Saturday Review of Literature, The, 1924-1964

Using these materials.

  • Info for Visitors
  • How to Request
  • Ordering Reproductions
  • Citations, Permissions, & Copyright

Collection is open for research.

The copyright interests in this collection have not been transferred to Duke University. For more information, consult the copyright section of the Regulations and Procedures of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

American Newspaper Repository collection

Some materials and descriptions may include offensive content. More info

Navigate the collection

Advanced search.

  • Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

CollectingOldMagazines.com

Magazine History & Collector Tips

History of the Saturday Review of Literature with a look inside 1950’s issues

After researching the Saturday Review of Literature , my conclusion is that its a publication that ties up a lot of loose ends in early 20th Century publishing. What I found interesting about the Saturday Review was that while it was most definitely Henry Seidel Canby’s baby, it’s origins also directly involve Cyrus Curtis, publisher of both Saturday Evening Post and Ladies’ Home Journal , and the TIME, Inc. team of Henry R. Luce and Britton Hadden, plus it also directly ties into a neat little web of connections through both Harvard and Yale.

Henry Seidel Canby, (1878-1961), taught at Yale after graduating in 1899 and became full professor in 1922. In 1920 Canby established the Literary Review section of the New York Post , a weekly supplement which also involved Amy Loveman, Christopher Morley, and William Rose Benet. The Literary Review only had a circulation of about 10,000, which was low but at the same time national and influential.

Thomas Mann on the September 8, 1951 Saturday Review of Literature

Naturally a deal was brokered leading to the creation of The Saturday Review . TIME, Inc. would publish the new magazine, Lamont would invest $50,000 into it, and Canby and his team from the Post would put together the editorial.

Due to copyright issues with a pre-existing publication in Britain, the magazine’s title was lengthened to The Saturday Review of Literature and the first issue was published in August 1924. (It would shorten its title to simply Saturday Review in 1952). TIME itself had only debuted in March 1923, and from their start a little over a year later the Saturday Review team of editors would share TIME’s offices and employ their circulation manager, Larsen, to conduct its own circulation and promotional campaigns, including a two-page ad inside TIME . The two groups split because of TIME’s move to Cleveland in 1925, but they continued to get along and Larsen actually remained on as Vice-President of the Saturday Review of Literature until 1932.

Rachel Carson on the July 7, 1951 Saturday Review of Literatur

“Readers of the little magazines no doubt would have regarded the Saturday Review of Literature as hopelessly middle class; but first as a somewhat sober literary journal, eventually as a lively magazine of ideas and the popular arts, the weekly probably affected the reading tastes and helped to shape the thinking of an influential segment of the population” (353).

In that other excellent history of magazines, The Magazine in America: 1741-1990, John Tebbel and Mary Ellen Zuckerman provide an easily understood examination of Saturday Review of Literature’s audience by calling up the names of the literary giants:

“Canby’s magazine addressed … literate readers who could enjoy the juxtaposition of Shaw and H.G. Wells, who enjoyed writers like Ellen Glasgow, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, and E.M. Forster, yet still welcomed such new writers as Hemingway, Lewis, and Faulkner. These readers did not take themselves so seriously, however, as to disdain writers like Robert Benchley and Ring Lardner” (215).

Both Bernard DeVoto and George Stevens would see time as editor after Canby, but the magazine was edited for the longest period of time by Norman Cousins, under whom circulation would climb from approximately 20,000 in the early 1940’s to over 650,000 in the early 1970’s. Cousins was appointed by Canby in 1940 when he was just 25, and remained editor through 1971 when he resigned.

While under Henry Seidel Canby in its earliest days the Saturday Review focused on critical writing while both DeVoto and Stevens concentrated more on book reviews. Cousins kept the book reviews but incorporated other relevant elements from arts and culture into the magazine making Saturday Review more of a general magazine.

Charlie Chaplin on the April 17, 1951 Saturday Review of Literature

The classifieds appeared to have been a popular feature as well with headlines taken from a random issue such as “Out-of-Print,” “Books,” “French Books,” “Bookplates,” “Back Numbers,” “Record Mart,” “Literary Services,” and most notably the “Personals” which included ads such as: “Artist would share Carolina country studio with writer”; “Woman, wide interests, desires correspondence with mature man”; “Sane, sensitive English major seeks stimulating position with magazine, radio, or other mass media concern”; “Charming girl correspondents wanted by young economist”; “100% freethinker seeks correspondence with available freethinker miss”; “Composer wants poems, lyrics”; and “Once acclaimed as talented writer here, abroad; now recovering from long illness; seeks job”. These were all pulled from the May 19, 1951 issue of Saturday Review of Literature.

And, of course, the mainstay of Saturday Review … the reviews! These were divided into categories such as Fiction, U.S.A., Belles-Lettres, Music, and more, plus the departments were often used for reviews that fit into each column. Typically in the issues that I paged through the featured work for an issue featured the reviewed works’ author on the front cover and the review itself was placed prominently towards the beginning of the issue. Also, alongside the review there would be a sidebar about the writer of the reviewed work.

J.D. Salinger on the July 14, 1951 Saturday Review of Literature

As a dealer I enjoyed paging through my pile of issues, and am curious to see how they sell. Again, my experience here is limited, but it is a title that intrigues me. The covers are somewhat ugly and the magazines are printed pretty cheaply, but with occasional cover gems such as Salinger or Thomas Mann, and reviews of some of the more intelligent books of the period, I do see some potential if marketed correctly. My research for this page has made me quite curious to acquire some of the early Canby issues, both to examine on my own and to see if they can make a buck on the market. As I handle more issues of the Saturday Review I will update this page with my findings insofar as both contents and marketability.

Closing this brief history of one of the 20th Century’s smarter publications, the Saturday Review would see its best days through about 1971 and Cousins’ resignation, and then survive through some confusing times in different editions through its 1987 purchase by Bob Guccione’s General Media. Guccione, of Penthouse fame, would give the Saturday Review its last gasps as an online-only publication on AOL in 1993. As of 2003, the time of the LookSmart article referenced below, Saturday Review was still in General Media’s hands with nothing planned for its future.

  • Lindsay, Greg. “A Great One Remembered…Saturday Review – 1924-1982; 1984; 1993-1994.” Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management. 1 Feb. 2003. LookSmart. 24 May 2006.

the saturday review of literature

Share this:

the saturday review of literature

Indiana University Indiana University IU

  • Repositories
  • Collections
  • No content inventory

Collection context

[Item], Saturday Review of Literature mss., Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

The Saturday Review of Literature, established in 1924, was an American weekly magazine of literary criticism that ran until 1986, changing its name to the Saturday Review in 1952. Norman Cousins acted as editor from 1940-1971.

The Saturday Review of Literature mss., 1946-1956, consists of letters from Upton Sinclair, 1878-1968, author, to Norman Cousins, 1915-1990, and Harrison Smith, 1888-1971, editors of the Saturday Review of Literature. They relate to articles by Sinclair and others sent to the review.

Indexed Terms

This collection is open for research.

Many collections are housed offsite; retrieval requires advance notice. Please make an appointment a minimum of one week in advance of your visit.

Photography and digitization may be restricted for some collections. Copyright restrictions may apply. Before publishing, researchers are responsible for securing permission from all applicable rights holders, then filling out the Permission to Publish form.

the saturday review of literature

  • McCormick Libary Request System (opens in a new tab)

Saturday Review of Literature , 1930 - 1931

Scope and contents.

The Edward Doro Papers consist of seven boxes spanning the years 1908-1998. The majority of the papers consist of his published works and scripts for his unfinished plays and operas. It also includes the deed of gift and a collection inventory from the previous owners of the collection, the Monterey (CA) History & Art Association (box 1, folder 1). The Biographical Information contains general material relating to Edward Doro’s life and associates. It includes information about Doro’s life and work; Doro’s correspondence and correspondence mentioning Doro; newspaper clippings and press releases; and reviews of Doro’s work. This section also contains a pencil sketch of Doro made by a classmate at the University of Pennsylvania, photographs and negatives relating to Doro (photographs of Doro himself are in the photo file). The file also has brief biographical information on two of Doro’s associates, Ellis Schuman and Philip van Lidth de Jeude. The records within each file are arranged chronologically when applicable. Literary Magazines and Anthologies are arranged chronologically. Included are single-page copies of Doro’s poetry, from two issues of The Saturday Review of Literature and one issue of The Commonweal , as well as entire issues of Gamut 4 , Theosophia , Opus 1 , and Nightsun that include Doro’s work. The sub-series Books by Doro includes multiple copies and editions of Doro’s published books of poetry (with the exception of Shiloh , which has its own sub-series), arranged by publication date. Two of these, The Boar and Shibboleth and Parisian Interlude , are signed by Doro. The last folder in this section includes photocopies of poems by Doro. The section on Shiloh contains a copy of the published book and two play scripts, one of which was the director’s copy when Shiloh was performed at Northwestern in Lutkin Hall in 1962. Also included are playbills and an announcement about the play. For posters and the musical score from the play, see the oversized materials box. The fifth section, Prophet of Izmir/Sabbatai , includes materials relating to Doro’s unfinished opera libretto, The Prophet of Izmir , and its later iteration, Sabbatai: The Prophet from Izmir . Arranged chronologically, it contains the original synopsis and plan of study prepared by Doro and composer Ellis Schuman. The section has the original libretto for The Prophet of Izmir and a revised version from 1963, as well as four copies of the later iteration from 1974. For the musical score, see the oversized materials box. The sub-series The Spanish Locket has a unbound manuscript from 1975, two scripts, and a combination of The Spanish Locket and Sabbatai (titled here Sabbatai, the Izmiran Prophet ). The materials in Other Works are arranged chronologically, and consists of Doro’s standalone poetry (i.e. poems not published in one of his books), and other works related to Doro. This includes Poems from a Mountain Ghetto , by Russell Marano, for which Doro wrote a review on the back cover; the Monterey “Seaside Oral History Program,” completed while Doro was on the Monterey Historical Commission; Questa and the House of Time , an unpublished work by Doro made of poetry clippings held together in a binder; and From My Creative Life , an essay by Doro about his works. The Audio Material section of this collection contains audio recordings in various forms of the Shiloh premier and of Doro reading his works. The last sub-series contains materials too large to be placed in their appropriate box. They are arranged in the order they would be placed, had they fit. This includes Doro’s diploma from Sussex College of Technology (which belongs in the Biographical File) and posters and a musical score for a 1962 performance of Shiloh at Northwestern (which would normally appear in the Shiloh sub-series). Also included are the completed parts of the score to The Prophet of Izmir (just the prologue, epilogue, and one scene); a copy of the epilogue that was printed in reverse; composer Philip van Lidth de Jeude’s notes on Sabbatai ; a “fair copy” of the score to Sabbatai ; and sheet music from Sabbatai ; all of which would have been included with the rest of the Prophet of Izmir and Sabbatai material.

