Paule Marshall: A Writer's Life by Mary Helen Washington

 

Hello my lovely readers! Don't you love it when you stumble upon a book in the library that relates to a book you recently read? Let's get into it!

SYNOPSIS
Growing up in World War II–era Brooklyn among West Indian immigrants, Paule Marshall (1929–2019) was fiercely driven to become a writer, making art from the world she knew, the life she lived, and the world she imagined. Though her novels and stories are understood by scholars as the beginning of contemporary Black feminist literature―bridging Harlem Renaissance writers like Zora Neale Hurston to such writers as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Maya Angelou―Marshall’s legacy is often overlooked.

In this elegant literary biography, distinguished scholar of African American literature Mary Helen Washington draws on exclusive access to the writer’s papers, including her newly discovered unpublished memoir, and scores of interviews with family and friends to give us the first account of Marshall’s life as an artist and of the depth and brilliance of her work.

Beginning with her 1959 debut, Brown Girl, Brownstones, a coming-of-age story set among Barbadian immigrants and African Americans in Brooklyn, and moving through her later works set in the Caribbean, Africa, and the United States, Marshall’s novels chart the diasporic life that Marshall herself lived, defined by Black women’s experiences, an unapologetic and sometimes queer sexuality, and the history of the African diaspora. Despite the lush and finely observed inner lives of her heroines, however, Marshall was famous for tightly guarding her own privacy, and it is this enigma―Marshall’s deeply expressive writing versus her guarded public exterior―that Washington draws out.

Here is the first look at a prescient, brilliantly talented writer, a complex and fascinating woman, whose fiction single-handedly stages a reverse middle passage that extends from the United States and the Caribbean to Africa.

W.E.B Du Bois: A Biography 1868-1963 by David Levering Lewis

 

Hello my lovely readers! These biographies also languished on my shelves for a minute before I finally decided to pick them up. I partially read the first biography along with its new audiobook (heyyy Courtney B. Vance), but for the second biography, it was a 100 percent audiobook. Let's get into it.

SYNOPSIS
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois—the premier architect of the civil rights movement in America—was a towering and controversial personality, a fiercely proud individual blessed with the language of the poet and the impatience of the agitator.  In his magisterial prose, David Levering Lewis chronicles Du Bois’s long and storied career, detailing the momentous contributions to our national character that still echo today.

Ted Hughes: An Unauthorised Life by Jonathan Bate

Hello my lovely readers! This was my second book for the 12 Lives Challenge and probably my first and only book for Mega May, unless I'm able to finish the W.E.B. DuBois biography in time!

SYNOPSIS

Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. He was one of Britain's most important poets.

With an equal gift for poetry and prose, he was also a prolific children's writer and has been hailed as the greatest English letterwriter since John Keats. His magnetic personality and insatiable appetite for friendship, love, and life also attracted more scandal than any poet since Lord Byron. His lifelong quest to come to terms with the suicide of his first wife, Sylvia Plath, is the saddest and most infamous moment in the public history of modern poetry.

Hughes left behind a more complete archive of notes and journals than any other major poet, including thousands of pages of drafts, unpublished poems, and memorandum books that make up an almost complete record of Hughes's inner life, which he preserved for posterity. Renowned scholar Jonathan Bate has spent five years in the Hughes archives, unearthing a wealth of new material. His book offers, for the first time, the full story of Hughes's life as it was lived, remembered, and reshaped in his art.

Lorraine Hansberry: The Life Behind a Raisin in the Sun by Charles J. Shields

 

Hello my lovely readers! This is yet another biography NOT on part of my 12 Lives Challenge. Sigh. At this rate, I might as well redo my list for the challenge because thus far, I've only read one off my planned list. Yikes! Let's get into this biography!

SYNOPSIS
Written when she was just twenty-eight, Lorraine Hansberry's landmark A Raisin in the Sun is listed by the National Theatre as one of the 100 most significant works of the twentieth century. Hansberry was the first black woman to have a play performed on Broadway, and the first black and youngest American playwright to win a New York Critics' Circle Award. Yet so much of her life has escaped public knowledge: the influence of her upper class background, her fight for peace and nuclear disarmament, the reason why she embraced Communism during the Cold War, and her dependence on her white husband--her best friend, critic, and promoter. Many of the identity issues she struggled about class, sexuality, and race with are relevant and urgent today.

