By Nava Atlas | On April 29, 2025 | Comments (0)
There’s a lot of hoopla around 2025 being the centenary of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in 1925. It’s the quintessential novel of what’s come to be known as the Jazz Age.
But it’s not the only centenary worth celebrating in 2025. There was some great 1925 fiction that came from the pens (and typewriters of women writers, including Virginia Woolf, Zora Neale Hurston, Willa Cather, Anita Loos, Anzia Yezierska, and more.
Poor Scott Fitzgerald didn’t live long enough to see the lasting legacy of his work (he was gone by 1940, at the age of 44). There’s a LOT (this is the listing on Google News alone) of news and editorializing about Gatsby. It’s kind of cool that a book is getting so much attention in the midst of all the horrors we’re living through — kind of a testament to the power of literature. Read More→
By Alex J. Coyne | On March 6, 2025 | Comments (0)
Zelda Fitzgerald was an American author, artist, and socialite. Although she is best remembered as the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald, she was a talented writer and artist in her own right, which caused the couple a great deal of conflict.
Zelda wrote one novel (Save Me the Waltz) and an unstaged play, Scandalabra. What is less known is that she wrote various articles for periodicals, including College Humor, Harper’s Bazaar, and the New York Tribune. Here, we’ll take a closer look at five of these little-known features. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On February 28, 2025 | Comments (2)
It’s incredible (and sad) that we’re still grappling with the same issues presented in these five 1920s novels by women writers. Four of them fell out of print and were rediscovered and reissued decades later; one has never gone out of print. It’s wonderful that all are available in fresh new or recent editions.
In these reissues, fascinating new introductions, forewords, or afterwords re-introduce these writers aren’t known enough and/or shouldn’t have been forgotten in the first place: Ursula Parrott, Radclyffe Hall, Anzia Yezierska, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Dorothy Canfield Fisher.
As Edna St. Vincent Millay famously wrote, it’s not one damn thing after another, it’s the same damn thing, over and over. One hundred years or so after these books came out, we’re still grappling with their central themes in the culture and in personal lives. And while that’s frustrating, it’s also why these novels are still relevant to contemporary readers. Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On February 28, 2025 | Updated March 28, 2025 | Comments (0)
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861) was one of the great romantic poets of the Victorian era. “Sonnet 43” breathed her famous words to life: “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”
Her early texts, flavored with feminism, paved the way for others to follow. Immensely popular in her lifetime, her work was somewhat forgotten until rediscovered with new appreciation starting in the second-wave feminist era of the 1970s. Her life was one of contrasts: she was remarkably prolific, enjoyed a happy marriage with fellow poet Robert Browning, yet her lifelong chronic illness shadowed her for all time.
Browning kept a diary of her ailments, yet many questions remain unanswered about the source of her maladies. A Penn State anthropologist may have found the answer more than a century later. Read More→
By Jon Macy | On February 22, 2025 | Comments (0)
Djuna Barnes was a Modernist writer whose various talents and eccentricities made her unique. She went to great lengths to protect her privacy, so it’s not surprising that she had a whole closet full of skeletons. These fascinating facts about Djuna Barnes are presented by Jon Macy, creator of the graphic novel Djuna: The Extraordinary Life of Djuna Barnes.
Childhood trauma armored Djuna with a razor sharp wit, and an almost Ahab-and-the-whale, determination to succeed as a writer. Immensely talented, she was a journalist, poet, artist and novelist.
She became a celebrated star in 1920s Paris along with her friends James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein. Her masterpiece, Nightwood, is one of the greatest lesbian novels ever written, and her influence on modern writers reverberates into the present. Read More→
Categories: 
Comments: