DANA GREENE
OEMLER, Marie Conway Born 29 May 1879, Savannah, Georgia; died 6 June 1932, Charleston, South Carolina Wrote under: Mrs. Marie Oemler Daughter of Richard H. and Helena Browne Conway; married John N. Oemler, 1910 Marie Conway Oemler was born, grew up, and married in Savannah. Her first publications were poems and short stories, which appeared in popular magazines of the day from 1907 through 1917, when Oemler turned from short works to the novel. Slippy McGee: Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man (1917) seemed unremarkable at first, but went through repeated printings. This was Oemler’s most popular novel, and it contains the elements which constitute both the popular appeal and the more serious aspect of her writing. Oemler’s success was in part attributable to her ability to exploit the popular taste for sensationalism, sentimentality, and conventional morality. The sensational element in Slippy McGee is found in the seamy background of the title character. The metamorphosis of Slippy McGee, formerly a successful ‘‘cracksman,’’ or burglar,
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into respectable John Flint is brought about by Father de Rancé, the Catholic priest in the small town of Appleboro, South Carolina. When Flint reverts to McGee in order to retrieve some sexually suggestive letters the heroine, in an adolescent fit of passion, had written to a former sweetheart, suspense is added to sensationalism. The love story between the heroine and the town’s crusading young lawyer provides the sentimentality. When this ideally perfect romance is threatened by blackmail, Flint’s burglary and heroic denial of his love for Mary Virginia permit its happy consummation, but Oemler alleviates the sentimentality by mixing praise and gently satiric condemnation in her comments about the South and southerners. She also quietly crusades for reform of the deplorable working conditions in southern factories and mills. This mixture of popular convention and serious comment is present in varying degrees in most of Oemler’s novels. Oemler deliberately appealed to the popular taste for sensationalism when she wrote some of her more exciting adventure scenes. There are ghosts, secret chambers, and a near rape (in A Woman Named Smith, 1919); forced marriage, adultery, and reconciliation (in The Purple Heights, 1920); a mysterious ‘‘brotherhood’’ that plots the assassination at Sarajevo, sexual assault, kidnapping, and near torture (in Two Shall Be Born, 1922); kidnapping, wife abuse, and a dramatic jungle rescue (in His Wifein-Law, 1925); and a labor riot and divorce (in Sheaves: A Comedy of Manners, 1928). At the same time, these and all of her novels contain romances which obey standard conventions of sentimentality and morality. Oemler’s most serious work is her historical, biographical novel, The Holy Lover (1927), about John Wesley’s career as a missionary at Savannah, Georgia. Quoting liberally from his personal diary, Oemler dramatizes the dissent created in the colony by his demand for rigid adherence to a strict moral and spiritual code. Although critics regarded this as a hopeful departure in her career, Oemler later reverted to her tried-and-true formula for popular fictions. As a writer of the fiction women read to fill their leisure hours, Oemler was quite successful. The novels containing a strong suspense plot read more easily today than those which rely more heavily on conventional romances, but even the latter are enlivened by occasional flashes of humor and adventure. OTHER WORKS: Where the Young Child Was, and Other Christmas Stories (1921). Shepherds (1926). Johnny Reb: A Story of South Carolina (1929). Flower of Thorn (1931). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Overton, G., The Women Who Make Our Novels (1928). Wynn, W. T., Southern Literature: Selections and Biographies (1932). Reference works: TCA. Other references: NYTBR (29 April 1917, 30 Nov. 1919, 24 Oct. 1920). SR (14 March 1925, 24 April 1926). —HARRIETTE CUTTINO BUCHANAN
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OLDER
OFFORD, Lenore Glen
Mystery Writers of America Edgar award for best criticism in 1951. She was also active in the Mystery Writers of America. Offord was given ‘‘titular investiture’’ into the Baker Street Irregulars (the American Sherlock Holmes society) as ‘‘The Old Russian Woman.’’ She was the first woman so honored.
Born 24 October 1905, Spokane, Washington; died 24 April 1991 Also wrote under: Theo Durrant Daughter of Robert and Catherine Grippen Glen; married Harold R. Offord, 1929, children: one daughter Lenore Glen Offord’s father was a newspaperman and her mother a piano teacher. Offord attended Mills College, where she graduated cum laude in 1925 with a degree in English. The next year, she attended the University of California at Berkeley. She experimented with writing short stories, dancing, dramatics, and running a rental library before producing her first novel, Murder on Russian Hill (1938). This mystery novel was well received by the critics. But before returning to detection, Offord would produce two nonmysteries: Cloth of Silver (1939), a romance with backbone (in which the heroine seeks wifely independence), and Angels Unaware (1940), a comedy of manners. In 1941, Offord returned to mystery with The Nine Dark Hours. The next year she produced a second mystery featuring the heroine of Murder on Russian Hill, Coco Hastings. This novel, Clues to Burn, is both a detective novel and a spoof of the formula. Skeleton Key (1943) introduced Georgine Wyeth and her soon-to-be-husband, Todd McKinnon, a crime ‘‘faction’’ writer, as amateur sleuths. All of Offord’s remaining mysteries, with the exception of My True Love Lies (1947), feature the McKinnons. Offord’s last published mystery novel, Walking Shadow (1959), involves McKinnon’s investigation of a murder/impersonation plot at the Ashland (Oregon) Shakespeare Festival. This unusual locale was inspired by the participation of Offord’s daughter, Judith, in the festival. Enchanted August (1956), her only novel for young adults, also focuses on the Ashland Festival. Offord’s mystery fiction is noted for its humor and characterization. Her light touch and humanity, plus a keen sense for domestic terror, have caused her to be labeled ‘‘a respectable member of the re-treaded Had-I-But-Known School.’’ Critics at once recognized the essential female character of her mysteries, and yet were self-conscious in their praise. It is as though they found it somehow surprising that a ‘‘feminine’’ mystery writer should show such skill and good sense. Offord’s mystery novels are both skillful and female in their use of women as focal characters, their compassionate (often reluctant) sleuths, and their effective use of suspense within a realistically drawn domestic setting. Over the years, Offord has written several accounts of actual crimes. In 1957, she collaborated with Joseph Henry Jackson in producing The Girl in the Belfry, about a 19th-century murder. Besides mystery fiction and true crime writing, Offord served the mystery genre as one of its most respected critics. From 1950 to 1982 Offord was the mystery critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, and is largely responsible for this paper receiving the
In recent years, Offord continued her critical career and produced some mystery-oriented light verse, including the oftenreprinted ‘‘Memoirs of a Mystery Critic.’’ Although she didn’t produce another novel after 1959, she remained one of America’s most charming and distinguished mysterywomen. OTHER WORKS: The Glass Mask (1944). The Smiling Tiger (1949). The Marble Forest (by T. Durrant, collectively written, 1951; film version, Macabre, 1958). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Catholic Authors (1948). Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (1995). —KATHLEEN L. MAIO
OLDER, Cora (Miranda) Baggerly Born 1875, Clyde, New York; died 26 September 1968, Los Gatos, California Wrote under: Mrs. Fremont Older Daughter of Peter and Margaret Baggerly; married Fremont Older, 1893 Cora Baggerly Older was a Syracuse University student on vacation when she met and married her journalist husband, who was soon fighting both corporations and labor as editor of the San Francisco Bulletin and later of the Call. In her early married years, Older wrote reviews, society news, and celebrity interviews for her husband’s paper. Her first novels were fictionalized versions of muckraking journalism. When the family moved to a ranch in the Santa Clara foothills in 1915, Older took charge of managing the property and its staff of paroled convicts. Older wrote in three distinct genres. Her early novels were social melodramas reflecting current events, like The Socialist and the Prince (1903), where Paul Stryne whips up resentment of cheap Chinese labor into a string of workingmen’s clubs, a paramilitary organization, and an enormous political influence, but ultimately loses all for a beautiful, self-willed society girl who flirts with socialism. The Giants (1905) plays off the free children of the West against the railroad-monopoly capital of the East. Esther Damon (1911) is mildly utopian. The hero, a Civil War veteran reduced to alcoholism through wartime pain and postwar bitterness, reforms and begins a cooperative community. His protegée wins her way back to a place in society after she has been ruined by her parents’ excessive Methodism and has had an illegitimate child.
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During this period, Older also wrote magazine articles on social questions, including a long account of the San Francisco graft prosecutions for McClure’s magazine. Her novels were, for the most part, condemned as too sensational, stark, and evident of purpose. Turning away from fiction, Older wrote plays (none of which have been published), and in the 1930s ‘‘authorized’’ and highly laudatory biographies of William Randolph Hearst (who was her husband’s employer) and his father George. Her last works took up the matter of California in a more sophisticated fashion. Savages and Saints (1936), a novel, two collections of short stories, and a book about San Francisco combine carefully researched history with fictionalized versions of the lives and legends of Hispanic and Anglo pioneers. Older’s style was not far removed from that of the dime novel. She wrote a spare, journalistic prose, with short simple sentences and abrupt paragraphs; she aroused emotion with predictable confrontations, duels, and love scenes played out on cliffs beside the sea during a thunderstorm. Yet although she shared the western naturalist’s admiration for the successful—even brutal— man, she also wrote about women who took action instead of simply being acted upon. Flirtatious, dependent, clinging women are assigned to the villainous role; happy women generally earn a place of their own before marrying. Many of the stories in California Missions and Their Romances (1938) and Love Stories of Old California (1940) tell of women who endured enormous hardship to keep the flames of religion and civilization alive in an unwelcoming land. OTHER WORKS: George Hearst, California Pioneer (with F. Older, 1933). William Randolph Hearst, American (1936). San Francisco: Magic City (1961). The diary of Cora Baggerly Older is in the Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Older, F., My Own Story (1926). Other references: Bancroftiana 59 (1974). NYT (29 Sept. 1965). Time (27 April 1936). —SALLY MITCHELL
OLDS, Sharon Born 19 November 1942, San Francisco, California Sharon Olds writes in the tradition of the confessional poets, especially of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, but has turned their poetic idiom to new purpose. Where Plath and Sexton bitterly denounced the state of affairs for women, they paradoxically sought haven in the persona of the crazy lady and threatened harm to themselves rather than the world. Olds speaks with similar energy, vividness, and emotional urgency about her life as a
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woman, as both daughter and mother, but seeks catharsis and healing rather than destruction of the self. The raw power of her poetry, which caused the critic David Leavitt to remark that ‘‘I was inclined to turn my eyes from the page,’’ is often leavened by a wry humor. Olds received a B.A. from Stanford University in 1964 and a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1972. She has taught poetry in many places, including the Theodor Herzl Institute, the Poetry Center at the YMCA in New York City, Goldwater Memorial Hospital (Roosevelt Island, New York), and at many colleges and universities, including Sarah Lawrence, Columbia, State University of New York at Purchase, and Brandeis. The Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts (1982-83) have awarded her fellowships. Satan Says (1980) received the San Francisco Poetry Center award in 1981, and The Dead and the Living (1984) was the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets for 1984 and received the National Book Critics Circle award in 1985. Love—erotic, maternal, and compassionate—lies at the heart of her poetic project. Rage lies there too, but rage is to be exorcised in relation to her own past and to be deployed in the present in defense of the vulnerable, like her own children and people caught in political violence. She can even rage in defense of the father, who has hurt her deeply. In ‘‘Late Poem to My Father,’’ she thinks of him as a child, ‘‘the / tiny bones inside his soul / twisted in greenstick fractures, the small / tendons that hold the heart in place / snapped. And what they did to you / you did not do to me.’’ Her fourth book, The Father (1992), is reminiscent of the deathwatch poetry of the 19th century. The poems lovingly and relentlessly detail the death of the father and the speaker’s care for him. Olds celebrates the body in the tradition of Walt Whitman. Sex, as human connection, regeneration, and a source of great energy, is sacred. Likewise, all the functions of the body, male and female, are sacred: menstruation, childbirth, dying, nursing, miscarriage. She revels in sexual life and in the sensual poem. In Olds’ world there are no dirty words; she uses the common names, ‘‘cock, sex, nipples,’’ and ‘‘fucking,’’ domesticates and reclaims them. In the short lyric ‘‘The Pope’s Penis,’’ the pope cannot repress his penis, but Olds converts failure into spiritual triumph: ‘‘and at night, / while his eyes sleep, it stands up / in praise of God.’’ This maternal and erotic love of the body determines Olds’ straightforward politic: love the body of the person, love the body of the world. To affirm the life of the human body stresses the preciousness of each and every life and our mutual belonging. Olds transforms William Carlos Williams’ famous imperative, as poet Linda McCarriston notes: ‘‘No ideas but in beings.’’ The poet asserts an intimate connection with others, no matter how distant, who are hurt. Olds’ refusal to maintain a conventional poetic distance from her subjects conveys what Alicia Ostriker calls a ‘‘tacit moral imperative.’’ She serves as a clear-eyed, compassionate witness; where others retreat behind irony, she confronts horror directly. Olds’ fifth collection, The Wellspring, continues the poetic exploration of her personal life found in her previous collections.
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In the nine years since her last collection, her children have grown up and her perspective has subtly changed. The savage quality of her poems, which perhaps began to ease in The Gold Cell, seems to have further abated. Not that her fierce attention has diminished; her sense of wonder and her imaginative scrutiny persist in full force, but with an increased sense of affection, wisdom, and humor. The Wellspring is another intimate portrait of Olds’ family as seen through various points in her life cycle. More than anything else, these portraits continue to demonstrate the physical urgency, the primacy, of the physical in human life; the title explicitly refers to this—a watery source of physical life. In The Gold Cell Olds laments her parents’ union in the poem ‘‘I Go Back to May 1937.’’ She wants to warn them how wrong they are for each other, the grief they will come to. Still, in her imagination she doesn’t intervene because, of course, she wants to live. In The Wellspring, Olds envisions a happier set of circumstances; rather than dwelling on her parents’ loveless sex, she imagines herself and her brother swimming in her father’s testicles; she imagines her mother at her own birth, ‘‘bearing down, pressing me out into / the world that was not enough for her without me in it.’’ This fascination with life’s beginnings can also be seen in the poem ‘‘May 1968.’’ Here, even as Olds lies in the street at a student protest, her attention shifts from the action above, namely advancing mounted police, to the drama within, where she is keenly aware of the life she holds there, the child she believes she’s conceived. Olds remains a clear-eyed witness to her own life. If her more recent poems seem to admit more light, perhaps it is because she has come to peace with her childhood and has chosen to step out of the dark tangle of her rage. OTHER WORKS: ‘‘George and Mary Oppen: Poetry and Friendship,’’ Ironwood (Fall, 1985). ‘‘Silenced Voices: Turkey-Ismail Besikci,’’ APR (July, 1986). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Matson, S., ‘‘Talking to Our Father: The Political and Mythical Appropriations of Adrienne Rich and Sharon Olds,’’ APR 18 (Nov.-Dec. 1989). Other References: American Book Review (Jan.-Feb. 1982). APR (Sept.-Oct. 1984). Booklist (1 Jan.1996). Georgia Review (Winter 1984). Iowa Review (Winter 1985). Nation (13 Oct. 1984). NYTBR (18 Mar. 1984, 11 Mar. 1987, 21 Mar. 1993, 14 Sept. 1996). Poetry (June 1981, Oct. 1984, Jan. 1987). VVLS (Mar. 1984). Virginia Quarterly Review (Aug. 1996). —NORA MITCHELL, UPDATED BY VALERIE VOGRIN
OLIPHANT, B. J. See TEPPER, Sheri S.
OLIVER
OLIVER, Mary Born 10 September 1935, Cleveland, Ohio Daughter of Edward William and Helen M. Vlasak Oliver At a time when critics increasingly regard ‘‘nature poetry’’ as an exhausted or outdated literary genre, Mary Oliver continues undaunted to explore the natural world in her poetry and prose. ‘‘It is one of the perils of our so-called civilized age that we do not yet acknowledge enough, or cherish enough, this connection between soul and landscape,’’ she wrote in a recent piece in Aperture (Winter 1998). ‘‘Without wilderness no fish could leap and flash, no deer could bound soft as eternal waters over the field; no bird could fly. Nor could we.’’ West Wind (1997) offers more of Oliver’s trademark meditations on flora and fauna. Like in her previous works, her intense yet simply formulated lyrics here evoke connections between their subject matter and the spiritual realm, as demonstrated in the penultimate verse of ‘‘Little Summer Poem Touching the Subject of Faith,’’ which reads: ‘‘And, therefore, let the immeasurable come. . . .How could I look at anything in this world / and tremble, and grip my hands over my heart? / What should I fear?’’ Winter Hours(1999), featuring Oliver’s most explicitly personal collection of poems and essays yet, examines the poet’s own work and the work of some of her favorite writers (Poe, Frost, Hopkins, and Whitman). ‘‘The Swan,’’ a commentary on Oliver’s poem of the same name that appeared in her earlier book House of Light (1990), provides perhaps one of the most incisive explanations of her poetic vision: ‘‘I want the poem to ask something and, at its best moments, I want the question to remain unanswered. I want it to be clear that answering the question is the reader’s part in an implicit author-reader pact. Last but not least, I want the poem to have a pulse, a breathiness, some moment of earthly delight.’’ Oliver holds the Catherine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College. It is perhaps her experience as a teacher that has inspired her in recent years to venture into producing books on how to write. A Poetry Handbook (1994), her reflections on the ‘‘craft’’ of writing, ‘‘is about the part of the poem that is a written document, as opposed to a mystical document.’’ Each brief chapter offers advice to the novice on subjects such as the devices of sound, form, and imagery. She also discusses the importance of reading other poets, providing examples of works by Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Frost, May Swenson, and others. Flashes of insight into the ‘‘mystical’’ side of poetry are not entirely absent, however: ‘‘Poetry is a life-cherishing force,’’ she writes. ‘‘And it requires a vision—a faith. . . .For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. Yes, indeed.’’ Oliver followed up A Poetry Handbook with Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse (1998). In addition to providing guidance to those poets wishing to pursue the form of metrical verse, one of her main intentions in writing the book was, she says, ‘‘to offer to readers of poetry a text
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and a commentary which would help them understand the metrical process: that is, not only how the metrical poem should be written, but how it should be read, or received by the reader.’’ The latter purpose is crucial because contemporary readers, ‘‘who don’t know an iamb from an anapest,’’ Oliver argues, ‘‘read the poem but they do not hear it sing, or slide, or slow down, or crush with the heel of sound, or leap off the line, or hurry, or sob, or refuse to move from the self-pride of the calm pentameter no matter what fire is rustling through it.’’ While Oliver’s moving yet accessible work has earned her a considerable following, particularly among women, the poet has recently come under criticism for her antipathy toward being labeled a feminist or lesbian writer. In 1993, for instance, she refused to allow her work to be included in Florence Howe’s anthology of 20th-century female poets, No More Masks!, because it consisted only of works by women. No less frustrating to Oliver’s feminist readers has been the fact that, although she is the longtime partner of her literary agent, Molly Malone Cook (to whom she dedicates her books), Oliver has only recently and reticently come out as a lesbian. But because ‘‘Oliver is one of the few contemporary poets with a sizable popular readership,’’ Sue Russell remarks, ‘‘it may be that her very popularity—which makes her an anomaly among poets—carries certain risks, so that the disclosure of that private layer of self would detract from the common denominator of her audience appeal.’’ OTHER WORKS: Blue Pastures (1995). White Pine (1994). Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Barrington, J., ‘‘Nostalgia Trip,’’ WRB (Mar. 1996). Russell, S., ‘‘Mary Oliver: The Poet and the Persona,’’ in Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review (Fall 1997). Reference works: CANR 43 (1994). CLC 98 (1997). Other references: America (13 Jan. 1996). Booklist (1 June 1998). Cross Currents (Spring 1996). LJ (15 Nov. 1995, July 1997, Aug. 1998). NYTBR (17 Dec. 1995). Parnassus (1996). Poetry (July 1993). PW (30 June 1997). —LAURA BRAHM
OLSEN, Tillie Born 14 January 1913, Omaha, Nebraska Daughter of Samuel and Ida Beber Lerner; married Jack Olsen, 1936 (died 1989); children: Karla, Julie, Katherine Jo, Laurie Tillie Olsen has been active on behalf of political, union, and feminist causes since her youth. As a member of the Young Communist League, she was jailed in Kansas City for her efforts to organize packinghouse workers. In 1932, ill with pleurisy, Olsen began work on a proletarian novel, Yonnondio, a chapter of which was enthusiastically received after publication in the Partisan Review in 1934. Olsen worked on the novel while continuing her political activities—in the San Francisco warehouse strike of
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1934 and the Spanish Civil War. Married in 1936 to a printer and union man, Olsen put aside her writing as she assumed her responsibilities as wife, mother of four daughters, and wage earner. Writing again in the 1950s, Olsen won the O. Henry Award for the best American short story of 1961 for ‘‘Tell Me a Riddle,’’ the title story of her first book. The Yonnondio manuscript, rediscovered by Olsen’s husband, was published in 1974 without rewriting or additions. Since that time Olsen has been active teaching writing and women’s studies and helping to rediscover and reprint the works of women writers. In Silences (1978), Olsen eloquently describes the loss to literature that occurs when great or potentially great writers are stunted by circumstances—especially of class, race, or sex— which often deny them the continuity and calm so conducive to creation. For women especially, Olsen argues, the discontinuity comes from the need and desire to nurture as well as the physical responsibilities for daily living. Olsen’s own experience and the excellence of her slender work lend credence to her argument. A powerful motive for Olsen’s writing is to give a voice to the inarticulate, to those that are silenced. She is unsurpassed in her power to make readers understand and empathize with the lives of people they have seen but have never known in their essential humanity. The elderly couple of ‘‘Tell Me a Riddle,’’ in facing the wife’s death from cancer, reevaluate their lives and affirm their idealism and love, despite years of bickering and betrayal which have divided them. As revolutionaries, Eva and David had fought and suffered for ‘‘that joyous certainty, that sense of mattering, of moving and being moved, of being one and indivisible with the great of the past, with all that freed, ennobled.’’ But in America, David has compromised his ideals, without achieving material success, and Eva has had to bury within herself her idealism and love of beauty as she responded to their poverty and the needs of their seven children. Eva’s fatal illness, kept secret from her, leads to a series of visits to children and grandchildren. Finally, aware of impending death, Eva can open herself again to beauty and idealism. Her delirious affirmations force David to confront his own betrayals and accept the burden of love imposed by his dying wife. ‘‘Hey Sailor, What Ship?’’ is the tragedy of an aging seaman. With his friend Lennie, Whitey has fought for brotherhood in early union battles, but the old spirit is dying, and drink and age are decaying him. Lennie’s family is Whitey’s only haven of love and the old values, but he realizes his behavior embarrasses the oldest child, and he leaves. Another story about Lennie’s family, ‘‘O Yes,’’ chronicles the separation of two ‘‘best friends’’—one white, one black—as they enter junior high school and respond to the ‘‘sorting’’ pressures exerted by their race and class. The mothers try to help, but when the white girl asks, ‘‘Oh why is it like it is and why do I have to care?’’ the mother silently responds, ‘‘. . .caring asks doing. It is a long baptism into the seas of humankind, my daughter. Better immersion than to live untouched.’’ Yonnondio: From the Thirties (1974) testifies to Olsen’s early and continuing commitment to give voice to the silent. Named after Walt Whitman’s lament for the Native Americans, the novel chronicles the struggles and aspirations of the Holbrook
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family. The vows of Anna and Jim to work for a decent life and a better chance for their children are ‘‘vows that life will never let them keep,’’ whether Jim works in a coal mine, on a tenant farm, or in sewer construction or packinghouse work. Illness, squalor, and despair poison the parents’ relationship and warp or maim their five children, but the urge to live and to fight nevertheless survives. Olsen’s ability to create and explain character, to involve and move the reader, is coupled with an ear for everyday cadences and the lyricism of unvoiced aspirations. She portrays the victories of the human spirit—not grand in the absolute height achieved, but inspiring because of the awesomeness of the forces to be battled. During her career, she has often had to balance her writing against these other responsibilities, particularly motherhood. Never a prolific writer, part of Olsen’s lasting appeal has been the struggle she has gone through to continue writing. She has published little since Silences (1978), but she has become increasingly the subject of critical attention. Mother and Daughter, Daughter to Mother: A Daybook and Reader (1984) consists of a daily calendar and monthly readings selected by Olsen. The collection also contains an essay in which she recounts the circumstances leading up to her mother’s death. In her hands, this potentially depressing scenario becomes instead an inspirational scene, as she is able to see within her mother’s dream visions signs of the wisdom she had obtained throughout a difficult life. It is this well-earned knowledge that Olsen keeps as her mother’s legacy. Similarly, in an introduction to Mothers and Daughters, That Special Quality: An Exploration in Photographs (1987, with Julie Olsen Edwards) Olsen celebrates the special bond between mothers and daughters. She finds ‘‘this crucial relationship still veiled in the unseen, the unexpressed, the unarticulated.’’ In commenting on the photographs, Olsen wishes for more pictures of women engaged in everyday activities, believing it is these commonplace, shared experiences ‘‘which create, condition the relationship.’’ Olsen has continued to lecture and promote the rediscovery and publication of women’s writing in the later 1980s and 1990s. She has written very little for a public reading audience since editing the publication of two mother-and-daughter volumes, though a short piece in Newsweek (3 January 1994) appeared, commemorating the magazine’s first 60 years, in which she considers the Depression era of the 1930s. ‘‘Tell Me a Riddle,’’ the title story from the much acclaimed collection of the same name (1963), continues to be reproduced and anthologized in a number of important collections of works by Jewish American writers, including American Jewish Fiction, edited by Gerald Shapiro (1998). In it, an elderly immigrant Jewish woman, dying of cancer, must come to terms with the disappointments and emotional entanglements of social and economic life in America. ‘‘I Stand Here Ironing,’’ another often anthologized short story collected in the same volume, is powerfully told in the form of an internal monologue, and speaks to the difficulties of a single mother in raising children. The play version of ‘‘I Stand Here Ironing’’ was produced in New York in 1981, and ‘‘Tell Me a Riddle’’ was adapted for film (Filmways, 1980).
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The relatively small number of published works of fiction has not prevented Olsen’s work from continuing to be the source of extensive literary criticism and analysis, especially but not limited to her place in the long-standing tradition of fiction by American Jewish women. Two such compendia include the notable America and I: Short Stories by American Jewish Women Writers, edited by Joyce Antler (1990), and Jewish American Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical and Critical Sourcebook, edited by Ann R. Shapiro (1994). Througout her career, Olsen has received a number of honorary degrees, awards, and university fellowships. Her husband, Jack Olsen, died in 1989; Olsen continues to live in California near her daughters and grandchildren. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Blumberg, B. L., ‘‘A Voice of Their Own’’: An Inquiry into the Theme of the Discovery of the True Self in the Writings of Helen Yglesias, Muriel Rukeyser, and Tillie Olsen (thesis, 1982). Davis, L. and M B. Mirabella, eds., Left Politics and the Literary Profession (1990). Frye, J., Tillie Olsen (1994). Kamel, R. W., Aggravating the Conscience: Jewish-American Literary Mothers in the Promised Land (1988). Martin, A., Tillie Olsen (1984). Meese, E., Crossing the Double Cross (1986). Orr, E. N., Tillie Olsen and a Feminist Spiritual Vision (1987). Pearlman, M, ed., Mother Puzzles (1989). Pearlman, M. and A. P. Werlock, Tillie Olsen (1991). Reference works: CANR (1981, 1994). CLC (1980). DLB (1984). DLBY (1981). FC (1990). MTCW (1991). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: MELUS (Fall 1997). Studies in American Fiction (Autumn 1993). Studies in Short Fiction (Fall 1990). Texas Studies in Literature and Language (Winter 1993). Twentieth-Century Literature (Fall 1998). —HELEN J. SCHWARTZ, UPDATED BY JAMES O’LOUGHLIN AND VICTORIA AARONS
ORDE, A. J. See TEPPER, Sheri S.
ORTIZ COFER, Judith Born 24 February 1952, Hormigueros, Puerto Rico Daughter of Jesús Ortiz Lugo and Fanny Morot Ortiz; married Charles J. Cofer, 1971; children: Tanya Judith Ortiz Cofer moved from Puerto Rico to Paterson, New Jersey, in 1956 when her father enlisted in the U.S. Navy. Jesús Ortiz Lugo frequently traveled to Europe with the cargo fleet and sent his family back to Puerto Rico during these prolonged absences. Consequently, Ortiz Cofer grew up in several cultures:
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peasant Puerto Rican society, the immigrant America of her tenement home, and the white middle class world of her American Catholic school. Her poetry, novel, and memoirs reflect her need to reconcile her disparate and at times conflicting self-identities. Her parents finally settled in Augusta, Georgia, where she attended high school and college. Subsequently, she earned an M.A. in English at Florida Atlantic University (1977) and a scholarship to study at Oxford University. She has been a member of the Bread Loaf Writers Association teaching staff since 1991 and an assistant professor of English and creative writing at the University of Georgia since 1992. Ortiz Cofer’s works usually describe Puerto Rican women—in Puerto Rico and in the United States—surviving harshly limited lives in either or both settings. Marisol, the semiautobiographical figure in The Line of the Sun (1989), must learn to make sense of two Americas, the ‘‘exclusive club’’ of her Puerto Rican tenement ‘‘expatriates’’ and the ‘‘white middle class world’’ of her classmates. In Puerto Rico, peasant women are burdened by poverty and large families, and often rejected from society. These characters endure ugly conditions yet they develop lives with an increasingly rich sense of human strength: ‘‘We are like the dead, / invisible to those who do not / want to see / and our only protection against / the killing silence of their eyes is color. / . . .we will build our cities of light, / we will carve them / out of the granite of their hatred / with our own brown hands’’ (‘‘What the Gypsy Said to Her Children,’’ Reaching for the Mainland, 1987). Like her metaphors, stories about the past give Ortiz Cofer’s characters a nearly visible foundation that extends with time and generations. Praising Silent Dancing (1990), Aurora Levins Morales warmly claimed, ‘‘For Puerto Rican women in the U.S. controlling language, telling our own stories, is central to our sense of territory, of having a place in the world.’’ In this book, Morales said, she ‘‘has told a piece of our common story, added another room to our house.’’ In this loosely autobiographical collection of short stories and poetry, Ortiz Cofer highlights the African as well as Spanish aspects of Puerto Rican culture. Her characters practice Santeria, the mixture of African spiritism and Western religion. They worship the Black Virgin at the church shrine in Hormigueros. ‘‘Being a woman and black made Our Lady the perfect depository for the hopes and prayers of the sick, the weak and the powerless,’’ Ortiz Cofer notes in the book. Silent Dancing resulted from an attempt to understand how she ‘‘came to be a writer,’’ she says. Similarly, Marisol in The Line of the Sun searches for an identity by writing a story. The first half of the novel depicts the childhood of her mother, father, and unconventional uncle in Puerto Rico. Marisol completes her story, soothed by the realization that ‘‘the only way to understand a life is to write it as a story, to fill in the blanks left by circumstance, lapse of memory, and failed communication.’’ Ortiz Cofer thus suggests that through writing one can construct a history and an identity perhaps not yet recognized: ‘‘I wish I could write a poem. . .that would make you want to get up in / the middle of the night to search for things / you didn’t know were lost’’ (‘‘A Poem,’’ Reaching for the Mainland). Ortiz Cofer writes in English, but an elusive future grammatically anticipated allows Reaching for the Mainland (her first
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commercial book), a collection of poems depicting loss and alienation within American and Puerto Rican society, to conclude with lyrically echoing hope: ‘‘In Spanish the conditional tense is the tense of dreamers / of philosophers, fools, drunkards / of widows, new mothers, small children / of old people, cripples, saints, and poets. / It is the grammar of expectation / and the formula for hope: cantaría, amaría, viviría. / Please repeat after me’’ (‘‘Lesson One: I Would Sing’’). In Terms of Survival, another book of poetry published in 1987, Ortiz Cofer confronts her poetic dialectic of survival. A cultural legacy, and her desire to be released from rituals associated with women, take root in tropical imagery. In 1996 she published her sixth book, An Island Like You: Stories of the Barrio, and in 1998, The Year of Our Revolution: New and Selected Stories and Poems. Of the few Puerto Rican women who began publishing in the early 1980s, Ortiz Cofer is the one who has most consistently endured, and worked in several genres—fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Her early novel The Line of the Sun has been called the most complex of the few novels by Puerto Rican women (writing in English) published in the 1980s. She has been compared to her critically acclaimed compatriot, Rosario Ferré, who remains living on the island and writes in Spanish. Ortiz Cofer received a PEN/Martha Albrand Special Citation in nonfiction for her book Silent Dancing, which was also chosen as a Best Book for the Teen Years in 1991 by the New York Public Library. Her novel The Line of the Sun was selected in 1989 by the New York Public Library as one of 25 Books to Remember. Ortiz Cofer is a recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. She attributes her writing talents to ‘‘the spoken word’’ and, most particularly, to the stories of her grandmother, although she did not begin writing poetry until she was an adult. Since 1992 Ortiz Cofer has been teaching full time at the University of Georgia, having previously been a part-time lecturer there for several years. Her poems and short stories have appeared in many journals, including Antioch Review, Kenyon Review, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, and Southern Exposure, and anthologies such as Best American Essays, The Norton Book of Women’s Lives, The Pushcart Prize anthology, the O. Henry Prize Stories, and others. OTHER WORKS: The Latin Deli: Prose and Poetry (1993). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Corpi, Lucha, ed., Máscaras (1997). Howard, E., ed., Issues and Identity in Literature (1997). McCracken, E., New Latina Narrative: The Feminine Space of Postmodern Ethnicity (1999). Zimmerman, M., U.S. Latino Literature: An Essay and Annotated Bibliography (1992). Reference works: Biographical Dictionary of Hispanic Literature in the U.S. (1989). CANR (1991). Hispanic Writers (1990). Who’s Who in Hispanic Americans (1991, 1992). Who’s Who in Writers, Editors, Poets (1989). Other references: LATBR (6 Aug. 1989). NYTBR (24 Sept. 1989). Reader’s Companion to the American Short Story (1998).
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Women on the Edge: Ethnicity and Gender in Short Stories by American Women (1998). WRB (July 1989, Dec. 1990). —PAMELA VASQUEZ AND ELIZABETH COONROD MARTINEZ
ORVIS, Marianne Dwight Born 4 April 1816, Boston, Massachusetts; died 12 December 1901, Boston, Massachusetts Wrote under: Marianne Dwight Daughter of John and Mary Corey Dwight; married John Orvis, 1846; children: two Marianne Dwight Orvis, the second of four children, lived the first 28 years of her life at the family home in Boston. After receiving a strong liberal arts education, she worked for some time as an assistant and later as a preceptress in Mr. Bailey’s High School for Young Ladies in Boston. In 1844, Orvis and her family moved to the Brook Farm community. In her first weeks at the farm, Orvis tried various occupations. She finally chose to teach drawing and assist her brother in teaching Latin. To increase the income of the farm, she devoted much of her time to painting lampshades, fans, and pictures of wild flowers. In her later years at the farm, Orvis spent most of her energy in the school, where she had been elected chief of the teachers’ group. Orvis contributed much to the life of the community through her artistic ability, her devotion to the school, and her belief in association, but her real legacy is her correspondence, published in 1928 as Letters from Brook Farm, 1844-1847. A few of the letters were directed to her brother Frank, who worked for an architect in Boston, but most were written to Anna Q. T. Parsons of Boston, a reader of characters and the founder of the Boston Women’s Associative Union, or Women’s Exchange. As the editor of the correspondence points out, it represents ‘‘the only considerable body of letters now in existence which were written on the spot by a member of the Brook Farm community with the definite intention of describing the life of the place.’’ Although they cover the years from 1844 to 1847 only, the letters give an enthusiastic first-hand account of Brook Farm as it passed from its early structure to an adaptation of a Fourierist phalanx. The letters reveal their author as a joyful, sensitive, yet realistic person, and they show life at the farm as physically, mentally, and culturally vigorous. A typical early letter (27 April 1844) describes the freedom of interpersonal relations among the young: ‘‘we had company come in (up in our room). . .and were drawn into playing whist and talking till eleven o’clock, which in these working days, is as late an hour as I like to keep. Evening before last went into the Pine Woods about sunset. . . . We threw ourselves upon our backs, Dora, Frederick and I, and whilst the
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rest walked on, and finally walked home, we staid (imprudent children) and talked till about nine o’clock when the dampness warned us home.’’ A letter written later in the same year (30 August 1844) states: ‘‘Women must become producers of marketable articles; women must make money and earn their support independently of man. . . . Raise woman to be the equal of man, and what intellectual developments may we not expect? How the whole aspect of society will be changed!’’ This serious, feminist tone pervades the remaining letters. Orvis records with enthusiasm the visits of people like Margaret Fuller, Theodore Parker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Owen, Albert Brisbane, and W. H. Channing. One group of letters written in October 1845 stands as the only explicit record of the period during which Channing led a core group of the community through a deeply spiritual phase. Channing also served as the presiding minister at the marriage of John and Marianne Orvis on Christmas Eve 1846. After leaving Brook Farm, the Orvises settled in Jamaica Plain, Boston, where their two children were born. Although Orvis was not a literary person in the strict sense of the term, her Letters from Brook Farm, 1844-1847 contains some of the most delightful feminist writing of the first half of the 19th century. The volume also serves as one of the most important documents of the Brook Farm community. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Codman, J. T., Brook Farm: Historical and Personal Memoirs (1894). Cook, T. W., John Sullivan Dwight, Brook-Farmer, Editor, and Critic of Music: A Biography (1898). Curtis, E. R., A Season in Utopia: The Story of Brook Farm (1961). Orvis, F. W., A History of the Orvis Family in America (1922). Swift, L., Brook Farm: Its Members, Scholars, and Visitors (1961). Other references: Independent (1 Sept. 1928). Times Literary Supplement (4 Oct. 1928). NYTBR (26 Aug. 1928). —LUCY FREIBERT
OSBEY, Brenda Marie Born 12 December 1957, New Orleans, Louisiana Daughter of Lawrence (Sr.) and Lois Hamilton Osbey A native of New Orleans, Brenda Osbey grew up in seventh ward, the largest downtown black community in the city, and attended McDonogh 35, an all-black examination high school in Faubourg Tremé. The area next to the French Quarter, Tremé had once been the site of Congo Square where before the Civil War, slaves congregated, practiced their religions, and carried on what recreation was allowed them. The area was also the focus of free black life in the city. Osbey attended Dillard University (B.A. 1978), a historically black college, and the Université Paul Valéry at Montpellier, France. In 1986 she received an M.A. from the University of Kentucky.
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Writer in residence at Loyola University in New Orleans since 1989, Osbey has taught at Dillard University and the University of California at Los Angeles. She has been a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony, and the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College. A writer of narrative poetry, Osbey has published three books to critical acclaim. In 1980 she won the Academy of American Poets Loring-Williams Prize; in 1984 she was honored with an Associated Writing Programs Award; and in 1990 won an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship. Her first book of poetry, Ceremony for Minneconjoux: Poems (1983), is about the women of New Orleans, and it is their voices that are heard in the poems. There is Lavinia, who lives in the tan house on Calliope Street and sings, as she says, ‘‘to tell the truth as i know it.’’ And there is Minneconjoux whose mother named her ‘‘so that people would not mistake / her indian blood.’’ The women—Eliza, Minneconjoux, Ramona Véagis (‘‘who fell off the earth in 1916’’), Eileen—make connections with each other and with women from other generations. In their stories there is a map of the city and a tapestry of black New Orleans life. In These Houses (1988) speaks again for generations of women. As in her earlier book, Osbey depends on many of the oral traditions of black New Orleans, and she appends a glossary to clarify phrases and to highlight the special traditions of the city. Divided into three sections, ‘‘Houses of the Swift Easy Women,’’ ‘‘House of Mercies,’’ and ‘‘House of Bones,’’ the book is a chronicle of the spiritual lives of women, and hoodoo, or voodoo, is evident not simply in rituals but in the spiritual care people take of one another. Elvena in her madness has lost touch with her neighbors, as Ramona Véagis did in ‘‘Ceremony.’’ It is the work of mothers or healers, central figures in Osbey’s poems, to bring them back to the community. As with the women, the houses have stories: if ‘‘you go inside for the first time / its stories come out to meet you.’’ In the final poem in the book, Osbey sums up the intensely spiritual nature of the lives of women and urges her readers to connect themselves to houses: ‘‘this is the house / i have carried inside me / this is the house / made of artifact and gut / this is the house / all my bones have come from / this is the house / nothing / nothing / nothing can tear down.’’ Bodies and souls are one in the house of life, and nothing can destroy the spirit of the powerful women whom Osbey portrays. Desperate Circumstance, Dangerous Women (1991) is a long narrative poem set, as is much of Osbey’s poetry, in the Faubourg Tremé. The speaker of the poem asks at the beginning, ‘‘do you know what hunger is?’’ and sets the tone for the rest of the narrative. It is the story of mothers and daughters, women and lovers; it is the story of rituals that heal and those that destroy; it is the story of obsession and loss; and finally, it is the story of the Faubourg and its ‘‘slave-bricked streets’’ and the rains that threaten to wash it all away. All of Osbey’s poetry is redolent with a sense of place and time passing. Past and present mingle in the lives of her women and in the vibrant and exotic life of the city. It is in her memories
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that Osbey conjures up race memories of the Faubourg and of its people. OTHER WORKS: All Saints: New and Selected Poems (1997). BIBLIOGRAPHY: American Book Review (April 1992). Louisiana Lit. (Fall 1987). Mississippi Quarterly (interview, Winter 1986-87). Parnassus (1985, 1992). Southern Review (Fall, 1994). —MARY A. MCCAY
OSBORN, Sarah Born 22 February 1714, London, England; died 2 August 1796, Newport, Rhode Island Daughter of Benjamin and Susanna Haggar; married Samuel Wheaton, 1731 (died); Henry Osborn, 1742; children: one Sarah Osborn emigrated to America with her family in 1722. They first settled in Boston, Massachusetts, and later moved to Newport, Rhode Island, where Osborn spent the remainder of her life. In Newport, she met and married a seaman, who was lost at sea in November 1733. Osborn cared for their child alone, sometimes through great hardships, until she remarried. Osborn was admitted to the Congregationalist church in Newport in 1737, an event of great significance to a Puritan in the early part of the 18th century. Her spiritual autobiography, The Nature, Certainty, and Evidence of True Christianity (1755), was evidently written in retrospect over a 10-year period from 1743 to 1753. It was originally couched in terms of a letter from one friend to another ‘‘in great Concern of Soul.’’ This 15-page work reappeared in later editions and reprints in 1793, and apparently was expanded by or with the help of her minister, Samuel Hopkins, as Memoirs of the Life of Mrs. Sarah Osborn (1799). The Life was meant as an example of piety for a younger generation. Osborn’s work is characterized by foreshadowings of the sentimental, moralistic fiction of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The work is replete with tear-stained emotion and signs of her sensibility. Osborn’s moments of doubt are linked to hysterics and excessive agitation. She relates how she could neither eat nor sleep for a week after Satan had suggested to her that the state of her soul was hopeless. Typically, Osborn weeps when asking her minister for church admittance, a change from the austere intellectualizing of earlier spiritual autobiographies by New England women. Osborn’s writing evidences a notable stylistic as well as contextual change from earlier spiritual autobiographies. In her conscious attempt to tell a life story, she increases the cast of characters to include not only the self, the savior, and the devil, but also family, friends, ministers, and various incidental personages.
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She includes a variety of incidents and events to carry the story forward; thus, while the narrative still focuses on her saving experience, it is broadened to contain plot, action, and dialogue. There is even an echo of the English novel of sentiment. Osborn shows an ambitious desire to create a lengthy, complex story. As such, her memoirs have importance. Although the content often appears unexceptional or repetitive to the modern reader, it stands out as an early attempt by a woman writer to use available, socially acceptable materials to fabricate a readable and entertaining story. —JACQUELINE HORNSTEIN
OSGOOD, Frances Sargent (Locke) Born 18 June 1811, Boston, Massachusetts; died 12 May 1850, New York, New York Wrote under: Ellen, Florence, Kate Carol Daughter of Joseph and Mary Foster Locke; married Samuel S. Osgood, 1835 Frances Sargent Osgood was the daughter of a Boston merchant. She was educated primarily at home. Osgood’s parents encouraged her to write, and she also benefitted especially from the influence of a half-sister, Anna Maria Foster Wells, and an older brother, Andrew Aitchison Locke, both of whom became writers. Osgood began publishing verse at the age of fourteen in the first American children’s monthly, Juvenile Miscellany. Osgood lived in England (1835-40) with her husband, an artist; her success there in turn commended her to readers at home. She was estranged from her husband in 1844, but they were reconciled, even though there was much gossip about her literary ‘‘romance’’ with Edgar Allan Poe. The major subject of Osgood’s poetry and prose sketches is the relationship between men and women. Love—passionate, spiritual, seductive, secret, instant, eternal, consummated, holy, pious, true, false, forbidden, self-denying, transforming, transcendent, destructive—receives such a variety of expression it cloys the appetite. Although she is adept in the traditional forms—songs, sonnets, ballads, rhymed narratives, and dramatic blank verse—her meters often lack the force or tension of the inevitable line; her rhymes are conventional, so blank verse is her best measure. Osgood frequently runs symbol and abstraction together. The poems are customarily straightforward; emotions are often stated directly. More interesting are Osgood’s verses about children. Several of the poems describe her own daughters: one of them sleeping with ‘‘beautiful abandonment’’ on a downy carpet; Fanny smiling for the first time; May trying to lift the sun’s rays, or inquisitively playing with a watch. The best of these poems is ‘‘A Sketch,’’ which describes two little careless girls—their straw bonnets
flung among the leaves—as, silent with delight, they make garlands for one another, and think of nothing but their own sweet play. It is also in poems about children and their fate that Osgood reveals a view of life she rarely allowed herself to express. In ‘‘The Daughter of Herodias,’’ Osgood imagines Salomé, a light and blooming child, without trouble or care, suddenly bewildered and terror-struck as her revengeful mother snares her in an unspeakable woe. The change in Salomé’s character is dramatically realized: ‘‘Now, reckless, in her grief she goes / A woman stern and wild.’’ Chilled with fear, the once thoughtless girl curses her fatal grace. During a period of literary nationalism, as well as an age of sentiment, Osgood was the most popular and most admired of American women poets. There is little of excruciating or evil design in her work; she wished ‘‘to live in blessed illusion.’’ As a writer, she idealizes almost every image and sentiment that engages her attention. But Osgood deserves the appreciation she enjoyed for her verses about children. OTHER WORKS: Philosophical Enigmas (circa 1830). A Wreath of Wild Flowers from New England (1838, reissued as Poems, 1846). The Casket of Fate (1839). Flower Gift (1840, reissued as The Poetry of Flowers and the Flowers of Poetry, 1841, reissued again as The Floral Offering, 1847). The Rose: Sketches in Verse (1842). The Snow-Drop (circa 1842). Puss in Boots, and the Marquis of Carabas (1844). The Flower Alphabet in Gold and Colors (1845). The Cries of New York (1846). A Letter About Lions (1849). Poems (1849, reissued as Osgood’s Poetical Works, 1880). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hewitt, M. E., ed., The Memorial: Written by Friends of the Late Mrs. Osgood (1851). Griswold, R. W., ed., The Literati by E. A. Poe (1850). Mabbott, T. O., Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Poems I (1969). Moss, S. P., Poe’s Literary Battles (1963). Quinn, A. H., Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (1941). Reference works: American Female Poets (1848). FPA. NAW (1971). The Poets and Poetry of America (1847). Other references: Godey’s (March 1846, Sept. 1846). Graham’s (Jan. 1843). Southern Literary Messenger (Aug. 1849). —ELIZABETH PHILLIPS
OSTENSO, Martha Born 17 September 1900, Haukland, near Bergen, Norway; died 24 November 1963, Seattle, Washington Daughter of Sigurd B. and Lena Tungeland Ostenso; married Douglas Durkin, 1944 Martha Ostenso was born in a small village high in the mountains of Norway, and immigrated to the U.S. with her
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parents when she was two. Her childhood was spent in small towns in both Minnesota and South Dakota, where she first learned to speak English and, more importantly, where she developed an ear for the Scandinavian dialects of the Midwest, which she would later incorporate into her fiction. While she was still in her early teens, her father moved the family to Canada where they settled in Manitoba. Ostenso attended Brandon Collegiate School and in 1918 entered the University of Manitoba. Following graduation, she spent a year (1921-22) at Columbia University, where she studied the ‘‘technique of the novel’’ with Douglas Durkin, with whom she lived for many years and eventually married. From 1920 to 1923 she was a social worker in Brooklyn. Yet what proved to have the greatest effect on her as a writer were her childhood years in the Midwest and then on Canada’s northern frontier. In those rugged and at times harsh environments Ostenso developed a deep appreciation for the men and women whose lives were spent working the land. Ostenso’s writing career began in 1924 with the publication of A Far Land, a book of verse. The following year she published two works of fiction, one of which was to become her most successful and highly regarded work, Wild Geese (1925, reprinted 1989). Its inspiration was the lake district of Manitoba: ‘‘Here was human nature stark, unattired in the convention of a smoother, softer life.’’ Although none of her later novels ever reached the acclaim Wild Geese attracted, most continued to explore a similar theme: the relationship between human beings and the land they work. Wild Geese centers on the Gares and their struggle to reach a balance between making a living off the land and allowing their lives to become consumed by it. The family is headed by a domineering father who pushes his family to sacrifice everything to the farm. The women, particularly his daughter Judith, truly understand the cost to the family. ‘‘Living only for the earth, and the product of the soil, they were meager and warped.’’ A Man Had Tall Sons (1958) also focuses on a domineering father; like Caleb, Luke is just as willing to sacrifice the happiness of his family for the sake of running the farm. The novel ends with the death of his son Mark. At the graveside, Luke quotes Whitman, for his son’s death illustrates the cyclical process of nature: ‘‘You will be given to the earth again and you will grow in beauty.’’ Like Willa Cather, Ostenso portrays the lives of rural immigrants with dignity and respect and examines the ‘‘strange unity between the nature of man and earth.’’ By the end of her career, Ostenso had published 16 works of fiction and a biography, And They Shall Walk: The Life Story of Sister Elizabeth Kenny (1943), which like a number of her other works was translated and reprinted several times. OTHER WORKS: The Passionate Flight (1925). The Dark Dawn (1926). The Mad Carews (1927). The Young May Moon (1929). The Water’s under the Earth (1930). Prologue to Love (1932). There’s Always Another Year (1933). The White Reef (1934). The Stone Field (1937). The Mandrake Root (1938). Love Passed This
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Way (1942). O River Remember! (1943). The Sunset Tree (1943). Milk Route (1948). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Arnason, D., The Development of Prairie Realism: Robert J. Stead, Douglas Durkin, Martha Ostenso and Frederick Philip Grove (dissertation, 1981). Atherton, S. S., Martha Ostenso and Her Works (1991). Baldwin, C. C., Martha Ostenso: Daughter of the Vikings (1983). Harrison, D., Unnamed Country (1977). Northey, M., The Haunted Wilderness (1976). Stanko, S. C., Image, Theme, and Pattern in the Works of Martha Ostenso (dissertation, 1968). Reference works: CA: Canadian Novelists, 1920-1945 (1946). DLB (1990). FC (1990). TCA (1942, 1955). —CHRISTINE O’CONNOR
OSTRIKER, Alicia Born 11 November 1937, Brooklyn, New York Daughter of David S. and Beatrice Linnick Suskin; married Jeremiah Ostriker, 1958; children: Rebecca, Eve, Gabriel It would be impossible to hierarchize the influences on Alicia Ostriker’s work, but the poetry and thought of William Blake has been a significant and consistent one throughout her career as a poet and critic. Blake, whom she calls a ‘‘rule-breaker and revolutionary,’’ had the courage and vision that for Ostriker clearly characterize the best and most challenging poetry. Raised in Manhattan, one of two daughters of working class Jewish parents, Ostriker did not always want to be a poet. Although her mother had read poetry to her throughout her childhood, and though she had written poetry since she was old enough to write, she first wanted to be a visual artist. By the time she graduated from Brandeis University in 1959, however, she knew that she wanted to do further work in English literature. In 1965, having received her M.A. (1961) and Ph.D. (1964) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Ostriker was hired to teach literature and creative writing in the English Department at Rutgers University, where she is currently a full professor. Ostriker’s dissertation, Vision and Verse in William Blake (1965, reprinted 1982), became the first of her full-length critical studies. At that time, she also looked to a number of other poets as models, including Keats, Whitman, and W. H. Auden. As varied as they were, all of the poets whose work she then admired were men. Like many women poets of her generation, Ostriker’s work was radically influenced in the 1970s by the women’s movement and the new recognition it gave to women poets like H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton. In their work and the work of such contemporaries as Adrienne Rich, Lucille Clifton, May Swenson, and June Jordan, Ostriker found complexity and challenge comparable to the work of Blake. She also found themes, motifs, and language that helped her begin to theorize a distinctly feminine sensibility in American poetry.
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Ostriker’s 1980 collection, The Mother/Child Papers (reissued 1986), may be the best and most explicit marker of her own move into what she identifies in her critical study Stealing the Language (1986, 1987) as ‘‘ women’s poetry.’’ Dominated by a specifically maternal voice, the poems reveal such a voice to be in fact many voices. Although the ‘‘I’’ of Ostriker’s poems is always in some sense Ostriker herself, the multiplicity of women’s experiences and forms of expression is something that her poetry nevertheless emphasizes. The courage to take risks and to break the silence of women partly defines Ostriker’s project as a Blakean, feminist, and Jewish poet. Her work involves playing with new poetic forms as well as rewriting already established ones. When she works in traditional forms, she implicitly confronts a masculine poetic tradition with the assertion of a feminine (and often, feminist) one. More explicitly, she often combines or interweaves the ‘‘public’’ discourses of politics with the ‘‘private’’ ones of the home and the body, as in her prose poem ‘‘Cambodia.’’ Throughout Ostriker’s poetry are signs of struggle—with day-to-day life, with history, with language. Poems like ‘‘The War of Men and Women’’ and ‘‘Surviving,’’ from The Imaginary Lover (1986; recipient in 1987 of the William Carlos Williams Prize from the Poetry Society of America) expose the subtle and not-so-subtle complexities of such struggles without providing any easy resolutions. In poems like ‘‘A Meditation in Seven Days,’’ from Green Age (1989), she looks to alternative constructions of history and religion to locate women in both. In The Crack in Everything (1996), which one the Paterson Poetry Prize, the San Francisco State Poetry Center Award, and was a National Book Award finalist, Ostriker struggles with her own mortality as she describes undergoing a mastectomy: ‘‘Like one of those trees with a major limb lopped / I’m a shade more sublime today than yesterday.’’ In addition to nine volumes of poetry and six critical works, Ostriker has published many essays, articles, and reviews in a number of journals. Her poems have been published in the New Yorker, Ms., Poetry, the Nation, Feminist Studies, and many other publications. She has also received numerous honors and awards, including fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts (1976-77) and the Guggenheim Foundation (1984-85), and three MacDowell Colony fellowships. OTHER WORKS: Songs: A Book of Poems (1969). Once More out of Darkness, and Other Poems (1971, 1976). William Blake: The Complete Poems (editor, 1977). A Dream of Springtime: Poems, 1970-1978 (1979). A Woman Under the Surface (1982). Writing Like a Woman (1983). Feminist Revision and the Bible (1993). The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions (1994, 1997). The Little Space: Poems Selected and New, 1968-1998 (1998). Dancing at the Devil’s Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics, and the Erotic (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bryan, S., ed., Where We Stand: Women Poets on Literary Tradition (1993). Lammon, M., ed., Written in Water, Written in Stone: Twenty Years of Poets on Poetry (1996).
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Middlebrook, D. W. and Yalom, M., eds., Coming to Light: American Women Poets in the 20th Century (1985). Mullaney, J. P., ed., Truthtellers of the Times: Interviews With Contemporary Women Poets (1998). Showalter, E., ed., The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory (1985). Reference works: CANR (1983, 1990). FC (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Alicia Ostriker and Dave Smith Reading Their Poems (tape, 1983). American Poetry Review (1997). Literature & Theology (1996). Poets and Writers (Nov./Dec. 1989). Religion & Literature (Summer 1994, Summer 1995). WRB (Mar. 1997). —MONICA DORENKAMP, UPDATED BY DENISE BAUER
OTTENBERG, Miriam Born 7 October 1914, Washington, D.C.; died December 1982 Daughter of Louis and Nettie Podell Ottenberg Miriam Ottenberg spent two years at Goucher College near Baltimore before transferring to the University of Wisconsin, where she received a B.A. in journalism in 1935. Her first job after college was writing copy for a Chicago advertising agency. A year later, Ottenberg became a reporter in the women’s department for the now-defunct Akron Times-Press. In 1937 Ottenberg joined the Evening Star, a Washington daily. Within her first two years on the job, she launched her first full-fledged newspaper investigation. She broke page one stories and exposés consistently over the years. By 1947 Ottenberg’s specialization was the investigation of crime and the conditions fostering it. According to the Star, Ottenberg probed ‘‘phony marriage counselors, a multi-state abortion ring, high food prices, juvenile crime, sex psychopaths and dope addicts.’’ In 1958 the Washington law enforcement community honored Ottenberg with a testimonial reception and a plaque crediting her contributions. When her ‘‘Buyer Beware’’ series broke in the Star in November 1959, it presented three months of painstaking investigation. Alerting the U.S. Congress to the shabby practices of unscrupulous used car dealers and finance companies, the articles led to wide-ranging legislation outlawing the unethical practices she revealed. Her work on the seven-part series brought Ottenberg a Pulitzer Prize for journalism in 1960. Only four women had won the award since its inception more than 40 years before. In 1963 another page one scoop was printed not only by the Star but by most other major U.S. newspapers as well. Here Ottenberg introduced the public to an evil underworld empire called the Cosa Nostra—‘‘Our Thing’’—better known then as the Mafia. Newspapers across the country ran her story on Joseph Valachi’s testimony, significant because it was the first time an insider was willing to talk and confirm the group’s existence. Ottenberg’s newspaper copy, always direct and crisp, is lucid, logical, and highly readable. She spoke with authority, and
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her writing, which focuses on how the individual is affected, makes what might be an impersonal situation personally interesting to the reader. The Federal Investigators (1962) employs the same combination of vibrant language and swiftly moving action. Ottenberg presents vignettes of 17 federal investigatory agencies, each dedicated to the safety and security of the American public. Tales of high excitement and intrigue illustrate the individual organizations, ranging from the Federal Bureau of Investigation to the Postal Inspection Service. Retiring on disability in 1974 after a 34-year career with the Star, Ottenberg in her ‘‘semiretirement’’ worked harder than ever as a writer and lecturer. In 1978 her study of her own disease, multiple sclerosis, was published. She used well-learned investigative reporting techniques for a three-year inquiry including over 100 interviews with victims of the disease and innumerable medical experts. The Pursuit of Hope has been hailed as the first comprehensive book on the disease. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hohenberg, J., The New Front Page (1966). Marzolf, M., Up from the Footnote (1977). Reference works: CA (1969). Foremost Women in Communication (1970). Other references: NYT (3 May 1960).Washington Star (2 May 1960). Wisconsin Alumnus (July 1960). —KATHLEEN KEARNEY KEESHEN
OVINGTON, Mary White Born 11 April 1865, Brooklyn, New York; died 15 July 1951, Newton, Massachusetts Daughter of Theodore T. and Louise Vetcham Ovington The daughter of a well-to-do New York family, Mary White Ovington was raised by abolitionists and radicals. Her education at Radcliffe College (1891-93) was followed by two years in society, after which Ovington worked as registrar at the Pratt Institute, and then opened the Greenpoint Settlement of the Pratt Institute Neighborhood Association, where she served as headworker from 1895 to 1903. Ovington’s 50 years of work in the cause of full equality for black Americans began with Half a Man: The Status of the Negro in New York (1911). Begun by Ovington while she was a Greenwich House fellow in 1904-05, the interviews and research in New York and in the South continued for seven years. Meanwhile, she had also convinced Henry Phipps to build the Tuskegee in New York City as an experiment in model housing for blacks; had caused a national sensation as the central white female participant in the 1908 interracial Cosmopolitan Club dinner at Peck’s Restaurant; had cofounded the Lincoln Settlement for Negroes with Verina Morton-Jones, a black physician; and had been the leading figure in the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.
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Work with the NAACP was to consume Ovington’s energies for the rest of her life. She was dubbed ‘‘Fighting Saint,’’ ‘‘Saint Mary,’’ and ‘‘Mother of the New Emancipation’’ by people in and out of the organization. Able to get along with almost everyone, Ovington was described by coworkers as sensitive, modest, shy, retiring, but fearless and unshakable wherever she encountered injustice, poverty, or exploitation. Ovington’s major writing can be grouped into sociological study, children’s books, fiction, drama, and biography/autobiography. Half a Man is a highly readable and insightful sociological study of what was in 1911 a nearly invisible minority populace. It gives a thorough picture of the differences between white and black women’s roles early in the 20th century, and provides a rare early depiction of the peculiar burdens and strengths of the American black woman. Ovington wrote two books and helped edit another to fill the gap she perceived in literature for black children. Hazel (1913), a novel for girls, was dramatized and performed at the YWCA in Brooklyn in 1916. Zeke: A School Boy at Tolliver (1931), was written for boys. With Myron Pritchard, Ovington compiled The Upward Path: A Reader for Colored Children (1920), an excellent collection of stories and poems by black writers. Notable in Ovington’s fiction is a short story, ‘‘The White Brute,’’ printed in the Masses in 1915 and also in her autobiography. Based on actual incident, the story seeks to realistically reverse the image of the ‘‘black brute’’ so often touted in the South as excuse for lynching. Dialogue and description are effectively done. The Shadow (1920) combines Ovington’s interests in race problems and the labor movement. Of her two plays, The Awakening (1923) and Phillis Wheatley (1932), the latter, shorter play remains the less dated. The Awakening is primarily a propaganda piece for the NAACP. Phillis Wheatley is based on letters of the 18th-century black poet to her friend Obour Tanner, and on the biographical notes prefacing editions of Wheatley’s poems. Ovington’s other two long books, Portraits in Color (1927) and The Walls Came Tumbling Down (1947), show again the clear, appealing writing style evident in Half a Man. Portraits in Color depicts the life and work of 20 black men and women. The Walls Came Tumbling Down is Ovington’s autobiography, concentrating not so much on the inward person as on her political activities. It provides an excellent personalized picture of the early days of the NAACP and the people, black and white, who helped push down walls of discrimination and exploitation. OTHER WORKS: Most of the papers of Mary White Ovington are in the NAACP collection of the Library of Congress Manuscript Division. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Archer, L., Black Images in the American Theatre: NAACP Protest Campaigns—Stage, Screen, Radio, and Television (1973). Hughes, L., Fight for Freedom: The Story of the NAACP (1962). Kellogg, C. F., Introduction to Half a Man by Ovington (1969). Kellogg, C. F., NAACP: A History of the
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National Organization for the Advancement of Colored People (1967). Ross, B. J., J. E. Spingarn and the Rise of the NAACP, 1911-1939 (1972). —CAROLYN WEDIN SYLVANDER
OWEN, Catherine See NITSCH, Helen Matthews
OWEN, Mary Alicia Born 29 December 1858, St. Joseph, Missouri; died 5 January 1935, St. Joseph, Missouri Also wrote under: Julia Scott Daughter of James A. and Agnes Cargill Owen The daughter of a Midwestern lawyer and financial writer, Mary Alicia Owen was educated in private schools and at Vassar College. She began her career by submitting verses, reviews, and travel sketches to a weekly newspaper in St. Joseph; eventually she became its literary editor. Under the pseudonym Julia Scott, Owen published short stories in Peterson’s Magazine, Overland Monthly, Century, and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. However, Owen’s most important work stemmed from her lifelong study of folklore. Owen’s native Missouri sheltered four groups that deeply influenced each other: the native Musquakie (Sacs) tribe, the French and English settlers, and the transplanted African slaves. Raised among these disparate peoples, Owen began collecting folklore, customs, and mythology. In 1888 she announced her findings on the voodoo magic practiced by ex-slaves; in 1891 she presented a paper on the Missouri-Negro tradition before the International Folk-Lore Congress in London. In 1893, with the encouragement of folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland, Owen published VooDoo Tales. Owen cast this book in a form similar to Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus. Five old slave women gather around the cabin fire to share their tales with little ‘‘Tow Head,’’ the plantation owner’s daughter. ‘‘Big Angie’’ carries her eagle-bone whistle with her missal, her ‘‘saint’s toe on her bosom and the fetish known as a ‘luck-ball’ under her right arm.’’ Rendered in dialect appropriate to each speaker, the exploits of Woodpeckeh, Ole Rabbit, and Blue Jay have the flavor of true oral tradition. Although the form of VooDoo Tales suffers from the effort to combine serious research with literary entertainment, Owen’s materials are compelling and accurate and the plots, language, and imagery are fresh. Owen describes gypsy tribes in The Daughter of Alouette (1896). The Musquakie, who granted Owen tribal membership in 1892, are described in a paper presented before the British Association at Toronto in 1897. Owen later expanded this paper into a monograph, published by the English Folk-Lore Society in
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1904. Accompanying the text is a catalogue of Owen’s extensive collection of Musquakie artifacts. Folk-Lore of the Musquakie Indians (1904) is a formal anthropological description of the tribe during a critical ‘‘clash of cultures.’’ After carefully surveying their myths and yearly festivals, Owen introduced the catalogue of her collection. Although she rejects the merely picturesque or aesthetically pleasing artifact in favor of the sacred or ceremonial, Owen also recognizes that ‘‘to the wild man surrounded by civilization and making a stand against it, everything that pertains to his free and savage past has become a ceremonial object.’’ Among Owen’s other works are The Sacred Council Hills (1909), a ‘‘folklore drama’’ portraying the Native Americans’ plight, and Home Life of Squaws, of which no extant copy has been located. Owen’s writing, like the cultures it described, was influenced by many different traditions: regional humor, pastoral romanticism, the reform spirit, and the pioneering research of other folklorists. Although VooDoo Tales retains considerable charm, Owen’s books are most interesting for their eclectic blend of literature and science. In an age when specialization was less narrow, she synthesized several elements of late 19th-century thought. A member of numerous scientific societies, she based her work on professional, firsthand observations; her conclusions were guided by deep respect for the people of the Mississippi Valley and their ways of life. OTHER WORKS: Oracles and Witches (1902). Messiah Beliefs of the American Indians (n.d.). Rain Gods of the American Indians (n.d.). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Dorsen, R. M., The British Folklorists (1968). Reference works: AW (1951). NCAB. —SARAH W. SHERMAN
OWEN, Ruth Bryan Born 2 October 1885, Jacksonville, Illinois; died 26 July 1954, Copenhagen, Denmark Daughter of William Jennings and Mary Baird Bryan; married William H. Leavitt, 1909; Major Reginald A. Owen, 1910; Captain Borge Rohde, 1936 Ruth Bryan Owen, Congresswoman, Minister to Denmark, lecturer, and author, was the eldest daughter of William Jennings Bryan. She was educated in public schools and at the University of Nebraska. Forced by the illness of her second husband to support her family of four children, Owen lectured on the Chatauqua circuit and taught public speaking at the University of Miami. On the death of her husband, Owen went into politics; she was elected to Congress from 1929-1933. Appointed Minister to Denmark in
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1933, Owen was the first woman ever to serve as minister to a foreign country. Forced to tender her resignation as Minister in 1936 when she married a captain of the Danish Royal Guards, Owen returned to the U.S., where she became the best-known and best-paid platform speaker in the nation, and was a director of the American Platform Guild from its formation. Active in numerous political and world peace organizations, Owen was appointed in 1949 as an alternate delegate to the United Nations’ General Assembly. Owen’s books reflect the many changes in her career. Elements of Public Speaking (1931) stressed her avowed conviction that no one is born with a silver tongue and oratory is an acquired art. She stresses the necessity for simplicity and clarity and quotes her father’s teaching of his art: ‘‘The purpose of speaking is to convince. To convince, you must make the people understand. . .’’ Leaves from a Greenland Diary (1935) is an account of Owen’s travels. Mutual admiration between Owen and the peoples of Greenland sets the tone of this work. Owen’s children’s books exhibit the same deceptively simple style. There is no wasted verbiage in the telling of the story of her trip around Denmark just before her appointment as Minister. Denmark Caravan (1936) sparkles with Owen’s warmth and camaraderie with the people she encountered. The Castle in the Silver Wood (1939), a collection of 13 fairy tales, is equally charming for young and old. Many of the stories concern soldiers on their way home from the wars who meet witches or magical objects that test their courage. All the tales have happy endings, and no one in these fairy tales is really wicked. Owen’s increasing concern for world peace after World War II was the obvious impetus for Look Forward, Warrior (1942). Owen based her system for peace on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Although some have criticized the fuzziness of Owen’s proposal, the main outlines of her work have found duplication in the actual documents of the United Nations Charter. Like her father, Owen believed political work is visible proof of concern for one’s fellow humanity. This sensible, sensitive love for her fellow human beings is most pronounced in Owen’s children’s books and travel works. OTHER WORKS: Picture Tales from Scandinavia (1939). Caribbean Caravel (1949). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Chamberlin, H., A Minority of Members: Women in the U.S. Congress (1973). From Then to Now: Women and Political Participation 1900-1982 (1995). Vickers, S. P., The Life of Ruth Bryan Owen: Florida’s First Congresswoman and America’s First Woman Diplomat (dissertation, 1994). Reference works: American Women (1974). CB (1944, 1955). DAB. NCAB. Other references: Arguments and Hearings Before Elections Committee. . .Contested Election Case of William C. Lawson v. Ruth Bryan Owen from the Fourth Congressional District of
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Florida (1930). Florida Historical Quarterly (Spring 1999). Literary Digest (22 Sept. 1935). Newsweek (28 Sept. 1935). NYT (27 July 1954). Woman’s Home Companion (Oct. 1933). —DOROTHEA MOSLEY THOMPSON
OWENS, Claire Myers Born 11 February 1896, Rockdale, Texas; died 7 May 1983, Rochester, New York Wrote under: Claire Myers Spotswood, Claire Myers-Saidla, Claire Myers Wanders, Claire Myers Alexander Daughter of Coren L. and Susan Allen Myers; married (common law) Leo Saidla, 1918 (divorced); George Wanders, 1931 (divorced); H. Thurston Owens, 1937 (died) From the time she was ten years old, Claire Myers Owens experienced altered states of consciousness, mystical moments of intense spirituality she found both enriching and unsettling. These transcendent moments informed her fiction and nonfiction, inspired her lifelong quest for self-discovery, and ultimately led to her participation in the human potential and transpersonal psychology movements at their inception. Though she never called herself a feminist, her writings champion women’s rights, sexual freedom, and financial independence. Growing up in Temple, Texas, Owens struggled to define herself against the expectations of her mother, Susan Allen Myers, and her maternal grandmother, Laura Smith Allen, fundamentalist Baptists who romanticized the ideals of antebellum South. Although they tried to mold her into a perfect lady, a true Southern belle, Owens gravitated to the philosophy of her father, Coren Lee Myers, who championed Jeffersonian principles and free thought. ‘‘The woods were my father’s cathedral,’’ she often remarked, comparing his open-mindedness to the narrower views of her maternal influences. Her father’s intellectual approach to life fostered a longing for the excitement of the wider world she glimpsed as an avid reader and student. In 1916, at age twenty, she graduated from the College of Industrial Arts in Denton (now Texas Woman’s University) and left home, intending to ‘‘change the world overnight.’’ She did social work at a settlement house in Chicago and later at an Alabama coal mine. Too much a ‘‘lady’’ to deal with the seedy side of life, in 1917 she moved to New York’s Greenwich Village. She worked at Dauber and Pine Book Shop on lower Fifth Avenue, wrote reviews for Publisher’s Weekly, and fell into the New Woman lifestyle of the late 1910s and 1920s. Early short stories and novels explore male-female relationships, the vicissitudes of life as a single woman in New York, and a rarely discussed phenomenon in American history: women’s hotels— cheap, ‘‘respectable’’ rooms with strict rules against male visitors. In 1920 she and Leo Saidla attempted to establish a utopian community in the Blue Ridge Mountains of West Virginia, based
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on their concepts of ‘‘free love’’ and ‘‘companionate marriage.’’ The relationship ended in bitter disappointment when Owens discovered Leo was, if not gay, sexually impotent. Though the couple never married, Leo insisted Owens obtain a legal divorce to clear him of technical obligation. Resettling in Greenwich Village, Owens became involved in a tumultuous affair with married British artist Carton Moore-Park. Short stories describing the end of this affair are comical, even burlesque, but in life she was shattered. In 1931 she married George Wanders, a journalist for the New York Sun, whose astute economic analyses placed him in high demand during the Depression. Eroticism and passion, laced with violence and emotional domination, marked their year-long marriage. Owens left Wanders and entered a period of hard times, searching for jobs in Depression-riddled New York, trying to earn a living through writing. The Unpredictable Adventure: A Comedy of Female Independence (published as Claire Myers Spotswood, 1935) dramatizes Owens’ journey from Temple to New York and satirizes her childhood and both marriages. The protagonist’s quest for self-definition turns on woman’s universal struggle to balance love and work, spirituality and religion, freedom and responsibility. Burton Rascoe, her editor at Doubleday, extolled her for writing the kind of book ‘‘no women have had the courage to write.’’ Considered by Carol Farley Kessler to be ‘‘the most significant of the nine utopias published by United States women during the 1930s,’’ the novel was banned by the New York Public Library for being ‘‘too risqué for its shelves.’’ The second half of Owens’ life stands in stark contrast to the first. In June 1937 she married H. Thurston Owens, a successful businessman who shared her love for art, literature, and theater. They moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where she wrote and performed radio plays for the local chapter of the American Association of University Women, attended classes at Yale University, and maintained an active social schedule. Although her spirit of rebellion mellowed, she authored a column for Today’s Woman magazine (1946-48) dealing with independence issues married women confront. In 1950 Owens experienced a psychological rebirth she called a ‘‘Great Awakening’’ that changed her life and the focus of her writing. Two autobiographies, Awakening to the Good: Psychological or Religious? (1958) and Discovery of the Self (1963), explain her spiritual experience in scientific terms, explore the nature of the unconscious, and examine right and left brain functions. She became a ‘‘key figure’’ in the human potential movement, along with Abraham Maslow, Aldous Huxley, and Jean Houston, and an ardent follower of Carl Jung, whom she interviewed in Geneva. Her article based on their meeting, published in the New York Herald Tribune, Paris Edition, as ‘‘Tourists Abroad,’’ won the 1954 Tribune Travel Story Contest and was reprinted in C. G. Jung Speaking (1954). Widowed by Thurston Owens at age seventy-three, she began meditating with a group of graduate students at Yale. After several months, she sold her home on prestigious Livingston
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Street and along with her young friends moved to Rochester, New York, to join the Zen Center. During this period, she contributed chapters to two anthologies on mystical experience: The Highest State of Consciousness (1972), and Transpersonal Psychologies (1975). Her autobiography, Zen and the Lady (1979), combining anecdote with scientific research, traces Owens’ spiritual journey toward enlightenment, describes her intellectual and erotic connections with a man nearly 40 years her junior, and dispels negative stereotypes surrounding old age and women’s sexuality. Two manuscripts followed: Meditation and the Lady, her fourth autobiography, and Varieties of Self-Realization, scientific and philosophical theories on enlightenment. Owens died on 7 May 1983. Her ashes are buried beneath a tree in the garden of the Rochester Zen Center. OTHER WORKS: Gaily Bedight (circa 1921). Belle Randolph (also titled Love is Not Enough and Sons and Lovers, circa 1939). The Claire Myers Owens papers are in the Woman’s Collection at the Blagg-Huey Library, Texas Woman’s University in Denton, Texas. Numerous articles and manuscripts, video and audio tapes, photos and memorabilia comprise the collection. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Harris, M. K., ed., The Unpredictable Adventure: A Comedy of Woman’s Independence (1993). Harris, M. K., Claire Myers Owens: Life, Work, Art—1896-1983 (dissertation, 1997). Iles, T., ed., All Sides of the Subject (1992). The New Handbook of Texas (1996). White, J., ed., Small Ecstasies (1983). Reference work: World Who’s Who of Women (1982). Other references: Belles Lettres (Winter 1990). Southern Quarterly (Fall 1992). —MIRIAM KALMAN HARRIS, PH.D.
OWENS, Rochelle Born 2 April 1936, Brooklyn, New York Daughter of Maxwell B. and Molly Adler Bass; married George Economou, 1962 Rochelle Owens is best known as a playwright and poet, although she has worked in all genres and with all forms of media. She professes to live a ‘‘middle-class existence’’ similar to her upbringing in Brooklyn. Her husband, a poet, has acted in Owens’ plays and written about her work. Owens never attended college; instead, after high school, she traveled to Greece, Egypt, Syria, Turkey, and Greenland; several of these became settings for her plays. She also took classes at the Herbert Berghof Studio, though never intending to act, and at the New School for Social Research. Owens has taught at the University of Oklahoma at Norman, the University of California at San Diego, and Brown University. Besides her membership in several professional organizations, she is cofounder of the New York Theatre Strategy, the Women’s Theatre Council, and Scripts/Performance magazine, a sponsor of
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the Women’s Interart Center, and a member of the editorial board of Performing Arts Journal. Owens’ plays are almost always nonnaturalistic or surrealistic, refiguring time and space. In both the poems and plays, she manages a sharp, frequently sexual humor while challenging traditional notions of gender roles, examining power issues, and, using her own anthropology, exploring the myths of other cultures. Owens sees herself as ‘‘belonging to the generation of experimental artists that gave rise to the present feminist movement.’’ Her poetry subverts language by dividing words, and by creating new words and unexpected combinations, juxtaposing biblical references and Hebrew, for example, with contemporary images and stark sexual language. The visual/verbal effect of the poems forces a reconsideration of these new word forms whose meaning assaults cultural conceptions of gender roles. ‘‘My writing is feminist,’’ says Owens, ‘‘because it has much to do with my identify as a woman in a particular culture.’’ In the four books of poems of The Joe Chronicles (1974-79), Owens creates WildMan, who with violence and the assumption of superiority, submits Wild-Woman, who represents the possibility of change and new values, to his rule. In the third book, Shemuel (1979), the queen of the title subverts the progress women have been able to make by acting with as much cruelty as any male ruler, allowing the women in her society to remain oppressed. Owens credits the use of myth by William Blake, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust as influences. She frequently uses different personas, notably in Luca: Discourse on Life and Death (1990, updated 1999), which, according to the author, is ‘‘a loose personal narrative around the theme of Mona Lisa and Da Vinci. The constant shifting of gender as well as personal pronoun referents represents an advance in the knowledge of women being part of culture rather than alien to it.’’ Owens has received numerous awards and honors for her plays including Rockefeller grants for playwriting (1965, 1974), a Yale School of Drama and American Broadcasting Fellowship (1968), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1971), grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, awards from the New York Drama Critics Circle, and several Obie nominations and awards. Both the New York Public Theatre and the New York Shakespeare Company have commissioned her works. Her first play, Futz (1961), which focuses on a man’s love for his sow, won the Obie award for best play (1967). Owens’ plays have been translated into several languages and have successfully toured Europe, although Futz was nearly banned at the 1967 Edinburgh festival for its explicit sexuality. Owens, who held jobs as a clerk, typist, and telephone operator, wrote Futz on office stationery when she was twentyone. She sees it as a moral play, about society’s improper need for individuals to conform. Owens feels the emergence of ‘‘feminist criticism adds a new dimension to my dramatic literature,’’ encouraging expression of the woman’s perspective that had been lost. Constantly shifting pronouns and gender in He Wants Shih! (1974), Owens portrays a Chinese emperor abdicating his rule to pursue the ‘‘Shih,’’ the ‘‘everything’’ in himself. ‘‘I have always
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drastically re-imagined and re-defined the relationships of female/ male. [That] is why I am an avant-garde poet and playwright,’’ Owens explains. A failed artist hates his mother and ex-wife for their success in Chucky’s Hunch (1982), which addresses feminist concerns of empowerment and victimization. Beclch (1968), set in Africa, precedes the poems in Shemuel with another cruel female ruler abusing power. The animal sacrifices and human violence in this play reflect the influence of Antonin Artaud. In both The Karl Marx Play (1974), a musical comedy, and Emma Investigated Me (1976), eponymously titled from the 19thcentury radical feminist/anarchist Emma Goldman, Owens concentrates on the author’s creative struggle. An African, Leadbelly, calling himself ‘‘the real revolutionary force,’’ inspires Marx to write. Similarly, Kontraption (1974) tests the bounds of theater with speeches to the audience and time measured in duration rather than by a clock. Dealing further with racial issues in this play, Owens stresses the concept of human community through a black character and a white character sharing their entire range of thoughts and emotions. In Homo (1968) Owens questions Western racial superiority; The String Game (1968) and Istanboul (1968) show the negative results of cultural imperialism. In the visual medium, Owens wrote the screenplay for and acted in the movie Futz (1969). Her autobiographical art video, How Much Paint Does the Painting Need (1990), sharing title and subject matter with the poems, fuses disjointed images of paintings, sculptures, and photographs with video art. Her audio work includes recordings of her adaptations of primitive and archaic world poetry, radio plays, and hosting a public radio program in Norman, Oklahoma, ‘‘The Writer’s Mind,’’ for which she interviewed authors. While Owens continues to write poetry, she has moved away from writing plays and more toward electronic media production in recent years. OTHER WORKS: Not Be Essence That Cannot Be (poetry, 1961). Four Young Lady Poets (coedited by Owens, 1972). Salt and Core (poetry, 1968). I Am the Babe of Joseph Stalin’s Daughter (poetry, 1972). Spontaneous Combustion: Eight New American Plays (editor and contributor, 1972). Poems from Joe’s Garage (1973). The Joe 82 Creation Poems (1974). The Karl Marx Play and Others (1974). The Widow and the Colonel (play, 1977). Mountain Rites (1978). French Light (poetry, 1984). Constructs (poetry, 1985). Anthropologists at a Dinner Party (1985). Futz; Who Do You Want, Peire Vidal? (plays, 1986). W. C. Fields in French Light (poetry, 1986). The Passerby (by L. Atlan, translated by Owens, 1990). Paysanne: New and Selected Poems,1961-1988 (1991). Black Chalk (poetry, 1992). Rubbed Stones and Other Poems (1994). New and Selected Poems, 19611996 (1997). Plays have been included in: New American Plays (Volume 2, 1968), Methuen Playscripts (1969), Yale Theatre (1969), New Underground Theatre (1968), Scripts (1971), Best Short Plays (1971, 1977, and 1978), Off-Off Broadway (1973), Performing Arts Journal (1976), Scenarios (1980), Wordplays (1982). The primary collection of Rochelle Owens’ papers are housed at Boston University; other collections are at the University of
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California at Davis, the University of Oklahoma, and the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brater, E, Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights (1989). Brustein, R., The Third Theatre (1969). Kerr, W., God on the Gymnasium Floor (1969). Maranca, B., and G. Dasgupta, eds., American Playwrights: A Critical Survey (1981). Novick, J., Beyond Broadway (1968). Ostriker, A., Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America (1986). Poggi, J., Theatre in America: The Impact of Economic Forces, 1870-1967 (1968). Ratner, R., Trying to Understand What It Means to Be Feminist: Essays on Women Writers (1984). Reference works: CA (1976). CAAS (1985). CD (1977, 1988). CP (1991). FC (1990). Notable Names in the American Theatre (1976). Notable Women in American Theatre (1989). WW of Writers, Editors, Poets (1989). Other references: Margins (1975). Nation (12 May 1969). NYT (interview, 21 July 1968, 17 Dec. 1968, 25 Dec. 1968, 2 Feb. 1973, 3 April 1973, 28 May 1977, 19 March 1978, 25 March 1981, 5 Sept. 1982). Parnassus (1985). SR (7 Jan. 1967). Theater (interview, Spring 1989). VV (19 Dec. 1965). WWD (3 April 1973). World (April 1974). —ANDREW SCHIAVONI, UPDATED BY NELSON RHODES
OWENS-ADAIR, Bethenia (Angelina) Born 7 February 1840, Van Buren County, Missouri; died 11 September 1926, Astoria, Oregon Daughter of Thomas and Sarah Damron Owens; married Legrand Hill, 1854; Colonel John Adair, 1884 Bethenia Owens-Adair’s pioneer experience began in 1843 when her parents left Missouri with their three children for the first great migration to the Pacific Northwest. No formal schooling was available until Owens-Adair was twelve and a young teacher boarding with the Owens family offered a three-month school, but Owens-Adair was inspired to value education. At the age of fourteen, Owens-Adair married Hill, a farmhand previously employed by her father. Hill’s idleness and business failures, coupled with his temper and harshness with their son, convinced Owens-Adair to leave him after four years of marriage. Owens-Adair obtained a divorce in 1859 and resumed her maiden name. Supporting herself by sewing, nursing, and taking in laundry, Owens-Adair attended schools in Roseburg and Astoria and became qualified to teach. In 1867, she established a successful millinery business in Roseburg, and sent her son to the University of California at Berkeley in 1870. In 1871 she made the local arrangements for Susan B. Anthony’s lecture in Roseburg and became a subscription agent and contributor to Abigail Scott Duniway’s women’s rights paper, the New Northwest.
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In 1872 Owens-Adair sold her millinery shop and enrolled in the Eclectic Medical College in Philadelphia. She returned to Oregon in a year with her M. D. degree and was ridiculed by orthodox doctors who were critical of her ‘‘bogus degree.’’ Specializing in women’s and children’s complaints, Owens-Adair built a substantial practice in Portland but was eager to obtain more medical knowledge. Owens-Adair was accepted by the University of Michigan Medical School in 1878 and received her degree in 1880. She followed this with a summer of hospital and clinical work in Chicago, six months of study as a resident physician in Michigan, and a tour of European hospitals. She returned to Portland in 1881 and established a specialized practice in eye and ear diseases. She later served as a country doctor in Oregon and Washington. In 1884 Owens-Adair married Colonel John Adair, a West Point graduate, farmer, and land developer whom she had known during childhood. Their only child was born in 1887, and died within three days. Later, the Adairs adopted two children. OwensAdair had adopted a daughter in 1875. Following her retirement in 1905, Owens-Adair intended to ‘‘write a book on medicine from a woman’s standpoint.’’ However, she decided to make her first attempt at ‘‘book-making’’ a volume of her life experiences, biographical sketches of pioneers, letters received from friends, and her own articles, letters, and speeches. The first 100 pages of Dr. Owens Adair: Some of Her Life Experiences (1906) were devoted to what Owens-Adair described as the ‘‘short, plain, truthful story of my own life. . .purposefully stripped of the sentiment, love, and romance with which my nature has always been super-charged.’’ She sought to assist in the preservation of the history of Oregon and to show, through her own life story, the labor and struggle of pioneer woman. Local reviewers praised her work and noted that they saw ‘‘no view to self-praise or egotism’’ in Owens-Adair’s ‘‘close personal history.’’ In 1922 Owens-Adair published a 64-page volume entitled A Souvenir: Dr. Owens-Adair to Her Friends. At the age of eightytwo, her sentimentality was evident as she presented ‘‘a pretty little booklet’’ to preserve ‘‘some of the beautiful reviews of the first child of my brain’’ and congratulations received from friends on her eighty-second birthday. Owens-Adair was the pioneer advocate in the Pacific Northwest for eugenic sterilization. Believing ‘‘every child has the right to be born mentally and physically fit,’’ she proposed bills in the Oregon and Washington legislatures to require that ‘‘Criminals, epileptics, insane and all feeble-minded persons committed to any state institution. . .shall be sterilized, except such as in the judgement of a legally appointed board of examiners. . .are exempted.’’ Her two 1922 publications on eugenic sterilization are examples of the major arguments she made in her 17-year battle for sterilization laws. Owens-Adair influenced the passage of a sterilization law in Washington in 1909 and the later passage of a law in Oregon—laws she believed were humanitarian in nature. Although she never wrote the woman’s medical book she had considered at retirement, she lectured and wrote articles on causes vital to her—temperance, woman suffrage, the values of vigorous
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exercise and physical culture for women, the proper raising of children, and the influence of heredity and habit—and was recognized as a straightforward and intelligent writer. The marker at Owens-Adair’s grave reads: ‘‘Only the enterprising and the brave are actuated to become pioneers.’’ OwensAdair had dedicated herself to a life of action and enterprise, dreaming of the ‘‘new woman’’ whom she had described in an address to the 1896 Women’s Congress: ‘‘She will be cleansed of the dross of dependence, and the prejudice of past ages.’’ OTHER WORKS: Human Sterilization: Its Social and Legislative Aspects (1922). The Eugenic Marriage Law and Human Sterilization—The Situation in Oregon: A Statement (1922). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Evans, E., et al., History of the Pacific Northwest II (1889). Gaston, J., The Centennial History of Oregon IV (1912). Gray, D., ‘‘Professional Women in the West,’’ in Women of the West (1976). Miller, H. M., Woman Doctor of the West: Bethenia Owens-Adair (1960). Ross, N. W., Westward the Women (1944). Smith, H. K., ed., With Her Own Wings (1948). Other references: New Northwest (1871-87). —JEAN M. WARD
OZICK, Cynthia Born New York, New York Daughter of Celia and William Ozick; married Bernard Hallote; children: one daughter. A distinctive voice in American literature, Cynthia Ozick is known chiefly for her complex fiction centered on Jewish characters and Judaic themes. Widely recognized as an outstanding essayist, she is also a poet and translator. She has received many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and in 1982 a Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, to which she was subsequently elected (1983). Success did not come early for Ozick. After receiving her B.A. from New York University (1949) and her M.A. in English from Ohio State University (1950), she spent seven years working on a long novel called ‘‘Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,’’ which was never published. Ozick then spent six and one-half years on yet another novel, Trust, which finally appeared in 1966. Writing with biting humor and poignancy about the painful years between her twenties and her ‘‘despairing middle thirties,’’ when she was writing obsessively and publishing nothing, submitting work to magazines and being routinely turned down, she said in a 1984 essay, ‘‘Cyril Connolly and the Groans of Success,’’ that she never truly ‘‘recuperated’’ from the ‘‘pounding of denigration and rejection.’’ Following the publication of Trust, which received varying appraisals, Ozick turned from the long novel to the shorter fiction
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that won her critical acclaim. Between 1971 and 1982 she published three collections of stories and novellas: The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1971), Bloodshed and Three Novellas (1976), and Levitation: Five Fictions (1982). Almost all of the tales in these collections revolve around Jewish themes, treated from cultural, historical, or theological perspectives: the Holocaust; Jewishness in America; ‘‘the corruptions and abominations’’ (Bloodshed) of the idolatry forbidden by the Second Commandment, whether it takes the form of worshiping ideas, nature, individuals, or poems. While some of Ozick’s stories are realistic, some are fantastic. ‘‘Puttermesser and Xanthippe,’’ for instance, involves a Frankenstein-like creation of Jewish folklore known as a golem. In the 1980s Ozick returned to the novel with two rich, compressed works: The Cannibal Galaxy (1983) and The Messiah of Stockholm (1987). In 1989 she published The Shawl, comprised of the title story and a prize-winning novella, Rosa, both revolving around a Holocaust survivor. Ozick’s work has been praised for its originality, intelligence, and superb craftsmanship. Her fiction has an intellectual, multilayered complexity, and critics have varied in both their interpretation and their assessment of individual works. Though Ozick has stated in her well-known preface to Bloodshed that ‘‘a story must not merely be, but mean,’’ in some of her tales the meaning seems obscure. At its best, her fiction is at once philosophical and witty, thought-provoking and gripping—adjectives that can be applied to the best of her essays as well. A contributor to many popular, literary, and Jewish periodicals, Ozick has gathered a selection of her essays into two collections: Art and Ardor (1983) and Metaphor and Memory. (1989). Whether offering literary analysis or portraits of literary figures, exploring Judaic issues, or addressing feminist concerns, Ozick can be a superb essayist. Successful personal essays have included ‘‘Washington Square, 1946,’’ which was included in The Best American Essays: 1986, and ‘‘A Drugstore in Winter,’’ a childhood memoir critic Katha Pollitt judged ‘‘as rich and dense as the best of her fiction.’’ In the ‘‘Forewarning’’ that opens Metaphor and Memory, Ozick warns readers against using her essays to ‘‘interpret’’ her stories, and critic Harold Bloom has observed that Ozick’s ‘‘narrative art and her stance as an essayist seem not to be wholly reconcilable.’’ Nonetheless, Ozick’s provocative, perceptive essays on Judaic and literary themes help define the religious and aesthetic issues central to her fiction, especially her views on idolatry. Taking a strong stand against postmodernism, minimalism, art for art’s sake—i.e., literature as idol—Ozick has argued that ‘‘literature is for the sake of humanity.’’ Her essays provide an understanding of the moral seriousness she believes should be central to all literature, and this clearly resides at the heart of everything she writes. Ozick published a third book of essays in 1994, Portrait of the Artist as a Bad Character, and a fourth in 1996, titled Fame & Folly, both of which focused on the writer’s art and its hazards.
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For Ozick, one of those hazards is perfectionism, specifically ‘‘bloodless perfectionism and the secret crisis of confidence that dogs it.’’ She offers personal and opinionated responses to the work of T. S. Eliot, Isaac Babel, and Edith Wharton. Sometimes her opinions are disarmingly blunt, as in the judgement, ‘‘[Henry] James was a genius, Wharton not.’’ With her National Book Award-nominated novel The Puttermesser Papers (1997), Ozick furthered her exploration of the character of Ruth Puttermesser—mayor of New York, George Eliot fan, and dabbler into Jewish mysticism—following her from the age of 34 years until her death. To an unusual extent for a semifantastic tale, the protagonist maintains her physical and emotional self-awareness throughout. ‘‘She was conscious of her Lilliputian measure,’’ Ozick wrote. ‘‘A worn-out city lawyer, stunted as to real experience, a woman lately secluded, eaten up with loneliness, melancholia ground into the striations of her face.’’ As Sarah Blacher Cohen wrote in her 1994 study of Ozick, the author uses the disjunction between physical and emotional states as the occasion for wry, even morbid humor. Ozick’s most recent fiction has taken place in the theatrical world, which presumably comes from her forays into playwriting. OTHER WORKS: The Mystic Explorer (1980). Voices Within the Ark: The Modern Jewish Poets, Howard Schwartz and Anthony Rudolf, eds. (1980). Ink and Inkling: Mark Podwal, Master of the True Line (1990). Translations in: A Treasury of Yiddish Poetry (edited by Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, 1969). Voices from the
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Yiddish: Essays, Memoirs, Diaries (1972). The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse (edited by Irving Howe, Ruth Wisse, and Khone Shmeruk, 1987);
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cohen, S. B., Cynthia Ozick’s Comic Art: From Levity to Liturgy (1994). Bloom, H., ed., Cynthia Ozick: Modern Critical Views (1986). Currier, S., and D. J. Cahill, ‘‘A Bibliography of the Writings of Cynthia Ozick,’’ in Contemporary American Women Writers: Narrative Strategies, Catherine Rainwater and William Scheick, eds. (1985). Friedman, L. S., Understanding Cynthia Ozick (1991). Kauvar, E., Cynthia Ozick’s Fiction: Tradition and Invention (1993). Lowin, J., Cynthia Ozick (1988). Pinsker, S., The Uncompromising Fictions of Cynthia Ozick (1987). The World of Cynthia Ozick: Studies in American Jewish Literature (1987). Reference works: CA (1976). CANR (1988). CLC (1975, 1977, 1984, 1991). Commentary (June 1976). Contemporary Novelists (1991). CB (1983). Discussion (1976). DLB (1984). DLBY (1982). FC (1990). Moment (April 1976). MTCW (1991). New Yorker (13 May 1996). NYRB (April 1976). Playboy (June 1976). Present Tense (Spring 1972). Other references: Texas Studies in Literature and Language (Summer 1983). —GAIL POOL, UPDATED BY MARK SWARTZ
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P PAGE, (Dorothy) Myra Born Dorothy Gary, circa 1899, Newport News, Virginia; died 1993, Yonkers, New York Also wrote under: Dorothy Page Gary, Dorothy Markey, Dorothy Myra Page Daughter of Benjamin R. and Willie Barham Gray; married John Markey (Dorothy) Myra Page’s interest in writing was explicitly tied to her sense of art as social commentary. Page’s earliest memories are of accompanying her doctor father in his carriage as he made rounds. It was here that Page first recognized the severe extremes of class and race characterizing her town. When Page was told that her brother, not she, would be encouraged to pursue a career in medicine, her sense of social inequity deepened. Writing became her vehicle for social investigation and self-expression. Page published her first poem at age nine in the Richmond Times and wrote fiction throughout high school. In 1918, she graduated from Westhampton College in Richmond, where she edited the yearbook and won an award for her short story, ‘‘Schuman’s Why.’’ After an unsatisfying year teaching literature and history in a local junior high school, Page went to Columbia University. She received her Master’s degree in political science, writing a thesis on yellow journalism. During the months in New York City, Page also became familiar with the goals of the trade union movement and revolutionary socialism. Page returned to Virginia as an industrial secretary for the YWCA. Her job was to organize women working in department stores and silk mills into cultural and educational clubs to prepare them for unionization, but Page became disenchanted with the conservative attitude of the local YWCA leadership. She began to work with the Amalgamated Clothingmakers Union in Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Chicago. Her writing, primarily as a journalist covering labor issues, continued sporadically during this period. In the late 1920s, Page received a teaching fellowship at the University of Minnesota. While in Minnesota she worked with the Minnesota Federation of Labor and the Farmers’ Labor Party and married another graduate student. Page earned her Ph.D. in 1928, majoring in sociology and minoring in economics and psychology. Her dissertation was published as Southern Cotton Mills and Labor in 1929. Although she taught briefly at Wheaton College, most of Page’s time was given to her political work and her writing. She was a contributor to the Nation, New Masses, New Pioneer, and Labor Age and a member of the Revolutionary Writers’ Federation. Gathering Storm (1932) is a fictional dramatization of several of the most significant events in the history of the American
labor movement. The novel begins with an aging woman telling her spirited granddaughter about how the North Carolina hill people originally came to work in the cotton mills, and then traces the various characters through their involvement in and impressions of the 1910 shirtwaist makers’ strike in New York City, the Russian Revolution, the political repression that accompanied patriotic zeal after World War I, the political debate between the Socialist Party and the IWW, the Chicago meatpackers’ strike, and the formulation of an American Communist Party. The novel culminates with the cotton mill workers’ strike in Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1929. Although heavily didactic, Gathering Storm is interesting because of Page’s attempts to make the problems of both women and black workers central to her discussion of the events and their possible resolution. In the early 1930s Page went to Europe to study and write about teachers’ unions, and went from there to the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union Page worked as a journalist and lived in a thriving artists’ community. Soviet Main Street (1933) describes the changes which occur in Poldolsk, a small factory town outside of Moscow, as the residents adjust to the new life made possible by the revolution. Moscow Yankee (1935, reissued 1995), a fictionalization of Page’s impressions of life in postrevolutionary Russia, is especially memorable for its portrayal of the personal dimensions of the conversion to Communism, most significantly the evolution of sexual relationships in a changing political climate. With Sun in Our Blood (1950) is a fictionalized biography of Dolly Hawkins, the daughter, wife, and mother of coal miners in the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee. Page’s admirable blend of local color realism, lyrical, often ballad-like descriptions, and astute social commentary make the novel one of lasting significance. Blacklisted during the repressive literary and political climate of the 1950s, Page adopted her husband’s name when she couldn’t get work published under her own. As Dorothy Markey, she wrote two biographies of American scientists for adolescent readers: The Little Giant of Schenectady (1956), a biography of Charles Steinmetz, and Explorer of Sound (1964), a biography of Michael Pupin.
OTHER WORKS: It Happened on May First (1940). ‘‘The March on Chumley Hollow,’’ 100 Non-Royalty Plays (edited by W. Konzlenko, 1941). With Sun in Our Blood (1950; reprinted as Daughter of the Hills: A Woman’s Part in the Coal Miners’ Struggle, 1977, 1986). Explorer of Sound (1964).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Blake, F., The Strike in the American Novel (1972). Chestnut, S., The Difference Within: Southern Proletarian Writers Olive Dargan, Grace Lumpkin, and Myra Page (dis-
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sertation, 1994). Hill, V., ‘‘Strategy and Breadth: The Socialist-Feminist in American Fiction’’ (Dissertation, 1979). Rideout, W., The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900-1954 (1956). Other references: In These Times (May 1978). Mountain Heritage (May 1978). Social Research (1971). Westchester Gannet (23 Jan. 1978). —VICKI LYNN HILL
PAGLIA, Camille Born 2 April 1947, Endicott, New York Daughter of Pasquale J. and Lydia Colapietro Paglia Camille Paglia, Professor of Humanities at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, is one of the most celebrated and castigated scholars of the late 20th century. She is a self-proclaimed feminist who has been criticized for deploring traditional feminist viewpoints and a self-proclaimed lesbian who has been shunned by much of the gay community. Many who admire Paglia’s controversial scholarship are offended by her brazen self-confidence. Paglia has proclaimed herself ‘‘the greatest woman scholar since Jane Harrison’’ and a ‘‘Joan of Arc willing to burn others at the stake.’’ She claims never to have received a bad review because she agrees with those who praise her works and looks upon poor reviews as a celebration of her misunderstood, outcast status in academia. Paglia was born in upstate New York, where her father, Pasquale, was a professor of Romance languages at Le Moyne College in Syracuse. She admits she had a ‘‘violent outlaw quality’’ as a child and rebelled against her parents’ and church’s teachings. She graduated with highest honors from the State University of New York in Binghamton with a B.A. in English in 1968. She earned a Ph.D. in English from Yale University in 1974 and was a faculty member in the Literature and Languages Division of Bennington College until 1980. She taught briefly at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, before accepting part-time positions as visiting lecturer in English at Yale University and at the University of New Haven from 1981 to 1984. She has been a professor of humanities at the University of the Arts since 1984. It was not until 1990 and the publication of her 700-page surprise bestseller, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, that Paglia became nationally known. In Sexual Personae, which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award, Paglia argues that ‘‘the amorality, aggression, sadism, voyeurism, and pornography in great art have been ignored or glossed over by most academic critics.’’ She recounts example after example of figures she calls sexual personae who represent these attributes in Western art, from ancient history to the late 19th century. She states her purpose is ‘‘to demonstrate the unity and continuity of Western culture’’ and to challenge the contemporary theory that culture is isolated and without meaning. Among the sexual personae she discusses are the femme fatale,
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the vampire, the beautiful boy, the hermaphrodite, the dandy, and the Great Mother. As the title of Sexual Personae suggests, Paglia applies this theory to literature as well as art. The Marquis de Sade, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Oscar Wilde, and Emily Dickinson are all discussed. Her favorable view of decadence and pornography created a furor in feminist and academic circles. Paglia wrote that ‘‘feminism has exceeded its proper mission of seeking political equality for women and has ended by rejecting contingency, that is, human limitation by nature or fate.’’ Paglia’s writings are informed by her adherence to the Apollonian-Dionysian dualism affecting everything from art to male-female relations. She believes all the major achievements of Western civilization stem from the human being’s need to challenge nature, which is represented by the female, or chthonian/ Dionysian, element. She once stated ‘‘there is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper. Great art and great crime are similar deviations from the norm that require a megalomania, an utter obsession. Most women have too much empathy to want to be involved in anything like that.’’ Paglia’s second book, Sex, Art, and American Culture (1992) is a collection of 21 lectures, articles, and interviews culled from national magazines and newspapers, including Playboy, New York Newsday, Publishers Weekly, New York, Mother Jones, the Washington Post, Vanity Fair, Reason, and the London Sunday Times. Different chapters are devoted to various topics, including Elizabeth Taylor, the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Madonna, whom Paglia considers ‘‘the true feminist’’ for teaching ‘‘young women to be fully female and sexual while still exercising control over their lives.’’ The core of the book is a long essay in which Paglia reviews and rips apart two books on homosexuality in ancient Greece while decrying the poor state of American higher education that would encourage such poorly researched scholarship. Paglia discusses date rape in two chapters and describes it as an ethical violation modern feminists cannot prevent. She argues ’’rape is an outrage that cannot be tolerated in civilized society,’’ but also states that women should be able to use ‘‘common sense’’ to protect themselves from it. Other chapters reveal Paglia’s libertarian beliefs of nonintervention by the state. She is against welfare, capitalism, and affirmative action but supports abortion and the legalization of both drugs and prostitution. Paglia’s third book, Vamps & Tramps: New Essays (1994) is a collection of similar articles, interviews, and lectures published since Sex, Art, and American Culture. Popular culture figures like Jackie Onassis, as well as the infamous Amy Fisher and Lorena Bobbitt, are discussed along with writers Andrea Dworkin and Susan Sontag. The longest new essay, ‘‘No Law in the Arena,’’ covers topics like rape, harassment, pornography, and abortion. A few quieter pieces are also included, one of which was written for four homosexual friends who helped Paglia shape her views. One of Paglia’s most recent projects is a BFI Film Classics series scene-by-scene analysis of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1998). Paglia discusses the making, production, and meaning of the film and provides quotes from both Hitchcock and previous essays on
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the movie. Additionally, in Sexual Personae, Paglia spoke of a sequel to this work to focus on similar themes in 20th-century popular culture, particularly movies, television, sports, and rock music. She told an interviewer recently that the work was finished, but no publication date had been set. Whether her next book is a continuation of Sexual Personae or something else entirely, it will undoubtedly claim the attention Paglia’s earlier works received and add to the debate about this controversial scholar. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CANR (1999). CBY (1992). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Who’s Who in America 1999 (1998). Other references: Commonweal (4 June 1993). PW (12 Sept. 1994). Time (12 Dec. 1994). —LEAH J. SPARKS
PALEY, Grace Born 11 December 1922, New York, New York Daughter of Isaac and Mary Ridnyik Goodside; married Jess Paley, 1942; Robert Nichols; children: two Reared in New York City, Grace Paley studied at Hunter College (1938-39) and New York University. Paley was active in radical, nonviolent anti-Vietnam war organizations and has taught at Columbia and Syracuse University and currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. Portraying the ‘‘irremediableness of modern life,’’ Paley nevertheless writes with the ironic vision of the joy and dirty diapers that an irrepressible tomorrow will bring. Her language leaps and somersaults, linking lofty abstractions with the colloquial, as in the titles of her two collections of short stories: The Little Disturbances of Man (1959) and Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974). Paley often uses ethnic first-person narrators who reveal the pathos or courage of their lives, often with unconscious and unsentimental hilarity. ‘‘Goodbye and Good Luck’’ describes the 30-year affair of the warmhearted Rose Lieber with Vlashkin, the Valentino of the Yiddish theater. Traditional Jewish sexual mores clash with Rosie’s decision to ‘‘live for love’’ until Vlashkin’s wife divorces him and the fiftyish Rosie insists on marriage. In ‘‘The Loudest Voice,’’ a young Jewish girl happily participates in the school Christmas play while her parents argue about religious freedom and assimilation. ‘‘An Interest in Life’’ and ‘‘Distance’’ tell about Mrs. Raftery and her married son John’s affair with his old girlfriend Ginny (now deserted with her four children). In the former, Ginny finally takes John as her lover to keep him around helping her raise her family, although she dreams passionately of the (unlikely) return of her husband. In ‘‘Distance,’’ Mrs. Raftery’s monologue shows how she, wild and passionate in her youth like Ginny, pushed John toward respectability and away from Ginny, only to encourage the later liaison as a way of seeing her
respectable suburbanite son. In such stories, Paley achieves the goal articulated in ‘‘Debts’’: to tell stories ‘‘in order. . .to save a few lives.’’ In many of the stories about Faith, the plot is less important than Paley’s insight into the emotional nature of women. Husbands and lovers are the transients—to be loved, tended, and mourned—but children are the comforters and inspirers. In ‘‘A Subject of Childhood,’’ Faith’s younger son comforts her after her lover leaves; her elder son’s ‘‘heartfelt brains’’ and gesture of revolt guide Faith out of a child-infested, man-hunting playground into political activism in ‘‘Faith in a Tree.’’ Enormous Changes at the Last Minute epitomizes Paley’s strengths and weaknesses. The author has protested in the autobiographical ‘‘A Conversation with My Father’’ against the wellplotted story: ‘‘because it takes all hope away. Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.’’ The aesthetic result of this theory, however, is abrupt, unlikely, and unsatisfying endings, as in ‘‘Enormous Changes.’’ But the heart of the story is the characterization of Alexandra, a middle-aged, childless social worker caught between love for her ailing socialist-intellectual Jewish father and for Dennis, a young rock lyricist who gets her pregnant. The characters’ reactions to Alexandra’s pregnancy contradict their supposed credos but reveal their humanity. With a tremendous capacity for vulnerability, Paley’s characters endure the glacial weight of ‘‘little disturbances,’’ armed with love, humor, and acceptance. Since Enormous Changes Paley continued publishing stories, as well as poetry, at her own laconic pace, still experimenting with structure. Her often-quoted protest against the well-plotted story (in ‘‘Conversations with My Father’’) remains the literary philosophy she follows. In Later the Same Day (1985), characters from earlier stories—most noticeably Faith—reappear, establishing a continuity that produces some of the best stories in the collection. Faith, considered to be Paley’s alter ego, is now middle-aged, giving Paley the opportunity to explore all the attending issues of that period of life. Her children have grown, and she must also face the death of her mother and her own aging. In ‘‘Friends,’’ Faith deals with middle age and mortality through the experience of visiting a seriously ill friend, Selena: ‘‘People do want to be young and beautiful. When they meet in the street, male or female, if they’re getting older they look at each other’s face a little ashamed. It’s clear they want to say, Excuse me, I didn’t mean to draw attention to mortality and gravity all at once.’’ To climb out of these depths, Faith says, requires a certain amount of strength; it is possible, but difficult. Other people offer assistance, and so Paley fills her stories with new characters: Chinese tourists; the parents of kidnapped children; Cissy who is slipping into insanity and her father who gives up comfort in old age to save her; Ruthy who holds too tightly to her granddaughter Letty. Another way to climb out of the depths is global awareness, and especially, as Paley herself has consistently done, acting on that awareness. In ‘‘Listening,’’ Faith passes out leaflets calling for the U.S. to honor the Geneva Agreements. It is common for many of the characters to be at, or on their way to, or coming from
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some kind of political gathering or rally. Later the Same Day is not only a continuation of Paley’s stories of life from youth to middle age, but also a reaffirmation to all the reasons to go on with life. In her afterword to Leaning Forward (1985), a book of poems, Jane Cooper reminds readers that Paley wrote nothing but poetry until the age of thirty and recommends the poems be read as preparation for the stories. Indeed, the poems clearly outline the stages of life on both a personal and global level in a journal style of free association. ‘‘Middle Age Poem,’’ ‘‘Note to Grandparents,’’ ‘‘Old Age Porch,’’ ‘‘The Sad Children’s Song,’’ and ‘‘Illegal Aliens,’’ among others, reassert Paley’s interest in how the everyday problems of life mirror on a smaller scale the cataclysms of world politics. New and Collected Poems (1991) offers more of the same economic style of observational poetry with the most clearly focused works dealing with Paley’s experiences in El Salvador and Hanoi. Paley’s political activism inspired Long Walks and Intimate Talks: Stories and Poems (1991), which also contains drawings by Vera Williams. In this collection, Paley moves away from her characteristic mixture of the global and the personal for works that are entirely issue-oriented: the Vietnam War draft, the nuclear power plant in Seabrook, New Hampshire, Mothers of the Disappeared in El Salvador, patriarchal government. The poems dealing with political problems have a sharp edge; but the stories are hardly fiction, more essays or sketches. Living most of the time in Vermont, Paley continues her political activism. It remains as much of a career and a way of life as her writing does. In terms of publication, the 1990s were a decade of summation for Paley. Perhaps prematurely—Paley in her late 70s is an active, vital woman. The Collected Stories (1994), nominated for a National Book Award, gave critics an occasion to consider the full body of her short fiction (45 stories in total) and her place in history. Many spoke of the lasting impression her work had made on them as writers. Some, like Francine Prose, reminded readers of the stark originality of Paley’s work; she was among the first to stake out as her realm what Paley refers to in her introduction as ‘‘everyday life, kitchen life, children life.’’ And she is perhaps unique in the way her tales are animated with what Prose calls ‘‘a bracing, unsentimental, celebratory populism.’’ Just as I Thought (1998) is a miscellany, a memoir by collage, bringing together over 30 years of poems, articles, talks, book prefaces, reminiscences, and position papers. Together they reveal the breadth of Paley’s passions and make manifest the way the roles of writer/activist have been inseparable for her. The book was criticized for being strident, for being as stubborn as its title implies; many preferred the equivocality and lightness of her stories, the way, for example, the character Faith is able to question herself and even appear foolish at times. Others such as Maxine Hong Kingston and John Leonard value her perseverance and integrity. Kingston points out that the book is, among other things, an important chronicle of the peace movement. Leonard calls Paley’s work, ‘‘a cunning patchwork of radiance and scruple, witness and example, nurture and nag, subversive humor and astonishing art: a Magical Socialism and a Groucho Marxism.’’
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Considering these volumes of poetry, fiction, and other writing, it is clear Paley has spent a career blurring boundaries between genres—poems pulled from journals, fiction with the brevity and spareness of poetry. Paley has always been impatient with interviewers who want to tie her down with these distinctions. She has said, ‘‘I mean you’re either a storyteller, an inventor in language or event. . .or you’re not.’’ With her collected works, Paley’s reputation as a storyteller has been cemented. Paley was the 1993 winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story, and in 1997 she received the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund Writer’s Award. OTHER WORKS: 365 Reason Not to Have Another War (1989). Conversations with Grace Paley (1997). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Arcana, J., Grace Paley’s Life Stories: A Literary Biography (1993). Bach, G. and B. Hall, eds, Conversations with Grace Paley (1997). Taylor, J., Grace Paley: Illuminating the Dark Lives (1990). Wisse, R., The Schlemiel as Modern Hero (1971). Reference works: Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia (1991). CA 15-28 (1977). CANR 13 (1984). CLC 4 (1975), 6 (1976), 37 (1986). CN (1991). DLB 28 (1984). FC (1990). MTCW (1991). Modern American Women Writers (1991). Other references: Commentary (Aug. 1985). Commonweal (25 Oct. 1968, 5 May 1994). Esquire (Nov. 1970). Forward (15 April 1994). Genesis West (Fall 1963). LAT (9 July 1998). Ms. (May 1974). Nation (11 May 1974, 11 May 1998). New Criterion (Sept. 1994). NR (29 Apr. 1985, 29 June 1998). NYT (19 April 1959, 10 Apr. 1985). NYTBR (14 April 1985, 15 Aug. 1985, 22 Sept. 1991, 19 April 1992, 3 May 1994, 11 Aug. 1994, 19 Apr. 1998, 21 June 1998). PW (28 June 1991, interview, Oct. 1991). Studies in Short Fiction (Winter 1994). Progressive (1 Nov. 1997). TLS (14 Feb. 1975). VVLS (June 1985). WRB (Nov. 1991, Nov. 1998). —HELEN J. SCHWARTZ AND LINDA BERUBE, UPDATED BY VALERIE VOGRIN
PALMER, Phoebe Worrall Born 18 December 1807, New York, New York; died 2 November 1874, New York, New York Daughter of Henry and Dorothea Wade Worrall; married Walter C. Palmer, 1827; children: six, three who died in infancy Author and evangelist of the ‘‘Holiness’’ movement, Phoebe Palmer was the fourth of 10 children of an American Methodist mother and an English father. In 1827 Palmer married a doctor and fellow Methodist; both were lifelong New Yorkers. The Palmers had six children, only three of whom survived infancy. In the 1840s Palmer distributed tracts in the slums and regularly visited the Tombs, the legendary New York prison. For 11 years she was corresponding secretary of the New York
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Female Assistance Society for the Relief and Religious Instruction of the Sick Poor. Palmer’s most lasting contribution was the founding of the Five Points Mission in 1850 in the city’s worst slum. Supported by the Methodist Ladies’ Home Missionary Society, it was the forerunner of later settlement houses. Palmer’s sister Sarah Worrall Lankford (1806-1896, who became the second wife of Walter Palmer in 1876) experienced ‘‘entire sanctification’’ in 1835. Though the experience was one testified to by many early Methodists in response to John Wesley’s teachings on Christian perfection, it had not been stressed by American Methodists. In August 1835, Sarah founded the Tuesday Meeting for the Promotion of Holiness, which met in the home the Palmers and Lankfords shared. This weekly meeting for prayer, Scripture reading, and testimony, which continued for more than 60 years, was widely copied and became the catalyst for the ‘‘Holiness’’ or ‘‘Lay’’ revival of 1857-58, which eventually led to the formation of such holiness denominations as the Church of the Nazarene and such Pentecostal groups as the Assemblies of God. Palmer testified to the same experience in 1837. Her writing and speaking, as well as her leadership in the Tuesday Meeting, soon made Palmer the more prominent sister. For six months each year ‘‘Dr. and Mrs. Phoebe Palmer’’ spoke in churches and camp meetings throughout the eastern U.S. and Canada. In 1859 they took the revival to the British Isles. Magazine reports on this trip were published as a book, Four Years in the Old World in 1865. Palmer was also a frequent contributor to the Guide to Christian Perfection, founded in Boston in 1839. Rechristened the Guide to Holiness in 1843, it was merged with the Beauty of Holiness when the Palmers purchased both in 1864. Palmer became editor, a post she held until her death. Palmer’s series of articles, ‘‘Fragments from My Portfolio,’’ were collected as Faith and Its Effects in 1849. Revivalist Charles G. Finney and his colleague at Oberlin College, President Asa Mahan, began in 1836 and 1837 to develop what came to be known as ‘‘Oberlin Perfectionism.’’ Finney had transformed the old Puritan notion of religious conversion as an agonizing process contingent on divine election into a simple decision of human free will, an act, and an event. Palmer transformed Wesley’s idea of perfection as a lifelong process into an act and an experience. In response to a Presbyterian elder’s question as to whether ‘‘there is not a shorter way of getting into the way of holiness?’’ Palmer replied in the Christian Advocate and Journal, ‘‘THERE IS A SHORTER WAY!’’ Her articles became her most famous work, The Way of Holiness (1843). Palmer begins with the premise that ‘‘God requires present holiness.’’ Using Finney’s logic that God would not command something people cannot do, Palmer declares a person must consecrate all to God. (For 80 descriptions of this by ministers who have experienced it, see Palmer’s Pioneer Experiences, 1868.) Using rather dubious biblical exegesis, Palmer termed this ‘‘laying all upon the altar.’’ She declared the altar was Christ and ‘‘whatever touched the altar became holy, virtually the Lord’s property, sanctified to His use.’’ Since God has declared this to be true, any person who consecrates everything to God can simply
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claim sanctification and testify to it publicly, whether or not he or she receives any inner confirmation from the Holy Spirit (as Wesley taught) or has any emotional experience. A person simply claims holiness on the basis of faith in God’s promise. Palmer’s other significant work was Promise of the Father (1859), in which she argued from Scripture, church history, and biographical example for the right of women to preach. Although Palmer never considered herself a ‘‘woman’s rights’’ advocate or sought ordination for her own ministry, she strongly supported the right and even Christian duty of women to publicly testify to their religious experience and to become full-time preachers if they felt it to be God’s call. Palmer’s understanding of holiness, despite her very controversial ‘‘altar terminology,’’ transformed the notion from one of process to one of experience. The movement Palmer helped give birth to left a lasting impact on American religious culture. Palmer’s defense of women’s ministry was the first of many in the holiness-Pentecostal tradition, which led such churches to ordain women more than 50 years before ‘‘mainline’’ Protestantism. OTHER WORKS: Present to My Christian Friend on Entire Devotion to God (1853). The Useful Disciple; or, A Narrative of Mrs. Mary Gardner (1853). Incidental Illustrations of the Economy of Salvation (1855). A Mother’s Gift (1875). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Dayton, D. W., Discovering an Evangelical Heritage (1976). Hughes, G., The Beloved Physician, Walter C. Palmer, M.D. (1884). Hughes, G., Fragrant Memories of the Tuesday Meeting (1886). Peters, J. L., Christian Perfection and American Methodism (1956). Roche, J., The Life of Mrs. Sarah A. Lankford Palmer (1898). Smith, T., Revivalism and Social Reform in Mid-Nineteenth Century America (1957). Wheatley, R., The Life and Letters of Mrs. Phoebe Palmer (1876). Reference works: NAW (1971). —NANCY A. HARDESTY
PAPASHVILY, Helen Waite Born 19 December 1906, Stockton, California; died 19 May 1996 Also wrote under: Helen Papashvily Daughter of Herbert and Isabella Lochhead Waite; married George Papashvily, 1933 Helen Waite Papashvily was educated in public schools and at the University of California at Berkeley. She graduated in 1929, and then opened a bookstore. The next year she met her husband, an immigrant from Kobiankari in Soviet Georgia who had come to the U.S. in 1923; about the same time Papashvily began her writing career with a variety of short pieces. In 1933 the Papashvilys moved to New York City, where Papashvily collected books for private libraries and wrote short
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stories, works for children, and articles. In 1935 they bought the Ertoba Farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where Papashvily lived until her death.
Nancy Cott notes, Papashvily thus found ‘‘the roots of feminism, in a shrewdly adapted form, in domesticity itself.’’
It was Papashvily’s idea to set down her husband’s accounts of his involved and colorful 20-year Americanization. Anything Can Happen (1945) quickly sold 600,000 copies, was translated into 15 languages, and was made into a film in 1952.
OTHER WORKS: Thanks to Noah (with G. Papashvily, 1951). Dogs and People (with G. Papashvily, 1954). Louisa May Alcott (1965). Russian Cooking (with G. Papashvily and the editors of Time-Life Books, 1969). Home, and Home Again (with G. Papashvily, 1973). George Papashvily: Sculptor, A Retrospective Catalogue (1979).
Anything Can Happen looks back to a period early in this century, just before the National Origins Act (1924) cut off the large wave of immigration from southern and eastern Europe. The book, told from a personal perspective, constitutes what the Saturday Review called a ‘‘psychological case-study in the adjustment of the alien.’’ Papashvily approaches the immigrant’s quest for food, shelter, and matrimony with wit, enthusiasm, honesty, and gracious old-world manners. His story presents a version of the old theme of innocence encountering experience—with not all the innocence on the immigrant’s side. Part of the book’s popularity originally stemmed from its optimistic portrayal of life in America, its tone being one of philosophic acceptance rather than rebellion against injustices. Consequently, the book lends credence to the vision of America as a melting pot. Its appeal, however, is also attributable to its vivid, charming, and often poetic use of language. This can be credited in part to Papashvily, who set out to capture the rhythm and flavor of her husband’s English rather than his exact speech. The Papashvilys’ five joint works constitute total and perfect collaboration. George supplied the material; his wife, seeing its potential, transformed it from verbal anecdotes into written words. (George, coming from a rural, oral tradition, and involved in tactile rather than verbal pursuits, eventually learned to read English, but never to write it.) Moreover, as an American married to an immigrant, Papashvily sensed how best to present her husband’s material to an American audience. Perhaps because the collaboration was so successful, the extent of George’s contribution to it is often glossed over. Of the Papashvilys’ other works the most important is Yes and No Stories (1946), one of the few books to render the folklore of Georgia, a country inaccessible both geographically and linguistically, into a language other than Russian. Because Georgian history involves recurrent invasions that resulted in the grafting of diverse ethnic cultures upon native materials, the tales, according to a New York Times Book Review, ‘‘though circumscribed in their locale, merge with the main stream of Indo-European folk matter.’’ Papashvily’s most important independent effort, All the Happy Endings: A Study of the Domestic Novel in America, the Women Who Wrote It, the Women Who Read It, in the Nineteenth Century (1956, reprinted 1972), was the first book to study in detail the enormous quantities of popular 19th-century American fiction written by, for, and about women; to discuss its authors individually; and to assess the relationship of their work to feminism. Treating domestic fiction as a social and psychological phenomenon, Papashvily concluded that while the suffragists of the period waged outright rebellion, the novelists engaged in surreptitious warfare ‘‘to destroy their common enemy, man.’’ As
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BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cott, N., Bonds of Womanhood (1977). Other references: CSM (22 Oct. 1956, 4 Nov. 1965, 17 Oct. 1973). NR (15 Jan. 1945). NYHTB (5 April 1951, 21 Oct. 1956). NYT (21 Nov. 1954). NYTBR (31 Dec. 1944, 1 Dec. 1946, 21 Oct. 1956). San Francisco Chronicle (8 Nov. 1946). SR (9 Nov. 1946, 10 Nov. 1956). Saturday Review (13 Jan. 1945). —JANET SHARISTANIAN
PARETSKY, Sara Born 8 June 1947, Ames, Iowa Daughter of David and Mary Edwards Paretsky; married Courtenay Wright, 1976; children: Kimball, Timothy, Phillip Since Sara Paretsky’s sharp-tongued feminist detective first inspected the scene of a crime, her lively and frequently dangerous sleuthings have had a strong impact on the genre of the mystery novel. Paretsky, determined to overcome the tired stereotypes of women in literature, created a semitough, smart, sexy female (partial to silk shirts and early morning jogs) to tackle the dirty business of crime. Indemnity Only (1982) was the debut of Paretsky’s half Italian/half Polish version of the classic hardboiled private eye, V.I. (for Victoria Iphigenia) Warshawski. Vic is streetwise but compassionate, determined to see the innocent relieved of their sufferings and equally determined the guilty should be punished. On her first case, she tracks a missing woman but uncovers more than a simple disappearance: there has been at least one murder, conspiracy, gang involvement. This feisty lady with a passion for justice—and for her ubiquitous red Ferragamo pumps—is unique among investigators in popular detective fiction. But in the early days, Vic was too good to be real and Paretsky had to endow her with a couple of flaws, ‘‘a short fuse and sloth,’’ about which the author is herself an expert. These particular features of Vic’s personality have endeared her to Paretsky’s many fans in Japan, one of whom wrote, ‘‘I like Vic because it is all right for her to be angry, and it’s all right for her to be messy.’’ Equally important to the character of Vic Warshawski and to Paretsky’s themes is the setting of these crime novels in contemporary Chicago. The first V.I. mystery includes scenes at the University of Chicago (where Paretsky was herself a student) and
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schemes in the insurance industry (where Paretsky was employed as an underwriter for several years). The thugs are real enough (brutal and vain), but most of the ‘‘crime’’ is of the white-collar kind. On the western shores of Lake Michigan, it seems corrupt institutions, seedy politicians, and shady practices were practically invented. And V.I. has plenty of trouble to battle against—the happy result of Sara Paretsky’s determination to be a writer. Paretsky grew up the only girl in a family of five children in a small Midwestern college town. Her academic parents agreed to pay for their boys to go to college, but Sara had to make it on her own. She worked her way through a B.A. at Kansas University (1967), and later an M.B.A. and Ph.D. in history (1977) at the University of Chicago. Until recently, she was fond of saying that they gave her the doctorate degree only after she ‘‘promised never to teach.’’ This remark is typical of Paretsky, who has no illusions about her writing either—though her novels about Vic Warshawski are dependable bestsellers both in America and abroad. She is self-effacing partly because of her years of commitment to social causes. In the summer of 1966, she did community service on the South Side of Chicago. Paretsky explains: ‘‘That summer informed my view of the difficulty that ordinary people have when faced with large and pitiless institutions. For that reason, Chicago dominates the way in which I think about life, power, justice.’’ An important contribution Paretsky has made is to raise the public awareness of social issues through her crime novels. She says that because ‘‘the crime novel is the place where law, justice and society naturally intersect,’’ a comprehensive and faithful vision of human and social interactions is possible. Her novels are praised as well plotted and convincing. But in Killing Orders (1985), when Paretsky takes on church corruption, her readers and reviewers compliment her courage as well as her skill. Newgate Callendar, a Paretsky fan and columnist for the New York Times, observed that she ‘‘seems willing to take on any institution, no matter how sacred.’’ And if Paretsky is fearless, her sleuth V.I. is even more so. With Blood Shot (1988), where Vic returns to the neighborhood of her childhood to help a friend despite death threats, the Chicago Tribune’s Paul Johnson recognized ‘‘the finest of the female first-person shamuses who have appeared in print over the last decade.’’ This novel won the Crime Writers Association Silver Dagger in 1988. Because she considers herself fundamentally a storyteller and not an activist, Paretsky has broken out of the traditional mystery genre to tell in Ghost Country (1998) about the plight of homeless people living under Wacker Drive in Chicago’s downtown Loop area. Her protagonist is an alcoholic opera singer down on her luck, but still regal and protective of her audience. Paretsky manages in this particular novel to expose not only the corrupt political attitudes and greed that have led to the misery of the poor in large cities, but to account for the increasing numbers we see on the streets every day by exposing the callous and abysmal treatment of the mentally ill. The element of mystery is ever present, since the book is marketed with these tag lines: ‘‘The world is waiting for a miracle. What if she’s already here?’’ Paretsky continues to live in Chicago with her husband, to take singing lessons, to be an avid fan of baseball, and to work
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with Sisters in Crime, an organization of women mystery writers she founded and served as president after a little breakfast she organized in Baltimore in 1986 grew into a promotional phenomenon. OTHER WORKS: Deadlock (1984). Bitter Medicine (1987). Burn Marks (1990). Guardian Angel (1991). Tunnel Vision (1994). Windy City Blues (1995). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1984, 1990). CANR (1998). Detecting Women (1994). Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (1994). St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (1996). Other references: Chicago (Mar. 1986). LAT (22 Dec. 1991). Mystery Scene (1995). TLS (30 Nov. 1984, 20 June 1986). —KATHLEEN BONANN MARSHALL
PARKER, Charlotte Blair Born 1858, Oswego, New York; died 5 January 1937, Great Neck, New York Wrote under: Lottie Blair Parker Daughter of George and Emily Hitchcock Blair; married Harry D. Parker Charlotte ‘‘Lottie’’ Blair Parker’s earliest theatrical experience was as an actress. She studied for the stage under Wyzeman Marshall in Boston, performed with the stock company of the Boston Theatre, and later toured with such major figures as the Czech tragic actress Mme. Janauschek and American actorproducer of poetic drama Lawrence Barrett. Parker married a theatrical manager. She turned to playwriting when White Roses, a one-act play she submitted to a New York Herald contest, received honorable mention. Parker’s most popular full-length play was Way Down East, which she wrote in 1897. ‘‘Elaborated by Joseph R. Grismer,’’ it opened at the Manhattan Theatre in 1898. Grismer’s wife, Phoebe Davis, played the leading role of Anna Moore in the original production and in the 1903 and 1905 revivals. In 1920 D. W. Griffith paid $175,000 for screen rights to the melodrama, which was by then considered dated. His film version was a popular success and an artistic triumph, largely because of the sweetly expressive face of Lillian Gish. Critics saw a strong resemblance between Way Down East and Steele MacKaye’s 1880 melodrama Hazel Kirke, in which Parker had once played the title role. Both plays feature an innocent girl who loves a man above her station in life and is duped by a sham marriage ceremony. Upon her learning of her dishonor, Hazel Kirke throws herself into the mill race. In Way Down East, Anna Moore is sent out into a New England blizzard. In both plays, the heroine is rescued at the last minute and a
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reconciliation is effected. The originality of Parker’s treatment lies in her use of ‘‘Down East’’ atmosphere and such comic characters as Hi Holler, Martha Perkins, and Reuben Whipple. Under Southern Skies was set in Louisiana in 1875. It opened 12 November 1901, with Grace George in the leading role. True to its reviewer’s prediction, the play was a popular success with ‘‘that large class of playgoers who like their color on thick without too much delicacy of shading, and with no great subtlety in the handling.’’ This criticism was intended metaphorically, but it might also be noted that several roles were performed in blackface. As in Way Down East, the heroine is caught between a falsehearted cad and an honorable young suitor; again, virtue triumphs. Parker’s third full-length play to reach Broadway was The Redemption of David Corson, based upon the novel by Charles Frederic Goss. It opened 8 January 1906 and ran for only 16 performances. With the novel Homespun (1909), Parker returned to a New England village milieu, Yankee characters, and rustic dialect. She used the formula of her stage melodramas—a conflict between a rich scoundrel and a poor-but-honest young man. A review of Homespun in the New York Times (14 Aug. 1909) sums up her characteristic manner: ‘‘It is as moral as a Sunday school tale, and at the end pleases if not surprises the reader by the tableau of virtue triumphant and vice in the dust.’’ OTHER WORKS: None of Charlotte Blair Parker’s plays were published, but the New York Public Library has Way Down East and Under Southern Skies in typescript. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Parker, L. B., ‘‘The Writer’s Thoughts Concerning Her Play,’’ in Green Book Album (Oct. 1911). Reference works: NCAB. Other references: New York Dramatic Mirror (27 Aug. 1901). NYT (8 Feb. 1898, 13 Nov. 1901, 9 Jan. 1906). The Stage (Jan. 1937, Aug. 1937). —FELICIA HARDISON LONDRÉ
PARKER, Dorothy (Rothschild) Born 22 August 1893, West End, New Jersey; died 7 June 1967, New York, New York Also wrote under: ‘‘Constant Reader,’’ Dorothy Rothschild Daughter of Henry and Eliza A. Marston Rothschild; married Edwin P. Parker, 1917 (divorced 1928); Alan Campbell, 1933 Dorothy Parker was the only daughter of a Jewish father and a Scottish mother who died while Parker was still an infant. After a very restricted youth and adolescence, Parker entered the publishing world in a minor editorial position at Vogue in 1916. A year later, she became drama critic for Vanity Fair and married Edwin Parker, whose name she retained even after their divorce in 1928.
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Parker became the acknowledged leader of the (Hotel) ‘‘Algonquin Round Table,’’ surrounded by such notables as Edna Ferber, Robert Benchley, and Alexander Woollcott. She left Vanity Fair in 1926 after her first volume of poetry, Enough Rope, became a bestseller. The opening poems of Enough Rope are composed of love lamentations and reiterate the desire for death in a dismal, often dirgelike tone. However, the tender lovers and passive victims soon give way to the carefree adventuress and the jaundiced ‘‘flapper.’’ The poems are characterized by regular lines of alternating rhyme and lapidary verse. Romance is often countered by a satiric thrust: ‘‘All of my days are gray with yearning. / (Nevertheless, a girl needs fun.)’’ Sunset Gun (1928) achieves a solidarity through alternating voices of melancholy and seriousness. The cavalier tone often reveals the comic dimensions of sorrow, but various poems, such as those concerning Mary’s pain at the loss of Jesus, touch on the universal nature of tragedy. Death and Taxes (1931) emphasizes the artistic integrity of the poetry by moving even further into the realm of the dramatic monologue. The usual caustic verse alternates with statements by various historical and literary figures. The contemplative verse shows a fine mastery of mood and tone and a manipulation of public myths, which places Parker far above the level of light entertainer. Poems from all three volumes were collected in Not So Deep as a Well (1936). In 1927 Parker began writing stories and a book review column signed ‘‘Constant Reader’’ for the New Yorker. Parker wrote for many popular magazines, but her most sustained critical endeavor was the ‘‘Constant Reader’’ column. Like her play reviews of the same period, the 46 pieces are characterized by an easy conversational tone that seems to effortlessly interweave epigrams, puns, and personal anecdotes. Notwithstanding the subjective mode of approach, sound literary commentary and insightful critical evaluations distinguish most of Parker’s work. Parker published stories in Laments for the Living: Collected Stories (1930, reprinted in 1995) and After Such Pleasures and collected them in Here Lies (1939). The stories reveal her as a master of cutting, ironic fiction. ‘‘Big Blond,’’ won the O. Henry Prize for 1930. Hazel Morse works hard at being a ‘‘good sport.’’ However, when near thirty, she marries Herbie and delights in being able to relax and give in to her moods. Unfortunately, he tires of her and leaves. The need to be a ‘‘good sport’’ again prevails. Hazel is provided for by a succession of men, but always in a mist of alcohol, depressed and longing for peace. The four-part presentation traces the progressive disintegration from contentment through despair over a number of years with an admirable unity of effect. The analogy made between the nonintrospective, passive victim and a ‘‘beaten driven, stumbling’’ horse struggling ‘‘to get a footing’’ is the heart of the narrative and is all the more vivid for the stark rendering of the background details. ‘‘A Telephone Call’’ (1930) provides a striking example of Parker’s proficiency in the modified stream-of-consciousness
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technique. As a woman futilely awaits a promised telephone call, the shifting phases of desperation and pain are revealed through a superb rhetorical display that encompasses rushing prayers, meandering introspections, and angry threats. ‘‘Clothe the Naked’’ (1939) concerns Big Lannie, a stoic black laundress whose only surviving daughter dies in childbirth leaving her with a blind grandson. The distanced narrative tone imparts a sense of sustained suffering throughout. Although Parker’s reputation has at times suffered a sharp decline (though she was the subject of a major film, Dorothy Parker and the Vicious Circle in 1995), the literary merit of her short stories and much of her poetry can scarcely be contested. The perennial concerns of alienation and loss of love are treated with an irony that only barely masks the sense of deep tragedy beneath. The economy of language, flawless dialogue, and sharp eye for detail that characterize the short stories is directly attributable to Parker’s poetic sense. The crystalline, concise sentences set the tone and sum up the characters as aptly as the measured, polished verse. OTHER WORKS: Dorothy Parker (1944). The Best of Dorothy Parker (1952, reissued in 1995, 1997). The Coast of Illyria: A Play in Three Acts (1990). The Poetry and Short Stories of Dorothy Parker (1994). Big Blonde and Other Stories (1995). Complete Stories (1995). Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker (1996). The Sayings of Dorothy Parker (1996). Complete Poems (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Babbitt, R. J., ‘‘Puffs and Pans: The Lives and Works of Three American Theatre Critics from the Algonquin Round Table ’’ (thesis, 1994). Breese, C., Excuse My Dust: The Art of Dorothy Parker’s Serious Fiction (dissertation, 1992). Buck, P. R. Dorothy Parker: Playwright (dissertation, (1997). Calhoun, R., Dorothy Parker: A Bio-Bibliography (1993). Carpenter, M., ‘‘Double-Burning Candles: A Close Look at Three Women Humorists of the 1920s’’ (thesis, 1995). Carr, L. P., Humor as a Rhetorical and Cognitive Strategy in the Work of Three 20th-Century Women Poets: Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Parker, and Anne Sexton (dissertation, 1995). Cowley, M., Writers At Work (1957). Dana, M. W., ‘‘Working Women in Depression-Era Short Fiction: The Short Stories of Tess Slesinger, Dorothy Parker and Marita Bonner’’ (dissertation, 1999). Frewin, L., The Late Mrs. Parker (1986). Keats, J., You Might As Well Live: The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker (1972). Kinney, A. F., Dorothy Parker (1978). Kinney, A. F., Dorothy Parker, Revised (1998). Mead, M., Dorothy Parker (1988). Melzer, S., The Rhetoric of Rage: Women in Dorothy Parker (1997). Miller, N., Love Poetry and the New Woman: Literary Negotiations in Edna St. Vincent Millay, Genevieve Taggard, and Dorothy Parker (dissertation, 1993). Wilson E., Classics and Commercials (1950). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Twayne’s Women Authors (CDROM, 1995). Other references: EJ (1934). Esquire (1968). Horizon (1962). Paris Review (1956). Poetry (1927, 1928, 1931). Rendezvous
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(1968). Revue de Paris (1947). The Infamous Dorothy Parker (video, 1995). —FRANCINE SHAPIRO PUK
PARRISH, Mary Frances See FISHER, M. F. K.
PARSONS, Elsie (Worthington) Clews Born 27 November 1875, New York, New York; died 19 December 1971, New York, New York Wrote under: John Main Daughter of Henry and Lucy Madison Clews; married Herbert Parsons, 1900 (died 1925); children: six Elsie Clews Parsons was the daughter of wealthy and socially prominent parents. She was educated in New York City, receiving from Columbia University a B.A. in 1896, M.A. in 1897, and Ph.D. in 1899. In 1900 she married a New York attorney who became a Congressman and a leader in the Republican Party. The marriage lasted until his death in 1925 and seems to have been unusual in the degree of autonomy Parsons achieved within it. There were six children born of this marriage, four of whom survived Parsons. Primarily a researcher and writer, Parsons taught only briefly from 1899 to 1905 at Barnard College and then at the New School for Social Research in 1919. But her professional achievements were well recognized: she presided over the American Folklore Society (1918), the American Ethnological Association (1923-25), and the American Anthropological Association (1940-41); she was also associate editor of the Journal of American Folklore (1910-41) and vice president of the New York Academy of Sciences (1936). Parsons’s career may be divided into two periods, the first beginning in 1899 when she undertook speculative work in sociology, committed to the belief individuals have the right to self-development, and that civilized society must allow for and benefit from such development. Occasionally, Parsons’s objective observations of her own society made readers uncomfortable. For example, a college textbook titled The Family (1906) attracted unusual attention because it was directed at both students and ‘‘intelligent mothers’’ of daughters, and discussed not only the family but also the inequities of the double standard and the advantages of trial marriage. Parsons’s next five books also dealt with social oppression, but from a broader perspective. The Old-Fashioned Woman (1913) is a book written with wit and quiet irony. Here Parsons reviews attitudes and customs relating to women in so-called primitive societies and in her own society so the limitations of
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each are revealed as painfully alike. In Social Freedom: A Study of the Conflicts Between Social Classifications and Personality (1915) Parsons explores the negative effects of such social categorization by age and sex on the development of individual personality. In Social Rule: A Study of the Will to Power (1916) she argues that social categories are used as a way of controlling such groups as women, children, employees, and ‘‘backward peoples.’’ Of special interest in this book is Parsons’s view of the ideal role of feminism. The second stage of Parsons’s career began about 1915, when she became interested in the anthropological approach of Franz Boas. Parsons did not abandon her commitment to selfdevelopment, but turned from speculating about the way society functioned to collecting ethnographic data that could indicate how a specific culture functioned. After 1915, Parsons undertook at least one field trip a year to study various groups, though her chief work was done with American and West Indian blacks and with Native Americans of the southwest Pueblos. On occasion, she returned to her earlier speculations and her interest in feministrelated issues when she wrote journal articles. Boas and other anthropologists cite two works of this period as having special significance—Pueblo Indian Religion (1939) and Mitla: Town of the Souls, and Other Zapoteco-speaking Pueblos of Oaxaca, Mexico (1936)—but these books are aimed at the specialist reader. Vital to any assessment of Parsons is a consideration of her character, which was marked by an uncompromising commitment to her work and to living in accordance with her beliefs. She was, Boas wrote: ‘‘intolerant towards [herself], tolerant towards others, disdainful of selfish pettiness and truthful in thought and action.’’ So strong was her personality that Robert Herrick, a novelist of the period, used it as the basis for several characterizations in Wanderings (1925), Chimes (1926), and The End of Desire (1932). Since Parsons’ death, her work has attracted little general attention, though at the time of her death the value of her work and the significance of her support of the American Folklore Society and of the field work of other anthropologists were acknowledged by many. OTHER WORKS: Educational Legislation and Administration of the Colonial Governments (1899). Religious Chastity (1913). Fear and Conventionality (1914). Notes on Zuñi (1917). Folktales of Andros Island, Bahamas (1918). Notes on Ceremonialism at Laguna (1920). Winter and Summer Dance Series in Zuñi in 1918 (1922). Folk-lore from the Cape Verde Islands (1923). Folklore of the Sea Islands, South Carolina (1923). Laguna Genealogies (1923). The Scalp Ceremonial of Zuñi (1924). The Pueblo of Jemez (1925). Tewa Tales (1926). Kiowa Tales (1929). The Social Organization of the Tewa of New Mexico (1929). Isleta, New Mexico (1932). Folk-lore of the Antilles, French and English (1933). Hopi and Zuñi Ceremonialism (1933). Taos Pueblo (1936). Taos Tales (1940). Notes on the Caddo (1941). Pequche,
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Canton of Otavelo, Province of Imbabura Ecuador: A Study of Andean Indians (1945). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: American Anthropologist (1943). Journal of American Folklore (1943). Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (1950). Scientific Monthly (May 1942). —PHYLLIS FRANKLIN
PARSONS, Frances (Theodora Smith) Dana Born 5 December 1861, New York, New York; died 10 June 1952, Katonah, New York Wrote under: Mrs. William Starr Dana, Frances Theodora Parsons Daughter of N. Denton and Harriet Shelton Smith; married William S. Dana, 1884 (died); James R. Parsons, Jr., 1896 (died); children: one son, one daughter Frances Dana Parsons was brought up and educated in New York City. During summers, she developed her lifelong love of the outdoors at her maternal grandparents’ home at Newburgh. After the loss of her first husband, a naval officer many years her senior, Parsons turned to nature writing. She gave up writing after 1899 to devote herself to other interests. After the accidental death of her second husband, an educator, in 1905, Parsons became a campaign worker in the suffrage movement. With the success of the campaign, she moved into Republican politics. Parsons had two children, a son and a daughter. Parsons’ most popular work was How to Know the Wildflowers (1893). Basically a guidebook arranged by flower colors, it not only describes a plant and gives botanical data but also tells where to find it. Parsons was not an authority on flowers, but she saw that a guidebook was needed and proposed the project to her publishers. The 1890s saw the real beginnings of the conservation movement, which today dominates popular nature sentiment, and the book was the first of many such books published during the decade. According to Season (1894) is a collection of essays about wildflowers that first appeared in the New York Tribune. This volume makes a nice supplement to the more scientific How to Know the Wildflowers, with informal descriptions of the flowers. The study of botany by children was especially encouraged in the 19th century. Plants and Their Children (1896), a charming, informal volume, is Parsons’ contribution to this field. In a series of essays on topics like ‘‘Seed Sailboats,’’ she introduces the child to botany and nature study in an interesting and unpatronizing way. During the early years of her second marriage, Parsons’ husband had financial problems, and so she wrote a companion
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volume to her wildflower guide, called How to Know the Ferns (1899). This volume was well received. Perchance Some Day, Parsons’ privately printed autobiography, was published in 1951. This book gives insight into the life of a gifted, spirited woman of the Eastern aristocracy, but does not dwell on her personal life. Instead, Parsons portrays a way of life and tells inside stories of political intrigue. As an intimate of the Roosevelt family, she was well placed to talk about the jockeying for position that went on in state Republican circles. Occasionally, she comments on the position of women or their interests, often seeming surprised at the lack of masculine support for women’s rights. Parsons was not a serious botanist or naturalist, but her organizing abilities, thoroughness, and common sense made her books successful. Politics and nature make an interesting combination in her writings. BIBLIOGRAPHY: NYT (11 June 1952).
Garden of Cats.’’ She started writing for the Hearst papers in 1924 and the following year discovered she had tuberculosis; she spent a year (on full salary) resting. After she recovered from the illness, Hearst sent Parsons to California, and she wrote her stories from Hollywood. At this time Parsons’s column became syndicated. In 1931 Parsons’s work expanded to the broadcast field when she was hired by the Sunkist Orange Company to do a 13-week radio show. She began a second radio show in 1934, on which she interviewed movie stars. For four years, ‘‘Hollywood Hotel’’ was one of the leading radio programs. Throughout the 1940s, Parsons continued to write her column, which was by then widely syndicated. Even at the age of sixty-four, Parsons was still doing a weekly radio show, writing her column, covering hard news events, writing stories for Photoplay and Modern Screen, and reviewing movies for Cosmopolitan. She retired in 1964.
Born 6 August 1893, Freeport, Illinois; died 9 December 1972, Beverly Hills, California Daughter of Joshua and Helen Wilcox Oettinger; married John Parsons, 1910 (died 1914); Dr. Harry Martin, 1931; children: one daughter
Besides writing columns and doing radio shows, Parsons was also the author of three books. The first, How to Write for the Movies, was published in 1915 and used as a text in early film classes at Ohio State University. With the advent of the ‘‘talkie,’’ however, the book became dated. The Gay Illiterate (1944) is a delightful account of Parsons’ life until 1939 and her entertaining style of writing makes the book a pleasure to read even today. Tell It to Louella (1961) is an account of some of Parsons’ more memorable celebrity interviews. Her quick and often acerbic wit provides greater insight into her life and personality than into the personalities of the stars she covered.
As a youngster, Louella Parsons showed an interest in writing and had her first story published in the Freeport JournalStandard before she reached high-school age. While in high school Parsons acquired her first newspaper job, working as the dramatic editor and assistant to the city editor on the Dixon, Illinois, Morning Star. Parsons received most of her journalism education through such practical experiences.
Parsons was the first widely read gossip columnist in the nation. She once wrote she would ‘‘do almost anything’’ in order to get a scoop. Her columns were largely devoted to interviews with the most popular movie stars and reports on weddings, divorces, and births; she was most proud of ‘‘scooping’’ the divorces of famous stars. Parsons maintained a colorful reputation throughout her career.
In 1910 Parsons married a real estate agent. The couple soon moved to Burlington, Iowa, where Parsons became frustrated and bored. After the birth of a daughter in 1911, Parsons left with the child to visit an uncle in Montana. From then on, Parsons and her husband drifted apart.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Eells, G., Hedda and Louella (1972). Reference works: CA (1973). CB (1940).
—BEVERLY SEATON
PARSONS, Louella Oettinger
After the death of her husband in 1914, Parsons took her daughter to Chicago and worked as a reporter for the Tribune. Parsons soon became involved in the movie business and took a job with the Essanay Company reading scripts and writing scenarios. She was later able to convince the Chicago Record-Herald to run a series of her articles on how to write for the movies. These articles were well received, and Parsons realized that if people were interested in a behind-the-scenes look at films, they would also be interested in a more surface view—a look at the movie stars. In 1918 Parsons moved with her daughter to New York City. She became the movie critic for the Morning Telegraph, where she remained until 1924. During her five years with the Telegraph, Parsons was made editor of the motion picture section and was presented with an all-female staff nicknamed the ‘‘Persian
—SANDRA CARLIN
PARTON, Sara (Payson) Willis Born 9 July 1811, Portland, Maine; died 10 October 1872, New York, New York Wrote under: Fanny Fern, Olivia Branch Daughter of Nathaniel and Hannah Parker Willis; married Charles Eldredge, 1837 (died); Samuel Farrington, 1849; James Parton, 1856; children: three daughters Sara Willis Parton preferred her talented mother to her harsh, narrowly religious father; she believed her mother would have
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distinguished herself in literature had she not had such a large family. Parton said her pen name, ‘‘Fanny Fern,’’ was inspired by happy childhood memories of her mother picking sweet fern leaves.
never missing a column. Parton lived a relatively quiet life with her third husband, James Parton, a well-known biographer 11 years her junior.
When Parton was a small child, her family moved to Boston, where her father established a religious newspaper. Parton attended Boston schools and Catharine Beecher’s famous seminary in Hartford, Connecticut, at the time when Harriet Beecher was a student teacher. Despite a lack of studiousness, Parton wrote witty essays at the Beecher school and on her return to Boston contributed to her father’s new publication, Youth’s Companion.
After Ruth Hall, Parton wrote only one more novel, Rose Clark, but her talent was not for fiction, and after Rose Clark she stuck with the form she was best at—the informal essay, sometimes lightly fictionalized but always short. She published several collections of these from her Ledger columns.
In 1884 Parton’s mother died, and in the next two years she lost the older of her three daughters and her first husband, a bank cashier. Parton was reduced to relative poverty, with only grudging support from her father and in-laws. She tried a marriage of convenience to Boston merchant Samuel Farrington, but it didn’t work out. Although Parton attempted to forget her second marriage, never directly referring to it, she later used Farrington as a model for one of her characters. In Rose Clark (1856), a ‘‘hypocrite’’ and ‘‘gross sensualist’’ tricks a reluctant widow into marriage and then slanders her and leaves her penniless. When Parton failed in her attempts to earn a living teaching and sewing, she appealed unsuccessfully to her brother, a successful poet and editor in New York, for help in launching a literary career. Parton began to write short sketches, and by 1851 she was placing her work in small Boston magazines. Her magazine pieces were so popular that in 1853 J. C. Derby published a collection of them as Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio. Parton continued the next year with a second series and a juvenile, Little Ferns for Fanny’s Little Friends. The three books sold an astonishing 180,000 copies in America and England, and Parton was suddenly rich and famous. Based very closely upon Parton’s own experience, Ruth Hall (1855) recounts the struggles of a widow to support herself and her children. Ruth Hall finds few opportunities open to women and is treated shabbily by her relatives, who can tolerate neither a passive dependent nor the successful and assertive writer Ruth finally becomes. Ruth Hall caused a sensation in the literary world. Parton had apparently thought herself protected by her pseudonym and neglected to disguise the characters, who were obviously based on her relatives. Parton’s true identity was discovered and the family quarrel aired in public. Ruth Hall was admired by Hawthorne, and attacked by the critics for the same reasons he praised it—its lack of restraint and ‘‘female delicacy’’—one critic referred to it as ‘‘Ruthless Hall.’’ Soon after the publication of Ruth Hall, the anonymous Life and Beauties of Fanny Fern appeared, satirizing Parton as a spendthrift, adventuress, and ingrate to her family. In the meantime, Parton moved to New York City and was engaged by Robert Bonner, publisher of the New York Ledger, to write a weekly column for the then outlandish sum of $100 a week. For the next 20 years, Parton wrote weekly for the Ledger,
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Because her early work is best known, Parton has been mistakenly classified as a sentimentalist. Yet her writing changed and developed significantly after her initial success. In the first series of Fern Leaves there are two parts: the first, which comprises about three quarters of the book, is indeed lachrymose, but the remaining quarter consists of humorous and satirical pieces. In the second series of Fern Leaves the proportion is exactly reversed. In Folly as It Flies (1859), Parton adopted a new voice, which she would maintain for the rest of her career. Her sentimentality and heavy-handed satire give way to relaxed, humorous philosophizing. She abandons the artificiality and straining for effect of her earlier pieces, and writes more naturally and spontaneously. While Parton’s staple continued to be everyday domestic topics, like child care and the annoying habits of husbands, she became conscious of social conditions in New York City and began to depict poverty, prostitution, exploitation of workers, and prison life. Parton also became more direct and outspoken in her championship of women. Women’s estate and the relationship between the sexes had always been Parton’s major subject, but in her early fiction she protested injustice to women by portraying them as passive victims of male brutality. By the end of the 1850s, Parton came to support the women’s rights movement and encourage her readers to seek suffrage, better education, and wider fields of endeavor.
OTHER WORKS: Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio (English title, Shadows and Sunbeams; 1st series, 1853; 2nd series, 1854). Fresh Leaves (1857). Play-Day Book (1857). A New Story Book for Children (1864). Ginger-Snaps (1870). Caper-Sauce (1872). Fanny Fern: A Memorial Volume (edited by J. Parton, 1873). The private papers of Sara Willis Parton are housed in the Sophia Smith Collection of Smith College.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Adams, F. B., Fanny Fern (1966). Derby, J. C., Fifty Years Among Authors, Books and Publishers (1884). The Life and Beauties of Fanny Fern (1855). Warren, J. W., Fanny Fern: An Independent Women (1992). Reference works: NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: AL (Nov. 1957). Biblion (Spring 1969). Colophon (Sept. 1939). NY Historical Society Quarterly (Oct. 1954). WS (1972). —BARBARA A. WHITE
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PASTAN, Linda Born 27 May 1932, New York, New York Daughter of Jack and Bess Schwartz Olenick; married Ira Pastan, 1953; children: Stephen, Peter, Rachel Linda Pastan studied at Radcliffe College (B.A., 1954) and in her senior year won Mademoiselle’s Dylan Thomas Poetry award. (Sylvia Plath took second place.) She earned an M.L.S. from Simmons in 1955 and an M.A. from Brandeis in 1957. Her life as a mother and homemaker both interrupted and fueled her vocation as a writer. She suspended a writing career and carved out hours for writing when her children were at school; family life emerged as her major subject. Pastan’s poetry explores the nuances and meaning of domestic life by recounting her daily transactions as mother, wife, daughter, and poet in light of older stories and myths (chiefly biblical and classical). Her oft-noted ironic vision rises out of the paralleling of familiar domestic experience and culturally privileged narratives. Pastan is committed to writing accessible short lyrics of personal observation. Skeptical of the division between public and private poetry, she asserts that ‘‘the ability of the poet to make the reader see and feel always serves a political function.’’ Pastan’s poems are built of finely wrought images and plainly articulated narratives and are replete with references to a writer’s tools. Her central emphasis is on labor: her labor to form words that meet experience; her labor against desolation and toward meaning in light of mortality. Death and the shadow that death casts on domesticity and life are major preoccupations. A Perfect Circle of Sun (1971), Aspects of Eve (1975), The Five Stages of Grief (1978), Waiting for My Life (1981), and PM/ AM: New and Selected Poems (1982) consider events large and small—in light of death. The tension, comedy, and continuity of family experience is explored in poems such as ‘‘Passover’’ that blend the old and new family saga: ‘‘The wise son and the wicked / the simple son / and the son who doesn’t act, are all my son / leaning tonight as it is written / slouching his father calls it.’’ In Aspects of Eve, Pastan asserts the writing of poems and the naming and nurturing of children as parallel and necessary acts of saving, although powerless against loss. The Five Stages of Grief is the most thematic of her books, taking its name and its divisions from Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’ understanding of the grief process as sequential stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. In this book of midlife, Pastan explores these feelings and discovers that her pain emanates from the reality that within mutability, nothing can be definitively lost. The book is a process of making peace with her desires for an intensity of feeling and perception that has passed. There is a permanent shift in the gravity of Pastan’s poems with A Fraction of Darkness (1985). Written during her mother’s stroke and its aftermath, the book reflects Pastan’s heightened sense of mortality and renewed commitment to the search for sense. This is evident, too, in the title and scope of her 1995
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offering, An Early Afterlife. In The Imperfect Paradise (1988) and Heroes in Disguise (1991), Pastan focuses her attention on art objects: paintings, formal gardens, museums, The Odyssey. She remains concerned with passages in a woman’s life and with the gleaning function of the poet in a world depleted of and hungry for meaning: ‘‘Look out the car window. / Hogs have been let loose / in the stubbled fields / like heroes in disguise / to find what grains of corn / are left.’’ Pastan was named poet laureate of Maryland in 1991. Cowinner with Naomi Lazard of the Poetry Society of America’s di Castagnola Award (1977), she has also received the Bess Hoskins Prize of Poetry magazine and the Maurice English Award.
OTHER WORKS: On the Way to the Zoo (1975). Selected Poems of Linda Pastan (1979). Even as We Sleep (chapbook, 1980). Setting the Table (chapbook, 1980). Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems, 1968-1998 (1998). Contributed poems to: Atlantic, Georgia Review, Harper’s, Kenyon Review, Ms., New Republic, Ohio Review, Paris Review, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Tri-Quarterly and others. Contributor to the following anthologies: Images of Women in Literature (1991), Writers on Writing (1991), A House of Gathering: Poets on May Sarton’s Poetry (1993), No More Masks! An Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Women Poets, Newly Revised and Expanded (1993), American Identities: Contemporary Multicultural Voices (1994), Poetry Baltimore: Poems About A City (1997) and others.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ingersoll, E. G., et all, eds., The Post-Confessionals: Conversations with American Poets of the Eighties (1989). Jackson, R., Acts of Mind: Conversations with Contemporary Poets (1983). Mullaney, J. P., Truthtellers of the Times: Interviews with Contemporary Women Poets (1998). Reference works: CA (1976). CANR (1986). CLC (1984). DLB (1980). Other references: Academic Medicine: Journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges (March 1992). America (21 Feb. 1976). American Book Review (March 1990). APR (Jan. 1982). Belles Lettres (Fall 1988). Christian Science Monitor (30 July 1975). Encounter (Apr. 1980). English Journal (Dec. 1979, Nov. 1990). Georgia Review (Winter 1979, Spring 1983, Summer 1986, Summer 1988). Hudson Review (Autumn 1978). Massachusetts Review (Spring 1989). Ms. (Sept. 1976). New Republic (4 Feb. 1978). NYT (18 Aug. 1972). NYTBR (20 Feb. 1983, 18 Sept. 1988). Poetry (Sept. 1982, Jan. 1984, Apr. 1986). Prairie Schooner (Summer 1976, Fall 1979, Spring 1991). Sewanee Review (July 1976). Southern Review (Winter 1992). TLS (18 Jan. 1980). Tulsa Studies in Women’s Lit. (Spring 1990), Virginia Quarterly Review (Winter 1981, Winter 1982, Spring 1983, Autumn 1988). Washingtonian (May 1996). WRB (June 1986, Oct. 1988). Audio and video: Linda Pastan Reading Her Poems with Comment in the Recording Laboratory (audio, 1971). The Poet and the Poem at the Library of Congress: Linda Pastan (audio recording, 1990). Seven Washington Poets Reading Their Poems
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in the Coolidge Auditorium, Library of Congress (audio, 1998). The Writing Life: A Conversation Between Richard Wilbur and Linda Pastan (video, 1986). The Writing Life: Linda Pastan Talks with Eavan Boland (video, 1996). The Writing Life: Lucille Clifton Talks with Linda Pastan (video, 1992). —DARIA DONNELLY, UPDATED BY SYDONIE BENET
PATCHETT, Ann Born 2 December 1963, Los Angeles, California Ann Patchett has had an extremely successful young career. Her first book, The Patron Saint of Liars (1992), published when she was in her mid-twenties, was a bestseller and made into a TV movie. Her second novel, Taft (1994), received great reviews. Her third book, The Magician’s Assistant (1997), was another bestseller and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize in Britain. Patchett also writes nonfiction, publishing in magazines such as GQ, Outside, and Vogue. Patchett summed up her first three novels with these words: ‘‘I wrote one book over and over. It is about a group of desperate characters who come together by circumstance and become a family.’’ While these novels of circumstance have been criticized for being overly contrived, most critics have been willing to overlook this, citing the rewards to be found once disbelief is suspended. In Patron Saint, a young, pregnant, married woman in the 1960s runs away from her life in Southern California and ends up at St. Elizabeth’s, a home for unwed mothers in Kentucky, intending to give up her baby. She completely abandons her old life, including her husband, who doesn’t even know she’s pregnant, and her much loved mother. She finds a new world at St. Elizabeth’s, ‘‘a country unto itself,’’ and a new life among the nuns and other pregnant girls. In Taft, John Nickel, a black bar owner in Memphis, is another lost soul. He has given up a promising career as a drummer to be a father, but his son’s mother cannot forgive him for not marrying her when he first learned she was pregnant, and eventually takes the boy away with her to Florida. Patchett doesn’t suggest that the holes in her characters’ hearts can ever be entirely filled, but she insists the wounds can be patched. In this case, Nickel’s loneliness is augmented by his unlikely involvement with a pair of white teenagers who have recently lost their father, the title’s Taft. Nickel finds a way to explore his own feelings about fatherhood by imagining the life and emotions of the deceased Taft. As The Magician’s Assistant begins, the assistant, Sabine, finds her life has effectively ended when the magician, her partner and the object of her devotion for 20 years, suddenly dies. Again
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the arrangement is rather complex, for the magician, Parsifal, was gay and lived for many years with his Vietnamese lover, Phan. Parsifal marries Sabine only after Phan dies of AIDS and Parsifal learns that he will likely die in a year or two. He tells her he wants her to be his widow. Sabine is the sudden inheritor of Parsifal’s rug business, Phan’s magnificent Los Angeles home, and a pack of lies. Parsifal always told Sabine he was alone in the world, his family killed in an auto accident; she learns this is not true. Again Patchett insists on redemption and again it is found in an improbable spot—wintry Nebraska—where Sabine travels to visit Parsifal’s mother and sisters. Her grief is eased as she recreates Parsifal’s past and sleeps in his boyhood bed. Here, as in Taft, the power of imagination is part of the healing process. She learns of the painful events that caused Parsifal to make a complete break with his past and comes to understand why he kept his secrets. Sabine is also able to do what he couldn’t: offer a chance of escape to his sister, Kitty, who was left behind. In Kitty, Sabine also finds the promise of the kind of love she never had with Parsifal. Patchett’s universe is orderly; when a door closes, somewhere, always, a window opens. This impulse toward redemption is democratic; no characters get written off, no one remains unforgiven at story’s end. Reality is portrayed but is leavened by the possibility of magic; Sabine’s Los Angeles has places where you can’t go anymore, even in the daytime, yet ocean breezes often blow away the smog. Patchett has taught at Murray State University in Murray, Kentucky, and the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. She has held numerous writing residencies and was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1995. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Booklist (19 July 1994). Independent (2 Feb. 1998). KR (1 Mar. 1992, 1 Aug. 1997). Larson, S., Black-andWhite Blues, The World & I (1 Mar. 1995). LATBR (19 Oct. 1997). Newsday (6 Oct. 1994). NYTBR (26 July 1992, 15 Oct. 1994, 15 Nov. 1997). Sacramento Bee (15 Oct. 1998). Tennessean (5 Apr.1998) —VALERIE VOGRIN
PATERSON, Katherine Born 31 October 1932, Qing Jiang, Jiangsu, China Daughter of George R. and Mary Goetchius Womeldorf; married John B. Paterson, 1962; children: Elizabeth, John Jr., David, Mary One of the foremost contemporary writers of children’s books, Katherine Paterson has won numerous awards; they include two Newbery Medals, for Bridge to Terabithia (1972, 1977) and Jacob Have I Loved (1980), and two National Book awards, for The Master Puppeteer (1976) and The Great Gilly Hopkins
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(1978). She also lectures and writes extensively about the importance of excellence in children’s literature. Paterson draws greatly from her own childhood experience to create multifaceted, realistic characters. Born in China, with the outbreak of war in 1941 she and her missionary parents fled to North Carolina. At the age of twelve, she was labeled an outcast by her peers because she spoke with a British accent, wore clothes from the missionary barrel (which some of the children recognized as their own contributions), and had peculiar mannerisms. She was painfully shy, and because of her parents’ work, she had to move 18 times during her growing-up years. She turned to books and her own elaborate fantasies for comfort. Although Paterson suffered some lonely years as a child of missionary parents, she became a missionary herself. After graduating from King College (B.A., 1954), she earned an M.A. from the Presbyterian School of Christian Education (1957) and served from 1957 to 1961 in Japan. There she studied at the Naganuma School of the Japanese Language in Kobe. When she returned to the United States, she earned an M.R.E. (1962) from Union Theological Seminary. Paterson’s deep interest in the culture and history of Japan inspired her first three novels for children, The Sign of the Chrysanthemum (1973), Of Nightingales That Weep (1974), and The Master Puppeteer. Despite her ability to capture the feel of Japanese culture and conventions, critics felt she did not find her true voice and style until she began to write contemporary novels set in the U.S. Paterson never planned on becoming a writer. She said: ‘‘When I finally began to write books, it was not so much that I wanted to be a writer but that I loved books and wanted somehow to get inside the process, to have a part in their making.’’ One of her college professors noted her tendency to conform her writing style to that of the author they happened to be studying, a habit that turned out to be a great asset; critics note Paterson’s ability to modify her writing style to create the appropriate mood for a piece. She believes that ‘‘the very language, the metaphors, must belong to the world of the story.’’ In The Tale of the Mandarin Ducks (1990, turned into a musical play 1999), Paterson displays this talent through the economy of language and clarity appropriate for a traditional tale. Paterson also draws from the experiences of her four children for her writing. She was moved to write the highly praised Bridge to Terabithia when her son David’s close friend was killed by lightning. She said, ‘‘I seem to be in tune with the questions my children and their friends are asking. Is there any chance that human beings can learn to love one another? Will the world last long enough for me to grow up in it? What if I die?’’ Critics note the sensitivity and honesty with which she explores these questions in her writing. Paterson’s talents as a writer for children are also reflected in her essays for adults collected in The Gates of Excellence (1981, reprinted 1988), and The Spying Heart: More Thoughts on Reading and Writing Books for Children (1989), which were combined under the title A Sense of Wonder: On Reading and Writing Books
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for Children (1995), as well as her Library of Congress lecture in November 1988, Stick to Reality and a Dream: Celebrating America’s Young Readers (1990). She is noted for her candor and humor when speaking about her own experiences as well as for her stimulating and challenging scholarly opinions about children’s literature. In the late 1990s, Paterson continued writing delightful tales at a brisk pace, averaging at least one per year. Taking on the historical was Parzival: The Quest of the Grail Knight (1998) and two more seasonal gifts for parents and children alike: Marvin’s Best Christmas Present Ever (1997) and A Midnight Clear: Stories for the Christmas Season (1995, 1998). OTHER WORKS: Who Am I? (1966, 1992). Justice for All People (1973). To Make Men Free (1973). Angels and Other Strangers: Family Christmas Stories (1979, published in England as Star of Night, 1980 and 1991). The Crane Women (translated by Paterson, 1981). Rebels of the Heavenly Kingdom (1983). Come Sing, Jimmy Jo (1985, 1994). Consider the Lilies: Plants of the Bible (with J. Paterson, 1986, 1998). Park’s Quest (1988). Lyddie (1991, 1995). The Smallest Cow in the World (1991, 1995). The King’s Equal (1992, 1999). The Big Book for the Planet (1993). The Lure of Story (1993). Flip-Flop Girl (1994). The Angel and the Donkey (1996). Jip: His Story (1996, 1998). Celia and the Sweet, Sweet Water (1998). Images of God (1998). Still Summoned By Books (1998). Preacher’s Boy (1999). Stories have appeared in numerous anthologies, including: A Newbery Christmas: Fourteen Stories of Christmas by Newbery Award-Winning Authors (1991, 1998), When I Was Your Age: Original Stories About Growing Up (1996, 1999), Miracles of Christmas (1997), Home for Christmas: Stories to Warm the Heart by O. Henry, George MacDonald, Katherine Paterson & Others (1998), Places I Never Meant to Be: Original Stories by Censored Writers (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bloom, H., ed., Women Writers of Children’s Literature (1998). Cary, A., Katherine Paterson (1997). Fisher, B. E., ‘‘Social Influences on the Writing of Marion Dane Bauer and Katherine Paterson’’ in Language Arts (1999). Fohey, C. A., ‘‘Overcoming Egocentrism: The Hope in Three Novels by Katherine Paterson’’ (thesis, 1990). Knight, K. F., A Study of the Revision Process as It Is Revealed in the Manuscripts of Katherine Paterson’s The Great Gilly Hopkins (dissertation, 1995). Mahmoud, L., ed., Books Remembered: Nurturing the Budding Writer (1997). Schmidt, G. D., Katherine Paterson (1994). Worlds of Childhood: The Art and Craft of Writing for Children (1998). Reference works: CLR (1984). CANR (1990). CLC (1980, 1984). DLB (1986). SATA (1988). Other references: ALAN Review (Spring 1997). Bookbird (1998). Booklist (April 1999). Horn Book (January 1991). School Library Journal (May 1998). Theology Today (1998). Writer (August 1995). Zena Sutherland Lectures, 1983-1992 (1993). —DIANE E. KROLL, UPDATED BY SYDONIE BENET
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PATTON, Frances Gray Born 19 March 1906, Raleigh, North Carolina Daughter of Robert L. and Mary S. MacRae Gray; married Lewis Patton, 1927 Doubtlessly influenced by her family’s literary bent (her father and brothers were journalists, and her mother published occasional pieces), Frances Gray Patton began writing for her high school newspaper and continued on through a playwriting fellowship at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. She wrote the Carolina Playmakers’ opening play in 1925, and another play published in a volume that also contains Thomas Wolfe’s first known work. A fourth-generation North Carolinian, Patton married a University of North Carolina English professor in 1927, had three children, and continued to reside in Durham until her death. During the 1940s and 1950s, Patton’s short stories appeared in magazines such as the New Yorker, Harper’s, and McCall’s. Her first book, The Finer Things in Life (1951), is composed of reprints of these simple stories of smalltown Southern life. Whether openly employing the first person or relating the problems of the Potter family—college professor, wife, and three children—these tales are primarily low-keyed autobiographical sketches lacking energy, substance, or depth of character. Only when Patton places some distance between herself and the subject does she succeed in generating a feeling of involvement through a fine use of dialogue and local color. ‘‘A Nice Name’’ won a Society of Intercultural Education award for its fine portrayal of the reactions of a group of young Southern matrons when they learn that the charming, intellectual ‘‘pen-pal’’ they had all thought ‘‘wonderful’’ and ‘‘bril-l-iant ’’ is black. ‘‘The Terrible Miss Dove’’ is the seminal episode of the subsequent novel and is highly successful in characterization and tone.
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of Liberty Hill,’’ Miss Dove has placed her stamp on almost every person in town. Each of them has spent a period under her tutelage, ‘‘where no leeway was given to the personality,’’ and in her room one was ‘‘sustained by the classic simplicity of inflexible rights and wrongs.’’ Miss Dove is a dedicated pedagogue who believes each child’s character is in her keeping. She attempts to prepare the children for the ‘‘inescapable perils of independent thinking’’ and to show them ‘‘life demanded all the disciplined courage and more, that one could bring to it.’’ Through the use of flashbacks, rhetorical questions, and multicharacter psychological intrusions, the personality of Miss Dove, her life, and the impact on her pupils are portrayed in a matter-of-fact tone with occasional ironic thrusts balancing the sentimental tendencies of the narrative. Although Patton seeks to illustrate the ‘‘vein-structure of human life’’ through a moment of illumination, most of her stories fall short through a lack of substance—the mundaneness of the insight or the inconsequence of the character. At her best, Patton judiciously balances the simultaneous planes of humor and tragedy while ironically exposing the foibles and nobility of human nature. These successful moments in a half-dozen stories and her novel have secured Patton’s place in American letters. OTHER WORKS: Twenty-Eight Stories (1969). Stories in ‘‘May Your Days Be Merry and Bright’’: Christmas Stories by Women (1991), Women’s Friendships: A Collection of Short Stories (1991). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: NYHT (9 Dec. 1951, 2 Oct. 1955, 31 Oct. 1954). NYT (16 Oct. 1955). North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame (video, 1997). SR (6 Nov. 1954). San Francisco Chronicle (8 Nov. 1951). —FRANCINE SHAPIRO PUK
Patton’s second volume of short stories, A Piece of Luck (1955), shows a greater mastery of form and language. The autobiographical strain has been submerged, and the Southern setting serves to illuminate rather than define the characters, as in the first volume. The various shifts of narrative perspective and the ironic detachment give this volume considerable substance. The masculine revenge of ‘‘The Homunculus’’ and the sorrow at the end of ‘‘The Game’’ of Maria, who has ‘‘nothing pure and beautiful left to love,’’ are delicately depicted and sensitively rendered. The fine use of dialogue, gentle irony, and vivid delineation of character convey ‘‘a time when life, for all its troubles, had been sweet and juicy in the mouth.’’ Patton’s greatest achievement is her only novel, Good Morning, Miss Dove (1954). Highly successful in both America and England, this work has been justly dubbed a minor classic. Although the story is overly sentimentalized, the great force of the general impression is sustained through the successful depiction of both smalltown life and the monolithic character of the ‘‘terrible Miss Dove’’—the sixth grade geography teacher who ‘‘caused children to flex their moral muscle.’’ As ‘‘the public conscience
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PEABODY, Elizabeth Palmer Born 16 May 1804, Billerica, Massachusetts; died 3 January 1894, Boston, Massachusetts Daughter of Nathaniel and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody The oldest of seven children, Elizabeth Peabody was educated by her mother, whose school for local children in Salem, Massachusetts, was dedicated to the principle that every child should be treated as a genius. In 1822 Peabody opened her own school in Boston and established her friendship with Ralph Waldo Emerson, who tutored her in Greek. The school failed, and after two years as a private governess Peabody opened a school in Brookline, a Boston suburb. Always responsive to ‘‘genius,’’ Peabody soon established two more significant friendships. The first, with William Ellery Channing, whose daughter was enrolled in Peabody’s school,
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shaped Peabody’s views on education, philosophy, and religion. Peabody eventually became Channing’s editor and prepared many of his sermons for the press. Friendship with Bronson Alcott, a leading transcendental philosopher, led Peabody to give up her own school and become his assistant in an experimental school in Boston. Record of a School (1835) suggests the idealistic philosophy she and Alcott shared. The second edition (1836) attempts to answer the popular outcry against Alcott’s discussion of childbirth in a conversation with the school children. Although his concern was to account for the creation of the individual soul, Victorian Boston was outraged he discussed childbirth at all. Peabody defended Alcott, but withdrew from his school and in July 1840 opened a bookshop in Boston, which soon became a center for the transcendental movement. Here Margaret Fuller held her conversations with women, the so-called Transcendental Club met, and its journal—The Dial—was published. When the Dial failed, it was succeeded by Peabody’s short-lived journal, Aesthetic Papers. Though influential, the bookshop did not prosper, and closed in 1850. Peabody taught for a time and through the 1850s campaigned for the adoption of Jozef Bem’s chronological history charts in elementary and secondary schools. She also traveled widely to speak in favor of the abolition of slavery. In 1859 Peabody became acquainted with the system of kindergarten education developed by Friedrich Froebel in Germany. From then to the end of her life, often assisted by her sister Mary Tyler Peabody Mann, Peabody devoted herself to establishing kindergartens and recruiting kindergarten teachers throughout the U.S. In her eighties, still vigorous, Peabody lectured successfully at Bronson Alcott’s Concord School of Philosophy. Although she was learned and widely read, Peabody was not an effective writer. Pieces like her ‘‘Plan of the West Roxbury Community’’ (The Dial, March 1844) and ‘‘Language’’ (Aesthetic Papers, 1849) suffer from the vague, inflated diction often characteristic of transcendental essays. Record of a School has historical significance as a journal of Alcott’s attempt to elicit evidence of an awareness of the Soul from very young children. Peabody’s writings on kindergartens, especially The Moral Culture of Infancy (with her sister, 1863) indicate the connection between transcendentalism and this significant movement in modern education. Peabody’s warm personal enthusiasms are reflected in her memoirs of Channing (Reminiscences of William Ellery Channing, D.D., 1877) and the painter Washington Allston (Last Evening with Allston, 1886). Peabody was ‘‘an intellectual spinster who lived to become a Boston institution,’’ according to Perry Miller (The Transcendentalists, 1950). Stout and plain, Peabody was eccentric and careless of her appearance. In old age, she is said to have traveled with no luggage but a toothbrush in her pocket and a nightgown under her dress. She is assumed to be the model for Miss Birdseye in Henry James’ The Bostonians (1886). Peabody was a central figure in the transcendental movement, the only woman other than Margaret Fuller to make a
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considerable intellectual contribution in this religious and philosophic forum. She was fortunate in her friendships with Jones Very, Horace Mann, and Nathaniel Hawthorne (who married her sister Sophia). Peabody’s lifelong interest in the development and education of young children stimulated others to contribute to this field. OTHER WORKS: First Steps to the Study of History by J. M. Gerando (edited by Peabody, 1832). Self-Education (1832). Key to History (1833). The Water-Spirit (1833). Method of Spiritual Culture (1836). Aesthetic Papers (edited by Peabody, 1849). First Nursery Reading Book (1849). Blank Centuries Accompanying the Manual of the Polish-American System of Chronology (1850). Crimes of the House of Austria Against Mankind (1852). Chronological History of the United States (1856). A Sunday School Hymn Book (1857). Memorial of. . .Wesselhöft (1859). Universal History (1859). American Kindergarten (with M. T. P. Mann, 1863). A Plea for Froebel’s Kindergartens (1869). Blank Centuries for Monographs of History (1870). The Kindergarten Messenger (edited by Peabody, 1873-1877). Lectures on the Nursery School and Kindergarten (1874). Record of Mr. Alcott’s School (1874). Manual of Universal History (1875). Kindergartens (1876). After Kindergarten—What? (1878). Female Education in Massachusetts (1884). Lectures in the Training Schools for Kindergarten (1886). Education in the Home, Kindergarten, and Primary School (1887). The Piutes (1887). Mother-Play and Nursery Songs by F. W. Froebel (edited by Peabody, 1906).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Baylor, R., ‘‘The Contribution of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody to Kindergarten Education in the United States,’’ (dissertation, 1960). Bilbo, Q. N., ‘‘Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Transcendentalist,’’ (dissertation, 1932). Coultrap-McQuin, S., Doing Literary Business (1990). Gohdes, L. F., The Periodicals of American Transcendentalism (1931). Miller, P., The Transcendentalists (1950). Tharp, L. H., The Peabody Sisters of Salem (1950). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: New England Quarterly (Sept. 1942). —JANE BENARDETE
PEABODY, Josephine Preston Born 30 May 1874, Brooklyn, New York; died 4 December 1922, Cambridge, Massachusetts Daughter of Charles and Susan Morrill Peabody; married Lionel S. Marks, 1906 Both Josephine Preston Peabody’s parents were from Massachusetts families. When Peabody’s father died in 1884, she moved with her mother and elder sister to her maternal grandmother’s
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house in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Peabody spent the remainder of her life, except for vacations and several trips abroad, in Dorchester and, later, Cambridge. Peabody’s diary, kept from age sixteen until her death, describes a life somewhat devoid of companionship and certainly of luxuries. Peabody early learned to love the theater, literature, and music, however; as a young woman, she saved for standing room at concerts and plays or for the purchase of a long-desired book. Peabody’s health was not robust, and writing—mainly poetry—was her greatest joy during a rather lonely girlhood. Peabody left Girls’ Latin School in Boston in her junior year, owing to ill health. She attended Radcliffe College from 1894 to 1896, and lectured on English Literature at Wellesley College from 1901 to 1903. In 1906, she married a professor of engineering at Harvard. Peabody began sending poems to magazines and journals during her school years. In 1887 and 1888, several were published; and in successive years, Peabody’s work appeared regularly in Atlantic Monthly, Scribner’s, and other periodicals. Old Greek Folk Stories was published in 1897, and The Wayfarers, Peabody’s first volume of poetry, in 1898. Portrait of Mrs. W— (1922), a play about Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, was published the year of her death. Despite household and maternal obligations (Peabody bore a daughter in 1908 and a son in 1910), and in the face of rapidly failing health, Peabody continued to write and work for causes she believed in. She expressed her conviction that peace and a more humane social order might be achieved if women could have equality of influence and participation in world affairs. Her last volume of poems, Harvest Moon (1916), expresses despair at war’s harvest: the blood shed by children women have borne, reared, and loved. Peabody’s writing reflects her deepest interests: the literature of the past and especially of the English Renaissance, nature, and the rights of all men and women to lead joyous, fulfilling lives. Her Greek tales and her poems for children—The Book of the Little Past (1908), for example—have a directness and simplicity that charms. Peabody’s verse dramas are credited with having revived interest in the traditional English blank-verse drama, but they are of concern chiefly to literary historians today. Marlowe (1901), an imaginative play about the Renaissance dramatist and poet, and The Piper (1909), an idealized version of the Pied Piper legend, are perhaps the most successful of these efforts. The Piper won the Stratford Play Competition in 1910, and was produced in both Stratford and London. The vibrant idealism of Peabody’s personality finds expression in her work, but unfortunately this idealism is not supported by a down-to-earth grappling with reality or by the intellectual rigor of argument. As a result, there is a quality of immaturity to Peabody’s writing which deprives it of force and limits its appeal. OTHER WORKS: Fortune and Men’s Eyes (1900). The Singing Leaves (1903). Pan (1904). The Wings (1907; produced, 1912). The Singing Man (1911). The Wolf of Gubbio (1913). The
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Chameleon (1917). Diary and Letters of Josephine Preston Peabody (Ed. C. Baker, 1925). Collected Poems of Josephine Preston Peabody (Ed. K. Bates, 1927). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Baker C., Diary and Letters of Josephine Preston Peabody (1925). Bates, K., in Collected Poems of Josephine Preston Peabody (1927). Dickason, D., The Daring Young Men (1953). Gregory, H., and M. Zaturenska, History of American Poetry, 1900-1940 (1942). Reference works: NAW (1971). TCAS. Other references: Atlantic (Dec. 1927). SR (20 Mar. 1926). NYT (5 Dec. 1922). —ANN PRINGLE ELIASBERG
PEATTIE, Elia Wilkinson Born 1862, Kalamazoo, Michigan; died 12 July 1935, Wellington, Vermont Wrote under: Elia W. Peattie, Sade Iverson Married Robert B. Peattie, 1883 (died 1930); children: three sons and a daughter, who died in childhood Elia Wilkinson Peattie’s family, moved from Michigan to Chicago shortly after the 1871 fire. They built a comfortable house, in which Peattie and her husband later raised their own children. In 1884 Peattie became the first ‘‘girl reporter’’ for the Chicago Tribune. After 10 years in Omaha, where Peattie wrote potboiler histories and her best stories while her husband managed the World-Herald, Peattie returned to Chicago in 1898, when she bore their third son. A daughter died in childhood; all three sons survived their parents, two becoming writers who married writers. From 1901 to 1917, Peattie was the Tribune’s literary critic, while also publishing prolifically. Invitations to the Peatties’ Sunday afternoon gatherings represented acceptance into the Chicago literary establishment. Peattie left Chicago in 1917, when her husband joined the New York Times. They retired to Tryon, North Carolina, in 1920, where Peattie remained after Robert’s death in 1930. Many of Peattie’s publications were primarily commercial ventures. The Story of America (1889) has neither original interpretation nor careful writing to recommend it, yet Peattie published several editions and adaptations. Similarly commercial were the two poetry anthologies the Tribune’s influential literary critic edited in 1903. Peattie’s other historical works reflect her involvement in Chicago’s cultural ‘‘uplift’’ movement. Her early historical romances and romanticized histories promoted the cultural establishment’s fascination with knighthood’s European flowering. Peattie’s one-act costume pageant of women’s changing status
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from mythological to modern times, Times and Manners (1918), was written specifically for a Chicago Woman’s Club production. Peattie’s involvement with club theatricals also inspired several fine one-act plays late in her career. The title piece of The Wander Weed (1923) is probably her best, dealing with a Blue Ridge mountain girl’s encounter with a sphinx-like old woman who breaks silence to convince Lu Constant of the need to accept the pains and joys of ongoing family relationships. Family settings and themes are the common denominators for Peattie’s girls’ books. Azalea (1912) is representative; its young heroine forsakes nomadic circus adventures for the everyday continuities and domestic affections of smalltown family life. Such smalltown virtues also win out over artistic ambition and urban wealth in Lotta Embury’s Career (1915) and Sarah Brewster’s Relatives (1916). The best of Peattie’s early magazine short stories, collected in A Mountain Woman (1896), call domestic sentimentality into question. In ‘‘Jim Lancy’s Waterloo,’’ newly married Annie Lancy confronts the hard facts of premature aging and madness among neighboring Nebraska wives and of infant death in her own home. Generally, the Mountain Woman stories embody a conviction that city and frontier pose irreconcilable cultures, engendering psychic disorientation for intercultural migrants. Similarly critical of domestic sentimentality are Peattie’s two adult novels. An implicitly erotic relationship between father and daughter informs the violent action of The Judge (1890), while The Precipice (1914) exposes patriarchal tyranny and neighborly hypocrisy underlying smalltown family life. Nonetheless, Kate Barrington’s search for independence in The Precipice is undercut by her friends’ dramatizations of feminine limitations and the joys of motherhood. Kate’s own social work activities—modeled on those of Julia Lathrop, first head of the U.S. Children’s Bureau— remain in the novel’s background. The organizing marriageversus-career theme ultimately resolves itself ambiguously in Kate’s decision to relinquish ‘‘prideful’’ independence for marital commitment, yet to subordinate ‘‘womanly’’ fulfillment to civic duty by living in Washington, D.C., apart from her husband. A few of Peattie’s short stories and one-act plays are fully realized literary works, and The Precipice is fascinating in its treatment of feminist issues. Peattie’s career, however, was ultimately compromised by easy commercial productions and thematic contradictions. As a critic and romancer, she upheld derivative genteel standards of ‘‘noble’’ thoughts and ‘‘classic’’ forms. Yet her best fictions and plays are realistic, and ‘‘The Milliner’’ (1914), a pseudonymous free verse poem for the Little Review, met with deserved acclaim. OTHER WORKS: A Journey Through Wonderland (1890). With Scrip and Staff (1891). The American Peasant (with T. Tibbles, 1892). Our Chosen Land (1896). The Pictorial Story of America (1896). Pippins and Cheese (1897). The Love of a Calaban: A Romantic Opera (1898; adapted by E. Freer as Massimillano, 1925). The Shape of Fear, and Other Ghostly Stories (1898).
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Ickery Ann, and Other Boys and Girls (1899). The Beleaguered Forest (1901). How Jacques Came into the Forest of Arden (1901). Castle, Knight, and Troubadore (1903). The Edges of Things (1903). Poems You Ought to Know (edited by Peattie, 1903). To Comfort You (edited by Peattie, 1903). Edda and the Oak (1911). Annie Laurie and Azalea (1913). Azalea at Sunset Gap (1914). The Angel with a Broom (1915). Azalea’s Silver Web (1915). The Newcomers (1917). Painted Windows (1918). The Great Delusion (1932). The Book of the Fine Arts Building (n.d.). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Atlantic (1899). Bookman (April 1914, Jan. 1916). Boston Transcript (18 Feb. 1914). NYT (24 Dec. 1916). —SIDNEY H. BREMER
PEATTIE, Louise Redfield Born 14 June 1900, Northern Illinois Daughter of Robert and Bertha Dreier Redfield; married Donald C. Peattie, 1923; children: three sons and a daughter, who died young Louise Redfield Peattie’s father was a prominent corporate lawyer, and her mother was the daughter of the Danish consul in Chicago. They gave Peattie a very happy childhood, much of it spent on the extensive farm where she was born—an estate established by Peattie’s ancestors several generations back. Peattie was educated by tutors and in private schools in Chicago, and her marriage to the naturalist-writer Donald C. Peattie was a very happy one, although the couple’s only daughter died young. They also had three sons. The family has lived in various places: Washington, D.C.; Provence and the French Riviera; Peattie’s childhood home; and Tryon, North Carolina. They finally settled in Santa Barbara, California. Each place has given Peattie colorful settings for the fiction she began to write shortly after her marriage. With her husband’s generous encouragement and cooperation, she became a prolific author. At times they collaborated on books, but most of Peattie’s writing has been on her own. Peattie summed up her life work in these words: ‘‘Grateful for the opportunity to combine a career with family life, it has been my endeavor that my family shall profit, never suffer, from my occupation with writing. My greatest pride is in the share I am privileged to have in my husband’s writing; this is the first of my interests. All that I asked of life in the first hope of youth has been fulfilled; I ask now only the opportunity to complete fully what we have begun together.’’ Peattie’s fiction is almost invariably concerned with the problems of male-female relationships and those of parents and children. Reviewers have praised the breadth of her insight into the inner lives of men and women and her sense of the comic as
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well as the pathetic. Peattie’s poetic prose has pleased many critics, and her delicate sentiment usually manages to escape sentimentality. Not all readers agree Peattie’s work is entirely devoid of oversweetness, and some critics have objected to the ‘‘thinness’’ of some of her stories. The style of Peattie’s later books often comes perilously close to being precious and affected. A Child in Her Arms (1938) shows what happens when a beautiful, barren woman longing for a child meets a beautiful pregnant girl who eventually gives birth to a perfect baby. The first woman is wealthy and educated, with a husband who wants only her happiness; the second is the ‘‘earth mother’’ type, almost a symbol of maternity, with no family and no place to go. Star at Noon (1939) tells of the oddly assorted members of a family coming together, puzzled and wondering about their tangled relationships: a man and his second wife, his second wife’s son, his first wife, and his daughter. The problems of these plots are beautifully smoothed out to leave the reader satisfied that human affairs can always be resolved, although not without emotional turmoil and soul-searching. Of one of Peattie’s books a critic says, ‘‘It leaves the impact of a bigger and better story than it is, perhaps; but nevertheless it is a crisp, economical job of writing that makes for entertaining reading.’’ Although Peattie’s work can certainly not be called great realistic fiction, it cannot be considered mere ‘‘light romance.’’ Serious purpose is at the core of each novel and story. OTHER WORKS: Bounty of Earth (with D. C. Peattie, 1927). Dagny (1928). Up Country (with D. C. Peattie, 1928). Down Wind (with D. C. Peattie, 1929). Pan’s Parish (1931). Wine with a Stranger (1932). Wife to Caliban (1934). Fugitive (1935). American Acres (1936). Tomorrow Is Ours (1937). Lost Daughter (1938). The Californians (1940). Ring Finger (1943). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Boston Evening Transcript (13 April 1935). NYT (23 Aug. 1936, 20 March 1938, 26 March 1939, 10 March 1940). —ABIGAIL ANN HAMBLEN
PECK, Annie Smith Born 19 October 1850, Providence, Rhode Island; died 18 July 1935, New York, New York Daughter of George B. and Ann Smith Peck Not only a writer, Annie Smith Peck was also an explorer, mountaineer, photographer, lecturer, and feminist. Peck was a descendant of the first New England settlers. Her family was well educated, rather austere, orthodox Baptists, who encouraged
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Peck’s education but did not condone her later mountaineering exploits. Peck’s self-confidence, self-reliance, healthy physical development, and feminist attitudes originated in her relationship to her three older brothers—she became determined to outdo them in sports when they denied her equal participation. Peck was precocious in school, entering the University of Michigan when it was first opened to women; she graduated in 1878 with honors in diverse subjects. Peck taught Latin at Purdue and Smith College for four years and studied in Europe, including a year as the first female student at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, earning an M.A. in Greek. Upon her return to the U.S., she began giving parlor lectures on Greek and Roman archeology, showing her own stereopticon slides. After seeing the Matterhorn in Europe, Peck’s ‘‘allegiance, previously given to the sea, was transferred for all time to the mountains.’’ Thus began her long and celebrated mountaineering career. She first climbed Mt. Shasta in California, in 1888; she scaled the Matterhorn in 1895, which brought her instant fame. Peck then ventured to South America, where she hoped to ascend the highest peak on that continent. After several harrowing attempts over six years, Peck (at fifty-eight) succeeded in climbing Mt. Huascaran in Peru. For having climbed higher than any American in the Western hemisphere at that time, she received several awards, and the north peak of Huascaran was named ‘‘Cumbre Ana Peck’’ in her honor in 1908. While in South America, Peck explored and made first ascents of other mountains, planting a ‘‘Votes for Women’’ banner on the top of one. These expeditions were pitifully financed. Peck was dependent upon contributions from a few friends, several articles for magazines (including Harper’s), her stereopticon slide lectures on archeology and mountaineering, and the generosity of South American acquaintances. A Search for the Apex of America (1911) was well received. This work, written in journal form, graphically relates Peck’s incredible six years of mishaps and adventures in this quest. Many photographs are included, some from Peck’s own collection. The hospitality, assistance, and encouragement of many South Americans that Peck encountered were responsible for her desire to promote trade and friendly relations between North and South America. This resulted in two books, both of which are now largely obsolete. The South American Tour (1913) is Peck’s version of what was commonly known as the ‘‘Grand Tour of South America,’’ including fares, routes, attractions, historical data, and photographs. Industrial and Commercial South America (1922) is a statistical handbook written mainly for the business person, describing the history, politics, and resources of South American countries, with little regard for human problems. At age eighty, Peck made an extensive air tour of South America, which was recounted in Flying Over South America (1932). Written the first year air transportation was available in that area, the book was designed to promote air travel. Peck is remembered mainly for her outstanding accomplishments as one of the first women mountaineers, as a promoter of
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South American trade and tourism, and for her furthering of women’s independence by living an outspoken and daringly unconventional life. BIBLIOGRAPHY: McGuigan, D. G., A Dangerous Experiment (1970). Reference works: AW. NAW (1971). Standard Encyclopedia of the World’s Mountains (1962). —PATRICIA E. PENN
personal fate becomes the embodiment of her sculptured symbol of Woman—‘‘the world’s ignored and terrible sufferer’’ who does not want charity, but only the justice she is due. While Peck’s assumptions are hardly feminist, this short novel is sharply critical of the church’s shortsighted biases against women. Although Peck’s literary output was limited in volume and artistic merit, she managed to write entertaining popular fiction which included serious social themes and vivid character conflicts as well as fast-paced action and romantic adventure. —KATHLEEN L. NICHOLS
PECK, Ellen Born circa 1840s; died death date unknown Wrote under: Cuyler Pine No biographical information is available on Ellen Peck. Her early novels indicate that the pseudonym Cuyler Pine designates only the male editor of ‘‘memoirs’’ supposedly written by his sister and her friend. Peck’s earliest novels, Mary Brandegee: An Autobiography (1865) and Renshawe (1867), are fast-paced love stories which rather awkwardly form two parts of an unfinished ‘‘trilogy’’ about Southern society immediately before and during the Civil War. The viewpoint is Northern, but the second novel is prefaced by the editor’s plea for mutual understanding between regions. Mary Brandegee chronicles the erring ways of a Northerneducated Southern heiress who begins by reading ‘‘trashy’’ novels and ends up nearly fatally poisoning her rival for the rather uncertain affections of the handsome, arrogant Southerner George Berkeley, whom she finally rejects in favor of a dependable lover. Although serious questions about the relationship between masters and slaves are raised, the focus is on the tendency for men and women to misinterpret each other’s characters. Renshawe introduces a new heroine, the Northerner Louisa Renshawe, and delineates the disruptive effects of war on both Northern and Southern society; but the center of interest lies in the heroine’s relationship with the unrepentant George Berkeley. While the Northern heroine tries to sort out spies from counterspies, she is allowed several major acts of physical courage but finally ends up paroled as a Union spy to her unacknowledged loverenemy, the Confederate Colonel Berkeley. Although the thrust of the plot seems to be toward the eventual reconciliation of regional differences after the North and Louisa presumably humble the South and the proud Berkeley, no evidence exists that the promised third part of the trilogy (Delaware) ever saw print. Ecce Femina (1874), republished as Ecce Femina; or, The Woman Zoe (1875), uses a highly economical style and wellmotivated plot to satirize the worldly elitism of the Presbyterian church as revealed by the psychological struggles of the ambitious clergyman Mr. Bowen. He courts, marries, and then unjustly casts off his wife, Zoe, a reformed ‘‘Magdelene’’ and artist whose
PEMBER, Phoebe Yates Born 18 August 1823, Charleston, South Carolina; died 4 March 1913, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Daughter of Jacob and Fanny Yates Levy; married Thomas Pember, in the 1850s (died) Phoebe Yates Pember was the fourth of seven children. Little is known about her early life or education. The family moved to Savannah, Georgia, in 1850. A few years later, Pember married, and after her husband’s death returned to live with her parents first in Savannah, then in Marietta, where they were refugees. In 1862, Pember received and accepted an offer to become matron of Chimborazo Hospital in Richmond. She remained there until the occupation of Richmond by federal troops in April 1865. After the war, Pember returned to Georgia and obscurity. Pember’s reminiscences of her life at Chimborazo were originally published in 1879. A modern edition of A Southern Woman’s Story, including several letters from Pember to her sister Eugenia, was prepared by historian Bell I. Wiley in 1959. Sometimes moving, sometimes humorous, these reminiscences are among the most revealing accounts of a woman’s life and work during the Civil War. Pember was unusual in that she received a salary for her nursing, and she had more responsibilities than volunteer nurses. Chimborazo was the largest military hospital in the world at that time. Matrons like Pember were assigned a number of wards for which they supervised the meals and the laundry, and oversaw the general welfare of their patients. Even though the Confederate Congress had made provisions for the use of matrons in army hospitals, Pember was not greeted with enthusiasm. Fear of ‘‘petticoat government’’ led one surgeon to remark in her presence that ‘‘one of them had come,’’ and things would never be the same again. Under Pember’s direction, care at Chimborazo’s second ward improved dramatically. Food and medications were prepared properly and delivered to the patients on time. Slaves and civilian laundresses were hired to wash the wards and linens regularly. Pember often went to great lengths or used her own money to prepare some special delicacy for a patient. Pember’s major conflict with members of the medical staff concerned the distribution of the whiskey ration. Believed to be
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both a stimulant and a narcotic, whiskey was a vital element in the treatment of disease. Almost immediately after her arrival at the hospital, Pember learned whiskey intended for the patients was being consumed by the male nurses and surgeons. She decided to remove all temptation by locking the cabinet at night and keeping the key on her person. Resenting Pember’s interference, the surgeons bombarded her with insulting and demeaning requests and even threatened her. Fortunately the chief surgeon supported Pember, and the harassment ceased. A Southern Woman’s Story helps strip the Confederacy of romantic myths. There was self-sacrifice and nobility of spirit, but Pember records the selfishness and pettiness which also marked the Confederate experience. Pember herself emerges as a strong vital woman, capable of great kindness and patience but certainly no saint. Its combination of wit and grim reality makes A Southern Woman’s Story a classic in its field. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Adams, George W., ‘‘Confederate Medicine,’’ in Journal of Southern History (1940). Cunningham, H. H., Doctors in Gray (1958). Hume, E. E., ‘‘The Days Gone By: Chimborazo Hospital,’’ in The Military Surgeon (1934). —JANET E. KAUFMAN
PENFEATHER, Anabel See COOPER, Susan Fenimore
PERCY, Florence See ALLEN, Elizabeth Akers
PERKINS, Frances Born Fannie Coralie Perkins, 10 April 1880, Boston, Massachusetts; died 14 May 1965, New York, New York Daughter of Frederick W. and Susan E. Bean Perkins; married Paul C. Wilson, 1913; children: Susanna Although known primarily as a social reformer and government official, Frances Perkins was also the author of a popular biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt. She also wrote books and articles dealing with labor and social problems. At the time of her death, she was working on a biography of Alfred E. Smith, which was completed by others and published posthumously in 1970. Frances Perkins was born Fannie Coralie Perkins and used this name until she was twenty-five years old. Born into a conservative, middle-class family that had lived in New England since colonial times, Perkins was expected to respect the authority of her father, but she was also encouraged to read and to obtain a good education. In 1898 she graduated from the Worcester Classical High School, an institution where almost all the other students were male. Although she was a shy, quiet child, in school
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she soon demonstrated an ability to win debates and to express herself in words. Perkins entered Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, in 1898 and quickly showed an aptitude for science. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and physics in 1902. While a student, Perkins took a class in economic history taught by Anna May Soule. Soule’s students visited factories and read How the Other Half Lives (1890) by Jacob Riis, a book describing conditions in the slums of New York City. After taking this class and hearing a speech by Florence Kelley, general secretary of the National Consumers’ League, an organization that sought to improve working conditions for laborers, Perkins was inspired to devote her life to social and economic reform. Perkins spent the next five years teaching and doing volunteer work for social reform organizations in New England and Illinois. From 1907 to 1909 she served as general secretary of the Philadelphia Research and Protective Association. She earned a master’s degree in social economics from Columbia University in 1910. In October of the same year, the Survey published her first article, ‘‘Some Facts Concerning Certain Undernourished Children.’’ From 1910 to 1912 Perkins served as executive secretary of the New York City Consumers’ League. On 25 March 1911, her commitment to improving working conditions was strengthened when she witnessed a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company that killed 146 workers, mostly young women. Perkins worked with the New York Committee on Safety from 1912 to 1917. In 1918 Perkins worked to elect Alfred E. Smith as governor of New York. When he took office in 1919, she was appointed a member of the New York State Industrial Commission. Perkins held several labor-related positions in the administrations of Smith and Franklin D. Roosevelt, who succeeded Smith as governor in 1929. In 1925 the Survey published her article ‘‘Do Women in Industry Need Special Protection?’’ When Roosevelt took office as president in 1933, Perkins was appointed secretary of labor, a position she held until 1945. She was the first woman to be appointed to a Cabinet post. During her years in office, she worked to enact legislation establishing a minimum wage, a maximum workweek, and limits on the employment of children under the age of 16. She was also instrumental in the creation of unemployment compensation and Social Security. In 1934 she published her first book, People at Work. She also published numerous articles in the Survey and other publications. She discussed her own career in ‘‘Eight Years as Madame Secretary,’’ published in Fortune in 1941. After Roosevelt died on 12 April 1945, Perkins continued as secretary of labor under his successor, Harry S. Truman. She resigned from her post in July of 1945. Truman appointed her as a member of the Civil Service Commission in 1946, a position she held until 1953. Also in 1946, the Survey published ‘‘The People Mattered,’’ her tribute to Harry Hopkins, a recently deceased colleague in the Roosevelt administration. The same year, with the assistance of Howard Taubman, she published her most famous work, The Roosevelt I Knew. An intimate, if uncritical,
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portrait of the late president, the book was an immediate success and was reprinted in 1964. From 1953 to 1957 Perkins lectured on the problems of business and labor at universities across the United States. She served as visiting professor at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University from 1957 until her death. OTHER WORKS: Two Views of American Labor (coauthur, 1965). Al Smith, Hero of the Cities (completed by Matthew and Hannah Josephson, 1970). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Martin, G. W., Madam Secretary (1976). Reference works: NAWMP (1980). DAB (1981). American Reformers (1985). Handbook of American Women’s History (1990). Great Lives from History (1995). Other references: NYT (obituary, 15 May 1965). —ROSE SECREST
PERKINS, Lucy Fitch Born 1865, Maples, Indiana; died 18 March 1937, Pasadena, California Daughter of Appleton H. and Elizabeth Bennett Fitch; married Dwight H. Perkins, 1891; children: two Lucy Fitch Perkins grew up in Maples, Indiana, and Kalamazoo, Michigan; her family also made frequent visits to Massachusetts, where both parents’ had roots. Perkins attended school at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, graduating at age twenty-one. For a year she was employed by the Louis Prang Educational Company of Boston to do illustrations for school materials. The following four years, Perkins was on the faculty of the newly established art school at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn. In 1891 she married and later had two children; the family made their home in Evanston, Illinois, and Perkins was employed by Prang’s Chicago office. By the time Perkins began her Twins series in 1911 (The Dutch Twins), she had become convinced of two things. One was that peace could come to the world only if the peoples of all nations could achieve ‘‘mutual respect and understanding,’’ and the other was that children could grasp really big issues if they were made interesting to them. Perkins also had a strong conviction American children should realize the labor, suffering, and inspiration that went into building the country. Utilizing both international and patriotic themes, Perkins produced the Geographical and Historical Twin series. Because Perkins understood the fear of loneliness, she gave each book two protagonists—inseparable twins; because she knew that girls and boys love to laugh, she laced her text with puckish humor, but the humor never detracts from the serious themes. Plots are invariably full of action and suspense, with
clever denouements that never seem contrived. Perkins’s delightful drawings illustrate the novels, but fully as delightful are the word pictures with which Perkins makes the reader familiar with faraway places and long-ago happenings. The geographical books show vividly how life is lived in various foreign countries. Customs, festivals, and games are skillfully woven into the plots. Glossaries for pronunciation of unfamiliar names and some foreign words and phrases are supplied. One critic cites Perkins as ‘‘one of the rare pioneers in. . .foreign background story books.’’ She shows ‘‘that the ‘travel story book’ could create sympathetic understanding of other people, that American children enjoyed the kinship they felt with her book children.’’ The same might be said for the historical books, which depict various eras and episodes in the nation’s life. Perkins never regarded herself as a feminist, but her stories give glimpses of a strong feeling about the role of women in society. Her twins are, with one exception, a boy and a girl (the Spanish twins are both male); the sister shares all the adventures of the brother (except in The American Twins of 1812, 1925, in which the boy becomes involved in the war). More than one of Perkins’ little girls voices frustration with her feminine lot, disliking the idea of being forced into an acquiescent, passive way of life and prevented from questing the new, the strange, and the dangerous. All the books have great charm, infused as they are with enthusiasm and cheerfulness. Few people of any age can read them without being captivated. But because they were aimed specifically at children, Perkins used to test each manuscript on a group of girls and boys she called ‘‘the poison squad,’’ taking their comments and suggestions seriously. As a result, the Twin series had a devoted following, achieving great popularity through the years. OTHER WORKS: The Goose Girl (1906). A Book of Joy: A Story of a New England Summer (1907). The Japanese Twins (1912). The Irish Twins (1913). The Eskimo Twins (1914). The Mexican Twins (1915). The Cave Twins (1916). The Belgian Twins (1917). The French Twins (1918). The Spartan Twins (1918). The Scotch Twins (1919). The Italian Twins (1920). The Puritan Twins (1921). The Swiss Twins (1922). The Filipino Twins (1923). The Colonial Twins of Virginia (1924). The American Twins of the Revolution (1926). The Pioneer Twins (1927). The Farm Twins (1928). Kit and Kat: More Adventures of the Dutch Twins (1929). The Indian Twins (1930). The Pickaninny Twins (1931). The Norwegian Twins (1933). The Spanish Twins (1934). The Chinese Twins (1935). The Dutch Twins and Little Brother (1938). Robin Hood (n.d.). Cornelia: The Story of a Benevolent Despot (n.d.). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Meigs, C., et al., A Critical History of Children’s Literature (1953, revised 1969). Perkins, E. E., Eve Among the Puritans (1956). Reference works: Junior Book of Authors (1951). NAW (1971). Other references: Elementary English Review (May 1936). —ABIGAIL ANN HAMBLEN
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PESOTTA, Rose Born Rachelle Peisoty, 20 November 1896, Derazhyna, Russia; died 6 December 1965, Miami, Florida Daughter of Masia and Issak Peisoty While it is for her years as an able and often inspiring trade union organizer that Rose Pesotta is best known, she is also the author of two autobiographical books. Bread Upon the Waters (1944) concerns itself largely with her eight years as a general organizer for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU); Days of Our Lives (1958) recalls her youth in a Ukrainian village in the Jewish ‘‘Pale.’’ Days of Our Lives links some of Pesotta’s childhood experiences with her later calling. In recounting hearing of the revolts of the mujiks and the ‘‘Peasants’ Union’’ they formed, Pesotta comments that it was ‘‘the first time I ever heard two words that would mean so much to me later on—organized and union.’’ Vivid descriptions are given also of her activities in the underground movement against the Czar, beginning at the age of ten as a clandestine carrier of leaflets. In 1913 Pesotta emigrated to the U.S., joining an older sister working in a New York shirtwaist factory. Pesotta had left Russia, she wrote, because she rebelled against a tradition in which she could ‘‘see no future for myself except to marry. . .and be a housewife.’’ She saw the new land as an alternative, a place where ‘‘a decent middle class girl can work without disgrace.’’ Soon after her arrival, Pesotta joined the two social-political movements to which she was to devote the rest of her life—trade unionism and anarchism. By the 1920s she was taking an active role, as a public speaker, in the drive to release the celebrated imprisoned Italian-American anarchists, Sacco and Vanzetti. (It is noteworthy that in neither of Pesotta’s books does she describe her experiences in the anarchist movement, although her participation in it is well-documented and well-remembered in interviews with her comrades.) In 1922 Pesotta was elected to the executive board of ILGWU Local 22. Over the next decade, Pesotta served on various important strike committees, and attended Bryn Mawr’s Summer School for Women Workers, and Brookwood Labor College. In 1933, she was appointed to a paid, full-time position as a general organizer for the ILGWU. The following year she was elected to serve as a vice president on its General Executive Board—a post she held for 10 years. In Bread Upon the Waters, Pesotta describes organizing thousands of women (including Mexican-American, Puerto Rican, and French-Canadian women frequently alleged to be ‘‘unorganizable’’) into new ILGWU locals, and how she planned and conducted strikes and negotiations in cities from Los Angeles to Buffalo, in Puerto Rico and Montreal. The imaginative flair with which she conducted her campaigns gained her a reputation as a skilled organizer which soon spread beyond her own union. Pesotta was well aware that she distinguished herself in a field in which there were few women, and she understood the
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important role played by sexual discrimination in this dearth. Indeed, it was discrimination that was in large part responsible for her resignation, in 1942, of her position as a general organizer for the ILGWU. In a statement explaining her resignation to the ILGWU General Executive Board, Pesotta cited the refusal of the union’s leadership to recognize she was as competent as any of the men on the ILGWU’s staff, and its concomitant refusal to give her responsibilities commensurate with her experience. Interestingly, Pesotta was publicly silent on the reasons surrounding her resignation. Like her participation in the anarchist movement, it is not discussed in either Bread Upon the Waters or Days of Our Lives. The importance of Pesotta’s books is not their literary quality, which is marginal, but their historical value. Bread Upon the Waters is almost certainly the first autobiography of a female labor union organizer ever published, and details the special challenges presented someone choosing this career. Days of Our Lives provides essential information on Pesotta’s ethnic, family, and political background, as well as suggesting what experiences such a woman considered important or formative enough to record. Together, these works add to the scant store of knowledge available on the lives that were led by the small but significant number of women who became union organizers and worked with the most desperately exploited workers—women.
OTHER WORKS: The Rose Pesotta Collection at the New York Public Library includes diaries and letters. There are papers of Rose Pesotta at the Bund Archives of the Jewish Labor Movement, in New York. The Tamiment Library of New York University has early drafts of Bread upon the Waters in its John Beffel Papers.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Kessler-Harris, A., ‘‘Organizing the Unorganizable: Three Jewish Women and Their Union,’’ in Labor History (Winter 1976). —ERIKA GOTTFRIED
PETERKIN, Julia Mood Born 31 October 1880, Laurens County, South Carolina; died 10 August 1961, Fort Motte, South Carolina Daughter of Julius A. and Alma Archer Mood; married William Peterkin, 1903 The youngest of four children, Julia Mood Peterkin spent several years with her grandparents in rural South Carolina after her mother’s early death. Later, she lived in Sumter, South Carolina, with her father. After receiving her B.A. and M.A.
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degrees from Converse College, Spartanburg, South Carolina, Peterkin taught at Fort Motte, a small, isolated community. She married the owner of Lang Syne plantation there. There were few whites and many blacks on the 2,000-acre plantation. Because of her husband’s ill health, Peterkin took over most of the responsibilities of running Lang Syne until her son William was able to assume the actual management. Peterkin began writing in her early forties, and her work was centered around Fort Motte and Murrell’s Inlet, a coastal village in South Carolina where she had a summer home. Plantation stories were a popular genre from antebellum days until well into the 20th century, and it is one of Peterkin’s contributions that she brought to this genre a sense of realism and dignity in her portrayal of the lives of black characters. In most of her work there is no stereotyped or affected local color, a common characteristic of plantation stories. Peterkin also broke out of the Southern pattern of sentimentality. Peterkin’s first works, which appeared in many magazines in the early 1920s, may be divided generally into two groups: Gullah-dialect sketches and more conventionally structured short stories. The former are usually dramatic monologues in the words of coastal South Carolina blacks, but the dialect at times becomes obtrusive. The larger group, in which Peterkin departs from extended use of dialect but maintains the rhythm and syntax of the speech, are stark, powerful portrayals of the lives of these isolated people. The stories in Green Thursday (1924) continue in this vein, but there is more description of the land and the natural cycles, which always play an integral part in the lives of her characters. The stories may be read almost as a novel, centering on Killdee and his family. Peterkin’s first novel, Black April (1927), incorporates some of the incidents of the stories. The book is episodic rather than tightly plotted; it gives a convincing picture of the daily lives of the characters and a strong sense of community. In Scarlet Sister Mary (1928), Peterkin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Peterkin creates a fully conceived heroine of modern fiction. Mary reveals a strong affirmation of life as she steers between the restrictive mores of the community and her sense of freedom and selfhood. Mary’s guiding principle is, ‘‘Everybody has a selfness that makes the root of his life and being.’’ Like many of Eudora Welty’s women characters, Mary, intelligent but uneducated, frequently articulates her emotions through metaphorical identifications with the natural world. Bright Skin (1932) is a sensitive portrayal of the developing relationship of a boy and girl as they mature. Roll, Jordan Roll (1933) is Peterkin’s commentary on photographs of blacks at Lang Syne. In this book, Peterkin loses her artistic objectivity and becomes somewhat nostalgic. Interestingly, Doris Ullman’s photographs capture much of the dignity and realism that is portrayed in Peterkin’s fiction. In A Plantation Christmas (1934), Peterkin seems overwhelmed by a sense of the past, and although there are fine descriptions, the total effect is local color for its own sake, nostalgic and sentimental. These two books are weakened by the presence of a white narrator; in Peterkin’s best works, all the
PETERSHAM
characters are black and events are viewed entirely through their eyes. Though Peterkin lived and wrote in isolation from the literary world, she was helped and encouraged by many literary figures who praised her economy of style, detachment, and compassion. Peterkin’s characters live in an isolated but believable society in which folk beliefs and folk wisdom aid them in the struggle between personal responsibility and fate. Their lives reveal the drama and dignity of the ordinary events of life.
OTHER WORKS: The Collected Short Stories of Julia Peterkin (edited by F. Durham, 1970).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Clark, E., Innocence Abroad (1931). Fain, J., ed., The Spyglass: Views and Review, 1924-1930 (1963). Durham, F., introduction to The Collected Short Stories of Julia Peterkin (1970). Landers, T. H., Julia Peterkin (1976). Other references: NYHT (17 Jan. 1933). —ANNE NEWMAN
PETERS, Sandra See PLATH, Sylvia
PETERSHAM, Maud Fuller Born 1890, Kingston, New York; died 5 August 1971, Ravenna, Ohio Married Miska Petersham The daughter of a Baptist minister, Maud Fuller Petersham grew up in New York, South Dakota, and Pennsylvania. Petersham faithfully attended church, listened to the stories told by visiting missionaries, and reveled in her Quaker grandfather’s stories, which she heard while living with her aunt in the summers. Petersham graduated from Vassar College in 1912, and then attended the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts. While working at her first job with International Art Service, Petersham met a young commercial artist from Hungary. At first he was her tutor in art, but later when they were married, Petersham’s influence in their cooperative creative activities was as strong as his. After they turned to children’s literature, Petersham usually wrote the major part of the text. The Petershams’ first picture book, Miki (1929), is about Miska’s early experiences in Hungary. Their early books continued to draw from their own childhoods and from the childhood
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experiences of their son Miki. Although the early books received good reviews, critics called the final book of the series, Get-a-Way and Háry János (1933), old-fashioned and quaint. The stories were episodic in nature. While cute, they were not significant in theme or writing style. Their major contributions to children’s literature came from their effective use of foreign lands and strong female characters. In Miki and Mary: Their Search for Treasures (1934), Mary is equal to Miki in courage and intelligence. Because of their quaint illustrations and overromanticized style, these early books are of little interest today.
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(1953). Off to Bed: Seven Stories for Wide-Awakes (1954). The Peppernuts (1958). The Shepherd Psalm (1962). Let’s Learn About Silk (1967). Let’s Learn About Sugar (1969). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference books: Caldecott Medal Books, 1938-1957 (1963). Illustrators of Children’s Books, 1946-1956 (1958). Junior Book of Authors (1951). Other references: Horn Book 22 (Sept./Oct. 1935). —JILL P. MAY
Their strongest books were those based on the Bible or on early U.S. history. Designed with the youngster in mind, these stories contained humor, optimism, and realistic drama. Their first religious book, The Ark of Father Noah and Mother Noah (1930), gave Mother Noah a more distinctive role without detracting from the biblical story. The Christ Child (1931) was produced after the Petershams had spent three months in Palestine. It is a reverent retelling of the Christian epic. In 1946 the Petershams won the Caldecott medal for their illustrations in The Rooster Crows (1945). The book, a compilation of American nursery rhymes, contains some of their finest art. The Box with Red Wheels (1949) and The Circus Baby (1950) are valuable as examples of their literary talents. Both are slight fantasies designed for the preschooler. The writing is simple and smooth; it is not descriptive and is not detailed in plot. The themes reflect Petersham’s optimism; the plots contain an exciting drama and are resolved through positive actions. The Petershams are also remembered for their many children’s nonfiction books. Not creative in writing style, these books follow an established format. They were instructive and therefore useful to children, but they were not significant as literature. As early author-artists in the field of children’s literature, this husband-wife team created lively females relating to the world around them. Their biblical adaptations are significant, and their picture book stories are charming. They were not trendsetters, but they successfully buoyed the expectations of children for quality writing and illustrating. OTHER WORKS: Auntie and Celia Jane and Miki (1932). The Story Book of Clothes (1933). The Story Book of Food (1933). The Story Book of Houses (1933). The Story Book of Things We Use (1933). The Story Book of Earth’s Treasures (1935). The Story Book of Gold (1935). The Story Book of Iron and Steel (1935). The Story Book of Oil (1935). The Story Book of Ships (1935). The Story Book of Wheels (1935). The Story Book of Trains (1935). The Story Book of Corn (1936). The Story Book of Foods from the Fields (1936). The Story Book of Rice (1936). The Story Book of Sugar (1936). The Story Book of Transportation (1936). The Story Book of Wheat (1936). David (1938). Joseph and His Brothers (1938). Moses (1938). Ruth (1938). Stories from the Old Testament (1938). The Story Book of Cotton (1939). The Story Book of Things We Wear (1939). An American ABC (1941). America’s Stamps (1947). A Bird in the Hand: Sayings from Poor Richard’s Almanack (1951). The Silver Mace: A Story of Williamsburg (1951). Story of the Presidents of the United States of America
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PETRY, Ann Lane Born 12 October 1908, Old Saybrook, Connecticut; died 28 April 1997, Old Saybrook, Connecticut Daughter of Peter Clark and Bertha James Lane; married George D. Petry, 1938; children: one daughter Ann Petry was born into a poor black family of Old Saybrook, Connecticut, a predominantly white New England community. Her father was the local druggist. After receiving her Ph.G. in 1931 from the University of Connecticut, Petry returned home to work as a pharmacist in the family drugstores from 1931 to 1938. In 1938 she married Petry (they had one daughter) and moved to New York City, becoming an advertising salesperson and writer for the Amsterdam News (1938-41), and then reporter and woman’s-page editor for the rival People’s Voice of Harlem (1941-44). Petry was also a member of the American Negro Theater and wrote children’s plays. Petry studied creative writing at Columbia University from 1944 to 1946 and published her first short stories in The Crisis and Phylon. In addition to writing, Petry lectured at Berkeley, Miami University, and Suffolk University, and was a visiting professor of English at the University of Hawaii (1974-75). After Petry had served her literary apprenticeship as a journalist, she began to publish short stories. ‘‘Like a Winding Sheet’’ was reprinted in Foley’s Best American Short Stories of 1946, and another story led to a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship, during which Petry completed her first novel, The Street (1946). The Street is a naturalistic novel usually associated with the Richard Wright school of protest fiction. The protagonist, Lutie Johnson, imbued with the American success ethic of Benjamin Franklin, is defeated in her attempts to improve her life by the detrimental influences of Harlem. Critics see the novel as gripping yet simplistic. Country Place (1947) is an ‘‘assimilationist’’ novel set in the small town of Lennox, Connecticut. The major characters are white, and are enmeshed in a plot and setting reminiscent of a cross between Winesburg, Ohio and Peyton Place, as an apocalyptic autumn storm brings out the true natures of the townspeople. Country Place is considered Petry’s most successful novel in scope and use of symbol and metaphor to parallel action and
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evoke character. The plot is unified and the prose clear and powerful. The Narrows (1953) demonstrates a return to the theme of race. The plot revolves around the classic love conflict between heroic black man and rich white woman. Link Williams, the protagonist, is a fine portrayal of a young black man, an orphan and possessor of a college degree who has chosen to tend bar in the hub of the Narrows, the black section of Monmouth, Connecticut, rather than become a member of the black bourgeoisie. The Narrows is simultaneously sophisticated and melodramatic, as brilliantly conceived characters outshine a standard plot. The rest of Petry’s opus consists of four juvenile books and a collection of short stories, Miss Muriel, and Other Stories (1971). ‘‘In Darkness and Confusion’’ concerns a poor black couple’s way of coping with their son’s mistreatment in a segregated army by participating in looting and property damage during the Harlem riot of August 1943. The well-wrought title story is semiautobiographical, told from the perspective of a twelve-yearold black girl. Set in the drugstore of a New England town, the story treats the loss of innocence that comes with a growing awareness of maturity. Petry’s fiction is of a fine quality. Her stories succeed better than her novels, although the novels certainly belong in the mainstream of American naturalism and realism. Petry’s work has not vet received thorough treatment by literary critics; she is typically portrayed as a lesser member of the naturalistic school centered around Wright. In the 1980s and 1990s, however, some critics argued this characterization misrepresents and trivializes Petry’s contributions. Although she was deeply interested in the impact of the social and physical environment, Petry also had a great concern with the role of the imagination and an attunement to black women’s lives that is not often found in the Wright school. Two articles in Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition (1985, edited by Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers) provide a useful critical introduction to Petry’s work. Bernard Bell argues that Petry’s works expose the operation of myth—including myths about the American dream, rural and urban places, and black and white people. He addresses all three of Petry’s adult novels, The Street, Country Place, and The Narrows, as he compares their treatment of time, space, and economic determinism. In the same volume, Marjorie Pryse focuses on The Street, which she argues draws heavily on the myth of Benjamin Franklin and the self-made man. The political backdrop of the novel, she suggests, reveals that the seemingly naturalistic and irresistible ‘‘laws’’ of urban life are actually human (specifically white human) constructions. The Street, she concludes, urges us to reconsider the links between motherhood and cultural roots. More recently, Lindon Barrett devoted a chapter of his Blackness and Value (1999) to a close reading of The Street, which he argues is emblematic of black people’s experiences of American cultural violence. The novel, he suggests, challenges the prevailing view that there is little in common between black urban and white suburban spaces. It reveals and probes the system of cultural signification that turns black people and black communities into ‘‘present absences.’’
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Hazel Ervin’s Ann Petry: A Bio-Bibliography (1993) is a useful doorway into critical literature about Petry. It contains almost 400 references to secondary sources (mostly in periodicals), interviews, short stories, book reviews both by and about Petry, and translations of Petry’s works into languages other than English. It provides, however, almost none of the biographical material promised in its title. For biographical information, Hilary Holladay’s Ann Petry (1996) is the best resource. OTHER WORKS: The Drugstore Cat (1949). Harriet Tubman (1955). Tituba of Salem Village (1964). Legends of the Saints (1970). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bone, R. A., The Negro Novel in America (1958; rev. ed., 1965). O’Banner, B. M., ‘‘A Study of Black Heroines in Four Selected Novels (1929-1959) by Four Black American Women Novelists: Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Paule Marshall, Ann Lane Petry’’ (thesis, 1985). Royster, B. H., The Ironic Vision of Four Black Women Novelists: A Study of the Novels of Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ann Petry (1980). Reference works: African-American Women: A Biographical Dictionary (1993). Black Women in America (1993). CA (vols. 5, 8R). CANR 4. CB (March 1946). CLC 1, 7, 18. DLB 76. Great Black Americans (1976). NBAW. SATA 5. TCCW (1978). WWAW (1974). Other references: African American Review (1992). CLAJ (1986). Callaloo (1994). Crisis 53 (1946). Criticism (Spring 1974). NEQ 47 (1974). NYHT (16 Aug. 1953). Opportunity 24 (1946). SBL (Fall 1975). Studies in Short Fiction (1994). Women’s Studies (1995). —ANN RAYSON, UPDATED BY LORI KENSCHAFT
PHELPS, Almira (Hart) Lincoln Born 15 July 1793, Berlin, Connecticut; died 15 July 1884, Baltimore, Maryland Daughter of Samuel and Lydia Hensdale Hart; married Samuel Lincoln, 1817 (died 1823); John Phelps, 1832 Almira Lincoln Phelps and her elder sister, Emma Hart Willard, shared a love for study, an aptitude for teaching, and a desire to improve the intellectual status of women. Close association with the pioneering Troy, New York, Female Seminary has made Emma more celebrated than her equally productive but more eclectic sister. Phelps’ early schooling was in Berlin, and she later studied at Middlebury and Pittsfield, Massachusetts. After teaching for several years, Phelps married a Federalist editor. Left a widow with two small daughters in 1823, she returned to teaching and to writing to earn a family income. After joining Emma at the Troy Female Seminary, she studied science with Amos Eaton, a professor of natural science at nearby
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Rensselaer Institute. In 1832 Phelps remarried. She continued to write, and in 1838 her husband urged her to accept the principalship of a promising new seminary in West Chester, Pennsylvania. After brief administrations in Pennsylvania and at the Rahway, New Jersey, Female Institute, Phelps headed the Patapsco Female Institute in Ellicott’s Mills, Maryland, from 1841 to 1855. An imaginative and successful educator, Phelps was also a prolific writer. Her first textbook, Familiar Lectures on Botany (1829), was her most original and useful. Botany was a popular subject, and Phelps’ text provided a middle ground between the conversational style of many books written for young ladies and the formal presentation of scientific principles designed for advanced students. Traditional in its reliance on the Linnean artificial classification system, the book provides diagrams and suggestions for study designed to engage the student’s participation in learning; appendixes provide all necessary reference material, including a description of genera and species, a dictionary of terms, and a common name index. Frequently revised and used widely in academies for boys and girls, the volume went through 28 editions (275,000 copies) by 1872. There were 18 editions of an abridged version, Botany for Beginners (1833). Moral observations, literary references, and history were combined with sound science in a text designed to develop specific skills while integrating student learning. The success of the botanical text led Phelps to write books on chemistry, natural philosophy, and geology; but these were more derivative in content and less popular. Familiar Lectures on Chemistry, for example, used similar teaching techniques, but a reliance on household examples circumscribed its audience, and borrowed material caused the book to lack cohesion. Most of Phelps’ writing was intended to educate and elevate young women. Her stories were in the popular, melodramatic, and didactic mode of antebellum novels. Caroline Westerley; or, The Young Traveler from Ohio (1833) presents a series of letters from an older sister to a younger; it is a guide through the New England landscape, an educational commentary on topics from plant life to housing styles, and a moral analysis of people encountered. Sarah Josepha Hale’s review found this story ‘‘a charming picture of a young girl, engaged in improvement, and finding happiness. . . .’’ Phelps’ two other novels held more drama but similar purposes. Both Ida Norman; or, Trials and Their Uses (1848) and The Blue Ribbon Society; or, The School Girls’ Rebellion (1879) were presented chapter by chapter for evening discussion at Patapsco Institute and were later published. As educator and writer, Phelps could not resist contemporary discussion about the purpose and nature of education for young women, whether in public addresses, journal articles, or books. Although a domestic feminist, Phelps did not advocate a curriculum to develop household skills, but stressed classical subjects as well as the sciences. Her Lectures to Young Ladies (1833) stressed the need to study widely and to discipline the mind. Discussions of morality became more common in later editions. The Female Student (1836) emphasized the value of study but also stressed the need for a good diet, proper exercise, and proper clothing. This
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volume, like Lectures, was published as part of the School Library series, under the sanction of the Massachusetts School Board. Phelps moved with the vanguard of women educational reformers of the mid-19th century. After the Civil War, Phelps retired from teaching but continued to write for national journals. Some of her essays explored the fine arts. Phelps also dedicated her energy to opposing the woman suffrage movement, although she continued to advocate educational equality for women. Phelps’s ideas and leadership, so significant to her own generation, were often disregarded or even dismissed by the suffragists and coeducational reformers of the late 19th century. Herself the model of the self-determination she taught, Phelps helped establish the possibility for women’s public and political roles. OTHER WORKS: Address on the Subject of Female Education in Greece and the General Extension of Christian Intercourse Among Females (1831). The Child’s Geology (1832). Chemistry for Beginners (1834). Familiar Lectures on Natural Philosophy (1837). Lectures in Chemistry for the Use of Schools, Families, and Private Students (1838). Natural Philosophy for Beginners (1838). Christian Households (1858). Hours with My Pupils (1859; republished as The Educator, 1868). Foreign Correspondence in Relation to the Rebellion in the United States (1863). Our Country, in Its Relations to the Past, Present, and Future (edited by Phelps, 1864). Reviews and Essays on Art, Literature, and Science (1873). Women’s Duties and Rights, the Woman’s Congress: An Address to the Women of America (1876). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bolzau, E. L., Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps: Her Life and Work (1936). Lutz, A., Emma Willard: Daughter of Democracy (1929). Woody, T., A History of Women’s Education in the United States (2 vols., 1929). Reference works: DAB. NAW (1971). NCAB. —SALLY GREGORY KOHLSTEDT
PHELPS (WARD), Elizabeth Stuart Born Mary Gray Phelps, 3 August 1844, Boston, Massachusetts; died 28 January 1911, Newton, Massachusetts Also wrote under: Mary Adams, E. S. Phelps Daughter of Austin and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps; married Herbert D. Ward, 1888 Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (née Mary Gray Phelps) was the oldest child and only daughter of the popular author, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. Her father was professor of sacred rhetoric at Andover Theological Seminary in Massachusetts. She identified so strongly with her mother, who wrote of her frustrations with the role of a minister’s dutiful wife, that she adopted her mother’s name after her death when Phelps was eight. She attended Abbot
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Academy and Mrs. Edwards’ School for Young Ladies, both in Andover. By 1868 Phelps had written 11 undistinguished Sunday school works and her first story to receive literary recognition, ‘‘The Tenth of January’’ (Atlantic, 1868), conceived under the influence of Rebecca Harding Davis. During the next two decades, Phelps found strong support from many other women writers, such as Lucy Larcom, Mary Bucklin Claflin, Annie Adams Fields, Harriet Prescott Spofford, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. In the late 1870s and early 1880s, Phelps’ ‘‘boon companion’’ was Dr. Mary Briggs Harris, a physician in Andover. Phelps’s female characters during this period were innovatively independent. But with the deaths of her brother [Moses] Stuart Phelps and Dr. Harris in the mid-1880s, the ever-declining health of her father, and her own increasing invalidism, Phelps’ desire for male companionship increased, and her female characters showed decreased self-confidence. Letters suggest Phelps hoped for literary companionship from the much younger man she married in 1888. Although the couple continued to summer together in Gloucester, Massachusetts, after 1900 she and her husband spent their winters apart. Phelps’ career as a writer was established with the immediate and international popularity of The Gates Ajar (1868). As commonly interpreted, it offers the consolation of a heavenly afterlife to those bereaved by Civil War deaths. This, however, was the first of a series of books presenting Phelps’ major theme of women’s right to self-fulfillment. The Gates Ajar shows the quality of female support required for women to gain fulfillment; Beyond the Gates (1883), the social and cultural institutions needed; and The Gates Between (1887), the behavior required of husbands and fathers. In 1901, Phelps recast the last book as a play—Within the Gates, which was never produced—strengthening the wife-mother role. The Gates series suggests that if earthly society—including a misguided clerical establishment—could not meet the rightful demands of women and the poor, then surely a heavenly society must exist as compensation for such earthly deprivation. These books antedate the outpouring of Utopian literature that followed Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888). From 1869 until her marriage in 1888, Phelps actively supported women’s rights. In the early 1870s she wrote feminist articles, published in The Independent and reprinted in the Woman’s Journal. They dealt with the sexual double standard, women’s economic and emotional independence, the sources of women’s ill health, the ‘‘true woman’’ stereotype, and the problems of women in traditional marriages. She also used these themes in fiction for youth and adults. Early fictional examples include Hedged In (1870), about the social constraints placed on an unwed mother, and A Silent Partner (1871), dealing with men’s prejudice against making a woman a business partner. Both novels emphasize women’s, not men’s, reliable support for women and women’s persistent innovation of social structures designed to meet, rather than frustrate, people’s basic needs.
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In The Story of Avis (1877), Phelps tackled an imaginative reworking of her mother’s life and fiction as well as of her own life. It is her most interesting work and contains her favorite heroine. Phelps shows that marriage has a devastating effect on a woman’s artistic potential: Avis is expected to be dedicated only to her husband and children. The Story of Avis was praised by such literati as James T. Fields, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and John Greenleaf Whittier. But it aroused indignation in others. In 1879 and 1881, Phelps’s father opposed her support for women by publishing two essays decrying woman suffrage. They were later collected in My Portfolio (1882). Two humorous books draw on Phelps’ experience as owner of a summer seaside cottage in Gloucester. An Old Maid’s Paradise (1879), a series of sketches, shows women enjoying typically masculine pleasures, unhampered by male protection. Burglars in Paradise (1886), a spoof of detective fiction, reveals men’s protection of women to be a mere charade and suggests the most insidious burglar of all is the suitor. Phelps’ only male protagonists appear in works written during her courtship and marriage. After her father’s death in 1890, Phelps memorialized him in Austin Phelps: A Memoir (1891), then based her favorite hero, Emanuel Baynard of A Singular Life (1895), on her father’s youthful ideals. The views on marriage here contradict those in The Story of Avis, much as Phelps’s mother’s and father’s views on the subject differed. A Singular Life is a temperance novel: alcoholic men should be reformed so that women’s lives might be safer—a more distanced advocacy of women’s rights than that of her earlier essays and novels. Phelps also supported antivivisection legislation, a cause that two novels connect with social wrongs against women: the vivisectors are men experimenting callously on dogs and women alike in Trixy (1904) and Though Life Do Us Part (1908). Phelps’ autobiography, Chapters From a Life (1896), is as tantalizing for what it omits as it is useful for its revelations. In addition to some 25 novels, she wrote poetry and short stories for the leading magazines of her day. The poetry is mediocre, but some of the stories are outstanding; they are collected in five volumes. Although Phelps’ work frequently lacks aesthetic merit, its importance lies in her ability to translate the psychological and sociological realities of her own life into literary figures. She was pulled in opposite directions by a woman’s movement urging the self-fulfillment for which her mother yearned and a conservative Calvinist tradition of advocating the ‘‘feudal views’’ of women held by her father. OTHER WORKS: Mercy Gliddon’s Work (1865). Up Hill or Life in the Factory (1865). Gypsy series (1866-1867). Men, Women and Ghosts (1869). The Trotty Book (1870). Trotty’s Wedding Tour and Story-book (1873). What to Wear? (1873). Poetic Studies (1875). My Cousin and I (1879). Sealed Orders (1879). Friends: A Duet (1881). Doctor Zay (1882). Songs of the Silent World, and
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Other Poems (1885). The Struggle for Immortality (1889). Fourteen to One (1891). Donald Marcy (1893). The Story of Jesus Christ: An Interpretation (1897). The Successors of Mary the First (1901). Avery (1902). Confessions of a Wife (1902). The Man in the Case (1906). Walled In: A Novel (1907). The Oath of Allegiance, and Other Stories (1909). A Chariot of Fire (1910). The Empty House, and Other Stories (1910). Comrades (1911). The papers of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (Ward) are at the Andover Historical Society, the Houghton Library at Harvard University, and Yale University’s Beinecke Library. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bennett, M. A., Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1939). Coultrap-McQuin, S. M., Doing Literary Business: American Women Writers in the Nineteenth Century (1990). Douglas, A., The Feminization of American Culture (1976). Hart, J. D., The Popular Book (1950). Kelly, L. D., The Life and Works of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Victorian Feminist Writer (1983). Kessler, C. F., Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1982). Phelps, A., My Portfolio (1882). Smith, H. S., The Gates Ajar (1964). Stewart, G. B. A., New Mythos (1979). Welter, B., Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1976). Reference works: AW. DAB. NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: AQ (1977). Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies (Fall 1980). MR (1972). PMLA (1976). Regionalism and the Female Imagination (Fall 1977). Women’s Studies (1978). —CAROL FARLEY KESSLER
PHILLIPS, Irna Born 1 July 1901, Chicago, Illinois; died 23 December 1973, Chicago, Illinois Daughter of William and Betty Phillips; children: two Irna Phillips was the 10th and youngest child of a Chicago grocer. Her interest in dramatics began in childhood and continued through her years at the universities of Illinois and Wisconsin. Phillips taught school in Missouri and Ohio. With her mother as a sturdy model of single parenthood (her father died in 1910), Phillips adopted two children in 1941.
names. The Guiding Light (1937-) featured the male equivalent of Mother Monahan in Dr. Rutledge, pastor of the nonsectarian Little Church of Five Points. Dr. Rutledge’s mission was to teach people how to live the good life. Scenes made up of long, slow discussions between two characters in sparse settings became a Phillips trademark. Guiding Light went on television in 1952. Although Phillips eventually turned the television version over to Agnes E. Nixon, the program continued to bear the stamp of Phillips’ devotion to professionals as heroes. The Road of Life (1937-59) gave the soap opera its first physician for a main character. The program’s standard opening, ‘‘Dr. Brent, call surgery! Dr. Brent, call surgery!’’ was its most memorable aspect. Woman in White (1938-42) was notable for its relative independence in treating subjects usually taboo in radio programs of the period. The Right to Happiness (1939-60) was the original program spinoff. The central characters were Guiding Light’s most popular family, the Kranskys. In The Right to Happiness, they became the Kramers, each of whom was certain of a God-given right to happiness. An innovation in this program was the voice of ‘‘The Past,’’ a haunting voice of conscience used regularly from 1941 to 1944, which Phillips later used in Today’s Children and Guiding Light. In The General Mills Hour (1944-48), Phillips introduced a concept that has since been employed in television soap operas and primetime series. Characters from Today’s Children, Woman in White, and Guiding Light interacted with one another. In 1941 Phillips created television’s first soap opera, These Are My Children. It was a resounding failure, but two later television serials were highly successful. The first, As the World Turns (1956-) carried several conventions of the daytime radio serial into television, including the use of organ music for mood enhancement and transitions, and the ‘‘glacierlike’’ progress of the plot. The show continues to this day on CBS. Her second major television serial, Another World (1964-99), concerned Ada Matthews McGowan, who regularly wrestled with the problem of how to guide her children’s lives without seeming to interfere. Another World, like As the World Turns went on to deal forthrightly with such issues as drugs, alcoholism, rape, and homosexuality. In 1999, after 35 years on the air, Another World was cancelled and replaced by a ‘‘new’’ soap opera.
Phillips began her radio career as an unpaid actress on Chicago’s WGN in 1930. She broadcast a daily program of poetry and philosophical commentary entitled ‘‘Thought for Today.’’ Phillips was then asked to write a serial. The result was Painted Dreams (1930-32), the story of Mother Monaran, a widow modeled after Phillips’s mother, and her daughter Irene. The central theme was the fulfillment of womanhood through marriage, love, and motherhood. All six female characters (and the sound effects) were played by Phillips and Irene Wicker.
Phillips’ penchant for philosophizing in her scripts grew out of her identification of three themes basic to successful daytime serials: appeals to self-preservation, sex, and family instinct. As a writer, Phillips saw herself as ‘‘part mechanic, part psychologist, and part dialogist.’’ In the early 1940s, when she had five dramatic serials on radio at one time, she kept their 60 characters and multiple plots straight with elaborate charts. This ‘‘veteran script carpenter’’ disdained voiceover narration and flashbacks as ‘‘lazy devices.’’ Rather, she built the review necessary to the serial form into the dialogue.
Phillips later went to work for NBC. The daytime serial Today’s Children (1932-38) was Painted Dreams with new
Technically speaking, Phillips did not write her scripts. She acted them before secretaries who recognized the characters by
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Phillips’ interpretation of their voices. When something elicited the wrong reaction, Phillips edited the script on the spot. The typed scripts were sent into production without her seeing them. In the interest of authenticity, Phillips retained a lawyer and two doctors for technical advice. She invited police officers, mail carriers, and policemen into her office as live models. Phillips once said, ‘‘Everybody is a serial story. We’re reporters.’’ Phillips was radio’s most prolific writer, at one point turning out 2,000,000 words (the equivalent of 40 novels) per year. To radio script technique, Phillips contributed the provocative ‘‘tease’’ ending, used to keep audiences interested from day to day, and the use of organ music to establish mood and to bridge breaks in the narrative. She also is credited with the introduction of amnesia as a plot device. Phillips was the only daytime radio dramatist to make a successful transition to television. In addition to the serials she created, Phillips regularly advised producers of other serials. She is recognized as the single most important influence on daytime television serials. OTHER WORKS: Judy and Jane (1932). Lonely Women (1941). The Brighter Day (1944-1948). Love Is a Many Splendored Thing (1967-1973). Bright Promise (1969-1971). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Edmondson, M., and D. Rounds, From Mary Noble to Mary Hartman: The Complete Soap Opera Book (1976). Stedman, R., The Serials: Suspense and Drama by Installment (1971). Wakefield, D., All Her Children (1976). Reference works: The Big Broadcast, 1920-1950 (1966). CB (1944). Tune Into Yesterday: The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Old Time Radio 1925-1976 (1976). Other references: Broadcasting (6 Nov. 1972). Fortune (June 1938). Newsweek (13 July 1942, 11 May 1964). NYT (30 Dec. 1973). Saturday Evening Post (25 June 1960). Time (10 June 1940). Variety (2 Jan. 1974). —CAREN J. DEMING
PHILLIPS, Jayne Anne Born 19 July 1952, Buckhannon, West Virginia Daughter of Russell R. and Martha Jane Thornhill Phillips; married Mark Brian Stockman, 1985; children: three Jayne Anne Phillips came of age during the Vietnam War and is one of the first American writers to deal explicitly with the social effects of this conflict at home. The daughter of a contractor father and schoolteacher mother, her rural roots situated her among ordinary people who were removed from the radical ferment of the 1960s and 1970s but who nevertheless had to deal with many of the wrenching social changes of that time. Phillips’ work examines the effects of these changes, especially the disruption of family and the individual’s search for both connection and transcendence.
Phillips began to publish poetry while a student at West Virginia University. After graduation in 1974, she lived in California and Colorado, working as a waitress and beginning to experiment with the intensely compressed, brief prose that culminated in Sweethearts (1976), published in the same year Phillips entered the University of Iowa writing program (M.F.A., 1978). Intrigued by the challenge of fiction, Phillips began to concentrate in that genre. Her first collection for a commercial press, Black Tickets (awarded the Sue Kaufman award for first fiction), was published in 1979. Critics praised its poetic language and its sharp observations of socially marginal characters: street people, drug addicts, the emotionally disturbed and neglected. Many stories deal frankly with violence and sexuality; others, more traditional in structure, explore family relationships. Phillips’ first novel, Machine Dreams (1984), set in a small West Virginia town, traces the history of the Hampson family from the Depression of the 1930s through Vietnam. The book received wide praise for its evocation of disillusionment and for the sensitivity with which it portrayed the disparate members of a loving, but troubled, family. The novel’s intimate sense of place— the rural and small-town South—again appears in some of the stories in Fast Lanes (1984; 1987). Other stories return, however, to the situations of rootless and confused young characters on the road. In them women as much as men have the need to wander and accumulate experiences, including erotic ones, in their search for themselves. In her second novel, Shelter (1994), Phillips again examines loss, this time the loss of the childhood innocence of four campers attending a summer camp for girls in 1963 in West Virginia. The girls have been sponsored by a local Daughters of the American Revolution group, and it being 1963, they are required to give patriotic (anti-Communist) speeches during dinner. But their days are spent pursuing the usual innocent summer activities of swimming and hiking until two ex-cons show up at the camp, one the father of Buddy, a young camper, and the other who has religious visions and is following the first ex-con to the camp. In addition, the families of the four girls are intertwined with an extramarital affair that led to the suicide of one of the girl’s fathers. Michiko Kakutani, writing in the New York Times, said that ‘‘Ms. Phillips manages to conjure up the humid realm of adolescence: its inchoate yearnings, its alternately languid and hectic moods of expectation. . .a tactile, dreamlike sense of her characters’ apprehension of the world.’’ Ann Hulbert, in the New York Times Book Review, wrote that ‘‘in the serpent-infested wild, Ms. Phillips has laid the ground for a cathartic convergence of physical, Freudian and fanatical visions of corruption. And in a number of scenes, she manages marvels of cross-cutting. . . . [She] plays skillfully with the rich metaphoric implications of violated children—the religious overtones of creatures being cast out, the mythic dimensions of generational rivalry and decay.’’ The novel, for the most part was well received, and although R. Z. Sheppard’s review in Time described the novel as ‘‘overwritten and trendy,’’ Hulbert concluded that ‘‘ever an astute chronicler of American preoccupations, Ms. Phillips has again put her finger on the collective (and racing) pulse.’’
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Phillips is an adjunct associate professor of English at Boston University. She has taught at Brandeis University, Humboldt State University, Arcata, and Williams College. She was a fellow at the Buntin Institute at Radcliffe College in 1981. Phillips’s stories have been widely anthologized. In addition to the Sue Kaufman award, she has received the Pushcart Prize (1977, 1979), the Fels Award for fiction (1978), two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1978, 1985), the St. Lawrence Award for fiction (1979), and an O. Henry award (1980) for her short story ‘‘Snow.’’ Her novel Machine Dreams was a National Book Critics Circle award nominee, and received an American Library Association Notable Book citation (1984) and a New York Times best books of 1984 citation.
OTHER WORKS: Counting (1978). How Mickey Made It (1981).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CANR (1988). CLC (1980, 1985). Croton Review (1986). DLBY: 1980 (1981). FC (1990). Interviews in PW (8 June 1984). NR (2 Sept. 1985). NYTBR (3 May 1987, 18 Sept. 1994). NYT (30 Aug. 1994). —ELIZABETH SHOSTAK, UPDATED BY LINDA SPENCER
PIATT, Sarah (Morgan) Bryan Born 11 August 1836, Lexington, Kentucky; died 2 December 1919, Caldwell, New Jersey Wrote under: Sarah M. B. Piatt, ‘‘A Woman’’ Daughter of Talbot and Mary Spiers Bryan; married John J. Piatt, 1861; children: seven, two of whom died young Sarah Bryan Piatt was related through her mother to the earliest settlers of Kentucky, including Daniel Boone. At the age of three, Piatt moved to Versailles, Kentucky, where her mother died five years later. Piatt was raised by her maternal grandmother, a well-to-do slave-owner, and educated at the fashionable Henry Female College. Soon after her marriage to a poet, Piatt moved to Georgetown, Virginia, where her husband was appointed to a clerkship which he held for the next six years. In 1867 they moved to North Bend, Ohio, where they built a house overlooking the Ohio River. In 1870 John Piatt, appointed librarian to the House of Representatives, returned to Washington, where his family joined him each winter. Piatt went to live in Queenstown, Ireland, in 1882 after her husband was appointed consul in Cork. During this sojourn, she became acquainted with a wide circle of literary people. Soon after the Piatts’ return from Ireland in 1894, their home was destroyed by fire. Though the house was later rebuilt, this
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misfortune signaled the onset of financial reverses from which they never recovered. Piatt bore seven children, two of whom died tragically. Their deaths form the subject matter and references of many of Piatt’s poems, particularly those written during the earlier part of her career. Thoroughly steeped in the traditional Southern woman’s role, she was devoted to domesticity and to the instruction of her children, and never spoke to anyone about her writing. It was only through the efforts of her husband, it seems, that Piatt’s work appeared in print. Of her 18 volumes of poetry, the two earliest were written in collaboration with her husband. Later volumes focus on the death of children and others, on disillusion with life and living, and to some extent on nature and the Civil War. Poems for and about children form another grouping. Piatt’s interest in children elicited comment from many critics, especially Edmund Stedman, who pointed out that she had ‘‘a special gift for seeing into a child’s heart.’’ In addition to formal collections, Piatt contributed to many periodicals, among them the Atlantic Monthly and Scribner’s. If there is any difference between Piatt’s early and late poems, it is in the direction of greater formal flexibility and greater awareness of the world outside. As the deaths of her two children receded in time, Piatt became less introspective. Her stay in Europe no doubt helped turn her toward less subjective themes. Some critics commented on Piatt’s simplicity and ‘‘daintiness,’’ a term so often applied to women poets. Several critics, Howells among them, commented on the universality of subject matter of the poems in relation to women’s lives; Emerson Venable called the poems ‘‘sometimes deeply tragic.’’ Piatt’s reputation was considerable, although much smaller than her husband’s. Whittier quoted from her work; Stedman called her America’s ‘‘best-known Western poetess.’’ Some English critics believed her ‘‘hard to surpass on either side of the Atlantic.’’ Piatt’s melancholy tone and modesty of scope were doubtless rooted in the female literary conventions of her time. Her poems express once again the unhappiness of a woman of talent and intelligence restricted by her role as the wife of another poet, who received acclaim and satisfaction that was denied her. OTHER WORKS: The Nests at Washington, and Other Poems (with J. J. Piatt, 1864). A Woman’s Poems (1871). A Voyage to the Fortunate Isles, Etc. (1874). Poems in Company with Children (1877). That New World, and Other Poems (1877). Dramatic Persons and Moods, and Other New Poems (1880). An Irish Garland (1884). The Children Out-of-Doors (with J. J. Piatt, 1885). Selected Poems (1885). Child’s World Ballads (1886). In Primrose Time: A New Irish Garland (1886). Child’s World Ballads, Second Series (1887). The Witch in the Glass, and Other Poems (1889). An Irish Wildflower (1891). An Enchanted Castle, and Other Poems (1893). Pictures, Portraits, and People in Ireland (1893). Poems (1894). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Howells, M., Life in Letters of William Dean Howells (1928). Stoddard, R. H., et al., Poet’s Homes (1877).
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Townsend, J. W., Kentucky in American Letters (1913). Tynan, K., Twenty-Five Years: Reminiscences (1913). Reference works: AW. CAL. LSL. NAW (1971). NCAB. The Part Taken by Women in American History (1912). Other references: Ohio State Archeological and Historical Quarterly (Jan. 1936). —VIRGINIA R. TERRIS
PIERCY, Marge Born 31 March 1936, Detroit, Michigan Daughter of Robert and Bert Bunnin Piercy; married (divorced); Robert Shapiro, 1962 (divorced); Ira Wood, 1982 Marge Piercy grew up in a lower-class family and has remained committed to the common people. She was educated at the University of Michigan and Northwestern University. Piercy was a member of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), and has for many years been intensely committed to the women’s movement. Piercy’s novels are richly peopled, strongly political works attacked for their polemicism. Reviewers often suggest literary integrity has been sacrificed to political convictions. Yet she forcefully confronts the important social issues of our time, exposing sexual, economic, and political injustices. Piercy’s first two novels are largely concerned with the New Left of the 1960s. Going Down Fast (1969) portrays the conversion of conscientious liberals from pacifism to militancy. Dance the Eagle to Sleep (1970) pictures the revolt of a group of student revolutionaries against a highly systematized and dehumanized American society of the near future. With Small Changes (1973), Piercy moved to a stronger feminist theme. The opening traces the disillusionment of Beth, whose marriage simply trades a mother’s domination for a husband’s. Beth’s flight leads to her friendship with Miriam, who is eventually trapped in an equally oppressive marriage. Meanwhile, Beth leaves for a women’s commune and then a lesbian relationship in which, despite social persecution, she finds personal fulfillment. The novel’s bias is obvious in the unrelentingly negative male characterizations and the idealization of Beth’s lesbian relationship. Yet it is a powerful and popular novel, frequently used in women’s courses. Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) combines feminism with other social issues, particularly economic inequality. Its protagonist, an impoverished Chicana, is victimized by husbands, lovers, pimps, and male doctors at the institution where she is finally confined. She escapes from the asylum by imagining a utopian future with political and sexual freedom, and economic and social equality. The High Cost of Living (1978) again combines economic and sexual inequality, showing the price working-class children
must pay to get ahead. The male’s attempt to dominate ends the brief heterosexual affair of the protagonist, who then returns to lesbian relationships and feminist ideals. Vida (1980) traces, through flashbacks, the antiwar movement of the 1960s, the increasing activism of the radical left, the movement underground in the 1970s, and the eventual fragmentation of a once strong and optimistic political movement. Piercy realistically portrays the personal price, the loneliness and despair, that the characters pay for their political ideals. Vida is Piercy’s most powerful protagonist, and her lover, Joel, is one of the few sympathetic men in Piercy’s fiction. Much of Piercy’s poetry contains the same anger and intensity. Whereas the novels are complex and often unfocused, the poetry is simply stated and often formally structured, sometimes employing brilliant metaphors. In ‘‘The Friend,’’ the woman, eager to please, says, ‘‘I love you,’’ and her lover responds, ‘‘Cut off your hands.’’ Similarly, ‘‘Barbie Doll’’ presents a young woman whose attempts to conform to ideals of feminine beauty culminate in death when she cuts off her too-fat legs and nose. Piercy’s poetic tone is impressively varied. It may achieve a mocking humor, as in ‘‘To the Pay Toilet’’: ‘‘You strop my anger, especially / when I find you in a restaurant or bar / and pay for the same liquid, coming and going.’’ Many poems deal with simple and homely pleasures—baking bread or planting gardens. There are nature poems, suffused with the Cape Cod environment, and sensual, sensitive love poems. Piercy’s poetic voice is always honest, never coy, avoiding word games and conveying moments of intensity with forthright feeling. While there has been some division of opinion concerning her novels, most critics agree she is an important and gifted poet. Since 1980, Piercy has solidified her reputation as a powerful and politically committed writer while branching out into a variety of genres. Her frequent publications testify to an author who uses her writing to explore vital issues and ideas. Braided Lives (1982) is Piercy’s most autobiographical novel to date. She describes it as ‘‘more novel than memoir. . .a heightened fantasy on certain autobiographical themes.’’ It follows the protagonist, Jill, from her youth in the 1950s through her growing radicalization in the late 1960s, and uses her relationship with a cousin to measure the psychic as well as geographic distances Jill has traveled. The book is concerned in great part with the difficulties Jill faces in becoming a writer. Fly Away Home (1984) centers around Daria, a woman whose traditional domestic life is forever altered. Her security shaken by her divorce and the death of her mother, Daria makes a number of difficult decisions that transform her life and draw her back to the working class values of her childhood. Gone to Soldiers (1987) was one of Piercy’s most ambitious works. This epic World War II novel follows 10 characters as their personal lives become intertwined with the war and its effects both on the battlefront and the home front. Although the war novel would not initially appear to be well suited to a feminist and leftist writer such as Piercy, she is able to work successfully within this
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genre to explore separation, friendship, and the overall impact of war on a varied cast of characters. Summer People (1989) follows three artists as their decade-long ménage à trois begins to fall apart. Running alongside the development of these personalities is an examination of the effect of real estate development on Cape Cod. In a 1984 autobiographical memoir, Piercy details her move to Cape Cod with her second husband, Robert Shapiro, whom she married in 1962, and her deep attachment to this area, which has remained her home. Summer People reflects her concern for the ecological survival of Cape Cod, threatened by overdevelopment. In He, She, and It (1991), Piercy ventures into the world of cyberpunk science fiction. Issues of individual identity and social responsibility are explored on a dystopian future Earth, primarily through the cyborg, Yod. Like much of cyberpunk writing, the future portrayed in this book is not so far away that we can easily distance ourselves from the questions Piercy forces her readers to ask. The reactions to Piercy’s novels have always ranged across the critical spectrum. Admirers feel that she achieves the difficult balance between political motivation and aesthetic accomplishment. Critics have complained her politics often lead to one-dimensional characterization. Her poetry, on the other hand, has met with a less varied, and generally positive, response. She credits her mother with making her a poet: ‘‘She taught me to observe sharply and to remember what I observed. She also taught me intense curiosity about other people.’’ As with her prose, Piercy’s verse brings together political and personal issues that can include her deeply held feminism, concern over the impact of nuclear power, and an environmentalist’s appreciation of nature. Circles on the Water (1982) is a collection of the best of Piercy’s early poems, reprinted along with seven new poems. Other recent volumes of poetry include Stone, Paper, Knife (1983), My Mother’s Body (1985), Available Light (1988), and Mars and Her Children (1992). In addition to these writings, Piercy has coauthored a play, The Last White Class (1980) with Ira Wood, whom she married in 1982. The play explores race relations in a changing Boston neighborhood. Piercy has also published a collection of essays on poetry, Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt (1982), and she has edited a poetry anthology entitled Early Ripening: American Women’s Poetry Now (1988). Described by critics as one of her best novels, The Longings of Women (1994) traces the lives of three women from differing backgrounds whose lives have the common theme of facing misuse by men and society. Piercy’s rendering of middle-class desires and her understanding of the often ethereal quality of self-worth that is a function of the opinions of others makes this an important piece. In City of Darkness, City of Light (1997), Piercy examines the personal realities of three women caught in the French Revolution. Claire, Marion, and Pauline each find their own cause within the tragedy of the revolution and work for the overthrow of
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the monarchy. Although their stories are intertwined with influential men of the time, the women drive this book. As always, Piercy mixes the politics of the time with the agonies of everyday life and enlivens historical fact with humanity. In her 13th collection of poems, What Are Big Girls Made Of? (1997), Piercy attempts to deal with her own feelings regarding her half-brother (now deceased), a paradox of a man. Piercy remarks that ‘‘we both felt the world as a great pain,’’ and that each set out to change it in their own way. Piercy collaborated with her husband on Storm Tide (1998), a novel of small-town politics and passions. Although filled with scheming characters, David Greene (protagonist) proves the old saying that politics make strange (and dangerous) bedfellows. Greene, a one-time local baseball star, returns to Cape Cod with little in the way of a future until he starts an affair with a local attorney (Judith), who is married to Gordon, a local political progressive. Gordon not only encourages the affair, but works with Judith to push Greene into running for a position in local government. Greene doesn’t know when to quit, however, and begins a second affair with a woman who works for his opponent. Early Grrrl: The Early Poems (1999) is a collection of Piercy’s poems that are either out-of-print or have never been published before. The title reflects the fact that the book is dedicated to the women of the Grrrl movement—the form of feminist expression found in contemporary zines, music, and on the Web. The Art of Blessing the Day (1999) is a collection of Piercy’s poems that reflect Jewish life as she has experienced it—both at home and in a world which is at times hostile to the traditions of her faith. She displays a ‘‘Jewishness’’ which she has inherited, adjusted over time, and merged with her work in a ‘‘passion for language and justice.’’ Piercy continues to publish poetry, essays, and reviews in magazines and periodicals such as Tikkun, Caprice, Orbis, New York Times Book Review, New Republic, and Woman’s Day. OTHER WORKS: Breaking Camp (1968). Hard Loving (1969). 4-Telling (with three other poets, 1971). To Be of Use (1973). Living in the Open (1976). The Twelve-Spoken Wheel Flashing (1978). The Moon Is Always Female (1980). The Earth Shines Secretly: A Book of Days (1990). Body of Glass (1992). Overload (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Barr, M., ed., Future Females: A Critical Anthology (1981). Barr, M., and N. Smith, eds., Women and Utopia (1983). Rainwater, C. S., ed., Contemporary American Women Writers (1985). Walker, S., and E. Hamner, Ways of Knowing: Critical Essays on Marge Pericy (1986). Reference works: CAAS (1984). CANR (1984). CLC (1991). FC (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers (1996). Other references: American Poetry Review (July/Aug. 1974). Booklist (1 Feb. 1999). Nation (10 Dec. 1970). NR (27 Oct. 1973).
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NYTBR (24 Feb. 1980, 5 Feb. 1984, 12 May 1985, 10 May 1987, 10 July 1988, 11 June 1989, 22 Dec. 1991). Parnassus (Fall/Winter 1979). Poetry (1971, 1997). PW (13 Dec. 1993, 23 Sept. 1996, 27 Apr. 1998). WRB (Aug. 1984, July 1987, July 1988). —SUZANNE HENNING UPHAUS, UPDATED BY REBECCA C. CONDIT
PIKE, Mary (Hayden) Green Born 30 November 1824, Eastport, Maine; died 15 January 1908, Baltimore, Maryland Wrote under: Mary Langdon, Sydney A. Story Daughter of Elijah and Hannah Hayden Green; married Frederick A. Pike, 1845; one child A writer of sentimental antislavery novels, Mary Green Pike was descended from old New England Puritan stock; her father was a Baptist deacon, bank director, and militia officer in Calais, Maine. Pike attended public schools and the Charleston, Massachusetts, Female Seminary. In 1845, she married Frederick A. Pike, a lawyer, who served in the U.S. Congress between 1861 and 1869 as a radical Republican. An adopted daughter was their only child. The religious enthusiasm evident in Pike’s early life was soon mingled with the cause of abolition. Her husband and his brother were also ardent abolitionists, yet both were dubious about allowing full citizenship to freed blacks. Pike was more egalitarian; she believed that, given adequate education, blacks could be fully integrated, both politically and socially. Pike’s three acknowledged novels were published between 1854 and 1858 under the names ‘‘Mary Langdon’’ and ‘‘Sydney A. Story.’’ She also made anonymous or pseudonymous contributions to newspapers and periodicals. In about 1860 she turned from literature to landscape painting. Her last years were devoted to charitable and religious work. Ida May (1854) was one of the more popular novels to follow in the wake of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Instead of requiring their readers to identify with black protagonists, most second-generation abolition novelists depended on the figure of the beautiful quadroon or octaroon. Pike went one step further—Ida May is wholly white, kidnapped as a child, taken South, and sold into slavery. Pike was probably attempting to make Northern readers feel personally endangered. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise had made the expansion of slave territory a topical issue. In passages of authorial comment, Pike notes the number of children, both black and white, who inexplicably disappear every year, and claims poor whites have been known to sell their children as mulattoes. The chief evil of slavery in Ida May is how it destroys the family. Caste (1856) was less popular, perhaps because the indictment was closer to home. Charles and Helen Dupré, a brother and
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sister, are discovered to have black blood. Helen immediately suffers a broken engagement and a bout of brain fever, but the effects are even more disastrous for Charles. His business associate dissolves their partnership, his father-in-law vows to have his marriage annulled, and his wife dies of distress in childbirth. The sudden alteration of attitudes toward Charles demonstrates the depth of prejudice; northerners cannot point to the black’s brutishness, ignorance, and slavery-induced childishness to excuse their discrimination, since Charles’ manners, morals, education, and tastes remain the same. Pike explicitly argues that Northern prejudice is more entrenched and will be harder to overcome than the institutionalized slave system of the South. Agnes (1858) attempts to show Native Americans as human beings with thoughts, emotions, and desires which are neither noble nor savage, but simply like those of other members of the human race. This subject matter, however, occupies a secondary place in the novel. The main plot is a sentimental melodrama laid during the Revolutionary War and using nearly all the conventional figures and situations of the genre. All three of Pike’s novels are based on the staple element of 18th-and 19th-century popular fiction: an innocent and unprotected woman is placed undeservedly—and repeatedly—in threatening situations. The melodrama is given social meaning by introducing race as an element increasing the threat. Pike also made the analogy between race and sex as handicaps. Her characters sometimes verbalize feminine independence and aspirations but never realize them; the conventional plot situations require helplessness, victimization, and male rescue. Despite the stereotyped plots, Pike’s writing is vigorous and touched by moments of fine dramatic irony. She is able to make moral points clearly without sermonizing and she is remembered as a committed woman who used the weapons of sentiment in the service of a cause she believed in. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: NAW (1971). Other references: Journal of Popular Culture (1969). —SALLY MITCHELL
PINCKNEY, Josephine (Lyons Scott) Born 25 January 1895, Charleston, South Carolina; died 4 October 1957, New York City Daughter of Thomas and Camilla Scott Pinckney Josephine Pinckney’s Charleston heritage is evident in most of her writing. During the 1920s, she was active in the Poetry Society of South Carolina, which she helped to found; she was also one of its leading poets. Some of Pinckney’s work was published in Poetry before she gathered it together in SeaDrinking Cities (1927).
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Pinckney’s poetry skillfully evokes scenes and moods of the Carolina Low Country; at times, however, it tends to be artificial and contrived. Realizing her limitations, Pinckney soon turned to writing prose fiction. During the 1930s, Pinckney published short stories in some of the better literary magazines. Hilton Head (1941) is a fictionalized account of the life of Henry Woodward, one of the first English settlers of South Carolina. Pinckney’s research into Woodward’s life and into the Native American and Spanish, as well as early English, settlements of the period was painstaking. The prose style is at times marred by Pinckney’s background as a poet of the imagist school, producing descriptions with the quality of stiff brocade. The major flaw is her failure to dramatize the complex actions she presents. The novel’s best passages are those which describe landscapes and personal interactions. Pinckney realized her inability to dramatize action, and in Three O’Clock Dinner (1945) she found a genuine fictional mode in the novel of manners, especially the manners of Charleston. A Literary Guild selection, this was the most popular of Pinckney’s works and perhaps her best. Set in early 20th-century Charleston, the story is of the inroads made by the daughter of a German immigrant family into one of the bastions of Charleston aristocracy, the Redcliff family. Although the girl fails to breech the family bulwark, she does shake and weaken its foundations. Pinckney’s skillful description of Charleston manners displays both the charms and shortcomings of her characters, and she retains the ability to capture the scenery and moods of her native city. Charleston is also the setting for Great Mischief (1948), but here it is the Charleston of the late 19th century. In addition to her careful research on the period, Pinckney explores the superstitions of the time and includes a historically accurate account of 19thcentury witchcraft. These elements are woven together so skillfully the line between fantasy and reality is blurred not only for the characters but also for the readers. The night of the witches’ sabbath coincides with the great Charleston earthquake of 1886 so both the main character and the reader are left to wonder if the witching was real or merely a dream. In My Son and Foe (1952), Pinckney abandons the Charleston setting to study the interactions of her characters in the crucible of a small, remote Caribbean island—interactions of love and jealousy, good and evil. Pinckney returned to a Charleston setting with Splendid in Ashes (1958). She chronicles the feelings of a generation of Charlestonians about the life and times of Augustus Grimshawe, recently deceased. Grimshawe’s career and personality, as well as the personalities of those with whom he came into contact, are revealed as the characters react to the news of his death. Pinckney ties the past to the present with a skillful combination of reminiscence and flashback. Pinckney’s first two books are the works of a literary novice. With her third book, Pinckney found herself and became not only a writer with popular appeal but also a skillful delineator of the manners of the rigid Charlestonian society she knew so well. In her best novel, Pinckney reveals the Charlestonian mind with wit and ironic humor.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY: Davidson, D., The Spyglass: Views and Reviews (1963). Reference works: American Novelists of Today (1951). TCAS. Other references: NYHTBR (20 Jan. 1952). NYTBR (23 Sept. 1945, 21 March 1948, 4 May 1958). —HARRIETTE CUTTINO BUCHANAN
PINE, Cuyler See PECK, Ellen
PLAIN, Belva Born 9 October 1919, New York, New York Daughter of Eleanor and Oscar Offenberg; married Irving Plain, 1941, children: three Belva Plain is known for writing bestselling historical romances, in particular a four-book family saga dealing with the lives of the descendants of immigrant Jews. She also writes novels set in modern times that deal with current issues such as date rape and corporate downsizing. Usually, Plain’s plots emphasize family togetherness, ‘‘rags to riches’’ scenarios, the value of a happy, long-lasting marriage, and they always end on a positive note. Plain resided on Park Avenue in New York City during her childhood. Although she wrote for school magazines and was once editor of the school newspaper, while majoring in history at Barnard College she was informed by a creative writing teacher that she had no feeling for words. Undaunted, Plain continued writing and submitted short stories to women’s magazines right after college. All were published and usually concerned the theme of a married woman being tempted by but in the end rejecting forbidden love. In 1941 Plain married Irving Plain, an ophthalmologist, and temporarily gave up her writing career to raise three children in the suburbs. She dreamed of writing a novel, preferably one that avoided common Jewish stereotypes. When her children became old enough to be curious about their ancestors, she toyed with the idea of writing about her grandmother, who had come to the U.S. from Europe all by herself at the age of sixteen. Eventually, when Plain had grandchildren of her own, familial generations took on even more importance, so she set out to write her first novel, Evergreen, published when she was fifty-nine. Delacorte bought the novel for an $87,000 advance, and it quickly became a bestseller. Plain went on to a second bestseller, Random Winds (1980), set in her native state of New York with a doctor as the main character, which garnered her a $100,000
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advance. Other books followed, usually at two-year intervals: Eden Burning (1982) was set in the Caribbean, while Crescent City (1984) concerns both Union and Confederate Jewish soldiers during the Civil War. Plain discovered while researching the novel that the Union erred in not providing chaplains for Jewish soldiers, while the Confederacy did not practice religious discrimination of this sort.
PLATH, Sylvia Born 27 October 1932, Boston, Massachusetts; died 11 February 1963, London, England Also wrote as: Victoria Lucas, Sandra Peters Daughter of Otto E. and Aurelia Schober Plath; married Ted Hughes, 1956; children: two
In 1985 Evergreen was selected to be filmed as a miniseries for network television. In 1986 Plain decided to continue the saga, this time focusing on the family history of the leading male character in The Golden Cup. Tapestry (1988) told of the grandchildren of the original female immigrant. Harvest (1990) completed the Werner family saga series.
Sylvia Plath’s father emigrated from the Polish corridor and became a biologist at Boston University; her mother, also a German immigrant, taught high school English. Plath was instilled with an achievement ethic which fueled her precocious talent for writing and drawing.
Blessings (1989) was a departure for Plain, as she took the idea from today’s news stories. Adoptees are now more likely to learn about their natural parents and seek them out. A woman who gave up a daughter for adoption many years before is confronted by her just before the former is to be married.
The facts of Plath’s biography directly inform her writing, especially her idyllic yet menaced childhood by the sea, which ended abruptly with her father’s death when Plath was eight. His death, its dramatic circumstances, and the ensuing move inland to Wellesley affected Plath profoundly. Writing poetry became ‘‘a new way of being happy.’’ Sea, father, and childhood became a haunting amalgam of loss.
Other novels pertaining to modern controversies were written by Plain in the 1990s. Promises (1996) departed from the formula romance fiction she wrote for magazines in the 1940s, in which a woman is tempted by the possibility of an extramarital affair. Plain has a man, suffering from the effects of being downsized, be tempted by a woman from his past. Secrecy (1997) shows the interaction between a teenage girl who has been date raped, the boy who raped her, and their mothers.
Plath’s legend as superachiever began early. By the time she won a scholarship to Smith (1950), Plath had drawings, poems, and stories in national publications, including Seventeen. Maintaining her momentum at Smith with school honors and steady publication, she won Mademoiselle’s College Fiction Contest, was named Guest Editor (‘‘the literary woman’s ‘Miss America’’’), and in June 1953 was initiated to ‘‘Mad’’-ison Avenue.
Homecoming (1997) returned to Plain’s predilection to portray families over several generations. A newly widowed woman devises a family reunion in which her children, deliberately estranged from each other, come together and resolve their differences after the lives of two children are threatened. Legacy of Silence (1998) returned to Plain’s Jewish roots. Two women in 1939 Berlin flee after their parents have been captured and killed by Nazis. The plot involves their escape to Switzerland, then the United States, where they try to build new lives.
Exhausted, demoralized, and at odds with her hard-won image as the all-American girl, Plath had a mental breakdown and attempted suicide. After psychiatric treatment she returned to Smith, graduating summa cum laude (1955), again winning top awards and also a Fulbright to Cambridge for graduate work. During her two years at Cambridge, Plath married Hughes. Returning to Smith as English professor, she found the conflict between teaching and writing untenable. After another year attending Robert Lowell’s poetry seminar and Yaddo, Plath made her life in England, immersing herself in writing, Devon country life, and motherhood.
Plain carries out extensive historical research, including visiting each location in which her novels take place to check such matters as local newspapers, dress, architecture, and everyday utensils. Usually in the top 20 of hardcover bestseller lists, Plain’s novels appeal to women of different backgrounds. Many have been published in large print, and her books have appeared in 14 languages in addition to English.
