Mary Jane Ward

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Mary Jane Ward (born August 27, 1905 in Fairmount , Indiana , † February 17, 1981 , in Tucson , Arizona ) was an American writer. She gained popularity through her novel The Snake Pit.

Life

Mary Jane Ward was born from the marriage of Claude Arthur Ward and Marion Ward, b. Lockridge. About the family of her mother she was a cousin of the writer Ross Franklin Lockridge, Jr. (born April 25, 1914, † March 6, 1948 by suicide ), the author of the novel Raintree County filmed by the director Edward Dmytryk .

Ward showed an interest in music and the arts in childhood. In 1915 the family moved to Evanston, Illinois . At the age of fourteen she played works by Schumann and Grieg as well as her own compositions. In 1923 she finished attending Evanston Township High School and studied English until 1925 at Northwestern University and then for a year at the Lyceum of Arts Conservatory in Chicago . After graduating from the conservatory, she took on various odd jobs .

In March 1928, Mary Jane Ward and statistician Edward Quayle married, who wrote plays in his spare time . This activity inspired the wife to start writing and publishing short stories herself. In 1937 Mary Jane Ward took a job as a literary critic ; in the same year her novel The Tree Has Roots was published . In 1938 she published the novel The Wax Apple. Both publications were unsuccessful.

In 1939 the couple moved to Greenwich Village , plagued by financial worries. They caused an acute stress reaction in Mary Jane Ward which, after admission, led to an eight month stay at Rockland State Hospital in Orangeburg, New York . The - probably incorrect - diagnosis was schizophrenia , the treatment of which was to be achieved by hot baths and electric shocks . Based on her experiences in psychiatry , Ward wrote the semi-autobiographical novel The Snake Pit , published in 1946. The publication sparked lively reactions from literary critics and psychiatry experts. The director Anatole Litvak made a film based on the motifs of the novel in 1948, which was shown in Germany under the title The Snake Pit .

After this success, the couple settled on a farm near Chicago . In the period up to her death in 1981, another three visits to a psychiatric hospital were required.

reception

Ward's novel, The Snake Pit , generated sales of more than one hundred thousand dollars for the publisher Random House in the first month after it appeared in 1946 . This release, and the 1948 film The Snake Pit, led to reforms in mental hospitals.

See also

bibliography

  • The snake pit. Random, New York 1946
    • German edition: The snake pit. Translated by Walter Firner and Bertie Panitz. Keyser, Heidelberg 1950
    • Snake pit . New edition with revised translation. Berlin 2020, ISBN 978–3–945980–47–7 pdf
  • The Professor's Umbrella. 1948
  • A Little Night Music. 1951
  • It's different for a woman. 1952
  • Counterclockwise. Henry Regnery, Chicago 1969
  • The Other Caroline. 1970
    • German edition: The other Caroline. Translated by Hans Erik Hausner. Kremayr & Scheriau, Vienna 1972

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Mugar Library, Boston University : Mary Jane Ward biography.
  2. ^ Nick Clooney: The Movies That Changed Us. Reflections on the screen. Simon & Schuster, New York 2002, p. 143.
personal data
SURNAME Ward, Mary Jane
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH August 27, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Fairmount , Indiana
DATE OF DEATH 17th February 1981
Place of death Tucson , Arizona