Grace King - Böcker

Not as well-known as some of her contemporaries- Mark Twain, George W. Cable, and Joel Chandler Harris, to name a few- author and historian Grace King (1851- 1932) was nonetheless highly praised in her own right. She garnered attention from such eminent critics as William Dean Howells, and her work frequently appeared in Harper's and Century Magazine. She published thirteen volumes of fiction, history, biography, and memoir. What contributed to King's critical acclaim, and her continued importance across time, was the panoramic view of social and historical New Orleans that she captured in her writing. She was, scholar Robert Bush argues, one of the most talented and perceptive citizens of New Orleans during the post- Civil War period.In pursuing an intellectual career, King broke with many Old South traditions. She embraced Anglo-Saxon and Creole French cultures. Much of her work is especially interesting for the way in which her view of the southern temper and cultural contribution supplemented that of other writers of the period. In his introduction, Bush analyzes the breadth of King's work, leading the reader on a biographical journey that clearly establishes King as an important symbol of a bygone era. He then offers selections that cover the full range of her writing: chapters from her autobiography, Memories of a Southern Woman of Letters; her major short fiction, including five uncollected stories and the best of her Balcony Stories; a large portion of The Pleasant Ways of St. Médard, a novel about life during Reconstruction; sections from her historical writings, including New Orleans: The Place and the People; a series of biographical sketches of Mark Twain and others; excerpts from her notebooks; and a group of more than twenty letters. Grace King of New Orleans offers readers a nuanced understanding of King's impressions of the people and places of New Orleans as well as southern life and culture.

"The past is our only real possession in life. It is the one piece of property of which time cannot deprive us; it is our own in a way that nothing else is. It never leaves our consciousness. In a word we are our past; we do not cling to it, it clings to us," wrote Grace King at the close of her remarkable career. Historian, novelist, essayist, short story writer, and friend or acquaintance of many of the period's leading literary figures, King chronicles life in the transitional world of postbellum New Orleans. A realist in the Jamesian manner, her work thematically centers on giving voice to the displaced, marginalized women of the Old Order South. Her avowed patrician orthodoxies are at times in conflict with her artistic commitment to truth-telling, and her work reveals the ironies and tensions in her dual roles as a southern woman and a writer.Her popular stories were first collected in book form in 1893 after originally appearing in Century magazine. Dedicated to her mother, a "charming raconteuse," the tales pay homage to all storytelling, story-loving women who give value and meaning to workaday lives through the life-defining intimacies of shaping and sharing stories.