The Starched Blue Sky of Spain, and Other Memoirs: Memoirs of a Woman's Literary and Political Life.. - Hardcover

Josephine Herbst

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 006016512X ISBN 13: 9780060165123

Publisher: HarperCollins, 1991

Synopsis

In the 1930s, journalist and novelist Josephine Herbst (1892-1969) was widely regarded as one of the most important women writers in America. Yet the conservative climate of World War II and the ensuing Cold War relegated Herbst - like other radical writers of the interwar period - to almost total obscurity. By the 1960s, when Herbst composed the autobiographical essays in this collection, the insight of radical writers was being re-evaluated and appreciated once again. Herbst's reminiscences provide brilliant and evocative portraits of intellectual, artistic, and political life in the early twentieth century. Here we are witness to Herbst's childhood and young womanhood in the Midwest, her bohemian life in the East, and her extensive travels as a journalist. Along the way, she offers sketches of many of her contemporaries, including Allen Tate, Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Anne Porter, and John Dos Passos.

About this title

About the Author

Josephine Herbst was born in Sioux City, Iowa, and died in New York City. Her numerous literary works include the recently republished Trexler Trilogy, which contains Pity Is Not Enough, The Executioner Waits, and Rope of Gold. Elizabeth Francis is a Visiting Scholar at Brown University and serves on the faculty at the University of Rhode Island. She is the author of a forthcoming book, The Secret Treachery of Words: Portraits of Feminism and Modernism in America. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

From Kirkus Reviews

These posthumous memoirs of novelist and journalist Herbst (1892-1969) alternate between dreamy recollection and thoughtful questioning of literary and political fashions. Herbst begins with tales of her pre-WW I childhood in Iowa, where she is raised by a mother who wonders hopefully whether young Josephine will grow up to be a lawyer and by a father who says as she leaves home for New York, ``Jo, I don't know what you're after, but I wish you all the luck in the world.'' In New York, Paris, and other centers of the cutting edge she is part of a literary circle that includes Katherine Anne Porter, Ernest Hemingway, Nathanael West, and others, living an enviable life of conversation and reading and stopping occasionally to wonder whether contempt for ``the lovely and the beautiful'' is becoming too popular. Her strongest contempt is for rigid ideologies. At a writers' conference in Moscow, she becomes disaffected from the literary figures whose praise for proletariat literature is a thinly veiled speech of self-promotion, and her refusal to paint the Spanish Civil War in black and white paralyzes her and keeps her silent about her trip for the next 30 years. Her questioning doesn't keep her from sentimentalizing the political debates of the time, but her description of sitting in an Italian-owned diner as Sacco and Vanzetti are executed is one of the work's memorable moments. Herbst convinces us that she was in the eye of the storm of the era that ``opened the world to its literary young on a scale never before ventured and not equaled since.'' -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 006016512X
• ISBN 13: 9780060165123
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 178