This dramatic telling of a passionate life-- a very American life through self-reinvention-- uses interviews with close friends in politics and theater, privately held correspondence, and deep research to reconcile old mysteries, and to raise new questions about a life not fully described until this, the authoritative biography of one of the twentieth century's most admired playwrights, Lorraine Hansberry.

QUICK REVIEWS PT. IX

 Hello my lovely readers! It's time for some more quick reviews! Lets get into it.

The Finalist by Joan Long
Five authors each with their own secrets, are chosen to complete a deceased novelist’s unfinished manuscript on a remote island as part of a one million dollar contest. But then someone dies and accusations fly.

*Meh. It was entertaining enough. A simple vacation or beach read, but it felt pretty thin. 3 out of 5 stars

Strange People on the Hill by Michael Edison Hayden
A gripping story that reveals what happened to a small American town when an influential white nationalist group relocated its headquarters there, illustrating how radical changes in American politics impact our psyches and divide our communities.

*Too much of a memoir with random bits on Berkeley Springs sprinkled throughout it. Also, way too heavy on the social media aspect of everything. I feel as though there's a way to talk about how residents thought/felt without reducing it to social media fights. 2 out of 5 stars

The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation by Anna Malaika Tubbs

Hello my lovely readers! You know, I had a planned TBR for this year regarding biographies as part of the 12 Lives Challenge but I've only read one off my list. Funnily enough, I've read three separate biographies this year. I should probably just add them to my challenge because this biography was fantastic. Let's get into it!

SYNOPSIS
Much has been written about Berdis Baldwin's son James, about Alberta King's son Martin Luther, and Louise Little's son Malcolm. But virtually nothing has been said about the extraordinary women who raised them, who were all born at the beginning of the 20th century and forced to contend with the prejudices of Jim Crow as Black women.

Berdis, Alberta, and Louise passed their knowledge to their children with the hope of helping them to survive in a society that would deny their humanity from the very beginning--from Louise teaching her children about their activist roots, to Berdis encouraging James to express himself through writing, to Alberta basing all of her lessons in faith and social justice. These women used their strength and motherhood to push their children toward greatness, all with a conviction that every human being deserves dignity and respect despite the rampant discrimination they faced.

These three mothers taught resistance and a fundamental belief in the worth of Black people to their sons, even when these beliefs flew in the face of America's racist practices and led to ramifications for all three families' safety. The fight for equal justice and dignity came above all else for the three mothers.

These women, their similarities and differences, as individuals and as mothers, represent a piece of history left untold and a celebration of Black motherhood long overdue.

DOUBLE REVIEW Baldwin: A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs AND James Baldwin by David Leeming Lewis

Hello my lovely readers! I recently read these two biographies, pretty much back to back. Let's get into it!

SYNOPSIS

Baldwin: A Love Story, the first major biography of James Baldwin in three decades, reveals how profoundly the writer’s personal relationships shaped his life and work. Drawing on newly uncovered archival material and original research and interviews, this spellbinding book tells the overlapping stories of Baldwin’s most sustaining intimate and artistic relationships: with his mentor, the Black American painter Beauford Delaney; with his lover and muse, the Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger; and with his collaborators, the famed Turkish actor Engin Cezzar and the iconoclastic French artist Yoran Cazac, whose long-overlooked significance as Baldwin’s last great love is explored in these pages for the first time. 

Nicholas Boggs shows how Baldwin drew on all the complex forces within these relationships—geographical, cultural, political, artistic, and erotic—and alchemized them into novels, essays, and plays that speak truth to power and had an indelible impact on the civil rights movement and on Black and queer literary history.

In James Baldwin: A Biography, David Leeming, Baldwin's friend for 25 years, accessed all of Baldwin's private papers to bring readers closer than ever to the complex man who struggled out of Harlem to become a legend of American literature.

Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood by Jill Watts

Hello my lovely readers!

Another day, another book. Let's get into it.

SYNOPSIS 
Hattie McDaniel is best known for her performance as Mammy, the sassy foil to Scarlett O’Hara in the movie classic Gone with the Wind. Her powerful performance won her an Oscar® and bolstered the hopes of black Hollywood that the entertainment industry was finally ready to write more multidimensional, fully-realized roles for blacks.