  • 1930 - 1931
  • From the Collection: Doro, Edward (Person)

Conditions Governing Access

There are no restrictions on use of the materials in the department for research; all patrons must comply with federal copyright regulations.

From the Collection: 7 Boxes

Language of Materials

From the Collection: English

Physical Storage Information

  • Box: 1, Folder: 20 (Mixed Materials)

Library Details

Part of the Northwestern University Archives Repository

Collection organization

Saturday Review of Literature, 1930 - 1931, Folder 20, Box: 1, Folder: 20. Edward Doro (1908-1987) Papers, 9/3/3. Northwestern University Archives.

The Saturday review of literature : printed magazines, 1935., 1935.

Language of materials.

Collection materials are in English.

Conditions Governing Access

There are no restrictions on physical access to this material. A portion of this collection is not housed at the Houghton Library but is shelved offsite at the Harvard Depository. Retrieval requires advance notice. Readers should check with Houghton Public Services staff to determine what material is offsite and retrieval policies and times.

Additional Description

Physical location.

Hyde Back Stacks, Harvard Depository

General note

Two issues: 1935 Jan. 26 featuring a review by Chauncey Brewster Tinker of the Hill-Powell edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson, and 1935 Mar. 23 featuring a letter to the editor by R.W. (Robert William) Chapman in response to the review.

Physical Storage Information

  • Box: 2 (Mixed Materials)

Repository Details

Part of the Houghton Library Repository

Houghton Library is Harvard College's principal repository for rare books and manuscripts, archives, and more. Houghton Library's collections represent the scope of human experience from ancient Egypt to twenty-first century Cambridge. With strengths primarily in North American and European history, literature, and culture, collections range in media from printed books and handwritten manuscripts to maps, drawings and paintings, prints, posters, photographs, film and audio recordings, and digital media, as well as costumes, theater props, and a wide range of other objects. Houghton Library has historically focused on collecting the written record of European and Eurocentric North American culture, yet it holds a large and diverse number of primary sources valuable for research on the languages, culture and history of indigenous peoples of the Americas, Africa, Asia and Oceania.

Houghton Library’s Reading Room is free and open to all who wish to use the library’s collections.

Collection organization

The Saturday review of literature : printed magazines, 1935., 1935.. R. B. Adam papers, MS Hyde 78, (202), Box: 2. Houghton Library.

Cite Item Description

The Saturday review of literature : printed magazines, 1935., 1935.. R. B. Adam papers, MS Hyde 78, (202), Box: 2. Houghton Library. https://id.lib.harvard.edu/ead/c/hou01764c00206/catalog Accessed February 17, 2024.

Saturday Review of Literature

Found in 2 collections and/or records:, henry seidel canby papers, harrison smith papers, more about 'saturday review of literature', subject term type, additional filters.

Header image

The Saturday Review of Literature , 1935 - 1936

Scope and contents.

Contents include: 1935 6/29, containing CDM's "Bowling Green" column. 1935 10/5, in which CDM was one of "The First Five Readers." 193 1/4, containing CDM's "Bowling Green" column.

  • 1935 - 1936

Access Restrictions

This collection is open for access. Box 10, "CDM Additions and Letters to FMM," in which all letters to Harrison Hires are not to be used or quoted without librarian's permission. Boxes 48-50, "Christopher, Frank, and Felix Morley Correspondence and Letters," which are restricted until January 1, 2026.

Box Number or Container

  • Box: 28, Object: 8-10 (Text)

Find It at the Library

Most of the materials in this catalog are not digitized and can only be accessed in person. Please see our website for more information about visiting or requesting reproductions from Haverford College Quaker & Special Collections Library

Collection organization

The Saturday Review of Literature, 1935 - 1936, Box: 28, Object: 8-10. Morley Family papers, HC.MC-807. Haverford College Quaker & Special Collections.

Cite Item Description

The Saturday Review of Literature, 1935 - 1936, Box: 28, Object: 8-10. Morley Family papers, HC.MC-807. Haverford College Quaker & Special Collections. https://archives.tricolib.brynmawr.edu//repositories/5/archival_objects/32301 Accessed February 17, 2024.

trico lib

Bryn Mawr College Special Collections

Haverford college quaker & special collections, swarthmore college libraries.

The Saturday Review of Literature

Copyright information, renewed issues.

This includes all active issue renewals through 1948. It might not show all renewals past that date.

Renewed contributions

This includes all active contribution renewals through 1931. It might not show all renewals past that date.

Additional note

Active contribution renewals are recorded beginning in the 1956 January-June CCE volume, but the earliest actively renewed contribution is noted in the 1957 January-June volume.

Page information

The preparers of this page do not represent the publishers or the rightsholders of this publication. To the best of their knowledge, the information in it is correct, and complete within any limits specified above. It may still have inadvertent errors and omissions, however; if you know of any, please contact the page maintainer shown above. This page is not legal advice.

Copyright registration and renewal records -- First periodical renewals -- Deep backfile knowledge base

Edited by John Mark Ockerbloom (onlinebooks@pobox.upenn.edu) Data on this copyright information page is CC0. See OBP copyrights and licenses .

To revisit this article, select My Account, then   View saved stories

Find anything you save across the site in your account

A Society of One

By Claudia Roth Pierpont

Blackandwhite photograph of a woman in a sweater and a hat smiling

In the spring of 1938, Zora Neale Hurston informed readers of the Saturday Review of Literature that Mr. Richard Wright’s first published book, “Uncle Tom’s Children,” was made up of four novellas set in a Dismal Swamp of race hatred, in which not a single act of understanding or sympathy occurred, and in which the white man was generally shot dead. “There is lavish killing here,” she wrote, “perhaps enough to satisfy all male black readers.” Hurston, who had swept onto the Harlem scene a decade before, was one of the very few black women in a position to write for the pallidly conventional Saturday Review. Wright, the troubling newcomer, had already challenged her authority to speak for their race. Reviewing Hurston’s novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God” in the New Masses the previous fall, he had dismissed her prose for its “facile sensuality”—a problem in Negro writing that he traced to the first black American female to earn literary fame, the slave Phillis Wheatley. Worse, he accused Hurston of cynically perpetuating a minstrel tradition meant to make white audiences laugh. It says something about the social complexity of the next few years that it was Wright who became a Book-of-the-Month Club favorite, while Hurston’s work went out of print and she nearly starved. For the first time in America, a substantial white audience preferred to be shot at.

Black anger had come out of hiding, out of the ruins of the Harlem Renaissance and its splendid illusions of justice willingly offered up to art. That famed outpouring of novels and poems and plays of the twenties, anxiously demonstrating the Negro’s humanity and cultural citizenship, counted for nothing against the bludgeoning facts of the Depression, the Scottsboro trials, and the first-ever riot in Harlem itself, in 1935. The advent of Richard Wright was a political event as much as a literary one. In American fiction, after all, there was nothing new in the image of the black man as an inarticulate savage for whom rape and murder were a nearly inevitable means of expression. Southern literature was filled with Negro portraits not so different from that of Bigger Thomas, the hero of Wright’s 1940 bombshell, “Native Son.” In the making of a revolution, all that had shifted was the author’s color and the blame.

As for Hurston, the most brazenly impious of the Harlem literary avant-garde—she called them “the niggerati”—she had never fit happily within any political group. And she still doesn’t. In this respect, she was the unlikeliest possible candidate for canonization by the black- and women’s-studies departments. Nevertheless, since Alice Walker’s “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” appeared in Ms. in 1975, interest in this neglected ancestress has developed a seemingly unstoppable momentum. All her major work has been republished (most recently by the Library of America), she is the subject of conferences and doctoral dissertations, and the movie rights to “Their Eyes Were Watching God”—which has sold more than a million copies since 1990—have been bought by Oprah Winfrey and Quincy Jones. Yet, despite the almost sanctified status she has achieved, Hurston’s social views are as obstreperous today as they were sixty years ago. For anyone who looks at her difficult life and extraordinary legacy straight on, it is nearly impossible to get this disarming conjure artist to represent any cause except the freedom to write what she wanted.

Hurston was at the height of her powers in 1937, when she first fell seriously out of step with the times. She had written a love story—“Their Eyes Were Watching God”—and become a counter-revolutionary. Against the tide of racial anger, she wrote about sex and talk and work and music and life’s unpoisoned pleasures, suggesting that these things existed even for people of color, even in America; and she was judged superficial. By implication, merely feminine. In Wright’s account, her novel contained “no theme, no message, no thought.” By depicting a Southern small-town world in which blacks enjoyed their own rich cultural traditions, and were able to assume responsibility for their own lives, Hurston appeared a blithely reassuring supporter of the status quo.

The “minstrel” charge was finally aimed less at Hurston’s subjects, however, than at her language. Black dialect was at the heart of her work, and that was a dangerous business. Disowned by the founders of the Harlem Renaissance for its association with the shambling, watermelon-eating mockeries of American stage convention, dialect remained an irresistible if highly self-conscious resource for writers, from Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown to Wright himself (whose use of the idiom Hurston gleefully dismissed as tone deaf). But the feat of rescuing the dignity of the speakers from decades of humiliation required a rare and potentially treacherous combination of gifts: a delicate ear and a generous sympathy, a hellbent humor and a determined imperviousness to shame. All this Hurston brought to “Their Eyes Were Watching God”—a book that, despite its slender, private grace, aspires to the force of a national epic, akin to works by Mark Twain or Alessandro Manzoni, offering a people their own language freshly caught on paper and raised to the heights of poetry.

“It’s sort of duskin’ down dark,” observes the otherwise unexceptional Mrs. Sumpkins, checking the sky and issuing the local evening variant of rosy-fingered dawn. “He’s uh whirlwind among breezes,” one front-porch sage notes of the town’s mayor; another adds, “He’s got uh throne in de seat of his pants.” The simplest men and women of all-black Eatonville have this wealth of images easy at their lips. This is dialect not as a broken attempt at higher correctness but as an extravagant game of image and sound. It is a record of the unique explosion that occurred when African people with an intensely musical and oral culture came up hard against the King James Bible and the sweet-talking American South, under conditions that denied them all outlet for their visions and gifts except the transformation of the English language into song.

Hurston was born to a family of sharecroppers in tiny Notasulga, Alabama, in 1891—about ten years before any date she ever admitted to. Both her biographer, Robert E. Hemenway, and her admirer Alice Walker, who put up a tombstone in 1973 to mark Hurston’s Florida grave (inscribed “ ‘A Genius of the South’ 1901-1960 Novelist, Folklorist, Anthropologist”), got this basic fact as wrong as their honored subject would have wished. Hurston was a woman used to getting away with things: her second marriage license lists her date of birth as 1910. Still, the ruse stemmed not from ordinary feminine vanity but from her desire for an education and her shame at how long it took her to get it. The lie apparently began when she entered high school, in 1917, at twenty-six.

She had been very young when the family moved to Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated black town in America (by 1914 there would be some thirty of them throughout the South), in search of the jobs and the relief from racism that such a place promised. In many ways, they found precisely what they wanted: John Hurston became a preacher at the Zion Hope Baptist Church and served three terms as mayor. His daughter’s depictions of this self-ruled colored Eden have become legend, and in recent years have seemed to hold out a ruefully tempting alternative to the ordeals of integration. The benefits of the self-segregated life have been attested to by the fact that Eatonville produced Hurston herself: a black writer uniquely whole-souled and self-possessed and imbued with (in Alice Walker’s phrase) “racial health.”

Her mother taught her to read before she started school, and encouraged her to “jump at de sun.” Her father routinely smacked her back down and warned her not to act white; the child he adored was her docile older sister. One must go to Hurston’s autobiographical novel, “Jonah’s Gourd Vine,” for a portrait of this highly charismatic but morally weak man, whose compulsive philandering eventually destroyed all he’d built. The death of Zora’s mother, in 1904, began a period she would later seek to obliterate from the record of her life. Although her actual autobiography, “Dust Tracks on a Road,” is infamously evasive and sketchy (burying a decade does not encourage specificity), it does acknowledge her having been shunted among her brothers’ families with the lure of school ever giving way to cleaning house and minding children. And all the while, she recalls, “I had a way of life inside me and I wanted it with a want that was twisting me.”

Working at every kind of job—maid, waitress, manicurist—she managed to finish high school by June, 1918, and went on to Howard University, where she published her first story, in the literary-club magazine, in 1921. Harlem was just then on the verge of vogue, and the Howard club was headed by Alain Locke, founding prince of the Renaissance, a black aristocrat out of Harvard on the lookout for writers with a sense of the “folk.” It was what everybody would soon be looking for. The first date that Hurston offers in the story of her life is January, 1925, when she arrived in New York City with no job, no friends, and a dollar and fifty cents in her pocket—a somewhat melodramatic account meant to lower the lights behind her rising glory.

One story had already been accepted by Opportunity, the premier magazine of “New Negro” writing. That May, at the first Opportunity banquet, she received two awards—one for fiction and one for drama—from such judges as Fannie Hurst, a best-selling, four-handkerchief novelist, and Eugene O’Neill. Hurston’s flamboyant entrance at a party following the ceremonies, sailing a scarf over her shoulder and crying out the title of her play—“ ‘Color Struck’!”—made a greater impression than her work would do for years. This was the new, public Zora, all bravado and laughter, happily startling her audience with the truth of its own preoccupations.

That night, she attached herself to Fannie Hurst, for whom she was soon working as a secretary and then, when it turned out that she couldn’t type or keep anything in order, as a kind of rental exotic, complete with outlandish stories and a turban. (Her new boss once tried to pass her off in a segregated restaurant as an African princess.) Hurston’s Harlem circle was loudly scornful of the part she was willing to play. For her, though, it was experience: it was not washing floors, it was going somewhere. And the somewhere still hadn’t changed. At the banquet she had also met Annie Nathan Meyer, a founder of Barnard College. In the fall of 1925, this ever-masquerading, newly glamorous Scott-within-Zelda of Lenox Avenue enrolled in school again—she had completed less than two years at Howard, and had finagled a scholarship out of Meyer—and discovered anthropology.

Hurston dived headlong into this new field of intellectual possibility, which had been conceived principally by her teacher, Franz Boas, a German-Jewish immigrant who’d founded the department at Columbia. (Like all his students, Hurston called him Papa Franz, and he teased that of course she was his daughter, “just one of my missteps.”) The bedrock of Boas’s frankly political theorizing was the adaptability and mutability of the races. Believing that culture and learning have as much influence on human development as heredity, he set out to prove how close the members of the family of man might really be. Probably no one except her mother influenced Hurston more.

Boas’s fervent belief in the historic importance of African cultures had already had tremendous impact on W. E. B. Du Bois, and Hurston was similarly inspired by the sense of importance that Boas gave to Southern black culture, not just as a source of entertaining stories but as the transmitted legacy of Africa—and as an independent cultural achievement, in need of preservation and study. Boas literally turned Hurston around: he sent her back down South to put on paper the things that she’d always taken for granted. Furthermore, his sanction gave her confidence in the value of those things—the old familiar talk and byways—which was crucial to the sense of “racial health” and “easy self-acceptance” that so many relish in her work today. It seems safe to say that no black woman in America was ever simply allotted such strengths, no matter how strong she was or how uniformly black her home town. They had to be won, and every victory was precarious.

As a child, Hurston informs us in her autobiography, she was confused by the talk of Negro equality and Negro superiority which she heard in the town all around her: “If it was so honorable and glorious to be black, why was it the yellow-skinned people among us had so much prestige?” Even in first grade, she saw the disparity: “The light-skinned children were always the angels, fairies and queens of school plays.” She was not a light-skinned child, although her racial heritage was mixed. If the peculiarities of a segregated childhood spared her the harshest brunt of white racism, the crippling consciousness of color in the black community and in the black soul was a subject she knew well and could not leave alone.

Such color-consciousness has a long history in African-American writing, starting with the first novel written by a black American, William Wells Brown’s 1853 “Clotel” (a fantasy about Thomas Jefferson’s gorgeous mulatto daughter), which takes color prejudice “among the negroes themselves” as its premise. By 1929, the heroine of Wallace Thurman’s bitterly funny novel “The Blacker the Berry . . .” was drenching her face with peroxide before going off to dance in Harlem’s Renaissance Casino. But there is no more disconcertingly morbid document of this phenomenon than Hurston’s prize-winning “Color Struck.” This brief, almost surreal play tracks a talented and very dark-skinned woman’s decline into self-destructive madness, a result of her inability to believe that any man could love a woman so black. Although the intended lesson of “Color Struck” seems clear in the retelling, the play’s fevered, hallucinatory vehemence suggests a far more complex response to color than Hurston’s champions today can comfortably allow—a response not entirely under the author’s control.

It would be wrong to say that whites did not figure prominently in Hurston’s early life, despite their scarcity. It was precisely because of that scarcity that she took hold of racism not at its source but as it reverberated through the black community. Whites around Eatonville were not the murderous tyrants of Richard Wright’s Deep South childhood, but they exerted, perhaps, an equally powerful force—as tantalizing, world-withholding gods, and as a higher court (however unlikely) of personal justice.

There is a fairy-tale aspect to the whites who pass through her autobiography: The “white man of many acres and things” who chanced upon her birth and cut her umbilical cord with his knife; the strangers who would drive past her house and give her rides out toward the horizon. (She had to walk back, and was invariably punished for her boldness.) Most important was a pair of white ladies who visited her school and were so impressed by her reading aloud—it was the myth of Persephone, crossing between realms of dark and light, which, she recalls, she read exceptionally well because it “exalted” her—that they made her a present of a hundred new pennies and the first real books she ever owned.

Hurston’s autobiography won an award for race relations, in 1943, and put her on the cover of the Saturday Review. The book has since been reviled by the very people who rescued her fiction from oblivion, and for the same reason that the fiction was once consigned there: a sense that she was putting on a song and dance for whites. In fact, there is nothing in “Dust Tracks on a Road” that is inconsistent with the romantic images of white judges and jurors and plantation owners which form a fundamental part of Hurston’s most deeply admired work. The heroine of “Their Eyes Were Watching God” ends up on trial for the murder—in self-defense—of the man she loved. (Having been infected by a rabid dog, he lost his senses and came at her with a gun.) The black folks who knew the couple have sided against her at the trial, hoping to see her hanged. It is the whites—the judge and jury and a group of women gathered for curiosity’s sake—who see into the anguished depths of a black woman’s love, and acknowledge her dignity and her innocence.

Does this reflect honest human complexity or racial confusion? In what world, if any, was Hurston ever at home? While at Barnard, she apparently told the anthropologist Melville Herskovits that, as he put it, she was “more white than Negro in her ancestry.” On her first trip back South to gather evidence of her native culture she could not be understood because of her Barnard intonations. She couldn’t gain people’s confidence; the locals claimed to have no idea what she wanted. When Hurston returned to New York, she and Boas agreed that a white person could have discovered as much.

So she learned, in effect, to pass for black. In the fall of 1927, in need of a patron, she offered her services to Mrs. R. Osgood Mason, a wealthy white widow bent on saving Western culture from rigor mortis through her support of Negro artistic primitivism. For more than three years, Mrs. Mason paid for Hurston to make forays to the South to collect Negro folk material. Hurston’s findings were not always as splendidly invigorating nor her attitude as positive as they later appeared. “I have changed my mind about the place,” she wrote despairingly from Eatonville, in an unpublished letter of 1932. “They steal everything here, even greens out of a garden.” But she became increasingly accomplished at ferreting out what she had been hired to find, and the results (if not always objectively reliable) have proved invaluable. Alan Lomax, who worked with Hurston on a seminal 1935 Library of Congress folk-music-recording expedition, wrote of her unique ability to win over the locals, since she “talks their language and can out-nigger any of them.”

The fruits of her field work appeared in various forms throughout the early thirties: stories, plays, musical revues, academic articles. Her research is almost as evident in the 1934 novel “Jonah’s Gourd Vine” as in her book of folklore, “Mules and Men,” which appeared the following year. Now routinely saluted as the first history of black American folklore by a black author, “Mules and Men” was faulted by black critics of its own time for its adamant exclusion of certain elements of the Southern Negro experience: exploitation, terror, misery, and bitterness.

By this time, however, Hurston had won enough recognition to go off on a Guggenheim grant to study voodoo practices in the Caribbean. It was not a happy trip. The anecdotal study she produced—“Tell My Horse,” published in 1938—is tetchy and belligerent, its author disgusted by the virulent racism of light-skinned mulattoes toward blacks in Jamaica, and as distinctly put out by the unreliability and habitual lying she experienced among the Haitians. In any case, this particular trip had been prompted less by an interest in research than by a need to escape from New York, where she’d left the man she thought of as the love of her life—a still mysterious figure who belongs less to her biography than to her art. In a period of seven weeks, in Haiti, in the fall of 1936, she wrote “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” a novel meant to “embalm all the tenderness of my passion for him.”

In her autobiography, Hurston quickly dismisses her first marriage and entirely neglects to mention her second; each lasted only a matter of months. She wed her longtime Howard University boyfriend in May, 1927, and bailed out that August. (Apparently unruffled, Hurston wrote her friends that her husband had been an obstacle, and had held her back.) In 1939, her marriage to a twenty-three-year-old W.P.A. playground worker dissolved with her claims that he drank and his claims that she’d failed to pay for his college education and had threatened him with voodoo. “The great difficulty lies in trying to transpose last night’s moment to a day which has no knowledge of it,” she writes in “Dust Tracks on a Road.” She concludes, “I have come to know by experience that work is the nearest thing to happiness that I can find.”

Those admirers who wish Hurston to be a model feminist as well as a racial symbol have seized on the issue of a woman’s historic choice between love and work, and have claimed that Hurston instinctively took the less travelled path. On the basis of Hurston’s public insouciance, Alice Walker describes, with delicious offhand aplomb, “the way she tended to marry or not marry men, but enjoyed them anyway, while never missing a beat in her work.” No sweat, no tears—one for the girls. It is true that Hurston was never financially supported by a man—or by anyone except Mrs. Mason. Hemenway, her biographer, writes that it was precisely because of her desire to avoid “such encroachment” on her freedom that her marriages failed.

Without doubt, Hurston was a woman of strong character, and she went through life mostly alone. She burned sorrow and fear like fuel, to keep herself going. She made a point of not needing what she could not have: whites who avoided her company suffered their own loss; she claimed not to have “ever really wanted” her father’s affection. Other needs were just as unwelcome. About love, she knew the way it could make a woman take “second place in her own life.” Repeatedly, she fought the pull.

There is little insouciance in the way Hurston writes of the man she calls P.M.P. in “Dust Tracks on a Road.” He was “tall, dark brown, magnificently built,” with “a fine mind and that intrigued me. . . . He stood on his own feet so firmly that he reared back.” In fact, he was her “perfect” love—although he was only twenty-five or so to her forty, and he resented her career. It is hard to know whether his youth or his resentment or his perfection was the central problem. Resolved to “fight myself free from my obsession,” she took little experimental trips away from him to see if she could stand it. When she found she couldn’t, she left him for good.

Her diligent biographer, who located the man decades later, reports that he had never known exactly what had happened. She’d simply packed her bags and gone off to the Caribbean. Once there, of course, she wrote a book in which a woman who has spent her life searching for passion finally finds it, lets herself go within its embrace, and learns that her lover is honest and true, and that she is not being played for a fool—despite the familiar fact that he is only twenty-five or so and she is forty. (He tells her, “God made it so you spent yo’ ole age first wid somebody else, and saved up yo’ young girl days to spend wid me.”) And then, in the midst of love’s perfection, the woman is forced—not out of anger or betrayal but by a hurricane and a mad dog and a higher fate—to shoot him dead, and return to a state of enlightened solitude.

“Their Eyes Were Watching God” brought a heartbeat and breath to all Hurston’s years of research. Raising a folk culture to the heights of art, it fulfilled the Harlem Renaissance dream just a few years after it had been abandoned; Alain Locke himself complained that the novel failed to come to grips with the challenges of “social document fiction.” The recent incarnation of Hurston’ s lyric drama as a black feminist textbook is touched with many ironies, not the least of which is the need to consider it as a social document. The paramount ironies, however, are two: the heroine is not quite black, and becomes even less black as the story goes on; and the author offers perhaps the most serious Lawrentian vision ever penned by a woman of sexual love as the fundamental spring and power of life itself.

The heroine of “Eyes,” Janie Crawford, is raised by her grandmother, who grew up in “slavery time,” and who looks on in horror as black women give up their precious freedom for chains they forge themselves. “Dis love! Dat’s just whut’s got us uh pullin’ and uh haulin’ and sweatin’ and doin’ from can’t see in de mornin’ till can’t see at night.” But no one can give a woman what she will not claim. Nanny’s immovable goal to see Janie “school out” meets its match in the teenager’s bursting sexuality. Apprehensive, Nanny marries her off to a man with a house and sixty acres and a pone of fat on the back of his neck. “But Nanny, Ah wants to want him sometimes. Ah don’t want him to do all de wantin’,” Janie complains, and she walks off one day down the road, tossing her apron onto a bush.

It isn’t exactly Nora slamming the door. There’s another man in a buggy waiting for Janie, and another unhappy marriage—this time to a bully who won’t let her join in the dazzling talk, the wildly spiralling stories, the earnest games of an Eatonville that Hurston raises up now like a darktown Camelot. After his death, a full twenty years later, she is rather enjoying the first freedom of widowhood when a tall, laughing man enters the general store and asks her to play checkers: “She looked him over and got little thrills from every one of his good points. Those full, lazy eyes with the lashes curling sharply away like drawn scimitars. The lean, overpadded shoulders and narrow waist. Even nice!”

It’s the checkers almost as much as the sex. After Nanny, this man, who is called Tea Cake (“Tea Cake! So you sweet as all dat?”), is the staunchest feminist in the novel. He pushes Janie to play the games, talk the talk, “have de nerve tuh say whut you mean.” They get married and set off together to work in the Everglades, picking beans side by side all day and rolling dice and dancing to piano blues at night. Hurston isn’t unaware of the harsh background to these lives—trucks come chugging through the mud carrying migrant workers, “people ugly from ignorance and broken from being poor”—but she’s willing to leave further study to the Wrights and the Steinbecks. Her concern is with the flame that won’t go out, the making of laughter out of nothing, the rhythm, the intensity of feeling that transcends it all.

During the nineteen-seventies, when “Their Eyes Were Watching God” was being rediscovered with high excitement, Janie Crawford was granted the status of “earliest . . . heroic black woman in the Afro-American literary tradition.” But many impatient questions have since been asked about this new icon. Why doesn’t Janie speak up sooner? Why can’t she go off alone? Why is she always waiting for some man to show her the way? Apologies have been made for the difficulties of giving power and daring to a female character in 1936, but then Scarlett O’Hara didn’t fare too badly with the general public that year. The fact is that Janie was not made to suit independent-minded female specifications of any era. She is not a stand-in for her author but a creation meant to live out other possibilities, which are permitted her in large part because—unlike her author—she has no ambition except to live, and because she is beautiful.

“I got an overwhelming complex about my looks before I was grown,” Hurston wrote her friend and editor Burroughs Mitchell in 1947, but went on to declare that she had triumphed over it. “I don’t care how homely I am now. I know that it doesn’t really matter, and so my relations with others are easier.” Despite the possible exaggerations of a moment, this vibrantly attractive woman was well acquainted with what might be called the aesthetic burdens of race (“as ugly as Cinderella’s sisters” is a phrase meaning Negro, Hurston reported to Mrs. Mason), and she spared her romantic heroine every one of them.

Janie recalls of an early photograph, “Ah couldn’t recognize dat dark chile as me,” and by the middle of the book neither can we. By then, we’ve heard a good deal about her breasts and buttocks and so extraordinarily much about her “great rope of black hair”—a standard feature of the gorgeous literary mulatto—that one critic wrote that it seemed to be a separate character. But it is only when Janie and Tea Cake get to the Everglades and confront the singularly racist Mrs. Turner, eager to “class off” with other white-featured blacks (“Ah ain’t got no flat nose and liver lips. Ah’m uh featured woman”), that we hear of Janie’s “coffee-and-cream complexion” and “Caucasian characteristics.” The transformation is both touching and embarrassing—something like George Eliot’s suddenly making Dorothea sublimely beautiful in the Roman-museum scene of “Middlemarch.” It’s as though the author could no longer withhold from her beloved creation the ultimate reward: Dorothea starts to look like a Madonna, and Janie starts to look white.

With Hurston, though, pride always rushes back in after a fall. These alternating emotional axes are what make her so unclassifiable, so easily susceptible to widely different readings, all of which she may intend. For Janie never acts white, or even seems to care whether she looks that way. She is sincerely mystified by Mrs. Turner’s tirades. “We’se uh mingled people,” she responds, seeming to rebuke her author’s own reflexive notions of beauty, too. “How come you so against black?”

Although Janie spends much of the book struggling to gain the right to speak her mind, she is not particularly notable for her eloquence. There is, however, a great deal of poetry of observation running through her head, which we hear not as her thoughts, precisely, but in the way the story is told. Those who analyze “narrative strategies” have pulped small forests trying to define Hurston’s way of slipping in and out of a storytelling voice that sometimes belongs to Janie and sometimes doesn’t and, by design, isn’t always clear. (As in “Mrs. Dalloway,” the effect is of a woman’s sensual dispersal through the world.) Janie’s panting teen-age sexuality is rendered in a self-consciously hyper-adolescent prose of kissing bees and creaming blossoms—prose that Wright seized on for its “facile sensuality” and that Hurston’s admirers now quote with dismaying regularity as an example of her literary art. But Hurston at her best is simple, light, lucid, nearly offhand, or else just as simply, Biblically passionate. Janie wakes to see the sun rise: “He peeped up over the door sill of the world and made a little foolishness with red.” (There is an archaic sense of power in Hurston’s sexing of all things: “Havoc was there with her mouth wide open.”) As for Tea Cake, even as Janie tries to push his image away he “seemed to be crushing scent out of the world with his footsteps,” Hurston writes. “Crushing aromatic herbs with every step he took. Spices hung about him. He was a glance from God.”

This is a sermon from the woman’s church of Eros. And, like the sermons in which Hurston was schooled—like her entire book, as it winds in and out of this realization of sexual grace—her message lives in its music. At her truest as a writer, Hurston was a musician. The delightfully quotable sayings that she “discovered” on her field trips (many of which recur as plucked examples in “Mules and Men” and her other books) are embedded in this single volume like folk tunes in Dvořák or Chopin: seamlessly, with beauties of invention often indistinguishable from beauties of discovery. The rhythms of talk in her poetry and the substance of poetry in her talk fuse into a radiant suspension. “He done taught me de maiden language all over,” Janie says of Tea Cake, and there may be some truth to the tribute: Hurston had never written this way before, and she never rose to it again. It seems likely that without the intensity of her feelings for “P.M.P.” this famously independent woman would not have written the novel that is her highest achievement and her lasting legacy. It perhaps complicates the issue of a woman’s life and work that the love she tore herself away from so that she could be free, and free to write, turned out to have been the Muse.

Hurston’s ability to write fiction seems to have dried up after the commercial failure of “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” which sank without a trace soon after publication. Her next novel, “Moses, Man of the Mountain,” published in 1939, seems a failed reprise of the Bible-based all-Negro Broadway hit “Green Pastures,” with the story of Exodus as its blackface subject. (“Oh, er—Moses, did you ask about them Hebrews while you was knocking around in Egypt?”) Gone is the miraculous ear. Gone, too, are her great humor and heart. “Moses” is a weary book, heavy with accumulated resentments. Hurston’s disillusionment is fully evident in her mordant, angry journalism of the nineteen-forties, in which she witheringly commends the Southern custom of whites favoring their own “pet Negroes” (and their eager pets returning the favor) as a functioning racial system, and rails against the substandard Negro colleges she calls “begging joints.” The title of one article—“Negroes Without Self-Pity”—speaks for itself.

This was her life’s theme, and she sounded it all the louder as two new novels were rejected, her poverty went from bohemian to chronic, and her health gave way. She bought a houseboat and spent much of the mid-forties sailing Florida rivers: individualism, her refuge from racism, had lapsed into nearly total isolation. She returned to New York in 1946, looking for work, and wound up in the campaign office of the Republican congressional candidate running against Adam Clayton Powell. When her side lost, she was stranded for a terrible winter in a room on 124th Street, in a different sort of isolation. She didn’t ask for help, and she didn’t get any. She felt herself slipping, surrounded by racists and haters, the whole city “a basement to Hell.”

It was just after this that she wrote her last published novel, “Seraph on the Suwanee.” The story of a white Southern woman and her family, it contains no prominent black characters. Among Hurston’s supporters, Alice Walker has called it “reactionary, static, shockingly misguided and timid,” and Mary Helen Washington has called it “vacuous as a soap opera.” Everyone agrees that Hurston had fallen into the common trap of believing that a real writer must be “universal”—that is to say, must write about whites—and that she had simply strayed too far from the sources that fed her. In fact the book is poisonously fascinating, and suggests, rather, that she came too close.

The story of beautiful, golden-haired Arvay Henson, who believes herself ugly and unworthy of love, contains many echoes of Hurston’s earlier work, but its most striking counterpart is the long-ago play “Color Struck.” The works set a beginning and an end to years of struggle with their shared essential theme—the destructive power of fear and bitterness in a woman’s tortured psyche. Arvay is born to a poor-white “cracker” family; in a refraction of Hurston’s own history, a preference for her older sister “had done something to Arvay’s soul across the years.” She falls in love with a magnificent fallen aristocrat, who rapes her—for Arvay this is an act of ecstatic, binding possession—and marries her. Tormented by her failure to live up to his perfection, she comes to hate him almost as much as she hates herself.

The book is a choking mixture of cynicism and compulsion. Hurston was desperate for a success, and hoped for a movie sale—hence, no doubt, the formulaic rape and the book’s mawkish ending, in which Arvay learns to sing happily in her marital chains. But to reach this peace Arvay must admit, after years of pretense, that she is not really proud of her own miserably poor and uneducated family, that poverty and ignorance lend them neither moral superiority nor charm, and that she is, in fact, shamed and disgusted by them. Arvay’s last attempt to go home to her own people results in her burning down the house in which she was raised.

The book was sharply criticized because Hurston’s white Southerners speak no differently from the Eatonville blacks of her earlier work. The inflections, the rhythms, the actual expressions that had been declared examples of a distinctive black culture were all now simply transferred to white mouths. The incongruous effects, as in her “Moses” book, point to a failure of technique, an aural exhaustion. But in a letter to her editor Hurston gave an even more dispiriting explanation for what she’d done. “I think that it should be pointed out that what is known as Negro dialect in the South is no such thing,” she wrote, in a repudiation nearly as sweeping as Arvay’s, at once laying waste to her professional past and her extraordinary personal achievement. The qualities of Southern speech—black and white alike, she claimed—were a relic of the Elizabethan past preserved by Southern whites in their own closed and static society. “They did not get it from the Negroes. The Africans coming to America got it from them.”

The novel’s publication, in the fall of 1948, was swallowed up in a court case that tested all Hurston’s capacity for resisting bitterness. That September, in New York, an emotionally disturbed ten-year-old boy accused her of sexual molestation. The Children’s Society filed charges, and Hurston was arrested and indicted. Although the case was eventually thrown out, a court employee spilled the news to one of the city’s black newspapers—the white papers were presumably not interested—and the lurid story made headlines. Hurston contemplated suicide, but slowly came back to herself on a long sailing trip.

She never returned to New York. For the rest of her life, she lived in Florida, on scant money and whatever dignity she was able to salvage. In Miami, she worked as a maid. Later, she moved to a cabin up the coast that rented for five dollars a week, where she grew much of her own food. She labored over several books, none considered publishable. Her radical independence was more than ever reflected in her politics: fervently anti-Communist, officially Republican, resisting anything that smacked of special pleading. When Brown v. Board of Education was decided, in 1954, she was furious—and wrote furiously—over the implication that blacks could learn only when seated next to whites, or that anyone white should be forced to sit beside anyone black. It was plain “insulting.” Although there was some hard wisdom in her conclusion—“the next ten years would be better spent in appointing truant officers and looking after conditions in the homes from which the children come”—her defiant segregationist position was happily taken up by whites of the same persuasion. Her reputation as a traitor to her people overshadowed and outlasted her reasoning, her works, and her life.

Hurston died in January, 1960, in the Saint Lucie County welfare home, in Fort Pierce, Florida, four days before the first sit-in took place, at a Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. She was buried in an unmarked grave in a segregated cemetery in Fort Pierce. All her books were out of print. In 1971, in one of the first important reconsiderations of writers of the Harlem Renaissance, the critic Darwin Turner wrote that Hurston’s relative anonymity was understandable, for, despite her skills, she had never been more than a “wandering minstrel.” He went on to say that it was “eccentric but perhaps appropriate”—one must pause over the choice of words—for her “to return to Florida to take a job as a cook and maid for a white family and to die in poverty.” There was a certain justice in these actions, he declared, in that “she had returned to the level of life which she proposed for her people.”

The gleaming two-volume Library of America edition of Hurston’s “Novels & Stories” and “Folklore, Memoirs, & Other Writings” makes for a different kind of justice. These books bring Hurston a long way from the smudged photocopies that used to circulate, like samizdat, at academic conventions, and usher her into the national literary canon in highly respectable hardback. She is the fourth African-American to be published in this august series, and the fifth woman, and the first writer who happens to be both. Although the Hurston revival may have been driven in part by her official double-victim status—a possibility that many will take as a sign that her literary status has been inflated—“Their Eyes Were Watching God” can stand unsupported in any company. Harold Bloom has written of Hurston as continuing in the line of the Wife of Bath and Falstaff and Whitman, as a figure of outrageous vitality, fulfilling the Nietzschean charge that we try to live as though it were always morning.

Outside of fiction, this kind of strength is mainly a matter of determination. For many who have embodied it in literature—Nietzsche, Whitman, Lawrence, Hurston—it is a passionate dream of health (dreamed while the simply healthy are sound asleep) which stirs a rare insistence and bravado. “Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry,” Hurston wrote in 1928. “It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company!” In the venerable African-American game of “the dozens,” the players hurl monstrous insults back and forth as they try to rip each other apart with words. (Hurston and Wright both call up the game, and quote the same now rather quaint chant of abuse: “Yo’ mama don’t wear no DRAWS , Ah seen her when she took ’em oFF ”). The near-Darwinian purpose was to get so strong that, no matter what you heard about whomever you loved, you would not let on that you cared to do anything but laugh. It’s a game that Richard Wright must have lost every time. But Zora Neale Hurston was the champ.

It is important not to blink at what she had to face and how it made her feel. Envy, fury, confusion, desire to escape: there is no wonder in it. We know too well the world she came from. It is the world she rebuilt out of words and the extraordinary song of the words themselves—about love and picking beans and fighting through hurricanes—that have given us something entirely new. And who is to say that this is not a political achievement? Early in “Their Eyes Were Watching God” Hurston describes a gathering of the folks of Eatonville on their porches at sundown: “It was the time to hear things and talk. These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed notions through their mouths. They sat in judgment.”

The powerless become lords of sounds, the dispossessed rule all creation with their tongues. Language is not a small victory. It was out of this last, irreducible possession that the Jews made a counterworld of words, the Irish vanquished England, and Russian poetry bloomed thick over Stalin’s burial grounds. And in a single book one woman managed to suggest what another such heroic tradition, rising out of American slavery, might have been—a literature as profound and original as the spirituals. There is the sense of a long, ghostly procession behind Hurston: what might have existed if only more of the words and stories had been written down decades earlier, if only Phillis Wheatley had not tried to write like Alexander Pope, if only literate slaves and their generations of children had not felt pressed to prove their claim to the sworn civilities. She had to try to make up for all of this, and more. If out of broken bits of talk and memory she pieced together something that may once have existed, out of will and desire she added what never was. Hurston created a myth that has been gratefully mistaken for history, and in which she herself plays a mythic role—a myth about a time and place fair enough, funny enough, unbitter enough, glad enough to have produced a woman black and truly free. ♦

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

That Sad Young Man

By John C. Mosher

Dearest Edith

By Janet Flanner

Nicholas Konrad’s “Online Profile”

By Françoise Mouly

Briefly Noted

(Stanford users can avoid this Captcha by logging in.)

  • Send to text email RefWorks EndNote printer

The Saturday review of politics, literature, science and art.

Available online, at the library.

the saturday review of literature

SAL3 (off-campus storage)

More options.

  • Find it at other libraries via WorldCat
  • Contributors

Description

Creators/contributors, bibliographic information, browse related items.

Stanford University

  • Stanford Home
  • Maps & Directions
  • Search Stanford
  • Emergency Info
  • Terms of Use
  • Non-Discrimination
  • Accessibility

© Stanford University , Stanford , California 94305 .

Advertisement

Supported by

editors’ choice

9 New Books We Recommend This Week

Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.

  • Share full article

It’s too early to know the full story behind the mass shooting at yesterday’s Super Bowl parade in Kansas City, but for the back story — the broader context of America’s love affair with guns and the resulting steady drumbeat of horrific incidents — you might look to two of our recommended books this week: Dominic Erdozain’s “One Nation Under Guns” and Jonathan M. Metzl’s “What We’ve Become,” which take cleareyed but different approaches to the country’s gun culture and its intractable challenges.

Also up this week, we recommend a couple of big biographies, of the choreographer Martha Graham and the Marxist revolutionary Frantz Fanon, along with a memoir of undocumented immigration and a true-crime history about a 1931 murder that exposed a network of political corruption. In poetry, we recommend Mary Jo Bang’s latest collection, and in fiction we like new novels by Paul Theroux and the British writer Dolly Alderton. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles

ONE NATION UNDER GUNS: How Gun Culture Distorts Our History and Threatens Our Democracy Dominic Erdozain

This galvanizing polemic by a historian appalled at American gun violence scrutinizes the historical record to show where contemporary interpretations of the Second Amendment have departed from the framers’ apparent intentions, with disastrous results.

the saturday review of literature

“Considers guns from cultural, legal and historical perspectives. ... So comprehensive and assured that the moment I finished it, I immediately went back to the beginning and read it again.”

From Rachel Louise Snyder’s review

Crown | $28

WHAT WE’VE BECOME: Living and Dying in a Country of Arms Jonathan M. Metzl

Homing in on a mass shooting at a Nashville Waffle House in 2018, Metzl, a psychiatrist and sociologist, argues that America’s gun violence epidemic requires us to address racial and political tensions deeply embedded in our history.

the saturday review of literature

“Casts a wide net. ... How, he asks, have public health experts failed to effect changes in policy, given their thousands of studies devoted to the myriad ways firearms increase risk and danger?”

Norton | $29.99

THE REBEL’S CLINIC: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon Adam Shatz

This absorbing biography of the Black psychiatrist, writer and revolutionary Frantz Fanon highlights a side of him that’s often eclipsed by his image as a zealous partisan — that of the caring doctor, who ran a secret clinic for Algerian rebels.

the saturday review of literature

“Part of what gives ‘The Rebel’s Clinic’ its intellectual heft is Shatz’s willingness to write into such tensions…. Portrays a man whose penchant for ‘rhetorical extremity’ could obscure how horrified he was by the brutality he had seen.”

From Jennifer Szalai’s review

Farrar, Straus & Giroux | $32

GOOD MATERIAL Dolly Alderton

Alderton’s novel, about a 35-year-old struggling to make sense of a breakup, delivers the most delightful aspects of romantic comedy — snappy dialogue, realistic relationship dynamics, funny meet-cutes and misunderstandings — and leaves behind clichéd gender roles and the traditional marriage plot.

the saturday review of literature

“Alderton excels at portraying nonromantic intimate relationships with tenderness and authenticity.”

From Katie J.M. Baker review

Knopf | $28

ERRAND INTO THE MAZE: The Life and Works of Martha Graham Deborah Jowitt

In the hands of a veteran dance critic, this rigorous biography excels at describing the flamboyant choreographer’s work and distinct style. About the messy life between performances, Jowitt is comparatively mild.

the saturday review of literature

“A study in balance and grace. ... A distinguished biography: its description rich, its author’s rigor unquestionable.”

From Alexandra Jacobs’s review

Farrar, Straus & Giroux | $35

THE BISHOP AND THE BUTTERFLY: Murder, Politics and the End of the Jazz Age Michael Wolraich

The 1931 murder of “Broadway Butterfly” Vivian Gordon exposed an explosive story of graft, corruption and entrapment that went all the way to the top of the state. Wolraich brings a journalist’s eye and a novelist’s elegance to this story of Jazz Age New York.

the saturday review of literature

“A disquieting reminder of how tragedy can be used to effect change, but also how it is often leveraged for advancement.”

From Lesley M.M. Blume’s review

Union Square | $28.99

MY SIDE OF THE RIVER: A Memoir Elizabeth Camarillo Gutierrez

When Gutierrez was 4, her parents moved the family from Mexico to Arizona in hopes of giving their children better opportunities than they would have had in their “violent little narco town.” In this moving, timely memoir, she considers the ripple effects of that decision.

the saturday review of literature

“A testament to the abiding allure — and often daunting reality — of the American dream.”

From Julia Scheeres’s review

St. Martin’s | $29

BURMA SAHIB Paul Theroux

This novel explores George Orwell’s years in colonial Burma, where he trained and worked as a police officer in the 1920s. Theroux’s Orwell is uneasy about his job and repelled by the British ruling class. But these experiences, the book suggests, made Orwell into the sharp thinker he became.

the saturday review of literature

“The Burma that he conjures in these pages is wonderfully present in lush and dense prose. ... Theroux is now in his early 80s and this novel is one of his finest, in a long and redoubtable oeuvre.”

From William Boyd’s review

Mariner | $30

A FILM IN WHICH I PLAY EVERYONE Mary Jo Bang

The poems in Bang’s latest collection, her ninth, are full of pleasure, color, sound and light — but also torment.

the saturday review of literature

“The work of miniaturizing a life is painstaking, and Bang’s poems have a characteristic clockwork precision — they tick and spin like mechanical music boxes.”

From Elisa Gabbert’s poetry column

Graywolf | Paperback, $17

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

In Lucy Sante’s new memoir, “I Heard Her Call My Name,” the author reflects on her life and embarking on a gender transition  in her late 60s.

For people of all ages in Pasadena, Calif., Vroman’s Bookstore, founded in 1894, has been a mainstay in a world of rapid change. Now, its longtime owner says he’s ready to turn over the reins .

The graphic novel series “Aya” explores the pains and pleasures of everyday life in a working-class neighborhood  in West Africa with a modern African woman hero.

Like many Nigerians, the novelist Stephen Buoro has been deeply influenced by the exquisite bedlam of Lagos, a megacity of extremes. Here, he defines the books that make sense of the chaos .

Do you want to be a better reader?   Here’s some helpful advice to show you how to get the most out of your literary endeavor .

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

  • International edition
  • Australia edition
  • Europe edition

Abstract open magic book on table with light inside.

The best recent science fiction and fantasy – reviews roundup

The Book of Doors by Gareth Brown; Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon by Wole Talabi; Red Side Story by Jasper Fforde; Past Crimes by Jason Pinter; The City of Stardust by Georgia Summers

Cover image of the Book of Doors by Gareth Brown

The Book of Doors by Gareth Brown (Bantam, £16.99 ) When Cassie receives the gift of a small leatherbound book, her life is transformed. It has the power to make “any door every door”, allowing her to walk out of her New York apartment on to a street in Paris, Venice, Prague – anywhere she’s been, or seen a picture of. Her best friend, Izzy, worries about how criminals could use it, while Cassie thinks they should just enjoy this amazing freedom. But Izzy was right to worry: the Book of Doors is just one of a small number of magical books, each with a different power, and although not many know they exist, some collectors won’t stop at murder to get what they want. What begins like a joyous daydream soon becomes a suspenseful thriller. It’s a truly magical book: exciting, intricately plotted and emotionally compelling.

Cover image of Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon by Wole Talabi

Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon by Wole Talabi (Gollancz, £2 2) The first novel from the Nigerian author of award-winning short stories is set in two worlds: ours, and the spirit side, where ancient gods have modernised into corporate board members who employ lesser spirits to deal with prayers and petitions. Shigidi, a minor god of nightmares, falls in love with the sexy, mysterious Nneoma, a succubus who feeds on human souls, and convinces him to be her partner in the freelance life. But his employer, the Orisha Spirit Company, won’t release him unless he steals back a precious sacred object from the British Museum. With their supernatural powers, the partners expect it to be an easy heist – until they tangle with London’s own spirit guardians. Moving back and forth in time, and between Lagos, London, Singapore and Algeria, this is a vivid, entertaining tale of love, power and revenge.

Cover image of Red Side Story by Jasper Fforde

Red Side Story by Jasper Fforde ( Hodder & Stoughton , £ 20 ) The long-awaited sequel to 2010’s Shades of Grey continues the story set in a country that used to be Britain – before Something Happened. Society now operates on a hierarchical, colour-based system, where everyone’s place and role are determined by the range of colours they are able to see. Eddie and Jane belong to hues of red and green: strictly prohibited from marriage, and now awaiting trial for a murder they did not commit. No one is allowed to question the many strict rules , no matter how absurd. But Eddie and Jane are in love, smart and curious, willing to run any risk to find out the truth about their world. Cleverly constructed, with engaging characters and lots of good jokes, this sparkling Wizard of Oz-inspired fantasy is the second book in an intended trilogy, and one of the quirkiest dystopias ever imagined.

Cover image of Past Crimes by Jason Pinter

Past Crimes by Jason Pinter ( Severn House, £21.99 ) The first venture into science fiction by a well-regarded crime writer is set in the 2040s, when Americans are spending most of their waking hours in an immersive virtual reality network known as Earth+. The popularity of true crime as entertainment has grown exponentially, with new tech allowing total sensory engagement. Subscribers to the simulations produced by entertainment company Past Crimes have the option of being not merely observers but players in famous historic crimes. Cassie West, the widow of the man held responsible for an outbreak of mass suicides and murders known as the Blight, is probably the only person in the world who believes the real culprit got away with it. She thinks she’s found evidence that he’s planning to strike again, with a massacre timed to coincide with the release of the highly anticipated Blight simulation. But will anyone believe her? A tense, unputdownable near-future thriller, chillingly believable about some of the drawbacks of life lived increasingly in non-physical spaces.

Cover image of The City of Stardust by Georgia Summers

The City of Stardust by Georgia Summers ( Hodderscape, £20 ) The Everly family is cursed: for generations, their youngest has been taken by the terrifying, ageless Penelope in payment of a long-ago debt. Violet is the last of the line, since her mother vanished on a quest to break the curse; unless she returns, Violet will be sacrificed instead. As the deadline approaches, newly adult Violet goes on her own quest. She looks to Penelope’s assistant, Aleksander, for help, knowing she shouldn’t trust him, but tempted by his stories of another world, where he lives in a city of scholar-magicians. Things soon turn very dark in an ambitious debut that doesn’t live up to its initial promise, flawed by an overly complicated, confusing plot and thin characterisations.

  • Science fiction books
  • Science fiction roundup
  • Fantasy books

More on this story

the saturday review of literature

Authors ‘excluded from Hugo awards over China concerns’

the saturday review of literature

‘Reading is so sexy’: gen Z turns to physical books and libraries

the saturday review of literature

Pity by Andrew McMillan review – men and memories in a Yorkshire pit town

the saturday review of literature

The Great Undoing by Sharlene Allsopp review – experimental debut takes on the tech apocalypse

the saturday review of literature

Bernardine Evaristo defends Royal Society of Literature over ‘false accusations’

the saturday review of literature

Five of the best recent books from Ukraine

the saturday review of literature

This month’s best paperbacks: Salman Rushdie, Greta Thunberg and more

the saturday review of literature

‘We didn’t expect this phenomenon to last’: France’s comic-book tradition is hitting new heights

Most viewed.

Duke University Libraries

Literature Reviews

  • Getting started

What is a literature review?

Why conduct a literature review, stages of a literature review, lit reviews: an overview (video), check out these books.

  • Types of reviews
  • 1. Define your research question
  • 2. Plan your search
  • 3. Search the literature
  • 4. Organize your results
  • 5. Synthesize your findings
  • 6. Write the review
  • Thompson Writing Studio This link opens in a new window
  • Need to write a systematic review? This link opens in a new window

the saturday review of literature

Contact a Librarian

Ask a Librarian

the saturday review of literature

Definition: A literature review is a systematic examination and synthesis of existing scholarly research on a specific topic or subject.

Purpose: It serves to provide a comprehensive overview of the current state of knowledge within a particular field.

Analysis: Involves critically evaluating and summarizing key findings, methodologies, and debates found in academic literature.

Identifying Gaps: Aims to pinpoint areas where there is a lack of research or unresolved questions, highlighting opportunities for further investigation.

Contextualization: Enables researchers to understand how their work fits into the broader academic conversation and contributes to the existing body of knowledge.

the saturday review of literature

tl;dr  A literature review critically examines and synthesizes existing scholarly research and publications on a specific topic to provide a comprehensive understanding of the current state of knowledge in the field.

What is a literature review NOT?

❌ An annotated bibliography

❌ Original research

❌ A summary

❌ Something to be conducted at the end of your research

❌ An opinion piece

❌ A chronological compilation of studies

The reason for conducting a literature review is to:

the saturday review of literature

Literature Reviews: An Overview for Graduate Students

While this 9-minute video from NCSU is geared toward graduate students, it is useful for anyone conducting a literature review.

the saturday review of literature

Writing the literature review: A practical guide

Available 3rd floor of Perkins

the saturday review of literature

Writing literature reviews: A guide for students of the social and behavioral sciences

Available online!

the saturday review of literature

So, you have to write a literature review: A guided workbook for engineers

the saturday review of literature

Telling a research story: Writing a literature review

the saturday review of literature

The literature review: Six steps to success

the saturday review of literature

Systematic approaches to a successful literature review

Request from Duke Medical Center Library

the saturday review of literature

Doing a systematic review: A student's guide

  • Next: Types of reviews >>
  • Last Updated: Feb 15, 2024 1:45 PM
  • URL: https://guides.library.duke.edu/lit-reviews

Duke University Libraries

Services for...

  • Faculty & Instructors
  • Graduate Students
  • Undergraduate Students
  • International Students
  • Patrons with Disabilities

Twitter

  • Harmful Language Statement
  • Re-use & Attribution / Privacy
  • Support the Libraries

Creative Commons License

We will keep fighting for all libraries - stand with us!

Internet Archive Audio

the saturday review of literature

  • This Just In
  • Grateful Dead
  • Old Time Radio
  • 78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings
  • Audio Books & Poetry
  • Computers, Technology and Science
  • Music, Arts & Culture
  • News & Public Affairs
  • Spirituality & Religion
  • Radio News Archive

the saturday review of literature

  • Flickr Commons
  • Occupy Wall Street Flickr
  • NASA Images
  • Solar System Collection
  • Ames Research Center

the saturday review of literature

  • All Software
  • Old School Emulation
  • MS-DOS Games
  • Historical Software
  • Classic PC Games
  • Software Library
  • Kodi Archive and Support File
  • Vintage Software
  • CD-ROM Software
  • CD-ROM Software Library
  • Software Sites
  • Tucows Software Library
  • Shareware CD-ROMs
  • Software Capsules Compilation
  • CD-ROM Images
  • ZX Spectrum
  • DOOM Level CD

the saturday review of literature

  • Smithsonian Libraries
  • FEDLINK (US)
  • Lincoln Collection
  • American Libraries
  • Canadian Libraries
  • Universal Library
  • Project Gutenberg
  • Children's Library
  • Biodiversity Heritage Library
  • Books by Language
  • Additional Collections

the saturday review of literature

  • Prelinger Archives
  • Democracy Now!
  • Occupy Wall Street
  • TV NSA Clip Library
  • Animation & Cartoons
  • Arts & Music
  • Computers & Technology
  • Cultural & Academic Films
  • Ephemeral Films
  • Sports Videos
  • Videogame Videos
  • Youth Media

Search the history of over 866 billion web pages on the Internet.

Mobile Apps

  • Wayback Machine (iOS)
  • Wayback Machine (Android)

Browser Extensions

Archive-it subscription.

  • Explore the Collections
  • Build Collections

Save Page Now

Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future.

Please enter a valid web address

  • Donate Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape

The Saturday review of politics, literature, science and art

Bookreader item preview, share or embed this item, flag this item for.

  • Graphic Violence
  • Explicit Sexual Content
  • Hate Speech
  • Misinformation/Disinformation
  • Marketing/Phishing/Advertising
  • Misleading/Inaccurate/Missing Metadata

No copyright or table of contents page found.

plus-circle Add Review comment Reviews

Download options.

For users with print-disabilities

IN COLLECTIONS

Uploaded by LexW on September 13, 2018

SIMILAR ITEMS (based on metadata)

  • Logout Login
  • Adventure Holidays
  • Weekend Getaways
  • Driving Holidays
  • Travel News

Top Searches

Juliet's House Italy

Japan Nomad Visa

Bharat Bandh

Places to Visit in India

Most Unhappy Countries

Bali Travel

New Delhi: World Book Fair 2024; all that you need to know

Times of India TIMESOFINDIA.COM / TRAVEL NEWS , DELHI / Created : Feb 12, 2024, 20:27 IST

You're Reading

img

The ongoing World Book Fair 2024 (February 10-18) at Pragati Maidan, New Delhi, is set to captivate bibliophiles and literature enthusiasts with its grandeur and diversity. With over 2000 exhibitors in attendance, including renown … Read more

The ongoing World Book Fair 2024 (February 10-18) at Pragati Maidan, New Delhi, is set to captivate bibliophiles and literature enthusiasts with its grandeur and diversity. With over 2000 exhibitors in attendance, including renowned publishers and independent booksellers, the fair is a treasure trove of literary delights. Spanning various genres and languages, the World Book Fair 2024 showcases a vast array of books to cater to every literary taste. Read less

New Delhi: World Book Fair 2024; all that you need to know

Most underrated countries to visit for a splendid vacation

More from travel news.

Bengaluru: Bannerghatta Biological Park all set to start leopard safari

  • When is it? The World Book Fair started on February 10, and will go on till February 18. Visitors can attend the fair from 11am to 8pm.
  • Where is it happening? The venue for the World Book Fair 2024 is Pragati Maidan, Halls 1-5.
  • How to reach? The nearest metro station is the Supreme Court station (formerly known as Pragati Maidan metro station) on the blue line of the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation. Wheelchair facilities are available at Gate number 4 and 8 of Pragati Maidan.
  • How to get the tickets? Tickets are available at the official website of National Book Trust (NBT). Tickets can also be purchased at the venue, in person. For children, the ticket will cost INR 10 per person; INR 20 per person for adults. The entry is free for students in school uniform, students on educational trips, persons with disabilities and senior citizens.

Comments (0)

the saturday review of literature

Refrain from posting comments that are obscene, defamatory or inflammatory, and do not indulge in personal attacks, name calling or inciting hatred against any community. Help us delete comments that do not follow these guidelines by marking them offensive . Let's work together to keep the conversation civil.

Comments ( ) Sort: Newest UpVoted Oldest Discussed Down Voted closecomments

userthumb

SIGN IN WITH

Or post without registration.

Arunachal Pradesh: Trekkers accidently discover cave used during World War II by Allied Forces

Visual Stories

test

Popular Galleries

Trivandrum

Discover the best scuba diving spots in Kerala

UPI payments abroad: Countries accepting UPI payments and activation guide

UPI payments abroad: Countries accepting UPI payments and activation guide TRAVEL TRENDS , WORLD

9 safest countries for LGBTQ+ travellers

9 safest countries for LGBTQ+ travellers TRAVEL TRENDS , WORLD

Trending stories.

the saturday review of literature

Travel tips to visit Vaishno Devi temple

the saturday review of literature

UPI payments abroad: Countries accepting UPI payments and activation guide

the saturday review of literature

Bengaluru: Bannerghatta Biological Park all set to start leopard safari

the saturday review of literature

Must-visit Indian destinations for foodies

the saturday review of literature

5 unforgettable bus journeys to take in India RIGHT NOW!

  • 1 New Delhi: World Book Fair 2024; all that you need to know
  • 2 Arunachal Pradesh: Trekkers accidently discover cave used during World War II by Allied Forces
  • 3 In pictures: Abu Dhabi’s first Hindu temple to be inaugurated by PM Modi on Feb 14
  • 4 Sri Lanka, Mauritius join the list of countries where India’s UPI is present
  • 5 Delhi travel advisory: Section 144 imposed in the capital ahead of farmers' march

image42

THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO DESTINATIONS, ITINERARIES, THINGS TO DO, RESTAURANTS, NIGHTLIFE and LOTS MORE!

FOLLOW US ON

Places to visit.

  • Places to visit in Bangalore
  • Places to visit in Mumbai
  • Places to visit in Delhi
  • Places to visit in Goa
  • Hotels in Goa
  • Hotels in Jaipur
  • Hotels in Shimla
  • Hotels in Mumbai

Things To do

  • Things to do in Goa
  • Things to do in Mumbai
  • Things to do in Bangalore
  • Things to do in Delhi

Travel Inspiration

  • Visa on arrival for Indians
  • Honeymoon Places in india
  • Hill Stations in India
  • Weekend getaways in Mumbai
  • Weather in Delhi
  • Weather in Chennai
  • Weather in Bangalore
  • Weather in Mumbai

Best Beaches

  • Goa Beaches
  • Mumbai Beaches
  • Pondicherry Beaches
  • Kerala Beaches
  • Restaurants in Bangalore
  • Restaurants in Chennai
  • Restaurants in Pune
  • Restaurants in Jaipur
  • Hill Station near Delhi
  • Winter trip to Ladakh
  • Places to visit in Kerala
  • Winter Honeymoon Destinations
  • UK visa guide for Indians
  • Winter Trip to Manali
  • Vaishno Devi Yatra
  • Special Train Ticket Booking
  • HP inter-state Bus
  • Honeymoon Destinations India

Latest News

  • How to plan a successful trip to Bangkok? A complete guide
  • 10 countries with the best quality of life
  • Best islands to explore in the Andamans
  • Discover the charms of India's pretty coastal towns
  • What not to miss in Jaisalmer?
  • These are the world’s most powerful passports for 2024!
  • Places in India that are a bird watcher's paradise
  • Diwali 2023: Gorgeous photos from India's mega-festival
  • Kyiv, Lviv in Ukraine on UNESCO’s 'in danger' list
  • Mystery behind the Hanging Pillar at Lepakshi in Andhra Pradesh
  • Real-life Hogwarts Express from Harry Potter
  • 15 cities every foreign traveller should visit in India
  • Singapore becomes world’s most powerful passport!
  • Europe's most beautiful places
  • Oh so pretty! World’s prettiest castles
  • Offbeat island destinations in Asia
  • Must-visits on the Golden Triangle
  • What makes Hornbill Festival the Festival of Festivals?

Congratulations!

You have been successfully added to the mailing list of Times of India Travel. To complete the subscription process, kindly open your inbox and click on the confirmation link which has been emailed to you.

Share with friends

Thank You for sharing! Your friend will receive the article link on email mentioned.

  • (For more than one recipient, type addresses separated by commas)

New Delhi: World Book Fair 2024; all that you need to know

The ongoing World Book Fair 2024 (February 10-18) at Pragati Maidan, New Delhi, is set to captivate bibliophiles and literature enthusiasts with its grandeur and diversity. With over 2000 exhibitors i...

the saturday review of literature

IMAGES

  1. The Saturday Review of Literature (豆瓣)

    the saturday review of literature

  2. A Copy of "The Saturday Review of Literature" Featuring a Review of

    the saturday review of literature

  3. The Saturday Review Of Politics, Literature, Science And Art; Volume 23

    the saturday review of literature

  4. The Saturday Review of Literature, Volume 30, Number 8 (XXX, February

    the saturday review of literature

  5. Saturday Review of Literature

    the saturday review of literature

  6. 'Saturday Review Of Literature by

    the saturday review of literature

COMMENTS

  1. Saturday Review (U.S. magazine)

    Saturday Review, [1] previously The Saturday Review of Literature, [2] was an American weekly magazine established in 1924. Norman Cousins was the editor from 1940 to 1971. [3] Under Cousins, it was described as "a compendium of reportage, essays and criticism about current events, education, science, travel, the arts and other topics." [1]

  2. The Saturday Review of Literature archives

    The Saturday Review of Literature, also known simply as the Saturday Review, was an American weekly magazine published in the 20th century. (There is a Wikipedia article about this serial .) Publication History The Saturday Review of Literature began in 1924. The first actively copyright-renewed issue is June 9, 1934 (v. 10 no. 47).

  3. The Saturday Review Of Literature v01n02 [1924-08-09]

    Saturday Review, previously The Saturday Review Of Literature , was an American weekly magazine established in 1924. Norman Cousins was the editor from 1940 to 1971.

  4. Saturday Review of Literature, The, 1924-1964

    Saturday Review of Literature, The, 1924-1964 - Archives & Manuscripts at Duke University Libraries. American Newspaper Repository collection, 1852-2004. This Series.

  5. History of the Saturday Review of Literature with a look inside 1950's

    "Readers of the little magazines no doubt would have regarded the Saturday Review of Literature as hopelessly middle class; but first as a somewhat sober literary journal, eventually as a lively magazine of ideas and the popular arts, the weekly probably affected the reading tastes and helped to shape the thinking of an influential segment of th...

  6. PDF The Saturday Review of Literature

    "The Saturday Review of Literature" Ezra Pound v. The Saturday Review of Literature Karen Leick Northwestern University "Of course we just printed the Hillyer articles and the editorial to start aa controversy. It was a great success. We thought it would give us three exciting issues but it went on for six." ?

  7. Saturday Review

    In John Ciardi …as poetry editor of the Saturday Review from 1956 to 1972. He felt that interaction between audience and author was crucial, and he generated continuous controversy with his critical reviews. He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Cousins In Norman Cousins

  8. Saturday Review of Literature mss., 1946-1956

    The Saturday Review of Literature, established in 1924, was an American weekly magazine of literary criticism that ran until 1986, changing its name to the Saturday Review in 1952. Norman Cousins acted as editor from 1940-1971. Scope and Content:

  9. The Saturday Review of Literature

    English literature -- Bibliography -- Periodicals. Subject: Books -- Reviews -- Periodicals. Call number: Z1219 .S25. Other copies: Look for editions of this book at your library, or elsewhere.

  10. Saturday Review of Literature, 1930

    Saturday Review of Literature, 1930 - 1931 Scope and Contents From the Collection: The Edward Doro Papers consist of seven boxes spanning the years 1908-1998. The majority of the papers consist of his published works and scripts for his unfinished plays and operas.

  11. Saturday Review of Literature

    Saturday Review of Literature, Volume 19. Saturday Review Associates, 1938 - American literature. From inside the book . Other editions - View all. Saturday Review of Literature, Volume 25 Snippet view - 1942. Saturday Review of Literature, Volume 19 Snippet view - 1937.

  12. The Saturday review of literature : printed magazines, 1935., 1935

    Houghton Library's Reading Room is free and open to all who wish to use the library's collections. Contact: Harvard Yard. Harvard University. Cambridge MA 02138 USA. (617) 495-2440. [email protected].

  13. The Saturday Review of Literature , 1945-1946, 1948, 1953

    The Saturday Review of Literature, 1945-1946, 1948, 1953 Dates. 1945-1946 1948 1953 Creator From the Collection: Collier, John, 1884-1968; Conditions Governing Access. This material has been microfilmed. Patrons must use HM 103 instead of the originals. Language of Materials. From ...

  14. Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free & Borrowable Books, Movies

    Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free & Borrowable Books, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine.

  15. Saturday Review of Literature

    Abstract: The Harrison Smith Papers contain writings, correspondence, printed material, and photographs that document the life and work of editor and publisher Harrison Smith, particularly his research on American author Sinclair Lewis, and his editorial work for the Saturday Review of Literature. Series I, Research Files on Sinclair Lewis, includes extensive biographical notes, presumably ...

  16. The Saturday Review of Literature, 1935

    The Saturday Review of Literature, 1935 - 1936 Item — Box: 28, Object: 8-10 Citation Staff Only Haverford College Quaker & Special Collections Morley Family papers (HC.MC) CDM Printed Items, 1933-1941 & n.d. The Saturday Review of Literature, 1935 - 1936 Scope and Contents. Contents include: ...

  17. Saturday Review

    Other articles where Saturday Review is discussed: George Bernard Shaw: Early life and career: …by Frank Harris to the Saturday Review as theatre critic (1895-98); in that position he used all his wit and polemical powers in a campaign to displace the artificialities and hypocrisies of the Victorian stage with a theatre of vital ideas. He also began writing his own plays.

  18. Saturday Review (London newspaper)

    The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science, and Art was a London weekly newspaper established by A. J. B. Beresford Hope in 1855. The first editor was the Morning Chronicle ' s ex-editor John Douglas Cook (1808?-1868), and many of the earlier contributors had worked on the Chronicle. [1]

  19. The Saturday Review of Literature copyright information

    The Saturday Review of Literature: Also known as: Saturday Review: Online content: Free online material via The Online Books Page: More information: Wikipedia article; Wikidata: First issue: August 2, 1924 (v. 1 no. 1) First renewed issue: June 9, 1934 (v. 10 no. 47); see 1962 January-June: First renewed contribution in: March 9, 1929; see 1957 ...

  20. Zora Neale Hurston, American Contrarian

    In the spring of 1938, Zora Neale Hurston informed readers of the Saturday Review of Literature that Mr. Richard Wright's first published book, "Uncle Tom's Children," was made up of four ...

  21. The Saturday Review of Literature : Henry Seidel Canby : Free Download

    The Saturday Review of Literature by Henry Seidel Canby. Publication date 1935 Publisher R.R. Bowker Company Collection inlibrary; printdisabled; internetarchivebooks Contributor Internet Archive Language English Volume 2023-12-13T05:00:00.000Z. Notes. inherent cut-off text due to tight binding. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate

  22. The Saturday review of politics, literature, science and art

    1855 Vol/date range v. 1- ; Nov. 3, 1855- Note Editors: 1855-68, J. D. Cook.--1868-83, Philip Harwood.--1883-94, W. H. Pollock.--1894-98, Frank Harris,--1898- Harold Hodge. Supplement Contains supplements. Browse related items Start at call number: 072 .S254 V.160 1935 View full page | Catkey: 394510

  23. 9 New Books We Recommend This Week

    Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times. It's too early to know the full story behind the mass shooting at yesterday's Super Bowl parade in Kansas City, but for the ...

  24. The best recent science fiction and fantasy

    The Great Undoing by Sharlene Allsopp review - experimental debut takes on the tech apocalypse 7d ago Bernardine Evaristo defends Royal Society of Literature over 'false accusations'

  25. Getting started

    What is a literature review? Definition: A literature review is a systematic examination and synthesis of existing scholarly research on a specific topic or subject. Purpose: It serves to provide a comprehensive overview of the current state of knowledge within a particular field. Analysis: Involves critically evaluating and summarizing key findings, methodologies, and debates found in ...

  26. The Saturday review of politics, literature, science and art

    The Saturday review of politics, literature, science and art. Publication date 1855 Publisher London : "Published at the Office" Collection uoftpreservation; robarts; toronto Contributor Robarts - University of Toronto Language English Volume 91. v. : Issues for Jan. 16, 1937-July 16, 1938 published without volume numbering

  27. New Delhi: World Book Fair 2024; all that you need to know

    The ongoing World Book Fair 2024 (February 10-18) at Pragati Maidan, New Delhi, is set to captivate bibliophiles and literature enthusiasts with its grandeur and diversity. With over 2000 ...