OTHER WORKS: Treasures (1992). Whispers (1993). Daybreak (1994). The Carousel (1995).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CANR (1990). SATA (1990). Twentieth Century Romance and Historical Writers (1994). —ROSE SECREST
Worn down by competing pressures of motherhood and muse, chronic ill health, a cold winter, a failed marriage, and recurrent depression, Plath gassed herself at the age of thirty-one. Plath’s middle class, Unitarian upbringing induced no radical activism. Although a liberal conscience does plead for peace, and a mature Plath fears the military-industrial complex and deplores ‘‘The Thin People,’’ Plath reaches out from her ‘‘bell jar’’ for an image of her own experience as a woman and artist. Compulsively trying to come to terms with the meaning of her female sexuality as she tries to realize her ambitions, Plath interprets global distress in terms of her personal conflicts. As a woman, Plath frequently identifies with the underdog; in her art she is Jew to a Nazi paternity, ‘‘chuffed off’’ to Auschwitz, turning and burning in Holocaust ovens, even the bright oven of Hiroshima. In her apprentice work, Plath submerges her specific concerns about identity, creation, death, and muse beneath detached,
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synthetic, allusive pieces on nature and art. Plath’s early poems attest to her control, not only over form but over the emotion it contains. Her middle poems are best represented by The Colossus (1960), which spans her college, breakdown, scholar, and marriage phases of development. Painstakingly wrought, word by well-chosen word, the clenched poems elicit admiration for their mature technical virtuosity, and criticism (shared by Plath) for their elaborate ‘‘checks and courtesies,’’ ‘‘maddening docility,’’ and ‘‘deflections.’’ The poems not only present the themes and images of the later Ariel-type poems (the baby/moon/mother/ muse matrix and father/sea/suicide cluster), but introduce the exuberant passion and wit that distinguish Plath’s greatest works. Three Women: A Monologue for Three Voices (1962) is a transitional, formative work. Always obsessed by, and ambivalent about, female creativity, Plath now presents her Darwinian value system: the mother is victor, for she produces, while the Girl and the Secretary are ‘‘empty,’’ ‘‘restless and useless,’’ creating ‘‘corpses.’’ The three voices represent Plath’s consciousness of her role conflict as artist, wife, and mother. The radio-play format opens up Plath’s style. After this, Plath’s poetry is dramatic rather than narrative or expository, written ‘‘all of one piece,’’ to be read aloud; its imperfect cadences, careless-seeming rhymes, and impression of spontaneity and free association underlie Plath’s new aesthetics, which demand of the poems that they be ‘‘possessed . . . as by the rhythms of their own breathing.’’ The poems in Ariel (1965, reprinted several times, including 1990 and 1997), Crossing the Water: Transitional Poems (1971, 1993), and Winter Trees (1971) are the culmination of themes and images of Plath’s previous works. They are different only in degree—‘‘extremist’’ in their profound disillusionment in her idealized marriage and the ‘‘years of doubleness, smiles, and compromise.’’ Plath releases her long-suppressed rage and is, at the same time, disconcertingly gleeful and triumphant, gaily macabre, and erotically murderous. Vitality, not iambics, produces the rhythm, and the haft, slanted rhymes sound like a drunk’s. While the poems appear autobiographical and private in imagery (the ‘‘toe’’ of ‘‘Daddy,’’ one of Plath’s best-known poems, refers to her father’s amputated foot) and bare of artifice, years of practice with form and poetics underlie these outbursts, and the literal concrete metaphors universalize the meaning. Plath’s fiction contains the same preoccupation with her own experience, but it never loosens control as in her breakthrough poetry and hence never assumes the poetry’s powerful voice. It was written throughout Plath’s career, largely for the commercial market. Yet in these manufactured stories, with their studied moralistic formulas, Plath gives candid expression to her own anxieties. In ‘‘The Fifty-Ninth Bear,’’ she projects a wife’s canny hostility to her husband. ‘‘Den of Lions’’ reveals the Plathian voice at its best, where the persona is ‘‘game,’’ wryly humorous, and self-deprecating about her traumas. The engaging narrator of ‘‘Den of Lions’’ turns up again in The Bell Jar (1963, 25th anniversary edition in 1996, film version 1979), Plath’s autobiographical novel about her mental breakdown. Again, disillusionment fuels the criticism Plath now levels
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about growing up female in middle-class America. Plath’s approach is satiric; the world’s injustice is more absurd than evil. The heroine’s summer on ‘‘Mad’’ Avenue is an initiation ritual into ‘‘the real world,’’ which turns out to be a disillusioning joke. Plath’s refusal to moralize and her naive insistence on the private nature of her vision effectively result in a moving book with tragic and universal overtones. Her earnest effort to conform as woman and artist led to Plath’s breakdown. As she herself disengages the gagging mask of pleasing, pleased normalcy, her literature devolves from its disguised interest in landscapes and events to the subject of raw, terrifying self released from the pretense of objectivity: ‘‘Peel off the napkin / O my enemy. / Do I terrify?’’ (‘‘Lady Lazarus’’). Accompanying the unmasking of the subject is the conversion of duty-bound literary behavior to the exuberant anarchies of a released prisoner of style. OTHER WORKS: A Winter Ship (1960). American Poetry Now (edited by Plath, 1961). Uncollected Poems (1965). Crystal Gazer (1971). Fiesta Melons (1971). Lyonesse (1971). Pursuit (introduction by T. Hughes, 1973). Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963 (edited by A. S. Plath, 1975, 1992). The Bed Book (1976). Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, and Other Prose Writings (edited by T. Hughes, 1978, 1998). The Collected Poems (1992). The It-Doesn’t-Matter Suit (1996). The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1998). Poems (1998). Sylvia Plath collections are housed in the Lilly Library of Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, and at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Aird, E., Sylvia Plath: Her Life and Work (1973). Alexander, P., Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath (1991, 1999). Alvarez, A., The Savage God (1971). Annas, P. J., A Disturbance in Mirrors: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath (1988). Axelrod, S., Sylvia Plath, the Wound and the Cure of Words (1992). Bassnett, S., Sylvia Plath (1987). Bloom, H., ed., Sylvia Plath (1989). Britzolakis, C., Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning (1999). Bronfen, E., Sylvia Plath (1998). Bundtzen L. K., Plath’s Incarnations: Woman and the Creative Process (1983). Butscher, E., Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness (1976). Butscher, E., ed., Sylvia Plath, The Woman and Her Work (1977). Chalmers, C. F., ‘‘Sylvia Plath: A Selected Annotated Bibliography’’ (thesis, 1989). Connell, E., Sylvia Plath: Killing the Angel in the House (1995). Friess, D. K., ‘‘The Shattering of Literary Families: A Lacanian Psychoanalysis of the Absent Male— Tennessee Williams, Marsha Norman, and Selected Poetry of Sylvia Plath’’ (thesis, 1998). Gilbert, S. M. and S. Gubar, Shakespeare’s Sisters (1979). Guide to the Sylvia Plath Materials in the Lilly Library (1993). Haberkamp, F., The Poetics of Beekeeping: Sylvia Plath (1997). Hall, C. K. B., Sylvia Plath: Revised (1998). Hargrove, N. D., The Journey Toward Ariel: Sylvia Plath’s of 1956-1959 (1994). Hayman, R., The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath (1992). Holbrook, D., Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence (1988). Hughes, T., Birthday Letters (1998). Jaidka, M., Confession and Beyond: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath (1992). Kroll, J.,
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Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath (1976). Lane, G., and M. Stevens, Sylvia Plath: A Bibliography (1978). Malcolm, J., The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (1995). Markey, J., A Journey Into the Red Eye: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath (1993). McCollough, F., ed., The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982). Meyering, S. L., Reference Guide to Sylvia Plath (1990). Newman, C., ed., The Art of Sylvia Plath: A Symposium (1970). Rose, J., The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (1996). Steiner, G., Language and Silence (1969). Stevenson, A., Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath (1989). Strangeways, A., Sylvia Plath: The Shaping of Shadows (1998). Tabor, S., Sylvia Plath, A Biography (1987). Wagner-Martin, L., Sylvia Plath: A Critical Heritage (1988, 1997). Wagner-Martin, L., The Bell Jar: A Novel of the Fifties (1992). Wurst, G., Voice and Vision: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath (1999). Reference works: Crowell’s Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry (1973). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). WA. Other references: Contemporary Literature (Winter 1993, 1996). Contemporary Review (1998). Criticism (1998). Hudson Review (Summer 1990). London Magazine (Feb. 1962). Mademoiselle (July 1975). Ms. (October 1975). NR (June 1994). New Yorker (1993, 1998). NYT (13 Feb. 1998). Raritan (Fall 1994). Southern Review (Summer 1973). Western Humanities Review (1997). —BARBARA A. CLARKE MOSSBERG, UPDATED NELSON RHODES
POLACCO, Patricia Born 11 July 1944, Lansing, Michigan Daughter of William F. and Mary Ellen Gaw Barber; married Enzo Mario Polacco, 1979; children: Traci, Steven Patricia Polacco writes and illustrates picture books for young children, drawing extensively from her family’s stories and her own life adventures. Ranging from her great-grandmother’s experiences as a newly arrived Russian immigrant to her personal exasperation with her older brother, Polacco’s stories are always accompanied by vivid, detailed pictures that capture characters’ expressions and gestures as well as ethnic decoration and patterns. Polacco was born in Lansing, Michigan, in 1944, and when she was three, her parents divorced. For a time, they lived close to each other and remained friends, but when Polacco was six, her mother took a teaching job in Florida. After three years, they moved once more to Oakland, California, where Polacco presently lives. For years she visited her father in Michigan during the summer months, riding horses and exploring in the woods. During a part of her childhood, both sets of grandparents were still living. As a child, Polacco had difficulty in school with math and reading, being diagnosed with dyslexia at fourteen. In compensation, she drew quite a bit, earning the praise of both her fellow
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students and teachers. She studied fine arts at the California College of Arts and Crafts and at Laney College, and obtained a Ph.D. in Greek and Russian iconography from the University of Melbourne in Australia. Subsequently, she did restoration and consulting work for museums. Polacco’s artwork remained among families and friends as she created greeting cards for special occasions. A friend who had expressed admiration for her art asked her to join in the local chapter of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. For a year, she drew appropriate pictures for the group and quickly developed an eagerness for producing work for children. In 1987 she gathered together her representative work in an 80-pound portfolio and headed for New York. After five days in which she had scheduled 16 appointments with publishers, Dodd Mead accepted her first book, Meteor! (1987) within a week. Not only that, but simultaneous submissions led her to contracts with Bantam, Simon & Schuster, and Putnam. Every book she has created has sold. Meteor! was based on the time a large meteor fell in Polacco’s paternal grandparents’ garden in Michigan. The unusual occurrence makes everyone in a small town feel special and accomplish tasks better. Polacco’s next book, Rechenka’s Eggs(1988), a fantasy about a goose that magically lays gorgeous Ukrainian decorated eggs, won the 1989 International Reading Association Best Picture Book award. Drawing upon her Ukrainian ancestors once more for The Keeping Quilt (1988), Polacco wrote about her great-grandmother as a child. The recent Russian immigrant turns to her clothes, the only things she owns from the time before she came to America, for comfort, and when she outgrows them, her mother creates a quilt that is handed down five generations. The Keeping Quilt won the Sidney Taylor Award. Babushka’s Doll (1990), a fantasy about a doll that comes to life to imitate a naughty child’s behavior in order to show her how annoying it is, and Chicken Sunday (1992), a story about a black family’s relationship to a little girl of Polacco’s background, both won the Commonwealth Club of California award for ages 10 and under. Chicken Sunday also won the Golden Kite award for illustration from the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. Mrs. Katz and Tush (1993), a story about an older Jewish woman, a young African-American boy, and the tailless cat that brings them together, won the Jane Addams Picture Book Award. In 1991 Polacco signed a ten-book contract with Putnam and won the Educators for Social Responsibility award. Since then, she has produced more than one book a year. Almost all of her books have received rave reviews that point out the imaginative plots and successful attempts at portraying characters from multicultural backgrounds achieving harmonious relationships. The warmth of family relationships across generations and the importance of traditions as Polacco portrays them is also praised. By the mid-1990s Polacco was veering toward more complex issues geared toward older readers. Her most ambitious book, Pink and Say (1994), presents the story of her paternal great-great-grandfather during the Civil War, in which he is
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rescued by a black Union soldier who is later executed by the Confederates. OTHER WORKS: Boat Ride with Lillian Two Blossom (1988). Casey at the Bat: A Ballad of the Republic Sung in the Year 1988 (adapted 1988). Uncle Vova’s Tree (1989). Just Plain Fancy (1990). Thunder Cake (1990). Appelemando’s Dreams (1991). Some Birthday! (1991). Picnic at Mudsock Meadow (1992). Babushka Baba Yaga (1992). The Bee Tree (1993). Firetalking (1994). My Rotten Redheaded Older Brother (1994). Tikvah Means Hope (1994). Babushka’s Mother Goose (1995). My Ol’ Man (1995). Aunt Chip and the Great Triple Creek Dam Affair (1996). I Can Hear the Sun: A Modern Myth (1996). The Trees of the Dancing Goats (1996). In Enzo’s Splendid Gardens (1997). Thank You, Mr. Falker (1998). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Children’s Literature Review (1996). SATA (1993). TCCW (1995) —ROSE SECREST
POLLACK, Rachel (Grace) Born Richard A. Pollack, 1945 Also wrote under: Richard A. Pollack Not much is known in print about Rachel Pollack’s personal life, but she is best known as a writer in the science fiction and fantasy genres. She has additionally written extensively in the fields of tarot, arcana, and the occult. Her first science fiction story, ‘‘Pandora’s Bust’’ was published in the British pulp magazine New Worlds in 1972 as by ‘‘Richard A. Pollack,’’ the legal name Pollack was born under. While living in the Netherlands from 1973 to 1990, Pollack underwent a gender transformation, becoming physically female and legally changing her name to Rachel Grace Pollack. All her subsequent stories have appeared under the latter name. Pollack’s first novel, Golden Vanity (1980), was a space-opera story about aliens running roughshod over the Earth while looking for a runaway female of their own species. Featuring Cecil B. DeMille’s ‘‘cast of thousands,’’ the book is difficult to follow but makes for an enjoyable read. Alqua Dream (1978) followed, a book, as science fiction critic John Clute noted, was ‘‘a rather flat drama of ontology set on an alien planet’’ in which ‘‘the human protagonist, faced with the obdurate Platonism of the inhabitants, must argue metaphysics with them in an attempt to suggest that the sensory world is sufficiently ‘real’ for them to sell him the rare mineral he needs. The background is voluminously drawn, but the narrative is sluggish.’’ Pollack finally made an impact on the literary criticism world with her third novel, Unquenchable Fire (1988), which received the Arthur C. Clarke award, given for the best science fiction novel published in England. Based around a reluctant hero who is
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the Virgin Mary of her world and destined to give birth to the one who will change everything, the narrative is still difficult to wade through, but Pollack’s alternate realities do prove to have some hilarious moments. Other Pollack stories, such as ‘‘The Protector’’ (1986), published in British magazine Interzone, depict similarly transformed universes. Pollack’s fourth novel was Temporary Agency (1994), in which ‘‘The Malignant One’’ and the narrator’s cousin run a temp agency in the same fantastic America as that of Unquenchable Fire. Fellow science fiction writer Orson Scott Card described Pollack’s writing in this book as ‘‘like a river in flood, resists the well-channeled ways, cutting its own channel through the fictional terrain.’’ Godmother Night: A Novel (1996), a collaboration with Gordon Van Gelder, long-time editor at St. Martin’s Press and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, followed. In yet another contemporary world-setting, two women named Laurie and Jaqe find themselves and each other, only to be separated by Mother Night, a small, elderly woman in extravagant clothes who is, literally, Death. She and her five red-haired, leather-clad bikers cruise through the lives of the lovers and their daughter, leaving behind a tale of heartbreak and humor, of loss and joy, of death and life. In addition to her fiction writing, Pollack’s interests range into the tarot and the occult, where she has penned additional works, including Salvador Dali’s Tarot (1985), Teach Yourself Fortune Telling: Palmistry, the Crystal Ball, Runes, Tea Leaves, the Tarot (1986), and Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom: A Book of Tarot: The Minor Arcana and Readings (1989). Her arcane interests led her to coedit with Caitlin Matthews an anthology of original stories called Tarot Tales (1989). In the anthology, each contributor used ‘‘oulipo’’—short for L’Ouvroir de Litterature Potentialle, translated roughly as ‘‘workshop of possible fictions’’— techniques to extract story ideas from a tarot pack. Oulipo is an extremely self-conscious, highly Modernist international literary movement founded in 1960 by French authors Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, inspired by the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussurre (1857-1913), and whose proponents have included writers, mathematicians, and fabulists such as Harry Matthews, Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, Ernest Vincent Wright, James Thurber, Thomas M. Disch, and John T. Sladek. Pollack wrote a nonfiction book with Cheryl Schwartz, The Journey Out: A Guide for and About Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Teens (1995), which gives practical advice on ‘‘coming out.’’ Some of her short work—anthologized in Jeffrey M. Elliot’s Kindred Spirits: An Anthology of Gay and Lesbian Science Fiction Stories (1984)—reflects her gender change, alternate lifestyle, and sexual world view. OTHER WORKS: Future Primitive (edited by K. S. Robinson, 1994). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Clute, J., and P. Nicholls, eds., The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993). Mallett, D. F., and R. Reginald, Reginald’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards: A Comprehensive Guide to the Awards and Their Winners, 2nd ed. (1991), 3rd
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ed. (1993). Reginald, R., Science Fiction & Fantasy Literature, 1975-1991: A Bibliography of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Fiction Books and Nonfiction Monographs (1992). —DARYL F. MALLETT
POLLARD, Josephine Born 1834, New York, New York; died 1892, New York, New York ‘‘A litterateur of New York City, whose work was mainly intended for juvenile readers,’’ Josephine Pollard was a prolific and inventive writer. Her juvenile books include original fairytales, verses, natural histories, Bible stories, biographies, and histories. Pollard also wrote several volumes of poetry, including Coeducation (1883), a rhymed tract promoting equal rights for women. Pollard’s most inventive contribution to the field of juvenile literature was a series of books consisting almost entirely of words of one syllable. The few polysyllabic words are divided into syllables to help the young reader. The series includes The History of the United States (1884), Our Hero, General U.S. Grant (1885), Bible Stories for Children (1899), and many others. Pollard uses simplified words, but she does not simplify her ideas or sacrifice accuracy and detail. Pollard’s rendition of the Sermon on the Mount, for example, loses none of the message of the biblical passage. Pollard’s poetry for adults, as exemplified by Vagrant Verses (1886), tends to be of the Edgar A. Guest school of philosophy and versification. ‘‘Don’t Take It to Heart,’’ a poem warning against nursing grudges, offers this insight: ‘‘There’s many a sorrow would vanish tomorrow, / Were we not unwilling to furnish the wings; / So, daily intruding, and quietly brooding, / It hatches out all sorts of horrible things.’’ ‘‘The Elder’s Talk’’ is a dialect poem contrasting the pious wisdom of Nancy, the old country wife, with the cold, ‘‘college l’arnt’’ theology of the parson. ‘‘A MotherBoy’’ is a paean to the youth who, despite his friends’ scorn, remains tied to ‘‘the strong cable of mother’s apron strings’’ for life. ‘‘A Commonplace Wooing’’ mocks the romantic and intellectual expectations of bluestocking maidens who want to be wooed with pages of ‘‘Emerson, Plato, Virgil and Cato.’’ Pollard’s model female here is ‘‘An Every-day Girl,’’ who is described as ‘‘womanly, gentle, and kind, the least little bit of a prude.’’ Coeducation, Pollard’s rhymed feminist tract, undercuts the conventional views of Vagrant Verses entirely. Divided into four chapters, the poem traces woman’s history as a helpmate and slave, describes her present condition as a toy, and looks forward to her future as an equal. In biblical times, men and women worked together as partners. Woman was a respected part of early society: ‘‘Her wit was keen, her judgment clear, /And no one talked of woman’s sphere.’’ But woman was too keen and clever, and so envious man enslaved her through brute strength.
In modern times man uses woman as a toy, not a slave. Compliant to his wishes, woman dresses in velvet and silk and passes her time idly. Consequently, when her husband dies, the toy-woman, ‘‘upon her own resources thrown,’’ cannot support herself. Woman’s future must lie in education and professional equality. Educated woman will have a career, and her husband will soon discover the cash benefit. The professional woman will have less time for her children, less leisure, and ‘‘an equal right to pay the bills.’’ She will cleverly hide any disappointments from man, however, and will strive to remain equal. Pollard’s primary talent lies in writing instructional and entertaining books for children. Her commercial poetry is rather trite. Coeducation, while it may be doggerel, raises interesting issues and predicts a future that has not yet fully arrived. OTHER WORKS: Wild Animals for Children (circa 1850). Lydia’s Duty (1869). The Open Door; or, Valera in Search of a Mission (1872). Gipsy in New York (1873). Gipsy’s Early Days (1873). Gipsy’s Travels (1874). Gipsy’s Adventures (1875). Gipsy’s Quest (1876). The Other Gipsy (1876). A Piece of Silver (1876). A Step, or a Mis-Step (1877). The Decorative Sisters, a Modern Ballad (1881). The Boston Tea Party (1882). The Burden Lifted (1882). Elfin Land (1882). Gellivor: A Christmas Legend of the North Land (1882). The Brave Little Tailor (1883). Good Manners: A Few Hints About Behavior (1883). Hours in Fairy Land (1883). Pantomime and Minstrel Scenes (1883). The Six Swans (1883). Snow White (1883). The Story of Bonnybelle (1883). Tales of the Fairy World (1883). Artistic Tableaux (1884). Songs of Bird Life (1885). Domestic Animals (1886). Large Birds (1886). Our Naval Heroes (1886). Pictures and Stories from Natural History (1886). Small Animals (1886). Small Birds (1886). Wild Animals (1886). Winter Sports (1886). Favorite Birds and What the Poets Sing of Them (1888). Flowers from Field and Woodland (1888). History of the Old Testament in Words of One Syllable (1888). Young Folk’s Bible in Words of Easy Reading (circa 1888). The Bible and Its Story (1889). Boys and Girls Name A, B, C (1889). History of the Battles of America in Words of One Syllable (1889). Plays and Games for Little Folks (1889). Fireside Fun (1890). Little Pig Series (1890). Pleasewell Series (1890). Singing Games (1890). Sports of All Sorts (1890). Two Little Tots on Their Way Through the Year (1890). The Wonderful Story of Jesus (1890). Young Folks’ Life of Jesus Christ (1891). The Life of George Washington (1893). The Boyhood of Jesus (1899). God Made the World (1899). The Good Samaritan and Other Bible Stories (1899). Ruth, a Bible Heroine, and Other Stories (1899). The Story of Jesus; Told in Pictures (1899). Sweet Stories of God (1899). The Children’s Bible Story Book (1925). Everyday Bible Stories (1926). A Child’s Life of Our Lord (1934). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Allibone, S. A., A Critical Dictionary of English Literature and American Authors Supplement (1891). —ZOHARA BOYD
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PORTER, Eleanor Hodgman
elderly gardener, bent with arthritis, to be glad he doesn’t have to stoop so far to do his weeding.
Born 1868, Littleton, New Hampshire; died 23 May 1920 Wrote under: Eleanor Stewart Daughter of Francis H. and Llewella Woolson Hodgman; married John L. Porter, 1892
Some critics claim Porter’s later writing was not as relentlessly cheerful as her earlier works, but evidence provided by the posthumously published Hustler Joe, and Other Stories (1970) indicates otherwise. In each of the stories a downbeat plot works itself miraculously into an upbeat ending. Hustler Joe, for instance, who shoots his father in the opening chapter, discovers in the closing chapter that the bullet didn’t kill him after all. When accused of being overly optimistic, Porter was quoted as saying, ‘‘I have never believed that we ought to deny discomfort and pain and evil. I have merely thought that it is far better to greet the unknown with a cheer.’’ That she did, and—despite her critics— there are readers of Pollyanna even today who are still cheering.
When Eleanor Hodgman Porter died, the headline of her brief obituary in the New York Times read simply: ‘‘Author of Pollyanna dies.’’ Porter had written four volumes of short stories and 14 novels, but it was the phenomenal success of Pollyanna that had made her famous. Porter dropped out of high school to lead a more robust outdoor life. Later she studied music at the New England Conservatory in Boston, going on to make public appearances as a singer and traveling with church choirs. In 1892 Porter married a businessman. Switching her profession from music to writing, Porter began to submit stories to magazines, at first with little success, but finally, with the publication of her novel Cross Currents (1907) the tide began to turn. Porter wrote a sequel in 1908 called The Turn of the Tide. An even more significant turning point was reached in 1913, when Pollyanna appeared, an event described by one commentator as ‘‘only less influential than the World War.’’ Pollyanna, that incredibly cheerful champion of the Glad Game, who could find in even the grimmest situation something to be glad about (if you break a leg, ‘‘be glad ’twasn’t two’’), stirred the hearts and hopes of people of all ages all over the world. After selling a million copies in this country, the book appeared in editions in France, Germany, Holland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Scotland, and Japan. Critics sang Pollyanna’s praises: ‘‘It is a wholesome, charming book, moral but not preachy,’’ said the popular Literary Digest. Even Bookman earnestly agreed: ‘‘If the Pollyanna books are read with the sympathetic comprehension they deserve, many a child’s life will be made happier. . .’’ With this end in view, Glad Clubs sprang up everywhere—and not just for children. One branch, ‘‘The Pollyanna Glad Kids,’’ was started by inmates of a penitentiary. Mary Pickford paid the then astronomical fee of $115,112 for the silent screen rights for Pollyanna. Although Porter won instant celebrity, she was not thereby admitted to the ranks of serious authors. A growing number of readers irked by the sentimental and simplistic outlook would join in Aunt Polly’s exasperated demand that Pollyanna ‘‘stop using that everlasting word. . . It’s ‘glad’—‘glad’— ‘glad’—from morning till night until I think I shall go wild.’’ In an early 1980s survey of girl’s fiction, the authors dismiss Pollyanna as hopelessly ‘‘puerile’’ and ‘‘intellectually debilitating,’’ her ‘‘imbecile cheerfulness’’ issuing from stupidity and an infuriating tactlessness, especially when she tells a chronic invalid to be glad other folks aren’t like her—‘‘all sick, you know’’—or when she tells the
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OTHER WORKS: Miss Billy (1911). The Story of Marco (1911). Miss Billy’s Decision (1912). Miss Billy Married (1914). Pollyanna Grows Up (1915). Just David (1916). The Road of Understanding (1917). Oh Money! Money! (1918). Dawn (1919). May-Marie (1919). Sister Sue (1921). The Tie that Binds: Tales of Love and Marriage (1924). Across the Years (1924). Money, Love, and Kate (1924). The Tangled Threads (1924).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cadogan, M., and P, Craig, You’re a Brick, Angela! A New Look at Girls’ Fiction from 1839-1975 (1976). Overton, G., The Women Who Make Our Novels (1918). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCA. Other references: Bookman (1914, 1915, 1916). Good Housekeeping (July 1947). PW (19 July 1941). Woman’s Home Companion (April 1920). —JACQUELINE BERKE
PORTER, Katherine Anne Born 15 May 1890, Indian Creek, Texas; died 18 September 1980, Silver Spring, Maryland Daughter of Harrison B. and Mary Jones Porter; married 1906; Eugene D. Pressly, 1933; Albert R. Erskine, Jr., 1938 Katherine Anne Porter was the fourth of five children, a descendant of pioneers. Her mother died as a young woman, and Porter was raised by her father and paternal grandmother. Although Porter is generally acknowledged to be a master stylist, she rarely earned her living directly through her writing. Instead, she supported herself through a variety of related activities: as a reporter, writer of screenplays in Hollywood, translator,
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hack writer, and most often, as a lecturer, writer-in-residence, and guest speaker. Porter has received a number of honorary degrees and an impressive range of prestigious literary awards, including Guggenheim fellowships in 1931 and 1938, Fulbright and Ford Foundation grants in the 1950s, an O. Henry Award in 1962, and the Pulitzer Prize in 1966 for her Collected Stories (1965).
‘‘Noon Wine’’ (Pale Horse, Pale Rider, 1939), Mr. Thompson affectionately yet cruelly pinches his wife Ellie, and we are introduced to those notions about himself, his intense, masculine pride, that will make Mr. Thompson capable of killing a man later in the story. ‘‘Noon Wine’’ is a study of sources of violence and self-betrayal in essentially good people.
Porter traveled extensively, lived often in Europe and Mexico, been married three times, and involved herself in political events. Yet these activities are only peripherally reflected in her stories. She makes a clear distinction between adventure, something you do to find an ‘‘illusion of being more alive than ordinarily,’’ and experience, which is ‘‘what really happens to you in the long run; the truth that finally overtakes you.’’ The latter is the subject of Porter’s prose. She delights in revealing through microcosmic events truths about human nature.
The disappointments that grow between people are evident in both men and women in Porter’s stories, but perhaps because her own awareness is based so firmly in feminine realities, Porter is especially effective in depicting the limitations in relationships as women experience them, or rather, the limiting relationships that she saw as the only ones allowed to women. In stores based around the experiences of Miranda (the character who seems most similar to Porter), Miranda’s grandmother (based on Porter’s grandmother), and others, Porter implies that for a woman the rejection of close and demanding relationships is virtually the only means of finding autonomy.
‘‘The Downward Path to Wisdom’’ (The Leaning Tower, and Other Stories, 1944) is a pivotal story in understanding the etiology of disillusionment in Porter’s work. The protagonist, a child named Stephen, is shuffled from adult to adult in an awkward and futile attempt to keep him unaware of his parents’ quarreling. Porter emphasizes Stephen’s genuineness by continually alluding to his sensual awareness of being warm, bare, embraced, sticky, scrubbed roughly, etc. In contrast, Porter shows us, through the overheard dialogue of the parents, that they experience him simply as a reminder of their growing antipathy. She deftly controls the emergence of Stephen’s final decision to set himself emotionally apart from these people who ‘‘love’’ him by juxtaposing the child’s motives with the adults’ harsh judgements of him. Stephen’s final rejection of them seems healthy, yet Porter manages to convey that the act of rejection forecasts Stephen’s own inability to love as an adult. Some of Porter’s best stories reflect the deterioration of relationships, especially of marriages, which are corrupted by the bitterness and anger accompanying dependence. Porter has said that one’s spouse is a ‘‘necessary enemy,’’ for whom we cannot help but feel both love and hate because we resent our need for him or her. Porter characterizes one such marriage in ‘‘Rope’’ (Flowering Judas, and Other Stories, 1930). The husband and wife quarrel over his purchase of some unneeded rope, and their discussion evolves into a destructive verbal battle about the entire relationship and their disappointments in one another. Porter conveys the tediously repetitive nature of these complaints by quoting them obliquely: ‘‘She had her notion of what had kept him in town. Considerably more than a notion, if he wanted to know. So, she was going to bring all that up again, was she? Well, she could just think what she pleased.’’ Porter’s use of this intriguing narrative technique shows us the depth of sarcasm, bitterness, and emotional stinginess underlying this marriage and belies the appearance of reconciliation at the end of the story. In Porter’s carefully crafted stories, narrative technique fuses with meaning in an almost perfect merging of form and content. Porter’s portraits of relationships ring true because she has a perfect eye for the tiny, telling domestic detail. Time and again, a single incident conveys the character of an entire relationship. In
In the three sections of ‘‘Old Mortality,’’ we see Miranda (raised with her sister by a likeable, average father and a strongwilled grandmother) withdraw successively further from the family myths which have comprised her whole understanding of reality as a young child. Miranda cannot reconcile what adults tell her about the beautiful, romantic, exciting, and perfect past (especially Aunt Amy, around whom an entire legend has been built) with the shabby remnants of the past she finds around her. At eighteen, Miranda realizes that the unequivocally negative memories of Cousin Eva, a poor defeated relative of Amy, are just as distorted as the romantic, tragic account the family has always given her and, drawing back from this massive collusion of lies, tells herself, in ‘‘her hopefulness, her ignorance,’’ that whatever else, she will live her life without illusions. Porter knows this is naive and that there are no easy answers. For all of Porter’s thoughtful characters, life involves introspection, disappointment, and moral dilemmas. If her characters (like her married couples) stay in their oppressive relationships, resentment eats away at them. If they break free, they are terribly alone. It is not surprising Porter projects onto her primitive characters—such as the eponymous Mexican in the story ‘‘María Concepción’’ (Flowering Judas) and the Spanish dancers in Ship of Fools (1962)—the very strengths which she believes introspective people cannot achieve: a passionate, unselfconscious, unquestioning spontaneity that carries with it no moral complications. Ship of Fools, Porter’s long-awaited novel, appeared in 1962. Porter was deeply shaken by the two world wars and by world events that for decades threatened the human race with catastrophe. She tells us much of her energy in those years was given to an attempt ‘‘to grasp the meaning of those threats, to trace them to their sources and to understand the logic of this majestic and terrible failure of the life of man in the Western world.’’ Porter’s allegorical novel became an exploration into the possible sources of human evil and particularly into the states of mind which could account for such horrors as the Holocaust.
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The story takes place on a German freighter-passenger ship traveling from Veracruz, Mexico, to Bremerhaven, Germany, in late summer of 1931, with a passenger list representing various nationalities. To the degree that the characters become stereotypes for particular countries, the novel seems a failure, for its ironies are heavyhanded and the notes of prophecy seem contrived, written as they were long after World War II. But on the level of individual human encounters, Porter’s portrayals are meticulous, vivid, and often engrossing. In depicting a range of individuals preoccupied with their narrow personal concerns, she shows acute perception of how we tend to blind ourselves to external realities and become culpable in evil events. Ultimately, the pleasures we find in reading Porter’s stories prove to be subtle ones: the frequent perfection of her choice of words and details and commentary on a character’s behavior; the telling scenes; the recognitions about human nature; the ironic narrative; and her understanding of the pleasures of childhood (always being crushed by somber adult realities), of the stories we tell ourselves to make our lives make sense, of the self-delusions, self-betrayals, and ultimate isolation of each of us. Her perceptions are acute, and her prose is often superb. Porter severely limited the number of stories she would allow to be published, yet her choices seem to have been wise ones, for they offer us a surprisingly consistent vitality in their revelation of human truths.
OTHER WORKS: Outline of Mexican Popular Arts and Crafts (1922). Katherine Anne Porter’s French Song Book (1933). Hacienda: A Story of Mexico (1934). Noon Wine (1937). The Itching Parrot (1942). The Old Order: Stories of the South (1944). The Days Before (1952). A Defense of Circe (1955). Holiday (1962). A Christmas Story (1967). The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter (1970).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Arima, H., The Theme of Isolation in Selected Short Fiction of Kate Chopin, Katherine Anne Porter, and Eudora Welty (dissertation 1998). Auchincloss, L., Pioneers and Caretakers: A Study of Nine American Women Writers (1965). Bayley, I., ed., Letters of Katherine Anne Porter (1990). Bennett, M., TwentyTwo Texas Women: Strong, Tough, and Independent (1996). Bloom, H., ed., American Women Fiction Writers, Volume Three 1900-1960 (1998). Bredeson, C., American Writers of the 20th Century (1996). Curry, K. C., The Art of a Genteel Rebel: The Craft of Katherine Anne Porter’s Fiction (dissertation 1996). DeMouy, J. K., Katherine Anne Porter’s Women (1983). Emmons, W. S., Katherine Anne Porter: The Regional Stories (1967). Gardner, J., The Conflicts of Life in the Works of Katherine Anne Porter (thesis 1994). Givner, J., Katherine Anne Porter: A Life (1982, 1991). Hardy, J. E., Katherine Anne Porter (1973). Hartley, L., and G. Core, eds., Katherine Anne Porter: A Critical Symposium (1969). Hendrick, G., Katherine Anne Porter (1965). Horn, T., To Grandmother’s House We Go: Modern Grandmother Archetypes in Works by Porter, Hurston, McCarthy, O’Connor, and Olsen (dissertation 1997). Kiernan, R. F., Katherine Anne
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Porter and Carson McCullers: A Reference Guide (1976). Krishnamurthi, M. G., Katherine Anne Porter: A Study (1971). Liberman, M. M., Katherine Anne Porter’s Fiction (1971). Magill, F. N., ed., Great Women Writers: The Lives and Works of 135 of the World’s Most Important Women Writers, From Antiquity to the Present (1994). Mooney, H. J., Jr., The Fiction and Criticism of Katherine Anne Porter (1962). Nance, W. L., Katherine Anne Porter and the Art of Rejection (1964). Nesbitt, A. S., ed., Short Story Criticism: Excerpts From Criticism of the Works of Short Fiction Writers (1999). Plimpton, G., ed., Women Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews (1998). Stout, J. P., Katherine Anne Porter: A Sense of the Times (1995). Unrue, D. H., ed., Critical Essays on Katherine Anne Porter (1997). Unrue, D. H., ed., This Strange Old World and Other Book Reviews by Katherine Anne Porter (1991). Waldrip, L., and S. A. Bauer, eds., A Bibliography of the Works of Katherine Anne Porter, and A Bibliography of the Criticism of the Works of Katherine Anne Porter (1969). Wescott, G., ‘‘Katherine Anne Porter, Personally,’’ in Images of Truth: Remembrances and Criticism (1962). West, R. B., Jr., Katherine Anne Porter (1963). Reference works: CA (1999). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: America (Nov. 1990). American Literature (1996). Book World (Aug. 1995). Literature and Medicine (Fall 1998). NYTBR (Apr. 1995). Southwest Review (Winter 1996). Twentieth Century Literature (1998). —GAIL MORTIMER
PORTER, Rose Born 6 December 1845, New York, New York; died 10 September 1906, New Haven, Connecticut Daughter of David and Rose Hardy Porter The author or editor of more than 70 books on religious themes, Rose Porter was descended from New England clergymen. Her father was a prosperous businessman and her mother an upper-class Englishwoman. Porter attended a New York City private school and spent time in England. After her parents’ deaths, she became a semi-invalid and lived alone in New Haven. Besides her 15 novels and her volumes of religious essays, Porter produced devotional exercises; anthologies of consolatory verse, such as Hope Songs (1885) and Comfort for the Mothers of Angels (1881); prayer books for the sick, such as In the Shadow of His Hand (1892); and collections of texts from literature and scripture arranged on calendars or diaries. Porter also edited selections from many poets. Her first success was Summer Driftwood for the Winter Fire (1870). Presented as the diary of a nineteen-year-old girl, the book
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records a summer’s travel, during which she falls in love and her lover dies. But most of the pages are occupied by the girl’s meditations about Ruskin, heaven, her dead mother, and the beauties of nature. At the end, she is consoled in her single life because she has found work helping orphans. Most of Porter’s novels are similar: calm, retrospective, meditative, and told without suspense or emotional tension. Porter seldom created a villain or even a character with whom the hero or heroine might have serious conflict. When she did attempt novels with more plot, Porter used the conventions of sentimental melodrama. In Foundations; or, Castles in the Air (1871), Alfred Merwin leaves his widowed mother in the country and goes off to be a city merchant’s clerk. He falls into temptation—stays home from church, goes to ‘‘places of amusement’’ (unspecified), and gambles—and the farm is mortgaged to pay his debts. Ultimately, his mother’s faith saves him; he prospers, gives to charity, returns to church, and marries his childhood sweetheart. The action is omitted; we do not see his debauchery or even his confession to his mother, but are told about both much later. The masochistic elements of victory through suffering are most clearly visible in Uplands and Lowlands (1872). After an idealized relationship with his mother, orphaned Paul Foster goes to Rome and paints a magnificent holy picture. Because he will do no crass commercial work, he starves to death. His genius, of course, is recognized as soon as he has died. The devotional books make Porter’s basically conservative theology explicit. Her God is not human and domesticated but other and unfathomable. Porter emphasizes faith rather than works. Most importantly, she extols weakness and submission and suffering, which subdue the individual will and open the mind to God, and which are also particularly suitable for women. In Life’s Everydayness (1893), Porter praises the daily annoyances and petty discouragements of the household because they enable one constantly to deny self and to exercise passivity and renunciation. Sympathy is woman’s special vocation; many days may be well spent doing nothing but attending to the interests of others. Porter also finds it important to fight discontent; a woman should daily count her blessings and be happy with the people and circumstances around her. Porter’s writing gave theological support to a conception of woman as domestic, virtuous, passive, weak, devoted to the trivial, inculcating morality by example, enforcing obedience by suffering, and utterly unfit for any sphere beyond house walls. Reviewers praised Porter’s novels for their purity; they were often included in series for young readers; and, to judge from the sheer number of titles, they must have had a fairly steady sale.
OTHER WORKS: Selected works: The Winter Fire (1874). The Years That Are Told (1875). Christmas Evergreens (1876). A Song and a Sigh (1877). In the Mist (1879). Charity, Sweet
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Charity (1880). Our Saints: A Family Story (1881). The Story of a Flower (1883). Foregleams of Immortality (1884). Honoria; or, The Gospel of a Life (1885). A Modern Saint Christopher (1887). Driftings from Mid-Ocean (1889). Looking Toward Sunrise (1890). Open Windows, a Heart-to-Heart Diary (1890). Saint Martin’s Summer; or, The Romance of the Cliff (1891). Women’s Thoughts for Women: A Calendar (1891). My Son’s Wife (1895). One of the Sweet Old Chapters (1896). The Pilgrim’s Staff (1897). A Daughter of Israel (1899). The Everlasting Harmony (1900).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: NCAB. A Woman of the Century (1893). Other references: Harper’s (Sept. 1870, June 1871). NYT (11 July 1870). —SALLY MITCHELL
PORTER, Sarah Born circa 1770s; died death date unknown Sarah Porter lived during the late 18th and probably the early 19th century. She was probably a resident of Plymouth, Massachusetts, and a member of either a Congregationalist or a Presbyterian church. Porter’s slender volume of published poetry, The Royal Penitent, in Three Parts, to Which Is Added David’s Lamentation Over Saul and Jonathan (1791), contains work of such quality and interest it seems probable she produced other works. This work reveals ambition and talent in its 352 lines, which deal with David’s guilt and repentance for his seduction of Bathsheba and betrayal of her husband, his loyal general, Uriah. Porter’s handling of this subject includes not only religious but also political and social themes relevant to contemporary interests of late-18thcentury Americans. The structure and content indicate at least a passing familiarity with Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel and the American poet Timothy Dwight’s epic, The Conquest of Canaan. Porter’s poem presents two major themes: the workings of divine providence and the necessity for morality in government. The poem particularly emphasizes the concept that a country is only as good (moral) as its leaders. A decadent ruling class subverts national morals. Porter’s was not a very veiled criticism of the contemporary political situation in the U.S. in the decade after the revolutionary war. During those years, a major complaint of those who remained staunch republicans was that the government and the nation as a whole were being subverted from the high ideals of the revolutionary era. This ‘‘subversion’’ was a result of an influx of new wealth, followed by a vulgar taste for luxury.
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Porter shows this type of moral decay through the example of King David as he remembers his humble beginnings, his rise to power, and his subsequent immoral behavior, the result of his lust for material possessions. Thus David’s downfall becomes a warning for Porter’s compatriots about their politics. Porter’s poetic ambitions appear also in her choice of style and form. She exhibits a thorough understanding of neoclassical poetic techniques and evidently possessed the training and ability to employ them with success. Porter produced a heroic poem in which characters of great personal and historical stature act against a background of national events as the supernatural and natural worlds mingle. The narrative alternates between descriptive passages and dialogue, producing an effective variety. Published along with the successful Royal Penitent is a short work, a paraphrase of David’s lament for Saul and Jonathan (2 Samuel 1:17). Taking full advantage of the substance of her biblical model, Porter uses the elegy to convey both religious and political themes. Using the Puritan concept of America as the new Israel, Porter draws an implied analogy between the dead Hebrew heroes and the dead American revolutionary heroes, stressing the recurrent theme of late-18th-century American literature—the necessity for national political unity in the face of anarchic and external incursions. Porter made important contributions to the broadening thematic materials in the poetry of American women. She enlarged the scope of women’s poetry to encompass current political and ideological interests through the device of the contemporaneously popular heroic verse form. —JACQUELINE HORNSTEIN
PORTER, Sylvia F(ield) Born 18 June 1913, Patchogue, New York; died 5 June 1991, Pound Ridge, New York Wrote under: Sylvia Porter, S. F. Porter Daughter of Louis and Rose Maisel Feldman; married Reed R. Porter, 1931 (divorced 1941); G. Summer Collins, 1943 (died 1977); James F. Fox, 1979; children: Cris, Summer Sylvia Field Porter was well known as a syndicated financial columnist, whose guides that helped middle-class Americans learn to save and invest their money became bestsellers in the 1970s and 1980s. Putting the complicated terminology and procedures of economics into plain language, Porter provided a rare service for those with no access to a personal financial adviser. Although the advice was necessarily superficial and not adjusted to an individual’s situation, Porter’s investment guides were valued as advice suitable for beginning investors. Porter was born in Patchogue, New York, the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Russia. When she was twelve, her father,
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a physician, died of a heart attack. In 1929 Porter switched her major from English and history at Hunter College to economics after her mother, a milliner, lost $30,000 invested in the stock market crash that triggered the Depression. Graduating magna cum laude in 1932, Porter then worked for a bond dealer for $15 a week and later worked at many different Wall Street firms, while also managing to take a few graduate classes at the New York School of Business Administration. Porter’s writing career began with occasional financial columns in the American Banker and the New York Post. In 1936 the Post appointed her financial editor and gave her a daily column, ‘‘S. F. Porter Says.’’ Originally, she used the byline S. F. Porter to conceal her gender. In 1939 she published her first book, How to Make Money in Government Bonds. When her second book, If War Comes to the American Home: How to Prepare for the Inevitable Adjustment, came out in 1942, its relative success caused the Post editors to run her photograph and change her byline to Sylvia Porter. Once the public learned she was female, she obtained a lecture circuit and got writing assignments in women’s magazines and general publications. The columns on bonds she had written for the American Banker led to her becoming editor of Reporting on Governments. . .Weekly Fixed Income Market Analysis in 1944. A weekly newsletter for banks, it covered interest-rate trends, fiscal policies, money markets, and investment strategy in the bond market. Porter’s column, ‘‘Your Money,’’ was first syndicated in 1947. She stayed with the Post until 1977, when she switched to the New York Daily News. From 1961 to 1978 she served on the Board of Editors of the World Book Encyclopedia Yearbook and wrote the annual economics survey article for the publication. As a contributing editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal she wrote the monthly column ‘‘Spending Your Money.’’ Porter continued writing columns and books over the next several decades, garnering numerous awards and over a dozen honorary doctorate degrees. In 1943 she won the National Headliner’s Club Medal for best financial and business reporting of 1942. The General Federation of Women’s Clubs awarded her a medallion in 1960 for outstanding achievement in the field of finance. In 1964 she received the Meritorious Public Service Certificate from the Internal Revenue Service for an outstanding contribution to the greater understanding of the federal tax laws. Porter’s popularity was confirmed in 1975, when Sylvia Porter’s Money Book: How to Earn It, Spend It, Invest It, Borrow It, and Use It to Better Your Life, a compendium of her syndicated newspaper columns, sold over 1,000,000 copies. Readers favored her ability not only to make economic jargon clear but also to write in a conversational, sometimes humorous, prose. The book provided advice on planning budgets, choosing work, purchasing, and making decisions about insurance, banking, housing, and credit. Some female critics, on the other hand, deplored its lack of understanding concerning divorced women’s small alimony and child support payments and its ignorance about women’s credit ratings. Porter was known, however, to criticize in her column
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government fiscal policies she considered to be unfair. Her column went on to be syndicated by Field Newspaper Syndicate in more than 400 newspapers that had a combined readership of over 40,000,000. Sylvia Porter’s Income Tax Guide, published annually, also proved popular. In 1984 Porter started a magazine, Sylvia Porter’s Personal Finance. At the time, it was the third largest periodical in the finance field, behind Time, Inc.’s Money and Kiplinger’s Changing Times. A stock market plunge in 1987 forced the magazine to fold, and in 1989 Kiplinger bought the list of 400,000 subscribers. On 5 June 1991 in Pound Ridge, New York, Porter died of complications from emphysema. Her legacy of providing simple economic advice to laypeople was a forerunner that many now imitate. Her name continues to appear on a wide number of financial advice guides well into the 1990s.
OTHER WORKS: The Nazi Chemical Trust in the United States (1942). How to Live within Your Income (with Jacob Kay Lasser, 1948). Money and You (1949). Managing Your Money (1953). How to Get More for Your Money (with Jacob Kay Lasser, 1961). Sylvia Porter’s New Money Book for the 1980s (1979). Sylvia Porter’s Your Own Money (1983). Sylvia Porter’s Love and Money (1986). Sylvia Porter’s Four Hundred and Forty-Two Tax Saving Tips (1988). Sylvia Porter’s A Home of Your Own (1989). Sylvia Porter’s Your Financial Security: Making Your Money Work at Every Stage of Your Life (1989). Sylvia Porter’s Your Finances in the 1990s (1990). Sylvia Porter’s Guide to Your Health Care: How You Can Have the Best Health Care for Less (1990). Sylvia Porter’s Planning Your Retirement (1991).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA 81-84 (1979). CA 134 (1992). Other references: CT (obituary, 7 June 1991). Los Angeles Times (obituary, 7 June 1991). NYT (obituary, 7 June 1991). Washington Post (obituary, 7 June 1991). —ROSE SECREST
debutante balls. After being divorced and then forced by economic stress to explore and expand upon her native talents, Post began her public life with interior decoration schemes. She wrote travelogues and a series of light novels of manners about Americans vacationing in Europe and associating with the Continental gentry. Post soon expanded her scope and wrote about American standards of manners, mores, and taste in manuals of etiquette and home decor. The original dean of modern American decorum, Post was the first in a line of inventive women writers of handbooks on etiquette and manners. She remains a key figure in setting the tone for civil behavior in a rapidly changing world of styles, relationships, and attitudes—a kaleidoscopic social scene of shifting patterns in class, money, taste, and mobility, intensified by the departure from 19th- and early 20th-century ‘‘laws’’ of social procedure, which had long been relied on as fixed and permanent. The need for more relaxed and flexible standards of behavior suited to the millions of upwardly mobile Americans after World War I made Post’s Etiquette: The Blue Book of Social Usage (1922) an immediate and long-lived success. Post’s name quickly became a household word for ‘‘proper’’ manners, even if in a new key. Ironically, the conventions of formality and civility now associated so firmly with her were heartily opposed in all Post’s analysis and advice, her most famous aphorism being, ‘‘Nothing is less important than which fork you use.’’ Post’s Blue Book was the most popular and influential book of etiquette by a woman of social standing since Mary Sherwood’s Manners and Social Usages (1884). Post’s easy readability and practical approach to the myriad problems of interpersonal relations posed by the unfamiliar contexts of changing times have made the Blue Book a perennial bestseller. In recent years, more progressive works by younger writers have supplanted the Blue Book, but Post’s emphasis on the spirit rather than the letter of the law of manners has made the Blue Book adaptable to change, assuring it a lasting place as a reference statement in the field. For example, in the 1940s, a supplementary edition was devised to deal with the special circumstances of wartime.
Born 3 October 1873, Baltimore, Maryland; died 25 September 1960, New York, New York Daughter of Bruce and Josephine Lee Price; married Edwin Post, 1892 (divorced)
The book’s success led to a newspaper column and a radio broadcast series, as well as many requests for Post’s endorsement of food, drink, and household products. The formulations Post established for diplomatic protocol were adopted by Washington offices as a uniform code, and The Personality of a House (1930), used as a text in courses about taste and decoration, is further evidence of her strong feeling for atmosphere and the quality of life. This feel for style informs such other works as Children Are People (1940).
Emily Post was a member of New York society, raised in the well-educated and proper atmosphere of Tuxedo Park. Her early career was prescribed by the conventions of upper-class leisure and manners: governesses, trips to Europe, private schooling, and
To Post, it was obvious that simplicity and grace are the fundamental precepts of manners, and that there is an urgent need to state this principle in detail, dramatizing its application in every conceivable setting and circumstance. Her writing ushered in a new era, which thought about etiquette not as a fixed system of
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gestures and words but as an everchanging rule of thumb, based on a much more open, democratic, and classless view of society with an active sense of mobility and impermanence. Post’s interpretation of etiquette as a ‘‘science of living’’ sets the terms of discussion later taken up and developed in the contemporary scene by a core of women social arbiters including Jean Kerr, Peg Bracken, Amy Vanderbilt, Abigail Van Buren, Ann Landers, and then a new generation including Martha Stewart and Sylvia.
OTHER WORKS: The Flight of a Moth (1904). Purple and Fine Linen (1906). Woven in the Tapestry (1908). The Title Market (1909). The Eagle’s Feather (1910). By Motor to the Golden Gate (1915). Parade (1925). How to Behave Though a Debutante (1928). Emily Post Institute Cook Book (with E. M. Post, Jr., 1949). Motor Manners (1950). Despite her death in 1960, a series of ‘‘Emily Post’’ titles continues to this day, including: Emily Post’s Complete Book of Wedding Etiquette (revised edition, 1991), Emily Post on Second Weddings (1991), Emily Post on Guests and Hosts (1994), Emily Post on Entertaining (1994), Emily Post on Etiquette (1995), Emily Post’s Guide to Business Etiquette (audiocassette, (1997), Emily Post’s Etiquette (16th edition, 1997), Emily Post’s Weddings (audiocassette, 1999), Emily Post’s Wedding Planner (1999).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CB (1941). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: AH (April 1977). NYT (27 Sept. 1960). —MARGARET J. KING
POWELL, Dawn Born 28 November 1897, Mount Gilead, Ohio; died 16 November 1965, New York, New York Daughter of Roy K. and Hattie Sherman Powell; married Joseph R. Gousha, 1920; children: Joseph
novels won neither huge popularity nor much serious critical attention. After her death, they fell into obscurity. Interest in Powell was revived in 1987, when Gore Vidal wrote an essay about her in the New York Review of Books. Vidal, who had known Powell, sketched in her life: her mother’s early death; her marriage and the birth of her brain-damaged only son; her playwriting ambitions and failure; her social life, which figures in Edmund Wilson’s The Thirties. But mainly he focused on the fiction of this forgotten writer whom he called ‘‘our best comic novelist,’’ discussing both her Ohio novels and the New York works in which, he felt, ‘‘she came into her own.’’ Five of Powell’s New York novels were reissued within a few years after Vidal’s essay: Angels on Toast (1940, revised as A Man’s Affair, 1956, 1989), The Locusts Have No King (1948, 1990), The Wicked Pavilion (1954, 1989), The Golden Spur (1962, 1989), and A Time to Be Born (1942, 1991). Edmund Wilson, writing in the New Yorker in 1962, remarked that women readers might ‘‘find no comfort in identifying’’ with Powell’s female characters who, he said, ‘‘are likely to be as sordid as the men.’’ Powell herself suggested her critical obscurity might be the result of her satire of the middle class. ‘‘It is considered jolly and good-humored to point out the oddities of the poor or of the rich. . . .I go outside the rules with my stuff because I can’t help believing that the middle class is funny, too.’’ As Vidal comments, neither reviewers nor readers knew quite how to take Powell’s work. She was ‘‘that unthinkable monster, a witty woman who felt no obligation to make a single, much less a final down payment on Love or the Family.’’ Americans have ‘‘never been able to deal with wit,’’ Vidal notes, citing a reviewer who complained that Powell viewed ‘‘the antics of humanity with too surgical a calm’’ and lacked a ‘‘sense of outrage.’’ Wit is certainly at the heart of Powell’s novels, which are filled with astute observations rather than either outrage or sentimental comfort. In writing about lovers and spouses, insiders, outsiders, and eccentrics, Midwesterners at home or in the big city, Powell does not make life or people out to be any better than they are. Her great talent was for evoking so precisely what—in all their comicality and sadness—they are.
Most of Powell’s early fiction is set in Ohio. Her later novels, which are her best, are witty satires set in a fast-paced, boozy New York world inhabited by artists, writers, and businessmen, by people out ‘‘to Live,’’ and, above all, by provincial Midwesterners dealing with Manhattan.
Caught up in duplicity and self-deception, messy love affairs or miserable marriages, Powell’s characters do not easily escape their predicaments—and not because she has set them up, Powell is too fine a satirist for that. As she once said, ‘‘My characters are not slaves to an author’s propaganda. I give them their heads. They furnish their own nooses.’’ Permeated as they are with their setting, Powell’s New York novels chronicle the city over decades. The Locusts Have No King conveys a postwar culture run amok. In her last novel, The Golden Spur, Powell playfully links past and present, Greenwich Village of the late 1920s and the 1950s, through the story of a young man from Ohio who believes he was illegitimately conceived in Manhattan and arrives there in 1956, seeking his true father.
Although in her lifetime Powell had a following that included Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and Edmund Wilson, her
For all their urbane smartness, Powell’s novels are extraordinarily intelligent; and for all their hilarity, as Wilson remarked,
Dawn Powell grew up in Ohio, received her B.A. from Lake Erie College in 1918, and then moved to New York City. She made her home in Greenwich Village, did various kinds of commercial writing to earn a living, and published some stories, a few plays, and the 15 novels that were her major work.
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they are ‘‘more than merely funny.’’ Filled with ‘‘psychological insights that are at once sympathetic and cynical,’’ they give us stories that are poignantly true.
than 20 books, including one volume of poems, Sugar Plums (1877). Many of Pratt’s best stories for young children, such as The Little Cave Dwellers (1901), were episodic tales based on the adventures of her son and his friends.
OTHER WORKS: Whither (1925). She Walks in Beauty (1928). The Bride’s House (1929). Dance Night (1930). The Tenth Moon (1932). Big Night (play, 1933). Jig Saw, a Comedy (play, 1934). The Story of a Country Boy (1934). Turn, Magic Wheel (1936). The Happy Island (1938). Lady Across (play, 1941). My Home Is Far Away (1944). Sunday, Monday, and Always (short stories, 1952). A Cage for Lovers (1957).
Pratt’s greatest virtue as a writer is that her heroes and heroines are interesting, though idealized, mixtures of strengths and weaknesses. Lois Gladstone of Mrs. Hurd’s Niece (1884), a novel for teenage girls, is an orphan; and ‘‘though quite a superior girl in many respects, she is unsophisticated in the ways of the great noisy selfish world. In some respects, she is not a modern girl at all.’’ Luckily, Lois also has spirit and temper enough to resent mistreatment.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bullis, J. A., Wisely Armed: The Psychology of Self and Satire in the Novels of Dawn Powell, Mary McCarthy, and Muriel Spark (dissertation, 1995). Pett, J. F., Dawn Powell: Her Life and Her Fiction (1982). Van Gelder, R., Writers and Writing (interview, 1946). Vidal, G., ‘‘Dawn Powell: The American Writer,’’ in At Home: Gore Vidal, Essays 1982-1988 (1988). Warfel, Harry R., American Novelists of Today (1951). Reference works: CA (1969). FC (1990). Other references: Belles Lettres (Fall 1990). LJ (1 May 1990, 15 April 1991). LATBR (25 March 1990). New Yorker (17 Nov. 1962). NYT (16 Nov. 1965, obituary). NYTBR (1 April 1990). Vanity Fair (Feb. 1990). VVLS (April 1990, June 1990). WPBW (18 March 1990). WRB (July 1990).
Despite the strengths of characterization, Mrs. Hurd’s Niece is marred by two common faults of the era: a tendency to melodrama and a compulsion to have very young characters speak baby talk. The melodramatic tendencies generally surface in elucidations of theme: ‘‘Lois feels no longer quite alone. Near her is a member of the great Household of Faith to which she belongs. As he comes down past her door, she impulsively steps out.’’ The baby talk, however, presents a more serious barrier to readability.
—GAIL POOL
PRATT, Ella Farman Born Eliza Anna Farman, 1 November 1837, Augusta, New York; died 22 May 1907, Warner, New Hampshire Also wrote under: Ella Farman, Dorothea Alice Shepherd Daughter of Tural T. and Hannah Burleson Farman; married Charles S. Pratt, 1887 Daughter of a Methodist minister, Ella Farman Pratt was educated in private schools. From her early years Pratt wrote for her own enjoyment, though she did not begin to publish in periodicals until about 1870. Her first books, Anna Maylie and Grandma Crosby’s Household, appeared in 1873. Like Mary Mapes Dodge, editor of St. Nicholas magazine, Pratt counted herself as one of the ‘‘new school’’ of writers who wished to change the balance between entertainment and instruction in children’s literature. However, when Pratt was chosen to edit Lothrop and Co.’s Wide Awake, a competitor to St. Nicholas, her statement of editorial policy showed the didactic still had a strong hold: ‘‘Stories, poems and sketches can be instructive and elevating, high in sentiment and pure in tone without being as solid as a sermon or as dull as ditchwater.’’ With her husband, Pratt edited Wide Awake from 1875 to 1892, when the magazine merged with St. Nicholas. The couple also edited several other juvenile periodicals, including Babyland, Little Men and Women, and Little Folks. Pratt also wrote more
A critic for the New Century wrote of Pratt that she ‘‘has the very desirable knack of imparting valuable ideas under the guise of a pleasing story’’; but, for the contemporary reader, Pratt’s work is chiefly interesting for what it reveals of the values and attitudes that an author and editor of widely read juvenile literature of the 19th century wished to inculcate in her readers. OTHER WORKS: A Little Woman (1873). A Girl’s Money (1874). A White Hand (1874). The Cooking Club of Tu-Whit Hollow (1876). The Doll Doctor, and Other Stories (1877). Good-for-Nothing Polly (1877). Lill’s Travels (with E. Towne, 1877). Little Miss Mischief and Her Happy Thoughts (1878). Prue’s Pocket Book (1878). How Two Girls Tried Farming (1879). The Home Primer (1882). Bo-Peep’s Stocking (1883). A Dozen Darlings and Their Doings (1898). The Play Lady (1900). Chicken Little (1903). The Little Owls at Red Gates (1903). Dear Little Sheila (1905). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: DAB. Other references: Wide Awake (Sept. 1881, Sept. 1892). —KATHARYN F. CRABBE
PRENTISS, Elizabeth Payson Born 26 October 1818, Portland, Maine; died 13 August 1878, Dorset, Vermont Daughter of Edward and Ann Shipman Payson; married George L. Prentiss, 1845; children: six Elizabeth Payson Prentiss was the fifth of eight children of a Congregational minister; both her theology and piety were deeply
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influenced by her father. Sickly and intense even as a child, Prentiss professed her faith in 1831 and joined the Bleecker Street Presbyterian Church in New York City. That same year her family returned to Portland, and Prentiss opened a school there in 1838. From 1840 to 1843, Prentiss taught in Richmond, Virginia. She married a recently ordained Congregational minister, and they moved first to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where they had two children, and later to New York City, where four more children were born. Prentiss began her writing career with the publication of children’s books. In Little Susy’s Six Birthdays (1853), Little Susy’s Six Teachers (1856), and Little Susy’s Little Servants (1856), Prentiss teaches children by example and allegory. Her use of realistic accounts of children’s high jinks and trials set a new trend in juvenile literature, and the Suzy books were printed in numerous domestic and foreign editions for the remainder of the century. The Flower of the Family (1853) was written to show girls that ‘‘trivial home duty,’’ when performed in the fear of God and love for Christ, leads ‘‘onward and upward through present selfdenial, to the highest usefulness, peace and joy.’’ Similar themes mark Prentiss’ adult fiction, including Stepping Heavenward (1869). In this semiautobiographical spiritual manual, the protagonist is Katherine Mortimer, who marries Dr. Ernest Elliott and has six children. Katy is spurred to spiritual growth by such misfortunes as the insensitivity of her husband, the death of a child, the neverending drudgery of housewifery, and, finally, her own terminal seven-year illness. For Prentiss, the path to Christian perfection—a very popular quest of the day—was through suffering endured and sorrow accepted. In all her novels the protagonists finally reach Christian maturity after their faith has been deepened, their spirituality refined by broken engagements, children’s sickness and death, social alienation, unjust accusations, or the nearly fatal illness of a spouse. As her husband and biographer writes, ‘‘she came to regard suffering, when sanctified by the word of God and by prayer, as the King’s highway to Christian perfection.’’ Although Prentiss’ books did not gain literary acclaim, they were a significant contribution to the ‘‘higher life’’ movement of the day. Prentiss’ most enduring contribution was her poem ‘‘More Love to Thee, O Christ,’’ still found in most hymnals. OTHER WORKS: Henry and Bessie (1855). Peterchen and Gretchen, Tales of Early Childhood (translated by Prentiss, 1860). The Little Preacher (1867). Fred, and Maria, and Me (1868). Little Threads (1868). Aunt Jane’s Hero (1871). Religious Poems; or, Golden Hours (1873-1874). Urbane and His Friends (1874). The Home at Greylock (1876). Pemaquid (1877). Avis Benson (1879). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Douglas, A., The Feminization of American Culture (1977). Prentiss, G. L., The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss (1882). Reference works: AA. DAB. NAW (1971). NCAB. —NANCY A. HARDESTY
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PRESTON, Harriet Waters Born 6 August 1836, Danvers, Massachusetts; died 14 May 1911, Cambridge, Massachusetts Daughter of Samuel and Lydia Proctor Preston Harriet Waters Preston received her education at home and later, during a prolonged residence in Europe, became an accomplished linguist. Her final years were spent in the New England area. Preston contributed reviews and critical articles to magazines such as the Atlantic Monthly, attempted several experimental fictions, and became a recognized scholar through her many excellent translations of Provençal literature and other subjects. Although her five novels about New England life and customs have been dismissed as negligible, as a whole they are competent fictions combining Preston’s intellectual interests with a type of regionalism somewhat reminiscent, at times, of Sarah Orne Jewett’s fictions. Aspendale (1871) and Love in the Nineteenth Century: A Fragment (1873) might be called ‘‘essay-novels.’’ Aspendale illustrates Preston’s ideas on friendship between two women, and Love in the Nineteenth Century presents Preston’s commonsensical program for establishing a workable love relationship. Liberally interspersed throughout these two novels are Preston’s astute critical evaluations of numerous authors and her ideas on national types, tradition, ‘‘modern’’ music, marriage, and feminism. The second novel also includes a long discussion on the deficiencies of male writers’ fictional portraits of women and a prediction that when women writers finally ‘‘dare’’ to speak their minds freely, a ‘‘new order of things in fiction’’ will result. Much more conventional in plot and character development are Preston’s later novels of manners. Is That All? (1876), a study of smalltown New England courtship and social rivalry, was one of the earlier selections published anonymously in the Robert Brothers’ ‘‘No Name Series,’’ an innovative publishing project designed to allow readers to judge fiction solely on its intrinsic merits rather than on an author’s established reputation. Probably her best novel, although somewhat superficial in some respects, Is That All? seriously strives to develop a new kind of heroine—the older society matron as a viable, admirable type. In The Guardians (1888), written with her niece Louise Preston Dodge, Preston tried to bring a new, sensible realism to the well-worn genre of the 19th-century women’s novel. Using the conventional plot based on the erring ways of the orphaned heroine, Preston seriously analyzes the deficiencies in the education of young women. She also explores the character-building effects of duty on the handsome but weak New England hero who must assume the responsibility of guardianship for the two orphaned sisters, undergo the horrors of the Civil War, and finally give up his claim on the affections of his grownup ward.
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Preston’s highly regarded work as a translator and editor reflects her interest in the lives and writings of famous women. She made notable translations of Sainte-Beuve’s Portraits of Celebrated Women (1868), The Writings of Madame Swetchine (edited by Count de Falloux, 1870), and Memoirs of Madame Desbordes-Valmore (edited by Sainte-Beuve, 1872); and she coedited The Complete Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1900). Preston’s scholarly reputation was ensured with her translations of Provençal literature, a subject she also wrote about in Charles Dudley Warner’s Library of the World’s Best Literature (1897). She also translated and wrote critical articles on Roman life and writers. The recognition Preston earned as a translator-critic has not been accorded to her novels. However, Preston’s minor but quietly realistic fictions reveal a technical competence as well as some interesting experiments with and ideas about genre, women’s roles and images, and New England life.
OTHER WORKS: Mireio: A Provençal Poem by F. Mistral (translated by Preston, 1872). Sea and Shore: A Collection of Poems (edited by Preston, with M. Le Baron Goddard, 1874). Troubadours and Trouveres: New and Old (translated by Preston, 1876). Biography of Alfred de Musset by P. de Musset (translated by Preston, 1877). The Georgics of Virgil (translated by Preston, 1881). A Year in Eden (1887). The Private Life of the Romans (with L. Preston Dodge, 1893).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Preston, C., Descendants of Roger Preston of Ipswich and Salem Village (1931). Reference works: DAB. Other references: Boston Transcript (15 May 1911). —KATHLEEN L. NICHOLS
PRESTON, Margaret Junkin Born 19 May 1820, Milton, Pennsylvania; died 28 March 1897, Baltimore, Maryland Daughter of George and Julia Miller Junkin; married John T. L. Preston, 1857; children: two sons (and seven stepchildren) Margaret Junkin Preston’s father, a Presbyterian minister and educator, headed several schools before coming in 1848 to Washington College in Lexington, Virginia, where Preston lived until 1892. Preston received a rigorous classical and biblical education overseen by her father at home. The deaths of a brother, a sister (Stonewall Jackson’s first wife), and Preston’s mother saddened the 1850s. In 1857 Preston married a Virginia Military Institute professor nine years her senior and a widower with seven children. She bore two sons.
Excerpts from Preston’s letters and journals published in Elizabeth Preston Allen’s laudatory but sometimes inaccurate Life and Letters of Margaret Junkin Preston (1903) reflect Preston’s reading taste, which while eclectic was conservative. Nevertheless, Preston was a ‘‘woman of letters,’’ numbering several important writers among a host of correspondents. Preston’s prose and poetry contain allusions that establish her knowledge of numerous works, writers, artists, paintings—American, English, and Continental. Known primarily as a poet, Preston was prolific, publishing widely in newspapers and journals and bringing out six books of collected verse. The abundant output may account in part for the general mediocrity of Preston’s poetry. She herself frequently commented on the ‘‘excessive rapidity’’ with which she turned out a poem—‘‘only a morning’s work.’’ Responsive to requests for occasional verse, Preston celebrated weddings, births, deaths, and agricultural fairs. Occasionally a poem enjoyed considerable popularity as did Beechenbrook (1865). Exonerating the South, Preston weaves a tale of brave suffering and death. Biblical imagery occurs frequently, classical allusions abound, and sentimental detail characterizes the lines. Yet Preston uses a considerable number of verse patterns, from an eight-line stanza to tercets, providing variety and displaying some ingenuity. Dedicated to ‘‘every Southern woman widowed by the war’’ and centered on love, duty, and sacrifice for family and state, the poem was read widely. In Silverwood (1856), a semiautobiographical novel, the protagonist Edith, shackled by genteel poverty, feels hampered by the restraints society imposes. Edith is Preston herself, who noted in letters, journal entries, and her published work the conflict of being a mother, wife, and artist, of dividing time between the kitchen and the writing table. Whatever its slight virtues (the death scenes are moving and drawn from Preston’s own experience, the countryside is convincingly described, and the suffering is real), Silverwood must be placed with its countless companions, the domestic-sentimental novels of the 1850s and 1860s—those trite, contrived, formula-ridden books. Incapable of producing fiction of the first order, Preston continued the nostalgic memories of the South’s triumphs and trials while other American writers moved into the complex and realistic concerns of the 20th century. What redeems Aunt Dorothy: An Old Virginia Plantation Story (1890) from banality are comic scenes, the somewhat ambitious structure, and the mixture of black dialect with artificial and formal white speech. Burdened with a large family, household duties, ill health, and requests from aspiring writers, Preston could never devote her full energy to her literary abilities, but she was sincere and displayed an occasional spark of talent.
OTHER WORKS: The Young Ruler’s Question (1869). Old Songs and New (1870). Cartoons (1875). Centennial Poem (1885). A
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Handful of Monographs (1886). For Love’s Sake (1886). Colonial Ballads, Sonnets, and Other Verse (1887). Chimes for Church Children (1889). Semi-Centennial Ode (1889). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Allen, E. P., Life and Letters of Margaret Junkin Preston (1903). Reference works: CAL. DAB. NAW (1971). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Commonwealth (1950). —ELIZABETH EVANS
PRINCE, Nancy Gardner Born 15 September 1799, Newburyport, Massachusetts; died after 1856 Daughter of Thomas Gardner and his wife (daughter of Tobias Warton); married Nero Prince, 1824 Nancy Gardner Prince was born of free parents of African and Native American descent. Called ‘‘a colored woman of prominence in Boston’’ by a contemporary, she was a member of the Anti-Slavery Society in Boston, a missionary, a reformer, and, during her marriage that took her to Russia for years, a businesswoman and a world traveler. Narrative of the Life and Travels of Mrs. Prince, her only published work, is the first African American woman’s narrative to combine the traditions of the spiritual autobiography, the slave narrative, and the travel narrative. Prince used all three forms to validate her identity as a free black woman and also to extend the conventions of these forms. Her work was first published in 1850 (a portion of it appeared in 1841) and had two more editions. Written primarily ‘‘to obtain the means to supply my necessities,’’ as Prince noted in her 1856 preface, the narrative tells of a childhood full of hardship and of overwhelming responsibilities. From the age of thirteen, Prince, along with her brother, George, were the main support of her family. After a series of exploitive domestic service jobs and years of ‘‘anxiety and toil,’’ she went in 1822 ‘‘to learn a trade’’ in Boston, but she met and married Nero Prince, a widower of standing in the New England black community and a sailor who had served the Russian czar as a footman for 12 years. They left for St. Petersburg in 1824. Although the first part of Prince’s narrative reads more as a spiritual autobiography, framed in the preface with an invocation to ‘‘divine aid,’’ her account of her life in Russia becomes a travel narrative, including vivid observations on the customs and events of czarist Russia and sketches of members of the court of Emperor Alexander and Empress Elizabeth. While in Russia, Prince was able to educate herself and to learn several languages, and she was successful in starting a business, making fashionable children’s clothes. She had to return to Boston in 1833 because of ill health. In the next phase of her life, Prince became active in the abolitionist movement, later meeting the Quaker abolitionist
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Lucretia Mott in Philadelphia. After an unsuccessful attempt due to lack of funds to start a home for orphans in Boston, Prince, now a widow, was persuaded by the pastor of the Free Will Baptist Church to go to Jamaica as a missionary to teach the newly freed native population. Her account of her missionary life from 1840 to 1843 combines a description of the chaos of postslavery days in Jamaica with a short travelogue on the geography and history of the island. The story of her hazardous final journey home is in the tradition of the slave narrative as she relates her own experiences with racism to the evils of slavery in America. During this one-year journey from Kingston to Boston, the unscrupulous captain detoured his ship to Key West and, after a storm disabled the ship, abandoned Prince in New Orleans without returning her passage money. Afraid to leave the ship in the Southern ports for fear that she might be seized as a slave, she was confronted constantly with images of her own oppressed people. Finally boarding another ship, she arrived in New York penniless. She stayed there for months trying to pay her debts and recover her belongings before she could return to Boston. Although Prince does not tell much more about her life after her return, an eyewitness account confirms that she remained an activist and in 1847 helped to save a fellow African American from a slaveholder. Like other women in the slave narrative tradition, she tells about her trials obliquely, stating that she shared ‘‘in common the disadvantages and stigma that is heaped upon us, in this our professed Christian land.’’ Her closing passages return to the traditional spiritual autobiography, citing her own suffering and the fearful ‘‘world’s pilgrimage’’ as purification for the life to come. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Braxton, J. M., Black Women Writing Autobiography (1989). Carby, H. V., Reconstructing Womanhood (1987). Shockley, A., Afro-American Women Writers (1988). Sterling, D., ed., We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (1984). Reference works: FC (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —MARY GRIMLEY MASON
PROSE, Francine Born 1 April 1947, Brooklyn, New York Daughter of Philip and Jessie Rubin Prose; married Howard Michels, 1976; children: two sons Novelist and short story writer Francine Prose received her B.A. in English from Radcliffe College in 1968 and a master’s degree in English from Harvard University in 1969. Since then she has maintained an academic career, teaching creative writing at a number of colleges and universities, including Harvard, Sarah Lawrence, the University of Utah, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In addition to
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writing fiction, Prose has published ‘‘profiles,’’ travel essays, short pieces, and reviews in a variety of literary journals, including the New York Times Book Review, Mademoiselle, the New York Times Magazine, and Gentleman’s Quarterly. She has also cotranslated two works of fiction by Ida Fink, the Polish-born Israeli Holocaust writer (A Scrap of Time and Other Stories, cotranslated with Madeleine Levine, 1988; and The Journey, cotranslated with Johanna Weschler, 1992). Prose’s first novel, Judah the Pious (1973), which she began during an extended visit to Bombay in 1971, was published when she was twenty-five years old. Prose received the Jewish Book Council Award for this novel, a mythical Hasidic tale set in a legendary Poland of the past. The story, likened to Chaucer’s ‘‘The Pardoner’s Tale,’’ and Isak Dinesen’s ‘‘Seven Gothic Tales,’’ revolves around Rabbi Eliezer of Rimanov’s appeals to the king for religious tolerance for Jews in Poland. His appeal is granted, but only as a result of a wager won by telling the tale of another legendary figure, Judah ben Simon, and the magical stories surrounding him. Steeped in allegory, in Hasidic oral legend and miraculous tales of wonder, this first novel situates Prose in a long tradition of Jewish storytelling, well since scripture, which shapes and defines much of the writing of American Jews into the 20th century. Judah the Pious thus sets the stage for the kind of mythic and magical fantasy and storytelling style characterizing Prose’s fiction written during the decade of the 1970s. During this distinct literary period, her fiction is marked by a preoccupation with fantasy, with mystery and miraculous occurrences, with remote and exotic settings, and with a legendarysince-distant past. Although this period of fantasy arguably defines Prose’s early writing—(other works in this period include the novel The Glorious Ones, 1974, about a wandering troupe of 16th-century commedia dell’arte players; Marie Laveau, 1977, in which prophetic dreams, magical spells, and curative powers surround the life of a 19th-century New Orleans mulatto woman; and Animal Magnetism, 1978, a fantastical novel of hypnosis and imaginary medical practices set in 19th-century New England)—her preoccupation with the supernatural, with the stuff of miracles and imaginary desire, inform, to one extent or another, the entire corpus of her fiction. In, for example, the deftly crafted short story ‘‘Electricity’’ (in Women and Children First, 1988), Prose weaves an extraordinary story of a miraculous occurrence throughout an ordinary story of a divorced young woman’s return with her young child to her parents’ home in Brooklyn. In this story, marked by the very real difficulties for American women of maintaining marriages, raising children, and defining their role out of gender-determined guidelines in the rapidly changing patterns of the end of the 20th century, Prose introduces a miracle that changes her protagonist’s vision of herself and of her place in the world. The protagonist, Anita, returns home defeated and embarrassed by her husband’s desertion, to find that her father, who in her childhood was always a nonobservant Jew, has become a Hasid, a member of a mystical Jewish sect that believes in the miraculous powers of the rebbe, the teacher and leader of the Hasidic movement. To Anita’s bewildered and unnerved surprise, her father—who, in the midst
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of her own marital upheavals, her sister’s feminism, and her mother’s outraged objections, attends a Hasidic shul—will not travel on the Sabbath, follows rigid Jewish law in all its specificity, and dances Hasidic dances of celebration in their basement. In an attempt to explain his ‘‘conversion,’’ Anita’s father tells her a story of his own rescue from some thugs on the subway by the miraculous powers of the rebbe, who, through the power of belief, can make lights blink, a universal message of help. For Prose, the ordinary is always imbued with the fantastical, the stuff of everyday life an occasion for stories. Many of Prose’s stories have been published in literary journals and magazines, including Redbook, Antaeus, TriQuarterly, North American Review, Commentary, Antioch Review, and Yale Review, and have been anthologized in collections such as Gates to the New City: A Treasury of Modern Jewish Tales, edited by Howard Schwartz (1983), and America and I: Short Stories by American Jewish Women Writers, edited by Joyce Antler (1990).
OTHER WORKS: Household Saints (1981). Hungry Hearts (1983). Bigfoot Dreams (1986). Primitive People (1992). The Peaceable Kingdom (1993). The Angel’s Mistake: Stories of Chelm (1997). You Never Know: A Legend of the Lamed-Vavniks (1998).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Pearlman, M., ed., Inter/View: Talks with America’s Writing Women (1990). Reference works: CA (1979). CANR (1991). Jewish American Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical and Critical Sourcebook (1994). Other references: Hudson Review (Summer 1973, Summer 1974). NYTBR (25 Feb. 1973, 12 July 1981, 6 Mar. 1983, 25 May 1986, 27 Mar. 1988, 5 Apr. 1992). PW (13 Apr. 1992). Sewanee Review (Winter 1984). Yale Review (Oct. 1992). —VICTORIA AARONS
PROUTY, Olive Higgins Born 10 January 1882, Worcester, Massachusetts; died 24 March 1974, Brookline, Massachusetts Daughter of Milton P. and Katharine Chapin Higgins; married Lewis I. Prouty, 1907 Olive Higgins Prouty was born into a loving New England family of comfortable means but had a troubled childhood saddened by the death of a beloved nurse. About the age of twelve, Prouty suffered a nervous breakdown that lasted nearly two years. Excelling only in composition, Prouty graduated from Worcester Classical High School in 1900; she was graduated from Smith College in 1904, with a Bachelor of Literature degree.
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Prouty’s professional writing career began with the encouragement of Albert Boyden, an editor at the American Magazine who published her first story, ‘‘When Elsie Came’’ (1909). This story, narrated by a young girl named Bobbie, was followed by some half dozen others about the same family. At Witter Bynner’s urging, Prouty transformed the Bobbie stories into her first novel, Bobbie, General Manager (1913). The Fifth Wheel (1916) takes up the story of Bobbie’s younger sister Ruth, who first achieves and then abandons a successful career to take temporary responsibility for several nieces and nephews. The experience of being needed by young children convinces Ruth that fulfillment lies in home and family, and she permanently renounces her vocation for reunion with an early suitor. While the resolution to The Fifth Wheel is sentimental and conventional, the conflict between the desire for self-determination through a career and commitment to family life is still relevant. This conflict between career and home, so neatly resolved in the novel, caused much stress in Prouty’s personal life and was in part responsible for her second nervous collapse in 1925. Prouty’s best-known novel, Stella Dallas (1923 dramatized, 1924; three film versions), received generally favorable reviews, although some critics complained of its sentimentality. It concerns a mother who sacrifices herself to assure her daughter’s social position. The plot is moved along by a jarring series of coincidences leading to a melodramatic climax, but the narrative style is smooth and Prouty’s characters draw us into their world. In 1931 Prouty began a series of novels about a wealthy Boston family, the Vales. These novels deal with themes typical of Prouty: the propriety of possible marriage partners and the obligations of social position. Two of the novels, however, include sympathetic treatments of psychological problems. Now, Voyager (1941, film version 1942), tells the story of Charlotte Vale, a woman unable to break away from the domination of her mother until early middle age. Charlotte’s growth toward independence begins with several months of treatment in a psychiatric sanatorium and a liberating love affair with a married man. Home Port (1947) describes the inferiority complex of a quiet, younger son growing up in the shadow of his athletic and popular older brother. The other novels of the Vale series are White Fawn (1931), Lisa Vale (1938), and Fabia (1951). Prouty’s psychological problems perhaps made her particularly sensitive to the demons of others. When the holder of the 1950 Olive H. Prouty Scholarship at Smith College, Sylvia Plath, attempted suicide in the summer of 1953, Prouty arranged to have her removed from the psychiatric ward of Massachusetts General Hospital and cared for at a private sanatorium near Boston. Plath’s five-month stay there was paid for by Prouty, who was rewarded for her generosity by the scathing caricature of herself as Philomena Guinea in Plath’s The Bell Jar. Prouty’s novels have been translated into many languages and have given pleasure to millions of readers. Prouty’s last book was a memoir, Pencil Shavings (1961). In it Prouty admits she
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‘‘was not as good a writer as [she] once thought [she] might be,’’ and candidly describes herself as a writer of light fiction. OTHER WORKS: The Star in the Window (1918). Good Sports (1919). Conflict (1927). Olive Higgins Prouty’s manuscripts are housed in the Robert Hutchins Goddard Library of Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: American Novelists of Today (1951). NCAB. TCA, TCAS. Other references: NYT (26 March 1974). NYTBR (22 April 1923). WP (28 March 1974). —HEDDY A. RICHTER
PRYOR, Sara (Agnes) Rice Born 19 February 1830, Halifax County, Virginia; died 15 February 1912, New York, New York Daughter of Samuel B. and Lucinda Walton Rice; married Roger A. Pryor, 1848 Sara Rice Pryor, the daughter of a Baptist minister, was educated primarily by tutors from the University of Virginia. At the age of eighteen, Pryor married a law student there. The early years of Pryor’s marriage were uneventful. While her husband practiced law and entered politics, Pryor occupied herself with her growing family and the duties of home. By the 1850s Roger Pryor had been elected to Congress as a Southern-rights man; he resigned in March 1861 to work for the secession of Virginia. During the Civil War, he served as a brigadier general in the army of northern Virginia. In her autobiography, Pryor recalled this period of her life as one of unremitting anxiety. Food and shelter were difficult to find at any price, and the enemy was never far away. Roger was captured in November 1864 and held prisoner for several months. After the war, Roger joined a law firm in New York City. He gained a reputation as counsel in some of the most famous civil and criminal cases of the late 19th century, while Sara Pryor became active in patriotic and philanthropic organizations. In the 1880s Pryor began to contribute occasional pieces to Cosmopolitan and the Delineator and in 1897 she wrote a chapter for a collective genealogy of the Robert E. Lee family compiled by Robert A. Brock. However, when her husband retired from the New York Supreme Court in 1899, Pryor began to write more regularly. Her first book, The Mother of Washington and Her Times (1903), was a popular history of colonial Virginia. She returned to this theme in The Birth of the Nation, Jamestown, 1607 (1907). These popular histories are highly romanticized versions of the facts and catered to reader nostalgia for the antebellum South. The Mother of Washington is both a biography of Mary Ball Washington and a social history of Virginia’s ‘‘Golden Age,’’ the
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latter half of the 18th century. Mary Washington appears as the ideal of 19th-century womanhood—modest, pious, and selfsacrificing—rather than a representative of the 18th century, which did not place such restrictions on women. Having had such a noble mother, George Washington could only be a great man, and Pryor spares no pains to embellish his accomplishments. Both The Mother of Washington and Jamestown contain serious factual inaccuracies; even by the standards of amateur history at the time, these works are inadequate. Pryor tends to superimpose her image of the antebellum South on earlier periods so her descriptions of life in Colonial and Revolutionary Virginia do not convey the rough-hewn frontier qualities of those times. Instead, we see them as earlier versions of the slave South. Pryor is best known for her two autobiographical works: Reminiscences of Peace and War (1905) and My Day: Reminiscences of a Long Life (1909). The first begins with the Pryors’ life in Washington in the 1850s. She takes the reader to the fancy dress balls and suppers. These halcyon days were ended, however, with secession and war, and Pryor turns to her precarious life in Petersburg, Virginia, where she lived during the Union siege of that city. My Day is more fully autobiographical, containing Pryor’s recollections of her childhood and encompassing her life in New York after the war. In many ways, it is less interesting than Reminiscences, as Pryor focuses more on her husband’s career than on her own life and works. Pryor’s observations of New York society during the Gilded Age and the position of Southerners in it are valid. Like her other works, these two autobiographies belong to the ‘‘moonlight and magnolias’’ school of history. OTHER WORKS: The Colonel’s Story (1911). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: LSL. NAW (1971). —JANET E. KAUFMAN
PUGH, Eliza (Lofton) Phillips Born 15 December 1841, Lafourche Parish, Louisiana; died 24 July 1889, Assumption Parish, Louisiana Wrote under: Arria Daughter of George W. and Sarah McRhea Phillips; married William W. Pugh, Jr., 1858; children: one son Eliza Phillips Pugh’s father, a successful politician and member of the Louisiana Legislature, died when she was a child. Her mother raised her on their plantation, the Hermitage, near Bayou Lafourche, a rich farming region of south Louisiana. Pugh grew up in relative isolation. Physically delicate, she is said to have begun writing stories to amuse herself when she was ten. In 1856 she matriculated at Miss Hull’s Seminary in New Orleans, and two years later, after graduating, she promptly married the son of a wealthy planter in nearby Assumption Parish. They had one son.
Shortly before the Civil War Pugh began to write professionally, beginning her first novel, and under her pen name, Arria, contributing several literary and political sketches to the New York World, the New Orleans Times, and other journals and papers. Later, she wrote an unpublished account of the battle of Georgia Landing and the Union invasion of the countryside near the Pugh plantation. Her husband died shortly after the war, and she continued to live and write at Bayou Lafourche until her death. Unrequited and hopeless love is the theme of both of Pugh’s novels. Not a Hero (1867) recounts the story of Rachel Grant, who, because of emotional infidelity to her husband, is punished by exile from their home and daughter, Judith. When Judith is fifteen, Rachel returns, begging her embittered husband to let her join the household anonymously. Phillip consents reluctantly. Their daughter then proceeds to repeat her mother’s mistake: marrying one man but falling in love with another, Stanley Powers, the very rake who had so unfortunately attracted her mother. The situation is enlarged rather than complicated by Powers’ staunchly faithful mistress, Janet Somers—who is, interestingly enough, a self-supporting artist in the French Quarter of New Orleans—and Elinor Grey, a Garden District matron. As a model of womanly virtue and an understanding friend, Elinor eventually saves Judith from repeating her mother’s folly of alienating her husband. We conclude finally that Powers, the catalyst of all the distress, is certainly not a hero despite his battlefield death. In a Crucible (1872) is a more complex novel involving several unworthy loves, particularly between Parolet, a south Louisiana beauty with a mysterious past, and two brothers of a wealthy rural family. This second novel is far more controlled and direct than Not a Hero, which is heavily encumbered with Latinate structures and moralizing effusions. But even here, Pugh has difficulty telling a straight story. The plots of both novels tend to be obscured by circumventions and her attempts to maintain suspense without resolving it adequately. Pugh was not unable to imagine interesting characters and situations, or to capture the flavor of south Louisiana lifestyles. Her efforts to probe the psychology of hopeless love have the ring of authenticity, but the dated inefficiency of her style keeps Pugh’s creations from springing to life and tends to obscure her thought. OTHER WORKS: The papers of Eliza Phillips Pugh are housed in the Louisiana State University Library in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Lathrop, B. F., ‘‘The Pugh Plantations: 1860-1865’’ (dissertation, 1955). Reference works: Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography (1888). Dictionary of American Authors (1904). The Living Female Writers of the South (1872). The Living Writers of the South (1869). Other references: New Orleans Picayune (31 Dec. 1871, 25 Feb. 1872). [Biographical data furnished by Dorothy Pugh.] —BARBARA C. EWELL
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PUTNAM, Emily (James) Smith Born 15 April 1865, Canandaigua, New York; died 7 September 1944, Kingston, Jamaica Daughter of James C. and Emily Adams Smith; married George H. Putnam, 1899 (died 1930); children: Palmer Cosslett Putnam The daughter of a judge, Emily Smith Putnam was the youngest of five children. Putnam’s parents encouraged her intellectual curiosity, and gave her every educational opportunity. At an early age, Putnam became fascinated with ancient Greek history. She was a member of the first graduating class of Bryn Mawr College (1889). Putnam became a pioneer in postgraduate education. She was among the first women to study at Girton College, Cambridge, England. She taught at Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn Heights, New York (1891-93)—where she published her first scholarly work, Selections from Lucian (1892)—and at the newly established University of Chicago (1893-94). In 1894 she accepted the challenging appointment of dean of Barnard College. Putnam believed women should be educated to pursue their interests, whatever they might be, and that her job as dean was to make certain the young women received an education equal to that of the young men at Columbia University. Putnam helped create an innovative relationship between the men’s and women’s colleges which was followed by administrators at other universities. Putnam married a publisher and scholar in 1899, and when she became pregnant in 1900, she was forced to resign her position. Her only child, Palmer Cosslett Putnam, became a noted author of scientific and technical works. Although Putnam maintained her ties with Barnard as a member of the Board of Trustees (1901-05), she devoted the next 14 years to her family and writing. During this period, Putnam published a variety of articles, ranging from ‘‘Americans at the English Universities’’ and ‘‘Preparation for College’’ to ‘‘Lucian the Sophist’’ and ‘‘Pagan Morals.’’ These articles, in addition to short stories, appeared in the most noted journals of the day. In 1914 Putnam returned to Barnard as a lecturer on Greek literature and history. In 1919 she, together with Columbia University professor James Harvey Robinson, helped found the New School for Social Research in New York City, an institution for the promotion of adult education. Putnam became a member of the New School’s board of directors, and lectured there from 1920 until 1932. Putnam continued to write articles and short stories, and translated a number of works by French social theorists. Candaules’ Wife, and Other Old Stories (1926) is devoted to interpreting and expanding upon certain stories of Herodotus.
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combines Putnam’s interest in history and the educational development of women: woman ‘‘can hardly understand herself unless she knows her own history.’’ The Lady contains essays on the role, education, and social life of the ‘‘female of the favored social classes’’ in ancient Rome and Greece, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance. Putnam studies other lifestyles in ‘‘The Lady Abbess,’’ ‘‘The Lady of the Salon,’’ and ‘‘The Lady of the Blue Stocking.’’ Her work concludes with the chapter, ‘‘The Lady of the Slave States,’’ because Putnam believed the economic changes the world was undergoing at the turn of the century eliminated the distinctions between social classes which had been so prevalent in history. Her collection of historical sketches is as valuable now as it was in 1910. A noted scholar, writer, historian, and educational administrator, Putnam provided an example for many women of her own and subsequent generations to follow in the quest for knowledge.
OTHER WORKS: The Dread of Responsibility by E. Fauget (translated by Putnam, 1914). The Secret of the Maine by M. Berger (translated by Putnam, 1918). The Illusion by R. Escholier (translated by Putnam, 1921).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Mirskey, J., Foreword to The Lady: Studies of Certain Significant Phases of Her History (1972). Reference works: AW. NAW (1971). Other references: Harper’s Bazaar (April 1911). PW (14 Aug. 1944). —PAULA A. TRECKEL
PUTNAM, Mary (Traill Spence) Lowell Born 3 December 1810, Boston, Massachusetts; died 1898, Boston, Massachusetts Also wrote under: M. L. P. Daughter of Charles and Harriet Spence Lowell; married Samuel R. Putnam
After retiring from Barnard in 1929 and from the New School in 1932, and after the death of her husband in 1930, Putnam moved to Spain with her sister Alice, and lived there until the Spanish Civil War forced them to relocate in Kingston, Jamaica.
Mary Lowell Putnam’s mother imbued her Christian rectitude and love of learning in her children. Her father, a minister at West Church in Boston, was descended from Judge John Lowell, who was a member of the Continental Congress and a district and circuit court judge. Judge Lowell’s benevolence toward black people, the family’s proud New England heritage, and a fervent Christian faith are all reflected in Putnam’s work.
The Lady: Studies of Certain Significant Phases of Her History (1910), the volume for which Putnam is best known,
Putnam is noted for translating Fredrika Bremer’s play, The Bondmaid, from Swedish (1844). Putnam’s fluency in French,
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coupled with her voracious reading, allowed Putnam to take on the editor of the North American Review, Francis Bowen, who had sharply criticized Kossuth and the Magyars after their revolution. In two essays in the Christian Examiner Putnam shreds Bowen’s articles, taking them line by line and proving their inaccuracy and bad logic. Putnam’s four chief works, all published anonymously and centered on the issue of slavery, are told from the vantage point of Edward Colvil, a New England farmer-poet transplanted to the South. Record of an Obscure Man (1861) and Fifteen Days: An Extract from Edward Colvil’s Journal (1866) are filled with exposition and speculation about black history and alternatives to slavery. Tragedy of Errors (1862) and Tragedy of Success (1862), both plays, embody some of Putnam’s theories about the beauty of black music, the eloquence of black preaching, and black people’s special capacity for loyalty and revenge. Record of an Obscure Man is narrated by a friend of Colvil’s who listened to his discussion of African history and theories about slavery and, after Colvil’s death, arranged for publication of his two verse plays, Tragedy of Errors and its sequel, Tragedy of Success. Written ‘‘in the dramatic form, but not intended for the stage,’’ the plays form the core of Putnam’s series. Their plot is overly complicated. The intrigue of a jilted mulatto woman, Dorcas, catapults a young white woman, Hecate, into slavery. She has a child by her plantation owner, Stanley, switches her baby with that of his wife, and watches her illegitimate daughter, Helen, grow up as a generous, highly intelligent, free woman who endears herself with the slaves and longs to accomplish some great work but feels hampered by a weakspirited husband. After the baby-switching comes to light, Helen takes her place as a slave, but escapes with her son when her husband tells her he wants to keep her as his mistress. Just as he sees the light (encouraged by proof that Helen is white), Helen is captured and dies in jail from loss of hope (but not faith). In contrast to Putnam’s very readable prose, the verse in the plays is only occasionally strong; but a few of the scenes have convincing dialogues: in one, Dorcas successfully confronts her remorseful accomplice, a slave trader, by skillfully reminding him of his self-doubts and mixed motivations. In another, Helen powerfully decries the severe limitations of woman’s freedom to her sister-in-law Alice: ‘‘Restrained and cramped / In all her outward acts, she cannot know / The joys of self-possession, — man’s great bliss; / She only claims those of renunciation.’’ Despite her limits, however, woman is ‘‘man’s second conscience,’’ and must speak ‘‘the word God printed on her soul.’’ Fifteen Days is the most unified work in the series. The journal starts on Good Friday, 1844, and describes Colvil’s meeting with a charismatic figure, Harry Dudley, a young visiting botanist from Massachusetts who tries to buy a slave so he can free him. Fifteen Days balances the joy of deepening friendship between Colvil and Dudley against the sense of looming tragedy.
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Colvil seems excessively anxious to live up to Dudley’s expectation, but his anxiety is interestingly confirmed when Dudley is killed at the end, ironically by a good friend who was also the slave’s former owner. The central victims in Putnam’s tragic series are all young, perceptive, and white, but her exposition of African history shows a sensitivity to the intelligence and culture of black people. Putnam’s writings on Hungary show her capable of imagining herself in other people’s shoes. Although her characters are scarce on flesh and blood, their sensibility is frequently compelling.
OTHER WORKS: The North American Review on Hungary (reprinted from the Christian Examiner, Nov. 1850, March 1851). [Memorial of William] Lowell Putnam (1863). Guépin of Nantes: A French Republican (1874). Memoir of Rev. Charles Lowell, D.D. (1885).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Adelman, J. Famous Women (1926). Dorland, W. A. N., The Sum of Feminine Achievement (1917). Homes of American Authors (1857). Reference works: American Authors, 1795-1895: A Bibliography (1897). American Fiction, 1851-1875. Wright (1965). A Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors (1872). A Dictionary of American Authors (1897). DAB. Index to Women of the World, from Ancient to Modern Times: Biographies and Portraits (1970). Women ’s Record (1870). Other references: North American Review (Jan. 1862, April 1862). —KAREN B. STEELE
PUTNAM, Ruth Born 18 July 1856, Yonkers, New York; died 12 February 1931, Geneva, Switzerland Daughter of George P. and Victorine Haven Putnam Ruth Putnam spent her youth in an exceptionally stimulating environment. Her father founded the publishing firm which bears his name; her brother George succeeded as head of the company; and her sister Mary Putnam Jacobi, about whom Putnam wrote in Life and Letters of Mary Putnam Jacobi (1925), was a pioneer in women’s medical education. Putnam’s interest in language and literature became evident during her undergraduate years at Cornell University, from which she graduated in 1878. She also studied in Paris, Oxford, Leiden, Geneva, and London. Besides her writing, Putnam was actively involved in the woman suffrage movement.
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Putnam’s first publication, The Pearl Series (1886), was a six-volume poetry anthology. In 1887 Putnam collaborated with Alfred Church on a historical novel entitled The Count of the Saxon Shore. Her first work indicating an interest in Dutch history is William the Silent, Prince of Orange: The Moderate Man of the Sixteenth Century (2 vols., 1895). Putnam attempts an unbiased biography, using an impressive number of primary sources, principally letters and documents signed by the Prince of Orange, which she describes as ‘‘authentic phrases of the subject-matter, though they may not be the whole truth.’’ As with a number of her historical works, Putnam consulted French, English, Dutch, and German sources, traveling widely throughout Europe and the U.S. to obtain as complete and accurate a picture of the protagonist as possible.
subject popular. Although her status as daughter of George Putnam no doubt helped her, the research skills and great versatility evident throughout her work warrant Putnam a position among respected historical writers.
In 1897 Putnam coedited the two-volume Historic New York During Two Centuries. The work, dealing with the days of New Amsterdam and early New York, contains Putnam’s own contribution on Annetje Jans’ Farm, which she traces until 1897.
PUTNAM, Sallie A. Brock
Her next work dealing with the history of the Netherlands was A Mediaeval Princess: Jacqueline, Countess of Holland (1401-1436) (1904). Putnam details Philip the Good’s incursion into Holland, which until that time (1904) had received little attention among English historians. Jacqueline was a contemporary of Jeanne d’Arc, who fought against and was finally conquered by the same men with whom Jacqueline maintained her futile struggle. Putnam’s second contribution to the Heroes of the Nations series was Charles the Bold: Last Duke of Burgundy (1433-1477) (1908). This biography is principally based on the materials of John Foster Kirk. As with all her historical works, Putnam’s wonderfully clear, readable prose makes these figures from remote history come alive. With the eruption of World War I, Putnam published a short work, Alsace and Lorraine from Caesar to Kaiser (1915), followed in 1918 by a much longer volume entitled Luxemburg and Her Neighbors, in which she gives a precise history of Luxemburg from the 10th century to the 20th century. Both works deal with areas brought to the public attention because of the events of the war. In the meantime, Putnam collaborated with H. I. Priestley on a lengthy monograph, ‘‘California: The Name.’’ Putnam’s extraordinary versatility is evident in the extensive use of Spanish historical and literary sources. She traces the name California to a 15th-century Spanish romance. Putnam’s most monumental historical work was the translation and adaptation of Petrus Blok’s volumes, The History of the Nederland People (5 vols., 1898-1912). Putnam condensed a great deal of political detail in the Dutch original in order to emphasize the cultural aspects of Dutch history. Putnam’s contribution to interest in the history of the Netherlands in the U.S. was substantial. Her personalization of important, though perhaps little-known, historical figures made her
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BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: DAB. Other references: Education Review (April 1908). Literary Digest (2 May 1908). Nation (13 Aug. 1908). SR (5 Sept. 1908). —CAROLE M. SHAFFER-KOROS
Born 1828, Madison County, Virginia; died 1911 Wrote under: Virginia Madison Daughter of Ansalem and Elizabeth Beverly Brock; married Richard Putnam, 1882 Little is known of Sallie A. Brock Putnam’s early life except she was educated by private tutors and by her father, who taught at the University of Virginia. After his death, Putnam and her mother moved to Richmond, Virginia, until the mother’s death in 1865. That summer, Putnam traveled to New York City and was persuaded to write an account of her life in the former Confederate capital, which was published in 1867 as Richmond During the War. The Southern Amaranth (1869) was a collection of Civil War poetry and included some of Putnam’s own verses. For 10 years Putnam was associated with Frank Leslie’s Lady’s Journal and also contributed pieces to other women’s magazines. She married a New York City minister, and they traveled extensively. Richmond During the War displays Putnam’s keen eye for detail. Filled with chatty gossip and shrewd observations of life in the beleaguered city, it is a fascinating account of civilians in a war zone. Historians have relied heavily on its descriptions of the inauguration of Jefferson Davis and the Richmond Bread Riot of 1863. Putnam evidently knew the city and its people well; although she wrote from hindsight, many of her conclusions are valid. She was correct in condemning the government’s willingness to give President Davis total control of the army, a function more properly entrusted to the secretary of war and the generals. Similarly, her criticisms of Richmond’s defenses and food supply are justified. Striking a note of sectional reconciliation at the end of the memoir, Putnam has only praise for Lincoln’s policy of Reconstruction and the conduct of the federal troops occupying Richmond in the last days of the war. Kenneth, My King (1873) is a romance set in the prewar South. It is very much like Jane Eyre. The plot revolves around the love between a young governess, Harriet Royal, and her employer, Kenneth Darrow. Harriet learns the secret of Kenneth’s wife,
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Bertha’s, madness and the ‘‘shadow of a terrible living sorrow’’ that hangs over Kenneth. Both Kenneth and his brother Richard were in love with Bertha, and although she married Kenneth, Richard was the father of her child. The novel ends happily with the marriage of Kenneth and Harriet after Bertha dies of a brain hemorrhage, Richard commits suicide, and Harriet’s fiancé is conveniently lost at sea. Kenneth, My King is a standard 19th-century romance, overlaid with gothic trappings and a Pollyannaish nostalgia for the Old South. What saves the novel from mere silliness is the character of Harriet. She is neither a clinging vine nor a flirt, but an independent, reasonable woman. Whereas Jane Eyre displayed the virtues of patience and self-sacrifice, Harriet was far stronger,
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choosing to work as a governess, rather than dutifully going where others sent her. It is unfortunate Putnam chose to try her hand at fiction. While Kenneth, My King may have pleased its audience, it does nothing to enhance Putnam’s reputation as a writer. It is difficult to understand how someone who displays such perception in her autobiographical works could write such an inane novel. BIBLIOGRAPHY: M. T. Tardy, Living Female Writers of the South (1872). —JANET E. KAUFMAN
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She utilizes hymns and religious poetry to sum up her faith and the struggles with doubt.
RAMPLING, Anne
Almost all the writings were for Ramsay’s own use, with the exception of the letters, a small number of which were included. The warmth of Ramsay’s nature is more evident here; the letters to her children are instructive, supportive, and appreciative.
See RICE, Anne
RAMSAY, Martha Laurens Born 3 November 1759, Charleston, South Carolina; died 10 June 1811, Charleston, South Carolina Daughter of Henry and Eleanor Ball Laurens; married David Ramsay, 1787; children: 11 children Martha Laurens Ramsay was the daughter of a prominent South Carolina patriot leader and the wife of another Revolutionary patriot. She achieved posthumous recognition as a writer when her husband published Memoirs of the Life of Martha Laurens Ramsay (1811). The work included his memoir of Ramsay as well as her writings: extracts from her diary, letters, and religious meditations and exercises. Ramsay had kept the writing secret until immediately before her death, and David Ramsay published them as a testimonial and a guide to others. Although Ramsay began writing in childhood, only a few things remain from the early years, the significant one being the ‘‘Covenant with God’’ which she drew up at age fourteen. There are some religious meditations from the period 1775-85, when Ramsay lived in England and France. These works reflect both the faith and the fear of ‘‘apostasy’’ on the part of a young woman first entering ‘‘gay, worldly, and even. . .profane company.’’ Ramsay did experience a decline of religious fervor at one point. What proved of more lasting significance was her encounter with the English evangelical movement, which helped confirm what Ramsay called her ‘‘heart religion.’’ The central core of Ramsay’s writings is the diary she kept after her return to Charleston and her marriage. The published extracts cover the period 1791 to 1808. Hers was a sporadically kept record of a life of faith, troubled by a recurring sense of falling away from God. Throughout Ramsay underscores a ‘‘sense of being drawn to God through trials.’’ These trials included the deaths of three of her 11 children and the family’s troubled financial affairs. Ramsay did not give details of the experiences of trial but instead recorded her inner turmoil and anguished efforts to regain stability. She felt the weight of ‘‘those sins which required this chastisement’’ and the fear lest her rebellions lead to ‘‘forfeiting all thy mercies.’’ Throughout the diary Ramsay stresses the importance of the sense of that grace ‘‘by which alone I stand.’’
Ramsay gives the impression of being at ease with the traditional role of women. Although she had read contemporary feminist writings, her husband maintained that she preferred ‘‘the teachings of the Bible to human reasoning.’’ She gives no indications of her feelings about the institution of slavery, which so troubled her fellow Charlestonian Sarah Grimké. Ramsay’s writing was essentially a private experience, a means of intensifying her religious life. One feels the intensity of her religious struggles and personal affection for her family, but she does not reveal herself as a rounded human being. For Ramsay, personal spirituality was at the heart of existence; it was also at the heart of her writing. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Begos, J. D., ed., A Women’s Diaries Miscellany (1989). Rogers, G. C., Jr., Evolution of a Federalist: William Loughton Smith of Charleston (1962). Pair, J. M., eds., A Selection of Papers from Women and the Constitution: A Bicentennial Perspective (1990). Spruill, J. C., Women’s Life and Work in the Southern Colonies (1938). Wallace, D. D., The Life of Henry Laurens (1915). Reference works: CAL. NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Colby Library Quarterly (Sept. 1989). William and Mary Quarterly (Jan. 1991). South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine (Oct. 1935). —INZER BYERS
RAMSAY, Vienna G. Morrell Born circa 1817, Maine; died after 1897 Wrote under: Mrs. V. G. Ramsay, Mrs. Vienna G. Ramsay (occasional variant spelling: Ramsey) Vienna G. Morrell Ramsay was both a religious writer and a children’s writer, frequently merging the two. Ramsay’s earliest available work, Facts and Reflections on the Condition of the Heathen World (1848), is a traditional treatise intended to awaken ‘‘in the hearts of Christians a deeper sympathy for those who are perishing in the darkness of Heathenism. . . .’’ In the often eccentric idiom of early-19th-century evangelism, Ramsey documents the importance of missions and conversion throughout ‘‘primitive’’ societies—Africa, Asia, South America.
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Evenings with the Children; or, Travels in South America (1871) serves the multifold purpose of much early children’s literature: to instill moral and religious values while instructing the young reader. Ramsay dedicates the book to the children she has known, ‘‘with the prayer that it may aid them in the acquisition of knowledge and that they may all be taught of Him whom to know is Eternal.’’ The 20 chapters—called ‘‘evenings’’—find ‘‘Mrs. White’’ taking her two very eager children on an imaginary journey through South America. The trip is, of course, geographically and culturally instructive, and the boy and girl await each lesson excitedly. The children are models for those reading the book. The young adventurers ‘‘study hard in order to get through their lessons early’’ and beg ‘‘their mother that they might continue their travels.’’ Thus Ramsay places factual history within the fictional frame of a woman and her two children, discussing the animals, vegetation, and geography of Central and Latin America. Ramsay’s evangelistic writings remain conventional in purpose and execution. Evenings with the Children, although of great factual integrity, has aged poorly in its strict, unimaginative presentation of the ‘‘ideal child.’’ —DEBORAH H. HOLDSTEIN
RAND, Ayn Born Alyssa (Alice) Resenbaum, 2 February 1905, St. Petersburg, Russia; died March 1982 Married Frank O’Connor, 1929 Ayn Rand’s early life of relative comfort was abruptly terminated when the family business was nationalized after the Russian Revolution. An excellent student whose far-ranging interests included mathematics, literature, philosophy, and engineering, Rand graduated from the University of Leningrad with a degree in history. Not able to adjust to the Communist regime, she accepted an invitation to visit relatives in New York in 1926. Rand went to Hollywood to write screen scenarios and was given a job as an extra by Cecil B. de Mille. Though de Mille rejected her first five scenarios as too romantic, unrealistic, and improbable, Rand did eventually work as a screenwriter. We, the Living (1936, 1977) received a lukewarm critical reception. The themes are the sanctity of human life and the evil of collectivism in Russia. Written at the same time, The Night of January 16th (1936, 1983) is an effective dramatic piece. The play’s originality derives from the gimmick of allowing each night’s audience to serve as the jury in a murder trial. The Fountainhead (1943, film version 1949) established Rand as a popular writer and is considered her best work. The world of contemporary architecture serves as the backdrop for this battle between the forces of individualism and collectivisim, between creativity and derivativeness.
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The plot follows protagonist Howard Roark’s career from the day he is expelled from architectural school, through his difficulties in establishing a career, to his professional and personal victory and vindication. The book ends with the triumph of the virtuous and the creative. The heavy moralizing has drawn negative reactions from some commentators. The philosophies set forth in The Fountainhead were amplified in Atlas Shrugged (1957), the fullest novelistic treatment of Rand’s theories and established her as an intellectual cult figure. A novel which can be read to satisfy many different tastes, it has been categorized by various critics as a mystery story, science fiction, a philosophical diatribe, a female fantasy novel, and a justification of capitalism. The protagonist, Dagny Taggart—whose attempts to run a transcontinental railroad are complicated by networks of bureaus, councils, and committees that strangle productive initiatives— fights a losing battle against a group that wants to ‘‘stop the motor of the world’’ in order to rebuild a society of free enterprise, devoid of government controls. She inadvertently finds a projection of this society, Galt’s Gulch, a utopia in a hidden valley in Colorado. Galt’s Gulch was born as a reaction against the collectivist maxim, ‘‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need’’—its motto is ‘‘I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man nor ask another man to live for mine.’’ Rand’s philosophical thought informs her work as well, and all of her publications following Atlas Shrugged were nonfiction. During the 1960s she was a popular campus lecturer, and in conjunction with the Objectivist, a newsletter published to explain Rand’s brand of philosophy, courses in objectivism were taught by the Nathaniel Branden Institute. Rand’s novels, though popular, have received little serious consideration as works of literature; she is something of a cultural phenomenon. Her books have been reprinted many times, and Atlas Shrugged is roundly considered one of the top books of the century from sources as disparate as the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, Book-of-the-Month Club, and Barnes and Noble. Rand’s life and thought were also depicted in a major film in late 1999. Though her politics are anathema to most feminists, her commitment to self-actualization both as a philosopher and as creator of one of the most positive female protagonists in American literature (Dagny Taggart) suggests that perhaps her works need to be reevaluated by women. OTHER WORKS: Anthem (1938; revised 1946, 1995). For the New Intellectual: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (1961). The Virtue of Selfishness (1964). Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966, 1976). Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (1967, 1990). The Romantic Manifesto (1969, 1971). The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1971). Philosophy: Who Needs It (1982, 1984). The Early Ayn Rand: A Selection From Her Unpublished Fiction (1986). For the New Intellectual: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (1996). Ayn Rand’s Marginalia: Her Critical Comments on the Writings of Over 20 Authors (1996). The Letters of Ayn Rand
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(1997). The Ayn Rand Column: Written for the Los Angeles Times (1998). The Journals of Ayn Rand (1999). The Ayn Rand Reader (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Binswanger, H., ed., The Ayn Rand Lexicon (1986). Bloom, H., ed., American Women Fiction Writers, Volume Three 1900-1960 (1998). Branden, B., The Passion of Ayn Rand (1986). Branden, B., Ayn Rand and Her Movement: An Interview With Barbara Branden, Rand’s Close Colleague and Administrator of Her Movement (1991). Branden, N., and B. Branden, Who is Ayn Rand? (1962). Branden, N., My Years With Ayn Rand (1999). Coleman, D. M., ‘‘The Pursuit of Happiness Through a Virtuous Life: Ayn Rand and Aristotle’’ (thesis, 1997). Den Uyl, D. J., The Fountainhead: An American Novel (1999). Erickson, P. F., The Stance of Atlas: An Examination of the Philosophy of Ayn Rand (1997). Gladstein, M. R., The Ayn Rand Companion (1984). Gladstein, M. R., The New Ayn Rand Companion (1999). Gladstein, M. R. and Sciabarra, C. M., eds., Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand (1999). Haught, J. A., 2000 Years of Disbelief: Famous People With the Courage to Doubt (1996). Hoffman, J. L., ‘‘Feminist Characteristics in The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged’’ (thesis, 1998). Merrill, R. E., The Ideas of Ayn Rand (1991). O’Neill, W., With Charity Toward None (1971). Peikoff, L., Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (1993). Perinn, V. L., Ayn Rand—First Descriptive Bibliography (1990). Pinson, J. L., Objective Journalism and Ayn Rand’s Philosophy of Objectivism (dissertation, 1996). Robbins, J. W., Without A Prayer: Ayn Rand and the Close of Her System (1997). Rothbard, M. N., The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult (1990). Sciabarra, C. M., Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (1995). Tuccille, J., It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand (1997). Walker, J., The Ayn Rand Cult (1999). Reference works: CA (1975). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCAS. Other references: America (1999). American Book Review (May 1990). American Enterprise (1997, 1998). Book World (July 1995). Commonweal (8 Nov. 1957). Forbes (Mar. 1998). Free Inquiry (Summer 1994). Freeman (May 1996). Harper’s (Feb. 1999). Insight (Sept. 1997, May 1999). In These Times (July 1999). Journal of Libertarian Studies (Fall 1992). Maclean’s (Aug. 1998). National Journal (1997). National Review (May 1990, Sept. 1994). NY (26 Oct. 1957). NYTBR (16 May 1943, Oct. 1997, Aug.1995). Playboy (March 1964). SR (12 Oct. 1957). U.S. News & World Report (Mar. 1998) —MIMI R. GLADSTEIN, UPDATED BY NELSON RHODES
RANDALL, Margaret Born 6 December 1936, New York, New York Wrote under: Margaret Randall de Mondragon (1962-68) Daughter of John P. and Elinor Davidson Randall; married Sam Jacobs, 1954 (divorced); Sergio Mondragon, 1962 (divorced);
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Floyce Alexander, 1984 (divorced); children: Gregory, Sarah, Ximena, Ana Poet, essayist, oral historian, translator, photographer, and political activist, Margaret Randall resists easy classification. Out of a politically committed life that has spanned several continents and extended over three decades, she has produced more than 50 works emboding her belief that ‘‘passion and reason, socialism and feminism, art and responsibility’’ all need one another. Randall’s life and work are an eloquent testimony to this commitment. Randall grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she attended the University of New Mexico from 1954 to 1955. After a brief marriage and divorce, she moved to New York City in 1957, where she became closely associated with the Black Mountain poets and Abstract Expressionist artists, published two collections of poetry, and gave birth to her first child. In 1961, with her 10-month-old son, Randall returned to Albuquerque for a brief visit and then headed south to Mexico. This was the first stage in an open-ended 23-year journey that would take her to Mexico, Cuba, Nicaragua, and, finally, back to Albuquerque. In 1962 Randall and the Mexican poet Sergio Mondragon (whom she married that year) began editing El Corno Emplumado: The Plumed Horn, a bilingual literary magazine that sought to publish the most exciting new voices of North and Latin America. In 1967, on the basis of poor legal advice, Randall took out Mexican citizenship and relinquished her U.S. passport to American consular authorities—a decision that would have grave consequences when she returned to the U.S. in 1984. Her involvement with El Corno Emplumado brought her into association with a generation of artists and intellectuals deeply committed to the struggle against social and political injustice. Randall traveled to Cuba in 1967, her first visit to a socialist country and one that was fundamental to her growing political commitments. In 1968 the Mexican student movement erupted and was violently repressed. During the same year, Randall separated from Mondragon and began to live with a U.S. poet, Robert Cohen. She took an active role in the Mexican student movement and El Corno Emplumado supported the student demands. As a result, Randall was harassed by the government and forced to live underground. In 1969 she and her four children managed to leave Mexico and move to Cuba, where she lived for the next 10 years. In Cuba, Randall immediately became interested in what a socialist revolution could mean for women. For the next two years, she traveled around the country talking with women from all walks of life about their experiences under the Cuban variety of socialism. The result of this research, Cuban Women Now (1974), signaled yet another stage in Randall’s multifaceted career, one marked by an increasing commitment to people’s voices, testimony, and oral history. In 1979, shortly after the victory of the Sandinista revolution, the Nicaraguan minister of culture, Ernesto Cardenal, invited Randall to visit the country and do field work on the experiences of Nicaraguan women. As a result, Randall produced Sandino’s Daughters (1981), her first work in which she created both the written and the photographic images. In 1980 Randall
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and her daughter Ana moved to Nicaragua, where they were later joined by another daughter, Ximena. Randall returned to the U.S. in 1984. After her marriage to Floyce Alexander, he petitioned the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) for her permanent resident status. In October 1985, Randall was informed that the INS, invoking the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, had denied her application because of the political nature of her writings; she was given 30 days to leave the country. During the next four years, with the assistance of the Center for Constitutional Rights and many supporters throughout the country, Randall fought the deportation order. She also continued to write, publishing six books and completing one novel between the date of the deportation order and the end of the case. Randall’s poetry, essays, short stories, articles, and book reviews have appeared in dozens of periodicals, including Nation, Chelsea Review, Women’s Review of Books, Village Voice, American Poetry Review, and the Los Angeles Times. She has read her poetry and lectured at dozens of universities throughout the U.S. and Latin America. Her photography, which has won several prizes, has been shown in both group exhibitions and one-woman shows around the country. She also launched a career as a teacher at the University of New Mexico, Trinity College, Oberlin College, Macalester College, and the University of Delaware. In the summer of 1989, the Board of Immigration Appeals finally ruled that Randall had never lost her American citizenship. A resident since 1989 of Albuquerque—the setting that continues to nourish her life and imagination—Randall lives with her companion, Barbara Byers, and continues to teach and write.
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(1990). Walking to the Edge: Essays of Resistance (1991). Dancing with the Doe: New and Selected Poems, 1986-1991 (1992). Gathering Rage: The Failure of Twentieth Century Revolutions to Develop a Feminist Agenda (1992). The Old Cedar Bar (1992). Sandino’s Daughters Revisited 1994). Our Voices, Our Lives: Stories of Women from Central America and the Caribbean (1995). Esto sucede cuando el corazón de una mujer se rompe: poemas, 1985-1995 (1997). Hunger’s Table: Women, Food, and Politics (1997). The Price You Pay: The Hidden Cost of Women’s Relationship to Money (1997). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Crawford, J., and P. Smith, This Is About Vision: Interviews with Southwestern Writers (1990). O’Brian, M., and C. Little, eds., Reimaging America: The Arts of Social Change (1990). Women and Other Aliens: Essays from the U.S. Mexican Border (1991). Reference works: CA (1979). Other references: Conceptions Southwest (Spring 1986). Express (24 Oct. 1985). Impact (14 Jan. 1986). LJ (1 Feb. 1997). Minnesota Review (1966). Ms. (June 1986). Nation (9 May 1994). National Catholic Reporter (9 Sept. 1994, 14 Nov. 1997). Poetry Flash (Dec. 1985). WRB (Jan. 1993). —JAMES A. MILLER, UPDATED BY LEAH J. SPARKS
RANDALL, Ruth Painter OTHER WORKS: Giant of Tears (1959). Ecstasy Is a Number (1961). Poems of the Glass (1964). Small Sounds from the Bass Fiddle (1964). October (1965). Twenty-Five Stages of My Spine (1967). Water I Slip into at Night (1967). So Many Rooms Has a House but One Roof (1967). Getting Rid of Blue Plastic (1968). Los hippies: analisís de una crisis (1968). Let’s Go! (1971). Part of the Solution (1972). Day’s Coming (1973). La Situatión de la Mujer (1974). With Our Hands (1974). Spirit of the People: Vietnamese Women Two Years from the Geneva Accords (1975). All My Used Parts, Shackles, Fuel, Tenderness, and Stars (1976). Carlotta: Poems and Prose from Havana (1978). Doris Tijerino: Inside the Nicaraguan Revolution (1978). These Living Songs: Fifteen New Cuban Poets (1978). We (1978). Sueños y realidades de un guajiricantor (1979). El pueblo no solo es testigo: la historia de Dominga (1979). Sueños y realidades de un Guajiricantor (1979). Cuban Women Twenty Years Later (1980). No se puede hacer la revolución sin nosotras (1980). A Poetry of Resistance (1983). Testimonios (1983). Christians in the Nicaraguan Revolution (1983). Risking a Somersault in the Air: Conversations with Nicaraguan Writers (1984). Women Brave in the Face of Danger (1985). Nicaragua Libre! (1985). Albuquerque: Coming Back to the USA (1986). The Coming Home Poems (1986). This Is about Incest (1987). Memory Says Yes (1988). The Shape of Red: Insider/Outsider Reflections (1988). Photographs by Margaret Randall: Image and Content in Differing Cultural Contexts (1988). Coming Home: Peace Without Complacency
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Born 1 November 1892, Salem, Virginia; died 22 January 1971, Urbana, Illinois Daughter of Franklin V. and Laura Shickel Painter; married James G. Randall, 1917 Ruth Painter Randall, whose father wrote books on American and English literature, grew up in an academic atmosphere. She received a B.A. from Roanoke College, Virginia, in 1913, and an M.A. from Indiana University in 1914. After marrying a wellknown Lincoln historian, Randall began writing. She shared her husband’s research and collaborated with him on two chapters of his monumental biography of Lincoln. Although she was a Southerner, her mature life was devoted to the study of Lincoln. Just as this work caused historians to reevaluate Lincoln’s presidency, Randall’s Mary Lincoln: Biography of a Marriage (1953) altered the view of Mary Todd Lincoln shaped by many detractors. This substantial work of historical research is scrupulous in its accuracy and original in presenting new materials. The result is a balanced judgement of the Lincolns’ personalities and their private life. After this first biography, Randall avoided footnotes but always explained that her studies had been fully documented and provided long bibliographies. She continued her exploration of the family life of the Lincolns in Lincoln’s Sons (1956), which
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both follows the lives of Lincoln’s heirs and considers the president’s role as a father, and in The Courtship of Mr. Lincoln (1957). Randall also wrote articles about Lincoln in American Heritage, Saturday Review, and the New York Times Magazine, and she contributed radio and television sketches for the American Story series and the Lincoln Story series. Her study of the Lincoln circle was extended with a biography of Colonel Elmer Elsworth (1960). Several appealing books for children occupied Randall’s last years. With Lincoln’s Animal Friends (1958), Randall reached an audience of young readers aged nine to 12. I, Mary (1959) and Lincoln’s Sons (1956), both feature Mary Todd Lincoln. As a writer of children’s literature, Randall continued to choose as subjects women whose lives had been exciting and difficult, such as the daughter of the politician Thomas Hart Benton (I, Jessie, 1963) and the wife of General George Armstrong Custer (I, Elizabeth, 1966). I, Ruth: Autobiography of a Marriage (1968) reiterates the traditional virtues of American family life and the wife’s supporting role; the sensibility is preWorld War I. Randall wrote with a clear sense of purpose. Clarity of style, meticulous attention to details, evocative descriptions of the historical moments and places, and sensitivity to emotions make her history very readable. She not only reached specialist historians but had a wide public audience as well. OTHER WORKS: Colonel Elmer Elsworth (1960). I, Varina (1962). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1967). CB (1957). Other references: AHR (1953). NYHTB (5 June 1960). NYTBR (8 Feb. 1953, 3 Feb. 1957, 13 Oct. 1963). SR (16 Feb. 1957). —VELMA BOURGEOIS RICHMOND
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causes her to act capriciously. Bessie and Tom’s youthful affection matures into conjugal love. And although Loo converses coquettishly with every young bachelor who visits the Tremount home, she eventually is attracted to the man most like herself—an opportunistic playboy. These couples play the social games of courtship throughout the novel. Rather than pierce the surface of these drawing-room conversations and explore the deep and conflicting faces of love, Rankin developed conventional characters who conformed to the prescribed rounds of courtship. In the Tremount sisters’ reflections on their personal identities as women and discussions of woman’s role in society, Rankin explored the issue of women’s rights. Yet Mrs. Tremount’s assertion that woman ‘‘brightens and encourages’’ man ‘‘in his aspirations after fame’’ circumscribes the sphere into which her daughters settle. Esther Tremount’s singular notion of joining a woman’s group is forgotten in her devotion to Cecil Graham. His untimely death does not diminish the strength of Esther’s love but sanctifies it—she devotes her life to working with the poor. The commonplace twists of love in the other couples’ courtships provide contrast to Esther’s eternal love, which surmounts even death. The woman who ventured to think of social activism is transformed by love to a saintly provider for the poor. Rankin’s characters come to their predictable ends; however, Esther’s goodness is rewarded on a higher plane than a happy family of her own. She achieves a religious devotion in life and a sort of spiritual communion with her beloved. These moralistic outcomes and homely sentiment typical of the fiction of the day were criticized in a review in Godey’s Lady’s Book faulting the constant concern with ‘‘love, jealousy, and engagements, as if they were the staples of existence.’’ BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: American Fiction 1851-1875 (1965). A Supplement to Allibone’s Critical Dictionary (1891). Other references: Godey’s (Aug. 1874). —ELIZABETH ROBERTS
RANKIN, Fannie W. Born circa 1840s or 1850s; died death date unknown Wrote under: F. W. R. Biographical information on Fannie W. Rankin has not been found. Her novel, True to Him Ever (1874), typified 19th-century sentimentality. The action takes place in the Tremount family’s country home. Through the vicissitudes of the final pairing of eight young men and women, Rankin deals just desserts to an indomitable woman and her determined lover, two childhood sweethearts, a flirt and a dandy, and lovers at first sight. The women’s perceptions, hopes, and acts are the novel’s focus, while the men disappear to conduct their business in New York and return to the home sphere to cause anguish and delight again. Maude loves Harold, yet her earnest desire for liberty
RANOUS, Dora Knowlton (Thompson) Born 16 August 1859, Ashfield, Massachusetts; died 19 January 1916, New York, New York Daughter of Alexander H. and Augusta Knowlton Thompson; married William V. Ranous, 1881 An author, editor, and translator, Dora Knowlton Ranous was the younger of two daughters in a learned, affluent Massachusetts family. Their birthplace, the Knowlton Homestead, attracted such scholars as James Lowell during the summer months, ‘‘lending to Mrs. Thompson’s dinner table an air of scholarship.’’ Ranous graduated from the Sanderson Academy in Ashfield, completing her formal education at the Packer Institute in New York City.
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Ranous’s acting career was encouraged by her mother. In her journal, Ranous writes of the trials and tribulations of a young actress seeking her first engagement. These experiences were published in Ranous’ autobiographical Diary of a Daly Debutante (1910), an interesting period piece of theatrical life in the late 19th century. Ranous is unassuming but confident, describing numerous rehearsals and travels; her strength lies in vivid characterization of associates and friends. Newspaper and magazine reviews of the book were almost unanimously enthusiastic. Public reaction was also strong; readers evidently asked Ranous to continue the story by documenting later experiences with the Kiralfy Theatre Company. She continued writing a journal, but the manuscript remains unpublished. Ranous might not have found her literary career had her marriage succeeded. While part of the Kiralfy group, she met her husband and left the stage. But after the marriage dissolved, Ranous mastered stenography in order to earn a living for herself and her daughter. This led to work in rare books and editing. As a result, Ranous translated and edited works by authors such as de Maupassant, Flaubert, and D’Annunzio. In one of her early projects, Ranous initiated and completed (with Rossiter Johnson) a set of 16 volumes on the literature of Italy (1907), including translations and biographical notes on authors from the time of Dante to the early 20th century. Ranous’ last book, Good English in Good Form (1916), is a remarkably useful reference guide. A basic composition text, its topics include ‘‘The Art of Punctuation’’ and ‘‘Words and Sentences,’’ although lengthy chapters on ‘‘Words Derived from Latin and Greek’’ are perhaps less useful. Ranous’ literary contributions are remarkable in their diversity. It is difficult to ascertain her place among American writers, but her works are examples of concise, lucid prose, and her translations are strong. Ranous’ coeditors and translators eulogized her as one ‘‘of brilliant intellect,’’ with ‘‘great literary ability.’’ OTHER WORKS: The Conquest of Rome by M. Serao (translated by Ranous, 1906). The Flame by G. D’Annunzio (translated by Ranous, 1906). An Anthology of Italian Authors from Cavalcanti to Fogazzaro, 1270-1907 (edited by Ranous, with R. Johnson; 16 vols., 1907). The Complete Works of Guy de Maupassant (translated by Ranous, 1910). Zibeline by P. de Massa (translated by Ranous, 1910). Influence, and How to Exert It by B. D. Blanchard (translated by Ranous, 1916). Madame Bovary by G. Flaubert (translated by Ranous, 1919). Salammbo by G. Flaubert (translated by Ranous, 1922). Sentimental Education by G. Flaubert (translated by Ranous, 1922). The Temptation of Saint Antony, and the Legend of St. Julien the Hospitaler by G. Flaubert (translated by Ranous, 1923). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Johnson, R., Dora Knowlton Ranous: A Simple Record of a Noble Life (1916). Reference works: NCAB. —DEBORAH H. HOLDSTEIN
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RAWLINGS, Marjorie Kinnan Born 8 August 1896, Washington, D.C.; died 14 December 1973, Crescent Beach, Florida Daughter of Arthur F. and Ida May Traphagen Kinnan; married Charles A. Rawlings, 1919 (divorced); Norton S. Baskin, 1941 Daughter of a U.S. patent examiner, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Wisconsin 1918 with a major in English. Rawlings wrote for the Louisville Courier-Journal and the Rochester Journal-American from 1920 to 1928. Needing solitude, she bought an orange grove in Hawthorn, Florida, near Cross Creek, where she farmed and wrote from 1928 to 1947. Rawlings traveled in England, Alaska, and Bimini. Her marriage to a journalist ended in divorce (1933). Rawlings’ second husband was a hotel owner in St. Augustine. Sued for libel, Rawlings left Florida to buy a New York farm. Rawlings’ earliest published story was ‘‘Cracker Chidlings’’ (1930) in Scribner’s. Her humorous sketches about local figures contained accounts of a squirrel feast at a church picnic, domestic squabbling, and an explanation of ‘‘Cracker’’ as the whipcracking country cattle driver. In 1931, Scribner’s published ‘‘Jacob’s Ladder,’’ a sensitive odyssey of a young Cracker pair through storm-ridden piney woods and scrub. These were Rawlings’ continuing subjects: the human bond to the earth, and the Florida Crackers with their folklore, language, and struggles. South Moon Under (1933) received critical acclaim. Three generations of a Cracker family subsist in the Florida scrub. Old Lantry, an irascible loner and moonshiner, moves his family into obscurity to elude the law for murdering a Prohibition official. He gives up moonshining and tries to farm. His grandson, Lant Jacklin, forced to early manhood by his father’s death, labors at farming and trapping. Hardships finally compel Lant to moonshine. Betrayed, he repeats his grandfather’s crime and kills a man, condemning himself to a life of restless fear and flight. The moon of the title symbolizes the powerful necessity laid upon all creatures, men and animals, forcing them to act against their will. Moon lore abounds. Deer feed in the moonlight. ‘‘South moon under’’ meant that the moon was directly under the earth, unseen, and yet ‘‘it reached through the earth’’ with a ‘‘power to move the owls and rabbits,’’ and drive a man to kill. Despite Rawlings’ descriptions of the earth’s beauty, these dark lunar forces, the treachery of kin, the legacy of family violence, and the intractability of the wilderness, convey her somber vision of the human lot. Golden Apples (1935) describes an uneasy idyll between a frail ignorant Cracker girl and a callous, hard-drinking young English planter who comes to the fertile hummock to reclaim his father’s homestead. Rawlings deals more frankly than elsewhere with sexuality: Desire seems to rise up out of the steamy Florida undergrowth. But the man’s real view of the land is that it is a ‘‘damn rotten crawling place,’’ and when the girl he seduces looks ‘‘all eyes and belly’’ as she wordlessly kneels to clean his boots, he looks at her with repugnance. The girl dies in premature labor. A strange reconciliation takes place between her brother and her lover, as they join together to plant an orange grove.
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The Yearling (1938, reprinted many times, most recently in 1998; film version 1945) won the 1939 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Rawlings’ editor, Maxwell Perkins, liked her hunt and river scenes, and urged her to do a boy’s book. The Yearling’s theme is the passage from childhood to manhood for fourteen-year-old Jody Baxter. The plot is based on Jody’s adopting a baby fawn when its mother is slain. After 13 months, the fawn is no longer a baby but a yearling that destroys the family’s crops and whose wild nature cannot be subdued. Jody is at first unable to obey his father’s directive to kill the yearling, which has become a part of himself, but is forced to do so when his mother’s faulty aim wounds the creature. His grief drives him from home to a river journey, and he wishes for the death of his gentle father, who, it seems, has betrayed him. Jody’s homecoming shows him ready to put a child’s happiness behind him and embrace the lonely hardships of manhood.
bakes yet another. Romantic figures—an Indian, a gypsy queen— whose earthly vitality might be redemptive perish obscurely. The main character dies in an airplane, significantly separated from the earth, which he sees below him as a ‘‘battered planet.’’ Rawlings seeks to depict broad movements: the American rural dream shattered by the rise of a money economy, westward expansion, ‘‘progress,’’ and foreign war. However, the novel lacks the power of her earlier writing.
Rawlings creates a Floridian earthly paradise. With all its loveliness, however, this wilderness reveals to the growing boy many signs of nature’s cruelty. This sacrifice of the wild creature is a gesture implying that to attain maturity a man must quell his own rapturous, irresponsible, animal nature. Biblical echoes reinforce the end of innocence.
OTHER WORKS: Cross Creek Cookery (1942). The Secret River (1955). Poems by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings: Songs of a Housewife (1983). The Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Reader (1956, 1989). Selected Letters of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1997). The Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Collection is housed in the Rare Book Section at the University of Florida Library. Further papers are collected at the University of Georgia (Athens), University of Virginia (Charlottesville), Princeton University, and Yale University.
When the Whippoorwill (1940) collects Rawlings’s best magazine stories. Noteworthy is ‘‘Gal Young Un,’’ about a gaunt gray woman married for her wealth by a flashing opportunist. Several stories introduce Rawlings’s fine comic narrator, Quincey Dover, ‘‘a woman with a tongue sharp enough to slice soft bacon.’’ Others treat of moonshining, alligator hunting, and family life. In 1942, Rawlings published Cross Creek (reissued 1992), chronicling her years in this chosen spot. Rawlings describes the farmhouse, the tall old orange trees, the coral honeysuckle twisting on the wire fence. She gathers materials that will feed her fiction: scenes, animals, anecdotes, personalities. Her portraits of the neighbors whose lives she shared, notably of black women, are both humorous and painful, revealing her sure grasp on human realities. In ‘‘Hyacinth Drift,’’ two women, Rawlings and a friend, navigate several hundred miles of river in an 18-foot boat. Beset with cares, Rawlings had momentarily ‘‘lost touch with the Creek,’’ and this is a journey of renewal enabling her once again to long for home. ‘‘Because I had known intimately a river, the earth pulsed under me.’’ Cross Creek ranks as a classic of the American pastoral scene. Although she was admired as a regional writer, Rawlings’ ambivalence about this designation led her to approach new subjects. She believed a ‘‘great’’ writer could write anywhere, and she broke from Cross Creek. Her last novel, The Sojourner (1953), about a Hudson Valley farm after the Civil War, shows the strain. It spins a vision of mythic rural America. This dream of plenty is dissipated in the reality of family bitterness: the cheerful wife does not adore her husband; a brother abandons home on a doomed quest of silver and diamonds; a mad and treacherous mother-in-law allows a child to die in a snowstorm; a corrupt son drives a red Cadillac; stale apple pies fester uneaten and the wife
Rawlings belongs to the tradition of Thoreau and Whitman. Nature was cruel as well as beneficent, and she accepts the savagery as part of the cycle of living and dying. Her witty revelation of regional character and language places her in the mainstream of writers from Mark Twain on. Rawlings’ typical fictional perspective is that of a male, usually naive, forced to acknowledge the sinister side of a seductive pastoral world.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Acton, P. N., Invasion of Privacy: The Cross Creek Trial of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1988). Bellman, S., Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1974). Berg, A. S., Max Perkins, Editor of Genius (1978). Bigelow, G. E., Frontier Eden: The Literary Career of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1966). Bigelow, G. E., and L. V. Monti, eds., Selected Letters of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1983). Bigham, J. S., Introduction to The Marjorie Rawlings Reader (1956). Dana, E., ‘‘Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s Linguistic Mirror of Nature: An Ecological Criticism’’ (thesis, 1992). Dykstra, N. A., ‘‘Eve in the New World Garden: The Autobiographies of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Elinore Pruitt Stewart’’ (thesis, 1992). Greene, F. U., Forgotten Florida: Tales Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Didn’t Tell (1997). Knowles, K., ed., Celebrating the Land: Women’s Nature Writings, 1850-1991 (1992). Parker, I., Idella: Marjorie Rawlings’ ‘‘Perfect Maid’’ (1992). Parker, I., Idella Parker: From Reddick to Cross Creek (1999). Perkins, M. E., Max and Marjorie: The Correspondence Between Maxwell E. Perkins and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1999). Ribblett, D. L., From Cross Creek to Richmond: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Researches Ellen Glasgow (1986). Rose, P., The Norton Book of Women’s Lives (1993). Sammons, S. W., Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and the Florida Crackers (1995). Shaw, P. J., Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings: Her Life in Cross Creek, 1928-1953 (1982). Silverthorne, E., Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings: Sojourner at Cross Creek (1988). Tarr, R. L., Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings: A Descriptive Bibliography (1996). Turk, J. K., ‘‘A Grove of One’s Own: Crossing Boundaries in Selected Works by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’’ (thesis, 1996). Wiley, C. and Barnes, F. R., eds., Homemaking: Women Writers and the Politics and Poetics of Home (1996). Wilken, J. J., ‘‘Selected Letters of
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Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings to James Branch Cabell and Margaret Freeman Cabell’’ (thesis, 1993). Yurick, A. J., ‘‘A Matter of Need: Food and Fulfillment in Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ ‘Gal Young Un’’’ (thesis, 1997). Reference works: American Women Fiction Writers, Volume Three 1900-1960 (1998). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Collier’s (29 Sept. 1945). EJ 64 (1975). Family Circle (7 May 1943). NYT Sunday Travel Section (27 Jan. 1980). LJ (1977) —MARCELLE THIÉBAUX
READ, Harriette Fanning Born circa 1820s; Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts; died death date unknown Harriette Fanning Read was born to a family whose Irish ancestors came to the U.S. during the time of Cromwell’s government in England. Both parents wanted their daughter to be a ‘‘literary woman.’’ Read’s father, a publisher and bookseller, died when she was very young. After attending school briefly in Boston, she went with her mother to Washington, D.C., where they joined the household of an uncle, Colonel Fanning. Because of his career, they moved from one military post to another for a time, then returned to the Washington area, where they resided until Fanning’s death. In 1847, Read published Dramatic Poems (dated 1848), a collection of three plays, Medea, Erminia, and The New World. In 1848, Read made her acting debut at the Boston Theater. Her novel, The Haunted Student: A Romance of the Fourteenth Century, appeared in 1860. By 1865 Read was living in New York City. Medea stands out as the least typical and most interesting of Read’s three romantic tragedies, all written in blank verse and modeled after Shakespeare’s poetic diction and five-act structure. Perhaps because the classical myth imposes a simplicity of plot and unified tone, Medea has a powerful, elemental quality that usually avoids the declamatory bombast and sentimental clichés marring Erminia and The New World. Read follows Euripides’ version of the Greek myth, frequently quoting from his Medea, but she rearranges the story to emphasize the themes of blind passionate love and defiant individual freedom. The author’s choice of this particular Greek myth suggests an awareness of women’s frustrations over their limited roles in 19th-century American society. When Medea’s younger brother asks, ‘‘When shall I be a man?’’ we are reminded that the play raises questions about how we define man, woman, father,
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and mother in a society ruled by Creons and Jasons, who leave little choice between passive submission and extreme action in response to their inflexible and arbitrary dictates. As a prototype of what a talented, strong, and independent woman can do in a male-dominated society, Medea offers little hope besides selfdestructive defiance. Erminia: A Tale of Florence enacts a brittle, banal tragedy of love and intrigue. After rousing family and friends to revenge her honor after she is jilted by her fiancé, Erminia regrets her action when it is too late to save her lover from execution, and she dies of remorse and love for him. Like Medea, Erminia squanders her love on a man of power and ambition but little moral integrity. The New World takes place in Haiti against a background of native resentment of Spanish colonial exploitation. Two lovers, the Spanish noble Guevara, and Alana, the daughter of the local chief, commit suicide to cheat the island’s corrupt Spanish governor of his planned marriage with Alana. The Haunted Student is a romantic novel with a gothic setting, complete with chivalrous knights and corrupt priests, convents and castles, and secret passages, dungeons, and torture chambers. But love rather than brooding darkness and evil forms the center of the story, set in 14th-century Germany during the struggle between the feudal nobility and the emerging free cities of the Hanseatic League. The beautiful Countess Ludmila plans to ‘‘haunt’’ her betrothed, Albert of Rabenstein, in order to win his love and secure him from the influence of his mentor, Father Cyrillus, who intends to make Albert a monk so that his father, the Baron of Rabenstein, will have no heir. The characters rather than the elaborate plot provide unity and interest, particularly Ludmila and Father Cyrillus. Ludmila’s energetic impulsiveness wins our affection, and her imaginative intelligence, outspokenness, and refusal to wait passively upon events win our respect. The complex Father Cyrillus, a good man corrupted by a justified desire for revenge, confounds our impulse to wholly like or dislike him, a tension increased because Read withholds his motives for revenge until late in the novel. Ludmila’s stubborn insistence upon doing whatever she believes is necessary and right exemplifies the novel’s main theme of individual freedom: while her actions illustrate the theme, the methods may vary and woman’s strength, intelligence, and courage equal that of a man in achieving a desired goal. The Haunted Student is a competently written and pleasantly readable example of the romantic novel, but Read’s powerful tragedy Medea stands out as her greatest achievement. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Watts, E. S., The Poetry of American Women from 1632 to 1945 (1977). Reference works: American Female Poets (1853). Critical Dictionary of English and American Authors Living and Deceased (1900). —MELANIE YOUNG
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READ, Martha
REED, Kit
Born circa 1780s; died death date unknown
Born Lillian Hyde Craig, 7 June 1932, San Diego, California Writes under: Kit Reed, Kit Craig, Shelley Hyde Daughter of John R. and Lillian Hyde Craig; married Joseph W. Reed, 1955; children: Joseph, John, Katherine
Martha Read’s only work, Monima; or, The Beggar Girl: A Novel (1802), reveals the author’s conscious control of plot and structure. In her dedication and preface to this long narrative, Read offers the conventional apology for the work’s defects and places a conventional stress on the novel’s foundation on fact. But she also hints at a developed aesthetic that her story will illustrate—adherence to truth and to nature, Read feels, determines a novel’s artistic success. The plot is thus simpler than those of many of the novels of late-18th and early-19th-century America and the principal characters are fewer. Set in Philadelphia in the early 1790s, the novel immediately focuses on Monima Fontanbleu, a beautiful seamstress of sixteen, and her old father, who have fallen upon hard times. Monima has lost her position with Madame Ursala Sontine, a selfish woman who fears her virtuous husband’s attraction to the young woman. The narrative grows naturally out of this situation as Madame Sontine repeatedly tries to remove Monima—by confinement to the workhouse, to her own country estate, and to a hospital for the insane—from possible contact with her husband. Ursala is abetted in her machinations first by her pliable maid, by her unscrupulous brother, and later by Pierre De Noix, an acquaintance of Sontine’s who becomes Ursala’s lover and who soon himself develops lecherous designs on Monima. Monima escapes from all these incarcerations, and even gains small sums through infrequent employment and occasional begging. Monsieur Sontine is attracted to Monima—but merely as a brotherly benefactor— and seeks to aid her, only sometimes succeeding because of his wife’s elaborate plotting. Read’s aesthetic principles seem clear. Actions are motivated by character, and the author emphasizes the historicity of her material. Read does not avoid unpleasant details despite the novel’s many sentimental scenes (primarily concerning Monima’s begging). The novel also contains sharply observed humor as Read exploits American prejudices against the French and satirizes the romantic plots of many of her contemporaries. Read’s themes are not original—American purity and innocence will triumph, and a happy marriage is the just reward for female virtue—but her technique and conscious attempt to realize aesthetic principles distinguish Monima from other novels of the period.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brown, H. R., The Sentimental Novel in America: 1789-1860 (1940). Petter, H., The Early American Novel (1971). Other references: American Review and Literary Journal (1802). —CAROLINE ZILBOORG
A graduate of the College of Notre Dame in Maryland (B.A., 1954), Kit Reed began her career as a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times in Florida before moving to Connecticut to work for newspapers there beginning in 1956; she won the New England Newspaperwoman of the Year award in 1958 and 1959. Since 1974 she has taught creative writing at Wesleyan University. Her fiction is richly colored with the very different settings of Florida and New England. She has held Guggenheim Foundation grants (1964, 1968) and an Aspen Institute Rockefeller Fellowship (1976), and in 1965 became the first American recipient of a five-year literary grant from the Abraham Woursell Foundation. Reed has published short fiction in over 60 anthologies and in American and international magazines. A short story, ‘‘The Singing Marine,’’ was nominated for the World Fantasy Award in 1996. Although Reed has published in several fields, she is best known for her novels of self-discovery and for her science fiction. From her earliest novel, Mother Isn’t Dead, She’s Only Sleeping (1961), which satirically confronts the pieties around aging, Reed has defied convention. The source of her defiance is moral indignation, even outrage; her most typical response is edgy humor and satire. Disillusionment is a common theme in Reed’s portrayal of character. Often outsiders seeking acceptance, her characters invariably come to recognize their own romanticism as well as the shallowness of the conventions they’ve been pursuing. They realize as well the need to create their own world to make up for the failures of what exists. Reed’s characters are sometimes overburdened with meaning, cast into allegorical structures reflecting her concern with the moral subtext of her fictions. Reed’s ventures into novels of self-discovery have been warmly received by critics. The Better Part (1967) and Tiger Rag (1973) are stories of adolescent girls coming into maturity under difficult circumstances, acutely aware of their status as outsiders. Tiger Rag, like the earlier Cry of the Daughter (1971), focuses on struggles between children and a mother who is proud, stubborn, and controlling, although perhaps not intentionally so. In The Ballad of T. Rantula (1979), one of Reed’s most critically successful coming-of-age novels, her speaker, the adolescent Futch, uses a relaxed colloquial voice reminiscent of Holden Caulfield in J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. Futch’s voice is both difficult and believable as he narrates a year of his life during which his parents split up and his two best friends go through changes he can neither understand nor control. Those with whom he has been most close are moving away from him and no adult will level with him; the adults are oblivious and foolish,
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the children remarkably sensitive and conscious of what is happening around them. T. Rantula was named to the American Library Association list of Best Books for Young Adults for 1979. Self-discovery is also the theme of one of Reed’s best-known adult novels, Catholic Girls (1987), the story of four graduates of a Catholic women’s college who reconverge at a bizarre funeral. Like an earlier work, Captain Grownup (1976), the book focuses on middle-aged characters whose internal growth seems incomplete; Reed allows each to come to a comfortable catharsis by the end. The success of the novel rests in the ambiguous Kath, who has consciously abandoned Catholicism. She is spiritually hungry, filled with nagging, inescapable remnants of her Catholic past; in the end, she is inspired toward her own freedom and vision, although it remains unclear whether this is a sign of something deep and powerful or is merely delusional. In the 1996 mainstream novel J. Eden, three families decide to rent a farmhouse together for the summer ‘‘so the parents could. . .stretch and grow and OK, find themselves.’’ The children play and squabble; the adults circle each other, their hidden feelings finally simmering to the surface. Every chapter is narrated by a different character, each of whom reports the same events with powerfully different emotional reactions. At first close friends, their story moves through revelations of professional envy, fear of aging and failure, despair in unfulfilled lives, adultery, and parental neglect toward a tragic ending. The various dark, enclosed spaces that set the stage for the drama—spooky barn, mysterious shed, frightening cave—suggest the hidden dark spaces within each character. Although Reed’s style and themes have remained essentially consistent through her many books, she has experimented widely with genres. Her first science fiction novel was the horrific Armed Camps (1969), in which her protagonists struggle to retain their humanity in an overmechanized world where war is the norm; others include Magic Time (1980), Blood Fever (1982), Fort Privilege (1985), and Little Sisters of the Apocalypse (1994). In Magic Time, the story of four characters attempting to escape a violent and fascist Disney World-like vacation park, she creates a prefabricated, allegorical world of concentrated authoritarianism. The novel is written in four voices, following the thoughts of the characters as they seek a way out of ‘‘Happy Habitat.’’ Here, as elsewhere, Reed’s attraction toward allegory controls the characters and their setting. Her fondness for painting social and temperamental contrasts is vividly indulged in Fort Privilege, in which maddened poor besiege the aging rich in a deteriorating near-future New York. Little Sisters of the Apocalypse is another story of war and what it does to women: it renders them self-paralyzed, turns them into creatures of waiting. A town of women stashed on safe, beautiful Schell Isle grapple not only with their ambivalent feelings toward the eventual return of their belligerent men but with the bizarre arrival of 16 nuns on motorcycles—the Little Sisters of the Apocalypse. This short novel was a nominee for the James Tiptree award, which is given to works exploring or expanding gender roles in science fiction and fantasy.
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Weird Women, Wired Women (1998) is typical of Reed’s collections of short fiction. Assembling stories written between 1958 and 1996, the book presents vision after gruesome vision of the tormented relationships between mothers and children, between men and women, and between women and themselves. In ‘‘Songs of War,’’ an army of unhappy housewives and lesbians start an actual war against the men in their town, but they are merely humored, and when they finally drift back home, ‘‘things went on more or less as they had before.’’ In the horrifying ‘‘The Hall of New Faces,’’ an aging mother undergoes radical facial surgery with a plaintive cry against peer pressure and the unfair demands society makes of women: ‘‘We all hate what age does to our faces, but there are worse things. . . . We hate ourselves when what we ought to hate is what people do to us.’’ In ‘‘Last Fridays,’’ several women who regularly meet for boastful but uncomfortable discussions about their role in raising their children are gradually revealed to be the mothers of serial killers. In two novels published in 1993, Reed embarked in a different direction. Gone and Twice Burned, both written as Kit Craig, are psychological thrillers. Critics consistently note the intensity of Reed’s fictions. John Clute has described Reed’s style as ‘‘prepubescent in its clean, clear tone, and. . .ominously pregnant with meaning.’’ Frank Kermode praised Armed Camps for offering a ‘‘new imaginative intensity and a power of communicating insights as dark as they are compassionate.’’ Reed has a particular ability, one reviewer noted, to ‘‘metamorphose the ordinary into the macabre.’’ She has often been compared with Shirley Jackson. In addition to novels, collections, and Fat (1974) (an anthology of personal writings about obesity, edited with an introduction by Reed), she has provided direct, sensible advice to writers in handbooks, the central theme of which is characterized by the title of a 1989 volume, Revision. OTHER WORKS: At War as Children (1964). Lighthouse: A Story (1966). When We Dream (1967). Mister da V., and Other Stories (1967). Love Story (1971). The Killer Mice (1976). The Bathyscaphe, (radio play, 1978). Other Stories and: The Attack of the Giant Baby (1981). The Savage Stain, (as Shelley Hyde 1982). Story First: The Writer as Insider, (with Joseph Reed 1982, reissued as Mastering Fiction Writing, 1991) The Revenge of the Senior Citizens (1986). Thief of Lives: Stories (1992). Strait (1995). Closer (1997). Some Safe Place (1999). Seven for the Apocalypse (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1967). CANR (1986, 1992). Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). SATA (1984). Science Fiction Source Book (1984). St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers (1996). WW in America (1982). WW of Writers, Editors, and Poets (1989). WW in Entertainment (1988). Other references: America (26 Dec. 1987). Best Sellers (1 July 1970, 1 Apr. 1971). Booklist (15 Mar. 1998). Books and Bookmen (Mar. 1968). Boston Globe (17 Mar. 1996). Dream Makers (1983). LATBR (21 Apr. 1996). LJ (1 May 1992). LAT (25
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Dec. 1992). Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (Dec. 1980). Newsweek (19 Apr. 1976, 22 June 1992). New Leader (4 June 1979). NYTBR (8 Mar 1964, 4 July 1976, 17 June 1979, 1 Mar 1981, 1 Nov. 1987, 12 July 1992, 17 Jan. 1993, 21 Apr. 1996, 19 July 1998). PW (24 July 1987). Science Fiction Chronicle (Nov. 1991). WP (20 Nov. 1992). WRB (1995). —ROBERT BONAZOLI, UPDATED BY FIONA KELLEGHAN
REED, Myrtle Born 27 September 1874, Norwood Park, Illinois; died 17 August 1911, Chicago, Illinois Also wrote under: Olive Green, Katherine LaFarge Norton Daughter of Hiram V. and Elizabeth Armstrong Reed; married James S. McCullough, 1906 Myrtle Reed was born of distinguished parents: her father, a preacher, established Chicago’s first literary magazine, the Lakeside Monthly, and her mother was a scholar of oriental literature and comparative religion. Reed’s parents encouraged her to be a writer, and she began her literary apprenticeship with her high school paper, advancing to freelance writing upon her graduation. Her first novel, Love Letters of a Musician (1899), was an immense success and established Reed as a romantic writer. Her marriage, however, did not live up to her romantic ideals, and her separation precipitated her suicide. In addition to her poetry and fiction, Reed also wrote cookbooks under the pseudonym of Olive Green and domestic articles under the pseudonym of Katherine LaFarge Norton. She is best known, however, for her many popular novels. Joseph Kesselring transformed her second novel, Lavender and Old Lace (1902), into the popular play Arsenic and Old Lace (1941), which was later made into a wonderfully funny film. Reed’s novels are formulaic at best. Each contains at least one Dickensian caricature. There are always two heroines, generally competing for the same man. When a middle-aged woman is involved, she has invariably, been separated from her ‘‘one true love’’ and is of course reunited with him by the novel’s end. Each novel is interrupted at least once by ‘‘philosophical’’ commentary on the nature of love and destiny. The later novels even include a smattering of telepathic communication and precognitive dreams. Typical of Reed’s novels is A Spinner in the Sun (1906), in which the heroine Evelina Grey had supposedly been disfigured when she saved her fiancé from injury in an explosion in his lab. The fiancé leaves Evelina and marries someone else, while for the next 25 years Evelina keeps a chiffon veil over her face. Evelina’s face, however, was not disfigured, only her shoulder and arms; she wears the veil to hide the beauty that has caused her so much sorrow. Eventually, Evelina forgives the ex-fiancé (after his suicide), discovers she loves a man far more worthy of her, and casts off the veil forever.
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Reed’s most interesting novel is her last, A Weaver of Dreams (1911), which concerns Judith and Margery and their love for the same man, Carter Keith. Although initially engaged to Judith, Carter discovers that Margery is the woman fate intended for him. Upon discovering the truth, Judith graciously releases him. What makes the novel an oddity is that Reed does not conjure up another man for Judith. As the novel ends, Judith is alone and bereft but determined to face the future with courage and dignity. Completed shortly before Reed’s suicide, this conclusion serves as an ironic epitaph for the author.
OTHER WORKS: Later Love Letters of a Musician (1900). The Spinster Book (1901). White Shield (1902). Pickaback Songs (1903). The Shadow of Victory (1903). The Book of Clever Beasts (1904). The Master’s Violin (1904). At the Sign of the Jack o’ Lantern (1905). Everyday Luncheons (1906). What to Have for Breakfast (1906). How to Cook Shell-Fish (1907). Love Affairs of Literary Men (1907). One Thousand Simple Soups (1907). Flower of the Dusk (1908). How to Cook Fish (1908). How to Cook Meat and Poultry (1908). How to Cook Vegetables (1909). Old Rose and Silver (1909). Master of the Vineyard (1910). Sonnets to a Lover (1910). Everyday Desserts (1911). Everyday Dinners (1911). The Myrtle Reed Year Book (1911). The White Shield (1912). Happy Women (1913). Threads of Grey and Gold (1913). A Woman’s Career (1914). The Myrtle Reed Cook Book (1916).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Colson, E. S., and N. B. Carson, Myrtle Reed (1911). Powell, M. B., Foreword to The Myrtle Reed Year Book (1911). Reference works: DAB. NAW (1971). NCAB. —CYNTHIA L. WALKER
REESE, Lizette Woodworth Born 9 January 1856, Waverly, Maryland; died 17 December 1935, Baltimore, Maryland Daughter of David and Louisa Reese Lizette Woodworth Reese’s life as a child and young woman in Waverly, a suburban village of Baltimore, provided the material for most of her writing, both poetry and prose. In Reese’s poems and reminiscences, Waverly becomes the symbol for a time and a value system more stable than those of the present. Reese not only grew up in Waverly but began her long teaching career in the local parish school. Her first poem, ‘‘The Deserted House,’’ appeared in the Southern Magazine in June 1874. From this time until her death, Reese continued to write lyric poetry that was of fairly consistent quality. Reese’s first volume of poetry, A Branch of May (1887), was privately printed through subscriptions from friends. This volume
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of 33 poems was sent to several of the leading critics of the day, all of whom received it favorably. Reese’s reputation grew with A Handful of Lavendar (1891), which was published by a national publisher. The subject matter and style of Reese’s poetry remained constant through her subsequent volumes. Her subjects are the eternal truths of life and death—joy and sorrow, expressed in images drawn from Reese’s childhood experiences in the Maryland countryside and readings in English literature. Her best poems make arrestingly fresh use of images from ordinary experience; her central images are of village and orchard. The orchard becomes a primary image, for, as Reese says, ‘‘although not so open as the lane, or so secret as the wood, it keeps the free heart of the one, and somewhat of the privileged quiet of the other.’’ Reese was generally praised for the freshness of her images in a time when most lyric poetry was marked by the tired conventions of excessive and archaic expression. Her forte was the short lyric, but she was also an accomplished sonneteer. Her best known poem was the sonnet ‘‘Tears,’’ which first appeared in Scribner’s magazine in 1899 and was repeatedly anthologized. The poem presents a series of arresting metaphors about the futility of grieving over the fugitive cares of life. Although primarily a lyric poet, Reese published one successful long narrative poem, Little Henrietta (1927), and was at the time of her death working on another, which was published posthumously as The Old House in the Country (1936). Little Henrietta probes the grief and eventual reconciliation over the death of a young child, and The Old House is an attempt to unify the diverse recollections of childhood memories. Childhood memories form the substance of two volumes of autobiographical reminiscence, A Victorian Village (1929) and The York Road (1931). These prose works poetically present the recollections and associations brought to Reese’s mind by people, places, and events from her childhood and young adulthood. At the time of her death, Reese was re-working these experiences into an autobiographical novel, published posthumously as Worleys (1936). Reese is neglected today, although she was one of the finest poets writing during the last decade of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th. She is a transition figure between the stylized conventions of the Victorian poets and the free form and subject matter of the moderns. At its best, Reese’s poetry is characterized by a striking intensity and freshness of image.
OTHER WORKS: A Quiet Road (1896). A Wayside Lute (1909). Spicewood (1920). Wild Cherry (1923). The Selected Poems (1926). White April, and Other Poems (1930). Pastures, and Other Poems (1933).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Gregory, H., and M. Zaturenska, A History of American Poetry, 1900-1940 (1946). Klein, L. R. M., ‘‘Lizette
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Woodworth Reese’’ (dissertation, 1943). Rittenhouse, J. B., in The Younger American Poets (1906). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Personalist (1900). SAQ (April 1930, Jan. 1957). SUS (1969). —HARRIETTE CUTTINO BUCHANAN
REMICK, Martha Born 11 June 1832, Kittery, Maine; died 11 April 1906, Everett, Massachusetts Daughter of Rufus and Sally Cram Remick The youngest daughter of a shipwright and farmer who had earned a lieutenancy in the War of 1812, Martha Remick never married, dedicating her life to writing. A family genealogy, the only source of biographical information on Remick, describes her as ‘‘unmarried, authoress and poetess.’’ In the preface to Agnes Stanhope: A Tale of English Life (1862), Remick declares her purpose to show the ‘‘ever-present providence of God,’’ but the novel is a romantic thriller that entertains far more than it elevates. Agnes, a heedless young girl, elopes with her sister Bertha’s fiancé Howard. Howard soon turns to cards, whiskey, and evil companions. One of these takes Howard to visit his soon-to-be-discarded mistress Helen, who has planned to poison her faithless lover with arsenic-laced champagne. Howard accidentally drinks the potion, then staggers home to die. Accused of Howard’s murder and condemned to die, Agnes escapes to Italy, where she meets and marries De Lacey, Helen’s brother, who knows nothing of his sister’s fallen life. They return to England, where Agnes is hard-pressed to conceal her identity. The conscience-stricken Helen does finally confess, and Agnes and De Lacey’s happiness is assured. Millicent Halford: A Tale of the Dark Days of Kentucky in the Year 1861 (1865), the story of a Massachusetts girl who goes to live with her slave-owning relatives in Kentucky, is a pro-North Civil War romance. Millicent is appalled by her first exposure to whippings and slave sales. Fred, one of Millicent’s Kentucky cousins, agrees with her and joins the Union army; his brother, James, is a supporter of the Confederacy. Fred survives the war and marries Millicent. Using the brothers as symbols of North and South, Remick deliberately leaves James’ fate in question, just as the fate of the defeated South was in question when the book was written. Richard Ireton: A Tale from the Early Settlement of New England (1875), purporting to be a tale of early American Puritans and Quakers, is actually another romantic thriller. Remick’s few forays into New England history here produce dancing, partygoing Puritans, gaudily clad Quakers, and battle scenes from the French and Indian War that are set in 1681. Remick’s heroines tend to be impossibly virtuous and pallid. To move her somewhat creaky plots forward, she relies heavily on
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the overworked device of ‘‘had she but known the tragedies that would befall her.’’ Despite these flaws, Remick is a talented writer whose heroes and villains alike are flawed, realistic, and sympathetic characters. Her villains have elements of kindness, gentleness, and even nobility, while her heroes have streaks of pride and selfishness. She also offers no simple, moralistic solutions to life’s tragedies. The modern reader would still find these books entertaining and worthwhile. OTHER WORKS: Miscellaneous Poems (1901; available only at the libraries of Brown University and the University of Chicago.) BIBLIOGRAPHY: Remick, O. P., Geneaology of the Remick Family (1893). Reference works: A Critical Dictionary of English and American Authors (1891).
‘‘Surely you are not so unprogressive to think woman’s career limited to the needle and the nursery?’’ asks Miss Hampton, an aspiring painter, of her admirer. Although the novel is uneven, marred by emotional traumas unrelated to Reno’s purpose, the heroine does realize, after her marriage has settled into sameness, that she is indeed culturally and intellectually starved. The novel ends with a compromise: She will stay with her husband (who had earlier forbidden her interest in art), but her days will be devoted to painting, his to his business—and their evenings to each other. Considering the expectations of Reno’s social class, the modern solution for her heroine’s predicament is quite admirable. Reno’s novels are conventional and unremarkable, adhering to the directives of social manner and breeding. But An Exceptional Case is precisely that for its faint glimmer of feminism, especially in light of the highly structured milieu in which it was written.
—ZOHARA BOYD
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: AW (1904). —DEBORAH H. HOLDSTEIN
RENO, Itti Kinney Born 17 May 1862, Nashville, Tennessee; died death date unknown Also wrote under: ‘‘A Nashville Pen’’ Daughter of Colonel George S. Kinney; married Robert R. Reno, 1885 Described in a biographical reference as a ‘‘high-strung, imaginative child, remarkably bright and precocious,’’ Itti Kinney Reno was known as a novelist and social leader, ‘‘marked by the brilliance that wealth and social influence confer.’’ Reno attended a convent in Kentucky, later marrying after a successful social debut. Reno began writing ‘‘for amusement,’’ and through family connections published Miss Breckenridge: A Daughter of Dixie in 1890. In this novel, Reno seems determined to show the extent of her learning and good breeding; she ‘‘namedrops,’’ citing authors even when they are irrelevant to the narrative. Complete with a sympathetic ‘‘Mammy’’ whose dialogue is conveyed in dialect, the novel is a wholly conventional tale of a Southern belle (of great athletic skill and personal charm) torn between two lovers. The story is predictably simple: In one episode, the heroine Cleo lapses into hysteria when the man she loves is called away to his ill mother; in another, ‘‘an unknown woman’’ arrives to tell Cleo her lover has fathered a child. The expected complications, of course, are resolved through the noble efforts of the rejected suitor, and Cleo is reunited with her love. An Exceptional Case (1891) is more than a narrative of conventional southern manners. It begins within the idiom of social-romantic banter, as ‘‘lips silenced their music in the lover’s smile that came to him at the sight of the beautiful girl,’’ and Reno’s name-dropping continues. Yet while she stresses ‘‘that nameless charm. . .the signet that Refinement gives to the children of Birth and Breeding,’’ the novel marks an early attempt at feminism.
REPPLIER, Agnes Born 1 April 1855, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; died 16 December 1950, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Daughter of John G. and Ages Mathias Repplier Agnes Repplier did not learn to read until she was almost ten. Her formal education was limited to two years at the Convent of the Sacred Heart and three terms at Miss Irwin’s School in Philadelphia. Both schools dismissed her because of independent behavior, so Repplier was entirely self-educated after the age of sixteen. Her intensive reading was augmented by numerous trips (the first in 1890) and long periods of residence in Europe. Urged by her mother, Repplier began publishing at sixteen to increase the family’s income when her father’s fortune collapsed, and throughout her life she loyally supported her family. Repplier’s first writings were stories and sketches for Philadelphia newspapers. After publishing ‘‘In Arcady’’ in Catholic World (1881), the editor urged Repplier to write essays, since she knew a great deal about books and not much about life. This set the direction of her career, for she made the familiar essay distinctively her own form—witty, graceful, and richly textured with allusions from her vast reading. In 1886 Repplier was accepted by the American literary establishment. ‘‘Children, Past and Present’’ appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. Here she continued to publish frequently—90 essays in all, the last in 1940. A highly disciplined writer, Repplier was determined from the start her work would have permanence. In 1888 she arranged the first of many collections, Books and Men, which included the first seven essays from Atlantic Monthly.
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Similar volumes appeared throughout the years. Repplier was a popular public lecturer, noted for her sharp perceptions, lively manner, and witty expression. A plain child and woman with an incisive mind and quick wit, Repplier never married. She thought the feminist cause a just one and opposed any kind of discrimination. She had, however, no use for reformers in any area because of their excessive claims and simplistic and sentimental solutions. ‘‘Woman Enthroned’’ presents her case, as do ‘‘The Strayed Prohibitionist’’ and ‘‘Consolations of the Conservative.’’ For Repplier, happiness was fleeting and lay in ‘‘the development of individual tastes and acquirements.’’ The urbane stance is typical of Repplier; however, before U.S. involvement in World War I, Repplier argued passionately for several years against neutrality, collaborating with Dr. J. W. White on a pamphlet, Germany and Democracy (1914), and writing many essays, collected in Counter-Currents (1916). A lifelong and devout Roman Catholic, Repplier wrote from a strong ethical code that provided a firm base for her relentlessly skeptical view of human performance. Repplier’s specifically Catholic writings are among her most successful and include a merry autobiography, In Our Convent Days (1905), and three distinguished biographies of American religious leaders: Père Marquette (1929), Mère Marie of the Ursulines (1931), and Junipero Serra (1933). Addressing herself to a wide range of literary subjects and social change for more than half a century, Repplier was usually provocative but rarely inelegant in her commentary. Her familiar essays provide a distinctive and pleasing alternative to the prevailing realism of American literature. Perhaps Repplier’s most characteristic mode is epitomized by two collections separated by half her writing career, A Happy Half-Century (1908) and In Pursuit of Laughter (1936). Repplier’s range is broad, but her audience was always a select and patrician one. OTHER WORKS: Points of View (1889). A Book of Famous Verse (edited by Repplier, 1892). Essays in Miniature (1892). Essays in Idleness (1893). In the Dozy Hours, and Other Papers (1894). Varia (1897). Philadelphia: The Place and the People (1898). The Fireside Sphinx (1901). Compromises (1904). Americans and Others (1912). The Cat, Being a Record of the Endearments and Invectives Lavished by Many Writers (1912). J. William White, M.D.: A Biography (1919). Points of Friction (1920). Under Dispute (1924). Times and Tendencies (1931). To Think of Tea! (1932). Agnes Irwin (1934). Eight Decades (1937). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Repplier, E., Agnes Repplier: A Memoir by Her Niece (1957). Stokes, G. S., Agnes Repplier: Lady of Letters (1949). Reference works: Catholic Authors: Contemporary Biographical Sketches, 1930-1947 (1948). DAB. NAW (1971). NCAB. Oxford Companion toWomen’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Nation (29 Nov. 1933). NYHTB (13 Jan. 1929, 29 Nov. 1931). SR (23 Dec. 1933). YR (March 1937). —VELMA BOURGEOIS RICHMOND
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RICE, Alice (Caldwell) Hegan Born 11 January 1870, Shelbyville, Kentucky; died 10 February 1942, Louisville, Kentucky Also wrote under: Alice Caldwell Hegan Daughter of Samuel W. and Sallie Caldwell Hegan; married Cale Y. Rice, 1902 Alice Hegan Rice was born and raised in Kentucky, the setting for most of her fiction. She married Rice shortly after the publication of her first book. They traveled widely in Asia and Europe, associating with many of the most prominent literary figures of the 20th century. Their permanent home was Louisville. Though he was primarily a poet and she a writer of fiction, they worked closely together, publishing short stories by each of them in three collections (Turn About Tales, 1920; Winners and Losers, 1925; and Passionate Follies, 1936). Rice also published an autobiography (The Inky Way, 1940) and two collections of religious meditations (My Pillow Book, 1937, and Happiness Road, completed by her husband in 1942). Rice’s best works are set among Kentucky’s poor, particularly the urban poor whom she came to know as a volunteer settlement worker. Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (1901), inspired by a real person and a slum area in Louisville, is noteworthy both for its fidelity to the facts of the lives of poor urban whites and for the gentle humor with which it depicts their characters. These are the ‘‘deserving poor,’’ honest and willing to work. Mrs. Wiggs, a widow with five children, is poor and illiterate but wise and proud; she straightens out the personal lives of the wealthy young woman and man who, in turn, give her surviving children a chance to make something of themselves. The novel’s humor comes from its use of dialect, from Mrs. Wiggs’ malapropisms, and from the children’s pranks and mishaps. Lovey Mary (1903) is a sequel about an orphan girl who flees the orphanage and is taken in by Mrs. Wiggs and her friends. Both novels are trite and sentimental in plot, but their restraint and gently comic tone keep them from becoming mawkish. Four other novels center on poor but meritorious characters trying to make their way in a hostile world. Sandy (1905), loosely based on the experiences of the magazine editor S. S. McClure, tells of a Scottish waif finally lucky enough to be taken in by a wealthy Kentuckian. Also dealing with an adolescent boy is Our Ernie (1939), whose title character quits school at fourteen to support his loving but feckless family. He rises in the business world, becoming entangled with the daughter of his employer, but in a reversal of the Horatio Alger motif, frees himself from her while retaining his position. A rather melodramatic subplot concerns German spies. Rice’s dedication describes it as ‘‘a happy book about funny people,’’ a valid description for most of her novels. Mr. Pete & Co. (1933) tells of a middle-aged derelict who returns home to Louisville when he inherits a riverfront tenement. The unaccustomed responsibility for the building and its inhabitants regenerates him, and by novel’s end he has instigated an urban renewal project and transformed the lives of his tenants.
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Rice’s most ambitious attempt to depict urban poverty and inspire reform is Calvary Alley (1917), which recounts the life of Nance Molloy, at eleven a mistress of gang-fighting techniques, later a reform school inmate, and then a factory worker. Through much of the novel her prime goal is to escape the slum, but she matures and through hard work and good luck becomes a nurse in a clinic serving her people. Rice was disappointed that this book was generally received as another comic novel rather than as the serious indictment of slum conditions she intended. Most of Rice’s other novels concern family situations, the central characters bearing responsibility for unworldly and eccentric relatives. Particularly interesting is The Buffer: A Novel (1929), which centers on Cynthia Freer, an aspiring writer who is strong and self-sacrificing but has a sense of humor. At the novel’s conventional happy ending, she seems to be ready to subordinate her literary ambitions to marriage—but she takes the manuscript of her novel with her. Though readable and amusing, Rice’s novels are lacking in roundness of characterization or thematic depth. Compared to the works of her naturalistic contemporaries, who used many similar materials, her treatments seem shallowly optimistic. She had few pretensions, however, always considering her husband’s serious poetry more important than her own light fiction. But his work is largely forgotten today, while at least one of her characters, Mrs. Wiggs, still lives. OTHER WORKS: Captain June (1907). Mr. Opp (1909). A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill (1912). The Honorable Percival (1914). Miss Mink’s Soldier, and Other Stories (1918). Quinn (1921). The Lark Legacy (1935). Passionate Follies: Alternate Tales (with C. Y. Rice, 1936). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Overton, G., The Women Who Make Our Novels (1919). Other references: Book News Monthly (Oct. 1909). Boston Transcript (31 Oct. 1917, 14 Sept. 1921, 23 Sept. 1933). NYHTB (10 Nov. 1940). —MARY JEAN DEMARR
RICE, Anne Born Howard Allen O’Brien, 4 October 1941, New Orleans, Louisiana Also writes under: Anne Rampling, A. N. Roquelaure Daughter of Katherine and Howard O’Brien; married Stan Rice, 1961; children: Michele (deceased), Christopher New Orleans and the Catholic church have been central to Anne Rice’s life. She was born and brought up in the Irish Channel, a working-class, ethnic neighborhood in the city. Her father, after whom she was named (she changed her name to Anne
when she began school), was a post office worker, and her mother maintained a strictly Catholic and very Southern household. Born not in but on the fringe of the wealthy Garden District, Rice spent her childhood wandering the distinct neighborhoods of New Orleans, and many of her novels capture the sense of the old Creole city. Shortly after her mother’s death, Rice was moved from the Catholic church and New Orleans to Richardson, Texas, with her father and his new wife. There she attended Richardson High School (where she met her husband, Stan, whose poetry she sometimes includes in her own works) and Texas Women’s University, eventually moving on to San Francisco State College. She received her B.A. in political science and creative writing in 1964, her M.A. in creative writing in 1971, and did further graduate work at the University of California at Berkeley. Stan Rice was already writing poetry and Anne had a short story, ‘‘October 4, 1948’’ (1965), published in Transfer, but after the death of their daughter from leukemia in 1972, Rice took up writing seriously at her husband’s suggestion, and her first novel, Interview with the Vampire (1976), became an instant publishing success. All of her books have continued to sell at a phenomenal rate. While she did not immediately return to the Vampire Chronicles after the success of the first, Rice later added more to the series, including: The Vampire Lestat (1985), Queen of the Damned (1988), and The Tale of the Body Thief (1992). The vampire series is responsible for much of Rice’s fame as a cult writer. There are elements in the novels, however, that touch on the deeper issues of good and evil, salvation and damnation. Louis, the vampire of her first novel, is a tormented creature who longs for companionship. He finds it briefly in Claudia, a child vampire whom he creates, and in a vampire community that gives him the illusion that he is almost human. Interview with the Vampire brings out the best in Rice’s writing. It captures her impeccable sense of place and her sense of how people become haunted and lost, and integrates these elements with the implacable sense of loneliness that one feels after great loss. Claudia’s death in the novel is almost an elegy for her own daughter. For almost 10 years after her success, Rice turned away from the Vampire Chronicles and wrote historical fiction, popular novels, and erotica. The Feast of All Saints (1980) and Cry to Heaven (1982) are carefully researched historical novels that examine respectively the lives of free people of color in New Orleans in the decades before the Civil War and of castrati in 18th-century Italy. Both deal with people on the outside, and Rice’s empathy for the outcast is palpable. Culturally, the free blacks of Feast of All Saints are as restricted in their movements as Rice’s vampires who can only come out at night, and the castrati of Cry to Heaven long for normal human lives as much as Louis the vampire does. Writing as A. N. Roquelaure, Rice released a trilogy of erotica—The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983), Beauty’s Punishment (1984), and Beauty’s Release (1985)—with the classic children’s character Sleeping Beauty as the focus. Highly titillating in content alone, Rice’s wonderful writing style enhances the story and then continues to shock the reader with themes of sadomasochism and bondage as she brings leather and lace together in the trilogy.
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In 1985 in The Vampire Lestat, Rice brings back Louis’ teacher/father, Lestat, the powerful vampire figure of the first novel. Unlike Louis, Lestat has no moral ambivalence about his condition, and in fact seems to revel in the power it gives him. Powerful physically, intellectually, and emotionally, he challenges not only the boundaries of the human world but of the vampire world as well. The third novel of the series, Queen of the Damned, seems weak, unfocused, and sometimes even silly by comparison with the first two. The same problem affects the fantastical novel The Mummy; or, Ramses the Damned (1989), which makes a joke out of the issues Rice once handled seriously. But in 1992 Rice redeemed herself in The Tale of the Body Thief, returning to the Vampire Chronicles, and Lestat—her most enduring and possibly most perceptive character—undertakes an amazing journey into contemporary philosophy and the meaning of existence. In this book and in Memnoch the Devil (1995), Rice’s writing exhibits the power of her two earliest chronicles. In 1998 Rice released The Vampire Armand, in which she examines the life of one of her regularly appearing characters. With the release of The Witching Hour (1990), Rice returns to New Orleans both literally and metaphorically. After almost three decades in San Francisco, she and her family of witches (called the Mayfairs) and a spirit named Lasher (who desperately wants to attain humanity) grapple with the nature of humanity, the tension between good and evil, and the mystery of life. Two more novels in the series quickly followed: Lasher (1993) and Taltos: Tales of the Mayfair Witches (1994). Servant of the Bones (1996) and Violin (1997) are considered Rice’s ‘‘ghost books.’’ The latter, set in the resort city of Rio, was ‘‘inspired by Gary Oldman’s Beethoven,’’ says Rice, as well as ‘‘the lush film Amadeus’’ and her ‘‘bitter disappointment as a child that I had no talent to make great music, especially on the violin.’’ While consistent with Rice’s witch-and-vampire world, it brings in new language, new poetry, and new visions of romance à la Shakespeare and Keats. Exit to Eden (1985), a Rampling novel dealing with fulfilling sadomasochistic fantasies, was made into a film in 1994 by Savoy Pictures. Directed by veteran Garry Marshall, Rice worked on the screenplay with Deborah Amelon and Bob Brunner, and the movie starred Dana Delany, Paul Mercurio, Rosie O’Donnell, Dan Aykroyd, Iman, and Hector Elizondo. It had all the makings of a great movie; unfortunately, it wasn’t. The movie turned into a comedic spoof, wanting to be kinky but falling quite short. Interview with the Vampire, on the other hand, following 17 years of controversial planning, finally became an all-star, award-winning film in 1994, starring Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Kirsten Dunst, Christian Slater, Antonio Banderas, and Stephen Rea. Neil Jordan directed Rice’s screenplay. In Katherine Ramsland, Rice has a devoted biographer/ bibliographer with at least six works about Rice’s writing under her belt. Dozens of other books have been written by others chronicling this excellent writer. There is no doubt that Rice is more than a popular novelist. Both her historical fiction and her vampire and witch novels focus on issues central to modern
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culture, and she deftly integrates larger philosophical and theological issues into her fiction. Even her potboilers and erotic fiction squarely confront the issues of fate and free will in ways that less serious novels simply ignore. OTHER WORKS: Belinda (1986). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA 65-68 (1977). CANR 12 (1984). CLC 41 (1987). Other references: Beahm, G., The Unauthorized Anne Rice Companion (1995). Commotion Strange (Rice’s fan newsletters). ‘‘David Bowie and the End of Gender’’ (1983). Dickinson, J., Haunted City: An Unauthorized Guide to the Magical, Magnificent New Orleans of Anne Rice (1995). FoxVideo/Oxford Television Company/BBC, Anne Rice: Birth of the Vampire (1994, videocassette). Hoppenstand, G., and R. B. Browne, The Gothic World of Anne Rice (1996). ‘‘Interlude With the Undead’’ (also known as ‘‘The Art of the Vampire at its Peak in the Year 1876’’) (1979). Marcus, J., In the Shadow of the Vampire: Reflections on the World of Anne Rice (1997). New Orleans Times-Picayune (28 Mar. 1990). NYTBR (4 Nov. 1990). NYT Magazine (14 Oct. 1990). Ramsland, K., Prism of the Night (1991, 1994). Ramsland, K., The Vampire Companion: The Official Guide to Anne Rice’s the Vampire Chronicles (1993, 1995). Ramsland, K., The Witches Companion: The Official Guide to Anne Rice’s Lives of the Mayfair Witches (1994). Ramsland, K., The Anne Rice Trivia Book (1994). Ramsland, K., The Roquelaure Reader: A Companion to Anne Rice’s Erotica (1996). Ramsland, K., The Anne Rice Reader (1997). Riley, M., Conversations with Anne Rice (1996). Roberts, B. B., Anne Rice (1994). Stephens, C. P., A Checklist of Anne Rice (1992). Smith, J., Anne Rice: A Critical Companion (1996). —MARY A. MCCAY, UPDATED BY DARYL F. MALLETT
RICH, Adrienne (Cecile) Born 16 May 1929, Baltimore, Maryland Daughter of Arnold and Helen Rich; married Alfred H. Conrad, 1953 (died 1970); life partner, Michelle Cliff; children: three Adrienne Rich was brought up in a Southern, Jewish household which she has described as ‘‘white and middle-class . . . full of books, with a father who encouraged me to read and write.’’ From her father’s library Rich read such writers as Rosetti, Swinburne, Tennyson, Keats, Blake, Arnold, Carlyle, and Pater, and as a child she was already writing poetry. Neither she nor her younger sister was sent to school until fourth grade: Dr. Rich, a professor of medicine, and Helen Rich, a trained composer and pianist, believed that they could educate their own children in a more enlightened, albeit unorthodox, way. In fact, most of the responsibility fell to the mother; she carried out the practical task of teaching them all their lessons, including music.
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Rich’s remaining education progressed conventionally enough, and she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Radcliffe College in 1951. That same year she enjoyed success with the publication of her first book of poems, A Change of World, chosen by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Award. Although Auden’s tone in the preface has been criticized as condescending, he focused immediately on Rich’s careful handling of form and clarity of thought: ‘‘The poems a reader will encounter in this book are neatly and modestly dressed, speak quietly but do not mumble, respect their elders but are not cowed by them, and do not tell fibs: that for a first volume is a good deal.’’ Indeed, critic after critic has noted Rich’s stylistic control and elegance as the hallmark of her early achievement. This restrained style was to continue through the 1950s and be perfected in her second volume, The Diamond Cutters (1955). In a review of this volume, Randall Jarrell called her not only an ‘‘enchanting poet,’’ but ‘‘endearing and delightful’’ as well. But in the early 1960s, Rich startled her critical audience with a shift to more political and feminist themes and an increasingly experimental style. Of her early experience, she has said, ‘‘In those years formalism was part of the strategy—like asbestos gloves, it allowed me to handle materials I couldn’t pick up barehanded. . . . In the late 1950s I was able to write, for the first time, directly about experiencing myself as a woman.’’ From 1953 to 1966, Rich resided in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her three sons and her husband. These were years of personal and political growth and crisis. Her teaching career reflected her political commitment as she became involved in the SEEK and Open Admissions Programs of City College in New York City, where she took up residence after 1966. Her husband died tragically in 1970. Rich continued teaching in the New York area until 1979, when she gave up her professorship at Rutgers University and settled in western Massachusetts with ‘‘the woman who shares my life.’’ Rich’s early poetry is marked by a detached and objective formalism. The poems from her first two volumes reveal those qualities so dear to the critics: the skillful use of meter and rhyme and the simple and precise phrasing that serves equally abstract thought and concrete description. ‘‘The Ultimate Act,’’ a meditative sonnet in octosyllabics, begins in the tones and syntax of Shakespeare, yet concludes with a line that is full of the elegiac ambiguities of Wallace Stevens. Other poems, such as ‘‘Pictures by Vuillard’’ and ‘‘The Celebration in the Plaza,’’ captivate the reader by means of the occasional exotic adjective and an evocation of place. There are also poems here anticipating Rich’s later commitment to exploring feminine experience. Rich wrote the title poem of Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963) ‘‘in a longer and looser mode than I’d ever trusted myself with before. It was an extraordinary relief to write that poem.’’ This and other poems here, composed of irregular stanzas, are about madness, anger, waste, and failure in women’s lives. ‘‘A Marriage in the Sixties’’ and ‘‘End of an Era,’’ as well as ‘‘Novella,’’ and ‘‘Readings of History’’ explore the self in relation to society, intimacy, war, violence, and pacifism. In
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‘‘From Morning-Glory to Petersburg,’’ Rich says, ‘‘. . .Now knowledge finds me out; / in all its risible untidiness / it traces me to each address, / dragging in things I never thought about.’’ Rich’s next three books, Necessities of Life (1966), Leaflets (1969), and The Will to Change (1971) carry her further into this new knowledge. Rich goes beyond the cadences of Frost, Auden, and Yeats, the tones of a mainstream tradition that modulates her voice in the early poems. Instead she draws upon diverse material—translating from Dutch, adapting poems from Yiddish and Russian, and experimenting with the ghazal-like forms inspired by the Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib. In the 1970s, Rich’s poetry revealed an urgent and driving tone expressive of her militant feminism. Critics worried politics and ideology were undermining the poetry, but Rich made no such distinction between politics and poetry. Diving into the Wreck (1973) is an attempt to start from the bottom, speaking of matters as yet unspoken in words as yet undefined. There are disturbing poems of pain, anger, and violence. Yet coexistent with this anger is a deep sorrow over our vulnerabilities and our frustrated ideals. In The Dream of a Common Language (1978), Rich begins to rebuild and to document the difficult process of re-vision. Expanding on an earlier method, she draws some of her material from historical figures: Marie Curie, Clara Westhoff (who married poet Rainer Maria Rilke), and Elvira Shatayev (the leader of a women’s mountain-climbing team). But her primary concern seems to be to provide mythic structures to confirm and nourish the vital hopes and experiences of women. Thus in her latest phase Rich has not abandoned form and restraint; rather she is searching for a new poetics defined by and for women. Rich’s concern with myth has also appeared in her prose. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976) is a carefully documented attempt to demystify motherhood as a patriarchal institution. She has also published widely on poetry, feminism, and lesbianism. In the 1980s, Rich became a poet who at times received standing ovations before she read—from audiences sometimes numbering in thousands, not hundreds. By the early 1990s, although some still deplored her work as ‘‘polemical,’’ she was acclaimed as both critic and poet, and 40 years after the publication of her first book of poems, she was beginning to be assigned her permanent niche in American literature. Rich is ‘‘widely recognized as the preeminent American poet-critic of the post– World War II years,’’ wrote Elaine Showalter. Rich ‘‘will be remembered in literary history as one of the first American women to claim a public voice in lyric,’’ wrote Helen H. Vendler. Further, among many living women, Rich came to be held in affectionate esteem as more than poet and critic: ‘‘This complex and controversial writer, who began as poet-ingenue, polite copyist of Yeats and Auden, wife and mother,’’ wrote Carol Muske, ‘‘has progressed in life (and in her poems, which remain intimately tied to her life’s truth) from young widow and disenchanted formalist, to spiritual and rhetorical convalescent, to feminist leader, lesbian separatist and doyenne of a newly-defined female literature—becoming finally a Great Outlaw Mother.’’
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Certainly the honors flowed. The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force gave Rich the Fund for Human Dignity Award in 1981. She was a nominee for the 1982 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (1981) and made an honorary fellow of the Modern Language Association in 1985. In 1986 Rich won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize of the Modern Poetry Association and American Council for the Arts, in 1987 the Brandeis University Creative Arts Medal, in 1989 the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award, and in 1992 the Lenore Marshall/Nation Prize for poetry. She received honorary doctor of letters degrees from Brandeis University(1987), City College of New York (1990), and Howard University (1990). Meanwhile, from 1980 to 1984 she coedited Sinister Wisdom with longtime companion Michelle Cliff and served after 1989 as a member of an editorial collective for Bridges, a Journal for Jewish Feminists and Our Friends. She taught, becoming White Professor at Large at Cornell University (1981-85), Clark Lecturer and distinguished visiting professor at Scripps College (1983), visiting professor at San Jose State University (1985-86), Burgess Lecturer at Pacific Oaks College (1986), and beginning in 1986, Professor of English and Feminist Studies at Stanford University. During the 1980s, Rich published a new volume of selected prose and five books of poetry, including The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New, 1950-1984 (1984). An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems, 1988-1991 appeared in 1991. As before, a dominant theme in her works is the search for integrity and meaning in her own identity. Echoing an early poem in which she had described herself as ‘‘split at the root / neither Gentile nor Jew, / Yankee nor Rebel’’ (‘‘Reading of History,’’ 1960) and others such as ‘‘The Spirit of Place’’ (in A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far), she asks in ‘‘Sources’’: ‘‘From where does your strength come, you Southern Jew? / split at the root. . . . With whom do you believe your lot is cast?. . . / I think somehow, somewhere / every poem of mine must repeat those questions.’’ In ‘‘Sources,’’ a long, moving autobiographical poem published first as a chapbook (1983, reprinted in Your Native Land, Your Life, 1986), Rich places her own past under ‘‘a powerful, womanly lens,’’ addressing several of the 23 parts of the poem to her father or her husband, both Jews at last seen to be similar. A woman born of a gentile mother and thus not a Jew under Jewish law, yet fully aware Nazi logic would have made her ‘‘a Mischling, first-degree—nonexempt from the Final Solution,’’ Rich reflects on her ‘‘own ambivalence as a Jew; the daily, mundane antiSemitisms of [her] entire life.’’ Repeating her key phrase in ‘‘Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity,’’ Rich increasingly sees herself as fragmented and conflicted: ‘‘Sometimes I feel I have seen too long from too many disconnected angles: white, Jewish, anti-Semite, racist, antiracist, once-married, lesbian, middle-class, feminist, exmatriate Southerner, split at the root—that I will never bring them whole’’ (1982, reprinted in Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979-1985, 1986). In bringing these multiple selves together, Rich has in the last decade developed an extraordinary empathy with others, particularly with the outsiders of the world. She uses her increasingly damaged body (see ‘‘The Skier’’) as a means to understanding: ‘‘I’m already living the rest of my life / not under conditions of my
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choosing / wired into pain. . . the body pain and the pain on the streets / are not the same but you can learn / from the edges that blur’’ (‘‘Contradictions: Tracking Poems,’’ Your Native Land). A lesbian who in 1976 came out in print with Twenty-One Love Poems, Rich has continued to demonstrate in her poetry that ‘‘Two women sleeping / together have more than their sleep to defend’’ (‘‘Images,’’ A Wild Patience). In important prose essays—such as ‘‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’’ (1979) and ‘‘Invisibility in Academe’’ (1984)—she warns that ‘‘invisibility is not just a matter of being told to keep your private life private; it’s the attempt to fragment you, to prevent you from integrating love and work and feelings and ideas, with the empowerment that that can bring.’’ A radical feminist, Rich has continued to write about a range of women, identifying passionately with victims and merging with them: ‘‘She is carrying my madness. . . . She walks along I.S. 93 howling / in her bare feet / She is number 6375411 / in a cellblock in Arkansas / She has fallen asleep at least in the battered / women’s safe-house and I dread / her dreams that I also dream.’’ Often she extends her empathy to the world, as in the poem ‘‘In the Wake of Home’’: ‘‘What if I tell you your home / is this planet of warworn children / women and children standing in line or milling / endlessly calling each other’s names’’ (Your Native Land). In a major essay, ‘‘Notes Toward a Politics of Location’’ (1984), Rich discusses how she came to experience ‘‘whiteness as a point of location for which I needed to take responsibility.’’ Born female in a segregated hospital, she was likewise born into whiteness, ‘‘though the implications of white identity were mystified by the presumption that white people are the center of the universe.’’ Extending her insight to criticism, Rich challenges those feminists who have formulated a largely ‘‘white-centered theory.’’ Moreover, she newly urges a greater understanding of ‘‘differences among women, men, places, times, cultures, conditions, classes, movements.’’ Increasingly, Rich has broadened her sense of what it means to be a poet. Drawing the mantle of public poet more closely about herself in ‘‘North American Time’’ (1983), she acknowledges and accepts responsibility: ‘‘One line typed twenty years ago / can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint. . . . We move but our words stand / become responsible / all you can do is choose them / or choose / to remain silent.’’ In Time’s Power (1989), in the short poem ‘‘Dreamwood,’’ Rich fashions a ‘‘dreammap’’ for the ‘‘last age of her life’’ by which to ‘‘recognize that poetry / isn’t revolution but a way of knowing / why it must come.’’ OTHER WORKS: Selected Poems (1967). Poems: Selected and New (1975). Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying (1977). On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978 (1979). Collected Early Poems (1993). What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (1993). Selected Poems, 1950-1995 (1996). Midnight Salvage (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bennett, P. My Life a Loaded Gun (1986). Berg, T., ed., Engendering the Word (1989). Cooper, J., ed., Reading Adrienne Rich: Reviews and Revisions, 1951-81 (1984).
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Gelpi, B. C., and A. Gelpi, Adrienne Rich’s Poetry: The Texts of the Poems, the Poet on Her Work, Reviews and Criticism (1975). Juhasz, S., Naked and Fiery Forms: Modern American Poetry by Women (1976). Kalstone, D., Five Temperaments (1977). Keyes, C., The Aesthetics of Power: The Poetry of Adrienne Rich (1986). Montenegro, D., ed., Points of Departure: International Writers on Writing and Politics (1991). Trawick, L. M., ed., World, Self, Poems: Essays on Contemporary Poetry from the ‘‘Jubilation of Poets,’’ (1990). Werner, C., Adrienne Rich: The Poet and Her Critics (1988). Reference works: Benet’s (1991). CANR (1987). CLC (1981, 1986). CP (1991). DLB (1980, 1988). FC (1990). Handbook of American Women’s History (1990). MTCW (1991). Modern American Women Writers (1991). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). WW of Writers, Editors, Poets (1989). Other references: Anonymous (1975). Hollins Critic (Oct. 1974). Hudson Review (Summer 1983). The Island 1 (May 1966). Ms. (July 1973). Newsweek (24 Dec. 1973). NYT (3 Feb. 1980). Ohio Review (1971). Parnassus (1973, 1975). Poetry (Jan. 1967). Proceedings of the Second CUNY English Forum (1981). Salmagundi (1973). SR (22 April 1972). Southwest Review (Autumn 1975). —SHEEMA HAMDANI KARP, UPDATED BY JEAN TOBIN
RICH, Barbara See JACKSON, Laura
RICH, Louise Dickinson Born 14 June 1903, Huntington, Massachusetts; died April 1991 Married Ralph E. Rich, 1934 (died 1944) Louise Dickinson Rich began writing about her life after her marriage. The couple settled in the Unorganized Territory of northwestern Maine. We Took to the Woods (1942) tells of their primitive housing, woods lore, various pets, and the birth of their first child without the aid of a midwife. The book was popular and successful in those discouraging war years. Rich retained her chatty personal narrative style in later books, including Only Parent (1953), which describes her trials and adventures as a single parent (her husband died in 1944). Rich’s descriptions of nature are always incidental to the central personal narrative. Only in The Natural World of Louise Dickinson Rich (1962) does she attempt to write a ‘‘natural history’’ of New England. Even here the writing is personal,
anecdotal, and humorous. Rich describes the creatures she has found and domesticated in each of New England’s three geographical areas; the typical flora, with appropriate stories about their names and uses; and the contradictory nature of New England climate and geological history. Rich’s more usual attitude toward nature is summed up in her ‘‘50-Year Bird Plan,’’ enunciated in My Neck of the Woods (1950): she will learn to recognize one bird species a year, then tell all the resort guests that year that the small birds are yellow-bellied sap-suckers and the large ones ospreys. A large portion of Rich’s work was written for young people. She has seven books in a First Book series, as well as many short stories and juvenile novels. In The First Book of New England (1957), each chapter has a fictionalized account of one or two children growing up in a region with a very distinct ethnic background. Through this format Rich manages to convey much history and economics. Sex-role stereotyping is thoroughgoing: boys grow up to be tobacco farmers, lawyers, doctors, or scientists; girls aim to be teachers, wives, or even Olympic skiers. An adventure series for young people about a young Maine guide, Bill Gordon, was abandoned after two volumes (Start of the Trail, 1949, and Trail to the North, 1952), but Rich’s later juvenile fiction continues the genre. Somehow the clichéd writing is not so annoying when it comes through the consciousness of a twelve year old, but again the stereotyping is disturbing. Rich’s boys must not show emotion or worry the women, while girls get hysterical over skunks and worms. Perhaps the most satisfactory of all her works are Rich’s informal guides to Maine: The Coast of Maine (1956), The Peninsula (1958), State o’ Maine (1964), and The Kennebec River (1967). Rich relates anecdotes well, and she obviously appreciates the unique down-east personality. Local history, geography, and lore are all told with great good humor. Describing the land, people, and creatures of the shore and sea around Maine’s Gouldsboro Peninsula, The Peninsula includes chapters on lobstering, local speech, community customs, regional cooking, and the strong independent women of the peninsula. At her best Rich can be humorous, fascinating, evocative of place, and very readable. At her worst she is clichéd, historically inaccurate, and full of unsubstantiated generalizations; her style is neither creative nor economical. Her works betray an intense desire for acceptability, for strengthening the image of the scatterbrained, flighty-but-responsible, cowed-by-men-and-tools, warmhearted American ‘‘mom.’’ Every unconventional action or comment is followed with some kind of apology. If Rich was forced into this pose by her popular audience, we can be thankful for the slightly heightened awareness of the 1970s.
OTHER WORKS: Happy the Land (1946). Innocence under the Elms (1955). The First Book of the Early Settlers (1959). Mindy (1959). The First Book of New World Explorers (1960). The First Book of the China Clippers (1962). The First Book of the Vikings
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(1962). The First Book of the Fur Trade (1965). The First Book of Lumbering (1967). Star Island Boy (1968). Three of a Kind (1970). King Phillip’s War, 1675-76 (1972). Summer at High Kingdom (1975).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CB (May 1943). TCAS. —MARGARET MCFADDEN-GERBER
RICHARDS, Laura (Elizabeth) Howe Born 27 February 1850, Boston, Massachusetts; died 14 January 1943, Gardiner, Maine Wrote under: ‘‘L. E. R.’’ Daughter of Samuel G. and Julia Ward Howe; married Henry Richards, 1871 As a child, Laura Howe Richards lived in her father’s Perkins Institute for the Blind. Her early education was varied, with wide independent reading. She married an architect in 1871. When his business failed to support his growing family, they moved to Gardiner, Maine, in 1876 so he could help with the family mill there. Richards was active in the life of Gardiner, founding the first American Red Cross chapter in Maine, the Gardiner Public Library (1884), the Women’s Philanthropic Union (1895), and the Howe Club (1875) to encourage the appreciation of literature in young boys. She began her writing career with stories and verses taken from the amusements she invented for her own children, but she soon turned to longer children’s stories and to adult novels as well. Her first book, Five Little Mice in a Mouse Trap (1880), was a group of stories about a family of boys and girls in a setting quite like Richards’ own childhood home. Sketches and Scraps (1881), illustrated by her husband, was the first volume of nonsense rhymes written by an American and printed in the U.S. Captain January (1890) tells of Star Bright and her guardian, the Maine lighthousekeeper who had rescued the infant from a shipwreck. Now ten years old, Star Bright is lively, and the joy of January’s life. Star Bright epitomizes Richards’ heroines: She is lively, sensitive to the feelings of others, bright, and generous, and has a sense of humor. Never wealthy, the Richards heroines value their happiness above wealth. The Margaret series develops the Richards heroine by presenting an older girl with more opportunity for both mischief and woe. In Three Margarets (1897), three cousins, all named for their paternal grandmother, meet when their uncle invites them to spend the summer at Fernley House. Peggy is from a western ranch; impulsive and rough, she is the source of amusement and scorn for her worldly Cuban cousin, Rita. It is Margaret the orphan
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who achieves harmony and good will with her calm temperament and soothing manner. By the end of the summer the three girls are fast friends. The next three books in the series each examine one of the Margarets. Richards’ first autobiography, When I Was Your Age (1893), was written for children. The second, Stepping Westward, appeared almost 40 years later, in 1931. Richards wrote several biographies for children. Laura E. Bridgman (1906) is about her father’s famous pupil, for whom Richards was named. She also wrote biographies of her parents and edited their papers: The Life of Julia Ward Howe (1916), which Richards wrote with her sister Maude Howe Elliott, was awarded the first Pulitzer Prize for biography. Richards also edited her mother’s journals, Walk with God (1919). Richards wrote over 80 books. Her stories and novels offer neither profound nor unique glimpses into American life; but as the statements of the ideal nature of children and of young women, the tales are of great interest. By giving us competent young women who are kind and good and at the same time fallible and given to mischief, Richards provides a model for young women, and offers some important clues to the social historian. Only slightly too good to be true, Richards’s heroines are real people with real failings.
OTHER WORKS: Four Feet, Two Feet, and No Feet (1884). The Joyous Story of Toto (1884). Toto’s Merry Winter (1885). Queen Hildegarde (1889). In My Nursery (1890). Hildegarde’s Holiday (1891). Hildegarde’s Home (1892). Glimpses of the French Court (1893). Melody: The Story of a Child (1893). Marie (1894). Nautilus (1894). Five Minute Stories (1895). Hildegarde’s Neighbors (1895). Jim of Hellas (1895). Isla of Heron (1896). Narcissa (1896). Some Say (1896). Love and Rocks (1898). Rosin the Beau (1898). Peggy (1899). For Tommy (1900). Rita (1900). Snow White (1900). Fernley House (1901). Goeffry Strong (1901). The Hurdy Gurdy (1902). Mrs. Tree (1902). The Golden Windows (1903). The Green Satin Gown (1903). More Five Minute Stories (1903). The Merryweathers (1904). The Armstrongs (1905). Mrs. Tree’s Will (1905). The Greek Revolution (edited by Richards, 1906). Letters and Journals of Samuel Gridley Howe (2 vols.; edited by Richards, 1906 and 1909). The Piccolo (1906). The Silver Crown (1906). Grandmother (1907). The Wooing of Calvin Parks (1908). Life of Florence Nightingale for Young People (1909). A Happy Little Time (1910). Up to Calvin’s (1910). Aboard the Mary Sands (1911). The Story of Two Noble Lives (1911). Miss Jimmy (1912). The Little Master (1913). Three Minute Stories (1914). The Big Brother Play Book (1915). Fairy Operettas (1916). Life of Elizabeth Fry (1916). Abigail Adams and Her Times (1917). Pippin (1917). To Arms! (1917). A Daughter of Jehu (1918). Life of Joan of Arc (1919). Honor Bright (1920). In Blessed Cyprus (1921). The Squire (1923). Oriental Operettas (1924). Acting Charades (1927). Honor’s New Adventure (1925). Star Bright (1927). Tirra Lirra (1932). Samuel Gridley Howe (1935). Edward Arlington Robinson (1936). Harry
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in England (1937). I Have a Song to Sing You (1938). What Shall the Children Read? (1939). The Hottentot, and Other Ditties (1939). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Gardiner, Maine, Public Library Association, Laura E. Richards and Gardiner (1940). Reference works: NAW (1971). NCAB. TCA. Other references: Horn Book (1941, 1943, 1956). —VIRGINIA GRANT DARNEY
RICHARDS, Louisa (Lula) Greene Born 8 April 1849, Kanesville, Iowa; died 9 September 1944, Salt Lake City, Utah Also wrote under: Lula, Lulu, Lula Greene Richards Daughter of Evan M. and Susan Kent Greene; married Levi W. Richards, 1873; children: seven Louisa Greene Richards was the eighth of 13 children born in a temporary settlement of the Mormon church. After leaving Iowa in 1852, Richards’ family lived in several Utah communities before settling permanently in Smithfield. Educated primarily by her father, a respected schoolteacher, Richards later enrolled for a term at the University of Deseret, Utah. She taught school briefly before moving to Salt Lake City in 1872. She married in 1873 and bore seven children, three of whom died in infancy. Contributing poems to local newspapers as early as age fifteen, Richards was appointed editor of the Smithfield Sunday School Gazette, a handwritten weekly paper devoted to moral admonitions and homilies reflecting conventional sentiments. Richards’s early poetic efforts led to an invitation to become founding editor of the Woman’s Exponent, a Mormon women’s newspaper published in Salt Lake City. In five years as editor, Richards established the tone and format of the paper that would play an influential role in the activities of Mormon women for 42 years (1872-1914). Richards was sympathetic to the women’s movement of her time and editorialized frequently in the Exponent on its developments. Despite disclaimers by the paper’s prospectus, woman suffrage became an issue treated extensively by Richards. Her editorials were perceptive, forthright, and unequivocating, especially when defending the practices of the Mormon faith. After leaving the Exponent, Richards became editor of the ‘‘Little Folks’’ department of the Juvenile Instructor, a Mormon Sunday school periodical. She also contributed poems and stories to other local and church publications while serving for over 25 years on the general board of the Primary Association, a churchsponsored organization for young children. Richards belonged to a coterie of local literary women who wrote typically unrestrained romantic celebrations in verse and prose of life, virtue, and faith in a divine creator. She compiled her writings under the title Branches That Run Over the Wall (1904), a collection in three parts. The first part is a poetic rendering of
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selected Mormon scriptures; the second, a group of poems and stories based on the author’s personal experiences and reflections; and the third, a group of children’s pieces. Many of the poems were composed for musical settings. Domestic life and virtuous living are the dominant themes. Richards cannot be characterized as more than a pleasing versifier. Her images are predictable and her verses often rhythmbound, the whole suffering from the sentimental effusiveness of the period. As part of a large number of parlor poets produced by Victorian acceptance of the propriety of ‘‘scribbling women,’’ Richards and her peers represent a substantial facet of the 19thcentury, literary world. Their significance derives not from the quality of their contribution, which is decidedly uneven, but from the strength of their broad commonality, distinguished less by regional characteristics than by common themes and style. That Richards possessed another literary dimension as a journalist, more substantial and durable than her poetic efforts, attaches a specific importance to her place among popular Utah women writers. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Arrington, L., ‘‘Woman Journalist of the Early West,’’ in The Improvement Era (1969). Gardner, H. R., Life of Levi Richards, 1799-1876, Some of his Ancestors and Descendants (1973). Greene, G. K., Daniel Kent Greene, His Life and Times, 1858-1921 (1960). Madsen, C. C., ‘‘ Remember the Women of Zion: A Study of the Editorial Content of the Woman’s Exponent, a Mormon Woman’s Journal,’’ (thesis, 1977). Reference works: Latter-Day Saint Biographical Encyclopedia, 1830-1936 (1936). Other references: Juvenile Instructor (1931, 1950). Relief Society Magazine (1925, 1928). Young Woman’s Journal (1891). —CAROL CORNWALL MADSEN
RICHMOND, Grace (Smith) Born 31 March 1866, Pawtucket, Rhode Island; died 26 November 1959, Dunkirk, New York Daughter of Charles and Catherine Kimball Smith; married Nelson G. Richmond, 1887 The only child of a Baptist clergyman, Grace Richmond was educated at Syracuse High School, New York, and took college work under tutors. Her father published several books on religious themes. After marriage to a physician, Richmond moved to Fredonia, New York, and had four children. In 1924, she was awarded a Doctor of Letters degree from Colby College, Maine. Richmond began her writing career in the 1890s with short stories in women’s magazines. Many of her novels were published in serial form in these magazines, especially Ladies’ Home Journal. Richmond’s novels upheld current popular ideals; she wrote patriotic war stories when needed, turned out several heartwarming Christmas books, and criticized nothing except
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dissipation (alcohol, nightclubs, drugs, aimless travel, and social climbing). The Indifference of Juliet (1905) set the tone for many of Richmond’s stories. Juliet Macy, a rich young woman, cannot agree to marry Anthony Robeson, a young man of good family who has to make his own way in the world. He tricks her into marriage by asking her to furnish a little old house he has bought for his California fiancée (nonexistent). Juliet does so, falls in love with the house, and then realizes that she wants to marry Anthony herself. They are an example to other couples: very happy in their charming, inexpensive home, they have a son and, at the end of five years of marriage, are ready to remodel the house. The home itself is at the heart of many of Richmond’s novels. In 1910, Richmond introduced her most popular character, Dr. Red Pepper Burns, the hero of six novels. A surgeon in a small city, Dr. Burns is a redhead with a hot temper and a warm heart. His wife Ellen is the ‘‘perfect’’ woman—motherly, womanly, ladylike, and beautiful. The couple have children, although they play little part in the stories and their sex and number is not consistent from book to book. As Richmond describes this ideal couple, ‘‘. . .no wonder everybody knew or wanted to know the Burnses; their position was of the best, everywhere’’ (Red of the Redfields, 1924). Red is the manliest of men, capable of sitting up night after night holding the hand of a dying patient. The plots of most of these books concern some philanthropy or other of his. However, the last of the series, Red Pepper Returns (1931), focuses on the hopeless love of Dr. Max Buller, Red’s longtime associate, for Ellen and that of Amy Mathewson, Red’s nurse, for Red. Max creeps off to Arizona to die (apparently of exhaustion) while Amy, going blind, confesses her love to Red and is allowed to examine his handsome countenance for the last time under his surgical spotlight. He kisses her goodbye. The most prevalent theme in Richmond’s novels is the making of manly men and womanly women. There are novels with young heroines who think they want to be independent women, until they meet Mr. Right and are content to be homemakers. There are novels in which rich, spoiled young men make something of themselves by getting involved in real work. The making of a home and the raising of a family are the most important goals in life, and Richmond’s men and women are in complete agreement on this. To a reader of Richmond’s work today, with some knowledge of American life and culture during the period in which she was writing, Richmond must seem like a woman who has made her daydreams public. But in a spirit of charity, let’s say that perhaps Richmond’s happy life did seem to her a pattern for others. One can’t help but point out, though, that the typical Richmond heroine does not write novels. OTHER WORKS: The Second Violin (1906). With Juliet in England (1907). Around the Corner in Gay Street (1908). On Christmas Day in the Morning (1908). A Court of Inquiry (1909). On Christmas Day in the Evening (1910). Red Pepper Burns (1910). Strawberry Acres (1911). Brotherly House (1912). Mrs. Red
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Pepper (1913). Under the Christmas Stars (1913). The TwentyFourth of June (1914). Under the Country Sky (1916). The Brown Study (1917). Red Pepper’s Patients (1917). The Whistling Mother (1917). The Enlisting Wife (1918). Red and Black (1919). The Bells of St. John’s (1920). Foursquare (1922). Rufus (1923). Cherry Square (1926). Lights Up (1927). At the South Gate (1928). The Listening Post (1929). High Fences (1930). Bachelor’s Bounty (1932).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Overton, G., The Women Who Make Our Novels (1922). —BEVERLY SEATON
RICKER, Marilla M. Born 18 March 1840, New Durham, New Hampshire; died 12 November 1920, Dover, New Hampshire Daughter of Jonathan and Hannah Stevens Young; married John Ricker, 1863 (died) Marilla M. Ricker’s mother was an educated woman who taught Ricker to read; her father was a prosperous farmer who was an early suffragist and freethinker; Ricker’s husband, whom she married when she was twenty-three and he fifty-six, was a wealthy realtor who believed in equality for women. When he died five years after their marriage, he left Ricker a substantial fortune. In her writings, she often remarks on the legal advantages of a widow’s position in contrast to a wife’s, and the value of financial independence. After her husband’s death, Ricker studied languages in Europe and then settled in Washington, D.C., where she read law in a private office. In 1882, she was admitted to the bar of the Washington, D.C., Supreme Court, having outscored all the men in her examination class. Ricker was later appointed a U.S. commissioner and examiner in chancery and was one of the first women admitted to the bar of the U.S. Supreme Court. Ricker pleaded several important test cases in Washington. Although her challenge of the Sunday closing law failed, she succeeded in ending Washington’s ‘‘poor convicts law,’’ under which convicts were jailed indefinitely for inability to pay fines. For her work in prison reform and legal and financial aid to prisoners and prostitutes, she became known as ‘‘the prisoners’ friend.’’ Ricker’s activities in the women’s rights movement began in 1869, when she attended the first National Woman’s Suffrage Association convention in Washington. Years later, Ricker wrote she was so stimulated she ‘‘hurried home’’ to New Hampshire and
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tried to vote. Although her ballot was refused, she actually succeeded in voting in 1871, becoming the first woman to cast a vote in a state election on the basis of the 14th Amendment. In addition to suffrage work, Ricker lectured on feminist issues, employed her legal skills on women’s behalf, and tried to open positions previously barred to women. In 1890, she gained the right for women to practice law in New Hampshire, and in 1910, at the age of seventy, she attempted to run for governor. Ricker was the first woman to seek a major diplomatic post in the U.S. foreign service, applying unsuccessfully for appointment as minister to Colombia. The Four Gospels (1911) contrasts Ricker’s idols, Thomas Paine and Robert Ingersoll, with Jonathan Edwards and John Calvin. In other free thought essays, Ricker attacks the Bible, the clergy, and missionaries, along with the efficacy of prayer, the immortality of the soul, and other points of Christian doctrine and practice. In her writings on women’s rights, Ricker’s various interests converge. Her legal training and lifelong interest in language are evident in her arguments; a frequent theme is the injustice of the use of the pronoun ‘‘he’’ to include women in laws imposing penalties and to exclude them in laws conferring privileges. Her antireligious views are also prominent in her writings on women. In fact, she never separated the two subjects in her thinking and seldom discusses one issue without mentioning the other. Her basic position is revealed in her statement that ‘‘the church has done more to degrade woman than all other adverse influences put together.’’ Ricker’s style is direct and colorful. There are few smooth transitions in her writings, and she is given to strong statements, even assigning her essays titles like ‘‘I Believe in Neither God Nor the Devil and I Am Not Afraid.’’ She is often intemperate, as in her pamphlet attacking Theodore Roosevelt when he was running for president in 1912; she calls him ‘‘coarse, vulgar and obscene,’’ an ‘‘unmitigated liar and traitor.’’ As a contemporary observed, ‘‘It is her custom to call a spade a spade, and not to beat about the bush in search of euphemistic expressions to gild the edge of criticism.’’
OTHER WORKS: I Don’t Know, Do You? (1916). I Am Not Afraid, Are You? (1917).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Scales, J., History of Strafford County, New Hampshire (1914). Other references: (Dover, N.H.) Foster’s Daily Democrat (23 June 1976, 25 June 1976). Granite Monthly (June 1910). New Hampshire Profiles (Sept. 1958). Prologue: The Journal of the National Archives (Winter 1973). —BARBARA A. WHITE
RIDGE, Lola Born Rose Emily Ridge, 12 December 1873, Dublin, Ireland; died 19 May 1941, Brooklyn, New York Also wrote under: Lola, L. R. Ridge Daughter of Joseph H. and Emma Reilly Ridge; married Peter Webster, 1895; David Lawson, 1919 Lola Ridge lived with her mother in Australia and New Zealand as a child. Her early interests included art and music, and when her marriage to the manager of a New Zealand gold mine proved unhappy, she moved to Sydney to study painting under Julian Ashton. Ridge later regretted having destroyed poems she wrote during this period, but a collection of her work was recently discovered at the Mitchell Library in Sydney. Ridge emigrated to San Francisco in 1907, and moved to New York City in 1908. She supported herself as a writer of fiction and poetry for popular magazines. At meetings of the Ferrer Association she met her second husband. The Ghetto (1918), written during a five-year absence from New York City, was hailed as a book that seemed destined for greatness. Revolutionary in spirit and written in free verse, the title poem dwells on life among the Jewish immigrants of New York’s Lower East Side and illustrates themes recurring throughout Ridge’s work—the moral courage of ordinary men and women, the paramount importance of liberty in human lives, and faith in the possibilities that America holds. After the success of The Ghetto, Ridge edited a number of issues of Others and served as the American editor of Broom. She also toured the Midwest, speaking on subjects such as ‘‘Individualism and American Poetry’’ and ‘‘Woman and the Creative Will.’’ Sun-Up (1920) contains both personal and public poems. The title poem draws heavily on the author’s own childhood. Technically, its flashing pictures resemble those of the Imagists; psychologically, it shares ground with the experiments of James Joyce. The public poems ‘‘Sons of Belial’’ and ‘‘Reveille’’ demonstrate Ridge’s sympathy with an exploited working class and affirm her function as a poet ‘‘[blowing] upon [their] hearts / kindling the slow fire.’’ Red Flag (1927) also includes poems saluting those who have fallen in the cause of freedom. ‘‘Red Flag’’ focuses on Russia and figures in the Russian revolution, and ‘‘Under the Sun’’ commemorates martyrs of other struggles. Most of the poems in this volume, however, are poems about natural and spiritual beauty and imagistic portraits of Ridge’s contemporaries. Ridge’s last two books are characterized by an increasingly stylized language and growing mysticism. Firehead (1929), her response to the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927, retells the story of the Crucifixion. The nine sections view the Crucifixion from a variety of points of view, including those of Judas, the two Marys, and Jesus himself; the Christ of the poem is viewed as ‘‘one who had proclaimed men equal—aye / Even unto slaves and
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women. . . / And babbled of some communal bright heaven.’’ During her lifetime, Firehead was widely acclaimed as Ridge’s masterpiece.
These mysteries fleshed out the novel of deduction with fuller if somewhat stereotyped characters, a second, romantic plot line, a good deal of gothic atmosphere, and frequently comic elements.
On a visit to Yaddo in 1930, Ridge outlined a poem cycle, ‘‘Lightwheel,’’ which was to occupy the greatest portion of her creative energies in her last years. ‘‘Lightwheel’’ was to include Firehead and five other books treating ancient Babylon, Florence during the Renaissance, Mexico at the time of Cortez and Montezuma, France during the revolution, and Manhattan after World War I. Ridge traveled to the Near East (1931-32) and to Mexico (1935-37) to research her epic work, but the cycle remained unfinished at her death.
Rinehart essentially stopped writing mystery novels after 1914, returning to the form in 1930 with The Door, her first novel to be published by her sons’ new publishing house, Farrar and Rinehart. In the next 23 years, Rinehart published 11 full-length mysteries in which she fully exploited the ‘‘buried story’’—a sequence of events never narrated in the novel and emerging only as ‘‘outcroppings,’’ places at which material about the past of the characters supplies clues to the solution of the mystery. Rinehart’s buried stories most often center on errors of passion leading to sexual alliances across class lines and leading inexorably to crime some years later.
Ridge’s theory of history also shapes a sonnet sequence called ‘‘Via Ignis, ’’ the central poem in Dance of Fire (1935). But despite the poem’s large theme—that we are at a crucial stage in history, but ‘‘may come forth, for a period, into a time of light’’— its language is essentially private. Though plagued by illness during much of her life, Ridge is remembered as an energizing person. Her work attests to the continuous if not special concern that American women poets have had with social issues. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Gregory, H., and M. Zaturenska, A History of Modern Poetry: 1900-1940 (1946). Perkins, D., A History of Modern Poetry: From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode (1976). Untermeyer, L., The New Era in American Poetry (1919). Reference works: Living Authors: A Book of Biographies (1931). NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: SR (31 May 1941). —ELAINE SPROAT
RIDING, Laura See JACKSON, Laura
RINEHART, Mary Roberts Born 12 August 1876, Allegheny, Pennsylvania; died 22 September 1958, New York, New York Daughter of Thomas B. and Cornelia Gilleland Roberts; married Dr. Stanley M. Rinehart, 1896 Mary Roberts Rinehart began her career in 1903, publishing short stories in magazines like All-Story and Munsey’s. In three or four weeks in 1905, Rinehart wrote The Man in Lower 10 for serialization in All-Story, and she followed it the next year with The Circular Staircase. When Bobbs-Merrill published The Circular Staircase in 1908, Rinehart’s long period of success began.
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The villains in Rinehart’s mysteries are frequently lower-class women who have ensnared richer, more aristocratic men. The heroines most often are unmarried young women with little money but of good family, who serve as the center of the romantic plot as well as the focus of the murder story. Her intention in establishing the young female narrator was to link her mystery plot as closely as possible with her romantic plot; however, the use of this central character type has had the effect of placing her work, erroneously, in the class of gothics. Although Rinehart is remembered today as a writer of mysteries, she was more popular in her own time for her serious novels. Beginning with The Street of Seven Stars (1914) and ‘‘K’’ (1915), Rinehart produced romances with some attention to contemporary problems. This emphasis became stronger with World War I; she depicted life near the western front in The Amazing Interlude (1918) and sabotage and attempted insurrection on the home front in Dangerous Days (1919) and A Poor Wise Man (1920). Both critical and popular success eluded Rinehart in her most serious attempt at fiction, This Strange Adventure (1929), a dark look at the life of a fairly typical married woman. Rinehart recouped in 1931 with her fine autobiography, My Story. Rinehart’s humor was not restricted to isolated episodes in mystery novels. With the creation in 1910 of Letitia Carberry, ‘‘Tish,’’ Rinehart produced a character who would remain a staple of the Saturday Evening Post and a favorite of American readers for nearly 30 years. Tish is an undaunted spinster of about fifty who with her two companions travels America and Europe, resolving lovers’ problems, rounding up bandits and kidnappers, once capturing an entire German company, and maintaining throughout her own slightly askew brand of absolute moral rectitude. Rinehart also achieved considerable success in the theater. In collaboration with Avery Hopwood, she wrote Seven Days (1909), with nearly 400 performances, and The Bat (1920), with 878 performances and six road companies. The Bat, with close affinities to The Circular Staircase, mixes murder, romance, and comedy. From 1910 to 1940, Rinehart was America’s most successful popular writer. Eleven of her novels were among the 10 top bestsellers of the year they were published, and in the 1930s,
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mass-circulation magazines paid as much as $65,000 to serialize her novels. From its infancy, the movie industry sought her work, and later radio and television used her material. Today Rinehart’s serious novels are dated by her cautious attitude toward popular morality; she was careful to offend neither editors nor audience. Rinehart’s mystery novels have fared better with time, continuing to sell well in reissue. The Circular Staircase has achieved the status of a classic in the genre. OTHER WORKS: When a Man Marries (1909). The Window at the White Cat (1910). The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry (1911). Where There’s a Will (1912). The Case of Jennie Brice (1913). The After House (1914). Kings, Queens, and Pawns (1915). Through Glacier Park (1916). Tish (1916). The Altar of Freedom (1917). Bab: A Sub-Deb (1917). Long Live the King (1917). Tenting Tonight (1918). Twenty-Three-and-a-Half Hours Leave (1918). Love Stories (1919). Affinities (1920). Isn’t That Just Like a Man? Well! You Know How Women Are! (with I. S. Cobb, 1920). The Truce of God (1920). The Breaking Point (1921). More Tish (1921). Sight Unseen and the Confession (1921). The Out Trail (1922). Temperamental People (1924). The Red Lamp (1925). Nomad’s Land (1926). Tish Plays the Game (1926). Two Flights Up (1926). Lost Ecstasy (1927). The Trumpet Sounds (1927). The Romantics (1929). Mary Roberts Rinehart’s Mystery Book (1930). The Book of Tish (1931). Mary Roberts Rinehart’s Romance Book (1931). Miss Pinkerton (1932). The Album (1933). The Crime Book (1933). The State v. Elinor Norton (1933). Mr. Cohen Takes a Walk (1934). The Doctor (1936). Married People (1937). Tish Marches On (1937). The Wall (1938). Writing is Work (1939). The Great Mistake (1940). Familiar Faces (1941). Haunted Lady (1942). Alibi for Isabel, and Other Stories (1944). The Yellow Room (1945). A Light in the Window (1948). Episode of the Wandering Knife (1950). The Swimming Pool (1952). The Frightened Wife, and Other Murder Stories (1953). The Best of Tish (1955). The Mary Roberts Rinehart Crime Book (1957). The papers of Mary Roberts Rinehart are housed in the Special Collections unit of the Hillman Library, University of Pittsburgh. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cohn, J., Improbable Fiction: The Life of Mary Roberts Rinehart (1980). Disney, D. C., and M. Mackaye, Mary Roberts Rinehart (1948). Doran, G. H., in Chronicles of Barrabas (1935). Overton, G., et al., Mary Roberts Rinehart: A Sketch of the Woman and Her Work (circa 1921). When Winter Came to Main Street (1922). Reference works: Detecting Women (1994). Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (1994). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (1996). Other references: American magazine (Oct. 1917). Boston Evening Transcript (12 June 1926). Good Housekeeping (Apr. 1917). Life (25 Feb. 1946). Writer (Nov. 1932). —JAN COHN
RIPLEY, Eliza (Moore Chinn) M(cHatton) Born 1 February 1832, Lexington, Kentucky; died 13 July 1912 Daughter of Richard H. and Betsy Holmes Chinn; married James A. McHatton, 1852; M. Dwight Ripley, 1873 Eliza M. Ripley was the 10th child of a judge. Ripley grew up in New Orleans and lived at Arlington Plantation on the Mississippi River below Baton Rouge after her first marriage to James Alexander McHatton. After the fall of that city in June 1862, the McHattons began a nomadic existence, living out of an ambulance while carrying Confederate cotton from Louisiana to Mexico to be sold. Six weeks before the fall of the Confederacy, the family joined a growing number of Southern exiles in Cuba. Using Cuban and Chinese coolie labor, they attempted to run a sugar plantation on the Southern model. James McHatton died in Cuba and Ripley returned to the United States. From Flag to Flag: A Woman’s Adventures in Wartime (1889) is autobiographical, dealing with Ripley’s flight from Louisiana and life in Cuba. Although she and her husband spoke little Spanish, they were welcomed on the island and soon moved in the highest social circles. For the most part, life in Cuba was pleasant and the exiles adapted quickly. Ripley notes but does not condemn the arrogance and extravagance of the plantation owners and shares their fears of reprisal by the peasants. Social Life in Old New Orleans (1912) is a combination of personal reminiscences and social commentary. It is Ripley’s attempt to preserve a vanishing past as a standard for future generations. Written in the ‘‘Moonlight and Magnolias’’ tradition of Southern history, Social Life in Old New Orleans deals in great detail with the life of Southern women before the Civil War. These were easy, carefree days, when life moved slowly and conventions governed social relationships. Ripley did not claim to be an apologist for slavery but was, in fact, a firm supporter of the institution. Although she states that ‘‘the whites suffered more from its demoralizing influence than the blacks,’’ this is not substantiated in the text. Ripley gives us an idyllic picture of life on a Southern plantation, with happy, well-cared-for slaves and kindly masters. She entitles one chapter ‘‘A Monument to Mammies,’’ and paints an affectionate portrait of those hefty black women of indeterminate age who governed both white and black with an iron hand. Yet Ripley is reconciled to the changes undergone since the halcyon days of the antebellum South. ‘‘We lived,’’ she concludes, ‘‘a life never to be lived again. ’’ Taken together, Ripley’s works provide a wealth of information on manners and customs of the prewar South. Her descriptions of fashions and entertainments, although rose-colored by memory, are unequaled. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Eaton, C., The Growth of Southern Civilization (1961). —JANET E. KAUFMAN
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RITCHIE, Anna (Cora) Mowatt Born 5 March 1819, Bordeaux, France; died 21 July 1870, Twickenham, England Wrote under: Helen Berkeley, Henry C. Browning, Cora, Isabel, Charles A. Lee, M.D., Anna Cora Mowatt, Anna Ritchie Daughter of Samuel G. and Eliza Lewis Ogden; married James Mowatt, 1834 (died 1951); William F. Ritchie, 1854 (divorced); children: three The ninth of 14 children, Anna Mowatt Ritchie was descended from old colonial families. Her early years were spent in France, but when she was seven, the family moved to New York, where Ritchie was educated in private girls’ schools. Although ‘‘Lily,’’ as she was called, was not outstanding at her studies, she was considered precocious by her family because of her ability to write and act in home theatricals. At 15 she eloped with James Mowatt, a wealthy young lawyer, and moved to Melrose, his estate on Long Island. Here she wrote Pelayo (1836), a romantic poem in six cantos ‘‘founded strictly upon historical facts.’’ Ritchie’s preface to this poem reveals an extensive acquaintance with literature. It was not well received, however, and she retaliated with Reviewers Reviewed (1837), a satiric essay on criticism. An attack of tuberculosis, her constant enemy, led Ritchie to visit Europe in 1838. Ironically, as her health improved, her husband’s began to fail. Nonetheless, they returned to the U.S. and celebrated his ‘‘cure’’ with a ball at which Ritchie’s blank verse melodrama in five acts, Gulzara; or, The Persian Slave, was presented with Ritchie in the title role. The play attracted much favorable attention from critics when it was published in the New World in 1841. Her husband’s fragile health and the loss of his fortune led Ritchie to give public poetry readings. When she became too ill to perform, she began to write articles for Godey’s Lady’s Book, Graham’s Magazine, Democratic Review, and other magazines. Under the pseudonym Henry C. Browning, she wrote a life of Goethe, and as Charles A. Lee, M.D., compiled Management of the Sickroom (1844). In 1842 Ritchie won a $100 prize from New World for her novel The Fortune Hunter (1842). Ritchie’s play Fashion (1845) had an unprecedented three-week run, and was long a favorite of audiences in England and America. The money she earned not only supported her and James, but three orphans she had taken into her childless home. Even more profitable than writing was Ritchie’s career as an actress. Starting as a star, she remained one for eight years of touring the U.S. and Great Britain. After Mowatt’s death in 1851, Ritchie returned to New York. Again she turned to writing to supplement her income, and her lively Autobiography of an Actress (1854) was an immediate success. In 1854 Ritchie married a prominent Virginian and editor of the Richmond Enquirer. In 1861 Ritchie left her husband because of irreconcilable political and personal differences. She went to Florence, where she
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supported herself by writing novels and sketches. In 1865 Ritchie visited England, became too ill to travel back to Italy, and took a small house in Twickenham, where she died five years later. Fashion (1845), Ritchie’s most important work, is a bright, witty satire of 19th-century New York society. The basic plot line is a standard love story with melodramatic elements, but the sharp comedy has kept its freshness. The play reveals a remarkable sense of theater and a grasp of dramaturgy rare in a first effort. The action moves rapidly, the plot turns are cleverly planned, and the climax satisfies the comedic expectations. The first American social comedy, Fashion was successfully revived in 1924 and again in 1959. Ritchie’s early novels, The Fortune Hunter (1842) and Evelyn (1845), are also contemporary views of New York life; Ritchie draws upon her own experience as a member of upper-class society, giving these works more substance than is usual in such tales. She paints the evils of money marriages and juxtaposes them with marriages based on honesty in values and actions. Autobiography of an Actress (1854) is an amusingly frank account of Ritchie’s years on the stage, distinguished by unusual modesty concerning herself and generosity toward others. Most of Ritchie’s later stories make use of her theatrical experiences in setting and characters; both background and types are recognizable and timeless. Her plots are traditional romantic love stories, and her characters are often embodiments of the sentimentality so prevalent in that time. They are seasoned, however, with humor and a Dickensian awareness of the ridiculous. Ritchie’s reliance upon action precludes the development of profound characters, but her use of detailed description removes them from the stock types in most popular novels of the time. She also differs from her contemporaries in her treatment of women, for she places a high value on independence. Dependent females in her stories invariably fall victim to circumstances or villains, whereas the heroines not only think for themselves but are usually self-supporting. Ritchie believed women should be wives and mothers, but she contemplated, and in some cases endorsed, the single life. A unique author, combining a European elegance with an American admiration for practical labor, she is, in the truest sense, the first transatlantic writer. OTHER WORKS: Armand; or, The Peer and the Peasant (1847). Mimic Life (1856). Twin Roses (1858). Fairy Fingers (1865). The Mute Singer (1866). The Clergyman’s Wife, and Other Selections (1867). Italian Life and Legends (1870). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Barnes, E. W., The Lady of Fashion (1954). Bernard, B., Tallis’s Drawing Room Table Book (1851). Blesi, M., The Life and Letters of Anna Cora Mowatt (1938). McCarthy, I., Anna Cora Mowatt and Her American Audience (1952). Other references: Howitt’s Journal (1848). Our Continent (1882). —HELENE KOON
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RITTENHOUSE, Jessie B(elle) Born 8 December 1869, Mount Morris, New York; died 28 September 1948, Detroit, Michigan Daughter of John E. and Mary J. MacArthur Rittenhouse; married Clinton Scollard, 1924 Jessie B. Rittenhouse was the fifth of seven children. Her early years were spent within the circle of a large and prosperous farm family in New York’s Genesee Valley. She attended Nunda Academy, New York, and went on to the Genesee Wesleyan Seminary at Lima, New York, where she became absorbed in reading the poetry of Tennyson and Browning. Rittenhouse’s schooling was interrupted when financial misfortunes caused the family to move to Cheboygan, Michigan. Having to support herself, Rittenhouse reluctantly chose to teach Latin and English. An aunt, seeing her anguish, suggested she write a poem. Instead, Rittenhouse wrote an article on St. Augustine, Florida, which she sold to the Rochester Union and Advertiser. Stimulated by her success, Rittenhouse moved to Rochester to work for the Democrat and Chronicle. Between 1905 and 1915, Rittenhouse served as a reviewer for the New York Times Review of Books and the Bookman and lectured widely on modern poetry. Throughout her career, Rittenhouse was acquainted with many literary figures. In 1901 she helped found the Poetry Society of America, which she served as secretary for 10 years. In 1930 she shared the society’s bronze medal for distinguished service with her husband, the poet Clinton Scollard. Rittenhouse’s first book of poems, The Door of Dreams, did not appear until 1918. Her fourth and last volume, The Moving Tide: New and Selected Poems (1939), was awarded a gold medal by the National Poetry Center. After her husband’s death in 1932, Rittenhouse moved to Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and wrote her autobiography, My House of Life (1934). The publication of The Younger American Poets in 1904 advanced Rittenhouse into the front rank of literary critics. Keenly aware of the neglect of American poetry, and of young American poets in particular, Rittenhouse focuses her discussions on the work of 18 relatively unknown poets. But it was her ‘‘instinct for the popular and salable anthology’’ that produced The Little Book of Modern Verse in 1913, with new versions in 1919 and 1923, and brought Rittenhouse’s name before a wide reading public. Represented in these anthologies are the best-known poets of the earlier part of the 20th century. Rittenhouse’s poems appeared in many periodicals. Focusing on love and loss, with nature and war as secondary themes, the poems were characterized as ‘‘slight,’’ ‘‘gentle,’’ and ‘‘graceful.’’ One critic viewed her work as ‘‘more distinguished for grace and perfection than warmth of imagination.’’ Rittenhouse had no illusions about the worth of her own poetry, nor did she, as anthologist, fail to recognize clearly the difficulties of keeping her perspective in regard to her contemporaries. The style of her compilations was innovative in that she abandoned the conventional chronological method of arrangement in favor of one along thematic lines.
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Rittenhouse was an important moving force in American poetry in the earlier part of this century-she built morale and established a sense of community among poets and also awakened the reading public to the new directions poetry was taking. As we consider the scope and variety of her contributions, it is safe to say that her services to American poetry have been greatly undervalued. OTHER WORKS: The Secret Bird (1919). The Lifted Cup (1924). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cook, W. H., Our Poets of Today (1918). Davidson, G., In Fealty to Apollo (1950). Untermeyer, L., The New Era in American Poetry (1919). Widdemer, M., Jessie Rittenhouse: A Centenary Memoir-Anthology (1969). Reference works: DAB. NAW (1971). TCA. TCAS. Other references: Detroit News (29 Sept. 1948). NYT (30 Sept. 1948). Saturday Review (30 Oct. 1948). —VIRGINIA R. TERRIS
RIVERS, Alfrida See BRADLEY, Marion Zimmer
RIVERS, Pearl See NICHOLSON, Eliza Jane Poitevent
ROBB, J. D. See ROBERTS, Nora
ROBERTS, Elizabeth Madox Born 30 October 1881, Perryville, Kentucky; died 13 March 1941, Orlando, Florida Daughter of Simpson and Mary Brent Roberts About 1884 Elizabeth Madox Roberts moved with her family to Springfield, Kentucky, the town that would become the center of her stories and novels. As a child, Roberts listened to her father’s storytelling. An equally important influence on Roberts as a child were family legends, including the tale of a great-grandmother who had come to Kentucky by the Wilderness Road. Roberts attended a private academy in Springfield and later graduated from high school in nearby Covington, Kentucky. In 1900 she entered the State College of Kentucky but withdrew from school, probably because of ill health and financial problems. In 1917 she registered at the University of Chicago—a college freshman at the age of thirty-six. Roberts wrote poetry
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while at Chicago and took part in a group—including such talented friends as Yvor Winters and Glenway Westcott—that met frequently to discuss one another’s work. Roberts graduated in 1921 with honors in English. In 1922 Roberts returned to Springfield, where she was to spend most of her life, and devoted herself to writing, even after she learned in 1936 that she had Hodgkin’s disease. The quality of Roberts’ work is uneven. Few people would claim greatness for Jingling in the Wind (1928), an allegorical novel of the courtship of two rainmakers, or He Sent Forth a Raven (1935), a highly artificial and contrived novel, but other novels are more successful. The Time of Man (1926) chronicles the life of Ellen Chesser, a poor white girl who is a descendant of Kentucky pioneers. Ellen is fourteen at the opening of the novel. Roberts portrays Ellen’s early love affair, her marriage to Jasper Kent, and the hardships she suffers as wife and mother. The real strengths of the novel lie in Roberts’ use of Ellen’s consciousness as we see her transcend the bleakness of her life and in the poetic quality of the narrative. My Heart and My Flesh (1927) traces Theodosia Bell’s initial rejection and ultimate acceptance of life. Theodosia, with a good family, wealth, and pride, loses her lover, her friends, her home, and her health. She is driven to suicide, but at last reaffirms her love for life. The power of the self to transcend external forces is the controlling thesis of The Great Meadow (1930), set during the Revolutionary War period in Virginia and Kentucky. Roberts’ central characters are Berkeleian idealists whose lives appear as spiritual dramas deriving their substance from the mind of God. The protagonist, Diony Hall, chooses to leave the order and safety of her family’s farm to enter the wilderness of the frontier. The most notable element of the novel is the mental or spiritual ordering Diony exerts over the chaos of her life and her surroundings. Roberts wrote poetry throughout her life—her first important volume, Under the Tree (1922), was poetry—and although her output in verse is slim in comparison with her prose, she wrote several first-rate poems, including ‘‘Love in the Harvest’’ and ‘‘Sonnet of Jack.’’ Roberts also published two volumes of short stories—The Haunted Mirror (1932) and Not by Strange Gods (1941)—but they are less successful than her novels. Roberts deserves further study and analysis. A fine prose writer whose experiments in stream-of-consciousness narration and feminine characterization seem far ahead of her time, she is of especial interest today for her penetrating analysis of the female consciousness. OTHER WORKS: In the Great Steep’s Garden (1915). A Buried Treasure (1931). Black is My Truelove’s Hair (1938). Song in the Meadow (1940). The papers of Elizabeth Madox Roberts are in the Library of Congress. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Auchincloss, L., Pioneers and Caretakers: A Study of Nine Women Writers (1965). Campbell, H. M., and R. Foster, Elizabeth Madox Roberts: American Novelist (1956).
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McDowell, F., Elizabeth Madox Roberts (1963). Rovit, E. H., Herald to Chaos: The Novels of Elizabeth Madox Roberts (1960). Other references: Kentucky Historical Society Review (Apr. 1966). Saturday Review (2 Mar. 1963). —ANNE ROWE
ROBERTS, Jane Born 8 May 1929, Albany, New York; died September 1984 Daughter of Delmar and Marie Burdo Roberts; married Robert F. Butts, Jr., 1954 Jane Roberts dedicated herself early to writing, beginning with poetry in her teens and later writing fiction. Nothing in Roberts’ life, however, foreshadowed the development of her mediumistic abilities or the messages from Seth—‘‘an energy personality essence no longer focused in physical reality’’— which form the backbone of her literary production. Roberts’ first novel, Bundu, was published in 1958 and her second, The Rebellers, in 1963. In September 1963, Roberts had her first psychic experience, during which she wrote almost automatically while simultaneously feeling the conditions about which she was writing. Shortly after this event, Roberts and her painter husband began research for How to Develop Your ESP Power (1966, reissued as The Coming Of Seth, 1976) using a Ouija board. In 1963 Seth introduced himself via the Ouija board and soon afterward Roberts started speaking as Seth’s voice. Since then, more than thousands of similar sessions have taken place, providing the material for Roberts’ Seth-dictated books as well as many books associated with the Seth communications. Virtually all the Seth dictations have been recorded in shorthand by Robert Butts. Butts is also author of the running commentary which provides background and framework for the Seth-dictated material in the Seth books. The cosmology voiced through Roberts by Seth is vastly different from the usual ‘‘spirit messages.’’ Seth depicts a monist creation of which this universe is only a small fraction. Everything has consciousness; God is ‘‘All That Is’’ and, as a whole and in all ‘‘Its’’ parts, is constantly evolving. As well as being parts of All That Is, humans are also parts of entities greater than themselves; humans have free will nonetheless. They have existed before birth as individuals and, after death, will continue to do so. The Seth teachings emphasize the power and potential of the individual human. ‘‘You create your own reality’’ is a basic tenet of his message. Since Seth’s advent, Roberts has not limited herself to material dictated by him. Roberts’ books depicting her own experiences in attempting to understand and apply Seth’s philosophy add a poignantly personal dimension to the Seth communications. Roberts has also written two fast-paced novels about Oversoul Seven, which embody and vivify Seth’s teachings. Another development in Roberts’ career is her work on the ‘‘afterdeath journal.’’ Two of these have been published, one received
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from the painter Paul Cézanne, and the other from the psychologist William James (The Afterdeath Journal of an American Philosopher, 1978). The Seth teachings are complex, intellectually demanding, and not for everyone. Readers of like mind will find Roberts’ Seth books uniquely challenging, expanding, and—if fortune smiles— deeply satisfying.
OTHER WORKS: The Seth Material (1970, 1997). Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul (1972, 1988, 1994). The Education of Oversoul Seven (1973). The Nature of Personal Reality: A Seth Book (1974, 1980). Adventures in Consciousness: An Introduction to Aspect Psychology (1975, 1997). Dialogues of the Soul and Mortal Self in Time (1975). Psychic Politics (1976). The Unknown Reality: Volume One of a Seth Book (1977, 1989). The World View of Paul Cézanne: A Psychic Interpretation (1977, 1994). The Unknown Reality: Volume Two of a Seth Book (1979, 1996). The Further Education of Oversoul Seven (1979, 1984). Emir’s Education in the Proper Use of Magical Powers (1979, (1984). The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression (1979, 1987, 1995). Unlimited Challenges in a World of Limited Resources (1980). The God of Jane: A Psychic Manifesto (1981). If We Live Again, or, Public Magic and Private Love: Poetry (1982). Seth, Dreams and Projections of Consciousness (1987). Dreams, ‘‘Evolution,’’ and Value Fulfillment: A Seth Book (1988, 1996). The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events (1994). The Magical Approach: Seth Speaks About the Art of Creative Living (1995). The Oversoul Seven Trilogy (1995). Secrets: A True Story from the Other Side of the Wall (1995). How to Develop Your ESP Power: The First Published Encounter with Seth (1996). The Way Toward Health (1997). Jane Roberts’ A View from the Other Side (1998).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Andreae, C., Seances and Spiritualists (1974). Bentov, I., Stalking the Wild Pendulum (1977). Other references: New Realities (1977). VV (9 Oct. 1978, 16 Oct. 1978). —LUCY MENGER
ROBERTS, Maggie Born circa 1840s; died death date unknown Wrote under: Eiggam Strebor No biographical information on Maggie Roberts has been found. She wrote in the late 1870s and was greatly influenced by the Civil War. In the introduction to her first book, Home Scenes during the Rebellion (1875), Roberts disclaims any attempt to
paint the ‘‘brilliant hues of fiction,’’ instead confining herself to ‘‘incidents that actually occurred during the Rebellion.’’ These episodic stories of the end of the war and the years afterward are peopled with struggling young widows, families and friends torn apart by opposing loyalties, illiterate blacks confused by their new status, and brave men in uniform. In scenes set in New York, Washington, and New Orleans, Roberts relates the circumstances of young lovers bridging the Mason-Dixon line. Goodwill is established between North and South through the marriages of a ‘‘little rebel’’ and a Yankee captain, a Southern heiress and a Union soldier, among others. Although herself a Southern sympathizer, Roberts respects the motivations on both sides of the conflict and surveyed the devastating results of the battles. Roberts chronicles these effects in the ‘‘home scenes’’ in which Americans beset by suffering carried on with unbeaten determination. Bravery tempered by faith and fierce loyalty to liberty were the noble principles of both Union and Confederacy, as Roberts paints them. Roberts takes up the theme of war again in Shadows and Silver Sprays (1875). A majority of these poems are inspired by the events of the Civil War. The frightening spectacle of battle, the death of a young dragoon, the stirring parade of troops, and a sad tribute to the assassinated president are recorded in this collection. Roberts commemorates holidays with rhymed verses and wrote acrostics and whimsical songs. Her prosody relies on a regular rhyme scheme and recurring meter that overwhelms the subject at times. The Shot Heard Round the World (1876) is a series of poems, from ‘‘Britannia’s Insult to Columbia’’ to ‘‘America’s Centennial,’’ tracing America’s history. Famous American victories are depicted as triumphs in the ‘‘dread name of Jehovah.’’ Roberts attempts epic scope in this volume, with Revolutionary generals Washington and Lafayette as ‘‘god-like heroes,’’ and the allegorical figure of America, girded by truth and justice, rising up from under England’s dominion. Patriotic, religious, and sentimental, Roberts’ poetry and fiction are typical of the 19th century. She captured feelings stirred by the strife of Civil War, but often her sentiments and observations were optimistic and simplistic.
OTHER WORKS: Ambition; or, The Launch of a Skiff upon the Sea of Life (1876). Gem of Youth; or, Fireside Tales (1876).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: American Fiction 1851-1875 (1965). American Fiction 1876-1900 (1966). A Dictionary of North American Authors Deceased Before 1950 (1951). Famous Women of History (1895). A Supplement to Allibone’s Critical Dictionary (1891). —ELIZABETH ROBERTS
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ROBERTS, Nora Born 10 October 1950, Washington, D.C. Also writes under: J. D. Robb Daughter of Bernard E. and Eleanor Harris Robertson; married Ronald Aufdem-Brinke, 1968 (divorced 1983); Bruce Wilder, 1985; children: Daniel, Jason Prolific and popular romance novelist Nora Roberts has published nearly 130 books since 1981. By 1999 more than 85 million copies of her books were in print. In 1997 six of her books were on the New York Times and USA Today bestseller lists. In 1998 she had 11 titles on the New York Times list. She writes category romance, romantic fiction, and suspense novels. In 1996 Publishers Weekly reported Tristar had paid an advance of $100,000 against $400,000 for a television option of her book Montana Sky, ‘‘one of the highest prices paid for a TV two-hour movie.’’ Roberts has received numerous awards for her work: the Golden Medallion, from Romance Writers of America, in 1982, 1983, 1984, and 1986; Waldenbooks Award, 1985; Maggie Award, Georgia Romance Writers of America, 1985; Rita Award, Romance Writers of America, 1990, 1991, 1992; and the B. Dalton award for several novels. In 1984 Romantic Times named her best contemporary author, and she won several Reviewer’s Choice awards from that publication. She was the first author inducted into the Romance Writers of America Hall of Fame. According to Publishers Weekly, she is particularly popular with military wives and is a favorite at book fairs. She works hard to promote her books and has a good rapport with her fans. Roberts’ success was no accident. Married at eighteen, she began her working life with several secretarial jobs, and later as a young mother with two small boys put a lot of creative energy into her family’s domestic life. As she told People magazine, ‘‘I became a kind of earth mother. I baked bread, canned, sewed, macraméd, embroidered, grew vegetables.’’ Roberts was also a fan of Harlequin romance novels: ‘‘For that period in my life—a bad marriage, endless days with small children—they were a kind of sanity.’’ During the winter of 1979, the family was snowed in for more than week, and needing something to occupy her, she wrote a steamy romance herself (‘‘It was very bad’’). Her first efforts were rejected, but she sold her first book, Irish Thoroughbred, just a year and a half later, in 1981, and has been writing her popular novels ever since. She was divorced in 1983 but later found happiness with Bruce Wilder, a carpenter and bookstore owner: ‘‘I am living proof that what I write about can happen in real life,’’ she told People. One of Roberts’ recent books, Sanctuary (1997), is set off the coast of Georgia. Jo Ellen Hathaway, a photographer, unnerved by shocking pictures that someone is sending her, returns to Sanctuary, her family home. Her sister Lexy, an unsuccessful actress, is now a waitress at the resort. Brother Brian loves his home—has no desire to leave—and enjoys running the resort and cooking for their guests. Older cousin Kate, who came to help the family when their mother mysteriously disappeared, has been in love ever since with their father, Sam, who has never gotten over
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the loss of his wife and has been little comfort to his children. The mysteries, involving the sender of the mysterious photographs and the disappearance of Annabelle Hathaway, and the romantic entanglements of the Hathaway siblings provide enjoyable, entertaining reading. Another recent novel, Homeport (1998), tells the story of archeometrist Dr. Miranda Jones of Maine, ‘‘a Jones of Jones Point. And she was never permitted to forget it.’’ Returning to her family home, she is viciously attacked and robbed. Her life is further complicated by Andrew, her alcoholic brother, and a bitter estrangement from her mother, Elizabeth, who summons her to Florence to test a Renaissance sculpture, The Bronze Lady. She becomes involved romantically and professionally with Ryan Boldari, an art thief. The smoothly written plot involves art thefts, murder, forgery, treachery, and romance. One of the aspects of Roberts’ books that appeal to many readers is that her heroines are strong, determined, intelligent. In the interview with People she said, ‘‘My readers are real women with real lives, and they don’t all live in trailers.’’ Roberts told Cathy Sova of the Romance Reader Web site, ‘‘I had always written what I felt were strong heroines, but as time passed the books reflected more and more what women wanted in a relationship. Equality, sensuality. . . . And the heroes were no longer burdened with having to be the richest man in the free world.’’ Roberts likes to write books continuing a story over several novels, such as the Born In. . . series and the Calhoun and the Daring to Dream novels. As she explained in the interview with Sova, ‘‘I really like ‘connecting’ books. . .immersing myself in characters I can stay with a while.’’ Considerate of her readers, she prefers to publish the connecting books in paperback so readers will not have to wait a long time for the next part of the story. Although most of her novels have a contemporary setting, she has also written historical romances, including those in the MacGregor clan series; the Donovan Legacy novels, which are about witches; and the Eve Dallas novels, which are set in the future and written under the name J. R. Robb. In 1997 Roberts filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against fellow romance novelist Janet Dailey for plagiarism. An enthusiastic Internet user, she noticed an e-mail posting from a fan pointing out passages in one of Dailey’s books that were almost identical to passages in one of Roberts’ own. Dailey later confessed to plagiarizing at least several passages from Roberts’ books. Roberts found the year-long legal process an unnerving experience; she admitted to People, ‘‘I couldn’t write for a while. . . . I felt like I was being stalked.’’ According to Publishers Weekly, Roberts donated all of her financial compensation (an undisclosed amount) to the Literacy Volunteers of America, the Authors Guild Foundation, and the Authors League Fund. OTHER WORKS: Selected titles: Blithe Images (1982). Search for Love (1982). The Heart’s Victory (1982). Tonight and Always (1983). Sullivan’s Woman (1984). Playing the Odds (1985). The Right Path (1985). The Playboy Prince (1987). Luring a Lady (1985). Courting Catherine (1992). Honest Illusions (1992). Best
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Laid Plans (1994). The MacGregor Brides (1997). Seaswept (1998). Inner Harbor (1999). River’s End (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1997). Other references: People (18 Aug. 1997, 12 Apr. 1999). PW (29 Apr. 1996, 11 Nov. 1996, 2 Feb. 1998, 4 May 1998). Writer’s Digest (Feb. 1997). Web site: further information available online at: http:// www.theromancereader.com/nroberts.html. —KAREN LESLIE BOYD
ROBINS, Elizabeth
Henfield, Sussex, where she was considered the most important literary figure of the area. Most of her novels are about love and marriage; but unlike many of her contemporaries, Robins is not sentimental about these subjects. She is primarily concerned with the relationships between men and women, and breaks away from the conventional view of romantic love and idyllic marriage as the only possible state. Indeed, she demonstrates the possibility of genuine friendship between the sexes. Robins’ writing is intelligent and lucid, her style clear and uncomplicated. Her descriptions are precisely visualized, her dialogue rings true, and she builds her characters, especially the women, fully. Her plots sometimes seem laborious and rambling when set beside a modern novel; but compared to contemporary novels, they are models of restraint.
Born 1862, Louisville, Kentucky; died 1952, Sussex, England Also wrote under: C. E. Raimond Daughter of Charles E. Robins; married George R. Parks, 1881 (died)
Perhaps because Robins spent so much of her life in England and published the majority of her work there, she has not been as well known in her native country. Nevertheless, Robins’ stories bear a distinctively American stamp in the independence of her women and in the emphasis on their innate dignity and individuality.
Elizabeth Robins was one of eight children of a prosperous banker. She spent her early childhood in Staten Island, New York, but received formal education at the exclusive Putnam Seminary for Young Ladies in Zanesville, Ohio. At the age of sixteen, Robins left school for the stage. She began acting under an assumed name in the Boston Museum Company and then went on tour. Married briefly to an actor, Robins was widowed when he met a violent death. She continued to act and developed an early and comprehensive interest in Ibsen’s work.
OTHER WORKS: George Mandeville’s Husband (1894). The New Moon (1895). The Fatal Gift of Beauty, and Other Stories (1896). The Open Question (1899). Below the Salt (1900). The Dark Lantern (1905). Under the Southern Cross (1907). Ibsen and the Actress (1908). The Mills of the Gods (1908). The Florentine Frame (1909). Under His Roof (1910). Why? (1912). My Little Sister (1913). The Messenger (1919). Time Is Whispering (1923). The Secret That Was Kept (1926). Both Sides the Curtain (1940).
Robins visited Norway and, on her return, stopped in England and was soon on good terms with London producers, playing leading roles. She became a close friend of Henry James and later published their lengthy correspondence in Theatre and Friendship (1930). She created most of the Ibsen heroines in London productions of his plays during the 1890s; these were generally poorly received because of the antipathy to Ibsen’s subjects, but Robins gained acclaim.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Ohio Authors and Their Books (1962). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCA. Other references: Athenaeum (1887, 1888, 1909). Atlantic (1895, 1906). Bookman (1904, 1907, 1908, 1909). Nation (1899, 1905, 1908). North American Review (1910). SR (1894, 1895, 1904, 1907, 1908, 1909).
An ardent suffragist, Robins was deeply involved in the early women’s rights movement, and a number of her books reflect this interest. Woman’s Secret (1905) is an illuminating and thoughtful historical examination of woman’s traditional place in Western culture. Votes for Women (1906), which gave English suffragists their slogan, is one of the few plays to deal directly with the question in an overt attempt to enlighten the public at large, as is Robins’ novel, The Convert (1907). Way Stations (1913) is one of clearest and most concise histories of the women’s rights movement of that time. In the early 1900s, Robins visited the Western U.S. and the Alaskan Klondike during the gold rush, and the result was two novels set in that area. Magnetic North (1904) is perhaps the best known of all Robins’ works, but Come and Find Me (1908) is equally well written. Robins lived in England for the rest of her life, although she made frequent visits to the U.S. After 1920 she made her home in
—HELENE KOON
ROBINSON, Harriet (Jane) Hanson Born 8 February 1825, Boston, Massachusetts; died 22 December 1911, Malden, Massachusetts Also wrote under: Harriet J. Hanson, Mrs. W. S. Robinson Daughter of William and Harriet Browne Hanson; married William S. Robinson, 1848 (died 1876); children: four Harriet Hanson Robinson’s father, a carpenter, died in 1831, and her mother took her four children to Lowell, where she managed a factory boardinghouse. Robinson began working as a bobbin-doffer at ten. After working a 14-hour day, she went to evening schools until she was able to attend Lowell High School
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for two years. At fifteen, her regular formal education ceased. She tended a spinning frame and then became a drawing-in girl, one of the most skilled jobs in the mill. Taking private lessons in German, drawing, and dancing, Robinson read widely and began publishing poetry in newspapers, annuals, and the Lowell Offering. One of her verses caught the attention of William Stevens Robinson, assistant editor of the Lowell Courier; after a two-year courtship, in which Robinson was torn between love and literary ambition, they were married. Her husband published the Lowell American, one of the first free-soil papers, from 1849 to 1854. Robinson joined him in his support of abolition and worked as editorial assistant while becoming the mother of four children. (Her elder daughter became the second woman admitted to the bar in Massachusetts.) After the Civil War, Robinson and her husband worked for woman suffrage until his death in 1876. Robinson became the Massachusetts leader of Susan B. Anthony’s National Woman Suffrage Association and a strong organizer and supporter of women’s clubs. All of Robinson’s books were published after her husband’s death. Her first is ‘‘Warrington’’ Pen-Portraits (1877), which combines her memoir of her husband with a collection of his works. (The title refers to the name under which his militant abolitionist writings had been published.) It gives valuable pictures of abolitionist circles of the 1850s and of two eras in Concord, Massachusetts, where W. S. Robinson grew up and the couple lived from 1854 to 1857. ‘‘Among his schoolmates were John and Henry D. Thoreau; ‘David Henry,’ as he was then called. Of the elder, John, Mr. Robinson was very fond. He was a genial and pleasant youth, and much more popular with his schoolmates than his more celebrated brother. Mr. Robinson had a high opinion of his talents and said that he was then quite as promising as Henry D.’’ Pen-Portraits also records impressions of John Thoreau Sr., as ‘‘the most silent of men, particularly in the presence of his wife and gifted son,’’ and of Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau as ‘‘one of the most graphic talkers imaginable, [who] held her listeners dumb.’’ In The New Pandora (1889), a verse drama, Robinson writes, ‘‘A woman should no more obey a man / Than should a man a woman. . . . My mate’s no more my slave than I am hers’’; and ‘‘Sex cannot limit the immortal mind. / We are ourselves, with individual souls, / Still struggling onward toward the infinite.’’ Her pleas for equality of the sexes and the equal representation of women in councils of state, however, bog down in archaic verbs and verb forms and poetic diction. Loom and Spindle (1898), Robinson’s most important work, adds personal history, anecdotes, and detail to the account she already had given in Early Factory Labor in New England (1883) of life in the cotton mills and corporation boardinghouses. Loom and Spindle provides analyses of the social hierarchy of Lowell and unforgettable vignettes, such as that of backwoods Yankee farm girls arriving to work in the city. Robinson also provides a full account of the Lowell Offering and biographical sketches of its chief contributors, carried through to 1898 whenever possible. She admits her account of ‘‘the life of every-day working-girls’’ may omit a darker side of their existence, but says, ‘‘I give the side
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I knew best—the bright side!’’ Robinson’s work may be only a relic of feminist propaganda, but her lucid first-person accounts of Lowell life in the 1830s and 1840s, of the Lowell Offering, and of Concord will always be valuable to literary and social historians as well as enjoyable reading. OTHER WORKS: Massachusetts in the Woman Suffrage Movement (1881). Captain Mary Miller (1887). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Eisler, B., ed., The Lowell Offering: Writings by New England Mill Women (1977). Foner, P. S., The Factory Girls (1977). Josephson, H. G., The Golden Threads: New England’s Mill Girls and Magnates (1949). Merk, L., Massachusetts and the Woman-Suffrage Movement (dissertation, 1961). Rothman, E., Harriet Hanson Robinson: A Search for Satisfaction in the Nineteenth Century Woman Suffrage Movement (dissertation, 1973). Reference works: American Literary Manuscripts (1977). NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —SUSAN SUTTON SMITH
ROBINSON, Martha Harrison Born circa 1830s or 1840s; died death date unknown Virtually nothing is known about Robinson’s life. Helen Erskine (1870), her only book, is a good example of conventional 19th-century feminine fiction. It is escapist in nature, approaching the gothic at times, and contains that staple of ladies’s fiction, the ward and her wealthy guardian. Helen Erskine is written in the American Anglophile tradition; it curls up happily in a fantasy projection of English aristocracy. The main plot concerns the dutiful and stalwart Hugh Bolton’s pursuit of the remarkable and equally honorable Helen Erskine. Hugh, in his late twenties, is legally related to Helen, a lass in her mid-twenties, but there is no blood connection. Helen’s mother had been married to Hugh’s uncle, but Helen was the result of her mother’s first marriage. When Helen’s stepfather, a Scottish laird, dies, he leaves his enormous holdings to Hugh. Hugh then becomes a variety of guardian to Helen’s mother, Helen, and Helen’s half-sister, Janet, the offspring of her mother’s marriage to Hugh’s uncle. Hugh falls in love with Helen’s stern rigorousness, but Helen cannot see the real motive for his offer to share his wealth and insists on working as a teacher to provide for herself. It is only after Hugh’s attempted suicide (he throws himself from a cliff) that Helen agrees to marry him. Robinson writes with a prodigious range of vocabulary. Her prose plays over a richly colored rainbow of words and allusions. On occasion, Robinson uses interesting images; a particularly arresting sexual metaphor has an unknown masked cavalier getting his rapier tangled in the lace bedecking a luscious masked lady.
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Robinson uses rather modern techniques to introduce the novel. She opens with an unmediated, entirely dramatized discussion of Hugh’s virtues by two relatively minor characters. Without a word of direct commentary from the narrator, the main character is introduced and the moral tone of the novel is set. Perhaps Robinson’s most interesting achievement is the creation of a strong, independent heroine who is chosen by the ideal man from among a bevy of passive conventional heroines. Helen exhibits, at least initially, the characteristics of the ideal liberated woman. She is intelligent, energetic, compassionate, dutiful, and courageous. After she has struggled to make her own way, however, Hugh nearly dies for her, and Helen admits her independence was really the sin of pride. In a larger way, the passivity of the privileged is also lionized—work, in this novel, is quite hateful. Robinson leaves us a novel highly charged with aristocratic romanticism and a subterranean streak of feminism. —MARTHA NOCHIMSON
RODGERS, Carolyn M. Born 14 December 1942, Chicago, Illinois Daughter of Clarence and Bazella Colding Rodgers Carolyn M. Rodgers grew up on Chicago’s South Side, a member of a vibrant urban black community that has served as one source for her poetry. She spent much of her younger years as an active member of an AME (African Methodist Episcopal) church congregation. Those experiences, as well as the continuing influence of her mother’s religious faith, would make themselves into the materials of poetry. As a child, Rodgers was an avid reader. In addition, her father, an aspiring singer, encouraged her musical talents. In her second year at Hyde Park High School, Rodgers converted to Roman Catholicism. During her high school and college years, she began writing, primarily for herself. While attending Roosevelt University, Rodgers attended a poetry reading by and a reception for the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks. This meeting stimulated Rodgers’ reading of black writers. She left Roosevelt University in 1963 and began to work with high school dropouts. Returning to school several years later, she received a B.A. from Chicago State University in 1981 and an M. A. from the University of Chicago in 1983. Although Rodgers had been writing throughout her high school and college years, it was while she was working in the dropout program that she decided she was a writer. Quitting her job in 1968, with some financial and moral encouragement from her first mentor, Gwendolyn Brooks, she began her career as a writer. A subsequent encounter with Hoyt W. Fuller, editor of Negro Digest (later Black World), provided a direct stimulus to Rodgers’ literary career. Soon after meeting him, she submitted several pieces to Negro Digest. Her poems and a short story were published and Rodgers became a regular contributor to the magazine. Shortly afterwards, Fuller and several other artists founded
the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC [oh-bah-see]), including a musicians’ workshop, a theater workshop, an artists’ workshop, and a writers’ workshop. It was the OBAC Writers’ Workshop that would thrive and Rodgers, along with Johari Amini (then Jewel Latimore), Haki Madhubuti (then Don L. Lee), Walter Bradford, Mike Cook, Rhonda Davis, and others provided the nucleus of the leadership of what became a center for the New Black Poetry movement. The same group met as the Gwendolyn Brooks Writers Workshop at Brooks’ home. Rodgers’ first books of poems, Paper Soul (1968), selected with Brooks’ assistance and featuring an introduction by Fuller, was self-published. The book was later distributed by the newly established Third World Press, publishers in 1969 of Songs of a Blackbird. Rodgers also published single poems in broadside form with the young Broadside Press. Described early on by a young actor fan as a ‘‘new Langston Hughes,’’ Rodgers translated black vernacular idioms into poetic language and won immediate response from her community and from college audiences. In the introduction to her first book, Fuller wrote of Rodgers’ language as ‘‘honed with bitterness and tipped with grace, [one that] swaggers along the brutal street and prances into the parlors: it does not know its bounds.’’ Rodgers’ poetry has been widely anthologized, and since the later 1960s she has been in demand as a reader of her own work. OBAC helped pioneer the poetry reading as cultural event, popularizing a style of presentation called ‘‘rise and fly,’’ in which each poet briefly presented the material that she or he felt would elicit the greatest crowd response. OBAC writers attempted to institutionalize poetry readings that functioned in the community in the same way as presentations of black music. The New Black Poets were also frequently characterized as Black Revolutionary Poets, an aspect of their writings that became something of a straitjacket for Rodgers and several of her colleagues who had a wider range of subjects than the ‘‘revolution.’’ In 1975 Rodgers published her first volume of poems with a ‘‘mainstream’’ publisher, Doubleday, How I Got Ovah: New and Selected Poems and the volume was nominated for the National Book Award for 1976. Her next work, The Heart as Ever Green: Poems (1978) also came from Doubleday, before Rodgers switched over to privately publishing under her own imprint, Eden Press, which she began with a grant from the Illinois Arts Council. Her poems have been widely anthologized (see works section above) and her critical essays, short stories, and reviews have appeared in numerous periodicals and journals (including Black Scholar, Black World, Carolina Quarterly, Colloquy, Ebony, Essence, Focus on Youth, Journal of Black Poetry, and others). In the introduction to Songs of a Blackbird, David Llorens describes Rodgers as a ‘‘storyteller of the highest order.’’ She has also been praised for her sensitive lyrics and musical lines. Angela Jackson, a sister OBAC poet, celebrated Rodgers as a ‘‘singer of sass and blues. . . . Everytime you look at her u see somebody u know. . . . She a witness. humming her people / to the promis / d land.’’ As a published writer of acclaim, throughout the years Rodgers has served as a writer-in-residence and taught creative
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writing and African American literature at many colleges and universities, yet she has continually returned to her roots in Chicago. In addition to her poetry and essays, she has written for the stage and seen her poetry used in dramatic productions OffBroadway. Rodgers has been the recipient of several book award nominations and won the Poet Laureate Award of the Society of Midland Authors for Songs of a Blackbird, and received a National Endowment of the Arts fellowship. OTHER WORKS: Two Love Raps (1969). Now Ain’t That Love (1969). For H. W. Fuller (1970). For Flip Wilson: Long Rap/ Commonly Known as a Poetic Essay (1971). Poems for Malcolm (1972). Translation: Poems (1980). Love (play, produced 1982). Eden and Other Poems (1983). A Little Lower Than the Angels (1984). Finite Forms (1985). Morning Glory: Poems (1989). Rain (1991). We’re Only Human (1994). A Train Called Judah (1996). The Girl With the Blue Hair (1996). Has also published poems in many anthologies, including: We Speak as Liberators, Brothers and Sisters, Spectrum in Black, Purpose in Literature, Geography of Poets and others in the 1970s; Understanding the New Black Poetry, No More Masks!, Exploring Life Through Literature, Counterpoint, Contemporary Black Poetry, Black Sister Anthology, Sturdy Black Bridges, Black Women Writers, Daughters of Africa and others in the 1980s; In Search of Color Everywhere, Honey Hush, A Rock Against the Wind, Father Songs, My Soul as a Witness, Language Issues and The Jazz Poetry Anthology, Volume 2 in the 1990s. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Evans, M., ed., Black Women Writers (1950-1980) (1984). Kirkland, S. A., ‘‘The Black Arts Movement and the Poetry of Sonia Sanchez and Carolyn Rodgers’’ (thesis, 1993). Parks, C. A., ed., Nommo: Literary Legacy of Black Chicago, 1967-1987 (1987). Redmond, E. B., Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro- American Poetry—A Critical History (1976). Russell, S., Render Me My Song: African-American Women Writers from Slavery to the Present (1990). Reference works: CAAS (1991). CANR (1989). CP (1991). DLB (1985). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: CLAJ (Sept. 1981). —FAHAMISHA PATRICIA BROWN
ROGERS, Katherine M(unzer) Born 6 June 1932, New York, New York Daughter of Martin and Jean Thompson Munzer; married Kenneth C. Rogers, 1956; children: Margaret, Christopher, Thomas The daughter of a business executive and a psychiatrist, Katherine M. Rogers was educated at Barnard College (B.A., 1952) and Columbia University (Ph.D., 1957). Rogers was a
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Fulbright fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge University, from 1952-53. After instructorships at Skidmore College and Cornell University, she joined the English Department at Brooklyn College in 1958, becoming a full professor in 1974. Rogers’ major fields are Restoration and 18th-century literature and 19th-century fiction; her special interest is the status of women as subjects and as writers in these periods. A ‘‘committed but not extreme feminist,’’ her view is that courses on women and literature should ‘‘never. . .reduce their texts to mere springboards for political theorizing or proselytizing.’’ The Troublesome Helpmate: A Study of Misogyny in Literature (1966) was inspired by the events of Rogers’ life. During the 1960s, regulations at Brooklyn College forced pregnant women to take leaves of absence. Since uninterrupted years of teaching were required for tenure, these regulations prevented Rogers from obtaining tenure at the end of the usual period of probationary service. She writes: ‘‘I managed to sublimate my indignation by applying my mind to a scholarly study of misogyny.’’ The Troublesome Helpmate defines misogyny not as the almost universal view that women are inferior to men and should therefore be subordinated to them, but as the fear, dislike, or contempt expressed by a writer who ‘‘insists on this view to an extent unusually harsh for his period.’’ Rogers traces misogyny back to its origins in Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultures. She then proceeds in an encyclopedic fashion through English literature, concentrating on historical variations in the literary expression of misogyny and on several important authors. Rogers offers various social, historical, and psychological causes of misogyny, suggesting that the most basic of these is the need to rationalize ‘‘the wish to keep women subject to men.’’ Rogers has continued her analysis of male writers in William Wycherley (1972) and in essays on Richardson, Fielding, Thackeray, Ibsen, and others. In ‘‘The Feminism of Daniel Defoe’’ (in Woman in the 18th Century, and Other Essays, edited by P. Fritz and R. Morton, 1976), Rogers analyzes carefully Defoe’s treatment of marriage, love, sex, adultery, economic survival, and female psychology in both his journalism and fiction. Of Arnold’s plea for birth control in Culture and Anarchy, she suggests that its motivation was social progress rather than sexual freedom (Dalhousie Review, Winter 1971-72). Like other feminist critics, Rogers has gradually moved from images of women in literature by men to women writers, some once well known but now forgotten. She shows how late 18th-century conventions of ‘‘feminine’’ writing inhibited Charlotte Smith, who centered her novels on insipid heroines, although her real skill lay in revealing political abuses and social pretensions, and Elizabeth Inchbald, who ignored conventions in the first half of her best novel but followed them ‘‘to the destruction of interest and plausibility in the second part’’ (Eighteenth-Century Studies, 1977). In Feminism in Eighteenth-Century England, Rogers continues analyzing the historical circumstances of women’s lives, their subjective position as defined by ideology, the literary developments that helped to encourage the feminism of the period, and the influence of that feminism on the work of women writers in various genres.
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The Cat and the Human Imagination: Feline Images from Bast to Garfield (1998) is a historical assessment of the shifting cultural perspectives on cats and the countless ways they have been portrayed in literature and art. The status of cats has changed significantly since the time of the ancient Egyptians, and the book explores the varying visions and examines the situations in which cats lived. The analysis includes the parallel evolution between human attitudes towards cats and towards animals, authority, and gender. Bloomsbury Review noted, ‘‘Scholarly but never stuffy, Rogers presents a fascinating parade of cats in art and literature, with many surprises for cat lovers who think they know their cat history. . .The author cites from classical literature, folklore, and popular culture in an endless stream of interesting excerpts and stories, peppered with her own dry wit. A wonderful resource for writers and researchers.’’ Rogers told Contemporary Authors in 1999: ‘‘My intense concern with the status of women (spurred by some deplorable experiences in my professional life—e.g., being deprived of academic tenure with each pregnancy) provided a driving motive for writing my first book. Lately, I have been concerned with how women of the past perceived themselves and their situations. To a surprising extent, they anticipated the insights of the Women’s Liberation Movement of today.’’ She continues to publish scholarly articles in professional journals and her forthcoming book, The Popish Midwife, studies the life of Elizabeth Cellier. OTHER WORKS: Selected Poems of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1979). Meridian Classic Book of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Drama (editor, 1979). Selected Writings of Samuel Johnson (editor, 1981). Meridian Anthology of Early Women Writers (editor, 1987). Frances Burney: The World of ‘‘Female Difficulties’’ (1990). Meridian Anthology of Early American Women Writers (editor, 1991). Meridian Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Plays by Women (editor, 1994). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (Online, 1999). Other references: Books Abroad (Autumn 1967). Johnsonian News Letter (Dec. 1966). Journal of Marriage and the Family (May 1972). PQ (July 1973). Review of English Studies (1993). The Year’s Work in English Studies (1967). Web site: information available online at: www.press.umich.edu/titles/10826.html. —JANET SHARISTANIAN, UPDATED BY ALLISON A. JONES
ROMAN, Klara Goldzieher Born 1881, Budapest, Hungary; died 9 August 1962, Zurich, Switzerland Daughter of William Goldzieher; married Mr. Roman, 1900 Born in Hungary to a medical, tradition-bound family that disapproved of a medical career for women, Klara Goldzieher
ROMAN
Roman secretly studied handwriting. Given her familial background and thwarted ambitions, Roman naturally focused on physiological-neurological aspects in handwriting. However, only after her marriage at nineteen, with her husband’s reluctant consent, did Roman study and experiment in Berlin. She became Kurt Lewin’s research assistant. Recognition and honors soon accumulated: Roman graduated from the Hungarian Royal State Institute for Abnormal Psychology; she was elected a member of the Hungarian Society of Psychology; she founded the Hungarian Institute for Handwriting Research; and she became the official forensic handwriting expert for juvenile delinquents and later for adult criminal courts. Although Roman by no means overlooked characterological indications in handwriting, her emphasis was physiological, resulting in her invention of the graphodyne, a stylus for measuring tension. Roman was best known for this invention and its use in her inquiries into handedness and children’s mental development and maturation. Her inquiries resulted in the conclusion that writing speed is based on genetic factors, and writing pressure chiefly on special conditions and environmental influences. When Roman came to the U.S. in 1947, her work was met with scepticism and indifference. In 1948 she won a unique prize: an appointment to teach graphology as a staff member of the New School of Social Research. It was the first time a recognized American college offered graphological courses for credit. In 1952 Handwriting: A Key to Personality was published and launched Roman’s graphological method in print. In the U.S., as in Europe, Roman won recognition for her astute findings concerning speech disorders, criminality, and personality. Additionally, she did research in arthritis, child disturbances, and differential diagnosis in speech and hearing deficiencies. Invitations to lectures and assignments as teacher in residence and research collaborator took Roman to many parts of the U.S. Perhaps her most influential, far-reaching work, Encyclopedia of the Written Word (1968), treated graphology as only one aspect of what Roman considered man’s greatest achievement: the written word. Roman’s most valuable contributions to graphology relate to the proven link between children’s handwriting variability and age, differential diagnosis in speech and hearing disturbances, and the psychogram (‘‘the profile-in-the-round’’), devised in collaboration with S. W. Staemfli. The psychogram introduced a pictorial concept of personality structure and functioning that more easily dovetailed with personality theories of overlapping functions. Three years before her death, eager to devote more time to the encyclopedia, Roman resigned from the New School, but not without certainty that the graphological courses would continue under the able teaching of her long-time assistant. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Vernon, P. E. and G. W., Studies in Expressive Movement (1933). Wolfson, R., Introduction to Encyclopedia of the Written Word (1968). —ROSE WOLFSON
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ROMBAUER, Irma von Starkloff Born 30 October 1877, St. Louis, Missouri; died 14 October 1962, St. Louis, Missouri Daughter of H. Max Starkloff and Clara Kuhlmann; married Edgar R. Rombauer, 1899 Irma von Starkloff Rombauer once said of herself, ‘‘Although I have been modernized by life and my children, my roots are Victorian.’’ Rombauer was born into the social and cultural milieu of upper-class St. Louis. Her father was a physician and also served for several years as American consul in Bremen, Germany. Travel in Europe with her family during her adolescence formed Rombauer’s taste in the traditional values of European society. Rombauer’s mother had originally emigrated to St. Louis from Germany in order to found, with others, the first kindergarten there. Ironically, she educated Rombauer in the traditional attributes of being ‘‘a lady.’’ In 1899, when she married a young attorney, Rombauer was surprised to discover her education had not prepared her for housekeeping and cooking. In self-defense, she slowly learned to cook; she became a student of Mrs. Nannie Talbot Johnson of Paris, Kentucky, a well-known teacher and lecturer on cookery. Simultaneously, she acquired recipes from members of her well-connected German family as well as from friends and newspapers in St. Louis. During her married life, Rombauer was actively involved with organizations in the cultural life of St. Louis. When her husband died, Rombauer wrote her bestselling cookbook ‘‘chiefly to distract her keen unhappiness.’’ Privately printed in 1931, in an edition of 3,000 copies, The Joy of Cooking was quickly bought out by St. Louis hostesses. Despite the great number of other cookbooks on the market, increasing requests for a copy of the book prompted Rombauer to work on a greatly enlarged edition, published in 1936. Since then it has gone through five hardcover editions and sold more than six million copies. The format she developed to unite the exact, scientifically measured ingredients with crystal clear procedural instructions was unique for that era. Instead of listing ingredients at the beginning of each recipe or burying them in the text as many ‘‘lady’’ writers did, Rombauer reduced her recipes to a step-by-step method of listing ingredients along with the mixing process. Rombauer’s daughter, Marion Rombauer Becker, tested recipes for the first edition and created simple illustrations for subsequent editions; her contributions help enliven the text. She became a full-fledged coauthor in the 1940s. Rombauer published two additional cookbooks: Streamlined Cooking (1939) and Cooking for Girls and Boys (1946). Rombauer’s great accomplishment was to have written the perfect cookbook, a how-to manual at a time when servants were disappearing from middle class homes because of a changing work force at the beginning of World War II. Rombauer’s book bridged the gap between the remembered elegance and richness of the 19th century and the more austere life of servantless homes of the 20th century. Her witty style, cultivated taste in multinational
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cuisines, and firsthand knowledge of the needs of American households provided America with its culinary classic. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CB (Dec. 1953, Dec. 1962). Other references: Coronet (Oct. 1950). NYTBR (12 Aug. 1951). St. Louis Post-Dispatch (3 Dec. 1931, 29 June 1952). Time (26 Oct. 1962). —DOROTHEA MOSLEY THOMPSON
ROOSEVELT, Eleanor (Roosevelt) Born 11 October 1884, New York, New York; died 7 November 1962, New York, New York Daughter of Elliot and Anna Hall Roosevelt; married Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1905; children: one daughter, five sons Eleanor Roosevelt wrote books, essays, and newspaper articles that inspired one’s duty to work for the freedom and common good of the community of humankind. She wrote a total of 12 nonfiction books and a daily newspaper ‘‘letter’’ that started in 1935 and ended with her death in 1962. The column appeared in 140 papers and helped inspire the people of the U.S. through the challenging years of a worldwide depression and a world war. She also wrote a monthly magazine column and made numerous lecture tours. Her personal popularity as First Lady and as an undaunted proponent of world peace overshadowed her writing career, but it is in her writings that we find the roots of her strength and courage. In This is My Story (1937), Roosevelt reveals that she had a privileged but unhappy childhood with a stern mother who doted on Roosevelt’s brothers. Her father and mother died when she was young and she was raised by her grandmother. Despite being shy, awkward, and an unusually tall young girl, Roosevelt grew into a mature woman known throughout the world for her crusading efforts on behalf of democracy and equality. She writes of a strong commitment to her husband (this despite a painful revelation of his infidelity not yet made public in 1937) and her interest in national and international concerns. Throughout her life she wrote a number of issue-oriented books, including The Moral Basis of Democracy (1940), an examination of the foundations of democracy, while India and the Awakening East (1953) looks at the then fledgling Indian nation, covering its challenges and successes. A strong proponent, indeed often considered the founder of the United Nations, Roosevelt’s UN Today and Tomorrow (1953) presents a picture of the international organization and its potential. But it was in her column, ‘‘My Day,’’ syndicated by United Feature Syndicate and first appearing on 30 December 1935, that her strong philosophy of life came through and where at times she dropped her public persona and revealed Eleanor Roosevelt the woman. In each column she shared her ‘‘day’’ with the American people and though often written after hours of activities and
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meetings, Roosevelt’s voice of compassion and justice was consistently expressed. Her style was simply to relate her activities to her readers and how she felt about them. The writing style was warm and intimate, often humorous, and through these ‘‘sharings’’ we find a woman sincerely concerned about the welfare and security of humankind, with an undaunted perseverance to work for changing the world for the better. What I Hope to Leave Behind: The Essential Essays of Eleanor Roosevelt (1995) is a collection of Roosevelt’s essays that appeared in various publications ranging from Harper’s magazine to Good Housekeeping magazine. The collection traces the development of Roosevelt’s style from a reticent political journalist to a self-assured activist for democracy and the ‘‘inherent responsibility of democratic citizenship.’’ In these essays Roosevelt consistently argues for the rights of all people, regardless of nationality, sex, age, wealth, or race. During her lifetime Roosevelt was the recipient of numerous humanitarian awards. Because of her strong interest for and involvement in international events, she has often been called the First Lady of the World and Number One World Citizen. Recent books have revealed that Roosevelt had intense relationships with women friends, but she never discussed them publicly. This circle of women provided nurturance and support throughout Roosevelt’s adult life and undoubtedly had a major influence in her unceasing work for the civil rights of African Americans and women’s equality. Overall, the sum of Roosevelt’s writings show her to have been a shy young woman who overcame her fear of criticism, grew in her independence, and became a world leader despite sadness and difficulty in her life. In overcoming her own difficulties, she became a role model for compassion and caring for all peoples. Her undefeated enthusiasm for life continues to draw generations to her writings. OTHER WORKS: When You Grow Up To Vote (1932). It’s Up to the Women (1933). My Days (1938). If You Ask Me (1946). This I Remember (1949). On My Own (1958). You Learn By Living (1960). Tomorrow Is Now (1963). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cook, B. W., Eleanor Roosevelt, 1884-1933 (vol. I, 1992). Cook,. B. W., Eleanor Roosevelt: 1933-1938 (vol. 2, 1999). Hickok, L.A., Reluctant First Lady (1962). Lash, J. P., Eleanor and Franklin (1971). —LINDA SPENCER
ROQUELAURE, A. N. See RICE, Anne
ROSS, Helaine See DANIELS, Dorothy
ROSS, Lillian Born 8 June 1927, Syracuse, New York Daughter of Louis R. and Edna Rosenberg Ross; children: Erik Lillian Ross comes from a middle-class Jewish background. She attended Hunter College in New York City, and in 1946 began writing for the New Yorker. Ross became a staff writer in 1948 under founding editor Harold Ross, she later worked with William Shawn, and most of the material in her books appeared first in the New Yorker. Few details of Ross’ private life were ever available, as she believed that ‘‘a reporter’s most valuable asset is his anonymity.’’ However, in the late 1990s, this anonymity was shattered when it was revealed that Ross and the very-married Shawn had carried on a decades-long affair, which produced a child. In the course of gathering material for her first New Yorker profile in 1947 (on Brooklyn-born bullfighter Sidney Franklin, reprinted in Reporting as ‘‘El Unico Matador’’), Ross met Ernest Hemingway. When Hemingway visited New York for a few days in 1949, Ross was invited to accompany him. The resulting profile (New Yorker, 13 May 1950) aroused both admiration and protest, a furor which surfaced again when the article appeared in book form as Portrait of Hemingway (1961). Ross explained and defended the work, of which Hemingway himself approved, in a letter to the editors of New Republic (7 August 1961). The Hemingway profile gave Ross a certain cachet when she went to Hollywood for 18 months to cover the entire process of making a motion picture, from original conception to stockholders’ box office report. The picture was MGM’s The Red Badge of Courage, directed by John Huston, and the New Yorker articles became the book Picture (1952). It was considered a literary innovation because it told a factual story in fictional form. Many objected to the ingenuous exposé of Hollywood’s preference for making money over making art, but the book remains, after 25 years, as instructive as it is entertaining. The Player: Profile of an Art (1962) is a collection of self-portraits of 55 actors and actresses. Over a four-year period, Ross and her sister, Helen, interviewed their subjects, taking copious notes and then arranging the material in the form of monologues, each prefaced by a ‘‘natural, unretouched’’ photograph taken by Ross Vertical and Horizontal (1963) is a collection of stories that, taken together, chronicle with wry humor and a touch of pathos the activities of a would-be upwardly mobile New York bachelor physician in his relationships with his less than competent psychiatrist, his patients, and the women he regards as ‘‘wife material.’’ Reporting (1964) contains five New Yorker articles, including ‘‘Portrait of Hemingway,’’ and ‘‘Picture.’’ Although both ‘‘The Big Stone’’ and ‘‘Terrific’’ cover events that occurred over a period of a year, Ross would seem to have been invisibly present at every moment of decision, every casual but crucial encounter of personalities. That sixth sense for striking chords of interest from an array of random notes reappears in Talk Stories (1966), a collection of 60 short pieces originally written for the unsigned
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‘‘Talk of the Town’’ section of the New Yorker. Ross’ preoccupations are reflected in the number of articles on Adlai Stevenson, theater people, and the United Nations. Occasionally, she assumes the persona of ‘‘our man Stanley’’ (whose style is parodied in a review in the Reporter, 16 May 1966) or of the ‘‘wild-haired typist, Miss Rogers.’’ Anonymity had always been the distinguishing feature of Ross’ reporting as well as of her private life. Though this is now changing with her memoirs and the recent disclosures of her private life, it doesn’t change her remarkable career or the effectiveness of her writing style—it simply makes her more human. In her writing, she has rarely allowed herself to interpret or comment upon what she observes; her artistry lies in the sensitive selection of detail and the ability to suggest more than she says. By documenting the objects surrounding her subject or the subject’s gestures, facial expressions, tone of voice, and interpersonal relationships, Ross has been able to evoke the essence of a particular personality, an entire corporate hierarchy, or a universal human foible. Asked for her advice to young writers, Ross tells them to ‘‘try to find the strongest and most direct line from your feelings and ideas to what you write. Hold to what you know is true, no matter what is offered to you in the way of distraction.’’ Sage advice. OTHER WORKS: Adlai Stevenson (1966). Maine Lingo: Boiled Owls, Billdads, and Wazzats (with J. Gould, 1975). Moments with Chaplin (1980). Takes: Stories from Talk of the Town (1983). Here But Not Here: A Love Story (1998). Picture (1998). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Albee, E., Conversations with Edward Albee (1988). Berner, R. T., ed., The Literature of Journalism: Text and Context (1999). Connery, T. B., ed., Sourcebook of American Literary Journalism: Representative Writers in an Emerging Genre (1992). Poirier, R., ed., Prize Stories 1964: The O. Henry Awards (1964). Other references: Counterpoint (1964). New Criterion (1998). New York (April 1998). NY (May 1998). New Republic (7 Aug. 1961). Newsweek (18 Dec. 1961). NYTBR (15 May 1966). SR (14 Mar. 1964). Time (1 May 1964, June 1998). —FELICIA HARDISON LONDRÉ
ROSSNER, Judith Born 31 March 1935, New York, New York Daughter of Joseph George and Dorothy Shapiro Perelman; married Robert Rossner,1954 (divorced); Mordeccai Persky, 1979 (divorced); children: Jean, Daniel Judith Rossner grew up in New York City, where she attended public schools and City College (1952-55). After marrying Robert Rossner, she dropped out. Though she has written a few short stories, Rossner applies her skill to novels to continue to support her early assertion that her ‘‘abiding theme is separations.’’
