Mary Roberts Rinehart
Mary Ella Roberts Rinehart (born August 12, 1876 in Pittsburgh , † September 22, 1958 in New York City ) was an American writer and journalist . She is considered to be one of the best known and most commercially successful authors of her time, who marketed her work with great skill. 1910 her novel was The Man in Lower Ten (dt .: The man in number ten ) as the first detective novel in the US year-seller list. He finished fourth, her romance novel When a Man Marries , published at the same time, was 10th on this list.
Rinehart became known through a large number of novels and short stories , some of which were performed with great success on Broadway . Her stories are shaped, among other things, by her experiences as a nurse. Today only her crime stories, which are still influenced by Victorian sensational literature, are of literary historical interest. Her most famous creation was Letitia "Tish" Carberry , but one of her protagonists is also the nurse Hilda Adams, who solves criminal cases together with a former patient.
Life
Family and childhood
Mary Ella was the daughter of retailer Thomas Roberts and his wife Cornelia Gilleland. Both the maternal and paternal families were of Irish-Scottish descent. In North America, the Gillelands family had come to some prosperity as farmers, members of the Roberts family pursued typical occupations of the middle class and often earned their living teaching or preaching. At the time of Mary Ella's birth, the married couple Thomas and Cornelia Roberts were still living in the house of Margaret Mawhinney Roberts, Thomas' mother. It was not until 1880, when their second daughter was born, that the couple moved into their own house. Thomas Roberts ran his own small company that sold sewing machines until 1887, but then had to give up the company due to economic failure and then worked as a representative. For the family, this meant that they had to forego the amenities that were typical of a middle-class family: the maid was fired, the daughters of the Roberts family no longer received piano lessons and had to share a bedroom because one of the children's rooms was rented out her mother took up sewing to help with household income.
Education, marriage and first successes as a writer
Rinehart was an avid reader even as a girl; she did not excel at school, but wrote for the school magazine, among other things. As a 15-year-old she had already published three short stories in a local magazine for one US dollar each. In 1893 she trained as a nurse with the American Red Cross at the local hospital; During this time she gained a lot of experience with poisons , which later played a role in her works. She had achieved her career choice against her parents' wishes. Although Florence Nightingale tried to establish the nursing profession as an accepted career choice for middle-class women as early as the 1860s, it was still considered a questionable choice. In fact, right from the start of her training, Rinehart was confronted with prostitutes, people who had suffered serious accidents at work in the Pittsburgh steelworks, alcoholics and drug addicts, cared for victims of a local typhus epidemic and people who were marked by venereal diseases such as syphilis, which was then incurable .
In November 1895, Rinehart's father shot himself in a hotel room: In her narrative work, Rinehart often describes the disrespectful and non-privacy-respecting behavior of press people. Dubose attributes this to Rinehart's own experience when reporters besieged the Roberts' house after the suicide. A few months later, in Pittsburgh, Mary Roberts married Stanley Marshall Rinehart, a young doctor from Maine. With him she had three sons, Stanley Junior (* 1897), Alan (* 1900) and Ted (* 1902). During her first pregnancy , she was forced to take a break from nursing; she used the time to write more little stories. The family later moved to Bar Harbor , Maine , where her husband got a job as chief medical officer. Rinehart later portrayed these years in public as a time in which she was filled with the new role of mother and housewife. A biography written for her sons, which she wrote towards the end of her life, paints a different picture, however: Rinehart was deeply unhappy and freely admitted how much envy she felt for her husband's wealthy patients. Dubose points out that although Rinehart felt materially comfortable living as a member of the middle class, he did not find this already satisfactory. It is true that Rinehart's husband lost the fortune saved up until then due to an unfortunate development in stock market prices in 1904 and the couple was briefly in debt with USD 12,000. Dubose, however, considers the story, which Rinehart later spread repeatedly, that she turned to writing in order to save her own family from financial ruin, as far exaggerated. Rinehart began to publish poems and short stories in newspapers and magazines even before the stock market loss, while Stanley Marshall Rinehart earned enough as a respected doctor to make up for this loss of wealth. With the self-portrayal as the faithful and loyal wife and mother who devotes herself to writing only out of necessity, Rinehart used the image of a life plan that was accepted by the public and actually applied to a number of earlier Victorian women writers such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon .
The first crime novels
Rineharts first longer story The Man in Lower Ten (dt .: The man in number ten ) appeared in 1906 as a serial in a magazine. Two years later she published her best-known work, the detective novel The Circular Staircase (Eng .: The Spiral Staircase ) as a book. Here, too, she created the popular romantic legend that she only made the step from occasional short story writer to novelist because an uncle discovered her draft novel by chance and, after long resistance, persuaded her to look for a publisher for it together with her husband. Because a novel by Anna Katharine Green, published by the publisher Bobbs-Merrill, happened to be on the bookshelf, the choice fell on this publisher. Dubose points out that this story does not stand up to factual examination either. Rinehart had previously looked for a publisher for another work, offered the crime thriller to a newspaper as a series and had previously been in contact with the publisher.
With The Circular Staircase it is considered the inventor Had I But Known (dt .: Had-I-just-know that ... ) novels, and the immortal phrase thriller "The butler's it." The detective novel received positive reviews and a year later Bobbs-Merrill also published the novel The Man in Lower Ten , which had previously only appeared as a newspaper series . This was the first crime novel to be on a US bestseller list. In 1910, Rinehart created the immensely popular figure of Letitia “Tish” Carberry , who let her experience adventures, big and small, which according to social etiquette were actually forbidden to women of this era. The success also paid off financially. The Rineharts moved to a larger house, increased the number of their servants, bought a large automobile, and enrolled their sons in private schools. Her stories about various nurses who got into work-related and private turmoil were also successful. With Hilda Adams , alias "Miss Pinkerton", she created a nurse figure in 1914 who also solves criminal cases.
Established author
During the First World War , Mary Rinehart was employed in England as a reporter for the Saturday Evening Post . She came to the front through the Belgian Red Cross and wrote about their impressions and events. After returning to the United States, she returned to literature . Her novel Lost Ecstasy (1927) was so successful that the film producer Louis B. Mayer bought the rights from the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) film studio for $ 15,000. The film was released under the name I take this woman (1931) in the leading roles Gary Cooper and Carole Lombard . In 1929 her sons, Stanley Jr. and Ted, founded Farrar & Rinehart with their friend John Chipman Farrar ; and Mary Roberts Rinehart was one of the earliest writers. In the years that followed, her husband became more and more ill with arthritis and resigned as chief surgeon . In his private clinic he specialized in the early detection and control of tuberculosis . In 1920, the family moved to Washington, DC , where her husband for medical adviser to the United States Army Medical Corps of the US government was appointed. He died in 1932 and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. In 1934, Mary Roberts Rinehart suffered a heart attack and moved from Washington to New York City a year later. During the summer months, she spent most of her time in her Farview summer home in Bar Harbor, which she had bought in 1937. Here she hosted dinner parties and other social events. In the early 1950s, doctors diagnosed her with breast cancer . In the women's magazine Ladies' Home Journal , Rinehart first wrote about the taboo subject and advocated a statutory early cancer screening program in the United States. Mary Ella Rinehart died of complications from another heart attack. For her service as first war correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post during World War I and for her advocacy for women's rights, Rinehart was honored with a burial site in Arlington National Cemetery in Washington. She was buried next to her husband.
Awards
- 1923 Honorary Doctorate in Literature from George Washington University in Washington, DC
- 1952 Special Award from the Mystery Writers of America
Others
- In Robert Siodmak's film The Spiral Staircase (1945, dt .: The spiral staircase ) were Rineharts book The Circular Staircase (1908) and elements from the novel Some Must Watch by Ethel Lina White mixed.
- At the end of the 1940s, her Filipino chef, Reyes, who had been employed by the Rineharts since 1922 , tried to murder her with a pistol - luckily the breechblock was jammed. Rinehart was able to flee to the kitchen, where they found their maid Peggy and Theodore Falkenstrom, their chauffeur . They were able to take the gun from Reyes, and when the police arrived, he was arrested. The next day, Reyes was found hanged in his cell; Rinehart paid for his funeral.
