historynewsnetwork.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from historynewsnetwork.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ca. 1900. Photo: C. F. Lummis. Restoration by Adam Cuerden. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
When I first read “The Yellow Wall-Paper” years ago, before I knew anything about its author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, I loved it. I loved the unnerving, sarcastic tone, the creepy ending, the clarity of its critique of the popular nineteenth-century “rest cure” essentially an extended time-out for depressed women. The story had irony, urgency, anger. On the last day of the treatment, the narrator is completely mad. She thinks she’s a creature who has emerged from the wallpaper.
The rest cure caused the illness it claimed to eliminate. Beautifully clear.
SUMMARY Sherwood Anderson was a poet, novelist, essayist, businessman, and newspaper editor most often associated with the American Midwest. His notable collection of related short stories,
Winesburg, Ohio (1919), examined small-town life in the late 1800s. Anderson moved in the highest of American literary circles, entertaining and to some extent even influencing such writers as William Faulkner (about whom Anderson wrote the short story “A Meeting South”) and Ernest Hemingway, who parodied Anderson in his debut novel
The Torrents of Spring (1926). Anderson moved to southwestern Virginia in 1926, where he spent the rest of his years chronicling life in the depression-era South.
Tarnished Gold
At a time when Communism continues to maintain a patina of coolness despite the tens of millions murdered by its adherents and the billions who have lived under its tyrannies, Patrick Chura has written a sympathetic biography of American Communism’s foremost literary hatchet man.
Michael Gold: The People’s Writer is a volume in the SUNY series in Contemporary Jewish Literature and Culture. Chura, a professor of English at the University of Akron, offers a pro forma mea culpa by admitting that Gold might have been wrong in his idolization of Stalin before asserting that American Communists like Gold were “collectively, a peaceful, democratic, and consistently progressive force for good in United States social history.” Gold’s life and work supposedly offer lessons for today on how to defeat “racism, anti-Semitism, fascism, and xenophobia.” Such praise is not warranted, not for Gold and not for the CPUSA.