By Taylor Jasmine | On May 19, 2018 | Updated September 22, 2025 | Comments (0)
Charlotte Temple by Susanna Rowson (1762 – 1824), sometimes known as Susanna Haswell Rowson) was the best-known work by this American-British author. It was also America’s first best-selling novel. First published in England in 1790 as Charlotte: A Tale of Truth, it was retitled Charlotte Temple in 1797.
With its classic theme of seduction and remorse, it sparked a great deal of controversy in its time. Yet it remained the most widely read novel of the first half of the nineteenth century.
Other than Charlotte Temple, Susanna Rowson’s prolific body of writings (which also included other novels as well as plays, poems, and school textbooks) has been largely forgotten. Though contemporary readers give this novel mixed reviews, judging from reader comments on Goodreads, Charlotte Temple has endured as an example of early American literature. Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On April 25, 2018 | Updated February 5, 2026 | Comments (0)
To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in her Own Words is a 1969 collection of autobiographical writings by the playwright and author best known for A Raisin in the Sun. The latter was the first play written by an African-American woman to be staged on Broadway.
Lorraine Hansberry‘s ex-husband and dear friend, the songwriter and poet Robert Nemiroff, became her literary executor after her death in 1965.
He gathered her unpublished writings and first adapted them into a stage play, To Be Young, Gifted and Black, which ran off Broadway from 1968 to 1969. The play was one of the most critically acclaimed and successful of that season and continues to be performed around the world. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On April 18, 2018 | Updated August 1, 2026 | Comments (0)
A Country Doctor by Sarah Orne Jewett is an 1884 novel by this American author noted for regional fiction set in Maine. Nan, the main character, is a young woman wants to become a doctor, something that was quite out of the ordinary at the time this story was published.
The story follows a central character in a narrative, unlike the linked sketches in her best-known book, The Country of the Pointed Firs. But like those linked stories, it’s more episodic than plot-driven. Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On April 15, 2018 | Updated October 1, 2026 | Comments (0)
By Nava Atlas | On April 15, 2018 | Updated September 22, 2026 | Comments (0)
The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett (1896) is often cited as this New England author’s most important work. Neither a novel nor traditional short stories, this book is rather a series of linked sketches of a fictional Maine seaport town called Dunnet Landing.
A quietly evocative writing style conveyed everyday events and quiet emotions, the joys as well as the inevitable losses and hardships experienced the people living in Maine’s coastal fishing villages. Crafting a portrait of a disappearing way of life with this book and the others that she wrote, Jewett helped popularize the genre of regionalism in fiction. Read More→
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