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Drawing on the 19th century as a fount for ideas, Rossner uses contemporary urban settings to explore, with increasing sensitivity, the difficulty of establishing and sustaining boundaries: between self and other, past and present, fiction and reality. She especially examines the complicated emotions of women-in-relationships who strive to negotiate ‘‘the dangers in attaching oneself to others out of sheer terror of the alternatives.’’ Rossner’s women characters, rejected or abandoned early in life, usually struggle emotionally. Acknowledging the influence of Tillie Olsen and especially Grace Paley, in whose voice she found her own as the ‘‘confirmed New Yorker’’ told Jean Ross that she reaps reward from the ‘‘chaos and energy’’ of the city. After leaving college, Rossner took jobs that would not tax the mental energy she needed to write before work each morning. The result was an unpublished novella and two novels, To the Precipice (1966) and Nine Months in the Life of an Old Maid (1969). The Rossners moved to New Hampshire to begin a free school, but Rossner returned to New York in 1971, ‘‘unsuited’’ to rustic living (and marriage). Any Minute I Can Split (1972), set in a commune of tenuous relationships and family ‘‘ties,’’ resulted. Her fourth novel received popular and critical acclaim and was made into a successful film that brought her earlier work into recognition. Rossner wrote Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) after Esquire lawyers rejected her article about an incident upon which the novel is based—the murder of Roseann Quinn, a teacher killed by a man she had met in a bar and brought home. Success allowed Rossner to resign secretarial work for her ‘‘real work,’’ writing. Her perception of herself as a writer had from earliest memory been encouraged by her ‘‘never critical’’ teacher-mother, who had desired but failed to write. Attachments (1977) was criticized as merely sensational. In this unique analysis of the marriage of friends to Siamese-twin brothers, Rossner sensitively uses the physical to get at complex emotional ‘‘attachments’’ between friends as well as within marriage and family. Also hurt by reviews, Emmeline (1980) differs radically in style, setting, and period from the rest of Rossner’s work. Yet the terse, true narrative of a 19th century Lowell factory girl still pivots on separation, recounting the distortion of a displaced need for love. Rossner constructs her characters and reveals their complicated motivations through colloquial yet pointed dialogue. She often recreates recorded conversation—trial proceedings, analyst sessions, or film dialogue. Further, each work evidences the ‘‘steady attention to character and psychological probability’’ that Walter Clemens found in Emmeline. This concern with authentic character development is especially apparent in August (1983) and His Little Women (1990). August emerged from Rossner’s reading of Freud and Anna O. and focuses on the process of attachment and separation; Rossner literally transcribes painful emotional growth and addresses gendering. His Little Women self-consciously examines the difficulty of the writer’s own processes of emotional separation that spur creativity and blur boundaries between fiction and reality. In Olivia (1994), Rossner examines her theme of attachment and separation, this time between mother and daughter. In the
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book Rossner writes of the relationship between the protagonist and her mother, who works all the time and leaves her daughter to the family cook. The protagonist rebels, running away to Europe, marrying, and has a daughter. The cycle repeats itself, with the protagonist leaving her daughter to her father to raise and returns to New York. In the New York Times, reviewer Ruth Reichl found the novel problematic, but when in the story Rossner ‘‘warms to her real subject, family ties, the book becomes increasingly rich.’’ Rossner’s Perfidia (1997), like Looking for Mr. Goodbar, was inspired by a story in the newspapers, and like Olivia, deals with the theme of attachment and separation of daughter and mother. In Perfidia, the protagonist doesn’t recover from her separation from her mother, rather that loss defines and drives the young Maddy’s life. Reviewing the book in the New York Times, Deborah Mason stated that ‘‘moving beyond the talkiness of her previous mother-daughter novel, Olivia, Rossner reveals a gritty new style, stripped down to the clean bones of feeling.’’ BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1976). CANR (1986). CLC (1976, 1978, 1984). DLB (1980). MTCW (1991). Other references: Hudson Review (Winter 1983-84). NYTBR (22 Apr. 1990). TLS (4 Nov. 1983). —NANCY L. BOISVERT, UPDATED BY LINDA SPENCER
ROURKE, Constance Mayfield Born 14 November 1885, Cleveland, Ohio; died 23 March 1941, Grand Rapids, Michigan Daughter of Henry B. and Constance Davis Rourke Constance Mayfield Rourke was an only child; her father was a lawyer, her mother a kindergarten teacher. Rourke moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, at age seven when her father died. Her close relationship with her mother, who passed on an appreciation for painting and handicrafts, probably encouraged Rourke’s later concern for Native American folk arts. In addition, Rourke’s professional interest in the details of ordinary life may have been a Midwestern inheritance. This regard for the near-at-hand was never mere provincialism, however; for she understood, as have all the best Midwestern writers and critics, the profound relationship between local details and national myth, between particular experience and its more universal implications. Rourke attended Vassar College (B.A. 1907); her primary interests were aesthetics and literary criticism. From 1908 to 1910 she was a researcher at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and the British Museum in London. She became an English instructor at Vassar in 1910, but in 1915 resigned from Vassar to live with her mother in Grand Rapids and to do freelance research and writing on American history and culture. Rourke is best known for her advocacy of a native American culture, her use of popular culture and other ‘‘living research’’ sources and methods, and her popular, highly readable prose style.
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She argued from a social and anthropological view of history against a belief that the quality of American society made it difficult for ‘‘culture’’ to live and prosper in the U.S. She saw a significant relationship between low and high cultures, and believed that America had a robust cultural tradition wherein unique native arts grew and flourished. Rourke proposed that American culture, woven from a great number of low- and high-culture strands, was more unified and vigorous than some scholars had believed. Implicit in Rourke’s work, especially in American Humor: A Study of the American Character (1931), is the belief that American culture need not be judged against European models. Rather, it has its own characteristics, resulting from the particular conditions of the national history that produced it. The first part of American Humor recreates the rich climate in which this culture arose. Rourke traveled widely and used personal interviews, oral history, and popular culture documents as well as traditional historical materials to present a vivid picture of the rise of American humor. She saw this humor as an essential element in the definition of American character and culture. The second part of the book analyzes mainstream-or high-culture American writers in relationship to their antecedents in native American humor. In American Humor, Rourke demonstrates a remarkable harmony between style and thematic approach. She writes in a lively, nonacademic prose, often using fictional narration and the present tense, which makes history come alive and which celebrates ordinary American experiences and the common man. Although American Humor and The Roots of American Culture (1942) include the most explicit statements of Rourke’s ideas, Charles Sheeler: Artist in the American Tradition (1938) is also a convincing application of Rourke’s theories about the interrelations between the popular American cultural experience and the mainstream art it produces. Similarly, Troupers of the Gold Coast; or, the Rise of Lotta Crabtree (1928) exemplifies Rourke’s approach. This is the lively biography of two women: Mary Ann Crabtree and her actress-comedienne daughter, Lotta. Like all of her social histories, it provides a myriad of everyday details from America’s past. Lotta Crabtree’s story is not only the chronicle of an important life, but the vital dramatization of San Francisco in the latter days of the gold rush, and of the popular theater and American humor on the Gold Coast. Critics have attacked Rourke for overstating her case on behalf of American culture and the interdependence of popular and so-called ‘‘high’’ arts; however, her reputation has been sustained not only by later studies supporting her views but by the increased use of Rourke’s popular culture research methods and by the continuing influence of her readable, scholarly books. OTHER WORKS: Trumpets of Jubilee (1927). Davy Crockett (1934). Audubon (1936). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Belman, S. I., Constance M. Rourke (1981). Brooks, V. W., Preface to The Roots of American Culture (1942). Hyman, S. E., The Armed Vision (1948, 1955). Luedtke, L. S., ed.,
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The Study of American Culture: Contemporary Conflicts (1977). Rubin, J. S., A World Out of a Wilderness: Constance Rourke and the Search for a Useable Past (dissertation, 1974). Rubin, J. S., Constance Rourke and American Culture (1980). Reference works: CB (May 1941). CAA (1940). DAB. NAW (1971). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Nation (17 Sept. 1938, 24 Oct. 1942). NR (31 Aug. 1942). WF (Apr. 1967). —NANCY POGEL
ROUTSONG, Alma Born 26 November 1924, Traverse City, Michigan; died 4 October 1996 Wrote under: Isabel Miller Daughter of Carol and Esther Miller Routsong; married Bruce Brodie, 1947 (divorced, 1962); children: Natalie, Joyce, Charlotte, Louise As Isabel Miller, Alma Routsong wrote A Place for Us (1969, later published as Patience and Sarah, 1972, reprinted in 1994), one of the first American novels to deal openly and optimistically with lesbianism. Raised in the Midwest, Routsong received her B.A. from Michigan State University in 1949. She married Bruce Brodie after a brief stint as a hospital apprentice in the U.S. Navy (1945-46) and ‘‘lived the straight life to the hilt’’ for 15 years, her life roughly paralleling that of Henrietta in her first novel, A Gradual Joy (1953). Considered at the time to be something of a model for happy heterosexuality, Joy chronicles the evolving marriage of Henrietta and Jim, children of the Depression drawn together more by a desire for stability and security than by love or passion. By mutual agreement they continue to pursue their own interests: Jim as a teacher, Henrietta as a medical student. After some initial difficulties, they suddenly discover what a New York Times reviewer called ‘‘the real meaning of love.’’ Jim becomes more concerned with the marriage, Henrietta with homemaking. With the arrival of their daughter, she abandons her professional aspirations to become ‘‘a real wife and mother.’’ Her decision goes without comment. Central to heterosexual union for Jim and Henrietta are sacrifice and compromise. Central to Patience and Sarah’s union in A Place For Us, on the other hand, are freedom and fulfillment. This may be less a comment on heterosexual convention than on the author’s experience of it. What makes A Place For Us remarkable, however, is not how it differs from A Gradual Joy, but how it differs from other literary portrayals of lesbian existence available at the time of its publication. Set in the early 1800s, Place is a rather conventional love story: two people discovering themselves and each other in the context of evolving love and intimacy. The uniqueness of the
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novel lies in its portrayal of women lovers, who are neither seen as tragic nor subjected to other popular stereotypes about lesbians. The women are, to some extent, misfits. Patience, well educated and left with an inheritance that allows her a modicum of independence, is on her way to becoming an ‘‘old maid,’’ as she puts it. Coming from a family with no sons, Sarah was reared by her father to perform traditionally male tasks, so the family might be able to eke out its living. Their respective eccentricities cause some distrust and disapproval but they remain fully integrated in their rural Connecticut community until they eventually fall in love with each other. The point at which they begin to desire a life together is the point at which they realize they must create a space for themselves elsewhere. Each woman wavers in her commitment to this goal at different moments in the novel. Patience eventually forces the issue—covertly, but cleverly. The two set out for New York State to make a life together and their relationship continues to evolve, and their intimacy deepens, as they go. They buy a farm and build a home together as the novel comes to a close. Many readers have felt the story leaves off where it ought to be beginning. Yet given the time when it was written and the era it is written about, Place must concern itself less with a life together than with the need to find—or make—a safe space in which this life can unfold. For this reason, the original title is more accurate than the sanitized, isolating Patience and Sarah, under which McGraw-Hill published the work in 1972 and as it is generally known today. The original title defies stereotype, Us implying a community, if only a community of two, rather than solitary individuals. Routsong also refused to typecast her lesbian protagonists. Their identities are complex, as is their relationship. Sarah is more overtly masculine and Patience is more overtly feminine. Read carefully, however, this is not simply ‘‘butch/femme’’ role playing. The women need Sarah’s ‘‘masculine’’ skills—the tasks she learned as a ‘‘boy’’—in order to survive on their own. They also need Patience’s ‘‘feminine’’ wiles to survive when dealing with the straight world. Within their relationship they value and desire each other as women. As they do not internalize preconceived roles, nor deliberately rebel against them, they must negotiate their identities and their relationship. The history of the novel runs parallel to its plot. Dissatisfied with available representations of women loving women, Routsong sought to create a new one. Unable to find a publisher at first, she printed the manuscript herself and sold the book out of shopping bags at meetings of burgeoning gay/lesbian rights groups. Such was the climate of fear that Routsong had to ask the editor of the Ladder, America’s first and then only lesbian periodical, to vouch for the fact that Routsong was not an ‘‘FBI fink.’’ Routsong distanced herself from her previous works by publishing Place, and such later lesbian-themed works as The Love of Good Women (1986, 1988), Side by Side (1990, 1992), and A Dooryard Full of Flowers (1993) under the pseudonym ‘‘Isabel Miller.’’ (Miller was her maternal grandmother’s surname; Isabel is an anagram for ‘‘Lesbia.’’) She told Jonathan Katz, ‘‘By using a new name, I wanted to start a new thing.’’
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Side by Side tells the story of two girls who grew up together but were separated by their parents when the relationship took an intimate turn. Each pursued lesbianism on her own, and eventually reunited years later. As a Publisher’s Weekly reviewer asserts, ‘‘The novel suffers from a lack of polish, and the narrow perspective will diminish its mainstream appeal.’’ As with most of Routsong’s other works, the novel is best suited to readers looking for a sympathetic discussion of homosexual issues. Routsong’s last publication was Laurel (1996), although her most popular, earlier book Patience and Sarah was reprinted in a special paperback edition early in 1999. OTHER WORKS: Round Shape (as Alma Routsong, 1959). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Katz, J., Gay American History (1976). Zimmerman, B., The Safe Sea of Women: Lesbian Fiction 1969-1989 (1990). Reference works: CA (1975, Online 1999). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Advocate (Feb. 1996). Critical Quarterly (1995). The Ladder (Dec. 1969-Jan. 1970, Oct.-Nov. 1971, Aug.-Sept. 1971). Lesbian & Gay Voices: A Tribute to Isabel Miller (audiocassette, 1994). New Statesman (26 Feb. 1988). NYT (23 Aug. 1953). NYTBR (6 Sept. 1959, 23 April 1972). PW (Feb. 1990). SR (26 Sept. 1953). TLS (26 Feb. 1988). VV (20 April 1972). —BETH GRIERSON, UPDATED BY CARRIE SNYDER
ROYALL, Anne Newport Born 11 June 1769, near Baltimore, Maryland; died 1 October 1854, Washington, D.C. Daughter of William and Mary Newport; married William Royall, 1797 (died 1812) Anne Newport Royall began her long and colorful life in Maryland, but moved with her family to Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, when she was three. The family lived in a rude cabin where William Newport taught his daughter to read and write. Newport, a Tory in those prerevolutionary days, died a few years later, and his wife Mary remarried. After the death of her second husband, Mary and Anne moved to Sweet Springs, now in West Virginia. A planter, Major William Royall, took them in and gave her mother domestic work. Anne, then eighteen years old, had access to the gentleman’s ample library and to his tutelage. Ten years later, Anne married her benefactor and mentor, who was then in his mid-fifties. When he died in 1812, he left Anne wealthy, and she began to travel. If a nephew had not broken Major Royall’s will, charging Anne with forgery and ‘‘barbarous treatment’’ of her husband, the
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world probably would not have heard of this strong-minded woman. Because she was without income, Royall turned to writing as a livelihood. Sketches of History: Life and Manners in the United States by a Traveller (1826) is the product of Royall’s trip from Alabama to New England in 1823, containing sketches of well-known and unknown people, descriptions of landscape and cities, and personal reflections. Royall’s blend of documentary material with gossipy tidbits fulfills the promise of the book’s subtitle. Although Royall’s books have limited literary value, they contribute to our knowledge of the social history of America. In spring 1824, Royall arrived in the District of Columbia, a sprawling community that would eventually become her home. Her first activity there was to lobby Congress for a commutation-of-pay resolution giving her an income from her husband’s military service in the Revolutionary War. Royall, in near-rags, solicited political, literary, and financial support from whomever she could interview, including Secretary of State John Quincy Adams. During the next seven years, Royall continued to crusade, travel, write, and interview influential people. When age forced Royall to stop traveling in 1831, she settled in Washington, where she founded and printed, in her kitchen, a weekly newspaper, Paul Pry. Royall served not only as editor and printer but also as reporter, writer, and solicitor of subscriptions. For years she had been attacking anti-Masons and fundamentalists, and she continued her propaganda against them in Paul Pry. One of her best-known conflicts with the ‘‘Holy Willies,’’ as she called evangelicals, resulted in her conviction as a ‘‘common scold.’’ Royall was fined $10. Deciding that Paul Pry sounded too much like a gossip sheet, Royall changed the name to the Huntress in 1836. In the prospectus for the new paper, she vowed to ‘‘expose corruption, hypocrisy and usurpation, without favor or affection.’’ Among the causes Royall championed were states’ rights on the issue of slavery, justice for the Native Americans, separation of church and state, tolerance for foreigners and Roman Catholics, and abolition of the U.S. bank monopoly. She interspersed editorials and diatribes against Congress with gossip and with stories and poems written by others. Royall’s crusading journalism continued in the Huntress for 18 years. OTHER WORKS: The Tennessean: A Novel Founded on Facts (1827). The Black Book: A Continuation of Travels in the United States (3 vols., 1828-1829). Mrs. Royall’s Pennsylvania (2 vols., 1829). Mrs. Royall’s Southern Tour (3 vols., 1830-1831). Letters from Alabama (1830). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Griffith, L., Introduction to Letters from Alabama, 1817-22 (1969). Jackson, G. S., Uncommon Scold: The Story of Anne Royall (1937). James, B. R., Anne Royall’s U.S.A. (1972). Porter, S. H., The Life and Times of Anne Royall (1909). Reference works: American History Illustrated (1976). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —LYNDA W. BROWN
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ROYCE, Sarah Bayliss
RUDDY, Ella Giles
Born 2 March 1819, Stratford-on-Avon, England; died 23 November 1891, San Jose, California Wrote under: Sarah Royce Daughter of Benjamin and Mary Bayliss; married Josiah Royce, 1845
Born 1851, near Jefferson, Wisconsin; died 26 June 1917, Los Angeles, California Also wrote under: Ella Giles Daughter of H. H. and Augusta Giles; married George D. Ruddy, 1895
The Bayliss family emigrated to New York when Sarah was six weeks old. She was raised and educated in Rochester, New York, in true Victorian style with a reverence for religion, family, and education. Royce met and married Josiah Royce (born in England, brought up in Dundas, Canada) in Rochester, and in 1848, with their first daughter Mary, they traveled to Iowa; in the spring of the following year they joined the other hopeful migrants on the overland trek to the California goldfields.
Ella Giles Ruddy’s father was a railroad representative and politician. Ruddy studied at the University of Wisconsin and at Medford Theological College and was an active clubwoman. She was a member of the Unitarian Church and was a city librarian for many years. After her marriage, Ruddy moved to Los Angeles and later to Venice, California. She attended the Friday Morning Club and founded the Los Angeles Political Equality League for woman suffrage, in which she was an officer until 1910.
During that grueling journey and in her early years in California, Royce wrote intermittently in her ‘‘Pilgrimage Diary’’ of the hardships, events, and impressions she experienced. Nearly 30 years later, she would use the diary to write a narrative account of the ‘‘family odyssey’’ at the request of her son, Josiah Jr. (Harvard professor of philosophy), for his history of the early American period in California. The manuscript of A Frontier Lady: Recollections of the Gold Rush and Early California (1932) was prepared not for publication but for her son’s interest and instruction and quite probably as a defense of religious faith, which the philosopher was questioning.
Out from the Shadows; or, Trial and Triumph (1876) catalogues the diverse types of American womanhood. Helen Lowell personifies the perfect woman. She endures a sour marriage to a drunkard and keeps the family alive by running a boardinghouse. Unjustly accused of poisoning her husband, Helen even endures prison with patience. Melinda Corson is the villain. A jealous, devious female of the worst sort, she incites Mr. Lowell to poison himself and lets Helen undergo a jury trial and loss of reputation rather than explain her own role in the tragedy. Finally, however, the natural goodness of womanhood prevails and even Melinda tells the truth and takes her just punishment.
Royce’s book is one of the more literate personal narratives we have of a pioneer woman’s experiences, but it is also a sensitive record of personal growth. The first night on the trail she silently faced the ‘‘chilling prospect’’ of months without house or home. In the morning, she felt ‘‘mildly exultant’’ at having ‘‘kept silent through a cowardly fit, and finding the fit gone off.’’
Maiden Rachel (1879) is a testimony to spinsterhood. Written when the author was twenty-eight and unmarried, it is an endorsement of Mary A. Livermore’s remarks on the merits of single women at the 1875 meeting of the Association for the Advancement for Women. Instead of being pitied for her inability to create a wholesome environment for a husband and children, Rachel is lauded for the good works she does for all of society. Ruddy insists that all women, regardless of their marital status, possess an intrinsic sensitivity and moral superiority that will bring love and service to the world.
The desire for and importance of a home are ideas recurring frequently in Royce’s narrative. Her uncomplaining acceptance of keeping house in tents, half-built cabins, and boardinghouse rooms (briefly described) offers a clearer picture of the deprivations and fears a pioneer woman faced than most works on the subject. Male accounts of the goldfields often stress the excitement, freedom, or camaraderie of the day; Royce’s view ‘‘etches in a few strong lines the sordidness of the mining camps,’’ so unlike anything a gently bred woman of the period could even imagine. True to her Victorian upbringing, Royce’s work is permeated with prescriptive and descriptive moral messages; it gives today’s reader valuable insight into Victorian values. Royce relinquished the necessary trappings of what was considered a civilized society, but she refused to compromise even minimally society’s moral codes for herself or her fellow pioneers. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Glendenning, J., Letters of Josiah Royce (1970). Reference works: NAW (1971). —JACQUELINE BAKER BARNHART
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For Ella Wheeler Wilcox, another Wisconsin writer, Ruddy compiled a date book, with quotations from Wilcox’s poems and blank pages for the diarist’s entries. The Story of a Literary Career, by Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1905) contains an account of Wilcox’s early life and a description of her summer home near New Haven and its furnishings. The Mother of Clubs (1906) is a laudatory biography of Caroline Severance, which claimed that Severance founded the New England Woman’s Club before Jane Croly founded Sorosis in New York City, thereby winning national acclaim for Severance’s farsightedness in ‘‘mothering’’ the widespread club movement for women. It is rich in quotations from letters to Severance, her speeches and writings, and reminiscences by prominent reformers of the 19th century Club Etiquette (1902) attempts to be a witty attack on club members’ habits. It deals with the problems of women hyphenating their last names to retain their maiden names, their difficulties
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in calling on social superiors at home, and the discourtesy of club officers who complain of the time, tact, and money required by their station. OTHER WORKS: Bachelor Ben (1875). Flowers of the Spirit (1891). Lace o’ Me Life (1906). The Ella Giles Ruddy papers are housed in the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Los Angeles Examiner (14 Oct. 1904). Madison Democrat (27 June 1917). —KAREN J. BLAIR
RUETHER, Rosemary Radford Born 2 November 1936, St. Paul, Minnesota Daughter of Robert and Rebecca Ord Radford; married Herman J. Ruether, 1957; children: Rebecca, David, Mary Elizabeth An educator, theologian, author, and lecturer, Rosemary Radford Ruether holds degrees from Scripts College (B.A., 1958) and Claremont Graduate School (M.A., 1960; Ph.D., 1965). Ruether’s academic appointments have included positions at Howard University in theology and church history; Harvard Divinity School as lecturer in Roman Catholic studies; Yale Divinity School, and currently at both Northwestern University’s graduate school and the Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary, where she is Georgia Harkness Professor of Theology. Ruether is also on the editorial board of Christianity and Crisis. Ruether’s written work explores the multifaceted area of theology and its relationship to contemporary society. Whether she is writing about sexist ideologies, the radical kingdom, anti-Semitism, or the eschatological community, Ruether attempts to destroy restrictive theological attitudes and reconstruct more liberating ones. In The Church Against Itself: An Inquiry into the Conditions of Historical Existence for the Eschatological Community (1967), Ruether asserts the importance of the pilgrim nature of the Catholic church. The dialectic she poses examines the unresolved and timeless themes of institution and person, being and becoming, and receiving and giving in the context of the theological challenge presented by Vatican II. Similarly, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (1974) calls for a complete rethinking of Christian theology vis-à-vis the Jews. Beginning with the pre-Christian classical world, Ruether traces the Jewish experience with the gentile world to the Holocaust of the 20th century. Her thesis, a critique of the ‘‘Christian Anti-Jewish Myth,’’ looks to a Judeo-Christian tradition exorcised of the ‘‘Christian imperialist myth.’’ Faith and Fratricide repeats Ruether’s basic argument for
an intellectual and human environment that encourages a radical approach to theological study. New Woman/New Earth: Sexist Ideologies and Human Liberation (1975) explores the ideologies that support sexist behavior and the companion social structures (class and race) that are tending to the ‘‘denouement of the entire human project.’’ This series of essays reveals the realism that is another quality of Ruether’s work. Ruether addresses a wide range of complex and varied topics and appeals for a shared search for needed solutions. Women of Spirit: Female Leadership in the Jewish and Christian Traditions (1979) is a collection of essays coedited with Eleanor McLaughlin. Ruether again asks for the destruction of false mythologies and the creation of new realities. By examining periods and figures in history to show women have made their mark in the male world, the book corrects the notion that women have always been denied leadership positions in churches and synagogues because of sex. As Ruether points out in the introduction, most people have been ignorant of the responsible roles of women in churches because of the ‘‘reconstruction of early church history from the point of view of male dominance, . . .a social and theological mythology. . .that justifies the present ecclesiastic structures of male power.’’ Ruether, as a Catholic feminist liberation theologian, has three distinct strands to scholarship. First is the historical work of documentation, retrieval, and revision; second is her work toward the development of a feminist systematic theology; and third is her interest in the connection between Christianity and anti-Semitism and the religious and political issues of the Middle East. Of the six anthologies Ruether has published since 1980, four have contributed to her work of feminist historical retrieval. With Rosemary Skinner Keller, she edited the three-volume Women and Religion in America spanning the colonial period through 1968. Each volume contains essays with selected documents that address women’s religious experiences in the designated time period with attention to various denominational, racial, and ethnic specificities. In 1985 Ruether published Womanguides, a compilation of historical and contemporary documents by and about women, including items that had existed either at the margins of Western Christian theological writing, such as the work of black Shaker eldress Rebecca Cox Jackson, or, like Aristotle’s statement on ‘‘woman as defective male,’’ had been central in proliferating patriarchal definitions. Ruether also included several contemporary stories she hoped would encourage other women to record their experiences as a legacy for future generations. In 12 chapters, each with its own introduction, Ruether organized the documents into theological topics that span systematic theology. Women-Church also appeared in 1985. The first part of the book is a descriptive essay of the women-church movement, a network of women gathering in small groups to pray, reflect, discuss, and act. The second part is a collaborative effort to record liturgies devised by women for various occasions, such as creating community and healing wounds due to patriarchal violence, and life passages. During the 1980s Ruether wrote three topical theological volumes reflecting her interest in the revision of systematic
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theology. To Change the World (1981) develops Christological themes based on an analysis of political theology from Europe, Latin-American liberation theology, and feminism. This work also relates Christology to her long-standing interests in Jewish-Christian relations and ecology. In Disputed Questions: On Being a Christian (1982), her most autobiographical piece, Ruether connects her personal experience to her investigation of the credibility of Christianity, Jewish-Christian relations, feminism, and politics and religion in the U.S. and delineates the critical dimensions of each of these issues. Contemporary Roman Catholicism (1987) examines three critical issues for the church at the end of the 20th century: ‘‘1) the challenge of democratic values and human rights in the church’s institutional life; 2) the demands of women for full participation in the church’s ministry, and the crisis over the church’s teachings on sexual morality; and 3) the challenge of the Third World liberation struggles and the church’s alignment with the poor.’’
Religion. This volume is a readable documentary history of women’s religious writings with commentary by the editors. It includes material from the earlier work along with new material, bringing the history up to the mid-1990s. It is an ecumenical work, ever mindful of the religious diversity in the United States, and includes introductions to evangelical, Pentecostal, Buddhist, Islamic, and Jewish traditions in America.
Ruether’s feminist systematic theological reflections culminate in Sexism and God-Talk (1983). Here, Ruether uses a topical outline similar to Womanguides but also including Christology and Mariology. She follows a consistent methodological pattern of tracing the history of the topic and calling the question for the contemporary situation. Noted for expanding the resources used in theological reflection, including pre-Christian, pagan, heterodox, and post-Christian sources, Ruether’s goal is to undo the dichotomous thinking that theology has inherited through Western philosophy and to unravel the deformations of the prophetic tradition at the heart of the biblical message.
In Women and Redemption (1998), Ruether examines gender in theological anthropology, making an original and important contribution to feminist tradition. This volume traces the history of the theological paradigms of ‘‘women and redemption’’ and the implications of them for women’s interests. In particular, Ruether deals with a major shift in the Christian model of gender and redemption in the 16th and 17th centuries that was based on a view of women as equal to men and that condemned the subordination of women as a sinful act. Based on extensive travel and networking with women around the world, Ruether is one of the most competent interpreters of international feminist reconstruction of gender and redemption.
After establishing her interest in anti-Semitism in her early work Faith and Fratricide (1974), Ruether collaborated with her spouse, Herman J. Ruether, a political scientist and former acting director of the Palestinian Human Rights Campaign, on Wrath of Jonah (1989). Convinced that an accurate historical portrayal of the Israel—Palestine conflict is key to a just settlement of the tensions, the Ruethers discuss the attitudes of exclusivity in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam; the development of Zionism and Palestinian nationalism; and the Christian relations to Judaism, the Holocaust, and Zionism. Not without its critics, it was generally well reviewed. Ruether provided a brief synopsis of the historical analysis in ‘‘The Occupation Must End’’ in Beyond Occupation, an anthology she edited with Marc H. Ellis. Her concluding essay, ‘‘Beyond Anti-Semitism and Philo-Semitism,’’ urged the distinction between anti-Semitism and critical analysis/ criticism of Israeli policy. Faith and Intifada: Palestinian. Christian Voices (1992), an anthology of papers given at the First International Symposium on Palestinian Liberation Theology, includes Ruether’s essay ‘‘Western Christianity and Zionism,’’ in which she discusses the deficits in ‘‘four key religious arguments that are still operative in linking Christians in America to Israel.’’ Ruether teamed with Rosemary Skinner Keller for In Our Own Voices: Four Centuries of American Women’s Religious Writing (1995), a continuation of their earlier work Women and
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Women Healing Earth (1996) is a collection of writings by 14 women of Latin American, Asian, and African heritage on eco-theological issues. Ruether spent several years studying the environmental crisis from religious and feminist perspectives and suggests that eco-advocates in the North have much to learn from the experiences of those in the South. Ruether remarks: ‘‘Deforestation means women walking twice as far each day to gather wood. . . . Pollution means children in shantytowns dying of dehydration from unclean water.’’
OTHER WORKS: Gregory of Nazianzus, Rhetor and Philosopher (1969). The Radical Kingdom: The Western Experience of Messianic Hope (1970). Liberation Theology: Human Hope Confronts Christian History and American Power (1972). Mary: The Feminine Face of the Church (1977). The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods (1983). Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing (1992). God and the Nations (with Douglas J. Hall, 1995). Introducing Redemption in Christian Feminism (1998).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ramsay, W., Four Modern Prophets: Walter Rauschenbuscb, Gustavo Gutierrez, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosemary Radford Ruether (1986). Snyder, M. H., The Christology of Rosemary Radford Ruether: A Critical Introduction (1988). Vaughan, J., Sociality, Ethics, and Social Change: A Critical Appraisal of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Ethics in the Light of Rosemary Radford Ruether’s Works (1983). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Booklist (15 Apr.1995). Interpretation (Apr. 1999). National Catholic Reporter (2 Feb. 1996). —ANN THOMPSON, UPDATED BY BARBARA A. RADTKE AND REBECCA C. CONDIT
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RUKEYSER, Muriel Born 15 December 1913, New York, New York; died 12 February 1980, New York, New York Daughter of Lawrence B. and Myra Lyons Rukeyser Muriel Rukeyser was educated at the Fieldston schools, Vassar College, and Columbia University. She was vice president of the House of Photography, New York (1946-60), taught at Sarah Lawrence College (1946, 1956-60), and later served as a member of the Board of Directors of the Teachers-Writers Collaborative in New York, a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and president of PEN. Rukeyser wrote and published a play, TV scripts, a novel, juveniles, biographies, criticism, translations, and fourteen volumes of poetry. Her poems have been translated into European and Asian languages, and her readings from Waterlily Fire: Poems 1932-1962 (1962) have been recorded for the Library of Congress. Rukeyser’s first book of poems, Theory of Flight (1935), won the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 1935. From Rukeyser’s poems we can study much that has happened in modernist and postmodernist poetry in the last 50 years—from distance to confession, social protest, and feminism; from Yeats and Eliot to Ginsberg, Bly, and Levertov. Rukeyser’s personality is manifest in the exuberant, hyperbolic, and generally optimistic tone dominating her work. She insists on experiencing and feeling everything, private or social, from the smallest physical sensation to transcendence of the physical. She treats sex, a cockroach, social injustice, and mystical self-dissolution with equal exuberance; being is its own excuse. The result is that Rukeyser’s poetry, but not the individual poems, is multidimensional. Some poems are almost pure sensation (‘‘Stroking Songs’’); some are explanation (‘‘Written on a Plane’’); some are vituperation (‘‘Despisals’’); and some are pure fun (‘‘From a Play: Publisher’s Song’’). Both her personal and artistic credos are expressed in the poem ‘‘Whatever.’’ For each mood or concept, Rukeyser selects or creates a perfectly suitable form. She is skillful enough so that her forms embody rather than contain their meanings: ‘‘Afterwards’’ is a poem that reaches into the unconscious for a ‘‘deep-image’’ (‘‘We are the antlers of that white animal’’) expressed inbreath rhythm, ‘‘Flying There: Hanoi’’ uses the incremental repetition and the rhythm of nursery rhyme to rededicate a poet. ‘‘Two Years’’ uses three terse stream-of-consciousness lines to express the dislocation of grief. ‘‘Rational Man’’ is a list of man’s tortures of his kind in the rhythm of a dirge, ending in a prayer. Rukeyser’s temperament and talent are best suited for writing the Dionysian sort of poems written by Bly and Levertov at their best—sensation, the concrete and physical, in ecstasy, rage, or prayer. Rukeyser weakens when she philosophizes and explains, and she frequently explains more than is necessary. For a poet whose published volumes of poetry spanned more than 40 years, Rukeyser’s range and energy were remarkable. Her changes were toward greater variety and flexibility and personal involvement.
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OTHER WORKS: Mediterranean (1938). U.S. 1 (1938). A Turning Wind: Poems (1939). The Soul and Body of John Brown (1940). Wake Island (1942). Willard Gibbs (1942). Beast in View (1944). The Children’s Orchard (1947). The Green Wave (1948). Elegies (1949). The Life of Poetry (1949). Orpheus (1949). Selected Poems (1951). Come Back Paul (1955). One Life (1957). Body of Waking (1958). I Go Out (1961). Selected Poems of Octavio Paz (translated by Rukeyser, 1963). Sun Stone by O. Paz (translated by Rukeyser, 1963). The Orgy (1966). Bubbles (1967). The Outer Banks (1967). Selected Poems of Gunnar Ekelöf (translated by Rukeyser, with L. Sjöberg, 1967). Three Poems by Gunnar Ekelöf (translated by Rukeyser, 1967). Poetry and Unverifiable Fact: The Clark Lectures (1968). The Speed of Darkness (1968). Mayes (1970). Twenty-nine Poems (1970). The Traces of Thomas Hariot (1971). Breaking Open (1973). Brecht’s Uncle Eddie’s Moustache (translated by Rukeyser, 1974). The Gates (1976). The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser (1978). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Blumberg, B. L., ‘‘A voice of their own’’: An Inquiry into the Theme of the Discovery of the True Self in the Writings of Helen Yglesias, Muriel Rukeyser, and Tillie Olsen (thesis, 1982). Daniels, K. ed., Rukeyser Out of Silence, Selected Poems (1992). Jarrell, R., Poetry and the Age (1953). Kertesz, L., The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser (1979). Rexroth, K., American Poetry in the Twentieth Century (1971). Reference works: CP (1975). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the Untied States (1995). Other references: American Poetry Review (May/June 1974). Carolina Quarterly (Spring 1974). Christian Century (21 May 1980). LJ (1 Oct. 1976). Ms. (April 1974). Nation (19 March 1977, 8 March 1980). NR (24 Nov. 1973). NYTBR (25 Sept. 1977). Poetry (Oct. 1974). Poetry East (special Rukeyser issue, 1985). —ALBERTA TURNER
RULE, Ann Born 22 October 1935, Lowell, Michigan Also writes under: Andy Stack Daughter of Chester R. and Sophie Hansen Stackhouse; married Bill Rule (divorced); children: Leslie, Laura, Andy, Mike, Bruce During her childhood, Ann Rule’s family moved around frequently as her father’s coaching career dictated. Her mother, a schoolteacher, taught the developmentally disabled. From the age of ten, Rule spent summers visiting her grandparents in Stanton, Michigan. Whiling away the hours at the Montcalm County Jail, where her grandfather was sheriff, she got to know the inmates at the same time as she watched her grandfather solve crimes based on what seemed the slightest of physical evidence. She wondered why Viola, the nice woman who taught her to crochet, was about to go on trial for murder, and was fascinated at what an investigator could glean from bits of clothing and blood.
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At the University of Washington, Rule majored in creative writing and minored in psychology, criminology, and penology. With her grandfather and an uncle both sheriffs, another uncle a medical examiner, and a district attorney cousin, it’s not surprising that after college she went on to get a job as an officer with the Seattle Police Department. She was let go from the force due to severe nearsightedness, after which she became a caseworker for the Washington State Department of Public Assistance for a time. When her husband decided to put his career on hold to return to school, she began to write stories about actual crimes. She wrote freelance for the Seattle Times, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Cosmopolitan, True Confessions, and others, eventually becoming a stringer for True Detective, writing under the name Andy Stack. She became a full-time writer in 1969. In the early 1980s she published a series as Andy Stack that included three books. She has written some fiction, including the novel Possession (1983), as well as book reviews and over 1,400 articles. Rule’s first true crime book, The Stranger Beside Me (1980) was her first bestseller. When she sold the proposal, Rule had no idea the book she would end up writing would be about a man she considered a friend, her work partner at a crisis hotline, Ted Bundy. Considered the definitive work on the elusive serial killer who murdered over 35 young women, The Stranger Beside Me is a meticulously researched, gripping account that benefits not just from Rule’s unique vantage on Bundy but from a clear and rational, very human voice. Her next true crime work, Small Sacrifices: A True Story of Passion and Murder (1987), recounts the story of a woman who shot her three children and then wounded herself, claiming to police that a ‘‘bushy-haired stranger’’ was responsible. As with most of Rule’s work, the book is part psychological profile, looking deeply into the woman’s past and present, part police procedural, and part real-life tragedy. If You Really Loved Me: A True Story of Desire and Murder (1991) followed, detailing the case of a wealthy computer expert who convinced his 14-year-old daughter by an earlier marriage to shoot and kill his present wife and take the fall for it alone. In Everything She Ever Wanted: A True Story of Obsessive Love, Murder, and Betrayal (1992), Rule profiles a beautiful woman who framed her third husband for the murder of his parents, tried to poison his grandparents, kept an elderly woman in her care drugged after killing her husband, and had a hand in the alleged suicide of her brother. Under Rule’s treatment, the over-the-top material becomes an absorbing character study. Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer? (1995) was next, followed by Bitter Harvest: A Woman’s Fury, a Mother’s Sacrifice (1997). With both, she achieved perceptive, chilling portraits of brilliant, successful individuals who became murderers, and tense, often riveting narratives of the investigations into their crimes. In The End of the Dream: The Golden Boy Who Never Grew Up and Other True Cases (1998), number five in her Ann Rule’s Crime Files series, she chronicles the story of a handsome, gifted preacher’s son who acted the part of the gentleman robber in the Northwest for years, netting over $300,000 dollars with no casualties at the scene of his crimes, but tragically fracturing a number of lives along the way.
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While the cases Rule writes about are of many different types, the two things she always looks for are an anti-hero or -heroine who is intelligent and talented, a person who seems to have it all but is incapable of being satisfied, coupled with an engaging set of surrounding elements: victims, families of victims, and the law enforcement team that works to bring them to justice. Rule continued her education in criminology, taking courses in crime scene investigation, police administration, arrest, search and seizure, and more. She attends seminars on organized crime, arson, bomb search, DNA, and forensic science. She is certified in many states to teach seminars on subjects from high-profile offenders to serial killers. The U.S. Justice Department Task Force that set up the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (VICAP) used by the FBI included Rule. Active in support groups for victims of violent crimes, she has also been tapped by police as a consultant on serial killers. She has been a plenary speaker at the Pacific Northwest Writers Conference and a pro in their ‘‘Ask a Pro’’ workshops. Two of Rule’s books have been made into television miniseries. One of them, Small Sacrifices, won the Peabody award. She received an Achievement Award from the Pacific Northwest Writer’s Conference, two Anthony awards from Bouchercon, the mystery fans’ organization, and was nominated twice for Edgar awards by the Mystery Writers of America, as well as receiving the Washington State Governor’s Award. She is considered by many to be the founder of the true crime genre as it exists today.
OTHER WORKS: Beautiful Seattle (1979). Lust Killer (1983). The Want-Ad Killer (1983). The I-5 Killer (1984). Beautiful America’s Seattle (1989). Beauty of Seattle (1991). A Rose for Her Grave And Other True Cases (1993). You Belong to Me And Other True Cases (1994). A Fever in the Heart and Other True Cases (1996). Three Classic Volumes from the Crime Files of Ann Rule: A Rose for her Grave, You Belong to Me, A Fever in the Heart, and Other True Cases (1997). In the Name of Love and Other True Cases (1998).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: ‘‘Are Serial Killers on the Rise?’’ in U.S. News & World Report (9 Sept. 1985). ‘‘Bitter Harvest: Arson and Murder in the Heartland’’ in PW (22 Dec. 1997). Brower, M., ‘‘Unmasking a Murderous Mother, Crime Writer Ann Rule Closes the Book on Another Psychopath,’’ in People (14 Sept. 1987). Johnson, A., and Ian Katz, ‘‘The Murderous Compulsion That Leads to Self-Destruction,’’ in Guardian (3 Jan. 1995). Katz, I., ‘‘A High Life of Crime,’’ in Guardian (19 Dec. 1994). Kelly, T., ‘‘Ann Rule Reigns as Queen of the True-Crime Stories,’’ in Washington Times (29 May 1991). Lindsey, R., ‘‘How a Writer Became a Murder Expert,’’ in New York Times Biographical Service (Feb. 1984). Price, D., ‘‘Crime Pays,’’ in Detroit News (6 May 1996). Reynolds, B., ‘‘They Feel No Remorse, Have No Conscience,’’ in USA Today (16 Feb. 1989). Reynolds, B., ‘‘This Is the Beginning of the End for Murderer,’’ in USA Today (30 Aug. 1990). Ryan, V., ‘‘PW interviews Ann Rule,’’ in PW (3 May 1991).
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Theiss, E., ‘‘Heroes Buoy Ann Rule in Grisly Crime Writing’’ in Plain Dealer (22 Feb. 1998). Reference works: CA, New Revision 65. CA 145. —JESSICA REISMAN
RUSCH, Kristine Kathryn Born 4 June 1960, Oneonta, New York Wrote under Sandy Schofield Daughter of Carroll ‘‘Tony’’ and Marian Beisser Rusch; married Dean Wesley Smith, 1992 Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s father was a college math professor, so reading was an important part of growing up for her and three older siblings, two of whom (sister Sandy Hofsommer and brother Fred Rusch) are college professors of English. Rusch graduated from Superior Senior High School in Superior, Wisconsin, and went on to get her B.A. in history from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1982. During her early career Rusch wrote nonfiction and was the news director at a radio station before turning to fiction writing. She graduated from the acclaimed Clarion Science Fiction Workshop in 1985 and an experimental writing workshop in Taos, New Mexico, in 1986, which was run by long-time science fiction writer and editor Algis Budrysn. There she met her future husband, Dean Wesley Smith. Rusch burst into the science fiction, fantasy, and horror scene with her first professional genre story, ‘‘Sing,’’ which appeared in Aboriginal Science Fiction in 1987. That same year she helped Smith cofound a small press called Pulphouse Publishing. Based in Eugene, Oregon, it specialized in the mystery, science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres. One of their first publications was a limited edition of Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine (1988), a quarterly publication with a magazine format but bound in a hardcover binding like a book. Rusch would go on to edit 12 total issues of the magazine, along with The Best of Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine (1991), which collected the best stories up to that point. Rusch additionally penned numerous books in Pulphouse’s nonfiction ‘‘how-to-write’’ series, including Characterization (1990) and Setting (1990). Pulphouse also won a World Fantasy award in 1989 for Best Nonprofessional (a terrible misnomer for the small press and alternate press category) of the year. The company went on hiatus in 1992 so the principals could pursue their own writing, and was still there as of early 1999. During the 1990s Rusch proliferated in the science fiction, fantasy, horror, and mystery pulp magazines, with stories appearing in dozens of magazines and anthologies ranging from cat mysteries to vampire tales, tabloid spoofs, and serious genre fiction. Notable stories included ‘‘Story Child’’ (1990), ‘‘Trains’’ (1990), and ‘‘Details’’ (1998), which won the Ellery Queen Reader’s Choice award in the short story category. In 1990 Rusch won the acclaimed John W. Campbell award for Best New Writer,
presented with the Hugo awards at the World Science Fiction Convention. In addition she coedited with Smith The Science Fiction Writers of America Handbook: The Professional Writer’s Guide to Writing Professionally, which won the Locus award for best nonfiction. A chapbook, The Gallery of His Dreams (1991), bridged Rusch’s move from editing nonfiction and short fiction into novel-length fiction works. The story—which won a Locus award for best novella, was a Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy award finalist and made the Locus Recommended Reading List—features United States Civil War photographer Mathew B. Brady (circa 1823-1896) in a time-travel adventure. Wasting no time, Rusch shortly thereafter saw publication of her first novel, The White Mists of Power (1991), a fantasy nominated as a Locus and a Science Fiction Chronicle Recommended Reading List Best First Novel. Also in 1991 she took the helm as editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, replacing Edward L. Ferman, who had held the position from 1966 and was managing editor from 1962 to 1966. Together, the two edited an anthology, The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction: A 45th Anniversary Anthology (1994). Rusch won the Hugo for best editor in 1994 and held the position until 1997, when she turned the reins over to editor Gordon Van Gelder. A collaborative novel, Afterimage (1992), was written with Kevin J. Anderson, who would become the dean of Star Wars books in the late 1990s. Five stand-alone novels followed in short time: Heart Readers (1993), Facade (1993), Traders (1993), Alien Influences (1994, published in England, and which made the short list for the Arthur C. Clarke award and was a John W. Campbell Memorial award finalist), and Sins of the Blood (1994). A new fantasy book series began with The Fey: Sacrifice (1996), which was listed by Science Fiction Chronicle as Best Fantasy Novel for that year, followed by The Fey: Changeling (1996), The Fey: Rival (1997), The Fey: Resistance (1998), and The Fey: Victory (1998). In between, Rusch wrote The Devil’s Churn (1996) and Hitler’s Angel (1998), a historical crime novel that was favorably reviewed in the mainstream media, including a full-page review in the New York Times. She also wrote The Tenth Planet (1999) in collaboration with Smith. A new Fey series began with Black Throne: The Black Queen (1999). Together with Smith, Rusch began penning novels based on television series or movies. Creating the pseudonym Sandy Schofield, the first book published was Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The Big Game (1993), followed by Aliens: Rogue (1995), Quantum Leap: The Loch Ness Leap (1997), and Predator: Big Game (1999). Rusch also began writing novels for Pocket Books’ various Star Trek series under her own name in collaboration with Smith, including Star Trek: Voyager: The Escape (1995), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The Long Night (1996), Star Trek: Klingon! (1996), Star Trek: Rings of Tautee (1996), Star Trek: The Next Generation/Invasion!, Book Two: The Soldiers of Fear (1996), Star Trek/Day of Honor, Book Four: Treaty’s Law (1997), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine/The Captain’s Table, Book Three: The Mist (1998), and Star Trek/Double Helix, Book 2: Vectors (1999). She also wrote one with Smith and fellow Oregon writer Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Star Trek: Voyager: Echoes (1997).
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Rusch broke into the New York Times bestsellers list and joined the small corps of Star Wars writers with her work Star Wars: The New Rebellion (1996), which was followed by the abridged audiocassette version with Anthony Heald the same year, and The Star Wars Diplomatic Corps Entrance Exam (1997), a fictional nonfiction ‘‘test’’ booklet. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Clute, J. and P. Nicholls, eds., The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993). Mallett, D. F., and R. Reginald, Reginald’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards: A Comprehensive Guide to the Awards and Their Winners (1991, 1993). Reginald, R., Science Fiction & Fantasy Literature, 1975-1991: A Bibliography of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Fiction Books and Nonfiction Monographs (1992). —DARYL F. MALLETT
RUSH, Caroline E. Born circa 1820s; died death date unknown Married and widowed; children: two Caroline E. Rush’s first novel appeared in 1850. In a preface, she wrote that ‘‘the circumstances which have left me, at an early age, a widow, with two orphan boys to educate,’’ forced Rush to write to support herself. However, her books, which were probably published by subscription, ‘‘awakened in the hearts of a generous and sympathizing public, a deep and noble interest.’’ Rush, a native of New York, was able to travel to a number of American cities, and especially to the South—a region whose beauty, climate, and customs she praised highly in nearly all her works. Her fiction is characterized by moral and didactic purpose and by religious and sentimental subject matter, which, the author claimed, was founded strictly on fact. Robert Morton; or, The Step-Mother (1850, reprinted 1979) is a collection of three short stories. ‘‘Edmund and Ione’’ describes the moral and spiritual regeneration of a wealthy young New York City bachelor whose adoption of two starving orphans leads him to devote his life to helping the needy. ‘‘Letters from the South’’ records a Northern girl’s delighted impressions of the scenery, people, and customs of the South. ‘‘The Step-Mother’’ shows how the influence of a cruel and negligent stepmother cancels the teachings of a child’s mother, blights his childhood, and ruins his future. The Dew Drop of the Sunny South; A Story Written From Every Day Life (1851) describes the short but pious life of Kate Herford, a wealthy Southern belle. Jilted by a dissipated fiancé, Kate resigns herself to remaining single, doing good, and spreading Christ’s teachings. After converting Caroline, a schoolgirl, Kate quietly dies of consumption. The North and the South; or, Slavery and Its Contrasts (1852, reprinted 1983) develops the proslavery argument that black Southern slaves were better off than poor whites of Northern cities by telling the sad tale of the Harleys, a wealthy New York family impoverished by drink,
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separated by work, and ruined by starvation, exposure, and the indifference of the well-to-do. Only one of the seven Harley children prospers; she is adopted by an affectionate and generous plantation family. The others—those who survive—are ground down by toil and hardship. The death of the Harleys’ pure and lovely eldest daughter, her Christian resignation to starvation and disease, is Rush’s strongest statement against wealthy Northerners who feel no Christian charity for the poor. Way-Marks in the Life of a Wanderer, The Incidents Taken From Real Life (1855, reprinted 1979) describes the edifying life of Marcia Walton, a beautiful and devout Northern governess employed on a Georgia plantation. Although Marcia’s gentle nature and piety endear her to the family for whom she works, she is poisoned by the jealous mulatto mistress of the planter’s son. Her health is impaired. Adopted into the planter’s family, she spends her remaining days traveling throughout the South— spreading love, ending misunderstandings, and practicing Christian teachings. She dies happy, surrounded by the people she loves. Shallow and inconsistent characterization, frequent digressions, authorial intrusions, and shifts in point of view indicate that Rush’s fiction is the work of an amateur. Even so, her books illustrate one of the major concepts of the popular domestic fiction of her day: woman as moral teacher. Rush’s heroines are all pious and resigned to low status, poor health, and oppressive circumstances; all are actively involved in spreading the gospel of Christian submission. Their beauty is moral as well as physical; they die young, pure, and certain of eternal life, providing the reader with both pleasurable tears and edifying Christian examples. —KATHERINE STAPLES
RUSH, Rebecca Born 1779; died death date unknown Wrote under: A Lady of Pennsylvania Daughter of Jacob and Mary Rench Rush The daughter of a judge of Philadelphia and the niece of Dr. Benjamin Rush, Rebecca Rush was the child of a prominent, wealthy, and well-educated family. She probably had access to the best education available to young women at that time, and must have moved in the highest social circles. Kelroy: A Novel, Rush’s only known work, was published in 1812. The eponymous hero does not appear until the fourth chapter, and the novel is more the story of Mrs. Hammond and her daughters, Lucy and Emily. Having been left moderately well off by the death of her husband, Mrs. Hammond takes her daughters to the country for five years to train them to make advantageous matches when they return to Philadelphia. The elder daughter thinks like her mother; Emily, however, has ‘‘a mind of the highest order’’ and ‘‘keen perceptions’’ and is not interested in her mother’s schemes. She falls in love with the impecunious poet, Kelroy. Mrs. Hammond forges letters and bribes people to ruin Emily’s relationship with Kelroy. Emily does not learn the truth until after she has married someone else; devastated, she wastes away and dies. When Kelroy learns
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the truth, he almost loses his reason. Half mad, he travels aimlessly, eventually dying in a shipwreck. Although Rush uses melodrama and improbable events to move the story, neither is a fatal flaw. The chief virtues of the novel lie in its use of language and in its characters. Rush calls this a ‘‘narrative of love,’’ but the emphasis is on clear, rather spare narrative, not on sentimentality. The major characters are often provided with complex personalities, rendering them lively and interesting. Rush’s greatest success is with her ‘‘minor’’ characters. Mrs. Hammond is ‘‘a woman of fascinating manners, strong prejudices and boundless ambition,’’ and her single-minded pursuit of financial security so enlivens the book that the reader almost ends up on her side. What is most striking about even very minor characters is that they all behave in manners consistent with their motivations and believable to the reader. Kelroy is also noteworthy for its very ‘‘American’’ qualities. Most of the characters are strongly individualistic. The ease with which people, especially men and women, meet and talk, and the casual and joking nature of many of their conversations also seem very American. Kelroy’s value lies in the fact that it embodies the best in an emerging national literature in a fairly polished work of art. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Davidson, K., Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (1986). Loshe, L. D., The Early American Novel (1907). Petter, H., The Early American Novel (1971). Reference works: A Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors (1870). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: American Transcendental Quarterly (Summer/Fall 1980). Studies in American Fiction (1977). —JULIA ROSENBERG
RUSS, Joanna Born 22 February 1937, Bronx, New York Daughter of Evarett I. and Bertha Zinner Russ Joanna Russ, whose parents were teachers, spent half her childhood ‘‘in the Bronx Zoo and half in the Botanical Gardens.’’ A gifted student, Russ went to Cornell University and received a B.A. in English in 1957. She later attended Yale University School of Drama, from which she received an M.F.A. in playwriting and dramatic literature in 1960. Since her graduation, Russ has worked as a lecturer at Queensborough Community College (1960-67); an instructor (1967-70) and assistant professor (1970-72) of English at Cornell University; assistant professor of English at State University of New York at Binghamton (1972-79); and professor of English at the University of Washington at Seattle until 1990. Although she is best known as a writer of science fiction, over half of Russ’ output has been outside the genre. She has
written a mainstream lesbian novel, On Strike Against God (1980), and Kittatinny: A Tale of Magic (1978), a children’s fantasy story. Her output in the nonfiction arena has been prodigious as well, beginning in 1967 when she cowrote Paranoia and Science Fiction with fellow writers Alexei Panshin and James Blish. She followed with How to Suppress Women’s Writing (1983), a witty indictment of the male-centered publishing and academic establishments; Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts: Feminist Essays (1985), a collection of feminist essays; To Write Like a Woman (1995); The Country You Have Never Seen: Science Fiction Reviews and Essays (1997); and What Are We Fighting For?: Sex, Race, Class, and the Future of Feminism (1997). She won the Science Fiction Research Association’s Pilgrim award in 1988 for her significant contributions to the study of science fiction. Russ also anonymously edited the anthology WomanSpace: Future and Fantasy Stories and Art by Women (1981). Her nonfiction essays and critical papers, mostly on aspects of feminism and science fiction, have appeared in various places like Science-Fiction Studies, the Village Voice, Sojourner, Ms., and Chrysalis ‘‘Nor Custom Stale,’’ Russ’ first science fiction story, was published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1959, a magazine to which she also occasionally contributed book reviews. Since then her stories have appeared in a variety of periodicals, including Orbit, Epoch, Quark, Cimarron Review, and Galaxy. Other notable short stories include ‘‘Daddy’s Girl’’ (1975), which revisits feminist themes Russ uses in her novels, and ‘‘The Autobiography of My Mother’’ (1975). Her short fiction has been collected in Alyx (1976; republished as The Adventures of Alyx 1983); The Zanzibar Cat (1983); Extra(Ordinary) People (1984), an interlocking series of meta science fiction tales; and The Hidden Side of the Moon: Stories (1987). Russ’ most famous story, ‘‘When It Changed’’ (1972), appeared first in the seminal anthology Again, Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison. The overtly feminist story, which won the Nebula award that year, describes the planet Whileaway, a planet with no men on it since a plague killed them all six centuries earlier. The women lead happy, independent, and fulfilled lives—having evolved a new system of government, fair methods of distributing work and wealth, and a method of reproduction involving the merging of two ova and resulting in girl children with a mixture of genes from both mothers—until men from Earth rediscover them. After learning about the plague, the men extend their sympathy to the women for having lived so long without them. They take no notice of the women’s happiness or accomplishments. For Janet, the narrator, the moment is poignant. Her life and work are devalued, and her lifelong and loving marriage is demeaned. At the downbeat ending, Janet realizes that all that is precious to her and to the other women of Whileaway will be destroyed, and she laments that the coming of men will cheat all women’s daughters of ‘‘their full humanity,’’ their freedom is at an end, and their accomplishments will again be made subordinate to masculine power. Russ’ first novel, Picnic on Paradise (1968), which makes up the lion’s share of Alyx, is a tale depicting a time-traveling female mercenary of the same name. Critic John Clute notes the author’s
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use of Alyx ‘‘in situations where she acts as a fully responsible agent, vigorously engaged in the circumstances surrounding her, but without any finger-pointing on the author’s part to the effect that one should only pretend not to notice that she is not a man,’’ has created a ‘‘liberating effect that has been pervasive’’ in the genre, and ‘‘the ease with which later writers now use active female protagonists in adventure roles, without having to argue the case, owes much to this example.’’ Russ studied with Vladmir Nabokov while at Cornell, and her science fiction reveals his influence. She is a fine stylist who does not hesitate to use experimental techniques or deal with themes like feminism and homosexuality that were ignored in science fiction for the most part until she began to write. And Chaos Died (1970) features a homosexual hero and a utopian telepathic society. The Female Man (1975), admired by most women and dismissed by many male readers, is a funny, angry, intelligent, and visionary novel about women’s fantasies of power. Four women—each a version of the same person—come from four different worlds and tell their interlocking stories. There is a Janet from Whileaway, and Jannine, who lives on a kind of 1950s Earth where World War II never happened and the Depression continues. The narrator is Joanna, whose world is much like our Earth. The fourth woman is Jael, from a possible futuristic Earth on which men and women are openly at war. She has been genetically altered to deal with warfare and has, among other qualities, ten retractable claws. Janet’s world on Whileaway is contrasted to the other three worlds, and the contrast results in an undercurrent of rage at how women have been devalued. The action provides women with a kind of revenge: Janet calmly breaks the arm of an obnoxious man at a cocktail party; Jael kills a man during the war on her world; and Joanna belittles the belittling critics and turns into the female man. It is iconoclastic, surrealistic, funny, and angry, and took quite some time to find a publisher. We Who Are About To. . . (1977) is a much darker novel. In it, the survivors of a wrecked spaceship are murdered one by one by a bitter and rebellious woman who refuses to go along with their survivalist attempt to establish a colony. The Two of Them (1978), in which two time-traveling agents rescue a young woman poet (who was raised on a planet whose religion is reminiscent of Islam) from the repressive male-dominated world, is more optimistic, as is Extra(Ordinary) People. Russ’ strong lesbian/feminist stance has often caused her to be described as ‘‘controversial,’’ ‘‘radical,’’ and ‘‘the least comfortable author writing SF,’’ and she has not always found it easy to get her work published. However, in addition to the Nebula in 1972, Russ has also received a Hugo award in 1983 for her novella Souls, which first appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science
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Fiction before appearing in chapbook form in 1989. She is a significant writer because she brings to science fiction truly innovative themes, perceptions, and subjects, such as her innovative and thoughtful looks at childbirth and mothering. Many of her works have a visionary quality, especially those that postulate worlds in which the exceptional woman is no exception. Russ has brought a freshness, intensity, and rigor to science fiction and is an influential writer whose example has encouraged other women to explore science fiction and fantasy as venues for serious writing about hitherto taboo themes, and has become a rallying point for younger feminists. OTHER WORKS: Window Dressing (1973). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Barr, M. S., Lost in Space: Probing Feminist Science Fiction and Beyond (1993). Calkins, E., and B. McGhan, Teaching Tomorrow: A Handbook of Science Fiction for Teachers (1972). Clute, J., and P. Nicholls, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993). Hall, H. W., and D. F. Mallett, Pilgrims and Pioneers: The History and Speeches of the Science Fiction Research Association Award Winners (1999). LeFanu, S., In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction (1988). Mallett, D. F., and R. Reginald, Reginald’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards: A Comprehensive Guide to the Awards and Their Winners (1993). McCaffery, L., Across the Wounded Galaxies: Interviews with Contemporary Science Fiction Writers (1990). Platt, C., Dream Makers II (1983). Reginald, R., Science Fiction & Fantasy Literature, 1975-1991: A Bibliography of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Fiction Books and Nonfiction Monographs (1992). Sargent, P., Women of Wonder (1974; as Women of Wonder: The Classic Years: Science Fiction by Women from the 1940s to the 1970s, 1995). Sargent, P., More Women of Wonder (1976). Scholls, J., and E. Rabkin, Science Fiction: History, Science, Vision (1977). Shinn, T. J., ‘‘Worlds of Words and Swords: Suzette Haden Elgin and Joanna Russ at Work,’’ in Women Worldwalkers: New Dimensions of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Jane B. Weedman, ed. (1985). Reference works: AWW 3. CA (1971). CANR (1990). CLC (1980). DLB (1981). FC (1990). MTCW (1991). Other references: Chrysalis (1977) Science-Fiction Studies (November 1979). A Room of One’s Own (1981). —BILLIE J. WAHLSTROM AND LYNN F. WILLIAMS, UPDATED BY DARYL F. MALLETT
RYAN, Rachel See BROWN, Sandra
Second Edition
VOLUME 4 S-Z Index Editor Ta r y n B e n b o w - P f a l z g r a f
Taryn Benbow-Pfalzgraf, Editor Glynis Benbow-Niemier, Associate Editor Kristin G. Hart, Project Coordinator Laura Standley Berger, Joann Cerrito, Dave Collins, Steve Cusack, Nicolet V. Elert, Miranda Ferrara, Jamie FitzGerald, Laura S. Kryhoski, Margaret Mazurkiewicz, Michael J. Tyrkus St. James Press Staff Peter M. Gareffa, Managing Editor, St. James Press Mary Beth Trimper, Composition Manager Dorothy Maki, Manufacturing Manager Wendy Blurton, Senior Buyer Cynthia Baldwin, Product Design Manager Martha Schiebold, Art Director Ronald D. Montgomery, Data Entry Manager Gwendolyn S. Tucker, Project Administrator
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data American women writers : from colonial times to the present : a critical reference guide / editor: Taryn Benbow-Pfalzgraf. -- 2nd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-55862-429-5 (set) — ISBN 1-55862-430-9 (vol.1) — ISBN 1-55862-431-7 (vol.2) — ISBN 1-55862-432-5 (vol.3) — ISBN 1-55862-433-3 (vol.4) 1. American literature-Women authors-Bio-bibliography Dictionaries. 2. Women authors, American-Biography Dictionaries. 3. American literature-Women authors Dictionaries. I. Benbow-Pfalzgraf, Taryn PS147.A42 1999 810.9’9287’03—dc21 [B]
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EDITOR’S NOTE American Women Writers, Second Edition is an important resource for many reasons, the least of which is to disseminate information about hundreds of women writers who have been routinely overlooked. A veritable treasure trove of knowledge, the women profiled in this series have literally changed the world, from Margaret Sanger’s quest for reproductive freedom to Jane Addams and Hull House, from Sylvia Earle and Rachel Carson’s environmental concerns, to the aching beauty of poems by Olga Broumas, Emily Dickinson, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath, Sara Teasdale, Lorrie Moore, and many others. There are writers who are immensely entertaining (M.F.K. Fisher, Jean Craighead George, Sue Grafton, Helen MacInnes, Terry McMillan, C. L. Moore, Barbara Neely, Danielle Steel), some who wish to instruct on faith (Dorothy Day, Mary Baker Eddy, Catherine Marshall, Anne Morrow Lindbergh), others who revisit the past to educate us (Gwendolyn Brooks, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Paula Allen Gunn, Carolyn Heilbrun, Mary Johnston, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Mary White Ovington, Sherley Ann Williams, Mourning Dove), and still more who wish to shock us from complacency of one kind or another (Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Lillian Hellman, Shirley Jackson, Harriet Jacobs, Shirley Jackson, Carson McCullers, A.G. Mojtabai, Bharati Mukherjee, Carry A. Nation, Flannery O’Connor, Anne Sexton, Phillis Wheatley, and more). The women filling these pages have nothing and everything in common; they are female, yes, but view their lives and worth in vastly different manners. There is no census of ethnicity, class, age, or sexuality—the prerequisites for inclusion had only to do with a body of work, the written word in all its forms, and the unfortunate limits of time and space. Yes, there are omissions, none by choice: some were overlooked in favor of others (by a voting selection process), others were assigned and the material never received. In the end, it is the ongoing bane of publishing: there will never be enough time nor space to capture all—for there will (hopefully) always be new women writers coming to the fore, and newly discovered manuscripts to test our conceptions of life from a woman’s eye. Yet American Women Writers is just what it’s title implies, a series of books recounting the life and works of American women from Colonial days to the present. Some writers produced far more than others, yet each woman contributed writing worthy of historical note, to be brought to the forefront of scholarship for new generations to read. Last but never least, thanks to Peter Gareffa for this opportunity; to Kristin Hart for her continual support and great attitude; to my associate editor Glynis Benbow-Niemier; to my editorial and research staff (Jocelyn Prucha, Diane Murphy, and Lori Prucha), and to the beloveds: Jordyn, Wylie, Foley, Hadley, and John.
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FOREWORD In a memorandum to contributors, Lina Mainiero, the founding editor of American Women Writers described the project she envisioned in 1978: Written wholly by women critics, this reference work is designed as a four-volume survey of American women writers from colonial days to the present. . . Most entries will be on women who have written what is traditionally defined as literature. But AWW will also include entries on writers in other fields. . . I see AWW as a precious opportunity for women—those who write it and those who read it— to integrate at a more self- conscious level a variety of reading experience. The result was a document of its time, a period when feminism was associated with building sisterhood and raising consciousness. Even a commercial publishing venture might take on the trappings of a consciousness raising session in which readers and writers met. The idea now seems naive, but the ideal is worth remembering. In 1978 Mainiero was neither young nor revolutionary. She was hesitant about pushing too far; she was content to let traditional definitions stand. But the very inclusion of Rachel Carson and Margaret Mead, Betty Smith and Ursula LeGuin, Rebecca Harding Davis and Phillis Wheatley, Gertrude Stein and Dorothy Parker in a reference work entitled simply and profoundly American Women Writers spoke eloquently. Without ever referring explicitly to ‘‘canon revision,’’ these four volumes contributed to the process. Having the books on the shelves testified to the existence of hundreds of women who had written across the centuries. Including those whose work was perceived to be ‘‘literary’’ alongside those whose work was not, prefigured debates that continue today both inside and outside of the academy. Mainiero was especially concerned that contributors not aim their entries at the academic specialist. The ‘‘putative reader’’ was a college senior, who was conversant with literary history and criticism, feminism, and the humanities. This emphasis provoked criticism, because it was expressed during the heyday of academic feminism. American Women Writers appeared the same year as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar published The Madwoman in the Attic, their influential study of 19th-century English women writers. Nina Baym’s American Women Writers and Women’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and About Women in America had appeared the year before. In retrospect, however, the reader Mainiero targeted is precisely the young woman she hoped would join the consciousness session organized by her elders, a woman who would not become an academic, but who would find in women’s writing the ‘‘necessary bread’’ to sustain her in living her life. Ideals and realities clashed in a project that was clearly intended to make money, but declined to pay honoraria to individual contributors. Instead, the publisher promised to contribute a percentage of any profits to ‘‘women’s causes.’’ The desire to reach the common reader was one reason the volumes were published without a scholarly overview. The decision not to address an academic audience meant the entries contained no critical jargon, but it also meant no authorities checked facts. In fairness, few facts were known about many of the women in the book. Numerous articles profiled women about whom no one had written. One way to gauge the success of feminist scholarship over the past two decades would be to compare the bibliographies of women in this edition with those in the original edition. What we know now about women’s writing in the United States is more than we realized there was to know two decades ago. Let me use my contributions as examples. I wrote entries on Gwendolyn Brooks, Frances Watkins Harper, Nella Larsen, and Anne Spencer. These black women lived and worked across almost two centuries. Harper, an abolitionist and women’s rights advocate, had been the most popular African American poet of the mid-19th century. Larsen and Spencer published fiction and poetry, respectively, during the Harlem Renaissance. Of Brooks, I concluded, ‘‘by any reckoning, hers is one of the major voices of 20th-century American poetry.’’ Yet no biographies existed for any of them. All of the information in print on Harper referred to a single source. Twenty years later, scholars have explored Harper’s life in depth; digging through the archives, Frances Smith Foster discovered three lost novels and a treasure trove of poems. In search of the women of the Harlem Renaissance, scholars have unearthed much more information concerning Larsen and Spencer. Now the subject of a biography by Thadious Davis, Larsen and her novels—Passing in particular—have become key texts in the formulation of feminist theory and queer theory. Ironically, though Spencer’s oeuvre was the most slender, she was the only one of these writers to have been the subject of a book: J. Lee Greene’s Time’s Unfading Garden, a biographical and critical treatment of the poet along with a selection of her poems. Brooks has begun to receive her due in five biographical and critical studies. As scholars have continued their work, readers have found a valuable reference tool in American Women Writers. The fourth and final volume of the original edition appeared in 1982. Soon afterward, Langdon Lynne Faust edited an abridged version, including a two-volume edition in paperback. In part because the original edition concentrated on writers before 1960, a supplement, edited by Carol Hurd Green and Mary G. Mason, was published in 1993. The writers included were more diverse than ever, as a more inclusive understanding of ‘‘American’’ grew. Fostering that understanding has been a priority of this project since the beginning. That new editions continue to be published confirms the existence of a need that these volumes fill. The explosion of feminist scholarship has enriched each subsequent edition of American Women Writers. In this venue at least, the gap between academic specialist and common reader has narrowed. One development that no one would have predicted is the re-emergence of the literary society, a common feature in 19th-century American life. The name has changed; it is now more often called the reading group. But the membership remains mostly female. Such groups have grown up in every segment of American society. Indeed, ‘‘Oprah’s Book Club’’ is a macrocosm of a widespread local phenomenon. I hope and suspect members of reading groups, as well as the undergraduates who remain its putative readers, will find this new edition of American Women Writers a resource that can be put to everyday use. CHERYL A. WALL Professor of English Rutgers University
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BOARD OF ADVISORS Roger Blackwell Bailey, Ph.D. Professor of English San Antonio College Alanna K. Brown, Ph.D. Professor of English Montana State University Pattie Cowell Professor of English Colorado State University Barbara Grier President and CEO Naiad Press, Inc. Jessica Grim Reference Librarian Oberlin College Library
Kathleen Bonann Marshall Assistant Director, Center for the Writing Arts Northwestern University Margaret (Maggie) McFadden Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies Editor, National Women’s Studies Association Journal Appalachian State University Kit Reed Novelist, Teaching at Wesleyan University
Carolyn G. Heilbrun Avalon Professor in the Humanities, Emerita Columbia University
Cheryl A. Wall Professor of English Rutgers University
Marlene Manoff Associate Head/Collection Manager Humanities Library Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Barbara A. White Professor Emeritus of Women’s Studies University of New Hampshire
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BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS Aarons, Victoria Allegra Goodman Alice Hoffman Faye Kellerman Lesléa Newman Tillie Olsen Francine Prose Adams, Barbara Aimee Semple McPherson Adams, Pauline Marion Marsh Todd Alldredge, Betty J. Katherine Mayo Katharine Pearson Woods Allen, Carol Alice Childress Allen, Suzanne Martha Moore Avery Madeleine Vinton Dahlgren Anna McKenney Dorsey Ella Loraine Dorsey Susan Blanchard Elder Caroline Gordon Laura Z. Hobson Lillian Smith Alonso, Helena Julia Álvarez Sandra Cisneros Achy Obejas Anderson, Celia Catlett Beverly Cleary Marguerite Henry Florence Crannell Means Cornelia Meigs Anderson, Eileen M. Phyllis Chesler Anderson, Kathryn Murphy Beth Henley Marsha Norman Anderson, Maggie Jane Cooper Anderson, Nancy G. Dorothy Scarborough Lella Warren
Antler, Joyce Lynne Sharon Schwartz Armeny, Susan Mary Sewall Gardner Lillian D. Wald Armitage, Shelley Ina Donna Coolbrith Anne Ellis Assendelft, Nick Lisa Alther Anne Bernays E. M. Broner Marilyn Hacker Joy Harjo Maureen Howard Florence Howe Susanne K. Langer Meridel Le Sueur Bach, Peggy Evelyn Scott Bakerman, Jane S. Vera Caspary Ursula Reilly Curtiss Dorothea Canfield Fisher Lois Gould Elisabeth Sanxay Holding Emma Lathen Ruth Doan MacDougall Margaret Millar Toni Morrison May Sarton Elizabeth Savage Susan Fromberg Schaeffer Gene Stratton-Porter Mary Sture-Vasa Dorothy Uhnak Jessamyn West Bannan, Helen M. Fabiola Cabeza de Baca Elizabeth Bacon Custer Elaine Goodale Eastman Helen Hunt Jackson Mary Harris Jones Kathryn Anderson McLean Franc Johnson Newcomb Anna Moore Shaw Elizabeth G. Stern xi
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Banner, Lois W. Harriet Hubbard Ayer
Barr, Marleen S. Deborah Norris Logan
Benet, Sydonie Janet Flanner Mary McCarthy Josephine Miles Edna St. Vincent Millay Virginia Ramey Mollenkott Linda Pastan Katherine Paterson Marilyn Sachs Elizabeth Spencer Ruth Stone Michele Wallace Mae West Sherley Anne Williams
Baruch, Elaine Hoffman Susan Sontag Diana Trilling
Berke, Jacqueline Harriet Stratemeyer Adams Eleanor Hodgman Porter
Bauer, Denise Lucille Clifton Alicia Ostriker Alix Kates Shulman
Berry, Linda S. Georgia Douglas Johnson
Barbour, Paula L. Jane Auer Bowles Barbuto, Domenica Anne Warner French Amanda Theodocia Jones Barnhart, Jacqueline Baker Sarah Bayliss Royce Elinore Pruitt Stewart
Baytop, Adrianne Margaret Walker Phillis Wheatley Beasley, Maurine Mary E. Clemmer Ames Emily Edson Briggs Kate Field Beecher, Maureen Ursenbach Susa Young Gates Bell, Alice Paula Fox Belli, Angela Frances Winwar Ben-Merre, Diana Helen McCloy Benardete, Jane Harriot Stanton Blatch Abby Morton Diaz Mary Abigail Dodge Amanda Minnie Douglas Malvina Hoffman Elizabeth Palmer Peabody Lydia Huntley Sigourney Sophie Swett Benbow-Niemier, Glynis Jane Kenyon Lorine Niedecker Jean Valentine xii
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Berube, Linda Susan Griffin Alice Hoffman Maxine W. Kumin Valerie Miner Grace Paley May Swenson Beyer, Janet M. Erma Bombeck Ellen Goodman Lois Gould Doris Grumbach Nicole Hollander Biancarosa, Gina Erica Jong Bienstock, Beverly Gray Anita Loos Shirley MacLaine Cornelia Otis Skinner Thyra Samter Winslow Biguenet, John Valerie Martin Bird, Christiane Rosamond Neal DuJardin Josephine Lawrence Harper Lee Harriet Stone Lothrop Alice Duer Miller Bittker, Anne S. Mary Margaret McBride
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Blair, Karen J. Jane Cunningham Croly Ella Giles Ruddy Blicksilver, Edith Leslie Marmon Silko Bloom, Lynn Z. Natalie Stark Crouter Bloom, Steven F. Wendy Wasserstein Bloom, Susan P. Natalie Babbitt Eloise Greenfield Boisvert, Nancy L. Judith Rossner Bonazoli, Robert Kit Reed Bordin, Ruth Elizabeth Margaret Chandler Mary Rice Livermore Anna H. Shaw Boyd, Karen Leslie Patricia Highsmith Nora Roberts Boyd, Lois A. Paula Marie Cooey Boyd, Zohara Sophia Robbins Little Josephine Pollard Martha Remick Mary Jane Windle Brahm, Laura Judy Grahn Mary Oliver Breitsprecher, Nancy Zona Gale Bremer, Sidney H. Lucy Monroe Elia Wilkinson Peattie Eunice Tietjens Edith Franklin Wyatt Brett, Sally Inglis Clark Fletcher Bernice Kelly Harris Edith Summers Kelley Ida Tarbell Broner, E. M. Anne Bernays
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Brooker-Gross, Susan R. Ellen Churchill Semple Brookes, Kimberly Hayden Barbara Deming Brostoff, Anita Gladys Schmitt Brown, Alanna Kathleen Mourning Dove Brown, Dorothy H. Rose Falls Bres Elma Godchaux Margaret Landon Mary Lasswell Mary Ashley Townsend Jeannette Hadermann Walworth Brown, Fahamisha Patricia Jayne Cortez Carolyn M. Rodgers Ntozake Shange Brown, Lois Octavia E. Butler Terry McMillan Brown, Lynda W. Caroline Whiting Hentz Octavia Walton Le Vert Anne Newport Royall Jennette Reid Tandy Bryer, Marjorie Michele Wallace Buchanan, Harriette Cuttino Corra May Harris Helen Kendrick Johnson Agnes C. Laut Blair Rice Niles Marie Conway Oemler Josephine Pinckney Lizette Woodworth Reese Mary Howard Schoolcraft Bucknall, Barbara J. Pearl S. Buck Ursula K. Le Guin Phyllis McGinley Hannah Whittal Smith Evangeline Walton Burger, Mary Diane DiPrima Burns, Lois Mary Hunter Austin xiii
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Burns, Melissa Anne Bernays E. M. Broner Mary McCarthy Helen Hennessy Vendler
Challinor, Joan R. Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams
Butery, Karen Ann Karen Horney
Chew, Martha Mary Henderson Eastman Sallie Rochester Ford Maria Jane McIntosh
Butler, Francelia Harriet Taylor Upton Byers, Inzer Annie Heloise Abel Mary Sheldon Barnes Mary Louise Booth Catherine Drinker Bowen Carrie Chapman Catt Frances Manwaring Caulkins Margaret Antoinette Clapp Margaret L. Coit Angelina Grimké Sarah Moore Grimké Louise Kellogg Adrienne Koch Martha Nash Lamb Alma Lutz Nellie Neilson Martha Laurens Ramsay Constance Lindsay Skinner Margaret Bayard Smith Byington, Juliet Susan Brownmiller Lorna Dee Cervantes Alice Childress Rosalyn Drexler Eloise Greenfield Catharine A. MacKinnon Kate Millett Andrea Nye Susan Sontag Campbell, Mary B. Carolyn Forché Carl, Lisa Nikki Giovanni Mary Lee Settle Carlin, Sandra Louella Oettinger Parsons Carnes, Valerie Janet Flanner Carroll, Linda A. Jean Craighead George xiv
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Chase, Evelyn Hyman Mary Ellen Chase
Chou, Jerome Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Cathy Song Eudora Welty Kate Wilhelm Christensen, Lois E. Louise Smith Clappe Clark, Susan L. Mignon G. Eberhart Doris Grumbach Mary R. Higham Mabel Seeley Cleveland, Carol Patricia Highsmith Cohn, Amy L. Lois Lowry Cohn, Jan Mary Roberts Rinehart Coleman, Linda S. Mollie Dorsey Sanford Condit, Rebecca C. Ai Jayne Cortez Joan Didion Frances FitzGerald Paula Fox Sandra M. Gilbert Ellen Gilchrist Marita Golden Mary Catherine Gordon Lois Gould Joanne Greenberg Beth Henley Pauline Kael Alison Lurie Marge Piercy Rosemary Radford Ruether Linda Ty-Casper Dorothy Uhnak Ann Belford Ulanov
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Cook, Martha E. Virginia Hamilton Annie Fellows Johnston George Madden Martin Katherine Bonner McDowell Mary Murfree Cook, Sylvia Olive Tilford Dargan Grace Lumpkin Coultrap-McQuin, Susan Eliza Leslie Catharine Arnold Williams Cowell, Pattie Bathsheba Bowers Martha Wadsworth Brewster Elizabeth Sandwith Drinker Anna Young Smith Annis Boudinot Stockton Lydia Fish Willis Anna Green Winslow Cox, Virginia Erica Jong Crabbe, Katharyn F. Jane Andrews Carolyn Sherwin Bailey Katherine Lee Bates Margery Williams Bianco Claire Huchet Bishop Rebecca Sophia Clarke Clara F. Guernsey Lucy Ellen Guernsey Theodora Kroeber Elizabeth Foreman Lewis Ella Farman Pratt Susan Ridley Sedgwick Monica Shannon Eva March Tappan Louisa Huggins Tuthill Elizabeth Gray Vining Eliza Orne White Crumpacker, Laurie Sarah Prince Gill Cutler, Evelyn S. Rose O’Neill Dame, Enid Edna St. Vincent Millay Darney, Virginia Maude Howe Elliott Laura Howe Richards
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Dash, Irene Carolyn G. Heilbrun Davidson, Cathy N. E. M. Broner Laura Jean Libbey Tabitha Tenney Davis, Barbara Kerr Ellen Moers Davis, Thadious M. Anna Julia Cooper Mollie Moore Davis Shirley Graham Mary Spring Walker Rhoda E. White Deegan, Mary Jo Edith Abbott Emily Greene Balch Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge Helen Merrell Lynd Marion Talbott DeMarr, Mary Jean Charlotte Armstrong Sarah T. Bolton Gwen Bristow Doris Miles Disney Janet Ayer Fairbank Rachel Lyman Field Alice Tisdale Hobart Agnes Newton Keith Alice Hegan Rice Mari Sandoz Anya Seton Ruth Suckow Elswyth Thane Agnes Sligh Turnbull Carolyn Wells Demetrakopoulos, Stephanie Mary Daly Mary Esther Harding June K. Singer Ann Belford Ulanov Deming, Caren J. Gertrude Berg Elaine Sterne Carrington Agnes E. Nixon Irna Phillips xv
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Denler, Heidi Hartwig Alice French Tina Howe Kristin Hunter-Lattany Alice McDermott Anne Tyler Denniston, Dorothy L. Paule Marshall DeRoche, Celeste Beverly Cleary Natalie Zemon Davis Rachel Blau DuPlessis Sylvia A. Earle Louise Erdrich Gail Godwin Katharine Graham Carolyn G. Heilbrun Linda Hogan Nicole Hollander Barbara C. Jordan Nancy Mairs Maria Mitchell Robin Morgan Gloria Naylor Anne Firor Scott Joan Wallach Scott Vida Dutton Scudder Jane P. Tompkins Dorothy West Dixon, Janette Goff Judy Blume Erma Bombeck Betty Friedan Barbara Tuchman Helen Hennessy Vendler Dobbs, Jeannine Hildegarde Flanner Hazel Hall Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck Leonora von Stosch Speyer Jean Starr Untermeyer Marya Zaturenska Domina, Lynn Dorothy Allison Susan B. Anthony Rita Dove Anne Lamott Denise Levertov Sojourner Truth xvi
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Donnelly, Daria Sarah Appleton-Weber Joy Harjo Naomi Shihab Nye Linda Pastan Donovan, Josephine Annie Adams Fields Louise Imogen Guiney Sarah Orne Jewett Lucy Larcom Celia Laighton Thaxter Dooley, Dale A. Ai Alexis DeVeaux Dorenkamp, Angela Mary Catherine Gordon Dorenkamp, Monica Kathy Acker Alicia Ostriker Dykeman, Amy Kate W. Hamilton Cecilia Viets Jamison Adeline Trafton Knox Eliasberg, Ann Pringle Annie Brown Leslie Josephine Preston Peabody Dorothy Thompson Victoria Woodhull Estess, Sybil Maxine W. Kumin Etheridge, Billie W. Abigail Smith Adams Mercy Otis Warren Evans, Elizabeth Josephine Jacobsen Helen MacInnes Frances Newman Margaret Junkin Preston Anne Tyler Eudora Welty Ewell, Barbara C. Sarah McLean Greene Fannie Heaslip Lea Eliza Jane Poitevent Nicholson Eliza Phillips Pugh Faust, Langdon Frances Willard
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Ferguson, Mary Anne Lisa Alther Sally Benson Doris Betts Tess Slesinger Finger, Mary E. Josephine Herbst Madeleine L’Engle Fiore, Jullie Ann Annie Dillard Fish, Virginia K. Frances R. Donovan Annie Marion MacLean Fitch, Noel R. Sylvia Beach Fleche, Anne Adrienne Kennedy Fleenor, Juliann E. Catharine Esther Beecher Caroline Chesebrough Susan Hale Emily Chubbuck Judson Margaret Sanger Ann Winterbotham Stephens Flint, Joyce Margaret Craven Florence, Barbara Moench Lella Secor Fowler, Lois Eleanor Flexner Frances Dana Gage Ida Husted Harper Julia McNair Wright Franklin, Phyllis Judith Sargent Murray Elsie Clews Parsons Jean Stafford Frazer, Winifred Dorothy Day Voltairine de Cleyre Emma Goldman Freiberg, Karen Kate Wilhelm Freibert, Lucy Georgiana Bruce Kirby Jessica N. MacDonald Marianne Dwight Orvis
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Friedman, Ellen Anna Hempstead Branch Bettina Liebowitz Knapp Dilys Bennett Laing Fuchs, Miriam Beulah Marie Dix Maude McVeigh Hutchins Gabbard, Lucina P. Mary Coyle Chase Clare Boothe Luce Galanter, Margit Barbara Tuchman Gallo, Rose Adrienne Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald Garson, Helen S. Jacqueline Susann Sophie Kerr Underwood Gartner, Carol B. Carman Dee Barnes Laura Benét Mary Putnam Jacobi Kate Jordan Myra Kelly Gaskill, Gayle Isabella MacDonald Alden Beatrice J. Chute Marchette Chute Mathilde Eiker Sarah Barnwell Elliott Jean Kerr Gensler, Kinereth Sandra M. Gilbert Gentilella, Dacia Paula Gunn Allen Gerson, Risa Susanna Anthony E. L. Konigsburg Eliza Buckminster Lee Gibbons, Christina Tischler Mary Palmer Tyler Gibbons, Sheila J. Mary McGrory Gilbert, Melissa Kesler Gloria Steinem Giles, Jane Elizabeth Elkins Sanders Catharine Maria Sedgwick xvii
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Ginsberg, Elaine K. Amelia Jenks Bloomer Maria Susanna Cummins Hannah Webster Foster Mary Jane Hawes Holmes Betty Smith E. D. E. N. Southworth Gironda, Suzanne Michelle Cliff Jill Johnston Meridel Le Sueur Gladstein, Mimi R. Ayn Rand Gleason, Phyllis S. Alice Adams Alison Lurie Goldman, Maureen Esther Edwards Burr Hannah Flagg Gould Hannah Sawyer Lee
Griffith, Susan Nicholasa Mohr Grim, Jessica Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Lucy R. Lippard Eileen Myles Rosmarie Waldrop Groben, Anne R. Ella Wheeler Wilcox Grove, Shari Linda Hogan Hall, Joan Wylie Ruth McEnery Stuart Eudora Welty Halpern, Faye Joanne Greenberg Maureen Howard
Grant, Mary H. Florence Howe Hall Julia Ward Howe
Hamblen, Abigail Ann Eleanor Hallowell Abbott Temple Bailey Amelia E. Barr Clara L. Root Burnham Elizabeth Jane Coatsworth Margaret Campbell Deland Mary E. Wilkins Freeman Honoré McCue Morrow Louise Redfield Peattie Lucy Fitch Perkins Margaret E. Sangster Elsie Singmaster Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard Nelia Gardner White Ola Elizabeth Winslow
Green, Carol Hurd Eve Merriam
Hamblen, Vicki Lynn Helen M. Winslow
Greene, Dana Sophia Hume Martha Shepard Lippincott Lucretia Mott Sara Vickers Oberholtzer
Hannay, Margaret P. Marabel Morgan
Gottfried, Erika Rose Pesotta Gottlieb, Phyllis Lucy Hooper Lucy Jones Hooper Graham, Theodora R. Louise Bogan Grace Elizabeth King Josephine Miles Harriet Monroe
Greyson, Laura Hannah Arendt Grider, Sylvia Ann Linda Dégh Grierson, Beth Rita Mae Brown Alma Routsong xviii
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Hardesty, Nancy Antoinette Brown Blackwell Hannah Chaplin Conant Sarah Ewing Hall Phoebe Worrall Palmer Elizabeth Payson Prentiss Elizabeth Cady Stanton Emma Willard Hardy, Willene S. Katharine Fullerton Gerould
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Harlan, Judith Sue Grafton Shere Hite Diane Johnson Sarah Winnemucca Naomi Wolf Harris, Miriam Kalman, Ph.D Jean Houston Claire Myers Owens Florida Scott-Maxwell Harvey, Mary E. Mari Evans Sally Miller Gearhart Marita Golden Kristin Hunter-Lattany Healey, Claire H. D. Amy Lowell Heilbrun, Carolyn G. A. G. Mojtabai Helbig, Alethea K. Carol Ryrie Brink Eleanor Estes Lucretia Peabody Hale Irene Hunt Madeleine L’Engle Myra Cohn Livingston Emily Cheney Neville Ruth Sawyer Kate Seredy Caroline Dale Snedeker Zilpha Keatley Snyder Elizabeth George Speare Anne Terry White Ella Young Henderson, Kathy Linda J. Barnes Joan Didion Martha Grimes Susan Minot
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Hill, Vicki Lynn Bessie Breuer Mary Cruger Helen Hamilton Gardener Ursula N. Gestefeld Marie Howland Ellen Warner Kirk Theresa S. Malkiel Myra Page Martha W. Tyler Marie Van Vorst Mary Heaton Vorse Bessie McGinnis Van Vorst Hobbs, Glenda Harriette Simpson Arnow Hoeveler, Diane Long Mathilde Franziska Giesler Anneke Phoebe Cary Mary Andrews Denison Alice Bradley Haven Eleanor Mercein Kelly Juliette Magill Kinzie Marya Mannes Jessica Mitford Frances Crosby Van Alstyne Babette Deutsch Holbrook, Amy Alice McDermott Holdstein, Deborah H. Harriet Livermore Vienna G. Morrell Ramsay Dora Knowlton Ranous Itti Kinney Reno Mae West Holly, Marcia Margaret Culkin Banning
Hepps, Marcia María Irene Fornés Tina Howe Megan Terry
Hornstein, Jacqueline Jenny Fenno Sarah Symmes Fiske Susannah Johnson Hastings Elizabeth Mixer Sarah Parsons Moorhead Sarah Wentworth Morton Sarah Osborn Sarah Porter Eunice Smith Jane Turell Elizabeth White
Hill, Holly Mina Kirstein Curtiss
Horton, Beverly Harriet Jacobs
Henning, Wendy J. Marie Manning
xix
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Howard, Lillie Fannie Cook Alice Walker Howze, Jo Mary McLeod Bethune Hoyle, Karen Nelson Virginia Lee Burton Natalie Savage Carlson Marguerite Lofft de Angeli Jean Lee Latham
Jones, Judith P. Phyllis Chesler Eleanor Clark Elizabeth Gould Davis Gayl Jones Kafatou, Sarah Ellen Bryant Voigt Kahn, Mariam Ruth Benedict Margaret Mead
Hudspeth, Cheryl K. Rodello Hunter
Kaledin, Eugenia Carolyn Kizer Elizabeth Spencer
Hughson, Lois Mary Ritter Beard Barbara Tuchman
Karp, Sheema Hamdani Adrienne Rich
Humez, Jean McMahon Rebecca Cox Jackson Hunter, Edith F. Sophia Lyon Fahs Irvin, Helen Deiss Antoinette Doolittle Anna White Johnson, Claudia D. Olive Logan Clara Morris Johnson, Lee Ann Mary Hallock Foote Johnson, Robin Marianne Moore Jones, Allison A. Maxine W. Kumin Rhoda Lerman Lois Lowry Paule Marshall Terry McMillan A. G. Mojtabai Katherine M. Rogers Susan Fromberg Schaeffer Ntozake Shange Jones, Anne Hudson Kate C. Hurd-Mead Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Esther Pohl Lovejoy Gail Sheehy xx
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Kaufman, Janet E. Eliza Frances Andrews Mary Miller Chesnut Kate Cumming Sarah Ellis Dorsey Rebecca Latimer Felton Constance Cary Harrison Sarah Stone Holmes Mary Ann Webster Loughborough Judith Brockenbrough McGuire Elizabeth Avery Meriwether Phoebe Yates Pember Sara Rice Pryor Sallie A. Brock Putnam Eliza M. Ripley Cornelia Phillips Spencer Susie King Taylor Katharine Prescott Wormeley Kavo, Rose F. Sue Petigru Bowen Jane C. Campbell Juliet Lewis Campbell Jane McManus Cazneau Jane Dunbar Chaplin Ella Rodman Church Jane Hardin Cross Keeney, William María Irene Fornés Tina Howe Keeshen, Kathleen Kearney Marguerite Higgins Ada Louise Huxtable Miriam Ottenberg
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Kelleghan, Fiona Marion Zimmer Bradley Suzy McKee Charnas Anne McCaffrey Vonda N. McIntyre Andre Norton Kit Reed Elizabeth Ann Scarborough Sheri S. Tepper Connie Willis
Koengeter, L. W. Ann Eliza Schuyler Bleecker Maria Gowen Brooks Hannah Mather Crocker Margaretta V. Faugeres Rose Wilder Lane Adah Isaacs Menken
Kenschaft, Lori Martha Ballard Barbara Ehrenreich Charlotte Perkins Gilman Frances Kellor Carson McCullers Ann Lane Petry Ida B. Wells-Barnett
Kolmerten, Carol A. Frances Wright
Kern, Donna Casella Frances Fuller Victor Kern, Edith Ann Landers Kessler, Carol Farley Elizabeth Stuart Phelps King, Margaret J. Clara Jessup Bloomfield-Moore Peg Bracken Judith Crist Maureen Daly Pauline Kael Elizabeth Linington Madalyn Murray O’Hair Emily Post Mary Wilson Sherwood Amy Vanderbilt Kish, Dorothy Rebecca Harding Davis Klein, Kathleen Gregory Susan Griffin Ruth McKenney Anne Nichols Bella Cohen Spewak Megan Terry Klein, Michael Jean Valentine Knapp, Bettina L. Anaïs Nin
Kohlstedt, Sally Gregory Anna Botsford Comstock Almira Lincoln Phelps
Kondelik, Marlene Mary Shipman Andrews Koon, Helene Marian Anderson Ruth Gordon Anna Mowatt Ritchie Elizabeth Robins Catherine Turney S. S. B. K. Wood Koppes, Phyllis Bixlir Frances Hodgson Burnett Kouidis, Virginia M. Mina Loy Krieg, Joann Peck Charlotte Mary Sanford Barnes Susan Fenimore Cooper Mary Baker Eddy Kroll, Diane E. Jean Fritz Katherine Paterson Krouse, Agate Nesaule Rhoda Lerman Kuenhold, Sandra Leta Stetter Hollingworth Kuznets, Lois R. Esther Forbes Lois Lenski Lamping, Marilyn Hallie Quinn Brown Pauline Hopkins Maria W. Stewart Fannie Barrier Williams Langhals, Patricia Florence Wheelock Ayscough Alice Bacon Dorothy Borg xxi
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Langsam, Miriam Z. Margaret Bourke-White Laska, Vera Marcia Gluck Davenport Elisabeth Elliot
Ludwig, Linda Kathryn Cavarly Hulme Margaret Mitchell MacDonald, Maureen Katherine Bolton Black
Lauter, Estella Diane Wakoski
MacKay, Kathryn L. Maurine Whipple
Levy, Ilise Alice Hamilton Jane Jacobs
MacPike, Loralee Emily Kimbrough Maxine Hong Kingston Mary Jane Ward
Lewandowska, M. L. Marilyn Hacker Lewis, Janette Seaton Carrie Jacobs Bond Joanne Greenberg Lewis, Sharon A. Marita Bonner Lezburg, Amy K. Ilka Chase Linden-Ward, Blanche Andrea Dworkin Marilyn French Robin Morgan Loeb, Helen Inez Haynes Irwin Lohman, Judith S. Crystal Eastman Londré, Felicia Hardison Agnes de Mille Edith Ellis Anne Crawford Flexner Harriet Ford Rose Franken Ketti Frings Dorothy Kuhns Heyward Jeannette Augustus Marks Frances Aymar Mathews Adelaide Matthews Marguerite Merington Lillian Mortimer Martha Morton Josefina Niggli Charlotte Blair Parker Lillian Ross Lillie West Rida Johnson Young Lord, Charlotte V. Sidney Cowell Bateman xxii
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Madsen, Carol Cornwall Louisa Greene Richards Emmeline Woodward Wells Maida, Patricia D. Lillian O’Donnell Mainiero, Lina Willa Sibert Cather Maio, Kathleen L. Anna Katharine Green Mary R. Platt Hatch Lenore Glen Offord Metta Fuller Victor Mallett, Daryl F. Leigh Brackett Jane E. Brody Carolyn Chute Emma Lathen Ursula K. Le Guin Reeve Lindbergh Bobbie Ann Mason Rachel Pollack Anne Rice Kristine Kathryn Rusch Joanna Russ Jessica Amanda Salmonson Lee Smith Margaret Truman Marchino, Lois Rita Mae Brown Marcus, Lisa bell hooks Sherley Anne Williams Margolis, Tina Eva LeGallienne Marie, Jacquelyn Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Marks, Elaine Germaine Brée Marshall, Kathleen Bonann Susan H. Bergman Elizabeth Hardwick Linda Kaufman Kerber Bette Bao Lord Lorrie Moore Sara Paretsky Elaine Showalter Mona Van Duyn Edith Wharton Martinez, Elizabeth Coonrod Sandra Benítez Rosa Guy Demetria Martínez Cherríe Moraga Judith Ortiz Cofer Esmeralda Santiago Helena María Viramontes Masel-Walters, Lynne Alice Stone Blackwell Mary Ware Dennett Miriam Follin Leslie Inez Haynes Irwin Mason, Mary Grimley Betty Friedan Carolyn G. Heilbrun Nancy Gardner Prince Mason, Sarah E. Pauline Kael Masteller, Jean Carwile Annie Nathan Meyer Elizabeth Seifert Masters, Joellen Gayl Jones Masters, Jollen Susan Fromberg Schaeffer Matherne, Beverly M. Alice Gerstenberg
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
McCarthy, Joanne Kay Boyle Maeve Brennan Mary Maguire Colum Hedda Hopper Betty MacDonald Kathleen Thompson Norris McCay, Mary A. Rosellen Brown Louise Erdrich Kaye Gibbons Ellen Gilchrist Patricia Highsmith Barbara Kingsolver Bobbie Ann Mason Brenda Marie Osbey Anne Rice Helen Yglesias McClure, Charlotte S. Gertrude Atherton McColgan, Kristin Dorothea Lynde Dix McCrea, Joan M. Katharine Coman McDannell, M. Colleen Katherine Eleanor Conway Pearl Richards Craigie Amanda Smith Frances Fisher Tiernan Ellen Gould White McFadden-Gerber, Margaret Sally Carrighar Annie Dillard Wilma Dykeman Fannie Hardy Eckstorm Josephine Winslow Johnson Harriet M. Miller Louise Dickinson Rich
May, Jill P. Ann Nolan Clark Ingri Mortenson d’Aulaire Maud Fuller Petersham Marilyn Sachs
McGovern, Edythe M. Margaret Wise Brown Rachel Crothers Susan Glaspell Lorraine Hansberry Sophie Treadwell Charlotte Zolotow
Mayer, Elsie F. Anne Morrow Lindbergh
McKay, Mary A. Lee Smith xxiii
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
McLennan, Karen Harriette Simpson Arnow Toni Cade Bambara Mary Daly Louise Glück Virginia Johnson-Masters Audre Lorde Patricia Meyer Spacks McQuin, Susan Coultrap Sarah Ann Evans Medeiros, Kimbally A. Sandra Harding Eleanor Munro Anne Truitt Anne Waldman Menger, Lucy Ruth Shick Montgomery Jane Roberts Susy Smith Mercier, Cathryn M. Yoshiko Uchida Cynthia Voigt Miller, James A. Margaret Randall Miller, Marlene M. Elizabeth Bishop Kelly Cherry Elizabeth Cook-Lynn M. F. K. Fisher June Jordan Mitchell, Nora Olga Broumas Louise Glück Sharon Olds Mitchell, Sally Francesca Alexander Helen Dore Boylston Margaret Mayo Cora Baggerly Older Mary Green Pike Rose Porter Molly Elliot Seawell Mary Ella Waller Moe, Phyllis Abbie Farwell Brown Helen Stuart Campbell Eliza Cabot Follen Emily Huntington Miller Sarah Chauncey Woolsey xxiv
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Mollenkott, Virginia Ramey Grace Livingston Hill-Lutz Sarah Smith Martyn Marjorie Hope Nicolson Rosemond Tuve Montenegro, David Linda Ty-Casper Morris, Linda A. Marietta Holley Frances Berry Whitcher Mortimer, Gail Katherine Anne Porter Mossberg, Barbara A. Clarke Sylvia Plath Genevieve Taggard Moynihan, Ruth Barnes Abigail Scott Duniway Murphy, Maureen Mary E. McGrath Blake Helena Lefroy Caperton Kathleen Coyle Blanche McManus Mansfield Mary L. Meaney Asenath Hatch Nicholson Florence J. O’Connor Jessie Fremont O’Donnell Katharine A. O’Keeffe Clara M. Thompson Murphy, Miriam B. Sarah E. Carmichael Martha Spence Heywood Murphy, Paula C. Maya Angelou Eleanor Taylor Bland Nora Ephron Barbara Kingsolver Barbara Neely Mussell, Kay Phyllis A. Whitney Nance, Guin A. Gail Godwin Nancy Hale Virginia M. Satir Elizabeth Spencer Clara M. Thompson Neils, Patricia Langhals Emily Hahn Charlotte Y. Salisbury Mary Clabaugh Wright
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Neville, Tam Lin Ruth Stone Newman, Anne Julia Mood Peterkin Elizabeth Sewell Amélie Rives Troubetzkoy Nichols, Kathleen L. Miriam Coles Harris Ellen Peck Harriet Waters Preston Anne Sexton Nix, E. M. Gail Godwin Nochimson, Martha Carry A. Nation Martha Harrison Robinson Norman, Marion Lucretia Maria Davidson Margaret Miller Davidson O’Connor, Christine Martha Ostenso O’Loughlin, James Tillie Olsen Ockerstrom, Lolly Mona Van Duyn Pannill, Linda Isadora Duncan Parker, Alice Ada Jack Carver Edith Hamilton Passty, Jeanette Nyda Isabella Oliver Sharp Sarah Pogson Smith Sukey Vickery Watson Payne, Alma J. Louisa May Alcott Pelzer, Linda C. Patricia Cornwell Martha Gellhorn Anita Shreve Penn, Patricia E. Del Martin Annie Smith Peck Penn, Shana Lucy S. Dawidowicz Perez-Guntin, Amiris Julia de Burgos
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Peterson, Margaret Emily Dickinson Janet Lewis Pettis, Joyce Zora Neale Hurston Philips, Elizabeth Sarah Helen Whitman Phillips, Elizabeth Elizabeth Ellet Annie Somers Gilchrist Estelle Robinson Lewis Frances Sargent Osgood Caroline Ticknor Mabel Loomis Todd Piercy, Josephine K. Anne Dudley Bradstreet Pogel, Nancy Constance Mayfield Rourke Poland, Helene Dwyer Julia Henrietta Gulliver Susanne K. Langer Pool, Gail Cynthia Ozick Dawn Powell Pouncey, Lorene Vassar Miller Marguerite Young Preston, Caroline Annie Trumbull Slosson Pringle, Mary Beth Léonie Fuller Adams Charlotte Perkins Gilman Puk, Francine Shapiro Elizabeth Akers Allen Victoria Lincoln Dorothy Parker Frances Gray Patton xxv
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Radtke, Barbara Anne Mary Daly Rosemary Radford Ruether Ratigan, Virginia Kaib Isabella Marshall Graham Mary Agnes Tincker Raugust, Karen Kathy Acker Natalie Angier Nevada Barr Ann Beattie Blanche McCrary Boyd Sandra Brown Edna Buchanan Amy Clampitt Nancy F. Cott Elizabeth Daly Dorothy Salisbury Davis Elizabeth Drew Carolyn Forché Jean Garrigue Kaye Gibbons Doris Kearns Goodwin Jorie Graham Jane Hamilton Lyn Hejinian Laurie R. King Ray, Sandra Rosa Guy Mildred Pitts Walter Nancy Willard Rayson, Ann Adelle Davis Ann Lane Petry
xxvi
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Rhodes, Nelson Margaret Wise Brown Alexis DeVeaux Ann Douglas Susan Griffin Lillian Hellman Zenna Henderson Jill Johnston Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Madeleine L’Engle Harper Lee Anne Morrow Lindbergh Shirley MacLaine Nancy Mairs Del Martin Marsha Norman Rochelle Owens Sylvia Plath Ayn Rand Hannah Whittal Smith Gertrude Stein Megan Terry Phyllis A. Whitney Richardson, Susan B. Mitsuye Yamada Hisaye Yamamoto Richmond, Velma Bourgeois Anne Fremantle Frances Parkinson Keyes Ruth Painter Randall Agnes Repplier Richter, Heddy A. Elizabeth Frances Corbett Olive Higgins Prouty Roberts, Audrey Caroline M. Stansbury Kirkland
Reardon, Joan Julia Child
Roberts, Bette B. Lydia Maria Child
Reisman, Jessica Hortense Calisher Angela Yvonne Davis Rachel Hadas Anne Moody Ann Rule Cynthia Voigt Alice Walker Kate Wilhelm
Roberts, Elizabeth Fannie W. Rankin Maggie Roberts Harriet Winslow Sewall Eliza Ann Youmans
Reuman, Ann E. Janice Mirikitani
Rogers, Katharine M. Lillian Hellman
Roca, Ana Julia Álvarez Gloria Anzaldúa Achy Obejas
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Rosenberg, Julia Emma Manley Embury Mary E. Moore Hewitt Rebecca Rush Caroline Warren Thayer Rosinsky, Natalie McCaffrey Anne McCaffrey Judith Merril C. L. Moore Rowe, Anne Maya Angelou Elizabeth Madox Roberts Constance Fenimore Woolson Rudnick, Lois P. Mabel Dodge Luhan Rushin, Kate Audre Lorde Ryan, Rosalie Tutela Jane Starkweather Locke Salo, Alice Bell Marjorie Hill Allee Mabel Leigh Hunt Elizabeth Yates Sandberg, Elisabeth Carolyn Chute Ruth Seid Scanzoni, Letha Anita Bryant Virginia Ramey Mollenkott Schiavoni, Andrew Rochelle Owens Susan Sontag Schleuning, Neala Yount Meridel Le Sueur Schoen, Carol B. Hannah Adams Rebekah Bettelheim Kohut Emma Lazarus Penina Moise Ruth Seid
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Schoenbach, Lisi Germaine Brée Schofield, Ann Helen Marot Schull, Elinor Adela Rogers St. Johns Schwartz, Helen J. Mary Antin Hortense Calisher Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer Margaret Thompson Janvier Margaret Woods Lawrence Tillie Olsen Grace Paley Schweik, Joanne L. Marilyn French Isabella Gardner Vivian Gornick Hettie Jones Gloria Steinem Scura, Dorothy M. Mary Johnston Seaton, Beverly Florence Merriam Bailey Gladys Hasty Carroll Mary Hartwell Catherwood Nellie Blanchan Doubleday Mateel Howe Farnham Margaret Flint Helen Morgenthau Fox Mary Griffith Susan Huntington Louisa Yeomans King Elizabeth L. Lawrence Alice Lounsberry Helen Reimensnyder Martin Sarah Edgarton Mayo Josephine Clifford McCrackin Helen Matthews Nitsch Frances Dana Parsons Grace Richmond Gladys Bagg Taber Anna Bartlett Warner Susan Bogert Warner Mary Stanbery Watts Adeline D. T. Whitney Kate Douglass Wiggin Laura Ingalls Wilder Louise Beebe Wilder Mabel Osgood Wright xxvii
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Secrest, Rose V. C. Andrews Mary Higgins Clark June Doman Katherine V. Forrest Nancy Freedman Carolyn G. Hart Joyce Maynard Sharon McCrumb Bharati Mukherjee Frances Perkins Belva Plain Patricia Polacco Sylvia F. Porter Pamela Sargent Shaffer-Koros, Carole M. Willystine Goodsell Helen Hazlett Ruth Putnam Shakir, Evelyn Ednah Littlehale Cheney Abigail May Alcott Nieriker Sharistanian, Janet Florence Howe Elizabeth Janeway Helen Waite Papashvily Katherine M. Rogers Shelton, Pamela Rita Mae Brown Nikki Giovanni Harriet Jacobs Sherman, Sarah Way Sarah Knowles Bolton Alice Brown Rose Terry Cooke Gertrude Battles Lane Louise Chandler Moulton Mary Alicia Owen
xxviii
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Shostak, Elizabeth Bette Bao Lord Jayne Anne Phillips Kate Simon Shur, Cherri L. Marianne Wiggins Shute, Carolyn Judy Blume Mildred Delois Taylor Siefert, Susan E. Ariel Durant Fannie Merritt Farmer Skaggs, Peggy Helen Keller Catherine Marshall Sladics, Devra M. Lilian Jackson Braun Gwendolyn Brooks Tess Gallagher Doris Grumbach Sonia Sanchez Dana Stabenow Wendy Wasserstein Sylvia Watanabe Jade Snow Wong Charlotte Zolotow Slaughter, Jane Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Smelstor, Marjorie Fanny Kemble
Shinn, Thelma J. Margaret Ayer Barnes Frances Courtenay Baylor Barnum Kate Chopin Martha Finley Lucy Smith French Shirley Ann Grau Mary Dana Shindler Harriet Prescott Spofford
Smethurst, James Maya Angelou Marilyn Hacker Maxine Hong Kingston Sonia Sanchez Alice Walker Margaret Walker
Shortreed, Vivian H. Elizabeth Oakes Smith Jane Grey Swisshelm
Smith, Martha Nell Toi Derricotte
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Smith, Susan Sutton Elizabeth Cabot Cary Agassiz Jane Goodwin Austin Delia Salter Bacon Sarah G. Bagley Mary Edwards Bryan Maria Weston Chapman Adelaide Crapsey Caroline Healey Dall Eliza Ann Dupuy Harriet Farley Eliza Rotch Farrar Margaret Fuller Caroline Howard Gilman Caroline Gilman Jervey Elizabeth Dodge Kinney Sara Jane Lippincott Harriet Hanson Robinson Phoebe Atwood Taylor Mary Hawes Terhune Jean Webster Sneller, Jo Leslie Rosemary Sprague Snipes, Katherine Clara Barton Laura Jackson Carson McCullers Snyder, Carrie Ana Castillo Julia Child Jane Cooper Mari Evans María Irene Fornés Shirley Ann Grau Bertha Harris Erica Jong Sandra McPherson Valerie Miner Alma Routsong Anya Seton Gail Sheehy Leslie Marmon Silko Zilpha Keatley Snyder Cathy Song Danielle Steel Mildred Pitts Walter Sonnenschein, Dana Rosalyn Drexler Jorie Graham Sandra McPherson
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Sparks, Leah J. Sanora Babb Carman Dee Barnes Doris Betts Germaine Brée Olga Broumas Octavia E. Butler Rachel Carson Kim Chernin Phyllis Chesler Marilyn Chin Michelle Cliff Judith Crist Toi Derricotte Diane DiPrima Andrea Dworkin Suzette Haden Elgin Carol Emshwiller Marjorie Garber Sally Miller Gearhart Donna Haraway Lillian Hellman Susan Isaacs Molly Ivins Shirley Jackson Gerda Lerner Del Martin Alice Notley Martha Craven Nussbaum Flannery O’Connor Joyce Carol Oates Camille Paglia Margaret Randall Harriet Beecher Stowe Lois-Ann Yamanaka Spencer, Linda Jayne Anne Phillips Eleanor Roosevelt Judith Rossner Sprague, Rosemary Sara Teasdale Sproat, Elaine Lola Ridge Stackhouse, Amy D. Edith Maud Eaton Lorine Niedecker Staley, Ann Jane Hirshfield Stanbrough, Jane Elizabeth Manning Hawthorne Hildegarde Hawthorne Rose Hawthorne Lathrop xxix
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Stanford, Ann Sanora Babb Sarah Kemble Knight May Swenson Staples, Katherine G. M. Flanders Louisa Park Hall Caroline E. Rush Alma Sioux Scarberry Stauffer, Helen Bess Streeter Aldrich Bertha Muzzy Sinclair Dorothy Swain Thomas Steele, Karen B. Elizabeth W. Latimer Mary Lowell Putnam Stein, Karen F. Paulina Wright Davis Alice Dunbar-Nelson Abbie Huston Evans Phebe Coffin Hanaford Elinor Hoyt Wylie Stein, Rachel Toni Cade Bambara Stepanski, Lisa Ann Beattie Stetson, Erlene Gwendolyn B. Bennett Stevenson, Deanna Olga Broumas Stiller, Nikki Helaine Newstead Stinson, Peggy Jane Addams Agnes Smedley Ella Winter Anzia Yezierska Stoddard, Karen M. Dorothy Daniels Summers, Shauna Joan Didion Anne Tyler Swan, Susan Jamaica Kincaid xxx
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Swartz, Mark Djuna Barnes bell hooks Susan Howe Ann Lauterbach Cynthia Ozick Swidler, Arlene Anderson Sarah N. Brownson Katherine Kurz Burton Aline Murray Kilmer Sister Mary Madeleva Helen Constance White Sylvander, Carolyn Wedin Martha Griffith Browne Jessie Redmon Fauset Frances Noyes Hart Helen Hull Mary Britton Miller Mary White Ovington Laura M. Towne Szymanski, Karen Anne C. Lynch Botta Eliza Woodson Farnham Talamantez, Inés Ella Cara Deloria Tebbe, Jennifer L. Georgette Meyer Chapelle Elisabeth May Craig Rheta Childe Dorr Elizabeth Drew Barbara Ehrenreich Frances FitzGerald Anne O’Hare McCormick Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman Anna Louise Strong Terris, Virginia R. Alice Henry Sarah Bryan Piatt Jessie B. Rittenhouse Lillian Whiting Thiébaux, Marcelle Faith Baldwin Cuthrell Julia Ripley Dorr Ellen Glasgow Anne Green Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Thomas, Gwendolyn A. Henrietta Buckmaster Charlotte L. Forten Pauli Murray
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Thompson, Ann Rosemary Radford Ruether Thompson, Dorothea Mosley Mary Cunningham Logan Ruth Bryan Owen Irma von Starkloff Rombauer Caroline White Soule Thornton, Emma S. Marion Marsh Todd Tipps, Lisa Bertha Harris Tobin, Jean Hilda Morley Adrienne Rich Ruth Whitman Townsend, Janis Mildred Aldrich Gertrude Stein Alice B. Toklas Treckel, Paula A. Alice Morse Earle Gerda Lerner Emily Smith Putnam Lucy Maynard Salmon Eliza Snow Smith Fanny Stenhouse Narcissa Prestiss Whitman Ann Eliza Young Turner, Alberta Katherine Garrison Chapin Ruth Herschberger Barbara Howes Muriel Rukeyser Uffen, Ellen Serlen Fannie Hurst Uphaus, Suzanne Henning Ann Chidester Eleanor Carroll Chilton Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn Pamela Frankau Maureen Howard Marge Piercy Vasquez, Pamela Judith Ortiz Cofer
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
Vogrin, Valerie Alice Adams Annie Dillard Jamaica Kincaid Maxine Hong Kingston Carole Maso Toni Morrison Sharon Olds Grace Paley Ann Patchett Amy Tan Wahlstrom, Billie J. Alice Cary Anna Peyre Dinnies Betty Friedan Zenna Henderson Andre Norton Joanna Russ Waldron, Karen E. Kim Chernin Walker, Cynthia L. Shirley Barker Taylor Caldwell Edna Ferber Eleanor Gates Caroline Pafford Miller Myrtle Reed Florence Barrett Willoughby Wall, Cheryl A. Gwendolyn Brooks Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Nella Larsen Gloria Naylor Anne Spencer Ward, Jean M. Elizabeth Blackwell Ella Rhoads Higginson Bethenia Owens-Adair Welch, Barbara A. Alice James Werden, Frieda L. Dorothy Dodds Baker Kate Millett Bernice Love Wiggins West, Martha Ullman Rosellen Brown Lynne Sharon Schwartz xxxi
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
White, Barbara A. Lillie Devereux Blake Sarah Josepha Hale Sara Willis Parton Marilla M. Ricker Caroline Slade
Yee, Carole Zonis Leane Zugsmith
White, Evelyn C. Angela Yvonne Davis
Yongue, Patricia Lee Zoë Akins Anne Douglas Sedgwick Helen Hennessy Vendler
Williams, Donna Glee Diane Wakoski Williams, Lynn F. Marion Zimmer Bradley Joanna Russ Wolff, Ellen Harriet E. Adams Wilson Jade Snow Wong Wolfson, Rose Klara Goldzieher Roman Wollons, Roberta Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg Woodward, Angela Natalie Babbitt Ellen Goodman Elizabeth Gray Vining Diane Wakoski Wright, Catherine Morris Mary Mapes Dodge Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne Gloria Anzaldúa Ana Castillo Lorna Dee Cervantes Sandra Cisneros Cherríe Moraga Helena María Viramontes
xxxii
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Yglesias, Helen Amy Tan
Young, Melanie Harriette Fanning Read Caroline H. Woods Zajdel, Melody M. Caresse Crosby Zilboorg, Caroline Elise Justine Bayard Ann Douglas Maud Wilder Goodwin Sarah Sprague Jacobs Charlotte A. Jerauld Mary Elizabeth Lee Dolley Madison Louisa Cheves McCord Maria G. Milward Agnes Woods Mitchell Mrs. H. J. Moore Martha Read Catherine Ware Warfield Amelia Coppuck Welby Zimmerman, Karen Marcia Muller
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS Abbott, Edith Abbott, Eleanor Hallowell Abel, Annie Heloise Acker, Kathy Adams, Abigail Smith Adams, Alice Adams, Hannah Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, Léonie Fuller Adams, Louisa Catherine Johnson Addams, Jane Adisa, Giamba See Lorde, Audre Agassiz, Elizabeth Cabot Cary Ai Akins, Zoë Alcott, Louisa May Alden, Isabella MacDonald Aldon, Adair See Meigs, Cornelia Aldrich, Bess Streeter Aldrich, Mildred Alexander, Francesca Allee, Marjorie Hill Allen, Elizabeth Akers Allen, Paula Gunn Allison, Dorothy Alther, Lisa Álvarez, Julia Ames, Mary E. Clemmer Anderson, Marian Andrew, Joseph Maree See Bonner, Marita Andrews, Eliza Frances Andrews, Jane Andrews, Mary Shipman Andrews, V. C. Angelou, Maya Angier, Natalie Anneke, Mathilde Franziska Giesler Anpetu Waśte See Deloria, Ella Cara Anthony, Susan B. Anthony, Susanna Antin, Mary Anzaldúa, Gloria Appleton-Weber, Sarah Appleton, Sarah See Appleton-Weber, Sarah Appleton, Victor, II See Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Arendt, Hannah Armstrong, Charlotte Arnow, Harriette Simpson Ashley, Ellen See Seifert, Elizabeth Atherton, Gertrude Atom, Ann See Walworth, Jeannette Hadermann
Auerbach, Hilda See Morley, Hilda Austin, Jane Goodwin Austin, Mary Hunter Avery, Martha Moore Ayer, Harriet Hubbard Ayscough, Florence Wheelock Babb, Sanora Babbitt, Natalie Bacon, Alice Bacon, Delia Salter Bagley, Sarah G. Bailey, Temple Bailey, Carolyn Sherwin Bailey, Florence Merriam Baker, Dorothy Dodds Balch, Emily Greene Ballard, Martha Bambara, Toni Cade Banning, Margaret Culkin Barker, Shirley Barnard, A. M. See Alcott, Louisa May Barnes, Carman Dee Barnes, Charlotte Mary Sanford Barnes, Djuna Barnes, Linda J. Barnes, Margaret Ayer Barnes, Mary Sheldon Barnum, Frances Courtenay Baylor Barr, Amelia E. Barr, Nevada Barton, Clara Barton, May Hollis See Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Bateman, Sidney Cowell Bates, Katherine Lee Bayard, Elise Justine Beach, Sylvia Beard, Mary Ritter Beattie, Ann Beebe, Mary Blair See Niles, Blair Rice Beecher, Catharine Esther Benedict, Ruth Benét, Laura Benítez, Sandra Bennett, Gwendolyn B. Benson, Sally Berg, Gertrude Bergman, Susan H. Bernays, Anne Berne, Victoria See Fisher, M. F. K. Bethune, Mary McLeod xxxiii
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Betts, Doris Bianco, Margery Williams Bishop, Claire Huchet Bishop, Elizabeth Black, Katherine Bolton Blackwell, Alice Stone Blackwell, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Elizabeth Blaisdell, Anne See Linington, Elizabeth Blake, Lillie Devereux Blake, Mary E. McGrath Bland, Eleanor Taylor Blatch, Harriot Stanton Bleecker, Ann Eliza Schuyler Bloomer, Amelia Jenks Bloomfield-Moore, Clara Jessup Blume, Judy Bly, Nellie See Seaman, Elizabeth Cochrane Bogan, Louise Bolton, Isabel See Miller, Mary Britton Bolton, Sarah T. Bolton, Sarah Knowles Bombeck, Erma Bond, Carrie Jacobs Bonner, Marita Booth, Mary Louise Borg, Dorothy Botta, Anne C. Lynch Bourke-White, Margaret Bowen, Catherine Drinker Bowen, Sue Petigru Bower, B. M. See Sinclair, Bertha Muzzy Bowers, Bathsheba Bowles, Jane Auer Boyd, Blanche McCrary Boyd, Nancy See Millay, Edna St. Vincent Boyle, Kay Boylston, Helen Dore Bracken, Peg Brackett, Leigh Bradley, Marion Zimmer Bradstreet, Anne Dudley Branch, Anna Hempstead Braun, Lilian Jackson Breckinridge, Sophonisba Preston Brée, Germaine Brennan, Maeve Brent, Linda See Jacobs, Harriet Bres, Rose Falls Breuer, Bessie Brewster, Martha Wadsworth Briggs, Emily Edson Brink, Carol Ryrie Bristow, Gwen Brody, Jane E. xxxiv
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Broner, E. M. Brooks, Gwendolyn Brooks, Maria Gowen Broumas, Olga Brown, Abbie Farwell Brown, Alice Brown, Hallie Quinn Brown, Margaret Wise Brown, Nancy See Leslie, Annie Brown Brown, Rita Mae Brown, Rosellen Brown, Sandra Browne, Martha Griffith Brownmiller, Susan Brownson, Sarah N. Bryan, Mary Edwards Bryant, Anita Buchanan, Edna Buck, Pearl S. Buckmaster, Henrietta Burke, Fielding See Dargan, Olive Tilford Burnett, Frances Hodgson Burnham, Clara L. Root Burr, Esther Edwards Burton, Katherine Kurz Burton, Virginia Lee Butler, Octavia E. Cabeza de Baca, Fabiola Cade, Toni See Bambara, Toni Cade Caldwell, Taylor Calhoun, Lucy See Monroe, Lucy Calisher, Hortense Campbell, Helen Stuart Campbell, Jane C. Campbell, Juliet Lewis Caperton, Helena Lefroy Carlson, Natalie Savage Carmichael, Sarah E. Carrighar, Sally Carrington, Elaine Sterne Carroll, Gladys Hasty Carson, Rachel Carver, Ada Jack Cary, Alice Cary, Phoebe Caspary, Vera Castillo, Ana Cather, Willa Sibert Catherwood, Mary Hartwell Catt, Carrie Chapman Caulkins, Frances Manwaring Cazneau, Jane McManus Cervantes, Lorna Dee Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Chandler, Elizabeth Margaret Chapelle, Georgette Meyer Chapin, Katherine Garrison Chaplin, Jane Dunbar Chapman, Lee See Bradley, Marion Zimmer Chapman, Maria Weston Charnas, Suzy McKee Chase, Ilka Chase, Mary Coyle Chase, Mary Ellen Chehia See Shaw, Anna Moore Cheney, Ednah Littlehale Chernin, Kim Cherry, Kelly Chesebrough, Caroline Chesler, Phyllis Chesnut, Mary Miller Chidester, Ann Child, Julia Child, Lydia Maria Childress, Alice Chilton, Eleanor Carroll Chin, Marilyn Chopin, Kate Church, Ella Rodman Chute, Beatrice J. Chute, Carolyn Chute, Marchette Cisneros, Sandra Clampitt, Amy Clapp, Margaret Antoinette Clappe, Louise Smith Clark, Ann Nolan Clark, Eleanor Clark, Mary Higgins Clarke, Rebecca Sophia Cleary, Beverly Cleghorn, Sarah Norcliffe Cliff, Michelle Clifton, Lucille Coatsworth, Elizabeth Jane Coit, Margaret L. Colum, Mary Maguire Coman, Katharine Comstock, Anna Botsford Conant, Hannah Chaplin Conway, Katherine Eleanor Cooey, Paula Marie Cook, Fannie Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth Cooke, Rose Terry Coolbrith, Ina Donna Coolidge, Susan See Woolsey, Sarah Chauncey Cooper, Anna Julia Cooper, Jane
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Cooper, Susan Fenimore Corbett, Elizabeth Frances Cornwell, Patricia Cortez, Jayne Cott, Nancy F. Coyle, Kathleen Craig, Elisabeth May Craig, Kit See Reed, Kit Craigie, Pearl Richards Crapsey, Adelaide Craven, Margaret Crist, Judith Crocker, Hannah Mather Croly, Jane Cunningham Crosby, Caresse Cross, Amanda See Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Cross, Jane Hardin Crothers, Rachel Crouter, Natalie Stark Crowe, F. J. See Johnston, Jill Cruger, Mary Cumming, Kate Cummins, Maria Susanna Curtiss, Mina Kirstein Curtiss, Ursula Reilly Custer, Elizabeth Bacon Cuthrell, Faith Baldwin Dahlgren, Madeleine Vinton Dall, Caroline Healey Daly, Elizabeth Daly, Mary Daly, Maureen Daniels, Dorothy Dargan, Olive Tilford d’Aulaire, Ingri Mortenson Davenport, Marcia Gluck Davidson, Lucretia Maria Davidson, Margaret Miller Davis, Adelle Davis, Angela Yvonne Davis, Dorothy Salisbury Davis, Elizabeth Gould Davis, Mollie Moore Davis, Natalie Zemon Davis, Paulina Wright Davis, Rebecca Harding Dawidowicz, Lucy S. Day, Dorothy de Angeli, Marguerite Lofft de Mille, Agnes de Burgos, Julia de Mondragon, Margaret Randall See Randall, Margaret de Cleyre, Voltairine Dégh, Linda xxxv
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Deland, Margaret Campbell del Occidente, Maria See Brooks, Maria Gowen Deloria, Ella Cara Deming, Barbara Denison, Mary Andrews Dennett, Mary Ware Derricotte, Toi Deutsch, Babette DeVeaux, Alexis Dexter, John See Bradley, Marion Zimmer Diaz, Abby Morton Dickinson, Emily Didion, Joan Dillard, Annie Dinnies, Anna Peyre DiPrima, Diane Disney, Doris Miles Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee Dix, Beulah Marie Dix, Dorothea Lynde Dix, Dorothy See Gilmer, Elizabeth Meriwether Dixon, Franklin W. See Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Dodge, Mary Abigail Dodge, Mary Mapes Doman, June Domini, Rey See Lorde, Audre Dominic, R. B. See Lathen, Emma Donovan, Frances R. Doolittle, Antoinette D(oolittle), H(ilda) Dorr, Julia Ripley Dorr, Rheta Childe Dorsett, Danielle See Daniels, Dorothy Dorsey, Anna McKenney Dorsey, Ella Loraine Dorsey, Sarah Ellis Doubleday, Nellie Blanchan Douglas, Amanda Minnie Douglas, Ann Dove, Rita Drew, Elizabeth Drexler, Rosalyn Drinker, Elizabeth Sandwith DuBois, Shirley Graham See Graham, Shirley DuJardin, Rosamond Neal Dunbar-Nelson, Alice Duncan, Isadora Duniway, Abigail Scott Dunlap, Jane See Davis, Adelle DuPlessis, Rachel Blau Dupuy, Eliza Ann Durant, Ariel Dworkin, Andrea Dykeman, Wilma xxxvi
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Earle, Alice Morse Earle, Sylvia A. Eastman, Crystal Eastman, Elaine Goodale Eastman, Mary Henderson Eaton, Edith Maud Eberhart, Mignon G. Eberhart, Sheri S. See Tepper, Sheri S. Eckstorm, Fannie Hardy Eddy, Mary Baker Egan, Lesley See Linington, Elizabeth Ehrenreich, Barbara Eiker, Mathilde Elder, Susan Blanchard Elgin, Suzette Haden Ellet, Elizabeth Elliot, Elisabeth Elliott, Maude Howe Elliott, Sarah Barnwell Ellis, Anne Ellis, Edith Embury, Emma Manley Emshwiller, Carol Ephron, Nora Erdrich, Louise Estes, Eleanor Evans, Abbie Huston Evans, Mari Evans, Sarah Ann Evermay, March See Eiker, Mathilde Fahs, Sophia Lyon Fairbank, Janet Ayer Fairfield, A. M. See Alcott, Louisa May Farley, Harriet Farmer, Fannie Merritt Farnham, Eliza Woodson Farnham, Mateel Howe Farquharson, Martha See Finley, Martha Farrar, Eliza Rotch Faugeres, Margaretta V. Fauset, Jessie Redmon Felton, Rebecca Latimer Fenno, Jenny Ferber, Edna Field, Kate Field, Rachel Lyman Fields, Annie Adams Finley, Martha Fisher, Dorothea Canfield Fisher, M. F. K. Fiske, Sarah Symmes Fitzgerald, Zelda Sayre FitzGerald, Frances Flanders, G. M.
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Flanner, Hildegarde Flanner, Janet Fletcher, Inglis Clark Flexner, Anne Crawford Flexner, Eleanor Flint, Margaret Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley Follen, Eliza Cabot Foote, Mary Hallock Forbes, Esther Forché, Carolyn Ford, Harriet Ford, Sallie Rochester Forester, Fanny See Judson, Emily Chubbuck Fornés, María Irene Forrest, Katherine V. Forten, Charlotte L. Foster, Hannah Webster Fox, Helen Morgenthau Fox, Paula Frankau, Pamela Franken, Rose Freedman, Nancy Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins Fremantle, Anne French, Alice French, Anne Warner French, Lucy Smith French, Marilyn Friedan, Betty Frings, Ketti Fritz, Jean Fuller, Margaret Gage, Frances Dana Gale, Zona Gallagher, Tess Garber, Marjorie Gardener, Helen Hamilton Gardner, Isabella Gardner, Mariam See Bradley, Marion Zimmer Gardner, Mary Sewall Garrigue, Jean Gates, Eleanor Gates, Susa Young Gearhart, Sally Miller Gellhorn, Martha Genêt See Flanner, Janet George, Jean Craighead Gerould, Katharine Fullerton Gerstenberg, Alice Gestefeld, Ursula N. Gibbons, Kaye Gilbert, Fabiola Cabeza de Baca See Cabeza de Baca, Fabiola
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Gilbert, Sandra M. Gilchrist, Annie Somers Gilchrist, Ellen Gill, Sarah Prince Gilman, Caroline Howard Gilman, Charlotte Perkins Gilmer, Elizabeth Meriwether Giovanni, Nikki Glasgow, Ellen Glaspell, Susan Glück, Louise Godchaux, Elma Godwin, Gail Golden, Marita Goldman, Emma Goodman, Allegra Goodman, Ellen Goodsell, Willystine Goodwin, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Maud Wilder Gordon, Caroline Gordon, Mary Catherine Gordon, Ruth Gornick, Vivian Gottschalk, Laura Riding See Jackson, Laura Gould, Hannah Flagg Gould, Lois Grafton, Sue Graham, Isabella Marshall Graham, Jorie Graham, Katharine Graham, Shirley Grahn, Judy Grant, Margaret See Franken, Rose Grau, Shirley Ann Graves, Valerie See Bradley, Marion Zimmer Gray, Angela See Daniels, Dorothy Green, Anna Katharine Green, Anne Green, Olive See Reed, Myrtle Greenberg, Joanne Greene, Sarah McLean Greenfield, Eloise Greenwood, Grace See Lippincott, Sara Jane Griffin, Susan Griffith, Mary Grimes, Martha Grimké, Angelina Grimké, Sarah Moore Gruenberg, Sidonie Matzner Grumbach, Doris Guernsey, Clara F. Guernsey, Lucy Ellen Guiney, Louise Imogen xxxvii
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Gulliver, Julia Henrietta Guy, Rosa H. D. See D(oolittle), H(ilda) Hacker, Marilyn Hadas, Rachel Hahn, Emily Hale, Lucretia Peabody Hale, Nancy Hale, Sarah Josepha Hale, Susan Hall, Florence Howe Hall, Hazel Hall, Louisa Park Hall, Sarah Ewing Hamilton, Alice Hamilton, Edith Hamilton, Gail See Dodge, Mary Abigail Hamilton, Jane Hamilton, Kate W. Hamilton, Virginia Hanaford, Phebe Coffin Hansberry, Lorraine Haraway, Donna Harding, Mary Esther Harding, Sandra Hardwick, Elizabeth Harjo, Joy Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Ida Husted Harris, Bernice Kelly Harris, Bertha Harris, Corra May Harris, Miriam Coles Harrison, Constance Cary Hart, Carolyn G. Hart, Frances Noyes Hasbrouck, Lydia Sayer Hastings, Susannah Johnson Hatch, Mary R. Platt Haven, Alice Bradley Hawthorne, Elizabeth Manning Hawthorne, Hildegarde Hazlett, Helen Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Hejinian, Lyn Hellman, Lillian Henderson, Zenna Henissart, Martha See Lathen, Emma Henley, Beth Henry, Alice Henry, Marguerite Hentz, Caroline Whiting Herbst, Josephine Herschberger, Ruth xxxviii
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Hewitt, Mary E. Moore Heyward, Dorothy Kuhns Heywood, Martha Spence Higgins, Marguerite Higginson, Ella Rhoads Higham, Mary R. Highet, Helen MacInnes See MacInnes, Helen Highsmith, Patricia Hill-Lutz, Grace Livingston Hirshfield, Jane Hite, Shere Hobart, Alice Tisdale Hobson, Laura Z. Hoffman, Alice Hoffman, Malvina Hogan, Linda Holding, Elisabeth Sanxay Hollander, Nicole Holley, Marietta Hollingworth, Leta Stetter Holm, Saxe See Jackson, Helen Hunt Holmes, Mary Jane Hawes Holmes, Sarah Stone hooks, bell Hooper, Lucy Jones Hooper, Lucy Hope, Laura Lee See Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Hopkins, Pauline Hopper, Hedda Horlak, E. E. See Tepper, Sheri S. Horney, Karen Houston, Jean Howard, Maureen Howe, Florence Howe, Julia Ward Howe, Susan Howe, Tina Howes, Barbara Howland, Marie Hull, Helen Hulme, Kathryn Cavarly Hume, Sophia Humishuma See Mourning Dove Hunt, Irene Hunt, Mabel Leigh Hunter, Rodello Hunter-Lattany, Kristin Huntington, Susan Hurd-Mead, Kate C. Hurst, Fannie Hurston, Zora Neale Hutchins, Maude McVeigh Huxtable, Ada Louise Hyde, Shelley See Reed, Kit
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Ireland, Jane See Norris, Kathleen Thompson Irwin, Inez Haynes Isaacs, Susan Ives, Morgan See Bradley, Marion Zimmer Ivins, Molly Jackson, Helen Hunt Jackson, Laura Jackson, Rebecca Cox Jackson, Shirley Jackson, Ward See Braun, Lilian Jackson Jacobi, Mary Putnam Jacobs, Harriet Jacobs, Jane Jacobs, Sarah Sprague Jacobsen, Josephine James, Alice Jamison, Cecilia Viets Janeway, Elizabeth Janvier, Margaret Thompson Jerauld, Charlotte A. Jervey, Caroline Gilman Jewett, Sarah Orne Johnson, Diane Johnson, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Helen Kendrick Johnson, Josephine Winslow Johnson-Masters, Virginia Johnston, Annie Fellows Johnston, Jill Johnston, Mary Jones, Amanda Theodocia Jones, Edith See Wharton, Edith Jones, Gayl Jones, Hettie Jones, Mary Harris Jong, Erica Jordan, Barbara C. Jordan, June Jordan, Kate Jordan, Laura See Brown, Sandra Judson, Emily Chubbuck Kael, Pauline Kavanaugh, Cynthia See Daniels, Dorothy Keene, Carolyn See Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Keith, Agnes Newton Keller, Helen Kellerman, Faye Kelley, Edith Summers Kellogg, Louise Kellor, Frances Kelly, Eleanor Mercein Kelly, Myra Kemble, Fanny
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Kennedy, Adrienne Kenyon, Jane Kerber, Linda Kaufman Kerr, Jean Keyes, Frances Parkinson Kilmer, Aline Murray Kimbrough, Emily Kincaid, Jamaica King, Grace Elizabeth King, Laurie R. King, Louisa Yeomans Kingsolver, Barbara Kingston, Maxine Hong Kinney, Elizabeth Dodge Kinzie, Juliette Magill Kirby, Georgiana Bruce Kirk, Ellen Warner Kirkland, Caroline M. Stansbury Kizer, Carolyn Knapp, Bettina Liebowitz Knight, Sarah Kemble Knox, Adeline Trafton Koch, Adrienne Kohut, Rebekah Bettelheim Konigsburg, E. L. Kroeber, Theodora Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth Kumin, Maxine W. Laing, Dilys Bennett Lamb, Martha Nash Lamott, Anne Landers, Ann Landon, Margaret Lane, Gertrude Battles Lane, Rose Wilder Langdon, Mary See Pike, Mary Green Langer, Susanne K. Larcom, Lucy Larsen, Nella Lasswell, Mary Latham, Jean Lee Lathen, Emma Lathrop, Rose Hawthorne Latimer, Elizabeth W. Latsis, Mary Jane See Lathen, Emma Laut, Agnes C. Lauterbach, Ann Lawrence, Elizabeth L. Lawrence, Josephine Lawrence, Margaret Woods Lazarus, Emma Le Guin, Ursula K. Le Sueur, Meridel Le Vert, Octavia Walton xxxix
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Lea, Fannie Heaslip Lee, Eliza Buckminster Lee, Hannah Sawyer Lee, Harper Lee, Marion See Comstock, Anna Botsford Lee, Mary Elizabeth LeGallienne, Eva L’Engle, Madeleine Lenski, Lois Lerman, Rhoda Lerner, Gerda Leslie, Annie Brown Leslie, Eliza Leslie, Miriam Follin Levertov, Denise Lewis, Elizabeth Foreman Lewis, Estelle Robinson Lewis, Janet Libbey, Laura Jean Lincoln, Victoria Lindbergh, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Reeve Linington, Elizabeth Lippard, Lucy R. Lippincott, Martha Shepard Lippincott, Sara Jane Little, Sophia Robbins Livermore, Harriet Livermore, Mary Rice Livingston, Myra Cohn Locke, Jane Starkweather Logan, Deborah Norris Logan, Mary Cunningham Logan, Olive Loos, Anita Lord, Bette Bao Lorde, Audre Lothrop, Amy See Warner, Anna Bartlett Lothrop, Harriet Stone Loughborough, Mary Ann Webster Lounsberry, Alice Lovejoy, Esther Pohl Lowell, Amy Lowry, Lois Loy, Mina Lucas, Victoria See Plath, Sylvia Luce, Clare Boothe Luhan, Mabel Dodge Lumpkin, Grace Lurie, Alison Lutz, Alma Lynd, Helen Merrell MacDonald, Betty MacDonald, Jessica N. xl
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Macdonald, Marcia See Hill-Lutz, Grace Livingston MacDougall, Ruth Doan MacInnes, Helen MacKinnon, Catharine A. MacLaine, Shirley MacLean, Annie Marion Macumber, Marie S. See Sandoz, Mari Madeleva, Sister Mary Madison, Dolley Mairs, Nancy Malkiel, Theresa S. Mannes, Marya Manning, Marie Mansfield, Blanche McManus March, Anne See Woolson, Constance Fenimore Marks, Jeannette Augustus Marot, Helen Marshall, Catherine Marshall, Gertrude Helen See Fahs, Sophia Lyon Marshall, Paule Martin, Del Martin, George Madden Martin, Helen Reimensnyder Martin, Valerie Martínez, Demetria Martyn, Sarah Smith Maso, Carole Mason, Bobbie Ann Mathews, Frances Aymar Matthews, Adelaide May, Sophie See Clarke, Rebecca Sophia Maynard, Joyce Mayo, Katherine Mayo, Margaret Mayo, Sarah Edgarton McBride, Mary Margaret McCaffrey, Anne McCarthy, Mary McCloy, Helen McCord, Louisa Cheves McCormick, Anne O’Hare McCrackin, Josephine Clifford McCrumb, Sharon McCullers, Carson McDermott, Alice McDowell, Katherine Bonner McGinley, Phyllis McGrory, Mary McGuire, Judith Brockenbrough McIntosh, Maria Jane McIntyre, Vonda N. McKenney, Ruth McLean, Kathryn Anderson McMillan, Terry McPherson, Aimee Semple
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
McPherson, Sandra Mead, Kate C. See Hurd-Mead, Kate C. Mead, Margaret Meaney, Mary L. Means, Florence Crannell Meigs, Cornelia Meloney, Franken See Franken, Rose Menken, Adah Isaacs Merington, Marguerite Meriwether, Elizabeth Avery Merriam, Eve Merril, Judith Meyer, Annie Nathan Meyer, June See Jordan, June M. Miles, Josephine Millar, Margaret Millay, Edna St. Vincent Miller, Alice Duer Miller, Caroline Pafford Miller, Emily Huntington Miller, Harriet M. Miller, Isabel See Routsong, Alma Miller, Mary Britton Miller, Vassar Millett, Kate Milward, Maria G. Miner, Valerie Minot, Susan Mirikitani, Janice Mitchell, Agnes Woods Mitchell, Margaret Mitchell, Maria Mitford, Jessica Mixer, Elizabeth Moers, Ellen Mohr, Nicholasa Moise, Penina Mojtabai, A. G. Mollenkott, Virginia Ramey Monroe, Harriet Monroe, Lucy Montgomery, Ruth Shick Moody, Anne Moore, C. L. Moore, Lorrie Moore, Marianne Moore, Mary Evelyn See Davis, Mollie Moore Moore, Mollie E. See Davis, Mollie Moore Moore, Mrs. H. J. Moorhead, Sarah Parsons Moraga, Cherríe Morgan, Claire See Highsmith, Patricia Morgan, Marabel Morgan, Robin Morley, Hilda
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Morris, Clara Morrison, Toni Morrow, Honoré McCue Mortimer, Lillian Morton, Martha Morton, Sarah Wentworth Mother Goose See Walworth, Jeannette Hadermann Mott, Lucretia Moulton, Louise Chandler Mourning Dove Mukherjee, Bharati Muller, Marcia Munro, Eleanor Murfree, Mary Murray, Judith Sargent Murray, Pauli Myles, Eileen Nation, Carry A. Naylor, Gloria Neely, Barbara Neilson, Nellie Neville, Emily Cheney Newcomb, Franc Johnson Newman, Frances Newman, Lesléa Newstead, Helaine Nichols, Anne Nicholson, Asenath Hatch Nicholson, Eliza Jane Poitevent Nicolson, Marjorie Hope Niedecker, Lorine Nieriker, Abigail May Alcott Niggli, Josefina Niles, Blair Rice Nin, Anaïs Nitsch, Helen Matthews Nixon, Agnes E. Norman, Marsha Norris, Kathleen Thompson Norton, Alice See Norton, Andre Norton, Andre Norton, Katherine LaForge See Reed, Myrtle Notley, Alice Nussbaum, Martha Craven Nye, Andrea Nye, Naomi Shihab Oates, Joyce Carol Obejas, Achy Oberholtzer, Sara Vickers O’Connor, Flannery O’Connor, Florence J. O’Donnell, Jessie Fremont O’Donnell, Lillian Oemler, Marie Conway xli
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Offord, Lenore Glen O’Hair, Madalyn Murray O’Hara, Mary See Sture-Vasa, Mary O’Keeffe, Katharine A. O’Neill, Egan See Linington, Elizabeth Older, Cora Baggerly Olds, Sharon Oliphant, B. J. See Tepper, Sheri S. Oliver, Mary Olsen, Tillie O’Neill, Rose Orde, A. J. See Tepper, Sheri S. Ortiz Cofer, Judith Orvis, Marianne Dwight Osbey, Brenda Marie Osborn, Sarah Osgood, Frances Sargent Ostenso, Martha Ostriker, Alicia Ottenberg, Miriam Ovington, Mary White Owen, Catherine See Nitsch, Helen Matthews Owen, Mary Alicia Owen, Ruth Bryan Owens, Claire Myers Owens-Adair, Bethenia Owens, Rochelle Ozick, Cynthia Page, Myra Paglia, Camille Paley, Grace Palmer, Phoebe Worrall Papashvily, Helen Waite Paretsky, Sara Parker, Charlotte Blair Parker, Dorothy Parrish, Mary Frances See Fisher, M. F. K. Parsons, Elsie Clews Parsons, Frances Dana Parsons, Louella Oettinger Parton, Sara Willis Pastan, Linda Patchett, Ann Paterson, Katherine Patton, Frances Gray Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Josephine Preston Peattie, Elia Wilkinson Peattie, Louise Redfield Peck, Annie Smith Peck, Ellen Pember, Phoebe Yates Penfeather, Anabel See Cooper, Susan Fenimore Percy, Florence See Allen, Elizabeth Akers xlii
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Perkins, Frances Perkins, Lucy Fitch Pesotta, Rose Peterkin, Julia Mood Peters, Sandra See Plath, Sylvia Petersham, Maud Fuller Petry, Ann Lane Phelps, Almira Lincoln Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart Phillips, Irna Phillips, Jayne Anne Piatt, Sarah Bryan Piercy, Marge Pike, Mary Green Pinckney, Josephine Pine, Cuyler See Peck, Ellen Plain, Belva Plath, Sylvia Polacco, Patricia Pollack, Rachel Pollard, Josephine Porter, Eleanor Hodgman Porter, Katherine Anne Porter, Rose Porter, Sarah Porter, Sylvia F. Post, Emily Powell, Dawn Pratt, Ella Farman Prentiss, Elizabeth Payson Preston, Harriet Waters Preston, Margaret Junkin Prince, Nancy Gardner Prose, Francine Prouty, Olive Higgins Pryor, Sara Rice Pugh, Eliza Phillips Putnam, Emily Smith Putnam, Mary Lowell Putnam, Ruth Putnam, Sallie A. Brock Raimond, C. E. See Robins, Elizabeth Rampling, Anne See Rice, Anne Ramsay, Martha Laurens Ramsay, Vienna G. Morrell Rand, Ayn Randall, Margaret Randall, Ruth Painter Rankin, Fannie W. Ranous, Dora Knowlton Rawlings, Marjorie Kinnan Read, Harriette Fanning Read, Martha Reed, Kit
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Reed, Myrtle Reese, Lizette Woodworth Remick, Martha Reno, Itti Kinney Repplier, Agnes Rice, Alice Hegan Rice, Anne Rich, Adrienne Rich, Barbara See Jackson, Laura Rich, Louise Dickinson Richards, Laura Howe Richards, Louisa Greene Richmond, Grace Ricker, Marilla M. Ridge, Lola Riding, Laura See Jackson, Laura Rinehart, Mary Roberts Ripley, Eliza M. Ritchie, Anna Mowatt Rittenhouse, Jessie B. Rivers, Alfrida See Bradley, Marion Zimmer Rivers, Pearl See Nicholson, Eliza Jane Poitevent Robb, J. D. See Roberts, Nora Roberts, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Jane Roberts, Maggie Roberts, Nora Robins, Elizabeth Robinson, Harriet Hanson Robinson, Martha Harrison Rodgers, Carolyn M. Rogers, Katherine M. Roman, Klara Goldzieher Rombauer, Irma von Starkloff Roosevelt, Eleanor Roquelaure, A. N. See Rice, Anne Ross, Helaine See Daniels, Dorothy Ross, Lillian Rossner, Judith Rourke, Constance Mayfield Routsong, Alma Royall, Anne Newport Royce, Sarah Bayliss Ruddy, Ella Giles Ruether, Rosemary Radford Rukeyser, Muriel Rule, Ann Rusch, Kristine Kathryn Rush, Caroline E. Rush, Rebecca Russ, Joanna Ryan, Rachel See Brown, Sandra Sachs, Marilyn St. Johns, Adela Rogers
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
St. Claire, Erin See Brown, Sandra Salisbury, Charlotte Y. Salmon, Lucy Maynard Salmonson, Jessica Amanda Sanchez, Sonia Sanders, Elizabeth Elkins Sandoz, Mari Sanford, Mollie Dorsey Sanger, Margaret Sangster, Margaret E. Santiago, Esmeralda Sargent, Pamela Sarton, May Satir, Virginia M. Savage, Elizabeth Sawyer, Ruth Scarberry, Alma Sioux Scarborough, Dorothy Scarborough, Elizabeth Ann Schaeffer, Susan Fromberg Schmitt, Gladys Schofield, Sandy See Rusch, Kristine Kathryn Schoolcraft, Mary Howard Schwartz, Lynne Sharon Scott, Anne Firor Scott, Evelyn Scott, Joan Wallach Scott, Julia See Owen, Mary Alicia Scott-Maxwell, Florida Scudder, Vida Dutton Seaman, Elizabeth Cochrane Seawell, Molly Elliot Secor, Lella Sedges, John See Buck, Pearl S. Sedgwick, Anne Douglas Sedgwick, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Susan Ridley Seeley, Mabel Seid, Ruth Seifert, Elizabeth Semple, Ellen Churchill Seredy, Kate Seton, Anya Settle, Mary Lee Sewall, Harriet Winslow Sewell, Elizabeth Sexton, Anne Shange, Ntozake Shannon, Dell See Linington, Elizabeth Shannon, Monica Sharon, Rose See Merril, Judith Sharp, Isabella Oliver Shaw, Anna Moore Shaw, Anna H. Sheehy, Gail xliii
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Sheldon, Ann See Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Sherwood, Mary Wilson Shindler, Mary Dana Showalter, Elaine Shreve, Anita Shulman, Alix Kates Sidlosky, Carolyn See Forché, Carolyn Sigourney, Lydia Huntley Silko, Leslie Marmon Simon, Kate Sinclair, Bertha Muzzy Sinclair, Jo See Seid, Ruth Singer, June K. Singleton, Anne See Benedict, Ruth Singmaster, Elsie Skinner, Constance Lindsay Skinner, Cornelia Otis Slade, Caroline Slesinger, Tess Slosson, Annie Trumbull Smedley, Agnes Smith, Amanda Smith, Anna Young Smith, Betty Smith, Eliza Snow Smith, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Eunice Smith, Hannah Whittal Smith, Lee Smith, Lillian Smith, Lula Carson See McCullers, Carson Smith, Margaret Bayard Smith, Rosamond See Oates, Joyce Carol Smith, Sarah Pogson Smith, Susy Snedeker, Caroline Dale Snyder, Zilpha Keatley Solwoska, Mara See French, Marilyn Somers, Suzanne See Daniels, Dorothy Song, Cathy Sontag, Susan Sorel, Julia See Drexler, Rosalyn Soule, Caroline White Southworth, E. D. E. N. Souza, E. See Scott, Evelyn Spacks, Patricia Meyer Speare, Elizabeth George Spencer, Anne Spencer, Cornelia Phillips Spencer, Elizabeth Spewak, Bella Cohen Speyer, Leonora von Stosch Spofford, Harriet Prescott Sprague, Rosemary Stabenow, Dana xliv
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Stack, Andy See Rule, Ann Stafford, Jean Stanton, Elizabeth Cady Steel, Danielle Stein, Gertrude Steinem, Gloria Stenhouse, Fanny Stephens, Ann Winterbotham Stephens, Margaret Dean See Aldrich, Bess Streeter Steptoe, Lydia See Barnes, Djuna Stern, Elizabeth G. Stewart, Elinore Pruitt Stewart, Maria W. Stockton, Annis Boudinot Stoddard, Elizabeth Barstow Stone, Ruth Story, Sydney A. See Pike, Mary Green Stowe, Harriet Beecher Stratton-Porter, Gene Strong, Anna Louise Stuart, Ruth McEnery Sture-Vasa, Mary Suckow, Ruth Sui Sin Far See Eaton, Edith Maud Susann, Jacqueline Swenson, May Swett, Sophie Swisshelm, Jane Grey Taber, Gladys Bagg Taggard, Genevieve Talbott, Marion Tan, Amy Tandy, Jennette Reid Tappan, Eva March Tarbell, Ida Taylor, Mildred Delois Taylor, Phoebe Atwood Taylor, Susie King Teasdale, Sara Tenney, Tabitha Tepper, Sheri S. Terhune, Mary Hawes Terry, Megan Thane, Elswyth Thanet, Octave See French, Alice Thaxter, Celia Laighton Thayer, Caroline Warren Thayer, Geraldine See Daniels, Dorothy Thomas, Dorothy Swain Thompson, Clara M. (b. c. 1830s) Thompson, Clara M. (1893-1958) Thompson, Dorothy Thorndyke, Helen Louise See Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Ticknor, Caroline
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Tiernan, Frances Fisher Tietjens, Eunice Tilton, Alice See Taylor, Phoebe Atwood Tincker, Mary Agnes Todd, Mabel Loomis Todd, Marion Marsh Toklas, Alice B. Tompkins, Jane P. Towne, Laura M. Townsend, Mary Ashley Treadwell, Sophie Trilling, Diana Troubetzkoy, Amélie Rives Truitt, Anne Truman, Margaret Truth, Sojourner Tuchman, Barbara Turell, Jane Turnbull, Agnes Sligh Turney, Catherine Tuthill, Louisa Huggins Tuve, Rosemond Ty-Casper, Linda Tyler, Anne Tyler, Martha W. Tyler, Mary Palmer Uchida, Yoshiko Uhnak, Dorothy Ulanov, Ann Belford Underwood, Sophie Kerr Untermeyer, Jean Starr Upton, Harriet Taylor Valentine, Jean Valentine, Jo See Armstrong, Charlotte Van Alstyne, Frances Crosby Vandegrift, Margaret See Janvier, Margaret Thompson Vanderbilt, Amy Van Duyn, Mona Van Vorst, Bessie McGinnis Van Vorst, Marie Vendler, Helen Hennessy Victor, Frances Fuller Victor, Metta Fuller Vining, Elizabeth Gray Viramontes, Helena María Voigt, Cynthia Voigt, Ellen Bryant Vorse, Mary Heaton Wakoski, Diane Wald, Lillian D. Waldman, Anne Waldrop, Rosmarie Walker, Alice
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Walker, Margaret Walker, Mary Spring Wallace, Michele Waller, Mary Ella Walter, Mildred Pitts Walton, Evangeline Walworth, Jeannette Hadermann Ward, Mary Jane Warfield, Catherine Ware Warner, Anna Bartlett Warner, Susan Bogert Warren, Lella Warren, Mercy Otis Wasserstein, Wendy Watanabe, Sylvia Watson, Sukey Vickery Watts, Mary Stanbery Weber, Sarah Appleton See Appleton-Weber, Sarah Webster, Jean Weeks, Helen C. See Campbell, Helen Stuart Welby, Amelia Coppuck Wells, Carolyn Wells, Emmeline Woodward Wells, John J. See Bradley, Marion Zimmer Wells-Barnett, Ida B. Welty, Eudora West, Dorothy West, Jessamyn West, Lillie West, Mae Wetherall, Elizabeth See Warner, Susan Bogert Wharton, Edith Wheatley, Phillis Wheaton, Campbell See Campbell, Helen Stuart Whipple, Maurine Whitcher, Frances Berry White, Anna White, Anne Terry White, Eliza Orne White, Elizabeth White, Ellen Gould White, Helen Constance White, Nelia Gardner White, Rhoda E. Whiting, Lillian Whitman, Narcissa Prentiss Whitman, Ruth Whitman, Sarah Helen Whitney, Adeline D. T. Whitney, Phyllis A. Wiggin, Kate Douglass Wiggins, Bernice Love Wiggins, Marianne Wilcox, Ella Wheeler Wilder, Laura Ingalls xlv
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS
Wilder, Louise Beebe Wilhelm, Kate Willard, Emma Willard, Frances Willard, Nancy Williams, Catharine Arnold Williams, Fannie Barrier Williams, Sherley Anne Willis, Connie Willis, Lydia Fish Willoughby, Florence Barrett Wilson, Harriet E. Adams Windle, Mary Jane Winnemucca, Sarah Winslow, Anna Green Winslow, Helen M. Winslow, Ola Elizabeth Winslow, Thyra Samter Winter, Ella Winwar, Frances Wolf, Naomi Wong, Jade Snow Wood, Ann See Douglas, Ann Wood, S. S. B. K. Woodhull, Victoria Woods, Caroline H.
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Woods, Katharine Pearson Woolsey, Sarah Chauncey Woolson, Constance Fenimore Wormeley, Katharine Prescott Wright, Frances Wright, Julia McNair Wright, Mabel Osgood Wright, Mary Clabaugh Wyatt, Edith Franklin Wylie, Elinor Hoyt Yamada, Mitsuye Yamamoto, Hisaye Yamanaka, Lois-Ann Yates, Elizabeth Yezierska, Anzia Yglesias, Helen Youmans, Eliza Ann Young, Ann Eliza Young, Ella Young, Marguerite Young, Rida Johnson Zaturenska, Marya Zolotow, Charlotte Zugsmith, Leane
ABBREVIATIONS A style of all or nothing (initials or complete title) has been employed in this new edition; partial abbreviations have been purged, to limit confusion. In cases where two well-known periodicals have the same initials, only one has the initials and the other is always spelled out in its entirety (i.e. NR is New Republic, and National Review is spelled out).
KR
Kirkus Reviews
LATBR
Los Angeles Times Book Review
LJ
Library Journal
APR
American Poetry Review
MTCW
Major Twentieth–Century Writers
CA
Contemporary Authors
NAW
Notable American Women
CAAS
Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series
NAW:MP
Notable American Women: The Modern Period
CANR
Contemporary Authors New Revision Series
NBAW
Notable Black American Women
CB
Current Biography
NR
New Republic
CBY
Current Biography Yearbook NYRB
New York Review of Books
NYT
New York Times
NYTM
New York Times Magazine
NYTBR
New York Times Book Review
CLAJ
College Literary Association Journal
CLC
Contemporary Literary Criticism
CLHUS
Cambridge Literary History of the United States
CLR
Children’s Literature Review
CN
Contemporary Novelists
PMLA
Publication of the Modern Language Association
CP
Contemporary Poets
PW
Publishers Weekly
CPW
Contemporary Popular Writers
SATA
Something About the Author
CWD
Contemporary Women Dramatists
SL
School Librarian
CWP
Contemporary Women Poets
TLS
[London] Times Literary Supplement
DAB
Dictionary of American Biography TCCW
Twentieth–Century Children’s Writers
WP
Washington Post
WPBW
Washington Post Book World
VV
Village Voice
DLB
Dictionary of Literary Biography
DLBY
Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook
DAI
Dissertation Abstracts International
FC
Feminist Companion
FW
Feminist Writers
WRB
Women’s Review of Books
GLB
Gay & Lesbian Biography
WWAW
Who’s Who of American Women xlvii
S SACHS, Marilyn Born 18 December 1927, New York, New York Daughter of Samuel and Anna Smith Stickle; married Morris Sachs, 1947; children: Anne, Paul Marilyn Sachs spent her childhood in harsh surroundings, in a poor neighborhood where the strong victimized the weak. After graduating from Hunter College (B.A. 1949), she took a job as a children’s librarian at the Brooklyn Public Library. While working, she attended Columbia University (M.S.L.S. 1953). Sachs and her husband, a sculptor, have two children. She lives in San Francisco. With her first books, Amy Moves In (1964), Laura’s Luck (1965), and Amy and Laura (1966), Sachs established herself as a favorite among preteens. Her characters’ conversations ring true, and the situations are humorous. In 1968 Sachs began to break from the traditional settings and themes of children’s literature with Veronica Ganz. Sachs once said, ‘‘Veronica was a composite of all the kids who tormented me while I was growing up in the Bronx,’’ yet the heroine is sympathetically portrayed. The daughter of a broken marriage, Veronica is one of the main characters in two other books, Peter and Veronica (1969) and The Truth About Mary Rose (1973). Sachs deftly portrays young girls in their struggles toward self-identity. Since Veronica Ganz, she has continued to probe the psychological traumas that can create or destroy a personality. The Bears’ House (1971) is a convincing story about an impoverished young girl whose father deserted the family and left them at the mercy of the welfare authorities. The Truth About Mary Rose describes the effects of Mary Rose’s death on her sister Veronica, her brother, and her young daughter. This story, unlike The Bears’ House, has an optimistic ending. The setting of A Pocket Full of Seeds (1973) is France in World War II. This short novel is a chilling picture of Nazi terrorism and the ramifications of Jewish refusal to believe Hitler’s power and tyranny could sweep through all the occupied lands. The story of one French family’s extermination is only slightly softened by the heroine’s survival.
cold and analytical. Although the literary quality of Sachs’s work may be controversial, her contributions in the field of children’s literature are not. Sachs leads young readers into a world of uncertainty and demands that they themselves consider questions of society’s responsibilities. Throughout her long career, which has spanned more than 35 years, Sachs has provided young adult readers with enjoyment and lessons, and though not all critics appreciate her skills she has won several awards. The aforementioned The Bears’ House (1971) won the Australian Children’s Book prize in 1977 as well as the George C. Stone Center’s Recognition of Merit award; The Truth About Mary Rose (1973) won the Silver Slate Pencil award in 1974; A Pocket Full of Seeds (1973) won the Jane Addams Children’s Book Honor award in 1974; Dorrie’s Book (1975) won both the Silver Slate Pencil and the Garden State Children’s Book award; Call Me Ruth (1982) was given an award by the Association of Jewish Libraries in 1983; Underdog (1985) won the Christopher award for 1986; Fran Ellen’s House (1987) was given the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association award in 1988 and Sach’s second Recognition of Merit award from the George C. Stone Center for Children’s Books; and The Big Book of Peace (edited with A. Durrell, 1990), won both the California Children’s Book award and the Jane Addams Children’s Book prize in 1991. Sachs is a longtime member of the ACLU, PEN, the Sierra Club, the Author’s Guild, and the Society of Children’s Bookwriters; she continues to review books for the San Francisco Chronicle.
OTHER WORKS: Marv (1970). Matt’s Mitt (1975). A December Tale (1976). A Secret Friend (1978). A Summer’s Lease (1979). Bus Ride (1980). Class Pictures (1980). Fleet Footed Florence (1981). Hello. . .Wrong Number (1981). Beach Towels (1982). Fourteen (1983). The Fat Girl (1984). Thunderbird (1985). Baby Sister (1986). Almost Fifteen (1987). Just Like a Friend (1989). At the Sound of the Beep (1990). Circles (1990). What My Sister Remembered (1992). Thirteen Going on Seven (1993). Ghosts in the Family (1995). Another Day (1997). Surprise Party (1998). Jo Jo and Winnie (1999).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1968, 1999). SATA (1972). WW in America (2000). Other references: PW (8 Jan. 1973).
Sachs continues to write good, realistic fiction for children. Her female characters are depicted as spirited young people squarely facing their emotional problems. Usually the heroine wins her battle over her environment. In The Bears’ House and A Pocket Full of Seeds, however, society’s impact is devastating. Critics have complained Sachs’s plots are too slick and that her aloofness from the characters sometimes makes the portrayals
—JILL P. MAY, UPDATED BY SYDONIE BENET
ST. CLAIRE, Erin See BROWN, Sandra
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ST. JOHNS
ST. JOHNS, Adela Rogers Born 20 May 1894, California; died 1988 Daughter of Earl and Harriet Greene Rogers; married William Ivan St. Johns, 1914; second marriage, circa 1930s The diversity of Adela Rogers St. Johns’ reporting may well have been anticipated by her unusually sophisticated childhood. She was the daughter of a renowned criminal lawyer and a displaced Southern Belle—a woman St. Johns has described as having been extremely unhappy and violently cruel. Her parents’ tumultuous relationship proved a daily trial, and their marriage, divorce, and remarriage frequently placed her with relatives or at boarding schools in various parts of California. She charts her father’s career and his tremendous influence on her in Final Verdict (1962). In 1913, when she was eighteen, he introduced her to William Randolph Hearst, and until 1918 she worked for the Hearst papers in San Francisco and Los Angeles. During these early years, St. Johns also began writing for Hollywood. In order to work at home when her children were young, she wrote and collaborated on several scripts. She became ‘‘Mother Confessor to the Stars’’ for Photoplay Magazine and later wrote biographies of movie stars for a Hearst series called ‘‘Love, Laughter, and Tears’’ (a title she would use for her memoirs of this period). St. Johns’ journalism began setting precedents in the 1920s when she became the country’s first woman sports writer. But it was in the 1930s, while an International News Service reporter, that she created her best stories. Among them is her Depression series on the plight of unemployed women. These articles are largely based on personal experiences. Despite the artificiality of the premise—St. Johns set out to look for a job with only a dime in her pocket—they dramatize the misery of these women and expose the uncharitableness of several charitable institutions. In 1934 St. Johns covered the volatile Hauptmann trial following the Lindbergh kidnapping. At the 1940 Democratic Convention that nominated Roosevelt for a third term, she scooped ‘‘The Voice from the Sewers’’ story, revealing the man largely responsible for creating a vocal illusion of pro-Roosevelt frenzy in the convention floor. She subsequently spent several years as a Washington correspondent. St. Johns’ fiction shares with her journalism a heavily emotive style (she was known as a ‘‘Sob Sister’’) and topical subject matter and background. She writes about Prohibition and World War II, and sometimes bases her plot on a publicized crime or incident. She can write engagingly, but the predominant concerns of her fiction can be traced to a few fixed themes. One of these themes, that of the ‘‘modern woman,’’ is treated with some depth in her autobiography, The Honeycomb (1969), but in her fiction it appears as a much less complex phenomenon. It is often merely a decorative element in stories that are largely examples of women’s escape fiction. Several of her novels are romances set in Hollywood or in ‘‘high society.’’ Women protagonists may, in fact, possess the
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characteristics of modern women—they may be important executives (Field of Honor, 1938) or women who freely engage in affairs (The Single Standard, 1928)—but as one critic put it, they are ultimately unconventional heroines too faithful to the conventions of their type. Characterizations are superficial and limited in depth and originality by the author’s moralizing. Nonetheless, St. Johns’ novels and more than 200 short stories appealed to a large readership. She published in all the leading fiction and women’s magazines of her time. This commercial success was in all likelihood the motivation for her 1956 book, How to Write a Story and Sell It. Unlike some of the characters in her fiction, the people she describes and the persona she reveals in her autobiographies are vivid, authentic, and moving. Her memoirs ramble sentimentally, but they are candid and provide lively insights into political and cultural history. St. Johns discusses her professional progress as well as such traumas as the death of a child, divorce and custody trials, and her alcoholism; her personal philosophy emerges as the distillation of family values, religious faith, and her self-consciousness as a modern woman. This consciousness, however, has little to do with any overt alliance with feminist issues. In her opinion, a ‘‘single standard’’ for men and women will remain unattainable so long as women are mothers. St. Johns approaches her ideal of modern woman through speculation on the moral integrity women should maintain in the flux of modern society. She sees this ideal most inspiringly realized in such admirable individuals as Eleanor Roosevelt and Anne Morrow Lindbergh. In recent years, St. Johns’s writing explored her deepening religious faith and her belief in the afterlife. First Step Up Toward Heaven (1959), is the account of the founder of Forest Lawn Cemetery; Tell No Man (1966) is a novel of a religious conversion, and No Goodbyes: My Search Into Life Beyond Death (1981, 1982), relates her communications with her deceased son. St. Johns was one of this century’s most famous women journalists. In 1970, she was awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Richard Nixon, her former newspaper boy in Whittier, California.
OTHER WORKS: A Free Soul (1924). The Skyrocket (1925). The Root of All Evil (1940). Never Again, and Other Stories (1949). Affirmative Prayer in Action (1955). Love, Laughter, and Tears: My Hollywood Story (1978).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Adela St. Johns. . .on 60 Minutes with Morley Safer (audio recording, 1976). Adela St. Johns Recounts Her Career and Dr. Robert Butler Talks About Longevity: On Over Easy with Hugh Downs (audio recording, 1979). Sum & Substance: P. Tillich and A. R. St. Johns (audiocassette, 1960, 1969, 1980, 1988). Working with Hearst, A Presentation and Discussion: An Oral History Interview (1991). Other references: Collier’s (24 Jan. 1924). Foremost Women in Communications (1970). Newsweek (27 June 1936). NYTBR (7
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
SALMON
June 1925, 28 Aug. 1927, 3 June 1928, 7 Aug. 1938, 12 June 1949, 10 April 1966). —ELINOR SCHULL
SALISBURY, Charlotte Y. Born 12 March 1914, Weston, Massachusetts Daughter of Benjamin L. and Mary Coolidge Hall Young; married Allstom Boyer, 1934; John A. Rand, 1940; Harrison Salisbury, 1964 Charlotte Y. Salisbury grew up in Weston, Massachusetts, and resided in Manhattan and Connecticut. Salisbury’s first major publication, Asian Diary (1968), is the result of an extensive trip in 1966, on which she accompanied her husband, Harrison Salisbury, a reporter for the New York Times, to Hong Kong, Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, India, Sikkim, Mongolia, Siberia, and Japan. The special quality of Asian Diary is its informality and vivid descriptions of everyday scenes. Although Salisbury had the opportunity to mingle with the ‘‘notables,’’ she preferred to associate mostly with the ‘‘nobodys.’’ She talked with generals, governors, princes and prime ministers, but the people in the cities and villages were the primary focus of her attention. Salisbury describes the magic colors of Cambodia, the melee of life in the Bangkok klongs, the grace and beauty of the Southeast Asian people, the charm and fairytale quality of Sikkim, and the surprisingly beautiful landscape of Siberia. Writing during the Vietnam war, Salisbury is acutely aware of the political threats to these Asian cultures. Not surprisingly, the book includes very harsh criticisms of foreign intrusions in general and of American involvement in particular. Salisbury asks, ‘‘What are we really doing there except trying to impose our thinking, our way of life, with our army, our bombs, our modern technology, on a small simple peasant country?’’ China Diary (1973) is also a descriptive travel book. It is the product of a six-week visit to Peking with her husband. As with her previous writings, China Diary is especially valuable for the perceptive observations and impressions of a casual visitor. In this sense it is a refreshing contrast to reports of experts that, though informative, are dull by comparison and lack the warmth which pervades these diaries. Of his wife, Harrison Salisbury noted that she ‘‘looks on the world with clear, unclouded eyes and records her response with a warm and frank heart. . . . Her feelings about people are solid and earthy. She senses what is real and what is diplomatic pretense. You can rely on her judgements.’’ In this book, Salisbury takes her readers on a journey through Peking, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Wuhan, Sian, and Changsha. Salisbury also describes the countryside, the farms, the factories, the schools, the hospitals, and the children’s facilities. It is a useful guide for the traveler, as well as a description of the life of Chinese peasants and high officials. A third book resulting from Salisbury’s travels with her husband is Russian Diary (1974). This time it was Moscow and
Leningrad they had the opportunity to visit. Again, Salisbury’s dominant concern is for the common people. She is interested in their daily living in an autocratic society. And again, she is not hesitant to be critical—this time of the U.S.S.R.’s oppressive policies. Salisbury writes that the government puts guns ahead of decency, and conformity ahead of creativity. In one sense, Salisbury’s books are travelogues; but they also speak out against all the indignities to the human spirit. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Atlantic (Sept. 1974). Christian Century (31 July 1974). LJ (1 June 1968, 15 March 1973, 1 June 1974). Nation (6 May 1968). NYTBR (18 Feb. 1968, 22 April 1973). —PATRICIA LANGHALS NEILS
SALMON, Lucy Maynard Born 27 July 1853, Fulton, New York; died 14 February 1927, Poughkeepsie, New York Daughter of George and Maria Maynard Salmon Lucy Maynard Salmon’s father was a staunch Presbyterian and a Republican with abolitionist sentiments. Her mother was head of the Fulton Female Seminary from 1836 until her marriage to George Salmon. With this strong heritage of female education, it is not surprising that Salmon received an excellent education for a woman of her day and age. She attended grammar school in Oswego, New York, and the coeducational Falley Seminar, formerly the Fulton Female Seminary. Salmon was one of only 50 women at the University of Michigan. Under the tutorship of Charles Kendall Adams, she majored in history and graduated with a B.A. degree in 1876. She received her M.A. degree in 1883, after several years as assistant principal and principal of a high school in MacGregor, Iowa. While teaching at the Indiana State Normal School, Salmon published her first significant historical work, Education in Michigan during the Territorial Period (1885). After further graduate study in American history at Bryn Mawr College, Salmon accepted a position as the first professor of history at Vassar College in 1887. Except for a time spent studying in Europe (1898-1900), she remained at Vassar the rest of her professional career. Salmon became a recognized leader within the Vassar College community. She believed the student should be the principal agent in her own education (Salmon taught her history courses in a seminar format, with emphasis placed on student research) and that the heart of any college is its library. She also anticipated future trends in historical research and methodology when she encouraged the development of a collection of periodical literature at the Vassar college library. Her personal contribution to the periodical collection was the guide The Justice Collection of Material Relating to the Periodical Press in the Vassar College Library (1925).
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SALMONSON
Salmon was a charter member of the American Historical Association. From 1896 to 1899, she served as a member of the association’s ‘‘Committee of Seven,’’ whose report, The Study of History in Schools (1915), formed the guide for teaching history in secondary schools for generations. In addition to her professional activities, Salmon was an active supporter of woman suffrage and an advocate of world peace. As a scholar, Salmon’s work followed no developmental pattern until her later years. Her most important early work is the volume History of the Appointing Power of the President (1886), which investigates the creation of the appointing power of the president by the Constitutional Convention, its precedents in English law, and the experience of the states under the Articles of Confederation. While this work is dated, and while Salmon’s hopes for a future when presidents would again make appointments based on merit, as they had during the Federalist era, were certainly not borne out by history, it is still a significant historical work for anyone interested in presidential use and abuse of power. Domestic Service (1897) and Progress in the Household (1906) document Salmon’s increasing interest in what are considered today to be nontraditional subjects and methods of writing history. Domestic Service is based on a survey conducted in 1889 and 1890. It presents an analysis of household employment within a historical perspective, beginning with a discussion of domestic service in colonial America. Salmon suggests there should be specialization in the work of domestic servants—paralleling the division of labor in other fields—and that servants be compensated fairly for their work, through higher wages and profit-sharing plans. Progress in the Household is, in essence, a supplement to Domestic Service, as the essays outline ‘‘recent progress in the study of domestic service.’’ These books are dated, and the institutions and problems described by Salmon are for the most part nonexistent today. Still, they present the modern reader with a picture of domestic life and service in the years before the technological revolution of the 20th century and express the issues of concern to American women at the time. Salmon’s departure from the then-current traditional school of history, which emphasized study of the political institutions of America, led to the writing of her most important historical works, The Newspaper and the Historian and The Newspaper and Authority, both published in 1923. The former discusses the advantages and limitations of newspapers and other periodicals as sources in the writing of history. Salmon points out how the periodical press reveals the personality of its time or environment. The companion volume, The Newspaper and Authority, is international in scope and investigates the press with reference to its external government controls. Just three months prior to her death, Salmon completed Why Is History Rewritten? (1929). ‘‘History must be continually rewritten because there is always a new history. To the end of time, as far as the human mind can see, history will need to be rewritten and in that very fact the historian finds one of its greatest interests.’’ Salmon was a pioneer in liberating the study of history
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from the narrow confines of a political perspective and introducing historians to a new range of sources for historical study. OTHER WORKS: History in the German Gymnasia (1898). Some Principles in the Teaching of History (1908). Patronage in the Public Schools (1908). History in the Back Yard (1913). The Dutch West India Company on the Hudson (1915). ‘‘Is This Vassar College?’’ (1915). Main Street (1915). What Is Modern History? (1917). Historical Material (1933). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brown, L. F., Apostle of Democracy: The Life of Lucy Maynard Salmon (1943, reprinted 1967). Reference works: DAB. NAW (1971). —PAULA A. TRECKEL
SALMONSON, Jessica Amanda Born Amos Salmonson, 6 January 1950, Seattle, Washington Daughter of Veronica (Walker) Salerno Jessica Amanda Salmonson grew up in an itinerant life because her mother, a sword swallower, and stepfather, a fire-eater, worked in carnivals. Abandoned at age seven, Salmonson saw neither for years while growing up in an abusive foster system with an older sister. Running away at the age of twelve, Salmonson lived in ‘‘hippy group-houses’’ until rediscovering her missing father and her stepmother, Lek (also known as Lumchuan), a Thai Buddhist nun who was raised in a temple, with whom she studied Buddhism for several years. Salmonson’s short story ‘‘Lincoy’s Journey’’ is based on the event that led to Lek’s placement in the temple where she was raised, and cites her stepmother as ‘‘the only decent adult in my childhood, otherwise I wouldn’t have believed decent adults existed.’’ Salmonson started submitting stories to pulp magazines at the age of ten but didn’t get published until age twenty-two in small presses. One of her first works was Tragedy of the Moisty Morning (1978), a short story published in chapbook form. Amazons! (1979), her first editorial credit in the science fiction and fantasy world, won a World Fantasy award for Best Collection/Anthology of that year. Her first novel, Tomoe Gozen (1981), began a fantasy series set in a Japanese milieu and allowed Salmonson to quit a ‘‘crappy secretarial job.’’ She hasn’t looked back since. Novels such as The Golden Naginata (1982), second in the Tomoe Gozen series, and The Swordswoman (1982) followed, along with several more anthologies: Amazons II (1982), Heroic Visions (1983), and Tales by Moonlight (1983). Hag’s Tapestry (1984), a collection of short stories, was published in chapbook form in England, and two more novels, Thousand Shrine Warrior (1984), third in the Tomoe Gozen series, and Ou Lu Khen and the
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Beautiful Madwoman (1985), would follow in the 1980s. Most of Salmonson’s work in that period encompassed anthologies. The Haunted Wherry, and Other Rare Ghost Stories (1985) appeared from Miskatonic University Press, named for H. P. Lovecraft’s fictional school. Other anthologies included Heroic Visions II (1986), The Supernatural Tales of Fitz-James O’Brien (1988), Tales by Moonlight II (1989), and What Did Miss Darrington See: An Anthology of Feminist Supernatural Fiction (1989), which won both the Lambda Literary award and the Readercon Small Press award. During that time, Salmonson also released two short story collections, A Silver Thread of Madness(1989) and John Collier and Fredric Brown Went Quarrelling Through My Head: Stories (1989).
1975-1991: A Bibliography of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Fiction Books and Nonfiction Monographs (1992).
In the 1990s Salmonson’s work focused mostly on short story collections and anthologies, although one novel, Anthony Shriek, His Doleful Adventures; or, Lovers of Another Realm (1992), appeared, and Tomoe Gozen was republished as The Disfavored Hero (1999). Eleven short story collections appeared under Salmonson’s pen in a wide variety of topics, ranging from ghosts—Harmless Ghosts (1990), The Mysterious Doom and Other Ghostly Tales of the Pacific Northwest (1992), and The Deep Museum: Ghost Stories of a Melancholic (1999)—to fairy tales,—Wisewomen and Boggy-Boos: A Dictionary Of Lesbian Fairy Lore (1992, with Jules Remedios Faye)—from myths and legends—Mystic Women: Their Ancient Tales and Legends Recounted by a Woman Inmate of the Calcutta Insane Asylum (1991), Phantom Waters: Northwest Legends of Rivers, Lakes and Shores (1995), Mister Monkey and Other Sumerian Fables (1995), and The Eleventh Jaguarundi and Other Mysterious Persons (1995)—to new creations—Twenty-One Novels (1995). She also edited numerous books, including The Encyclopedia of Amazons: Women Warriors from Antiquity to the Modern Era (1991), Master of Fallen Years: The Complete Supernatural Tales of Vincent O’Sullivan (1995), and The Phantom Coach: An Antiquary’s Ghost Stories (1999).
Born in the South, Sonia Sanchez moved north at the age of nine with her family to the Harlem community of New York City. She graduated from Hunter College (B.A., 1955) and did postgraduate work at New York University, where she studied with poet Louise Bogan.
One of the reigning experts on feminist and 19th-century fantasy literature, as well as a respected fantasist in her own right, Salmonson’s short fiction has appeared in a variety of publications, such as Deathrealm, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Pirate Writings, Science Fiction Age, Shadows, Weirdbook, and Weird Tales, as well as in anthologies like Jane Yolen’s Xanadu 2 (1994) and Poppy Z. Brite’s Love in Vein (1994), among many others. After getting burned out on paperback originals, Salmonson has been focusing her current and future work on editing mostly limited edition hardcovers and selling antiquarian books through her Violet Books bookstore in her hometown of Seattle, where she lives with artist friend Rhonda Jean Boothe. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Barr, M. S., Lost in Space: Probing Feminist Science Fiction and Beyond (1993). CA. Mallett, D. F., and R. Reginald, Reginald’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards: A Comprehensive Guide to the Awards and Their Winners (1991, 1993). Reginald, R., Science Fiction & Fantasy Literature,
—DARYL F. MALLETT
SANCHEZ, Sonia Born Wilsonia Benita Driver, 9 September 1934, Birmingham, Alabama Daughter of Wilson L. and Lena Jones Driver; married Etheridge Knight; children: Anita, Morani, Mungu
Sanchez worked in the civil rights movement and became further radicalized as a result of hearing Malcolm X. Becoming involved with the burgeoning black arts movement in Harlem during the 1960s and early 1970s as a poet and dramatist, Sanchez became one of the most forceful and best known of the cultural nationalist African American writers of that period. In 1966, she began teaching at San Francisco State College where she was a founder of the nation’s first black studies program. Sanchez has since taught at a number of colleges and universities and has been a faculty member at Temple University since 1977. Following in the tradition of such writers as Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, and Margaret Walker, Sanchez is widely credited as one of the writers most important in the establishment of ‘‘Black English’’ as legitimate literary diction. In addition to her use of a distinctly African-American syntax and phonetic spelling, she often, particularly in her early work, broke the lines of her poems unusually and used unorthodox spellings that were not phonetic—leaving out certain vowels, for example—forcing the reader to look more carefully at the words themselves and to consider them as a distinctive African-American cultural product. Sanchez also constructs her poetry and her short fiction so as to emphasize the oral performative aspect she sees both as an important part of the African-American tradition and as more accessible to popular audiences. Some of Sanchez’s best work engages with African-American music, as in ‘‘a / coltrane / poem’’ from We a BadddDDD People (1970), in which Sanchez literally attempts to re-create the structure and sound of John Coltrane’s music while connecting it to the oppression of black people and the fight against that oppression. Sanchez’s poems and short stories both celebrate the survival and strengths of the black community in the U.S. and chronicle its losses. Since the beginning of her career, she has gradually adopted a stance rooted in her experiences as an African-American woman that addresses itself beyond a specifically black context to concern with all oppressed peoples. The powerful and moving ‘‘MIA’s’’ in homegirls and handgrenades (1984), for example, links the disappearance of black children from the
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streets of Atlanta in the early 1980s to the death squad disappearances in El Salvador and the death of Stephen Biko in South Africa. The volume won the American Book Award for poetry in 1985. Her concern with social justice has also led Sanchez to write a number of books for children, who she sees as having been particularly poorly served by literature. These include a volume of inspirational poems, It’s a New Day: Poems for Young Brothas and Sistuhs (1971); The Adventures of Fat Head, Small Head, and Square Head (1973); and a collection of stories, A Sound Investment (1980), which invites children to draw moral meaning from the tales. Since the beginning of her career, Sanchez has been a voice for the concerns of women even during the black arts era, when such concerns were generally muted. In this respect, she consciously sets herself in the tradition of female blues, jazz, and rhythm and blues singers who are tough, strong, loving, and often betrayed by love in a harsh world. Several poems in Wee a BadddDDD People reflect the suffering in her marriage to poet Etheridge Knight, who had a severe drug problem. Love Poems (1973) demonstrates the poet’s lyricism, but here too the poems of man—woman relationships reflect their difficulty as well as their passion. Sanchez’s work celebrates the power, pride, and solidarity of black women; she also portrays the personal betrayals of love—which often have a larger social implication—as in the poem ‘‘Blues’’ and the short story ‘‘After Saturday Night Comes Sunday.’’ A Blues Book for Blue Black Magical Women (1974), written while Sanchez was a member of the Nation of Islam (1972-75), praises black women, ‘‘Queens of the Universe,’’ and urges them to turn away from false values to ‘‘embrace Blackness as a religion / husband.’’ Her concern for women’s lives and their freedom reverberates through such later volumes as I’ve Been A Woman (1978) and Under a Soprano Sky (1987). Sanchez has also written a number of significant plays, including The Bronx is Next (1968, produced 1970), where she speaks ‘‘symbolically’’ about the need for blacks to destroy urban centers, ‘‘to move out of that which is killing them,’’ and the autobiographical Sister Son/ji (1969). Sanchez remains one of the most powerful writers, and readers, of poetry, drama, and prose in the U.S. Her voice speaks forcefully, and at times bittersweetly, about racism, sexism, oppression, and the need for revolutionary change. She is also one of the most poignant chroniclers of the social and emotional experience of a woman in the late 20th century in the United States. In 1995 Sanchez was featured reading her poem ‘‘I Have Come into the City’’ on Sweet Honey in the Rock’s CD, Sacred Ground. Her poetry has been featured in many other mediums also, such as in the movie lovejones, in various black magazines, or on rapper D-Knowledge’s CD. Sanchez’s poetry includes a mixture of styles, languages, and dialects, specifically the Black English she has brought to the surface of the literary world. Her 13th book, Wounded in the House of a Friend, explores the plights of the African-American people, from the terrain of Africa to the poverty-stricken urban areas of America. It is a journey into racism, anger, and many
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issues that have faced blacks throughout history. Does Your House Have Lions (1997) mixes the many speech patterns, tones, and styles Sanchez is known for to create and speak of her characters. It recounts her brother’s death from AIDS and her family’s reaction to the tragedy. Her 1998 collection, Like the Singing Coming Off the Drums: Love Poems, expresses the passions and fire of a new generation. She has dedicated these works to such persons as Ella Fitzgerald and Tupac Shakur. Her recent book, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems (1999) is a collection from over 30 years of her work. It comes soon after her 1998 nominations for both the NAACP Image and National Book Critics Circle awards. It includes selections from her previous books as well as some unpublished works. Ann K. Van Buren of Library Journal said of the collection, ‘‘This retrospective of 30 years of work leaves one in awe of the stretches of language Sanchez has helped to legitimize throughout her career.’’ Donna Seaman of Booklist said, ‘‘Her ringing voice gives voice to the emotions of many.’’ Yet praise of Sanchez from the literary and black communities is sparse. However, another great black writer, Maya Angelou, has said ‘‘The world is a better place because of Sonia Sanchez: more livable, more laughable, more manageable.’’ She goes on to say, ‘‘I wish millions of people knew that some of the joy in their lives comes from the fact that Sonia Sanchez is writing poetry. I wish they knew it so they could write her, and thank her, and love her up as I do.’’ OTHER WORKS: Home Coming (1969). New Plays from the Black Theatre (edited by E. Bullins, 1969). Ima Talken bout the Nation of Islam (1972). Uh Hub: But How Do It Free Us? (1975). Malcolm Man Don’t Live Here Anymore (1979). I’m Black When I’m Singing, I’m Blue When I Ain’t (1982). Culture in Crisis: Two Speeches by Sonia Sanchez (1983). Generations: Selected Poetry, 1969-1985 (1986). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Baker, H. A., Jr., ‘‘Our Lady: Sonia Sanchez and the Writing of a Black Renaissance,’’ in Black Feminist Criticism and Critical Theory (1988). Curb, R., ‘‘Pre-Feminism in the Black Revolutionary Drama of Sonia Sanchez,’’ in The Many Forms of Drama (1985). Madhubuti, H., ‘‘Sonia Sanchez: The Bringer of Memories,’’ in Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation (1984). Melhem, D. M., Heroism in the New Black Poetry: Introductions and Interviews (1990). Black Women Writers at Work (1983).Voices From the Gaps: Women Writers of Color (1998). Reference works: CANR (1988). CLC (1976). DLB (1985). FC (1990). MTCW (1991). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). SATA (1981). Other references: Beacon Press Online (1999). MELUS (Fall 1985, Spring 1988).Parnassus: Poetry in Review (Spring-Winter 1985). —JAMES SMETHURST, UPDATED BY DEVRA M. SLADICS
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SANDERS, Elizabeth Elkins
SANDOZ, Mari
Born 12 August 1762, Salem, Massachusetts; died 19 February 1851, Salem, Massachusetts Daughter of Thomas and Elizabeth White Elkins; married Thomas Sanders, 1782, children: four daughters and two sons
Born Marie Susette Sandoz in 1896, Sheridan County, Nebraska; died 10 March 1966, New York, New York Also wrote under: Marie S. Macumber Daughter of Jules A. and Mary Fehr Sandoz
Elizabeth Elkins Sanders came from a family of well-to-do colonial merchants, and, at the age of twenty, she married Thomas Sanders, who was to become one of Salem’s most successful businessmen. They had four daughters and two sons. Sanders attended the First Unitarian Church of Salem.
Mari Sandoz grew up in northwest Nebraska, in a frontier area at the edge of Native American country. Despite little formal education and much opposition from her father to a literary career, Sandoz’s life was dedicated to writing. In both fiction and nonfiction she depicted the difficulties of frontier life and its violence, the harsh beauty of the country, the changes that have come to the area as Native Americans have been pushed aside and whites have imposed their way of life, the effects of political and social corruption upon the lives of the people, and the relations between ranchers, farmers, and Native Americans.
Sanders was sixty-six when she wrote her first pamphlet, a plea for compassion for Native Americans entitled Conversations, Principally on the Aborigines of North America (1828). This unsigned essay is written in the form of a dialogue between a mother and her young daughter. Its publication coincided with the presidential nomination of Andrew Jackson, who sanctioned the confiscation of Native American lands. Sanders writes of the atrocities committed by federal troops against such tribes as the Creeks of Georgia, and suggests true Christians would not condone these acts. The pamphlet also includes a detailed survey of Native American culture, from Mexico to the Great Lakes. Sanders emphasizes the Native Americans’ skill in medicine and agriculture. Her information was drawn from her extensive reading. The following year she wrote a second pamphlet on Native American rights, The First Settlers of New England (1829). During the next 15 years, many of Sanders’s articles, book reviews, and letters appeared in New England newspapers. She did not resume writing pamphlets, however, until she was eightytwo, with Tract on Missions (1844). This was followed by Second Part of a Tract on Missions (1845) and Remarks on the ‘‘Tour Around Hawaii,’’ by the, Missionaries, Messrs. Ellis, Thurston, and Goodrich (1848). These essays convey her distrust of most foreign missionaries. In the last, Sanders cites Melville’s statement that they converted native peoples, not into Christians, but ‘‘into beasts of burden.’’ Sanders fears Europeans will destroy the natives’ way of life in the Pacific islands, as they had done in the Caribbean during the 16th century. It is her belief that future generations will not feel that too little had been done for foreigners, but instead will regret ‘‘the golden opportunity has been lost. . .to perpetuate and improve our institutions, which it is feared are rapidly on the decline.’’ Sanders’s writing style is characterized by its directness. She refers to Andrew Jackson as ‘‘a second Robespierre’’ and plainly states her distaste for what she calls ‘‘the gloomy doctrines’’ and ‘‘appalling formulas’’ of Calvinism. Undaunted by the refusal of her contemporaries to accept her values, this woman of advanced years persisted in voicing her concern for oppressed peoples. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Critical Dictionary of English Literature (1872). Dictionary of American Authors (1905). NAW. —JANE GILES
Sandoz’s first published book was Old Jules (1935), a biography of her father; three years of research and two years of writing went into it. The book’s subject is a vigorous frontiersman, opinionated and cruel as well as creative and foresighted; Sandoz’s mixture of fear and admiration for him are ably conveyed. In his story Sandoz epitomized the recent history of her part of the West. Five other works later joined Old Jules as parts of the Great Plains series. Crazy Horse (1942) is a biography of the Oglala chief, stories of whom Sandoz had heard in her girlhood from old traders, frontiersmen, and Native Americans; Cheyenne Autumn (1953) tells of an epic flight of the northern Cheyenne Native Americans. The Buffalo Hunters (1954), The Cattlemen (1958), and The Beaver Men (1964) study aspects of the economic history of the West, evoking people, landscape, and events and showing their interactions through several hundred years. Two projected volumes were never written; one, the introduction to the series, would have dealt with stone-age people, the other with the impact of oil upon the history of the region. Sandoz considered this series the contribution upon which her reputation would rest. As history the books are flawed by lack of documentation and by fuzzy handling of dates and chronology; as evocative recreations of their time and place they are unsurpassed. Sandoz’s fiction uses similar materials. Of her novels, only Capital City (1939) is set in the present. One of many antifascist novels of the period, it analyzes a thinly disguised Nebraska and is flawed by its lack of a clear central character and focus. The four novels set in the past are firmly rooted in historical fact. Slogum House (1937), the story of a woman who ruthlessly uses her family to build an empire, vividly depicts frontier violence. Murders, prostitution, and the castration of a man she perceives as an enemy are incidents in the growth of the central character’s power. The Tom-Walker (1947) follows three generations of war veterans (of the Civil War, World War I, and World War II) from their return home, wounded in body and spirit, through their disillusioning attempts to adjust to a corrupt society. Miss Morissa (1955), the story of a young woman doctor who makes a life for herself on the frontier, is dedicated to three actual women doctors of the period. Son of the Gamblin’ Man (1960) is a
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fictionalized biography of painter Robert Henri, son of a frontier gambler and community builder. Through her imaginative recreation of the complicated relationship between father and son, Sandoz mirrored the development of a section of Nebraska. In her later years, Sandoz received many honors, both as novelist and as historian. Her brutally realistic depictions of frontier violence and lawlessness and her penetrating analyses of Western history give her a secure place among those who have tried to understand that region both as it actually was and as a mythic force in the American consciousness. OTHER WORKS: Winter Thunder (1954). The Horsecatcher (1957). Hostiles and Friendlies: Selected Short Writings (1959). Love Song to the Plains (1961). These Were the Sioux (1961). The Far Looker (1962). The Story Catcher (1963). Old Jules Country: A Selection from Old Jules and Thirty Years of Writing Since the Book Was Published (1965). The Old Jules Home Region (1965). The Battle of the Little Bighorn (1966). Sandhill Sundays, and Other Recollections (1966). The Christmas of the Phonograph Records: A Recollection (1966, reprinted 1970). A collection of Sandoz’s work is housed at Love Library of the University of Nebraska, in Lincoln. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Pifer, C .S., Making of an Author (1972). Stauffer, H.W., Story Catcher of the Plains (1982). Stauffer, H. W. and S. J. Rosowski, eds., Women and Western American Literature (1982). Stauffer, H. W., ed., Letter of Mari Sandoz (1992). Villager, L. R., Mari Sandoz: A Study in Post-Colonial Discourse (1994). Wilkinson, J. L., Scribe of the Great Plains: Mari Sandoz (1998). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia (1987). Other references: American West (Spring 1965). Great Plains Quarterly (Winter 1992). PS (1966, 1967, 1968, 1971). —MARY JEAN DEMARR
mine in Colorado, but they spent most of the remainder of their lives in Denver, raising a son and a daughter. Sanford records these experiences in the journal she kept from March 1857 (just before her departure from Indianapolis) to January 1865 (just after the birth of her second child). In 1895 Sanford recopied her journal (unfortunately destroying the original) for her grandson to emulate and to profit by. Selections from the journal were published in The Echo in 1925 and in Colorado Magazine in 1930. Mollie: The Journal of Mollie Dorsey Sanford in Nebraska and Colorado Territories, 1857-1866 was published in 1959 (and reprinted in 1975). The journal’s tone is resilient, paralleling the extremes of humor, pathos, and insight which the young and sensitive woman reached during those years. Sanford’s themes are both universal and specific: not only morality and religion but male and female relationships in a shifting, mobile society; the importance of home and family to a woman raised on the domestic novel; and the problems a talented woman faces when forced to limit her interests. Perhaps because of the shock pioneer life delivered to her eastern sensibilities, Sanford’s journal combines two literary extremes: the romantic and the realistic. Before her marriage, a single entry might range from a selection of sentimentalized poetry Sanford sometimes wrote to a detailed account of killing a rattlesnake and triumphantly bringing home the trophy. Sanford’s marriage and the trip to Denver caused her to lose the security of her home and family and to face the chaos and rigors of mining life: the sentimental becomes religious, her ‘‘journey’’ turns into a ‘‘pilgrimage,’’ and the taxing details of existence take over the page. As a journal writer, Sanford fits into a long tradition of young women who turn to a blank page for the friend life fails to provide, but Sanford also sought a world in which to play the roles of heroine and writer, in which she found release and inspiration. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Arizona and the West 49 (1960). Nebraska History 41 (1960). NYHTB (6 March 1960). SR (7 Dec. 1959). —LINDA S. COLEMAN
SANFORD, Mollie Dorsey Born 17 December 1838, Rising Sun, Indiana; died 6 February 1915, Denver, Colorado Daughter of William Dorsey; married Byron N. Sanford, 1860; children: a son and a daughter At the age of eighteen, Mollie Dorsey Sanford set out from Indiana with her family on what she considered a journey to the ‘‘far west,’’ the Nebraska Territory. After two weeks aboard a waterwheel ship, she arrived in Nebraska City. To earn money for her family, she spent the next three years moving between the family homestead and Nebraska City, working at various odd jobs. In 1860 she married a New York blacksmith; soon after, Sanford was again uprooted. She and Sanford, having caught Pike’s Peak fever, spent the next six years moving from mine to
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SANGER, Margaret Born 14 September 1879, Corning, New York; died 6 September 1966, Tucson, Arizona Daughter of Michael and Anne Purcell Higgins; married William Sanger, 1902; J. N. H. Slee, 1922 Margaret Sanger’s mother died, leaving 11 children, when Sanger was seventeen. Profoundly affected by her mother’s death, Sanger would later refer to women like her as ‘‘breeders,’’ and would dedicate Women and the New Race (1920) to her. Although her life was undoubtedly molded in great degree by her iconoclastic and atheistic father, Sanger felt simultaneous fear, anger, and love
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for him, while expressing love and compassion for her mother. She would later assert her mother was a victim of her father’s lust; and her writings suggest that she, like others born in the 19th century, believed women are threatened by men’s sinister dual nature that at times can divide itself precipitously into benevolent husband and father and sexual aggressor. Sanger trained as a nurse, married William Sanger, an architect, had three children, and lived in suburban Hastings-onHudson for ten years. After the destruction of their new home (an event which Sanger was later to see as symbolic), the Sangers moved to New York City and became involved in socialist and union activities. This activity and her earlier experiences led to Sanger’s feminist writings. The Sangers’ 1913 trip to Europe spelled the end of their 11-year marriage. After visiting Glasgow to research an article on the benefits of municipal ownership for women and children, Sanger went to France where she discovered that, in contrast to Scotland and America, contraceptive information was available and poverty was limited. After some time of ‘‘inactive, incoherent brooding,’’ Sanger returned to America, with her three children but without her husband. On her return Sanger took up the cause of woman suffrage, linking it loosely to birth control. In 1914 she founded the journal The Woman Rebel, written by women and for women. Contributors included Voltairine De Cleyre and Emma Goldman. The first issue was an unfocused burst of rage, with a rather sharp statement of feminist community and less concern for birth control than for emancipation. Although The Woman Rebel never included much birth control information, sending any through the mail was illegal, so Sanger was arrested and forced to flee to Canada and Europe until the charges were dropped. In 1916 Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in America in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. She also established the Birth Control Review, a publication greatly superior to The Woman Rebel. Sanger’s feminist rage had become sharply focused on the problem of birth control. Birth Control Review continued until 1928. Sanger’s greatest successes came with her association with America’s health professionals in achieving the legalization and availability of birth control. With physicians, social workers, and technicians to staff it, she opened the Clinical Research Bureau. When the police raided the clinic in 1929 and seized the confidential physicians’ records, the medical profession defended its right to dispense birth control information. In 1936 a U.S. District Court upheld this right, which had been denied previously by the Comstock Law. In 1932 Sanger had rallied individuals across the nation to join the National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control, and in 1937—one year after the court decision— the American Medical Association publicly endorsed birth control, bringing American physicians and their prestige to the side of Sanger’s cause. The National Birth Control League and Sanger’s clinics were combined in 1942 to form the Planned Parenthood Association of America. Sanger’s many publications consistently express her view that women are victims and need to ‘‘free themselves from
SANGER
involuntary motherhood.’’ Concerned mainly for working-class women, Sanger believed they were victimized by their husbands, their doctors, and their priests. They suffered from the sexual appetites and insensitivity of the first, from the passivity of the second, and from the doctrine of the third. Sanger writes in Woman and the New Race: ‘‘Women are determined to decide for themselves whether they shall become mothers, under what conditions and when. This is the fundamental revolt. . . . It is for woman the key to the temple of liberty.’’ In Happiness in Marriage (1926), Sanger claims men are the sexual aggressors, while women are sexually passive. Female sexuality, she maintains, has not been expressed; if it were, it could become a creative force; and birth control is the means by which it could be released. Influenced by Havelock Ellis, Sanger asserts that only through birth control could the whole female nature be dealt with and the importance of female sexuality be recognized. Even after her marriage to Slee, a wealthy industrialist, Sanger continued to address the problems of working-class women. Motherhood in Bondage (1928) is based on 5,000 of the 250,000 letters she claimed to have received in response to The New Woman. The letters are arranged in chapters entitled ‘‘Girl Mothers,’’ ‘‘The Problem of Poverty,’’ ‘‘The Trap of Maternity,’’ ‘‘The Struggle of the Unfit,’’ and ‘‘The Sins of the Fathers.’’ To Sanger, the birth control movement meant not only prevention of unwanted babies and abortions but, more importantly, the rational control of the individual woman’s body and spirit, synthesized into female sexuality, as well as the subsequent lessening of war and of suffering. Her numerous publications, starting from the premise that women had always been the victims of men and society, are devoted to changing that role. OTHER WORKS: What Every Girl Should Know (1913). Family Limitation (1914). What Every Mother Should Know (1914). Dutch Methods of Birth Control (1915). Appeals from American Mothers (1921). Sayings of Others on Birth Control (1921). The Pivot of Civilization (1922). Problems of Overpopulation (1926). Religious and Ethical Aspects of Birth Control (1926). What Every Boy and Girl Should Know (1927). My Fight for Birth Control (1931). Woman of the Future (1934). Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography (1938). ‘‘From Which I Spring’’ in Women Without Superstition. . . : The Collected Writings of Women Freethinkers of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1997). ‘‘The Goal’’ in Motherland: Writings by Irish American Women About Mothers and Daughters (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Chesler, E., ‘‘Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement’’ in Against the Tide: Women Reformers in American Society (1997). Chesler, E., New Woman, New World: The Life of Margaret Sanger (dissertation, 1990). Chesler, E., Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America (1993). Dash, J., A Life of One’s Own: Three Gifted Women and the Men They Married (1973). Douglas, E. T.,
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Margaret Sanger: Pioneer of the Future (1970). Edwards, N. A., ‘‘Margaret Sanger: The Transitional Years, 1912-1916’’ (thesis, 1985). Forster, M., ‘‘Birth Control: Margaret Sanger 1876-1966’’ in Significant Sisters: The Grassroots of Active Feminism 18391939 (1984). Grant, G., Killer Angel: A Biography of Planned Parenthood’s Founder Margaret Sanger (1995). Gray, M., Margaret Sanger: A Biography of the Champion of Birth Control (1978). Johnson, M. S., Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in Japan, 1921-1955 (dissertation, 1989). Kennedy, D., Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger (1970). Mansfield, A. K., Imperious Women: Margaret Sanger, Blanche Ames and the Birth Control Movement in the United States 1928-1935 (1995). Miller, R. M. and P. A. Cimbala, American Reform and Reformers: A Biographical Dictionary (1996). Moore, G., Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement: A Bibliography, 1911-1984 (1986). Nadler, P. F., ‘‘Margaret Sanger’s Family Limitation Pamphlet: A Rhetorical and Historical Analysis’’ (thesis, 1990). Raible, R. E., ‘‘Conquering Comstock Law: The Combined Efforts of Mary Ware Dennett and Margaret Sanger’’ (thesis, 1997). Roldan Ruiz, M., ‘‘Margaret Sanger’s ‘First victory’: A Rhetorical Analysis’’ (thesis, 1981). Topalian, E., Margaret Sanger (1984). Other references: Margaret Sanger (microfilm of diaries and correspondence, 1988). The Margaret Sanger Papers Microfilm Edition: Smith College Collections Series Guide (1995). The Margaret Sanger Papers: Documents from the Sophia Smith Collection and College Archives, Smith College (Series 2) (microfilm, 1994). The Margaret Sanger Papers: Collected Documents Series (1997). The Margaret Sanger Papers: Collected Documents Series (microfilm, 1996). Margaret Sanger: A Register of Her Papers in the Library of Congress (1977). The Papers of Margaret Sanger (microfilm, 1976). —JULIANN E. FLEENOR
SANGSTER, Margaret E(lizabeth Munson) Born 22 February 1838, New Rochelle, New York; died 4 June 1912, Brooklyn, New York Also wrote under: Margaret Sangster Daughter of John and Margaret Chisholm Munson; married George Sangster, 1858 A precocious little girl, Margaret E. Sangster learned to read at age four, and early showed interest in writing. Her childhood, as she was later to say, was ‘‘wholly beautiful and wholly sweet,’’ and in her old age she looked back upon her education with approval: ‘‘It was in marked contrast to the education young women are receiving now, but I am inclined to think that, as a practical preparation for life, it may bear comparison with twentieth century methods.’’ She attended schools in Paterson, New Jersey, and Brooklyn, New York.
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In 1855, when Sangster was only seventeen, she wrote ‘‘Little Janey’’ and sold it to the Presbyterian Board of Publication, which then commissioned her to write 100 stories for children. After her husband’s death in 1871 she began a long, fruitful career of writing and editing. She was, at different times, assistant editor of Hearth and Home; assistant editor of Christian at Work; family-page editor of the Christian Intelligencer; and editor of Harper’s Bazar. In addition she was connected in various capacities with the Christian Herald, Harper ’s Young People, Ladies’ Home Journal, and the Woman’s Home Companion. Sangster’s industry was remarkable; over the years she produced an incredible amount of poetry (published in various periodicals), as well as essays, short stories (many for children and young people), and novels. A number of Sangster’s books are compilations of her short pieces, and all were popular in her day. Many of Sangster’s essays and books were written for girls and young mothers. These combine the elements of ‘‘self-help’’ and inspiration and were well received by contemporary reviewers. Sociable and friendly, Sangster possessed an unusually sweet and cheerful personality, nourished by an unshakable religious faith. Not one to fret at life’s vicissitudes, she remarks serenely of her autobiography (1909) that from her youth she has ‘‘had more joy than sorrow, more pleasure than pain, more ease than hardship, and if my little book is optimistic, it is because optimism has been the dominant note of all my years.’’ Such words are noteworthy when one considers Sangster had lived through the Civil War, with people dear to her on both sides of the conflict, and that her husband died when she was just thirty-three, leaving her with a young son. Sangster’s work is dated, but it was popular and respected during a long period of American life. By reading it, one may gain a vivid picture of the middle class in the half-century following the Civil War, what its basic ideals were, and how it felt those ideals to be threatened. OTHER WORKS: Manual of Missions of the Reformed Church in America (1878). Poems of the Household (1882). Some Fairies and Heart Flowers (1887). Little Knights and Ladies (1895). Easter Bells (1897). Home Life Made Beautiful in Story, Song, Sketch, and Picture (1897). Cheerful Todays and Trustful Tomorrows (1899). Winsome Womanhood (1900). Lyrics of Love, of Hearth and Home, and of Field and Garden (1901). Janet Ward: A Daughter of the Manse (1902). Eleanor Lee (1903). Good Manners for All Occasions (1904). What Shall a Young Girl Read? (1905). Fairest Girlhood (1906). Radiant Motherhood (1906). Story Bible (1906). An Autobiography: From My Youth Up (1909). Happy School Days (1909). Ideal Home Life (1910). Eastover Parish (1912). Mother Book (1912). My Garden of Hearts (1913). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Christian Herald (19 June 1912). NYT (5 June 1912). World’s Work (Feb. 1910). —ABIGAIL ANN HAMBLEN
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
SANTIAGO, Esmeralda Born 17 May 1948, San Juan, Puerto Rico Daughter of Ramona Santiago and Pablo Santiago Díaz; married Frank Cantor, 1978; children: Lucas David Being the oldest of 11 children may have had an impact on Esmeralda Santiago’s desire to write. She not only became a surrogate mother to younger children, but also the assistant and translator for her mother in her new English-speaking society. Santiago greeted each experience with eyes wide open, examining everything and putting it to memory. ‘‘Being a writer is like being a collector,’’ she told the Los Angeles Times. ‘‘Instead of baseball cards, I collect memories, colors. And I carry my collection everywhere I go.’’ Memories are important to Santiago in documenting the Puerto Rican and Puerto Rican-American experience. Her first and third books are memoirs, the first, When I Was Puerto Rican (1993), of her childhood in Puerto Rico (she came to New York City at the age of thirteen). Her recent book, Almost a Woman (1998), is a reminiscence of her teenage years in New York. In between, Santiago published a long novel, América’s Dream (1996), which is based on the life of a hotel maid in Puerto Rico who flees her abusive spouse to become a nanny and housekeeper for an upstate New York family. In the 1970s, after finishing her bachelor’s degree at Harvard University, Santiago volunteered at a center for battered women, and must have learned firsthand the experiences of her character América, who has difficulty leaving the man who beats her. This novel prompted the Boston Globe to label Santiago ‘‘one of the most powerful new voices in American fiction.’’ Santiago says she wants her readers to know how people live life, and in fact in her extensive novel several issues are examined, both for Latin Americans and for U.S. Americans. In her memoirs Santiago introduces the reader to the scent and feel of guava, the bloody contents of her mother’s spicy morcilla sausage, and to the reaction of Puerto Ricans on the island who were taught the four food groups by U.S. health employees in the 1950s. Many of the suggested items in the food groups were not found on the island and therefore seemed as foreign as the English language. In her second memoir, Almost a Woman, Santiago displays the roach-ridden apartments and welfare inspections of Brooklyn, in the second stage of her life, an experience that also included the fists and spit of her classmates. Although she was a bright student, she was placed in a low-intelligence class in New York because she could not ‘‘spik inglis.’’ But Santiago excelled in overcoming any obstacle. After high school she attended the Performing Arts school in New York, participated in experimental theater, and found work as a dancer. She appeared on Broadway at age nineteen and had a small role in the 1967 movie Up the Down Staircase. Later in life she preferred producing documentary film, her major at Harvard. Now Santiago is considering writing a third memoir with experiences from her twenties. Her principal language as an adult is English, but it does not keep her from sharing her culture in any
SARGENT
and all forms. ‘‘If you don’t exist in the arts of a people,’’ she told the Washington Post, ‘‘you don’t exist in a culture.’’ On another occasion, in an interview for the Boston Globe, she said her ‘‘emotional life is still in Spanish.’’ In 1998, shortly after Almost a Woman was published, Santiago released another book, coedited with Joie Davidow and titled Las Christmas, the word Spanish-speakers give to the Christmas festivities. This book includes 25 essays in English by various U.S. Latino authors about their remembrances as a child and the Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, or Mexican-style Christmas celebrations still held in their homes. In the introduction Santiago notes that for Latinos, the Christmas season is more about getting together with people and eating than it is about shopping and exchanging gifts. She also explains that the Christmas season begins 12 days before December 25 and does not end until January 6, Three Kings’ Day. The editors bring several women together to prepare a huge feast with each of their traditional specialties, which is enjoyed at the end of the book. Home and hearth are fond themes for Santiago; she describes a childhood’s worth of closets and closetlike spaces in a collection of mini-memoirs by several authors titled Home, published in 1995. Half the editors’ book proceeds go to homeless assistance groups. Santiago has also undertaken something few authors do, which is the translation of her own books. She has translated When I Was Puerto Rican and América’s Dream into Spanish, and these books are now distributed throughout Spanish-speaking countries. Santiago lives in a small town in upstate New York. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Marquis Who’s Who Biographies (1987). Other references: Americas (Sept./Oct. 1996). Bilingual Review/La Revista Bilingue (Spring 1998). Book Report (Mar./Apr. 1995). Boston Globe (20 Sept. 1998). Hispanic (May 1994, Dec. 1998). ‘‘Latino Writers Ponder Meaning of Community,’’ in LAT (14 Dec. 1998). New Orleans Times-Picayune (5 Apr. 1998). People (22 July 1996). PW (25 Mar. 1996). Sacramento Bee (17 Jan. 1999). Seattle Times (9 June 1997). WP (12 Nov. 1998). WRB (Jan. 1997). —ELIZABETH COONROD MARTINEZ
SARGENT, Pamela Born 20 March 1948, Ithaca, New York Pamela Sargent has since the late 1970s written science fiction that presents female characters as strong, intelligent, usually empathic individuals, as opposed to earlier, male-dominated science fiction that either ignored or greatly diminished the role of women in fictional societies. Sargent is also known as the editor of Women of Wonder: Science Fiction Stories by Women
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about Women (1975), More Women of Wonder: Science Fiction Novelettes by Women about Women (1976), and The New Women of Wonder: Recent Science Fiction Stories by Women about Women (1978), all of which portray early classics of pioneering women science fiction writers (such as C. L. Moore) as well as more pointedly feminist fiction of the 1960s and 1970s. Sargent was born in Ithaca, New York, to parents who both had eclectic careers. Her father was at various times a Marine Corps officer, professional singer, insurance salesman, college admissions director, education professor, and county legislator. Her mother was a pianist and a high school chemistry teacher who worked for the New York State Education Department. Sargent’s house was full of books, and she recalls reading children’s fantasies such as Bambi and Charlotte’s Web, mythology, and science books like Fred Hoyle’s The Nature of the Universe. Her mother gave her The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, and while in an institution for troubled adolescents at fourteen, Sargent read science fiction such as The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester and claimed it helped her not feel like an outcast. At no time did she feel encouraged to pursue a writing career. Sargent attended the State University of New York at Binghamton and secured an M.A. in philosophy in 1970. While attending college, she worked as a sales clerk, a runway model, a solderer on an assembly line, a library typist, an office worker, and a teaching assistant in philosophy. She submitted handwritten stories to publishers until a reader at the New Yorker advised her to type them before marketing them. At college she was good friends with Jack Dann, who later became a science fiction editor, and George Zebrowski, who later became a science fiction writer. Both of her companions became published while still in college, and they encouraged her to submit one of her own science fiction stories for publication. ‘‘Landed Minority,’’ an eerie tale about college students becoming gradually stupider, then dying from an inexplicable epidemic that has turned the college greens into cemeteries, was published by the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in September 1970. Sargent lived with George Zebrowski after college, though only rarely collaborating with him in her writing. During the early 1970s she wrote several children’s stories that were later collected into three anthologies, as well as science fiction stories that were collected in Starshadows (1977). Most of her adult science fiction stories deal with children coping with bizarre circumstances and new technology. Earthseed (1983), Eye of the Comet (1984), and Homesmind (1984) were young adult science fiction novels, while The Sudden Star (1979), Watchstar (1980), and The Golden Space (1982) portray children as significant characters. Sargent, it has been claimed by critics, is both acknowledging the power of childhood impressions and decisions that could affect them later as adults and providing role models for the youthful readers of science fiction. Sargent delved into alternative feminist societies in The Shore of Women (1986). Women control the technology while the men are hunter-gatherers in this reverse of stereotypical sex roles. Other topics beckoned, however, as she wrote about ‘‘terraforming’’
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in Venus of Dreams (1986) and Venus of Shadows (1988), novels in which, as the planet Venus is made habitable for human life, colonists must create a new world society from scratch. Sargent also wrote a historical novel called Genghis Khan, Ruler of the Sky (1991), which emphasizes to some extent the women Mongols as well, and an alternate history novel, Climb the Wind (1998), in which Native Americans conquer settlers of the West after the Civil War. Sargent returned to women in science fiction in 1998 with Firebrands: The Heroines of Science Fiction and Fantasy, an illustrated guide to fictional women in fantasy and science fiction since the 1600s. A prolific writer and editor of numerous anthologies, Sargent was awarded the best book for young adults by the American Library Association in 1983 for Earthseed, and she was a finalist in 1992 for the Nebula award by the Science Fiction Writers of America for the novelette Danny Goes to Mars. OTHER WORKS: Bio-Futures: Science Fiction Stories about Biological Metamorphosis (1976). Cloned Lives (1976). Elvira’s Zoo (1979). Divide the Night (1981). The Alien Upstairs (1983). The Mountain Cage (1983). Afterlives: Stories About Life after Death (with Ian Watson, 1986). The Best of Pamela Sargent (1987). Alien Child (1988). Fury Scorned (with George Zebrowski, 1996). Heart of the Sun (with George Zebrowski, 1997). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CANR 8 (1983). CANR 41 (1994). DLB 8 (1981). Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993). —ROSE SECREST
SARTON, May Born Eléanore Marie Sarton, 3 May 1912, Wondelgem, Belgium; died 16 July 1995 Daughter of George and Mabel Elwes Sarton May Sarton was an only child. Her father was a noted historian of science; her mother, an artist and designer. Sarton became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1924. She originally planned a career in the theater and served a valuable apprenticeship in Eva LeGallienne’s Civic Repertory Theater. She founded and was director at the Apprentice Theatre (New School for Social Research) and was director of the Associated Actors Theatre in Hartford, Connecticut. From her mid-twenties, however, Sarton devoted herself to the craft of writing. Sarton’s autobiographical writings achieve a clear, candid, conversational tone and are significant explorations of the life of the mind and of the writer at work. It was her belief that genuinely valid autobiography must move beyond reportage of event or even feeling and extend into an examination of motive, impulse, thought, and belief; and her journals are enriched by miniature informal essays which provide these explorations.
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
I Knew a Phoenix (1959) closely traces Sarton’s early life. In Plant Dreaming Deep (1968), Sarton uses her renovation of an old house in Nelson, New Hampshire, as an effective metaphor for the establishment of roots and nourishment of the spirit. Journal of a Solitude (1973) deals frankly with the pain, frustration, and rage of the human experience. A World of Light (1976) is a series of fascinating character sketches of Sarton’s friends and relatives. In The House by the Sea (1977), Sarton’s home in York, Maine, is a symbol of the joys of productive solitude. Her recuperation from a mastectomy becomes the symbol for overcoming emotional deprivation and despondency caused by harsh reviews in Recovering (1980), one of her most effective journals. Sarton’s poetry often discusses the balance growing from difficult human choices. Her tenet that ‘‘form is freedom’’ accounts for the frequent employment of traditional poetic forms, although she also works in free verse. She believed the ‘‘white heat’’ of inspiration fuses the poet’s critical and emotional selves to trigger artistically productive revision. ‘‘Prayer before Work,’’ from Inner Landscape (1939), is an evocation of such inspiration. In both poetry and fiction, Sarton treats the social and political questions of the day. ‘‘Night Watch,’’ from A Grain of Mustard Seed (1971), compares human sickness and social ills. Faithful Are the Wounds (1955, reprinted 1985, and again in 1997) fictionalizes the political witch hunts of the 1950s with force, wisdom, and understanding. Crucial Conversations (1975, 1994) includes comments about the Watergate scandal. Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (1965) is the story of an elderly, successful writer who reviews her life and work during an important interview and in preparation for helping a young friend at odds with himself and his sexuality. Frank, direct, powerful, this novel ranks among Sarton’s best work and is an example of why she is often hailed as a spokesperson for women writers. Death is a topic Sarton treats in all the genres she employs, and the tonal and philosophical span is generous, ranging from the contemplative comments of The House by the Sea through the furious protest of Caroline Spencer, the protagonist of As We Are Now (1973), who transforms her death into an indictment of society’s attitudes toward the aged and the infirm. Brief, spare, blunt, the splendid characterizations of As We Are Now elevate it far above most protest fiction. One of Sarton’s constant and most compelling themes is friendship, as in The Birth of a Grandfather (1957), in which the terminal illness of a close friend engenders a middle-aged man’s reconsideration of himself and his values, and Kinds of Love (1970, 1995), a character study of two lifelong women friends. The Small Room (1961) compares and contrasts Lucy Winter’s growth as a teacher with her developing ability to function as an independent person. Her many committed colleagues serve as Lucy’s mentors as she seeks to understand not only herself but also a brilliant student who has broken under the demands of personal pride and faculty pressure. Honest, compassionate, discerning, The Small Room is a major novel, its treatment of the student-teacher relationship singularly effective.
SARTON
Steadily productive, unusually successful in her explorations of both isolation and union, Sarton was a serious writer who won great popularity, with significant achievements in three major genres. The last decade of her life, Sarton’s work, especially her ever popular journals, dealt with issues of aging and illness and her struggle to remain active as an artist. OTHER WORKS: Encounter in April (1937). The Single Hound (1938). The Bridge of Years (1946, 1974, 1997). The Underground River: A Play in Three Acts (1947). The Lion and the Rose (1948). Leaves of the Tree (1950). Shadow of a Man (1950). A Shower of Summer Days (1952, 1979, 1995). The Land of Silence (1953). The Birth of a Grandfather (1957). The Fur Person (1957). In Memorium (1957). The Writing of a Poem (1957). In Time Like Air (1958). Cloud, Stone, Sun, Vine (1961). The Design of a Novel (1963). Joanna and Ulysses (1963). Miss Pickthorn and Mr. Hare (1966). A Private Mythology: Poems (1966, 1996). As Does New Hampshire (1967). The Poet and the Donkey (1969). Kinds of Love (1970). A Durable Fire (1972). Collected Poems, 1930-1973 (1974). Punch’s Secret (1974). The Leopard Land: Alice and Haniel Long’s Santa Fé (1976). A Walk Through the Woods (1976). A Reckoning (1978, 1997). Halfway to Silence (1980). Letters from Maine: Poems (1984, 1997). May Sarton, Among the Usual Days: A Portrait—Unpublished Poems, Letters, Journals, and Photographs (1993). Coming Into Eighty: and Earlier Poems (1995). Endgame: A Journal of the Seventy-Ninth Year (1995). Beyond the Map: Poems (1995). At Eighty-Two: A Journal (1996). May Sarton: Selected Letters, 1916- 1954 (1997). Dear Juliette: Letters of May Sarton to Juliette Huxley (1999). Contributor to several anthologies and collections, including: Through Other Eyes: Animal Stories by Women (1988), Family Portraits: Remembrances (1991), Images of Women in Literature (1991), Writing Women’s Lives: An Anthology of Autobiographical Narratives by 20th Century American Women Writers (1994), The Beacon Book of Essays by Contemporary American Women (1996), Seasons of Women: An Anthology (1996), and others. She also produced, in creative partnership with several artists, a number of broadsides and limited editions of her poetry. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Anderson, D. H., in Images of Women in Fiction (1972). Blouin, L. P., May Sarton: A Bibliography (1978). Evans, E., May Sarton Revisited (1989). Hunting, C., ed., May Sarton: Woman and Poet (1982). Kallet, M., ed., A House of Gathering: Poets on May Sarton’s Poetry (1993). Peters, M., May Sarton: A Biography (1998). Prenshaw, P. W., ed., Conversations with May Sarton (1991). Sarton Selected: An Anthology of the Journals, Novels, and Poems of May Sarton (1991). Sibley, A., May Sarton (1972). Swartzlander, S. and M. R. Mumford, eds., That Great Sanity: Critical Essays on May Sarton (1995). Reference works: CA (1999). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Twayne’s Women Authors on CD (1995). Other references: A Service in Celebration of the Life of May Sarton, 1912-1995: Nelson Congregational Church, Nelson, New Hampshire, Saturday, 7 October 1995 (audiocassette, 1995). World of Light: A Portrait of May Sarton (video, 1987). Chrysalis
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(Summer 1975). Educational Gerontology (1999). Essays in Literature (Fall 1993). Hollins Critic (June 1974). In Their Own Voices: A Century of Recorded Poetry (CD, 1996). May Sarton: Woman of Letters (videocassette, 1995). May Sarton: Writing in the Upward Years (video, 1990). NR (8 June 1974). Pilgrimage (Sept. 1994). PW (24 June 1974). Sojourner (August 1995).
regulatory systems as indexes to the dynamics of a family, and uses the family context to focus on the experiences and processes which go into the making of a person.
—JANE S. BAKERMAN
Satir was one of the pioneers in the development of family therapy in the early 1950s. Conjoint Family Therapy and Peoplemaking are considered ‘‘bibles’’ of family dynamics. In all her books, she is consistent in her affirmation that the human being is capable of continued growth and change. In her writing and her practice, the focus is upon understanding the congruence between the individual and the family context and the processes that go into the making of an effective and happy human being.
Born 26 June 1916, Neillsville, Wisconsin; died 1988 Daughter of Reinhold O. and Minnie Wilke Pagenkopf; married Norman Satir, 1951 (divorced 1961)
OTHER WORKS: Self Esteem: A Declaration (1975). Helping Families to Change (with others, 1975). Making Contact (1976). Changing with Families (with others, 1976). The Satir Model: Family Therapy and Beyond (1991).
SATIR, Virginia M.
Virginia Satir was born on a farm in Wisconsin. Her parents moved to Milwaukee when she was twelve. She was married in 1951 and divorced in 1961. In 1936, Satir completed her bachelor’s degree in education at Wisconsin State University. For six years, she taught in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Louisiana, with the objective of working with different kinds of children in various settings. During this period, Satir regularly visited the homes of her students and became aware of important psychological and social clues to understanding the behavior of handicapped and of gifted children. Interested in the complex dynamics between the dysfunctional individual and the family, she went back to school ‘‘to specialize,’’ earning an M.A. in 1948 in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. Satir has worked as therapist in a broad spectrum of settings—psychiatric clinics, mental hospitals, public welfare programs, and family service agencies. Satir who describes herself as a ‘‘teacher-at-large in communications and family therapy,’’ has conducted seminars and workshops for government, industry, hospitals, universities, and other public and private institutions all over the world. Out of a rich and diversified background of practical experience, Satir evolved a cohesive theory of family systems, which she explains through a step-by-step approach in Conjoint Family Therapy (1964). This book challenges the idea that the locus of an individual’s illness, or dysfunction, is exclusively within the individual and also the notion that therapists are godlike figures, who should hold themselves aloof from relationships with the patients. Rejecting such a ‘‘medical model,’’ Satir offers what she calls the ‘‘growth model’’ of psychotherapy, which is based on the idea that illness is an appropriate communicative response to a dysfunctional system or context. Peoplemaking (1972) explores the kinds of ‘‘factories’’ (families) and ‘‘people-makers’’ (adults, parents) that make human beings. Intended more for families than therapists, Peoplemaking addresses the reader directly, providing exercises intended to allow self-assessment and assessment of the reader’s family. Satir again stresses communication systems and family
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BIBLIOGRAPHY: Andreas, S., Virginia Satir: The Patterns of Her Magic (1991). Brothers, B. J., Virginia Satir: Foundational Ideas (1991). Caston, C., Burnout in African American Family Caregivers: Nursing Interventions (1997). Hardmeier, H., ‘‘The System Theory Approach to Family Therapy: Analysis of an Interview by Virginia Satir’’ (thesis, 1972). Keener, J., Communication within Families: A Study of the Theories of Virginia Satir and Salvador Minuchin as They Inform the Task of Pastoral Care (dissertation, 1986). Laping, M., ‘‘A Critique of Virginia Satir’s Use of System Theory to Build Self-Esteem in Family Members’’ (thesis, 1979). Loeschen, S., The Secrets of Satir: Collected Sayings of Virginia Satir (1991). Loeschen, S., Systematic Training in the Skills of Virginia Satir (1998). Schwab, J., ed., A Resource Handbook for Satir Concepts (1990). Other references: Virginia Satir, M.S.W., Interview with Frederick J. Duhl, M.D (videocassette, 1976). Virginia Satir: The Use of Self in Therapy (videocassette, 1993). Kramer, E., An Interview with Virginia Satir (audiocassette, 1960, 1980). Contemporary Psychology (March 1977). Human Behavior Magazine (Sept. 1976). LJ (15 May 1976). —GUIN A. NANCE
SAVAGE, Elizabeth Born 15 February 1918, Hingham, Massachusetts; died 15 July 1989 Daughter of Robert B. and Mildred Ridlow Fitzgerald; married Thomas Savage, 1939; children: three Elizabeth Savage graduated from Colby College in Maine. She married a writer and raised three children. She is primarily known as a novelist but has also published short fiction in such periodicals as the Paris Review, Cosmopolitan, Redbook, and the Saturday Evening Post.
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Savage’s earliest novels—Summer of Pride (1960), But Not for Love (1970), and A Fall of Angels (1971)—explore seemingly perfect or privileged families at turning points that reveal the reality and the fallibility beneath the surface. Summer of Pride examines the headstrong Olivers and their Western heritage as their unity is threatened by three outsiders. The portraits of the women, especially the matriarch Emily and the matriach-to-be Rea, are rendered vividly and their values are compared with those of the head of the family, who mistakes avoidance of change for dedication to his dependents. The tone of But Not for Love is more ironic. The plot depicts the intricate relationships of the Hollister clan after the disappearance of one member; the climax, a dangerous fire, is rendered in a series of wonderfully funny and frightening scenes. Both books skillfully employ multiple points of view and reveal two of Savage’s basic themes: all human beings are both unique and ordinary, both strong and weak, and that genuine love fosters tolerance and compassion. The point of view of Helena St. John Strider, proud of her marital and professional successes, dominates A Fall of Angels. During the Striders’ annual Jamaican vacation, the whole fabric of their life and their sense of themselves is twisted when Luke takes a young, bewitching mistress. The relationship between the tourists and Jamaicans serves as a powerful symbol for the unexamined life, and the novel makes effective comments about fidelity and the double standard. In Happy Ending (1972), Savage’s conversational tone again reveals her ear for colloquial speech and for dialogue. The struggle of an aging couple to retain independence is compared to the striving of their young employees for some degree of security. These central characters are unsentimentally portrayed as realistic men and women of conscience, trying to live decent lives. The Last Night at the Ritz (1973) details the long friendship between the unnamed narrator and her college roommate. The protagonist has few illusions about herself or her loved ones, but even in the crises depicted here she displays charity and understanding. Tension and suspense are maintained beautifully during telling glimpses of the publishing world and the 1960s generation gap, and the powerful flashbacks render college life vividly. South Boston, locale of A Good Confession (1975), serves protagonist-narrator Meg O’Shaugnessy Atherton as both background and symbol. Called to her dying grandfather’s bedside just as she discovers her husband’s infidelity, Meg faces her own shortcomings by evaluating herself against memories of her large Irish-American family. The importance of openness with one’s loved ones is a central theme. The friendship among five high school girls in Missoula, Montana, is the frame for The Girls from the Five Great Valleys (1977). Savage again conveys a clear sense of the 1930s Depression by contrasting reports of poverty and suffering with the lives of families who are secure. The Girls from the Five Great Valleys reveals that nurturing love teaches strength for survival; selfish possessiveness leads only to tragedy.
SAWYER
Savage’s interest in Victorian literature is reflected in Willowwood (1978), a story of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The novel depicts the complex relationship between Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Elizabeth Siddal, Fanny Cornforth, and Jane Burden Morris. The four central characterizations are brought vividly to life by honest treatment of their motivations—both charitable and selfish—and the supporting figures are beautifully drawn. The setting is enriched by effective details of everyday life and insights into the status of women. The decisions of several summer residents to ‘‘winter over’’ on Jacataqua Island off the coast of Maine becomes the symbol for crisis and change in Toward the End (1980). Effective weather imagery and a well-drawn cast of intriguing characters are the book’s greatest strengths. Savage’s novels often feature a central image drawn from the animal kingdom; this device underscores Savage’s fine ability to describe the natural world. Always in control of her subject matter and style, Savage is particularly adept at characterization and setting and her fiction is informed by splendid humor and illuminating irony. BIBLIOGRAPHY: NYTBR (5 Feb. 1961, 19 Aug. 1973). Time (19 Nov. 1973). Writer (Sept. 1972, Dec. 1974). —JANE S. BAKERMAN
SAWYER, Ruth Born 5 August 1880, Boston, Massachusetts; died 3 June 1970, Hancock, Maine Daughter of Francis M. and Ethelinda Smith Sawyer; married Albert C. Durand, 1911; children: one son and one daughter The only daughter among the five children of an importer, Ruth Sawyer spent her early years on New York City’s Upper East Side, summering with the family in Maine; both areas provided subjects and settings for her writings. Sawyer often tagged after her brothers, and undoubtedly the very real and attractive boy protagonists in her stories arose from the warm relationship she had with them. Although Sawyer’s father often read aloud from Stevenson and Twain and her mother frequently sang ballads and read from the Bible, it was the folk stories told by her Donegal nurse that made the greatest impression upon Sawyer and awakened in her the love for traditional tales and the wonder of storytelling. After two years at the Garland Kindergarten Training School in Boston, Sawyer began storytelling and collecting in Cuba, where she went at twenty as a volunteer to help organize kindergartens for orphans of the Spanish-American War. At Columbia University, Sawyer studied folklore and storytelling, at the same time telling stories in schools, libraries, and missions in
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New York City and doing features for the Sun. She collected tales in Ireland in 1905 while on assignment for the Sun, and later in Europe and Mexico. In 1911 Sawyer married an ophthalmologist and went to live in Ithaca, New York. They had a son and a daughter. Although Sawyer’s earlier works have not endured and some of the later works seem contrived and sentimental, the juvenile works that rose out of her personal experiences at home and abroad have justly enjoyed lasting popularity. Sawyer’s 1931 Spanish trip, described in the graphic My Spain (1941), produced Toño Antonio (1934), the humorous story of a boy who travels to Malaga with a herd of playful goats after his family has come upon hard times. Based upon a chance meeting with a shepherd boy at a bakery shop, Toño Antonio conveys a strong sense of the Spanish countryside and character. Picture Tales from Spain (1936) consists of fresh and vivid traditional stories, including the lively ‘‘The Flea.’’ The Least One (1941), a realistic story of the relationship between the son of a burden-carrier and his gray burro, is a warm, genuine account of the life of Mexican peasants and was commissioned by UNESCO for translation into several languages. Among the most highly acclaimed of Sawyer’s works are her two autobiographical novels, Roller Skates (1936) and its sequel, The Year of Jubilo (1940). In Roller Skates, as ten-year-old, free-spirited Lucinda Wyman, Sawyer records vividly and sensitively her year in the 1890s with the Misses Peters while her parents are traveling in Europe, a time she spends skating around New York City, involving herself in the lives of the people she meets, most of whom really existed. The Year of Jubilo takes Sawyer to Maine after the death of her father. Sawyer especially enjoyed the Christmas season, and her several collections of holiday folk tales, particularly The Long Christmas (1941) and Joy to the World (1961), are perennial favorites. The best loved and most widely known of Sawyer’s Christmas tales is ‘‘The Voyage of the Wee Red Cap,’’ told to her by an itinerant tinker at a crossroads in Ireland. Eleven more traditional stories are included in The Way of the Storyteller (1942), in which Sawyer presents her philosophy of storytelling and gives advice about telling tales and putting together a story hour. Marked by warmth of tone, love of life, and confidence in the goodness of people, Sawyer’s writings hold up the old virtues of hard work, perseverance, and faith in God. Always present, regardless of genre, is the sense of the storytelling situation, the effect of Sawyer’s sharp eye for ethnic detail, keen ear for the cadence of common speech, and leisurely and loving narrative manner. Sawyer’s ability to invest with new life old magic and legend made her the acknowledged great lady of American storytelling. OTHER WORKS: The Primrose Ring (1915). This Way to Christmas (1916). A Child’s Year Book (1917). Herself, Himself, and Myself (1917). Myself (1917). Seven Miles to Arden (1917). Doctor Danny (1918). Leerie (1920). The Silver Sixpence (1921).
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Gladiola Murphy (1923). The Tale of the Enchanted Bunnies (1923). Four Ducks on a Pond (1928). Folk House (1932). The Luck of the Road (1934). Gallant (1936). The Christmas Anna Angel (1944). This Is the Christmas (1945). Old Con and Patrick (1946). The Little Red Horse (1950). Maggie Rose (1952). Journey Cake, Ho! (1953). A Cottage for Betsy (1954). The Enchanted School House (1956). The Year of the Christmas Dragon (1960). Dietrich of Berne and the Dwarf King Laurin (with E. Mollès, 1963). Daddles: The Story of a Plain Hound-Dog (1964). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Haviland, V., Ruth Sawyer (1965). Reference works: Authors of Books for Young People (1971). Junior Book of Authors (1951). Newbery Medal Books, 1922-1955 (1955). TCA (1942). Other references: Horn Book (1965). —ALETHEA K. HELBIG
SCARBERRY, Alma Sioux Born 24 June 1899, Carter County, Kentucky; died10 April 1990 Also wrote under: Beatrice Fairfax, Annie Laurie Daughter of George W. and Caledonia Lee Patrick Scarberry; married Theodore A. Klein, 1930 Alma Sioux Scarberry is the daughter of a Kentucky fundamentalist minister. Her early home life was difficult; her father, a stern disciplinarian, remarried several times, and Scarberry often had to support herself as a child. She began to write prose and poetry at an early age, and writing always seemed natural to her. After working her way through a semester at New Bethlehem Business College in Pennsylvania, Scarberry moved in 1917 to New York City, selling varnish to pay her way. Scarberry first found a sales job in a Brooklyn department store, but soon enlisted in the Navy, serving a year as one of the first Yeomanettes. Scarberry took a position with King Features in 1920, first writing daily love columns under the names Beatrice Fairfax and Annie Laurie, but soon writing under her own byline for the New York American, Graphic, and Mirror. She won fame for her feature articles and daring publicity stunts. Scarberry also appeared on Broadway in Irving Berlin’s Music Box Revue (1922-23) and in the Shubert revival of The Mikado (1924). In 1926 Scarberry moved to Pittsburgh to write a daily column and features for the Pittsburgh Sun Telegraph. On her editor’s dare, she wrote her first novel. The tremendous popularity of Make Up (1931) won her a contract as columnist and serial writer with Central Press in 1928. After her marriage, Scarberry moved to Chicago, where her first radio drama, The Girl Reporter, was purchased and produced by NBC. In 1930 she began to write for the Bell Syndicate and North American Newspaper Alliance. The next 14 years would see all 21 of her romances published serially; only 12 were republished in book form. Scarberry’s son was also born in 1930.
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In 1940 Scarberry took a publicity job with CBS in Hollywood, soon moving to head the writing department of the Mutual Don Lee Network to write radio dramas and general continuity. From 1944 to 1946, Scarberry directed the Radio Bureau of the National War Fund in New York. The years after 1946 were productive; she wrote features, columns, and songs for films. The Doofer Family, a serial fantasy for children which was inspired by songs and jokes she enjoyed with her young son and is Scarberry’s own favorite, appeared through General Features (1955-56). During the Korean War, Scarberry was a soldier-show technician for the U.S. Army, stationed at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas. Scarberry worked as public relations director for Columbus Plastics in Columbus, Ohio, from 1959 until 1965, when she moved to Austin, Texas. Since 1965 she handled public relations for good causes and contributed columns to magazines and newspapers. Scarberry was featured in a local radio talk show and was still writing and starring in television commercials into the early 1980s. Scarberry’s romances are readable, with interesting characters, rapidly developed action, and lively dialogue. The serials reflect the author’s experiences and views. Like Janet James of Make Up and Rosalie March of Dimpled Racketeer (1931), Scarberry’s heroines are often attractive and talented country girls who come to the city naive but eager to get ahead. But like singer Elanda Lee of High Hat (1930), determined to get a break in radio, or dancer Jan Keats of Rainbow Over Broadway (1936), determined to become a Broadway star, Scarberry’s heroines are characterized by independence, hard work, and a refusal to compromise values and expectations. After finding independence and success, they can make room in their lives for love, happiness, and a home with a reliable, honest, and sensitive man. All offer readers the vicarious experience of the best of both a brilliant career and a loving family. Each novel climaxes with the happy marriage of hero and heroine, a marriage that resolves all subplots. For Scarberry, writing always meant the use of a particular kind of talent for profit. Inspiration usually begins with characters; when these are fully developed, a plot forms around them. From the plot outline, the writing comes quickly. As Scarberry puts it: ‘‘Writing takes three things. It requires an active creative imagination which leads to a pattern, a formula. And it requires a market. Without a market, a writer really has no purpose.’’ The great popularity of Scarberry’s serial fiction indicates her success and understanding in creating for the market of her choice. OTHER WORKS: The Flat Tire (1930). Flighty: A Romance of Gypsy O’Malley—A Girl Who Lived Down Her Family (1932). Puppy Love: A Hollywood Romance (1933). Penthouse Love (1934). Too Wise to Marry (1935). Too Many Beaus (1936). Thou Shalt Not Love (1937). The Lady Proposes (1941). BIBLIOGRAPHY: unknown.htm.
Web
site:
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—KATHERINE STAPLES
SCARBOROUGH, Dorothy Born 27 January 1878, Mount Carmel, Texas; died 7 November 1935, New York, New York Daughter of John B. and Mary Ellison Scarborough Dorothy Scarborough came from a prosperous Southern background—both grandfathers owned large plantations, and her father was a lawyer and judge. Scarborough received her B.A. (1896) and M.A. (1898) from Baylor University, where she taught from 1905 to 1914. She did advanced graduate work at the University of Chicago, Oxford University, and Columbia University (Ph.D. 1917). She joined the faculty of Columbia, specializing in teaching short story writing. Scarborough’s doctoral dissertation, The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (1917), is an important scholarly work. She establishes the Gothic romance and French, Italian, German, and Russian works as primary influences on the use of the supernatural in modern literature. She discusses the supernatural by categories: modern ghosts, the devil, folktales, and supernatural science. Scarborough concludes that the war was the cause for the contemporary interest in the supernatural and that American writers are essentially responsible for combining humor and the supernatural. Scarborough contributed book reviews, sometimes covering more than twenty works in a single review, to publications such as the New York Sun, Bookman, and the Dial. She attacks writers who use fiction as a vehicle for propaganda or didacticism. Unfortunately, as many reviewers have noted, this criticism is applicable to her own novels and short stories. Scarborough is praised for her realistic presentation, but condemned for her editorializing. Many of Scarborough’s novels use the Texas farmlands as setting. The plots revolve around romance, but love is frequently hampered by the problems facing the tenant farmer, the economics of the cotton industry, the threat of drought, flood, and the boll weevil. The depiction of natural forces in The Wind (1925) has been compared with that of Conrad (Times Literary Supplement, 5 Nov. 1925); the 1928 film, starring Lillian Gish, was, however, criticized for excessive use of nature imagery. Impatient Griselda (1927) is one novel not flawed by propagandizing. Again the setting is a small Texas town with its typical inhabitants: the minister and his wife and children, the doctor, the do-gooder, the busybody, and the Negro cook. Scarborough contrasts two types of women: the seductress (Lilith) and the wife (Irene). The novel opens with the death of one Lilith as she gives birth to a second. Irene marries Lilith’s widower (Guinn the minister) and raises the stepdaughter Lilith and her own four children, but feels she never replaces either Lilith in her husband’s heart. The book closes with the death of the second Lilith as she gives birth to a third-generation Lilith. Irene sees the cycle continuing as her own daughter must stand in for another Lilith. The types remain unreconciled.
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Scarborough did important research in collecting folk songs and ballads; her interest dated back to her early teaching career in Texas. In On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs (1925) and A Song Catcher in Southern Mountains (sponsored by ‘‘Project 41’’ at Columbia University and published posthumously in 1937), Scarborough discusses origins, influences, instruments, and variations and provides melodies for many songs. (Ola Lee Gulledge collected and transcribed the music in the first book.) On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs includes a chapter on the blues based primarily on a visit with W. C. Handy. Scarborough uses these songs extensively in her novels and the autobiographical From a Southern Porch (1919). Humor pervades Scarborough’s writings; she employs informal language, coins words, and puns. A modern reader may be annoyed by Scarborough’s facile stereotyping of races (she shows blacks as a happy people singing while they toil in field or kitchen) or amused by her genteel treatment of passion and illegitimate birth, but her novels are entertaining. A scholar may be frustrated by the lack of scholarly apparatus in The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction, but Scarborough has made significant contributions to scholarship with her dissertation and folk-song collecting.
OTHER WORKS: Fugitive Verses (1912). Famous Modern Ghost Stories (edited by Scarborough, 1921). Humorous Ghost Stories (edited by Scarborough, 1921). In the Land of Cotton (1923). Can’t Get a Red Bird (1929). The Stretch-Berry Smile (1932). The Story of Cotton (1933). Selected Short Stories of Today (edited by Scarborough, 1935).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Overton, G. The Women Who Make Our Novels (1928). Reference works: DAB. TCA (1942). Other references: Bookman (Jan. 1920). PW (16 Nov. 1935). NYT (8 Nov. 1935). NYTBR (11 Nov. 1917, 14 Aug. 1927, 27 Oct. 1929, 14 Feb. 1932, 11 April 1937). TLS (15 Nov. 1917, 5 Nov. 1925, 20 Nov. 1937). —NANCY G. ANDERSON
SCARBOROUGH, Elizabeth Ann Born 23 March 1947, Kansas City, Missouri Daughter of Betty Lou and Donald Dean Scarborough; married Richard G. Kacsur, 1975 (divorced 1981). Elizabeth Ann Scarborough is best known for The Healer’s War (1988), a novel about a Vietnam nurse, which was inspired by her career after she received an R.N. in 1968 from the Bethany Hospital School of Nursing in Kansas City, Missouri. From 1968
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to 1972 she served in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps in Vietnam, earning the rank of captain. She later worked as a surgical nurse at St. David’s Hospital in Austin, Texas. In 1987 she earned a B.A. in history from the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, where she lived for 15 years. She has been a freelance writer since 1979 and lives in the state of Washington. Scarborough is popular for her humorous fantasy, which uses the conventional tropes of witches, dragons, and magic spells in comic, unconventional ways. She has written several series, starting with those about the magical land of Argonia: Song of Sorcery (1982), The Unicorn Creed (1983), Bronwyn’s Bane (1983), and The Christening Quest (1985). Republished as Songs from the Seashell Archives, these stories chronicle the comical, fast-paced misadventures of a young witch named Maggie and her mother, Bronwyn. The Arabian Nights-influenced novel The Harem of Aman Akbar (1984) involves a young bride fighting a genie’s curse in the Middle East. Next Scarborough mixed fantasy with western fiction in The Drastic Dragon of Draco, Texas (1986) and The Goldcamp Vampire (1987), which are set respectively in the Texas plains and the Yukon frontier. Her journalist heroine in these works pursues and confronts the titular monsters. The Healer’s War won the 1989 Nebula award (granted by the Science Fiction Writers of America). Although its subject and incidents are dreadful, the story is warmly narrated with frequent flashes of humor. Nurse Kitty McCulley spends Part I in ‘‘The Hospital’’ caring for her American and Vietnamese patients. Kitty describes with sanguine common sense the exhaustion of working long shifts, the grief of losing patients, and the frustrations of finding romance with combat personnel. A dying patient, a Vietnamese ‘‘holy man,’’ gives her a magic amulet which allows her to perceive the colorful auras emanating from others’ emotions as well as to heal critical injuries. The value of the former ability becomes evident when Kitty is shot down over enemy territory in Part II, ‘‘The Jungle,’’ and must evade the Viet Cong and an American soldier prone to homicidal fugues. Kitty learns, or rather confirms, that goodness is found not in political ideology but in ordinary people struggling to survive desperate times. Returning to America, she feels both strengthened by her experiences yet uprooted in a consumer society in which the truths of famine, pain, and death are frivolously disregarded. Nothing Sacred (1991) is another powerful tale with an intriguing mystery. Viveca Vanachek, a 41-year-old prisoner of war, is kept alive for reasons she cannot fathom in a bizarre POW camp within a secluded valley in Tibet. Her fellow American prisoners are oddly out of date, more concerned with 20th-century baseball than with 21st-century shifting alliances. The guards are downright friendly, ‘‘carelessly’’ allowing her to access their computer files and to organize an ancient library while other prisoners rebuild the war-torn building, a palace which the Dalai Lama had previously called home. Viv’s haunting dreams of its past glory give clues to the climactic revelation that the prison is as great an ontological mystery as a sociopolitical enigma. The novel
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ends with nuclear war destroying the world outside, but Viv has found happiness and no longer calls herself a prisoner. In Last Refuge (1992), Viv’s granddaughter, Chime, ventures out of this magical oasis to seek renewal for a holocaust-burned world. The humorous Songkiller Saga includes Phantom Banjo (1991), Picking the Ballad’s Bones (1991), and Strum Again? (1992). Trouble begins when Torchy, actually the supernatural Faerie Queen, decides to abolish music. Seeking revenge against balladeer Tam Lin, who imprisoned her in the devil’s underworld, she especially hates folk songs. As her name foreshadows, Torchy burns the Library of Congress and other musical archives and causes people to forget their fondness for music. Protagonist Willie gathers a fellowship of humans who remember folk music. Aided by a magic banjo, they launch a quest to save their favorite tunes. Scarborough’s friendships with social workers inspired her to write The Godmother (1994), in which a magical fairy godmother visits Rose Simpson, a Seattle social worker. In 1995’s The Godmother’s Apprentice, a teenager travels to Ireland to become a fairy godmother herself, and the series was rounded out with The Godmother’s Web (1998). Next Scarborough collaborated with fantasy writer Anne McCaffrey on the Petaybee trilogy, consisting of Powers That Be (1993), Power Lines (1994), and Power Play (1995). These novels are set on a faraway planet and concern a rebellion by settlers against the controlling corporation. Scarborough returned to Earth for her next fantasies. Carol for Another Christmas (1996) brings the spirit of Ebenezer Scrooge to visit workaholic Monica Banks, who needs to learn the lessons only Scrooge can teach. In The Lady in the Loch (1998), the sheriff of Edinburgh investigates the disappearance of gypsy women at Loch Ness and discovers an ancient evil. Scarborough’s works are accessible and pleasing. The values she promotes in her fiction are trust, caring, and sharing, which her protagonists personify. Her narrative voice is energetic, as are her characters, who ruefully take stock of the evils they confront but who rally enthusiasm to tackle the work of defeating them. These traits promise to keep her popular for years to come. OTHER WORKS: An Interview with a Vietnam Nurse (1989). The Untold Lives: The First Generation of American Women Psychologists (1989). Acorna’s People (with Anne McCaffrey, 1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Everett, G., ‘‘The American National Character and the Novelization of Vietnam’’ (thesis, 1994). Reference works: St. James Guide to Fantasy Writers (1996). Other references: Fantasy Magazine (Fall 1993). Locus (June 1990). New York Review of Science Fiction (Sept. 1991). Starlog (Feb. 1991). SATA (1998). Science Fiction Chronicle 11:9 (June 1990). —FIONA KELLEGHAN
SCHAEFFER, Susan Fromberg Born 25 March 1941, Brooklyn, New York Daughter of Irving and Edith Levine Fromberg; married Neil J. Schaeffer, 1970; children: Benjamin, May Susan Fromberg Schaeffer is a mother of two. Educated at the University of Chicago (B.A. 1961, M.A. 1963, Ph.D. 1966) and a summer Vermonter, Schaeffer uses these locales in her fiction. She teaches American literature at Brooklyn College. The Witch and the Weather Report (1972) contains ‘‘Ancestors,’’ a series of fine poems about Schaeffer’s grandparents, commenting realistically about the tragedy of aging and about death. The tone is peaceful and positive, giving a strong sense of the values of life and of family continuity. ‘‘Housewife’’ captures the tension generated by a woman’s desire for freedom and her love for family and home, and the effective imagery of ‘‘Wood Fire’’ celebrates human comfort in an uncertain world. Granite Lady (1974) reprints selections from the first volume and introduces new poems. The apocalyptic vision of ‘‘Reading the Signs’’ reveals Schaeffer’s continuing examination of contemporary social and political problems introduced in the earlier ‘‘Sniper’’ and ‘‘Bombing.’’ ‘‘Mother and Daughter,’’ ‘‘Glimmerings,’’ ‘‘The Mother’s Curses,’’ and the very powerful ‘‘Alphabet’’ all depict parent-child relationships; imagery based on household objects and fairytales effectively evokes the child’s impressions, feelings, and responses. ‘‘The Door’’ offers exciting insights into inspiration and the craft of writing. Schaeffer’s novels all tell family sagas. In Falling (1973), the plot details Elizabeth Kamen’s struggle for inner peace and mental health. Three generations of the Kamen and Katz-Mazel families are portrayed, and over a dozen members come vividly to life. Flashbacks, often stemming from sessions with her psychiatrist, reveal Elizabeth’s background and her steady progress toward self-respect and control. In Elizabeth’s growing pride in her capability as a teacher, in her developing acceptance of her looks, and her newly discovered ability to cope with the conflict between her own needs and her family’s demands, Schaeffer documents her protagonist’s maturation. Anya (1974) reveals Schaeffer’s remarkable historical imagination through the tale of Anya Savikin, survivor of the Holocaust, who attempts to come to terms with its meaning. The fabric of daily life of Anya’s family, Russian Jews living in Poland, is woven with great care so that its destruction is wholly felt, without authorial comment. Details of dress, household chores, food, and drink form one unifying device—a motif that contrasts the comfortable prewar life with ghetto and concentration camp experiences. As existence itself becomes the paramount goal, these details serve to symbolize the characters’ enormously altered hopes and dreams. Time in Its Flight (1978) examines the inner forces operating among the Steeles, a Vermont clan whose story covers most of the 19th and 20th centuries. Flashbacks, letters, diaries, and excellent
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dialogue all report the ordinary yet important moments in the Steeles’ history. John’s preoccupation with daguerreotypes provides a good image to point up his wife, Edna’s, speculations about the nature of time; both devices serve the central thesis, that little in life changes except the cast of characters, each event renewing the past and invoking the future. In 1980 Schaeffer published a volume of poetry, The Bible of the Beasts of the Little Field; a collection of short fiction, The Queen of Egypt; and Love: A Novel, the powerful story of Esheal Luria’s early life in Russia and his fortunes as an immigrant to the United States. This novel reaffirms Schaeffer’s keen interest in family ties, the tensions that threaten these ties, and the impact of historical events as well as of personal choice upon an individual’s fate. In Schaeffer’s fiction as in her poetry, mother-daughter relationships are crucial, and both Anya and Time in Its Flight movingly portray supportive female friendships. Both the damaging and the nurturing factors are honestly presented, making clear that Schaeffer commands a good understanding of the human condition as well as splendid narrative skill enlivened by rich humor. Although discussion of Schaeffer’s fiction has labeled her a Jewish American writer, her recent novels do not deal with Jewish feminism. The Madness of a Seduced Woman (1983) involves a young woman in 19th-century Vermont; Mainland (1985) and The Injured Party (1986) use Brooklyn writers and academics of no discernible ethnic heritage as their heroines. Buffalo Afternoon (1989) focuses on a teenage Vietnamese girl and an Italian American soldier. As in her earlier novels, Schaeffer writes of women who face the power wielded by memory and the often paralyzing trauma inflicted by family. Human inconstancy and vision and blindness are prevalent images complementing themes of enclosure, and Schaeffer’s rich development of spatial metaphors stresses depression and isolation as female more than male conditions. Schaeffer’s novels are filled with ‘‘ghosts’’—The Madness of a Seduced Woman and Buffalo Afternoon, for instance, have narrators who are themselves dead. Voices from the past and dreams haunt her characters. While some have described her fusion of time as ‘‘Faulknerian,’’ Schaeffer claims this approach as a feminist one: trapped in the present, her heroines must deal with the unresolved past by rejecting their roles as wives and mothers and often by facing the aggression Schaeffer portrays as a given between mother and daughter. Her peripheral male characters aid the heroines’ epiphany because of their constant, albeit marginal, roles. Although Mainland and The Injured Party depict women who are healed by this recovery and acceptance process, The Madness of a Seduced Woman shows the violent consequences when a passionate woman rejects family history in favor of shaping a unique present. Buffalo Afternoon departs from these novels in several ways. While it continues Schaeffer’s interest in memory, death, and identity, its male protagonist faces the chains of generational influence after the horror he undergoes as a soldier in Vietnam. Thus the hero learns to understand a political as well as a familial past.
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Schaeffer tells the story of two seemingly different women in First Nights (1993). Her protagonists, a Swedish actress inspired by Greta Garbo and her West Indian housekeeper, reveal similarities in their characters as the reader follows their relationship over 15 years. The elegant Anna interacts with Ivy, and her character moves from melancholy to a more genuine and identifiable woman. Robert Plunket noted in the New York Times Book Review, ‘‘The problems faced by the most beautiful woman in the world are not the sort that trouble the average reader, and it is not until the conclusion of the book, in an ending both effective and affecting, that Anna becomes a real human being.’’ Another complex female relationship is explored in The Golden Rope (1996). Doris and Florence, identical twins, share the narrative, each with their respective points of view. The sisters’ feelings toward the other are contradictory, as one reveals total attachment to her twin while the other denies her sibling’s existence. Schaeffer explores the lives of two women whose personality traits clash, as the sisters’ reflections alternate throughout the novel. The passive, heartbroken Doris clings to the idea that she and her twin are one spirit in two bodies, while the overemotional Florence sustains the belief that a fierce rivalry is intact. Publishers Weekly noted, ‘‘Schaeffer’s beautifully inflected prose has an affinity with visual art; rich sensory details and vivid imagery give her sentences an almost tactile quality.’’ Schaeffer is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review. She has published new poems in Prairie Schooner, the Southern Review, and the Literary Review, and two novels for young readers: The Dragons of North Chittendon (1986) and The Four Hoods and Great Dog (1988). Schaeffer has received many literary awards: the O. Henry award (1978), the Lawrence award (1984), the Friends of Literature award (1984), and the Prairie Schooner’s Edward Lewis Wallant Award (1984). She received a Guggenheim Fellowship for 1984-85 and the Centennial Review’s Poetry Award in 1985. Schaeffer is Broeklundian Professor of English at Brooklyn College, where she began the M.F.A. program in creative writing. The film rights to Schaeffer’s The Madness of a Seduced Woman have been purchased. OTHER WORKS: Widow (1973). Rhymes and Runes of the Toad (1975). Alphabet for the Lost Years (1976). Times of the King and Queen (1978). Autobiography of Foudini M. Cat (1997). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Pearlman, M., ed., in Mother Puzzles (1989). Pearlman, M., ed., American Women Writing Fiction: Memory, Identity, Family, Space (1989). Reference works: CA (1999). CANR (1986). CLC (1986). DLB (1984). MTCW (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). WW in Writers, Editors and Poets (1989). Other references: APR (Jan./Feb. 1976). Best Sellers (1 Oct. 1974). Book-of-the-Month Club News (July 1978). Centennial Review (1978). MELUS (Winter 1980). NYTBR (20 May 1973, 18
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May 1975, 30 May 1993). Poetry (July 1975). PW (6 May 1996). Southwest Review (Winter 1984). Time (18 June 1973). —JANE S. BAKERMAN, UPDATED BY JOLLEN MASTERS AND ALLISON JONES
SCHMITT, Gladys Born 31 May 1909, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; died 3 October 1972, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Daughter of Henry H. and Leonore Schmitt; married Simon Goldfield, 1937 Gladys Schmitt graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 1932 and in 1933 became an editor at Scholastic magazines. In 1942 Schmitt left Scholastic to teach English at Carnegie Institute of Technology, a job she held until her death. Schmitt was married to a musician who gave up his career and devoted his talents to editing Schmitt’s writing and taking care of her. The Gates of Aulis (1942) is an autobiographical novel about a young woman who needs to define herself by being loved. The failure to gain love through sacrificing herself to another person leads to despair and a suicide attempt before she gains more balanced and therefore redemptive insights. The theme is the need to choose and be committed to a societal myth such as religion. In David the King (1946), Schmitt combines introspective detail and a concern over moral issues with material that could sustain serious philosophic themes. Structural and thematic unity exist in David’s struggles to reconcile his ambition for power with his commitments to God and his people, and to choose an action when faced with moral ambiguity. David, who can achieve selffulfillment because everybody loves him, grows in stature as he becomes capable of self-sacrifice and understands the ways of a God who offers no clear moral guidance. Rembrandt (1961) examines the relationship between the artist, art, and family obligations. Rembrandt’s torments arise from conflicts between commitment to art and shame over disloyalty to people he loves, from conflicts between the need to please those who commission his paintings and the need to paint according to his vision and from bitterness over inadequate recognition. Brief popular success ruins Rembrandt; his love of splendor leads to bankruptcy and superficiality. In The Godforgotten (1972), a formerly monastic, medieval community has lapsed into despair, believing that it has been forgotten by God. The church sends a disaffected priest to restore the people to the fold. He succeeds, but by setting inflexible standards disrupts their family relationships and destroys their faith in simple human values. Sonnets for An Analyst (1973) records the process of Schmitt’s recovery after an emotional breakdown. The sonnets give expression to Schmitt’s memories and dreams; her emotions; her identifications, loyalties, and insecurities; her need for love. The progression of Schmitt’s feelings for the analyst, from anger to
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love to acknowledgment of his role, parallels the movement of her psyche toward acceptance of her losses—above all, the loss of her commitment to religion—and of herself. Schmitt controls her chaotic emotions through language, wit, and irony, and the structure of the sonnet form. Schmitt’s central concerns are with human relationships and especially the need for compassion in a world where the sustaining myth, and therefore the moral bases, are obscured, decayed, or dead. Her fiction is based in characterization; complexity and irony arise from the technique of multiple point of view—the shifting of points of view between chapters or sections to provide different personal and moral perspectives. Schmitt is known as a writer of historical fiction, but this categorization does not do her full justice. Schmitt’s writing is sometimes too philosophically weighty and too artful, but at its best it contains controlled craftsmanship, past worlds richly recreated on the basis of scanty evidence, and searching psychological and moral depth. OTHER WORKS: Alexandra (1947). Confessors of the Name (1952). The Persistent Image (1955). A Small Fire (1957). The Heroic Deeds of Beowulf (1962). Electra (1965). Boris, the Lopsided Bear (1966). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brostoff, A., Only Human Values (1973). Brostoff, A., ed., I Could Be Mute (1978). Reference works: CA (1967). CB (1943). TCAS. Other references: American Scholar (Summer 1961, Winter, 1973). WSJ (16 May 1972). —ANITA BROSTOFF
SCHOFIELD, Sandy See RUSCH, Kristine Kathryn
SCHOOLCRAFT, Mary Howard Born circa 1820 in Beaufort County, South Carolina; died date unknown Wrote under: A Southern Lady Daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Howard; married Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, 1847 There is little biographical information available about Mary Howard Schoolcraft. The only firm facts are her birth place, her marriage in Washington, D.C. to an ethnologist, and her role as his amanuensis. After their marriage, Schoolcraft apparently was instrumental in securing the commission for Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s monumental, six-volume Historical and Statistical
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Information Respecting the History, Conditions, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States (1851-57). Because of his paralysis, Schoolcraft helped with the preparation of this classic document. Schoolcraft’s first published work was a pamphlet, Letters on the Condition of the African Race in the United States (1852), written to her brother, General John H. Howard. Schoolcraft moves from voicing her concern about the abolitionist sentiment then shaking the capital to a description of the good life of the South Carolina slave, as opposed to the degradation and deprivation of the freed black in the North. She declares that the furor over slavery is not a real issue but merely an expression of ‘‘sectional jealousy’’ used as a rhetorical device for commanding public attention. She details the paternal tenderness with which the South Carolina landowner treats his slaves, explains the philosophical reasons for the Southerners’ opposition to abolition, and details the horrors of the freed blacks’ life in Philadelphia. The sentiments in these letters form the core of the novel The Black Gauntlet (1860). This book consists of a series of defences of slavery and diatribes against abolition. Schoolcraft has here fleshed out the sentiments of her pamphlet by the addition of numerous lengthy citations from contemporary speeches and magazine and newspaper articles. The clean, comfortable homes and gardens of the plantation blacks and the relaxed lifestyle of these happy, loyal slaves are described glowingly. Schoolcraft bases her defense of slavery on the thesis that it is mandated by God, who directs His people to take slaves among the heathen for the purpose of Christianizing them and saving their eternal souls. The benevolence of such a system is contrasted with the neglect that the abolitionist exhibits once he has tempted the slave to betray his master’s loving trust. This material is loosely attached to a narrative about the Wyndham family of Beaufort District, South Carolina. Schoolcraft uses the story of the Wyndham daughters, of whom Musidora is apparently an autobiographical character, to preach the values of a strict Christian upbringing and the perils of being an orphan raised by a self-centered stepmother. The Household of Bouverie (1860) repeats some of the themes already treated in The Black Gauntlet. The novel opens as the orphaned Lilian de Courcey meets the grandmother who had apparently abandoned her daughter as an infant. With Lilian’s questioning of her grandmother’s motives and the development of the relationship with her grandmother, the theme of mother love is again explored. Other themes are the visitation of the sins of the fathers on the children and the necessity of expiation of these sins. The plot is skillfully handled, revealing the solutions to the mysteries facing Lilian only at the end of the gothic romance. Schoolcraft’s intentions are clearly didactic. She defends slavery and deplores abolition; she extols Christian duty and motherhood and condemns moral irresponsibility and the lack of altruistic motives in interpersonal relationships. Schoolcraft’s style is hyperbolic and ludicrous by 20th-century standards and her ideas exhibit bigotry, but the plot of The Household of Bouverie does have merit as an example of the gothic thriller.
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OTHER WORKS: Plantation Life: The Narratives of Mrs. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (containing Letters on the Condition of the African Race and The Black Gauntlet, 1969).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Library of Southern Literature (1970). —HARRIETTE CUTTINO BUCHANAN
SCHWARTZ, Lynne Sharon Born 19 March 1939, Brooklyn, New York Daughter of Jack and Sarah Slatus Sharon; married Harry Schwartz, 1957; children: Rachel, Miranda Lynne Sharon Schwartz grew up in Brooklyn, the subject of her most important work to date, Leaving Brooklyn (1989), which she describes as a novel about an adolescent girl’s transition from youthful self-preoccupation to adult consciousness of the greater world beyond. She graduated from Barnard College (1959), received an M.A. in literature from Bryn Mawr College (1961), and did further graduate study in comparative literature at New York University between 1967 and 1972. Schwartz worked as associate editor for the magazine the Writer from 1961 to 1963, and as a writer for Operation Open City, a civil rights-fair housing organization in New York City from 1965 to 1967. She was a lecturer in English at Hunter College of the City University of New York from 1970 to 1975. Schwartz’s other major works include three highly acclaimed novels and two collections of short stories. Her fiction is remarkable for its sharply delineated portraits of the everyday life of the urban middle class; skillfully piercing through the surface of the comfortable, familiar worlds of her characters, she exposes the dreams, anxieties, and absurdities that lie beneath. The rich images with which she paints her characters’ foibles and eccentricities have led critics to compare her to the painter Goya or to Flannery O’Connor. Yet while she often deals with idiosyncrasies of personality and behavior, Schwartz strives to portray the universal motivations that channel human desires. She succeeds unusually well in depicting the complex emotional and psychological underpinnings of the ‘‘dailiness of life,’’ as one reviewer noted, while at the same time exploring the moral and philosophical dilemmas that confront her characters. Her work is distinguished by its broad intellectual range as well as by its clear style, graceful elegance, and wit. Much of Schwartz’s writing probes the contradictory pull between security and risk, order and change, the ‘‘safety of rules and traditions’’ and the ‘‘thrill of defiance.’’ This theme is prominent in Leaving Brooklyn, a novel about Audrey, a 15-year-old girl coming of age just after World War II. Narrated by the
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protagonist, now a mature writer struggling to understand and accept her own history, the story concerns discovery of her physical differences—a ‘‘wandering’’ eye that gives her a special ‘‘double vision’’—and her seduction by her eye doctor, a seduction in which she is a willing participant. By telling ‘‘the story of an eye, and how it came into its own,’’ Schwartz reveals the development of her own ‘‘I,’’ as the girl Audrey begins to ‘‘see’’ the truths beneath Brooklyn’s surface comforts, its rules, and its order, and to distance herself from the conventions of her parents, immigrants once removed, and of Brooklyn. ‘‘Leaving Brooklyn’’ becomes a metaphor for reaching beyond custom, convention, and rules, for risk taking, experience, and passion. In Disturbances in the Field (1983), the comfortable, uppermiddle class lives of Victor Rowe, a painter, and his talented, well-educated wife, Lydia, a chamber pianist, are suddenly split apart after the deaths of two of their children in a school bus accident. Unable to respond to her husband’s emotional needs in the wake of the tragedy, Lydia sets in motion the ‘‘disturbances’’ of the title—when ‘‘something gets between the expressed need on the one hand and the response on the other.’’ This unsettling, compelling story is told crisply and compassionately: through the accumulation of detail, character, and event, Schwartz compiles a stunningly realistic portrait of an intelligent, but ultimately ordinary woman seeking to find meanings in the terrible loss that wrenched the ‘‘placidity’’ from her life. Rough Strife (1980), Schwartz’s first novel, is a chronicle of the emotional dynamics of a marriage over 20 years; Schwartz, in Katha Pollitt’s words, ‘‘registers the fluctuations of marital feeling with the fidelity of a Geiger counter.’’ The attention paid to detail and to exposing the jumbled, contrapuntal realities beneath the surface of what appears to be a successful conventional relationship predicts the course of much of Schwartz’s later fiction. The theme is realized most vividly in Schwartz’s masterful short story collection, Acquainted with the Night and Other Stories (1984). In the title story, a successful 47-year-old architect, given to insomnia, confronts terrifying demons of his past, his psyche, and even beyond, something more ‘‘cosmic’’—as he seeks sleep in the middle of the night. The characters in the 15 other stories of this anthology also wrestle with the terrors, illusions, and fantasies that compose their reality. For Schwartz, true knowledge is based on an understanding of night—the hidden fears, secrets, and reversals of life—as well as of day. The characters in the stories collected in The Melting Pot and Other Subversive Stories (1987) also confront ‘‘the unending cycles of light and darkness’’ that shatter complacency. Nuances of shifting relationships, marriage, and divorce are once again illumined; Schwartz also writes poignantly, and with great good humor, of other subjects—a middle-aged woman undergoing a hysterectomy; another reflecting on the life and death of her opinionated, tempestuous father; a homeless family finding shelter in a Manhattan TV studio. She is particularly concerned with the impact of dream and memory on consciousness: exploring the present, she reaches back to ‘‘subversive’’ impulses—among them, tradition, illusion, and fantasy—that guide contemporary
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lives. Here, as in Leaving Brooklyn and other stories, the daughter of Americanized Jews must confront the meaning of that heritage. While much of Schwartz’s writing defies categorization and she is willing to experiment—The Fatigue Artist (1995) includes a series of graphics of an empty swimming pool—she belongs very much to a group of politically oriented Jewish women writers that includes Grace Paley, Rosellen Brown, Cynthia Ozick, and Erica Jong. She is emphatically not an autobiographical writer in her fiction—the long 1996 essay in Ruined by Reading: A Life in Books is another matter entirely—but her life inevitably informs her work. In The Fatigue Artist, Schwartz examines and satirizes both traditional and nontraditional medical practice as well as the profound effect a chronic illness (in this case the virus known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) can have on the person who has it. The novel was particularly well reviewed by Oregon poet Floyd Skloot, a sufferer of the same disease. A new novel, In the Family Way, was published in late 1999 and a book of essays, Only Connect is due in 2000. A widely respected teacher of writing, Schwartz has taught at the graduate level at Washington University in St. Louis, Columbia University, and the University of California at Irvine, as well as in such workshops as Bread Loaf. Schwartz has been widely anthologized in The Pushcart Prize III; The Best American Short Stories and many other prize-winning anthologies. Essays, satirical pieces, and translations have appeared in Harper’s, the New York Times, Threepenny Review, Ladies’ Home Journal, Dance magazine, and the Best American Essays, 1998, among others. Schwartz is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the New York State Foundation for the Arts. Leaving Brooklyn was nominated for the 1989 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction and was a Literary Guild Selection and the winner of Hadassah magazine’s Harold U. Ribalow award. Her first novel, Rough Strife, was nominated for the PEN/Hemingway First Novel award and a National Book award and received the Great Lakes College Association Honorable Mention. OTHER WORKS: Balancing Acts (1981). We Are Taking About Homes: A Great University Against Its Neighbors (1985). The Four Questions (text for paintings by O. Sherman, 1989). Smoke Over Birkenau (by L. Millu, translated by Schwartz from Italian, 1991). A Lynne Sharon Schwartz Reader: Selected Poetry and Prose (1992). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1982). CLC (1985). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: American Book Review (Nov./Dec. 1989). Hudson Review (Spring 1984). NYTBR (6 Nov. 1983, 26 Aug. 1984, 24 Nov. 1985, 16 Apr. 1989). Newsweek (14 Jan. 1985). Sewanee Review (Spring 1985). WRB (Sept. 1989). —JOYCE ANTLER, UPDATED BY MARTHA ULLMAN WEST
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SCOTT, Anne Firor Born 24 April 1921, Montezuma, Georgia Daughter of John W. and Mary Moss Firor; married Andrew M. Scott, 1947; children: Rebecca, David, Donald Historian Anne Firor Scott has a unique perspective on remembering when women received suffrage in the United States. Born nine months after the suffrage amendment passed, Scott and women’s right to vote came into being nearly at the same time. As the only girl among four siblings, Scott was never taught that girls were inferior. Only when she was in college did a favorite professor warn her that being female might limit her opportunities. Her parents, however, set out to give her every opportunity. Her mother was a full-time homemaker and her father was a college professor. An early influence on Anne was reading. Her father would read aloud to his children. But rather than reading them children’s books, he read them his favorites. This emphasis on the printed word would stand Scott in good stead. She did not set out to be a historian or educator. In her autobiographical essay, ‘‘A Historian’s Odyssey,’’ Scott read back through her journals, which by 1984 numbered 20 volumes, to examine her choices. She realized that she came to history by chance. ‘‘If my journal is to be believed,’’ she wrote, ‘‘I went out into the world in 1940 in search of fame, fortune, and a husband, in no particular order. As to how that search was to be conducted the journal is significantly silent. It was very much a matter of what might turn up.’’ Scott attended the University of Georgia and graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1941. After graduation, she held a job at IBM and was briefly enrolled in a graduate program for personnel managers. It was a U.S. Congressional internship that marked a pivotal juncture; her internship responsibilities included writing speeches and listening to politicians talking, both of which had a tremendous impact on her. She later wrote, ‘‘[The experiences] made me so painfully aware of my ignorance that I went back to school.’’ She chose Northwestern University, where she earned a master’s degree in political science. She then took a job with the National League of Women Voters, married, and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. She enrolled in the American Civilization program at Harvard because it ‘‘seemed to have few requirements but plenty of scope.’’ Before she could finish her dissertation, her husband, who had already finished his degree, secured a job in Washington, D.C. and they moved. Scott mused years later, ‘‘All our planning was for his career; it did not occur to me to think this odd.’’ Seven years and three children later, she finished her dissertation and took a job teaching history at Haverford College in Haverford, Pennsylvania. While Scott’s decision to study history may have been indirect, her specialization in the study of women’s history was not accidental. Her maternal grandmother had worked for the League of Women Voters. At the age of twenty-three, Scott decided to write a history of women, beginning with Eve. These interests and influences led her to research the history of women of the American South. She soon found ‘‘there was almost no
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historiographical tradition and no network of established scholars. My temerity rested not on courage but on ignorance; if I had known what was involved I might never have begun.’’ Her ‘‘ignorance’’ resulted in her first book, The Southern Lady (1970), now considered a classic in the field of women’s history. After her temporary appointments at Haverford College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she was hired as assistant professor of history at Duke University. In 1980 she earned the distinguished rank of W. K. Boyd Professor of History and in 1991 W. K. Boyd Professor of History Emerita. The recipient of many fellowships, prizes, and honorary degrees, Scott was awarded a university medal from Duke in 1994, a Berkshire Conference Prize in 1980, and honorary degrees from Queens College, Northwestern University, Radcliffe College, and the University of the South. The author of numerous articles, chapters for books and introductions to the work of other scholars, as well as her own books, Scott is best known as one of the first historians of U.S. women. She is clear in remembering those who went before her. In Unheard Voices: The First Historians of Southern Women (1993), she reflected, ‘‘It is impossible to measure the cost to the world of scholarship of their marginality (and that of so many other), or the cost to themselves.’’ Scott tried to mitigate this cost for subsequent generations of women historians in service to the profession. She served as president of the Organization of American Historians and president of the Southern Historical Association, and on the advisory boards of the Schlesinger Library, the Princeton University Department of History, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. OTHER WORKS: The American Woman: Who Was She? (1970). One Half the People (with A. M. Scott 1975). Making the Invisible Woman Visible (1984). Virginia Women: The First Hundred Years (with S. Lebsock (1988). Natural Allies: Women’s Associations in American History (1991). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: American Women Historians, 1700s-1990s: A Biographical Dictionary (1996). CA (1973). —CELESTE DEROCHE
SCOTT, Evelyn Born Elise Dunn, 17 January 1893, Clarksville, Tennessee; died 1963, New York, New York Also wrote under: E. Souza Daughter of Seely and Thomas Dunn; married Frederick C. Wellman (Cyril Kay Scott), 1919 (common law); John Metcalf, 1928 Although Evelyn Scott’s family no longer held the moneyed position it enjoyed before the Civil War, Scott was trained in the values of the Southern aristocratic tradition. At fifteen, she
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rejected the role of the Southern woman and became an ardent feminist; at eighteen the Dunn family moved to New Orleans. She enrolled in Sophie Newcomb College, but never finished her studies there; instead, she educated herself. In 1913 Scott ran away to Brazil with the dean of the School of Tropical Medicine of Tulane University, and they changed their names to Evelyn and Cyril Kay Scott. One son was born in Brazil. The Scotts returned in 1920, lived in Greenwich Village and Cape Cod, and separated in Bermuda. In 1928 Scott married British novelist John Metcalf. Escapade (1923) is an account of Scott’s six-year exile with her lover in Brazil. It is written in a subjectively impressionistic style, controlled by a conception: the entanglement of life and death in a conflict between the lush tropical growth soaring above villages of earthy natives and Scott’s deathlike isolation. By selecting images that express feelings and actions, Scott balances emotionalism with understanding, and avoids immersion in subjectivity. Scott endured hunger, squalor, severe illness, and a fearful pregnancy. Each episode or carefully composed moment is imbued with Scott’s belief that only in the presence of death do we discover life. Background in Tennessee (1937) is an autobiographical history in which Scott discusses the sociological, economic, religious, and cultural growth of the South, integrating her own experiences and judgements. Scott believed the slow growth of culture in the South was due to the short span of time between the Revolution and the Civil War; most of the important men of the South were orators and politicians, not artists. Scott wrote several novel trilogies: The Narrow House (1921), Narcissus (1922), and The Golden Door (1925) are about three generations of a family attempting to hold on to their selfmade ideals and hollow beliefs. Migrations (1927), The Wave (1929), and A Calendar of Sin (1932) cover American history from 1850 to 1918. In The Wave, set during the Civil War, Scott combined over 100 episodes in a deliberately structured mosaic, illustrating the conflict of individuals with society and with themselves. Scott equated the perversion of war with the perversion of love lying in the heart of each individual. The range of Scott’s other publications is broad. Precipitations (1920), her first book, is of imagist poetry. The Winter Alone (1930) contains poetry more varied in subject and techniques. Love, a play, was performed by the Provincetown Players in 1930. Scott wrote a mystery, Blue Rum (1930), under the name E. Souza, and three juvenile books: In the Endless Sands (1925), Witch Perkins (1928), and Billy, the Maverick (1934). Scott possessed the rare combination of emotional intuition and an artistic genius for style and technique. She was a fervent intellectual, sensitive but analytical. She had no strict philosophy, but she consistently strove in her life and work for freedom from every limitation. Scott believed in authorial intrusion and wrote all her fiction from an omniscient point of view, a technique which gave her the freedom she desired. Scott’s major works can be read and studied simultaneously on psychological, philosophical, and artistic levels.