But despite this victory, and pleas by organizations such as the NAACP and SAG, roles for blacks continued to denigrate the African American experience. So Hattie McDaniel continued to play servants. “I’d rather play a maid then be a maid,” Hattie McDaniel answered her critics, but her flip response belied a woman who was emotionally conflicted. Here, in an exhaustively detailed and incisive text by a talented historian, is the story of a valiant woman who defied the racism of her time.

Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality Tomiko Brown-Nagin

Hello my lovely readers! This was a book I've had on my shelf for a while now and I finally decided to read it. Well...honestly it was prompted by the fact that I was canceling my Audible account and I wanted to physically read it and listen to it so I could get through it faster! Let's get into it.

SYNOPSIS

Born to an aspirational blue-collar family during the Great Depression, Constance Baker Motley was expected to find herself a good career as a hair dresser. Instead, she became the first Black woman to argue a case in front of the Supreme Court, the first of ten she would eventually argue. The only Black woman member in the legal team at the NAACP's Inc. Fund at the time, she defended Martin Luther King, Jr. in Birmingham, helped to argue Brown vs. The Board of Education, and played a critical role in vanquishing Jim Crow laws throughout the South. She was the first Black woman elected to the state Senate in New York, the first woman elected Manhattan Borough President, and the first Black woman appointed to the federal judiciary.

Civil Rights Queen captures the story of a remarkable American life, a figure who remade law and inspired the imaginations of African Americans across the country. Building on an extraordinary wealth of research, Tomiko Brown-Nagin, an award-winning, esteemed civil rights and legal historian and dean of the Radcliffe Institute, compels us to ponder some of our most timeless and urgent questions. How do the historically marginalized access the corridors of power? What is the price of the ticket? How does access to power shape individuals committed to social justice?

In Civil Rights Queen, she dramatically fills out the picture of some of the most profound judicial and societal change made in 20-century America.

Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler by Susana M. Morris

 

Hello my lovely readers! This biography came out on Tuesday, I got a Libby copy of it on Wednesday and I'm already finished! Let's get into it.

SYNOPSIS

As the first Black woman to consistently write and publish in the field of science fiction, Octavia Butler was a trailblazer. With her deft pen, she created stories speculating the devolution of the American empire, using it as an apt metaphor for the best and worst of humanity—our innovation and ingenuity, our naked greed and ambition, our propensity for violence and hierarchy. Her fiction charts the rise and fall of the American project—the nation’s transformation from a provincial backwater to a capitalist juggernaut—made possible by chattel slavery—to a bloated imperialist superpower on the verge of implosion.

In this outstanding work, Susana M. Morris places Butler’s story firmly within the cultural, social, and historical context that shaped her the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, women’s liberation, queer rights, Reaganomics. Morris reveals how these influences profoundly impacted Butler’s personal and intellectual trajectory and shaped the ideas central to her writing. Her cautionary tales warn us about succumbing to fascism, gender-based violence, and climate chaos while offering alternate paradigms to religion, family, and understanding our relationships to ourselves. Butler envisioned futures with Black women at the center, raising our awareness of how those who are often dismissed have the knowledge to shift the landscape of our world. But her characters are no magical martyrs, they are tough, flawed, intelligent, and complicated, a reflection of Butler’s stories.

Morris explains what drove She wrote because she felt she must. “Who was I anyway? Why should anyone pay attention to what I had to say? Did I have anything to say? I was writing science fiction and fantasy, for God’s sake. At that time nearly all professional science-fiction writers were white men. As much as I loved science fiction and fantasy, what was I doing? Well, whatever it was, I couldn’t stop. Positive obsession is about not being able to stop just because you’re afraid and full of doubts. Positive obsession is dangerous. It’s about not being able to stop at all.”

Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Life and Times of a Caged Bird by Gene Andrew Jarrett

Hello my lovely readers! This book is an example of what I look for in biographies. Let's get into it.

SYNOPSIS
A major poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) was one of the first African American writers to garner international recognition in the wake of emancipation. In this definitive biography, the first full-scale life of Dunbar in half a century, Gene Andrew Jarrett offers a revelatory account of a writer whose Gilded Age celebrity as the "poet laureate of his race" hid the private struggles of a man who, in the words of his famous poem, felt like a "caged bird" that sings.

