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1. Woman in the Big Town: Career and Life
- Southern Illinois University Press
- Chapter
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tI . WOMAN IN BIG TOWN: CAREER AND LIFE Should your daughter go alone to tbe Moe, "Her Voice and Her Soul," C...ood Housekeeping, November 19I3 Mrs. M. Cohen.-Kindly tell me something of the short story writer Fannie Hurst?-"Queries and Answers," New York Times Book Re~iew, January 9, 19r6 "AN AUTHOR Is THE PERSON WHO WROTE THE STORY" H ad Fannie Hurst been born a century she might have found herself denigrated by novelist/critic Willian"! Gilmore Simms as a writer of that "very inferior" school of fiction known as the "social life noveI;' or even by Nathaniel Hawthorne as one of those "female scribblers" whose popular sentimental romances made his tales, rooted in allegorical symbolism, difficult to market. I As it is, though, Hurst attracted millions ofreaders during the first third of the twentieth century and left an intimjdating quantitative legacy of some seventeen novels, between two hundred and three hundred short stories, as well as numerous articles and movie/ radio scripts. Approximately one hundred of tales, collected from widely circulated magazines of the day, were published in eight generally well-received volumes between 1914 and 1937. Indeed, during the 19208 and the 1930S, Fannie Hurst was frequently identified as the "highest paid writer in the world:' not at all a hyperbolic assertion when one realizes that in the midst of the Great Depression the serial rights for a Hurst novel sold for $70,000 and movie rights commanded a then-astronomical $100,000. 2 Nor was this St. Louisan simply a national phenomenon; when Theodore Dreiser returned from a trip to Russia in 1927, he allnounced that Hurst, his friend, was among a small handful of American writers more popular I WOMAN IN THE BIG TOWN over there than "even Tolstoy or Gogol or Dostoevsky could hope to be."3 In addition to her lucrative and even renowned career as author, Hurst was a very visible and vocal American celebrity. News in 1920 ofher "secret"marriage five years earlier precipitated front page headlines in reputable newspapers across the country along with numerous follow-up stories and editorials detailing incidents in her personal and professional life,presenting in addition her sometimes authorized, "expert " views on family, love, marriage-actually on nearly all the processes of day-to-day living.Any Hurst public utterance was newswOfthy ; when she returned to the United States from any ofher occasional European voyages, reporters met the boat and competed vigorously for interviews with her. Truly, such public acclaim, even adulation, had come to Fannie Hurst for one reason: This essentially shy, bookwormish young woman, product of conservative fin de siecie St. Louis and the brand new university just established there, had intuitively realized an aesthetic capability for tapping into the great public heart; she had thus skyrocketed to enormous literary success and its accompanying financial rewards by recognizing and controlling uses of sentiment in fiction. Hurst had come to fuse in a rapidly plotted talespinning technique those dilemmas ofdepartment store and tenement house, business office and "love nest;' currently unfolding in earlytwentieth -century America and intriguing its prospective and new citizens then stewing about in the melting pot. For many so-called ordinary readers, Fannie Hurst dramatized the actual plight of the immigrant girl aspiring to become the "New Woman;' then current term for a liberated female, and the immigrant family aspiring to become American. No Hurst heroine was far from old-world roots, and the writer had combined a commercially effective aesthetic and ethic to focus on images of women in America's turbulently challenging society. Throughout her career,too, Fannie Hurst maintained that "the Cates Avenue [St. Louis] in me, still clings."4 "Please make no mistake;' Hurst once emphasized in an interview; "I am very clearly aware that I am not a darling of the critics. I have a vast popular audience-it warms me; it's a furnace:'j In fact, Fannie Hurst had been a "darling" of the critics, mentioned alongside literary masters for her early short story accomplishments, though later in her career she had become a favorite target of parodists, had come to be 2 [52.90.235.91] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 14:41 GMT) WOMAN IN THE BIG TOWN labeled "a glorified True COl1fossions"scribe, and had been charged with a writing style that "flows like the Mississippi-wide, deep and rather muddy." Reluctantly, though, even these hostile commentators had to admit that in a Hurst tale "the pulse of life...