By Norma Brickner | On May 22, 2020 | Updated September 6, 2026 | Comments (5)
Lorraine Hansberry (1930 – 1965) was an American playwright and author best known for A Raisin in the Sun, a 1959 play influenced by her background and upbringing in Chicago. The fascinating facts about Lorraine Hansberry following illustrate her development as a Black woman, activist, and writer.
Though A Raisin in the Sun is the crown jewel in Hansberry’s legacy, she was also known for the plays The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window and Les Blancs.
To Be Young, Gifted and Black was a posthumously produced play and collection of writings that capped a brief and brilliant career. When she died of pancreatic cancer in 1965, she was only thirty-four years old. Read More→
By Norma Brickner | On May 22, 2020 | Updated October 6, 2025 | Comments (15)
By the time of Zora Neale Hurston’s death, most of her considerable body of work was out of print, rarely read or studied. Here we’ll explore how Alice Walker rediscovered Zora Neale Hurston and revived her literary legacy.
Zora Neale Hurston (1891 – 1960) had a dual career as an anthropologist and writer, incorporating regional and cultural realism in her short stories, folklore collections, and novels.
Alice Walker (1944 – ) is an activist, novelist, short story writer, and poet best known for the 1982 novel The Color Purple. Some of her views and alliances are controversial, yet if there is one good deed she has done, it has been to return Zora to her rightful place in the world of literature.
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By Nava Atlas | On May 14, 2020 | Updated June 25, 2026 | Comments (0)
Who was Emily Brontë? This is a question not easily answered. This thoughtful chronology of her brief life by W. Robertson Nicoll was part of the introduction to the 1908 edition of The Complete Poems of Emily Brontë. It provides much insight into how she lived and worked.
Emily Brontë (1818 – 1848), the English author known for the novel Wuthering Heights, was also recognized as a brilliant poet. The sister of Charlotte and Anne Brontë, she is arguably the most enigmatic of the trio who produced some of the most widely read classics in English literature.
Emily lived only to age thirty and led a sheltered life at Haworth Parsonage in Yorkshire. After her boarding school education, brief sojourn to study in Brussels, and even briefer stint as a governess, she rarely engaging with anyone outside of her immediate family. That appeared to have been by choice.
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By Elodie Barnes | On May 9, 2020 | Updated March 15, 2025 | Comments (5)
The relationship of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West has earned a place in literary history, and continues to fascinate with its allure of the unconventional, bohemian, and charmingly eccentric.
On December 15, 1922, Virginia Woolf recorded in her diary that she had met “the lovely aristocratic Sackville-West last night at Clive’s. Not much to my severer taste … all the supple ease of the aristocracy, but not the wit of the artist.”
She was, of course, writing of Vita, the woman who would go on to become her lover, friend, and confidante. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On April 2, 2020 | Updated March 14, 2023 | Comments (0)
2020 marked one hundred years since Christie’s debut novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was first published.
As the inaugural Hercule Poirot mystery, the story was serialized in The Times (London) weekly edition from February to June 1920 and later published as a complete novel in the U.S. in October, 1920.
The book was written as the result of a challenge between Agatha and her older sister, who bet that Agatha couldn’t write a detective novel. While she was working in a dispensary during World War I, Agatha came up with the idea for the story using her knowledge of poisons. Read More→
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