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 15, 2018 | Updated March 18, 2026 | Comments (0)
Nella Larsen (April 13, 1891 – March 30, 1964), born Nellie Walker in Chicago was an American author associated with the Harlem Renaissance movement. Her body of writing was modest, but she was considered a respected voice of her time.
Larsen was the first woman of color to graduate from library school and to receive the Guggenheim Fellowship for creative writing. The theme of her life, and in effect, her work, was a sense of never belonging — not to any community, nor even to an immediate family. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On March 13, 2018 | Updated November 2, 2024 | Comments (0)
Phillis Wheatley (ca 1753 – December 5, 1784), born in Senegal/Gambia, Africa, was one of the first women to be published in colonial America. She was also the first person in the U.S. to have a book of poetry published while enslaved.
Phillis was kidnapped as part of the slave trade as a young child and brought to North America, where she arrived on July 11, 1761. She arrived on a schooner, The Phillis, undoubtedly the source of her name.
Later, she was described as “a slender, frail female child, supposed to have been about seven years old at the time, from the circumstances of shedding her front teeth.” Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On March 13, 2018 | Updated October 20, 2025 | Comments (4)
Mary McCarthy (June 21, 1912 – October 25, 1989) was an American novelist, political activist, and critic. Born in Seattle, Washington, she endured a difficult childhood but overcame it to become a woman of strength and determination.
She began her writing career as a critic and gained admiration for her honest observations on culture and politics. In 1942 she published her first novel, The Company She Keeps, about a young woman’s college education, and subsequent foray into New York City social circles.
The Group (1963) was her most commercially successful novel — it sat on the New York Times bestseller list for two years and was made into a film that was more popular with audiences than critics. Read More→
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