Fannie Hurst

Fannie Hurst

Fannie Hurst in 1932. Photograph by
Carl Van Vechten.
Born October 19, 1885
Hamilton, Ohio
Died February 23, 1968
New York City, NY
Occupation novelist
Nationality American
Notable works Back Street, Imitation of Life
Spouse Jacques S. Danielson

Fannie Hurst (October 19, 1885, – February 23, 1968)[1] was an American novelist whose works were highly popular during the post-World War I era. Her work combined sentimental, romantic themes with social issues of the day, such as women's rights and race relations. She was one of the most widely read woman authors of the 20th century, and for a time in the 1920s was was one of the highest-paid American writers, along with Booth Tarkington. Hurst also supported or was actively involved in a number of social causes, including women's rights, African American rights, and New Deal politics.[2]

Although her novels, including Lummox (1923), Back Street (1931), and Imitation of Life (1933), lost popularity over time and as of the 2000s were mostly out of print, they were bestsellers when first published and were translated into many languages. Hurst is now best known for the film adaptations of her works, including Imitation of Life (1959) starring Lana Turner, Humoresque (1946) starring Joan Crawford, and Young at Heart (1954) starring Frank Sinatra.

Early life

Hurst was born in Hamilton, Ohio, to shoe factory owner Samuel Hurst and his wife Rose (neé Koppel), and was the only surviving child of her family. Her parents were assimilated Jewish emigrants from Bavaria. She grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, where she attended Washington University and graduated in 1909. In her autobiography, she portrayed her family as comfortably middle-class, except for a two-year stint in a boarding house necessitated by a sudden financial downturn, which sparked her initial interest in the plight of the poor. However, this has been challenged by later researchers, including her biographer Brooke Kroeger and literary historian Susan Koppelman. According to Koppelman, while Fannie Hurst was growing up, her father changed businesses four times, never achieved much financial success, and failed in business at least once, and the Hurst family lived at eleven different addresses — all of them boarding houses — before Fannie Hurst turned 16. Kroeger wrote that while Samuel and Rose Hurst did eventually move to a house in a fashionable section of St. Louis, this did not occur until Fannie Hurst's third year of college, rather than during her childhood.

After her college graduation, Hurst briefly worked in a shoe factory before moving to New York City in 1911 to pursue a writing career. Despite having already published one story while in college, she received more than 35 rejections before she was able to sell a second story and establish herself as a regularly published author. During her early years in New York she worked as a waitress and a salesgirl and acted in bit parts on Broadway. In her spare time, Hurst attended night court sessions and visited Ellis Island and the slums, becoming in her own words “passionately anxious to awake in others a general sensitiveness to small people,” and developing an awareness of “causes, including the lost and the threatened.” [3]

Career

Author

In 1912, after numerous rejections, Hurst finally published a story in The Saturday Evening Post, which shortly thereafter requested exclusive release of her future writings. She went on to publish many more stories, mostly in the Post and in Cosmopolitan magazine, eventually earning as much as $5,000 per story. Her first collection of short stories, Just Around the Corner, was published in 1914, and her first novel, Star-Dust: The Story of an American Girl, appeared in 1921.[4] Hurst went on to write a succession of novels, plays, screenplays, short stories, and articles.[5] By 1925, she had published five collections of short stories and two novels, and become one of the most highly paid authors in the United States.[4] It was said of Hurst that "no other living American woman has gone so far in fiction in so short a time." Hurst's total publications over her career include 18 novels, over 300 short stories (63 of which were gathered in eight short-story collections), five plays, a full-length autobiography and an autobiographical memoir, numerous magazine articles, personal essays, articles (often unsigned) for various organizations to which she belonged, and screenplays (both independently written and collaborations) for several films.

Hurst was heavily influenced by the works of Edgar Lee Masters, particularly Spoon River Anthology (1916), and also read the works of Charles Dickens, Upton Sinclair, and Thomas Hardy. Early in her career, critics considered Hurst a serious artist, admiring her sensitive portrayals of immigrant life and urban working girls.[4] Her second novel, Lummox (1923), about the tribulations of an oppressed domestic servant, was praised for its insights by Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Eleanor Roosevelt. However, some of her books received poor reviews, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, in his 1920 novel This Side of Paradise, had a character describe Hurst as one of several authors "not producing among 'em one story or novel that will last 10 years."[6] Later in her career, she became a favorite target of parodists. Her own editor, Kenneth McCormick, described her as a "fairly corny artist" but a "wonderful storyteller". She was also called the "Queen of the Sob Sisters", "sob sister" being a term used in the early 20th century for female reporters who wrote sentimental human interest stories designed to evoke an emotional response. Hurst herself recognized that she was "not a darling of the critics" but said, "I have a vast popular audience — it warms me, like a furnace." The great popularity of her works gave her major celebrity status and she was frequently interviewed by news media about her views on subjects relating to love, marriage and family.

Back Street (1931), Hurst's seventh novel, was hailed as her "magnum opus" and has been called her "best loved" work. Its main character, a confident, independent young gentile woman, falls in love with a married Jewish banker and becomes his secret mistress, sacrificing her own life in the process and ultimately meeting a tragic end. Hurst's next novel, Imitation of Life (1933), was also hugely popular. It told the story of two single mothers, one Jewish and one African American, who become partners in a successful waffle and restaurant business (modeled after Quaker Oats Company's "Aunt Jemima" pancake mix) and have conflicts with their teenage daughters.

A total of 29 films were made from Hurst's fiction. Back Street was the basis for three films of the same name in 1932, 1941 and 1961, plus a fourth film written by Frank Capra, Forbidden (1932), which liberally borrowed elements from Hurst's novel. Imitation of Life was twice adapted for film in 1934 and 1959, with both films being selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.[4] Her short story Humoresque, published in 1919, was made into a 1920 silent film and a 1946 film noir starring Joan Crawford. A later story, "Sister Act", published in Cosmopolitan in 1937, inspired the musical films Four Daughters (1938) and the Frank Sinatra vehicle Young at Heart (1954). MGM reportedly paid her a million dollars for the rights to her 1936 novel Great Laughter.

Social activism

Fannie Hurst with Eleanor Roosevelt in 1962.

Throughout her life, Hurst was involved with many social activist groups supporting equal rights for women and minorities, as well as charities assisting people in need. In 1921, Hurst was among the first to join the Lucy Stone League, an organization that fought for women to preserve their maiden names. She was a member of the feminist intellectual group Heterodoxy in Greenwich Village, and was active in the Urban League. She was involved with Jewish causes, and during World War II raised money to help Jewish refugees fleeing Europe. She also volunteered as a regular visitor to inmates of a women's prison in Manhattan.

During the 1930s and 1940s, Hurst was a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt and a frequent White House visitor. Hurst was named chair of the National Housing Commission in 1936-1937 and appointed to the National Advisory Committee to the Works Progress Administration in 1940. She was a delegate to the World Health Organization in 1952.

In 1958, Hurst briefly hosted a television talk show out of New York called Showcase.[7] Showcase was notable for presenting several of the earliest well-rounded discussions of homosexuality and was one of the few on which homosexual men spoke for themselves rather than being debated by a panel of "experts".[8] Hurst was praised by early homophile group the Mattachine Society, which invited Hurst to deliver the keynote address at the Society's 1958 convention.[9]

Personal life and death

In 1915, Hurst secretly married Jacques S. Danielson, a Russian émigré pianist. Hurst kept her maiden name (unusual for that time) and the couple maintained separate residences and arranged to renew their marriage contract every five years, if they both agreed to do so. The revelation of the marriage in 1920 made national headlines, and The New York Times criticized the couple in an editorial for occupying two residences during a housing shortage. Hurst responded by saying that a married woman had the right to retain her own name, her own special life, and her personal liberty. Hurst and Danielson had no children, and remained married until Danielson's death in 1952. After his death, Hurst continued to write weekly letters to him for the next 16 years until she died, and regularly wore a calla lily, the first flower he had ever sent her.

During the 1920s and 1930s, while she was married to Danielson, Hurst also had a long affair with Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson.[10][11][12] They often met at Romany Marie's café in Greenwich Village when Stefansson was in town. According to Stefansson, at one point Hurst considered divorcing Danielson in order to marry him, but decided against it. Hurst and Stefansson ended their relationship in 1939.

Hurst was friends with many leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance, including Carl Van Vechten and Zora Neale Hurston, who served as Hurst's chauffeur and secretary while attending Barnard College. In 1958, Hurst published her autobiography, Anatomy of Me, which described many of her friendships and encounters with famous people of the era such as Theodore Dreiser and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Hurst died in 1968, at the age of 82, in New York City.[1] A few days before she died, she sent her publishers two new novels, one untitled and the other entitled Lonely is Only a Word.

In popular culture

"Hope for the best, expect the worst.
You could be Tolstoy or Fannie Hurst."
"You're so kippers, you're so caviar and I'm so liverwurst.
You're so Shakespeare, so Bernard Shaw and I'm so Fannie Hurst."

Selected works

Story collections

Novels

Autobiography

Miscellaneous

References

  1. 1 2 West, Kathryn (2004). "Fannie Hurst". In Wintz, Cary D. Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance. 1: A-J. Finkelman, Paul. New York and Abingdon: Routledge. pp. 596–597. ISBN 1-57958-389-X. Retrieved June 21, 2010.
  2. ↑ O'Brian, Edward (1918). The best American short stories of 1917 and the yearbook of the American short story. BOSTON SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY PUBLISHERS. Retrieved 17 October 2015.
  3. ↑ Frederick, A.(1980). HURST, Fannie, oct. 18, 1889-feb. 23, 1968.. In Notable American women: The modern period. Retrieved from http://0-search.credoreference.com.library.simmons.edu/content/entry/hupnawii/hurst_fannie_oct_18_1889_feb_23_1968/0
  4. 1 2 3 4 Hurst, Fannie 1885 - 1968. (1999). In The Cambridge guide to women's writing in English. Retrieved from http://0-search.credoreference.com.library.simmons.edu/content/entry/camgwwie/hurst_fannie_1885_1968/0
  5. ↑ Hurst, Fannie, (1889 --1968). (2005). In The crystal reference encyclopedia. Retrieved from http://0-search.credoreference.com.library.simmons.edu/content/entry/cre/hurst_fannie_1889_1968/0
  6. ↑ "This Side of Paradise". 1920.
  7. ↑ "Yakety-Yak". TIME magazine. 1959-04-06. Retrieved 2009-01-10.
  8. ↑ Tropiano, pp. 4–5
  9. ↑ Capsuto, Steven. "Kudos! AGLA's and GLAAD's Gay and Lesbian Media Awards". Retrieved 2009-01-10.
  10. ↑ Fannie Hurst. Anatomy of Me: A Wonderer in Search of Herself (p. 219). New York: Doubleday, 1958. ISBN 0-405-12843-6.
  11. ↑ Gísli Pálsson. Travelling Passions: The Hidden Life Of Vilhjalmur Stefansson (pp. 187, 195). Lebanon: University Press of New England, 2005. ISBN 1-58465-510-0.
  12. ↑ Robert Shulman. Romany Marie: The Queen of Greenwich Village (p. 144). Louisville: Butler Books, 2006. ISBN 1-884532-74-8.
  13. ↑ Hurst, Fannie (1920) [1919]. Humoresque: A Laugh on Life with a Tear Behind It. New York City: Harper & Brothers.

Bibliography

External links

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Wikisource has the text of a 1921 Collier's Encyclopedia article about Fannie Hurst.
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