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 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→
By Marsha Gordon | On February 11, 2025 | Comments (0)
Once the most renowned ex-wife in America, bestselling author Ursula Parrott (1899 – 1957) was routinely described as “famous” in her lifetime when the press covered her new books, Hollywood deals, marriages and divorces, and run-ins with the law.
As I detail in Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life & Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott, she published twenty books from the late 1920s through the late 1940s, several of them bestsellers, and over one hundred short stories, articles, and novel-length magazine serials.
Ursula Parrott piloted for the Civilian Air Corps during World War II; co-founded a weekly rural Connecticut newspaper with a group including American Newspaper Guild founder Heywood Broun and her literary agent George Bye; was an informant in a federal drug investigation; and travelled the world, including an extended story-collecting trip to Russia in the 1930s. And between all her writing and other adventures, she married (and divorced) four times. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On January 31, 2025 | Comments (0)
To write a great novel (or even a decent one), it seems that a writer should have a certain amount of life experience. But that’s not always the case — not in the past, and not in the present. Following are seven novels written when their authors were precocious young women — some still in their teens.
Some have become iconic classics; others sold in the millions are forgotten bestsellers.
So, what of it? Maybe the point is that if you have a story inside of you, find a way to tell it no matter what your age — tender through advanced. It may not become a classic or a bestseller or even be published, but at least will be something to build on. Read More→
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