The Library of America

12/12/2022

The Loudest Voice

Grace Paley was born 100 years ago, on December 11, 1922.

In a book-length study of Paley’s short fiction, Neil D. Isaacs surveys her 44 stories and reveals a woman with nine lives: “as mother, wife, daughter, sister, that is, as family person intimately involved within and across generations; as poet; as antiwar activist; as short story writer; as antinuclear activist and environmentalist; as teacher; as neighborhood organizer and agitator; as feminist; and as friend to those whose lives interact with hers in these several spheres.... Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of Paley the writer is that her stories, taken as a whole, encompass all those lives.”

Mostly set in the Bronx or Greenwich Village, Paley’s stories make up “a body of work the expansiveness of which is at odds with its parochial setting and recurrent themes,” one British critic recently remarked. They were written over a period of thirty years, from 1955 to 1985. During her last two decades, she turned her attention to poetry and the occasional essay. When asked to explain the length of the time between her books and her reluctance to write a novel, she would respond, “Art is too long, and life is too short. There’s a lot more to do in life than just writing.”

In celebration of her centennial, we present one of her most popular tales, “The Loudest Voice.” In a predominately Jewish neighborhood in the early 1930s, Shirley Abramowitz has been unexpectedly chosen to be the narrator of her school’s Christmas play. From the comedy that follows, she emerges triumphant, with her voice intact.

Read the story at: https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2022/12/the-loudest-voice.html

Postcard: Entrance to Starlight Amusement Park on East 173rd Street, Bronx, NY. (Seymour B. Durst Old York Library)

In Grace Paley's much-anthologized story, a school's Christmas play results in a moment of triumph for a young Jewish schoolgirl.

12/09/2022

A Christmas Party That Prevented a Split in the Church

The Baltimore-based weekly newspaper The Afro-American is celebrating its 130th year—and for 125 of those years it has been operated by the same family. The paper, now known simply as the Afro, is currently run by the great- and great-great-grandchildren of John H. Murphy, Sr., the man who rescued it from oblivion in 1897.

One of those descendants, Savannah Wood, has been spearheading the effort to organize and preserve the newspaper’s archives, which are loaded with uncatalogued content. “Everybody knows Rosa Parks, but who are the people standing with her?” she wondered recently in an interview. “What role did they play in the wider civil rights movement? What can we learn about their lives? I’m curious to learn more about these communities around the main characters, if you want to call them that, in our history.”

One of the many items resuscitated from its past issues is a Christmas story by Margaret Black, first published in 1916 and reprinted in 1997 by the esteemed historian Bettye Collier-Thomas. Although Black wrote for The Afro-American for a quarter of a century, had her own weekly column for several years, published a few short stories in its pages, and seems to have been active in local women’s clubs and in the movement for women’s suffrage, we know virtually nothing about her—not even when or where she was born or what happened to her after she stopped writing for the paper. As the archives become available to researchers in the coming years, perhaps more information about her will be revealed.

In the meantime, we have “A Christmas Party That Prevented a Split in the Church,” an unusual (for its time) and humorous look into the lives of middle-class Black women who lived in small-town America. It has been included in the recent Library of America collection “American Christmas Stories” and we present it in full as our Story of the Week selection. You can read it here: https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2022/12/a-christmas-party-that-prevented-split.html

Photo: The Murphy family, c. 1920. (Afro-American Newspaper Archives.)

A Christmas story from 1916 by Margaret Black, a columnist for the Baltimore Afro-American.

12/05/2022

Joan Didion would have been 88 years old today.

Born in Sacramento on December 5, 1934, she died at her home in New York City last year, on December 23. The author of five novels and twelve books of nonfiction, she is represented in the Library of America series by the collections Joan Didion: The 1960s & 70s and Joan Didion: The 1980s & 90s.

In 1966, she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, were freelance magazine writers who had been evicted from their home in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, shortly after adopting their infant daughter. Income from their work had been sparse when, out of the blue, Henry Robbins, a senior editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, flew into town and arranged to take them out to dinner. He had been impressed with their magazine articles and hoped to convince them both to write books. Their subsequent association with Robbins would help turn Didion and Dunne into what The New York Times would call “America’s best-known writing couple.”

When Robbins died of a heart attack in 1979, Didion eulogized her editor and friend in an essay titled “A Death in the Family.” In 1992, she included her remembrance as the introduction to a new collection, renaming it with the title she gave to the collection: “After Henry.”

We present “After Henry” at our Story of the Week site, with an introduction detailing Didion and Dunne’s extraordinary early career. You can read it here: https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2022/01/after-henry.html

Photo: Joan Didion in Berkeley, California, April 1981. (Janet Fries/Getty Images)

11/30/2022

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (aka Mark Twain) was born 187 years ago, on November 30, 1835.

Shortly after he turned 32, he met Olivia Langdon, whom most people called Livy. A little over two years later, they were married and, by all accounts, theirs was a close relationship; she read and edited virtually everything he wrote, often moderating his excesses, and together they traveled the world. Her later years were plagued by ill health and, while in Florence in June 1904, she died.

Clemens was devastated. “An hour ago the best heart that ever beat for me and mine went silent out of this house, and I am as one who wanders and has lost his way,” he wrote to friends. “She had been chatting cheerfully a moment before, and in an instant she was gone from us and we did not know it.” A few days later, he sent a letter to William Dean Howells: “Shall we ever laugh again? If I could only see a dog that I knew in the old times! and could put my arms around his neck and tell him all, everything, and ease my heart.” And later yet: “It is 18 days. I am bewildered and must remain so for a time longer. It was so sudden, so unexpected. Imagine a man worth a hundred millions who finds himself suddenly penniless and fifty million in debt in his old age.”

For the next year Clemens, who was suffering from gout, dyspepsia, and chronic bronchitis, churned out “an intolerable pile of manuscript,” most of it unpublished and unpublishable. Only a few short pieces from this pile (most notably, “King Leopold’s Soliloquy”) would appear during his lifetime. He took a “holiday” the following summer and wrote “Eve’s Diary,” a comical yet touching tale imagining the Creation story from Eve’s perspective, just as he had imagined it from Adam’s point of view in a story more than a decade earlier. The new piece was, in truth, an homage to Livy.

We present “Eve’s Diary” as our Story of the Week selection, with an introduction discussing Mark Twain’s literary obsession with biblical stories from the Book of Genesis. You can read it here: https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2022/11/eves-diary.html

Pictured: Three illustrations by Lester Ralph for the book publication of Eve's Diary.

11/23/2022

After the Civil War, Harriet Beecher Stowe turned her literary attention from the abolition of slavery to the role of women in the domestic sphere. For three years during the 1860s she published a column of household advice in the pages of The Atlantic Monthly, which resulted in four of the better-selling books during her later career. In addition, she was the founding coeditor of Hearth and Home magazine. While she wrote extensively on traditional roles for homemakers (“there is nothing as sacred as … the time-honored institutions of hearth and home”), she advocated for suffrage, higher education, and property rights for women in the pages of her magazine.

Much of Stowe’s later fiction has been overlooked in recent decades—many readers may not realize she wrote eleven novels after “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”—but a notable exception is the chapter on an old-fashioned Thanksgiving celebration from the 1869 novel “Oldtown Folks,” which is often abridged and reprinted in anthologies. And one thing the narrator remembers most about Thanksgiving is the abundance of pie:

“The pie is an English institution,” Stowe writes, “which, planted on American soil, forthwith ran rampant and burst forth into an untold variety of genera and species. Not merely the old traditional mince pie, but ... pumpkin pies, cranberry pies, huckleberry pies, cherry pies, green-currant pies, peach, pear, and plum pies, custard pies, apple pies, Marlborough-pudding pies—pies with top crusts and pies without—pies adorned with all sorts of fanciful flutings and architectural strips laid across and around, and otherwise varied, attested the boundless fertility of the feminine mind when once let loose in a given direction.” (Pies seem to have been a family obsession; her brother Henry Ward Beecher, a famous preacher, wrote an entire essay on apple pie.)

While Stowe had nothing but compliments for American pies, she had harsh words for the way her fellow countrymen and -women prepared and cooked meat, and she especially detested the new, mass-produced cooking-stoves and the American habit, born of convenience, of serving “dried meats with their most precious and nutritive juices evaporated.” She urged her readers to follow the lead of European chefs, especially of the French—advice that was, in fact, remarkably prescient.

For our Story of the Week selection, we present the section of her essay “Cookery” on the proper preparation of meat dishes, and in the introduction we explain what Christopher Crowfield had to do with all this:
https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2022/11/cookery-meat-department.html

11/14/2022

When It Changed

Fifty years ago, in 1972, Joanna Russ’s Nebula Award–winning story “When It Changed” was published—and it caused quite a stir.

The story turns the tables on those many earlier tales and novels in which astronauts land (or crash) on a planet where all the inhabitants or all the rulers are women (usually portrayed as randy vixens or dominatrices); Russ re-imagines the idea from the women’s point of view. It first appeared in “Again, Dangerous Visions,” the second of two legendary science fiction anthologies edited by Harlan Ellison, who knew the story would be controversial among some of his readers. In his introduction to the story, he called out his fellow authors for their chauvinism and declared that “others may pillory me for this, but as far as I’m concerned, the best writers in SF today are the women.”

About the story itself, he wrote: “Joanna has here written a story that makes some extraordinarily sharp distinctions between the abilities and attitudes of the sexes, while erasing many others we think immutable. It is, in the best and strongest sense of the word, a female liberation story, while never once speaking of, about, or to the subject. And it points out why I think women’s lib is one of the three or four most potent and influential movements to spring up in our country during these last decades of social upheaval.”

Whileway, the name of the planet in the tale, would figure again in Russ’s novel “The Female Man,” published in 1975. A half century later, both the story and the novel are considered classics—significant turning points in science fiction. For our Story of the Week selection, we present “When it Changed,” along with an introduction about Russ’s extraordinary career.

Read it here:

Joanna Russ's 1972 science fiction classic that imagines a civilization entirely of women that encounters men for the first time.

11/01/2022

Stories Told by an Artist

Stephen Crane was born on this date 151 years ago—November 1, 1871.

He was only 28 when he died, yet Crane was already at work on his seventh novel and had also published two volumes of poetry and more than a hundred stories, sketches, and pieces of journalism.

The year he turned 22 was pivotal for launching his career. While residing (or as we would say today, “crashing”) in the room shared by three young artists in the old Art Students League building in New York, he finished his second novel, “The Red Badge of Courage,” started his third, “George’s Mother,” and began writing regularly for The New York Press and various magazines.

For much of that period—from the fall of 1893 to the spring of 1894—he ate sparsely and lost a significant amount of weight. Most of his friends were not much better off than he was. One of his roommates later remembered, “The hard and meagre life—two poor meals a day, a bun or two for breakfast and a dinner of potato salad and sausages warmed over the little stove that heated the room, frequently eaten cold because there was no coal for the stove—could be borne if he were progressing towards his end.” His friends would often give him a nickel so he could get a meal in a local pub. “His teeth, his bad hours and his disregard for his health and proper food caused us such concern,” wrote another roommate. “I think these things helped cause his death.”

In a semi-autobiographical account published in The New York Press, he described the hand-to-mouth life of his artist roommates. Although they were often obsessed with worry over where the next meal and the rent were going to come from, “Stories Told by an Artist” focuses more on the camaraderie and banter among four men living together in a small studio with only one bed and an improvised cot.

We present “Stories Told by an Artist” as our Story of the Week selection, with an introduction describing in greater detail the eight months he spent in the old Art Students League building: https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2022/10/stories-told-by-artist.html

Photo: Stephen Crane in the studio of the landscape artist Corwin Knapp Linson.

In Stephen Crane's autobiographical vignettes of student life, there are humor and camaraderie to be had, even when you're flat broke.

10/28/2022

For Halloween: we present a ghost story published in 1891 that was largely forgotten until it was reprinted 34 years ago.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in the words of her biographer Cynthia J. Davis, was “initially acclaimed for her gifts as a poet and lecturer, but she sealed her reputation by writing a series of books on women’s economic dependence, domestic confinement, and desire for public service.” Gilman wrote, by Davis’s count, 500 poems, close to 700 works of fiction, and 2,000 works of nonfiction.

Today she is mostly remembered for “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” which is now ubiquitous in school curricula—and is sometimes (mis)read as a ghost story. Without labeling it as such, H. P. Lovecraft mentions it in his book “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” saying the tale “rises to a classic level in subtly delineating the madness which crawls over a woman dwelling in the hideously papered room where a madwoman was once confined.” Science fiction author Joanna Russ recalled, “I read it at fifteen and it scared me. When I re-read it at thirty-five I was amazed that I had so completely missed the feminist message.” A work of psychological horror, certainly—but it contains no ghosts.

Yet early in Gilman's career, around the time she wrote “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” she did, in fact, write a couple of ghost stories that unambiguously feature ghosts. One of them, “The Giant Wistaria,” can probably now lay claim to being Gilman’s second-most famous story. Three couples learn of an abandoned but well-maintained cottage—“What a lovely house! I am sure it’s haunted!”—and decide to rent it. “I’m convinced there is a story, if we could only find it,” one of the party exclaims, and another responds, “And if we don’t find a real ghost, you may be very sure I shall make one.” There’s no need: the ghost is waiting to be found and the story told.

You can read “The Giant Wistaria” at our Story of the Week website, which includes an introduction describing how the newly incorporated Southern California town of Pasadena played a role in the story’s development: https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2022/10/the-giant-wistaria.html

Image: Detail from a hand-colored photographic postcard showing Gilman's neighbor, Ezra Carr, in front of his wisteria-draped cottage.

10/21/2022

The Emissary

In August 1953, the film director John Huston asked Ray Bradbury to write the screenplay for "Moby Dick," and Bradbury and his family went by train and ocean liner to Europe, where he worked on the film for eight grueling months before returning to the States in June 1954. This posed a problem for one of his other deadlines: Ballantine Books had anticipated having a new and revised edition of “Dark Carnival,” Bradbury’s first book, in time for Halloween that year. The book had to be postponed.

“Dark Carnival” had been published in 1947 by Arkham House, a small niche press specializing in weird fiction. As Bradbury was becoming a better-known author published by trade houses, he bought back the rights to the book. Already under contract with Ballantine for "Fahrenheit 451," he reached an agreement to publish a revised collection with some of the original 27 Dark Carnival stories along with newer stories dropped from the provisional contents of "Fahrenheit 451" when the novel doubled in size.

Once he returned to Los Angeles, Bradbury began revising and, in some cases, rewriting the Dark Carnival stories. The final contents included fifteen stories from the original collection and four newer tales from the group removed from "Fahrenheit 451." While Bradbury worked on finalizing the contents, staff members at Ballantine began to realize that this would basically be a new collection. His editor, Stanley Kauffmann, suggested he retitle the book, and Bradbury wrote an imagined childhood conversation with his grandfather, describing the “October Country” and the autumn people of his imagination. A snippet of that conversation became the epigraph of the new collection, and Ballantine published “The October Country” in hardcover on Halloween of 1955.

One of the earlier tales that Bradbury significantly revised for “The October Country” is “The Emissary,” about a sick boy confined to bed and dependent on his dog for news from the outside world. We present that story in full at our Story of the Week site: https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2022/10/the-emissary.html

Image: Drawing of Landseer’s oil painting The Poor Dog (1829).

Ray Bradbury's Halloween story about a sick boy confined to bed and keeping tabs on the outside world through his dog.

10/21/2022

Future Is Female! Volume 2, The 1970s: More Classic Science Fiction Stories By Women

Future Is Female! Volume 2, The 1970s: More Classic Science Fiction Stories By Women

Go back to the Future Is Female in this all new collection of wildly entertaining stories by the trailblazing feminist writers who transformed American science fiction in the 1970s

10/14/2022

LOA publisher and president Max Rudin and former LOA editor-in-chief Geoffrey O'Brien in conversation with Robert Polito at NoirCon next weekend at NoirCon: Sunday, October 23, 5:00 pm.

See the full schedule at: https://www.accelevents.com/e/noircon-2022#agenda

✵ NOIRCON AWARDS CONVERSATIONS ✵
7 Days until Virtual
Fri, Oct 21–Sun, Oct 23, 2022

MORE INFO:
https://noircon.com

REGISTER:
https://accelevents.com/e/noircon-2022
-----
JAY AND DEEN KOGAN AWARD

GEOFFREY O’BRIEN (2018 Honoree)
(poet, editor, book and film critic, translator, and cultural historian)

&

MAX RUDIN (2018 Honoree)
(publisher, The Library of America)

LIVE in conversation with ROBERT POLITO
(author, poet, founding director of The New School’s Creative Writing Program)

NOIRCON

10/14/2022

After his escape from slavery, Frederick Douglass found work in a brass foundry in New Bedford, Massachusetts. “The three years of my freedom had been spent in the hard school of adversity,” he recalled. “My hands seemed to be furnished with something like a leather coating, and I had marked out for myself a life of rough labor ... as a means of supporting my family and rearing my children.” The hours were long and the work was exhausting, leaving him little time for “mental improvement.”

When Douglass attended an anti-slavery convention in August 1841, however, everything changed. “Here opened for me a new life—a life for which I had had no preparation.” At the meeting, he was urged to speak to the entire gathering. “It was a severe cross, and I took it up reluctantly,” he wrote. “The truth was, I felt myself a slave, and the idea of speaking to white people weighed me down. I spoke but a few moments, when I felt a degree of freedom, and said what I desired with considerable ease.” His speech made such an impression that leading abolitionists urged him to travel throughout the Northeast that fall on the lecture circuit—for which he would be paid. For the remainder of his life, he would support himself as a lecturer, author, and newspaper editor.

Unfortunately, the impromptu speech Douglass gave at the convention did not survive in any form—but we do have an eyewitness report detailing the contents of an address he delivered two months later, during his first tour on the lecture circuit. That speech, “I Have Come to Tell You Something About Slavery,” is the opening selection in the just-published Library of America volume containing more than 100 speeches and articles written by Douglass during his fifty-year career, and we present it as our Story of the Week selection.

Read it here: https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2022/10/i-have-come-to-tell-you-something-about.html

Portrait of Frederick Douglass, c. 1845. Oil on canvas, artist unknown. National Portrait Gallery