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OTHER WORKS: Ideals (1927). Eva Gay (1933). Breathe Upon These Slain (1934). Bread and a Sword (1937). Shadow of a Hawk (1941). The papers of Evelyn Scott and two unfinished novels are in the possession of Robert L. Welker.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Scott, C. K., Life Is Too Short (1943). Welker, R. L., ‘‘Liebestod with a Southern Accent,’’ in Reality and Myth (1964). Reference works: America Now (1938). Living Authors (1935). —PEGGY BACH
SCOTT, Joan Wallach Born 18 December 1941, Brooklyn, New York Married Donald Scott With the development of the new social history in the 1960s, history from ‘‘the bottom up’’ grew in scope, importance, and diversity. Historian Joan Wallach Scott is a leading figure in the development of women’s history, labor history, and gender theory. A renowned teacher and writer, Scott is an influential participant in the ongoing postmodern debate. The daughter of two high school teachers, Scott knew early in her life that she wanted to be a historian. She attended Brandeis University, graduating with a bachelor’s degree magna cum laude in 1962. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1969. Her first academic appointment was as assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle. From there she taught at Northwestern University, where she was the first woman faculty member in the history department. Her next appointment was as first assistant and then associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 1980 she was appointed Nancy Duke Lewis Professor at Brown University. She continued to encounter ‘‘firsts’’: this time she was the first woman to secure tenure in the history department at Brown. During her time at Brown, she also served as director of the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. Her current position is at Princeton University. She is only the second woman to be invited to join the faculty of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, an institute founded by Albert Einstein and others in 1930. In an interview with Katherine Hinds, Scott described her appointment to the Institute’s faculty as significant to women’s studies, a field ‘‘which has been struggling to legitimize itself in the scholarly world for the last ten to fifteen years.’’ Scott’s first book brought together her interests in French social history and labor history. The Glassworkers of Carmaux:
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French Craftsmen and Political Action in a Nineteenth-Century City (1974) won the American Historical Association’s prize for the best first book written by an American on European history. It made a critical contribution to the developing specialty of the new labor history. Scott is perhaps best known for her penetrating work in exploring gender dynamics in history and in historiography. She decided to focus more on these issues when students began to demand courses on women. She forthrightly addressed the invisibility of gender (which she herself acknowledged characterized her first book) in her second book, Women, Work, and Family (1978). Coauthored with Louise Tilly, this book examines how women figured—actually and symbolically—in working-class history. She told Katherine Hinds in 1985, ‘‘Since labor history is my field, it seems appropriate to take these questions about women and gender and work them into labor history.’’ Most recently, Scott’s scholarship has brought her into the center of the sometimes contentious realm of French postmodern theory. Scott has been influential in the consideration of how this theory can apply to the study of history. She borrows from Michel Foucault in arguing that history is the study of politics. Like Foucault, Scott contends that politics cannot be simply defined in governmental terms, but rather as ‘‘contests that involve power.’’ Scott and others continue to debate power as not only ‘‘a relationship of repression or domination but also a set of relationships or processes that produce positive effects.’’ She maintains all history is decision-making, all history is political. Scott provides important leadership in opening the historical profession to other women. She gives a great deal of service to the profession, inside and outside her universities. While at Chapel Hill, she chaired the University of North Carolina Committee on the Status of Women. For the American Historical Association, she chaired the Committee on Women Historians. Her expertise includes institution building. She was instrumental in establishing women’s studies programs at the University of North Carolina and at Brown.
OTHER WORKS: Gender and the Politics of History (1988). Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (1996).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: American Women Historians, 1700s-1990s: A Biographical Dictionary (1996). CA (1973, 1978). Other references: Change (July/Aug. 1985). —CELESTE DEROCHE
SCOTT, Julia See OWEN, Mary Alicia
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SCOTT-MAXWELL, Florida Born Florida Pier MacChesney, 24 September 1883, Orange Park, Florida; died 6 March 1979, Exeter, England Daughter of Robert and Anna Pier MacChesney; married Scott J. Scott-Maxwell, 1910 (divorced 1929); children: four In her writing and in her various careers, Florida Scott-Maxwell’s life was defined by her curiosity, her allegiance to women’s issues, and her devotion to writing. Named for the state of Florida where she was born, Scott-Maxwell grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she attended public school until the age of fifteen when she moved to New York City. By age sixteen, she had enrolled in a drama school, which launched her brief career as an actress at the Edwin Mayo Theater Company. In her twenties, she began a second career writing short stories that were published in Harper’s and Century magazines. In due course, she became the first woman hired by the New York Evening Sun, where she wrote a weekly column. In 1910 she married Scott Maxwell-Scott; the couple moved to Ballieston, England, near Glasgow, Scotland. Because so few details on her life are available, the names, ages, and gender of their four children are at this time unknown. Dividing her time between marriage and career, she worked for women’s suffrage and wrote a feminist play, The Flash Point (1914). After divorcing Scott-Maxwell in 1929, Florida, now forty-six, moved to London, where she supported her family writing columns, short stories, reviews, and the play Many Women, which was produced in 1932 at the Arts Theater. Meanwhile, she became interested in Jungian psychology, trained as an analyst under Carl Jung, and practiced throughout the 1930s in clinics in both Scotland and England. In 1939 she published Toward Relationships, which examines the difficulties women face maintaining a sense of individuality while fulfilling their socially assigned roles. Toward Relationships takes a Jungian approach to feminist themes such as woman as ‘‘other,’’ and the importance of feminine, or nurturing, qualities in a world that values achievement and progress—themes current in today’s gender debates. After World War II, she began writing plays again. I Said to Myself (1946) implemented an experimental narrative approach that used several actors to represent various personality traits of one central character. Women and Sometimes Men, her second Jungian-feminist tract, elaborated on themes introduced in Toward Relationships. While many of Scott-Maxwell’s publications and dramas received negative criticism, her most famous and provocative book, The Measure of My Days (1968), has been widely anthologized and highly acclaimed. Looking at once back over her life while examining her continued search for self-understanding, this self-critical yet life-affirming journal examines the passions and problems of aging. Reflecting on old age, adult children and grandchildren, the nature of love and work, and the significance of owning the self
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comprises a process that makes her ‘‘fierce with reality.’’ In a powerful commitment to living in the present, she proclaims: ‘‘At my age I care to my roots about the quality of women, and I care because I know how important her quality is.’’
OTHER WORKS: The Kinsmen Knew How to Die (with S. Batcharsky, 1931).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Allison, K. A. Florida Scott-Maxwell: Biography of a Woman/Writer (dissertation, 1990). Cahill, S., Writing Women’s Lives: An Anthology of Autobiographical Narratives by Twentieth Century American Women Writers (1994). Ireland, N. O., Index to Women of the World from Ancient to Modern Times: A Supplement (1988). Moffat, M. J., and C. Painter, Revelations: Diaries of Women (1974). Rose, P., The Norton Book of Women’s Lives (1993). Reference works: Biography Index 8 (1971), 10 (1977). Encyclopedia of British Women Writers. —MIRIAM KALMAN HARRIS, PH.D.
SCUDDER, Vida Dutton Born 15 December 1861, Madura, India; died 9 October 1954, Wellesley, Massachusetts Daughter of David C. and Harriet Dutton Scudder Vida Dutton Scudder spent her lifetime attempting to unite literature, socialism, and Christianity. She was a member of the Wellesley College Department of English for 41 years (1887-1928) but achieved her fame as an activist Christian socialist. She helped to found college settlements on the East Coast, working at Denison House in Boston. She was a tireless advocate for higher education for women, took a public role in the debate of the issues of her times (workers’ rights, democracy, social community), and was a prolific writer. She was above all an idealist with strong leanings both toward the world and its politics and the church and its organizations. Born in India where her father served as a Congregationalist missionary, she was related to old New England families through each parent. When her father died suddenly in 1862, the infant Vida and her mother returned to the Dutton home in Auburndale, Massachusetts. Scudder grew up surrounded by doting grandparents, distinguished aunts and uncles, and a devoted mother. Scudder spent much of her childhood in Europe; she absorbed as much from her mother as from their travels. This exposure set for life her devotion to beauty and tradition. In 1878 she joined the first class of Girls’ Latin School in Boston and in
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1880 entered Smith College. After graduating from Smith, she spent an academic year at Oxford University, among the first American women to be accepted as special students there, where she heard John Ruskin present the last set of lectures he gave before he retired. Through these lectures she became aware of the ‘‘plethora of privilege’’ in her life. She came away from Ruskin and Oxford filled with a social radicalism, and returned to Smith to obtain her master’s degree. Ruskin’s ideas gave Scudder a way to link literature to social reality and social purpose. Scudder accepted a position in the English Department at Wellesley College in 1887. She chose Wellesley over Smith so she could remain with her mother. From the outset, both a great love of letters and a growing social concern animated her teaching. Her two earliest books, The Life of the Spirit in Modern English Poets (1895) and Social Ideals in English Letters (1898), reflected this combination. While teaching gave her more self-confidence, Scudder continued to worry about ‘‘privilege unshared.’’ This concern led her in 1887 to form a college settlement organization, the college Settlements Association. When the first settlement opened on Rivington Street in New York City in 1889, Scudder, as secretary of the electoral board of the association, promoted its work on college campuses. In 1893 she took a leave of absence from Wellesley to join in the official opening of Denison House in Boston’s South End. For the next 20 years she was an integral part of the continued existence of the settlement. Scudder’s deep commitment to social activism informed her teaching career to such a degree that rather than writing the literary criticism that would have given her more prestige among her colleagues, she wrote books designed to convince people that their beliefs should commit them to ‘‘social reconstruction.’’ It was perhaps a natural progression for Scudder to decide in 1889 to become a member of William D. P. Bliss’ Society of Christian Socialists, a charter member of the Brotherhood of the Carpenter, and an active worker in the Christian Social Union. Her settlement work and her friendships with the women in settlement neighborhoods turned her attention to the practical side of the labor question. Yet these priorities often put Scudder in conflict with the Wellesley College administration over her socialist activities. In 1911 Scudder was a founding member of the Episcopal Church Socialist League. The goal of the League was to encourage the application of Christian principles to industrial and social relations. In Socialism and Character (1912), she tried to reconcile the apparent differences between Christianity and socialism. Through her socialist connections, Scudder was asked to speak in Lawrence, Massachusetts, during the 1912 textile strike, where her speech led to demands for her resignation from Wellesley. Scudder weathered this storm and remained at Wellesley until her retirement in 1928, when a new phase of her career began. Years of research on the early history of the Franciscans resulted in her major work, The Franciscan Adventure (1931), and established her as a leading Franciscan scholar. Her greatest
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contribution to the growth of Christian social thought in the United States came through her writing. Her autobiography, On Journey (1937), provides a perceptive review of 75 years of social history and of her own religious ideals. Only age could curtail her activities, because her interest in the social questions of her time never waned. In 1952 she published My Quest for Reality, a sequel to her autobiography. She died suddenly in 1954. OTHER WORKS: The Witness of Denial (1895). Introduction to the Study of English Literature (1901). A Listener in Babel: Being a Series of Imaginary Conversations (1903). Saint Catherine of Siena as Seen in Her Letters (1905). The Disciple of a Saint (1907). Le Morte d’Arthur of Sir Thomas Malory and Its Sources (1917). The Church and the Hour: Reflections of a Socialist Churchwoman (1917). The Social Teachings of the Christian Year (1921). Brother John: A Tale of the First Franciscans (1927). The Privilege of Age: Essays Secular and Spiritual (1939). Father Huntington (1940). BIBLIOGRAPHY: NAW: The Modern Period (1980). DLB: American Literary Critics and Scholars, 1880-1900 (1988). —CELESTE DEROCHE
SEAMAN, Elizabeth Cochrane Born 5 May 1865, Cochran’s Mills, Pennsylvania; died 27 January 1922, New York, New York Wrote under: Nellie Bly Daughter of Michael and Mary Jane Cochran; married Robert L. Seaman, 1895 (died 1910) Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman, a.k.a. Nellie Bly, spent her youth in a small milltown; her education, except for one year in a local boarding school, was directed by her father, a lawyer and mill owner. After the death of her father, who left only a small legacy, Seaman moved to Pittsburgh with her mother and sought work for their support. Seaman found her first journalism position with the Pittsburgh Dispatch at nineteen. At twenty, she moved to New York, attaining a position on Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World which she kept from 1887 until 1895. She became an international celebrity after her 72-day trip around the world, breaking the record of Jules Verne’s fictional hero Phileas Fogg. In the U.S., her exposé stories about urban social conditions and corruption were widely syndicated. Seaman’s husband was an industrialist and a New York socialite. After his death in 1910, she controlled his failing business interests through 1919. Returning to journalism, she worked on the New York Journal until her death in 1922. Seaman’s writings consisted primarily of articles written for the Dispatch and the World, some of which appeared as subscription series books. Ten Days in a Mad-house (1887) contained
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three stories written for the World, an article about Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum, sketches on servant girls’ experiences at employment agencies, and a piece on shop girls working in a paper box factory. The story of Blackwell’s Island, pronounced by the World to be ‘‘an immense sensation everywhere,’’ established Seaman as a journalist in New York. She pretended insanity in order to ‘‘chronicle’’ the ‘‘simple tale of life in an asylum.’’ She illustrated conditions and treatment of patients by describing her personal experiences and the experiences of individual women whom she met. Her narrative, written in unadorned prose, was a dramatic and realistic account. To arouse the reader’s emotions Seaman openly expressed sympathy for ‘‘her suffering sisters’’ and her intent to ‘‘influence others to make life more bearable for them.’’ While the asylum story and others which Seaman wrote appeared under ‘‘sensationalist’’ headlines—‘‘Behind Asylum Bars’’ or ‘‘Nellie Bly as a White Slave’’—her exposé journalism, in both content and style, was an early manifestation of the progressive period’s muckraking journalism. Six Months in Mexico (1888), Seaman’s most thoughtful and stylistically pleasing (although often repetitive) book, was an examination of national character and an exposé of corruption and exploitative social conditions. The fact that Seaman went to Mexico as a foreign correspondent in late 1886 made the book a significant document, for this was a period when few other American journalists were providing the public with firsthand information about their neighboring country. Seaman recorded ‘‘Mexico in all its splendor,’’ but she also showed that through ‘‘civilization’s curse or blessing,’’ the country was becoming a ‘‘new California.’’ While the book indicated Seaman’s sensitivity to unjust social conditions, especially for women and the native Indian population, and provided a record of the responses of an American middle class woman toward a culture both alien and ‘‘beautiful’’ to her, it was occasionally condescending in tone. The ‘‘around the world’’ story for which Seaman achieved the widest attention was of the ‘‘stunt’’ variety. Chronicling her journey in Nellie Bly’s Book: Around the World in Seventy-two Days (1890), Seaman presents herself as a ‘‘free American girl’’ encountering diverse cultures, all exciting and exotic, but none measuring up to the American way of life. She provides colorful descriptions of peoples and customs while maintaining the suspense of her race against time. From San Francisco to New York, Seaman was met with extraordinary public adulation; her journey was celebrated in song and dance; toys, clothing, and games carried her name. Seaman’s story of ‘‘Nellie Bly’s stunt’’ and the public response to it are material for a case study of the rapidly changing relationship between the press and the popular mind in the late 19th century.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Marzolf, M., Up From the Footnote: A History of Women Journalists (1977). Noble, I., Nellie Bly: First Woman Reporter (1956). Quillan, J., Nellie Bly (produced 1946).
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Rittenhouse, M., The Amazing Nellie Bly (1956). Ross, I., Ladies of the Press (1936). Reference works: A Woman of the Century (1893). Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia (1987). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Pittsburgh Press (8 Jan. 1967, 15 Jan. 1967). —JENNIFER L. TEBBE
because the feminine nature innately lacked the faculty for invention. Seawell then campaigned against suffrage in national magazines and The Ladies’ Battle (1911). She attacked suffragists as women ‘‘born with socialistic and communistic rather than domestic tendencies’’ who ‘‘have an antagonism to men.’’ Even contemporary reviews of Seawell’s work were often lukewarm: her novels were called ‘‘wholesome,’’ ‘‘slight,’’ and ‘‘unpretentious.’’ Plot was never her strong point, and the perfect ladies and gentlemen, the overt racism, and the condescending tone are interesting only because they reflect values once widespread.
SEAWELL, Molly Elliot Born 23 October 1860, Gloucester County, Virginia; died 15 November 1916, Washington, D.C. Also wrote under: Foxcroft Davis, Vera Sapoukhyn Daughter of John T. and Frances Jackson Seawell Molly Elliot Seawell was born on a Virginia country estate. Educated primarily at home, Seawell learned riding, dancing and household management, and read history, encyclopedias, Shakespeare, and the Romantic poets. After her father’s death, Seawell supported her mother and sister by writing stories and as Washington correspondent for a New York daily. Seawell’s earliest books were regional novels. Throckmorton (1890) established the basic cast: an elderly old-school southern gentleman, childish but faithful black servants, and young lovers kept apart by family difficulties. Seawell’s romantic novels are Ruritanian fantasies tied to some period which allows a historical personage to appear in a minor role—Voltaire in Francezka (1902), Robespierre in The Last Duchess of Belgarde (1908), Napoleon in The Fortunes of Fifi (1903), and so forth. The heroines are active, courageous, stoic, and impeccably pure. The narrative grows from a piquant situation rather than a complex plot. The books for boys (primarily sea stories) dwell on honor, not action; heroism is demonstrated by dutiful self-sacrifice instead of valiant aggression. Little Jarvis (1890) remains at his post and dies when the mast is struck by cannon shot, and the manly officers of Through Thick and Thin (1893) risk their lives to bring water to their suffering men. Despotism and Democracy (1903), published anonymously, and the two books by ‘‘Foxcroft Davis,’’ Mrs. Darrell (1905) and The Whirl (1909), treat Washington society and politics in the silver-fork tradition. The characters are senators, justices, and British diplomats, but the action takes place in drawing rooms and at dinner tables. Seawell’s article ‘‘On the Absence of the Creative Faculty in Women,’’ published in the Critic in 1891, set off a debate which occupied the letters column for several months. Her thesis was that women had never produced any immortal books or art
OTHER WORKS: The Berkeleys and their Neighbors (1888, rev. ed. 1892). Hale-Weston (1888). Maid Marian, and Other Stories (1891, dramatization, 1893). Midshipman Paulding (1891). Children of Destiny (1893). Paul Jones (1893). Decatur and Somers (1894). Quarterdeck and Fok’sle (1895). The Sprightly Romance of Marsac (1895, dramatization by Seawell, 1900). A Strange, Sad Comedy (1896). A Virginia Cavalier (1896). The History of the Lady Betty Stair (1897). Twelve Naval Captains (1897). The Loves of Lady Arabella (1898). The Rock and the Lion (1898). The Lively Adventures of Gavin Hamilton (1899). The House of Egremont (1900). Papa Bouchard (1901). Laurie Vane, and Other Stories (1901). The Great Scoop (1903). The Chateau of Montplaisir (1906). The Victory (1906). The Secret of Toni (1907). The Imprisoned Midshipman (1908). The Marriage of Theodora (1910). The Jugglers (1911). The Son of Columbus (1912). Betty’s Virginia Christmas (1914). Betty at Fort Blizzard (1916).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: American Women (1938). DAB. Library of Southern Literature (1970). NCAB. TCA. (1942). Other references: Bookman (Jan. 1901). Critic (28 Nov. 1891, 19 Mar. 1892). NYT (16 Nov. 1916). North American Review (Mar. 1914). —SALLY MITCHELL
SECOR, Lella Born February 1887, Battle Creek, Michigan; died 16 January 1966, Birmingham, England Wrote under: Lella Secor Florence, Lella Faye Secor Daughter of William and Loretta Sowle Secor; married Philip S. Florence, 1917; children: two sons The youngest of seven children of her mother’s two marriages, Lella Secor grew up in a fatherless household. The family was poor. As a child, Secor helped in her mother’s boarding
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house, and after high school, she found work at the Battle Creek Journal. About 1910, Secor followed her brother to Coulee, Washington, homesteading a claim next to his. She later ceded her claim to him when she resumed her newspaper work. In 1915, Secor represented the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on Henry Ford’s ‘‘Peace Ship’’ to Europe and returned to New York a committed pacifist. Secor was cofounder of two organizations devoted to keeping the U.S. out of World War I—the American Neutral Conference Committee and the Emergency Peace Federation—for which she wrote impassioned advertisements, articles, and tracts. She describes this period in ‘‘The Ford Peace Ship and After,’’ in Julian Bell’s We Did Not Fight: 1914-18 Experiences of War Resisters (1935), a collection of articles by outstanding British pacificists such as Bertrand Russell, David Garnett, and Roger Angell. Secor’s article is also printed in The History of the Woman’s Peace Party, edited by Marie Louise Degan (1939). In Lella Secor: A Diary in Letters, 1915-1922 (1978), edited by her daughter-in-law, Secor’s letters to her mother and sisters show a woman indomitable in her quest for independence. Telling of her attempts to enlist all America’s antiwar resources under one aegis, Secor’s letters blaze with zeal. In 1917 Secor married British economist Philip Sargant Florence; two sons were born. The later letters describe her new life as wife and mother. Resolutely cheerful in tone, they nevertheless reveal weariness and discouragement at her loss of personal freedom. In 1921 Secor’s husband secured a lectureship at Cambridge University, and the family moved to England, where the ready availability of servants freed Secor to take up an activist role. Birth Control on Trial (1930) discusses Secor’s work at the Cambridge Clinic, of which she was a founder. In 1929 her husband accepted a chair in economics at Birmingham University; there Secor worked to promote world disarmament, Labour politics, women’s rights, slum clearance, and family planning. In 1949, on a trip to Egypt, Secor and her husband were cut off by the outbreak of World War II; they escaped to America, and spent a year in Washington, D.C., before returning to England. Secor describes their adventures in My Goodness! My Passport! (1942). Back in England, Secor worked at the American embassy, promoting greater understanding of America by the British. During this period, she also gave radio talks on the BBC and wrote articles for British periodicals and two books. Only an Ocean Between (1943) and Our Private Lives (1944) are designed for mass consumption, and it is easy to see why Secor’s chatty style helped make them popular in England during the war.
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stirring and little known episode in American history. The account in My Goodness! My Passport! of her flight from Egypt, while exceptionally wide-eyed, is still an exciting yarn by a woman possessed of both curiosity and nerve. In contrast to her subjective writing, Secor’s two volumes on birth control show considerable restraint. Undertaken in a spirit of scientific inquiry, they nevertheless attest, in the vivid prose of their case histories, to Secor’s own belief in the necessity of family planning. Although Secor was to spend more than half her life in England, she remained a particularly American writer. Her straightforward prose and gift for affecting anecdote reveal her origins as an American journalist and propagandist. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Booklist (15 Sept. 1978). CSM (Sept. 1978). New Directions for Women (Autumn 1978). SR (22 July 1978). LAT (17 Oct. 1978). —BARBARA MOENCH FLORENCE
SEDGES, John See BUCK, Pearl S.
SEDGWICK, Anne Douglas Born 28 March 1873, Englewood, New Jersey; died 19 July 1935, Hampstead, England Daughter of George S. and Mary Douglas Sedgwick; married Basil de Sélincourt, 1908 Born to gentility and wealth and descended from early settlers of Massachusetts, Anne Douglas Sedgwick developed a strong if idealistic sense of caste and tradition, which later expanded into a Jamesian preoccupation with the social and psychological relationships between people of different cultures. She was intrigued particularly by the confrontation of English and French cultures and by the American’s encounter with the mores and values of the old world. Sedgwick’s affluent and genteel background also generated a devotion to social manners, costume, and interior design.
After the war, Secor channeled her energies into the Birmingham Family Planning Association, serving for 10 years as its chairperson. Progress Report on Birth Control (1956) is based on research into the case histories of the clinic’s patients.
As a child, Sedgwick lived in her parents’ elegant home in Irvington-on-Hudson, near New York City, and was educated by a governess. Except for two happy years spent with grandparents in Ohio when she was a teenager, childhood provided Sedgwick with her only sustained exposure to her native America. During Sedgwick’s tenth year, her father, an attorney, moved his wife and three daughters to London. There Sedgwick lived and studied until she was eighteen. Then she studied painting in Paris for five years.
Secor’s chapter on the Peace Ship in We Did Not Fight is perhaps her most outstanding piece of writing, evoking as it does a
It is not, however, as a painter but as a novelist that Sedgwick is best known. The Dull Miss Archinard (1898), a half-serious
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venture on Sedgwick’s part, became a popular success and gave Sedgwick the impetus to continue writing stories about an existence devoid of emotions and barely touched by the daily vicissitudes of life. Sedgwick married Basil de Sélincourt, an English essayist, in 1908. Except for the World War I years, when she and her husband worked in France as hospital volunteers, Sedgwick conducted her affairs from her home near the Cotswolds. She cultivated the image of the genteel lady of letters who tended her rosebushes, served tea to the prime minister’s wife, and wrote pleasant fiction, and who was equally conversant with fashionable ladies and radical writers. The de Sélincourt ‘‘salon’’ admitted aristocrats, prominent politicians, and literary notables. Most of Sedgwick’s ‘‘liberal thinking’’ and social consciousness was, however, something of a pose, common among the genteel class of her era and more the expression of sentimental idealism than real commitment. In 1931 Sedgwick was elected to the (American) National Institute of Arts and Letters, having written 17 novels, two collections of short stories, and a rather charming account of the reminiscences of a friend, A Childhood in Brittany Eighty Years Ago (1919). She died in 1935 after a lengthy paralytic illness. Tante (1911) was Sedgwick’s most successful novel measured by American sales, but The Little French Girl (1924) is artistically better. Though as is characteristic of Sedgwick’s fiction, the precocious child of the latter book is a little too precocious, the sensitive man a little too sensitive, and the mysterious lady a little too mysterious. Yet Sedgwick plays out her theme of the tensions created by cultural differences well, and gives the characters some fullness of personality missing in her other books. Also attractive is the juxtaposition of the vitality of the little French girl’s promiscuous mother to the insipidness of the child’s virginial friend, Toppie. The apparently selfless and saintly Toppie emerges as the character whose selflessness has been an effective cover for a fundamental egocentricity and martyr-complex that threatens to harm not only herself but others. Toppie is an example of Sedgwick’s best efforts at irony and perceptive characterization. Sedgwick’s female characters are interesting combinations of conventionality and modernism. Generally the positive heroines are man-and-marriage (but not maternity) oriented. Yet, like Gillian in The Old Countess (1927) they reveal an independence of spirit, thought, and emotional reaction that makes the reader wish Sedgwick had devoted more time to character and less to plot. As novels of manners, Sedgwick’s novels are accurate and thorough representations of the social customs and attitudes of the cultures they analyze, but she never quite manages a sustained psychological realism. Invariably, Sedgwick is carried away by romantic plots, idealism, and the social mise en scene. OTHER WORKS: The Confounding of Camelia (1899). The Rescue (1902). Paths of Judgment (1904). The Shadow of Life (1906). A Fountain Sealed (English title, Valerie Upton, 1907). Annabel Channice (1908). Franklin Winslow Kane (1910). The Nest
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(1912). Short Stories (1913). The Encounter (1914). The Third Window (1920). Christmas Roses (English title, Autumn Crocuses, 1920). Christmas Roses, and Other Stories (1920). Adrienne Toner (1921). The Nest, and Other Stories (1926). Dark Hester (1929). Phillippa (1930). BIBLIOGRAPHY: de Sélincourt, B., ed., Anne Douglas Sedgwick: A Portrait in Letters (1936). Overton, G., The Women Who Make Our Novels (1928). Overton, G., An Hour of the American Novel (1929). Quinn, A. H., American Fiction (1936). Swanson, G., ‘‘The Novels of Anne Douglas Sedgwick’’ (dissertation, 1956). Reference works: NAW. —PATRICIA LEE YONGUE
SEDGWICK, Catharine Maria Born 28 December 1789, Stockbridge, Massachusetts; died 31 July 1867, West Roxbury, Massachusetts Wrote under: Miss Sedgwick Daughter of Theodore and Pamela Dwight Sedgwick Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s father was from a family of New England farmers and tavern keepers. He served in both houses of Congress and as Massachusetts Supreme Court chief justice. Her mother belonged to one of the wealthiest colonial families. Because she was sickly, her seven surviving children were raised by a black servant, Elizabeth Freeman, whom they called ‘‘Mumbet.’’ Education was an important part of the Sedgwicks’ daily life. All the children were required to read Hume, Butler, Shakespeare, and Cervantes. Sedgwick attended the local grammar school at Stockbridge and was sent to Mrs. Bell’s School in Albany and Payne’s Finishing School in Boston. She later commented that the greatest influence on our characters is our childhood home. Shortly before her father’s death in 1813 he unexpectedly confided his liberal religious beliefs to a close friend, the Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing. At this time, Sedgwick began to express in her journals and letters her own disapproval of Calvinism, the predominant religion of her Berkshire community. Several years later she joined the Unitarian church in New York. Her brothers Theodore and Henry, both noted lawyers and advocates of social reform, also joined the Unitarian church, but other of her relatives objected to Sedgwick’s conversion. An aunt told her, ‘‘Come and see me as often as you can, dear, for you know, after this world, we shall never meet again.’’ In 1822 Sedgwick began to write a small pamphlet protesting religious intolerance. This work evolved into a full-length novel entitled A New England Tale, which was published anonymously that year. The book is set in the New England countryside, and includes characters who speak in the local dialects. It is the story of a virtuous orphan girl, Jane Elton, who is reduced to extreme
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poverty. The heroine is mistreated by ostensibly pious relatives until she marries a Quaker gentleman and lives happily ever after. The book exposes the hypocrisy of certain church officials, and includes subplots concerning corrupt lawyers, dueling, and gambling. It was an immediate success. At that time, most books read in the U.S. were British imports or American imitations of British works. A New England Tale was recognized as one of the first novels to include authentic American settings, situations, and characters and was soon a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. With the publication of her second novel, Redwood (1824), Sedgwick became as popular as her contemporaries Cooper and Irving. Redwood was translated into German, Swedish, Italian, and French. The novel is about the marriage of a Southern gentleman to the daughter of a Vermont farmer. It also has a subplot involving the Shaker sect and a character study of a strong, outspoken New England spinster. After her third novel, Hope Leslie (1827) was published, Sedgwick became the most famous American woman writer of her day. Sedgwick’s own mother had nearly been a victim in a Native American raid, and one of the family ancestors had married a Native American. The book contains lengthy discussions of Mohawk customs and colonial history. It is the story of three American women: Faith Leslie, who is captured by Native Americans, marries into the tribe, and adopts its way of life; her sister Hope, who is pursued by a villainous English admiral until his ship sinks in Boston harbor; and Madawisca, a Native American woman who saves Hope’s fiancé when Mohawks attack him, and loses her arm in the process. Hope Leslie was hailed by critics as an American masterpiece. Sedgwick’s next novel, Clarence (1830), discusses fashionable New York society. The Linwoods (1835) is a historical romance set during the Revolutionary War. Sedgwick’s last novel, Married or Single? (1857) was designed, in her words, ‘‘to lessen the stigma placed on the term ‘old maid.’’’ Sedgwick, who never married, divided her time among the Sedgwick family homes in Stockbridge, Lenox, and New York City. She also toured Europe. Her tea parties were attended by Cooper, Hawthorne, Bryant, Emerson, and Melville. Sedgwick kept a journal for most of her life; it describes her spiritual quest, her travels, and her daily activities. She was an active social reformer: she founded the Society for the Aid and Relief of Poor Women and organized the first free school in New York, primarily for Irish immigrant children. During the second half of her career, Sedgwick became famous as the author of didactic stories intended for children and working class people. She hoped to convince her readers of the importance of education, democracy, and a close-knit family life. She believed that in America social mobility was largely determined by manners. Her most famous didactic novels were the trilogy consisting of Home (1835), The Poor Rich Man and the Rich Poor Man (1836), and Live and Let Live (1837). These books went through 15, 16, and 12 editions respectively. Sedgwick lived to the age of seventy-eight and was buried next to her nurse Mumbet in Stockbridge. Her contemporary
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Hawthorne called Sedgwick ‘‘our most truthful novelist.’’ Her finely crafted writing is more direct than the embellished style of most novels of her time. She was one of the creators of the American literary tradition, and one of the first American novelists to achieve international popularity. OTHER WORKS: Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (1841). The Boy of Mount Rhigi (1848). Memoir of Joseph Curtis (1858). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Buell, L., New England Literary Culture: From Revolutionary Through Renaissance (1986). Dewey, M., ed., The Life and Letters of Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1871). Foster, E. H., Catharine Maria Sedwick (1971). Kelley, M., Private Women, Public Stage (1984). Kolodny, A., The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 16301860 (1984). Reference works: NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women Writing in the United States (1995). —JANE GILES
SEDGWICK, Susan (Anne Livingston) Ridley Born circa 1789; died 20 January 1867, Stockbridge, Massachusetts Daughter of Matthew and Catharine Livingston Ridley; married Theodore Sedgwick, 1808 Susan Ridley Sedgwick, whose grandfather was Governor William Livingston of New Jersey, is said to have spent three or four years of her youth ‘‘on our frontier, living partly in a fort with General Harrison, afterward President of the United States.’’ Sent back to the East Coast to be educated, she first met Catharine Maria Sedgwick, later her sister-in-law and a successful novelist, at boarding school. After her marriage to Theodore Sedgwick, Catharine’s brother, the couple lived for several years in Albany, New York, where Theodore practiced law. Theodore’s ill health caused him to retire to the family home in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The Morals of Pleasure (1829), written for children, is a collection of didactic stories reflecting the life and values of the genteel and counseling tolerance for the faults of others, ‘‘patient diligence and virtuous perseverance,’’ and ‘‘courtesy and gentleness of deportment, to which public schools are, in general, so unfriendly.’’ The dialogue is clumsy: in ‘‘Twelfth Night,’’ the mother says, ‘‘I am really sorry that you should both have forgotten yourselves so far, as to suffer mere general reflections to run into personalities.’’ Sedgwick does, however, attempt effects to show she was not unconscious of style. Almost every story contains an episode in which music plays an important part, and one of Sedgwick’s favorite devices is to slip from prose to poetry during those episodes.
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Like the short stories of The Morals of Pleasure and The Children’s Week (1830), Sedgwick’s novels are written for a young audience. The Young Emigrants (1836), the story of a New York family resettling in Ohio in the late 18th century, is, like all of Sedgwick’s fiction, sentimental and didactic. It is important, however, as one of the earliest examples of nonreligious fiction for American children. Theodore Sedgwick is known to have encouraged his sister Catharine’s writing. Though contemporaries describe Susan Ridley Sedgwick as a woman of considerable personal charm and intellectual achievement, no record of similar encouragement for her own writing exists. OTHER WORKS: Allen Prescott; or, The Fortunes of a New England Boy (1834). Alida; or, Miscellaneous Sketches of Incidents During the Late American War (1841). Alida; or, Town and Country (1844). The Seven Brothers of Wyoming; or, The Brigands of the Revolution (1850). Walter Thornley; or, A Peep at the Past (1859). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Buell, L. New England Literary Culture: From Revolution to Renaissance (1986). Walsh, M. M., Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1937). Reference works: DAB (article on Theodore Sedgwick). Twentieth Century Biographical Dictionary of Notable Americans (1904). —KATHARYN F. CRABBE
special brand of horror and suspense that Seeley develops in her stories of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances. The background against which Seeley casts her crimes is solidly middle class, and the predominant work ethic colors the manner in which Seeley’s money-oriented crimes are viewed: criminals are those who take economic power from others, while positively viewed characters are those who either work to regain what was theirs or acquire additional property or status. Seeley includes people under proprietary claims, so that murders with economic implications originate in dominating love that turns into jealous and possessive obsession. This money-love nexus can be viewed positively (as when the heroine gets man and money in The Listening House) or negatively (as when the villain loses girl and money in The Beckoning Door). In the well-ordered, familiar world of Seeley’s detective fiction, crime and murder are intrusions which let themselves be felt in the economic and romantic inversions which they effect. The interlocked themes of love and money run strongly through Seeley’s two nondetective novels, the well-received Woman of Property (1947) and the thought-provoking The Stranger Beside Me (1951). Unlike the seven mysteries, these novels rely on third person narration, and in them Seeley portrays particularly sensitive women who are very different from her wisecracking detective fiction heroines. For Frieda in Woman of Property and Christine in The Stranger Beside Me, economic success does not go hand in hand with success in marriage. Both novels present sexual incompatibility, men who are not particularly successful at their work, families marred by psychic if not physical abuse, and women who strive for success in what is very obviously a man’s world. It is a far cry from the world of Seeley’s detective fiction, where the clever woman solves crimes as she falls in love with a man who considerately encourages her in her work.
SEELEY, Mabel Born 25 March 1903, Herman, Minnesota; died 9 June 1991 Daughter of Jacob and Alma Thompson Hodnefield; married Kenneth Seeley, 1926; Henry S. Ross, 1956 Mabel Seeley was raised in Minnesota, Illinois, and Wisconsin in a family of storytellers. She worked in Chicago as an advertising copywriter after she obtained her B.A. at the University of Minnesota. Seeley’s nine novels, seven of which fall into the ‘‘Had I But Known’’ subgenre of detective fiction, showcase Midwesterners who are at once regional stereotypes and highly individual characters. In her detective novels, Seeley’s slow-talking NorwegianAmericans, mercurial French-Canadians, and ironic heroines all contribute to the sense of the regionally familiar that Seeley consciously works to establish, as she shows Midwesterners at routine jobs in grain elevators (The Whispering Cup, 1940) and small-town hospitals (The Beckoning Door, 1950), between jobs in seedy rooming houses (The Listening House, 1938), and out of their element in Wyoming (Eleven Came Back, 1943) and Georgia (The Whistling Shadow, 1954). This identification with a specific geographic region and its heritage paves the way for the
OTHER WORKS: The Crying Sisters (1939). The Chuckling Fingers (1941). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Barzun, J. and W. H. Taylor, eds., A Catalogue of Crime (1972). Haycraft, H., ed., The Art of the Mystery Story (1946). Haycraft, H., Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story (1941). Slung, M. B., Crime on Her Mind (1975). Symons, J., Mortal Consequences (1972). Reference works: American Novelists of Today (1951). Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (1994). TCAS. —SUSAN L. CLARK
SEID, Ruth Born 1 July 1913, Brooklyn, New York; died 3 April 1995 Wrote under: Jo Sinclair Daughter of Nathan and Ida Kravesky Seid The third daughter and fifth child of Jewish immigrants from Russia, Ruth Seid was born in Brooklyn and the family moved to
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Cleveland when she was three. Growing up as a Jewish workingclass lesbian in a society that was anti-Semitic, homophobic, and hostile to values not perceived as middle class, Seid devoted her output as a writer to the battle against prejudice and to the reclamation of those whose lives have been crippled by the role of outsider. After graduation from a vocational high school in 1930, she worked in factories and offices, as a ghostwriter and a trade magazine editor, and with the WPA (1936-41) and the American Red Cross (1942-46). In the mid to late 1930s, she submitted stories to a wide range of political and general interest magazines. Esquire, in 1938, was the first to pay for a short story by ‘‘Jo Sinclair.’’ Other stories, articles, and poems appeared soon after, and a number have been anthologized. One of her best short works, ‘‘Red Necktie’’ (Common Ground, Spring 1941), describes the meeting of an elderly, fearful Jewish immigrant with an equally old but cheerful black man, revealing the essential humanity that transcends cultural barriers. Seid also aired a number of radio plays throughout the 1940s; a stage play The Long Moment (1951), about a black musician contemplating passing for white to get work, had an eight-week run in Cleveland. Her earlier experiences with the WPA and the American Red Cross were significant influences on her writing. Many of her Red Cross stories are about donating blood, a practical contribution to the war effort that also symbolized for the breaking down of ghetto walls. Donating blood is a central image near the end of the Harper Prize novel Wasteland (1946) in which ‘‘John Brown’’ learns to accept himself as Jake Braunowitz, an assimilated American Jew, through the help of his strong, caring sister who has learned to accept herself as a lesbian. Seid concentrates on the psychological manifestations of identity, the corroding effects of guilt and shame, and the bitter, twisted family relationships that result.Wasteland, which pioneered the use of psychotherapy as a narrative device, is also remarkable both for its focus on a Jewish family at a time when anti-Semitism was peaking in America, and in its presentation, possibly for the first time in 20th century American fiction, of a lesbian as a positive role model. Sing at My Wake (1951) also details the psychological causes of alienation and loneliness. Catherine Ganly, deeply wounded by her insecure childhood, escapes as a teenager into a romantic infatuation, only to find herself trapped in a shotgun marriage with a man as immature as herself. Divorce frees Cathy to develop a successful career as a journalist, but only when she realizes the threat she poses to the development of her son does she recognize that she remains imprisoned emotionally by her refusal to admit the imperfections of human love. The Changelings (1955) portrays the destructive effects of racial prejudice on the lives of the immigrant residents of a single street in a large Ohio city. Their fear at the prospect of integration triggers waves of anger and violence that overwhelm the community. The title refers to the children of these immigrants and of the black families, who want to end bigotry and ‘‘leave behind the narrow corner of our frightened elders.’’ Of these the best realized
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is Judith Vincent, the thirteen-year-old gang leader who comes to understand the common humanity of all groups and who takes the first steps toward friendship and justice. The heroine of Anna Teller (1961) is a strong, proud, competent woman who survived the Nazi invasion of Hungary and fought in the uprising against the Russians. At 74, she is relegated to the status of ineffectual dependence in her son’s American home. Anna’s insistence on her right to prove her usefulness inspires her grandson and two young friends to overcome their own fears, but it creates intolerable friction with her son. Viewed from a number of perspectives that reveal both her strengths and her imperfections, Anna Teller emerges as a compelling and complex personality. In 1969 Seid completed the still-unpublished Approach to the Meaning, dedicated to her sister Fannie, the author’s constant emotional and financial supporter. The novel depicts a fragmented woman who must discover herself in order to save her adopted daughter from imitating her own wasted life. Seid herself was saved from the emotional wastelands of her youth when she met Helen Buchman in 1938. Although Buchman was married with two children, Seid lived in her household for almost 30 years, including seven years with Helen’s widower. The Feminist Press launched a series of women’s autobiographies with a reprinting of Seid’s The Seasons: Death and Transfiguration (1972, 1993), which describes the author’s attempt to keep her own creative death at bay when Helen, her muse and best editor died. In 1973, Joan Soffer, who began their correspondence with a fan letter after Wasteland, asked Seid to move in with her in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania. There Seid continued gardening and writing in her lifelong attempt to save walking wastelands with her changeling language. She died in April 1995. Whether dealing with psychoanalysis or sexual maladjustment, racial tension or the treatment of the elderly, Seid was been far ahead of her contemporaries. Many of her novels deal with Jews, but Seid makes them emblematic of all who feel themselves excluded from the mainstream of American life. Of special value is the attention she gives to women in situations in which the man’s problem has usually been emphasized. Seid’s narrative skill and rich characterization, her sensitivity, and the objective clarity of her vision more than compensate for the wordiness of her fiction.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Liptzin, S., The Jew in American Literature (1966). Sandberg, E., ‘‘Jo Sinclair: Toward a Critical Biography’’ (unpublished dissertation, 1985). Reference works: American Novelists of Today (1951). CA (1969). Contemporary Novelists (1986). DLB (1984). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCA (1951). Other references: NR (10 June 1946). NYT (25 Sept. 1955). SR (20 Aug. 1960). —CAROL SCHOEN AND ELISABETH SANDBURG
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SEIFERT, Elizabeth
themes of the isolation of the professional woman from other women and her fears about accepting a man’s love.
Born 19 June 1897, Washington, Missouri; died June 1983 Also writes under: Ellen Ashley Daughter of Richard C. and Anna Sanford Seifert; married John Gasparotti, 1920; children: four
Unlike her other novels, which stop when the woman doctor successfully wins the man who had previously fought her career, When Doctors Marry (1960) explores the special complications caused by the marriage of two doctors. Even the birth of her child does not deter the heroine from her practice of medicine. Though problems arise, this novel shows one woman combining her roles as wife, mother, and professional.
Elizabeth Seifert was educated in St. Louis; she received a B.A. in 1918 from Washington University and attended the university’s medical school for 18 months. She left, she has explained, because the university refused to grant a medical degree to a woman. Seifert did take courses in anatomy, physiology, and dietetics and later used her knowledge of medical subjects in her novels. When her husband, wounded in WWI, became totally disabled in the 1930s, she needed to earn money to support her husband and four children. Again she pursued her interest in medicine. As a clinical secretary in a small hospital, she took case histories and monitored the activities of both the patients and the staff. A self-described ‘‘wife, housewife, and mother who writes,’’ Seifert began a new career at age forty when Young Doctor Galahad won the 1938 Dodd, Mead–Redbook Magazine $10,000 prize for a first novel. Since this prominent beginning, Dodd, Mead has published 81 of her novels, some of which have been translated into 17 languages. Until a heart attack in the early 1980s, which prevented her from doing the research necessary for a new book, she had completed an average of two books a year throughout her career. Almost all Seifert’s novels are medical romances. Using her knowledge of medicine, which she continued to update by reading medical journals, she creates an air of authenticity in her medical scenes. She is, however, more interested in personal relationships, and the hospital environment with its life and death crises provides the dramatic stage for personal and professional dilemmas doctors face. Although Seifert’s novels tend to follow the formula which she adopted from George M. Cohan (‘‘You have a man, you get him up a tree, you throw rocks at him, you get him down again’’), her novels about women doctors are of special interest. These usually emphasize the special conflicts faced by a woman doctor who must not only prove she can succeed in medicine, but who must also juggle her role as woman and as doctor. For such a woman, romance is threatening: she may be asked to surrender her career if she accepts a marriage proposal. Eventually, Seifert’s women doctors win both professional status and romantic love. In Girl Intern (1944) Chris (Christine) Metcalfe is repeatedly asked why a pretty girl would try to become a doctor when women are so emotionally and physically unsuited for such a grueling profession. After all, Chris faints when a patient’s father pulls a gun on her in the operating room, she weeps and becomes unable to close the incision when a woman dies during a Caesarean section, and she becomes hysterical when rumors accuse her of sexual misconduct. In the end, however, she proves her ability to handle emergencies and to be both a female and a doctor. Even the chief of staff finally relents and admits his love for her. The Story of Andrea Fields (1950) and Miss Doctor (1951) develop similar
Seifert has asserted she would not consider writing about failure, and at least in the world of her medical romances, the women doctors eventually solve their dilemmas. They are depicted as emotional and romantic, but Seifert’s women doctors remain true to their profession and seek ways to combine marriage and career. Becoming a doctor is not easy for these women: they encounter severe discrimination, but they do not surrender their goals. Seifert’s writing began as a means of self-expression and amusement for a woman in a small town with an invalid husband and four small children. Eventually her writing provided the means of support for her family. When asked how she would like her work to be remembered, she quickly answered, ‘‘It saved the life of me and my family.’’ OTHER WORKS: A Great Day (1939). Hillbilly Doctor (1940). Thus Doctor Mallory (1940). Bright Scalpel (1941). Army Doctor (1942). Doctor Bill (1942). Surgeon in Charge (1942). Bright Banners (1943). A Certain Doctor French (1943). Girl in Overalls: A Novel of Women in Defense Today (as Ellen Ashley, 1943). Doctor Ellison’s Decision (1944). Doctor Woodward’s Ambition (1945). Orchard Hill (1945). Dusty Spring (1946). Old Doc (1946). So Young, So Fair (1947). Take Three Doctors (1947). The Glass and the Trumpet (1948). Hospital Zone (1948). The Bright Coin (1949). Homecoming (1950). Doctor of Mercy (1951). The Doctor Takes a Wife (1952). The Strange Loyalty of Dr. Carlisle (1952). The Doctor Disagrees (1953). Lucinda Marries the Doctor (1953). Doctor at the Crossroads (1954). Marriage for Three (1954). Challenge for Dr. Mays (1955). A Doctor in the Family (1955). A Call for Dr. Barton (1956). A Doctor for Blue Jay Cove (1956). The Doctor’s Husband (1957). Substitute Doctor (1957). Love Calls the Doctor (1958). The New Doctor (1958). Doctor on Trial (1959). Home-town Doctor (1959). The Doctor’s Bride (1960). Doctors on Parade (including The Doctor Takes a Wife, The Doctor Disagrees, and Lucinda Marries the Doctor, 1960). Dr. Jeremy’s Wife (1961). The Doctor Makes a Choice (1961). The Doctor’s Strange Secret (1962). The Honor of Dr. Shelton (1962). Dr. Scott, Surgeon on Call (1963). Legacy for a Doctor (1963). A Doctor Comes to Bayard (1964). Katie’s Young Doctor (1964). Doctor Samaritan (1965). Ordeal of Three Doctors (1965). Hegerty, M.D. (1966). Pay the Doctor (1966). Doctor With a Mission (1967). The Rival Doctors (1967). The Doctor’s Confession (1968). To Wed a Doctor (1968). Bachelor Doctor (1969). For Love of a Doctor (1969). Doctor’s Kingdom (1970). The Doctor’s Two Lives (1970). Doctor in Judgment (1971). The Doctor’s Second Love (1971). Doctor’s Destiny (1972). The
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Doctor’s Private Life (1972). The Doctor’s Reputation (1972). The Two Faces of Doctor Collier (1973). Doctor in Love (1974). The Doctor’s Daughter (1974). Four Doctors, Four Wives (1975). The Doctor’s Desperate Hour (1976). Two Doctors and a Girl (1976). Doctor Tuck (1977). The Doctors on Eden Place (1977). The Doctors Were Brothers (1978). Rebel Doctor (1978). The Doctor’s Promise (1979). The Problems of Dr. A (1979).
During World War I, Semple lectured on the geography of the Italian front to officers and participated in a special study of the Mediterranean region and Mesopotamia. After the war, she resumed her teaching at the University of Chicago and later at Clark University. Semple was the first geographer solicited for that school. She also gave lectures and taught courses at other universities in both the U.S. and Europe.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Seifert, E., in Writer (Aug. 1945, Oct. 1961). Reference works: American Novelists of Today (1951). CA (1967). CB (1951). Other references: Columbia Daily Tribune (16 April 1978).
Semple’s contemporary recognition included election as president of the Association of American Geographers in 1921; medals presented by the American Geographical Society and the Geographic Society of Chicago; and honorary degrees, included one from the University of Kentucky.
—JEAN CARWILE MASTELLER
SEMPLE, Ellen Churchill Born 8 January 1863, Louisville, Kentucky; died 11 May 1932, West Palm Beach, Florida Daughter of Alexander and Emerine Price Semple Ellen Churchill Semple was the daughter of a prosperous businessman. In 1882 Semple graduated from Vassar College with a B.A. in history. She then taught in a private school in Louisville, and began work on her masters degree in history (Vassar, 1891). During this time, she came into contact with the writings of the renowned geographer Friedrich Ratzel, who coined the word ‘‘anthropogeography’’ to designate the study of the effect of the natural landscape on society. In 1891 Semple went to Leipzig to study with Ratzel. Although women could not matriculate at Leipzig, Semple was permitted to listen to Ratzel’s lectures from outside the open classroom door. In ‘‘The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains’’ (Geographic Journal, 1901), Semple adds to a description of life in the isolated mountains of eastern Kentucky explanations of the presumed influence of the natural environment on the development of a way of life. She documents the scarcity of transportation alternatives, and concludes nature is largely responsible. This article displays a preoccupation with the lives of women, and this interest is less pronounced in Semple’s other articles and books, most of which are heavily dependent on archival sources and lack the intimate involvement of the researcher with her subjects. Semple’s first book, American History and Its Geographic Conditions (1903), explains the pattern of settlement and the political power of the U.S. as influenced by topographic features. The book was widely adopted as a textbook, and Semple became a geographer in demand. In 1906 she became a visiting lecturer at the newly established department of geography at the University of Chicago; she lectured there nearly every other year until 1924. Influences of Geographic Environment (1911) is a tribute to Ratzel. Initially intended as a translation of Ratzel’s AnthropoGeographie, the book was expanded to include documentation of Ratzel’s sometimes unsubstantiated claims.
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Semple’s sweeping assertions, in all her works, of the dominant influence of nature, won her the epithet ‘‘environmental determinist’’ and subjected her works to substantial criticism. Semple’s eloquence, enthusiasm, and thorough method, however, led to her being highly regarded and influential in the intellectual development of other geographers. OTHER WORKS: Geography of the Mediterranean Region (1931). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bronson, J. A. C., Ellen Semple: Contributions to the History of American Geography (dissertation, 1974). Ellen Churchill Semple Papers (Library of Congress archives, 1900-1932). Other references: Annals of the Association of American Geographers (1933). Geographical Review (1932). Journal of Geography (1932). Professional Geographer (1974). Science (1932). —SUSAN R. BROOKER-GROSS
SEREDY, Kate Born 10 November 1896, Budapest, Hungary; died 7 March 1975, Montgomery, New York Daughter of Louis P. and Anna Irany Seredy Kate Seredy was the daughter of a well-known Hungarian teacher and storyteller. She attended the Academy of Art in Budapest for six years, receiving an art teacher’s diploma. During World War I, she served for two years as a nurse in frontline hospitals, an experience which left her ill in body and spirit and caused her to become a confirmed pacifist. In 1922 Seredy emigrated to the U.S., where she earned a living by illustrating lampshades, greeting cards, and sheet music, moving on gradually to fashion design and magazine and book illustration. Seredy illustrated books by other writers—including Carol Ryrie Brink’s Newbery Medal-winning Caddie Woodlawn—as well as her own. Seredy’s most highly acclaimed works rose out of her memories of her Hungarian childhood and the stories her father
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told her. When Seredy was nine years old, she accompanied her father on a trip to the countryside, where they studied peasant art and life. The Good Master (1935), Seredy’s first and most popular book, is the humorous, episodic story of wild, spoiled, motherless Cousin Kate from Budapest (Seredy herself), who goes to live with her uncle, called ‘‘the Good Master’’ for his wise and gentle ways, his wife, and son, Jancsi, on their horse ranch on the Hungarian plains. Kate gets caught up in the pleasures and responsibilities of farm life, and she calms down and develops a sounder set of values. A sequel, the more serious The Singing Tree (1939), takes Kate through World War I, when Jancsi’s father must join the army and the boy is left in charge of the ranch, which becomes a refuge for family, neighbors, and war orphans. The White Stag (1937) is a stirring retelling of the legendary founding of Hungary. The twins, Magyar and Hunor, Hunor’s son Bendeguz, and his son Attila, lead their tribes from their ancient home in Asia steadily westward until they reach their promised land along the Danube. This spirited and rhythmical account of wars and hardships, the drama of the conquest heightened by bold, sweeping drawings, was awarded the John Newbery Medal in 1938. By contrast with these strongly conceived books, Seredy’s novels with American settings seem contrived, shallow, and dated. The most convincing of them, with its sense of history and closeness to nature, is the earliest, Listening (1936), the story of the old Dutch colonial house in the Ramapo Mountains of New Jersey in which Seredy lived for a time. While such values as love of family, respect for authority and the aged, pleasure in hard work, and faith in God reappear throughout Seredy’s writings, overriding themes involve confidence in the ultimate goodness of human beings and a deep affection for the soil. The greatest evil is war, a senseless business which hurts most the simple people who are never responsible for bringing it about. Descriptive passages are highly poetic and are particularly rich in visual imagery. Seredy writes with an artist’s eye, drawing details from nature and folk life and art. Although didacticism and sentimentality sometimes get in the way of the narrative, the best of Seredy’s writing has auditory and visual qualities which draw readers in and carry them along. OTHER WORKS: A Tree for Peter (1941). The Open Gate (1943). The Chestry Oak (1948). Gypsy (1952). Philomena (1955). The Tenement Tree (1959). A Brand-New Uncle (1961). Lazy Tinka (1962). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CB (1940). Junior Book of Authors (1951). Newbery Medal Books: 1922-1955 (1955). SAA (1971). Other references: Elementary English (1968). Horn Book (1968). —ALETHEA K. HELBIG
SETON, Anya Born 1904, New York, New York; died November 1990, Greenwich, Connecticut Daughter of Ernest T. and Grace Gallatin Seton; married twice; secondly to Hamilton Chase, circa 1934; children: three Anya Seton’s father was a nature writer and cofounder of the Boy Scouts; her mother was a feminist, explorer, and writer. Seton was educated in England, France, and the U.S. primarily by private tutors, although she also attended Oxford University. She married and had three children, two from her first marriage, and one from her second marriage to Hamilton Chase. She died of heart failure in November 1990 in Greenwich, Connecticut. She wrote 13 novels, all historical, although her preferred term is ‘‘biographical.’’ The variety of periods depicted is remarkable, but the settings are generally either British or American. All tell exciting stories, usually from the point of view of a female protagonist. The heroines of the fictionalized biographies are related in some way to men who made history. My Theodosia (1941), Seton’s first novel and the story of Aaron Burr’s only child, dramatizes an obsessive, almost unnatural relationship between father and daughter. Katherine (1954) sympathetically recreates the life of Katherine Swynford, mistress and then wife of John of Gaunt and sister-in-law of Geoffrey Chaucer. The Winthrop Woman (1958) centers on Elizabeth Fones Winthrop, niece and daughter-in-law of Jonathan Winthrop, a settler with him of the Massachusetts Bay Colony but a rebel against harsh Puritan rule. Devil Water (1962) studies Jenny Radcliffe, daughter of an English Jacobite nobleman who was executed for his participation in the rebellions of 1715 and 1745; her conversion to participation in his cause and her life in England and in Virginia are recreated. Among the novels not centered on actual events is Seton’s best-known work, Dragonwyck (1944). Set among Dutch patroons on the Hudson River in the mid-19th century, it contains an effective portrait of a Gothic villain and a heroine who is his innocent accomplice, for her passion and ambition have unconsciously helped cause his crimes. The Turquoise (1946), set in late 19th-century New Mexico and New York, shows its destitute heroine’s rise to the top of New York society, inadvertently causing a catastrophe. Her repentance and later life of contrition are movingly depicted. The Hearth and the Eagle (1948), set in 19th- and 20th-century Marblehead, with a flashback to the 17th century, contains another strong heroine whose passionate and impulsive behavior leads her to a series of disappointments, then to ultimate acceptance of values she had earlier rejected. In the 1970s Seton’s interest in the occult has led her to the theme of reincarnation. In Green Darkness (1972), contemporary characters redress evils occurring in 1552 to 1559. Smouldering Fires (1975), a mixture of popular psychology and the occult, depicts an ungainly high school girl who must, through hypnosis, relive the anguish of her Acadian ancestress in order to exorcise it and become a normal young woman. The Mistletoe and the Sword (1955), set in Roman Britain, tells of the relationship between a Celtic girl and a Roman soldier,
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their initial enmity gradually being transformed to love. Avalon (1965), which moves through the British and Norse worlds of the late 10th century, follows the relationship of a Cornish girl and a French-English prince, whose lives are intertwined but who are always at cross-purposes. These two novels are unusual for Seton in that male and female protagonists are balanced against each other, both angles of vision being used about equally. Foxfire (1950) is the only one of Seton’s novels not clearly historical. It is set in Arizona in the 1930s and combines the common western myth of the fabulous lost mine with the motif of a Shangri-la. Seton’s female protagonists are passionate and ambitious. In their youthful romantic idealism, they often rush into relationships doomed to disaster. The novels generally end with the heroines recognizing their responsibility for their fates and either doing penance or making a new beginning. In the process, they become ‘‘strong to endure.’’ The historical backgrounds in each novel are based on thorough research. Seton admitted, ‘‘I have a passion for facts, for dates and places. I love to recreate the past, and to do so with all the accuracy possible.’’ For The Winthrop Women, for example, Seton spent two years reading about the real people on whom she planned to base her story and visiting the places they lived before beginning to write the novel. Since Seton’s death, many of her works have been reissued or republished and remain enormously popular with historical romance fans. Yet because of the age and popularity of her novels, her work is not easy to find. According to her readers, however, it is worth the hunt. OTHER WORKS: Washington Irving (1960). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (Online, 1999). Other references: NY (6 Feb. 1946). NYTBR (16 March 1941, 16 Feb. 1958, 21 Nov. 1965). SR (9 Oct. 1954, 15 Feb. 1958, 3 March 1962). —MARY JEAN DEMARR, UPDATED BY CARRIE SNYDER
SETTLE, Mary Lee Born 29 July 1918, Charleston, West Virginia Daughter of Joseph E. and Rachel Tompkins Settle; married Rodney Weathersbee, 1939; Douglas Newton, 1946; William Littleton Tazewelt, 1978; children: Christopher Although she draws heavily from memories of her Kentucky and West Virginia childhood for her important novel sequence, the Beulah Quintet, Mary Lee Settle defies the regional writer pigeonhole. Blood Tie (1977), for which she won the National Book Award in 1978, is set principally in Turkey. Celebration (1986) is set all over the world—London, Kurdistan, Africa, Hong
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Kong, Virginia—settings reflecting Settle’s 17 years of living and working abroad. The Beulah Quintet, composed of O Beulah Land (1956), Know-Nothing (1960), Prisons (1973), The Scapegoat (1980), and The Killing Ground (1982), traces four centuries of family networks as they affect the development of what is now West Virginia. Charleston, Settle’s birthplace, appears as the fictional town of Canona. The novels reflect Settle’s mixed reactions to growing up in the South where, she wrote, children are taught to ‘‘ridicule the delicate qualities in ourselves and in others that might interfere with that hard, polite drifting acceptance. The punishment for choosing another path. . .is brutal and unconscious.’’ Although The Love Eaters (1954), The Kiss of Kin (1955), The Clam Shell (1971), and Charley Bland (1989, 1991) are usually considered apart from the quintet, all are set in or near Canona; the latter three include families familiar from the quintet. Settle has called The Clam Shell her one autobiographical novel; it is drawn from her years (1936-38) at Sweet Briar College. Settle’s characters, whatever their age, race, sexual preference, or national origin, are psychologically informed by their physical environments. In Blood Tie, Ariadne, a middle-aged American divorcee who is diving off the coast of Turkey, discovers a new world, both physical and psychic. ‘‘For once, Ariadne realized, I am not searching for someone else’s words, only my own will do. Nothing is new in this kneeling in this place. It is the most ancient of homecomings, astonishing familiar water fields of light.’’ Much of Settle’s work is distinctively visual, almost cinematic, although grounded in the psychological. She traces this concentration to her partial blindness, a result of a childhood bout with whooping cough that precipitated a premature eye-straightening operation: ‘‘I had consciously to develop a visual sense and that psychic awakening was to me like seeing for the first time.’’ Much of Settle’s work similarly echoes her own experiences, both obliquely and, as in The Killing Ground, rather slyly. Settle’s casts are often large. Some critics have complained she sometimes tempts the reader with an intriguing portrait, then fails to develop the character satisfactorily. Nevertheless, she has a remarkable eye for texture, for the interweaving of points of view to create transcendent meaning. Plus Deng, the physically imposing African priest who is the hero of Celebration appears first as an iconic figure. Later, however, we learn through a shift in the limited omniscient point of view that ‘‘he was the youngest of his father’s children, a prince in his own tribe, a nigger in Washington, D.C., ageeb in Khartoum, nignog in London, and priest everywhere.’’ In the majority of her novels, Settle uses the omniscient point of view, not to imply a central authority, but to express the irony of discrepancies between various characters’ worldviews, and to demonstrate their basic misunderstandings of each other, sometimes despite their best intentions. Her style is conventional only on its surface, profound and innovative in its final effect. Settle’s nonfiction includes All the Braw Promises: Memoirs of Aircraft Woman Second Class 2146391 (1966), an account of
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experiences with the Women’s Auxiliary of the Royal Air Force during World War II, and The Scopes Trial: The State of Tennessee vs. John Thomas Scopes (1972), an intense account of the famous ‘‘monkey trial,’’ written for young adults. Over the years, she has supplemented her writing career by teaching, at Bard College in New York, and at the University of Virginia.
The serious illness of Sewall’s husband’s forced him to depend on her for financial support when she was a young wife. By the time Sewall was thirty-seven, her mother, brother, both her sisters, and her husband had died. She remarried her sister’s widower. Despite these personal losses, Sewall engaged in philanthropic work and was involved in the abolition and women’s rights movements and in the promotion of the interests of labor.
OTHER WORKS: Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday (1964). The Story of Flight (1967, juvenile). Prisons (1973); also published as The Long Road to Paradise, (1974). Water World (1984, juvenile). The Search for Beulah Land: The Story Behind the Beulah Quintet (1988). Turkish Reflections: A Biography of a Place (1991). Beulah Quintet (bound together, 1996). Choices (1995). Contributor to several anthologies and collections, including: The Best American Essays, 1988 (1988), Encounters (1989), The Sound of Writing (1991), Maiden Voyages: Writings of Women Travelers (1993), Southern Excursions (1997), Bloodroot: Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers (1998). Contributor to periodicals, including: Paris Review, Southern Review, Travel & Leisure, Virginia Quarterly Review, Yale Review and others.
Sewall compiled the Letters of Lydia Maria Child (1882). The letters were an inspiration to Sewall, and this collection revealed Child’s determination, compassion, and dedication to abolitionism through the frankness of her personal correspondence. Eschewing any recognition for this work, Sewall would not have her name appear in the volume.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brosi, G., Contemporary Appalachian Writers (1988). Flora, J. M., and R. Bain, eds., Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook (1993). Garrett, G. P., Understanding Mary Lee Settle (1988). Murrey, L. M., Dream and Reality in Mary Lee Settle’s Beulah Quintet (1993). Pearce, W. M., ‘‘Lacunae of Forgetfulness and the Censorship of Memory: Reconstructing History in The Beulah Quintet’’ (thesis, 1997). Prenshaw, P. W., ed., Women Writers of the Contemporary South (1984, 1990). Rosenberg, B., Mary Lee Settle’s Beulah Quintet: The Price of Freedom (1992). Reference works: CAAS (1992). CA (1980). CLC (1981, 1990). DLB (1980). Cyclopedia of World Authors, Two (1989). FC (1990). Other references: Iron Mountain Review (special issue, Spring 1991). NYTBR (Oct. 1998). Washington College Magazine (Winter 1988). Mary Lee Settle Interview with Kay Bonetti (audiocassette, 1982). Tell It On the Mountain: Appalachian Women Writers (audiocassette, 1997). The Fiction of Mary Lee Settle (video, 1990). —LISA CARL
It was only after Sewall’s death that a book of her poetry was published (Poems, 1889). In her more serious poems, Sewall considered the constant fears and doubts of the human condition but reaffirmed faith in human goodness through an appreciation of family, friends, nature, and a moral consciousness. The worldweary were sustained by loved ones in ‘‘Pessimist,’’ while the ‘‘Optimist’’ realized that joy would follow sorrow in nature’s cycle. In ‘‘Why Thus Longing,’’ Sewall teaches that one can find fulfillment and happiness in one’s lot through a Romantic reverence for nature. Characterized as a religious verse writer, Sewall extolled the richness of ‘‘moral treasures,’’ acceptance of God’s will, and perservering effort toward moral progress. In ‘‘To S.E.S.,’’ Sewall celebrated the felicitous combination of faith and love in her husband. She wrote to him: ‘‘My hopes of what mankind may be / To loftier soarings are encouraged, / Belovéd, when I think of thee.’’ Sewall was most successful in capturing the ‘‘impulse of her own feeling.’’ The poems written out of her own personal relationships were more freshly felt than her versification on other subjects. Her gentle tribute to her husband achieved a subtle meter and imaginative quality.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Biographical Dictionary and Synopsis of Books Ancient and Modern (1902). CAL, A Dictionary of American Authors (1905). Famous Women of History (1895). NCAB. —ELIZABETH ROBERTS
SEWALL, Harriet Winslow Born 30 June 1819, Portland, Maine; died February 1889, Wellesley, Massachusetts Daughter of Nathan and Comfort Hussey Winslow; married Charles Liszt, 1848 (died); Samuel E. Sewall, 1857 Harriet Winslow Sewall was raised in a traditional Quaker family, and the discussion of personal, social, and political responsibilities in Quaker doctrine deeply concerned her throughout her life.
SEWELL, Elizabeth Born 19 March 1919, Coonoor, India Daughter of Robert S. and Dorothy Dean Sewell; married Anthony Sirignano, 1971 Elizabeth Sewell’s parents were English, and they sent her to England as a child to be educated. She received her B.A., M.A.,
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and Ph.D. degrees at Newham College, Cambridge. Sewell became an American citizen in 1972 and has taught at several American colleges, including Fordham University, Hunter College and Notre Dame University. Her scholarship extends to literature, philosophy, religion, language theory, botany, and biology. In her writing, Sewell has concentrated upon theories and methods that attempt to integrate the sciences and the humanities. The Structure of Poetry (1951), an inquiry into the stasis and dynamics of poetry, shows Sewell’s early interest in ideas developed in later works. In The Field of Nonsense (1952), Sewell uses works of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear to define ‘‘nonsense’’ as a carefully controlled world directed by reason and subject to its own laws, rather than a merely random reversal of ordinary experience. The Orphic Voice (1960) has gained Sewell recognition as an original and important voice in modern theory and criticism. Sewell claims that because of his having been in the worlds of the living and the dead, the figure of Orpheus has been used from ancient times to the present as a symbol of the combined creative forces of mind and body. Sewell supports her theory through detailed and convincing illustrations from the works of many poets, philosophers, and scientists. In The Human Metaphor (1964), Sewell further investigates what she sees as the prevailing empirical method of western thought in the post-Cartesian world. Sewell acknowledges the importance of empiricism, but believes it leads to a split in the human mind and society when it excludes the validity of other modes of thought. Through examples from many major poets, Sewell develops a theory that the metaphoric properties of language can bring apparently divergent methods into meaningful synthesis. In Sewell’s first novel, The Dividing of Time (1951), her young heroine lives in two worlds at the same time: the drab world of the civil servant in wartime London and a realm of adventures in lands of fantasy. The two are interwoven, and the ‘‘dividing’’ actually leads to integration of the narrator’s personality as she gradually loses her fears and comes to know herself. Sewell’s two later novels lack the imagination and intensity of the first. In The Singular Hope (1955), set in a school hospital for crippled children in England, the young heroine is also going through a process of increasing self-awareness, but the book remains rather flat and colorless. In Now Bless Thyself (1962), characters and action are never fully realized; they serve primarily as vehicles for political, aesthetic, and philosophical discussions. In her two volumes of poetry, Sewell is especially effective in short lyrics such as ‘‘The Oracle,’’ ‘‘Job,’’ and ‘‘Archangels in Winter,’’ which testify to her fine eye for detail. Several of her longer poems such as ‘‘The Great Darkness’’ sustain a dramatic intensity. ‘‘Dialogue,’’ the opening poem of Signs and Cities (1968) is a fine expression of Sewell’s attitude toward art and science; and the final poem of the volume, ‘‘Achievement,’’ makes a moving and affirmative statement of Sewell’s philosophy of life.
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OTHER WORKS: Paul Valéry: The Mind in the Mirror (1952). Poems: 1974-1961 (1962
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ladner, B., ‘‘Elizabeth Sewell: Poetic Method as an Instrument of Thinking and Knowing’’ (dissertation, 1970). Other references: Nation (4 Feb. 1961). Soundings (Summer 1972). TLS (17 Oct. 1951, 29 April 1955). —ANNE R. NEWMAN
SEXTON, Anne Born 2 November 1928, Newton, Massachusetts; died 4 October 1974, Weston, Massachusetts Daughter of Ralph and Mary Staples Harvey; married Alfred M. Sexton II, 1948 (divorced); children: two daughters Although Anne Sexton’s childhood included winters with her beloved great-aunt at the spacious family residence in Weston, Massachusetts, as well as happy seaside summers in Maine, Sexton was a demanding, rebellious child who felt rejected by her upper-middle class parents. Her impulsive marriage in 1948 to Alfred Sexton weathered many years of crises before it ended in divorce in 1973. Sexton’s sudden bouts of suicidal depression, which for several years necessitated separating her from her two small daughters, continued throughout her life, as did her psychiatric care in and out of mental hospitals. All of these problematic relationships form the basis of much of her poetry. Discovering her poetic interests at age twenty-eight, this attractive housewife from the suburbs of Boston began studying under mentors such as Robert Lowell. Sexton taught at Boston University from 1970 until she took her life at the age of forty-five. In To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), Sexton probed the intensely personal terrain of madness, guilt, and loss. As she undertakes her poetic journey from madness to partial sanity, her most frequent voice is that of the helpless, dependent child searching into the past for the lost parents and the disinherited self. Her two most famous Bedlam poems, ‘‘You, Doctor Martin’’ and ‘‘Ringing the Bells,’’ capture the helpless childishness of mental patients who are ‘‘like bees caught in the wrong hive.’’ ‘‘Pushing their bones against the thrust / of cure,’’ these ‘‘foxy children’’ are dependent on the godlike doctor of the ‘‘oracular / eye,’’ who oversees the protective order of their lives. However, the bellringing therapy shows that this order is only the regulated passivity of patients directed by the bell-lady’s commands. Like the rows of moccasins they make—‘‘waiting on the silent shelf’’—the patients are the ‘‘moving dead.’’ Bedlam also contains numerous elegies to the beloved dead moving through the poet’s memories.
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In two remarkable mother-daughter poems, ‘‘The Double Image’’ and ‘‘Division of Parts,’’ Sexton becomes a female Oedipus investigating the ‘‘appalling truths’’ of identity and guilt. While many readers objected to her subject matter, the raw power of the Bedlam poetry quickly established Sexton as a new and significant ‘‘confessional’’ poet. In the Pulitzer Prize-winning Live or Die (1966), religious parallels tend to universalize the dilemma of the ‘‘mad’’ persona; thus in ‘‘For the Year of the Insane,’’ Sexton tries to overcome the passivity which keeps her ‘‘locked in the wrong house’’ but fumbling for a fragmented prayer to Mary, the ‘‘tender physician’’ who could heal the spiritual sickness of the ‘‘unbeliever.’’ A new voice of awareness and self-irony is also heard. In one of her best poems, ‘‘Flee on Your Donkey,’’ Sexton realizes her madness has lost its ‘‘innocence.’’ All the years of ‘‘dredging’’ dreams, ‘‘like an old woman with arthritic fingers, / carefully straining the water out,’’ have only brought her back to the same ‘‘scene of the disordered senses,’’ the ‘‘sad hotel’’ or mental institution from which she urges herself to flee. This book ends on an affirmative note: ‘‘I say Live, Live because of the sun, / the dream, the excitable gift.’’ Probably most notable are her poems on womanhood. In ‘‘Those Times. . . ,’’ Sexton remembers childhood humiliations and how she ‘‘hid in the closet’’ waiting ‘‘among shoes / I was sure to outgrow’’ while she ‘‘planned my growth and my womanhood.’’ The joyous lyric ‘‘Little Girl, My Stringbean, My Lovely Woman’’ is addressed to her daughter who is about to discover that ‘‘women are born twice.’’ The frustrations of being female are the focus of poems like ‘‘One for My Dame,’’ ‘‘Man and Wife,’’ and ‘‘Menstruation at Forty,’’ frustrations which, in ‘‘Consorting with Angels,’’ culminate in Sexton’s weariness with the ‘‘gender of things’’—her own and that of the ‘‘men who sat at my table, / circled around the bowl I offered up.’’ Sexton’s interest in the religious drama of self led to an only moderately successful psychodrama, the one-act play Mercy Street (produced at the American Place Theatre, New York City, 1969) as well as several experimental short stories. More successful was Conrad Susa’s freeform operatic adaptation of Transformations (1971), Sexton’s colloquially rendered poetic fairytales, which was produced by the Minneapolis Opera Company in 1973 and televised in 1978. These experiments foreshadow some of the characteristics of Sexton’s later poetry: the looser poetic-prose line, the bold image, and the informal interpretations of mythic characters and situations. Although Sexton’s poetry has sometimes been labeled bathetic or hysterical, the startling force of the hyperbolic image is her forte. In her best poetry, Sexton explores the intensely personal but also universal conflict between the creative and self-destructive selves, a schizophrenic drama controlled by formal metrical patterns and casually placed rhymes. The elegiac voice searches for the lost, original self that has been tainted with experience and repressed in shame. Although the frankness of her approach and the rather limited range of her autobiographical themes will continue to alienate
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some readers, Sexton attained a significant ranking among contemporary confessional poets.
OTHER WORKS: All My Pretty Ones (1962). Eggs of Things (with M. Kumin, 1963). More Eggs of Things (with M. Kumin, 1964). Selected Poems (1967). Poems (with D. Livingston and T. Kinsella, 1968). Love Poems (1969, 1989). Joey and the Birthday Present (with M. Kumin, 1971). The Book of Folly (1972). O Ye Tongues (1973). The Death Notebooks (1974). The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975). The Wizard’s Tears (with M. Kumin, 1975). 45 Mercy Street (edited by L. G. Sexton, 1976). Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters (edited by L. G. Sexton, 1977, 1991). No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews, and Prose (1985). Selected Poems of Anne Sexton (edited by D. W. Middlebrook and D. H. George, 1988, 1991). Contributor of poetry to: What Did Miss Darrington See? An Anthology of Feminist Supernatural Fiction (1989); No More Masks! An Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Women Poets, Newly Revised and Expanded (1993); Eight American Poets: Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, James Merrill: An Anthology (1994, 1997); Nature’s Ban: Women’s Incest Literature (1996); Splash! Great Writing About Swimming (1996); An Anthology of Great U.S. Women Poets, 1850-1990: Temples and Palaces (1997); and others.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Barnard, C. K., Anne Sexton (1989). Bixler, F., et al, eds., Original Essays on the Poetry of Anne Sexton (1988). Colburn, S. E., ed., Anne Sexton: Telling the Tale (1988). Donovan, J. A., Her Kind: Personae in Anne Sexton’s Poetry (dissertation, 1993). George, D. H., Oedipus Anne: The Poetry of Anne Sexton (1987). George, D. H., ed., Sexton: Selected Criticism (1988). Hall, C. K. B. Anne Sexton (1989). Hedges, E., and Fishkin, S. F., eds., Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism (1994). Heyen, W., ed., American Poets in 1976 (1976). Hungerford, E., ed., Poets in Progress: Critical Prefaces to Thirteen Modern American Poets (1967). Lacey, P. A., The Inner War: Forms and Themes in Recent American Poetry (1976). Markey, J., A New Tradition? The Poetry of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Adrienne Rich: A Study of Feminism and Poetry (1988). McClatchy, J. D., ed., Anne Sexton: The Artist and Her Critics (1978). Middlebrook, D. W., Anne Sexton: A Biography (1991). Mills, Jr., R. J., Contemporary American Poetry (1966). Morton, R. E., Anne Sexton’s Poetry of Redemption: The Chronology of a Pilgrimage (1988). Northouse, C., and Walsh, R. P., Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton: A Reference Guide (1974). Phillips, R., The Confessional Poets (1973). Plimpton, G., ed., Women Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews (revised edition, 1998). Rosenthal, M. L., The New Poets: American and British Poetry Since World War II (1967). Seduction and Theory: Readings of Gender, Representation, and Rhetoric (1989). Sexton, L. G., Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton (1994). Shaw, R., ed., American Poetry Since 1960:
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Some Critical Perspectives (1973). Showalter, E., et al, eds., Modern American Women Writers (1993). Smith, S. E., Serious Daring: Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton (dissertation, 1998). Wagner-Martin, L., Critical Essays on Anne Sexton (1989). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Poetry Criticism (1991). Twayne’s Women Authors on CD (CD, 1995). Other references: Anne Sexton Reads (audiocassette, 1999). Boston Phoenix (Nov. 1994). Centennial Review (Spring 1975). Contemporary Literature (Fall 1992). In Their Own Voices: A Century of Recorded Poetry (audio cassette & CD, 1996). Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis (Winter 1992). Literature and Psychology (1993). Mythlore (Winter 1994). NMAL (Summer 1979). WRB (Apr. 1995). —KATHLEEN L. NICHOLS
SHANGE, Ntozake Born Paulette Linda Williams, 18 October 1948, Trenton, New Jersey Daughter of Paul T. and Eloise Owens Willams; married David Murray, 1977 (divorced); John Guess; children: Savannah Ntozake Shange was originally named for her father, a surgeon. Her mother was a social worker and educator. In 1971 she renamed herself, taking the Zulu names Ntozake (she who comes with her own things) and Shange (she who walks like a lion). The name reflects some of the cultural and personal concerns of Shange’s writings. Shange’s early life was a privileged one. Her home life brought her into contact with many of the giants of black intellectual and cultural life, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Josephine Baker, and musicians Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and Chuck Berry. The impact of black musical traditions remains characteristic of Shange’s work today. An avid reader as a child, after the family’s move to St. Louis she seems to have immersed herself in the world of her imagination: her novel Betsey Brown (1985) is semiautobiographical. Shange attended Barnard College, graduating in 1970 with honors in American studies. She completed an M.A. in American studies at the University of Southern California (1973) and began her academic career, teaching humanities, women’s studies, and Afro-American studies at Sonoma State College, Mills College, and the University of California Extension. During these years, Shange formed and worked with several performing arts groups and began performing her poetry in clubs across the country. Her transition from poet to dramatist began during this period. In 1975 Shange moved to New York City, a move that brought her work a wider audience. Her Obie award—winning ‘‘choreopoem,’’ for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf (1977) displayed what would come to be seen as characteristic of Shange’s art: mixing dramatic interpretations of her poems with movement, dance, song, music, and
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lighting effects to forge a unified woman-centered statement. The poignancy, humor, and rage of the piece delighted some and infuriated others. The work’s focus on relationships among women in the face of neglect and mistreatment by men brought attacks from drama, literary, and politico-social critics alike. Shange herself had attempted suicide in 1966 after separating from her first husband, a law student. In 1976 she described this and subsequent suicide attempts as the result of suppressed rage. Writing and artistic expression, among other things, provided a healthier outlet for this rage. In subsequent theater pieces, Shange continued the experiments of for colored girls, substituting poetry, music, and dance for straight plot narrative and character development. It is only in her adaptations, Mother Courage and Her Children (1980, from the Berthold Brecht work) and Betsey Brown (1991, from her own novel of the same name), that Shange attempts something approaching conventional drama. And each of these plays makes use of several experimental devices, particularly in their use of music. None of Shange’s subsequent work for the theater has received the praise of for colored girls. Shange is primarily a poet who works in the oral tradition. Her strength is in her artistic rendering of the spoken word emanating from her sure ear for the musicality of vernacular speech, its rhythms and intonations. Criticized for ‘‘distorting’’ the language in her written work, she has responded in characteristic language: ‘‘i cant count the number of times i have viscerally wanted to attack deform n maim the language that i waz taught to hate myself in / the language that perpetuates the notions that cause pain to every black child as he / she learns to speak of the world & the ‘self’. . . / in order to think n communicate the thoughts n feelings i want to think n communicate / i haveta fix my tool to my needs.’’ Shange’s creation of her own black, female image weaves together her prose and poetry, Her novels Sassafras, Cypress, and Indigo (1982) and Betsey Brown explore various aspects of the black woman’s psyche, from Betsey’s youthful introspection through the trials of young womanhood of the three plant-named sisters. Fusing her personal and public concerns, Shange also writes cultural criticism and social commentary for a wide variety of publications. In addition, she continues to lecture widely and perform her works as a soloist and in performing arts ensembles. In addition to her 1977 Obie, Shange also received nominations for the Tony, Grammy, and Emmy awards for the Broadway-recorded and televised versions of for colored girls. She has served as artist-in-residence for the New York State Council on the Arts (1977 and 1981). In 1981, additionally, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Columbia University Medal of Excellence as well as an Obie for the off-Broadway production of Mother Courage and Her Children. The Love Space Demands: A Continuing Saga (1991) revisits the blend of poetry, music, dance, and drama that were combined in for colored girls who have considered suicide. The pieces in the choreopoem touch on issues ranging from celibacy to crack addiction during pregnancy. Shange hopes, as she told Eileen
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Myles in the Voice Literary Supplement, ‘‘to keep our sensibilities alive. . . . To keep people alive so they know they can feel what is happening as opposed to simply trying to fend it off.’’ Shange examines race and gender in modern America in her 1994 novel, Liliane: Resurrection of the Daughter. The book features monologues delivered by the protagonist, Liliane Lincoln, as she undergoes psychoanalysis. Liliane deals with racial discomfort and her need to assimilate with all cultures, and Shange makes her heroine more identifiable by including appealing qualities, which also add to her complexity. Kelly Cherry noted in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, ‘‘a daring portrait of a black woman artist recreating herself out of social and psychological chaos. . . . Shange has written a novel that manages to be both risky and stylish.’’ Combining poetry and Romare Bearden’s mixed media art, I Live in Music (1994) takes the reader from an metropolitan setting to a bayou. In this all-ages book, Shange again here incorporates more than words in her effort to provide a story that provokes all the senses. The mid-1990s saw frequent incidents involving racially motivated violence. Tackling the subject in a picture book for children, Shange tells a story of a brother and sister who are victims of a racial attack. Whitewash’s (1997) serious tone reflects an honest look at understanding and preventing such incidents. OTHER WORKS: Natural Disasters and Other Festive Occasions (1977). Nappy Edges (1978). Three Pieces: Spell #7; A Photograph; Boogie Woogie Landscapes (1981). A Daughter’s Geography (1983). from okra to greens: poems by ntozake shange (1984). see no evil: prefaces, reviews, & essays, 1974-1983 (1984, reissued as See No Evil: Prefaces, Essays, & Accounts, 1976-1983). Melissa and Smith: A Story (1985). Ridin’ the Moon in Texas: Word Painting (1987). Other productions: A Photograph: A Still Life with Shadow/A Photograph: A Study of Cruelty (1977, revised as A Photograph: Lovers in Motion, 1979). Where the Mississippi Meets the Amazon (with T. Nkabinda and J. Hagedorn, 1977). From Okra to Greens/ A Different Kinda Love Story: A Play/ With Music & Dance (1985). Black and White Two-Dimensional Planes (1979). Spell #7 (1979). If I Can Cook, You Know God Can (1998). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Betsko, K., and R. Koenig, Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights (1987). Brater, E., ed., Feminine Focus (1989). Foster, K., ‘‘Detangling the Web: Mother-Daughter Relationships in the Plays of Marsha Norman, Lillian Hellman, Tina Howe, Ntozake Shange’’ (thesis, 1994). Keyssar, H., Feminist Theatre (1984). Tate, C., ed., Black Women Writers at Work (1983). Reference works: CA (1980, 1999). CANR (1989). CLC (1978, 1983, 1986). DLB (1985). FC (1990). MTCW (1991). Notable Women in the American Theatre (1989). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: LATBR (18 Dec. 1994). Ms. (December 1977). NYT (7 May 1989). PW (3 May 1985, 10 Oct. 1994,
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14 Nov. 1994, 3 Nov. 1997). Spare Rib: A Women’s Liberation Magazine (May 1987) Voice Literary Supplement (Aug./ Sept. 1991). —FAHAMISHA P. BROWN, UPDATED BY ALLISON A. JONES
SHANNON, Dell See LININGTON, Elizabeth
SHANNON, Monica Born Eastern Canada, 7 March 1893; died August 1965 Married Mr. Wing, circa 1927 Monica Shannon and her family moved from Canada to Seattle, Washington, and then to the Bitter Root Valley in the Montana Rockies. There, on a cattle ranch, Shannon lived among the Bulgarian immigrants and the Flatheads, Native Americans who, with her Irish ancestors, provided the inspiration for much of her writing. After Shannon moved to California with her family, she received a B.L.S. and began work at the Los Angeles Public Library. As a librarian/storyteller and as a doting aunt to two active and inquisitive children, she first told and then wrote the stories that became California Fairy Tales (1926). In these tales, elements of several cultures—California Spanish, Irish, Native American—are combined in original fairy tales taking place in a land of bean fields, redwood forests, deserts, and droughts. Eyes for the Dark (1928) and More Tales from California (1935) are collections similar to California Fairy Tales in tone and subject. Tawnymore (1931), a novel, was a less successful literary venture. Tawnymore, the hero, is a Pericu of the 18th century, and the book begins as the story of his adventures. It is soon taken over by the pirates with whom Tawnymore and his companion sail. The critical consensus was that the book was episodic and marred by the inclusion of distracting incidents. With Dobry (1934), a Newbery Award winner, Shannon showed she could control an extended narrative. Dobry, a young Bulgarian boy, discovers he must be an artist. Against the wishes of his widowed mother, who naturally hopes he will become a productive member of village society, his storytelling grandfather defends Dobry and the primacy of his calling. In addition to celebrating the importance of art, Dobry presents a striking portrait of life in rural Bulgaria. The love for nature, especially for the changing colors and lights of the high mountains, that is so much of the achievement of Dobry is also an important feature of Shannon’s poetry. Her collection of poems for children, Goose Grass Rhymes (1930) is just such an example. Shannon’s stories, filled with the sights and
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sounds of their settings and peopled by whimsical characters, appealed to her young readership.
world as the feet of the washerwoman ‘‘on the banks of the Conodoguinet,’’ most of Sharp’s poems merge into the noumenal world as well.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Junior Book of Authors (1951). Other references: Horn Book (Nov. 1928, Aug. 1931, MarchApril 1935). LJ (22 Jan. 1930). NYT (24 Dec. 1934). PW (29 June 1935).
Sharp was a popular poet in Cumberland County. She worked with pleasantly musical phrases and ingenious images. It is unfortunate that Sharp’s hardworking rural life deprived her of the educational opportunities that might have enabled her to do more.
—KATHARYN F. CRABBE
SHARON, Rose
—JEANETTE NYDA PASSTY
SHAW, Anna H(oward)
See MERRIL, Judith Born 2 February 1847, Newcastle-on-Tyne, England; died 2 July 1919, Moylan, Pennsylvania Daughter of Thomas and Nicola Stott Shaw
SHARP, Isabella Oliver Born 1777, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania; died 1843 Daughter of Mr. and Mrs. James Oliver, Esq.; married (James?) Sharp Biographical data about Isabella Oliver Sharp can be found in the note ‘‘To the Editor,’’ from ‘‘R.D.’’ which prefaces Poems, on Various Subjects (1805), as well as in several of the poems themselves. Sharp’s parents owned a house and farmlands, and her father was highly regarded in the community. He was learned in mathematics and the sciences, and his lessons ‘‘improv’d many a youth,’’ as Sharp remembers in her poem ‘‘Inscribed to My Brothers.’’ He took pains to instruct his own sons and also the sons of his neighbors, but he virtually neglected the education of his daughters. Sharp’s father died around 1791, and her mother was left with a number of small children to raise. Eventually, the house and lands ‘‘passed to another hand.’’ ‘‘R.D.’’ states that Sharp never received anything more than a ‘‘common english [sic] education.’’ That is, she was taught to read and—just barely!—to write. Still, Sharp became a voracious reader. From her earliest years, hard work was required of her, and while she worked, she composed verses. ‘‘Composed on the Banks of the Conodoguinet’’ actually describes the composition process as it is taking place: while Sharp’s hands are laboring to cleanse soiled garments in the river, her mind is busy turning those same clothes into a metaphor for the human soul, and that same river into an analogue for Christ’s redemptive sacrifice. The hauntingly beautiful lines of this poem were among the many hundreds Sharp composed and ‘‘treasur’d’’ in her memory over the years until she found someone who could write well enough to transcribe them for her. As she records in ‘‘To the Public,’’ Sharp took an active and empathetic interest in the joys and sorrows of her friends and neighbors. A birth, a death, an illness, a wedding—all were grist for her poetic mill. Deeply read in divinity, Sharp continually sought to explore, as in her speculations ‘‘At the Request of B--n,’’ ‘‘What strange contact binds / Material things to immaterial minds?’’ While planted as firmly on the shores of this phenomenal
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The daughter of Scotch-English Unitarians, Anna H. Shaw was brought to the U.S. in 1851 and spent her early childhood in New Bedford and Lawrence, Massachusetts. In 1859 Shaw’s father established his family in a half-completed log cabin near Big Rapids on the Michigan frontier. An erratic and impractical man, he was seldom at home, and Shaw and her brothers ran the farm with little assistance. Although her formal schooling was fragmentary and frequently interrupted, Shaw was an eager scholar and an avid reader; at fifteen she became the teacher in the local school. At age twenty, Shaw moved to Big Rapids to live with her sister, and there heard a woman preach for the first time. This encounter reawakened Shaw’s childhood desire to make preaching her profession. At about this time Shaw was converted to Methodism; in 1871 she was licensed to preach by the Methodist church. To prepare for a ministerial career, Shaw attended the local high school, Albion College, and the theological school of Boston University, supporting herself by preaching in vacant pulpits. Shaw was the first woman to be ordained by the Methodist Protestant denomination. While serving as pastor of two East Dennis churches, Shaw attended the medical school of Boston University and received her degree in 1886. Shaw decided, however, that her true vocation lay in furthering the public causes of women. In 1885 she became organizer and lecturer for the Massachusetts Woman’s Suffrage Association, and in 1888, she became superintendent of the franchise department of the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Although Shaw remained active in the temperance cause, she shifted her major commitment to the suffrage movement in the 1890s. In 1892 Shaw was elected vice-president of the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association, and she served as its president from 1904 to 1915. Shaw was a splendid proselytizer but an unsuccessful administrator, and she resigned in the face of rising disaffection and conflict. In 1917 Shaw was appointed chairman of the Women’s Committee of the Council of National Defense. She was highly effective in uniting women’s organizations, coordinating their war efforts, and exhorting them to inspirational patriotism; she
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SHAW
Shaw was primarily a sermonizer, lecturer, and propagandist. She did not conceive her only book as a literary work, but rather as a personal chronicle of the woman’s movement. The Story of a Pioneer (1915) is a lively, graphic reminiscence with a strong feminist refrain. Shaw was a witty advocate and told a story well, but she was also a poor concealer of her prejudices; and her memoirs, frank and revealing, bear testimony to her obvious disdain for men and matrimony.
of their then-small youngest daughter. Although they trained Shaw in the values and skills central to their Pima heritage, they sent her to American schools and encouraged her to learn a different tradition. After graduating from Phoenix Indian Boarding School in 1918, Shaw completed her high school work and became in 1920 the first full-blooded Native American graduate of Phoenix Union High School. Shortly thereafter, she married her school sweetheart, a Pima-Marcicopa, and settled in Phoenix. During her forty years in the city, Shaw raised three children, cared for her aged parents, led an antiracism project for Church Women United, and was the first woman ordained as an elder in her Presbyterian church.
Much of Shaw’s literary output consisted of sermons, lectures, and testimony before legislative committees. Several of her sermons have survived. ‘‘The Heavenly Vision,’’ delivered before the International Council on Women in 1888, was responsible for convincing Susan B. Anthony that she must convert Shaw to full-time devotion to the suffrage cause. Anthony described Shaw as ‘‘beyond question the leading woman orator of this generation,’’ and her sermon, ‘‘The Heavenly Vision,’’ as a ‘‘matchless discourse.’’
Shaw and her family always spent weekends and vacations on the reservation, and when Ross Shaw retired in 1960 as a foreman for the Railway Express, they returned to his birthplace, the Salt River Reservation. Shaw’s ‘‘retirement’’ was active: she edited the tribal newsletter and served with the Pima Mutual SelfHelp Housing Program. She also helped start an Aid to the Elderly program, revived basketweaving among Pima women, and founded a tribal museum. Meanwhile, Shaw taught Pima language and culture to young children in the reservation school.
Shaw made frequent use of analogy in her sermons, and she liked rhetorical questions and figurative language. Shaw used humor less in her sermons than in her lectures; her wit was at its best when refuting male arguments against equal suffrage. After she became a highly visible leader of the suffrage movement, Shaw occasionally wrote articles on women and women’s rights for popular magazines, but it was as a speaker that Shaw made her major contribution.
In the 1930s, Shaw began recording Pima legends in order to prevent their loss as the older generation took their memories to their graves. In 1950 she enrolled in a two-year writing course at Phoenix Technical School to gain the skills necessary to actualize her ‘‘plan to help make both Indians and whites aware of the proud heritage of the original Americans.’’ Her first major work was a play, Darkness to Light, dramatizing the missionary efforts of Dr. Charles H. Cook among the Pimas, which was performed at her Phoenix church.
was later awarded a Distinguished Service Medal. After the war, Shaw joined William Howard Taft and President A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard on a speaking tour to support the League of Nations.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cott, Nancy F., The Grounding of Modern Feminism (1987). Harper, I. H., ed., The History of Woman Suffrage (1922). Kraditor, A. S., The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890-1920 (1965). Muncy, R., Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform (1991). O’Neill, W. L., Everyone Was Brave: The Rise and Fall of Feminism in America (1969). Riegel, R. E., American Feminists (1963). Reference works: HWS, IV-VI. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Journal of Social History (Winter 1969). Pacific History (Oct. 1961). —RUTH BORDIN
SHAW, Anna Moore Born Chehia (Pima name), 30 November 1898, Santa Cruz village, Gila River Pima Reservation, Arizona; died April 1975 Daughter of Josiah (S-wegi Hapot, Red Arrow) and Rose (Haus Molly) Moore; married Ross (Jujul Tonal, Zigzag Light) Shaw, 1920; children three When Anna Moore Shaw’s parents, traditional Pimas, converted to Presbyterianism, they chose a new direction for the life
Shaw’s first book, Pima Indian Legends (1968), realizes her goal of presenting Pima oral traditions as told by her father in lively, readable English. Although Shaw removes the contextual elements of the telling and uses pseudo-Native American words like ‘‘squaw’’—ostensibly to follow white practice —her work has importance as an example of an intermediate stage between oral and written Native American literatures folklore scholars are just beginning to investigate. The tales Shaw includes are those intended traditionally for education and entertainment; only a simplified version of the sacred Pima origin myth appears among many humorous and instructive animal legends and trickster coyote stories. One tale, ‘‘Potsherd Speaks,’’ is especially interesting, establishing a living link between the ruins of the ancient Hohokam and ongoing Pima culture. Conscious of traditional Pima injunctions against being ‘‘boastful and over-talkative about myself’’ like Coyote, Shaw begins her autobiography, A Pima Past (1974), with her ancestors and ends it with her ‘‘Indian Hall of Fame’’ of successful 20thcentury Pimas, producing an unusual blend of tribal, family, and personal history. The information Shaw provides about Pima culture in depicting the life of her father, raised by his grandmother, helps readers appreciate the drastic change her own lifestyle represents. Her work lacks the bitterness of many Native American autobiographies, focusing more on the possibilities for
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intercultural understanding and less on the traumas often experienced by those attempting to reach this goal in a prejudiced society. While Shaw, a committed Christian, is insistent upon the values of education and cultural adjustment through brotherly love, she is proud of her Pima identity and has helped revitalize her heritage. Her works, as strong statements of dual values, reveal the complexity obscured by the facile dichotomy separating ‘‘progressive’’ from ‘‘traditional’’ Native Americans. Shaw shows us what she calls ‘‘a lifetime of treading the bridge between two cultures’’ can be creative and fulfilling, rather than psychologically debilitating. Her works are important in giving readers a firsthand report on the adaptability of Native American values, and the continued strength of Native American women. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Indians of Today (fourth edition, 1971). Other references: Arizona and the West (Summer 1975). Choice (May 1969, Oct. 1974). EJ (Jan. 1974). Journal of Arizona History (Summer 1974). LJ (July 1974). —HELEN M. BANNAN
SHEEHY, Gail Born 27 November 1937, Mamaroneck, New York Daughter of Harold M. and Lillian Rainey Henion; married Albert F. Sheehy, 1960 (divorced 1967); children: one daughter Gail Sheehy grew up and attended high school in Mamaroneck, New York. After graduating from the University of Vermont in 1958, with a dual major in English and home economics, she worked for the J. C. Penney Company as a consumer representative and then as a filmstrip editor. In 1960 Sheehy moved with her husband to Rochester, New York, where he entered medical school and she became fashion editor for the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle. Her daughter was born a few months after she moved with her husband to New York City. The Sheehys were divorced in 1967. In New York, Sheehy first wrote for the women’s department of the Herald Tribune. After a few years she began to write freelance articles and soon became a contributing editor of New York magazine. She studied at Columbia University in 1969 and 1970, on a fellowship in interracial reporting, and again later, on an Alice Patterson Foundation fellowship. Lovesounds (1970) uses alternating points of view—the wife as well as her husband—to relate the breakup of the marriage of a New York City couple of the 1960s. Although not successful as a novel, the book is of interest for its autobiographical elements and analysis of modern marriage. Speed Is of the Essence (1971) is a collection of articles originally published in New York. The book offers case histories
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of the prophetic loudmouthed minority Sheehy calls the ‘‘speeders,’’ those who first experiment with new life options. The title essay is about amphetamine addicts, but Sheehy’s point in the collection is that speed is of the essence in our entire culture. Panthermania: The Clash of Black Against Black in One American City (1971) is a result of what Sheehy calls an ‘‘experiment in interracial journalism.’’ Accompanied by a young black photographer, David Parks, she spent nine months of 1970 in New Haven, Connecticut, investigating the black community’s reactions to the trials of the Black Panthers accused of murdering Alex Rackley. Her next book, Hustling: Prostitution in Our Wide-Open Society (1973) brings together a series of articles Sheehy wrote about prostitution in New York City—from street hookers to high-society courtesans. Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life (1976) was written in response to Sheehy’s personal midlife crisis. She shows there is a pattern of adult development that can be charted and described. She attempts to locate the individual’s inner changes, to compare the developmental rhythms of men and women, and to examine the predictable crises for couples. The book is based on case histories of 115 educated middle-class people between the ages of 18 and 55. The enormous success of the book attested to the popular appeal of its theories. Sheehy followed up her bestselling Passages with another popular success. Pathfinders (1981), a testament to the American public’s need to fit their psyches into a schema, is rife with such generalizations as ‘‘What’s wrong with me?’’ is the ‘‘archetypal female response.’’ Nonetheless, the book demonstrates Sheehy’s genuine concern for ‘‘the female psychology.’’ Pathfinders revives the ‘‘Sexual Diamond,’’ of Passages, describing the gradual divergence of male and female character traits from 18 to 40 and the slow crossover each sex makes thereafter. Subsequently, Sheehy redirected her analysis of the human personality toward politics aiming at, in her words, an ‘‘X-ray of history.’’ Character: America’s Search for Leadership (1988) concerns the ‘‘character’’ of achievers: the cast includes Al Gore, George Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jesse Jackson, and Gary Hart, examined to substantiate her view on how achievers handle crises and develop. Character was followed by a long biography, The Man Who Changed the World: The Lives of Mikhail S. Gorbachev (1990). Sheehy describes her journey to Gorbachev’s hometown to talk to its residents, her time with the KGB, and her interviews with more than 100 people. The Man received almost universally negative reviews across the political spectrum, with several critics noting the inadequacy of her preparation and her popular psychology approach to the massiveness of her subject. To Sheehy’s credit, however, she charged into a complicated issue and attempted a comprehensive account; her relatively uncritical fascination is what makes her good at what she does—American journalism. Sheehy returned to the subject with which she seems most comfortable, female psychology, with The Silent Passage: Menopause (1992). The book immediately made the bestseller list
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although some women were critical in their reviews. Barbara Ehrenreich, in a review titled ‘‘All Aboard the Raging Hormone Express,’’ claims Sheehy’s description of menopause ‘‘drive[s] women to whimper, ‘Won’t I ever be me anymore?’’’ Fortunately, as Ehrenreich points out, Sheehy gives plenty of evidence within the book to refute this frightening image. In 1995 Sheehy published what was originally intended as an update of her 1976 Passages but instead became an entirely new look at the progression of adulthood. Life in the past 20 years had changed drastically for many adults, Sheehy found, and in New Passages: Mapping Your Life Across Time, she proposed a novel look at the stages of maturity. She suggested the years between 18 and 30 are a time of ‘‘provisional adulthood,’’ while ages 30 to 45 are the ‘‘first adulthood,’’ and from 45 up is the ‘‘second adulthood.’’ Some critics hailed the book as a large improvement from the original, while others found it lacked maturity and depth. Either way, it drew upon Sheehy’s strength of collecting stories and data from other sources and weaving it together with her own theories. Sheehy’s next work, Understanding Men’s Passages: Discovering the New Map of Men’s Lives (1998), examines the older, male subgroup of New Passages. Again through the use of interviews and other research, Sheehy chronicles the struggles and fears of men over 40 and offers suggestions for overcoming new challenges. Though she often employs what Kirkus Reviews calls an ‘‘overly and redundantly upbeat tone,’’ the book has been well received as a readable, useful guide striking a good balance between hard psychology and popular psychology. Despite some mixed reviews, Sheehy has received praise for her journalistic excellence; a March 1991 poll in the Washington Journalism Review gave her a high rating and she is widely published in newspapers and magazines. Her self-help books are among the most frequently read within an extremely popular genre, employing a blend of easy reading and easily accepted advice that has proven to be a lucrative combination.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1975). CA Online (2 June 1999). CANR (1981, 1991). MTCW (1991). Other references: Amazon.com (8 June 1999). Glamour (Dec. 1977). KR (1 May 1998). NR (28 Sept. 1987, 27 May 1991). National Review (11 Feb. 1991). Newsweek (4 Dec. 1972). NYTBR (5 Sept. 1971, 30 May 1976, 7 June 1992). PW (1 June 1992). SR (24 July 1971, 15 May 1976). Time (10 May 1976). Town & Country (Oct. 1978). —ANNE HUDSON JONES, UPDATED BY CARRIE SNYDER
SHELDON, Ann See ADAMS, Harriet Stratemeyer
SHERWOOD
SHERWOOD, Mary (Elizabeth) Wilson Born 27 October 1826, Keene, New Hampshire; died 12 September 1903, New York, New York Daughter of James and Mary Richardson Wilson; married John Sherwood, 1851; children: four sons Mary Wilson Sherwood was the oldest of seven children of a distinguished family of Scotch-Irish origin. She attended a fashionable private school for girls in Boston, where the training focused on good manners, not academic studies. Sherwood became part of Washington social life as a hostess during her father’s term in Congress (1847-50). Upon her mother’s death in 1884 Sherwood also assumed the duties of family management. After her marriage to a New York lawyer, Sherwood settled in Manhattan. She had four sons; Robert Sherwood, the playwright, was a grandson. Sherwood first began to sponsor literary events in a fundraising effort for the restoration of Mount Vernon. By the 1870s, the Sherwood residence had become an establishment in New York literary and philanthropic circles. Sherwood served as president of the Causeries, a literary gathering of distinguished New York women and was a member of several benevolent societies. The drain on the family resources induced by entertaining persuaded Sherwood to turn her efforts toward writing professionally. She had already published short stories and occasional verse in New York and Boston magazines. A Transplanted Rose (1882), her second novel, about the acceptance of a western girl into New York society, and a later, similar novel, Sweet-Brier (1889), were well-received. Sherwood also published a volume of poetry and two autobiographical books, An Epistle to Posterity: Being Rambling Recollections of Many Years of My Life (1897) and Here & There & Everywhere: Reminiscences (1898). Her style is lively, idiomatic, and touched with humor. Sherwood’s most notable works, however, are in the field of etiquette. Sherwood’s experience in Washington and Europe, where she traveled extensively, gave her great familiarity with a variety of styles of manners. Her articles on manners appeared in Atlantic, Scribner’s, Harper’s, Appleton’s Journal, and Frank Leslie’s Weekly. Manners and Social Usages (1884) was the most successful of Sherwood’s books. Sherwood wrote popular manuals of style treating such standard topics as table manners and the art of conversation. Like later 20th century philosophers of social convention such as Emily Post, Amy Vanderbilt, and Peg Bracken, Sherwood pointed to kindness and regard for others as the universal law of manners. Sherwood was, however, keenly aware of class differences. She was frank and firm in advocating the leadership of society by a class possessing talent and money. This was largely in reaction to the ‘‘upstarts’’ of the lower orders who were coming into sudden fortunes and social prominence. Sherwood’s several books on etiquette are addressed to a status quo of domestic women in the roles of wives and mothers— ladies of leisure and some means, whose main duties were, in Sherwood’s belief, to temper the uncivilized tendencies of men and to serve as exemplars of congenial and decorous interpersonal
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relations. Like those social arbiters following her, Sherwood sees women as the directors and managers of social setting and action. Although Sherwood can be criticized for not using her talents for more serious ends, and although her assessment of the role of good manners and the position of women in society was conservative, she should be remembered as the author of the most influential etiquette book of her time. OTHER WORKS: The Sarcasm of Destiny; or, Nina’s Experience (1878). Amenities of Home (1881). Etiquette (1884). Home Amusements (1884). Royal Girls and Royal Courts (1887). The Art of Entertaining (1892). Poems by M.E.W.S. (1892). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: AW. NAW (1971). Other references: NYT (15 Sept. 1903).
The religion permeating Shindler’s life also fills her poetry, as does the lavish description of her southern homeland. Her collections The Southern Harp, The Northern Harp, and The Western Harp (published in the 1830s and 1840s) were all wellreceived, and her poetry found its way into many newspapers and magazines, including particularly the New York Observor and the Augusta Mirror. Although Shindler’s contributions are minor and often sentimental, they reflect a mind constantly challenging its own earlier assumptions and exploring the limitless possibilities of both the natural and the supernatural worlds. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Daughters of America; or, Women of the Century (1883). Index to Women of the World from Ancient to Modern Times (1970, incorrect entry). —THELMA J. SHINN
—MARGARET J. KING
SHINDLER, Mary Dana Born 15 February 1810, Charleston, South Carolina; died 1883, Texas Wrote under: Mary S. B. Dana, Mrs. Mary S. B. Dana Shindler Daughter of B. M. and Mary S. Palmer; married Charles E. Dana, 1830; R. D. Shindler Mary Dana Shindler’s life was beset with tragedies; she lost sister, brother, son, and husband in the span of a few years. Each of these deaths is commemorated by a poem in her collection The Parted Family, and Other Poems (1842). These poems reflect how religion enabled Shindler to survive and, not surprisingly, became the dominant theme of her life. With her first husband, she lived on the Mississippi River in Bloomington, Iowa Territory. After Dana’s death, Shindler returned to Charleston; later, she lived in other areas of the South, including Texas, where she composed the U.S. Labor Greenback Songbook in 1879. Her writing includes poetry, novels, essays on religion and spiritualism, and, most importantly, Letters Addressed to Relatives and Friends Chiefly in Reply to Arguments in Support of the Doctrine of the Trinity (1846), which traces her conversion from Calvinism to Unitarianism. Shindler’s later marriage to R. D. Shindler, an Episcopal clergyman, initiated another conversion, to his faith, and produced A Southerner Among the Spirits: A Record of Investigations into Spiritual Phenomena (1877). Shindler’s novels, directed mostly toward a young audience, never gained the popularity of her poetry. Charles Morton; or, The Young Patriot: A Tale of the American Revolution (1843) is pure romantic history motivated by convenience and circumstance. The seagoing adventures, The Young Sailor (1843) and Forecastle Tom; or, The Landsman Turned Sailor (1846), are both moral tales; Forecastle Tom becomes a sailor missionary.
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SHOWALTER, Elaine Born 21 January 1941, Cambridge, Massachusetts Daughter of Paul and Violet Rottenberg Cottler; married English Showalter Jr., 1963; children: Victoria (Vinca), Michael Elaine Showalter invented gynocriticism, a feminist critical theory and approach that focuses on the woman writer, the meaning of her text, the structure of literature written by women including its history, themes, genres. She introduced this new method of reading specific texts and its application in an essay, ‘‘Toward a Feminist Poetics’’ (1979). Because of the relative success of gynocritics, especially of Showalter herself, whose prolific works demonstrate the method in all its possible combinations ( Daughters of Decadence—highly praised by the Times (London) Literary Supplement when it was published in 1993— applies gynocritics to 19th-century short fiction in Britain), the very foundations of feminism have shifted from practical concerns to intellectual ones. In the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Showalter is named ‘‘one of the founders of feminist criticism and still one of its most important and influential practitioners.’’ She began by concentrating on British women novelists, studying their work not as part of a tradition dominated by male writers but as a separate tradition altogether, even a subculture with its own ‘‘values, conventions, experiences, and behaviors.’’ Her subsequent books, especially Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (1990), include literary histories that contribute to the modern area of ‘‘gender studies,’’ since she is concerned with the language, especially the rhetoric, of popular fiction and periodicals as these reflect the changes in themes and tensions at the end of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th. Showalter has had a significant academic career. She earned a B.A. at Bryn Mawr (1962), an M.A. at Brandeis (1964), and a Ph.D. in English at the University of California at Davis (1970). She began teaching at Douglass College, Rutgers University, in 1970 and rose steadily to full professor by 1983. While at Rutgers,
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she received the Christian and Mary Lindbach Foundation award for distinguished teaching (1976). The following year, she was a Guggenheim fellow (1977-78), and she spent an additional research year as a Rockefeller humanities fellow (1981-82). Since 1984 she has been Avalon Professor of Humanities (and professor of English) at Princeton University, where she remains an active faculty member despite frequent visits to places as diverse as Dartmouth College’s Critical Theory School (1986), the Salzburg Seminars (1988), and Oxford University (1989). Showalter’s leap to national prominence came in April 1997 when she appeared with Lynne Cheney on Crossfire Sunday, a popular confrontational television show, as a guest during a discussion of the causes of Gulf War Syndrome. Her recent book, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture (1997), proposes that afflictions like Gulf War Syndrome arise not from exposure to chemicals but from the mind of the individual. Naturally, this was not a popular opinion or one that people suffering from modern maladies like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome were going to admit without loud arguments against it. It must be said that Showalter does not consider these conditions faked or made up; on the contrary, she contests these claims by suggesting that ‘‘we’re a society that doesn’t understand or really take seriously the effects of psychological stress and conflict and anxiety and a certain kind of helplessness on our bodies and on our emotions.’’ After Crossfire’s speakers had finished for the evening, one of the hosts (Bob Beckel) remarked that Showalter was driven from a book signing because of a confrontation with ‘‘people who have legitimate, legitimate suffering.’’ It cannot be easy for Showalter to keep explaining that psychological suffering can be just as devastating to the body as physical suffering. Nevertheless, she continues to pursue this frequently marginalized line of inquiry and research. One might note that she does not ever connect ‘‘hysteria’’ to ‘‘hypochondria’’ (which is imagined illness), though her critics seem to believe her choice of term means the same thing. In a balanced review of Hystories, Jenn Shreve applauds her ‘‘slow, well-researched study of the history of hysterical epidemics and their modern day manifestations.’’ The inclusion of alien abduction, satanic ritual abuse, recovered memory, and multiple personality disorder with Gulf War Syndrome has made Showalter the object of intense scrutiny by the very press she says assists in spreading the contagion of these illnesses rooted in the unconscious. There are stories widely circulated on the Internet of people suffering from some of the conditions Showalter lists who appear at events where the author/scholar is present to attack her verbally. These unfortunate people seem to be confirming her diagnosis rather than refuting it. She writes: ‘‘The United States has become the hot zone of psychogenic diseases, new and mutating forms of hysteria amplified by modern communications and fin-de-siècle anxiety.’’ It is only fair to point out that David Futrelle, a regular contributor to Salon and a self-diagnosed hypochondriac, recognizes a moral vision in Showalter’s unmasking of the forces making people sick in modern society. Indeed, the shrill tone of her loudest critics makes it absolutely necessary to read and understand Showalter’s position on hysteria and psychosomatic illness. It is characteristic of Showalter that she continues to work as editor of two prestigious
SHREVE
scholarly publications, Women’s Studies and Signs: Journal of Women, Culture, and Society, and to contribute regular essays to respected academic periodicals. OTHER WORKS: A Literature of Their Own: British Women Writers from Brontë to Lessing (1977). The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980 (1985). Speaking of Gender (1989). Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing (1991). Hysteria Beyond Freud (coauthor, 1993). Scribbling Women: Short Stories by Nineteenth Century American Women (1997). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CANR (1997). DLB (1988). Feminist Writers (1996). Other references: Crossfire Sunday (20 Apr. 1997). —KATHLEEN BONANN MARSHALL
SHREVE, Anita Born 7 October 1946, Boston, Massachusetts Daughter of Richard H. and Bibiona Kennedy Shreve; children: Katherine, Christopher ‘‘Love is a very devalued subject to be writing about these days,’’ Anita Shreve has observed. ‘‘That strikes me as sad.’’ For Shreve, no subject is ‘‘more serious to write about,’’ and her six finely wrought, deftly plotted tales of love, passion, betrayal, and loss give weight to her words. Since the publication of her first novel, Eden Close, in 1989, the former English teacher turned journalist turned novelist has been exploring the nature of love— ‘‘how it affects people right down to their soul, how it affects their families, how it affects their future’’—without exposing its essential mystery. Mystery, in fact, is frequently at the heart of Shreve’s novels, serving as the perfect metaphor for her subject. The eldest of three daughters of an airline pilot and a homemaker, Shreve is a product of the contradictory New England landscape so important to her fiction: she absorbed the appeal of its stark beauty during summers spent roaming the dunes of her native Massachusetts and on the coast of Maine. After graduation with an English degree from Tufts University in 1968, she began teaching high school English and writing the short stories that would find publication in small literary journals. One story, ‘‘Past the Island, Drifting,’’ won an O. Henry prize in 1975. Shreve spent three years working as a journalist in Kenya, where her then-husband attended graduate school. Upon her return to the U.S. in the late 1970s, she was a freelance writer for publications ranging from Cosmopolitan to the New York Times Magazine. She expanded an award-winning article on working mothers into her 1987 book, Remaking Motherhood. Another article, on the consciousness-raising movement, provided the
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foundation for her second book, Women Together, Women Alone (1989). The advance for this second book gave her the freedom to pursue fiction writing, and she published her first novel the same year as well. Subsequent novels have earned her steadily increasing readership and critical acclaim. Her 1997 novel, The Weight of Water, won several New England book awards and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, awarded to a woman author published in Great Britain. Eden Close, Shreve’s first novel, is a gothic tale that strips bare the layers of thwarted love between a husband, wife, and their adopted daughter. Her second novel, Strange Fits of Passion (1991), dissects the nature of an abusive relationship, while her third, Where or When (1993), explores the legacy of unrequited love that leads a man and a woman to risk all. In Resistance (1995), a U.S. bomber crashes in a small Belgian town during World War II, a life-transforming event. Shreve’s most critically acclaimed novel, The Weight of Water, weaves together parallel plots: the true tale of a 19th-century double murder on the Isles of Shoals, off the New Hampshire coast, and the contemporary story of the disintegration of a marriage. The Pilot’s Wife(1998), which received rather mixed reviews, exposes the deceptions that lie beneath the surface of a seemingly happy marriage. Clearly, love and marriage lie at the heart of a Shreve plot, but the traditional happy ending frequently eludes her characters. The threat of violence gives her fiction an edge, and when it erupts, as it inevitably does in her human—and therefore flawed—relationships, the consequences are tragic. Discontinuous plot structures and unconventional points of view give Shreve’s fiction an undeniable literariness, but they are not merely tricks of the trade. Instead, they elicit other thematic issues, particularly the nature and burden of truth. The narrator in Strange Fits of Passion, for instance, is a journalist who believes she reported the truth about a domestic tragedy, but years later, upon receiving the convicted killer’s account of the events, doubts her version of reality. Similarly, in The Weight of Water, jealousy blinds the photographer-narrator, a woman with a keen eye for penetrating surface realities. Shreve’s literary strategies highlight the subjective nature of truth, the impossibility of ever really knowing another’s reality, and the shifting ground on which truth is based. Shreve hopes to earn a reputation as ‘‘a writer who tells a good story and has a beautiful command of the language,’’ and she is well on her way to achieving it. Her plots, which frequently turn on murder, adultery, and incest, are compelling. Her style, which is both luminous and measured, lends its own intensity to these human catastrophes. In only a decade, Shreve has clearly created a body of work that commands both attention and respect for its exploration of the undercurrents of passion, creative and destructive, that lie beneath the surface of our domestic worlds. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Roche, B. J., ‘‘Anita Shreve’s Life Stories,’’ in Boston Globe Magazine (September 1998). —LINDA C. PELZER
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SHULMAN, Alix Kates Born 17 August 1932, Cleveland, Ohio Daughter of Samuel S. and Dorothy Davis Kates; married Marcus Klein, 1953 (dissolved); Martin Shulman, 1959 (divorced); children: Teddy, Polly. Praised by the New York Times as ‘‘the voice that for three decades provided a lyrical narrative of the changing position of women in American society,’’ Alix Kates Shulman is a writer, feminist, and political activist. Through her numerous essays, short stories, novels, and children’s books, she has used the landscape of her own life as a white, middle-class Jewish woman to explore the social and political issues shaping many women’s lives in late 20th-century American culture. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1932, Shulman graduated from Bradford Junior College in 1951 and received a B.A. from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland in 1953. She then moved to New York City, where she briefly studied philosophy at Columbia University (1953-54) and math at New York University (1960-61). She earned her living working as an encyclopedia editor until the late 1960s, when she attended her first meeting of the then burgeoning Women’s Liberation Movement, became a member of the radical feminist group Redstockings, and by her own accounts was forever changed. The publication of Shulman’s first novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen (1972) created a media sensation for its frank depiction of a young Midwestern girl’s sexual coming of age. The story recounts the life of a white, middle class girl, Sasha, and the humiliations and degradations that passed as ‘‘normal’’ for girls like her growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. Suffering from unwanted groping by neighborhood boys and valued more for her beauty than her intelligence, by the time she is in her 20s, Sasha ends up married with children and no hope for a life of her own. Critic Lucy Rosenthal called Memoirs a ‘‘breakthrough book incorporat[ing] all the points of the Women’s Liberation Movement and giv[ing] them rare fictional life.’’ The novel sold over a million copies. Memoirs was re-released in a special 25th anniversary issue in 1997, when it was widely, and sadly, reviewed as ‘‘still relevant.’’ In both her fiction and nonfiction writing, Shulman often addresses the conflicts inherent in marriage, mothering, and having a creative life. Her first marriage was short lived; her second marriage to Martin Shulman, with whom she had two children, became the basis for one of her most famous essays, ‘‘A Marriage Contract.’’ First written in 1969 and subsequently published in such mainstream magazines as Redbook and Life in 1971 and 1972, this was a contract intended to equally divide housework and childcare duties between spouses. Inspired by the women’s movement analysis of the inequities in traditional marriage arrangements, the first principle was the most radical: woman’s work is just as valuable as man’s work, regardless of pay. Criticized in the popular press at the time, most memorably by Norman Mailer, who said he’d rather have a roommate than be married to her, ‘‘A Marriage Contract’’ has been anthologized in
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feminist, sociological, and even legal anthologies and textbooks, including one by Harvard Law School Professor Lon Fuller, in Basic Contract Law. Shulman is also the biographer of the feminist anarchist Emma Goldman in The Anarchist Life of Emma Goldman (1971). She cites Goldman’s work and life as one of her greatest political and literary inspirations. Researching and writing about Goldman’s life helped Shulman gain the confidence and personal authority to write from her own life. Shulman also edited Red Emma Speaks: Selected Writings and Speeches by Emma Goldman (1972) and most recently, Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader (1996). Other novels by Shulman include Burning Questions (1978), about the emergence and ascendance of the women’s movement, On the Stroll (1981), about a bag lady and a young runaway, and In Every Woman’s Life. . .(1987), which Shulman describes as a ‘‘feminist comedy of ideas.’’ In recent years Shulman has written two books of her own memoirs. In the first, Drinking the Rain (1995), which won the Body Mind Spirit Award of Excellence, Shulman narrates her own continuing journey of personal and spiritual discovery, living alone in a primitive cabin on an island off the coast of Maine. By now a mature woman, divorced, and with grown children, she describes foraging for wild food and relishing her solitude. Shulman’s second memoir is a family memoir, A Good Enough Daughter (1999). Shulman has taught literature and writing at New York University, Yale University, and the Universities of Colorado, Arizona, and Hawaii, where she held the Citizen’s Chair from 1991-92. She has also been a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome and the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagios, Italy. She has been the recipient of awards from DeWitt Wallace-Reader’s Digest and the National Endowment for the Arts. In addition to these literary accomplishments, Shulman’s most recent feminist activism has included the founding of a Pacific chapter of the pro-choice group No More Nice Girls and work with the Women’s Action Coalition (WAC). Today she lives half the year in New York City and the other half in her cabin in coastal Maine.
OTHER WORKS: Bosley on the Number Line (1970). The Traffic in Women and Other Essays (editor, 1970). Women’s Liberation: A Blueprint for the Future (contributor, 1970). Woman in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness (contributor, V. Gornick and B. K. Moran, eds., 1971). Awake or Asleep (1971). To the Barricades: The Anarchist Life of Emma Goldman (1971). Finders Keepers (1972).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ascher, C. et al, eds., Between Women: Biographers, Novelists, Critics, Teachers, and Artists Write about Their Work on Women (1984). DuPlessis, R. B., and A. Snitow, eds.,
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The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women’s Liberation (1998). Reference works: CA 29-32 (1978). CLC 2 (1974), 10 (1979). SATA 7 (1975). Other references: Booklist (15 June 1971, 15 June 1987). Children’s Literature in Education 17 (1986). Commonweal 94 (21 May 1971). LJ (15 June 1971, Aug. 1981). News & Observer (12 Sept. 1997). Newsweek (1 May 1972). NYT (25 April 1972). NYTBR (23 Apr. 1972, 26 Mar. 1978, 31 May 1987). Saturday Review (20 May 1972). —DENISE BAUER
SIDLOSKY, Carolyn See FORCHÉ, Carolyn
SIGOURNEY, Lydia (Howard) Huntley Born 1 September 1791, Norwich, Connecticut; died 10 June 1865, Hartford, Connecticut Daughter of Ezekiel and Zerviah Wentworth Huntley; married Charles Sigourney, 1819; children: five, two of whom survived infancy Lydia Huntley Sigourney was christened ‘‘Lydia Howard,’’ in memory of her father’s deceased first wife. As a child, she was favored by the widow of Dr. Daniel Lathrop, who employed Sigourney’s father as a gardener. Mme. Lathrop made a pet of the clever, bookish girl, read with her and nurtured her sentimental tastes. After Mme. Lathrop’s death in 1806, Sigourney became acquainted with Lathrop’s relatives, the Wadsworths of Hartford, and with their assistance she and a friend—Nancy Maria Hyde— opened a school in Hartford in 1814. In 1815 Daniel Wadsworth helped her publish her first volume of poetry, Moral Pieces. In the following year, Sigourney published her first elegiac volume, a tribute to her former colleague, Nancy Maria Hyde. In 1819 Sigourney gave up teaching to marry Charles Sigourney, a widower with three young children. Five children were born to her, of whom two survived infancy. When her husband’s hardware business began to fail in the 1820s, Sigourney turned to writing as a source of income and quickly became successful. A book of her poems was published by Samuel Goodrich in 1827. By 1830, according to her biographer Gordon Haight, more than 20 periodicals were regularly accepting her occasional verse. In 1840 Sigourney made a tour of Europe, intending both to meet the literary great and to view the ‘‘ruinous castle, where romance lingered, or royal palace, where pomp abode . . .’’ Her Pleasant Memories of Pleasant Lands (1842) records this trip and gives her probably exaggerated account of ‘‘friendships’’ with Europe’s literary elite. Sigourney was, at this time, an attractive woman with a cultivated manner who dressed carefully and was known for her elegant hands, a hallmark of the Victorian lady.
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Mrs. Thomas Carlyle’s description of this ‘‘over-the-water poetess’’ suggests Sigourney seemed artificial and provincial to her, ‘‘beplastered with rouge and pomatum—with long ringlets that never grew where they hung. . .all glistening in black satin. . .staring her eyes out, to give them animation,’’ and even taking ‘‘the liberty of poking’’ Carlyle ‘‘now and then to make the lion roar. . . .’’ Sigourney was nonetheless received by many writers abroad and so enabled to puff her reputation at home in an era when European acceptance virtually guaranteed American success. To the end of her life, Sigourney remained a public figure, well known, even revered, especially in her native Connecticut. Sigourney was early labeled ‘‘the American Hemans,’’ a reference to her English counterpart, Mrs. Felicia Hemans, a popular writer of elegiac verse. Sigourney’s work was indeed derivative and, like Heman’s, unstintingly sentimental. Best known as a contributor to the ‘‘graveyard school’’ of popular verse, her ‘‘tributes,’’ sometimes written at the request of unknown admirers, combine stilted rhetoric, conventional Christian consolation, and commonplace references to the condition or character of the deceased. Collections of her verse catalogue occasions on which the mourning note may be sounded. In one such volume, ‘‘The Anniversary of the Death of An Aged Friend’’ is followed by other verses lamenting deaths—‘‘The Faithful Editor,’’ ‘‘The Babe Who Loved Music,’’ ‘‘The Good Son,’’ ‘‘A Sunday School Scholar,’’ and ‘‘The Original Proprietor of Mount Auburn’’ (a well-known rural cemetery near Boston). Despite the individualized titles, the verses are almost interchangeable evocations of genteel religiosity and the postures of decorous sorrow. Such collections, prettily printed and illustrated, were republished throughout Sigourney’s lifetime. Their popularity reflects conventional attitudes toward death, the quality of popular piety, and the widespread admiration for cultured refinement in Victorian America. Always a popular writer, Sigourney was never respected by contemporary literati. Edgar Allan Poe condemned her imitation of Hemans and her ‘‘gemmy,’’ or overcolored, diction. (Sigourney described her home, for example, as a ‘‘domain. . .beloved by flowers’’ where life ‘‘in its varied forms, biped and quadrupedal, leaped and luxuriated among us.’’) Bayard Taylor in Diversions of the Echo Club (1876) parodied her verse ‘‘to see whether a respectable jingle of words, expressing ordinary and highly proper feelings, can be so imitated as to be recognized.’’ The best known parody of Sigourney’s style and its imitators is Mark Twain’s ‘‘Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Dec’d’’ in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). However meager its merits, Sigourney’s verse is an important index of an era in American taste, and she herself was hailed by Taylor as ‘‘good old Mother Sigourney’’ who had once been ‘‘almost our only woman-poet.’’ John Greenleaf Whittier, in a memorial verse of 1887, also noted ‘‘She sang alone, ere womanhood had known / The gift of song which fills the air today.’’ OTHER WORKS: The Writings of Nancy Maria Hyde (1816). The Square Table (1819). Traits of the Aborigines of America (1822). Sketch of Connecticut Forty Years Since (1824). Poems (1827). Female Biography (1829). Biography of Pious Persons (1832).
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Evening Readings in History (1833). The Farmer and Soldier (1833). How to Be Happy (1833). The Intemperate (1833). Letters to Young Ladies (1833). Memoir of Phebe P. Hammond (1833). Report of the Hartford Female Beneficent Society (1833). Poems (1834). Poetry for Children (1834). Sketches (1834). Tales and Essays for Children (1835). Memoir of Margaret and Henrietta Flower (1835). Zinzendorff, and Other Poems (1835). History of Marcus Aurelius (1936). Olive Buds (1836). Poems for Children (1836). History of the Condition of Women (1837). The Girl’s Reading-Book. . . (1838). Letters to Mothers (1838). The Boy’s Reading-Book (1839). The Religious Souvenir for 1839 (1839). Memoir of Mrs. Mary Ann Hooker (1840). The Religous Souvenir for 1840 (1840). Letters to Young Ladies (1841). Pocahontas, and Other Poems (1841). Poems, Religious and Elegiac (1841). The Pictorial Reader. . . (1844). The Lovely Sisters (1845). Poetry for Seamen (1845). Scenes in My Native Land (1845). Myrtis, with Other Etchings and Sketchings (1846). The Voice of Flowers (1846). The Weeping Willow (1847). Water-drops (1848). The Young Ladies Offering (with others, 1848). Illustrated Poems. . . (1849) Poems for the Sea (1850). Whisper to a Bride (1850). Letters to My Pupils (1851). Examples of Life and Death (1852). Margaret and Henrietta (1852). Olive Leaves (1852). Voices of Home (1852). The Faded Hope (1853). Memoir of Mrs. Harriet Newell Cook (1853). Past Meridian (1854). The Western Home, and Other Poems (1854). Sayings of the Little Ones, and Poems for their Mothers (1855). Examples from the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (1857). Lucy Howard’s Journal (1858). The Daily Counsellor (1859). Gleanings (1860). The Man of Uz, and Other Poems (1862). Selections from Various Sources (1863). Sayings of Little Ones (1864). Letters of Life (1866). The Transplanted Daisy: Memoir of Frances Racilla Hackley (n.d.). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Haight, G. S., Mrs. Sigourney: The Sweet Singer of Hartford (1930). NAW (1971). —JANE BENARDETE
SILKO, Leslie Marmon Born 5 March 1948, Albuquerque, New Mexico Daughter of Lee H. and Virginia Marmon; married John Silko (divorced); children: two sons Native American novelist, poet, essayist, and short story writer, Leslie Marmon Silko was raised in Old Laguna, New Mexico. The Spaniards had founded a mission there early in the 18th century, but old Laguna had been formed centuries earlier by cattle-keeping Pueblos, successfully repelling raids by the Navajos and the Apaches. Silko’s heritage is complicated: her greatgrandfather was Caucasian, while her mother was a mixed-breed Plains Indian; she also has Mexican ancestors. Silko uses the heritage as a source of strength: ‘‘I suppose at the core of my writing is the attempt to identify what it is to be a half-breed or mixed blooded person; what it is to grow up neither white nor fully traditional Indian.’’ She asserts, however, that ‘‘what I know is
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Laguna. This place I am from is everything I am as a writer and human being.’’ Silko draws from the oral traditions and folklore of her heritage to enrich her work and to relate Native American moral codes, values, and experiences. She insists storytelling is integral to the oral tradition in order to store knowledge, and her themes include pride in transmitting an untouched heritage to scholars, aware that hers is a culture threatened with extinction. She recounts in her short stories and poems what happens when a way of life that as existed for centuries rapidly undergoes cataclysmic and brutal changes with the coming of the Anglos. Community and tribal life break down under the pressure of external conflicts, the advent of reservation life, and the introduction of English-based educational schools. She insightfully interprets her people’s plight—disease, wars, broken treaties, relocation, alcoholism, promiscuity—but her characters are seldom embittered or defeated. Instead they cope with adversity, using survival tactics learned from their past to enrich and strengthen their resolution to triumph in spite of a harsh environment or Caucasian society abuse. For Silko, literature is an extension of an oral tradition based on the power of the word to maintain a sense of a Native American tribal and community culture. Although nostalgia and a sense of loss haunt her stories, they frequently end on an optimistic hope for a better future where diverse ethnic groups have learned respect for each other’s unique lifestyles. Silko’s first published story, ‘‘The Man to Send Rain Clouds’’ (1969) recounts an actual event of an old man found dead and given a traditional Native American burial. Although the local priest sees this as heresy, he nonetheless wisely cooperates by sprinkling holy water on the corpse when Grandpa’s relatives tell him the water is necessary so the old man would not be thirsty, and through some form of sympathetic magic ‘‘could send them big thunderclouds.’’ ‘‘Tony’s Story’’ (1981), also a fictionalization of an actual event, describes the reasons for an embittered war veteran’s killing of a racist state patrolman. Ceremony (1977), the first fulllength novel published by a Native American woman, also uses a World War II veteran in acute physical and emotional straits, managing to survive by reestablishing contact with his Native American cultural roots. Silko explained that the novel ‘‘is essentially about the powers inherent in the process of storytelling. . . The chanting or telling of ancient stories to effect certain cures or protest from illness and harm have always been a part of the Pueblo’s curing ceremonies.’’ There is strong moral connection between Silko’s artistic delight in crafting a story and the therapeutic functional purpose she hopes it will serve in the Native American community. In both Ceremony and the aptly titled Storyteller (1981), which also includes poems and photographs as well as short stories, she sketches realistically sympathetic people living in harmony with animals and with the forces of nature. ‘‘Lullaby’’ (1974), included in The Best American Short Stories (1975) and Two Hundred Years of Great American Short Stories (1975), shows the tough, devoted perseverance of an old woman, Ayah, sitting wrapped in a blanket with her husband, Chato, their backs against a rock as a storm beats down. Ayah sings a lullaby as the story ends: ‘‘The
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earth is your mother, she holds you. The sky is your father, he protects you. Sleep, sleep. Rainbow is your sister, she loves you. The winds are your brothers, they sing to you. Sleep, sleep. We are together always.’’ Thus, Silko draws upon religious and philosophic ideas from her Native American oral and cultural storytelling traditions to create poignant artistic creations. One of Silko’s best critics, Per Seyerstedt, believes her achievement is to have ‘‘raised the life and problems of a minority to the level of general significance.’’ The Delicacy and Strength of Lace: Letters Between Leslie Marmon Silko and James Wright (1985) chronicles an 18-month exchange of correspondence and friendship-through-the-mail; the letters interpret both writers’ concept of brotherly love, sensitivity to nature’s beauty, and the clarity of their courageous voices. Silko’s sensitivity and humanity are displayed through language always rich, yet controlled and finely tuned, reminding us that the persistent drums of tradition reverberating down the generations powerfully shape lives today. Silko’s second novel, Almanac of the Dead (1991), was a 10year project for the author, evidenced by the wide scope of the story and large cast of characters. Some critics viewed the variety of characters as the novel’s weakest feature, but still concluded the story was well worth reading for its strengths. Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today (1997) returned to Silko’s real strength— short fiction. The collection succeeds in blending Silko’s life experiences and ethnicity with ancient Pueblo ideas. Her recent novel, Gardens in the Dunes (1999), has been hailed as her best yet. In it she examines differences between white and Native American cultures, and illustrates her preference for the latter. Kirkus calls it ‘‘a thoughtful exploration of the incompatibility of dissimilar traditions and an absorbing reading experience.’’ Silko’s awards and honors include a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and a poetry award from Chicago Review, both in 1974, the Pushcart Prize for poetry in 1977, and a Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation grant in 1983. She has written screenplays for public television and has taught at the University of New Mexico-Albuquerque and the University of Arizona. OTHER WORKS: Laguna Woman (1974). ‘‘Lullaby’’ in The Ethnic American Woman: Problems, Protests, Lifestyle (edited by E. Blicksilver, 1978). ‘‘Gallup, New Mexico—Indian Capital of the World,’’ et al., in The Third Woman: Minority Women Writers of the United States (edited by D. Fisher, 1980). Sacred Water Narratives and Pictures (1993). Yellow Woman (1993). Love Poem and Slim Man Canyon (1996). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bruchac, J., ed., Songs From This Earth on Turtle’s Back (1983). Fisher, D., The Third Women (1980). Jaskoski, H., Leslie Marmon Silko: A Study of Short Fiction (1998). Seyersted, P., Leslie Marmon Silko (1980). Reference works: CA (1985, 1988, Online 1999). CLC (1983). CN (1986). CP (1985). Encyclopedia of Frontier and Western
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Fiction (1983). FC (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: American Indian Quarterly (Winter 1977-78, 1979). American Studies in Scandinavia (1981). Booklist (15 February 1996). Harper’s (June 1977). KR (1 January 1996, 1 February 1999). LATBR (4 Jan. 1987). MELUS (Winter 1978, Summer 1981). Ms. (July 1981). New Leader (6 June 1977). Newsweek (4 July 1977). NYT (12 June 1977, 23 April 1978, 25 May 1981). NYTBR (12 June 1977). Prairie Schooner (Winter 1977-78). PW (27 Feb. 1978). Saturday Review (May 1981). Southwest Review (Spring 1979). Time (8 Aug. 1983). WP (24 April 1977). WPBW (24 April 1977). Web sites: Engle, S., Review of Gardens in the Dunes available online at Amazon.com (4 July 1999). ‘‘Voices From the Gaps: Leslie Marmon Silko,’’ available online at voices.cla.umn.edu/authors/LeslieMarmonSilko (4 July 1999). —EDITH BLICKSILVER, UPDATED BY CARRIE SNYDER
SIMON, Kate Born Kaila Grobsmith, 5 December 1912, Warsaw, Poland; died 4 February 1990, New York, New York Daughter of Jacob and Lina Babicz Grobsmith; married Dr. Stanley Goldman (common law, died 1942); Robert Simon, 1947 (divorced); children: Alexandra Kate Simon’s passionate and daring life provided excellent material for her many popular travel books and the memoirs she produced in old age. Born in the Jewish section of Warsaw, she emigrated to New York with her family at age four and grew up in working-class neighborhoods in the city, where she excelled in the public schools and displayed unusual musical talent. Holding a series of odd jobs, she worked her way through the demanding James Monroe High School and Hunter College (B.A., 1935). A common-law marriage to Dr. Stanley Goldman ended with his death in 1942, leaving Simon to support herself and their daughter, Alexandra, by working at various editorial and reviewing jobs. After her marriage to Robert Simon, which apparently freed her from financial constraints, Simon began to travel extensively throughout Europe and Mexico. She published her first book, New York Places and Pleasures: An Uncommon Guidebook, in 1959. Hailed as a landmark in the travel genre, it went through four revisions and sparked a successful career in travel writing. Simon went on to produce guides to Mexico City, Paris, London, Rome, Italy, and England—all informed by her artistic tastes and graceful prose—as well as the more historically focused Fifth Avenue: A Very Social History (1978) and A Renaissance Tapestry: The Gonzaga of Mantua (1988). Acclaimed as these works are, it is Simon’s memoirs that distinguish her as more than an elegant and cosmopolitan stylist. Bronx Primitive: Portraits in a Childhood (1982, latest reissue 1997) shocked readers with its revelation of intense emotional
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conflict and sexual abuse within her family: Simon recounts the strong influence of her mother, who built her own business as a corset maker and encouraged her daughter to acquire an education and the means to be self-supporting. She describes her defiance of her shoemaker father, who insisted she leave high school to become a concert pianist and who, Simon believed, tolerated the sexual abuse by relatives and acquaintances to which she was subjected from early adolescence. Leaving her family in her early teens, Simon eagerly absorbed the influence of leftist politics, antibourgeois sentiment, artistic values, and free love among the 1920s New York City avant-garde. A Wider World: Portraits in an Adolescence (1986) reveals, however, that this life was scarcely romantic: Simon was again the victim of sexual predators (sometimes her teachers) and was often desperately poor. She describes shabby lodgings and meager jobs, illegal abortions, and above all, her struggle to nourish her growing aesthetic and intellectual sensibilities. The posthumously published Etchings in an Hourglass (1990) is the most digressive of her books, and also the most bitter and intimate. Here she confronts her grief and anger at the early deaths of Goldman and of her only child, and contemplates a long life filled with as much doubt as comfort: ‘‘At seventeen I was so enamored of life. . .that I promised myself I would experience everything, stipulating no qualities good or bad, and it has pretty much all happened. Little more than I knew at seventeen do I surely know who I am at seventy-five.’’ Simon’s books document, through the consciousness of a complex and brave woman, the arduous process of living fully. Also widely published in such magazines as Harper’s, Holiday, National Geographic, Saturday Review, and Vogue, Simon received awards of honor from Hunter College and the English Speaking Union. The National Book Critics Circle listed Bronx Primitive as one of the most distinguished books published in 1982. OTHER WORKS: New York (1964). Mexico: Places and Pleasures (1965, 1988). Kate Simon’s Paris: Places and Pleasures (1967). Kate Simon’s London: Places and Pleasures (1968). Italy: The Places in Between (1972, 1987). England’s Green and Pleasant Land (1974). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Burstein, J., Writing Mothers, Writing Daughters: Tracing the Maternal in Stories by American Jewish Women (1996). Cahill, S. N., ed., Writing Women’s Lives: An Anthology of Autobiographical Narratives by 20th Century American Women Writers (1994). Norris, G., ed., The Seasons of Women: An Anthology (1996). Rose, P., The Norton Book of Women’s Lives (1993). Yang, M. C., ‘‘From Ethnicity to a Wider World: The Education of Kate Simon and Maxine Hong Kingston’’ (thesis, 1992). Reference works: CA (1989, 1990). MTCW (1991). Other references: Feminist Studies (Spring 1991). Los Angeles Times (4 May 1982). Ms. (June 1982, July 1986). NYT (5 Feb. 1990). NYTBR (19 Aug. 1990). PW (14 May 1982). Time (14 July 1967, 19 Apr. 1982, 24 Feb. 1986). —ELIZABETH SHOSTAK
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SINCLAIR, Bertha Muzzy Born 15 November 1871, Cleveland, Minnesota; died 23 July 1940, Los Angeles, California Wrote under: B. M. Bower Daughter of Washington and Eunice A. Miner Muzzy; married Clayton J. Bower, 1890; Bertrand W. Sinclair, 1906; Robert E. Cowan; children: four Bertha Muzzy Sinclair moved to Montana as a youngster, where she gained expertise in ranching and acquaintance with cowboys, which she would later use in her novels. Sinclair lived in the West most of her life; she was married three times and was the mother of four children. Sinclair wrote nearly 60 Westerns from 1904 to 1940. Her use of initials as a pseudonym led many to assume her works were written by a man. In this guise she was probably the first woman, and certainly the most prolific, to write in the genre of the ‘‘formula’’ Western. Chip of the Flying U (1904) furnishes the basic plot for Sinclair’s writing and introduces characters for later works. ‘‘The Happy Family,’’ the cowboys of the Flying U Ranch, appear in several subsequent novels and furnish prototypes for others. Chip is the first of many young heroes predictably tall, handsome, taciturn, and, by modern standards, remarkably naive about his emotions. Della, the heroine, is petite and dimpled, and has the tiny hands and feet so admired in the 19th century. Their love affair suffers many vicissitudes before it reaches its foregone conclusion, with intimations they will live happily ever after. Later books sometimes offer more violence and villainy, but in most of the novels the happy outcome is predictable. Sinclair’s detailed descriptions of ranch life in the early 20th century make her books attractive. The habits—down to the typical gestures—of the cowboys are well depicted, from the backhand twist the practiced roper uses to catch a calf to the apparently eternal preoccupation of all cowboys with their cigarettes. The men’s affection for their horses is an inevitable part of the Western, but, in addition, the actions of horses often affect the stories, with scenes in which the individual characteristics of horses play a major role. Dialogue especially reflects both the Western setting and the period in which Sinclair wrote. When a man declares his love it is apt to be in terms of a card game: ‘‘It’s my deal. . .do you want to know what’s trump?’’ Characterization of males is, on the whole, weak, with one hero almost indistinguishable from another and supporting characters flat. Sinclair’s women, on the other hand, are often accomplished and independent, indicating Sinclair’s interest in unconventional roles for women. She introduces two women doctors in Chip of the Flying U, for example, in which the heroine is not only a doctor, she is also a crack shot and brave in the face of danger. Housewifely skills assume little importance in other books as well. In The Five Furies of Leaning Ladder (1935), five orphan girls run their ranch in the face of many obstacles; the one sister who is domestic is relegated to a minor role.
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The suffering young mother in Cabin Fever (1918), whose little boy has been kidnapped, is much more interesting than the male hero in this mining story. The heroine of The Heritage of the Sioux (1916) is an Indian. She travels a long distance alone to find the man she loves. Later, when she learns the man she promised to marry has betrayed her friends, she kills herself. Sinclair’s books read like early Western scenarios, and with good reason: the uncluttered scenery and rapid uncomplicated actions of her characters lend themselves easily to film. Several of Sinclair’s novels were in fact made into movies. Some books, written in the 1910s, in the early days of the film industry, portray the cowboys forming their own film company and making Westerns in New Mexico. Sinclair brought a fairytale West to life for her readers. In spite of the realism of her descriptions of Western life and specific details of ranch scenes, Sinclair’s description of the larger scene is vague and ephemeral. The background, no matter what state is named, is simply ‘‘the West,’’ and her books are typical formula Westerns. There are many weaknesses in Sinclair’s writing; nevertheless, her stories are fun—warm and full of humor. OTHER WORKS: The Lure of the Dim Trails (1907). Her Prairie Knight (1908). The Lonesome Trail (1909). The Long Shadow (1909). The Happy Family (1910). The Range Dwellers (1910). Good Indian (1912). Lonesome Land (1912). The Gringos (1913). The Uphill Climb (1913). Flying U Ranch (1914). The Ranch at the Wolverine (1914). Flying U’s Last Stand (1915). Jean of the Lazy A (1915). The Phantom Herd (1916). The Lookout Man (1917). Starr of the Desert (1917). Skyrider (1918). The Thunder Bird (1919). The Quirt (1920). Rim o’ the World (1920). Casey Ryan (1921). Cow Country (1921). Trail of the White Mule (1922). The Parowan Bonanza (1923). The Voice at Johnnywater (1923). The Bellehelen Mine (1924). Desert Brew (1924). Black Thunder (1925). Meadowlark Basin (1925). Van Patten (1926). White Wolves (1926). The Adam Chasers (1927). Points West (1928). The Swallowfork Bulls (1928). Rodeo (1929). Fool’s Goal (1930). Tiger Eye (1930). Dark Horse (1931). The Long Loop (1931). Laughing Water (1932). Rocking Arrow (1932). Open Land (1933). Trails Meet (1933). The Flying U Strikes (1934). The Haunted Hills (1934). The Dry Ridge Gang (1935). Trouble Rides the Wind (1935). The North Wind Do Blow (1936). Shadow Mountain (1936). Pirates of the Range (1937). Starry Night (1938). The Wind Blows West (1938). The Singing Hill (1939). The Man on Horseback (1940). The Spirit of the Range (1940). Sweet Grass (1940). The Family Failing (1941). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: TCA. Other references: NYHT (24 July 1940). NYT (24 July 1940). —HELEN STAUFFER
SINCLAIR, Jo See SEID, Ruth
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SINGER, June K. Born 23 October 1918, Cleveland, Ohio Daughter of Jonas and Regine Kurlander; married Richard E. Singer, 1939; children: one daughter June K. Singer was the first of two daughters; her father was a dentist, her mother a journalist. Singer saw early that a woman could be successful in a ‘‘man’s world’’ without losing touch with her feminine roots. Singer earned a B.S. in English and education from Ohio State University in 1939. She married a rabbi and they had one daughter. In 1959 Singer received an M.A. in counseling and guidance from Northwestern University. She and her husband went to Zurich, where in 1964 they both received their diplomas as analysts from the C. G. Jung Institute. Shortly after their return to the U.S., Singer’s husband died. Singer settled in Chicago to practice, where she was one of the founders of two Jungian organizations. She returned to Northwestern University for a Ph.D. in psychology (1968). The Unholy Bible (1970) is a psychological interpretation of William Blake and an extension of Singer’s thesis for her analyst’s diploma. It was roundly and often deservedly attacked for the tenuous connections Singer draws between images in the poetry and Blake’s unconscious desires and drives. At a time when many literary critics were reviling any use of biographical materials, the reviews of this book often overlooked Singer’s many useful insights, such as how Blake’s writing, engraving, and drawing gave him the psychic discipline that grounded and controlled the flooding of his unconscious. Singer’s style moves unevenly from overlush appreciation to smooth and measured analysis, yet The Unholy Bible is an often insightful example of Jungian psychobiography. Singer’s style and thought cohere far better in Boundaries of the Soul (1972), and here her view of Jungian thought within its context of contemporary culture reveals a comprehensive, even philosophical, perspective. She departs from some of Jung’s ideas, such as his sometimes Victorian concepts of women and his rather limiting and reductionist personality typology. The book is not only an introduction for the general reader but a critique of Jungian thought. Androgyny (1976) is more difficult to read, but it is also more rich and original. Singer adds a much needed metaphysical and philosophical dimension to the analysis of relationships between the masculine and feminine in both inter- and intrapersonal relationships. She sees the dynamic energy for this development as coming from the alternating union and polarities of masculine and feminine in the archetype of the androgyne. Some feminist reviewers faulted Singer for not presenting a ‘‘highly sophisticated, empirical’’ study or chided her for delving into ‘‘esoterica.’’ Singer suggests the universe is winding up, not down, as it develops more complexity and higher consciousness. The book seems to ramble at times because of the great breadth of material included, but Singer’s analyses of non-Western systems of thought and their significance are clear and often brilliant. Hers is a
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hopeful vision, perhaps overly sanguine at times but nevertheless well worth reading.
OTHER WORKS: Has contributed to the following works: C. G. Jung and the Humanities: Toward a Hermeneutics of Culture (1990); To Be a Woman: The Birth of the Conscious Feminine (1990); The Allure of Gnosticism: The Gnostic Experience in Jungian Psychology and Contemporary Culture (1995).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Rountree, C. On Women Turning 70: Honoring the Voices of Wisdom (1999). Other references: Contemporary Psychology (October 1991). Journal of Analytical Psychology (1972, 1974, 1977). Living Your Myths (video, 1992). Ms. (Nov. 1976). —STEPHANIE DEMETRAKOPOULOS
SINGLETON, Anne See BENEDICT, Ruth
SINGMASTER, Elsie Born 29 August 1879, Schuylkill Haven, Pennsylvania; died 3 September 1958, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania Daughter John A. and Caroline Hoopes Singmaster; married Harold Lewars, 1912 (died 1915) Elsie Singmaster’s father was of German Lutheran stock; her mother, a descendant of English Quakers. Singmaster seems to have developed along the lines of the former. When she was four the family moved to Macungie, Pennsylvania, and later to Brooklyn, New York, and Allentown, Pennsylvania, where Singmaster graduated from high school. After a year at West Chester Normal School, she attended Cornell for two years. Five years later she entered Radcliffe, graduating in 1907, a member of Delta Gamma and Phi Beta Kappa. In 1909 she became one of the first women to receive an honorary Litt.D. from Gettysburg College; similar degrees were awarded to her by Pennsylvania College (1916), Muhlenburg College (1929), and Wilson College (1934). Singmaster married a musician in 1912, but after his death in 1915 she returned to the family home at Gettysburg, where her father was connected with the Lutheran Theological Seminary. Singmaster lived in this historic small town the rest of her life, drawing from it and the surrounding area ample material for her
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steady writing. From her father and from her surroundings she gained a comprehensive knowledge of the German immigrants who settled so much of Pennsylvania. And with amazing industry she reproduced in fiction (both adult and juvenile) their way of life, their mores, their quaint turns of speech. Creating a typical rural village, Millerstown, she peopled it with appealing characters who appear and reappear throughout her fiction. Occasionally, she builds a story around an historic figure and at times she incorporates actual events into her plot. From the beginning of Singmaster’s career—while she was still in college—magazines were glad to buy her stories; she remarked once that the editors’ interest in those first years was probably caught more by the ‘‘local color’’ she gave than by any real literary merit. Kathy Gaumer (1915) was praised for its picture of the Pennsylvania Germans, but as time went on critics pointed out the technical excellence of her fiction as seen in structure, characterization, and comprehension of life. Hers is perhaps the first fiction to emphasize the importance of the German settlers of Pennsylvania. History was one of Singmaster’s special interests. She wrote several history books for children, as well as a popular life of Martin Luther (published in 1917, on the 400th anniversary of the Reformation). Living most of her life in Gettysburg, Singmaster was able to do a great deal of thorough research on the famous battle, research which she used to good effect in her novels. Perhaps Singmaster’s most widely known work is her controversial I Speak For Thaddeus Stevens (1947), a life of the forceful Pennsylvania congressman who advocated the sternest measures of Reconstruction. It is sensitively written; Singmaster tries to show the reasons behind Stevens’ passionate advocacy of chastisement for the South, but some reviewers felt Singmaster showed too much partiality for her subject. It remains, however, a vivid picture of a brilliant, iron-willed man who fought for what he considered was right. I Speak for Thaddeus Stevens is one of Singmaster’s outstanding achievements, and it may be ranked with her imaginative recreation of the Gettysburg battle and her beautifully wrought pictures of Pennsylvania German life as her contribution to American literature. OTHER WORKS: When Sarah Saved the Day (1909). When Sarah Went to School (1910). Gettysburg (1913). Emmeline (1916). The Long Journey (1917). Short Life of Martin Luther (1917). Basil Everman (1920). John Baring’s House (1920). Ellen Levis (1921). Bennet Malin (1922). The Hidden Road (1923). A Boy at Gettysburg (1924). Bred in the Bone (1925). Book of the Constitution (1926). Book of the United States (1926). Book of the Colonies (1927). Keller’s Anna Ruth (1926). ‘‘Sewing Susie’’ (1927). Virginia’s Bandit (1928). What Everybody Wanted (1928). You Make Your Own Luck (1929). A Little Money Ahead (1930). The Young Ravenals (1932). Swords of Steel (1933). The Magic Mirror (1934). Stories of Pennsylvania (3 vols., 1937-1938). Rifles for Washington (1938). The Loving Heart (1939). Stories to Read at Christmas (1940). A High Wind Rising (1942). The Isle of
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Que (1948). I Hear of a River: The Story of Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna (1950). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Overton, G., The Women Who Make Our Novels (1928). Reference works: American Novelists of Today (1951). TCA. Other references: Ladies’ Home Journal (March 1925). NYT (1 Oct. 1958). New York Tribune (1 March 1925). —ABIGAIL ANN HAMBLEN
SKINNER, Constance Lindsay Born 7 December 1877, Quesnal, British Columbia, Canada; died 27 March 1937, New York, New York Daughter of Robert J. and Annie Lindsay Skinner Constance Lindsay Skinner was profoundly influenced by her childhood at a fur trading post in the Peace River area of the Canadian Northwest where her father held a position with the Hudson’s Bay Company. Her best works have dealt with this area and the historical interaction of Native Americans and traders. Skinner began as a journalist writing drama and music criticism for Los Angeles and San Francisco newspapers. She became a freelance writer in New York, writing reviews and poetry. In 1910 her first play, David, was produced, and in 1917 her second, in New York, Good Morning, Rosamund! Her first historical works were two volumes in the Yale Chronicles of America, a series addressed to the general reader. The two works, Pioneers of the Old Southwest (1919) and Adventurers of Oregon (1921), were praised for their ‘‘gusto’’ and vitality. They showed her sense of the dramatic and her highly personalized approach to historical work. They were also criticized for their impressionist quality and lack of detailed scholarship. Skinner placed strong emphasis on the environmentalist approach to history, reflecting the influence of Frederick Jackson Turner. In Pioneers of the Old Southwest, she argues that the ‘‘spirit of the frontier was modeling out of old clay a new Adam to answer the needs of a new earth.’’ She traces with broad appreciation the development of the various ethnic groups into commonwealth builders. In Adventurers of Oregon, she sympathetically portrayed the ‘‘romance of the fur trade’’ and the interaction of American, British, and Native American lifestyles. After the chronicles, Skinner turned to poetry and fiction to reveal her understanding of the origin of the American nation and the importance of the frontier. Her dramatic sense of history found an outlet especially in the 11 adventure stories she wrote for children between 1925 and 1934. In these works she stressed the courage and perseverance of women no less than men. Beaver, Kings, and Cabins (1933), perhaps Skinner’s most ambitious historical work, is an effort to recapture the lost world of the fur trader and his interaction with the natural world and with the Native Americans. Skinner’s tone is essentially poetic and
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romantic; at times she dramatizes her narrative, occasionally inserting dialogue. Tracing the fur traders from their Atlantic coast origins to the Alaskan wilds, she gives primary attention to the era of imperial conflicts when the beaver trade was dominant. Interspersed in some of Skinner’s works are Native American poems. These are her own concepts, not translations; they grew out of her early childhood experiences with Native American culture. In 1930 she published a volume of such poems, Songs of the Coast Dwellers; the book won considerable acclaim for Skinner’s interpretations of Native American moods and her basic empathy with Native American life. Skinner’s last significant venture in American history was the editing of the Rivers of America series. In an introductory statement, reprinted in most of the early volumes and issued in 1937 as Rivers and American Folk, Skinner sets forth her concerns in writing history. What is truly important, she argues, is ‘‘folk-centered’’ history and ‘‘history as literature.’’ Her aim is to ‘‘kindle imagination and to reveal American Folk to one another.’’ While her historical works lack the closely woven texture and the considered perspectives of trained historians, Skinner succeeded in her own aim. She did indeed ‘‘kindle imagination’’ and portrayed dramatically the frontier experiences of the American folk. OTHER WORKS: Adventures in the Wilderness (with C. Wister, 1925). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: NAW (1971). Other references: American History Review (Oct. 1920). NYT (19 Oct. 1919, 5 Oct. 1930, 25 Sept. 1933). SR (31 May 1930, 30 Sept. 1933). —INZER BYERS
SKINNER, Cornelia Otis Born 30 May 1901, Chicago, Illinois; died 9 July 1979, New York, New York Daughter of Otis and Maud Durbin Skinner; married Alden S. Blodget, 1928; children: one son Cornelia Otis Skinner was the only child born to a theatrical couple. Her mother retired from the stage shortly after Skinner was born, but her father went on to gain national prominence as an actor and matinee idol. Otis Skinner spent much of his time on tour, but the family’s desire for a stable and respectable home life led them to settle in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, where Skinner grew up. Tall and lanky, Skinner thought of herself as an ugly duckling. The autobiographical Family Circle (1948) underscores the embarrassing contrast between her mother’s effortless charm and Skinner’s adolescent gawkiness. Nevertheless, from an early age Skinner gravitated toward the theater. After two years at Bryn
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Mawr, where she proved herself hopelessly unmathematical, Skinner departed for Paris. There she attended lectures at the Sorbonne while also receiving classical theater training from Jacques Copeau and Émile Dehelly of the Comédie Francaise. Skinner’s father paved her way onto the Broadway stage by providing a small role for her in his own production of the Spanish novel Blood and Sand. While undertaking small roles in a number of productions, Skinner wrote a play for her father. Called Captain Fury, it opened in December 1925. Soon Skinner was using her writing talents for her own benefit, creating lively theatrical monologues, which she performed in the U.S. and London. The monologues grew into a series of historical costume dramas, with Skinner herself playing all the roles. From a sentimental novel of the day, Edna His Wife, Skinner developed a monodrama in which she portrayed three generations of women. This ambitious work toured the country in 1938, generating great public enthusiasm, although the New York critics were less kind. She was much better received by them in the title role of Shaw’s Candida and in other full-fledged productions. Skinner also contributed light verse and humorous essays to the New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar, Ladies’ Home Journal, and other magazines. The witty depiction of human social foibles is her particular specialty, and her sketches often turn on comic selfdeprecation. Skinner married in 1928 and had one son, and she often wrote of domestic matters. Her satirical treatment of her own ineptness as wife, mother, and social animal is good-natured enough so readers can identify easily with her tales of woe. Her essays have been collected into a number of genuinely funny volumes, among them Tiny Garments (1932), That’s Me All Over (1948), and Bottoms Up! (1955). Skinner’s most famous volume is Our Hearts Were Young and Gay (1942), an uproarious account of a youthful trip abroad in the company of a schoolmate, Emily Kimbrough. The book details how these two naive young ladies spent the night in a brothel, came down with childhood diseases at inopportune moments, and otherwise found themselves in hot water. It captured the public fancy, and a million copies were sold. Inevitably there was soon a motion picture version (1944), and in 1948 Jean Kerr adapted the book into a popular play. Through all of this, Skinner did not neglect her own stage career. With Samuel Albert Taylor she wrote a successful Broadway comedy, The Pleasure of His Company (1959), and played one of the key supporting roles to general acclaim. Her one-woman shows also continued. Skinner’s skills as a biographer were first displayed in Family Circle, which is as much about her parents as herself. Her major work on Sarah Bernhardt, Madame Sarah (1967), was well received, less for its scholarship than for the vivid and affectionate portrait it draws. Skinner’s reputation in the decades after her death in 1979 rested on the grace with which she moved in several directions at once. Both a master of the comic sketch and a serious researcher into theater history, she brought to her writing projects an effortless quality that tends to obscure her very real talent.
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OTHER WORKS: Excuse It, Please! (1936). Dithers and Jitters (1938). Soap Behind the Ears (1941). Popcorn (1943). Nuts in May (1950). The Ape in Me (1959). Elegant Wits and Grand Horizontals (1962). Life with Lindsay & Crouse (1976).
men are safer’’). Mrs. Party gradually loses her initial feelings of guilt and begins to see herself as a ‘‘pure’’ woman, a savior of society; she dreams of ‘‘hundreds of clean Houses, a chain of them, little islands free of disease, oases in the midst of killing sand, stepping stones leading the way to a great clean up.’’
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: New Yorker (21 Nov. 1942). NYT (5 Sept. 1948, 10 July 1979). NYTBR (8 Jan. 1967). SR (19 Nov. 1938, 14 Nov. 1942, 11 Sept. 1948). TLS (27 April 1967).
The irony of society’s definition of purity runs through all Slade’s novels of prostitution. At the same time that Slade portrays the economic basis of prostitution, she exposes the hypocrisy of the ideal of female purity, which she sees as working hand in hand with the economic system. Slade’s characters— prostitutes, pimps, and ‘‘good men’’ alike—believe that virginity and ignorance of sex are the center of virtue for women. However, it is this ignorance which leads the young girls in Sterile Sun to prostitution and makes Margaret’s schoolmates so easily victimized. Margaret, who is more aware, derives comfort from society’s glorification of virginity. She does not feel the slightest guilt at procuring her friends, for she knows she is not a ‘‘bad girl’’— she herself is still a virgin.
—BEVERLY GRAY BIENSTOCK
SLADE, Caroline Born 7 October 1886, Minneapolis, Minnesota; died 25 June 1975, Saratoga Springs, New York Daughter of William G. McCormick; married John Slade At the age of seven Caroline Slade moved with her family to Saratoga Springs, New York, where she resided for the rest of her life. She attended Skidmore College and married a lawyer and lecturer at the college. A county social worker for many years, Slade organized and became first director of the Saratoga County Board of Child Welfare. She was also an adviser to the Children’s Court. In 1933, she retired and began to write articles, short stories, and novels based on her social work experience. All Slade’s writings portray in realistic detail the lives of the urban poor, and all are strong indictments of the inequities of American society. In The Triumph of Willie Pond (1940), Job’s House (1941), and Lilly Crackell (1943), the social welfare system comes under particular attack as Slade reveals the absurdities of the welfare bureaucracy, the insensitive attitudes of many social workers, and the loss of independence and self-esteem suffered by welfare recipients. The most striking of Slade’s works are her three novels about prostitution. These are unusual not only because there are few novels of prostitution by American women but also in the realism and honesty of the treatment. Slade cuts through a variety of stereotypes; her prostitutes are neither ‘‘nymphomaniacs’’ nor innocents who ‘‘fall’’ through one misstep. Sterile Sun (1936) consists of the life stories of three prostitutes, related in their own words. In Margaret (1946), an adolescent girl procures her school friends for a group of men. Mrs. Party’s House (1948), Slade’s best and most complex novel, is told from the point of view of a poverty-stricken widow who becomes a madam and in the process undergoes a complete education on the nature of prostitution. Mrs. Party is surprised to learn it is not ‘‘vice rings’’ which create and maintain the institution of prostitution, but ‘‘good men’’—the grocer down the street, the judge who tells her she ‘‘helps society,’’ the sheriff who compliments her on her clean, disease-free house (‘‘This way,
Slade’s novels were popular and well received, although some reviewers complained about their flat characterization and case history flavor. In general, Slade’s work is notable less for its literary merit than for its sensitive and realistic treatment of unusual subject matter. However, the quality of Slade’s writing is high enough to lift her novels above the level of sociological tracts, and her effective use of irony saves the novels from sentimentality. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Farrell, J., ‘‘Issues and Writers,’’ in SRL (12 April 1941). Reference works: American Novelists of Today (1951). TCAS. —BARBARA A. WHITE
SLESINGER, Tess Born 16 July 1905, New York, New York; died 21 February 1945, Los Angeles, California Daughter of Anthony and Augusta Singer Slesinger; married Herbert Solow, 1928 (divorced); Frank Davis, 1936; children: two Tess Slesinger could be said to have had everything but time: well-to-do parents who sacrificed in order to give her the best education at the Ethical Culture Society School in New York, Swarthmore College, and Columbia University; immediate and continued success when she started to write; a happy marriage and children. But her works show this success was not achieved without pain. Through her first husband she became part of a leftwing circle important in publishing, and she was able to publish her first short story at age twenty-three; but Slesinger found radical theorizing and intellectualizing insufficient to give meaning to life and divorced Herbert Solow. In 1935 Slesinger went to Hollywood to begin a new career as a scriptwriter.
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After working on the screenplay for Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth (produced in 1937), Slesinger began a collaboration with Frank Davis which led to many successful scripts. She was able to combine a happy marriage to Davis and having two children with full professional activity until her untimely death from cancer at thirty-nine. Just a week after her death, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, for which she and her husband had written the script, opened in New York. Slesinger was politically active in helping to make the Screen Writers Guild a viable union and in many other human rights causes. Received by contemporaries as a realistic portrayal of the ‘‘lost generation,’’ The Unpossessed (1934, reprinted 1966) reveals Slesinger’s profound understanding of her own time. The central character Margaret Flinders attempts to please her egotistical husband, even undergoing an abortion in order to ‘‘free’’ him; Slesinger lets us see her act as a violation of her own being in exchange for his pretentious and selfish ambition. Slesinger reveals his attempts to find meaning through endless discussions with other intellectuals, without any commitment to action, as typical of the futilities of the 1930s. Her skillful use of stream-ofconsciousness establishes a light tone while revealing her persona’s despair; the reader identifies with her because her problems are questions, her attempts to solve them are processes, not authoritative answers. The final chapter, ‘‘Missis Flinders,’’ also published as a short story, is a masterpiece of ironic understatement affirming both the pain and the power to endure of her character. The tide of Slesinger’s 1935 collecton of short stories Time: The Present (reprinted 1971 as On Being Told That Her Second Husband Has Taken His First Lover, and Other Stories) is ironic in that its very contemporary concerns are timeless. Slesinger touches on the emptiness of middle class life, disillusionment with the American dream, the ruthlessness of the struggle to survive brought on by the Depression, the hypocrisy of whites toward blacks, the ambiguities for women of their relationships to their adulterous husbands and to their mothers, the problems of the artist attempting to reduce the felt hugeness of experience into effective form. Her story on this last theme, ‘‘A Day in the Life of a Writer,’’ shows Slesinger’s mastery of form and her typical ironic tone. Following the mental ramblings of a male writer trying to overcome a writing block, she shows his ‘‘life in the day’’—his self-loathing for not being able to repeat the success of his first book, his childish projection of his failure onto his ‘‘deafmute’’ typewriter and his wife. The reader understands both his ambivalence toward writing as a prison and the anger of his wife, who supports him. Slesinger’s stories about women show particular acuity. ‘‘On Being Told that Her Second Husband has Taken his First Lover’’ focuses on the continuance of the double-bind for women even with the sexual revolution. A wife who did not originate adultery feels she must accept her husband’s announced infidelity as his right to freedom but cannot perceive her right to respond in kind as viable. Her only recourse is to accept his decision, with wit and anguish; rejecting him will only be a repetition of the end of her first marriage. ‘‘Mother to Dinner’’ explores the dilemma of a young wife caught between her husband’s demands for her entire
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devotion and her mother’s need for emotional support. The character sees no way out. (Slesinger, in divorcing her first husband, refused such a commitment and devoted herself to her writing.) Slesinger’s works show not truly promise but accomplishment; her short stories and her film scripts will long outlive her. Although her works have been republished, many of her stories remain uncollected. Excerpts from newly discovered notes for another novel, focusing on the real workers of Hollywood, confirm her importance as one who saw through the pretensions and complexities of her own time to basic human issues. OTHER WORKS: Screenplays: The Bride Wore Red (1937). Dance, Girl, Dance (with F. Davis, 1940). Remember the Day (with F. Davis, 1941). Are Husbands Necessary? (with F. Davis, 1942). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCA, TCAS. Other references: Antioch Review (Spring/Summer 1977). Jewish Social Studies (Summer 1976). Michigan Quarterly Review (Summer 1979). NYT (20 May 1934). Prospects (1981). WLB (Dec. 1934). —MARY ANNE FERGUSON
SLOSSON, Annie Trumbull Born 18 May 1838, Stonington, Connecticut; died 4 October 1926 Daughter of Gordon and Sarah A. Trumbull; married Edward Slosson, 1867 A popular and critically admired short-story writer, Annie Trumbull Slosson published over 15 collections of short stories between 1878 and 1912 and was a frequent contributor to the Atlantic and Harper’s. Her first book, The China Hunter’s Club (1878), a collection of dialect stories situated in her native Stonington and the Fraconia Notch area, was considered, along with Sarah Orne Jewett’s Deephaven (1877) and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Pogonuc People (1878), to be one of the first identifiable examples of the regional or ‘‘local color’’ genre. In Seven Dreamers (1891), her second collection of short stories and her first critical and popular success, Slosson introduces a distinctive style and themes that, as a regional writer, she would develop in her later work. There are seven portraits of ‘‘dreamers,’’ people Slosson met in small New England villages who function within the restrictive environment of 19th-century rural communities by discarding social conventions and substituting their own system of rituals and beliefs. Her characters are the natural outcasts of society, frequently mentally or physically defective and without family or friends. She portrays their retreat into a private dreamworld as neither pathetic nor grotesque but rather as a practical means of escaping the hard realities of their lives.
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Many of Slosson’s characters, such as Lucy Ann Breed who thought she’d written Pilgrim’s Progress or Miss Prentice who claimed she’d been a pirate, are caricatures of the stereotypical New England eccentric. In her better stories, however, she demonstrated an ability to create more fully realized, realistic characters. In ‘‘Deacon Pheby’s Selfish Nature,’’ the most powerful story in the collection, she examined the psychological motives behind a young boy’s mental disintegration after the death of his sister. Painfully aware of his mother’s preference for his deceased sister, he sublimates his own personality and impersonates his sister in the desperate hope of finally winning his mother’s love. In The Heresy of Mehitabel Clark she addressed a question that had concerned other regional writers such as Stowe and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: how the conscience reconciles its more humanitarian instincts with a faith in Calvinist doctrine. Mehitabel Clark, described as tormented and God-fearing, suddenly abandons orthodox Calvinism and substitutes her own religious system, which involves a benevolent ‘‘president’’ and the ‘‘president’s son.’’ Although her fellow church members feel consciencebound to dissociate themselves from Mehitabel, even the devout deacon is forced to admit her conversion has made her ‘‘a heap happier, that’s the melancholy truth.’’ For Slosson, independent thinkers such as Mehitabel Clark performed an invaluable function by questioning and thereby undermining the accepted beliefs and values of the community. In Dumb Foxglove, and Other Stories (1893), Slosson examined the innate religious faith of children and their method for reducing the complexity of Calvinist doctrine to a simple system of beliefs applicable to their own lives. In the title story, a terminally ill child refuses to read the catechism and insists instead on concocting curious tales of what her life will be like ‘‘when I get to heaven.’’ Eventually the distressed minister realizes her seemingly heretical fantasies are a way of preparing for her imminent death. Dumb Foxglove was Slosson’s last critical and popular success. Like many other regional writers, she was unable to evolve beyond the limited achievement of her early work. Instead she reworked the characters and themes that had succeeded so well in Seven Dreamers and Dumb Foxglove, but she no longer displayed the same artistic control over structure and style. Although contemporary critics had compared her early work favorably with that of Freeman and Jewett, Story-Tell Lib (1900) and A Local Colorist (1912) were faulted for shallow character development and excessive use of dialect. OTHER WORKS: Fishin’ Jimmy (1889). Aunt Leafy (1892). Anna Malann (1894). White Christopher (1901). Aunt Abby’s Neighbors (1902). Simples From Master’s Garden (1907). A Dissatisfied Soul (1908). A Little Shephard of Bethlehem (1914). Puzzled Souls (1915). Other People (1918). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —CAROLINE PRESTON
SMEDLEY, Agnes Born 1892, Missouri; died 6 May 1950, London, England Daughter of Charles and Sarah Rails Smedley; married Ernest Brundin, 1912 (divorced) Agnes Smedley’s life began in the drab rural poverty of northwestern Missouri. She grew to maturity in the squalor of Colorado mining towns, where her father, an uneducated, harddrinking, defiant man, had hoped to find his fortune and where her mother took in laundry and died of overwork when Smedley was sixteen. Determination to avoid her mother’s fate led Smedley to leave home, work at odd jobs throughout the Southwest, and supplement her grade school education with a year at Tempe Normal School in Arizona. A brief ‘‘egalitarian’’ marriage ended in divorce. Around 1917 Smedley began a decade of deep involvement, in New York and Berlin, with the efforts of Indian nationalists to free India from British rule. At the same time she wrote in support of socialist and feminist causes, established birth control clinics, and studied Asian history and Marxism. A relationship during the 1920s with exiled revolutionary leader Virendranath Chattopadhyaya drove Smedley to a nervous breakdown; she wrote her autobiographical novel Daughter of Earth (1920, reprinted in 1973, 1986) in an attempt to reorient her life. Smedley went to China in 1928 and dedicated the rest of her life to the Chinese revolutionary cause. She developed friendships with Communist leaders, traveled with the Red Army as it fought Chiang Kai-Shek’s Kuomintang and later the Japanese, and worked unstintingly to secure medical treatment for the wounded. Smedley wrote prolifically, producing three books during the 1930s and a profusion of articles for European, American, and Asian periodicals. Ill health forced Smedley to return to the U.S. in 1941, and in 1943 she published her widely acclaimed Battle Hymn of China. Although she had never joined the Communist Party, the forces of McCarthyism hounded Smedley out of the country in the late 1940s. She died in London en route to the new People’s Republic of China; her ashes were buried there. Daughter of Earth, Smedley’s only novel, tells of a working class woman who develops a feminist and a class consciousness as she pits her determination to be a free person against the traps society lays for women and the poor. Marie Rogers, the narrator of this first-person account, attains and preserves her independence—the book’s plot is taken from Smedley’s own life right up to the moment of its writing—but the emotional cost is high. Marie must cope with the persistent guilt, confusion, and pain of a woman who refuses to fit into expected roles. Smedley’s novel differs from standard proletarian fiction in its outspoken feminism and its emphasis on the psychological. Although it is not reliable autobiography, especially in the concluding sections, the book suffers artistically from its close
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identification with the still-unfolding events of Smedley’s own life. But what this startlingly up-to-date novel lacks in balance and perspective it makes up for in emotional power. Chinese Destinies: Sketches of Present-Day China (1933), the first of Smedley’s five books about China in upheaval, is a collage of articles, stories, and impressions; it communicates a vivid sense of the corruption and utter wretchedness of life in the old China and the revolutionary fervor of those who hoped to build the new. Smedley focuses on individual lives, often women’s lives; the tales are well told and the effect is moving. China’s Red Army Marches (1934) follows a similar but less kaleidoscopic format, its sketches relating loosely to the Red Army’s historic progress as it widens and secures its territory in inland China. In China Fights Back: An American Woman with the Eighth Route Army (1938), Smedley becomes an active participant in her story, using her journal entries to give the Western world a rare inside account of what life was like in the Red Army as it battled the Japanese invaders. Smedley’s zeal and haste sometimes lead to simplistic characterizations and inelegant style, but at their best these books display stirring narrative power. In Battle Hymn of China, history, autobiography, war reporting, and story telling intermingle as Smedley tries to tell wartime America all she had experienced and learned during her 22 years in China. This most comprehensive of Smedley’s China books is also Smedley’s comprehensive autobiography. Like all her books, this one is strongly partisan, but its very fervor helps promote an understanding of modern Chinese history by capturing and communicating the spirit that made revolution possible. The Great Road: The Life and Times of Chu Teh, Smedley’s enthusiastic biography of the peasant who became commanderin-chief of the Red Army—and Smedley’s personal friend—was begun in the 1930s and published posthumously in 1956. Despite stylistic inadequacies, the book is strong in its depiction of rural Chinese society and its detailed look at life and politics within the Red Army. Smedley saw herself as an interpreter of the Chinese revolution to the West. Her vivid and sensitive observations from the center of one of the century’s great dramas constitute her most important professional achievement. But Smedley also saw herself as a woman who, as she once wrote, refused to ‘‘live the life of a cabbage.’’ OTHER WORKS: Portraits of Chinese Women in Revolution (edited by J. MacKinnon and S. MacKinnon, 1976). The papers of Agnes Smedley are housed in several locations, yet the Hayden Library of Arizona State University in Tempe, is the primary repository. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Howe, F. Afterword to Portraits of Chinese Women in Revolution (1976). Huberman, L., and P. M. Sweezy, Publisher’s foreword to The Great Road: The Life and Times of Chu Teh by A. Smedley (1956). Lauter, P., afterword to Daughter of Earth by A. Smedley (1973). Lovett, R. M., preface to China’s Red Army Marches (1934). MacKinnon, J., and S. MacKinnon,
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Agnes Smedley: The Life and Times of an American Radical (1988). Reference works: CB (1944, 1950). DAB. NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCA, TCAS. Other references: Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars (Jan.-March 1975). Chinese Literature (Oct. 1980). Monthly Review (April 1978). Nation (19 Feb. 1949). NR (29 May 1950, 14 Dec. 1974). New Statesman and Nation (20 May 1950). NYT (9 May 1950, 6 April 1978). Playbooks (adaptation of Daughter of Earth, 1986). Survey (Autumn 1974). —PEGGY STINSON
SMITH, Amanda Born 23 January 1837, Long Green, Maryland; died 24 February 1915, Sebring, Florida Daughter of Samuel and Mariam Matthews Berry; married Calvin Devine, 1854; James Smith, 1863 Born of slave parents, Amanda Smith was the eldest daughter of 13 children. Her father, through persistent hard work, bought his own freedom and that of his wife and family. He moved his family to Pennsylvania where they farmed, worked as domestics, and were a part of the Underground Railroad. Smith worked as a domestic until 1870, when she began her career as an evangelical preacher and missionary. Although she had only a few months of schooling, her natural charismatic character and religious enthusiasm made her a well-known figure in the holiness movement. In 1878 an associate suggested Smith preach in England, and after a year in England she traveled to India where she lived and preached for two years. In 1881, she left for West Africa, returning to the U.S. in 1890. After Smith’s missionary works abroad, she settled in Chicago where she focused her attentions on evangelism, temperance, and social work among black orphans. Smith’s contribution to literature is an autobiography published in 1893. Even though her formal education was minimal, her autobiography is rich with sensitive understanding of her life as a black, a woman, and a religious leader. Beginning with her early life, and prior to her full-time commitment to evangelism, the reader senses Smith’s struggle with her conversion experience and her understanding of God’s direction in her life. Although her faith is strong, Smith candidly writes of her confusion and indecision about her religious convictions. Throughout this first section, she frequently cites examples of the difficulties she encountered as a woman and a black—from burying her small child to not being allowed off the train until all the white people had disembarked. Smith’s descriptions of her travels and adventures in England, India, and Africa give the modern reader a unique view of those countries as seen through the eyes of a 19th-century black evangelical Christian. While in Africa she was particularly sensitive to the plight of women who were sold at an early age to men for wives, and worked like animals in the fields. Her memories of
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Africa and Asia would shape her latter involvement with black orphans in Chicago.
more conventional pieces detail Smith’s courtship, her gratitude to her aunt, a tribute to her grandfather, and advice to a friend.
The autobiography tells the story of a remarkable woman, and gives a realistic account of 19th-century Protestantism. The holiness doctrine, faith healing, the ‘‘Amen Corner,’’ and the missionary movement all figure prominently in the autobiography. Smith extended the role of women in evangelical Christianity, and especially in the Methodist church, by her ability to preach and to personally relate to her Savior.
Creating in a very short time a body of poetry remarkable for its diversity, Smith leaves one wishing she had more than 24 years to pursue her craft.
OTHER WORKS: An Autobiography (1893). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cadbury, M. H., The Life of Amanda Smith (1916). Reference works: NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —M. COLLEEN MCDANNELL
OTHER WORKS: Manuscript poems by Anna Young Smith are in Elizabeth Fergusson’s commonplace book, Dickinson College Library. Nine poems were published individually in periodicals, one in the Pennsylvania Magazine (June 1775) and eight in the Universal Asylum and Columbian Magazine 5-9 (1790-1792). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Armstrong, Edward, ed., Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (1864). Cowell, P., Women Poets in Pre-Revolutionary America, 1650-1775 (1981). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —PATTIE COWELL
SMITH, Anna Young SMITH, Betty (Wehner) Born 5 November 1756, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; died 3 April 1780, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Wrote under: Sylvia Daughter of James and Jane Graeme Young; married William Smith, 1775; children: three After the death of their mother, Anna Young Smith and her brother were raised at Graeme Park near Philadelphia by their aunt, Elizabeth Fergusson. Fergusson was a prolific poet and correspondent, a circumstance which may have encouraged Smith in her own writing. Smith’s early poetry and letters suggest admiration for Fergusson’s talent and gratitude for her kindness. Most of Smith’s extant poems were written before her marriage, to which her father apparently did not consent. Smith died as a young woman, probably of complications resulting from the birth of her third child (contradictory accounts leave the circumstance and precise date of her death in dispute). Smith’s poems reveal a woman of firm opinions and wideranging interests. She treated political and feminist themes as well as the more conventional subjects of love and courtship, gratitude, sensibility, and grief. Her ‘‘Elegy to the Memory of the American Volunteers. . . ,’’ for example, places her on the side of the rebels during the Revolutionary War: ‘‘Where e’er the Barb’rous story shall be told, / The British cheek shall glow with conscious shame.’’ Smith was as firm in her demand for fair treatment of women as she was in her politics. She responded to ‘‘Reading [Jonathan] Swift’s Works’’ in characteristically strong language: ‘‘Ungenerous bard, whom not e’en Stella’s charms / Thy vengeful satire of its sting disarms! / Say when thou, dipp’st thy keenest pen in gall, / Why must it still on helpless woman fall? / . . .thy harsh satire, rude, severe, unjust, / Awakes too oft our anger or disgust.’’ Other
Born 15 December 1896, Brooklyn, New York; died 17 January 1972, Shelton, Connecticut Daughter of John C. and Katherine Hummel Wehner; married George Smith, circa 1924 (divorced); Joseph Jones, 1943 (divorced); Robert Finch, 1957 (died); children: two daughters Born and raised in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, Betty Smith attended public schools until the age of fourteen when, having completed eighth grade, she began working at a series of factory and clerical jobs. An avid reader as a young girl, she also wrote poems and acted in amateur productions at the Williamsburg YMCA. Moving to the Midwest, she met and married George Smith, a law student at the University of Michigan, and they had two daughters. She audited literature and writing classes at the university and, although not a regular student, had two plays published in a collection of undergraduate work and won an Avery Hopwood prize. From 1930 to 1934 Smith studied with George Pierce Baker and others at the Yale Drama School. Smith’s first two marriages ended in divorce. After the first divorce, Smith accepted a Rockefeller fellowship in playwriting at the University of North Carolina; she remained in Chapel Hill, writing, occasionally lecturing at the university, and playing small roles in local productions. Her third husband, Robert Finch, a writer with whom she had collaborated on several plays, died about a year and a half after their marriage. A dramatist by inclination, Smith wrote over 70 plays and edited several collections and texts for drama classes. Most of her plays were not published and none received critical acclaim or even major professional performances. Typical of her plays meant for youth groups or schools are The Boy, Abe and First Sorrows,
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both about the young Abe Lincoln and the death of his mother. Other one-act plays range in tone from burlesque to sentimentality and in setting from a mid-19th century rural political rally (Freedom’s Bird, written with Robert Finch) to the sidewalk in front of an illegal abortionist’s office on a late depression era Christmas Eve (So Gracious Is the Time). Though she preferred drama, Smith won fame through her fiction. Drawing upon her own memories and those of her mother, she expanded an earlier work, ‘‘Francie Nolan,’’ into A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943), her most successful novel. It sold millions of copies and was made into a movie and a Broadway musical. Whereas the plot and much of the writing can be criticized for excessive sentimentality, the strength of this highly autobiographical novel lies in the richness of detail with which Smith recreates a young girl’s childhood and adolescence in the slums of early-20th century Brooklyn, including both the pains of a poverty-stricken childhood and the good times. The characters are vivid and three-dimensional; even the minor characters come alive as recognizable types. Smith’s next novel, Tomorrow Will Be Better (1948, in Britain as Streets of Little Promise) is set against the same background as her first, but reviewers were not impressed with this effort; they found the dialogue authentic but the book as a whole less spontaneous and more self-conscious than A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. In Maggie-Now (1958), the character types are similar to those in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn—charming, irresponsible men and their long-suffering, hardworking wives and daughters—but this novel too lacks the depth of the earlier one. In her fourth novel, Joy in the Morning (1963), Smith shifted the locale from Brooklyn to a Midwestern college campus. In some ways, this book is a sequel to the first novel, as the heroine, a Brooklyn girl with only a grade school education, marries a law student, audits literature and writing classes, and has her work published in a student collection. Smith obviously drew heavily upon her own experiences for the material for her novels. Her accurate ear for dialogue (a legacy of her dramatic training) is a strength in all of them. But the wealth of detail in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn may have exhausted her memories. Each of the succeeding books was less rich in characterization and atmosphere. Her greatest weakness, however, was her inability to shape her novels into realistic and meaningful form; thus they tend to be overly sentimental and to end mechanically or without resolution. OTHER WORKS: Selected: Folk Stuff (1935). His Last Skirmish (1937). Naked Angel (1937). Popecastle Inn (1937). Saints Get Together (1937). Plays for Schools and Little Theaters: A Descriptive List (edited by Smith, with R. Finch and F. H. Koch, 1937). Trees of His Father (1937). Vine Leaves (1937). The Professor Roars (1938). Western Night (1938). Darkness at the Window (1938). Murder in the Snow (1938). Silver Rope (1938). Youth Takes Over; or, When a Man’s Sixteen (1939). Lawyer Lincoln (1939). Mannequins’ Maid (1939). They Released Barabbas (1939). A Night in the Country (1939). Near Closing Time (1939). Package for Ponsonby (1939). Western Ghost Town (1939).
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Bayou Harlequinade (1940). Fun After Supper (1940). Heroes Just Happen (1940). Room for a King (1940). Summer Comes to the Diamond O (1940). To Jenny with Love (1941). 25 NonRoyalty One-Act Plays for All-Girl Casts (edited by Smith, 1942). 20 Prize-Winning Non-Royalty One-Act Plays (edited by Smith, 1943). Young Lincoln (1951). A Treasury of Non-Royalty One-Act Plays (edited by Smith et al., 1958). Durham Station (1961). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1969). CB (1943, 1972). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCAS. —ELAINE K. GINSBERG
SMITH, Eliza (Roxey) Snow Born 21 January 1804, Becket, Massachusetts; died 5 December 1886, Salt Lake City, Utah Daughter of Oliver and Rosetta Pettibone Snow; married Joseph Smith, 1842 (died); Brigham Young, 1847 When Eliza Snow Smith, the second of seven children, was very young, her parents migrated to Ohio, where her father successfully took up farming. Smith received the most liberal education allowed a young woman at the time, attending the local schools of Ravenna, Ohio, and a grammar school taught by a Presbyterian minister. In her early teens, Smith began writing poetry. Her first efforts were published in local newspapers and journals under pen names. These verses are typical of her day— sentimental, religious, and didactic. In the 1820s Smith and her parents joined the Reformed Baptist or ‘‘Campbellite’’ church, and she began a devoted study of the Bible. Smith converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints early in 1835, and left her family’s home for the Mormon stronghold of Kirtland, Ohio, where she lodged with the Prophet Joseph Smith and his family. To support herself, Smith founded a select school for young girls in Kirtland. She played an active role in the life of the Mormon community, singing in the Kirtland Temple choir and writing songs and poems for the church. In 1838 she followed Smith and his flock first to Missouri and then to Illinois, where she began her rise to prominence in the Mormon church. She was the first secretary of the Female (later Women’s) Relief Society, a charitable and a spiritual organization associated with the Mormon church. Smith also served as an officer of the Nauvoo, Illinois, Temple and as president of the Nauvoo Endowment House, the building where the important religious ceremonies of the Mormon church took place. It was in Nauvoo that Joseph Smith quietly introduced the doctrine of plural marriage to his most devoted followers. At first, Smith was repelled by the doctrine, but she came to ‘‘esteem it a precious, sacred principle—necessary to the elevation and salvation of the human family—in ridding women from the curse, and the world from corruption.’’ Smith probably became the Prophet’s fourth or fifth wife when she secretly wed him in 1842. Their
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marriage was kept secret until 1852 when Brigham Young, then head of the Mormon church, formally announced polygamy was an integral part of church doctrine. After the murder of Joseph and the dispersal of the followers, Smith was among the first pioneering companies to reach the valley of the Great Salt Lake. During the course of the journey west, she kept a diary (published in the Improvement Era, 1943-44), and wrote patriotic, religious, and eulogistic poetry. Her poetry served as an inspiration to trail-weary Mormons, and encouraged them to continue on their way to the promised land: ‘‘Altho’ in woods and tents we dwell / Shout, shout O Camp of Israel. / No Christian males on earth can bind / Our thoughts, or steal our peace of mind.’’ On this trip westward, Smith, along with several of Joseph’s widows, was married to Brigham Young. Smith became the most beloved and powerful woman in Utah, as she increased her involvement with charitable, spiritual, and educational projects. In addition to publicly defending polygamy, Smith was an ardent feminist. As head of the Women’s Suffrage Society, she worked to dispel the myth that Mormon women lived lives subject to their husband’s wills. She worked hard to ensure Utah’s women the right to political franchise and won success in 1870. Smith continued to write poetry, hymns, and religious essays, published in several Utah journals, as well as practical educational texts while living in Utah. Her first volume of poetry, incorporating many of the poems she had written while on the trail from Illinois, was published in 1856, and a second volume was published in 1877. Smith compiled a number of hymnals for the church, containing some of her own hymns, the most popular of which was ‘‘O My Father, Thou that Dwellest.’’ She contributed an account of the ‘‘assassination’’ of Smith and his brother and several poems to Lucy Smith’s Biographical Sketches of Joseph Smith (1853). With her brother Lorenzo Snow, the fifth president of the Mormon church, Smith wrote The Correspondence of Palestine Tourists (1875), the record of their missionary trip to the Middle East. Smith was reticent to write of her own experiences, but she did write an autobiographical sketch, which was published in the Relief Society Magazine (1944). Smith’s best-known work, and an excellent source for historians interested in the foundations of the Mormon religion, is The Biography and Family Record of Lorenzo Snow (1884). Married in turn to the two most important figures in the history of the Mormon church, Smith made a name for herself through her own involvement in church affairs and education, and she pointed with pride to Utah women’s right to vote and active participation in church affairs as evidence of Mormon women’s freedom and equality. In addition, Smith wrote poems and songs for the church; she provided the young Mormon church with its chief hymns. OTHER WORKS: The Story of Jesus (1845). Poems, Religious, Historical, and Political (2 vols., 1856 and 1877). Bible Questions and Answers for Children (1883). Recitations for the Primary Associations (edited by Smith, 1887). Hymns and Songs: Selected
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from Various Authors for the Primary Associations of the Children of Zion (edited by Smith, 1888). Recitations for the Primary Associations in Poetry, Dialogues, and Prose (edited by Smith, 1891). A copy of Eliza Snow Smith’s 1847 diary and her autobiographical sketch are in the Bancroft Library at the University of California. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brodie, F. M., No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, the Mormon Prophet (1971). Crocherson, A. J., Representative Women of Deseret (1884). Gates, S. Y., and L. D. Widstoe, Women of the Mormon Church (1926). Hill, D., Joseph Smith: The First Mormon (1977). Tullidge, E., The Women of Mormondom (1877). Reference works: DAB. NAW (1971). —PAULA A. TRECKEL
SMITH, Elizabeth Oakes (Prince) Born 12 August 1806, North Yarmouth, Maine; died 15 November 1893, Hollywood, North Carolina Also wrote under: E., Ernest Helfenstein, Oakes Smith, Mrs. Seba Smith Daughter of David and Sophia Blanchard Prince; married Seba Smith, 1823 As a child, Elizabeth Oakes Smith lived in the country near the south coast of Maine, where she spent much time even after her family moved to Portland when she was eight. At the age of sixteen, Smith married Seba Smith, an editor and publisher and the author of the popular Major Jack Downing stories. Smith’s first poems and sketches appeared anonymously in his newspapers. In Portland, Smith had five sons; one died as a young child. After a series of financial reverses, the Smiths moved to New York in 1837 and took their places in the city’s literary circles. Smith contributed to the support of her family through her writing. Her stories, sketches, and poems appeared in the Ladies’ Companion, Godey’s Lady’s Book, Graham’s Magazine, and other popular monthlies of the day, in addition to her husband’s various periodical publications. She contributed to 36 gift books (sentimental annual publications) between 1836 and 1856, editing some of them with her husband and some of them on her own. From about the midpoint of her life, the ‘‘busy devil’’ with which Smith professed to be afflicted directed her into intense reform activity. She was an active participant in the women’s rights conventions of 1848, 1851, 1852, and 1878. In 1851, as an advocate of the working woman, Smith, with Lucretia Mott, sponsored a tailoring cooperative that employed women in Philadelphia. Under the auspices of the YMCA, she was a social worker in New York City. In 1868, she became a charter member of New York’s first women’s club; she served as its vice-president in 1869. In 1877, after a lifetime of religious searching and
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questioning, Smith became the minister of an independent congregation in Canastota, New York. Smith’s early writings draw heavily on her immediate environment and include Native American myths and legends, Down East characters, and stories of Maine. These early writings also include sketches of women whose lives were far outside her experience, such as Charlotte Corday and Mme. de Staël, which reappear in later writings and in her lectures on the Lyceum circuit. Smith won popular and critical acclaim for ‘‘The Sinless Child,’’ a long narrative poem which first appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger, to which she was a frequent contributor. In the poem, the unworldly heroine is released from a corrupt world through death. Its publication as the title piece in a collection of her poems in 1843 established Smith’s reputation. Smith’s first novel, Riches Without Wings, was published in 1838. Its themes and values are conventional: the superiority of natural beauty, temperance in all things, modesty, cleanliness. Worldly riches are not to be pursued at the expense of spiritual purity, but wealth and recognition do reward hard work and honesty. Her dialogues and asides to her readers are intended to instruct, and in these, along with the dominant themes, Smith occasionally disparages convention, as when the leading female character asserts the value of passion in women as well as in men, and again when she refuses to wear the prescribed mourning dress on the death of a relative. In her later work, Smith continued to use the conventional themes of her first novel. A strong strain of mysticism, present in most of her writing, becomes more marked in the later writing. Patriotism and progress are typical themes. The evils of cities, the romantic theme of the superiority of the natural, or country life, is the major theme in The Newsboy (1854), a novel credited with influencing social reform in New York. Smith believed women had the right to develop fully as individuals, and that the current constraints of the marriage relation inhibited their development, were articulated in a series of essays in the New York Tribune, published as a monograph in 1851, under the title Woman and Her Needs (reprinted in 1974). As a writer, Smith was spurred always by financial necessity. Her work is remarkable for variety, volume, and inventiveness; it ranges from sonnets to very informal travel sketches and reminiscences, from children’s stories to tragic drama. Though in general her characters have the conventional virtues and vices and her intensely romantic themes were chosen to appeal to a wide audience, Smith’s fiction, poetry, and essays expose the occasional ‘‘burr under the saddle’’ that placed her among contemporary reformers and made her a significant contributor to the popular literature of the middle third of the 19th century. OTHER WORKS: The Western Captive (1842). The Sinless Child, and Other Poems (1843). The Dandelion, The Rosebud and The Moss Cup (1845). The Lover’s Gift (1848). The Salamander (1848). The Roman Tribute (1850). The Good Child’s Book (1851). Hints on Dress and Beauty (1852). Shadowland (1853).
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Old New York (1853). The Sanctity of Marriage (1853). Bertha and Lily (1854). Black Hollow (1864). Bald Eagle (1867). The Sagamore of Saco (1868). Selections from the Autobiography of Elizabeth Oakes Smith (edited by M. A. Wyman, 1924). The New York Public Library has a collection of Elizabeth Oakes Smith’s unpublished papers, including the manuscript of her autobiography. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Wyman, M. A., Two American Pioneers: Seba Smith and Elizabeth Oakes Smith (1927). Reference works: Appleton’s Annual Cyclopedia (1893). CAL. DAB. FPA. NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Broadway Journal (23 Aug. 1845). Graham’s (June 1843, Sept. 1853, April 1856). North American Review (Oct. 1854). —VIVIAN H. SHORTREED
SMITH, Eunice Born circa 1770s; died death date unknown Eunice Smith, who wrote during the closing decade of the 18th century, was a resident of Ashfield, Massachusetts. Whatever Smith’s personal life may have been like is unknown. From her publishing record it is clear that she experienced a good deal of success as a writer of religious tracts. Smith was a forerunner of the multitude of American women who wrote on religious topics throughout the 19th century. Smith’s success is indicated by the multiple editions and printings of her works, not a common phenomenon in the U.S. of the 1790s. Practical Language Interpreted in a Dialogue Between a Believer and an Unbeliever in Two Parts (1793) passed through at least four or five separate editions before 1795, and Some Arguments Against Worldly Mindedness. . .By Way of a Dialogue or Discourse Between Mary and Martha (1795) saw seven separate printings before its popularity wore thin. Smith structured her prose as simple dialogues in which one of the speakers, with the encouragement of the other, changes her state of religious doubt or sin for one of blessed assurance and understanding. The dialogues demonstrate the difference in thought between a sinner and a saint and explore the conception of the role of a Christian vis à vis the Savior. Smith uses these dialogues in an attempt to enliven traditional religious subjects and themes. Whether she was familiar with earlier precedents for such use of dialectic dialogue, she did not reveal. Smith’s tropes, reminiscent of the figurative diction of some of the Puritan Fathers and of the revivalist ministers of the 1740s, also makes her conventional material more vivid. She conjures up explicit images of hell, the ‘‘horrible pit.’’ Whereas Smith’s tropes and style achieve some complexity, the religious beliefs they illustrate are simple. Smith emphasizes uplifting thoughts rather than the subtle uncertainties and repeated self-doubts of her
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Puritan predecessors. Smith was not concerned with fine theological distinctions or knotty religious issues, but with helping the reader to a calm self-scrutiny based on a simple assurance of God’s eternal benevolence toward all sinners. She assures the reader that if the individual fights evil diligently, God will intervene with a saving hand. Smith’s religious tracts are not particularly enticing to the modern reader in their simple, antique pious sentiments. But her works are historically interesting as an indication that the betterknown moralist women writers of the 19th century, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, had deep roots in the small towns of 18thcentury New England. —JACQUELINE HORNSTEIN
SMITH, Hannah Whittal Born 7 February 1832, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; died 1 May 1911, Iffley, England Wrote under: H.W.S. Daughter of John M. and Mary Whitall; married Robert P. Smith, 1851 After a happy childhood in her Quaker home, Hannah Whittal Smith married in 1851 and had four children. She departed early from strict Quaker ways, which seemed too rigid, to set out on a spiritual pilgrimage. Eventually she began to preach alongside her husband. The Smiths preached the ‘‘Higher Life’’ in America, in England, and on the Continent, being particularly active around 1873. Because Smith’s husband was suspected of preaching false doctrine and also of improper conduct with female admirers, they returned to the U.S., but settled permanently in England in 1886. Smith’s preaching was nonsectarian and the influences on her thought were various. After her marriage, Smith came under the influence of the Plymouth Brethren, the Baptists, and the Methodists. But she had inherited from her father an attachment to the works of the 17th-century French quietist Mme. Guyon. Smith also treated as a guide Mme Guyon’s friend Fénelon, whose Spiritual Letters she quoted with approval. Because Smith was open to religious enlightenment from any source, she worked out for herself a safeguard against fanaticism, which she offers to her readers in The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life (1875, reprinted under several similar titles in 1984, 1985, 1993, and most recently in 1999). Her message is that God’s guidance comes to us in four ways: ‘‘through the Scriptures, through providential circumstances, through the convictions of our own higher judgement, and through the inward impressions of the Holy Spirit on our minds.’’ In early editions Smith also included a chapter warning against taking emotional states as proof of the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Both The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life and The God of All Comfort (1906) are still religious bestsellers today. They owe
their appeal to the clarity, simplicity, and directness with which Smith expresses her complete trust in God. Of at least equal interest, but out of print, is Smith’s spiritual autobiography, The Unselfishness of God, and How I Discovered It (1903, reissued, the latest being in 1987 and 1993). In the end, Smith found she had returned to a basic Quaker principle: that God has power to save us from sin, not only in a legalistic sense but also in a practical way, by preserving us from it and giving us constant guidance. Because of this interest in the practical applications of Christian teaching, Smith was also active in the temperance and woman suffrage movements. Smith believed in will power as the chief condition for total trust in God. Her orthodoxy may have been suspect at one time, but her outlook suits the modern Christian, hence her continuing popularity today—not only in scholarly works but in recent reprints of many of her works in the 1980s and into the late 1990s. OTHER WORKS: The Devotional Writings of Robert Pearsall Smith and Hannah Whitall Smith (1870, 1984). The Record of a Happy Life: Being Memorials of Franklin Whitall Smith (1873). John M. Whitall: The Story of his Life (1879). Every-Day Religion (1893). The Science of Motherhood (1894). Religious Fanaticism: Extracts from the Papers of Hannah Whitall Smith (edited by R. Strachey, 1928, 1976). Philadelphia Quaker: Letters of Hannah Whitall Smith (edited by L. P. Smith, 1950). The Christian’s Secret of a Holy Life: The Unpublished Personal Writings of Hannah Whitall Smith (1990, 1994). The Hannah Whitall Smith Collection (1995). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Pearsall, C. E., et al, History and Genealogy of the Pearsall Family (1928). Smith, L. P., Unforgotten Years (1939). Smith, R. M., The Burlington Smiths (1877). Strachey, R., A Quaker Grandmother: Hannah Whitall Smith (1914). Reference works: DAB. NAW (1971). —BARBARA J. BUCKNALL, UPDATED BY NELSON RHODES
SMITH, Lee Born 1 November 1944, Grundy, Virginia Daughter of Ernest Lee and Virginia Marshall Smith; married James E. Seay, 1967; Hal Crowther, 1985; children: Josh, Page As a child, Lee Smith was convinced she was going to be a writer and chose to attend Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia, because it offered an M.F.A. in Creative Writing. She took writing courses throughout college and found that they taught her elements of a technique that helped her mature as a writer; two teachers, Louis D. Rubin and R. W. Dillard, were especially important to her. She graduated with a B.A. in 1967, and in
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that year, the novel she wrote in college, The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed (1968), won a Book-of-the-Month Club Writing Fellowship. Smith calls herself a storyteller, and her stories range from humorous short stories to novels that seek to understand the artist’s search for a self. Some of her characters, like Susan, the narrator of The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed, watch the world around them and try to transform it into something beautiful. Others, like Crystal of Black Mountain Breakdown (1981), cannot accept themselves and escape into a fantasy world. Something in the Wind (1971), Fancy Strut (1973), Black Mountain Breakdown, and Cakewalk (1981) all received positive reviews, and critics saw in Smith a writer who could combine comic elements with a skilled narrative technique. The books did not sell well, however. With Oral History (1983), Smith’s acceptance by reviewers was translated into acceptance by the reading public, and the book, compared by critics to Faulkner’s work, was the first to make a profit for her. While Smith deprecates the comparison with Faulkner, the book is a tightly constructed examination of the Old and the New South for the benefit of Jennifer, a young college student who has returned to the Virginia mountains to find her roots. Smith interweaves the history of Appalachia with the legends, songs, and folktales of the region in a way that makes the mountain people live again. In Family Linen (1985), Smith uncovers a family secret, the murder of Jewell Rife by his wife, Elizabeth Bird Hess, the family matriarch who is dying while all her children try to come to terms with her and with their lives. Viewed from the perspective of several family members, the discovery of the secret murder counters the journal that Elizabeth Bird herself leaves to carry on the myth of her devotion to family and duty. Written in the orotund style of the Victorian South, the journal becomes a mockery when contrasted with the lives of Elizabeth’s children and when set beside the murder she has hidden for almost half a century. With Fair and Tender Ladies (1988), Smith achieved real popularity as a teller of a wonderful story. The novel, written in the epistolary form, chronicles the lives of Ivy Rowe and again reveals Smith’s deep affection for the mountains of Virginia and for the mountain people who have lived, suffered, and endured. Like many of Smith’s narrators, Ivy Rowe is chiefly an observer, and her letters vividly depict life in Sugar Fork, where her parents’ homestead is, and in the two neighboring towns to which her hard life takes her. Throughout her long life, Ivy Rowe reveals her passions, secrets, hopes, and dreams to a long list of correspondents, but chiefly to her sister, Silvaney, who has lived most of her life in an asylum and whom Ivy keeps alive through her letters. Here Smith again reveals the truth behind the myths of Southern womanhood, and the reality is far more solid and enduring than the fantasy. In Me and My Baby View the Eclipse (1990), a collection of stories, Smith highlights the daydreams of average Southerners
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and weaves epiphany and loss in the stories of breakdowns, divorces and death. The conflict is often between those like Rose Dee in ‘‘Tongues of Fire,’’ who insist on keeping up appearances at all costs, and those like her daughter, who learn to accept the tragedies in their lives and go on living. The stories are full of humor, empathy, and a sense of the irony of being a Southerner in the 20th century. The Devil’s Dream (1992) is a characteristic blend of Virginia history and wry and loving accounts of family held together by women. Moving back from Nashville to the roots of country music in the lives of the mountain people, the novel again demonstrates Smith’s ability as a storyteller. Like generations of Southern writers before her, Smith has a sense of place, an ear for language, and a vision of a South that endures. And Saving Grace (1995) touches on a Smith theme that is familiar—rural families. Smith tells the heartwarming tale of three generations in the same family who write Christmas letters in The Christmas Letters (1996). The book is about family tradition, love, and strength as Birdie Pickett, her daughter, Mary, and her granddaughter, Melanie, tuck letters containing stories inside their Christmas cards. The long letters tend to explain their lives as much to themselves as to scattered family and friends. Smith captures vividly the familiar gossipiness of letters that intimates will write each other, women’s voices, the clash of generations, and ever-evolving American family life. In News of the Spirit (1997), Smith collects many of her best-loved short stories, following love, longing, despair, imagination, and grace, with family members, brothers, sisters, parents, and friends. Brothers appear in ‘‘The Bubba Stories,’’ where character Charlene Christian explains, ‘‘I made Bubba up in the spring of 1963 in order to increase my popularity with my girlfriends,’’ but her legendary sibling takes on a life of his own. Another brother appears in ‘‘News of the Spirit,’’ as Paula’s damaged sibling, Johnny, in the title story, is ‘‘writing a new kind of book,’’ constructing another narrative of his tragic life. Parents show up in ‘‘Live Bottomless,’’ in which 13-year-old Jenny tells the funny yet hurting tale of her philandering father’s fall from grace and the family’s subsequent trip to Key West as her parents attempt a ‘‘geographical cure’’ for their troubled marriage. The housekeeper’s daughter is the focus as the housekeeper tells prim and proper old maid Sarah about the youngster’s ‘‘blue wedding.’’ Finally, in ‘‘The Southern Cross,’’ Chanel, a girl of easy virtue and dubious reputation, chronicles her cruise around the Caribbean with three Atlanta developers, and Alice Scully talks about her retirement home writers group in ‘‘The Happy Memories Club.’’ BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1985, 1987). CLC (1983). DLBY (1983). FC (1990). Other references: NYTBR (19 July 1992). New Orleans Times-Picayune (11 Mar. 1990, 12 July 1992). Southern Quarterly (Fall 1983). —MARY A. MCKAY, UPDATED BY DARYL F. MALLETT
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SMITH, Lillian Born 12 December 1897, Jasper, Florida; died 28 September 1966, Atlanta, Georgia Daughter of Calvin and Anne Simpson Smith Lilian Smith was the seventh of nine children. She tasted the ‘‘strange fruit’’ of racial segregation early in her childhood, when her well-to-do, genteel Methodist parents took in an apparently white orphan found living with a black family. The Smiths welcomed the girl until they learned she was part black; then the children were hastily separated, leaving Smith in conflict over the paradox of a culture that teaches hospitality, democracy, and Christian charity at the same time it violently denies the humanity of blacks. Smith’s traditional Southern upbringing led her to value literature, art, and music and to want to be socially useful. Her education (at Piedmont College and Baltimore’s Peabody Conservatory of Music) was repeatedly interrupted by declining family fortunes, which had forced the Smiths to move to their summer home in Clayton, Georgia, in 1915. Smith joined the Student Nursing Corps in World War I and, after the Armistice, taught for a year in an isolated mountain school in Georgia. She spent three years teaching music at a Methodist mission school in Huchow, China, and then returned to help run Laurel Falls Camp for Girls, the exclusive summer camp her father founded at their Georgia home, and to act as secretary to her brother Austin, the city manager of Fort Pierce, Florida. In 1928 she attended Columbia University’s Teachers College, adding to her already considerable knowledge of child development and Freudian psychology. After her father died in 1930, Smith assumed heavy family responsibilities including the care of her invalid mother. And, in the next five years, she wrote five novels, never published and all lost in a 1944 house fire. Along with her lifelong companion, Paula Snelling, another young liberal Southern intellectual hired to help run the camp, Smith founded Pseudopodia, a little magazine heavily influenced by the editors’ Freudian persuasion and their antisegregationist political and social views. At first the magazine concentrated on reviewing works by and about blacks and took a literary stand against, among other things, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind and the Agrarians. It was renamed twice—as the North American Review (1937-42) and South Today (1942-44)—as the editors broadened their liberal crusade against the consequences of caste in the South and in other countries and as it became a forum also for Smith’s fervent views on sexuality and childrearing. Strange Fruit (1944, reprinted most recently in 1992), Smith’s first published novel, sold over 3,000,000 copies and was translated into 16 languages. It was banned from the bookstores and libraries of Boston and from the bookstores of Detroit; Eleanor Roosevelt intervened to remove the Post Office ban. Much of the uproar stemmed from the realistic language and the ironic treatment of miscegenation, sexuality, and abortion. Set in racially segregated Maxwell, Georgia, in the years following World War I, the plot traces from its youthful beginning the secret interracial
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love affair of Tracy Deen—a war veteran, son of the town’s respected white doctor and his aristocratic wife—and Nonnie Anderson—a black college graduate who can only find a job as a maid in Maxwell. As in Theodore Dreiser’s American Tragedy and Richard Wright’s Native Son, Smith’s fictional world is deterministic. Characters breaking a taboo in this segregated society must suffer violence. Tracy Deen is murdered by the brother of his pregnant lover. A mob lynches the black servant Deen had paid to marry Nonnie so he could marry as his mother and the town expect him to. Smith handles the stream-of-consciousness technique well, aptly combining it with the sensational plot and subject matter to create a strongly moving, finely detailed picture of the tragedy of racism for both black and white Southerners. The furor over Strange Fruit created the national publishing and speaking outlet Smith needed to wage her campaign against racism. She published a second novel, One Hour (1959, 1994), and five nonfiction books that preach racial justice and denounce any person or organization that did not seem as liberal as she. Each book contains eloquent stories about her personal life and the lives of those she encountered on her travels through the South and abroad. Her ability to recreate atmosphere through physical detail allows her to carry out the psychological, social, and political analysis that is her purpose. Smith also wrote a column for the Chicago Defender and articles and book reviews for such widely read magazines as New Republic, Saturday Review, Redbook, the Nation, and McCall’s. Smith’s contribution to the cause of racial justice in the U.S. won her the reputation as the most liberal white advocate of civil rights in the South in the 1940s. In the 1950s and 1960s, despite recurrent battles with lung cancer, Smith continued to fight against the evils of segregation by championing the nonviolent movement of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Her conviction was deep and sincere, but her view of literature and art was limited by the intensity of her belief in the perfectability of mankind. She took daring stands against segregation, but the impact of her writing is diminished by her moralizing. Smith is justifiably recognized as a minor literary figure and a major social reformer. OTHER WORKS: Killers of the Dream (1949, 1994). The Journey (1954, 1964). Now Is the Time (1955). Memory of a Large Christmas (1962, 1996). Our Faces, Our Words (1964). From the Mountain (writings from South Today, edited by H. White and R. S. Suggs, Jr., 1972). The Winner Names the Age (edited by M. Cliff, 1978, 1982). How Am I to Be Heard? Letters of Lillian Smith (1993). Lillian E. Smith Papers: 1920-1980 (archives of the Library of Congress, 1980). Now Is the Time (1955). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Blackwell, L., and F. Clay, Lillian Smith (1971). Brewer, P. B., Lillian Smith: Thorn in the Flesh of Crackerdom (dissertation, 1983). Camacho, R. V., Woman Born of the South: Race, Region and Gender in the Work of Lillian Smith (dissertation, 1992). Hill, S. W., ‘‘The South Today: A Critical Study of
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Lillian Smith’s Little Magazine’’ (thesis, 1991). Jenkins, M., The South in Black and White: Race, Sex, and Literature in the 1940s (1999). Loveland, A. C., Lillian Smith, a Southerner Confronting the South: A Biography (1986). Miller, K. A. Out of the Chrysalis: Lillian Smith and the Transformation of the South (dissertation, 1986). Morehouse, L. ‘‘Bio-Bibliography of Miss Lillian Smith’’ (thesis, 1956). O’Dell, M. D., ‘‘Sites of Southern Memory: The Autobiographies of Katharine DuPre Lumpkin, Lillian Smith, and Pauli Murray’’ (dissertation, 1997). Sosna, M., In Search of the Silent South: Southern Liberals and the Race Issue (1977). Sullivan, M., A Bibliography of Lillian Smith & Paula Snelling (1971). Reference works: CB (1944). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Great Women Writers Read Their Work (audiocassette, 1974, 1986). —SUZANNE ALLEN
SMITH, Lula Carson See McCULLERS, Carson
SMITH, Margaret Bayard Born 20 February 1778, near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; died 7 June 1844, Washington, D.C. Daughter of John B. and Margaret Hodge Bayard; married Samuel H. Smith, 1800 Margaret Bayard Smith married the editor of the Jeffersonian newspaper the National Intelligencer and brought with her to Washington in 1800 a lively curiosity, a warm understanding of human relationships, and an openness to experience. During her early life in Washington, Smith wrote privately, chiefly letters and notebooks. Her public career as a writer began in the 1820s. She published two novels based on Washington life, A Winter in Washington (1824) and What is Gentility? (1828). She also wrote short stories, essays, and verse for such publications as Godey’s Lady’s Book, the National Intelligencer, and the Southern Literary Messenger. In addition, Smith wrote several biographical accounts for James Herring and John B. Longacre’s National Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Americans. Smith’s reputation as a writer rests primarily on the collection of her letters and notebook entries edited by Gaillard Hunt in 1906 and published under the title The First Forty Years of Washington Society. This miscellany revealed Smith as a person of wit, insight, and affection and as a discerning observer of the society of her time. Smith’s Jeffersonian sympathies are evident in her work, but her circle of friends far transcended party lines. She found the transition from Jeffersonian republicanism to Jacksonian democracy a difficult one. Though flexible by nature, Smith belonged to
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an earlier age of gentility and ordered society. Her writing about the pre-Jacksonian period combined the personal world and public political concern; in the latter period, her focus was more on the private side of Washington life. Smith was a novelist whose primary concern was the changing ways and values of society. A Winter in Washington had its elements of suspense and mystery, including an abducted child and a murder. But the central theme of this book and of What is Gentility? is the clash of moral values and cultural ways. Smith saw the Jeffersonian era as a kind of republican golden age, and she sought to convey the values of that period to a later generation. Smith portrayed the political scene as women saw it—as outsiders. For her novels, she drew on some of the sketches of real-life events she had recorded previously in her notebooks as historical memoirs. On the whole, Smith held traditional views about women and their role in society. In A Winter in Washington she did voice, through Mrs. Mortimer, perhaps the most original and nonconformist of her female characters, some of the discontent experienced by women of the day. An incipient feminist, Mrs. Mortimer thinks it folly for women to talk of government when they are ‘‘slaves to all’’ or ‘‘mill horses’’ or ‘‘captive birds.’’ But Smith herself affirmed the theory of separate spheres and home as the ‘‘place of highest duties. . .and most enduring pleasures.’’ As a novelist Smith is on soundest ground in depicting the social and political world of which she had been a part. Her private papers have proved a storehouse of information about this society. As a letter writer, Smith has charm and liveliness. She clearly enjoyed people, and her portraits of the personalities of her age are drawn with an affectionate yet keen-eyed view. It is both the quality of the person Smith is and the perceptive insight she brings to bear on her society that give her work its vitality and durability. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Green, C. M. Washington: Village and Capital, 1800-1878 (1962). van der Linden, F., The Turning Point: Jefferson’s Battle for the Presidency (1962). Reference works: NAW (1971). —INZER BYERS
SMITH, Rosamond See OATES, Joyce Carol
SMITH, Sarah Pogson Born circa 1790, Woodside House, Essex, England; died death unknown, in Charleston, South Carolina Wrote under: ‘‘A Lady’’ Daughter of John and Ann Wood Pogson; married Judge Peter Smith Very little is known about Sarah Pogson Smith’s life. The date of her arrival in Charleston, South Carolina was recorded
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there on her tombstone, but the date on the original stone was nearly indecipherable and may have been 10 May 1788 or 1793. She was the daughter of a planter of St. Kitts, West Indies, and his second wife, from Sussex, England. At some point, Smith was married to Judge Peter Smith of Peterboro, New York, by whom, if we are to regard the introduction to her Essays (1818) as autobiographical, she had one son and more than one daughter. Colonel Alston Deas, a relative who restored the tombstone and who has corresponded with this contributor, states Smith was ‘‘noted for her witty and sometimes caustic conversation,’’ and that she ‘‘lived with her sister, Mrs. William Blamyer. . .in later life.’’ William S. Kable has firmly established Smith’s claim to the Essays, previously attributed in error to Maria Henrietta Pinckney; he has also published evidence supporting the attribution to Smith of The Female Enthusiast (1807). The Female Enthusiast, a five-act drama, offers a sympathetic portrayal of Charlotte Corday, who killed the demagogue Marat during the French Revolution. The play explores the moral reasons that might impel a ‘‘good’’ girl from a respectable, uppermiddle class home to commit a political assassination. While Smith has relied quite heavily on Shakespeare for various stylistic devices, The Female Enthusiast is a remarkably capable apprentice piece. Essays, Religious, Moral, Dramatic, and Poetical is a random and extensive collection of Smith’s writings. The first section consists of seven essays that champion Christian virtue and criticize a variety of moral and religious failings. By far the most interesting is Essay Seven, in which Smith very effectively castigates the fanaticism and vanity of ‘‘Camp-Meeting’’ (revivalist) preachers and laments the fatuousness of their followers. The second section consists of three five-act plays. In ‘‘The Young Carolinians; or, Americans in Algiers,’’ various young Americans en route to Europe are captured by pirates and sold in Algiers. While much is made of the sufferings of these ‘‘Christian slaves’’ at the hands of their cruel and cunning Mohammedan captors, Smith does briefly acknowledge that the captives themselves come from a slave-based economy. The play concludes happily, with the repatriation of all the principal captives. Far less happy is ‘‘A Tyrant’s Victims,’’ a tragedy about Agathocles, the self-made king of Syracuse, whose ‘‘soaring ambition’’ and overweening selfishness play havoc with multitudes; but ironically, Agathocles himself escapes unscathed. Three young English girls, heroines of ‘‘The Orphans,’’ are defrauded by their guardian and cast out unprotected into the world. Fortunately, they are rescued by their hearty, sea-going brother, who arrives back in England just in time. The third section consists of several poems on such subjects as friendship, virtuous conduct, love, and bereavement. A recurrent theme is the mutability of the ‘‘shadow’’ things of earth and the permanence of the heavenly reward promised to the believing Christian. The 13 long poems of Daughters of Eve (1826) tell colorful tales set in several lands at different stages of human history; most are loosely bound by the theme of human, and especially female, suffering. As Smith reminds the reader in the 13th poem, it was
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‘‘Woman,’’ the ‘‘first Transgressor’’ who bore Christ, and ‘‘Woman’’ who first saw Him after the Resurrection. The afflicted Christian ‘‘Daughters of Eve,’’ represented by the needy deafmutes in the book’s first poem, and the non-Christian ‘‘Daughters of Eve,’’ symbolized by the innocent pagan girls so cruelly ‘‘degraded’’ and slaughtered in the second poem, pass through various permutations and emerge as America’s regenerate ‘‘virtuous Daughters’’ in the final lines of the concluding poem. In the heroic couplets of Smith’s 1133-line poem The Arabians, her poetic gifts reach their full fruition. In splendidly fluid lines, rich in ingenious imagery, exotic scenery, and powerful emotional appeal, Smith recounts the conversion to Christianity of Abdallah and Sabat, two young Arabs of virtuous character and noble family, and the martyrdom of one. Not only were many of Smith’s works intended to inspire right conduct, but the proceeds from these works were frequently applied to good causes, although Smith herself was probably much in need of income. Thus, Daughters of Eve helped to educate and care for ‘‘the indigent deaf and dumb’’; Zerah (1837) laid the cornerstone for a church; the first edition of The Arabians provided essential aid for two ‘‘important Institutions’’ in Charleston, while a later edition helped to fund a ‘‘Seamen’s floating Church.’’ If the record of Smith’s life remains incomplete, the record of her benevolence endures. But it is her considerable achievement as a writer that is Smith’s chief claim to modern scholarly consideration. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Deas, A., Information on Sarah Pogson Recorded in the Files of the Charleston Library Society (n.d.). Kable, W. S., ‘‘South Carolina District Copyrights: 1794-1820,’’ in Proof: The Yearbook of American Bibliographical and Textual Studies 1 (1971). Other references: South Carolina Historical [and Genealogical] Magazine (1903-1934). —JEANETTE NYDA PASSTY
SMITH, Susy Born 2 June 1911, Washington, D.C. Daughter of Merton M. and Elizabeth Hardegen Smith; married M. L. Smith, 1934 (divorced) Suzy Smith’s childhood was rootless because of frequent moves. After her father’s death in 1933, Smith married but later divorced and lived with her mother until her mother’s death in 1949. Subsequently, she has generally lived alone. Her loneliness led Smith to the paranormal. In 1955, success in contacting her deceased mother with a Ouija board initiated Smith’s interest in the field. Desiring to learn, Smith worked briefly with Dr. J. B. Rhine’s Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. This association, together with many years in newspaper work, have had a lasting influence
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on Smith’s writing. From Durham, Smith moved to Florida and thence to New York, where she resided until 1965. During this period, Smith received grants from the Parapsychology Foundation, which enabled her to prepare her first published books. Since 1965 when writing began to provide a modest living, Smith has traveled and lectured widely.
Voices of the Dead? (1977). Ghost Writers in the Sky: More Communication from James (1990).
Smith’s works fall roughly into two categories: those reporting psychic occurrences and those about herself. Smith’s books on the psychic constitute an extensive data resource. Because Smith was deeply impressed by the methods of Dr. Rhine’s laboratory, she has striven to bring similar objectivity and precision to her books. She rarely expresses her own opinions, but instead presents, simply and lucidly, the matters she is reporting and leaves the readers to form their own conclusions.
—LUCY MENGER
In sharp contrast, Smith’s autobiographical works, Confessions of a Psychic (1971) and Conversion of a Psychic (1978), are deeply personal. Smith writes openly, even ingenuously, of herself and her psychic experiences. Her honesty provides the very evidence needed by skeptics to explain away her psychic life as the fabrication of her unconscious mind. She reveals herself as physically crippled, unwillingly single, and lonely. Yet the seemingly clear pattern of need fulfillment proves not to be clear. The spirit mother is bossy but not all—knowing. The spirit admirer is, as he was at death, ignorant, selfish, and dull. Nor does Smith’s handling of her painful psychic misadventures draw attention; she does not discuss her difficulties until she has them under reasonable control. Smith’s conversion to a born-again Christian, described in her second autobiography, provides skeptics with similar ammunition—but ammunition still not sufficient to prove her insincerity. Smith has made a unique literary contribution. Her many works documenting psychic events and processes have brought an unprecedented amount of information on this subject to the public view, in simple, easily understandable language. Her books on herself provide a different, more moving insight. Smith shares with her readers the difficult, sometimes painful, process of becoming a psychic and, finally, of finding a living Jesus and the close comfort of a loving God. OTHER WORKS: ESP (1962). The Mediumship of Mrs. Leonard (1963). The World of the Strange (1963). The Enigma of Out-ofBody Travel (1965). ESP for the Millions (1965). A Supernatural Primer for the Millions (1966). Haunted Houses for the Millions (1967). More ESP for the Millions (1967). Prominent American Ghosts (1967). Reincarnation for the Millions (1967). Adventures in the Supernormal (1968). Out-of-Body Experiences for the Millions (1968). Understanding ESP (1968). ESP: Widespread Psychic Wonders (1970). Ghosts Around the House (1970). Psychic Animals (1970). Today’s Witches (1970). Susy Smith’s Supernatural World (1971). ESP and You (1972). How to Develop Your ESP (1972). She Spoke to the Dead (1972). ESP and Hypnosis (1973). The Book of James (1974). Do We Live After Death? (1974). Exorcism: #5, Widespread Psychic Wonders (1974). Life is Forever: Evidence for Survival After Death (1974). Power of the Mind (1975). Strangers from Space (ca. 1976).
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BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: WW of American Women (1978).
SNEDEKER, Caroline Dale Born 23 March 1871, New Harmony, Indiana; died 22 January 1956, Bay St. Louis, Mississippi Wrote under: Caroline Dale, Caroline Dale Owen Daughter of Charles A. and Nina Dale Owen Parke; married Charles H. Snedeker, 1903 Caroline Snedeker was the great-granddaughter of Robert Owen, the Welsh reformer who brought together scientists and educators in an attempt to found a model ‘‘village of cooperation’’ in New Harmony, Indiana, in 1825. Snedeker grew up in nearby Mt. Vernon. Nourished on her grandmother’s stories of New Harmony and its ideals and her mother’s singing and love for music, Snedeker early developed a keen interest in history, literature, and classical music. The family moved to Cincinnati for the children’s schooling, and there Snedeker later entered the College of Music to study piano and composition. After the death of their father, Snedeker and her three sisters gave instrumental concerts to support the family, with Snedeker serving as pianist as they toured the Midwest. She was also an instructor of music before her marriage to the Dean of the Cathedral of Cincinnati. The couple moved to Hempstead, New York, where Snedeker was encouraged and advised in her writing by her husband. Snedeker’s writings comprise 13 juvenile novels, all but one of them historical fiction for older children and young adults, two novels for adults, and articles, stories, and poems. The Coward of Termopylae (1911), Snedeker’s first novel, grew out of her great love for ancient Greece. Intended for adults, but gaining success when reissued in 1912 as The Spartan, for young people, it is based on two passages from Herodotus about a Spartan soldier during the Persian Wars who was branded a coward and who later acquitted himself by a noble death. In Theras and His Town (1924), written in response to a request for a child’s version of The Spartan, an eleven-year-old Athenian boy goes to live with his uncle in Sparta, where he observes the tremendous differences in life and values between the two states. The strength of both books is their revelation of ancient life and thought. The strength of other Snedeker novels about ancient Greece and Rome is this depiction of everyday life; their weaknesses are events that strain credulity, plots based on too little material, and explanatory and moralistic digressions that impede the plot. The
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Perilous Seat (1923), about the daughter of a priest at Delphi; The White Isle (1940), which takes Lavinia and her patrician family from Rome to frontier Britain; and The Forgotten Daughter (1933) are romances. The last, the best crafted, tells of the romance of a Greek slave girl and a Roman aristocrat during the period when Tiberius Gracchus tried to break up the big estates of the nobles and parcel out the land to Roman peasants. Snedeker also wrote a series of books based on American history. Downright Dencey (1927) deals with friendship that develops between a little Quaker girl and a waif after she has injured him by thoughtlessly throwing a stone at him. Carefully delineated details of Quaker life on Nantucket at the beginning of the 19th century, Dencey’s forthright personality, and the mystery of the waif’s parentage have a certain charm, making this probably the most read of Snedeker’s books today. The Beckoning Road (1929) takes Dencey’s family west to New Harmony. Snedeker first wrote about New Harmony in Seth Way: A Romance of the New Harmony Community (1917), a fictionalization for adults of the life of the zoologist Thomas Say. Although too slow-moving, this book does give a good sense of the community’s potential and its problems. The Town of the Fearless (1931) is the fictionalized history of Snedeker’s own family and its connection with New Harmony. Snedeker contributed further to the knowledge of Robert Owen’s experiment by editing the diaries of another resident, Donald Macdonald, which she discovered in Ireland after a lengthy search. Snedeker’s books are distinguished by conscientious research and careful attention to details of setting, but, particularly in her books for children, Snedeker frequently intrudes upon her story with explanatory and moralistic comments, imposing the value judgements of her time upon the mores of the past. Although generally well received by critics and popular when they came out, Snedeker’s books have not stood the test of time. Too labored in movement, romanticized, and stiff in dialogue to appeal to modern audiences, they are seldom read except by those who have a deep interest in their period or a scholarly concern with the history of literature for young people.
OTHER WORKS: The Black Arrowhead (1929). Uncharted Ways (1935). The Diaries of Donald Macdonald (edited by Snedeker, 1942). Luke’s Quest (1947). A Triumph for Flavius (1955). Lysis Goes to the Play (1962).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Miller, B. M., ‘‘Caroline Dale Snedeker,’’ in Horn Book (April 1956). Snedeker, C. D., ‘‘Trilobite Door: Chapters from my Life,’’ in Horn Book (1947-1948). Reference works: Authors of Books for Young People (1967). Indiana Authors and Their Books (1949). Junior Book of Authors (1951). Yesterday’s Authors of Books for Children (1978). —ALETHEA K. HELBIG
SNYDER, Zilpha Keatley Born 11 May 1927, Lemoore, California Daughter of William S. and Dessa Jepson Keatley; married Larry A. Snyder, 1950; children: Melissa, Douglas, Ben The daughter of a rancher and driller, Zilpha Keatley Snyder grew up in rural Southern California; she recalls that her world was quiet and revolved around animals and books. She attended Whittier College, where she met her husband, a music student. While her husband completed his graduate studies at the University of California at Berkeley, Snyder became a master teacher and demonstrator for education classes there. After she began to write, Snyder retired from teaching. The Snyders have three children, one a foster child from Hong Kong. Snyder has written one book of poetry, Today Is Saturday (1969), but most of her books are novels. The most convincing of these are the earliest, each of which is grounded firmly in reality before moving into the world of fantasy. Season of Ponies (1969), based on a dream, combines Snyder’s two childhood interests, horses and magic. A lonely girl on an isolated farm uses her grandmother’s amulet, which she thinks is magical, in imaginary games with the free-spirited Ponyboy and his herd of pastel-colored ponies, very like the glass ponies on her bedroom shelf. Expressive writing succeeds in mingling magic with the reality of the heroine’s life. Black and Blue Magic (1966), written for Snyder’s son, who wanted a funny story about a boy, also uses a magic device—an ointment that causes a twelve-year-old boy to grow wings. Although contrived, the book moves along with much realistic dialogue and deftly portrays an adolescent who gradually gains a greater sense of self-worth. In Eyes in the Fishbowl (1968), a suspense story for older readers, Dion, a shoeshine boy, spends his spare time in the basement of a department store. He becomes aware that Madame Stregovitch in the cosmetics department has summoned the ‘‘Others,’’ the spirits of needy children, who terrify the clerks with their antics and cause so much confusion the store eventually goes out of business. The plot is spun out and slightly didactic, but Dion’s strained relationship with his casual, easygoing musician father is true to life, and the department-store setting is vivid with realistic details. Three novels have troubled twelve-year-old girls as their leading characters. The Velvet Room (1965) develops around dreamy, intelligent Robin Williams, the daughter of migrant workers, and a migrant worker herself, who finds a special haven in the library of a deserted mansion where the owners of a large fruit ranch used to live. The Truth About Stone Hollow (1974) is deft and rich in its characterization of both adults and children and in its portrayal of smalltown relationships and prejudices. Both these novels are set in rural California during the Depression. The Witches of Worm (1972) takes place in a modern urban apartment complex. Jessica thinks either she herself is a witch or that her cat is a witch’s cat. Whatever causes her to do the spiteful things she
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does, it is clear that she is hostile and angry and feels misunderstood by her mother and playmates. Although, like many of Snyder’s conclusions, this one is abrupt and unsatisfying, the story is fast paced and presents an intriguing picture of a girl’s attempts to come to grips with the painful realities of her life. One of Snyder’s most highly regarded books, both by critics and children, is The Egypt Game (1967), with characters based on children Snyder taught at the Washington School in Berkeley. The story arose out of her desire for a book to encourage close and proud identification with minority characters. A group of children play in the yard of the strange and aloof Professor—who runs a secondhand store—and imagine themselves to be rulers and gods in ancient Egypt, until a child is murdered in the neighborhood and the old Professor is suspected of being responsible. Although the story moves with suspense and humor, the interracial cast seems too deliberately assembled and the plot too carefully concocted to thrill young readers. Snyder produced seven books for children and two young adult novels in the 1980s. One of these novels, The Birds of Summer (1983), received the Parent’s Choice award and the PEN Literary award. Numerous others were given the Dell Yearling Edition distinction. The year 1990 brought Libby on Wednesday, which was named by the ALA as a Best Book for Young Adults. More recently, Snyder’s work Cat Running (1994) highlights her characterization skills and concern with social interaction. The book is set in the dust bowl during the Depression and shows how a young, slightly self-absorbed girl overcomes problems within her family and reaches beyond prejudice. Snyder drew on her descriptive powers for the next novel, The Trespassers (1995), which tells the tale of children exploring a deserted mansion. Thirty years following publication of The Egypt Game, Snyder picks up the story of the young characters of this novel to play in The Gypsy Game (1997). The sequel was not nearly as well received as Egypt, in part because reading the first novel is almost essential to understanding the second and because the children never actually pretend to be gypsies, which is a large part of the charm of the original. Snyder continued with a 1998 publication of Gib Rides Home, a work based on the life of her father, which features an eleven-year-old orphan boy who is eventually sent to work for a family. Reviewer Susan Lempke credits the story with ‘‘deft pacing and characterization, along with a background rich in sensory detail. . .[which] makes this a touching, satisfying tribute to Snyder’s father and to all children who face difficult lives with courage.’’ In 1999, Synder’s book, The Runaways was released, receiving starred reviews from both Publishers Weekly and School Library Journal. Snyder draws her ideas chiefly from memories of her own childhood, from her teaching, and from her life with her family. Recurring themes involve friendship, curiosity, coming to terms with oneself and life, and the power of the imagination. Snyder’s work is distinguished by her ability to build suspense, by her literate use of sprightly and vigorous language to capture the cadence and content of children’s speech, and by her skill in creating sympathetic protagonists who are imaginative, highly
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intelligent, lonely preteens with psychological problems arising from their domestic circumstances. OTHER WORKS: The Changeling (1970). The Headless Cupid (1971). The Princess and the Giants (1973). Below the Root (1975). And All Between (1976). Until the Celebration (1977). Heirs of Darkness (1978). The Famous Stanley Kidnapping Case (1979). A Fabulous Creature (1981). Come On, Patsy (1982). Blair’s Nightmare (1984). The Changing Maze (1985). The Three Men (1986). And Condors Danced (1987). Squeak Saves the Day and Other Tooley Tales (1988). Janie’s Private Eyes (1989). Song of the Gargoyle (1991). Fool’s Gold (1993). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hopkins, L. E., More Books by More People (1974). Reference works: CA (1974, Online 1999). SATA. Third Book of Junior Authors (1972). Other references: Booklist (1 Sept. 1994, June 1995, 1 Feb. 1997, 1 Jan. 1998). Claremont Reading Conference Yearbook (1973). Elementary English (1974). Web sites: www.microweb.com/1snyder/. —ALETHEA K. HELBIG, UPDATED BY CARRIE SNYDER
SOLWOSKA, Mara See FRENCH, Marilyn
SOMERS, Suzanne See DANIELS, Dorothy
SONG, Cathy Born 1955, Honolulu, Hawaii Married Douglas Davenport; children: two The selection in 1982 of Cathy Song’s Picture Bride (1983) as the winning manuscript in the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition marked the young poet’s rather sudden literary emergence. In a review of Picture Bride, Shirley Geok-lin Lim hails Song as ‘‘a major figure on the Asian American literary scene.’’ Song received her B.A. from Wellesley College (1977) and an M.F.A. from Boston University’s creative writing program. After her graduation from the program in 1981, Song returned to Honolulu. She now teaches creative writing at several universities in addition to working on her own literary projects. In many of the poems in Picture Bride, Song writes about her family’s history and interrelationships. In the title poem she imagines her grandmother, joined to a stranger through a prearranged marriage, leaving home to meet her husband for the first
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time. Insightful and sensitive in capturing her evolving relationship with her mother, Song intimates in several poems that she must escape her mother’s presence, but eventually realizes what she draws from her mother is vital to her own identity. ‘‘When I stretch a canvas / to paint the clouds, it is your spine that declares itself.’’ The poems of Picture Bride, though driven by the specific details of Song’s past, also help to illuminate the Asian-American experience in general. In ‘‘Lost Sister,’’ about a Chinese-American who finds herself alienated from both East and West, and in her unflinching portrayal of Chinatowns, Song addresses the difficult realities faced by Asian-American immigrants. Song has expressed concern that critics encountering her acute cultural awareness may marginalize her work. Her strengths as a poet— startlingly clear description, lines quietly unfolding a story in short breaths, images running threadlike throughout a poem, weaving a unified work—stand independent of her Asian themes. Song further explores her past in Frameless Windows, Squares of Light (1988), her second volume of verse. These poems, writes Song, focus on ‘‘the mind. . .tunneling into memory, released by imagination. Out of that depth, squares of light form, like windows you pass at night.’’ In these new poems, Song returns to many of the themes and scenarios introduced in Picture Bride. Also familiar are her characteristic straightforward diction and her strong sense of closure. ‘‘A Small Light’’ captures with rhythmic repetition the feel of a distant memory. In ‘‘A Child’s Painting’’ Song reaffirms her ability to transform commonplace events into beautiful portraits. Song’s third collection, School Figures (1995), continues to explore her familial relationships. Her position as both daughter and mother is captured in verse; both the loss of her father and the challenges of raising children are addressed. ‘‘Neither woundedly angry at nor sentimentally accepting of her family and its heritage, Song explores the nuances of intimacy with admirable clarity and passion,’’ writes Pat Monaghan of Booklist. In addition to her poetry, Song has edited (with Juliet Kono) Sister Stew (1991), an anthology of writings by Asian-American women. Her poems have also appeared in several anthologies and in such periodicals as Asian-Pacific Literature, Hawaii Review, Poetry, and Seneca Review. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cheung, K.-K., Asian-American Literature (1988). Chock, E., Talk Story: An Anthology of Hawaii’s Local Writer (1978). Fisher, D., The Third Woman: Minority Women Writers of the United States (1980). Lim, S. G. and A. Ling, eds., Reading Literatures of Asian America (1992). Reference works: CA (Online, 1999). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Booklist (1 Oct. 1994). International Examiner (2 May 1984). MELUS (Fall 1983, Spring 1988). WRB (Oct. 1988). —JEROME CHOU, UPDATED BY CARRIE SNYDER
SONTAG
SONTAG, Susan Born 16 January 1933, New York, New York Married Philip Rieff, 1950 (divorced); children: one son Susan Sontag, the elder of two daughters of a traveling salesman and a teacher, was raised in Arizona and California. She studied at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Chicago, from which she received her B.A. when she was only eighteen, a year after marrying sociologist Philip Rieff. Her M.A. degree in philosophy is from Harvard University. In the late 1950s, she divorced her husband and settled with her son (born in 1952) in New York City, although she has spent a good portion of each year in Europe. Through the mid-1960s she taught English and philosophy at several American colleges and universities. She began writing fiction and critical essays and reviews when she was twenty-eight. She is also a writer and director as well as a critic of films: the provocative Duet for Cannibals (1969) and Brother Carl (1971) were both made in Sweden; Promised Lands (1974) is a documentary about Israel. As PEN’s American Center president (1987-89), she joined a protest at an international conference in Seoul, South Korea, against this government’s treatment of writers and publishers. Among her other achievements and awards, including being named in 1984 by the French government an Officier de Arts et des Lettres, she is a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1990 she was also granted a five-year fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation. Sontag has become a cultural icon of our age. Her intellectual precociousness and her unique critical perspective that takes the influence of American and European thought equally into account has carved her a niche in ‘‘the modern critical canon.’’ One critic lauded her by saying Sontag’s career as a writer ‘‘has been marked by seriousness of pursuit and a relentless intelligence that analyzes modern culture on almost every possible level: artistic, philosophical, literary, political, and moral. . .Sontag has produced a stimulating and varied body of work which entertains the issues of art while satisfying the rigors of her own intellect.’’ Another critic sees Sontag’s critical writing as primarily concerned with discovering ‘‘what is the central tradition of Western thought in the 20th century and which writers have contributed most to its creation.’’ While her importance can be interpreted in many ways, she is nonetheless a central figure in both the discovery and the codification of our contemporary intellectual culture. Sontag has disappointed some of the feminist community because of her lack of interest in feminist scholarship. However, averse to labels and stereotypes, Sontag says her writing is ‘‘based on freedom and self-revelation.’’ While Sontag has always insisted she is a fiction writer, she is one of our most influential cultural critics. Her subjects have been European writers, thinkers and filmmakers, and photography, pornography, and the problems with assigning metaphorical meaning to epidemic illness. Throughout, Sontag has insisted her work and the work of her models be allowed to stand on their own as art,
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to maintain their aesthetic, not decimated by interpretation: ‘‘Criticism in all the arts. . .treats the work of art as a statement being made in the form of a work of art.’’ Against Interpretation, and Other Essays (1966, reissue 1986) is a brilliant expression of the modernist sensibility. Despite the title, she does interpret, making accessible the most striking experiments in avant-garde film and criticism. From her treatment of new-wave critics to her famous ‘‘Notes on Camp,’’ she is always provocative and original, so much so that one critic observed: ‘‘Perhaps what makes Against Interpretation valuable and exciting is not so much its erudition, which is considerable. . .as its passionate irresponsibility, its determined outrageousness.’’ In Under the Sign of Saturn (1980, 1989), which Sontag has described as ‘‘seven portraits of consciousness,’’ she explores how modernism has become ‘‘the dominant tradition of high literary culture instead of its subversion’’ through essays on artists who are also her models, particularly Walter Benjamin, Paul Goodman, Antonin Artaud, Roland Barthes, and Elias Canetti. She thus makes European intellectuals not only available, but also relevant in the United States. In Styles of Radical Will (1969, 1989), Sontag again investigates the difficulties of confronting new artistic modes. Part of her appeal lies in her ability to move from the world of high culture to low—from Karl Marx to Harpo Marx, for instance. She flirts with the demonic, the underside of human experience. Her ‘‘dark and complex vision of sexuality’’ is not to feminists’ taste, but it is worth paying some attention to what she has to say about our impulses towards violence and destruction. Elsewhere, as in ‘‘The Third World of Women’’ (Partisan Review, 1973), she shows she can be, at times, a brilliant spokeswoman for feminism. Politically, Sontag takes the part of adversary, as in the autobiographical Trip to Hanoi (1968). She sees art as something that expands consciousness; thus, in Styles of Radical Will, her views on politics and art are related, ‘‘for it is sensibility that nourishes our capacity for moral choice.’’ As a novelist, Sontag has never been autobiographical. The heroes of her full-length works are male. The Benefactor: A Novel (1963, reissue 1994) is about a European man who looks back on his 60-plus years and on such surrealistic adventures as selling his mistress to an Arab merchant. Despite the brilliance of isolated perceptions, the work as a whole lacks the passionate conviction of those writers (Djuna Barnes, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche) who influenced it. For many readers, the work requires an interpreter to give it meaning. In Death Kit (1967, reissue 1986), Sontag wittily combines mythical, religious, and philosophical elements within the structure of a whodunit making use of the journey-to-hell theme. Despite the high praise of some critics, such as Granville Hicks, most readers are more excited by Sontag’s criticism than her fiction. The reader of the short story collection I, etcetera (1978, 1996) has a greater sense of the intimate self with all its pain and longing than is usual in her fiction. Travel imagery is pervasive. ‘‘Unguided Tour’’ counterpoints a broken love affair and the
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return to a past pervaded by the cliché-ridden language of tourism. ‘‘When I travel, it’s always to say goodbye,’’ the narrator laments. ‘‘I don’t consider devotion to the past a form of snobbery. Just one of the more disastrous forms of unrequited love.’’ In Illness as Metaphor (1977, 1988), Sontag describes ‘‘not what it is really like to emigrate to the kingdom of the ill and live there [a theme that would have had autobiographical relevence], but the punitive or sentimental fantasies concocted about that situation: not real geography, but stereotypes of national character.’’ She applies a moralist’s scorn to the use of tuberculosis and cancer as metaphor. AIDS and Its Metaphors (1988) examines the language and interpretation surrounding the disease and argues against the degradation and guilt AIDS patients suffer due to ill-chosen metaphors. Yet Sontag’s own metaphoric power is freely employed in equally dubious contexts, as when, in On Photography (1979, 1989), she labels those who take or view photographs as junkies, rapists, and murderers. In some ways, the aesthetic position here is the antithesis of Against Interpretation and Styles of Radical Will: art, at least the art of the photographer, is now an amoral force rather than one which enlivens sensibilities and consciousness. ‘‘By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals. . . .’’—for the worse, it is implied. After years of important political and cultural work, including speaking out against martial law in Poland at Town Hall in New York City (1982), Sontag became drawn to the particular plight of besieged Sarajevo. In summer of 1993, Sontag braved the Sarajevo siege and directed a production of Waiting for Godot. Her devotion to the arts brought her to the war-torn city to help inspire and bring unity to people oppresses by racial hatred. Deftly, she assembled actors and crew members from all ethnic groups to symbolize the possibility for peace through creativity. Her efforts are extraordinary not just because she orchestrated performances in the midst of bombings and explosions, but because she succeeded in bringing hope to the besieged people. Recognized and respected by the citizens of Sarajevo, she became one of only two foreigners to be named an honorary citizen. In other projects, Sontag has continued to look toward Europe for her subjects. Her fourth film, Unguided Tour (1983), from the short story of the same title, tells of a relationship that is fragmenting as the couple tours the decaying ruins of Italy. In Sarah (1988), a documentary film about Sarah Bernhardt, Sontag narrates the voice of the actress. She has directed two other plays: As You Desire Me by Luigi Pirandello, whom she calls ‘‘the most influential playwright of the 20th century,’’ ran in Italy (1979-81). Jacques and His Master by Milan Kundera played at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1985). In addition to essays on dance, Dutch painting, and Robert Mappelthorpe, Sontag collaborated with Cesare Colombo on One Hundred Years of Photography (1988), and included 10 of her poems, collectively entitled ‘‘In Memory of Their Feeling,’’ in a catalog for a London exhibition entitled Cage, Cunningham, and Johns: Dancers on a Plane (1989).
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SOULE
Some 25 years after the publication of her previous novel Death Kit (1967), Sontag’s The Volcano Lover (1992, reissue 1993) found a new kind of success. Accepted publicly with greater enthusiasm than her previous fiction met, the historical romance is based on the love triangle between Sir William Hamilton, the famous British ambassador to the court of Naples, his much younger wife Emma, and her lover, Lord Nelson. The novel is said to have a ‘‘coolly modern narrative voice that recounts action while commenting on love and grief, cracking jokes, digressing to discuss artistic philosophies, referring to developments. . .that her 18th-century characters should know nothing about.’’ It’s style is difficult for some because of the historical license taken, but most found this temporal aberration ‘‘a satisfying saga of high literary quality, a brainy page-turner.’’
(Oct. 1972). Sewanee Rev. (Fall, 1984). Theater (1993). Time (24 Oct. 1988). VVLS (Nov. 1990). WP (1992).
With intellectual passion and great human compassion, unconfined by genre, Sontag has been a renaissance woman with both critical and artistic offering. Like the camera, to which she is addicted at the same time she bewails it, Sontag always brings to the reader a new awareness of the world.
Born 3 September 1824, Albany, New York; died 6 December 1903, Glasgow, Scotland Also wrote under: Aunt Carra Daughter of Nathaniel and Elizabeth Merselis White; married Henry B. Soule, 1843 (died 1852); children: five
OTHER WORKS: Cage-Cunningham-Johns: Dancers on a Plane—In Memory of Their Feelings (1990). Illness as Metaphor; and AIDS and Its Metaphors (1991). The Way We Live Now (1991). Who Was the Much Admired Sir William Hamilton (1992). Alice in Bed: A Play in Eight Scenes (1993, reissue 1994). Conversations with Susan Sontag (1995). In America (1999). Contributor of short stories, reviews, essays, and articles to periodicals including New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and Harper’s.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bruss, E., Beautiful Theories (1982). Hiding in Plain Sight: Essays in Criticism and Autobiography (1993). Kennedy, L., Susan Sontag: Mind as Passion (1995). Markgraf, S. T., ‘‘Novelty of/as Metaphor: Susan Sontag, Adrienne Rich, and Yvonne Rainer’’ (thesis, 1994). Misrach, R., Violent Legacies: Three Cantos (1992). Plimpton, G., ed., Women Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews (1998). Poague, L. A., Susan Sontag: An Annotated Bibliography, 1948-1992 (2000). Sayres, S., Susan Sontag: The Elegiac Modernist (1990). Stead, A. A., ‘‘Mapping Spiritual Dangers: The Novels of Susan Sontag’’ (thesis, 1993). The Other Within Us: Feminist Explorations of Women and Aging (1997). Tydeman, W. E., ‘‘Photography, Meaning and Methodology: American Writings on Photography Since 1945’’ (thesis, 1985). Willis, L. A., ‘‘Womanist Intellectuals Developing Tradition’’ (thesis, 1996). Reference works: Benet’s (1991). CA (Online, 1999). CANR (1988). CN (1986). DLB (1985). FC (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the Untied States (1995). Other references: American Literary History (Fall, 1989). Book Review Digest (1992, 1994). Feminist Review (Summer, 1991). Journal of American Studies (April 1990). LATBR (1993). Midwest Quarterly (Winter, 1988). Nation (1992). National Review (31 Aug. 1992). NR (7, 14 Sept. 1992). NYTBR (24 Oct. 1982, 9 Aug. 1992, 24 Oct. 1992). NYTM (2 Aug. 1992). October (Summer, 1989). Performing Arts Journal (interview, 1985). SR
—ELAINE HOFFMAN BARUCH AND ANDREW J. SCHIAVONI, UPDATED BY JULIET BYINGTON
SOREL, Julia See DREXLER, Rosalyn
SOULE, Caroline White
Despite her family’s limited means, Caroline White Soule was educated at the Albany Female Academy, from which she graduated with high honors at seventeen. Soule, like others in her family a member of the Universalist church, took a job as principal of the female department of the Clinton Liberal Institute, a secondary school operated by that church in Clinton, New York. She taught for only two terms before marrying a Universalist minister, with whom she made frequent moves from one parish to another. Henry Soule died of small pox in 1852, leaving Caroline with five small children. She immediately wrote The Memoir of Rev. H. B. Soule, published the following summer. The anguish and grief of Soule’s loss come through the simply told narration of his life. Soule supported her family as a part-time teacher and, increasingly, as a contributor of stories and articles to various story-papers and magazines. In 1853 Soule migrated to Boone County, Iowa. In Iowa, she became western editor of the Ladies Repository, and her stories and novellas appeared at regular intervals. A serious eye ailment forced Soule to return to the East for treatment in 1864. She did not resume editorial work until 1868, when she founded and edited the Guiding Star, a Sunday school paper. She was also children’s editor for the Christian Leader and contributed to other Universalist papers under several pseudonyms, one of which was ‘‘Aunt Carra.’’ Soule helped to found what became the Woman’s Centenary Association, the first national organization of churchwomen in the U.S.; she was its president from 1869 to 1880. From an office in New York City, she ran fund raising activities netting the organization over $100,000 in five years, a substantial sum for that time. Her activities for the association undermined her health, and Soule went for a visit to England and Scotland to recuperate. She interrupted her rest many times, however, to lecture on temperance and the higher education of women. She helped organize a Scottish Universalist Convention and finally became minister of
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St. Paul’s Universalist in Glasgow; she was officially ordained in 1880. Soule remained in Scotland for the rest of her life except for a period between 1882 and 1886 when she again worked for the Centenary Association in the U.S. Soule’s stories appeared in the 1850s, the era of the sentimental novel, when many women writing for the numerous weeklies and monthlies were also pleading the various causes of women’s rights, abolition, and temperance. Home Life; or, A Peep across the Threshold (1855) is a collection of Soule’s ‘‘little moral tales’’ published by a Universalist publisher. Soule intended Wine or Water (1862) as a novel, but it is really three separate tales loosely bound by the moral thread of its temperance theme. Soule’s moral tales are notable for their emphasis on the virtues of happy home life as a bulwark against vice and degradation. She wrote in the preface to Home Life, ‘‘we wrote of homelife. . .because we have thought much on the secret influences which gladden or madden human homes. . .that if a peep across the threshold showed a happy home—. . .we might cross the sacred steppingstone and look thence upon a world of beauty, peace, and joy.’’ Soule’s concern for nurture and education was lifelong, and her stories and novellas illustrate her sensitive and sensible ideas on the raising of children. In ‘‘The Only Daughter,’’ for example, she criticizes parents who raise children with no useful skills, no healthful sports in their daily activity, and no appropriate discipline. In Wine or Water, she describes the type of family life she hoped to inspire in her readers: ‘‘both parents were yet firm in their requirements, and as they never were forgot, as too many do, that their children were not yet men and women, but simplehearted little ones, their commands were suited to their varied ages and dispositions, and their home was thus a fair type of the Christian’s thought of heaven, care with comfort for an accompaniment, labor made light by love.’’ Much of Soule’s writing exhibits the flowery sentimentality and effusive moralizing of the late 19th century. A thread of common sense and down-to-earth intelligence, however, pervades her sermonizing and exemplifies her lifelong concern for home and family. She summed up her own life by writing: ‘‘I have written everything from a sermon to a song, and done everything from making sorghum molasses in a log cabin on a prairie to preaching three times a Sunday in the city of London.’’
OTHER WORKS: The Pet of the Settlement (1860). Some letters and papers of Caroline W. Soule are at the New York Public Library.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography (1900). Daughters of America (1883). NAW (1971). Our Woman Workers (1882). —DOROTHEA MOSLEY THOMPSON
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SOUTHWORTH, E(mma) D(orothy) E(liza) N(evitte) Born 26 December 1819, Washington, D.C.; died 30 June 1899, Washington, D.C. Wrote under: Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth Daughter of Charles L. and Susanna Wailes Nevitte; married Frederick H. Southworth, 1840 E. D. E. N. Southworth and her sister were educated in Washington, D.C., at the school run by her stepfather, Joshua Henshaw, whom her mother had married after the death of Captain Nevitte. Southworth taught school in Washington after her graduation. Deserted by her husband within a few years of their marriage, Southworth was left with two young children to support. Despite ill health, which plagued her for many years, she returned to teaching in Washington and began to write. Southworth’s first publication was a short story, ‘‘The Irish Refugee,’’ which appeared in the Baltimore Saturday Visitor. This was followed by other short stories. Her first novel, Retribution (1849), was serialized in 1847 in the columns of the Washington National Era, which published most of her early stories. It is reported Southworth never knew how long her serials would be; she would continue on week after week, with characters presumed dead sometimes reappearing. When the serial had reached a certain length, the book publisher would bring out as one volume the work written so far and later publish the rest as a sequel. Many of her works were reprinted in other countries and translated into several languages. Southworth produced about three novels per year throughout most of the rest of her life and even at that rate could hardly satisfy the demands of her readers, so popular were her works. The Hidden Hand (1888), first published serially in the New York Ledger, is said to have been the most popular work that paper ever printed. In book form it sold almost two million copies; it was also transformed into several dramatic versions, one of which starred John Wilkes Booth. Ishmael (1876) and Self-Raised (1876) sold over two million copies each. Others tried to capitalize on Southworth’s popularity by writing under names such as S. A. Southworth, Ella Southworth, or Emma S. Southworth; her publishers insisted however that the only genuine novels were those signed with the famous initials E.D.E.N. A typical theme in Southworth’s novels is the ‘‘rags and riches’’ romance, exemplified in The Curse of Clifton (1853). Clifton, heir to an ancestral fortune, loves a humble mountain girl. Clifton’s ‘‘curse’’ is his stepmother—one of Southworth’s more malignant villains, who in her most furious soliloquies echoes the most evil moments of Lady Macbeth. Some critics consider The Hidden Hand Southworth’s best work. The heroine, Capitola, is a multifaceted character, though she is portrayed as thoroughly good. The plot has a great deal of variety, with pranks, outlaws, and much mystery. The villain, Colonel LeNoir, is a model of the type; he grinds his teeth in impotent rage and vows revenge for afronts both real and imagined. Southworth considered Self-Made her best work. It was originally published in 1876 in two parts, the
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first called Ishmael; or, In the Depths and the second Self-Raised; or, Out of the Depths. This novel has an interesting rags-to-riches theme, a degenerate villain, and a highborn young woman who refuses to marry the hero, Ishmael, because of his low birth but who is justly punished for her pride. It also has a fine touch of humor and well-handled descriptions of setting and costume. Villains in Southworth’s novels are thoroughly evil, heroes and heroines thoroughly pure. The situations in which they are brought together are the familiar fare of most novels written originally in serialized form: sudden catastrophic illnesses, bankruptcies, murders or other calamitous deaths, ancestral secrets revealed, hidden passions unleashed. A voracious reader herself, Southworth perhaps unconsciously echoes in her work such 19thcentury authors as Scott, Dickens, and Cooper. Some of her favorite settings—wild mountain roads and fearful chasms—are reminiscent of the novels of the Brontës. Finally, however, the enormous popularity of Southworth’s novels seems to be attributable to the simple black and white morality of her tales, her fine melodramatic touch, and her innate storytelling ability. OTHER WORKS: The Deserted Wife (1850). The Mother-in-Law (1851). Shannondale (1851). The Discarded Daughter (1852). Old Neighborhoods and New Settlements (1853). The Lost Heiress (1854). India: The Pearl of Pearl River (1855). The Missing Bride (1855). Vivia; or, The Secret of Power (1857). Virginia and Magdalene (1858). The Lady of the Isle (1859). The Haunted Homestead (1860). The Gipsy’s Prophecy (1861). Hickory Hall (1861). The Broken Engagement (1862). Love’s Labor Won (1862). The Fatal Marriage (1863). The Bridal Eve (1864). Allworth Abbey (1865). The Bride of Llewellyn (1866). The Fortune Seeker (1866). The Coral Lady (1867). The Widow’s Son (1867). Fair Play (1868). The Bride’s Fate (1869). The Changed Bride s (1869). The Family Doom (1869). How He Won Her (1869). The Prince of Darkness (1869). The Christmas Guest: A Collection of Stories (1870). The Maiden Widow (1870). Cruel as the Grave (1871). Tried for Her Life (1871). The Artist’s Love (1872). The Lost Heir of Linlithgow (1872). A Noble Lord (1872). A Beautiful Fiend (1873). Victor’s Triumph (1874). The Mystery of Dark Hollow (1875). The Spectre Lover (1875). The Fatal Secret (1877). The Red Hill Tragedy (1877). The Phantom Wedding (1878). Sybil Brotherton: A Novel (1879). A Leap in the Dark (1889). Nearest and Dearest (1889). Unknown (1889). For Woman’s Love (1890). The Lost Lady of Lone (1890). Broken Pledges (1891). David Lindsay (1891). Gloria: A Novel (1891). Lillith (1891). The Unloved Wife (1891). ‘‘Em’’: A Novel (1892). Em’s Husband: A Novel (1892). Brandon Coyle’s Wife (1893). Only a Girl’s Heart (1893). A Skeleton in the Closet (1893). Gertrude Haddon (1894). The Rejected Bride (1894). The papers of E.D.E.N. Southworth are in the Perkins Library of Duke University, and at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Baym, N., Women’s Fiction (1978). Boyle, R. L., Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth, Novelist (1939). Coultrap-McQuin, S., Doing Literary Business (1990). Hart, J. D., The Popular Book (1950). Kelly, M., Private Women, Public Stage (1984). Mott, F. L.,
SPACKS
Golden Multitudes (1947). Pattee, F. L., The Feminine Fifties (1940). Reference works: DAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —ELAINE K. GINSBERG
SOUZA, E. See SCOTT, Evelyn
SPACKS, Patricia (Ann) Meyer Born 17 November 1929, San Francisco, California Daughter of Norman B. and Lillian Talcott Meyer; married Barry B. Spacks, 1955; children: Elizabeth As an academic writer and professor of English, Patricia Meyer Spacks writes literary criticism on 18th-century authors, the structure of the novel, and women writers; nonfiction that elucidates aspects of mind (or age) such as the imagination, gossip, boredom, and adolescence; and essays on pedagogy and the literary profession. Presently the Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia, Spacks also held the positions of chair of the English Department and president of the Modern Language Association (1994). She received her education at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida (B.A., 1949), Yale University (M.A.), and the University of California (Ph.D., 1955). Her academic appointments include instructor at Indiana University at Bloomington (1954-56) and the University of Florida at Gainesville (1958-59). At Wellesley College she began as an instructor and was promoted to professor. Her awards include the Shirley Farr Fellowship of the American Association of University Women (1962-63), Guggenheim Fellowship (1969-70), National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Fellowship (1974), National Humanities Institute Fellowship (1976-77), Honorary Doctor of Letters from Rollins College (1976), and American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship (1978-79). In six books about 18th-century literature, Spacks writes with a vision that considers the writer and the genre in the social and cultural context of the period as well as the history of literary evolution and significance. Imagining a Self: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (1976) is a comparative study between the two genres. The pairing of each autobiography with a work of fiction, e.g., Edward Gibbon’s Autobiographies (1776) and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1760), reveals that the clear distinctions between the two genres invented in the 18th century are more apparent than true. As in her other studies, Spacks looks to the common ground: ‘‘the meaning of technique, the insistence of theme, and the implications of genre.’’ ‘‘Autobiographies affirm identity’’ and novels in the development of character and plot assert identity. In the 20th century, the aim of either genre, ‘‘imagining a self,’’ requires borrowings and blurring of the differences as self becomes the central subject.
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Similarly, in Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English Novels (1990), Spacks explores the question: What truth does fiction tell? She shows, although ‘‘desire’’ is a critical term of the 20th century, its priority is for building plots and assigning meaning: ‘‘Truth, dressed—like Falsehood—by Desire, becomes Fiction.’’ Several studies associate fictional structures and reality, the making of novels, and social, ultimately, ethical, truth. In all of her literary analyses, Spacks includes women writers and their writings, many of whom were unknown and excluded from traditional criticism. Imagining a Self (1976) presents several 18th-century writers: Fanny Burney, Charlotte Lennox, Jane Barker, Susannah Rowson, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Laetitia Pilkington, Charlotte Charke, Hester Lynch Thrale, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Davys, Penelope Aubin, and Sarah Fielding. Spacks edited Series: Women Writers in English, 1350-1850 (1999). The Female Imagination: A Literary and Psychological Investigation of Women’s Writings (1975), Spacks’ first full-length text about women writers, introduces the integral relationship between the imagination and freedom. The text examines the ‘‘special female awareness [that] emerges through literature in every period.’’ Three themes predominate that reveal the social limitations of women’s lives and the power of writing in obviating those restraints: the problems of women writing about women; the threat and the appeal of dependency, usually represented by marriage; and children or care-taking as a central justification of women lives. The imagination becomes the way to reproduce the reality that makes awareness and thus change possible and to represent other possibilities that bode for freedom. The Adolescent Idea: Myths of Youth and the Adult Imagination (1981), Gossip (1985), and Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind (1995) share ideas, concepts, and states of mind that concern the 20th century, yet, through literary example, Spacks demonstrates the historical continuity. Adolescence as a social and psychological phenomena is a 20th century construct but earlier times represented this stage of life. Gossip, like relationships, forms the subject, structure, and subtext of literature, as explored in Gossip. It functions as a plot device, as the source of malice or intimacy, as a mirror from the private to the public life. It is ‘‘the language of shared experience’’ transformed into story. Where gossip is social, boredom is lonely. Boredom examines how writing protects the writer against its vacuum, and reading admits the reader into the created antithesis to boredom: an active state of mind. ‘‘All writing—at least since 1800 or so—is about boredom. . . . The ideal dynamic between writing and reading depends in part on boredom as displaced, unmentioned, unmentionable possibility. The need to refute boredom’s deadening poser impels the writer’s productivity and the reader’s engagement.’’ Spacks’ recent articles discuss pedagogy. The title of her presidential address to the MLA (1994) links the structural and ethical concerns of her criticism with those of teaching: ‘‘Reality—Our Subject and Discipline’’ (1995). She asks, ‘‘So what. . .Why does it matter that we struggle to understand others’
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words and to shape our own language to convey meaning and feeling?’’ Her present work-in-progress is a study of self-love in the 17th and 18th centuries.
OTHER WORKS: The Varied God: A Critical Study of Thomson’s ‘‘The Seasons’’ (1959). The Insistence of Horror: Aspects of the Supernatural in Eighteenth-Century Poetry (1962). John Gay (1965). The Poetry of Vision: Five Eighteenth-Century Poets (1967). An Argument of Images: The Poetry of Alexander Pope (1971).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: CA Online (1999). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the Untied States (1995). —KAREN J. MCLENNAN
SPEARE, Elizabeth George Born 21 November 1908, Melrose, Massachusetts; died 14 November 1994 Daughter of Harry A. and Demetria Simmons George; married Alden Speare, 1936; children: son and a daughter After graduation from college during the Depression, Elizabeth George Speare taught English in Massachusetts high schools for several years. She married an industrial engineer and then settled in Wethersfield, Connecticut. Speare did little writing until her son and daughter were in their teens, when she began to do articles for women’s magazines and an occasional story and play. Two of Speare’s books, The Witch of Blackbird Pond (1958) and The Bronze Bow (1961) received the Newbery Award. While reading about the history of the Connecticut River valley, Speare came upon A Narrative of the Captivity of Mrs. Johnson, the personal account of the actual experiences of Susanna Johnson during the French and Indian War. This pioneer woman and her family were taken by Indians to Montreal, where they were sold to the French, who held them for ransom. Among the captives was Mrs. Johnson’s younger sister, Miriam Willard. Calico Captive presents events from Miriam’s point of view, adding details and characters and elaborating upon the romantic aspects to produce an engrossing story and an interesting view of the period. Although Speare often seems overly conscious of her audience and many of the characters are types, Miriam emerges as a strong and likable young woman. The Witch of Blackbird Pond also had its origin in a chance reading encounter. Speare happened to learn how children used to be sent from Barbados to Boston to be educated and wondered what life would have been like for a girl from those sunny
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surroundings in colonial Wethersfield with its grim, hard Puritan way of life. The result was the story of sixteen-year-old orphaned Kit Tyler—free-spirited, Anglican, and reared in luxury in the tropics—who travels to Connecticut to live with her aunt in 1687. Her recklessness brings her into conflict with the duty-ridden Puritans and culminates with her trial for witchcraft. Although the book’s three romances seem contrived to please a teenaged audience, Kit’s rigidly principled Uncle Matthew; the gentle, old but despised Quaker woman, Hannah; and the lonely, frightened child, Prudence, whose testimony saves Kit from conviction, are well-drawn characters, while the sense of Puritan ways and values is particularly strong. An equally strong protagonist is Daniel bar Jamin in The Bronze Bow, an imaginary story set in Jesus’ time, which rose out of Speare’s wish to give her teenaged Sunday School class the feeling of what it must have been like to live in Palestine during the Roman occupation. It excels in making credible the intense hostility the ancient Jews felt for their conquerors and their deep frustration at being unable to stand up to the military might of the Romans. In The Prospering (1967), Speare fictionalizes the actual experiences of the settlers who participated in the experiment of the Stockbridge mission in western Massachusetts. This was the plan of the visionary and zealous young John Sergeant to prepare the Native Americans to live and work in English ways upon land he hoped would remain theirs forever. The story is related by Elizabeth, youngest daughter of the Williams family, which was among the earliest settlers there. She sees the village grow over a 50-year period into a beautiful town, observing how the experiment fails because the Native Americans are unable to change their ways and the colonists increasingly use the Native Americans and the land for their own purposes. This novel is less successful as fiction than Speare’s award-winning novels because its heroine is too objective and impassive and too much on the fringes of events to involve the reader deeply. Speare knows how to tell a story well and create sympathetic central characters and memorable minor ones. Her best books move fast through well-researched, judiciously selected detail and are enlivened with much realistic dialogue. Speare is most outstanding for her ability to recreate past times believably and to give them life and immediacy by integrating the personal problems of her protagonists with those of the era. Although her output has not been large, Speare is ranked among the best of contemporary writers of historical fiction for young people.
OTHER WORKS: Life in Colonial America (1963).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CB (1959). More Books by More People (1974). More Junior Authors (1963). Newbery and Caldecott Medal Books: 1956-65 (1965). SAA (1973). —ALETHEA K. HELBIG
SPENCER, Anne Born 6 February 1882, Henry County, Virginia; died 27 July 1975, Lynchburg, Virginia Daughter of Joel C. and Sarah Cephus Scales; married Edward Spencer, 1901 Anne Spencer was the only child of divorced parents; she had no formal education before the age of eleven, when she entered Lynchburg Seminary. Spencer lived with her husband in Lynchburg, where for the next 20 years her local fame derived chiefly from the beautiful garden she cultivated. Throughout this period, Spencer also wrote poems for her private pleasure, and at the urging of James Weldon Johnson, in 1920 she began to publish her work. Over the next three decades, her poems appeared in almost every major anthology of black American poetry. In many of her poems, Spencer rejects this world of ugliness, impurity, and hate and replaces it with a visionary world of beauty and love. The sonnet ‘‘Substitution’’ is the clearest statement of this theme. A love for natural scenery in general and for her garden in particular provided a metaphorical setting for several works. The central conceit of ‘‘Life-Long Poor Browning’’ mourns the fact the poet never enjoyed the beauties of Virginia. Here and elsewhere, Spencer reveals an affinity for the technical devices and philosophical concerns of the metaphysical poets. Spencer used the traditions of English poetry, but she was not a conventional poet. Her best poems remain fresh and strikingly original. ‘‘At the Carnival’’ offers a finely hued, evocative description of a tawdry street fair. Onlookers like ‘‘the limousine lady’’ and ‘‘the bull-necked man,’’ ‘‘the unholy incense’’ of the sausage and garlic booth, the dancing tent where ‘‘a quivering female-thing gestured assignations,’’ and the crooked games of chance combine to produce an atmosphere of unrelieved ugliness and depravity. Yet the possibility of beauty exists even here, in the person of a young female diver, the ‘‘Naiad of the Carnival Tank.’’ Her presence transforms the scene. Usually Spencer’s references to the world of reality were more oblique. That she was aware of life’s travails, particularly as they affect women, is nonetheless evident. Her poem ‘‘Letter to My Sister’’ begins: ‘‘It is dangerous for a woman to defy the gods.’’ Despite her participation in the civil rights struggle and her work as a librarian in the local black high school, Spencer rarely employed racial themes in her poetry. An autobiographical statement she wrote for Countee Cullen’s anthology, Caroling Dusk (1927), suggests the reason: ‘‘I write about the things I love. But have no civilized articulation for the things I hate.’’ Spencer’s posture was typical of the black female poets of her generation. Several of her critics have drawn comparisons between Spencer and Emily Dickinson. They share a penchant for cryptic imagery and perhaps a similar method of composition, but Spencer is not the major poet Dickinson is. As her biographer, J. Lee Greene, attests, the wonder is that Spencer became a poet at all. A Southern black woman with little education, who belonged to no literary coterie and lived her entire life in small, provincial towns, Spencer
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proved by writing poetry of the quality she did, when she did, though dangerous, it is not impossible to defy society’s gods. OTHER WORKS: Anne Spencer’s poems may be found in the following volumes: Brown, S., A. P. Davis, and U. Lee, The Negro Caravan (1941); Greene, J. L., Time’s Unfading Garden: Anne Spencer’s Life and Poetry (1977); Johnson, J. W., The Book of American Negro Poetry (1931). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brown, S., Negro Poetry and Drama (1937). Gilbert, S. and S. Gubar, eds., Shakespeare’s Sister (1979). Greene, J. L., Time’s Unfading Garden: Anne Spencer’s Life and Poetry (1977). Honey, M., ed., Shadowed Dreams: Women’s Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance (1989). Stetson, E., ed., Black Sister: Poetry by Black American Women, 1746-1980 (1981). Reference works: Notable Black American Women (1992). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: A Journal (March 1978). Echoes from the Garden: The Anne Spencer Story (documentary film, 1980). —CHERYL A. WALL
SPENCER, Cornelia (Ann) Phillips Born 20 March 1825, Harlem, New York; died 11 March 1908, Cambridge, Massachusetts Daughter of James and Judith Vermeule Phillips; married James Spencer, 1855 (died 1861); children: one daughter The year after Cornelia Spencer’s birth, her family moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where her father became professor of mathematics at the University of North Carolina. Spencer was educated at home and always felt her education had been inferior to that received by her brothers. For this reason, she was a tireless crusader for women’s education later in life. After her husband, an Alabama lawyer, died in 1861, she and her daughter returned to the Phillips home in Chapel Hill. After the Civil War, Spencer began teaching Latin and Greek to children in the community. To make ends meet, she also tutored, ran a boarding house, painted china, worked for the university, and contributed occasional articles to the newspapers. An offer from the North Carolina Presbyterian to write a column on subjects of her choice at $400 per year provided some measure of financial security. Spencer used her column to promote her two favorite projects—the restoration of the University of North Carolina and education for women. The university had been closed during the Civil War, and when it reopened it was under the control of a president and professor appointed by the ‘‘Carpetbag’’ Republican government. Spencer not only criticized the politics of the faculty, but their lack of educational qualifications. When the university was reorganized again in 1875, and the Republicans dismissed, Spencer climbed the belfry to ring out the good news. In 1895 the university awarded her an honorary degree for her
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lifelong devotion, the first ever given to a woman by that institution. Her crusade for better education for women also bore fruit in 1877 when the university opened a summer normal school for girls. Spencer was instrumental in founding the Normal and Industrial School for Women in 1891, which later became the Women’s College of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. In 1894 Spencer moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to live with her daughter and son-in-law. She wrote her first book, The Last Ninety Days of the War in North Carolina (1866), at the urging of her good friend David L. Swain, president of the University of North Carolina. Swain and former Confederate Governor Zebulon B. Vance offered her access to their private wartime papers to give the work authenticity and accuracy. Called a ‘‘Whig review of the War’’ by the press, The Last Ninety Days is a bitter condemnation of secession and the Confederate leadership. ‘‘That North Carolina accepted a destiny which she was unable to control, when she ranged herself in the war for Southern independence, is a fact which cannot be disputed.’’ As a result, the state was left ravaged and penniless by Sherman’s invasion, and its people broken in spirit. Spencer firmly believed, as most North Carolinians did, that her state had sent more men to the Confederate army than any other but was the least honored in civil and military appointments. She has only high praise for Governor Vance’s attempts to feed and clothe his people, even when his actions violated Confederate law. ‘‘Looking back at our delusions, errors, and miscalculations for the four years of the war,’’ she concludes, ‘‘the wonder is that the Confederacy lasted as long as it did.’’ Spencer’s second book, Pen and Ink Sketches of the University of North Carolina (1869), first appeared as a series of articles in the Raleigh Standard. Her last book, published in 1888, is a children’s history of the state. OTHER WORKS: First Steps in North Carolina History (1888). Selected Papers of Cornelia Phillips Spencer (edited by L. R. Wilson, 1953). Cornelia Phillips Spencer’s diaries, journals, and letters are in the Southern Historical Collection of the University of North Carolina Library in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Chamberlain, H. S., Old Days in Chapel Hill (1926). Russell, P., The Woman Who Rang the Bell (1949). —JANET KAUFMAN
SPENCER, Elizabeth Born 19 July 1921, Carrollton, Mississippi Daughter of James L. and Mary McCain Spencer; married John Rusher, 1956 (died 1998) A native of Mississippi and the progeny of a family whose ancestors had lived in Carroll County, Mississippi, since the
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1830s, Elizabeth Spencer spent her childhood in the kind of rural South she depicts with topographic precision in several of her novels. Spencer studied English at Belhaven College in Jackson, Mississippi, (B.A. 1942) and Vanderbilt University (M.A. 1943); and went on to teach for two years, first in Mississippi and then in Tennessee, resigning from teaching to work as a reporter for the Nashville Tennessean. In 1946 Spencer abandoned the craft of the journalist for that of the novelist, and her first novel, Fire in the Morning, was published two years later. Recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1953, Spencer traveled to Italy, the scene of two later novels, The Light in the Piazza (1960) and Knights & Dragons (1965). She has served as writer-in-residence at several colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada, including Bryn Mawr (1962), the University of North Carolina (1969), Hollins College (1972), and Concordia University (1977-78). Her first novel, Fire in the Morning (1948, reprinted 1998, 1999), published with the encouragement of the Fugitive poet Donald Davidson, reveals Spencer’s firsthand knowledge of the intricate workings of a small Southern town—its layers of intrigue and the complexities of relationships that span several generations. With the Southerner’s sense of local story as possessing the power of myth, Spencer delineates the history and works out the fate of two antagonistic families in Tarsus, Mississippi, in a fashion recalling the conflicts in various ‘‘houses’’ of Greek drama. The movement of the novel is predicated on a young man’s gradual discovery of the interwoven affairs of love, fraud, and violence which underlie one family’s dominance of the town. In the process of uncovering the private histories which link together the inhabitants of Tarsus, he comes to terms with the town, his own family, and himself in relationship to what had seemed an inexplicable past. In Fire in the Morning, Spencer suggests there are sociological differences between the regions of Delta and hill country in Mississippi. In This Crooked Way (1952, reprinted 1999), these regions provide symbolic points of reference for charting Amos Dudley’s odyssey from poverty to riches and from damnation to salvation. Convinced as a consequence of a religious experience that God will support him in his opportunistic endeavors, Dudley leaves the Yocona hills, striding into the Delta in Colonel Sutpen fashion to wrest a plantation out of the overgrown land. His success, however, leaves destruction in its wake; and it is not until he brings the remnants of his hill country family to the Delta to share his affluence that he finds a measure of peace and is able to reconcile himself with his past. Spencer’s third novel, The Voice at the Back Door (1956, reprinted 1994), which treats politics and the cost of equal justice for blacks and whites in a Southern town, is the last to deal with the Mississippi South. She returns in The Snare (1972) to a Southern locale; but in this novel it is to the New Orleans atmosphere of the French Quarter, where her heroine becomes involved in the city’s underworld of jazz musicians. In 1960, with the publication of The Light in the Piazza, Spencer shifts locales, delineating in this novella the crisis of conscience of an American woman who decides to allow her beautiful but mentally retarded daughter to marry her young
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Italian suitor. Spencer treats such a dilemma, which might otherwise be too ponderous, with grace and charm; and her evocation of the Florentine atmosphere and its impact upon the Americans makes the city a powerful force in the story. The Light in the Piazza was made into a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film in 1962, starring Olivia de Havilland, Yvette Mimieux and George Hamilton. Critics distressed by the power of the manipulative American mother in The Light in the Piazza, saw Spencer following the international theme of Henry James. Few acknowledged the ironic force of the idea that many men might prefer a pretty obedient woman with the mind of a ten-year-old. Knights & Dragons (1965), also set in Italy, reflects a recurrent theme in Spencer’s work: the tension between a woman’s need for independence and her social conditioning and psychological need to live for others. Perhaps because critics considered this work too allegorical, Spencer’s next two novels, No Place for an Angel (1967) and The Snare (1972), are rich in realistic detail. Both attempt to record the demoralized affluent life of post—World War II America and each features a strong heroine who refuses to connect meaning in life with men. Spencer continued to expand her vision of life both in terms of setting and ideas. Early identified as a Southern writer influenced by William Faulkner and Eudora Welty (a close friend) because of the regional themes and precise local details in her first three novels, she has kept challenging her original identity both geographically and spiritually. Like many women writers trained by men she remains intensely aware of the importance of craft, and she has created as many heroes as heroines. She has also learned over the years, however, to identify and articulate the human problems that women’s lives often exemplify more clearly than men’s. The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer (1981, 1983), 33 stories written over more than 30 years, appeared with Welty’s foreword paying tribute to Spencer’s seriousness. Asked in a 1980 interview about recurrent themes in her writing, Spencer remarked that many stories were ‘‘about liberation and the regret you have when you liberate yourself.’’ Such ambivalence might well isolate Spencer from more ideological feminists but links her with the divided self that remains a valued part of American literary tradition. Jack of Diamonds and Other Stories (1988), a shorter collection of stories including two O. Henry Award winners, reveals Spencer to be one of our most skillful literary artisans. In The Salt Line (1983, reprinted 1995) Spencer returned to the novel to create a more complex social reality. Here the academic upheavals of the 1960s and the natural disaster of a hurricane help shape her characters’ needs. Once again using the South as a convincing background she explores the problematic nature of marriage. The Night Travellers (1991, reprinted 1999), her most political work to date, uses the war in Vietnam as a focus for generational conflict. Beginning in the traditional South, perhaps reflecting her personal growth toward a cosmopolitan conscience, Spencer carries her characters to Canada and the midAtlantic states and finally even to Vietnam. Again, a motherdaughter relationship becomes the most unforgettable aspect of this record of social upheaval.
