Jessamyn West

Mary Jessamyn West (born July 18, 1902 in Vernon , Indiana , † February 23, 1984 in Napa , California ) was an American writer , who was best known for the short story collection The Friendly Persuasion .

Life

The daughter of a lemon farmer studied after school at Whittier College , which she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1923 . After marrying a school administrator, she later took postgraduate studies at the University of Oxford in 1929 and at the University of California at Berkeley , which she did not graduate.

Jessamyn West, who was also involved in the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), made her writing debut in 1945 with the publication of The Friendly Persuasion , a collection of short stories published in 1956 was filmed by William Wyler under the title Alluring Temptation .

After the novel The Witch Diggers (1951) and the short story collection Cress Delahanty (1953), her memoirs appeared for the first time in 1957 under the title To See the Dream . In 1958 she worked again with the film director William Wyler as a screenwriter for his film Weites Land .

This was followed by the non-fiction book Love Is Not What You Think (1959), the novel A Matter of Time (1966) and Except for Me and Thee (1969), before she published another volume of her memoirs, Hide and Seek (1973). In 1974 Jessamyn West published the anthology The Secret Look , which was followed by an autobiography in 1976 with The Woman Said Yes: Encounters with Life and Death . The book Double Discovery: A Journey (1980) also has autobiographical traits.

Most recently, she published the short story volume Collected Stories posthumously in 1986 .

Web links

• Jessamyn West in nndb (English)

Background literature

• Alfred S. Shivers: Jessamyn West , Boston (Twayne), 1972 (reprint 1992)
• Ann Dahlstrom Farmer / Philip M. O'Brien: Jessamyn West: A Descriptive and Annotated Bibliography , Lanham (Scarecrow Press), 1998