By Nava Atlas | On March 20, 2018 | Updated February 16, 2026 | Comments (5)
Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960), was a novelist, memoirist, and ethnographer best known for Their Eyes Were Watching God, her 1937 novel. (Photo at right by Carl Van Vechten.)
Her love of story would lead her not only to create her own, but to collect tales from the oral traditions of the African American South and the Black cultures of the Caribbean.
With her determined intelligence and irrepressible personality, she quickly became a big name in the Harlem Renaissance movement of the 1920s. She pursued a dual career as a writer (producing fiction, plays, and essays) and as an anthropologist.
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By Nava Atlas | On March 20, 2018 | Updated June 26, 2025 | Comments (2)
Harriet Beecher Stowe (June 14, 1811 – July 1, 1896), American author and abolitionist, is best known for the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
She grew up in a large, socially progressive family of ministers, authors, reformers, and educators who were well known in their time.
Among Harriet’s siblings were the prominent minister Henry Ward Beecher, and educator Catharine Beecher. She showed an early talent for writing and in her early twenties had a steadily paying profession, contributing articles to numerous publications. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On March 20, 2018 | Updated December 3, 2020 | Comments (0)
She Came to Stay by Simone de Beauvoir was originally published in France in 1943 as L’Invitee. The autobiographical, philosophical novel was based on de Beauvoir’s open relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre, and takes place just before and during World War II.
The novel’s main character, Françoise, is based on de Beauvoir herself, and Pierre is a thinly veiled Sartre. A younger woman, Xaviere, enters their lives as they form a ménage a trois. Xaviere is a mash-up of sisters Olga and Wanda Kosakiewicz. Read More→
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