www.NeglectedBooks.com: Where forgotten books are remembered
“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 …
There have been plenty of examples where a film bears little resemblance to the novel that inspired it, but it’s hard to imagine any fan of the classic Pre-Code ensemble comedy If I Had a …
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 …
I first came across Eleanor DeLamater’s novel Personals in a survey of recent (in 1932) novels that the critic considered “experimental” in form. Aside from the first two volumes of John Dos Passos’s landmark U. …
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 …
So many pleasures in an old book. A while ago, I started browsing through a handsome 1926 edition of The Autobiography and Memoirs of Benjamin Robert Haydon published by Peter Davies (the Peter of …
“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, …
A few days ago, I posted a note on BlueSky: “Dear writers of creative nonfiction: Creative nonfiction is more than just writing about how you’re writing what you’re writing.” It’s an observation that’s neither new …
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 …
Recently, a new press joined the growing field of reissue publishers. Quite Literally Books, a New York-based firm, debuted in April 2025 with three novels: Plum Bun by Jessie Redmon Fauset (1929); The Home-Maker by …
At a time when writers could make small fortunes by selling the film rights to their novels, plays, and magazine stories to studios hungry for scripts for talkies, the biggest fortune by far was that …
When Farrar and Rinehart published Big Business Girl in 1930, they credited the book to the anonymous “One of Them” — meaning one of the women in big business. “She knows whereof she writes. She …
Looking about for a good book to offer as my contribution to the 1952 Club, I was a bit daunted by the gulf between the extremely un-neglected candidates (Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Steinbeck’s East of …
In late 1931, the budding literary journal Prairie Schooner informed its readers that “Miss Eunice Chapin, formerly of Lincoln” (and formerly of the University of Nebraska, where Prairie Schooner was based) had published her first …
As part of my current project of digging into the source texts of Hollywood Pre-Code movies of the early 1930s, I spent much of February exploring the rabbit-hole of the brief-lived phenomenon of books inspired …