Jessamyn west biography of albert

In the spring of , West graduated from college with a B. Intelligent and gregarious, Max had no interest in literature. He later earned a doctorate, served as principal in several schools, was a professor at the University of California , and became superintendent of the Napa Valley Unified School District. He was also the founder and first president of Napa Valley College.

Max supported and encouraged Jessamyn to write and respected her need for privacy after they were married in the Yorba Linda Friends Church on August 16, The following year they moved in with his parents in Hemet, California. Jessamyn worked as a school secretary for a year and then began teaching in a one-room schoolhouse near her in-laws' apricot orchard.

She enjoyed teaching and her students grades one through six. During her four-year teaching career, she gained insights into young people which she used in her writings. West now set her sights on graduate school; her goal was to earn a doctorate and teach English in a college, an ambitious, independent course for a young, married woman in More unusual was her decision to enroll in summer classes at Oxford University in England while Max attended the University of California at Berkeley.

She traveled to Paris, and in mid-winter she rejoined her husband. Work toward her doctorate in American Studies was satisfying, but she still had an urge to write, a desire she had suppressed for years. While in her 20s, West suspected she had a "medical problem. After nine months, she was able to return home to her husband in Yuba City. A few weeks later, she suffered a relapse.

The doctors concluded that nothing could save her, and told her parents to take her home to die among her "loved ones. Richard Nixon's older brother, Harold, had died from the disease. By November , Jessamyn was able to join her husband. While recuperating, she read a great deal, and she finally began to write. Her first effort was a short story , " When a female acquaintance suggested that Jessamyn make a quilt so her mother would have a remembrance, West decided, "Hell, if I've reached the end of the road, I am not going to leave a quilt.

I'll put Grace's stories down on paper. And I began writing. The possibility that her hold on life was precarious made her more aware of the world and gave her a heightened appreciation of being alive, "that elation which is the chief fact of my life," as she expressed it. West still had no intention of publishing her writing. But after reading a few of her stories, Max pressured her to submit them to magazines.

She sent the stories to various "little magazines" that did not pay for entries, and they were accepted. Jessamyn West was a published author. She never wrote to earn money, for her needs were simple and few, and Max's salary had always sufficed. Despite her lack of interest in material things, West earned a great deal of money which Max invested well.

There was no longer a need for West "to curb her imagination. In November , Harcourt Brace published her collection of stories entitled The Friendly Persuasion ; and in , it came out in England. This "love poem to Indiana," as West called it, became an international bestseller and was translated into Dutch, French, German, Spanish, and Italian—all in In response to protests from family members, Jessamyn did change the name of her "fictitious" characters from Millhouse to Bird-well.

Her cousin Olive Marshburn also objected to the frank language attributed to the Birdwells; words such as "pa, ain't, and duck dung" were offensive, and she insisted the language be "linguistically deodorized, scrubbed, and dressed in such proper attire as would befit a genteel family tradition. The Friendly Persuasion translated well into a motion picture.

West was paid well for the rights to her book, and she received an even greater sum from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for her novel South of the Angels. In , future president Ronald Reagan produced and starred in "Learn to Say Goodbye," West's story about a boy who had raised a bull and cried when it was given over for auction; this televised version was on Reagan's "General Electric Hour.

Writing is so difficult that I often feel that writers, having had their hell on earth, will escape all further punishment hereafter. Except for Me and Thee , the sequel to The Friendly Persuasion , was published in , and also became a bestseller. That West was a second cousin to then President Richard Nixon may have helped increase sales, and she was invited to appear on NBC's "Today" show which introduced her to a wide audience.

Once again, Jess and Eliza Birdwell are portrayed as "sober, Godfearing, orderly, practical, and artistically starved" rural Quaker folk who are forced to deal with the Civil War , the question of slavery, and social change. The outside world infringes on their innocent, quiet, "even charming mode of existence," just as the modern world was making inroads into West's own rural surroundings.

When Jess Birdwell relents and allows a Christmas tree in the house, he says to Eliza, "People are getting more worldly every day. In these two novels, West "quite gently reminds us that everything is an adventure … in order to return, turn back and find yourself. West's most popular works are set in the past, in rural or small-town America.

But she did not shy away from controversial subjects such as adultery, pederasty, rampant materialism, and declining religious faith which affected society in post- World War II America. In Cress Delahanty , she describes the problems of growing up, a "thinly disguised story of her girlhood" in Yorba Linda, according to one critic. Her science-fiction novel The Pismire Plan , also set in California, satirizes 20th-century American civilization; tastelessness and vulgarity, advertising that exploits sex, soap operas, "infantile motion pictures ," and crass consumerism exemplify "a brave new world of the absurd," as West saw it, where humans were reduced to consumers.

In addition to fiction, West wrote memoirs, but not a complete autobiography. In , they moved to Napa when her husband obtained a job as a high school principal. In , West published her first literary work, a short story called " It was a fictionalized account of her stay in the sanatorium. Asked about this in an interview, she said, "I write about Indiana because knowing little about it, I can create it.

Would you ask him how he could do this since he had never been a breast?

