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Fannie: The Talent for Success of Writer Fannie Hurst - Hardcover

Kroeger, Brooke

 
9780812924978: Fannie: The Talent for Success of Writer Fannie Hurst
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0812924975 ISBN 13: 9780812924978
Verlag: Times Books, 1999

Inhaltsangabe

A biography of one of the most dynamic women writers of the twentieth century describes Fannie Hurst's novels, her controversial views on everything from communism to women's rights, and her unusual marriage

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

<b>Brooke Kroeger</b>, for many years a reporter and editor for United Press International based in Chicago, Brussels, London, and Tel Aviv, has also worked for New York Newsday as a reporter and editor and is a visiting associate professor of journalism at New York University. She lives in Manhattan.

Aus dem Klappentext

In the first half of the twentieth century, Fannie Hurst was known as much for the startling particulars of her extraordinary life as for writing stories that penetrated the human heart. Hers is the story of a Jewish girl from the Middle West turned dynamic celebrity author, the kid down the street who spoke her dreams out loud and then managed to fulfill every one of them.<br>Her name was constant newspaper fodder. It appeared in reviews of her twenty-six books; in reports of her travels, her lifestyle (including the marriage she curiously chose to hide from her friends as well as the public), her diet, and her provocative public statements; and in her obituary, which was front-page news, even in The New York Times.<br><br>With stories and novels such as "Humoresque," Back Street, and Imitation of Life, Fannie Hurst reigned as the leading "sob sister" of American fiction in the 1920s and 1930s. Her name on the cover of a magazine was enough to sell out an issue. She wrote of immigrants and shopgirls, love, drama, and trauma, and in no time the title "World's Highest-Paid Short-Story Writer" attached itself to her name. Hollywood fattened her bank account, making her works into films thirty-one times in forty years.<br><br>Fannie Hurst lent her prominence and pen to the day's significant socialist, liberal, humanitarian, and feminist causes. She became a forceful supporter for the rights of African Americans, and was an early friend and literary advocate of Zora Neale Hurston and Dorothy West. As a pioneering crusader for women's advancement--she mounted the soapbox years before it was fashionable--she promoted economic self-sufficiency, equal opportunity, and Eleanor Roosevelt, whose frequent guest she was at the White House. Her life seems to have intersected with everyone of significance in her era, in science, the arts, the media, Hollywood, academia, and politics.<br><br>In examining the life of this great, celebrated, and yet now nearly forgotten woman, Brooke Kroeger also explores the curious backslide in the progress of women in general from the Depression to the mid-1960s. This is a carefully drawn, extensively researched, and entertaining portrait of one of the most successful, glamorous, and forward-thinking women of the twentieth century.

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"What I lack is rhythm"
The first known published work of Fannie Hurst appeared in her high school newspaper at Christmastime 1904, the month before she graduated. "An Episode," a nine-paragraph story, sketches a few moments in the life of a wealthy, powerful, but godless man alone with his conscience in a cathedral. Overcome by the haunting majesty of his surroundings, he watched his misdeeds pass before him. Pain and remorse engulfed him. He sat crouched alone on a pew until the last echoes of "Ave Maria" died away.

Then he rose, and went out, and as he went he said, "I have knowledge, I have power--what I lack is rhythm."
Then he threw back his head and laughed, long and loud and bitterly, and went off into the dusk.

Fannie Hurst, the daughter of now quite comfortable, assimilated German Jews with deadening middle-class aspirations, wanted to be a writer. She liked to claim that the Saturday Evening Post mailed back her manuscripts as if by boomerang from the time she was fourteen. This did not deter her. Nor did her mother's dire prediction that she would end up "an old-maid schoolteacher like Tillie Strauss," the sad and lonely spinster daughter of one of her mother's friends. Fannie defied this well-meant but suffocating opposition and compromised only enough to go to college in St. Louis, her hometown. She entered Washington University in the fall of 1905, a month before she turned twenty.

