by PBS
Over nine books, Maupin traces the lives of a multitude of gay and straight characters as they fall in love, have sex, uncover secrets, build friendships, and create families in the 1970s and beyond. He does an excellent job of normalizing difference. Praising the series’ exuberance, the New York Times once likened the experience of reading the interconnected books to “dipping into an inexhaustible bag of M&Ms, with no risk of sugar overload.” The series is chock-full of period-specific details, giving the prose a newsy immediacy and serving, now that some time has passed, as a firsthand record of the decades in which queer culture entered the American mainstream. It became the basis for an acclaimed series on PBS in 1993.
Born Armistead Jones Maupin, Jr., in 1944 in Washington, DC, Maupin studied journalism at the University of North Carolina, where he led the charge to establish a memorial to Thomas Wolfe, and served in the Vietnam War. He moved to San Francisco to work for the Associated Press bureau there. Maupin came out as gay around the time he began writing his Tales. His novels celebrate the freedom that comes with being happy in one’s skin. They also have autobiographical elements. Further Tales of the City (1982), describes, in veiled terms, Maupin’s affair with Rock Hudson. Babycakes (1984), the fourth novel in the series, addresses the AIDS crisis, one of the first works of fiction to do so directly. Maupin has always sought to be as honest as possible in the series, confronting difficult or potentially inflammatory issues with candor and humor.
With Sure of You (1989), Maupin attempted to end the series. That sixth novel covers the 1980s, a much different time politically and socially than the 1970s, when Mary Ann arrived: she’s preparing to decamp for New York, while Barbary Lane’s landlady, Anna, thinks she might sell the property and settle permanently in Greece. However, there were other books to come. With the ninth book, The Days of Anna Madrigal (2014), Maupin concluded the series once again. Now in her 90s, Anna Madrigal, the transgender landlady of Barbary Lane, looks back on her long life and many tenants. Perhaps Maupin ended Tales because he wants to focus on other work, or perhaps he wants to let the forthcoming Netflix series stand on its own. Or maybe he plans to surprise readers with still another book, another take on the city he loves and the people who make it marvelous. We can only hope.
A first edition of Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937.
Zora Neale Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God while researching voodoo and folk culture in Haiti.
A page from Hurston’s handwritten manuscript of the novel.
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THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD
Zora Neale Hurston · 1937
Writers die two deaths: they pass away, as everyone does. But they die a second time when their work stops being read. Author Alice Walker gave Zora Neale Hurston a new life, some fifteen years after Hurston died in poverty and obscurity in 1960. Today, Hurston is a touchstone, having influenced new generations of writers, and her posthumous honors include conferences and awards in her name. Her voice continues to be heard; her words continue to exist.
The fifth of eight children, Hurston was born to a preacher and his schoolteacher wife in 1891 in Alabama. A few years later, the family moved to Eatonville, Florida, one of the first all-black towns in the United States. Her father eventually became mayor. After concentrating on writing at Howard University, Hurston landed in New York, where she was a part of the Harlem Renaissance, befriending writers such as Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. Along with founding a magazine and writing plays that landed on Broadway, she began studying with Franz Boas, sometimes called “the Father of American Anthropology.” While in Haiti to research its folk culture and voodoo, she wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).
Charismatic Janie Crawford returns to Eatonville in the early 20th century. While the town’s women gossip and its men gawk, Pheoby Watson welcomes her friend and learns of Janie’s life since leaving for Jacksonville with her much-younger paramour, Tea Cake. The novel then switches to flashback. Raised by her grandmother, a former slave named Nanny, Janie was forced to marry Logan, who treats her poorly. She leaves, then marries the scheming Jody, who takes her to Eatonville. He becomes a wealthy landowner and mayor. Ambitious, he treats Janie as if he owns her. Upon Jody’s death, she meets the flirtatious Tea Cake, with whom she falls in love; they marry and move to the Everglades. Tea Cake, infected with rabies after a dog bite, goes insane, and Janie is forced to make an awful choice.
Their Eyes Were Watching God puts gender front and center. Janie’s interaction with men drives the novel’s plot, from her first kiss and sexual awakening as a young girl, which propels Nanny to marry her off to Logan, to her final act of mercy with Tea Cake and subsequent trial with an all-male, all-white jury. Janie refuses to settle in the way Nanny—whose rape produced Janie’s mother—wants her to. She holds out for genuine love but doesn’t find it until she meets Tea Cake, when she’s in her forties. Both Logan and Jody wish Janie would fulfill a stereotypical role of wife, subjugating her desires to those of her husbands’. Even Tea Cake, who gives Janie some leeway to develop her own identity, still whips her.
Drawing on her academic training as an anthropologist, Hurston wrote in the vernacular forms of speech she grew up hearing; this approach helps give her characters distinct identities. She mixes those voices with a more traditional, dispassionate narrative one. While Jody literally attempts to prevent Janie from speaking, it is Janie’s voice we hear telling the story of her hardships and ultimate empowerment.
