May Sarton

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May Sarton (born May 3, 1912 in Wondelgem , Belgium as Eleanore Marie Sarton ; † July 16, 1995 in York (Maine) , United States ) was an American novelist , poet and diary author .

Life

May Sarton was born as the daughter of the Belgian-American science historian George Sarton and the British artist Mabel Elwes in the Belgian village of Wondelgem, which later became a district of Ghent . In 1914, when the First World War broke out, she moved with her parents to England , and one year later to the United States. In 1924 she received US citizenship. She spent her childhood in Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts . From 1917 to 1926 she attended the Shady Hill School in Cambridge, interrupted by a year of study at the Institut Belge de Culture Française in Belgium, and then until 1929 the Cambridge High and Latin School . At the age of 17 she published sonnets in Poetry Magazine .

Initially, Sarton aspired to a career as a stage actress. She attended the Gloucester School of the Little Theater summer school . From 1929 to 1933 she was trained at Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory Theater in New York. She then founded and directed the Apprentice Theater (later renamed the Associated Actors Theater ). At the same time she appeared in four plays at the Civic Repertory Theater and in 1933 as a substitute for Gallienne in Alice in Wonderland on Broadway. The Associated Actors Theater closed around 1936, partly due to the Great Depression and Sarton's selection of hard-to-reach plays.

After the end of her theater career, Sarton devoted herself more to writing, traveled regularly to Europe until the beginning of the Second World War and took various positions as a teacher. From 1937 to 1942 she taught creative writing at the Stuart School in Boston . She then worked briefly as a screenwriter for the Overseas Film Unit of the Office of War Information in New York. Among other things, she was involved in the script for the short film Hymn of the Nations . From 1949 to 1952 she was at Harvard University Briggs-Copeland Instructor in English Composition , from 1960 to 1964 lecturer in creative writing at Wellesley College . She taught as a visiting professor at numerous other American universities.

In 1937 Sarton published her first volume of poetry, Encounter In April . Sarton wrote numerous novels, poems and, in the last third of her life, diaries, which are considered the most important part of her oeuvre . They are about loneliness, love, death, homosexuality , their love for nature (especially flowers), the joys and sorrows of artistic creation. Since the 1960s, most of her books have been published by the New York publisher WW Norton & Company . As a feminist and lesbian author, she had a predominantly female and increasingly enthusiastic readership, but was ignored by official criticism throughout her life. Perhaps this explains in part why very few of her works have been translated into German to date. May Sarton did not see herself as a lesbian writer, but emphasized the universal aspiration of her work.

May Sarton had numerous lesbian relationships, the longest of which was with Judy Matlack, whom she met in Santa Fe (New Mexico) in 1945 and with whom she lived until 1956. The controversial biography May Sarton (Ballantine Books, USA) by Margot Peters, published in 1998, describes Sarton as a difficult person who struggled throughout his life in interpersonal and intimate relationships.

Sarton developed breast cancer in 1979 , and suffered strokes in 1986 and 1995 . Despite her health problems, she continued to work and travel. She published her last novel, The Education of Harriet Hatfield , in the 1980s , followed by a few volumes of poetry and her last diaries, which, increasingly weakened by the disease, she had dictated with the help of a recording device. In 1995 she died of breast cancer at the age of 83. Her most recent diary, At Eighty-two: A Journal , was published posthumously.

Awards and grants

Works

Poems

  • Encounter in April. Houghton, Boston 1937.
  • Inner landscape. Houghton, Boston 1939.
  • The Lion and the Rose. Rinehart, Boulder 1948.
  • The Land of Silence. Rinehart, Boulder 1953.
  • In Time like Air. Rinehart, Boulder 1958.
  • Cloud, Stone, Suit, Vine. Norton, New York 1961.
  • A Private Mythology. Norton, New York 1966.
  • As Does New Hampshire. Richard R. Smith, 1967.
  • A Grain of Mustard Seed. Norton, New York 1971.
  • A durable fire. Norton, New York 1972.
  • Collected Poems: 1930-1973. Norton, New York 1974.
  • Selected Poems. Norton, New York 1978.
  • Halfway to Silence. Norton, New York 1980.
  • Letters from Maine: New Poems. Norton, New York 1984.
  • Honey in the Hive: Judith Matlack, 1898-1982. Warren, Boston 1988.
  • The Silence Now: New and Uncollected Earlier Poems. Norton, New York 1988.
  • Collected Poems: 1930-1993. Norton, New York 1993.
  • Coming into Eighty. Norton, New York 1994.

