Betty Smith
Betty Smith was born Elisabeth Wehner on December 15, 1896. The daughter of German immigrants, she grew up poor in Brooklyn, a world where she re-creates in “ A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.”
Wehner later on married fellow Brooklynite George H.E. Smith, where they moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he was a law student at the University of Michigan. The bride son had two daughters, Nancy and Mary, and had to wait until the girls entered school before endeavoring to complete her own education. Although Smith never finished high school, she was permitted to take classes at the university, she focused on her studies in journalism, drama, writing and literature. Smith showing off her knowledge won the Avery Hopkins Award for work in drama, and had a three-year course in playwriting at the Yale Drama School.
After writing features for a Detroit newspaper, reading plays for the Federal Theatre Project, and acting in summer stock, Smith than moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina under the favors of the W.P.A. She and her first husband divorced in 1938. In 1943, she married Joe Jones, a writer, journalist, and associate editor of the Chapel Hill Weekly, while he was serving as a private in the wartime army. That same year, “ A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” her first novel, was published.
The prestige of writing a best-selling, critically lauded a book brought assignments from the New York Times Magazine, which she wrote both light-hearted and serious commentary. In a December 1943 piece called “Why Brooklyn is that Way,” Smith shown the core of her childhood borough’s unofficial champion.
Although most readers remembered for the amazing success of that first book, Smith wrote other novels, including Tomorrow Will Be Better, Maggie-Now, and Joy in the Morning.
Mary Rowlandson was an Indian captive, and also an American writer. She was born in England approximately 1637-1638. She immigrated to Lancaster, Massachusetts with her parents. Joseph Rowlandson became a minister in 1654 and two years later he married Mary. They together had four children, one whom died as an infant, but the others were Joseph, Mary, and Sarah.
Bertha Wilson, most commonly known as the first woman to be a judge at the Supreme Court of Canada and she is remembered as a great leader and changed the lives of many people. Bertha Wilson showed many good character traits that all contributed to her in becoming a successful leader. Bertha Wilson was very intelligent. The first woman to judge at the Supreme Court of Canada showed integrity towards the fact that woman and men should be treated equally. Bertha Wilson was courageous and brave. A good and successful leader must always be intelligent, show integrity and be determined.
Of the few short stories penned by Hughes, one that stands out the most was his series of weekly writings from the Chicago Defender in the 1940’s about a middle aged black man and a narrator who would speak on a variety of issu...
When O'Connor was 12, her family moved to Milledgeville, her mother's birthplace. She attended the Peabody High School and enrolled in the Georgia State College for Women. At school she edited the college magazine and graduated in 1945 with an A.B. O'Connor then continued her studies at the University of Iowa, where she attended writer's workshops conducted by Paul Engle. At the age of 21 she published her first short story, 'The Geranium', in Accent. In the following year she received the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Literature. In 1947 she lived for seven months at Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, N.Y., an estate left by the Trask family for writers, painters and musicians.
Dumenil, Lynn, ed. "New York City." The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Social History. N.p.: Oxford UP, 2012. Oxford Reference. Web. 8 Apr. 2013.
Dorothy West was a novel and short story writer. She was born on June 2, 1907 in
Gwendolyn Brooks is the female poet who has been most responsive to changes in the black community, particularly in the community’s vision of itself. The first African American to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize; she was considered one of America’s most distinguished poets well before the age of fifty. Known for her technical artistry, she has succeeded in forms as disparate as Italian terza rima and the blues. She has been praised for her wisdom and insight into the African Experience in America. Her works reflect both the paradises and the hells of the black people of the world. Her writing is objective, but her characters speak for themselves. Although the idiom is local, the message is universal. Brooks uses ordinary speech, only words that will strengthen, and richness of sound to create effective poetry.
Tell-Tale Heart, written by Edgar Allan Poe, depicts the inner conflict of a murderer as he retells his story of how he came to kill the old man as a means to prove his sanity. The story is told in the point of view of an unreliable narrator, of whom is greatly disturbed by the eye of a geriatric man. The eye in question is described as evil, irritating the narrator beyond his comprehension, to the point when he has no choice but to get rid of the vexation by destroying the eye. This short story is similar to The Black Cat, of which is also penned by Poe. In The Black Cat, the narrator, albeit unreliable, describes his wrongdoings to the reader. He tells his story of how he murdered his wife, killed one of the two cats, and trapped the other
Betty Ford was born on April 8, 1918 in Chicago. She lived in Denver and
Child’s birth name was Julia Carolyn Williams on August 15, 1912 in Pasadena, California. She was the eldest of three children; Dorothy Dean and a brother John III. She attended three boarding schools growing up. Child enjoyed playing sports including tennis, basketball, and golf. She attended Smith College and graduated in 1934 with a major in English. Julia moved to New York and had several different jobs that included her major, which included working for an advertising company and also in publications.
In 1942, Margaret Walker won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award for her poem For My People. This accomplishment heralded the beginning of Margaret Walker’s literary career which spanned from the brink of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1930s to the cusp of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s (Gates and McKay 1619). Through her fiction and poetry, Walker became a prominent voice in the African-American community. Her writing, especially her signature novel, Jubilee, exposes her readers to the plight of her race by accounting the struggles of African Americans from the pre-Civil War period to the present and ultimately keeps this awareness relevant to contemporary American society.
Ruth Benedict’s anthropological book, Patterns of Culture explores the dualism of culture and personality. Benedict studies different cultures such as the Zuni tribe and the Dobu Indians. Each culture she finds is so different and distinctive in relation to the norm of our society. Each difference is what makes it unique. Benedict compares the likenesses of culture and individuality, “A culture, like an individual, is a more or less consistent pattern of thought or action” (46), but note, they are not the same by use of the word, “like.” Benedict is saying that figuratively, cultures are like personalities. Culture and individuality are intertwined and dependent upon each other for survival.
She was born on January 23, 1918 to a Russian emigrated mother and a Lithuanian emigrated father whom owned his own dentistry practice. She had a younger brother, Herbert, who was six years younger than she was. She grew up for the first six years of her life in Manhattan, then when her brother was born they moved to the suburbs of the Bronx.
Later she found another husband name Warren Smith, no relation to the other Warren. They moved to Nauvoo and had three more children. She saw the Nauvoo temple be finished and received her endowments.
Walker graduated from high school as valedictorian and prom queen, attended Spelman College after receiving a disability scholarship from the state of Georgia, then in 1963 transferred to Sarah Lawrence College where she graduated in 1965 with a B.A. She was involved with civil rights movement in Mississippi where she lived for seven years. During that time she also got married to a lawyer by the name of Meyvn Rosenman Leventhal and had her daughter Rebecca. In 1967 she wrote The Third Life of Grange Copeland while on fellowship at Macdowell Colony in New Hampshire. In 1973 she released a collection of short stories that dealt with the oppression, the insanities, the loyalties and triumphs of black women. Love and trouble won Walker the American Academy and Institutions of Arts and Letters Rosenthal award.