Imitation of Life
The author of numerous bestselling novels, a masterful short story writer, and an outspoken social activist, Fannie Hurst was a major celebrity in the first half of the twentieth century. Daniel Itzkovitz's introduction situates Imitation of Life in its literary, biographical, and cultural contexts, addressing such topics as the debates over the novel and films, the role of Hurst's one-time secretary and great friend Zora Neale Hurston in the novel's development, and the response to the novel by Hurst's friend Langston Hughes, whose one-act satire, "Limitations of Life" (which reverses the races of Bea and Delilah), played to a raucous Harlem crowd in the late 1930s. This edition brings a classic of popular American literature back into print.
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Fannie Hurst (1889-1968) was a popular writer of many novels and short stories. Among her best-known works are Back Street (1930) and Lummox (1923).
Daniel Itzkovitz is Associate Professor of English and Director of American Studies at Stonehill College in North Easton, Massachusetts. He is a coeditor of Queer Theory and the Jewish Question.
"This new edition of an influential American classic--one of the first books in twentieth-century popular literature to grapple with issues of gender and race--is reason enough to celebrate, but Daniel Itzkovitz's splendid and insightful introduction reclaims for Fannie Hurst a preeminent position as an essential American literary figure whose work matters today more than ever."--Michael Bronski, author of The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom
"Although it's a 'white' novel, Imitation of Life is certainly a part of the African American canon. No film was more important to me as a 'colored' child growing up in West Virginia; the funeral scene has to move even the most stoic viewer to tears. Now this new edition of the novel brings this richly layered story back into public view, where it will, I hope, remain."--Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard University