- Mary Roberts Rinehart is often compared to the British writer Agatha Christie (1890–1976).
classification
Martha Hailey Dubose calls Mary Roberts Rinehart the first female superstar in crime fiction. She was fortunate to live in a time when crime fiction was changing from a sub-genre of sensationalism to one of the most profitable segments of popular fiction and was able to take advantage of this. However, she did not see herself as a crime fiction writer, but attached great importance to being classified as a serious commentator on social developments, as a journalist and novelist. Dubose points out, however, that from the extensive work of literary history only her detective novels are of interest today. She developed a form of detective story that owed more to Victorian sensational literature than to the cool rationalism of an Anna Katharine Green or an Arthur Conan Doyle . Literature Scientifically it is however treated in the history of detective fiction rather than marginal figure: She invented no protagonist, who is an investigative worked in the real sense, their criminal history are seldom not reliably solved rationally, but in the investigation of the case play chance, intuition and even spiritism a Role.
Dubose grants her such a great literary talent that it would have been enough to become a writer that shaped her time. Dubose goes on to judge, however, that in a kind of Faustian pact she would have subordinated her talent to a literary focus on commercial success. She ignored the advice that the then largely unknown Willa Cather gave her, namely that for high-quality writing it was necessary to critically revise her own work again and again before publication. A characteristic of her early stories in particular was a quickly written down story that was published as soon as possible without any revision. That she was also able to write better quality, she proved with her first novel The Man in the Lower Ten .
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Novels and plays
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Series
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Collections of short stories
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literature
- Sybil Downing: Crown of Life: The Story of Mary Roberts Rinehart , Roberts Rinehart Pub (2001) ISBN 978-1-879-37313-6
- Jan Cohn: Improbable Fiction: The Life of Mary Roberts Rinehart , Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. (2005) ISBN 0-8229-5912-7
- Martha Hailey Dubose: Women of Mystery - The Lives and Works of Notable Women Crime Novelists . Thomas Dunne Books, New York 2011, ISBN 9780312276553 .
Web links
- Literature by and about Mary Roberts Rinehart in the catalog of the German National Library
- Mary Roberts Rinehart in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Munzinger.de - Mary Roberts Rinehart
- Biography, literature & sources for Mary Roberts Rinehart FemBio of the Institute for Women's Biography Research
- Mary Roberts Rinehart (private website, English)
- Mary Roberts Rinehart (private website)
- Mary Roberts Rinehart on Project Gutenberg
- Mary Roberts Rinehart on Internet Archive
Single receipts
- ↑ Martha Hailey Dubose: Women of Mystery , p. 35.
- ↑ Martha Hailey Dubose: Women of Mystery , p. 20
- ↑ Martha Hailey Dubose: Women of Mystery , pp. 21 and 24
- ↑ Martha Hailey Dubose: Women of Mystery , p. 24.
- ↑ Martha Hailey Dubose: Women of Mystery , p. 21
- ↑ Martha Hailey Dubose: Women of Mystery , p. 27.
- ↑ Martha Hailey Dubose: Women of Mystery , p. 29.
- ↑ Martha Hailey Dubose: Women of Mystery , p. 32.
- ↑ Martha Hailey Dubose: Women of Mystery , p. 33.
- ↑ Martha Hailey Dubose: Women of Mystery , p. 34.
- ↑ Martha Hailey Dubose: Women of Mystery , p. 18
- ↑ Martha Hailey Dubose: Women of Mystery , p. 18
- ↑ Martha Hailey Dubose: Women of Mystery , p. 18. In the original Dubose wrote: ... at some point early in her career, Mary Roberts Rindhart appears to have made a Faustian bargain: her talent in exchange for commercial popularity and its concomitant rewards and blessings.
- ↑ Martha Hailey Dubose: Women of Mystery , p. 32
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Roberts Rinehart, Mary |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Roberts, Mary (maiden name); Roberts, Mary Ella (maiden name); Roberts Rinehart, Mary Ella (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American writer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | August 12, 1876 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Pittsburgh |
| DATE OF DEATH | September 22, 1958 |
| Place of death | New York City |