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Spencer returned to the South from Canada in 1986 to teach at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, and retired in 1992. She is a writer who has continued to grow, struggling to give her readers more than just a slice of life or a neat ideology. Although her effort to create mythology and enhance themes may make her work seem old-fashioned, the precision of her observations, the subtlety of her style, and the diversity of backgrounds she evokes marks her place as an important writer of the 20th century and beyond. Her novels, moving as they do from the fixed geography and traditions of the South to an international scene, demonstrate the scope of a writer who may have begun under the shadow of the mythic South but whose vision is not regionally limited. She has explored in several contexts and with considerable artistry the individual as an outsider to the environment, whether that environment be the Mississippi Delta, Vietnam, Canada, or an Italian city. By the end of the 1990s, Spencer had written nine novels, three short story collections (not including three reprints), a dramatic play (For Lease or Sale, produced in 1989), a compilation of interviews from varied sources, entitled Conversations with Elizabeth Spencer (1998), and her memoirs, Landscapes of the Heart (1998). Her works have been translated into a myriad of foreign languages, including French, Finnish, German, Norwegian, Japanese, Polish, and Bengali. She is also the recipient of many fellowships (McGraw-Hill, NEA, Bryn Mawr, Guggenheim Foundation, and the Kenyon Review), awards (Award of Merit from the American Academy, 1983; John Dos Passos Award for Literature, 1992; Salem Award for Distinction, 1992; North Carolina Governor’s Award, 1994; J. William Corrington Award for Fiction, 1997; Richard Wright Literary Excellence Award for Fiction, 1997; Fortner Award for Literature, 1998) and holds honorary degrees from Rhodes University (Memphis, 1968), Concordia University (Montreal, 1988), University of the South (Sewanee, Tennessee, 1992), the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1998), and Belhaven College (Jackson, Mississippi, 1999).
OTHER WORKS: Ship Island, and Other Stories (1968). Marilee: Three Stories (1987). On the Gulf (1991). The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales (1996). Contributor to Opera News, Sewanee Review, Southern Review, the Writer, and others.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bradbury, J. M., Renaissance in the South: A Critical History of Literature, 1920-1960 (1963). Clayton, M. E., ‘‘Rejecting Tradition: A Contemporary View of Place and Identity in the Short Stories of Elizabeth Spencer’’ (thesis, 1997). Entzminger, B., ‘‘Frustrated Passions: Emotional Distance as Narrative Strategy in Elizabeth Spencer’s Fiction’’ (thesis, 1993). French, W. C., ed., The Fifties: Fiction, Poetry, Drama (1970). Jones, J., Mississippi Writers Talking (1982). Prenshaw, P. W., Elizabeth Spencer (1985). Roberts, T., Self and the Community in the Fiction of Elizabeth Spencer (1993). Rubin, L. D., and R. D.
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Jacobs, South: Modern Southern Literature in its Cultural Setting (1961). Reference works: CANR (1990). CLC (1982). DLB (1980). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Mississippi Quarterly (Fall 1976, Spring 1994, Fall 1994, 1996). NYTBR (January 1998). South Atlantic Quarterly (Summer 1964). Southern Quarterly (special issue, 1997). Style (Fall 1993). Elizabeth Spencer Interview with Kay Bonetti (audiocassette, 1993). —GUIN A. NANCE, UPDATED BY EUGENIA KALEDIN AND SYDONIE BENET
SPEWAK, Bella Cohen Born 15 March 1899, Bucharest, Rumania; died December 1987 Daughter of Adolph and Fanny Lang Cohen; married Samuel Spewak, 1922 Born in Hungary (now Rumania), Bella Cohen Spewak moved to New York in her youth. She graduated from Washington Irving High School (1917) and began her career reporting for various New York newspapers, writing features. She later assisted her husband as a foreign correspondent in Europe and Russia from 1922 to 1926. They returned to New York to collaborate on Broadway dramas and musicals and Hollywood film and television scripts. After World War II, Spewak returned to Europe for material to broadcast an ABC series on the work of United Nations Refugee Relief Association and conditions abroad. She once served as national publicity director of the Camp Fire Girls; she was a member of the Dramatists Guild and the Screen Writers Guild. Although they experimented with different styles, the Spewaks wrote primarily comedy and satire. The commercial failure of Spring Song (produced 1934, published 1936) with its affectionate portrayal of New York’s ethnic East Side neighborhood and its tragedy apparently convinced them to challenge social ills through humor. The effects of fortune and fame upon the individual became subjects for satiric attack. Characters are manipulated to satirize institutions—generally connected with the mass media— they represent. The Spewaks expose romantic love, movie stardom, and wartime heroism to unsentimental analysis. While sometimes too extravagant to be truly satiric, their works invariably center on the exploitation of reality and universal emotion which characterizes the mass media. The Spewaks’ best play, Boy Meets Girl (1935, film version, 1938), winner of the Roi Cooper Megrue Prize (1936), is a hilarious comedy in which theme, content, structure, subplots, satire, and even the movie scripts being discussed duplicate each other by presenting variations on the boy-meets-girl cliché. The traditional love story is complicated by the presence of baby Happy, around whom all the developments center. His not so innocent mother, widowed by a bigamist, is only the most visible ‘‘girl’’ whose love life is rearranged when the baby becomes a movie star. Hollywood and its film audiences are unmercifully
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satirized as the Spewaks expose formulaic composition, deliberate inaccuracy, and shameless pandering to the lowest public taste. A spirit of fun pervades the criticism as the play inevitably concludes with the boy getting the girl—and the baby. The Spewaks’ most popular work is Kiss Me Kate (produced 1948, published 1953, television version 1959), with music by Cole Porter. The plot meshes a theatre company’s on-stage production of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew with the similar backstage marital battles of the actors playing Kate and Petruchio, who carry their dramatic roles into their private lives. Genuinely humorous, the musical avoids mechanical complications and purely slapstick gags. Spewak employed her extensive working experience in newspapers, television, Broadway, and Hollywood to provide an unquestionably authentic atmosphere; her characters, dialogue, and action are believable. Even though her satire is based on the extremes of behavior, the total circumstances seem realistic and the resultant humor is good natured and unthreatening. The success of Spewak’s dramas results from a judicious blend of mockery and acceptance of the vagaries of human nature.
OTHER WORKS: All written with Samuel Spewak: Poppa (1929; produced, 1935). Clear All Wires (1932; produced, 1932; film version, 1933). Solitaire Man (1934; produced, 1926). Trousers to Match (1941; produced, 1941; produced as Miss Swan Expects, 1939). Woman Bites Dog (1947; produced, 1946). My Three Angels (1953; produced, 1953; television version, 1960). Festival (1955; produced, 1955). Boy Meets Girl and Spring Song: Two Plays (1973, 1987). Streets: A Memoir of the Lower East Side (1995).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: From Russia to Kiss Me, Kate: The Careers of Sam and Bella Spewack: An Exhibition at the Alan and Margaret Kempner Exhibition Room Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 8 March 1993 to 9 July 1993 (1993). Professional Luncheon Meeting Guest Speaker, Miss Bella Spewack (audiocassette, 1966). —KATHLEEN GREGORY KLEIN
SPEYER, Leonora von Stosch Born 7 November 1872, Washington, D.C.; died 10 February 1956, New York, New York Wrote under: Leonora Speyer Daughter of Count Ferdinand von Stosch; married 1893 (divorced); Sir Edgar Speyer, 1902; children: four daughters Daughter of a Prussian father who fought for the Union in the Civil War and a New England mother, Leonora von Stosch
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Speyer’s first career was as a violinist. Having attended public schools, then the Brussels Conservatory, she made her debut at eighteen with the Boston Symphony and later played with the New York Philharmonic. Speyer had four daughters during her first marriage, which ended in divorce. In 1902, she married Sir Edgar Speyer, a banker, who gave up his British title to become an American citizen. In 1915 the couple moved to the U.S. and Speyer, already in her forties, began writing poetry. When acute neuritis forced Speyer to give up the violin, she turned seriously to writing. Her career was highlighted by receipt of several prizes, among them the Pulitzer Prize in 1927 for her second book of poems, Fiddler’s Farewell (1926). Speyer was president of the Poetry Society of America from 1934 to 1936; beginning in 1937, she taught a writing workshop at Columbia University for a number of years. Speyer was obviously influenced by her friend Amy Lowell and other Imagist poets, and she is noticeably derivative of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Even so, her own voice is distinctive; it is direct, personal, and immediate, even when the subject is a remote place or distant time. Speyer writes in ‘‘House of Calvin’’ (Slow Wall, 1939), that she is one ‘‘who loved the lovely things of God,’’ an attitude clearly reflected in her many nature poems. Music often provides subject or image, and she was praised for the ‘‘melodious and rhythmical sound effects’’ in her work. Speyer employs such diverse forms as free verse, prose poetry, ballads, and sonnets. Speyer often uses fresh or startling images, as in ‘‘Bird in a Tree’’ (Slow Wall), when she writes of ‘‘The beak like tiny scissors / Snipping the sound to shape.’’ Occasionally her images are strained or precious, but many succeed dramatically, as when ‘‘thunder crumbles the sky’’ in ‘‘Squall’’ (A Canopic Jar, 1921). The linking of antithetical terms is another of her favorite devices: in ‘‘Of Mountains’’ (Fiddler’s Farewell) the hills are ‘‘stone wings’’ in ‘‘granite flight.’’ Least successful of Speyer’s poems are those in which she invents female characters in the tradition of folklore. These tend to be melodramatic, sentimental, or even silly. ‘‘Monk and Lady’’ and ‘‘Ballad of Old Doc Higgins’’ (both from Naked Heel, 1931) are prime examples. More successful are poems whose heroines, such as Sappho, Medusa, Salome, Mary Magdalene, are drawn from myth or history. Also successful are poems that explore the relationships of modern women and men. The speaker of ‘‘The Ladder’’ (A Canopic Jar), for example, reveals herself a martyr to a faithless man, saying she ‘‘kissed the foot that bruised [her] as it passed.’’ The sequence ‘‘Sonnets of a Not Unusual Situation’’ (Naked Heel) describes a woman with casual lovers in her past who now finds herself unable to establish intimacy with the man she loves. From the study and practice of the violin, Speyer learned, she said, ‘‘the patience, the concentration, the knowledge of how to work’’ that helped her with her writing. But it was the writing, she also said, that gave her ‘‘a sense of. . .high noon in the soul.’’
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OTHER WORKS: American Poets: An Anthology of Contemporary Verse (edited by Speyer, 1923). Nor Without Music (published with Slow Wall, 1946). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: TCA. Other references: Bellman (4 Jan. 1919). NYT (3 May 1927, 11 Feb. 1956). Poetry (July 1940). SR (23 May 1946). —JEANNINE DOBBS
SPOFFORD, Harriet (Elizabeth) Prescott Born 3 April 1835, Calais, Maine; died 14 August 1921, Deer Island, Massachusetts Also wrote under: Harriet Prescott Daughter of Joseph N. and Sarah Bridges Prescott; married Richard S. Spofford, 1865; children: one child, who died as an infant Harriet Prescott Spofford was born into a distinguished New England family that had suffered economic reversals since the War of 1812. Spofford spent most of her early years in a household of women, including her mother and four Prescott aunts, while her father sought his fortune in the West. In 1849 she settled with her mother in Newburyport, Massachusetts, where she attended Putnam Free School, finishing her education later at the Pinkerton Academy in Derry, New Hampshire. In 1856, when her father returned an invalid and her mother soon was stricken, Harriet became the support of the family. She turned to writing, one of the few lucrative careers open to women in her day. This early work, published anonymously in Boston family storypapers in the 1850s, remains uncollected and unacknowledged. Quantity was demanded rather than quality, as these pieces earned Spofford between $2.50 and $5 each. Only with the publication of her short story ‘‘In a Cellar,’’ in the young Atlantic Monthly (February 1859) did her career really begin. Spofford’s marriage to Richard S. Spofford, a Newburyport lawyer, was long and successful, although their only child died as an infant in 1867. They lived briefly in Washington (Old Washington, 1906, is based on Spofford’s memories); traveled abroad twice; and finally settled on Deer Island, a five-acre island in the Merrimac River near Newburyport. The scenery, legends, and people of her New England home supplied much of the material for Spofford’s writing, especially her poetry. In ‘‘June on the Merrimac,’’ John Greenleaf Whittier called attention to the setting in which ‘‘Deer Island’s mistress sings.’’ Spofford lived on Deer Island for the rest of her life, visiting and often visited by a circle of women writers in Boston including Sarah Orne Jewett, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, and Julia Ward Howe. From the 1860s until her death, Spofford was one of the most widely published of American authors. Many stories, essays, and
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poems appeared in Harper’s Bazar, Atlantic Monthly, the Knickerbocker, the Cosmopolitan, and in juvenile magazines such as Youth’s Companion. Two strengths save Spofford from being dismissed as merely a popular magazine contributor producing only ‘‘romantically frothy tales.’’ The first, for which she is alternately highly praised and condemned, is her vivid and often graphic description. In Sir Rohan’s Ghost: A Romance (1860), for instance, her description of a wine cellar was so convincing and memorable connoisseurs sent her tributes of wine for years afterward. In a century when a woman’s sphere was domestic, Spofford utilized her special knowledge to make textures, jewelry, even furniture definitive of character. In Art Decoration Applied to Furniture (1878), Spofford observed that furniture is ‘‘emblazoned, as one might say, with the customs of a people and the manners of a time.’’ Her ability to capture character through setting and inanimate objects is nowhere more stunning than in the title story of The Amber Gods (1863), where the two women, Yone and Lu, are defined by the jewels they wear (‘‘This amber’s just the thing for me, such a great noon creature!’’) and the materials that suit them (‘‘I never let Lu wear the point at all; she’d be ridiculous in it,—so flimsy and open and unreserved; that’s for me.’’). Spofford’s second strength is that although she too divides her women into opposites reminiscent of the fragile blondes and passionate brunettes who represent saint and sinner for most romantics—and only too accurately represent the roles in which contemporary women were cast—Spofford reveals the woman within the role. If she takes sides, her vibrant heart urges her to admire the passionate Yones over the dutiful Lus; but Lu, too, is always loved. In ‘‘Desert Sands,’’ for instance, the submissive wife Eos has artistic talent that is recognized immediately and appreciated by the seductive Vespasia, and her cousin Alain berates her husband for suppressing it: ‘‘This aptitude, this power, this whatever you choose to call it, genius or inspiration, for which you refuse her utterance, this has produced a spiritual asphyxia.’’ Beginning her career in the 1850s, Spofford found herself caught between the dying school of romanticism and the newlyvociferous advocates of realism. Her discerning eye and ability to capture the character of her New England neighbors in dialect and description earned the praise of W. D. Howells and the young Henry James, but they were both bothered by her romantic lushness and discouraged her from ‘‘fine writing.’’ Although her realistic talent would culminate in her last collection, The Elder’s People (1920), it could at best earn her recognition as a strong minor writer scarcely comparable to Mary Wilkins Freeman. It is in her romantic tendencies that the uniqueness of Spofford’s writing can be found, even though in response to the fickle changes in popular taste and literary approach, she often either abandoned (always reluctantly) or failed to develop and control the poetic promise of her early romantic work. OTHER WORKS: Azarian: An Episode (1864). New England Legends (1871). The Thief in the Night (1872). The Servant Girl Question (1881). Hester Stanley at St. Marks (1882). The Marquis of Carabas (1882). Poems (1882). Ballads About Authors (1887).
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House and Hearth (1891). A Lost Jewel (1891). A Scarlet Poppy, and Other Stories (1894). A Master Spirit (1896). In Titian’s Garden, and Other Poems (1897). An Inheritance (1897). Stepping-Stones to Happiness (1897). Hester Stanley’s Friends (1898). Priscilla’s Love-Story (1898). The Maid He Married (1899). Old Madame, and Other Tragedies (1900). The Children of the Valley (1901). The Great Procession, and other Verses for and about Children (1902). That Betty (1903). Four Days of God (1905). The Fairy Changeling: A Flower and Fairy Play (1911). The Making of a Fortune: A Romance (1911). The King’s Easter (1912). A Little Book of Friends (1916). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bendixen, A., ed., ‘‘The Amber Gods’’ and Other Stories (1989). Cooke, R. T., Our Famous Women (1883). Halbeisen, E. K., Harriet Prescott Spofford (1935). Hopkins, A. A., Waifs, and Their Authors (1879). The Development of the American Short Story (1923). Pattee, F. L., A History of American Literature Since 1870 (1915). Ward, E. S. P., , ‘‘Stories That Stay,’’ in The Century Magazine (Nov. 1910). Richardson, C. F., American Literature (1607-1885) (1902). Reference works: NCAB, IV. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Bookman (Nov. 1925). —THELMA J. SHINN
SPRAGUE, Rosemary Born 29 June 1920, New York, New York; died 25 September 1991 Daughter of Percy C. and Nell Andersen Sprague Rosemary Sprague was the only child of a comfortable Episcopalian family that stressed both manners and the arts. Her early years in Cleveland, Ohio, were filled with the best that city had to offer from the Hathaway Brown School for Girls in Shaker Heights to concerts, museums, and instruction in piano, dance, and fine embroidery. Sprague received her B.A. from Bryn Mawr and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Western Reserve University, where she specialized in Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Victorian literature. Further study was done at the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-on-Avon; Oxford University; and the University of London. Sprague lectured at colleges and universities in England and the U.S.; she was the Board of Visitors Distinguished Professor in English at Longwood College, Virginia, where she taught beginning in 1962.
provides authentic history along with high entertainment. An example is Fife and Fandango (1962), in which a young conventreared Spanish aristocrat suddenly loses her family and fortune, due to the invasion of Napoleon and the English. Because of her courage and resourcefulness, Juanita reveals the traits necessary for survival in chaos. And in Red Lion and Gold Dragon (1967) young Alfred, who has been carefully taught to avoid violence, is suddenly forced to make decisions about supporting the last king of the Saxons at the time of William’s 1066 invasion of England. The conflicts between relatives, beliefs, and, of course, the two armies are backdrops for the interior suffering and growth of Alfred. Sprague has written excellent biographical studies for young adults, of Robert Browning and George Eliot. In Imaginary Gardens (1970), she writes about five American poets: Emily Dickinson, Amy Lowell, Sara Teasdale, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Marianne Moore. As in all her work, Sprague avoids sentimentality and substitutes concrete accuracy. Her writing reveals the human in her subjects and she avoids letting any one aspect of a subject’s life (such as Browning’s romance) distort her presentation. Sprague’s work emphasizes the importance of honor, courage, and fidelity in human lives. She connects the exterior system of manners to the interior morality of her characters, as she creates believable characters in historical situations. She had a good ear for language and successfully shifted from one culture or period to another. Her universe has order, meaning, and hope. Her young villains see the errors of their pasts, and adult villains, once caught, are disposed of quickly. Sprague’s books give young adults a positive introduction to history while providing role models who handle realistic human problems with dignity. OTHER WORKS: Northward to Albion (1947) A Kingdom to Win (1953). Heroes of the White Shield (1955). Heir of Kiloran (1956). Conquerors of Time (1957). Dance for a Diamond Star (1959). The Jade Pagoda (1964). The Poems of Robert Browning (Crowell Poets Series; edited by Sprague, 1964). Forever in Joy: The Life of Robert Browning (1965). George Eliot: A Biography (1968). Imaginary Gardens (1970). Longwood College: A History (1989). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1968). Ohio Authors and Their Books (1962). Other references: Best Seller (15 May 1968). Book Week (7 May 1967). Chicago Sunday Tribune (27 April 1958). Horn Book (May 1947). KR (1 March 1956). LJ (15 Sept. 1965). NYHTB (31 July 1955). NYT (12 July 1953). —JO LESLIE SNELLER
Well-researched historical novels for young adults comprise the bulk of Sprague’s literary production. Her characters range from a ballerina in the court of Louis XV to the great grandson of Aeneas, who in legend escaped Greece to found a kingdom in Britain. Sprague’s characters have pluck and energy whether they are historical people or fictitious participants of actual historical events.
STABENOW, Dana
All of Sprague’s books are action-filled, but the characters are given believable motivation and emotions and Sprague always
Dana Stabenow has followed a growing trend in crime fiction in recent years of putting emphasis on regional settings. The
Born 27 March 1952, Anchorage, Alaska
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particularities and peculiarities of an author’s home can add interesting flavor to an otherwise blasé story line. Following in the footsteps of other regional writers, like Tony Hillerman who writes about his home in the Southwest, Stabenow has made her home in the Pacific Northwest an intricate part of her contemporary mysteries. One of Stabenow’s most popular of her three writing series features Alaskan Kate Shugak, a feisty, courageous, and yet very independent freelance investigator. Throughout the series, Stabenow makes effective use of the Alaskan settings, Aleutian culture, and Kate’s personal heritage passed down from her grandmother to add depth and meaning to her tales of mystery and intrigue. Kate is an ex-investigator for the Anchorage district attorney and has turned part-time private detective while trying to maintain a low profile after retiring to her native home in a fictional national park somewhere near the town of Cordova. Stabenow herself was born in Anchorage and raised on a 75-foot fish tender in the Gulf of Alaska. She worked many odd jobs, including being a gofer for Cook Inlet Aviation and an egg grader, bookkeeper, and expediter for Whitney-Fidalgo Seafoods. Along the way, she learned the traditions of her homeland and the industries located there. After saving her earnings during the bustling days of the oil pipeline, Stabenow was able to pay her way through the University of Alaska’s M.F.A. program. She began her writing career penning science fiction—the subject of another of her series starring Star Svensdotter. Her science fiction work has been described as ‘‘almost cinematic vividness’’ by Roland Green of Booklist. However, the Kate Shugak series remains her most well known. Stabenow won an Edgar award for the first book in the Kate Shugak series, A Cold Day for Murder (1992). This first whodunit features a popular formula for the contemporary crime story: a female investigator, a remote setting, and a conflict between the traditional culture (in this case Aleutian) and the modern American way of doing things. The story line explores how the Aleutian culture is pressured into fitting into the mostly white society. Stabenow seamlessly weaves Aleut traditions and customs into the plot, as she does in all the books in the series. She has the ability to relate to the reader the majesty of Alaska, as well as the rugged terrain and the toll it takes on its inhabitants. Stabenow’s Kate Shugak series offers readers a welcome change to the ever present urban crime drama. Moving the mystery out of the city and into the beauty of Alaska makes for a pleasant change for crime fiction followers. She now competes head on with Alaskan mystery writer John Straley, the creator of Sitka private detective Cecil Younger, with one difference— Stabenow’s character being a woman adds a whole new twist to the mystery novel and attracts a whole new crop of readers. Both Staley and Stabenow, however, have the ability to describe in great detail the eccentric and interesting characters that inhabit the towns they write about. This is one of the most intriguing elements to the regional novel—the reader feels like they get to know the small-town folks depicted in the story. Take, for instance, Kate’s crafty grandmother, Ekaterina, a leader of the Niniltna Native Association, and Olga (Dead in the Water, 1993),
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a skilled Native basket weaver. Learning the Native stories is intriguing to the reader and teaches a little bit of the local color. In 1998 Stabenow introduced a new character and, in doing so, a new series. Again the backdrop for her mysteries is Alaska, but this time the hero is Alaskan State Trooper Liam Campbell. Campbell’s character debuted in Fire and Ice, the story of another Anchorage native who has left behind the city to retreat to smalltown life in Newenham. This story is filled with turmoil and twisted plots, but is led to a smooth ending by the sure writing of Stabenow. With both the Kate Shugak series and the newest Liam Campbell series, Stabenow ably weaves tales of the region where she was born. She writes splendid, intriguing mysteries, successfully interplaying the beauty and harshness of the Alaskan wilderness, the eccentric but unique inhabitants, and the Native Aleut customs and traditions. Stabenow ably blends thrills and chills, fact and fiction, and danger and peace to tell compelling tales of mystery and crime. OTHER WORKS: Second Star (1991). A Handful of Stars (1991). A Fatal Thaw (1993). A Cold-Blooded Business (1994). Play with Fire (1995). Red Planet Run (1995). Blood Will Tell (1996). Breakup (1997). Killing Grounds (1998). So Sure of Death (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA Online (1999). Other references: PW (1991, 1993, 1998). Seattle Times (online, 1998). Dana Stabenow website (1999). —DEVRA M. SLADICS
STACK, Andy See RULE, Ann
STAFFORD, Jean Born 1 July 1915, Covina, California; died 26 March 1979, White Plains, New York Daughter of John and Mary McKillop Stafford; married Robert Lowell, 1940; Oliver Jensen, 1950; A. J. Liebling, 1959 (died 1963) Jean Stafford spent her childhood in California and Colorado. She received a B.A. and an M.A. from the University of Colorado and did postgraduate work at the University of Heidelberg (1936-37). Stafford was married three times: to the poet Robert Lowell; to Oliver Jensen, staff photographer for Life; and to A. J. Liebling, a writer associated with the New Yorker. Liebling died in 1963. Stafford’s literary achievement was recognized early and rewarded by several grants and prizes. Boston Adventure (1944), Stafford’s first published novel, is an ironic story of a lonely child. After years of daydreams of
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escaping the hostility of her own chaotic home by living with the impeccable, wealthy Miss Pride of Boston, Sonie Marburg, daughter of poor immigrants, has her dream come true. Sonie learns Miss Pride’s world is not as simple or as superior as she had imagined. Despite some ambivalence and a sense that the price of order and peace may be high (paid for, perhaps, by a loss of spontaneity and ‘‘normal’’ love), Sonie commits herself to Miss Pride and her well-ordered world. Freudian overtones suggest Sonie’s choice is unfortunate, but at the same time, Stafford conveys well the dearth of options women have to shape their lives. Although some critics consider the prose uneven, Boston Adventure was well-received and remains in print. Stafford’s most successful novel, The Mountain Lion (1947), set partly in a middle class home in Covina and partly in the rougher, simpler atmosphere of a Colorado cattle ranch, is primarily the story of Ralph Fawcett’s coming of age. Traditional in its insistence that entering the male adult world requires courage, skill, and loss of innocence, The Mountain Lion is also the story of Ralph’s sister Molly’s failure to achieve initiation, of her refusal to accept realities of the flesh or tolerate adult compromise with banality. Thus the book ultimately resists the traditional simplicities of initiation, revealing certain mindless aspects of the male adult world and the fact that in such a world females must be ruthlessly excluded and may even be sacrificed. The Catherine Wheel (1952) tells of the strength, order, and beauty—as well as of the isolation, jealousy, guilt, and fear— engendered by unrequited love. Stafford explores two kinds of disappointed love: between men and women, and between friends. This is also a story of delayed maturity, painfully achieved only after the protagonists realize those they love are unworthy. Although the novel has been criticized because it is stylized and overly populated with grotesques, it retains the power to charm and to raise uncomfortable questions about the value of requited and unrequited love. Stafford contributed short stories to a wide range of magazines, particularly to the New Yorker, and published several collections. Collected Stories (1969) contains most of the short fiction she published from 1945 through 1968. In 1970 it received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The stories are arranged in four geographic groupings, dealing generally with Americans abroad, the New England area, the West, and Manhattan. Stafford considers most frequently the lonely—those few with strength to carve narrow places for themselves and those who fail even at this, strangers in strange lands, physically or spiritually isolated or trapped in hollow social rituals with people who are sometimes thoughtless and cruel. Most effective are the stories set in Adams, Colorado: to these Stafford brings not only impressive narrative skill but also a warmth, range of tone, and richness of observation not so apparent elsewhere in her work. Such a story is ‘‘The Tea Time of Stouthearted Ladies,’’ which gives us middle class women down on their luck and making the best of it; another is ‘‘In the Zoo,’’ which gives us a longer perspective on the lives of the sensitive children and adolescents Stafford so successfully draws.
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In evaluating Stafford’s achievement in Collected Stories, one may also evaluate her general achievement, which is considerable. Although she was criticized for some preciousness and for including selections that seem closer to sketches than stories, she was rightly praised by the Pulitzer Committee for ‘‘her range in subject, scene and mood’’ and for her ‘‘mastery of the short story form.’’ She achieves here, as in much of her work, what she argued writers should try for: the vivid presentation of truth without moral judgement. OTHER WORKS: Children Are Bored on Sunday (1953). The Interior Castle (1953). The Lion and the Carpenter (1962). Elphi, the Cat with the High I.Q. (1962). Bad Characters (1964). A Mother in History (1966). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Avila, W., Jean Stafford: A Comprehensive Bibliography (1983). Goodman, C. M., Jean Stafford: The Savage Heart (1990). Hulbert, A., The Interior Castle: The Art and Life of Jean Stafford (1992). Roberts, D., Jean Stafford: A Biography (1988). Ryan, M., Innocence and Estrangement in the Fiction of Jean Stafford (1987). Walsh, M. E. W. Jean Stafford (1985). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Criticism (1962, 1967, 1975). SAQ 61 (Autumn 1962). Southern Review 9 (Summer 1973). SR (Summer 1969). Studies in the Novel (Fall 1976). TriQ (Winter 1973). WAL (1973). Writer (Spring 1955). —PHYLLIS FRANKLIN
STANTON, Elizabeth Cady Born 12 November 1815, Johnstown, New York; died 26 October 1902, New York, New York Daughter of Daniel and Margaret Livingston Cady; married Henry Brewster Stanton, 1840; children: seven Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the fourth of six children. Her father was a lawyer, politician, and judge. Listening to his clients and reading his law books, she learned at an early age of the injustices women suffer. When the family’s only son died in 1826, she resolved to take his place. She was tutored in Greek by her Presbyterian minister and later studied Latin and mathematics at the Johnstown Academy. She graduated from Emma Willard’s Troy Female Seminary in 1832. A strong advocate of the reforms of the day—temperance, abolition, and women’s rights—she had the word ‘‘obey’’ omitted from the ceremony at her marriage to Henry Brewster Stanton, an antislavery lecturer. On their honeymoon, the couple attended a world antislavery convention in London, where Stanton met Lucretia Mott, a delegate the convention refused to seat because she was a woman. After the European tour, they settled in
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Johnstown, where the first of their seven children was born in 1842. They moved to Boston shortly thereafter and, in 1847, to Seneca Falls, New York. Stanton and Lucretia Mott organized the first convention for women’s rights there in 1848. Stanton was commissioned to draft the Declaration of Principles (later Declaration of Sentiments), in which she included a most controversial resolution demanding suffrage. Stanton met Susan B. Anthony in 1851, and the two formed a very fruitful collaborative friendship which spanned the next half century. Stanton was the writer and speaker whenever possible; Anthony the strategist, organizer, and intrepid traveler. In the years after the Civil War there were increasing divisions in the women’s movement, due partly to differing assessments of priorities. Stanton campaigned against the 14th and 15th Amendments because they did not extend rights to women. This alienated many reformers who argued ‘‘this is the Negro’s hour.’’ In 1868 Stanton and Anthony published a magazine, Revolution, financed by erratic entrepeneur George Francis Train, in which they included his controversial views on economics and labor unions as well as their own radical views on marriage and divorce. In 1869 Stanton and Anthony formed the National Woman Suffrage Association, which Stanton led as president for 21 years. Other reformers, generally more conservative, formed the American Woman Suffrage Association. When the two suffrage associations merged and became the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in 1890, Stanton served as president for two years. In order to finance her children’s education, Stanton spent many years delivering lectures, on subjects such as the education of women and divorce, for the New York Lyceum Bureau. Throughout a 50-year career, she wrote many letters and articles, not only on suffrage but on a wide range of social and political questions affecting women, for feminist and general newspapers. In addition to numerous tracts and pamphlets reprinting her speeches and articles, she published three major works. With Anthony, Stanton edited the first three volumes of the monumental History of Woman’s Suffrage (1881-86), covering the years from 1848 to 1885. Admittedly one-sided, their history contains a rich store of speeches, summarized debates, letters, and evaluations of the early women’s rights conventions, both national and state. Stanton’s most controversial work is The Woman’s Bible (2 vols., 1895-1898, reprinted 1999). Her unorthodox views had been known for years, through essays like ‘‘The Effect of Woman Suffrage on Questions of Morals and Religion,’’ included in pamphlets such as The Christian Church and Women (1881) and Bible and Church Degrade Women (1885). Stanton believed ‘‘whatever the Bible may be made to do in Hebrew or Greek, in plain English it does not exalt and dignify woman.’’ Although she invited a panel of women scholars to assist her, most declined. The bulk of the brief notes on each book are Stanton’s, and the results are eclectic and sketchy. Despite an appeal from Anthony for tolerance of differing opinions, the 1896 national convention of the NAWSA passed a resolution dissociating the organization from the work. Stanton’s autobiography, Eighty Years and More (1898), contains the candid and delightful reminiscences of a woman
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who, at eighty-three, was still trying to expand the frontiers for her sisters. OTHER WORKS: Elizabeth Cady Stanton as Revealed in Her Letters, Diary, and Reminiscences (edited by T. Stanton and H. S. Blatch, 2 volumes, 1922, reprinted 1969). The Elizabeth Cady Stanton-Susan B. Anthony Reader: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches (1992). Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (1997). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Banner, L. W., Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Radical for Women’s Rights (1987). Blatch, H. S., and A. Lutz, Challenging Years: The Memoirs of Harriot Stanton Blatch (1940). Cimbala, P. A., and R. M. Miller, eds., Against the Tide: Women Reformers in American Society (1997). Cimbala, P. A., and R. M. Miller, eds., American Reform and Reformers: A Biographical Dictionary (1996). DuBois, E. C., Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of the Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848-1869 (1978). DuBois, E. C., ed., Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches (1981). Gaylor, A. L., ed., Women Without Superstition: ‘‘No Gods—No Masters’’: The Collected Writings of Women Freethinkers of the 19th and 20th Centuries (1997). Griffith, E., In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1984). Lutz, A., Created Equal (1940), Lutz, A., Susan B. Anthony: Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian (1959). McFadden. M., Golden Cables of Sympathy: The Transatlantic Sources of 19th-Century Feminism (1999). Oakley, M. A. B., Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1972). Strange, L. S., Pragmatism and Radicalism in Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Feminist Advocacy: A Rhetorical Biography (dissertation, 1999). Wagner, S. R., Elizabeth Cady Stanton Through Her Stories (1994). Ward, G. C., Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony: An Illustrated History (1999). Watson, M., Lives of Their Own: Rhetorical Dimensions in Autobiographies of Women Activists (1999). Reference works: Norton Book of American Autobiography (1999). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —NANCY A. HARDESTY
STEEL, Danielle Born 14 August 1947, New York, New York. Daughter of John and Norma Stone Schuelein-Steel; married Claude-Eric Lazard, 1967 (divorced 1975); Danny Zugelder, 1975 (divorced 1978); William Toth, 1978 (divorced); John Traina, 1981 (divorced 1997); Thomas Perkins, 1998 (separated 1999); children: five daughters, four sons (one deceased). The life of Danielle Steel, an enormously popular author throughout the 1980s and 1990s, has developed like the plot of
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one of her novels. As the only child of wealthy parents, Steel was born in 1947 in New York, New York. She lived with her father after her parents divorced when she was seven but had what she describes as a lonely childhood, with most nurturing coming from relatives and servants. She spent her childhood and teenage years in Paris and New York and graduated from the Lycée Français at fourteen. She entered New York’s Parsons School of Design but left soon after because of a stomach ulcer. Instead, she studied at New York University from 1963 to 1967. Steel’s first marriage began at age eighteen with a wealthy French banker, Claude-Eric Lazard. Money wasn’t a problem, but Steel grew bored after several years and insisted on finding a job. A public relations firm in Manhattan hired her as vice president of public relations, where she stayed from 1968 to 1971. In 1973 she began working as a copywriter for Grey Advertising but not before writing her first novel, Going Home. Dell published it as a paperback in 1973 with moderate sales. During these years, Steel’s marriage to Lazard was ending, and she more seriously turned to writing. It took five rejected novels, however, before Passion’s Promise (1977) changed her fortune. Ironically, this novel’s plot, featuring a socialite who falls for an ex-convict, mirrors her own experience in 1975: while visiting another inmate at a prison in Vacaville, California, Steel met and fell in love with Danny Zugelder. They were married that year inside the prison while he served a sentence for robbery and sexual assault Another four of Steel’s novels were published in the late 1970s: The Promise (1978), Now and Forever (1978), Seasons of Passion (1979), and Summer’s End (1979). The Promise was her first big hit, with sales of over 2,000,000 copies. During these years in her personal life, Steel divorced her second husband and married William Toth, a recovering heroine addict. They were divorced shortly after. Not surprisingly, Steel’s 1981 novel, Remembrance, is about a beautiful woman who marries a heroine addict. Private life for Steel settled down somewhat in 1981 with her marriage to John Traina, but her writing career was just taking off. Both Steel and Traina brought two children to their marriage, and in the coming years they had an additional five. Steel spent time with her family by day but would write for hours every night while they slept. This schedule produced novels at a breakneck speed: 17 works were published between 1981 and 1989. All told, Steel has amassed nearly four dozen bestselling novels during her career thus far, and almost two dozen of those have been adapted to made-for-TV movies. But despite her popularity among readers, critics are still not fond of Steel’s somewhat cookie-cutter approach to plots, which are often not realistic, and her shallow handling of character development. Most of her books center around a glamorous, wealthy woman facing great trials and challenges. While her books do not typically conclude with a storybook ending, they often focus on the growth and personal triumph of the main character. She is credited, however, with artfully weaving romance and often history into the journey of the protagonist. More recently, Steel has strayed from her traditional story lines. She addresses love between siblings in Kaleidoscope (1987)
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and No Greater Love (1991), and chooses a male lead in Fine Things (1987) and Daddy (1989). She focuses on more realistic situations in some novels: Mixed Blessings (1992) deals with issues of infertility, Accident (1994) shows how one family copes with their teenage daughter’s serious car accident, and The Gift (1994) tells of a 1950s family that must deal with the loss of their daughter but welcomes an unwed mother into their home. Steel’s other writing ventures include two series of books for children, which actually began as a project for her own children, a collection of her poetry written during the 1970s, and coauthorship of the nonfiction work, Having a Baby (1984). Steel’s personal life again took a rocky turn in 1994 with the publication of an unauthorized biography, the release of which she fought unsuccessfully in court. Her marriage to Traina ended within two years, in part because of the embarrassing revelations in the biography (many of which Steel denies are true). Further heartbreak struck with the suicide of Steel’s 19-year-old son Nicholas, who struggled with manic depression throughout his childhood and teenage years. It was during this difficult time that she was charged with plagiarism by another popular writer, and the matter was ended with an out-of-court settlement. To assuage her pain over Nicholas, Steel wrote a book about his life and death called His Bright Light (1998). But just like the women who overcame trials in her novels, Steel’s work has not been diminished by these hurdles and in fact may prove to have been enhanced by them. She has developed a winning formula that draws millions of faithful readers, and by all indications she will continue producing popular novels for years to come. OTHER WORKS: The Ring (1980). Loving (1980). Palomino (1981). To Love Again (1981). Love Poems: Danielle Steel (1981, abridged edition 1984). Crossings (1982). Once in a Lifetime (1982). A Perfect Stranger (1982). Changes (1983). Thurston House (1983). Full Circle (1984). Secrets (1985). Family Album (1985). Amando (1985). Wanderlust (1986). Zoya (1988). Star (1989). Martha’s Best Friend (1989). Martha’s New Daddy (1989). Martha’s New School (1989). Max and the Baby-Sitter (1989). Max’s Daddy Goes to the Hospital (1989). Max’s New Baby (1989). Martha’s New Puppy (1990). Max Runs Away (1990). Message from Nam (1990). Max and Grandma and Grandpa Winky (1991). Martha and Hilary and the Stranger (1991). Heartbeat (1991). Freddie’s Trip (1992). Freddie’s First Night Away (1992). Freddie’s Accident (1992). Freddie and the Doctor (1992). Jewels (1992). Vanished (1993). Wings (1994). Five Days in Paris (1995). Lightning (1995). Malice (1996). Silent Honor (1996). The Ranch (1997). Special Delivery (1997). The Ghost (1997). The Long Road Home (1998). The Klone and I (1998). Mirror Image (1998). Bittersweet (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: CA Online (6 Apr. 1999). DISCovering Authors Online (7 Apr. 1999). Entertainment Weekly (20 Dec. 1996). SATA 66 (1991). Twentieth-Century Romance and Historical Writers (1994). —CARRIE SNYDER
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women returned to Paris and opened their apartment to American soldiers. Stein died in 1946, after an operation for cancer.
Born 13 February 1874, Allegheny, Pennsylvania; died 27 July 1946, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France Daughter of Daniel and Amelia Keyser Stein; life partner Alice B. Toklas
The range of her work is great, and her innovations in style make strict classifications difficult and misleading. She wrote poems, plays, novels, autobiography, theory, and criticism; and, in addition, she created new kinds of works, such as the ‘‘portraits.’’
Gertrude Stein was the last of seven children. Her father was an intense, restless, argumentative man who moved his family about Europe during her early years, before settling in Oakland, California. The death in 1888 of her mother, who came from a well-to-do German-Jewish family of artistic and mercantile accomplishment, plunged Stein into a painful, lonely adolescence. Her father’s death three years later left her with a sense of release from firm restraint. Her principal companion as a child and until she was well into her thirties was her brother, Leo, a brilliant but erratic lifelong student of the arts. In 1893 Stein enrolled in the Harvard Annex (renamed Radcliffe College the following year). She studied under Hugo Münsterberg in the Harvard Psychological Laboratory and with William James. Her college compositions, collected by Rosalind Miller, exhibit her passionate temperament and also her insecurity. She published a number of technical papers while at Harvard, including one with fellow student Leon Solomons, reporting their joint study of automatic responses. The behaviorist psychologist B. F. Skinner believes her writing style is in essence automatic writing and rooted in her undergraduate research experience. At James’s prompting, Stein went on to Johns Hopkins Medical School in 1897. There she completed two satisfactory years, but then became less disciplined in her work and did not receive her medical degree. She did research in neurology, lived in London and New York, and then joined Leo in Paris at 27, rue de Fleurus, the site of her now legendary salon. Under Leo’s guidance, she began to collect modern art. Her friendship with Picasso began in 1905; the following year, she sat for her portrait. In 1907 Alice B. Toklas arrived in Paris, and the two women soon established the love relationship that would endure for the remainder of their lives. In 1909 Toklas joined Stein at the rue de Fleurus and became a counter to Leo’s vociferous disparagement of Stein’s writing. Gertrude and Leo formally separated in 1913, with the women staying on at the rue de Fleurus. Except for a visit to America in 1934 and 1935, Stein spent the rest of her life in Europe, mostly in France. Between 1916 and 1919, Stein and Toklas did war-relief work for the American Fund for French Wounded, and Stein was awarded the Médaille de la Reconnaissance in 1922 for this work. Following the war, Stein’s studio became a haven for expatriate American writers and continued to be a showcase for abstract painters. In the 1930s, her reputation grew, especially with the extensive promotion of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933, reissued several times, most recently in 1993). She and Toklas spent much of World War II in the French countryside, where their fellow villagers protected them as Jews during the Nazi Occupation. Late in 1944, the two
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Her first full-length work charts the dynamics of a lesbian love triangle. Q. E. D. was written in 1903 and published posthumously in 1950 as Things as They Are. Adele, the principal character, is modeled in Stein’s own image, and the plot is patterned after her thwarted love affair at medical school. The novel is largely realistic, with an established set of characters and a sequential plot line. Stein is most concerned with the revelation of character through plot and believes character determines events. In this respect, she differs from contemporary naturalistic and realistic writers and their concern with the effects of deterministic forces external to the individual. She introduces a notion essential to her theory of character, the notion of ‘‘personal time,’’ by which she means the integral patterning of response and event transcending any single response of the individual to experience, and which is unique to that individual. Written between 1903 and 1911 but not published until 1925 (reprinted 1995), The Making of Americans; or, the History of a Family’s Progress is Stein’s most voluminous and possibly most accomplished prose work. Her original intention was to write a history of every American ‘‘who ever can or is or was or will be living,’’ but her goal changed in the course of writing the novel. It begins in the realistic mode, with attention to delineation of time, place, and character, but swiftly becomes an autobiographical record in which she meditates on partially transformed aspects of her past and the movement of her consciousness at the moment of composition. Stein seeks to express the ‘‘bottom nature’’—that rhythmic movement of consciousness that is what one essentially is, that makes up one’s identity. As a consequence, the work becomes increasingly abstract, for narrative is abandoned and associative patterning determines the ordering of word and phrase and sentence. Three Lives (1909, 1990) contains three stories of lowerclass women. The heroines of ‘‘The Good Anna’’ and ‘‘The Gentle Lena’’ are lightly sketched, flat characters. ‘‘Melanctha,’’ the most accomplished work of Three Lives, represents a great change and advance in Stein’s style. Ostensibly, ‘‘Melanctha’’ concerns the relationship between a young mulatto woman and a black doctor; the fairly sympathetic portrayal of black characters is remarkable for the time. The work also concerns the same love triangle Stein had written of earlier. Now the focus is on Jeff Campbell who shares the cerebral, bourgeois quality of Stein’s alter ego Adele in Q. E. D.; Melanctha, a vibrant, sensual woman corresponds to Adele’s beloved. Stein later contended the detailed and complex characterization was the result of writing in the spirit of a Cézanne portrait, for she accords substantial attention to each aspect of her characters’ composition. She was praised for using sentence forms that reflect her characters’ mode of dealing with reality. For example, compound declarative sentences, replete
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with participial modifiers, represent Campbell’s habitual recoiling from experience into endless rumination. During the years from 1908 to 1913, Stein wrote one- to three-page prose ‘‘portraits’’ of her friends and acquaintances. The portraits were published in a variety of places: Alfred Stieglitz published ‘‘Picasso’’ and ‘‘Matisse’’ in Camera Work (1912); many were included in Portraits and Prayers (1934). In far shorter works than ‘‘Melanctha,’’ Stein continues her study of how sentence forms can express character. The portraits have two prominent stylistic features: they contain repeated phrases and clauses and are lyrical. Repetition illustrates a character’s essential rhythm and thus portrays the essential self. The portraits are helpful in charting the increasing abstraction of Stein’s style, the change from the minimal narrative and direct characterization of Three Lives to the hermetic style of Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms (1914, 1991). Instead of portraying the character of others, in the latter she meditates on her own individual mode of perceiving and reacting to experience. Virtually without referents and narrative, Tender Buttons is unified by a single consciousness. In each of three parts (‘‘Objects,’’ ‘‘Food,’’ and ‘‘Rooms’’), Stein meditates on some element—a thing, a foodstuff, her role in society. It is, as Weinstein puts it, ‘‘a master score of phenomenology and psychology, naiveté and wisdom, nonsense and sense.’’ Stein’s early plays, some of which are included in Geography and Plays (1922), use conventional dramatic elements in an idiosyncratic way to call attention to their mere conventionality. ‘‘Counting Her Dresses,’’ for example, contains numerous ‘‘parts’’ and ‘‘acts’’ randomly assigned; most have one line, only one has three. Yet the subject is fairly accessible: the eccentricities, frailties, and vanities of women who identify with their outward appearance. Composition as Explanation (1926) builds on the substance of talks Stein addressed to the literary societies of Oxford and Cambridge about her own work and that of other avant-garde writers and artists. The central concepts are the nature of composition, the necessary ugliness of masterpieces, and the continuous present. By ‘‘composition,’’ she means both the world as a set of phenomena perceived in any moment of time and the expression of this perception in a work of art. The artist creates an impression of what is seen in her time, but because her realization is far more sensitive and acute than that of others, her work is termed ugly by contemporaries. The greater the masterpiece, the more surely it will be judged ugly. Only in the future will the validity and beauty of such a work be established. The artist is, then, very much in and of her time, while her public lags behind. Such a theory served Stein’s own minimal reputation in 1926. Operas and Plays (1932) contains works spanning the years 1913 to 1931, including Stein’s best-known opera, Four Saints in Three Acts (1927), for which Virgil Thomson composed the music. It deals with the condition of being a saint—of being constant in faith, of sustaining internal balance, of knowing one’s identity clearly and truly. Like Stein’s other dramatic pieces, it
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treats dramatic conventions in an unconventional manner. There are not four saints, but many; there are not three acts, but many; there is no identifiable setting, no external plot development. The setting is a state of mind, the plot a meditation on being. The religious significance of many lines has been explicated by critics, but the religiosity is not doctrinal. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is Stein’s most popular work and also her most stylistically accessible. By writing as if she were Toklas, she distances herself from her material and creates her own legend, and she takes advantage of a certain latitude with the truth allowed by the semifictional mode that results from her innovative use of narrative voice. It remains unclear to what degree Toklas herself contributed to the work’s composition and editing. Stein recounts with sympathy and wit Toklas’s life in San Francisco and arrival in Paris in 1907, relates her own early years (not necessarily accurately), and then treats the women’s lives in Paris. The years before World War II are recalled with delight; the war and its aftermath as if in shadow. Her treatment of fellow artists is frequently severe and vituperative. It prompted the ‘‘Testimony Against Gertrude Stein’’ published by Eugene and Marie Jolas (in Transition in 1935) and signed by Braque, Matisse, and others who contend Stein understood very little of what was going on around her. Lectures in America (1935) is Stein’s theoretical explanation and justification of her work. It is fairly straightforward, highly egocentric, and thoroughly charming. Her assessment of her place in the history of literature must be looked at in the light of her intense sense of self-importance, but the lectures are significant because in them she sets up the critical framework (relating her writing to the goals of cubist painters) that is the most frequent means of explaining her style. The Geographical History of America; or, The Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind (1936) is Stein’s formal treatise on the nature and operation of consciousness. She distinguishes between the two major aspects of consciousness: human nature and human mind. Human nature is the agent of individual perception; it is bound to the sensible world and considers the concepts it creates to be reality. From human nature arise notions of past and future time that limit one’s self-awareness. ‘‘What is the use of being a little boy if you are growing up to be a man,’’ she writes, and by this she means that notions of time and identity limit the individual by diverting attention from the experience of the present. Human mind, for Stein, takes as its province abstract thought and has knowledge of the rhythm that underlies and organizes all experience, independent of individual perception. The artist who is aware of human nature—and there are few such besides herself, Stein believes—creates the finest work. Everybody’s Autobiography (1937, 1993) was intended to capitalize on the interest in Stein’s work that The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and her 1934-35 visit to America had generated. It recounts her experiences as a visitor to America after an absence of 30 years. The general subjects are the American character, the American landscape, people she met there, and the production of Four Saints in Three Acts. Throughout, her overriding concern is with who she is. She seems to have suffered a substantial identity
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crisis when she finally achieved an audience and is here moving back inside herself to separate out the essential Stein from the public Stein In The World Is Round (1939), Stein puts the traditional fairytale motif of individuation to her own use in a story for children. She recounts the experiences of two children, Rose and Willie, who seem to be projections of dual aspects of one self. The final union of Rose and Willie in marriage seems to represent knowledgeable self-acceptance gained through experience. The story may also be Stein’s treatment of partners—sister and brother, woman and lover—which were essential to her own developing sense of identity. The tone of the work is quite different from her other work: it is wistful, even sad, although there are humorous moments. Wars I Have Seen (1945), begun in 1942, is a journal of living in an occupied land and owes much to her friend Mildred Aldrich’s work On the Edge of the War Zone (1917), written in similar circumstances during World War I. The subject matter is highly accessible, despite the lengthy sentences and absence of section headings. Of particular interest is Stein’s almost exclusive focus on domestic affairs and her acceptance of the Vichy regime. Her placid attitude may be the result of her age—she was then seventy—her consistently conservative political views, and her lifelong need to bring events within the spectrum of her personal philosophy, often at the expense of the truth. Brewsie and Willie (1946), Stein’s last novel, demonstrates her sure ear for dialect and slang. Brewsie and Willie are polar characters. Brewsie is a thoughtful, restrained young man absorbed in the meaning of events. Stein identifies with his views in an addendum to the book. Willie is unconcerned with issues, loud, boisterous, and critical of others’ seriousness. Their portraits are intended to represent American types and Stein’s contention that Americans had become too rich and too self-satisfied. Although Stein rarely concerned herself with politics, she was reactionary for her time: a 19th-century rugged individualist at sea in the technological 20th century. Stein’s 43-year career was as prolific as it was long. It is however, her lot to be remembered primarily for her support and encouragement of other artists, and neglected for her own accomplishments as a writer. Undoubtedly, Stein’s patronage of abstract painters encouraged and supported Picasso, Matisse, and others in their work. Her friendship with and close reading of such writers as Ernest Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson clearly affected the direction of their writing. Her own work was read by American and European writers, and the simplicity and purity of her language was well appreciated by a number of them. Stein’s salon was a site of intellectual ferment at a time when Americans and Europeans were forging an artistic community in Paris. Still, Stein was accomplished as a writer herself, and it is time that increased critical attention is paid her and the measure of her innovative work made. OTHER WORKS: Useful Knowledge (1928). Lucy Church Amiably (1930). How to Write (1931, 1995). Matisse, Picasso, and Gertrude Stein, with Two Shorter Stories (1933). Narration (1935).
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Picasso (1938). Paris, France (1940, 1996). Ida: A Novel (1941). Four in America (1947). Blood on the Dining Room Floor (1948). The Gertrude Stein Reader and Three Plays (1948). Last Operas and Plays (1949). The Unpublished Works of Gertrude Stein (8 vols., 1951-58). A Novel of Thank You (1958, 1994). Gertrude Stein: Writings and Lectures, 1909-1945 (1967). Gertrude Stein on Picasso (edited by E. Burns, 1970). Fernhurst, Q. E. D., and Other Early Writings (1971). Sherwood Anderson/Gertrude Stein: Correspondence and Personal Essays (1972). A Book Concluding with As a Wife Has a Cow: A Love Story (1973). Reflections on the Atomic Bomb (1973). How Writing Is Done (1974). In Savoy; or, ‘‘Yes’’ Is for Yes for a Very Young Man (1977; produced, 1949). Really Reading Gertrude Stein: A Selected Anthology with Essays by Judy Grahn (1989). A Stein Reader (1993). Stanzas in Meditation (1994). The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder (1996). History, or Messages from History (1997). Writings, 1903-1932 (1998). Writings, 1932-1946 (1998). Baby Precious Always Shines: Selected Love Notes Between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas (1999). The papers of Gertrude Stein are housed in several locations, including the the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley; Beinecke Library of Yale University; and the Humanities Research Library of the University of Texas at Austin. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Alfrey, S., The Sublime of Intense Sociability: Emily Dickinson, H. D., and Gertrude Stein (1999). Berry, E. E., Curved Thought and Textual Wandering: Gertrude Stein’s Postmodernism (1992). Bloom, H., American Women Fiction Writers, Volume Three, 1900-1960 (1998). Bowers, J. P., Gertrude Stein (1993). Bridgman, R., Gertrude Stein in Pieces (1970). Brinnin, J. M., The Third Rose: Gertrude Stein and Her World (1959). Gallup, D., ed., The Flowers of Friendship: Letters Written to Gertrude Stein (1953). Galvin, M. E., Queer Poetics: Five Modernist Women Writers (1999). Gygax, F., Gender and Genre in Gertrude Stein (1998). Hobhouse, J., Everybody Who Was Anybody: A Biography of Gertrude Stein (1975). Hoffman, F., Gertrude Stein (University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers, 1961). Hoffman, M., The Development of Abstractionism in the Writings of Gertrude Stein (1965). Hoffman, M., Gertrude Stein (1976). Klaich, D., Woman + Woman: Attitudes Towards Lesbianism (1974). Knapp, B. L., Gertrude Stein (1990). Kostelanetz, R., Gertrude Stein Advanced: An Anthology of Criticism (1991). Marren, S. M., ‘‘Passing for American: Establishing American Identity in the Work of James Weldon Johnson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nella Larsen and Gertrude Stein’’ (thesis, 1995). Mellow, J. R., Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein & Company (1974). Miller, R., Gertrude Stein: Form and Intelligibility (1949). Parini, J., ed., The Norton Book of American Autobiography (1999). Quartermain, P., Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe (1992). Riddel, J. N., The Turning Word: American Literary Modernism and Continental Theory (1996). Ruddick, L. C., Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis (1990). Simon, L., Gertrude Stein Remembered (1995). Souhami, D., Gertrude and Alice (1999). Sprigge, E., Gertrude Stein: Her Life and Work (1957). Stewart, A., Gertrude Stein and the Present (1950). Sutherland, D., Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her Work (1951). Toklas, A. B.,
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Staying on Alone: Letters of Alice B. Toklas (1973). Toklas, A. B., What Is Remembered (1963). Watson, S., Prepare for Saints: Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, and the Mainstreaming of American Modernism (1998). Wilson, R. A., Gertrude Stein: A Bibliography (1994). Wineapple, B., Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein (1997 1996). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Poetry Criticism (1997). Other references: American Literature (1973, 1996). American Scholar (1998). Ascent (Autumn 1958). Biography (Spring 1999). College Literature (June 1996). Forum for Modern Language Studies (1996). Massachusetts Review (Fall 1997). Midstream: A Monthly Jewish Review (June 1996). Modern Fiction Studies (1996). NYRB (8 April 1971). South Dakota Review (Fall 1997). —JANIS TOWNSEND, UPDATED BY NELSON RHODES
STEINEM, Gloria Born 25 March 1934, Toledo, Ohio Daughter of Leo and Ruth Nuneviller Steinem As a child, Gloria Steinem moved around from city to city in a house trailer while her father Leo, who ‘‘never wore a hat and never had a job,’’ looked for work. Her parents divorced when she was ten, and Steinem became the sole caretaker of her mentally ill mother. As a teenager, Steinem was an avid reader who dreamed of ‘‘dancing [her] way out of Toledo,’’ not of following in the footsteps of her pioneer feminist grandmother, Pauline Steinem, who was president of the Ohio Women’s Suffrage Association and one of two U.S. representatives to the 1908 International Council of Women. In her teens Steinem worked part-time dancing for $10 a night at conventions. She left Toledo during her senior year in high school and moved to Washington, D.C., to live with her older sister. Winning an academic scholarship to Smith College, she graduated with a B.A. in government, Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude (1956). Travel in southern India after graduation as a Chester Bowles Asian Fellow helped her develop a lifelong understanding and empathy for oppressed peoples and started her writing career freelancing for Indian newspapers. In India she joined a group called the Radical Humanists and worked as part of a peacemaking team during the caste riots. Her first monograph, The Thousand Indias, a guidebook for the government in New Delhi, appeared in 1957. When Steinem returned to the U.S. in 1958, filled with an ‘‘enormous sense of urgency about the contrast between wealth and poverty,’’ she became the codirector of the controversial Independent Research Service, an offshoot of the National Student Association. Steinem moved to New York in 1960 to establish herself as a journalist. Her first job was as a writer of photo captions and celebrity liaison for Help!, a political satire magazine. In 1962 her
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first bylined article, a study of the contraceptive revolution called ‘‘The Moral Disarmament of Betty Co-ed,’’ appeared in Esquire. Her second monograph, The Beach Book (1963), a coffee-table semibook filled with excerpts from literature about beaches, featured suggestions of things to do while sunbathing, beach fantasies, and a foil jacket that could double as a sun reflector. ‘‘I Was a Playboy Bunny,’’ written in 1963 for Show magazine, helped launch Steinem’s freelance writing career and celebrity status by bringing her assignments on fashion, culture, celebrities, and books from such mass circulation magazines as Glamour, McCall’s, and Look and from the New York Times. The essay, in the form of a diary, recounts Steinem’s undercover experiences working in the New York Playboy Club, waiting on tables with a Kleenex-stuffed bosom. It is full of the beginnings of her feminist consciousness, the recognition of power differences, and illustrations of indignities suffered by the body. Looking back, Steinem refers to this work as ‘‘schizophrenic.’’ In 1968 she began taking on more serious writing assignments, becoming a cofounder, contributing editor, and political columnist for New York magazine. After attending a 1969 hearing on illegal abortions, organized by the radical feminist group Redstockings, Steinem wrote ‘‘After Black Power, Women’s Liberation,’’ her first openly feminist essay, which won her the Penney-Missouri Journalism award. Having come to believe that only a magazine controlled by women would advance women’s issues, in 1972 Steinem was a cofounder, with Pat Carbine and others, of Ms., the first feminist mass circulation magazine. Steinem’s first major collection of articles, essays, and diary entries, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (1983), chronicles her 20-year writing journey from prefeminist pretty ‘‘girl reporter,’’ who never thought her work was good enough, to feminist editor of Ms. and spokeswoman-icon of American women’s liberation. The collection begins with ‘‘I Was a Playboy Bunny,’’ which was adapted for an ABC television movie, A Bunny’s Tale, in 1985 starring Kirstie Alley. Outrageous Acts also includes pieces on politicking with McGovern, McCarthy, Kennedy, King, and Chavez, the contradictory messages of the right-wing, the institution of marriage, the media, and the comical ‘‘If Men Could Menstruate.’’ Steinem shows us where feminism has been and encourages women to network, find their sisters, and perform outrageous acts in order to advance the liberation of women and other powerless groups. Her personal journey to feminism is accompanied by empathic sketches of a diverse group of notable women that includes Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Onassis, Alice Walker, Pat Nixon, and Linda (Lovelace) Marchiano, and a moving tribute to Steinem’s mother in ‘‘Ruth’s Song.’’ Like herself, the women Steinem profiles are both victims and survivors, sexual objects and, in most cases, feminist protagonists. Steinem’s biography of Marilyn Monroe, Marilyn: Norma Jean (1986), expands on her profiles of emblematic women. In a series of essays, Steinem provides a feminist and psychological portrait of a multidimensional sex goddess who is a prisoner of her neglected childhood and of an age characterized by sexual exploitation. Steinem explores her own identification with the actress,
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remembering that as a teenager in 1953 she walked out of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in embarrassment at the ‘‘whispering, simpering, big-breasted child-woman’’ who dared to be just as ‘‘vulnerable and unconfident’’ as she was. Focusing on the private, inner life of Norma Jean, not the mythical, public Marilyn Monroe, Steinem’s sensitive portrayal weaves together the story of a neglected, abused, unparented child with a vulnerable woman, an ‘‘interchangeable pretty girl,’’ living behind a mask of sexuality, struggling for independence, wanting only to please others but longing to be taken seriously. Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem (1992) is also a modern parable of a woman whose image of herself is very distant from the image others had of her. Steinem employs her autobiographical account of the search for identity and self-worth to help explore internal barriers to women’s equality. She takes the reader from a rat-infested Toledo home where she is her mentally ill mother’s caretaker to a television studio where her ‘‘imposter’’ self has become the mother of a movement. While supporting her argument that inner strength and self-esteem are the bases of liberation with extensive summaries of psychological research and exegeses of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, she also makes central the voices of diverse people: a lesbian, a man-junkie, a Cherokee Indian, and others whose comparable journeys of personal growth are linked to social activism. She associates women’s loss of self-esteem with such factors as stereotypical gender roles, a preoccupation with romantic love, and male-imposed standards of female beauty. Steinem encourages both men and women to find their inner child, unlearn, reparent themselves, and imagine a future self in order to begin their own positive personal and social change. Moving Beyond Words (1994) is another of Steinem’s essay collections, this time containing three original essays, the wicked satire ‘‘What If Freud Were Phyllis? or, The Watergate of the Western World’’; ‘‘Revaluing Economics’’; and ‘‘Doing Sixty’’; and three that were recastings of articles that had originally appeared in Ms., ‘‘The Strongest Woman in the World’’ (on body-builder Bev Francis); ‘‘The Masculinization of Wealth’’ (an analysis of the position of wealthy women); and the much-reprinted and frequently taught indictment, ‘‘Sex, Lies, and Advertising.’’ While her earlier books were and are still bestsellers, Moving Beyond Words has not enjoyed this success, though the book continues to demonstrate Steinem’s intellectual acumen, her writing ability, and her admirable candor. ‘‘Doing Sixty,’’ written as its author enters her seventh decade, identifies herself as ‘‘a nothing-to-lose, take-no-shit older woman,’’ and exults, ‘‘I’m looking forward to trading moderation for excess, defiance for openness, and planning for the unknown. . . . More and more, there is only the full, glorious, alive-in-the-moment, don’t-give-a-damn yet caring-for-everything sense of the right now.’’ Steinem was chosen by the World Almanac as one of the Twenty-five Most Influential Women in America for nine consecutive years and has received the Front Page, Clarion, and ACLU Bill of Rights awards, the United Nations’ Ceres Medal, and the first Doctorate of Human Justice awarded by Simmons
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College (1973). In 1978 she studied the impact of feminism on the premises of political theory as a Woodrow Wilson Scholar at the Smithsonian Institution. Arguing that ‘‘we teach what we need to learn and write what we need to know,’’ she has been credited with inventing the phrase ‘‘reproductive freedom’’ and popularizing the usage of ‘‘Ms.’’ to address women. Her nearly constant travel as a lecturer and feminist organizer (nearly two decades of plane travel every week is documented) and her constant presence in connection with Ms. magazine since its founding have earned her the distinction of being, probably, the leading American feminist of her time, although throughout she has also been one of the most controversial—and, assuredly, much misunderstood—of famous Americans. She has served as a board member or adviser to the Ms. Foundation for Women, the National Women’s Political Caucus, Voters for Choice, Women’s Action Alliance, and the Coalition of Labor Union Women. At her sixtieth birthday party, organized by friends and other famous feminist leaders, a ‘‘Gloria fund’’ was established at the Ms. Foundation, which raised more than $2,000,000 in two months. The object was, according to Marlo Thomas, to enable Steinem ‘‘to continue doing what she always did—giving away every cent of every dollar she had.’’ Bella Abzug, the former U.S. congresswoman, said about Steinem, ‘‘She’s served as our most vivid expression of our hopes and demands. She’s our pen and our tongue and our heart. She’s Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony and Emma Goldman all rolled up into one.’’ There have been several biographies of Steinem, one for children, and, most notable, The Education of a Woman: The Life of Gloria Steinem (1995) by Carolyn G. Heilbrun (which Steinem authorized), and Gloria Steinem: Her Passions, Politics, and Mystique (1997) by Sydney Ladensohn Stern. Assessing Steinem’s impact, Stern concluded her book by saying, ‘‘Bella [Abzug] and Stan Pottinger and Marie Wilson and so many others inside and outside the movement understand [Steinem’s] place in history. Feminism’s second wave had better theorists. There were more graceful writers. There were more eloquent speakers. There was no better leader.’’ OTHER WORKS: The Steinem papers are in the Sophia Smith Collection and College Archives at Smith College BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cohen, M., The Sisterhood: The Inside Story of the Women’s Movement and the Leaders Who Made It Happen (1988). Daffron, C., Gloria Steinem (1988). Davis, F., Moving the Mountain: The Women’s Movement in America since 1960 (1991). Diamonstein, B., Open Secrets: Ninety-Four Women in Touch with Our Time (1970). Echols, A., Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975 (1989). Gilbert, L., and G. Moore, Particular Passions: Talks with Women Who Have Shaped Our Times (1981). Heilbrun, C. G., The Education of a Woman: The Life of Gloria Steinem (1995). Henry, S., and E. Taitz, One Woman’s Power: A Biography of Gloria Steinem (juvenile, includes afterword by Steinem, 1987). Lazo, C., Gloria Steinem:
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Feminist Extraordinaire (1998). Stern, S. L., Gloria Steinem: Her Passions, Politics, and Mystique (1997). Reference works: CANR 28 (1990). CBY (1988). CLC 63 (1991). Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century Journalists (1986). FC (1990). MTCW (1991). Other references: Booklist (15 Sept. 1995). Boston Globe (17 Jan. 1973, 15 Jan. 1992, 22 Jan. 1992). Chicago Tribune (20, 22 Jan. 1992). Christianity and Crisis (14 Dec. 1992). Commentary (May 1992). Humanist (May/June 1987). LAT (3 Feb. 1992). LJ (1 Oct. 1995). Nation (6 Nov. 1995). Newsweek (16 Aug. 1971, 2 Oct. 1995). TLS (8 June 1984). NYT (11 Dec. 1984; 9 Feb. 1995; 9 Oct. 1997; 2 Nov. 1997; 14, 19 Dec. 1997; 25 Jan. 1998; 3 May 1998; 22, 24, 25, 27, 28 Mar. 1998; 11 Oct. 1998). NYTBR (21 Dec. 1986, 2 Feb. 1992, 10 Sept. 1995). Sewanee Review (Fall 1984). WSJ (6 Mar. 1992). WP (9 Oct. 1983, 12 Jan. 1992). WRB (Dec. 1983, June 1992, Dec. 1995). Yale Review (Winter 1988). —MELISSA KESLER GILBERT, UPDATED BY JOANNE L. SCHWEIK
STENHOUSE, Fanny Born 12 April 1828, St. Heliers, Jersey, England; died date unknown Married T. B. H. Stenhouse, 1850; children: six
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in the Mormon religion in jeopardy, and her husband came to share her doubts. In 1870 Stenhouse and her husband withdrew from the church, and his second wife soon divorced him. While visiting gentile (non-Mormon) friends in New York, Stenhouse was encouraged to write the story of her life in the Mormon church and discuss the institution of polygamy. Stenhouse’s first effort, Exposé of Polygamy in Utah: A Lady’s Life Among the Mormons (1872), was written in a few short days. A small volume, illustrated with woodcuts, the book briefly outlined Stenhouse’s life and presented her arguments against the doctrine of polygamy. Exposé of Polygamy in Utah was a popular book widely read by a population hungry for sensational news of the Mormons’ bizarre practice of polygamy. One of Brigham Young’s wives, Ann Eliza Webb Young, claimed the influence of this book as one reason why she left and later divorced her husband. Stenhouse’s Exposé is an accurate book, less melodramatic than most written in that day and age, and as a result of its popularity, she embarked on a lucrative lecture tour. In 1874 Stenhouse published a second book covering the same issues but in greater detail. The value of Stenhouse’s work rests in her attempt at objectivity on a very controversial subject. The books are significant for the student of Mormon history because of what they reveal about the Mormon missionary system and the role played by English and European converts in the settlement of Utah. —PAULA A. TRECKEL
Little is known of Fanny Stenhouse’s biography except what she recorded in her two books. Stenhouse was one of the younger children of a large English farming family. At the age of fifteen she took a job teaching English at a convent school in France and shortly afterwards became governess to a wealthy French family. At eighteen, Stenhouse was formally engaged to the cousin of her employer, but she gave up all thought of the marriage when, in 1849, she visited England and discovered her family had converted to the Mormon religion. Two weeks later, Stenhouse herself became a convert, and in 1850 she married the Scottish Mormon missionary responsible for her conversion. She had six children. The Stenhouses did missionary work in Switzerland before they migrated in 1855 to New York and in 1859 to Utah. In Salt Lake City, Stenhouse founded and edited the Daily Telegraph, the city’s first daily paper. Tolerant of the Mormon doctrine of plural marriage, Stenhouse became its opponent when it invaded her own home. For 15 years, Stenhouse and her husband had maintained a monogamous marriage. Yet as Stenhouse became more prominent in the community, he succumbed to pressure to meet his religious obligation to take another wife (who bore him two more children). At about the same time her husband was considering taking a third wife, Stenhouse’s eldest daughter became the fourth wife of Brigham Young’s eldest son. Stenhouse began to doubt the divinity of Joseph Smith’s revelation about polygamy; she believed the doctrine was created by Smith to justify his own amorous activities. Stenhouse’s doubts concerning the revelation placed her faith
STEPHENS, Ann (Sophia) Winterbotham Born 30 March 1810, Humphreysville (now Seymour), Connecticut; died 20 August 1886, Newport, Rhode Island Wrote under: Jonathan Slick, Mrs. Ann S. Stephens Daughter of John and Ann Wrigley Winterbotham; married Edward Stephens, 1831; children: two Ann Winterbotham Stephens was the third of 10 children, raised by her stepmother after the death of her own mother. Stephens was educated in local schools in Connecticut. After her marriage, she moved with her husband to Maine, where she edited and contributed to his publication, the Portland Magazine. In 1837 Stephens and her husband moved to New York, where she became active in literary circles and continued to edit and contribute to magazines. Her longest association was with Peterson’s Magazine; she served as an editor, from 1842 to 1853, and contributed numerous serials later published as books. Stephens had two children and contributed significantly to the support of her family. Stephens wrote humorous sketches (High Life in New York, published under the name Jonathan Slick, 1843), thrillers (such as
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Henry Langford; or, The Forged Will, 1847), novels with Indian themes (such as Malaeska: The Indian Wife of the White Hunter, 1860), and, especially, historical romances. Stephens’ romances feature little action and focus instead on long descriptions of female clothing, which appealed to the women who were the primary readers of Peterson’s. Stephens’ stories fit in well with the other contents of the magazine, whose pages were filled with patterns for slippers and children’s clothes and richly colored illustrations of house dresses, walking dresses, carriage dresses, etc. In fact, some passages of Stephens’ stories read like modern advertising copy. The romances also illustrate Stephens’ conception of women. Women are always described externally, as if they appear on a stage. Many of her romances are merely a series of historical tableaux, silent scenes selected from well-known novels or legends set within a frame for an audience to view. The women posture in these serials, posing in the view of others. They are acted upon by others; or they wait for some lover to arrive. The women’s clothes and jewelry conceal their emotions from others. In ‘‘The Pillow of Roses,’’ Mary, Queen of Scots, constantly aware of the prying eyes of others, uses her jewels to conceal her mood. As the magazines which Stephens edited and contributed to were aimed at the upper-class woman, so was her fiction. Although it contained many pictures of poverty, it was a sentimentalized poverty which only served to make her heroines attractive, innocent, and humble. As Peterson’s declared, ‘‘This is emphatically the Magazine for ladies.’’ During her lifetime Stephens was an important writer and editor. Recognized and respected, she had a writing career of over 40 years and was read by the daughters of her original readers. Her work was being gathered into a 23-volume edition at her death in 1886. Today, however, her work can no longer find acceptance.
OTHER WORKS: The Portland Sketchbook (edited by Stephens, 1836). Alice Copley: A Tale of Queen Mary’s Time (1844). David Hunt and Malina Gray (1845). The Diamond Necklace, and Other Tales (1846). The Tradesman’s Boast (1846). The Red Coats; or, The Sack of Unquowa: A Tale of the Revolution (1848). Fashion and Famine (1854). The Ladies’ Complete Guide to Crochet, Fancy Knitting, and Needlework (1854). Zana; or, The Heiress of Clair Hall (1854). Frank Leslie’s Portfolio of Fancy Needlework (edited by Stephens, 1855). The Old Homestead (1855). Myra, the Child of Adoption (1856). The Heiress of Greenhurst: An Autobiography (1857). Mary Derwent (1858). The Works of Mrs. Ann S. Stephens (23 vols., 1859-1886). Ahmo’s Plot; or, The Governor’s Indian Child (1860). Victor Hugo’s Letter on John Brown, with Mrs. Ann S. Stephen’s Reply (1860). Sybil Chase; or, The Valley Ranche: A Tale of California (1861). Esther: A Story of the Oregon Trail (1862). Mahaska: The Indian Princess (1863). The Rejected Wife; or, The Ruling Passion (1863). The Indian Queen (1864). A Pictorial History of the War for the Union (2 vols., 1863-1865). The Wife’s Secret (1864). Silent Struggles (1865).
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The Gold Brick (1866). Double False (1868). Mabel ’s Mistake (1868). The Curse of Gold (1869). Ruby Gray’s Strategy (1869). Wives and Widows; or, The Broken Life (1869). Married in Haste (1870). A Noble Woman (1871). Palaces and Prisons (1871). The Reigning Belle (1872). Lord Hope’s Choice (1873). The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals (A sequel to Lord Hope’s Choice, 1873). Bellehood and Bondage (1874). Bertha’s Engagement (1875). Norston’s Rest (1877). The Lady Mary (1887).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brown, H. R., The Sentimental Novel in America, 1789-1860 (1940). Douglas, A., The Feminization of American Culture (1977). Papashvily, H. W., All the Happy Endings (1956). Stern, M. B., We the Women (1963). Reference works: NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —JULIANN E. FLEENOR
STEPHENS, Margaret Dean See ALDRICH, Bess Streeter
STEPTOE, Lydia See BARNES, Djuna
STERN, Elizabeth G(ertrude Levin) Born 14 February 1889, Skedel, Poland; died 9 January 1954, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Wrote under: Eleanor Morton, Leah Morton, E. G. Stern, Elizabeth Stern, Elizabeth Gertrude Stern Daughter of Aaron and Sarah Rubenstein Levin; married Leon T. Stern, circa 1911 The infant Elizabeth Stern emigrated with her parents in 1890 from Poland to Pittsburgh, where she was raised and educated, graduating from the University of Pittsburgh in 1910. After a year at the New York School of Philanthropy, she married penologist Leon Stern, and began a career that successfully combined marriage and motherhood with social work and writing. Stern was a night school principal in New York and Galveston, supervised welfare work for Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia, and directed two New York settlement houses. A journalist from 1914 to 1937, Stern included features in the New York Times and a regular column in the Philadelphia Inquirer among her accomplishments. In the 1940s she wrote, lectured, and was active in
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many Quaker and philanthropic organizations. She died at sixtyfour after a long illness. Stern’s best works are fictionalized autobiographies that focus on her movement from Polish-Jewish ghetto to American mainstream. Theodore Roosevelt introduced Stern’s first book, My Mother and I (1917), which poignantly describes how education loosens bonds between an immigrant mother and her daughter. While the young protagonist is proud of her achieved status as middle-class housewife, she regrets her mother’s alienation from the world maternal self-sacrifice helped her reach. In I Am a Woman—and a Jew (1926), Stern explores the confrontation between a rebellious daughter and her rabbi father, with the mother as mediator. The first person narrator’s rejection of both orthodox Judaism and feminine domesticity is complicated by a lingering sense of responsibility to both traditions, and inability to escape anti-Semitism and sexism. Stern also used her work experience as raw material for fiction. With her husband, she wrote A Friend at Court (1923), the ‘‘casebook’’ of an idealized female probation officer. The work is marred by a predictable romantic subplot and panegyrics on probation as a social panacea. The middle-aged social worker in When Love Comes to Woman (1929) provides no such pat answers to women involved in unconventional living arrangements; Stern’s ideal is a dual-career marriage promising lifelong friendship. Her telling comparisons between the sexual experimentation of the ‘‘new women’’ of the 1920s and the seriousness of the suffragists of her youth offer insights into important and still-contemporary issues. Family relationships are central to Stern’s other novels. In A Marriage Was Made (1928), a mother’s domination of her daughter thwarts the girl’s promising career by making her too passive to express emotion in her music or life. The mother-daughter theme is also important in Gambler’s Wife (1931), which traces a strong but self-sacrificing woman from her youth in the Arkansas hills, through her elopement with a drifter who repeatedly abandons her, to her last years with her grown, but immature children. Later in life, Stern moved from fiction to essay and biography. A collection of her newspaper columns, Not All Laughter (1937), reveals her consuming interest in relationships, and her version of woman’s true role: the thinking wife, the comrade. Stern wrote biographies of a businesswoman (Memories: The Life of Margaret McAvoy Smith, 1943) and a Quaker inventor (Josiah White: Prince of Pioneers, 1946). In her last book, The Women Behind Gandhi (1953), Stern concentrates on Gandhi’s wife and his Indian and European female disciples, highlighting the women’s rights phase of his movement for India’s full liberation. In her works, Stern accurately accounts the costs and benefits of both the Americanization process and the application of feminist principles to life. Her books may appear dated by their romanticism and frequent concentration upon battles considered long won (particularly on the right of married women to work), but Stern’s emphasis upon the sacrifices involved in family
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relationships complicated by cultural change is of continuing interest, and her perspective as a daughter of immigrants makes her insights especially important.
OTHER WORKS: This Ecstasy (1927).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Baum, C., P. Hyman, and S. Michel, The Jewish Woman in America (1976). Reference works: NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Bookman (Aug. 1917). NYT (8 July 1917, 24 April 1929, 19 Feb. 1928, 12 April 1931, 10 Jan. 1954). SR (18 Dec. 1926, 7 Sept. 1929, 8 Aug. 1953). Survey (15 Oct. 1923, Feb. 1947). —HELEN M. BANNAN
STEWART, Elinore Pruitt Born 1878; died 1933 Wrote under: Elinore P. Stewart, Elinore Rupert Married n.d., widowed; Clyde Stewart, 1909; children: one daughter and three sons (one died young) Almost nothing is known of Elinor Pruitt Stewart’s early life. She was one of six children who were raised by their grandparents after their parents died ‘‘within a year of each other.’’ She grew up in Indian Territory (Oklahoma), married, but lost her first husband in a railroad accident. As a widow with a two-year-old daughter, Jerrine, she went to work in Denver as ‘‘washlady.’’ In 1909 intending to homestead a place for herself and her daughter, Stewart accepted a position as housekeeper for a Wyoming cattle rancher, Clyde Stewart. Stewart filed on the 160 acres adjoining Clyde Stewart’s property but after six weeks as housekeeper she accepted Stewart’s proposal of marriage. They had three sons, the first dying of erysipelas. Stewart never regretted her hasty marriage nor did she give up her determination to ‘‘prove-up’’ her own land without the help of her husband. Stewart’s literary contribution is in the form of letters to Juliet Coney, her former employer in Denver. The letters were first published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1913, and in book form in 1914 as Letters of a Woman Homesteader. A second volume, Letters on an Elk Hunt, was published in 1915 (both were reprinted in 1993). In the foreword of the 1961 edition, Jessamyn West writes that Stewart ‘‘was a born storyteller with a novelist’s eye for those persons and events which have in them the seeds of development. . .which make good narrative possible.’’ The ‘‘stories’’ paint a vivid picture of life on the Wyoming frontier. Stewart’s enjoyment of life and her interest in everything around
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her are revealed in her writing. She was an energetic, adventurous woman who was not afraid of new experiences. She wrote to her friend that ‘‘homesteading is the solution of all poverty’s problems,’’ especially for women. She would like to urge all the ‘‘troops of tired, worried women, . . .scared to death of losing their places to work, who could have plenty to eat, who could have. . .comfortable homes of their own, if they but had the courage and determination to get them’’ homesteading. Stewart’s letters are not only interesting stories; they are the essence of social history.
OTHER WORKS: The Adventures of the Woman Homesteader: The Life and Letters of Elinore Pruitt Stewart (1992).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Dykstra, N. A., ‘‘Eve in the New World Garden: The Autobiographies of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Elinore Pruitt Stewart’’ (thesis, 1992). George, S. K., ‘‘Elinore Pruitt Stewart’’ in By Grit & Grace: Eleven Women Who Shaped the American West (1997). Lindau, S. K., My Blue and Gold Wyoming: The Life and Letters of Elinore Pruitt Stewart (dissertation, 1990). West, J., foreword to Letters of a Woman Homesteader (1961). Other references: Booklist (Spring 1914). Dial (1 July 1914). Nation (16 July 1914). NYT (7 June 1914). Outlook (1 Aug. 1914). Review of Reviews (Aug. 1914). Wisconsin Library Bulletin (July 1914). —JACQUELINE B. BARNHART
STEWART, Maria W. (Miller) Born 1803, Hartford, Connecticut; died 17 December 1879, Washington, D.C. Married James W. Stewart, 1826 (died 1829) Maria W. Stewart was the daughter of black parents whose name was Miller. According to biographical information in the introduction to Meditations from the Pen of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart (1879), Stewart was orphaned at ‘‘five years of age; was bound out in a clergyman’s family.’’ She left this family when she was fifteen and attended ‘‘Sabbath schools’’ until she was twenty. This appears to be the only formal education she acquired though her ‘‘soul thirsted for knowledge.’’ Her marriage in Boston to a navy veteran of the War of 1812 lasted until 1829 when she was widowed. Experiencing a religious conversion in 1830 and making a ‘‘public profession of. . .faith in Jesus Christ’’ in 1831 evidently led to her writing an essay, ‘‘Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality: The Sure Foundation on Which We Must Build,’’ which was printed in tract form in Boston by the young
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abolitionist editor of the Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison. Another essay, ‘‘Meditations from the Pen of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart,’’ was printed by him in 1832. In 1832 and 1833, Stewart gave three public addresses which were subsequently printed in the Liberator (28 April 1832, 17 Nov. 1832, 27 April 1833). Discouraged by the lack of support and disheartened by the criticism of her friends, she gave a farewell speech in September 1833, and moved to New York City where she became involved with a Female Literary Society for black women. She taught school in Manhattan and in Brooklyn until 1852 when she moved to Baltimore, again teaching school there. In 1861 she moved to Washington, D.C., where she organized a school during the Civil War period. Later while working as a matron at the Freedmen’s Hospital in Washington, she claimed a pension under a law passed granting funds to widows of veterans of the War of 1812. Not long before her death, using these funds and again with Garrison’s help, Stewart published Meditations from the Pen of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart, a collection of all her speeches and writings. It appears that Stewart was the first American-born woman to speak in public halls in America. Hers are the only extant speeches, although British-born women had spoken in public and American-born women had spoken in churches, particularly Quaker meetings, before her. All of Stewart’s speeches and essays exhibit certain general characteristics. Most obvious and pervasive is her strongly emotional appeal to Christian virtue. A second characteristic is her appeal to blacks to help themselves; she speaks of the ‘‘great necessity of turning your attention to knowledge and improvement.’’ Her special concern with black women’s importance is evidenced frequently as she cries, ‘‘O ye daughters of Africa, awake, awake.’’ Stung by criticism of her public speaking, in her farewell speech in 1833 Stewart justifies her personal virtue and morals and her public speaking with many historical and Biblical references. These allusions attest to the scope of what must have been largely her ‘‘self-education.’’ In all her speeches, Stewart laments the injustices inflicted on black people, both free and slave, and takes to task white women, addressing them as ‘‘ye fairer sisters.’’ She chides white Americans further, lamenting, ‘‘But how few are there among them that bestow one thought upon the benighted sons and daughters of Africa who have enriched the soil of America with their blood and tears.’’ A dedicated feminist, Stewart was an equally dedicated pacifist. In early speeches she advocates moderation saying, ‘‘Far be it from me to recommend to you, either to kill, burn, or destroy.’’ Later she admonishes her listeners to ‘‘sheath your swords and calm your angry passions.’’ Her strongest appeal for action is that black men ‘‘sign a petition to Congress to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia.’’ Stewart’s early essay, ‘‘Meditations from the Pen of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart,’’ is the most literary in form of her writings. A series of fourteen meditations written in a variety of rhyme schemes, most commonly couplets and quatrains, it is somewhat reminiscent of the style of Edward Taylor’s meditations written
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more than a century earlier. Interspersed among the meditations are seven prayers written from the intimately personal and unique viewpoint of a black woman. To characterize Stewart as an abolitionist is to put the case too strongly; to name her as an early feminist is to describe her accurately. Her writings and speeches indicate her total awareness of her femininity first, her blackness second.
OTHER WORKS: Productions of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart (1835).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bormann, E.G., ‘‘Female Antislavery Speakers,’’ in Forerunners of Black Power: The Rhetoric of Abolition (1971). Flexner, E., Century of Struggle (1959). Golden, J. L., and R. D. Rieke, ‘‘Separation,’’ in The Rhetoric of Black Americans (1971). Lerner, G., Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (1972). Loewenberg, B. J., and R. Bogin, eds., in Black Women in Nineteenth-Century American Life (1976). O’Connor, L., Pioneer Women Orators (1954). Porter, D., Early Negro Writing 1760-1837 (1971). Reference works: NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Journal of Negro Education (5 October 1936). —MARILYN LAMPING
STOCKTON, Annis Boudinot Born 1 July 1736, Darby, Pennsylvania; died 6 February 1801, Burlington County, New Jersey Wrote under: ‘‘Emelia’’ (sometimes spelled ‘‘Amelia’’) Daughter of Elias and Catherine Williams Boudinot; married Richard Stockton, circa 1755 (died 1781); children: six Although few records of Annis Boudinot Stockton’s childhood remain, her extant manuscripts and Stockton family histories leave a considerable body of material for reconstructing her adult life. Born to a tradesman of French Huguenot descent, Stockton apparently received a more substantial education than was common for girls of her time. Her first poems were written before her marriage to Richard Stockton, a well-known New Jersey lawyer, landowner, and future signer of the Declaration of Independence. Some of these poems celebrate their courtship: ‘‘. . .I find on earth no charms for me / But what’s connected with the thought of thee!’’ After her marriage, Stockton moved to the Stockton estate near Princeton, naming her home ‘‘Morven,’’ after the imaginary land of Ossian’s (James Macpherson’s) Fingal. The romance of that title and the elaborately stylish gardens Stockton cultivated at Morven reflect the impulses of much of her verse: pastoral, sentimental, and imitative of popular British modes.
The quiet life at Morven was interrupted by the Revolutionary War. Because both Stockton and her husband were committed patriots, Morven was occupied by the British under Cornwallis during the Battle of Princeton in December 1776. The estate was sacked; plate and papers (including some of Stockton’s early poems) were stolen. And although the family had been evacuated, Richard Stockton was taken prisoner soon after their escape. Washington’s quick recapture of Princeton allowed Stockton and her children to return to their ruined home. Richard Stockton was released later in 1777, but ill treatment in prison probably hastened his death in 1781. Stockton’s watch by her husband’s deathbed occasioned two of her most moving elegies: ‘‘But vain is prophesy when death’s approach, / Thro’ years of pain, has sap’d a dearer life, / And makes me, coward like, myself reproach, / That e’re I knew the tender name of wife.’’ Stockton continued to live at Morven until the marriage of her eldest son, at which time she left the estate to him and moved to the home of her youngest daughter, Abigail Field of Burlington County, where she died in 1801. Much of Stockton’s life had been occupied with the raising of her six children and the managing of a sizeable household. But however demanding those responsibilities became, she continued to make time for her verse. Her husband encouraged her work, and Stockton’s audience gradually expanded beyond the family circle. She exchanged verses, for example, with Philadelphia poet Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson. Noting the support she found in her ‘‘sister’’ poet, Stockton addressed Fergusson directly in ‘‘To Laura’’ (Fergusson’s pseudonym): ‘‘Permit a sister muse to soar / To heights she never try’d before, / And then look up to thee. . . .’’ Additionally, Stockton became a close friend of Esther Burr, who preserved two of Stockton’s poems in her journal. She wrote a number of odes to George Washington, many of them warmly acknowledged in his letters to her. Such encouragement from family and friends may have suggested to Stockton the possibility of an even wider audience: her first known publication, ‘‘To the Honorable Colonel Peter Schuyler,’’ appeared in the New-York Mercury on 9 January 1758, and in the New American Magazine in January of 1758. Although other Philadelphia, New York, and New Jersey periodicals printed Stockton’s verse from time to time, most of her work remained in manuscript. Throughout her life, Stockton continued to work in the couplets and alternately rhymed quatrains of Pope, Young, Thomson, and Gray. Using these models, she developed themes of courtship, marriage, nature, friendship, patriotism, old age, and grief. But even as she imitated conventional forms, Stockton worried about the propriety of her activities: she confided to her brother Elias in a letter dated 1 May 1789, about one of her odes to Washington, that ‘‘if you think it will only add one sprig to the wreath the country twines to bind the brows of my hero, I will run the risk of being sneered at by those who criticize female productions of all kinds.’’ Fearful for her reputation, yet wishing recognition for her work, Stockton faced a dilemma common to colonial women poets. The number of her publications and the size of her
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extant manuscript collection may indicate that the desire to write finally outweighed her fear of impropriety. OTHER WORKS: Poems by Stockton were published in the NewYork Mercury, New American Magazine, Pennsylvania Magazine, Columbian Magazine, and New Jersey Gazette. Some poems are appended to the Reverend Samuel Stanhope Smith’s Funeral Sermon on the Death of the Hon. Richard Stockton. . . (1781). Manuscripts (poetry notebooks) are in the Princeton University Library, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Library of Congress, and the New Jersey Historical Society. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bill, A., A House Called Morven (1954, revised 1978). Cowell, P., Women Poets in Pre-Revolutionary America, 1650-1775 (1981). Ellet, E., Women of the American Revolution (1850). Glenn T., Some Colonial Houses and Those Who Lived in Them (1899). Green, H. C., and M. W. Green, Pioneer Mothers in America (1912). Mulford, C. J., The Poetry of Annis Boudinot Stockton (1994). Stockton, J., A History of the Stockton Family (1881). Stockton, T. C., The Stocktons of New Jersey, and Other Stocktons (1911). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —PATTIE COWELL
STODDARD, Elizabeth (Drew) Barstow Born 6 May, 1823, Mattapoisett, Massachusetts; died 1 August 1902, New York, New York Wrote under: Elizabeth Stoddard Daughter of Wilson and Betsey Drew Barstow; married Richard H. Stoddard, 1851; children: three, all of whom died young Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard grew up in prosperous circumstances. She did not like school, but briefly attended Wheaton Female Seminary in Norton, Massachusetts. At home, her eager and intelligent personality attracted the attention of the town minister, Thomas Robbins, who gave her access to his excellent library. Taking full advantage of the opportunity to read widely, she became acquainted with the work of the best 18th-century authors. Stoddard moved to New York City after her marriage to Stoddard, a young writer. In spite of poverty and the early deaths of all three of the couple’s children, the marriage was happy. Importantly, it resulted in Stoddard’s acquaintance with many prominent contemporary literary figures, who made the Stoddard home a meeting place. She began writing, and produced numerous stories and poems, which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Knicker-bocker, and Appleton’s Journal. Stoddard’s Lolly Dinks’ Doings (1874) is a book for children. None of her works are noteworthy today; however, her three novels are worth consideration in that they presage the trend toward realism in American literature.
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The Morgesons (1862) is concerned with the development of Cassandra Morgeson, who seems remarkably like Stoddard herself. Daughter of an old family, Cassandra is intensely individualistic, not very well liked by those about her, but respected nevertheless. Sent to a distant town to attend an academy, she falls desperately in love with her cousin, Charles, in whose home she stays. After his death, she falls in love with wild, handsome Desmond Somers, an hereditary alcoholic. He goes abroad to reform, returns cured, and marries her. His brother, Ben, marries her elfish sister, Veronica, but six months after the birth of their child dies of drink. The story ends with the discovery that the baby is mentally defective. Two Men (1865) is the story of two strangers who come into the Parke family and after many years find their happiness in each other’s love, despite disparity of age. Jason Auster is the first ‘‘interloper.’’ He marries proud Sarah Parke, who is secretly in love with her half-cousin, Osmond, long gone from home. When Jason and Sarah’s son, Parke, is nine years old, Osmond returns to leave his ten-year-old daughter, Philippa, the second stranger, to grow up in the family. The years pass and Jason is more and more remote; Sarah and Philippa dislike each other intensely. The girl, however, loves the charming Parke and is sure she, and only she, can make him happy. Parke, unconscious of her devotion, has a love affair with a beautiful mulatto who dies bearing his child. His mother, Sarah, dies also, and he goes off to adventure in South America. Jason and Philippa, left alone, are after many months drawn together. Temple House (1867) describes the strange doings and passions of the inhabitants of a great, decayed, barely furnished house. They are the owner, the retired sea captain Argus Gates; his worthless brother, George; George’s wife; and their daughter, Temple. A shipwreck off the coast brings another member to the family—the mysterious and half-Spanish Sebastian Ford. Both Van Wyck Brooks and Arthur Hobson Quinn praise Stoddard for attempting stark realism, and both see evidence of a spirit much like that of Emily Brontë. Her style is rough and occasionally difficult; at times her characters speak in riddles. Descriptions of nature are arresting, full of strange conceits and jolting figures. The reader is aware that Stoddard is determined never to glamorize life, though every so often she does lapse into Victorian sentimentality.
OTHER WORKS: Poems (1895). Papers of Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard are located in many institutions, including the American Antiquarian Society, the Boston Public Library, Columbia University, Duke University, Harvard University, the New York Public Library, and others.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Buell, L. and S. Zagarell, ‘‘The Morgesons’’ and Other Writings, Published and Unpublished by Elizabeth Stoddard (1984). Harris, S., 19th-Century American Women’s Novels: Interpretive Strategies (1990). Matlack, J. A., ‘‘The Literary
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Career of Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard’’ (unpublished dissertation, 1967). Stoddard, R. H., Recollections, Personal and Literary (1903). Reference works: AA. DAB. Oxford Companion to American Literature (1965). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Academy (24 Oct. 1896). Bookman (Nov. 1902). Legacy (1991). San Jose Studies (Fall 1984). Studies in American Fiction (1985).
roots, / The long arms and the boots / of despair’’), it is guilt and the impossibility of reconciliation that keep the wound open and drive the poet. In an interview with Robert Bradley, Stone said, ‘‘What is this living in the present? It seems your past drags behind you like a great huge snake or worm. . . . You can’t help but live in your past.’’ But Stone’s particular past makes her present very vivid, intense with the work of seeing for two. Her vision, never subdued and dutiful, is shot through with a respect for the crazy perverse fertility of life.
—ABIGAIL ANN HAMBLEN
STONE, Ruth Born 6 August 1915, Roanoke, Virginia Daughter of Roger and Ruth Ferguson Perkins; married twice; second to Walter B. Stone; children: Marcia, Phoebe, Abigail Ruth Stone is a poet, born in Virginia and raised in Indianapolis. She attended the University of Illinois and received her B.A. from Harvard University. The author of five books of poetry, she has also taught at universities across the country. Stone’s poems are fresh and original, quirky and funny. Gaiety and loneliness are all mixed up together and self-pity does not stand a chance. The poems are marked throughout by a strong sense of rhythm that never loses touch with the first primitive body rhythms, ‘‘the natural singing mind’’ she absorbed from her parents as a child. Her mother taught her poems by heart, and by the time she was two, both the cadence of the language and the music of poetry and forms had become part of her body. Her father was a musician; hearing him play drums at home was another way she took in rhythms by ear at an early age. By the time she was six, Stone was writing poems and ballads with a strong, uninhibited attachment to form. This is particularly evident in her first book, In an Iridescent Time (1959). In her later books, though the feeling for rhythm remains, the poems become more elastic and are less often strictly rhymed. Stone’s life and work are closely bound together. Her second book, Topography (1971), begins with a strong rhymed love poem, ‘‘Dream of Light and Shade,’’ a poem of young marriage, enchantment, and stability. ‘‘I watch him sleep, dreaming of how to defend/ his inert form.’’ But soon death, with a horrible abruptness, makes a mockery of normality and order. After the suicide of her husband the book becomes heavier, tilted, and ‘‘chaotic with necessary pain’’ (‘‘The Plan’’). In Topography Stone begins the long letter to her deceased husband that in a sense becomes the body of the rest of her work. Sometimes, as in ‘‘Tenacity,’’ he is addressed directly: ‘‘I sit for hours at the window / preparing a letter; you are coming toward me.’’ At other times, as in the poem ‘‘Salt’’ (‘‘I saw the long hair
The poses and props of ‘‘the literary life’’ hold no attraction for her and her poems work hard to demystify poetry. In her third book, Cheap: New Poems and Ballads (1975), the reader often glimpses the underbelly of life. In ‘‘Codicil,’’ an ornithologist’s widow recounts trips with her husband: ‘‘Yes, / he would send her up a tree / And when she faltered he would shout, / ‘Put it [the egg] in your mouth. Put it in your mouth.’ / It was nasty, she said.’’ These glimpses are seldom ‘‘pretty’’ or decorative but they speak with their own bold vitality. The events of her life have made Stone impatient with convention. She shrugs off distinctions between morbidity and fertility and chooses instead to walk, grieving fiercely, along the messy borders where decay and regeneration overlap (‘‘Overlapping Edges’’). Stone’s development, with its wild quirky ups, downs, and turns, is exhilarating to follow. The pure girlish delight of her first book’s title poem, ‘‘In an Iridescent Time,’’ surfaces again in an odd, funny, matronly form in the title poem of Second Hand Coat: Poems New and Selected (1987, reprinted 1991). In this book, and particularly in her 1991 book, the exuberant, irreverent Who Is the Widow’s Muse? Stone’s strong survivor’s instinct has brought her through. Confronting late middle age with buoyancy, she speaks in a rich, original voice of courage that makes you want to be near her. She has been many things—a young bride, an exasperated mother, a wild granny who has sat wailing with an apron over her head. Stone gives us a fresh, unconventional eye with which to look at women’s lives. OTHER WORKS: Unknown Messages (chapbook, 1974). American Milk (chapbook, 1986). The Solution (chapbook, 1989). Nursery Rhymes from Mother Stone (chapbook, 1992). Simplicity (1995). Ordinary Words (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ferguson, M. A., ed., Images of Women in Literature (1991). Gilbert, S., and W. Barber, The House Is Made of Poetry: The Art of Ruth Stone (1996, 1999). Hamlin, S., ‘‘We Are Alive! A Cycle of Women’’ (thesis, 1999). Howe, F., ed., No More Masks! An Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Women Poets, Newly Revised and Expanded (1993). Myers, J. E. and R. E. Weingarten, eds., New American Poets of the ’90s (1991). Stankard, L. J., ‘‘The ‘We’ of ‘Me’: Relational Feminism in the Poetry of Ruth Stone’’ (thesis, 1992). Reference works: CANR (1981). FC (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). The 1997 Pushcart Prize XXI: Best of the Small Presses (1996). Sextet One:
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Six Powerful American Voices: A Pennywhistle Poetry Anthology (1996). Other references: Associated Writing Programs Chronicle (Oct./Nov. 1990). Hudson Review (Summer 1988). English Studies (Oct. 1988). Iowa Review (1981). —TAM LIN NEVILLE, UPDATED BY SYDONIE BENET
STORY, Sydney A. See PIKE, Mary Green
STOWE, Harriet (Elizabeth) Beecher Born 14 June 1811, Litchfield, Connecticut; died 1 July 1896, Hartford, Connecticut Wrote under Christopher Crowfield Daughter of Lyman and Roxana Foote Beecher; married Calvin E. Stowe, 1836; children: Eliza, Isabella, Henry, Frederick, Georgiana, Samuel, Charles Harriet Beecher Stowe was born on 14 June 1811, in Litchfield, Connecticut, the daughter of Congregational minister Lyman Beecher and his first wife, Roxana, who died when Stowe was four. Lyman Beecher was a devout Puritan and a believer in orthodox Calvinism, so Stowe and her siblings received a primarily theological education from their father, although they also attended the local academy. Her intellectual promise appeared early, and when she was seven years old her father wrote to a friend, ‘‘Hattie is a genius. I would give a $100 if she was a boy.’’ She left Litchfield in 1824 to attend the Hartford Female Seminary, which had been founded by her elder sister Catharine. While at Hartford, Stowe began her first major literary endeavor, which was a tragedy in blank verse depicting a young Roman’s conversion to Christianity at the court of the emperor Nero. It was also during this time Stowe began to suffer from periodic episodes of paralyzing depression that would follow her throughout her life. At the age of fourteen, a year after moving to Hartford, Harriet had a highly emotional ‘‘conversion’’ to the Christian faith in which she believed she had truly experienced God’s saving grace. This event would remain with her and be dramatized in several of her works. In 1832 Stowe and Catharine moved with their father to Cincinnati, Ohio. Within a year of their arrival, Catharine started a new school, the Western Female Institute, and Stowe worked there as a teacher from 1833 to 1836. During this time she published a geography textbook, An Elementary Geography (1835), under her sister’s name and assisted her brother, Henry Ward Beecher, with the publication of his daily newspaper, the Cincinnati Journal. She also contributed to the magazine Western Monthly, which awarded her a short story prize in 1834.
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In 1836 Stowe married Professor Calvin E. Stowe of the Lane Theological Seminary and quit teaching to care for twin daughters born later the same year. She wrote only intermittently during these years, but it was her writing that allowed the family to hire domestic help for their growing brood. Stowe had her first true encounter with slavery when one of her servants was accused of being a runaway slave, and Henry Ward Beecher and Stowe’s husband helped her to escape. An intellectual and author of religious books, her husband was a widower who suffered from visions and depression. The early years of their marriage were not happy ones because of her difficulty in adjusting to married life and her unhappiness with the frontier life in Ohio. Cincinnati was a conflict-torn border town between the slave-holding South and the free North. Lane Theological Seminary became a seat of abolitionist fervor, and Stowe developed a growing awareness of the evils of slavery and the plight of runaway slaves during the early years of her marriage. She was not an ardent abolitionist at this point, however, and wrote virtually nothing on slavery during the 1840s. Her concerns were primarily for her family’s well-being, because her husband was poorly paid and they suffered increasing poverty and hardship during their first 14 years of marriage. Harriet still found time to write occasionally, however, and her first book, a collection of short stories called The Mayflower: or, Sketches of Scenes and Characters of the Descendants of the Pilgrims (1843), was published to good reception both in the U.S. and in England, where its title was changed to Let Every Man Mind His Own Business. Stowe’s family situation improved in 1850 when her husband became the Collins Chair of the Natural and Revealed Religion at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. Two years later he received a professorship at Andover Theological Seminary and the family moved to Massachusetts. Happier in her native New England and with much of her flagging health restored, Stowe began to write in earnest. Uncle Tom’s Cabin: or, Life Among the Lowly (1852) would become Stowe’s most famous work and indeed one of the most well-known books in American literature. This novel was inspired by Stowe’s increasing distress over slavery and her outrage over the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The idea for the book came to her when she had a vision of the triumphant death of Tom while at a Communion church service. Harriet’s brothers, Henry Ward and Edward, both ministers, urged their sister, in the words of Edward’s wife, ‘‘to make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is.’’ Uncle Tom’s Cabin contains the stories of dozens of slaves but focuses on two who live on the Shelby plantation in Kentucky. Eliza Harris runs from the plantation because her child is to be sold and eludes the hired slave catchers by crossing the broken ice of the Ohio River into the free state of Ohio. Aided by the underground railroad, Eliza and her son are eventually reunited in Canada with her husband, George. As Eliza and her son head north toward freedom, ‘‘Uncle Tom,’’ the other protagonist in the novel, is sent ‘‘down the river’’ for sale. Too noble to run away from the plantation and too Christian to resent his master for
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selling him, Tom befriends a sickly white child named Evangeline St. Clare and is purchased by her father, Augustine. Eva eventually dies, but not before convincing her father to free his slaves. St. Clare does not fulfill his pledge, however, because he dies suddenly, thus representing those who want to help slaves but take no action on their behalf. Tom is sold farther downriver to Simon Legree, the epitome of a cruel slaveholder, whose abuse of Tom ends in the latter’s death by whipping. Eliza and Tom thus both triumph over slavery, although Tom’s triumph is in his martyr’s death while Eliza’s is in her successful escape. Stowe’s story ends with her narrator demanding that readers consider whether slavery, which separates families, leads to pain and suffering, and violates Christian principles, can be tolerated. As some of Stowe’s early and modern critics pointed out, however, Uncle Tom’s Cabin does not provide a ringing endorsement for integration and coexistence. Escaped slave Eliza and her family settle in the African state of Liberia rather than live in North America, which many readers see as an indirect endorsement of colonization. Critics, including those who praised the novel, assert that it perpetuates racial stereotypes and 19thcentury prejudicial views on the innate differences between blacks and whites. Many critics have now begun to reinterpret the novel and praise little-mentioned aspects of it, such as Stowe’s portrayal of women as strong figures. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published first as a serial novel in the Washington antislavery newspaper National Era in 1852 and later that year as a novel by John P. Jowett of Boston. The book sold 300,000 copies within a year and would sell over 1,000,000 more in England. Stowe herself allowed the National Era to publish the work but thought it too mild for abolitionists and was surprised when it became a mobilizing force for the entire antislavery movement. The poet Longfellow echoed the feelings of many when he wrote the following of Stowe in his journal: ‘‘How she is shaking the world with her Uncle Tom’s Cabin!. . . At one step she has reached the top of the stair-case up which the rest of us climb on our knees year after year.’’ Author Henry James noted that the novel was ‘‘less a book than a state of vision, of feeling, and of consciousness.’’ Although Uncle Tom’s Cabin was not aimed at Southern slaveholders, this group became its chief opponents, just as abolitionists became its staunchest supporters. The book aroused so much fervor on both sides of the slavery issue that many, including a future president of the U.S., credited it with contributing to the outbreak of the Civil War. When President Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1862, he is reported to have said to her, ‘‘So you are the little woman who wrote the book that created this great war!’’ Uncle Tom’s Cabin led to over 30 anti-Tom novels within three years claiming to show slavery’s positive effects on slaves. Stowe published A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1853 to document some of the anecdotes she used in the novel. Critics were far from finished with attacking the book, however, and an overly dramatic although hugely popular stage version was largely
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responsible for the ‘‘Uncle Tom’’ stereotype of a servile black trying to please whites that persists today. Stowe’s second and last real antislavery novel, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), sold well but was less successful because it had no heroic central figure like Tom. The case of Dred, a runaway slave living in the Dismal Swamp and preaching of a Holy War to end slavery, reveals the ill effects of slavery on slaveholders. Like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, however, this novel does not call for widespread emancipation and an end to slavery. A year after the publication of Dred, Stowe’s eldest son, Henry, a freshman at Dartmouth College, drowned in a swimming accident, and Stowe’s religious faith was called into question. She eventually regained her faith in God but converted from staunch Calvinism to the Episcopalian Church. Although she never again achieved the fame which Uncle Tom’s Cabin brought to her, she continued to write, and her collected works eventually filled 16 volumes. Stowe did have another brush with notoriety in 1869, however, when she published an article in the Atlantic Monthly about her friend Lady Byron. Stowe had met the poet’s wife when she and her husband visited England and Scotland after the publication of Uncle Tom, which was enormously successful in the United Kingdom. The two women had become good friends, and Stowe, defending Lady Byron against detractors, used her Atlantic Monthly article to reveal Lord Byron’s incestuous relationship with his sister. The furious English and American publics accused Stowe of lying, and Stowe responded in turn by elaborating on her article in the book Lady Byron Vindicated (1870), which was a departure from the works that made her famous. Other well-known novels by Stowe include The Minister’s Wooing (1859) and Pearl of Orr’s Island (1862). The latter is about angelic Mara Lincoln, a ‘‘pearl of great price,’’ and her life in a Maine fishing village. Mara, like many of Stowe’s heroines, is somewhere between saint and angel. Her religious convictions and sudden death, like that of the virginal Eva in Uncle Tom, brings salvation to her loved ones. Stowe does a marvelous job in rendering the dialect and daily life of the inhabitants of Orr’s Island, and critics agree the local-color movement in New England began with Pearl of Orr’s Island. The Minister’s Wooing is set in late-18th-century Newport, Rhode Island, and is one of a group of novels set in the New England Stowe remembered from girlhood. The principal character in the novel is Mary Scudder, who loves her cousin James but refuses to marry him because he is not a Christian. Mary agrees to wed Minister Samuel Hopkins after James is reportedly lost at sea, but Hopkins releases her from her obligation when James, having made his fortune and become a Christian, returns to Newport. Like many of her novels, The Minister’s Wooing is romantic and sentimental, with a rather formulaic plot culminating in marriage and the salvation of a soul. Although Stowe’s characters—the young, pure heroine who often suffers an untimely fate; the noble mother figure; the hypocritical minister; and the young
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man in need of Christian salvation—are stereotypical, readers can identify with their problems and beliefs because they mirror those of the day. Stowe was not a complex or sophisticated writer, but she gave readers characters they could understand and problems they could relate to.
A Dog’s Mission; or, The Story of Old Avery House, and Other Stories (1881). Nellie’s Heroics (1888). Our Famous Women (1884). The Collected Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe (16 vols., 1896).
In the aftermath of the Civil War, Stowe adopted a pseudonym, Christopher Crowfield, and began to write essays on domestic life for the Atlantic Monthly. Crowfield’s personality was that of a congenial old busybody. The essays themselves were on such diverse topics as women’s suffrage, parlor furniture, problems with servants, reading suggestions for young girls, and the employment of former slaves in the new South. These writings were collected into three volumes, House and Home Papers (1865), Little Foxes (1866), and The Chimney-Corner (1868).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Adams, J. R., Harriet Beecher Stowe (1963). Crozier, A., The Novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe (1969). Ellsworth, M. E. T., ‘‘Two New England Writers: Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mary Wilkins Freeman’’ (thesis, 1981). Elrod, E. R., ‘‘Reforming Fictions: Gender and Religion in the Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rose Terry Cooke, and Mary Wilkins Freeman’’ (thesis, 1991). Hedrick, J., Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (1994). Jakoubek, R. E., Harriet Beecher Stowe: Author and Abolitionist (1989). Kirkham, E. B., The Building of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1977). Reference works: American Authors, 1600-1900 (1966). Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature (1991). DAB (1957). NAW (1971). The Reader’s Companion to American History (1991).
Revenue from the sales of Stowe’s works brought prosperity to her family and allowed them to purchase a winter home in Mandarin, Florida, in 1868, where Stowe hoped to employ former slaves. She also wanted to provide a permanent home for her alcoholic son, Frederick, who had never quite recovered from wounds received in the Battle of Gettysburg. Although she was not as successful in either venture as she would have liked, she and her husband did spend much of each winter in Florida until shortly before his death in 1886, when ill health prevented them from returning. Stowe’s own health began to fail in 1890 and her mind began to wander. She lived out the remaining six years of her life in Hartford, Connecticut, with her minister son, Charles, and his family. Mark Twain, a longtime neighbor, would often find her, ‘‘vague and cheerful,’’ picking flowers in his garden. Not long before her mind began to fail, Stowe wrote the following in a letter to Oliver Wendell Holmes: ‘‘And now I rest me, like a moored boat, rising and falling on the water, with loosened cordage and flapping sail.’’ Though she may not have been aware of it at the end, Stowe’s contributions to literature and to humanity would ensure her immortality.
OTHER WORKS: The Two Altars (1852). Uncle Tom’s Emancipation (1853). Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands (1854). My Expectations (1858). My Strength (1858). Our Charlie and What To Do with Him (1858). Strong Consolation (1858). Things That Cannot Be Shaken (1858). A Word to the Sorrowful (1858). Agnes of Sorrento (1862). Stories about Our Boys (1865). Religious Poems (1867). Daisy’s First Winter and Other Stories (1867). Queer Little People (1867). Men of Our Times (1868). The American Woman’s Home (with C. E. Beecher, 1869). Oldtown Folks (1869). Little Pussy Willow (1870). My Wife and I (1871). Pink and White Tyranny (1871). Sam Lawson’s Old Town Fireside Stories (1872). Palmetto Leaves (1873). Women in Sacred History (1873, reissued as Bible Heroines, 1878). Deacon Pitkin’s Farm (English version, 1875, similar American collection, Betty’s Bright Idea, and Other Tales, 1876). We and Our Neighbors (1875). Footsteps of the Master (1876). Poganuc People (1878).
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—LEAH J. SPARKS
STRATTON-PORTER, Gene Born Geneva Stratton, 17 August 1863, Wabash City, Indiana; died 6 December 1924, Los Angeles, California Daughter of Mark and Mary Shellabarger Stratton; married Charles Dorwin Porter, 1886; children: one daughter Gene Stratton-Porter was the youngest of 12 children. She married in 1886; there was one daughter. From early childhood, Stratton-Porter spent most of her time outdoors with her father and brothers and was fascinated by plants and birds. From her father, she learned her first lessons as a naturalist. Few authors claim to write so directly from life. StrattonPorter stressed that she based fictional characters on her beloved family and admired friends, insisting that true-to-life portraits need not focus on undesirable human traits. Similarly, the three areas in which she lived—the Wabash River Basin, the Limberlost Swamp in northeastern Indiana, and Southern California—figure importantly in her work. Although Stratton-Porter was enormously popular and successful at several types of imaginative writing (magazine articles, short stories, poetry, and novels), she considered herself primarily a naturalist. In natural history as in fiction, Stratton-Porter relied wholly on her own observations, devoting enormous energy and facing considerable danger to achieve veracity. Largely selfeducated, Stratton-Porter also trained herself as an expert photographer and polished her drawing skills to illustrate the nature
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books. Although critics have questioned the accuracy of some of her observations, Stratton-Porter had total confidence in her field work as in her personal experience. Stratton-Porter’s aim was to teach love of nature, God, and one’s fellow man, and these themes regulate all her fiction. An equally important motif is familial heritage and relationships. Often a mystery about the family’s background lends tension. Another powerful pattern is the consistent strength and capability of the females. Although these characters believe that their first obligation is to run a perfect home and to nurture husband and children, they are also frequently committed to a life work of their own. They are able, productive citizens, usually equal partners in their marriages, who value the money earned for the independence it represents. Stratton-Porter’s enduring popular reputation is based largely on her novels. Freckles (1904), the story of a maimed orphan who works his way to fame, position, and wealth through honesty, bravery, and tremendous effort, is a prime example of the pluckmakes-luck school of American fiction. The sequel, A Girl of the Limberlost (1909), portrays Elnora Comstock, born in the Limberlost and dedicated to studying and earning her way out of it and to resolving a severely damaged relationship with her mother. Some of the values the Limberlost youngsters share—the desires for urban life, fine clothing, wealth, and social position—have been sharply criticized, but for Stratton-Porter, these were the logical rewards of ability and extremely hard work. These two novels celebrate the swamp’s danger as well as its beauty and are surprisingly little concerned with conservation; Stratton-Porter depicts the area as a natural prey to progress. Other novels clearly reflect Stratton-Porter’s lifelong commitment to conservationism, and their protagonists value money in part as a means of serving humanity. David Langston in The Harvester (1911) and Linda Strong in Her Father’s Daughter (1921) earn their livings from the flora, but they also make deliberate efforts to harvest wisely and to save threatened species. Though accused of preoccupation with happy endings and the sunny side of life, Stratton-Porter intended thoughtful examination of serious human problems. At the Foot of the Rainbow (1907) and the long narrative poem, ‘‘Euphorbia’’ (Good Housekeeping, Jan.—Mar. 1923) treat serious marital discord, and The Magic Garden (1927) explores problems faced by children of divorced parents. In Michael O’ Halloran (1915), Stratton-Porter examines the work ethic as spiritual salvation for both Mickey, a slum child, and Nellie Minturn, a woman whose inherited wealth has barred her from genuine love. Mahala, of The White Flag (1923), struggles for self-definition as well as purity. Always, the Stratton-Porter formula prevails: central love stories embellished by nature lore, a pattern devised deliberately to make nature study and moral guidance palatable and salable. More than 20 films were based on the novels, and StrattonPorter organized her own company, Gene Stratton-Porter Productions, to protect the moralistic tone of her work. The movies she produced were popular but not landmark productions.
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Perhaps the most widely read female American author of her day, Stratton-Porter is generally considered somewhat limited in her world view, but she is an author of power, invention, and strong narrative ability.
OTHER WORKS: The Song of the Cardinal (1903). What I Have Done with Birds (1907). Birds of the Bible (1909). Music of the Wild (1910). After the Flood (1911). Moths of the Limberlost (1912). Laddie (1913). Birds of the Limberlost (1914). Morning Face (1916). Friends in Feathers (1917). A Daughter of the Land (1918). Homing with the Birds (1919). The Firebird (1922). Jesus of the Emerald (1923). Wings (1923). The Keeper of the Bees (1925). Tales You Won’t Believe (1925). Let Us Highly Resolve (1927).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hart, J. D., The Popular Book: A History of America’s Literary Taste (1950). Long, J. R., Gene StrattonPorter: Novelist and Naturalist (1990). MacLean, D. G., Gene Stratton-Porter: A Bibliography and Collector’s Guide (1976). Overton, G., American Night’s Entertainment (1923). PorterMeehan, J., Life and Letters of Gene Stratton- Porter (1927, 1972). Richards, B., Gene Stratton-Porter (1980). S. F. E. [E. F. Saxton], Gene Stratton-Porter: A Little Story of the Life and Works and Ideals of ‘‘The Bird Woman’’ (1915). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Harper’s (Oct. 1947). The Old Northwest (June 1977). Smithsonian (April 1976). —JANE S. BAKERMAN
STRONG, Anna Louise Born 14 November 1885, Friend, Nebraska; died 29 March 1970, Peking, China Also wrote under: ‘‘Anise’’ Daughter of Sydney and Ruth Tracy Strong; married Joel Shubin, 1932 Anna Louise Strong descended from Puritan families who arrived in New England in 1630. Her father was a Congregational minister; her mother an important figure in the church’s missionary organizations. Strong completed secondary schooling by the age of fourteen, studied languages in Germany and Switzerland, and obtained her bachelor’s degree at Oberlin. Her first writing, poetry and stories, was published in Youth’s Companion during her teens. After college, Strong took her first journalism position as an associate editor and writer for a fundamentalist weekly, the
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Advance, where she was overworked and fired by the publisher as soon as she had increased circulation. ‘‘As for their exploitation of myself, I was only eager to do more work for the salary than anyone else could do; this seemed the road to advancement.’’ Partially to save face, she enrolled in a philosophy program at the University of Chicago. At the age of twenty-three, Strong defended her doctoral thesis on the psychology of prayer before the combined theology and philosophy faculties and became the youngest student ever awarded such a degree at the university. For several years, Strong worked in urban social reform projects, including organizing child welfare exhibits in cities across America. She began to combine political activism and journalism after rejoining her father in Seattle, Washington, in 1915. Strong was elected to the Seattle School Board, but was recalled in 1918 because of her activism in antiwar groups and her reportage (under the pseudonym ‘‘Anise’’) for the Seattle Daily Call and the Seattle Union Record, both socialist newspapers. Her first major article was a rather detached, ‘‘impartial’’ account of the Everett Massacre (New York Evening Post, 4 February 1919). As events led to the Seattle General Strike of 1919, Strong became their major chronicler. After the strike, she analyzed what happened and the lessons to be learned in a pamphlet, The Seattle General Strike (1918). Roger Sale, a historian of Seattle history, considers the chapter on the strike in Strong’s autobiography, I Change Worlds: The Remaking of an American (1935), as the ‘‘best single work on Seattle in one of its most critical periods.’’ In 1921 Strong did publicity work on the famine in Poland and Russia for the American Friends Service Committee, and she reported on the famine in both countries for the International News Service. From Moscow she wrote in defense of the Bolsheviks’ new government and made several trips to the U.S. to lecture and raise money for projects aimed at promoting friendship between the two nations. In 1930 Strong founded the Moscow News, an English-language newspaper for foreigners in Russia. Despite working as hard as she once did for the Advance, Strong’s ultimate inability to reconcile her American view of the proper style and philosophy of reporting with the perspectives of the Russian staff, caused her to leave the newspaper. Eventually concluding she would always remain an ‘‘outsider,’’ Strong ceased to dream of ‘‘becoming a creator in chaos’’ declining to ‘‘organize’’ further and determining to continue writing. For the next 45 years, Strong reluctantly embraced a life of ‘‘roving to revolutions and writing about them for the American press.’’ In addition to her coverage of Russia from the 1920s through the 1940s, Strong reported on the course of revolutionary change in Mexico, the civil war in Spain, the advance of the Red Army against the Germans in Poland—her only novel, Wild River (1943), is a celebration of the courage shown by Russians during the German invasion—and, most regularly, on the revolution in China. Strong’s most famous single piece of reportage is ‘‘The Thought of Mao Tse-Tung’’ (Amerasia, June 1947), an article she based on an interview with the leader at the Chinese Revolutionary Army’s headquarters in Yenan in 1946. Mao’s first use of the
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phrase ‘‘paper tiger’’ is found here. Perhaps the most widely read of Strong’s writing among intellectuals, academics, and government officials is Letter from China, a monthly newsletter which she published from 1962 until January 1969. During this period, it represented one of the few reliable sources of information about life in China and the position of the Chinese leadership on their rift with the Soviet Union. In addition to her China reportage, Strong’s best works are her only book on the U.S., My Native Land (1940), and her autobiography, I Change Worlds. The first belongs to the genre of documentary reportage in which American intellectuals sought to ‘‘discover America.’’ Her account is moving, filled with human interest stories, and governed by a simple—although not reductive— vision of the world. Strong condemns the failures of the American capitalist system; yet she does not entirely deny the past, but rather affirms a kind of populist democracy. Strong wrote the first volume of her autobiography, I Change Worlds, partially as a result of urging from Lincoln Steffens. She identified herself as ‘‘motor-minded,’’ one who thinks ‘‘in terms of actions.’’ Critical of American civilization and resigned to a ‘‘haunting feeling of not being wanted,’’ Strong documents the history of her times in the context of her largely unsuccessful attempts to be an ‘‘insider’’ in social movements for change. Despite a tone of innocent wonder, which is at the same time the tone appropriate to a manifesto, Strong’s autobiography is a ‘‘rare tale’’ of ‘‘chosen’’ change in the consciousness of a remarkable woman. The second volume of her autobiography, which it is reported she was finishing at the time of her death, remains in China, unpublished. Most of Strong’s journalism is flawed by a consistent naiveté, a disinterest in explaining theory, and an overabsorption in portraying personality and action. The best of her work, however, is informative and meaningful ‘‘for the great Middlewestern masses,’’ because of Strong’s well-constructed images, dialogue, and use of the human-interest story. OTHER WORKS: The Psychology of Prayer (1909). Child Welfare Exhibits: Types and Preparation (1915). The First Time in History: Two Years of Russia’s New Life (1924). Children of Revolution (1925). China’s Millions (1928). Red Star in Samarkand (1929). The Soviets Conquer Wheat (1931). The Road to the Grey Pamir (1931). The Soviet World (1936). The Soviets Expected It (1941). The Chinese Conquer China (1949). Cash and Violence in Laos and Vietnam (1962). Letters from China, Nos. 1-10 (1963). Letters from China, Nos.21-30 (1966). The papers of Anna Louise Strong are housed at the University of Washington in Seattle. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Chen, P., China Called Me (1979). Friedham, R. L., The Seattle General Strike (1967). Milton, D., and N. Dall, The Wind Will Not Survive (1976). Nies, J., Seven Women: Portraits from the American Radical Tradition (1977). Ogle, S. F., ‘‘Anna Louise Strong: Seattle Years’’ (thesis, 1973). Pringle, R. W.,
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Anna Louise Strong: Propagandist of Communism (dissertation, 1972). Sale, R., Seattle: Past to Present (1976). Reference works: NAW: MP (1980). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Eastern Horizon (1970). NR (25 April 1970). Newsweek (13 April 1970). NYT (30 March 1970). Survey (Oct. 1964). —JENNIFER L. TEBBE
STUART, Ruth McEnery Born 21 May circa 1849, Marksville, Louisiana; died 6 May 1917, New York, New York Daughter of James and Mary Routh Stirling McEnery; married Alfred Oden Stuart, 1879 (died 1883); children: Stirling (died 1905) During the 1890s Ruth McEnery Stuart was one of the South’s most popular women writers, rivaling Kate Chopin in her fame. Praised as the ‘‘laureate of the lowly,’’ she became best known for her African-American dialect fiction, and at her death the New York Times observed that she ‘‘left no successor’’ in the genre. Although racial stereotypes, sentimentality, and Old South nostalgia now date much of her work, Joel Chandler Harris, creator of the Uncle Remus stories, said Stuart ‘‘got nearer the heart of the negro’’ than any other white author of that era. Stuart was born on a plantation, but she grew up in New Orleans, the nation’s most exotic setting for regionalist writing. After the Civil War, her father failed to regain his earlier prosperity, and Stuart contributed to the family’s support by teaching. She moved to Washington, Arkansas, after marrying an affluent widower, but he died four years later, apparently leaving most of the estate to his grown children.
country reading to enthusiastic audiences from her own works, as Twain and Cable—but few women—did. Progressive on such issues as African-American education and women’s suffrage, she opposed America’s entry into World War I and recited one of her poems at a large peace demonstration in New Orleans. Most of the stories in Stuart’s first collection, A Golden Wedding and Other Tales (1893), are black dialect fiction. Her characters include an elderly ex-slave couple, who are poignantly reunited in New Orleans after decades apart, and a mischievous country boy whose mother dresses him in his sisters’ hand-me-downs. Reviewers liked Stuart’s blend of ‘‘humor and pathos’’ in such accounts of African-American life and also in her early portrayals of urban immigrants and genteel Arkansas spinsters. Soon matching the black dialect stories in popularity were Stuart’s Deuteronomy Jones monologues, narrated in folksy style by a middle-aged farmer from the fictitious Simpkinsville, Arkansas, who dotes on his precocious child. Stuart collected these comic pieces in the bestselling collection Sonny: A Christmas Guest (1896) and the sequel Sonny’s Father (1910). Stories about the Jones’ fellow townspeople appeared in In Simpkinsville: Character Tales (1897), which includes ‘‘The Unlived Life of Little Mary Ellen,’’ a widely read portrayal of a young woman who is jilted at the altar, loses her mind, and goes to an early grave believing that her niece’s talking doll is her own baby. Most of Stuart’s women characters, both black and white, cope better with adversity than the fragile Mary Ellen does. Stories in Solomon Crow’s Christmas Pockets and Other Tales (1897) depict a cheerful widow with several children who earns ‘‘a scant living’’ at newspaper work but hosts a holiday dinner for all her boarding-house neighbors; an ancient African-American candy woman in New Orleans, who always claims Easter Sunday as her birthday; and a teenage girl who collaborates with her old mammy to start a new life in the city after the family plantation is sold for debts.
A favorite of the ‘‘Harper set,’’ Stuart mixed well in artistic and literary circles, both in New York and at her summer home in the Catskills. Her friends were diverse, from William Dean Howells, George Washington Cable, and Mark Twain to St. Nicholas editor Mary Mapes Dodge, General George Armstrong Custer’s widow, Elizabeth, the Tiffany Company designer Candace Wheeler, and the Boston twin physicians Augusta and Emily Pope.
Until her son died from an accidental fall in 1905, Stuart published a story collection or novella almost every year. An interviewer reported that her intense program of writing and platform reading would exhaust even a strong man. But Stuart cut back drastically on her work and her social life for about four years after Stirling’s death. Even though the market for local color fiction was shrinking, all but one of Stuart’s later volumes reprise the Southern settings, dialects, and character types that made her famous. The exception is her last book of fiction, The Cocoon: A Rest-Cure Comedy (1915). Drawing on her experiences at the Jackson Health Resort in Dansville, New York, Stuart uses the genre of romantic burlesque to comment on such issues as infertility, eugenics, and women’s nervous diseases. Critics have noted resemblances to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist classic ‘‘The Yellow Wallpaper’’ (1892), and Stuart had met Gilman’s bane, Dr. Weir Mitchell—a likely model for the presiding physician of the Virginia sanitarium in The Cocoon. Stuart’s protagonist, Blessy Heminway, is a witty New Yorker who spends much of her stay undermining the rest cure regimen.
Thanks to her sister Sarah Stirling McEnery’s support as household manager, Stuart was able to travel throughout the
In the 1920s, plays about African-American life were attracting attention, and Sarah McEnery tried unsuccessfully to find a
Stuart returned with her young son to New Orleans, where she met Dorothy Dix, Mollie Moore Davis, Eliza Jane Poitevent Nicholson, and other women writers. She probably resumed her teaching career, but an encounter with the editor of Harper’s Monthly, Charles Dudley Warner, led her to submit stories to Northern magazines and by 1892 she made a permanent move to New York. She occasionally substituted for editors of various journals, turning down offers of regular staff positions in order to focus on her writing, which she published everywhere from the Youth’s Companion to the Century Magazine.
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dramatist who would adapt her sister’s black dialect fiction for the New York stage. Racially insensitive as some of these stories now look, one obituary described the author as a ‘‘friend of the negro,’’ and Kate Chopin—whose literary reputation has fared much better than Stuart’s—emphasized that her body of work was unmarred by ‘‘prejudices’’ of any sort. OTHER WORKS: Carlotta’s Intended and Other Tales (1894). The Story of Babette: A Little Creole Girl (1894). Gobolinks or Shadow-Pictures for Young and Old (with Albert Bigelow Paine, 1896). The Snow-Cap Sisters: A Farce (1897). Moriah’s Mourning and Other Half-Hour Sketches (1898). Holly and Pizen and Other Stories (1899). Napoleon Jackson: The Gentleman of the Plush Rocker (1902). George Washington Jones: A Christmas Gift That Went A-Begging (1903). The River’s Childen: An Idyl of the Mississippi (1904). The Second Wooing of Salina Sue and Other Stories (1905). Aunt Amity’s Silver Wedding and Other Stories (1909). The Haunted Photograph, Whence and Whither, A Case in Diplomacy, The Afterglow (1911). Daddy Do-Funny’s Wisdom Jingles (1913). Plantation Songs and Other Verse (1916). The main collection of Stuart’s papers is in the Manuscripts Department of Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University, New Orleans. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Fletcher, M. F., ‘‘Ruth McEnery Stuart: A Biographical and Critical Study’’ (dissertation, 1955). Frisby, J. R., Jr., ‘‘New Orleans Writers and the Negro: George Washington Cable, Grace King, Ruth McEnery Stuart, Kate Chopin, and Lafcadio Hearn, 1870-1900’’ (dissertation, 1972). Halsey, F. W., ed., Women Authors of Our Day in Their Homes: Personal Descriptions and Interviews (1903). Harkins, E. F., and C. H. L. Johnston, Little Pilgrimages Among the Women Who Have Written Famous Books (1902). Knight, D. D., ed., Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers (1997). McKee, K. B., ‘‘Writing in a Different Direction: Women Authors and the Tradition of Southwestern Humor, 1875-1910’’ (dissertation, 1996). Simpson, E. C., Introduction to Simpkinsville and Vicinity: Arkansas Stories of Ruth McEnery Stuart (1983). Sneller, J. E., ‘‘Bad Boys/Black Misfits: Ruth McEnery Stuart’s Humor and ‘The Negro Question,’’’ in Images of the Child (1994). Sneller, J. E., ‘‘Man-Figs and Magnolias, Ladies and Lariats: Humor and Irony in the Writings of Three New Orleans Women, 1865-1916’’ (dissertation, 1992). Sneller, J. E., ‘‘‘Old Maids’ and Wily ‘Widders’: The Humor of Ruth McEnery Stuart,’’ in New Directions in American Humor (1998). Sneller, J. E., ‘‘‘Sambo’ and ‘The Southern Lady’: Humor and the (Re)Construction of Identity in the Local Color Fiction of Ruth McEnery Stuart,’’ in Gender, Race, and Identity (1993). Taylor, H., Gender, Race, and Region in the Writings of Grace King, Ruth McEnery Stuart, and Kate Chopin (1989). Reference works: ANB (1999). DAB. DLB 202. Library of Southern Literature (1909). Nineteenth-Century American Fiction Writers (1998). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Southern Writers: A Biographical Dictionary (1979). Other references: Bookman (1904). Harper’s Bazaar (1899). Legacy (1993). Louisiana Literature: A Review of Literature and
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Humanities (1987). NYT (8 May 1917). Studies in American Fiction (1998). Xavier Review (1987). —JOAN WYLIE HALL
STURE-VASA, Mary (Alsop) Born Mary O’Hara Alsop, 10 July 1885, Cape May Point, New Jersey; died 15 October 1980, Chevy Chase, Maryland Wrote under: Mary O’Hara Daughter of Reese Fell and Mary Lee Spring Alsop; married Kent K. Parrott, 1905; Helge Sture-Vasa, 1922 Mary Sture-Vasa was privately educated, with the emphasis on languages and music. She traveled widely during her youth in the eastern U.S., and she also lived in California and Wyoming, locales important to her career as popular novelist, screen writer, and composer. For example, The Catch Colt (1964), a musical drama, blends all these influences. Sture-Vasa was married twice and had two children. In Wyoming Summer (1963), a fictionalized autobiography, Sture-Vasa defines a story as ‘‘a reflection of life plus beginning and end (life seems not to have either) and a meaning.’’ She applied her definition to ranch life as recorded in her journals to create this book and her best-known works, the Flicka series. Like the straight autobiographical works, Novel-in-the-Making (1954) and A Musical in the Making (1966), Wyoming Summer conveys a clear sense of the artist, writer, and composer at work. Episodic but smooth, highly personal but detached, it includes poignant comments about women and their careers and is embedded with tiny, insightful essays about adversity, loneliness, religion, creativity, happiness, and love. Now regarded as young people’s classics, the very popular series My Friend Flicka (1941), Thunderhead (1943, film version, 1945), and Green Grass of Wyoming (1946) shares these themes and reflects Sture-Vasa’s knowledge and love of animals. These novels trace the maturation of Ken McLaughlin and his development of a line of horses destined to realize his family’s dreams. In the first novel, Ken’s struggle to master the filly is clearly the symbol for his efforts to discipline himself. The parallelism continues in the next two books, where Ken’s development is symbolized by the difficulty of training Flicka’s colt, Thunderhead, a promising but wild stallion. Ken learns to differentiate between absolute freedom and freely exercised responsibility, between dream and reality, and is thus prepared for his role as young man and young lover. The characterization is well wrought, persuasive, and sound. Thunderhead and Green Grass of Wyoming are more intricately plotted than My Friend Flicka and more appealing to adults, for in each an important subplot explores the sometimes strained marriage (complicated by possessiveness, financial worries, and parenthood) of Rob and Nell McLaughlin. Nell’s portrait
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is particularly strong in its presentation of the tensions engendered by traditional women’s roles. Defining herself only as Rob’s wife, the mother of Ken and Howard, Nell learns to subordinate herself to her husband in Thunderhead. In Green Grass of Wyoming, she finds herself at a stage of life she has always desired—she has at last borne a daughter, has taught her sons to be self-reliant young men, and has helped her husband achieve some financial security. But Nell is unprepared for this new era, and it precipitates a physical and emotional breakdown. Her resolution of these difficulties remains traditional and is honestly depicted; she does not alter her self-definition, but she does learn to invest herself in herself as well as in others. Beautifully rendered natural settings and details of ranch life underscore the realism of all three works. Christian faith is a major theme in Sture-Vasa’s work. Let Us Say Grace (1930) explains the Trinity in a fable framing a parable. The parable compares the function of the monetary system to the relationships within the Trinity. In the Flicka series, Nell’s musings and her talks with her sons often concern religion. The Son of Adam Wyngate (1952), a less well-received novel, portrays a clergyman whose faith is tested when he confronts his wife’s adultery. The hero, Bartholomew Wyngate, is a mystic, and the novel attempts to make his mysticism readily understandable to the average reader. More successfully, it probes the relationships of several generations of a large family, and the insights into sibling rivalry in both young and older characters are vivid. Set in New York, this book continues the religious theme which is rooted in Sture-Vasa’s serious study of Christianity and Eastern philosophy and theology. Sture-Vasa is considered a talented, careful writer who reveals a genuine understanding of human nature and a fine ability to project into animal ‘‘mentality’’ without anthropomorphizing. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Witham, W. T., The Adolescent in the American Novel, 1921-1960 (1964). Other references: NYTBR (24 Aug. 1941, 27 Oct. 1946). SR (1 Nov. 1941, 17 May 1952). —JANE S. BAKERMAN
SUCKOW, Ruth Born 6 August 1892, Hawarden, Iowa; died 23 January 1960, Claremont, California Daughter of William J. and Anna Kluckhohn Suckow; married Ferner Nuhn, 1929 The second daughter of a Congregational minister, Ruth Suckow grew up in Iowa. A moving and useful account of her childhood, which examines many of the materials used in novels and stories, is ‘‘A Memoir,’’ published in Some Others and Myself (1952). She was educated in Iowa schools, Grinnell College, the Curry School of Expression in Boston, and the University of Denver (B.A. 1917, M.A. 1918—her thesis dealt with woman
novelists). Learning the apiary business, she later supplemented her earnings by bee-keeping. In 1929 she married Ferner Nuhn, another Iowa writer. Arthritis eventually necessitating a dry climate, she spent her last years in Southern California. A regional realist, Suckow created fiction that is remarkably even in quality and consistent in theme and tone, although her stories treat a wider variety of character types than are fully portrayed in the novels; they also tend to end less hopefully. Her almost invariable setting is rural Iowa. Early reviewers praised her knowledge of her characters and her skill in description; often they also accused her of stressing the unpleasant side of Iowa life and of the indiscriminate piling up of detail. In mid-career, she was praised for her realism and for the warmth now seen in her work. Critics found the late novels nostalgic and less pessimistic than the early works. But today they seem very much of a piece: all show disappointed lives but end on a positive note. What changed was not Suckow’s view of her world but the critical expectations of her. Country People (1924) tells the story of August Kaetterhenry, dour son of German immigrants. Years of toil, leading finally to prosperity, leave him unable to enjoy the results of his labor. After his death, however, his wife discovers an unsuspected independence in herself and lives more happily than ever before. This novel seems static, for it is presented almost entirely through narration; dialogue and dramatized action are lacking. The next four novels, The Odyssey of a Nice Girl (1925), The Bonney Family (1928), Cora (1929), and The Kramer Girls (1930), make effective use of dramatized scenes and of accurately rendered and functional dialogue. All are concerned with family relationships, but most particularly with women. Their fully and sympathetically drawn characters are ordinary people about whom Suckow makes us care. The Odyssey of a Nice Girl and Cora follow the lives of two Iowa girls from childhood into adulthood. In the first, Marjorie is a middle-class girl; while ‘‘nice,’’ she is also shallow. Her marriage strikes many readers as an unsatisfactory, conventional ending to a pointless ‘‘odyssey.’’ Cora is from working-class backgrounds; her success in a career and her failed marriage leave her facing the future with courage; although not happy, she is strong and would not change her life. The experiences of both women are so presented as to be typical for their time and place. The Bonney Family and The Kramer Girls deal with families. The Bonney family consists of parents, two sons, and two daughters; in the novel, the initially happy family is followed to its eventual breakup. The final focus is on Sarah, the oldest daughter, as she sets out on a new career. In The Kramer Girls, the central family group is three sisters, the two eldest sacrificing themselves to give the youngest a chance. All three lead narrow lives, but the youngest, after years of struggle, eventually reaches a balance, content in her marriage and in her job. The depictions of the mannish Georgie and feminine Annie, the two older sisters, breathe new life into the stereotype of the ‘‘old maid.’’
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The Folks (1934), Suckow’s most ambitious novel, shows a natural progression from earlier themes and techniques. Fred Ferguson, his wife Annie, and their children are all developed fully and believably. Each of the children is given a section of the novel, while the opening and closing sections focus on their parents. All four children ultimately disappoint the parents: Carl, the most apparently successful, is trapped in an unhappy marriage, and Bunny marries a young woman whom his parents can neither approve nor understand. Dorothy, conventionally pretty and popular, makes an apparently ideal marriage; her section, set near the center of the novel, describes her wedding as a perfect moment against which everything else is measured. Margaret’s section, the longest, follows her from college, through a Bohemian period in New York City, into an obsessive affair with a married man. The novel’s structure is thematic rather than chronological, presenting some key events from several viewpoints. Margaret is the most complex of the characters; the depiction of her rebellion against middle class Midwestern standards is well handled. Only two more novels followed. They continue Suckow’s earlier themes but are more heavily symbolic, abstract, and moralistic. New Hope (1942) is a parable of the American experience. The town of New Hope is presented in the first optimism of its early years. But the settlers bring their old sins with them, and Suckow makes it clear New Hope will never become more than a village. The novel centers around two families, those of a businessman and a minister. The minister’s arrival and departure several years later give the novel its form; events are seen through the perspective of the little son of the businessman. A central theme is the loss of innocence. Like The Folks, New Hope is organized thematically, though without any complication of chronology or point of view. The John Wood Case (1959) studies the effects on family, church, and community of the revelation that a trusted smalltown business and church leader is an embezzler. The town’s hypocrisy is revealed, but some characters behave well under the pressure. The novel ends hopefully, as the culprit’s son is shown courageously facing the future. While never considered a major writer, Suckow has always been deservedly respected for her contributions to regional realism, her sensitive characterizations of Iowa women and men, and her honest, unflinching studies of decent people meeting the disappointments of their lives with dignity. Her fiction is always carefully crafted; to read her work is to be carried to rural Iowa as it was not long ago.
OTHER WORKS: Iowa Interiors (1926). Children and Older People (1931). Carry-Over (1936).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Kissane, L. M., Ruth Suckow (1969). McAlpin, S., ‘‘Enlightening the Commonplace: The Work of Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, and Ruth Suckow’’ (dissertation, 1971).
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Omreanin, M. S., Ruth Suckow: A Critical Study of Her Fiction (1972). Stewart, M. O., ‘‘A Critical Study of Ruth Suckow’s Fiction’’ (dissertation, 1960). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: BI (Nov. 1970). Palimpsest 35 (Feb. 1954). —MARY JEAN DEMARR
SUI SIN FAR See EATON, Edith Maud
SUSANN, Jacqueline Born 20 August 1921, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; died 21 September 1974, New York, New York Daughter of Robert and Rose Jans Susann; married Irving Mansfield, 1939; children: one son Jacqueline Susann was an only child. After graduation from high school, she went to New York City, where she married television and film producer Irving Mansfield in 1939 (date and place vary in interviews). They had one son. Susann worked as a model, an actress, and television performer. In 1946, she wrote the play Lovely Me, collaborating with Beatrice Cole. Seventeen years later she began to publish. Every Night, Josephine! (1963, reprints in 1970 and 1974), Susann’s only book of nonfiction, tells about her French poodle. In depicting the hedonism of her dog’s life, Susann also describes her own lifestyle in New York and Hollywood, her friendships, and her television and theater work. Some critics think the book is Susann’s best; it is unique in showing the author’s sense of humor and is funny except for occasional slips into coyness. Animal lovers often find the story irresistible. Susann considered but never wrote a sequel about Josephine. Instead, she turned to fiction. Although critics scorned her work, Susann was a popular success and a literary phenomenon, the first author to have two number-one bestsellers back to back. In Valley of the Dolls (1966), using character types and settings that would become part of a familiar format, Susann traces the lives and loves of three women in the entertainment business. Each gains money and prominence in the neon-lighted world, but a heavy penalty is exacted. The actress commits suicide; the singer becomes a drunken drug addict; the television star finds marriage brings sorrow and a need for drugs, the ‘‘dolls’’ of the title. Susann manages to keep several plots going simultaneously in the novel, but the content is that of a soap opera, the characters are wooden, and the dialogue clichéd. Robin Stone of The Love Machine (1969, 1981) leads a fastpaced, self-centered existence in the wheeling-dealing world of show business and television. Although women flock to him, he cannot love until he gains understanding through psychoanalysis.
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The novel, a ‘‘fast-read,’’ is almost as quickly forgotten. Its attraction lies in the author’s ability to interweave numerous subplots with the major plot and to keep the storyline going. Susann is less skillful in her depiction of characters, who are lifeless and whose speech makes no distinction for education, position, regionalism, or personality traits. Once Is Not Enough (1973, 1976) has more violence and more varieties of sexual types and behavior than Susann’s other novels. This time the multiple plots concern characters from the movie and publishing world. The major female character has incestuous feelings for her father, which lead her into disastrous relationships; when her father dies, she commits suicide. Many of the characters are vaguely familiar; they seem to have come from gossip columns and movie magazines. Nevertheless, Susann has some success in creating sympathy for her unhappy, driven women. Susann’s shortest and last work, Dolores (1976), is an obvious portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy. The novel is Susann’s weakest, lacking any of the vitality of her previous works. Thinly disguised characters become caricatures of actual persons in public life. Had the novel been written by a lesser-known author, it probably would not have been published. Readers must be impressed, however, by the courage of Susann, who wrote the novel during her final bout with cancer. Susann wrote with warmth and knowledge about developmentally disabled children and about cancer; they were the tragedies that touched her own life. She looked with less sympathy at many other aspects of existence. Although she detailed with gusto the sins of a select group of people, behind the glitter of the prose stood a moralist who granted as little happiness to transgressors as any writer of earlier periods. OTHER WORKS: Yargo (1979). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hanna, D., The World of Jacqueline Susann (1975). Mansfield, I., Life with Jackie (1984). Seaman, B., Lovely Me: The Life of Jacqueline Susann (1987, 1996). Ventura, J., The Jacqueline Susann Story (1975). Other references: Harper’s (Oct. 1969). Life (19 Aug. 1966, 30 May 1966). Nation (1 Sept. 1969). NYT (23 Sept. 1974). NYTM (12 April 1973). —HELEN S. GARSON
SWENSON, May Born 28 May 1919, Logan, Utah; died 4 December 1989, Ocean View, Delaware Daughter of Dan Arthur and Anna Margaret Hellberg Swenson One of a large family, May Swenson grew up and was educated near the State University in Logan, where her father was
professor of mechanical engineering. After graduation, Swenson worked as a reporter on the Salt Lake City Deseret News and then moved to New York where she held various jobs, becoming an editor for New Directions in 1959. In 1966 she resigned to devote full time to her writing, with interludes as poet-in-residence at several American and Canadian universities. Swenson received numerous honors for her poetry, including Guggenheim and Rockefeller Fellowships, the Shelley Memorial Award, and an Award in Literature from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1970 she was elected to membership in the institute. Though Swenson did translations from the work of the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer and wrote a play and some prose, she was best known as a poet. Her first book, Another Animal (1954), indicated the directions and methods much of her later work would follow; it demonstrates the qualities of freshness, vitality, and keen and often unusual observations of natural phenomena and a magical balancing of surface and interior meanings. Often the balancing takes the form of metaphor as in the equation between landscape and the human body in ‘‘Sketch for a Landscape.’’ In this book she begins, too, the riddling pattern often followed later of refusing to name lest naming interfere with the observer’s truly identifying the object. Swenson’s second book, A Cage of Spires (1958), a solid volume both in length and quality, continues the pressure upon the things of this world, turning them into emblems of other, deeper structures. For example, in ‘‘Promontory Moment,’’ the poem evolves from the image of a yellow pencil tilted in sand like the mast of a ship, to the whole relationship of the works of man, nature, the sea, and sun where ‘‘little and vast are the same to that big eye / that sees no shadow.’’ But Swenson’s cosmic images are rarely solemn, so interspersed are they with vivid accounting of the immediate world. Depth and wit come together in this book described by Richard Wilbur as ‘‘happy throughout in both senses of the word.’’ To Mix with Time: New and Selected Poems (1963) reproduces most of the poems of her first two volumes, along with an entire new collection. Some of the poems came as a response to France, Italy, and Spain, which Swenson visited in 1960 and 1961 with an Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship. Of particular interest is ‘‘Death Invited,’’ in which Swenson combines an awareness of the ongoingness of death with the ritual of the bullfight. Half Sun Half Sleep (1967) continues the search for ‘‘the clarities of Being’’ through the landscapes of city, country, and the sea. She continues also her experiments with unusual typography suited to the material of the poem which has marked her work from the beginning. All the poems in Iconographs (1970) are in such shapes. It is important to notice, however, that Swenson has never sacrificed the sense of the poem to its iconography; the shapes are imposed upon the poems after composition. Iconographs marks too a further expression of passion in such poems as ‘‘Feel Me,’’ ‘‘A Trellis for R.,’’ ‘‘Wednesday at the Waldorf,’’ and ‘‘The Year of the Double Spring.’’ Here Swenson releases some of the intense feeling that remained as a strong undercurrent in many of the earlier poems.
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Besides her original verse, Swenson has published several books for young readers. Most of the poems in the first two, Poems to Solve (1966) and More Poems to Solve (1971), have been chosen from her already published work. Swenson has carried the perception of visual detail farther than any other contemporary poet, and probably none so successfully joins freshness of vision with serious undercurrents of ideas. Moreover, she is aware of the textural connotations of sound, consistently using them to enhance meaning. Wit, too, enlivens poem after poem in the metaphysical sense, being a play between intellect and object in a serious sleight of hand. As Richard Howard has said, ‘‘her attention is to the quality of being itself in order to encounter, to espouse form as it becomes what it is.’’ Swenson’s poetry is unique in such encounter and well deserves the high praise it enjoyed in a career spanning 35 years. Swenson published some 450 poems, and amid the many that speak of nature, science, and technology, there are also a number of love poems. Those originally published in earlier works, along with 13 not previously published, have been collected in The Love Poems of May Swenson (1991). Included in this volume are visual and nature poems that treat love and sexuality while also interpreting the world through human hearts. Swenson’s metaphorical use of flowers to communicate a frank sexuality and sensuality has much in common with the more erotic interpretation of the Song of Songs. Love is not always pleasure, and Swenson is quick to point out the isolation occurring in a life without love as an anchor. ‘‘In love we are set free’’ certainly, and Swenson implies that without love we are truly imprisoned in ourselves.
OTHER WORKS: The Contemporary Poet as Artist and Critic (1964). Windows and Stones: Selected Poems by Tomas Tranströmer (translated by Swenson, 1972). The Guess & Spell Coloring Book (1976). New and Selected Things Taking Place (1978). In Other Words: New Poems (1987, reprinted 1992). American Sports Poems (with R. R. Knudson, 1989). The Complete to Solve (juvenile, 1993). Nature (1993). The Centaur (1994). Nature: Poems Old and New (1994). May Out West: Poems of May Swenson (1996). Made with Words (1998). Contributor to many journals, including: American Poetry Review, Nation, Paris Review, Parnassus, Poetry, and Yale Review. Contributed to anthologies, most recently: No More Masks! An Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Women Poets, Newly Revised and Expanded (1993); The Best American Poetry 1994 (1994); An Anthology of Great U.S. Women Poets, 1850-1990: Temples and Palaces (1997). May Swenson’s papers are housed at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Gilbert S. M., and S. Gubar, eds., Shakespeare’s Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets (1979). Hotelling, K. R., ‘‘After Autonomy: The Feminist Poetics of Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and May Swenson’’ (dissertation, 1998). Knudson, R. R., May Swenson: A Poet’s Life in Photos (1996).
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Mullaney, J. P., ed., Truthtellers of the Times: Interviews with Contemporary Women Poets (1998). Reference works: AWP (1986). CA (1969, 1990). CANR (1992). CLC (1975, 1980, 1990). CP (1985). DLB (1980). FC (1990). MTCW (1991). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). SATA (1979). Other references: American Poetry Review (March-April 1978, Sept. 1994). Bulletin of Bibliography (March 1987). CSM (12 Feb. 1979). Explicator (Fall 1979). Hudson Review (Summer 1988). Nation (10 Aug. 1963, 28 Feb. 1972). NR (7 March 1988). NYT (obituary, 5 Dec. 1989). NYTBR (7 May 1971, 11 Feb. 1979, 19 Jan. 1992). Parnassus (Fall 1978, 1985, 1990). Paris Review (Summer 1993). Poetry (Nov. 1971, Feb. 1979, Feb. 1980, July 1989). Poetry Criticism (1996). Southern Review (Winter 1969). Twentieth Century Literature (1998). TriQuarterly (7 Fall 1966). Wilson Quarterly (1997). WRB (Jan. 1995). —ANN STANFORD, UPDATED BY LINDA BERUBE
SWETT, Sophie (Mariam) Born Brewer, Maine, 1858; died 12 November 1912 Daughter of Nathaniel and Susan Braston Swett Sophie Swett was educated in public and private schools in Boston, Massachusetts. She served for a time as an associate editor of Wide Awake, the juvenile periodical established by Daniel Lothrop, a Boston-based publisher of children’s books. In later life, Swett made her home in Arlington Heights, Massachusetts. Swett’s stories for young people characteristically combine a ‘‘Horatio Alger’’ plot and a Down-East setting. A Cape Cod Boy (1901), for example, tells of a ‘‘little Portugee,’’ swept ashore in a storm, who masters the Yankee virtues of the Cape Codders who adopt him and, in time, prospers and repays his benefactors. In Mary Augusta’s Price (1903), a homebody who yearns to be ‘‘like those brilliant girls who taught school and gave music lessons and could learn to paint portraits,’’ turns her domestic skills to profit and demonstrates both good character and ability as a ‘‘business girl’’ by selling preserves to repay a moral debt. Swett’s Stories of Maine (1890) is a local history intended as a school reader. Swett should be regarded as both a juvenile author and a practitioner of the New England ‘‘local color’’ style best known through the works of Sarah Orne Jewett. Swett’s sister, Susan Hartley Swett (1860-1907) was a poetess and author of local color fiction who also published in the juvenile periodicals.
OTHER WORKS: Captain Polly (1889). Flying Hill Farm (1892). The Mate of the Mary Ann (1894). Cap’n Thistletop (1895). The
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Lollipops’ Vacation (1896). Pennyroyal and Mint (1896). The Ponkaty Branch Road, and Other Stories for Young People (1896). Tom Pickering of ‘‘Scutney’’ (1897). Bilberry Boys and Girls (1898). The Boy from Beaver Hollow (1900). The Littlest One of the Brown (1900). Sarah the Less (1902). The WonderShip (1902). The Young Ship-Builder (1902). The Lion Tamer’s Little Girl (1903). Long Tom and How They Got Him (1903). Peaseblossom’s Lion (1903). The Yellow-Capped Monkey (1903). Sonny Boy (1904). Polly and the Other Girl (1906). Princess Wisla (1908). The Six Little Pennypackers (1911). How the Pennypackers Kept the Light (1912).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Herringshaw’s Encyclopedia of American Biography of the Nineteenth Century (1911). Who Was Who in America, 1899-1942 (1966). —JANE BENARDETE
SWISSHELM, Jane Grey Born 6 December 1815, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; died 22 July 1884, Sewickley, Pennsylvania Also wrote under: Jennie Deans, J. G. S. Daughter of Thomas and Mary Scott Cannon; married James Swisshelm, 1836 (separated); children: one daughter When Jane Grey Swisshelm was seven, her father died of tuberculosis. Her mother, who had previously lost four children to the disease, disregarded the doctor’s prescription when Swisshelm showed symptoms, treating her with fresh air, fresh food, and exercise. Swisshelm recovered, and at the age of fourteen was teaching in the public school in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania. Swisshelm joined the church of her Scotch Covenanter parents at the age of fifteen, after a period of torment. The church provided her with a sense of purpose and a source of conflict throughout her life. In 1836 she married James Swisshelm, entering upon a marriage that was stormy and intermittent. A short stay in Louisville, Kentucky, where her husband went into business, provided Swisshelm with material for her later writing against slavery. She started a school for blacks, but gave it up when threats were made to burn down her house. From 1840 on, Swisshelm’s articles attacking capital punishment, advocating woman suffrage and the right of women to hold property, and urging the abolition of slavery appeared, at first anonymously, in newspapers in and around Pittsburgh. She contributed stories and poems as well. When Pittsburgh was left without an abolitionist paper in 1847, Swisshelm resolved to edit one herself. She delighted in the criticism she drew as a woman editor with pronounced political views. She continued to write for the Pittsburgh Saturday Visiter after it merged with Robert Riddle’s
Journal in 1852. Her zeal for reform included advocacy of the ‘‘watercure treatment,’’ advice on woman’s health, dress, reading, and education. An opponent of the Mexican War, Swisshelm went to Washington, D.C., in 1850 to observe the debate over disposition of Mexican territory acquired through the War. Horace Greeley engaged her as a Washington correspondent to the New York Tribune, and as the first woman to have such a regular assignment, she sought and secured a seat in the Congressional reporters’ gallery. In 1857 Swisshelm severed her connection with the Family Journal and Visiter, left her husband, and took her small daughter to northern Minnesota. There she agreed to revive and edit a defunct Democratic newspaper, which had as a major purpose attracting immigration to Minnesota. Her agreement with its proprietor included, however, the right to express her own views. The St. Cloud Visiter readily offended one of the leading political powers in the territory, and in March 1858, three men broke into her office and destroyed her press. Swisshelm first discovered she had an aptitude for public speaking at a meeting to raise funds to procure a new press, and for some years afterward made a lecture tour each year. As she traveled, she sent vivid letters to the St. Cloud Democrat, the weekly which had emerged under her editorship in July 1858 when, in order to avoid a libel suit, she had promised never again to use the Visiter as a political organ. In 1863, following a revolt by the Sioux, Swisshelm went on a lecture tour through the East to arouse opinion in favor of sterner treatment of Native Americans. At this time, she characterized the Washington scene as ‘‘treason, treason, treason all around about— paid treason—official treason.’’ She served as a nurse in military hospitals around Washington, while waiting to begin her duties as a clerk in the War Department. Her letters continued, castigating all whose conduct she disapproved: public officials, the Sanitary Commission, women who knit in the office. Her last journalistic venture, the Reconstructionist (1865), was a radical newspaper, outspoken in its criticism of Andrew Johnson. Johnson responded by dismissing her from her post in the War Department, and without this source of income, she could not continue publication of the Reconstructionist. Swisshelm’s autobiography, Half a Century (1880), is unquestionably flawed by her biases. In addition, it was reconstructed from memory, as she had systematically destroyed letters and diaries during her unhappy marriage. It is, nevertheless, an important first-hand account of events of her time, as well as of her struggle as a woman. The last third of the book contains her picture of her experiences nursing the sick and wounded during the Civil War, putting to use her powers of keen observation, willingness to sacrifice herself, her sense of humor, her strong will, and her personal warmth. A journalist who espoused many reform causes, Swisshelm was best known as an abolitionist. Her unrestrained style often
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provoked violent response, physical as well as verbal. Her writing is simple and direct, distinguished by dramatic narrative, graphic description, and vivid characterization. Although Swisshelm is noted and remembered for her ruthlessness, invective, and sarcasm, her brilliant style is equally effective in describing men and women she admired, and in conveying her warmth and her sense of pride in places and events which, to her, meant progress. OTHER WORKS: Letters to Country Girls (1853). True Stories About Pets (1879). Crusader and Feminist: The Letters of Jane Grey Swisshelm, 1858-1865 (edited by A. J. Larsen, 1934). Files of the St. Cloud Visiter and the St. Cloud Democrat and a partial file of the Pittsburgh Saturday Visiter are in the Minnesota Historical Society. A file of the Pittsburgh Saturday Visiter and
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a few issues of the Reconstructionist are in the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Stuhler, B. and G. Kreuter, eds., Women of Minnesota (1977). Thorp, M. F. Female Persuasion (1949). Reference works: DAB. NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Abraham Lincoln Quarterly (Dec. 1950). American Historical Review (July 1932). Minnesota History (March 1951). Mississippi Valley Historical Review (Dec. 1920). NYT (23 July 1884). Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine (July 1921). —VIVIAN H. SHORTREED
T TABER, Gladys Bagg
mid-20th century examples by a woman of the subgenre of semiautobiographical books about country life.
Born 2 April 1899, Colorado Springs, Colorado; died 11 March 1980, Hyannis, Massachusetts Daughter of Rufus M. and Grace Raybold Bagg; married Frank A. Taber, 1922 (died 1964); children: one daughter
Sharing Stillmeadow with Tabor and her daughter is Jill (Eleanor Mayer), Tabor’s beloved ‘‘lifelong friend,’’ and her two children. Jill was widowed in 1943. Tabor’s husband, who is seldom mentioned, died in 1964. Throughout the series, the reader follows the changes coming to the lives of Tabor and Jill as their children grow up and they struggle with the usual problems of country life. Jill is portrayed by Tabor as the stereotyped demon gardener; her death in 1960 was acknowledged in Tabor’s columns and became the subject of a book on coping with grief, Another Path (1963). Tabor characterizes herself, like the usual middle-aged heroines in her later novels, as timid and incompetent in mechanical things, unable to use the telephone or the vacuum cleaner.
Gladys Bagg Tabor was born in the West, grew up in the Midwest, and lived her adult life in Virginia, New York, and New England. She graduated from Wellesley in 1920; took an M.A. at Lawrence College, Appleton, Wisconsin, in 1921; and did graduate work at Columbia University. In 1922 she married a professor of music at Randolph-Macon College in Virginia, who lost his hearing and had to leave his profession. Tabor had one daughter. Tabor’s early work includes a play and a book of poems, but most of it is popular romance, sometimes serialized in magazines such as the Ladies’ Home Journal. Her fiction is light and uplifting; her heroines usually find true love despite an unsympathetic father or class differences. In later novels, her heroines are long-suffering middle-aged housewives. Tabor’s fiction shows a remarkable concentration on her own life, with the same themes and characters appearing again and again, and, as often happens with popular writers about whom the public is very curious, she became increasingly open about her own life when she turned completely to nonfiction after publishing her last novel, a barely disguised autobiography, in 1957. Tabor’s father is a perennial character in her books, fiction or autobiography. She wrote one book about him, Especially Father (1949), and portrays him in detail again in Harvest of Yesterdays (1976). He is harshly dealt with in her fiction, where he is the tyrant who keeps his daughter from marrying the man she loves, but in Tabor’s nonfiction she tries to sympathize with him. Nevertheless, Tabor always portrays him as a hyperactive domestic tyrant with the social responsibility of a sand flea. Tabor’s literary treatment of her father is an interesting case history in the making of capital from one of life’s burdens. Tabor’s fiction is not the work which gained her the loyal fans she has attracted over the years; rather, her magazine columns and the books she made from them are the cornerstone of her success. From November 1937 to December 1957, her column ‘‘Diary of Domesticity’’ ran in the country’s leading women’s magazine, the Ladies’ Home Journal, where she was also assistant editor (1946-58). Then for10 or more years the column continued, in Everywoman’s Family Circle, the supermarket magazine, as ‘‘Butternut Wisdom.’’ These columns, and the books she made from them, chronicle the life of Tabor and her family at Stillmeadow, a farmhouse built in 1690, near Southbury, Connecticut. The first Stillmeadow book, Harvest at Stillmeadow, was published in 1940. There is a lot of repetition in the Stillmeadow books, which are organized seasonally, but these are the most popular
Like other women who write for the popular audience, Tabor portrays herself as much more of an average housewife than she could have been. In Mrs. Daffodil (1957), an autobiographical novel in which the heroine is a columnist who lives in an old house in New England, an interviewer asks Mrs. Daffodil why she is so successful as a writer. ‘‘I think it’s because I am not a special person at all. . . . I am just any woman with a house and a family and dogs and a garden. So if I put down what I feel, others feel the same way. I’ve often wished I were a literary writer, like Virginia Woolf, but I’m just the common garden variety.’’ Such is indeed the nature of popular appeal; the readers want to read what they already think. OTHER WORKS: Lady of the Moon (1928). Lyonesse (1929). Late Climbs the Sun (1934). Tomorrow May Be Fair (1935). The Evergreen Tree (1937). Long Tails and Short (1938). A Star to Steer By (1938). This is For Always (1938). Nurse in Blue (1943). The Heart Has April Too (1944). Give Us This Day (1944). Give Me the Stars (1945). Especially Spaniels (1945). The Family on Maple Street (1946). Stillmeadow Kitchen (1947). The Book of Stillmeadow (1948). Stillmeadow Seasons (1950). When Dogs Meet People (1952). Stillmeadow and Sugarbridge (with B. Webster, 1953). Stillmeadow Daybook (1955). What Cooks at Stillmeadow (1958). Spring Harvest (1959). Stillmeadow Sampler (1959). Stillmeadow Road (1962). Another Path (1963). Stillmeadow Cookbook (1965). Stillmeadow Calendar (1967). Especially Dogs (1968). Stillmeadow Album (1969). Amber: A Very Personal Cat (1970). My Own Cape Cod (1971). My Own Cook Book (1972). Country Chronicle (1974). Conversations with Amber (1978). Still Cove Journal (1981). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ladies’ Home Journal (Oct. 1946). NYT (9 Oct. 1955). WLB (April 1952). —BEVERLY SEATON
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TAGGARD, Genevieve Born 28 November 1894, Waitsburg, Washington; died 8 November 1948, New York, New York Daughter of James N. and Alta Arnold Taggard; married Robert Wolf, 1921; Kenneth Durant, 1935; children: one daughter Genevieve Taggard was the eldest child of schoolteachermissionaries, whose Scots-Irish pioneer ancestors had migrated to Washington from Vermont. Feeling alienated from the spiritual and cultural sterility of eastern Washington, Taggard’s devout parents moved the family to Hawaii when she was two. Except for two traumatic returns to Washington necessary for her father’s health, Taggard lived 18 years in what she later idealized as innocent, exotic poverty. The contrast between Hawaii, where caste, race, and wealth seemed irrelevant, and Waitsburg’s smalltown prejudice and rude materialism, focused Taggard’s moral vision. Her social conscience was a logical extension of her parents’ preachings, but their faith as fundamentalist Disciples of Christ allowed only biblical reading; Keats and Ruskin were illicit pleasures. Defiantly, Taggard embarked upon her writing career at age twelve. By the time she graduated from the University of California at Berkeley (1920), Taggard was both poet and socialist. Nationally published, Taggard was offered work in New York by Max Eastman at the Liberator. She took a leading role in the literary and social developments of the 1920s and 1930s, working first for B. W. Huebsch’s avant-garde Freeman and helping found and edit the Measure, a lyric poetry journal. Taggard taught at several colleges, traveled in Europe and Russia, raised a daughter, and was active in humanitarian and proletarian causes. Her two husbands were also radical writers. Taggard retired in 1946 in Vermont; she died in 1948 of the effects of hypertension. Known primarily to scholars for her biography of Emily Dickinson (1930), a passionate, bold interpretation of the fatherdaughter relationship and Dickinson’s psychology, Taggard received wide recognition throughout her career as a literary activist and poet, who was published and reviewed in journals ranging from the New Yorker to New Masses. Her first book of poetry, For Eager Lovers (1922), established her unique idiom as a metaphysical Marxist, a lyric intellectual who incorporates Hawaiian exotica into poems about revolution and a woman’s experience in love. Even such Marxist visions of doomed decadence as ‘‘Twentieth Century SlaveGang’’ eschew rhetoric and combine modern directness (‘‘the ants are hurried’’) with extraordinary images: oaks bend knotted knees in labor, a pond is wrinkled with velvet oil, wasps carry spider-spoil to where crude honey hangs in mud. While this volume commemorates a first year of marriage, and Taggard occasionally speaks as an ‘‘eager lover,’’ she insists on the necessary independence—even defiance—of soul, voice,
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whole being, especially in the potentially compromising love relationship. Her resolute quest for freedom (personal, artistic, social, and political) is the dominant theme of Taggard’s poetry; here the tone is ‘‘caged arrogance’’ as the voice celebrates its emancipation. In Collected Poems, 1918-1938, Taggard juxtaposes early and late poems to show their essential continuity, that love of beauty and hatred of oppression are not contradictory. She brings her modernist and ideological rebellion against romanticism to the lives of ‘‘mothers, housewives, old women’’ to capture with compassion, ‘‘the kitchens they knew, sinks, suds, stew-pots, and pennies. . . / Dull hurry and worry, clatter, wet hands and backache.’’ While Taggard’s Marxism and moral upbringing lead her to respect ‘‘those timid slaves of breakfast’’ who ‘‘get out in the line, drop for once dish rag and broom,’’ her tolerance turns to scorn for artists who care only for aesthetics. That she feels the odds are against a ‘‘middle-class middle-aged woman’’ succeeding either socially or aesthetically at ‘‘useful’’ lyrics is told in ‘‘Words Property of the People,’’ where Taggard cites the cost of her convictions. She finds herself ‘‘stammering/Anxious to show that a poet’s mind / Is as useful as a carpenter’s hammer.’’ In Slow Music (1946), Taggard is still working to support her lifelong conviction that the desire to be socially relevant and the belief that art obeys its own laws must coexist. Charges that her poetry lacks a ‘‘unified sensibility’’ point to what makes Taggard’s poetry unusual: the lifelong synthesis of her experience and vision as sister, daughter, mother, wife, lover, professor, activist, and poet, whose words were heard on records and on the radio, sung at Carnegie Hall to music of Copland and Schuman, and read in Moscow and in bean fields. She lived paradox as naturally as she wrote metaphysical verse. The synthesis of mangoes, metaphor, and Marx makes Taggard’s poetry complex. But her passion for precision makes abstract idea and mood arresting and accessible: Taggard renders psychological and social states through metaphors of the physical world.
OTHER WORKS: Hawaiian Hilltop (1923). Continent’s End (edited by Taggard, with G. Sterling and J. Rorty, 1925). May Days (edited by Taggard, 1925). Words for the Chisel (1926). The Unspoken, and Other Poems by Anne Brenner (edited by Taggard, 1927). Travelling Standing Still (1928). Circumference: Varieties of Metaphysical Verse, 1459- (1929). The Life and Mind of Emily Dickinson (1930). Remembering Vaughan in New England (1933). Ten Introductions (with D. Fitts, 1934). Not Mine to Finish (1934). Calling Western Union (1936). Long View (1942). Falcon (1942). A Part of Vermont (1945). Origin Hawaii (1947).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Aaron, D., Writers on the Left (1961). Lins, K. L., ‘‘An Interpretive Study of Selected Poetry by Genevieve Taggard’’ (thesis, 1956). Mossberg, B.A., and C. L. Mossberg, Genevieve Taggard (Western Writers Series). Peck, D. R., ‘‘Development of an American Marxist Literary Criticism: The Monthly New
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Masses’’ (dissertation, 1968). Wilson, E., ‘‘A Poet of the Pacific,’’ in The Shores of Light (1952). Reference works: DAB. NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to American Literature (1965). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCA. Other references: Masses and Mainstream (Jan. 1949). Ms. (1979). Nation (19 Jan. 1927). New Masses (Jan. 1927). Poetry (Dec. 1934, May 1936, Feb. 1947). SR (7 Nov. 1936; 14 Dec. 1946). Scholastic (17 May 1938). Time (22 Nov. 1948). WLB (Jan. 1930). —BARBARA CLARKE MOSSBERG
TALBOTT, Marion Born 31 July 1858, Thun, Switzerland; died 20 October 1948, Chicago, Illinois Daughter of Israel T. and Emily Fairbanks Talbott Marion Talbott’s was an intellectual, well-established New England family; her father was the first dean of the medical school of Boston University, and her mother was active in establishing the Girls’ Latin School in Boston. Talbott was encouraged by her parents in her advocacy of women’s rights in academic institutions. She received a B.A. from Boston University in 1884 and a B.S. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1888.
TAN
defense of social hygiene, exercise, and training for rational thinking dates the book, but she was advocating ‘‘daring’’ ideas at the time. Talbott’s emphasis on women in the home pervades her writing, and in this way she makes her more ‘‘radical’’ ideas acceptable to a skeptical readership. The History of the American Association of University Women, 1881-1931 (1931), written with Lois Mathews Rosenberry, is a detailed account of the committees, work, and goals of the association Talbott helped to found. Anyone interested in the turbulent, innovative founding days of the University of Chicago will find Talbott’s More Than Lore (1936) a delight to read. She is forthright in her statements about discrimination against women professionals at the university. Talbott believed women should be ‘‘ladies,’’ polite and well-bred, and that a higher education prepared women to be better wives and mothers. In this way, she supported the traditional roles of women. Her writings are also interspersed, though, with a sharp appreciation of women’s contributions to society and the difficulty of managing a home, and these analyses sound similar to modern writings on the sociology of housewives and housework. Most clearly, her critiques of discrimination against women in academia are relevant and accurate today. BIBLIOGRAPHY: NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Publications of the Members of the University of Chicago: 1902-1916 (1917). —MARY JO DEEGAN
In 1892 Talbott joined the University of Chicago faculty as an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, where she taught sanitary science and was appointed the first women’s dean in a coeducational institution. In 1906 she established the Department of Household Administration. After her retirement in 1925, Talbott served as acting president of Constantinople Women’s College in Turkey (1927-28, 1931-32). Talbott’s pioneering work in women’s education was complemented by her scholarly study of the application of science to the home. This latter interest was probably sparked by her association with Ellen H. Richards, a leader in the home economics field, a family friend, teacher, and colleague. With Richards, Talbott edited Home Sanitation: A Manual for Housekeepers (1887) and wrote ‘‘Food as a Factor in Student Life’’ (1884). The latter is a more scholarly study of food services in dormitory settings and how to set nutritious standards at a low cost. Both books are simplistic and outdated but were important beginning steps in the study of nutrition and home economics. The Modern Household (1912) is an introductory text intended for housewives and college students to help them adapt to modern social changes affecting the home. The book covers a variety of topics ranging from the mundane care of the house to ethics in consumerism and the community. The Education of Women (1910) describes the educational opportunities available to girls and women in the U.S. Talbott’
TAN, Amy Born 19 February 1952, Oakland, California Daughter of Daisy (Tu Ching) and John Tan; married Lou de Mattei, 1974 Amy Tan’s fiction, infused with the spirit of the fairytales she read avidly as a child, earned the author a fairytale success in real life. While still in her thirties, Tan published two novels to spectacular critical acclaim and commercial gain. She grew up in San Francisco, the child of Chinese immigrant parents who made it out of China just before Mao came to power. Drawing on the tensions and dislocations of this background, her novels depict a new aspect of an honored American literary experience, the immigrant adventure. In the first, The Joy Luck Club (1989), and even more so in the second, The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991), Tan exhibits an extraordinarily satisfying storytelling gift: pacing, imagery, descriptive vividness, laced with suspense, humor, emotion, and psychological reality. Clearly a writer with a modern sensibility, she also includes acute social observations in the manner of the 19th-century novel, and the mix results in a masterful tapestry of
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individual and social anguish. Both novels describe mother-daughter relationships in which exotic elements of Chinese background clash against a contemporary feminist point of view. The mothers are oppressed, but not victims; the daughters strive to place themselves beyond the control of these strong mothers, claiming their own space and time, without losing the richness of their beginnings and their loyalties. The resolutions of the conflicts are emotionally satisfying, without a trace of romanticizing lies or sentimentality. In ‘‘Two Kinds,’’ a short story published in the February 1989 Atlantic Monthly, Tan describes the narrator’s mother’s background: ‘‘She had come to San Francisco in 1949 after losing everything in China: her mother and father, her family home, her first husband, and two daughters, twin baby girls.’’ Tan’s fiction tells and retells variations of this story, while engaging a modern audience with the further labyrinthine irony and pain of other-daughter love, complicated by dual, conflicting cultures and needs. Further, in The Kitchen God’s Wife, the reader is swept into the detailed horrors of the havoc and devastation suffered by the Chinese people throughout the social upheavals of this century. Tan’s father was an engineer and Baptist minister. She knew her mother had been married before, but she learned only at twenty-six that she had half sisters from that marriage still living in China. Tan herself was a middle child and only daughter of her mother’s second marriage. Both her father and her older brother died of brain tumors in the 1960s. Her remarkably resourceful mother took Tan and her younger brother from the ‘‘diseased’’ house to Montreux, Switzerland, where Tan finished her high school years. When the family returned to the Bay Area, Tan enrolled in Linfield College, a Baptist school in Oregon, but soon followed her boyfriend to San Jose State University (B.A., 1963), changing her major from premed to English. Her mother had harbored unrealistic hopes for her daughter. ‘‘Of course you will become a famous neurosurgeon. . .and, yes, a concert pianist on the side.’’ What Tan had always wanted to be was a writer, ever since she won a writing contest at age eight. Disappointing her mother, she married her boyfriend, Lou de Mattei, earned a master’s degree in linguistics (San Jose State, 1974), worked at a variety of freelance technical writing jobs, and wrote her stories on the side. She and her mother became more and more estranged until a trip to China resolved Tan’s ambiguities about her past heritage and her present sense of herself. For the first time, she felt Chinese as well as American. ‘‘When I began to write The Joy Luck Club, it was so much for my mother and myself,’’ to explain the turbulent disagreements of their lives together. She has reported that the writing of her first novel was like ‘‘taking dictation from an invisible storyteller.’’ One is reminded of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s statement that God had dictated Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Tan’s third published book is for children. The Moon Lady (1992) is ‘‘set in the China of long ago. . .a story of a little girl who discovered that the best wishes are those she can make come true herself.’’ Superficially, Amy Tan’s next book, her third novel, The Hundred Secret Senses (1995), has much in common with its
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predecessors. The mother-daughter paradigm in those books is only slightly altered; Tan presents Olivia, a California-born, modern, practical, skeptical career woman and her much older half-sister Kwan, who is nurturing, Chinese-born, unassimilated, accented; Kwan also communicates with the ‘‘world of yin,’’ a ghost world. Again, the two women are set in opposition; in Olivia’s eyes Kwan is odd, intruding, unsophisticated—a nearly lifelong source of embarrassment and guilt. The book’s plot sends Olivia, her husband, Simon, and Kwan on a pilgrimage back to China. Nineteenth-century China is again explored, this time through Kwan’s account of the lives of hers and Olivia’s reincarnated selves. However, the heart of the story rests in the resolution of the two sisters’ world views, which occurs in Olivia’s acceptance of mystery and opening herself to a spiritual life—rather than the acceptance of anything specifically generational or Chinese. Tan is undoubtedly the best known (and bestselling) Chinese-American author. The film adaption of The Joy Luck Club, for which she cowrote the script, was a box office hit. While her success may have opened doors for other young Asian-American writers, it is also true that every Asian-American writer published in the 1990s has had his or her work compared to Tan’s. Though Tan enjoys her fame, she does not relish being pigeonholed as an ethnic writer; she’d like her work (and that of other hyphenated American writers) to be found not on multicultural reading lists but on ones simply for American literature. Regarding her own work, she points out that ‘‘the obsessions I write about are very American—marriage, love, the idea that you can create your own life.’’ Tan doesn’t take herself too seriously as a literary star. She’s appeared on Sesame Street, and her second children’s book, The Chinese Siamese Cat (1994), is the tale of a mischievous, independent-thinking kitten who changes history. Tan has also appeared as the leather-clad, whip-yielding lead singer of a band called the Rock Bottom Remainders with fellow band members (and fellow authors) Dave Barry and Stephen King. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cosslett, T., ‘‘Feminism, Matrilinealism, and the ‘House of Women’ in Contemporary Women’s Fiction,’’ in Journal of Gender Studies (Mar. 1996). Reference works: Bestsellers (1989). CA (1992). CLC (1990). Other references: Asian Week (21 Oct. 1994). Far Eastern Economic Review (27 July 1989, 14 Nov. 1991). Independent (10 Feb. 1996). KR (15 July 1994). LATBR (12 Mar. 1989). Newsday (11 Nov. 1995). New Statesman and Society (30 June 1989, 12 July 1991, 16 Feb. 1996). Newsweek (17 Apr. 1989). NYT (4 July 1989, 31 May 1991, 11 June 1991, 20 June 1991, 17 Nov. 1995). NYTBR (19 Mar. 1989, 16 June 1991, 8 Nov. 1992, 29 Oct. 1995). St. Louis Post-Dispatch (11 Nov. 1995). Time (27 Mar. 1989, 3 June 1991). WP (8 Oct. 1989). WPBW (5 Mar. 1989, 16 June 1991). WRB (Sept. 1991). —HELEN YGLESIAS, UPDATED BY VALERIE VOGRIN
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TAPPAN
TANDY, Jennette Reid
traveler and always questing after knowledge and new experiences, Tandy studied art and weaving in this country and Europe, most intensely with the Navajos in Arizona. A collector of Native American jewelry and crafts, she incorporated Navajo motifs into some of her tapestries.
Born 27 September 1889, Vevay, Indiana; died 24 August 1968, Dillsboro, Indiana Daughter of Carroll S. and Jennette Carpenter Tandy Descended on her father’s side from Swiss immigrants, Jennette Reid Tandy was the oldest of six daughters in a locally prominent and well-educated family. Both parents encouraged the girls in reading, needlework, music, and art. The family valued academic achievement, and all of the daughters attended universities or art school. Tandy and her sister Elizabeth earned doctorates. After studying at Wellesley College for two years, Tandy went to the University of Chicago for her Ph.B. (1911), then studied library science at Western Reserve University. During the 1910s she worked as librarian and teacher in Ohio and Indiana. In the 1920s, Tandy studied and taught at Columbia University where she received her M.A. (1920) and her Ph.D.(1925). At Columbia, Professors William P. Trent and Carl Van Doren guided Tandy and other graduate students to undertake some of the necessary groundwork for establishing American literature, then a just barely respectable subject for academic inquiry, as a legitimate discipline. Always independent and iconoclastic, Tandy more than met the challenge for a pioneering study. Her dissertation, published as Crackerbox Philosophers in American Humor and Satire (1925), goes beyond mainstream American literature to include what she calls the ‘‘underbrush of literature,’’ that is, the popular writing of newspapers and almanacs. Her book, one of the landmarks in the study of American humor, has been overshadowed by Constance Rourke’s American Humor (1931) but is notable on several counts. Although Crackerbox Philosophers is a study in American letters, Tandy is mindful of the cultural context out of which literature comes. In assuming a broad definition of literature that includes folk and popular material and in treating literature as an artifact of culture, Tandy, her mentors, and colleagues helped to establish a perspective that eventually gave rise to the American studies and popular culture movements. Tandy’s work anticipates Rourke’s later recognition that a study of American humor is a study of American character. In her book, Tandy describes and analyzes the provincial character type she calls ‘‘crackerbox philosopher.’’ Her study is the earliest full treatment of this unlettered American social critic. The crackerbox philosopher in literature and in life is a variant of the ‘‘wise fool’’ a person deficient in book learning but strong in common sense. In her chapter, ‘‘The Development of Southern Humor,’’ Tandy gives the first serious attention to a group of journalistic writers later to be identified as ‘‘frontier’’ or ‘‘Old Southwestern’’ humorists. Since frontier humor is often described as ‘‘masculine,’’ it is noteworthy that a woman became one of its earliest scholars. Serious illness and a long recuperation ended Tandy’s career as a scholar. She returned to her native Ohio River Valley and as a therapeutic continuation of her interest in textiles and needlework started weaving tapestries on a small hand loom. Always a willing
When Tandy returned to Vevay, she chose for her studio an early 19th-century building, formerly used as a saloon and tavern, where Daniel Boone is reputed to have stayed overnight. In her weaving, she continued some of the same interests that had occupied her as a literary scholar: local culture and ordinary folk. Many of Tandy’s tapestries depict scenes along the Kentucky and Ohio Rivers: shanty boats, tobacco market, and provincial architecture. Her interest in popular culture shows in woven representations of a hamburger stand and pool hall. Some of her portrait tapestries are caricatures. In her depiction of ‘‘Mrs. Uppercrust,’’ for instance, Tandy pokes fun at the pretensions of social class in the spirit of a crackerbox philosopher. Never content with mediocrity, Tandy experimented with technique, floss, and color and became an accomplished artisan. In the 1940s and 1950s, she produced hundreds of tapestries and exhibited them in one-woman shows in art museums in the U.S. and Canada. Life as a New York City intellectual and life as a village weaver seem unconnected, but a common thread runs through Tandy’s diverse activities and achievements: in her art and in her scholarship, she focused on Native American culture. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Louisville Courier-Journal Magazine (1 Oct. 1950). Indianapolis Star Magazine (5 Dec. 1954). —LYNDA W. BROWN
TAPPAN, Eva March Born 26 December 1854, Blackstone, Massachusetts; died 29 January 1930, Worcester, Massachusetts Daughter of Edmund M. and Lucretia Logee Tappan Eva March Tappan, whose father died when she was six years old, spent most of her childhood at various ladies’ seminaries where her mother supported them both by teaching. Indeed, the first half century of Tappan’s life belonged, one way or another, to educational institutions. After receiving a B.A. from Vassar in 1875, Tappan taught in secondary schools, first at the Wheaton Seminary in Norton, Massachusetts (1875-80), and later at the Raymond Academy in Camden, New Jersey, where she was also an associate principal (1884-94). In 1894 Tappan entered the University of Pennsylvania full time. There she earned an M.A. (1895) and a Ph.D. (1896), writing her dissertation on the 17thcentury English poet, Nicholas Breton. In the same year she published her first book, Charles Lamb, the Man and the Author. The following year, 1897, Tappan returned to teaching, this time as head of the English department of English High School, Worcester, Massachusetts. During the next seven years, she balanced the demands of teaching and authorship, writing several
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successful textbooks in history and literature, including In the Days of Alfred the Great (1900), England’s Story (1901), and Our Country’s Story (1902). In 1904, determined to devote all her energies to writing, Tappan resigned her post at English High School. Tappan’s books are characterized by a simple, direct style, extensive use of picturesque detail, and a pervasive sense of drama. Although the use of details and dramatization may not seem unusual now, it was at the time, for Tappan was among the first writers to present history in terms of the customs, culture, and manner of living of a people, rather than in terms of battles and political settlements. In addition, although Tappan’s style is dramatic, she does not make the mistake of dramatizing at the expense of accuracy. Among her contemporaries and ours, the consensus is that her research was thorough and her interpretations sensitive. For example, her Little Book of the War (1918) is a careful attempt to explain the causes of World War I without recourse to the frenzied propaganda of the time. In all of her more than 40 books, Tappan manages to be scholarly without being pedantic, informative without being didactic, and entertaining without being trivial. Her conviction that history was more than a record of wars helped to change the nature of historical writing for children. OTHER WORKS: In the Days of William the Conqueror (1901). Old Ballads in Prose (1901). In the Days of Queen Elizabeth (1902). The Christ Story (1903). In the Days of Queen Victoria (1903). Robin Hood, His Book (1903). A Short History of England’s Literature (1905). The Golden Goose, and Other Fairy Tales (1905). A Short History of America’s Literature (1906). American Hero Stories (1906). A Short History of England’s and America’s Literature (1906). America’s Literature, with Selections from Colonial and Revolutionary Writers (1907). The Chaucer Story Book (1908). Letters from Colonial Children (1908). The Story of the Greek People (1908). Dixie Kitten (1910). A Friend in the Library (12 vols., 1910). An Old, Old Storybook (1910). The Story of the Roman People (1910). Old World Hero Stories (1911). When Knights Were Bold (1912). The House with the Silver Door (1913). Diggers in the Earth (1916). The Farmer and His Friends (1916). Makers of Many Things (1916). Travelers and Traveling (1916). The Little Book of the Flag (1918). Our European Ancestors (1918). Food Saving and Sharing (1918). The Little Book of Our Country (1919). Hero Stories of France (1920). Heroes of Progress (1921). Story of Our Constitution (1922). Ella, a Little Schoolgirl of the Sixties (1923). American History Stories for Very Young Readers (1924). Barry, the Dog Hero of the St. Bernard Pass (1924). Stories of America for Very Young Readers (1926). The Prince from Nowhere (1928). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Smith, D. V., Fifty Years of Children’s Books (1963). Reference works: DAB. NAW (1971). Other references: Boston Evening Transcript (30 Jan. 1930). —KATHARYN F. CRABBE
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TARBELL, Ida (Minerva) Born 5 November 1857, Erie County, Pennsylvania; died 6 January 1944, Bridgeport, Connecticut Daughter of Franklin S. and Esther McCullough Tarbell Ida Tarbell grew up in what was then the heartland of America’s oil region. As a child, she evinced considerable intellectual curiosity and independence, which her parents (both former teachers) encouraged. The Tarbell family was closely knit and espoused the typical virtues of the early American Dream: hard work, honesty, thrift, and moral good. To the end of her life, she tended to judge all character (of person or corporation) on the basis of its adherence to what she called ‘‘the fair and open path.’’ It was this high moral sense that animated her best writing. An adolescent struggle to reconcile the Holy Writ with scientific fact (she found a solution in theories of evolution) led Tarbell to study biology at Allegheny College, as the sole female in a freshman class of 40. After graduating in 1880, Tarbell took an onerous and poorly paid teaching position with a Poland, Ohio, seminary (like her college, not far from her family home). In 1882 she returned home and soon became a staff member of the Chautauquan, a monthly magazine connected with the Chautauqua movement and its home studies program. Beginning as an editorial secretary, Tarbell advanced during her eight-year employment on the magazine to writer and annotator. At the age of thirty, Tarbell decided she was ‘‘dying of respectability’’ and gave vent to her need for adventure by quitting her job and going to Paris to write a biography of a French revolutionary, Madame Roland: A Biographical Study (1896). Despite her own (and others’) assessment of her ability as ‘‘not a writer but a dead scholar,’’ Tarbell supported herself in France by writing for American magazines. In this manner she was noticed by S. S. McClure, publisher of the fledgling McClure’s magazine. Her contribution on Napoleon, in 1894, boosted the magazine’s popularity and Tarbell’s reputation as a journalist of note. From 1894 until 1906 Tarbell was a writer for McClure’s; from 1906 to 1915, for American Magazine. In this 21-year period as a staff writer, Tarbell produced the works which support her journalistic reputation. Almost all resulted from assignments for articles, which later were published separately as books; they are either biographies (not critical or analytical but thoroughly researched) or studies of complex issues (such as the oil corporations or tariffs), which Tarbell could explain in concepts and language understandable to the average person. These studies, however, are not purely objective analyses but reflect the attitudes and values of her background. Tarbell was one of the investigative journalists popular in the early 20th-century who were given the name ‘‘muckrakers’’ by Theodore Roosevelt. Like many others, Tarbell was profoundly affected by World War I and its alteration of traditional beliefs; this is reflected in her focus, from 1911 until the 1920s, on war and peace and resultant social problems. Her writings after WWI are fewer; in these years, Tarbell was more active as lecturer or delegate to various national and international conferences. She herself considered her postwar
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writings ‘‘musty’’-it seems probable she no longer was able to write from the fierce certainties of youth and that the concerns of the reading public had been altered substantially by the war. Perhaps Tarbell’s best writing from the later years of her life is her autobiography, All in the Day’s Work (1939), written when she was eighty-two. She relates that at fourteen, she had prayed never to be married; as a college student, she avoided ‘‘entangling alliances.’’ The phrase (hers) is telling; throughout her autobiography, Tarbell repeatedly notes her need for independence and freedom—freedom from marriage and from groups, especially the suffragists or other women’s groups. Tarbell was not a feminist; she opposed the woman suffrage movement because she felt suffragists belittled women’s contributions to society. As her autobiography, her study of Mme. Roland, and her two treatises on ‘‘womanhood’’— The Business of Being a Woman (1912) and Ways of Woman (1915)—reveal, she answered ‘‘the woman question’’ with the cliché that the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. The home, which Tarbell felt to be a sufficient and necessary sphere in which women could operate, was the most vital unit in a healthy society. Thus she approved patriarchal practices by big business (such as Henry Ford’s workers communities) and she herself flourished under the direction of patriarchal males. In fact, the staff at McClure’s operated as a family, with Tarbell the laudable ‘‘big sister,’’ training younger men to become editors. Her aversion to equally independent and talented women, especially feminists, can be traced to early rebuffs by female suffragists and scientists; recalling these incidents in her autobiography, Tarbell concludes, ‘‘men have always been nicer to me than women.’’ Tarbell deserves recognition, however, for her pioneering role in journalism and especially for her classic study of the oil industry, The History of the Standard Oil Company, a two-volume work first published in 1904 (reissued in one volume, 1963; abridged, by D. Chalmers, 1966). H. H. Rogers, a Standard Oil executive, guided Tarbell through selected corporate documents during her two-year research effort, but she consulted other sources, as the massive documentation reveals. The History does not by any means whitewash Standard Oil; Tarbell frankly regards the corporation as guilty of ‘‘commercial sin.’’ But she is equally honest in recognizing the genius of John D. Rockefeller: he early understood control of the oil industry depended on control of the transportation of that oil. While he embodied the industry and verve she had been taught to admire, he created the corporate entity she recognized as death to the individual businessman—a clear negation of the American dream. The History of the Standard Oil Company is a landmark in both business and journalism because it represents Standard Oil’s first serious attempt at public relations and because it was in the vanguard of serious investigative reporting by American periodicals. OTHER WORKS: A Short Life of Napoleon Bonaparte (1895). Early Life of Abraham Lincoln (1896). The Life of Abraham Lincoln (2 vols., 1900). Napoleon’s Addresses (1902). He Knew Lincoln (1907). Father Abraham (1909). Selections from the Letters, Speeches, and State Papers of Abraham Lincoln (1911).
TAYLOR
The Tariff in Our Times (1911). New Ideals in Business: An Account of Their Practice and Their Effects upon Men and Profits (1916). The Rising of the Tide: The Story of Sabinsport (1919). In Lincoln’s Chair (1920). Boy Scout’s Life of Lincoln (1922). He Knew Lincoln, and Other Billy Brown Stories (1922). Peacemakers, Blessed and Otherwise: Observations, Reflections, and Irritations at an International Conference (1922). In the Footsteps of the Lincolns (1922). Life of Elbert H. Gary: The Story of Steel (1925). A Life of Napoleon Bonaparte (1927). A Reporter for Lincoln: Story of Henry E. Wing, Soldier and Newspaper Man (1927). Owen D. Young: A New Type of Industrial Leader (1932). The Nationalizing of Business, 1878-1898 (Volume 9, A History of American Life series, 1936). Women at Work: A Tour Among Careers (1939). Ida Tarbell’s papers are in the collections of the Reis Library of Allegheny College and the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Chalmers, D., The Social and Political Ideas of the Muckrakers (1964). Filer, L., Crusaders for American Liberalism (1939). Fleming, A., Ida Tarbell: First of the Muckrakers (1971). Marzolf, M., Up from the Footnote (1977). Tomkins, M., Ida M. Tarbell (1974). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing (1995). Other references: American Heritage 21 (April 1970). —SALLY BRETT
TAYLOR, Mildred Delois Born 1943, Jackson, Mississippi Daughter of Wilbert L. and Deletha Davis Taylor In writing realistic stories about the African American experience in the South, Mildred Delois Taylor juxtaposes the warmth and safety of family love and community solidarity against the burning injustices of racism. Emotionally powerful and often graphic in its horrifying verisimilitude, Taylor’s relatively small but critical body of work celebrates the physical and spiritual survival of her heroic black characters and the indomitability of the human spirit. Taylor graduated from the University of Toledo and pursued graduate study in journalism at the University of Colorado, but her most valuable education took place at home and through life experiences. Storytelling was an integral part of Taylor’s family life. From her father, a master storyteller, she learned the black history absent from the textbooks she studied at school—a history that emphasized the pride, dignity, and values of African American life despite the sorrows and defeats experienced in an unjust society. During two years (1965-67) spent in Ethiopia with the Peace Corps, Taylor was frequently reminded of her father’s
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stories, and her determination to write the truth about the black experience further solidified. Taylor’s first book, a novella called The Song of the Trees (1975, most recent reissue 1997), won first prize in the African American category of a competition sponsored by the Council on Interracial Books for Children. Told from the perspective of eight-year-old Cassie Logan, the book begins the saga of the proud Logan family, and in particular the children, which continues in much of Taylor’s subsequent work. The Logan books chronicle the family’s hardships and joys in Depression-era Mississippi, exploring what it means to grow from childhood to adulthood as an African American in the United States. Themes of strength, dignity, determination, integrity, love of the land, and the importance of family are woven through works alive with drama and vivid with sure characterization, quick dialogue, and a skilled narrative style. Taylor incorporates into her stories much of what she learned in her own childhood, and incidents about which she read or heard. The result are stories that bristle with life, read like autobiography, and have an aural, poetic quality. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (1976, reissued 1997), the first full-length novel about Cassie and her family, won the 1977 Newbery Medal, was chosen as a National Book award finalist, and was named a Boston Globe-Horn Book honor book for 1977. Let the Circle Be Unbroken (1981, reissued 1991) was nominated for the American Book award and won the Coretta Scott King award for 1981. The Friendship and Other Stories (1987, 1993), like The Song of the Trees, focuses on a single incident in the life of the Logans, and is also intended for a younger audience. It received the 1989 Boston Globe—Horn Book award. The Road to Memphis (1990, 1995) brings the Logan children into explosive young adulthood, and was chosen as the 1990 Coretta Scott King award winner. In The Gold Cadillac (1987, 1998), a Christopher award winner, Taylor introduces the reader to new characters, ‘lois and her sister, Wilma, who discover for the first time what it is like to be scared because of the color of their skin. Mississippi Bridge (1990) is written from the point of view of a white boy, Jeremy Simms, who witnesses a tragic bus accident that results in ironic justice for the blacks who have been ordered off the bus. Both books resonate with honesty and emotionally wrenching incidents. In all of her work, Taylor draws upon the well of history and the ‘‘cauldron of story.’’ As a writer, she considers herself only a link in the storytelling chain, drawing from a long tradition that has enabled her to write of herself, but ultimately to write of others. Taylor’s work rises above the personal to the universal, standing as a historical monument to how things used to be, and a contemporary reminder of how much work remains to be done in the eradication of racial discrimination. In 1988 Taylor was honored by the Children’s Book Council ‘‘for a body of work that has examined significant social issues and presented them in outstanding books for young readers.’’ She is widely acknowledged as a talented voice whose groundbreaking contributions have greatly enriched the field of children’s literature. Many critics consider Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry already a classic work in the tradition of realistic fiction. Nearly all of her
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books were reprinted in the late 1990s; an enduring testament to her consummate skill and popularity. OTHER WORKS: The Well: David’s Story (1995, 1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: African-American Voices and Visions: Biographies of Some of our Most Prestigious Author and Illustrators (1997). Crowe, C., Presenting Mildred D. Taylor (1999). Hohn, H., Nevada Women Military Pilots of World War II (1998). Ketter, J., Responding to Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry: A Reading/Writing Connection (1991). McDougal L., ed., Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and Related Readings (1997). Pilgrim, I., Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, Mildred D. Taylor: Notes (1997). Rediger, P., Great African Americans in Literature (1996). The Marble in the Water: Essays on Contemporary Writers of Fiction for Children and Young Adults (1980). Vick, D., Favorite Authors of Young Adult Fiction (1995). Wood, M., Twelve Multicultural Novels: Reading and Teaching Strategies (1997). Reference works: Black Authors and Illustrators of Children’s Books (1988). CA (1980, 1989). CANR (1989). CLC (1982). CLR (1985). DLB (1986). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). SATA (1979, 1988). TCCW (1989). Other references: Booklist (1 Dec. 1990). Children’s Literature Association Quarterly (Summer 1988). Horn Book (Aug. 1977, Mar./Apr. 1989). —CAROLYN SHUTE
TAYLOR, Phoebe Atwood Born 18 May 1909, Boston, Massachusetts; died 8 January 1976, Boston, Massachusetts Also wrote under: Alice Tilton Daughter of John D. and Josephine Atwood Taylor; married Grantley W. Taylor Phoebe Atwood Taylor’s parents were both natives of Cape Cod; her father was a physician. Taylor graduated from Barnard College in 1930, published her first detective novel in 1931 and published up to three detective novels a year, every year afterwards for almost 20 years. She wrote between midnight and 3:00 a.m., ‘‘after housekeeping all day,’’ usually ‘‘beginning three weeks before the deadline for the novel to be delivered to her New York publishers.’’ (Her Leonidas Witherall novels include heartfelt depictions of the harried popular author, besieged by telegrams from his publisher, struggling to meet his deadlines.) Taylor married a prominent Boston surgeon of the same surname and lived in Newton Highlands and then in Weston, suburbs of Boston, always keeping a summer home at Wellfleet on Cape Cod. She died of a heart attack. Taylor’s first book, The Cape Cod Mystery (1931), features her most famous detective, Asa Alden (Asey) Mayo. A ‘‘man of all work’’ to the wealthy Porter family, he is a ‘‘fine and bleak’’
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Cape Cod native who chews tobacco and must be sixty but could be anything from thirty-five to seventy. Using what he calls ‘‘common sense,’’ he extricates a Porter scion suspected by incompetent local officials of murdering a popular novelist and identifies the actual killer—the 300-lb. widow of a Boston minister who bashed the writer with an advance copy of his latest book, a sensational account of her husband’s life. By the last of the Cape Cod mysteries, Diplomatic Corpse (1951), the hero’s character has evolved and, like many of his fellow series detectives, he has become a superman. ‘‘Tall, lean, salty Asey Mayo’’ has changed from chewing tobacco, as in the first two books, to smoking a pipe, and from being the Porters’ handyman to being Chairman of the Board of Porter Motors. In intervening novels he has been revealed as a more and more expert marksman, knife-thrower, hand-to-hand fighter, driver, sailor, and cook. The charm of the Cape Cod novels lies not only in Asey’s role as the wryly humorous Yankee, but also in their settings. Taylor’s eye for detail and lively sense of place combine with many glimpses of the daily life of the times, and now increase the historical interest and fun of her novels. Leonidas Xenophon Witherall, hero of the mysteries Taylor wrote under the pen name of Alice Tilton, solves crimes taking place in a recognizable prewar and wartime Boston and its suburbs. He is a master, then headmaster and owner of Meredith’s Academy, a private boys’ school. His escapades are even crazier and more convoluted, if possible, than Asey Mayo’s. The Hollow Chest (1941) concerns a samurai sword as murder weapon, an antique horse car, a Lady Baltimore cake, a papier-maché lion’s head, and the manuscript of a treatise on the ‘‘11th-century vowel shift,’’ and requires a massive suspension of disbelief. Many of Taylor’s works are notable for their brisk, even breathless, pace. Both detectives encounter problems and solve them within a day or two, and their chases—by car, on foot, by plane, by motorboat, or via antique horsecar—often make their adventures tests of physical stamina and agility as well as mental ability. This pace and Taylor’s zany plots rife with eccentric characters and odd props often make her mysteries seem the literary equivalents of the classic screwball film comedies of the 1930s. Taylor’s mystery comedies also incorporate many elements of the classic detective story. Asey has a trio of Dr. Watsons and a Lestrade. Taylor includes one case of young love per story: the ingénue is never guilty, nor is the young man who falls in love with her. Like many British detective stories of the same era, Taylor’s works are touched with xenophobia, racism, and antiSemitism. Some of this narrowness is of the ‘‘Napoleon was a great man and a great general, but he was an off-Islander’’ variety and goes with Taylor’s regional-comedy territory. Taylor’s mystery-farces will never appeal to those who want realism in their criminal fiction, but they have withstood the
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passage of time at least as well as those of her Golden Age sisters, Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh. Taylor’s characters, settings, and historical interest still provide excellent entertainment, and explain why the novels have been reissued in the 1960s, in the 1980s, and again in the 1990s. OTHER WORKS: Death Lights a Candle (1932). The Mystery of the Cape Cod Players (1933). The Mystery of the Cape Cod Tavern (1934). Sandbar Sinister (1934). Deathblow Hill (1935). The Tinkling Symbol (1935). The Crimson Patch (1936). Out of Order (1936). Beginning with a Bash (1937, reprinted 1972). Figure Away (1937). Octagon House (1937). The Annulet of Gilt (1938). Banbury Bog (1938). The Cut Direct (1938). Cold Steal (1939). Spring Harrowing (1939). The Criminal C.O.D. (1940). The Deadly Sunshade (1940). The Left Leg (1940). The Perennial Boarder (1941). The Six Iron Spiders (1942). Three Plots for Asey Mayo (1942). File for Record (1943). Going, Going, Gone (1943). Dead Ernest (1944). Proof of the Pudding (1945). The Asey Mayo Trio (1946). Punch with Care (1946). The Iron Clew (1947, in Britain as The Iron Hand). Phoebe Atwood Taylor’s manuscripts are collected in the Mugar Memorial Library of Boston University. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Haycraft, H., Murder for Pleasure (1941). Klein, K. G., ed., Great Women Mystery Writers: Classic to Contemporary (1994). Waugh, C. R., ed., Murder and Mystery in Boston (1987). Reference works: A Catalogue of Crime (1971). Detecting Women (1994). Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (1994). Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection (1976). St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (1996). TCA, TCAS. Twentieth-Century Crime and Mystery Writers (1980). Other references: Barnard Alumnae Monthly (Oct. 1932, March 1936). NYT (12 Jan. 1976). WP (17 Jan. 1976). —SUSAN SUTTON SMITH
TAYLOR, Susie King Born 6 August 1848, Isle of Wight, Georgia; died after 1902 Daughter of Hagar and Raymond Baker; married Edward King, 1862 (died 1866); Russell Taylor, 1879 Susie King Taylor was the first of nine children born to slaves on the Grest family plantation. When she was seven years old, her grandmother took her to Savannah. There Taylor learned to read and write at the home of a free black woman. She used her knowledge to make life more bearable for her grandmother and other urban slaves by forging passes for them to be out after the nine o’clock curfew. While on a trip to St. Catherine’s Island in 1862, Taylor and her family came within Union lines and asked for protection. She
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was then asked by the commander to take charge of a school for freedmen on St. Simon’s Island. In August 1862 Captain C. T. Trowbridge came to St. Simon’s to recruit freed slaves for a new regiment, the first U.S. Colored Troops, later the 33rd U.S. Colored Infantry. Taylor and her new husband enlisted. Technically, Taylor was enrolled as a laundress, but according to her reminiscences, her duties were far greater: she taught the soldiers to read and write, helped them clean their muskets and prepare ammunition, cooked the food, and nursed the wounded. She and King served with the occupation forces in Charleston, Augusta, and Savannah before being mustered out in February 1866.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cornish, D. T., The Sable Arm (1956). Higginson, T. W., Army Life in a Black Regiment (1870). McPherson, J. M., ed., The Negro’s Civil War (1965). Pierce, E., ‘‘The Freedmen at Port Royal,’’ in Atlantic Monthly (Sept. 1863). Rose, W. L., Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (1964).
Taylor’s life after the war was a succession of hardships. King died in September 1866, leaving her broke and pregnant. She tried teaching, first in a school she and King had opened in Savannah; later she taught in a school in Liberty County and then in a night school for adult freedmen in Savannah. But Taylor’s teaching career was less than successful and in the 1870s, she worked as a laundress, first in Georgia and later in Boston. In 1879 she married Russell Taylor, a free black man of Boston.
Born 8 August 1884, St. Louis, Missouri; died 29 January 1933, New York, New York Daughter of John W. and Mary Willard Teasdale; married Ernst B. Filsinger, 1914
For the rest of her life, Taylor’s major interest was the lot of veterans of the Union army, especially of its colored regiments. In 1886 she helped found the Boston Corps of the Women’s Relief Corps, an auxiliary of the Grand Army of the Republic. She became its president in 1893 and compiled a survey of the Massachusetts veterans of the war. Taylor’s autobiography, Reminiscences of My Life in Camp, was published in 1902 with an introduction by her old friend and commander, Thomas Wentworth Higginson. It is a brief but fascinating look at the Civil War and Reconstruction from the perspective of a former slave. Taylor skips quickly over her life under slavery, a subject of much interest to and speculation by historians. Nevertheless, a sense of excitement—a feeling she and others were participants in a great experiment—comes through vividly. The reader can sense her fear of capture by Confederate soldiers and her joy at the reading of the Emancipation Proclamation. Taylor’s pride in the loyalty and bravery of the colored troops, despite lack of pay and hazardous front-line duty to which blacks were routinely assigned, is also evident. Reminiscences of My Life in Camp ends on a somber note. On a trip to Louisiana to visit her dying son, she was subjected to the indignities of segregation on trains, in hotels, and on the street. (Although segregation was still widely practiced in both North and South for many years after the war, Taylor found her adopted home of Massachusetts a paradise in comparison to the South.) Saddened and angered, she asked: ‘‘I wonder if our white fellow men realize the true sense or meaning of brotherhood? For 200 years we had toiled for them; the war of 1861 came and was ended, and we thought our race was forever free from bondage, and that the two races could live in unity with each other, but when we read almost every day of what is being done to my race by some whites in the South, I sometimes ask, ‘Was the war in vain? Has it brought freedom, in the full sense of the word, or has it not made our condition more hopeless?’’’ The question is still pertinent today.
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TEASDALE, Sara
The youngest of four children, Sara Teasdale was born into comfortable circumstances provided by her father, a prominent businessman, and her independently wealthy mother. Because of her nervous temperament, she was educated at home until she was nine. After attending Mary Institute (founded by T. S. Eliot’s grandfather) for a year, she completed her education at Hosmer Hall, a school designed to prepare young women for college. She was already writing poetry, and she received much encouragement from her teachers; she also read Heine and Sappho, who, along with Christina Rossetti, were the greatest influences on her own work. Following graduation in 1902, Teasdale, together with several of her friends, published a manuscript magazine, the Potter’s Wheel, in which many of her early poems appeared. Her first professional publication came in May, 1907, when her dramatic monologue ‘‘Guenevere’’ appeared in Reedy’s Mirror. The poem attracted much attention, as did Sonnets to Duse, and Other Poems published that same autumn, though the book was not a financial success. Teasdale literally sacrificed herself to poetry, and therein lay her tragedy. Frail and high-strung, she lived perforce a disciplined life which brought both unhappiness and loneliness, for she was innately an outgoing person, capable of great emotional depth. Her line, ‘‘O, beauty, are you not enough? Why am I crying after love?’’ reveals her constant ambivalence. She experienced two major romantic involvements, one with the poet Vachel Lindsay, and the other with Ernst Filsinger, a St. Louis businessman whom she married in December 1914. But the demands of poetry brought about a gradual estrangement, and the marriage was dissolved in 1929 by Teasdale’s decision. After courageously enduring four years of rapidly deteriorating health and acute depression, exacerbated by the fear that she might become a helpless invalid, she took an overdose of barbiturates and died in 1933. At first glance, Teasdale’s poetry appears to be simple, but its simplicity is deceptive. Although it does not lend itself to involved critical exegesis, its highly connotative language can imply deeply felt emotion which evokes an equal response. Teasdale treads a fine line between revelation and reticence. Sonnets to Duse and
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Helen of Troy, and Other Poems (1911) reveal her experimentation to find her own poetic voice, and successive volumes demonstrate her constant striving to speak from her own experience, honestly and without sentimentality. Her constant theme is love, its joys, and, as her own life grew more difficult, its tragedies. The source of her imagery is invariably nature, which serves equally well for moments of exaltation—‘‘I am the pool of gold/ Where sunset burns and dies/ You are my deepening skies,/Give me your stars to hold,’’—or, as in her posthumous volume Strange Victory (1933), for moments of deepest pain: ‘‘Nothing but darkness enters this room,/ Nothing but darkness and the winter night,/ Yet on this bed once years ago a light/Silvered the sheets with an unearthly bloom;/ It was the planet Venus in the west/ Casting a square of brightness on this bed,/ And in that light your dark and lovely head/ Lay for a while and seemed to be at rest.’’ Here the controlled objectivity of the language deepens the sense of anguish and desolation; the words must be read for implication and nuance, as well as for obvious meaning. In Teasdale’s poetry, every word is important. Though deprecated by critics of the post-Wasteland generation, Teasdale continues to be read and admired. One reason for her popularity doubtless derives from her ability to write about bitter experience without bitterness, and to laugh wisely, especially at herself. But even more important is a sense of that inner courage and integrity, which compelled her to write in her own way, uninfluenced by the work of her contemporaries: ‘‘Let the dead know, but not the living see—/ The dead who loved me will not suffer, knowing/ It is all one, the coming or the going—/ If I have kept the last essential me./ If that is safe, then I am safe indeed. . . .’’ She recognized her way inevitably incurred suffering. Even at her moments of deepest despair, however, Teasdale exercises a control born of a conscious choice, and the ultimate effect of her poetry is one of confident affirmation: ‘‘If this be the last time/ The melody flies upward/ With its rush of sparks in flight,/ Let me go up with it in fire and laughter. . . .’’
OTHER WORKS: Rivers to the Sea (1915). The Answering Voice: Love Lyrics by Women (edited by Teasdale, 1917). Love Songs (1917). Flame and Shadow (1920). Rainbow Gold (edited by Teasdale, 1922). Dark of the Moon (1926). Stars To-Night (1930). Collected Poems of Sara Teasdale (1937, 1996). Mirror of the Heart: Poems of Sara Teasdale (1984).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brenner, R., Poets of Our Time (1946). Carpenter, M. H., Sara Teasdale: A Biography (1960). Drake, W., Sara Teasdale: Women and Poet (1979). Dubois, J., The Same Sweet Yellow (1994). Howe, F., No More Masks! An Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Women Poets, Newly Revised and Expanded (1993). Lester, D., ed., I Lay Me Down: Suicide in the Elderly (1994). Lupack, A., Modern Arthurian Literature: An Anthology of English and American Arthuriana from the Renaissance to the Present (1992). Maser, F. E., Sara Teasdale: A Returning Comet: An Essay (1993). Moore, M., Nevertheless
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(1983). Ruihley, G. R., ed., An Anthology of Great U.S. Women Poets, 1850-1990: Temples and Palaces (1997). Schoen, C. B., Sara Teasdale (1986). Sprague, R., Imaginary Gardens: A Study of Five American Poets (1969). Untermeyer, L., The New Era in American Poetry (1919). Walker, C., Masks Outrageous and Austere: Culture, Psyche, and Persona in Modern Women Poets (1991). Woodard, D., This More Fragile Boundary: The Female Subject and the Romance Plot in the Texts of Millay, Wylie, Teasdale, Bogan (dissertation, 1993). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Turn-of-the-Century Women (Summer/ Winter 1990). —ROSEMARY SPRAGUE
TENNEY, Tabitha (Gilman) Born 7 April 1762, Exeter, New Hampshire; died 2 May 1837, Exeter, New Hampshire Daughter of Samuel and Lydia G. Gilman; married Samuel Tenney, 1788 (died 1816) Tabitha Tenney was descended from early pioneers in New Hampshire who had raised themselves to prominent social positions in the town of Exeter. She was the oldest of the seven children, and probably remained at home with her mother to help raise her younger siblings after the death of her father. Tenney was somewhat older than was typical for her time and social class when she married; the couple had no children. Her husband, who served as a physician in the Revolutionary army, later directed his attention chiefly to politics and scientific inquiry. Although Tenney was described as an ‘‘accomplished lady,’’ it is unlikely her formal schooling differed greatly from that of other respectable 18th-century American women, or from that form of ‘‘female education’’ which she satirizes in her novel, Female Quixotism: Exhibited in the Romantic Opinions and Extravagant Adventures of Dorcasina Sheldon (1801). Her education, like Dorcasina’s, would have provided her with a command of the fine points of fashion and household management, some acquaintance with the classics, and a fuller knowledge of contemporary novels. While married, Tenney produced two books which largely derived from her reading. After her husband’s death in 1816, she spent the remainder of her life concentrating on her needlework, which was renowned for its intricacy. Tenney’s first publication was The Pleasing Instructor (1799), an anthology of classical literature addressed to young women. It was intended to ‘‘inform the mind, correct the manners, or to regulate the conduct’’ while at the same time blending, in best classical fashion, ‘‘instruction with rational amusement.’’ Tenney
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dedicated Female Quixotism ‘‘to all Columbian Young Ladies, who Read Novels and Romances.’’ But unlike most novels so dedicated, Tenney’s book satirizes both sentimentality and sentimental fiction in general. Female Quixotism is roughly modeled on Charlotte Ramsay Lennox’s The Female Quixote; or, The Adventures of Arabella (1752), but Tenney alters the pattern of her model to emphasize a different message. In the earlier book, the main character is basically innocent but is corrupted by the ideals of the sentimental fiction she reads. Tenney, however, portrays a character who rationalizes her foolishness by blaming it on the novels she has read. This change gives Female Quixotism an effective focus. Dorcasina, who is an adolescent when we first see her, remains frozen in the kind of prolonged adolescence that sentimental fiction requires. She is intelligent, occasionally witty, but entirely blind to the increasing disparity between her own life and the sentimental life she envisions for herself. Dorcasina early rejects a sensible suitor, Lysander, because his letter proposing marriage fails to use words like ‘‘angel’’ or ‘‘goddess.’’ Ironically, Lysander is as close as Dorcasina ever comes to making the sentimental match she aspires to. Over the years, Dorcasina is duped by and deceives herself about men who seek to humiliate her or gain her fortune. Finally, the malicious ridicule of Seymour, a most despicable character who intends to marry the toothless, white-haired Dorcasina and then have her committed to a mental institution so he can enjoy her fortune unhindered by her company, leads Dorcasina to recognize the folly of her life and warn her young readers ‘‘to avoid the rock on which I have been wrecked.’’ The novel is a satire, but it is written with a sensitivity to its main character seldom encountered in satire. As silly as Dorcasina’s version of reality is, it is in many ways preferable to the world she faces. Most of the men she meets are singularly cruel, spiteful, misogynistic creatures, and, on this level, Tenney’s novel covertly warns women that they must be particularly cautious in a world where they have little place and little power. Tenney’s satire is also effectively double-edged in another sense. While she criticizes the women who get their education from fiction, she equally criticizes a social system that denies women any real education. F. L. Pattee once described Female Quixotism as the most popular novel written in America before Uncle Tom’s Cabin. This is not the case, but Tenney’s novel did run through at least six separate editions between the time of its publication and 1841. No current edition, however, of the novel is available. Ironically, Female Quixotism fell into obscurity by the middle of the last century, while novels it satirized, such as Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (1791), continued to be popular into our own century, and even now are available in modern editions.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bell, C. H., History of the Town of Exeter (1888). Brown H. R., The Sentimental Novel in America, 1789-1860 (1940). Davidson, C. N., Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the
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Novel in America (1986). Gilman, A., The Gilman Family (1869). Hoople, S. C. Tabitha Tenney: Female Quixotism (dissertation, 1985). Loshe, L. D., The Early American Novel, 1789-1830 (1907). Petter, H., The Early American Novel (1971). Tenney, M. J., The Tenney Family; or, The Descendants of Thomas Tenney of Rowley, Massachusetts, 1638-1890 (1891). Reference works: CAL (1965). NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —CATHY N. DAVIDSON
TEPPER, Sheri S(tewart) Born Shirley Stewart Douglas, 16 July 1929 in Colorado Wrote under A. J. Orde, B. J. Oliphant, E. E. Horlak, Sheri S. Eberhart Married Gene Tepper; children: one son, one daughter Sheri Tepper was born in Colorado. She sold poetry and children’s stories as Sheri S. Eberhart while working for the relief agency CARE, then in 1962 launched a 24-year career in the Rocky Mountain Planned Parenthood, becoming executive director and writing pamphlets on topics such as sex instruction for children and self-assertiveness for young women. She married Gene Tepper in the late 1960s. Her first fictional works were King’s Blood Four (1983), Necromancer Nine (1983), and Wizard’s Eleven (1984), later collected as The True Game (1996). These are narrated by Peter, who grows up on another planet ruled by Game-players, who wield supernatural powers such as shape-shifting and teleportation. The Gamelords carelessly throw away their Gamesmen and ‘‘pawns’’— unTalented farmers, traders and craftsmen—in bloody feuds. Peter, who seems to have no Talents, learns otherwise when he discovers special figurines, representing the Eleven forebears of the Gamesmen, which lend him their powers. Peter is forced to join the Game, and his adventure-filled quest to defeat tyranny leads him to discover the historic colonization of the planet and the reasons behind the terrible Game. The tripartite bildungsroman concludes with a revelation of Peter’s identity and his own, unforeseen Talent. This trilogy is continued in the Mavin Manyshaped series and the Jinian series, collected as The End of the Game(1986). The True Game books exemplify the plot format Tepper uses in most of her works: young protagonists dwelling on an old planet become aware of the mysteries of their world and discover their strengths as they fight those who delight in destruction and enslavement. Through their journeys they learn of the foolish ambitions that led to the planet’s colonization, realize the deceptions and self-deceptions upon which their government is based,
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ally themselves with the natives, and create a balance in which human and alien can live harmoniously. In each case, revelation opens up to greater and greater revelations, considered delightful by some reviewers and implausible by others; novels like Grass (1989) and The Family Tree (1997) are particularly famous for their wondrous plot surprises. Tepper is a didactic writer. These early books attack the evils of despoliation and coercion, arguing that humans must learn selfrestraint in politics and religion, the thoughtless destruction of dimly understood ecologies and population control. Her villains are two-dimensional, as though Tepper considers tyrants merely stupid rather than criminal masterminds. Though preachy, she provides nonstop thrills and stunningly imagined landscapes that make her books compulsively readable. Tepper’s feminist polemical streak turned bitingly satiric in The Gate to Women’s Country (1988), an important novel that sparked a continuing controversy between male and female readers. Feminists loved the book; men found it disturbing. Stavia grows up in a postapocalyptic society in which women govern all aspects of culture except, seemingly, the military, which men maintain in closed garrisons. Adolescent males must choose to join the garrisons or enter the walled Women’s Country, where they are educated and become ‘‘servitors.’’ Most choose the former, though over the centuries more men seek the gentler way of life. Foolishly running away, Stavia learns the ‘‘true nature’’ of men in the wilderness. She is raped, then confined and tortured in a settlement made up of the worst aspects of Mormonism and Islam. Returning to Women’s Country, she learns the ruling clique of women has been selectively breeding men for feminine traits such as cooperation and caring. Many readers consider Tepper’s finest novel to be Grass (1989), a New York Times Notable Book and Hugo awards nominee. Marjorie Westriding Yrarier is sent as ambassador to Grass, the one planet immune to a plague devastating other worlds. There she learns of the bizarre relationship between the local human nobility and the native creatures and discovers the truth that will lead to a cure for the pandemic. ‘‘Grass is about man’s relationship to God’’ and ‘‘what religion does to man: environmentalists don’t worship the same god as those who are out to destroy the world. Western religions are all about getting even,’’ Tepper said in a 1989 interview. Marjorie also appears in Raising the Stones (1990), which considers ‘‘what would we do if we had a god that actually gave us peace?,’’ and Sideshow (1992), a blistering attack upon the complacent relativism that condones atrocities perpetrated in the name of freedom of religion. Tepper became increasingly didactic on the issues of ecology and women’s rights. Beauty (1991) interweaves and revises the tales of Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, and Snow White. A Plague of Angels (1993) shows that female dictators can be evil too, as a witch prepares an army of androids to kill or subjugate everyone in a far-future America. The protagonists ally with talking animals and mythological monsters to overthrow her and reforest the wastelands. In Plague and Shadow’s End (1994), alien superbeings
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sit in judgement upon humanity and take extreme measures to end oppression and order men not to ruin and discard one planet after another. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall (1996), a near-future tale set in the U.S., rages against antiabortionists. The Family Tree (1997) and Six Moon Dance (1998) continue these polemics, but in a more lighthearted vein. Six Moon Dance again considers allowing women to control breeding. Both novels argue that humans are not superior beings, but part of a beautiful biosphere. Tepper feels we must learn to treasure our planet in its majestic variety. Tepper has also written mysteries under the pseudonyms A. J. Orde and B. J. Oliphant, and a few horror novels under her own name and as E. E. Horlak. Her canon is widely praised for its overall high quality and boldness in tackling controversial themes, chiefly her celebration of biodiversity and transformations of all types; her demand for equality and symbiosis not only among humans but between humans and their environment; and her promise that the antagonistic relationships between men and women can evolve into something precious and life-affirming.
OTHER WORKS: The People Know (1968). The Perils of Puberty (1974). The Problem with Puberty (1976). This Is You (1977). So Your Happily Ever After Isn’t (1977). So You Don’t Want To Be a Sex Object (1978). The Revenants (1984). The True Game (1985). Marianne, the Magus, and the Manticore (1985). The Song of Mavin Manyshaped (1985). The Flight of Mavin Manyshaped (1985). The Search of Mavin Manyshaped (1985). Jinian Footseer (1985). Blood Heritage (1986). Dervish Daughter (1986). The Bones (1987). Northshore (1987). Southshore (1987). The Awakeners (1987). After Long Silence (1987, as The Enigma Score,1989). Marianne, the Madame, and the Momentary Gods (1988). Marianne, the Matchbox, and the Malachite Mouse (1989). Still Life (1989). The Marianne Trilogy (1990). Singer From the Sea (1999). As A. J. Orde: A Little Neighborhood Murder (1989). Death and the Dogwalker (1990). Death for Old Times’ Sake (1992). Looking for the Aardvark (1993, retitled Dead on Sunday, 1993). A Long Time Dead (1995). A Death of Innocents (1997). As B. J. Oliphant: A Ceremonial Death (1985). Dead in the Scrub (1990). The Unexpected Corpse (1990). Death and the Delinquent (1992). Deservedly Dead (1992). Death Served Up Cold (1994). Here’s to the Newly Dead (1997). As E. E. Horlak: Still Life (1989).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bogstad, J., ‘‘Gender, Power and Reversal in Contemporary Anglo-American and French Feminist Science Fiction’’ (thesis, 1992). Canty, J. F., ‘‘Does Eugenics = (E)Utopia? Reproductive Control and Ethical Issues in Contempoary North American Feminist Fabulation’’ (thesis, 1995). Carroll, L., ‘‘Mythological Backgrounds in Sheri S. Tepper’s Fiction’’ (thesis, 1996). Harris, D. L., ‘‘Acts of Genesis: A Feminist Look at the Changing Face of the Mother in Selected Works of Science
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Fiction by Women’’ (thesis, 1997). Jesser, N. S., ‘‘Troubling Worlds: The Transformation and Persistence of Violence in Contemporary Feminist Utopian Narratives’’ (thesis, 1998). Zaman, Sobia, ‘‘The Feminist Appropriation of Dystopia: A Study of Atwood, Elgin, Fairbairns, and Tepper’’ (thesis, 1995). Reference works: Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997). Magill’s Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature (1996). St. James Guide to Fantasy Writers (1995). Other references: Denver Post (15 Oct. 1989, 30 July 1990, 3 Dec. 1995) Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 7 (1996). Locus 41 (Sept. 1998). New York Review of Science Fiction 8 (July 1996). Science-Fiction Studies 19 (1992). —FIONA KELLEGHAN
TERHUNE, Mary (Virginia) Hawes Born 21 December 1830, Dennisville, Virginia; died 3 June 1922, New York, New York Wrote under: Marion Harland Daughter of Samuel P. and Judith Smith Hawes; married Edward P. Terhune, 1856; children: six, three of whom died in childhood Mary Hawes Terhune was tutored at home and began contributing regularly to Richmond papers at fourteen. She wrote a version of her first published novel at sixteen and had published two very successful novels when she married a Presbyterian minister at twenty-six. She continued to write while she successively moved with her husband to Newark, New Jersey; Springfield, Massachusetts; and Brooklyn, New York. He assisted her in her work, providing ‘‘the first reading and only revision of her manuscripts, before they are given into the hands of the printer.’’ She bore six children, three of whom survived childhood. Daughters Christine Terhune Herrick and Virginia Terhune Van de Water followed their mother as writers on domestic matters, and son Albert Payson Terhune became ‘‘the collie’s Balzac,’’ an enormously popular author of dog stories. Alone (1854), the first of Terhune’s many novels and her most popular, follows the trials of Ida Ross, who must live ‘‘alone’’ at fifteen after the death of her widowed mother, ‘‘a being more than human—scarcely less than divine.’’ The first scene of the book depicts Ida throwing herself upon her mother’s coffin as it is lowered into the grave. She must leave her plantation home and live in Richmond with a cynical, worldly guardian who has raised his daughter to be as coldhearted as himself. For a time, under their influence, Ida becomes almost misanthropic, but she blossoms again when she meets the loving and merry Dana family. She finds and loses and finds again her true love, the Reverend Morton Lacy, and they are happily married at the novel’s end. Alone depicts life in Richmond and a prewar plantation—slaves are all happy, devoted family ‘‘servants.’’ In a closing scene Ida strikes the book’s keynote: ‘‘A woman is so lonely without a home and friends! They are to us—I do not say to you [men]—necessaries of life.’’
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Many of Terhune’s 25 novels and three collections of short stories have the same antebellum Southern background and sentimental message: women can and should be educated and able to support themselves, but their truest position is dependence and their proper sphere the home. Her most famous book on household affairs, Common Sense in the Household: A Manual of Practical Housewifery (1871), became a bestseller and was translated into French, German, and Arabic. She advocates learning by doing, attention to the presentation of food and a varied menu, and she deprecates the ‘‘vulgar prejudice against labor-saving machines.’’ Here, the housewife can consult a 13-page essay on how to handle her servants; she can find out how to clean and cook a catfish or restore luster and crispness to black alpaca and bombazine. The style is informal, the advice practical. Terhune’s books of advice are by no means confined to the culinary and domestic. Eve’s Daughters; or, Common Sense for Maid, Wife, and Mother (1892) covers all facets of the growing girl’s physical, mental, and moral health, including the way in which a mother should educate her daughter about sex: ‘‘Get some good familiar treatise upon Botany,—I know of none better than Gray’s ‘How Plants Grow,’—and read with her of the beautiful laws of fructification and reproduction.’’ Eve’s Daughters also counsels women through marriage and motherhood to menopause—the ‘‘climacteric’’—and a postmenopausal ‘‘Indian Summer.’’ In the chapter ‘‘Shall Baby Be?’’ Terhune voices her convictions on the sin of childlessness; she believed American mothers had a duty to bear ‘‘troops’’ of boys and girls to withstand the invasion of ‘‘massed filth’’— ‘‘Irish cottiers and German boors, and loose and criminal fugitives from everywhere.’’ Terhune’s ideas on women’s roles seem as dated today as her methods for healing cuts, but her cookbooks and domestic advice profoundly influenced Americans for half a century. OTHER WORKS: The Hidden Path (1855). Nemesis (1860). Miriam (1862). Husks (1863). Moss-Side: Husbands and Homes (1865). Colonel Floyd’s Wards (1866). Sunnybank (1866). The Christmas Holly (1867). Phemie’s Temptation (1869). Ruby’s Husband (1869). At Last (1870). The Empty Heart: ‘‘For Better, for Worse’’ (1871). True as Steel (1872). Jessamine (1873). From My Youth Up (1874). Breakfast, Luncheon, and Tea (1875). My Little Love (1876). The Dinner Year-Book (1878). Loiterings in Pleasant Paths (1880). Our Daughters: What Shall We Do with Them? (1880). Handicapped (1881). The Cottage Kitchen (1883). Judith: A Chronicle of Old Virginia (1883). Cookery for Beginners (1884). Common Sense in the Nursery (1885). Country Living for City People (1887). Not Pretty, but Precious (1887). Our Baby’s First and Second Years (1887). A Gallant Fight (1888). House and Home (1889). Stepping-Stones (with V. F. Townsend and L. C. Moulton, 1890). With the Best Intentions (1890). His Great Self (1892). The Story of Mary Washington (1892). Mr. Wayt’s Wife’s Sister (1894). The Premium Cook Book (1894). The Royal Road (1894). Home of the Bible (1895). Talks Upon Practical Subjects (1895). Under the Flag of the Orient (1895). The Art of Cooking by Gas (1896). The National Cook
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Book (with C. T. Herrick, 1896). The Secret of a Happy Home (1896). An Old-Field School-Girl (1897). Ruth Bergen’s Limitations (1897). Some Colonial Homesteads and Their Stories (1897). The Comfort of Cooking and Heating by Gas (1898). Where Ghosts Walk (1898). Charlotte Brontë at Home (1899). Cooking Hints (1899). Home Topics (1899). More Colonial Homesteads and Their Stories (1899). William Cowper (1899). Dr. Dale (with A. P. Terhune, 1900). Hannah More (1900). John Knox (1900). In Our County: Stories of Old Virginia Life (1901). Marion Harland’s Complete Cook Book (1903). Everyday Etiquette (with V. Van de Water, 1905). When Grandmamma Was Fourteen (1905). The Distractions of Martha (1906). Marion Harland’s Cook Book of Tried and Tested Recipes (1907). The Housekeeper’s Week (1908). Ideal Home Life (with M. E. Sangster et al., 1910). Marion Harland’s Autobiography (1910). The Story of Canning and Recipes (1910). Home Making (1911). The Helping Hand Cook Book (1912). Should Protestant Ministers Marry? (1913). Looking Westward (1914). A Long Lane (1915). The Carringtons of High Hill (1919). Two Ways of Keeping a Wife (n.d.). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Baym, N., Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870 (1978). Griswold, W. M., A Descriptive List of Novels and Tales, Dealing with the History of North America (1895). Halsey, F. W., Women Authors of Our Day in Their Homes (1903). Pattee, F. L., The Feminine Fifties (1940). Reference works: AA. The Living Female Writers of the South (1872). The Living Writers of the South (1869). NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Southland Writers (1870). Women of the South Distinguished in Literature (1861). Other references: Harper’s (Nov. 1882). NYT (4 June 1922). —SUSAN SUTTON SMITH
TERRY, Megan Born 22 July 1932, Seattle, Washington Daughter of Harold Joseph Duffy, Jr., and Marguerite Cecelia Henry Duffy Formerly adjunct professor of theater at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, and later playwright-in-residence at the Omaha Magic Theater (OMT), Megan Terry is also a founding member of the New York Theatre Strategy and the Women’s Theatre Council; she was one of the playwrights-in-residence of the Open Theatre (1963-68) with Joseph Chaiken, Jean-Claude van Itallie, and others. In 1973 Terry won the Village Voice Obie award for best off-Broadway play for Approaching Simone. Two concerns of the Open Theatre have characterized much of Terry’s work and her approach: ensemble creation and performance and the presentation of abstraction and illusion to clarify complex human attitudes. The ‘‘transformation’’ which marks so much of her work involves, first, characters, place, time, and
action changing unpredictably and, second, different actors replacing each other as characters. These are present also in the ‘‘musicals’’ which Terry has composed for OMT (a regional company which presents only new ‘‘musicals’’), her new works, and the workshops she conducts. Terry’s best-known play, Viet Rock: A Folk War Movie (1967), was developed in the playwright’s workshop for the Open Theatre. Parodying and satirizing attitudes toward war, Viet Rock is less an anti-American political statement than a universal condemnation of the wastefulness, hypocrisy, and senselessness of war. The transformations of scenes, characters, and actors guarantee that each production will be individuated by its cast and circumstances. In Brechtean fashion the slogans and clichés, songs and battles can be revised or updated, but the theme of war’s destructiveness remains. The mythic conclusion, when the Viet Cong kill and devour a G.I. and a native woman, intensifies the audience’s repugnance and reveals the universal character of the military as one soldier ingests another—transforming another’s flesh into his own. Terry’s earlier theatrical transformations had made soldiers into senators or witnesses, sweethearts into soldiers, or actors into babies and mamas. Approaching Simone (1970) has received the best reviews of all Terry’s plays. It presents a totally self-aware hero, Simone Weil, in her struggle to gain complete truth. In the two most strikingly dramatic scenes (‘‘Simone at Fourteen—When and Why She Wants to Kill Herself’’ and ‘‘The Visitation’’) the physical pain of migraine headaches and battle wounds is symbolic of the lacerating agonies she endures. At fourteen, Simone is challenged by the chorus with her inadequacies: gender, ignorance, awkwardness, arrogance. Urged to kill herself, she slowly is drawn back to the will to live, to ‘‘know truth.’’ During the ‘‘visitation,’’ Simone focuses on the metaphysical poet George Herbert’s ‘‘Love’’ as her pain is assumed by the physically and emotionally supportive ensemble. Believing love is the disintegration of the self, and truth is to be found in love, Simone is Terry’s heroic woman, an individual not described or circumscribed by sexual conflicts. Terry writes of Simone as a model for other women to ‘‘know that a woman can make it and think clearly in a womanly way.’’ Terry is a somewhat iconoclastic combination, an experimental dramatist who advocates entrepreneurial management and espouses the ‘‘pioneer values’’ of hard work and self-sufficiency. A designer early in her career, she still thinks of her work as ‘‘a kind of architectural process in which she ‘builds’ plays,’’ and not only as a metaphor. She believes theater is a hands-on-business, and that one must be willing to build sets, create audiences, and manage finances, as well as conceive of ‘‘theater.’’ Called ‘‘The Mother of American Feminist Drama’’ by Helene Keyssar, Terry writes plays characterized by rapid transformation of character and situation, by a great deal of physical action, and by a deep political commitment. The body of her work has continued to grow, as has the range of her styles. Critic David Savran has said her plays constitute ‘‘a virtual compendium of the styles of modern drama, ranging from collaborative ensemble work to performance art to naturalism.’’
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Terry is a feminist whose critique of society is less ‘‘ideological’’ than it is grounded in humanist values and in a deep commitment to community. In her work she explores such issues as ‘‘production and reproduction, the language of patriarchy, gender roles. . .the victimization and heroism. . .and the pain and power of women,’’ according to Keyssar and Jan Breslauer. Directing her critiques less at systems than ‘‘as protests against individual circumstances, institutional corruption, or verbal and conceptual distortions,’’ her feminism, Keyssar says, is ‘‘a precise criticism of gender roles, an affirmation of women’s strength, and a challenge for women to use their own power.’’ Terry puts these principles into practice in her own professional life, encouraging other women playwrights, collecting and distributing bibliographies, and building networks as she crosses the country. One of her own best expositors, she says of the legacy of the Open Theatre in New York, ‘‘I feel we democratized the theater.’’ She also feels she contributed to the form of American musicals by proving ‘‘that rock music worked on the stage’’ and by ‘‘speed[ing] up exposition.’’ Of her work now, she says the playwright’s responsibility is ‘‘to critique [her] society,’’ and she wishes to convey through her plays ‘‘that life is possible.’’ OTHER WORKS: Calm Down Mother (1966). Ex-Miss Copper Queen on a Set of Pills (1966). Keep Tightly Closed in a Cool Dry Place (1966). Comings and Goings (1967). The Gloaming, Oh My Darling (1967). Home (1968). The Magic Realists (1969). Fireworks (1970). The People vs. Ranchman (1970). One More Little Drinkie (1971). The Tommy Allen Show (1971). Massachusetts Trust (1972). Megan Terry’s Home; or, Future Soap (1972). Sanibel and Captive (1972). American Wedding Ritual (1973). Couplings and Grouplings (1973). Hothouse (1975). Nightwalk (with S. Sheppard and J. C. van Itallie, 1975). The Pioneer (1975). Pro Game (1975). Women and the Law (1976). Willa-Willie Bill’s Dope Garden (1977). American King’s English for Queens (1978). Babe in the Bighouse (1978). 100,001 Horror Stories of the Plains (1978). Attempted Rescue on Avenue B (1979). Brazil Fado (1979). Goona-Goona (1980). Scenes from Maps (1980). Comings and Goings (1980). Fireworks (1980). The Gloaming, Oh My Darling (1980). The Trees Blew Down (1980). Flat in Afghanistan (1981). Katmandu (1981). Molly Bailey’s Traveling Circus Featuring Scenes from the Life of Mother Jones (1983). Fifteen Million Fifteen-Year-Olds (1983). The Pioneer (1984). Pro Game (1984). Retro (1985). Kegger (1985). Objective Love (1985). Sea of Forms (with J. A. Schmidman, 1986). Sleazing Towards Athens (1986). Amtrak (1988). Dinner’s in the Blender (1988). Headlights (1989). Snow Queen (for children, 1990). Walking Through Walls (1991). Sound Fields (with J. A. Schmidman and S. Kimberlaine, 1991). India Plays (1992). Right Brain Vacation Photos: New Plays and Production Photographs, 1972-1992 (edited with others, 1992). Belches on Couches (with J. A Schmidman and S. Kimberlaine, 1993). Remote Control (1994). Body Leaks (1994). Star Path Moon Stop (1996). Fireworks (1996). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Barron, E. A., A Structural Analysis of Representative Plays of Megan Terry (dissertation, 1984). Benzel, K. N.
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and L. P. de la Vars, eds., Images of the Self as Female: The Achievement of Women Artists in Re-envisioning Feminine Identity (1992). Betsko, K. and R. Koenig, eds., Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights (1987). Chinoy, H. K. and L W. Jenkins, Women in American Theatre (1981). Cohn, S. B., ed., Comic Relief: Humor in Contemporary American Literature (1977). Hart, L., ed., Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women’s Theatre (1989). Keyssar, H. Feminist Theatre (1985). Kolin, P. C., ed., American Playwrights Since 1945 (1989). Kolin, P. C. and C. Kullman, eds., Speaking on Stage: Interviews with Contemporary American Playwrights (1996). Larson, J. Public Dreams: A Critical Investigation of the Plays of Megan Terry, 1955-1986 (dissertation, 1989). Marranca, B. and G. Dasgupta, eds., American Playwrights: A Critical Survey (1981). Savran, D., In Their Own Words (1988). Schlueter, J., ed., Modern American Drama: The Female Canon (1990). Senelac, L., ed., Gender in Performance (1992). Wagner, P. J., Megan Terry: Political Playwright (dissertation, 1980). Winner, C. A., A Study of American Dramatic Productions Dealing with the War in Vietnam (dissertation, 1977). Reference works: CA (1979). CD (1973, 1977, 1982, 1988). CLC (1981). Contemporary Theater, Film, and Television (1988). DLB (1981). FC (1990). Notable Women in American Theater (1976). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Prize-Winning Drama: A Bibliographic and Descriptive Guide (1973). TCAD (1981). Other references: Art and Cinema (1987). Centennial Review (Summer 1988). Interview with Megan Terry (audiocassette, 1981). Megan Terry (audiocassette, 1984). Mississippi Folklore Register (Spring-Fall 1988). Modern Drama (Dec. 1984). Notes on Contemporary Literature (March 1990). Performing Arts Journal (1983). Studies in American Drama (1987, 1989). University of Mississippi Studies in English (1992). —KATHLEEN GREGORY KLEIN, UPDATED BY MARCIA HEPPS AND NELSON RHODES
THANE, Elswyth Born 16 May 1900, Burlington, Iowa; died July 1984 Married William Beebe, 1927 The wife of naturalist and writer William Beebe, Elswyth Thane made her permanent home on a farm in Vermont. As an author, however, she is most closely associated with Virginia and with England, where from 1928 to 1939 she worked each summer in the British Museum. A prolific writer, she produced works of fiction, historical and biographical studies, autobiographical books, plays, and several books for children. Thane identified herself as a historian and scholar. Although her historical and biographical works lack the elaborate apparatus of academic studies and employ novelistic devices, and although they sometimes have been criticized for blending fact and fiction,
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they rely heavily on primary source material. The Tudor Wench (1932; on Elizabeth I) and Young Mr. Disraeli (1936), written near the beginning of Thane’s career, study the early lives of their subjects. Thane also dramatized episodes from each, under the same titles. Later she concentrated on Virginia history, particularly the Revolutionary period, examining Martha Washington in Washington’s Lady (1960) and George Washington in Potomac Squire (1963), and the children they reared in Mount Vernon Family (1968), a book for children. In addition, Mount Vernon Is Ours (1966) and Mount Vernon, the Legacy (1967) relate the history of their home’s preservation as a national shrine. Thane’s best fiction grew from her historical interests. Most ambitious is the series of Williamsburg novels, which epitomize American history from the Revolutionary War until World War II through the experiences of two Williamsburg families and their English relatives. The seven novels are Dawn’s Early Light (1943; the Revolution), Yankee Stranger (1944; the Civil War), Ever After (1945; the Spanish-American War), The Light Heart (1947; World War I), Kissing Kin (1948; the end of World War I to Hitler’s coming to power), This Was Tomorrow (1951; the Nazis and the prelude to World War II), and Homing (1957; the beginnings of World War II). The early novels, which are set in times when Williamsburg played a significant historical role, are most successful. In the later novels, the Williamsburg connection becomes strained as most action necessarily takes place elsewhere, and the symbolic use of the town (now a forgotten backwater) as a refuge from war and suffering doesn’t really work. All are romances, the lovers frequently being a very young woman and a mature, masterful man; some are star-crossed, but more often love conquers all. In the ideal relationship, the man cherishes and protects the woman, while she adores him. Similar romantic relationships and themes occur in the nonhistorical fiction, and an additional motif used in several novels is the occult. Tryst (1939) tells of the love of a young girl for a man she has never met in life; their souls are united in death, when she is killed in an automobile accident. Remember Today (1941) is narrated by the heroine’s guardian angel; this device is not very successful, and the guardian angels seem oddly helpless to affect the lives of their charges. Thane’s autobiographical writings are informal and somewhat diffuse. England Was an Island Once (1940), centering on Thane’s last two summers in England before World War II, includes digressions on her previous summers there, on English history, and on people she has known. It effectively conveys both a sense of change in England’s relations with the world and the feeling of impending war. Reluctant Farmer (1950, reprinted as The Strength of the Hills, 1976) is a very personal account of how Thane turned a rundown Vermont farm with a ramshackle house into a working farm and her real home. Full of local color, it avoids both preciousness and sentimentality. Thane managed both to please the popular taste with her light fiction and to write serious biography. Melodramatic and sentimental elements mar her fiction, and some plots are excessively
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contrived. Her most significant accomplishments are in her historical works, which are based on careful research, are imaginatively recounted, and always readable.
OTHER WORKS: Riders of the Wind: A Romance (1926). Echo Answers (1927). His Elizabeth: A Novel (1928). Cloth of Gold: A Novel (1929). Bound to Happen (1930). Queen’s Folly: A Romance (1937). From This Day Forward (1941). The Bird Who Made Good (1947). Melody: A Romance (1950). The Lost General (1953). Letter to a Stranger (1954). The Family Quarrel: A Journey Through the Years of the Revolution (1959). The Virginia Colony (1969). Dolly Madison: Her Life and Times (1970). The Fighting Quaker: Nathanael Greene (1972).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Atlantic (Jan. 1946). NYHTB (29 Jan. 1950). NYTBR (11 Sept. 1932, 22 March 1936, 23 May 1943). SR (14 March 1936, 10 Aug. 1963). —MARY JEAN DEMARR
THANET, Octave See FRENCH, Alice
THAXTER, Celia Laighton Born 29 June 1835, Portsmouth, New Hampshire; died 26 August 1894, Appledore Island, Isles of Shoals, Maine Daughter of Thomas B. and Eliza Rymes Laighton; married Levi L. Thaxter, 1851 (separated); children: three sons Raised on a lighthouse island in the Isles of Shoals 10 miles off the New Hampshire coast, Celia Laighton Thaxter grew up within the sound and sight of the sea and early learned to appreciate its beauty and its cruelty. This dual awareness became a major theme in her poetry, which established her literary reputation at a relatively young age. Thaxter’s father became the lighthouse keeper when she was four years old. She, her father, mother, and two brothers were the sole human inhabitants of the island for many years. In 1841 the family moved to another of the islands, Smutty-Nose, where they began receiving paying summer guests. As this proved a successful venture, Thomas Laighton in 1847 began building a resort hotel on Appledore Island, the largest of the Shoals island group. This he completed in 1848 with the help of Levi L. Thaxter, a young Harvard graduate. The Appledore House opened the following year and became a major summer resort attracting artists and writers including
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Hawthorne, Thoreau, Emerson, Whittier, Lowell, Mark Twain, Charlotte Cushman, Ole Bull, Lucy Larcom, Sarah Orne Jewett, Annie Adams Fields, and Childe Hassam. Hassam completed a series of remarkable paintings of the islands, including some of Thaxter in her garden (1892), which are now in the Smithsonian. Many of these artists were attracted by Thaxter as well as by the scenery, and she established a kind of literary salon on the islands beginning in the 1860s. Levi Thaxter had become Celia’s tutor in her early teens, and in 1851 they married and later had three sons. The marriage was not successful, as Thaxter pined for her island home when, off and on in the 1850s, they lived on the mainland in several Massachusetts towns. Levi, on the other hand, began to resent her literary success. By the end of the 1860s, Thaxter and her husband lived essentially separate lives, although they never divorced. She remained on Appledore with her mother and her oldest son Karl, who was developmentally disadvantaged. The death of her mother in 1877 was a severe shock to Thaxter, precipitating a religious crisis wherein she attempted to communicate through seances with her mother. This endeavor may have inspired a similar experience described fictionally by Sarah Orne Jewett in her spiritualistic story, ‘‘The Foreigner’’ (1900). Although a religious skeptic in her early years, Thaxter did turn to spiritualism, theosophy, and Eastern religions in her later years. Thaxter was an extraordinarily accomplished watercolorist; this is an overlooked aspect of her considerable talent. Her prose publications, Among the Isles of Shoals (1873) and An Island Garden (1894), also remain as gems of descriptive prose. Thaxter’s first poem, significantly entitled ‘‘Land-Locked,’’ appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in March 1861. She continued to publish poems in the major literary journals of her day, namely Scribner’s, Harper’s, the Independent, the Century, and the Atlantic. She also published juvenile material in Our Young Folks and St. Nicholas Magazine. The first collection of Thaxter’s poetry, Poems, appeared in 1871. Many subsequent revised editions were printed. Most of Thaxter’s poetry deals with nature, not the benign nature of the Romantics, but a harsh, indifferent ocean. Several poems deal with actual shipwrecks that occurred on the Isles of Shoals while she was there. In ‘‘The Wreck of the Pocohantas,’’ Thaxter asks: ‘‘Do purposeless thy children meet / Such bitter death? How was it best / These hearts should cease to beat?’’ She returns often in her poetry to this basic theological question. Thaxter’s tones is sometimes bitter and despairing, and occasionally somewhat cynical about traditional religious explanations. At times her austere, harsh imagery anticipates that of 20th-century poets such as Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. Probably some of Thaxter’s bitterness, like theirs, stemmed from the frustrations she encountered trying to play the many and conflicting roles of wife, mother, and artist. These conflicts are apparent in her letters, published in 1895.
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OTHER WORKS: Drift-Weed (1878). Poems for Children (1884). The Cruise of the Mystery (1886). Idyls and Pastorals (1886). My Lighthouse, and Other Poems (1890). Stories and Poems for Children (1895). The Letters of Celia Thaxter (edited by A. A. Fields and R. Lamb, 1895). The Heavenly Guest, and Other Unpublished Writings (edited by O. Laighton, 1935). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Faxon, S., et al., A Stern and Lovely Scene: A Visual History of the Isles of Shoals (1978). Hawthorne, N., The American Notebooks (1881). Laighton, O., Ninety Years at the Isles of Shoals (1930). Spofford, H. P., A Little Book of Friends (1916). Thaxter, R., Sandpiper: The Life and Letters of Celia Thaxter (1962). Westbrook, P. D., Acres of Flint, Writers of Rural New England 1870-1900 (1951). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —JOSEPHINE DONOVAN
THAYER, Caroline (Mathilda) Warren Born 1787 (?); died 1844 Wrote under: Caroline Mathilda Warren, Caroline Mathilda Thayer Married Mr. Thayer (died); children: three Caroline Warren Thayer was reared in New England in what seems to have been an intellectually stimulating and affectionate environment. She married a Mr. Thayer and had three children, but husband and children died within a few years. She made her living as a writer and schoolteacher, heading the ‘‘Female Department’’ at various schools. Many of Thayer’s books went through several editions. The prefaces are the best source of biographical information. Nothing, however, is known of her later years. The Gamesters; or, Ruins of Innocence (1805), a warning against the ‘‘vices of gaming,’’ is Thayer’s only novel. Its hero, Leander Anderson, is physically appealing and morally upright, but the potential weakness in his character is that his sensibility overwhelms his judgement; he is purposefully corrupted by his close friend, Somerton, a libertine. Several other stories, meant to provide moral guidance, are intertwined with Leander’s, but all the digressions do not save or even enliven The Gamesters. The pace of the novel is very slow, and the characterization weak. Leander is the greatest disappointment; in response to Thayer’s own question, ‘‘Why did he fall?’’ she answers, ‘‘Inquiry is vain.’’ Thayer’s other works are nonfiction, and all were published under the name of Thayer. Religion Recommended to Youth (1817) is a plea for Methodism, to which she converted in her early twenties, in the form of letters addressed to a former pupil. Letter to the Members of the Methodist Episcopal Church (1821) is a pamphlet about her conversion to Swedenborgianism and subsequent dismissal from Wesleyan Seminary. In a clear and lively style, she outlines the points at which Methodism and
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Swedenborgianism differ and her reasons for accepting the latter. In Thayer’s account of her dismissal, one also learns a good deal about the way the seminary was run. Poems Moral and Sentimental by Mrs. Harriet Muzzy, which Thayer edited in 1821, contains some verses of Thayer’s own. Her literary merit, such as can be found, surfaces when she speaks in her own voice, that of an intelligent and religious teacher, and not when, as in her novel, she follows various popular formulas for success.
OTHER WORKS: First Lesson in the History of the U.S. (1825).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cowie, A., The Rise of the American Novel (1948). Peter, H., The Early American Novel (1971). —JULIA ROSENBERG
THAYER, Geraldine See DANIELS, Dorothy
THOMAS, Dorothy Swain Born 13 August 1898, Barnes, Kansas; died 22 September 1990 Daughter of Willard I. and Augusta Dodge Thomas; married John W. Buickerood, 1939 Dorothy Swain Thomas was a member of a large and talented family of a minister. The Reverend Thomas’ family moved often: to several towns in Kansas and then, when Thomas was seven, to a homestead in Alberta, Canada; 40 miles from a railroad. Six years later, the family moved back to the Midwest, eventually to Lincoln, Nebraska, where Thomas attended high school and college. She interrupted her college education from time to time to teach in country schools, in small towns, and eventually in Lincoln. She moved to New Mexico in 1934, but the locale of her stories remains primarily the Midwest. Thomas published numerous stories, several poems, and books for children. She also wrote one-act plays; one is included in Best One-Act Plays of 1950. Her novels, Ma Jeeter’s Girls (1932, reissued 1986) and The Home Place (1936, 1966) are actually collections of short stories. All episodes use the same cast of characters, however, and the continuity of theme makes a unified novel. Ma Jeeter’s Girls is told from the point of view of the young school teacher who ‘‘boards’’ with Ma Jeeter and teaches at the
school across the road. Living at home with Ma are her apparently virginal son Pete, her unmarried daughter Laura, and Laura’s little daughter. But Ma has five other daughters, and every chapter delineates the courtship of one of the daughters, each of whom, with only one exception, has become pregnant without the sanction of marriage. Ma Jeeter is particularly well-drawn. Although her physical appearance is rather horrible, she is a wonderfully sympathetic character as she relates the downfall of her daughters, the emotions of the family concerning ‘‘the family weakness,’’ and the various ways in which the problems of paternity and marriage are resolved. The novel seems at first glance to be a lighthearted treatment of an age-old problem, but Thomas’ understanding of the moments of sorrow and defeat in the particular situation of each daughter is notable. The first chapter of The Home Place won second prize for the O. Henry Memorial Awards in 1935; the editors considered it one of the best in depicting the effects of the Depression on family life. Subsequent chapters, all published earlier as short stories, have merit but do not achieve the harmony found in Ma Jeeter’s Girls. Events cover a year during the Depression on the Nebraska farm to which the three sons and their families return when they lose their jobs and homes. The small, crowded house becomes the scene of conflict and resolution between the varied members— particularly the women—of four generations of the family. It is through the eyes of Phyllis, the young, pregnant wife of the second son, that the other characters and their problems are sympathetically developed. Thomas’ book is rich in details of Midwestern farm life during the Depression and shows both humor and warmth in development of character. H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury named Thomas one of the ablest of American short story writers. Several of her stories have been anthologized or marked for special honors. As did Ruth Suckow in Iowa and Bess Streeter Aldrich in Nebraska, Thomas explores the everyday lives of ordinary people. Her stories are, she has said, pretty sure to be about love and happiness sought for. In contrast to Mari Sandoz, writing in Lincoln, Nebraska, at the same time, Thomas believed life to be more kind than cruel; her work, while realistic, often reflects an optimistic point of view. The author’s skill lies in her fidelity to physical detail and her ability to develop her characters and present their story from a clean, clear, and unmannered viewpoint.
OTHER WORKS: Hi-Po the Hippo (1942). Eliphant Dilemma (1946). The Child in America: Behavior Problems and Programs (with W. I. Thomas, 1928, reissued 1970).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Daniels, S., Dorothy Thomas: The Woman and the Work (videocassette, 1989). Getting Away (film based on Thomas’ short story, 1980). Other references: American Mercury (Dec. 1946). CSM (4 Jan. 1941). Quill Minutes, Nebraska State Historical Society,
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Lincoln, Nebraska (1931-32). San Angelo Standard-Times (6 Mar. 1977). Saturday Evening Post (10 April 1937). —HELEN STAUFFER
THOMPSON, Clara M. Born circa 1830s; died death date unknown Also wrote under: Logan While Clara M. Thompson was one of the more important Victorian popular novelists, she is barely mentioned in contemporary literary encyclopedias. Her sentimental, moralistic novels are informed by complicated plots: young women seduced and ruined, families separated and reunited, insanity, miscegenation, kidnapping, ransom, and religious bigotry. The Chapel of St. Mary (1861) is characteristic. Agatha Douglass comes to live with her uncle Rodney Douglass at Maple Cliff; she is befriended by Papsy, Douglass’ black-Native American maid and neighbors Honora and Gregory Clarendon. Honora’s friend Charlotte Morgan comes to Maple Cliff to teach Agatha and Anne Walbridge, whose dissolute brother Dick seduces Papsy. When Douglass goes to Scotland, Agatha’s brother Chauncey arrives to run Maple Cliff and falls in love with Charlotte, who rejects him after being warned by Mrs. Douglass never to marry a Douglass. Three other families are introduced: the pious, self-righteous Ridgeways, the scheming Winchesters, and the Fergusson sisters who provide further romantic complications. In the end Gregory and Agatha reject Isabelle and Duncan Winchester and marry each other. The Fergusson sisters are reunited with their brother Robert Walton; Charlotte marries Chauncey Douglass. Papsy and her brother Chet are discovered to be Rodney Douglass’ children. While plot construction is Thompson’s strength, characterization is not. Most of the characters are conventional Victorian types; however, those Thompson says she based on real life— Papsy, Chet, and the Judge—are more fully developed, and the generous Aunt Polly, another black-Native American character, is a foil to the smug hypocrisy of the Ridgeways and their Ladies’ Sewing Circle. Although the theme of this didactic novel is hypocrisy, the contrast between the Christian charity of the blackNative Americans of the Gorge and the narrow sectarianism of the other characters, The Chapel of St. Mary actually reflects the antiCatholic nativism of the period in its allusion to Maria Monk and its mention of Ursuline nuns fostering vocations, perhaps a veiled reference to the burning of their convent by a Charleston mob in 1834. Thompson is undistinguished as a stylist, but, as a writer of sensational novels, her work is of some interest to those concerned with the popular literature of the Victorian period. —MAUREEN MURPHY
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THOMPSON, Clara M(abel) Born 3 October 1893, Providence, Rhode Island; died 20 December 1958, New York, New York Daughter of T. Franklin and Clara Medberry Thompson Clara M. Thompson graduated from the Women’s College of Brown University and began her medical training at Johns Hopkins University in 1916. It had at one time been her ambition to become a medical missionary, but at Johns Hopkins her interest in psychoanalysis intensified. After her internship at the New York Infirmary for Women and Children, Thompson completed her residency in psychiatry at the Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins in 1925. Thompson’s career was varied and its course inextricably linked to changes occurring in the field of psychoanalysis as the culturally oriented analysts challenged many of the Freudian theories to which the classical psychotherapists ascribed. After establishing a private practice, teaching at Vassar and the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, and studying at Budapest with Sandor Ferenczi, Freud’s pupil and colleague, Thompson, along with other proponents of the cultural approach to psychoanalysis, formed the American Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis. Thompson was elected vice president. With others, she established the William Alanson White Institute in New York in 1943. As its executive director for many years, she provided the leadership that allowed the institute to preserve its ideal of open scientific investigation. Although Thompson published over 50 papers, articles, reviews, and interviews, the works which make her most accessible to the lay reader are three books, only one of which was published during her lifetime. Psychoanalysis: Evolution and Development (1950) is a study of the major trends and developments in psychoanalysis. Thompson builds her discussion of the most significant theories of Freud, Adler, Jung, Ferenczi, Sullivan, Fromm, and others on the thesis that a thread of continuity runs through the evolution of psychoanalysis, even as it develops in divergent directions. No polemicist, Thompson approaches this study as a reconciler whose perspective is based on the belief that it is premature to assume any one school of psychoanalysis has discovered final truth. Interpersonal Psychoanalysis: The Selected Papers of Clara M. Thompson (1964) is addressed primarily to a professional audience. The selections in the first two-thirds of the book deal with changing concepts in psychoanalysis, the contributions of Ferenczi, Sullivan, and Fromm, and various clinical problems in psychotherapy. The last portion of the work contains professional articles and an uncompleted manuscript on the psychology of women. This material has been edited a second time and presented for a more popular audience under the title On Women (1971). In her exploration in these two books of what might be called ‘‘female distinctiveness,’’ Thompson is interested in the extent to which the basic experiences that set women apart from men affect their essential makeup. She is sufficiently Freudian to acknowledge the impact of woman’s biological distinctiveness on her role
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in life, but she differs with Freud over the degree of biologic determinism. Many of the characteristics which Freud saw as being innate in the female Thompson attributes to cultural factors, and she imputes the preponderance of distorted ideas about the female psychosexual life to the unavoidable bias of male theorists. Thompson credits Freud with having developed the most comprehensive and detailed theories about women, but she opposes his view that a woman is essentially a castrated male. Thompson insists that a woman’s psychology is ‘‘something in its own right and not merely a negation of maleness;’’ she was one of the very early psychoanalytic theorists to insist many of the ‘‘truths’’ about the innate nature of women have to be examined in light of the culture that has defined the woman, and she was one of the pioneers in asserting that the female experience has an inherent validity of its own. In her contributions to the literature of psychoanalysis, Thompson was both evaluator and originator. She assessed the work of others in the field from the perspective of one capable of realizing continuity in divergence. In her own divergence from the classical psychoanalytic concepts, Thompson provided new ways of looking at human problems. Her theories concerning the impact of culture on the psychosexual development of women foreshadowed many of the perspectives on women which only emerged in popular literature after her death in 1958. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Green, M. R., Interpersonal Psychoanalysis: The Selected Papers of Clara M. Thompson, Part VI (1964). Other references: Chicago Sun (13 June 1950). NYTBR (28 Feb. 1965). —GUIN A. NANCE
THOMPSON, Dorothy Born 9 July 1894, Lancaster, New York; died 30 January 1961, Lisbon, Portugal Daughter of Peter and Margaret Grierson Thompson; married Josef Bard, 1923; Sinclair Lewis, 1928 (divorced); Maxim Kopf, 1943 (died) Dorothy Thompson was the daughter of an English clergyman who married an American woman and settled in upper New York State. Left motherless when she was still a child, she turned early to history, literature, and languages for pleasure as well as study. She attended the Lewis Institute in Chicago, and received the B.A. degree from Syracuse University in 1914. Thompson began her writing career as a publicist for woman suffrage groups and the Red Cross. This work took her abroad, where she secured freelance writing assignments and made influential friends among the overseas press corps. Within a few years she had become a regular correspondent for the Philadelphia Public Ledger and the New York Evening Post. Later she became a bureau chief in Berlin.
Thompson was fluent in German and thoroughly at ease with German culture and politics—which was perhaps why she was among the first, and among the most perceptive and persistent, critics of Nazism. Her enduring reputation rests chiefly on the worldwide recognition and respect she won as the plain-speaking reporter who, through her widely syndicated New York Herald Tribune column ‘‘On the Record,’’ alerted the English-speaking world to the brutality and menace of the Hitler regime. Although she broke with the Herald Tribune over her support for President Franklin Roosevelt in 1940 (she had originally favored the paper’s candidate, Wendell Willkie), Thompson continued writing until virtually the end of her life. In addition to her newspaper column, she contributed a monthly article to the Ladies’ Home Journal and did regular radio broadcasts. A series of wartime talks sent by short wave to Germany was published under the title Listen, Hans (1942). Let the Record Speak (1939) was culled from her political columns. The Courage to be Happy (1957), drawn from Thompson’s Journal pieces and dealing mainly with personal and social topics, reflects the rigorous, work-centered ethic of her Methodist childhood. By the 1940s, Thompson was one of the most widely read columnists in the country, and the press of travel and speaking engagements made her writing of necessity a collaborative effort with researchers and editorial aides. Critics should look to her early work for the full flavor of her journalistic style. In The New Russia (1928), for example, she combines cogent political analysis with vivid personal detail to give a memorable picture of the Soviet Union after ten years of Communist rule. Thompson compares the pioneering work of the Soviet experiment to the development of the American frontier. She is, however, astute and clearsighted in her recognition of the ways in which classical communist ideals have been jettisoned for practical political purposes. Perhaps Thompson’s greatest gift as a journalist was her ability to maintain an enthusiastic receptivity to her subject while tempering enthusiasm with objective judgement. She was considered a highly opinionated writer, but in general, her opinions represent moral convictions which the reader can easily detect and allow for. In I Saw Hitler (1932) Thompson’s scorn for the subject of her interview is everywhere apparent, yet personal antipathy does not lead her to underestimate the leadership potential of the Nazi dictator. One of Thompson’s biographers suggests she felt keenly her failure to produce a body of writing that would transcend the topical. In particular, she seems to have wanted to write her own autobiography, and she made several efforts, which she abandoned as unsatisfactory. Thompson seems to have been a writer with greater powers than her subjects called forth. OTHER WORKS: Depths of Prosperity (with P. Bottome, 1925). Refugees (1938). Political Guide (1938). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Kurth, P., American Cassandra: The Life of Dorothy Thompson (1990). Sheean, V., Dorothy and Red (1963).
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Sanders, M., Dorothy Thompson: A Legend in Her Time (1973). Schorer, Sinclair Lewis: Am American Life (1961). Reference works: Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia (1987). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Atlantic July (1945). CB (1940). Colliers (June 1945). Newsweek (20 Oct. 1944). NY (20 April 1940, 27 April 1940). —ANN PRINGLE ELIASBERG
THORNDYKE, Helen Louise See ADAMS, Harriet Stratemeyer
TICKNOR, Caroline Born 1866, Boston, Massachusetts; died 11 May 1937, Boston, Massachusetts Daughter of Benjamin H. and Caroline Cushman Ticknor As a member of a family prominent in the publishing business, from childhood Caroline Ticknor knew many men and women in the literary establishment and was devoted to their work. She was the granddaughter of William D. Ticknor, who founded Ticknor and Fields. The firm published the most successful authors of the period; directed the old Corner Bookstore, rendezvous for the intellectuals of Boston, Cambridge, and Concord at the time of their dominance in the country’s cultural life; and also published the Atlantic Monthly, whose contributors included leading writers of America and England. Her father continued in the business, and Ticknor became an author and editor. Having been educated privately, except for a year in public school and a special course at Radcliffe College, Ticknor began writing at the age of eighteen ‘‘for the fun of it.’’ She wrote both short fiction and articles for Harper’s, Century, the Independent, Cosmopolitan, the New England Magazine, and Atlantic. Although a collection of minor stories and a light satire appeared in 1896, her work as a biographer is more important. Hawthorne and His Publisher (1913) is an account of the mutually rewarding relationship between the major American author and William Ticknor from 1851 to 1864, when they both died. The work relies on family recollections of the two men and their acquaintances, as well as 150 letters from Hawthorne to Ticknor’s grandfather. Consonant with the spirit of a memorable friendship, Ticknor neither intrudes nor shows partiality in the depiction of the two men. Sympathetic in her characterization of Hawthorne, she thereby reflects the integrity of the self-effacing and loyal publisher on whom the man of letters counted not only for good advice but magnanimous favors. The second biographical study by Ticknor is Poe’s Helen (1916), a tribute to Sarah Helen Whitman, preeminent among the literary women closely associated with the controversial writer. The substance of the book is derived from Whitman’s manuscripts
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and correspondence, including Poe’s previously published letters to her. Poe figures in the biography as a romantic poet, a fascinating and morbid genius; ‘‘Helen’’ is the woman ‘‘of poetry and moonlight,’’ but one with whom he had intellectual and spiritual ties. Whitman is praised for being free from bias, generous in her attitudes toward Poe’s ‘‘eccentricities,’’ and keen in her critical judgements. The praise is weakened, however, by Ticknor’s failure to consider even briefly Whitman’s bold defense of him in Edgar Poe and His Critics (1860). In Glimpses of Authors (1922), Ticknor takes advantage of experiences she enjoyed as a member of a family hospitable to ‘‘the great and near great’’ writers associated with the publishing house. The book is, in fact, semiautobiographical, but its author is modest, discreet, and gently amusing in her reminiscences. Because she is dependent upon a variety of sources—the testimony of relatives and friends, letters, proof sheets, and other memorabilia—some of which are inconsequential, Glimpses of Authors is composed of fragments. Those about Lew Wallace, Joel Chandler Harris, and Thomas de Quincey, for example, prove more interesting than those about Henry James and Mary N. Murfree. Her sketches evoke the manners, tastes, diversions, and anxieties of American and English literary circles before the rise of modernism. Ticknor was aware of the vicissitudes of those who write for a livelihood; she observed that originality is always theoretically in great demand but finds itself scantily appreciated when it appears. Nonetheless, at the time when a radical change in perspectives necessitated a reappraisal of the history of American literature, Ticknor ratified the accepted 19th-century view of its achievement. There is a suggestion of nostalgia in Ticknor’s adherence to the aims of conserving records of an earlier period. OTHER WORKS: A Hypocritical Romance, and Other Stories (1896). Miss Belladonna: A Child of Today (1896). Miss Belladonna: A Social Satire (1897). The ‘‘Old North’’ Signal Lights, 1723- 1923; or, Christmas Comes to Boston (1923). May Alcott: A Memoir (1928). Washington’s Surprising Ancestor (n.d.). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Flagg, M. B., Boston Authors Now and Then (1966). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the Untied States (1995). Other references: Boston Globe (12 May 1937). —ELIZABETH PHILLIPS
TIERNAN, Frances (Christine) Fisher Born 5 July 1846, Salisbury, North Carolina; died 24 March 1920, Salisbury, North Carolina Wrote under: Christian Reid Daughter of Charles F. and Elizabeth Caldwell Fisher; married James M. Tiernan, 1887 (died 1898) Frances Fisher Tiernan was born into an aristocratic Southern family. Her father, president of the Western North Carolina
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Railroad, was a Confederate officer killed at the Battle of Bull Run. Tiernan was educated primarily at home. At twenty-two, she converted to Roman Catholicism. Tiernan was able to support herself and several family members by her writing. Her career began in 1870, with the publication of Valerie Aylmer, the first of a series of five ‘‘plantation novels’’ romanticizing the domestic life of the antebellum South. As with most of Tiernan’s romances, the plantation novels are melodramatic accounts of women turning men’s heads and men breaking women’s hearts. Many of Tiernan’s romances were serialized in Catholic magazines before publication in book form. Although she wrote primarily fiction, her travel sketch, The Land and the Sky (1876), won much acclaim for its vivid portrayal of the back country of western North Carolina. Tiernan’s fondness for the wilderness also is expressed in her novels. After Many Days (1877) is set in the preindustrial South and emphasizes the pride of land ownership, natural refinement, and simple rural existence. In 1879 Tiernan decided she needed to ‘‘broaden the narrow little world in which my life, so far, has been spent’’ so she traveled for a year on the Continent. Upon returning to America her writing assumed a ‘‘European’’ flavor. Hearts of Steel (1883), Armine (1884), and Weighed in the Balance (1900) are located in European cities but still focused on the love troubles and triumphs of the ruling class. The geographical flavor of Tiernan’s novels changed again in 1887, when she moved with her husband, a widowed land speculator, to Mexico. Several books are attempts to capture what she understood as the life of Mexico and its people. Trips to the West Indies and the Dominican Republic produced two adventure novels: The Man of the Family (1897) and The Chase of an Heiress (1898). After James Tiernan’s death in 1898, Tiernan returned to North Carolina where she became active with the Daughters of the Confederacy. Proceeds from the play Under the Southern Cross (1900) were used to construct a monument to Jefferson Davis. Tiernan firmly believed that reading was a means of moral enlightenment, and to this end she established two Catholic women’s reading circles. Her literary, civic, and religious achievements were commemorated in 1909 when she was awarded the Laetare Medal by Notre Dame University. In 1911 Tiernan wrote what was considered her most successful work, The Light of Vision. The theme is central to many of her other novels: the Christian way of life, especially for women, is one of personal sacrifice. A Catholic convert remarries her divorced, good-for-nothing husband after he becomes a helpless invalid. Through her patient care she is able to save her husband from self-destruction and lead him to a holy death. The Light of Vision echoes the common Victorian theme of the suffering, saintly wife (or innocent child) leading the sinful man back to a life of piety and goodness. In her more than forty novels, Tiernan sought to portray life not as it was, but as it should be—restrained and refined. Her Southern, aristocratic characters abhorred excess wealth, strove for purity, and attempted to
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preserve an idyllic preindustrial society. Although Tiernan traveled in areas seldom frequented by other Southern women, her novels show only the geographical change; characters, plots, and morals remain unchanged. Her portrayal of the ‘‘proper’’ life had contemporary popularity, but the novels are too steeped in turnof-the-century mentality to say much to the modern reader. OTHER WORKS: Morton House (1871). Ebb-Tide, and Other Stories (1872). Mabel Lee (1872). Carmen’s Inheritance (1873). Nina’s Atonement, and Other Stories (1873). A Daughter of Bohemia (1874). Hearts and Hands (1875). A Question of Honor (1875). Bessie’s Six Lovers (1877). Bonny Kate (1878). A Summer Idyl (1878). A Gentle Bell (1879). A Child of Mary (1885). Roslyn’s Fortune (1885). His Victory (1887). Miss Churchill (1887). Philip’s Restitution (1888). A Cast for Fortune (1890). Carmela (1891). The Lost Lode (1892). A Little Maid of Arcady (1893). A Comedy of Elopement (1893). The Land of the Sun (1894). The Lady of Las Cruces (1896). The Picture of Las Cruces (1896). A Woman of Fortune (1896). Fairy Gold (1897). A Daughter of Sierra (1903). Vera’s Charge (1907). Princess Nadine (1908). The Coin of Sacrifice (1909). The Wargrave Trust (1911). The Daughter of a Star (1913). A Far Away Princess (1914). A Secret Bequest (1915). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Becker, K. B., Biography of Christian Reid (1941). Reference works: The Book of Catholic Authors (1942). NAW (1971). NCAB. —M. COLLEN MCDANNELL
TIETJENS, Eunice (Hammond) Born 29 July 1884, Chicago, Illinois; died 6 September 1944, Chicago, Illinois Also wrote under: E. H., Eloise Briton, Guy Trevor MacKenzie, Frances Trevor Daughter of William A. and Idea Strong Hammond; married Paul Tietjens, 1904; Cloyd Head, 1920; children: two daughters and one son ‘‘Born under a wandering star,’’ Eunice Tietjens lived on Chicago’s suburban North Shore until her banker father drowned in 1897. She and three younger siblings were schooled in Geneva, Dresden, and Paris, where her mother was an exhibiting painter. Tietjens married a composer and bore two daughters, burying one before she returned alone to Chicago in 1909. Tietjens established her financial independence by writing pseudonymous serials. In 1912 she experienced an aesthetic ‘‘birth,’’ and, encouraged by friends in the Chicago literary movement, she turned to poetry and began her 25-year association with Harriet Monroe’s Poetry. Tietjens became assistant editor of the literary journal in 1915. In 1917 Tietjens published the first of her four volumes of poetry. She spent 1917 and 1918 in Paris, as the Chicago Daily
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News’ first woman war correspondent. After the war, she remarried, bore a son, and became active in Chicago’s major literary clubs. Travels in China and Japan, three winters in Tunisia, and a year in the South Seas confirmed Tietjens’ fascination with nonWestern cultures. She wrote an unsuccessful play, Arabesque, with her husband in 1925 and edited a successful Oriental anthology. After 1929 she wrote mostly children’s travel books. When her husband Cloyd Head joined the Miami Players in 1934, Tietjens taught college there, wrote her autobiography, became involved in Pan-American affairs, and worked on an epic poem about the Caribbean. During her lifetime, Tietjens was best known for her earliest poems, collected in Body and Raiment (1919). ‘‘Proem: A Plaint of Complexity,’’ a finely wrought catalogue of her ‘‘too many selves,’’ implicitly acknowledges the biographical basis for her successes, reflected in several notoriously sensuous lyrics and occasional poems to famous contemporaries. Among this youthful collection’s best poems, ‘‘The Great Man’’ is the first example of Tietjens’ mastery of free verse, while ‘‘The Drug Clerk’’ and ‘‘The Steam Shovel’’ introduce contemporary, sociological subject matter. Most of the poems, however, rely on regular rhymes and conventional forms and emotions, which often undermine Tietjens’s psychological insights and sensory perceptions. Thus in her frequently anthologized poem ‘‘A Bacchante to her Babe,’’ trivial rhymes reduce mythic eroticism and powerful images of birth to a harmlessly playful song of maternal joy. Such weaknesses do not mar Tietjens’ most consistent volume of poetry, Profiles from China (1917). Written after most poems in Body and Raiment, these free verse sketches are rooted in a complex cross-cultural perspective with perceptual and emotional power. In ‘‘The Cormorants,’’ for instance, her painterly skill focuses unblinkingly on an Oriental scene her Western mind finds revolting: the semistarved slavery of fishing birds whose string collars prevent them from swallowing the catches their ‘‘lousy lords’’ require. Characteristic of Tietjens’ work are the uncensored sensory details of fermenting toilet pots in ‘‘Spring,’’ the troublesome shadow of brutality underlying exotic mystery in ‘‘The Hand,’’ and her condemnation in ‘‘My Servant’’ of the inhumanity of praising as ‘‘golden lilies’’ thumping, bound feet. But only ‘‘The City Wall’’ and ‘‘The Most-Sacred Mountain’’ were often anthologized. Pressing squalor is muted by references to the European middle ages and countered by distant beauty in the former, while memorable lines with clear, open tones fully realize the pure ‘‘white windy presence of eternity’’ in the latter, her most admired poem. Profiles from Home (1925), which Tietjens wrote at a distance from her subjects and on the self-derivative model of her free verse Chinese ‘‘profiles,’’ lacks both sensory immediacy and personal response. These qualities appear frequently, however, in Leaves in Windy Weather (1929)—for instance, in the burnished, tactile images of ‘‘Old Friendship’’ and the sibilant, sizzling burst of primitive passion in ‘‘Fire.’’
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This final, miscellaneous volume of Tietjens’ poetry also includes her best poetic narratives. ‘‘From the Mountains,’’ a sonnet sequence that her family had suppressed in 1915, plots a brief, parabolic love affair. ‘‘The Man Who Loved Mary’’ is the best of several dramatic narratives. For her personal prose, as well as her poetry, however, the vignette—with its sharply etched description and compressed emotional force—was Tietjens’ best form. Her novel Jake (1921) relies more on lyric description than narrative development, and her 1938 autobiography is loosely episodic. Tietjens’ contemporaries accurately identified painterly perception, not formal technique, as the most dependable quality of her literary oeuvre. Clichéd closing lines often mar promising poems, although her best poems exhibit an emotionally direct poetic voice that responds honestly to even the most complex experiences. OTHER WORKS: Japan, Korea, and Formosa (edited by B. Holmes, 1924). Boy of the Desert (1928). Poetry of the Orient (edited by Tietjens, 1928). The Romance of Antar (translated by Tietjens, 1929). China (with L. S. Hammond; edited by B. Holmes, 1930). The Jaw-Breaker’s Alphabet (with J. Tietjens, 1930). Boy of the South Seas (1931). Manga Reva, the Forgotten Island (with R. L. Eskridge, 1931). The Gingerbread Boy (1932). The World at My Shoulder (1938). An Adventure in Friendship (edited by Tietjens, 1941). The Eunice Tietjens Papers are housed in the Newberry Library in Chicago, Illinois. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Love, W. N. S., ‘‘Eunice Tietjens: A Biographical and Critical Study’’ (dissertation, 1960). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Bookman (Aug. 1925, April 1929). Masses (Aug. 1917). NYHTB (6 Oct. 1929). NYT (19 Oct. 1919). Poetry (Sept. 1917, Oct. 1917, Feb. 1920, July 1925, Sept. 1938). SR (7 Oct. 1944). —SIDNEY H. BREMER
TILTON, Alice See TAYLOR, Phoebe Atwood
TINCKER, Mary Agnes Born 18 July 1831, Ellsworth, Maine; died 27 November 1907, Dorchester, Massachusetts Daughter of Richard and Mehitabel Jellison Tincker Mary Agnes Tincker was a precocious child who had progressed from the role of student to that of full-time teacher in the public schools of Ellsworth by age thirteen. Within two years she
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had begun her lifelong involvement with the literary world by contributing anonymous sketches to local newspapers and journals. Tincker became a Catholic in 1851, an event which shaped much of the content, characterization, and setting of her works. Her most frequent contributions were made to the Catholic World which serialized her first novel, The House of York (April 1871June 1872). The setting for this novel is Ellsworth, during the Know-Nothing period (1854-55). The story follows the developing vocation of Dick Rowan, an impetuous young man whose maturation takes place through suffering and persecution not unlike that which the author herself endured after her acceptance of Catholicism. In 1863 Tincker volunteered as a Civil War nurse serving in Judiciary Square Hospital, Washington, D.C., until ill health prevented her from continuing. Some of the destruction and conflict of this period is reflected in her writing, particularly in the poem ‘‘A Soldier’s Daughter,’’ from the collection, Autumn Leaves (1889). In this work the war is seen from a child’s point of view. There is a poignant description of a New England home—of the children, the land, and the death of the father. Tincker struggled with the theme of death throughout her life and work. Perhaps her most mature expression is in a short sketch ‘‘Palingenesis,’’ in which she concludes the arch enemy humanity must conquer is the fear of death. In addition, one must conquer death not by despising life but by enjoying life to its fullest, so there will be no final fear in that change in the form of individual life called death. Tincker’s father served as a sheriff of Hancock County and as warden of the Maine state prison. A persistent interest in the criminal, from both a legal and religious point of view, permeates her work. For example, in Grapes and Thorns (1874) the plot includes unraveling the mysterious death of the mother of a devout parish priest. This work also provides a look into late-19th-century prison life and the inadequacies of rural penal systems, as well as observations on the motivations and weaknesses in the human person. Although Tincker holds Catholicism in great esteem, this does not preclude a tolerance which enables her to recognize the depth of goodness in all creation, as well as the proclivity to evil. In Grapes and Thorns, the conversion of Mr. Schöninger from Judaism to Christianity is treated as a gradual transition in which Judaism is never renounced but, in his own eyes, fulfilled. Tincker spent 14 years in Italy (1873-87) during which time she also traveled in Spain and France. This sojourn formed the setting for her remaining novels. Tincker became known in England with the publication there of Six Sunny Months (1878) and Signor Monaldini’s Niece (1879). On the continent, Grapes and Thorns was translated into French; By the Tiber (1881) and Two Coronets (1889) were translated into German. The critics of her time singled out Tincker’s power of description and her astuteness in developing the most minute details of personality in characters as her greatest gifts. Yet all of the works suffer from the clichés and coincidence characteristic of many novels of this period. Tincker’s own struggle as a single
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woman in the turn-of-the-century world became a focus in much of her work. She protests the restrictions placed on women’s freedom; the stereotype of woman as a being of inferior intelligence is consistently reversed in her novels. Tincker, however, did achieve recognition for her work and was accepted as a member of the Ancient Academy of the Aracadia in Rome. OTHER WORKS: The Winged Word (1873). The Jewel in the Lotus (1884). Aurora (1886). San Salvador (1892). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Catholic Encyclopedia (1913). DAB. NCAB. Novels and Tales by Catholic Writers (1946). Supplement to Allibone’s Critical Dictionary of English Literature (1891). Other references: Catholic World (June 1872). Literary World (27 Sept. 1878, 12 Dec. 1885). Nation (March 1879, 9 June 1881). —VIRGINIA KAIB RATIGAN
TODD, Mabel Loomis Born 10 November 1856, Cambridge, Massachusetts; died 14 October 1932, Hog Island, Muscongus, Maine Daughter of Eben J. and Mary Wilder Loomis; married David Todd, 1879; children: one Mabel Loomis Todd, an only child, was a descendant of Priscilla and John Alden of Plymouth Colony. Todd’s father, astronomer at the U.S. Naval Observatory, poet, and naturalist, was a friend of Asa Gray, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Educated at private schools in Cambridge and Georgetown, D.C., Todd later studied at the New England Conservatory of Music. She married an astronomer, and their one child was born in 1880. They moved to Amherst College in 1881, when her husband became director of the observatory and a member of the faculty. Upon his retirement in 1917, they made their winter home in Coconut Grove, Florida, where Todd fostered the movement to establish the Everglades National Park; her Maine island, where they had a summer house, became a National Audubon Society wildlife sanctuary. Todd, who was responsible for the publication of the first volumes of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, undertook the editorial work at a time when no one else would. The Todds had been initially well-received, when they moved to Amherst, by Susan Gilbert Dickinson and her husband Austin, treasurer of the College and the poet’s brother. A liaison developed between Todd and Austin in the fall of 1882 and continued until his death in 1895. Although the men remained friends, animosity between the wives extended to family imbroglios over Todd’s legitimate claims as the editor, at the request of the poet’s family, of Dickinson’s verse and selected letters. The editing was a formidable job. Dickinson’s handwriting was idiosyncratic; her grammar and punctuation were not always conventional. There were tentative words, alternate lines, or
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different versions of the same poem between which to choose. The labor required a sure grasp of the poet’s intentions, but also anticipation of readers’ resistance to an original and imaginatively daring language. Todd enlisted the help of her husband, of Austin, and of the reluctant T. W. Higginson, editor of the Atlantic, with whom Dickinson had begun correspondence as early as 1862. A modest selection, Poems by Emily Dickinson, appeared in 1890 with a preface by Higginson (known as the First Series, followed by the Second Series, 1891), who assisted in securing a publisher and launching the book. ‘‘You,’’ he told Todd, ‘‘did the hardest part of the work.’’ Todd is less well known for the books she wrote. She first published Footprints (1883), which in retrospect seems fictionalized autobiography. The story of a quiet, lonely man—a fortyyear-old physician for whom life’s mysteries are cold and bleak— ends as he comes to know a spirited young woman who shares his sense of the autumnal beauty of the New England seacoast and they glimpse a promise of joy together. Lyrical descriptions of an austere landscape with its granite cliffs, wild flowers, and expanse of sky and ocean suggest emotions that are not overtly described in the narrative. Todd wrote Total Eclipses of the Sun (1894), the first volume in the Columbian Knowledge series, edited by her husband. She traces the separation of modern scientific astronomy from the inaccurate poetic views characterized by mysticism, superstition, and terror of the past. Authoritative without being pedantic, Todd writes a muted poetry describing an eclipse she witnessed with her husband in Japan during 1887. ‘‘A startling nearness to the gigantic forces of nature,’’ she concludes, ‘‘seems to have been established,’’ and personalities, hates, jealousies, even mundane hopes ‘‘grow very small and very far away.’’ Todd also collaborated with her husband in other scientific writing. She published informal essays, reviews of new books, three serialized novels, and a sonnet sequence. She also wrote two travel books: Corona and Coronet (1898) is a leisurely account of a yacht trip to Japan to view the total eclipse of the sun in 1896, and Tripoli the Mysterious (1912) describes Libya’s ancient desert city, its changeless etiquette, sandblown ruins, architecture, crafts, trades, and the people Todd met on two ‘‘eclipse trips’’ in 1900 and 1905. In the tour de force, A Cycle of Sunsets (1910), she observes changes of light, hues, tones, and atmosphere at the end of every day throughout a year as attentively as an artist like J. M. W. Turner Studies sky and land. Sixty of her paintings are in the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documents, Carnegie-Mellon University.
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by Emily Dickinson (edited by Todd; Third Series, 1896). Steele’s Popular Astronomy (edited by Todd, with D. P. Todd, 1899). Bolts of Melody: New Poems of Emily Dickinson (edited by Todd, with M. T. Bingham, 1945). The Thoreau Family Two Generations Ago (Thoreau Society Booklet No. 13, 1958).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bingham, M. T., Ancestor’s Brocades (1945). Blake, C. R., and C. F. Wells, eds., The Recognition of Emily Dickinson (1967). Sewall, R. B., The Life of Emily Dickinson (1974). Reference works: NAW (1971). —ELIZABETH PHILLIPS
TODD, Marion Marsh Born March 1841, Plymouth, New York; died after 1914 Daughter of Abner K. and Dolly Wales Marsh; married Benjamin Todd, 1868 (died 1880); children: one daughter Marion Marsh Todd was one of seven children. Her family moved to Eaton Rapids, Michigan, in 1851. Her father, a Universalist preacher, died in 1852. She attended Ypsilanti State Normal School, then taught until she married a lawyer, who, like her father, encouraged Todd to pursue a career. She had one daughter. In the late 1870s, the Todds moved to San Francisco, where Todd enrolled in Hastings Law College. In 1880 her husband died and the following year she withdrew from school without a degree but was admitted to the bar. Todd, like many women lawyers, became politically active although women had no vote. She ran for state attorney general on the Greenback-Labor ticket in 1882; although she lost, she led her party in votes. By 1886, having returned to Michigan, she continued in reform politics: as delegate to the Knights of Labor General Assembly in Richmond, Virginia; as cofounder in 1887 (with Sarah Emery and others) of the Union Labor Party. In 1890 she moved to Chicago to edit the Express, a nationally circulated reform weekly. She later returned to Michigan, first to Eaton Rapids, then to Springport.
Todd’s judgements are apt to be aesthetic rather than conventionally moral; her condescension toward ‘‘village’’ insularity is tempered if not tolerant. Her tensions are disciplined, her feelings cultivated. Graceful in manner, she values decorum appropriate to occasions and is sensitive to the nuances of the moment. Human presences rarely dominate the scenes or subjects to which Todd responds with subtlety, composure, and intelligent interest.
Between 1886 and 1902, Todd published five books on critical political issues and three novels. The political books are well documented and cogently argued; they reflect her legal training, yet are seasoned with wit. In Protective Tariff Delusions (1886), Todd, addressing a general audience, takes on the political issue of the day. She asserts, with supporting statistics, that protective tariffs help neither the farmer nor the laborer and hence should be abolished.
OTHER WORKS: Letters of Emily Dickinson (edited by Todd, 1894; enlarged edition, 1931). A Cycle of Sonnets (1896). Poems
Senator John Sherman (formerly secretary of the Treasury) was a primary target of the Populists in the 1880s and 1890s.
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Accused of selling his vote and political influence to big bankers, he was held partly responsible for the nation’s problems, which the Populists saw as resulting from deflation. In two works, Honest (?) John Sherman; or, a Foul Record (1890) and (an elaboration) Pizarro and John Sherman (1891), Todd reenforces the Populist attack. Her chief effort on behalf of the woman suffrage movement is a delightful book, Prof. Goldwin Smith and His Satellites in Congress (1890). This is a response to Smith’s article, ‘‘Woman’s Place in the State’’ (Forum, January 1890). Smith, a respected historian at Cornell, attacked the feminist movement. In her counterattack, Todd uses quotes from Smith as her text and pursues them to their ludicrous but logical ends. She leavens her caustic analysis with anecdotes from diverse sources: literature, periodicals, hearsay. The book remains clear, persuasive, and amusing. One of Todd’s best known work is Railways of Europe and America (1893). She presents tables comparing aspects of the 1890 American and European railway industries: equipment, stock, trackage, workers, accident records, and passenger and freight rates. These are the groundwork for her major recommendation: nationalize the American railroad industry since, ‘‘They know no people, no party, no God—but the God of Greed, based upon unrighteous dividends and watered stock.’’ Like her previous works, though weighted with facts, this book is readable. It is difficult to believe the woman who wrote these interesting books also wrote novels so meretricious as Todd’s three romances. The stories are unexciting, the characters undeveloped, the stabs at ‘‘social issues’’ superficial. Claudia (1902), for example, revolves around a well-born woman’s search for a husband among three suitors. There is little action and much talk—about evolution, growth, reincarnation, the burdens of the rich. All this talk is shallow and unrealistic. Inexplicably, Todd’s social concerns in her nonfiction are mocked by the middle class trivia in her fiction. Scholars of Populism are aware of Todd’s work on railroads; scholars of feminism have yet to discover her work on suffrage. Readers of novels are unaware of her romances; perhaps it’s better so. It is difficult to accept sentimental novels written by women who have demonstrated their insightful understanding of the political and economic world in which they live. OTHER WORKS: Rachel’s Pitiful History (1895). Phillip: A Romance (1900). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Davis, W. J., History of Political Conventions in California (1893). Reference works: AW. NAW (1971). Other references: Arena (July 1892). Green Bag (Jan. 1890, April 1890). Michigan Pioneer and Historical Collections (1892). —PAULINE ADAMS, UPDATED BY EMMA S. THORNTON
TOKLAS
TOKLAS, Alice B. Born Alice Babette Toklas, 30 April 1877, San Francisco, California; died 7 March 1967, Paris, France Daughter of Ferdinand and Emma Levinsky Toklas; life partner Gertrude Stein (died 1946) Alice B. Toklas was born into San Francisco’s upper-middle class Jewish society. When she was thirteen, Ferdinand Toklas moved his family to Seattle, where Toklas enrolled in the music conservatory of the University of Washington to study piano, but her mother’s failing health forced the family to return to San Francisco. After her mother’s death in 1897, Toklas became the ‘‘responsible granddaughter’’ to a house full of male relatives. She made brief contact with the bohemian life in San Francisco, but largely concentrated on domestic duties. Henry James’ novels filled her with longing for Europe and fueled her desire to escape her situation. In 1907 Toklas left America. Soon after her arrival in Paris, she met Gertrude Stein and the two became intimate friends. Toklas recalled her first impression of Stein, of a ‘‘golden brown presence, burned by the Tuscan sun.’’ The two women agreed to a marital relationship in 1908. Toklas soon joined Stein and her brother Leo in their apartment—Leo Stein left in 1913—and the two women lived together until Stein’s death in 1946. Toklas devoted herself to the care, ease, and fulfillment of Gertrude Stein. As Stein’s secretary, Toklas typed, edited, and organized the writer’s manuscripts. As her companion, she made travel arrangements, scheduled meetings, entertained visitors, and maintained their home. In the years following Stein’s death, Toklas was instrumental in publishing Stein’s unpublished works, worked with biographers and critics of Stein whose approaches pleased her, and annotated abstruse and allusive aspects of Stein’s writing. In 1957 Toklas formally entered the Catholic Church to insure an afterlife with Stein. Toklas collaborated with Stein on at least two books. She helped, in Stein’s words, ‘‘to reduce tenses grammar spelling and genders into some kind of order’’ in Stein’s Picasso (1938), then translated this work into English. It is problematic how much Toklas contributed to Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, but clearly she contributed anecdotes, observations, and judgements. There is some evidence Toklas and Stein jointly wrote Stein’s ‘‘Ada’’ (1908 to 1912, exact date uncertain) and A Novel of Thank You (1925, 1994). After Stein’s death, Toklas published a number of books and articles. The most substantial of these is her volume of memoirs, What Is Remembered (1963). The material here is much the same as that in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, but the tone is frequently more caustic and the scenes more carefully composed. The anecdotes are finely polished; they have the ring of having been told many times before and so brought to this final form.
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Toklas’ skill in rendering an event and portraying an acquaintance displays her finely honed intelligence. Though she devotes herself largely to fleshing out Stein’s legend in her memoirs, Toklas’ accomplished style shows her to be a prose writer in her own right. The same anecdotal style pervades Toklas’ The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook (1954, reprinted several times, most recently in 1994 and 1995). This work consists of both her own recipes and those of friends. More importantly, it includes reminiscences of friends, servants, and journeys. Toklas’ writing is witty, laconic, and precise; her anecdotal style taut and ironic. The book reads as a memoir, with foods the emblems of memory. Aromas and Flavors of Past and Present (1958), edited by Poppy Cannon, is simply a collection of Toklas’ recipes. Toklas also wrote several articles in which she reminisces about literary life in Paris. In 1956, she published a translation of a book of fables, The Blue Dog and Other Fables for the French, written by the adolescent daughter of some friends. After her death, a volume of her letters appeared. Staying on Alone: Letters of Alice B. Toklas (1973) includes only letters written after Stein’s death. They are gossipy, irreverent, and full of devotion to Stein’s memory. They deal with Toklas’ adjustment to life as a widow and her difficulties with Stein’s heirs. When Toklas writes of herself as a woman, it is in the reflected glow of Stein’s genius. Toklas’ writing is largely autobiographical. She presents an impression of herself as a loving woman devoted to the comfort of her spouse. She writes a carefully controlled prose, precise of phrase, concise and strong in its evocation of person and place. Toklas’ role as secretary to Stein and her involvement with several generations of writers and artists earn her special interest as a participant in the expatriate American world of letters.
OTHER WORKS: Baby Precious Always Shines: Selected Love Notes Between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas (with G. Stein, 1999).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bridgman, R., Gertrude Stein in Pieces (1970). Levy, H., 920 O’Farrell Street (1947). Friedrich, O., The Grave of Alice B. Toklas and Other Reports from the Past (1991, 1989). Lord, J., Six Exceptional Women: Further Memoirs (1994). Mellow, J. R., Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein & Company (1974). Rogers, W. G., When This You See Remember Me (1948). Simon, L., The Biography of Alice B. Toklas (1977, 1991). Souhami, D., Gertrude and Alice (1999). Stein, G., The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1993). Steward, S. M., A Pair of Roses (1993). Thomson, V., Virgil Thomson (1966). Windham, D., The Roman Spring of Alice Toklas: 44 Letters by Alice Toklas in a Reminiscence (1987). Reference works: Norton Book of Women’s Lives (1993). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Biography (Spring 1999). Modern Fiction Studies (1996). People Weekly (February 1996). Prose (Fall,
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1973). Twentieth Century Literature (1999). Women’s Studies International Forum (May 1993). —JANIS TOWNSEND
TOMPKINS, Jane P. Born 18 January 1940, New York, New York Daughter of Henry and Lucille Reilly Parry; married Daniel P. Tompkins, 1963 (divorced); E. Daniel Larkin, 1975 (divorced); Stanley Fish, 1982 Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for nonfiction, Professor of English Jane P. Tompkins lets her unabashed affection for the work of Louis L’Amour, Zane Grey, and John Ford provide the backdrop for her examination of male Westerns and cultural polarities in gender and power in West Of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (1992). Tompkins combines a loving tribute with an unflinching condemnation and she shares her own inner great divide over male Westerns. Tompkins’ work on Westerns followed her study of 19th-century sentimental novels; she sees the Westerns as a ‘‘cannon-burst’’ against sentimental women’s fiction in the 19th century, against the dominance of women’s culture and the women’s invasion of the public sphere between 1880 and 1920. ‘‘It’s about men’s fear of losing their mastery, and hence their identity, both of which the Western tirelessly reinvents.’’ Tompkins had previously argued that serious study of the sentimental novels America produced in the 19th century offered substantial rewards. Her primary question is: What makes a literary classic? She argued it is not the intrinsic merit of a text, but rather the circumstances of its writing. She contends that writers like Brockden Brown, Cooper, Stowe, and Warner wrote in order to alter the face of the social world, not to elicit aesthetic appreciation. Thus the value and significance of the novels, for readers of their time, depended on precisely those characteristics that formalist criticism has taught us to deplore: stereotyped characters, sensational plots, and clichéd language. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of America Fiction (1985) angered some critics who saw her attempts to open up the literary canon to ‘‘classics’’ that the current critical tradition has ignored as ‘‘suffocatingly nationalistic.’’ Tompkins graduated from Bryn Mawr College with a B.A. magna cum laude in 1961 and did her graduate work at Yale University; she received an M.A. in 1962 followed by a Ph.D. in 1966. She began her teaching career at Connecticut College and Greater Hartford Community College. She taught at Temple University, Columbia University, and the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York. Since 1985 she has been professor of English at Duke University. Tompkins’ commitment to bringing heretofore unheralded ‘‘classics’’ to the reading public is reflected in her introduction to
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the Penguin Twentieth-Century Classic edition of Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage. Her efforts have also recovered a novel first published in 1852. The Wide Wide World by Susan Warner is often acclaimed as America’s first bestseller. Tompkins finds the value in these two texts, works often discounted and ignored. In her most recent work, Tompkins turns the lens on herself. A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned (1997) is a painful and exhilarating story of Tompkins’ spiritual awakening. She looks back on her own life in the classroom and discovers how much of what she learned there needs to be unlearned—she offers a critique of our educational system while also paying tribute to it. Tompkins identifies the key problem as an obsessive quest to educate as opposed to a shared exploration by student and teacher. ‘‘The university has come to resemble an assembly line, a mode of production that it professes to disdain. Each professor gets to turn one little screw—his specialty—and the student comes to him to get that screw turned. Then on to the next. The integrating function is left entirely to the student.’’ Her prescription is for teachers to adopt a style of instruction that uses open discussions, intensive interaction, and more fluid syllabi. In her literary criticism, Tompkins frequently unsettled the more traditional literary canon by examining texts often relegated to the margins. A Life in School takes as its starting point what is often most marginalized: the emotional dimensions of teaching. She describes the fear of shame and the desire for admiration and love that motivate the behavior of both teachers and students in higher education. Tompkins relates her four years of experimental teaching as an effort to unsettle and reform the authoritarian patterns that molded her as a teacher. BIBLIOGRAPHY: CANR (1986, 1992). —CELESTE DEROCHE
TOWNE, Laura M(athilda) Born 3 May 1825, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; died 22 February 1901, St. Helena Island, South Carolina Daughter of John and Sarah Robinson Towne Laura M. Towne’s father was from Massachusetts, her mother from Coventry, England. After the early death of her mother, the family moved to Boston, where the children were educated, and later to Philadelphia. The Towne family became interested in abolition in Boston and had its abolitionist convictions reinforced by the sermons of Dr. William Henry Furness at the First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia. Towne became active in the movement while studying at Woman’s Medical College and with Dr. Constantine Hering, the famous homeopath. When the Civil War began, she immediately sought to do what she could in the Union cause. What came to be called the Port Royal Experiment provided Towne with the opportunity to engage in the teaching and medical
and missionary work that was to occupy her for the last 40 years of her life. When Union forces occupied the Sea Islands of South Carolina seven months after the fall of Fort Sumter, resulting in the total abandonment of the islands by the white planters, the islands became an experiment in freedom for 10,000 slaves far behind Confederate lines. Northern abolitionists, philanthropists, and antislavery government forces quickly organized contingents of volunteer teachers and labor superintendents to travel to the Sea Islands. In April 1862, Towne sailed from New York to Port Royal with one such group, sponsored by the Freedmen’s Aid Society of Pennsylvania. The freed slaves of the Sea Islands had been kept by the cotton aristocracy in abject poverty, superstition, and ignorance. Facing not only the difficulties of providing education, health care, and food and clothing for the people but also the unhealthy, smallpox-ridden climate and the constant threat of the return of Confederate soldiers, the Northern ‘‘Gideonites,’’ as many were called, had to be a hardy, dedicated lot to remain and to succeed. Not all remained, and not all succeeded with the tasks of the experiment in freedom, but Towne did, and she recorded her experiences in letters and a diary. She established the Penn School on St. Helena Island—a school which had continuous independent existence until 1948, when it became part of the South Carolina state school system—and soon impressed the community, Northern visitors, and the Freedmen’s Bureau with the progress of pupils who received warm personal encouragement and no corporal punishment. Her medical training also made her the closest thing to a doctor the island had, and she spent long hours doctoring and nursing blacks and whites alike. Towne eventually bought one of the abandoned St. Helena Island estates, Frogmore, and lived and worked out her life there with her friend Ellen Murray, returning to the North infrequently for holidays and family visits. The manuscripts of Towne’s diary and letters are more complete and somewhat more pungent in rebuking the rebels than is the version edited by Rupert S. Holland in 1912. But the edited version of Towne’s writing, The Letters and Diary of Laura M. Towne, nevertheless gives a lively, personal account of an important sideline in Civil War history. Towne’s letters and notes not only cover her comments on the major military and political figures and events of the Port Royal Experiment but are also sensitive descriptions of ex-slaves, of day-to-day existence, of the halting progress she sees in education, health care, and selfsufficiency. The primary historical account of the Port Royal Experiment, Rehearsal for Reconstruction, by Willie Lee Rose, relies heavily on the firsthand accounts of Towne and other similar Northern workers. The impact of Northern white women school teachers on Southern black education after the Civil War is often forgotten. Towne was a forerunner, and her book is a forgotten link in our history.
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OTHER WORKS: Laura M. Towne’s diary is at the University of North Carolina; many letters from Towne are in the James Miller McKim Collection at Cornell University.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Abbott, M., The Freedmen’s Bureau in South Carolina, 1865-1872 (1967). Evans, M., Martha Schofield: Pioneer Negro Educator (1916). Rose, W., Rehearsal for Reconstruction (1964). Simkins, F., and R. Woody, South Carolina during Reconstruction (1932). Tindall, G. B., South Carolina Negroes: 1877-1900 (1966). Williamson, J., After Slavery: The Negro in South Carolina during Reconstruction, 1861-1877 (1965). Other references: Journal of Negro History (1923). —CAROLYN WEDIN SYLVANDER
TOWNSEND, Mary Ashley (Van Voorhis) Born 24 September 1832, Lyons, New York; died 7 June 1901, Galveston, Texas Also wrote under: Mary Ashley, Crab Crossbones, Michael O’Quillo, Henry Rip, Xariffa Daughter of James G. and Catherine Van Voorhis; married Gideon Townsend, 1852 Mary Ashley Townsend was the only child of her mother’s second marriage. Her father died when she was one year old, and her mother subsequently married a third time. The family, with five children, lived in pleasant circumstances in the country, and Townsend attended the district school and the academy. She married a first cousin and after living in Fishkill, New York, and Iowa City, they moved in 1860 to New Orleans, where they lived for the remainder of their lives. Townsend became known as the ‘‘poet laureate of New Orleans.’’ Her husband, Gideon, was a successful businessman and they led an active social life. Three daughters were born to them. The first in a long series of contributions by Townsend to newspapers was published in the Daily Delta (19 Sept. 1850), while she was in New Orleans visiting a married sister. In her many years as a writer, Townsend adopted different pseudonyms for her work in various genres. ‘‘Xariffa’’ was the signature used for a great many of her poems, especially in her early period. For essays on topics ranging from bonnets to warfare and in tones from light to serious, she used the name ‘‘Michael O’Quillo.’’ She signed her name as ‘‘Crab Crossbones’’ to ‘‘Crossbones Papers,’’ which were often didactic or satiric comments on society’s foibles. ‘‘Henry Rip’’ was the signature to ‘‘My Penny Dip,’’ a popular moral tale. Her own name, Mary Ashley, was signed to both prose and poetry late in her career. Her work was published in newspapers, magazines, and anthologies.
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Townsend published a number of short stories, but her only novel was The Brother Clerks: A Tale of New Orleans (1857). The novel is concerned with the coming of age of two very different brothers, who move to New Orleans from New York, and with their experiences in a strange city. It has interesting sketches of what life was like in New Orleans in the early 19th century, but the characters do not really come alive. In common with the betterknown fiction writers of the 19th century, Townsend has an intrusive manner in addressing comments directly to the reader. Townsend was best known and widely praised for her poetry. It reflects her wide diversity of interests; much of it is of a moral or religious nature. Her love of the region is also evident. She was asked to write poems for many special occasions, which she did (but asked others to read for her, feeling her gift was for writing and not public reading). Her most popular poem was ‘‘Creed,’’ first published in 1868, and reprinted many times. It is included in Xariffa’s Poems (1870). James Wood Davidson wrote in 1869, ‘‘Her blank verse is remarkable for its ease, vigour, and spirit.’’ He compared her poetry favorably with all other women writers of the time. Four of her poems were printed in the Louisiana Book by Thomas McCaleb in 1894, and he quoted Henry Austin on her essentially Southern style, saying further: ‘‘This poet, I think, has written finer passages than any other American woman, except perhaps, Emma Lazarus and Sarah Helen Whitman.’’ Grace King eulogized Townsend in 1901 as a poet and a woman who would be greatly missed by readers throughout the South. OTHER WORKS: The World’s Cotton Centennial Exposition (1885). Easter Sunrise (1889). Distaff and Spindle (1895). Down the Bayou: The Captain’s Story, and Other Poems (1902). BIBLIOGRAPHY: McCaleb, T., The Louisiana Book (1894). Manly, L., ed., Southern Literature from 1579-1895 (1900). Meyer, A. M., ‘‘Mary Ashley Townsend: A Biographical and Critical Study’’ (thesis, 1938). Thompson, T. P., Louisiana Writers, Native and Resident (1904). Reference works: AA. DAB. Living Female Writers of the South (1872). Living Writers of the South (1869). LSL. Poets of America (1886). The South in History and Literature: A Handbook of Southern Authors (1907). —DOROTHY H. BROWN
TREADWELL, Sophie Born 5 October 1885, Stockton, California; died 20 February, Tuscon, Arizona Daughter of Alfred B. and Nellie Fairchild Treadwell Sophie Treadwell was the only child of a pioneer California family. From her father, a judge whose maternal grandmother had
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raised him in Mexico, Treadwell inherited a passion for all things Spanish and Mexican. During her years at the University of California at Berkeley, from which she graduated in 1906, Treadwell wrote some one-act plays and acted both on campus and in little theaters in nearby Oakland. Then after one year as a teacher in a one-room school at Yankee Jims, in the Mother Lode Country—where she impressed the natives with her insistence on feminist ideas—Treadwell returned to San Francisco, to work as a reporter on the San Francisco Bulletin, soon becoming a feature writer with her own byline. She attained verisimilitude for her ‘‘sob stories’’ by masquerading, for example, as a prostitute in order to prove the established churches gave ‘‘only a stone’’ to the poor unfortunate women who ‘‘asked for bread.’’ In 1910 Treadwell married a sports writer for the San Francisco Chronicle; in 1915, she went with him to New York, where he took a position with the New York Herald Tribune. The connection served Treadwell well; she persuaded the Herald Tribune newspaper to send her to Europe as a war correspondent during World War I. Treadwell continued to write plays; by 1920 she had written nearly three dozen. In 1921 she used her Mexican connection to secure the only American interview with Pancho Villa at his ranch near Durango, Mexico. This visit resulted in her first professionally produced Broadway play, Gringo (1922). Throughout the rest of the decade, Treadwell concentrated on work for the theater. Plumes in the Dust, the story of Edgar Allan Poe, was originally written for John Barrymore but ultimately produced in 1936 with Henry Hull in the lead. Treadwell’s most successful effort, Machinal (1928), also was the result of her newspaper work—as a reporter covering the infamous Snyder-Gray murder case in 1927. Machinal provided the first starring role for the then-unknown Clark Gable. The play was staged in England and in many European cities, including two productions in Moscow. Treadwell was the first American playwright to be paid royalties in the U.S.S.R. In 1938, insisting on the potential for achieving the ‘‘good life’’ through a return to traditional American values, Treadwell wrote Hope for a Harvest. When the play was produced in 1941, with Frederic March in the lead, it was rejected by a public that, on the eve of Pearl Harbor, no longer agreed that a simple return to farm life and hard work could be the solution to all problems. Throughout most of the 1950s Treadwell lived in Spain, continuing to write and rewrite her plays. A novel was published in 1959. A careful craftsman, Treadwell never relinquished hope for another box office success to equal that of Machinal, and she left many versions of a great number of efforts in this direction. The only play produced in her final years was Now He Doesn ’t Want to Play, set in Mexico. Even at eighty, Treadwell was actively engaged in the production at the University of Arizona, working with the director and rewriting throughout rehearsals, in
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the vain hope the play would go to Broadway. As it turned out, Treadwell was destined to be remembered only for Machinal, which in itself is no small accomplishment. In ‘‘real life’’ both lovers, Snyder and Gray, were found guilty of the murder of Snyder’s husband and executed. But, with consumate skill, Treadwell concentrates in Machinal on the woman, making her female protagonist a genuinely universal character, a simple person, frustrated in every relationship through no fault of her own. Ultimately, the killing of her husband becomes an almost symbolic act—committed to free herself from a mechanistic world with which she cannot cope. She is very nearly acquitted, but the prosecutor reads aloud a deposition from her absent lover, now living in Mexico, in which he ‘‘tells all.’’ This final, callous disregard for their relationship elicits a tortured admission of guilt, and the young woman goes to her death without understanding how the sin of murder made her ‘‘free and not afraid for one minute.’’ Machinal was done on BBC-TV in England and on several American television programs in the 1950s. When it was revived at the off-Broadway Gate Theatre in 1960, it won the Vernon Rice Award. Machinal, an eloquent statement about the stultifying effects of the mechanization and meaninglessness of the modern world and the lack of human concern for others, is a fitting obituary for Treadwell, a woman who strove passionately throughout her long life for the right to be an individual dedicated to old-fashioned humanistic principles.
OTHER WORKS: Oh, Nightingale (1925). Lone Valley (1933). One Fierce Hour and Sweet (1959). There is a collection of Sophie Treadwell’s unpublished plays at the University of Arizona, Tuscon.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Gassner, J., Best American Plays (Early Series, 1900). Himelstein, M. Y., Drama was a Weapon (1976). Mantle, B., Best Plays, 1928 (1929). Ross, I., Ladies of the Press (1936). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Theatre Magazine (Jan. 1929). —EDYTHE M. MCGOVERN
TRILLING, Diana Born 21 July 1905, New York, New York Daughter of Joseph and Sadie Forbert Rubin; married Lionel Trilling, 1929 (died 1975); children: one son Diana Trilling has spent most of her life in New York City, except for brief sojourns abroad, mainly at Oxford and London. In
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1925 she received her B.A. from Radcliffe College, where she majored in fine arts. In 1929 she married literary critic and professor Lionel Trilling, who died in 1975. They had one son, who is an art historian. From 1955 to 1957, Trilling was chairman of the board of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom. She has also served on the board of the American Scholar and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 1950, and in 1977 received a joint grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Rockefeller Foundation for an oral history of the advanced literary-intellectual culture of New York from 1925 to 1975. Trilling was fiction critic for the Nation from 1942 to 1949. A collection of the Nation reviews appears in Reviewing the Forties (1978). During the 1950s, Trilling frequently contributed penetrating essays on McCarthyism and civil liberties to the New Leader. Trilling has published widely, in periodicals ranging from the popular Redbook to the intellectual Encounter and American Scholar. The Claremont Essays (1964) is a brilliant collection that demonstrates Trilling’s salient qualities as a cultural critic—her fusion of literary, social, and political commentary in which the personal and the public, the thinking and feeling selves are combined. The critical analysis of ‘‘The House of Mirth Revisited’’ is no mere explication de texte but an explication of life as well. Granville Hicks has called ‘‘The Death of Marilyn Monroe’’ a masterpiece of analysis. ‘‘The Oppenheimer Case: A Reading of the Testimony’’ is political analysis informed by the examination of one thousand pages of court records.
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outward, to the world of social and human fact,’’ she is keenly aware of the significance of sexuality and its effect on personal freedom. In her provocative piece ‘‘The Liberated Heroine’’ (Partisan Review, 1978), Trilling contrasts contemporary ‘‘heroines’’ with earlier ‘‘heroines of spirit’’—classical literary figures—and shows that women are still capitulating to men and accommodating to their fantasies. Trilling is a critic in the liberal tradition. Her humanism recognizes the realities of lust and rage, whose boundaries Freud had mapped out, at the same time that it upholds the virtues of manners and form. One might say of her what she said of President Kennedy, that she has had the ‘‘ability to bring past and present together, with the hope that this [offers] of a continuing life in civilization—which is to say, a future.’’
OTHER WORKS: The Portable D. H. Lawrence (edited by Trilling, 1947, 1981). The Selected Letters of D. H. Lawrence (edited by Trilling, 1958). Of This Time, of That Place, and Other Stories (1980). Uniform Edition of the Works of Lionel Trilling, 1978- 80 (edited by Trilling, 1981). Mrs. Harris: The Death of the Scarsdale Diet Doctor (1981, 1982). The Last Decade: Essays and Reviews, 1965-1975 (1982). The Beginning of the Journey: The Marriage of Diana and Lionel Trilling (1993).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: From the Library of Lionel and Diana Trilling (1998). Ozick, C. and Atwan, R., The Best American Essays 1998 (1998). Podhoretz, N., Ex-Friends: Falling Out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel & Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer (1999). Thomson, V., A Virgil Thomson Reader (1981). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Change (March 1979). Commentary (July 1977). New Leader (23 May 1977). NR (20 Aug. 1977). NYTBR (15 March 1964). Partisan Review (1978). SR (14 March 1964).
In the more recent We Must March, My Darlings (1977), it is primarily the 1960s that are under scrutiny, and again the pen is far-ranging. This collection includes ‘‘The Assassination of President Kennedy,’’ ‘‘Celebrating with Dr. Leary’’—which Irving Howe praised as a ‘‘major demolition of everything in the late 1960s and beyond, that yielded to the soft swoon of unthinking’’—and ‘‘On the Steps of Low Library,’’ about the university revolts. One can never count on Trilling for the expected or comfortable ending. She defends anticommunists in ‘‘Two Symposiums,’’ arguing one can be opposed to both communism and McCarthyism. Trilling sees the critic’s function as a ‘‘moralizing function, whatever additional critical purpose he may also be pursuing,’’ but she is never a propagandist. The title essay deals with the author’s return in 1971 to Radcliffe, where she lived for almost nine weeks in a coed dorm. Trilling’s detractors have accused her of siding with the older generation and of accommodating herself to institutional authority; but, in fact, she resists categories, and in many instances the young end up agreeing with her.
Born 23 August 1863, Richmond, Virginia; died 16 June 1945, Charlottesville, Virginia Wrote under: Amélie Rives Daughter of Alfred and Sarah Macmurdo Rives; married John Chanler, 1888 (divorced 1895); Pierre Troubetzkoy, 1896
Trilling is not popular with radicals, partly because of her desire to point out ambiguities in the arguments of advocates of social theories. Unlike many feminists, she refuses to discount biology. Though she urges women to ‘‘direct their sensibility
Both of Amélie Rives Troubetzkoy’s parents were of prominent Virginia families. Her father was a colonel of engineers on Robert E. Lee’s staff. Soon after her birth, Troubetzkoy and her
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—ELAINE HOFFMAN BARUCH
TROUBETZKOY, Amélie Rives
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mother were moved to Castle Hill, the home of her father’s parents, a gracious colonial estate in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains not far from Charlottesville. Her grandparents took a great interest in Troubetzkoy’s education, and she developed sophisticated tastes in the rich cultural milieu of Castle Hill. It became a center of security for her throughout her active life and provided the setting for a number of her novels. By all accounts, Troubetzkoy was a beautiful and dynamic woman; and many of her heroines are reflections of herself in their vivacity, intelligence, sensitivity—and their luxuriant blond hair. She traveled widely and maintained contacts with many outstanding English and American authors of her time. Her first marriage proved incompatible and ended, amicably, in divorce in 1895. Her second marriage, to Prince Pierre Troubetzkoy, a young portrait painter who had given up his wealth and position in Russia, was long and happy. Troubetzkoy’s writing career spanned several American literary movements and several trends in American reading tastes. Frequently, the fiction that appealed most strongly to the public was not her strongest work. Troubetzkoy’s first published story, ‘‘A Brother to Dragons’’ (Atlantic, March 1886), is a romantic, sentimental tale written in Elizabethan diction. Weak novels appealing to the public primarily for their exotic settings or melodramatic situations are interspersed throughout her career; still, the strength and development of Troubetzkoy’s talents can be seen. In Virginia of Virginia (1888), we can see the beginning of the strong Troubetzkoy heroine. Most critics praised its realism and dialogue while pointing out that it is an uneven work. The novel The Quick or the Dead? (1888) caused a public furor. The heroine is a young widow, and her debate on whether to remarry shocked propriety; yet more shocking were the scenes of sensuality, especially implications they were instigated by the heroine herself. But the novel is more than a deliberately sensational one; it is a sincere portrayal of the painful self-questioning Barbara undergoes as she considers the conflict between what she sees as her duty and feels as her need for fulfillment. Tinged with sentimentality and flowery diction, it is not consistently realistic; but in many ways The Quick or the Dead? is a more open, honest statement of the sexuality of women than the major realists of the period allowed. As a result of its notoriety, The Quick or the Dead? became a bestseller. In its sequel, Barbara Dering (1893), Barbara continues to show a conflict between her true nature and her expected role. In both novels, Troubetzkoy uses nature imagery to reveal this conflict. Another strong heroine is Phoebe, the protagonist of World’s End (1914), a novel winning high critical praise and had large sales. Phoebe, like earlier heroines, is a young woman of feeling and intellect; but she is less perfect and more realistic and develops more as a character than her predecessors. In this novel, for the first time, the heroine is matched by a fully developed,
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strong male character. Troubetzkoy’s later works move more and more to sympathetic, less stereotyped male characters, possibly because of her years of happy marriage with Pierre. In World’s End, the conflict is resolved in the sense that the heroine comes to some self-knowledge; but, as is usual in Troubetzkoy’s novels, there is no totally happy ending. Troubetzkoy’s Shadows of Flames (1915)—reflecting her own experience with drug addiction—The Queerness of Celia (1926), and her last novel, Firedamp (1930), are all among her best works, but do not quite equal the achievement of World’s End. In addition to her novels, Troubetzkoy wrote drama and poetry throughout her career. She published several plays written in blank verse and a long narrative poem, Seléné (1905), which shows a skillful handling of sustained verse, with many fine sensuous passages. During and after World War I, Troubetzkoy wrote a series of plays which had successful Broadway runs, including Allegiance, The Fear Market (of which a movie version was made), and an adaptation of Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper. Love-ina-Mist (1927) was an effective comedy of manners, and her only commercially successful play to be published after its Broadway run. Her last play, The Young Elizabeth (1938), shows her admiration for the young queen who is torn between love and duty; Elizabeth becomes a true Troubetzkoy heroine. Troubetzkoy has been called a realist, a fine local colorist, and an important social historian; she has also been called a semierotic, a sensationalist, a romantic who revels in morbid scenes and hysterical passions. Both strengths and weaknesses can be found in her work. Troubetzkoy did not always use her many talents to their best artistic effect; her active life and spontaneity may have led her away from careful revision. But the vitality and sincerity of much of her work remain fresh and significant for modern readers. OTHER WORKS: A Brother to Dragons, and Other Old-Time Tales (1888). Herod and Mariamne (1888). The Witness of the Sun (1889). According to Saint John (1891). Athelwold (1893). Tanis, the Sang-Digger (1893). A Damsel Errant (1898). Augustine, the Man (1906). The Golden Rose: The Romance of a Strange Soul (1908). Trix and Over-the-Moon (1909). Pan’s Mountain (1910). Hidden House (1912). The Ghost Garden (1918). As the Wind Blew (1920). The Sea-Woman’s Cloak and November Eve (1923). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Clark, E., Innocence Abroad (1931). Longest, G., Three Virginia Writers: Mary Johnston, Thomas Nelson Page, and Amélie Rives Troubetzkoy: A Reference Guide (1978). Manly, L., Southern Literature from 1579-1895 (1895). Meade, J., I Live in Virginia (1935). Painter, F., Poets of Virginia (1907). Taylor, W., Amélie Rives (Princess Troubetzkoy) (1973). Reference works: LSL, 10. Other references: Lippincott’s (Sept. 1888). Mississippi Quarterly (Spring 1968). Virginia Cavalcade (Spring 1963). —ANNE NEWMAN
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TRUITT, Anne Born 16 March 1921, Baltimore, Maryland Married James Truitt (divorced 1971); children: Alexandra, Mary, Sam ‘‘I will be going along, doing one thing on the surface— while underneath something else is brooding and preparing itself—the thing I’m going to do next,’’ Anne Truitt said in an interview with Eleanor Munro. On the surface, Truitt is an astonishing artist of sculptures, paintings, and drawings. Since her first exhibit, a one-artist show with dealer Andre Emmerich in New York City in 1963, Truitt has proven herself to be one of the most profound artists of this century. She has won several awards, like the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1971 and the National Endowment of Arts Fellowship in 1972 and 1977. Truitt earned her B.A. in psychology at Bryn Mawr College in 1943. Afterward, she decided to turn down a scholarship from Yale and took a night class in sculpture in Cambridge. She went on to formally educate herself in art at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Washington, D.C. (1949-50). During the time of her education and private work, Truitt destroyed the art she created from 1950 to 1961, saying, ‘‘My eye was off then.’’ As she realized herself as an artist, Truitt became a writer. Merely accounting her own life, she wrote three insightful journals: Daybook: The Journal of An Artist (1982, reprinted 1987, and with an excerpt published in The Norton Book of Women’s Lives, 1993), Turn: The Journal of An Artist (1986, 1987), and Prospect: The Journal of An Artist (1996). Committing herself to introspection through writing, Truitt began Daybook on 6 June 1974, the day she visited a friend in Arizona. The visit was an attempt for rest after she had just accomplished two retrospective exhibits: one at the Whitney Museum of American Art in December 1973 and the other at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington in April 1974. The journal was inspired after the exhibits were displayed and she experienced a disturbing realization that her life had gone by without attention to her feelings. She concealed them with her art. Her writing articulates her thoughts of growing old and how it had been artistically recorded. She is aware that she had not given much thought to the time in between young and old when she wrote of her modeling of human bodies: ‘‘Classical beauty held no interest to me. I pursued the marks of experience. . .’’ She then added, ‘‘When I modeled one marked, used female body after another, I was recording adumbrations of what I have now, at the age of fifty-three, become.’’ While writing Daybook, Truitt continued her daily routine: gardening, taking care of her three children and home, and working in the studio. She wrote this diary for seven years and, at the end of those years, brought ‘‘the artist of the present together with the artist of the past.’’ The private writing of the journal was not unlike Truitt. Seeing her sculptures with clear vision, she
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always worked on them in seclusion, insomuch as to put her work in storage for no public eye. That was until Ken Noland, the owner of the studio she rented, asked to see the sculptures. After a progression of talks by Noland to friends in the art circle, Emmerich took her work, displayed them appropriately, and her identity as an artist became public. In Turn, Truitt’s consideration of her age and death is pursued further for two-and-one-half years of writing. She begins in July 1982, after her ex-husband, James Truitt, killed himself in November 1981. She struggles with the pain of the loss, noting they had been divorced 10 years prior to his death, while contemplating her own death. Her writing is moving and bounces the reader through all emotions with grace and ease. Turn brings both laughter and tears as Truitt shares her happiness in the publication of Daybook and her sadness of James’ death. Despite her melancholy feeling toward his suicide throughout the diary, Truitt’s writing in Turn is lighter, even happier, than that of Daybook because she is no longer concerned with finding herself as an artist. She has already done so in Daybook. Truitt has a change in attitude, a ‘‘turn,’’ in her second disclosure. She revels in her joys of being a grandmother, takes in daily life as a teacher and gardener, and enjoys the company of family and friends. Turn is the emergence of a defined artist and woman of wisdom. Spring 1991 through spring 1992 Truitt finds herself ‘‘as a person who is preparing to reach the end of a long life.’’ She considers this closeness to death in Prospect, a journal she begins to write as a last attempt to bring her life together as a whole. Burdened by the fears of death, illness, decreased finances, and worry for her children and grandchildren, Truitt’s writing forces her to face harsh reality. The diary becomes a remembrance of her life as she prepares for a retrospective exhibition, an attempt to increase her financial worth once more, with Emmerich’s gallery— this time showing 30 years of her art. As she goes through piece by piece of her sculptures, paintings, and drawings from 1961 to 1991, she recollects her life with literary eloquence. ‘‘The work demanded to be answered to,’’ she wrote, giving her art the honor it deserves. She successfully brings a sense of completeness as she fully understands the meaning of her past and courageously accepts her fated future. Aside from her work as an artist and writer, Truitt spent much of her time as a professor at the University of Maryland beginning in 1975. She also served one year as acting Director of Yaddo, a retreat for artists. OTHER WORKS: Anne Truitt: Sculpture and Drawings, 1961-1973 (exhibition catalogue, 1974). Anne Truitt: Sculpture and Painting: 17 October-19 November 1976, University of Virginia Art Museum (exhibition catalogue with E. Carmean, 1976). Originals: American Women Artists (1979). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Berger, M., Beyond Formalism: Three Sculptors of the 1960s: Tony Smith, George Sugarman, Anne Truitt : 18
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September-24 October 1986, Hunter College Art Gallery, New York City (exhibition catalogue, 1986). Harrop, J. F., ‘‘Anne Truitt and the Minimalist Movement’’ (thesis, 1983). Reference works: Newsmakers (1993). Other references: Anne Truitt: The Influence of Willa Cather on Her Art (videocassette, 1985). NYTBR (April 1996). Studies in Art Education (Winter 1991). The Future of the Object in Art (audiocassette, 1979). —KIMBALLY A. MEDEIROS
TRUMAN, Margaret Born Mary Margaret Truman, 17 February 1924, Independence, Missouri Writes under: Margaret Truman Daniel Daughter of Harry S. and Elizabeth Virginia ‘‘Bess’’ Wallace Truman; married Clifton Elbert Daniel, 1956; children: Clifton, William, Harrison, Thomas Like Reeve Lindbergh, Margaret Truman is another famous daughter-turned-writer. The child of President Harry S. Truman and First Lady Bess Wallace Truman, Margaret grew up around Washington, D.C., politics and politicians; her friends include Drucie Snyder Horton, daughter of John W. Snyder, Secretary of the Treasury for the Truman Administration. So it is no wonder that her writings, both fiction and nonfiction, center around her famous family, those involved in politics and history, and the nation’s capital. Truman attended public school in Independence, Missouri, until 1934, when her father was elected to the U.S. Senate. A talented singer, Truman began taking voice lessons at the age of sixteen and made her concert debut singing over a nationwide radio hookup with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. She graduated from George Washington University in 1946, receiving a B.A. in history. Her father, then the president, gave the commencement address and presented her with her diploma. In 1949 she made a concert appearance with the National Symphony Orchestra at Constitution Hall in Washington. In 1956 Truman married Clifton Daniel, who would later become the chief of the New York Times Washington Bureau. Beginning her career as a writer of nonfiction, Truman’s Souvenir: Margaret Truman’s Own Story came out in 1956, the story of growing up in the White House and in politics. White House Pets (1969), a chronicle of the ‘‘First Pets’’ (animals in the Oval Office), followed. In 1972 she released a book about her father titled Harry S. Truman, a thorough biography of one of the most important political figures of the 20th century, containing unequaled insight and understanding of the man’s extraordinary life and offering rare glimpses of the personalities and politics behind the world events of his time.
More books about the Truman family followed, with Letters from Father: The Truman Family’s Personal Correspondence (1981) with and about her father, and then Where the Buck Stops: The Private and Personal Writings of Harry S. Truman (1989), by her father, and edited by Margaret, containing the 33rd president’s interesting theories and opinions on leadership and leaders, plus his Letterman List of picks for the best and worst presidents, all penned in President Truman’s bluntly honest ‘‘give ’em hell’’ style. Truman’s son Clifton Truman Daniel also wrote Growing Up with My Grandfather: Memories of Harry S. Truman (1994), and Truman wrote a book about her mother, Bess W. Truman, published in 1986. Women of Courage came out in 1976, called by some the female version of John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage. The book contains brief biographies emphasizing the courage of 12 women both famous (such as Susan B. Anthony and Dolly Madison) and little known in U.S. history, including Susan Livingston, Sarah Winnemucca, Ida Wells-Barnett, Elizabeth Blackwell, Marian Anderson, and others. First Ladies (1995) examines the lives of the women who occupied the White House with their husbands. As a First Daughter, Truman has known and met First Ladies from Frances Cleveland to Hillary Clinton. The book also contains interviews with Lady Bird Johnson, Betty Ford, Nancy Reagan, Rosalynn Carter, Barbara Bush, and Mrs. Clinton; and recollections of Pat Nixon, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Edith Wilson, and Eleanor Roosevelt. In addition, Truman wrote about Dolly Madison, Mary Todd Lincoln, Grace Coolidge, Julia Tyler, Julia Grant, and Mamie Eisenhower. The result is a remarkable group portrait of the women who have more than merely resided in the house on Pennsylvania Avenue. Truman has won numerous accolades as both writer and political figure. In 1984 she was the recipient of the Harry S. Truman Public Service award presented annually by the City of Independence (Missouri) to an outstanding American citizen, an ironic honor considering her lineage and city of birth are both represented therein. In 1980 her first novel, Murder in the White House, was published, beginning a long career as a mystery writer. She subsequently released a novel a year until 1987. Murder at Kennedy Center came out in 1989, followed by Murder at the National Cathedral (1990), Murder at the Pentagon (1992), Murder on the Potomac (1994), Murder at the National Gallery (1996), Murder in the House (1997), and Murder at the Watergate: A Novel (1998). Three of her books were collected in Margaret Truman: Three Complete Mysteries (1994). Many mystery writers seem to try and capitalize on a theme—Sue Grafton with her alphabet mysteries, guaranteeing her at least 26 novels, Lillian Jackson Brown and her cat series, Dick Francis favoring horses. All of Truman’s mystery novels center around the nation’s capital and its monuments. Called the Capital Crimes Mysteries, starting in the White House in 1980 (a good place for a former First Daughter to begin), Truman takes us to Capitol Hill,
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the Supreme Court, the Smithsonian, Embassy Row, the FBI, to Georgetown, and the CIA before 1989, often featuring the elegant couple Mackensie ‘‘Mac’’ Smith and Annabel Reed as they become enmeshed in political imbroglios and murder. Though not known for stellar dialogue, well-developed characters, or gripping cliffhangers, Truman’s thoughtful meditations and sarcastic snickers about politics and politicians are a delight. We’ve yet to see the monuments (Washington, Jefferson, or Lincoln), the Treasury building, and others. What happens, though, when she runs out of famous places in Washington, D.C., about which to write?
OTHER WORKS: Murder on Capitol Hill (1981). Murder in the Supreme Court (1982). Murder in the Smithsonian (1983). Murder on Embassy Row (1984). Murder in the FBI (1985). Murder in Georgetown (1986). Murder in the CIA (1987).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ferrell, R. H., ed., The Autobiography of Harry S. Truman (1980). McCollough, D., Truman (1992). Daniel, C. T., Growing up with My Grandfather: Memories of Harry S. Truman (1994). Klein, K. G., Great Women Mystery Writers: Classic to Contemporary (1994). —DARYL F. MALLETT
TRUTH, Sojourner Born circa 1797, Ulster County, New York; died 26 November 1883, Battle Creek, Michigan Daughter of Elizabeth and James; married Thomas; children: five Sojourner Truth, born a slave approximately 30 years before New York State abolished the institution, was originally given the name Isabella. From 1810 to 1827, she belonged to John Dumont, but left him when he broke his promise to manumit her one year before he was legally required to do so. She took the surname Van Wagenen from a family with whom she subsequently resided. In 1843 she adopted the name ‘‘Sojourner Truth’’ after hearing a call to become an itinerant preacher. Much of Truth’s early life is undocumented. Her first language was Dutch, and she spoke with a Dutch accent throughout her life. As a slave, she gave birth to a minimum of five children, one of whom likely died in infancy and two of whom were sold as children. Truth’s eventual public commitment to justice was foreshadowed when her son Peter was sold, contrary to New York law, to an Alabama plantation owner. Despite her inexperience with the judicial process, Truth sued successfully for his return.
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After attaining her freedom, Truth moved to New York City and worked as a domestic. She participated in several churches, eventually aligning herself with Robert Matthews, who, calling himself Matthias, founded the Kingdom of Mathias. In 1833 he organized a short-lived and scandal-ridden communal society of which Truth was a member. After this organization foundered, Truth lived more quietly and conventionally until she became Sojourner Truth in 1843. Despite her lifelong illiteracy, Truth spent the summer of 1843 walking across Long Island and through Connecticut, singing at revivals and speaking at various church meetings, and acquiring the beginnings of her reputation as an orator. She spent the subsequent winter in Northampton, Massachusetts, within another communal society, this one organized by George W. Benson, the brother-in-law of William Lloyd Garrison. Through this association she became a resolute abolitionist. After several years in Massachusetts, she began to travel throughout the Midwest, sharing public speaking responsibilities with such other abolitionists as Frederick Douglass. Her autobiography, Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850), an as-told-to narrative transcribed and edited by Olive Gilbert, was published in 1850. This narrative is comparatively brief; it is at its liveliest when Truth describes her determination to take her freedom from Dumont despite his attempt to renege on his promise and when she anxiously pleads for the return of her son Peter. Later she describes her distress after Peter goes to sea; he rarely wrote and didn’t return home when expected. At the time the Narrative was composed, Truth hadn’t heard from Peter in nearly 10 years; he never reappeared in her life. During her speaking tour after its publication, Truth lived primarily off the profits from the book’s sale. She became a women’s rights advocate at this point, a decision that permitted her to continue her career as an orator during the years following the Civil War. Although Truth lived as a free woman for over 50 years, including nearly 20 following the Civil War, she would die two generations before passage of the woman suffrage amendment. Truth is perhaps most well known for her ‘‘Aren’t I a Woman’’ speech, which she also delivered in 1850. The exact text of this speech is unknown, for although it was transcribed by a newspaper reporter, he portrayed Truth’s accent and diction as stereotypically Southern rather than the Dutch-accented English she spoke. This speech was prompted by a rumor that Truth was in fact a man, an accusation made in part because of her physical appearance, particularly her height, and her voice. When someone asked her to prove she was a woman, she did by lifting her blouse and baring her breast. The speech interrogates stereotypes regarding gender—she is strong, hard-working, and muscular, but she has also borne and raised children and suffered the anxiety and grief mothers suffer. Although men have not treated her as a ‘‘lady,’’ she refuses to conflate the definition of ‘‘lady’’ with ‘‘woman’’ and continues to insist on her own femininity. She concludes with the assertion that if the first woman was strong
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enough to disrupt all of human history, then a crowd of contemporary women should be able to accomplish at least as much in the way of good. After her Narrative was published, Truth moved to Battle Creek, Michigan, where she would eventually settle permanently. She worked during the Civil War to see that African-American regiments were adequately supplied, and worked with newly freed slaves for a year in Virginia. In 1864 she was received by President Lincoln in the White House, an unusual honor for African-Americans even during the Lincoln presidency. Back in Battle Creek, she received flocks of visitors until she died in 1883. She is buried in Oak Hill Cemetery in Battle Creek.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Painter, N. I., Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (1996). Reference works: NAW (1973). —LYNN DOMINA
TUCHMAN, Barbara Born 30 January 1912, New York, New York; died 6 February 1989, Greenwich, Connecticut Daughter of Maurice and Alma Morgenthau Wertheim; married Lester R. Tuchman, 1940 Barbara Tuchman was a distinguished American historian who created narratives that brought to life people, places, and events of the past. Although academics at times criticized her approach, she earned the respect of many historians and had a loyal following among lay readers. She strongly believed history should be readable, and her grounded attitude carried through in her fascinatingly plotted history books. Tuchman’s first book, The Lost British Policy: Britain and Spain since 1700, appeared in 1938. During the following 50 years, she received critical and popular acclaim for her studies in history, with subjects ranging from 14th-century England to late 20th-century America. Two won Pulitzer prizes and several became bestsellers. Her commentaries on American and world policies also appeared in distinguished journals. Tuchman’s grandfather was Henry Morgenthau Sr., the businessman and diplomat; her uncle was Henry Morgenthau Jr., Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury; and her father was an international banker and owner of the Nation. Tuchman was educated at Radcliffe College. Her first job, with the Institute of Pacific Relations, took her to Tokyo in 1935. One of her earliest works is an essay on the Japanese character published in the prestigious Foreign Affairs when she was only twenty-three.
Tuchman’s work as a journalist during the next seven years, reporting from the war in Spain and writing in London for the magazine The War in Spain, led to the publication in England of her first book, The Lost British Policy. Tuchman’s Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour (1956) argues that support for the Jewish homeland in Palestine had a double root: imperial strategy in defense of Suez, India, and Middle Eastern oil fields, and the attitude toward what Thomas Huxley called the ‘‘national epic of Britain,’’ the Bible. In 1958 came The Zimmerman Telegram, a historical work that aroused both professional respect and popular notice. It tells the story, only partly known until then, of efforts by German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmerman, before America’s entrance into World War I, to bring about an alliance with Mexico in return for territorial concessions in the United States. The Guns of August (1962), which brought Tuchman a Pulitzer, applied a similar technique to a broader and more significant moment in World War I. Beginning with the description of the funeral of Edward VII, Tuchman sketches the familial and political ties of Germany, England, and France and makes clear the interrelatedness of their world on the eve of its dissolution. It is typical of Tuchman’s style in its mix of detail and long view, character, and event. She aims at an account of the way things happened, rather than seeking the underlying causes or attempting to convert events into arguments for historical theory. Nevertheless, in her next book, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914 (1966), Tuchman describes her interest in writing about the decade before World War I as coming in part from a desire to understand the war. Although the individual chapters—for example, on the Dreyfus case—are beautifully done, it is not easy to see how these particular parts of a social history support a coherent conception of the origins of the war. In Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45 (1970), for which Tuchman received her second Pulitzer prize, the career of General Joseph W. Stilwell becomes the central focus of an examination of the relationship of America and China. Tuchman sees Stilwell as quintessentially American and his career in China as a ‘‘prism of the times,’’ representing America’s greatest effort in Asia as well as the ‘‘tragic limits’’ of America’s experience there. Tuchman believes the efficiency and aggressiveness Stilwell brought were like the Christianity and democracy he also represented—all foreign to Chinese society and not assimilable. While the response of professional historians to Stilwell and the American Experience in China was very positive, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (1978) has been the most criticized of any of Tuchman’s books. It has, however, received an enthusiastic greeting from the layperson eager to read well-shaped narrative about an unfamiliar period. Tuchman regards the 14th century as a period like our own, ‘‘a distraught age whose rules were breaking down under the pressure of adverse and violent events.’’ Her original plan to follow the effects of the bubonic plaque was changed to allow her to explore the marriage alliances
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and treaties that made up medieval diplomacy and to examine the code of chivalry. Whatever professional questions have been raised about the book’s overarching concept, its sense of time and place are as brilliant as in any of Tuchman’s works. Practicing History (1981) is a collection of essays in which Tuchman discusses the techniques and role of the historian. She also comments on some crucial events of her own day: the Six Day War, Watergate, and Vietnam. Tuchman’s The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam (1984) examines four episodes of evident governmental blunder across a broad sweep of time, attempting to discern their commonalities. Her subjects include the Trojans’ decision to bring a mythical Greek horse within their city walls, the refusal of six Renaissance popes to arrest the church’s growing corruption, British misrule under King George III, and the mishandling of Vietnam by the U.S. She notes three vital connections between these highly varied events: that those responsible were all forewarned of outcomes of ‘‘folly’’; that feasible alternatives existed; and that a group rather than an individual perpetrated foolishness. Although the book was criticized for its lack of a true common thread, Tuchman was praised for her thoroughness, imagination, and valuable insight into the political process. In her final book, The First Salute: A View of the American Revolution (1988), Tuchman turns to the subject of the American Revolution and the reasons for Britain’s defeat. Focusing on the failure of famed British naval officer Sir George Brydges Rodney to pursue the French fleet from his Dutch West Indian island base, Tuchman places the Revolution in international context. She draws parallels between the Dutch struggle for independence and that of the American colonies and, with great admiration for the leadership of George Washington, examines the forces on both the British and American sides that resulted in the American victory. In addition to books and articles, Tuchman produced a significant paper on disarmament in the early 1980s entitled ‘‘The Alternative to Arms Control’’ for the Center for International Strategic Affairs at the University of California. Tuchman’s many honors include honorary degrees from Yale, Columbia, Harvard, and New York University; the Regent Medal of Excellence from the State University of New York; and the Order of Leopold from the Kingdom of Belgium.
OTHER WORKS: The Other One (alternate title Possessed, 1955). Notes from China (1972). The Book (1980).
TURELL, Jane Born 25 February 1708, Boston, Massachusetts; died 26 March 1735, Medford, Massachusetts Daughter of Benjamin and Jane Colman; married Ebenezer Turell, 1726; children: four, all died young Jane Turell’s father was minister of the innovative Brattle Street Church and an influential figure in Boston’s cultural and religious life. Like the fathers of other notable 18th-century New England women, Colman carefully attended to his daughter’s education, so that by the time Turell was four she had amassed amounts of knowledge remarked upon by her father’s peers. She began writing poetry under her father’s guidance when she was about eleven years old. Throughout her life, Colman remained her mentor in spiritual and literary matters, partly through a lively, intimate exchange of letters and poems. Turell’s husband, a Congregationalist minister, had a pastorate in Medford, Massachusetts, where the couple settled. Of their four children, three died in infancy; one survived to age six. Turell suffered from bouts of illness and depression for many years and died at age twenty-seven. Turell wrote poetry and prose throughout her adolescent years, and her poetic ambitions were not diminished by domestic duties and pregnancies. Her reading ranged from divinity to history, medicine, public debates, and poetry. After her death, her husband wrote a short biography, interspersed with selections from her works, to illustrate her talent and piety. He wished her life and work to serve as examples for young New England women. First published in Medford in 1735 as Reliquiae Turellae et Lachrymae Paternal, the slim volume contains correspondence, diary extracts, short religious essays, and verse—the only extant samples of Turell’s writing. Unfortunately, because he published her work to illustrate her piety, her husband excluded material, such as her humorous verse, that he judged unsuitable. It is probable that, even before her death, Turell’s works circulated in manuscript form among her friends and acquaintances, as was customary in 18th-century New England. She achieved enough contemporary fame as a writer to warrant a second edition of the biography, published in 1741 as Memoirs of the Life and Death of the Pious and Ingenious Mrs. Jane Turell.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Atlantic (Dec. 1988). Nation (26 Apr. 1971, 6 Mar. 1989). NYRB (22 Dec. 1988). NYT (19 Oct. 1958; 7 Mar. 1984; 7, 8, 13 Feb. 1989). NYTRB (28 June 1962, 3 Feb. 1968, 28 Sept. 1978, 11 Mar. 1984, 2, 16 Oct. 1988, 12 Nov. 1989). Time (3 Oct. 1988, 7 Nov. 1988, 20 Feb. 1989). Times [London] (8 Feb. 1989).
Like many of her female contemporaries, Turell had no wish to compete with male writers or to be published; she wrote privately, discussing personal events and religious ideas. She read widely in the neoclassic English poets and copied their style, adapting it to her religious subjects. Even her eulogies of other writers find their meaning in religious themes. She praises the English moralist poet Elizabeth Singer because Singer attacked evil: ‘‘A Woman’s Pen Strikes the curs’d Serpents Head, / And lays the Monster gasping, if not dead.’’
—LOIS HUGHSON AND MARGIT GALANTER, UPDATED BY JANETTE GOFF DIXON
Turell’s neoclassicism is evident in a poetic enticement to her father to pass the hot summer months in Medford. ‘‘An Invitation
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into the Country in Imitation of Horace’’ is exactly what the title indicates. She compares harsh city life to the joys of innocent country living, transforming her small New England village and rural domicile into a model Arcadia. She lures her father with pastoral descriptions of ‘‘soft Shades’’ and ‘‘balmy Sweets / of Medford’s flow’ring Vales, and green Retreats’’ and an occasional New England touch: ‘‘Yet what is neat and wholsom. . .Curds and Cream just turn’d.’’ She again mixed the neoclassic, religious, and personal in what is perhaps her most moving work, a lament for her dead children, written during her last pregnancy. She recollects the pains of childbirth in vivid tropes, but ends the poem with a reaffirmation of faith in Christ, as she pledges her next child to God’s service. The major portion of Turell’s verse consists of skillful paraphrases of psalms and canticles, which reveal her understanding of Puritan ideas and historiography. For example, she transforms Psalm 137 to dramatize the Puritan’s experiences in the New World, changing a Babylonian landscape into American wilderness. Most of Turell’s prose pieces are simple meditations on religious subjects, often expressing doubts and fears over the state of her soul. In letters to her father, she repeatedly sought comfort from anxiety. Often, in more serene moments, she wrote short, essaylike letters to her younger sister, guiding her towards a life of virtue and pietry and advising her to abandon the frivolities of youth. Her prose works are thoughfully serious, although undistinguished in style and content. Since only fragments of Turell’s work are available, a thorough assessment remains impossible. Clearly, she imitated her father’s style and ideas, and she followed the prescriptions of early-18th-century poetics. Religious themes are ever present, and abstractions and personifications are common in her poetry. Much of her later verse indicates a potential never realized.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brooks, C., History of the Town of Medford (1855). Evans, C., American Bibliography (1912). Reference works: NAW (1971). —JACQUELINE HORNSTEIN
TURNBULL, Agnes Sligh Born 14 October 1888, New Alexandria, Pennsylvania; died January 1982 Daughter of Alexander H. and Lucinda McConnell Sligh; married James Turnbull, 1918; children: one daughter Of Scots Presbyterian background, Agnes Sligh Turnbull grew up in western Pennsylvania and graduated from Indiana
(Pennsylvania) State College in 1910. She then attended the University of Chicago for one year. She was married in 1918 and had one daughter. Turnbull’s fiction is varied and uneven. She began with a number of sentimental and undistinguished narratives about actual and imagined Biblical women. Scattered throughout her career are a few children’s books: Elijah the Fishbite (1940), Jed, the Shepherd’s Dog (1957), George (1965), and The White Lark (1968). Her best fiction deals with Scottish settlers in the coal country of western Pennsylvania. Major concerns are the difficult lives of pioneer women and the effect upon them of their strict Presbyterianism. Her attitude toward this faith is ambivalent. While she dramatizes the psychological damage done by adherence to the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination and portrays Episcopalianism as gentler (see especially The Rolling Years, 1936, and The Bishop’s Mantle, 1947), she also shows the comfort and sense of community given by the faith. In some books (notably The Gown of Glory, 1952, and The Nightingale, 1960) set in the early years of this century, she writes nostalgically of smalltown life centered around the local Presbyterian church. Her women are strong and self-reliant, but they also are traditionally home and family centered. Two of Turnbull’s finest novels are set on the Pennsylvania frontier during the Revolutionary War. Vividly depicting the joys and hardships of the frontier, The Day Must Dawn (1942) tells of a gently bred pioneer woman who schemes to have her daughter go east to an easier life. The novel climaxes with an Native American raid, based on an actual incident, and ends with her dying acceptance of the fact her daughter will marry a frontiersman and go West to still wilder country, postponing the dream for another generation. The King’s Orchard (1963), set in the same period and using some of the same historical material, is a fictionalized biography of James O’Hara, who came to this country shortly before the Revolution, traveled west to Indiana, became Washington’s quartermaster during the war, and was prominent in the early history of Pittsburgh. Many other historical personages, of minor as well as major importance, figure in its pages. It effectively contrasts settled Philadelphia, rough young Pittsburgh, and the wilderness that would become Indiana and Illinois. For other novels Turnbull turned to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The most ambitious of these, The Rolling Years, studies three generations of Scots Presbyterian women in western Pennsylvania. Sarah McDowell bears 12 children (of whom five survive) to her dour Calvinistic husband; her bitterness about her repeated, difficult confinements is effectively shown. Her last child, Jeannie, has an easier and yet more restricted life. A gay and loving girl, she marries a minister and moves to town. As a young widow, she rears her daughter, Constance, with the help of her spinster sisters, who are also strikingly portrayed. Engaged to a Presbyterian divinity student, Constance faces her crisis when he denies some of the tenets of their faith. Thus the novel dramatizes
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the gradual weakening of the strict Calvinism of the Scottish immigrants as their life grows increasingly easy. Remember the End (1938) tells of Alex MacTay, a poetic young Scotsman who comes to Pennsylvania in 1890. Suppressing his aesthetic interests, he rises to great wealth and power, but at the cost of deeply wounding his wife and alienating his only son. Sympathetically portrayed, he typifies the strengths and weaknesses of the great tycoons of the period, such as his own model, Andrew Carnegie. Much of Turnbull’s fiction tends toward the sentimental and some of her novels seem written to inculcate an easy and conventional morality. In addition, her novels tend to use trite plot devices. But at her best, in the novels studying her Scottish background in western Pennsylvania, she has created moving and believable pictures of women’s joys and sufferings.
OTHER WORKS: Far Above Rubies (1926). The Wife of Pontius Pilate: A Story of the Heart of Procla (1928). In the Garden: A Story of the First Easter (1929). The Four Marys (1932). The Colt that Carried a King (1933). Old Home Town (1933). This Spring of Love (1934). Dear Me: Leaves from the Diary of Agnes Sligh Turnbull (1941). Once to Shout (1943). The Golden Journey (1955). Out of My Heart (1958). Little Christmas (1964). The Wedding Bargain (1966). Many a Green Isle (1968). Whistle and I’ll Come to You: An Idyll (1970). The Flowering (1972). The Richlands (1974). The Winds of Love (1977).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: NYHTB (26 Oct. 1947). NYTBR (9 Feb. 1936, 27 Nov. 1938, 25 Oct. 1942, 26 Oct. 1947, 16 March 1952). SR (17 Oct. 1942, 19 Nov. 1955). —MARY JEAN DEMARR
TURNEY, Catherine
Turney organized the Bandbox, a small touring company that later became the Leo Carillo Theater on Olvera Street in Los Angeles. As the difficulties of maintaining such theaters multiplied, she turned more and more to writing. She first wrote scripts for radio, a medium to which she returned from time to time. In 1936 Turney’s first stage play, Bitter Harvest, opened in London, concerning the ill-fated love of Byron for his half sister. My Dear Children, produced on Broadway in 1938, was an excellent starring vehicle for John Barrymore. It capitalized on his reputation as a romantic figure and reveals the strong sense of theater characterizing much of Turney’s work. She wrote for Metro Goldwyn Mayer for a year during the 1930s, and for Warner Brothers from 1942 to 1948. Among her screen credits are Mildred Pierce (first draft, 1945), A Stolen Life (1946), Winter Meeting (1948), My Reputation (1946), and Cry Wolf (1947). In 1949 she moved to New York to write television scripts for Studio One and Starlight Theater, later returning to California where she continued to write for television shows such as Ford Theater, Lux Video, One Step Beyond, and Walt Disney. Turney wrote one novel, The Other One (1955, later called Possessed), a supernatural story. Its dramatic quality led to its being made into a film, Bring Back the Dead (1956). Byron’s Daughter (1972) is a biography of Medora Leigh, daughter of Byron and his half sister. It is a readable and well-documented study of an element in the poet’s life that had previously been ignored. Turney’s films, particularly those written for Warner Brothers, are often characterized as ‘‘women’s pictures,’’ in part because the starring roles went to actresses like Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, and Eve Arden; in part because the subject matter supposedly appeals to a female audience. Like her stage plays, however, they are theatrically effective vehicles with strongly characterized roles for all the players. OTHER WORKS: Surrender the Seasons (1981). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Chicago Tribune (9 May 1939, 21 Jan. 1973). LAT (19 Nov. 1972). New York Daily News (1 Feb. 1941). NYRB (22 Feb. 1973). TLS (14 June 1973). —HELENE KOON
Born 16 December 1906, Chicago, Illinois Daughter of George W. and Elizabeth Blamer Turney; married Cyril Armbrister, 1930; George Reynolds, 1940 When Catherine Turney was six months old, her family moved to Rome, New York, where she grew up. In 1921 they moved to Pasadena, California. She studied play and short story writing at Columbia School of Journalism. In the summer of 1926, she began to work at the Pasadena Playhouse, where she assisted Gilmore Brown on the world premiere of Eugene O’Neill’s Lazarus Laughed. She became director of the Playhouse Workshop and received a scholarship when the School of Theatre was officially established; she graduated in the first class in 1931.
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TUTHILL, Louisa (Caroline) Huggins Born 6 July 1799, New Haven, Connecticut; died 1 June 1879, Princeton, New Jersey Wrote under: Mrs. Louisa C(aroline) Tuthill, Louisa Tuthill Daughter of Ebenezer and Mary Dickerman Huggins; married Cornelius Tuthill, 1817 (died 1825); children: four Educated in seminaries for young ladies in New Haven and Litchfield, Connecticut, Louisa Caroline Huggins Tuthill apparently expected to settle down into an unexceptional life as a
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lawyer’s wife, but a religious experience caused her husband to give up the law for the ministry and an attack of typhoid fever forced him to give up the ministry for a brief attempt at publishing a literary magazine. Tuthill encouraged his wife to write. After his death in 1825, she began to write steadily and seriously in order to support herself and her four children. Tuthill’s guidebook for young girls leaving school, The Young Lady’s Home (1839) is a combination of vignette, sermon, and sentiment typical of her work. It is dedicated ‘‘to my young friends, who, in completing school education, have arrived at an important era in life, hoping it may aid you in estimating the value of knowledge already acquired, in the momentous task of selfeducation, and the performance of the duties at home.’’ Throughout, the emphasis is on the qualities and accomplishments that make one ‘‘a good, useful American woman!’’ In the modest fictional frame of the book, three girls leave school together. Clara, who feels ‘‘every inch of the United States is home to me,’’ returns to her mother to learn domestic economy and later marries a kind and distinguished U.S. senator. Isabel, who longs for the lights of New York, is gradually brought to an understanding of the dangers of pride and, with the guidance of Clara and her husband, exercises her Christian usefulness by rescuing from poverty the third friend, Geraldine, who, searching for the excitement of Europe, has married ‘‘a dissipated gambler.’’ Tuthill counsels young women to be silent in company and to respect their elders, but she also insists on good nutrition, plentiful exercise, and fresh air. She advocates a much broader curriculum than was generally recommended for female education at the time: systematic and continuous study of history, literature, natural science, composition, classical and modern languages, and the fine arts—especially architecture. Tuthill wrote the first history of architecture published in the U.S. (1848). Among the most successful of her guidebooks for behavior were I Will Be a Lady: A Book for Girls (1845) and I Will Be a Gentleman: A Book for Boys (1846). A popular author, whose works often ran to many editions and were reprinted in England, Tuthill wrote with a clear intention to instruct, to edify, and to raise the moral tone of the women and children who read her books. OTHER WORKS: James Somers: The Pilgrim’s Son (1827). Love of Admiration (1828). Mary’s Visit to Boston (1829). Ancient Architecture (1830). Calisthenics (1831). The Young Lady’s Reader (edited by Tuthill, 1839). The Belle, The Blue, and the Bigot (1844). Onward! Right Onward! (1844). Any Thing for Sport (1846). When Are We Happiest (1846). My Wife (1846). Hurrah for New England (1847). The Mirror of Life (edited by Tuthill, 1847). My Little Geography (edited by Tuthill, 1847). The Boarding-School Girl (1848). The Boy of Spirit (1848). History of Architecture from the Earliest Times (1848). Goals and Guerdons (1848). The Nursery Book (1849). The Merchant (1850). A Strike for Freedom (1850). Braggdocio: A Book for Boys and Girls (1851). Queer Bonnets (1852). Tip-top (1853). Joy and Care (1855). Beautiful Bertha (1855). Reality (1856). Edith, the Backwoods Girl (1859). Caroline Perthes, the Christian Wife (edited by Tuthill, 1860). I Will Be a Soldier (1862). Romantic Belinda
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(1864). Larry Lockwell; or, I Will Be a Sailor (1864). True Manliness (1867). The Young Lady at Home and in Society (1869). Get Money (1871). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Appleton’s Cyclopedia of American Biography (1889). NAW (1971). —KATHARYN F. CRABBE
TUVE, Rosemond Born 27 March 1903, Canton, South Dakota; died 21 December 1964, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania Daughter of Anthony G. and Ida Larsen Tuve With a father who was president of Augustana College and a mother who taught music at the same institution, Rosemond Tuve lived her entire life in the climate of higher education. She earned her B.A. from the University of Minnesota in 1924 and her M.A. from Bryn Mawr in 1925, studied at Johns Hopkins (1926-28) and Oxford the next year, and completed her Ph.D. at Bryn Mawr in 1931. Tuve taught at a number of American colleges and universities; she was a professor of English at Connecticut College for Women for 28 years. A Democrat, Tuve spent three summers teaching at the Bryn Mawr School for Women Workers in Industry and was a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). She was a member also of many professional and literary organizations and the recipient of honorary degrees and awards. She contributed incisive articles on Spenser, Chaucer, Ramus, and other medieval and Renaissance authors to scholarly journals and wrote several books. Characteristic of her perspective is the stress on the importance of historical scholarship as opposed to ‘‘criticism without footnotes.’’ Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery: Renaissance Poetics and 20th Century Critics (1947) distinguishes between imagery as defined by Romantic criticism and Symbolist poetics, and the theories and practices of Renaissance poetry. Citing ‘‘modern man’’ as ‘‘surely the timidest host any century has produced,’’ Tuve emphasizes that Renaissance poets, who saw their art as concerned with truth and directed to the reasoning mind of humankind, produced ‘‘imagery such as no period since has matched. . .images of such profound reach that our own more selfconscious attempt to ’be suggestive’ cannot rival them in penetration.’’ Her style is clear, forceful, and quietly witty, as when she comments that ‘‘no one who leaps to his feet to announce a critical error ever sits down without adding some new one.’’ In the words of medievalist Dorothy Bethurum, Tuve’s next book, A Reading of George Herbert (1925), ‘‘rescued Herbert from the Freudian critics and returned the study of his poems to their traditional background of liturgical symbolism.’’ ‘‘What kind of readers do we make,’’ Tuve asks, ‘‘whom circumstances
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have intervened to make ignorant of what every literate man once knew?’’ Tuve’s Images and Themes in Five Poems by Milton (1957) focuses on earlier poems rather than on the great epics or Samson Agonistes. In 1958 Tuve gave a BBC talk (‘‘Rosemund Tuve on John Milton,’’ Listener, 1958) in which she explains that works of art are ‘‘irrevocably born one of a kind,’’ and that ‘‘the way peculiar to him in which a great poet uses a common archetypal image or a familiar symbol is part of that uniqueness.’’ Essays by Rosemond Tuve (1970) gathers previously published essays into one convenient volume: three on education, seven on Edmund Spenser, two on George Herbert, and two on John Milton. There is also a bibliography of all of Tuve’s articles and reviews and all books, except for the unaccountable omission of Allegorical Imagery: Some Medieval Books and Their Posterity (1966) a posthumously published book based on an almost complete manuscript. The value of Tuve’s work lies in her constant faith in the importance of literature, her particularized onslaughts on modern arrogance and ignorance, and her patience in teaching students how to rise above the problems surrounding the art of reading well. Her disciplined studies made her not only the foremost authority on the subject of Renaissance imagery but also a leading exponent of the relationship between pictorial and verbal imagery and of the significance of which books an author had read and how the author had read them. OTHER WORKS: Seasons and Months: Studies in a Tradition of Middle English Poetry (1933). Palingenius’ ‘‘Zodiake of Life’’ (Introduction by Tuve, 1947). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Roche, T. P., Jr., Introduction to Essays by Rosemond Tuve (1970). Other references: CA (1964). NYT (22 Dec. 1964). PMLA (June 1960). TLS (5 Sept. 1958, 9 Sept. 1958, 26 Sept. 1958). —VIRGINIA R. MOLLENKOTT
TY-CASPER, Linda Born 17 September 1931, Manila, Philippines Daughter of Francisco Figueroa Ty and Catalina Velasques-Ty; married Leonard Casper, 1956; children: Gretchen, Kristina Although Linda Ty-Casper has lived for over 35 years in the U.S. with her husband, writer and critic Leonard Casper, and their two daughters, she has maintained her Philippine citizenship and makes frequent visits there. She has published nine novels and two collections of short stories, all of which focus on life in the Philippines, with a strong concern for historical and political crosscurrents and developments, particularly the long history of
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colonialism and revolution and the imposition of martial law. One of her recent novels, Awaiting Trespass (1985), could not be published there for political reasons during the last years of the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, which came to an end in 1986 with the Peoples Revolution. Published in Britain and the U.S., it recounts the mysterious death by torture of a prominent citizen. Trained as a lawyer, with law degrees from both the University of the Philippines (1955) and Harvard University (1957), Ty-Casper began writing fiction almost immediately upon graduation from law school. She started her first novel in 1957, she says, ‘‘because I’d read some historical accounts which were derogatory to the Philippines and I wanted to answer them.’’ The result was The Peninsulars (1964), in which Ty-Casper brings to life the impact of Spanish colonialism on the Philippines in the 18th century, heightened by the English invasion of Manila and early, unsuccessful attempts by various local factions at gaining independence. With a precision of detail and observation, Ty-Casper documents in short stories and novels the personal and political lives of her characters with great subtlety. Moral choices are often at the center of the conflicts faced by her characters, but these choices evolve naturally out of the lives of the characters themselves; they are not imposed on them by the author. Ty-Casper’s writing often joins the precision of a legal brief with a poetry of brilliantly ambiguous imagery. With careful and understated language, she explores the difficult decisions encountered by ordinary people confronted with violence and political treachery. Ty-Casper’s approach to writing and to her characters is that of the storyteller. Her writing takes on a cumulative trancelike quality that weaves the reader into the events that it recounts by maintaining a cool and distanced objectivity that is at the same time passionate and deeply felt. Her later work, such as Wings of Stone (1986), becomes almost surrealistic as her characters encounter the frenetic tensions of modern-day life in the Philippines and the United States. Her storyteller’s voice, she says, was inherited from her grandmother, who told her stories during World War II. The post-Marcos Philippines is the backdrop for Ty-Casper’s novel DreamEden (1997). Although a number of books have been written using this venue in the years since the 1989 coup, Ty-Casper is uniquely qualified to handle the issues and weaves a story which, in her own words, ‘‘focuses on the experiences of the people.’’ The story involves the conflicts and dreams of a jaded attorney, the politician he works for, and others who adjust daily to the changes brought about by revolution. As always, her characters are three-dimensional and pull the reader into their lives. Filipinos rejoiced at their new freedom after the overthrow of Marcos but were then faced with adjusting to a life with less structure and order. This same type of conflict is evident in the lives of the characters in DreamEden. Ty-Casper’s research into newspaper archives and interviews with those who have lived the revolution make this a believable piece of fiction. Ty-Casper is working on a yet to be released novel on the Philippine-American War of 1899, provisionally titled The Stranded Whale. She is an officer of the Boston Authors, the oldest
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continuing writers group in the U.S., originally founded in 1900. She has had fellowships at Harvard, Radcliffe College, and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation. In 1993 Ty-Casper won a UNESCO/PEN short story prize and the Southeast Asia WRITE award.
of old people who are presented with compassion and of invincible and usually eccentric women. Tyler uses diction and grammar to establish her characters’ backgrounds and imagery reflecting their problems and traits: ‘‘Pieces of Emerson were lodged with Elizabeth like shrapnel.’’ She has established herself as a writer of unquestioned talent.
OTHER WORKS: The Transparent Sun and Other Stories (1963). The Secret Runner and Other Stories (1974). The Three-Cornered Sun (1979). Dread Empire (1980). The Hazards of Distance (1981). Fortress in the Plaza (1985). Ten Thousand Seeds (1987). A Small Party in a Garden (1988). Common Continent: Selected Stories (1991).
Jeremy Pauling, of Celestial Navigation (1974), is a sensitive and shy artist who lives in his own mind and who finds forays into the real world puzzling and, finally, destructive. The chapters centering on him employ a narrative voice, but the six chapters devoted to four women in Jeremy’s life all use first person voices. Ironically, Jeremy experiences his greatest happiness and creativity after his mother’s death (an event his sisters thought would devastate his life) and after Mary and their children depart, leaving only a note on the refrigerator door. Both Jeremy— ‘‘Wasn’t that what life was all about: steadfast endurance?’’—and Mary—‘‘I don’t know which takes more courage: surviving a lifelong endurance test because you once made a promise or breaking free, disrupting your whole world’’—embody the trait Tyler insists on for most of her characters: endurance.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bresnahan, R., Conversations with Filipino Writers (1990). Casper, L., New Writing from the Philippines (1966). Lumbera, B., Revaluation: Essays on Philippine Literature, Cinema, and Popular Culture (1984). Montenegro, D., Points of Departure: International Writers on Writing and Politics (1991). Valeros, F., and E. Greunberg, Filipino Writers in English (1987). Reference works: CA (1983). CANR (1988). Encyclopedia of World Literature (1992). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Belles Lettres (May-June 1987). Philipinas (Fall 1987). PW (26 May 1997). World Literature Today (Winter 1998). Geocities web site: http://www.geocities.com/Paris/4485/ linda.html. —DAVID MONTENEGRO, UPDATED BY REBECCA C. CONDIT
TYLER, Anne Born 25 October 1941, Minneapolis, Minnesota Daughter of Lloyd P. and Phyllis Mahon Tyler; married Taghi Mohammad Modaressi, 1963; children: two daughters Anne Tyler was raised in North Carolina. She graduated from Duke University with a major in Russian (1961) and pursued graduate work at Columbia University (1962). She served as Russian bibliographer at the Duke University Library and as assistant to the librarian at McGill University Law Library in Montreal. In 1963 Tyler married a child psychiatrist, and they had two daughters. Tyler has been prolific: she has written several phenomenally bestselling novels and numerous short stories, which appear in many diverse magazines, from McCall’s to the New Yorker. Tyler introduces most of the major characteristics of her novels in her first, If Morning Ever Comes (1964). Plots involve the complexities of family life and are geographically bound to small towns in North Carolina or to withering row houses or more fashionable Roland Park in Baltimore. The title of each novel appears in the text and focuses on a major theme. Humor, often bittersweet, is important. Characterization is Tyler’s greatest strength, especially
Searching for Caleb (1975) juxtaposes the comic and the serious, chronicling three generations of a Baltimore family of Roland Park. Family strife climaxes when the first cousins, Justine and Duncan, marry each other. These two set out on adventures best symbolized by the Mayflower truck that moves their rosewood chests and crystal from Roland Park and by the orange U-Haul van that, much later, moves only their books and clothes to a circus’ winter trailer park. Like Celestial Navigation, this novel brings characters into Chekhovian scenes where people talk to unlistening ears. Daniel and Caleb Peck, Tyler’s most endearing old people; Justine, Daniel’s fortune-telling, nomad-like granddaughter; other Pecks; and eccentric strangers make up this comic novel, which details man’s foibles, charms, mores, weaknesses, and flaws. In Earthly Possessions (1977), Charlotte Emory gives a minute account of being kidnapped in a Maryland bank and abducted to Florida. In alternate chapters she tells the history of her own life (a struggle to dispossess herself of encumbering possessions) and the histories of the peculiar and unhappy families of her mother and husband. Richly humorous, this novel epitomizes in Charlotte a woman Tyler frequently portrays—a woman denied the autonomous existence she craves. No shrill feminist cries rise from Tyler’s fiction, but an existential longing for freedom does. Eccentric characters are prominent in Tyler’s work; they settle into a private world, unconcerned with the day-to-day activities that dominate the lives of others. Morgan’s Passing (1980) presents a highly eccentric character, Morgan Gower, in fascinating detail. The reader, however, is left somewhat at a loss, never completely sure of the character or of his personae. A skillful writer, Tyler treats serious and often tragic themes without sacrificing the comic. Her prose, as some critics charge, is not stylistically daring, and her concerns are not with depressed minorities or with mythic ghosts. Instead, she writes truly about the lives of middle class Americans, and her characters dwell, as
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John Updike has said, ‘‘where poetry and adventure form as easily as dew.’’ Tyler’s critical and popular success has increased steadily. Since Morgan’s Passing she has published more critically acclaimed and prize-winning novels and many short stories. In 1988, The Accidental Tourist (1985, a National Book Critics award-winner) became a major motion picture starring William Hurt; in the same year, Tyler received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for Breathing Lessons (1988). All of Tyler’s novels take place in Baltimore, where she has lived for many years. They are portraits of families who, behind the appearance of normality, shelter idiosyncrasies, pain, and secrets. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982) begins with 85-year-old Pearl Tull looking back on her life and the three children she raised alone after being abandoned by her husband. Gradually, the reader sees the profound effect this desertion has had on each character, and the inability of these children to escape their past, even as adults. In the end, however, the bonds of family overcome the pain of years of misunderstandings and lack of communication. The Accidental Tourist is about the Learys, another abandoned family. Most of the story centers around Macon Leary, a man controlled by structure and routine. His apparent refusal to grieve after the brutal murder of his son drives away his wife, causing Macon to draw even more inward. Not until he meets Muriel Pritchett, whom he hires to train his unruly and sometimes vicious dog, does Macon finally begin to live. The Learys are an excellent example of Tyler’s ability to portray a seemingly ordinary family with all their quirks and hangups in a subtle, ironic, and humorous way. Breathing Lessons (1988) takes place in one day, with periodic flashbacks. During the journey to and from a friend’s funeral, Ira and Maggie Moran come to certain realizations about their children and themselves, particularly how different from their expectations their life has become. Recognizing their regrets, they also come to know the importance of the bond they share. The Bedloe family in Saint Maybe (1991) has also failed to live up to its own expectations. It is the ‘‘ideal’’ family, but through a series of tragic events, the course of all their lives changes drastically and permanently. The novel focuses on Ian, the youngest son, who sacrifices his own goals and dreams in an effort to make amends for what has happened. With more sadness and less humor than Tyler’s previous work, the novel delves beautifully into the lives of ordinary people and the necessity for endurance. Winner of the 1996 O. Henry award, Ladder of Years (1996) tells the adventures of Mrs. Delia Grinstead, who, following a chance encounter at a grocery store while on vacation with her family, runs away to begin a new life as Miss Grinstead. Life’s little complications happen to Miss Grinstead just as they did to Mrs. Grinstead. Ladder of Years is a novel about marriages of all sorts, family relationships, and the interaction of people in general. The theme of Ladder of Years alludes to King Lear: when all
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three of his boss’s daughters are lined up in front of him, Sam Grinstead chooses the youngest, Cordelia (‘‘Delia’’) to become his bride. A fairy tale of sorts ensues, but for Delia all is not the ‘‘happily ever after’’ of fairytales. Publisher’s Weekly said Tyler ‘‘engages our sympathy and growing respect for a character who finally realizes that the ladder of years is a time trip to the future.’’ A Patchwork Planet (1998) again is a study of family life and interpersonal relationships. Tyler once again makes the ordinary magical as she weaves the story of Barnaby, a wealthy ne’er-do-well, as he tries to make something of his life. The reader comes to care about Barnaby, struggling along with him as he tries to turn his life around. Tyler’s first foray as a writer of children’s literature came in 1993 with the publication of Tumble Tower. Written for children ages four to eight, Kirkus called it ‘‘a gently subversive fable celebrating the rewards of disorder.’’ It is the story of Molly, whose discomfortingly messy room ultimately offers comfort to the rest of her family. Tyler continues to write novels of family life peopled with characters who are true-to-life in middle-class oddball families, dealing with loneliness, isolation, human interaction. A psychologist analyzing her characters might call them dysfunctional, but they continue to be endearing to the reader. All of Tyler’s main characters face crossroads, and while deciding what to do, waver, just like ‘‘real’’ people. The rest of her novels deal with the results of the decision ultimately made. Her work retains its clarity of style, and her ability to combine the tragic with the comic gives her characters a genuine humanity. She consistently addresses the individual struggle for identity, happiness, and fulfillment, and demonstrates that the simple, even the apparently trivial, is sometimes the source of what is most rich and complex in life, and well worth examination. OTHER WORKS: The Tin Can Tree (1965). A Slipping-Down Life (1970). The Clock Winder (1972). The Best American Short Stories of 1983 (edited with S. Ravanel, 1983). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Petry, A. H., Understanding Anne Tyler (1990). Rainwater, C. and W. J. Scheick, eds., Contemporary American Women Writers: Narrative Strategies (1985). Stephens, C. R., ed., The Fiction of Anne Tyler (1990). Sternburg, J. ed., The Writer on Her Work: Contemporary Women Reflect on Their Art and Situation (1980). Voelker, J., Art and the Accidental in Anne Tyler (1989). Reference works: CA (1974). CANR (1984, 1991). CLC 7 (1977, 1979, 1981, 1984, 1987, 1990). CBY (1981). DLB (1980). DLBY (1982). MTCW (1991). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). SATA (1975). Other references: Atlantic (Mar. 1976). Atlantis: A Women’s Studies Journal (Fall 1987). Classical and Modern Literature (Fall 1989). English Journal (Fall 1987). Hollins Critic (Apr. 1986). Iowa Journal of Literary Studies (1981). KR (1997). Mississippi Quarterly (Winter 1988). New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly (Spring 1985). NY (29 Mar. 1976, 6 June 1977). People (26 Dec. 1988). Southern Literary Journal (Fall
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1983). Southern Quarterly (Summer 1983). SR (Jan. 1978, Fall 1984). Web sites: Amazon.com, and various reviews and articles available online at: http://auxiliaries.ba.kent.edu/pages/Book/ Bizs/fiction.html; http://books.realcities.com/reviews/0420/patchworkplanet1/.htm; http://www.canoe/ca/JamBooksReviews/jul5_ patchwork.html; and http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/atyler.htm; http:// www.randomhouse.com/. —ELIZABETH EVANS, UPDATED BY SHAUNA SUMMERS AND HEIDI HARTWIG DENLER
TYLER, Martha W. Born circa 1830s; died death date unknown The only surviving biographical information about Martha W. Tyler is what can be surmised from her only known novel, the autobiographical A Book Without a Title; or, Thrilling Events in the Life of Mira Dana (1855). Mira Dana, Tyler’s heroine, challenges any definition of womanhood forcing her to submit to tyrannical authority. Her early battles with the Lowell mill owners who employ her as a factory operative become the model for her subsequent encounters with all representatives of male power, be they husbands, doctors, lawyers, bankers, or publishers. In this, the first American novel to depict a strike, Mira convinces her coworkers to oppose an arbitrarily imposed pay cut. The decision to become a striker entails a new definition for womanhood, a definition predicated on woman’s right to justice and self-expression. Mira explains, ‘‘ought we not [to strike], when they are striving to crush our very souls for cursed gold? They’ll find that there is one girl in Lowell who dares to speak of liberty and act like a true woman.’’ In her preface Tyler explains that her novel should be read not as a work of art but as a direct attack on the misuses of mate authority. She describes a world in which the supposedly reciprocal relationship between the sexes has broken down. She asks how women can be expected to behave properly within their own sphere when men neither respect women’s sphere nor fulfill their obligations within the male sphere. Although difficult to read because of its erratic plot and often tortured prose, the novel merits resurrection because of the intriguing information it provides for both the historian and the literary critic. Tyler pays attention to the early women factory workers, the mid-19th-century phenomena of bank failures and financial crises, and the consequences of structuring a society according to the doctrine of separate sexual spheres. Like her contemporaries Harriet Beecher Stowe and Fanny Fern, Tyler wrote fiction in explicitly political terms, while writing within the popular tradition of domestic fiction written for women. Like many of the female novelists who wrote during the mid-19th century, Tyler, in drawing attention to various aspects of women’s position in society, was in part responsible for the
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popularization of those issues which would eventually develop the struggle for women’s rights into a mass movement. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Blake, F., The Strike in the American Novel (1972). Hill, V. L., ‘‘Strategy and Breadth: The Socialist-Feminist in American Fiction’’ (dissertation, 1979). —VICKI LYNN HILL
TYLER, Mary (Hunt) Palmer Born 1 March 1775; died 7 July 1866 Also wrote under: An American Matron Daughter of Joseph P. and Elizabeth Hunt Palmer; married Royall Tyler, 1794 (died 1826); children: 11 Mary Palmer Tyler was born of a respected family in Boston on the eve of the American Revolution. At the age of nineteen she married her father’s close friend and contemporary, Royall Tyler, a lawyer who was already celebrated for writing the first native comedy to be produced in America. The couple moved to Brattleboro, Vermont, where Tyler bore and raised her 11 children (all surviving childhood and most prospering as adults), nursed her husband through his final illness (1821-6), and then survived him by 40 years. In her later years, she was supported by her children and revered in her community where she was known affectionately as ‘‘Madam Tyler.’’ Tyler’s obituary describes her as ‘‘imparting a tone of elevation and refinement, and an ambition for literary pursuits, to the new and unformed society around her.’’ In 1810 Tyler, already the mother of eight children, wrote a child-care manual, The Maternal Physician. This book was reprinted in 1972 as part of a series on medicine and society in America because it is the first book of its genre to have been written in the new world. In correspondence with his publisher, Royall Tyler notes that his wife insisted on remaining anonymous, even though she was offered more money for the book if she would sign it. Tyler’s intent in The Maternal Physician was to give medical advice to families based on her own successful experience. In an age when infant death was a common and accepted occurrence, she criticizes the tendency to be passive in the face of illness. She asserts that the mother is the child’s best guardian and must be ever vigilant, vigorous in the treatment of the slightest ailment, and willing to call a doctor if the complaint is serious. The book includes advice on bathing, sleeping, teething, weaning, obedience, exercise, diet, and disease. If Tyler didn’t have firsthand experience with an illness, she quoted from British medical authorities of the day. Her remedies, including a wide variety of herbal treatments, sound totally unfamiliar now, but her basic philosophy of childrearing remains remarkably fresh and sound: she advocates gentle, firm, consistent guidance. Grandmother Tyler’s Book was undertaken by Tyler in her eighty-third year at the request of her children and grandchildren.
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It is a series of vivid reminiscences of her girlhood and marriage. Through the efforts of her descendants, it was finally published in 1925. The earliest stories, dealing with the events of the Revolution in and around Boston, are interspersed with quotations from her mother’s memoirs. Although too young to remember it, Tyler had been told of her father’s participation in the Boston Tea Party. Her mother actually describes her fright when he came home in his Native American costume. From the age of nine, Tyler had admired her father’s friend, Royall Tyler. She discloses the story of his disastrous love affair with Abby Adams (daughter of John Adams), which ended as a consequence of his having ‘‘lived too gay a life.’’ When they did marry, the marriage was kept a secret for a while, owing apparently to the opposition of Tyler’s mother. During the time Tyler was secretly married, pregnant, and waiting at home for her husband to establish a law practice in the wilds of Vermont, she suffered a great sense of sinfulness and a crisis of faith. This was resolved after many months by a dream in which she was chased by wolves to the edge of a precipice only to be rescued at the last minute by the figure of Christ. He encircled her waist with his arm and said, ‘‘Lean on me and I will save you.’’ From this time on, Tyler’s profound faith sustained her
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through many trials, including the lingering and painful cancer which killed her husband, and the consequent poverty and reliance on friends and neighbors to sustain the family. She accepted good and bad fortune alike with the comment that all was God’s will. Tyler’s observations of family life are as unsentimental and spirited as her advice on childrearing. Her faith and her maternal orientation gave meaning to her life and to the books she wrote as an expression of gratitude for and pleasure in that life.
OTHER WORKS: Mary Palmer Tyler’s letters and a journal (1821-40) are preserved by the Vermont Historical Society at Montpelier, Vermont, in the Royall Tyler Collection.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Tanselle, G. T., Royall Tyler (1867). Other references: Boston Transcript (16 Dec. 1925). New York Tribune (10 May 1925). SR (28 March 1925). Vermont Quarterly 20 (1952). Vermonter (1924). —CHRISTINA TISCHLER GIBBONS
U UCHIDA, Yoshiko Born 24 November 1921, Alameda, California; died 21 June 1992 Daughter of Dwight Takashi and Iku Umegaki Uchida A tenacious belief in the power of literature and education directed Yoshiko Uchida’s work as an author. A cum laude graduate of the University of California at Berkeley (1942), Uchida received an M.Ed. from Smith College (1944). Her publications included articles on folk arts and crafts for the Tokyo Nippon News and columns for Craft Horizons; her diverse contributions to children’s literature span the genres of picture book, chapbooks for young readers, adolescent novels, collections of folklore, and historical novels. In addition, an adult novel, a number of nonfiction titles, and countless short stories illustrate Uchida’s versatility. Of her work, Uchida stated: ‘‘I try to write of meaningful relationships between human beings, to celebrate our common humanity.’’ The realistic stories set in the United States often depict immigrant Japanese families and first-generation Japanese Americans struggling to make a good life in a new land. The Promised Year (1959), The Birthday Visitor (1975), A Jar of Dreams (1981, 1996), The Best Bad Thing (1983, 1993), and The Happiest Ending (1985) especially portray the promises of America and the hopes of a better future. Journey to Topaz (1971) and Journey Home (1978, 1996) never abandon such hope even as they chronicle a dark chapter of America’s history. As a college student, Uchida was evacuated with her family from California to the Tanforan Racetrack with 8,000 other Japanese Americans, and four months later moved to the Topaz concentration camp in Utah. In writing of the Japanese internment during World War II from an eleven-year-old child’s perspective, Uchida not only describes the physical treatment of prisoners, but also captures the individual and collective bafflement at America’s imprisonment of its own citizens. She also speaks openly about her experience in a Japanese relocation center, where she worked as a teacher. In her two novels, Uchida recreates the family’s sparse and crowded living quarters, and contrasts their physical humiliation and poverty with a triumphant spirit and tenacious belief in goodness. Well-developed, complex characters, provocative situations, and gifted storytelling account for Uchida’s success with critics and readers alike. She garnered many awards and honors, including citations from the National Council of Teachers of English, the American Library Association, the California Association of Teachers of English, chapters of the Japanese American Citizens League, the International Reading Association, the National Council for Social Studies, and the Children’s Book Council. A Ford Foundation Fellowship in 1952 enabled Uchida to travel to Japan. This and later trips brought authority and authentic settings to her
writing. Books set in Japan include the series about the endearing young Sumi, Rokubei and the Thousand Rice Bowls (1962), and In-Between Miya (1967). An early work, The Full Circle (1957), is a compelling story of postwar peace in Japan and of the dubious privilege of being Umeko Kagawa, the adolescent daughter of a prominent religious leader. Based on conversations between Uchida and Kagawa, the novel is essentially a biography. Ceremony, tradition, and revered customs influenced Uchida’s creations. Both old and young are respected; joyous friendships between young and old promote genuine intergenerational understanding. The centrality of family, and its unquestioning support of individual contributions and invaluable uniqueness, fosters the growth of all of Uchida’s characters. A strong sense of morality inhabits the center of her work, but it never overpowers nor seems artificial. Uchida’s early commitment to education flows through her books that teach in the best possible ways: answers are never simple, growth never easy but always possible. Her memoir, The Invisible Thread (1991), chronicles the relationship between her adopted country, her Japanese legacy, and her growth as a writer. Sharing her own cultural heritage, Uchida defeated stereotypes and presented to ‘‘Japanese-American young people an understanding of their own history and pride in their identity.’’ OTHER WORKS: The Dancing Kettle and Other Japanese Folk Tales (1949). New Friends for Susan (1951). We Do Not Work Alone: The Thoughts of Kanjiro Kawai (1953). The Magic Listening Cap: More Folk Tales from Japan (1955). Takao and Grandfather’s Sword (1958). Mik and the Prowler (1960). The Forever Christmas Tree (1963). Sumi’s Prize (1964). The Sea of Gold and Other Tales from Japan (1965, reprinted with M. Yamaguchi 1991). Sumi’s Special Happening (1966). Sumi and the Goat and the Tokyo Express (1969). Kisako’s Mysteries (1969). Makoto, the Smallest Boy (1970). Samurai of Gold Hill (1972). The History of Sycamore Church (1974). The Rooster Who Understood Japanese (1976). Tabi: Journey Through Time: Stories of the Japanese in America (1981). Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese American Family (1982, reprinted 1989). The Foolish Cats (1987). Picture Bride (1987, expanded, 1997). Bird Song (1992). The Bracelet (1993, reprinted 1996). The Magic Purse (1993). The Wise Old Woman (1994). Contributor to numerous anthologies and collections, including: Animal Tales (1990); The Graywolf Annual Seven: Stories from the American Mosaic (1990); Tales of Justice (1990); Humorous Tales (1990); Six Short Stories by Japanese American Writers (1991); Growing Up Female: Stories by Women Writers from the American Mosaic (1993); Berkeley! A Literary Tribute (1997); and others. Yoshiko Uchida’s manuscripts and papers are in several collections across the country: in the Kerlan Collection at the University of Minnesota; manuscripts prior to 1981 at the University of Oregon Library; and manuscripts, papers, and all published
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materials since 1981 are in the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Allman, B., et al, eds., Children’s Authors and Illustrators (1991). Chang, C. E. S., Language Arts (1984). Dreyer, S. S., The Bookfinder: A Guide to Children’s Literature about the Needs and Problems of Youth Ages Two through Fifteen (1981). Flora, S. B., Famous Asians & Their Culture (video, 1992). Marvis, B. J., Contemporary American Success Stories: Famous People of Asian Ancestory Vol. II (1994, 1997). Reference works: Asian American Literature: Reviews and Criticism of Works by American Writers of Asian Descent (1999). CA (1975). CANR (1982, 1988). Children’s Book World (1967). MTCW (1991). SATA (1971, 1989). TCCW (1989). Other references: NYHTBR (8 Mar. 1949, 15 May 1955). NYT (4 Nov. 1942, 9 Mar. 1958, 24 June 1992). TLS (3 Oct. 1968). —CATHRYN M. MERCIER
UHNAK, Dorothy Born 1931, Bronx, New York Married; children: one daughter For fourteen years, Dorothy Uhnak served as a member of the New York City Transit Police, achieving the rank of detective first class. She is married and the mother of one daughter. Her first book, Policewoman (1964), is a partially fictionalized account of the transformation of the narrator (who shares Uhnak’s name and background) from applicant to full-fledged working member of the New York City Police Department. No attempt is made to gloss over the frustrations engendered by tedious procedures, the reluctance of citizens to testify against offenders, the use of influence to free criminals justly apprehended, or the hardening process through which a beginning officer must pass. In contrast, however, the excitement of the work and the sense of service rendered and assignments well done is also dramatized, making Policewoman a strong, compelling first book. Uhnak then introduced a cast of continuing characters who appear in a series of three novels. The protagonist, Detective Christie Choriopoulos Opara, works for the district attorney’s Special Investigations Squad. The problems common to working mothers—Opara is a young widow whose husband, also a policeman, was killed while on duty—and the presence of Opara’s family, which serves as a support group, both contribute to the realism of the series. The developing personal and professional relationships between Opara and her boss, Casey Reardon, one of fiction’s best realized ‘‘tough cops,’’ provide subplots throughout the trilogy. Other members of the squad lend depth, color, comic relief, and effective detail. The plot of The Bait (1968) springs from an arrest Opara unwillingly makes while on her way to the culmination of a seemingly more important undercover assignment. Uhnak’s development of the background and motivation of the murderer
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enhances the suspense and offsets the book’s dependence on coincidence. The organization and the machinations of the Secret Nation, a black religio-political gang, form the subplot of The Witness (1969); seen through the eyes of initiate Eddie Campion, the scenes involving the Nation are especially powerful. Elena Vargas of The Ledger (1970) is one of Uhnak’s most vibrant and complex characters, and her attitudes and history are fully explored. Vargas and Opara engage in a long, absorbing battle of wills which contributes enormously to the book’s success. Law and Order (1973) is not a crime novel but rather the panoramic saga of a family of New York policemen, their connections, their work, their sense of self and place. The central character, Brian O’Malley, is a study of an essentially decent man struggling to master himself, his work, and the necessarily shady world into which that work takes him. Next came Sergeant Joe Peters, the officer investigating the murder of two little boys, who is the protagonist and narrator of The Investigation (1977). Both the police and public opinion point to Kitty Keeler, the children’s mother, as the killer, and Peter solves a double mystery to achieve the book’s climax. Much of the tension springs from the contradictory and intense appraisals other characters make of the accused. She is believed by some to be nearly saintly in her generosity, warmth, and kindness and believed by others to be a sensual, self-indulgent, fiendish woman. Kitty Keeler’s real motivations and personality are the plot’s true mystery. False Witness (1981) portrays two women who have achieved success in professions dominated by men. Sanderalee Dawson, model, television personality, and political activist, is the victim of rape and attempted murder; Lynne Jacobi, a bureau chief in the New York City District Attorney’s Office, investigates the crime, forcing the two women into an uneasy alliance. The extreme violence of the attack on Sanderalee underscores the brutality of the struggles for power and control the protagonists experience professionally. False Witness is a superior novel whose characterizations are especially strong. The Ryer Avenue Story (1994) is a departure for Uhnak from her tried and true police/crime novels. In this story, six childhood friends bound by a secret, shared act of violence are followed throughout several generations. As kids, the six friends—boys and girls—beat a man to death in the Bronx borough where they live. One of their fathers is eventually tried and put to death for the crime, which the six friends continue to hide. The book follows them to success and in some cases fame, through their tragedies and joys, until their secret is finally revealed. In Codes of Betrayal (1997), Uhnak returns to crime drama in this tale of NYPD cop, Nick O’Hara. Although Nick was raised by an ‘‘Irish cop uncle,’’ his estranged mother is a product of the Ventura crime family. Nick’s son is killed while spending time with a cousin—from the Ventura side of the family. At the same time, Nick finds that his father was also killed by the Venturas years ago. Nick’s life falls apart, but his anger eventually saves him when he is offered a deal by the FBI to help bring down the Venturas. Ulnak has her own method of writing and says she has never found anyone else who works the way she does. Hers is not a
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nine-to-five routine, and often she will construct entire chapters mentally ‘‘until the pictures, words, and actions must absolutely be on paper.’’ Characters are the unifying force in her novels. As she states, ‘‘What I must know, absolutely, before I start a novel is who each character is at the beginning and who he will be at the end. I’m never sure how the characters will get from the first place to the last, but I am positive where they will end up.’’ Remarkably able to convey tellingly the ambiences of home, squad room, and mean streets, Uhnak is a good writer noted for her mastery of realistic detail in plot, setting, and characterization.
approach’’ of Freud and the ‘‘cultural approach’’ of more current socioanthropological studies. Using the theories of Kant and Cassire, as well as of Jung, she maintains that all perceptions of reality are symbolic and partially subjective. She describes aspects of the feminine—both as the predominant approach to reality in a woman and as it appears in a man’s psyche as the contra-sexual element, the anima—and the negative effects of its repression in western religion. This book delineates the religious significance for our culture of accepting the experience and consciousness of women and sheds light on the difficulty of the Christian experience for women.
OTHER WORKS: Victims (1987). Secrets and Mysteries (1993). A manuscript collection of Dorothy Uhnak is housed at the Muger Memorial Library at Boston University.
Ulanov wrote Religion and the Unconscious (1975) with her husband. They begin by describing the intrapsychic relationship between consciousness and the unconscious, and how both depth psychology and religion mediate and illuminate numinous and primordial experiences of the psyche. They predict an assimilation of Jungian ‘‘active imagination’’ into religious institutions in the form of spiritual exercises. Like Ulanov’s first book, the style of Religion and the Unconscious is lucid, smoothly written, methodical. But because it breaks new ground through a synthesis of two fields, the second book is more difficult to understand. Religion and the Unconscious is nevertheless exciting, hopeful, brilliant, and profound. It is ecumenical in the deepest sense in showing the universal psychic need for the processes that religion has codified into sacraments. The book is quiet in tone and written for a well-educated reader but will undoubtedly become a classic in its new field.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Best Sellers (1 Feb. 1964). Detecting Women (1994). Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (1994). Mystery Fancier (Jan. 1978). Newsweek (13 Apr. 1973). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (1996). Other references: Booklist (15 Sept. 1997). LJ (15 Sept. 1997). PW (15 Feb. 1993). —JANE S. BAKERMAN, UPDATED BY REBECCA C. CONDIT
ULANOV, Ann Belford Born 1 January 1938, Princeton, New Jersey Daughter of Ralph J. and Ruth Belford; married Barry Ulanov, 1968; children: one son. Ann Belford Ulanov was the youngest of three children. Her father was a surgeon and her mother a nurse. She earned her B.A. cum laude from Radcliffe in 1959. She received a Master of Divinity magna cum laude (1962) and a Ph.D. in psychiatry and religion (1967) from the Union Theological Seminary. Ulanov received her analytical training from the C. G. Jung Training Center in New York City (1963-67). She has been in private practice in New York since 1965 and a professor of psychiatry and religion at the Union Theological Seminary since 1974. Her husband is an English professor (and former chairman of the Department of Religion at Barnard College). They have one son. In The Feminine in Jungian Psychology and in Christian Theology (1971), Ulanov investigates the implications for Christian theology of Jung’s special insights into the feminine. Ulanov emphasizes Jung’s idea that the psyche is structured in polarities; she believes that the masculine-feminine polarity encompasses in its symbolism all the other psychic polarities. She goes on to demonstrate that of these two poles, the feminine has been most neglected in psychoanalytic literature. It is usually treated as auxiliary to the masculine and confined to its literal sexuality. Ulanov analyzes and then rejects what she calls the ‘‘biological
In The Functioning Transcendent: A Study in Analytical Psychology (1996), Ulanov tackles the manner in which the transcendent—or ‘‘God, the unknown, or the holy’’—operates in our lives by demonstrating how it has operated in her clinical practice. Drawing on her observations, she discusses the spiritual aspects of analysis as they are manifested in cases involving issues such as weight problems in women, suicidal ideation, and masochism. Ulanov and her husband, Barry, collaborated on Cinderella and Her Sisters: The Envied and the Envying (1998), a study of the emotion of envy. Using the fairytale’s story as a basis, the Ulanovs consider the psychological aspects of envy and discuss the male and female aspects of the individual as well as relationships between persons of the same and/or opposite sexes. In The Female Ancestors of Christ (1999), Ulanov attempts to resurrect the ‘‘female voice’’ in the Christian religion. The Gospel according to Matthew includes four women in Christ’s genealogy—Ruth, Tamar, Rahab, and Bathsheba. Ulanov argues that these women merge issues of sexuality and spirituality and represent Jesus’ feminine side. Critics have remarked that although the premise showed promise, Ulanov’s obscure narrative style requires acceptance of her analyses on faith rather than as supported by logic. Ulanov has a compassionate, perceptive viewpoint on both women and universal religious needs. She never waxes angry, and one feels trust in her always balanced, fair discussion of all issues. Her books will outlive contemporary controversies because she always takes the long view.
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OTHER WORKS: Primary Speech: A Psychology of Prayer (1988). The Witch and the Clown: Two Archetypes of Human Sexuality (1990). Men and Women: Sexual Ethics in Turbulent Times (1991). Transforming Sexuality: The Archetypal World of Anima and Animus (1994). The Wisdom of the Psyche (1994). The Wizard’s Gate: Picturing Consciousness (1994). Receiving Woman: Studies in the Psychology and Theology of the Feminine (1995).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: American Journal of Psychiatry (Aug. 1974). Anglican Theological Review (Oct. 1976). Christian Century (2 Mar. 1977). Crosscurrents (Summer-Fall 1972). Religion in Life (Winter 1976). Other references: Barnes & Noble web site: http:// www.barnesandnoble.com. —STEPHANIE DEMETRAKOPOULOS, UPDATED BY REBECCA C. CONDIT
UNDERWOOD, Sophie Kerr Born 23 August 1880, Denton, Maryland; died 6 February 1965, New York, New York Also wrote under: Sophie Kerr Daughter of Jonathan W. and Amanda Sisk Kerr; married John Underwood, 1904 (divorced) A well-educated woman, Sophie Kerr Underwood had diverse interests: cooking, writing, and a love of plants and flowers imparted to her by her father, a nurseryman. She held a B.A. from Hood College, an M.A. from the University of Vermont, and several honorary degrees. Underwood’s marriage ended in divorce after four years.
Typical of Underwood’s short stories are those in the collection Confetti (1927), a work divided into four groups, each with a general theme. The section, ‘‘Greedy,’’ has stories about food and jealousy; ‘‘Women’’ concerns envy, love, and discipline; ‘‘In America,’’ the weakest section, details the efforts of three young men to marry; and the best section, ‘‘Country,’’ insists that country life is not only healthier than city life but also more pleasurable. The stories are absolutely representative of the kind of fiction appearing in women’s magazines for many years. Sentimentality rules: all the endings are happy, true love always wins, old virtues stand fast, as do the old aphorisms. Plots appear to have evolved from maxims, and characters who are indistinguishable from each other speak in dated and hackneyed language. In the short stories, as in the novels, Underwood’s effectiveness is greatest in descriptions of country life, food, and scenery. She does not provide information or understanding of her era. She gave the readers of her day escape and entertainment, but the modern reader will not find either in Underwood’s work.
OTHER WORKS: Love at Large (1916). The Blue Envelope (1917). The Golden Block (1918). Painted Meadows (1920). One Thing Is Certain (1922). Mareea-Maria (1929). Tigers Is Only Cats (1929). In for a Penny (1931). Girl into Woman (1932). They’re None of Them Perfect (1933). Big-Hearted Herbert (with A. S. Richardson, 1934; film version, 1935). Stay out of My Life (1934). Miss J. Looks On (1935). There’s Only One (1936). Fine to Look At (1937). Adventure with Women (1938). Not a Cloud in the Sky (1938). Curtain Going Up (1940). The Beautiful Woman (1940). It Was a Lovely Meeting of the Flower Show Committee (1940). Michael’s Girl (1942). Jenny Devlin (1943). Love Story Incidental (1946). Wife’s Eye View (1947). The Sound of Petticoats (1948). As Tall As Pride (1949). The Man Who Knew the Date (1951). The Best I Ever Ate (with J. Platt, 1953).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: NYT (8 Feb. 1965). PW (1 March 1965). A prolific writer, Underwood contributed to the Saturday Evening Post, the Ladies’ Home Journal, Collier’s, and Harper’s. She edited the woman’s page of the Chronicle Telegraph and the woman’s Sunday supplement of the Pittsburgh Gazette Times and was managing editor of the Woman’s Home Companion. She published more than two dozen works of fiction and drama. Characteristic of Underwood’s fiction is the novel, The SeeSaw: A Story of Today, (1919). Marcia Grossey, the heroine, is beautiful, warm, gentle, and understanding of her husband, Harleth, who is a handsome, temperamental, restless, and very rich man. Although Harleth loves Marcia, he falls prey to a femme fatale, Leila. When Marcia divorces Harleth, he marries Leila for honor’s sake. Several years later Leila divorces Harleth, who returns to the woman he always loved. See Saw is ‘‘woman’s fiction’’—furs, perfume, and jewels are given more attention than the characters, who are flat and predictable: good wife, erring husband, wicked adventuress. The plot line is obviously manipulated, built on the premise that all’s well that ends well.
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UNTERMEYER, Jean Starr Born 13 May 1886, Zanesville, Ohio; died 27 July 1970, New York, New York Daughter of Abram E. and Johanna Schonfeld Starr; married Louis Untermeyer, 1907 (divorced 1933, remarried, divorced again in 1951); children: Richard (died 1927) An artistic child, Jean Starr Untermeyer was sent by her Midwestern family to Kohut’s College Preparatory School in New York. She also attended special courses at Columbia University. In 1907 she married poet and editor Louis Untermeyer, a
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friend and associate of many leading literary figures. Several years later, Untermeyer began secretly writing poems, which her husband discovered and submitted to magazines. She felt she had absorbed poetry ‘‘by osmosis’’ from her husband and his coterie and that music was her ‘‘major passion.’’ A brief career as a lieder singer in Vienna and London in 1924 was interrupted by marital problems. The Untermeyers separated in 1926; but the suicide of their only child, Richard, in 1927, brought about a temporary reconciliation. They divorced in 1933, later remarried, and obtained a final divorce in 1951 after many years of separation. Untermeyer taught at Olivett College (1936-37, 1940) and at the New School for Social Research (1948-55). Untermeyer’s memoir, Private Collection (1965), describes her childhood, early married life, and acquaintances; but it is her poetry that reveals the more intimate, emotional aspects of her life. In an essay published in the Bookman (June 1923), Untermeyer defends the woman artist’ right to use her own experience in her art. In addition—six years before Virginia Woolf published A Room of One’s Own—Untermeyer discusses a woman’s need for ‘‘peace and privacy,’’ for relief from domestic routine, and time in which to do creative work. Recognizing that ‘‘the sexual instinct is. . .bound up with the artistic impulse,’’ Untermeyer calls upon scientific research to discover something ‘‘to liberate woman in her sex life.’’ ‘‘Love minus Art = Wife’’ is a telling line in ‘‘Love and Art,’’ part of a dream sequence that concludes Dreams Out of Darkness (1921). Untermeyer’s most domestic work appears in her early poems. In ‘‘Autumn’’ (Growing Pains, 1918), she portrays in exquisite detail her mother, now ‘‘so shaken and so powerless,’’ when she was ‘‘high priestess’’ of her home, involved in the seasonal ritual of canning and preserving. ‘‘Birth’’ celebrates the ‘‘exultation and. . .fertile pain’’ of her sister’s labor. Numerous poems, published throughout Untermeyer’s career, portray a woman whose lover has betrayed or abandoned her. She seeks solace in religion, music, or nature; or, she seeks to repress or renounce her self and, mystically, to achieve a state that provides, paradoxically, both security and freedom. Usually the woman counters faithlessness with faith and forgiveness. Although her suffering may leave her withdrawn, ‘‘without elation,’’ and ‘‘disheveled,’’ as in ‘‘Overseen’’ (Love and Need, 1940), she is strong and proud. Untermeyer also wrote light verse, occasional poetry, and many poems with war or nature as their subject. Untermeyer translated Oscar Bie’s Schubert, the Man (1928), the official Schubert centennial biography. Her highly praised translation of Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil (1946) took her five years to complete. Her last book, Re-creations (1970), contains translations of French, German, and Hebrew poems. Untermeyer’s early poems were often highly imagistic, and many were in free verse, but she moved—counter to most of her contemporaries—to more traditional, rhymed forms. Critics praised her ear for sound and rhythm—qualities that reflect her love of music.
UPTON
OTHER WORKS: Steep Ascent (1927). Wingéd Child (1936). Later Poems (1958). Job’s Daughter (1967). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Untermeyer, L., ed., Modern American Poetry: A Critical Anthology (1936). Other references: CSM (5 Sept. 1942). Poetry (Aug. 1936, July 1941). SR (15 Feb. 1941). —JEANNINE DOBBS
UPTON, Harriet Taylor Born 17 December 1854, Ravenna, Ohio; died 5 November 1945, Pasadena, California Daughter of Ezra B. and Harriet Frazer Taylor; married George W. Upton, 1884 Harriet Taylor Upton’s family had a long history of pioneering and public service. Her father, a lawyer and later a judge, was a member of the U.S. Congress for 13 years. She and her husband, also a lawyer, lived in Warren, Ohio, and in Washington, D.C., when Congress was in session. Upton had ample opportunity to develop her interest in politics. At first, she was antipathetic to the woman suffrage movement and worked actively against it; but in 1890, she changed her mind and joined the National American Woman Suffrage Association. She served as acting chairman of the congressional committee and through her efforts the national headquarters was for some time located in Warren. From 1902 to 1910, Upton edited the monthly Progress, which became the official organ of the association in 1907. When, in 1920, the vote of Tennessee was crucial in gaining acceptance of the 19th Amendment, Upton and Carrie Chapman Catt waged an active campaign there which was instrumental in winning approval. Upton’s political work was done primarily through the Republican party. During the Harding administration, she served as vice chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, probably the highest ranking position a woman had yet held in America. Later she did important social work in Ohio as liaison officer between Governor Myers Cooper and state institutions. She was also instrumental in opening the diplomatic corps to women, in placing women on the Advisory Committee of the Conference for the Limitation of Arms, and in the final reporting out and passage of the Child Labor Bill. Upton wrote children’s stories for Wide Awake and St. Nicholas. For a book for children, Our Early Presidents and Their Wives and Children, from Washington to Jackson (1890; also serialized in St. Nicholas), she did considerable research and wrote to the descendants of the presidents. The review in the Nation (22 Jan. 1891) acknowledges the minute detail in the description of home life, but the author is accused of ‘‘an absolute affectation of intimacy’’ in her style: ‘‘This kind of baby talk is much to be regretted, for it weakens a book which otherwise
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appears to be thorough, authentic, and useful.’’ Upton also wrote two several-volume works of local (Ohio) history. The New England Magazine (March 1899) published an avant-garde love story by Upton, about a young Hollander, Rita, who is jilted by an American businessman. Rita still believes the U.S. is ‘‘a woman’s own land, and she can do what she wants to. She can study, work, go to college, and vote.’’ Obviously, this was fantasy, as Upton recognized six years later. In 1905 she, Ida Husted Harper, and Susan B. Anthony visited President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House to call his attention to the action of Congress in forbidding the legislature of Hawaii to extend the suffrage to women, and ‘‘to ask him to see that this outrage is not repeated in the Philippines.’’ At this point he exclaimed with scorn, ‘‘What! Give the franchise to those Oriental women!’’ Upton contributed articles on women’s rights to the Ladies’ Home Journal and Harper’s Bazaar. Characteristic is ‘‘A Woman’s View of Practical Politics,’’ the lead article in the Woman’s Home Companion (Aug. 1921). She urges a humanistic rather than a tough-minded approach to political problems. Politics, she feels, are only as good as the people themselves: ‘‘Therefore, it is of the most tremendous importance that the women-people repudiate ‘practical politics’ as an excuse for dealing with government concerns in ways which they would never tolerate in their own personal affairs, and, instead, give to ‘practical politics’ its real meaning of straightforward, honest understanding of the science
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of government.’’ She concludes by prophesying that men will not come to understand women’s point of view in her generation: ‘‘It is our granddaughters who will profit by men learning to understand women.’’ In spite of her advanced ideas, Upton was a woman of her time, who still thought in terms of ‘‘feminine’’ traits and ‘‘masculine’’ traits and seemed unaware these might be the result of conditioning. The writer of this entry knew her personally and corresponded with her between 1920 and 1934. She was once told by Upton, ‘‘You can do any job a man can do, but never forget that you are a woman. Always keep your shirtwaist and skirt pinned together so the safety pin doesn’t show.’’
OTHER WORKS: A Twentieth-Century History of Trumbull County (2 vols., 1909). A History of the Western Reserve (3 vols., 1910).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Harper, I. H., The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (1908). Other references: Century (Aug. 1923). Ladies’ Home Journal 39 (Aug. 1922). Literary Digest 81 (May 1924). Outlook 136 (Jan. 1924). Woman Citizen (May 1924). —FRANCELIA BUTLER
V VALENTINE, Jean Born 27 April 1934, Chicago, Illinois Daughter of John and Jean Purcell Valentine; married James Chace, 1957 (divorced); Barrie Cooke, 1991; children: Sarah, Rebecca Jean Valentine is a graduate of Radcliffe College (B.A. 1956). Her first book of poetry, Dream Barker and Other Poems (1965) was chosen by Dudley Fitts and published as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. She has taught at Yale, Barnard, Swarthmore, and Hunter Colleges, among others, and since 1974 has been on the faculty of Sarah Lawrence College. Though over the years Valentine has not had the recognition accorded many of her contemporaries, she is considered by many to be among the finest American poets. Hayden Carruth has commented: ‘‘No other living poet gives me as keen a sense of intelligence, the mind at work there on the page, as [Valentine’s]. . . . Such poems are very, very rare.’’ Valentine has received awards from many foundations and organizations including the National Endowment for the Arts (1972), New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council for the Arts, The Bunting Institute, and the Rockefeller Foundation. She was also the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship in 1976, and was awarded the Maurice English Prize in 1991 and the Sara Teasdale Poetry Prize in 1992. Her poetry makes of experience something spare and emblematic, dream-like. Her lines rely on image, and often time and objects become a haunting presence in her poems. She investigates what Richard Jackson calls the ‘‘hallowing of the everyday,’’ using language to go places it seems most difficult or perhaps useless to go, to describe the moment things invisible become visible. Valentine’s early poems are more formal and explore language and images; she often alludes to classical and biblical narratives which give these poems a sense of depth and context, as seen in a few lines from ‘‘Waiting’’: You will not be forgiven if you ignore / The pillar of slow insistent snow / Framing the angel at the door / Who will not speak and will not go.’’ Many of her poems range through the varied experiences of women’s lives: first love, marriage, childbirth, family life. She often uses dialogue in a symbolic manner where voices in poems speak in associative rather than linear ways. And, as in ‘‘September 1963,’’ people populate her poems much in the way they populate dreams, as figures floating between language: ‘‘With twenty other Gullivers / I hover at the door, / Watch you shy through this riddle of primary colors, / The howling razzle-dazzle of your peers.’’ In Valentine’s subsequent volumes, her poems become more delineated and definite in the world they evoke. Wider political and social forces appear in tangible ways. And though Valentine’s poems are perhaps less specifically concerned with her own
private life, the experiences of others are still grounded in the physicality of life lived in bodies. This does not mean Valentine leaves the personal behind, she has just found a way to widen what is personal into ever overlapping circles which vibrate out from images in her poems: ‘‘Today we visited a field of graves— / slaves’ or Indians’ graves, you said—/ sunk, unmarked, green edges of hammered granite / sharp as a shoulder blade’’ (‘‘Forces’’ Home. Deep. Blue., 1989). In her most recent book, Growing Darkness, Growing Light (1997), Valentine’s poems are pared down and deal deeply with the presence of death and the spiritual. These are often evoked by the simplest of things as in ‘‘A Bit of Rice’’: ‘‘A bit of rice in a string bag: / the rice spills, / we have to sweep it up. . . / What will be left here when you die? / Not the rice / not the tea / left somewhere when the monk / knocked over the cup / not / not.’’ As Alberta Turner comments, all of [Valentine’s] poems, in one way or another, address ‘‘the threat of an empty universe.’’ Valentine also returns to the world of women with a small series of poems (beginning with ‘‘Mother and Child, Body and Soul’’) which explore the often painful and deeply knotted relationships between mother and daughter. Valentine’s poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Atlantic Monthly, Field, Ironwood, New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poetry Ireland Review, Salt Hill Journal, and many other journals and anthologies. Valentine currently lives in New York City, but spends part of her time in County Sligo, Ireland. Her newest book of poems The Cradle of Real Life is forthcoming in 2000. OTHER WORKS: Pilgrims (1969). Ordinary Things (1974). Turn (chapbook, 1977). The Messenger (1979). The River at Wolf (1992). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Jackson, R., Acts of Mind: Conversations with Contemporary Poets (1983). Kravis, J., Teaching Literature: Writers and Teachers Talking (1995). Upton, L., The Muse of Abandonment: Origin, Identity, Mastery, in Five American Poets (1998). Reference works: CANR (1991). CP (1991). Other references: American Book Review (May 1990). APR (Jan. 1980, July/Aug. 1991, interview). Field (Spring 1989). Harper’s (Jan. 1980). NYTBR (7 Nov. 1965, 2 Aug. 1970, 21 Oct. 1979). Ploughshares (Fall 1993). Poetry (Oct. 1975, Dec. 1992). Southern Review (1997). VLS (23 May 1989). —MICHAEL KLEIN AND GLYNIS BENBOW-NIEMIER
VALENTINE, Jo See ARMSTRONG, Charlotte
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VAN ALSTYNE, Frances (Jane) Crosby Born 24 March 1820; Putnam County, New York; died 12 February 1915, Bridgeport, Connecticut Wrote under: Fanny Crosby and some 200 others Daughter of John and Mercy Crosby; married Alexander Van Alstyne, 1858 (died 1902) At the age of six weeks, Frances Crosby Van Alstyne was permanently blinded as a result of an eye infection treated by hot poultices that destroyed the optic nerves. This trauma was compounded when her father died before she was one year old, but as an eight-year-old she wrote the lines: ‘‘O what a happy soul am I! / Although I cannot see, / I am resolved that in this world / Contented I will be!’’ Van Alstyne spent her childhood studying the Bible and developing the powers of her memory. In fact, she later told friends she had memorized the first five books of the Bible, the Psalms, and most of the New Testament. At the age of fifteen, Van Alstyne enrolled in the New York Institution for the Blind, where she remained as a student for the next eight years. While there she developed her poetic talents by reciting topical poems for visitors, such as Jenny Lind and Henry Clay. She also recited on fundraising tours for the institution from 1842 to 1844. One of her favorites on such occasions began: ‘‘Contented, happy, though a sightless band, / Dear friends, this evening we before you stand.’’ After graduating at the age of twenty-three, Van Alstyne stayed at the institution and taught a number of subjects for the next 15 years. Van Alstyne’s first volume of poetry, The Blind Girl, and Other Poems (1844), was published when she was twenty-four. Ironically, the preface states that ‘‘any pecuniary advantage’’ to the authoress will be appreciated since she is in ‘‘declining health.’’ Van Alstyne died at the age of ninety-five. The volume concentrates on the extremely morbid subjects so popular at the time. Typical poems are ‘‘My Mother’s Grave,’’ ‘‘Ida, the BrokenHearted,’’ and ‘‘On the Death of a Child.’’ In her next volume of poetry, Monterey, and Other Poems (1851), Van Alstyne again appeals to her readers’ sympathy: she states her health is ‘‘sadly impaired,’’ while she hopes her ‘‘declining years’’ will be supported by the sale of this volume. The contents are even more maudlin, including ‘‘The Dying Daughter,’’ ‘‘Let Me Die on the Prairie,’’ ‘‘Weep Not for the Dead,’’ ‘‘The Stranger’s Grave,’’ and ‘‘Reflections of a Murderer.’’ A Wreath of Columbia’s Flowers (1858) is a collection of short fiction. Although Van Alstyne claims her writings are ‘‘natural and true to life,’’ this volume contains the story ‘‘Annie Herbert,’’ about a girl who hears flowers talking to her. Her final volume of poetry, Bells at Evening, and Other Verse (1897), includes a biographical sketch by Robert Lowry. Van Alstyne considered Bells at Evening her finest poetic effort. It contains such secular poems as ‘‘A Tribute to Cincinnati’’ and other patriotic fare. The final section includes some 65 of her most famous hymns.
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Hymn writing was Van Alstyne’s major claim to fame. She began writing popular songs with the composer George F. Root in 1851, and the two collaborated on about 50 songs, including ‘‘Rosalie, the Prairie Flower,’’ which earned $3,000 in royalties. In 1864 Van Alstyne began writing hymns with William B. Bradbury, generally considered the father of Sunday school music in America. Over her long career, she wrote around 8,000 hymns. Not even she could remember the exact figure, since so many were published under her more than 200 pseudonyms. Her most successful hymns include ‘‘Rescue the Perishing’’ and ‘‘Safe in the Arms of Jesus,’’ used by Dwight L. Moody and Ira D. Sankey in their missionary work and by Frances E. Willard in her temperance work. Van Alstyne’s final literary efforts were two versions of her autobiography, Fannie Crosby’s Life-Story (1903) and the more detailed volume, Memories of Eighty Years (1906). In the latter volume she gives one paragraph to her marriage to another blind teacher at the institution. The two moved to Brooklyn, where Van Alstyne continued to write hymns and her husband worked as a music teacher until his death in 1902. One suspects, from Van Alstyne’s autobiographical volumes, that beneath her saccharine surface she was a shrewd businesswoman who prospered by presenting to the public the popular sentiments they wanted to hear. OTHER WORKS: Ode to the Memory of Captain John Underhill (1902). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Van Alstyne, F. C., Fanny Crosby’s Life-Story (1903). Van Alstyne, F. C., Memories of Eighty Years (1906). Reference works: NAW (1971). —DIANE LONG HOEVELER
VAN DUYN, Mona Born 9 May 1921, Waterloo, Iowa Daughter of Earl G. and Lora Kramer Van Duyn; married Jarvis Thurston, 1943 The first woman named as poet laureate of the U.S. (1992), Mona Van Duyn was educated at the University of Northern Iowa (B.A. 1942) and the University of Iowa (M.A. 1943), where she was an instructor at the Writer’s Workshop from 1943 to 1946. In 1946 she joined the faculty of the University of Louisville, leaving there in 1950 for a lectureship at Washington University in St. Louis. She later served as poetry consultant to the Olin Library Modern Literature Collection at Washington University, and was appointed Visiting Hurst Professor there in 1987. In 1973 she taught at the Salzburg (Austria) Seminar in American Studies; she also taught at the Breadloaf Writers Conferences. Van Duyn and her husband founded Perspective: A Quarterly of Literature and coedited the journal from 1947 to 1967. Van Duyn has received an impressive array of awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1991, and the prestigious
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Bollingen Prize (1971). She has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1966, 1985), the Academy of American Poets (1981), and the Guggenheim Foundation (1972). In addition to honorary degrees from Washington University and Cornell College, her honors also include the Shelley Memorial Prize (1987); National Book Award (1971); Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize, from Poetry Magazine (1968); Borestone Mountain Poetry Prize (1968); Hart Crane Memorial Award (1968); Helen Bullis Prize from Poetry Northwest (1964); and the Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize (1956). In 1985 Van Duyn became a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Van Duyn has been compared to such diverse poets as William Shakespeare, John Donne, Robert Browning, Wallace Stevens, Robert Lowell, and Elizabeth Bishop. Well received by critics, her work of almost four decades is frequently characterized as formalist. Examining the quotidian, her poetry is sometimes called ‘‘domestic,’’ a designation she decries for its sexism. She writes of married life and ordinary people, and speaks of love and its losses, often using ventriloquism to speak the stories of her family members. Sweet but painful, her poems provide glimpses into suburban life. Conventional in subject matter, they lack postmodern cynicism. Drawing from Greek mythology, the Bible, and employing colloquial language, her poetry combines the usual with the unusual. Her seventh book, Near Changes (1990, Pulitzer Prize, 1991), asks, ‘‘How can human love be unfearing?’’ and asserts Van Duyn’s belief in an essential goodness in human community. Even as she accuses the earth of ‘‘uncaring’’ in the ‘‘The Accusation,’’ she resolves that ‘‘no lie can conceal the truth / that our kind was built to be caring.’’ This world view permeates Van Duyn’s work. Praised for its seemingly effortless crafting of formality, storytelling, and wit into a poetics of transformation, Near Changes marks her passage from middle age. To See, To Take (1970, National Book Award, 1971) contextualizes the poet-speaker within a larger world, concentrating on observations of middle-class suburban life. Merciful Disguises: Published and Unpublished Poems (1973) acknowledges, in ‘‘Open Letter, Personal,’’ that ‘‘We know the quickest way to hurt each other,’’ but insists nevertheless, ‘‘We love.’’ Van Duyn reveals the disguises we use to distance ourselves from our deepest sorrows, to keep ourselves going despite the pain of living. In Letters from a Father and Other Poems (1983) Van Duyn projects an anecdotal, epistolary style as she explores relationships with aging parents. Autobiographical, the poems are without the high egocentricism of the confessional poets, and break through personal pain to celebrate joy and compassion. Emphasis on the power of love and its healing properties remains a hallmark of Van Duyn’s poetry. Preferring hope to despair, her work offers a vision where love peers through rage as it confronts the impossibility of satisfying human desire, quietly bringing gentleness to a world accustomed to hardness. With Firefall (1993) Van Duyn takes up the familiar domestic topics with gentle cynicism, writing in ‘‘We Are In Your Area’’ about the ceaseless requests for old household goods which she is very reluctant to discard: ‘‘old clothes that have learned our
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old bodies, / old dear castiron skillets, the old chairs / we sit on, reand re- covered since the fifties.’’ In ‘‘The Marriage Sculptor’’ she imagines the broken halves of one wrecked marriage transformed into two happier marriages, not ignoring the pain of ‘‘Time’s tempests’’ but seeing ‘‘a larger work’’ in the human lives ‘‘stronger than Time.’’ Van Duyn’s favorite themes of love and loss converge in this volume at an emergency room, in a National Park (Yosemite, scene for the ‘‘Falls’’ of fire in her anchor poem), in the deathbed of a poet (several, in fact), in beginnings and endings (each has a separate poem here). These poems are comforting because they acknowledge pain as part of the process of living, not something to be escaped but something to be savored for what we can learn from it—from her. Van Duyn has forged an equal place for women as poets in the 20th century not simply because of what she has done, but because of what she has not done. She has not insisted on special feelings or rights; she has not expected her readers to separate values from human experience or to divide those of one gender from the other. She has honored intimate family relationships and aging without shrinking from or exaggerating the difficulties of adjusting to either of these. Van Duyn encourages the reader to hope by showing the eternal present in the everyday, ‘‘Firefall still blazing bright in memory.’’ OTHER WORKS: Valentines to the Wide World: Poems (1958). A Time of Bees (1964). Bedtime Stories (1972). If It Be Not I (Poems 1959-1982) (1993). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1974). CANR (1982, 1998). CLC (1975, 1977, 1991). CP (1991). DLB (1980). FC (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: APR (Nov.-Dec. 1973). Antioch Review (Spring 1970). Carleton Miscellany (Spring/Summer 1974). Nation (4 May 1973). NR (6 Oct. 1973, 31 Dec. 1990). NYT (11 Jan. 1971, 21 June 1991). NYTBR (21 Nov. 1965, 2 Aug. 1970, 9 Dec. 1973, 18 Nov. 1990). Parnassus (1991). Poetry (Oct. 1990). Sewanee Review (Winter 1973). Virginia Quarterly Review (Spring 1965, Winter 1974). WP (10 April 1991, 15 June 1992). WPBW (6 Jan. 1974). —LOLLY OCKERSTROM, UPDATED BY KATHLEEN BONANN MARSHALL
VAN VORST, Bessie McGinnis Born 1873, New York, New York; died 18 May 1928, Paris, France Wrote under: Mrs. John Van Vorst Daughter of John Jr. and Lydia Matteson McGinnis; married John Van Vorst, 1899 (died); Robert H. Le Roux, 1914 Bessie McGinnis Van Vorst was educated in New York City at private academies for women. She took up writing as a career after the death of her first husband. While living in France with her
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sister-in-law, Marie Van Vorst, she served as a correspondent for the New York Evening Post and a contributor to Harper’s, Century, Revue des Deux Mondes, Saturday Evening Post, and Ladies’ Home Journal. The close association with her sister-inlaw was of crucial importance to the development of Van Vorst’s career. Her first two book-length publications were written in collaboration with Marie. After Van Vorst ceased actively writing herself, she continued to consult frequently with her sister-in-law throughout Marie’s more lengthy career. Their first novel, Bagby’s Daughter (1901) centers on the complications surrounding the rapid courtship and European honeymoon of a prominent American manufacturer’s daughter. Although quite comical, perhaps unintentionally, the moderately successful novel was dismissed by contemporary reviewers as ‘‘a wild-goose chase, mental, moral, physical and literary, leaving the reader uncertain whether he has been at the vaudeville or the grand opera.’’ Their second collaboration, The Woman Who Toils (1903), catapulted the two women into public prominence. To research material for this muckraking exposé of the working conditions, values, and aspirations of women wage earners, the two women from fashionable and well educated upper-middle-class families adopted pseudonyms and worked for several months in various mills and factories. In her section, Van Vorst—or Esther Kelley, as she called herself—relates her experiences in a Pittsburgh pickle factory, a western New York mill, and several Chicago clothing establishments. Van Vorst is especially disturbed by what she considers the moral and spiritual bondage of the working woman: ‘‘vulgar and prosaic, there is nothing in the language they use that suggests an ideal or any conception of the abstract. . . . What could be the result upon the mind and health of this frantic mechanical activity devoid of thought?’’ Although sympathetic to the plight of her coworkers, Van Vorst is critical of the younger women, who, she believes, worked only to satisfy an egotistical desire for shoddy finery. Van Vorst is in no way an advocate of equal pay for male and female workers. As a strident propagandist for the domestic orientation of women as the wives and mothers of the nation, Van Vorst sees the vast numbers of working women as potentially destructive to the family and feminine sensibilities. Believing effective reform would arise through altering working conditions and combatting the increasing tendency of American manufacturers toward shoddy mass production, Van Vorst espouses the theory most women wage earners should be taken out of the factories and put to work in the ‘‘industrial arts’’: lace-making, hand weaving, and embroidery. In her novel, The Issues of Life (1904), Van Vorst is as critical of women of her own class for what she perceived to be a willful shirking of domestic responsibilities as she was of wage-earning women. In what is essentially a melodramatic arraignment of club women, Van Vorst describes those disasters that befall women who embrace eccentric, frivolous, or egotistical theories. Only the heroine, Madeline Dillion, who quits the club and returns to her husband, escapes the crimes of infanticide, suicide, divorce, and reckless driving to which her less maternal friends succumb.
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Letters to Women in Love (1906) bears striking resemblance to today’s self-help manuals. Here again, Van Vorst’s focus is domestic as she counsels women on effective means of safeguarding an endangered hearth. ‘‘Fireside particulars’’ become the crux of all the social problems that besiege American society. The success of marriage, of the family as a viable, thriving unit and, ultimately, the future well-being of the nation depend on the ability of women to ameliorate, compromise, and cajole. Too often didactic and uncompromising in their delineation of women’s familial duties, Van Vorst’s works are not likely to enjoy any significant renewal of popularity or influence. Only The Woman Who Toils receives any attention today. But her writing, perhaps because of its limitations, does provide interesting insight into one aspect of the ongoing debate about the proper sphere of influence and activity of the American woman.
OTHER WORKS: A Popular History of France (1906). The Cry of the Children (1908). A Girl from China (1926).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Filler, L., The Muckrakers (1976). Hill, V. L., Strategy and Breadth: The Socialist-Feminist in American Fiction (dissertation, 1979). Maglin, N., Rebel Women Writers, 1894-1925 (dissertation, 1975). Other references: Bookman (April 1903). Critic (Jan. 1902, May 1904). Independent (26 May 1904, 10 Jan. 1907). Literary World (Feb. 1902, April 1904). Nation (19 Dec. 1901, 5 May 1904, 1 Nov. 1906). Overland Monthly (May 1903). —VICKY LYNN HILL
VAN VORST, Marie Born 23 November 1867, New York, New York; died 16 December 1936, Florence, Italy Daughter of Hooper C. and Josephine Treat Van Vorst; married Count Gaetano Gaiati, 1916 Marie Van Vorst was the daughter of a financially prosperous and socially prominent family, and she was educated by private tutors; but most of her best-known writings are animated by a conscious dedication to social reform. She most likely inherited this commitment to reform from her father who, during his tenure on the New York City Superior Court, was involved in an investigation of urban corruption which contributed to the demise of the Tweed Ring. Van Vorst began writing short stories, poems, and nonfiction essays for periodical publication during the late 1890s. Shortly after the death of her brother, John, she and her sister-in-law,
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Bessie, moved to France where they both served as correspondents for American journals. With only occasional visits to the U.S., primarily to gather research material for her writing, Van Vorst lived in various European cities until her death in 1936. Although she wrote for many American, French, and British periodicals, her association with Harper’s was the most sustained and significant. One of her most important assignments for Harper’s was a cultural series, ‘‘Rivers of the World’’ (1906-09), which included information gathered at the Seine, Tiber, and Nile rivers. Van Vorst began writing before her sister-in-law, but it was their collaboration on a novel and, particularly, on an exposé of women factory workers that initially brought the work of both women public attention. After the two ceased actively writing together, Bessie remained Van Vorst’s most constant friend, critic, and consultant. Van Vorst and Bessie returned to the U.S., assumed aliases, and worked in factories to gather information for The Woman Who Toils (1903). As ‘‘Bell Ballard,’’ Van Vorst worked in a shoe factory in Lynn, Massachusetts, and in cotton mills in South Carolina. Describing herself as a ‘‘mirror, expositor and mouthpiece’’ for working women, she was more sympathetic to her coworkers than Bessie. Although she never identified herself with these women, she was more understanding in her estimation of their values. Where Bessie criticized the women for their frivolity, Van Vorst saw in it an incipient rebellion against the deadening limitations of their lives. Similarly, she was more hopeful of reforms coming within the industrial workplace rather than by removing the women from the mills. Although sharply critical of ‘‘the abnormality, the abortion known as Anarchy, Socialism,’’ she championed the cause of labor unions: ‘‘Organize labor, therefore, so well that the work-woman who obtains her task may be able to continue it and keep her health and selfrespect.’’ Van Vorst’s experiences in the cotton mills provided her with enough information to write a fictionalized account of the situation in one of her better novels, Amanda of the Mill (1905). She presents both the history of how the hill people came to work in the mills and the world they found there, primarily through two characters—the somewhat idealized, but none the less interesting heroine, Amanda Henchley, and the man she loves, Henry Euston, a drunkard whose reformation is effected through the dual inspirations of Amanda and reform-oriented labor organizing. The novel is memorable for its accurate and concerned reporting of industrial issues. In Amanda of the Mill, Van Vorst leads her characters through a series of crises that could seemingly be resolved only through economic revolution. She avoids this conclusion through a propitious natural disaster, which clears the way for a new era without requiring confrontation with the problems the narrative so carefully raises. Although a tendency to equivocate also occurs in the later novels—in which dilemmas posed by marital incompatibility and illicit sexual passion predominate, and spouses conveniently die before virtue is endangered—these books are entertaining and occasionally of more lasting interest.
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The most significant of the later novels is Mary Moreland (1915), the story of a stenographer in love with and loved by her employer, a married Wall Street financier. In Mary Moreland, Van Vorst writes her most sophisticated discussion of the moral issues surrounding marital dissatisfaction and infidelity and creates her most complex and admirable heroine. Mary, a selfsupporting suffragist dedicated to her career while searching for a passionate love that is neither compromising nor limiting, is a memorable fictional portrait of a young American woman seeking her identity in a world of shifting social and sexual values. First excerpted in Colliers, War Letters of an American Woman (1916) is a record of Van Vorst’s experiences as a volunteer field hospital worker with the American Ambulance corps during the early months of World War I. Although primarily written to encourage American involvement in the war, it also provides interesting insight into Van Vorst’s life and associations. Although Van Vorst’s fiction fails to fulfill the promise engendered by her vivid moral and economic observations, the novels, especially Amanda of the Mills and Mary Moreland, deserve some renewal of critical interest. Perhaps because of her continued inability to solve the problems she raises without resorting to catastrophe and coincidence, Van Vorst’s writings provide a remarkable record of the turmoil of a society in transition. Although she never abandoned the traditional codes of behavior, she raised penetrating questions about their viability. OTHER WORKS: Bagsby’s Daughter (with B. Van Vorst, 1901). Philip Longstreth (1902). Poems (1903). Miss Desmond (1905). The Sin of George Warrener (1906). The Sentimental Adventures of Jimmy Bulstrode (1908). In Ambush (1909). First Love (1910). The Girl from His Town (1910). The Broken Bell (1912). His Love Story (1913). Big Tremaine (1914). War Poems (1916). Fairfax and His Bride (1920). Tradition (1921). The Queen of Karmania (1922). Sunrise (1924). Goodnight Ladies! (1931). The Gardenia (1933). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Blake, F., The Strike in the American Novel (1972). Filler, L., The Muckrakers (1976). Hill, V. L., Strategy and Breadth: The Socialist-Feminist in American Fiction (dissertation, 1979). Maglin, N., Rebel Women Writers, 1894-1925 (dissertation, 1975). Rose, L., ‘‘A Descriptive Catalogue of Economic and Politico-Economic Fiction in the United States, 1902-1909’’ (dissertation, 1936). Taylor, W., The Economic Novel in America (1942). Reference works: NAW (1971). Other references: Athenaeum (18 April 1908). Bookman (May 1902, April 1903, June 1905, Jan. 1910). Critic (Jan. 1902, Oct. 1903). Dial (1 Sept. 1906). Overland (May 1903). SR (18 August 1906). —VICKI LYNN HILL
VANDEGRIFT, Margaret See JANVIER, Margaret Thompson
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VANDERBILT, Amy Born 22 July 1908, New York, New York; died 27 December 1974, New York, New York Daughter of Joseph M. and Mary Brooks Vanderbilt; married Hans Knopf, 1945 Amy Vanderbilt grew up on Staten Island with the rich cultural inheritance of the wealthy Vanderbilt family. She was educated at the Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn, New York University, and the Heubi Institute in Switzerland, where she studied home economics. Vanderbilt began her career as an arbiter of manners with a stint as society reporter for the Staten Island Advance. She served as business manager for the American Spectator, worked as an account executive in an advertising firm, and served as vice president and later president of Publicity Associates, Inc., a public relations firm for a number of publishing houses. Vanderbilt took up Doubleday’s offer to write an etiquette book and spent four years in research and writing. With her often revised Complete Book of Etiquette (1952), she became the natural successor to Emily Post in the 20th-century field of common sense manners. She was an institution, combining the functions of adviser, consultant, editor, writer, and television and radio producer. Vanderbilt distinguishes between manners and custom: the first is largely an artificial and superimposed code, set by a small coterie of leaders, that people follow consciously and the second is the natural and unconscious response to social change and new contexts and relationships. With the dizzying rate of change in the political, economic, and social scenes, these two are rapidly merging into one. The comprehensive guidelines for the new contexts of post-World War I society provided in Emily Post’s Blue Book (1922) are further developed, elaborated, and updated for the post-World War II generation. Vanderbilt was hostess for a television program, It’s in Good Taste (1954-60), and a radio program, The Right Thing to Do (1960-62). Her ‘‘Amy Vanderbilt’s Etiquette’’ was a syndicated newspaper column, which ran from the early 1950s through 1974. She was also a regular contributor to Ladies’ Home Journal and an etiquette consultant to the U.S. State Department. As the new dean of American sociability, Vanderbilt held a prominent position in the increasingly female establishment of philosophers of public mores and manners—a guild of imaginative, adaptive, and inventive women writers, such as Emily Post, Jean Kerr, Peg Bracken, Abigail Van Buren, and Ann Landers. Like these others, Vanderbilt believed etiquette is at its heart a matter of fellow-feeling, of innovation, of a spirit of comfort and generosity, and of common sense, rather than the formal, prescribed ritual associated with the manuals of decorum of earlier eras. Vanderbilt’s Complete Book of Etiquette (reprinted 1995) is ‘‘a guide to gracious living rather than a rule book.’’ For the individual with a social conscience, it is a guide to discovering some common ground for behavior, which can be relied on even in the midst of a pluralistic society where other guidelines have been virtually abandoned.
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OTHER WORKS: Amy Vanderbilt’s Everyday Etiquette (1956, 1981). Amy Vanderbilt’s Complete Cook Book (1961). Amy Vanderbilt’s Success Program for Women (1964). BIBLIOGRAPHY: AB Bookman’s Weekly (20 Jan. 1975). CB (Feb. 1975). Newsweek (6 Jan. 1975). NYT (28 Dec. 1974, 29 Dec. 1974). Time (6 Jan. 1975). —MARGARET J. KING
VENDLER, Helen Hennessy Born 30 April 1933, Boston, Massachusetts Daughter of George and Helen Conway Hennessy; married Helen Vendler’s sophisticated and demanding method and style have earned her a reputation as America’s best ‘‘close reader’’ of poetry. She believes the close, passionate reading of a poem leads to the discovery of its human voice and emotion. Through her work as a scholar, critic, and teacher, Vendler offers readers the tools with which to understand and appreciate the artistry and power of poetry. From 1950 to 1954, Vendler studied at Emmanuel College in Boston, where she took her B.A. in chemistry, summa cum laude. In the following years, she studied at the University of Louvain under a Fulbright Fellowship and at Boston University. She received her Ph.D. in English and American literature in 1960 from Harvard University, where she is now a professor. Yeats’s Vision and the Later Plays (1963) is Vendler’s defense of A Vision against critics who find it incomprehensible or embarrassing as a statement of Yeats’ belief in gnosticism and a supernatural reality. Vendler believes critics stress Yeats’ philosophical and historical failure at the cost of the more successful aesthetic statement. In On Extended Wings: The Longer Poems of Wallace Stevens (1969), which won the Explicator Prize, Vendler tries to approximate Stevens’ actual experience in writing a line of poetry. She then scrutinizes the repetitions and variations of syntactical pattern, diction, and mood to elucidate what the poet is continually in the process of doing rather than what he is finally saying. She believes Stevens himself is unrelenting in demanding that poet and reader participate vigorously, line by line, in the metrical, metaphoric, grammatical, and intellectual action of the poem. In The Poetry of George Herbert (1975), Vendler explains her dissatisfaction with Herbert’s reputation as merely a beautiful phrasemaker whose expression of sentiments is wholly conventional. Like other critics, she finds beauty and originality in his language, but primarily she demonstrates his religious attitudes and use of religious conventions are also original. With The Odes of John Keats (1983), Vendler proposes the odes are best understood when studied together, in sequence. When read this way, she argues, the odes raise and attempt to
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resolve a series of formal and philosophical questions about the nature of art. Vendler’s original treatment of the odes as an artistic unity was welcomed by critics as a full and persuasive study of Keats’ great poems. Vendler studies Wallace Stevens’ shorter poems in Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire (1984). She hopes to correct what she considers to be a popular misconception—that his work is remote and cerebral. Instead, she focuses on the ‘‘disappointment of desire’’ in Stevens’ work, revealing the warmth and loneliness that permeate many of the poems. In 1995 Vendler published The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham and The Given and the Made: Strategies of Poetic Redefinition, both of which are based on lecture series. In The Breaking of Style, she examines the nature and significance of the changes during the careers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Seamus Heaney, and Jorie Graham. Vendler further explores the work of Irish poet Heaney in Seamus Heaney (1998). In The Given and the Made, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Rita Dove, and Graham are the subjects of Vendler’s discussion of how personal circumstances shape a poet’s themes. With The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1997), Vendler ignores the historical detective work, which is so often associated with the sonnets, and instead focuses on how and why the poems work. Her commentaries on the 154 sonnets offer new perspectives on the imaginative, stylistic, and technical features in these poems. A compact disk of her reading 65 sonnets is bound with the book. The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, and Critics (1988), a collection of previously published essays, includes discussions of contemporary poets, as well as articles on Wordsworth, Keats, and Whitman. In a particularly interesting introduction, Vendler explains her critical methods. Dismissing interpretation-centered and ideological criticism as ‘‘paraphrase and polemic,’’ she argues that a work of literature, like any work of art, can best be understood only through a thorough consideration of the work’s formal elements and their relationship to meaning. She calls her own method ‘‘aesthetic criticism’’ and claims that too often critics involved in both hermeneutic and ideological criticism overlook aesthetic achievement, thereby missing the essence of the artwork itself.
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Poets, a companion work to the Public Broadcasting System television series of the same name. Vendler also edited and introduced Wallace Stevens’ Poems (1985), and W. B. Yeats’ Selected Poems (1990). She has written regularly for the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, and the New York Times Book Review, and began as poetry critic for the New Yorker in 1978. Vendler is the recipient of numerous professional awards including the National Book Critics Circle award for Criticism (1980) and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1986-87). She was a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Singapore in 1986 and at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1988. For many years she served as a judge for the Pulitzer prize in poetry and since 1990 has been a member of the board of that organization. She was the first woman to be awarded the A. Kingsley Porter University Professorship, the highest academic distinction Harvard awards faculty members. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Donoghue, D., ‘‘The Supreme Fiction,’’ in NYRB (28 Nov. 1996). Pettingell, P., ‘‘Vendler’s Letter to the World,’’ in New Leader (18 Dec. 1995). Weiss, T., ‘‘Reviewing the Reviewer,’’ in APR (May-June 1996). Reference Works: CA (1979). CANR (1989). CB (1986.) MTCW (1991). Other references: Journal of American Studies (Aug. 1989). Nation (25 Dec. 1995, 29 Dec. 1997). New Boston Review (Mar. 1984). NYT (27 Nov. 1983). TLS (2 Mar. 1984, 24 May 1985, 8 July 1988). Wilson Quarterly (Winter 1984). —PATRICIA LEE YONGUE AND MELISSA BURNS, UPDATED BY JANETTE GOFF DIXON
VICTOR, Frances Fuller Born 23 May 1826, Rome, New York; died 14 November 1902, Portland, Oregon Also wrote under: Frances Barritt, Dorothy D., Florence Fane, Frances Fuller Daughter of Adonijah and Lucy A. Williams Fuller; married Jackson Barritt, 1853 (divorced 1862); Henry C. Victor, 1862 (died 1875)
Because her method and style are so sophisticated and because of her belief that to enjoy poetry at all one must be conscious of the use of a wide range of technical devices, Vendler appeals most to other critics and scholars. In her reviews and essays for magazines, she becomes more accessible to the general reader. Some of these works have been collected in Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets (1980), which won a National Book Critics’ Circle award, and in Soul Says: On Recent Poetry (1995).
Frances Fuller Victor was the eldest of five daughters, descended from an old colonial family. Victor and her sister Metta, with whom she wrote poetry, received their schooling at a young ladies seminary in Wooster, Ohio. At the age of nine she wrote verses on her slate and directed her fellow students in plays she had written. The publication of her verses in the Cleveland Herald in 1840 marked the beginning of a long writing career.
Vendler edited the Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry (1985), published in England as the Faber Book of Contemporary American Poetry (1986), and served as poetry editor of the Harper Anthology of American Literature (1987). In 1987 she edited and contributed to Voices and Visions: American
Victor’s turbulent private life frequently interrupted her prolific writing career. When her father died in 1850, she stopped writing poetry and returned home to live with her family, who by then had moved to St. Clair, Michigan. Her first marriage broke up after a period of homesteading in Omaha, but Victor didn’t obtain
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a divorce until March, 1862, two months before she married her sister’s brother-in-law, Henry Clay Victor, a navy engineer. Victor and her husband moved to the West Coast, but his position in the navy often took him away for long periods of sea duty. Left alone, Victor embarked on a successful career as a historian, and continued it after her husband was drowned in 1875 in the wreck of the Pacific. As teenagers, Victor and her sister Metta together wrote poetry and published it locally and eventually in the New York Home Journal. In 1848 they moved to New York, and in 1851 they published Poems of Sentiment and Imagination, a collection of descriptive and highly melodramatic poetry. The remainder of their poetry was written and published separately. After Victor moved west in 1862, she wrote numerous poems of a more descriptive quality for Western magazines. In 1848 Victor published her first melodramatic romance, Anizetta, the Guajira; or, The Creole of Cuba. She abandoned this genre when she discovered she had more talent as a realistic dime novelist. For her brother-in-law’s editions of Beadle’s Dime Novels, Victor wrote East and West; or, The Beauty of Willard’s Mill (1862) and The Land Claim: A Tale of the Upper Missouri (1862), both realistically treating Nebraska farm life, especially the hardships faced by women. Her short stories, published in the Western magazines, reflect this same concern for the hard lot of frontier women; the regional writing of Bret Harte was a major influence on these realistic short stories. Victor’s work as a satirist and crusader began when she moved to the West Coast in the 1860s. As Florence Fane, she took satiric pokes at all levels of society in regular contributions to the San Francisco Bulletin and the Golden Era. Her brief crusade as a temperance supporter resulted in one temperance tract, The Women’s War with Whiskey (1874). She also served as a columnist for the Call-Bulletin under the name of Dorothy D. The 30 years Victor spent as a historian and folklorist proved the most successful aspect of her writing career. She discovered history was her forte in 1864 when she began studying local Oregon history. She interviewed many Western pioneers and researched family papers and archives. The River of the West (1870), based on an interview with Joseph Meek, is his first person account of life as a Rocky Mountain trapper. Victor acknowledges in her introduction her debt to Washington Irving’s Astoria (1836) and Captain Bonneville (1837), which reveal a romantic attachment to historical places. Victor’s second attempt at this new genre, All Over Oregon and Washington (1872) contains less folklore than The River of the West. The book covers the discovery, early history, natural features, resources, and business and social conditions of these two states. Victor’s response to rapid social and economic change is nostalgic. She emphasizes her disappointment at the close of the frontier, but points with pride to the cultural developments of the Northwest Coast. Victor’s major historical endeavor was her contribution to Hubert Howe Bancroft’s voluminous History of the Pacific States (1890); she contributed to all but two of the 28 volumes. Victor
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joined the staff as a chief assistant and its only woman in 1878, three years after the death of her husband. By this time, she had accumulated a wealth of journalistic, literary, and historic experience. As a member of Bancroft’s staff, she prepared all of the twovolume history of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Montana and was the major writer and researcher for the history of Utah. She also wrote over half of the two California volumes and researched Northwest Coast and California Inter Pocula. The series is written in textbook style, but Victor’s volumes, like her other historical works, exhibit a sensitive response to the aesthetics of the land and a nostalgia for the past. Victor’s historical accounts reflect a keen understanding of the economic and social elements of a slowly diminishing frontier; these works also reveal a seemingly contradictory perception of the West as a land of hardships and cherished memories. Her main contribution to American letters rests with these history and travel books and their blend of fact and romance. Her realistic dime novels and short stories, her sentimental and descriptive poetry, and her satiric and crusading pieces, however, also earn a place for her in American letters. OTHER WORKS: The New Penelope, and Other Stories and Poems (1877). Eleven Years in the Rocky Mountains (1879). The Early Indian Wars of Oregon (1894). Poems (1900). Letters to Matthew P. Deady, F. G. Young, and Others, 1866-1902 (1902). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Caughey, J. W., Hubert Howe Bancroft: Historian of the West (1946). Morris, W. A. ‘‘Historian of the Northwest: A Woman Who Loved Oregon,’’ in In Memoriam: Frances Fuller Victor; Born May 23, 1826; Died November 14, 1902 (1902). Morris, W. A., ‘‘The Origin and Authorship of the Bancroft Pacific States Publications,’’ in Oregon Historical Society Quarterly 5 (1903). Reference works: NAW (1971). —DONNA CASELLA KERN
VICTOR, Metta (Victoria) Fuller Born 2 March 1831, Erie, Pennsylvania; died 26 June 1885, Hohokus, New Jersey Wrote under: George E. Booram, Corinne Cushman, Eleanor Lee Edwards, Metta Fuller, Walter T. Gray, Rose Kennedy, Mrs. Mark Peabody, Seeley Regester, the Singing Sybil, Mrs. Henry J. Thomas, Metta Victor Daughter of Adonijah (Adanigh?) and Lucy Williams Fuller; married Dr. Morse, circa 1850; Orville J. Victor, 1856; children: nine Five years younger than her sister Frances, Metta Fuller Victor was eight years old when the family moved to Wooster Village, Ohio. Soon thereafter, she began her writing career. By the age of thirteen she was publishing in journals and papers. By fifteen, she had published The Last Days of Tul: A Romance of the
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VINING
Lost Cities of Yucatan (1846). The same year, Victor began publishing as ‘‘The Singing Sybil’’ in Willis and Morris’ New York Home Journal. Her poetry was much praised, but after producing one joint poetry volume with her sister, she turned her greatest energies to the writing of stories and novels.
created a comic realm populated by bad boys, bashful men, and prosperous pork merchants. During the heyday of the American dime novel and serial Victor was in great demand. At one point in the 1870s, Victor received $25,000 for exclusive story rights from the New York Weekly.
Victor’s early novels are often moralistic as well as melodramatic and focus on a particular social ill. One example, The Senator’s Son (1853; sometimes called Parke Madison), is a temperance novel. It was also Victor’s first bestseller, running to 10 editions in the U.S., and selling some 30,000 copies in pirated British editions.
Victor could easily be labeled a hack writer. But she was also a writer of undeniable skill whose inventiveness anticipated the needs of her reading public. Sensational thrillers like The Dead Letter opened new frontiers in popular fiction and have the power to entertain even a modern reader.
There is some evidence that, by 1851, while living in Michigan, Victor was married to a Dr. Morse. Nothing is known about this marriage, which does not appear in records for St. Clair, Washtenaw, or Oakland County, Michigan. Her first marriage is even more mysterious than that of her sister to Jackson Barritt. It is known that in 1856 Victor married Orville J. Victor, a young journalist who would soon become one of the architects of the Beadle Dime Novel empire. Besides untold poems, stories, articles, manuals, and novels, Victor produced nine children. She was still an active writer when she died at age fifty-four of cancer.
OTHER WORKS: Poems of Sentiment and Imagination (with F. F. Victor, 1851). Fresh Leaves from Western Woods (1852). Fashionable Dissipation (1854). Mormon Wives (1856). The Arctic Queen (1858). Miss Slimmen’s Window (1859). The Dime Cook Book (1859). The Dime Recipe Book (1859). The Backwood’s Bride (1860). Myrtle: The Child of the Prairie (1860). Uncle Ezekiel and his Exploits on Two Continents (1861). The Emerald Necklace (1861). The Unionist’s Daughter (1862). The Gold Hunters (1863). Jo Daviess’ Client (1863). The Country Cousin (1864). The Two Hunters (1865). The Housewife’s Manual (1865). Who Was He? (1866). Laughing Eyes (1868). The Betrayed Bride (1869). Black Eyes and Blue (1876). Passing the Portal (1876). Brave Barbara (1877). The Hunted Bride (1877). Guilty or Not Guilty (1878). The Locked Heart (1879). A Wild Girl (1879). A Bad Boy’s Diary (1880). The Black Riddle (1880). Madcap: The Little Quakeress (1880). The Mysterious Guardian (1880). Pretty and Proud (1880). Pursued to the Altar (1880). The Blunders of a Bashful Man (1881). At His Mercy (1881). Miss Slimmen’s Boarding House (1882). A Woman’s Sorrow (1882). The Bad Boy Abroad (1883). Morley Beeches (1883). Naughty Girl’s Diary (1883). Abijah Beanpole in New York (1884). Mrs. Rasher’s Curtain Lectures (1884). The Bad Boy at Home (1885). A Good Boy’s Diary (1885). The Brown Princess (1888). The Phantom Wife (1888). Born to Betray (1890). The Gay Captain (1891). Who Owned the Jewels? (1891). The Georgie Papers (1897).
Not surprisingly, Victor was one of Beadle’s prime resources. She edited their journal, the Home, and was the author of manuals and cookbooks as well as fiction. She produced more than 20 books for Beadle. Dime Novel Number Four was Victor’s Alice Wilde (1860). Her most popular Beadle novel was Maum Guinea and Her Plantation Children, first published in 1861. This impassioned story of slave life is said to have been praised by both President Lincoln and Henry Ward Beecher. It sold some 100,000 copies in the U.S. and was also reprinted widely in Britain. Although Victor is perhaps best known for sensationalist sermons on issues like temperance and slavery, her most important contribution is probably her landmark work in the American detective novel. Under the pseudonym Seeley Regester, Victor produced The Dead Letter. First published by Beadle in 1866 (but believed to have been originally published two years earlier), The Dead Letter is one of the first detective novels. It antedates, by at least 12 years, Anna Katharine Green’s The Leavenworth Case, which was long believed to be the first American detective novel. Still a highly readable tale of treachery, true love, and murder, The Dead Letter features a professional gentleman sleuth named Mr. Burton. Besides the help of the young hero, Redfield, Burton also relies on the considerable talents of his young daughter, a psychic. Victor produced a second novel as Seeley Regester, The Figure Eight; or, The Mystery of Meredith Place (later called A Woman’s Hand) in 1869. Other novels by Victor during this period, although not pure detective puzzles, feature violent crimes and their detection. One example, Too True: A Story of Today (1868), was published under Victor’s real name and features a good deal of detection by a woman artist. Victor deserves recognition as one of the earliest creators of the detective novel and as a writer with facility in any formula of popular fiction. She wrote romance, pioneer adventure, detective, sensation, and social issue novels. Late in her career she also
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Johannsen, A., The House of Beadle and Adams, Vol. 2 (1950). Other references: Cosmopolitan Art Journal (March 1857). —KATHLEEN L. MAIO
VINING, Elizabeth Gray Born 6 October 1902, Germantown, Pennsylvania Also writes under: Elizabeth Janet Gray Daughter of John G. and Anne Izard Gray; married Morgan Vining, 1929 (died 1934) Elizabeth Gray Vining, of Scottish descent, was born into a Quaker family and a Quaker environment. She attended Germantown schools and later received a B.A. from Bryn Mawr (1923) and a B.S. in library science from Drexel Institute in
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Philadelphia in 1926 (now Drexel University). Her husband was a professor at the University of North Carolina. After his death in an automobile accident in 1934, Vining traveled widely, doing research for her historical novels. When World War II made travel impossible, Vining worked for the American Friends Service Committee as a writer of reports, articles, and appeals. In 1946 Vining was selected by American officials, at the behest of Emperor Hirohito, to tutor Crown Prince Akihito of Japan. She was the first foreigner permitted inside the living quarters of the imperial palace. Vining was the tutor of Akihito’s brother and three sisters as well, and became so close to the cloistered imperial family that she played cards with the emperor and empress. Vining published two accounts of her time in Japan, the bestselling Windows for the Crown Prince (1952) and Return to Japan (1960), the story of her return as a visitor to the country she had left 10 years earlier. Interest in Vining and these books was revived when Akihito ascended to the throne in 1988. Vining also authored other nonfiction works, which were imbued with her Quaker heritage. These include Contributions of the Quakers (1939), Friend of Life: The Biography of Rufus M. Jones (1958), and her autobiography, Quiet Pilgrimmage (1970). Vining is a master of the art of recreating a historical period, with all its sights, sounds, and smells, and of creating realistic, believable characters to people her recreated worlds. Her greatest achievement in historical fiction for children, Adam of the Road (1942), won a Newbery award for excellence. It is the story of a 14th-century boy, son of a minstrel, who loses and then regains his father and his dog. Adam’s journey through southeastern England is filled with fragments of English ballads and French lays and with fascinating details of life in inns, on farms, and in monastery schools. Whether she is writing for children or for adults, whether her treatment is essentially biographical, as in Flora: A Biography (1966)—the story of Flora MacDonald, who is credited with saving the life of Charles II—or novelistic, as in Take Heed of Loving Me (1964)—based on the life of John Donne—Vining brings the same careful attention to finding and evaluating both primary and secondary sources. Moreover, her gift for creating characters allows her to make Flora, Donne, William Penn, and the young Walter Scott into real people rather than historical abstractions. Vining has had similar success with the contemporary family story, exemplified by The Fair Adventure (1940) and Sandy (1945), winner of the Herald Tribune Spring Festival Award. Although Vining has made important contributions as a chronicler of the lives of important Quakers and of the education of the Crown Prince of Japan, her greatest contribution to contemporary letters is to be found in her juvenile fiction, especially her historical novels. Vining lives in retirement in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. OTHER WORKS: Meredith’s Ann (1929). Tilly Tod (1929). Meggy MacIntosh (1930). Tangle Garden (1932). Jane Hope (1933). Young Walter Scott (1935). Beppy Marlowe of Charles Town
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(1936). Penn (1938). Anthology with Comments (1942). The Virginia Exiles (1955). The Cheerful Heart (1959). I Will Adventure (1962). I, Roberta (1969). The Taken Girl (1973). Mr. Whittier (1974). Being Seventy: The Measure of a Year (1978). Harnessing Pegasus: Inspiration and Meditation (1978). John Woolman, Quaker Saint (1981). A Quest There Is (1982).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Junior Book of Authors (1951). Encyclopedia of Japan: Japanese History and Culture from Abacus to Zori (1991). Other references: Books (10 May 1942). NYT (30 Nov. 1930, 2 Oct. 1988). SR (9 Apr. 1966). —KATHARYN F. CRABBE, UPDATED BY ANGELA WOODWARD
VIRAMONTES, Helena María Born 26 February 1954, Los Angeles, California Daughter of Serafin and María LaBrada Viramontes; married Eloy Rodríguez, 1983; children: Pilar, Eloy Helena María Viramontes is a short story writer, editor, and screenwriter, as well as faculty member at Cornell University. She was born in East Los Angeles and graduated from Garfield High School. Growing up in a working-class family with eight brothers and sisters, she learned about hard work at an early age. If working 20 hours a week while carrying a full load at Immaculate Heart College (B.A., 1975) were not enough, she had the added pressure of being one of only five Chicanas in her class. Her first collection of short fiction, The Moths and Other Stories was published 10 years after college, in 1985. Some of the stories, especially ‘‘Growing,’’ have now been republished in several anthologies. This early fiction presents Chicana subjects who are a contradictory blend of strengths and weaknesses, struggling against lives of unfulfilled potential and restrictions forced upon them because they are women. While racial prejudice and the economic and social oppression of Chicanos form the backdrop, Viramontes focuses her narrative lens on the cultural values that shape women’s lives and against which they struggle with varying degrees of success. Most of her stories develop a conflict between a Chicana and the man who represents the maximum authority in her life, either father or husband, i.e., society mores dictated by the patriarch. To assume more independence and responsibility in their lives, these women must break with years of indoctrination by the church. In ‘‘Birthday,’’ Alice’s abortion radically redefines her relationship to her religion. In ‘‘The Long Reconciliation,’’ Amanda’s decision to abort because she cannot bear to ‘‘watch a child slowly rot’’ in poverty defies the values of her husband as well as the
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dictates of the priest: ‘‘It is so hard being female, Amanda, and you must understand that this is the way it was meant to be.’’ The main character in ‘‘The Broken Web’’ reveals her disillusionment with ‘‘a distant God.’’ ‘‘Her children in time would forgive her. But God? He would never understand. He was a man, too.’’ In most cases, Viramontes’ characters pay dearly for breaking with traditional values, and the exploration of their sexuality outside the bounds of cultural norms often brings negative consequences. The two women who abort are either wracked with guilt or ostracized by their communities. By murdering her husband, the nameless woman of ‘‘The Broken Web’’ breaks a cycle of use and abuse but suffers both literal incarceration and the belief that she has condemned her soul to eternal punishment. ‘‘Growing’’ and ‘‘The Moths’’ explores the relationship between the culture and female sexuality in that crucial phase in the life of a Chicana when she ceases to be a girl and must accept her role as ‘‘woman.’’ In ‘‘Growing,’’ Naomi rebels against the mandate that her life must change because her body has changed. When she asks for an explanation, her father responds in Spanish, ‘‘Tú eres mujer’’ (you are a woman, or a female), and her mother says nothing. She understands that she will always have other duties than her brother because she is a woman, and that she must be chaperoned, or watched carefully, also because she is a woman. ‘‘The Moths’’ also depicts the coercive socialization of adolescent girls in femininity. The adolescent tomboy of the story is acutely aware that she is ‘‘different’’ from her ‘‘pretty’’ and ‘‘nice’’ older sisters. Estranged from her mother and sisters, she is close to her grandmother, whose body she bathes after her death in a cleansing ritual that is also a rite of passage. The words she whispers, ‘‘I heard you, abuelita. . .I heard you,’’ suggest that she may have inherited from her grandmother the strength to alter her culture’s definitions of ‘‘man’’ and ‘‘woman.’’ Two of Viramontes’ strongest stories, for demonstrating in writing the ethnic and gender barriers to obtaining voice in the U.S. society, are ‘‘The Cariboo Cafe’’ from her book The Moths and ‘‘The Jumping Bean’’ published in 1995 in Chicana (W)rites: On Word and Film. In ‘‘Cariboo Cafe,’’ a technique of unheard, parallel monologues provides for striking expression: a third-world feminist’s meditation on the function of silence and the overtly sociopolitical commentary on the plight of those individuals displaced by either economic necessity or political horrors. The illiterate, the silent, the unintelligible, the senselessly violent, and those driven mad by life in extreme poverty all appear in quick strokes before the reader’s eyes, as they come to the ‘‘zero zero cafe,’’ a virtual no-man’s-land. The police and strangers are to be feared at all times; these individuals’ only safety lies in silence. ‘‘The Jumping Bean,’’ written several years later, represents an important moment in Viramontes’ writing for the integration of the competing discourses of ethnicity, gender, and the aesthetic. A father brings home a bag of jumping beans, the result of an ethnic ridicule he suffers at his job, and gives them to his daughters to
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play with. While a cruel joke was played on him, he turns the beans to a positive act by giving them to his children for playthings. His eldest daughter, however, wants to free the caterpillar in each bean, and diligently works at cracking the beans open, thus metaphorically freeing her ethnicity. When she is scolded, however, and told to account for one last bean, her younger sister swallows the bean rather than have it turned over, directly confronting her own fear and her father. The daughters, who express their pain when they are silenced by covering their mouths with their hands, have symbolically placed themselves in the dark interior of a jumping bean. The jumping beans represent speech and empowerment as well as the potential to overcome ethnic slurs and patriarchal silence. The father’s behavior, however, is seen to be caused in part by harsh working conditions and the cruelty of coworkers. Viramontes has said that her writing of this story helped her develop male characters more fully in her later work. In The Moths, her stories in effect screamed and shouted against the pain her female characters experienced, even as they were silenced. In later stories and especially in her novel Under the Feet of Jesus (1995), male characters are more ‘‘complicated.’’ The principal male character in this novel, Perfecto, makes many sacrifices for his family, but is about to leave when he senses his common-law wife is pregnant again. Even so, he is seen as a human being who has been worn down by the conditions under which migrants must work. And he is a help to Estrella (the mother’s oldest child) as she finds her own voice in this migrant family that keeps its civil papers (proving citizenship in this country) tucked into the feet of the plaster statue of Jesus disassembled and reassembled and mounted on an altar each time the family moves. Eventually, the statue is broken, and Estrella symbolically replaces the image as she stands tall atop the barn she has been forbidden to enter. While accomplishing a superb work of fiction in Under the Feet of Jesus, Viramontes also continues to study and write critically. In 1987 she collaborated on a first book with fellow Los Angeleno, María Herrera-Sobek, editing Chicana Creativity and Criticism: Charting New Frontiers in American Literature, one of the first books of criticism on Hispanic writing by women. A provocative combination of original poetry, prose, criticism, and visual art, the book documented the continuing growth of literature by and about Chicanas. Through innovative use of language and images, the editors collected 1970s and 1980s discourse on economic and social injustice, gender roles, and female sexuality critical theory. Seven years later, Viramontes collaborated again with Herrera-Sobek on Chicana (W)rites: On Word and Film. Viramontes has been awarded two consecutive first prize awards in fiction by the California State University at Los Angeles’ Statement magazine, and a third prize award in fiction from the University of California at Irvine. In 1989 she received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship. Viramontes was selected from a national pool of nominees by Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez to participate in a ten-day storytelling workshop sponsored by the Sundance Institute in
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Utah. She completed an M.F.A. in creative writing at the University of California at Irvine in 1997, and is working on a novel titled Their Dogs Came with Them and her second collection of short stories, called Paris Rats in East Los Angeles. She lives in Ithaca, New York, and teaches at Cornell University.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Corpi, L., ed., Máscaras (1997). McCracken, E., New Latina Narrative: The Feminine Space of Postmodern Ethnicity (1999). Rebolledo, T. D., Women Singing in the Snow (1995). Talking Back: Toward a Latin American Feminist Literary Criticism (1992). Reference works: CA (1979). CANR (1989). MTCW (1991). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Américas Review (Fall-Winter 1987; Summer 1989). Chasqui-Revista de Literatura Latinoamericana (Nov. 1995). Journal of American Studies (Aug. 1989). New Boston Review (Mar. 1984). NYT (27 Nov. 1983). TLS (2 Mar. 1984, 24 May 1985, 8 July 1988). Wilson Quarterly (Winter 1984). Women’s Studies (1989). —YVONNE YARBRO-BEJARANO AND ELIZABETH COONROD MARTINEZ
VOIGT, Cynthia Born 25 February 1942, Boston, Massachusetts Daughter of Frederick C. and Elise Keeney Irving; married Walter Voigt, 1974; children: Jessica, Peter A graduate of Smith College (1963), Cynthia Voigt places independent, resilient, and intelligent young women at the center of all but two of her novels. She made her debut in the children’s literature field in 1981 with Homecoming, the first of her Tillerman stories, which earned immediate critical applause. The seven novels in the Tillerman family saga form the core of Voigt’s substantial contributions to realistic young adult literature. Abandoned by their mother in a shopping mall parking lot, thirteen-year-old Dicey leads her siblings, intelligent James, reliable Sammie, and gifted Maybeth, on a long search for family. Homecoming documents their arduous journey from Massachusetts to their grandmother’s house in Maryland. Dicey’s Song (1982), winner of the Newbery Medal, explores their new family constellation. Sons from Afar (1987) depicts James and Sammie’s attempts to find their father, while Seventeen Against the Dealer (1989) concludes the cycle with Dicey’s encounter with her drifter father as she achieves a hard-earned focus on the future. The three satellite novels, A Solitary Blue (1983), The Runner (1985), and Come a Stranger (1986), maintain the Chesapeake Bay setting integral to the Tillerman books while each tells
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the story of a relative or friend connected to the family. The Runner completes an intricate portrayal of their grandmother before the arrival of Dicey and her siblings. A Solitary Blue develops the character of Jeff Greene, Dicey’s first friend in Crisfield, who becomes her steadfast boyfriend. Come a Stranger concentrates on Dicey’s schoolmate, Mina Smiths, who feels the burn of racial prejudice when she is excluded from an all-white dance camp. As she does with all of her characters, Voigt imbues each Tillerman with the fiber of individuality and the substance of family. Hard physical work, belief in positive change, and sheer will drive these determined characters. Love, generosity, and mutual respect temper them and deepen their emotional ties. Similar qualities within interdependent relationships characterize The Vandemark Mummy (1991) in which an intelligent, tenacious brother and sister team up to defeat a villain and solve a mystery in a small college town. David and Jonathan (1992) explores the ties of friendship as a Holocaust survivor disrupts a New England family. Essential human bonds infuse not only Voigt’s realistic novels but also those drawing on fantasy and myth. A tense gothic novel, The Callender Papers (1983), unearths dark family secrets as Jean Wainwright discovers her inner resources. Building Blocks (1984) transports Brann Connell from modern times to a recent past where he confronts his father as a boy. Jackaroo (1985) and On Fortune’s Wheel (1990) share the same mythical setting of Kingdom but are separated in time by two generations. Voigt reshapes the well-known Robin Hood tale with vigor and freshness in Jackaroo, while the later book relates the escape and survival of spirited Birlie, Jackaroo’s granddaughter, and her devoted companion, Orien, in a riveting adventure and love story. Orfe (1992) casts the Orpheus myth into a contemporary setting. Tree by Leaf (1988) also includes elements of the fantastic as it tells the very real story of a World War I soldier’s agonizing return to his neglected family in Maine. Since the early 1990s, Voigt has produced high caliber, unflinchingly honest young adult novels in both the realistic and fantasy genres. She has continued to garner high praise and a loyal readership. The Wings of a Falcon (1993) is her third book in the world of Kingdom. It is the story of two boys who together survive childhood on the island of a sadistic man called the Damall. The two very different heroes, one brave and self-assured, the other more reflective and likened in his resiliency to a strong bendable sapling, travel into brutal adventures together, undergoing the traditional rigors of the heroic quest. Yet Voigt’s story is never stock. Rather, by dint of the author’s fine prose and gift for storytelling, it is a gripping tale that becomes a reflection on the nature of heroism and identity, friendship, ethics, and love. The action of When She Hollers (1994) takes place over the course of one day in the painfully realistic life of a seventeen-year-old girl who has been repeatedly molested by her stepfather. Voigt tells the tale unsparingly from Tish’s point of view, true to her difficult and broken mental-emotional state.
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Bad Girls (1996) and its sequel are funny, unrepentant stories of Mikey and Margalo, two likable bad girls with bravado and smarts. In the first book, they become friends—and allies in power—while in the fifth grade class of Mrs. Chemsky, which is where all the action takes place. It is a setting Voigt is familiar with from her years as a teacher, and this shows in the authenticity of her depiction of classroom cliques, factions, and power struggles. Voigt writes adeptly beautiful fiction about interesting, wellrealized characters in sometimes desperate situations. She writes without moralizing or shying away from the gritty and difficult realities of life. Her consistency alone would win her readers. She can be counted on to tell a ‘‘rattlin’ good tale’’—one enlivened by unexpected plot twists but satisfying in its honest, complete resolution. Her portrayals of trustworthy, capable adolescents can empower readers to effect meaningful change, and she shares with them her vision of a better world, strengthened by human connectedness.
OTHER WORKS: Tell Me If the Lovers Are Losers (1982). Izzy Willy-Nilly (1986). Stories About Rosie (1986). Glass Mountain (1991).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Drew, B. A., The 100 Most Popular Young Adult Authors (1996). Felps, M. C., ‘‘Dicey’s Story: A Contemporary Hero Following an Established Path’’ (thesis, 1992). Gillespie, J. T. and C. J. Naden, The Newberry Companion (1996). Henke, J. T., Children’s Literature in Education (1985). Rahamut, J. C. ‘‘Family Relationships in Selected Young Adult Novels by Cynthia Voigt and Sue Ellen Bridgers’’ (thesis, 1995). Reid, S. W., Presenting Cynthia Voigt (1995). Sutherland, Z., Newbery and Caldecott Medal Books: 1976-1985 (1986). Reference works: CA (1982). CLR (1987). CANR (1986). CLC (1984). Helbig, A. K., and A. R. Perkins, Dictionary of American Children’s Fiction (1986, 1993). SATA (1987). TCCW (1989). Other references: Children’s Literature in Education (Spring 1985). CSM (13 May 1983, 7 June 1985, 1 Nov. 1985). Horn Book (Aug. 1983). Language Arts (Dec. 1983, Dec. 1985). PW (July 1994). SLJ (Nov. 1983). WPBW (1 July 1985). —CATHRYN M. MERCIER, UPDATED BY JESSICA REISMAN
VOIGT, Ellen Bryant Born 9 May 1943, Danville, Virginia Daughter of Lloyd G. and Zue Yeatts Bryant; married Francis G. W. Voigt, 1965; children: Julia, William ‘‘The fight is on between the will to live and the nature to die,’’ wrote Ellen Glasgow in Vein of Iron (1935), set in the
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Piedmont area of Virginia. Ellen Bryant Voigt’s poetry carries on this contest with passion and persistence. Voigt grew up in a family of Southern Baptists rooted for generations in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, knowing rural life not as pastoral but as daily reality. Her mother was an elementary schoolteacher. Her own life growing up was mainly music, her most crucial teacher her music teacher; she worked her way through college and graduate school by playing the piano in various settings. She later wrote (in ‘‘The Chosen’’) that when a ‘‘clear melody / comes in to represent a grieving heart, / it will do so as a brook, rushing over stones, / approximates a flock of birds rising.’’ A graduate of Converse College (1964), Voigt earned an M.F.A. at the University of Iowa (1966), where she studied with Donald Justice. Settling in rural Vermont, she joined the core literature and writing faculty of the Adult Degree Program at Goddard College. There, in 1976, she founded the country’s first low-residency M.F.A. program for writers, believing many writers, and particularly women, could benefit from a program that did not obligate them to be in residence throughout the term. In 1980 the faculty of the program transplanted itself as a body to Warren Wilson College in North Carolina, where Voigt continued to teach and beginning in 1984, to serve as chair of the academic board. She has held many other teaching positions and received many grants and awards, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. In Voigt’s first book of poems, Claiming Kin (1976), a strong physical compassionateness asserts itself in and against the wrenchings and separations of family life. The poet is gifted with lucid perception, musical speech, and a controlling sense of shapely form, ‘‘following the taut strands / that span flower and drain spout, / down the long loops, moving / through the spider’s whole house’’ (‘‘Dialogue: Poetics’’). But her moral imagination is with the drowned, buried, and violated; it springs from something vital and inarticulate. Of the flailing body of a decapitated hen, she writes, ‘‘I knew it was this / that held life, gave life, / and not the head with its hard contemplative eye’’ (‘‘The Hen’’). The Forces of Plenty (1983, reprinted 1996) is alert to the delicate balances and subtle patterns that preserve love and trust in the world and sustain life in the face of danger. Often, as in the marriage poem ‘‘Liebesgedicht,’’ where recurring masculine and feminine half-rhymes support a meditation of selfhood and otherness, she dwells on the fragility of connection. Momentarily suspended between love and loss, these poems are filled with poignant longing for a world where we ‘‘are buoyed past our individuating fear, / and. . .memory is not, as now, a footprint filling with water.’’ Voigt’s third book, The Lotus Flowers (1987), leaves behind the stillness-in-motion of the lyric to embrace a more textured, inclusive, open world of narrative. It is a collection of elegies, but a newfound security of tone and richness of emotional, circumstantial, and symbolic reference enable the poems to reach beyond
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grief and loss toward a vision of community. The stars, which in an earlier poem for her father had failed to promise immortality, here are seen as constellations, even as the poet, learning to recognize her own mortality, gains new access to the world around her. ‘‘Staring down into her losses,’’ she ‘‘fills her throat with air and sings,’’ and even, in the last poem, dances with ‘‘all those who cannot speak / but only sing.’’ Two Trees: Poems (1992) refuses to rest in the achieved vision and art of The Lotus Flowers. Seeking truth, wary of the beautiful, these elliptic and difficult, often angry, bitter, or sardonic poems, refuse to mask the pain and cold-blooded savagery of the world. Art must get outside of itself, Voigt insists, must be ‘‘flung like a rope into the crater of hell’’ (‘‘Song and Story’’): only so can the knowledge of good and evil, in the myth of the title poem, lead us beyond our limits, toward a vision of the forever inaccessible tree of everlasting life.
OTHER WORKS: Kyrie (1995). Poets Teaching Poets: Self and the World (editor with G. Orrs, 1996). The Flexible Lyric (1999). Poems in journals including: American Poetry Review, Antioch Review, Atlantic, Ploughshares, Southern Review, Tri-Quarterly and others.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Pack, R. and J. Parini, eds., Writers on Writing (1991). Reference works: CA (1978). CANR (1984, 1990). CLC (1989). Other references: Ellen Bryant Voigt Reading Her Poems with Comment in the Recording Laboratory (audio, 1978). Hudson Review (Spring 1988). John Peck and Ellen Bryant Voigt Reading Their Poems (audio, 1980). Nation (6 Aug. 1977). New Letters Review of Books (Spring 1987). NYTBR (1 May 1977, 17 July 1983, 23 Aug. 1987). Partisan Review (Summer 1988, 1998). Poetry (Feb. 1984). Southern Review (April, 1993). Tikkun (July 1991). Tri-Quarterly (Winter 1988). Yale Review (Spring 1977). —SARAH KAFATOU
VORSE, Mary Heaton Born 9 October 1874, New York, New York; died 14 June 1966, Provincetown, Massachusetts Daughter of Hiram and Ellen Blackman Heaton; married Albert W. Vorse, 1898 (died); Joe O’Brien, 1912; Robert Minor, 1920; children: three Mary Heaton Vorse was born to an old New England family. As a child, she spent her summers in the college town of Amherst, Massachusetts, and her winters in New York City and Europe. Although seemingly cosmopolitan, Vorse wrote, in later life, about how the sheltered academic atmosphere of her youth
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enabled her to acquire a dedication to intellectual speculation, but left her isolated from the industrial and economic changes characterizing late-19th-century America. Vorse was married three times and had three children. After the death of her first husband, Vorse supported herself through her writing. Her earliest published writings were short sketches, which appeared in diverse periodicals including Criterion, Critic, Woman’s Home Companion, and Atlantic Monthly. Both The Very Little Person (1911) and The Prestons (1918) include short fiction excerpted from these early publications. Vorse drew on the experiences of her first years of marriage to Albert Vorse in her first novel, The Breaking-in of a Yachtsman’s Wife (1908). The Autobiography of an Elderly Woman (1911), an anecdotal and entertaining narrative, is told from the point of view of a woman her mother’s age who resents the circumscriptions youth imposes on the aged. In 1906 Vorse moved to Greenwich Village, where she and her husband founded the A Club, an experimental cooperative living arrangement frequented by Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Mother Jones, Maxim Gorky, and others. Primarily a collection of liberal reformers who flirted with varieties of socialism, the participants in the A Club were devoted to a thoughtful and stimulating analysis of American society. Vorse wrote favorably about her experiences in the club. Still, she affectionately satirizes the Greenwich Village lifestyle in the novel I’ve Come to Stay (1915). The heroine, Camilla Deerfield, justifies the excesses and absurdities of the village residents as a necessary and long overdue response to their Calvinist heritage: ‘‘We are the flaming shadows cast by unfulfilled joys which died unborn in our parents’ souls. We come of people who lived in the ordinary hypocrisies so long that some of us cast away even the decencies in our endeavor not to be hypocritical.’’ From 1906 through the mid-1940s, Vorse spent a portion of each year in Provincetown, Massachusetts, as did other members of the Greenwich Village radical intelligentsia. It was here that Vorse, prompted by a series of articles on infant education she had researched in Italy for Woman’s Home Companion, organized a Montessori school. More importantly, it was here that Vorse was among the founding members of the experimental theater group, the Provincetown Players, the group that staged Eugene O’Neill’s earliest plays. In A Footnote to Folly (1935), an autobiographical account of the years 1912 to 1922, Vorse identified the 1912 Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile strike as the single most significant event in her political and literary development. She described how her experiences at Lawrence led both her and Joe O’Brien, the labor reporter who became her second husband, to active identification with the problems and struggles of the American working class. Henceforth, Vorse was to write the bulk of her work in explicitly politicized terms. Vorse’s dedication is reflected in the prolific writing of her major phase; for more than 30 years she was a tireless reporter of
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current events on labor and battle fronts throughout the U.S., Europe, and the Soviet Union. Most of this writing is ephemeral; it appeared in Hearst newspapers, Harper’s the Nation, New Republic, Advance, World Tomorrow, Outlook, and the Masses (which she edited) and was never collected. As a war correspondent during World War I, Vorse covered the 1915 International Congress of Women in Amsterdam and the International Woman Suffrage Convention in Budapest. Her journalism was enhanced by personal involvement with the Red Cross, the American Relief Association, and the Committee for Public Information; her coverage of the war, like that of labor disputes, often focused on the ignored victims—women and children. With the exception of The Ninth Man (1918), a novel set in 12th-century Italy, all of Vorse’s book-length publications spring from her experiences as a radical journalist. They vary from compilations recording her coverage of actual events, such as Men and Steel (1920) and Labor’s New Millions (1938), to fictionalized accounts of actual strikes, such as Passaic (1926) and Strike (1930), and novels springing from her impressions of a world in turmoil, such as Second Cabin (1928), based on an ocean voyage from inflation-ravaged postwar Germany to the U.S., after a visit to ‘‘optimistic’’ postrevolutionary Russia. For the contemporary reader, unfamiliar with the events Vorse so passionately described throughout her lengthy career, the best introduction to her writing and sensibilities probably will be found in either A Footnote to Folly—in which she effectively describes the relationship between personal identity and political commitment and growth—and Of Time and the Town (1942). The latter deals with her years in Provincetown; the legends and
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traditions of the fishing village provide a background for her history of the Provincetown Players and cultural attitudes during the first half of the 20th century. Both books reflect the perspective Vorse acknowledges in A Footnote to Folly: ‘‘Indeed, my book is the record of a woman who in early life got angry because many children lived miserably and died needlessly.’’ OTHER WORKS: The Whole Family (with others, 1908). The Heart’s Company (1913). Growing Up (1920). Fraycar’s Fist (1923). Wreckage (1924). Here Are the People (1943). The Mary Heaton Vorse Collection is in the Archives of Labor History and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Aaron, D., Writers on the Left (1961). Blake, F., The Strike in the American Novel (1972). Hill, V. L., Strategy and Breadth: The Socialist-Feminist in American Fiction (dissertation, 1979). Overton, G., The Women Who Make Our Novels (1918). Rideout, W., The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900-1954 (1956). Sochen, J., The New Woman in Greenwich Village, 1910-1920 (1972). Sochen, J., Movers and Shakers (1973). ‘‘The Reminiscences of Mary Heaton Vorse’’ (transcript of interviews conducted for the Oral History Research Office of Columbia University, 1957). Reference works: American Women (1939). TCA. Other references: Nation (4 June 1908, 15 Jan. 1936). NR. (13 July 1942). Time (23 Dec. 1935). —VICKI LYNN HILL
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W WAKOSKI, Diane Born 3 August 1937, Whittier, California Daughter of John J. and Marie Mengel Wakoski; married S. Shepherd Sherbell, 1965 (divorced); Michael Watterlond, 1973 (divorced); Robert J. Turney, 1982 Black Sparrow Press regularly prints a note at the end of Diane Wakoski’s books saying her poems give all the important information about her life; but because she invents her autobiography as often as she records it, the information concerns her imaginative life more than her verifiable biography. Still, the poems indicate that she and one sister were born to poor Polish American parents and were deserted by their father in early childhood. Wakoski may have borne two children and given them up for adoption before 1971, and she has experienced at least two cycles of marriage and divorce. Other published sources indicate Wakowski studied music and poetry at the University of California at Berkeley (B.A. in English, 1960) and moved to New York in 1960. In 1962 she published the first of more than 20 collections of poems. She worked in a bookstore until 1963 and then taught English at a junior high school until 1969. Since then, she has supported herself by her writing, poetry readings, and workshops and guest appointments at universities. Wakoski has written several long poems, such as the multivolume Greed, which she published in parts beginning in 1968, and was finally collected as The Collected Greed in 1984. She began putting out a sequence of autobiographical poems beginning with Medea the Sorceress in 1991, followed by Jason the Sailor (1993), The Emerald City of Las Vegas (1995), and Argonaut Rose in 1998. These four books, though concerned with the particulars of her personal life, such as the death of her ex-husband, all fall under the subtitle The Archaeology of Movies and Books and employ disparate allusive material, from L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz through classical Greek myths, particularly the tale of Medea. Wakoski’s essays have been collected in a book called Toward a New Poetry (1980). Although she has eschewed the politics of feminism, she has treated many of the most difficult issues faced by feminists. Wakoski seeks to convert the imagination into something tangible and beautiful. Her poems can best be read as a record of her imaginative confrontations with the relationships between beauty and pain, love and rejection, identity and roles, power and submission, greed and generosity, sacrifice and reward, and loyalty and betrayal. Wakoski writes in an idiosyncratic form that allows her to be discursive or imagistic, factual or mythical, mundane or visionary, and to shift from one of these levels to another in the same poem without warning. The staples of her form are repetition and digression, used to hold the reader’s
interest in the most ordinary aspects of experience, or to place a painful aspect in an unexpected perspective to reveal its potential beauty. ‘‘Looking for the Bald Eagles in Wisconsin,’’ from The Man Who Shook Hands (1978), begins with a story about Wakoski’s ride with friends to the Mississippi on ‘‘black camels’’ and proceeds through several digressions on the natives’ incredulity, the stubbornness of camels and men, America’s history of destroying its mythical creatures, and her own ability to navigate on the back of her mythical beast to her direct experience of the bald eagles and her vision of the rising moon—whose landscape ‘‘is still not part of real/ life.’’ Although the image of the camel ride holds the poem together, Wakoski’s journey serves to affirm the different modes of transportation we can use on our own journeys. Relying for the most part on common language and ordinary rhythms of speech, Wakoski seeks to reveal the extraordinary dimensions of life, becoming alternatively an archaeologist, an astronomer, a magician, a goddess, a misfit, and an ordinary woman in the process. Although Wakoski’s experimental form and her attention to devalued (feminine, intellectual, and imaginative) aspects of human experience have provoked negative criticism, her talent, courage, seriousness, intelligence, and insight into human feelings seem likely to make this ambitious, coherent oeuvre one of the hallmarks of our time. Wakoski’s middle years have brought no extreme rupture with the poetics of her youth, but rather an organic process of refinement and development. As she says in ‘‘When Breakfast Is Brought by the Morning Star,’’ from Medea the Sorceress, ‘‘New day doesn’t mean new life;/ it means that you continue work out afresh/ each day/ the story, you were always destined/ to tell.’’ She continues to work with loose forms, free imagination, coherent narrative, tangential digression, reiteration of images, and personal history and mythology to add to the poetic mosaic she is constructing of her life. This life work is a self-portrait of a woman across time—aging—and space: the West, the Midwest, and Europe orient Wakoski’s work like a three-cornered compass rose. Because her project is essentially the weaving of an autobiography consisting of many individual poems, these poems are tightly interconnected. The full strength of the work can best be appreciated by taking it as a unified whole, a life in progress. In 1988 Wakoski published Emerald Ice, a selection of her poems written between 1962 and 1987. This volume, like The Collected Greed, shows the development of the poet’s technique and themes over the decades. Medea the Sorceress entwines poems with prose in the form of letters and excerpts from quantum physics texts. In this volume, her dark focus—on the humiliations of aging, human ugliness in its many forms, and what she perceives to be her own failures—lightens toward a calmer self-appreciation and acceptance.
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Although Wakoski wholeheartedly engages many issues in contemporary women’s lives, she avoids being labeled as political. ‘‘I don’t ever want a political point of view imputed to me,’’ she said in a 1983 interview. Alliance with a political movement seems to run counter to her strong individualism: ‘‘One of the reasons I have not been wanting to be called a feminist poet is that the label seems to lump all women writers together, as if we have a common message. I am not sure I have a message, but if I do, it is full of contradictions and paradoxes and perhaps even baffling’’ (Medea the Sorceress). Wakoski has received many awards and honors, including Guggenheim (1972), National Endowment for the Arts (1973), and Fulbright (1984) fellowships. She received a grant from the Michigan Arts Council in 1988 and the Michigan Arts Foundation award in 1989. Her selected poems, Emerald Ice, (1988) won the William Carlos Williams prize from the Poetry Society of America in 1989. Wakoski has maintained a steady outpouring of publications, primarily poetry and occasionally essays. Her collections consistently show concern for the quality of books as physical objects and continue to be fine samples of the bookbinder’s as well as the poet’s art. She has long been an itinerant poet, supporting herself with numerous one-term teaching appointments at colleges across the country and by giving public readings. Nevertheless, she has been poet-in-residence at Michigan State University since 1975, where she was awarded a Distinguished Professorship in 1990. She continues to teach there, and to work on the series The Archaeology of Movies and Books.
OTHER WORKS: Coins and Coffins (1962). Four Young Lady Poets (1962). Discrepancies and Apparitions (1966). The George Washington Poems (1967). Inside the Blood Factory (1968). The Magellanic Clouds (1970). The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems (1971). Smudging (1972). Dancing on the Grave of a Son of a Bitch (1973). Trilogy: Coins and Coffins, Discrepancies and Apparitions, The George Washington Poems (1974). Virtuoso Literature for Two and Four Hands (1975). Creating a Personal Mythology (1975). Waiting for the King of Spain (1976). Cap of Darkness (1980). Earth Light (1981). Saturn’s Rings (1982). Divers (1982). The Lady Who Drove Me to the Airport (1982). Making a Sacher Torte (1982). The Magician’s Feastletters (1982). Why My Mother Likes Liberace (1985). The Managed World (1985). The Rings of Saturn (1986). Roses (1987). The manuscript collection of Diane Wakowski is housed at the University of Arizona at Tuscon.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Gerber, P., and R. Gemmett, eds., A Terrible War: A Conversation with Diane Wakowski (1970). Women as Mythmakers: Poetry and Visual Art by Twentieth-Century Women (1984). Reference works: CA (1966). CAAS (1984). CANR (1983). CLC (1986). CP (1991). FC (1990). Crowell’s Handbook of
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Contemporary Poetry (1973). Contemporary Poets of the English Language (1970). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Boundary (Spring 1982). Gypsy Scholar (Summer 1979). Hudson Review (Autumn 1985). LATBR (18 July 1982; 4 Nov. 1984). Margins (Jan-Mar. 1976). —ESTELLA LAUTER, UPDATED BY DONNA GLEE WILLIAMS AND ANGELA WOODWARD
WALD, Lillian D. Born 10 March 1867, Cincinnati, Ohio; died 1 September 1940, Westport, Connecticut Daughter of Max D. and Minnie Schwarz Wald The third of four children of a successful German-born dealer in optical goods, Lillian D. Wald grew up in an affectionate and cultured household within the Americanized German-Jewish community in Rochester, New York. Unsatisfied with the life of a well-to-do young woman, in 1889 Wald applied for admission to the New York Hospital training school for nurses, because she felt ‘‘the need of serious, definite work’’ and found nursing ‘‘womanly [and] congenial.’’ After graduating and working at the Juvenile Asylum in New York, Wald entered the Woman’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary. While teaching home nursing on Manhattan’s East Side, she was called to the bedside of a suffering woman in a filthy tenement. This ‘‘baptism of fire’’ inspired her to abandon medical school, move to the East Side with a friend from training school, and begin nursing her neighbors in their tenement homes. Aided from the first by wealthy Jews who felt a duty to their coreligionists crowding the slums, and later by other philanthropists, Wald founded the Henry Street Settlement and a visiting nurse service, which by 1915 served all of Manhattan and the Bronx and cared for more patients than three of New York’s largest hospitals combined. Wald did more than any other individual to invent and popularize the American version of public health nursing. She became a national figure in social reform and nursing circles, reaching her peak of influence in the decade before WWI when she spearheaded the successful drive for a federal children’s bureau. Adept at conciliating people of differing views, Wald was a suffragist but not a militant. Wald wrote for practical purposes and frequently had others, particularly Henry Street—resident Lavinia L. Dock, prepare her speeches and articles. Wald’s briefer writings often described the
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methods of the Settlement and visiting-nurse service in businesslike detail, leaving motives and goals vague. Her two books, The House on Henry Street (1915) and Windows on Henry Street (1933), show a similar disjunction between concrete fact and impalpable ideal. They juxtapose anecdotes of her experiences as a nurse, East Side resident, and participant in reform crusades with inspirational but fuzzy generalizations. Wald did not formulate a consistent philosophy. But her writings show three fundamental loyalties which shaped her career: to the settlement movement; to women, children, and the family; and to the promotion of women’s social mission. Her interest in settlements was based on her sense of kinship with all human beings and comradeship in social service and on her pragmatism. The powerful first chapter of The House on Henry Street recounts Wald’s ‘‘awakening’’ to her ties to tenement dwellers and her immediate decision to live among them. Wald’s writings reveal her dedication to women and children, combined with a tendency to subsume their interests under those of the home and family. A skillful propagandist sharing many of the values of her readers, Wald plays on middle-class Americans’ reverence for motherhood by presenting the immigrant and working-class women of her neighborhood as conscientious, perplexed mothers. She endorses statements of individual working women and the Women’s Trade Union League that, as actual or potential mothers, women workers need unions, shorter hours, and legal protection from poor working conditions. Wald’s discussions of nursing best express her conception of women’s social role. Nurses act on a traditional, womanly impulse to care for the young and sick. She sees public health nurses as part of a reform movement based on the new conviction that much disease could be prevented by teaching ordinary people what scientists had learned about hygienic living and by improving social conditions. In Windows on Henry Street, Wald claims that ‘‘intelligent medical men’’ recognize the ‘‘essential independence’’ of nursing. Despite similar origins, medicine and nursing have separate histories, because scientific advance sets the pace of medical development, while religious and humanitarian interests determine the growth of nursing. The practicality, conciliatory charm, and unanalytical sincerity that made Wald a star fund raiser and effective witness before committees appear in her writings as a fondness for anecdotes and comforting generalities and an unwillingness to probe struggles in her own soul or in society. Other women in the settlement movement, including Jane Addams and Vida Scudder, used their autobiographies to explore how they came to pioneer new roles for women and launch a social movement. Wald wrote less personally and less critically. Although her books do not reveal her innermost life and do not explain the dynamics of American society, they have value as documents of women’s leadership in the settlement and public health movements. Their concreteness, disjointedness, and optimism convey the élan of women confident of their special ability to make the world a kinder, more humane place, while finding freedom for themselves at the same time.
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OTHER WORKS: The papers of Lillian D. Wald are at the New York Public Library and in the Butler Library, Columbia University, New York City. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Daniels, D., Lillian D. Wald: The Progressive Woman and Feminism (dissertation, 1976). Duffus, R., Lillian Wald: Neighbor and Crusader (1938). Reznick, A., Lillian D. Wald: The Years at Henry Street (dissertation, 1973). Reference works: DAB, NAW (1971). Other references: NR (8 Jan. 1916, 27 June 1934). NYT (2 Sept. 1940, 2 Dec. 1940). Survey Graphic (Oct. 1940). —SUSAN ARMENY
WALDMAN, Anne Born 2 April 1945, Milville, New Jersey Married to Reed E. Bye, 1980; children: one son Anne Waldman has spent over 30 years writing and chanting poetry. She has published over 40 books, of which she has either written or edited. She ran the St. Mark’s Poetry Project as assistant director from 1966 to 1968 and director from 1968 to 1978 at St. Mark’s church in New York. The two World anthologies were derived from her work with other poets from the St. Mark’s Poetry Project. Waldman then went on to become the cofounding director of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, with Allen Ginsberg in 1974. The school revived the idea of poetry as a vocalization and a public art. Together with Ginsberg, Waldman taught poetry as a theatrical event. Her experience beginning at age six as a performer at the Greenwich Village Children’s Theatre to her upbringing with a jazz culture to her Buddhist religion influenced her ‘‘expansive chant-like structures,’’ which in turn gave her the basis for her teachings at the school. Ginsberg said of Waldman’s performances: ‘‘Anne Waldman is a poet orator, her body is an instrument for vocalization, her voice a trembling flame rising out of a strong body, her texts the accurate energetic fine notations of words with spoken music latent in mindful arrangement on the page.’’ Waldman has won numerous awards, including the Dylan Thomas Award in 1967, the Cultural Artists grant in 1976, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1980. Her poetic career in the 1960s was heavily influenced by the Beat Generation. She describes her post-Beat career as ‘‘a unique creative generation, a second generation Beat.’’ It is from this Beat and post-Beat era that Waldman edited and contributed to Women of the Beat Generation (1996). The book is her attempt to give women the chance to express themselves artistically and poetically. This effort was due to her own struggles to become a writer in a male-dominated world. Women of the Beat Generation features prolific women writers in an attempt ‘‘to acknowledge. . .the suffering, difficulty, and dignity’’ of their lives. It includes an
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excerpt from several of Waldman’s better known poems, including ‘‘Fast Speaking Woman,’’ ‘‘Two Hearts,’’ ‘‘A Phone Call From Frank O’Hara,’’ and ‘‘I Am the Guard.’’ Fast Speaking Woman (1996), the 20th-anniversary expanded edition, is a collection of pieces published in the first two editions (1975 and 1978) and works from old files and notebooks never published before. The title poem, ‘‘Fast Speaking Woman,’’ is almost 600 lines like the following: ‘‘I’m the phenomena woman the woman who studies the woman who names the woman who writes I’m the cataloguing woman water that cleans waters that run flowers that clean as I go’’ The poem uses the word ‘‘woman’’ in nearly every line. The ‘‘water that cleans. . .as I go’’ break is a pause and shift in rhythm and cleanses the impulsiveness of the writing. This is a clear example of the rhythmic chant of Waldman’s poetry. ‘‘Fast Speaking Woman,’’ is a tribute to Maria Sabina, the Mazatec Native American shamaness in Mexico who guided Waldman in a magic mushroom ceremony. Waldman began writing it during a trip to South America, intended for meditation. She continued writing it back in New York and then later in India. The poem is Waldman’s intention to list-chant all the things women are to be, including her own personal intricacies (how she sees herself). Again, with this poem, Waldman concerns herself with women’s roles and how Everywoman is both messenger and protector. Iovis: All Is Full of Jove (1986) and Iovis: Book II (1993) are two of Waldman’s masterpieces. The former book is a 336-page epic, where Waldman combs the masculine soul and the sources of its energy. She uses several distinct male voices including her grandfather, her son, and male deities from other cultures. She explores her own aggression and male energy in mostly English, but also in Greek, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Balinese, Indonesian, Mayan, Czech, Sanskrit, and Gaelic. It ends with ‘‘To blunt the knife,’’ alluding to the continuation of the exploration of female energy, may it be compassion, overtaking male aggression.
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OTHER WORKS: On the Wing (1967). Giant Night (1968). O My Life! (1969). The World Anthology: Poems from the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, and Another World (1969, 1971). Baby Breakdown (1970). Giant Night: Selected Poems (1970). Goodies from Anne Waldman (1971). Holy City (1971). Icy Rose (1971). Memorial Day (with T. Berrigan, 1971). No Hassles (1971). Light and Shadow (1972). Spin Off (1972). The West Indies Poems (1972). Life Notes: Selected Poems (1973). Self Portrait (with J. Brainard, 1973). Fast Speaking Woman (1975). Shaman (1977). 4 Travels (with R. Bye, 1978). Talking Poetics from Naropa Institute (ed. with M. Webb, 2 vols., 1978-1979). To a Young Poet (1979). Countries (1980). Cabin (1982). First Baby Poems (1982). Make-Up on Empty Space (1984). Invention (1985). Skin Meat Bones (1985). The Romance Thing (1987). Blue Mosque (1988). Helping the Dreamer: New and Selected Poems (1989, 1992). Not a Male Pseudonym (1990). Lokapala (1991). Nice to See You: Homage to Ted Berrigan (edited, 1991). Out of This World (edited, 1991). Disembodied Poetics, Annals of the Jack Kerouac School (edited with A. Schelling, 1994). Kill or Cure (1994). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cloward, T. F., ‘‘The Shaman’s Voice: Anne Waldman and Maria Sabina—Some Notes on Contemporary Performance Poetry’’ (thesis, 1992). Reference works: CP (1996). Other references: Anne Waldman (audiocassette, 1987). Anne Waldman (video, 1991). Battle of the Bards (video, 1990). Cassady, Vega, Waldman: Three Women of (and Beyond) the Beat Generation (video, 1998). Fried Shoes, Cooked Diamonds (video, 1978, 1989). Inquiring Mind (Spring, 1997). —KIMBALLY A. MEDEIROS
WALDROP, Rosmarie Born 24 August 1935, Kitzingen-am-Main, Germany Daughter of Josef and Friederike Wolgemuth Sebald; married Bernard K. Waldrop
Iovis: Book II is a continuation of Iovis: All Is Full of Jove. Its purpose of exploration, however, changes from male to female energy. It is in this second part that Waldman sets up themes about the confusion of women’s roles in the 20th century. She explores the compassionate female energy and at the end exclaims the renewal of that feminine charge with ‘‘I rang him down.’’
Poet and translator Rosmarie Waldrop’s work has had a great impact on the world of contemporary American letters. The author of over 30 books of poetry and prose and the translator of more than 20 books of poetry, Waldrop’s contribution to contemporary poetry and poetics has been both significant and influential. In addition to her writing and translating work, since 1968 Waldrop has been coeditor of Burning Deck Press, one of the most important publishers of experimental poetry and prose in the United States.
Waldman is known for her chants, powerful performances, and quest for recognition for women writers. Her poems rhyme or don’t; her books, such as Journals & Dreams (1976), include impulsive words from her travels, including poems and personal letters. She explores sexuality, cultures, and personality, and her words never lie flat on the pages—they chant to you as if she were performing them.
Waldrop was born in Nazi Germany in 1935, the youngest of three daughters. She learned English as a child, the result of living in what was to become, from 1945 on, an American occupation zone. The experience of having grown up (as a non-Jew) in Hitler’s Germany is recounted in Waldrop’s novel, The Hanky of Pippin’s Daughter (1986), and issues relating to the themes of personal history and knowing are at the root of much of her work.
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Waldrop began studying comparative literature at the University of Wurzberg in 1954. In that same year, she met Bernard Keith Waldrop, a recently discharged private from the United States Army, who was to become her husband. Waldrop finished her undergraduate studies at the University of Freiburg in 1958 and moved to the U.S. to undertake graduate work at the University of Michigan. She and Keith were married a month after she moved to the U.S. Waldrop’s German-language roots, and her life in an English-speaking country, have had a profound impact on her writing: ‘‘In crossing the Atlantic my phonemes settled somewhere between German and English. I speak either language with an accent. This has saved me the illusion of being the master of language. I enter it at a skewed angle, through the fissures, the slight difference.’’ Finding it awkward and ‘‘artificial’’ to write in German after having settled in the U.S., where she was already ‘‘thinking in English, dreaming in English, living in English,’’ Waldrop fastened on translating as a ‘‘natural substitute.’’ While she began with translating American poets into German, she soon settled on translating poets such as Günter Grass and Gottfried Benn into English. Thus Waldrop’s work with translation dates as far back as her poetic output; some of her most compelling and important thought stems from how these two projects are intertwined and in some sense overlapping. In 1963 Waldrop first had her work—both original poems and translations—published in journals. In 1964, with her dissertation not yet completed (she received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1966), Waldrop was hired to teach comparative and German literature at Wesleyan University. Since 1968 the Waldrops have lived in Providence, Rhode Island, where they’re associated with the Creative Writing Department at Brown University. Waldrop’s first chapbook, A Dark Octave, appeared in 1967. Her first major collection, The Aggressive Ways of the Casual Stranger, appeared in 1972 from Random House. The period of time between these two events was both busy for Waldrop (in addition to a number of chapbooks, her doctoral dissertation was published, as was her translation of Peter Weiss’ novel Bodies and Shadows), and formative. During a year spent in Paris in 1970-71, the Waldrops met and became friends and colleagues with Claude Royet-Journoud and Anne-Marie Albiach. Not only did these new friendships provide an important context for literary discourse, but it was through Royet-Journoud that Waldrop met Edmond Jabès. Waldrop, as of the late 1990s, has translated 10 volumes of Jabès’ works and has become his major translator. The predominant themes of the poems in Aggressive Ways are gender, family, domestic life, and the body. Issues relating to gender identity continue to be in some way central to Waldrop’s writing, yet her position vis-à-vis gender is complex and refreshingly nondogmatic. In a critical piece originally appearing in Onward: Contemporary Poetry & Poetics (edited by Peter Baker, 1996) and subsequently excerpted in Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women, Waldrop notes that ‘‘The fact [of being a woman] clearly shapes my writing; thematically, in attitude, in awareness of social conditioning, marginality—but does not determine it exclusively.’’ In addition, she says, ‘‘I don’t really see ‘female language, female style or technique.’ Because the
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writer, male or female, is only one partner in the process of writing. Language, in its full range, is the other. And it is not a language women have to ‘steal back.’’’ Also central to Waldrop’s thought and practice as a poet is the handling of, the examination of, language itself, the structure of language, and notions of authorship. Again, from the piece in Moving Borders: ‘‘Language comes not only with an infinite potential for new combinations, but with a long history contained in it. The blank page is not blank. No text has one single author. Whether we are conscious of it or not, we always write on top of a palimpsest. . . . This is not a question of ‘linear influence,’ but of writing as dialog with a whole net of previous and concurrent texts, tradition, with the culture and language we breathe and move in, which conditions us even while we help to construct it.’’ OTHER WORKS: Change of Address (with K. Waldrop, 1968). Camp Printing (1970). The Relaxed Abalone; or, What-You-May-Find (1970). Spring Is a Season and Nothing Else (1970). Body Image (with N. Howe, 1970). Until Volume One (with K. Waldrop, 1973). Words Worth Less (with K. Waldrop, 1973). Kind Regards (1975). Since Volume One (with K. Waldrop, 1975). Acquired Pores (1976). The Road Is Everywhere or Stop This Body (1978). The Ambition of Ghosts (1979). When They Have Senses (1980). Psyche & Eros (1980). Nothing Has Changed (1981). Differences for Four Hands (1984). Streets Enough to Welcome Snow (1986). Morning’s Intelligence (1986). The Reproduction of Profiles (1987). Shorter American Memory (1988). A Form of Taking It All (1990). Peculiar Motions (1990). Light Travels (with K. Waldrop, 1992). Lawn of Excluded Middle (1993). Fan Poem for Deshika (1993). Concerned Stone, Split Infinites (1994). A Key into the Language of America (1994). Another Language: Selected Poems (1997). Blindsight (1998). In a Flash (1998). Well Well Reality (with K. Waldrop 1998). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Sloan, M. M., ed., Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women (1998). Reference works: ANR 39. DLB (1996). —JESSICA GRIM
WALKER, Alice Born 9 February 1944, Eatonton, Georgia Daughter of Willie L. and Minnie Grant Walker; married Melvyn R. Leventhal, 1967 (divorced); children: Rebecca Alice Walker is the eighth child of black sharecroppers. She attended Spelman College in Atlanta and Sarah Lawrence College (B.A., 1965). Deeply involved in the civil rights movement, she worked with voter registration in Georgia, welfare rights and Head Start in Mississippi, and the Welfare Department in New York City. She taught at Jackson State University (1968-69) and
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Tougaloo College (1969-70), both in Mississippi. She has lived in Kenya, Uganda, and the Soviet Union, and now resides in Northern California where she is a fiction editor of Ms. magazine and continues to write poetry, fiction, and essays. In Once (1968), Walker renders into verse her experiences in the civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s and her impressions of her African travels. Influenced primarily by Zen epigrams and Japanese haiku, Walker writes simple, brief, and mysterious poems about love, pain, struggle, and the joy of being alive and whole. Revolutionary Petunia (1973) was written in honor of ‘‘incorrect’’ people like Sammy Lou, the heroine of the title poem, who ‘‘struggled against oppression and won.’’ Much of the poetry is autobiographical, conjuring up a child’s image of home—a small, rural southern Georgia town, a place where children and adults are aware of their roots and experience a sense of community. Walker describes The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), her first novel, as a ‘‘grave book in which the characters see the world as almost entirely menacing.’’ Spanning the years between 1900 and the 1960s, it is about three generations of black people, all descendants of Grange Copeland. He is the unifying force of the book and it is he who, after many painful years of white oppression, learns that black oppression can be even more deadly and dehumanizing—that there is never any excuse for the cruelty of blacks to each other. Walker’s characters are painfully credible—painfully alive and painfully oppressed by others and by themselves. In her one book of short stories, In Love and Trouble (1973), Walker explores—as do her two favorite writers, Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Toomer—‘‘the oppressions, the insanities, the loyalties, and the triumphs of black women,’’ the only people she respects ‘‘collectively and with no reservations.’’ Although many of the women in the book suffer from everything from stifled creativity to stifled sexuality, they endure stoically. The subjects are often ghastly, but the book as a whole is not a sad one; it has its anguished grace. In Langston Hughes (1974), a biography, Walker lovingly renders into language that young children can understand and appreciate the story of the poet laureate of Harlem. In 1977’s Meridian, chronicles the coming of age of several civil rights workers, one of whom is white, during the 1960s in the South. The main character is Meridian, a mysterious, sensitive black woman dedicated to helping others and, more important, to living her life ‘‘against whatever obstacles, and not to give up any particle of it without a fight to the death, preferably not her own.’’ In the 20 years since publication of The Third Life of Grange Copeland, Walker became one of the best-known American writers. Among the numerous honors and awards she has won are the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award in 1983 for The Color Purple, the O. Henry Award in 1986 for the story ‘‘Kindred Spirits,’’ and the Langston Hughes Award in 1988. Set in the rural South in the early 20th century, Walker’s epistolary novel The Color Purple (1982) describes the spiritual,
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emotional, and practical growth of the protagonist Celie from a physically and emotionally repressed ‘‘slave’’ of black men and white men and women to a loving and loved, self-sufficient woman. This growth is largely a process of Celie’s finding her own voice and learning to control it. In many respects, The Color Purple is a tribute to the work of Walker’s ‘‘foremother,’’ Zora Neale Hurston, particularly Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. The autobiographical essays of Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983) range in subject from the civil rights movement to the writer Flannery O’Connor to discussions of beauty and childbearing. The book discovers and articulates a black feminist sentiment and tradition Walker calls ‘‘womanist.’’ Walker recovers the work of African American women artists, locating art in the quilts and gardens of mothers and grandmothers, and reclaims writers, particularly black women writers, whose writing had been distorted or entirely ignored. It was in part due to this book that Their Eyes Were Watching God was elevated from a forgotten book to a near-canonical text. A fourth collection of poems, Horses Make a Landscape More Beautiful (1984), attempts to come to grips with the complexities of what Walker elsewhere has called her ‘‘triple-blood,’’ her inheritance from African American, European American, and Native American ancestors, within the political landscape of the contemporary U.S. The language of these spare poems often appears prosaically simple and almost artless, but is in fact tightly bonded by slant rhymes, alliteration, and repetition. Living by the Word: Selected Writings 1973-1987 (1988) covers as wide a range of subjects as In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. The overriding concern running through the diverse pieces of the later book is for a universal spirituality Walker hopes will redeem a world seemingly bent on destroying itself. The novel The Temple of My Familiar (1989) represents 500,000 years of human history, investigating the cultural inheritance of black and white Americans through the medium of the oral tradition of storytelling. Instead of a linear narration, the novel consists of a series of stories, many told from the perspective of Miss Lissie, an elderly African American woman who can recall earlier lives and who switches back and forth in gender, race, nationality—even species. Miss Lissie is not the only storyteller in the novel; virtually all the characters tell stories in a variety of media: oral narratives, letters, diaries, songs. Some complete stories come from earlier books: the reader finds out more, for example, about the later history of Shug and Celie from The Color Purple. In Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), Walker again returns to characters from The Color Purple, using Tashi, the young African girl who marries Adam, as her heroine. Her story is about her struggle to reconcile her African heritage with the modern world. In order to show her solidarity with her Olinka people’s fight against colonialism, Tashi embraces their traditions, including female circumcision, a practice that had proven fatal to her
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own sister. Political in intent, Walker’s novel focuses on this controversial subject of clitoridectomy to call attention to a practice of submitting women to a patriarchal definition of sexuality that not only destroys their pleasure in sex but also endangers their health throughout their lives. In the 1990s, Walker continued to produce work that is challenging, technically rich, and culturally acute. With fiction, wide-ranging essays, and journal works, Walker’s writings reflect a deep and ever evolving passion for language and story, along with an integral commitment to activism and social change. In 1994 a controversy was sparked when two of Walker’s stories were abruptly removed from a California 10th grade achievement test. The stories were removed because of complaints that they were, in the case of ‘‘Roselily’’ (1972), considered ‘‘antireligious,’’ and, in the case of ‘‘Am I Blue?’’ (1986), labeled ‘‘anti-meat eating.’’ Shortly thereafter, Walker was chosen to receive a California Governor’s Award, which she politely declined. The stories are collected in a volume with an excerpt from The Color Purple (1982) and a detailing of the numerous attempts which have been made to censor these works, along with an introduction citing Walker’s initial response and her eventual acceptance of the Governor’s Award. The book, Alice Walker: Banned (1996) represents a unique entry in the literature of censorship. A collection of essays on a myriad of topics, Anything We Love Can Be Saved (1997), roves from religion, daughters, and saving literary heritages to Fidel Castro and Jung’s house in Zurich. The essays, beginning with ‘‘The Only Reason You Want to Go to Heaven Is That You Have Been Driven Out of Your Mind’’ (in which Walker writes of her quest for a spirituality beyond that of the Judeo-Christian tradition), are united loosely by Walker’s activism and her ‘‘belief in the love of the world.’’ In the novel By the Light of My Father’s Smile (1998), Walker unfolds the story of an anthropologist couple who take their two daughters to the Sierras in Mexico to study the Mundo, a mixed-race black and Indian tribe. When one daughter becomes intimate with a boy in the tribe, her father responds violently. The events that take place among the Mundo form the central knot of the novel. Through first person narrative, shifting gracefully from and between characters, time periods, life and afterlife, Walker ravels her reader into and out of the tangle. As is the case with much of Walker’s work, the novel focuses on family relationships, social injustice, spirituality, and sexuality within a culturally diverse setting. Walker’s importance as a writer encompasses her skill as novelist, essayist, and poet as well as her role as a promoter and reclaimer of an African American women’s cultural tradition. Her work has changed the shape of contemporary literature as her novels helped to put African American women fiction writers at the front of the American literary culture. Walker has also changed literary scholarship, reviving the work of nearly forgotten writers and articulating a black feminist criticism that has had a major impact on the increase in critical writings by African American women scholars.
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Walker’s writings evoke both criticism and delight while provoking both controversy and change. As she continues to write from her unique intellectual and spiritual perspective, her contribution to literature and social change grows ever more solid and abiding. Walker is dedicated to the continuation and preservation of the traditions that are hers as a black American. To her, to lose those traditions is not only to lose ‘‘our literary and cultural heritage but, more insidiously, to lose ourselves.’’ Her works, though often painful, are refreshingly and lovingly real. As Grange Copeland says after the birth of his granddaughter, ‘‘Out of all kinds of shit comes something clean, soft and sweet smellin’.’’ OTHER WORKS: Good Night Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning (1979). You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down (1981). Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems, 1965-1990 (1991). Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women (with P. Parmar, 1993). The Complete Stories (1994). The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult (1995). Langston Hughes, American Poet (1998). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bell, R. P., et al., Sturdy Black Bridges (1979). Benevol, D., Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1995). Bloom, H., ed., Alice Walker (1989, 1999). Butler-Evans, E., Race, Gender, and Desire: Narrative Strategies in the Fiction of Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker (1989). Christian, B., Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976 (1980). Dieke, I., ed., Critical Essays on Alice Walker (1999). Evans, M., ed., Black Women Writers (1950-1980). A Critical Evaluation (1984). Gates, H. L., Jr., The Signifying Monkey (1988). Gates, H. L., Jr., ed., Reading Black, Reading Feminist (1990). Gates, H. L., Jr., and K. A. Appiach, eds., Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives Past and Present (1993). Gentry, T., Alice Walker (1998). Howard, L. P., ed., Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston: The Common Bond, (1993). Humphries, J., ed., Southern Literature and Literary Theory, (1990). Jenkins, P. J., The Wandering Soul: The Search for Identity in Chopin’s The Awakening, Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Walker’s The Color Purple (1995). Johnson, W. D., and T. L. Green, eds., Perspectives on Afro-American Women (1975). Lauret, M., Alice Walker (1999). Lazo, C. E., Alice Walker (1999). O’Brien, J., ed., Interviews with Black Writers (1973). Pendergast, T., and S. Pendergast, eds., Gay and Lesbian Literature 2 (1998). Simawe, S. A., Music and the Politics of Culture in James Baldwin’s and Alice Walker’s Fiction (1994). Tate, C., ed., Black Women Writers at Work (1983). Winchell, D. H., Alice Walker (1992). Witherspoon-Walthall, M. L., The Evolution of the Black Heroine in the Novels of Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker (1988). Reference works: African American Writers (1991). Black Literary Criticism (1992). CA Online (1999). CANR (1989). CLC (1976, 1978, 1981, 1984, 1988, 1998). DLB (1980, 1984, 1994). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: American Scholar (Winter 1970-71). Black World (Sept. 1973, Oct. 1974). Callaloo (Spring 1989). CLA
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Journal (Sept. 1973, Dec. 1975, March 1981). Essence (July 1976). Freedomways (1971, 1974, 1976, 1979). Ms. (Feb. 1974). NR (14 Sept. 1974). Newsweek (24 Apr. 1989). NY (27 Feb. 1971). NYRB (29 Jan. 1987). NYTBR (5 June 1988, 30 Aug. 1989). PMLA (Oct. 1991). Southern Literary Journal (Fall 1998). Third Woman (1980). Time (1 May 1989). Alice Walker and The Color Purple (video, 1995). Alice Walker: A Portrait in the First Person (video, 1988). Alice Walker: Possessing the Secret of Joy (film, 1994). Conversation with Alice Walker (video, 1992). Visions of the Spirit: A Portrait of Alice Walker (film, 1989). Walker, Alice, My Life as My Self (recording, 1996). Women’s Rights: A Global Movement (video,1995). The World Is Made of Stories (recording, 1995). —LILLIE P. HOWARD, UPDATED BY JAMES SMETHURST AND JESSICA REISMAN
WALKER, Margaret Born 7 July 1915, Birmingham, Alabama; died 30 November 1998 Daughter of Sigismund and Marion Walker; married M. Alexander, 1943; children: four Margaret Walker’s middle-class parents were both university graduates; her father was a Methodist minister, and her mother a musicologist and third-generation educator. Walker graduated from Gilbert Academy (1930) and studied at Northwestern University (B.A. 1935) and the University of Iowa (M.A. 1940; Ph.D. 1965). After working on the federal government’s Writers Project in Chicago and as a newspaper and magazine editor, she began teaching. Beginning in 1949, Walker was a professor of English at Jackson State College, Mississippi. She also served as director of the Institute for the Study of History, Life, and Culture of Black People and organized black culture and writers’ conferences, notably the Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival (in November 1973), at which 20 black women poets read. Walker had four children. Walker began writing poetry at the age of twelve. She was the first of her race to receive the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first volume of poetry, For My People (1942, reissued in 1989 and 1992), and other awards have followed. Her work is widely published in periodicals. For My People is an early indication of Walker’s poetic talent. She experiments with traditional and modern poetic forms. There are 10 occasional poems, written in unmistakably black poetic rhythms; 10 ballads with superimposed jazz rhythms or blues metrics; and six sonnets, the most traditional of her poetry in substance and structure. The volume begins at a dramatic, intense pitch, continues in a relaxed tone, and ends in contemplative
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modulation. In Prophets for a New Day (1970), Walker limits her subject to the often fatal struggle to secure human rights—chiefly for blacks. Substance clearly dominates form, whether sonnet or ballad. Walker dedicates October Journey (1973), a volume of 10 poems, to two of her greatest influences: her father and Langston Hughes, her ‘‘friend and mentor.’’ Her verse is at its most melodramatic here. The first poem, ‘‘October Journey,’’ establishes the volume’s tone: ‘‘A music sings within my flesh / I feel the pulse within my throat.’’ The final piece, ‘‘A Litany from the Dark People,’’ is a skillful, rhythmic composition. Jubilee (1966, 1999), Walker’s gripping novel, spans several genres: Civil War epic, historical fiction, and the slave narrative. It is the story of Vyre, daughter of a slave and her master. She experiences simultaneously the rite of passage to womanhood and the change from slavery to freedom. Walker frees her epic from the traditional male-oriented sense of the heroic, structuring her novel around Vyre, her maternal great-grandmother. Vyre’s first husband, a free and literate Negro, functions only in a supportive role to underscore Vyre’s heroism. Walker’s poetic style is evident in Jubilee’s rhythmic prose and biblical overtones. Jubilee was conceived in part as an answer to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. The former draws on both the modern form of historical fiction and the genre of the 19th-century slave narrative as well as oral African American traditions. Sometimes criticized for an overly conciliatory tone, the novel chronicles the survival and personal and spiritual growth of an African American woman, Vyre, in the face of slavery and incredible cruelty. Vyre not only withstands slavery but is able to transcend her hatred and forgive her former slave mistress, offering a vision of society without racism. In How I Wrote Jubilee and Other Essays on Life and Literature (1972, 1990) Walker writes about her own artistic development, her experience as a woman teacher in traditionally black colleges, African American literature, and Southern literature. Walker’s essays especially chronicle the difficulties of African American women who teach in colleges dominated by men. Her biography Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius (1988) attempts to analyze the complex influences that molded Wright’s particular literary vision. Walker brings to bear her skills as scholar and writer as well as her personal knowledge of Wright, with whom she had a close working relationship—Walker did much of the primary research for Wright’s novel Native Son. This Is My Century: New and Collected Poems (1989) is a collection of autobiographical poems, elegies, historical portraits, and meditations on the state of African American life in the 1980s. It contains a new group of poems, ‘‘This Is My Century,’’ and another, ‘‘Farish Street,’’ previously published only in periodical form. ‘‘Farish Street’’ describes and commemorates an African American community in Jackson, Mississippi, portrayed both as a specific place and as an archetype of African American life in the United States.
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Walker’s work, particularly her poetry, shares many formal and thematic concerns with other African American writers of her generation, notably in her use of the sonnet, epic free verse, and vernacular-based ballads. In her fiction, she shares with such women writers of her generation as Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur a feminist sensibility, portraying strong female protagonists and suggesting that a more humane society is possible in the U.S. through the maternal power of women.
OTHER WORKS: A Poetic Equation: Conversations with Nikki Giovanni (1974). On Being Female, Black, and Free: Essays by Margaret Walker, 1932-1992 (1997).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Carmichael, J. M., Trumpeting a Fiery Sound: History and Folklore in Margaret Walker’s Jubilee (1998). Edwards, M. L., The Rhetoric of Afro-American Poetry: A Rhetorical Analysis of Black Poetry and the Selected Poetry of Margaret Walker and Langston Hughes (dissertation, 1980). Evans, M., ed., Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation (1984). Gwin, M. C., Black and White Women of the Old South: The Peculiar Sisterhood in American Literature (1985). McCray, J., For My People: The Life and Writing of Margaret Walker (video, 1998). Miller, R. B., ed., Black Poets Between Worlds, 1940-1960 (1986). Pryse, M., and H. Spillers, eds., Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction and Literary Tradition (1985). Tate, C., ed., Black Women Writers at Work (1983). Reference works: African-American Writers (1991). CANR (1989). CB (Nov. 1943). CLC (1973, 1976). DLB (1988). Ebony Success Library (1973). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Poetry Criticism (1998). Other references: A Message from Margaret (video, 1992). African American Review (1999). Black World (Dec. 1971). Callaloo (Winter 1999). CSM (22 Jan. 1990). LATBR (19 Feb. 1989). Margaret Walker Interview with Kay Bonetti (audiocassette, 1991). Mississippi Quarterly (1995). Nation (1999). WRB (July 1990). Yale Review (1943). —ADRIANNE BAYTOP, UPDATED BY JAMES SMETHURST
WALKER, Mary Spring Born circa 1830s or 1840s; death date unknown Married Reverend J. B. R. Walker Mary Spring Walker’s works are all temperance novels set in Connecticut. No biographical information, aside from her marriage to a minister, could be found to indicate the origins of her concern with the temperance movement. Her novels anticipate the great women’s temperance crusade of 1873-74, and they precede
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Frances E. Willard’s Women and Temperance: or, The Work and Workers of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (1883); nevertheless, reference to Walker’s name or writing does not appear in connection with either of the two. In The Family Doctor; or, Mrs. Barry and Her Bourbon (1868), Walker interweaves the stories of the Barry and Barton families. The narrator is Lizzie Barton whose father, a heavy drinker, squanders the family’s income and drowns himself. From her vantage point as a lady’s maid, Lizzie relates the tragedy of Mrs. Barry, a beautiful aristocrat, who becomes addicted to bourbon after her doctor prescribes it as a tonic. Lizzie reports the deterioration of the Barry household and, in graphic detail, the death of the eldest son, Philip, who also falls victim to alcohol. She attempts to help the Barry family, particularly the younger son and the father, salvage their lives. Walker’s primary theme is the irresponsible prescription of alcohol as medication. She blames the medical profession for ignoring the harmful consequences of alcoholism and portrays Dr. Sharpe, the offending family physician, as selfish and pompous. Sharpe becomes more villainous as the novel progresses; his careless prescription, while drunk, of a poisonous drug causes a death and serves as his own punishment for destroying many families. Walker links a religious theme with temperance concerns in The Rev. Dr. Willoughby and His Wine (1869). In this novel, she launches an attack upon ‘‘ministers who do not minister.’’ Scholarly Dr. Willoughby prefers conversation in his study to spiritual work among the needy. He and his fellow ministers enjoy port and cognac to lift their spirits after their Sabbath labors, which, ironically, are pious sermons on Christian charity. Dr. Willoughby, the eldest and most influential minister in Hartford, undermines his position by his contradictory attitudes toward alcohol. Walker’s long, complicated plot dramatizes the inability of many ministers and church members to recognize that even occasional intoxication leads invariably to incapacity and ruin. Because she establishes the church as an institution affecting all parts of society, Walker can involve numerous minor characters and subplots in extending her message to widely diverse socioeconomic groups. She is skillful in describing the impact of alcoholism on the family and home. Although her emphasis is on tragic effects, Walker redeems the ministry and congregations by also presenting a ‘‘teetotal parson’’ who leads an entire town in a successful war against rum sellers. Walker’s novels indict those in responsible positions for their social and moral complacency. She addresses a professional and middle class audience which does not realize that alcoholism affects not merely the poor and the laboring classes. Walker creates a large multilayered society which grows in awareness of mutual concerns through its connection with temperance issues. But she seldom penetrates her characters’ exteriors or explores their reactions to problems other than lives ruined by drink. Her descriptions of a young wife’s loyalty divided between her
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husband and her parents and of a poor mother’s conflicting desires to keep her son or give him to wealthy foster parents show she had abilities beyond proselytizing that she rarely used.
OTHER WORKS: Both Sides of the Street (1870). Down in a Saloon (1871). White Robes (1872).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —THADIOUS M. DAVIS
WALLACE, Michele Born 4 January 1952, New York, New York Daughter of Robert E. and Faith Ringgold Wallace African American cultural critic and feminist theorist Michele Wallace received her B.A. (1974) and M.A. (1990) from the City College of New York, where she did graduate work in African American literature and feminist literary criticism. She has taught journalism at New York University, and creative writing and African American literature at the University of California at San Diego, the University of Oklahoma, and the University of Buffalo. Wallace joined the faculty of the City College of New York and the City University of New York Graduate Center in 1989, teaching literature and women’s studies. Wallace’s articles, essays, short stories, and poetry have appeared in a number of anthologies, newspapers, and magazines. She is best known for her two books of cultural criticism, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (1979, reprinted with a new introduction by the author in 1990, and again in 1999) and Invisibility Blues (1990). Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, published when Wallace was twenty-six, generated an enormous amount of controversy; and the debates it provoked continue to resonate. Using autobiography, psychohistory, literary and political criticism, sociological study, and feminist theory, she examines the ways in which racism and sexism distort relationships between black men and women. She argues that black leaders and writers give credence to the stereotypes of the black stud and the super matriarch imposed on them by whites. These myths, she says, perpetuate hatred and self-hatred and leave black men and women at odds with one another and politically powerless. Wallace contends as well the black power movement failed because it equated manhood and masculinity with power and did not move beyond the sexual politics that play an important role in maintaining the oppression and marginalization of black women.
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Some critics, like June Jordan, felt Wallace’s youth invalidated her arguments, many of which were based on personal experience. Others criticized her for devaluing the civil rights and black power movements and for neglecting the additional factors leading to their demise, such as institutional racism, economic inequality, and political assassinations. Many critics agreed with Wallace, however, seeing her as a harbinger for change and praising her for urging black women to assert their own identity. Even those who thought her vision was limited agreed that it provoked important and necessary discussion about the future of African Americans in general and of black women in particular. In Invisibility Blues (1990), Wallace turns her attention to questions of representation, examining popular culture and its limited representations of black womanhood from a black feminist perspective. She discusses the ways in which black artists, ranging from her mother, artist Faith Ringgold, to pop superstar Michael Jackson, make a distinct contribution to American culture and at the same time challenge the status quo or disrupt the dominant discourse. Wallace repudiates the notion that black women are marginal to the production of culture or knowledge and explores the ways in which demands for their solidarity with black men often render women’s contributions to the struggle for liberation invisible. Invisibility Blues has been generally well received. Wallace’s unique combination of popular journalism and rigorous scholarship makes an important contribution to the field of cultural studies and to the formidable and growing body of black feminist criticism. OTHER WORKS: Black Popular Culture (with G. Dents, 1992, 1998). Contributor to many anthologies, periodicals and exhibition catalogues, including: All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies (1982). Global Television (1988). Multi-Cultural Literacy (1988). Art in America (Dec. 1990). Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures (1990). Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology (1990). Aperture (Spring, 1992). Our Town (1992). America Street: A Multicultural Anthology of Stories (1993). Aesthetics in Feminist Perspective (1993). Black American Cinema (1993). The Cultural Studies Reader (1993). Race, Identity, and Representation in Education (1993). Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader (1994). Constructing Masculinity (1995). Division of Labor: ‘‘Women’s Work’’ in Contemporary Art (1995). Face Value: American Portraits (1995). Subjects and Citizens: Nation, Race, and Gender from Oroonoko to Anita Hill (1995). Ms. (1995, 1996). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Coleman, L. M., ‘‘Cultural Representations of Blackness: Discourse, Identity, and Voice in the Texts of bell hooks and Michele Wallace, 1979-1992 ’’ (thesis, 1994). Exum, P. C., Keeping the Faith (1972). Reference works: CA (1983). Other references: African American Review (1995). Black American Literary Forum (Winter 1984). Black Female Authors
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& Playwrights (video, 1989). Black Women, Sexual Politics and the Revolution (video, 1991, 1992). College Literature (Oct. 1993). Essence (Feb. 1979, Aug. 1979). Journal of Communication (Spring 1991, Autumn 1991). Michele Wallace (video, 1991). Nation (17 Feb. 1979, 15 July 1991). New Directions for Women (Jan. 1992). New Statesman and Society (30 Nov. 1990). Newsweek (5 Feb. 1979). NYTBR (18 Mar. 1979). Signs (Spring 1995). Washington Monthly (Feb. 1979). Woman’s Art Journal (1999). —MARJORIE BRYER, UPDATED BY SYDONIE BENET
WALLER, Mary Ella Born 1 March 1855, Boston, Massachusetts; died 14 June 1938, Wellesley, Massachusetts Wrote under: M. E. Waller, Mary E. Waller Daughter of David and Mary Hallet Waller The early deaths of Mary Ella Waller’s father and brother made it necessary for her to earn her own living—in a manner compatible with her genteel New England descent. Four years in Europe, acquiring languages, qualified her to teach at an exclusive Boston finishing school. She later held a similar post at the Brearly School in New York and then founded Miss Waller’s School for Girls in Chicago. Waller’s first writings were children’s stories and translations of German verse. Forced by poor health to give up her school, she turned to writing fiction and became a popular novelist. Her earliest books were most successful: A Daughter of the Rich (1903), The Wood-Carver of ’Lympus (1904), and Sanna (1905) ran through more than a dozen editions each. She also published magazine verse, Our Benny (1909, a Civil War narrative poem honoring Abraham Lincoln), and From an Island Outpost (1914), a semiphilosophical work in journal form. Waller’s work is similar to that of her contemporary Gene Stratton-Porter The Wood-Carver of ’Lympus, published the same year as Freckles, strikes the same vein: the crippled hero lies in bed at the center of the house carving exquisitely detailed wildflowers which are bought by wealthy New Yorkers. He also provides a home for a girl cousin whose illegitimacy creates a subplot. Customers bring science and culture into the rural retreat and are in turn restored by the woodcarver’s wholesomeness. Thus sentimentality, goodwill, and a healthy dose of coincidence reconcile opposites: nature with art, the work ethic with aristocratic privilege, urban culture with rural simplicity, and physical helplessness with the ability to control one’s life and influence the lives of others. As her journal reveals, Waller sympathized with the downtrodden, and particularly with the Native American. At the same time, she was a social Darwinist; her belief in progress and manifest destiny made her see life as a competition in which the fittest succeed. She made sentimental use of the issues of the
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Progressive era. Flamstead Quarries (1910) is about an exconvict’s reform; both it and The Little Citizen (1902) deal with child labor, abandoned children, and the exploitation of children; Out of the Silences (1918) portrays Cree culture and religion; A Cry in the Wilderness (1912) deals with a working girl’s loneliness and depression. In a different vein, A Year Out of Life (1909), an epistolary novel about a German writer and his young American translator deals with the paradoxes of sexual politics. The heroine struggles not to fall in love for fear of losing her freedom; she aggressively declares her love because she knows forwardness will drive the man away and so save her from the decision of whether to marry him. The book, however, ends unsatisfactorily with an easy irony. Waller was among the novelists considered safe for readers of all ages. Several elements in her usual story express a typically adolescent fantasy: the sense of being outcast, different, deficient, or unwanted and the belief that love can be earned by martyrdom. The lost-father plot solves the problems of the insecure adolescent or unhappy working woman by allowing a rich man to arrive and make all well. Waller has, however, given some deliberate thought to sex roles. Most of her heroines can catch and ride a horse; the nicest of her men can cook a meal or care for a baby without looking foolish. All of her admirable characters support themselves. Yet for both men and women the ideal is a life of cultured leisure. Though Waller pays lip service to hard work and the beauties of nature, express trains are continually rushing into her countryside laden with books, objects d’art, hothouse flowers, and out-of-season fruits. Waller uses shifting viewpoints, with letters, diaries, and first-person narratives sandwiched in the midst of omniscient passages. She emphasizes the effect of events on people rather than the events themselves; only rarely does she write strong scenes. The sentimental tension works to sustain the early books; the lame newsboy’s heroic ride to save the town from the bursting dam in The Little Citizen (1902) must touch responsive chords in the heart of anyone who has ever felt helpless and patronized. But because Waller deals primarily in melodramatic events of the sort usually found in plot-centered books and her emotional analysis is seldom profound, the novels are flat and anticlimactic. The vogue for Waller’s sort of fiction ended with World War I, and, as her later novels failed to develop any new directions, they were dismissed by critics and public alike. OTHER WORKS: The Rose-bush of Hildesheim (1889). Giotto’s Sheep (1889). Through the Gates of the Netherlands (1907). My Ragpicker (1911). Aunt Dorcas’s Change of Heart (1913). Deep in the Hearts of Men (1924). The Windmill on the Dune (1931). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Overton, G., The Women Who Make Our Novels (1922). Other references: Nation (19 May 1904). NYT (15 June 1938). —SALLY MITCHELL
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WALTER, Mildred Pitts Born 9 December 1922, De Ridder, Louisiana Daughter of Paul and Mary Ward Pitts; married Earl Lloyd Walter, 1947; children: Earl Jr., Craig Mildred Pitts Walter began writing because she ‘‘wanted to know why there were so few books for and about the children I taught who were black.’’ She became an author ‘‘out of the need to share with all children the experiences of a people who have a rich and unique way of living that has grown out of the ability to cope and to triumph over racial discrimination.’’ Raised in Louisiana, Walter has spent her adult life in California and Colorado. After graduating from Louisiana’s Southern University with a B.A. in English (1944), Walter accepted a position as a teacher and librarian in the Los Angeles Unified School System, where she taught for many years. She received an M.A. in education from Antioch Extension in Denver (1947) and later (1950-52) attended California State College in Los Angeles. With her husband, a city chairman of the Congress on Racial Equality, Walter worked with the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People toward desegregating the Los Angeles schools. She was also a consultant for the Western Interstate Commission of Higher Education and a consultant, teacher, and lecturer in Metro State College. In 1977 Walter served as a delegate to the second World Black and African Festival of the Arts and Culture in Lagos, Nigeria. In her books, which range from picture format to young-adult novels, Walter sensitively incorporates issues of family, heritage, race relations, and change. She specifically builds her characters around ‘‘the dynamics of choice, courage and change.’’ Walter firmly believes that heritage is integral to identity: children must know their family and cultural heritage before they can know themselves. Although she did not start her writing career until 1969, Walter has written more than a dozen children’s books and received numerous awards and honors. In 1987 Justin and the Best Biscuits in the World (1986) won the Coretta Scott King Award, and Because We Are (1983) and Trouble’s Child (1985) were Coretta Scott King Honor Books. The nonfiction Mississippi Challenge (1992) relates the history of the African American in Mississippi from slavery through the Civil War and Reconstruction, to the inception of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Walter has also attempted to raise awareness of the African holiday Kwanzaa through her children’s books Have a Happy. . . (1989) and Kwanzaa: A Family Affair (1995). The latter book is a guide to celebrating the occasion, including information on its origin, vocabulary, related family activities, and ideas for giftgiving. Another recent work is Darkness (1995), geared to the preschool level and addressing the fear of the dark. Despite the occasional awkward phrasing, Walter illustrates the beauty of darkness with symbolic and philosophical descriptions of good things taking place there.
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Second Daughter: The Story of a Slave Girl (1996) is a novel based on the true story of Elizabeth ‘‘Mum Bett’’ Freeman, a slave who sued for her freedom in 1781, helping to end slavery in Massachusetts. The book has been praised for its extensive research, although the story gets heavy with historical details and the plot wanders at times. Walter’s recent project, The Suitcase (1999), was just published. Walter’s strength in writing for children is her ability to bring life to everyday situations. Children’s literature has been enriched through the warmth, sensitivity, love, gentleness, and caring that speak out in her work. OTHER WORKS: Contribution of Minorities to American Culture (n.d.). Lillie of Watts: A Birthday Discovery (1969). Lillie of Watts Takes a Giant Step (1971). The Liquid Tap (1976). Ty’s One-Man Band (1980). The Girl on the Outside (1982). My Mamma Needs Me (1983). Brother to the Wind (1985). Mariah Loves Rock (1988). Little Sister, Big Trouble (1990). Mariah Keeps Cool (1990). Two and Too Much (1990). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Authors of Books for Young People (1979). Black Authors and Illustrators of Children’s Books (1988). CLR (1988). SATA (1986, 1992). Sixth Book of Junior Authors and Illustrators (1989). TCCW (1989). Other references: Booklist (15 Nov. 1995, 15 Feb. 1996). Horn Book (Jan./Feb. 1991, 1996). LJ (Oct. 1995). —SANDRA RAY, UPDATED BY CARRIE SNYDER
WALTON, Evangeline Born circa 1920s Evangeline Walton’s full name is Evangeline Walton Ensley and she has lived in Arizona. No other biographical information can be found. Walton is one of several modern writers who have retold stories from the four branches (or first four stories) of the Mabinogion, a collection of ancient Welsh legends. Sex, magic, and heroism loom large in the Mabinogion, which encompasses in simple words a wide range of emotion, striking every note from the comic to the tragic. In her first book, The Virgin and the Swine (1936), based on the fourth branch, Walton portrays magic as a demonstration of the powers of the mind. She lays great stress on the cleverness of the enchanter Gwydion, who is constantly overreaching himself in the tricks he plays on others and who emerges as a very human and fully rounded character. Walton explains much that happens in the Mabinogion in terms of a shift from matrilineal descent and worship of the
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Mother Goddess to patrilineal descent and neglect of the Mother Goddess, bringing about a deterioration in the relationships of men and women. She also attempts to recreate the religion of the Druids. Her characters believe in reincarnation, and Walton expresses this belief so wholeheartedly she appears to share it. The Virgin and the Swine was not a success, and Walton went on to different subjects in her next books. Witch House (1945) tells of a battle between good and evil in a house that was built by a warlock in 17th-century New England. The struggle between the warlock’s 20th-century descendants is intense and thrilling. In the end good triumphs.
WALWORTH, Jeannette (Ritchie) Hadermann Born 22 February 1837, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; died 4 February 1918, New Orleans, Louisiana Wrote under: Ann Atom, Jeannette R. Hadermann, Mother Goose, Mrs. Jeannette H. Walworth Daughter of Charles J. and Matilda Norman von Winsingen Hadermann; married Douglas Walworth, 1873
The Cross and the Sword (1956, reissued 1960) is the story of a Viking who comes to England in Anglo-Saxon times and is converted to Christianity. There is tenderness, violence, cruelty, and a touch of magic in this story, which attempts to solve some historical puzzles.
Jeannette Hadermann Walworth was one of seven children. Her father was a German political exile who came to this country in the 1820s, after supporting the attempted formation of a German republic. Not long after Walworth was born, her family moved to Washington, Mississippi, where her father became professor of modern languages at Jefferson College.
Lin Carter, the editor of a popular fantasy series, reprinted Walton’s first book under the title The Island of the Mighty (1970, reprinted several times, the most recent 1993) and asked Walton for any other stories she might have based on the Mabinogion. She brought out a 30-year old manuscript, based on the second branch. In The Children of Llyr (1971, 1992), Walton is particularly fascinated by the character of Evnissyen, an insanely spiteful young man who is finally induced by the goodness of his twin, Nissyen, to atone for his crimes. Walton suggests the good man is higher up the ladder of reincarnation than the bad man and must help him.
From the age of sixteen until the close of the Civil War, Walworth was a governess on Louisiana plantations. The desire for a writing career took her to New Orleans, where she wrote for the New Orleans Times under the name Ann Atom, earning little but attracting some interest. More lucrative endeavors soon followed, when two novels (written while she was serving as governess) were published. Forgiven at Last (1870) did not create more than polite interest, but Dead Men’s Shoes (1872) outraged the residents of Tensas Parish, Louisiana, who believed the author had maligned a prominent family of the parish through her character portrayals.
The Song of Rhiannon (1972, 1992) and Prince of Annwn (1974, 1992), based on the third and first branches, followed in rapid succession, completing the adventures of the characters in Walton’s earlier retellings of the Mabinogion. These two suggest that this world and supernatural worlds beyond are connected in a gigantic chain of evolution.
After marriage to Major Walworth of Natchez, Mississippi, the couple lived for five years in Arkansas on the Walworth plantation, where she wrote Against the World (1873), Heavy Yokes (1876), and Nobody’s Business (1878). For a short time the Walworths then lived in Memphis, Tennessee, where she wrote for the Memphis Appeal as ‘‘Mother Goose,’’ before leaving the South for a 16-year stay in New York City.
Walton’s chief claim to critical attention is the way in which she has fleshed out the spare narrative of the Mabinogion, giving a plausible explanation in human and historical terms for the strange and magical doings of its heroes and heroines. She is a mistress of fantasy and deserves her long-delayed success. OTHER WORKS: Son of Darkness (1957). Four Branches of the Mabinogion: In a Complete Boxed Set (1974). The Sword Is Forged (1984). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Carter, L., Introductions to The Island of the Mighty (1970), The Children of Llyr (1971), and The Song of Rhiannon (1972). Merla, P., Introduction to Prince of Annwn (1974). Zahorski, K. J., Lloyd Alexander, Evangeline Walton Ensley, Kenneth Morris: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography (1981). Other references: Children’s Literature in Education (Spring 1978). —BARBARA J. BUCKNALL
In New York, Major Walworth established a law practice and Jeannette wrote for magazines and newspapers and also published many novels. The Walworths returned to Mississippi, where he was editor of the Natchez Democrat and she continued to write. She lived with relatives in New Orleans following the death of her husband in 1914. A number of Walworth’s novels reflect changes in the South following the war. These difficult times for both blacks and whites and the change from an agrarian life to one influenced by urban values are seen through her characters. The New Man at Rossmere (1886), Baldy’s Point (1889), On the Winning Side (1893), and Uncle Scipo (1896) all have plantation settings. Perhaps because she was a journalist with more than casual knowledge of society beyond her own household, Walworth provides a kind of synthesis of the average postwar citizen’s view of things. Her forte is the realistic novel, not light romance, and she is adept at giving substance to her characters and the places where they live. Many of the same character types (such as women who are noble, longsuffering, virtuous, and strong), reappear in her novels. They are not mere stereotypes, however, because she varies the patterns,
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and the major characters are often skillfully and at times powerfully developed. Walworth attracted considerable attention from critics and readers for her condemnation, in The Bar Sinister: A Social Study (1885), of polygamy in Mormon Utah. It is somewhat different from her other novels in that she does not provide a happy ending for her protagonist, Anna Quinby, the legitimate wife of a Mormon convert. Uncle Scipo: A Story of Uncertain Days in the South tells of a Yankee who goes South to check land titles for a firm that has bought 10 cotton plantations. Through a first-person account, the reader comes to know all the facets of life in the Delta country. There are good, insightful descriptions of the customs and folkways of the South, as well as a realistic portrayal of the postwar scene. Walworth wrote nearly 30 novels, most set in the South. They are often melodramatic, in the accepted style of the period, and display strict religious moralizing. There are villains in plentiful supply, but usually they confess their wrongs and repent (and are compassionately forgiven by those who have been illused). Although the plots are somewhat obvious, Walworth uses a variety of characters from all levels of society, portraying them adequately and sometimes memorably. OTHER WORKS: Matsy and I (1883). Old Fulkerson’s Clerk (1886). Scruples (1886). Without Blemish (1886). At Bay (1887). Southern Silhouettes (1887). The Silent Witness (1888). A Strange Pilgrimage (1888). That Girl from Texas (1888). True to Herself (1888). The Martlet Seal (1889). A Splendid Egotist (1889). An Old Fogy (1895). Ground-Swells (1896). Where Kitty Found Her Soul (1896). Three Brave Girls (1897). Fortune’s Tangled Skein (1898). Green Withes (1899). A Little Radical (1900). His Celestial Marriage (n.d.). Stories of a Southern Country (n.d.). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Roberts, O. H., ‘‘A Criticism of Jeannette Ritchie Hadermann Walworth’s Novels’’ (thesis, 1938). Reference works: A Bibliography of Fiction by Louisianians and on Louisiana Subjects (1935). DAB. Living Female Writers of the South (1872). —DOROTHY H. BROWN
WARD, Mary Jane Born 27 August 1905, Fairmont, Indiana; died February 1981 Daughter of Claude A. and Marion Lockridge Ward; married Edward Quayle, 1928 Mary Jane Ward lived most of her life in Evanston, Illinois, where she attended Evanston High School and Northwestern University. She studied art and piano and won a year’s scholarship
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at the Chicago Lyceum of Arts Conservatory. She began writing after her marriage to a statistician and published stories in such magazines as Woman’s Home Companion and Good Housekeeping. The Snake Pit (1946), her best known book, is based on her experiences in a state mental institution, where she spent nine months after a nervous breakdown in 1941. Ward became an advocate for mental health, speaking and writing regularly on behalf of more progressive treatment of the mentally ill. In 1949, she was given the Women’s National Press Club Achievement Award. The Tree Has Roots (1937) deals with the lives of people without whom a university could not function: grounds crews, a night watchmen, a commons waitress, a stenographer. Ward is sympathetic to the everyday frustrations of lower class life during the Depression. In this first novel, she shows herself to be a fine craftsman, especially skillful with dialogue. The Wax Apple (1938) treats the lives of two families living on the wrong side of Chicago during the Depression. Less touching than The Tree Has Roots, this is still a strong chronicle of the ultimate frustrations of life. The Professor’s Umbrella (1948) is a slight work about the attempt of a Jewish college professor to find a new career after he is dismissed from his teaching position on a trumped-up charge of moral turpitude, which masks the college administration’s anti-Semitism. Ward moves away from ordinary lives and takes up the politics of religion; in doing so, she unfortunately weakens the novel, creating flat types rather than characters. Less dogmatic and more diffuse is It’s Different for a Woman (1952), Ward’s closest approach to a feminist novel. Sally Cutter faces middle age, a roaming husband, a daughter’s shaky romance, and the prospect of 40 uneventful and changeless years in an expensive suburb. The Snake Pit is generally considered one of the most accurate and moving fictional accounts of insanity. The book follows the life in an asylum of Virginia Stuart Cunningham, writer and wife, who has had a nervous breakdown. One sign of her returning sanity is her increasing attention to the events of the asylum as ‘‘material for a story.’’ Although Ward at the end applauds the ministrations of doctors, the story makes it clear that Virginia’s recovery was born, shaped, and realized within her own mind. Counterclockwise (1969) depicts a relapse that returns its heroine, the author of a bestselling novel about mental illness, to an expensive private hospital. The book effectively contrasts with The Snake Pit, for the heroine receives the kind of care that should have been available to Virginia Cunningham. Ward attempts to show that, properly treated, the mental patient can be fully cured and, above all, need not be feared nor rejected by society. Neither as intense nor as focused as The Snake Pit, The Other Caroline (1970) is yet another treatment of a woman’s return from insanity. In this novel, a woman is convinced her brain has been transplanted into the body of Caroline Kincaid, ‘‘the other Caroline’’ of the novel’s title. As part of her therapy, she writes a fictionalized account of ‘‘the other Caroline’s’’ life. By this structural device, Ward shows both the cause and the cure of the mental illness.
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Ward presents in her early novels a world now unfashionable, but so concrete that her works could serve as social history. Although decidedly not a feminist, she possesses ‘‘sensitive and compassionate insight into feminine psychology.’’ Her work, always meticulously crafted and skillfully organized, makes the subject of nervous breakdowns acceptable and even engaging; it thus creates a wide and receptive audience for her mental health crusades. Ward is an example of a single-subject writer who produces one great book and several minor gems.
OTHER WORKS: A Little Night Music (1951).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: American Novelists of Today (1951). CB (June 1946). TCA. Other references NYTBR (25 April 1937, 16 Jan. 1938, 7 April 1946, 14 April 1946, 11 Jan. 1948, 24 Feb. 1951, 9 Nov. 1952, 12 Oct. 1969, 23 Aug. 1970). —LORALEE MACPIKE
WARFIELD, Catherine (Ann) Ware Born 6 June 1816, Natchez, Mississippi; died 21 May 1877, Louisville, Kentucky Daughter of Nathaniel A. and Sarah Ellis Ware; married Robert E. Warfield, 1833 Catherine Ann Ware Warfield was brought up by her father, a major during the War of 1812 and an amateur scientist, who had strict notions about home education and the benefits of travel. Her mother was institutionalized for insanity after the birth of her second daughter in 1820. Nathaniel Ware then sold his property in Mississippi and moved with his children to Philadelphia, where he obtained tutors for his daughters’ social education, while he taught them academic subjects at home. Each year the family traveled for educational purposes in both the South and the North. After her marriage, Warfield settled at her husband’s home in Lexington, Kentucky. In 1857 she and her family moved to Beechmoor, an estate near Louisville, where she lived in comparative retirement until her death. Warfield and her sister, Eleanor Ware Lee, wrote poetry together and, with their father’s encouragement, published The Wife of Leon, and Other Poems in 1843, followed by The Indian Chamber, and Other Poems in 1846. While none of the verse is attributed specifically to either of the sisters, clear hints of Warfield’s later work pervade the poetry’s tone, settings, subjects, and themes: the pieces are generally sentimental, while insisting on rigid principles of conduct and on moral absolutes. They are often stilted, with conventional rhythms, rhymes, and forms; yet
the emphasis on character, first person voices, and narrative suggests the strengths of Warfield’s fiction. She ceased writing for a time after her sister’s death in 1849. Her calm and secluded life at Beechmoor, however, evidently provided the proper atmosphere for a return to writing; Warfield wrote steadily after her first novel, The Household of Bouverie was published in 1860. This novel is not only one of her best, it is characteristic of her fiction. It is a lengthy, somewhat autobiographical study of a fascinating criminal scientist, Erastus Bouverie, who tortures his wife and, obsessed by monomaniacal jealousy and possessiveness, uses strange chemical processes to maim and murder those he resents. The first part of the narrative is written from the point of view of Bouverie’s granddaughter, Lilian; the story is carried on by a detached narrator after Lilian’s death; and the last third of the novel consists almost entirely of excerpts from the diary of Bouverie’s wife. The plot depends heavily on mystery, suspense, and sensationalism, and is not always psychologically sound. The strengths of The Household of Bouverie lie in its experiments with point of view and its sometimes sharply drawn details; in its sustained, if windy, narrative; and in its emphasis on women’s responses to bizarre exploitation. In the story of the Bouveries, as throughout her writing, Warfield stresses primarily domestic tensions, but at times her social and political allegiances become explicit, as when she writes of the necessity of slavery, noting that ‘‘God intended the white man to govern the negro.’’ The Civil War inspired Warfield to return to writing poetry, which she published in periodicals and anthologies. Her verse shows strong Confederate sympathies, as do her later novels. Warfield deserves recognition in the history of American literature as one of the first female novelists of consequence in the South.
OTHER WORKS: The Romance of the Green Seal (1866). The Romance of Beauseincourt: An Episode Extracted from the Retrospect of Miriam Monfort (1867; also published as Miriam’s Memoirs, 1876). Miriam Monfort (1873; parts 1 and 2 published separately as Monfort Hall, Sea, and Shore, 1876). A Double Wedding; or, How She Was Won (1875). Hester Howard’s Temptation (1875). Lady Ernestine; or, The Absent Lord of Rochester (1876). Ferne Fleming: A Novel (1877). The Cardinal’s Daughter: A Sequel to ‘‘Ferne Fleming’’ (1877).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brown, A., The Cabells and Their Kin (1895). Simpson, E. M., ‘‘The Meadows,’’ in Bluegrass Houses (1932). Townsend, J. W., Kentucky in American Letters (Volume 1, 1913). Warfield, J. D., The Warfields of Maryland (1898). Reference works: LSL (1910). Southland Writers (Volume 1, 1870). Women of the South Distinguished in Literature (1861). —CAROLINE ZILBOORG
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WARNER, Anna Bartlett
Warner had made her garden feed her family, selling produce on the side.
Born circa 1824, New York, New York; died 22 January 1915, West Point, New York Wrote under: Amy Lothrop, Anna B. Warner Daughter of Henry W. and Anna Bartlett Warner
A more active and outgoing person than her sister, Warner was modest and self-effacing about her own accomplishments. In her biography of Susan, she glorifies her sister’s achievements, perhaps at the expense of her own. While she was not gifted, she was a hardworking and disciplined professional writer.
Anna Bartlett Warner’s mother died soon after she was born. After the business depressions of mid-century, her father had to be supported by Warner and her sister, Susan. For most of her long life, Warner lived on Constitution Island, in the Hudson opposite West Point. The Warners owned the entire island, making their home in a Revolutionary War-era farmhouse. While the sisters did not earn much money from their many books, they did manage to spend most winters in New York City, where they had friends among the literary set. Warner continued to live on the island with two black servants for 30 years after the death of her sister. The island is maintained by the Constitution Island Association, and the Warner house is a historic landmark, open to the public during the summer. Both Warner and her sister published prolifically. Warner’s first book, Dollars and Cents (1852), published under the pseudonym Amy Lothrop, is not very good, but it enjoyed considerable popularity. Based on her own experiences, it tells of the Howard family’s loss of fortune and retirement to country life. All ends well, of course, with a marriage. She wrote a few other adult novels with Susan, but most of her fiction is for children. Warner’s children’s novels are all of a didactic nature intended for Sunday school readers. She did not have her sister’s gift for telling a story; somewhat unusual, however, is that not all of her books have happy endings. The young readers are urged to become Christians, give to missionaries, and obey their parents. Poor children are described in most of her books, but not all of them are rescued. Warner is perhaps best known as the writer of the famous children’s hymn, ‘‘Jesus Loves Me,’’ which appears in a scene in Say and Seal (1860), sung by the hero as he walks the floor with a dying child. Another of her hymns, ‘‘We Would See Jesus,’’ from the deathbed scene in Dollars and Cents, has achieved some popularity. In addition to novels and hymns, Warner wrote some nonfiction about the Bible and Christian life. Her most distinctive work deals with gardening. Pond Lily Stories (1857) is a collection of flower fables for children. Most have a moral and teach something about plants, in the style of mixed flower fantasy and botanical fact common at the time. Three Little Spades (1868), a story that presents some of the principles of gardening, and the sequel, Blue Flag and Cloth of Gold (1879), are more instructional than Pond Lily Stories. For adult readers, she wrote Gardening by Myself (1872), encouraging women to do their own gardening, as she had done. In a fictional companion volume, Miss Tiller’s Vegetable Garden and the Money She Made by It (1872), she tells how, with the help of a wise boarder, a woman is able to support herself and her two children with produce from her own backyard. For several years,
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OTHER WORKS: (The following is a list of Anna Bartlett Warner’s more important works. A complete bibliography is included in They Wrote for a Living, compiled by D. H. Sanderson, 1976). My Brother’s Keeper (1855). Stories of Vinegar Hill (1871). Tired Christians (1881). Tired Church Members (1881). Cross Corners (1887). Yours and Mine (1888). Patience (1890). Up and Down the House (1892). Fresh Air (1899). West Point Colors (1903). Susan Warner (1909).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hollingsworth, B., Her Garden Was Her Delight (1962). Sanderson, D. H., They Wrote for a Living (1976). Stokes, O. E., Letters and Memoirs of Susan and Anna Bartlett Warner (1925). Other references: Fourth Report and Yearbook of the Martelaer’s Rock Association (1920-23). N.Y. History (April 1959). —BEVERLY SEATON
WARNER, Susan Bogert Born 11 July 1819, New York, New York; died 17 March 1885, Highland Falls, New York Wrote under: Susan B. Warner, Elizabeth Wetherall Daughter of Henry W. and Anna Bartlett Warner Susan Bogert Warner’s family was prosperous during her childhood, but the depression of 1837 saw the collapse of their fortunes. Thereafter, Warner and her sister Anna were responsible for the support of themselves, their father (their mother had died young), and a paternal aunt. Their father had purchased Constitution Island, in the Hudson River opposite West Point, as a summer retreat, but the family was forced to make it their permanent home. The sisters cooked, gardened, chopped wood, and fished. At her aunt’s suggestion, and because of a great need for money, Warner wrote The Wide, Wide World (1850), which went through many editions in many languages. She and her sister were among the century’s most prolific writers, but their earnings were small, partly due to literary piracy. A sensitive, rather morbid personality distinguished Warner from her younger sister socially, but hers was the greater talent.
