Month: April 2020

Portrait of Zora Neale Hurston: Eatonville, Florida by Florida Memory via Flickr/No known copyright restrictions Biography Zora Neale Hurston is widely regarded as one of the most prominent Black female writers and thinkers of the twentieth century. Her most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, is currently widely read and taught, and was recently … Continue reading Zora Neale Hurston: a Bibliography of “A Genius of the South”

The following text is my translation of part I of “Les Marocaines chez elles,” a piece written in French by Edith Wharton and published in the French periodical La Revue des Deux Mondes on June 15, 1918. One year later, Wharton published in English four essays about Morocco in Scribner’s Magazine which, along with an … Continue reading “Les Marocaines chez elles” by Edith Wharton (Section I)

Postcard from c. 1900. Charters Street, Lower French Quarter, New Orleans. Alice Dunbar Nelson was a first-generation free Black person born in New Orleans, Louisianna in 1875. She studied at renowned institutions such as Cornell, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania. She worked as a public school teacher her entire adult life while also pursuing … Continue reading Alice Dunbar Nelson’s MultiCultural New Orleans

Hathitrust Digital Library, digitized copy of "The Yellow Wall-Paper" from The New England Magazine 1891-192, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924080769783&view=1up&seq=655. Accessed April 5, 2020. “John is a physician, and perhaps — (I would not say this to another living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind) — perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster” (647). This quote, … Continue reading The Alliance Between Medical Truth and the Patriarchy in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper”

Many early examples of American women’s writings found within the archive demonstrate how societal organization placed women’s voices into the sphere of domesticity. What women wrote about and the types of writing that they produced demonstrate this: personal letters, recipe books, instruction for household chores, diaries, and other very distinctly “domestic” types of writing. However, … Continue reading Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s Diary as “Political Warfare”

Ida B. Wells/ Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library/ Biography.com. In this essay, I will sketch the biography of Wells’ life in terms of racial prejudice, highlighting her important publications within the context of her personal experiences. “The Princess of the Press,” Ida B. Wells used her voice and her pen to battle … Continue reading Ida B. Wells: The Tale of a True Journalist

Cover of Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law In All Its Phases. The New York Age, 1892. From New York Public Library Schomburg Center for Black Culture Digital Collections. Southern Horrors: Lynch Law In All Its Phases was first published in 1892 in response to the mob that kept author Ida B. Wells-Barnett from returning … Continue reading A Hypocritical America: An Examination of Ida B Wells-Barnett’s Southern Horrors

Photograph of writer Edith Wharton, taken by E. F. Cooper, at Newport, Rhode Island. Cabinet photograph. Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University. “Roman Fever”, first published in Liberty magazine in 1934, is a short story by Edith Wharton detailing a conversation between two wealthy, middle-aged women. The two women, Grace … Continue reading Edith Wharton’s Frenemies in “Roman Fever”