For more than half a century, poet and essayist Adrienne Rich (May 16, 1929 — March 27, 2012) explored with equal parts courage and conviction such complex cultural phenomena as identity and ideology, gender and politics, oppression and freedom. The recipient of numerous honors, including the National Book Award for Poetry, two Guggenheim fellowships, and a MacArthur “genius” grant — Rich is celebrated as one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century.
For Rich, art was as much a tool of creative expression as it was a vehicle for empathy, for expanding one’s understanding of the world beyond the limits of the individual. In a 2005 conversation at the Kelly Writers House, she articulates her ethos with a beautiful definition of art:
One of the great functions of art is to help us imagine what it is like to be not ourselves, what it is like to be someone or something else, what it is like to live in another skin, what it is like to live in another body, and in that sense to surpass ourselves, to go out beyond ourselves.
Rich’s own life was anything but ordinary. In 1953, she married Harvard professor Alfred Haskell Conrad, who fathered her three children. Over the decade that followed, her career exploded, in the process catapulting her into a spurt of personal growth, self-discovery, and political awakening. In 1970, stifled by the institution of marriage, Rich divorced Conrad. In 1976, she met and fell in love with Jamaican-born novelist and editor Michelle Cliff, who became her lifelong partner and inspired Rich’s Twenty-One Love Poems (1977), her first literary exploration of lesbian desire and sexuality, later included in one of her most celebrated works, The Dream of a Common Language (1978). The two remained together for thirty-six years, until Rich’s death in 2012. In a lamentable manifestation of the current failings of marriage equality, as of this writing, her Wikipedia entry still lists Conrad as her only spouse.
In 1997, in protest against the growing monopoly of power and the government’s proposed plan to end funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, Rich famously became the first and only person to date to decline the prestigious National Medal of Arts, the highest honor bestowed upon an individual artist on behalf of the people of the United States, previously awarded to such luminaries as Ralph Ellison, Georgia O’Keeffe, John Updike, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, and fellow reconstructionist Maya Angelou.
But despite the strong undercurrents of political and sociocultural commentary, Rich’s work was driven first and foremost by the irrepressible stirrings of her inner life. She reflected in an interview:
A poem can come out of something seen, something overheard, listening to music, an article in a newspaper, a book, a combination of all these… There’s a kind of emotional release that I then find in the act of writing the poem. It’s not, ‘I’m now going to sit down and write a poem about this.’
Learn more: Brain Pickings | Wikipedia
“There’s something, which impels us to show our inner-souls. The more courageous we are, the more we succeed in explaining what we know,” Marguerite Ann Johnson, better-known as Maya Angelou (born April 4, 1928), asserted in her eloquent meditation on on why we write. But more than a mere literary device, this ethos of lyrical bravery permeates every aspect of the beloved author’s spirit, from her stirring autobiographies to her resolute civil rights activism to her valorous poetry. Though her most memorable work is autobiographical in nature, it emanates an expansive celebration of the tender resilience of the human spirit, reverberating at the intersection of the deeply personal and the universally resonant.
Far from a beeline to literary success, the trajectory of Angelou’s life treks the uneven topography of fortune and misfortune, steered by that same daring spirit of unflinching conviction. Born into a tumultuous working-class family and abandoned by her father at the age of three, Angelou was sent to live with her grandmother, an unusually prosperous store owner amidst the otherwise impecunious environment of the Great Depression. Angelou was eventually reunited with her mother, Vivian, in what turned out to be a heartbreaking trade-off — at the age of 8, Angelou was raped by Vivian’s boyfriend. Though terrified, she confessed to her brother, who then alerted the rest of the family. The attacker was convicted but jailed for only a day. Mere days after his release, he was murdered — by Angelou’s uncles, according to most speculations.
With the tragic magical thinking that leads abused children to take the weight of the world on their shoulders, young Maya came to believe that her words had killed her abuser and that her voice had the power to destroy. She became mute for nearly five years — an extreme manifestation of the soul-wrenching see-saw of silence and sanity that rocks many victims of sexual abuse — and it was in this verbal interlude that Angelou developed her love of literature, her keen capacity for observation, and her remarkable memory for fact and detail.
Less than a month after her high school graduation, at the age of 17, Angelou gave birth to her son, Clyde. Over the following decade, she spiraled into poverty and cycled through various relationships, cities, and occupations — from a pimp to a prostitute to a line cook — in struggling to survive as a single mother. While performing modern dance with her husband, the Greek electrician and aspiring musician Enistasious (Tosh) Angelos — an interracial marriage in an era that deemed the union radical and worthy of condemnation — she adopted “Maya Angelou” as her professional name upon her managers’ insistence.
Shortly thereafter, Angelou was drawn to the antiapartheid movement in South Africa and became a champion of civil rights, befriending both Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose subsequent assassinations only three years apart left Angelou devastated but even more committed to the cause. King’s loss in 1968 threw Angelou into a particularly deep depression. In an effort to cheer her up, her friend James Baldwin took her to a dinner party at legendary cartoonist Jules Feiffer’s home. Taken with the story of Angelou’s childhood, Feiffer’s wife, Judy, urged iconic Random House editor and family friend Robert Loomis to convince Angelou to write a book. In 1969, despite having almost no writing experience, she penned her first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which catapulted her into the strata of international literary celebrity.
Over the half-century that followed, Angelou earned her reputation as one of modern history’s most acclaimed and disciplined authors with five more autobiographies, five books of essays, and a number of poetry anthologies, in addition to collaborating on various theater, television, and film projects. The recipient of numerous awards and nearly three dozen honorary doctoral degrees, she is only the second poet in history, after Robert Frost’s famous performance, to recite at a presidential inauguration.
“We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not,” Joan Didion (born December 5, 1934) observed in her timeless meditation on the value of keeping a notebook. For the past half-century, the beloved author has been keeping American society on nodding terms with itself, despite the themes of cultural collapse and moral chaos that permeate Didion’s novels and her literary nonfiction.
A champion of the New Journalism movement, Didion has brought her exquisite amalgamation of narrative storytelling and nonfiction to such diverse subjects as mourning, museums, music, second-wave feminism, and the American political process. She lists Hemingway and Henry James among her handful of influences, but women writers like the Brontë sisters and George Eliot she sees as “models for a life, not for a style.”
Despite devastating personal tragedy — the sudden loss of her husband of nearly forty years, followed closely by the death of her daughter — Didion has continued to find in writing, above all, access to her own mind, in turn inviting the reader to access greater truths about what it means to be human in modern culture, implicitly asking, as she often does in her nonfiction, “Do you get the point?”
Learn more: The Paris Review | Brain Pickings | Wikipedia
In 1957, as her 15th college reunion was approaching, writer Betty Friedan (February 4, 1921 — February 4, 2006) set out to survey university graduates about their education, life after college, and their present life-satisfaction. In a series of articles, Friedan noted a recurring pattern — the quiet, recondite, yet intense unhappiness of women in the golden age of the housewife. Termed “the problem that has no name,” it spurred an outpour of passionate responses from women for whom it resonated deeply. Friedan wrote:
The shores are strewn with the casualties of the feminine mystique. They did give up their own education to put their husbands through college, and then, maybe against their own wishes, ten or fifteen years later, they were left in the lurch by divorce. The strongest were able to cope more or less well, but it wasn’t that easy for a woman of forty-five or fifty to move ahead in a profession and make a new life for herself and her children or herself alone.
In 1963, after witnessing the profound cultural resonance of the topic, Friedan reworked the articles into The Feminine Mystique, which went on to ignite the second wave of modern feminism and to become the most influential book on gender politics in contemporary history. It championed women’s reproductive rights, called for better education, criticized workplace laws and cultural attitudes towards childcare responsibilities and, above all, advocated for women’s right to freely explore the fundamental question of what it means to live a full life.
She wrote:
Each suburban wife struggles with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night — she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question — ‘Is this all?’
In 1970, on the 50th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted American women the right to vote, Friedan organized the nation-wide Women’s Strike for Equality. It culminated with a New York City march led by Friedan herself, which drew 50,000 women and men and became one of the largest marches in history. The following year, she and other front-line feminists founded the National Women’s Political Caucus and continued to work tirelessly for the full inclusion of women in mainstream society.
Friedan passed away on her 85th birthday, bequeathing a powerful legacy that shaped the feminist movement not merely as relentless advocacy for women’s equality but as enduring protection and celebration of the human spirit.
Learn more: Wikipedia | Autobiography
