www.NeglectedBooks.com: Where forgotten books are remembered
In-depth reviews, excerpts, and background information on selected neglected books. This section is the centerpiece of this site.
The open stacks of the Suzzallo Library at the University of Washington provided the richest part of my undergraduate education. I did most of my studying there and took all-too-frequent breaks to browse in the …
At eleven o’clock at night the tenement stairs are dark. Sandy linoleum stairs scraped by the feet of children. Up the stairs and down the stairs. Ma give me bread and butter. Ma look what …
Nathalie Sedgwick Colby was hardly a typical first-time novelist when Green Forest appeared in the spring of 1927. Not only was she making her debut at the age of 52, but she was the wife …
At one of the Dumbles’s Cosmic Evenings (their term), W. E. Woodward, Bunk’s narrator as well as author, hears a man proclaim, “We are now conducting de-bunking operations on a rather large scale.” What is …
Had I bothered to do a bit more research, I wouldn’t have read Swastika. But a couple of reviews that lauded its realism and immediacy suckered me in, as did its premise: an American woman …
It’s a little hard to believe now how important So Little Time was to John P. Marquand’s career. He’d already won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his 1937 epistolary novel, The Late George Apley, …
I usually do a little research into an author before preparing an article, but in the case of John Heygate, I thought the few facts I already knew — that his affair with Evelyn Waugh’s …
I can’t help feeling a certain amount of mistrust when I see In Search of America in a book title. It’s a phrase that’s pompous in its humility. The author poses as one looking for …
“Antoinette Spitzer’s heroine in Life Comes to Judith belongs to a comparatively new and, if one may judge by the book sales, an increasingly popular type of amorous adventuress: the young woman on her own,” …
In my research into the source texts (novels, plays, magazine stories) of Hollywood’s earliest sound films — the Pre-Code era, as it’s usually referred to — I have amassed stacks of cheaper hardback novels published …
“So gentlemen prefer blondes, do they?” Jean Harlow’s opening line in Red-Headed Woman (1932) was a double self-jest: a retort to the title of screenwriter Anita Loos’s best-seller, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and a jab at …
For much of the mid-20th century, the Chicago Tribune was America’s biggest newspaper, and for much of that time, Fanny Butcher was its book editor and lead reviewer — which made her one of the …
“I have it on the word of an astute psychoanalyst that Mrs. Philip Lydig is a creature from an antique world,” Harvey O’Higgins, credited by some as its ghostwriter, writes in the introduction to Tragic …
This is a guest post by Brooke Binkowski. November Grass Many years ago, I read a beautiful little book written about an unnamed girl (“the girl”) who lived and worked on a ranch and mused …
“Arthur Train believes in facts” began a 1930 profile of the writer in the Wilson Bulletin. The son of a lawyer, he graduated from Harvard Law, became a member of the bar in both Massachusetts …
I have a book coming out in January. It’s a biography of Virginia Faulkner, a writer even many followers of this site have never heard of. So, a book about a woman nobody’s ever heard …
There were some great books published in 1925. This is not one of them. It is, however, great fun. By his own admission, Mon coeur au ralenti (1924), the French original of Wings of Desire, …
In March 1928, just weeks before Viña Delmar’s first novel, Bad Girl, was published, Boston’s self-appointed censors, the Watch and Ward Society, announced that it disapproved of the novel and threatened to prosecute any Massachusetts …
Inside the Callahan Building, thirteen magazines are being put together. They hold “tales of love and desire and hate, fresh each month –as life, moving over cities small and large, leaves a fresh supply of …
Thirteen million words. Over forty years’ work. Millions of readers. It’s been called the longest novel ever written. And you’ve never heard of it or its author. That’s because Adele Garrison’s Revelations of a Wife …