Nell Kimball

Nell Kimball (born June 14, 1854 , Illinois , USA ; † 1934 , USA) is said to have been an American prostitute and author. Nell Kimball is a pseudonym, her maiden name is unknown. Her memoir, allegedly written in 1932, was published by Stephen Longstreet in 1970 . As early as 1972 doubts were expressed about the authenticity of the memoir. The book first appeared in a German-language edition in 1972.

Life

The following life story is essentially based on the information in her memoir and should therefore be treated with caution:

Kimball grew up on a farm in poor conditions from 1854. The closest reference person was a sister of the mother, a former prostitute , who spent her old age here. At the age of 15, she ran away with a Civil War veteran who ruled her and soon left. She then applied to a brothel , using her aunt as a reference. Later she lived in a middle-class family as an endured lover, then as the wife of a bank robber or a safe-cracker, then as a single widow. After the death of her husband, who was murdered, and the death of her child, she returned to her previous life. However, with the money of her wealthy husband, she was able to make a career as a madam, the then name for a brothel operator . She ran her first brothel on Basin Street in New Orleans. She had to close this in 1998 when a prostitute killed a client in self-defense. She then opened another in San Francisco, but returned to Storyville , New Orleans in 1901 .

This, her last brothel, she closed in 1917 when prostitution was banned in New Orleans during the First World War . In the Great Depression , she lost her fortune and tried to open up with the publication of her memoirs a new income. She took the name Nell Kimball after 1917, her real name is unknown.

According to legend, the manuscript came into the possession of Stephen Longstreet as early as 1932 , who was supposed to bring the work to a publisher. At that time it seemed too disreputable and scandalous to publish and he could not convince a publisher to have the work printed. When he cited part of it in his books Sportin House: A History of New Orleans Sinners and the Birth of Jazz (1965) and The Wilder Shore: A Gala Social History of San Franscisco's Sinners and Spenders (1968), he remembered it again . He succeeded in finding a suitable publisher in the Macmillan Company, especially since the company had developed further in the intervening 30 years. Then he edited the work, provided it with a foreword and published it.

Doubts about the authenticity of the memoir

James L. Wunsch published a review in the Journal of Social History ( Oxford University Press ) in 1972 , in which he both expressed considerable doubts about the authenticity of the memoirs and questioned whether Nell Kimball had even lived. On the one hand, individual passages are taken almost word for word from Herbert Asbury's works Gangs of New York (1927), The French Quarter (1936), The Barbary Coast (1933) and The Gem of the Prairie (1940); on the other hand, there are historical inaccuracies. According to the manuscript, Kimball lived as a prostitute in St. Louis between 1867 and 1876 . The associated prostitution laws, which were in force from 1870 to 1874 and during which more than 2,600 prostitutes were registered, are not mentioned with any syllable. Nor is there any evidence that Nell Kimball ever existed.

The publisher pointed out to these inadequacies that the work had been used as a source for various authors for several years. On the one hand, this is questionable due to the temporal circumstances and the inaccessibility of the material.

plant

• Her Life as an American Madam. By Herself. Edited by Stephen Longstreet . New York: The Macmillan Company 1971.
  • Memoirs from the brothel , edited by Stephen Longstreet , from the English by Reinhard Kaiser , Eichborn 1999, series Die Other Bibliothek, Volume 176, ISBN 3-8218-4176-1 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Nell Kimball in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Melissa Hope Ditmore: Encyclopedia of Prostitution and Sex Work . Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006, ISBN 978-0-313-32968-5 , pp. 238 ( google.de [accessed on February 26, 2019]).
2. ↑ Robert Berkvist: Nell Kimball . In: The New York Times . July 5, 1970, ISSN  0362-4331 ( nytimes.com [accessed February 26, 2019]).
3. ↑ ^{a b} James L. Request: Nell Kimball: Her Life as an American Madam . In: Journal of Social History . tape 6 , 1 (autumn 1972). Oxford University Press, S. 121-126 , JSTOR : 3786441 .