By Skyler Gomez | On August 1, 2019 | Updated September 4, 2022 | Comments (0)
Ntozake Shange (1948 – 2018) was an African American playwright, poet, and feminist. She is best remembered for her 1975 Obie Award-winning choreopoem, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf. Following is a selection of inspiring and empowering quotes by Ntozake Shange, a valiant and unapologetic talent. Photo at right, 1978, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Born in Trenton, New Jersey, she was the oldest of four children in an upper-middle-class family. She attended a white school where she endured racial attacks to receive a “quality” education. Shange’s family pushed her to find an artistic outlet which was how she discovered her love for poetry.
Heartbreak and racial attacks were influences in her work, which spans several genres addresssing injustice, violence, and oppression. Though her choreopoems have been criticized for using African American dialect and one-sided attacks on black men, many value her work for its flair and lyricism.
Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On June 13, 2019 | Updated September 4, 2022 | Comments (0)
Here, we’ll sample a selection of quotes from The Yearling, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ 1938 novel and her crowning literary achievement.
For many years, Rawlings desperately wanted to break into the literary world, she tried writing the kinds of stories she thought editors were looking for. Mostly, she racked up rejections.
The Yearling was the result of a radical change in her lifestyle and locale, as she immersed herself in an environment that was quite different from where she came from. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On May 17, 2019 | Updated September 8, 2022 | Comments (0)
How to select quotes from Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, when almost every sentence in the book is quotable? It’s a tough choice, indeed.
The 1925 novel whose narrative is built on the inner consciousness of its characters, particularly Clarissa Dalloway, was groundbreaking in its time. Often called “a novel of one day,” it was almost universally praised for its innovative format. One 1925 review stated:
“Mrs. Woolf makes one aware of one’s own mental experiences in a way no other contemporary writer has ever achieved. Her characters appear upon the scenic screen of Clarissa Dalloway’s consciousness in proportion to her personal reaction to them; and then appear again in a swift soul-probing analysis as they really are. Read More→
By Larrisa Pope | On May 2, 2019 | Updated August 5, 2023 | Comments (0)
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→
By Nava Atlas | On May 2, 2019 | Updated September 4, 2022 | Comments (0)
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→
Categories: 
Comments: