Fannie Hurst
Fannie Hurst was an American novelist and short-story writer whose works were highly popular during the post-World War I era. Her work combined sentimental, romantic themes with social issues of the day, such as women's rights and race relations. She was one of the most widely read female authors of the 20th century, and for a time in the 1920s she was one of the highest-paid American writers. Hurst actively supported a number of social causes, including feminism, African American equality, and New Deal programs.
Although her novels, including Lummox, Back Street, and Imitation of Life, lost popularity over time and were mostly out of print as of the 2000s, they were bestsellers when first published and were translated into many languages. She also published over 300 short stories during her lifetime.
Hurst is known for the film adaptations of her works, including Imitation of Life, Four Daughters, Imitation of Life, Humoresque, and Young at Heart .
Early life
Hurst was born on October 19, 1885, in Hamilton, Ohio, to shoe-factory owner Samuel Hurst and his wife Rose, who were assimilated Jewish immigrants from Bavaria. A younger sister died of diphtheria at age four, leaving Hurst as her parents' only surviving child. She grew up at 5641 Cates Avenue in St. Louis, Missouri and was a student at Central High School.She attended Washington University and graduated in 1909 at age 24. In her autobiography, she portrayed her family as comfortably middle-class, except for a two-year stint in a boarding house necessitated by a sudden financial downturn. This period sparked her initial interest in the plight of the poor.
But later researchers, including her biographer Brooke Kroeger and literary historian Susan Koppelman, have challenged this account of Hurst's childhood. According to Koppelman, while Fannie Hurst was growing up, her father changed businesses four times, never achieved much financial success, and failed in business at least once. The Hurst family lived at 11 different boarding houses before Fannie turned 16. Kroeger wrote that while Samuel and Rose Hurst did eventually move to a house in a fashionable section of St. Louis, this did not occur until Fannie Hurst's third year of college, rather than during her childhood.
In her last term in college, Hurst wrote the book and lyrics for a comic opera, The Official Chaperon, which was performed on the Washington University campus in June 1909.
After her college graduation, Hurst briefly worked in a shoe factory before moving to New York City in 1911 to pursue a writing career. Although she had published one story while in college, she received more than 35 rejections before she was able to sell a second story and begin to establish herself as a regularly published author.
During her early years in New York, she worked a variety of jobs: as a waitress at Childs and a sales clerk at Macy's, and acted in bit parts on Broadway. As Hurst worked these jobs, under the name Rose Samuels, she observed her customers as well as employees. She began to take note of important social issues such as unequal pay and gender inequality.
In her spare time, Hurst attended night court sessions and visited Ellis Island and the slums, becoming in her own words "passionately anxious to awake in others a general sensitiveness to small people", and developing an awareness of "causes, including the lost and the threatened".
Career
In the years after World War I, Hurst became famous as an author of extremely popular short stories and novels, many of which were made into films. Her popularity continued for several decades, only beginning to decline after World War II.Throughout her life, Hurst also actively worked and spoke on behalf of social justice organizations and causes supporting feminism and African-American civil rights, and occasionally supported other oppressed groups such as Jewish refugees, homosexuals, and prisoners.
She was also appointed to several committees associated with President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal programs.
Author
In 1912, after numerous rejections, Hurst finally published a story in The Saturday Evening Post, which shortly thereafter requested exclusive release of her future writings. She went on to publish many more stories, mostly in the Post and in Cosmopolitan magazine, eventually earning as much as $5,000 per story. Her first collection of short stories, Just Around the Corner, was published in 1914, and her first novel, Star-Dust: The Story of an American Girl, appeared in 1921.By 1925, she had published five collections of short stories and two novels, and become one of the most highly paid authors in the United States. It was said of Hurst that "no other living American woman has gone so far in fiction in so short a time."
