Dorothy Canfield Fisher (February 17, 1879 – November 9, 1958) was an American author, educational reformer, and social activist based in New England. Her ancestors settled in Vermont in 1764 and owned land there ever since.
Her father, James Hulme Canfield, was a college professor and president of several universities, and so the family valued education. Her own education was rather cosmopolitan, as she moved among several midwest university towns and traveled to France and Italy to broaden her scope.
After receiving a bachelor’s degree from Ohio State University and studying at the Sorbonne in Paris, she received a Ph.D in French from Columbia University in 1905. Eventually, she had the ability to speak five languages. Read More→
Dame Agatha Christie earned her place in The Guinness Book of World Records as the best-selling novelist in the world with sales of over four billion books. She is also the third most widely translated author, beaten only by William Shakespeare and the Bible.
Reassuringly for anyone struggling to follow in her footsteps, after four years working on her first novel, even she was rejected by all the leading publishers of her day, before The Bodley Head press took a chance with her. Read More→
Daphne du Maurier was born in London in May 1907 and was still writing at her death in 1989. Educated by private tutors in Paris, she published her first short stories at the age of twenty-one. Daphne du Maurier’s writing habits surely contributed to her prolific career as an author of fiction and drama.
Her publisher encouraged her to write a novel, which became The Loving Spirit in 1931. She was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1952 and became a Dame of the British Empire in 1969.
In 1977 she won the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award. As well as Jamaica Inn, Hitchcock directed film versions of The Birds and Rebecca. Read More→
On Certain Brisk, Bright Days, an essay by American author Kate Chopin, was originally published in the St. Louis Dispatch in November 1899. It was the same year her now-classic novella The Awakening was published.
In her analysis of this novella on this site, Sarah Wyman writes that it “came under immediate attack when published and was banned from bookstores and libraries.
The author died virtually forgotten, yet The Awakening has been rediscovered and holds a secure and prominent position as a watershed text in U.S. literature and feminist studies.” Despite the initial negative initial reaction to her novella, Kate Chopin created this cheery description of her writing life: Read More→
The Awakening by Kate Chopin is a short novel, published in 1899. Now considered a feminist classic, it was widely criticized, even reviled when first published.
The heroine, a young Creole named Edna Pontellier, searches for meaning outside her accepted roles of wife and mother. She also seeks sexual fulfillment and independence.
It’s more accurate to say that The Awakening was silenced rather than was banned after initial publication, as is commonly believed. Critics were brutal; one called the story “poison,” which captured the prevailing sentiment of others. Read More→
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith was the first novel by this British author. It’s the story of Rose and Cassandra Mortmain, two sisters who are part of an eccentric family living in genteel poverty in a crumbling castle in the 1930s.
This coming of age novel has been beloved by young adults ever since it was published in 1948.
At the time of its publication, Smith was an established playwright, and would later become even better known for the children’s classic, The 101 Dalmatians (1956). I Capture the Castle was as well received by critics as it was by the public; here is one such review: Read More→
Clock Without Hands by Carson McCullers was this esteemed American author’s final novel, published in 1961. McCullers was known for writing in the Southern Gothic genre, with elements of the grotesque in some of her storytelling.
When her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, was published in 1940 she became the toast of the literary scene. The novel was wildly successful, more so than her next three works, which were all published before her thirtieth birthday.
Clock Without Hands received mixed- to favorable reviews; by the time of its publication, her greatest successes were behind her. Following is a review from the year of its publication, which gives a mixed view of the novel. Read More→
From the 1941 John Day Company edition of Dragon Seed (1941) by Pearl S. Buck: In Dragon Seed, Pearl Buck writes once more in the mood and vein of The Good Earth and The Mother.
Like those two classic novels this new one tells of plain people dwelling close to the Chinese soil, but a soil now sodden by the invader.
The story is of the farmer Ling Tan, and his wife and sons and daughters. The scene is outside and inside the walls of Nanking, the capital city where the author lived for seventeen years. Read More→