Novels

  • The Single Hound (1938)
  • The Bridge of Years (1946)
  • The Return of Corporal Greene (1946)
  • Shadow of a Man (1950)
  • A Shower of Summer Days (1952)
  • Faithful are the Wounds (1955)
  • The Birth of a Grandfather (1957)
  • The Fur Person (1957)
  • The Small Room (1961)
  • Joanna and Ulysses (1963)
  • Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (1965)
  • Miss Pickthorn and Mr. Hare (1966)
  • The Poet and the Donkey (1969)
  • Kinds of Love (1970)
  • As We Are Now (1973)
  • Crucial Conversations (1975)
  • A Reckoning (1978)
  • Anger (1982)
  • The Magnificent Spinster (1985)
  • The Education of Harriet Hatfield (1989)

Diaries

  • I Knew a Phoenix: Sketches for an Autobiography. (1959) The Women's Press Ltd; Edition: New edition 1995, ISBN 978-0704343924 .
  • Plant Dreaming Deep. (1968) WW Norton & Company New York; Edition: Reissue 1996, ISBN 978-0393315516 .
  • Journal of a Solitude. (1973) WW Norton & Company New York; Edition: Reissue 1993, ISBN 978-0393309287 .
  • A World of Light. Norton, New York 1976, ISBN 0-39307-506-0 .
  • The House by the Sea - A Journal. WW Norton & Company, New York 1977, ISBN 978-0393075182 .
  • Recovering: A Journal. Norton, New York 1980, ISBN 0-39301-402-9 .
  • At Seventy: A Journal. (1984) WW Norton & Company New York, 1993, ISBN 9780393310306 .
  • After the stroke. (1988) WW Norton & Company New York; Edition: 1st Edition (1998) ISBN 978-0393025330 .
  • Endgame: A Journal of the Seventy-Ninth Year. (1992) WW Norton & Company New York; 1996.
  • Encore: A Journal of the Eightieth Year. (1993) WW Norton & Company New York; Edition: 1st Edition, ISBN 978-0393035292 .
  • At Eighty-Two: A Journal. (1996) WW Norton & Company New York; Edition: Reprint 1997, ISBN 978-0393316223 .

Translations into German

  • A settlement. Women's offensive, Munich 1985, ISBN 3-88104-146-X .
  • Mrs. Stevens hears the mermaids sing. Women's offensive, Munich 1980, ISBN 3-88104-087-0 .
  • Johanna and Odysseus. Krüger Verlag, Hamburg 1966.
  • Little gentleman in fur. A. Müller, Rüschlikon-Zurich 1959.
  • Bridge of Years. Kindler et al. Schiermeyer, Bad Wörishofen 1951.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements, Isobel Grundy: The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Batsford, London 1990, ISBN 0-7134-5848-8 , accessed from the British Biographical Archive, p. 150.
  2. ↑ a b at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University ( Memento from November 9, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
  3. ^ May Sarton poetryfoundation.org, accessed March 7, 2014.
  4. ^ John Simon Guggenheim Foundation - May Sarton. In: gf.org. Retrieved February 12, 2016 .
  5. ↑ May Sarton Papers archives.nypl.org, accessed March 7, 2014.
personal data
SURNAME Sarton, May
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sarton, Eleanore Marie
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH May 3, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Wondelgem , Belgium
DATE OF DEATH July 16, 1995
Place of death York (Maine) , United States