Jessamyn west biography of albert

Adams wrote Watership Down. Would you ask him how he could do this since he admitted his rabbit knowledge came from a book about rabbits? And those hobbits! I am a bigger risk-taker than these others. The Hoosiers can contradict me. No rabbit, hobbit, or breast has been known to speak up in reply to their exploiters. Her Quaker stories, although shaped by her imagination, are loosely based on tales she heard from her mother and grandmother about their life in rural Indiana.

The Friendly Persuasion is West's best-known work. The New York Times book reviewer Orville Prescott called it "as fresh and engaging, tender and touching a book as ever was called sentimental by callous wretches There have been plenty of louder and more insistent books this year, but few as sure and mellow as The Friendly Persuasion.

It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture. Cress Delahanty is a collection of vignettes about a sensitive and artistic teenage girl, Crescent "Cress" Delahanty, growing up in rural Orange County, California in the pre- World War II period. Los Angeles Times book reviewer Milton Merlin called it "a richly rewarding story of five mysterious, unpredictable and adventurous years in a girl's life on a Southern California ranch It was published in Boston, and I thought, 'here is a little magazine I have never heard of, unknown, interested in good writing.

Here I am a writer, unknown, interested in good writing. We should get together. Immediately, back came a letter saying, 'We are entranced with your story. We think it is fine. We want to publish it; however, we are an Armenian magazine publishing the stories of young Armenians. Are you, by any chance, a young Armenian using a pseudonym Well, by this time I wasn't even young, but Napa is a long way from Boston, and I thought, 'The door has opened a crack to a literary career.

Am I not going to have enough nerve to walk through that crack. George Eliot, you know, she was not a man. Joseph Conrad was not an Englishman; he was a Pole with a name that long. They had enough nerve. So I looked through the phone book of Napa, hunting Armenian names which I could use. It's full of good Italian people making wine, but no Armenian names.

If they had wanted an Italian writer, I would now be the author of The Godfather, but they didn't. So finally I told them the bitter truth; I am not an Armenian. And that very nice editor, for a number of years after that, whenever he saw a story of mine in some magazine, would write me and say 'I just want to congratulate you. You're doing very well, in spite of the fact that you're not an Armenian.

This led to the discussion of her Quaker background, highly evident in her first book, The Friendly Persuasion. Then they were horribly disappointed because they thought the second book they would read would be another good, sweet, wholesome, friendly persuasion, and it didn't turn out that way. So they were disappointed. Then there were people who didn't like anything about sad, gray, unlaughing, 'theeing' and 'thying' Quakers in the first place, and once they had had one look at a book like The Friendly Persuasion, they didn't ever want to see another one.

So, in a sense, I fell between two stools as far as readers go, and I would rather have had them face the fact that I write various things. Sometimes they're Quakers, sometimes they aren't. That would have been easier for me. I edited for Viking an anthology of Quaker writings. I was amazed to discover there were no Quaker novels. Young Quakers were urged to stay away from that sort of thing-there are plenty of serious things to read without mulling around in fiction.

It is very hard for me to know about the Quaker influence. Probably it would be easier for someone else who has read what I have written. I never look inside a book once it's written, and I even forget them. Some of you probably have heard Robert Cromley, who has a television program from Chicago and who reviews and interviews writers. Once about a year and a half after Massacre at Fall Creek had been written, he interviewed me in Chicago.

He had read the book, I think, the night before. Meanwhile, I had forgotten everything. I didn't know the characters' names, I didn't know the battles, I didn't know who was an Indian and who was a white. He was very kind and very polite and helped me through, reminding me of what happened where. At the end of the program, I'm quite sure everybody thought Cromley wrote that book.

I should have had the nerve and the backbone, if I wanted to write, to start writing, because women Quakers in the past did things that women even today are thought better of to let alone. They could preach from the beginning Today we are still discussing whether a woman should preach or not. A Quaker woman could preach. No one thought anything of it.

Quaker women went to jails, where no one before had gone, to read the Bible to men who were locked up, and people were extremely shocked. They thought that male offenders shut away from women for decades-that the sight of these women would rouse them to a high pitch of lust, but they didn't know Quaker women. Nothing happened. Except that some of the prisoners did do some Bible reading they hadn't done before.

And women could go on missionary tours with men who weren't their husbands, and this was thought all right. I'll tell you one illustrative story. I read in the library of the Friends Meeting House in London a letter which had been written by a person, possibly from Wales, who had been the host or hostess of my great-great-grandmother, who was a Quaker minister.

She was in Wales and Ireland and England, preaching, and this letter said: 'You should see her husband Arnos, when she comes home tired and weary from a day or evening of preaching, he has her chair ready by the fire and her comfortable slippers already out. When asked if she considered herself a feminist, West answered: "If I saw you getting only seventy-five cents an hour for something that a man was getting a dollar for, I would be an immediate feminist.

While her stories were imaginative, they were also grounded in historical events. She continued to write and publish until her death on August 19, Her legacy as a talented storyteller and insightful observer of American society continues to inspire readers today. Jessamyn West She was an American author of short stories and novels. Date of Birth: Contact About Privacy.