Fannie and her classmates watched much ground break. The handsome new Gothic-style "Quad" had been a site for the most defining seven months of the century for St. Louis, the "Universal Exposition," more commonly known as the 1904 World's Fair. The trees that lined the campus drives were only saplings in those days, reminding Fannie of "the knees of newborn calves." By her sophomore year the first girls' dormitory opened, and every city girl who could afford to do so took a room in McMillan Hall to get a better feel for college life. This did not stop the trips back to Mama, however. The sight of coeds toting overnight bags out the door of the new red-brick building was so common that some of the professors took to calling the campus Suitcase U. Although McMillan had space for 125 girls, only 16 moved in that first year, and together they became a tight little band. Every evening they joined in a kind of family party. Fannie usually provided the entertainment, amusing the group with parodies, anecdotes, and character sketches. She could concoct a spooky mystery yarn with no more inspiration than the sight of the same car parked at the edge of campus day after day. Fannie laid claim to the most exotic suite of rooms, in a little tower at the dormitory's very top. She dubbed it "the test tube," a name that stuck. So did Fannie's penchant for snaring the best and most unusual living spaces.

Her vitality was legendary on campus; she never seemed to sleep. From the Quad, friends often saw the lights in the test-tube windows burn till daylight, the sole indication that she was making time to study. For Fannie, classwork always came a distant second to acting, writing, editing, sports, and, as McMillan's first president, even dorm life.

Nevertheless she took pains to project the air of a serious scholar and desperately wanted the approval of the university's intellectual elite. With pretentious displays of verbiage, she dazzled friends and classmates, but her academic average was no better than a straight B-minus. Her A's in subjects that mattered to her, like composition and literature, did not quite balance out the C's. "More conspicuous than distinguished" was the way she later described her academic performance. Thinking back on those days years later, a dormmate remembered Fannie not as brilliant but as robust and vigorous, someone who "enjoyed living in every fiber of her being." Fannie showed no inclination for social activism in those years; that came later. Nor did she engage in any experimentation with the opposite sex.

Nothing seems to have sated Fannie's need for attention--not her stage performances, not her student compositions, not the admiration of her friends or even a coveted nod from a professor who might occasionally acknowledge a flash of talent. She found herself "slashing around in all directions at once"--silently tormented, violently ambitious, jealous of the achievements of others.

This anguish, which she deftly concealed, seemed to center on her inability to get any of her writing published professionally. As yearnings go this one was not so far-fetched. Fannie was among a number of students in this St. Louis litter to show precocious promise. Among the young women in her age-group, a few already had distinguished themselves in the greater St. Louis community. Zoë Akins, poet and future playwright, spent a term on the Washington University campus in Fannie's sophomore year. By that time Akins's work was appearing regularly in the Mirror, a local magazine of national literary repute owned and edited by the legendary William Marion Reedy. Sara Teasdale, another poet about Fannie's age, had her first book of verse published in 1907, when Fannie was a junior. Reedy had been publishing Teasdale's poems in the Mirror for a year. Especially irksome to Fannie was the publication in book form of Completion of Coleridge's Christabel by her classmate Edna Wahlert. Years later Fannie oddly remembered this work as her own unpublished effort as a child of sixteen in one telling, and eleven in another. Yet of all this local achievement, Cornelia Catlin Coulter stirred the most envy. Brilliant, austere, and scholarly, Coulter had little time for Fannie in their days at Washington U. After graduation she went straight to Bryn Mawr and earned a doctorate on the strength of a dissertation titled "Retraction in the Ambrosian and Palatine Recensions of Plautus; a Study of the Persa, Poenulus, Pseudolus, Stichus, and Trinummus." Next to Coulter, Fannie always felt diminished, "transparent . . . a cheap and garish thing."

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Verlag
Times Books
Erscheinungsdatum
1999
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812924975
ISBN 13 
9780812924978
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
478
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