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Although poverty and hard work narrowed her world, she managed to travel some, meeting Emerson and other New England literary figures in Boston. She spent almost every winter in New York, where she knew such writers as Alice and Phoebe Cary. The Wide, Wide World, which had been rejected by several publishers, was a literary phenomenon. Its basic appeal is to girls and women. After her mother dies, Ellen Montgomery must live with other relatives—first an old maid aunt who runs her own farm and then a worldly Scottish family who claim her for a time. Ellen finds they try her Christian patience—and they disapprove of her priggish ways. No matter what the issue, Ellen expresses herself by bursting into tears. (Biographers say that Warner was apt to cry frequently herself.) However sentimental this novel appears today, Warner’s ability to tell a story and to involve the reader in the lives of her characters is superior.
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time, however, and deserves serious consideration from literary scholars.
OTHER WORKS: (The following is a list of Susan Bogert Warner’s more important works. A complete bibliography is included in They Wrote for a Living, compiled by D. H. Sanderson, 1976). The Law and the Testimony (1853). The Hills of the Shatemuc (1856). The Old Helmet (1863). Melbourne House (1864). Daisy (1868). Walks from Eden (1870). The House in Town (1872). A Story of Small Beginnings (1872). Willow Brook (1874). Say and Do Series (1875). Bread and Oranges (1877). Pine Needles (1877). The Broken Wall of Jerusalem and the Rebuilding of Them (1878). The Flag of Truce (1878). The Kingdom of Judak (1878). My Desire (1879). The End of the Coil (1880). The Letter of Credit (1882). Stephen, M.D. (1883). A Red Wallflower (1884). Daisy Plains (1885).
Warner’s second novel, Queechy (1852), almost as popular as her first, tells how, after the death of her grandfather and the business failure of her uncle, young Fleda Ringgan helps support her family by selling flowers and garden produce. Throughout the novels of both sisters, young women in financial difficulties are commonplace; they are often furnished with a father, uncle, or guardian who cannot function once his money is gone. The autobiographical element is obvious. While the sisters preserved a pious respect for their father (who lived until 1875), their books reveal their annoyance with such helpless characters. In Queechy even the resourceful heroine feels faint if she must answer the door or eat with the hired girl, but the late novel Nobody (1882) shows a family of sisters who do their own work and thrive on it. Presumably, as the years passed, Warner became more accustomed to her status in life.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Baker, M., Light in the Morning: Memories of Susan and Anna Warner (1978). Sanderson, D. H., They Wrote for a Living: A Bibliography of Susan Bogert Warner (1976). Stokes, O. E., Letters and Memoirs of Susan and Anna Bartlett Warner (1925). Warner, A., Susan Warner (1909). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: American Quarterly (Winter 1990). N.Y. History 40 (April 1959).
By herself and in collaboration with Anna, she wrote many children’s books. Most of them are highly didactic and were popular in the Sunday school libraries of the time. Although both sisters were evangelical Presbyterians—they disapproved of the theater, but not of all novels—Warner’s books are centered on accepting and serving Christ, with little interest in doctrinal or controversial themes.
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Most of her adult novels are what she called ‘‘true stories’’ (she didn’t like the word ‘‘novel’’). The books usually have a good Christian heroine (or hero) who overcomes poverty and becomes successful. Meals of bread and molasses are to be found in these books, but generous meals are much more common. In Diana (1877), Warner attributes her fascination with writing about food to her intimate knowledge of is preparation. ‘‘Sympathy and affection and tender ministry are wrought into the very pie crust, and glow in the brown loaves as they come out of the oven; and are specially seen in the shortcake for tea and the favorite dish at dinner and the unexpected dumpling.’’ Warner had a gift for describing the material things of life; a reading of her novels will give the modern reader a close look into 19th-century American kitchen cupboards, desk drawers, and clothes closets. Interest today in Warner’s books is mainly historical. She is one of the best of the ‘‘damned mob of scribbling women’’ of her
—BEVERLY SEATON
Born 22 March 1899, Clayton, Alabama; died March 1982 Daughter of Benjamin S. and Lee Ella Underwood Warren; married John Spanogla, 1921; Buel W. Patch, 1941 Lella Warren’s father’s duties as a doctor with the U.S. Public Health Service took his family to many marine hospitals and quarantine stations before they settled in Washington, D.C., when she was twelve. Dr. Warren, however, returned his family to Clayton, Alabama, for frequent visits so they would retain ties with the state where Warren ancestors had been pioneers. Warren graduated from Western High School in Washington and attended Goucher College (1918-19) and George Washington University, where she received a B.A. (1921) and did graduate work. Warren and her first husband had one daughter. Warren published short stories and features in Washington newspapers and national magazines. ‘‘Before the Flight,’’ an indepth feature on the preparations for Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight, with details checked by Lindbergh himself, appeared
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in Collier’s (18 July 1931). She also worked in government, publicity, advertising, and education—meanwhile devoting years to extensive background research for her novels. In 1941, Warren was chosen one of the ‘‘women of the year’’ by the National Women’s Press Club. Warren describes her first novel, A Touch of Earth, (1926) as semiautobiographical. It follows Jick, the daughter of an Army doctor, from her childhood through her development as a woman and a writer. The novel’s style becomes more mature and sensitive as Warren’s heroine grows up. Warren’s father wanted a ‘‘true-to-life book about Southern planters,’’ so she spent nearly 12 years researching Foundation Stone (1940) and a similar period on Whetstone Walls (1952). She used diaries, correspondence, court records, research at the Library of Congress, as well as interviews in Alabama with friends and relatives. Foundation Stone opens on a South Carolina plantation in the 1820s. Yarbrough Whetstone moves his family and possessions from the depleted South Carolina land to the Alabama wilderness, leaving behind luxury of the plantation life for the hardships of the frontier planter. Warren follows the family through the settlement years and the ravages of the Civil War. At the end of the book—the title, drawn from a passage in Stephen Vincent Benét’s John Brown’s Body, refers to Whetstone’s wife, Gerda—the war is over and the remnants of the Whetstone family are collecting their resources to rebuild. The sequel, Whetstone Walls, is a self-contained novel, set in the 1880s and 1890s. The focus is on the children and grandchildren of Gerda and Yarbrough. The extent of Warren’s research is reflected in her meticulous attention to details, such as pioneers’ building methods, food preparation, and schooling, and her detailed attention to broader concerns, such as Indian affairs (Yarbrough attended the Alabama legislature to hear the farewell speech of Chief Yufala); difficulties of travel and the coming of the railroad; and the course and effects of the Civil War. The historical background, however, never overshadows the characters and plot. The events are important only as they touch the lives of the Whetstones and their friends. Warren excels at characterization as she creates a range of characters comparable to that in Dickens’s novels. The variety increases as the family grows in the third and fourth generations and the circle of friends widens. Warren believes ‘‘the family is a way of life. . . and will ultimately survive.’’ However confused the casual reader may become by the multiplicity of characters, each individual is carefully delineated in relationship to the Whetstone family. Episodes that might be attacked as too coincidental are justified by the importance of family ties, even as members move to New Orleans and Washington. The family is the unifying force of the novels. There are to be two more works in the Whetstone saga: an ‘‘interlude’’ novel about some minor characters, already in manuscript, and a novel in progress following Rob, one of the Whetstone grandchildren, through his medical career.
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Even without future works, Warren fulfilled a prediction of William Rose Benét, who wrote one of her teachers about an early Warren short story: ‘‘The girl who wrote ‘Red Brick’ will inevitably be a writer.’’
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Atkins, L. R., The Romantic Ideal: Alabama’s Plantation Eden (1978). Ross, J. C., A Sense of Place: Fiction in the Agrarian Tradition (1978). Other references: Alabama Librarian (Jan. 1953). NYTBR (15 Sept. 1940, 8 Dec. 1940). Perspectives: The Alabama Heritage (ETV broadcast, 10 Jan. 1979). —NANCY G. ANDERSON
WARREN, Mercy Otis Born 25 September 1728, Barnstable, Massachusetts; died 19 October 1814, Plymouth, Massachusetts Wrote under: A Columbian Patriot Daughter of James and Mary Allyne Otis; married James Warren, 1754; children: five sons Mercy Otis Warren was the third of 13 children. Her father, a staunch Whig, was a district judge whose life revolved around politics. Although women were customarily denied formal education, her father permitted Warren, his eldest daughter, to be tutored with her brothers by their paternal uncle, Rev. Jonathan Russell. Russell encouraged her to take lessons in all fields except Greek and Latin, so her elder brother James, an exceptionally brilliant young man, instructed her in these languages. Theirs was an unusually close relationship. He introduced her to Locke’s Essay on Government, which became the foundation of the political theory they shared. Her writing shows the influence of Raleigh, Pope, Dryden, Milton, Shakespeare, and Molière, but she learned the art of writing from her study of her uncle’s sermons. Warren’s husband, like her brother James, was a Harvard graduate. In this cultured and politically astute man she found a husband she loved and respected who returned her feelings, and they enjoyed a long and happy life together. She bore five sons to him between 1757 and 1766, all of whom survived to adulthood. Warren took much pride in his wife’s intelligence and literary talents. He not only brought stimulating guests like John and Samuel Adams regularly into their home but he himself gave her companionship and stability. During the early years of marriage, Warren served her literary apprenticeship, writing verse on every subject considered proper for poetry. She also wrote many letters. Perhaps her favorite correspondent was Abigail Adams, but she exchanged letters with many distinguished people on both sides of the Atlantic.
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During the 1770s, Warren became active in politics, along with her husband, father, and brother. ‘‘Be it known unto Britain even American daughters are politicians and patriots,’’ she wrote. She began writing political satires in the form of plays; none had much plot nor women characters. They were not stage-worthy pieces, but they were not intended to be. They accomplished their task, firing their readers’ imaginations and urging them to turn the depicted events into reality and punish the easily recognized villains. The Adulateur (1772), published anonymously in two installments in the Massachusetts Spy, presents ‘‘Rapatio, the Bashaw [ruler] of Servia whose principal mission in life is to crush the ardent love of liberty in Servia’s freeborn sons,’’ who clearly is the colony’s Governor Thomas Hutchinson. The classical names of her characters do not obscure their identities: for example, Brutus is James Otis, Jr., champion of the patriots. The ‘‘play’’ was so well received that the names Warren had given the characters were widely and gleefully used in the community. Her second play, The Defeat (1773), published by the Boston Gazette, continued Rapatio (Hutchinson) as arch villain. It pictures Rapatio planning to charge the improvements he has made on his house to the public taxes. Together with his self-incriminating letters then being circulated among the patriots, it brought about Hutchinson’s disgrace and recall. The Group (1775), the most popular of Warren’s political satires, appeared in pamphlet form only two weeks before the clash of ‘‘Minutemen’’ and British soldiers at Lexington. John Adams himself arranged its printing and, years later, personally verified Warren was its author. Almost pure propaganda, the play has only villains, the Tory leaders who are the group of the play’s title. Chief is Brigadier Hate-All, really the American-born Tory Timothy Ruggles, a longtime enemy of the Otis family. Other characters include Hum Humbug, Esq.; Crusty Crowbar, Esq.; Dupe; and Scrblerius Fribble. After the collapse of the Confederation, Warren wrote Observations on the New Constitution, and on the Federal Conventions (1788), under the pen name ‘‘A Columbian Patriot,’’ opposing the Constitution as it was originally proposed. She was an antiFederalist who believed, as she said, in ‘‘a union of the states on the free principles of the late Confederation.’’ The pen name caused some confusion, and the author’s identity was in dispute until 1930. Poems, Dramatic and Miscellaneous (1790) was dedicated to George Washington. The major works of the volume, ‘‘The Sack of Rome’’ and ‘‘The Ladies of Castille,’’ had been published previously. Though much praised by her political friends, critics pointed out her poems have faulty versification, too much alliteration, and bad rhyme. History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution, Interspersed with Biographical and Moral Observations (1805) was published in three volumes nearly 17 years
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after Warren finished it. By this time, other histories of the Revolution had appeared. Hers, however, is the only contemporary history told from a Republican point of view. Much of its value lies in the fact that more than 10 percent of the work is devoted to character analyses of the people she knew. John Adams broke off their long friendship over her analysis of him, but a number of years later a mutual friend brought them together again. Her history did not enjoy the success she had expected or it deserved; yet it has endured, and her reputation survives principally upon its merits. Warren was given a chance—rare for a woman—to use her talents, and she made the most of them. Although she was much respected in her own time, her reputation has dimmed somewhat—perhaps because so much of her writing was published in pamphlets and newspapers, so much of it was topical, and perhaps because so much of it reflects the classical pretensions of the time. Her history of the Revolution, however, is viewed by modern scholars as having enduring value as a strikingly realistic record of the struggle for independence.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Anthony, K., First Lady of the Revolution: The Life of Mercy Otis Warren (1958). Brink, J. R., ed., Female Scholars: A Tradition of Learned Women Before 1800 (1980). Brown, A., Mercy Warren (1896). Fritz, J., Cast for a Revolution: Some Friends and Enemies 1728-1814 (1972). Schlueter, J., ed., Modern American Drama: The Female Canon (1990). Smith, W., History as Argument: Three Patriot Historians of the American Revolution (1966). Reference works: Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia (1991). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: New England Magazine (April 1903). PMHS (March 1931). WMQ (July 1953). —BILLIE W. ETHERIDGE
WASSERSTEIN, Wendy Born 18 October 1950, Brooklyn, New York. Daughter of Morris W. and Lola Schleifer Wasserstein. The plays that Wendy Wasserstein has written since the late 1970s capture with humor the hope and the despair, the joy and the anguish of her generation of well-educated, successful upper-middle-class women whose lives have defined, and been defined by, the progress of the women’s movement in America during the last few decades of the 20th century. The women of Wasserstein’s plays have ridden the exhilarating, yet sometimes disorienting, wave of the women’s movement through college in the 1960s and 1970s, only to come crashing ashore in the 1980s to find the beckoning sands of professional success and personal fulfillment
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made rocky by the demands of relationships, family, and the ‘‘biological clock.’’ Wasserstein was raised in New York City, the youngest of four children of Jewish immigrant parents who prospered in the United States. She was educated at the Calhoun School (an exclusive Manhattan private school for girls), Mount Holyoke College (B.A., 1971), City College of New York (M.A., 1973), and the Yale School of Drama (M.E.A., 1976). For most of her life since Yale, she has lived in New York City in a world focused on the theater. As a child, Wasserstein was introduced to dance and theater (she was especially fond of musicals) by her mother and wrote musical revues at the Calhoun School. While an undergraduate, she took a summer playwriting course at Smith College and performed in campus theatrical productions. After she graduated from Mount Holyoke, but before she enrolled at Yale, in 1973 her play Any Woman Can’t was produced off-Broadway by Play-wrights Horizons. While at Yale, Wasserstein collaborated on two musical works, Montpelier Pa-zazz and When Dinah Shore Ruled the Earth. She wrote a one-act version of Uncommon Women and Others as her master’s thesis, and after completing her M.F.A., she expanded this play into two acts. The revised version was produced initially at the 1977 National Playwrights Conference at the O’Neill Theatre Center in Waterford, Connecticut, and then a few months later, by the Phoenix Theatre Company, at the Marymount Manhattan Theatre. Uncommon Women and Others (1978) was Wasserstein’s first successful play; receiving an Obie award, among others. It was followed in 1981 by Isn’t It Romantic (published 1984), also produced by the Phoenix at the Marymount Manhattan Theatre; a revised version opened off-Broadway late in 1983. Wasserstein’s most important work to date, The Heidi Chronicles, opened at Play-wrights Horizons in New York in 1988; after three months, it moved to Broadway. This play ‘‘chronicles’’ the life of Heidi Holland from her adolescence in the 1960s to her adulthood in the 1980s. Heidi voices disillusionment with the women’s movement (‘‘I thought the point was that we were all in this together’’), yet in her commitment to rearing her adopted daughter (she remains unmarried), she makes an active statement of hope for the future. The Heidi Chronicles received the Pulitzer Prize for drama and the Tony award as best new play of the year in 1989, as well as ‘‘best play’’ awards from the New York Drama Critics Circle, Outer Critics Circle, and Drama Desk; Wasserstein also received the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and the 1988 Hull-Warriner Award from the Dramatists Guild. While her work has been criticized by some for lack of depth, it has been praised by many critics for its witty dialogue and honest insights into one particular contemporary social milieu. Wasserstein has also written a one-act play, Tender Offer, produced in 1983, and collaborated on a musical, Miami, as yet
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(1993) unproduced. She has written several scripts for television, including an adaptation of the John Cheever story ‘‘The Sorrows of Gin’’ for public television; she was also a regular contributor to the CBS series Comedy Zone in 1984-85. She coauthored with Christopher Durang the screenplay The House of Husbands and wrote Maids in America for Steven Spielberg (both still unproduces), and adapted Stephen McCauley’s novel The Object of My Affection for Twentieth Century-Fox. She also adapted her own Uncommon Women for television (broadcast on PBS in 1978 and rebroadcast in 1991), and wrote a screenplay for Isn’t It Romantic (unproduced). In 1991 Wasserstein published Bachelor Girls, a collection of her personal essays on contemporary women’s lives; many critics found these nonfictional prose writings less compelling than her dramatic work. Wasserstein has received several fellowships and grants, including a 1983 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 1984 NEA grant for playwriting. Wasserstein’s play The Sisters Rosensweig (1992), about the conflicts between Jewish ethnic/religious identity and cultural assimilation in the lives of three sisters, opened off-Broadway to favorable reviews. It moved to Broadway in early 1993 and won a Tony for Madeline Kahn. In October 1995, The Heidi Chronicles was brought to television by the Turner network, starring Jamie Lee Curtis as the heroine. Some asked why make the award-winning play into a movie, and Wasserstein responded, ‘‘It would have killed me if Heidi never became a movie.’’ She said she was going to bring it to public television, but there was no money until Curtis became interested and Turner picked it up. The Heidi Chronicles, Wasserstein explains, is ‘‘a play by a woman about women running on Broadway and commercially viable.’’ Thus she opened the door for other women to do the same, to be funny, yet taken seriously. And she opened the door for other women playwrights to be brought to television. The story, originally written as a reaction to Wasserstein’s own disillusions, follows the flashbacks of a woman who is very successful yet feels stuck by the decisions she’s made. Although when it was released on television there were fears that audiences would not relate to Heidi’s character, women of today are relating to the recurring theme of ‘‘What if. . .?’’ Wasserstein more recent play, An American Daughter, which she calls ‘‘a bitter and angry play’’ opened in Seattle in the spring of 1996 and in New York that fall.
OTHER WORKS: The Heidi Chronicles and Other Plays (1991). Pamela’s First Musical (1996).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Betsko, K., and R. Koenig, Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights (1987). Carlson, S. L., ‘‘Comic Textures and Female Communities 1937 and 1977: Clare Boothe
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and Wendy Wasserstein,’’ in Modern American Drama: The Female Canon (1990). Keyssar, H., Feminist Theatre (1984). Raymond, M. G., ‘‘Chronicling Our Selves: Hermeneutical Consciousness in Four Plays by Marsha Norman, Caryl Churchill, and Wendy Wasserstein’’ (thesis, 1998). Reference works: CB (July 1989). CA (1987, 1989, 1990). CLC (1990). Contemporary Theatre, Film, and Television (1986). Feminist Companion to Literature in English (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the Untied States (1995). National Playwrights Directory (1981). WWAW (1984). Other references: Modern Drama (Dec. 1984). Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal (1988, interview). —STEVEN F. BLOOM, UPDATED BY DEVRA M. SLADICS
WATANABE, Sylvia Born circa 1950s or 1960s Over the past 20 years, there has been a sort of renaissance of Hawaiian literature. Writers like Milton Murayama, Darrell Lum, Nora Okja Keller, Susanna Moore, and Lois Ann Yamanaka have written significant fiction with Hawaiian themes. Another writer to follow this theme in her work is Sylvia Watanabe. With the emergence of Watanabe and these other writers, Hawaii seems to be carving out its own place in contemporary American literature. Hawaii has for more than 100 years been seen as the land of the hula and smiling faces with greetings of ‘‘Aloha.’’ It is viewed as a land of tourist fare through TV shows and exotic travel brochures. However, the latest dawning of Hawaiian literature has redefined the state and locale, showing a more realistic view of life from the insider’s point of view. Watanabe, a Japanese American born and raised on Maui, has taken her place among today’s literary voices with her first collection of stories, Talking to the Dead (1991, 1993, 1994). She evokes the everyday lives of Hawaiian villagers with a disarming blend of humor and pathos. Though for most Hawaii represents the dreamed-of vacation getaway, Watanabe adds some heart and soul, blended with some mysticism, to create a mood and picture that even the best vacation brochure could not provide. Talking to the Dead is a collection of interrelated short stories revolving around a close-knit Asian community of Luhi in Hawaii. The stories depict Maui’s Lahaina coast before it turned from fishing villages to tourist traps. The stories center on the community and family and often focus on interfamilial power struggles. Beneath the calm, normal exterior of the village, the reader will find some magic and dark family secrets. The various stories are heartwarming and memorable. In ‘‘Anchorage,’’ the story that opens the collection, Little Grandma
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takes her granddaughter (the narrator) to her attic to show the granddaughter her life’s work—a magnificent quilt: ‘‘Though unfinished the quilt covered nearly the entire wall. From where I stood, perhaps 15 feet away, it seemed to contain every color in the entire world. As I moved closer, the colors began to cohere into squares, the squares into scenes—each scene depicting places and people in the life of the village.’’ This story, like many others, celebrates Watanabe’s relationship with her grandmother. This same celebration is relived in a collection edited by Mickey Pearlman, Between Friends: Writing Women Celebrate Friendship (1994). Watanabe’s essay focuses on her mother and grandmother and on the heart-wrenching bedside vigil as her mother lies dying of pancreatic cancer. ’’Anchorage’’ and the other stories also evoke a fantastic portrait of this rural Hawaiian village. It is a way of life that is rapidly disappearing, being replaced by resorts and tourist destinations. Watanabe writes in an afterword, ‘‘I wanted to tell how the Lahaina coast looked before it was covered with resorts. . . . I wanted to save my parents’ and grandparents’ stories.’’ The title story of Talking to the Dead, winner of the O. Henry Award, explores the life of an elderly mystic, Auntie Talking to the Dead, who conducts funeral rites. She is joined by a young, local Japanese girl, who cannot be married off and who becomes her apprentice. The apprentice learns the medicinal uses of indigenous plants and Hawaiian healing chants. She learns the value of the gift of life passed on by the elderly woman and is able to use her knowledge after the woman’s death to keep the traditions of the old culture alive. Talking to the Dead was nominated for a National Book award in 1992. This first collection has allowed Watanabe to open the doors of opportunity before her even further. She has made an impressive start; her writing infuses her stories and characters with a timeless, boundless quality. Though the stories are rooted in the period of World War II and its effect on Japanese Americans, they intermingle the different generations and make the settings easily adjustable to the past, present, and future. Watanabe has also edited two collections of Asian American works, Home to Stay: Asian American Women’s Fiction and Into the Fire: Asian American Prose (1996), and her work has been included in additional volumes like the 1998 Pushcart Prize XXII: Best of the Small Presses, edited by Bill Henderson. In addition, Talking to the Dead was nominated in 1993 for the PEN/Faulkner award for fiction.
OTHER WORKS: O-bon: A Gathering of Joy (1985).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bauermeister, E., 500 Great Books by Women. Cheuse, A. and Marshall, C., eds., Listening to Ourselves: More Stories From ‘‘The Sound of Writing’’ (1994). Frosch, M., Coming of Age in America: A Multicultural Anthology (1994).
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Pearlman, M., ed., A Place Called Home: Twenty Writing Women Remember (1997). Penelope, J. and Valentine, S., eds., International Feminist Fiction (1992). Other references: American Book Review (Nov. 1990). Asian Week (16 Oct. 1992). International Examiner (20 Apr. 1992). NYT (27 Sept. 1992). PW (6 July 1992). San Francisco Chronicle (6 Sept. 1992). —DEVRA M. SLADICS
WATSON, Sukey Vickery Born 12 June 1779, Leicester, Massachusetts; died 17 June 1821, Leicester, Massachusetts Wrote under: ‘‘Fidelia,’’ ‘‘A Young Lady of Worcester County’’ Daughter of Benjamin and Susannah Barter Vickery; married Samuel Watson, 1804
that American men and women of large landed estates and ritualistic courtesies still bore a striking resemblance to their English counterparts, from whom they had so violently severed themselves only 20 years before. OTHER WORKS: The papers of Sukey Vickery Watson (poems, letters, and a fragment of her diary) are in the collection of the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bennett, J. B., A Young Lady of Worcester County (1942). Other references: Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society (1942). —JEANETTE NYDA PASSTY
WATTS, Mary Stanbery Sukey Vickery Watson was educated at Leicester Academy and wrote poetry for the Massachusetts Spy, under the pseudonym ‘‘Fidelia’’ during 1801 and 1802. She also produced the first novel to be published in Worcester County, Emily Hamilton (1803). In 1804 she married Samuel Watson, a successful manufacturer and representative to the Massachusetts legislature. Dr. Charles L. Nichols in his bibliography of Worcester attributed the novel Emily Hamilton to ‘‘Eliza Vicery,’’ an error which was copied by other scholars and by the Library of Congress, by means of which the error has been perpetuated. Sukey Vickery Watson had a daughter Eliza, which may have been the reason for the confusion of names. In the introduction to Emily Hamilton, Watson explains the function of a novel is to delight and to instruct the reader, but not to arouse false romantic expectations that could lead to ‘‘ruin.’’ Emily Hamilton is an epistolary novel, consisting of some 70 letters spanning over four years. The principal plot concerns Emily, who is courted by one man, conceives a ‘‘guilty passion’’ for another, and becomes promised to a third. The first of these, Lambert, proves a villain and flees to Canada under sentence of death. The second, the miserably married Belmont, becomes a widower at a most opportune time. The third, Devas, is tragically lost at sea, thereby freeing Emily to marry Belmont. Because events described in the letters have already taken place, the story lacks the immediacy of a present-tense narrative. Other handicaps are correspondents’ lengthy reflections on the moral consequences of actions and Watson’s overly elegant language: when Belmont attempts to convince Emily that they should be married quickly, ‘‘the pearly drop of sensibility gave additional lustre to his beamy eyes.’’ Watson includes numerous poems in a variety of styles, almost all lengthy and undistinguished. Emily Hamilton’s chief virtue—and Watson’s chief claim to fame—is as a sociological document rich in detail about upperclass life after the Revolution. Watson’s ‘‘real life’’ novel shows
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Born 4 November 1868, Delaware County, Ohio; died 21 May 1958, Cincinnati, Ohio Daughter of John and Anna Stanbery; married Miles T. Watts, 1891 Mary Stanbery Watts wrote in 1918 that her childhood on an Ohio farm was the ‘‘greatest asset’’ in her writing career. Apparently, because of declining fortunes, the family lived at ‘‘The Lindens’’ in solitude enforced by their social superiority over their illiterate neighbors. She was educated at the Sacred Heart Convent in Cincinnati. She married a successful real estate agent and spent the rest of her life in Cincinnati. Most of Watts’ novels are set in Ohio, and she consciously chronicles Midwestern manners. One of the prevalent themes of the early novels is the once-prominent and wealthy family now down on its luck. Her first novel, The Tenants (1908), set in Columbus during the 1880s, concerns the fortunes of the Gwynne family and their management of the family mansion built by Governor Gwynne and now merely a burden to his heirs. As in two other early novels—The Legacy (1911) and Van Cleve (1913)—there is one sensible and responsible member to contrast with less reliable family members. Watts’ second novel centers not on a family on its way down but on a young man on his way up. Nathan Burke (1910), a historical novel with a wealth of interesting characterization, is set in the Scioto River country where Watts was born and in Columbus, where young Burke goes to seek his fortunes. He becomes a hero in the Mexican war and makes good as a lawyer. The novel was well received by reviewers in major critical papers. With The Rise of Jennie Cushing (1914), Watts launched the dominant theme of all her later novels: the difficulties of marriages between classes. As a child, Jennie is taken from her home to become a ward of the state at the Girls’ Home (a facility that
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actually existed near the Stanbery farm). A beautiful, hardworking, independent young woman, Jennie leaves the school at eighteen, works for a farm family, becomes a manicurist, then later works in private homes as a hairdresser. Donelson Meigs, a painter, falls in love with her and takes her to Paris. But when he finds out about Jennie’s background, she, believing she’d only drag him down, goes back to America and runs a home for orphans in the country near the Girls Home. When Meigs comes after her, she refuses to marry him. Clearly, Watts believes this is the wise decision not only for Jennie but also for Meigs and his family. The rest of Watts’ novels all use romance and marriage to make the point, in the words of Mrs. McQuair of The Noon-Mark (1920), ‘‘the clay pots cannot float down stream with the brass pots; each to its own current.’’ There are good and bad characters in both classes. In Luther Nichols (1923), a handsome, aggressive chauffeur’s life ends tragically because of a flirtatious irresponsible society girl. In The Noon-Mark, two realistic young people break their engagement when they realize they are too widely separated in background. The lower-class heroine, a secretary, is rewarded by marriage to her employer. Watts does not gloss over these troubled relationships, and only in her last novel, The Fabric of the Loom (1924), about the terrible error made by Dick Meryon in marrying a middle-class ‘‘person’’ who does not share his family’s tastes in pastimes or home decoration, does she become petty and absurd. Perhaps the best of these novels is The Rudder (1916), which contains varied characters in a humorous story about a young woman of good family who becomes a social worker. There are no deserving poor, according to the heroine, but ‘‘they’ve got to be taken care of whatever they are.’’ Watts herself said she modeled her work on the novels of such writers as Thackeray, Defoe, and Hardy; and she believed the depiction of ordinary life to be the highest goal of a writer. To a certain extent, she was successful, for her novels are rich in realistic characterization and incident. Perhaps her gift for describing the social milieu of a group of people and then relating them to people in other circumstances led to her preoccupation with class issues. Watts was a fairly competent writer whose novels are quite worth reading, although it is hard to imagine how a woman with such vision could have such narrow sympathies. OTHER WORKS: Three Short Plays (1917). The Boardman Family (1918). From Father to Son (1919). The House of Rimmon (1922). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Overton, G., The Women Who Make Our Novels (1922). Other references: Atlantic (1910). Bookman (July 1910). Dial (1910). Mentor (15 Aug. 1919). NYT (21 May 1910, 25 Oct. 1914). —BEVERLY SEATON
WEBER, Sarah Appleton See APPLETON-WEBER, Sarah
WEBSTER, Jean Born Alice Jane Chandler Webster, 24 July 1876, Fredonia, New York; died 11 June 1916, New York, New York Daughter of Charles L. and Annie Moffett Webster; married Glenn F. McKinney, 1915; children: one daughter Jean Webster was a grandniece of Mark Twain; her father was Twain’s partner in his ill-fated publishing ventures. She attended the Lady Jane Grey School in Binghamton, New York, and graduated from Vassar College in 1901. She was a frequent contributor to college publications and literary editor of the yearbook. Webster’s friend and roommate at Vassar, Adelaide Crapsey, was probably the inspiration for Patty in her books When Patty Went to College (1903) and Just Patty (1911). Webster became a freelance writer, lived in Greenwich Village, and traveled extensively touring the world in 1906-07. After her marriage in 1915 to a lawyer, she and her husband lived in New York City and the Berkshires. She died a day after the birth of her only child, a daughter. When Patty Went to College collects sketches Webster began writing while still at Vassar. It depicts the escapades of Patty Wyatt and Priscilla Pond, seniors in a turn-of-the-century women’s college where the students surreptitiously brew afternoon tea and evening cocoa on alcohol stoves in their rooms, receive gentleman callers in the parlor after a maid has carried up cards, dine in evening dress, evade obligatory chapel, and study Greek and ethics. A sequel, Just Patty, concerns the innocent adventures of Patty and Priscilla as seniors at a church boarding school. The epistolary novel Daddy-Long-Legs (1912) presents a modern Cinderella, Jerusha Abbot (‘‘Judy’’), who leaves her lifelong home in a depressing orphanage to attend a women’s college. She must report her progress to her nameless benefactor, whom she christens ‘‘Daddy-long-legs’’ and whom she marries four years later. Webster’s dramatization became highly successful on Broadway, starring Ruth Chatterton, and appeared in several film versions, including a silent version with Mary Pickford. A 1915 reviewer criticized the drama on the ground that ‘‘the chief object of the play’’ was to provide ‘‘sentimentalism sentimentally interpreted, turnip smothered in sugar offered as an apple of life.’’ The novel, however, largely avoids sentimentalism, and the brisk irreverence and piquancy of its humor have made it a perennial favorite with both adults and children. Dear Enemy (1914), an epistolary sequel to Daddy-LongLegs, follows Judy’s college friend Sallie McBride as she arrives to reform the old-fashioned orphanage from which Judy had escaped and stays to fall in love with its dour Scotch doctor. Once again, a potentially sentimental story is saved from stickiness by the practical point of view and the lively prose of its narrator. Both Daddy-Long-Legs and Dear Enemy remained in print for almost 70 years. Their strong stories and charming characters, together with Webster’s real interest in reforms in the care of dependent children, will secure them an audience for many years to come.
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OTHER WORKS: The Wheat Princess (1905). Jerry, Junior (1907). The Four Pools Mystery (1908). Much Ado About Peter (1909). Asa (1914). The papers of Jean Webster are collected in the Lockwood Library of Vassar College. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Simpson, A., Jean Webster, Storyteller (1984). Reference works: Junior Book of Authors (1951). NAW (1971). TCA. Other references: NR (13 March 1915). NYT (9 Nov. 1914, 13 Dec. 1914, 12 June 1916). Vassar Quarterly (Nov. 1916). —SUSAN SUTTON SMITH
WEEKS, Helen C. See CAMPBELL, Helen Stuart
WELBY, Amelia (Bell) Coppuck Born 3 February 1819, Saint Michaels, Maryland; died 3 May 1852, Louisville, Kentucky Daughter of William and Mary Shield Coppuck; married George H. Welby, 1838; children: one Soon after Amelia Coppuck Welby’s birth, her father, a mason, moved his family to Baltimore, where Welby received some formal education, and in 1834 the family moved to Louisville. By 1837 poems signed ‘‘Amelia’’ appeared in the Louisville Daily Journal. Welby’s poems were quickly copied and circulated in other local papers, and by the 1840s she had gained national popularity. Five years later, her poems were collected in her only book, Poems by Amelia (1845); by 1860, it had appeared in 15 editions. At the age of nineteen, Welby married an English businessman. While she continued to write verse after her marriage, it appears the work Welby had found important to her from girlhood no longer attracted her so powerfully toward the end of her life. She died two months after the birth of her only child. Welby’s poetic techniques and subjects are generally standard. She usually writes in slavishly exact and repetitive meter of nature, love, death, children, and religion; romanticized peasants, disappointed lovers, and sentimentalized brides abound. Equally conventional are the themes of her reflective lyrics and occasional dramatic narratives (such as ‘‘The Dying Girl’’ and ‘‘The Dying Mother’’), in which she often juxtaposes innocence and sin. ‘‘The American Sword’’ and ‘‘My Own Native Land’’ reveal a passionate if sometimes brutal patriotism. But Welby’s sentimental conventionality does not obscure her real if unsustained strengths. Her poetry reveals a fanciful imagination and sensitive humor. She freely assumes the voice of the dew in ‘‘The Dew-Drop’’ and of the violet in ‘‘The Violet’s Song to the Lost Fairy.’’ Her humor appears less frequently in her
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earlier than in her later poems, in which she is able to smile even at love. Welby shows understanding of character and skill in exploring first person speakers. For example, in appropriately childlike rhythms, she reveals her understanding of a small boy and his stepmother in ‘‘The Little Step-Son’’; here, through the voice of the stepmother, Welby admires the cute but realistic child in stanzas punctuated by the refrain, ‘‘My sturdy little stepson, that’s only five years old.’’ With apparent ease, she assumes the male voice of a lover (as in ‘‘The Golden Ringlet’’ or in ‘‘Lines—to a Lady’’), of a boy (as in ‘‘The Captive Sailor Boy’’) or of a soldier (as in ‘‘The American Sword’’). She also uses her personae to explore her vague frustrations with her role as a woman; in ‘‘My Own Native Land,’’ she writes: ‘‘Oh, had I the strength of my heart in my hand, / I’d fight for thy freedom, my own native land.’’ Whether expressed through her clearly fictional or suggestively autobiographical speakers, Welby’s concern with various voices reveals an interest in self that never quite fully informs her poetry; still, her exploration of the first person rewards the careful reader as the poet writes as ‘‘I. . .a Minstrel Girl’’ in ‘‘The Stars’’ or as ‘‘I, the youngest, wildest one’’ in ‘‘The Sisters.’’
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Coggeshall, W. T., The Poets and Poetry of the West (1860). Poe, E. A., in the Democratic Review (Dec. 1844). Watts, E. S., The Poetry of American Women from 1632 to 1945 (1977). Reference works: Daughters of America (1882). Female Poets of America (1848). Women of the South (1860). Women’s Record (1853). —CAROLYN ZILBOORG
WELLS, Carolyn Born 18 June 1869, Rahway, New Jersey; died 26 March 1942, New York, New York Also wrote under: Rowland Wright Daughter of William E. and Anna Wells; married Hadwin Houghton, 1918 A precocious child, Carolyn Wells hated formal schooling and refused to attend college. Scarlet fever, suffered at the age of six, caused her to become hard of hearing. Reared in New Jersey, she made her home in New York City after her marriage to Haldwin Houghton, of the Houghton Mifflin publishing clan. She loved puzzles, bridge, chess, charades, and detective stories (her discovery of a mystery by Anna Katharine Green was pivotal, inspiring her both to read voraciously and to write voluminously in that genre). Her literary career began almost by accident, with
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the contribution of jingles to humorous periodicals. She considered 1902 an important date in her career: by then she had written eight books and had begun composing juveniles; after this date she consistently published at least three or four books annually. From 1909 on she wrote mysteries, and she claimed in an autobiographical work (The Rest of My Life, 1937) to have written 170 books, including 70 detective stories—‘‘so far.’’ Her other main literary activity was as an anthologist, but she was also an important collector and bibliographer of the works of Walt Whitman. Her parody of Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street (Ptomaine Street, 1921), in which Carol Kennicott becomes Warble Petticoat, is funny and full of witty puns. Sometimes it misses its mark because both locale and social class are changed, but it wickedly refashions a number of episodes from the original. Wells’ juveniles are intended for young girls; different series are aimed at different age groups. Marjorie is in her early teens, for example, and is presented as a child, sometimes mischievous though generally a model little girl (in Marjorie’s Vacation, 1907, and five other novels through 1912). Patty, on the other hand, is in her later teens, and the final books in her series lead to her marriage (in Patty Fairfield, 1901, and 16 other novels through 1919). In the middle are ‘‘two little women,’’ who are fifteen when their series begins (see Two Little Women, 1915, and two other novels through 1917). All these novels are seriously dated by their intense concern for the social conventions of the early20th century. For example, Patty’s main problems and decisions grow from situations in which she has (either apparently or actually) been led to behave in an unconventional manner (such as going out without a chaperone). Although also clearly limited by its time and place, Wells’ detective fiction holds up somewhat better. She claimed the title of ‘‘Dean of American Mystery Writers’’ and was widely considered an authority. The Technique of the Mystery Story (1913; revised 1929), heavily larded with quotations of both primary and secondary materials, is a thorough survey of the field, written for aspiring authors. Unfortunately, Wells’ own style is undistinguished; dialogue and dialect are often clumsily handled. Characterization is flat, characters often being hard to distinguish from each other. Her women are often irritatingly coy, shallowly coquettish ingenues—whom the reader is clearly expected to find charming—and she made it a rule that a woman could never be the murderer (though women were sometimes the victims in her stories). Although male figures are more varied, heroes and detectives are consistently well educated and wealthy. Plotting, however, is inventive, and Wells made interesting use of such conventional types as the ‘‘locked room’’ mystery. Wells created a number of detectives, the best known and most frequently used (in 61 novels) being Fleming Stone, a professional detective who is a cultivated gentleman, moving easily in the elevated social circles in which Wells’ mysteries occur. He was her first creation (The Clue, 1909), and she continued to use him until the end of her career (Who Killed Caldwell?, 1942). Similar to Stone in characterization and methods of detection is Kenneth Carlisle, but he is distinguished by
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being a former screen star and matinee idol (in Sleeping Dogs, 1929, and two other novels). More interesting is the team of Pennington (‘‘Penny’’) Wise and Zizi (in The Man Who Fell Through the Earth, 1919, and five other novels). His approach to detection is rational while hers is intuitive; both are fallible, although Zizi is more often right. She is presented as a mysterious young sprite of a girl who seems to have no background or past. Wells’ other detectives are Lorimer Lane (in More Lives Than One, 1923, and another novel) and Alan Ford (in Faulkner’s Folly, 1917, and two other novels). Wells’ sleuths often work wonders of detection, but they occasionally err and thus illustrate her distaste, often expressed, for the ‘‘omniscient detective.’’ Once well known and highly respected, Wells’s works now languish unread. She was too prolific, wrote too easily and rapidly, reflected her age too uncritically, and restricted herself too narrowly to popular genres and formulas. Her importance thus is largely historical, and is most clearly found in her practice of the detective novel.
OTHER WORKS: The Jingle Book (1899). The Story of Betty (1899). Idle Idyls (1900). Folly in Fairyland (1901). The MerryGo-Round (1901). Mother Goose’s Menagerie (1901). Children of Our Town (1902). Abeniki Caldwell: A Burlesque Historical Novel (1902). Eight Girls and a Dog (1902). Folly in the Forest (1902). A Nonsense Anthology (1902). The Pete & Polly Stories (1902). A Phenomenal Fauna (1902). Trotty’s Trip (1902). Folly for the Wise (1904). The Gordon Elopement: The Story of a Short Vacation (with H. P. Taber, 1904). In the Reign of Queen Dick (1904). A Parody Anthology (1904). Patty at Home (1904). The Staying Guest (1904). The Dorrance Domain (1905). The Matrimonial Bureau (with H. P. Taber, 1905). Patty in the City (1905). A Satire Anthology (1905). At the Sign of the Sphinx (1906). Dorrance Doings (1906). Patty’s Summer Days (1906). Rubáiyát of a Motor Car (1906). A Whimsey Anthology (1906). The Emily Emmins Papers (1907). Fluffy Ruffles (1907). Patty in Paris (1907). Rainy Day Diversions (1907). A vers de société Anthology (1907). The Happychaps (1908). Marjorie’s Busy Days (1908). Patty’s Friends (1908). Year Book of Old Favorites and New Fancies for 1909 (1908). Dick and Dolly (1909). Marjorie’s New Friend (1909). Patty’s Pleasure Trip (1909). Pleasant Day Diversions (1909). The Rubáiyát of Bridge (1909). The Seven Ages of Childhood (1909). Betty’s Happy Year (1910). Dick and Dolly’s Adventures (1910). Marjorie in Command (1910). Patty’s Success (1910). The Gold Bag (1911). Marjorie’s Maytime (1911). Patty’s Motor Car (1911). A Chain of Evidence (1912). The Lover’s Baedeker and Guide to Arcady (1912). Marjorie at Seacote (1912). Patty’s Butterfly Days (1912). Christmas Carollin’ (1913). The Eternal Feminine (1913). Girls and Gayety (1913). The Maxwell Mystery (1913). Patty’s Social Season (1913). Pleasing Prose (1913). The Re-echo Club (1913). Anybody but Anne (1914). Jolly Plays for Holidays: A Collection of Christmas Entertainments (1914). Patty’s Suitors (1914). Patty’s Romance (1915). The Disappearance of Kimball Webb (1915). The White Alley (1915). The Bride of a Moment (1916). The Curved Blades
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(1916). Patty’s Fortune (1916). Two Little Women and Treasure House (1916). Baubles (1917). Doris of Dobbs Ferry (1917). The Mark of Cain (1917). Patty Blossom (1917). Two Little Women on a Holiday (1917). Patty—Bride (1918). Such Nonsense! An Anthology (1918). Vicky Van (1918). The Diamond Pin (1919). Patty and Azalea (1919). The Book of Humorous Verse (1920; revised 1936). In the Onyx Lobby (1920). Raspberry Jam (1920). The Room with the Tassels (1920). The Come Back (1921). The Luminous Face (1921). The Mystery of the Sycamore (1921). A Concise Bibliography of the Works of Walt Whitman, with a Supplement of Fifty Books about Whitman (with A. F. Goldsmith, 1922). The Meaning of Thanksgiving Day (1922). The Mystery Girl (1922). Queen Christmas: A Pageant Play (1922). The Sweet Girl Graduate: A Commencement Play (1922). The Vanishing of Betty Varian (1922). The Affair at Flower Acres (1923). Feathers Left Around (1923). An Outline of Humor: Being a True Chronicle from Prehistoric Ages to the Twentieth Century (1923; revised edition, World’s Best Humor, 1933). Spooky Hollow (1923). Wheels Within Wheels (1923). Cross Word Puzzle Book (1924). The Fourteenth Key (1924). The Furthest Fury (1924). The Moss Mystery (1924). Prillilgirl (1924). Anything But the Truth (1925). Book of American Limericks (1925). The Daughter of the House (1925). Face Cards (1925). The Bronze Hand (1926). The RedHaired Girl (1926). The Vanity Case (1926). All at Sea (1927). American Detective Stories (1927). American Mystery Stories (1927). Ask Me a Question: Over 2000 Questions and Answers on Interesting and Informative Subjects (1927). A Book of Charades (1927). The Sixth Commandment (1927). Where’s Emily? (1927). The Crime in the Crypt (1928). Deep-Lake Mystery (1928). The Tannahill Tangle (1928). The Tapestry Room Murder (1929). Triple Murder (1929). The Doomed Five (1930). The Doorstep Murders (1930). The Ghosts’ High Noon (1930). Horror House (1931). The Skeleton at the Feast (1931). The Umbrella Murder (1931). Fuller’s Earth (1932). The Omnibus Fleming Stone (1932). The Roll-Top Desk Mystery (1932). All for Fun: Brain Teasers (1933). The Broken O (1933). The Clue of the Eyelash (1933). The Master Murderer (1933). Eyes in the Wall (1934). In the Tiger’s Cage (1934). The Visiting Villain (1934). The Beautiful Derelict (1935). The Cat in Verse (1935). For Goodness’ Sake (1935). The Wooden Indian (1935). The Huddle (1936). Money Musk (1936). Murder in the Bookshop (1936). The Mystery of the Tarn (1937). The Radio Studio Murder (1937). Gilt Edged Guilt (1938). The Killer (1938). The Missing Link (1938). Calling All Suspects (1939). Crime Tears On (1939). The Importance of Being Murdered (1939). Crime Incarnate (1940). Devil’s Work (1940). Murder on Parade (1940). Murder Plus (1940). The Black Night Murders (1941). Murder at the Casino (1941). Murder Will In (1942).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (1994). Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection (1976). NCAB. St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (1996). Other references: NYT (27 March 1942). NYTBR (4 Dec. 1937). —MARY JEAN DEMARR
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WELLS, Emmeline (Blanche) Woodward Born 29 February 1828, Petersham, Massachusetts; died 25 April 1921, Salt Lake City, Utah Wrote under: Amethyst, ‘‘Aunt Em,’’ Blanche Beechwood, E.B.W., Emmeline B. Wells Daughter of David and Deiadama Hare Woodward; married James H. Harris, 1843 (deserted); Newell K. Whitney, 1845 (died 1850); Daniel H. Wells, 1852; children: five daughters Emmeline Woodward Wells converted to Mormonism when she was fourteen, married James Harris at fifteen, and moved the following year to Nauvoo, Illinois, then the Mormon headquarters. Deserted by Harris, Wells married Newell K. Whitney and joined the exodus of Mormons to Salt Lake City. After Whitney’s death in 1850 she married Wells. Five daughters were born of Wells’ last two marriages. An ardent suffragist and women’s rights advocate, Wells was a member of numerous national and state woman suffrage and other (especially literary) organizations. As president of the Utah Woman’s Suffrage Association, she successfully lobbied for the inclusion of woman suffrage in Utah’s constitution in 1895. In 1910, at age eighty-two, Wells was appointed general president of the Mormon woman’s Relief Society, serving until three weeks before her death in 1921. The Woman’s Exponent, a Mormon women’s journal Wells edited from 1877 to 1914, gave her an influential voice in women’s affairs. She used its editorial page to promote equal rights for women, and also to defend the Mormon practice of plural marriage. Wells’ only collection of poetry, Musings and Memories, (1896), is aptly named. The poems are reflective and personal, most of them a sentimental backward look at a past both pleasant and painful. ‘‘A Glance Backward’’ illustrates the portentous mood pervading much of her retrospective verse. The festive celebration in honor of two young lovers who ‘‘plighted their troth’’ is underscored by ominous intimations. Shadows of a fire creep ‘‘like spectres,’’ trees stand ‘‘phantom-like,’’ and laughter echoes ‘‘in a hollow sound.’’ The lovers are doomed, yet choose to shun the ‘‘potent sway of dread’’ and exchange their vows in ‘‘fond expectancy.’’ Wells subtly sustains the fateful mood, which she delicately balances on a thin narrative thread that gives the piece its unity. ‘‘Memory of the Sea’’ evokes the same mood, heightened by the mournful cadence associated with Poe’s ‘‘The Raven.’’ Wells uses the sea as metaphor: it holds the answer to life’s mysteries, but recklessly drives human hopes to and fro. Unyielding, it keeps its secrets ‘‘sleeping in its surging bosom,’’ and frail humanity must find its answer elsewhere. One of the author’s most effective poems, ‘‘Memory of the Sea’’ is persistently but restrainedly emotional. As a poet, Wells fits comfortably under Hawthorne’s rubric of ‘‘scribbling women.’’ While much of her poetry has definite
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merit, it occasionally demonstrates the stilted manner and excessive sentiment typical of the period. Poetry, she said, was ‘‘a history of the heart.’’ She wrote for a receptive local audience appreciative of her style; a second edition of her poems was published in 1915. Wells did not use poetry as a medium for polemics, reserving her feminist arguments for the editorial page. She left a collection of diaries spanning nearly half a century. A prominent figure in the Mormon female hierarchy, she wrote perceptively and intelligently, if not always disinterestedly, of events in Mormon history, especially during the critical period of 1876 to 1896. She is often frustratingly elusive in her references to personal affairs but remarkably informative in her observations of the effect on women of a changing Mormon society.
WELLS, John J.
It is as a journalist that Wells is most noted. The majority of her editorials for the Woman’s Exponent responded to the ‘‘woman question’’ of her century, her rhetoric often echoing the polemics of other feminists. In them she exercised both logic and analysis, sometimes interlacing her premises with poetic imagery. Other editorials dealt with local issues, particularly those centering on the religious and political tensions polarizing Utah and the rest of the nation. Writing initially as a contributor to the Exponent under the name of Blanche Beechwood, Wells dropped the pseudonym soon after becoming editor. She created another literary identity, however, ‘‘Aunt Em,’’ who wrote 87 articles and stories incorporating traditional Victorian values and sentiments. Wells, the editor, and ‘‘Aunt Em,’’ the contributor, symbolize the different views of woman battling for women’s allegiance and formed the double dimension of Wells’ literary personality.
Ida B. Wells was born a slave, but her father was a skilled carpenter and she grew up in a house he had built and owned. Both of her parents emphasized the importance of education and were very active in civic and religious activities. The oldest of eight children, Wells attended Rust College in Holly Springs, Mississippi, a school for blacks that extended down to the primary grades. Her childhood ended in 1878 when an epidemic of yellow fever decimated Holly Springs, killing her parents and youngest brother. Wells was determined to keep the remaining children together, so she became a schoolteacher.
Wells was a woman of her time, her literary products felicitously harmonizing with its concerns and values. While her poetry was addressed to another audience, her editorials are relevant to the contemporary woman’s movement. One of the most influential of 19th-century Mormon women, Wells made a literary impact both substantial and effective. OTHER WORKS: Memorial of the Mormon Women of Utah to the President and Congress of the United States, April 6, 1886 (1886). Charities and Philanthropies: Women’s Work in Utah (1893). Songs and Flowers of the Wasatch (edited by Wells, 1893). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Anderson, R., ‘‘Emmeline B. Wells: Her Life and Thought’’ (thesis, 1975). Burgess-Olson, V., Sister Saints (1978). Crocheron, A. J., Representative Women of Deseret (1884). Gates, S. Y., History of the Young Ladies Mutual Improvement Association, 1869-1910 (1911). Madsen, C. C., ‘‘‘Remember the Women of Zion’: A Study of the Editorial Content of the Woman’s Exponent, A Mormon Woman’s Journal’’ (thesis, 1977). Whitney, O.F., History of Utah, Vol. 4 (1904). Reference works: Latter-Day Saint Biographical Encyclopedia (1914). NAW (1971). Other references: Improvement Era (June 1921). NYT (27 April 1921). Relief Society Magazine (Feb. 1915, Feb. 1916). Sunset (May 1916). Utah Historical Quarterly (Fall 1974). Young Woman’s Journal (April 1908). —CAROL CORNWALL MADSEN
See BRADLEY, Marion Zimmer
WELLS-BARNETT, Ida B. Born 16 July 1862, Holly Springs, Mississippi; died 25 March 1931, Chicago, Illinois Wrote under Ida B. Wells Daughter of Jim and Lizzie Warrenton Wells; married Ferdinand Barnett, 1896; children: four
About five years later, Wells moved to Memphis, where she taught in a rural school while studying for the city’s teacher’s examinations. In May 1884 she was riding the train to work when the conductor told her to leave her seat and ride in the smoking car. Wells refused. When the conductor and baggage man tried to force her to move, she got off the train and sued the railroad. The law required separate but equal accommodations, and Wells did not consider the smoking car equal to the first-class car. The local court agreed and awarded her $500 in damages, but on appeal the Supreme Court of Tennessee supported the railroad’s claim that the smoking car was acceptable for blacks. Wells was furious and dismayed to discover that the law was not on the side of justice. In 1887 Wells wrote about this formative experience for a church paper. Readers and editors asked for more, and soon she was writing for a variety of church papers and secular black newspapers. She was then offered the editorship and part-ownership of a Memphis paper, the Free Speech and Headlight, which she shortened to Free Speech. In 1891 she wrote a series of articles criticizing the conditions in Memphis’ segregated schools for blacks. Not surprisingly, the Memphis Board of Education responded by firing her from her teaching position. Wells was now a full-time journalist. On 9 March 1892, three young black businessmen were lynched. They were owners of a Memphis grocery store, friends of Wells, and too independent and successful to be safe in a time of increasing racism. In response to their deaths, Free Speech called on Memphis blacks to stop spending money in white businesses, boycott the streetcars, and move west to a place where the laws would protect them. Hundreds of people—including two church congregations—left Memphis, and the superintendent and treasurer of the City Railway Company begged Wells to call off the boycott. Instead, she renewed her campaign against lynching.
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After a fiery editorial appeared in Free Speech, a mob destroyed Wells’ press in May 1892. She escaped only because she happened to be in Philadelphia reporting on a conference. Knowing that her life was in danger if she returned to the South, she began to write for the New York Age and tried to rally Northerners against lynching. Few were interested until Wells went abroad with her stories of American barbarism. In 1893 and again in 1894, Wells toured England, Scotland, and Wales, telling interested audiences about America’s failure to live up to its promise of justice, liberty, and equality for all. She sent home articles that were published in the Chicago Inter-Ocean and other papers. In 1895 she published A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States, 1892-1893-1894. Wells’ careful documentation and appeal to international opinion helped turn white popular opinion against lynchings and decrease the lynching rate. Wells also remained concerned about the broader scope of American racism. She wrote The Reason Why the Colored American is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition—The Afro-American’s Contribution to Columbian Literature (1893), denouncing the exclusion of all individual blacks and black groups from Chicago’s great World’s Fair. Wells had been very impressed with the English women’s civic clubs that sponsored her lecture tours. After her return she helped found the first black women’s clubs, which were devoted to community improvement and local and national activism. In 1896 Wells married Ferdinand Barnett, an activist lawyer/ journalist and a widower with two children. After the birth of their second child, she gave up newspaper work until her youngest child was eight and able to go to school by herself. She continued, however, to fight for racial justice. In 1901 the family moved into a white neighborhood. In 1910 Wells-Barnett founded the Negro Fellowship League, which was roughly modeled after Jane Addams’ Hull House but located in the roughest part of Chicago. Whenever a race riot happened anywhere in the country, she would promptly go to the location, gather facts, and publish her reports in black newspapers. She remained active in black women’s clubs, organized the first black women’s suffrage club, and urged black men to use the power of the vote. As her children grew older, she returned to lecturing, and she always used her pen to document injustices. In 1928 she recorded the events of her life in Crusade for Freedom: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (published 1970). Despite increasing ill health, she kept active until a final illness of four days. OTHER WORKS: Lynch Law in Georgia (1899). To the Members of the Anti-Lynching Bureau (1902). On Lynchings (1969). Lynching and Rape (1977). Selected Works of Ida B. Wells (1991). The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells (1995). Southern Horrors and Other Writings (1997). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bederman, G., Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (1995). Davidson, S., Getting the Real Story (1992). Lisandrelli, E., Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1998). McMurray, L., To
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Keep the Waters Troubled (1998). Miller, E. M., The Other Construction: Where Violence and Womanhood Meet in the Writings of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Angelina Gimké Weld, and Nella Larsen (1999). Sterling, D., Black Foremothers (1988). Thompson, M., Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1990). Townes, E., Womanist Justice, Womanist Hope (1993). Reference works: African-American Orators: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook (1996). African-American Women: A Biographical Dictionary (1993). Black Women in America (1993). DLB 23. NAW. Other references: Black Scholar (1994). Radical History Review (1992). Sage (1991). —LORI KENSCHAFT
WELTY, Eudora Born 13 April 1909, Jackson, Mississippi Daughter of Christian W. and Mary Andrews Welty Although she is thoroughly Southern, Welty’s family came from Ohio (her father’s home) and West Virginia (her mother’s home, which figures prominently in The Optimist’s Daughter). Welty’s childhood in Jackson was in a household of readers and in a town not yet industrialized, where schools and parks and grocery stores were all within walking distance of her home. Welty attended Mississippi State College for Women from 1925 to 1927, received her B.A. in 1929 from the University of Wisconsin, and spent 1930 to 1931 at Columbia University, studying advertising. With jobs scarce in Depression days and with her father’s death in 1931, Welty returned to Jackson, where she has continued to live. Various jobs with local newspapers, Jackson radio station WJDX, and the Works Progress Authority (WPA) occupied her in the mid-1930s; but all the while she was writing, and her first story, ‘‘Death of a Traveling Salesman,’’ appeared in Manuscript (May-June 1936). Predictably, it was not easy to convince an editor to publish a collection of Welty’s short stories before a novel appeared, but Doubleday, Doran did bring out A Curtain of Green, and Other Stories in 1941. The volume, distinguished in having an introduction by Katherine Anne Porter, brought Welty critical acclaim, and readers still find it contains many favorite stories—‘‘Petrified Man,’’ ‘‘Why I Live at the P.O.,’’ ‘‘Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden.’’ These stories establish Welty’s voice in portraying lower-middle class characters with convincing dialogue, in her lyrical descriptive power, and in her sense of place. Reviewers were generally puzzled by The Wide Net, and Other Stories (1943), finding this second collection’s stories (with the exception of ‘‘Livvie’’) radically different and less accessible than those in the first. Welty’s third collection, The Golden Apples (1949), presents seven interrelated stories based on three generations of families in Morgana, Mississippi, whose lives intertwine publicly and privately. It is a work that draws heavily on myth to give added dimension to the lives and deeds of characters whose daily activities are of great interest.
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Of the stories in Welty’s fourth collection, not all are set in the South. The title story takes place in the boat train running from London to Cork, and ‘‘Going to Naples’’ aboard the Pomona en route to Palermo and Naples; ‘‘Circe’’ portrays the goddess on her enchanted island with Ulysses and his crew. Welty’s first novel, The Robber Bridegroom (1942), is a short work integrating stories of the Old Natchez Trace and remnants of Grimms’ fairy tales and American frontier humor to relate the story of Clement Musgrove, his fair daughter Rosamond, and Jamie Lockhart, her ‘‘robber bridegroom.’’ As Welty has pointed out, this work is not a historical historical novel, and many critics see it as ‘‘an examination of the theme of disenchantment in the pursuit of a pastoral, and fundamentally American, Eden.’’ Delta Wedding (1946), Welty’s first full-length novel, had its origin in a short story, ‘‘The Delta Cousins.’’ The novel is set in 1923, a year chosen for its relative calm so that domestic concerns in the Fairchild household might take precedence over outside involvements in a narrative presenting a Southern demiparadise on the verge of social change. Welty’s comic masterpiece, The Ponder Heart (1954), has enjoyed success as a short novel and then as a Broadway play (adapted by Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodorov), in which the antics of Uncle Daniel and Bonnie Dee Peacock, Miss Teacake Magee, Mr. Truex Bodkin, the Peacock clan, and the populace of Clay, Mississippi, combine with the firm narrative voice of Edna Earle Ponder to form a work of boundless humor. Two more novels appeared much later. After a virtual silence of 15 years, Welty published Losing Battles in 1970. A work of brilliant parts, Losing Battles is a long novel and has not pleased all readers; its diffusion and loose structure, however, are for many compensated by its comic richness—its eccentric characters, amusing situations, and details of places, names, and objects. Telescoped into a day-and-a-half, the novel presents the community of Banner, Mississippi, during the Depression, with kin and neighboring connections joined by choice or chance at the Beecham family reunion. It is an expression of Welty’s persistent emphasis on the mystery surrounding human relationships and on the redeeming power of love. For The Optimist’s Daughter (1972) Welty won the Pulitzer Prize, an award many thought she should have received already. This novel presents both lower-middle class characters and the upper-middle-class citizens of Mount Salus, Mississippi. The second marriage of Judge Clinton McKelva to Wanda Fay Chisom evokes consternation in the town gossips, forces the Judge’s daughter, Laurel McKelva Hand, to reassess her life, and in the end leaves her able to give up the ties of the past and to live in the present. In addition to fiction, Welty has written introductions—for Jackson cookbooks, an anthology of suspense stories, and collections of others’ stories—as well as occasional essays, reviews, and critical articles. The Eye of the Story (1978), containing 20 essays and 15 book reviews, attests to her skill as a critic. One Time, One Place (1971) marked the publication of photographs Welty had taken in the 1930s during her various assignments for the WPA in Mississippi. The photographs are of the Mississippi countryside,
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its black farmers and teachers and workers, its churches, its crossroad stores, its houses and shacks. They reflect Welty’s keen eye and her sensitive response to man and nature as surely as does her fiction. A prominent theme in Welty’s work, in the stories as well as the novels, is the mystery of human life and human relationships. For example, the nameless couple in ‘‘No Place for You, My Love’’ have come from unhappy relationships and meet by chance in a New Orleans restaurant. Their day together, however, does not result in a solution of the situations they left nor does it lead them into a love affair with each other. The force of mutability is another theme insistently at work as young characters discover love for the first time, as mothers and fathers watch their daughters grow up and marry and move away, as characters become aware of the approach of old age, as life is measured by the rituals of birthdays, reunions, weddings, and funerals. Some of these changes bring almost insufferable loneliness to characters: Miss Eckhart, in ‘‘June Recital,’’ loses all contact with pupils and society; Snowdie MacLain of ‘‘Shower of Gold’’ lives through the years of her husband’s wandering; Virgie Rainey approaches middle age in ‘‘The Wanderers,’’ with her career as a pianist unrealized and her love life a series of second-rate affairs; in ‘‘The Whole World Knows,’’ Eugene MacLain, unhappy with his wife and living in San Francisco, far away from Morgana, the town of his youth, grieves for his dead daughter. Equally important as a theme in Welty’s fiction is the restorative power of love. Gloria and Jack Renfro (Losing Battles) may fail in their respective roles as intellectual and financial saviors, and their private world of marriage seems continually threatened by the imposing force and sheer numbers of the Beecham and Renfro families. The fact and power of their love, however, cannot be denied. Some characters experience an excess of love and joy, quite beyond their ability to communicate— Marjorie in ‘‘Flowers for Marjorie,’’ the American girl in ‘‘The Bride of Innisfallen,’’ the deaf boy in ‘‘First Love,’’ and Hazel in ‘‘The Wide Net.’’ If any writer has ever brought to life the dignity of the human spirit, Welty has certainly done so in the old, dying Solomon, husband to a young wife (‘‘Livvie’’); in the simple couple, Sonny and his woman (‘‘Death of a Traveling Salesman’’); and most assuredly in Phoenix Jackson in ‘‘A Worn Path,’’ whose persistent journey of selfless love and devotion indeed numbers her among the saints. In Welty’s first volume, Katherine Anne Porter praised her range of mood, place, tone, and material, and this wide range has been present in Welty’s subsequent work. If place is usually the South, it is place particularized, made concrete, rendered visually and aurally. If, as some critics have charged, Welty has not often taken the South’s social turmoil as subject matter, she has always been sensitive to the injustice of human beings to each other, has dealt with that injustice in her fiction, and has rightly maintained the necessity for a writer to be a writer, not a tractarian. (Her most explicit statement on this point is the essay ‘‘Must the Novelist Crusade?’’ in The Eye of the Story.) Welty’s writing skill is particularly evident in the inevitably ‘‘right’’ dialogue, the tale-telling that reflects an individual’s character. Welty has had success with scenes built on external confrontations as well as on internal
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meditation and reflection (‘‘vortexes of quiet,’’ they are called in ‘‘The Bride of Innisfallen’’). She makes use of surrealism, of dream and fantasy and myth, of accurate details gleaned from careful observation and from a lifelong habit of insatiable reading. A distinguishing feature of Welty’s fiction is what she calls ‘‘that dateless quality’’—detail. The varieties of roses in Ethel’s garden in ‘‘Kin,’’ the contents of the luncheon basket in ‘‘The Bride of Innisfallen,’’ Granny’s birthday gifts in Losing Battles, or the wedding activities in Delta Wedding are carefully and rightly chosen. Character names and place names emerge after thoughtful selection, as illustrated by Welty’s explanation of the young husband’s name change in ‘‘Death of a Traveling Salesman’’: ‘‘Rafe’’ in the 1936 version became ‘‘Sonny’’ when that story appeared in A Curtain of Green in 1941. The change was not only to a more indigenous name but to one that heightened an intended ambiguity.
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In 1984 Welty published her autobiography One Writer’s Beginnings. In this book, she celebrates the clarifying power of memory, capturing her past in a stream of individual moments and events. With all the humor and attention to detail Welty exhibits in her fiction, the author recreates the Jackson, Mississippi, of her childhood, once again painting a lasting portrait of the American South. Throughout One Writer’s Beginnings, Welty focuses on her development as a writer. As a young girl, surrounded by books, reading constantly, Welty had begun to attune her ear to the rhythms and cadences of the written word. In addition, the gossip and anecdotes flying recklessly about her small hometown provided a fertile environment in which she learned the art of telling tales. Welty devotes the third and final chapter of One Writer’s Beginnings to reflections on her career and on writing in general, offering a window on both the forces that move a master artist and the act of creation itself. The book achieved universal acclaim, and received an American Book award.
The spirit of celebration, of lived life, is of singular importance in much of Welty’s fiction. While there are always serious matters at the heart of her fiction, it is also true that the comic spirit is a significant force, not merely entertaining but also conveying thoughtful commentary. Standard comic devices are found: disingenuous characters (Leota in ‘‘Petrified Man’’), eccentric characters (Aunt Cleo in Losing Battles), and homely figures of speech. In ‘‘Why I Live at the P.O.,’’ Sister valiantly cooks away, trying ‘‘to stretch two chickens over five people and a completely unexpected child into the bargain without one moment’s notice.’’ Comedy of situation, comic one-liners, and ironic juxtapositions— used by Welty in a variety of stories—confirm the presence of the comic spirit at the base of Welty’s fiction. She writes, in the essay ‘‘The Radiance of Jane Austen,’’ that comedy ‘‘is social and positive, and exacting. Its methods, its boundaries, its point, all belong to the familiar.’’ For Welty, the comic spirit is true and natural.
In 1989 Welty published Photographs, her second collection of what she likes to refer to as ‘‘snapshots.’’ She also continued to contribute articles to such publications as Atlantic, the New Yorker, and the New York Times Review of Books.
The publication of The Collected Stories (1980, winner of the American Book Award in 1981) gave critics the opportunity to reassess three decades of Welty’s work. Reviewers were particularly impressed with the range of her work. Indeed, Walter Clemons found her ‘‘an experimental writer with access to the demonic. . . . She is bigger and stranger than we have supposed.’’ If some of Welty’s prose has occasionally been described as deformed, if she has sometimes been charged with presenting an imprecise landscape and using vague language, most of her fiction challenges our reading power, speaks to our hearts, and convinces us her world of fiction embodies the best and truest of human experience.
Selecting Welty as the first living author for inclusion in the monumental Library of America series, the publisher cited Salman Rushdie’s remark that her work is ‘‘impossible to overpraise.‘‘ In honor of Welty’s 90th birthday, 22 contributors describe her impact in Eudora Welty: Writers’ Reflections upon First Reading Welty (1999). Barry Hannah marvels at her ‘‘soul-traveling magic’’ in creating such characters as a jazz virtuoso and a lonely salesman, and Doris Betts reflects that she ‘‘has influenced generations of writers while her lucid and luminous prose defies imitation.’’
Her work spanning a period of more than 50 years, Welty ranks among the most extraordinary writers of the 20th century. Her lyrical passages, her transcendence of conventional narrative form, and her concern for the inner stirrings of her characters have invited comparisons to Virginia Woolf. Into commonplace events and surroundings Welty can infuse an illusory quality, invoking myths, and interweaving shades of memory. In this dreamlike light, she strikes what is true and concrete in human relationships. The unbridgeable gulfs that separate us, the experiences drawing us together—these, she writes, are her ‘‘true subjects.’’
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Welty possesses the coveted honors America awards its writers: including the American Book Award, National Medal for Literature (1980), the American Academy of Arts and Letters Howells Medal, the National Institute of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for the Novel, the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1980), Commonwealth Award for distinguished service in literature from the Modern Language Association (1984), the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres (1987), and the National Medal of Art (1987), the National Book Foundation Medal (1991), the Cleanth Brooks Medal in Southern Letters (1991), the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the short story (1993), induction into France’s Legion of Honor (1996), and numerous honorary degrees.
At the end of the decade, osteoporosis made it difficult for Welty to leave her home in Jackson, and arthritis brought a stop to the writing career began in the 1930s. Her final book-length project was an anthology, the Norton Book of Friendship (1991), coedited with Ronald A. Sharp. A revised, silver anniversary edition of One Time, One Place, Welty’s book of Depression-era photographs, appeared in 1996; ‘‘The Death of a Traveling Salesman’’ (1936) was reprinted in The First Story (1999), along with Welty’s essay about the story’s composition. Although no comprehensive collection has been made of her letters, Michael Kreyling’s Author and Agent: Eudora Welty and Diarmuid Russell (1991) is structured around more than 30 years
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of correspondence between Welty and the literary agent who offered her his assistance in 1940. Another important gathering is A Writer’s Eye: Collected Book Reviews (1994), Pearl Amelia McHaney’s edition of the 67 reviews Welty wrote between 1942 and 1984. According to McHaney, these pieces (most of them published in the New York Times Book Review) are ‘‘as sensory-laden, as thoughtful, and as well-crafted as her stories,’’ whether she is discussing books about World War II or volumes of fairy tales. Scholars have studied the full range of Welty’s work, from the short stories that are considered her greatest achievement to her photographs, her bestselling 1984 memoir, and her longer fiction, most notably Delta Wedding (1946) and Losing Battles (1970). Emphasizing her ‘‘compassionate vision and memorable incantation,’’ the novelist Reynolds Price predicts that American authors will continue to find Welty ‘‘a guide to both the threatening shades and the brilliant peaks of human life.’’
OTHER WORKS: The Bride of Innisfallen (1955). The Shoe Bird (1964). One Time, One Place: Mississippi in the Depression. A Snapshot Album (1971). A Worn Path (editor, with Ronald A. Sharp, 1991). The manuscripts and papers of Eudora Welty are housed in the Department of Archives and History (Jackson, Mississippi) and at the Humanties Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Appel, A., Jr., Eudora Welty (1965). Binding, P., The Still Moment: Eudora Welty, Portrait of a Writer (1994). Bloom, H., Eudora Welty (1986). Brantley, W., Feminine Sense in Southern Memoir: Smith, Glasgow, Welty, and Hurston (1993). Bryant, J. A., Jr., Eudora Welty (1968). Carson, B. H., Eudora Welty: Two Pictures at Once in Her Frame (1992). Champion, L., ed., The Critical Response to Eudora Welty’s Fiction (1994). Civil War Women: The Civil War Seen Through Women’s Eyes in Stories by Louisa May Alcott, Kate Chopin, Eudora Welty, and Other Great Women Writers (reissue, 1990). Desmond, J. F., ed., A Still Moment: Essays on the Art of Eudora Welty (1978). Devlin, A., Eudora Welty’s Chronicle: A Story of Mississippi Life (1983). Devlin, A., ed., Eudora Welty: A Life in Literature (1987). Dollarhide, L., and A. Abadie, eds., Eudora Welty: A Form of Thanks (1979). Gretlund, N. J., and K. Westarp, eds., The Late Novels of Eudora Welty (1998). Gygax, F., Serious Daring from Within: Feminine Narrative Strategies in Eudora Welty’s Novels (1990). Harrison, S., Eudora Welty and Virginia Woolf: Gender, Genre, and Influence (1997). Howard, Z., The Rhetoric of Eudora Welty’s Short Stories (1973). Isaacs, N., Eudora Welty (1968). Kreyling, M., The Achievement of Eudora Welty (1980). Kreyling, M., Author and Agent: Eudora Welty and Diarmuid Russell (1991). Johnston, C. A. Eudora Welty: A Study of the Short Fiction (1997). MacKethan, L. H., Daughters of Time: Creating Woman’s Voice in Southern Story (1990). Manning, C., With Opening like Morning Glories: Eudora Welty and the Love of Storytelling (1985). Manz-Kunz, M., Eudora Welty: Aspects of
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Reality in Her Short Fiction (1971). Marsh, R., The Dragon’s Blood: Feminist Intertextuality in Eudora Welty’s Golden Apples (1994). McHaney, P. A., ed., Eudora Welty: Writers’ Reflections upon First Reading Eudora Welty (1999). Mortimer, G., Daughter of the Swan: Love and Knowledge in Eudora Welty’s Fiction (1994). Pingatore, D. R., A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Eudora Welty (1996). Polk, N., Eudora Welty: A Bibliography of Her Work (1994). Prenshaw, P., ed., Eudora Welty: Critical Essays (1979). Prenshaw, P., Conversations with Eudora Welty (1984). Prenshaw, P., ed., More Conversations with Eudora Welty (1996). Schmidt, P., The Heart of the Story: Eudora Welty’s Short Fiction (1991). Senter, Lester (vocals), The Memory Is a Living Thing: Songs Based on the Writings of Eudora Welty (CD, 1996). Spacks, P., Gossip (1985). Trouard, D., ed., Eudora Welty: Eye of the Storyteller (1989). Turner, W., and L. Harding, eds., Critical Essays on Eudora Welty (1989). Vande Kieft, R., Eudora Welty (1962). Waldron, A., Eudora: A Writer’s Life (1998) Westling, L., Sacred Groves and Ravaged Gardens: The Fiction of Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O’Connor (1985). Weston, R., Gothic Traditions and Narrative Techniques in the Fiction of Eudora Welty (1994). Westling, L., Sacred Groves and Ravaged Gardens: The Fiction of Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O’Connor (1985). Reference works: ANR (1991). CLC (1998). DLB (1991; 1994). FC (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Atlantic (Mar. 1984). Boston Globe Magazine (29 Nov. 1992). Brightleaf: A Southern Review of Books (Winter 1998). Delta Review (Nov. 1977). Eudora Welty Newsletter. Mississippi Quarterly (1973; 1986; 1997). Newsweek (20 Feb. 1984). New Yorker (20 Feb. 1984, 5 Oct. 1998). NYTBR (19 Feb. 1984, 22 Oct. 1989, 22 April 1990). Oxford American (Nov./Dec. 1998). Shenandoah (1969). Southern Literary Journal (Spring 1989). Southern Quarterly (Fall 1990, Fall 1993). Southern Review (Spring 1990, Autumn 1997). TLS (20 July 1984). —ELIZABETH EVANS, UPDATED BY JEROME CHOU AND JOAN WYLIE HALL
WEST, Dorothy Born 2 June 1907, Boston, Massachusetts; died 16 August 1998, Oak Bluffs, Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts Daughter of Isaac Christopher and Rachel Pease Benson West Novelist, short story writer, editor, and critic Dorothy West decided as a child that she never wanted to be the last leaf on the tree. Yet with her death at the age of ninety-one, the person Langston Hughes nicknamed ‘‘the Kid’’ of the Harlem Renaissance was indeed the last surviving member from a luminous group of writers, painters, musicians, poets, and other artists who created the most important cultural renaissance of the 20th century. With two novels, a collection of essays, and numerous short stories to her credit, West’s talent and social awareness marked her as a writer of enduring significance.
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West was the only surviving child of Rachel Pease Benson and Isaac Christopher West. She came of age in Boston, where her family joined the slim ranks of Boston’s black upper middle class. Her father, born a slave, built a prosperous wholesale fruit and vegetable business in the shadow of Fanuiel Hall. This success allowed his family a fairly privileged life in predominantly white Brookline, Massachusetts. The Wests were among the first blacks to summer on Martha’s Vineyard. West began her formal education at age two under the tutelage of Bessie Trotter, sister of Monroe Nathan Trotter, then editor of the Boston Guardian. At age four, she entered Farragut School in Boston, where she proved herself capable of doing second-grade work. She completed her elementary education at Matin School in Boston’s Mission District. A precocious writer, she began to write short stories at age seven. Her first story, ‘‘Promise and Fulfillment,’’ was published in the Boston Globe, and at age ten she won prizes from the Boston Post. After elementary school she went to the Girls’ Latin School, graduating in 1923. She then took courses at Boston University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. West’s long association with Harlem began in 1926 when she and a cousin, Helene Johnson, both still teenagers, entered a national writing contest sponsored by Opportunity magazine. They were both invited to attend the annual awards dinner in New York City. They stayed at the Harlem Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA). When the two arrived at 125th Street in Harlem, West remembered, they were delighted to see ‘‘all these colored people’’ and, unable to imagine any other reason for such a gathering, asked, ‘‘When is the parade?’’ That night, West’s entry, ‘‘The Typewriter’’ (1926), shared second place with Zora Neale Hurston, then 25 years of age. This story reflected West’s fascination with people’s hidden motivations. With this heady experience behind them, West and her cousin soon moved to the city. During the 1930s she traveled to Russia to make a movie about the life of African Americans. Traveling with Langston Hughes and 20 other blacks, the film, Black and White, was a story of the oppression of American blacks. The project was dropped following accusations of association with communism. When she returned from Russia, West felt guilty that at the age of twenty-five she had not written more. With her own $40, she published the first issue of Challenge. The periodical was only published quarterly for a few years, but it contained the best of black literature at the time. The work of Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, Zora Neale Hurston, and Claude McKay maintained the journal’s high caliber of writing. With the failure of the periodical in 1937, a more ambitious version was launched. The renamed journal, New Challenge, listed West and Marian Minus as coeditors and Richard Wright as associate editor. Only one issue was published, but the magazine reflected West’s increasing interest in class issues as well as the struggles of black people generally. When the second journal folded, West became a welfare investigator in Harlem, which inspired ‘‘Mammy’’ a story, published in Opportunity in 1940. She then joined the
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Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) until its demise in the 1940s. In the more than 60 short stories she wrote throughout her career, West showed that form to be her forte. Like Dostoyevsky, to whom critics have compared her narrative style, West probed deeply into the minds of her characters, who face ‘‘moral, psychological, and social confinement,’’ wrote Sally Ann H. Ferguson in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. And much like the Russian novelist, West also shared a belief in the innocent nature of children. Although the short story was the mainstay of her career, West published two novels, The Living Is Easy (1948) and The Wedding (1995). In the first, she reveals the shadow side of the aspiring and proper black Bostonians. Adopting a tone of ironic humor, she satirized the pretensions of the Boston black elite, especially their desire to distinguish themselves from ‘‘ordinary’’ blacks. According to Mary Helen Washington, West wrote about the black middle class from the viewpoint of ‘‘the marginalized insider, both a fierce critic of the bourgeois life and a loyal daughter upholding the values of family and class.’’ The central figure of The Living Is Easy is Cleo Judson, a neurotic beauty who marries an older, financially secure man. She then invites her three sisters and their husbands to live with them, leading to the demise of all their marriages. The novel earned West high marks for its treatment of the class snobbery, insularity, and all-around shallowness of the New England black bourgeoisie, whom West termed the ‘‘genteel poor.’’ In the 1950s West began The Wedding. She was unable to find a publisher because its theme of interracial marriage may have been too controversial. West set the unfinished novel aside. She continued to write and contributed short pieces to the daily newspaper on Martha’s Vineyard, where she made her permanent residence in 1943. She returned to The Wedding in the early 1990s and finished it. Published in 1995, the novel is set on Martha’s Vineyard and tells the story of Shelby Cole, who, much to the consternation of her parents, Dr. Clark and Corinne Cole, is preparing to wed a white jazz musician. Lute McNeil, a compulsive womanizer, is determined to stop Shelby’s wedding, confident that he can convince her to marry him. West tells Shelby’s story while relaying the intertwined histories of her ancestors. The reader meets a fascinating cast of characters, from slaves to a college president, all the while being made privy to the striving for achievement, status, and light skin color that has marked the early decades of this family’s history. One reviewer described the novel as ‘‘an account of a journey down many roads, along with which the seeds planted so many generations ago have engendered a family tree of many colors.’’ West draws the many strands of her story together in a genuinely cathartic ending. A cross section of West’s writing can be found in her collection The Richer, The Poorer: Stories, Sketches, and Reminiscences (1995). Her prize-winning piece ‘‘The Typewriter,’’ first published in 1926, is included, as is the widely anthologized ‘‘Jack in the Pot’’ from 1940. Numerous pieces from the Vineyard Gazette appear as well. West remained constant as a chronicler of
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several generations of black middle-class Bostonians. She was constant, too, in her devotion to the craft of writing. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference Works: African American Almanac (1997). African American Women (1993). Black Women in America II (1993). Black Writers (1994). Bloomsbury Guide to Women’s Literature (1992). CA 143 (1994). Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History 5 (1996). The Essential Black Literature Guide (1996). Harlem Renaissance and Beyond (1990). The Schomburg Center Guide to Black Literature (1996). Selected Black American Authors: An Illustrated Bio-Bibliography (1977). Other References: NYT (19 Aug. 1998). NYT Magazine (3 Jan. 1999). —CELESTE DEROCHE
WEST, Jessamyn Born 18 July 1902, near Butlerville, Indiana; died February 1984 Daughter of Eldo R. and Grace Milhous West; married Harry M. McPherson, 1923; children: one daughter The eldest of four children, Jessamyn West was reared in Yorba Linda, California. She began writing—novels, short stories, essays, autobiography, articles, reviews—after a severe case of tuberculosis halted her formal education while she was in graduate school. West married Harry McPherson in 1923, and later adopted an Irish daughter. The female maturation process is a frequent pattern in West’s fiction, which treats girls’ social, emotional, and familial joys and difficulties evenhandedly and well. A central problem for the young protagonists is often the mother-daughter relationship: mothers, uneasy with their own rigidly controlled sensuality, teach their daughters to fear sexuality; furthermore, they often insist the elder daughters help curb sexual impulses in their younger sisters. In The Witch Diggers (1951) and South of the Angels (1960), the maturation stories are embedded in a cluster of subplots. Here, the healthy acceptance of sexuality is the symbol of genuine maturity and the ability to love. The locales, eras, and atmospheres of both books are beautifully wrought. Despite some problems with structure, these novels succeed through the power of the maturation device, and the portraits of the sisters Cate and Em Conboy in the first are splendid. Leafy Rivers (1967) and The Massacre at Fall Creek (1975), both set on the Indiana frontier, provide variations of the female maturation pattern. In West’s most traditional maturation novel, Leafy comes to terms with her flawed marriage by undergoing the usual Bildungsroman journey, presented in flashbacks. The story of the first whites to be executed for murdering Native Americans
is the subject of The Massacre at Fall Creek, told largely through the perceptions of Hannah Cape, who learns to accept her own limitations as well as those of her lover. Clearly, this novel compares Hannah’s maturation with the coming of age of the frontier; the device is compelling and works well. These books present large casts of characters portrayed with West’s usual sound insight. One of West’s most successful forms is the collection of a series of interrelated short stories into books having the impact of novels. Cress Delahanty (1953), set in the California of West’s youth, is the sunniest of the female maturation pieces, the portrait of a gifted girl who learns to value herself and her abilities. The Friendly Persuasion (1945) and Except for Me and Thee (1969) draw upon the Quaker family background and Indiana locale of West’s mother’s memories, which provided West with ‘‘the look of the land, the temper of the people, the manner of speech.’’ Probably the best known of her books, these ‘‘Quaker stories,’’ depicting the deepening relationship and developing family of Jess and Eliza Birdwell, avoid sentimentality through an excellent use of humor. The Friendly Persuasion was made into a successful movie in 1956; To See the Dream (1957) is West’s account of her work on the film. Central to all West’s work is her basic theme: genuine love is acceptance; the lover may not approve of all the traits and habits of the loved one, but to demand alteration as the price of love is unfair. This theme is stated most overtly in the autobiographical The Woman Said Yes: Encounters with Life and Death—Memoirs (1976, reprinted 1986), which celebrates Grace West’s influence upon her daughters. The emphasis is on Grace’s life-enhancing qualities, and West attributes both her own recovery from tuberculosis and her sister Carmen’s capacity to defeat cancer (by choosing suicide) to strength learned from their mother. A Matter of Time (1966), which is West’s best novel, also deals with a mother’s influence and love, but here redemptive understanding occurs late. As Tassie nurses Blix, her younger sister, through terminal illness, the middle-aged women discuss their mother’s use of Tassie to control Blix’s behavior. This exploitation has severely damaged the women and their relationship, but they now validate their sisterly love by acceptance of themselves and one another. The maturation story appears in flashbacks, its strength completely overshadowing any moral question arising from the fact Tassie helps Blix commit suicide. This decision is presented as a final affirmation of Blix’s humanity and her will. In The Life I Really Lived (1979), Orpha Chase, successful novelist, attempts to put her experiences into perspective. She recounts the central events of her Kentucky girlhood and of her later life in California and Hawaii. Each step of the real journey as well as the maturation journey is illuminated by Orpha’s analysis of the people—parents, husbands, daughter, lover, friends—who influenced and formed her. As in A Matter of Time, the impact of a sibling is especially important. Serious and sometimes grim, The Life I Really Lived is less successful than A Matter of Time and sometimes recalls The Massacre at Fall Creek, for it reflects
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West’s clear grasp of the danger, difficulty, and complexity as well as the joys and triumphs of the life of her protagonist, who stands for the women whose lives bridged the gap between the frontier and ‘‘civilization.’’ Considered an able, serious craftsperson, West was noted for her detailed, accurate settings and the careful development of motivation which makes fine characterization a dominant quality in her sound work. OTHER WORKS: A Mirror for the Sky (1948). The Reading Public (1952). Love, Death, and the Ladies’ Drill Team (1955). Love Is Not What You Think (1959). The Quaker Reader (1962). The Chilekings (1967). Crimson Ramblers of the World, Farewell (1970). Hide and Seek: A Continuing Journey (1973, reprinted 1987). The Secret Look (1974). Violence (pamphlet, 1976). Double Discovery: A Journey (1980, reprinted 1981). Collected Stories of Jessamyn West (1986, 1987). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Farmer, A. D., Jessamyn West (1982). Farmer, A. D., Jessamyn West: A Descriptive and Annotated Bibliography (1998). Sherwood, R. I., A Special Kind of Double: Sisters in British and American Fiction (1991). Shivers, A. S., Jessamyn West (1972). Shivers, A. S., Jessamyn West: Revised Edition (1992). Whistler, K. A. ‘‘Social Justice in the California Fiction of Jessamyn West’’ (thesis, 1996). Yalom, M. and M. B. Davis, eds., Women Writers of the West Coast: Speaking of their Lives and Careers (1983). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Twayne’s Women Authors (CDROM, 1995). Other references: EJ (Sept. 1957). Expl (Dec. 1964). Indiana Magazine of History (Dec. 1971). Nation (30 March 1957). NYTBR (14 Jan. 1951). SR (24 Oct. 1970). Writers Digest (May 1967, Jan. 1976). An Interview with Jessamyn West (audiocassette, 1980). Jessamyn West Talks About Her Career and About Other Writers, with Dick Cavett (audio recording, 1980). —JANE S. BAKERMAN
WEST, Lillie Born 11 October 1860, West Burlington, Iowa; died 3 July 1938, Chicago, Illinois Wrote under: Amy Leslie, Marie Stanley Daughter of Albert W. and Kate Webb West; married Harry Brown, 1880 (divorced); Frank H. Buck, 1901 (divorced 1916) Lillie West was the daughter of an Iowa newspaperman and banker. After graduating with honors from St. Mary’s Academy in Notre Dame, Indiana, and receiving a gold medal from the Chicago Conservatory of Music, she joined the Grayson Comic Opera Company, one of the many troupes formed in the 1870s to
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tour the phenomenally popular Gilbert and Sullivan operetta H.M.S. Pinafore. West rapidly rose to prominence on the lightopera stage. She married singer Harry Brown, and they performed together on Broadway and toured with the famous Grau Opera Company. When her four-year-old son died of diphtheria, a griefstricken West retired from the stage. She settled in Chicago, and she and Brown were later divorced. Her second husband was a twenty-three-year-old bell captain at the Virginia Hotel, where West lived. In her forties at the time, West dyed her hair to win the man who was later to earn the nickname ‘‘Bring ’em Back Alive’’ as a big-game hunter and author. He divorced her in 1916, claiming she humiliated him in public, but they were good friends in her last years. West began contributing brief sketches to the Chicago Daily News after the death of her son; she became the first woman racetrack reporter and finally worked as a drama critic. As such she served for over 40 years, using the pen name Amy Leslie. West’s style might best be described, like her personality, as effervescent. In a 1906 feature story on Sarah Bernhardt’s tent tour of Texas, for example, she writes: ‘‘If no cyclone blows Sarah clear over the Gulf of Mexico, and if the coyotes are protected by game laws and warned out of gunshot and the centipedes are still hibernating, Mme. Bernhardt will triumph prismatically and bring beauty of art, splendor of charm, amazement, and a superb example to the youth and femininity of Dallas by her courage, her repertoire, her inexhaustible ambition, her diet of applause through sixty years and her power of concentration on the American dollar unadulterated and beatified.’’ Through the years, West encouraged many beginning stage and screen performers whose careers brought justification to the early praise she had lavished on them. She was the personal friend of such outstanding actors and actresses as Edwin Booth, Helena Modjeska, Julia Marlowe, E. H. Sothern, and Lily Langtry, whose intimate portraits she sketched in Some Players (1899). In 1930 West published her only novel, Gulf Stream, using the name Marie Stanley. In it a fair-skinned black heroine spends a lifetime trying to deny her ethnic heritage, but is finally chastened when her daughter grows up to affirm her blackness with pride. West was a popular critic and personality. Among the many affectionate tributes to her is one written by Ben Hecht, upon the occasion of her retirement: ‘‘There is a high wind about Amy that blows your hat off. She is as hilarious as a feast day. Her conversation is as successful as a circus. And she looks like a Mardi Gras. . . .Her phrases still rise like Fourth-of-July balloon ascensions.’’ OTHER WORKS: Amy Leslie at the Fair (1893). The New York Public Library has a collection of clippings and photographs relating to Lillie West (Amy Leslie). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bookman (Feb. 1901). Chicago Daily News (5 July 1939). Chicago Herald Examiner (4 July 1939). Chicago
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Tribune (4 July 1939). NYT (30 Aug. 1930, 4 July 1939). Show World (17 Aug. 1907). —FELICIA HARDISON LONDRÉ
WEST, Mae Born 17 August 1893, Brooklyn, New York; died 22 November 1980, Los Angeles, California Daughter of John and Mathilda Doegler West; married once (annulled) Mae West’s description of her childhood (in the early chapters of her autobiography, Goodness Had Nothing to Do with It, 1959) illustrates the qualities that were to become her caricature: she learned early that ‘‘two and two are four, and five will get you ten if you know how to work it.’’ She began her performing career at age seven. When, as a young actress and singer, she was criticized for ‘‘wriggling’’ on stage during performances, she realized it was the ‘‘force of an extraordinary sex-personality that made quite harmless lines and mannerisms seem suggestive.’’ Her one marriage was annulled; she had no children. West was producer, author, and star of SEX (1927). At first, the title scared away both booking agents and theatergoers. Ultimately, however, the play was a success, firmly casting the stylistic idiom in which West, actress, author, and woman, would be known: the tough, street-smart, unashamedly sexual ‘‘dame’’— no man’s fool—whose unrelenting self-promotion is exceeded only by her vanity. West believed The Drag (1928), in which she did not appear, was a serious approach to a modern social problem, but her sensitivity to the issue of homosexuality is relative to her time. She writes that the homosexual’s ‘‘abnormal tendencies (have) brought disaster to his family, friends, and himself’’—and her message is that ‘‘an understanding of the problems of all homosexuals by society could avert such social tragedies.’’ SEX and The Drag ran simultaneously—SEX in New York City (for 41 weeks, before, thanks to efforts by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, West was arrested and jailed for a short time) and The Drag in Paterson, New Jersey. The district attorney in New York had The Drag closed and the entire cast arrested after only two performances. Diamond Lil (1932) was written specifically to attract the female audience her earlier plays had failed to draw. Later filmed (as She Done Him Wrong, 1933) and even turned into a novel (1932), it features perhaps the most famous West character in a ‘‘grand Bowery folk play.’’ One critic wrote an appropriately picturesque summation: ‘‘It’s worth swimming to Brooklyn to see her descend those dance hall stairs, to be present while she lolls in a golden bed reading the Police Gazette, murders her girlfriend, wrecks the Salvation Army, and sings as much of ‘Frankie and Johnny’ as the mean old law allows.’’
WEST
The novel follows the footsteps and idiom of Diamond Lil. The narrative is liberally dosed with slang and hickish diction; women are ‘‘skirts,’’ policemen are ‘‘dicks,’’ and are all vividly drawn. It is lively and reasonably well written, given the genre. In The Constant Sinner (originally titled Babe Gordon, 1930), a novel, the siren Babe ‘‘starts low and ends up high’’— reversing everything mothers tell their daughters about the fate of bad girls. Babe is celebrated by the author, in part, for knowing her own mind and keeping the control of her body up to no one but herself. Again, West deals with subjects (such as interracial sex) socially unmentionable in the U.S. of the 1930s; yet she does it all within the confines of her public’s expectations of the West caricature. Pleasure Man (1975), West’s novelization of The Drag, is about a bisexual Broadway headliner, Rodney Terrill, ‘‘whose wild sex-affairs with women,’’ West declares, ‘‘led to unexpected but well-deserved difficulties.’’ Again, street talk prevails, but in the novel the prose is often laced with attempts at more eloquent diction—mixed usage with mixed results. Beginning in 1932, West appeared in many films. She wrote (or cowrote—as with her plays and novels, her collaborative debts are often unclear) at least six of these. Films such as She Done Him Wrong, I’m No Angel (1933), and My Little Chickadee (1939)— the last of which was written with her costar, W. C. Fields—are considered comedy classics. Her novel, stage, and film personae are one and the same, often a mirror of West herself: the woman who will not conform, in her words, to the ‘‘old-fashioned limits’’ men have ‘‘set on a woman’s freedom of action.’’ Unfortunately, West’s sex-personality became legitimate for the American public only as she became more and more a caricature of herself. Her public self was laundered into a distant cousin, twice-removed, from West the woman, thereby making her frank yet refreshing sexuality laughable and comic, but legitimate. An extension of American pulp literature, West’s fiction receives little attention. She is well known, however, as the queen of the reverse sexist one-liners: Hatcheck Girl: ‘‘Goodness, what lovely diamonds!’’ West: ‘‘Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie.’’ Her contributions to American culture are immeasurable, yet—perhaps because her outrageous persona commands so much attention—her written work is virtually unrecognized. She was not only the performer but the author of plays and films in which she appeared, and she deserves to be acknowledged as a creative and successful comic playwright. OTHER WORKS: The Wit and Wisdom of Mae West (edited by J. Weintraub, 1967). Three Plays by Mae West (1997). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Baxt, G., The Mae West Murder Case (1993). Blubaugh, A., ‘‘Mae West and the Effects of the Camp Sensibility on the Sex Goddess’’ (thesis, 1997). Chipman, D., Cool Women (1998). Cole, W. and L. Phillips, eds., Sex: Even More Fun You
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Can Have without Laughing (1990, published in Britain as The Humour of Sex: From Aristotle to Mae West and Beyond, 1990, 1995). Curry, R., Power and Allure: The Mediation of Sexual Difference in the Star Image of Mae West (1990). Curry, R., Too Much of a Good Thing: Mae West as Cultural Icon (1996). Hamilton, M., When I’m Bad, I’m Better: Mae West, Sex, and American Entertainment (1995). Ivanov, A. J., ‘‘Sexual Parody in American Comedic Film and Literature: 1925-1948’’ (dissertation, 1994). Janik, V. K., ed., Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook (1998). Leider, E. W., Becoming Mae West (1997). Leonard, M., Mae West: Empress of Sex (1991). Malachosky, T., Mae West (collectors edition, 1993). Robertson, P., Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp From Mae West to Madonna (1996). Sochen, J., Mae West: She Who Laughs, Lasts (1992). Tuska, J., The Complete Films of Mae West (1992). —DEBORAH H. HOLDSTEIN, UPDATED BY SYDONIE BENET
WETHERALL, Elizabeth See WARNER, Susan Bogert
WHARTON, Edith Born 24 January 1862, New York, New York; died 11 August 1937, St. Brice-sous-Forêt, France Also wrote under: Edith Jones Daughter of George and Lucretia Rhinelander Jones; married Edward Wharton, 1885 (divorced) The literary and social world of Edith Wharton’s childhood was exclusive, old-fashioned, and wealthy: her parents were socially prominent and well-established in New York, with income derived from landholdings and tracing their family history back 300 years. Her childhood was spent wandering around Europe’s most luxurious spas and cities with indolent and indulgent parents. When she was ten—already making up stories to amuse her parents and their friends—the family returned to New York City, where her adolescent years were spent in a brownstone on West 23rd Street and in a summer cottage at Newport. Wharton was well educated in modern languages and good manners, but recognized an injustice immediately when she saw it. An early ambition to be the best-dressed woman in New York gave way to a stronger humanitarian instinct. When she organized an extensive refugee relief program during World War I the French government awarded her their Legion of Honor. Her emotional life was vastly complicated: engaged to two other promising young men, she finally married the socially prominent Bostonian Edward Wharton. The early broken engagements—and the youthful death of one of her suitors—clearly
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influenced the plots and themes of her fiction. Her marriage seems to have provided additional material since it was not only unhappy but sent both of the partners into profound depressions. Wharton coped with her own recurring bouts of illness by steadily writing, and trusting in close relationships with important literary and intellectual figures of her time including Henry James and Bernhard Berenson. Her husband turned to infidelity and embezzlement, which led to recriminations and finally to their divorce. Wharton was well aware of the intensity these dramas produced in her early writing, chiefly verse and short stories, and remarked in later years: ‘‘I regard them as the excesses of youth. They were all written at the top of my voice, and ‘The Fullness of Life’ is one long shriek. I may not write any better, but at least I hope that I write in a lower key.’’ Indeed Wharton’s works of fiction with their keen social observation, rich detail, and penetrating satire have come to be regarded as masterful and important contributions to the literary tradition of the 20th century. In the course of her life and her writing Wharton rebelled against the rigid, traditional, stifling attitude toward women and toward the middle classes who had to work for a living. She began quietly with poems privately printed (by her mother) in 1878 and a quartet of short stories in Scribner’s Magazine. Between those and her first full-length novel The Valley of Decision (1902) she produced many stories and three novellas: Fast and Loose (1867), Bunner Sisters (1892) and The Touchstone (1900). But this period of her life is most notable for The Decoration of Houses (1897), a study of interior arrangements and furniture in upper-class homes written with architect Ogden Codmen. Her wildly successful novel, The House of Mirth (1905), with its contemporary theme and tragic heroine redeemed by an unexpected strength of character, brought instant fame to Wharton. It sold faster than any book ever published by Scribner’s—and sold well over 140,000 copies in the first year. The novel’s main character, Lily Bart, is a pathetic young woman trapped in the treacherous world of New York society and the murky depths of investment politics in turn-of-the-century America. Lily’s determination to settle in a marriage of wealth and privilege leads her to compromise moral values, even to sacrifice love, in order to achieve her goal of a luxurious and idle life. This particular heroine and the times Wharton describes might have remained mysterious and unintelligible to modern readers without the happy coincidence that her stories are readily adaptable into screenplays. So her work has enjoyed a sort of revival in recent years. Several of Wharton’s most famous novels including The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome (1911), and The Age of Innocence (1920) have appeared in respectable Hollywood versions, bringing her milieu—with its stiff tradition of innocent women, forced by circumstances or lack of moral judgement into social-climbing; and of ruggedly determined American men, grasping through necessity or design at wealth and its seductive power—to the sympathetic attention of the educated middle-class film buff. Still it is a pleasure to pick up the Library of America two volume edition of her novels and stories. Here one finds her great novels of manners, The Custom of the Country (1913) and The
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Age of Innocence. These two long studies of love affairs, entanglements, and marriages in the time between the ‘‘old New York’’ and the new era focus on the differences in depth and quality of feeling that protected the boundaries of established society from the errors of youthful exuberance. The indefatigable and magnificently lovely Undine Spragg dashes through The Custom of the Country at furious pace. She has several husbands from both the American and European aristocracy and trashes them with equal fervor and disregard. Undine cares supremely for herself—the consequences to anyone else, of course, are unimportant—and demonstrates the tenacity and single-mindedness which made America a nation of great achievements: ‘‘If I were only sure of knowing what you expect!’’ her future father-in-law jokes with her at dinner; and she replies ‘‘Why, everything!’’ The perfect foil for Undine’s vulgar scenes is the deep serenity of Countess Olenska (formerly Ellen Mingott) in The Age of Innocence. The Countess must tolerate the upstarts in New York society as she struggles to assert an identity against the pressures of her tyrant of a European husband and her unyieldingly stiff and unsympathetic American relatives. Ellen Olenska’s gentleness and self-deprecating humor linger even as she slips away to Paris and obscurity while those less able but stronger dominate the rest of the novel: ‘‘When I turn back into myself now,’’ she explains, ‘‘ I am like a child going at night into a room where there’s always a light.’’ Wharton died and was buried in her beloved French countryside, where she had lived contented for two decades; though she remained essentially American, the comforts of a European pace were irresistible to a writer.
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Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century (1991). Auchincloss, L., Edith Wharton (1961). Bell, M., Edith Wharton and Henry James: The Story of Their Friendship (1965). Donovan, J., After the Fall: The Demeter-Persphone Myth in Wharton, Cather, and Glasgow (1989). Erlich, G., The Sexual Education of Edith Wharton (1992). Goodman, S., Edith Wharton’s Women: Friends and Rivals (1990). Howe, I., ed., Edith Wharton: A Collection of Critical Essays (1962). Lawson, R. H., Edith Wharton (1977). Lewis, R. W. B., Edith Wharton: A Biography (1975). Lewis, R. W. B., and N. Lewis, eds., The Letters of Edith Wharton (1988). Lubbock, P., Portrait of Edith Wharton (1947). Lyde, M., Edith Wharton: Convention and Morality in the Work of a Novelist (1959). Maxwell, D. E. S., American Fiction: The Intellectual Background (1963). McDowell, M., Edith Wharton (1976). Nevius, B., Edith Wharton: A Study of Her Fiction (1953). Patterson, M. H., ‘‘Survival of the Best Fitted: The Trope of the New Woman in Margaret Murray Washington, Pauline Hopkins, Sui Sin Far, Edith Wharton and Mary Johnston, 1895-1913’’ (thesis, 1996). Springer, M., Edith Wharton and Kate Chopin: A Reference Guide (1976). Tuttleton, J., The Novel of Manners in America (1972). Waid, C., Edith Wharton’s Letters from the Underworld: Fictions of Women and Writing (1991). Walton, G., Edith Wharton: A Critical Interpretation (1970). Wolff, C. G., A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton (1977). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Critical Inquiry (Mar. 1985). Representations (Winter 1985). —KATHLEEN BONANN MARSHALL
OTHER WORKS: Verses (1878). The Greater Inclination (1897). Crucial Instances (1901). The Joy of Living, by H. Suderman (translated by Wharton 1902). Sanctuary (1903). The Descent of Man, and Other Stories (1904). Italian Villas, and Their Gardens (1904). Italian Backgrounds (1905). Fruit of the Tree (1907). Madame de Treyms (1907). The Hermit and the Wild Woman, and Other Stories (1908). A Motor Flight through France (1908). Artemis to Actaeon, and other Verses (1909). Tales of Men and Ghosts (1910). The Reef (1912). Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort (1915). The Book of the Homeless (1916). Xingu, and Other Stories (1916). Summer (1917). The Marne (1918). French Ways and Their Meaning (1919). In Morocco (1920). The Glimpses of the Moon (1922). A Son at the Front (1923). Old New York (1924). The Mother’s Recompense (1925). The Writing of Fiction (1925). Here and Beyond (1926). Twelve Poems (1926). Twilight Sleep (1927). The Children (1928). Hudson River Bracketed (1929). Certain People (1930). The Gods Arrive (1932). Human Nature (1933). A Backward Glance (1934). The World Over (1936). Ghosts (1937). The Buccaneers (1938). Eternal Passion in English Poetry (1939). The Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton (2 vols., edited by R. W. B. Lewis, 1968).
WHEATLEY, Phillis
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ammons, E., Edith Wharton’s Argument with America (1980). Ammons, E., Conflicting Stories: American
Greatly influenced by Pope, Wheatley began poetry at thirteen. After she started publishing at seventeen, she received the
Born circa 1753, Senegal, Africa; died 5 December 1784, Boston, Massachusetts Married John Peters, 1778; children: three, all of whom died young Facts about Phillis (sometimes written as Phyllis) Wheatley’s birth are unknown. The speculation of biographers that she was seven years old in 1760, when she was sold as a slave in Boston, is based on the condition of her teeth at the time. Susannah Wheatley, the wife of a prosperous Boston tailor, bought the frail, asthmatic child. It is inferred from her later recollection of a sunrise ritual and familiarity with Arabic script that her African background was that of a Senegalese Moslem. Her nurturing with the Wheatley’s two eighteen-year-old twins was remarkably pleasant and unique to the period. Struck by her sharp intellect, the Wheatleys, contrary to the law and the accepted morality of the times, immediately began to teach Phillis to read and write. In sixteen months, Wheatley was reading the Bible, and at the age of twelve, she began to learn Latin and read the classics of English literature.
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attention of Boston society and was invited to social gatherings. Whether to advance their social status or to further Phillis’s career, the Wheatleys greatly supported her success among the Boston elite. Her fame soon spread from Boston to New York, Philadelphia, and England. She became a freedwoman in 1772. In 1773, the Wheatleys financed her trip to England, where—on a visit cut short by Mrs. Wheatley’s illness—Phillis Wheatley was presented to London society. In 1776 Wheatley was warmly received by General Washington, with whom she had corresponded and to whom she had addressed a 42-line poem, published in the Pennsylvania Magazine, edited by Thomas Paine (April 1776). By 1778 the Wheatleys were either dead or had moved to England; Phillis fended for herself as a poet and seamstress. After marrying Peters, she moved to Wilmington, Massachusetts, and lived in poverty for the rest of her life. According to the Massachusetts Historical Society record, when Peters was jailed for debts, Wheatley experienced drudgery for the first time in her life, working in a boarding house for blacks in Boston. She bore three children, and two had died by 1783; the third died a few hours after her own death in 1784. Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was first published in England in 1773; the first American edition did not follow until 1784. It includes 39 poems of varying merit, some published earlier in magazines. Most of the poems are occasional; some are elegies. ‘‘Niobe in Distress for Her Children Slain by Apollo’’ and ‘‘Goliath of Gath,’’ both long poems, reveal the two all-encompassing passions in Wheatley’s life, for the Bible and the classics. The first, along with short poems such as ‘‘An Hymn to Morning’’ and ‘‘An Hymn to Evening,’’ exhibits her characteristic classical allusions and use of heroic couplets. A very few poems, such as her odes to Washington and Major General Charles Lee reflect her response to the war. Wheatley has been criticized for not being concerned enough with her own background and the problems of her race. Only two poems, ‘‘On Being Brought from Africa’’ and ‘‘To S. M., a Young African Painter, on Seeing His Works,’’ deal with African subjects. There are clear references to Africa in only another nine poems. Richard Wright suggests that Wheatley’s lack of racial protest must be explained by her acceptance in Boston society. It may well be that what we consider weaknesses in the collection of her poetry are the results of the temper of contemporary New England and the literary tastes of Wheatley’s time. Wheatley was celebrated by her contemporaries as a child prodigy and poet and regarded as a skillful letter writer and entertaining literary conversationalist. Her poetry is impersonal, with a self-effacement that subordinates her racial and sexual identities to her identities as Christian and poet. She retains, however, the distinction of being the first famous black woman poet. OTHER WORKS: Letters of Phillis Wheatley, the Negro-Slave Poet of Boston (edited by C. Deane 1864). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hughes, L., Famous American Negroes (1954). Mason, J., Introduction to The Poems of Phyllis Wheatley (1966,
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revised and expanded 1989). Odell, M. M., Memoir and Poems of Phillis Wheatley (1834). Richmond, M. A., Bid the Vassal Soar: Interpretive Essays on the Life and Poetry of Phillis Wheatley and George Moses Horton (1974). Robinson, W. H., Phillis Wheatley in the Black American Beginnings (1975). Robinson, W. H., Phillis Wheatley: A Bio-Bibliography (1981). Shields, J. C., The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley (1988). Reference works: Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia (1991). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —ADRIANNE BAYTOP
WHEATON, Campbell See CAMPBELL, Helen Stuart
WHIPPLE, Maurine Born 20 January 1903, St. George, Utah; died April 1992 Daughter of Charles and Anne McAllister Whipple Maurine Whipple was born in an arid city in southern Utah settled by Mormons in 1861 as part of the ‘‘Dixie Mission.’’ Her ancestors were religiously motivated pioneers who struggled against drought, floods, and pestilence to build a town that is now a tourist stop between Salt Lake City and Las Vegas. They, like many other 19th-century Mormons, were polygamists who struggled with domestic conflicts and psychological and sexual anguishes to support a social system abjured by the now respectable and conservative religion that spawned it. It is from these ancestors and this environment that Whipple drew subject and documentation for her writings. Whipple spent her childhood and youth in the St. George area, attended the local Dixie College, and then graduated from the University of Utah (1926). She spent several years in Utah and California teaching in smalltown high schools, earning extra money by winning dance contests and playing bit parts in movies. In her spare time she wrote. In 1937 a friend persuaded Whipple to submit a manuscript to a writers’ conference in Boulder, Colorado. Members of the conference encouraged her to continue writing. She submitted an outline of a novel to Houghton Mifflin Company for which she was awarded their annual fiction scholarship of $1,000 in order to complete it. In 1941 Houghton Mifflin published The Giant Joshua (reprinted 1976), a novel about Whipple’s ancestors and the environment from whence she came. Whipple wrote a few magazine articles and This is the Place: Utah (1945), a delightful, if somewhat acerbic, tourist guide, accompanied by a series of photographs. The Giant Joshua, however, remained her only major work; its long awaited sequels were never completed. Whipple continued to live in St. George, having taught school there for many years.
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The Giant Joshua revolves around the story of Clorinda Agatha (‘‘Clory’’) a Mormon pioneer who settled Utah’s Dixie and one of the women caught up in the polygamy system. She suffers physically for her commitment to build the ‘‘Kingdom’’ of the Mormons; she suffers mentally with the questions she has about the Mormons’ curious beliefs; she suffers emotionally over vows which tie her to a husband three times her age and to sister wives torn with jealousies. With its poignant portrayals of the weaknesses inherent in such a system, the book was branded by the locals as scandalous, its author as heretical. Whipple has relished both appraisals through the years since its publication. Although occasionally cloying and sentimental, the story remains firmly grounded in the historical milieu which it enlivens. Whipple owed much to documentary materials collected under the Work Projects Administration studies conducted in southern Utah in the 1930s. The Giant Joshua is an arresting book. It has a secure place in the literature of the West and of women, and stands as the single most significant fictional treatment of the 19thcentury Mormon experience. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Capener, B., The Giant Joshua: Screenplay (adapted Whipple’s novel, 1986). Reference works: CB (1941). Other references: Who (November 1941). NYTBR (10 Jan. 1941). SR (4 Jan. 1941). —KATHRYN L. MACKAY
WHITCHER, Frances (Miriam) Berry Born 1 November circa 1813, Whitesboro, New York; died 4 January 1852, Whitesboro, New York Wrote under: Aunt Maguire, Frank, Widow Bedott, Widow Spriggins Daughter of Lewis Berry and Elizabeth Wells; married Benjamin Whitcher, 1847; children: Alice Miriam The eleventh of 15 children, Frances Berry Whitcher was the daughter of a prominent Whitesboro innkeeper. Deemed a precocious child, she was educated both at home and at a local academy. In spite of close family ties, she recalled having a lonely childhood because of her keen sense of the ridiculous; the neighbors sternly disapproved of her caricatures of them. As a young woman, however, she participated in many community activities.
society, are burlesques of a popular English sentimental novel, Children of the Abbey (1798), by Regina Maria Roche. The sketches ridicule both sentimental fiction and women who attempt to imitate literary heroines; Whitcher’s persona, Permilly Ruggles Spriggins, is an uncouth sentimentalist who models her language and her every action on Roche’s Amanda. Whitcher’s most famous series of sketches, written at the request of Joseph Neal of the Saturday Gazette (1846-47), are dramatic monologues presented entirely in the malapropian vernacular language of the Widow Bedott, who is a parody of a smalltown gossip. The sketches are laced with references to contemporary fads, such as phrenology lectures and literary society meetings. Bedott devotes considerable energy to a search for a second husband. The first widower she shamelessly pursues seems about to propose, but instead asks for permission to court her daughter. Her second major effort succeeds when she encourages the rumor that she is a woman of means; she succeeds in marrying the Reverend Sniffles, who is as pompous as Bedott is conniving. After Whitcher’s move to Elmira, she began a third series of sketches for the widely popular Godey’s Lady’s Book (1847-49). Her new persona, Aunt Maguire, is more compassionate than her fictive sister Bedott and speaks a more colloquial language. Inspired by her own observations and experiences as a minister’s wife, Whitcher satirizes the residents of small towns for their uncharitable conduct and genteel pretensions. In one sketch, ‘‘The Donation Party,’’ Whitcher satirizes the custom whereby parishioners augment their minister’s meager salary by giving him ‘‘donations’’ of substantial commodities. In her story, the minister’s guests bring only trifling gifts, break the wife’s heirloom china, eat more food than they contribute, and exhibit crude and socially reprehensible behavior. At the end, the fictive minister resigns, declaring that one more donation party would ruin him financially. Whitcher’s most controversial Aunt Maguire sketches focus on a fictional sewing society ostensibly created for charitable purposes, but whose participants turn the meetings into malicious gossip sessions. The series ends when Aunt Maguire travels to a neighboring village where the inhabitants mistakenly believe it is their sewing society that served as the model for the story in Godey’s and their minister’s wife who is the offending author.
In her mid-thirties, Whitcher married an Episcopal minister and moved with him to his new pastorate in Elmira, New York. Although her marriage was happy, her life in Elmira apparently was not. In 1848 her husband resigned his pastorate and they returned to Whitesboro, where she gave birth to her only child, Alice Miriam. Whitcher died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-nine.
Although Whitcher’s responsibility for the sketches had been a closely guarded secret, rumors persisted that the author lived in Elmira. So realistic and biting were the sketches that when Benjamin Whitcher confirmed his wife was indeed ‘‘Aunt Maguire,’’ he was threatened with a lawsuit and ultimately forced to resign his Elmira pastorate. Not since Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) had readers been so stung by a woman’s social satire. Whitcher responded by abandoning humorous writing.
Whitcher’s first humorous sketches (published posthumously as The Widow Spriggins, 1867), written to entertain a literary
Following the tradition of writers such as Seba Smith (who created Jack Downing), Whitcher used first-person vernacular
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humor as a medium for social criticism. She was unique in humorously depicting smalltown life from a woman’s perspective, and became one of America’s first significant woman humorists. Her work was widely popular in the 19th-century, and modern readers will find much to admire and enjoy in her humor.
when Shakerism was rapidly dying out, the book seeks proselytes and puts the case for Shakerism before the world. According to the preface, ‘‘Shakerism presents a system of faith and a mode of life, which, during the past century, has solved social and religious problems and successfully established practical brotherhoods of industry, besides freeing women from inequality and injustice.’’
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Curry, J. A., ‘‘Woman as Subjects and Writers of Nineteenth-Century American Humor’’ (dissertation, 1975). Derby, J. C., Fifty Years Among Authors, Books, and Publishers (1884). Hart, J. D., The Popular Book: A History of America’s Literary Taste (1961). Morris, Linda A. Finton, ‘‘Women Vernacular Humorists in Nineteenth-Century America: Ann Stephens, Frances Whitcher, and Marietta Holley’’ (dissertation, 1978). Neal, A., Introduction to The Widow Bedott Papers (1856). Whitcher, Mrs. M. L. Ward, Introduction to The Widow Spriggins, Mary Elmer, and Other Sketches (1867). References works: NAW (1971). Other references: Godey’s (July 1853, Aug. 1853). New York History (1974).
Despite its polemics, Shakerism: Its Meaning and Message is a valuable account of the origins of Shakerism, its early leaders and first societies, its movement westward, and its numerical growth. It explains the principles of Shakerism, its theology, and its advocacy of pacifism, celibacy, and communism. Further, the history provides an insider’s view of the practical lives of the Shakers, of their industries and inventions, and their instruction of children. Shakerism: Its Meaning and Message concludes with an exhortation to remaining Shakers to maintain their spiritual commitment. Prophesying Shakerism would rise again and flourish, the authors maintain that Shaker principles will continue to influence the world outside.
—LINDA A. MORRIS
WHITE, Anna Born 21 January 1831, Brooklyn, New York; died 16 December 1910, New Lebanon, New York Daughter of Robert and Hannah Gibbs White The fourth of five children who survived infancy, Anna White was a daughter of Quakers and a relative of prominent New Englanders. She attended a Quaker boarding school at Poughkeepsie, New York. At eighteen, she rejoined her family in New York City, learned tailoring, and was trained by her mother in ‘‘systematic benevolence to the poor.’’ White’s father, however, was the principal influence on her life. A successful businessman, he shocked his family by joining the Shakers. Despite family opposition and disinheritance by an uncle, she followed her father into Shakerism in 1849 at New Lebanon, New York. In 1865 she was made second (or assistant) eldress, and at the death of Eldress Mary Antoinette Doolittle in 1887, she became eldress, a position she held until death. Described as ‘‘cheerful and vigorous,’’ practical and intellectual, White was at the same time committed to mystical experiences, especially spiritualism and faith-healing. An ardent reformer, she served as vice president of the Alliance for Peace and the National Council of Women in the U.S. and met with President Theodore Roosevelt to discuss international arbitration. An active feminist as well, she belonged to the National American Woman Suffrage Association and spoke before the Equal Rights Club of Hartford, Connecticut, in 1903. With Eldress Leila S. Taylor, White wrote Shakerism: Its Meaning and Message (1904), an authoritative history of Shakerism and the only published history by Shakers themselves. Written
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White also wrote songs and compiled two books of Shaker music. Her verse appeared in a book of poetry by members of the North family at New Lebanon. Although her talent as a poet was limited, her prose was forceful. In an essay on feminism, ‘‘Woman’s Mission,’’ written for the Shakers’ official periodical, the Manifesto (Jan. 1891), White declares ‘‘Man has exercised his power over woman to a marked degree. She has either been worshiped by him as an idol, used as a plaything, or bandied about as a slave.’’ White’s formal education—an advantage many Shakers lacked—and her wide social concerns made her an intellectual leader and the most effective Shaker woman writer. OTHER WORKS: Original Shaker Music (1884). Affectionately Inscribed to the Memory of Eldress Antoinette Doolittle (1887). Voices from Mount Lebanon (1899). The Motherhood of God (1903). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Taylor, L., A Memorial to Eldress Anna White and Elder Daniel Offord (1912). Reference works: NAW (1971). —HELEN DEISS IRVIN
WHITE, Anne Terry Born 19 February 1896, Ukraine, U.S.S.R.; died July 1980 Daughter of Aaron and Sarah Terry, married Harry D. White, 1918; children: two daughters Anne Terry White’s family came to the U.S. when she was eight years old. She grew up and attended school in New England, graduated from Brown University, and received an M.A. from Stanford University. She held positions as a teacher and social
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worker, but is best known as the author of nonfiction books for children. White’s wish to present great literature to her own two daughters in a way they would find entertaining and easy to understand resulted in her first book, Heroes of the Five Books (1937), about Old Testament figures. Three Children and Shakespeare (1938) grew out of questions her daughters asked when she read Shakespeare to them; it adapts and discusses four plays in a fictitious family setting. White’s books span a wide range of subjects. Many of them, such as The First Men in the World (1953) and Rocks All Around Us (1959), are aimed for third- to fifth-grade readers and are intended to serve as introductions to particular fields of study. Her ‘‘All About’’ books on natural science, geography, and geology are considered among the best of their kind for very young readers. Other books, such as Lost Worlds (1941) and Men Before Adam (1942), both on archeology, have great appeal to older youths and adults. Lost Worlds, a history of the discovery of Troy, the palace of Minos on Crete, the tomb of Tutankhamen, and other sites, was reprinted more than two dozen times by the 1980s and is regarded as one of her finest books. White has translated a myriad of Russian stories, including works by Pushkin and old stories from oral tradition. All are highly readable. In addition, the subjects of her biographies range from scientist George Washington Carver to William Shakespeare, King David of ancient Israel, and socialist labor-leader Eugene Debs. All are greatly fictionalized. To known facts, White judiciously adds dialogue and details to produce entertaining as well as informative pictures of the people concerned. White has skillfully adapted for young children many books by other authors. Some of these, such as Treasure Island (1956), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1956), and Heidi (1956) were originally intended for a young audience; while others were written for adults. Among the most notable of the latter are Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us (1958) and the American Heritage books Indians and the Old West (1958) and The American Indian (1963). The last appears on lists of books regarded as essential for elementary and junior high school libraries. White has also successfully retold the stories of King Arthur and Odysseus, Aesop’s fables, and European and Asian myths and legends.
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About Rocks and Minerals, 1963). Will Shakespeare and the Globe Theater (1955). All About Great Rivers of the World (1957). The Golden Book of Animals (1958). All About Archaeology (1959). Natural Wonders (1960). The Solar System (1960). The St. Lawrence, Seaway of North America (1961). Birds of the World (1962). All About Mountains and Mountaineering (1962). Windows on the World (with G. S. Lietz, 1965). Secrets of the Heart and Blood (with G. S. Lietz, 1965). Built to Survive (with G. S. Lietz, 1966). When Hunger Calls (with G. S. Lietz, 1966). Man, the Thinker (with G. S. Lietz, 1967). The False Treaty (1970). Human Cargo: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade (1972). North to Liberty: The Story of the Underground Railroad (1972). Eugene Debs (1974). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Authors of Books for Young People (1971). CA (1974). More Junior Authors (1963). SAA (1971). —ALETHEA K. HELBIG
WHITE, Eliza Orne Born 2 August 1856, Keene, New Hampshire; died 23 January 1947, Brookline, Massachusetts Wrote under: Alex Daughter of William O. and Margaret Harding White Eliza Orne White grew up in an intellectual and artistic household; her father was a Unitarian minister in Keene, and her mother was the daughter of the self-taught portrait artist, Chester Harding. Lucretia Hale, author of The Peterkin Papers, was an old school friend of White’s mother and visited the family each year. Though a happy and active child, White was apparently not a completely healthy one, for her education in the public schools of Keene was twice interrupted by illness: at fourteen she missed a year of school because of eye trouble and at sixteen suffered an attack of typhoid, which ended her public school education, although she later spent a year at Miss Hall’s School for Girls in Roxbury, Massachusetts.
Regardless of the literary form, White’s books are distinguished by fluid and rhythmical prose and thorough research. Analogies drawn from everyday life clarify obscure points, and skillfully framed questions and anecdotes and an informal, conversational tone create a storylike atmosphere. Because of her remarkable ability to put difficult concepts into terms many (but not all) children can understand easily without finding her condescending, sentimental, or overly melodramatic, White is ranked among the foremost writers of nonfiction for young people.
A prolific writer (she wrote 41 books, 29 of them for children), White began at age eighteen to publish children’s stories under the pseudonym ‘‘Alex’’ in periodicals such as the Christian Register. Her first story for adults, ‘‘A Browning Courtship’’ (Atlantic, July 1888), is a witty social comedy based on the craze for Browning societies during the later years of the 19th century. Her first book for children was When Molly Was Six (1894), an episodic rendering of the life of a little girl, her older brother, her mother and father, and her young unmarried aunt. Each chapter is self-contained, and the book’s unity is provided by the clearly defined and consistent characters.
OTHER WORKS: Prehistoric America (1951). George Washington Carver: The Story of a Great American (1953). All About the Stars (1954). All About Our Changing Rocks (1955; reissued as All
The conception and execution of character, along with an eye and an ear for humor, are White’s greatest strengths in both her books for children and those for adults. None of her stories are
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heavily plotted, but their virtues are clearly summarized by the reviewer of Miss Brooks (1890), who wrote, ‘‘The fortunes of a few interesting persons are followed. . . . As a study of social life, it shows capital observation and shrewd insight. . . .’’ Whether White’s children’s books are historical (as is A Little Girl of Long Ago, 1896, based on stories of her mother’s life) or contemporary (as is The Blue Aunt, 1918, concerned with the home front manifestations, such as rationing, of World War I), whether they are grounded in autobiography (as is A Borrowed Sister, 1906) or are purely imaginative, White’s books nearly always focus on New England families and realistic relationships between children and adults. The families in White’s children’s books are clearly middle class. The fathers are doctors, businessmen, and artists; the children are aesthetically and morally sensitive, although they are liable to lapses in judgment out of which the episodes grow. In Ednah and Her Brothers (1900), for example, the children decide to make wine, so they pick the grapes their father had intended to sell, put them in tub, and stomp on them. The father is naturally displeased, but he quickly comes around to see the humor of the episode, and the children are forgiven. The function of the adults in these books, then, is to protect the children from the dangers to which inexperience makes them subject. Beyond that, the adults are basically indulgent, charged with finding ways to let the child’s natural goodness express itself. They invariably support children’s activities, respect their humanity, and encourage their use of imagination. White’s conception of the ideal relations between children and adults is perhaps most clearly expressed in her description of Lucretia Hale: ‘‘Aunt Lucretia. . .was the most perfect companion for any child. She never made you feel you were an inferior.’’ White had a long and productive life. Her last book, When Esther Was a Little Girl (1944), appeared 70 years after her first collection of short stories, and it is filled with interesting experiences and good, humorous characters, most drawn from White’s childhood. Although by the end of her life she was very deaf and had been totally blind for nearly 30 years, she never lost her imaginative vision or her ability to write natural-sounding dialogues. She once wrote, ‘‘The good thing about imagination is that it defies time and bridges the gap between childhood and what to the uninitiated seems like age.’’ OTHER WORKS: As It Should Be (1873). As She Would Have It (1873). Winterborough (1892). The Coming of Theodora (1895). A Browning Courtship, and Other Stories (1897). A Lover of Truth (1898). John Forsyth’s Aunts (1901). Leslie Chilton (1903). An Only Child (1905). The Wares of Edgefield (1909). Brothers in Fur (1910). The Enchanted Mountain (1911). The First Step (1914). William Orne White: A Record of Ninety Years (1917). The Strange Year (1920). Peggy in Her Blue Frock (1921). Tony (1924). Joan Morse (1926). Diana’s Rosebush (1927). The Adventures of Andrew (1928). Sally in Her Fur Coat (1929). The Green Door (1930). When Abigail Was Seven (1931). The Four Young Kendalls (1932). Where is Adelaide (1933). Lending Mary (1934). Ann Frances (1935). Nancy Alden (1936). The Farm
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Beyond the Town (1937). Helen’s Gift House (1938). Patty Makes a Visit (1939). The House Across the Way (1940). I: The Autobiography of a Cat (1941). Training of Sylvia (1942). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Moore, A. E., Literature Old and New for Children (1934). Reference works: Junior Book of Authors (1934). NAW (1971). NCAB (1906). Other references: Horn Book (Apr. 1955). —KATHARYN F. CRABBE
WHITE, Elizabeth Born circa 1637; died 1699 married 1657; children: one Elizabeth White was born in New England, possibly in or near Boston, around 1637, and married in 1657; she had at least one child. There are apparently no extant records of her life, except for these sketchy details that she put into the one published work, her spiritual autobiography. The Experience of God’s Gracious Dealing with Mrs. Elizabeth White, published as a short pamphlet in 1741, is a notable example of early American women’s spiritual autobiography. It contains imaginative and personally revealing details about the psychic life of a Puritan woman in 17th-century New England. After White’s death, this work was discovered in her ‘‘closet,’’ a small room used for private meditation and writing. Although it was probably circulated among friends and relatives for many years (as was the practice), it was not published until four decades after White’s death during a period of religious revival in New England; her confession would have evoked for its readers an earlier, much admired pious period. The lack of polish and sophistication in White’s autobiography is made up for by spontaneity and vividness as she reveals the internal landscape of the darkest recesses of her soul in an attempt to express her redemptive experience. Three experiences of deepest despair about her soul’s destiny occurred concurrently with her marriage, the birth of her first child, and the weaning of this infant. A month before her marriage, she relates, her father desired her to take communion, but she suddenly had grave doubts about her preparedness for taking part in the sacrament. Similarly, she experienced a crisis three days after delivering her first child; she was tempted by the devil with a vision of the Trinity, but escaped Satan’s clutches through the suckling of her infant and finally through sleep, in which she dreamt of her assured place in heaven, a place secured for her after death in childbirth. A third great trial coincided with weaning, and relates directly to White’s stated feelings of guilt for the affection she lavished on her firstborn. Tempted to believe the Bible is not God’s word, she was uplifted by Christ, and the darkness about her soul dispelled. Although she felt renewed after this final experience, moments of doubt continued to plague her. But she felt secure enough
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in her salvation and regeneration to commit to writing her account of repentance and trust in Christ. In talking about the trials and religious doubt in the period of early womanhood, White reveals the deep-seated conflicts and uncertainties felt by a Puritan woman when facing the responsibilities and struggles of marriage and motherhood. As a Puritan, she views these external events only as markers by which she identifies moments of acute spiritual awareness. For the modern reader, the conjunction of White’s internal and external experiences provides thought-provoking clues to the psychic life of Puritan women. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Shea, D., Spiritual Autobiography in Early America (1968). —JACQUELINE HORNSTEIN
WHITE, Ellen Gould (Harmon) Born 26 November 1827, Gorham, Maine; died 16 July 1915, St. Helena, California Daughter of Robert and Eunice Harmon; married James White, 1846 (died 1888); children: four The daughter of a hatter, Ellen Gould White had only a third-grade education. Although baptized in the Methodist church, by the age of seventeen she was enthusiastically involved with the activities of William Miller—an itinerant preacher who believed the Second Coming of Christ and the end of the world would occur during the fall of 1844. In that year, White had the first of a series of over 2,000 visions, which revealed to her why Miller’s prediction failed and what God intended her to accomplish. White married a fellow ‘‘Millerite,’’ and together they spread the message of the coming of Christ to the New England area. She had four children; the first died at sixteen and the last in infancy, but the other two boys became active in the church their mother helped found. The Whites moved to Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1855, and prompted by her visions White preached and wrote on the significance of the imminent (if unknown) coming of Christ, the validity of biblical prophecies, fundamental Christianity, and the divine desire for observing the Sabbath not on Sunday but on the seventh day of the week, Saturday. The Seventh Day Adventist church was eventually established on those principles in 1863. When her husband died in 1888, White increased her writing and speaking activities, campaigning for Adventist Christianity, health reform, and temperance. As many as 20,000 people gathered to hear her orations against alcohol. Her travels included two years touring Europe and 10 years as a missionary to Australia. In 1902 White moved the Adventist headquarters from Battle Creek to a suburb of Washington, D.C., and she settled in California. She died at the age of eighty-seven from complications following a hip fracture. It has been estimated that White wrote over 105,000 pages of published and unpublished materials. She maintained that because of her poor health and lack of education, only God’s visions
enabled her to produce this literary corpus. Much of her writing was done late at night or in the early morning when domestic tasks were completed. The foundation of the Seventh Day Adventist church rests on the belief that the Bible reveals the ultimate truth concerning the nature of God, the origin and purpose of human life, and the future of the world. Divine inspiration was not sufficient to convince most 19th-century Americans that Adventist doctrine was the ultimate truth; White wanted to show the continuity of biblical prophecy and the course of historical events. Five books, the Conflict of Ages series, are devoted to tracing the history of the battle between God and Satan as predicted in the Old and New Testaments. Four books tell the biblical story from Genesis to the Pauline epistles. The Great Controversy (1888), although actually written first, continues the story into the European and American historical settings. White used the history of Western civilization to underline certain central themes in Adventist belief: the reality of Satan, the evil of Roman Catholicism, and the redemptive quality of William Miller’s proclamation. Much of White’s writings were composed during a period of general social reform in the United States. Women’s rights, prison reform, the settlement-house movement, and prohibition were important issues at grassroots and national levels. Such late 19th-century reforms were a part of the ‘‘social gospel movement,’’ which emphasized the role of Christianity as a force for social change, rather than as a promoter of the status quo. White fueled this movement with her tracts on health, education, temperance, and diet; and she encouraged her followers to adopt a lifestyle encompassing many of the contemporary reforms. According to White, God intends humans to lead a simple life: pure air, deep breathing, regular sleeping and eating habits, and good sanitation promote moral as well as physical well being; tobacco, coffee, alcohol, meat, and sugar are all detrimental to the body, soul, and mind. Her views on dress reform echo some of the earlier sentiments of Amelia Bloomer and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. In The Ministry of Healing (1905), she condemns the restrictive and overly decorative style of contemporary dress: ‘‘Every article of dress should fit easily, obstructing neither the circulation of the blood nor a free, full, natural respiration. Everything should be so loose that when the arms are raised, the clothing will be correspondingly lifted.’’ Educational reform also figures prominently in White’s writings. Education must include not only the biblical and historical basis of Adventism but also a foundation in physiology, diet, health, and medicine. Traditional secular education should be limited to basic English, arithmetic, and history (‘‘from the Divine point of view’’). She sought to purge from Adventist education ‘‘pagan’’ languages and literature, modern literature by immoral authors, frivolous fiction writers, non-Christian science, biblical criticism, spiritualism, and anarchy. Seventh Day Adventist education included girls as well as boys and even encouraged some fluidity in sex role education: ‘‘Boys as well as girls should gain a knowledge of household duties. . . . It is a training that need not make any boy less manly; it will make him happier and more useful.’’
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White’s writings on practical reforms have antecedents in the work of earlier reformers, but she was able to institutionalize them in the doctrine of the Seventh Day Adventist church. She remains a unique woman in the history of American religions, for her writings act as a foundation not only for a growing religious organization but for that religion’s extensive system of schools, hospitals, and sanatoriums. OTHER WORKS: Sketches from the Life of Christ and the Experience of the Christian Church (1882). Christian Temperance (1890). Gospel Workers; Instructions for the Minister and the Missionary (1892). Steps to Christ (1892). The Story of Patriarchs and Prophets; the Conflict of the Ages Illustrated by the Lives of Holy Men of Old (1890). Christ Our Savior (1895). The Desire of Ages (1898). Christ’s Object Lessons (1900). Testimonies for the Church (1901). Education (1903). The Acts of the Apostles in the Proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ (1911). Counsel to Teachers, Parents and Students Regarding Christian Education (1913). Life Sketches of Ellen G. White, Being a Narrative of her Experience to 1881 as Written By Herself (1915). The Captivity and Restoration of Israel; the Conflict of Ages Illustrated in the Lives of Prophets and Kings (1917). Christian Experience and Teachings of Ellen G. White (1922). Counsels on Health and Instruction to Medical Missionary Workers (1923). Spiritual and Subject Index to the Writings of Mrs. Ellen G. White (1926). Principles of True Science (1929). Message to Young People (1930). Medical Ministry (1932). An Appeal for Self-Supporting Laborers (1933). A Call to Medical Evangelism (1933). Selections from the ‘‘Testimonies’’ (1936). The Sanctified Life (1937). Counsels on Sabbath School Work (1938). Counsels on Diet and Food (1938). Counsels to Editors (1939). Counsels on Stewardship (1940). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Noorbergen, R., Ellen G. White: Prophet of Destiny (1972). Numbers, R., Prophetess of Health: A Study of Ellen G. White (1976). Spalding, A. W., There Shines a Light (1976). White, A., Ellen G. White: Messenger to the Remnant (1969). Reference works: Comprehensive Index to the Writings of Ellen G. White (1962-63). NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —M. COLLEEN MCDANNELL
WHITE, Helen Constance Born 26 November 1896, New Haven, Connecticut; died 7 June 1967, Madison, Wisconsin Daughter of John and Mary King White In 1901 Helen Constance White’s family moved to Boston, where she attended Girl’s High School and Radcliffe College, receiving her M.A. in 1917. After teaching for two years at Smith,
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she moved west to the University of Wisconsin, where, except for study tours and research leaves, she remained until her death, living in the same apartment for over 40 years. She received her Ph.D. in English in 1924, and in 1936 was the first woman to become a full professor in Letters and Science at the university. She later served as chairman of the English department. According to White, ‘‘Belonging to things is an occupational disease of the profession!’’ One year she was simultaneously president of the local University Club, president of the University of Wisconsin Teachers Union, and national president of the American Association of University Women. As the first woman national president of the American Association of University Professors, she took a firm stand for academic freedom. Twice she served as a U.S. delegate to UNESCO meetings. White’s scholarly works usually combine her competence in literature with her lifelong interest in religion. The Mysticism of William Blake (1927) and The Metaphysical Poets (1936) are critical studies of major literary figures. Other studies, such as Tudor Books of Saints and Martyrs (1963), analyze materials of greater religious and historical import than literary significance. Such scholarly work served as impetus and background for the writing of novels centering on figures from Catholic history. Her fiction probed the minds and souls of sensitive men and women gallantly attempting to live out their ideals in a blemished church and world. In Dust on the King’s Highway (1947), the competing goals of the pioneering Franciscan friars in California and the secular Spanish administration result in massacre and martyrdom. In Not Built with Hands (1935), the strong Countess Matilda, ‘‘Lord of Tuscany,’’ loyally keeps her resources in the service of the vulnerable Pope Gregory VII. To the End of the World (1939) focuses on a young priest who, though he supports the ideas of the French Revolution, refuses to accept the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and goes underground. Each of the protagonists must in the end face partial defeat. Critics suggested that editorial pruning would have improved the narrative line of White’s fiction. In none of her novels is there a developed love story. Her readers often find her careful spiritual appraisals and rich descriptions slow and gentle in pace, but her concern for the spiritual is at once the strength and the weakness of her fiction. She confessed to a passion for history and steeped herself in the lore and traditions of monasticism and mysticism. She filled a broad canvas with lavish historical detail against which opposing forces of order and chaos, freedom and bondage, persuasion and violence, played themselves out. Her sympathetic delineation of the delicate conscience and missionary zeal is unsurpassed in spiritual insight. OTHER WORKS: Victorian Prose (with F. Foster, 1930). English Devotional Literature (Prose) 1600-1640 (1931). A Watch in the Night (1933). Social Criticism in Popular Religious Literature of the Sixteenth Century (1944). Seventeenth-Century Verse and Prose (with R. Wallerstein and R. Quintana, 1951). The Tudor Books of Private Devotion (1951). The Four Rivers of Paradise
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(1955). Bird of Fire (1958). Prayer and Poetry (1960). Changing Styles in Literary Studies (1963). BIBLIOGRAPHY: State Historical Society of Wisconsin Women’s Auxiliary, Famous Wisconsin Women (1976). Other references: Catholic Library World (Apr. 1940). Catholic World (May 1937). Christian Century (4 June 1947). NYT (2 June 1935). RES (Feb. 1965). —ARLENE ANDERSON SWIDLER
WHITE, Nelia Gardner Born 1 November 1894, Andrews Settlement, Pennsylvania; died 12 June 1957, New Hartford, Connecticut Daughter of John A. and Anna Jones Gardner; married Ralph L. White, 1917; children: two Nelia Gardner White, one of five children of a Methodist minister, lived in several small towns as she was growing up. Though the family had very little money, the atmosphere of the home was happy; life was filled with ‘‘books, friends, and fun.’’ By taking many different sorts of jobs, White was able to attend Syracuse University for two years (1911-13) and the Emma Willard Kindergarten School (1913-15). After several years as a kindergarten teacher, she married a lawyer. The couple had two children. During World War II, as a guest of the British Ministry of Information, White wrote articles about England. In 1948 she won the $8,000 prize in the Westminster Press Fiction Contest with her novel No Trumpet Before Him. White gives great credit for her start as a writer to Maude Stewart, a teacher in the kindergarten school who helped her toward an understanding of human character and of the various relationships between people. White contributed articles about child care to a kindergarten magazine. She began writing fiction with stories for kindergarten children and four novels for young people and then branched out to adult fiction. The rest of her life is a record of much industry and a great deal of success. Hundreds of her stories appeared in such popular magazines as the American, Ladies’ Home Journal, People’s Home Journal, Midland, McCall’s, Pictorial Review, Forum, and Good Housekeeping. In addition, she wrote 25 novels. Her fiction is notable for a clear and compassionate delineation of human characters and a smooth, almost poetic style. In her early writing, she frequently exhibits a facile sentimentality; later she was able to control this, so it could enhance rather than mar her narrative. Though all her life she used rural and smalltown settings and characters, near the very end she portrayed a few more sophisticated men and women against a city background. While certainly not ‘‘high brow,’’ her fiction is not to be classed as ‘‘slick’’ or ‘‘light.’’ According to one critic, her last novel, The Gift and the Giver, published the year of her death (1957), is ‘‘perhaps her most penetrating and at times disturbing book.’’ Another critic wrote, ‘‘None of Mrs. White’s prize winning
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novels has the brutal realism and the compassionate power of truth that The Gift and the Giver evokes.’’ Thus White’s art grew and developed throughout the years, always illustrating her personal theory about writing. One must have discipline, she said, and ‘‘discipline comes through failure, through writing thousands of words and using only a hundred of them, through filling the mind with great literature, through stretching the imagination to the utmost, through forgetting markets and concentrating on the immediate work. A surface cleverness is not enough.’’ OTHER WORKS: Mary (1925). Marge (1926). And Michael (1927). Jen Culliton (1927). David Strange (1928). Joanna Gray (1928). Kristin (1929). Tune in the Tree (1929). Toni of Grand Isle (1930). Hathaway House (1931). Mrs. Green’s Daughter-In-Law (1932). This, My House (1933). Family Affairs (1934). The Fields of Gomorrah (1935). The Heaths and the Hubbells (1937). Daughter of Time (1941). Brook Willow (1944). The Pink House (1950). Woman At the Window (1951). The Merry Month of May (1952). The Spare Room (1954). The Thorn Tree (1955). A Little More Than Kin (1956). BIBLIOGRAPHY: KR (15 July 1957). NYHTB (19 Aug. 1956). WLB (Nov. 1950). Writer (Sept. 1955). —ABIGAIL ANN HAMBLEN
WHITE, Rhoda E(lizabeth Waterman) Born circa 1800s; died death date unknown Also wrote under: Uncle Ben of Rouses Point, N.Y. Uncle Ben Daughter of Thomas G. and (?) Whitney Waterman; married James W. White; children: six daughters, two sons No biographical data on Rhoda E. White appears in the standard 19th-century sources; however, some general information about her background can be abstracted from Memoir and Letters of Jenny C. White Del Bal (1868), a book she wrote following her daughter’s death. White was the oldest daughter of General Waterman, a New York state lawyer who married the eldest daughter of General Joshua Whitney, founder of Binghamton, New York. Her parents were socially prominent Episcopalians. She married a member of an exemplary Irish Catholic family. White converted to Catholicism in 1837, and the Catholic religion was one of the major influences in her life. Her husband, a wealthy lawyer, became a judge of the Superior Court of New York City. She traveled in fashionable New York society, vacationed at Newport and Saratoga, and enjoyed the privileges of the rich, but her life was not idle. She studied throughout her marriage and received private lessons in all subjects from the best teachers. The mother of eight children,
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including six daughters, she tutored her family at their home, Castle Comfort. The title page of Jane Arlington; or, The Defrauded Heiress: A Tale of Lake Champlain (1853) lists The ‘‘Buccaneer’’ of Lake Champlain as an earlier work of Uncle Ben. Any prior publications, however, have been lost. Jane Arlington, a short novel, is the story of a ‘‘young lady perfect and accomplished in every aspect’’ who, after she is orphaned, is deceived by her kindly stepfather’s villainous brother into leaving home and finding employment in the frontierlike Lake Champlain region. The plot is predictable: Jane receives both charity and cruelty from employers and others she encounters, but her moral fortitude and personal goodness enable her to survive and regain her rightful inheritance. White does make use of the unprincipled scoundrel, but her premise is that villainy, or virtue, is frequently disguised and unanticipated. As a corollary, White exposes class pretensions and distinctions as inadequate measures of individual merit. In developing her theme of false class consciousness, she reveals a keen comic talent that emerges most fully in the caricatures of Mrs. Prim and her family. White extends her humorous portrayal of human foibles in Portraits of My Married Friends; or, A Peep into Hymen’s Kingdom (1858), a series of six sketches narrated by a wry old bachelor, Uncle Ben, who terms his married acquaintances ‘‘more fortunate’’ than he, but who mainly tells of the problems of marital discord and unhappy matches. Most of the portraits, whether comic or tragic, are slight, melodramatic treatments, but the most effective integrate character and theme with moral vision and social consciousness. One of these, ‘‘Jerome and Susan Daly,’’ idealizes the love between a village couple and their children, while at the same time it contrasts child-rearing practices in the village with those in the city, depicts Scotch and Irish servant girls in the homes of the rich, and proposes ‘‘cultivated hearts’’ as a means of leveling class distinctions. Another effective portrait, ‘‘Kate Kearney,’’ combines social realism—including graphic descriptions of tenement life and the plight of abused wives—with a strong story line. White’s main concern in Mary Staunton; or, The Pupils of Marvel Hall (1860), the most fully realized of her fiction, is the detrimental effects of poor training and environment on young girls, even if their natures are gentle, loving, and sensitive. The novel is an exposé of a fashionable boarding school in New York City, whose pupils acquire little meaningful education and only superficial training in social amenities. Mary is an unlikely heroine; mean, vengeful, and ‘‘coarse,’’ she has been neglected by Mrs. Marvel, who is satirized for her false values. Deprived throughout her childhood of affection as well as of religious and moral instruction, she receives a chance for a different life when her long-absent father returns from India and attempts to repair the damage done to his motherless daughter. Although the novel is weakened by White’s penchant for exaggerating virtues and faults, it is for the most part refreshingly frank and unsentimental. Two ideas dominate White’s fiction—Catholicism and education. Her recurrent theme is that children, regardless of their
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socioeconomic status, develop best when they are instilled with faith and love. Her style is at times stilted and melodramatic, and she uses dialogue excessively in forwarding plots. Nevertheless, White captures voices accurately, particularly immigrant brogues and regional dialects, and she is skillful in rendering realistic scenes of both lower- and upper-class life. Her treatment of New York tenement dwellers and their living conditions, though neither extensive nor primary, is a forerunner of the work of Stephen Crane and Jacob Riis. All of White’s writing stems from a sense of ethical and social responsibility, but her view of conventional situations is generally from an unexpected angle. Her humorous perspective raises even her most commonplace subjects from the level of cliché and stereotype. —THADIOUS M. DAVIS
WHITING, Lillian Born 3 October 1847, Olcott, New York; died 30 April 1942, Boston, Massachusetts Daughter of Lorenzo D. and Lucretia Clement Whiting Lillian Whiting was an only daughter and the eldest of three children. While she was still very young, her parents moved to a farm near Tiskilwa, Illinois, where both parents served as principals of the local school. Whiting, however, was educated privately and at home, where she became acquainted early with literary classics. With the assistance of her mother, her father became editor of the Bureau County Republican, published in Princeton, Illinois. A leader in the Grange movement and a fighter against the expansion of the railroads and for the expansion of waterways, he served as both representative and senator in the state legislature and assisted in framing the state constitution. Whiting’s writing career started when her articles were accepted by the local newspaper, of which she later became editor. In 1876 she went to St. Louis as a journalist and soon became associated with the idealist Philosophic Club. In 1879 she went to work for the Cincinnati Commercial after it published two papers she had written on Margaret Fuller. The following year, she moved to Boston to become the art editor—and later literary editor—of the Boston Traveler. In 1890 she became editor-in-chief of the Boston Budget, to which she also contributed literary reviews (among them, favorable commentary on Emily Dickinson’s poems) and a column, ‘‘Beau Monde,’’ credited with helping to break down the artistic parochialism of contemporary Boston. In Boston, Whiting was a member of a circle that included James Russell Lowell, Lucy Stone, Mary Livermore, Frances Willard, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and many others active in the intellectual life of the time. She visited Bronson Alcott’s School of Philosophy and attended Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s Round Table. She went to Europe for the first time in 1895 (to do research for the first of several biographies, A Study of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1899),
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and thereafter made 18 pilgrimages abroad. While there, she became the friend of artists such as Auguste Rodin, Harriet Hosmer, and Rosa Bonheur and the theosophist Annie Besant. Benjamin O. Flower, editor of the Arena, said of her that she ‘‘knew more men and women of letters than any other woman in America.’’ So widespread was Whiting’s reputation as a writer and critic and as a spiritual influence that in 1897 a Lillian Whiting Club was formed in New Orleans with the aim of inspiring its members in matters relating to the arts and sciences. Whiting’s spiritualist leanings had deep roots: her father was a descendent of Cotton Mather and her mother of a long line of New England Episcopalian ministers. She wrote 10 inspirational books and became one of the most popular of New Thought writers. (William James called New Thought the ‘‘religion of healthy-mindedness.’’) Liberal in her acceptance of a variety of religious sects—in Life Transfigured (1910), she discusses spiritualism, theosophy, Christian Science, the Vedantic philosophy, psychotherapy, and Bahai, all as means of salvation—her philosophy is optimistic. She believed in the primacy of the spiritual world and referred to death merely as ‘‘change’’—she viewed the time she lived in as the ‘‘dawn of a new perfection.’’ The death of the journalist Kate Field, a close friend, led Whiting to write After Her Death: The Story of a Summer (1897), which she considered her best work. It spells out her belief in communication between the living and the dead. The essays, such as ‘‘Success as a Fine Art,’’ collected in the World Beautiful series (three volumes, 1894-96, which ran to 14 editions), are typical of Whiting’s approach to living. Boston Days: The City of Beautiful Ideals (1902) was the first of her eight books dealing with places she visited in North America, Europe, and Africa. The chatty tone of her accounts of popular landmarks and works of art as well as the liberal sprinkling of names of her famous acquaintances no doubt were the chief sources of the popularity of her travel writing. Whiting’s third-person autobiography, The Golden Road (1918), is effusive rather than factual. She published one volume of poetry, From Dreamland Sent (1895). The poems are largely personal in subject and traditional in form and tone. Whiting is of interest to those studying popular taste rather than excellence and originality in the literary arts. It is worth noting, however, that she achieved fame and success as a professional among professionals and moved freely in an international society of artists in a way few women of her time were privileged to do. OTHER WORKS: The World Beautiful (1894-1896). Kate Field: A Record (1899). The Spiritual Significance; Or, Death As An Event in Life (1900). The World Beautiful in Books (1901). The Life Radiant (1903). The Florence of Landor (1905). The Joy That No Man Taketh From You (1905). The Outlook Beautiful (1905). From Dream to Vision of Life (1906). Italy, the Magic Land (1907). Paris, the Beautiful (1908). The Land of Enchantment (1909). Louise Chandler Moulton: Poet and Friend (1910). The Brownings: Their Life and Art (1911). Athens, the Violet-Crowned
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(1913). The Lure of London (1914). Women Who Have Ennobled Life (1915). The Adventure Beautiful (1917). Canada, the Spellbinder (1917). Katherine Tingley (1919). They Who Understand (1919).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Flower, B. O., Progressive Men, Women, and Movements in the Past Twenty-Five Years (1914). Gardner, W. E., Memorial (1942). Reference works: AW. NCAB. Other references: Arena (Apr. 1899). Boston Globe (1 May 1942). Boston Herald (1 May 1942). NYT (1 May 1942). —VIRGINIA R. TERRIS
WHITMAN, Narcissa Prentiss Born 14 March 1808, Prattsburg, New York; died 29 November 1847, Waiilatpu Mission, Oregon Territory Daughter of Stephen and Clarissa Ward Prentiss; married Marcus Whitman, 1836; children: twelve Narcissa Prentiss Whitman was the third of nine children. Her father, a prominent landowner, served for a time as associate justice of the Steuben County Court. In 1827 Whitman was among the first women admitted to Prattsburg’s Franklin Academy and Collegiate Institute. After graduation, she taught at schools in New York state. Like her parents, Whitman was a Presbyterian. Attendance at a revival meeting in 1824 led to her decision to devote her life to missionary work, and in 1834 a minister convinced her of the need for Presbyterian missionaries in the Northwest. It is unlikely Narcissa knew Dr. Whitman, another prospective missionary, before his proposal of marriage. The match was a practical affair, because the American Board of Missionaries would not accept single men and women as missionaries. She and her husband set out immediately after their marriage in February 1836 for their mission in Oregon Territory and reached Fort Walla Walla in September. They established their mission station on the Walla Walla River, 25 miles from the fort, at a place called Waiilatpu, or ‘‘the Place of Rye Grass,’’ among the Cayuse. Whitman, with Eliza Hunt Spaulding, another missionary traveling with her husband and the Whitmans, was the first white woman to cross the continental divide. She and her husband have symbolized the pioneering spirit for countless American men and women. She learned the Cayuse language and established a mission school. She was also responsible for domestic economy. A daughter was born early in 1837, and over the years the Whitmans became foster parents of 11 children. Whitman’s love of children, both Native American and white, aided the missionaries in their work among the Cayuse. The Native Americans, after an initial curiosity, became hesitant to receive the missionaries’ religion. Language and cultural barriers began to seem
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insurmountable, and the idealism with which the Whitmans approached their mission faded in the face of reality. Despite Whitman’s ill health and depression after the drowning death of her daughter in 1839 and despite criticism from other missionaries and the Board of Missionaries’s threat to transfer them, the Whitmans were willing to work hard and overcome their difficulties. Whitman was in charge of the mission herself for the better part of a year, when her husband went east to convince the board to let them remain at Waiilatpu. The Native Americans became increasingly skeptical of the missionaries’ intentions because of the observed animosity between the Presbyterians and nearby Catholic missionaries and because of the pressure of growing white immigration. Late in 1847, a small band of Cayuse entered the Whitman mission and killed Whitman, her husband, and 11 others. Forty-seven people, mostly immigrants staying with the Whitmans, were captured. One result of the public sentiment raised by the Whitman massacre was that in 1848 Congress declared the region where the Whitmans had lived and died the Oregon Territory. With American control, immigration increased, and soon the area was heavily populated by white settlers who subdued or drove out the Native American population. Whitman’s experiences during the four-month trip on horseback and on foot from Missouri to her new home in the West are recorded in what started as a serial letter to her family and became a journal. Beginning with an entry written ‘‘above the Platte River,’’ and ending with a description of the Whitman’s house at Waiilatpu, the journal is an invaluable account. Written by a well-educated woman, with an interest in botany and science, it is filled with details about the journey, the terrain the group covered, and Whitman’s own responses to her new experiences. Unlike many later trail diaries written by women traveling west, Whitman was intensely aware that hers was a unique experience, and she was open to the beauties of the scenery around her. Both the Whitmans were prolific letter writers. Whitman’s letters to her parents and friends as well as her journal were meant for private eyes only. They are especially valuable and enjoyable reading for their candor. Because historians have been primarily concerned with the work of Marcus Whitman and the Oregon missions, comparatively little has been written about Narcissa, although her journal of their travels is often quoted. Certainly, more work should be done on the life and writing of this most remarkable American woman. Whitman’s journal was most recently published by the Oregon Historical Quarterly (1936-38). Her many letters remain largely unpublished and are located in various Oregon historical collections, as well as in private hands. The best catalogue of the Whitman letters is found in Appendix I of Clifford Drury’s Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and the Opening of Oregon (1973). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brown, D., The Gentle Tamers (1958). Eaton, J., Narcissa Whitman, Pioneer of Oregon (1941). Nard, J., The Great Command: The Story of Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and the
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Oregon Country Pioneers (1959). Richardson, M., The Whitman Mission (1940). —PAULA A. TRECKEL
WHITMAN, Ruth Born 28 May 1922, New York, New York Daughter of Meyer D. and Martha Sherman Basbein; married Cedric Whitman, 1941 (divorced); Firman Houghton, 1959 (divorced); Morton Sacks, 1966; children: Rachel, Leda, David Poet, translator, editor, teacher, Ruth Whitman has won literary awards for 30 years, but she is best known for the imagined journals of two real women—Tamsen Donner and Hanna Senesh—in the last extraordinary months of their lives. Born a New Yorker and a lawyer’s daughter, Whitman in her adult life has been associated with academia and Cambridge, Massachusetts. She attended Radcliffe (B.A., 1944), graduating Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude, and three years later received her M.A. from Harvard University. She gained experience in publishing in the early 1940s with Houghton Mifflin, working first as an editorial assistant, then as educational editor. She served as a freelance editor for Harvard University Press from 1945 to 1960, from 1958 to 1963 as poetry editor for the Cambridge magazine Audience, and from 1980 as poetry editor of the Radcliffe Quarterly. Whitman has taught in Cambridge, giving poetry workshops at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, 1965-68, and serving as a lecturer in poetry at Radcliffe and Harvard. During 1968-70, she was a fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe. Beginning in 1989 she was a visiting professor of poetry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Listing her religion as ‘‘secular Jewish,’’ Whitman often writes on Jewish themes. In Blood and Milk (1963), her first book of poems, Whitman celebrates her grandfather’s life in ‘‘The Lost Steps,’’ ‘‘The Old Man’s Mistress,’’ and ‘‘Touro Synagogue.’’ Her grandfather is also important in such personal poems as ‘‘I Become My Grandfather’’ in The Marriage Wig (1968), which begins with a prose paragraph on the custom of Jewish brides in Eastern Europe shaving their heads to wear the sheytl, or marriage wig, lest their beauty distract their husbands from proper study. Whitman has frequently translated Yiddish poetry: she edited and translated An Anthology of Modern Yiddish Poetry (1966) and translated Isaac Bashevis Singer in Short Friday (1966) and The Seance (1968). Her poem ‘‘Translating,’’ about King David and Abishag, and included in The Passion of Lizzie Borden: New and Selected Poems (1973), is dedicated to Jacob Glatstein, whom she edited and translated. In 1990 she published The Fiddle Rose: Poems, 1970-1972 by Abraham Sutzkever. Laughing Gas: Poems New and Selected, 1963-1990 (1991) contains a series of poems
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about being a present-day Jew as well as personal poems such as ‘‘Eighty-three,’’ about her aged mother, and a beautiful elegiac sequence, ‘‘The Drowned Mountain.’’ Whitman in some of her later poetry turned away from celebrating her own life and experience to ‘‘bearing witness’’ to the experience of others. ‘‘I believe such poetry,’’ she wrote in 1985, ‘‘teaches us how to live, how to cope with loss and disaster, how to survive.’’ Four such works are: the title poem of The Passion of Lizzie Borden; Tamsen Donner: A Woman’s Journey (1977), about a poet and teacher native to Newburyport, Massachusetts, who married the wagonmaster of the ill-fated Donner party; The Testing of Hanna Senesh (1986), about a young Hungarian poet who emigrated to Palestine in 1939, later to train with British intelligence, to parachute into Yugoslavia and be killed by the Nazis; and ‘‘Anna Pavlova,’’ a short seven-part poem in Laughing Gas about the life and aging of the famous ballerina. All of these are meticulously researched. Whitman has also written a book-length poem, To Dance Is to Live, about the passionate life of Isadora Duncan, and Hatshepsut, Speak to Me (1992), a dialogue between the only woman pharaoh in ancient Egypt and the poet. The Passion of Lizzie Borden, as chamber opera, was performed in Santa Fe in 1986, and in 1988 in New York. Both To Dance Is to Live and Tamsen Donner have been performed as theater/dance by Julie Ince Thompson. To use Whitman’s words, these works assert ‘‘the value of the individual in an apocalyptic world.’’ In her role as teacher, Whitman has frequently been poet in residence at universities in the U.S. and Israel. Books related to her teaching include Poemmaking: Poets in Classrooms (editor, with Harriet Feinberg, 1975) and Becoming a Poet: Source, Process, and Practice (1982). Whitman recorded her work for the Library of Congress in 1974 and 1981. OTHER WORKS: Sachuest Point (television documentary, 1977). Permanent Address: New Poems, 1973-1980 (1980). Rhode Island Women on Women: A Poetry Chapbook (1986). The papers of Ruth Whitman are housed in the Schlesinger Library of Radcliffe College. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ferguson, M. A., ed., Images of Women in Literature (1991). Hartwell, D. and K. Cramer, eds., Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder (1993). Israel, B., In Praise of Practically Nothing (CD, 1999). Kates, J. and G. T. Reimer, eds., Reading Ruth: Contemporary Women Reclaim a Sacred Story (1994). Kaye-Kantrowitz, M. and I. Klepfisz, eds., The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women’s Anthology (1989). McLennan, K. J., ed., Nature’s Ban: Women’s Incest Literature (1996). Macdonald, C., Cynthia Macdonald and Ruth Whitman Reading Their Poems (audiotape, 1981). Schwartz, H., and A. Rudolf, eds., Voices Within the Ark: The Modern Jewish Poets (1980). Reference works: CA (1984, 1987). CP (1985, 1991). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). WW in America (1990-91). Other references: American Book Review (June 1991, Feb. 1992). Booklist (1 May 1969, 15 July 1978). Book World (20 May
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1973). Choice (Sept. 1978, June 1979). Horn Book (Dec. 1976). International Journal of Aging & Human Development (1991). LJ (1 Feb. 1969, July 1973). Poetry (May 1964, Mar. 1970). Prairie Schooner (Spring 1995). SR (15 Mar. 1969). —JEAN TOBIN
WHITMAN, Sarah Helen (Power) Born 19 January 1803, Providence, Rhode Island; died 27 June 1878, Providence, Rhode Island Also wrote under: Helen Daughter of Nicholas and Anna Marsh Power; married John W. Whitman, 1828 (died 1833) Both of Sarah Helen Whitman’s parents were from old Rhode Island families. Her father was absent from home for many years when, after being captured at sea by the British in 1813, he chose to continue his seafaring career until 1832. Whitman was educated, for brief periods, at private schools in Providence and at a Quaker school in Jamaica, Long Island, where she lived with an aunt. Although a taste for poetry and novels was thought pernicious, she preferred them to lessons and read the classics and French and German literature in the library of another aunt in Providence. She lived in Boston with her husband, an attorney, editor, and writer, but returned to Providence after his death in 1833. She traveled in Europe in 1857. Whitman’s first published poem was ‘‘Retrospection,’’ signed ‘‘Helen’’ (American Ladies Magazine, 1829). The editor, Sarah Josepha Hale, encouraged further contributions. Whitman wrote scholarly essays on Goethe, Shelley, and Emerson and served as a correspondent for the New York Tribune and the Providence Journal. Whitman was an advocate of educational reforms, divorce, the prevention of cruelty to animals, the liberal ethics of Fourier, women’s rights, and universal suffrage. Opposing the materialism of the Protestant churches, she subscribed to the intellectual and spiritual idealism of the Transcendentalists. She was also noted for her belief in prenatal influences and occult and psychic phenomena. A woman of unusual intelligence and charm, Whitman knew many prominent people, but today she is best known as a friend of Edgar Allan Poe. Following their first meeting on 2 September 1848, exchanges of poems, and a romantic correspondence, they were engaged to be married by the end of the year, but the engagement was broken at the time the banns were to be published. After Poe’s death in 1849, Whitman cherished his memory and worked to exonerate the maligned author when, in many circles, it was not considered respectable to have been associated
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with him. She searched for and located materials and lent valuable items in her possession, and as the Poe controversy became international, she answered all inquiries about him. Whitman’s one volume of verse, Hours of Life, and Other Poems (1853), is more carefully composed than the work of most women who were her contemporaries, but it is too genteel and restrained to be of moment by comparison with rougher, more original writers. The subjects are typical for the period: dreams and memories of love, the reality of death, visions of paradise, and the comforts of serene religious faith. Her voice is subdued or languorous; her eyes are sensitive to light and color; her heart is tender. Sixteen poems are the record of her love for Poe; they constitute a structure of illusions for reconciling the ‘‘orient phantasies,’’ the experience of mundane and rather ugly stresses, the shame and guilt, the grief, and what she calls the ‘‘silent eyes of destiny.’’ The reconciliation freed her for the most radical writing of her career, Edgar Poe and His Critics (1860). Having witnessed a decade of what she calls ‘‘remorseless violation’’ to the memory of Poe, Whitman wished her vindication of him to be impersonal and authoritative. She refrains from discussing her troubled romance with Poe but does take advantage of having known him, of long familiarity with what he wrote, and a scrupulous reading of all that had been written about him. She draws legitimately on the recollections of others who knew him and her own trenchant knowledge of literature and familiarity with the national scene. Finally, taking into account Poe’s mental desolation and periodic insanity, Whitman views his ‘‘unappeased and restless soul’’ in relation to an era when a prevailing skepticism and ‘‘divine dissatisfaction everywhere present’’ showed that the age was moving feverishly through processes of transition and development, ‘‘yet gave no idea of where they were leading us.’’ Poe was, for Whitman, one of the men of ‘‘electric temperament and prophetic genius’’ who anticipate those latent ideas about to unfold themselves to humanity. Nothing would have been gained, she observes, had he been another Wordsworth or Longfellow. Whitman was a woman of courage, independent mind, tact, and dignity—and one of the most impressive of American literary critics of the 19th century.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Harrison, I. A., ed., The Last Letters of Edgar Allan Poe to Sarah Helen Whitman (1909). Miller, J. C., Building Poe Biography (1977). Miller, J. C., Poe’s Helen Remembers (1979). Osgood, F. S., Poems (1849). Ostrom, J. W., ed., The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe (1966). Robertson, J. W., Edgar A. Poe: A Psychopathic Study (1923). Ticknor, Caroline, Poe’s Helen (1916). Reference works: American Female Poets (1849). NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —ELIZABETH PHILIPS
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WHITNEY, Adeline D(utton) T(rain) Born 15 September 1824, Boston, Massachusetts; died 21 March 1906, Milton, Massachusetts Wrote under: Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney Daughter of John and Adeline Dutton Train; married Seth Whitney, 1843; children: four Adeline Dutton Train Whitney was one of the second generation Boston Brahmins. She received a fine education and married a man 20 years her senior, a businessman like her father. She had four children—one of whom died in infancy—and did not begin her writing career until her children were grown. She tried her hand at all sorts of books, such as poetry collections, a cookbook, an attack on Christian Science, but her juvenile novels were the most popular. In Friendly Letters to Girl Friends (1896), she calls novels ‘‘stories of human possibilities.’’ Since most of her novels were written for girls, the ‘‘possibilities’’ she was concerned with were those of her young readers, and in novel after novel she counseled them to stay in woman’s own sphere—the home. ‘‘Perfect homes must be the centres and starting-points of the perfect commonwealths,’’ she writes in Friendly Letters. This theme is evident in the four novels that make up the Real Folks series: A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite’s Life (1866), We Girls (1870), Real Folks (1871), and The Other Girls (1873). All the girls who meet one another in these lightly connected works find their happiness in home and family life, even if they have to go out as servants. One of Whitney’s themes is that women should not want to work anywhere outside the home even if they have to earn money, so they should take jobs as servants in other women’s homes above any other work. (Perhaps the most widely expressed grievance of Whitney’s day among women of her class was the difficulty of finding good servants.) In all, Whitney’s fiction defends the most traditional aspects of the lives of upper-class American women of her day. She perhaps tempers her support by some criticism of social snobbery and a respect for sincere religious profession. Brought up in the Congregational and Unitarian churches, Whitney later became an Episcopalian. She was no evangelist, and her plots do not turn on the characters’ conversions, but most of her novels touch on religion or Christian ethics. Faith Gartney’s Girlhood (1863) was one of the standbys of Sunday school libraries for over 50 years. It was also her most popular and most interesting novel and has a rather common theme: Faith’s family loses its money in a business depression; both parents are unable to cope with the change in their lives, but Faith offers a plan, in which they move to a country house they own and do some of their own work. Three women—her aunt, who runs her own home and maintains a rigid independence; her father’s nurse, who though middle-aged and plain finds her life in service; and the servant girl taken in by the aunt, who is unlucky in love but is left the means to run a small orphan’s home—serve as examples of paths women may tread without becoming unwomanly. Faith is one of the lucky
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ones; young and beautiful, she gets married and will have her own home, husband, and children. It may not be intentional, but Whitney’s novels set up a very woman-centered way of life and scheme of values, even as they promote the notion of woman’s inferiority to man. Her wives are not seen much with their husbands, but with aunts, mothers, daughters, and girlfriends. Faith’s father is a broken man when he loses his money: ‘‘I’m no more than a mere useless block of wood,’’ he complains; his daughter answers, ‘‘We shall just have to set you up, and make an idol of you then!’’ Her girls are advised to seek a completely separate way of life from men. As she put it in Friendly Letters, ‘‘Puss, puss! run for the chimney-corner. And leave something outside for men to do, that there may still be chimney-corners.’’ Whitney was a writer familiar to several generations of American young women. While her prose style is murky and her diction high-flown, her depictions of ideal home life and successful girlhoods pleased her readers. Modern cultural historians find her novels of interest in the study of the segregation of the sexes in 19th-century America.
OTHER WORKS: Boys at Chequasset (1862). The Gayworthys (1865). Patience Strong’s Outings (1868). Hitherto (1869). Mother Goose for Grown Folk (1870). Pansies (1872). Sights and Insights (1876). Just How: A Key to Cook-Books (1878). Odd or Even? (1880). Homespun Yarns (1886). Bonnyborough (1886). Bird Talk (1887). Daffodils (1887). Ascutney Street (1890). A Golden Gossip (1892). White Memories (1893). The Open Mystery: A Reading of the Mosaic Story (1897). Square Pegs (1899). The Integrity of Christian Science (1900). Biddy’s Episodes (1904).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Halsey, F. W., Women Authors of Our Day in Their Homes (1903). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Horn Book (June 1953). NYT (22 Mar. 1906). —BEVERLY SEATON
WHITNEY, Phyllis A(yame) Born 9 September 1903, Yokohama, Japan Daughter of Charles J. and Lillian Mandeville Whitney; married George A. Garner, 1925 (divorced); Lovell F. Jahnke, 1950 (died); children: one daughter Born of American parents, Phyllis A. Whitney first came to the U.S. at the age of fifteen, after living in Japan, China, and the
Philippines. She graduated from high school in Chicago. She married a businessman in 1950 and had one daughter, living in Staten Island, New York, and northern New Jersey. Whitney has written more than 50 novels, which she divides into three groups: novels for young people, mysteries for young people, and adult novels. Almost all of the last are gothic romances. During her long career, she has reviewed books for newspapers and has taught courses, lectured, and written widely on the business and craft of writing fiction. Two novels, Mystery of the Haunted Pool (1960) and Mystery of the Hidden Hand (1963), have received Edgars from the Mystery Writers of America, and she received the Grand Master award in 1988 for her lifetime achievement. The novels for young people appeal to young girls rather than boys. Many of them carry girls’ names in the title: A Place for Ann (1941), A Star for Ginny (1942), A Window for Julie (1943), Linda’s Homecoming (1950), and Nobody Likes Trina (1972). A majority of these didactic novels have been favorably reviewed by educators and librarians, and Whitney’s success in this field has made her an authority. She has also published how-to guidebooks, including Writing Juvenile Fiction (1947, revised 1960), Writing Juvenile Stories and Novels: How to Write and Sell Fiction for Young People (1976, 1985) and Guide to Fiction Writing (1984). Her mysteries for young people can be easily recognized because, with the exception of The Vanishing Scarecrow (1971), each of them has a title beginning with ‘‘mystery’’ or ‘‘secret.’’ These too are primarily written for girls, although the adventure aspect is strong. They are all characterized by vivid backgrounds. Whitney’s early life abroad provided exotic background material for many of her novels. For many years, she made each of her many trips serve a double purpose: she used the background material gathered for one juvenile novel and one adult gothic romance. Thus a trip to the Virgin Islands produced both Secret of the Spotted Shell (1967) and Columbella (1966). She has set novels in Turkey, Norway, Japan, Greece, South Africa, and a wide variety of places in the United States. Whitney’s first adult novel was Red Is for Murder (1943), a straightforward mystery novel set in a department store. She did not return to adult fiction until sometime later; the next adult book, The Quicksilver Pool (1955), is a historical novel set on Staten Island during the Civil War draft riots. Although there is a domestic mystery, the most important aspect of the plot is a love story, a pattern she also uses in The Trembling Hills (1956), a novel about the San Francisco earthquake. After Skye Cameron (1957), a domestic novel of 19th-century New Orleans, Whitney turned to modern Japan for the background to The Moonflower (1958). The following three books—Thunder Heights (1960), a novel of the 19th-century Hudson River valley; Blue Fire (1961), a mystery of modern South Africa; and Window on the Square (1962), set on Washington Square in 19th-century New York— are similar to the novels preceding them. All deal with young women trying to make their way in the world and who marry their true loves after a series of dangerous adventures. The novels are competent romantic mysteries, but not nearly so well realized as the books to come.
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After the successful contemporary romantic adventures Seven Tears for Apollo (1963) and Black Amber (1964), Whitney only once, in Sea Jade (1964), uses a historical setting for her novels. The mystery element becomes a more important part of the plot than it had been before. Whitney’s preoccupation with women and their identities in these novels is often very sophisticated (she has written that she relies on Karen Horney for psychological insight about women). In novels such as Columbella, Silverhill (1967), Lost Island (1970), Listen for the Whisperer (1972), The Turquoise Mask (1974), and The Golden Unicorn (1976), she is increasingly concerned with relationships between mothers and daughters and with questions of feminine identity as they relate to the past—with the problems of women trying both to come to terms with and transcend their family background. In later years, most of her heroines sought their own identities through returning to their ancestral home or through a reconciliation with another woman in the family. The solution of the mystery provides both a conclusion for the plot and an answer to the significant questions asked by the heroine of her past. Although each of these books ends with clear answers, the process of finding them is arduous and uncompromising. The mystery genre imposes limits on the ambiguity Whitney can allow in the resolution, but it does not keep her from an honest and rigorous development of the issues. Her women make mistakes: they marry the wrong man, they misjudge character, one of them has an illegitimate child; but they are allowed the opportunity to see what they have done and to change it and themselves. Many authors write gothic romances; very few write them with the continuing sophistication and wisdom of Whitney. Further testament to her enduring written powers are that most of her books are still in print, with three dozen or so titles reprinted in the 1990s alone.
OTHER WORKS: The Silver Inkwell (1945). Willow Hill (1947). Ever After (1948). Mystery of the Gulls (1949). Island of the Dark Woods (1951; alternate title, Mystery of the Strange Traveler). Love Me, Love Me Not (1952). Step to the Music (1953). A Long Time Coming (1954). Mystery of the Black Diamonds (1954). Mystery of the Isle of Skye (1955). The Fire and the Gold (1956). The Highest Dream (1956). Mystery of the Green Cat (1957). Secret of the Samurai Sword (1958). Creole Holiday (1959). Secret of the Tiger’s Eye (1961). Mystery of the Golden Horn (1962). Secret of the Emerald Star (1964). Mystery of the Angry Idol (1965). Hunter’s Green (1968). Secret of Goblin Glen (1968). Mystery of the Crimson Ghost (1969). Secret of the Missing Footprints (1969). The Winter People (1969). Mystery of the Scowling Boy (1973). Snowfire (1973). Secret of the Haunted Mesa (1975). Spindrift (1975). Secret of the Stone Face (1977). The Stone Bull (1977). The Glass Flame (1978). Domino (1979). Poinciana (1980). Vermillion (1981). Emerald (1983). Rainsong (1984). Dream of Orchids (1985). The Flaming Tree (1986). Silversword (1987). Feather on the Moon (1988). Rainbow in the Mist (1989). The Singing Stones (1990). Woman Without a Past (1991). The Ebony Swan (1992). Star Flight (1993). Daughter of
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the Stars (1994). Phyllis A. Whitney Presents Malice Domestic 5: An Anthology of Original Traditional Mystery Stories (1996). A manuscript collection of Phyllis A. Whitney’s work is housed in the Mugar Memorial Library of Boston University. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1967). Detecting Women (1994). Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (1994). St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (1996). Other references: LJ (June 1991). NYTBR (2 July 1967). Time (12 Apr. 1971). Writer (Feb. 1960, Feb. 1967). —KAY MUSSELL, UPDATED BY NELSON RHODES
WIGGIN, Kate Douglass Born 28 September 1856, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; died 24 August 1923, Harrow-on-Hill, England Also wrote under: Mrs. Riggs Daughter of Robert and Helen Dyer Smith; married Samuel Wiggin, 1881 (died 1889); George Riggs, 1895 Kate Douglass Wiggin was born to a prosperous Philadelphia lawyer and his wife, a native of Maine. Her childhood was spent in the village of Hollis, Maine, after the death of her father and her mother’s remarriage. She was educated at home and then at various schools in New England. In the mid-1870s, she moved with her family to California, where they came on hard times. Wiggin became interested in the new kindergarten movement and took a course under Emma Marwedel in Los Angeles, and then opened the Silver Street Kindergarten in a slum in San Francisco, the first free kindergarten in California. For a number of years, she was a national leader in the Kindergarten movement, and she began her own training school in San Francisco in 1880. To raise money for the free-kindergarten movement, Wiggin published privately two short sentimental novels, The Story of Patsy (1883) and The Birds’ Christmas Carol (1887). Her first husband, a lawyer, died in 1889. Wiggin had given up kindergarten work in 1884, and she began writing full time after the successful commercial publication of The Birds’ Christmas Carol in 1889. She returned to the East Coast and lived in New York City and Hollis, giving readings from her works and traveling to Europe. Her second husband was a businessman. Among her New York circle were William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and Carolyn Wells. Wiggin suffered periodically from nervous exhaustion; the opening chapters of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903) were written in a sanatorium. The Birds’ Christmas Carol became a seasonal classic, published in multiple editions in various languages. In this edifying tale, Carol Bird, a wealthy but sick ten-year-old, gives a Christmas dinner for the children of a poor family in the neighborhood, the Ruggles. Although the heroine dies after the children
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leave on Christmas night, the book’s popularity did not rest on sentiment alone; the portrayal of the Ruggles family is realistic and humorous. Two children’s novels set in California, A Summer in a Canon (1889) and Polly Oliver’s Problem (1893), are not very good, and the same may be said of a series of travel novels, most of which have Penelope Hamilton as the heroine. Wiggin is best known for stories set in Maine, and these are undoubtedly her best work. Timothy’s Quest (1890) and some early short stories have Maine backgrounds, but Wiggin only began to concentrate on regional material after the success of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Today this is considered a children’s book, but it was first a bestselling adult novel. Set in a village similar to Hollis, in the Saco River valley, the story is a classic orphan story without the orphan: Rebecca, the daughter of a poor widow, is sent to live with two maiden aunts in order to be ‘‘made.’’ In traditional fashion, she wins their hearts, even that of the stern Aunt Miranda. A spirited child, Rebecca accomplishes many things in the course of the story, including the saving of her family fortunes. She graduates from boarding school in a cheesecloth dress, but her time at school has been a success—she is class president. Rebecca’s character and the local color of her background are both appealing. This story did not end with a marriage, but with only the hint of an attachment. There was no sequel, only a volume of ‘‘missing chapters,’’ or stories about Rebecca set in the time of the first novel, The New Chronicles of Rebecca (1907). Mother Carey’s Chickens (1911) is another of Wiggin’s popular New England novels. A more saccharine story than Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, it tells how the Carey family, under the leadership of young Nancy, manages to survive economically after the death of their father. Other Maine stories with good regional description are another Christmas story, The Old Peabody Pew (1907), and Susanna and Sue (1909), which features a Shaker colony. The Story of Waitstill Baxter (1913) shows more mature character development than the average Wiggin novel. Set in the early-19th century, this novel of Saco valley life features a historical figure, the traveling evangelist Jacob Cochrane, and describes the disruption he brings to a family. Wiggin’s autobiography, My Garden of Memory (1923), is a charming and valuable document, revealing its author as a woman of spirit and sense. Several of her novels were filmed more than once. These movies mirror the popular modern conception of Wiggin as a silly sentimentalist, but her novels, slight as they are, belie that reputation. She was a chronicler of the romance of real life, not a romanticist. And while there is sentimentality in her earlier works, her major novels are free of it. Most of her heroines—Rebecca, Nancy Carey, Polly Oliver, Waitstill Baxter— are active, intelligent young women, unlike the Little Eva stereotype, Carol Bird. Wiggin argued for wholesomeness, not hypocrisy, in fiction, and her point of view was that of a sophisticated professional writer, not that of a sheltered matron. She was a popular writer who expressed what her contemporaries themselves thought of as ‘‘real life.’’
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OTHER WORKS: A Cathedral Courtship and Penelope’s English Experiences (1893). The Village Watch-tower (1895). Marm Lisa (1896). Penelope’s Progress (1898). Penelope’s Irish Experiences (1901). Diary of a Goose Girl (1902). Rose o’ the River (1905). Penelope’s Postscripts (1915). The Romance of a Christmas Card (1916). Ladies in Waiting (1919). Creeping Jenny, and Other New England Stories (1924). Fifteen books, some collection of stories and some about kindergartens, written with her sister, Nora Archibald Smith. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Benner, H., Kate Douglass Wiggin’s Country of Childhood (1956). Smith, N., Kate Douglass Wiggin as Her Sister Knew Her (1925). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Bookman (1910, 1924). Lamp (1905). London Bookman (1910). NEQ (June 1968). —BEVERLY SEATON
WIGGINS, Bernice Love Born 4 March 1897, Austin, Texas; death date unknown Daughter of J. Austin Love; married (Mr.) Wiggins Bernice Wiggins may never have lived with her father, a college-educated black poet who worked as a laborer and later became state Sunday-school director for the Holiness church. When her mother died in 1902, Wiggins went to El Paso to live with an aunt. She grew up without a home library, but her first-grade teacher encouraged her in her habit of inventing and reciting rhythmical lines. In high school, Wiggins learned ‘‘something of the art of versification’’—perhaps to her detriment, as her weakest poems are those that follow the conventions of white writing of her day. Folklorist J. Mason Brewer praises Wiggins as a dialect poet, calling her the best of her contemporaries and comparing her favorably with Paul Laurence Dunbar. Wiggins’ reputation was probably made chiefly through performances in her own community. One of her poems, ‘‘Miss Annie’s Playing,’’ is marked for piano accompaniment. ‘‘Church Folks,’’ a satire in dialect, was immortalized by J. Mason Brewer, who not only published it but also recited it to open all his speeches during several decades. Wiggins also had poems published in the black press, including the Houston Informer, the Chicago Defender, and Half-Century Magazine. Much of her work deals with political issues: poverty, racism, women’s rights, lynching, the black soldier’s role in World War I. She even essays a work on the injustice of the laws against prostitution, in which she assumes the persona of a ‘‘vampire.’’ In 1925 Wiggins herself published a book of her poems called Tuneful Tales. This 174-page volume is the chief storehouse of her work, and its introduction by her former high school principal is almost the only published source of biographical data.
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J. Mason Brewer mentions in 1936 that Wiggins had moved to Los Angeles. No further books by Wiggins have come to light. The best poems in Tuneful Tales are characterized by excellent scansion, good narrative flow, and marvelous attention to detail. In ‘‘A Race with a Corpse,’’ a broadly humorous ballad, Wiggins carefully lays the groundwork by stating, ‘‘dis t’ing yo’ call ‘Embalmin’/ Didn’t hab dat in my day,’’ and filling in details of a church funeral. Often her poems are tragicomic. In ‘‘Who’s to Blame,’’ a man walks home in the snow and puts his only pair of shoes in the oven to dry. In the morning, his mother has built a fire and reduced the shoes to cinders. Wiggins’ characteristically loving tone comes through as the character ponders, ‘‘who’s I gwine to blame fo’ it,/ De party or de weather?’’ He does not blame his mother or himself. Wiggins often does fresh and original work in male personas. Her ‘‘Sighs of a Soldier,’’ for instance, picks up the voice of a black G.I., responding to ‘‘dis sawed off Sarjunt’’: ‘‘He ’lows, ‘Whose givin’ orders here?’ ‘Alright,’ I sez, ‘I’se cumin’.’/ ‘Why surtainly, I no yo’ is, mak’ ’ace, an’ cum a runin’.’’’ In ‘‘Ethiopia,’’ Wiggins observes that black patriots answered the call to arms only to face a resurgence of lynching at home. She suggests, through the persona of the race itself, the radical step of revoking loyalty to the nation: ‘‘Take it back till they cease to burn them alive,/ Take it back till the white man shall cease to deprive/ My sons, yea, my black sons, of rights justly won.’’ In the next stanza, the author comments: ‘‘Mary forgave, ’twas her Savior son’s will,/ Ethiopia forgives, but remembers still.’’ In ‘‘The Poetical Farmwife,’’ Wiggins explains why it is difficult to write while doing housework. Yet many of her best works deal with relationships between parents and children and sacrifices lovingly made for family. More of her writing may be discovered among the papers of her friends or in the archives of churches or schools in one of her communities.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brewer, J.M., Heralding Dawn (1936). —FRIEDA L. WERDEN
WIGGINS, Marianne Born 8 November 1947, Lancaster, Pennsylvania Daughter of John and Mary Klonis Wiggins; married Brian Porzak, 1965 (divorced 1970); Salman Rushdie, 1988 (divorced 1993); children: Lara Novelist and short story writer Marianne Wiggins grew up in the Amish region of eastern Pennsylvania. Her father was a farmer
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and preacher and her mother was the daughter of Greek immigrants who had settled in Virginia. Wiggins’ childhood was shaped both by the fundamentalist Christianity of her father and the ritual-filled Greek Orthodoxy of her mother as well as by the neighboring Amish community’s endeavor to create an ideal religious society. These contentious influences permeate Wiggins’ fictional themes in which she examines and dissects the tenacious yet mutable hold of religious mythology, romanticism, patriarchy, colonialism, and violence upon her characters’ lives. Married young and with a daughter who was born in Rome in 1968, Wiggins lived in Paris, Brussels, New York, and Massachusetts before settling in London, where she has resided since 1985. While a single mother, she supported herself with work in a stockbroker’s office before the proceeds from her first novel, the semiautobiographical Babe (1975), enabled her to pursue a full-time career in writing. Her early work focuses in often comic fashion on the travails of young mothers attempting to make their way in the world despite loutish men and the conventions of traditional expectations for women. Wiggins’ third novel, Separate Checks (1984), features a matriarchal family full of eccentric overachievers and wild women characters as seen through the eyes of one of their daughters, Ellery McQueen. Ellery is composing her own version of the life histories of her female relatives, which serves as the framing device for the narrative. Through storytelling, Ellery is attempting to understand her own troubled inheritance of that ineffable mixture of emotions passed on from mothers to daughters. While the satirical language of the novel is uneven, shifting, as one reviewer noted, ‘‘between the dazzling and the contrived,’’ Wiggins largely succeeds in creating a portrait of the complicated, intimate, and not always welcome ties that bind this family of women. In a collection of short stories, Herself in Love (1987), Wiggins turns an edgy eye upon the vagaries of romantic love and posits a nearly inevitable outcome of estrangement between women and men. Her characters suffer from odd disconnections, poignant regrets, and uneasy exile. There is an idiosyncratic range of content in these stories in which Wiggins demonstrates her ability to experiment with style and language, while still maintaining an attentive ear for the subtle nuances of dialect, locale, and period that so individuate her characters. In her critically acclaimed novel John Dollar (1989), Wiggins successfully weaves together recurring themes from her earlier work into a caustic satire on the conceits of Christianity, imperialism, and the too easy descent of civilized society into barbarism. The book tells the story of Charlotte Lewes, a World War I widow, who accepts a position in Burma teaching the children of the smugly superior British colonialists living there at the height of the Raj. Once in Rangoon, Charlotte falls in love with sailor John Dollar and begins to shed the constraints of her English compatriots while adopting the customs of the Burmese. On an outing to name an island in honor of their king, the British colonialists are beset by catastrophes, perhaps brought on by their own brutality, leaving a paralyzed John Dollar and eight schoolgirls as the
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stranded survivors. In language alternately disturbing and lyrical, Wiggins depicts the relentless moral disintegration of the girls’ social order. Forming a rigid hierarchy in a doomed attempt to survive, the girls instead devolve from petty bullying into ritualistic cannibalism, fated to recreate a nightmarish version of what they’ve seen modeled by their elders. With John Dollar, Wiggins is unsparing in her scathing critique of the myths of empire and of Christian sacrifice. At the time of John Dollar’s publication, Wiggins was married to author Salman Rushdie. Their life together was severely disrupted by the death threat placed on Rushdie by Islamic zealots in response to the perceived blasphemy of his book The Satanic Verses. Wiggins and Rushdie were forced to live in hiding for a period of time and they subsequently separated and divorced. With respect to this episode, Wiggins has commented ironically on her obligation as a writer to point out the historical parallels with other eras in which religious doubters have been sentenced to death for voicing their skepticism. In Almost Heaven (1998), Wiggins depicts a foreign correspondent, damaged by having witnessed too much violence in the Balkans, who returns to America, only to fall in love with a woman suffering from traumatic amnesia. The novel functions as an interrogation of the role of memory in human affairs and takes as its central metaphor the capricious nature of weather. However, Almost Heaven is less than satisfying due to its melodramatic prose and unwieldy plotting, which transpire at the expense of plausibility and depth of character development. Throughout her novels and stories to date, Wiggins has established herself as an author willing to grapple with substantive ideas and with the darker cultural and political forces against which her characters enact their dreams and fears. At times her work is marred by overly clever wordplay, but more typically Wiggins infuses her writing with keen intelligence, a jaded vigilance toward hypocrisy, and the passionately acerbic sensibility of an expatriate. The recipient of a Whiting award, a National Education Association grant, and the Janet Heidinger Kafka fiction prize, Wiggins’ next project is a novel about the American Revolution.
OTHER WORKS: Went South (1980) Bet They’ll Miss Us When We’re Gone (1991). Eveless Eden (1995).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: ANR 60 (1998). CA 130 (1990). CLC 57 (1990). Other references: Booklist (1 Oct. 1995). LATBR (1 Apr. 1984). MacClean’s (21 Aug. 1989). NYT (16 Feb. 1989, 4 Apr. 1990, 9 Apr. 1991). NYTBR (19 Feb. 1989, 15 Oct. 1995, 20 Sept. 1998). PW (17 Feb. 1989). Salon (17 Sept. 1998). San Francisco Bay Guardian (25 Nov. 1998). WSJ (19 July 1991). WPBW (6 Sept. 1998). Writer’s Digest (Feb. 1991). —CHERRI L. SHUR
WILCOX, Ella Wheeler Born 5 November 1850, Johnstown Center, Wisconsin; died 30 October 1919, Short Beach, Connecticut Wrote under: Ella Wheeler Daughter of Marcus H. and Sarah Pratt Wheeler; married Robert M. Wilcox, 1884 Ella Wheeler Wilcox was the youngest of four children born to a music teacher turned farmer and a mother who had strong literary ambitions. She claimed that her mother’s extensive reading of Shakespeare, Scott, and Byron was a prenatal influence that shaped her entire career. Her mother helped her to find time to read and write rather than work on the bleak Wisconsin farm. Wilcox was influenced early by the romantic melodramas of Ouida, Mary J. Holmes, May Agnes Fleming, and Mrs. Southworth. At the age of ten, she wrote a ‘‘novel’’ in 10 chapters, printing it in her childish hand on scraps of paper and binding it in paper torn from the kitchen wall. The New York Mercury published an essay when she was fifteen. In 1867 she enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, where, however, she remained only a short time. She begged her family to be allowed to remain at home and write. By the time she was eighteen, she was earning a substantial salary, which aided her impoverished family. People from Madison, Milwaukee, and Chicago began to seek out the little country girl with the ‘‘inspired pen,’’ and she in turn was delighted to visit their city homes. By 1880 the ‘‘Milwaukee School of Poetry’’ was at its height with Wilcox as its shining light; the poets were all well known throughout the West, and some had even gained recognition in the East. Maurine (1876), a narrative poem, introduces two types of women Wilcox often wrote about: Helen, a weak and passive person who bears a daughter and soon dies, and Maurine, an aggressive and highly intelligent artist who eventually marries an American poet-intellectual. Maurine travels to Europe, where her paintings are favorably received. Helen and Maurine reappear in more complex form as Mabel and Ruth, two of the characters in Three Women (1897). When Wilcox attempted to publish Poems of Passion (1883), a collection of poems that had appeared previously in various periodicals, the book was rejected because of the ‘‘immorality’’ of several poems, and its author became the subject of unpleasant notoriety. When a Chicago publisher brought out the book, however, it was an immediate success, and Wilcox’s reputation was made. In this work, she brought into her love poetry the element of sin. By 1888 she was a leader in what was called the Erotic School, a group of writers who rebelled against the stricter rules of conventionality. By 1900 a whole feminine school of rather daring verse on the subject of the emotions followed Wilcox’s lead.
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The symbolism of sexual passion is depicted throughout her poems as a tiger who is ‘‘a splendid creature,’’ as in ‘‘Three and One’’ (Poems of Pleasure, 1888); sex for Wilcox is ‘‘all the tiger in my blood.’’ In ‘‘At Eleusis,’’ motherhood is praised and welcomed, a common theme of her poetry. Wilcox wrote editorials and essays for the New York Journal and the Chicago American as well as contributing to Cosmopolitan and other magazines. In 1901 she was commissioned by the New York American to write a poem on the death of Queen Victoria and was sent to London, where she was presented at the court of St. James. During World War I, she toured the army camps in France, reciting her poems and counseling young soldiers on their problems. Throughout her life, Wilcox enjoyed great popularity, and she took her work most seriously. In defending her poetry against critics, she maintained that ‘‘heart, not art,’’ is most important in poetry and pointed out that her poems comforted millions of weary and unhappy people.
OTHER WORKS: Drops of Water (1872). Shells (1873). The Birth of the Opal (1886). Mal Moulee: A Novel (1886). Perdita, and Other Stories (1886). The Adventures of Miss Volney (1888). A Double Life (1891). How Salvatore Won (1891). The Beautiful Land of Nod (1892). An Erring Woman’s Love (1892). A Budget of Christmas Tales (1895). An Ambitious Man (1896). Custer and Other Poems (1896). Men, Women, and Emotions (1896). Poems of Power (1901). The Heart of the New Thought (1902). Kingdom of Love (1902). Sweet Danger (1902). Around the Year (1904). Poems of Love (1905). A Woman of the World (1905). Mizpah (1906). New Thought Pastels (1906). Poems of Sentiment (1906). New Thought Common Sense and What Life Means to Me (1908). Song of Liberty (1908). Poems of Progress (1909). Sailing Sunny Seas (1909). The New Hawaiian Girl (1910). Yesterdays (1910). The Englishman, and Other Poems (1912). Gems (1912). Picked Poems (1912). The Art of Being Alive (1914). Cameos (1914). Lest We Forget (1914). Poems of Problems (1914). World Voices (1916). The Worlds and I (1918). Poems (1918). Sonnets of Sorrow and Triumph (1918). Collected Poems (1924).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ballou, J., Period Piece: Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Her Time (1940). Brown, N., Critical Confessions (1899). Town, C. H., Adventures in Editing (1926). Watts, E. S., The Poetry of American Women, 1632-1945 (1977). Wheeler, M. P., Evolution of Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Other Wheelers (1921). Reference works: AA. NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: American Mercury (Aug. 1934). Bookman (Jan. 1920). Cosmopolitan (Nov. 1888). Harper’s (Mar. 1952). Literary Digest (22 Nov. 1919).London Times (31 Oct. 1919). NYT (31 Oct. 1919). Poetry and Drama (Mar. 1913). —ANNE R. GROBEN
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WILDER, Laura Ingalls Born 7 February 1867, Pepin County, Wisconsin; died 10 February 1957, Mansfield, Missouri Daughter of Charles and Caroline Quiner Ingalls; married Almanzo Wilder, 1885; children: one son, one daughter Born in a cabin in the Wisconsin woods, Laura Ingalls Wilder is perhaps America’s best-known female pioneer. While her books do not follow the pattern of her early life exactly, they are very close. Her parents moved their family many times, searching for a better life for Wilder and her three sisters. After living in Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, and Minnesota, they settled in De Smet, South Dakota, where Wilder met and married her husband. After a difficult early married life, in which one daughter was born and a baby son died, the Wilders bought a farm near Mansfield, Missouri, where they lived the rest of their lives. At Rocky Ridge Farm, Wilder raised chickens and made butter, helped her husband build their home, and began to write articles for various rural papers and a column, ‘‘As a Farm Woman Thinks,’’ for the Missouri Ruralist. She stopped writing for the papers in 1924, but her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, a writer herself, encouraged her to write about her early life. So, in 1930 at the age of sixty-three, Wilder began to write the Little House books. The seven autobiographical volumes published during Wilder’s lifetime cover the years from about age four to her marriage and reflect the changing point of view of the maturing heroine. Little House in the Big Woods (1932) describes life in a log cabin in the forest, as seen by a young child. This volume features stories about Pa’s adventures in the woods, a jolly Christmas, and a maple sugaring dance. Little House on the Prairie (1935) takes the Ingalls family across the Mississippi into Indian lands, where they create a homestead but are forced by the government to leave. Minnesota is the scene of On the Banks of Plum Creek (1937), where Laura goes to school and first encounters Nellie Oleson, a tiresome brat who appears in later books as well. The Ingalls family’s life in Minnesota is dominated by the plague of grasshoppers. By the Shores of Silver Lake (1939) takes the family to South Dakota, where they live at a railroad camp, then spend the winter in the surveyor’s house so they will be on hand when the town is established. The Long Winter (1940) describes the severe winter of 1881, which the family spends in a house in De Smet. The book ends with the arrival of the train (snowbound since fall) and the celebration of Christmas in May. Little Town on the Prairie (1941) gives scenes of Laura’s life as a teenager in town. At the end of the book, she is given a certificate to teach school, although she is only fifteen. The final volume, These Happy Golden Years (1943), tells of her teaching and her courtship with Almanzo Wilder; they are married at the end of the volume. One other volume of the Little House books, Farmer Boy (1933), does not deal with her own life but with her husband’s boyhood on a large farm near Malone, New York.
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The other three books published under her name are all posthumous. The First Four Years (1971) covers the early, difficult years of her marriage, ending with the death of her baby boy and the burning of their home. On the Way Home (1962) is a journal she kept during their trip to Missouri and the beginning of their life at Rocky Ridge Farm. West from Home (1974) is a group of letters written to her husband from San Francisco when visiting Rose there in 1915. The only major award won by Wilder was a special award given at the Newbery-Caldecott dinner in 1954, but her Little House books are among the most popular and beloved of children’s classics, and have spawned many related series. The Children’s Library Association set up the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, of which she was the first recipient, to be given every five years. A popular television series was been based on her work, although the scripts departed a good deal from the themes and spirit of the original books, giving more emphasis to exciting and unusual events. Many of the places Wilder lived have memorials of some sort, and Rocky Ridge Farm is now a museum. The Little House books’ description of everyday life in pioneer times appeals to both children and adults. As children’s fiction, their greatest achievement is the ease and grace with which Wilder speaks to children. She never patronizes, yet she retains a suitable perspective. Laura and her sisters are not glamorized; Laura is adventurous, but in contrast to children in other books about pioneer life, she performs no heroic deeds. Of course, these novels are cosmetic reality, for only a few of the harsher aspects of pioneer life are depicted, as a study of those parts of Wilder’s life left out of the story reveals. No doubt the romance of pioneer life, aided by the appeal of a series, is no small part of the success of the Little House books, but the heart of Wilder’s achievement is the literary artistry with which she uses a simple, declarative style and shapes her narrative around ordinary events. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Alter, J., Extraordinary Women of the American West (1999). Anderson, W., Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Biography (1995). Anderson, W., Pioneer Girl: The Story of Laura Ingalls Wilder (1998). Bloom, H., ed., Women Writers of Children’s Literature (1998). Erisman, F., Laura Ingalls Wilder (1994). Glasscock, S., Laura Ingalls Wilder: An Author’s Story (1998). Hines, S. W., I Remember Laura: Laura Ingalls Wilder (1994). Miller, J. E., Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little Town: Where History and Literature Meet (1994). Miller, J. E., Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Woman Behind the Legend (1998). Neuman, J. M., ‘‘Cowgirl, Trailblazer, American: Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Ideology of New Traditionalism’’ (thesis, 1996). Perkins, C. N., 100 Authors Who Shaped World History (1996). Romines, A., Constructing the Little House: Gender, Culture, and Laura Ingalls Wilder (1997). Ross, L. H., To Sanctify the World: Skyscapes in the Fiction of Wilder, Guthrie, and Cather (dissertation, 1991). Scherf, J. C., The ‘Wilder’ Side of Laura Ingalls: The Role of Nature in the Little House Books (1992). Spaeth, J., Laura Ingalls Wilder (1987). Subramanian, J. M., Laura Ingalls Wilder: An Annotated Bibliography of Critical, Biographical, and Teaching Studies (1997). Wadsworth, G., Laura Ingalls Wilder: Storyteller
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of the Prairie (1997). Wallner, A., Laura Ingalls Wilder (1999). Wheeler, J. C., Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Tribute to the Young at Heart (1992). White, D. L., Laura’s Friends Remember: Close Friends Recall Laura Ingalls Wilder (1992). Zochert, D., Laura (1976). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Atlantic (Feb. 1975). Children’s Literature (1975, 1978). Commentary (1998). Horn Book (Sept. 1943, Dec. 1953, Oct. 1965). Legacy (1998). Lion and the Unicorn (197980). NYRB (Dec. 1994). NYTBR (Aug. 1998). PW (Sept. 1992). Signs (Spring 1990). Western Historical Quarterly (1999). —BEVERLY SEATON
WILDER, Louise Beebe Born 30 January 1878, Baltimore, Maryland; died 20 April 1938, New York, New York Daughter of Charles S. and Mary Harrison Beebe; married Walter R. Wilder, 1902; children: two Louise Beebe Wilder was educated in private schools. With her husband, an architect, and her two children, she lived for many years in Pomona, New York, and moved in 1922 to Bronxville, then a fairly rural area. Very active in gardening club circles, she founded the Working Gardeners Club of Bronxville in 1925 and served as vice president of the Federated Garden Clubs of New York and editor of New York Gardens, its journal. She was also a director and member of the advisory council of the New York Botanical Garden. In 1937 the Garden Club of America awarded her a Gold Medal for Horticultural Achievement, a rare honor. Between 1916 and 1937, Wilder wrote nine gardening books and many articles for magazines and newspapers. In her writing, she often mentions her own gardens, especially a large garden surrounding an old farmhouse in Pomona and her ‘‘suburban’’ garden in Bronxville. Her first book, My Garden (1916), covers many topics and gives general advice. In the foreword, she points out the suitability of gardening and the manual labor involved in it as a pastime for women. Colour in My Garden (1918) discusses the use of color in garden design but again is fairly nonspecialized in its approach. These and other works by Wilder are distinguished from the usual general gardening books because she presents a good deal of original material. Rock gardening was one of her special interests, dealt with not only in her general books but in Pleasures and Problems of a Rock Garden (1927). Wilder steers a course between the high cultists for whom rock gardening is an exotic and demanding pursuit and the average enthusiasts who plant their treasures in the backyard amidst clinkers and brick bits and are often criticized for a lack of skill in garden design. She points out that the enjoyment gardeners get from their gardens is what is most important.
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The Fragrant Path (1932) is a thorough and charming book about the scents of a garden. Of the many books on this subject, this is the most comprehensive. There are chapters on such things as fragrant mushrooms as well as those on the more common herbs and roses. Adventures with Hardy Bulbs (1936) is a classic work on its subject. It is illustrated with photographs and line drawings by Wilder’s son. She explains in the foreword her frequent use of the word ‘‘adventures’’ in her titles: ‘‘Adventure is of the mind—a mental attitude toward everyday events wherever experienced. One does not have to sit through the long night of an antarctic winter with an Admiral Byrd to know this, or to explore uncharted airways. Adventure may be met with any day, any hour, on one’s own doorstep, just around the corner; it may lurk in the subway, on a bus stop, in the garden.’’ Wilder’s gardening books are written with humor and grace. Behind her words lie a lifetime of real gardening experience and a lifetime of reading and research. Such gardening books may be out of print, but they can hardly be out of date. OTHER WORKS: Adventures in My Garden and Rock Garden (1923). Adventures in a Suburban Garden (1931). What Happens in My Garden (1935). The Garden in Colour (1937). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Andrews, L. L., The Story of the Working Gardeners of Bronxville (1976). —BEVERLY SEATON
WILHELM, Kate Born 8 June 1928, Toledo, Ohio Daughter of Jesse T. and Ann McDowell Meredith; married Joseph Wilhelm, 1947; Damon Knight, 1963; children: three Kate Wilhelm has two children from her first marriage and one from her second. She lives in Eugene, Oregon, with her second husband, a science fiction writer, critic, and editor. She was one of the directors of the Milford Science Fiction Writers Conference from 1963 to 1972. She lectured at the Clarion Fantasy Workshop from 1968 to 1970 and at Tulane University in 1971. Wilhelm has long been recognized as an outstanding writer of science fiction. Yet this prolific author is proving more and more difficult to classify. She has successfully transplanted her economical prose and her imaginative ideas into a wide range of forms and genres; always she displays in her writing a sharp understanding of human psychology. Wilhelm won the Nebula award from the Science Fiction Writers of America for the best short story of 1968 with ‘‘The Planners,’’ from the collection The Downstairs Room and Other Speculative Fiction. The hero is a scientist who experiments with
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monkeys, prison convicts, and developmentally challenged children. Rather than admit to his ethical doubts about these practices, he externalizes them in the form of an imaginary laboratory technician. The Clewiston Test (1976) is also about a scientist who has ethical doubts. Anne has been testing a new painkilling drug on monkeys, who have become violent, shunning the friendly advances of the laboratory technicians, but the pharmaceutical company has ignored her report of these developments and markets the drug anyway. After Anne is seriously injured in a car accident and bedridden, she feels increasingly angry and isolated, and she avoids her husband, who wonders if Anne’s rage is justified or unjustified (proof she has used the drug herself to ease the pain after the accident)? Fault Lines (1977) follows the inner monologue of an elderly woman trapped in an isolated beach house following an earthquake. As she waits to die, she remembers her childhood, marriage, and love affairs and discovers the sources of guilt and blame in her life. She realizes the personal disasters she has tried to forget were simply predictable shifts, like earthquakes. Fault Lines, like many of Wilhelm’s works, is about cycles: a preexisting weakness, a ‘‘fault line,’’ shifts and reveals a stronger structure underneath. Wilhelm is best known as a science fiction writer, and the science she fictionalizes is psychology. Sometimes it is physiological psychology (as in ‘‘The Planners’’ and The Clewiston Test), sometimes Jungian (as in Margaret and I, 1971, a novel based on Jung’s theory of the unconscious), sometimes humanistic (as in Fault Lines). Her short stories range from the eloquent to the clever but superficial; her novels, however, are of more even quality. Her prose is economical and her psychological portraits engrossing. Wilhelm second and third Nebula awards were earned for the novella ‘‘The Girl Who Fell into the Sky’’ (1988, from the collection Children of the Wind) and in 1989 for the short story ‘‘Forever Yours, Anna.’’ The former contrasts sharply with Wilhelm’s earlier short works, which are darker and more pessimistic. As in so much of her fiction, Wilhelm here explores ‘‘the inexplicable.’’ Touched by the vast peace of the Midwestern prairie and by mysteries of the past, her characters find fulfillment beyond the colder pattern of the modern world. This world and all its absurdities and threats is the focus of much of Wilhelm’s work. Throughout her career, she has questioned whether or not we can accept the consequences of our scientific and technological advances. She writes with a strong sense of moral responsibility and social conscience. Her work— the majority of which has been categorized as social science fiction—raises questions about medical practices (The Clewiston Test), scientific research (‘‘The Planners’’), and environmental concerns (Juniper Time, 1979), and confronts a host of ethical issues. Wilhelm has repeatedly demonstrated her literary versatility. Since 1980, she has ventured into the field of drama, collaborated in separate works with her husband, Damon Knight, and her son
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Richard, and written mysteries, too. Against the varied, sometimes fantastic surroundings and situations of her fiction, her social commentary and her exploration of the human psyche remain constant. In the collection Listen, Listen (1981), a novella entitled ‘‘With Thimbles, With Forks, and Hope’’ introduces two characters whose continuing stories act as something of a transitional vehicle for Wilhelm. The characters are psychologist Constance Leidl and her husband, Charlie Meiklejohn, a retired fire inspector and police detective. The transition takes place over the course of several stories pitting the investigative duo against mysteries with fantastic, science fictional elements. By the time the first Leidl-Meiklejohn novel appears, Constance, Charlie, and Wilhelm have taken up a more traditional place in the mystery genre. The Hamlet Trap (1987) has no elements of fantasy or science fiction, but is instead a thoroughly observed psychological mystery with satisfyingly believable characters. Wilhelm, however, did not abandon the science fiction genre. Among the other Leidl-Meiklejohn novels is The Dark Door (1988), more of a tightly drawn thriller than a mystery featuring a supernatural foe; and Crazy Time (1988), also nominally science fiction, which achieves the same sort of hybrid status. It begins as generous farce and becomes a gripping comedy thriller that is also a rather profound metaphysical fantasy. While some science fictional elements do appear in the following series of Leidl-Meiklejohn novels, the stories move solidly into reality-based investigations. Wilhelm also published a number of courtroom drama mysteries during this time. Chaos theory and superhuman powers are integral to the theme and plot of Death Qualified: A Mystery of Chaos (1991), but the novel is as much murder mystery and psychological study as it is science fiction. Following volumes with the same protagonist, criminal lawyer Barbara Holloway, Malice Prepense (1996) and Defense for the Devil (1999), are compelling works with Wilhelm’s usual psychologically sophisticated character development and dexterous prose. The Good Children (1998), while it has the theme of haunting and the haunted house in common with several of Wilhelm’s earlier works, is not a novel of the supernatural, but rather an exquisitely detailed account of the psychological problems affecting a boy when his older siblings cover up their mother’s death. The resulting story is a believable and sensitive but unsentimental psychological portrait; it is also a taut gothic tale. Whatever the genre position, Wilhelm’s fiction attains brilliance through her commitment to verity in the depiction of the human estate. OTHER WORKS: More Bitter Than Death (1962). The Mile-Long Spaceship (1963, British edition as Andover and the Android, 1966). The Clone (with T. Thomas, 1965). The Nevermore Affair (1966). The Killer Thing (1967, British edition as The Killing Thing). Let the Fire Fall (1969). The Year of the Cloud (with T. Thomas, 1970). Abyss: Two Novellas (1971). City of Cain (1974). The Infinity Box (1975). Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (1976). Somerset Dreams and Other Fictions (1978). Axolotl (play, 1979). Better Than One (with Damon Knight, 1980). A Sense of
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Shadow (1981). Oh, Susannah!: A Novel (1982). Welcome, Chaos (1983). The Hindenberg Effect (radio play, 1985). The Hills Are Dancing (with R.Wilhelm, 1986). Huysman’s Pets (1986). Smart House (1989). Cambio Bay (1990). Sweet, Sweet Poison (1990). State of Grace (1991). Naming the Flowers (1992). And the Angels Sing (1992). Seven Kinds of Death (1992). Justice for Some (1993). The Best Defense (1994). A Flush of Shadows: Five Short Novels Featuring Constance Leidl and Charlie Meiklejohn (1995). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ash, B., ed., Anatomy of Wonder: Science Fiction (1976). Barr, M., Lost in Space (1993). Donald, M., Patterns of the Fantastic (1983). Marleen, S., Future Females (1985). Platt, C., Dream Makers (1980). Weedman, J., ed., Women Worldwalkers (1985). Reference works: DLB (1981). Science Fiction Writers (1999). St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers (1996). Other references: Anatomy of Wonder (1987). LATBR (19 Dec. 1982, 3 Dec. 1989, 30 June 1991). LJ (Jan. 1999). Newsweek (9 Feb. 1976). NYTBR (10 Mar. 1974, 18 Jan. 1976, 22 Feb. 1976, 9 Mar. 1986, 1 Sept. 1991). PW (24 June 1968, Feb. 1990). TLS (3 Oct.1986). Tribune Books (17 Dec. 1989). WPBW (27 Apr. 1986, 29 Oct. 1989). —KAREN FREIBERG, UPDATED BY JEROME CHOU AND JESSICA REISMAN
WILLARD, Emma (Hart) Born 23 February 1787, Berlin, Connecticut; died 15 April 1870, Troy, New York Daughter of Samuel and Lydia Hinsdale Hart; married John Willard, 1809 (died 1825); Christopher Yates, 1838; children: one son Emma Willard was the 16th of her father’s 17 children, the ninth born to his second wife. Books were the center of life on the Hart family farm. Captain Hart had served in the Revolution, and in addition to Chaucer, Milton, and Shakespeare, the family savored stories of Washington and Lafayette. Willard attended the Berlin Academy (where within two years she was teaching younger children), but she was extensively self-taught. She took advantage of the medical books of her husband—a fifty-year-old physician and politician who had four children from two previous marriages—and the books of his nephew—a student at Middlebury College who lived in their home in Vermont. Willard had been preceptress of a school in Middlebury before her marriage, and in 1814—to aid family finances—she opened the Middlebury Female Seminary, where she began to introduce ‘‘higher subjects,’’ such as mathematics, history, and languages, in addition to the ‘‘ornamental’’ subjects usually deemed proper for women. Willard realized that private means were too limited to provide suitable housing, adequate libraries, and the necessary
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apparatus for quality education. She presented New York governor DeWitt Clinton with her Plan for Improving Female Education (1819), published at her own expense and sent to prominent men throughout the country. It received enthusiastic response from all quarters, but the legislature voted no funds. In 1821, however, the Troy, New York, Common Council voted to raise $4,000 for female education. Five years before the first public high schools for girls opened in New York (and closed shortly thereafter) and 16 years before Mary Lyon founded the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, Willard was offering women a serious course of study equivalent to the best men’s high schools and sometimes superior to their college work. She was supported in her work by her husband (until his death in 1825), her sister, Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps, and later by her one son and his wife. Her brief second marriage (to a man who turned out to be a gambler and fortune hunter) was not successful, but Willard had had the foresight to draw up an unusual prenuptial financial agreement protecting her property, income, and school. The work that established Willard’s reputation is her Plan for Improving Female Education. Incisive as any lawyer’s brief, it argues that the current system of privately financed education was inadequate because most proprietors saw schools only as moneymaking ventures and because many schools, particularly girls’ schools, had no entrance requirements, few regulations, and a shallow curriculum. She declares that education ‘‘should seek to bring its subjects to the perfection of their moral, intellectual, and physical nature, in order that they may be of the greatest possible use to themselves and others,’’ and concludes by noting that since women give society its moral tone, the country would benefit from quality female education. In 1833 Willard expanded these ideas in a series of lectures published as The Advancement of Female Education to promote a female seminary in Greece. Even while running the seminary herself, Willard found time to write several textbooks, which made her financially independent. The first is A System of Universal Geography (1822), written with William Channing Woodbridge. Older texts had been written as if London were the center of the world and emphasized rote learning. Willard encourages students to study and draw maps and to use a globe. She describes the climate, customs, and history of different countries. Willard is best known for her history texts. Republic of America (1828) begins with a chronological table dividing American history into 10 epochs and concludes with the ‘‘political scriptures’’ she learned as a child. Lafayette endorsed her account of the Revolution, and Daniel Webster wrote, ‘‘I keep it near me as book of reference, accurate in facts and dates.’’ It was popular for both the student and the general reader. Her Episcopal faith gave the books a popular moral tone. A System of Universal History in Perspective (1837) details the ‘‘virtues which exalt nations and the vices which destroy them.’’ In 1844 she published Temple of Time, the first in a series of books in which she charted world history as a multistoried temple, in which each floor is held up by groups of 10 pillars on which are engraved the names of the principal sovereigns of each century. Each floor contains various groupings of nations and the roof
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displays the names of heroes. Although these books may appear stilted and moralistic today, they were hailed as educationally innovative, making history exciting in their time. In 1820, at a time when the great popularity of millennial speculation in the United States was just beginning, Willard researched biblical prophecies to write Universal Peace, to Be Introduced by a Confederacy of Nations Meeting at Jerusalem; 54 years later, she published an expanded version. Her commitment to peace was such that during the Civil War she wrote two works about how slavery might be modified in order to satisfy both sides. She did not press the plan, however, after her nephew, a state Supreme Court judge, told her the time for such suggestions was long past. Willard wrote many poems, but only ‘‘The Ocean Hymn; or, Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep,’’ written in 1831 on the return voyage from a trip in Europe, became well known. Another of Willard’s interests was science. Although not as well known in the field as was her sister Almira, she did argue in two works of the 1840s that there is a connection between respiration and the circulation of the blood. Although she was made a member of the Association for the Advancement of Science, she was somewhat miffed when the idea was called the ‘‘American theory’’ rather than the ‘‘Willardian.’’ Willard never participated in women’s rights activities, but she opposed Almira’s Anti-Woman Suffrage Society. She wrote to Celia Burr Burleigh in support of her career as a feminist lecturer: ‘‘After all, you have only entered now upon a work that I took up more than half a century ago—pleading the cause of my sex. I did it in my way, you are doing it in yours, and as I have reason to believe that God blessed me in my efforts, I pray that he will bless you in yours.’’ OTHER WORKS: Geography for Beginners; or, The Instructor’s Assistant (1826). Journal and Letters from France and Great Britain (1833). Chronographer of Ancient History (1846). Chronographer of English History (1846). Historic Guide to the Temple of Time (1846). A Treatise on the Motive Powers which Produce the Circulation of the Blood (1846). Respiration and Its Effects, Particularly as Respects Asiatic Cholera (1849). Last Leaves of American History (1849 enlarged edition, Late American History: Containing a Full Account of the Courage, Conduct, and Success of John C. Fremont, 1856). Astronomy; or, Astronomical Geography (1853). Morals for the Young; or, Good Principles Instilling Wisdom (1857). Appeal to South Carolina (1860). Via Media (1862). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Lord, J., The Life of Emma Willard (1873). Lutz, A., Emma Willard: Daughter of Democracy (1929; rev. ed., Emma Willard: Pioneer Educator of American Women, 1964). Woody, T., A History of Women’s Education in the U.S. (1929). Reference works: NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —NANCY A. HARDESTY
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WILLARD, Frances (Elizabeth Caroline) Born 28 September 1839, Churchville, New York; died 17 February 1898, New York, New York Daughter of Josiah F. and Mary Hill Willard In 1840 Frances Willard’s family moved from New York to Oberlin, Ohio, where both parents attended classes at the then-young college. In 1846 they moved further west, to a homestead on the Wisconsin frontier. Willard had very little formal education before she enrolled in the Wisconsin Female College. After one year she transferred to North Western Female College in Evanston, Illinois, an institution affiliated with her family’s church, the Methodist. Her parents joined Willard and her sister in Evanston, which was to be her home for the rest of her life. Willard graduated in 1859 and then taught in local schools and at female seminaries and colleges in Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New York. She spent two years (1868-70) traveling in Europe, Russia, and the Near East, studying languages and meeting expenses by writing weekly articles for Illinois papers. As Jane Addams was to do in the 1880s, she returned from Europe determined to find independence and a career of service, but Willard meant to serve among the young middle-class women for whom she had already developed a great affection in her years as a student and as a teacher. She was president of Evanston College for Women from 1871 to 1873, when it was absorbed by Northwestern University. She then became dean of women and professor of English and art. Her career as an educator ended with her resignation in 1874, probably due to conflicts with the university’s president, who happened to be Willard’s ex-fiancé. This same summer, Willard was asked to lead the Chicago Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). In October, she became secretary of the state organization, and one month later, at the Cleveland convention that founded the national WCTU, she was chosen as corresponding secretary. She was elected national president in 1879 and remained in that position until her death in 1898, leading for over two decades the largest organization of American women in the 19th century. From 1876 to 1879 she was head of the publications committee, and she used the WCTU journal, Our Union, to promote her own views on the necessity of linking the temperance cause with other political issues, particularly woman suffrage. She lectured widely across the country and became a nationally known figure. The WCTU advocated not temperance but prohibition. Willard was herself responsible for their slogan, ‘‘For God, Home, and Native Land,’’ and regularly rang that theme in pamphlets such as Home Protection Manual (1879). This was to some extent a means to retain the support of a basically middle-class and conservative movement for the aims of the more radical Willard, but it is also a reflection of the fact alcoholism was not only an
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individual problem, but a threat to women and children who, in the 19th century, had little protection against the financial and physical exploitation of drunken husbands. In the 1890s, she became interested in socialism and argued that poverty is the cause of intemperance. Long before this country’s experiment with prohibition, she came to believe that education, not prohibition, is the solution of the problem of alcohol abuse. After her death, however, the WCTU limited its attention to prohibition and abstinence. As a feminist, Willard was most interested in the development of women’s abilities and interests through their active involvement in the WCTU and in the improvement in their status that she hoped the political power of a strong WCTU might accomplish. Describing the temperance movement that began late in 1873 with spontaneous demonstrations of women in several Midwestern states, she writes in History of the Women’s National Christian Temperance Union (1876): ‘‘A phenomenon no less remarkable, though certainly much less remarked, succeeded the crusade—indeed, is aptly termed its ‘sober second thought.’ This was the phenomenon of organization. The women who went forth by impulse, sudden, irresistible, divine, to pray in the saloons, became convinced. . .that theirs would be no easy victory.’’ The image of women as the spiritual saviors (in the home) of a crass society was common in 19th-century America; working with a conservative group, Willard used this image when she discussed the organization of women outside the home. With Mary A. Livermore, Willard edited A Woman of the Century (1893), the most important 19th-century biographical reference work on American women. In their preface, the editors draw attention to the ‘‘vast array of woman’s achievements here chronicled, in hundreds of new vocations and avocations.’’ The articles are laudatory, but also concise and factual. Nineteen Beautiful Years (1864), Willard’s first book, is a brief account of the life of her sister, who died in 1861. It is certainly sentimental, but considerably less so than the flowery preface by John Greenleaf Whittier to the second edition (1885). Her sentimentality is particularly evident in What Frances Willard Said (1905), a collection of aphorisms and brief exhortations such as the following appeal for woman suffrage: ‘‘by the hours of patient watching over beds where helpless children lay, . . . I charge you, give mothers power to protect, along life’s treacherous high-way, those whom they have so loved.’’ In fact, Willard developed a clear and fairly simple style in which, as in her organizational work, appeals to the ideals of piety, domesticity, and patriotism—although still unpleasant to the modern reader— are connected with a usually well-reasoned argument about the needs of women. In Glimpses of Fifty Years (1889), Willard’s sentimental tendencies are used to good effect in the autobiography of a feminist who did not mean to undervalue the ‘‘household arts or household saints. . . . All that I plead for is freedom for girls as well as boys, in the exercise of their special gifts and preferences of brain and hand.’’ For personal and political reasons, Willard did not choose to dissociate herself from the sentimental or the domestic modes in either her writing or her organizational work.
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OTHER WORKS: Hints and Helps in Our Temperance Work (1875). Woman and Temperance; or, The Work and Workers of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (1883). How to Win: A Book for Girls (1886). Woman in the Pulpit (1888). The Year’s Bright Chain: Quotations for the Writings of Frances E. Willard (1889). A Classic Town: The Story of Evanston by ‘‘An Old Timer’’ (1891). A Great Mother: Sketches of Madam Willard, with M. B. Norton (1894). Do Everything: A Handbook for the World’s White Ribboners (circa 1895). A Wheel within a Wheel: How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle, with Some Reflections by the Way (1895, reprinted 1991). Occupations for Women, with H. M. Winslow and S. J. White (1897). Writing Out My Heart: Selections from the Journal of Frances E. Willard, 1855-96 (1995). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bordin, R. B. A., Frances Willard: A Biography (1986). Dobschuetz, B. S.‘‘A Historical Study of the Religious Factors in Frances Willard’s Development Before 1874’’ (thesis, 1992). Earhart, M., Frances Willard: From Prayers to Politics (1944). Gifford, C., ‘‘My Own Methodist Hive’’: The Nurturing Community of Frances Willard’s Young Womanhood (1997). Leeman, R. W., ‘‘Do Everything’’ Reform: The Oratory of Frances E. Willard (1992). Mitchell, N. T., Frances E. Willard: ‘‘Yours for Home Protection’’ (1987). Shelton, C. J., ‘‘Frances E. Willard’s Southern Tours for Temperance: 1881-1883’’ (thesis 1986). Slagell, A. R., A Good Woman Speaking Well: The Oratory of Frances E. Willard (dissertation, 1993). Stine, E. C., ‘‘Translating the Passive Voice into the Active Voice: An Examination of the Rhetoric of Frances Willard’s Evangelical Feminism’’ (thesis, 1986). Strachey, R., Frances Willard: Her Life and Work (1912). Reference works: DAB. NAW (1971). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Church History (1997). Feminist Studies (Spring 1993). Humanities (July 1995). —LANGDON FAUST
WILLARD, Nancy Born 26 June 1936, Ann Arbor, Michigan Daughter of Hobart H. and Marge Sheppard Willard; married Eric Lindbloom, 1964; children: James Nancy Willard describes herself as having been a creative child with boundless curiosity, influenced by the fantasy of George Macdonald, the Oz books, and Alice in Wonderland. Drawing, writing, and storytelling were, and remain, her favorite activities. The dream quality in Willard’s works comes from an early childhood experience to which she attributes her ‘‘call’’ to become a writer. Even as a child Willard created and designed books as gifts for friends and relatives. Her first poem was published when she was seven. Born and raised in Ann Arbor where her father, a renowned chemist, taught at the University of Michigan, Willard describes
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her childhood home as a lively place with all sorts of characters in it and her writing often reflects memories of life there. Willard followed her insatiable love of story into the study of literature. Graduating from the University of Michigan (B.A., 1958), she studied for an M.A. (1960) at Stanford University, where her thesis in medieval literature opened ‘‘doors to all kinds of legends, . . .stories and fantasies.’’ Equally important to Willard was the poetry she memorized as an undergraduate. ‘‘All those passages I learned are part of me, too.’’ In 1963 she received her Ph.D. in modern literature from the University of Michigan. For years, Willard has lectured in English at Vassar College and taught at the summer Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences. Between 1974 and 1990, Willard wrote 22 children’s books. She says about writing for children: ‘‘I’ve always thought that questions are more interesting than answers,’’ and she believes the most important question a children’s author can ask is ‘‘What if?’’ Willard often uses a storyteller’s voice while weaving a tapestry of fantasy, myth, legend, dreams, folk and fairy tales with her words. To this she adds mystical and magical elements, augmenting her own rich imagination. Two adult works also reflect her ability to make the ordinary extraordinary: a novel, Things Invisible to See (1984), and a book of poetry, Household Tales of Moon and Water (1982). The recipient of numerous awards, in 1982 Willard became the first author ever to receive the Newbery award for poetry, given for A Visit to William Blake’s Inn: Poems for Innocent and Experienced Travelers (1981), a whimsical fantasy inspired by Blake’s poetry to which she had been introduced at the age of seven. Willard was also the recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (1976). Although she has written fantasy novels, her forte in children’s literature is picture books. In two particularly enchanting early books, The Snow Rabbit (1975) and Shoes Without Leather (1976), the child’s imagination invites magic to happen. Examples of Willard’s sharing her own optimism, joy, and sense of the absurd are evidenced in A Visit to William Blake’s Inn and The Voyage of the Ludgate Hill: Travel with Robert Louis Stevenson (1987). Nothing is impossible or improbable in her stories. Because she wants children to experience story, she rewrote East of the Sun and West of the Moon (1989) as a play, placing the characters and action in the present, thereby adding unexpected touches of comedy. In a later picture book, The High Rise Glorious Skittle Skat Roarious Sky Pie Angel Food Cake (1990, reprinted 1996), Willard answers the age-old dilemma—what to get a mother for her birthday—with poignancy and magic. By adding ‘‘What if?’’ she stretches the solution to the limitless heights of heavenly intervention. OTHER WORKS: In His Country: Poems (1966). Skin of Grace (1967). A New Herball: Poems (1968). The Lively Anatomy of God: Stories (1968). Testimony of the Invisible Man: William Carlos Williams, Francis Ponge, Rainer Maria Rilke, Pablo Neruda (1970). Nineteen Masks for the Naked Poet: Poems (1971). Childhood of the Magician (1973). The Carpenter of the Sun: Poems (1974). The Merry History of a Christmas Pie: With a
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Delicious Description of a Christmas Soup (1974). Sailing to Cythera and Other Anatole Stories (1974). All on a May Morning (1975). The Well-Mannered Balloon (1976). Stranger’s Bread (1977). Simple Pictures Are Best (1977). The Highest Hit (1978). The Island of the Grass King: Further Adventures of Anatole (1979). Papa’s Panda (1979). The Marzipan Moon (1981). Uncle Terrible: More Adventures of Anatole (1982). Angel in the Parlor: Five Stories and Eight Essays (1983). The Nightgown of the Sullen Moon (1983). Night Story (1986). The Mountains of Quilt (1987, 1997). Firebrat (1988). Water Walker (1989). The Ballad of Biddy Early (1989). Pish, Posh, Said Hieronymas Bosch (1991). Beauty and the Beast (1992). A Starlit Somersault Downhill (1992). Sister Water (1993). The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1993). Telling Time: Angels, Ancestors, and Stories (1993). Bell Ringers of Kalamazoo (1993). Sister Water (1993). Simple Pictures are Best (1994). An Alphabet of Angels (1994). Among Angels (1995). Gutenberg’s Gift (1995). The Good-Night Blessing Book (1996). Guest (1997). Cracked Corn and Snow Ice Cream: A Family Almanac (1997). The Magic Cornfield (1997). The Tortilla Cat (1998). Raggedy Ann and the Christmas Thief (1999). Shadow Story (1999). Swimming Lessons (1999). The Tale I Told Sasha (1999). When There Was Trees: A Poem (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Datlow, E. and Windling, T. eds., This Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Ninth Annual Collection (1996). Pearlman, M., ed., Between Friends (1994). Reference works: CA (1980). CANR (1983). CLC (1977, 1986). CLR (1983). Dictionary of American Children’s Fiction, 1960-1984 (1986). DLB (1986). MTCW (1991). SATA (1983, 1985). Writer’s Directory (1984-86). Other references: Book World (May 1993). Horn Book (Aug. 1982). —SANDRA RAY
WILLIAMS, Catharine (Read) Arnold Born 31 December 1787, Providence, Rhode Island; died 11 October 1872, Providence, Rhode Island Daughter of Alfred and Amey Read Arnold; married Horatio N. Williams, 1824 (divorced); children: Amey Catharine Arnold Williams’ father was a sea captain. Because her mother died when she was a child, Williams was raised and educated by two religious aunts. She did not marry until her mid-thirties, after which she and her husband moved to western New York. Two years later, Williams returned to Providence with her infant daughter, Amey, and secured a divorce, although she continued to call herself ‘‘Mrs. Williams.’’ Williams opened a school, but soon abandoned teaching for health reasons. It was then that she turned to writing. Williams’ first book, Original Poems on Various Subjects (1828), sold by subscription, contains some poems that had been
published previously. Her next book, Religion at Home (1829), was quite successful and went through several editions. During the next two decades, Williams wrote histories, biographies, and fiction. About 1849 she moved to Brooklyn, New York, to care for an aged aunt. When her aunt died, she returned to Rhode Island, but never to writing. In theme and choice of subject, Williams always expressed patriotic, republican sentiments. Tales, National and Revolutionary (2 vols., 1830-35) and Biography of Revolutionary Heroes (1839) reflect her belief in American democracy and her desire to encourage good citizenship. In Williams’ opinion, both men and women need to know about and emulate the heroism of Americans in defense of liberty; both need to understand the political and judicial systems. She praises the virtues of patience, industry and self-control, not the display of wealth and aristocratic style, as the marks of a good citizen. Religion is also a major theme in her works. According to Williams, dignified and sincere religious expression, not showy religious fervor, was appropriate in the new nation. In Fall River (1833), for example, Williams argues that the religious display at camp meetings and revivals threatens people’s morality, health, and self-control; genuine religion, accordingly, is practiced at home and expressed in the heart. Good manners and useful accomplishments blossom from pure religious sentiment. There are admirable characters of both sexes in Williams’ works. In Religion at Home, Aristocracy; or, The Holbey Family (1832) and other works, ‘‘true women’’ and admirable men are intelligent, sincerely pious, and courageous; they have good natures and even tempers. The men are distinguished from the women principally by their responsibilities and occupations. Honor and admiration characterize men’s relationships with their wives; therefore, husbands frequently ask for their wives’ opinions on public matters. Williams is critical of aristocratic pretensions in both sexes, but evil doing is mostly a male trait. When a reader pointed out to Williams that her worst characters are male, she responded in the preface to the second volume of Tales, National and Revolutionary that she only told stories as they were told to her. Williams insists on the truth and high moral purpose of all her works. To prove that her stories are based on fact, she inserts written ‘‘proof’’ into the text, alluding to her personal acquaintance with the characters, explains where her information was gathered, or gives a historical account of the events behind her story. Sometimes this documentation becomes pedantic, as in The Neutral French (1841), but the attention Williams gives to historical truth is still impressive. To emphasize the moral of a story, Williams sometimes embellishes the facts, as she admits in Tales, National and Revolutionary, but she insists she never distorts them. Through her historical fiction, Williams warns her readers against errors in personal habits and governmental practices. Williams described her own life as quiet; she said she excluded herself from gaiety not only to have time to earn a living, but also out of a sense of propriety. Prefatory remarks in Religion at Home, Aristocracy; or, The Holbey Family and elsewhere indicate that Williams was somewhat self-conscious about being a
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woman writer on political, legal, and historical topics, yet she never hid the fact of her sex from her readers. In recognition of her talents in those areas, Williams was elected to several state historical societies. For contemporary readers, it is not Williams’ moralistic fiction but her histories that are most interesting. Fall River is a fascinating study of ministerial corruption, female textile workers, and legal abuses in the early republic. The Neutral French is a gold mine of carefully collected information on the Acadians. Tales, National and Revolutionary and Biography of Revolutionary Heroes contain much information about Americans in Revolutionary times. One can’t help but regret that this intelligent woman stopped publishing books some 25 years before her death. OTHER WORKS: Annals of the Aristocracy, Being a Series of Anecdotes of Some of the Principal Families of Rhode Island (1843-1845). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Rider, S. S., Biographical Memoirs of Three Rhode Island Authors (1880). Reference works: DAB. Other references:Providence Daily Journal (14 Oct. 1872). —SUSAN COULTRAP-MCQUIN
WILLIAMS, Fannie Barrier Born 12 February 1855, Brockport, New York; died 4 March 1944, Brockport, New York Daughter of Anthony J. and Harriet Prince Barrier; married S. Laing Williams, 1887 Born, raised, and educated in the small town of Brockport, near Rochester, New York, Fannie Barrier Williams first encountered racial prejudice when she began her teaching career among the freedmen ‘‘in one of the ex-slave States.’’ After graduating from the academic department of the Normal School at Brockport, she later attended the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston and the School of Fine Arts in Washington. She moved to Chicago after her marriage to a lawyer and spent most of her married life there. Williams was the only black woman allowed to give a major address before the World’s Congress of Representative Women at the World’s Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893. She was the first black member in the Chicago Women’s Club and an impelling force in the black women’s club movement. She was also instrumental in founding the interracial Provident Hospital in 1891 and the Frederick Douglass Center in 1905 and was the first woman—black or white—to be appointed to Chicago’s Library Board in 1924. For many years, Williams gave lectures throughout the country. A prolific essayist, she wrote primarily for the Voice of
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the Negro, but her articles also appeared in several other periodicals. Progress of a Race: or, The Remarkable Advancement of the American Negro (edited by J. W. Gibson and W. H. Crogman, 1902) features her long historical essay ‘‘Club Movement among Negro Women.’’ A pervasive concern evident in Williams’ speeches and essays is the vindication of the morals of black women, which had been attacked by some because of the high number of illegitimate black babies. In an article in Voice of the Negro (June 1905), she writes, ‘‘It is because of this tyranny of race prejudice that the colored girl is called upon to endure and overcome more difficulties than confront any other women in our country.’’ She maintains, in the essay in Progress of a Race, that equality will never come ‘‘until the present social stigma is removed from the home and the women of the race.’’ Williams was criticized by some blacks for her assertion in the 1893 speech in Chicago (printed in World’s Congress of Representative Women, edited by M. W. Sewall, 1893) that the ‘‘colored people are in no way responsible for the social equality movement.’’ Much of her later writing espouses a doctrine of assimilation. The tone of all her writing, while eloquent, is moderate rather than militant. While a large part of her writing is concerned with her advocacy of justice for blacks, particularly women, as a well-educated, genteel woman writing at the turn of the century, Williams also wrote articles reviewing books, discussing art, advocating travel, and exploring domestic matters. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Davis, E. L., Lifting as They Climb (1933). Flexner, E., Century of Struggle (1959). Lerner, G., Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (1972). Lowenberg, B. J., and R. Bogin, eds., Black Women in Nineteenth Century American Life (1976). Martin, C. E., The Story of Brockport, 1829-1929 (1929?). Mossell, Mrs. N. F., The Work of the Afro American Woman (1908). Spear, A., Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920 (1967). Reference works: NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Profiles of Negro Womanhood, 1619-1900 (1964). —MARILYN LAMPING
WILLIAMS, Sherley Anne Born 25 August 1944, Bakersfield, California; died 6 July 1999 Daughter of Jesse W. and Lelia Siler Williams; children: John Born in California to a sharecropping family, Sherley Anne Williams grew up picking cotton and fruit in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley alongside her parents. Overcoming the poverty of her childhood and the burden of being a single mother, Williams emerged as a well-known poet, novelist, and critic. As Lillie
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Howard notes, her skillful use of blues cadences ‘‘attests to her role as a tradition bearer and puts her firmly in that long line of artists that stretches all the way back to the beginnings of black folk culture.’’ A prolific voice and presence in African American literature and culture, Williams published poetry, novels, a historical drama, a stage show, numerous television programs, a screenplay (from her novel Dessa Rose, 1986), and numerous critical articles. In 1966 Williams received a B.A. in English from California State University at Fresno, having used her earnings from cotton and fruit picking to pay her way through college. She began writing short stories around 1966, ‘‘with the idea of being published, not just to slip away in a shoebox somewhere.’’ Williams’ first published story, ‘‘Tell Martha Not to Moan,’’ appeared in Massachusetts Review in 1967. It is her tribute to the women who ‘‘helped each other and me thru some very difficult years.’’ Williams continued her studies as a graduate student at Howard University. In 1972 she earned an M.A. degree from Brown University, where she was also teaching in the black studies program. Williams’ first book, Give Birth to Brightness: A Thematic Study in Neo-Black Literature, a critical text, appeared in 1972. Offering a thematic study of modern black (male) writers, the text articulates ‘‘a black aesthetic which grows from a shared racial memory and common future.’’ Williams’ first book of poetry, The Peacock Poems (1975) was nominated for a National Book Award and a Pulitzer in 1976. The central image for the book is expressed in ‘‘The Peacock Song’’: ‘‘They don’t like to see you with/yo tail draggin low so I try to hold mines up high.’’ The poems follow a blues motif, ‘‘fingering the jagged edges of a pain that is both hers and ours,’’ as Lillie Howard comments. Williams anticipates this pattern in her own poetry in her early Massachusetts Review essay, ‘‘The Blues Roots of Contemporary Poetry’’ (1977), and further explores the blues motif in her second book of poetry, Some One Sweet Angel Child (1982). Williams’ life in the projects and the years spent ‘‘following the crops’’ are charted in her ‘‘Iconography of Childhood’’ (the fourth section of the book), where she demonstrates her central belief that ‘‘our migrations are an archetype of those of the dispossessed.’’ In her work she wants ‘‘somehow to tell the story of how the dispossessed become possessed of their own history without losing sight, without forgetting the means or the nature of their journey.’’ Williams most notably demonstrates her attention to cultural memory and African American history in her critically acclaimed novel, Dessa Rose (1986, reprinted 1999), which fictionalizes and unites two historical incidents: a pregnant slave leads an uprising in 1829 and is sentenced to hang after the birth of her baby, and in 1830 a white woman, living on an isolated North Carolina farm, is reported to have sheltered runaway slaves. Williams amalgamates these stories and thus ‘‘buys a summer in the 19th century.’’ This text (which is a revision of an earlier story, ‘‘Meditations on History’’) received much attention and praise from literary critics interested in postmodern texts rewriting the narratives of slavery. Williams has been a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Ghana (1984), and taught at Brown and at Fresno State College
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before becoming professor of Afro-American literature at the University of California at San Diego. In 1987, Williams was chosen Distinguished Professor of the Year by the UC San Diego Alumni Association. She has been significantly influenced by the poetry of Langston Hughes, whose ‘‘black vernacular diction’’ encouraged her to write the ‘‘way black people talk.’’ She also notes her connection to other African American literary figures such as Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, and Toni Morrison, who ‘‘make a conscious effort to carry on the past of their ancestors in their writing.’’ Black feminist critic Michele Wallace, a close friend of Williams, writes that for Williams fiction is ‘‘a sieve through which the culture has passed in an interesting and idiosyncratic way.’’ Williams’ second novel, Working Cotton (1992) was a Caldecott winner and awarded the Coretta Scott King Book Award. Her play, Letters from a New England Negro was performed during the National Black Theatre Festival in 1991 and at the Chicago International Theatre Festival in 1992. Williams died of cancer on 6 July 1999. She was only 54 and in the prime of her writing and academic career. She left two unfinished novels, including a sequel to Dessa Rose, which is in its fourth printing and has been translated into German, Dutch and French.
OTHER WORKS: Contributor of poetry, fiction and critical work to several collections and anthologies, including: Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology (1990), Black Popular Culture (1992, 1998), Every Shut Eye Ain’t Asleep: An Anthology of Poetry by African Americans Since 1945 (1994), Centers of the Self: Stories by Black American Women from the 19th Century to the Present (1994), Richard Wright: A Collection of Critical Essays (1995). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Andres, P. M., Literacies of Resistance: Script and Voice in Five 20th Century Women’s Novels (dissertation, 1998). Beaulieu, E. A., Black Women Writers and the American Neo-Slave Narrative: Femininity Unfettered (1999). Butler, R., Contemporary African American Fiction: The Open Journey (1998). Davenport, D., Four Contemporary Black Women Poets: Lucille Clifton, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Sherley Anne Williams (dissertation, 1985). Henderson, C. E., The Body of Evidence: Reading the Scar as Text—Williams, Morrison, Baldwin, and Petry (dissertation, 1996). Jordan, S. M., ed., Broken Silences: Interviews with Black and White Women Writers (1993). McDowell, D., and A. Rampersand, eds., Slavery and the Literary Imagination (1989). Mitchell, A., Signifyin(g) Women: Visions and Revisions of Slavery in Octavia Butler, Sherley Anne Williams, and Toni Morrison (dissertation, 1995). Schiff, J. L., Rebellion into the Past: Sherley Anne Williams and the Quest for an Historical Voice (1993). Ward, K. L., From a Position of Strength: Black Women Writing in the Eighties (dissertation, 1996). Tate, C., ed., Black Women Writers at Work (1983). Wall, C., ed., Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women (1989). (1999). Reference works: African American Short Story, 1970-1990: A Collection of Critical Essays (1993). CANR (1988). DLB
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(1985). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Black American Literary Forum (Winter 1989). Callaloo (Summer 1989, Fall 1991). Feminist Studies (Summer 1990). Genders (Winter 1992). History and Memory in African-American Culture (1994). Massachusetts Review (Autumn 1977). PW. —LISA MARCUS, UPDATED BY SYDONIE BENET
WILLIS, Connie Born Constance Elaine Trimmer, 31 December 1945, Denver, Colorado Married Courtney Willis, 1967; children: Cordelia Connie Willis was born in Denver, Colorado. She earned a B.A. in English from the University of Northern Colorado and taught elementary school from 1967 to 1969, serving as a substitute teacher for some years thereafter. After temporary residence in other states, the Willises settled in Greeley, Colorado, in 1984. Her first story sale was ‘‘The Secret of Santa Titicaca’’ (1971) to Worlds of If, and her first novel, Water Witch, a collaboration with Cynthia Felice, appeared in 1982. Fire Watch (1985), her first short story collection, reveals Willis’ gift for narrating both tragedy and hilarious satire in a clear, intelligent voice. The story ‘‘Fire Watch’’ (1982), which won the two most prestigious awards in the field—the Hugo (given by the World Science Fiction Association) and the Nebula (bestowed by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America)—concerns a 21st-century history student sent back to London during the Blitz of World War II. Working with the volunteers who attempt to save St. Paul’s Cathedral from the Luftwaffe, he learns that history is not a matter of statistics but of living people, of human frailties and courage. In the Nebula-winning ‘‘A Letter from the Clearys’’ (1982), a teenager chafes against her family’s strict rules and obsession with agriculture. With her discovery of a lost letter from some old friends, her parents’ reaction and her own naive garrulity gradually enlighten the reader to the horrific reality of their society. Willis’ first solo novel, Lincoln’s Dreams (1987), won the John W. Campbell Memorial award for Best Science Fiction Novel. Jeff Johnston, a researcher for an author of historical novels, is steeped in Civil War minutiae when he meets Annie, a woman suffering terrible nightmares that, he realizes, are actually a tangle of Robert E. Lee’s memories. Falling in love with her, Jeff seeks to exorcise Annie’s dreams, but as they tour the Southern battlefields, Annie determines to ‘‘finish the dreams’’ and exorcise Lee’s guilt so he may literally rest in peace. With powerfully drawn characters and vivid descriptions of the horrors of war, Willis achieves an unforgettable drama of love, loyalty, and duty. Doomsday Book (1992), like the later To Say Nothing of the Dog, or, How We Found the Bishop’s Bird Stump at Last (1997),
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is set in the same universe as ‘‘Fire Watch.’’ In 2054 history student Kivrin visits medieval Oxford for her practicum, but because the time technician falls ill with an unknown virus, he accidentally sends her to 1384, the year of the Black Death. The story alternates between the two timelines, the characters in each fighting panic and plague. Willis identifies her themes as the psychological response to the end of the world, portraying religious faith, helplessness, and incredible heroism, ‘‘people who come and people who don’t come and promises that are made that can’t be kept and promises people will kill themselves in order to keep.’’ This popular novel, a New York Times Notable Book, earned both the Hugo and the Nebula awards. Impossible Things (1993) was Willis’ second collection. Beginning with another Hugo and Nebula winner, ‘‘The Last of the Winnebagos,’’ a novella about guilt, grief, and expiation in a near future where most animals have died out, the tales encompass all areas of the emotional spectrum. The Nebula-winning ‘‘Even the Queen’’ (1992) offers a witty commentary on how society might change were women allowed to avoid menstruation; in ‘‘Ado’’ (1988) political correctness forces English professors to bowdlerize Shakespeare to the point of meaninglessness; and in the heart-wrenching ‘‘Chance’’ (1986), an unhappy housewife wonders how her life might be today had she made a different decision 20 years earlier. The collection also showcases the screwball comedies ‘‘Spice Pogrom’’ (1986) and ‘‘At the Rialto’’ (1989), another Nebula winner. Despite the grim subject matter that infuses so much of her fiction, Willis is famous as a humorist. Remake (1994), like ‘‘Ado,’’ presents a future in which classic films are edited to remove any politically incorrect scenes, while two star-crossed lovers long for the days when movies told real stories with real actors. Uncharted Territory (1994), parodying science fiction clichés, suggests that space exploration will actually be bedeviled by stifling regulations and fussily bureaucratic aliens. Bellwether (1996) offers a screwball romance between a woman who studies fads and a chaos theorist who arrive at a cynical revelation of how human bellwethers start trends. To Say Nothing of the Dog, which won the 1999 Hugo Award, documents a time-traveler’s misadventures in a madcap tour of Victorian England. As Willis said in an interview, ‘‘The time is ripe for comedy. . .but no one has a sense of humor about anything. We really are Victorians now— it’s so distressing.’’ Elsewhere she added, ‘‘This [the 1990s] is a very serious and pretentious time. The battle cry of the special interest groups is ‘That’s not funny.’’’ Besides her talent for plotting and peopling screwball romances, Willis’ comedies reveal her anger against the ineffectual busybodies who attempt to run society. Reviewers praise her bitpart characters, annoyances all: scientists with all the answers, inept nurses, middle managers and conference organizers, control freaks, overbearing do-gooders, hypocrites and political-correctness zealots of all stripes. She takes comedy seriously, saying, ‘‘There are real things at stake, and real things that matter. . . .[F]or every Coventry Cathedral rebuilt, for every uplifting moment—at the center is the burning down of these things, and the loss of things.’’ Willis calls herself an optimist, though her narrative voice is that of a cheerful pessimist. Her settings are usually
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domestic rather than galaxy-spanning; her narrators frequently middle-aged women wondering what happened to their happilyever-afters and still seeking romance, or young people struggling to find love and preserve beauty while hampered by imbeciles. At the end of the 1990s, Connie Willis has won more Hugos and Nebulas for fiction than any other writer in the science fiction/ fantasy genre.
At the request of Eliakim Willis, after his wife’s death in 1767, 21 of Willis’ letters were collected and published in a memorial volume, Rachel’s Sepulchre. Materials about Ann Stockbridge and Sarah Page were added to the 1788 edition. This second edition was intended to provide a female audience with examples of women ‘‘who were an honour to their sex.’’ The editor offers the letters that ‘‘the ladies in other countries, by these examples [may] be fir’d with a laudable ambition to excel.’’
OTHER WORKS: Daisy, in the Sun (1991). Futures Imperfect (1996). With Cynthia Felice: Light Raid (1989). Promised Land (1997).
The published letters are generally melancholic, recording grief, sickness, family deaths, and spiritual struggle. They are apparently only a limited selection from among the papers she left at her death. The editor’s selection criteria are not specified, so the collection may reveal more about the editor than Willis.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Burchette, B., ‘‘Subversive Housewife: An Interview with Connie Willis,’’ in Forbidden Lines 9 (1992). ‘‘Connie Willis: Talking Back to Shakespeare,’’ in Locus 29 (July 1992). ‘‘Connie Willis: Serious Funny Business,’’ in Locus 38 (Jan. 1997). Doyle, C., ‘‘Lincoln’s Dreams,’’ in Magill’s Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature (1996). Harrington, M., ‘‘Prize Writer,’’ in Denver Post (23 Jan. 1994). Kincaid, P., ‘‘Willis, Connie,’’ in St. James Guide to Fantasy Writers (1995). Mulcahy, Kevin P., ‘‘Doomsday Book,’’ in Magill’s Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature (1996). Roberts, R., ‘‘Uncharted Territory,’’ in Magill’s Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature (1996). Schafer, W. K., ‘‘Willis, Connie,’’ in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997). Reference works: CA 114 (1985). The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993). —FIONA KELLEGHAN
WILLIS, Lydia Fish Born April 1709, Duxborough, Massachusetts; died 25 January 1767, Malden, Massachusetts Daughter of Thomas Fish; married Eliakim Willis, circa 1738; children: three, all of whom died in infancy Lydia Fish Willis was the only daughter among five children. She developed an ‘‘early taste for reading’’ which led her, according to the anonymous editor who collected some of her letters, to an acquaintance with ‘‘authors, polite as well as religious.’’ An unnamed friend reported that ‘‘she excelled most of her sex in a relish for works of genius. . . .’’ Unidentified family difficulties in 1734 led Willis to seek employment outside her home, despite recurring health problems. She confided to her brother in a letter dated 13 September 1734 that she could not tell him ‘‘how shocking it is to think of leaving home, to go I know not where!’’ It is not clear from her extant letters whether she actually found employment. Willis’ father died in 1736, her mother in 1737. She married a minister, perhaps the following year, and lived in Dartmouth, New Hampshire, and later in Malden, Massachusetts, where her husband was called to parishes. She bore three children, a daughter who died in infancy and twin sons who were stillborn.
Willis excuses her occasionally self-pitying tone by writing to her brother that ‘‘it is not in my power to assume a language foreign to my heart, or to dissemble. . .my griefs so handsomely, as I could wish, if thereby I might be entertaining.’’ The letters portray an unhappy woman who struggled with depression, a woman who felt that her life was ‘‘made up with blots and blurts.’’ The source of her melancholy was unclear, even to Willis: ‘‘Don’t think it an act of the will, but attribute it to the weak government of my passions.—If I murmur, it is at I don’t know what.’’ BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cowell, P., Women Poets in Pre-Revolutionary America, 1650-1775 (1981). —PATTIE COWELL
WILLOUGHBY, Florence Barrett Born 1900; died 29 July 1959, Berkeley, California Wrote under: Barrett Willoughby Daughter of Martin Barrett; married Robert Prosser Florence Barrett Willoughby, daughter of a riverboat captain, was, as she comments in Gentlemen Unafraid (1928), literally raised on Alaska’s waters. Some of her earliest Alaskan experiences are recounted in her first novel, Where the Sun Swings North (1922). She grew to love Alaska, its land, history, and people— and all but one of her novels have an Alaska setting. Many of her male protagonists are, like her father, riverboat captains, and all of her female protagonists share her love of the state. In addition to her novels, she wrote short stories, travel books, and character sketches of significant Alaskan pioneers. Where the Sun Swings North centers on two sisters, Jean and Ellen. After giving Ellen’s husband false information about the presence of gold on a deserted island, the evil and lecherous ‘‘White Chief’’ of Katleen, Paul Kilbuck, abandons them there, not returning with the winter provisions he had promised. He gives Ellen, whom he wishes to seduce, a homing pigeon, which she is to release when she decides she wants him. Meanwhile, his drunken bookkeeper, Gregg Harlan, attempts to warn the family but becomes a castaway too. Thanks to foraging, they all survive
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the winter; Harlan ‘‘dries out’’ and falls in love with Jean; Jean discovers a rich vein of gold, and Kilbuck gets his just desserts.
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As in this first novel, all her others feature romance and outdoor adventure. Rocking Moon (1925) is about the independent, strong-minded Sasha Larianoff—who, to keep her Russian Orthodox father out of debt, sets up a successful fox farm on the island of Rocking Moon—and the men who are interested in her. The Trail Eater (1929) is loosely based on the adventures of Scotty Allen, which Willoughby had already described the year before in Gentlemen Unafraid. It traces Kerry Wayne’s eventful and successful bid to win the All-Alaska Sweepstakes, a 400-mile dogsled race from Nome to the Arctic Sea and back, and, incidentally, the heart of Barbee Neilan, spunky ex-fiancée of his major opponent.
Born circa 1828, Milford, New Hampshire; died circa 1865 Wrote under: ‘‘Our Nig’’ (novel copyrighted by Mrs. H. E. Wilson) Daughter of Charles Adams (probably, though not proven); married Thomas Wilson, 1851; children: George M. Wilson
The title of Spawn of the North (1932) refers to both salmon and first generation Alaskans. Dian Turlon is the daughter of a canning king and has returned to Alaska for a nostalgic vacation before her marriage to a ‘‘Southerner.’’ After many adventures and not much of a vacation, she discovers the vigorous North is preferable to the materialistic South and that she has opportunities in Alaska for independence, adventure, and accomplishment that she could never have ‘‘Outside.’’ Sondra O’Moore (1939) alternates between the adventurous seafaring days of Sondra’s grandfather, Dynamite Danny, and contemporary Alaska. One of Sondra’s suitors, Jean, tries to warn her that the other is illicitly involved with Japanese imperialists. Sondra is kidnapped, Jean rescues her, and all the protagonists are reconciled. Willoughby writes Alaska potboilers bubbling with romance (at least three potential lovers per novel) and fast-paced adventure (usually on the high seas). She also celebrates Alaska—the land, the lifestyle, the traditions—so much so that all of her Alaskaborn protagonists are fiercely loyal to the land and all of her Outside protagonists succumb to Alaska’s lure. Most interesting in Willoughby’s work are her portraits of almost mythic Alaskan women. All of her heroines are physically dauntless; they sail boats, ride horses, and drive dogsleds superbly. They are intensely interested in the work of Alaska, whether it be fishing or mining, and occasionally run their own businesses (Rocking Moon) or take over their father’s (Spawn of the North). And they always marry the man who possesses the same physical attributes and interests. Willoughby has created the ideal ‘‘Daughter of Alaska’’—independent, self-sufficient, intelligent, and devoted to her homeland. OTHER WORKS: Sitka, Portal to Romance (1930). Sitka: To Know Alaska One Must First Know Sitka (1930). Alaskans All (1933). River House (1936). Alaska Holiday (1940). The Golden Totem (1945). Pioneer of Alaska Skies: The Story of Ben Eielson (with E. W. Chandler, 1959). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Boston Transcript (24 June 1925). NYT (7 July 1929, 1 May 1932, 29 March 1936, 11 March 1945, 31 July 1959). —CYNTHIA L. WALKER
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Harriet E. Adams Wilson was the first African American woman to publish a novel in the U.S. and one of the first two black women in the world to publish a novel, Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story White House, North, Showing That Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There. The work appeared on 5 September 1859, printed for Wilson by George C. Rang & Avery, Boston. The novel chronicles the hard life of a young woman named Frado, an indentured servant in an antebellum Northern household. Our Nig is characterized by generic tension. At once autobiographical and fictional, it builds on two literary forms prevalent in Wilson’s day: the slave narrative (a black male genre) and the sentimental novel (a white female genre). Wilson thus innovated a new literary form. In the view of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Wilson not only provided ‘‘a ‘missing link’. . .between the sustained and well-developed tradition of black autobiography and the slow emergence of a distinctive black voice in fiction,’’ she ‘‘created the black woman’s novel.’’ The details of Wilson’s life remain sketchy. It is believed she was born in Milford, New Hampshire in 1827 or 1828, although some sources give a date of 1808. In 1850 she moved to Massachusetts where she worked as a ‘‘straw-sewer’’ and servant and met Thomas Wilson, whom she married in 1851. He deserted her soon thereafter, leaving her to bear and support their son alone. Perhaps she received an education like that of her at least semiautobiographical character Frado: nine months of elementary schooling over three years. Wilson fought illness and poverty all her life, and wrote Our Nig at least in part to remedy her precarious situation. Her preface explains: ‘‘Deserted by kindred, disabled by failing health, I am forced to some experiment which shall aid me in maintaining myself and child without extinguishing this feeble life.’’ Wilson’s son died six months after Our Nig was published. Details of Wilson’s death are unknown. Our Nig vanished from view for more than a century after its publication, perhaps because of its unflinching portrait of Northern racism and its rendering of a marriage between a white woman and a black man. Since its rediscovery by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and its republication in 1983, the text has been of special interest to scholars of African American autobiography and literature by African American women. Their work has focused on Wilson’s expansion of the representation of black women beyond the conventions of the slave narrative and the sentimental novel and her novel’s revelation of the impact of race, class, and gender on black women and their self-representations. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Andrews, W. L., To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865 (1988). Bell, B. W., The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (1987).
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Gates, H. L. Jr., ed., Reading Black, Reading Feminist (1900). Jackson, B., A History of Afro-American Literature (1989). Jacobs, H. A., Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written By Herself (1987). Pryse, M. and H. J. Spillers, eds., Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition (1985). Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the ‘‘Racial’’ Self (1989). Wall, C. A., ed., Changing Our Own Words (1989). Reference works: DLB (1986). FC (1990). Other reference: American Quarterly (1991). —ELLEN WOLFF
WINDLE, Mary Jane Born 6 February 1825, Wilmington, Delaware; died death date unknown Born into a ‘‘large family circle,’’ Mary Jane Windle was left fatherless at an early age and was supported by her mother. ‘‘A martyr to ill health’’ most of her life, she never married but led an active social life and had a large circle of male and female friends. This social life was crucial to her career as a society reporter and gossip columnist. Her four major books are all collections of previously published stories and articles. As a writer of historical fiction, Windle is irritating and boring. ‘‘Grace Bartlett, an American Tradition,’’ in the Life at White Sulphur Springs, or Pictures of a Pleasant Summer (1857) collection, is the overwrought tale of a young boy, Frank Winthrop, who is kidnapped from his Puritan home by Native Americans, raised by a British general, and given the mission of inciting Native American attacks on American villages near the Canadian border. Sent by his adoptive father to spy on his own village, he falls in love with Grace, a childhood playmate, but remains true to his dastardly task and betrays the town to his stepfather’s Native American henchmen. Grace is one of the few survivors. By the end of the book, Grace and Frank, who has renounced spying, are happily married and surrounded by children. Since the tale is set in colonial days, it makes no sense whatsoever for a British general to be under orders to destroy his fellow subjects. Windle never clarifies this point, however. She also does not say how Grace brought herself to forgive Frank for aiding in the slaughter of all her kin and neighbors. Windle’s tales are short on logic and historical accuracy and long on swoons, brain fevers, and elision of time. These devices make explanations unnecessary, by Windle’s standards. Unlike her fiction, Windle’s social sketches are crisp, witty, and interesting. Life at White Sulphur Springs contains a sprightly collection of gossip columns dealing with the parties, fashions, and flirtations at a summer resort for Washington’s elite. Life in Washington and Life Here and There (1859), too, deals largely with presidential levees, state dinners, and fancy-dress balls. Interspersed with these gossip columns, however, are some shrewd articles about congressional proceedings just before Lincoln’s election. An admirer of Henry Clay, Windle supports the Missouri
Compromise, Stephen Douglas’ candidacy, states’ rights, and slavery. She attacks several Southern congressmen for their ‘‘disunion sentiments’’ but praises their attacks on abolitionism. In Windle’s sketches, Southern delegates, cabinet members, and judges are all uniformly handsome, learned, and eloquent; Northerners are all cold, haughty, and wrongheaded. Southern women, of course, are prettier, more elegant, and more sweet-tempered. A brief trip to New York convinces Windle that slaves fare better than Northern servants and love their masters more. She displays her biases with innocence, and her staunch faith in a way of life so soon to be destroyed is moving. Contemporary critics praised Windle for her ‘‘fascinating descriptive powers’’ and her ‘‘refined and ladylike prose.’’ By modern standards, her fictional style is overheated, gushing, and coy. Her journalism, however, stands the test of time well. Windle’s sketches of Washington society and congressional activity in the two years preceding the Civil War are particularly fascinating to read. OTHER WORKS: Truth and Fancy (1850). Legend of the Waldenses, and Other Tales (1852). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Women of the South Distinguished in Literature (1861). Female Prose Writers of America (1857). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —ZOHARA BOYD
WINNEMUCCA, Sarah Born circa 1844, Humboldt Sink, Nevada; died 16 October 1891, Monida, Montana Daughter of Old Chief Winnemucca II and Tuboitonie; married an unidentified Native American; Edward Bartlett, 1871; Joseph Satwaller, 1878; Lewis Hopkins, 1881 Known as the ‘‘Princess of the Paiutes’’ by whites and as ‘‘Mother’’ by the Paiutes, Sarah Winnemucca served as interpreter, chronicler, and liaison for the Paiutes during their last days of freedom and their first decades of reservation life. Winnemucca’s Paiute name, Thocmetony, means Shell Flower and she later took the name of her fourth and last husband, Hopkins. She is usually known today as Sarah Winnemucca. Her life and the lives of all Paiutes were shaped by the invasion of the white settlers, who, in her words, arrived ‘‘like a roaring lion.’’ Before the settlers’ arrival, Paiutes ranged over what is now the lands of northwestern Nevada, northern California and into Oregon; afterwards, they were kept chiefly on small reservations, including one surrounding Pyramid Lake, Nevada. Winnemucca, however, lived a life caught between whites and Paiutes. As a girl, she lived with and worked for several white
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families. From them, she learned to read and write. She further educated herself on her own. In her own time, Winnemucca was nationally known as a spokesperson for the Paiutes. She spent her life in a quest for a peaceful resolution to the clash between Paiute residents of the land and encroaching whites. She served as an interpreter, scout, and mediator. She made many heroic efforts for her people, at one time staging a daring midnight rescue of Paiutes who were being held prisoner by enemy Bannock tribe. Most of her efforts were through negotiations or appeals to the American public and its politicians. One of those first efforts was a stage production depicting Paiute life that she performed with her father and sister; they presented it in San Francisco with a dual hope. They hoped to raise money for the Paiutes, and also to educate the whites about the plight of the Paiute people. The performances sold out, but public response was mixed, some of it condescending. Only a few responded as Winnemucca had hoped, with concern for the Paiute people. But she didn’t give up her appeals to the white population. Through the years, she lectured many times both in San Francisco and on the East Coast and is reputed to have been an effective and impassioned speaker. Winnemucca believed she could enlist the help of white citizens by revealing what was being done to the Native Americans: encroaching on their land; stealing food, clothing, and supplies meant for Native Americans confined on reservations; murdering Paiute people. Throughout her life, she attempted to communicate these crimes and to win redress and restitution. Winnemucca is best known today for her one published book, Life Among the Piutes [sic]: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883, reprinted 1994). It was edited by Mrs. Horace [Mary] Mann, who, along with her sister Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, became a patron to Winnemucca after hearing one of her lectures. A year earlier, Winnemucca had also published an article, ‘‘The Pah-Utes,’’ about Paiute ethnography for a periodical called the Californian. Controversy surrounded Winnemucca’s life. Some accused her of self-aggrandizement; some were disapproving of her divorces. As a teen, she was married to a Paiute man, who was abusive; she quickly left him. Later she was unhappily married less than a year to Lieutenant Edward Bartlett, a heavy drinker. In 1878, she was married for a short time to a man named Joseph Satwaller. In December 1881, she married Lieutenant Lewis H. Hopkins who is described by biographer Gae Whitney Canfield as ‘‘a bit of a dandy’’ and a gambler. He died of tuberculosis in 1887. Her divorces and her life as a single woman were considered scandalous in her day. Reports also surfaced of Winnemucca’s involvement in the occasional street brawl or other ‘‘unladylike’’ behavior. She established a reputation as a woman quick with a knife for any threats to her person, making it known she was able and willing to defend herself. Undoubtedly, she lived a colorful, adventurous life—too rich to be acceptable in her era. Still, even many of her contemporaries were able to completely discount the ‘‘scandals,’’ and see her as a dedicated leader and defender of her people.
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In her last years, Winnemucca spent any money she raised, along with her time and her talents, to educating the Paiutes. She had come to believe that education was their only route out of absolute dependence on the government. She established schools for Paiute children, keeping them open as long as her money held out, which was about four years. Soon afterward, at approximately age 48, she died of tuberculosis. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Canfield, G. W., Sarah Winnemuca of the Northern Paiutes (1983). Gehm, K., S. W., Sarah Winnemuca: Most Extraordinary Woman of the Paiute Nation (1975). Liberty, M., ed., American Indian Intellectuals (1978). Peabody, E., Sarah Winnemucca’s Practical Solution of the Indian Problem (1886). Ruoff, A. L. B., American Indian Literatures: An Introduction, Bibliographic Review, and Selected Bibliography (1990). Turner, K. C., Red Men Calling on the Great White Father (1951). Reference works: NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: American West (Nov. 1975). Nevada Historical Society Quarterly (Winter 1971). Oregon Historical Quarterly (June 1952). —JUDITH HARLAN
WINSLOW, Anna Green Born 29 November 1759, Nova Scotia, Canada; died 19 July 1780, Hingham, Massachusetts Daughter of Joshua and Anna Green Winslow Anna Green Winslow’s father was commissary-general of the British forces in Nova Scotia. In 1770 she was sent to a finishing school in Boston, where she lived with her aunt and uncle, Sarah and John Deming. During her separation from her family, she kept a diary sporadically from November 1771 to May 1773. Her aunt apparently encouraged the effort as a penmanship exercise, but its chief function was to provide a running letter to her parents. Much of the diary is a minute description of Winslow’s daily routine. She summarizes sermons, details current fashions, tells jokes, and keeps her parents posted on family affairs. She mentions her fun at ‘‘dansing; danceing I mean,’’ and asks to be allowed to dress in Boston styles: ‘‘I hope aunt wont let me wear the black hatt with the red Dominie—for the people will ask me what I have got to sell as I go along street if I do, or, how the folk at New guinie do? Dear mamma, you don’t know the fation here—I beg to look like other folk.’’ Winslow even admits to an occasional ‘‘egregious fit of laughterre’’ that caused her aunt to label her ‘‘whimsical.’’ But Boston life was not all fashion and frivolity; Winslow’s ‘‘laughterre ’’ was balanced by repeated descriptions of her industry at sewing, spinning, reading, and writing. The entry for 22 February 1772 is typical: ‘‘I have spun 30 knots of linning yarn, and (partly) new footed a pair of stockings for Lucinda, read
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a part of the pilgrim’s progress, coppied part of my text journal. . .play’d some, tuck’d a great deal. . .laugh’d enough.’’ Although most of Winslow’s diary is preoccupied by such matters of social and domestic routine, the politics of pre-Revolutionary Boston occasionally attracted her attention. She notes, for example, that ‘‘Col[onel] Gridley. . .taught [her] the difference between [Whigs and Tories],’’ and she added some months later that the militia trained on Boston Common with drills that were ‘‘very prettyly perform’d.’’ In all these descriptions of the world around her, Winslow reveals herself as well. References to her homesickness remind us that Winslow was, in 1771, a girl of twelve who wished desperately to please her parents. As she candidly remarked on 17 November 1771, ‘‘I think I have been writing my own Praises this morning.’’ Her homesickness may have been exacerbated by her concern at her father’s neglect. The entry for 30 December 1771, for example, shows Winslow attempting to make light of a letter from her father to the Demings: ‘‘I am told my Papa has not mention’d me in this Letter. Out of sight, out of mind.’’ Winslow was reunited with her family in 1773 when Joshua Winslow moved them to Marshfield, Massachusetts. In 1775 he was exiled as a Tory; his family, including Winslow, remained behind. Before the end of the Revolution, Winslow died of tuberculosis in Hingham, Massachusetts. Despite her early death, her childhood diary remains an appealing document in the social history of colonial Boston. OTHER WORKS: Diary of Anna Green Winslow, A Boston School Girl of 1771 (edited by A. M. Earle 1894). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cowell, P., Women Poets in Pre-Revolutionary America, 1650-1775 (1981). Forbes, H., ed., New England Diaries, 1602-1800 (1923). —PATTIE COWELL
WINSLOW, Helen M(aria) Born 13 April 1851, Westfield, Vermont; died 27 March 1938 Also wrote under: Aunt Philury Daughter of Don A. and Mary Newton Winslow Educated at the Westfield Vermont Academy, the Vermont Normal School, and the New England Conservatory of Music, Helen M. Winslow began her literary career writing pastoral poems and short fiction for such children’s periodicals as Youth’s Companion, Wide Awake, and Cottage Hearth. Although she continued to write poetry and children’s fiction sporadically throughout her life, she is best remembered not for these ‘‘Aunt Philury Papers’’ but for her newspaper and club work Early in Winslow’s career as a journalist, after the death of her parents, she lived in the Boston area with her three sisters.
During the 1880s, she wrote for numerous Boston papers, including the Beacon, Transcript, Advisor, and the Saturday Evening Gazette. Her first novel, A Bohemian Chapter (1886), the story of a struggling woman artist, was serialized in the Beacon. Her journalistic experiences led her to help form the New England Woman’s Press Association (which she served as first treasurer) and the Boston Author’s Club (which she served as secretary); she was also vice president of the Women’s Press League. Winslow’s most sustained activity resulted from her involvement with the General Federation of Woman’s Clubs. In the early 1890s, she was assistant editor of the Woman’s Cycle, the federation’s first official journal, and editor and publisher of its second journal, the Club Woman. She also edited the Delineator’s ‘‘Woman’s Club’’ department for 13 years and was founder and editor of the ‘‘Woman’s Club’’ column in the Transcript. From 1898 through 1930, Winslow annually published the official Woman’s Club Register. In addition to her direct affiliation with the club movement and its many publications, Winslow wrote numerous articles celebrating club women and their work in journals such as the Arena, the Critic, and the Atlantic Monthly. The most significant of these articles was her extensive history of American woman’s clubs, ‘‘The Story of the Woman’s Club Movement’’ (New England Magazine, June and October 1908). Among the more interesting of Winslow’s generally forgotten novels is Salome Shepard, Reformer (1893), an indictment of industrial working conditions with suggestions for reform. Salome, a young society woman, awakens to a sense of social responsibility after discovering the unsafe working and intolerable living conditions in the mills she has inherited from her father. Almost single-handedly, Salome initiates a series of reforms, including a model dormitory for the women workers, a social hall for the families of workers, and profit sharing. Winslow partly duplicates this plot in The President of Quex (1906). In this novel, written in response to Agnes Surbridge’s strident denunciation of club women in ‘‘The Evolution of a Club Woman—A Story of Ambition Realized’’ (Delineator, 1904), Winslow’s heroine, the president of a woman’s club concerned with municipal reform, becomes aware of abusive child labor conditions in her factories. Again, the women, this time through their club work, initiate and effect the necessary reforms, with no sacrifice to their home lives. A Woman for Mayor (1909) is Winslow’s most effective dramatization of the political sensibilities and capabilities of middle-class women. Written in support of the ‘‘municipal-housekeeping’’ concept of social reform, moderate women’s rights, and the Progressive-era concept of expanded social services in local government, the novel relates the story of a young woman who is elected mayor on a platform dedicated to the eradication of political graft and corruption. For Gertrude Van Deusen, Winslow’s heroine, the demands of public and domestic life are not only complementary but mutually reinforcing. It is difficult to tell whether she will be a good wife because she was a good mayor or was a good mayor because she was well versed in the skills of domestic efficiency.
