By Nava Atlas | On July 14, 2018 | Updated August 19, 2022 | Comments (0)
Fannie Hurst (October 19, 1885 – February 23, 1968) was a prolific American novelist and short-story writer. Though largely forgotten today, her work was hugely popular in her heyday, roughly from the 1920s through the early 1950s.
Her best-known work is the 1933 novel Imitation of Life, which was adapted twice into feature films.
Fannie’s books and short stories featured romantic and sentimental themes, into which were woven social issues that mattered to her. Her writing made her fabulously wealthy and she was acknowledged as one of the highest-paid American writers, male or female.
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By Emma Ward | On July 12, 2018 | Updated June 29, 2024 | Comments (0)
Audre Geraldine Lorde (February 18, 1934 – November 17, 1992) was a self-identified “Black lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.” The daughter of West Indian parents, she grew up in New York City.
Her love of writing took root at an early age. Her first poem published in Seventeen magazine while she was in high school.
As society progressed with the anti-war, feminist, and civil rights movements, Audre shifted her writing from themes of love to more political and personal matters. She used her platform as a writer to spread ideas about intersecting oppressions and experiences faced especially by women of color. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On June 15, 2018 | Updated August 24, 2022 | Comments (0)
Vita Sackville-West (March 9, 1892 – June 2, 1962), was a British poet, novelist, and garden designer. Born at Knole Park, a 365-room ancestral home, her writing career was launched with the publication of Poems of East and West (1917).
She’s known for her private life and as a master gardener perhaps as much as her literature. She was bisexual and concurrent with her happy marriage with Harold Nicolson (also bisexual) had many affairs with women.
It’s widely believed that Vita was the inspiration for the title character of Virginia Woolf’s novel, Orlando. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On June 1, 2018 | Updated August 24, 2022 | Comments (0)
May Sarton (May 3, 1912 – July 16, 1995) born Eleanore Marie Sarton, was an American poet, novelist, and memoirist. Born in Belgium, her family moved to Boston, Massachusetts in 1915 after briefly living in England.
Her mother was the English artist Mable Elwes Sarton, and her father, George Sarton, was a science historian.
Sarton began writing poetry when she was in her teens. After graduating from high school, she moved to New York City with notions of becoming an actress. She joined the New York’s Civic Repertory Theater and even tried her hand at starting and running such a venture, launching Associated Actor’s Theater in 1933. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On May 31, 2018 | Updated March 17, 2026 | Comments (1)
Harper Lee (April 28, 1926 –February 19, 2016) was an American author best known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird (1960).
Born in Monroeville, Alabama, she was originally named Nelle Harper Lee.
Few novels have had the cultural impact of To Kill a Mockingbird, which has sold tens of millions of copies and has been translated into more than forty languages. Lee drew from her upbringing in a small southern town to tell an indelible American story. Read More→
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