Her works were designed to appeal primarily to a female audience, and usually had working-class or middle-class female protagonists concerned with romantic relationships and economic need. Hurst was strongly influenced by the works of Edgar Lee Masters, particularly Spoon River Anthology. She also had read and learned from the works of Charles Dickens, Upton Sinclair, and Thomas Hardy. Hurst considered herself to be a serious writer, and publicly disparaged the works of other popular authors such as Gene Stratton-Porter and Harold Bell Wright, dismissing Wright as a "sentimental" author whose works people read only for "relaxation".
Early in Hurst's career, critics also considered her to be a serious artist, admiring her sensitive portrayals of immigrant life and urban "working girls". Her stories and books regularly made annual "best-of" lists, and she was called a female O. Henry. Her second novel, Lummox, about the tribulations of an oppressed domestic servant, was praised for its insights by Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Eleanor Roosevelt. However, some reviewers criticized her for "sappy" plots and careless writing. F. Scott Fitzgerald, in his 1920 novel This Side of Paradise, had a character presciently describe Hurst as one of several authors "not producing among 'em one story or novel that will last 10 years."
By the late 1930s, critics no longer took her seriously and sometimes expressed frustration about the continued commercial popularity of her work in the face of bad reviews. In the post-World War II era, she was regarded as a popular author who wrote for and about the working classes. She became a favorite target of parodists, including Langston Hughes, who parodied her racially themed novel Imitation of Life as Limitations of Life. Her own editor, Kenneth McCormick, described her as a "fairly corny artist" but a "wonderful storyteller". She was also called the "Queen of the Sob Sisters". Hurst recognized that she was "not a darling of the critics" but said, "I have a vast popular audience — it warms me, like a furnace."
The great popularity of Hurst's works gave her major celebrity status. Hurst also took steps to publicize herself for purposes of promoting both her writing and the activist causes she espoused. In the 1920s, news media widely covered aspects of her personal life such as her unconventional marriage and a diet on which she lost 40 pounds. She was frequently interviewed about her views on subjects relating to love, marriage and family. For decades, The New York Times continued to report regularly on Hurst's doings, including her walks in Central Park with her dogs, her travels abroad, her wardrobe, and the interior decoration of her apartment.
Back Street, Hurst's seventh novel, was hailed as her "magnum opus" and has been called her "best loved" work. Its main character, a confident, independent young gentile woman, falls in love with a married Jewish banker and becomes his secret mistress, sacrificing her own life in the process and ultimately meeting a tragic end.
Hurst's next novel, Imitation of Life, was also hugely popular. It is now considered her best known novel. It told the story of two single mothers, one white and one African American, who become partners in a successful waffle and restaurant business and have conflicts with their teenage daughters. Hurst's inspiration for the book was her own friendship with African-American author Zora Neale Hurston. However, Imitation of Life and the two films based on it provoked controversy due to their treatment of the African-American characters. These include a romanticized mammy figure and a "tragic mulatto" young woman
who rejects her loving mother in order to pass for white.
Approximately 30 films were made from Hurst's fiction. Back Street was the basis for three films of the same name in 1932, 1941 and 1961. Frank Capra 's Forbidden liberally borrowed elements from Hurst's novel without crediting her.
Imitation of Life was twice adapted for film in 1934 and 1959. Both films were respectively inductees for the 2005 and 2015 National Film Registry lists.
It was also adapted by Joselito Rodriguez for the 1949 Mexican film Angelitos negros. This was adapted again and released in 1970 in two versions: as a feature film and as a telenovela.
Her short story "Humoresque", published in 1919, was adapted as a 1920 silent film and as a 1946 film noir starring Joan Crawford. A later story, "Sister Act", published in Cosmopolitan in 1937, inspired the musical films Four Daughters and the Frank Sinatra vehicle Young at Heart.
Hurst continued to write and publish until her death in 1968, although the commercial value of her work declined after World War II as popular tastes changed. Her total publications over her nearly six-decade career include 19 novels, more than 300 short stories, four plays produced on Broadway, a full-length autobiography and an autobiographical memoir, numerous magazine articles, personal essays, articles for various organizations to which she belonged, and screenplays for several films.