By Nava Atlas | On April 14, 2019 | Updated July 9, 2023 | Comments (0)
The Member of the Wedding (1946), Carson McCullers’ third novel (more accurately, it is a novella), followed the incredibly successful The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) and the far less successful Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941). The Member of the Wedding re-established McCullers, still in her twenties, as a literary force.
The story centers on a lonely twelve-year-old girl, Frankie Addams, who prefers to be known as F. Jasmine. Her mother has died, and her father, a jeweler, treats her with benign neglect.
The story takes place during a hot summer in a small Georgia town, finding Frankie consumed with worry that she doesn’t belong anywhere or with anyone. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On April 11, 2019 | Updated September 8, 2022 | Comments (0)
Charlotte Brontë (1816 – 1855) outlived all five of her siblings, including her literary sisters, Emily and Anne. The grief at losing her sisters at ages thirty and twenty-nine, respectively, may have been easing with the happiness she found as the wife of Arthur Bell Nichols, and the widespread recognition of her talents as a writer.
Jane Eyre, Shirley, and Villette had all been published, and Charlotte was recognized as a major talent. Her books sold well, too. And though she was still known as “Currer Bell,” the male pseudonym she’d use to break into the publishing world, her true identity had been established. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On April 9, 2019 | Updated September 8, 2022 | Comments (0)
The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir is a semi-autobiographical novel published in her native French in 1954, and in English translation in 1956. The same year it was published in France, it won the prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt.
When The Mandarins was published outside of France, de Beauvoir was best known (as she is still today, perhaps) for her 1949 nonfiction book, The Second Sex, a feminist classic.
The Mandarins encompasses many of de Beauvoir’s favored themes, including existentialism, feminism, political structures (including communism), and morality. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On April 1, 2019 | Updated September 8, 2022 | Comments (0)
In January of 1947, Simone de Beauvoir, existentialist philosopher, novelist, and author of feminist classic The Second Sex, landed at La Guardia airport. From there she embarked on a months-long journey from one end of the U.S. to the other.
Immersing herself in American culture, customs, and vistas, she kept a detailed diary that was published in France in 1948. It was first published in an American edition in 1954.
The University of California Press published a more recent edition in 1999, describing it as “one of the most intimate, warm, and compulsively readable texts from the great writer’s pen.” The publisher’s description continued: Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On March 31, 2019 | Updated September 8, 2022 | Comments (4)
The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather, published in 1915, was the third of her twelve novels. It traces the artistic development of Thea Kronberg from Moonstone, her hometown in the desert of Colorado, to the stage of New York’s Metropolitan Opera House.
Thea Kronborg has a dream of becoming a world-class singer. Born into the family of a Swedish Methodist minister in the Colorado village of moonstone, she has a beautiful voice, a driving ambition, and an innate sense of what is true and fine. She sees the surroundings in which she is growing up in as cheap and tawdry, though it’s a part of the booming American West. Read More→
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