A Zora Neale Hurston companion

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Robert A. Schanke

"In the first book-length biography of Mercedes de Acosta, theater historian Robert A. Schanke adroitly mines lost archival materials and mixes in his own interviews with de Acosta's intimates to correct established myths and at last construct an accurate, detailed, and vibrant portrait of the flamboyantly uninhibited early-twentieth-century author, poet, and playwright." "Born to wealthy Spanish immigrants, Mercedes de Acosta (1893-1968) lived in opulence and traveled in the same social circles as the Astors and Vanderbilts. She was introduced to the New York theater scene at an early age, and her dual loves of performance and of women informed every aspect of her life thereafter. De Acosta was notorious for walking the streets of New York in mannish pants, pointed shoes trimmed with buckles, a tricorn hat, and a cape. With her chalky white face, deep-set eyes, thin red lips, and jet black hair, de Acosta was labeled "Countess Dracula" by Tallulah Bankhead. And Alice B. Toklas's observation, "Say what you will about Mercedes, she's had the most important women in the twentieth century," was well justified, as her romantic conquests included such internationally renowned beauties as Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and Isadora Duncan, as well as Alla Nazimova, Eva Le Gallienne, Tamara Karsavina, Pola Negri, and Ona Munson." "Not merely a record of her personal life and infamous romances, this account offers the first analysis of de Acosta's complete oeuvre, including three volumes of poetry, two novels, two film scripts, and a dozen plays. Although only two of her plays were ever published during her lifetime, four of them were produced, featuring such stage luminaries as John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, and Eva Le Gallienne. When she published her first volume of poetry, Moods, in 1919, critics praised her achievements and predicted her rise to literary fame. Unfortunately, the love of other women that fueled her writing also limited her opportunities to fulfill this destiny. Failing to achieve any lasting fame, she died in relative poverty at the age of seventy-five." "Aided by twenty-seven photographs, Schanke establishes Mercedes de Acosta's rightful place as a pioneer - and indeed a champion - in the early struggle for lesbian rights in this country. The famous portrayal of her as "that furious lesbian" should now be considered an admiring description rather than a scornful slur."--Jacket.

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Alix Kates Shulman

At twenty, Alix Kates Shulman wrenched herself from her middle-class family and staked a claim to a fierce independence. In this unflinching but tender memoir, she explores what it means to do what is expected of a daughter - discovering in the process the unexpected, complicated joys of going home. A Good Enough Daughter is the story of Schulman's difficult journey from dependency to alienation to reconciliation, as she returns home to care for her aging parents in the last years of their lives. The intersection of her own memory with family documents discovered in her parents' house provides the structure for this riveting exploration of her life as a daughter.

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Robert Olmstead

Robert Olmstead has peopled his fiction with the laconic, rough-hewn farmers, loggers, and hired hands of rural New England mountain towns where getting drunk, getting into fights, and getting thrown out of bars are the normal rites of passage. In Stay Here with Me he draws directly from his own experience as he journeys back to his youth on his grandfather's dairy farm in New Hampshire to confront the ghosts that continue to afflict him. Authentic, intimate, and intense, Stay Here with Me is about coming of age and leaving home, about the acts of rebellion that free the body even as they bind the soul to a place forever. Olmstead lays bare the acute pain of his father's alcoholism and the shattering decline of his grandfather, the family patriarch. With delicate sensuality, he traces the flowering of his love for a woman who "walks like light would walk if it could." And throughout, there is the land where his family has worked and lived and died for six generations, land at once richly abundant and cruelly demanding.

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Anatole Broyard

"Nineteen forty-six was a good time - perhaps the best time - in the twentieth century. The war was over and there was a terrific sense of coming back, of repossessing life. Rents were cheap, restaurants were cheap, and it seemed to me that happiness itself might be cheaply had." Broyard made his first bid for happiness by moving in with a young painter, the difficult and challenging Sheri Donatti - a protegee of Anais Nin - who never wore underpants and who "embodied the new trends in art, sex, and psychosis." Broyard tells their story; by turns comic and poignant, while describing along the way his meetings with Caitlan and Dylan Thomas, Delmore Schwartz, Dwight MacDonald, Maya Deren, William Gaddis, and other writers and artists just beginning their careers. He opens a bookstore on Cornelia Street ("If it hadn't been for books we would have been entirely at the mercy of sex. Books steadied us, they gave us gravity."). He goes to the New School and listens to Eric Fromm, Karen Horney and Meyer Shapiro ("I went to him as students, twenty years later, would go to India."). He tries going to a psychoanalysist ("I never gave him a chance. l had a literature rather than a personality."). In dazzling prose, Broyard captures with crystalline clarity the feeling of a particular time and place "when everything mattered, everything was serious." With economy, style, wit, flair, and astounding powers of observation, Broyard has left us a most remarkable memoir.