By Lynne Weiss | On March 18, 2022 | Updated August 31, 2026 | Comments (2)
I became aware of novelist and poet Ruth Moore (July 21, 1903–December, 1989) while vacationing in Maine. Walking through a parking lot in Acadia National Park, I spotted a bumper sticker: “I Read Ruth Moore.”
That’s how a lotof people learn of Ruth Moore. Like me, they spot one of the three hundred bumper stickers spread around eastern Maine by publisher Gary Lawless and then they begin to investigate.
What they’ll find out is that Moore was a best-selling novelist (her second novel, Spoonhandle, spent 14 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, along with George Orwell and Somerset Maugham, when it was published in 1946). Read More→
By Nancy Snyder | On March 6, 2022 | Updated July 25, 2023 | Comments (0)
Natalia Ginzburg (July 14, 1916 – October 7, 1991) is considered among the best Italian writers of the post-World War II generation. Her vast literary legacy of novels, essays, plays, and nonfiction captures the devastation endured by war survivors.
In her works, the reader is struck by the imagery and near lyricism as she describes the mundane details and personal catastrophes that define life under political oppression. It has been said of Ginzburg that she “wrote like a man,” given that she was unsentimental in portraying the historic, violent traumas she witnessed. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On February 16, 2022 | Updated September 21, 2025 | Comments (0)
Vera Caspary (1899– 1987) was a remarkably prolific American novelist, screenwriter, and playwright. Over the course of her long career, she became known as a writer of crime fiction, though she created works in other genres.
With more than twenty novels published (plus others left unpublished), the best known remains Laura (1943). She also wrote long short stories and novellas, not to mention numerous screenplays for Hollywood films, some based on her own works.
Many of her works featured young, forward-thinking women (then called “career girls”) who fought for female autonomy and equality, and refused male protection. Read More→
By Nancy Snyder | On January 16, 2022 | Updated June 27, 2026 | Comments (0)
Sydney Taylor (born Sarah Brenner; October 30, 1904 – February 12, 1978) was an American author best known for All-of-a-Kind Family. This series of autobiographical children’s novels portrays the life of an Eastern European Jewish immigrant family in New York City in the early twentieth century.
Though she wrote several other children’s novels, the five books in the All-of-a-Kind Family series proved to be her lasting legacy, earning a devoted audience for their warm and loving depiction of Jewish life in early twentieth-century America.
Photo above right, Sydney Taylor (Sarah Brenner) in the 1920s, from the private collection of her daughter, Jo Taylor Marshall. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On January 11, 2022 | Updated August 25, 2022 | Comments (0)
Anzia Yezierska (October 29, 1880 – November 21, 1970) was a Polish-born Jewish-American writer who achieved renown for her fiction on the immigrant experience in the early twentieth century.
Her most notable novel has remained Bread Givers (1925). She also achieved renown with her first short story collection, Hungry Hearts (1920), and her 1923 novel, Salome of the Tenements (1923).
When her family immigrated to the U.S. in 1893, they were among the masses of Eastern European Jews who arrived between 1880 to 1924. Like many Jewish immigrants, they settled and lived in the immigrant neighborhood of the East side of Manhattan. Read More→
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