By Nava Atlas | On September 11, 2023 | Updated September 17, 2023 | Comments (0)
Presented here is the full text of “John Redding Goes to Sea,” the first story by Zora Neale Hurston to be published.
Launching what would become her typical style, with characters speaking in dialect, the story was first published in the May, 1921 issue of Stylus, Howard University’s literary magazine. A slightly edited version in the January, 1926, issue of Opportunity, a prominent literary journal associated with the Harlem Renaissance.
More recently, the story is included in Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick (2020) a collection of Zora’s rediscovered short stories. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On May 8, 2023 | Comments (0)
Xingu by Edith Wharton (1862 – 1937), a longform short story, satirizes a snobby ladies’ literary lunch group in the early 1900s. It was first published in Xingu and Other Stories (1916) and is a fairly rare occasion in which Wharton’s sly sense of humor is on display.
The six pretentious, competitive women invite a famous author as a guest to visit their group, with unexpected results. Whereas the guests assume that the author is there to discuss her latest novel, she insists on only discussing another work — Xingu.
The ladies of the group feign knowing the work and insist they’ve studied it — but did they really? Xingu, reprinted in full here, is in the public domain. Long paragraphs have been broken up for easier viewability on devices.
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By Nava Atlas | On April 28, 2023 | Comments (0)
“The Daughters of the Late Colonel” by Katherine Mansfield is a modernist short story. New Zealand-born Mansfield (1888 – 1923) has been recognized for revolutionizing the short story form.
“The Daughters of the Late Colonel” is considered among her most highly regarded stories, along with “At the Bay,” “The Voyage,” and “The Stranger.”
Written in 1920, this story (now in the public domain) was first published in The London Mercury in 1921, and was later part of Mansfield’s short story collection, The Garden Party and Other Stories. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On April 14, 2023 | Updated July 16, 2023 | Comments (0)
Beginning in 1886, Amy Levy wrote several essays on Jewish culture and literature for The Jewish Chronicle. The best known is The Ghetto at Florence, presented here. Others in this series included The Jew in Fiction, Jewish Humour, and Jewish Children.
Amy Levy (1861 – 1889) was a 19th-century British novelist, essayist, and poet. She was best known for Reuben Sachs, an 1888 novel that examined Jewish life in Victorian England, a subject that was unusual for its time.
Despite talent and accomplishment, this promising writer died by her own hand when not quite twenty-eight years old following years of struggle with depression. Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On April 7, 2023 | Updated April 8, 2023 | Comments (0)
Blind and deaf from an early age, Helen Keller (1880 – 1968) became a prolific American author and disability rights activist. The 1905 essay by Helen Keller presented here, “A Chat About the Hand,” conveys in great detail how she communicated and sensed the world around her. At right, Helen Keller in 1904.
This entry in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica illustrates how accomplished she was already (with decades to live yet ahead of her) at the age of thirty-one:
Helen Adams Keller was born in Tuscumbia, Alabama, in 1880. When about nineteen months old she was deprived of sight and hearing by an attack of scarlet fever. At the request of her parents, who were acquainted with the success attained in the case of Laura Bridgman, one of the graduates of the Perkins Institution at Boston, Miss Anne Sullivan was sent to instruct her at home … Read More→
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