Jarrett tells the fascinating story of how Dunbar, born during Reconstruction to formerly enslaved parents, excelled against all odds to become an accomplished and versatile artist. A prolific and successful poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and Broadway librettist, he was also a friend of such luminaries as Frederick Douglass and Orville and Wilbur Wright. But while audiences across the United States and Europe flocked to enjoy his literary readings, Dunbar privately bemoaned shouldering the burden of race and catering to minstrel stereotypes to earn fame and money. Inspired by his parents' survival of slavery, but also agitated by a turbulent public marriage, beholden to influential benefactors, and helpless against his widely reported bouts of tuberculosis and alcoholism, he came to regard his racial notoriety as a curse as well as a blessing before dying at the age of only thirty-three.

The Life of Langston Hughes, Volume 1: 1902-1941, I, Too Sing America by Arnold Rampersad

Hello my lovely readers!

Boy, this book took me...I'm ashamed to say, MORE THAN A YEAR to read! Again, I blame the pregnancy, the birth and being a new mom. Let's get into it!

SYNOPSIS
In young adulthood Hughes possessed a nomadic but dedicated spirit that led him from Mexico to Africa and the Soviet Union to Japan, and countless other stops around the globe. Associating with political activists, patrons, and fellow artists, and drawing inspiration from both Walt Whitman and the vibrant Afro-American culture, Hughes soon became the most original and revered of black poets.

King: A Life by Jonathan Eig

 

Hello my lovely readers!

SYNOPSIS

Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig’s A Life is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.―and the first to include recently declassified FBI files. 

In this revelatory new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world, the bestselling biographer gives us an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled human being who demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself. He casts fresh light on the King family’s origins as well as MLK’s complex relationships with his wife, father, and fellow activists. King reveals a minister wrestling with his own human frailties and dark moods, a citizen hunted by his own government, and a man determined to fight for justice even if it proved to be a fight to the death. As he follows MLK from the classroom to the pulpit to the streets of Birmingham, Selma, and Memphis, Eig dramatically re-creates the journey of a man who recast American race relations and became our only modern-day founding father―as well as the nation’s most mourned martyr.

In this landmark biography, Eig gives us an MLK for our a deep thinker, a brilliant strategist, and a committed radical who led one of history’s greatest movements, and whose demands for racial and economic justice remain as urgent today as they were in his lifetime.

The Dead are Arising by Les Payne

 

Hello my lovely readers!

I'll admit, I never had a strong opinion on Malcolm X. I only thought of him what I was taught: violent and the opposite of Martin Luther King Jr. I'd never seen the Spike Lee biopic on him. I knew not a thing. But somehow, I came across this book. I thought it'd be good to add to my library because I'm at a point in my life where I really want to KNOW my Black American history as an Black woman. 

I've known the sanitized version of Black American history (i.e. what you're taught in school), but nothing in depth. This book was on my TBR list and I picked it at random from my vase of books. Let's get into it.

SUMMARY

Author and journalist Les Payne spent nearly 30 years interviewing anyone who Malcolm  X including his siblings, classmates, friends, cellmates, Nation of Islam figures, FBI moles, political figures and more.

Payne corrects the historical record of Malcolm X and unveils extraordinary revelations like the secret 1961 meeting between Malcolm X and the Ku Klux Klan.

The result of his research is this biography that gives a never-before-seen view of Malcolm from his  1925 birth in Nebraska to his 1965 assassination in Harlem. 

Lover of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath's Rival and Ted Hughes' Doomed Love by Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev

 

Hello my lovely readers!

Welp. This book...man. I recently read Red Comet, which an extensive biography on Sylvia Plath. I'm pretty sure that when I bought it, I saw that there was a biography on her husband's mistress, so I bought that as well. It's not everyday you get a full biography on a mistress right?

The whole triangle between Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes and Assia Wevill showed just how messy and flawed human beings are, but whoa. I did not realize Ted Hughes was such a weasel. Let's get into it!

SUMMARY

The failure of the marriage between famed poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes has always been considered from three viewpoints: his, hers and hers. The other "her" in their marriage was that of Assia Wevill. The mistress. The homewrecker. The other woman.

Plath and Wevill shared parallel lives. Both were poets, both were lovers of Hughes for seven years. Both women gassed themselves to death. But the stark difference is that Wevill also killed her daughter. Who is Wevill? What is her story?