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Despite both her own achievements and those of her many heroines, Winslow showed a lifelong ambivalence about the public role of women. In each of her novels, the heroine, after ably demonstrating her superiority, retires willingly to marriage and an essentially domestic orientation. In Spinster Farm (1908), for example, Winslow chronicles the experiences of two women who create a productive, independent life for themselves by renovating and living on an abandoned farm. Both women articulate their preference for self-sufficient spinsterhood throughout the novel, only to marry in the final pages. In each novel, the heroine claims that her marriage will not end her public activism, although her primary focus will necessarily be on her home life. In no novel, however, does Winslow present her heroine after marriage. It is unclear whether this seeming ambivalence results from Winslow’s desire to defend club women and meet the demands of a literary public in search of the happy ending or from an uncertainty about her own lifestyle—as her article ‘‘Confessions of a Newspaperwoman’’ (Atlantic, February 1905) might suggest. Whatever the reason, Winslow’s fiction provides useful material for any reader interested in the ongoing debate about the public and private roles of women. OTHER WORKS: Mexico Picturesque (with M. R. Wright, 1897). Occupations for Women (with F. Willard, 1898). Concerning Cats (1900). Concerning Polly (1902). Little Journeys in Literature (1902). Literary Boston of Today (1903). Confessions of a Club Woman (1904). The Woman of Tomorrow (1905). The Pleasuring of Susan Smith (1908). The Road to a Loving Heart (1926). Keeping Young Gracefully (1928). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Blair, K., The Clubwoman as Feminist: The Woman’s Culture Club Movement in the United States, 1868-1914 (Ph.D. dissertation, State University of New York at Buffalo, 1976). Blake, F., The Strike in the American Novel (1972). Hill, V. L., Strategy and Breadth: The Socialist-Feminist in American Fiction (dissertation, 1979). Taylor, W., The Economic Novel in America (1942). Reference works: AW (1939). NCAB (1927). Other references: Atlantic (Dec. 1894). Godey’s (Nov. 1893). Independent (26 Nov. 1893). Literary World (17 June 1893). Picayune (7 May 1893). —VICKI LYNN HAMBLEN
WINSLOW, Ola Elizabeth Born 1885, Grant City, Missouri; died 27 September 1977, Damariscotta, Maine Daughter of William D. and Hattie Colby Winslow Ola Elizabeth Winslow could trace her ancestry back to the Mayflower. Although born in the Midwest, she grew up
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in California, where she attended Stanford University (B.A. 1906, M.A. 1914). In 1922 she received a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. From 1909 to 1961 she taught English at several colleges, on both coasts. She was professor of English at Wellesley College (1944-50) and instructor at the Radcliffe Seminars (1950-61). Winslow was fond of New England, and after her retirement spent her winters in Boston, doing research in the Boston Atheneum Library. In the summers, she lived in Sheepscott, Maine, in an old farmhouse she had restored. Here she enjoyed gardening and observing wildlife and did much of her writing. Her biography of Jonathan Edwards won the Pulitzer Prize in 1941, acclaimed a masterpiece by one critic after another. One wrote, ‘‘This is by far the most complete and scholarly account of Edwards’s career that has been written.’’ Winslow followed the Edwards biography with Meetinghouse Hill, 1630-1783 (1952), a description of religious life in colonial New England. It is so readable and informative it has been hailed as a valuable addition to any collection of Americana. Then came a succession of seven books, each one notable for its careful scholarship, its exquisite craftsmanship, and its flashes of demure humor. Each has drawn praise from thoughtful critics. For instance, of Master Roger Williams (1957) one exclaimed that it is ‘‘certainly one of the most inspiring biographies about an American by an American written in recent years.’’ And her history of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, written in 1966 for young children, was described as delightful reading, ‘‘a graceful, well-integrated narrative bringing the past to life.’’ Although primarily occupied with American subjects, she produced a highly successful life of John Bunyan, the English mystic (1961). One reviewer proclaimed it the best biography of Bunyan in print. Her primary interest lay with religious subjects, but she also wrote a book about Samuel Sewall, the judge at the Salem witch trials, and one about the conquest of smallpox. As her writings testify, she developed over the years a serene tolerance for the follies and errors of mankind. It was the sort of tolerance that comes only after much study of history and much thoughtful observing of the contemporary world. OTHER WORKS: American Broadside Verse (1930). Jonathan Edwards, 1703-1758 (1940). John Bunyan (1961). Samuel Sewall of Boston (1964). Portsmouth: The Life of a Town (1966). Jonathan Edwards: Basic Writings (1966). John Eliot, Apostle to the Indians (1968). A Destroying Angel (1974). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Boston Globe (2 Oct. 1977). Chicago Sunday Tribune (27 Oct. 1957). Christian Century (4 May 1940). NYT (20 Oct. 1957). NYTBR (8 May 1966). Yale Review (Autumn 1940, Winter 1953). —ABIGAIL ANN HAMBLEN
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WINSLOW, Thyra Samter Born 15 March 1893, Fort Smith, Arkansas; died 3 December 1961, New York, New York Daughter of Louis and Sara Harris Samter; married John S. Winslow, 1920; Nelson W. Hyde, 1927 After leaving her smalltown Arkansas home, Thyra Samter Winslow made some attempt at gaining a formal education. She spent two years at the University of Missouri School of Journalism and later studied at the Cincinnati Art Academy and Columbia University. Her real education, however, began when she first went on stage as a chorus girl. The theatrical phase of Winslow’s career ended in 1915 when she was hired as a feature writer on the Chicago Tribune. By this time she was regularly selling short stories and articles. Between 1914 and 1923, her rueful stories of small-town life appeared almost monthly in H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan’s widely read magazine, the Smart Set. Later, in 1934, she contributed to the New Yorker a regular series of sketches, which was later published as a book, My Own, My Native Land, in 1935. She also wrote book and theater reviews and, from 1937 to 1940, screenplays for major Hollywood studios. Her hobby was cooking, and late in her career she produced three diet books, expounding her own highly unscientific method of weight control. Winslow’s writing style is marked by shrewd observation of the absurdities of social ritual. She was acutely aware of the snobbery of the small town and often focused with ironic understatement on the strategies of the social climber. Courtship was for her of particular interest, especially those cases in which an outwardly naive young girl lures an unwitting suitor into matrimony. She also wrote extensively about theater people and about the sophisticated denizens of New York. Show Business (1926) is a tale of an ambitious Missouri girl who finds glamour and financial reward in the chorus line. It is marred by a somewhat tedious plot as well as a lackluster central character. The novel’s chief strength lies in its realistic depiction of the backstage milieu, complete with gold-digging chorines adept at ‘‘grafting’’ a dinner or a diamond from an attentive male. Given this sordid but wholly credible environment, it seems especially unlikely that the heroine remains virginal until a nice young millionaire proposes marriage. This novel, her only one, reveals the difficulties Winslow met in moving beyond the limits of the short story; in fact, more than 200 short stories make up the bulk of her published work. Her concern with the three-generation household is exemplified in her best and most widely anthologized story, ‘‘A Cycle of Manhattan.’’ This long story, which first appeared in the Smart Set (1919) and was later published in the volume Picture Frames (1923), traces the rapid assimilation of a Jewish immigrant family into the American mainstream. As the Rosenheimers move from rags to riches, their lifestyle grows increasingly pretentious and their family name becomes progressively more Anglo-Saxon: ‘‘Abe Rosenheimer’’ of the story’s opening pages finally emerges as ‘‘A. Lincoln Ross.’’ Winslow’s sharp eye for social detail
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reinforces the sardonic humor behind the family’s ascent. She clearly sees what these people have sacrificed in terms of emotional well-being for the sake of a fashionable veneer. The story is typical of her, however, in that it lacks sympathy for its characters. She remains so scrupulously detached from her creations that she appears rather heartless. She is a master of the ironic twist, and it is the cleverness of her plotting far more than the sensitivity of her characterizations that made her popular. OTHER WORKS: People Round the Corner (1927). Blueberry Pie, and Other Stories (1932). Think Yourself Thin (1951). Winslow Weight Watcher (1953). The Sex without Sentiment (1954). Be Slim—Stay Slim (1955). BIBLIOGRAPHY: NR (11 Apr. 1923, 14 Apr. 1926, 17 Aug. 1927). Saturday Evening Post (11 Dec. 1943). SR (25 June 1927, 10 Aug. 1935). —BEVERLY GRAY BIENSTOCK
WINTER, Ella Born 17 March 1898, Melbourne, Australia; died 5 August 1980, London, England Daughter of Adolph and Frieda Lust Winter; married Lincoln Steffens, 1924 (divorced, died 1936); Donald Ogden Stewart, 1939; children: one son Ella Winter spent her early years in suburban Melbourne, where her German Jewish parents had settled in 1894 as baptized but nonbelieving Protestants eager to make a fresh start in a new land. The family moved to London in 1910. Winter graduated from the London School of Economics, where she associated with the Fabian Socialists. In the early 1920s, she was active in the Labor Party, spent a year at Cambridge, and translated two German books for English publication. Her first husband, the American radical journalist Lincoln Steffens, was fifty-eight when Winter married him shortly before their son was born. Although principled objections to formal marriage led later to a nominal divorce, the relationship continued unchanged until Steffens’s death in 1936. Winter combined a career in journalism with active support of leftist causes. Her trips to the Soviet Union provided material for two of her three books and many articles; she also wrote about California labor struggles in the 1930s and worked actively against fascism. Winter was one of the editors of two volumes of Steffens’ letters and a collection of his later writings. She published an autobiography in 1963. Winter and her second husband, film writer Donald Ogden Stewart, left America under pressure of the McCarthy-era blacklists in the early 1950s. She lived in London until her death in 1980. Red Virtue: Human Relationships in the New Russia (1933), Winter’s best received and most noteworthy book, examines the
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social transformations accompanying the political and economic upheavals that followed the Russian revolution. Winter is interested especially in the new ethics and sexual morality, the changing patterns of marriage and family life, and the new psychology employed by the communists in ‘‘designing a new man.’’ Winter’s enthusiastic portrayal of Soviet Russia in 1931 is as revealing of the psychology of the observer as of the observed—in the early 1930s, Winter and the rest of the American Left still thought that the Soviets were designing mankind’s utopian future. The book stands today as a kind of period piece, interesting as both portrait and product of its times. I Saw the Russian People (1945) is competently written human-interest journalism, combining social commentary with a travel account to give a disjointed but comprehensive picture of Russian life in 1944. While Winter notes changes in Soviet society and policy since the publication of Red Virtue, her main focus is on the suffering and bravery of the Russian people in turning back the Nazi invaders. When Winter wrote And Not to Yield: An Autobiography (1963), she could look back on a rich life filled with stimulating work, extensive travel, and close association with an extraordinary number of famous people. Unfortunately, although Winter’s autobiography provides a usefully comprehensive reminiscence, the book is awkwardly narrated and fails to bring to life most of the people it portrays. Winter achieved some stature in her time as a journalist, political activist, and interpreter of Soviet society, but her contributions are overshadowed by those of other leftist writers more gifted than she was. Although Winter sought a career and an identity independent of her well-known husbands, she is remembered more for her connection with Steffens and with the American radical left than for her own accomplishments. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Kaplan, J., Lincoln Steffens: A Biography (1974). Steffens, L., The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (1931). Steffens, L., The Letters of Lincoln Steffens (1938). Reference works: CB (1946, 1980). Other references: London Times (11 Aug. 1980). Nation (2 Nov. 1963). NYT (5 Aug. 1980). NYTBR (3 Nov. 1963). SR (30 Nov. 1963). —PEGGY STINSON
WINWAR, Frances Born Francesca Vinciguerra, 3 May 1900, Taormina, Sicily; died July 1985 Daughter of Domenico and Giovanna Sciglio Vinciguerra; married Bernard D. N. Grebanier, 1925; Richard W. Webb, 1943; F. D. Lazenby, 1949; children: one son Frances Winwar spent her early years playing in and around the Greek theater of her native Sicilian town, peering between symmetrical columns at Aetna and the Ionian Sea. Her fascination with other cultures and languages was inspired by the many
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foreign tourists who regularly visited the site, considered one of the most scenic in the world. Brought to America at the age of eight, she mastered English and demonstrated a talent for writing; soon she could claim a reputation as a book reviewer, translator, novelist, and biographer. As a concession to the editor of her first book, she agreed to anglicize her lengthy Italian name. She married three times and was the mother of one son. Four books, beginning with Poor Splendid Wings (1933), form a tetralogy covering some of the major figures and movements of 19th-c. English literature. The first gained Winwar wide recognition, winning the Atlantic Monthly prize for the best nonfiction book of the year. A biography of those young artists who, during Queen Victoria’s reign, started the movement known in England as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, it is imbued with sympathy and compassion for desperate souls who, despite strong wills and the superiority of talent and refined sensibilities, are frequently caught in the tragedy of circumstances beyond their control. The center of interest is Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his frustrating courtship and marriage to the idol of the brotherhood, Elizabeth Siddal. Assimilating a mass of material, Winwar retells familiar tales; but she does so with originality, for she represents the personal interrelationships of her subjects as they existed in a colorful age. The Romantic Rebels (1935) is a composite biography in which Winwar, taking liberties with the historical facts, depicts the temperamental natures of Shelley, Keats, and Byron. She concentrates her efforts more on relating the eccentricities of her subjects than their poetic achievements and describes relationships that never actually existed between the three poets. Nevertheless, the book is well documented, even offering some previously unpublished letters, discovered by Winwar herself in the Morgan Library. Farewell the Banner (1938) is a biography of William Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Exploring the close and curious relationship of the famous literary trio, Winwar analyzes their individual yet merging personalities, stopping short of Freudian interpretations. She demonstrates the self-destructive nature of Coleridge’s worship of Wordsworth, Dorothy’s attachment to both men, and the eventual rupture between Wordsworth and Coleridge. Oscar Wilde and the Yellow Nineties (1940) is a treatment both of an era, the decadent ‘‘yellow nineties,’’ and a notorious figure of the age, Oscar Wilde. Winwar gives a full account of Wilde by relating his work to the aesthetic movements of the time and viewing his personal degradation against the backdrop of Victorian morality. Handling her controversial subject with frankness and sufficient delicacy to avoid offence, Winwar presents a moving account of the tragedy of Wilde’s life. The Life of the Heart (1945), a biography of George Sand and her times, proved the most popular with the general reading public. In it, one of the most fascinating women writers in history is brought to life by a woman biographer who is able to convey the authenticity of the Sand’s many roles: wife, mother, mistress, novelist, political revolutionist. Since George Sand encountered many famous men in art and politics, Winwar created excellent
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individual portraits, including Chopin, Sainte-Beuve, Musset, Flaubert, and Louis Napoleon. The book’s outstanding feature is the accurate assessment of George Sand in relation to the social revolution of her age and ours. The Haunted Palace (1959) presents a romantic and psychologically facile portrait of Edgar Allen Poe. Carefully basing her flights of fancy upon a large body of published and unpublished material, Winwar reconstructs Poe’s life, especially his emotional involvements and his inability to face the realities of rejection, poverty, and physical and mental suffering. Neither an historian nor a literary critic, Winwar demonstrates a masterly handling of material as she heightens fact with imagination to recreate the lives of legendary figures from exciting epochs. OTHER WORKS: The Ardent Flame (1927). The Golden Round (1928). Pagan Interval (1929). Gallows Hill (1937). Puritan City (1938). American Giant: Walt Whitman and His Times (1941). The Sentimentalist (1943). The Saint and the Devil (1948). Immortal Lovers (1950). The Land of the Italian People (1951). Napoleon and the Battle of Waterloo (1953). The Eagle and the Rock (1953). The Last Love of Camille (1954). Queen Elizabeth and the Spanish Armada (1954). Wingless Victory (1956). JeanJacques Rousseau: Conscience of an Era (1961). Up from Caesar (1965). The papers of Frances Winwar are at the Brooklyn College Library, New York, and the Rutgers University Library in New Brunswick, New Jersey. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Peragallo, O., Italian-American Authors (1949). Other references: Atlantic (May 1940). Booklist (1 Mar. 1959). KR (15 Nov. 1958). NY (8 Oct. 1938, 23 Mar. 1940, 10 Nov. 1945). NYTBR (24 Sept. 1933, 17 Nov. 1935, 25 Sept. 1938, 24 Mar. 1940, 23 Dec. 1945, 18 Jan. 1959). SR (7 Oct. 1933). Time (25 Mar. 1940, 29 Oct. 1945, 26 Jan. 1959). —ANGELA BELLI
WOLF, Naomi Born 12 November 1962, San Francisco, California Daughter of Leonard and Deborah W. Wolf; married David Shipley; children: one daughter Often heralded as a voice of feminism’s third wave, Naomi Wolf came to international attention with the publication of her first book, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women (1990), published first in England, then in the U.S. It explores the beauty standards imposed on women and argues that these standards serve to maintain the status quo by continuously undermining women’s advances—making women answerable to beauty standards set by a male-centered culture.
The book grew out of Wolf’s work as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University. She was exploring ideas about beauty in the 19th and 20th centuries when she made the connection to her own generation—females growing up in the 1970s. Her generation, despite the changes wrought by the second wave of the women’s movement (the 1960s and 1970s), faced daunting beauty requirements; in response, many were succumbing to anorexia and bulimia. She further explored the idea that beauty standards circumscribe women in every occupation, subjecting them to required makeup, hair, and fashion routines that amount to a ‘‘third shift’’ of work. Successful women who want to continue up the corporate ladder know that looking young and vital is excruciatingly more important to them than to the male with whom they compete for promotions. The Beauty Myth was a bestseller and embraced by many in the women’s movement, though some questioned its depth of scholarship. It brought Wolf immediate fame and placed her in the celebrity circle of media attention. Her next book, Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How to Use It (1993), was more controversial. In part, it was a critique of second-wave feminism, accusing it of becoming too rigid in its views and calling on feminists to broaden their self-definition. Wolf presented the idea of ‘‘power feminism,’’ arguing that the time had come for women to embrace their political power (political parties were then courting women’s votes). She urged women, too, to eschew ‘‘victim feminism’’ and to acknowledge, celebrate, and build their own power in business and in all of life’s realms. Unfortunately, the term ‘‘victim feminism,’’ Wolf told Publishers Weekly in 1997, was picked up by antifeminists. It was used in ways that Wolf ‘‘couldn’t control,’’ she said. She had meant to ‘‘acknowledge that women are victimized.’’ Instead, the term has come to mean the equivalent of whining and has been used against established feminists ever since. Wolf, meanwhile, gained fame as a talk show guest and speaker, as well as author of numerous articles. Her third book, Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood (1997), again tackled views of women’s power, this time focusing on the sexuality and coming-of-age stories of young women. In it Wolf shares reminiscences of her own and those of old friends about their sexuality during the confusing teen years, and attempts to generalize from them. Critics varied in their response. A New York Times reviewer called Wolf ‘‘a sloppy thinker and incompetent writer.’’ But a New York Times Book Review writer called the book ‘‘a searing and thoroughly fascinating exploration of the complex wildlife of female sexuality and desire.’’ Some reviewers panned the book’s format. The Los Angeles Times reviewer called it ‘‘chaotic and frustrating,’’ adding that it ‘‘reads like several projects pasted together: a memoir, a polemic, a random assortment of readings on female sexuality.’’ Wolf has said her book is ‘‘not a polemic, but a set of confessions.’’ And she is aware her format is a combination of personal and theoretical information. Promiscuities’ conclusions were questioned by some reviewers. The Library Journal stated that ‘‘overgeneralization abounds as she [Wolf] attempts to apply the microcosmic events of this mostly white, middle-class, liberal milieu to a whole generation.’’ It also acknowledged that the book would likely be
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popular, and advised librarians to ‘‘purchase accordingly.’’ Good advice. Promiscuities became a New York Times bestseller. Wolf continues to be a popular speaker and writer. In the 1997 words of New York Times Book Review’s Courtney Weaver, ‘‘One of Ms. Wolf’s great strengths’’ is ‘‘blasting away myths.’’ In the year following Weaver’s review, Wolf was taking on many myths and closely held beliefs in a monthly opinion column in George magazine, exploring topics from patriotism, to the Virgin Mary, to the need for America to apologize for slavery. On the personal side, Wolf leads a busy life. She is married to political speechwriter David Shipley and has a daughter, born in 1995. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1994). CBY (1993). Who’s Who in America (1996). Other references: Commonweal (25 Feb 1994). George (1998 passim). LJ (15 June 1997). Los Angeles Times (27 July 1997). Nation (9 June 1997). NYT (10 June 1997). NYTBR (8 June 1997). PW (30 June 1997). Time (30 June 1997). —JUDITH HARLAN
WONG, Jade Snow Born 21 January 1922, San Francisco, California Daughter of Hong and Hing Kwai Tong Wong; married Woodrow Ong, 1950; children: Ming Tao (Mark Stuart), Lai Yee (Tyi Elizabeth), Lai Wai (Ellora Louise), Ming Choy (Lance Orion) Jade Snow Wong’s best-known work is Fifth Chinese Daughter. First published in 1950 and still in print in the 1990s, this third-person autobiography was one of the first books published by a Chinese American woman in the United States. Fifth Chinese Daughter traces Wong’s life in San Francisco through the mid-1940s. Like later works by Chinese American women as Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, Wong’s book documents a young woman’s search ‘‘for balance between the pull from two cultures.’’ The book poignantly recounts Wong’s search for a ‘‘middle way’’ between the conflicting demands of the traditional Chinese culture of her immigrant parents, with its values of obedience, respect, and order and its assumption of women’s inferiority, and the more individualistic American culture. It at once poses and tries to answer the question, ‘‘Am I of my father’s race or am I an American?’’ Wong’s search for a ‘‘middle way’’ is crystallized in her book’s form. She writes an autobiography, consistent with the American valuation of the individual and the individual’s right to speak her mind. But in keeping with Chinese custom, which deems extensive use of the first person immodest (and perhaps, for women, unthinkable), she writes in the third person. Women of today—those of Asian American descent and those who are not—continue to identify with Wong’s autobiographical work. They can relate to her straightforward and honest storytelling of growing up in one world and growing into another
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world upon reaching maturity. Many can even identify with having to prove themselves in the eyes of a male-oriented culture. Though Wong grows up in a very sheltered Chinese family, she must face many of the same challenges women face every day, even in today’s culture. Fifth Chinese Daughter also explores the intricacies of the Chinese culture Wong grows up in, including the emphasis on males in the family, Chinese cooking and traditions, and Chinese festivals. The story also paints a vivid picture of Chinatown in San Francisco during the World War II. Her experiences and choices move her further from the confines of Chinatown and expands her horizons into the rest of American society. Wong herself said Fifth Chinese Daughter is still in print and used by schools to create an understanding between the worlds of the Chinese and Americans. Wong continues to use third-person narration through much of No Chinese Stranger (1975), her less well-received sequel to Fifth Chinese Daughter. She uses the first person only after having narrated the death of her father. In addition to these autobiographical writings, Wong has written a column in the San Francisco Examiner and contributed to periodicals including Holiday and Horn Book. Educated at San Francisco Junior College (A.A., 1940) and Mills College (B.A., 1942), Wong is also an accomplished potter. Wong has received recognition for both her work as a writer and for her accomplishments as a potter. In 1947 she received an award for pottery from the California State Fair, and again in 1949 she received an award for enamel. She also received a Silver Medal for craftsmanship from Mademoiselle magazine. For her treasured work in Fifth Chinese Daughter she was honored with a Silver Medal for nonfiction from the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco in 1976. She also holds an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Mills College. In addition, she has continued to honor her Chinese background as a member of the advisory councils for the China Institute of New York and as a director of the Chinese Culture Center from 1978 to 1981. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Demirturk, E. L., The Female Identity in Cross-Cultural Perspective: Immigrant Women’s Autobiographies (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Iowa, 1986). Kim, E. H., Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context (1982). Ling, A., Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry (1990). Meissenburg, K., The Writing on the Wall: Socio-Historical Aspects of Chinese American Literature, 1900-1980 (1986). Reference works: CA (1983). CLC (1981). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Amerasia Journal (1971). DAI (Jan. 1987). Hawaii Review (1988). MELUS (Fall 1979, Spring 1982). —ELLEN WOLFF, UPDATED BY DEVRA M. SLADICS
WOOD, Ann See DOUGLAS, Ann
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WOOD, S(ally) S(ayward) B(arrell) K(eating) Born 1 October 1759, York, Maine; died 6 January 1855, Kennebunk, Maine Wrote under: Madam Wood, Sally Keating Daughter of Nathaniel and Sarah Sayward Barrell; married Richard Keating, 1778 (died 1783); Abiel Wood, 1804 (died 1811); children: two daughters, one son The first of 11 children, S. S. B. K. Wood (commonly referred to as Madam Wood) was born into a colonial New England family while her father was serving with General James Wolfe, British leader of the attack on Quebec. Her mother was the daughter of Judge Jonathan Sayward, with whom Wood lived until she was eighteen. During the American Revolution, Judge Sayward was a Loyalist, and much of his conservatism is evident in Wood’s work. Her first husband was a clerk in her grandfather’s office. Judge Sayward gave them a house as a wedding present, and they settled into the cultivated social life that had surrounded her childhood. Two daughters and a son were born before Keating died suddenly in 1783. Wood turned to writing, not from any pressing financial need, but because it ‘‘soothed many melancholy, and sweetened many bitter hours.’’ Her work was well received, and she gained a considerable literary reputation. She stopped writing when she married General Abiel Wood in 1804. ‘‘Madam Wood,’’ as she was then known, took up writing again, after his death in 1811. Following in the path of such early American novelists as Sarah Wentworth Morton, Susannah H. Rowson, and Hannah Webster Foster, Wood occupies an important niche in the development of American fiction, although her work does not mark a radical break from the traditions imported from England. In accordance with her 18th-century upbringing, she was serious, moralistic, and sentimental. Her stories generally follow a Cinderella pattern centering on a virtuous young woman who either is, or is reputed to be, a poor orphan but who after severe trial is rewarded with a wealthy marriage. Virtue, for Wood, is more than chastity; it is linked to intelligence and education with a strong infusion of patience and submission. Her heroines redeem, reform, or blunt the evil of the world by the example of their behavior, and if they are passive in suffering vicissitudes, they are strong in the face of vice. Like many other 18th-century novelists, Wood uses rambling narrative interspersed periodically with side stories giving the history and background of various minor characters. These digressions relate to the main line through some plot complication, but they also serve as moral examples; most are object lessons in the dangers of falling from virtue. They serve to build suspense, vary the texture, and add scope to the central story. Julia and the Illuminated Baron (1800) is perhaps her best-known work. Certainly it is the most complex, and Julia’s progress from nameless orphan to respectably pedigreed wife and
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mother involves a set of characters (all related by blood) in a series of gothic adventures. The baron of the title is a member of the Illuminati, a secret society that shocked Wood; she presents him as an atheist, anarchist, and mystic who announces proudly, ‘‘I am to myself a God, and to myself accountable. . . . If anyone stands in my way, I put him out of it, with as little concern as I would kick a dog.’’ The setting is France, but the characters are clearly recognizable as Americans in their actions and values. Amelia or, The Influence of Virtue (1802) states her most constant theme. The gentle heroine, married to a rake, prefers death to divorce and meekly bears the taunts of her husband’s mistress and rears his illegitimate children without complaint. She is rewarded in the end with a repentant husband, adoring children, and a respectable position in society. As in all her works, Wood does not plumb psychological depths, and the solution is simplistic, but the action is rapid, and her gift for creating melodramatic moments holds the reader’s attention. Ferdinand and Elmira (1804) is an adventure tale, again with intertwined lives of a single family, in a Russian setting that gives an exotic flavor to a moral tale. As it opens, Elmira is a captive in a mysterious castle, and the explanation of this circumstance leads to another mystery. This pattern (of one mystery following the solution of another) is consistent throughout, and the resultant suspense is the primary means of moving the action forward. The ending resolves all, pairs the heroine and hero, rewards the good, and permits the villains an extravagant repentance. Wood’s focus is on the morality of the simple life as opposed to the corruption of courts; and, despite her Loyalist grandfather, the tale is clearly antiroyalist in tone. Wood is one of the first writers to embody distinctly American ideals. She does not admire aristocratic idleness; indeed, one of her heroes is praised for his ambition to go into trade, and her young lovers rarely end with titles of nobility. She reflects strongly the responsibilities of freedom so uppermost in the consciousness of the young nation. Typical of her time in sentimental morality and her view of woman’s place in society, her work nevertheless reveals an inquiring and imaginative mind searching for new horizons. OTHER WORKS: Dorval; or, The Speculator (1801). Tales of the Night (1827). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Gould, W., in Collections and Proceedings of the Maine Historical Society (1890). Dunnack, H. E. The Maine Book (1920). Freibert, L. M. and B. A. White, eds., Hidden Hands: An Anthology of American Women Writers, 1790-1870 (1985). Petter, H., The Early American Novel (1971). Sayward, C. A. The Sayward Family (1890). Spencer, W. D. Maine Immortals (1932). Sprague, R. S., ed., A Handful of Spice: Essays in Maine (1968). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Studies in American Fiction (Spring 1988). —HELENE KOON
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WOODHULL, Victoria (Claflin) Born 23 September 1838, Homer, Ohio; died 10 June 1927, Bredon’s Norton, Worcestershire, England Daughter of Reuben B. and Roxanna Hummel Claflin; married Canning Woodhull,1853; James Blood, 1866; John B. Martin, 1883 Victoria Woodhull was the seventh child of an itinerant worker who married a tavernkeeper’s daughter in Pennsylvania and moved with her to Ohio. Woodhull and Tennessee Celeste, a younger sister, both demonstrated psychic powers in early childhood. These were exploited as the family, leaving Ohio hurriedly after a suspicious fire in Claflin’s grist mill, set up a traveling medicine show promising psychic cures for a variety of physical ailments. Although Woodhull had little schooling, she was clearly an ambitious, intelligent child with extraordinary physical beauty and a strong sense of destiny. Her first marriage was a failure, although she had two children. In 1868 obeying Woodhull’s vision that fame and fortune awaited her in a city crowded with ships, she and Tennessee moved to New York City. For almost a decade, Woodhull was a notorious figure in New York, famous for her brilliance as an orator; her vigorous espousal of free love, spiritualism, woman suffrage, and the rights of workers; her establishment of a brokerage business in male-dominated Wall Street; and her publishing venture, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly. Cornelius Vanderbilt provided help in her financial venture, but it was Woodhull’s intensity, courage, and beauty that won not only public support for her causes but also the interest of public men such as the editor Theodore Tilton, the philosopher Stephen Pearl Andrews, and Congressman Benjamin F. Butler, an advocate of woman suffrage. Woodhull earned the enmity of Henry Ward Beecher when she accused him of secretly practicing the free love doctrines she openly espoused. After publishing details of an alleged liaison between Beecher and Tilton’s wife in her weekly magazine, Woodhull was attacked by the moralist Anthony Comstock and imprisoned for sending obscene matter through the mails. The suit was dismissed, but Woodhull, who at the height of her fame had been named the Equal Rights Party’s candidate for president (black leader Frederick Douglass was nominated for vice president), had lost money, prestige, and health in the struggle. Shortly after Vanderbilt’s death, Woodhull and Tennessee left for England amid rumors that money for the trip had been provided by Vanderbilt’s son and heir, who did not wish the sisters to testify in a lawsuit contesting his father’s will. In England, Woodhull gave lectures such as ‘‘The Human Body, the Temple of God’’ and attracted the interest of her third husband, a banker. The prosperous comfort of her last years in England was a surprising end to her sensational career as lecturer, propagandist, and free thinker. Yet she continued to write and to publicize herself, attempting to refute through the press and by
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legal action those whom she accused of persecuting her. Woodhull’s new causes—eugenics, a single moral standard, and educational reform—were pursued as vociferously as her earlier ones. Although Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly—which was the first U.S. magazine to publish Marx’s Communist Manifesto— reflected Woodhull’s ideas, as did her lectures, there is a question as to how much of what was published under her name she actually wrote. Colonel Blood, her second husband, was an experienced writer and propagandist, and the commonly held notion that he wrote much of what she signed may be correct. On the other hand, Woodhull herself wrote extensively after their divorce. Despite her lack of formal education, Woodhull had undoubted originality and intelligence, and a driving force that helped her rise from a childhood of poverty and social ostracism to become an internationally known spokeswoman for human freedom.
OTHER WORKS: Origins, Tendencies, and Principles of Government (1871). Speech on Labor and Capital before the Labor Reform League (1871). Speech on the Principles of Finance (1871). The Elixir of Life (1873). Tried by Fire (1874). Breaking the Seals (1875). A Fragmentary Record of Public Work (1887). Stirpiculture; or, The Scientific Propagation of the Human Race (1888). The Garden of Eden (1890). The Human Body, the Temple of God (1890). The Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit (1891). Humanitarian Money (1892).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Anker, C., and I. Rosenberg, Onward Victoria: A Musical (1979). Johnston, J., Mrs. Satan: The Incredible Saga of Victoria C. Woodhull (1967). Marberry, M., Vicky: A Biography of Victoria C. Woodhull (1967). Sachs, E., ‘‘The Terrible Siren’’: Victoria Woodhull, 1838-1927 (1928). Reference works: AA. NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: London Times (11 June 1927). NYT (11 June 1927). —ANN PRINGLE ELIASBERG
WOODS, Caroline H. Born circa 1840s; died death date unknown Wrote under: Belle Otis Stimulated by a restless curiosity about human nature, Caroline H. Woods observed, analyzed, and wrote about the people around her. If her two books, Diary of a Milliner (1867) and Woman in Prison (1869), can be accepted as autobiographical
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(which they claim to be), she opened a millinery shop after her husband died. A few years later her interest in reform led her to take the job of prison matron, which she kept until exhausted by overwork and lack of sleep. In both books the author seeks to reveal the principles of human nature behind the personalities she meets; everyday encounters are material for generalizations and philosophical musings about her fellow women and men. But to a modern reader, her abstract cogitations are perhaps less interesting than her clear portrayal of her surroundings. Diary of a Milliner humorously records the manners, eccentricities, and financial rituals of her predominantly middle- and upper-class clients. Her customers include the fussily pretentious woman who tries on every hat in the store without buying one, the ‘‘highway shopper’’ who custom orders a bonnet and then decides it is not what she wanted after all, the wealthy socialite who needs reassurance that she has purchased the most expensive hat in town, and the bold woman who just wants to ‘‘borrow’’ a mourning bonnet for a funeral. Woods has a quick-witted answer and apt sales psychology for dealing with every kind of client. Woman in Prison, however, adopts a more serious tone, concentrating less on exposing the foibles of human nature than the shameful conditions in the women’s section of the state penitentiary. Without condescension, her plain, unpretentious prose captures the personalities, feelings, slang, and behavior of the prisoners. Through the eyes of the new matron, we come to like and respect the inmates more than those in charge of them. Woods’ revelations about prison conditions support her assertion that if such institutions were open for public inspection, reform would inevitably follow. The small ‘‘stone dens’’ where prisoners live resemble the ‘‘low, narrow. . .cages of wild animals,’’ where bedbugs, rats and mice, and colonies of insects freely gather. Because the prison master keeps the inmates busy doing contract work (mostly sewing) in the ‘‘shop,’’ (which brings revenue to the prison’s board of directors), he will not assign anyone to clean the cells. Prisoners also must sew and keep house for the master’s family, while his wife receives a full-time salary as ‘‘Head Matron,’’ without doing any work. Other abusive conditions include long hours and minimal food—barely enough to keep the prisoners working. Punishment is arbitrary (inmates are not allowed to talk while working in the shop) and unrelated to the offense. Given the conditions Woods describes in Woman in Prison, one can easily see why she asserts that the prisoners leave the penitentiary more degraded and hardened in crime than when they entered the institution. While the literary value of Woods’ writings is slight, her clear rendering of two very different sides of American society will be useful to students of social history and psychology. BIBLIOGRAPHY: A Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors Living and Deceased (1900). —MELANIE M. S. YOUNG
WOODS, Katharine Pearson Born 28 January 1853, Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia); died 19 February 1923, Baltimore, Maryland Daughter of Alexander and Josephine McCabe Woods The oldest of three daughters of a tobacco merchant, Katharine Pearson Woods grew up in Baltimore. Her father was descended from an early Huguenot emigrant to Virginia, and her mother’s family of Irish Protestants had been eminent in colonial Pennsylvania before an ancestor moved to Virginia at the time of the Revolution. In Virginia, the McCabes were prominent in literature and education, two important influences in the work of Woods. In 1874 she became a postulant with the All Saints Sisters of the Poor, and although she withdrew because of poor health, the religious experience led to her work in charity and the religious and moral tone of her writing. For 10 years (1876-86), she taught in girls’ schools and worked with the poor. The bulk of her writing was done in the 12 years from 1889 to 1901. After that period, she lived mostly in Baltimore, serving the community in charitable functions, social concerns, and feminist activities. From 1903 to 1912, she worked as a missionary and taught kindergarten. Of particular interest is a paper she read that ‘‘awakened’’ Charleston to the problem of woman suffrage (Woman’s Journal, May 1891). In 1893-94, she received a fellowship from the College Settlements Association to study factory working conditions. Results of her investigation were published in the American Journal of Statistics (December 1895). Woods’ first novel, Metzerott, Shoemaker (1889), secretly written and anonymously published, reflects her experience among the German working people of Wheeling. In this and her two other social novels (A Web of Gold, 1890, and From Dusk to Dawn, 1892), Woods advocates a just relationship, based on Christian cooperation, between capital and labor. John: A Tale of King Messiah (1896), Woods’ first religious novel, is based closely on the biblical narrative of the lives and relationships of Christ and John the Baptist, beginning with Christ’s rescue of a little girl, Ingar, from a burning village and continuing through the crucifixion and resurrection. There are occasional passages of beauty in her descriptions of the Holy Land, and the drama of the narrative itself is sustained by the biblical source. The flow, however, of the narrative is frequently interrupted by prolonged moralistic and didactic passages directed to the reader. The Son of Ingar (1897) departs further from biblical sources and takes up the story of the girl, Ingar, and of her son, Theophilus, in the difficult years of the formation of the early Christian church. The first scene of the novel is well constructed and offers promising subtle undertones of an interesting study, but Woods almost immediately retreats into her more usual moral tone and digresses from her tale. The narrative as a whole is not well sustained, and Woods tends to lose some of the strands she has been weaving, leading to a final contrived unraveling.
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In The True Story of Captain John Smith (1901), Woods makes a determined effort to redeem the somewhat tarnished reputation of Smith, the founder of Virginia. Family ties to Virginia no doubt influenced her choice of subject. As she explains in the preface, she attempts to ‘‘substantiate Smith’s account of himself. . .by. . .enclosing, so to speak, his autobiography in a framework of the manners and customs of the times.’’ The text includes documentary maps and photographs which are of interest to the student of colonial history. The text itself is readable, but useful only to the history student. Woods’ greatest strength in her fiction is evident in her description of natural settings, reflecting a deep love of nature; that love and appreciation is also evident in her poems, several of which were published in Harper’s in the first years of the century. However, characterization in the novels lacks depth, and her narratives are strained. As a whole, her work is limited in literary quality by these formal problems as well as by the didactic moral tone. OTHER WORKS: Mark of the Beast (n.d.). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Handbook of Settlements (1911). LSL (1907). NAW (1971). Other references: Lippincott’s (Sept. 1890). Nation (Jan. 1923). —BETTY J. ALLDREDGE
WOOLSEY, Sarah Chauncey Born 29 January 1835, Cleveland, Ohio; died 9 April 1905, Newport, Rhode Island Wrote under: Susan Coolidge Daughter of John M. and Jane Woolsey Sarah Chauncey Woolsey spent her formative years in a lively household, amusing her three younger sisters, brother, and cousin with games and stories. She was first educated in Cleveland private schools, then sent to a boarding school in Hanover, New Hampshire, nicknamed ‘‘The Nunnery.’’ From 1855 to 1870, Woolsey lived with her parents in New Haven, Connecticut, where her uncle, Theodore Dwight Woolsey, was president of Yale University. During the Civil War, she spent one summer working with her friend Helen Hunt Jackson in the New Haven Government Hospital and 10 months serving as an assistant superintendent at the Lowell General Hospital in Portsmouth Grove, Rhode Island. After her father’s death in 1870, Woolsey moved to Newport, Rhode Island, a residence interrupted only by journeys to Europe, California, and Colorado and, in her later years, by summers in the Catskills. In 1871 her career as children’s author began with the publication of The New Year’s Bargain. The Katy series (1872-91) brought her fame. She also wrote poetry and magazine articles, served for a time as children’s book reviewer for the Literary
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World, and worked as reader and editor for her publishers, Roberts Brothers. Although The New Year’s Bargain employs fantasy reminiscent of Hans Christian Andersen in a story of two German children who trick the months into telling them stories, What Katy Did (1872) establishes Woolsey as a writer of realistic juvenile fiction, similar to Louisa May Alcott in her gift of depicting real American girls in an appealing family setting. Katy Carr, an impulsive, boisterous, and ever well-intentioned girl who leads her younger sisters and brothers into scrapes, finally matures through suffering and the acceptance of responsibility. Her adventures continue in What Katy Did at School (1873) when Katy and her sister, Clover, become students at a New England boarding school and meet the irrepressible Rose Red, beloved by more than one generation of schoolgirl readers in America and England. Katy travels to Europe and finds romance in What Katy Did Next (1886), where Woolsey uses the travelogue, a popular formula in children’s literature of the period, to carry a rather pedestrian plot. The Katy series concludes with Clover (1888) and In the High Valley (1891), as the six Carrs grow up and marry. The charm of the final books lies less in the portraits of the young people than in the Colorado setting, which Woolsey remembered so vividly from her trips to visit Helen Hunt Jackson. Woolsey’s other juvenile novels also feature plucky girls in realistic settings, but none of the heroines has Katy’s imagination and vitality. Motherless Isabella of Eyebright (1879) moves from a sheltered home to an island off the Maine coast where she risks her life to help a stranger. Although Lilly of A Guernsey Lily (1881) heals a feud, she is really a device to unify descriptions of the scenery, people, history, and legends of the Channel Islands. Because orphaned Candace of A Little Country Girl (1885) shows moral courage, she wins a place in her aunt’s family, thereby continuing to enjoy the civilized pleasures of Newport. Among the notable collections of Woolsey’s short stories are Mischief’s Thanksgiving (1874), Nine Little Goslings (1875), Cross Patch (1881), A Round Dozen (1883), and Just Sixteen (1889). These volumes illustrate her capacity for invention and her range—stories for children and for adolescents, tales of realism and of fantasy. Nine Little Goslings and Cross Patch cleverly translate Mother Goose stories into tales peopled with real children in contemporary settings. Although Woolsey hoped to achieve distinction as a poet, her three volumes of verse for adults, Verses (1880), A Few More Verses (1889), and Last Verses (1906), reveal little more than careful workmanship, a sober acceptance of suffering and death, and a certain flair for the narrative poem. A talented and versatile writer of children’s fiction, Woolsey was once almost as popular as Louisa May Alcott in both England and America. Today she is still remembered for her stories of the incomparable Katy Carr. OTHER WORKS: For Summer Afternoons (1876). A Short History of the City of Philadelphia from Its Foundation to the Present
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Time (1887). The Day’s Message (1890). Rhymes and Ballads for Boys and Girls (1892). The Barberry Bush (1893). Not Quite Eighteen (1894). An Old Convent School in Paris, and Other Papers (1895). Curly Locks (1899). A Little Knight of Labor (1899). Little Tommy Tucker (1900). Two Girls (1900). Little Bo-Peep (1901). Uncle and Aunt (1901). The Rule of Three (1904). A Sheaf of Stories (1906). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Banning, E., Helen Hunt Jackson (1973). Darling, R. L., The Rise of Children’s Book Reviewing in America, 1865-1881 (1968). Kilgour, R. L., Messrs. Roberts Brothers, Publishers (1952). Meigs, C., A Critical History of Children’s Literature (1969). Reference works: NAW (1971). Other references: Horn Book (1959). —PHYLLIS MOE
WOOLSON, Constance Fenimore Born 5 March 1840, Claremont, New Hampshire; died 24 January 1894, Venice, Italy Wrote under: Anne March Daughter of Charles J. and Hannah Pomeroy Woolson Constance Fenimore Woolson was the sixth of nine children and the grandniece of James Fenimore Cooper. After the death of three older sisters from scarlet fever, Woolson moved at a very early age with her family to Cleveland. She attended school there until enrolling in Madame Chegary’s school in New York City, from which she graduated in 1858. Her childhood summers were spent at the family cottage at Mackinac Island, later to become the setting for a number of her short stories. After her father’s death in 1869, she traveled extensively in the South with her mother. Upon her mother’s death in 1879, Woolson and her sister, Clare Benedict, traveled in Europe, where Woolson spent the remainder of her life. She died in Venice after falling or leaping from her bedroom window. Whether her death was the result of delirium from influenza or of depression has never been determined. At the time of her death, she had achieved a moderate degree of recognition as a writer; today her works are virtually unknown. Woolson’s writings reflect her experiences in the northern lake country, the South, and Europe. Much of her fiction appeared initially in magazines and was later in books. She also published several novels, the quality of which is usually inferior to that of her stories. Woolson’s first book, The Old Stone House, a book for children, was published in 1872 under the pseudonym of Anne March. Of more importance, however, is the collection Castle Nowhere: Lake-Country Sketches (1875), which contains nine stories fashioned from her observations of Mackinac Island. Castle Nowhere has been compared favorably with Sarah Orne Jewett’s Deephaven (1877) and Mary Noailles Murfree’s In the Tennessee Mountains (1884).
Of even better quality is her second volume of short stories, Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches (1880), which sympathetically treats the Reconstruction period. One of the most skillfully written pieces in this collection, ‘‘Old Gardiston,’’ depicts the downfall of an ancient Southern family, and concludes with the burning of their mansion before it can be possessed by a Northern businessman and his wife. Anne (1882) was published as a novel shortly after its serialization in Harper’s. Set in various places, including Mackinac Island, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, the novel tells the story of Anne Douglas in a somewhat melodramatic plot including a love affair and a murder trial. In the 1880s, Anne was a popular novel; today it is a forgotten work deserving renewed attention. For the Major (1883), set in Far Edgerly, a mountain village in western North Carolina, is a tale of Sara Carroll’s return home from a long journey and her discovery her father, Major Carroll, has become senile and her stepmother is laboring to shield both the Major and the townspeople from this knowledge. Woolson’s story provides an excellent blend of comic treatment of the inhabitants of Far Edgerly and a noble portrait of the declining Major and his compassionate wife. It is considered one of Woolson’s finest works. East Angels (1886), set in Florida, was also a popular work at the time of its publication. Woolson brings together a group of wealthy Northerners and impoverished Southern aristocrats in this postwar novel of reconciliation. In her novel Jupiter Lights (1889), Woolson incorporates Georgia, the Lake Country, and Italy as settings. Although the plot is contrived and the action melodramatic, the work has been noted for its advances in the psychological complexity of the characters, especially the heroine, Eve Bruce. Woolson’s final novel, Horace Chase (1894), set in Asheville, North Carolina, after the war, chronicles the marriage of Horace Chase, self-made millionaire, and Ruth Franklin, his headstrong young wife. Ruth becomes infatuated with a young man of her own age, but is forgiven by her husband, who says at the close of the novel, ‘‘I don’t know that I have been so perfect myself, that I have any right to judge you.’’ In a letter to Henry Mills Alden, Woolson notes that the essence of the novel lies in that last sentence and concludes, ‘‘Do you think it is impossible? I do not.’’ Two volumes of Italian stories, The Front Yard, and Other Italian Stories (1895) and Dorothy, and Other Italian Stories (1896), as well as a volume of travel sketches, Mentone, Cairo, and Corfu (1896), were published after Woolson’s death. The Italian stories include some of her best work, such as ‘‘The Front Yard,’’ the story of Prudence Wilkin, a New England woman who accompanies her wealthy cousin to Italy. Prudence marries an Italian waiter, who dies after their first year of marriage, leaving her a house inhabited by eight children and other assorted relatives whom Prudence supports until her death 16 years later. A minor writer who produced a number of fine stories, Woolson is to be noted as a pioneer both in local color writing and
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in her depiction of a number of female characters—such as Ruth Franklin of Horace Chase or Margaret Harold of East Angels— which anticipates female characterization of 20th-century literature. OTHER WORKS: A significant number of Constance Fenimore Woolson’s papers are housed at the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland, Ohio. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Benedict, C., ed., Five Generations (1785-1923) (1929-30). James, H., Partial Portraits (1888). Kern, J. D., Constance Fenimore Woolson: Literary Pioneer (1934). Moore, R., Constance F. Woolson (1963). Tornsey, C. B., Constance Fenimore Woolson: The Grief and the Artistry (1989). Tornsey, C. B., ed., Critical Essays on Constance Fenimore Woolson (1992). Weimer, J. M., ed., Women Artists, Women Exiles: ‘‘Miss Grief’’ and Other Stories (1988). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: SAQ (Apr. 1938, June 1940). Mississippi Quarterly (Fall 1976). —ANNE ROWE
WORMELEY, Katharine Prescott Born 14 January 1830, Ipswich, England; died 4 August 1908, Jackson, New Hampshire Daughter of Ralph and Caroline Wormeley Katharine Prescott Wormeley was descended, on her mother’s side of the family, from Boston merchants and, on her father’s, from a long line of Virginians. The family lived in England for many years, settling in the U.S. after her father’s death in 1852. At the beginning of the Civil War, Wormeley threw herself into volunteer work. She formed the local chapter of the Woman’s Union in Newport, Rhode Island, and headed it until 1862. She also obtained a contract from the federal government to manufacture clothing for the troops, thus giving employment to otherwise destitute soldiers’ wives. In April 1862, Wormeley began working for the U.S. Sanitary Commission, a private volunteer organization, as a matron on a hospital ship. Later that year, she became ‘‘lady superintendent’’ of Lowell General Hospital in Portsmouth Grove, Rhode Island. Her health, however, gave out after a year, and she returned home to Newport. After the war, Wormeley continued her charitable work. She helped found the Newport Charity Organization Society in 1874 and served it in various capacities for the next 15 years. She also established an industrial school for girls that offered classes in cooking, sewing, and domestic management. Besides charity work, Wormeley’s passion was for literature. Fluent in French, she translated many of the works of Balzac, Molière, Daudet, and Saint-Simon. In 1892 she published A Memoir of Honoré de Balzac. In The Other Side of War (1889),
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Wormeley describes her function on the hospital ship Daniel Webster: ‘‘Our duty is to be very much that of a housekeeper. We attend to the beds, the linen, the clothing of the patients; we have a pantry and store-room, and are required to do all the cooking for the sick, and see that it is properly distributed according to the surgeons’ orders; we are also to have a general superintendence over the condition of the wards and over the nurses, who are all men.’’ Wormeley and her companions were on duty almost constantly; when they could relax, space and privacy were limited. When Wormeley was loaned temporarily to the medical department of the Army, she discovered conditions that were, incredibly, worse than what she had already seen. Accustomed to abundant supplies of food, bandages, and medications, she found the Army lacked adequate stores of all three. Because of this many men died whom, Wormeley believes, the Sanitary Commission might have saved. The commission’s example finally shamed the government into reorganizing its medical department in July 1862. Then, Wormeley claims with pride, the commission could resume its original functions, ‘‘inspecting the condition of the camps and regiments, and continuing on a large scale its supply business.’’ The Other Side of War is an appropriate title for Wormeley’s work. As she notes, it is far too easy, both for her contemporaries and modern historians, to get caught up in the romance and glory of war without fully acknowledging the human suffering that invariably accompanies it. She and the countless other women who worked in the hospitals of the Civil War, in both the North and South, remind us of its true horror. OTHER WORKS: The United States Sanitary Commission: A Sketch of Its Purpose and Work (1863). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brockett, L. P., and M. C. Vaughn, Woman’s Work in the Civil War (1867). Massey, M. E., Bonnet Brigades (1966). Maxwell, W. O., Lincoln’s Fifth Wheel (1956). —JANET KAUFMAN
WRIGHT, Frances (Fanny) Born September 1795, Dundee, Scotland; died 13 December 1852, Cincinnati, Ohio Also wrote under: Madam D’Arusmont, Frances Wright Daughter of James and Camilla Campbell Wright; married William P. D’Arusmont, 1831; children: one daughter Frances (Fanny) Wright was a 19th century anomaly: in the age of the passive True Woman, she created a utopian community dedicated to abolishing slavery in America, edited a liberal journal, and lectured passionately on women’s rights. In 1818 Wright and her younger sister Camilla enthusiastically sailed to America for the first time. Encouraged by the great
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human progress allowed in a democracy, Wright kept an epistolary record of her American experiences which she published upon her return to England in 1820 (Views of Society and Manners in America, 1821). Her optimistic portrait of America and her implied criticism of Europe angered many of her non-American contemporaries. In 1824 Wright returned to the U.S. with her sister, and this time, turned her attention to what she considered America’s most significant problem—slavery. Wright believed slaves could be prepared for freedom if they worked for their emancipation. To this end, she founded Nashoba, an experimental community in southwestern Tennessee. Purchasing slaves who would ‘‘work out’’ their freedom, and gathering together concerned individuals, Wright devoted much of her energy in 1826-1827 to her community. Nashoba attempted a radical implementation of sexual as well as racial equality. Wright declared that at Nashoba ‘‘no woman can forfeit her individual rights or independent existence.’’ Because of her outspoken attitudes about sexual equality and because the white overseer at Nashoba and a black woman began ‘‘living together,’’ Nashoba soon gained a notorious reputation, and was labeled ‘‘Fanny Wright’s Free Love Colony.’’ Wright herself became known as a ‘‘female monster,’’ who wished to destroy marriage and the family. Though Nashoba suffered from a lack of fresh food, comfortable living arrangements, and economic stability, Wright did accomplish one goal—she took the Nashoba slaves to Haiti and settled them there. In 1828 Wright became the editor of the New Harmony Gazette (soon to be renamed the Free Enquirer). Wright became disillusioned with a community that could not support itself and was constantly the subject of controversy. During the ensuing two years, she and her coeditor Robert Dale Owen (founder of the utopian community in New Harmony, Indiana) energetically urged women to break the fetters of false conventions and prejudices. Wright, purporting to be the ‘‘first woman speaker on the American platform,’’ lectured widely, advocating increased rights for women and for workingmen. Wright was horrified a marrying woman ‘‘swore away her person and her property’’— she impelled her audiences, in her Enlightenment-like style, to listen to reason. Always she lambasted cultural pressures which compelled women to be meek and obedient. In 1830 Wright’s vacation to Europe was indefinitely extended by her sister’s sudden death in 1831 and her own hasty marriage to William Phiquepal D’Arusmont, a former Pestalozzian teacher at New Harmony. From 1930 on, Wright traveled extensively between the U.S. and Paris where her child and husband resided. She wrote little during this period and she spent the final years of her life battling her husband in court for her property and for custody of her daughter. She obtained neither, and died crippled and alone—a fitting end, many believed, for America’s first woman-rights’ advocate. OTHER WORKS: Altorf, a Tragedy (1819). A Few Days in Athens (1822). Course of Popular Lectures (1829). Fables (1830). England the Civilizer: Her History Developed in Its Principles
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(1848). Biography, Notes, and Political Letters of Frances Wright D’Arusmont (1849, reissued on microfilm, 1980). Life, Letters and Lectures (enlarged ed. of 1849 publication, 1972). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bartlett, E. A., Liberty, Equality, Sorority: The Origins and Interpretation of American Feminist Thought: Frances Wright, Sarah Grimke, and Margaret Fuller (1994). Follis, J. T., Frances Wright: Feminism and Literature in Ante-Bellum America (dissertation, 1983). Gilbert, A., Memoir of Fanny Wright (1855). Hartley, D., ‘‘The Embrace of Nature: Representations of Self and Other by Women Travel Writers of the Romantic Period’’ (dissertation, 1992). Kissel, S. S., In Common Cause: The ‘‘Conservative’’ Frances Trollope and the ‘‘Radical’’ Frances Wright (1993). Kuntz, K., ‘‘Toward a Religion of Humanity: Frances Wright’s Crusade for Republican Values’’ (thesis, 1998). Lane, M., Fanny Wright and the Great Experiment (1972). Morris, C., Fanny Wright: Rebel in America (1984, 1992). Mullen, R., Birds of Passage: Five Englishwomen in Search of America (1994). O’Donnell, M. M., Reflections on a Free Enquirer: An Analysis of the Ideas of Frances Wright (dissertation, 1979). Perkins, A. J. G., and T. Wolfson, Fanny Wright: Free Enquirer (1939, 1996). Rutherford, V., ‘‘A Study of the Speaking Career of Fanny Wright in America’’ (dissertation, 1960). Waterman, W., Fanny Wright (1924). Sandlund, V. E., ‘‘To Arouse and Awaken the American People’’—The Ideas and Strategies of the Gradual Emancipationists, 1800-1850 (dissertation, 1996). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: American History Illustrated (April 1980). Indiana’s Guerrillas of the Philippines: Fanny Wright (audiocassette, 1987). Lerner, G. Frances Wright (audiotape, 1962). THQ (Jan. 1932, Dec. 1947). —CAROL A. KOLMERTEN
WRIGHT, Julia McNair Born 1 May 1840, Oswego, New York; died 3 September 1903, Fulton, Missouri Daughter of John McNair; married William J. Wright, 1859; children: two Julia McNair Wright was born to an upper-middle class family who saw to her sound academic—and private—education. She was married at nineteen to a clergyman who, after serving churches for several years at a time in Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and New Jersey, became a professor of mathematics and then vice president at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. She had two children. Except for occasional one-to-two-year periods of silence—perhaps caused by the efforts of resettling her family or by travel in Europe, Wright published almost continuously. Her work ranged widely, including short stories and novels, histories, poems, religious tracts, moral lessons on temperance, cookbooks, and scientific works on botany. Many
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books were published by the Presbyterian Board of Publication or the National Temperance Society. The idealism and morality pervading her writing are that of conventional middle-class Protestantism: some of her work displays anti-Catholic themes; and in some of her fiction she explicitly denies the importance of votes for women. Nevertheless, if she was inactive in the feminist movement and unsympathetic to some of its demands, her fiction and poetry rely heavily on the delineation of women’s struggles, hopes, fears, and successes. Her heroines strike the modern reader as well conceived both aesthetically and psychologically. Adam’s Daughters (1892) has a provocative subject: three genteel and well-educated young women and their mother are left suddenly on their own with neither money nor means of support. As Wright explains in the preface: ‘‘‘What shall we do for a living?’ is a problem proposed to many women, maids, wives, and widows.’’ She suggests in Adam’s Daughters and in many of her short stories that women should be prepared to work in positions other than teaching or the home. They must, she insists, follow their interests and abilities. Van, one of her heroines who appears in a number of stories, struggles in unsuitable jobs until she recognizes that her real calling lies with the land. She reminds one of Willa Cather’s later heroine Alexandra in O Pioneers!; each learns to run a successful farm against difficult odds. Wright’s fiction is characterized by the melodrama and sentimentality of the time, but it also conveys messages that go beyond rigidly conventional bounds. Fallen women survive, widows become independent, spoiled melancholic young women are treated with psychological sensitivity and perception. Medical care, especially in asylums for the poor, is realistically scrutinized in books such as Under the Yoke, and Other Tales (1897), The Awakening of Kohath Sloan (1897), and Duncan’s Errand (1899). Wright’s botanical works contain descriptions of nature similar to those in most popular 19th-century poetry—roots, for instance, are called ‘‘treasures of darkness.’’ But the books contain also a substantial amount of scientific information about plants and the care of seeds. She made a thorough reading of Thomas Huxley, especially of his analysis of arbitrary distinctions between plant and animal life. Her approach insists that nature always has its purposes, but she supports her philosophical ideas with close observation and extensive knowledge of her subject—a synthesis of love and understanding. The most important of these works, the Nature Reader series (1888-1901), was translated into several languages and into braille. Wright’s primary interest, in whatever she wrote, lay in her concern for the human soul. This concern took her from the nativism and prejudices of her Secrets of the Convent and Confessional (1872) to the Darwinian struggle to survive in society as a man or a woman, to the tragedy of intemperance, and to the lack of natural joy in the education of children. The latter themes appear in The Temperance First Reader: Writing, Spelling, and Reading Lessons for Young Children (1889).
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Like an increasing number of popular and successful American women writers in the 19th century, Wright produced books with remarkable speed on a variety of subjects—books devoured by a growing audience always impatient for more. But she even outdid most of her peers in volume, and the popularity of her work suggests its influence on her times.
OTHER WORKS: The Golden Life (1867). The Shoe Binders of New York; or, The Fields White to the Harvest (1867). Almost a Nun (1868). The New York Needle-Woman; or, Elsie’s Stars (1868). John and the Demijohn: A Temperance Tale (1869). The New York Bible-Woman (1869). Our Chatham Street Uncle; or, The Three Golden Balls (1869). Almost a Priest (1870). How Could He Escape? (1870). Jug-or-Not (1870). Moth and Rust (1870). Priest and Nun (1870). Westward: A Tale of American Emigrant Life (1870). Saints and Sinners of the Bible (1872). Nothing to Drink (1873). The Life-Cruise of Captain Bess Adams (1874). The Early Church in Britain: Its Faith and Works (1875). Lights And Shadows of Sacred Story (1875). Patriot and Tory: One Hundred Years Ago (1876). A Strange Sea-Story: A Temperance Tale (1876). Circled by Fire (1879). The Complete Home: An Encyclopedia of Domestic Life and Affairs (1879). The Curse and the Cup (1879). Firebrands (1879). On London Bridge (1879). Twelve Noble Men (1879). A Day with a Demon (1880). Step by Step (1880). The Oath-Keeper of Forano (1881). Practical Life; or, Ways and Means for Developing Character and Resources (1881). No Cards, No Cake: Marriage Extraordinary (1882). Among the Alaskans (1883). Bricks from Babel: A Brief View of the Myths, Traditions, and Religious Belief of Races, with Concise Studies in Ethnography (1883). Hannah: One of the Strong Women (1883). Mr. Standfast’s Journey; or, The Path of the Just (1884). A Wife Hard Won (1884). The Dragon and the Tea-Kettle: An Experience, and the Dopplegänger (1885). Roland’s Daughter: A Nineteenth-Century Maiden (1885). Graham’s Laddie: A Story of God’s Providence (1886). Million Too Much: A Temperance Tale (1886). Rasmus; or, The Making of a Man (1886). The Heir of Athole (1887). In Black and Gold: A Story of Twin Dragons (1887). A Made Man: A Sequel to ‘‘Rasmus; or, The Making of a Man’’ (1887). Mother Goose for Temperance Nurseries (1887). ABC for Temperance Nurseries (1888). Nature Readers: Seaside and Wayside (1888). Rag Fair and May Fair (1889). Sara Jane: A Girl of One Talent (1889). A Plain Woman’s Story (1890). Fraü Dagmar’s Son (1891). The Temperance Second Reader (1891). A Modern Prodigal (1892). The House on the Beach (1893). Mr. Grosvenor’s Daughter (1893). On a Snow-Bound Train (1893). The Temperance Third Reader (1893). Ragweed: A West-World Story (1894). Her Ready-Made Family (1895). A New Samaritan (1895). Cynthia’s Sons (1896). The House on the Bluff (1896). Ladies’ Home Cook Book: A Complete Cook Book and Manual of Household Duties (1896). The People’s Millions: The Story of a Card House (1896). The Cardiff Estate (1897). Astronomy: The Sun and His Family (1898). Botany: The Story of Plant Life (1898). Toward the Glory Gate (1898). A Bonnie Boy (1899). Three Colonial Maids (1900). Studies in Hearts (1902). The Gospel in the Riviera: A Story of Italy (n.d.). My Five Wards; or,
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Aunt Huldah’s Homilies (n.d.). The True Story Library (n.d.). Two Boys (n.d.). The papers of Julia McNair Wright are housed in the Fulton Public Library (Missouri) and the Westminster College Library, also in Fulton.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Dowland, W. A., The Sum of Feminine Achievement (1917). Neven, A., ed., Encyclopaedia of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (1884). Rice, J. J., ed., History of Westminster College, 1851-1903 (1903). Other references: Collegian (Apr. 1898). Fulton (Missouri) Weekly Gazette (4 Sept. 1903). NYT (4 Sept. 1903). Records of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.
Among Wright’s most popular works are the semiautobiographical Barbara books, particularly the first, The Garden of a Commuter’s Wife (1901), which introduces her alter ego, Barbara, who lives in the country with her husband and shares her life with many eccentric friends. Wright calls this book and The Garden, You, and I (1906) ‘‘pages from Barbara’s Garden Book.’’ Three other Barbara books bear designations intended to reveal other aspects of Barbara’s life. People of the Whirlpool (1903) is ‘‘from the Experience Book,’’ Princess Flower-Hat (1910) is ‘‘from the Perplexity Book,’’ and A Woman Errant is ‘‘from the Wonder Book.’’ Wright blends fanciful fiction with social comment, showing that she was an interested observer of the changes taking place in New York society— particularly among her own class of people. Servants provide comic relief.
—LOIS FOWLER
A Woman Errant is the most serious book of the series. It is a melodramatic statement of Wright’s belief that woman lives for and through man. According to Wright, women who leave their proper sphere for a career become bisexual. She shows a woman doctor who causes her own son’s death because of her lack of the right kind of ability. Wright’s attack on career women is not atypical of popular writers, even the professional women writers.
Born 26 January 1859, New York, New York; died 16 July 1934, Fairfield, Connecticut Wrote under: Barbara Daughter of Samuel and Ellen Murdock Osgood; married James O. Wright, 1884
Wright’s novels, set in the same area as her Barbara stories, are all romances, and in most of them she focuses on marriage as the most important part of life. In her last, Eudora’s Men (1931), she underlines the importance of men to women by tracing a family from the beginning of the Civil War down to the present, when one of the youngest generation, a woman doctor, almost ruins the life of her husband by her ‘‘unnatural’’ concept of marriage.
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Mabel Osgood Wright’s father was a Unitarian minister who late in life became an Episcopalian; the Osgood family lived in a large house in lower Manhattan when there were still cows pastured nearby. Educated at home and at a private school, Wright was a keen amateur naturalist from her youth, enjoying long summer vacations at the family summer home. With her husband, a dealer in rare books and art (whom she referred to as ‘‘Evan’’ in her Barbara books), she lived in Fairfield, Connecticut. She apparently had no children. Wright was the first president of the Audubon Society of Connecticut and a member of the American Ornithologists’ Union and the Connecticut Society of Colonial Dames—a much more exclusive organization than the Daughters of the American Revolution, which she ridiculed in A Woman Errant (1904). Wright’s first published books were about nature. Three— The Friendship of Nature (1894), Birdcraft (1895), and Flowers and Ferns in Their Haunts (1901)—were written for adults, but most are for children. As was common in 19th-century children’s nature books, Wright taught about nature in story form, creating fictional children to lead the little readers through their lessons. Tommy-Anne and the Three Hearts (1896) and its sequel, Wabeno the Magician (1899), tell of a young tomboy who discovers the ‘‘Magic Spectacles’’ that combine truth with imagination. Wearing her spectacles, she can converse with the grass, flowers, insects, squirrels, and even her dog, Waddles.
In her autobiography, My New York (1926), she writes of her life up to the death of her beloved father and her engagement, focusing entirely on the city. It is a beautifully written picture of life in lower Manhattan in the 1860s and 1870s, giving her gift for observation and social comment its best exercise; it memorializes old New York, which had all but vanished when she wrote the book. While Wright is historically an important figure in popular nature writing, she did not make a successful transition to fiction as did Gene Stratton-Porter. But her autobiography is a charming, nostalgic book written without the bitterness she showed in other books when writing of the changes in society.
OTHER WORKS: Citizen Bird (1897). Four-footed Americans and Their Kin (1898). The Dream Fox Story Book (1900). Dogtown (1902). Aunt Jimmy’s Will (1903). At the Sign of the Fox (1905). Gray Lady and the Birds (1907). The Open Window (1908). Poppea of the Post-office (1909). The Love that Lives (1911). The Stranger at the Gate (1913). Captains of the Watch of Life and Death (1927).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: NAW (1971). NYT (18 July 1934). —BEVERLY SEATON
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WRIGHT, Mary Clabaugh Born 25 September 1917, Tuscaloosa, Alabama; died 18 June 1970, Guilford, Connecticut Daughter of Samuel F. and Mary Duncan Clabaugh; married Arthur Wright, 1940; children: two Mary Clabaugh Wright grew up in Alabama. She studied European history at Vassar College (she graduated summa cum laude) and then at Radcliffe, but early in her graduate career she turned to the study of Chinese history. Her husband was also involved in Chinese studies. Together they spent most of World War II in an internment camp in Shantung. After their release in 1945, they decided to stay in Peking for a while. Wright assisted the Hoover Institute on War, Revolution, and Peace as a researcher. She was resourceful in searching book markets and government agencies throughout the country; it is through her efforts that the Hoover Institute became the center of documents and research material on the Chinese revolution. She became the curator of the institute’s Chinese collection in Palo Alto when she returned to the U S. in 1947. During the next 10 years she received her Ph.D. at Radcliffe, became the mother of two boys, and was recognized as a major historian. In the 1950s, she defended victims of the McCarthy hysteria, particularly China scholar Owen Lattimore. In 1959, she became the first tenured woman faculty member at Yale University. Wright’s classic work, The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism: The Tung-chih Restoration, 1862-1874 (1957, reprinted 1967) analyzes the late Ch’ing dynasty. It describes the imperial effort to rebuild China’s social, cultural, and economic base, which were being threatened by internal rebellion as well as by foreign ideas and values. The book points out in what areas the restoration of the Confucian order was a partial success; more importantly, it analyzes the reasons why the movement ultimately was doomed to fail. The reformers are portrayed as extraordinarily great men who fought a hopeless battle against changing times. Believing that ‘‘there is no way in which an effective modern state can be grafted onto a Confucian society,’’ Wright shows the policies of Chiang Kai-shek in more modern times in a new light. She explains in the final chapter how the attitudes and policies of Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang after 1927 were influenced by the conservative restorationists of the Tung Chih period. In adopting the Restoration as a model for his own government, Chiang Kai-shek fatefully affected the outcome of the NationalistCommunist struggle. The Kuomintang did not meet the needs and share the values of the new age, and, like the Restoration, was doomed to fail. The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism has often been acclaimed as a work of prime historical scholarship. The author is applauded for having studied a period in Chinese history often been neglected because of the lack of sources in Western languages. Wright was able to use Chinese sources and to relate the ideas and events of this era through the eyes of the Chinese.
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In 1965, Wright organized a research conference on the Chinese Revolution of 1911, with 22 participants from six countries. She edited the collection of their papers, China in Revolution: The First Phase, 1900-1913 (1968, 1973), which has been recognized as one of the best works on 20th-century China. Martin Wilburn of Columbia University described her 60-page introduction as a ‘‘masterful historical synthesis.’’ She discusses the unprecedented intellectual ferment and rapid social and institutional changes occurring in China during the first decade of the 20th century. She vividly portrays the anti-Imperialist nationalism arising in a determined effort to save China from foreign domination, and she points out that the quest for rapid modernization and the belligerent assertions of sovereignty displayed by the People’s Republic of China in the 1950s had close parallels 40 years earlier. BIBLIOGRAPHY: A Memorial Service for Mary Clabaugh Wright (1917-1970) (1970). Fairbank, J. K., China Perceived (1974). Feuerwerker, A., Approaches to Modern Chinese History (1967). Other references: Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (Nov. 1969). Choice (Sept. 1969). Journal of American Studies (Nov. 1970). NYTBR (23 Nov. 1969). SR (15 March 1969). TLS (5 June 1969). VQR (Spring 1969). —PATRICIA LANGHALS NEILS
WYATT, Edith Franklin Born 14 September 1873, Tomah, Wisconsin; died October 1958, Chicago, Illinois Daughter of Franklin and Marian La Grange Wyatt A self-designated ‘‘middle-class American,’’ Edith Franklin Wyatt spent her earliest years in Midwestern towns where her father was a railroad and mining engineer. Settled in a modest, neighborly Chicago home in the 1880s, she and her two younger sisters shared wide-ranging interests with their mother, who was later a privately published poet. Wyatt attended Bryn Mawr from 1892 to 1894 and taught at a local girls’ school for five years. Wyatt’s first publication, ‘‘Three Stories of Contemporary Chicago’’ (1900), caught the attention of William Dean Howells, who publicly praised her early fiction and remained an admiring friend. While teaching at Hull House and participating in the Little Room, Chicago’s preeminent salon, she produced most of her fiction during this decade. After her McClure’s report on the 1909 Cherry Mine fire, Wyatt was in great demand during the 1910s as a social commentator and Progressive activist, promoting the causes of working-class women, child laborers, victims of the Eastland pleasure-boat disaster, and suffragists. A founding board member of Poetry, her concurrent literary work included a report on working women’s budgets, a documentary play, poems, and literary criticism. Socially conscientious but temperamentally retiring, Wyatt lived with her mother and maintained a few close friendships with people who shared her commitments. Her creative talent seems to
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have exhausted itself in 1923, when she published her second novel after a year as assistant editor for McClure’s. Her remaining work was mostly retrospective; she memorialized deceased colleagues and Chicago’s past and also collected her earlier short stories. The stories first published in Every One His Own Way (1901) demonstrate Wyatt’s attention to the everyday strengths and distinctive mannerisms of urban ethnic types as well as her exposure of genteel intolerance. Recurring characters and neighborhood settings link together stories ranging from tragedy to satire. ‘‘A Matter of Taste’’ is representative: it recounts a literary critic’s disdain for the participative, popular musical tastes of a German American couple, while embodying Wyatt’s own characteristic perspective in the clear-sighted observations of the critic’s sister. A similar dichotomy between conventionality and wholesomeness informs Wyatt’s first novel, True Love (1903). Snobbish Norman Hubbard—whose ‘‘sepulchral’’ Chicago home traps visitors in vacuous conversation—engages himself to an equally convention-bound woman, until they can no longer stand each other’s narrowness. A second romance between unpretentious Chicagoan Emily Marsh, whose simple family home welcomes friends to billiards and cards, and an equally ordinary country man, leads to marriage. Wyatt believed heterogeneous Americans share primarily the experience of migration: ‘‘Movement through a variety of country’’ is, she declares, the unifying theme of the poems in The Wind in the Corn (1917). ‘‘To a River God’’ exemplifies her poetry’s dynamic attention to geography, unity-in-diversity theme, and ritualistic, chanting rhythms, which occasionally disintegrate into sing-song. Most admired were Wyatt’s urban poems: ‘‘November in the City’’ and ‘‘City Equinoctial’’ epitomize her unconventional portrayal of natural cycles in city as well as country scenes. Original observation and social perspective mark Wyatt’s literary criticism and social commentary. A well-chosen selection in Great Companions (1917) demonstrates her concerns with national literary culture, writers’ attitudes toward women, and autobiographies of working people. ‘‘The Dislike of Human Interest’’ clarifies the political basis for her objections to standardized literary stereotypes. Invisible Gods (1923) tries to combine Wyatt’s fictional talents with her political commitments in a sociological novel about three generations of a Chicago family. But an uncharacteristically loose, episodic structure and wordy prose undercut her uncompromising vision and talent for characterization. Wyatt combined a pluralistic appreciation of common people and regional integrity with original observation and satiric humor in her fiction, poetry, literary criticism, and social commentaries. Her early fiction and essays represent her best work, as fine as that of Howells and undeservedly ignored by literary historians and critics. OTHER WORKS: The Whole Family (with W. D. Howells, et al., 1907). Making Both Ends Meet (with S. A. Clark, 1911). Art and the Worth While (with R. M. Lovett, et al., 1929). The Satyr’s
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Children (1939). Two Fairy Tales: The Pursuit of Happiness and The Air Castle (n.d.). The manuscripts of Edith Franklin Wyatt are housed in the Newberry Library in Chicago, and include both correspondence and three boxes of published and unpublished works. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Boston Transcript (22 Dec. 1917). Harper’s (Oct. 1901). New York Tribune (11 Mar. 1923). North American Review (May 1903, Mar. 1917). Poetry (Jan. 1918). —SIDNEY H. BREMER
WYLIE, Elinor Hoyt Born 7 September 1885, Somerville, New Jersey; died 16 December 1928, New York, New York Daughter of Henry M. and Anne McMichael Hoyt; married Philip Hichborn, 1905; Horace Wylie, 1916 (divorced); William Rose Benét, 1923 Elinor Hoyt Wylie, the eldest of five children born into a socially and politically prominent family, grew up and attended private schools in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. Her elopement in 1910 with a married Washington lawyer, Horace Wylie, and abandonment of her husband and son became a highly publicized scandal. To escape the notoriety, the couple lived for a few years in England as Mr. and Mrs. Horace Waring. There she published—privately and anonymously—her first book of poetry, Incidental Numbers (1912). The pair returned to the U.S. before World War I, living first in Boston, then in Augusta, Georgia, and Washington, D.C. In Washington, Wylie became friendly with the writers William Rose Benét, Edmund Wilson, and John Dos Passos, who encouraged her to take her writing seriously. After separating from Wylie in 1921, she moved to New York and captivated the literary world with her beauty, elegance, conversation, and acid wit. She married Benét in 1923. During the eight years from 1921 until her death, Wylie served as a contributing editor of the New Republic and wrote short stories, literary criticism, four volumes of poetry, and four novels. Two of the latter derive from her great interest in the Romantic movement, especially in the poet Shelley. The Orphan Angel (1926) is a fantasy of Shelley searching across the expanding American West for a mysterious and beautiful woman. Mr. Hodge and Mr. Hazard (1928) recounts the decline of romanticism in the tale of ‘‘the last Romantic poet’’ confronting the bourgeois world of the Victorians. Much careful scholarship went into the backgrounds of these novels. Wylie’s talent is notable, but problematic. A tension between opposing impulses often led her to miss her mark; but when these tensions were confronted and developed, her work achieved its full potential in powerful poems of heightened irony. Wylie’s technical facility and taste for elegance produced in her novels and some of her verse a polished surface with little sustaining depth.
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No doubt aware of this, she called her first full-length novel, Jennifer Lorn (1923), ‘‘a sedate extravaganza.’’ One critic described it as ‘‘a dish of curds and cream flavored with saffron.’’ The book’s heroine is such a delicacy herself—elaborately confected, a visual delight, but entirely unsubstantial. One focus of the novel’s rather mild satire is society’s vision of women as decorative objects. The Venetian Glass Nephew (1925, reprinted 1984) concerns itself with the conflicting claims of art and nature, but thematic development is submerged to elegant sensual richness. Rosalba Berni undergoes the painful transformation into glass in order to become a suitable bride for the manufactured Virginio. One of the characters notes, ‘‘The result, although miraculous, is somewhat inhuman. I have known fathers who submitted their daughters to the ordeal, husbands who forced it upon their wives.’’ In her best poetry, Wylie dealt more pointedly with the conflicts that claimed her attention: the problem of the feeling self smoldering beneath its decorative surface. Statements of this theme appear in ‘‘Sleeping Beauty,’’ ‘‘Sanctuary,’’ ‘‘Where, O Where?,’’ ‘‘The Lie,’’ and ‘‘Full Moon.’’ In the last poem, the speaker, dressed elegantly in ‘‘silk and miniver,’’ cries, ‘‘There I walked, and there I raged; / The spiritual savage caged. . . .’’ Images of falsehood—masks, disguises, and costumes—convey the tension between beautiful exterior and turbulent interior, between felt passion and enforced restraint. Carl Van Vechten called Jennifer Lorn ‘‘the only successfully sustained satire in English with which I am acquainted.’’ Praise for her other works was equally adulatory. Recent criticism has been scanty and less favorable. The inclusion of Wylie in recently published anthologies of women poets indicates a reawakening of appreciation; it is time for her to receive a full-scale literary reappraisal. OTHER WORKS: Nets to Catch the Wind (1921). Black Armour (1923). Angels and Earthly Creatures (1928). Trivial Breath
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(1928). Collected Poems of Elinor Wylie (1932). Collected Prose of Elinor Wylie (1933). Last Poems of Elinor Wylie (1943, 1982). The Beineke Rare Book and Manuscript Collection at Yale University holds papers of Elinor Wylie and William Rose Benét; in addition, Wylie’s correspondence is also housed with that of the Hoyt family in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Auchincloss, L., The Man Behind the Book: Literary Profiles (1996). Blanck, J., Bibliography of American Literature (1991). Colum, M., Life and the Dream (1947). Farr, J. The Life and Art of Elinor Wylie (1983). Gaggke, C. T. et al, eds., Poetry Criticism: Excerpts from Criticism of the Works of the Most Significant and Widely Studied Poets of World Literature, Volume 23 (1999). Gray, T. A., Elinor Wylie (1969). Gregory, H., and M. Zaturenska, A History of American Poetry, 1900-1940 (1942). Howe, F., ed., No More Masks! An Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Women Poets, Newly Revised and Expanded (1993). Hoyt, N., Elinor Wylie: The Portrait of an Unknown Lady (1935). Kazin, A., On Native Grounds (1942). Olson, S., Elinor Wylie: A Life Apart (1979). Philip, N., ed., Singing America (1995). Ruihley, G. R., An Anthology of Great U.S. Women Poets, 1850-1990: Temples and Palaces (1997). Van Doren, C., Three Worlds (1936). Walker, C., Masks Outrageous and Austere: Culture, Psyche, and Persona in Modern Women Poets (1991). West, R., Ending in Earnest (1931). Wilson, E., The Shores of Light (1952). Woodard, D., This More Fragile Boundary: The Female Subject and the Romance Plot in the Texts of Millay, Wylie, Teasdale, Bogan (dissertation, 1993). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Dial (June 1923). ES (Dec. 1938). NR (5 Dec. 1923, 6 Feb. 1929, 7 Sept. 1932). PMLA (1941). VQR (July 1930). —KAREN F. STEIN
Y YAMADA, Mitsuye Born 5 July 1923, Fukuoka, Japan Daughter of Jack K. and Hide Shirake Yasutake; married Yoshikazu Yamada, 1950; children: Jeni, Stephen, Douglas, Hedi Mitsuye Yamada was born in Japan of naturalized Japanese American parents and lived in Seattle, Washington, until the outbreak of World War II, when her family was relocated to the concentration camp at Minidoka, Iowa. Yamada left the camp to attend school at the University of Cincinnati and New York University (B.A., 1947). She earned an M.A. from the University of Chicago in 1953 and did further graduate study at the University of California at Irvine. A professor of English, Yamada taught in California at Fullerton College (1966-69) and at Cypress College from 1969 until her retirement in 1989. She has received several awards, including the Vesta award for writing from the Woman’s Building of Los Angeles (1982) and the Women of Achievement award from the Rancho Santiago Foundation (1991). Yamada’s poetry, essays, and short fiction have appeared in numerous anthologies and periodicals, and she has published two books: Camp Notes and Other Poems (1976, 1992, 1998) and Desert Run: Poems and Stories (1988, reissued 1992). Her work is driven by her experience as a Japanese American woman growing up in 20th-century American society; in ‘‘Invisibility is an Unnatural Disaster,’’ she claims membership in ‘‘the most stereotyped minority of them all, the Asian American woman.’’ Her poetry and stories are charged with her sense of a double or divided identity, while her essays confront issues of race, gender, and justice that profoundly affect Asian American lives. Some of Yamada’s earliest poems, written during her internment, are included in Camp Notes. The short lines, simple stanzas, and matter-of-fact tone initially belie the poems’ complexity, but the cumulative documentation of the daily indignities of camp life exposes the fundamental absurdity of the camps’ existence. In the title poem of her later book, Desert Run, Yamada returns to the desert ‘‘with new eyes’’ for a reconsideration of the camp experience, and she discovers that ‘‘as an older Asian American woman [she has] come to identify with the desert.’’ The poems and stories in this volume also explore the writer’s connections to Japan and portray the cultural, generational, and sexual miscommunications between issei and nisei (first- and second-generation Japanese Americans) and between women and men. Yamada maintains that Japanese Americans must acknowledge their often painful history in order to claim their identify. Because she believes that ‘‘art is a powerful force in effecting personal as well as social and political change,’’ Yamada views her own writing as a means to exorcize racism and sexism and to create a more truly multicultural society. She actively supports
other ethnic writers and artists; she has been an officer of MELUS (the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States), the founder of the Multi-Cultural Women Writers of Orange County, and the editor of two collections of ethnic literature. Yamada has also served on the national board of directors for the human rights organization, Amnesty International. OTHER WORKS: The Webs We Weave: Orange County Poetry Anthology (with J. Brander, eds., 1986). Sowing Ti Leaves: Writings by Multicultural Women (with S. S. Hylkema, eds., 1991). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Rountree, C., On Women Turning 70: Honoring the Voices of Wisdom (1999). Yamamoto, T., Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American Women, Identity, and the Body (1999). Reference works: CA (1979). FC (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Amerasia Journal (1991). Contact Two (1986). MELUS (Spring 1988). Tozai Times (Mar. 1989). ‘‘Mitsuye and Nellie [Wong]: Asian American Poets,’’ Light-Saraf Films, Public Broadcasting System (1981). Mitsuye and Nellie: AsianAmerican Poets (video, 1981). Mitsuye Yamada (audiocassette, 1992). ‘‘A Woman is Talking to Death,’’ an interview by Stan Yogi (audiotape, with Judy Grahn, KPFA, 1991). —SUSAN B. RICHARDSON
YAMAMOTO, Hisaye Born 23 August 1921, Redondo Beach, California Wrote under: Napoleon Daughter of Kanzo and Sae Tamura Yamamoto; married Anthony DeSoto, 1955; children: Paul, Kibo, Elizabeth, Anthony, Claude Hisaye Yamamoto has been described as ‘‘not just one of the best Nisei [second-generation Japanese American] writers, not just one of the best Asian American writers, but. . .among the best short story writers today.’’ Although she has written short stories over a span of more than 50 years, her work long remained relatively unknown. Most of it, which also includes some essays and poems, has appeared in West Coast Japanese American newspapers, literary magazines, and World War II camp publications. It was only with the publication of Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories (1994, reprinted 1998)—a collection of 15 stories dating from 1948 to 1987—that Yamamoto’s work became generally accessible to American readers. Yamamoto has tended to minimize her identity as a writer; in interviews she underscores the importance of her family life and
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describes herself as a housewife. Yet Yamamoto was among the first Japanese American writers to reach a national audience after World War II and one of the early few to receive national acclaim. During the late 1940s and 1950s, when anti-Japanese sentiment inhibited the publication of work by Japanese Americans, her stories appeared in such major journals as Partisan Review, Harper’s Bazaar, Furioso, and the Kenyon Review. Four stories from this period were included on Martha Foley’s annual list of ‘‘Distinctive Short Stories,’’ and ‘‘Yoneko’s Earthquake’’ (1951) was selected for Foley’s 1952 collection of the Best American Short Stories. Yamamoto was awarded a John Hay Whitney Opportunity Fellowship in 1949 to support her writing. In 1952 she declined a Stanford (University) Writing Fellowship in order to join the Catholic Worker in New York. She received the 1986 American Book Award for lifetime achievement from the Before Columbus Foundation. When pressed, Yamamoto will admit to having her ‘‘little madness’’ for writing, and she concedes ‘‘if somebody told me I couldn’t write, it would probably grieve me very much.’’ Born to immigrant parents, Yamamoto grew up on her father’s strawberry farms among the Japanese American agricultural community of Southern California. She began publishing stories when she was still in her teens under the pen name ‘‘Napoleon.’’ Before World War II, she earned an associate of arts degree at Compton Junior College, and she was writing columns for a Japanese American newspaper when the evacuation order relocated her family to the internment camp at Poston, Arizona. During her almost three years in Poston (1942-44), Yamamoto continued writing stories and columns for the camp paper, the Poston Chronicle. After the war, she worked three years for an African American newspaper, the Los Angeles Tribune, and spent several years writing full time before moving to New York in 1952 to join Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker community on their Staten Island farm. Returning to Southern California in 1954, she married and subsequently combined writing with rearing five children. Her work has appeared regularly in West Coast publications, and she has continued a tradition established in the 1950s of contributing to the annual holiday literary issue of Rafu Shimpo. Yamamoto gives readings from her work throughout the country. Hot Summer Winds, a 1991 film shown on PBS’ American Playhouse, was based on two of Yamamoto’s stories. Yamamoto’s carefully crafted stories—delicate yet dense, small in scale but multilayered, spare of language yet laced with irony—portray the Japanese American experience. They are told by Japanese American narrators, most of them second-generation (nisei) women like Yamamoto herself; the narrator’s age and the time and place of events tend to parallel the author’s own life. Although not overtly political, the stories touch on issues of racism and the distribution of power in American society. OTHER WORKS: Contributor to numerous anthologies and collections, including: Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (1983, 1999); Images of Women in Literature (1991); Imagining America: Stories from the Promised Land (1991); Short Stories by Japanese American Writers (1991); Charlie
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Chan is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction (1993); Growing Up Asian American: An Anthology (1993); Where Coyotes Howl and Wind Blows Free: Growing Up in the West (1995); Into the Fire: Asian American Prose (1996). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bloom, H., ed., Asian American Women Writers (1997). Bloom, H., ed., Asian-American Writers (1999). Cheung, K., Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa (1993). Cheung, K., and S. Yogi, eds., Asian American Literature: An Annotated Bibliography (1988). Hong, K. W., ‘‘Interethnic and Interracial Relations in the Short Stories of Hisaye Yamamoto’’ (thesis, 1995). Ignacio-Zimardi, J. T., ‘‘Self-Discovery and Subversive Expressions in Four Asian American Narratives’’ (thesis, 1993). Lim, S. and A. Ling, eds., Reading the Literatures of Asian America (1992). Pollack, H., ed., Having Our Way: Women Rewriting Tradition in Twentieth-Century America (1995). Schweik, S. A Gulf So Deeply Cut: American Women Poets and the Second World War (1991). Truchlar, L., ed., Opening up Literary Criticism: Essays on American Prose and Poetry (1986). Yogi, S. S., ‘‘Legacies Revealed: Uncovering Buried Plots in the Stories of Hisaye Yamamoto and Wakako Yamauchi’’ (thesis, 1988). Reference works: Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context (1982). Asian American Literature: Reviews and Criticism of Works by American Writers of Asian Descent (1999). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Amerasia Journal (1990). American Literature (1999). Calyx (Summer 1992). Chicago Review (1993). Comparative Literature Studies (1996). East-West Film Journal (July 1993). International Examiner Literary Supplement (19 July 1989). MELUS (Fall 1980, Spring 1987). Modern Language Notes (1995). Studies in American Fiction (Autumn 1989). Sunbury (1981). Tozai Times (March 1989). —SUSAN B. RICHARDSON
YAMANAKA, Lois-Ann Born 7 September 1961, Ho’olchua, Molokai, Hawaii Daughter of Harry and Jean Yamanaka; married John Inferrera; children: John Lois-Ann Yamanaka was raised in the sugar plantation town of Pahala, Hawaii, by Japanese American parents. Yamanaka, the eldest of four daughters, grew up speaking pidgin, the dialect of working-class Hawaiians, as her first language. Formally known as Hawaii Creole English, pidgin originated with the influx of immigrant laborers from Japan, China, and the Philippines during the 19th century. Despite the fact that her mother was a teacher and her father a school administrator turned taxidermist, Yamanaka felt inferior to middle-class Japanese Americans who did not speak pidgin.
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Yamanaka received a B.A. in education from the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 1983 and a masters in education from the same university in 1987. She credits poet Morgan Blair, one of her instructors, with helping her to overcome her fear of writing in pidgin. Blair introduced her to African American writers like Ntozake Shange and Thulani Davis who successfully wrote in dialect. Yamanaka was also encouraged by the members of Bamboo Ridge, a literary publishing collective formed in 1978 to encourage works by local-born authors of all ethnicities. Yamanaka’s first book, Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre (1993) is a collection of four verse novellas whose narrators are working-class Hawaiian teenagers. This debut work explores many of the issues Yamanaka is know for throughout her writing—ethnic identity, sexual development, peer pressure, self-hatred, and drug use. Yamanaka received critical praise for her first book and won several awards, including the Asian American Studies National Book Award, a Carnegie Foundation grant, and a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship, enabling her to take a sabbatical from her teaching position in order to write full time. She received a Pushcart Prize the same year for her novella Yarn Wig. Yet many Hawaiian educators criticized Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre for its use of pidgin and its profanity. Of particular concern to educators was a passage in which a young girl repeats local stereotypes about Filipino men. Yamanaka was uninvited from several speaking engagements and her book was banned at many Hawaiian schools. Yamanaka’s next work, Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers (1996), is told in the pidgin dialect of narrator Lovey Nariyoshi, a Japanese American teenager in Hilo, Hawaii, during the 1970s. The story, which consists of a series of loosely collected anecdotes, revolves around Lovey’s desire to be thin and Caucasian like the teen idols in her fan magazines. Yamanaka’s other works also reveal the extent to which American culture has pervaded Hawaiian youth and replaced adherence to the traditions and customs of many ethnic groups with an affection for pop music, fast food, and Hollywood movies. Like Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre, Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers also explores issues of class and ethnicity. Racism among different ethnic groups is a theme throughout the book as Lovey picks on a young Filipino girl in order to feel better about herself. Although Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers was nominated for an Asian American Studies National Book Award, criticism of the book within the association was so fierce no award was granted in 1996. Yamanaka’s third book, Blu’s Hanging (1997), centers on its thirteen-year-old narrator, Ivah Ogata, her eight-year-old brother Blu, and her five-year-old sister, Maisie. The plot focuses on their attempts to come to terms with both their mother’s death and their poverty-stricken lives. Ivah, who narrates in pidgin, watches helplessly as her father turns to drugs, Blu is sexually abused and develops an eating disorder, and Maisie quits speaking. The book’s criminal and morally bankrupt characters are both Filipino and Japanese, which made Yamanaka’s critics furious. She was awarded the 1998 Asian American Studies National Book Award for Blu’s Hanging against her detractors’ wishes, but the award was rescinded almost immediately.
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Heads by Harry (1999) is another of Yamanaka’s coming-of-age in Hawaii tales and has the most richly drawn characters of her books to date. The title takes its name from the Yagyuu family’s taxidermy shop in Hilo. Sixteen-year-old underachiever Toni Yagyuu is from an offbeat but primarily stable family. The book, which is narrated in pidgin, revolves around Toni’s relationship with her homosexual older brother, Sheldon, and beautiful younger sister, Bunny, who dreams of marrying a haole (Caucasian). The siblings grow older and share an apartment at college. Toni deals with a host of unexpected problems, including addiction, pregnancy, and poor grades. Like many of Yamanaka’s characters, Toni has a wry sense of humor that sustains her throughout her troubles. Yamanaka’s recent work, Name Me Nobody (1999), is aimed at a younger audience than her previous works. The protagonist is thirteen-year-old Emi-Lou, who is overweight and whose only friends are her grandmother and her friend, Von. Emi-Lou struggles to overcome the nickname ‘‘Lumpy,’’ given at school. She also tries to maintain her friendship with Von as the two grow older and it appears Von might be gay. Yamanaka asserts that her work represents a more realistic picture of Hawaii than the ‘‘exotification’’ the islands receive in the mainstream media. Yamanaka’s writing serves as an effective and just condemnation of the poverty and despair of Hawaii’s immigrant minorities. She sees her books as helping to reclaim Hawaii’s identity from the haole culture that has dominated the islands for the last several centuries. She also views her writing as a bridge linking pidgin-speaking students with literature to which they can relate. Yamanaka is a fierce defender of pidgin and a critic of what she sees as government attempts to eradicate the language. ‘‘Linguistic identity and cultural identity are skin and flesh. When you sever one from the other, you make it not okay to be who you are’’ (quoted in the Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service). Yamanaka’s unique voice makes it very clear she knows exactly who she is and that she is proud of it. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1998). Other references: Atlantic Monthly (Feb. 1999). Harper’s Bazaar (Apr. 1997). Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service (28 Feb. 1996). Nation (1 Mar. 1999). Newsweek (17 Aug. 1998). People (26 May 1997). —LEAH J. SPARKS
YATES, Elizabeth Born 6 December 1905, Buffalo, New York Daughter of Harry and Mary Duffy Yates; married William McGreal, 1929 (died 1963) Long summers on her father’s farm south of Buffalo were the most memorable days of Elizabeth Yates’ childhood and youth. After graduation from high school, she worked in New York City for three years, writing as much as possible. In 1929 she moved
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with her husband to London, where she continued her apprentice work, writing articles, book reviews, and short stories. Her first book was published in England in 1938. Because of her husband’s failing eyesight, the couple returned to the U.S. in 1939, bought a small farm in New Hampshire, restored a century-old farmhouse, and created a new life focused around her writing, his work for the blind, and the fields and woodlands they both enjoyed. Yates’ The Lighted Heart (1960) tells of this part of her life. Although her husband died in 1963, she has continued to live in New Hampshire, the setting of many of her works. She has been a staff member at writers’ conferences and has received several honorary degrees as well as the Sarah Josepha Hale Award (1970) for a ‘‘distinguished author whose work and life reflect the literary tradition of New England.’’ In Patterns on the Wall (1943), which received the New York Herald Tribune Spring Festival Award, a kind-hearted itinerant painter who decorates rooms with stenciled designs is held responsible for the severe weather of 1816 and tried for witchcraft. In Hue and Cry (1953, reprinted 1991), the same painter-farmer risks position and property 20 years later to befriend a disillusioned immigrant youth who has stolen a valuable horse. Mountain Born (1943), a Newbery honor book, and A Place for Peter (1952, latest reissue 1994), a Boys’ Clubs of America gold medal winner, depict the quiet, pastoral life on a sheep farm. The earlier book presents a detailed picture of the shepherd’s life; the latter shows other farm activities, such as clearing brush and making maple syrup, and explores a growing boy’s relationship with his father. Amos Fortune, Free Man (1950, reissue 1989), the fictionalized biography of an obscure man of great strength and dignity, won the Newbery Medal in 1951 and the William Allen White Award in 1953. Born the son of a king in Africa, Fortune lived as a slave in Massachusetts until he was able to buy his freedom at the age of sixty. After purchasing the freedom of other slaves, including his wife and her daughter, he moved to New Hampshire, where he operated a tannery for 20 years and became a respected member of the community. Carolina’s Courage (1964, 1989) records the adventures of a small girl during the long trip by covered wagon from New Hampshire to Nebraska Territory. After she gives her doll, her only personal possession, to a Native American girl, the settlers receive a friendly welcome to the territory. Sarah Whitcher’s Story (1971) is based on a published account of a little girl, lost in the woods, who was befriended by a black bear. Rainbow Round the World (1954), an interpretation of the work of UNICEF, won the Jane Addams Award for promotion of peace and world community. In Someday You’ll Write (1962), Yates advises young people about practicing the writer’s craft. In her adult fiction, Yates writes about social and racial prejudice, emotional illness, and attempted suicide, but the books are suffused with an atmosphere of serenity, hope, and idealism rare in contemporary literature. Problems are resolved through the help of an understanding friend, through inspiration drawn from secular or religious literature, or through communion with nature.
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Yates has also written biographies of the writer Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Howard Thurman, and Prudence Crandall, a courageous young woman who, in 1833, established a school for black girls in Canterbury, Connecticut. The latter was written for children. Yates’ writings are characterized by a faith in the nobility of people, love of nature and all creatures, family affection, religious belief, and detailed descriptions of crafts and occupations. Although she has written fiction and nonfiction for both children and adults, she is best known for her award-winning juvenile books. Though in her nineties, Yates has continued to write throughout the last decade of the century. Her recent book, Open the Door: A Gathering of Poems and Prose Pieces was published in 1999. Additionally, Yates was honored with an ‘‘Ageless Heroes’’ plaque from Blue Cross/Blue Shield of New Hampshire in March 1999 for her continuing creativity and ‘‘vitality.’’ A proponent of community involvement, Yates has served on the Board of New Hampshire Association for the Blind for 25 years, and as a trustee of the Peterborough Town Library for 22 years. She still makes appearances in schools, and has donated 40 acres of land and her home in Peterborough for the creation of the Shieling Forest Learning Center.
OTHER WORKS: Gathered Grace (1938). High Holiday (1938). Climbing Higher (1939). Hans and Frieda (1939). Haven for the Brave (1941). Around the Year in Iceland (1942). Under the Little Fir (1942). Wind of Spring (1945). Nearby (1947). Once in the Year (1947). Beloved Bondage (1948). The Young Traveller in the U.S.A. (1948). Children of the Bible (1950). Guardian Heart (1950). Brave Interval (1952). David Livingstone (1953). Prudence Crandall, Woman of Courage (1955, 1996). The Carey Girl (1956). Pebble in a Pool: The Widening Circles of Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s Life (1958; reissued as The Lady from Vermont, 1971). The Next Fine Day (1962, 1994). Sam’s Secret Journal (1964). Howard Thurman: Portrait of a Practical Dreamer (1964). Up the Golden Stair: An Approach to a Deeper Understanding of Life Through Personal Sorrow (1966, 1990). Is There a Doctor in the Barn? A Day in the Life of Forrest F. Tenney, D.V.M. (1966, 1994). An Easter Story (1967). With Paddle, Pipe, and Song: A Story of the French-Canadian Voyageurs (1968, 1998). New Hampshire (1969). On that Night (1969). The Road Through Sandwich Notch (1973). Skeezer, Dog with a Mission (1973). We, the People (1974). A Book of Hours (1976, 1989). Call It Zest (1977). My Diary—My World (1981). My Widening World (1983). One Writer’s Way (1984). The Journeyman (1990). Sound Friendships: The Story of Willa and Her Hearing Ear Dog (1992). A Place for Peter (1996). Spanning Time: A Diary Keeper Becomes a Writer (1996). Swiss Holiday (1996). Iceland Adventure (1997).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Arbuthnot, M. H., and Z. Sutherland, Children and Books (1972). Greenberg, M. H. and Waugh, C., eds., A Newbery Christmas: Fourteen Stories of Christmas by Newbery Award-Winning Authors (1998). Hoffman, M., and E. Samuels, eds., Authors and Illustrators of Children’s Books (1972). MacCann, D., and G. Woodward, The Black American in Books
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for Children (1972). Vaughn, R., Elizabeth Yates’ On That Night: Stageplay (1978). Reference works: Junior Book of Authors (1951). Newbery Medal Books: 1922-1955 (1955). SATA (1973). Other references: Meet the Newbery Author: Elizabeth Yates McGreal (filmstrip, Miller-Brody Productions, 1976). —ALICE BELL SALO
YEZIERSKA, Anzia Born circa 1880, Plinsk, Russian Poland; died 21 November 1970, Ontario, California Daughter of Baruch and Pearl Yezierska; married Jacob Gordon, 1910; Arnold Levitas, 1911; children: one daughter Anzia Yezierska was born into the poverty and orthodoxy of an East European shtetl. When her large family came to the Lower East Side of New York in the 1890s, her father clung to his life of full-time Talmudic study and the wife and children supported the family. Yezierska had little opportunity for formal education; she worked in sweatshops and laundries and learned what she could from night school English classes and borrowed books. A scholarship enabled her to attend a training program for domestic science teachers, and from 1905 to 1913 she taught cooking in an elementary school. Her determination to rise from the dirt and drudgery of poverty to ‘‘make from herself a person’’ led to an early break with her family, the failure of two brief marriages, and the surrender of her daughter to the father’s care. A meeting with John Dewey, then dean at Columbia Teachers College, led to a romantic involvement that Yezierska wrote about repeatedly, in disguised form, in her later fiction. Dewey wrote a number of poems to Yezierska during the years 1917 and 1918; two of these unearthed poems appear in Yezierska’s books of 1932 and 1950, attributed only to the Dewey-figures ‘‘Henry Scott’’ and ‘‘John Morrow.’’ Yezierska published her first short story in 1915; in the next decade her stories appeared in respected magazines. Edward J. O’Brien praised ‘‘The Fat of the Land’’ as the best short story of 1919. When Hollywood bought the film rights to the short story collection Hungry Hearts and Other Stories (1920, reissued 1985) and also hired Yezierska as a salaried writer, the impoverished immigrant became overnight a wealthy celebrity.
America of poverty and exploitation while they search for the ‘‘real’’ America of their ideals. The stories, like all of her fiction, are realistic, passionate, occasionally autobiographical, sometimes formless and overwrought; their effusive language suggests the style and intonation of an immigrant speaker. Women are the chief protagonists—women whose bodies are tied to sweatshop or household drudgery but whose spirits hunger for love, beauty, and some measure of independence, self-expression, and dignity. In Salomé of the Tenements (1922), her first novel, she exhibits more passion than craftsmanship. It explores the attraction between two of Yezierska’s stock character types: the ‘‘Russian Jewess,’’ idealistic and emotional, and the rational, aloof, ‘‘born American’’ male. Sonya Vrunsky, poor girl of the ghetto, marries wealthy John Manning. But Sonya is not happy; she renounces her marriage and seeks to build an independent life based on her own talents. Yezierska prefaces the short story collection Children of Loneliness (1923) with a revealing essay, ‘‘Mostly about Myself,’’ in which she discusses her tortured efforts to write. The nine stories themselves are similar in style and substance to those of Hungry Hearts. They deal with conflicts between old- and new-world values, the insensitivity and ineptness of social service agencies, the corrupting influence of materialism, and the spiritual hunger of the poor. Bread Givers (1925, reprinted 1975) is an autobiographical novel about a dominating, unbending Talmudic scholar and his daughter’s struggle to break free of subservient roles and to forge for herself an independent, fulfilling life. It is worth rediscovering. Arrogant Beggar (1927, reprinted 1996) mixes social criticism with sentimentality for an effect that is at once trite and moving. Adele Lindner is from a poor neighborhood on New York’s East Side; her gratitude to the Hellman Home for Working Girls turns to disgust with the patronizing attitudes and policies of her rich benefactors. She denounces the home and finds true charity and a satisfying life among her own people. All I Could Never Be (1932), Yezierska’s last and not very successful novel, is at least a useful companion piece to her autobiography. Its heroine is the intense and idealistic Fanya Ivanowna; in her unsuccessful but obsessive romance with an older professor, her writing career which first blossoms and then fades, and her lonely search for a meaningful life and for satisfying human contact, she lives a fictionalized version of Yezierska’s own experiences.
But Yezierska could not write in materialistic Hollywood. She wrote productively in New York for a few more years, but by the time she lost her money in the Depression, she had also lost her creative inspiration. She joined the Work Projects Administration (WPA) Writers Project in the 1930s; published an autobiography in 1950 and then a few stories about old age; and was poor and forgotten long before her death in 1970.
Since Yezierska’s fiction is frequently autobiographical, it is perhaps not surprising that her autobiography, Red Ribbon on a White Horse (1950, reprinted in 1981 and 1987), is semifictional. Autobiographical data is selectively presented and unreliable, but the book is interesting for its discussion of the bureaucratic absurdities of the WPA and for its account of Yezierska’s painful attempts to come to terms with herself, her values, and her immigrant Jewish heritage, and to find some real happiness and peace.
In Hungry Hearts, 10 stories of Lower East Side life, Yezierska’s immigrant characters struggle with the disillusioning
Yezierska was not a master of style, plot development, or characterization, but the intensity of feeling and aspiration evident
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in her narratives often transcends the stylistic imperfections. Her work deserves consideration as one of the few chronicles of the immigrant experience from a woman’s viewpoint and as an early attempt in American fiction to present the struggles of women against family, religious injunctions, and social and economic obstacles to create for themselves an independent identity. OTHER WORKS: The Open Cage: An Anzia Yezierska Collection (1979). How I Found America: Collected Stories of Anzia Yezierska (1991). Contributor to several anthologies including: Women of Valor: The Struggle Against the Great Depression As Told in Their Own Life Stories (1990), Imagining America: Stories From the Promised Land (1991), Women’s Friendships: A Collection of Short Stories (1991), Growing Up Female: Stories by Women Writers From the American Mosaic (1993), Oxford Book of Jewish Stories (1998), The Urban Muse: Stories on the American City (1998), and others. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Batker, C. J., Ethnic Women’s Literature and Politics: The Cultural Construction of Gender in Early 20thCentury America (dissertation, 1993). Baum, C., et al., The Jewish Woman in America (1975). Bloom, H., ed., Jewish Women Fiction Writers (1998). Burstein, J., Writing Mothers, Writing Daughters: Tracing the Maternal in Stories by American Jewish Women (1996). Hendriksen, L. L., Anzia Yezierska: A Writer’s Life (1991). Hendriksen, L. L., How I Found America: The Collected Stories of Anzia Yezierska (1991). Jackson, P. Beyond Gender: Constructing Women’s Middle-Class Subjectivity in the Fiction of Wharton, Austin, Yezierska, and Hurston (dissertation, 1997). Konzett, D. C., Diasporic Modernisms: Displacement and Ethnicity in Anzia Yezierska, Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Rhys (dissertation, 1997). Sigerman, H. M., Daughters of the Book: A Study of Gender and Ethnicity in the Lives of Three American Jewish Women (dissertation, 1993). Sullivan, R. M., Anzia Yezierska: An American Writer (dissertation, 1975). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCA, TCAS. Other references: Bookman (Nov. 1923). Judaism (Fall 1993). MELUS (1980). NYT (23 Nov. 1970, 6 Apr. 1978, 27 Apr. 1978, 24 Feb. 1980). Social Education (Jan. 1995). Studies in American Jewish Literature (Winter 1975, 1997, 1998). —PEGGY STINSON
YGLESIAS, Helen Born 29 March 1915, New York, New York Daughter of Solomon B. and Kate Goldstein Bassine; married Bernard Cole, 1937 (divorced); Jose Yglesias, 1950 (divorced); children: Tamara, Lewis, Rafael In her autobiographical sketch in Starting Early, Anew, Over, and Late (1978), Yglesias describes herself as the youngest in a
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family of seven children (four sisters and two brothers) growing up in a crowded New York apartment overflowing with relatives. Her father, a Jewish immigrant, was hard-pressed to provide for his family on the earnings from his neighborhood grocery. By the time she was sixteen both of Yglesias’ parents were invalids and America was in the midst of the Great Depression. She began to write a novel hoping to save the family financially; her older brother told her nobody would be interested in what she was writing, and Yglesias destroyed the manuscript. She recalled that her mother, watching her, grieved, ‘‘What are you doing to yourself: you’re killing yourself. Stop killing yourself.’’ It was almost 40 years before Yglesias was able to recapture the career she destroyed with her first unfinished novel. During those years she worked in a print shop, became a member of the Young Communist League, married a union official who became a photographer, and became a wife and mother. Divorced and remarried at thirty-four, Yglesias remained at home, caring for children and doing political work until she was well into her forties. Then, after a few unrewarding jobs, she became the assistant to the literary editor of the Nation. When he died, Yglesias took over the job and worked there for five years (1965-70) before leaving New York and moving to Maine to begin her writing career. Her career was heralded by the publication of How She Died (1972), which won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship. The novel chronicles the last days of Mary Moody Schwartz, a young radical activist who is dying of cancer. The book focuses not simply on the death of a single individual, but on the possibility of the death of a group—political death. More important, perhaps, than the dying Mary is her best friend, Jean, who becomes entangled in a love affair with Mary’s husband. Jean watches while her friend becomes schizophrenic and is briefly incarcerated in an asylum. The object of her own children’s neurotic needs, Jean tries, with the best will but with little effect, to make Mary’s dying meaningful. Skillfully interwoven with the story of Mary’s death is the story of the radicals who had tried to free Mary’s mother from prison and who, during Mary’s deathwatch, try to free themselves from their own failures. Yglesias’s first book, the one she said she had waited decades to write, is a densely packed novel with sharp attention to the minute, oftenhidden, details of her characters’ lives, a clear sense of place and politics, and the sympathy of one who has lived long for one who is dying young. Her second novel, Family Feeling (1976), while disclaiming the representation of any real persons, has a distinctly autobiographical flavor. Anne Goddard, the youngest daughter of Jewish immigrants, lives her childhood beneath the Myrtle Avenue El and listens to her mother’s stories. She is torn between trying to escape her immigrant past and trying to come to terms with the love her mother gave her so unstintingly. Family conflicts, especially with one son, Barry, who is determined to make it big in America, threaten to unravel the Goddards’ lives, and the murder of Anne’s husband, Guy Rossiter, sends her home to Fort Greene in search of the past she has tried to forget. The novel’s climax, in Barry’s penthouse office overlooking the lights of New York
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City, is Anne’s attempt at reconciliation while still maintaining what she has won for herself.
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Yglesias’ third novel, Sweetsir (1981), uses a series of journalistic flashbacks to reveal the character of Morgan Beauchamp Sweetsir, a brutal, abusive husband who was fatally stabbed by his wife, Sally Stark Sweetsir, who is on trial for his murder. More important than just the story are the issues women face in their relationships with men. The questions of wife beating, the need many women have to stay with abusive husbands, and the roles women make for themselves in marriage are all painted with the deft hand of one who knows how to tell a story.
Born 17 December 1826, Greenfield, Saratoga County, New York; died death date unknown Daughter of Vincent and Catherine Scofield Youmans
With The Saviors (1987), Yglesias returns once again to the questions of her own political past and to the issues of culture and ethnicity that filled her first two novels. The central question of the novel asks why people whose political goals are admirable are often less than admirable in their daily lives. Lionized by the political left for their life’s work, Maddy Brewster Phillips and her husband, Dwight, are on their last political march. Maddy remembers her life with the Society of the Universal Brotherhood and with her lover, Vidhya, who has turned the principles of the society to his own ends. In one last effort to understand her life, Maddy says to her husband, ‘‘We’re old, two old people. Death is right ahead of us, a step away. If we don’t accept reality now, then when?’’ It is with this plea for reality that Maddy realizes only ‘‘love and faith and truth’’ matter to her, not the lies of her past or the myths the young make up about her. Yglesias’ nonfiction work, Starting Early, Anew, Over, and Late, not only reveals her own struggle to become a writer, but also chronicles the struggles of others who found their way at different stages in their lives. The first section, ‘‘Starting Early,’’ features her son, Rafael Yglesias, a published novelist at age seventeen. ‘‘Starting Anew’’ and ‘‘Starting Over’’ focus on female and male ways of beginning again. ‘‘Starting Late’’ tells Yglesias’ story and that of Helen and Scott Nearing, whose lives harmonized two central movements of the 20th century, socialism and ecology. Isabel Bishop (1988) is a vivid appreciation of the life and work of one of America’s outstanding women artists whose compelling portraits of working women Yglesias had long admired. In 1996 Yglesias published Semblant, followed by The Girls in 1999. Though starting late at the career she knew from her youth she was well suited for, this experience has given her an eye to see beyond the surface of people’s lives into the essential truths of what it means to be human in the late 20th century. Now in her mid-eighties, she shows few signs of slowing down. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Blumberg, B. L., ‘‘A Voice of Their Own—An Inquiry into the Theme of the Discovery of the True Self in the Writings of Helen Yglesias, Muriel Rukeyser, and Tillie Olsen’’ (thesis, 1982). Reference works: CA 37-40 (1979). CANR (1985). CLC (1977, 1982). FC (1990). —MARY A. McCAY
Eliza Ann Youmans’ father was a farmer and mechanic. As a young girl, she enabled her brother, Edward Livingston, to pursue his scientific studies despite his near blindness by reading to him and assisting in his experimentation; he founded and edited Popular Science Monthly, and a younger brother became a noted physician. Like her brothers, Youmans worked to disseminate scientific knowledge through writing and education. She hoped to establish botany as a fourth fundamental branch of education (with reading, writing, and arithmetic) to correct the ‘‘almost total lack of any systematic cultivation of the observing powers.’’ Botany seemed the most suitable discipline to advance independent analysis and reasoned judgement because of its abundant and ever varying materials and precise vocabulary. The First Book of Botany (1870) develops a new method of study founded on systematic observation and independent thought. It is copiously illustrated and written with the assumption that field samples are in hand. There were six editions of the book and a sequel for more advanced study, The Second Book of Botany (1873). This more close and thorough study introduces scientific notation; methods of gathering, pressing, and mounting specimens; and an explanation of plant processes. In the introduction, Youmans explains her wish to remedy the common faults of ‘‘carelessness in observation, looseness in the application of words, hasty inferences from partial data, and lack of method in the contents of the mind.’’ The appendix, ‘‘On the Educational Claims of Botany,’’ describes the natural laws of mental growth and their affinity to the study of botany. To supplement the study of botany, Youmans adapted Henslow’s Botanical Charts (1873) for American use by substituting native plants for English species not found in the U.S. and enlarging the diagram for classroom use. After the favorable reception of her translations in Popular Science Monthly of the lectures of Armand de Quatrefages de Breau on the newly established field of anthropology, the series was collected in The Natural History of Man: A Course of Elementary Lectures (1875). Again, her concern is for a basic discussion of important scientific disciplines. The unity of the human species, the antiquity and origin of man (in which the theory of evolution was refuted), and human races and cultures are covered. Youmans includes an essay explaining evolution to present a balanced treatment of a controversial issue. Youmans’ interest in practical self-instruction and the systemization of basic skills led her to adapt the English handbook, Lessons on Cookery (1879); she includes an appendix on diet. In Appleton’s series of science textbooks, she combined her earlier works on botany in Descriptive Botany (1885) and abridged the series’ sequel to her book Bently’s Physiological Botany (1886). Youmans’ commitment to the application of scientific
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knowledge to everyday life encompassed kitchen and classroom. She realized the potential value of systematic scientific study at an early age and of a general understanding of basic scientific principles, and her insights into the educational process are incorporated into teaching methods today. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: AA. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography (1889). CAL. A Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors (1871). A Dictionary of American Authors (1905). A Dictionary of North American Authors Deceased Before 1950 (1951). NCAB. A Supplement to Allibone’s Critical Dictionary (1891). —ELIZABETH ROBERTS
YOUNG, Ann Eliza (Webb) Born 13 September 1844, Nauvoo, Illinois; died after 1908 Daughter of Chauncey and Eliza Churchill Webb; married James L. Dee, 1863 (divorced 1865); Brigham Young, 1869 (divorced 1873); Moses R. Denning, 1883 (divorced 1893); children: two sons Ann Eliza Young was the fifth child born to Mormon parents shortly after their prophet, Joseph Smith, was murdered by an angry mob in the Mormon community at Nauvoo. When she was only four, her family joined the Mormon exodus from Illinois, following Brigham Young to Salt Lake City. In compliance with Smith’s doctrine of polygamy, her father married four more women in Utah; his second wife bore him 11 children. An especially strong bond developed between Young and her mother, strengthened by their mutual dislike of polygamy. As Young reached maturity, her beauty attracted the attention of Brigham Young, who persuaded her to become an actress with the Salt Lake City Theatre and live with his many wives and daughters in his home. She was moderately successful in her stage career, and it was while acting that she met her first husband, James Leech Dee, a plasterer and amateur actor who was a Mormon convert. She was awarded a civil divorce in 1865 when Dee became interested in taking a second wife. Young and her two sons lived with her parents until 1869, when she married Brigham Young because, she later claimed, he had threatened to excommunicate her parents and bankrupt her brother unless she did so. More likely, Young’s hostility to plural marriage was overwhelmed by a proposal from the most powerful man in the Mormon church and community. In 1873 she filed for divorce from Young, and she immediately became a celebrity. Young traveled the country with a highly profitable lecture tour. She developed three themes in her lectures: ‘‘My Life in Bondage’’ discussed her childhood and her tenure as a member of the Young household; ‘‘Polygamy as It Is’’ was a discussion of
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the institution of plural marriage from the viewpoint of women and children; and ‘‘The Mormon Religion’’ was a lecture devoted to denunciation of the horrors of the Mormon faith. To increase her appeal on the lecture circuit, she published the very successful Wife No. 19; or The Story of a Life in Bondage in 1876. Attractive and ladylike, Young was a popular lecturer, discussing Mormon sexuality under the guise of lectures on the evils of polygamy. She spoke before members of Congress and President and Mrs. Ulysses Grant, and continued to lecture until passage of the Edmund Bill in 1882 which outlawed polygamy in the U.S and all its territories. She then lived with her third husband, Moses R. Denning, a wealthy lumber and coal dealer, in Michigan, where she devoted her time to the Christian Science church and the woman suffrage movement. She divorced Denning in 1893, charging him with adultery. In 1907, due to financial problems and a fear that the U.S. Congress would seat as Utah’s senator the polygamist Reed Smoot, Young revised Wife No. 19. Shortly after the publication of her second book, which was never the success its predecessor had been, she disappeared, and no record of her movements after 1908 can be found. The most notorious of all Brigham Young’s many wives, popular author and lecturer, and at one time the most newsworthy woman in the U.S.—she died in anonymity. Although authorship of Wife No. 19 has been disputed, it is likely Young wrote the original draft from the notes of her lectures and then had it polished for publication by a professional writer. It was a very popular book in its time, although it was sold only by subscription. It was considered respectable by rigidly moral middle-class men and women shocked by polygamy at the same time that it appealed to their sexual curiosity. Overemotional, melodramatic, biased in content, and repetitive, it is filled with the tragic life stories of plural wives and diatribes against Mormon leaders and the institution of polygamy. At the same time, however, it gives the historian of Mormon family life an invaluable inside look at the household of Brigham Young and the effects of polygamy on family life. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Wallace, I., The Twenty-Seventh Wife (1961). Woodward, H. B., The Bold Women (1953). Reference works: NAW (1971). —PAULA A. TRECKEL
YOUNG, Ella Born 26 December 1867, Fenagh, County Antrim, Ireland; died 25 July 1956, Oceana, California When she was three years old, Ella Young’s family moved from northeastern Ireland to Limerick in the southwest, where she developed the love of the country so marked in her poems and
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stories. She was deeply religious even as a child, but tales of banshees, sprites, giants, and various other creatures of Irish folk lore nourished her imagination. She studied political economics, history, and law at the Royal University. Some years after graduation, she moved to Dublin, where she became involved with the Celtic Renaissance and the Irish National movements. She learned Gaelic and traveled around the countryside gathering myths and tales from the peasants. After the deaths of many of her friends in the conflicts with England, she emigrated to the U.S. in 1925. She taught Celtic mythology at the University of California at Berkeley for many years and lectured at other American colleges. Young’s earliest books were published in Ireland, but the first book published in America, The Wonder-Smith and His Son (1927), is also the first in which her style is truly distinctive. She retells stories gathered in Ireland; some are reproduced almost exactly as she heard them; all are true to the spirit of Irish folklore. The tales present a short biography of the Wonder-Smith, the Gubbaun Saor, maker of the universe and the gods. These are uncomplicated, fast-moving and highly entertaining tales, filled with humor and some terror. Young wrote two more children’s books based on Irish folklore, The Tangle-Coated Horse (1929) and The Unicorn with the Silver Shoes (1932). The last is not as successful as the first two; it exudes ‘‘old Irish charm,’’ but events are contrived and the tone is condescending. She also published several books of poetry, both in Ireland and the U.S. As in her prose works, much of the subject matter stems from Irish folklore and much of the imagery is drawn from nature. Mostly regular in rhyme and meter, Young’s poems are particularly notable for their evocation of haunting worlds of fairyland and mystery. Flowering Dusk (1945) is Young’s memoirs. Written in poetic prose with sharp flashes of imagery and humor, it includes many lively anecdotes and some tales and poems. Some critics praised it, but others found it excessively ‘‘arty’’ and self-conscious. The book is valuable, however, for the picture it gives of the intellectuals and nationalists—such as William Butler Yeats, George Russell, Maud Gonne, Seamus O’Sullivan, and Standish O’Grady—with whom Young associated at a critical period in Irish history. Although Young made important contributions both as a teacher and writer to the knowledge and appreciation of Celtic literature, her works have not endured, being too romantic for present-day tastes. She had, however, a storyteller’s eye for homely and magical detail. She had also a keen ear for euphonious language and the ability to capture the cadence of Irish speech. She once said that she had talked with elves and understood the language of forest and sea. It is her deep feeling for the Ireland of myth and magic and her skill in investing with life that ancient realm that make her books unique and led Padraic Colum to call her a ‘‘reincarnated Druidess.’’ OTHER WORKS: Poems (1906). The Coming of Lugh (1909). Celtic Wonder Tales (1910). The Rose of Heaven (1920). The
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Weird of Fionavar (1922). To the Little Princess (1930). Marzilian (1938). Seed of the Pomegranate (1949). Smoke Myrrh (1950). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Authors of Books for Young People (1964). Junior Book of Authors (1951). TCA. Other references: Horn Book (May 1939). —ALETHEA K. HELBIG
YOUNG, Marguerite Born 1909, Indianapolis, Indiana Daughter of Chester E. and Fay Knight Young Marguerite Young was raised from early childhood by her maternal grandmother. She attended Indiana and Butler Universities (B.A. in English and French, 1930) and the University of Chicago (M.A., 1936). Working her way through graduate school, she read the works of Shakespeare aloud to a prominent woman who was bedfast due to opium addiction. From this experience, Young gained an insight into life and an understanding of the psychology of opium and dreams. Later, while studying at the University of Iowa, she became interested in the philosophies of Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and William James. She has taught creative writing at many universities, and after 1943 lived in New York City. Young has published well-received poetry, Prismatic Ground (1937) and Moderate Fable (1945), both concerned with the fabulous and the illusory. The first deals especially with the hidden recesses of the mind, as in ‘‘The Dark Wood.’’ In ‘‘Slow Motion,’’ from the second volume, she makes use of an image of timelessness as fixed motion: ‘‘The heart is that camera of a slow motion.’’ Even in her reviews (such as ‘‘Fictions Mystical and Epical,’’ Kenyon Review, Winter 1945, about Katherine Anne Porter’s The Leaning Tower and Virginia Woolf’s A Haunted House), she is most concerned with apparitions, ghosts, and the evanescent. Her style reflects her interest in what is obscure, in the fantastic and supernatural, ‘‘the certitude of the permanent possibility of sensation, which is the one reality.’’ Young is obsessed with utopian quests. Angel in the Forest: A Fairy Tale of Two Utopias (1945) is a poetic and fairly successful history of the Rappist and Owenite societies of New Harmony, Indiana. Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (1963, reissued and recorded in 1983) is an epic novel of illusion and reality. The heroine, Vera Cartwheel, journeys in search of reality as personified by her old Scotch Presbyterian nursemaid, Miss MacIntosh. Other characters—such as her mother, an opium addict—represent illusion. The novel concludes with Vera accepting ambivalence as a reality of life and marrying a stone-deaf man. Replete with detail, endless digressions, mythical legends, and arcane
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symbols, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, even more than Young’s other works, calls for suspended judgement on the part of an uncommon reader. If Young’s style is obscure, it is an obscurity well matched with her subject matter and based on her extensive knowledge of a long history of symbolism, particularly of Elizabethan and Jacobean symbols.
OTHER WORKS: Below the City (1975). Pacific Transport (1976). Leaves, Leaves (1989). Marguerite Young: The Collected Poems (1990). Nothing But the Truth (1993). Inviting the Muses: Stories, Essays, Reviews (1994). Harp Song for a Radical: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debbs (1999).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Etlin, M. E., ‘‘‘Bee Bak in a Whale’: The Matriarchal Vision of Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling’’ (thesis 1983). Fuchs, M., ed., Marguerite Young, Our Darling: Tributes and Essays (1994). Newquist, R., Conversations (1967). Ruas, C., Conversations with American Writers (1985). Staley, R. E., No Landscape but the Soul’s: A Critical Study of the Work of Marguerite Young (dissertation 1993). Reference works: CA (1975). World Authors, 1950-1970 (1975). Other references: Book Forum (1977). Book World (Aug. 1994). Cimarron Review (Jan. 1995). Marguerite Young Interview With Kay Bonetti (audiocassette, 1983). Paris Review (1977). Review of Contemporary Fiction (1989). —LORENE POUNCEY
YOUNG, Rida Johnson Born 28 February 1875, Baltimore, Maryland; died 8 May 1926, Southfield Point, Connecticut Daughter of William A. and Emma Stuart Johnson; married James Young, 1904
musical comedies. She collaborated with such composers as Victor Herbert, Jerome Kern, Sigmund Romberg, and Rudolf Friml. Her best-known songs were ‘‘Mother Machree’’ (Barry of Ballymore, 1911), ‘‘When Love is Young in Springtime’’ (Brown of Harvard, 1906), ‘‘I’m Falling in Love with Someone’’ (Naughty Marietta, 1910), and ‘‘Sweethearts’’ (Maytime, 1917). In 1906 Brown of Harvard began the long string of her plays produced on Broadway. Until 1921 there were one or two of Young’s works on Broadway every year. The longest running were Naughty Marietta (1910, revived 1929, 1931, 1936, 1964), Maytime (1917), Sometime, with Mae West and Ed Wynn (1918), and Little Old New York (1920). Young claimed that all but one of her plays had been successful in production. That one, The Girl and the Pennant (1913), was written in hopes of breaking a theatrical jinx: no play dealing with baseball had ever triumphed on Broadway. Young’s manager sent her south with the Giants one winter to learn about baseball and write a play in consultation with pitcher Christy Mathewson, but the result only confirmed tradition. The considerable royalties from her plays went into a summer home at Bellhaven, New York, and an estate at Stamford, Connecticut. The Lottery Man (1909), directed by Edith Ellis, was one of Young’s most popular early plays. Its bumptious young hero hits upon a scheme to pay off his debts and to provide for his charming mother. He advertises a lottery at a dollar per ticket with his hand in marriage as the prize, and then—too late to cancel the lottery— he meets the girl he would like to marry. He, his mother, and the girl’s aunt begin buying tickets in her name. The girl is properly scandalized at the whole idea of the lottery, but love finds a way in the end. As in most of Young’s plays, the plot and its resolution are trite, but there is freshness and sparkle in the dialogue and comic business. In this play, she pokes fun at a current fad by having the wealthy aunt test various diet schemes (pills, massage, medicine balls) on her emaciated paid companion before trying them herself. A minor character is an Irish girl who affects a Swedish name and accent to promote her business as a masseuse. Young often used national types in her plays, most frequently Irish and Scotch Americans.
Rida Johnson Young attended Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. Her poems and stories had frequently been published in Baltimore-area newspapers. When she finished writing her first play, she decided, over parental objections, to take it in person to New York. Her persistence won her an interview with theater manager Daniel Frohman, who turned down the lengthy, 100-character play about Omar Khayyam but gave her a walk-on part.
Asked for the secret of her success, Young said, ‘‘I know that a play cannot succeed if it does not please women. . . . I am supposed to write musical comedies which will please the ‘tired business man.’ But if they do not please the lady whom the tired business man brings with him, the show will not last long.’’ Her plays usually feature a self-possessed, bright young woman with modern wit and old-fashioned values. The heroines of her novels Out of the Night (1925) and Red Owl (1927) both achieve financial success in a man’s world before accepting the traditional fulfillment sought by heroines of popular romances—a husband, home, and family.
Two years later, convinced she would never be a good actress, Young turned to songwriting for a music publisher. This experience was training for her later success as lyricist for her
Author of over 25 plays and musical comedies, three novels, and approximately 500 songs, Young was—among such playwrights as Anna Caldwell, Catherine Chisholm Cushing, Edith
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Ellis, Harriet Ford, Margaret Mayo, and Martha Morton—one of the most prolific and successful women dramatists of the 1910s and 1920s.
(1920). The Front Seat (1921). The Dream Girl (1924). The Rabbit’s Foot (1924). Cock o’ the Roost (1924).
OTHER WORKS: The Boys of Company B (1907). The Lancers (1907). Glorious Betsy (1908). Next (1911). The Red Petticoat (1912). The Isle o’ Dreams (1913). Lady Luxury (1914). Shameen Dhu (1914). Captain Kidd, Jr. (1916). Her Soldier Boy (1916). The Little Widows (1917). Little Simplicity (1918). Macushla
BIBLIOGRAPHY: American Magazine (Dec. 1920). Good Housekeeping (Nov. 1911). NYT (Sept. 1920, 19 Sept. 1920). Theatre (Nov. 1913, April 1917). —FELICIA HARDISON LONDRÉ
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Z ZATURENSKA, Marya Born 12 September 1902, Kiev, Russia Married Horace Gregory, 1925 Marya Zaturenska emigrated to the U.S. with her parents and a younger brother in 1909; the family settled in New York City. At fourteen, she began working in a factory by day and attending high school at night. She also worked briefly as a newspaper reporter. Her education, at Valparaiso University and the University of Wisconsin, where she spent her last year (1925) in the library school, was financed by scholarships. Her husband was a poet and critic. Zaturenska’s poems are traditional in form and meter. Because of the delicate, abstract quality of much of her work, they have little emotional impact unless a number of poems are read together, allowing for an accumulation of insight and feeling. An extensive reading also reveals how she uses stock images, usually drawn from nature—suns, moons, water, gardens—to form pastoral and dreamlike landscapes. Characters from myth, literature, art, and history people Zaturenska’s poems; she has written only a few ‘‘personal’’ poems, in which the persona and the poet seem to be one. These poems, such as ‘‘The Invaders,’’ about children growing up and away from their parents, and ‘‘Another Snowstorm,’’ in which the poet’s faith reconciles her to approaching death (both from The Hidden Waterfall, 1974), seem timeless. However, the ones that lean heavily on tradition too often seem mere exercises, and those that remain abstract seem hollow or cryptic. Frequently, Zaturenska’s poems are about a romantic and mysterious character who, renouncing passion, has become a recluse or whose lover is lost or dead. This interest in romantic figures lies behind the choice of subjects for her prose studies as well: she has written on Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Siddal, and Algernon Charles Swinburne. A sense of loss pervades much of Zaturenska’s poetry—not only the loss of love but the loss of homeland, innocence, youth, and joy. She has a gift for capturing a sense of the duality of human experience. The girl in ‘‘Girl and Scarecrow’’ (Cold Morning Sky, 1937) exults in the joy of beauty and youth while the ‘‘face of a scarecrow sorrow-worn and sick’’ lurks behind her mirror. In ‘‘Rare Joy’’ (Cold Morning Sky), she shows that the price of peace is a loss of passion. Such a loss may not be great, since passion can be disturbing, but it is accompanied by nostalgia or yearning. For over 40 years, Zaturenska has polished her craft. She has received a number of awards, the most prestigious being the Pulitzer Prize, which she received in 1938 for Cold Morning Sky. While highly dependent on the past, she is, as she herself puts it,
‘‘an independent’’—true to her own interests, her own voice, and her own vision. OTHER WORKS: Threshold and Hearth (1934, 1983). The Listening Landscape (1941). The Golden Mirror (1944). A History of American Poetry, 1910-1940, with H. Gregory (1946). Christina Rossetti: A Portrait with Background (1949). Selected Poems (1954, 1983). Terraces of Light (1960). The Crystal Cabinet: An Invitation to Poetry, with H. Gregory (1962) Collected Poems (1965). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Axelrod, L. S., Moonsongs: Seven Poems For Soprano and Piano (musical score, 1986). Reference works: Contemporary Poets (1975). Other references: NYT (3 May 1938). Poetry (Feb. 1935, Sept. 1941, May 1975). —JEANNINE DOBBS
ZOLOTOW, Charlotte Born 26 June 1915, Norfolk, Virginia Daughter of Louis J. and Ella Bernstein Shapiro; married Maurice Zolotow, 1938 (divorced); children: two When she was young, Charlotte Zolotow moved with her parents to New York City, where she attended public schools. As a shy fourth grader, she discovered that writing was her way to reach out to the world through a persona when she wrote a first-person essay ‘‘as told by a Boston bull terrier,’’ and says she has been writing for ‘‘the child within’’ ever since. She studied writing at the University of Wisconsin and then returned to work in New York, eventually becoming a senior editor in the children’s division at Harper & Row. She worked under Ursula Nordstrom, whom Zolotow credits not only with building the department from its original staff of three to a complement of nearly 50, but also with being, as the editor of imaginatively illustrated books dealing with contemporary subjects and problems, a truly seminal force in the development of modern children’s literature. Zolotow began writing children’s books after leaving her editorial job in 1944 to stay home with the first of her two children. She returned to Harper & Row in 1962 and resigned as vice president and associate publisher of Harper Junior Books in 1981, when she was given her own imprint, Charlotte Zolotow Books. She still remains an editorial consultant for Harper Junior Books, unable to give up a job she loved so much. Many believe her success as an editor is attributed to her talent for matching the right illustrator with the right author. The same is true for her own works. She was divorced from her husband, also a writer, in 1970.
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Many of her best books, considering both their quality and popularity with children, have been those that deal honestly with situations and problems that prior to the ‘‘new wave of realism’’ were not considered suitable subjects for this genre. Three examples would be The Quarreling Book (1963), The Hating Book (1967), and The Unfriendly Book (1975), all of which recognize that children, like adults, can harbor unpleasant emotions, be negatively affected by gloomy weather and gloomy behavior, and be downright antisocial at least some of the time. Earlier literature eschewed discussion of sibling rivalry and the displacement of an older child with the coming of a new baby, but Zolotow deals frankly with this topic in both If It Weren’t for You (1966) and Big Sister and Little Sister (1966). Several of her books humorously set forth a child’s point of view about adult rules for the behavior of children, as in When I Have a Little Girl (1965) and When I Have a Son (1967). She addresses the once taboo subject of one-parent families in The Night When Mother Went Away (1961; reissued as The Summer Night, 1974), which shows a father dealing with the situation, and in A Father like That (1968), which shows a young boy telling his mother what his father would be like if he had one. In the latter, the subject is handled very subtly; we are never told if it has been death or divorce or an unmarried mother that has caused the father’s absence, and Zolotow resolves the problem posed by having the child’s mother agree with his dreams of an ideal father and reassure him that when he grows up, he can be such a parent. A special favorite with feminists is William’s Doll (1972). Its main character is a little boy who wants a real ‘‘baby doll,’’ despite all the negative reactions from his big brother and the boy next door. His father brings home a basketball, which William enjoys, and electric trains, for which William builds model towns. Only his grandmother understands that he wants to ‘‘practice being a father.’’ The point is clearly made, although Zolotow claims like all her other work, it was not written to ‘‘get a point across,’’ but rather to let children see other children have shared the same emotions, frustrations, and joys. Zolotow’s work is lyrical, but not overstated. One of the finest examples is Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present (1962), in which Mr. Rabbit helps a child find the perfect gift for her mother, who is especially fond of red, yellow, green, and blue. Paul Williams identified it as an all-time favorite: ‘‘It is a perfect presentation of something rich and rare and untouchable, the time that exists between friends.’’ In Someone New (1978), she presents a boy puzzled by a difference in his life, which he is unable to pinpoint. He packs away his babyish toys and stuffed animals, realizing that he has a new interest in his shell collection, and finally comes to know that it is he who has changed. Zolotow closes with ‘‘Someone is gone. Someone is missing and I know who. It is I. I am someone new.’’ In a genre sometimes accorded less importance than it deserves, Zolotow’s contribution has been tremendous. For many decades, she has provided leadership by example with books that are successful both artistically and commercially; she has reached children by communicating with them through the child within
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AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
herself and has evoked a response in adults as well. In every respect, Zolotow must be considered a major voice in the area of juvenile literature today. Zolotow’s career has also been punctuated with different honors, including the Harper Gold Medal for editorial excellence awarded in 1974, the 1974 Christopher Award for her writing, and Honor Book citations from the distinguished Caldecott and Newbery selection committees. She also is a teacher of the editorial and writing crafts she practices, lecturing widely to audiences around the country. Zolotow has participated in both the University of Colorado Writer’s Conference of Children’s Books and the University of Indiana Writer’s Conference. And astoundingly enough, while being dedicated to her editorial responsibilities, she has published more than 60 of her own books for children since the writing of her first book, The Park Book, in 1944. OTHER WORKS: The Park Book (1944). But Not Billy (1947). The City Boy and the Country Horse (1952). Indian, Indian (1952). The Magic Word (1952). The Storm Book (1952). The Quiet Mother and the Noisy Little Boy (1953). One Step Two (1955). Not a Little Monkey (1957). Over and Over (1957). Do You Know What I’ll Do? (1958). The Bunny Who Found Easter (1959). Aren’t You Glad? (1960). Big Brother (1960). In My Garden (1960). The Little Black Puppy (1960). The Three Funny Friends (1961). The Man with the Purple Eyes (1961). When the Wind Stops (1962; revised 1975). The Sky Was Blue (1963). Thomas the Tiger (1963). The White Marble (1963). I Have a Horse of My Own (1964). The Poodle Who Barked at the Wind (1964). A Rose, A Bridge, and a Wild Black Horse (1964). Someday (1965). All that Sunlight (1967). I Want to Be Little (1967). Summer Is (1967). My Friend John (1968). The New Friend (1968). A Day in the Life of Yani (1969). The Old Dog (1969). A Day in the Life of Latef (1970). Flocks of Birds (1970). River Winding (1970; rev. ed., 1978). Where I Begin (1970). Wake Up and Goodnight (1971). You and Me (1971). The Beautiful Christmas Tree (1972). Hold My Hand (1972). Janey (1973). My Grandson Lew (1974). It’s Not Fair (1976). May I Visit? (1976). If You Listen (1980). Say It! (1980). The Song (1982). I Know a Lady (1984). Everything Glistens and Everything Sings: New and Selected Poems (1987). I Like to Be Little (1987). Something is Going to Happen (1988). The Seashore Book (1992). Smippets (1992). This Quiet Lady (1992). The Moon Was Best (1993). The Old Dog (1995). When the Wind Stops (1995). Who is Ben? (1997). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hopkins, L. B., Books Are by People (1969). Wintle, J., and E. Fisher, The Pied Pipers: Interviews with the Influential Creators of Children’s Literature (1974) Reference works: Children’s Literature Review (1976). SATA (1971). Other references: Houston Post (10 Apr. 1976). Mademoiselle (Jan. 1973). New Orleans Times-Picayune (30 Apr. 1974). New York Daily News (18 May 1971). Palo Alto Times (20 Sept. 1976). Prism (Dec. 1974). PW (10 June 1976). —EDYTHE M. MCGOVERN, UPDATED BY DEVRA M. SLADICS
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
ZUGSMITH, Leane Born January 1903, Louisville, Kentucky; died 1969 Wrote under: Mrs. Carl Randau Daughter of Albert and Gertrude Zugsmith; married Carl Randau, 1940 Leane Zugsmith spent most of her childhood in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Her formal education consisted of a year each at Goucher College, the University of Pennsylvania, and Columbia University. She lived in New York until her death, except for a year in Europe and some months in Hollywood, where she worked as a screenwriter for the Goldwyn studio. She has also worked as a copy editor for pulp magazines like Detective Stories and Western Story Magazine and written advertising copy. In the early 1940s, after marrying a newspaperman, she was a special feature writer on the staff of the New York newspaper P.M. Her first novel, All Victories Are Alike (1929), is the story of a newspaper columnist’s loss of ideals. Goodbye and Tomorrow (1931), which Zugsmith said is ‘‘shamelessly derivative of Virginia Woolf,’’ is about a romantic spinster who becomes a patron of artists. Never Enough (1932) is a panorama of American life during the 1920s. The Reckoning (1934) tells the story of a New York slum boy. A Time to Remember (1936) is concerned with labor troubles and unionization in a New York department store. Its heroine, Aline Weinman, a Dreiseresque, middle-class, Jewish employee of the store, goes out on strike. She pays the price of painful separation from her family for her political ideals because her father, who has lost his job, would disapprove if he knew Aline’s politics. The Summer Soldier (1938) is about a small group of men and workmen, mostly Northerners, who travel by train to a Southern county to hold a hearing on the abuse of black workers. Their mission, however, is not successful. The novel is a slick character sketch of different political types.
ZUGSMITH
Home Is Where You Hang Your Childhood (1937) is a collection of short stories. ‘‘Room in the World’’ describes the desperation unemployment causes in a young family. The title story, about a very young high school girl’s movement from childish innocence to experience, uses one of Zugsmith’s favorite themes. Hard Times with Easy Payments (1941) is another collection of short stories, all from P.M. With her husband, Zugsmith wrote The Setting Sun of Japan (1942) about their flying trip through the Far East for P.M.; a mystery story, Visitor (1944); and Year of Wrath, a novel serialized in Collier’s in 1942. Stories by Zugsmith appeared infrequently until 1949 in Good Housekeeping, the New Yorker, and Collier’s. In the early 1940s, Zugsmith was considered one of the most promising young left-wing novelists. She said her greatest influences were Albert Maltz and Irwin Shaw in the short story and Josephine Herbst in the novel. All of her six novels are political, and her political themes gained considerable sophistication and some cynicism during the decade of her productivity (1929-38). Her sympathetic treatment of Jewish characters is of interest to the history of Jewish American writers because her Jewish characters solve the problem of assimilation by becoming socialists. Zugsmith belongs with those Jewish writers of the 1930s who attempted to transform ethnic background into meaningful politics. Her work became dated and of historical interest after World War II and the anti-Soviet backlash of the 1950s.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Madden, D., ed., Proletarian Writers of the Thirties (1968). Ravitz, A. C., Leane Zugsmith: Thunder on the Left (1992). Reference works: CAA (1944). TCA. Universal Jewish Encyclopedia (1943-48). Other references: Science & Society (Spring 1994). —CAROLE ZONIS YEE
287
GENERAL INDEX AAAL award see Bishop, I, 88 Abbott, Edith, I, 1 Abbott, Eleanor Hallowell, I, 2 Abel, Annie Heloise, I, 2 Abolitionists see Jacobs, II, 265; Prince, III, 296 Abstract expressionists see Randall, III, 307 Absurdists see Drexler, I, 311; Howe, II, 238 Academy awards see MacLaine, III, 77 Acker, Kathy, I, 3 Actress see Angelou, I, 31; Barnes, I, 61; Barr, I, 66; Bateman, I, 69; Chase, I, 188; Childress, I, 199; Ellis, II, 21; Ford, II, 61; Fornés, II, 62; Freedman, II, 71; Gordon, II, 127; Henley, II, 200; Kemble, II, 302; LeGallienne, III, 29; Logan, III, 55; Loos, III, 56; MacLaine, III, 77; Mayo, III, 100; Menken, III, 129; Morgan, III, 169; Morris, III, 171; Mortimer, III, 175; Morton, III, 176; Nichols, III, 196; O’Donnell, III, 217; Parker, III, 251; Phillips, III, 274; Ranous, III, 309; Ritchie, III, 330; Robins, III, 335; Skinner, IV, 58; Sontag, IV, 75; West, IV, 219; Young, IV, 280 Adams, Abigail Smith, I, 5 Adams, Alice, I, 6 Adams, Hannah, I, 7 Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer, I, 8 Adams, Léonie Fuller, I, 9 Adams, Louisa Catherine Johnson, I, 10 Addams, Jane, I, 11 Adisa, Giamba See Lorde, Audre Adventure stories see Voigt, IV, 180 Advice see Farrar, II, 35; Felton, II, 38; Gage, II, 85; Gilmer, II, 108; Hale, II, 164; Landers, III, 3; Leslie, III, 35; Leslie, III, 37; Manning, III, 83; Moulton, III, 178; Scarberry, IV, 16; Terhune, IV, 130; Tyler, IV, 161; Van Vorst, IV, 171; Vanderbilt, IV, 174
Agassiz, Elizabeth Cabot Cary, I, 12 Ai, I, 13 Akins, Zoë, I, 14 Alcott, Louisa May, I, 15 Alden, Isabella MacDonald, I, 17 Aldon, Adair See Meigs, Cornelia Aldrich, Bess Streeter, I, 18 Aldrich, Mildred, I, 19 Alexander, Francesca, I, 19 Allee, Marjorie Hill, I, 20 Allegorical works see Bonner, I, 105; Hamilton, II, 173; Reed, III, 313; Spencer, IV, 82 Allen, Elizabeth Akers, I, 21 Allen, Paula Gunn, I, 21 Allison, Dorothy, I, 23 Alther, Lisa, I, 24 Álvarez, Julia, I, 25 AmAcAaLe award see Brennan, I, 125; Buck, I, 150; Colum, I, 219; Freeman, II, 72; Welty, IV, 212 AmAcAaLe grant see Brooks, I, 133 American Book award, Before Columbus foundation see Ai, I, 13; Bambara, I, 58; Fox, II, 67; Gilchrist, II, 103; Harjo, II, 180; Hogan, II, 219; Kingston, II, 315; Naylor, III, 189; Sanchez, IV, 5; Walker, IV, 189; Welty, IV, 212; Yamamoto, IV, 273 American Jewish writers see Goodman, II, 120; Newman, III, 195 Ames, Mary E. Clemmer, I, 26 Anarchists see Owens, III, 239; Shulman, IV, 50 Anderson, Marian, I, 27 Andrew, Joseph Maree See Bonner, Marita Andrews, Eliza Frances, I, 27 Andrews, Jane, I, 28 Andrews, Mary Shipman, I, 29 Andrews, V. C., I, 30 Angelou, Maya, I, 31 Angier, Natalie, I, 32 Anneke, Mathilde Franziska Giesler, I, 33 Anpetu Waśte See Deloria, Ella Cara Anthologist see Muller, III, 182
289
GENERAL INDEX
Anthologists see Botta, I, 108; Chapman, I, 186; Clark, I, 211; Curtiss, I, 248; Dawidowicz, I, 269; Johnson, II, 277; Larcom, III, 8; Leslie, III, 36; Marshall, III, 86; Merril, III, 133; Newman, III, 194; Newstead, III, 196; Ovington, III, 236; Peattie, III, 262; Putnam, III, 301; Rittenhouse, III, 331; Scarborough, IV, 17; Smith, IV, 63; Smith, IV, 65; Tenney, IV, 127; Tietjens, IV, 139; Wells, IV, 208; White, IV, 224 Anthony, Susan B., I, 34 Anthony, Susanna, I, 35 Anthropologists see Allen, I, 21; Deloria, I, 277; Greenberg, II, 142; Le Guin, III, 21 Antin, Mary, I, 36 Anzaldúa, Gloria, I, 37 Appleton, Sarah See Appleton-Weber, Sarah Appleton, Victor, II See Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Appleton-Weber, Sarah, I, 38 Architecture see Cooper, I, 230; Howland, II, 240; Huxtable, II, 252; Jacobs, II, 266; McCarthy, III, 104; Tuthill, IV, 156 Arendt, Hannah, I, 39 Armstrong, Charlotte, I, 41 Arnow, Harriette Simpson, I, 42 Artisans see Dennett, I, 279; Hall, II, 168; Tandy, IV, 121; Woods, IV, 262 Artists see Alexander, I, 19; Cha, I, 182; Cliff, I, 216; Comstock, I, 221; Didion, I, 287; Howe, II, 238; Loy, III, 65; Millett, III, 144; Mohr, III, 154; Nieriker, III, 201; Thaxter, IV, 133; Todd, IV, 141; Truitt, IV, 150 Ashley, Ellen See Seifert, Elizabeth Astronomy see Mitchell, III, 151 Atheists see O’Hair, III, 218 Atherton, Gertrude, I, 43 Atom, Ann See Walworth, Jeannette Hadermann Auerbach, Hilda See Morley, Hilda Austin, Jane Goodwin, I, 45
290
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Austin, Mary Hunter, I, 45 Autobiographical works see Ai, I, 13; Angelou, I, 31; Brown, I, 142; Chernin, I, 191; Cliff, I, 216; DiPrima, I, 292; Heilbrun, II, 194; Jackson, II, 261; Johnston, II, 281; Kingston, II, 315; Kumin, II, 329; Lord, III, 57; MacLaine, III, 77; Millett, III, 144; Prince, III, 296; Steinem, IV, 95; Wakoski, IV, 185; Walker, IV, 189; Walker, IV, 192; Wilson, IV, 252; Wong, IV, 260; Yglesias, IV, 278 Autobiography see Graham, II, 135; Hite, II, 214; Jones, II, 285; Jordan, II, 289; Moody, III, 161; Scudder, IV, 27; Truth, IV, 152 Avery, Martha Moore, I, 47 Aviators see Lindbergh, III, 43 Ayer, Harriet Hubbard, I, 47 Ayscough, Florence Wheelock, I, 48 Babb, Sanora, I, 49 Babbitt, Natalie, I, 49 Bacon, Alice, I, 50 Bacon, Delia Salter, I, 51 Bagley, Sarah G., I, 52 Bailey, Carolyn Sherwin, I, 52 Bailey, Florence Merriam, I, 53 Bailey, Temple, I, 54 Baker, Dorothy Dodds, I, 55 Balch, Emily Greene, I, 56 Ballard, Martha, I, 57 Bambara, Toni Cade, I, 58 Banning, Margaret Culkin, I, 59 Barker, Shirley, I, 59 Barnard, A. M. See Alcott, Louisa May Barnes, Carman Dee, I, 60 Barnes, Charlotte Mary Sanford, I, 61 Barnes, Djuna, I, 61 Barnes, Linda J., I, 62 Barnes, Margaret Ayer, I, 63 Barnes, Mary Sheldon, I, 64 Barnum, Frances Courtenay Baylor, I, 65 Barr, Amelia E., I, 65 Barr, Nevada, I, 66 Barton, Clara, I, 67 Barton, May Hollis See Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Bateman, Sidney Cowell, I, 69 Bates, Katherine Lee, I, 69 Bayard, Elise Justine, I, 70 Beach, Sylvia, I, 71
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Beard, Mary Ritter, I, 72 Beat writers see DiPrima, I, 292; Waldman, IV, 187 Beattie, Ann, I, 73 Beebe, Mary Blair See Niles, Blair Rice Beecher, Catharine Esther, I, 74 Benedict, Ruth, I, 75 Benét, Laura, I, 77 Benítez, Sandra, I, 78 Bennett, Gwendolyn B., I, 79 Benson, Sally, I, 80 Berg, Gertrude, I, 80 Bergman, Susan H., I, 81 Bernays, Anne, I, 82 Berne, Victoria See Fisher, M. F. K. Bethune, Mary McLeod, I, 84 Betts, Doris, I, 85 Bianco, Margery Williams, I, 86 Biographies see Fritz, II, 80; Greenfield, II, 144 Biography see Doman, I, 298; Jones, II, 285; Munro, III, 182; Perkins, III, 266; Truman, IV, 151 Bishop, Claire Huchet, I, 87 Bishop, Elizabeth, I, 88 Black mountain poets see Morley, III, 170; Randall, III, 307 Black, Katherine Bolton, I, 89 Blacklisted writers see Le Sueur, III, 23 Blackwell, Alice Stone, I, 90 Blackwell, Antoinette Brown, I, 91 Blackwell, Elizabeth, I, 92 Blaisdell, Anne See Linington, Elizabeth Blake, Lillie Devereux, I, 93 Blake, Mary E. McGrath, I, 94 Bland, Eleanor Taylor, I, 95 Blank verse see Hooper, II, 227; Kinney, II, 317; Larcom, III, 8; Lee, III, 28; Nicholson, III, 197; Troubetzkoy, IV, 148 Blatch, Harriot Stanton, I, 96 Bleecker, Ann Eliza Schuyler, I, 96 Bloomer, Amelia Jenks, I, 97 Bloomfield-Moore, Clara Jessup, I, 98 Blume, Judy, I, 99 Bly, Nellie See Seaman, Elizabeth Cochrane Bogan, Louise, I, 100 Bolton, Isabel See Miller, Mary Britton Bolton, Sarah Knowles, I, 102 Bolton, Sarah T., I, 103 Bombeck, Erma, I, 103
GENERAL INDEX
Bond, Carrie Jacobs, I, 105 Bonner, Marita, I, 105 Book publishers see Crosby, I, 243; Fields, II, 42; Gestefeld, II, 99; Graham, II, 135; O’Hair, III, 218; Ticknor, IV, 138 Book reviews see Cooey, I, 223 Book sellers see Beach, I, 71; Peabody, III, 260 Booth, Mary Louise, I, 106 Borg, Dorothy, I, 107 Botta, Anne C. Lynch, I, 108 Bourke-White, Margaret, I, 109 Bowen, Catherine Drinker, I, 110 Bowen, Sue Petigru, I, 111 Bower, B. M. See Sinclair, Bertha Muzzy Bowers, Bathsheba, I, 111 Bowles, Jane Auer, I, 112 Boyd, Blanche McCrary, I, 113 Boyd, Nancy See Millay, Edna St. Vincent Boyle, Kay, I, 113 Boylston, Helen Dore, I, 115 Bracken, Peg, I, 116 Brackett, Leigh, I, 117 Bradley, Marion Zimmer, I, 118 Bradstreet, Anne Dudley, I, 119 Branch, Anna Hempstead, I, 120 Braun, Lilian Jackson, I, 121 Breckinridge, Sophonisba Preston, I, 122 Brée, Germaine, I, 124 Brennan, Maeve, I, 125 Brent, Linda See Jacobs, Harriet Bres, Rose Falls, I, 126 Breuer, Bessie, I, 126 Brewster, Martha Wadsworth, I, 127 Briggs, Emily Edson, I, 128 Brink, Carol Ryrie, I, 129 Bristow, Gwen, I, 130 Broadcast journalists see Drew, I, 309; McBride, III, 101; Thompson, IV, 137 Brody, Jane E., I, 131 Broner, E. M., I, 131 Brooks, Gwendolyn, I, 133 Brooks, Maria Gowen, I, 135 Broumas, Olga, I, 136 Brown, Abbie Farwell, I, 136 Brown, Alice, I, 137 Brown, Hallie Quinn, I, 138 Brown, Margaret Wise, I, 139 Brown, Nancy See Leslie, Annie Brown Brown, Rita Mae, I, 141 Brown, Rosellen, I, 142
291
GENERAL INDEX
Brown, Sandra, I, 144 Browne, Martha Griffith, I, 145 Brownmiller, Susan, I, 145 Brownson, Sarah N., I, 146 Bryan, Mary Edwards, I, 147 Bryant, Anita, I, 148 Buchanan, Edna, I, 149 Buck, Pearl S., I, 150 Buckmaster, Henrietta, I, 152 Burke, Fielding See Dargan, Olive Tilford Burnett, Frances Hodgson, I, 153 Burnham, Clara L. Root, I, 154 Burr, Esther Edwards, I, 154 Burton, Katherine Kurz, I, 155 Burton, Virginia Lee, I, 156 Butler, Octavia E., I, 157 Cabeza de Baca, Fabiola, I, 159 Cade, Toni See Bambara, Toni Cade Caldwell, Taylor, I, 160 Calhoun, Lucy See Monroe, Lucy Calisher, Hortense, I, 160 Campbell, Helen Stuart, I, 162 Campbell, Jane C., I, 163 Campbell, Juliet Lewis, I, 163 Caperton, Helena Lefroy, I, 164 Carlson, Natalie Savage, I, 164 Carmichael, Sarah E., I, 165 Carrighar, Sally, I, 166 Carrington, Elaine Sterne, I, 166 Carroll, Gladys Hasty, I, 167 Carson, Rachel, I, 168 Cartoonists see Hollander, II, 221 Carver, Ada Jack, I, 170 Cary, Alice, I, 171 Cary, Phoebe, I, 172 Caspary, Vera, I, 173 Castillo, Ana, I, 174 Cather, Willa Sibert, I, 175 Catherwood, Mary Hartwell, I, 178 Catholic fiction see Banning, I, 59; Brownson, I, 146; Dorsey, I, 304; Frankau, II, 69; Fremantle, II, 73; Gordon, II, 125; Howard, II, 233; Keyes, II, 307; O’Connor, III, 215; Tiernan, IV, 138; Tincker, IV, 140; White, IV, 229 Catt, Carrie Chapman, I, 179 Caulkins, Frances Manwaring, I, 180 Cazneau, Jane McManus, I, 181 Cervantes, Lorna Dee, I, 181 Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung, I, 182 Chandler, Elizabeth Margaret, I, 183 Chapelle, Georgette Meyer, I, 184
292
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Chapin, Katherine Garrison, I, 185 Chaplin, Jane Dunbar, I, 185 Chapman, Lee See Bradley, Marion Zimmer Chapman, Maria Weston, I, 186 Charnas, Suzy McKee, I, 187 Chase, Ilka, I, 188 Chase, Mary Coyle, I, 189 Chase, Mary Ellen, I, 189 Chehia See Shaw, Anna Moore Cheney, Ednah Littlehale, I, 190 Chernin, Kim, I, 191 Cherry, Kelly, I, 192 Chesebrough, Caroline, I, 193 Chesler, Phyllis, I, 194 Chesnut, Mary Miller, I, 195 Chidester, Ann, I, 196 Child, Julia, I, 197 Child, Lydia Maria, I, 198 Children’s drama see Bates, I, 69; Chase, I, 189; Field, II, 41; Gerstenberg, II, 98; Graham, II, 136; Latham, III, 11; Lawrence, III, 18; L’Engle, III, 30; Merington, III, 130; Smith, IV, 63; White, IV, 224 Children’s fiction see Allee, I, 20; Benét, I, 77; Brink, I, 129; Carlson, I, 164; Cheney, I, 190; Chute, I, 204; Cleary, I, 213; Diaz, I, 283; Foote, II, 57; Fox, II, 67; Hale, II, 162; Haven, II, 191; Hunt, II, 243; Hunt, II, 244; Hurst, II, 249; Janvier, II, 271; Jones, II, 285; Judson, II, 292; Konigsburg, II, 326; Lenski, III, 31; Leslie, III, 36; Lindbergh, III, 45; Maynard, III, 98; Meigs, III, 128; Miller, III, 142; Neville, III, 192; Newman, III, 195; Norton, III, 208; Parton, III, 255; Petersham, III, 269; Petry, III, 270; Polacco, III, 283; Pratt, III, 293; Ramsay, III, 305; Rich, III, 323; Sachs, IV, 1; Seawell, IV, 29; Seredy, IV, 36; Shindler, IV, 48; Skinner, IV, 57; Snyder, IV, 73; Stein, IV, 92; Tepper, IV, 128; Waller, IV, 195; White, IV, 229; Yates, IV, 275 Children’s poetry see Bailey, I, 52; Bates, I, 69; Benét, I, 77; Chute, I, 205; Field, II, 41; Follen, II, 56; Freeman, II, 72; Gould, II, 130; Janvier, II, 271; Kroeber, II, 327; L’Engle, III, 30; Livingston, III, 52; Marks, III, 84;
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Peabody, III, 261; Piatt, III, 276; Pratt, III, 293; Shannon, IV, 43; Swenson, IV, 113 Children’s/YA/juvenile fiction see Angelou, I, 31; Babbitt, I, 49; Blume, I, 99; Childress, I, 199; Clifton, I, 217; DeVeaux, I, 282; Evans, II, 28; Greenfield, II, 144; Guy, II, 157; Hamilton, II, 173; Hunter-Lattany, II, 246; Lowry, III, 64; Lurie, III, 68; Paterson, III, 258; Sanchez, IV, 5; Taylor, IV, 123; Voigt, IV, 180; Willard, IV, 246 Childress, Alice, I, 199 Chilton, Eleanor Carroll, I, 200 Chin, Marilyn, I, 201 Chinese American literature see Chin, I, 201 Chinese poetry see Kizer, II, 321 Chopin, Kate, I, 202 Choreographers see Mirikitani, III, 148 Church, Ella Rodman, I, 203 Chute, Beatrice J., I, 204 Chute, Carolyn, I, 204 Chute, Marchette, I, 205 Cisneros, Sandra, I, 207 Civil rights activists see Anthony, I, 34; Bethune, I, 84; Blackwell, I, 90; Brooks, I, 133; Cheney, I, 190; Cooper, I, 229; Forten, II, 65; Giovanni, II, 109; Hansberry, II, 175; Harper, II, 181; Martin, III, 90; Meyer, III, 134; Mitford, III, 152; Smith, IV, 69; Walker, IV, 189; WellsBarnett, IV, 211 Civil War diarists see Andrews, I, 27; Barton, I, 67; Chesnut, I, 195; Cumming, I, 247; Holmes, II, 225; McGuire, III, 116; Towne, IV, 145 Clampitt, Amy, I, 208 Clapp, Margaret Antoinette, I, 209 Clappe, Louise Smith, I, 210 Clark, Ann Nolan, I, 210 Clark, Eleanor, I, 211 Clark, Mary Higgins, I, 212 Clarke, Rebecca Sophia, I, 213 Cleary, Beverly, I, 213 Cleghorn, Sarah Norcliffe, I, 215 Cliff, Michelle, I, 216 Clifton, Lucille, I, 217 Coatsworth, Elizabeth Jane, I, 218 Coit, Margaret L., I, 219
GENERAL INDEX
Colonialism see Angelou, I, 31; Butler, I, 157; Cliff, I, 216; hooks, II, 226; Mirikitani, III, 148; Ty-Casper, IV, 158; Walker, IV, 189 Colum, Mary Maguire, I, 219 Columnists see Ivins, II, 257; Maynard, III, 98; Scott-Maxwell, IV, 26 Coman, Katharine, I, 220 Comedy see Akins, I, 14; Berg, I, 80; Chase, I, 189; Flexner, II, 53; Ford, II, 61; Franken, II, 70; Gates, II, 93; Gerstenberg, II, 98; Glasgow, II, 110; Gordon, II, 127; Hale, II, 162; Heyward, II, 206; Johnson, II, 275; Kerr, II, 306; Luce, III, 66; Marks, III, 84; Mathews, III, 97; Matthews, III, 97; Mayo, III, 100; Mortimer, III, 175; Morton, III, 176; Nichols, III, 196; O’Connor, III, 215; Ritchie, III, 330; Skinner, IV, 58; Spewak, IV, 84; Taylor, IV, 124; Troubetzkoy, IV, 148; Tyler, IV, 159; West, IV, 219; White, IV, 225; Wiggins, IV, 237; Young, IV, 282 Coming-of-age novels see Alther, I, 24; Mohr, III, 154; Reed, III, 313 Communists see Flynn, II, 55; McKenney, III, 119; Mitford, III, 152; Olsen, III, 228 Comparative study see Spacks, IV, 79 Comstock, Anna Botsford, I, 221 Conant, Hannah Chaplin, I, 222 Confessional literature see Millett, III, 144; Sexton, IV, 40 Congresswoman see Jordan, II, 289 Conversion literature see Adams, I, 7; Burton, I, 155; Hume, II, 242; Livermore, III, 50; Luce, III, 66 Conway, Katherine Eleanor, I, 223 Cooey, Paula Marie, I, 223 Cook, Fannie, I, 225 Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth, I, 227 Cooke, Rose Terry, I, 226 Coolbrith, Ina Donna, I, 228 Coolidge, Susan See Woolsey, Sarah Chauncey Cooper, Anna Julia, I, 229 Cooper, Jane, I, 230
293
GENERAL INDEX
Cooper, Susan Fenimore, I, 231 Corbett, Elizabeth Frances, I, 231 Cornwell, Patricia, I, 232 Cortez, Jayne, I, 233 Cott, Nancy F., I, 234 Coyle, Kathleen, I, 235 Craig, Elisabeth May, I, 236 Craig, Kit See Reed, Kit Craigie, Pearl Richards, I, 237 Crapsey, Adelaide, I, 238 Craven, Margaret, I, 239 Crime novel see Cornwell, I, 232; Daly, I, 254; Grafton, II, 132; Paretsky, III, 250; Stabenow, IV, 87 Crist, Judith, I, 239 Critics see Beattie, I, 73; Brée, I, 124; Brown, I, 141; Deming, I, 277; Ehrenreich, II, 11; French, II, 76; Gilbert, II, 101; Goodman, II, 121; Grumbach, II, 152; Heilbrun, II, 194; hooks, II, 226; Jacobs, II, 266; Johnston, II, 281; Kael, II, 293; McCarthy, III, 104; Oates, III, 220; Ostriker, III, 234; Rich, III, 320; Sontag, IV, 75; Vendler, IV, 174; Wallace, IV, 194; Williams, IV, 248 Crocker, Hannah Mather, I, 241 Croly, Jane Cunningham, I, 241 Crosby, Caresse, I, 243 Cross, Amanda See Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Cross, Jane Hardin, I, 244 Crothers, Rachel, I, 244 Crouter, Natalie Stark, I, 245 Crowe, F. J. See Johnston, Jill Cruger, Mary, I, 246 Cuisine see Cabeza de Baca, I, 159; Child, I, 197; Davis, I, 262; Farmer, II, 33; Fisher, II, 45; Jones, II, 283; Lasswell, III, 11; Leslie, III, 36; Nitsch, III, 204; Rombauer, III, 340; Terhune, IV, 130; Winslow, IV, 257; Youmans, IV, 279 Cumming, Kate, I, 247 Cummins, Maria Susanna, I, 247 Curtiss, Mina Kirstein, I, 248 Curtiss, Ursula Reilly, I, 249 Custer, Elizabeth Bacon, I, 250 Cuthrell, Faith Baldwin, I, 250 Dahlgren, Madeleine Vinton, I, 253 Dall, Caroline Healey, I, 253 Daly, Elizabeth, I, 254
294
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Daly, Mary, I, 255 Daly, Maureen, I, 257 Dance and dancers see de Mille, I, 274; Johnston, II, 281; MacLaine, III, 77; Mirikitani, III, 148; Shange, IV, 42; Sontag, IV, 75; Whitman, IV, 232 Dancers see Duncan, I, 315; Fitzgerald, II, 49; MacLaine, III, 77 Daniels, Dorothy, I, 258 Dargan, Olive Tilford, I, 259 D’Aulaire, Ingri Mortenson, I, 260 Davenport, Marcia Gluck, I, 260 Davidson, Lucretia Maria, I, 261 Davidson, Margaret Miller, I, 262 Davis, Adelle, I, 262 Davis, Angela Yvonne, I, 263 Davis, Dorothy Salisbury, I, 265 Davis, Elizabeth Gould, I, 265 Davis, Mollie Moore, I, 266 Davis, Natalie Zemon, I, 267 Davis, Paulina Wright, I, 268 Davis, Rebecca Harding, I, 269 Dawidowicz, Lucy S., I, 269 Day, Dorothy, I, 270 De Angeli, Marguerite Lofft, I, 271 De Burgos, Julia, I, 272 De Cleyre, Voltairine, I, 273 De Mille, Agnes, I, 274 De Mondragon, Margaret Randall See Randall, Margaret Dégh, Linda, I, 275 Del Occidente, Maria See Brooks, Maria Gowen Deland, Margaret Campbell, I, 276 Deloria, Ella Cara, I, 277 Deming, Barbara, I, 277 Denison, Mary Andrews, I, 279 Dennett, Mary Ware, I, 279 Depression literature see Bourke-White, I, 109; Craven, I, 239; Daniels, I, 258; Dargan, I, 259; Field, II, 41; Hobart, II, 215; Janeway, II, 270; Johnson, II, 278; Le Sueur, III, 23; McKenney, III, 119; St. Johns, IV, 2; Slesinger, IV, 59; Snyder, IV, 73; Thomas, IV, 135; Ward, IV, 198; Welty, IV, 212 Derricotte, Toi, I, 280 Deutsch, Babette, I, 282 DeVeaux, Alexis, I, 282 Dexter, John See Bradley, Marion Zimmer Diarists
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
see Adams, I, 10; Anthony, I, 35; Ballard, I, 57; Boylston, I, 115; Burr, I, 154; Crouter, I, 245; Drinker, I, 312; Forten, II, 65; Gill, II, 105; Goodwin, II, 124; Heywood, II, 207; Huntington, II, 247; James, II, 269; Kemble, II, 302; Knight, II, 323; Lindbergh, III, 43; Logan, III, 53; Mott, III, 177; Nicholson, III, 197; Nin, III, 203; Owen, III, 237; Peabody, III, 261; Peck, III, 264; Ramsay, III, 305; Ranous, III, 309; Salisbury, IV, 3; Smith, IV, 70; Stein, IV, 92; Whitman, IV, 231; Wilder, IV, 240; Williams, IV, 247; Winslow, IV, 254 Diaz, Abby Morton, I, 283 Dickinson, Emily, I, 284 Didactic fiction see Campbell, I, 163; Chesebrough, I, 193; Dahlgren, I, 253; Hale, II, 164; Hooper, II, 227; Lawrence, III, 19; McIntosh, III, 117; Phelps, III, 272; Rush, III, 352; Smith, IV, 65; Thomas, IV, 135; Victor, IV, 176; Williams, IV, 247 Didion, Joan, I, 287 Dillard, Annie, I, 289 Dime novel see Denison, I, 279; Older, III, 225; Victor, IV, 175; Victor, IV, 176 Dinnies, Anna Peyre, I, 291 DiPrima, Diane, I, 292 Disabled writers see Hall, II, 169; Keller, II, 295; Miller, III, 144; Van Alstyne, IV, 170; Wells, IV, 208; White, IV, 225 Disney, Doris Miles, I, 293 Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee, I, 294 Dix, Beulah Marie, I, 295 Dix, Dorothea Lynde, I, 296 Dix, Dorothy See Gilmer, Elizabeth Meriwether Dixon, Franklin W. See Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Documentaries see Angelou, I, 31; Hunter-Lattany, II, 246; Sontag, IV, 75 Dodge, Mary Abigail, I, 297 Dodge, Mary Mapes, I, 298 Doman, June, I, 298 Domestic literature see Gilman, II, 105; Hall, II, 169; Logan, III, 54; Parton, III, 255; Uhnak, IV, 164; Warren, IV, 202
GENERAL INDEX
Domini, Rey See Lorde, Audre Dominic, R. B. See Lathen, Emma Donovan, Frances R., I, 299 Doolittle, Antoinette, I, 300 D(oolittle), H(ilda), I, 300 Dorr, Julia Ripley, I, 302 Dorr, Rheta Childe, I, 303 Dorsett, Danielle See Daniels, Dorothy Dorsey, Anna McKenney, I, 304 Dorsey, Ella Loraine, I, 305 Dorsey, Sarah Ellis, I, 305 Doubleday, Nellie Blanchan, I, 306 Douglas, Amanda Minnie, I, 307 Douglas, Ann, I, 308 Dove, Rita, I, 309 Drew, Elizabeth, I, 309 Drexler, Rosalyn, I, 311 Drinker, Elizabeth Sandwith, I, 312 DuBois, Shirley Graham See Graham, Shirley DuJardin, Rosamond Neal, I, 313 Dunbar-Nelson, Alice, I, 315 Duncan, Isadora, I, 315 Duniway, Abigail Scott, I, 316 Dunlap, Jane See Davis, Adelle DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, I, 314 Dupuy, Eliza Ann, I, 317 Durant, Ariel, I, 318 Dworkin, Andrea, I, 319 Dykeman, Wilma, I, 320 Earle, Alice Morse, II, 1 Earle, Sylvia A., II, 3 Eastman, Crystal, II, 4 Eastman, Elaine Goodale, II, 5 Eastman, Mary Henderson, II, 6 Eaton, Edith Maud, II, 7 Eberhart, Mignon G., II, 8 Eberhart, Sheri S. See Tepper, Sheri S. Eckstorm, Fannie Hardy, II, 9 Ecology literature see Carson, I, 168; Griffin, II, 146 Eddy, Mary Baker, II, 10 Editors see Brownmiller, I, 145; Catt, I, 179; Cook-Lynn, I, 227; Cott, I, 234; Follen, II, 56; Fremantle, II, 73; Harding, II, 178; Hejinian, II, 196; Munro, III, 182; Newman, III, 195; Ranous, III, 309; Salmonson, IV, 4; Sargent, IV, 11; Toklas, IV, 143; Watanabe, IV, 205 Educational administrators see Abbott, I, 1; Agassiz, I, 12; Andrews, I, 27; Bethune, I, 84;
295
GENERAL INDEX
Cooper, I, 229; Gardner, II, 91; Gulliver, II, 156; Hamilton, II, 171; Livermore, III, 51; Madeleva, III, 79; Miller, III, 141; Putnam, III, 300; Tappan, IV, 121; Willard, IV, 245 Educators see Andrews, I, 27; Bethune, I, 84; Clapp, I, 209; Cooper, I, 229; Cott, I, 234; Dix, I, 296; DunbarNelson, I, 315; Gruenberg, II, 151; Hamilton, II, 171; Harris, II, 183; Hollingworth, II, 223; Orvis, III, 231; Peabody, III, 260; Phelps, III, 271; Satir, IV, 14; Tappan, IV, 121; Taylor, IV, 125; Willard, IV, 243; Willard, IV, 245 Egan, Lesley See Linington, Elizabeth Ehrenreich, Barbara, II, 11 Eiker, Mathilde, II, 14 Elder, Susan Blanchard, II, 15 Electronic media works see Owens, III, 239; Sarton, IV, 12 Elgin, Suzette Haden, II, 15 Ellet, Elizabeth, II, 17 Elliot, Elisabeth, II, 18 Elliott, Maude Howe, II, 19 Elliott, Sarah Barnwell, II, 19 Ellis, Anne, II, 20 Ellis, Edith, II, 21 Embury, Emma Manley, II, 22 Emmy award see Childress, I, 199; Drexler, I, 311; Griffin, II, 146 Emshwiller, Carol, II, 23 Environmental concerns see Allen, I, 21; Clampitt, I, 208; Cortez, I, 233; Dillard, I, 289; Hogan, II, 219; Kumin, II, 329; Levertov, III, 38; Piercy, III, 277; Ruether, III, 347; Silko, IV, 52; Wilhelm, IV, 242 Ephron, Nora, II, 24 Epistolary novels and poems see Castillo, I, 174; Smith, IV, 67; Van Duyn, IV, 170; Walker, IV, 189 Erdrich, Louise, II, 25 Eroticism see Broumas, I, 136; Forrest, II, 64; Martin, III, 91; Olds, III, 226; Rice, III, 319 Essayists see Allen, I, 21; Allison, I, 23; Bagley, I, 52; Beattie, I, 73; Bergman, I, 81; Boyd, I, 113; Cherry, I, 192; Clark, I, 211;
296
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Cooey, I, 223; Didion, I, 287; DuPlessis, I, 314; Ephron, II, 24; Fisher, II, 45; FitzGerald, II, 47; Gallagher, II, 86; Garber, II, 87; Gornick, II, 128; Hadas, II, 160; Hall, II, 169; Haraway, II, 176; Hardwick, II, 179; Hawthorne, II, 192; Heilbrun, II, 194; Hirshfield, II, 213; hooks, II, 226; Howe, II, 234; Howe, II, 235; Ivins, II, 257; Jordan, II, 290; Kerber, II, 305; Ozick, III, 242; Paglia, III, 246; Randall, III, 307; Repplier, III, 317; Rich, III, 320; Ross, III, 341; Russ, III, 353; Sanders, IV, 7; Scott, IV, 24; Sontag, IV, 75; Steinem, IV, 95; Walker, IV, 189 Estes, Eleanor, II, 26 Ethnographers see Deloria, I, 277 Etiquette see Bogan, I, 100; Bracken, I, 116; Hall, II, 167; Leslie, III, 36; Logan, III, 54; Vanderbilt, IV, 174 Evangelists see McPherson, III, 122; Walker, IV, 193 Evans, Abbie Huston, II, 27 Evans, Mari, II, 28 Evans, Sarah Ann, II, 29 Evermay, March See Eiker, Mathilde Expatriates see D(oolittle), I, 300; Fitzgerald, II, 49; Stein, IV, 92; Toklas, IV, 143 Experimental writers see Acker, I, 3; Derricotte, I, 280; Dworkin, I, 319; Fornés, II, 62; Graham, II, 134; Howard, II, 233; Howe, II, 238; Johnston, II, 281; Jong, II, 287; Maso, III, 94; Niedecker, III, 199; Owens, III, 239; Russ, III, 353; Shange, IV, 42; Terry, IV, 131 Fahs, Sophia Lyon, II, 31 Fairbank, Janet Ayer, II, 32 Fairfield, A. M. See Alcott, Louisa May Fairy tales see Bambara, I, 58; Gould, II, 130; Lurie, III, 68; Tan, IV, 119; Willard, IV, 246 Family saga see Caldwell, I, 160; Fairbank, II, 32; Flint, II, 54; Kelly, II, 300; Keyes, II, 307; Lewis, III, 41;
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Norris, III, 207; Rawlings, III, 310; Schaeffer, IV, 19; Scott, IV, 24; Suckow, IV, 111; Turnbull, IV, 155; Tyler, IV, 159; Uhnak, IV, 164; Warren, IV, 201; Welty, IV, 212; Wyatt, IV, 270 Fantasy see Brackett, I, 117; Bradley, I, 118; Castillo, I, 174; Fritz, II, 80; Gould, II, 130; Howe, II, 238; Le Guin, III, 21; McIntyre, III, 118; Moore, III, 162; O’Neill, III, 220; Ozick, III, 242; Pollack, III, 284; Rice, III, 319; Rusch, III, 351; Salmonson, IV, 4; Scarborough, IV, 18; Tepper, IV, 128; Walton, IV, 196; Willard, IV, 246; Willis, IV, 250 Farley, Harriet, II, 32 Farmer, Fannie Merritt, II, 33 Farnham, Eliza Woodson, II, 34 Farnham, Mateel Howe, II, 35 Farquharson, Martha See Finley, Martha Farrar, Eliza Rotch, II, 35 Faugeres, Margaretta V., II, 36 Fauset, Jessie Redmon, II, 37 Felton, Rebecca Latimer, II, 38 Feminist critic see DuPlessis, I, 314 Feminist fiction see Barnes, I, 63; Blake, I, 93; Breuer, I, 126; Broner, I, 131; Brown, I, 141; Chopin, I, 202; Dargan, I, 259; Didion, I, 287; Ferber, II, 39; Gardener, II, 89; Gestefeld, II, 99; Gould, II, 130; Green, II, 140; Harris, II, 184; Heilbrun, II, 194; Holley, II, 222; Irwin, II, 255; Johnson, II, 275; Johnston, II, 281; Jong, II, 287; Lane, III, 5; Lathen, III, 12; Le Sueur, III, 23; Lerman, III, 33; Morrison, III, 172; Piercy, III, 277; Reno, III, 317; Russ, III, 353; Smedley, IV, 61; Tyler, IV, 161; Ward, IV, 198 Feminist literature see Addams, I, 11; Anneke, I, 33; Anthony, I, 34; Ayer, I, 47; Blackwell, I, 90; Bloomer, I, 97; Brown, I, 141; Carmichael, I, 165; Chesler, I, 194; Child, I, 198; Daly, I, 255; Davis, I, 265; Davis, I, 268; Doolittle, I, 300; Dorr, I, 303; Duniway, I, 316; Eastman, II, 4; Eddy, II, 10; Farnham, II, 34; Flanner, II, 50;
GENERAL INDEX
Friedan, II, 78; Fuller, II, 81; Gardener, II, 89; Gilmer, II, 108; Goodsell, II, 122; Hacker, II, 159; Hasbrouck, II, 189; Heilbrun, II, 194; Herschberger, II, 205; Howe, II, 234; Howe, II, 235; Howland, II, 240; Janeway, II, 270; Johnston, II, 281; Jong, II, 287; Malkiel, III, 81; Martin, III, 89; Millett, III, 144; Moers, III, 154; Moore, III, 162; Murray, III, 185; Orvis, III, 231; Ozick, III, 242; Papashvily, III, 249; Phelps, III, 272; Sanger, IV, 8; Shaw, IV, 44; Sontag, IV, 75; Walker, IV, 189; Wells, IV, 210; White, IV, 224; Wright, IV, 266 Feminist poetry see Broumas, I, 136; Flanner, II, 50; Gilman, II, 106; Giovanni, II, 109; Grahn, II, 137; Griffin, II, 146; Hacker, II, 159; Herschberger, II, 205; Jong, II, 287; Laing, III, 1; Le Sueur, III, 23; Menken, III, 129; Millay, III, 138; Piercy, III, 277; Rich, III, 320; Smith, IV, 63; Treadwell, IV, 146 Feminist writers see Broumas, I, 136; Brownmiller, I, 145; Charnas, I, 187; Cliff, I, 216; Cooey, I, 223; Daly, I, 255; Davis, I, 263; Deming, I, 277; Derricotte, I, 280; DeVeaux, I, 282; Drexler, I, 311; Dworkin, I, 319; Ehrenreich, II, 11; Emshwiller, II, 23; French, II, 76; Gearhart, II, 94; Gornick, II, 128; Griffin, II, 146; Grumbach, II, 152; Harding, II, 178; Hite, II, 214; Hollander, II, 221; hooks, II, 226; Howard, II, 233; Howe, II, 234; Howe, II, 238; HunterLattany, II, 246; Jackson, II, 261; Jacobs, II, 265; Jones, II, 283; Kizer, II, 321; Le Guin, III, 21; Le Sueur, III, 23; MacKinnon, III, 76; Mairs, III, 81; Millett, III, 144; Miner, III, 146; Moraga, III, 167; Morgan, III, 169; Nussbaum, III, 210; Owens, III, 238; Owens, III, 239; Paglia, III, 246; Paretsky, III, 250; Piercy, III, 277; Rich, III, 320; Sanchez, IV, 5; Schaeffer, IV, 19; Scott- Maxwell, IV, 26; Showalter, IV, 48; Shulman, IV, 50; Steinem, IV, 95;
297
GENERAL INDEX
Tan, IV, 119; Walker, IV, 189; Williams, IV, 248; Wolf, IV, 259 Fenno, Jenny, II, 39 Ferber, Edna, II, 39 Field, Kate, II, 41 Field, Rachel Lyman, II, 41 Fields, Annie Adams, II, 42 Film adaptations see Baker, I, 55; Bristow, I, 130; Buck, I, 150; Carroll, I, 167; Didion, I, 287; Farnham, II, 35; Franken, II, 70; Hobart, II, 215; Hobson, II, 216; Holding, II, 220; Hulme, II, 242; Hurst, II, 249; Jackson, II, 259; Jewett, II, 273; Lee, III, 27; Lincoln, III, 43; McKenney, III, 119; McLean, III, 120; Miller, III, 139; Oates, III, 220; Papashvily, III, 249; Porter, III, 286; Rinehart, III, 328; Scarborough, IV, 17; Slesinger, IV, 59; Stratton-Porter, IV, 106; Turney, IV, 156; Webster, IV, 207; West, IV, 217 Film criticism see Crist, I, 239; Deming, I, 277; hooks, II, 226; Kael, II, 293; McMillan, III, 121; Parsons, III, 255 Film director see Ephron, II, 24 Film producer see Ephron, II, 24 Films see Angelou, I, 31; Bambara, I, 58; Beattie, I, 73; Brown, I, 141; Childress, I, 199; Didion, I, 287; French, II, 76; Harjo, II, 180; Henley, II, 200; Highsmith, II, 210; Hollander, II, 221; hooks, II, 226; Johnson, II, 275; Jordan, II, 290; Kennedy, II, 303; Kingston, II, 315; MacLaine, III, 77; McDermott, III, 113; McMillan, III, 121; Mohr, III, 154; Norman, III, 206; Owens, III, 239; Rossner, III, 342; Sarton, IV, 12; Sontag, IV, 75; Steinem, IV, 95; Tyler, IV, 159; Wasserstein, IV, 203; Williams, IV, 248; Yamamoto, IV, 273 Financial analysts see Porter, III, 290 Finley, Martha, II, 43 Fisher, Dorothea Canfield, II, 44 Fisher, M. F. K., II, 45 Fiske, Sarah Symmes, II, 46
298
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
FitzGerald, Frances, II, 47 Fitzgerald, Zelda Sayre, II, 49 Flanders, G. M., II, 50 Flanner, Hildegarde, II, 50 Flanner, Janet, II, 51 Fletcher, Inglis Clark, II, 52 Flexner, Anne Crawford, II, 53 Flexner, Eleanor, II, 53 Flint, Margaret, II, 54 Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley, II, 55 Folklore see Alexander, I, 19; Allen, I, 21; Brown, I, 136; Butler, I, 157; Dégh, I, 275; Deland, I, 276; Eastman, II, 5; Guy, II, 157; Hamilton, II, 173; Hurston, II, 250; Kincaid, II, 310; Kingston, II, 315; Laut, III, 16; Le Sueur, III, 23; L’Engle, III, 30; Lurie, III, 68; Marshall, III, 87; Morrison, III, 172; Newcomb, III, 193; Owen, III, 237; Papashvily, III, 249; Rawlings, III, 310; Sawyer, IV, 15; Seredy, IV, 36; Shaw, IV, 44; Silko, IV, 52; Smith, IV, 67; Victor, IV, 175; Walker, IV, 192; Walton, IV, 196; Willard, IV, 246; Williams, IV, 248; Young, IV, 280 Folksingers see Nye, III, 212 Follen, Eliza Cabot, II, 56 Foote, Mary Hallock, II, 57 Forbes, Esther, II, 58 Forché, Carolyn, II, 59 Ford, Harriet, II, 61 Ford, Sallie Rochester, II, 61 Forester, Fanny See Judson, Emily Chubbuck Formalism see Van Duyn, IV, 170 Fornés, María Irene, II, 62 Forrest, Katherine V., II, 64 Forten, Charlotte L., II, 65 Foster, Hannah Webster, II, 66 Fourierists see Howland, II, 240; Kirby, II, 318; Orvis, III, 231 Fox, Helen Morgenthau, II, 67 Fox, Paula, II, 67 Frankau, Pamela, II, 69 Franken, Rose, II, 70 Freedman, Nancy, II, 71 Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins, II, 72 Fremantle, Anne, II, 73 French, Alice, II, 74 French, Anne Warner, II, 75
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
French, Lucy Smith, II, 76 French, Marilyn, II, 76 Friedan, Betty, II, 78 Frings, Ketti, II, 79 Fritz, Jean, II, 80 Fulbright grants see Huxtable, II, 252; Le Guin, III, 21; Plath, III, 281; Porter, III, 286; Vendler, IV, 174 Fuller, Margaret, II, 81 Gage, Frances Dana, II, 85 Gale, Zona, II, 86 Gallagher, Tess, II, 86 Garber, Marjorie, II, 87 Gardener, Helen Hamilton, II, 89 Gardner, Isabella, II, 90 Gardner, Mariam See Bradley, Marion Zimmer Gardner, Mary Sewall, II, 91 Garrigue, Jean, II, 92 Gates, Eleanor, II, 93 Gates, Susa Young, II, 93 Gearhart, Sally Miller, II, 94 Gellhorn, Martha, II, 95 Genêt See Flanner, Janet Geographer see Semple, IV, 36 George, Jean Craighead, II, 96 Gerould, Katharine Fullerton, II, 98 Gerstenberg, Alice, II, 98 Gestefeld, Ursula N., II, 99 Gibbons, Kaye, II, 100 Gilbert, Fabiola Cabeza de Baca See Cabeza de Baca, Fabiola Gilbert, Sandra M., II, 101 Gilchrist, Annie Somers, II, 103 Gilchrist, Ellen, II, 103 Gill, Sarah Prince, II, 105 Gilman, Caroline Howard, II, 105 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, II, 106 Gilmer, Elizabeth Meriwether, II, 108 Giovanni, Nikki, II, 109 Glasgow, Ellen, II, 110 Glaspell, Susan, II, 113 Glück, Louise, II, 114 Godchaux, Elma, II, 116 Godwin, Gail, II, 116 Golden, Marita, II, 118 Goldman, Emma, II, 119 Goodman, Allegra, II, 120 Goodman, Ellen, II, 121 Goodsell, Willystine, II, 122 Goodwin, Doris Kearns, II, 123 Goodwin, Maud Wilder, II, 124 Gordon, Caroline, II, 125
GENERAL INDEX
Gordon, Mary Catherine, II, 126 Gordon, Ruth, II, 127 Gornick, Vivian, II, 128 Gothic and grotesque see Andrews, I, 30; Bradley, I, 118; Church, I, 203; Daniels, I, 258; Farnham, II, 35; Harris, II, 186; Henley, II, 200; Holding, II, 220; Kennedy, II, 303; Lurie, III, 68; Martin, III, 91; Oates, III, 220; O’Connor, III, 215; O’Donnell, III, 217; Read, III, 312; Scarborough, IV, 17; Schoolcraft, IV, 21; Voigt, IV, 180; Whitney, IV, 235; Wood, IV, 261 Gottschalk, Laura Riding See Jackson, Laura Gould, Hannah Flagg, II, 130 Gould, Lois, II, 130 Grafton, Sue, II, 132 Graham, Isabella Marshall, II, 133 Graham, Jorie, II, 134 Graham, Katharine, II, 135 Graham, Shirley, II, 136 Grahn, Judy, II, 137 Grant, Margaret See Franken, Rose Graphologists see Roman, III, 339 Grau, Shirley Ann, II, 138 Graves, Valerie See Bradley, Marion Zimmer Gray, Angela See Daniels, Dorothy Greek tragedies see Norman, III, 206 Green, Anna Katharine, II, 140 Green, Anne, II, 141 Green, Olive See Reed, Myrtle Greenberg, Joanne, II, 142 Greene, Sarah McLean, II, 144 Greenfield, Eloise, II, 144 Greenwood, Grace See Lippincott, Sara Jane Griffin, Susan, II, 146 Griffith, Mary, II, 147 Grimes, Martha, II, 148 Grimké, Angelina, II, 149 Grimké, Sarah Moore, II, 150 Gruenberg, Sidonie Matzner, II, 151 Grumbach, Doris, II, 152 Guernsey, Clara F., II, 154 Guernsey, Lucy Ellen, II, 154 Guggenheim fellowship see Adams, I, 9; Betts, I, 85; Bishop, I, 88; Boyle, I, 114; Brooks, I, 133; Carson, I, 168; Clark, I, 211; Colum, I, 219; Fox, II, 67; Gordon, II, 125; Hardwick, II,
299
GENERAL INDEX
179; Higgins, II, 208; Hirshfield, II, 213; Kenyon, II, 304; Larsen, III, 9; Moore, III, 164; Porter, III, 286; Spencer, IV, 82; Swenson, IV, 113; Trilling, IV, 147; Truitt, IV, 150 Guiney, Louise Imogen, II, 155 Gulliver, Julia Henrietta, II, 156 Guy, Rosa, II, 157 Gynocriticism see Showalter, IV, 48 H. D. See D(oolittle), H(ilda) Hacker, Marilyn, II, 159 Hadas, Rachel, II, 160 Hahn, Emily, II, 161 Hale, Lucretia Peabody, II, 162 Hale, Nancy, II, 163 Hale, Sarah Josepha, II, 164 Hale, Susan, II, 166 Hall, Florence Howe, II, 167 Hall, Hazel, II, 168 Hall, Louisa Park, II, 169 Hall, Sarah Ewing, II, 169 Hamilton, Alice, II, 170 Hamilton, Edith, II, 171 Hamilton, Gail See Dodge, Mary Abigail Hamilton, Jane, II, 171 Hamilton, Kate W., II, 172 Hamilton, Virginia, II, 173 Hanaford, Phebe Coffin, II, 174 Hansberry, Lorraine, II, 175 Haraway, Donna, II, 176 Harding, Mary Esther, II, 177 Harding, Sandra, II, 178 Hardwick, Elizabeth, II, 179 Harjo, Joy, II, 180 Harlem renaissance see Bennett, I, 79; Bonner, I, 105; Fauset, II, 37; Hunter- Lattany, II, 246; Johnson, II, 276; Johnson, II, 277; Larsen, III, 9; West, IV, 215 Harlem Writer’s Guild see Angelou, I, 31; Guy, II, 157; McMillan, III, 121 Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins, II, 181 Harper, Ida Husted, II, 182 Harris, Bernice Kelly, II, 183 Harris, Bertha, II, 184 Harris, Corra May, II, 185 Harris, Miriam Coles, II, 186 Harrison, Constance Cary, II, 187 Hart, Carolyn G., II, 187 Hart, Frances Noyes, II, 188 Hasbrouck, Lydia Sayer, II, 189
300
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Hastings, Susannah Johnson, II, 190 Hatch, Mary R. Platt, II, 190 Haven, Alice Bradley, II, 191 Hawaiian literature see Watanabe, IV, 205; Yamanaka, IV, 274 Hawthorne, Elizabeth Manning, II, 192 Hawthorne, Hildegarde, II, 192 Hazlett, Helen, II, 193 Heilbrun, Carolyn G., II, 194 Hejinian, Lyn, II, 196 Hellman, Lillian, II, 197 Henderson, Zenna, II, 199 Henissart, Martha See Lathen, Emma Henley, Beth, II, 200 Henry, Alice, II, 201 Henry, Marguerite, II, 202 Hentz, Caroline Whiting, II, 203 Herbst, Josephine, II, 204 Herschberger, Ruth, II, 205 Hewitt, Mary E. Moore, II, 206 Heyward, Dorothy Kuhns, II, 206 Heywood, Martha Spence, II, 207 Higgins, Marguerite, II, 208 Higginson, Ella Rhoads, II, 209 Higham, Mary R., II, 210 Highet, Helen MacInnes See MacInnes, Helen Highsmith, Patricia, II, 210 Hill-Lutz, Grace Livingston, II, 212 Hirshfield, Jane, II, 213 Historians see Barnes, I, 64; Cott, I, 234; Davis, I, 267; Dawidowicz, I, 269; Durant, I, 318; Kerber, II, 305; Neilson, III, 192; Putnam, III, 301; Randall, III, 307; Scott, IV, 24; Scott, IV, 25; Wright, IV, 270 Historical biography see Goodwin, II, 123 Historical drama see Dix, I, 295; Hall, II, 169; Heyward, II, 206; Johnston, II, 281 Historical fiction see Austin, I, 45; Barker, I, 59; Barr, I, 65; Bleecker, I, 96; Bristow, I, 130; Buckmaster, I, 152; Caldwell, I, 160; Catherwood, I, 178; Dorsey, I, 304; Duniway, I, 316; Field, II, 41; Fletcher, II, 52; Forbes, II, 58; Ford, II, 61; Gellhorn, II, 95; Goodwin, II, 124; Greenberg, II, 142; Harper, II, 181; Jewett, II, 273; Johnston, II, 281; King, II, 311; Latimer,
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
III, 15; Laut, III, 16; Lewis, III, 41; Linington, III, 46; Lothrop, III, 60; MacInnes, III, 75; Martin, III, 90; McDowell, III, 114; McKenney, III, 119; Meaney, III, 126; Meigs, III, 128; Miller, III, 140; Morrow, III, 174; Morton, III, 176; Murfree, III, 183; Niles, III, 202; Norton, III, 208; Oemler, III, 224; Pinckney, III, 279; Porter, III, 286; Putnam, III, 300; Roberts, III, 333; Sachs, IV, 1; St. Johns, IV, 2; Schmitt, IV, 21; Scott, IV, 24; Seawell, IV, 29; Sedgwick, IV, 31; Seredy, IV, 36; Seton, IV, 37; Stephens, IV, 97; Thane, IV, 132; Turnbull, IV, 155; Walker, IV, 192; Walton, IV, 196; Wharton, IV, 220; White, IV, 228; Whitney, IV, 235; Williams, IV, 247; Windle, IV, 253; Woods, IV, 263; Woolson, IV, 265 Historical poetry see Gould, II, 130; Morton, III, 176 Historical romance see Plain, III, 280 Hite, Shere, II, 214 Hobart, Alice Tisdale, II, 215 Hobson, Laura Z., II, 216 Hoffman, Alice, II, 217 Hoffman, Malvina, II, 218 Hogan, Linda, II, 219 Holding, Elisabeth Sanxay, II, 220 Hollander, Nicole, II, 221 Holley, Marietta, II, 222 Hollingworth, Leta Stetter, II, 223 Holm, Saxe See Jackson, Helen Hunt Holmes, Mary Jane Hawes, II, 224 Holmes, Sarah Stone, II, 225 Hooks, bell, II, 226 Hooper, Lucy, II, 227 Hooper, Lucy Jones, II, 228 Hope, Laura Lee See Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Hopkins, Pauline, II, 228 Hopper, Hedda, II, 229 Horlak, E. E. See Tepper, Sheri S. Horney, Karen, II, 230 Horror see Rusch, III, 351 Horticulturists see Fox, II, 67 Houston, Jean, II, 231 Howard, Maureen, II, 233 Howe, Florence, II, 234 Howe, Julia Ward, II, 235
GENERAL INDEX
Howe, Susan, II, 237 Howe, Tina, II, 238 Howes, Barbara, II, 239 Howland, Marie, II, 240 Hugo award see Butler, I, 157; Le Guin, III, 21; McIntyre, III, 118; Russ, III, 353; Wilhelm, IV, 242; Willis, IV, 250 Hull, Helen, II, 241 Hulme, Kathryn Cavarly, II, 242 Hume, Sophia, II, 242 Humishuma See Mourning Dove Humor see Alther, I, 24; Bombeck, I, 103; Brown, I, 141; Cleary, I, 213; French, II, 75; Hollander, II, 221; Hunter-Lattany, II, 246; Lathen, III, 12; Le Guin, III, 21; Lowry, III, 64; McCarthy, III, 104; Mitford, III, 152; Phelps, III, 272; Powell, III, 292; Rinehart, III, 328; Shulman, IV, 50; Skinner, IV, 58; Smith, IV, 67; Stephens, IV, 97; Welty, IV, 212; Whitcher, IV, 223 Hunt, Irene, II, 243 Hunt, Mabel Leigh, II, 244 Hunter, Rodello, II, 245 Hunter-Lattany, Kristin, II, 246 Huntington, Susan, II, 247 Hurd-Mead, Kate C., II, 248 Hurst, Fannie, II, 249 Hurston, Zora Neale, II, 250 Hutchins, Maude McVeigh, II, 251 Huxtable, Ada Louise, II, 252 Hyde, Shelley See Reed, Kit Hymn writers see Chapman, I, 186; Moise, III, 155; Oberholtzer, III, 223; Smith, IV, 64; Van Alstyne, IV, 170; Warner, IV, 200 Illustrators see Alexander, I, 19; Comstock, I, 221; Foote, II, 57; Keith, II, 294; Mansfield, III, 84; O’Neill, III, 220; Polacco, III, 283; Seredy, IV, 36 Imagism see Graham, II, 134; Niedecker, III, 199 Imperialism see Griffin, II, 146; Owens, III, 239 Indian-American literature see Divakaruni, I, 294
301
GENERAL INDEX
Interior design see Dennett, I, 279; Wharton, IV, 220 Investigative journalism see Eastman, II, 4; Ottenberg, III, 235; Tarbell, IV, 122 Ireland, Jane See Norris, Kathleen Thompson Irwin, Inez Haynes, II, 255 Isaacs, Susan, II, 256 Ives, Morgan See Bradley, Marion Zimmer Ivins, Molly, II, 257 Jackson, Helen Hunt, II, 259 Jackson, Laura, II, 260 Jackson, Rebecca Cox, II, 261 Jackson, Shirley, II, 262 Jackson, Ward See Braun, Lilian Jackson Jacobi, Mary Putnam, II, 264 Jacobs, Harriet, II, 265 Jacobs, Jane, II, 266 Jacobs, Sarah Sprague, II, 267 Jacobsen, Josephine, II, 268 James, Alice, II, 269 Jamison, Cecilia Viets, II, 270 Janeway, Elizabeth, II, 270 Janvier, Margaret Thompson, II, 271 Jerauld, Charlotte A., II, 272 Jervey, Caroline Gilman, II, 273 Jewett, Sarah Orne, II, 273 Johnson, Diane, II, 275 Johnson, Georgia Douglas, II, 276 Johnson, Helen Kendrick, II, 277 Johnson, Josephine Winslow, II, 278 Johnson-Masters, Virginia, II, 279 Johnston, Annie Fellows, II, 280 Johnston, Jill, II, 281 Johnston, Mary, II, 281 Jones, Amanda Theodocia, II, 283 Jones, Edith See Wharton, Edith Jones, Gayl, II, 283 Jones, Hettie, II, 285 Jones, Mary Harris, II, 286 Jong, Erica, II, 287 Jordan, Barbara C., II, 289 Jordan, June, II, 290 Jordan, Kate, II, 291 Jordan, Laura See Brown, Sandra Journalists see Ames, I, 26; Anneke, I, 33; Bombeck, I, 103; Bonner, I, 105; Bourke-White, I, 109; Boyle, I, 114; Brody, I, 131; Buchanan, I, 149; Chapelle, I, 184; Craig, I,
302
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
236; Day, I, 270; Didion, I, 287; Dorr, I, 303; Drew, I, 309; Eastman, II, 4; Ehrenreich, II, 11; Ephron, II, 24; FitzGerald, II, 47; Flanner, II, 51; Flynn, II, 55; Gardener, II, 89; Gellhorn, II, 95; Gilchrist, II, 103; Gilmer, II, 108; Goldman, II, 119; Goodman, II, 121; Hahn, II, 161; Hawthorne, II, 192; Higgins, II, 208; Hunter-Lattany, II, 246; Kingsolver, II, 314; Le Sueur, III, 23; Martínez, III, 92; McCloy, III, 106; McCormick, III, 108; McCrackin, III, 109; McGrory, III, 115; Mitford, III, 152; Obejas, III, 222; Ottenberg, III, 235; Sheehy, IV, 46; Spewak, IV, 84; Steinem, IV, 95; Strong, IV, 107; Tarbell, IV, 122; Thompson, IV, 137; Tuchman, IV, 153; Vorse, IV, 182; Wallace, IV, 194; Warner, IV, 200 Judson, Emily Chubbuck, II, 292 Kael, Pauline, II, 293 Kavanaugh, Cynthia See Daniels, Dorothy Keene, Carolyn See Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Keith, Agnes Newton, II, 294 Keller, Helen, II, 295 Kellerman, Faye, II, 296 Kelley, Edith Summers, II, 297 Kellogg, Louise, II, 298 Kellor, Frances, II, 299 Kelly, Eleanor Mercein, II, 300 Kelly, Myra, II, 301 Kemble, Fanny, II, 302 Kennedy, Adrienne, II, 303 Kenyon, Jane, II, 304 Kerber, Linda Kaufman, II, 305 Kerr, Jean, II, 306 Keyes, Frances Parkinson, II, 307 Kilmer, Aline Murray, II, 308 Kimbrough, Emily, II, 309 Kincaid, Jamaica, II, 310 King, Grace Elizabeth, II, 311 King, Laurie R., II, 312 King, Louisa Yeomans, II, 313 Kingsolver, Barbara, II, 314 Kingston, Maxine Hong, II, 315 Kinney, Elizabeth Dodge, II, 317 Kinzie, Juliette Magill, II, 317 Kirby, Georgiana Bruce, II, 318 Kirk, Ellen Warner, II, 319
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Kirkland, Caroline M. Stansbury, II, 320 Kizer, Carolyn, II, 321 Knapp, Bettina Liebowitz, II, 322 Knight, Sarah Kemble, II, 323 Knox, Adeline Trafton, II, 324 Koch, Adrienne, II, 325 Kohut, Rebekah Bettelheim, II, 325 Konigsburg, E. L., II, 326 Kroeber, Theodora, II, 327 Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth, II, 328 Kumin, Maxine W., II, 329 Labor and social problems see Perkins, III, 266; Scott, IV, 25 Laing, Dilys Bennett, III, 1 Lamb, Martha Nash, III, 1 Lamott, Anne, III, 2 Landers, Ann, III, 3 Landon, Margaret, III, 4 Lane, Gertrude Battles, III, 5 Lane, Rose Wilder, III, 5 Langdon, Mary See Pike, Mary Green Langer, Susanne K., III, 6 Larcom, Lucy, III, 8 Larsen, Nella, III, 9 Lasswell, Mary, III, 11 Latham, Jean Lee, III, 11 Lathen, Emma, III, 12 Lathrop, Rose Hawthorne, III, 14 Latimer, Elizabeth W., III, 15 Latin American literature see Benítez, I, 78 Latsis, Mary Jane See Lathen, Emma Laut, Agnes C., III, 16 Lauterbach, Ann, III, 17 Lawrence, Elizabeth L., III, 17 Lawrence, Josephine, III, 18 Lawrence, Margaret Woods, III, 19 Lawyers see Bres, I, 126; Murray, III, 185; Ricker, III, 326; Todd, IV, 142 Lazarus, Emma, III, 20 Le Guin, Ursula K., III, 21 Le Sueur, Meridel, III, 23 Le Vert, Octavia Walton, III, 24 Lea, Fannie Heaslip, III, 25 Lee, Eliza Buckminster, III, 26 Lee, Hannah Sawyer, III, 26 Lee, Harper, III, 27 Lee, Marion See Comstock, Anna Botsford Lee, Mary Elizabeth, III, 28 LeGallienne, Eva, III, 29 L’Engle, Madeleine, III, 30 Lenski, Lois, III, 31 Lerman, Rhoda, III, 33
GENERAL INDEX
Lerner, Gerda, III, 34 Lesbian feminist writers see Anzaldúa, I, 37; Cliff, I, 216; Deming, I, 277; DeVeaux, I, 282; Gearhart, II, 94; Grumbach, II, 152; Moraga, III, 167 Lesbian fiction see Forrest, II, 64 Lesbian writers see Allen, I, 21; Anzaldúa, I, 37; Bradley, I, 118; Broumas, I, 136; Brown, I, 141; Cliff, I, 216; Deming, I, 277; French, II, 76; Gearhart, II, 94; Gilbert, II, 101; Grahn, II, 137; Grumbach, II, 152; Hacker, II, 159; Herbst, II, 204; Johnston, II, 281; Moraga, III, 167; Morgan, III, 169; Newman, III, 195; Rich, III, 320; Routsong, III, 344; Russ, III, 353; Sarton, IV, 12 Lesbianism see Brown, I, 141; Myles, III, 186; Stein, IV, 92 Leslie, Annie Brown, III, 35 Leslie, Eliza, III, 36 Leslie, Miriam Follin, III, 37 Letters see Adams, I, 5; Anthony, I, 35; Clappe, I, 210; Dickinson, I, 284; Graham, II, 133; Grimké, II, 149; Grimké, II, 150; Hale, II, 166; Lindbergh, III, 43; Lippincott, III, 48; Madison, III, 80; Mead, III, 124; O’Connor, III, 215; Orvis, III, 231; Ramsay, III, 305; Robins, III, 335; Schoolcraft, IV, 21; Secor, IV, 29; Shindler, IV, 48; Smith, IV, 70; Stewart, IV, 99; Thaxter, IV, 133; Toklas, IV, 143; Towne, IV, 145 Levertov, Denise, III, 38 Lewis, Elizabeth Foreman, III, 39 Lewis, Estelle Robinson, III, 40 Lewis, Janet, III, 41 Libbey, Laura Jean, III, 42 Librarians see Bishop, I, 87; Estes, II, 26; Hunt, II, 244; Mojtabai, III, 156; Newman, III, 194; Norton, III, 208; Ruddy, III, 346; Sachs, IV, 1; Shannon, IV, 43 Lincoln, Victoria, III, 43 Lindbergh, Anne Morrow, III, 43 Lindbergh, Reeve, III, 45 Linguistics see Elgin, II, 15; Le Vert, III, 24
303
GENERAL INDEX
Linington, Elizabeth, III, 46 Lippard, Lucy R., III, 47 Lippincott, Martha Shepard, III, 48 Lippincott, Sara Jane, III, 48 Literary criticism see Brée, I, 124; Chase, I, 189; Colum, I, 219; Deutsch, I, 282; DuPlessis, I, 314; Guiney, II, 155; Hadas, II, 160; Hardwick, II, 179; Madeleva, III, 79; Martyn, III, 94; Mollenkott, III, 157; Moulton, III, 178; Muller, III, 182; Newstead, III, 196; Nicolson, III, 198; Nin, III, 203; Offord, III, 225; Scarborough, IV, 17; Singer, IV, 56; Spacks, IV, 79; Tompkins, IV, 144; Wyatt, IV, 270 Literary prizes see Brennan, I, 125; Conway, I, 223; Dargan, I, 259; Dix, I, 295; Dorsey, I, 304; Fox, II, 67; Moore, III, 165; Yates, IV, 275 Literary scholars see Brée, I, 124; Colum, I, 219; Heilbrun, II, 194; Howe, II, 234; Knapp, II, 322; Moers, III, 154; Newstead, III, 196; Nicolson, III, 198; Sewell, IV, 39; Tandy, IV, 121; Tuve, IV, 157; Vendler, IV, 174; White, IV, 228; Whitman, IV, 233 Little, Sophia Robbins, III, 49 Livermore, Harriet, III, 50 Livermore, Mary Rice, III, 51 Livingston, Myra Cohn, III, 52 Locke, Jane Starkweather, III, 53 Logan, Deborah Norris, III, 53 Logan, Mary Cunningham, III, 54 Logan, Olive, III, 55 Loos, Anita, III, 56 Lord, Bette Bao, III, 57 Lorde, Audre, III, 58 Lothrop, Amy See Warner, Anna Bartlett Lothrop, Harriet Stone, III, 60 Loughborough, Mary Ann Webster, III, 61 Lounsberry, Alice, III, 61 Love poetry see Cary, I, 171; Chilton, I, 200; Crosby, I, 243; Dickinson, I, 284; French, II, 76; Garrigue, II, 92; Hewitt, II, 206; Hooper, II, 227; Millay, III, 138; Moulton, III, 178; Osgood, III, 233; Piercy, III, 277 Lovejoy, Esther Pohl, III, 62
304
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Lowell, Amy, III, 63 Lowry, Lois, III, 64 Loy, Mina, III, 65 Lucas, Victoria See Plath, Sylvia Luce, Clare Boothe, III, 66 Luhan, Mabel Dodge, III, 67 Lumpkin, Grace, III, 67 Lurie, Alison, III, 68 Lutz, Alma, III, 69 Lynd, Helen Merrell, III, 70 Lyric poetry see Dargan, I, 259; Gardner, II, 90; Guiney, II, 155; Hall, II, 169; Lewis, III, 41; Madeleva, III, 79; Miller, III, 141; Miller, III, 144; Reese, III, 315 MacDonald, Betty, III, 73 MacDonald, Jessica N., III, 73 Macdonald, Marcia See Hill-Lutz, Grace Livingston MacDougall, Ruth Doan, III, 74 MacInnes, Helen, III, 75 MacKinnon, Catharine A., III, 76 MacLaine, Shirley, III, 77 MacLean, Annie Marion, III, 78 Macumber, Marie S. See Sandoz, Mari Madeleva, Sister Mary, III, 79 Madison, Dolley, III, 80 Magazine columns see Brennan, I, 125; Farmer, II, 33; Friedan, II, 78; Porter, III, 290; Thompson, IV, 137 Magazine editors/publishers see Aldrich, I, 19; Brownson, I, 146; Cather, I, 175; Drew, I, 309; Fremantle, II, 73; French, II, 76; Hunter, II, 245; Kirkland, II, 320; Luce, III, 66; Marot, III, 85; Mayo, III, 100; O’Hair, III, 218; Sangster, IV, 10; Smith, IV, 69; Victor, IV, 176; Wilder, IV, 241; Woodhull, IV, 262 Mairs, Nancy, III, 81 Malkiel, Theresa S., III, 81 Mannes, Marya, III, 82 Manning, Marie, III, 83 Mansfield, Blanche McManus, III, 84 March, Anne See Woolson, Constance Fenimore Marks, Jeannette Augustus, III, 84 Marot, Helen, III, 85 Marshall, Catherine, III, 86 Marshall, Gertrude Helen See Fahs, Sophia Lyon Marshall, Paule, III, 87
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Martin, Del, III, 89 Martin, George Madden, III, 90 Martin, Helen Reimensnyder, III, 91 Martin, Valerie, III, 91 Martínez, Demetria, III, 92 Martyn, Sarah Smith, III, 94 Marxism see Davis, I, 263 Maso, Carole, III, 94 Mason, Bobbie Ann, III, 95 Materialism see Naylor, III, 189 Mathews, Frances Aymar, III, 97 Matthews, Adelaide, III, 97 May, Sophie See Clarke, Rebecca Sophia Maynard, Joyce, III, 98 Mayo, Katherine, III, 99 Mayo, Margaret, III, 100 Mayo, Sarah Edgarton, III, 100 McBride, Mary Margaret, III, 101 McCaffrey, Anne, III, 102 McCarthy, Mary, III, 104 McCloy, Helen, III, 106 McCord, Louisa Cheves, III, 107 McCormick, Anne O’Hare, III, 108 McCrackin, Josephine Clifford, III, 109 McCrumb, Sharon, III, 109 McCullers, Carson, III, 110 McDermott, Alice, III, 113 McDowell, Katherine Bonner, III, 114 McGinley, Phyllis, III, 114 McGrory, Mary, III, 115 McGuire, Judith Brockenbrough, III, 116 McIntosh, Maria Jane, III, 117 McIntyre, Vonda N., III, 118 McKenney, Ruth, III, 119 McLean, Kathryn Anderson, III, 120 McMillan, Terry, III, 121 McPherson, Aimee Semple, III, 122 McPherson, Sandra, III, 123 Mead, Kate C. See Hurd-Mead, Kate C. Mead, Margaret, III, 124 Meaney, Mary L., III, 126 Means, Florence Crannell, III, 127 Medical/medicine see Fisher, II, 45; Gibbons, II, 100; Johnson, II, 275; Johnson- Masters, II, 279; Mitford, III, 152; Wilhelm, IV, 242 Meigs, Cornelia, III, 128 Melodrama see Barnes, I, 61; Luce, III, 66; Mortimer, III, 175; Parker, III, 251; Ritchie, III, 330 Meloney, Franken See Franken, Rose
GENERAL INDEX
Memoir see Bergman, I, 81; Buchanan, I, 149; Calisher, I, 160; Cleary, I, 213; Clifton, I, 217; de Mille, I, 274; Graham, II, 135; Griffin, II, 146; Grumbach, II, 152; Highsmith, II, 210; Howard, II, 233; Lamott, III, 2; Le Sueur, III, 23; Lurie, III, 68; Mairs, III, 81; Maynard, III, 98; McCarthy, III, 104; Munro, III, 182; Santiago, IV, 11; Schwartz, IV, 22; Simon, IV, 54; Uchida, IV, 163 Menken, Adah Isaacs, III, 129 Merington, Marguerite, III, 130 Meriwether, Elizabeth Avery, III, 131 Merriam, Eve, III, 132 Merril, Judith, III, 133 Meyer, Annie Nathan, III, 134 Meyer, June See Jordan, June M. Miles, Josephine, III, 136 Millar, Margaret, III, 137 Millay, Edna St. Vincent, III, 138 Miller, Alice Duer, III, 139 Miller, Caroline Pafford, III, 140 Miller, Emily Huntington, III, 141 Miller, Harriet M., III, 142 Miller, Isabel See Routsong, Alma Miller, Mary Britton, III, 143 Miller, Vassar, III, 144 Millett, Kate, III, 144 Milward, Maria G., III, 146 Miner, Valerie, III, 146 Minimalism see Howe, II, 238; Ozick, III, 242 Ministers see Blackwell, I, 91; Bowers, I, 111; Fahs, II, 31; Hanaford, II, 174; Hume, II, 242; McPherson, III, 122; Shaw, IV, 44; Smith, IV, 62; Smith, IV, 65; White, IV, 227 Minot, Susan, III, 148 Mirikitani, Janice, III, 148 Missionaries see Elliot, II, 18; Lewis, III, 39; Nicholson, III, 197; Smith, IV, 62; White, IV, 225; Whitman, IV, 231 Mitchell, Agnes Woods, III, 150 Mitchell, Margaret, III, 150 Mitchell, Maria, III, 151 Mitford, Jessica, III, 152 Mixer, Elizabeth, III, 153 Modernism see de Burgos, I, 272; Sontag, IV, 75 Moers, Ellen, III, 154 Mohr, Nicholasa, III, 154
305
GENERAL INDEX
Moise, Penina, III, 155 Mojtabai, A. G., III, 156 Mollenkott, Virginia Ramey, III, 157 Monroe, Harriet, III, 158 Monroe, Lucy, III, 159 Montgomery, Ruth Shick, III, 160 Moody, Anne, III, 161 Moore, C. L., III, 162 Moore, Mrs. H. J., III, 163 Moore, Lorrie, III, 164 Moore, Marianne, III, 165 Moore, Mary Evelyn See Davis, Mollie Moore Moore, Mollie E. See Davis, Mollie Moore Moorhead, Sarah Parsons, III, 166 Moraga, Cherríe, III, 167 Moral reformers see Blackwell, I, 92; Grimké, II, 149 Morgan, Claire See Highsmith, Patricia Morgan, Marabel, III, 168 Morgan, Robin, III, 169 Morley, Hilda, III, 170 Morris, Clara, III, 171 Morrison, Toni, III, 172 Morrow, Honoré McCue, III, 174 Mortimer, Lillian, III, 175 Morton, Martha, III, 176 Morton, Sarah Wentworth, III, 176 Mother Goose See Walworth, Jeannette Hadermann Mott, Lucretia, III, 177 Moulton, Louise Chandler, III, 178 Mourning Dove, III, 179 Mukherjee, Bharati, III, 181 Muller, Marcia, III, 182 Multiculturalism see Ai, I, 13; Bambara, I, 58; Butler, I, 157; Castillo, I, 174; Chernin, I, 191; Childress, I, 199; Forché, II, 59 Munro, Eleanor, III, 182 Murfree, Mary, III, 183 Murray, Judith Sargent, III, 184 Murray, Pauli, III, 185 Museum curators see Mead, III, 124 Music/musicals see Angelou, I, 31; Bambara, I, 58; Clifton, I, 217; Cortez, I, 233; DeVeaux, I, 282; Godwin, II, 116; Golden, II, 118; Greenfield, II, 144; Guy, II, 157; Harjo, II, 180; Howe, II, 238; Kennedy, II, 303; Le Guin, III, 21; Norman, III, 206; Owens, III, 239; Rodgers, III, 337; Sanchez, IV, 5;
306
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Shange, IV, 42; Terry, IV, 131; Wasserstein, IV, 203; Wilhelm, IV, 242 Musicals see Ferber, II, 39; Forbes, II, 58; Frings, II, 79; Graham, II, 136; Landon, III, 4; Lasswell, III, 11; Loos, III, 56; Mayo, III, 100; Read, III, 312; Smith, IV, 63; Spewak, IV, 84; Sture-Vasa, IV, 110; Young, IV, 282 Musicians see Anderson, I, 27; Bond, I, 105; Chapman, I, 186; Graham, II, 136; Speyer, IV, 85; Sture-Vasa, IV, 110; White, IV, 224; Young, IV, 282 Myles, Eileen, III, 186 Mystery fiction see Barnes, I, 62; Barr, I, 66; Betts, I, 85; Bland, I, 95; Brackett, I, 117; Braun, I, 121; Brown, I, 141; Clark, I, 212; Cornwell, I, 232; Curtiss, I, 249; Daly, I, 254; Davis, I, 265; Eiker, II, 14; Ford, II, 61; Forrest, II, 64; Grafton, II, 132; Grimes, II, 148; Guy, II, 157; Hart, II, 187; Hart, II, 188; Hatch, II, 190; Heilbrun, II, 194; Highsmith, II, 210; Hull, II, 241; Isaacs, II, 256; Kellerman, II, 296; King, II, 312; Mason, III, 95; McCrumb, III, 109; Muller, III, 182; Neely, III, 191; Oates, III, 220; Paretsky, III, 250; Rinehart, III, 328; Seeley, IV, 33; Stabenow, IV, 87; Stephens, IV, 97; Taylor, IV, 124; Tepper, IV, 128; Truman, IV, 151; Tuchman, IV, 153; Uhnak, IV, 164; Voigt, IV, 180; Warfield, IV, 199; Whitney, IV, 235; Wilhelm, IV, 242 Mystery Wr of Am Awd see Eberhart, II, 8; Hamilton, II, 173; Heilbrun, II, 194; Highsmith, II, 210; McCloy, III, 106; Offord, III, 225; Whitney, IV, 235 Mysticism see Dillard, I, 289; White, IV, 228 Myth and legend see Allen, I, 21; Broumas, I, 136; Butler, I, 157; Cervantes, I, 181; Clampitt, I, 208; Deloria, I, 277; DiPrima, I, 292; Glück, II, 114; Gould, II, 130; Graham, II, 134; Grahn, II, 137; Harjo, II, 180;
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Hoffman, II, 217; Hogan, II, 219; Howe, II, 234; Marshall, III, 87; McPherson, III, 123; Merriam, III, 132; Morrison, III, 172; Owens, III, 239; Pastan, III, 257; Smith, IV, 67; Voigt, IV, 180; Wallace, IV, 194; Welty, IV, 212; Willard, IV, 246 Mythology see Brooks, I, 135; D(oolittle), I, 300; Davis, I, 265; Hamilton, II, 171; Harding, II, 177; Knapp, II, 322; Lerman, III, 33; McCullers, III, 110; Read, III, 312; Rich, III, 320; Welty, IV, 212; Young, IV, 280 Nation, Carry A., III, 189 National Book award see Arnow, I, 42; Bishop, I, 88; Carson, I, 168; Clark, I, 211; FitzGerald, II, 47; Gardner, II, 90; Gilchrist, II, 103; Hacker, II, 159; Hamilton, II, 173; Jacobsen, II, 268; Johnson, II, 275; Le Guin, III, 21; McDermott, III, 113; Oates, III, 220; O’Connor, III, 215; Oliver, III, 227; Paterson, III, 258; Porter, III, 286; Settle, IV, 38; Van Duyn, IV, 170; Walker, IV, 189 National Book Critics Circle award see Bishop, I, 88; Erdrich, II, 25; Fox, II, 67; Glück, II, 114; Hamilton, II, 173; Howard, II, 233; Kingston, II, 315; Le Guin, III, 21; Lowry, III, 64; Morrison, III, 172; Mukherjee, III, 181; Olds, III, 226; Sontag, IV, 75; Taylor, IV, 123; Tyler, IV, 159; Vendler, IV, 174 National Institute of Arts and Letters Award see Benét, I, 77; Brennan, I, 125; Brooks, I, 133; Clark, I, 211; Evans, II, 27; Fox, II, 67; Swenson, IV, 113; Welty, IV, 212 National Medal for literature see McCarthy, III, 104; Welty, IV, 212 National Women’s Hall of Fame see Brooks, I, 133 Native American legends and tales see Allen, I, 21; Erdrich, II, 25; Harjo, II, 180; Mourning Dove, III, 179
GENERAL INDEX
Native American literature see Cook-Lynn, I, 227; Silko, IV, 52 Naturalists see Dillard, I, 289 Nature poetry see Bleecker, I, 96; Dickinson, I, 284; Evans, II, 27; Howes, II, 239; Jones, II, 283; Oberholtzer, III, 223; Piercy, III, 277; Sewall, IV, 39; Thaxter, IV, 133 Nature study see Austin, I, 45; Carrighar, I, 166; Lounsberry, III, 61; Wright, IV, 267; Wright, IV, 269 Naylor, Gloria, III, 189 Nebula award see Butler, I, 157; Le Guin, III, 21; McIntyre, III, 118; Russ, III, 353; Scarborough, IV, 18; Wilhelm, IV, 242; Willis, IV, 250 Neely, Barbara, III, 191 Neilson, Nellie, III, 192 Neville, Emily Cheney, III, 192 New criticism see Chute, I, 205; Gordon, II, 125 Newbery award see Alcott, I, 15; Allee, I, 20; Bailey, I, 52; Brink, I, 129; Carlson, I, 164; Clark, I, 210; Cleary, I, 213; Coatsworth, I, 218; de Angeli, I, 271; Estes, II, 26; Field, II, 41; Forbes, II, 58; Fox, II, 67; George, II, 96; Hamilton, II, 173; Henry, II, 202; Hunt, II, 243; Hunt, II, 244; Konigsburg, II, 326; Latham, III, 11; L’Engle, III, 30; Lenski, III, 31; Lewis, III, 39; Lowry, III, 64; Meigs, III, 128; Neville, III, 192; Paterson, III, 258; Sawyer, IV, 15; Seredy, IV, 36; Shannon, IV, 43; Speare, IV, 80; Taylor, IV, 123; Vining, IV, 177; Voigt, IV, 180; Willard, IV, 246; Yates, IV, 275 Newcomb, Franc Johnson, III, 193 Newman, Frances, III, 194 Newman, Lesléa, III, 195 Newspaper columns see Bagley, I, 52; Blake, I, 94; Briggs, I, 128; Lawrence, III, 18; McCormick, III, 108; Monroe, III, 159; Neville, III, 192; Parton, III, 255; Porter, III, 290; Post, III, 291; Smith, IV, 69; Spencer, IV, 82; Stern, IV, 98; Victor, IV, 175; White, IV, 229 Newspaper correspondents
307
GENERAL INDEX
see Ames, I, 26; Craig, I, 236; Dorr, I, 303; Dorsey, I, 305; Fuller, II, 81; Hawthorne, II, 192; Higgins, II, 208; McCloy, III, 106; McCormick, III, 108; Montgomery, III, 160; Seaman, IV, 28; St. Johns, IV, 2; Thompson, IV, 137; Tietjens, IV, 139; Treadwell, IV, 146; Tuchman, IV, 153; Van Vorst, IV, 171; Whitman, IV, 233 Newspaper editors/publishers see Field, II, 41; French, II, 76; Gage, II, 85; Nicholson, III, 197; Whiting, IV, 230 Newstead, Helaine, III, 196 Nichols, Anne, III, 196 Nicholson, Asenath Hatch, III, 197 Nicholson, Eliza Jane Poitevent, III, 197 Nicolson, Marjorie Hope, III, 198 Niedecker, Lorine, III, 199 Nieriker, Abigail May Alcott, III, 201 Niggli, Josefina, III, 201 Niles, Blair Rice, III, 202 Nin, Anaïs, III, 203 Nitsch, Helen Matthews, III, 204 Nixon, Agnes E., III, 205 Nobel Prize see Buck, I, 150; Morrison, III, 172 Nobel Prize for Peace see Addams, I, 11; Balch, I, 56 Nonfiction see Angier, I, 32; Brownmiller, I, 145; Cooey, I, 223; Davis, I, 267; Earle, II, 3; Elgin, II, 15; Garber, II, 87; Graham, II, 135; Haraway, II, 176; Harding, II, 178; Hite, II, 214; Houston, II, 231; Howe, II, 237; Isaacs, II, 256; Lamott, III, 2; MacKinnon, III, 76; Mitchell, III, 151; Newman, III, 195; Nussbaum, III, 210; Owens, III, 238; Paglia, III, 246; Patchett, III, 258; Rusch, III, 351; Santiago, IV, 11; Scott, IV, 25; Spacks, IV, 79; Steel, IV, 90; Tompkins, IV, 144; Truitt, IV, 150; Truman, IV, 151; Wolf, IV, 259 Norman, Marsha, III, 206 Norris, Kathleen Thompson, III, 207 Norton, Alice See Norton, Andre Norton, Andre, III, 208 Norton, Katherine LaForge See Reed, Myrtle Notley, Alice, III, 210 Novelists see Acker, I, 3; Adams, I, 6; Allison, I, 23; Alther, I, 24; Benítez, I, 78;
308
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Boyd, I, 113; Bradley, I, 118; Broner, I, 131; Brown, I, 141; Brown, I, 144; Brownmiller, I, 145; Buchanan, I, 149; Chernin, I, 191; Cherry, I, 192; Cliff, I, 216; Cook-Lynn, I, 227; Deming, I, 277; Dillard, I, 289; Divakaruni, I, 294; Dove, I, 309; Drexler, I, 311; Dworkin, I, 319; Ephron, II, 24; Erdrich, II, 25; Forrest, II, 64; Freedman, II, 71; French, II, 74; French, II, 76; Gallagher, II, 86; Gearhart, II, 94; Gibbons, II, 100; Golden, II, 118; Goodman, II, 120; Grumbach, II, 152; Hacker, II, 159; Hamilton, II, 171; Herbst, II, 204; Hite, II, 214; Hoffman, II, 217; Hogan, II, 219; Howard, II, 233; Hunter-Lattany, II, 246; Isaacs, II, 256; Jacobs, II, 265; Johnson, II, 275; Johnston, II, 281; Jones, II, 283; Jong, II, 287; Jordan, II, 290; Lamott, III, 2; Le Sueur, III, 23; Lindbergh, III, 45; Lurie, III, 68; Marshall, III, 87; Martin, III, 91; Martínez, III, 92; Maso, III, 94; Maynard, III, 98; McCrumb, III, 109; McMillan, III, 121; Miner, III, 146; Minot, III, 148; Moore, III, 164; Moraga, III, 167; Mukherjee, III, 181; Muller, III, 182; Naylor, III, 189; Niedecker, III, 199; Oates, III, 220; Obejas, III, 222; Owens, III, 238; Paley, III, 247; Patchett, III, 258; Plain, III, 280; Powell, III, 292; Prose, III, 296; Reed, III, 313; Rice, III, 319; Roberts, III, 334; Routsong, III, 344; Rule, III, 349; Rusch, III, 351; Russ, III, 353; Santiago, IV, 11; Sargent, IV, 11; Sarton, IV, 12; Scarborough, IV, 18; Seid, IV, 33; Settle, IV, 38; Shreve, IV, 49; Shulman, IV, 50; Silko, IV, 52; Smith, IV, 67; Sontag, IV, 75; Steel, IV, 90; Ty-Casper, IV, 158; Waldrop, IV, 188; Walker, IV, 192; Wiggins, IV, 238; Williams, IV, 248; Wilson, IV, 252; Yamanaka, IV, 274; Yglesias, IV, 278 Nurses see Barton, I, 67; Boylston, I, 115; Dorsey, I, 305; Gardner, II, 91; Lathrop, III, 14; Sanger, IV, 8; Wald, IV, 186
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Nussbaum, Martha Craven, III, 210 Nutrition see Brody, I, 131; Cabeza de Baca, I, 159; Davis, I, 262; Jacobi, II, 264 Nye, Andrea, III, 211 Nye, Naomi Shihab, III, 212 O. Henry Memorial award see Adams, I, 6; Phillips, III, 275; Schaeffer, IV, 19; Spencer, IV, 82; Walker, IV, 189 O. Henry Memorial prize see Benson, I, 80; Boyle, I, 114; Breuer, I, 126; Daly, I, 257; Irwin, II, 255; Jacobsen, II, 268; Lane, III, 5; McCullers, III, 110; Newman, III, 194; Olsen, III, 228; Parker, III, 252; Porter, III, 286; Thomas, IV, 135 Oates, Joyce Carol, III, 220 Obejas, Achy, III, 222 Oberholtzer, Sara Vickers, III, 223 Obie awards see Fornés, II, 62; Howe, II, 238; Kennedy, II, 303; Merriam, III, 132; Owens, III, 239; Shange, IV, 42; Wasserstein, IV, 203 Objectivism see Niedecker, III, 199 Occult fiction see Moore, III, 162; Pollack, III, 284; Turney, IV, 156; Wharton, IV, 220 Oceanography see Earle, II, 3 O’Connor, Flannery, III, 215 O’Connor, Florence J., III, 216 O’Donnell, Jessie Fremont, III, 217 O’Donnell, Lillian, III, 217 Oemler, Marie Conway, III, 224 Offord, Lenore Glen, III, 225 O’Hair, Madalyn Murray, III, 218 O’Hara, Mary See Sture-Vasa, Mary O’Keeffe, Katharine A., III, 219 Older, Cora Baggerly, III, 225 Olds, Sharon, III, 226 Oliphant, B. J. See Tepper, Sheri S. Oliver, Mary, III, 227 Olsen, Tillie, III, 228 One-act plays see Brown, I, 137; Field, II, 41; Gale, II, 86; Gerstenberg, II, 98; Glaspell, II, 113; Marks, III, 84; Merington, III, 130; Peattie, III, 262; Sexton, IV, 40; Smith, IV, 63; Thomas, IV, 135
GENERAL INDEX
O’Neill, Egan See Linington, Elizabeth O’Neill, Rose, III, 220 Opera see Anderson, I, 27; Davenport, I, 260; Graham, II, 136; Sexton, IV, 40; Stein, IV, 92; Wilhelm, IV, 242 Oral tradition see Evans, II, 28; Gibbons, II, 100; Jones, II, 283; Mairs, III, 81; Sanchez, IV, 5; Shange, IV, 42; Silko, IV, 52; Walker, IV, 189; Walker, IV, 192 Orators see Bloomer, I, 97; Brown, I, 138; Catt, I, 179; Duniway, I, 316; Goldman, II, 119; Harper, II, 181; Henry, II, 201; Houston, II, 231; Jones, II, 286; Jordan, II, 289; Livermore, III, 51; Martin, III, 89; Nussbaum, III, 210; O’Keeffe, III, 219; Owen, III, 237; Shaw, IV, 44; Stanton, IV, 89; Stein, IV, 92; Truth, IV, 152; Williams, IV, 248; Woodhull, IV, 262; Young, IV, 280 Orde, A. J. See Tepper, Sheri S. Ortiz Cofer, Judith, III, 229 Orvis, Marianne Dwight, III, 231 Osbey, Brenda Marie, III, 231 Osborn, Sarah, III, 232 Osgood, Frances Sargent, III, 233 Ostenso, Martha, III, 233 Ostriker, Alicia, III, 234 Ottenberg, Miriam, III, 235 Ovington, Mary White, III, 236 Owen, Catherine See Nitsch, Helen Matthews Owen, Mary Alicia, III, 237 Owen, Ruth Bryan, III, 237 Owens, Claire Myers, III, 238 Owens, Rochelle, III, 239 Owens-Adair, Bethenia, III, 241 Ozick, Cynthia, III, 242 Page, Myra, III, 245 Paglia, Camille, III, 246 Paley, Grace, III, 247 Palmer, Phoebe Worrall, III, 248 Papashvily, Helen Waite, III, 249 Paretsky, Sara, III, 250 Parker, Charlotte Blair, III, 251 Parker, Dorothy, III, 252 Parrish, Mary Frances See Fisher, M. F. K. Parsons, Elsie Clews, III, 253
309
GENERAL INDEX
Parsons, Frances Dana, III, 254 Parsons, Louella Oettinger, III, 255 Parton, Sara Willis, III, 255 Pastan, Linda, III, 257 Patchett, Ann, III, 258 Paterson, Katherine, III, 258 Patriotic literature see Fisher, II, 44; Hastings, II, 190; Hawthorne, II, 192; Williams, IV, 247 Patton, Frances Gray, III, 260 Peabody award see Childress, I, 199 Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer, III, 260 Peabody, Josephine Preston, III, 261 Peace movement see Deming, I, 277; Howe, II, 234; McCarthy, III, 104 Peattie, Elia Wilkinson, III, 262 Peattie, Louise Redfield, III, 263 Peck, Annie Smith, III, 264 Peck, Ellen, III, 265 Pember, Phoebe Yates, III, 265 Penfeather, Anabel See Cooper, Susan Fenimore Percy, Florence See Allen, Elizabeth Akers Perkins, Frances, III, 266 Perkins, Lucy Fitch, III, 267 Pesotta, Rose, III, 268 Peterkin, Julia Mood, III, 268 Peters, Sandra See Plath, Sylvia Petersham, Maud Fuller, III, 269 Petry, Ann Lane, III, 270 Pharmacists see Petry, III, 270 Phelps, Almira Lincoln, III, 271 Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, III, 272 Phillips, Irna, III, 274 Phillips, Jayne Anne, III, 275 Philosophers see Arendt, I, 39; Gulliver, II, 156; Koch, II, 325; Langer, III, 6; Rand, III, 306 Philosophy see Arendt, I, 39; Benedict, I, 75; Fremantle, II, 73; Fuller, II, 81; Gardener, II, 89; Goodsell, II, 122; Gulliver, II, 156; Howland, II, 240; Kirby, II, 318; Koch, II, 325; Langer, III, 6; Le Sueur, III, 23; Martyn, III, 94; Mollenkott, III, 157; Nicolson, III, 198; Nye, III, 211; Orvis, III, 231; Peabody, III, 260; Rand, III, 306; Ricker, III, 326; Sewell, IV, 39; Stein, IV, 92; Whitman, IV, 233
310
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Photographers see Bourke-White, I, 109; Chapelle, I, 184; Randall, III, 307 Photographic journalists see Bourke-White, I, 109; Chapelle, I, 184 Photography see Forché, II, 59; Harjo, II, 180; Lowry, III, 64; Olsen, III, 228; Randall, III, 307; Silko, IV, 52; Sontag, IV, 75 Physicians see Blackwell, I, 92; Hamilton, II, 170; Harding, II, 177; Horney, II, 230; Hurd-Mead, II, 248; Jacobi, II, 264; Lovejoy, III, 62; Owens-Adair, III, 241; Thompson, IV, 136 Piatt, Sarah Bryan, III, 276 Piercy, Marge, III, 277 Pike, Mary Green, III, 279 Pinckney, Josephine, III, 279 Pine, Cuyler See Peck, Ellen Plain, Belva, III, 280 Plath, Sylvia, III, 281 Plays see Flexner, II, 53; Gerstenberg, II, 98; Glaspell, II, 113; Goldman, II, 119; Hardwick, II, 179; Hellman, II, 197; Jacobsen, II, 268; LeGallienne, III, 29; McCarthy, III, 104; Owens, III, 239; Parker, III, 251; Stein, IV, 92; Terry, IV, 131 Plays—Broadway see Brown, I, 137; Crothers, I, 244; Ellis, II, 21; Flexner, II, 53; Ford, II, 61; Franken, II, 70; Frings, II, 79; Gordon, II, 127; Hansberry, II, 175; Hellman, II, 197; Heyward, II, 206; Kerr, II, 306; Loos, III, 56; Luce, III, 66; McLean, III, 120; Meyer, III, 134; Parker, III, 251; Skinner, IV, 58; Smith, IV, 63; Spewak, IV, 84; Treadwell, IV, 146; Troubetzkoy, IV, 148; Turney, IV, 156; Webster, IV, 207; Young, IV, 282 Playwrights see Angelou, I, 31; Bonner, I, 105; Broner, I, 131; Childress, I, 199; Fornés, II, 62; Freedman, II, 71; Grahn, II, 137; Griffin, II, 146; Henley, II, 200; Howe, II, 238; Jordan, II, 290; Kennedy, II, 303; Myles, III, 186; Newman, III, 195; Norman, III, 206; Notley,
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
III, 210; Oates, III, 220; Owens, III, 239; Sanchez, IV, 5; ScottMaxwell, IV, 26; Seid, IV, 33; Shange, IV, 42; Sontag, IV, 75; Terry, IV, 131; Wasserstein, IV, 203; Willard, IV, 246; Williams, IV, 248 Poetry see Allison, I, 23; Bergman, I, 81; Bishop, I, 88; Brooks, I, 133; Cha, I, 182; Cherry, I, 192; Chin, I, 201; Crapsey, I, 238; Deutsch, I, 282; Dickinson, I, 284; Dinnies, I, 291; DuPlessis, I, 314; Gallagher, II, 86; Hadas, II, 160; Harper, II, 181; Hejinian, II, 196; Hirshfield, II, 213; Howe, II, 237; Jackson, II, 260; Johnson, II, 276; Johnson, II, 277; Kenyon, II, 304; Lauterbach, III, 17; Lee, III, 28; Levertov, III, 38; Lowell, III, 63; Martínez, III, 92; Miles, III, 136; Mitchell, III, 150; Monroe, III, 158; Moore, III, 165; Myles, III, 186; Notley, III, 210; Obejas, III, 222; Reese, III, 315; Rukeyser, III, 349; Sarton, IV, 12; Sewell, IV, 39; Sigourney, IV, 51; Smith, IV, 65; Stein, IV, 92; Swenson, IV, 113; Tepper, IV, 128; Troubetzkoy, IV, 148; Vendler, IV, 174; Wakoski, IV, 185; Waldman, IV, 187; Waldrop, IV, 188; Welby, IV, 208; Wilcox, IV, 239; Woolsey, IV, 264 Poets see Ai, I, 13; Allen, I, 21; Álvarez, I, 25; Angelou, I, 31; Brooks, I, 133; Broumas, I, 136; Brown, I, 142; Cervantes, I, 181; Chernin, I, 191; Clampitt, I, 208; Clifton, I, 217; Cooper, I, 230; de Burgos, I, 272; Derricotte, I, 280; Dove, I, 309; Erdrich, II, 25; Evans, II, 28; Forché, II, 59; Giovanni, II, 109; Glück, II, 114; Golden, II, 118; Graham, II, 134; Grahn, II, 137; Hacker, II, 159; Harjo, II, 180; Hogan, II, 219; Jones, II, 283; Jong, II, 287; Jordan, II, 290; Kizer, II, 321; Kumin, II, 329; Lerner, III, 34; Levertov, III, 38; McPherson, III, 123; Merriam, III, 132; Miles, III, 136; Mirikitani, III, 148; Morley, III, 170; Niedecker, III, 199; Nye, III, 212; Oates, III, 220; Olds, III,
GENERAL INDEX
226; Oliver, III, 227; Olsen, III, 228; Osbey, III, 231; Ostriker, III, 234; Owens, III, 239; Ozick, III, 242; Paley, III, 247; Pastan, III, 257; Piercy, III, 277; Rich, III, 320; Rodgers, III, 337; Sanchez, IV, 5; Shange, IV, 42; Song, IV, 74; Stone, IV, 103; Swenson, IV, 113; Valentine, IV, 169; Van Duyn, IV, 170; Voigt, IV, 181; Wakoski, IV, 185; Walker, IV, 189; Walker, IV, 192; Whitman, IV, 232; Wilhelm, IV, 242; Willard, IV, 246; Williams, IV, 248; Yamada, IV, 273 Poets laureate see Dove, I, 309; Van Duyn, IV, 170 Polacco, Patricia, III, 283 Political activists see Angelou, I, 31; Chernin, I, 191; Davis, I, 263; Deming, I, 277; Guy, II, 157; Herbst, II, 204; hooks, II, 226; Kingsolver, II, 314; Levertov, III, 38; MacKinnon, III, 76; Millett, III, 144; Mirikitani, III, 148; Olsen, III, 228; Paley, III, 247; Randall, III, 307; Sontag, IV, 75; Steinem, IV, 95; Walker, IV, 192 Political literature see Acker, I, 3; Arendt, I, 39; Boyle, I, 114; Chernin, I, 191; Clapp, I, 209; Cleghorn, I, 215; Coit, I, 219; Dargan, I, 259; Davis, I, 263; Dawidowicz, I, 269; de Burgos, I, 272; Deming, I, 277; DeVeaux, I, 282; Didion, I, 287; Drew, I, 309; Drexler, I, 311; Evans, II, 28; Fairbank, II, 32; FitzGerald, II, 47; Glasgow, II, 110; Hahn, II, 161; Herbst, II, 204; hooks, II, 226; Howland, II, 240; Irwin, II, 255; Ivins, II, 257; Jordan, II, 290; Kingsolver, II, 314; Koch, II, 325; Lane, III, 5; Le Sueur, III, 23; Levertov, III, 38; Millay, III, 138; Millett, III, 144; Miner, III, 146; Paley, III, 247; Piercy, III, 277; Porter, III, 289; Ridge, III, 327; Ruether, III, 347; Smedley, IV, 61; Smith, IV, 63; Smith, IV, 70; Steinem, IV, 95; Strong, IV, 107; Taggard, IV, 118; Thompson, IV, 137; Tuchman, IV, 153; TyCasper, IV, 158; Warren, IV, 202; Zugsmith, IV, 287
311
GENERAL INDEX
Pollack, Rachel, III, 284 Pollard, Josephine, III, 285 Porter, Eleanor Hodgman, III, 286 Porter, Katherine Anne, III, 286 Porter, Rose, III, 288 Porter, Sarah, III, 289 Porter, Sylvia F., III, 290 Post, Emily, III, 291 Postmodernism see Ozick, III, 242 Powell, Dawn, III, 292 Pratt, Ella Farman, III, 293 Prentiss, Elizabeth Payson, III, 293 Preston, Harriet Waters, III, 294 Preston, Margaret Junkin, III, 295 Prince, Nancy Gardner, III, 296 Prison reformers see Dix, I, 296; Farnham, II, 34; Felton, II, 38; Ricker, III, 326; Woods, IV, 262 Prix de Rome see Jordan, II, 290 Prose, Francine, III, 296 Prouty, Olive Higgins, III, 297 Pryor, Sara Rice, III, 298 Psychiatrists see Harding, II, 177; Horney, II, 230; Thompson, IV, 136; Ulanov, IV, 165 Psychics see Jones, II, 283; Montgomery, III, 160; Roberts, III, 332; Smith, IV, 71 Psychological fiction see Caspary, I, 173; Eiker, II, 14; Frankau, II, 69; Gerstenberg, II, 98; Gilchrist, II, 103; Greenberg, II, 142; Howard, II, 233; Janeway, II, 270; Nin, III, 203; Prouty, III, 297; Seid, IV, 33; Snyder, IV, 73; Stafford, IV, 88; Wilhelm, IV, 242 Psychologists see Chernin, I, 191; Chesler, I, 194; Scott-Maxwell, IV, 26; Sheehy, IV, 46 Psychotherapists see Chesler, I, 194; Nin, III, 203; Satir, IV, 14; Singer, IV, 56 Pugh, Eliza Phillips, III, 299 Pulitzer Prize see Akins, I, 14; Angier, I, 32; Barnes, I, 63; Bishop, I, 88; Brooks, I, 133; Buck, I, 150; Cather, I, 175; Chase, I, 189; Clapp, I, 209; Coit, I, 219; Dillard, I, 289; Dove, I, 309;
312
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Durant, I, 318; Elliott, II, 19; Ferber, II, 39; FitzGerald, II, 47; Forbes, II, 58; Frings, II, 79; Gale, II, 86; Glasgow, II, 110; Glaspell, II, 113; Glück, II, 114; Goodman, II, 121; Grau, II, 138; Henley, II, 200; Huxtable, II, 252; Johnson, II, 278; Kizer, II, 321; Kumin, II, 329; Lee, III, 27; Lowell, III, 63; Lurie, III, 68; McCormick, III, 108; McGinley, III, 114; McGrory, III, 115; Millay, III, 138; Miller, III, 140; Mitchell, III, 150; Moore, III, 165; Morrison, III, 172; Norman, III, 206; Oliver, III, 227; Ottenberg, III, 235; Peterkin, III, 268; Plath, III, 281; Porter, III, 286; Rawlings, III, 310; Richards, III, 324; Rodgers, III, 337; Sexton, IV, 40; Speyer, IV, 85; Stafford, IV, 88; Teasdale, IV, 126; Tuchman, IV, 153; Tyler, IV, 159; Van Duyn, IV, 170; Vendler, IV, 174; Walker, IV, 189; Wasserstein, IV, 203; Welty, IV, 212; Wharton, IV, 220; Winslow, IV, 256; Zaturenska, IV, 285 Putnam, Emily Smith, III, 300 Putnam, Mary Lowell, III, 300 Putnam, Ruth, III, 301 Putnam, Sallie A. Brock, III, 302 Radical feminists see Daly, I, 255; Davis, I, 263; Deming, I, 277; Ehrenreich, II, 11; Millett, III, 144; Morgan, III, 169; Owens, III, 239; Rich, III, 320; Shulman, IV, 50; Steinem, IV, 95 Radio plays see Griffin, II, 146; Owens, III, 239; Seid, IV, 33 Radio programs see O’Hair, III, 218; Post, III, 291; Randall, III, 308; Secor, IV, 29; Thompson, IV, 137; Turney, IV, 156 Raimond, C. E. See Robins, Elizabeth Rampling, Anne See Rice, Anne Ramsay, Martha Laurens, III, 305 Ramsay, Vienna G. Morrell, III, 305 Rand, Ayn, III, 306 Randall, Margaret, III, 307 Randall, Ruth Painter, III, 308 Rankin, Fannie W., III, 309
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Ranous, Dora Knowlton, III, 309 Rawlings, Marjorie Kinnan, III, 310 Read, Harriette Fanning, III, 312 Read, Martha, III, 313 Reed, Kit, III, 313 Reed, Myrtle, III, 315 Reese, Lizette Woodworth, III, 315 Reflectivism see Niedecker, III, 199 Refugee relief workers see Buck, I, 150; Hulme, II, 242; Moore, III, 162; Stein, IV, 92; Taylor, IV, 125; Wharton, IV, 220 Regional literature see Aldrich, I, 18; Alther, I, 24; Arnow, I, 42; Austin, I, 45; Bristow, I, 130; Brown, I, 137; Cabeza de Baca, I, 159; Caperton, I, 164; Carrighar, I, 166; Carver, I, 170; Cary, I, 171; Cather, I, 175; Catherwood, I, 178; Chase, I, 189; Chidester, I, 196; Chopin, I, 202; Chute, I, 204; Cook, I, 225; Cooke, I, 226; Dargan, I, 259; Davis, I, 266; Dunbar-Nelson, I, 315; Duniway, I, 316; Dykeman, I, 320; Eckstorm, II, 9; Elliott, II, 19; Ellis, II, 20; Farnham, II, 34; Farnham, II, 35; Ferber, II, 39; Field, II, 41; Fisher, II, 44; Fletcher, II, 52; Foote, II, 57; Freeman, II, 72; Gibbons, II, 100; Gilchrist, II, 103; Gilman, II, 105; Glasgow, II, 110; Glaspell, II, 113; Godchaux, II, 116; Gordon, II, 125; Grau, II, 138; Greene, II, 144; Hale, II, 163; Hale, II, 164; Harris, II, 183; Harrison, II, 187; Hentz, II, 203; Higginson, II, 209; Holmes, II, 224; Hunter, II, 245; Jewett, II, 273; Johnson, II, 277; Kelley, II, 297; King, II, 311; Kinzie, II, 317; Kirkland, II, 320; Lane, III, 5; Laut, III, 16; Luhan, III, 67; Lumpkin, III, 67; MacDonald, III, 73; Martin, III, 91; Mason, III, 95; McCrackin, III, 109; McCullers, III, 110; McDowell, III, 114; Meriwether, III, 131; Miller, III, 140; Morris, III, 171; Morrow, III, 174; Murfree, III, 183; Niedecker, III, 199; O’Connor, III, 215; Older, III, 225; Parker, III, 251; Patton, III, 260; Peterkin, III,
GENERAL INDEX
268; Pinckney, III, 279; Preston, III, 294; Pugh, III, 299; Rawlings, III, 310; Reno, III, 317; Rice, III, 318; Roberts, III, 331; Sandoz, IV, 7; Scarborough, IV, 17; Seawell, IV, 29; Sedgwick, IV, 31; Seeley, IV, 33; Settle, IV, 38; Sinclair, IV, 55; Singmaster, IV, 56; Slosson, IV, 60; Spencer, IV, 82; Spofford, IV, 86; Suckow, IV, 111; Taylor, IV, 124; Terhune, IV, 130; Terry, IV, 131; Thomas, IV, 135; Tiernan, IV, 138; Townsend, IV, 146; Turnbull, IV, 155; Walworth, IV, 197; Warren, IV, 201; Watts, IV, 206; Welty, IV, 212; Wilhelm, IV, 242; Willoughby, IV, 251; Woolson, IV, 265; Wyatt, IV, 270 Religious educators see Caulkins, I, 180; Fahs, II, 31; Martin, III, 89; White, IV, 227 Religious literature see Avery, I, 47; Buck, I, 150; Cather, I, 175; Hill-Lutz, II, 212; Martyn, III, 94; Miller, III, 141; Mollenkott, III, 157; Nicolson, III, 198; Rush, III, 352; Slosson, IV, 60; Stewart, IV, 100; Sture-Vasa, IV, 110; Walker, IV, 193; Whiting, IV, 230; Williams, IV, 247 Remick, Martha, III, 316 Reno, Itti Kinney, III, 317 Reporters see Breuer, I, 126; Briggs, I, 128; Craig, I, 236; Day, I, 270; George, II, 96; Gilmer, II, 108; Graham, II, 135; Higgins, II, 208; McBride, III, 101; McCormick, III, 108; Ottenberg, III, 235; Parsons, III, 255; Seaman, IV, 28; St. Johns, IV, 2; Stern, IV, 98; Strong, IV, 107; Treadwell, IV, 146; West, IV, 218 Repplier, Agnes, III, 317 Rice, Alice Hegan, III, 318 Rice, Anne, III, 319 Rich, Adrienne, III, 320 Rich, Barbara See Jackson, Laura Rich, Louise Dickinson, III, 323 Richards, Laura Howe, III, 324 Richards, Louisa Greene, III, 325 Richmond, Grace, III, 325 Ricker, Marilla M., III, 326 Ridge, Lola, III, 327 Riding, Laura See Jackson, Laura Rinehart, Mary Roberts, III, 328
313
GENERAL INDEX
Ripley, Eliza M., III, 329 Ritchie, Anna Mowatt, III, 330 Rittenhouse, Jessie B., III, 331 Rivers, Alfrida See Bradley, Marion Zimmer Rivers, Pearl See Nicholson, Eliza Jane Poitevent Robb, J. D. See Roberts, Nora Roberts, Elizabeth Madox, III, 331 Roberts, Jane, III, 332 Roberts, Maggie, III, 333 Roberts, Nora, III, 334 Robins, Elizabeth, III, 335 Robinson, Harriet Hanson, III, 335 Robinson, Martha Harrison, III, 336 Rodgers, Carolyn M., III, 337 Rogers, Katherine M., III, 338 Roman, Klara Goldzieher, III, 339 Romance see Abbott, I, 2; Bailey, I, 54; Bradley, I, 118; Bristow, I, 130; Brown, I, 144; Burnett, I, 153; Burnham, I, 154; Carrington, I, 166; Child, I, 198; Clarke, I, 213; Comstock, I, 221; Craigie, I, 237; Dorsey, I, 305; Dupuy, I, 317; Eaton, II, 7; Evans, II, 29; Ford, II, 61; Forrest, II, 64; French, II, 75; Green, II, 141; Hart, II, 187; Hart, II, 188; Higham, II, 210; Hill-Lutz, II, 212; Hoffman, II, 217; Hopkins, II, 228; Kelly, II, 300; Keyes, II, 307; Kirby, II, 318; Kirk, II, 319; Lamb, III, 1; Lawrence, III, 19; Lea, III, 25; Lee, III, 26; Libbey, III, 42; Logan, III, 55; Manning, III, 83; Moore, III, 163; Norris, III, 207; Oates, III, 220; Oemler, III, 224; Peck, III, 265; Pugh, III, 299; Rankin, III, 309; Reed, III, 315; Remick, III, 316; Reno, III, 317; Richmond, III, 325; Rinehart, III, 328; Roberts, III, 334; Robinson, III, 336; St. Johns, IV, 2; Scarberry, IV, 16; Seawell, IV, 29; Sedgwick, IV, 31; Seifert, IV, 35; Southworth, IV, 78; Spofford, IV, 86; Stowe, IV, 104; Taber, IV, 117; Thane, IV, 132; Tiernan, IV, 138; Todd, IV, 142; Troubetzkoy, IV, 148; Underwood, IV, 166; Victor, IV, 175; Watson, IV, 206; Watts, IV, 206; Whitney, IV, 235; Willoughby, IV, 251; Wood, IV, 261
314
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Rombauer, Irma von Starkloff, III, 340 Roosevelt, Eleanor, III, 340 Roquelaure, A. N. See Rice, Anne Ross, Helaine See Daniels, Dorothy Ross, Lillian, III, 341 Rossner, Judith, III, 342 Rourke, Constance Mayfield, III, 343 Routsong, Alma, III, 344 Royall, Anne Newport, III, 345 Royce, Sarah Bayliss, III, 346 Ruddy, Ella Giles, III, 346 Ruether, Rosemary Radford, III, 347 Rukeyser, Muriel, III, 349 Rule, Ann, III, 349 Rural literature see Campbell, I, 163; Carroll, I, 167; Cleghorn, I, 215; Flint, II, 54; Greene, II, 144; Harris, II, 183; Holmes, II, 224; Johnson, II, 278; Milward, III, 146; Rawlings, III, 310; Smith, IV, 65 Rusch, Kristine Kathryn, III, 351 Rush, Caroline E., III, 352 Rush, Rebecca, III, 352 Russ, Joanna, III, 353 Ryan, Rachel See Brown, Sandra Sachs, Marilyn, IV, 1 St. Claire, Erin See Brown, Sandra St. Johns, Adela Rogers, IV, 2 Salisbury, Charlotte Y., IV, 3 Salmon, Lucy Maynard, IV, 3 Salmonson, Jessica Amanda, IV, 4 Sanchez, Sonia, IV, 5 Sanders, Elizabeth Elkins, IV, 7 Sandoz, Mari, IV, 7 Sanford, Mollie Dorsey, IV, 8 Sanger, Margaret, IV, 8 Sangster, Margaret E., IV, 10 Santiago, Esmeralda, IV, 11 Sargent, Pamela, IV, 11 Sarton, May, IV, 12 Satir, Virginia M., IV, 14 Satires see Adams, I, 6; Childress, I, 199; Drexler, I, 311; Johnson, II, 275; Lurie, III, 68; Merriam, III, 132; Miles, III, 136; Powell, III, 292; Reed, III, 313 Savage, Elizabeth, IV, 14 Sawyer, Ruth, IV, 15 Scarberry, Alma Sioux, IV, 16 Scarborough, Dorothy, IV, 17 Scarborough, Elizabeth Ann, IV, 18 Schaeffer, Susan Fromberg, IV, 19 Schmitt, Gladys, IV, 21
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Schofield, Sandy See Rusch, Kristine Kathryn Scholars see Appleton-Weber, I, 38; Brée, I, 124; Daly, I, 255; Heilbrun, II, 194; Howe, II, 234; Jacobs, II, 265; Lerner, III, 34; Nye, III, 211; Oates, III, 220; Ruether, III, 347; Russ, III, 353; Sanchez, IV, 5; Silko, IV, 52; Sontag, IV, 75; Walker, IV, 189; Wallace, IV, 194; Wilson, IV, 252; Wolf, IV, 259 Schoolcraft, Mary Howard, IV, 21 Schwartz, Lynne Sharon, IV, 22 Science and technology see Alther, I, 24; Butler, I, 157; Gearhart, II, 94; Mojtabai, III, 156; Swenson, IV, 113; Wilhelm, IV, 242 Science fiction see Brackett, I, 117; Bradley, I, 118; Butler, I, 157; Calisher, I, 160; Carroll, I, 167; Charnas, I, 187; Elgin, II, 15; Emshwiller, II, 23; Forrest, II, 64; Hamilton, II, 173; Le Guin, III, 21; McCaffrey, III, 102; McIntyre, III, 118; Merril, III, 133; Moore, III, 162; Piercy, III, 277; Pollack, III, 284; Reed, III, 313; Rusch, III, 351; Russ, III, 353; Salmonson, IV, 4; Sargent, IV, 11; Wilhelm, IV, 242; Willis, IV, 250 Science historian see Haraway, II, 176 Science journalism see Angier, I, 32 Scott, Anne Firor, IV, 24 Scott, Evelyn, IV, 24 Scott, Joan Wallach, IV, 25 Scott, Julia See Owen, Mary Alicia Scott-Maxwell, Florida, IV, 26 Screenwriters see Brackett, I, 117; Caspary, I, 173; Ephron, II, 24; Frings, II, 79; Gordon, II, 127; Grafton, II, 132; Loos, III, 56; Mead, III, 124; Millett, III, 144; Minot, III, 148; Moore, III, 162; Rand, III, 306; St. Johns, IV, 2; Slesinger, IV, 59; Spewak, IV, 84; Sture-Vasa, IV, 110; Turney, IV, 156; West, IV, 219; Winslow, IV, 257 Scudder, Vida Dutton, IV, 27 Sculptors
GENERAL INDEX
see Hoffman, II, 218; Millett, III, 144 Seaman, Elizabeth Cochrane, IV, 28 Seawell, Molly Elliot, IV, 29 Secor, Lella, IV, 29 Sedges, John See Buck, Pearl S. Sedgwick, Anne Douglas, IV, 30 Sedgwick, Catharine Maria, IV, 31 Sedgwick, Susan Ridley, IV, 32 Seeley, Mabel, IV, 33 Seid, Ruth, IV, 33 Seifert, Elizabeth, IV, 35 Semple, Ellen Churchill, IV, 36 Sentimental fiction see Jacobs, II, 265; Wilson, IV, 252 Sentimental novels see Blake, I, 93; Elder, II, 15; Evans, II, 29; Gates, II, 93; Harper, II, 181; Hazlett, II, 193; Hooper, II, 227; Jackson, II, 259; Jamison, II, 270; Moore, III, 163; Morton, III, 176; Oemler, III, 224; Pike, III, 279; Prouty, III, 297; Rankin, III, 309; Thompson, IV, 136; Underwood, IV, 166 Seredy, Kate, IV, 36 Serialized fiction see Corbett, I, 231; Franken, II, 70; French, II, 75; Gale, II, 86; McLean, III, 120; Richmond, III, 325; Scarberry, IV, 16; Wright, IV, 269 Seton, Anya, IV, 37 Settle, Mary Lee, IV, 38 Sewall, Harriet Winslow, IV, 39 Sewell, Elizabeth, IV, 39 Sexton, Anne, IV, 40 Sexuality see Dove, I, 309; French, II, 76; Hite, II, 214; Johnson-Masters, II, 279; Mairs, III, 81; Martin, III, 91; Naylor, III, 189; Olds, III, 226; Phillips, III, 275; Swenson, IV, 113; Walker, IV, 192; Wolf, IV, 259 Shange, Ntozake, IV, 42 Shannon, Dell See Linington, Elizabeth Shannon, Monica, IV, 43 Sharon, Rose See Merril, Judith Sharp, Isabella Oliver, IV, 44 Shaw, Anna H., IV, 44 Shaw, Anna Moore, IV, 45 Sheehy, Gail, IV, 46 Sheldon, Ann See Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Sherwood, Mary Wilson, IV, 47 Shindler, Mary Dana, IV, 48
315
GENERAL INDEX
Short story see Boyd, I, 113; Cherry, I, 192; Davis, I, 265; Emshwiller, II, 23; French, II, 74; Gallagher, II, 86; Goodman, II, 120; McCrumb, III, 109; Minot, III, 148; Moody, III, 161; Moore, III, 164; Mukherjee, III, 181; Neely, III, 191; Obejas, III, 222; Prose, III, 296; ScottMaxwell, IV, 26; Watanabe, IV, 205; Wiggins, IV, 238 Showalter, Elaine, IV, 48 Shreve, Anita, IV, 49 Shulman, Alix Kates, IV, 50 Sidlosky, Carolyn See Forché, Carolyn Sigourney, Lydia Huntley, IV, 51 Silko, Leslie Marmon, IV, 52 Simon, Kate, IV, 54 Sinclair, Bertha Muzzy, IV, 55 Sinclair, Jo See Seid, Ruth Singer, June K., IV, 56 Singers see Anderson, I, 27; Bond, I, 105; West, IV, 218 Singleton, Anne See Benedict, Ruth Singmaster, Elsie, IV, 56 Skinner, Constance Lindsay, IV, 57 Skinner, Cornelia Otis, IV, 58 Slade, Caroline, IV, 59 Slave narratives see Jacobs, II, 265; Prince, III, 296; Stowe, IV, 104; Walker, IV, 192; Williams, IV, 248; Wilson, IV, 252 Slave owners see Andrews, I, 27; Browne, I, 145; Dorsey, I, 305; McCord, III, 107 Slaves see Gage, II, 85 Slesinger, Tess, IV, 59 Slosson, Annie Trumbull, IV, 60 Smedley, Agnes, IV, 61 Smith, Amanda, IV, 62 Smith, Anna Young, IV, 63 Smith, Betty, IV, 63 Smith, Eliza Snow, IV, 64 Smith, Elizabeth Oakes, IV, 65 Smith, Eunice, IV, 66 Smith, Hannah Whittal, IV, 67 Smith, Lee, IV, 67 Smith, Lillian, IV, 69 Smith, Lula Carson See McCullers, Carson Smith, Margaret Bayard, IV, 70 Smith, Rosamond See Oates, Joyce Carol Smith, Sarah Pogson, IV, 70
316
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Smith, Susy, IV, 71 Snedeker, Caroline Dale, IV, 72 Snyder, Zilpha Keatley, IV, 73 Soap opera see Carrington, I, 166; Nixon, III, 205; Phillips, III, 274 Social activists see DeVeaux, I, 282; Ehrenreich, II, 11; Levertov, III, 38; Randall, III, 307; Sanchez, IV, 5; Steinem, IV, 95 Social criticism see Goldman, II, 119; Mannes, III, 82; Mitford, III, 152; Monroe, III, 159; Older, III, 225; Sontag, IV, 75; Stein, IV, 92; Strong, IV, 107 Social history see Andrews, I, 27; Arnow, I, 42; Banning, I, 59; Beard, I, 72; Breckinridge, I, 122; Chesnut, I, 195; Farrar, II, 35; Gruenberg, II, 151; Harper, II, 182; Lamb, III, 1; Laut, III, 16; O’Keeffe, III, 219; Ripley, III, 329; Robinson, III, 335; Rourke, III, 343; Royall, III, 345; Stewart, IV, 99; Watson, IV, 206; Windle, IV, 253; Wright, IV, 269; Yezierska, IV, 277 Social realism see Beattie, I, 73 Social reformers see Abbott, I, 1; Addams, I, 11; Blackwell, I, 90; Blackwell, I, 91; Blackwell, I, 92; Breckinridge, I, 122; Campbell, I, 162; Goldman, II, 119; Mott, III, 177; Phelps, III, 272; Strong, IV, 107; Todd, IV, 142; Wald, IV, 186; Ward, IV, 198; White, IV, 224; Woodhull, IV, 262; Wyatt, IV, 270 Social satire see Ritchie, III, 330; Victor, IV, 175; Whitcher, IV, 223 Social workers see Abbott, I, 1; Addams, I, 11; Balch, I, 56; Blackwell, I, 91; Breckinridge, I, 122; Henry, II, 201; McPherson, III, 122; Slade, IV, 59; Smith, IV, 65; Stern, IV, 98; Strong, IV, 107 Socialism see Avery, I, 47; Blackwell, I, 90; Blatch, I, 96; Cleghorn, I, 215; Day, I, 270; Earle, II, 1; Eastman, II, 4; Flynn, II, 55; Grumbach, II, 152; Howland, II, 240; Kelley, II, 297; Lane, III, 5; Lumpkin, III,
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
67; Malkiel, III, 81; Mannes, III, 82; Page, III, 245; Scudder, IV, 27; Smedley, IV, 61; Strong, IV, 107; Taggard, IV, 118; Vorse, IV, 182; Winter, IV, 257; Zugsmith, IV, 287 Socialist realism see Catherwood, I, 178; Johnson, II, 278; Olsen, III, 228; Smedley, IV, 61 Socialists see Herbst, II, 204; Randall, III, 307 Solwoska, Mara See French, Marilyn Somers, Suzanne See Daniels, Dorothy Song, Cathy, IV, 74 Sonnets see Branch, I, 120; Brooks, I, 133; Chilton, I, 200; Dargan, I, 259; Hacker, II, 159; Jerauld, II, 272; Lazarus, III, 20; Lee, III, 28; Merington, III, 130; Millay, III, 138; Moulton, III, 178; Reese, III, 315; Rich, III, 320; Ridge, III, 327; Spencer, IV, 81; Teasdale, IV, 126; Tietjens, IV, 139; Walker, IV, 192 Sontag, Susan, IV, 75 Sorel, Julia See Drexler, Rosalyn Soule, Caroline White, IV, 77 Southern writers see Alther, I, 24; Betts, I, 85; Calisher, I, 160; Gibbons, II, 100; Gilchrist, II, 103; Godwin, II, 116; Henley, II, 200; hooks, II, 226; Martin, III, 91; Mason, III, 95; Naylor, III, 189; Osbey, III, 231; Rice, III, 319; Settle, IV, 38; Smith, IV, 67; Spencer, IV, 82; Tan, IV, 119; Taylor, IV, 123; Walker, IV, 192; Welty, IV, 212 Southworth, E. D. E. N., IV, 78 Souza, E. See Scott, Evelyn Spacks, Patricia Meyer, IV, 79 Speare, Elizabeth George, IV, 80 Spencer, Anne, IV, 81 Spencer, Cornelia Phillips, IV, 82 Spencer, Elizabeth, IV, 82 Spewak, Bella Cohen, IV, 84 Speyer, Leonora von Stosch, IV, 85 Spirituality see Jackson, II, 261 Spofford, Harriet Prescott, IV, 86 Sprague, Rosemary, IV, 87 Stabenow, Dana, IV, 87 Stack, Andy See Rule, Ann Stafford, Jean, IV, 88 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, IV, 89
GENERAL INDEX
Steel, Danielle, IV, 90 Stein, Gertrude, IV, 92 Steinem, Gloria, IV, 95 Stenhouse, Fanny, IV, 97 Stephens, Ann Winterbotham, IV, 97 Stephens, Margaret Dean See Aldrich, Bess Streeter Steptoe, Lydia See Barnes, Djuna Stern, Elizabeth G., IV, 98 Stewart, Elinore Pruitt, IV, 99 Stewart, Maria W., IV, 100 Stockton, Annis Boudinot, IV, 101 Stoddard, Elizabeth Barstow, IV, 102 Stone, Ruth, IV, 103 Story, Sydney A. See Pike, Mary Green Stowe, Harriet Beecher, IV, 104 Stratton-Porter, Gene, IV, 106 Strong, Anna Louise, IV, 107 Stuart, Ruth McEnery, IV, 109 Sture-Vasa, Mary, IV, 110 Suckow, Ruth, IV, 111 Sui Sin Far See Eaton, Edith Maud Surrealism see Cortez, I, 233; Drexler, I, 311; Erdrich, II, 25; Hoffman, II, 217; Marshall, III, 87; Ty-Casper, IV, 158 Susann, Jacqueline, IV, 112 Swenson, May, IV, 113 Swett, Sophie, IV, 114 Swisshelm, Jane Grey, IV, 115 Taber, Gladys Bagg, IV, 117 Taggard, Genevieve, IV, 118 Talbott, Marion, IV, 119 Tan, Amy, IV, 119 Tandy, Jennette Reid, IV, 121 Tappan, Eva March, IV, 121 Tarbell, Ida, IV, 122 Taylor, Mildred Delois, IV, 123 Taylor, Phoebe Atwood, IV, 124 Taylor, Susie King, IV, 125 Teasdale, Sara, IV, 126 Television programs see Angelou, I, 31; Child, I, 197; Childress, I, 199; Cleary, I, 213; Drew, I, 309; Drexler, I, 311; Ehrenreich, II, 11; Evans, II, 28; French, II, 76; Hansberry, II, 175; Highsmith, II, 210; Hobart, II, 215; Howe, II, 238; HunterLattany, II, 246; Kincaid, II, 310; Merriam, III, 132; Moore, III, 162; Naylor, III, 189; Randall, III, 308; Shange, IV, 42; Spewak, IV, 84; Steinem, IV, 95; Turney,
317
GENERAL INDEX
IV, 156; Viramontes, IV, 178; Wasserstein, IV, 203; Williams, IV, 248 Tenney, Tabitha, IV, 127 Tepper, Sheri S., IV, 128 Terhune, Mary Hawes, IV, 130 Terry, Megan, IV, 131 Textbooks see Andrews, I, 27; Bacon, I, 51; Barnes, I, 64; Bates, I, 69; Beard, I, 72; Botta, I, 108; Brown, I, 138; Coman, I, 220; Dégh, I, 275; Fisher, II, 44; FitzGerald, II, 47; Hamilton, II, 170; Hawthorne, II, 192; Hollingworth, II, 223; King, II, 311; Kirk, II, 319; Owen, III, 237; Parsons, III, 253; Parsons, III, 255; Phelps, III, 271; Piercy, III, 277; Semple, IV, 36; Tappan, IV, 121; Willard, IV, 243; Youmans, IV, 279 Thane, Elswyth, IV, 132 Thanet, Octave See French, Alice Thaxter, Celia Laighton, IV, 133 Thayer, Caroline Warren, IV, 134 Thayer, Geraldine See Daniels, Dorothy Theater see Angelou, I, 31; Bateman, I, 69; Crothers, I, 244; Ellis, II, 21; Gerstenberg, II, 98; Glaspell, II, 113; Gordon, II, 127; Hamilton, II, 171; Heyward, II, 206; Hopper, II, 229; LeGallienne, III, 29; Logan, III, 55; Marks, III, 84; Mathews, III, 97; Morris, III, 171; O’Donnell, III, 217; Ranous, III, 309; Rawlings, III, 310; Ritchie, III, 330; Sarton, IV, 12; Smith, IV, 63; Terry, IV, 131; Vorse, IV, 182; West, IV, 218; West, IV, 219; Winslow, IV, 257 Thomas, Dorothy Swain, IV, 135 Thompson, Clara M., IV, 136 Thompson, Clara M(abel), IV, 136 Thompson, Dorothy, IV, 137 Thorndyke, Helen Louise See Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Thrillers see Clark, I, 212 Ticknor, Caroline, IV, 138 Tiernan, Frances Fisher, IV, 138 Tietjens, Eunice, IV, 139 Tilton, Alice See Taylor, Phoebe Atwood Tincker, Mary Agnes, IV, 140 Todd, Mabel Loomis, IV, 141 Todd, Marion Marsh, IV, 142
318
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Toklas, Alice B., IV, 143 Tompkins, Jane P., IV, 144 Tony award see Wasserstein, IV, 203 Towne, Laura M., IV, 145 Townsend, Mary Ashley, IV, 146 Tragedy see Faugeres, II, 36; Johnson, II, 275; Lewis, III, 41; McCord, III, 107; Norman, III, 206; O’Connor, III, 215; Read, III, 312 Transcendentalism see Alcott, I, 15; Cheney, I, 190; Fuller, II, 81; Peabody, III, 260; Whitman, IV, 233 Translators see Appleton-Weber, I, 38; Blackwell, I, 90; Broumas, I, 136; de Cleyre, I, 273; Fisher, II, 44; Fisher, II, 45; Forché, II, 59; Guy, II, 157; Hadas, II, 160; Hawthorne, II, 192; Hejinian, II, 196; Hirshfield, II, 213; Kizer, II, 321; Lurie, III, 68; McCord, III, 107; Morley, III, 170; Nye, III, 212; Ozick, III, 242; Prose, III, 296; Randall, III, 307; Ranous, III, 309; Swenson, IV, 113; Waldrop, IV, 188; White, IV, 224; Whitman, IV, 232; Youmans, IV, 279 Travel see Adams, I, 10; Bates, I, 69; Blatch, I, 96; Chase, I, 188; Clark, I, 211; Didion, I, 287; Dorr, I, 302; Dykeman, I, 320; Elliott, II, 19; Field, II, 41; Fisher, II, 45; Gilman, II, 105; Gilmer, II, 108; Hale, II, 166; Hart, II, 188; Hawthorne, II, 192; Hulme, II, 242; Kimbrough, II, 309; Knight, II, 323; Knox, II, 324; Lane, III, 5; Laut, III, 16; Le Vert, III, 24; Leslie, III, 37; Lippincott, III, 48; Lounsberry, III, 61; MacLaine, III, 77; Mansfield, III, 84; McKenney, III, 119; Nicholson, III, 197; Nieriker, III, 201; Niles, III, 202; Owen, III, 237; Peck, III, 264; Prince, III, 296; Prose, III, 296; Rich, III, 323; Roosevelt, III, 340; Royall, III, 345; Salisbury, IV, 3; Simon, IV, 54; Tiernan, IV, 138; Todd, IV, 141; Whipple, IV, 222; Whiting, IV, 230; Wormeley, IV, 266
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Treadwell, Sophie, IV, 146 Tribal history and legends see Allen, I, 21; Cervantes, I, 181; Deloria, I, 277; Hogan, II, 219; Mourning Dove, III, 179 Trilling, Diana, IV, 147 Troubetzkoy, Amélie Rives, IV, 148 True crime see Buchanan, I, 149; Rule, III, 349 Truitt, Anne, IV, 150 Truman, Margaret, IV, 151 Truth, Sojourner, IV, 152 Tuchman, Barbara, IV, 153 Turell, Jane, IV, 154 Turnbull, Agnes Sligh, IV, 155 Turney, Catherine, IV, 156 Tuthill, Louisa Huggins, IV, 156 Tuve, Rosemond, IV, 157 Ty-Casper, Linda, IV, 158 Tyler, Anne, IV, 159 Tyler, Martha W., IV, 161 Tyler, Mary Palmer, IV, 161 Uchida, Yoshiko, IV, 163 Uhnak, Dorothy, IV, 164 Ulanov, Ann Belford, IV, 165 Underwood, Sophie Kerr, IV, 166 Untermeyer, Jean Starr, IV, 166 Upton, Harriet Taylor, IV, 167 Urban studies see Huxtable, II, 252 Utopian fiction see Castillo, I, 174; Gearhart, II, 94; Grahn, II, 137; Griffith, II, 147; Howland, II, 240; Moore, III, 162; Norris, III, 207; Phelps, III, 272; Piercy, III, 277; Russ, III, 353 Valentine, Jean, IV, 169 Valentine, Jo See Armstrong, Charlotte Van Alstyne, Frances Crosby, IV, 170 Van Duyn, Mona, IV, 170 Van Vorst, Bessie McGinnis, IV, 171 Van Vorst, Marie, IV, 172 Vandegrift, Margaret See Janvier, Margaret Thompson Vanderbilt, Amy, IV, 174 Vendler, Helen Hennessy, IV, 174 Verse drama see Barnes, I, 61; Bateman, I, 69; Branch, I, 120; Faugeres, II, 36; French, II, 76; Green, II, 140; Hall, II, 169; Lazarus, III, 20; Lewis, III, 40; McCord, III, 107; Miller, III, 141; Peabody, III, 261;
GENERAL INDEX
Read, III, 312; Ritchie, III, 330; Robinson, III, 335 Victor, Frances Fuller, IV, 175 Victor, Metta Fuller, IV, 176 Vining, Elizabeth Gray, IV, 177 Viramontes, Helena María, IV, 178 Voigt, Cynthia, IV, 180 Voigt, Ellen Bryant, IV, 181 Vorse, Mary Heaton, IV, 182 Wakoski, Diane, IV, 185 Wald, Lillian D., IV, 186 Waldman, Anne, IV, 187 Waldrop, Rosmarie, IV, 188 Walker, Alice, IV, 189 Walker, Margaret, IV, 192 Walker, Mary Spring, IV, 193 Wallace, Michele, IV, 194 Waller, Mary Ella, IV, 195 Walter, Mildred Pitts, IV, 196 Walton, Evangeline, IV, 196 Walworth, Jeannette Hadermann, IV, 197 War correspondents see Bourke-White, I, 109; Chapelle, I, 184; Craig, I, 236; Dorr, I, 303; FitzGerald, II, 47; Gellhorn, II, 95; Hawthorne, II, 192; Higgins, II, 208; Tietjens, IV, 139; Treadwell, IV, 146; Tuchman, IV, 153; Vorse, IV, 182 Ward, Mary Jane, IV, 198 Warfield, Catherine Ware, IV, 199 Warner, Anna Bartlett, IV, 200 Warner, Susan Bogert, IV, 200 Warren, Lella, IV, 201 Warren, Mercy Otis, IV, 202 Wasserstein, Wendy, IV, 203 Watanabe, Sylvia, IV, 205 Watson, Sukey Vickery, IV, 206 Watts, Mary Stanbery, IV, 206 Weber, Sarah Appleton See AppletonWeber, Sarah Webster, Jean, IV, 207 Weeks, Helen C. See Campbell, Helen Stuart Welby, Amelia Coppuck, IV, 208 Wells, Carolyn, IV, 208 Wells, Emmeline Woodward, IV, 210 Wells, John J. See Bradley, Marion Zimmer Wells-Barnett, Ida B., IV, 211 Welty, Eudora, IV, 212 West, Dorothy, IV, 215 West, Jessamyn, IV, 217 West, Lillie, IV, 218 West, Mae, IV, 219
319
GENERAL INDEX
Western novels see Hawthorne, II, 192; Hobson, II, 216; Sinclair, IV, 55 Wetherall, Elizabeth See Warner, Susan Bogert Wharton, Edith, IV, 220 Wheatley, Phillis, IV, 221 Wheaton, Campbell See Campbell, Helen Stuart Whipple, Maurine, IV, 222 Whitcher, Frances Berry, IV, 223 White, Anna, IV, 224 White, Anne Terry, IV, 224 White, Eliza Orne, IV, 225 White, Elizabeth, IV, 226 White, Ellen Gould, IV, 227 White, Helen Constance, IV, 228 White, Nelia Gardner, IV, 229 White, Rhoda E., IV, 229 Whiting, Lillian, IV, 230 Whitman, Narcissa Prentiss, IV, 231 Whitman, Ruth, IV, 232 Whitman, Sarah Helen, IV, 233 Whitney, Adeline D. T., IV, 234 Whitney, Phyllis A., IV, 235 Wiggin, Kate Douglass, IV, 236 Wiggins, Bernice Love, IV, 237 Wiggins, Marianne, IV, 238 Wilcox, Ella Wheeler, IV, 239 Wilder, Laura Ingalls, IV, 240 Wilder, Louise Beebe, IV, 241 Wilhelm, Kate, IV, 242 Willard, Emma, IV, 243 Willard, Frances, IV, 245 Willard, Nancy, IV, 246 Williams, Catharine Arnold, IV, 247 Williams, Fannie Barrier, IV, 248 Williams, Sherley Anne, IV, 248 Willis, Connie, IV, 250 Willis, Lydia Fish, IV, 251 Willoughby, Florence Barrett, IV, 251 Wilson, Harriet E. Adams, IV, 252 Windle, Mary Jane, IV, 253 Winnemucca, Sarah, IV, 253 Winslow, Anna Green, IV, 254 Winslow, Helen M., IV, 255 Winslow, Ola Elizabeth, IV, 256 Winslow, Thyra Samter, IV, 257 Winter, Ella, IV, 257 Winwar, Frances, IV, 258 Wives of U.S. presidents see Adams, I, 10; Anderson, I, 27; Madison, III, 80; Randall, III, 308; Smith, IV, 69; Thane, IV, 132; Warren, IV, 202 Wolf, Naomi, IV, 259 Women in drama
320
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
see Akins, I, 14; Carver, I, 170; Glaspell, II, 113; Hall, II, 169; Luce, III, 66; Meyer, III, 134; Morton, III, 176; Read, III, 312; Stein, IV, 92; Terry, IV, 131; Treadwell, IV, 146; West, IV, 219 Women in fiction see Cary, I, 171; Eberhart, II, 8; Gould, II, 130; Holley, II, 222; Jackson, II, 260; Jerauld, II, 272; Lathen, III, 12; Le Sueur, III, 23; O’Connor, III, 216; Stephens, IV, 97; Susann, IV, 112 Women’s history see Cott, I, 234; Scott, IV, 24 Wong, Jade Snow, IV, 260 Wood, Ann See Douglas, Ann Wood, S. S. B. K., IV, 261 Woodhull, Victoria, IV, 262 Woods, Caroline H., IV, 262 Woods, Katharine Pearson, IV, 263 Woolsey, Sarah Chauncey, IV, 264 Woolson, Constance Fenimore, IV, 265 Wormeley, Katharine Prescott, IV, 266 Wright, Frances, IV, 266 Wright, Julia McNair, IV, 267 Wright, Mabel Osgood, IV, 269 Wright, Mary Clabaugh, IV, 270 Wyatt, Edith Franklin, IV, 270 Wylie, Elinor Hoyt, IV, 271
Yamada, Mitsuye, IV, 273 Yamamoto, Hisaye, IV, 273 Yamanaka, Lois-Ann, IV, 274 Yates, Elizabeth, IV, 275 Yezierska, Anzia, IV, 277 Yglesias, Helen, IV, 278 Youmans, Eliza Ann, IV, 279 Young adult literature see Hawthorne, II, 192; Knox, II, 324; McCaffrey, III, 102; Woolsey, IV, 264; Yates, IV, 275 Young, Ann Eliza, IV, 280 Young, Ella, IV, 280 Young, Marguerite, IV, 281 Young, Rida Johnson, IV, 282
Zaturenska, Marya, IV, 285 Zionism see Ruether, III, 347 Zolotow, Charlotte, IV, 285 Zugsmith, Leane, IV, 287