Hurston’s own story has become the stuff of literary legend. In the 1940s and 1950s, she had such trouble getting her writing published that she began working as a maid. The 1960s witnessed a great shift in literary trends, elevating works that had a distinct political slant, so Hurston’s output fell further into obscurity. In 1973, Alice Walker discovered Hurston’s grave in Florida, with her name spelled incorrectly. She paid for a new headstone, including the epitaph “A Genius of the South,” and wrote an essay for Ms. magazine about the experience as well as the significance of Hurston’s legacy. Walker’s “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” rebooted Hurston’s career, and Their Eyes Were Watching God breathes on.
A 2017 paperback edition of Things Fall Apart, originally published in 1958.
Chinua Achebe was born in Ogidi, Nigeria, in 1930. While he wrote Things Fall Apart in English, he weaved in Igbo words in a nod to the Igbo culture of storytelling.
A promotional poster for Things Fall Apart.
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THINGS FALL APART
Chinua Achebe · 1958
Things fall apart,” writes William Butler Yeats in his 1919 poem “The Second Coming.” The verse continues, “[T]he centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned.” With its forceful imagery of chaos and destruction, the poem makes a fitting source of inspiration for Things Fall Apart (1958), a powerfully influential novel about the effects of colonialism in Africa, and perhaps the continent’s most important literary work of the 20th century.
As Things Fall Apart begins, Okonkwo lives in an 1890s-era Nigerian village, where he earns respect and renown as a wrestler, then prospers as a farmer. He embodies many masculine ideals, in contrast to his eldest son, Nwoye, who strikes Okonkwo as shiftless. Ikemefuna, a prisoner from a neighboring village, lives with Okonkwo and grows close to the family, but Okonkwo doesn’t hesitate to slay him when the time comes to carry out Ikemefuna’s death sentence. After accidentally killing someone else, Okonkwo and his family are forced to move to the village of Mbanta. Here, missionaries are spreading religion, colonizers are imposing a different government, and the community is starting to pull apart.
The novel dramatizes several conflicts. Okonkwo represents indigenous beliefs and rituals, and much of the book concerns the manner in which Okonkwo fulfills or breaks accepted societal norms. He largely subscribes to the rules of his clan, even if that means violence and exile. Nwoye, in
contrast, feels troubled by some of these behaviors, such as the society’s sanctioned murder of infants, and he abandons the faith of his ancestors to join the Christians. The gentle missionary Mr. Brown builds a school and a hospital, helping to usher in modernity, but his replacement, Reverend Smith, encourages divisiveness and foments trouble within the clan. Things cannot stay the same, given the external pressures coming to bear on the indigenous culture, but they cannot change in exactly the way the hubristic foreigners wish them to, either.
Albert Chinụalụmọgụ Achebe was born in 1930 in Ogidi, a town in southeastern Nigeria, where he was exposed to Igbo oral traditions as well as his parents’ Protestant faith. Over the course of his career, he wrote four other novels, one memoir, and various books for children, and in 2007 he won a Man Booker Prize for lifetime achievement. In 1975, Achebe published an impassioned analysis of Heart of Darkness (1899), in which he called Joseph Conrad a “bloody racist,” fundamentally altering the reception of that work. Achebe taught at various universities in the United States, and died in 2013. In a plot straight out of fiction, Nigerian American novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was raised in a house once inhabited by Achebe on the University of Nigeria’s campus. She, like many other writers in Africa and the African diaspora, considers Achebe to be an enormous source of inspiration.
Somewhat controversially, Achebe opted to write Things Fall Apart, his debut novel, in English rather than Igbo, in part because it was the colonizer’s language. Making one’s message heard means speaking, or writing, so that your audience can understand you. But he incorporated many Igbo words into his text, a nod to the depth and richness of Igbo storytelling and language, as well as his story’s geographic setting and characters’ heritage. At the same time, the spread of English throughout Nigeria gave Nigerians a shared language across clans and cultures, so Achebe’s use of English enabled the colonized to read the work as well, thereby expanding the novel’s readership. And read it has been, widely taught and greatly admired throughout the world.
A letter from author Herman Melville to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, dated October 25, 1852.
Mothers, Lovers, and BFFs
RELATIONSHIPS AMONG WRITERS
IN CONTRAST TO THE MYTH of the lonely artist toiling away in a bare garret, writers are just as social as the rest of the human race. They need friends, lovers, parents, siblings, and neighbors, both for companionship and to serve as sounding boards and spurs to greater accomplishments than could be achieved alone. Here are just a few of the many relationships writers have relied on.
THE FAMILY THAT COMPOSES TOGETHER
Being a part of a literary family no doubt gives some writers a head start when it comes to creative endeavors. As children, the Brontës—sisters Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, and brother Branwell—created fictional worlds, which they wrote about in their self-published literary magazines. Later, as adults, the three women jointly published a book of poetry, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846), and Charlotte and Emily separately published the canonical novels Jane Eyre (1847) and Wuthering Heights (1847).
Prizewinning poet and novelist Nick Laird sometimes claims he set Zadie Smith on her path to stardom when he accepted her short story for inclusion in an anthology he was working on while both were students at Cambridge University. Nowadays the pair is married with children. Stephen King also married a fellow writer he met while an undergraduate, and has joked that he fell for her in large part because she owned a typewriter. Of their three children, two have followed in their parents’ footsteps and published novels. In addition, for about 20 years King periodically played in a band called the Rock Bottom Remainders with other writers, including Dave Barry and Amy Tan.
WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE
Ernest Hemingway drew on the experiences, ennui, and anomie of his expat friends, a group Gertrude Stein dubbed “the lost generation,” to write The Sun Also Rises (1926), with F. Scott Fitzgerald offering suggestions and edits. After a while, their friendship went south, culminating in a likely fictionalized scene in the memoir A Moveable Feast (1964), in which Hemingway tries to reassure his former friend and mentor about his genitals by telling him to compare them to statues at the Louvre. Let’s hope the relationship stays better between pals George R. R. Martin and Diana Gabaldon, who share the unusual experience of writing an ongoing series of novels even as their imaginative universes get tweaked and altered for the popular television shows Game of Thrones and Outlander.
Dandy Truman Capote became best friends with tomboyish Harper Lee when they lived next door to one another as young children in the small town of Monroeville, Alabama. As Capote would remark during an interview some years later, the two of them often felt like “apart people.” Lee allegedly based the character of Dill, Scout’s best friend in To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), on Capote. She traveled with him to do research for his true-crime masterpiece In Cold Blood (1966), a contribution he recognized via that book’s acknowledgments. Nevertheless, she felt her assistance merited more gratitude, and their friendship suffered from jealousy and competitiveness. Childhood friends Kathryn Stockett and Tate Taylor, meanwhile, have managed to maintain their closeness into maturity. They met in nursery school in Jackson, Mississippi, and when they grew up Taylor directed the film version of his chum’s megasuccessful book The Help (2009).
Harper Lee and Truman Capote, photographed in New York City in 1976;
the Inklings were an informal writing group that met for 16 years at Oxford University, and had such esteemed members as C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien.
American literary titans Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne didn’t meet until adulthood, but they did so in suitably dramatic fashion, on a mountain during a thunderstorm—they were coincidentally living just a few miles apart from one another in western Massachusetts in 1850 and joined a hike and picnic organized by mutual acquaintances. Their bond grew so rapidly that Melville dedicated Moby-Dick to Hawthorne the next year. Later in the 19th century, another set of icons became neighbors when Mark Twain settled in Hartford, Connecticut, right next door to Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) had made her one of the most famous writers of the period. The two would often visit one another across their adjoining lawns, and it was here that Twain wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Little Women (1868–1869) author Louisa May Alcott not only also had a famous writer as a close neighbor—Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose library she regularly raided when growing up—but her schoolteacher was Henry David Thoreau, who by then had moved back into town from Walden Pond, the site made famous by his Walden: or, Life in the Woods (1854).
AT SCHOOL AND AT WORK
Schools have brought together numerous writers. C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien were introduced at a faculty meeting at Oxford, and although Lewis noted in his diary that day that Tolkien “needs a smack or so,” the two grew to be friends as well as collaborators in the effort to get fantasy literature taken seriously. As a young girl, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie moved into a house on the University of Nigeria’s campus recently vacated by Chinua Achebe, and she has emphasized the importance of the elder Nigerian writer on her development. Bret Easton Ellis and Donna Tartt had an even more direct university connection, as they were two of only three students in a writing seminar at Bennington College in the early 1980s, where they each began the debut novels that would make them famous: Less Than Zero (1985) and The Secret History (1992), respectively. Kurt Vonnegut and John Irving likewise shared a classroom, with the former teaching the latter at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the 1960s. When Vonnegut died in 2007, Irving reminisced, “The only criticism he ever made of my writing was making fun of my fondness for semicolons, which Kurt never liked very much. He called semicolons ‘transvestite hermaphrodites.’” Vonnegut helped Irving see how a writer might be “both funny and kind,” even while describing humanity’s worst impulses.
Then-editor Toni Morrison me
t James Baldwin when she tried to sign him to a book deal. That didn’t work out, but the two became friends, and on Baldwin’s death, Morrison wrote a reminiscence that eloquently captures the power of close relationships among writers: “I discover that in your company it is myself I know.… You gave me a language to dwell in, a gift so perfect it seems my own invention. I have been thinking your spoken and written thoughts for so long I believed they were mine.”
A 2006 cover of This Present Darkness.
Author Frank Peretti is often lauded for reinventing Christian fiction with his writing.
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THIS PRESENT DARKNESS
Frank E. Peretti · 1986
Many of the first printed texts were religious works. Fiction—with its emphasis on story-line, character development, and description—became a natural medium for exploring religious themes, with early novels like The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) giving readers a great dose of story with a healthy dollop of message. Frank E. Peretti continues the tradition of marrying spiritual belief with literary techniques in This Present Darkness (1986), his first novel for adults.