For the first time ever, we get a full-length biography on Wevill, a three-times divorcee, career woman, mistress, single mother and everything else in between.

The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke by Jeffrey C. Stewart

Hello my lovely readers!

Well this book took me literally, TWO MONTHS to read....but I finished it! As you already know, I love the Harlem Renaissance. I love all of the work that came out of it, it's players, it's supporters...if there's anything that's tied to the Harlem Renaissance, sign me up!

When I saw this book at The Strand in New York City, I HAD to get it. I had already read The New Negro before I got this book. I wasn't too thrilled with the book, but I think I'm going to read it again now that I'm older and just finished this biography. Let's get into it!

SYNOPSIS
A tiny, well-dressed, Black Victorian from Philadelphia would go on to be the "father" of the Harlem Renaissance, mentoring a generation of young artists, including Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. He called them the "New Negro"--the creative African Americans whose art, literature, music, and drama would inspire Black people to greatness.

In The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke by Jeffrey C. Stewart, Stewart offers the definitive biography of Locke from his childhood, to becoming the first African American Rhodes Scholar and earning a PhD in philosophy at Harvard University to his long career as a professor at Howard University.

We learn about his promotion of the literary and artistic work of African Americans as the quintessential creations of American modernism as well as his private life, especially his lifelong search for love as a closeted homosexual man in the 1920s.

Stewart's thought-provoking biography recreates the worlds of this illustrious, enigmatic man who, in promoting the cultural heritage of Black people, became -- in the process -- a New Negro himself.

Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark

 Hello my lovely readers!

Wow. What an exhaustive journey into the life of Sylvia Plath. An absolutely amazing tribute and celebration into her life. Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath  by Heather Clark...let's get into it!

Vigilance by Andrew K. Deimer

 

Hello my lovely readers!

Just before the end of the month, I finished this absolute beauty of a book. 

I came across Vigilance: The Life of William Still, Father of the Underground Railroad by Andrew K. Deimer several weeks ago while in a local bookstore. I'd recognized the name because when I first started my Bookstagram account and this blog, The Underground Railroad  by William Still was the first book I reviewed. So it was a welcome surprise to find a full biography on Still that was just published last year.

Let's get into it.

Sissieretta Jones by Maureen D. Lee

Hello lovely readers!

I hope you all had a safe and happy New Year!

My husband and I went to Asheville, NC to celebrate New Year's Eve as we got tickets to go to the Biltmore as a wedding gift. While on the way up to the mountains, I FINALLY broke my reading slump and started reading Sissieretta Jones: The Greatest Singer of Her Race 1868-1933 by Maureen D. Lee. I had never heard of her, but I came across her through someone's post on Bookstagram, I think. Since I was heavy in my book buying last year, I added this to the list and bought it. So let's get into it!

"To my mind no artist should omit one of these beautiful [Negro Folk] songs from his or her repertoire. Every school, college or university should include one of these songs in their musical program. Let the 'Negro folk song' become universally popular and their sweet dolorous melodies will proclaim to the world that the Negro is a people of sorrows who has made companionship with grief. A people that will yet come through the furnaces of affliction and persecution and become as gold, tried in the fire."

Dreaming With His Eyes Open: A Life of Diego Rivera by Patrick Manham

 

Hello my lovely readers!

Diego Rivera. The man. The myth. The legend.

I'm sure if you've heard of the great Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, then you know of her turbulent relationship and marriage with fellow Mexican artist Diego Rivera.

However, I feel that's usually people's extent of Rivera. I was the same way! One day, while I was in my favorite used bookstores McKay's, I found this biography on him for 75 cents. I didn't know anything about Rivera, so I decided to pick it up. I'm so glad I did!

SUMMARY
This is the first biography of Diego Rivera in more than 40 years. Author Patrick Marnham covers his life from beginning to end, starting off in rural Mexico, then heading to Spain, Italy and most importantly Paris where his life and art would change forever. We see him as he becomes a father, a husband and as he interacts with other legendary artists like Picasso, Modigliani and Leger.

The reader then goes to Moscow, Russia to understand Rivera's "lifelong flirtation with Communism." We see his triumphs and failures in both Mexico and the U.S. and of course, we see his side of his marriage to Frida Kahlo.