Marcie McCauley reflects on revisiting Harriet the Spy, the 1964 classic by Louise Fitzhugh, and how the story continues to resonate and inspire her as a working writer.
See, first you take off your coat and hang it on the back of a library chair, use it to mark a comfortable seat as your place to return to with a stack of books. Then you fetch the ones you remember most fondly. You can’t have too many at one time or the librarians are annoyed. I usually have ten.* Read More→
Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa (September 26, 1942 – May 15, 2004) was a queer Chicana poet, feminist theorist, and writer. Going by the name Gloria E. Anzaldúa as an author, her writing and poetry discuss the anger that stems from social and cultural marginalization.
She herself experienced this kind of marginalization growing up in the Mexican-Texas border as the daughter of a Spanish American and Native American. (Photo above right courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)
Anzaldúa was born in Jesús María Ranch in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas as the oldest of four siblings. Throughout her childhood, her parents, Urbano Anzaldúa and Amalia Anzaldúa García, moved their family to various ranches working as migrant farmers.
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Lorraine Hansberry (1930 – 1965) was an American playwright and author. Presented here is a sampling of quotes from A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry’s most famous work.
Her best-known work, A Raisin in the Sun (1959), was the first play by an African-American woman to be staged on Broadway. And at the age of twenty-nine, Hansberry became the youngest American and the first Black playwright to win the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play.
The play details the life of the Youngers, an African-American family living on the South Side of Chicago in the 1950s. It follows their struggles to overcome prejudice while staying strong as a family unit. Read More→
My Cousin Rachel is a novel by British author Daphne du Maurier (1907 – 1989), first published in the U.K. in 1951 and in the U.S. in 1952. Echoing du Maurier’s 1938 masterwork Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel is a romantic thriller. Read on for quotes from My Cousin Rachel, which will give you the flavor of this iconic novel.
It’s set primarily on a large estate in Cornwall, England, where du Maurier drew real-life inspiration. She saw a portrait of a woman named Rachel Carew at an estate, and the creative spark was lit.
Multiple television and film adaptations of this novel have been produced. My Cousin Rachel was adapted into a 1983 BBC miniseries, and as a 2011 radio play, also by the BBC. Most recently, a film adaptation was released in 2017 starring the aptly named Rachel Weisz in the title role. Read More→
A House with Four Rooms (1989) is the second part of a two-part autobiography by Rumer Godden (1907 – 1998). A noted and prolific novelist and memoirist born in Eastbourne, Sussex (England), her early years and youth were spent in India at the height of British colonial rule.
Though her life was not without its share of struggles, it was often as dramatic and colorful as the stories she so skillfully created.
Interestingly, she based the title — A House With Four Rooms —on an Indian proverb, which says: “Everyone is a house with four rooms, a physical, a mental, an emotional and a spiritual. Most of us tend to live in one room most of the time but, unless we go into every room, every day, even if only to keep it aired, we are not a complete person.” Read More→
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson is a 1959 novel in the gothic horror genre, though it might be more accurately described as a literary ghost story. A finalist for the National Book Award, it’s a masterful story of psychological terror.
Hill House is a mansion built by Hugh Crain, long passed away. Dr. John Montague, an investigator of the supernatural, wishes to conduct a study there to find existence of spirits.
With him are three young companions including Luke, the young heir to the mysterious house, and two young women, Eleanor and Theordora. Eleanor is unquestionably the central character, and a close reading of the novel is an exploration of her essential loneliness and psychological breakdown. Read More→
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892 – 1950) has long been regarded as a major twentieth-century figure in the genre of poetry. Here is a selection of 12 poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay from some of her earlier collections.
Vincent, as her family and friends called her, was introduced by her mother to great works of literature from an early age, especially poetry by Shakespeare, Keats, Longfellow, Shelley, and Wordsworth.
At age of sixteen she compiled a dozen or so poems into a copybook and presented them to her mother as The Poetical Works of Vincent Millay. Read More→
My Cousin Rachel is a novel by British author Daphne du Maurier, first published in the U.K. in 1951 and in the U.S. in 1952.
Echoing du Maurier’s masterwork, Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel is a romantic thriller. It’s set primarily on a large estate in Cornwall, England, where du Maurier drew real-life inspiration from Antony House.
There she saw a portrait of a woman named Rachel Carew, and the creative spark was lit. So highly anticipated was My Cousin Rachel’s publication that the film rights were fought over even before it was published. Read More→
